Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Vidor provides her with a most dramatic entrance. After a rather lengthy voice-over sets the scene in the small sawmill town of Loyalton, Wisconsin, and after a series of static shots of quiet, nearly empty streets, Vidor cuts to a courtroom with equally static shots of an immobile crowd of quiet, bland midwesterners all staring solemnly toward the judge. Suddenly Bette stands up into the image, and shouts, “Why should I kill him!? Will someone tell me that? Why should I want to? It was an accident!” She punctuates the line by impulsively scratching the back of her neck, the effect of which is to give an itchy toss to the hideous black wig.

  She looks monstrous, a fact not lost on the Hollywood Reporter, which commented in its review that “photographically, Bette Davis has never looked worse; she affects the most grotesque makeup and the strands of stringy black hair hardly belong to a small town belle out to land a man.” But the Reporter missed a key point of Beyond the Forest: Rosa Moline is scarcely a “belle.” She’s a tramp. Davis does look horrible, but it’s not just the wig, which exposes far too much of her high forehead. Her lipstick is lurid, her mascara equally extreme. And Davis’s face itself has broadened and shows its age. (Bette had turned forty-one in April.) What Perc Westmore disguised in Winter Meeting and June Bride he enhanced in Beyond the Forest: not only was Davis no longer oddly attractive; she’d suddenly become downright ugly while losing none of her carnality.

  What Davis achieved under Vidor’s direction in Beyond the Forest is much more intriguing and courageous than either the Reporter or Davis herself appreciated. As with the wretched Mildred in Of Human Bondage, Davis had the guts to compel audiences to see a contemptible, evil woman as being not only contemptible but repulsive and venal, too. Davis successfully makes us hate her.

  And as a result, we adore her. In an early scene, Rosa picks off an innocent porcupine with a single rifle shot. Her husband’s geezer friend Moose disapproves, but Rosa couldn’t care less. “I don’t like porkies,” she cracks. “They ir-ritate me.”

  “I don’t want people to like me,” she informs her callow husband a little later. “Nothing pleases me more than when people don’t like me.” Then, with a smirk—“Means I don’t belong.” Davis’s voice rises to an abnormally high pitch on the word nothing, and she drags it out, too— “nuuuhhh-thing.” By way of this mannerist, showy, theatrical device, we catch the extent of Rosa’s perversity. Rosa Moline is the hearty appetizer served before the main course of Baby Jane Hudson.

  But perversely, as with Baby Jane, Rosa Moline presents Bette Davis at her most authentic. Beyond the Forest is exactly the kind of film that must be seen to be believed, and the belief it inspires is in the essential truth of camp. Like Vidor’s previous film, The Fountainhead, Beyond the Forest achieves a peculiar but no less worthy goal: melodrama that periodically teeters over the edge into dark comedy. Davis appreciated the value of such a weird, on-the-precipice tone, however little she was aware of the fact. Her fidgety gestures may be tragically clownish, but they’re no less tragic for it. Her vocal delivery artificially calls attention to itself as a way of conveying a more ephemeral honesty than invisible naturalism could possibly express. When Davis held a script in contempt, as she clearly held Beyond the Forest’s, she worked all the harder to make it work, the consequence being that by the time Rosa attempts to get an abortion, throws herself off a cliff, and comes down with the peritonitis, Davis has chewed every bit of scenery she could get her mouth around and spat it all out. The performance is electrifying.

  Rosa Moline dies in feverish dementia while staggering and then crawling in the dirt toward a departing train. One pays her the greatest honor by laughing. In awe.

  DAVIS MADE HER exit from Warner Bros. after a row over a medicine bottle, or, more precisely, over the direction Vidor gave her on how to hurl one. As Rosa lies in bed at the end, her temperature rising to the point of altering her skin tone to a rich, sweaty-ripe brown—it now matches that of Jenny, the Molines’ surly, gum-chewing Indian maid—Louis tries to give her a shot of what one presumes is an antibiotic to combat what Albee’s Martha calls peritonitis. In her delirium, she smacks the medicine away. Bette did it her way. Vidor told her to do it his way. She demanded that he be fired. Jack Warner refused. She asked to be released from her contract, won the release, returned to the set, and did it Vidor’s way.

