Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  “In the second act she appeared three times and was marvelous each time,” Logan continueed. “She was all that I dreamed Bette Davis might be in a musical.” Logan and Osborn went backstage to see Bette after the show, “but the only one we got to see was Gary Merrill.” Davis refused to meet with them. So they headed back to New York.6

  Ogden Nash took a more felicitous tone.

  It happened in Detroit,

  And let who will be clever.

  The passion in my life came late,

  But Bette late than never.7

  The troupe moved to Pittsburgh, where the Press was unimpressed: Two’s Company “lacks two main essentials for a show of its type—comic punch and zingy tunes.” New cast members came and went; sketches were shuffled around or dropped altogether. The troupe moved to Boston.

  Enter, or reenter, John Murray Anderson, Bette’s flaming drama teacher from 1926. Anderson, who had directed many circuses over the years and harbored a particular fondness for freaks, was an inspired choice to pull Two’s Company together.8 “Murray was the king of revues,” said Harnick. “He had done many of them, and he’d been around for decades—a man of great taste. You always pictured him with a glass of champagne in his hand—or a martini.”9 Gary Merrill remembered that Anderson took one look at Two’s Company in its present form and pronounced it “more amateurish than a Princeton Triangle show.”10 Trimming, tweaking, cutting, reigniting ensued, all voiced with what Harnick called Anderson’s “aspish wit.” “What he did was miraculous,” Bette declared.11

  “I was never able to do the original opening song again,” Bette later admitted. “I was just plain frightened of it. . . . Jerome Robbins planned a new opening for me finally. We rehearsed it for a day or so and then put it in the show after the Boston opening. It was a success—‘Just Turn Me Loose on Broadway’ became my opening number.”12

  Collier’s covered the production with a photo spread: “In haglike garb, Miss Davis crouches before the footlights, brings down first-act curtain of Two’s Company singing rowdy hillbilly ballad.” The picture shows Bette looking like an Ozarks witch with long tangles of gray hair poking out from beneath a raggedy black hat. Another photo presents her in the hag getup sitting in a chair next to an “XXX” jug of corn likker. Another caption: “In song and dance parody ‘Roll Along Sadie,’ Bette Davis cuts loose in hip-swinging, gum-chewing take-off on tropic siren Sadie Thompson.” The photo shows Davis wearing a brilliant yellow hat and skirt set off by an orange and black feather boa and a long string of pearls.13

  After a delay of almost two weeks, Two’s Company opened at the Alvin Theater in New York on December 15. Congratulatory telegrams flew in: Irving Rapper; Joshua Logan; Kim Hunter; Janis Paige (“your number one fan”); Edith Head; “Ruthie, B.D. and Margot and Michael and Klaus and Tinker Belle and Aunt Bobby”; “Lenny Bernstein”; Joan Blondell; Yul Brynner; Richard Widmark; Don Siegel; Bob Taplinger; Jule Styne; Abe Burrows; Glenda Farrell; Kay Thompson; Kay Francis; “Lilli and Rex”; Gary (“All I can say is that I love you and I think you are wonderful in this show—your husband”); Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle; Michael Todd; and one most surprising one: “Believe me, I wish all that is fine for you tonight!—Miriam Hopkins.”14

  Walter Winchell went out of his way to plug Two’s Company. One of Bette’s scrapbook pages contains a total of nine Winchell columns praising the show. “One sourpuss fussed, ‘She can’t sing or dance,’” Winchell reported, but “that’s worth the price of admission!” “There is no coincidence in the two Ts in the star’s first name,” another column roared. “They stand for Terrific Trouper! There are two Ts in Bette and two in Talent.”15

  The New York run played to sold-out houses and mild if not downright hostile reviews. “The ovation was, to say the least, heartwarming. The reviews were bloodcurdling,” Davis wrote.16 Greta Garbo showed up to see the show one night, Marlene Dietrich another.

  Appearing as the high-profile star of a Broadway revue was taxing enough, but Davis felt an unusual exhaustion and kept popping Dexedrine to get her through the performances. She sought medical help, but her physicians found no reason for her lack of energy until, on March 7, one of her wisdom teeth became inflamed. She was examined by Art Carney’s dentist brother; Dr. Carney referred her to Dr. Stanley Behrman, who diagnosed her with osteomyelitis, an acute bone inflammation of the jaw. Two’s Company closed the following night.

