Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

DAVIS FILMED THE NANNY at Elstree Studios in London in the spring of 1965. She threw a party for the press at the Ritz Hotel. (“Where else?” she quipped. “It’s just like home.”) Asked by a reporter why she continued to work so hard, Bette was bluntly bitter: “I’m a single woman with kids to bring up, and I’ve only made ten cents out of every dollar I’ve earned in this goddamn business.”50

  The Nanny is a thriller, the tale of a dysfunctional family: a histrionic mother (Wendy Craig) and a cruelly indifferent father (James Villiers) who try without much success to recover from the drowning death of their little girl, possibly at the hands of their disturbed son (William Dix). Davis plays the title character.

  “I got on with her very well,” Wendy Craig recalled.

  We were all very nervous, because we’d heard she could be quite tough. But when she met us and realized that we were all out to help her—that there was going to be no attempt at scene stealing or anything of that nature—she relaxed and began to enjoy it. And I think she really did enjoy it. She was very happy.

  She took being the nanny very seriously. She dressed right down to her underwear—she wore these big navy blue bloomers that came down to her knees with elastic at the bottom. Sometimes she used to lift up her skirt and do the can-can and show us her terrible old knickers!

  [The two actresses discussed technique.] She said you should go straight into a scene. You don’t have to muck around behind the scenery trying to get into the mood, but instead just go instantly into what you’ve got to do. It was something she did. She didn’t do the Method thing of working herself up into a state before she could do a scene but rather went straight into it.51

  Michael Merrill came over for a visit while Davis was shooting The Nanny, and one day Bette and her son took in a greyhound race at White City Stadium. Bette put all her hope on a dog called I’m Crazy. As one reporter described it, “There was pandemonium in the box. Avocado pears and prawn cocktails positively wilted under a din of decibels as La Davis screamed ‘I’m Crazy!’ ” The dog won, and Bette collected £16 5s.52

  While Davis was in England, John Gielgud asked her if she’d like to do a play with him; she suggested a revival of Design for Living, with Gielgud as the husband and Michael Redgrave as the lover.53 But it didn’t work out, and she returned from England to do an episode of Gunsmoke. “The Jailer” aired on October 1, 1965. The following week she gamely appeared on The Milton Berle Variety Show in a skit called “The Maltese Chicken.”54

  DAVIS RETURNED TO Europe in 1968 to make The Anniversary for Hammer Films. Jimmy Sangster, who wrote and produced The Nanny, performed the same functions for The Anniversary. “Oh, I just adore that film,” Davis told Lawrence O’Toole. “This is a woman who puts her glass eye on the pillow when her son is going to bed with his new girlfriend. Oh, she was an adorable woman. But they were all idiots. Weak nothings. One son is definitely homo. And he loved women’s underwear. Oh, it’s a fun picture.”55 In point of fact, though, the homo son is not a homo. He does, however, love women’s underwear. Bette clearly failed to appreciate the distinction.

  “I was a very young director,” Alvin Rakoff reflected,

  and she was certainly the alpha female—very dominant. That sort of star finds it very difficult when the director comes along. With an alpha male directing an alpha male, you get conflict, but usually it’s resolved. To carry on the analogy, which is wearing thin: the alpha male meeting the alpha female can result in trouble.

  When we first met we got on very well. We had lots of dinners together at the Brown Derby. She couldn’t believe some of the films I saw. She kept saying, “How old are you?” I’d say, “I was five then, or six.” The Bride Came C.O.D.—she was intrigued that I’d seen it. We went through various scenes; she was taken aback that I could remember them. The scene where she smells pickles on Cagney’s breath—she was amazed that I could recall it. We talked about Mr. Skeffington. We talked about Claude Rains a great deal.

  She was worried about her accent. I said, “You played the queen in Elizabeth and Essex. I’ve seen your work, and I know you can do an English accent. Don’t worry about it.”

