Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Joseph Cotten made yet another appearance with Davis as a faithful friend who plays with her and offers ruefully tactful comments. Sordi is effective in his usual style and Silvana Mangano offers a vivid performance as the card-game opponent without illusions.

  I caught the film at the Museum of Modern Art in 1986, where it played to an appreciative audience. The picture reportedly made money in Italy (primarily on the strength of Sordi’s name), but got scant distribution in both England and America, which is surprising, as the Eastman color is handsome, the production values fair enough, and the direction by Luigi Comencini extracts all that is good from the Rodolfo Sonego script.

  Davis never liked the film, however, citing not only Sordi’s rudenesses and prima-donna posturings, but the fact that she didn’t know the dialogue would be shot in Italian, with dubbing.

  Joseph Cotten, who later admitted he did the film only because he admired Bette and needed the money, felt that she was not shown due respect and that Sordi was regarded by the Italian cast and crew as the star while Davis was treated as a cameo player. Her role is actually large, and she manages to project a kinetic energy and sense of movement while being confined to a wheelchair. It is an odd blend of the fantastic and the realistic, not always successful, but the Italianate ambience lends flavor and spice, so Scientific Cardplayer is not a film that Davis need apologize for.

  Sordi told several interviewers that he had no wish to work with Davis again, as she had been consistently rude to him and accused him of selfishly hogging the camera. He tried, he said, to pass off her tactlessness with humor, but this only succeeded in enraging Davis further. “Then I gave up,” he said.

  Davis’s close friendship with the actor Robert Wagner dated from the early 1970s. He had used his influence to cast her in a segment of his television series, To Catch a Thief. In “A Touch of Magic,” Davis played a safecracker who assumed different personas. First she was a frail convalescent, then she dressed up as a grand lady, and then got into nun’s “drag” and did a comic shtick. She gave Wagner credit for influencing the writer to enlarge her role in order to display her range.

  Davis watched with regret when Wagner’s marriage to Natalie Wood broke up and was delighted when they remarried some years later. Natalie, as she often said, was “another daughter” to her. (Davis had appeared with her in The Star years before.)

  Then in 1972 Robert Wagner came to her rescue again. She starred with him in Madame Sin, originally shown as a TV pilot but later released in European theaters.

  In this she is a sinister-looking, totally evil, half-Chinese woman who indulges in endless machinations. Ensconced in a Scottish castle that, as one reviewer put it, “is loaded with typical spy-movie gadgetry,” she runs afoul of the Wagner character, who is out to counter her plots. As one critic said, “Evil genius (Davis) uses former C.I.A. agent (Wagner) as pawn for control of Polaris submarine. Elaborate production has Bad beating out Good at end; with Bette in charge, it’s well worth seeing.”

  Davis is sinister and serpentine indeed, and garishly made up, with black wig, snappy black gown, and jangling jewelry. Her poisonously powerful performance won good reviews here and abroad.

  Davis had been doing television shows since the early 1950s. She never took them very seriously, but now and then landed good parts on Wagon Train, Perry Mason, and others. Many were done as pilots that never caught on as a series.

  Two of her television movies in the 1972–1973 period illustrate the quality of her work in that medium. In The Judge and Jake Wyler, Davis contributed an ironic, humorous portrayal of an eccentric jurist who decides to open a detective agency and takes on an ex-con as her partner. Together they solve the murder of a businessman. The story has ingenious twists and Davis plays with a light, throwaway style that is unusual for her, though the familiar overcooked, sometimes hammy Davis mannerisms did show up at times when director David Lowell Rich obviously wasn’t looking. Doug McClure and Joan Van Ark supported her ably. Davis told an interviewer later that McClure was “all man and very cute.”

  The Judge and Jake Wyler, like so many of her other television appearances, had originally been designed as a pilot for a series, but footage was added to bring it to feature length, and it debuted as a TV Movie of the Week for NBC in December 1972. Kent Smith, who had a supporting role in it, told me: “Bette was always a good sport in the television shows she was forced to make because she needed money or had nothing else on tap. I was on hand to watch her make something out of nothing with Judge. She always went all out, even in drek. That was part and parcel of her professionalism.”

