Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 11

"There is so much that's wonderful in your characterization that it seems a crime to risk its total effect by neglecting the final touches. Yours devotedly, Tennessee."24 "It was there in Chicago that Bette Davis said she'd not take further direction from Frank Corsaro and ordered him barred from the theatre," Williams later recalled in his Memoirs. "He stayed out of the theatre but stayed in Chicago; but Bette said she could sense his lingering presence in Chicago and that he must be returned to New York and that G.o.ddam Actor's Studio, which had sp.a.w.ned him."25 Williams and Charles Bowden took over the direction, though Corsaro remained on the bill.

The Night of the Iguana opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on December 28, 1961. The director Joshua Logan saw the show and admired it, particularly Davis: "She was svelte, handsome, voluptuous, wicked, wise, raffish, slightly vulgar-in fact, she was ideal for the part and gave the play an added dimension."26 Bette kept an autograph book to register those who came backstage during the New York run. The first signatory is "Mike Merrill, your ever loving son." Others include Anita Loos, Dakin Williams, Natalie Schafer, B. D. Merrill ("your ever lovin' daughter"), Glenda Farrell, Kaye Ballard, Teresa Wright, Ann Sheridan, Joan Bennett, Olivia de Havilland, Fredric March, Margot Merrill (who printed her name in a legible but childish hand), Mike Merrill again, right below Margot, and, in an outsized flourish that dominates the lower half of one page, "Love to Bette-Joan Crawford."27 Telegrams flew in, too, from such notables as Ray Stark, Leland Hayward, Spencer Tracy, Dore Shary, Terence Rattigan, Bobby ("Hang this above the steam pipes and know that I am there with you and only you on this opening night . . . I love you for all the greats you are. Great mother, great aunt, great great sister, great dad and my best friend. Pocket full of miracles for you on opening night and every night thereafter"), Johnny Dall, Farley Granger, Mike Levee, and finally one that reads, "Darling Bette-Please let me do the movie version. Bless you-and love-Tallulah."28 Despite the mean if funny critical fanfare in Chicago, The Night of the Iguana was a success in New York, but Bette began missing performances-according to Audrey Wood, without explanation. Wood's theory is that Davis began to resent the amount of time her character was offstage: "When you have been a great film star, it must be difficult to sit backstage in your dressing room for protracted periods in which there is nothing to do but to wait for your next entrance."29 Sh.e.l.ley Winters saw the show after hearing some negative buzz. "Bette Davis seemed to be shooting her lines right at the audience, facing squarely front and not talking to Margaret or Patrick at all," Winters later wrote. "She was getting uproarious laughs, but I knew she wasn't that kind of actress. What the h.e.l.l was going on? Only in the scenes when Bette was alone with Patrick was there any communication. Those scenes were powerful. Why had she just stood on the stage and shouted out her jokes?"

Davis left the show in disgust in early April 1962, and Winters agreed to take over the role. She attended a matinee during the interim, when Maxine Faulk was being played by Davis's quite experienced understudy, Madeleine Sherwood. When the announcement was made that Sherwood was appearing that afternoon in Davis's place, "half of the audience stood up simultaneously and rushed to the box office to get their money back." (Sherwood had the guts to yell out from the stage, "Come on, ladies! Give me a chance! I'm really very good, and the play is terrific!") "The first time I walked into my dressing room backstage at the Royale," Winters continued, "written on the mirror in very red lipstick were the following words: 'Sh.e.l.lEY-AFTER YOUR FIRST OR POSSIBLY SECOND PERFORMANCE you will find out why i left this show. bette davis.' " Winters noted that Sherwood hadn't "washed Bette's message to me off the mirror. So whatever was going to happen to me must have happened to Madeleine, too."

She figured it out soon enough. As Winters explained it, Williams had written Maxine Faulk as a comic role to relieve the relentless sadness of an alcoholic going to "his almost certain death, like the iguana that is tied up under our stage veranda." And the laugh lines Williams gave to Faulk depended on timing-everyone's, not only the actress delivering them. According to Winters, "Margaret Leighton or Patrick O'Neal would say the setup of my joke and then move slightly for a few seconds, keeping the eye of the audience so the audience was not looking at me or even listening. . . . It's a wicked British stage trick." It took Winters about three performances to understand exactly why Davis had gotten fed up enough to leave the show.30 Williams saw things differently. "Bette Davis quit the show and Sh.e.l.ley Winters went in," the playwright wrote to his friend Maria St. Just. "It is hard to say which was worse but at least La Davis drew cash and La Winters seems only to sell the upper gallery."31 But Sh.e.l.ley got the last laugh. At one performance she became so enraged at her fellow actors' antics that she pushed a c.o.c.ktail cart across the stage so hard that it "knocked Patrick O'Neal over and he knocked Margaret Leighton over as he fell. The audience either liked this stage business or felt they deserved it," she wrote.32 NEUROSIS, HYSTERIA, AND paranoia are defining features of Davis's acting style, the film scholar Martin Shingler points out-"the fidgity fingers; the cracks in her voice and leaps to a shrill, high pitch; the roving eyes suspiciously scanning her immediate environment." But Davis's performance style is complicated, as was her psyche. "In contrast," Shingler adds, "there's the absolute restraint, the steady, steadfast glare; the straight back; the ability to subdue all the tics and mannerisms, suggesting a high level of self-control." Davis's public image was similarly split: "Her star persona shifts from her famous furies to her absolute level-headedness about herself and the industry she worked in."33 To put it in psychiatric terms, Davis's torn nature suggests that she may have had a borderline personality, one that shifts been the commonly neurotic-anxiety, depression, emotional outbursts-and a baldly psychotic inability to perceive the point at which reality stops and paranoid fantasy takes over. Davis's temper was, it might go without saying, legendary, and behind it lay not only a deep-seated rage against authority, at root antipaternal, but also a compulsion to disrupt the outside world so that it matched her convulsive interior. A history of unstable relationships with men; an impulsive streak; a raw incapability to control anger; a destructive tendency to undercut her directors' interests purely for the sake of undercutting them; a disrupted, itinerant childhood; paternal abandonment; increasing alcoholism . . . Davis's character traits come straight out of a diagnostic manual.*

Davis also shifted drastically between two other poles: the obsessive-compulsive and the hysterical. The woman who recalled with candor her childhood upset at the uneven seam in the circus's red carpet was the same woman whose hot crying jags led to the shutting down of The Little Foxes. The Bette Davis who routinely polished all the silver and bra.s.s in her house as a way of expending nervous energy was the same Bette Davis who threw fits, swore filthily, called people vile names. Robbie Lantz recalled meeting Bette Davis for the first time in Westport: "She showed us the house. On the landing, she had railings made of bra.s.s-very shiny. I said, 'Somebody comes to keep this spotless?' And she said, 'No. I do it.' This gave me a clue to certain things."34 Did the suppression of her hysteria lead to the compulsive bra.s.s polishing, or did the unquenchable need to keep everything in perfect order lead to the regular breakdowns?

* The manual happens to be Disordered Personalities by David J. Robinson, M.D., second edition.

