Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  When things finally got going, Olivia did well in her role, and she and Joe Cotten, as the family doctor who is in league with her to declare Davis insane, worked well together. When I asked Cotten in 1965 how things had gone on the set and location of Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, he said, with his usual tact and kindly obliqueness, that he felt Olivia had done well considering she had been brought in at the last minute and that “Bette, as always, was a pleasure to play with. She went out of her way to be considerate to me.”

  Another cast member who spoke well of Bette during Hush . . . Hush shooting was Mary Astor, who in the second of her autobiographies commented that Davis made it a point to visit her before her few scenes (Astor was the murderous wife who is not exposed until the dénouement) and compliment her on her appearance. Davis reportedly told Aldrich, “Pay attention to this woman—you may learn something.”

  Agnes Moorehead walked away with critical kudos for her role as the protective servant. She later said, “Working with Bette was a real pleasure. I don’t think the role made the most of her talents, but she gave it everything she had, and then some. It’s a shame they can’t find roles that would do justice to Bette’s gifts.”

  Aldrich later admitted he was relieved when shooting ended. “I can’t think of a picture that took more out of me,” he said. “There was so much unpredictability throughout—Joan’s illness (I was terribly disappointed she couldn’t complete her role; it would have helped her at that stage) and Bette’s tensions. The last time I called ‘cut’ on closing day I felt profound relief.”

  Davis next took off for England, where she did The Nanny, from a screenplay by Hammer Films’ Jimmy Sangster, based on an Evelyn Piper novel. Assigned as director was Seth Holt, a creative but erratic forty-two-year-old who was troubled with weight problems, a “nervous” heart, and chronic alcoholism that would kill him six years later while he was directing a strenuously horrific film called Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb. (Michael Carreras completed it and shared co-directing credit.)

  A kindly, bluff, outwardly placid individual, Holt was a churning mess of tensions and neuroses on the inside, and Davis, as he told me later, got on his nerves exceedingly. Several times he almost told Jimmy Sangster that he found her impossible to work with and wanted to be taken off the film. Holt told me:

  “She got the flu during shooting, and sometimes she’d stay away altogether, holding up shooting while she sent in day-to-day reports on her condition—‘It’s worse!’—‘It’s better!’—‘Oh God, I’ve relapsed!’—and so forth, and when she was on set, still sniffling and coughing, she was drinking out of everyone’s glasses and wheezing in her co-actors’ faces in the best show-must-go-on manner—oh it was hell! Then she was always telling me how to direct. When I did it her way, she was scornful; when I stood up to her, she was hysterical. I managed some kind of middle course and got through the film and stayed calm, smiled sweetly, and got my way when I could. But I’d never have wanted to work with her again.”

  Holt felt she overacted, but when he tried to tell her this, “She’d say, ‘I act larger than life; that’s what my audience paid me for all these years. If they wanted ordinary reality they’d go out and talk with their grocer!’ I knew she hated rushes, hated to look at herself. I’d ask her what did it matter since she was made up and dressed to be a frumpish, unattractive, middle-aged nanny anyway—and she was fifty-seven or so and how did she expect to look, even if Dior were dressing her and her old pal Perc Westmore making her up—but I couldn’t get her to look at those rushes. If I had, I might have made her realize that she was pouring it on too much!”

  Co-star Jill Bennett was afraid of Davis. She said Davis was always ready with advice and suggestions, including one to the effect that “making love to the furniture” helped enliven a scene. She told Jill that one should always dress up like a star on public occasions and then ridiculed archrival Joan Crawford the next day for doing the same thing! Jill also recalled that when she and Bette went to an event together and Bette felt she was dressed better than Jill, she would make her walk behind her like a servant.

  The plot deals with a neurotic nanny who is responsible for a child’s death through neglect. She railroads the young son of the house into a home for disturbed children claiming he is the culprit—her attitude being that nannies have to keep up appearances. Naturally the little boy hates her. When he’s released, she almost drowns him in the bathtub, but finally comes to her senses and revives him—then exits the family’s life.

