Dedication
For Daniel A. Strone,
Agent and Friend
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1:Spawned in Witch Country
2:Struggling to the Surface
3:Hollywood
4:Warner, Zanuck—and Arliss
5:Ham, Sex, and Other Things
6:Battling Toward the Big Break
7:Of Human Bondage—and Recognition
8:Grinding out the Warner Sausage
9:The First Oscar—and Its Aftermath
10:The Great Rebellion—and the Return
11:Bette O’Hara?
12:Jezebel, Oscar II, and Wyler
13:1939: The Great Year
14:The Old Maid and Elizabeth: Davis at Her Zenith
15:The Fourth Warner Brother—and Farney
16:Popeye the Magnificent
17:War Bonds, Now, Voyager, and the Canteen
18:The Quintessential Bette Davis Movie
19:Sliding Downward with Sherry
20:Renaissance—and Gary Merrill
21:Back in the Doldrums
22:The Horrors
23:Bette Davis: Survivor
24:A Legend—But Alone
25:The Lioness in Winter
A Bette Davis Film Listing (With Stage Roles and Some TV Films)
Acknowledgments
A Selective Bette Davis Bibliography
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Lawrence J. Quirk
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
IN JANUARY 1988, Bette Davis was a guest on The Tonight Show. She came out looking like a skeletal marionette, limping on legs that were toothpick-thin and wearing a white hat shaped like an inverted kettle, straight on top of her head, and a blue knit dress with horizontal white stripes. Her makeup did not hide the pallor of her skin, nor her ancient, wrinkled neck.
She wobbled over and sat down, waving her arms, cigarette in hand, looking for all the world like a carefully caparisoned death’s-head—until she spoke. Then the blue eyes sparkled as of yore, and the famous voice, projected from a stroke-twisted mouth, came down on the consonants and pushed hard on the vowels with its fabled authority. Everyone realized that the legendary Bette Davis was on hand and accounted for.
In spite of her frail appearance, her well-publicized health problems, the career that seemed all but over, she was still the Warner Brothers queen of four decades before.
She was still feisty: She had found Faye Dunaway unprofessional to work with, and said so. She told a fellow guest, a young comedian who had done a lame imitation of her, that he could “skip it.” She was still stubborn: Her smoking must be okay, she claimed, if she had lived as long as she had. She could be as vulgar as ever: She laughed at Johnny Carson’s statement that champagne made him fart, and even topped his ace with a story about Disraeli and Queen Victoria.
She could still kid herself: A photographer had told her he preferred her legs to her face. She played schoolmistress with her audience, putting them down when they laughed at her saying how she had loved working with Lillian Gish in The Whales of August.
Then it was time to go, and Bette Davis wobbled out into the night, to the waiting car, leaving in the minds of her audience a kaleidoscope of her eighty-plus films, her two Oscars and ten Oscar nominations, the studio battles, the four husbands and myriad lovers, the retarded daughter and the treacherous other daughter, and the solid-citizen lawyer son far away in Boston with his wife and children—the one she kept in touch with—somewhat.
They had—at least the Bette Davis devotees among them had—read about the waiting Forest Lawn tomb and the mother and sister who had preceded her there. They could chant by rote her oft-repeated statement, “I did it the hard way,” and such famous lines from her films as, “What a dump!” “Fasten your seat belts—it’s going to be a bumpy night!” “I’d love to kiss ya but I just washed ma hair” (reportedly her favorite), “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” and above all, “Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars!”
The true fans of Bette Davis glued to TV sets around the nation that night knew that her career had always been her life. That career had always been the constant, the safety valve, the refuge. It would not divorce her, turn on her, parasitize her, play games with her. She would declare her passionate love, wreak murder and vengeance, exorcise epic hurts and jealousies and rages forever—courtesy of revival house screens, television reruns, and a million videocassette recordings.
