James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  If Sherry still doubted that Bette was serious about a divorce, he soon found out that she’d stop at nothing to make sure she got one. “Weeding outside one day, I found a strange-looking wire and traced it up to the attic. Bette had the place bugged. There were microphones placed in the ceiling over the bedroom. She was doing the same thing her first husband did when he found out she was having an affair with Howard Hughes.” Sherry says he later found out that Bette was prepared to have two men swear that they had had sex with him. “I couldn’t believe this was the woman I had loved and married.”

  Aware that her refusal to give Sherry reasonable visitation rights posed a threat to a smooth divorce, Bette reversed her tactics. She agreed to allow B.D. to visit Sherry in Laguna every weekend, but she insisted once again that Marion Richards had to accompany the child. Over the next few weekends, Sherry, B.D., and Marion spent idyllic hours together in Laguna. “We’d have all kinds of fun,” Sherry recalled. “We’d go up in the hills, we’d walk on the beach. When the child was sleeping at night Marion and I would sit and chat, and I’d just look at this person and think in the back of my mind…”

  Two weeks later, during another visit, Sherry told Marion, “I feel like a washed-out dishrag. But I think you’re the most wonderful person. Would you consider marrying me?”

  “Oh, no,” Marion replied. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

  “I just didn’t like him,” she says. “I thought he was self-centered. I had no intention of marrying him.”

  The next weekend, Sherry repeated the question. Marion turned him down again, but this time he sensed a softening in her refusal. He remembers her telling him, “Since I’ve been coming down I’ve seen a different person than the one who was always fighting. It was the way you treated your daughter. You’re so loving with that child that I see a different side of you.”

  Encouraged, Sherry bought an engagement ring. “I know you don’t want to marry me,” Sherry said as he gave it to her. Marion didn’t know how to react. “I said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ I never did say yes. Before I knew it the ring was on my finger, and I’m the kind of person who hates to hurt somebody’s feelings. So I thought, Well, I’ll go along with it and then I’ll get out of it.”

  Despite Marion’s lukewarm feelings, Sherry was so overjoyed that she had accepted his ring that when he took her and B.D. home to Beverly Hills he called Harrison Carroll to give him the news. Bette’s secretary overheard the call and immediately telephoned Bette. She rang back in a flash and demanded to speak to Marion. Sherry intercepted the call. “She started cursing and calling Marion names and claimed we were having an affair. I just put the receiver down and hung up on her. It wasn’t true that we had had an affair, of course. Marion was a virgin. In fact, I hadn’t even kissed her. I asked her if I could that day, and she said ‘Yes.’ I kissed her and I almost fainted. It was the loveliest experience of my life, kissing that girl. Just one kiss, and she kind of melted. It was so wonderful.”

  Bette’s divorce from Sherry was final on July 3. “It cost me a bundle,” Bette said. “Houses, cars, the usual things. And for the first time in my life, I had to pay alimony to a man.” As usual, she exaggerated; Sherry received only his artist’s studio in Laguna, and he vehemently denies that Bette paid him alimony. “I had my own money in our joint checking account. She closed it out and all of a sudden my checks were being returned. She owed me that money. I met with her and her lawyers and said, ‘I want my money.’ They said, ‘Well, she doesn’t have it. She can’t come up with it all at once.… She could arrange to give you $700 a month.’ And I said ‘Nothing doing’—with Bette sitting right there. ‘She’d call it alimony.’ I got up and they all came running after me. She said, ‘Grant, I will never call it alimony.’ And of course, that’s exactly what she did call it.”

  Three days after the divorce was final, Sherry told the press of his engagement to Marion. Bette was furious, particularly about the way Sherry characterized his intended. “Here is a girl who can make my life happy,” he said. “She is beautiful and calm and spiritual and wants the really worthwhile things in life. She has no complexes.” Just the opposite, clearly, of Bette Davis.