  Scream, Pretty Peggy, a 78-minute 1973 television movie, got the treatment from William Schoell, author of the book on horror films, Stay Out of the Shower: “[The picture] is a ridiculous rip-off of Psycho that has yet another crazed cross-dresser as the killer. You have to see Ted Bessell running around in drag to believe it. The plot deals with a college girl who becomes a housekeeper at a place with a dark secret. Jimmy Sangster’s screenplay is ludicrous, Gordon Hessler’s direction never rises above the routine, and Bette Davis as Bessell’s mother doesn’t put herself out too much, to put it charitably.”

  In 1973 Bette Davis began appearing in a one-woman show, a sort of retrospective of her life and career. Her first appearance at Town Hall in New York was a smash success, so she took it all around the country and even to Australia and Europe.

  The program for the evening never varied. The first half was a series of film clips, cleverly chosen by film historians like Don Koll. The second half had Davis fielding any and all sallies and queries, personal as well as professional.

  These sessions drew a large contingent of gay men, who delighted in her reminiscences and witty, tart remarks about former co-workers and, of course, her complex relationships with Miriam Hopkins and Joan Crawford. Michael Ritzer, then a reporter for Quirk’s Reviews, stupefied Bette and the audience at the 1973 Town Hall event when he stood up and told her that Beyond the Forest had always been his favorite picture. Davis gave him one of her steely-eyed looks and snorted, “Oh really . . .” Whereupon the audience roared with laughter. Oddly, Ritzer proved a pioneer in his evaluation of Beyond the Forest, for today it is an ever-more-acclaimed cult film.

  On the tour, Davis was endlessly accommodating. She answered as many questions (written and sorted-out in advance) as time and energy permitted. Over and over she reviewed the two-cigarette scene in Now, Voyager, told what a bitch Miriam had been during The Old Maid shooting; refused again and again to admit that William Wyler had been the only man she truly loved but refused to surrender to. She recited the get-set-for-a-bumpy-night speech from All About Eve until it was running out of her ears, praised Eddie Goulding and Willie Wyler as her favorite directors, discussed her feuds with Jack Warner, her marriages, fellow actors such as Charles Boyer, Leslie Howard, Paul Henreid, and her favorite-of-favorites, Claude Rains.

  Before Davis began this tour, she had appeared with three other luminaries in a Town Hall series called “Legendary Ladies”—the others being Sylvia Sidney, Myrna Loy, and Joan Crawford, with each assigned her own evening. Since Joan was involved in the same project under the same auspices, Bette kept a civil tongue regarding her, and Crawford returned the favor, although many felt the series would have been even more lively had the ladies really let loose on each other. Later, off on her own, Davis was more frank, but still restrained for her. She recalled that when she told the press in 1962 that before What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? no bank had wanted to take a chance on a picture starring “two old broads” like her and Crawford, Crawford had sent her a sharp note telling her not to refer to her in that way again.

  Like many observers, I am curious about what seems to be a Bette Davis and Joan Crawford obsession on the part of many gay men. Despite the fact that the mannered and incisive Davis persona is very easily imitated, Crawford, too, has attracted a cult, as has Judy Garland. But it was the Crawford-Davis gay cult phenomenon I was concerned wi
th, and in 1973, I wrote an analytical article about it for Quirk’s Reviews.

  After reading “The Cult of Bette and Joan,” as I titled it, Joan Crawford said she was not quite certain what the gays saw in her, though she had an easier time comprehending the gay fixation on Davis. Up in her apartment over dinner one evening, we covered the topic comprehensively.

  Joan led off by saying that she and her friends had found “The Cult of Bette and Joan” most amusing and incisive, and recalled that Leonard Frey, as Harold in the 1970 movie version of The Boys in the Band, had held up my 1968 book, The Films of Joan Crawford, in plain view of the camera. Joan added that gays were wonderful people, that she had many gay friends, and was happy to join such as Garland and Davis in their pantheon of goddesses, but remained a little puzzled as to whether she deserved the honor of being included.

