by James Spada
A few weeks after Marion began to work for Bette, they had a furious row, and when it was over Bobby told Marion, “Don’t worry, Bette’s had a tough day. It’s not you, she has other things going on. I’ve told her that she’ll never find anyone who’s as wonderful with B.D. as you are. She needs a young person, not those old fuddy-duddies she’d always had. The child’s just blossomed since you’ve been here.”
What Marion did to help B.D., she says, was to treat her like a child. “I just started tickling her and playing with her, and she started opening up. We even started drawing on the wall, which Bette allowed. She could be wonderful at times. She just didn’t know how to relate to a child.”
Bette came to like and respect Marion Richards, mainly because the young woman never allowed her boss to “walk all over her” the way Bette did so many others. “If I came home late, even on my day off, she’d be pacing back and forth like a wild animal: ‘Why weren’t you home?’ And I didn’t even discuss it with her, I just looked her right in the face, and she knew that if she went too far, I’d say forget it. Most people would say to her, ‘Okay, Bette, oh yes, Miss Davis. Kick me in the you-know-where. I’ll take anything you say.’ But I was firm with her. I knocked the wind out of her sails. If enough people had done that, she wouldn’t have acted the way she did—like a spoiled brat.
“She was careful with me because she knew I had my own independence. When I showed her that I wasn’t going to let her step all over me, she started catering to me. It was weird. It showed her insecurity. She actually brought me coffee and toast in bed the morning after we had had a confrontation and I hadn’t backed down.”
As the last months of 1949 dragged on without a suitable script for Bette, she became all the more overwrought and volatile. Sherry was desperate with anxiety over the state of his marriage, and the situation disintegrated further after Bette began to humiliate him in public, carping about everything from his unemployed status to his thinning hair. At a party in Hollywood thrown by MCA, Bette’s talent agency, Sherry, for the first time, wasn’t allowed to sit next to his wife, who was at a table “with the big shots.” Several people asked him why he wasn’t with Bette, and he was at a loss to explain it. At one point he walked over to her and said, “Bette, let’s dance.” She looked up at him as the others at the table fell silent. “I’m not dancing with you!”
Without another word, Sherry leaned down, put his arm around her waist and lifted her out of her chair. He pulled her out onto the dance floor, and every time she struggled to get away from him he hissed, “You’re not going anywhere!” Finally the music stopped and Sherry loosened his grip. Bette charged off the floor, and as Sherry started after her Joseph Cotten grabbed his arm. “When you catch up to her,” Cotten advised, “punch her in the mouth.” Bette never returned to the banquet, and Sherry later learned that she had climbed out of the bathroom window and taken a taxi home.
On October 21, Bette filed for divorce, claiming that Sherry had threatened her, and obtained a court order restraining him from doing her “bodily harm.” She left him alone in the Laguna house and fled to what the press described as a “secret hideaway.” Four days later, Sherry agreed to undergo psychiatric treatment in order to “curb his temper” and change Bette’s mind about the divorce. “I’ve told her I’ll do anything to preserve our marriage,” Sherry said to reporters who had jumped on the story. “The whole trouble is due to my violent temper. It’s hooked up with the war, I think. It’s one of those nasty things. But I adore Bette and I’d be miserable if anything happened to this marriage.”
Sherry consulted Dr. Frederick Hacker, who had a strong reputation as a “shrink to the stars.” During the first session, Hacker informed Sherry that he wanted Bette to accompany him on his next visit. When Sherry told Bette this, she retorted, “No way! No psychoanalyst is getting to me. What’s the matter with him? You’re the crazy one!” Sherry explained that it wasn’t a matter of who was sane or who was crazy, but only that Dr. Hacker felt it would be advantageous for both partners to see him. Bette snorted, and Sherry went back to Hacker alone.
During the sessions, Sherry confronted a number of issues in his marriage and his life, including his ambivalent feelings toward his father, who “wanted me to be a tough guy. I really wasn’t. I was a tender person.” After a fall from a fire escape, he had grown up thin and delicate, “not what my father wanted as a son at all, I’m sure. He wanted me to beat up the kids who took pokes at me on the street, so I started playing with the girls instead of the boys because they were gentler. My father made me feel like I was a sissy.”
