Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Ray Stricklyn didn’t discuss what happened next in this “Joan Crawfordish” late-night tête-à-tête with Davis. Instead he cut to the next evening—Sunday. “We were about to sit down for dinner when suddenly headlights glared into the house. ‘Oh Christ,’ Davis commented. ‘He’s home!’ That could only mean Gary. And indeed it was. They’d finished rehearsal earlier than he’d expected and he decided to make the drive to Newport Beach instead of staying in town.”

  Ray got the distinct impression that Gary wasn’t pleased to see him. “I was introduced, and I’m sure he wondered who I was, but possibly he really thought I was Barbara’s daughter’s date. Which I was—though, in my mind, I was really Davis’s date!

  “Following dinner, more drinks were served. Now, both Davis and Merrill liked to drink—but she seemed to hold hers better than he. I remember him saying something about ‘Claire Trevor is going to be terrific in the Playhouse 90,’ adding, ‘She’ll probably win an Emmy.’ Davis didn’t seem to like that remark, particularly since she’d turned the role down. The bickering started.

  “Finally she recommended the children go to the other room and watch TV. I was relegated to ‘one of the children.’ I didn’t like that too well but dutifully followed her order. But I must admit, my ear was more turned to the conversation they were having than what was on television. Suddenly I heard Merrill say, ‘I wish I were Gregory Peck, so I’d only have to do one good movie a year and make some decent money.’ To which Davis growled, ‘If you’re going to pick an actor to be, at least pick a good one.’ And they were off.”

  Ray Stricklyn also recalled that the following morning Gary Merrill asked him to go sailing with him and Michael, but “I declined, much preferring to spend the little time left with Miss Davis. She heard me decline and later said, ‘I’m glad you didn’t go with them.’ We wandered down to the beach, though she was fully clothed, and sat on the sand for a while. I got the distinct impression she was quite sad. I bid my adieus and drove back to Hollywood.”

  A few weeks later, while Davis was shooting another television movie, Ray read in the morning paper that she and Merrill had separated and went to visit her on the set.

  “She greeted me warmly and we went into her dressing room. Then she suddenly burst into tears and wept about the end of her marriage. How difficult it was, at her age, to start all over. I felt very close to her, that she would share this unhappy moment with me.”

  It appears Stricklyn was on hand at other Davis low points in the 1956–1958 period. He spent time with her at her Brentwood home when she was confined to her bed after falling down a flight of cellar steps and severely injuring her back. Ray remembered how disappointed she was at the time because the injury prevented her from doing the Broadway version of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward, Angel. The role went to Jo Van Fleet, who was a success in it.

  Stricklyn sometimes gets his dates mixed up—she and Merrill did not divorce until 1960 and her cellar-stairs accident was in 1957, not after the divorce, as he states. But emotionally his memories ring true.

  After that, Stricklyn and Davis didn’t see each other until years later, when Davis won the American Film Institute Award for Life Achievement. Stricklyn, who had become a publicist, found himself representing her and was warned that because he had acted with her in the past, given her quixotic nature, that could be an advantage or a disadvantage.

  As he recalled it, “It turned out, thank God, to be a great advantage. She always (if she liked you) preferred working with people she knew and trusted. She also knew the great value of this award and she was on very good behavior. She was the belle of the ball again, and she relished that position. She did dozens and dozens of interviews, did many shots with her favorite photographer, George Hurrell, and was always the consummate pro. ‘I like you, Ray. You’re a survivor like me,’ I remember her saying.”

  At that point, Ray remembered Davis as “firm, definite in her likes and dislikes, what she would do and wouldn’t do—but you always knew where you stood with her. And she knew the value of publicity. The old studio training had taught her that. The event was a smashing success and she relished the attention and eminent position she was in once again.

  “That and handling the Henry Fonda AFI tribute the next year were the highlights in my twelve years as a publicist. Davis appeared, of course, on the Fonda tribute—and I remember her seeking me out at the affair and we went into a secluded room off the main ballroom and chatted for a good half-hour. Then she wanted me to get her ‘out of there’ once it was over—so, of course, I graciously escorted her to her limo.”

