20 Hollywood Feuds The Press Invented, Exaggerated, Or Fueled

Dramatic stars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were major rivals at Warner Bros., but their legendary rivalry didn’t begin with a picture. It began with a man. In 1935, Davis became involved with actor Franchot Tone, her co-star in Dangerous, but Crawford ended up marrying him later that year. Matters heated up in 1943, when Crawford was signed by Davis’s studio, and the two women began competing for roles and even Academy Award nominations. Hollywood gossip columns eagerly covered their rivalry, turning personal grudges and professional jealousies into public entertainment.

In the 1920s, Gloria Swanson was the top silent film star of Paramount Pictures, and Paramount studio head Adolph Zukor brought Pola Negri in from Poland to be her competition. The studio’s press people created a rivalry between Swanson and Negri to generate publicity for the two stars. They even leaked a story that they threw live cats at one another while filming on set. In reality, Swanson and Negri worked separate schedules and rarely met. Swanson, Pola Negri, and actor-director Charlie Chaplin said later that the entire feud was made up.

Hearst newspaper syndicate columnist Lee Mortimer had been hounding singer Frank Sinatra for months over claims that Sinatra was a communist, connected to organized crime, and evading the draft. In the front entryway of the Sunset Strip nightclub Ciro’s on April 8, 1947, Sinatra met with Mortimer and knocked him to the ground. The police arrested Sinatra for battery, and he settled the matter by paying Mortimer $9,000 in May. Mortimer continued to lambast Sinatra in print for years to come.

In 1956, Sir Laurence Olivier, the great British theater director, made a film with Marilyn Monroe, The Prince and the Showgirl, shot at England’s Pinewood Studios. The two clashed because Olivier was a formal, script-oriented director while Monroe depended on her acting coach. As one of the tabloid newspapers that covered their every move put it, Olivier simply told her to “just be sexy and stand there.” For weeks, British and American journalists reported on her tardiness and his displeasure. Afterward, however, Olivier wrote in his memoirs that her performance was brilliant.

Singer Dean Martin and comedian Jerry Lewis became America’s number-one comedy team in 1946. When Lewis wanted more creative input, Martin resented being treated like a cheap straight man. Columnist Hedda Hopper chronicled every fight between them as they made their last picture. On the 10th anniversary of their debut, Martin and Lewis played their last night together on stage at New York’s Copacabana and split personally. They didn’t speak privately again until Frank Sinatra surprised them with a reunion decades later.

The Italian-born star Rudolph Valentino, whose role as a screen seducer earned him the moniker “Latin lover,” had his manliness called into question in a 1926 editorial in the Chicago Tribune. When the author of the piece declined to reveal himself, the sports columnist Frank “Buck” O’Neill accepted the challenge in his place, and Valentino fought him at New York’s Ambassador Hotel. He won the respect of the sports press. But weeks later, he died at age 31 from peritonitis after surgery.

Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine were sisters who used different last names to build separate careers. Both were nominated for Best Actress in the same year, and Fontaine won. When de Havilland offered her congratulations, the newspapers reported that Fontaine had rejected the gesture. De Havilland received her own Oscar years later, and press photographers captured her refusing to shake Fontaine’s hand when the two met backstage. And, according to those same papers, the two never spoke after that. But family records tell a different story: the sisters stayed in touch privately for years.

When Marlon Brando took the role of Sky Masterson in the musical Guys and Dolls, which Frank Sinatra also coveted, the singer openly criticized the method acting of the young star, calling his style “mumbling.” During one cheesecake-eating scene, Brando bungled enough dialogue for Sinatra to eat eight slices before throwing down his fork and storming out of the room. Tabloids alleged that Sinatra sent gangsters after Brando, but there was never any truth to these stories.

After the success of It, Clara Bow became Paramount’s biggest moneymaker and the symbol of the 1920s flapper. But Louella Parsons, Hearst’s most influential columnist, kept hounding Bow for years about her gambling debts, extramarital affairs, and low-class origins. Coverage intensified in 1931, around a criminal trial in which Bow’s secretary was accused of theft, and included the unsubstantiated claim, later discredited, that Bow had bedded every member of the University of Southern California’s football squad. The unrelenting assaults on her reputation wrecked her health, and she quit show business in 1933 when she was only 28 years old.

Mae West’s racy comedies made her a top star, but that didn’t go over well with everyone, particularly newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who refused to mention her in any of his publications or place advertisements for her films in them, and wrote editorials denouncing her films as “a menace to morality.” West used all the controversy as free advertising, still playing to packed houses. The smear campaign was partly responsible for the move to strict censorship in the film industry. West kept her career going with later hits.