  Vidor was unaware of Davis’s demand that Warner fire him until later, when Harry Warner told him the story. “They didn’t want to tell me because they thought I’d take it out on her or that it would affect our work together. . . . As it turned out, she came up to me at dinner on that last night of work and told me how much she had enjoyed working with me, and that if I ever had any stories she could do, to please let her know. . . . She was preparing herself for freelancing, and if I came up with a good story, she would like to play in it.”49

  According to Davis, her last professional act at Warner Bros.—after eighteen years and fifty-two pictures—was to loop the line “I can’t stand it here anymore.”50 She got her wish, though by her own account she drove off the lot for the last time in tears. The trouble was, she couldn’t stand it anywhere.

  PART THREE

  ONGOING

  CONFLICTS

  CHAPTER

  17

  FAST FORWARD

  IN MAY 1983, BETTE, THEN SEVENTY-FIVE, stepped out of the shower, dried herself off, and felt a lump on her breast.1 She checked into New York Hospital under an assumed name and underwent a mastectomy on June 9. Nine days later she suffered a debilitating stroke. Her doctors told her she’d never work again, but her lawyer, Harold Schiff, disagreed. “You just don’t know Bette Davis,” he said.2

  The doctors were wrong. Work was to Bette Davis as human blood is to vampires: hot, fresh, nourishing, and vital for survival. She made twenty-four feature films after she left Warner Bros. in August 1949; over a dozen made-for-televsion movies; several TV pilots; and a number of guest appearances on existing series. She starred in two stage musicals: one in the 1950s, the other in the 1970s. During the latter decade she also performed a one-woman show all over the United States as well as in London, New Zealand, and Australia; and she appeared on countless talk shows until the end of her life.

  The mastectomy and stroke slowed her down, but only temporarily. Davis recovered and shot three and a half more pictures before she died in 1989: Agatha Christie’s Murder with Mirrors and As Summers Die, both made for television; Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August; and Larry Cohen’s ill-fated Wicked Stepmother, out of which she walked after a few weeks of filming, saying that she had no choice but to do so “for the good of my future career.”

  For any female Hollywood star over the age of fifty to speak without irony of her “future career” might strike one as clinically crazy. After all, Norma Desmond, the demented star of Sunset Boulevard, was barely into her fifties, and to put it in the kindest possible light, her comeback (“I hate that word!”) is quixotic at best. But the octogenarian Bette Davis didn’t even see Wicked Stepmother as the end of the line. “I’m not a vain person,” she explained. Still, she’d seen some of the rushes and commented, “At 80 years old I don’t want to look the way I looked. It seriously could be the end of anybody ever hiring me again.”3

  She was a hellion—on the sets of her films, at the homes of her friends, at New York Hospital at the time of the mastectomy and stroke. One can only begin to imagine the acid rage she hurled at nurses and interns, errants and innocents, in the days following her surgery and stroke. “After a stroke you have a very short fuse with people” was the excuse she offered to a visitor to her hospital suite. “Bette,” the friend responded, “you’ve always had a short fuse with people. Don’t blame it on your stroke.”4

  Still, she managed to display proper etiquette to a neighbor down the hall. Robert Lantz, the agent who represented Davis in the 1970s and ’80s, tells the story: “At the end of the corridor on the 16th floor were two special suites, what we now call a junior suite at a h
otel—a bedroom and a sitting area with sofas. Bette was in one. In the opposite one was Mrs. Richard Nixon. Now Bette was, like Myrna Loy, a militant Democrat. I came to visit her, and because there were so many flowers, she said to me, ‘Do you think I should send some flowers to Mrs. Nixon?’ I said, ‘If you think you should, you should.’ She told me the next day that she had sent the flowers with a note that said, ‘We’re neighbors, and I hope these please you.’ Mrs. Nixon sent back a very nice letter but said she was allergic to flowers. But how nice it was of Bette to have offered. I mean, very few people would have had the manners, especially with somebody she hated as much as Bette hated the Nixons.”5

