Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  At 6 o’clock precisely—we had not gotten anywhere near finishing—she summoned me over and said, “Now, look. I could get up and leave—right now—and that would screw up your entire schedule. But I’m not going to. Because I think you deserve to finish this scene. However. I do not want those men over there”—she pointed to the producers, who were in a huddle—“I don’t want them to think I am doing them any favors.” And, you know, at exactly 10 o’clock she finished.

  She knew her lights; she knew her situation. She even said to me, “The right side of my face is not my best side because it’s falling down. If you’d be kind enough to ask the cameraman to be aware of that, and I’ll also talk to him.” She would walk on the set and say, “I love it, Tony [Tony Imi, the cinematographer]—that’s great. Just help me with a little bit of light over here, and there.” That’s a lady who knew her art.

  There are long-standing rumors that Davis was difficult on the set, especially to Angela Lansbury, but that wasn’t the case, said Hussein.

  If ever there was a more difficult person to work with, it wasn’t Bette Davis—it was Glynis Johns. She was a bundle of neuroses. We had a sequence where they were all at a lunch table together. Glynis was playing an extravagant South American woman and was very over the top, and I had to keep bringing her down. There was a storm brewing, and we had an exterior shot, and I thought “I have to just get through this quietly, quietly,” and Bette sat there watching Glynis do her number. She had all her reaction shots to do with Glynis. The looks on her face, the subtle variations of contempt for this character—as well as the actress—were all in the film! She utilized the situation as it grew. Later, she took me aside and said, “Mr. Hussein. I want to let you know that I thought you were magnificent with Miss Johns. I thought she was being very difficult in view of the fact that we were about to be rained on.”

  Little Gloria aired on NBC on October 24 and 25, 1982. Davis has two particularly delightful lines—one for her delivery of it, the other for its irony. “These Morgan girls have, as I believe the expression has it, been around,” Davis tells Plummer over tea, pronouncing been as bean. And at the end of the tracking shot Hussein describes as having taken until 10 o’clock to shoot, the camera ends up on Bette, draped in yet another of the designer Julie Weiss’s all-black gowns. “When a family’s divorces begin to outnumber its marriages,” Davis says, “we must question the intelligence of its romantic choices.”

  IN 1983, DAVIS starred in the pilot of Hotel, Aaron Spelling’s trashy TV series. The series got picked up, but the mastectomy and the stroke and Bette’s irascible distaste for the scripts she read kept her from continuing with it. She told Spelling that she would return to Hotel in January 1984 but later wrote, “[My] decision, while sincere, was motivated by my desire to go back to work, not by my opinion of the product. . . . After watching the episodes each week I thought that Hotel should have been called Brothel.”10 Bette’s daughter was outraged at her mother’s intransigence: “I cringe thinking that she turned down $100,000 a day,” B.D. Hyman told the Hollywood columnist George Christy in 1985. “I did everything but physically shake her.”11

  “I DON’T BLAME the daughter—don’t blame her at all,” Bette said in the early 1980s, referring to Christina Crawford. “She was left without a cent living in a motor home in Tarzana, and I doubt she could have written this if it weren’t true. One area of life Joan should never have gone into was children. She bought them—paid thousands for them—and here was a role she was not right for. No, I don’t blame Christina Crawford. I don’t think anyone would invent her book. You couldn’t just make it up.” Then: “I’ve never behaved like . . . well, I doubt that my children will write a book.”12

  My Mother’s Keeper came out in the spring of 1985, just in time for Mother’s Day. It was, as People magazine reported at the time, a “portrait of Davis as a mean-spirited, wildly neurotic, profane and pugnacious boozer who took out her anger at the world by abusing those close to her.” B.D. was clear about her motives in writing it: “After I found the Lord,” she said, “I realized there was a chance of a miracle in the literal sense with Mother. For Mother to change, she has to discover God through facing herself in this book. I want her to go to heaven.”13 B.D. and her husband, Jeremy, went on to write a sequel, Narrow Is the Way, chronicling their religious awakening and bad-mouthing Bette at every opportunity.

  It was Robbie Lantz and Harold Schiff who broke the news to Bette that B.D. had written the tell-all.

