After the divorce, Gary took up with Rita Hayworth, who was between men. Once when Gary and Rita brought Michael home after an excursion, Bette stuck her head out of a second-floor window and called Rita a whore. Fed up with scenes like this, tired of Davis’s overbearing insistence that she was his only real parent, Michael gradually pulled away from Davis, while his devotion to Gary remained unswerving. Gary assuaged Michael’s insecurities about being adopted by telling him his actual lineage was probably better than the Merrill and Davis lines combined, and he did all he could to make Michael feel that he was his child, that he loved and cared about him.
It is a tribute to Gary Merrill’s fatherly nurturing that Michael Merrill turned out as well as he did—he is now a lawyer in Boston, with a wife and two sons. Since Michael is totally uninterested in “bookwriting histrionics,” as he has reportedly called them, it is unlikely that we will ever see a Michael Merrill tale of family woe. Davis eventually realized that Michael preferred to steer his own course, so she kept on good, if somewhat distant, terms with him until she died.
With the divorce (and its accompanying costs) implemented and the rent due on an expensive townhouse on East Seventy-eighth Street in New York City, Davis found herself desperate for money in the fall of 1960. When a publisher offered her a solid advance for the first of two autobiographies she started to work on it immediately with the help of author Sandford Dody, who in a book he wrote later recalled the daily horrors of trying to wheedle, cajole, and finally force Davis into facing the facts of her life honestly. She went over every sentence, every word, with a fine-tooth comb, as he recalled, cutting out large segments that Dody felt would have improved the work. Gary Merrill would drop in occasionally during the bookwriting sessions, but never interfered. “I trust Bette,” he’d smile.
Disspirited by her mother’s death in July 1961, bickering with her publisher over the autobiography, concerned over the reception of her just-completed film, Pocketful of Miracles, Davis needed something new to think about, so she decided to go along with Tennessee Williams’s insistence that she appear in his new play, The Night of the Iguana.
The trouble began as soon as The Night of the Iguana went into rehearsal in the fall of 1961. Davis was not at ease around Margaret Leighton and Patrick O’Neal, her co-stars. She also knew that Leighton deeply resented having to alternate top billing with her on the marquee. Both performers considered her a personality first and an actress second and did not feel she had developed the stage discipline necessary for Iguana.
Tennessee Williams, who looked in on the rehearsals, had second thoughts about Davis’s suitability for Maxine, the sexy, pot-smoking, freewheeling landlady of the Mexican resort hotel where the action takes place. He thought O’Neal and Leighton perfect, though—O’Neal was admirable as the alcoholic former clergyman and Leighton affecting as the sad woman with the aged father. Short on plot and strong on Williams atmosphere, The Night of the Iguana had a fair success on Broadway and in 1964 was made into a movie with Richard Burton, Deborah Kerr, and Ava Gardner in the Davis role.
Davis felt resentful when she was not asked to repeat her role on film, but in fact she was much too old for it, and had been in the play as well. Her carryings-on seemed inappropriate, given her haggard face and matronly figure.
During the run, whenever Davis appeared on stage the outbursts of applause disconcerted her fellow actors and interfered with the flow of the play. Later she said unkind things about her co-stars’ efforts to reason her into a disciplined, ensemble-type performance. By April she walked out on the production. The critics tried to be kind, calling her “marvelously brash and beguiling” and referring to the “tattered and forlorn splendor” of her aura as Maxine. But Davis knew that Iguana had been an ill-advised theatrical excursion for her.
In her first movie in two years, Davis was flagrantly miscast.
May Robson had made a solid hit with the 1933 film Lady for a Day, in which she played Apple Annie, a pathetic alcoholic who sells apples on the New York streets during Prohibition. Frank Capra directed. The story has Annie rehabilitated and gussied up to masquerade as society lady Mrs. E. Worthington Manville in order to receive her daughter, whom she has not seen for years. The young lady is engaged to marry a Spanish aristocrat who is coming with his family to New York for a visit.
