The book was released just in time for Mother’s Day, but the timing was more cruel for another reason still. Per The Washington Post, “The then 77-year-old Bette Davis just had recovered from a broken hip, a mastectomy and a devastating stroke. So much for Christian charity.”

Despite her failing health, Davis sat for interviews after the release of My Mother’s Keeper to contradict her daughter’s book. Asked about a possible reconciliation in a 1987 interview with Bryant Gumbel, Davis replied, “We can hardly have a close relationship like that after a book like that is written about you. I lost her. . .Realizing she had written this book about me was as catastrophic as the stroke.”

Davis also published an open letter to Hyman in her 1987 memoir This n That, beginning, “Dear Hyman, I am now utterly confused as to who you are or what your way of life is. [Your book] is a glaring lack of loyalty and thanks for the very privileged life I feel you have been given.”

As for the title of Hyman’s book, Davis wrote, “If my memory serves me right, I’ve been your keeper all these many years. I am continuing to do so, as my name has made your book about me a success.”

Asked that same year whether she considered herself a good mother, Davis told Gumbel, “I think I was. . .I loved my children very, very much. . .I think I was a good mother. My son does too. That’s a comfort, that one child agrees.” Indeed, Michael Merrill stopped speaking to B.D. after she wrote the book, and co-founded the Bette Davis Foundation, awarding scholarships to aspiring actors, in his mother’s honor.

But Davis, strong Yankee that she was, was not one to dwell, and told Gumbel that she wanted to move past the drama—even if it meant moving past her relationship with her daughter: “That is in the past and we go forward. Forward march.”

In the end, perhaps it speaks to the ambitiousness and competitiveness of Crawford and Davis that they were not able to bond over their professional successes. But later in life, each found sympathy and genuine sentiment for the other on the subject of their family failures.

“There was one thing where Bette was one up on me,” Crawford, who adopted four children, told her biographer Charlotte Chandler. “She’d had a baby, a child of her own. I wanted one, and Bette was so lucky to have been able to have her own daughter.”

Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud goes as far as to link B.D.’s birth to Crawford’s decision to adopt twins the same year, as if that could one up Davis. Davis allegedly responded to the news by saying, “She buys babies like she’s in a supermarket.”

Before Davis had any sense that her own daughter would write a venomous tell-all book about her, the actress actually had sympathetic words for Crawford, which she shared with biographer Charlotte Chandler.