On Sunday’s episode of Feud, Ryan Murphy kicked his burgeoning Joan Crawford-Bette Davis rivalry up to the screaming crescendo that was the 1963 best-actress race—when Davis earned an Oscar nomination for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Crawford, her snubbed co-star, channeled her jealousy into the kind of scorched-earth Oscar campaign that would make Harvey Weinstein swell with pride. Not only did Crawford get the outcome she wanted—a win for anyone but Davis—but in the end, it was Crawford who took the Oscar stage to accept the best-actress award. (Yes, it was on behalf of Anne Bancroft—but that was just a technicality in the Machiavellian movie star’s mind.) To quote Hedda Hopper in her post-Oscars column: “When it comes to giving or stealing a show, nobody can top Joan Crawford.”

Murphy set the stage for the showdown on Sunday’s episode by establishing that, in 1963, Davis already had two Oscars, and her iconic eyes were focused on a third—which would have made her the first actress in Hollywood history to collect a gilded trio. After the nominations were announced, Crawford acted every bit the team player, telling reporters, “I always knew Bette would be chosen, and I hope and pray that she wins.”

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“That’s so much bull,” Davis retorted after hearing what Crawford said, according to Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud by Shaun Considine. “When Miss Crawford wasn’t nominated, she immediately got herself booked on the Oscar show to present the best director award. Then she flew to New York and deliberately campaigned against me. She told people not to vote for me. She also called up the other nominees and told them she would accept their statue if they couldn’t show up at the ceremonies.”

The evidence: well, it was Crawford who ultimately accepted Bancroft’s trophy. (An interesting footnote: had the Academy had different rules, Crawford would have missed this opportunity—as Bancroft initially wanted Patty Duke to accept for her. Alas, Duke was nominated for an award herself and was not allowed to do the honor.) Fellow nominee Geraldine Page (played by Sarah Paulson in Sunday’s episode) also confirmed that Crawford reached out to her in an interview about her bizarre interaction with the movie star, who was two decades her senior at the time. The excerpt, from Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud:

“I received a lovely note of congratulations from Miss Crawford,” said nominee Geraldine Page. “And then she called me. I was tongue-tied, very intimidated in talking with her. To me she was the epitome of a movie star. I always loved her movies . . . All I could manage was, “Yes, Miss Crawford. No, Miss Crawford.’ When she mentioned about accepting the Oscar for me if I won, I said yes. Actually I was relieved. That meant I wouldn’t have to fly all the way to California, or spend a lot of time looking for a new dress to wear. I was happy and honored that Joan Crawford would be doing all of that for me.”

While Page would have fretted about finding the perfect dress, Crawford reveled in dressing for the occasion, wearing an Edith Head-designed silver gown, Van Cleef and Arpels diamonds, and silver powder dusted onto her curled hair. Davis, who was positive she would win, also wore Edith Head—and was accompanied to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium by her daughter B.D., son Michael, and friend Olivia de Havilland (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones). On the red carpet, Davis stated her intentions with the kind of immodesty that would have made Meryl Streep blush. “Yes, I want that Oscar,” Davis told columnist Army Archerd. “I have to be the first to win three.”

Rather than watch from the audience, Crawford, Davis, and their entourages watched backstage. Davis sat in host Frank Sinatra’s dressing room, while Crawford commanded her own viewing soiree in the main dressing room. The consummate host, Crawford transformed the space into her own viewing party, according to Considine, who wrote that “she had a wet bar set up, with Pepsi coolers filled with bourbon, scotch, vodka, gin, champagne—‘plus four kinds of cheese and all the fixings,’ ” as well as a TV brought in so her guests could watch in real time.

Both women made their way to the stage wings when it was time for Swiss actor Maximilian Schell to announce the best-actress category (although Davis’s biography, Dark Victory, alleges that the actresses stayed in their respective green rooms for the category to be announced). Yes, the show’s director Richard Dunlap considered positioning a camera backstage to capture the dramatic moment—and, even better, the expressions of Davis and Crawford when the winner was announced. But in a charitable gesture that would never be extended in today’s brutal reality-TV era, Dunlap declined. “I couldn’t,” Dunlap later told authors Mason Wiley and Damien Bona for their book Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards. “It would have been cruel.”

So we’ll have to trust the memories of those backstage, like Davis.

“When Anne Bancroft’s name was announced, I am sure I turned white,” Bette said, according to Ed Sihov's Davis memoir Dark Victory.

Oscars director Richard Dunlap remembered how Crawford’s entire posture changed—instantly switching into movie-star mode—the second she heard her name. Per Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud:

“Joan stood instantly erect,” said TV director Richard Dunlap. “Shoulders back, neck straight, head up. She stomped out her cigarette butt, grabbed the hand of the stage manager, who blurted afterwards, ‘she nearly broke all my fingers with her strength.’ Then with barely an ‘excuse me’ to Bette Davis, she marched past her and soared calmly onstage with the incomparable Crawford manner.

