Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 12

I forwarded David Merrick's interest to her agent, Martin Baum, who called me and said that Miss Davis wanted to meet me. We went out for dinner to talk about it. We went to a place called The Leopard. It was a townhouse in the East 50s-very elegant. The lady who owned it was an Italian princess named Goia Cook. She'd been married to an actor, Donald Cook. [Cook appears with Davis in The Man Who Played G.o.d.] When we arrived, she took Bette Davis's coat, and she kept coming over to chat. Miss Davis got very irritated and said, "Who is that hat check girl?" I said, "Miss Davis, she's not the hat check girl. She's the owner of the restaurant, and she's a princess." That didn't wash. As far as Bette was concerned, she was the hat check girl.

I asked for the wine list and ordered wine. Apparently that was an enormous break-through. She was having dinner with some friends, including [her lawyer] Harold Schiff, the following night, and she said to me, "Oh thank G.o.d! You ordered wine! I know [Schiff] won't order wine. It's so nice to go out with a young man who takes control." At the end of the dinner, she said I could bring Gower Champion to see her. [Champion was the director and ch.o.r.eographer of h.e.l.lo, Dolly!]

She was very nice to Gower, though she treated him rather like a schoolboy. She told him she'd seen the play, she'd loved it, she loved his work, she loved him, and then she said, "But I'm not going to do your musical. It's a fifteen-minute show. But I would like to work with you some other time. Good afternoon." And that was that. She thought it was a fifteen-minute show-the "h.e.l.lo, Dolly!" number. My feeling was, "but what a fifteen minutes it would have been."7 The Killing of Sister George was another no-go for Davis. "The producers told me that they were going to make a movie of it," Dame Eileen Atkins remembered.

And they said, "We're not going to use Beryl Reid [who costarred with Atkins on Broadway], but we want to use you, and we want a big American Hollywood star for Beryl's part." Katharine Hepburn turned it down out of hand. I was also supposed to meet Angela Lansbury, only it never got far-she also turned it down out of hand. The only person who didn't turn it down out of hand was Bette Davis. They wanted her to meet me to see if she would like to work with me.

It was at a party. My producers brought me over. Andy Warhol was standing there as well. [As Atkins approached, Bette let fly a zinger:] She looked at Andy Warhol and said, "Why the h.e.l.l don't you do something about your skin?"

I was just stunned that anyone could be that rude. But the thing was, I can remember thinking that she was quite right to be rude to Andy Warhol.

I think Bette Davis made a big mistake by not doing The Killing of Sister George. I think she'd have been wonderful in the part. But none of them would play a lesbian. I think they all thought they'd ruin their reputations by playing a fully blown, male-type lesbian. She was an out-and-out "Eat my cigar! Drink my bathwater!" lesbian, and they got very nervous. In the end they had to have Beryl, so therefore they had to find a star for my part.8 Susannah York took Atkins's role in the movie, which was directed by Robert Aldrich.

IN 1965, DAVIS filmed a pilot for a sitcom series to be called The Decorator. The gimmick, apart from Bette herself, was that her character, Liz, moves into her clients' homes and solves their personal problems while redesigning their rooms-a blend of June Bride's Linda Gilman with a more overtly benign Sheridan Whiteside from The Man Who Came to Dinner. Mary Wickes played Liz's wisecracking a.s.sistant, Viola. In the first (and only) episode, we meet Liz in the darkened bedroom of her chic Malibu beach house. Viola is trying to rouse her from a hangover. "My head feels like an old combat boot," Liz groans. "It was a di-vine party. I liked everything about it after the second martini-especially something British with a lot of gray going for it in the temples." Her new client soon shows up-an Oklahoma judge played by Ed Begley-and before the half hour is over, Liz has defied the judge's wishes by convincing his daughter to sneak away by bus and elope with her hunky but impoverished boyfriend. We later learn that Liz has sent them to honeymoon at her own house in Malibu, where, in the final scene, Mary Wickes delivers a line seemingly written with the express purpose of propelling a mouthful of coffee out of one's nose: "It was quite unnerving having to meet your honeymooners at the terminal. All those sailors, my dear! I've never been in a bus station in my life!"

The end credits go a long way toward explaining how that line got there. Before he wrote The Boys in the Band in the late 1960s, the playwright Mart Crowley was working as Natalie Wood's secretary. As the writer Dominick Dunne told the critic Michael Giltz, "I was the vice-president of Four Star, this studio owned by Charles Boyer, d.i.c.k Powell and David Niven-three of the cla.s.siest guys ever in Hollywood." [The fourth star was Ida Lupino.] "The script came in by a famous writer and she [Davis] hated it-she hated it. We were supposed to start shooting two days hence, and I went to Mart Crowley because he's hilarious and camp and I said, 'Mart, rewrite this.' He had written before; he wasn't going to be a secretary to Natalie forever. And he rewrote it, and it was so hilarious and so exactly right for Bette Davis. It was a great pilot but it didn't sell."9 Dunne was overly generous in calling the original scriptwriter "famous." Cy Howard is best known for having written My Friend Irma. But he was correct in his a.s.sessment of The Decorator. If one can ignore the distracting canned laugh track, the show is genuinely amusing. Most remarkable of all is Davis's relaxed, in-your-living-room performance. Still, within the confines of a 1960s sitcom on the small screen, her Liz is certainly flamboyant. In the precredits sequence, the designer-hiding behind fashionably oversized sungla.s.ses, still trying to get over the hangover-charmingly bullies a little girl into adding a moat to the sandcastle the child has built on the beach outside Liz's fabulous house. "I don't need a decorator," the girl pouts. "Don't be absurd," the snood-wearing Bette snaps. "Ehhh-vrybody needs a decorator!"

Mart Crowley remembered many entertaining details:10 "The lot itself had been Republic Studios. Outside my office window were Trigger's hoofprints, just to let me know where I was.

