“She’s slept with every male star at MGM apart from Lassie”.

We are accustomed to celebrities bitching about each other but the current lot are mere novices compared with the screen goddesses of the past.

The feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford lasted over 40 years and began when Bette’s launch into the big time with the release of the film Ex Lady, was totally overshadowed by Joan’s announcement on the same day of her divorce from husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

” Ex-Lady was dropped from theatres after a week thanks to poor ticket sales, and Davis’s beef was supposedly born.

In 1935, Davis starred in the drama Dangerous and fell hard for her co-star Franchot Tone. “I fell in love with Franchot, professionally and privately,” she said. “Everything about him reflected his elegance, from his name to his manners.” Unfortunately, Crawford got to Tone first, and the couple would announce their engagement during the filming.

“She took him from me, she did it coldly, deliberately and with complete ruthlessness.” Davis would go on to win an Oscar for her performance in Dangerous and yet Crawford had still managed to upstage her.”

In 1945, the title role in Mildred Pierce which was originally intended for Davis was given to Crawford, who won an Oscar for it.

“Given the comparisons, it’s no surprise that some producers were keen to get Davis and Crawford on screen together. The women-in-prison drama Caged was intended by Warner Bros. as a joint Davis/Crawford vehicle, but Davis supposedly refused to sign on opposite Crawford, calling the film “a dyke movie.

Crawford, who had relationships with both men and women throughout her life, was suspected by some to have harbored a sexual curiosity about Davis. “Franchot isn’t interested in Bette, but I wouldn’t mind giving her a poke if I was in the right mood,” Crawford is quoted as saying by her friend and confidante Jerry Asher. “Wouldn’t that be funny?”

“The romantic drama The Star (in 1952) was written by Crawford’s longtime friend Katherine Albert, supposedly as retaliation after a falling-out. Davis was cast in the lead role of a washed-up actress clinging desperately to her fading star power—a thinly veiled, deeply unflattering depiction of Crawford. Davis presumably didn’t take much convincing to sign on.”

“It was Crawford who persuaded Davis to sign onto What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, the psychological horror story about a crippled former actress (Crawford) who is terrorized by her deranged sister (Davis) in their Hollywood home. Though the film was an unexpected box office success, and did to some extent represent the comeback that both actresses desperately needed, it became remembered most powerfully as a public document of their real-life rivalry.

Davis agreed to sign onto Baby Jane on two conditions: that she play the title role of Jane, and that the film’s director Robert Aldrich assure her he was not sleeping with Crawford: “It wasn’t that I cared about his private life, or hers either,” Davis reportedly said. “I didn’t want him favouring her with more close-ups.”

It was on the set of Baby Jane that the most legendary episodes in Davis and Crawford’s feud took place. Crawford was on Pepsi’s board of directors at the time (her late husband, Alfred Steele, was a Pepsi executive), so Davis had a Coke machine installed in her dressing room just to spite her. In one scene where Jane beats Crawford’s character Blanche, Crawford requested a body double because she didn’t trust Davis not to hurt her for real. She was reportedly proved right during a close-up in which a body double could not be used, where Davis hit her hard in the head—some reports claim hard enough to require stitches, though Davis insisted that she “barely touched her.”

Crawford got her payback during the filming of another scene, where Jane drags Blanche out of bed and across the room. Knowing that Davis had back problems, Crawford made herself as heavy as possible—either by filling her pockets with rocks, wearing a weightlifter’s belt or simply making herself deadweight, depending on which report you believe—and deliberately ruined several takes, forcing Davis to drag her around again and again until she was in agony.

Even when filming had wrapped on Baby Jane, the tension kept simmering, helped along by the Academy, which opted to give Davis an Oscar nod for her performance—along with supporting actor Victor Buono—while overlooking Crawford.

Not only did Crawford campaign hard against Davis, who was the favorite for that year’s Best Actress prize, but she made arrangements to get up onstage herself at any cost. Noting that several of that year’s nominees were unable to attend the ceremony, Crawford offered to collect the Best Actress award on their behalf. And so, when the absent Anne Bancroft’s name was read out, Crawford went up to accept the Oscar on her behalf as Davis watched in shock, and posed happily with Bancroft’s award alongside the night’s actual winners backstage.