They had called her witch incarnate, force of nature. They had spoken of her demon within, of the lightning nature that could not seem to find any ordinary outlet. Within two years of that January 1988 TV appearance, the frail body would finally fail her—but the spirit within, fierce, persistent, undying, would endure forever. Bette Davis, actress, will always be a force to reckon with.
1
Spawned in Witch Country
BETTE DAVIS WAS born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in the mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts, on April 5, 1908. There was, later, considerable hoopla to the effect that she had debuted, with histrionic suitability, in a welter of lightning and thunder, but in actuality it was a day of mild wind and a little rain. Though the city in the main was an industrial community where textile workers were constantly on strike and ugly worker-police battles took place regularly on the streets, Davis was from one of the “old families.” She was born in her maternal grandmother’s house on upper-class Chester Street. Her father, Harlow Morrell Davis, was a young Bates College graduate who would go on to Harvard Law School and become a prosperous patent lawyer and government consultant. He was descended from the Welch James Davis, who had come to New England in 1634 and had helped found the community of Haverhill. Her mother, the former Ruth Favor, was a descendant of seventeenth-century English and Huguenot pioneers. The Huguenot Favors had blended their blood so thoroughly with the old Brahmins as to qualify as bluebloods through and through. There was even a Salem witch in the ancestry.
Her father was a cold, unemotional, detached man; her mother, whom she was always to call “Ruthie,” a woman who lived in her emotions. They were a strange, ill-suited pair. They separated when “Betty” (as she was then known—Betty with a y) was seven and her younger sister Barbara—called Bobby—was six. Three years afterward, in 1918, came a full-fledged divorce which horrified all their staid, straitlaced relatives in an era when divorce was almost a synonym for depravity.
Later she remembered that during the first seven years of her life, she “could not recall one moment of affection between my parents.” While treated kindly by her mother’s relations, and while not lacking for any of the necessities, Davis was strongly affected by this unloving marriage. She said, “I was fed on impermanence and insecurity. Men made vows they did not keep. They left women in the lurch, as my father left my mother. Nothing lasted—not love, not even life itself. One lived from day to day. One made do, cherishing the moment. The past was beyond retrieving. The future was a challenge, a danger.”
At the beginning—the very beginning—she got off to a bad start with her father. He had married her mother on July 1, 1907, and she arrived nine months later, almost to the day. Her father had not planned to have a child so soon. His studies, his strict budget, did not provide for it. He tried to force the idea of an abortion on her mother, which horrified Ruth’s brother, an Episcopal clergyman. Harlow Morrell Davis was an agnostic, a pragmatist. He dealt with facts. The rest was romantic fluff. Dissuaded from his intention to terminate Betty’s life before it had
even begun, he punished her for it later with unloving coldness and indifference. This was an attitude that Davis was to maintain toward both his daughters all his life.
Unwanted—and later deserted—by the first man in her life, Betty—later re-spelled Bette because a friend of her mother’s had read Balzac’s Cousin Bette and felt the e at the end sounded more glamorous and actress-y—developed a distrust of men that stayed with her all her life. “Childhood shows the adult,” as a famed apothegm has it. As a result of the psychic wounds that Harlow Morrell Davis inflicted on his two daughters, Bette grew to think of men as rivals to be bested and Bobby regarded them as frightening threats. Many years later, after her fourth and last divorce, Bette Davis said, “I always knew I would end up an old woman alone on a hill.”
Ruthie, her mother, was a loving flibbertigibbet of a woman, childlike and feminine during the years of her marriage to Davis. She seemed to her relatives and friends to be all sugar water, devoted to her babies, scrupulous about her maternal duties. But looks can deceive. Her husband’s desertion and the divorce in 1918 brought the real woman to the fore. From then on she thought of herself and her two little ones as the Three Musketeers, Three Against the World, iron-willed survivors, come what might.
