Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  In any case, Maggie Elliot is as much Bette herself as she is Joan. When preparing for the catastrophic screen test, Maggie redoes her makeup to her own specifications (including high, thin, Crawford-like eyebrows); claims to know what the screenplay should be about despite the fact that her ideas contravene the screenplay; refuses to take direction from the director. . . . As Dale Eunson observed, “With Bette Davis and a director like Stuart Heisler, he didn’t direct—she directed.”13

  The Star opened on Christmas Day, 1952. “I liked it. The public was lukewarm,” Davis writes. She was nominated for another Academy Award for Best Actress—as was Joan Crawford for Sudden Fear—but they both lost to Shirley Booth for the pathos-laden melodrama Come Back, Little Sheba, in a role Bette had turned down.

  The Star was the last picture Bette Davis made before moving with Gary to Cape Elizabeth on the coast of Maine to raise their children, with results both rejuvenating and disastrous. She felt she needed the break artistically, and she loved the bitter beauty of northern New England. But according to Davis, it hurt her marriage to pent up her professional energies. “For three years I was solely a wife and mother and Gary fell out of love with me,” she wrote.14 She finally had the domestic life she thought she’d craved, but her drive scarcely abated. Now, in place of the blood she’d sweated to create Jezebel, The Letter, Now, Voyager, Mr. Skeffington, and even Beyond the Forest, she found herself scooting the kids off to school and feverishly polishing the silver.

  Clippings from the scrapbooks:

  Mrs. Franklin F. Ferguson of Surf Rd., Cape Cottage, entertained at coffee Tuesday to meet Mrs. Gary Merrill, a newcomer to the Cape Shore.

  Pourers at the silver tea sponsored by the Waynflete Alumnae Association Thursday afternoon at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Gary Merrill on Ocean House Road will be Mrs. Kenneth C. M. Sills, Mrs. S. Allan Howes, Mrs. Howard R. Ives, and Miss Mildred Owen.

  The Merrills emceed the Community Chest’s twenty-fifth birthday party. Bette Merrill was seen attending a rehearsal of the South Portland Lion’s Club play The Red Mill. Mrs. Merrill made a theatrical appearance in the Portland Junior League Follies of 1954.15 She also assisted Mrs. William Kirkpatrick in applying makeup for the cast of the Waynflete Christmas Program on December 19, 1956; the pageant began at 11:00 a.m. under the direction of Mrs. Hugh L. Bond IV and featured Lord Waynflete, lords and ladies of the court, carolers, tumblers, shepherds, and Mary and Joseph, with angels supplied by grades 9, 10, and 11.16

  One of the scrapbooks contains a handwritten name tag for the Democratic State Convention, held March 23–24, 1956, in Brewer: “BetteD. Merrill, Cape Elizabeth, Me.” An accompanying newspaper photo shows Bette waving a Cumberland County convention placard.17

  The rural life appears to have affected the Merrills’ minds. They got into their heads the cockamamie plan of building a movie studio in Portland, the first production of which was to have been a little number called Angel Manager. They were scouting Catholic orphanages in Biddeford, Saco, and Lewiston as possible locations for the film, which was to be . . . well, a local newspaper reported the facts: “She said her husband would play the part of a wounded veteran and former baseball player who assists a nun, played by Miss Davis, in forming an orphanage baseball team.”18

  MARGOT MOSHER MERRILL—NAMED, of course, after Margo Channing—was born in January 1951 to an unmarried alcoholic who immediately put her up for adoption. Gary came to believe that the birth mother’s alcoholism contributed to Margot’s developmental problems, which only became evident over time; Bette wondered if the mother had taken drugs to induce an abortion. But at the time of her adoption within days of her birth, Margot was to all appearances a normal, healthy baby. “She was so beautiful that Gary and I scarcely could believe our good fortune,” Bette said. All was not quite so rosy, though. At the time of Margot’s adoption in 1951, Bette and B.D. were staying in Westport, Connecticut, with Bette’s friend Robin, now married to Albert “Brownie” Brown, a New York advertising executive; Merrill was filming Frogmen on Key West. “It was here that I got a call from Bette,” he wrote. “ ‘You’re the proud father of a beautiful baby girl.’ Our plan had been to adopt a boy next, then a girl, then a boy. So my response to her announcement was, ‘Wrong fucking sex.’ ”19

