Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  As for the sailors-at-the-bus-station line, Crowley could barely believe it either. “Good God! What was the state of my brain by the time I got to that line? It’s funny for a woman who has a profile that looks like it belongs on a nickel to say it, but it would have been hilarious for Paul Lynde.”

  The Decorator pilot was actually shot, clearly at Davis’s insistence, by her favorite Warner Bros. cinematographer, Ernie Haller. And of course she brought in her own makeup person—a man who specialized in temporary rejuvenation. As Crowley recalled:

  She had a very famous makeup man, Gene Hibbs, who invented the glue-on tabs with the hooks in them. You smash all the hair down under a wig cap, then glue these awful gauzes with hooks in them all around, and then attach rubber bands over the top and back of the head and the neck to pull everything back, and then you slap a wig on top of it.

  The set was tense as hell, because she was just not moving as fast as you have to move in television. It was going over schedule and over budget. She was slow to get out of the dressing room; she was slow between shots. She was used to the director saying “Cut” and then they’d light for an hour. In TV, they’re ready to go in ten minutes, and she just could not work at that pace. [Her attitude was] “I’m gonna show them. I’ll be out when I’m ready—don’t knock on that door one more time.” It’s like Judy Garland’s line in I Could Go On Singing: someone says, “Jenny, Jenny, they’ve been waiting an hour,” and Judy screams, “I don’t care if they’re fasting!”

  She was very disappointed that The Decorator didn’t go. No, not disappointed—hurt. Very hurt.

  The Viola character in The Decorator didn’t come by her name accidently. “Bette had a manager called Violla Rubber,” Lionel Larner explained.

  Violla was tied into all her deals. [If they wanted Bette Davis,] they also had to take Violla Rubber for $400 a week. Martin Baum would say to me, “Trust me. She’ll earn her money—it will be worth it.”

  She was like a gym mistress—a sort of old maid British spinster. She wore tweed skirts and brogue shoes like those ladies you see in British movies of the 1940s with feathers in their hats going ’round the park. Violla was also kind of tricky. She was manipulative—that would be the word. A little two-faced and manipulative. And controlling. She had two sides: one that Miss Davis would see, and one that other people would see.11

  Alvin Rakoff remembered Violla Rubber well from his initial meeting with Bette about The Anniversary. “Violla was very much her protector; that’s what she was there for. Every time I said something that she thought Bette would disagree with, Violla would kick me under the table. I left that evening with a lot of bruises.”12

  BETTE’S CLOSEST FRIENDSHIPS were both enduring and strained in equal measure. Her friends were loyal to her, by and large, though they had to put up with a lot, particularly when alcohol came into play. “She wasn’t the nicest person to be friends with,” Vik Green-field admitted. “It was fine when she was fine, but if she felt lousy or mean, she took it out on you. As a friend of mine once said, ‘Bette defies friendship.’ She defied it. How she had any friends I don’t know, to be quite honest.”13

  Davis’s oldest friend was Robin Brown—the former Marie Simpson, from West Virginia via Ogunquit. “I knew Robin very well,” Greenfield said. “She was a very nice woman. Quiet, intelligent, small—she was only about 5’2”.” Robin’s size may have helped; she could look Bette directly in the eye. “Robin was a very good friend to Bette. And Bette wasn’t awfully nice to her at times. Her husband, Albert Brown—everybody called him ‘Brownie’—was a very nice man. Bette always behaved herself more when Brownie was around. Robin told me once that she used to say to Brownie, ‘We’re going to dinner with Bette tonight,’ and he’d say, ‘Do we have to?’ You had to guard every word you said around her. It was tough.”

  “Robin spent a lot of time with her over the years,” said Brown’s sister, Reggie Schwartzwalder (the widow of the legendary Syracuse football coach Ben Schwartzwalder). “She was always very cautious about what she said about Bette; she never admitted anything that wasn’t admirable about her.”14

  “My sister was a private nurse,” Greenfield continued.