Hoping to replicate the success of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, Warner Bros. commissioned a spiritual sequel of sorts called Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. It was based on a short story by Henry Farrell, who wrote the novel that Baby Jane was based on, and would see Davis and Crawford reunite on screen as a different pair of women locked in psychological warfare, again directed by Aldrich. Crawford dropped out after a week and a half of filming, claiming that she was unwell—but she was in fact still reeling from the indignities of Baby Jane, and felt at risk of being upstaged by Davis again.

While Bette and Joan fought throughout their acting careers and over relationships, there was one area where there was sympathy.

“I was not Miss Crawford’s biggest fan,” Davis acknowledged, “but, wisecracks to the contrary, I did and still do respect her talent. What she did not deserve was that detestable book written by her daughter… To do something like that to someone who saved you from the orphanage, foster homes, who knows what. If she didn’t like the person who chose to be her mother, she was grown up and could choose her own life.”

Davis went on to admit that she “felt very sorry for Joan Crawford, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate my pity, because that’s the last thing she would have wanted, anyone being sorry for her, especially me. I can understand how hurt Miss Crawford had to be. Well, no I can’t. It’s like trying to imagine how I would feel if my own beloved, wonderful daughter, B.D., were to write a bad book about me. Unimaginable.”

That last part would soon become bitterly ironic, to a degree that would seem heavy-handed if you wrote it in a screenplay. In 1985, B.D. Hyman would indeed follow in Christina Crawford’s footsteps, and publish a book entitled My Mother’s Keeper, in which she described Davis as a selfish, emotionally abusive alcoholic.

It’s an extraordinary story, particularly when you consider that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, although born 4 years apart, are actually twins.

The odds against two people having the same Sun, Moon and Rising signs are over 1700/1 against.

Their Moons and Ascendants are conjunct each other which multiplies these odds tenfold.

The chances of two born four years apart both having the same T Squares (Uranus opposite Neptune focused on an apex Sun) and the same Moon/Pluto conjunction are off the scale.

For such major film stars it is entirely appropriate that those T squares focus on a very driven 5th house Aries Sun.

But it’s not just through the cinema that the 5th house focus came.

In Zsa Zsa Gabor – Uranian Divorce I argue that someone with a strong and challenged 5th house can view marriage as belonging there rather than the 7th house because they are not built for the long term experience.

Both Crawford and Davis had 4 marriages and Joan had many affairs with both men and women.

Fittingly given the 5th house themes, they also adopted children (Joan had 5 and Bette 2) and had acrimonious relationships with them, both having daughters that wrote scathing biographies about their mothers, casting them as unfit for the role.

Despite the enormous similarity between Joan and Bette’s charts, their actual synastry is pretty horrible.

Joan’s Sun is within a degree of Bette’s Saturn.

Bette’s Sun is closely conjunct Joan’s Mars.

Joan’s Moon is within a degree of Bette’s Pluto.

Bette’s Moon is within two of Joan’s Pluto.

Given that Pluto is their ruler and conjuncts both Moons in its natural house, it makes sense that Joan Crawford’s whole career fits around Bette Davis’ major Pluto transits.

Joan first became famous when Pluto was square to Bette’s Sun (and her Mars) and the feud ended with Joan’s death as Pluto formed the opposition to those two.

It is bizarre how strongly these two charts overlap and with Scorpio rising, Moon/Pluto in the 8th, Mars in Aries and apex Sun/Jupiter in the 5th, Joan Crawford would have got a rise out of anyone.

Even Lassie.”

This was my article posted 18 months ago.

Since then my discoveries in the area of Progressions/Regressions have convinced me to have a new look at the synastry between these two screen goddesses, to see if there is more to it than a simple this life professional/personal rivalry.

Could Joan and Bette’s antagonism be part of a pre-arrangement, a contract that was agreed between them before they were even born?

Could it have been carried over from a shared previous lifetime?

Could they in fact be each other’s nemesis, a kind of soul hate figure?

How could we find out if any of this was so?

For this purpose we need second sight, the ability to look at a chart not simply from the point of view of the life it initiates and describes.