  Ray remembered that as they made their way through the crowded room, Davis stopped suddenly and tapped Cloris Leachman on the shoulder. Leachman almost collapsed when she saw who it was. Davis said, “I’m doing a television movie—a great script—you might be very right to play my daughter.” As Ray recalled it, “Leachman was loud in her praise and said, ‘Oh, I think my agent’s mentioned it.’ There was a pause and then Davis said, ‘I understand you don’t allow smoking on your sets.’ Leachman was very flustered (she was a very vocal nonsmoker advocate) and lamely replied, ‘Ohhh, I’m sure there can be an adjustment.’ Davis said tartly, ‘Hmmmm,’ and we walked off. . . . Gena Rowlands played her daughter.”

  Ray said that he rarely saw her after that. He thinks the last time was when she autographed her album, Miss Bette Davis Sings, at a small record shop in West Hollywood—“and the lines were blocks long.” Ray added, “She’s a tough, difficult lady. But she’s also one of the greatest . . . one of a handful of truly great movie stars.” He said, “I’ve heard a lot of disparaging stories about her in recent times, but certainly my relationships with her were, for the most part, ones I will always cherish.”

  I had heard, of course, of Ray Stricklyn’s on-again/off-again relationship with Davis for years. Jerry Asher, the publicist who knew Davis well, felt that Davis had been in love with Ray for a while—which may or may not be news to Ray circa 1990. When they met, she was pushing fifty and he was in his early twenties. He seems to have been the first of a line of young men half her age—later even a third her age—with whom, as she admits in her second autobiography, she was destined to fall in love, never happily.

  “Ray was a gentleman with her, compared to the way some of the other pups treated her,” Jerry told me. “She had a side of her that was consummate vulnerable-romantic. I think she was trying to recapture some of her own lost youth by osmosis with these young men. Remember that she was a virgin until she married that first man, Nelson, at the overripe age of twenty-four. With these kids she could imagine herself sixteen or eighteen again, going all the way, totally, without her mother standing guard over her, without her puritanical ideas [at that long-gone time] about passion unleashing itself only in the sanctity of holy matrimony.”

  Circa 1967, Jerry Asher opined, “Romantic ideas like that will get Bette into a lot of emotional hot water yet—in that respect she doesn’t learn from her mistakes.” In the years after that, Davis would prove him right more often than she cared to remember.

  21

  Back in the Doldrums

  IN MAY 1958, Davis set out for Europe on the S.S. Independence with eleven-year-old B.D. and Bobby. They were bound for Spain and France, where she would shoot her cameo role (as Catherine the Great of Russia) in John Paul Jones, produced by Samuel Bronston. It pleased her that the film would be distributed by Warner Brothers. Bronston had offered $50,000, which she was in no position to refuse, 1958 being one of her leanest years ever.

  Robert Stack was the star of this somewhat episodic historical drama, which eventually ran 126 minutes. The founder of the U.S. Navy, John Paul Jones was an advocate of sea power for the newly independent United States. Temporarily frustrated in his aims, he tours Europe seeking alliances and winds up in Russia, where Catherine the Great claims she wishes to employ him as commander of her Black Sea fleet. She also has romantic designs on him, which become apparent to the
serious, dedicated Jones, so he leaves Russia and goes on to France and other adventures.

  As soon as Davis arrived in Spain, she was dispatched to the Palace of Versailles outside Paris, where many of her scenes were shot. She did not get along well with John Farrow, once a talented director who was nearing the end of his life and was crotchety, fidgety, and every bit as temperamental as she was. Humiliated over her cameo part, Davis tried bits of business that Farrow hated. He informed her he wanted Catherine the Great played as an all-out bitch in heat and that she was to underline the sexiness in the part, pursuing the handsome Stack with mad abandon. “You are to be the Queen of All the Rushes,” he laughed, and found that his attempt at sardonic humor went right by her. She told him his concept of Catherine was vulgar and shallow, that she, with her predecessor Peter the Great, had guided Russia into the modern era, and while she was willing to be flirtatious and vain, she wanted to stress Catherine’s more statesmanlike aspects. All this went over and around Farrow. Ill and disgruntled at fifty-four (he was to die a scant five years later), the macho and posturing Farrow was in no mood to indulge Davis’s whims, and her attempts to cultivate his friendship off the set met with chilling silence.

