Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Soon she was giving Karen Black acting lessons, telling her she was too “improvisational” and “lacked discipline” and “needed the seasoning of more stage training.” Davis would stage-whisper, “You missed your marks, girl” and Black would sweat profusely. Oliver Reed’s behavior also annoyed Davis to no end. “That man seems to be perpetually on a hangover,” she told producer Curtis. Reed hated her so much, he would say his lines and retreat immediately to his dressing room. “Get him to use a mouthwash,” he overheard Davis tell Curtis. “His breath stinks to high heaven!”

  There was general relief that Davis’s character was to get killed off early, as this meant Davis would no longer be on the set. She surprised them, however, by hanging around anyway, even after her few scenes were shot. “They can use a veteran’s experience; they might want to ask me something!” No one did, to her exasperation.

  Variety gave her a coup de grace with: “As for Davis, she doesn’t have much to do. Her role is that of a weak and pathetic old woman, hardly the kind of thing she does best. Unkind lighting and costuming make her resemble Baby Jane Hudson.”

  Meanwhile Oliver Reed and Karen Black were letting it be known that they would never act with her again.

  During the 1970s Davis alternated between film and television.

  She did not like working with Faye Dunaway in The Disappearance of Aimee, a Hallmark Hall of Fame television drama that debuted in November 1976. Chief among Davis’s complaints was Faye’s alleged failure to get to the set on time, her “prima-donna habit,” as Davis put it, of sulking in her dressing room while costs mounted, and her frequent disappearances in her limousine while all production activity came to a halt.

  As late as 1987 Davis was telling Johnny Carson that during the long periods Dunaway kept everyone waiting she’d have to entertain the cast and crew by singing “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” and other songs associated with her. She called Dunaway blatantly unprofessional and inconsiderate and said she’d never work with her again. Dunaway, for the most part, ignored the criticism and, patronizing Davis’s by-then sixty-eight years, told an interviewer, “She’s been around for ages and is getting on, and I cannot believe that she would speak of anyone the way she has spoken of me!” Driving the knife home, Faye added, “Of course she hasn’t been well for a long time.”

  Dunaway could have mentioned that for many years Davis had wanted to play Aimee Semple McPherson herself—and now here she was in a secondary role as her mother! McPherson had been a famous radio evangelist and mesmerist who galvanized audiences of the 1920s from coast to coast. Although suspected by many of being a fake and a charlatan, the magnetic Aimee won millions of fans who would rise en masse to clobber any dissenters in the hall. Directed by Anthony Harvey, who had triumphed with such movies as the Katharine Hepburn–Peter O’Toole The Lion in Winter in 1968, the television film dealt with the strange disappearance of Aimee in 1926. She claimed she had been kidnapped, but rumors persisted that she had shacked up with a man with whom she had temporarily fallen “into lust.” Davis, as her mother, joins with Faye to hoodwink the public into accepting the kidnapping theory. Davis didn’t have as many scenes as she would have liked, but she got in her innings in a flamboyant scene in which she drives the audience to hysteria with the wild declaration that she believes her daughter has been murdered.

  Whatever her problems with Faye, Davis garnered some good reviews for her performance in Aimee, with the Los Angeles Times television critic noting, “[She] summons her familiar crisp authority as a dominating mother who, believing her daughter has met foul play, is full of skepticism and demands for the truth.” Other reviewers cross-country called her “forceful” and “attention-getting,” with a few commenting on her familiar tendency to overact and overembroider. Indeed, frustrated by the fact someone else was playing a character she had long wanted to do, and fueled by her personal dislike for Dunaway, Davis did cut loose with some fancy scenery-chewing on occasion. She enjoyed the 1920s costumes, wearing them with flair.

  In 1977, Davis was on hand to accept the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, which was presented to her on March 1. The first woman to receive it—a fact she made sure the press duly noted—she appeared with hostess Jane Fonda, whose imminent birth had speeded up the Jezebel shooting nearly forty years before. On hand were old lover and mentor William Wyler (“Sometimes she wanted more takes than I did!”), Olivia De Havilland (“She got the roles I always wanted!”), and Robert Wagner, Henry Fonda, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and other stars she had worked with.