"I wrote the a.s.sistant as a man," Crowley casually dropped. "I suggested Paul Lynde. She thought it was funny, but the network said, 'No way are we having a gay character on the screen.' They didn't even call him gay; they called him much worse things. I just did it to take the edge off the Eve-Arden of it all, you know? Yet another wisecracking sidekick?"

As for the sailors-at-the-bus-station line, Crowley could barely believe it either. "Good G.o.d! What was the state of my brain by the time I got to that line? It's funny for a woman who has a profile that looks like it belongs on a nickel to say it, but it would have been hilarious for Paul Lynde."

The Decorator pilot was actually shot, clearly at Davis's insistence, by her favorite Warner Bros. cinematographer, Ernie Haller. And of course she brought in her own makeup person-a man who specialized in temporary rejuvenation. As Crowley recalled: She had a very famous makeup man, Gene Hibbs, who invented the glue-on tabs with the hooks in them. You smash all the hair down under a wig cap, then glue these awful gauzes with hooks in them all around, and then attach rubber bands over the top and back of the head and the neck to pull everything back, and then you slap a wig on top of it.

The set was tense as h.e.l.l, because she was just not moving as fast as you have to move in television. It was going over schedule and over budget. She was slow to get out of the dressing room; she was slow between shots. She was used to the director saying "Cut" and then they'd light for an hour. In TV, they're ready to go in ten minutes, and she just could not work at that pace. [Her att.i.tude was] "I'm gonna show them. I'll be out when I'm ready-don't knock on that door one more time." It's like Judy Garland's line in I Could Go On Singing: someone says, "Jenny, Jenny, they've been waiting an hour," and Judy screams, "I don't care if they're fasting!"

She was very disappointed that The Decorator didn't go. No, not disappointed-hurt. Very hurt.

The Viola character in The Decorator didn't come by her name accidently. "Bette had a manager called Violla Rubber," Lionel Larner explained.

Violla was tied into all her deals. [If they wanted Bette Davis,] they also had to take Violla Rubber for $400 a week. Martin Baum would say to me, "Trust me. She'll earn her money-it will be worth it."

She was like a gym mistress-a sort of old maid British spinster. She wore tweed skirts and brogue shoes like those ladies you see in British movies of the 1940s with feathers in their hats going 'round the park. Violla was also kind of tricky. She was manipulative-that would be the word. A little two-faced and manipulative. And controlling. She had two sides: one that Miss Davis would see, and one that other people would see.11 Alvin Rakoff remembered Violla Rubber well from his initial meeting with Bette about The Anniversary. "Violla was very much her protector; that's what she was there for. Every time I said something that she thought Bette would disagree with, Violla would kick me under the table. I left that evening with a lot of bruises."12 BETTE'S CLOSEST FRIENDSHIPS were both enduring and strained in equal measure. Her friends were loyal to her, by and large, though they had to put up with a lot, particularly when alcohol came into play. "She wasn't the nicest person to be friends with," Vik Green-field admitted. "It was fine when she was fine, but if she felt lousy or mean, she took it out on you. As a friend of mine once said, 'Bette defies friendship.' She defied it. How she had any friends I don't know, to be quite honest."13 Davis's oldest friend was Robin Brown-the former Marie Simpson, from West Virginia via Ogunquit. "I knew Robin very well," Greenfield said. "She was a very nice woman. Quiet, intelligent, small-she was only about 5'2"." Robin's size may have helped; she could look Bette directly in the eye. "Robin was a very good friend to Bette. And Bette wasn't awfully nice to her at times. Her husband, Albert Brown-everybody called him 'Brownie'-was a very nice man. Bette always behaved herself more when Brownie was around. Robin told me once that she used to say to Brownie, 'We're going to dinner with Bette tonight,' and he'd say, 'Do we have to?' You had to guard every word you said around her. It was tough."

"Robin spent a lot of time with her over the years," said Brown's sister, Reggie Schwartzwalder (the widow of the legendary Syracuse football coach Ben Schwartzwalder). "She was always very cautious about what she said about Bette; she never admitted anything that wasn't admirable about her."14 "My sister was a private nurse," Greenfield continued.

Bette asked her to nurse her after the mastectomy. I said to Stephanie, "Don't do it. Don't do it. You'll rue the day." And of course she rued the day. Bette wouldn't allow Stephanie to ring her husband from the hospital. Robin asked Stephanie if she should come up and see Bette, and Stephanie said of course. When Robin got there, Bette shrieked at her: "What are you doing here? Get out!" That's to her oldest friend in the world.

They fell out when Bette, after the operation, went up to Connecticut to stay with Robin in her house, and she accused Robin of trying to get rid of her by not setting the heat high enough. That more or less ended the friendship.

The actress Ellen Hanley, who had met Bette during the run of Two's Company (John Murray Anderson brought her into the show), became friendly again with Bette when they both lived in western Connecticut in the late 1960s and '70s. Hanley saw the best in Bette: "She was very proud of being a Yankee. She loved American holidays, so every time there was a holiday like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, she wanted to do things. She loved to cook and be a homemaker. Her homes were beautiful; everything was lovely, lovely. I still use some of her recipes. There's a meatloaf: it's got poultry seasoning in it, and red wine and eggs and all that stuff."15 Hanley fondly remembered visiting Twin Bridges, the Westport house Bette lived in from 1965 to 1973, and Bette's contribution to the surrounding landscape. A river ran behind the house, but a merely natural body of water wasn't enough for the industrious Davis. As Hanley noted, "She and Vik Greenfield had physically moved rocks and stones and made a swimming hole there. My kids loved to go there."

But there was tension, too, and it usually appeared with the first drink of the day. "I saw that if she had a drink at lunch-I think it was screwdrivers she liked to have at lunch-there would be an instant personality change. Not into any kind of meanness at that point. It's difficult to describe. My point is that she would have a snap change when she drank. But she was still the Bette I knew and loved.

"She was getting older, and her stardom days were over-that had to be difficult. It caused her a lot of anxiety."

