Davis’s next venture, The Star, represented yet another occasion on which Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s paths crossed—after a fashion. Katherine Albert, the fan-mag maven turned screenwriter with her husband, Dale Eunson, also a magazine veteran, had her friend turned enemy Joan Crawford in mind when she wrote the screenplay, a harsh, unflattering portrait of an aging movie star—not a stage refugee or dedicated artist but a movie star—whose whole world revolves around the unrealities of Hollywood. Obsessed with her appearance, her fan impact, her position in the Hollywood firmament, she is the personification of self-centeredness, replete with a childish ruthlessness that refuses to accept the reality that she is over forty, has lost that “fresh, dewy quality” her agent extols, and is washed up as a box-office draw.
Instead of trying the stage or radio or television or commercials, she continues to hammer at studio gates, believing that all it will take is one good role to put her back on top.
This is how Katherine Albert saw Joan Crawford in 1952. It was also her revenge on Joan, because a year or so before, Katherine had asked her daughter, budding star Joan Evans, to forgo marrying a young man named Kirby Weatherly because she was too young and should wait. Crawford, Evans’s godmother, arbitrarily sided with the daughter, planned the marriage for her, and even held the reception in her own home.
Katherine Albert never spoke to Joan Crawford again.
Davis, of course, was in on all of this. She had never liked Joan, which was no secret to Katherine and Dale and everyone else in Hollywood, and she accepted the role with ill-concealed glee. The irony that Davis missed, of course, was that the role of Margaret Elliott had as many elements of Bette Davis in it as of Joan Crawford.
Henry Hart, the brilliant editor of Films in Review once said: “Bette Davis is an artist, and Joan Crawford is a trouper. There’s a difference.” By this Henry meant, of course, that Davis had a creative gift, while Joan took more essentially limited talent and enhanced it through sheer hard work and force of personality. Curtis Bernhardt, who had directed both actresses, once cited a salient difference between them. Davis’s characters lived only while the cameras rolled, he said. Once “cut!” was shouted, she immediately reverted to her usual self, asking him if she had overdone or underdone anything, and so forth. Joan, on the other hand, went on weeping or raging or hystericizing or whatever for minutes, sometimes hours after the cameras stopped filming, so completely did she live and identify with her roles. Davis, with an artist’s discipline, knew how to turn it on or off on command; Crawford simply lived it. “But both approaches could be equally effective,” Curt added.
But in the role of the has-been Margaret Elliott there were many aspects of the real-life Bette Davis. Her scorn of producers, her ragings against the “tripe” they put her in, her determination to make a comeback through sheer will and determination against all odds, these were standard Bette Davis characteristics.
There is a wonderful scene early in the picture that only Davis could have played. She is broke and living in a small apartment court, her landlord is threatening to evict her, and then her parasitic sister and brother-in-law come for their monthly check. In this scene, Davis played out all the bitterness she had felt over supporting so many people, including her mentally ill sister, her spendthrift mother, and other relatives and hangers-on. The scene has a force and a reality almost frightening in its intensity as she reminds her munching, foolish-faced brother-in-law of the business she set him up in that failed, of the operations she has paid for, of her help to his twin boys, of the thousands she has loaned them that were not paid back. “It’s too bad I forgot to give you a printing press!” she screams. “Then you could have printed your own money!”
And then she orders them out, slams the door behind them, and grabs her Oscar from the desktop and hisses, “Come on, Oscar, you and I are going to go and get drunk!” Her spree lands her in jail on a drunk-driving charge.
Bette Davis is written all over scenes like this. It is surprising, in retrospect, that she let Katherine get away with it. It is not possible that she saw The Star as a takeoff only on Crawford. Crawford herself saw what was intended (“That bitch is getting her revenge on me for interfering in her family affairs!” she screamed to Hedda Hopper), but she was perceptive enough to see that Katherine Albert and Dale Eunson had also trapped Davis into a rather blatant self-caricature. Oddly, when Hopper brought up the similarity between The Star’s story situations and her own life, Davis merely snorted: “It’s a damned strong part, the strongest I’ve had in some time, so why shouldn’t I play it?”