  Bette asked her to nurse her after the mastectomy. I said to Stephanie, “Don’t do it. Don’t do it. You’ll rue the day.” And of course she rued the day. Bette wouldn’t allow Stephanie to ring her husband from the hospital. Robin asked Stephanie if she should come up and see Bette, and Stephanie said of course. When Robin got there, Bette shrieked at her: “What are you doing here? Get out!” That’s to her oldest friend in the world.

  They fell out when Bette, after the operation, went up to Connecticut to stay with Robin in her house, and she accused Robin of trying to get rid of her by not setting the heat high enough. That more or less ended the friendship.

  The actress Ellen Hanley, who had met Bette during the run of Two’s Company (John Murray Anderson brought her into the show), became friendly again with Bette when they both lived in western Connecticut in the late 1960s and ’70s. Hanley saw the best in Bette: “She was very proud of being a Yankee. She loved American holidays, so every time there was a holiday like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, she wanted to do things. She loved to cook and be a homemaker. Her homes were beautiful; everything was lovely, lovely. I still use some of her recipes. There’s a meatloaf: it’s got poultry seasoning in it, and red wine and eggs and all that stuff.”15

  Hanley fondly remembered visiting Twin Bridges, the Westport house Bette lived in from 1965 to 1973, and Bette’s contribution to the surrounding landscape. A river ran behind the house, but a merely natural body of water wasn’t enough for the industrious Davis. As Hanley noted, “She and Vik Greenfield had physically moved rocks and stones and made a swimming hole there. My kids loved to go there.”

  But there was tension, too, and it usually appeared with the first drink of the day. “I saw that if she had a drink at lunch—I think it was screwdrivers she liked to have at lunch—there would be an instant personality change. Not into any kind of meanness at that point. It’s difficult to describe. My point is that she would have a snap change when she drank. But she was still the Bette I knew and loved.

  “She was getting older, and her stardom days were over—that had to be difficult. It caused her a lot of anxiety.”

  Hanley described the day Bette was left at Hanley’s place while Hanley helped her brother move into a new house nearby. “When we got back, Bette was annoyed with me because we had been gone so long and she wasn’t included. While we were gone, she had emptied my food closet and had gone through all my spices and said to my daughter, ‘Why does your mother have two jars of rosemary? She only needs one!’ She went through all kinds of things and cleaned out my closet. I was very annoyed. It was noontime, and I think she’d had a drink or two.”

  It was to Ellen Hanley that Bette turned at a particularly dark moment in the early 1970s. It’s a story Hanley never before told anyone out-side her immediate family, and it goes a long way toward explaining the increasing bitterness and rage that Bette felt—and expressed—from that point on. “One morning in 1973 she called me [wanting] to know if I could come down and be with her. She said she had to do something, and she didn’t want to be alone to do it. I said, ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ ” Someone had sent Bette a liquor-sized carton of letters written over many years by Ruthie to a friend—one of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sisters. The box had been found in the attic by the new owners of the Millay sister’s house in Maine, and they thought that Bette would want them.

  According to Hanley, Bette was terrified of what she would find in that carton.

  The closer it came to arriving, the more frightened she got. Their relationship must have been very complicated, but you never got an inkling of that from Bette, really. She never said a word against her mother—and we talked about a lot of things over the years. She never said, “Ugh, my mother was this, my mother was that.” Never. Actually, sh
e rarely talked about Ruthie.

  It was a very upsetting morning. It was really frightening for her to open that box. I said to her, “Do you want me to open it?” and she said, “No. I will open it.” And then she started reading the letters to me. Bette was extremely devastated. Some of them were just about what Ruthie was doing that week, but there were others of a sarcastic nature. She wrote as though Bette was a chore and a pain, calling her “the Queen Bee” and other things. Bette was so upset. She never came across this before—that her mother was writing so critically about her and in such a derogatory sense to someone she herself didn’t know.

  She was devastated, and hurt, and angry. In the midst of it she fixed herself a screwdriver. She was furious—absolutely furious. The whole thing came falling in on her that morning. She looked across the room at me and screamed, “Can you believe this? Can you believe this?! After all I did for her!”