  Harold and I agreed that we could not tell her on the phone. We had to go there. I have to tell you it was one of the worst moments of my life. To tell any mother, whether it’s Bette Davis or not, that her child has written a book like that—to tell any mother that her child has turned on her. But Bette was one of those people who had to hear the truth. You could only tell her the truth, pleasant or unpleasant. Harold and I were absolutely flat and direct about it. She was shocked and distraught in equal measure, but she also appreciated that she had two friends who understood.

  I wouldn’t want to suggest . . . that I would have liked her for a parent. She must have been overwhelming. But she did love the girl. She made enormous financial sacrifices for her.14

  Davis, her cancer seemingly in remission but still debilitated from the stroke, was preparing to leave for England to film the made-for-television film Murder with Mirrors when she learned that B.D. had betrayed her in the name of the Lord. According to B.D., Bette responded by calling and writing angry letters, all the while insisting on seeing the manuscript, a request B.D. denied. “How dare you do this to me? I’m a very famous woman,” B.D. claims Bette said, though clearly Davis’s fame was only one of her concerns at that point. “Did you do it for the money?” Bette inquired.

  B.D. and Jeremy had been receiving lavish gifts and direct financial support from Bette for years. Gary Merrill, who doesn’t come off very well in My Mother’s Keeper, thought that B.D. wrote the book to get back at her mother for refusing to pay for something: “I surmised that B.D. must have wanted something Bette couldn’t afford,” a thought that occurred to Robbie Lantz and Chuck Pollack as well.15 “As long as Bette was making money and she could get things from her, she took, took, took,” Pollack said of B.D. “She had no taste—no sense. To write the book while her mother was still alive! Bette was very ill. She probably was hoping that she would die before the publication, but who knows? She’s not a very nice person.”16 Ellen Hanley remembered, “Harold Schiff called me on the phone one time and said, ‘Ellen, you’ve got to tell Bette that she cannot let B.D. charge any more on her credit card.’ He said, ‘There is no money. She cannot keep doing it.’ ”17

  Gary Merrill acknowledged at the time that “there are kernels of truth in [the book], but multiplied. Bette and I were both big drinkers, and sure—I slapped her and B.D. We had physical fights, but not much more than the average family. Usually Bette pushed me first or something. I’m a lazy slob. I wouldn’t start a fight.” Merrill also made a point of denying that he ever called B.D. “a little slut,” as B.D. claimed. “Christ!” Merrill said. “She doesn’t have enough gumption to be a slut.”18

  My Mother’s Keeper is a sour, whiny book written by a spoiled child who grew up and found Christ. B.D.’s accounts of Bette’s temper, her drinking, her ill treatment of Bobby and Margot are believable enough, but her sanctimoniousness and take-it-for-granted privilege counterbalance whatever Bette or Gary did or didn’t do to her. For instance, Bette never hid the fact that she, like most parents of her generation, used spanking as punishment. “Be a fanny-spanking disciplinarian until your kids are ten—then they’ll turn out all right,” Bette told Look in 1962, a point on which she was quite evidently wrong.19 B.D., though—like many parents of her generation—saw it as child abuse.

  “B.D. had fastened on an item on display which she thought she must have,” Gary recalled, “but Bette refused to buy it. Aware that people were noticing her famous mother, B.D. decided a tantrum might
help change Bette’s mind—and proceeded to perform. Bette yanked her around, gave her a good one, and marched B.D. out of the store. It was a mother’s appropriate reaction to an embarrassing scene created by a manipulative eight-year-old.”20

  “If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent,” Bette once said.21

  B.D.’s prolific accounts of the abuse she endured—from the harrowing (Bette’s theatrical threats to commit suicide, threats that were issued in front of her children) to the laughable (the museums and churches B.D. was forced to tour while accompanying Bette to Spain)—have been echoed by enough people that, on whole, one has to agree with certain aspects of B.D.’s characterization: Bette Davis could be a drunk, and a nasty one; she picked fights for the hell of it; and she could be very mean.

