B.D. was particularly disgusted in the mid-1960s, when Davis, approaching sixty, got involved with many unsuitable young men. In her later autobiography, Davis admitted having been a “fool for love” right up to the gates of old age. She recounted one instance in England when she and her swain went into a gift shop and the woman asked if she could wait on her “and your son.” And to B.D.’s exasperation, Davis took up with another handsome pup who lived at Malibu Beach and who was gay. When she tried to warn her mother about him, Davis laughed that he wasn’t gay anymore, “now that he had a real woman!” Davis took to parading around the beach in tight bikinis that outlined every bulge and line in her aging body. Finally, after trying to force the kid into one sexual position too many, they split up rather noisily—and when B.D. called, Davis admitted that she had been right all along.
Davis herself recalled, in This ’n That, her second book, another instance of a young man, circa 1967, who courted her in England. She wanted very much to marry him, though he was some thirty-five years her junior. Her lawyer told her she would have to have him sign a prenuptial agreement stating that what was hers was hers, even after they became husband and wife. The kid disappeared the next morning from the hotel where they were both staying, and she never saw him again.
During the 1960s Davis took up with a series of gay men whose wit and campiness amused her. She even brought them along with her to B.D.’s and Jeremy’s. None of them lasted, however. Invariably they did or said something to annoy her and were promptly banished. Then there was a succession of lawyers, such as Tom Hammond and later Harold Schiff, who were saddled with a number of assignments, not the least being to keep B.D. in dutiful contact—until B.D. lost patience with the ploy. When they told her that she should be more daughterly and understanding toward her busy mother, B.D. told them that her mother was an unbearable egotist who thought of no one but herself.
On her end, Davis was a very generous mother and on occasion lent Jeremy money when his businesses failed. B.D. insisted that her mother used the loans to establish a hold over her and her family, but the fact is that the help was forthcoming.
Davis never tired of reminding her daughter that she had given her a very expensive Hollywood wedding in 1964, with all the trimmings—thanks to the $125,000 she had been paid for a picture (Where Love Has Gone) she hadn’t particularly wanted to do.
Jeremy found Davis a chore and a bore—and worse, a threat to the peace of his marriage. Gifted with uncommon patience, he tried to understand his wife’s deep ties to her mother, but Davis’s unreasonable conduct (she once sneaked him a sleeping pill when he asked for an aspirin, to embarrass him at a public restaurant) and her constant cracks at his expense were more than he was willing to take. He and his formidable mother-in-law thereafter lived in a state of armed truce.
Michael, a sturdy, sensible boy, was essentially disillusioned by the domestic fights at Witchway, then by the nasty custody battles in which he was a helpless pawn. He, too, asserted his own individuality and independence in time.
Davis was soon engaged in another of her famous on-set feuds.
She had a low opinion of Where Love Has Gone from the moment she read John Michael Hayes’s pedestrian screenplay. But she needed the money offered so she reluctantly signed on.
In this instance, she was not on particularly good terms with anyone connected with the proceedings. She thought the Harold Robbins novel on which Hayes based his screenplay trashy, vulgar, and exploitative—its inspiration being the notorious murder of Lana Turner’s lover, Johnny Stompanato, by her daughter Cheryl in 1958. Robbins and Hayes had skirted the libel laws by changing the profession of the lead, played by Susan Hayward, from actress to sculptor, and the father’s (Mike Connors) from restaurateur (like Stephen Crane, Cheryl’s father) to architect, and giving Hayward a monster-mother (Davis) written along the lines of Gladys Cooper’s monster-mother in Now, Voyager. The ending, too, was changed, with the lover getting killed protecting Hayward from her murderous daughter, who, in the book and film, ends up in an institution.
Edward Dmytryk had been assigned as director by producer Joe Levine, who thought he was making up to Davis for the Empty Canvas fiasco. Davis didn’t particularly respect Dmytryk, as she felt he had sold out on his early promise as a director of such arresting films as Crossfire (about anti-Semitism in the armed forces) to make glossy, commercial potboilers. She also didn’t care for his politics; he had been one of the “Hollywood Ten” and later tattled on his confederates to get back into Hollywood’s good graces. The atmosphere between director and star was therefore on the frosty side, and a timid, tentative Dmytryk let Davis direct herself for the most part. When he ventured a suggestion now and then, Davis tongue-lashed him viciously in front of the whole crew. “That woman has the temper of a fiend!” he said later.