  LATER THAT YEAR, Bette Davis sat for several portrait sessions with Don Bachardy. The first occurred in Westport on November 1, several weeks after Davis met Bachardy at a party thrown by Roddy McDowall in Hollywood. “I realized right away that if I was going to get on with her, if I wasn’t going to become one of her victims, I had to stand up to her,” Bachardy remembered.16 “She had contempt for people who gave way to her.” Bachardy’s stance didn’t stop Davis from issuing an ultimatum for the second sitting; she gave him precisely one hour and not a minute more. “She did relent,” Bachardy reported. She saw that I was trying to keep to the limitation she set, and she said, ‘Well, you know, you can go on working.’ But she didn’t tell me soon enough.

  “I didn’t dare to ask her to look directly at me because, when I began to peer into her face, I saw her intense shyness and uncertainty. She hides her vulnerability with an outward show of strength and independence, but I suspect that if anyone made the mistake of cowering before her, she would be merciless.”

  There was initial tension—“she managed to be restless and rigid”—but she loosened up with cigarettes and drinks. But the liquor continued to loosen her beyond what Bachardy needed; it killed her concentration. She began chatting and moving her head constantly. “As I gradually lost control of my drawing, it became a sad, almost mournful version of her,” Bachardy noted. Bette thought it captured her well: “That’s the best,” she told the artist.

  “There was one drawing of her that she wouldn’t sign—which was so odd coming from Bette Davis, who was so eager to make a grotesque out of herself for a part, and in fact she was likely to go way too far. I was surprised that she would object to the second drawing as ‘cruel,’ but it was just a bit more factual than the other two I did that day.”

  Davis then proceeded to prepare one of her prized homemade dinners: a frozen chicken pot pie and canned beets, which she boiled for half an hour before serving.

  “Drink eased her shyness, and it also brought out her susceptibility to self-pity,” said Bachardy. “She complained of loneliness but cited her own perversity as the cause. She was often too impatient to endure having other people around her, and she sent them away, only to find that she was alone again. Narrowing her eyes and fixing them on a slim white cat sleeping on a kitchen chair, she exclaimed: ‘I never thought I’d wind up with a cat!’

  “I’d imagined that in her movies she exaggerated herself for the camera. Now I realized she was keeping herself down.”

  Another sitting took place on December 4, at Chuck Pollack’s house on North Orlando Drive in West Hollywood. “I kept my drawing simple and was determined not to worry about a flattering likeness. But the uncompromising face that gradually formed on the paper scared me.” The drawing shows precisely the steely look masking vulnerability that Bachardy describes, the familiar painted mouth a dark crescent, the set jaw, the heavy, weary eyes. Davis took one look at the rendering and declared, “Yup—that’s the old bag.”

  The sittings went well enough for Bachardy to invite Davis to dinner with him and his lover, Christopher Isherwood. But she turned him down. “I think she was, like a lot of bullies, also a coward,” Bachardy reflected. “I think she was scared of meeting Chris—of being in company that might outdistance her.” There was no reason to think that Isher-wood would have been anything less than friendly to her. “He wasn’t a combative person, but she most certainly was. I think she was just afraid of meeting a literary figure who might make demands on her—I mean, just asking her what she’d read lately. She took cover when she felt threatened, and she didn’t have any idea what he was like, and rather than find out, she just refused to come.”

  “THEY SHOULD HAVE changed the title to The Corn Was Green,” Emlyn Williams quipped of the ill-fated Miss Moffat, Joshua Logan’s 1974 musical adaptation of Williams’s play.17 Originally planned for Mary Martin, Miss Moffat became a Bette Davis vehicle after Martin’s husband, Richard Halliday, died suddenly and Martin withdrew. Logan sent a script to Katharine Hepburn, who, according to Logan, “felt it wasn’t right for her.”18 (Hepburn did go on to film George Cukor’s nonmusical film adaptation of The Corn Is Green in 1979.) Williams, Logan, and the composer Albert Hague then drove to Weston, Connecticut, where Davis was living in a house she called “My Bailiwick,” and pitched the idea to Davis, who agreed to do it after hearing the songs. “She thought it was her answer to Katharine Hepburn doing Coco,” Chuck Pollack explained.19

  The show’s topical, mid-1970s gimmick was to shift the setting from the Welsh mining town to the South, and to turn Morgan Evans into a young African-American. Davis was more than interested. “We had numbers of conferences, talks on the phone, and I began to realize her true brilliance, her originality of thought,” Logan wrote in his memoirs.20

  Logan’s account of the tanking of Miss Moffat is credible, albeit in a self-serving way. He begins by insisting that he cast Bette Davis in a musical and expected her to speak her songs the way Rex Harrison did in My Fair Lady, but by his own account he didn’t tell Davis about this strategy until well into the show’s development—whereupon, to Logan’s apparent astonishment, Davis responded contrarily and testily. She insisted on singing, he reported.