  As a director he was a martinet, demanding that things be done his way all the time, but Davis, sensing he was no Willie Wyler on whom she could depend implicitly, resisted and fought him, which led to many screaming matches. Then word came that Bronston had run into money troubles and corners would have to be cut, which meant that the script Farrow and Jesse Lasky, Jr., had concocted on a day-by-day basis would have to be tightened.

  In actuality, Davis filmed many more scenes than appeared in the final print, and she later resented the cuts that made her performance seem perfunctory, abrupt, and off balance.

  The picture had a large cast. In addition to Stack, Marisa Pavan, Charles Coburn (as Benjamin Franklin), and Bruce Cabot, there were such cameo stars as Macdonald Carey, Jean-Pierre Aumont, David Farrar, and Peter Cushing.

  Max Steiner composed one of his later, less felicitous scores for the film, which was photographed by Michel Kelber in Technicolor and Technirama. The Technicolor did not favor the fifty-year-old Davis, making her look lined and tired. Even the magnificent gown of velvet trimmed with sable that designer Phyllis Dalton concocted ran afoul with an off-the-shoulder effect that overemphasized the cruel bulges and lines in Davis’s neck. When she saw the rushes, she was so infuriated at the way she looked that she threw an ashtray at Kelber in the screening room. The ashtray contained a match that was still smoldering, so, for his pains in photographing her—or rather lack of pains—Kelber sported an ash-spattered face and a small red spot on his chin from the smoking match.

  Robert Stack, always mellow and relaxed in an interview, was in high spirits at the time he made John Paul Jones, he had just gotten an Oscar nomination for the 1956 Written on the Wind. But mention of Davis in John Paul Jones brought on one of his rare low moods when I asked him about it in 1964. “Her role was small to begin with—I always thought cameo a cruelly sarcastic term,” he told me. “And after Bronston went on a cost-cutting jag, what scenes she had were cruelly cut—and I don’t blame her for screaming loud and long about it,” Stack said, “but working with her was not easy. She and Johnny Farrow did not get along, she overplayed her scenes and she seemed very tense and nervous and went right off to her dressing room to rest when we were through. Farrow used to wink and tell me Davis had romantic designs on me, but I think she played her scenes très intime because Johnny insisted on it, not because she was after me. Certainly I got no invites to the dressing room, so we can’t plead her guilty on that. But she knew the project was doomed, I think, and it kept her in a sour mood. I can’t really blame her, either.”

  John Paul Jones turned out to be a monumental, elephantine bore when it was released in 1959, and the few critics who mentioned Davis patronized her. Current Screen observed, “Bette-Davis-is-Bette-Davis-is-Bette-Davis, to crib from Gertrude Stein. Say that, and you’ve said it all. . . .”

  After the picture’s completion, Davis took B.D. on a vacation in Italy. They did all the sights, photographed the pope, and Davis later recalled the interlude as one of the most relaxing of her life.

  Davis left Italy for England feeling sanguine about her new project, The Scapegoat, playing opposite Alec Guinness. Guinness was forty-five then, and at the height of his acclaim. That same year, 1958, he had been knighted for his many distinguished performances on stage and screen, and the year before, he had won an Academy Award for his role in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  Co-workers felt Davis resented the fact that her co-star was attaining his peak of fame and success while she was on the downslide. She was doubtless irritated, too, because Sir Alec was doing the A Stolen Life–Dead Ringer twin bit. Daughter B.D. later quoted Davis as saying of Guinness: “He’s overbearing, egotistical, haughty, snotty, insensitive to play opposite and a dreadful actor!” Guinness was more temperate in his comments, but his dislike for Davis was obvious. He remembered that she refused his dinner invitations, kept aloof, and warded off all his friendly overtures. Certainly there is no question that Davis felt Guinness was getting all the attention, and soon she was accusing cameraman Paul Beeson of favoring Sir Alec and quarreling bitterly with director Robert Hamer, a confirmed alcoholic who died of his affliction a scant four years later. Beeson didn’t like the chalky white makeup she insisted on, and told her so. Daughter B.D., a frequent visitor to the set, recalled the constant tension and hostility.