Robson, a fine old character actress with a solid stage background, made a career playing grumpy, grouchy, baggy-eyed, dumpy characters. She won the hearts of film fans who sensed the warmth beneath the crusty exterior. Lady for a Day was a one-of-a-kind film and May Robson a one-of-a-kind actress perfectly suited to the role. (Capra’s mistake, circa 1961, was his attempt to remake it.)
Based on Damon Runyon’s story “Madame La Gimp,” from which Robert Riskin had written a sprightly screenplay back in 1933, it was beyond the talents of the two new writers assigned, Hal Kanter and Harry Tugend. In addition, Capra and company failed to realize that the subject matter and sentimental theme were extremely dated for 1961 audiences. Capra was desperate for a hit, however, as his career had languished over the previous years.
Glenn Ford joined Capra as co-producer and took over the lead, a gangster who helps Annie create the proper atmosphere in which to receive her long-absent daughter (Ann-Margret in her debut film). His quiet, introverted, hesitant on-screen persona turned out to be totally unsuited for the dapper, witty underworld character that Runyon had conceived for the original. Nor was Hope Lange, Ford’s girlfriend at the time, right for the role of his showbusiness moll who also takes a personal interest in Annie’s transformation.
Capra later admitted that he had made a mistake with this pathetic retread, and said it had been “shaped in the fires of discord and filmed in an atmosphere of pain, strain, and loathing.”
Two other actresses rejected the role of Apple Annie before Davis took it. After viewing the original film, Shirley Booth said no actress could possibly duplicate Robson’s perfect characterization. Capra then approached Helen Hayes, who hemmed and hawed, reportedly because she agreed with Booth, but who eventually begged out because of a State Department tour.
Glenn Ford claims he then suggested Davis to Capra. Davis was hesitant to accept the role until daughter B.D. told her (in a notorious example of fourteen-year-old bad judgment), “You’d be the best Apple Annie in the world!”
Production began inauspiciously in the spring of 1961 when Glenn Ford let it be known that he wanted current love Lange to have the dressing room next to his. Davis went off on a wild tirade and made everyone miserable until the dressing room was declared hers, firmly and finally.
Next Davis read in a newspaper interview that Ford had gotten her the Apple Annie part as a token of his appreciation for the boost she gave him sixteen years before in A Stolen Life. Davis screamed a stream of outraged, ego-affronted obscenities of which the mildest example was: “Who is that son of a bitch that he should say he helped me have a comeback! That shitheel wouldn’t have helped me out of a sewer!”
Word of this got back to Glenn, who remained distant toward Davis for the remainder of the shooting. And Hope Lange had gotten off on the wrong foot with the dressing-room incident. Davis let it be known that Lange was an inadequate actress who was inauthentic in manner, style, and looks for her role. That resulted in two people not speaking to Davis on the set of Pocketful of Miracles.
Frank Capra was not well at the time and began to get migraine headaches trying to cope with Davis’s tantrums and demands. Later he tried to excuse her egomaniacal ravings on the grounds of her “inner insecurity and delicate-spirited fears, especially after having been off the screen for so long.” To which Lange—in one of her milder rejoinders—snickered, “Bette Davis is about as delicate-spirited as a tank!”
Certainly this was not one of Davis’s more felicitous assignments. She was hopelessly miscast as Apple Annie and played her with a heaviness and awkward overstatement that fell far short of the heart and vulnerability with which the great May Robson
had invested the part. As the rehabilitated Mrs. E. Worthington Manville, Davis was one-dimensional, lending the transformed “society lady” grande-dame airs without the subtle hesitancies and insecurities Robson had gotten across so well. Because Ford, Lange, and Peter Falk were also lamentably miscast, their performances were wan, tepid, and lackluster. Only Thomas Mitchell and Edward Everett Horton managed to summon the proper panache.
Playboy tried to be charitable, saying that Davis “slices the jambon” and that Glenn Ford seemed “like a very nice fellow from the studio accounting department who stumbled onto the set by accident.”
22
The Horrors
THE YEAR 1962 was the start of Bette Davis’s six-year horror film period.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, based on a novel by Henry Farrell, is not a good picture by any standards, and it is apparent now that it was cynically designed by director Robert Aldrich and producers Eliot and Kenneth Hyman to lure film audiences in and then shock them. The film certainly fulfilled its perpetrators’ dreams: in time its bonanza box-office performance totaled a cool nine million dollars.