  I explained that many gay men identified with Joan’s and Bette’s struggle—for careers, for men, for self-respect, for social acceptance, for all the good things in life, as exemplified in their 1930s–1950s movies. I pointed out the ads on their movies, for instance: “Bette Davis as a Twelve O’Clock Girl in a Nine O’Clock Town” (Beyond the Forest). “No One Can Hold a Candle to Joan Crawford When Joan Is Carrying the Torch” (Good-bye, My Fancy). “It Happens in the Best of Families but Who Would Have Thought It Could Happen to Her?” (Now, Voyager). “Joan’s Having Man-Trouble Again!” (Daisy Kenyon). “Disillusioned, Sick with Men, Does Joan Dare Love Once More?” (Humoresque). “She’s Meanest When She’s Lovin’ Most!” (Jezebel). “Deep in Her Heart, She Knew She Could Never Hold Him!” (The Corn Is Green). “He Strayed and He Paid—She Saw to That!” (Payment on Demand).

  Then I described the standard Bette and Joan plots with which many gay men identified: Joan climbing, on a ladder of rich and powerful men, from rags to riches (Sadie McKee); Bette determined to break out of the stultifying small town to glamour and men in Chicago (Beyond the Forest); Joan, unrequitedly and obsessively in love with a guy, goes bonkers and shoots him to death when he takes up with someone else (Possessed); Bette and Miriam fighting over men with both of them losing out (Old Acquaintance); Joan suffering unrequited love for a loser, winding up in a house of ill fame, then going for a smash finish as the wife of the richest guy in town (Flamingo Road); Bette defying the conventional monster-mother to go out and fight for happiness and love (Now, Voyager); good Bette and bad Bette in a dual role as twins fighting over a guy, who—for a while—prefers the frosted naughty girl to the unfrosted goody-goody (A Stolen Life); Joan on the rags to riches shtick again, loving a no-good son of a bitch and winding up with a squeaky-clean boy scout (Mannequin).

  At the end of this recital, Joan said she understood her and Davis’s appeal to gay men. Davis, for her part, said often that gays were among the most appreciative, tasteful, and artistically aware members of her audience. She appreciated their loyalty and love for her, which, at times, it is true, was a bit excessive. A popular Greenwich Village joke has it that two gay guys are drinking in a bar and one says to the other, “You must be in love with Bette Davis the way you go on about her at such length!” The other replies, “In love with Bette Davis! I AM Bette Davis!”

  On her tour, Davis said she always enjoyed seeing nightclub comedians, drag queens, and others parody her, but claimed she could do it better herself. She would proceed to demonstrate with cigarette, twitching pelvis, bugging eyes, and elbow wavings. She maintained that she never said “Petah—the Lettah!” in any picture. It was actually a synthesis from two of her films—The Letter, and In This Our Life, in which a man named Peter (Dennis Morgan) is driven to suicide by her.

  The year 1974 brought Bette Davis, at age sixty-six, a big opportunity, one she truly cherished—but it ended as an all-out disaster. There is still a running debate in show business circles as to whether Davis was victim or perpetrator of what came to be known as “the Miss Moffat mess.”

  For thirty years Davis had longed to repeat her role of the valiant Welsh schoolteacher in The Corn Is Green. Though the film (shot in 1944) was a hit, she felt that, at thirty-six, she had been too young for the role, recalling that Ethel Barrymore, its originator, had been sixty-one when she did it on Broadway. It was the talented director and writer Joshua Logan, a longtime admirer, who approached her with the idea of a musical version to be toured and taken to Broadway. Mary Martin had been the original choice for the lead, but she had declined at the last moment. Emlyn Williams wrote the lyrics, Albert Hague the music.

  Davis told Logan that her Two’s Company musical attempt of 1952–1953 had “left a bad taste” in her mouth; she didn’t think she was up to it. She brightened up when Logan told her that he was relocating the story from Wales to the Deep South and that the racial question would be addressed four-square by making Morgan Evans a black boy of singular brilliance whom Miss Moffat’s tutelage inspires to future greatness.