Hacker explained to Sherry that he had overcompensated for these feelings with bodybuilding and boxing, and that his repressed anger caused his fits of violence. Hacker suggested that Sherry see a female associate of his, and she presented him with Rorschach inkblots that she asked him to interpret.
“All I could see in those blots were drawings I had made during surgeries while I was in the service,” Sherry recalled. When he told the woman that one blot looked “like something I drew up of a kidney operation,” she said to him, “You mean to tell me that this doesn’t remind you of a woman’s vagina?”
Sherry winced. “If it did, I’d have nothing more to do with women.”
The next day, Dr. Hacker told Sherry that he had upset the woman because “you didn’t come up with the answers she thinks you should.”
“You mean, I should answer the way she thinks I should answer? I don’t get it.”
Hacker laughed. “We’re not going any further with this,” he concluded. “I have surmised what’s wrong. You’re a red-blooded American man who’s married to the wrong woman.”
The same thought had occurred to Sherry a year earlier, when Bette hired Marion Richards as B.D.’s governess. To this day, Sherry remembers what Marion was wearing when she first came to the Laguna Beach house to apply for the job. “Bette and I were in the living room and Marion came in wearing this lovely navy blue suit. With white gloves. She was beautiful, with hair down to here, a lovely looking person.” Sherry found himself staring at her and thinking, I got married too soon.
Still, Sherry tried to keep his marriage to Bette intact, and they reconciled early in 1950. The friction between the two was eased considerably when Bette finally began work on a new picture—for Howard Hughes at RKO. The Story of a Divorce had not only a prophetic title, but a plot line that uneasily paralleled Bette’s marriage to Sherry. She played Joyce Ramsey, a driven career woman who pushes her easygoing husband David (Barry Sullivan) into business success that he neither wants nor enjoys. Cold and obsessive about her career, Joyce unwittingly drives her husband into an affair with a gentle schoolteacher who gives him the comfort and affection he craves. Finally he asks her for a divorce after twenty years of marriage. When she learns of his affair, she countersues him, demanding a large settlement in cash and property.
Later, after their daughter’s wedding, Joyce and David decide to reconcile. The next morning, Joyce is as nasty and domineering as ever at the breakfast table, and David leaves her once again, this time for good. Director Curtis Bernhardt shot the film’s final scene from above, as Joyce sits alone in her enormous house, having pushed away everyone who loved her.
After the shot was completed, Bette turned to Betty Lynn, the young actress who played her daughter in the film, and said, “This is the great fear of my life. That I’ll end up just like this.”
By all accounts, Bette was less temperamental on this film than she had been in years. Both her costar Barry Sullivan and Leonard Shannon, the film’s publicist, recall dire warnings from a number of people that Bette would be impossible to work with, but both found her “a real pleasure.” Shannon believes that Bette was so shaken by the six months she had spent without a good script that she was determined to prove herself “considerate” of cast and crew on this picture. “Of course,” he adds, “it was also true that by that time a lot of people had figured out how to handle Bette Davis.
If you wanted her to do something, you had to tell her just the opposite. If you wanted to take lunch off the lot with her, you couldn’t say so, because she’d say, ‘Ah, it’s too much trouble, let’s eat in my dressing room.’ You had to say, ‘Bette, it’s a really crappy day. It isn’t the kind of day that you’d want to go out and have lunch.’ Then she would say, ‘Hell, it’s a beautiful day out there! Of course I’ll go out and have lunch!’ She would do what you wanted her to do without ever knowing you wanted her to do it—just as long as she could be contrary.”
Bette was also made more docile by the presence of B.D. on the set. She had decided to have her nearly three-year-old daughter make her screen debut in the film, and for one scene between Bette and B.D., Curtis Bernhardt asked for six retakes. After the fifth, B.D. shot him a look of exasperation. “I’ve seen that look before,” Bernhardt mumbled.
