Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  In 1981 Davis was delighted with the success of the song “Bette Davis Eyes,” written by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, which is about a forceful blond actress who has led a glamorous and successful life. The lyrics are witty and charming, and Davis found the entire concept flattering and amusing. Singer Kim Carnes won considerable fame as a rock singer after she recorded this, and the song itself went on to win a Grammy as Best Song of 1981. Kim and Bette got together at a party where they toasted the song’s success in champagne. Davis told interviewers, “My grandson has finally sat up and taken notice of me. He loves the song and goes around saying he now realizes how famous Grandma is!”

  Davis admitted she missed New England at times but liked the swirl and excitement of Hollywood life, and even began to entertain old and new friends at the West Hollywood townhouse that she had recently taken. Her old friend Joan Blondell told Mike Wallace in 1980 that it was good for Davis to be back in her old stamping grounds, that the atmosphere gave her strength. And of course work offers poured in constantly, mostly from TV, and this kept her in good spirits. By 1982 she was feeling so well that she even ventured a few plane trips East to visit relatives and friends there, but continued to say that Los Angeles—and the loved ones in the mausoleum at Forest Lawn—was her “final stop.”

  Another old friend, Ginger Rogers, who bore her then-seventy-one years lightly, appeared with Davis at the historic, memory-filled Cocoanut Grove nightclub in 1982, where Davis received the American Movie Award in honor of her fifty-four years in show business. She and Ginger later had dinner together, full of good spirits and plans, and even began planning a benefit appearance together in Paris at the Olympia Theatre. But this never materialized because Davis did not feel she was up to a six-thousand-mile plane journey. Katharine Hepburn came up in the conversation and they recalled how they had both wanted to play the small but telling role of Queen Elizabeth in Hepburn’s Mary of Scotland back in 1936. “Certainly we both look old enough to play her now!” Ginger laughed. “We wouldn’t need any makeup either!” With a graciousness people found atypical of her, Davis replied, “I could play her—you still look too young, Ginger!”

  Also in 1982, an amusing memento of Davis’s past reappeared in the shape of a statue called “Spring” that Davis had posed for as a teenager in Massachusetts. People were startled when they found out she had posed for it nude. “Virginal, protected teenage Bette Davis posing for a nude statue? Why it sounds like something out of Marlene Dietrich’s The Song of Songs!” one of Davis’s Hollywood friends laughed. (In that 1933 film, Dietrich, with sexy abandon, had posed naked for sculptor Brian Aherne.) Word of the Davis statue set in motion a great “Bette Davis Statue Hunt” all around Massachusetts. It was discovered that it had stood in the midst of a fountain in a square near Boston, but there had been a crusade to remove its “shameless nakedness,” and it had disappeared into a warehouse. It was finally traced to the Museum of Fine Arts. Retitled “Young Diana,” it languished in a back room. Careful study of the statue by museum experts established its authenticity. Indeed it was teenage Bette Davis! Asked about it in far-off Hollywood, Davis laughed and said, “It represented me at an uncharacteristically rebellious moment. If I had known then what I know now, I’d have broken some other rules, too—lots of them!”

  In April 1982 Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles officially announced Bette Davis Day, April 3, two days before her seventy-fourth birthday. At that time one honor was following another—she said she didn’t have room for all the plaques and citations she was receiving. B.D. remembered Davis saying she was sick of all those awards, they were a nuisance and a bother. She had to dress up and go down to some place and smile at people and express her thanks. With her customary directness B.D. suggested that she simply pack them away or throw them out if they were such a bother, and Davis drew herself up and declared that if people were kind enough to show her honor, she in turn should treat their citations with respect. End of subject!

  In 1982 alone, Davis was honored with the Film Advisory Board’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the first Golden Reel Trophy from the National Film Society, and the Valentino Award (Burt Reynolds was the male recipient), given in memory of Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926). In their tribute the donors stated that this award was a special salute to stars who had “persevered and endured.”

  In early 1983 Davis and perennial companion Roddy McDowall were among the more glittering guests at the banquet honoring Queen Elizabeth II during her American visit. It was held at Twentieth Century–Fox Studios, and Davis got almost as much attention, Roddy later recalled, as the queen.