The origins of Bette Davis's double nature are clear enough-Ruthie on the one hand, Harlow on the other-but Ruthie was herself a mix of obstinacy and neurosis. In their unpublished, jointly written memoir, her brother Paul Favor asks Ruthie to name the traits that led Ruthie to "see drama in Bette," and Ruthie tellingly responds: "What he really means is that she had a very bad temper. Yes, this is true, but I know now that I did not understand how to manage it. We were too much alike. She cannot take correction. She is perfectly sure she is right, and so am I. They just do not mix. Many people have asked me why did I let her have her own way. Well, I couldn't help it."35 In other words, Bette's theatricality went hand in hand with its diametric opposite: unshakable conviction.

As Shingler notes, Davis's mix of righteousness and combustibility served to "make her a frightening figure for those who worked with her. It also made her more enigmatic and intriguing for audiences and fans. It probably also frightened her."36 Bette Davis was scarcely easy to live with, perhaps least of all by herself. Still, her nuttiness led directly to one of the greatest performances of her career, an all-stops-pulled portrait of degenerated talent and family resentment spun out of control. And for better or worse (mostly worse), the performance was so brilliant that it set the tone of the rest of her career.

"I've written. A letter. To Daddy! His address is heaven above. . . ."

IT'S TIME FOR What's My Line? again. Now it's November 11, 1962. The first guest, Mimmi Paulsen, is a shipboard radio operator in a black c.o.c.ktail dress. The second, Dell Winders, is a toothy, outdoorsy type from Philadelphia. He's a porpoise trainer. n.o.body gets either of them.

After a pitch for the folks at home to get tested during Diabetes Week, the panelists-Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Art Linkletter-put on their blindfolds before Bette Davis makes her entrance. This time, the signing arm is clad in long-sleeved velvet and graced by a charm bracelet. So far so good, but to loud applause from the audience, Davis strides to her seat and we see that the dress is a disaster: a full-length gown with a drastic Empire waist combined with a plunging neckline. The sleeves are tightly fitted, a satin bow calls further attention to the too-high waist, and the skirt is of densely gathered chiffon. It's too girlish for a woman of fifty-four, mutton dressed as lamb in a prom dress. She has gotten thick.

And yet . . . although she looks every year of her age, she's also glamorous and attractive. There are big bags under her eyes, but the neck and face are fine. The hair, thinner and coa.r.s.er than it was when she was in her prime, is cut just short of her shoulders and suggests Margo Channing with soft waves around her face. She's undeniably s.e.xy and vibrant. Bette Davis has been a movie star for thirty years.

Bennett Cerf knows who she is even before she sits down, probably because Joan Crawford had been on the show a few weeks earlier promoting the same movie. "Well," he says, "that was a spectacular ovation that you received, Mr. or Miss Mystery Guest! Uh, would it be possibly because you have made a great name for yourself in motion pictures?"

"Yes," Davis replies in a weirdly squeaky voice.

"Do you have a new picture just out?" Linkletter asks.

"Yes."

Arlene Francis knows the answer, too: "Boy, try to fake that voice-the most impersonated voice in America! Have you just done a picture with a vis--vis who is also a big name in the picture business?"

"Yes," squeals Bette, who clearly knows what's coming.

Cerf provides the coup de grce: "Would the vis--vis be a lady who has also been a Mystery Guest here within the past month named Miss Joan Crawford?"

"Altogether now," the host, John Daly, says-"one, two, three . . . ," and the panelists cry in unison, "Bette Davis!"

"I've just come back from Miami," Cerf remarks (p.r.o.nouncing it Miama), "and it seems to me your picture's playing in every motion picture theater in Florida-it's all over the place!"

"Well, you know," Bette replies, "we were chosen by motion picture theater owners as a sort of a test run-what they call preview engagements. We were very fortunate we were chosen. We opened in 137 theaters in Manhattan alone, 22 of which I have done in three days in a Greyhound bus."

"You have won two Academy Awards, if memory serves me right," says Daly.

"Very old boys and very tarnished," Davis modestly replies, "a long time ago-oh, they're so tarnished!" (She'd probably polished the gold plate right off of them.) "I think a bright, shiny new one is what is necessary and will be forthcoming," Daly adds.

"Well, I think my two old boys would be pretty pleased," Davis responds, "but you never know."

The picture in question is, of course, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

The night Joan Crawford signed Bette's autograph book backstage after a performance of Night of the Iguana, she told Davis of a novel she had just read-one that could be adapted into a film for both of them. It was written by Henry Farrell and concerned two strange sisters, one considerably stranger than the other. The Hudson girls had once been movie stars but now live in simple baroque despair on the fringes of Hollywood. Blanche is in a wheelchair, the result of a car accident; Jane is off her rocker, the result of the American film industry.

As Davis recalled of Crawford's suggestion, "She said she had sent it to Robert Aldrich with hopes that he would direct it. He had phoned her from Italy, where he was finishing a film, to say he had acquired the rights to the book."37 Several weeks later, Aldrich arrived at Bette's townhouse on East Seventy-eighth Street. Bette first asked him which part was hers.38 Then she asked him whether he'd ever f.u.c.ked Joan. "If you had," Davis stated, "then you couldn't be fair to both of us." "The answer is no-not that I didn't have the opportunity," Aldrich responded.39 Davis was between agents at the time, said Martin Baum: "I was Bob Aldrich's agent, and Bob suggested her for the part of Jane Hudson. I volunteered to be her agent for that job, and she allowed me to sign her."40 Bill Frye claims some credit for the genesis of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? He came across Farrell's novel while searching for new material for his new series Thriller. It was too complex for a TV show, he decided, but it would make a great feature. According to Frye, he gave a copy of the novel to Davis and to Olivia de Havilland as well, with the idea of casting de Havilland as the invalid sister; Frye thought Ida Lupino would be an ideal director for the project. He took the package to Lew Wa.s.serman at Universal (Wa.s.serman had ceased being an agent and became head of MCA, which bought Universal), but when Wa.s.serman learned that Frye wanted to cast Davis, he declined to give the project the go-ahead. (Wa.s.serman had recently seen Davis in "The Bettina May Story" on Wagon Train and, according to Frye, disliked her performance.) "You'll never believe it," Davis told Frye later, "but Crawford gave me a copy of the book with a note suggesting I play the younger sister. I told her never. The only part I'm interested in is Baby Jane."41*

"I hadn't the faintest idea what to do with her until I saw the wardrobe," Davis told James McCourt. "The minute I did, she came to me like that."42 In one way, at least, Davis appreciated the finer, creepier points of Jane Hudson better than Aldrich. She insisted not only on applying her own makeup but on designing it. "What I had in mind no professional makeup man would have dared to put on me," she remarked in This 'n That. "One told me he was afraid that if he did what I wanted, he might never work again. Jane looked like many women one sees on Hollywood Boulevard. . . . I felt Jane never washed her face-just added another layer of makeup each day. I used a chalk-white base, lots of eye shadow-very black-a cupid's-bow mouth, a beauty mark on my cheek and a bleached blond wig with Mary Pickford curls."43 The effect is hideous.