Hanley described the day Bette was left at Hanley's place while Hanley helped her brother move into a new house nearby. "When we got back, Bette was annoyed with me because we had been gone so long and she wasn't included. While we were gone, she had emptied my food closet and had gone through all my spices and said to my daughter, 'Why does your mother have two jars of rosemary? She only needs one!' She went through all kinds of things and cleaned out my closet. I was very annoyed. It was noontime, and I think she'd had a drink or two."

It was to Ellen Hanley that Bette turned at a particularly dark moment in the early 1970s. It's a story Hanley never before told anyone out-side her immediate family, and it goes a long way toward explaining the increasing bitterness and rage that Bette felt-and expressed-from that point on. "One morning in 1973 she called me [wanting] to know if I could come down and be with her. She said she had to do something, and she didn't want to be alone to do it. I said, 'What is it? What's the matter?' " Someone had sent Bette a liquor-sized carton of letters written over many years by Ruthie to a friend-one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's sisters. The box had been found in the attic by the new owners of the Millay sister's house in Maine, and they thought that Bette would want them.

According to Hanley, Bette was terrified of what she would find in that carton.

The closer it came to arriving, the more frightened she got. Their relationship must have been very complicated, but you never got an inkling of that from Bette, really. She never said a word against her mother-and we talked about a lot of things over the years. She never said, "Ugh, my mother was this, my mother was that." Never. Actually, she rarely talked about Ruthie.

It was a very upsetting morning. It was really frightening for her to open that box. I said to her, "Do you want me to open it?" and she said, "No. I will open it." And then she started reading the letters to me. Bette was extremely devastated. Some of them were just about what Ruthie was doing that week, but there were others of a sarcastic nature. She wrote as though Bette was a ch.o.r.e and a pain, calling her "the Queen Bee" and other things. Bette was so upset. She never came across this before-that her mother was writing so critically about her and in such a derogatory sense to someone she herself didn't know.

She was devastated, and hurt, and angry. In the midst of it she fixed herself a screwdriver. She was furious-absolutely furious. The whole thing came falling in on her that morning. She looked across the room at me and screamed, "Can you believe this? Can you believe this?! After all I did for her!"

LATER THAT YEAR, Bette Davis sat for several portrait sessions with Don Bachardy. The first occurred in Westport on November 1, several weeks after Davis met Bachardy at a party thrown by Roddy McDowall in Hollywood. "I realized right away that if I was going to get on with her, if I wasn't going to become one of her victims, I had to stand up to her," Bachardy remembered.16 "She had contempt for people who gave way to her." Bachardy's stance didn't stop Davis from issuing an ultimatum for the second sitting; she gave him precisely one hour and not a minute more. "She did relent," Bachardy reported. She saw that I was trying to keep to the limitation she set, and she said, 'Well, you know, you can go on working.' But she didn't tell me soon enough.

"I didn't dare to ask her to look directly at me because, when I began to peer into her face, I saw her intense shyness and uncertainty. She hides her vulnerability with an outward show of strength and independence, but I suspect that if anyone made the mistake of cowering before her, she would be merciless."

There was initial tension-"she managed to be restless and rigid"-but she loosened up with cigarettes and drinks. But the liquor continued to loosen her beyond what Bachardy needed; it killed her concentration. She began chatting and moving her head constantly. "As I gradually lost control of my drawing, it became a sad, almost mournful version of her," Bachardy noted. Bette thought it captured her well: "That's the best," she told the artist.

"There was one drawing of her that she wouldn't sign-which was so odd coming from Bette Davis, who was so eager to make a grotesque out of herself for a part, and in fact she was likely to go way too far. I was surprised that she would object to the second drawing as 'cruel,' but it was just a bit more factual than the other two I did that day."

Davis then proceeded to prepare one of her prized homemade dinners: a frozen chicken pot pie and canned beets, which she boiled for half an hour before serving.

"Drink eased her shyness, and it also brought out her susceptibility to self-pity," said Bachardy. "She complained of loneliness but cited her own perversity as the cause. She was often too impatient to endure having other people around her, and she sent them away, only to find that she was alone again. Narrowing her eyes and fixing them on a slim white cat sleeping on a kitchen chair, she exclaimed: 'I never thought I'd wind up with a cat!'

"I'd imagined that in her movies she exaggerated herself for the camera. Now I realized she was keeping herself down."

Another sitting took place on December 4, at Chuck Pollack's house on North Orlando Drive in West Hollywood. "I kept my drawing simple and was determined not to worry about a flattering likeness. But the uncompromising face that gradually formed on the paper scared me." The drawing shows precisely the steely look masking vulnerability that Bachardy describes, the familiar painted mouth a dark crescent, the set jaw, the heavy, weary eyes. Davis took one look at the rendering and declared, "Yup-that's the old bag."

The sittings went well enough for Bachardy to invite Davis to dinner with him and his lover, Christopher Isherwood. But she turned him down. "I think she was, like a lot of bullies, also a coward," Bachardy reflected. "I think she was scared of meeting Chris-of being in company that might outdistance her." There was no reason to think that Isher-wood would have been anything less than friendly to her. "He wasn't a combative person, but she most certainly was. I think she was just afraid of meeting a literary figure who might make demands on her-I mean, just asking her what she'd read lately. She took cover when she felt threatened, and she didn't have any idea what he was like, and rather than find out, she just refused to come."