  The story holds up in the telling, but Davis overacts. Seth Holt’s reservations about her style and approach to the material show up clearly on the screen. When the picture opened in America in November 1965, Time magazine gleefully reported, “The Nanny is her definitive essay on the servant problem, and may be taken as antidote by those who found Mary Poppins too sweet to stomach.”

  It was becoming increasingly apparent with her next film, The Anniversary, made in England for Hammer Productions in mid-1967 and released in early 1968, that Davis was not only increasingly devoid of judgment where appropriate scripts were concerned, but could not recognize the faults in her performance which were apparent to everyone else. She was also falling into the cantankerous, abrasive, on-set habits for which she had castigated Miriam Hopkins.

  The Anniversary had opened as a hit black comedy on the London stage in the spring of 1966, with Mona Washbourne scoring a signal success as the domineering one-eyed mother. Once again, Davis would be repeating the monster-mother shtick. Moreover, she did not get along with the director, Alvin Rakoff, and had him replaced by Roy Ward Baker, with whom, she informed producer Jimmy Sangster, she was sure she would “enjoy the requisite simpatico.” Rakoff later told associates that she was demanding and impossible, had ridiculed what she called his “trash-TV methods” (Rakoff hailed from television), and kept insisting that all the good films she had done had been shot in an atmosphere of tension and the bad ones in hale-and-hearty felicity. Over and over she said to the baffled crew, “Tension breeds creativity! Relaxation and conviviality breed mediocrity!”

  Sheila Hancock and others from the original London production found her impossible to work with. Hancock recalled that Davis wanted to be treated deferentially, as a sort of queen. When she made her first entrance, coming down a flight of stairs, she received loud applause and was so gratified by this that she went upstairs and did the whole thing over again!

  The story, which was an excellent black comedy on the London stage, turned into what Davis insisted would be, after she dictated rewrites and directorial changes by Baker, a comedy-drama acceptable to American as well as British audiences. “This star-turn changeover, plus the script changes designed to favor her front and center, and overacting to beat the band,” Rakoff later charged, “ruined the balance of the original stage concept of MacIlwraith and Washbourne and Co. and resulted in a mess of a film built around Davis’s foolish, overbaked posturings and camera-hoggings.”

  Unfortunately the picture is as bad as Rakoff said it was. Davis hams it up as never before, complete with glass eye (one of her sons had accidentally shot out her real one years before). She gathers her grown children together yearly to celebrate her wedding anniversary. And quite a collection they are, too: One is a transvestite, the second is a hen-pecked husband, and the third is a satyriacal womanizer with a new “fiancée” every few months. She proceeds to insult the latest fiancée by telling her she has body odor, pokes fun at the transvestite, raises every kind of vicious hell she can, and is finally brought up short by the spirited fiancée, who tells her she might well shoot out her other eye. This results in a sort of truce, with Davis planning future anniversaries.

  Davis gave pathetically obtuse and short-sighted interviews at the time, saying that the film was meant to be a high-powered attack on monster-momism, to which too many American women were given. The truth was that she had so confused the intent of the play’s author and star and had so weighted the total effect wi
th her confused, unbalanced performance that the film ended up neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring fare. “So exaggerated that it shatters the credibility needed to be effective satire,” sniffed the New York Post.

  23

  Bette Davis: Survivor

  AFTER “MAKING DO” with more television shows to keep the income flowing, Davis at last found a script that she felt might kill her horror-film cycle conclusively.

  Connecting Rooms has gone down in the Bette Davis pantheon as the Mystery Film. It was never distributed in America, had only a limited release in England, and hasn’t even made it onto American television, let alone the videocassettes or cable showings. I was one of the few to see this film in England in 1971, courtesy of a friend who pulled strings to get me a screening-room look.

  Connecting Rooms was shot at Pinewood in the spring of 1969. British release was held up until 1972, for reasons that are still obscure. While it is a far cry from being one of Davis’s best films, it doesn’t deserve to be situated toward the bottom of her deck either. It should have art house exposure now, some twenty years later, and certainly would register better on television and videocassettes than other widely shown Davis films that are inferior to it.

