"Olivia has always said I was first at everything,” said Joan Fontaine of her sister, Olivia de Havilland, to People magazine in 1978. “I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first. If I die, she'll be furious, because again I'll have got there first!"
Olivia de Havilland didn’t sound furious when Joan Fontaine died, back in December 2013, and issued an entirely normal-sounding statement of sisterly grief. But the fact that Joan died aged 96 has meant that only one of the sisters has reached the ripe old age of 100, and that’s Olivia, today.
She may have been pipped at the post to everything else, but this feat – along with eventually winning two Oscars to Joan’s mere one – is hers alone.
Give or take Kirk Douglas, de Havilland is one of the last true greats of the Hollywood Golden Age still drawing breath. She has legendary credits to her name, including the signature role of Melanie in Gone with the Wind (1939) for which Joan auditioned before she got the part.
But it’s her relationship with her sister that gets us all to lean in close, wondering if the record will ever be set straight. Depending on who you believe, this is either one of the most storied and bitter rivalries in film history, or a fiction cooked up by the gossip-hungry press.
One version sees a Cold War enacted across decades, with rumours of little to no communication through much of the sisters’ adult life. The other – supported by Fontaine shortly before her death – sweeps this aside as bunk, and says they spoke and visited all the time.
"I bequeath to my sister the ability to win boys’ hearts, which she does not have at present"Olivia De Havilland
It seems unlikely that de Havilland, comfortably ensconced in her Paris home and the subject of a much-deserved BFI retrospective this month, will be weighing in on the matter any time soon. According to her sister’s autobiography No Bed of Roses (1978), it began as classic sibling rivalry from their earliest childhood years. Olivia, the older sister by 15 months, rattled the crib and ripped her hand-me-downs.
One fight broke Joan’s collar-bone, and Olivia was a wicked bully in print, publishing a fake will in their high school newspaper with this devilish line: “I bequeath to my sister the ability to win boys’ hearts, which she does not have at present.”
They competed for the attentions of their actress mother, Lillian, especially after she moved them from Tokyo to Los Angeles post-divorce and they started jostling for parts in films. While Olivia got the earliest breaks, in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and a series of swashbucklers with Errol Flynn, Joan served as her chaffeur, despite harbouring her own ambitions as a star.
Deterred by their mother from seeking employment at Warner Bros, where Olivia was thriving, Joan got small parts at RKO, and then caught the attention of George Cukor in The Women (1939), right at the moment when Cukor and Selznick were engaged in their legendary Gone with the Wind casting blitz.
Fontaine – who chose her stepfather’s surname to set herself apart from Olivia – takes the credit for her sister’s casting as Melanie, simply because, according to her account, Joan turned up at the audition wearing overly chic clothes. “You’re much too stylish for the role,” Cukor is meant to have told her, to which she replied in a classic moment of shade, “Well, what about my sister?”
Imagine Fontaine’s envy if de Havilland had waltzed off with the Oscar for that part – Best Supporting Actress – which she was widely tipped to win. Instead, she lost on the night to the first ever black trophy-winner, Hattie McDaniel, in the same film.
The next year, it was Fontaine’s turn, up for Best Actress in another Selznick production, Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Even though the film won Best Picture, she lost to Ginger Rogers. And the year after that, 1941, both sisters were nominated – Joan for Suspicion, Olivia for the immigration romance Hold Back the Dawn.
Relations were understandably tense at the ceremony that night, and then Fontaine’s name was called out. “I stared across the table, where Olivia was sitting directly opposite me,” she wrote in her book. “‘Get up there, get up there,' Olivia whispered commandingly. “Now what had I done? All the animus we'd felt toward each other as children, the hair-pullings, the savage wrestling watches, the time Olivia fractured my collarbone, all came rushing back in kaleidoscopic imagery. My paralysis was total.”
It feels almost de trop for this great feud to have flared up in public at Academy Awards ceremonies – the stuff of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?-style melodrama, rather than life. And yet it’s the way history records it.
Fast-forward exactly five years, to the Oscars in 1946, and there’s a famous photo of the two sisters, captured by Hymie Fink of Photoplay, just after Olivia levelled the score by winning Best Actress for To Each His Own. Fontaine is meant to have approached her backstage with congratulations, and De Havilland is seen giving her the cold shoulder.
“Our relations have been quite strained for some time,” Olivia told a reporter afterwards. “I couldn’t change my attitude.” And her publicity agent, Henry Rogers, told the press that the two hadn’t spoken for four months. “Miss de Havilland had no wish to have her picture taken with her sister. This goes back for years and years, ever since they were kids,” he said.
There had been man trouble between them in the early Hollywood years, stoking the flames further. If it weren’t enough that Fontaine got married first – the first of four times – she did so to the English actor Brian Aherne, whom Olivia had once dated.
And on the night before their wedding, Olivia’s boyfriend Howard Hughes is meant to have discouraged Joan from going ahead with it: Hughes, the story goes, wanted Joan for himself. When this got back to Olivia, it did so directly from Joan’s mouth. Whatever her intentions, Olivia unforgivingly shot the messenger.
Over the years, though Olivia kept demanding apologies for Joan’s behaviour, things weren’t always openly frosty between them – there’s a photo of them laughing together at a party thrown by Marlene Dietrich in 1967. But another whopping grievance arose when their mother died, in 1975.
"Our relations have been quite strained for some time,” Olivia told a reporter. “I couldn’t change my attitude"
Joan was out of the country and not informed about the funeral arrangements. She threatened to call the press if she wasn’t allowed to attend. At the service, they didn’t speak, beginning a pattern of public avoidance which would endure in 1979, when they took opposite ends of the Academy stage for a 50th anniversary class photo, and at the equivalent event 10 years later, when Joan, in the last Oscars appearance she would ever make, is meant to have switched hotel rooms so that she wouldn’t have to stay next to her sister.
Joan, in her later years, had a habit of denying the vendetta, even though much of the evidence for it is in her own written account. Olivia, for her part, has always adopted queenly silence on the matter, showing no interest in raking over old coals. Why should she? Her years of resenting Fontaine as flavour of the month, or the supposedly prettier one leapfrogging over her own stellar achievements, must be long gone.
She’s the more highly regarded actress by a long shot, and has that pair of trophies to show for it, however long she waited to get them. What’s more – Destiny’s Child crescendo, please – she’s the survivor.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/07/01/100-years-of-shade-olivia-de-havilland-joan-fontaine-and-the-sto/
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Jes' Sayin' (5946)
3 years ago
I get the impression that their feud began already in childhood. Joan liked her stepfather while Olivia preferred their real father, hence the difference in surnames.
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