"THEY SHOULD HAVE changed the t.i.tle to The Corn Was Green," Emlyn Williams quipped of the ill-fated Miss Moffat, Joshua Logan's 1974 musical adaptation of Williams's play.17 Originally planned for Mary Martin, Miss Moffat became a Bette Davis vehicle after Martin's husband, Richard Halliday, died suddenly and Martin withdrew. Logan sent a script to Katharine Hepburn, who, according to Logan, "felt it wasn't right for her."18 (Hepburn did go on to film George Cukor's nonmusical film adaptation of The Corn Is Green in 1979.) Williams, Logan, and the composer Albert Hague then drove to Weston, Connecticut, where Davis was living in a house she called "My Bailiwick," and pitched the idea to Davis, who agreed to do it after hearing the songs. "She thought it was her answer to Katharine Hepburn doing Coco," Chuck Pollack explained.19 The show's topical, mid-1970s gimmick was to shift the setting from the Welsh mining town to the South, and to turn Morgan Evans into a young African-American. Davis was more than interested. "We had numbers of conferences, talks on the phone, and I began to realize her true brilliance, her originality of thought," Logan wrote in his memoirs.20 Logan's account of the tanking of Miss Moffat is credible, albeit in a self-serving way. He begins by insisting that he cast Bette Davis in a musical and expected her to speak her songs the way Rex Harrison did in My Fair Lady, but by his own account he didn't tell Davis about this strategy until well into the show's development-whereupon, to Logan's apparent astonishment, Davis responded contrarily and testily. She insisted on singing, he reported.

Two weeks into rehearsals she changed her mind. One of her numbers was called "The Words Unspoken Are the Ones That Matter." "Without any warning, she began to act the song-gave it the full Bette Davis hot talent-and the cast and I were moved to tears and applause. . . . None of us could have believed then that she would never perform it that way again."

When Miss Moffat was ready for its first run-through, Logan invited more than a dozen people to come and watch, including some of the show's investors. The problem was, he didn't bother to inform his notoriously high-strung star. Davis reacted poorly to the surprise audience and, no surprise, ended up giving a terrible performance.

That's when the first hysterical symptoms appeared: Bette started walking around with a p.r.o.nounced limp. The next day she saw a doctor, who suspected a slipped disk and had her check into Columbia Presbyterian. "As it turned out, we never really found what was causing her pain," Logan noted, unable to imagine that one source might have been himself.

Davis's doctors put her in traction for three weeks, but after a few days she called Logan, invited him to the hospital for a visit, and told him that she wanted to continue with the show. The hospital actually permitted them to schlep a piano into her room so she could work on her songs.

Rehearsals continued without the show's star for another week, after which the company took a two-week break before setting up shop in Philadelphia for the first tryouts. Bette, released from the hospital, was able to perform the first preview as scheduled on a Friday night in early October. As Logan described it, she "entered without her script for the first time and got an ovation at the end of the performance that I had never heard before for anyone. The entire audience rose as one, calling out, applauding, whistling, cheering, and they would have gone on for an hour had she allowed them to. But she bowed slightly and left the stage, only to be forced to return three or four times before they would quiet down. It was almost like a revivalist meeting."

Davis gave another great performance on Sat.u.r.day. "Her music was handled in a much better way," according to Logan. "She spoke a bit, sang a bit, spoke a bit, sang a bit, close to the way we had agreed." Robbie Lantz agrees that Davis was on target in Miss Moffat: "I saw it in Philadelphia. She was good. She was always good. She was sometimes over the top-she needed a good director-but she was unendingly interesting."21 But, Logan claimed, Miss Moffat's opening night-Monday, October 7, 1974-was disastrous owing to an acute attack of stage fright. Davis mumbled lines and repeated lyrics or skipped them altogether, he writes. "She forgot dialogue she had never forgotten before, then giddily repeated what she had just said. At one point she turned to the audience and said, to our horror, 'How can I play this scene? Morgan Evans is supposed to be onstage. Morgan Evans, get out here!' " Dorian Hare-wood, playing Morgan, is said to have rushed onto the stage "prematurely, as he knew, and a surprised Bette then turned to the audience and said, 'I was wrong. I want you to know that. It wasn't his fault.' The audience, under her spell, cheered and applauded and laughed all through it, forgiving, even enjoying, any slip, any mistake. Bette went on. 'It was my own stupid fault, and Dorian had nothing to do with it. Go back, Morgan, and we'll start over.' "

Later in the show, a child actor, thinking that she needed help, whispered one of her lines to her. "Don't you tell me my line!" Bette shouted at the kid. "I know it! You're a naughty little boy!"

Things improved, however, climaxing on Thursday evening with a truly magnificent performance. Logan went backstage to see her after the final curtain and found her "in a state of euphoria. The audience could always get her into this mood. In her dressing room she told me how much she loved the play, how she wanted to tour it all year and then play at least a year in New York and a year in London, and she said, 'And then we'll make the picture. We'll make this whole picture all over again, with music.' "

"Thank G.o.d for this play," Davis declared. "It's going to save me from those flea-bitten films. The last one I read they had me hanging in a closet. Miss Moffat has saved me-saved me."

Except that the next morning Logan was called to her suite and found her lying flat on her bed refusing to move, let alone perform the show that night, or ever again. Doctor's orders. "I was walking naked through h.e.l.l," Logan observed.

They summoned a well-known orthopedist, who announced, "It is absolutely impossible for her to walk onto the stage tonight or to think of continuing playing or even getting to her feet for another six weeks to three months. During that time she mustn't move." And so Miss Moffat closed.

A muddy-sounding bootleg recording of Miss Moffat's opening night floats around the twilight netherworld of Bette Davis collectors. One clearly hears the audience rooting for Davis; she gets a sustained round of applause at her entrance and appreciative laughs and clapping throughout the show. But the relative weakness of the score and one young actor's cutesy sing-song delivery leave sour notes in the ear even without Davis flubbing her lines. The extent of that particular aspect of the disaster is difficult to confirm; audience members' coughs come across more clearly on the recording than any of the dialogue. The songs are faint; the dialogue is unintelligible.

Fish run in schools, geese in gaggles, but theater queens come in shrieks, and Miss Moffat, like Two's Company, has provided superbly amusing schadenfreude to shrieks of queens who never saw or heard the show. But Dorian Harewood sells his bluesy numbers with pa.s.sion, and Davis is so predictably off-key when she sings that it's not only forgivable but lovable. It's a charming sort of croaking, and it's precisely what audiences wanted-and expected-to hear from her. Had it not been for Davis having been seized with extreme attacks of anxiety that manifested themselves in back pain horrific enough to convince two orthopedists of its authenticity, the show might well have been one of her greatest tours de force. But Davis herself killed it, and that's a fact.