  Walter Winchell promptly reported that Bette Davis had cancer.

  “Your recent statements about me are utterly without foundation,” an enraged Bette wired Winchell. “Have authorized my physician at NY hospital to answer any questions you may care to put to him, and to examine hospital’s and pathologist’s reports. I am sure you have no wish to hurt me. Accept my assurances that I do not have cancer. Please retract on broadcast. Bette Davis.”17 By way of a retraction, Winchell printed the telegram in his column.

  Two’s Company has developed a reputation as one of Bette Davis’s stinkers, a humiliation, a camp classic of the mean-spirited-cackle variety. But according to Sheldon Harnick, that’s unjustified. “I felt that the show was mixed. It wasn’t brilliant, but it had a number of things in it that were great, including three absolutely wonderful dances that Jerome Robbins choreographed. They starred Maria Karnilova, who later became our Golde in Fiddler on the Roof, and Nora Kaye. The dances alone would have made this show worth seeing. I guess they hadn’t found as much terrific material as they wanted, and consequently there were letdowns in the show—sketches or songs that didn’t work. But it was not a bad show. I think if she had been able to do the show, just her name alone would have kept it running, and they would have had a very good run. There was a lot that was entertaining.”18

  BOREDOM AND A dual need for cash and attention brought Davis back to Hollywood from Maine in 1955.

  “You must be out of your mind to work with Bette Davis,” Curtis Bernhardt told the director Henry Koster after reading in the trades in early 1955 that Koster and the producer Charles Brackett had cast Davis in The Virgin Queen. Bernhardt ranted in a way he never did in public: “I worked with her—the most impossible thing! I was ready for the insane asylum—for the sanitarium!” Koster wanted to know what exactly Davis had done to enrage Bernhardt, and the director of A Stolen Life and Payment on Demand answered, “Well, she argues and she’s impossible! Don’t take the picture! Tell them you don’t feel well or something, because if you like your health, you won’t work on a picture with Bette Davis.”19

  Davis invited Koster to tea, and Koster informed her that if there was to be trouble, he’d rather not do the picture at all. “She laughed,” Koster later reported, “and said, ‘If you know your business, there won’t be any arguments. But if I feel a director guides me into something where I think he’s absolutely wrong, then I’ll argue ’til my last drop of blood.’ ” Evidently Davis approved of Koster’s vision, because Koster came away from the experience saying that he and Davis “were the best of friends all the way through.”20

  She reserved her enmity for The Virgin Queen’s cinematographer, Charlie Clarke. According to Koster, Davis “couldn’t stand” him. She was justifiably annoyed by Clarke’s tendency to make what Koster called “funny remarks” during rehearsals. “She had had her head shaved” for the role, Koster said, and Clarke would say such things as ‘Gee, you scare me with that billiard-ball head.’ She got mad, because she was trying to get into the mood of the scene.”21 One can hardly blame her, though at the same time she’d had her hairline shaved back precisely to be unnerving.

  The Virgin Queen finds Elizabeth at forty-eight; Davis herself was on the brink of forty-seven in March 1955, when she shot her scenes. (She’d played the monarch at sixty in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.) The film concerns Walter Raleigh’s quest to convince Elizabeth to fund his exploration of the New World, Elizabeth’s unrequited love for Raleigh (played by Richard Todd), and her jealousy of one of her ladies-in-waiting (Joan Collins), who ev
entually marries the explorer. “It had been three years since I’d been in front of a camera,” Davis noted. “I was sure of nothing. Least of all myself. The first day was a nightmare for me. I heard Henry Koster, the director, say, ‘Okay, let’s try a take,’ and I heard my voice: ‘Mistress Throckmorton, is this your pet swine? I see you cast pearls before him.’ ”22 (Joan Collins is ticking off pieces of advice for Richard Todd using a strand of pearls to make her points. She breaks the strand and sends the pearls cascading to the floor just as Elizabeth enters.)

  Davis gives a thoughtful, muted performance, except for one self-defeating decision. The Virgin Queen gives the lie to an old saying: if it walks like a duck and acts like a duck, it isn’t a duck at all but rather Elizabeth I as portrayed by Bette Davis, whose bandy-legged waddle was compared by one critic to that of Groucho Marx. Another wag had her “walking not on one artificial leg but on three,” while two others compared her to “a saddle-sore jockey” and “an overhearty lacrosse captain in a red wig.”23 It’s a shame she felt the need to add such a pointless tic to an otherwise restrained rendition.