  Sherry and Marion were married on August 6, and their financial situation was so tight by November that he was forced to advertise in the local Laguna Beach paper for work as a handyman. When the story made the papers—“Bette’s Ex Doing Odd Jobs in Laguna”—Sherry was nonchalant. “I’ll do any kind of work,” he told a reporter, “as long as they pay me $2 an hour.”

  But before long Sherry’s paintings began to sell, and he eventually was able to develop a self-sufficiency he had been denied as Mr. Bette Davis. He and Marion remained married until his death in 2003, despite some rocky stretches and a 1954 divorce action that Marion withdrew. In the 1960s, Bette and Sherry came into contact again when Sherry went to visit B.D. while he was in New York for a show of his paintings. “I have to hand it to you,” Bette told him. “You’ve done very well by yourself—the paintings in New York, and you’ve got a big job in Florida.”

  Sherry was polite. “Well, sure I have—” he responded. “What I really wanted to say was, ‘You told everybody that I’d marry some rich bitch or become a bum. Instead, I married this beautiful girl.’ That was what really infuriated Bette. She just never got over it.”

  Marion believes Bette’s anger pushed her into marriage with Gary Merrill. “They would never have gotten married if Grant and I hadn’t,” she said. “Bette pushed Gary into it. She was saving face. She didn’t want it to look like her husband had thrown her away for a young girl.”

  Joe Mankiewicz may also have influenced Bette’s decision to marry Gary. In a speech Margo makes to Karen Richards about her need for more in life than just a career, Bette could not have failed to see an astonishing similarity to her own situation, a manifesto for Bette Davis in 1950:

  Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder, so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you go back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common—whether we like it or not—being a woman. Sooner or later we’ve got to work at it, no matter what other careers we’ve had or wanted… and, in the last analysis, nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed—and there he is. You’re something with a French Provincial office or a book full of clippings—but you’re not a woman.

  PART FOUR

  “Ten Black Years”

  TWENTY-ONE

  B

  ette and Gary Merrill were married in Juárez, Mexico, on July 28, just hours after his divorce was final. Immediately they embarked on their honeymoon trip, a cross-country drive from Mexico to Massachusetts. The journey was disturbingly similar to the one Bette had taken to Mexico with Sherry. Nearly a dozen suitcases and other paraphernalia jammed the car, and the newlyweds hardly had room to move; the heat as they drove through the desert Southwest was suffocating; and their patience dried up quickly. “For five long days I drove that damn car,” Gary recalled. “It felt more like horsing a truck around.”

  They bickered constantly, and several times their tempers erupted into shouting matches. Whenever they stopped at one of the few roadside inns along the way, Bette didn’t like it. “Each time we checked into a place,” Gary recalled, “something was wrong with it, and out we’d go. I’d be tired, saying, ‘What the hell, it’s a bed.’ But no, it had to be better. Before the trip was over, my normally easygoing attitude was wearing thin, and I began to wonder.”

  Bette had sent Bobby and Bobby’s daughter Ruth ahead to Massachusetts with B.D., and the Merrills met up with them in Gloucester, a small, picturesque fishing village and art colony near the border with Maine, where they had rented a house as a honeymoon cottage. Ruth, then eleven years old, found her new uncle’s presence disturbing. “It seemed like Gary was always drunk,” she recalls. “All I can remember about him was drinking and yelling. The screaming between them
got so bad that I left the house and went down to the shore to do some crabbing. I could still hear them going at it, even from that far away.”

  Like Gary, Bette later professed that shortly after the marriage she felt that she had made “a terrible mistake.” But she wasn’t going to let go easily of Joe Mankiewicz’s romantic vision of love conquering all. Years later, she admitted that she had fallen in love with Bill Sampson and Gary had fallen in love with Margo Channing—“and we woke up with each other.” Still, Bette had a new mission—finally to be the “foursquare, upright, downright, forthright married lady” Margo Channing had wanted to be. No matter what, she was determined to make this marriage last. Even the battles with Gary, that had begun almost the minute they were married, gave her as much pleasure as they did pain. Bette thrived on confrontation and drama, and Merrill gave as good as he got.