We need to look from our soul’s perspective and see the whole 360 degree space in the birthchart as potentially ours.

The moment of our birth and the planetary pattern of our chart is simply an emergence from this space, one of many that we have made and presumably will continue to make.

That birth pattern does not stop there, it is continually progressing and moving forward.

The planets involved in it represent different parts of ourselves in this life but also parts of our soul’s required experience for this time round.

These experiences can and often do come through the form of other people in our life. These people are this life representations of members of our own soul group.

They have either agreed as souls to come in and perform this role for us in order to help us learn from the experience, or they have to do this as the inevitable result of unresolved and accumulated past life experiences.

Perhaps there is a bit of both.

Maybe there are two different types of soul group contact.

One person in our life could be playing the consciously arranged role of genuine soulmate, who comes to help us. Another one’s presence in our lives could be entirely determined by these unresolved past issues.

A kind of soulhate figure, someone who we are forced to engage with precisely because of our past dealings with them, which have created a momentum of their own, demanding some kind of new territory for these themes to play out.

We all have experience of someone in our lives playing this type of role, someone who we have not chosen and probably would not consciously do so anyway, but they seem to be there anyway forcing us to find some way of dealing with them.

They could even be playing a major role in our lives as a husband or wife but it still on some level feels that we would not have consciously deliberately chosen to have that experience.

This experience could be easily identified in our charts.

I have had one such person play this role in my life.

I have Venus in Scorpio in the 10th house conjunct Saturn and square to Pluto in the 7th house.

I now understand this to mean that I would be not allowed to experience love until my later years (Venus conjunct Saturn) in order to concentrate on my work (10th house).

In the meantime I would have to experience a difficult and dysfunctional marriage experience (Venus square to Pluto in the 7th).

I met this person in my mid 20s when transit Pluto was conjunct my Venus.

My progressions at the time show that it was an important meeting.

My Sun is at 4 Capricorn, hers is 3 Aries. The tight square aspect between our Suns is one of the many difficult pieces of synastry that we had.

My progressed Mars when we met was at 4 Aries exactly square to my Sun.

I have now applied my recent progressed birth moment discovery to our relationship.

She was born 3 years after me. In such a short time frame there is not much room for any progressed movements apart from the Moon.

If I progressed my own chart forward to the date of her birth, my Moon forms an exact opposition with my 7th house Pluto.

Through my own work with past life regressions, I know that our relationship had to occur because she was responsible for my death in 1915 during the First World War.

I was an American however and was not involved in the war, but she was a German officer who considered my presence a threat.

So there were unresolved themes that demanded being revisited this time round.

When you look at the synastry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, it must have come from somewhere.

Astrologers would agree that such challenging and powerful interconnecting chart patterns would inevitably need to play out through their lives.

If this life is really just a one off, why should some people have massively challenging charts and others have very easy ones?

We can’t just say this has come together purely as the result of pure chance.

Yet this is effectively what astrologers who don’t believe in some form of recycling or reincarnation are asserting. That there is no purpose in a system that is so meticulously constructed.

That the astrology gods are just using us all for their sport.

For Joan and Bette to have a future, they must also have had a past.

The method of Secondary Progressions, both forward and backward can help us see both.

But what date to use?

It is difficult to say exactly when these two screen queens met, they certainly had dealings even thirty years before they appeared in film together.

At this point it probably makes sense to have another look at both charts together.

We can see the incredible synastry.

Both are Aries Suns.

They both have Ascendants in mid Scorpio

They both have the Moon/Pluto conjunction in Gemini in the 8th house.

Joan’s Mars is conjunct Bette’s Sun.

In the absence of a meeting date what happens if we progress Joan Crawford’s chart forward those 4 years to Bette Davis’ birthdate.

Despite the fact that 4 years allows little time for progressed planet movements, Joan’s Mars has tightened its sextile aspect with her Moon/Pluto.

Mars is now within a degree of her Moon and is exactly (orb of 3 minutes) sextile Bette’s Pluto.

The Moon is the one planet that would move a decent distance in 4 years, and it is forming a T square with Saturn and her Ascendant and also trine her Mars.