Joe Levine avoided visiting the set, as Davis thought as little of him as she did of Dmytryk. “True, she was taking all that nice money from Joe, but she thought him a purveyor of pap and let him know it,” Susan Hayward later said.
Susan herself found Davis a holy terror and avoided her as much as possible. Nervous and uncertain about how to interpret her part, Susan was in no mood to fuss with her co-star, and beat a hasty retreat after their scenes together. Davis, feeling more than usually paranoid, interpreted this as disdain and returned Susan’s attitude in kind. Eddie Dmytryk later remembered, “When Susan ventured to suggest a change in the blocking in one scene, Davis angrily tore off her gray wig and threw it in Susan’s face. Susan turned white—yes, you could see the paleness even under her makeup—and wheeled around and stomped toward her dressing room hissing, ‘Bitch! Bitch!’ under her breath. ‘What did you say, Miss Hayward?’ Davis shouted imperiously, unable, as usual to relinquish the last word. Angered beyond control, Susan Hayward wheeled around and yelled, ‘Bitch! That’s what you are. An old bitch!’”
Startled, Davis was for a moment speechless. Later she sent a note to Susan suggesting they talk over the problems of what she called “a stinking, lousy script.” Susan gave her the silent treatment. Later, when Susan learned that Davis was shouting that she was going to “rewrite this crock of shit,” she went to Levine to protest. Levine, himself rattled with Davis, sent down word that every word in the script would be retained.
After that, except for onscreen interchanges, Susan Hayward and Bette Davis never spoke to each other again.
“They were both on the defensive,” their co-star, Mike Connors, later recalled. “Bette felt insecure up against a ten-years-younger woman, Susan, who was better-looking, and, moreover the real star of the film, the person the proceedings revolved around. And Susan, who was sullen and defensive anyway, found that hers and Davis’s temperaments were too much alike for pleasant socializing off-camera. I remember it, and so did Eddie Dmytryk, as an atmosphere of armed truce—and a mean, icy truce it was, too!”
The critics greeted Where Love Has Gone, when it opened in November 1964, with frosty disdain, which occasionally took a jocular turn. One critic made sport of one of Davis’s terribly overwritten speeches in which she rattles on, Gladys Cooper—fashion, about the decline of standards—and this in a picture that was a perfect example of what she was gassing off about.
Davis proceeded to complement the mixed reviews with an endlessly repeated story she gave out during interviews of how they had wanted her to go insane at the end and slash her own portrait, a majestic, grande-dame affair that closely resembled the over-the-fireplace portrait of Cooper in Now, Voyager. When she refused to do this, claiming it was out of character for such a strong-minded matriarch to go bonkers, the producers threatened to sue her. But she—and her battery of lawyers—held firm, and the original ending was retained.
Newsweek, on Bette’s side in its review, called her “splendid, with her eyes rolling and her mouth working and her incredible lines to say.” The Saturday Review, also in her corner, said she lent “all her old verve and intensity to the role of the domineerin
g dowager.”
Davis’s next film, Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, was shot in the summer of 1964, released briefly in California in December to qualify for Oscars, and then opened in New York in March 1965. She has always insisted that it was not a horror film, but rather a drama in which she gave a strong, fully realized characterization. Unfortunately, this is just not true.
Based on yet another Henry Farrell story (he of Baby Jane) with a script by Farrell and Baby Jane writer Lukas Heller and produced and directed by Baby Jane director Robert Aldrich for Twentieth Century–Fox release, the film’s original titles shamelessly tried to trade on the Baby Jane phenomenon. What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? was one. When Davis vociferously objected, the title became finally Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (which Davis liked very much, curiously enough). Many critics thought Hush a ripoff of the film Diabolique.