Margaret Elliott does something neither Crawford nor Davis would ever have stooped to—she takes a job clerking in a department store. When two middle-aged ladies recognize her and talk about her recent jailbird stint and her faded appearance, she screams that she won’t degrade herself a moment longer by waiting on “two old bags like you” and storms off the job screaming, “I’m Margaret Elliott and I’ll stay Margaret Elliott!”
It is then that Margaret does something Crawford would have been more likely to do—pretends to accept the role of a drab older sister in a test for a picture in which she actually wants to do the lead—a young girl twenty years too young for her. She ruins her chances by dolling up, speaking her lines flirtatiously, and conducting herself so ridiculously that she loses the badly needed role to a more realistic middle-aged performer. The shots of Davis, in a projection room, registering the gradual horror at the spectacle of her forty-plus-year-old self trying to be young and sexy is in itself worth the price of admission to any revival theater. Her growing chagrin, her humiliation, her self-disgust in this scene are graphic and realistic.
A chastened Davis is offered another role at a party, that of a washed-up star living in pathetic illusions. Finally recognizing her true self, shocked and disgusted at her longtime flight from reality, she jumps into her car, grabs her daughter (Natalie Wood) from her father’s home, and speeds to the docks and patient Sterling Hayden, a “wet-nurse for sick boats” who bailed her out of jail and has offered her his name and protection.
The ending was considered a copout by critics and audiences alike. The part Elliott ran away from might have put her back on top, but since the character was more Crawford than Davis she didn’t see it as an artistic opportunity but rather as a fall from grace.
Ernest Laszlo’s photography gave the picture a grayish, grainy, drab look (he doubtless thought he was achieving documentary realism but it didn’t turn out that way, unfortunately). Certainly Davis, at the time forty-four, could have used more sympathetic lighting and camera angles, as in many shots, even the ones where she dolls up, she shows her true age rather brutally, complete with bags under the eyes, bulges (she was overweight), and harsh facial lines.
While it won a number of critical kudos at the time of its release, The Star, due to weak distribution, did poorly at the box office. It was shot in twenty-four days by producer Bert Friedlob and director Stuart Heisler and looks it, too. Twentieth Century–Fox released The Star in time for Academy Award consideration in December 1952, but it showed more widely in the early months of 1953. That January, Davis was feeling flushed with success in New York. The Star was playing at the Rialto Theatre on Broadway while around the corner she was starring in Two’s Company, to full-house, appreciative audiences. My mother and I were among a group of well-wishers congratulating her on her double-header backstage in her dressing room after a performance. She chortled gleefully, “I’m on a roll—I’m on top of the world—couldn’t feel better about things!” It might have been exhaustion from the demanding two hours she had put in onstage, or mere exuberance, or a reaction to the painkillers she was already taking for her bad teeth, but she seemed barely conscious of any of us—wrapped totally in a private euphoric universe, and looking for all the world like Margo in All About Eve in her dressing-room sessions.
She was happier still when her performance in The Star won her yet another Oscar nomination.
Ironically, Shirley Booth’s Oscar came for a role that Davis had refused—a refusal she later ranked with the most serious mistakes of her career. Two years before, Shirley had made a smash hit on Broadway in the role of a drab housewife whose marriage to an alcoholic, played in the theater by Sidney Blackmer, has disintegrated. The poignant title refers to the dog named Sheba that she lost years before. The sensitive playwright William Inge had concocted a heartrending study of the loss of illusion and hope in marriage—the sensitive husband losing himself in drink and the more earthbound but well-meaning wife finding escape in illusions of her own.
In a 1953 article, “Shirley Booth: Heifer in the Hollywood Crockery Shop,” I commented on the unusual Booth mystique: a solid reality wed to a dreamy, vague, escapist projection that proved as irresistible on screen as onstage. She was not the type Hollywood usually took to its heart, as Davis had not been, either, twenty years before. She was not beautiful, svelte of figure, nor did she comport herself glamorously, on or off stage or screen. Davis was lost in admiration of Shirley Booth’s performance and general mystique, she later said she refused the role because she did not feel she could capture the gorgeously defenseless dithering that was Booth’s trademark nor did she feel she could come on quite that vulnerable and still hold on to her fans. It turned out to be a great mistake, as she later realized, but to her credit she also said that the part was Shirley Booth’s and hers alone—on film as well as onstage.