"The audience stood up cheering and screaming every night," she told Rex Reed about a year after Miss Moffat's failure, "but I knew it wasn't what they wanted. They wanted me to be a b.i.t.c.h, not a middle-aged schoolteacher." (This is preposterous. They simply wanted her to be Bette Davis.) "The songs were wonderful. I sang them all and I was good at it, but it was nothing but h.e.l.l. I had to carry the burden of the rewrites, and I spent three weeks in a hospital traction from the nerves and tension." Routinely, she blamed her director: "Joshua Logan finished me off in two weeks. He was terrified of the critics and started changing things on opening night in Philly. I had one year on the road to do those changes, but I couldn't work ten hours a day and play a different show at night. They wanted me to learn forty pages in four days. I had to get my health back before I could concentrate on that kind of work. So we closed it down. I will never go near the stage again as long as I live." (Vik Greenfield, who ran lines with Davis in Philadelphia, confirmed that Logan kept throwing script changes at her throughout the play's short run.) "I think theater is a dog's life-grueling," Davis told the critic Bruce Williamson seven years later. "And I'm too selfish. I find eight shows a week absolutely inhuman, plus I cannot be replaced. Someone like me, from motion pictures, cannot have an understudy because the box office for picture people is astronomical. Astronomical. If you don't appear, customers just get up and turn in their tickets. Therefore, you have a monkey on your back and aren't allowed even a small case of flu. It's frightening. So you sit around between shows and worry about your health-I find that a very stupid way to live."22 SHE HAD MUCH more success the year before Miss Moffat-and for several years thereafter-with An Evening with Bette Davis, the first of a series dreamed up and produced by the veteran film publicist John Springer: Legendary Ladies of the Movies. It debuted at New York's Town Hall on West Forty-third Street on February 11, 1973. The idea was to present cla.s.sic film clips from the star's career for the first half of the program and then bring the star herself out onstage to field questions from her adoring fans.

John Springer's son, Gary, remembers Bette's opening night vividly.

My dad came out and did a little introduction, and then there was a good hour or so of film clips that he'd put together, then intermission, and then there were maybe fifteen more minutes of film clips, ending of course with, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a b.u.mpy night." And onstage walked Bette.

Later on we had people write questions and pa.s.s them through, but on opening night, as soon as Bette walked onstage, every gay man in the audience ran to the stage screaming, 'Bette! Bette! I want to be you!' They had Baby Jane dolls. They had Bette dolls. Some were dressed as Bette. It was the campiest thing!

They managed to quiet everybody down, and my dad did maybe a twenty minute interview with Bette. Then they opened it up to questions, and again it was just ma.s.s hysteria. They were laying palm fronds at her feet-it was such an experience.23 She had only to stand there in velvet and satin, her hair in a blond pageboy, her lips done in a bright shade of red, and bask in her own glory. "What can I say?" she asked after the crowd finally grew quiet. "You have had a long session with me. Some of them were bad years, and some were glorious years. But, oh. . . I would go through all the bad times again for what you just did for me."24 Springer and Davis knew they were onto something good, and they began booking tours around the country, to England, and to Australia. Whatever she said onstage got laughs and applause.

QUESTION: How do you stay so young?

ANSWER: I'm really 14 years old half the time.

QUESTION: How do you think of yourself as a legend?

ANSWER: In a coffin.25 During the question-and-answer portion of the show at the Palm Springs High School auditorium, a voice called out from the audience, "Who was your favorite producer at Warner Bros.?" "She got off her stool, walked to the edge of the stage, peered into the darkness, and called back, 'Hal Wallis? Is that you, Hal?' " Wallis's widow, Martha Hyer Wallis, continues: She said, "You know you gave me my best roles at the studio," and she named them and thanked him.

We had drinks with her after the show and, later, she came to dinner at our home in Rancho Mirage. Age had mellowed both Bette and Hal, but she still seemed driven-typically wired. I made sure that she was the center of attention, respected, revered-no other guests better known or with bigger egos. But she never seemed to relax. She was wound so tight she seemed to vibrate-tense, taut, very Margo Channingish.26 While in London on the Legendary Ladies tour, Davis cut a record with the help of the composer Roger Webb and the lyricist Norman Newell. After an afternoon's worth of studio time, Webb invited Davis to dinner along with his wife. "She arrived with two cartons of cigarettes, drank her way through an awful lot of booze, and totally ignored me," Margot Webb remembered. "She got on very well with the boys, Roger and Norman, but she didn't speak a word to me through the dinner. I thought, 'This is awful, I feel I ought to say something to her.' I wasn't allowed to call her Bette, though Roger and Norman were, so I said, 'Miss Davis, during the show, a young man asked you what I thought was quite an impertinent question.' She said, 'What was that?' 'Well,' I said, 'he asked you if you wore underwear during love scenes on a film.' She turned around to me and said, 'You stupid ---cow.' (I won't tell you the language she used, but you can imagine what the word was.) She said, 'You've been in the business long enough. You should know.' And that was all she said to me."27 Mrs. John Springer recalled a similar antagonism toward women, particularly spouses. She accompanied her husband into the VIP lounge at Kennedy Airport on one occasion only to be greeted by Bette angrily shouting, "No wives! No wives!"28 LATE BETTE DAVIS offers few pleasures. For every delicate, watchable The Whales of August there are five Scream Pretty Peggys. Jimmy Sangster cowrote the script for that one, a made-for-television horror movie starring Davis as the reclusive mother of a creepy, Norman Bateslike sculptor (Ted Bessell) who hires coeds to clean their mansion. The film, described by its own director as "a second-rate thriller based on cliche ideas," aired on ABC in November 1973.29 Bette herself was succinct: "Scream Pretty Peggy? She never even screamed."30 She was equally dismissive of another schlocky-scary effort: "I was in one really b.l.o.o.d.y film, which turned out much bloodier than indicated in the script. That was Burnt Offerings, and if you haven't seen it, congratulations."31 The Judge and Jake Wyler, another failed series pilot, aired as a made-for-television movie in early December 1972. Davis played a hypochondriacal retired judge-turned-private-investigator; Doug McClure was Judge Meredith's ex-con sidekick. Vik Greenfield, who accompanied Davis to a number of shoots during his employment as her a.s.sistant, recalls only one occasion when she blew up: During the filming of Jake Wyler, McClure showed up late one day and was obviously hungover and having a hard time. But Davis didn't take it out on him. She took it out (naturally) on the director, David Lowell Rich.32 Davis's interminable filmography certainly presents her biographers with a challenge. Barbara Leaming, for example, solves the problem by covering The Anniversary, Connecting Rooms, Bunny O'Hare, Lo Scopone Scientifico (an Italian comedy), and Burnt Offerings as well as the TV pilots Madame Sin, The Judge and Jake Wyler, and h.e.l.lo Mother, Goodbye! in a single paragraph. In the same spirit, then, and with the same literary goal. . .