After three days of filming, Aldrich told her to tone it down; it was too much. "If you change my makeup," Bette claimed she told her director, "you'll have to recast me, because if I play Jane I will continue to wear this makeup."44 Aldrich relented, though according to him, when Davis herself saw the film she was aghast at what she'd wrought. "She'd never seen the complete picture before seeing it with me at Cannes, and I don't think she was prepared for the experience of seeing it among lots of people," Aldrich said. "About five minutes into the picture I heard this quiet but kind of desperate sobbing beside me and turned to her wondering what the h.e.l.l was the matter. 'I just look awful,' she wept. 'Do I really look that awful?' "45 According to Bette, Joan had precisely the opposite impulse. Crawford wanted to look glamorous: "her hair well dressed, her gowns beautiful, and her fingernails with red nail polish. For the part of an invalid who had been cooped up in a room for twenty years, she wanted to look attractive!" Crawford launched an argument with Aldrich the morning they were set to film Blanche hobbling her way down the stairs. Aldrich wanted her to remove her nail polish. "You have taken everything else away from me," Joan moaned, bereft. "You're not taking away my nail polish!"46 * It's at best unclear whether Blanche is younger than Jane. The opening scene suggests that she is older.

"In her vanity she was consistent," Davis observed. She offered an especially ludicrous example: "As part of her wardrobe, Miss Crawford owned three sizes of bosoms. In the famous scene in which she lay on the beach, Joan wore the largest ones. Let's face it-when a woman lies on her back, I don't care how well endowed she is, her bosoms do not stand straight up. And Blanche had supposedly wasted away for twenty years. The scene called for me to fall on top of her. I had the breath almost knocked out of me. It was like falling on two footb.a.l.l.s."47 B.D., who plays the Hudson sisters' teenage neighbor in a bit of stunt casting (apart from an uncredited appearance as a toddler in Payment on Demand, this was her only professional acting job), told Look that, as the reporter described it, "the most revealing difference in the personalities of the two women is that Miss Crawford lights her cigarettes with a dainty, ultrafeminine gold lighter, whereas her mother fiercely strikes enormous cowboy matches on the sole of her shoes."48 Bob Thomas, one of Crawford's biographers, overheard the following dialogue on the set one day.

DAVIS: Of course you know, Joan, that everybody is trying to work up a feud between us.

CRAWFORD: I know, dear, and isn't that ridiculous? We're much too professional for anything like that.49 As conventional as the observation may be, the fact is that the tortures the Hudson sisters inflict upon each other in the film-Blanche applies graciousness in the face of infirmity as though it was a painful wrestling hold while Jane, more elemental, chains her sister to the bed and starves her to death-played out in precisely the way Crawford politely denied. Davis fondly told of the day she and Joan were sitting together on the set-Joan serenely knitting-when Bette industriously began crossing out huge portions of the screenplay. "Whose dialogue are you cutting, Bette?" Joan asked. "Yours," Bette answered, whereupon Joan burst gratifyingly into tears.50 She wasn't really eliminating Joan's lines, Bette confessed to Vik Greenfield; she only performed the routine to upset Joan.

Joan, meanwhile, was driving Bette crazy with kindness. Someone began sending a single rose to Davis on the set every day. "If you're going to send roses, for G.o.d's sake send a dozen or more," Bette muttered. When she found out they were coming from Crawford, she thought she'd retch.51 She retaliated by signing Crawford's copy of The Lonely Life with the following inscription: "Joan, Thanks for wanting my autograph. Bette."52 Sheilah Graham reported that Joan, always the company gal, showed up one day with a cooler full of Pepsi for the cast and crew; the next day Bette appeared with an even larger cooler full of c.o.ke.53 Bette was blunt: "We were polite to each other-all the social amenities, 'Good morning, Joan,' and 'Good morning, Bette' c.r.a.p. Thank G.o.d we weren't playing roles where we had to like each other. She was always so d.a.m.n proper. She sent thank you notes for thank you notes!'"54 As Curtis Bernhardt once observed, the two actresses employed opposing strategies to get to a similar place onscreen: "Crawford was a typical film actress. When she needed to play an emotional scene, the director had to take her aside and tell her a sad story. Tears came to her eyes and you let her go out and play the scene. Bette would immediately use tears if I said I wanted them. She was completely professional. I would call Crawford an amateur actress. But Crawford was very good as such. Bette, of course, never shed real tears in an emotional scene. Crawford shed real tears."55 s.e.xually, they were opposites as well. Vincent Sherman, who slept with each of them, tells the story of Crawford watching her own film Humoresque in a screening room with him in preparation for Sherman's The d.a.m.ned Don't Cry and becoming so "stimulated by her own eroticized image" that she stood up in the middle of the film, "raised her dress, and quickly pulled off a pair of silk panties she was wearing." "Was it possible," Sherman asks, "despite my efforts to keep it quiet, that someone had whispered to her that Bette Davis and I had had an affair and she was out to accomplish what Davis had not: have me get a divorce and marry her?" Sherman sums it up: "s.e.x for Bette was a biological need, while for Joan it was primarily an ego trip."56 IN SUNSET BOULEVARD, Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), Norma Desmond's chauffeur and former husband, drives her-in her lengthy and fabulous Isotta Fraschini-through Paramount Pictures' ornate Bronson Avenue gate, the elegant architectural symbol of one of world cinema's preeminent inst.i.tutions. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?-filmed on the cheap-was shot across the street.

The Producers Studios, on the other side of Melrose Avenue from Paramount, has been described as "ramshackle," but that's overstating the case.57 Now called Raleigh Studios, it has been a working lot since 1914, providing relatively inexpensive accommodations to independent filmmakers such as Aldrich and Stanley Kramer as well as television series such as Ronald Reagan's Death Valley Days. Aldrich and company shot Baby Jane there from July 9 through September 12, 1962, with the exteriors of the Hudsons' two-story Spanish Revival house filmed on location in the Wilshire district at 172 South McCadden Place near the corner of Highland and Beverly.58 According to Bob Thomas, Joan got $40,000 and 10 percent of the producer's net profit, but Bette had a more immediate need for cash and agreed to $60,000 with only 5 percent of the profit.59 Aldrich's biographers Alain Silver and James Ursini disagree; according to them, Crawford got 15 percent while Davis got 10 percent.60 And Aldrich himself cited a different base figure for Joan: $25,000.61 No matter; the point is, Baby Jane was relatively cheap to shoot, and the two stars settled for less up front than they had earned in their prime.

Baby Jane was made so inexpensively that Aldrich couldn't afford process shots for Jane Hudson's drive through Hollywood, so Bette herself got behind the wheel one day and drove, with Ernie Haller crouched in the backseat or perched on the hood with his camera.62 But artistic considerations played into Aldrich's decision, too. It was a full twelve years after Eve Harrington and Addison DeWitt strolled toward the camera on a soundstage floor while images of a New Haven sidewalk were projected behind them, and by 1962, rear projection was beginning to look more than a tad artificial. By placing the preposterous Jane Hudson in a real car wending her way in traffic down real Los Angeles streets, Aldrich renders her even more terrifying: the drive visually forces Jane to be plausible in her demented absurdity.