  Two weeks into rehearsals she changed her mind. One of her numbers was called “The Words Unspoken Are the Ones That Matter.” “Without any warning, she began to act the song—gave it the full Bette Davis hot talent—and the cast and I were moved to tears and applause. . . . None of us could have believed then that she would never perform it that way again.”

  When Miss Moffat was ready for its first run-through, Logan invited more than a dozen people to come and watch, including some of the show’s investors. The problem was, he didn’t bother to inform his notoriously high-strung star. Davis reacted poorly to the surprise audience and, no surprise, ended up giving a terrible performance.

  That’s when the first hysterical symptoms appeared: Bette started walking around with a pronounced limp. The next day she saw a doctor, who suspected a slipped disk and had her check into Columbia Presbyterian. “As it turned out, we never really found what was causing her pain,” Logan noted, unable to imagine that one source might have been himself.

  Davis’s doctors put her in traction for three weeks, but after a few days she called Logan, invited him to the hospital for a visit, and told him that she wanted to continue with the show. The hospital actually permitted them to schlep a piano into her room so she could work on her songs.

  Rehearsals continued without the show’s star for another week, after which the company took a two-week break before setting up shop in Philadelphia for the first tryouts. Bette, released from the hospital, was able to perform the first preview as scheduled on a Friday night in early October. As Logan described it, she “entered without her script for the first time and got an ovation at the end of the performance that I had never heard before for anyone. The entire audience rose as one, calling out, applauding, whistling, cheering, and they would have gone on for an hour had she allowed them to. But she bowed slightly and left the stage, only to be f
orced to return three or four times before they would quiet down. It was almost like a revivalist meeting.”

  Davis gave another great performance on Saturday. “Her music was handled in a much better way,” according to Logan. “She spoke a bit, sang a bit, spoke a bit, sang a bit, close to the way we had agreed.” Robbie Lantz agrees that Davis was on target in Miss Moffat: “I saw it in Philadelphia. She was good. She was always good. She was sometimes over the top—she needed a good director—but she was unendingly interesting.”21

  But, Logan claimed, Miss Moffat’s opening night—Monday, October 7, 1974—was disastrous owing to an acute attack of stage fright. Davis mumbled lines and repeated lyrics or skipped them altogether, he writes. “She forgot dialogue she had never forgotten before, then giddily repeated what she had just said. At one point she turned to the audience and said, to our horror, ‘How can I play this scene? Morgan Evans is supposed to be onstage. Morgan Evans, get out here!’ ” Dorian Hare-wood, playing Morgan, is said to have rushed onto the stage “prematurely, as he knew, and a surprised Bette then turned to the audience and said, ‘I was wrong. I want you to know that. It wasn’t his fault.’ The audience, under her spell, cheered and applauded and laughed all through it, forgiving, even enjoying, any slip, any mistake. Bette went on. ‘It was my own stupid fault, and Dorian had nothing to do with it. Go back, Morgan, and we’ll start over.’ ”

  Later in the show, a child actor, thinking that she needed help, whispered one of her lines to her. “Don’t you tell me my line!” Bette shouted at the kid. “I know it! You’re a naughty little boy!”

  Things improved, however, climaxing on Thursday evening with a truly magnificent performance. Logan went backstage to see her after the final curtain and found her “in a state of euphoria. The audience could always get her into this mood. In her dressing room she told me how much she loved the play, how she wanted to tour it all year and then play at least a year in New York and a year in London, and she said, ‘And then we’ll make the picture. We’ll make this whole picture all over again, with music.’ ”