“I regret that I remember not one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood,” movie star Joan Fontaine once said of her equally famous older sister, Olivia de Havilland.
De Havilland begged to differ. “I loved her so much as a child,” she told Vanity Fair in 2016. Throughout their long lives, they seemed to disagree with each other about almost everything, making theirs one of the few Hollywood feuds which truly lived up to the hype—so much so that it was a subplot in the first season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud. (One that de Havilland did not care for.)
Each woman’s resume was impressive. Fontaine was the Oscar-winning star of films including Rebecca, Suspicion and The Women. De Havilland won two Oscars to her sister’s one, gracing the screen in movies as varied as Gone with the Wind, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Snake Pit and The Heiress. Their love lives were impressive as well, with Fontaine boasting romances with Conrad Nagel, Brian Aherne, John Houseman, Adlai Stevenson, the Aga Khan and cartoonist Charles Addams. For De Havilland there were affairs with Howard Hughes, Jimmy Stewart and John Huston.
As Charles Higham’s catty, gossipy, seemingly pro-Joan 1984 biography, Sisters: The Story of Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine paints them, both were steely, brave, and talented know-it-alls, determined to have the last word. In Fontaine’s delightfully bitchy, self-serving 1978 autobiography, No Bed of Roses, she claims victimhood in almost every situation—particularly regarding her sister—leading de Havilland (and Fontaine’s ex-husband William Dozier) to refer to the book acidly as No Shred of Truth.
de Havilland’s own literary output, the charming and slight 1962 expatriate memoir Every Frenchman Has One, scarcely mentions her younger sister. But after Fontaine’s death in 2013, the claws came out. “Dragon lady,” as she referred to Fontaine, “was a brilliant, multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way.”
Indeed, Fontaine even made a competition out of their impending mortality, spilling their sibling rivalry into the afterlife. “I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did,” Fontaine said in 1978. “And if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it!”
Made in Japan
Oliva de Havilland was born on July 1, 1916, in Tokyo, Japan. Joan followed quickly, on October 22, 1917. “From birth,” Fontaine writes in No Bed of Roses, “we were not encouraged by our parents or nurses to be anything but rivals.”
Their parents were an odd pair. Father Walter De Havilland was a British expatriate who had studied at Harrow and Cambridge and was descended from a prolific Channel Island family that had a streak of insanity. An eccentric, haughty, deeply strange man, he married the much younger Lillian, a thwarted English actress who in Fontaine’s view was a “snob” with exquisite taste, “a rigid code of behavior… and not one mediocre thought in her head.”
Both girls, particularly Fontaine, were sickly, and the marriage was a disaster. In 1919, Lillian escaped, taking the girls to San Francisco to start a new life. While the nervous, flighty Fontaine suffered from health problems and was often in bed, De Havilland was a popular, hardworking go-getter, whom Fontaine claims would torture her by reading aloud from the Bible.
“Listening to her read aloud the crucifixion from the Bible in mounting gusto, I not only experienced man’s inhumanity to man, but that of sister to sister,” Fontaine writes. “When she read of the crown of thorns…my screams were heard down the entire row of cottages.”