  The breast cancer metastasized; that’s what got her in the end. She died on October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, where she was taken after falling ill at the San Sebastian Film Festival in late September. Her attitude all along was a mix of denial and concern for what she refused to stop calling her “future career.” Before leaving for San Sebastian, she told her friend Robert Osborne, “I hope this will prove to the world I’m not dying. The only thing that’s making me sick are all those awful reports and rumors about how ill I’m supposed to be. Where do they start? And how do you get them to stop?”6

  It was the stroke, not the cancer, that defined Bette Davis’s public persona in the last five years of her life. Or, more precisely, it wasn’t the stroke itself that defined Bette in the end but rather her vitally stubborn persistence in the face of it—her refusal to withdraw tastefully behind a veil of privacy despite the obvious physical damage the stroke had wrought. Davis was not one to go gently into retirement. In fact, she didn’t retire at all. Just as she compelled the world to look at her before half of her mouth went slack, Davis craved attention afterward with the same degree of dynamic daring. Bette Davis wasn’t a quitter. “Old age is not for sissies,” she famously declared.

  The small woman became minuscule. By the end of 1983 she weighed only ninety-two pounds. But in spite—literally, in angry spite—of her wizened body, wrinkled face, and droop-mouthed speech, Bette Davis kept acting, appearing in public, showing up on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and at awards ceremonies, surviving, too ornery to die, too driven to sit still, too proud to recede into muted seclusion.

  By that point she had a loyal helpmate, secretary, surrogate daughter, go-fer, adviser, factotum, and slave by the name of Kathryn Sermak, whom Davis hired in June 1979 to accompany her to London for the filming of The Watcher in the Woods, a trying-to-be-spooky Disney tale in which she plays a reclusive landlady.7 Luckily, Sermak, then twenty-two, had studied psychology at UCLA before taking the job.

  “I asked if you could boil an egg,” Bette once recalled. “And I believe I asked you your astrological sign. You told me that you were a Libra. Almost to my own surprise, I said, ‘You have the job.’ ”8 Davis believed increasingly in the authority of astrology as she aged. She was, of course, an Aries. And what an Aries she was. “The fire element of Aries brings assertive I energy,” a popular astrology guide states. “This is a flaming drive and the desire to do something! The Aries will is full of tension and passion—the I brings a need for independence.” So far, so accurate; this description of the Aries temperament could have been written specifically as a zodiacal biography of Bette Davis. “Aries coincides with spring time,” the sketch continues, “when seeds germinate in an outpouring of energy and growth. This sign has an instinctive identity, early extroversion, spontaneity, and a very direct approach.” But all is not well in the garden. Aries carries with it a fundamental danger: “ ‘Fire’ can rage out of control! Aries’ cardinal-sign assertiveness can become too willful. Then we have wild spring weather—a storming nature and a passion for power. Spontaneity can become impulsive, as only a sign ruled by energizing Mars can be!”9

  Aside from weathering her boss’s fiery storms, Kathryn Sermak did much more than boil Bette’s eggs. She answered Bette’s mail, conveyed messages, nursed. “She was wonderful with Bette,” says Robbie Lantz. “I don’t think she called her anything but ‘Miss Davis.’ She was just remarkable.” During Davis’s nine-week hospitalization, Sermak—whom Davis called Kath—spent every night with her until even Bette had to admit that her crankiness was “beginning to take its toll,” so with Bette’s encouragement she flew to Paris to visit her boyfriend. During the week she was away, Kath sent Davis a gardenia every day, each accompanied by a card with a little poetic inscription and a smiley face: “A gardenia a day while I’m away, love & kisses.” “Gardenia number two, because I need understand and adore you.” “Gardenia number three sends love to thee, I believe in you for I love you.” “Gardenia number five, remember April five, je vous envoyer mille braisse.” “Gardenia number seven, you are my heaven, miss you like mad, will be so glad to see you, your crazy stepdaughter.”10