  Still, a fly flew all but unnoticed into the ointment. “On the night we met in Hollywood she immediately said to me that I reminded her of Gary Merrill. I took it as a ‘how nice’ sort of thing. I should have taken it as an omen.” The relationship deteriorated when they met again in London before filming began. In the script, said Rakoff,

  her son’s girlfriend (played by Elaine Taylor) doesn’t like revealing her ears because she thinks they’re not what the world demands in terms of beautiful ears. A psychological hangup about some part of your anatomy is fairly common, but Bette insisted that the ears be scarred. And so the ears were duly scarred. I protested like hell, but they were disfigured. I kept saying, “It isn’t necessary—It’s a psychological hangup.” But Bette insisted. . . . It was an old Hollywoodjoke. When the poor actress arrived on the set with the disfigured ears, Bette said, “Oh, aren’t they horrible! Cover them up with your hair!” I knew then that we were in for some fun and games.

  The producers did say, when we first started to disagree with each other, “In the event of a row, Alvin, you’re not going to be the survivor.” And the row did happen. The megastar and the young director have a row, and the megastar wins. It’s not really very surprising when you think about it.

  Rakoff was replaced with Roy Ward Baker after only a week. “I was on the floor shooting and was told to go see Jimmy Sangster,” Rakoff said. “[Sangster informed me] that Miss Davis was not coming on the set as long as I was there. I asked if I could see her and was told she didn’t want to see me. So I was driven home.”56

  Susan Sontag famously argued that camp was failed seriousness, but The Anniversary is failed camp—a metafailure. It supposes itself to be sickly amusing, but its own self-consciousness kills it. Mrs. Taggart (Davis, playing to the rafters) utters this foul remark: “Shirley, my dear, would you mind sitting somewhere else. Body odor offends me.” She’s wearing the fuschia eye patch for that one, a touch we’re expected to find droll. To her shame-filled transvestite son, Mrs. Taggart advises, “You can’t go to dinner dressed like that. You know nylon brings you out in a rash.” Haw! To son Thomas she declares, “If I could stuff you I’d put you in that cabinet there, with all my other beautiful po-sessions. And that’s love.” That one’s delivered with the black patch.

  It wasn’t a good dramatic decision for Bette to screech the hymn “Rock of Ages” in a forcedly off-key manner. Given the thudding obviousness of The Anniversary, let alone Davis’s singing voice, she scarcely needed to force anything. The film concludes with Bette laughing maniacally in freeze frame while playing with a working model of the Manneken Pis.

  CHAPTER

  22

  LOSSES

  FAILED FILM PROJECTS, PLAYS SHE DE-clined, television series that didn’t work out; the chronicle of things Bette Davis didn’t do after All About Eve is as fascinating as what she did. In April 1955, for instance, she and Paul Henreid discussed remaking The Affairs of Anatole, Gloria Swanson’s 1921 comedy-drama based on an Arthur Schnitzler play. Henreid owned the rights, which Max Ophüls and, later, Joseph Mankiewicz had each tried to buy. Henreid saw it as a vehicle for the Merrills, with Gary playing Anatole and Bette his wife. But only a month later, Henreid’s interest turned instead to two other projects, each with madness at its core: The Bad Seed, the tale of a sociopathic child; and The Stubborn Wood, Emily Harvin’s autobiographical account of her time in a women’s asylum.1 Mervyn LeRoy ended up making The Bad Seed; Henreid went through two screenwriters on The Stubborn Wood over the course of a year and a half, but it never got farther off the ground.

  Bette considered returning to Broadway in 1957 for George Roy Hill’s adaptation of Look Homeward, Angel, but Hill cast Jo Van Fleet instead.2

  Gore Vidal, who wrote the screenplay for Suddenly Last Summer, Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1959 adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play
, pushed the idea of casting Bette as Mrs. Venable with Joanne Woodward as Cathy, the role ultimately taken by Elizabeth Taylor. “I lost on both parties,” Vidal stated. “Shrewd Sam [Spiegel, the producer]—he said, ‘Baby, Davis has played it, Hepburn hasn’t.’ In other words, you would know that Bette Davis would cut out the girl’s brain, and you wouldn’t think that Katharine Hepburn—such a healthy person—would.”3

  Also around that time John Huston offered Davis the role of Mrs. Zachary in The Unforgiven, but she turned it down; she wasn’t ready to admit she was old enough to play Burt Lancaster’s mother.4

  She was seriously considered for the role of Martha in the film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. “Let’s get the story straight,” Edward Albee declared.