Bette’s attitude toward younger sister Bobby was always ambivalent. Basking in her mother’s adoration, in her sure knowledge that Ruthie thought her the talent to be nurtured, the white hope, she sensed that Bobby felt neglected, almost unwanted. In truth, Bobby always felt inferior to Bette in looks, brains, and creative talent. Lacking her mother’s and sister’s strong ego and will to survive, Bobby failed in all her pursuits, personal and professional. In time her feelings of inferiority progressed to mental illness that waxed and waned like a recurrent fever.
Harlow Morrell Davis left Ruthie with an alimony that provided only bare subsistence, in spite of the fact he was making excellent money as a major patent lawyer. After a few ill-advised and fruitless attempts to get more money from her frugal ex-spouse, Ruthie showed the true mettle of her hardy Huguenot and Yankee ancestors and went to work as a housekeeper and a dormitory mother in various colleges. This woman who loved art and music, who was a photographer, a painter, and a fine public speaker, was without false pride. She took any job that came to hand and that suited her immediate needs, and she taught Bette that a person was not to be judged by the job she held but by who she showed herself to be—that was where true dignity lay. Later, when she was attending an academy, Bette would wait on tables to earn her keep.
By necessity, Ruthie and her two daughters went where the work was. Sometimes it was New York City. Sometimes it was Boston or Newton, Massachusetts, or Maine. Bette Davis later estimated that they had lived in some seventy-five apartments, furnished rooms, or houses in the period between 1918 and 1926.
During those years, from the time she was ten until she was sixteen, Bette Davis learned that life was a battle. You had to fight for everything. Fight for self-respect. Fight for survival itself, because the male was more dangerous than the most ferocious tiger or the fiercest bird. Women had to look out for themselves, Ruthie taught Bette. She herself had been willing to be Harlow Morrell Davis’s homemaker, helpmeet, loyal and loving little wife through life, but he had pulled the rug out from under her. All right, if that was how men were, she would be tough and self-sufficient.
Some thirty years later, teenage Barbara Davis Sherry heard the echoes of that long-ago refrain from the world-famous film star who was her mother: Men were unreliable, love tarried but a while. After the initial sexual thrill and romance were gone, men went wandering, looking for something or someone new, fresh, and exciting. Men craved novelty and lacked constancy. They were cold, tyrannical, brutal. Women must always be on their guard.
After matriculating in the public schools of Lowell and Winchester, a neighboring Massachusetts town, the Davis girls were sent to Crestalban, a rural academy in the Berkshires where outdoor life and wholesome pursuits were encouraged. By working as a governess for various wealthy families, Ruthie made sure that her girls were dressed nicely, but they were painfully aware that other children had prosperous fathers and loving, intact families with the snug joys and securities all that implied. Bobby reacted by shrinking into her own world. Bette responded by competing for prizes and acting in school plays. She was determined to be the best, the biggest, the brightest. She lived for the day when Ruthie wouldn’t have to work so hard, when she would be the provider.
It was at Crestalban that Davis, playing Santa Claus, got too near a Christmas tree and sustained severe facial burns that blistered painfully. The outer layer of her skin had to be removed, and she was in pain for months while her mother kept her face constantly oiled. Thanks to good care, the skin healed, but with the outer layer missing, it was sensitive to sun, harsh makeup, and other irritants. Although her eyesight was not affected, her blue eyes became prominent because she bulged them outward compensatively as if to assure herself they were still functioning.
During the years between 1922 and 1926, Bette’s high school years, the Davises moved frequently. While working in a photographic studio in New York, Ruthie took the girls to live in a one-room apartment on the Upper West Side. Later they moved to East Orange, New Jersey, where they lived in a bleak little flat that Davis always remembered for its claustrophobic, drab ambience. Then it was back to Newton, Massachusetts, where the girls went to the local high school. After a few more stopovers, Bette and Bobby wound up at Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, where Bette spent her junior and senior years.
Davis was sixteen and Henry Fonda a gangling nineteen when they met in 1924. On a double date with a friend of his and her sister, Davis got a crush on Hank, which was not reciprocated. He later said he forgot all about her once she was out of sight. She seems to have carried a torch for some months, writing him letters he did not trouble to answer. They were not to meet again for thirteen years, and then under entirely different circumstances.