Aldrich struck a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Jack Warner recalled in his memoirs that he caught a preview of the film in New York at the RKO Theater on Eighty-sixth Street. "There were perhaps 3,000 people in the house, and I thought they'd blow the roof off. I hadn't heard such screaming and yelling at a preview in years. Baby Jane lit up the skies like a paint-factory fire."63 The film was an immediate hit upon its release, first in New York on October 31, 1962, a week later in Los Angeles. As the Hollywood Reporter trumpeted, "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? made film history by ama.s.sing through the weekend $1,600,000 in film rental, putting the WarnerSeven Arts a.s.sociation and Robert Aldrich picture into the profit column in less than two weeks."64 Although the trades reported the film cost $825,000, the actual negative cost was $1,075,664.28.65 Still, the film made money; by the end of August 1963, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? had grossed $3,898,568.55.66 Davis herself claimed that by the late 1980s Baby Jane had pulled in about $10 million.67

CHAPTER.

21.

"SITUATION WANTED"

IT WAS ONLY NINE DAYS AFTER WHAT EVER Happened to Baby Jane? wrapped that Bette Davis placed her notorious want ad in the trades. Listed under "Situation Wanted, Women" was the following: MOTHER OF THREE-10, 11 & 15-DIVORCEE. AMERICAN. THIRTY YEARS EXPERIENCE AS AN ACTRESS IN MOTION PICTURES. MOBILE STILL AND MORE AFFABLE THAN RUMOR WOULD HAVE IT. WANTS STEADY EMPLOYMENT IN HOLLYWOOD. (HAS HAD BROADWAY.) BETTE DAVIS, c/o MARTIN BAUM, G.A.C. REFERENCES UPON REQUEST.1 As Martin Baum described his bemused reaction in retrospect, "I was an important agent, she was a big star, and I wasn't going looking for work for her. That was not exactly the position I expected to be in at that point in my career-or her career. She was never out of work, but she was concerned about where her career was going. So she placed the ad. Everyone was laughing-it was a joke. Bette Davis looking for a job? It didn't make sense! But she was serious about it. She felt she needed work. It just wasn't as dire a circ.u.mstance as she portrayed it in the ad.2 "I had a good three years representing her," Baum concluded, "but then she left. She wanted to work more consistently." (The last film he repped for her was Hush. . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte.) "She was a lovely human being-feisty, a fighter all the way, and had great pride in the work she did. As she grew older, and parts became more difficult to get, she still went in there fighting for what she believed in. I loved her, and I'm honored to have represented her for a little while."3 "Actually the ad was tongue-in-cheek, but a deep dig as well," Bette later commented. "The ad was half playful and half serious. After all, I had left a hit play, had finished What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and my book The Lonely Life was just out, so my career was not in jeopardy. If I was truly unemployed, I could never have taken the advertis.e.m.e.nt."4 The ad is a prime example of how Bette's sense of humor could misfire-a less extreme, eminently more comprehensible version of the baskets of rotten vegetables Chuck Pollack says she'd send to friends as her peculiar way of apologizing for her drunken hostility at dinner parties in later years.5 She meant the ad to be a serious joke, a goof with a chip on its shoulder. (How she meant the rotten vegetables remains inexplicable.) But Hollywood took it as an inadvertent joke, and Bette ended up looking foolish in the eyes of fools.

The ad was clearly still on the machers' minds when, in early 1963, the Academy nominated Bette Davis as Best Actress for Baby Jane. Bette blamed not the Academy but Crawford for her loss. "Joan did everything she could possibly think of to keep me from winning," Bette bitterly recalled. "She campaigned openly in New York, contacting all the Oscar nominees who were in plays in New York that year."6 By "all," Bette is referring to two: Geraldine Page, nominated for Sweet Bird of Youth, who was appearing in a revival of O'Neill's Strange Interlude; and Anne Bancroft, who was nominated for The Miracle Worker and was starring in Jerome Robbins's production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. The other two nominees were Katharine Hepburn, for Long Day's Journey into Night, and Lee Remick, for Days of Wine and Roses.

Crawford somehow convinced Bancroft to allow her, Joan, to accept the award on her behalf should she win. And she did, the Academy predictably choosing Helen Keller's heartwarmingly devoted teacher over an atrocity-committing wackjob who, were she real, could herself have been a member of the Academy.

The honors were awarded at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 8, 1963, with Frank Sinatra serving as the emcee. According to Davis, all the nominees or their surrogates were backstage in dressing rooms, each with its own television monitor. The Oscar historians Mason Wiley and Damien Bona specify that Bette was ensconced in Sinatra's dressing room with Olivia de Havilland. Joan was down the hall. Wiley and Bona quote the show's director, Richard Dunlap, on why he refused to show the television audience the scene backstage: "I couldn't. It would have been cruel."7 "When Anne Bancroft's name was announced, I am sure I turned white," Bette wrote. "Moments later, Crawford floated down the hall past my door. I will never forget the look she gave me. It was triumphant. The look clearly said, You didn't win and I am elated!"8 Bill Frye was Bette's escort that night. Watching Crawford standing there receiving an ovation for an award she hadn't even won was too much for Davis to bear. "Let's get out of here!' " she demanded and asked to be taken home. But Frye convinced her to go to a party at the Beverly Hilton, where they were joined by Bobby, B.D., Robert Aldrich and his wife, and Olivia de Havilland. All the tables were graced with fifths of booze, and Bette immediately dove for the scotch, filling a gla.s.s to the brim. "This is for La Belle Crawford," she announced. When told that Joan drank vodka, not scotch, Bette replied, "I don't care what she drinks. This is going into her f.u.c.king face."

Bette didn't throw the drink but said "I refuse to be in the same room with her. I don't care how big the room is." So they all went to Bette's house, whereupon she began to make scrambled eggs and toast. She was slicing a loaf of bread when Frye, casually seated in a rocking chair, tactlessly remarked on Crawford's elegant appearance. "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.9 AFTER BABY JANE, Davis filmed her episode of The Virginian-"The Accomplice," which aired on December 19, 1962-and didn't work again until the fall of 1963, when she agreed to make a film in Italy. "The name of the film was The Empty Canvas," Bette remarked. "Empty it was."10 The film's producer, Carlo Ponti, promised Davis to add more scenes with Davis's character-the extravagantly wealthy, no-named mother of a depressed young painter (Horst Buchholz)-to give her more pizzazz as well as screentime. But as Davis described it, "[I] arrived in Italy to find that nothing had been done to the script at all. In desperation I decided to use a Southern accent to give some kind of flavor to this extremely dull woman. The blonde wig was also my idea, a further attempt to make her at least a noticeable character in the film. My costar, Horst Buchholz, was anything but easy to work with; in fact, he went out of his way to thwart me at every turn.11 "My first day on the set, I arrive, and here is this completely naked girl-and I mean completely naked-walking around, and the grips and the electricians are ogling her and naturally not getting any work done at all, and I thought I'd taken leave of my senses," Bette declared a few months after The Empty Canvas's American release. "Then somebody thinks to introduce me, and the naked lady turns out to be my costar, Catherine Spaak, who has a scene in the picture where her nude body is covered by Mr. Buchholz with ten-thousand lire notes. Quite a change, you see, from the good old days on the Warner lot. . . . Never again. Never another picture in Italy! Remember the Italian t.i.tle, La Noia? Well, it means The Bore."12 On that point she's not trying to be funny, though La Noia actually translates as Boredom; the film is based on the novel by Alberto Moravia.