Two’s Company, the revue with lyrics by Ogden Nash and words by Vernon Duke, was one of Davis’s catastrophic career mistakes. In the summer of 1952, with The Star completed and no acceptable movie offers on the horizon (she had just rejected Come Back Little Sheba), it seemed like a lark. Gary agreed. Davis had been impressed by Judy Garland’s one-woman-show success at the Palace in 1951, forgetting that Judy was a first-class singer. Davis did not want to do heavy drama, though it seems clear that would have been the logical move. Possibly she feared falling flat on her face and felt some singing and dancing in a light revue would be a way of easing back.
Even so, she was taking a risk. In my Westchester Life article in Fall 1952, “George Jean Nathan Versus Bette Davis,” I pointed out that the great Nathan, a formidable and relentless theater critic of that day who had been originally instrumental in bringing Lillian Gish back to the stage in the early 1930s, would be among those she would have to face. She would have to measure up to the judgments of Brooks Atkinson and others, and was she prepared?
Had she elected to come back in a drama, Davis might have done well, but she feared the critical reaction, and Two’s Company seemed a change of pace, what she thought was a stretching-of-wings. What Davis overlooked was that she lacked timing and singing-dancing expertise, to say nothing of physical stamina. She was inevitably an unprepossessing figure in that métier.
Gary, Bette, and the kids were living in a rather nondescript house on Camine Palmero in a not-too-fashionable section of Hollywood when an army friend, Ralph Alswang, called from New York to ask Gary to feel Bette out about the musical. When Davis heard the Duke music and the Nash lyrics she was enthusiastic, and agreed at once.
By September 1952, the Merrills were ensconced in a Beekman Place triplex with the kids, and sister Bobby on hand to protect B.D., Margot, and Michael from Bette’s sudden fits of anger and frustration—as well as nerves, for she was beginning to realize what she had taken on. During the out-of-town tryouts there were several explosions over “creative differences.” Davis fainted in her opening number, then, roused by a worried Gary, went out before the curtain and told the audience, “You can’t say I didn’t fall for you!”
There were rumors that the show was so bad it would close shortly after opening in New York, but in Boston her old drama school mentor, John Murray Anderson, was called in to do repairs. He and Jerome Robbins, ballerina Nora Kaye, and Jules Dassin, who directed the skits, worked so that a passable—but only passable—production opened in New York on December 15, 1952. Davis later recalled living on Dexadrine and emergency shots during the running. She was somewhat consoled by the frantic ovation on opening night and the continuously full houses. Indeed, the producers estimated that if her will and energy held out, the show could run until summer—or longer.
Davis alternated rather heavy-handed skits with musical turns such as “Roll Along, Sadie” (parodying Sadie Thompson) in which, as one critic wrote, she looked like a female impersonator done up in Sadie’s garish costume, heavy jewelry, and elaborate feathered hat. She tried to torch a number called “Just Like a Man” and showed considerable strain trying to inject the requisite heartiness into her opening number, “Just Turn Me Loose on Broadway.” All in all, she coasted on her personality, talk-singing the songs and dancing awkwardly, her flaws artfully covered by a watchful chorus. It was to her advantage that her audience, comprised of the curious, the die-hard Bette Davis film fans, and the gays came simply to see Bette Davis. In person. Do or die.
The New York World-Telegram & Sun critic nailed down her performance accurately: “Her dancing is likely to consist of hip rolls, marching, and none-too-steady lifts by a whole corps of male partners. Her singing is deep, husky, very articulate and rhythmic but not very musical.” The reviewer for The New Yorker, after watching Davis attempt a hillbilly singer with pipe and minus front teeth followed by a parody of Tallulah Bankhead plus other misfires, wrote: “About half these items ought to be funny, but there is some quality in Miss Davis’s technique that suggests she should confine her talents to Maugham’s pale green and despicable Mildred and leave humor to the girls who just play for quick laughs.”
Davis was puzzled by her fatigue during the run of Two’s Company, which pills couldn’t relieve. Then she discovered that she had an infected tooth that was draining poison into her system. Dr. Stanley Berman of New York Hospital’s dental surgery unit removed the tooth and discovered that she had osteomyelitis of the jaw, which, while noncancerous, necessitated a serious operation, during which the jawbone would be scraped to remove all diseased tissue. Upon hearing this, she gave up her ill-advised effort at the Alvin Theatre in March 1953 and went promptly into the hospital.