  An independent observer—Don Owens, Kaye Ballard’s manager—establishes that B.D. didn’t have it easy. Owens was invited, along with Ballard and the composer Fred Ebb, to a dinner party at Bette’s East Seventy-eighth Street town house in 1960 or 1961. B.D. was about thirteen. Owens describes Bette drinking so heavily—martinis—that her sister Bobby had to wipe Bette’s lipstick off her nose, where she had drunkenly smeared it. Then, at the dinner table, in front of Michael, Bobby, and the guests, Bette humiliated B.D. by forcing her to tell everyone what her current career aspiration was. B.D., knowing what was coming, clearly didn’t want to, but Bette forced her to say it—“a horse doctor”—whereupon Bette threw her head back and cackled. B.D. quickly asked to be excused from the table. (Bobby then ended the meal by handing out checks to the guests. Bette told her that, no, they weren’t giving out checks that night, after which Bobby told the guests to go into the kitchen and wash the dishes. Bette explained that Bobby had just been released from a mental hospital.)22

  In short, one ends My Mother’s Keeper feeling sorry for everyone, but B.D.’s spectacular breaking of the fifth commandment ends up backfiring. We feel sorrier for Bette than for B.D. in the end.

  Knowing the end of the story gives a certain poignance to various items in Davis’s scrapbooks: An elaborate hand-made Valentine with cut-out, pasted-on red hearts: “Dear Mommy—Valentine’s Day is loads of fun, if only you think it is, and if you think so, I will think so too! To the sweetest mother in all the world, from B.D.”23 A 1964 photo of the dining room at Honeysuckle Hill, the house in Bel-Air; the room is dominated by an enormous portrait of B.D. in an evening gown, her hair piled high. Photos of Christmas at Twin Bridges, 1967—Mike putting an angel at the top of the tree, Bette roasting her traditional goose—and a notation in Bette’s daybook: “Wednesday December 27: order 4 doz white roses—for Hymans anniversary—wrap presents for them—make goose a la king.”24 “Wednesday August 11, 1971—Ashley’s outfit, steak knives for Jeremy, nightgowns.”25

  Here are a few shots of B.D.’s twenty-first birthday party: balloons are tied to an overhead light; B.D. wears a pink top hat.26 There’s the baby shower Bette threw for B.D. before the birth of B.D.’s first son, Ashley; B.D. is in a flowing chartreuse gown with matching eye shadow.27 (Ashley was born on June 19, 1969; B.D.’s second son, Justin, was born on August 7, 1977.) And finally photos of the extravagant twentieth anniversary party Bette threw for B.D. and Jeremy at La Scala in Beverly Hills; guests included R. J. Wagner and Rock Hudson.28 The party took place on January 4, 1984. By the end of that year, Bette had found out about B.D.’s book and had stopped talking to her.

  After My Mother’s Keeper was published, letters of support and sympathy came in from friends such as Burt Reynolds, Meryl Streep, and Sally Field, but Bette was consoled only so much. At first she was deeply hurt. Then, characteristically, she got mad—very, very mad. She devoted a sizable portion of This ’n That to telling B.D. off. (This ’n That was published in 1987 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons; it was written with the assistance of Katheryn Sermak and Michael Herskowitz.)

  There are no mind-blowing wire hanger scenes in B.D.’s book, but that doesn’t mean it has no camp value. “There’s one funny part in My Mother’s Keeper,” Charles Busch pointed out. “B.D. tells her mother about letting Jesus into her life, and Davis says something like ‘I wouldn’t let any man run my life!’—as though Jesus was an agent at William Morris.”29

  Davis had an equally good line outside the book. “Jeremy’s become a Christian, too, right?” she asked B.D. one day while they were still speaking. “That means he’ll go to heaven, too, right? Well,” she said, “if that bastard wants to be there, I’m not going.”30

  CHAPTER

  24

  WAR’S END

  FOR BETTE DAVIS, ALCOHOL AND CIGArettes were props in both senses of the word: they buttressed her against her nerves and served equally well as reliable bits of business, things to do with her hands. According to her friend Chuck Pollack, “We had a lot of fun, especially early in the day before she started drinking.”1 When did she start drinking? “Early in the day. She would drink orange juice with vodka, and by the time it got around to lunch it was just vodka, and it was vodka for the rest of the afternoon until cocktail hour, when she switched to what she considered the hard stuff—scotch.”