  Davis got a roar of laughter hissing, “I’d love to kiss ya but I just washed ma hair” and saluted Ruthie, by then sixteen years dead, as someone who “worked and slaved for many years to help make my dreams come true.”

  After Aimee, Davis was not seen on television for over a year. Nursing her uncertain health, disdainful of much she was asked to do, she finally accepted the two-part television dramatization of Tom Tryon’s The Dark Secret of Harvest Home. She got off on the wrong foot at her first meeting with the producers by telling them that Tom Tryon had been a lousy actor but was obviously a better writer or she wouldn’t be gracing them with her presence.

  In this Davis is a mover and shaker in a small New England village that visitors find strangely old-fashioned. There is an obsession with the town’s corn crop, and it turns out that the townsfolk practice some arcanely sinister fertility rites to assure that it grows properly. Included in the rituals are unabashed human sacrifices.

  A young couple moves into the town. Soon enough they are drawn into the horrific proceedings, wishing fervently that they were back among the jangling unpredictabilities of bold, bad New York, from whence they came.

  The television offering ran five hours (with commercials), several of them monumentally slow and tedious. As the ringleader of the morbid and bloody doings, Davis wears granny glasses, a strangely angled pilgrimlike cap, and a severe high-necked dress, and the camera does nothing to hide all the lines and bulges of her seventy years. To her annoyance the producers decided to go on location in Ohio rather than her beloved native New England, where the story was laid. Later she wrote critics who had demurred at her rather overwrought and unbalanced performance that if she had been allowed to cut loose “in the proper locations” instead of “drab, flat Ohio” she might have summoned the proper creative inspiration. Among her problems in Ohio was a local witch’s coven that harassed her for “misrepresenting” their calling and threatened to burn down her trailer. One paper called the film’s garishly ominous proceedings “terrifically earnest.”

  Again giving the press her standard excuse, “I needed the money and gambled it would turn out well,” Davis appeared in Return from Witch Mountain in early 1978. A sequel to Escape to Witch Mountain, a popular release of three years before, the film featured young Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards as two aliens villain Christopher Lee and his accomplice, Davis, try to manipulate—he to gain world power, she for riches. After much rushing about, the kids foil the bad guys. The original picture reportedly grossed over nine million dollars in rentals, chiefly because children liked it; the sequel did nowhere near as well.

  The movie was Davis’s first feature appearance for Disney (she did one other, two years later). The Variety critic put his finger on what was wrong, writing: “Davis doesn’t quite click as [Lee’s] partner in crime,” adding, “It’s interesting to note that Disney villainesses are triumphantly cruel in animation, a quality difficult to duplicate in live action. For the men, it’s the opposite way around, which should give sociologists something to ponder.”

  Janet Maslin in The New York Times wrote: “John Hough’s direction, ungainly at its best, is occasionally downright cruel, [such as] shooting Miss Davis in close-up when her heavy makeup seems designed for long shots. She’s supposed to look frightening much of the time, but there’s such a thing as gallantry, too.”

  The witty Harry Haun summed up the problem succinctly in the New York
Daily News, writing: “Good roles for 70-year-old grandmothers are in such short supply these days that Bette Davis sometimes has to settle for pictures every bit as slim as her pickings . . . it would have been nice if the elves in charge had been ready for her [and] had come up with something in the way of a character to play—but apparently even Disney witchcraft has its limits . . . however, the real trick in Return from Witch Mountain is a dubious one: making a formidable force like Bette Davis seem invisible. A working grandmother deserves more.”

  That year, in a series of press interviews, Davis held forth on the “execrable, monstrously bad” pictures that had been forced on her in that period. “Money,” she then screamed to one and all, “it’s the bane of my existence. People expect a star to live high no matter how old she gets, or whatever the state of her finances may be. And when they learn who you are, they deliberately charge you more—more—more!” Her voice rose: “Some people can never get it into their stupid, stupid heads that a star can work for fifty years and still not have any decent money put away. Certainly I don’t! So I slave and slave and grub and grub and take a lot of perfectly terrible stuff for the money—and yes, the continued exposure.”