Bette took one look at her costumes and rejected them all, prompting Carlo Ponti's wife, Sophia Loren, to escort Davis on a shopping spree at the couture house of Loren's friend, Simonetti.13 The results range from the fashionable to the ludicrous-the elegant effect of Simonetti's mid-1960s dresses and suits is destroyed by a hideous fur-trimmed dressing gown that would have looked more at home on Milton Berle.

The Empty Canvas is overripe; Davis's character is literally introduced in a hothouse sniffing "the most heh-venly dahlias." Other rank moments include Bette lying bare-shouldered on a ma.s.sage table receiving a muscular rubdown while smoking, and her casual but hilarious delivery of the line "For G.o.dsakes be careful, Dino-there are all kahnds of diseases floatin' aroun'!"

Davis was baffled by the fact that after shooting each master shot, the director, Damiano Damiani, made no attempt to match anything when shooting different angles and closer distances. "Not only do they not know how to match, the whole concept of matching to a master scene is foreign to them. I began to realize the kind of trouble I was in." This is what Davis said in public; in private, she called Damiani "an idiot, impolite, boor of an untalented director."14 "Mr. Buchholz plays my son, you see-an American-with an accent that just screams 'unter-den-Linden.' And Miss Catherine Spaak-I never did understand what nationality her character was."15 The man playing Spaak's father solved the accent problem easily; his character is mute.

Bette's out-of-nowhere southern accent caused enough postproduction distress that one of Ponti's a.s.sistants flew to London and asked Davis to return to Rome to redub herself. "He nearly left this room through that window, let me tell you," she told a visiting journalist. The reason Ponti's a.s.sistant was unnerved was Bette's response: she would be willing to consider doing the redubbing, she told him-for $50,000. Ponti ultimately decided that Bette's accent was just fine.

"In a blonde Dutch-boy bob, Bette looks like a degenerate Hans Brinker," Time claimed in its review.16 Perhaps, though in this case the role of Hans Brinker is being played by an aging drag queen with heavy black lashes, dark red lips, smears of eye shadow, and dramatically shaped brows that are many shades darker than his wig. Hans also waves a long cigarette holder around and wears metallic harlequin gla.s.ses.

The Legion of Decency awarded The Empty Canvas a C rating- "Condemned"-calling it "a peep-show excursion with a special appeal to the prurient-minded."17 But that's what's good about the picture. The film's philosophical aspects are dreary and irrelevent-Michelangelo Antonioni inadvertently parodied by Damiano Damiani. "That's it," says Dino (Buchholz) as he gazes moodily at a stretched piece of white cloth. "That's my masterpiece. There's nothing worth painting in the whole d.a.m.n world. The empty canvas says everything worth saying." Dino has anomie. It's catching.

Much more entertaining is the abundant sleaze: watching Bette playing Dino's mother as she pimps her son with a serving girl whose a.s.s he squeezes while she serves him lunch on a silver platter; Cecilia (Spaak) hitching her skirt up to the tune of a 1963 bubble-gum pop song; Dino sporting a tight European swimsuit while morosely regarding a corpselike piece of driftwood on the beach. . . . All the while Cecilia tortures Dino with her affairs with both a formerly elderly, now-dead artist and a muscular Nordic blond whose name, absurdly, is Luciani. At one point, Dino pays Cecilia for a near rape and calls her a s.l.u.t; she loves it. Later, they strip for a toss on Mother's bed-the bed in which Dino was born. That's where Cecilia's naked body serves as the second eponymous canvas for Dino's lira-based conceptual art. By the time Dino rams his sleek Italian sportscar into a convenient cinder-block wall, you, too, are ready to call it quits.

ALSO IN 1963, Bette covered for Raymond Burr on an episode of the television series Perry Mason when Burr got sick; Davis's show was called "The Case of Constant Doyle." The thriller Dead Ringer, filmed in 1963 but released in 1964, was a smooth production. Directed by Paul Henreid, it features Bette killing her twin sister, also played by Bette. And in 1964, she made the film version of Harold Robbins's potboiler Where Love Has Gone, the most notable aspect of which is that she fought bitterly with her costar, Susan Hayward, to the point that after the last take Bette ripped her wig off, pitched it straight at Hayward's face, and shouted, "f.u.c.k you."18 "What film isn't a struggle? I am so sick of the struggle." This is Bette writing to Paul Henreid in August 1964, from Honeysuckle Hill, her home at 1100 Stone Canyon Road in Bel-Air. (She moved to Honeysuckle Hill in 1962 from the town house on East Seventy-eighth Street in New York in which she had composed The Lonely Life, after spending a brief interlude in a house on Heather Road in Beverly Hills.) "The history of our film would really fill a book-and it's an idea-it would be quite a story of a real villainess-Miss C.-unbelievable."19 She is referring to Hush. . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, her second Robert Aldrich horror film-one that costarred, for a while, Joan Crawford. But Crawford, in a notorious act of cowardice, checked herself into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and refused to come out. During the entire month of July Crawford worked only four days.20 "I played no scenes with 'her' before she retired into the hospital," Bette told Henreid. Crawford was eventually replaced by Olivia de Havilland.

There are those who favor Davis's performance in Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte over hers in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?-among them Robert Aldrich. His reason is technical: Aldrich's use of multiple cameras on Charlotte enabled less of the performance to be lost. "Now, Bette-never mind the picture-is much better in Hush . . . Hush than she is in Baby Jane, but only for that reason: that every reaction-and that's what film is, really-every reaction is recorded. It's not lost in transition because you have to be on somebody else. That's very, very tough to do. But with two cameras you can do it and still not lose it. And you're not often going to be that lucky to work with people as intelligent and as knowledgeable as Davis, so from Baby Jane on I said, 'Oh, f.u.c.k it, I'll use two cameras all the time.' "21 The filming of Charlotte-based, like Baby Jane, on a novel by Henry Farrell-began on June 1, 1964, but was suspended not only by Crawford's phantom illness but by a lawsuit against Bette, who had refused to shoot additional scenes for Where Love Has Gone and had to be forced back to Paramount. Whitney Stine quoted at length from Boxoffice, Monday, June 15, 1964; the article is headlined "Drama, Confusion Too, in Joan-Bette Affair."

A two-p.r.o.nged decision issued Friday [June 12] in Superior Court forbids Bette Davis from appearing in any picture until she first completes added scenes in Paramount's Where Love Has Gone and at the same time requires Paramount to put up a bond of $175,000 to be used to pay Miss Davis's salary in the event she is prevented from working in Robert Aldrich's Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte underway at Twentieth Century-Fox. Miss Davis already has received the first $125,000 on payment of $200,000 pledged by Aldrich. Meanwhile, an upper respiratory infection landed Joan Crawford, who also stars in Charlotte, in the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.