  Davis’s own children were decreasingly involved in her life, though at the time of the mastectomy and stroke, it was not out of malice. By 1983, B.D. had been married for nineteen years to a former film executive, Jeremy Hyman, who had recently gone into the trucking business; they and their two children had their own lives to live in eastern Pennsylvania, though it was Bette who paid many of their bills. In addition, Bette had adopted two children during the early years of her fourth marriage—to Gary Merrill, her costar in All About Eve. Michael Merrill, a sturdy and good-looking guy who graduated from the University of North Carolina and went on to law school at Boston University, married Charlene “Chou Chou” Raum in 1973, opened up a legal office in Boston, and had two children of his own. Another adopted child, dark-haired Margot Merrill, was discovered early on to be mentally retarded, and after much soul searching and grief, Davis and Merrill sent her away to live at Lochland, a home for the developmentally disabled in Geneva, New York, where she has remained more or less consistently ever since.

  And so it was Kathryn Sermak who assumed the role of the loving and selfless daughter with the aged, increasingly needy, and cantankerous Bette Davis for the last ten years of her life, especially after B.D. published a harsh tell-all book, My Mother’s Keeper, in 1985. She wrote it, B.D. explained, as an act of Christian charity. That and a $100,000 advance.11

  Sermak, who calls Bette “Miss Davis” to this day, described the way she and Bette celebrated holidays together in her portion of This ’n That. On Washington’s Birthday, Kath wrote, “she serves cherry pie to go with dinner—and once she dressed like Martha Washington. On St. Patrick’s Day we dressed like leprechauns.” One Easter Kath bought Bette a rabbit. “She adored the rabbit, whom we named Mr. Brier, but the amount of traveling we did forced us to give him away.”12

  Sermak was, and remains, fiercely loyal to Davis. She was reluctant to be interviewed for Dark Victory and ultimately declined. She polarized Davis’s friends, some of whom admired the support and care she provided Bette, while others came to distrust her immensely. From 1965 to 1977, Davis lived in Connecticut and needed a place to stay when visiting Los Angeles; she found her home away from home with Chuck Pollack, a designer and antiques dealer who lived on North Orlando Drive. “I knew Bette for about fifteen years,” Pollack recalled. “We were very close. Then she brought in that terrible girl, and the girl started to cut off all of Bette’s real friends. She started to cut Bette down to where Bette had only her. And Bette was desperate not to be left alone, so the girl had full control. The girl got exactly what she was after. She ended up being the recipient of half of Bette’s estate.”

  “She was a road-show Eve Harrington,” Davis’s earlier assistant, Vik Greenfield, piped in. Greenfield had introduced Davis to Pollack and was living in Pollack’s guest cottage at the time of the joint interview. “Yes,” Pollack continued. “It was like Bette found her own Eve. The girl wormed her way into her confidence, and little by little, she got rid of almost all of Bette’s close friends. I was a friend, and Vik had worked for her and was always friendly toward her. Vik was out of the picture, I was out of the picture, and s
everal more were out of the picture. So there was nobody left but her and Bette and the adopted son. The daughter cut herself out with that book.”13

  The desperate race Davis ran throughout her life against self-doubt and a morbid fear of idleness is infectious to the point that her biographer, heaving and winded by his subject’s furious pace, has found it impossible to endure the marathon without pulling a Rosie Ruiz: breaking ranks, ducking into the literary equivalent of the Boston T, speeding ahead, and crossing the finish line before the race is truly over. So we return to our place in the pursuit: Bette has just driven out of the Warners’ lot in 1949 and still has forty years to go. But strict chronology doesn’t necessarily reflect the life being chronicled. Cut loose from the indentured (albeit lucrative) servitude to Jack Warner and the studio system in general, Davis was if anything too free—free to pursue a purely domestic life for which she wasn’t naturally suited; free to make movies far worse and more demeaning than any of the Warners programmers she decried; free to drink away her days when she wasn’t working and become obnoxious and mean; free to be truly impossible. The story of Bette Davis’s life is still a race, but it is at times a nonlinear one—a race, one might say, against time.