In January 1970, she turned up on an episode of her friend Robert Wagner's. .h.i.t series It Takes a Thief, in which she played the world's greatest lady jewel thief who was then reduced to poverty. This led to 1972's Madame Sin, which costarred Wagner (who also served as executive producer) and concerned Bette's character's diabolical attempt to take over the world. As the t.i.tle character, Bette is made up rather like Gale Sondergaard in The Letter.

As the Davis encyclopedist Randall Riese drily puts it, "The Dark Secret of Harvest Home was shot on location in Mentor, Ohio, and starred Bette as a witch with a pitchfork in a very strange neighborhood."33 There's a cult involved. The five-hour, two-part made-for-television movie aired on NBC on January 23 and 24, 1978.

In 1980 she made White Mama, the story of an aging white woman and her friendship with an African-American boy from the ghetto. APiano for Mrs. Cimino and Right of Way were both made in 1982. The former found Bette as the aging owner of a music store; the latter costarred Jimmy Stewart and was about the right of an elderly couple to end their lives on their own terms.

In Agatha Christie's "Murder with Mirrors" Miss Marple, played by Helen Hayes, helps her old friend Carrie (Davis) save her family's estate-and herself-from covetous, murderous forces. Murder with Mirrors aired on CBS on February 20, 1985. As Summers Die aired on HBO on May 18, 1986. Jamie Lee Curtis has said that her primary motivation in taking the role in As Summers Die was to play opposite Bette Davis; "How many actors of my generation can say that?" Curtis asked. Someone once asked her what first came to mind when hearing Davis's name, and Curtis answered, "Heat. I have to qualify this. I was president of the homeowners a.s.sociation at the Colonial House in West Hollywood where she lived. I would get calls from her. 'h.e.l.lo. Jamie. This is Bette Davis. It's too cold. I want the heat.' I'd say, 'Miss Davis, I understand you are chilly, but it's July. I can't in good conscience go to the board of directors and say that we're going to turn on the heat and charge people for heat in July in Southern California. I really would suggest you get a heater or plug ins.' She'd answer, 'It's too expensive on my electric bill.' "34 Although it's one of Davis's more highly regarded made-for-television dramas and in fact won her an Emmy Award, Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter is just an even more lackl.u.s.ter On Golden Pond. Bette is the ornery, resentful mother; Gena Rowlands is the daughter who ran away from home twenty-one years earlier and returns with terminal cancer. Given the film's reputation, Davis's performance is surprisingly uninspired. Mistaking shouting for emotional depth, she punches her lines and stomps around in sensible Yankee slacks and milks a predictable breakdown scene of the sort that earns honors for familiar actresses whose best years are behind them. Strangers aired on CBS in May 1979.

"I wanted badly to win that Emmy," Davis admitted. "I felt I deserved it, if not for the performance I gave, then for the difficulty of the part and the hardships of the filming. The setting was a Rhode Island summer, but we worked in the bitter winter cold of Montecito, in northern California."35 The older Davis got, the better Warner Bros. looked in retrospect.

"They claim it's cheaper to shoot on location," Bette griped to Bruce Williamson. "I claim that we're all stunt people today-we're not actors anymore. When we shot Family Reunion, we were outdoors, with the temperature 22 below, trying to act of all things!"36 The four-hour, two-part miniseries, which aired on NBC on November 11 and 12, 1981, finds Davis as a retired Yankee schoolteacher who goes on a genealogical odyssey. Its gimmick was the casting of stars' offspring: Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson's daughter Roberta; Don Murray and Hope Lange's son Christopher; John Garfield's daughter Julie; Victor Borge's daughter Frederikke; and Bette's grandson, J. Ashley Hyman. Bette had been impressed by Ashley's ability to mimic movie stars, particularly Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Still, Davis writes, "The day we rehea.r.s.ed our first scene I had no idea what to expect. He was terrific. He hit his marks, remembered his lines, did all the right things."

Davis grew concerned, however, about the fact that when Ashley was some distance away from the director, Fielder Cook, he couldn't hear his instructions. She called B.D. and told her that she wanted to take Ashley to a specialist, to which B.D. is said to have replied, "If you want to waste your money, go ahead." It turns out Ashley had an eraser jammed up his nose. "Finding this eraser did away with the many headaches he had had for years. No more aspirin daily." Unfortunately, the misplaced eraser led to partial deafness in Ashley's left ear.37 * * *

"YOU TELL HER."

"No, you tell her."

This is the conversation Mike Merrill and Vik Greenfield had on the sidewalk of Bette's Westport house in 1971 after they saw a screening of Bunny O'Hare. Bette, aware of trouble, had sent them as scouts. The news they bore wasn't encouraging.