Both events focused attention on the "Joan CrawfordBette Davis Day" luncheon at the Twentieth-Fox commissary, which Mayor Sam Yorty had proclaimed in honor of the two actresses for Monday, the 15th. Robert Aldrich was host at the affair, a bit confused perhaps, but the luncheon went on despite the absence of Miss Crawford.22 The dual delays forced Aldrich to suspend filming from July 2 to July 21 and from July 29 to September 9. The production, which was shot partly on location in Louisiana but mostly on the Fox lot in what is now Century City, finally wrapped on November 23, 1964, at a cost of $2,265,000. It was released on December 24.23 Crawford's ostrichlike plunge into a suite at Cedars, together with her insatiable need for glamour and s.e.x, has provided much merriment over the years, all of it at her expense. Bette wrote, "The rest of the cast and I kept up with her condition by reading Hedda Hopper, who received frequent bulletins from Joan's hospital room. She had clothes fitted every day. The Brown Derby catered her food.24 "The only thing I will say about Miss Crawford is that, when Olivia replaced her in the film, Crawford said, 'I'm glad for Olivia-she needed the part.' Joan issued these daily releases from her oxygen tent."25 Vincent Sherman, upon learning that Joan had landed in the hospital, sent flowers. Joan invited him over for a visit, whereupon, says Sherman, "she confided that there was nothing wrong with her and that she was merely trying to get out of doing Sweet Charlotte because Bette was maneuvering Aldrich to reduce her role down to nothing. After we talked for a few minutes, she got up from the bed, walked over to the door, locked it, and asked me to get into bed with her." Always a gentleman, Sherman obliged.26 Bob Thomas reports that Crawford learned of her replacement by de Havilland from the columnist Dorothy Manners, who called her on the phone at Cedars and asked for her opinion. "I cried for nine hours," Crawford was quoted as saying at the time. "I still believe in this business, but there should be some gentleness." Yes, she told a reporter, she would continue to make motion pictures. "But I'm going to make them with decent, gentle people."27 The films she went on to make include Berserk! and Trog.

Crawford's faux-hurt att.i.tude further fueled Bette's rage. As she told a publicist, "The widow Steele has had her say, now I'll have mine." But disappointingly, Bette simply expressed regret over Joan's condition, the only zinger being Davis's employment of the word reported as the modifier to illness.28 Crawford simply couldn't take the strain of challenging Bette for primacy again, both on-and offscreen, particularly after she'd provoked Davis's undying enmity with the Oscar incident the year before. In short, Bette Davis was a far better actress than Joan Crawford, they both knew it, and by faking infirmity in such an obvious and theatrical way, Crawford proved it. At least Davis actually had osteomyelitis when she left Two's Company.

Davis enjoyed working with Aldrich a second time, but she claimed to have disliked certain aspects of their second collaboration. "He had strange lapses of taste. I thought the scene in Charlotte in which the head bounces down the stairs was a bit much. Baby Jane had some shocks and high drama, but no heads bouncing down the stairs."29 At the time, however, she told Sight and Sound's John Russell Taylor that Charlotte was (in Taylor's words) "incomparably better than Baby Jane." Still, she said, "the role is a cheat. . . . Charlotte really has to be played dishonestly, because though she didn't do the murder and knows that she didn't, she has to keep doing things in such a way that you think she might have, though there is no reason inherent in her situation in the story why she should. I tell you, it was one of the most difficult parts I have ever played; I just had to try to construct some sort of reality for the character in my own mind so that I could do it at all."30 Kenneth Tynan, a discerning critic, was impressed with Charlotte, though he was dismissive of the material: "An accomplished piece of Grand Guignol is yanked to the level of art by Miss Davis's performance as the raging, aging Southern belle; this wasted Bernhardt, with her screen-filling eyes and electrifying vocal attack, squeezes genuine pathos from a role conceived in cardboard. She has done nothing better since The Little Foxes."31 AS CENTRAL AS Charlotte to Bette's experience of 1964 was the January 4 wedding of her daughter B.D. to Jeremy Hyman. The groom was twenty-nine, the bride sixteen. B.D. obviously wanted to get out from under Bette's thumb as quickly as was legally possible.

Bette planned everything, from the selection of B.D.'s bridal gown-a sleeveless, white cotton velvet number with a guimpe and a veil made of Ma.r.s.eilles lace-to the lavish reception at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and even beyond. She arranged for the couple to spend their wedding night at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As she herself blithely described it in This 'n That, she went into the nuptial chamber earlier in the day and pulled some pranks-iced tea in a bottle of scotch, tape on all the faucets. Then she made the bed: "Jeremy had once mentioned that he thought black satin sheets were the s.e.xiest background for a roll in the hay. I must say they were hard to come by for a king-size bed, but find them I did. My new son-in-law obviously had extravagant tastes, Dom Perignon and black satin sheets included. Of course, champagne was waiting for them in a cooler, along with ma.s.ses of flowers."32 Bill Frye and his a.s.sociate Jim Wharton were invited to the wedding as escorts for Rosalind Russell and Hedda Hopper. As the reception began, they attempted to order gla.s.ses of champagne but were told that no champagne would be served until the bride and groom were toasted. Frye asked the waiter to put a bottle of champagne on his account, whereupon an enraged Bette descended on the table and declared, "There is to be no champagne until the toasts are made, do you understand?" After she walked away, Hopper announced that she'd had quite enough, thank you very much; Russell agreed, and the four of them adjourned to the Bistro for dinner. According to Frye, Bette never spoke to him again.33 When the child bride departed the latest of her homes, she left behind her extensive collection of miniatures, which filled three long shelves at Honeysuckle Hill: little giraffes, some cutesy fawns and does, little playful puppies; many porcelain dolls; a tiny gondola fitted with even tinier pa.s.sengers.34 B.D.'s rejection of her mother in favor of an older man was a stinging rebuke to Bette, though Bette never acknowledged it as such. Until B.D.'s all-but-matricidal betrayal with My Mother's Keeper Davis reserved all of her resentment for Jeremy, who made his independence clear even before the wedding by marrying B.D. in a civil ceremony the week before. Bette never forgave him.

AFTER A SERIES of short-term schools, Michael Merrill was sent to Gary's alma mater, Loomis, a prep school in Windsor, Connecticut, from which he graduated in 1968. Both of his parents attended the ceremony; Gary and Bette chatted, but only briefly. The most notable aspect of Mike's high school graduation was his father's outlandish getup: Gary showed up for his son's rite of pa.s.sage not having shaved for several days and wearing a watermelon colored jacket graced by a roaring yellow print tie, with gold shoes and a red plastic water pistol completing the ensemble. This attention-grabbing stunt was designed, Merrill told reporters, to publicize his most recent film, Cycad, which ended up never being released. Whatever humiliation Mike suffered at the hands and clothing of his strange father was partly offset by his graduation present: a brand-new MG.