  Shortly after this, Davis was particularly happy to receive a Defense Department award for her work with the Hollywood Canteen during World War II. At the ceremony, her hard work on bond-selling tours was also acknowledged. On hand with her were such other honorees as Bob Hope, who had made many tours overseas to entertain servicemen, and Martha Raye, who was honored for her work in Vietnam.

  There was much celebration for Davis’s seventy-fifth birthday on April 5, 1983, and she went to numerous parties and luncheons. She seemed to thrive on all the attention, all the reminiscing, and she talked freely and joyously to any reporters who wanted to interview her.

  In the spring of 1983 during one of these sessions, she set forth her attitudes toward life and her career at age seventy-five. She acknowledged that young married people such as Michael and Charlene Merrill had adjustments to make and should be left in peace. She said she tried to steer a middle course between reminding her children of her existence with calls, gifts, and occasional visits, and leaving them to what she called “their reality” as against “my reality.” Philosophically, she maintained that her life was drawing to a close and that she had learned the truth of the adage: “Accept wisely the counsel of the years, surrendering gracefully the things of youth.” When asked if she had given up on romantic love, a shadow crossed her face, she sat pensively for a minute, then said, “I accept the realities of my years—yes. . . . All that is gone now, for good.”

  In the fall of 1982 Davis appeared with James Stewart in their first movie together, Right of Way. It was shown during 1983 as an HBO cable television production.

  George Schaefer directed the Richard Lee script, and Davis, not in the least put off by the fact the picture would not be a theatrical release, began referring to it as the answer to Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn’s On Golden Pond, which had won them both the 1981 Oscar. There was, however, little relation between the plots of On Golden Pond and Right of Way. Stewart and Davis play an elderly couple who decide to commit suicide together after they learn that she is terminally ill.

  Both Davis and Stewart were saddened by Henry Fonda’s death that year (he had been one of Stewart’s closest friends) and when they worked particularly hard on a scene and felt it went well, Jimmy whispered, “This was for you, Hank!”

  In Right of Way Davis plays Miniature Dwyer, her unusual first name coming from her mother, who was making miniature doll houses when Minnie was born. Minnie, too, has built doll houses for years, and when she and Teddy Dwyer (Stewart) begin planning their joint suicide, she makes sure that her dolls are placed with people who will appreciate and cherish them. The couple refuse to allow their grief-stricken daughter (Melinda Dillon) or the solicitous social worker or anyone else to forestall the death they are determined is right for them, so in the end they die together in the family car of carbon monoxide poisoning.

  It is the precise, ordered, matter-of-fact objectivity displayed by the couple that vitiates this film’s impact. It lacks the emotion and poignancy that, properly orchestrated, make for a moving and cathartic experience.

  Davis’s performance, especially, is much too detached and icy. She deprives her character of any sympathy. Stewart, on the other hand, makes his character human and understandable. Humble, down-to-earth, quietly determined to accompany the wife he loves into their last adventure, Stewart was the essence of kindly realism. But
even he is hampered by the impersonal, methodical quality of Lee’s script and Schaefer’s direction. Obviously, everyone feared that the picture would sink into a morass of sentimental bathos and that the plight of these two old people might be limned as Hollywoodishly maudlin. Unfortunately, the net result goes to the other extreme and comes across as uninvolving and cold.

  After receiving a Best Actress testimonial from the International Television Festival in early 1983 for her performance in A Piano for Mrs. Cimino, Davis took on a new television series, Hotel, which became a long-running success (four years) and made permanent television stars out of James Brolin and Connie Sellecca. Davis was set to play Laura Trent, the owner of a San Francisco hotel. Her part would run through the series, though she asked that her appearances be limited to nine episodes per season, feeling that, at seventy-five, she could not sustain a more intense workload.