During her geographical and scholastic peregrinations, Bette attracted a number of beaux, most of whom she kept at a friendly distance. Ruthie, who harbored firm puritanical attitudes toward the opposite sex, drummed into the girls that the loss of virginity before marriage was the worst thing that could happen to a woman. Boys and men, she declared, were passionate, driven creatures, slaves of their genital urges; they sought only to pleasure themselves, leaving the consequences—venereal disease, pregnancy, the loss of reputation and self-respect—to their hapless female encounters of the moment. Ruthie told the girls that a woman’s virginity was her integrity, her suit of armor, her defense against the rampaging, predatory male. Retain it and men would accord respect from a dutiful distance; surrender it and they would treat her as a plaything to be discarded. Total love, total surrender were only to be found in marriage—and even that called for a wary, considered approach.
The girls reacted to this advice according to their differing natures: To unstable, fragile Bobby it meant fear and distrust of the male, and to self-confident, strong Bette it spelled aggression, challenge, and role-playing.
The first man to get through Bette Davis’s defenses emotionally, but certainly not sexually (she remained a virgin until she finally married him at twenty-four), was the shy, gangling Harmon Oscar “Ham” Nelson, who was a year ahead of her at Cushing Academy. Big, gawky, awkward, with liquid brown eyes and a large nose, his vulnerable essence appealed to Bette, brought out an element of the maternal and protective in her. Her fundamental attitudes toward men surfaced unmistakably in this, her seventeenth year. Ham was too weak to be a threat; he seemed to be in doubt of his masculinity. Certainly he never made passes, never tried to be alone with her, never pawed her, never maneuvered for kisses. Sometimes she wished he would. When he acted in plays with her, he was cast in character rather than romantic lead roles. He played in the school orchestra, and Davis would watch her shy swain nervously tinkling on his piano or tootling his trumpet. Though he was a talent
ed musician, she regarded him half-protectively, half-contemptuously. This was no dashing Sir Galahad ready to sweep her off her feet, no take-charge male who would aggressively pitch for what he wanted. Although she responded to Ham and liked him, part of her longed to be totally feminine, yielding, dominated by a man she could adore and totally respect.
This dichotomy in Bette Davis’s nature—a longing for a dominant man to whom she could surrender herself without reserve and attraction to weak, clinging, passive men—was a conflict she never resolved.
Meanwhile, at Cushing, Davis profited from the instruction of such fine dramatic coaches as Lois Cann, who taught her a special form of expressionism—a vital, disciplined projective technique that she permanently incorporated in her acting. She starred in many school plays at Cushing, including Seventeen by Booth Tarkington. Ham had a character role in this with her. When he graduated a year ahead of her in the class of 1925, she missed him. Ham went off to an uncertain career. After matriculating at an agricultural college, he eventually landed at Amherst after doing some band work. He finally graduated at the ripe (for college) age of twenty-five, after which playing in bands became his life. He and Bette continued to keep in touch over the years, meeting when their schedules permitted. Ruthie approved of him: His family was right, his Yankee background was right, and above all, in her view, he was docile and manageable, a kind, affectionate puppy dog. That was the kind of man she wanted for her daughters. It was tacitly understood that however much Bette might wander in the male forests, Ham was the man she would eventually marry.
During the summer between her junior and senior years, Davis went with her mother to Peterboro, New Hampshire, where Ruthie had obtained work as a photographer. She enrolled, at her mother’s urging, in a dance school there that also had drama on the curriculum. The school was called Mariarden. While there she fell under the influence of a dance teacher who rather grandly called herself Roshanara, though her origin was plebeian English. Roshanara was a self-made woman who had turned her life into what she called “a thing of beauty and glamor and elegance.” It was from Roshanara, Davis said, that she developed the grace of movement that later served her well in acting.
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