Mike proceeded to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his mother took a puritanical approach to the prevailing haze: "During Michael's college years," Davis recalled, "the primary problem was marijuana. I could find no excuse for it, or for the parents who ignored how dangerous a habit it was. I flatly stated, 'If ever he or a friend indulge in marijuana in my house, they are not welcome in the future.' And I made it clear to Michael that no more college tuition would be paid."35 The house in question was the one on Crooked Mile in Westport, Connecticut, where Mike increasingly tended to take walks without revealing his destination. He wasn't going off to smoke pot in the woods, as it turned out, but rather to visit a girl down the street. Her name was Charlene Raum; everyone called her Chou Chou. Michael announced his intention to propose, and Bette, who had approved B.D.'s decision to marry at sixteen, now advised a postponement for her son. He should wait until he finished law school, she told him. "As is usually the way with parental advice, he did not take it. A few months later, Michael proposed to Chou Chou and she accepted. I always promised him one of my rings as an engagement ring when the time came, and this he gave to Chou Chou."36 Mike had just graduated from Chapel Hill only a week or two before marrying and was preparing to start law school at Boston University in the fall. Gary threw Mike and about fifty of his college buddies a bachelor party the night before the wedding. For the main event, Chou Chou wore a satin gown finished with pearls and lace and gold threads on the sleeves, and the groom's mother wore a floor-length electric blue silk organza gown.37 Tempers had tempered since the custody battle. Of her ex-husband, Bette writes, "We stood side by side at the head of the reception line. Gary had obviously regained control of his life and was once more the attractive man I had met during the filming of All About Eve. I often wished that my feelings toward Gary had been less hostile and that he had not given me such good reasons for having them."38 After graduating from law school in 1976 and pa.s.sing the bar exam the following February, Michael Merrill and his wife moved to Frankfurt for a year while Mike worked as a lawyer for the military. They returned to Boston after three years, and Mike set up his own legal practice, at which he still works. He and Chou Chou are the parents of two sons: Matthew Davis Merrill, born on April 27, 1981; and Cameron S. Merrill, born on September 22, 1984.39 "I think she has been fantastic with us," Michael Merrill once said in a rare interview. "She doesn't impose at all. She will ask if we want to come visit with her, and if we do, we do. If we don't she says, fine, there will be a better time. You know, we do like to stay close."40*

* To me, he wrote the following: "I am pleased that you intend to write a book about my mother. She was a great actress and a loving mother. I have not cooperated with any writers on the past books, and I see no reason to change my position. Best of luck, and I hope your book is both sympathetic and successful. Very truly yours, Mike."41 His brief note speaks volumes about his temperament.

IN THE FALL of 1959, Bette told Margot Merrill's story to the writer Adele Whitely Fletcher for a magazine article t.i.tled "The Story of Our Daughter, Margot, r.e.t.a.r.ded!" Margot was then eight years old, but as Bette described her, in "all other ways, except for her size, she is about four." "She still deeply resents authority," Bette told Fletcher. "She still is destructive. She cannot read. And she cannot write."42 Davis announced in the article that she planned to bring Margot home to live with her and Gary once B.D. was married and Michael was away at prep school. At the time, Lochland generally didn't house girls over sixteen or boys over twelve. But Margot's return to family life was a pipe dream. Not only did Bette and Gary divorce the following year, but Bette herself was const.i.tutionally unable to put up with Margot for anything longer than a brief visit for the rest of her life. Fortunately, Lochland expanded its mission and began providing ongoing care for adults as well as children.

As Gary Merrill acknowledged, "Miss Stewart once said that she was the most pathetic child at the school because she was just bright enough to know what she was missing. She wanted to have babies, hold a job, get married-all the things normal people do-and she knows she can't."43 "Margot weaves and makes things," Bette said in 1964. "She writes letters-though it takes hours, of course-and she truly adores coming home for visits. With her, one must be very quiet, though firm. I must talk to her in short sentences, or it becomes too complicated. Right now, Margot has a pa.s.sion for the Beatles. John Lennon is her favorite. However, the children at school finally told her to stop talking about the Beatles or they'd never speak to her again. I can understand why. I spent two weeks with her on the Beatles."44 In public, Bette always credited Florence Stewart and her staff for providing Margot with a stable, caring home. But sometime in the early to mid-1960s, and for unexplained reasons, she pulled Margot out of Lochland. "Margot isn't here," Bette told Hedda Hopper. "She's having a whole new life with a family in Pennsylvania and adoring it. She is happy and I am thrilled for her."45 One detail Davis failed to tell Hedda was that she hadn't informed Margot's father of the move. She and Gary spoke infrequently at that point-they were locked in their bitter, years-long custody battle-but changing Margot's living situation was worthy of at least a brief conversation.

Gary found out about it when he returned from Europe and called Lochland to check on things. He was enraged. "I was told that Bette had consulted a psychologist, who, without any real understanding of the matter, had convinced Bette that Margot would be better off living with a family," Merrill wrote. "So Bette had found a family on a farm outside of Philadelphia and had taken Margot there." Merrill got the address and arrived unannounced only to find that Bette had moved Margot again, this time to somewhere outside of Pittsburgh. Merrill called Lochland again and asked if anyone knew why Margot would be living near Pittsburgh, and one of the teachers mentioned that a former employee of Lochland had in fact moved to western Pennsylvania.

Merrill tracked down his daughter, and according to him she seemed happy. She liked living in the country, she said. But when Merrill returned to Pennsylvania for another visit sometime later, he found that Bette had moved Margot yet again, this time to a Devereux Foundation home in Santa Barbara.

Later, in one of their rare conversations, Bette called Gary and told him that Margot was unhappy at Devereux. A shouting match ensued after Merrill demanded to know why Bette had moved her out of Lochland in the first place. "If you're so set on Lochland, all right!" Bette yelled. "You take her back there, and you pay for it!" "What were you looking for, a bargain?" Merrill shouted in response. Bette hung up on him.46 "Margot is past thirty now," Bette benignly wrote in This 'n That. "She has come home often, and our times together have been happy. On one of her birthdays, I took her to New York and pulled out all the stops-nightclubs, theaters, the works. Wherever we went I was asked for my autograph. In the car going back to the hotel, Margot said, 'Mummy, may I have your autograph?' Sometimes you laugh to keep from crying."47 Bette's former personal a.s.sistant Vik Greenfield remembers Margot well. Davis, said Greenfield, would periodically lose her temper at Margot, though of course Margot couldn't help her behavior. "But you could hold a conversation with her," Greenfield recalled. "She was very pretty. Huntington Hartford, who liked young girls, once struck up a conversation with her at a party. She held her own."48 Still, Bette's visits were far less frequent than she suggests in her books. Lochland's housemother Mary Beardsley once said that Margot's visits to her mother generally ended abruptly and prematurely. If Margot was scheduled to be with Bette for two weeks, it would usually turn out to be only one. And, Beardsley added, "Whenever Margot got back from Bette's, she always had a new vocabulary of curse words. And she'd be crushed that her mother treated her that way."49 Bette Davis made no provision for her second daughter in her will; she left everything to Michael Merrill and Kathryn Sermak. Gary Merrill paid for Margot's care until his death in 1990 and bequeathed a trust for Margot, who still resides at Lochland. The trust is administered by Michael.