  One reporter asked her if she’d forego trash like Return from Witch Mountain if she had a private fortune. “Would you hold out only for quality fare, then?” he ventured. “And would you go back on the stage, do Albee, Williams, Chekhov perhaps?”

  To this she thundered, puffing furiously away at her cigarette: “I would hold out for parts that showcased my particular talents, yes. But I don’t know about the classics—they’re for another type of artist” [she did not elaborate on this statement]. As for the stage, “I’ve had enough of theater. It’s too hard on me at my age. Everyone depends on you because you’re the star. An understudy will never do in an emergency. And the repetition and the touring and the physical strain—no, the stage is now firmly in my past.” And more pictures like Witch Mountain? “Regrettably, in my future. The money, remember?”

  At first it looked like Bette Davis would go against type, so to speak, by behaving like an absolute angel on the set of Death on the Nile, an Agatha Christie mystery following in the wake of the highly successful Murder on the Orient Express of four years before. Ingrid Bergman had won a supporting Oscar for her brief but telling role in that, and Davis told friends that she might get one herself this time around. “I’m not proud—a supporting Oscar would be fine,” she said. “Ingrid won two best actress Oscars and then that one, and a two and a half would be gratefully received in my case, too.”

  But soon it became obvious to her that her role, a haughty dowager who bullies secretary-companion Maggie Smith, was not the stuff of which Oscar nominations are made. Before long she was overacting in her usual style, frantically trying to make her few scenes “pay off big,” as she put it. Then she and director John Guillermin began having what she called “constructive sessions” in far corners. She insulted color photographer Jack Cardiff when she told him that he didn’t understand her “special problems” and was not photographing her “with the professionalism” to which she was accustomed.

  The small size of her role ate at her continually, and she was forever coming up with “bits of business that will help the picture as a whole,” as she put it, but that were actually designed to further her advance toward that ever-more-elusive third Oscar.

  Thinking to enlist the other actors to her cause, she went out of her way, as George Kennedy later recalled, to be nice to them—at least in the beginning. “But keeping herself reined in was taking its toll on her,” he felt. Certainly even she was somewhat put off by the major-league talent that surrounded her; the cast included Peter Ustinov, Angela Lansbury, David Niven, Maggie Smith, and Harry Andrews.

  The plot concerns the murder of spoiled heiress Lois Chiles during a cruise down the Nile. Detective Hercule Poirot (Ustinov), who happens to be aboard the houseboat, determines to find the killer, and is confronted with her fortune-hunting, weakling husband (Simon MacCorkindale); the crooked lawyer who has been preempting her money (Kennedy); jilted fiancée Mia Farrow; socialite Davis and her companion, Smith; radical politician John Finch; a doctor, Jack Warden; and Lansbury, who is delightful as a writer of elegantly sexy novels. Poirot bags the murderer, of course, but not before two more people are killed.

  The film was shot on location in Egypt, and Davis was thrilled at first by the geographical novelty. Soon, however, she was reacting adversely to the hot weather and dusty terrain. The weather got her so down that instead of giving a visiting English journalist the nice interview she had rehearsed—just in case Oscar beckoned—she reverted to her usual brittle carping, telling him that back in the Great Warner Days they’d have put the whole shebang on a nice, convenient back lot, but that “nowadays, films have become travelogues, and actors stuntmen!”

  She became particularly angry when the handsome costumes prepared for her began to wilt in the brutally hot weather. One hat, large and impressive and shaped like Napoleon’s famous headgear, began to wilt at both ends, and wound up framing her haggard, lined face comically. Maggie Smith, who as the drab secretary wore simple dresses, coats, and hats, ventured to commiserate with Davis one day over the condition of her wardrobe, and Davis snapped back, “Well, at least they’ll look at me in my costumes, but they’ll overlook you!”

  Davis took a shine to handsome young Simon MacCorkindale and began giving him tips on his acting—some he found workable, others he quietly discarded. “She was such a nice old lady,” he said later. “They told me she was just turning seventy. I wanted to be nice to her. I know the weather got her down.” Had Davis overheard these sentiments, she doubtless would have exiled MacCorkindale, resenting his condescension.