  When word reached Davis that Daphne DuMaurier, the author of the novel on which the film was based, didn’t approve of her in her role and felt she was not injecting enough life and vitality into her scenes, Davis refused to have dinner with her. Eventually, Guinness, DuMaurier, the unfortunate tippling Hamer, and photographer Beeson reacted to Davis by withdrawing. “At times I felt I was acting in an absolute vacuum,” Davis later complained, and her co-workers let it be known that the vacuum was of her own making.

  The story deals, somewhat murkily, with an Englishman and a Frenchman who are identical in appearance. The Frenchman, upon meeting his lookalike, conceives a scheme whereby he will murder his wife and take up officially with his mistress by pinning it all on the Englishman. Plot ramifications abound, and at the end the mistress is not completely sure if the man who claims her is the Frenchman or his counterpart.

  Davis played the role of the Frenchman’s dowager-countess mother, who is addicted to drugs and cigars. Most of her scenes were shot in bed. Overdressed, overmade-up, frowsy and fussy and furbelowed, Davis acted up a storm, throwing the film off stride. In the finished picture, Guinness dominated the action, and Davis was reduced to an also-ran supporting player, a fact that enraged her.

  The truth, according to producer Michael Balcon, was that the film had to be severely edited, especially the Davis scenes, because her grotesque attitudinizing and overplaying hopelessly unbalanced the flow. Characteristically, Davis put the blame on Sir Alec, saying he had demanded that her scenes be cut so that he could appear in a more commanding light. In turn, the cuts injured the film’s continuity and deprived the picture of all sense. Alec Guinness later conceded that it was one of his poorer efforts.

  In later years, Davis refused to speak of the film, treated it as if it didn’t exist, as well she should have, as it was one of her more humiliating ventures. She and Guinness not only never acted together again, but they also never spoke to one another.

  Hoping to give herself a new start in the theater, Davis toured the country in 1959–1960 in The World of Carl Sandburg. It consisted of readings from the works of the noted American writer and biographer and had Sandburg’s hearty approval. Simple, homespun Americanisms abounded in the text, which was directed by Norman Corwin. Davis and Gary Merrill won plaudits in their seventy-two-city tour.

  Worthy as the Sandburg project was, it did not provide Davis’s talents with an appropriate showcase, however, and she quarreled with Mer
rill constantly during the production, which resulted in his being replaced by Barry Sullivan and then by Leif Erickson right before the New York run.

  Davis later admitted that firing Merrill, then divorcing him, just as the readings were picking up speed had been a serious mistake. Merrill, who physically resembled Sandburg and captured something of the author’s flavor, would have been ideal for the New York opening in the fall of 1960, as Davis later admitted.

  She has said of The World of Carl Sandburg, “A reading is a total departure from an acting performance. You become the servant of the author. The audience, which you play to in a reading, is one of the characters of the play. Norman Corwin, our director, gave us practically every gesture, every reading. So it was not a matter of time mellowing or quelling my ‘famed mannerisms.’ It was a question of a new, to me, form of theater—a form I grew to love.”

  The public in New York did not agree with her. The project had a short run, drew small audiences, and closed within weeks. “It wasn’t the Bette Davis they came to see,” one commentator noted succinctly.

  After Davis divorced Merrill in May 1960, she began a series of unseemly and undignified public custody battles over eight-year-old Michael. She resented the fact that he preferred to be with Merrill; the child had had enough turmoil in the Cape Elizabeth house to last him for the rest of his life, and he wanted only peace, a permanent school, and his friends.

  Michael resented being the pawn in a custody suit that had his schoolfellows talking, and was more annoyed by Davis’s public castigation of the father he adored as a drunken, irresponsible, unreliable parent.