  The new parents began to notice problems early on, but a blend of acceptance and denial kept them from facing the extent of their infant daughter’s brain damage. As Bette described Margot’s behavior and their reactions, “She cried a great deal as a baby, but she cried differently than I remembered B.D. crying. But as we told each other, knowledgably enough, children differ. We were to remark this more and more frequently and with less and less conviction.”20

  Margot learned to run as any normal child would, but she ran unusually fast for a toddler. “She seemed driven,” Bette observed, though for a mother as driven as Bette was, that can’t have been all that odd. Once Bette left her in the car for a short time, and when she came back, Margot had stripped off all of her clothes. Bette and Gary’s tolerance of their children’s individuality turned out to be misguided in Margot’s case; it contributed to their failure to face the reality, let alone the extent, of Margot’s problems. Other children did things like this, they told themselves, but Margot somehow did them differently, more disturbingly.

  She was slow to learn to talk. At age two she didn’t have much of a vocabulary, and what she said she repeated: “Hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi . . .” “Five minutes after we had put her to bed she would be up shaking the crib bars and screaming,” Bette said, describing the sort of unrestrained rage that parents of a two-year-old might excuse from time to time but which would necessarily become more troubling the more it became routine. “I remember the day she tried to choke her kitten.”21

  Bette and Gary brought their second adopted child, Michael Woodman Merrill, directly home from the Los Angeles hospital in which he was born on February 5, 1952. Michael, whom they threatened to call Woody but mercifully never followed through, was a pretty baby and grew into a handsome man, having passed through a knock-’em-dead-blond-boy phase between the ages of five and sixteen. Bette described him at ten as “devastating,” and her scrapbooks have the photos to prove it.22

  “Compared to me he has turned out pretty square,” Mike Merrill’s father once observed—an understatement made even greater when one considers his parents’ volatile eccentricities; their regular absences and the family’s frequent uprootings (Hollywood, New York, Maine, Beverly Hills, New York again . . . ); and the multiplicity of schools to which he was sent, sometimes for as little as a few months.23 By all accounts Michael Merrill emerged unscathed from a difficult, unenviable childhood and grew into a stand-up fellow.

  Gary, Bette wrote, “claimed that I could study my lines, polish the silver, prepare dinner, and still discover in a rage that Michael had been wearing gym pants without knees when he had assured me that he didn’t need new ones.”24 The word that gives pause, of course, is rage. Over a boy’s torn sweats?

  In 1953, when Michael was one, the Merrills hired a nanny, Elsa “Coksie” Stokes. Coksie “no doubt took a psychological beating during the years she spent with us,” Gary Merrill later admitted, but she did give “Michael much of the mothering of which he was deprived. . . . Coksie said she couldn’t understand girls. Fortunately for Michael and me, she did understand men and boys, which offered security for Michael when I was away from home.”25

  The onus was certainly not solely on Bette. Gary was a heavy drinker and thus an absent father even when he was around. But in terms of a little boy’s needs, Gary got it in a way Bette didn’t. “When Michael went to school the year we moved to Maine, he came home after the first day crying,” Bette recalled. The reason: “I never believed that a five-year-old boy should wear long pants, and that day he was wearing shorts. And he was a new boy in school, with hair a beautiful golden blond. All these ingredients were definitely a problem for him. One of the boys called him a sissy and tried
to beat him up.” What James McCourt calls Davis’s “rectitude” in this case took the form of a steadfast but out-of-time belief in short pants for school-age boys, “I never believed” being a startling locution to employ when discussing little boys and long trousers. Having dressed B.D. with similarly religious rigor as her idea of a model child, Bette tried to do the same with Michael, but this time the results were disastrous. Still, it was Bette, not Gary, who taught Michael how to fight back—according to Bette, that is.26