  Davis started work on Hotel in April. But after filming only two episodes, she visited her doctor, Vincent Carroll, complaining of a breast lump and a circulatory dysfunction. When her lawyer, Harold Schiff, learned that hospitalization would be necessary, he recommended that she go to Manhattan’s New York Hospital—Cornell Medical Center, as it was near his office and apartment, and the hospitalization, in his view, could more easily be kept secret from the press.

  The breast lump was found to be malignant, and a mastectomy was performed. Davis remained in the hospital for testing on the circulatory disorder. Shortly after, she suffered three strokes in a row. She had been in the hospital for weeks when she began to suffer severe attacks of chronic itching. B.D. learned from Dr. Vincent Carroll that Davis’s drinking was causing the itching, but Davis prohibited any discussion of her smoking or drinking habits.

  Ever more intractable, she heaped abuse and obscenities on the staff and the therapists who worked on her limb and circulatory disorders. And she began to recover, she grew more temperamental. Kathryn Sermak was exhausted by her demands, and B.D. began to dread visiting her. Soon therapists refused to work with her as she was so difficult. She would throw dinner trays on the floor, holler with high-decibel impatience at all comers, and make a thorough nuisance of herself. Later in the summer of 1983 Davis was pronounced fit for discharge but she insisted on remaining in the hospital for weeks longer, claiming she knew better than anyone else her true condition.

  B.D. recalled one occasion when Davis had been screaming at her helpers. Her room was in a shambles, she flicked cigarette ash over her bed, shouted orders and commands with ever more frenetic restlessness. Then word came that a handsome young doctor, who had nothing to do with her case but was an admirer of hers and liked to drop in, was about to pay one of his periodic visits.

  The transformation in the hospital room was dramatic. Davis had her hair brushed, she perfumed and dolled herself up, moved to a chair, rearranged her features into an expression of martyred composure, and was utterly charming with the handsome pup in the white coat. According to B.D. she was every inch the great star, the consummate survivor, talking with chin-up bravery about her condition and referring to her daughter’s “beautiful farm” and how she hoped she’d see it again soon. The young doctor expressed his admiration and made a respectful withdrawal, at which time it was back to Madame Hyde time, and the screaming and ash-scattering and general disorder started up all over again.

  Eventually Davis was persuaded to leave the hospital and the handsome young doctor and repair to the Lombardy Hotel, where she rested for some time before returning to her West Hollywood townhouse. A friend later said that Davis’s behavior with the doctor convinced her that even at seventy-five, she still hadn’t given up on romance, and that her actressy declaration to the press about “surrendering gracefully the things of youth” was her usual brand of public relations hogwash.

  All was well as 1983 progressed, but back in West Hollywood Davis fell and broke a hip. A fresh period of disablement ensued, and her temper was worse than ever. But, as usual, when in the company of Robert Wagner or other friends from the show-business world, she was the soul of dignified behavior.

  Though hundreds of thousands of dollars were involved—money she desperately needed—she abruptly informed Aaron Spelling that she would not be returning to Hotel, and that as far as she was concerned that episode in her life was over. There were reports that in exchange for release from her Hotel commitment, she would star at a later date in one of Spelling’s television movies. Her reasons for walking out on her lucrative Hotel commitment were, as usual, complex and dichotomous. She claimed she hated the scripts, thought them “garbage.” She felt, also, that Brolin and Sellecca were the real stars because they were “young and cute” and that she, with all her hard-won expertise, was being “cameo-ized” and “downgraded” and “pushed aside.” Whatever the reasons, Hotel was definitely a thing of her past by early 1984.

  In October 1984, after nearly two years without work, Davis flew to England with Kathryn Sermak to do a television movie, Murder With Mirrors, in which she would co-star with Helen Hayes. John Mills, Leo McKern, Liane Langland, and Dorothy Tutin were also in the cast.

  Helen Hayes had the actual lead, playing the legendary Agatha Christie detective Miss Marple. In one of Christie’s more popular mysteries, adapted by George Eckstein, Miss Marple visits the ancestral home of an old friend. Among the guests are several suspicious characters, one of whom commits a murder. The shocked and horrified hostess has more faith in Marple’s ability to solve the murder than she has in the police’s methods. Davis has a distinctly secondary role as an aged dowager who comments on the proceedings, which puzzle and annoy her mightily.