  Delighted with the updating of the theme, assured that the musical score and lyrics would be adapted to her limited abilities, and that dancing would be sparse and discreet, Davis took the bait.

  Trouble began at once. She had difficulty remembering lines. The young black actor-singer Dorian Harewood, whose big chance this would have been, was nervous trying to cope with her erratic, unpredictable style, and they did not work well together. In Philadelphia she collapsed from nerves, finding little consolation in the knowledge that advance ticket sales in New York guaranteed that the show might run for a year at least.

  Josh Logan and Davis emerged from the ill-starred venture as all-out enemies. “She was tactless, overbearing, did not blend in with the cast,” he claimed, and, in his view, faked a succession of illnesses in order to get out of her commitment. She disconcerted her cast by stopping the action dead to complain about a scene. She threw young Harewood off stride by failing to pick up his cues. Then the sore throats and neuralgic pains and hysterics began, and Davis took to her bed in a Philadelphia hotel. Then she claimed that the back injury from the 1957 fall had flared up. Logan visited her room and surrounded her with two doctors, a lawyer, and an insurance representative. He all but accused her of malingering and then asked her to show some professionalism, some consideration for the cast of young hopefuls, especially the despairing Harewood, whose future she was “mangling beyond the point of return.”

  Angered, Davis called in her own set of doctors, who, upon examining her, informed the distraught Logan he was dealing with a woman at the gates of old age who had no business in such a stressful endeavor, and that if she continued, she might die on his hands. Logan, a director of many Broadway hits, had a history of mental breakdowns, and he told his wife Nedda Harrigan that “the Wicked Witch of the West,” as he called Davis, might well bring on “the grand extravaganza nervous breakdown of my life.” He insisted angrily that Davis was exaggerating her assorted afflictions to cop out.” She’s always calling other people cowards, but she’s the biggest coward of all!” he said. Davis ignored all pleas, and at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, withdrew. Logan closed down the show—and never forgave her.

  Davis went into temporary retirement. For most of the year 1975 she rested, amidst recurring rumors about her health, and soon she was game for more activity. But, she stressed to the press, never again, ever, in the theater!

  24

  A Legend—But Alone

  IN 1976 DAVIS appeared in a gory film called Burnt Offerings—at least it was supposed to be gory. Trouble was, the gore was at a minimum and the boredom preeminent—at least for the audience. She played the aunt of a married couple (Karen Black and Oliver Reed) who take over a strange old house for the summer and gradually fall under its evil spell (the house grows newer and sprucer while the inmates grow older and more decrepit). Reed turns murderous and tries to drown his son, Davis tries to combat the evil influence and is killed, and Black winds up a zombie taken over by Satan who serves meals to a mysterious person in the attic, and so forth and so on.

  Davis didn’t get
along with anyone during the shooting of Burnt Offerings. She yelled so often at producer-director Dan Curtis that he walked off the set and disappeared for days. She was nervous about how the DeLuxe Color would make her look and argued endlessly with cinematographers Stevan Larner and Jacques Marquette, frightening them into dropping and smashing valuable camera lenses. She walked in and out of other people’s dressing rooms hollering that the original novel by Robert Marasco “stank,” that the screenplay was lousy, and that she might have to rewrite the whole thing herself.

  Then she started giving out interviews saying, “There’s practically no rehearsal, and the sloppy attitude on the set is unbelievable. These people that have been bred on television production have no sense of pacing or style . . . it’s all ‘just get it into the can!’”

  When Producer Curtis sent a mild-mannered publicity man to point out to her the disadvantages inherent in the unfortunate publicity such negative interviews would attract, which might affect bookings and future reviews, she yelled at him so furiously that the poor man retreated in tears and later vomited in the men’s room. When told of this later, she said, “Good—it got all the damned puke out of him. Let’s hope he took a good crap, too—he was full of it when I talked to him!”