  When I went out to talk to Jack Warner, who wanted to buy Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, my major interest was, “Who do you plan to put in it?” I knew, even then, that when you sell a play to Hollywood you don’t retain any rights in casting or anything—they do what they want with it. They could have made it a swimming flick for Esther Williams—which would have been interesting. And I remember Jack Warner saying to me, “I’m buying your play for Bette Davis and James Mason.” I remember him saying that to me. And I said, “Well, that sounds pretty good to me.” Bette was exactly the right age. And James Mason seemed absolutely right. I was delighted, and I signed the deal.

  Now we all know about verbal agreements not being worth the paper they’re written on. The next thing I knew, Davis and Mason had become Burton and Taylor.

  I remember talking to [Davis] afterward, and I got the impression—though she was drunk and I was drunk when we were talking—that she thought she had the role. And I think it would have been extraordinary [with Davis]—in a somewhat different way, of course. We wouldn’t have had the two superstars, and that problem that you have when you have a couple like Burton and Taylor: is it Burton and Taylor up there, or is it the characters? There were such similarities between Burton and Taylor’s home life and George and Martha’s, as we read in the newspaper gossip columns, and it’s hard to know what’s being acted up there. I think with Mason and Davis you would have had a less flashy and ultimately, I think, a deeper film. And gee, to have watched Bette Davis do that Bette Davis imitation in the first scene—that would have been so wonderful. To have her do a Bette Davis imitation on purpose, rather than later, when she did them without intending to.5

  Davis doing Davis in Albee makes great sense, but one can only pause in wonder at the revelation that she was one of Walt Disney’s first choices for the role of Mary Poppins.6

  In the mid-1960s, Bette was offered what would have been a landmark role onstage, but she declined it. The agent Lionel Larner tells the tale:

  They were looking for a replacement for Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, and I suggested Bette Davis. I thought it was an exciting and challenging idea. The head of my department dismissed it, saying “She’ll never do it, and [the producer] David Merrick will never go for it.” The next thing I knew, I got a call from David Merrick, saying “was I serious?” And I said, “Very.” He said, “Well, I am seriously interested, and I’d like to pursue it.” She would have made it her own, and she would have had a success. It would have done phenomenal business, and Merrick was smart enough to know that.

  I forwarded David Merrick’s interest to her agent, Martin Baum, who called me and said that Miss Davis wanted to meet me. We went out for dinner to talk about it. We went to a place called The Leopard. It was a townhouse in the East 50s—very elegant. The lady who owned it was an Italian princess named Goia Cook. She’d been married to an actor, Donald Cook. [Cook appears with Davis in The Man Who Played God.] When we arrived, she took Bette Davis’s coat, and she kept coming over to chat. Miss Davis got very irritated and said, “Who is that hat check girl?” I said, “Miss Davis, she’s not the hat check girl. She’s the owner of the restaurant, and she’s a princess.” That didn’t wash. As far as Bette was concerned, she was the hat check girl.

  I asked for the wine list and ordered wine. Apparently that was an enormous break-through. She was having dinner with some friends, including [her lawyer] Harold Schiff, the following night, and she said to me, “Oh thank God! You ordered wine! I know [Schiff] won’t order wine. It’s so nice to go out with a young man who takes control.” At the end of the dinner, she said I could bring Gower Champion to see her. [Champion was the director and choreographer of Hello, Dolly!]

  She was very nice to Gower, though she treated him rather like a schoolboy. She told him she’d seen the play, she’d loved it, she loved his work, she loved him, and then she said, “But I’m not going to do your musical. It’s a fifteen-minute show. But I would like to work with you some other time. Good afternoon.” And that was that. She thought it was a fifteen-minute show—the “Hello, Dolly!” number. My feeling was, “but what a fifteen minutes it would have been.”7

  The Killing of Sister George was another no-go for Davis. “The producers told me that they were going to make a movie of it,” Dame Eileen Atkins remembered.

  And they said, “We’re not going to use Beryl Reid [who costarred with Atkins on Broadway], but we want to use you, and we want a big American Hollywood star for Beryl’s part.” Katharine Hepburn turned it down out of hand. I was also supposed to meet Angela Lansbury, only it never got far—she also turned it down out of hand. The only person who didn’t turn it down out of hand was Bette Davis. They wanted her to meet me to see if she would like to work with me.