In this ghoulish fiasco, Davis is a half-demented aging chatelaine of an old Louisiana plantation house, whose married lover had been savagely beheaded by unknown persons many years before. Suspecting that her late father (Victor Buono) killed him, Davis’s Charlotte Hollis is fearful that his memory will be incriminated if evidence is discovered during the razing of Hollis House, which is being forced by the Louisiana Highway Commission. Her cousin from abroad comes, ostensibly to help and comfort Davis, but it turns out her mission is to drive Davis even crazier with disembodied heads and hands rattling around downstairs. The cousin conspires with a confederate to pretend Davis has murdered him so that he can appear at the top of the stairs muddy and bloody, and so forth and so on. When Davis hears them plotting, she topples a piece of statuary from the balcony of the mansion, killing them. Then, after her lover’s widow dies, she is handed a letter in which the widow admits to the murder and also to having paid the cousin to remain silent. Davis is purged and liberated.
Aldrich pulled out all the stops on this one, so it is impossible to believe that Davis ever considered Hush . . . Hush a legitimate drama of any kind.
Films in Review, Henry Hart’s feisty and honest magazine, declared, “Bette Davis and producer-director Robert Aldrich here attempt to duplicate their success with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Though not so effective as their earlier effort, this film will please all who like the macabre. Baby Jane, despite its contrivances, had a better story and was more believable than Charlotte, but the supporting cast and production values of the latter are grander.”
This was followed by a condescending pat on the back to Davis, to wit: “No matter. Miss Davis, as Charlotte, gives another of her bravura performances and one which will disappoint none of her admirers.”
Time magazine minced no words, stating, “[The picture] is a gruesome slice of shock therapy that, pointedly, is not a sequel to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The two films are blood relatives, as [Aldrich] well knows, but Charlotte has a worse play, more gore, and enough bitchery to fill several outrageous freak shows . . . choicest holdover from Jane is Bette Davis, unabashedly securing her clawhold as Hollywood’s grandedame ghoul.”
As photographed by an obviously indifferent Joseph Biroc with frumpily fustian costumes by Norma Koch, Davis looks every year, month, day, hour, and minute of her fifty-six years—meaning like hell.
And her “acting” is anything but that. Robert Aldrich showed himself the most craven pussycat of her many pussycat directors by letting her run wild and throw in anything that occurred to her, resulting in a performance that is as excessive as anything she ever essayed.
As if manically determined to top the ace of his Baby Jane screenplay, Lukas Heller rang all the gongs. It is hard to imagine how Davis thought she was giving a strong dramatic performance when the script insisted on keeping her hysterical, deranged, and wild-eyed all the way through. Still, she had her critical defenders for this film, including reviewer William Schoell, who felt that her delineations of fear and incipient madness were convincing, and at times, even touching and true.
Davis’s hysterical cavortings and wild-eyed gesticulations might possibly have been due to all the trouble she was having with—who else?—Joan Crawford, who had been persuaded to join this rehash of Baby Jane horrifics. Joan was not keen on the idea; she had had enough of Davis the first time around, but Aldrich persuaded her that a Joan Crawford–Bette Davis repeat was good business and good box-office, and besides, the money was excellent. Satisfied with her fee and determined to brave Bette on her own terms and her own ground, Joan showed up for work—and immediately there was trouble.
She became convinced that Bette and Agnes Moorehead, who was very effective as Bette’s protective servant, were conspiring to trip her up, embarrass her in her line readings, and make her life on set as miserable as possible. So nervous was Joan that she fluffed her lines once too often, and Davis icily declared to Aldrich in front of the whole crew that she could do nicely by herself, thank you, reading her lines straight into the camera, and that “Miss Crawford can withdraw and compose herself.”
As Bob Aldrich remembered it, “There were no gifts from Joan to Bette this time! It was all business, and they didn’t even bother to conceal their deep dislike of each other. Soon Bette was sneaking around to me asking for rewrites and new camera setups, all of which, I couldn’t help but notice, favored her over Joan.”
Then Davis began calling Aldrich on the phone every night complaining about Joan—how she was overdressed, how her jewelry jangled, how she read her lines “amateurishly,” adding, with a sardonic laugh, “and when she’s been around for centuries, too!”