Davis had her doubts when Aldrich offered her the script. She realized the role of demented Jane Hudson, a former child star, would call for messy makeup, outlandish clothes and hairdo, and a loony acting style that could either be ridiculed or applauded by her fans. But no one around was offering her anything better at the moment, so she even agreed to take a low salary in return for a percentage of the picture after Aldrich and the Hymans told her the quick shooting schedule (twenty-one days) and the low budget necessitated all manner of cost-cutting. The picture is B-movie cheapjack and grotesque, but what puts it over is the spectacle of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, both symbols of old glamorous Hollywood, looking worn and totally out of character, but acting up a storm.
Davis is a former kiddie star now gone to seed, and Crawford the once beautiful sister who was a famous romantic film star who has been crippled since a mysterious accident. Bitter and half crazy, Davis torments her sister and then goes downstairs to conspire with overweight mama’s-boy Victor Buono about revitalizing her career—a pathetic travesty of her kiddie act in vaudeville in which she will reprise her maudlin, dated song, “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy.” When she learns that Crawford is going to sell the house they live in and put her away, she locks her up.
Crawford crawls downstairs in a pathetic attempt to escape, and Davis hits her and then ties her up in her room. Later, a drunken Buono finds the near-dead Crawford and rushes to notify the police, but Davis bundles her sister into a car and takes her to the beach at Malibu to bury her. There, Crawford confesses that she perpetrated the accident which Davis had always thought her fault. It is too late to save Baby Jane’s sanity however; the police find her cavorting and singing while her dying sister lies on the sand.
Such is the plot. It was ridiculous enough when Henry Farrell made it into a novel; it is outlandish when acted out on the screen. The dead rat (and later dead parrot) for lunch is grotesque, and Davis’s Mary Pickford hairdo, pasty face, and kohl-lined eyes, plus a mouth that, as one critic put it, looks like “a messy black bow tie shunted up to her lower face,” are pathetic.
And yet the public ate it up. It had a saturation booking in the major cities in November 1962 where it ran up huge grosses. The movie made back its modest cost in eleven days and went on to reap a huge profit, which enriched Davis’s and Crawford’s coffers as well as the producers’. In July, Jack Warner gave a big luncheon on his movie lot for returned prodigal Davis (away thirteen years) and long-departed Crawford (out of Warners ten years) to celebrate the Warner release of the Hymans’ Seven Arts Production.
Davis’s daughter, B.D., played the daughter of a neighbor, and her memories of the film were vivid—and nasty. On the first day of shooting Crawford insulted her by telling her to stay away from her twins, Cathy and Cindy, who were also on the set part time. Crawford said that because B.D. had been exposed by her mother to far more sophisticated surroundings and situations than her sweet, protected, innocent girls, she might prove a contaminating influence. After a “Bless you”—her insincere, condescending benediction to friend or foe—Crawford left Davis and her daughter open-mouthed and seething at her effrontery.
Next, Crawford, a Pepsi-Cola executive, began carrying a Pepsi bottle everywhere, which infuriated and disgusted Davis, because she knew it was half Pepsi-Cola, half vodka. In the privacy of her dressing room, after reining in her fury and frustration all day, Davis would scream, “That bitch is loaded half the time! How dare she pull this crap on a picture with me? I’ll kill her!”
The next bone of contention, which arose when Davis was obliged to lean over Crawford for long periods of time, was the size of Joan’s legendary and often ridiculed falsies. They were so sharply-pointed that they threatened to tear through Joan’s blouses. They stabbed Davis’s chest like miniature stilettos until she hollered, “I keep turning into them like the Hollywood Hills!”
But worse was to come. Joan Crawford began sending Davis gifts—just as she had fifteen years before. Grumbling and swearing, Davis opened perfumed boxes containing lingerie, candy—and even flowers, all accompanied by sugary “Bette dear”–style notes. Davis gathered all the items into a bundle and sent them straight back to Joan, with a terse note stating she appreciated the thought but was much too busy to go out and select suitable reciprocal gifts. Crawford was deeply hurt by this and even looked teary-eyed on the set. After a few days of heavy silence, however, the gifts and notes started arriving again.