  It is easy to see, in retrospect, why Davis decided to do Connecting Rooms. After the grotesqueries of The Anniversary, she felt it represented a definite change of pace for her—and she was right. Based on a play of the same name by Marion Hart, with screenplay and direction by Franklin Collings, it was produced by two Englishmen, Harry Field and Arthur Cooper.

  The producers clinched it with Davis, who had been considering the script for two years, by getting Sir Michael Redgrave, the distinguished star of stage and screen, to co-star with her. Each admired the other and had wanted to work together for some time. Once roped into it, Davis and Redgrave found themselves in mutual agreement as to the script’s deficiencies. It tended to be maudlin, sentimental, and unconvincing. A downbeat story of the inhabitants of a seedy London boarding house, it displays Davis as a middle-aged cellist, on the mousy and drab side, who supports herself by playing in front of theaters. Sir Michael plays a former schoolteacher, sacked because he was suspected of a homosexual affair with a handsome student protégé. In the third lead was the young, handsome Alexis Kanner as a pop artist, song writer, and would-be gigolo. Davis becomes emotionally involved with Kanner and befriends her next-door neighbor, Redgrave. Kanner is a cynical, opportunistic type, however, for all his charisma, and Davis predictably winds up with Redgrave after Kanner unkindly exposes his past.

  Davis—whose cello work was faked by Ian Fleming’s sister, Amaryllis—is subdued and kindly and well-meaning in this. Obviously she felt that after playing horror-film grotesques and one-eyed harridans, a sympathetic, warm role—in the tradition of The Sisters and All This and Heaven Too—was called for. But in this instance she did not have the talented Anatole Litvak to guide her—only the insecure Franklin Gollings, who spent most of the picture acting frightened to death of her. As usual, this “scaredy-cat” approach irritated her mightily and soon she was bullying the hapless Gollings mercilessly. “I was trying to rouse him to tell me what to do, for God’s sake!” she later reported. “I can’t stand a director who doesn’t direct!” If Gollings had stood up to her even once, things might have gone more smoothly—but this he didn’t do. Once, out of sheer panic and the worse for wear after an unaccustomed drink or two, he even fainted dead away on the set. This aroused her contempt further.

  Davis and Redgrave spent a lot of time in her dressing room blue-penciling and rewriting the script, and Gollings hemmed and hawed indecisively when presented with the results.

  Then there was the problem of young Alexis Kanner. Sassy, tactless Kanner had an unshakable belief in the power of his own charm and his photogenic capacities, and it was obvious he was not impressed with the Great Bette Davis. Soon the two were arguing loudly, and after pushing him at Gollings and demanding that he be thoroughly rehearsed, Davis began looking for a replacement. “That was her idea, not ours!” Harry Field later said. “She just took things into her own hands without consulting us, even directed a scene when Gollings passed out one time. She wanted Keith Baxter to take over for Kanner, but we had to tell her he wasn’t young enough (the kid was supposed to be a late teenager) and she grumblingly backed down.” Again Davis and Kanner rehearsed, and some compromise was obviously reached, because they function well enough together in the final result.

  Much of Connecting Rooms is touching and real. In low-keyed fashion Davis and Redgrave make the weak script look better than it is, via sincere, honest acting. Davis seemed to curb her usual tendency to overplay, inspired perhaps by her co-star Redgrave’s subtle, more muted technique. Redgrave is touching as a man who feels himself unjustly buffeted by fate, and Kanner is so masculinely charismatic as the gigololike young heel that it is surprising little was heard from him thereafter. Reportedly Kanner told an interviewer, “If working with Bette Davis is an example of what movies are all about, then I want no more of them!”

  As a study of loneliness and emotional distress, the film has its fine moments. At times it is overly sentimental, the pace lags, and there is an undue drabness, but despite these faults, it certainly deserved an American release and wider distribution.

  The year 1971, when Davis turned sixty-three, brought her yet another failure in Bunny O’Hare (formerly known as Bunny and Billy). Davis had been intrigued by the script and felt the role would be good for her, but it was yet another instance of her poor judgment during this period.

