Bette Joan

This joint biography of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford follows Hollywood's most epic rivalry throughout their careers. They only worked together once, in the classic spine-chiller "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane" and their violent hatred of each other as rival sisters was no act. In real life they fought over as many man as they did film roles. The story of these two dueling divas is hilarious, monstrous, and tragic, and Shaun Considine’s account of it is exhaustive, explosive, and unsparing. “Rip-roaring. A definite ten.” - New York Magazine.

A painfully funny, Obie Award-winning play about the tragedy and comedy of family life. Never have marriage and the family been more scathingly or hilariously savaged than in this brilliant black comedy. The Marriage of Bette and Boo brings together two of the maddest families in creation in a portrait album of life’s uncertainties and confusion. Bereaved by miscarriages, undermined by their families, separated by alcoholism, assaulted by disease, and mystified by their priest, Bette and Boo, in their bewildered attempts to provide a semblance of hearth and home, are portrayed with a poignant compassion that enriches and enlarges the play, and makes clear why Christopher Durang has become one of the great names in American theater. “One of the most explosively funny American dramatists.”—Newsweek

From “Grand Hotel” to “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?,” Joan Crawford played some of the finest parts Hollywood had to offer, establishing a reputation as the most spectacular diva on the silver screen. Even when the cameras quit rolling, her life never stopped being over-the-top. In My Way of Life, a cult classic since it was first published in the early 1970’s, Crawford shares her secrets. Part memoir, part self-help book, part guide to being fabulous, My Way of Life advises the reader on everything from throwing a small dinner party for eighteen to getting the most out of a marriage. Featuring tips on fashion, makeup, etiquette and everything in between, it is an irresistible look at a bygone era, when movie stars were pure class, and Crawford was at the top of the heap.

Once grande dames of Hollywood, by 1962 arch-rivals Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were in danger of becoming has-beens. Then an opportunity came along: to appear together in a new movie called Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?-2 women

Located in the Textbook/Curriculum Library Collection.

Originally published in 1987, a collection of anecdotes as well as opinions pro and con on a wide range of subjects by legendary actress Bette Davis--now in ebook for the first time! A woman of strong appetites and opinions, Bette Davis minces no words. In frank, no nonsense terms she talks about the stroke that nearly killed her, and inspires us with the story of her subsequent recovery from cancer--a lively and encouraging account shot through with the star's unique blend of spunk and wit. Davis was famous for being as unsparing of herself as she was of others. Among the "others" of this book are President Ronald Reagan, who was a contract player at Warner Bros. when she was; Joan Crawford, her costar in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Humphrey Bogart; Marilyn Monroe; Elizabeth Taylor; and Helen Hayes, Bette's costar in her first film after her illness, Murder with Mirrors. She also talks about her deep friendship with her longtime assistant, Kathryn Sermak, who nursed Davis back to health after her stroke and ushered her back into acting when Davis's doctors thought all hope was lost. As Davis says, "If everyone likes you, you're doing your job wrong." This is a unique and controversial book by one of the most incandescent and unconventional acting talents of all time, as magnetic and supremely talented as the lady herself.

For ten years Kathryn Sermak was at Bette Davis's side--first as an employee, and then as her closest friend--and in Miss D and Me she tells the story of the great star's harrowing but inspiring final years, a story fans have been waiting decades to hear. Miss D and Me is a story of two powerful women, one at the end of her life and the other at the beginning. As Bette Davis aged she was looking for an assistant, but she found something more than that in Kathryn: a loyal and loving buddy, a co-conspirator in her jokes and schemes, and a competent assistant whom she trained never to miss a detail. But Miss D had strict rules for Kathryn about everything from how to eat a salad to how to wear her hair...even the spelling of Kathryn's name was changed (adding the "y") per Miss D's request. Throughout their time together, the two grew incredibly close, and Kathryn had a front-row seat to the larger-than-life Davis's career renaissance in her later years, as well as to the humiliating public betrayal that nearly killed Miss D. The frame of this story is a four-day road trip Kathryn and Davis took from Biarritz to Paris, during which they disentangled their ferocious dependency. Miss D and Me is a window into the world of the unique and formidable Bette Davis, told by the person who perhaps knew her best of all.

Now published for the first time as a trade paperback with a new introduction and the short story on which it was based. Williams wrote: “This is a play about love in its purest terms.” It is also Williams’s robust and persuasive plea for endurance and resistance in the face of human suffering. The earthy widow Maxine Faulk is proprietress of a rundown hotel at the edge of a Mexican cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the defrocked Rev. Shannon, his tour group of ladies from a West Texas women’s college, the self-described New England spinster Hannah Jelkes and her ninety-seven-year-old grandfather, Jonathan Coffin (“the world’s oldest living and practicing poet”), a family of grotesque Nazi vacationers, and an iguana tied by its throat to the veranda, all find themselves assembled for a rainy and turbulent night. This is the first trade paperback edition of The Night of the Iguana and comes with an Introduction by award-winning playwright Doug Wright, the author’s original Foreword, the short story “The Night of the Iguana” which was the germ for the play, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Kenneth Holditch. “I’m tired of conducting services in praise and worship of a senile delinquent—yeah, that’s what I said, I shouted! All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent and, by God, I will not and cannot continue to conduct services in praise and worship of this…this…this angry, petulant old man.” —The Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon, from The Night of the Iguana