  It was at a party. My producers brought me over. Andy Warhol was standing there as well. [As Atkins approached, Bette let fly a zinger:] She looked at Andy Warhol and said, “Why the hell don’t you do something about your skin?”

  I was just stunned that anyone could be that rude. But the thing was, I can remember thinking that she was quite right to be rude to Andy Warhol.

  I think Bette Davis made a big mistake by not doing The Killing of Sister George. I think she’d have been wonderful in the part. But none of them would play a lesbian. I think they all thought they’d ruin their reputations by playing a fully blown, male-type lesbian. She was an out-and-out “Eat my cigar! Drink my bathwater!” lesbian, and they got very nervous. In the end they had to have Beryl, so therefore they had to find a star for my part.8

  Susannah York took Atkins’s role in the movie, which was directed by Robert Aldrich.

  IN 1965, DAVIS filmed a pilot for a sitcom series to be called The Decorator. The gimmick, apart from Bette herself, was that her character, Liz, moves into her clients’ homes and solves their personal problems while redesigning their rooms—a blend of June Bride’s Linda Gilman with a more overtly benign Sheridan Whiteside from The Man Who Came to Dinner. Mary Wickes played Liz’s wisecracking assistant, Viola. In the first (and only) episode, we meet Liz in the darkened bedroom of her chic Malibu beach house. Viola is trying to rouse her from a hangover. “My head feels like an old combat boot,” Liz groans. “It was a di-vine party. I liked everything about it after the second martini—especially something British with a lot of gray going for it in the temples.” Her new client soon shows up—an Oklahoma judge played by Ed Begley—and before the half hour is over, Liz has defied the judge’s wishes by convincing his daughter to sneak away by bus and elope with her hunky but impoverished boyfriend. We later learn that Liz has sent them to honeymoon at her own house in Malibu, where, in the final scene, Mary Wickes delivers a line seemingly written with the express purpose of propelling a mouthful of coffee out of one’s nose: “It was quite unnerving having to meet your honeymooners at the terminal. All those sailors, my dear! I’ve never been in a bus station in my life!”

  The end credits go a long way toward explaining how that line got there. Before he wrote The Boys in the Band in the late 1960s, the playwright Mart Crowley was working as Natalie Wood’s secretary. As the writer Dominick Dunne told the critic Michael Giltz, “I was the vice-president of Four Star, this studio owned by Charles B
oyer, Dick Powell and David Niven—three of the classiest guys ever in Hollywood.” [The fourth star was Ida Lupino.] “The script came in by a famous writer and she [Davis] hated it—she hated it. We were supposed to start shooting two days hence, and I went to Mart Crowley because he’s hilarious and camp and I said, ‘Mart, rewrite this.’ He had written before; he wasn’t going to be a secretary to Natalie forever. And he rewrote it, and it was so hilarious and so exactly right for Bette Davis. It was a great pilot but it didn’t sell.”9

  Dunne was overly generous in calling the original scriptwriter “famous.” Cy Howard is best known for having written My Friend Irma. But he was correct in his assessment of The Decorator. If one can ignore the distracting canned laugh track, the show is genuinely amusing. Most remarkable of all is Davis’s relaxed, in-your-living-room performance. Still, within the confines of a 1960s sitcom on the small screen, her Liz is certainly flamboyant. In the precredits sequence, the designer—hiding behind fashionably oversized sunglasses, still trying to get over the hangover—charmingly bullies a little girl into adding a moat to the sandcastle the child has built on the beach outside Liz’s fabulous house. “I don’t need a decorator,” the girl pouts. “Don’t be absurd,” the snood-wearing Bette snaps. “Ehhh-vrybody needs a decorator!”

  Mart Crowley remembered many entertaining details:10 “The lot itself had been Republic Studios. Outside my office window were Trigger’s hoofprints, just to let me know where I was.

  “I wrote the assistant as a man,” Crowley casually dropped. “I suggested Paul Lynde. She thought it was funny, but the network said, ‘No way are we having a gay character on the screen.’ They didn’t even call him gay; they called him much worse things. I just did it to take the edge off the Eve-Arden of it all, you know? Yet another wisecracking sidekick?”