But the most significant of all of these is the fact that Joan’s progressed Ascendant has moved forward to be exactly conjunct Bette’s own Ascendant.

If we regress Bette’s chart the 4 years to Joan’s birthdate.

In an extraordinary mirror effect, Bette’s Ascendant has formed an exact conjunction with Joan’s (with an orb of 4 minutes).

The Moon/Pluto 8th house conjunction that they both share is again triggered strongly.

Bette’s regressed Moon is exactly (orb of 6 minutes) sextile her Pluto.

It is also exactly sextile Joan’s Moon.

And exactly (9 minutes) conjunct Joan’s progressed Mars at Bette’s birth.

All of these progressions/regressions highlight that Mars/Pluto nature of their relationship.

We can clearly see from this example as with the others from recent articles (King Charles, Richard Gere, Michael Douglas) that a soul group connection between people is flagged up by each one’s entrance into this life, even if it happens a quarter of a century before or after their own.

The odds of any of these progressions/regressions occurring by chance are hundreds or even thousands to one against.

This is an extraordinary discovery which has to be acknowledged as proof of both reincarnation and also of the method of secondary progressions to indicate it.

Naturally any breakthrough like this will raise as many questions as it answers.

One that comes to mind is are there any other dimensions of this soulmate relationship that can be discovered through the use of this method?

If it is possible to see the date when your nemesis entered this life, is the date that they leave it also available?

The feud between Davis and Crawford ended in 1977 with Joan’s death and a final quote from Bette “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”

One theme that consistently comes up is that unresolved issues have to continue. This is simple logic applied to the nature of human minds.

If we are carrying an issue with someone, it continues to affect us particularly in our relationship with them. But we assume that ends with their death.

This is just another naive assumption that we have because of our desperation to see this life as a one off. Once we start to consider the possibility of continuity, we would have to drop it.

If someone is dispatched from this life with Bette Davis’ quote ringing in their ears, there’s a fair bet that there will be more to come.

Particularly if that moment has its own powerful progressed significance.

Progressing Bette’s chart forward to the date of Joan’s death produces a mind boggling configuration.

A 7 planet stellium mostly in the 8th house of death says enough in itself.

A Sun/Pluto conjunction opposite the Moon and a T square involving Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Uranus and an apex Saturn would be suggesting that this is one of the most powerful moments of Bette Davis whole life, particularly from a soul’s perspective.

But once we remember that Bette’s natal Pluto is 22.55 Gemini in her 8th house and it’s conjunct her Moon at 16.46 Gemini, these progressed Sun and Moon positions become astonishingly powerful.

These kind of things happen all the time in astrology, particularly with progressions. I often wonder whether my readers are as gobsmacked by them as I am and whether I can sufficiently convey their stunning accuracy because I run out of superlatives to describe them and give them the credit that they are due.

Astrologers are always saying this means this and that means that, whether they are focusing on their own favourite methods or simply the ones that most of us use.

As readers we easily lose our capacity to evaluate what we are seeing and just get used to absorbing it all, nodding appreciatively and moving on to the next one.

When really what we are witnessing is something so incredible that we would never be able to see the world in the same way again.

This is particularly so if we are being shown an absolute proof of reincarnation and astrology’s ability to detail it.

To attempt to give a fair perspective to this mind-blowing discovery, my only resort is to give the odds against such a thing occurring by chance.

Remember that Pluto is Bette Davis’ ruler (Scorpio rising) and in the 8th house. So why should the most powerful progression of her life indicating death come 12 years before she passed on?

It must be because as I have stated many times, progressions are an indication of the comings and going of members of our soul group, whether they are our mates or our hates.

So given she lived into her 80s, the odds against Bette’s progressed Sun occurring within 1/4 of a degree of her 8th house Pluto at the death of Joan Crawford are over 160/1 against.

The odds against her progressed Moon fitting into this pattern are at a conservative estimate 20/1 against. So we are looking at a combined total of over 3,000/1.

I have calculated that there must have been at least 300 male stars at MGM during Joan Crawford’s career. The odds against her sleeping with all of them are much less than the odds of her death appearing in Bette Davis’ progressions.

Even if we include Lassie.

Posted 4th Nov 2025

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