I read a story once about Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine and found it fascinating for the following reasons.
Firstly, I am a sister myself, so I could easily identify with what I read. Oh boy, can I!
Secondly, because I really didn’t know that these two well- known stars were sisters. Maybe I did somewhere along the line, and it has become another one of those facts that has drowned in the morass of this ageing brain.
Thirdly, that they are the only set of sisters ever to win Academy awards.
What really surprised me though, was the discovery that these two literally fought like cat and dog their entire lives. Yes, I know that sisters tend to argue and fight a lot, but it’s not compulsory and not all the time?
Not knowing they were related is easy enough to explain, as their surnames were different. Although if you compare their younger photographs, they do look remarkably similar. Olivia kept her real name, but due to some peculiar favouritism of their mother, Joan was never allowed to use hers and had to call herself Joan Fontaine.
What on earth could that have been about?
It would appear that the feud between the sisters was part of an ongoing family situation with everybody at odds with everybody else. Even Joan’s daughters joined in and took their grandmothers side against their mother.
This is all reading like a Hollywood script, don’t you think?
As with all family squabbles, and I say that tongue in cheek and with a fair amount of experience, you are never sure who to point an accusing finger at. These things tend to start over something quite trivial, which then accelerates into a monster before you know what’s happening. By then, it is usually too late to do anything about it, more is the pity.
I wonder what it was all about, and how it could have gone on unchecked for so many years.
They ended up living on different continents, but you get the feeling that the distance didn’t matter.
Joan died peacefully in her sleep, although I’m sure that wouldn’t have made her feel any better. As she was once quoted as saying,” I married first, won an Oscar first. If I die first, she’ll be livid because I beat her to it.”
Basically, I wanted to write about these two, because I am a sister and know only too well what can happen.
Because we are so different, with very different ways of doing things, Anita and I have had some pretty horrendous rows. Some would call them spectacular, but most of them hurt both of us pretty badly at the time. We may be a pair of stroppy old cows, but we do hate it when we fall out. The thought of it going on for years doesn’t bear thinking about, and I for one couldn’t live like that. Even if we were filthy rich and continents apart!
After what has happened this year in particular, I am incredibly grateful to be part of my family, for there was a time when I had no one. Tragic circumstances had done their utmost to make me an emotional cripple and I bear the scars to this day, although they have faded a good deal, thanks mainly to the love and support I receive on a daily basis from my family.
A sometimes annoying, often demanding, but eternally surprising family, all of whom I love so very much.
We have a Father’s Day and a Mother’s Day, why not a Family Day too?
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