  Producer-director Gerd Oswald, who had directed her for television, and the American-International entrepreneurs James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff had sold her some months before on a story by Stanley Cherry, which Cherry and Coslough Johnson had worked into a screenplay. They had also enlisted the help of Davis’s ex-co-star of The Catered Affair, Ernest Borgnine. Davis said she liked Borgnine and would be glad to reteam with him.

  The story deals with a widow (Davis) who, after her home is foreclosed on by a bank, takes up robbing similar institutions with the help of a former bankrobber (Borgnine). In this manner the widow intends to continue supporting her hapless, foolish, dependent children (Reva Rose and John Astin). The bank robber and she proceed to careen around in harsh New Mexico locations on a motorcycle, wreaking assorted mayhem and sporting wild hippie clothing (the ad copy for the film implied they were the geriatric answer to Warren Beatty’s and Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie and Clyde of four years before).

  Borgnine and Davis are trailed by cop Jack Cassidy and criminologist Joan Delaney. Cassidy hates hippies, especially old ones, and pursues them assiduously, but later, through a fluke, the pair get off the hook. The picture ends in a burst of vulgarity, Davis shucking off her children with the words “Fuck ’em!” and Borgnine being revealed as a purveyor of toilets to disadvantaged Chicanos. Many of Davis’s fans wondered why she, who said she was so concerned about good taste and high standards, ever stooped to four-letter words and vulgar situations, and she herself felt guilty for doing the film because she had permitted the bad language and vulgar dénouement.

  Davis and Borgnine began the film agreeably enough, but, according to Gerd Oswald, soon they began coming to him separately, asking to have the scenes built up to their respective advantages. It was also noted that when Borgnine and Davis were forced to careen along New Mexico roads on the motorcycle, he didn’t take particular care for her safety as she clung to him frantically. Davis objected loudly to everything—the harsh sun, which bothered her skin, the strange New Mexico weather, which was alternately icy cold and unbearably hot, and the ludicrous, unbelievable situations which a frantic Oswald tried to hype up from the foolish, poorly motivated screenplay in which he, the stars, and everyone else had lost faith.

  Back in Hollywood Arkoff and Nicholson were getting frantic phone messages and telegrams from the director, the stars, the cameraman (who was trying to lens all the chaos in widescreen and M
ovielab Color), and even some prop people, who threatened to complain to their union about the impossible conditions on location.

  When Davis saw the first rough cut, she screamed and threatened to sue the company, claiming that they had edited all sense out of the story. After some changes and more recutting, Davis dropped her much-publicized suit threats, claiming that Bunny O’Hare was a lost cause and she wanted to forget it and move on. The critics hated it, with Variety saying it needed “a swift kick in the movieola.” The New York Post felt the picture was “weak” and “let her down” and added, “I don’t know how they sold her on it in advance.”

  Next Dino De Laurentiis talked Davis into flying from California to Italy to make The Scientific Cardplayer (Lo Scopone Scientifico), also known as The Game. Alberto Sordi, the beloved Italian comedian, would appear opposite her.

  The project was in for trouble from the start. Davis did not get on well with Sordi because, though he spoke good English, he insisted on yelling at her in staccato Italian. She suspected it was a ploy to disconcert her and show her who was boss, so she gave as good as she got, screaming some of her best obscenities at him. She never apologized for her behavior, acidly observing, “What good would it have done, for Christ’s sake? Except for Sordi, who was bluffing, they would no more have understood English civilities than they did my curses!”

  The plot deals with an egomaniacal American millionairess who enjoys playing regular card games with impoverished Italians who hope to win a fortune from her. Of course she rigs it so that she is always the winner, but hope beats eternal in the breasts of her Italian suckers, and the game goes on and on. The Variety reviewer threw her a critical posy with: “Bette Davis dominates with a neat display of egomania and cruelty beneath a stance of gracious dignity.” Silvana Mangano is one of her opponents at the perennial card game—known as Scopa—and almost beats her at it several times. Then at the end, one of the outraged Italian youngsters presents her with a poison-filled cake. It is obvious she won’t be coming back for her usual sport.