  Little Michael Merrill paid his first visit to a movie set on one of the eleven days Bette worked on The Virgin Queen. Gary brought him over to the Fox lot to see what his parents did for a living. “I was doing a scene in which I, as Queen Elizabeth, had to rant and rave at Sir Walter Raleigh, played by Richard Todd,” Davis wrote in Collier’s just before the film’s release. “After a few minutes of listening to my tirade, Mikey turned to Gary with a puzzled face and asked, ‘Why is Mummy yelling at that man instead of you?’ ”24

  The Virgin Queen received its world premiere in Portland, Maine, on July 22, 1955, a benefit for the Portland Children’s Theater, in which the Merrills had taken an interest. The newspaper magnate Jean Gannett threw a clambake in the afternoon. Guests included Bette’s Bad Sister costar Conrad Nagel; the comedian Tom Ewell, fresh from The Seven Year Itch; the former pinup girl Jinx Falkenberg; and the actress Faye Emerson.25 After the clams came cocktails at Witch Way, the Merrills’ rambling house on the shore, followed by a buffet dinner—cold cuts and potato salad—at the Eastland Hotel. (Why Bette and Gary dubbed their house Witch Way requires no explanation.)

  The film was to start at 9:00 p.m. at the Strand Theater, which held 1,900 people. A half an hour before showtime there were 10,000 people milling around in front of the Strand. Unfortunately, the planned gag of a fan blowing up Bette’s skirt when she introduced Tom Ewell failed to come off.26

  DAVIS FILMED FOUR more feature films in the 1950s: Richard Brooks’s The Catered Affair, with Ernest Borgnine, and Daniel Taradash’s Storm Center, both in 1956; and John Farrow’s John Paul Jones and the British film The Scapegoat, with Alec Guinness, both in 1959. She found more employment on television dramas, with decidedly mixed results. She was still big; it was the picture that got small, and for the most part Davis plays her television roles that way. They’re performances designed for the living room rather than the movie palace.

  Davis’s role in The 20th Century-Fox Hour’s “Crack-Up,” billed at the time (February 8, 1956) as marking her television drama debut, was actually just reused footage from Phone Call from a Stranger. But in the spring of 1957, Bette appeared in two new television dramas: General Electric Theatre’s “With Malice Toward One” and Schlitz Playhouse’s “For Better, for Worse.” The malice of the former’s title is wholly understandable: Bette plays an unpublished novelist, an accountant by day, who attends a writer’s conference only to have her beloved manuscript savaged by a pretentious and mean-spirited New York editor. So, following the lead of her fictional protagonist, she buys a gun and threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t publish it. “The editor was really the murderer,” Bette’s character thoughtfully explains. “He took the work I loved and threw it in my face like a piece of trash.” It’s an inspirational tale.

  “For Better, for Worse” features Davis as John Williams’s compulsively lying new wife, a former actress who finds that the simplest way out of a touchy situation is to make up a tale. First it’s half a bottle of scotch gone missing; later there’s the little matter of a hit-and-run accident. Ray Stricklyn plays Davis’s stepson; Stricklyn had played her son in The Catered Affair and went on later to become her friend and publicist.

  After making “Footnote on a Doll” for Ford Theatre (in which she played Dolley Madison) and “Stranded” for Telephone Time, both in 1957, Davis returned to General Electric Theatre in 1958 for “The Cold Touch,” which aired on April 13. Set in Hong Kong, filmed in Hollywood, it’s a convoluted drama about a kidnapped husband. “Oh, you’ll never get away with it—never!” Davis cries as she attempts to understand the plot. Highlights include Bette climbing out on an eighth-story ledge in high heels and a hilarious performance by Jonathan “Dr. Smith” Harris—in full Fu Manchu makeup—as “Hong Kong Sam,” a shady figure from whom Davis’s distraught character seeks assistance. Also in 1958 was Studio 57’s “Starmaker,” the tepid tale of a Broadway agent (Davis) and one of her clients, a nervous young actor whose father, a Barrymore-like ham, intimidates him into giving a terrible opening-night performance. Gary Merrill plays Davis’s playwright husband. “Starmaker” was designed as a pilot for a series called Paula, named after Davis’s character, but it wasn’t picked up. It might have ended even earlier: “The night before Gary and I started the actual filming on Paula,” Bette recalled, “our living room at the Chateau Marmont, where we were staying, caught on fire. Had not someone in a nearby room seen the smoke billowing out our window, we would have been asphyxiated by morning. I often wondered why I was saved.”27