Joan tried to mask her anger under her usual sweety-sweet “bless yous” but began to develop psychosomatic symptoms and shortly was complaining of a respiratory ailment. “She’s just bluffing, grandstanding, trying to cadge sympathy!” Davis told Aldrich contemptuously. Then Joan came down with a real fever and went into the hospital. Determined to finish the movie, she recovered in short order, returned to the set, then collapsed again. This was three weeks into the filming.
Back again in Cedars of Lebanon hospital, Joan fretted and steamed and finally began to scream at the hospital help. I was in Hollywood that summer, and I visited Joan at the hospital. She pulled a series of X-rays out of a drawer, got out of bed, and began stalking back and forth. A nurse came in to tell her to get back into bed, and Joan told the frightened woman to get out, pronto—or else. She began holding the X-rays up to the light. “I can’t figure them out,” she said over and over. “I know there’s something wrong and they won’t tell me and I have to do it all myself!”
She grew more and more agitated. “Have you been to the set, Larry? What is Bette up to? How are they handling my absence? Are they shooting around me?” The nurse came in again, accompanied by a handsome young doctor who proceeded to tell Joan that he had been an admirer of her screen performances for years. Joan calmed down, began to primp and purr, and when the dreamboat medico gently suggested it would be nice if she were a good girl and took her sedative, she climbed back into bed, opened her mouth dutifully, and swallowed. It must have been a knockout sedative for she was already yawning when I left.
Over on the set, Aldrich was arguing with Davis, who at one point screamed that she would walk off the set and off the Twentieth-Fox lot, never to return, “unless you do something, anything about that malingering bitch!” Joan began calling Aldrich from the hospital. Caught between the irresistible force and the immovable object that were Joan and Bette, Aldrich took the coward’s way out.
The insurance company had assured him that huge fees could be collected to compensate for Crawford’s illness. They sent their own doctors over to the hospital, and they confirmed (or so Aldrich always claimed) that “the malingering bitch” was actually quite sick and would not recover in time to finish the film. One day, while listening quietly to the radio and looking forward to having her pulse checked by the white-coated dreamboat, Joan heard that she had been removed from the film and replaced by Olivia De Havilland.
On my next visit t
o Cedars of Lebanon, Joan was cursing Aldrich’s perfidy. “He didn’t even have the manhood to come and tell me to my face or even over the phone! I had to hear it from the radio!” Joan screamed over and over. And yet I sensed a kind of backhanded relief that she was out of the picture and free of Bette. In typical Crawford schizoid style, she changed her manner and tune in a matter of seconds when the handsome young doctor reappeared, a trembling nurse behind him, to take her pulse and speak soothing words. I suspect she had taken a slow-acting tranquilizer before I arrived, because she began to nod, smile sleepily, and ask for a good-bye kiss. Her last words before wafting off to dreamland were: “Don’t you think Doctor Charles is handsome as all get out? Don’t you think he ought to be in the movies?”
Aldrich had great difficulty getting De Havilland to sub for Crawford. She and Davis were on excellent terms, had always been good friends since the Warner days when they had co-starred several times. But De Havilland felt the role of Miriam was too murderous, too sinister for her. In spite of the fact she had been a naughty girl in films like The Dark Mirror and My Cousin Rachel, now, at age forty-eight, she wanted to be beneficent, kindly, and feminine. No, she repeated, the role of Miriam wouldn’t do at all. Before clinching it with De Havilland, thanks to a special long-distance phone plea from Davis, Aldrich had braved the likes of Vivien Leigh and Loretta Young. Loretta dismissed the role as totally wrong for her; Vivien was more tart about it:
“I could just about look at Joan Crawford’s face on a southern plantation at seven o’clock in the morning,” she purred venomously from London, “but I couldn’t possibly look at Bette Davis!” When Leigh’s words were relayed to Davis, all her repressed anger and frustration over Leigh’s copping her Scarlett role and beating her out for the 1939 Oscar burst forth, and she smashed several mirrors and overturned a number of expensive props from the drawing room set of Hollis House. Katharine Hepburn, yet another headliner who had been asked to replace Crawford, declined with more verbal economy. She said but one word, “No,” and informed Aldrich she was going to Connecticut, and her car couldn’t wait.
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 45
