This 'quotation' comes up regularly, but it's of very dubious provenance.
According to Bustle, it was related in Bette and Joan: the Divine Feud (1989), a joint biography of the two actresses in question, by Shaun Considine. I couldn't find it in any source that I would regard as reliable – including the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations and Wikiquote.
The feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford is legendary. Most sources trace it to the filming of Dangerous (1935), in which Bette Davis starred with the American actor Franchot Tone. She fell madly in love with him, but unfortunately he was already engaged to Joan Crawford. According to The Sun, Tone had fallen for Crawford when she invited him for dinner and greeted him completely naked.
Other widely–reported remarks, allegedly made by Bette Davis about Joan Crawford, include:
| • | Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies. |
| • | I wouldn't piss on her if she was on fire. |
| • | You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good! |
On artsmeme, someone called Damon commented: "She never said about 85% of those. Those quotes are from a fictional book called The Divine Feud with no points of reference in it."
If you google "bette davis joan crawford lassie", you will find plenty of websites that treat the Lassie quote as genuine. But most if not all of them agree that the term was "slept with" and not "screwed".
© Haydn Thompson 2023