DAVIS FILMED THE NANNY at Elstree Studios in London in the spring of 1965. She threw a party for the press at the Ritz Hotel. ("Where else?" she quipped. "It's just like home.") Asked by a reporter why she continued to work so hard, Bette was bluntly bitter: "I'm a single woman with kids to bring up, and I've only made ten cents out of every dollar I've earned in this G.o.dd.a.m.n business."50 The Nanny is a thriller, the tale of a dysfunctional family: a histrionic mother (Wendy Craig) and a cruelly indifferent father (James Villiers) who try without much success to recover from the drowning death of their little girl, possibly at the hands of their disturbed son (William Dix). Davis plays the t.i.tle character.

"I got on with her very well," Wendy Craig recalled.

We were all very nervous, because we'd heard she could be quite tough. But when she met us and realized that we were all out to help her-that there was going to be no attempt at scene stealing or anything of that nature-she relaxed and began to enjoy it. And I think she really did enjoy it. She was very happy.

She took being the nanny very seriously. She dressed right down to her underwear-she wore these big navy blue bloomers that came down to her knees with elastic at the bottom. Sometimes she used to lift up her skirt and do the can-can and show us her terrible old knickers!

[The two actresses discussed technique.] She said you should go straight into a scene. You don't have to muck around behind the scenery trying to get into the mood, but instead just go instantly into what you've got to do. It was something she did. She didn't do the Method thing of working herself up into a state before she could do a scene but rather went straight into it.51 Michael Merrill came over for a visit while Davis was shooting The Nanny, and one day Bette and her son took in a greyhound race at White City Stadium. Bette put all her hope on a dog called I'm Crazy. As one reporter described it, "There was pandemonium in the box. Avocado pears and prawn c.o.c.ktails positively wilted under a din of decibels as La Davis screamed 'I'm Crazy!' " The dog won, and Bette collected 16 5s.52 While Davis was in England, John Gielgud asked her if she'd like to do a play with him; she suggested a revival of Design for Living, with Gielgud as the husband and Michael Redgrave as the lover.53 But it didn't work out, and she returned from England to do an episode of Gunsmoke. "The Jailer" aired on October 1, 1965. The following week she gamely appeared on The Milton Berle Variety Show in a skit called "The Maltese Chicken."54 DAVIS RETURNED TO Europe in 1968 to make The Anniversary for Hammer Films. Jimmy Sangster, who wrote and produced The Nanny, performed the same functions for The Anniversary. "Oh, I just adore that film," Davis told Lawrence O'Toole. "This is a woman who puts her gla.s.s eye on the pillow when her son is going to bed with his new girlfriend. Oh, she was an adorable woman. But they were all idiots. Weak nothings. One son is definitely h.o.m.o. And he loved women's underwear. Oh, it's a fun picture."55 In point of fact, though, the h.o.m.o son is not a h.o.m.o. He does, however, love women's underwear. Bette clearly failed to appreciate the distinction.

"I was a very young director," Alvin Rakoff reflected, and she was certainly the alpha female-very dominant. That sort of star finds it very difficult when the director comes along. With an alpha male directing an alpha male, you get conflict, but usually it's resolved. To carry on the a.n.a.logy, which is wearing thin: the alpha male meeting the alpha female can result in trouble.

When we first met we got on very well. We had lots of dinners together at the Brown Derby. She couldn't believe some of the films I saw. She kept saying, "How old are you?" I'd say, "I was five then, or six." The Bride Came C.O.D.-she was intrigued that I'd seen it. We went through various scenes; she was taken aback that I could remember them. The scene where she smells pickles on Cagney's breath-she was amazed that I could recall it. We talked about Mr. Skeffington. We talked about Claude Rains a great deal.

She was worried about her accent. I said, "You played the queen in Elizabeth and Ess.e.x. I've seen your work, and I know you can do an English accent. Don't worry about it."

Still, a fly flew all but unnoticed into the ointment. "On the night we met in Hollywood she immediately said to me that I reminded her of Gary Merrill. I took it as a 'how nice' sort of thing. I should have taken it as an omen." The relationship deteriorated when they met again in London before filming began. In the script, said Rakoff, her son's girlfriend (played by Elaine Taylor) doesn't like revealing her ears because she thinks they're not what the world demands in terms of beautiful ears. A psychological hangup about some part of your anatomy is fairly common, but Bette insisted that the ears be scarred. And so the ears were duly scarred. I protested like h.e.l.l, but they were disfigured. I kept saying, "It isn't necessary-It's a psychological hangup." But Bette insisted. . . . It was an old Hollywoodjoke. When the poor actress arrived on the set with the disfigured ears, Bette said, "Oh, aren't they horrible! Cover them up with your hair!" I knew then that we were in for some fun and games.

The producers did say, when we first started to disagree with each other, "In the event of a row, Alvin, you're not going to be the survivor." And the row did happen. The megastar and the young director have a row, and the megastar wins. It's not really very surprising when you think about it.

Rakoff was replaced with Roy Ward Baker after only a week. "I was on the floor shooting and was told to go see Jimmy Sangster," Rakoff said. "[Sangster informed me] that Miss Davis was not coming on the set as long as I was there. I asked if I could see her and was told she didn't want to see me. So I was driven home."56 Susan Sontag famously argued that camp was failed seriousness, but The Anniversary is failed camp-a metafailure. It supposes itself to be sickly amusing, but its own self-consciousness kills it. Mrs. Taggart (Davis, playing to the rafters) utters this foul remark: "Shirley, my dear, would you mind sitting somewhere else. Body odor offends me." She's wearing the fuschia eye patch for that one, a touch we're expected to find droll. To her shame-filled transvest.i.te son, Mrs. Taggart advises, "You can't go to dinner dressed like that. You know nylon brings you out in a rash." Haw! To son Thomas she declares, "If I could stuff you I'd put you in that cabinet there, with all my other beautiful po-sessions. And that's love." That one's delivered with the black patch.

It wasn't a good dramatic decision for Bette to screech the hymn "Rock of Ages" in a forcedly off-key manner. Given the thudding obviousness of The Anniversary, let alone Davis's singing voice, she scarcely needed to force anything. The film concludes with Bette laughing maniacally in freeze frame while playing with a working model of the Manneken Pis.

CHAPTER.

22.

LOSSES.

FAILED FILM PROJECTS, PLAYS SHE DE-clined, television series that didn't work out; the chronicle of things Bette Davis didn't do after All About Eve is as fascinating as what she did. In April 1955, for instance, she and Paul Henreid discussed remaking The Affairs of Anatole, Gloria Swanson's 1921 comedy-drama based on an Arthur Schnitzler play. Henreid owned the rights, which Max Ophls and, later, Joseph Mankiewicz had each tried to buy. Henreid saw it as a vehicle for the Merrills, with Gary playing Anatole and Bette his wife. But only a month later, Henreid's interest turned instead to two other projects, each with madness at its core: The Bad Seed, the tale of a sociopathic child; and The St