With its inane premise, tacky costumes, irritatingly bouncy early 1970s score, and execution that makes the word shoddy seem like a compliment, Bunny O'Hare really ought to be delightful. But it's a plain bore, the rock-bottom nadir of Davis's career. The eponymous Mrs. O'Hare (Bette) awakes one morning to find a bulldozer about to demolish her house at the insistence of the bank. Ernest Borgnine shows up as a used toilet dealer and spirits Bunny's commode away before the bulldozer knocks the house down, and together they take off in Borgnine's ramshackle camper. "I betcha didn't always sell second-hand toilets," Bunny pleasantly remarks. No, he used to be a bank robber. So they dress up as hippies-Bette in a Peggy Lipton wig and Peggy Ca.s.s sungla.s.ses, Borg-nine bearing an uncanny resemblence to Jerry Garcia-and launch a late-in-life of crime. "This is a stickup," Bunny comments to a startled teller. "I've got a gun in my purse. Howdja like to have your guts spilled all over the floor?" It's not just c.r.a.p; it's dull c.r.a.p.

There was a preview screening at the Picwood Theatre in Los Angeles on June 24, 1971, but as Whitney Stine remarked, "the showing was poorly attended, probably because many Davis admirers were attending a Gay Liberation Parade on Hollywood Boulevard at the time."38 Rumors grew, and Bette, to her professed shock, discovered that Bunny O'Hare's artistic integrity had been violated-that the producer, Samuel Z. Arkoff, had peremptorily spirited the film away from its auteur, Gerd Oswald, and had recut it and ordered that additional scenes be shot. Farcically, the case of Bunny O'Hare ended up in litigation when, on August 23, 1971, Davis filed suit in the New York Supreme Court against American International Pictures. She asked for $3.3 million in damages. As Stine phrased it, "AIP made fraudulent misrepresentation to induce her to star in a film designed to be a social doc.u.mentary with humorous undertones"-Stine reported this with the prose equivalent of a straight face-"and, after the film was finished, transformed it into a substantially different film." But the feisty Samuel Z. Arkoff was not one to sit idly by and let himself be sued, so on November 1, AIP countersued for $17.5 million.39 The suit was settled out of court for undisclosed terms.

The auteur took Bette's side. "I feel that they mutilated the picture completely after I turned in my final cut," Gerd Oswald told an interviewer as though he were Orson Welles lamenting The Magnificent Ambersons. "They made a different film from that which we had conceived."40 Bunny O'Hare did, however, find one prominent admirer. The generous and genial Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, "Certainly not since What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? have I admired [Davis's] wit, courage, discipline, talent, and guts in quite the same degree as I did yesterday. . . . The gimmick is dreadful, [but] Miss Davis gives a performance that may be one of the funniest and most legitimate of her career."41

CHAPTER.

23.

BETRAYAL.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1976, BETTE DAVIS traveled to Colorado to play Mildred Pearce-not the old Crawford role (which is spelled Pierce), but rather the mother of Aimee Semple McPherson, the Pentecostal preacher who faked her own kidnapping in 1926, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930, and committed suicide in 1944. The Disappearance of Aimee is essentially a courtroom drama, the story of McPherson's trial on charges relating to the ersatz kidnapping. McPherson was originally to have been played by Ann-Margret, but she dropped out and Faye Dunaway took the role.*

"I can imagine no circ.u.mstances under which I would work again with Miss Dunaway," Davis sniffed in This 'n That. "It is possible she feels the same about me, but I believe I have the stronger claim." According to Davis, she'd wanted to play Aimee herself twenty-five years earlier, but "at the time no studio would touch the story; the censors would never permit a film about a woman who was the head of a church and was also a wh.o.r.e. So I ended up later playing her mother.

"We filmed The Disappearance of Aimee in Denver, in the summer, and day after day Miss Dunaway kept the cast and crew waiting. She had a fondness for riding around town all night in a chauffeur-driven limousine, sipping champagne in the back seat. [Dunaway showed up late] while nearly two thousand extras sweltered in a church that could not be air-conditioned. . . . To help pa.s.s the time, I went onstage and sang 'I've Written a Letter to Daddy' from Baby Jane."1 * McPherson's mother's nickname was Minnie and she married James Kennedy; thus Davis's character is called Minnie Kennedy in the film.

The film's director, Anthony Harvey, had been a Davis fan since his youth in Britain. He and his mother would see any Davis picture that came out, so he was especially excited by the prospect of directing her. "I just loved working with Bette," Harvey said, because she had a wonderful, dark sense of humor-gritty, gritty, very straightforward. The very first time I met her, she said, "You know something? That cameraman of yours-we'll have to get someone else." And I said, "Bette, if you get someone else I have to leave." Then she saw some of the tests and thought they were pretty good. She said, "I don't know if he's a great photographer, but he sure is a looker." He was a marvelous cameraman, actually-Jim Crabe.

We were shooting in this exhausting place, but she was always there at 6 in the morning, long before anyone else; knew all her lines; tremendous!2 Predictably, there was one other altercation. Davis's hairdresser, Peggy Shannon, had concocted-obviously at Davis's behest-what Harvey described as an "All About Eve wig," and it wasn't at all right for the part. "My fans expect me to look like that," Davis argued, but Harvey stood his ground. Harvey sat outside her trailer reading a book for about two hours, and finally Peggy Shannon came out and said, "Miss Davis would like you to see her." "And there she was looking absolutely great, with perfectly marvelous hair of her own, and that was that. In both occasions-the cameraman and the wig-I thought, you know, she admired you if you were stubborn and stood up to her."