  Snapshots from Michael’s childhood:

  “Our first family boat trip, Casco Bay, 1953”—a grumpy eighteen-month-old boy sits on his father’s lap on the deck of a sailboat.27

  “Daddy as Santa, 1954”—Gary making a slightly bizarre St. Nick with the requisite red jacket with white trim and a full white paste-on beard and an unusual black leather belt tied midway up his chest.28

  “Fall of 1954, when Mother visited us”—Michael and B.D. standing in the crook of a tree, with Ruthie standing next to a sweetly clowning Margot mimicking the photographer by holding an imaginary camera in front of her face.29

  Margot loved to play dress up; “the customary perplexed look in her eyes was dissipated by her excitement.” But then she began to pull out her little brother Michael’s hair. One day, Bette found Margot standing near the bar calmly watching toddler Michael staring at his bleeding hands and crying. There was broken glass all over the floor, Margot having destroyed the barware.

  Beginning to fear for Michael’s safety, Bette and Gary took the three-year-old Margot to Presbyterian Hospital in New York in 1954 for a week of diagnostic tests, at the end of which the doctors reported that Margot was brain damaged and had an IQ of 60. (An IQ of 65 or below places one in the lowest percentile of the population.) One of the physicians recommended the Lochland School, a home for the developmentally disabled located on Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Bette cried on the way home and told Gary they couldn’t send Margot away. Gary resisted the idea as well. So as Merrill described it later, “A little vest was made for her, which could be attached to the bed to keep her in, and when she finally understood that she was secure, unable to climb out of bed, she began to nap.”30 Ruthie, meanwhile, was coldly advocating that they just give Margot back to the adoption agency and start again with a fresh baby.

  When Margot’s harness proved to be ineffective in the long run, the Merrills invited the founder of Lochland, Florence Helene Stewart, to come to their house for a two-day visit, at the end of which Stewart gently laid out the facts.

  “The most difficult day of my life was the day I was dressing Margot, three years old, in a sailor suit and a sailor hat [and told her] about the lovely school she was going to,” Bette said. Gary escorted Margot to Lochland by plane; Bette stayed home with B.D. and Michael. “The setting was lovely,” Merrill later recalled—“a big old Victorian house on a sloping lawn near a lake. But God it was depressing.”31

  CHAPTER

  19

  ONSTAGE, ONSCREEN,

  AND ON TV

  IN THE SPRING OF 1952, BETTE, GARY, AND the children were still living near the heart of Hollywood in what Gary called “a terrific, old, wooden California-style house” at the corner of Camino Palmero and Franklin. The Los Angeles Times’s Radie Harris wasn’t nearly as impressed, dismissing the neighborhood as “unfashionable.”1 In any case, it was there that a friend of Gary’s, the theatrical designer Ralph Alswang, called from New York with an idea: his office mates, Jimmy Russo and Mike Ellis, wanted to produce a revue called Two’s Company. They wanted someone like Beatrice Lillie or Gertrude Lawrence or Mary Martin—none of whom they could get. Alswang suggested Bette. “I had been approached to follow Judy Garland into the Palace, and I gave it some serious thought,” Bette told Radie Harris in August after she signed on to Two’s Company. “I knew I didn’t want to do the usual ‘in-person’ appearance of reenacting scenes from my movies, nor did I want to do anything heavy and dramatic. I thought it would be fun to try a variety act—if I could get the right material. Famous last words!”