“Bette was screwing Barry Sullivan at night,” Leonard Shannon recalls. “He was always hanging around her dressing room after the company broke. That wasn’t a secret.” Although Sullivan denies having had an affair with Bette—he was married, he says, and didn’t find her attractive—the rumors got back to William Grant Sherry that his wife and the handsome thirty-seven-year-old leading man were having late-night tête-à-têtes in her dressing room. Sherry arrived on the set on April 5, the final day of filming, and angrily demanded that Bette come home with him. She refused and ordered him off the lot. When studio guards blocked him from entering the commissary to accompany Bette to a combination wrap party and birthday bash the crew was throwing for her, he put up such a fuss that Barry Sullivan intervened. He and Sherry got into a verbal clash, Sherry recalls, and “I let him have one and knocked him down. The studio cops broke it up.”
The incident made front pages around the country, and Sherry told the Hollywood columnist Harrison Carroll that “my wife is a troubled, mixed-up girl. She has never been really happy.… I tried to help her as much as I could, but I can’t go any further alone.… If she would join me in consulting my psychiatrist, I am positive that our marital problems could be worked out. But whether she continues with me or not she ought to have the treatment. If she does not, she will be a miserable woman all her life.”
Instead, Bette reinstated her divorce action against Sherry. This time, he didn’t contest it, and he remained in Laguna Beach while Bette holed herself up in a new house she had rented in Beverly Hills. Sherry was granted visitation rights with B.D. while the divorce suit was pending, and he told Bette he wanted to take her down to Laguna with him. Bette agreed, but only if Marion Richards, still the child’s governess, could accompany her each time. “Well,” said Sherry, “if you insist.”
A few days before she completed filming The Story of a Divorce, Bette had received a telephone call on the set. When she heard the call was from Darryl Zanuck, the head of 20th Century-Fox, she knit her brows: she hadn’t spoken to Zanuck since he had told her she’d never work in Hollywood again after she resigned her Academy presidency in 1941. She took the call and was on the phone for about five minutes. When she returned to the set “her eyes were blazing,” Betty Lynn recalled.
“You’ll never guess who that was,” she said to Lynn, and without waiting for a response, she told her. “It was Darryl Zanuck. He’s sending over a script that Joe Mankiewicz wrote and will be directing for Fox.”
“He just won two Oscars for writing and directing!” Lynn exclaimed.
“Yes, he did,” Bette replied dreamily. “And Zanuck wants me to replace Claudette Colbert in this new picture. She’s hurt her back and can’t do the part.”
“What’s the movie about?” Lynn asked.
“Zanuck wouldn’t tell me much except that it’s about a theater actress.”
Bette sat in her chair and stared straight ahead, her mind abuzz with limitless possibilities. “Zanuck wants me to do some tests with my leading man this weekend.” Then she turned back to Lynn. “Do you know an actor named Gary Merrill?”
TWENTY
B
ette couldn’t believe her eyes. She sat in an overstuffed chair in the corner of her bedroom, a fire crackling across the room, a glass of Scotch beside her and a cigarette between her fingers, and read the script that Darryl Zanuck had sent over. Entitled All About Eve, it was based loosely on a short story by Mary Orr that had appeared in Cosmopolitan several years earlier. With each page she turned, Bette’s excitement grew.
The plot had grabbed her instantly: What was Eve Harrington (to be played by Anne Baxter), the seemingly innocent, loyal young fan, really up to as she insinuated herself into every aspect of the life of Margo Channing, Broadway superstar? The supporting characters jumped off the page at her: Margo’s lover Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill), a director, pretentiously grandiloquent about the theater but a rock of masculinity and loyalty to Margo; her best friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm), warm and witty but not above a few Eve-like machinations of her own; Karen’s husband Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe), a playwright, admiring of Margo but resentful that her star personality often overwhelmed his characters; Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff), Margo’s producer, a victim of chronic indigestion; Birdie Coonan (Thelma Ritter), Margo’s personal maid, a wise and wisecracking ex-vaudevillian; and Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), the cynical, Machiavellian “critic and commentator” who is, by his own admission, as “essential to the theater as ants to a picnic.”