“What is this crap?” Davis hollered. “Christ, I’m fifty-four years old and my figure is shot to hell. She’s fifty-eight if she’s a day, and she’s still coming on like a dikey schoolgirl with a crush on the boobs and twat at the next schoolroom desk!”
Davis seethed for a while, then sent the next batch of presents back with a note that said, “Other than ripping my toilet seat off and wrapping it up to send you, I can’t think of any other way to answer. Except to tell you: get off the crap!”
After that, Davis-Crawford relations were icy. But since both knew that on the limited budget they would have to be ultraprofessional and finish on time or before, they did not flare up at each other on set. The tension, however, as Robert Aldrich and cameraman Ernie Haller recalled, was thick and mean. Crawford began planning a subtle revenge, which, when it came off, was, to her credit, a dilly!
Meanwhile there was the picture to get through. Davis’s insistence on having Ernie Haller photograph her seems strange in retrospect, as Haller, one of the greats in his field, had specialized in making her look beautiful in the old Warner days. Now, to his bewilderment, he was forced to follow her strident commands to make her look as horrible as possible. This he succeeded in doing. So well, in fact, that when she finally got to see the picture straight through the following year at the Cannes Festival, she turned to Aldrich and wailed, “Did I look that bad? Did I really?” He replied, “You wanted to look your worst, Bette; you insisted on it, raised hell about it, and Ernie gave you your wish!” After that she grumbled and grumped through the rest of the showing, then left abruptly when the closing credits rolled. Aldrich recalled, “She drew herself up and marched out of that auditorium so quickly and briskly—like someone in the military would have—that I couldn’t catch up with her, and when I got out to the limousine she slammed the door on me and told the driver, ‘Drive on, for Christ’s sake!’”
Joan Crawford had her own ax to grind. She realized that Davis had the showier role, and that she—as in real life—was consigned to playing beseeching masochist to Davis’s rejecting sadist. Crawford’s role is admittedly passive. She sits sweetly in her wheelchair in the upstairs bedroom, widening her eyes and covering her mouth in horror when she lifts up silver plate covers to find a dead rat for lunch. Later Davis said to Aldrich, “The scenes I most enjoyed playing were the ones where I had to beat the shit out of her! They were nothing she’d simper ‘bless
you’ about later!”
Inexplicably, considering the grotesque nature of her role, Davis won another Academy Award nomination—her first in ten years. Crawford, enraged over being ignored, set her special revenge plan in motion. On Oscar night, while Davis, who had been presenting other awards, stood waiting tensely backstage, primping and clearing her throat for her big acceptance speech, she saw Crawford standing serene and composed nearby. Then the winner was announced—Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker! “Shit!” Davis muttered, but before she had decided whether to stalk angrily off or stay and smile grimly in good-sport fashion, Crawford sidled by her with a smirking, “Excuse me!” and went out to accept the award for Anne Bancroft, who was in New York. As surrogate, she graciously acknowledged the waves of applause. Unbeknownst to Davis, Crawford had made deals with all the other nominees to accept in their place if they could not be on hand!
Prior to this catastrophe, Davis made extensive personal appearance tours for Baby Jane that reached as far as London. She bowed and preened in city after city. “What a glorious comeback! Oh how wonderful it is!” she glowed to fan writer Ruth Waterbury, who told me later, “The comeback she thought was so glorious was for a trashy little cheapjack film that was neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring!” Ruth said that she never could figure out if Baby Jane was horror, pure and simple, or suspense or Grand Guignol. “You’d think she had scaled the heights in something classic, something prestigious like in the old days; she thought she’d given a great performance. What she had actually tendered her audiences was just a grotesque stunt, overembroidered and overacted at that!”
What was the secret of Baby Jane’s success? Certainly Seven Arts’ cynical but effective promotion approach helped. One advertisement presented the stars’ names at the top of the layout in type so faint one didn’t even notice them. The body of the ad showed both ugly, lined faces jammed together with the legend, Sister sister, oh so fair, why is there blood all over your hair?
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 43