  “Vernon Duke played me the score he had written to Ogden Nash’s lyrics, and I adored it,” Davis went on. “Jerome Robbins, than whom there is none better, is going to stage the show.” Costumes would be done by Miles White. “We won’t come in until we’re sure it’s in perfect shape. That’s why we’re trying it out first in Detroit—far from the Sardi’s scuttlebutt.”2

  The Merrills left Los Angeles for New York in September and moved into a Beekman Place triplex. Bobby Davis came along. “Bless her heart,” Gary Merrill wrote—“always reliable in emergencies. In times of stress, Bette had a tendency to take out her frustrations on whomever she ran into first. Frequently this was Bobby, who, by her presence, enabled the children to be once removed from Bette’s short circuits.”3

  Bette and Gary invited everyone over to the triplex for cocktails to get acquainted. The evening appeared to go very well and eventually everyone left, except for Ralph Alswang, whereupon Bette abruptly announced that she couldn’t possibly work with Jerome Robbins. As Merrill later explained, Davis thought that Robbins would concentrate “on the ballet numbers and forget about her.”4

  Robbins stayed on, but tensions between him and Davis soon became obvious. “They were rehearsing a big production number based on Sadie Thompson from Somerset Maugham’s Rain,” recalled Sheldon Harnick, who wrote one of Two’s Company’s songs.

  It was a big musical number with Bette and other dancers and singers onstage. Jerome Robbins was trying to teach her a very simple dance step. Robbins. . . could be so severe with his people that many of them hated him. I was not one of them; I liked him a lot. But he created a lot of hostility in the company. So anyway, he was trying to teach Bette how to do this simple step, and finally he said, “Let me demonstrate it for you.”

  I think it was because of nervousness, but she just started to scream at him, “You’re trying to make me look like a horse’s ass, and I won’t stand for it!” And she stomped off-stage and went to her dressing room. I looked at the company, and because so many of them disliked Robbins, I could see them trying to conceal their giggles. They were very pleased by the whole thing. Mike Ellis came out and said, “Jerry, you have to go apologize to her.” Robbins said, “What did I do? I was just . . .” “You’ve got to go apologize to her.” It was not an easy thing for Robbins to do. But he did. He went offstage and shortly after that she came back out and began to rehearse again.

  Two’s Company set out on a preview tour in mid-October. The first stop was Detroit. “I only had one song in the show,” Harnick continued,

  and they didn’t pay for me to go out of town. I paid for myself so I could be there opening night. Davis had a song—her first song—called “Good Little Girls.” It was the kind of song like “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” where each additional chorus had an additional couple of lines in it, so it got very long. I never saw her get through the song. She always fumbled at some point—she blew it. So I was worried about it. The way she was introduced, she was in a magician’s cabinet, and the magician opened the door to the cabinet and showed the audience it was empty, and then he closed the door, waved his wand over it, said some magic words, he opened the door, and there was Bette. She stepped out of the cabinet, and everybody applauded. Then she went into “Good Little Girls.”

  As she got to about the third or fourth chorus, where it began to get longer, I detected a sense of hesitation. I thought, “Oh my God, she’s going to blow it again. She doesn’t know it well enough. And she’s nervous—it’s opening night.” And suddenly, she fainted. She just fell to the floor. I thought, “Oh, what is this? Is this new staging?”

  The audience thought that it was part of the show—until the lights went up and a stagehand came out in his shirtsleeves. Shortly after that, Mike Ellis came out and announced to the audience that Miss Davis had fainted. She claimed that the magician’s cabinet was so airless that she was suffocating, and
that’s why she fainted. But I’m sure it was because she got to the part where she knew she didn’t know the lyrics and just collapsed. It was very smart.

  Then she did something even smarter. Mike told the audience she needed just a little bit of rest and then she would go on with the show, and everybody applauded. He then went into the wings and brought her out, and she looked at the audience and said, “Well, you can’t say I didn’t fall for you,” which was charming.5

  Two’s Company still wasn’t working for reasons that went beyond Davis’s opening-night jitters, and Robbins asked her for permission to bring Joshua Logan and the writer Paul Osborn to Detroit to try to help. “The show started and continued, and I kept waiting for Bette Davis to appear,” Logan recalled in his memoirs. “Finally, the first act was over and she had still not appeared onstage once, although in the program she had been listed at least six times. I couldn’t decide whether I was more frustrated or infuriated.” During the intermission, Robbins explained to Logan what the matter was: “She won’t come on. She says her first-act scenes aren’t good enough, so she just told the stage manager to cut them tonight.”