But it was the character that Zanuck wanted Bette to play—Margo Channing—that made her actress’s heart flutter more than it had since she read Of Human Bondage. “A Star of the Theater,” Addison DeWitt describes Margo, who “made her first stage appearance at the age of four in Midsummer Night’s Dream. She played a fairy and entered—quite unexpectedly—stark naked. She has been a Star ever since.” Throughout the script, Margo is described variously as “talented, famous, wealthy,” “beautiful and intelligent,” “a junk yard,” “childish,” “ageless,” “maudlin and full of self-pity,” “magnificent,” “a body with a voice,” “paranoiac,” “an hysterical, screaming harpy,” “Peck’s bad boy,” and finally, in her own words, “a foursquare, upright, downright, forthright married lady.”
Clearly, this character was a marvelously layered creation, larger than life, a mass of contradictions, the true possessor of the “fire and music” used in the script to describe Eve Harrington’s surreptitious reading of Margo’s role during an audition. Bette’s only reservation had been that she would be playing someone other than Eve in a movie entitled All About Eve. As she put the script down, however, the kind of thrill only an actress can feel when offered a magnificent role coursed through her body. The movie could just as easily have been called All About Margo. And it was probably the best script she had ever read.
It was also the wittiest, replete as it was with ultrasophisticated aphorisms, biting theatrical in-jokes, and epigrammatic observations. Bette howled as she read some of the lines Joe Mankiewicz had written. As Birdie finishes snapping up the back of Margo’s dress when she prepares for a party, she proclaims, “Voila!” Margo turns to her and mutters, “That French ventriloquist taught you a lot, didn’t he?” When Birdie tells Margo that she ordered domestic gin by mistake, she replies, “The only thing I ordered by mistake is the guests. They’re domestic, too, and they don’t care what they drink as long as it burns.”
After Margo and Bill fight over his attentions to Eve, Lloyd Richards arrives at the party and comments, “the general atmosphere is very Macbethish.” Then Karen says to Margo, “We know you, we’ve seen you before like this. Is it over—or just beginning?”
“Fasten your seat belts,” Margo replies. “It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
When Margo is told that a famous movie star has arrived at her party, she says, “Shucks. And my autograph book is at the cleaner’s.” When Addison tells Margo that Eve’s performance of her part for an audition was “made of fire and music” and that “in time she’ll be what you are,” Margo shoots back, “A mass of music and fire
. That’s me. An old kazoo with some sparklers.”
It went on like that, page after page, glittering wit sparkling off a rock-solid story of backstage chicanery. The next morning, Bette called Darryl Zanuck and told him she would love to play Margo Channing. He said she would need to be in San Francisco, ready to film at the Curran Theatre, in two weeks. She still had four days’ work on The Story of a Divorce, but she told Zanuck she would be there.
The night before Bette left for San Francisco, Sherry came up from Laguna to try to talk her out of divorcing him. Bette had banished him from the Beverly Hills house, and she wouldn’t let him in after he knocked on the door. Instead, she came out on the lawn to talk to him, still in her nightgown, and within a few minutes their discussion had degenerated into a vicious fight.
Illuminated only by the lamp over the front door, Bette and her husband stood a few feet across from each other and yelled. She baited him with her usual taunts about his manhood and his lack of a job, and then she lobbed a new one at him—she told him she was having an affair with Joe Mankiewicz. “He’s a real man,” Bette hissed. “He’s a genius! He makes a living all his own!”
“Shut up!” Sherry fairly roared as Bette broke for the house and barricaded herself behind the door. Within a few minutes, she looked down at the lawn from her bedroom window. All was quiet; Sherry was gone. But Bette wasn’t able to sleep that night—she had screamed so loudly that she ruptured a blood vessel in her throat.
The next day, Saturday, April 15, Bette arrived in San Francisco with B.D., her nurse Marion Richards, and a bodyguard to protect her from Sherry, who she feared would follow them. The broken blood vessel in her throat had left her barely able to speak, and when Joe Mankiewicz heard her he nearly panicked—filming was to start in two days. He called in a doctor who advised Bette that if she used her voice as little as possible over the weekend, she would probably have no trouble with it come Monday.