  What with the mastectomy, strokes, and then a broken hip from which she had recently recovered, Davis was nervous about the long flight and the five weeks of shooting in the misty English climate. But she weathered it nicely, commuting from the Savoy Hotel to the set daily. She had long talks with Mills, McKern, and Tutin and felt comfortable and relaxed, except for some problems with makeup and costuming.

  Davis claimed that she and Hayes did not work together until near the end of Davis’s shooting schedule, and then had scenes for only a day or two. According to her, Hayes wrote a cordial letter expressing her pleasure in working with her for the first time, and she and Sermak selected a gift for her, an antique mirror on which she had “H.H. from B.D.” engraved.

  She seemed to respond well to Dick Lowry’s direction, and she said later that he and the adapter, George Eckstein, went out of their way to be accommodating.

  Murder With Mirrors, telecast in 1985, is standard Christie, with reasonable suspense elements, but nothing calculated to advance either Davis’s or Hayes’s careers.

  In a 1988 interview, Helen Hayes gave her own version of what it was like to work with Bette Davis in Murder With Mirrors.

  “Dear Bette Davis,” she purred. “I love her, admire her and I certainly admire her work. But that time, she seemed determined to make life difficult for us all!”

  Hayes continued, “She started by snapping at me the first day. I said, ‘Good morning,’ and she looked right through me. Later, when the cast gathered for introductions, our eyes met, and I waved. ‘What’s that mean?’ she snapped. ‘I was saying good morning,’ I answered. ‘You already did that!’ she snapped back.”

  Coming to the defense of her longtime close friend Lillian Gish, Hayes added, “While Bette Davis has indeed always been one of my idols, she did make mincemeat out of poor Lillian when they made The Whales of August, a lovely picture. Lillian swears she’ll never act again [whether with Davis or with anyone, ever, Hayes did not make clear]. So first she drove me from the screen, now she’s driven Lillian. She’s making a clean sweep of everyone our age!

  “When the film was over, I asked John Mills, who was in it, if he’d enjoyed himself. ‘I was never so scared in my life,’ he said. ‘And I was in the war!’”

  Hayes’s anger toward Davis is unusual coming from her, as she is balanced and sweet-natured in her deali
ngs with most people. She has said that at eighty-eight she isn’t going to get her blood pressure up unnecessarily fussing and feuding. Davis obviously goaded her into suspending her usual rules.

  During 1986, while struggling off and on with a new autobiography, aided by writer Michael Herskowitz (it was rejected by one publisher as lacking bite and honesty and inside material of a lively nature), Davis ventured on an HBO movie for television called As Summers Die. In this she is an eccentric lady in a small town in the 1950s South, who helps lawyer Scott Glenn defend a poor, underprivileged, black woman. Jamie Lee Curtis is on hand as her niece.

  The 90-minute film was shown in 1986, and garnered some respectful but restrained reviews, with one critic declaring:

  “Bette Davis is always touching and honest when she is sincere about what she is trying to get across, and in As Summers Die, her liberal beliefs in civil rights and equality of opportunity and human respect for all are given a thorough, and wholesome showcase. And more power to her!”

  During the making of As Summers Die, Davis found it necessary to pace herself, as this was only her second television movie after her serious illnesses, and at times she tended to overdo. Scott Glenn and Jamie Lee Curtis both publicly commended her durability and courage in 1986 interviews, and she, in turn, pronounced them thorough professionals who were “delights” to work with.

  With Kathryn Sermak’s help she had found a spacious eight-room apartment in West Hollywood, near Sunset Boulevard. There was nothing pretentious about the place or the neighborhood, which was nondescript. In a foyer, near her terrace, she kept her two Oscars and other trophies. Ashtrays and cigarette cases were all over the place. She had problems with help, going through cooks, butlers, secretaries at a fast clip. Taylor Pero, who, like the others, lasted an average of a week, found her testy, nervous, abrupt. “No,” he said, was her favorite word, on the phone and in person, and “No” finally got to him.