Davis plays McPherson's mother understatedly, giving the charismatic Dunaway the lioness's share of the histrionics. But Aimee's mother does have one notable moment. Standing in front of her daughter's vast congregation while Aimee goes missing, she leads the crowd in a hymn, and she's remarkably on-key: "In the sweet. By and by. We shall meet-on that byoo-tee-ful-sh.o.r.e." The Disappearance of Aimee aired on NBC in November 1976. Harvey last saw Davis sometime in the 1980s. He was driving down Sunset Boulevard on the western edge of West Hollywood, and there she was-standing right in the middle of traffic. "It was near Doheny, down from where she used to live, and she was looking for a taxi. So I pulled up. She said, 'Oh, I'm fine-don't worry about me.' And, very reluctantly, I drove off."

TWO ADORABLE SNUB-NOSED children, Tia and Tony (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann), arrive from outer s.p.a.ce in a large metal frisbee in the opening scene of Return from Witch Mountain, an unremittingly bad Disney picture from 1978. The villains, Letha (Bette) and Dr. Victor Gannon (Christopher Lee), kidnap the kids to utilize their skills at levitation in a terroristic attempt to take over a plutonium plant. The boy executes his tricks without apparent strain, but whenever Tia wants to make something move, she jams her hands against her temples and squints as though she's suffering a terrific migraine.

The children get separated when Davis whisks Tony away for kinky experimentation-she strips the boy to the waist before binding him to a table-leaving Tia stranded in a bad part of town. Tia promptly gets involved in a gang fight among multiracial nine-year-olds, all of whom are quite amazed when she telekinetically clobbers the bad ones with a bunch of garbage cans. Later, after being chloroformed, Tia, too, finds herself strapped to a gurney. "I've put her into a state of comatose neutralization," says Christopher Lee, referring inadvertently to most of the audience as well. Luckily, Tia manages to escape and enlists the aid of Alfred the friendly goat, who runs off to Tia's new friends and communicates a necessarily obscure message.

Bette partic.i.p.ates gamely in this awful exercise, and it's just plain sad to see a great star working at such sorry stuff solely for the sake of employment. The cute kids levitate her at the end of Return from Witch Mountain, which features neither a witch nor a mountain. They hoist her up and hang her in midair. "I've lost my faith in science," the star of Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, The Letter, Now, Voyager, and All About Eve sadly remarks, aloft.

BETTE HAD ONE reservation about accepting the role of Mrs. Van Schuyler in the 1978 Death on the Nile: the director, John Guillermin, planned to shoot on location in Egypt. "But what if they start a war while I'm there?" she asked her agent, Robbie Lantz. "They wouldn't dare," Lantz replied.3 "She was a terrific pro," said Guillermin.4 "I just adored her. The first day, we were shooting on location in a real boat on the Nile. (That's how we started; we finished up at Pinewood Studios later.) And Bette was sitting there, all made up and ready in costume, and I was sitting on the rail of the riverboat. I was in shorts, naturally. She was looking at me. I said, 'What's up, Bette?' And she said, 'You've got nice legs.' From that moment on, she was a darling. Everybody liked her and had a lot of laughs with her."

Death on the Nile, adapated by Guillermin and Anthony Shaffer from Agatha Christie's novel, presents a collection of disparate characters dying from a series of creatively lethal acts. It features, in addition to Bette, an international cast of stars: Maggie Smith, Peter Ustinov, Mia Farrow, David Niven, Angela Lansbury, George Kennedy, and Jack Warden.

Davis was seventy years old in 1978. "She had a little bit of a problem sometimes remembering her dialogue," Guillermin continued. "She'd make pauses that didn't exist in the script. But she was such a consummate pro that they were pregnant pauses, and she got away with it. She did it so well you'd think it was the way the d.a.m.n thing was written." Guillermin didn't approach Death on the Nile's screenplay as though it had been written by G.o.d or Billy Wilder: "It didn't matter whether she got the f.u.c.king dialogue right. If the scene is right, the dialogue doesn't mean a f.u.c.k if it's saying the same thing."

Given the number of stars crammed together on a Nile riverboat, there was bound to be friction among the all-star egos, but as Guillermin saw it the tensions weren't generated by Bette. "Maggie was difficult," Guillermin noted. "She had had a very expensive wig made in London and got terribly upset after Mia saw the wig and said that it was the color of her hair. I had to tell Maggie that she couldn't wear that wig, and she hated me for the rest of the film." Was there tension between Olivia Hussey and Bette? "No, not with Bette. With Mia." Hussey is said to have reprimanded Farrow's child, "and Mia got really angry and went for her physically. I don't know-I think it was the girl that Woody married later. Anyway, Mia wasn't pleased, and I don't blame her. If anybody smacked my child I'd give them a smack back." (Bette herself claimed that Hussey stopped speaking to her after Davis complained about having to listen to Hussey's Eastern religious chanting.) What about B. D. Hyman's claim that there was trouble between Davis and Ustinov? "That's absolute bulls.h.i.t. I never saw Bette and Peter having anything but fun together. He was very much a gentleman and had a wonderful sense of irony. They used to kid each other mercilessly.

"She had this heavy period stuff on, you know-her wardrobe. And of course it was Egypt-115 in the shade some days and no breeze. I'm amazed that she was on time every day at her age, never missed a day, never was sick, never complained. As you can see, I liked Bette," Guillermin concluded.

"I especially enjoyed working with Maggie Smith, who played the companion to my rich dowager," Davis wrote in This 'n That. "Maggie and I felt a few more scenes between us would have been an addition to the film. The relationship between our characters was hilarious." The aristocratic Bowers (Smith) has been reduced to servitude-she's Mrs. Van Schuyler's companion, nurse, and prison matron-and she takes her frustrations out on Mrs. Van Schuyler. Guillermin's firm denial to the contrary notwithstanding-"no, no, absolutely not!"-there really is a hint of sadomasochism to the mistress-slave relationship. Not only do they enjoy mutual verbal abuse at every opportunity, but the mannish, suited Bowers wrenches the femme-y old lady roughly by the arm toward what she calls her "ma.s.sage" and yanks her again when it's time for bed. These precious moments are the closest Bette Davis ever came to playing any kind of lesbian, let alone a kinky one.