  “Angela Lansbury seemed to get along well with her,” Peter Ustinov later observed, “but then Angela gets along well with everybody.” Asked how he himself had weathered the Davis presence, he hesitated, then observed: “Well, the poor lady is getting on in years, and the weather is hard on people that age, and, well, I let things roll off me—no sense getting my blood pressure up!” A statement that hinted at far more than it revealed.

  David Denby in New York Magazine did not hold Death on the Nile in high esteem, calling it “a great lummox of a movie,” adding, “What is the point of this dreadnought approach to a basically frivolous genre?” He continued: “Apart from a satirical duet between dragon-eyed rich-bitch Bette Davis (wearing a cloche—or is it a toque?)—and her cranky-tweedy companion, Maggie Smith, the performances are demoralized and stale. This is one formula whose charm has run out.”

  Davis closed out the uncertain and unsatisfying 1970s, at age seventy-one, with her television appearance in Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter, which aired in May 1979. Gena Rowlands, whom she found pleasantly rewarding to work with, played opposite her.

  In this television drama directed by Milton Katselas and written by Michael de Guzman, Davis is an aging widow confronted with the knowledge that her daughter, from whom she has been separated for twenty years, has come home to die. Together the two women work through and resolve, after a fashion, their lifelong differences, with Davis learning to accept her daughter’s imminent demise.

  Gena Rowlands told the press how “happy and proud” she was to be playing “with such a distinguished legend” while Davis said how gratifying it was “to note that younger performers have among them people who understand the disciplines and dedication of my day!”

  The critics noted, however, that Davis offered practically a self-parody in most of her scenes, and that she was forbidding and dour throughout, leaving little room for sincere emotion.

  John O’Connor in The New York Times described the trouble well when he stated, “Miss Davis is an institution, very much a national treasure. But her thoroughly familiar mannerisms can be a handicap, and they are precisely that in the opening scenes. She is overwhelming in her passionate withdrawals.”

  A pleasant, eas
ygoing woman in private life, Gena Rowlands, wed for years to the late actor-director John Cassavetes, has said of Davis in Strangers: “I felt that life had left her worn and tired, and that her work, while it was the important thing in her life, was not yielding the consolations that she had hoped for. We had many talks, and I found her more objective about herself than her publicity would lead one to believe.”

  The 1980 Emmy that Davis received for Strangers was widely regarded as a sympathy vote.

  Skyward, another TV movie, was aired in November 1980. In this, Davis is a veteran airplane pilot who helps a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair, Suzy Gilstrap, actually a paraplegic, fulfill her dearest ambition—to fly. It was Ron Howard’s first directorial assignment, and he was nervous around Bette, who couldn’t help but see him as the boy from Happy Days. Addressing him icily as Mr. Howard and “Richie,” she recalled, she didn’t begin calling him what he had requested, Ron, until she was sure he “had what it took.” Howard later told an interviewer that a combination of tact and good cheer carried him through his debut as a “Bette Davis director,” and that she “wasn’t that tough—if she knew she was in good hands and was sure I knew what I was doing.”

  While Davis kept a stiff upper lip with her co-workers, she screamed bloody murder to B.D., who recalled that she had said scornfully of Howard and his producer, Anson Williams, “They’re going to tell me what to do? Jesus! Someone has to be kidding!”

  Davis also complained that the two didn’t have any idea what they were doing, and improvised atrociously. She sarcastically observed, “All those kids care about is that dear, darling little crippled girl. She gets to sit in the shade in her wheelchair while I’m out on the burning-hot pavement with blisters on my feet and my sneakers stuck to the tar. Shit!”

  Skyward got a sympathetic reception from the press, but the kudos had a rather dutiful tone. After all, it would not do to put down a picture that attempted to deal affirmatively with the aspirations of the disabled to live normally. Amidst all the hollow praise, one Baltimore critic dared to assert that Davis made “rather forbidding and cold” company for the aspiring paraplegic, and that the proceedings were “soap.”