Will Work for Feud

I don't know if this will be of interest to anyone outside my home base of Edmonton, Alberta, but it is movie-related: a preview I did for SEE Magazine of a play written by and co-starring a legendary local drag queen named Darrin Hagen and called Bitchslap!—in which Hagen and another respected local actor and director, Trevor Schmidt, re-enact the bitter, legendary feud between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, which culminated on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Well, actually, it really culminated during the making of Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, when Crawford was so broken by Davis' mind games that she withdrew from the film and was replaced by Olivia de Havilland.

You may not be able to see the play, but Hagen's insights into the two women are pretty interesting and insightful. Read on!

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“We don’t caricature Joan Crawford and Bette Davis,” says Darrin Hagen, playwright and co-star of Bitchslap! “We play them big.”

It’s a key distinction. Bitchslap! may look like a drag show about two Hollywood camp icons, but underneath the thickly painted eyebrows, the giant shoulder pads, and the deliciously catty insults, it’s a real play about two strong-willed adversaries who ultimately wound up prisoners of their own larger-than-life personas. (It also efficiently condenses nearly four decades of Hollywood history into less than 90 minutes.)

“It’s a juicy feud,” says Hagen, who plays Joan opposite Trevor Schmidt’s Bette. “That was the starting-off point. And the lines are brilliant—these women were so fucking funny when they talked about each other. I couldn’t write lines that funny! But I’m also fascinated by how their images were also constructions of the women who played them, which is sort of what I go through when I’m doing drag.

“And I was also really interested in how we give Joan and Bette so much power in the play, but in fact gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper [played here by Davina Stewart] had so much power behind the scenes—at the end, you realize they weren’t really in charge. And there’s the iconic gay status Joan and Bette both have—there’s one theory that calls them the first queer politicians, in the sense that in the 1930s and ’40s, when gay men had absolutely no visibility, these actresses acted out their dreams and fantasies of success onscreen.”

But there was little sisterly solidarity between the two women, who became rivals almost from the moment Davis arrived in Hollywood—Hagen pinpoints the start of their feud to the moment when Crawford upstaged Davis at the moment she was about to accept an award as one of Hollywood’s rising young stars by swanning into the hall with six male escorts in tow. Davis envied Crawford’s glamour and star power, Hagen says, while Crawford knew she was never taken seriously as an actress the way Davis was. They exchanged barbs throughout the ’30s and ’40s (Davis supposedly once said Crawford had “slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie”), and their clashes on the set of the first film they made together, the 1962 gothic potboiler Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, are the stuff of legend.

“They were fighting for the same things—the Oscars, the money, the roles, often the lovers,” Hagen says, “so they were always in competition. And you have to remember that when Bette came on the scene, Joan was already a huge star. And Bette never respected Joan as an actress—Joan started out as a dancer, a chorus girl—and I think Bette made it her mission to become more famous than Joan Crawford. Joan could sing and dance, which Bette couldn’t do at all. So I think despite her Oscars, she had reason to be jealous of her.”

And as Hagen points out, there are some interesting parallels between Crawford and Davis and the men playing them—minus the bitchy attempts at one-upmanship. (Although Hagen points out that he made sure to pose on the left in all the Bitchslap! publicity photos so that his name would always come first on the poster.) Like Crawford, Hagen was a star before he became a serious actor thanks to his drag career. “I got famous before I ever learned how to create art,” he says. “I’m very much a movie star, while Trevor is very much the ‘actress’ who had to fight to get a higher profile in this town.”

If the response that his Bette Davis act got at the Orlando Fringe earlier this year is any indication, Schmidt has no problem convincing anyone of his starpower. When the moment came for Schmidt to deliver Davis’ classic Baby Jane line, “But y’are, Blanche! Y’are in that chair!” Hagen says, “I swear, 75 gay men in the audience said it along with him. They were waiting for that scene!”

So, Hagen hopes, are audiences everywhere—he’s trying to put together a touring production of Bitchslap! as a vehicle for Canadian female impersonator Christopher Peterson. “This show has serious legs,” Hagen promises. “And not just my own!”