In 1939’s The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Bette Davis wanted the classical Laurence Olivier cast opposite her instead of actor Errol Flynn, and she publicly criticized him for his easygoing attitude on the set. When she was playing a scene in which her character slapped his, she hit him full-force and almost knocked him down. Flynn and trade papers said it was a real show of frustration. Davis, however, wrote in her memoirs that it was just good acting. In any case, they never appeared onscreen together again.

Humphrey Bogart had chafed at having to do the part that Cary Grant had rejected from Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, filmed in 1953, and he vented his anger by insulting William Holden’s acting abilities, resentful of his natural charm with co-star Audrey Hepburn. A few gossip columns even suggested there had been a physical fight between them. Holden later confessed that he’d wanted to punch Bogart, but Wilder and the production’s records indicated that no actual blowup happened.

The rivalry between Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer was widely publicized during the 1930s. As the wife of Irving Thalberg, the studio’s head of production, Shearer had first pick of scripts, directors, and lighting setups. “How can I compete with Norma when she sleeps with the boss?” Crawford asked journalists. Columnist Louella Parsons chronicled the feud for years, referring to their 1939 movie The Women as the stage where their rivalry was played out. In reality, though, according to the MGM studio files, Shearer’s pick of scripts and directors was studio policy, not favoritism, and it was director George Cukor who selected their costumes, not the two women.

Teenage singers Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland shared the screen in a 1936 MGM short before the studio allowed Durbin’s contract to expire. Deanna signed on with Universal, and her first film kept the studio from going under. MGM launched Garland’s career with The Wizard of Oz in 1939. The press compared Durbin’s bel canto technique to Garland’s power belt and watched their box office take throughout the 1940s. Both women later said they stayed close friends off camera the whole time.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Dolores del Río and Lupe Vélez were Hollywood’s two biggest Mexican movie stars. The former came from a wealthy family and was marketed as sophisticated and classy, while studios pushed a wild, racialized persona built around her “exotic” features for the latter, primarily for comedic roles. For several years, publicists and newspaper columnists made the most of pitting the two against each other, writing lurid tales of catfights between the pair. According to historians, any actual altercations between them were greatly exaggerated.

During 1934 and 1935, America’s two top box-office draws were 6-year-old Fox star Shirley Temple and Paramount’s Mae West. Newspapers, trade journals, and religious organizations debated the relative merits of the two, framing Temple’s wholesome appeal and West’s risqué comedies as a week-to-week moral competition. Box office tallies were printed in the papers much like baseball scores, complete with rankings. Ostensibly a rival of Temple’s, West publicly praised her young counterpart. But this manufactured rivalry, fueled by Depression-era anxieties over movie morality, played a role in the studio system’s tightening of censorship by July 1934.

In the 1940s, military publications and the show biz trade press fueled the national competition to determine the top pin-up girl between Fox’s Betty Grable and Columbia’s Rita Hayworth. Newspapers reported on polls about whether the 1943 white-swimsuit picture of Grable was more popular than Hayworth’s 1941 black-and-white nightgown shot in Life magazine. Studios also used the pinup battle to market the stars’ movies. Though tabloids claimed the actresses had been feuding backstage at USO shows, Grable and Hayworth were publicly amicable during WWII.

Universal Pictures’ top-grossing comedy act in the 1940s was straight man Bud Abbott and comedian Lou Costello. When Abbott hired a maid Costello had recently fired in 1945, their offscreen relationship broke down. On set, they sometimes only talked to each other via scripts. Each man hired a publicist, and they started taking turns insulting each other in newspapers. The tabloids would later claim they didn’t speak to one another for more than a decade, but they did continue to talk about business together until their formal split in 1957.

When Frank Sinatra began singing his way through New York’s Paramount Theatre in 1942, the press portrayed him as a challenger to crooner Bing Crosby, pitting their fans against each other and dissecting their records for any evidence of disrespect. In truth, Sinatra was Crosby’s biggest fan. The elder singer famously quipped on the radio that a singer like him “comes along once in a lifetime, why did it have to be my lifetime?” Their unlikely friendship ultimately led them to star opposite one another years later.

Sophia Loren attended a Paramount party hosted in her honor in 1957. Fox’s Jayne Mansfield showed up late, wearing a low-cut dress and sitting at Loren’s table. A photographer snapped a picture of Loren giving Mansfield a sidelong glance. The photo was circulated around the world, where it was interpreted as evidence of catty envy. It turned out that Loren was actually just worried that Mansfield’s dress was about to fall off. Out of respect for her fellow actress, Loren has never agreed to sign a copy of the photograph.

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