“Bette bit into her cigarette and seemed to stop breathing,” said Dunlap. “She had lost the award. Joan was out there—suddenly it was her night.”

While Davis did not recall specific details of that gut-punch moment, a single glance that Crawford gave her later in the night would remain seared into Davis’s memory.

“Moments later, Crawford floated down the hall past my door,” remembered Davis. “I will never forget the look she gave me. It was triumphant. The look clearly said, ‘You didn’t win and I am elated!’”

Although Murphy rushes Sarandon’s Davis home to lick her wounds, producer Bill Frye, a friend of Davis’s, offered Vanity Fair a different, juicier version of the post-Oscars events.

Watching Crawford stand there next to Gregory Peck clutching Anne Bancroft’s Oscar, Bette became so angry that she turned to me and said loudly, “Let’s get out of here!”

She stood up, and we left the auditorium before the ceremony was over. Bette wanted to go home, but I persuaded her to make an appearance, at least, at the post-ceremony party at the Beverly Hilton. There we were joined by Bette’s sister, Bobby, Bette’s daughter B.D., Bob Aldrich and his wife, and Olivia de Havilland. At the center of each table were bottles of vodka, gin, bourbon, and scotch. The first thing Bette did was take a glass and fill it with scotch, right to the top—no water, no ice. “This is for La Belle Crawford,”she said.

“She doesn’t drink scotch,” I said. “She drinks vodka.”

“I don’t care what she drinks. This is going into her fucking face.”

A few moments later, Joan Crawford appeared at the entrance to the ballroom and surveyed the party in her imperial manner. Her eyes zeroed in on Bette, and for one moment I was sure she was going to come over to our table. Instead she turned to her left, circled the whole room, and sat far away from us. But not far enough for Bette. “I refuse to be in the same room with her. I don’t care how big the room is,” she announced, and demanded that we leave.

According to Davis biographer Ed Sikov in Dark Victory, Frye accompanied Davis back to her home, where the actress—unsure of what else to do—began making a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. It was at this moment that Frye, desperately searching for something to say, made a faux pas by complimenting Crawford’s look that evening. The repercussions were immediate:

“What did you say?” asked Bette, who stopped slicing the bread and proceeded to advance upon the startled Frye with the knife in her hand. “What did you say?” she repeated, aiming the blade at his heart. “You make me sick,” she told him and calmly went back to making breakfast.

In the days afterward, Crawford claimed that she went into the ceremony with the most innocent of intentions.

“Disloyalty never entered my mind,” Crawford told a reporter, according to Considine. “If Geraldine Page had won, I’d have been glad for her. I’m working for an industry, not an individual.”

To Davis, though, Crawford’s Oscar machinations were pure evil—which Davis could not forgive and would never forget.

In 1969, when asked about Crawford, Davis actually had some nice things to say about her erstwhile co-star. “She is a professional,” Davis told an interviewer. “She is always on time. She knew her lines . . . we made [What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?] in three weeks, Joan and I, because that is all the money anybody would give for us . . . But I had great respect for her as a professional. And I wish I was half as beautiful, that I will say for her.”

“Now if you want to meet me privately sometime, I will tell you what I really think,” Davis added, eliciting laughs from the audience.

As bitterness set in, though, Davis quit feigning politeness in public.

“Joan did not want me to have that Oscar,” Davis told Barbara Walters in an interview decades after the 1963 Oscars, the pain still fresh in her memory. “She worked very hard, campaigned very hard, talking to all of the New York people, saying, ‘If you win, I’ll accept your Oscar.' ”

“I thought I should have had it,” Davis continued. “The foolish part was that because we were both [receiving] percentages of the profits, an award would have meant a million more dollars to the film”—thanks to a presumed post-Oscar box-office swell. “She cut off her own nose, just so I wouldn’t win.”

Even in 1987, after she had suffered a debilitating stroke and been diagnosed with breast cancer, Davis was still dwelling on the loss.

“I was furious,” a gaunt-looking Davis told Bryant Gumbel, again recalling that evening in 1963 between drags of her cigarette. “That would have made me the first person to have three [Oscars] . . . I always have to be the first as an Aries,” she continued, referring to her astrological sign. “I should have had it all. How very immodest of me, but I should have had it. No question.”

Gumbel followed up by asking whether the awards meant as much to her then as they did when she first won them. While any actress of the modern era would most likely wave off the question with a publicist-approved statement, saying the experience—not the material trophy—is what matters most, Davis, even in old age, was fierce, unrelenting, and award-focused.

“Do the honors mean as much now as when you won the—,” Gumbel asked.

“Youuuu bet,” Davis said, cutting Gumbel off before he could finish the question. After all, Davis had put everything else in her life—her marriages, her relationships with her children—behind her career. And if she didn’t do it for the awards, what the hell did she make all of those sacrifices for, anyway?

“I have them displayed in a beautiful cabinet at home,” Davis continued—discussing something she cared about so passionately that she didn’t even dare interrupt herself by taking a puff from her omnipresent cigarette. “I have awards from all over the world, and I am so proud of it. I call it my blood, sweat, and tears.”