After only ninety performances, Two’s Company had become theatrical history. The show’s young producers, Jimmy Russo and Mike Ellis, had nurtured hopes of a run of many months, possibly a year. They were left to count their losses. The talented cast of actors, singers, and dancers were left jobless.
Walter Winchell, the then-famous New York columnist, had been one of the show’s chief boosters. He often dropped in to catch parts of it and ran plug items every other day in his column. Then Winchell sprang a bombshell. He reported that Davis had cancer. Angered and then horrified, Davis and Merrill insisted that Winchell publish a retraction. After checking with the hospital and her doctors, Winchell did so gladly, assigning it a prominent place in his syndicated column. But as Davis later noted, a retraction does little to lessen the initial impact of a report, and during her lengthy convalescence many people were left with the impression that cancer had figured in it.
Davis had been heavily insured for Two’s Company. With the insurance money, she, Merrill, and the kids repaired to Maine, where she was absent for nearly two years from the screen or any other medium. During this time, as she recovered her health and strength, Davis devoted herself to wifehood and motherhood. The Merrills bought a large, handsome white-clapboard mansion that faced on the Atlantic Ocean at Cape Elizabeth, near Portland. It was set back in woods and fields and was difficult to find, so they named it Witchway. Davis later said they had decided on the name given its location and because “a witch lived there—guess who?”
They were hardly settled in when they were hit with a new disaster. Three-y
ear-old Margot had been acting strangely for some time. She was enormously strong for her age and knocked heavy objects around. She pulled out some of the year-old Michael’s hair, to Davis’s great alarm, and then B.D., who was about six, announced she wouldn’t sleep in the same room as Margot because she was afraid of her.
Margot’s temper tantrums grew worse, so Gary devised a little vest to keep her confined to her chair and her bed. Finally Gary and Bette decided to take her to a specialist in New York, who came up with the horrifying diagnosis that Margot was permanently brain-damaged, would never achieve an IQ above sixty or so, and should, for her and her family’s sake, be institutionalized.
Ruthie, enraged at the agency that had sent Margot their way, declared that she should be returned forthwith, labeled “damaged goods.” But Davis loved the beautiful child, whose appearance, at least in the early years, gave no indication of her affliction, and insisted on keeping her. Later, however, when the sleepless nights and the strain of coping with Margot became too much for her, Davis reluctantly agreed to send Margot off to a special school.
This was the Lochland School, outside Geneva, New York, run by a kindly, dedicated woman named Florence Stewart. Davis’s heart was heavy when she left Margot there that first day, but later she came to feel that it was for the best, although the expense of maintaining her there was a terrible drain on the family finances, even with Gary’s quick return to filmmaking. Under Miss Stewart’s tutelage, Margot improved steadily, and eventually she came home to the family on holidays. There were rumors late in the 1950s that Margot had been lobotomized to keep her calm, cheerful, and tranquil. While vigorously denied by both Davis and Merrill, the rumors persist to this day. Certainly the mild, sweet, harmless Margot that Davis and B. D. Hyman describe in their respective books does not correspond to the earlier violent wildcat who had so disrupted their lives at Witchway.
Meanwhile, much of the mischief that eventually alienated Bette Davis from Gary and then in varying degrees from both B.D. and Michael was being played out from 1953 to 1955. Throwing herself into the role of housewife and mother, and having found—after much trial and error—a solid, dependable man-and-wife team to run the house for her, Davis so thoroughly domesticated herself that she began to turn Gary off. “He wanted Margo Channing—not a little wife and mother,” Davis later said regretfully. Both have given their sides of the marital unhappiness that ensued. He painted her as temperamental, prone to fights over nothing, a maddening motormouth with an infuriating capacity for putdown. She painted him as refusing to accept the responsibility of his talent, lazy, irresponsible, drunken, and physically abusive. In her book B.D. wrote that Gary’s and Bette’s all-night fights and constant screaming frightened her and young Michael terribly. She recounted tales of Gary’s obscene and abusive language to her mother, his accusations that she was a sexless bitch and a lousy lay and incapable of relating to a man in any context. She also recalled scenes of violence, Bette at Gary’s feet while he threatened added physical abuse—and threatened B.D. into the bargain.
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 39