  In early 1959, Davis filmed an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Called “Out There—Darkness,” the tale features Bette as an Upper East Side matron who falsely accuses her elevator operator of mugging her. It’s not one of the series’s best programs; the story is muddled, through no particular fault of the director, Paul Henreid. “It was the first time I directed Bette,” Henreid remembered. “She was remarkably easy to work with, intelligent and very quick to grasp what you had in mind.”28 Perhaps because of the weakness of the teleplay, Davis is even more prone than usual to delivering line readings eccentrically, laying peculiar stresses on odd words and breathing before she finishes her sentences. It was a strategic way of putting her personal stamp on a generic script, but it could veer toward the absurd. At one point, Eddie, the elevator operator, calls her “Ma’am.” “Oh, Ed-die,” Bette enunciates. “You make me feel so an-cient! Like some-thing out of Charles.”

  Breath.

  “Dickens!”

  The mind reels at the fact that Bette Davis appeared in three episodes of Wagon Train. In the legendary “Ella Lindstrom Story,” she plays a widowed mother of seven with an eighth on the way, except it turns out to be a malignant tumor. Legend has it that the episode begins with a covered wagon’s flap opening and a familiar face popping out, saying, “I yoost want to get my gir-ls to Californ-eye. A!” The reality is less camp but still fun. Ella is in fact the Boston-born widow of a Swede; Mr. Lindstrom died on the wagon train about a month before our story begins. As if the premise needed any more sentimentality, the last of the seven children, little Bo, is deaf and dumb on account of Ella’s having come down with the measles while carrying him. After a doctor in Dodge City diagnoses the supposedly eighth pregnancy as cancer, Bette asks Ward Bond, “How much time did . . . how much time did he say I would have to live?” “Five or six weeks, maybe less,” says Bond. “He was sure?” “He was sure,” at which point Davis hurls herself to the dusty ground and wails, “My babies! My babies!”

  The heroic but pragmatic Ella insists on going on with the wagon train and forces the kids to ingratiate themselves among various families who will then become their foster parents. She’s terribly upset over the fate of little Bo, however: “As for school, or boarding him out, I’d ra-ther see him dead!” (The critic Brigid Brophy captured this tendency well when she described Davis’s “unique method of
expelling the words as though snubbing them.”)29 Bond then acts as unlikely cupid for the oldest girl, Inga, and an attractive cowboy named James; they become engaged at the end and pledge to raise little Bo. There’s no death scene for Bette. We simply see the wagon train heading off into the distance at the end.

  Bette appeared on Wagon Train again in “The Elizabeth McQueeney Story,” playing what the script delicately calls “an impresario.” Yes—of a whorehouse. She introduces herself to Ward Bond as “Madame Elizabeth McQueeney” and says she’s heading out West to start “a girl’s finishing school.” Asked why girls would want to go out West, she flatly answers, “men.” “I am an impresario,” she announces; “any woman is an impresario if she chooses to entertain a man.” “You’ll be entertaining a lot of men,” Bond remarks. “I am a lot of woman,” Bette replies.

  She did a third episode of Wagon Train in 1961, “The Bettina May Story,” and an episode of The Virginian in 1962 in which she appears in the first shot as a bank teller, nose upturned in disgust at the robbers who are cleaning out the bank. Bette’s expression also registers as personal contempt for the sad fact that she’s stuck in yet another TV western.

  DAVIS’S DRINKING, IN play since the Farney years, deepened during her marriage to Merrill. One August early in the relationship Bette threw a surprise birthday party for Gary—a barbecue. At the end of the meal she presented him with an iced cardboard-prop cake that said, instead of “Happy Birthday,” “Fuck You!” “I think that was the party where Jim Backus and I wound up in Margot’s playpen,” Merrill managed to recall.30