  The good times, Pollack went on to say, were mostly times when Bette wasn’t drinking. When she had a job to do, an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, for instance, she didn’t touch a drop all day long. Instead, she’d spend the time preparing herself to appear as the grand movie star she was. “She came off beautifully on all those shows,” Pollack observed. “She’d done them a million times, and she knew exactly what the answers were. When she was working, she was a different person because she didn’t drink. She was much easier to cope with.”

  Liquor made her feel better, but her behavior got exponentially worse. Pollack offered some examples:

  She would offer to help in the garden—I’d be pruning—and she’d just chop up a plant and kill it. People would send over bouquets of flowers. She’d sit there drinking and smoking, with those nervous little hands twitching away, and she’d start picking the buds off, one by one. By the end of the day there would be no flowers left.

  She would pick fights with people and be absolutely horrible. She’d ask me to have people over for cocktails, and then she couldn’t wait to attack somebody and make a scene. People in the movie business, friends of mine—it didn’t make any difference to her. If they looked cross-eyed and she decided she wanted to attack them, she did—for no reason. She’d become argumentative, insulting, sarcastic. Finally she’d just say, “Why don’t you go home?” We’d all sit there with our mouths hanging open thinking, “My god, what just happened?”

  One such evening occurred when Pollack invited Carroll O’Connor and his wife to dinner along with Louis B. Mayer’s granddaughter, Barbara Wyndham. Bette was filming a television movie at the time—Pollack didn’t recall which one—and she brought home a birthday cake from the set. Having been baked to serve as a prop, it was a gaudy affair, iced in bright Technicolor. Barbara Wyndham made the mistake of calling it ugly. The remark provoked Davis into an instant and violent rage; she screamed at Wyndham about what a rude and ungrateful person she was. Carroll O’Connor tried to calm her down, but to no avail.

  When Pollack invited Mae West one evening, it proved to be just as disastrous, if much less loud. For whatever reason, the prospect of meeting Mae West frightened Bette; she was anxious all day, started drinking early, and was violently drunk—falling-down drunk—by the time West arrived. It was August in Los Angeles, but Bette insisted that Pollack light a fire in the fireplace. “I tried to stop her,” he recalled, “but two minutes later there was a fire blazing. She was so drunk that she picked up a paper napkin—not a cracker—and smeared it with caviar and handed it to Mae.” As was often the case, however, once dinner was served and she got some food into her, she returned to a state that approximated presentability.

  The writer Dotson Rader, who interviewed her for Parade in 1983, experienced Bette’s extended cocktail hours at her apartment f
rom time to time. “She’d call me up and say, ‘Can you come over for dinner tomorrow night?’ ” Rader remembered.

  She’d call at 10:00 or 11:00 o’clock in the morning and say, “I’ve been up since six. Cooking. For dinner!” Well, I’d show up, but there was never any dinner.

  Once there was an old lady there—Bette Davis’s hair-dresser. She opened the door—Bette was off getting ready—and offered me a drink and hors d’oeuvres, “hors d’oeuvres” being Ritz crackers with a roll of American cheese on them and a stuffed olive on a toothpick—and not even standing up straight but lying on its side. Anyway, she brought me this little plate and a vodka, and then she sat in a little French chair against the wall and never said another word. That’s the only time I ate anything at Bette Davis’.

  Miss Davis came into the living room where I was sitting with this mousy little hairdresser. Bette was a tiny little woman, but she had this sort of Death Ray Look that was terrifying. She walked in, paused a moment to give you time to collect yourself—you were supposed to be awestruck at the vision that presented itself. So she paused, smiled at me, and then That Look came over her face—a look of ill-contained rage. She marched over, grabbed the hors d’oeuvres plate with two hands—not one hand, but two, the way you’d grab a tray—and marched back over to the table where the hors d’oeuvres were, slammed the plate down, and turned on the poor little hairdresser and started screaming at her. “This is my party! He’s my guest! I’m the hostess! This is my house! How dare you? How dare you?!” She put the olive back where it was, paused a moment, and came back over to me carrying the original hors d’oeuvres tray, and asked if I’d like one.