  The Merrills spent the rest of their honeymoon, alone, on Westport Island, Maine, near Squirrel Island, where Bette had been conceived forty-two years earlier. They rented a campsite, complete with oil lamps and an outhouse, and took boat trips for groceries and five-gallon jugs of fresh water. With none of the stress of the outside world to impinge on her happiness, Bette felt as though she were “blooming,” that her hopes were “never higher,” her “chance for a life, never surer.” With this marriage, she felt, it was “do or die.”

  “I’m a hausfrau at heart,” Bette told the press, “the little woman.” Never one to do anything halfway, she threw herself into domesticity with her usual single-mindedness. When she and Gary rented their first house, a furnished cottage at Prout’s Neck, Maine, Bette became so fervid about turning it into a home that she rearranged everything in it. When Gary returned from a round of golf with a friend and saw what Bette had done, he told her that the place “looks like something out of Good Housekeeping.” She threw a piece of chicken at him.

  She had ample time for such frenetic housekeeping because once again there were no offers of work. Gary, on the other hand, was considered “hot” after Twelve O’Clock High, and scripts came in for him just about daily. Shortly after they moved into the Prout’s Neck house, Gary left for Germany to make the World War II drama Decision Before Dawn. In his absence, Bette flew to Los Angeles to attend the opening of All About Eve and try to find a West Coast house for the family. She did—a spacious bungalow on the beach at Malibu.

  Bette and Ruthie strode onto the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre as flashbulbs flared and reporters shouted questions at them. It was October 13, and the world premiere of All About Eve. Bette basked in the glory that reflected from the film; advance word in Hollywood was that it was little short of a masterpiece and that Bette had orchestrated the comeback of the year. She didn’t stay to watch the film, however, because she had promised Gary she wouldn’t until he returned.

  The advance word was right on the mark—the critics were rhapsodic. Leo Mishkin’s opinion in the New York Morning Telegraph was typical: “Let’s get right down to cases on this. All About Eve is probably the wittiest, the most devastating, the most adult and literate motion picture ever made that had anything to do with the New York stage. It is also one of the top pictures of this or any other recent year, a crackling, sparkling, brilliantly written and magnificently acted commentary on… the legitimate theater. And just to show you that I haven’t yet run out of superlatives, All About Eve is also a movie in which Bette Davis gives the finest, most compelling, and the most perceptive performance she has ever played out on screen. Including Of Human Bondage.… You have my word for it: All About Eve is one of the great pictures of our time.”

  The film brought in $3.1 million at the box office, and after the dismal failure of Beyond the Forest a year earlier, represented a stunning return to form for Bette. She was the talk of the country for months, and on December 24, Hedda Hopper wrote a profile of her headlined “Comeback in ‘Eve’ Proves Bette’s Still Film Queen.” Hopper wrote that “Hollywood’s most thrilling comeback in 1950 was made by its finest actress.… Just a year ago her long and brilliant career was never in worse shape. A succession of bad pictures had proved that not even the queen was immune to the skids. Thinking that Beyond the Forest was the worst thing she’d ever done, I wrote in my column, ‘If Bette had deliberately set out to wreck her career, she could not have picked a more appropriate vehicle.’… Hollywood wondered: Was Bette Davis through? The answer is that a girl like Bette is never through until the last gong has sounded.… For my money, her performance in All About Eve topped anything she ever did, including the two pictures that brought her Oscars.… If the job doesn’t get her a third Academy Award, I’ll miss my guess.”

  On February 12, 1951, All About Eve received a record fourteen Oscar nominations (one more than Gone With the Wind), including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Bette was nominated for the eighth time as Best Actress, along with Anne Baxter; Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter, and George Sanders were cited in supporting categories. Bette had already won the New York Film Critics Award, her first, and most observers considered her the Oscar front-runner. Still, it promised to be a tight race; also strongly contending (along with Anne Baxter) were the silent-screen great Gloria Swanson for her own extraordinary comeback in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, and Judy Holliday for her effervescent comic performance in the movie version of Garson Kanin’s Broadway success Born Yesterday.

  In an upset, the award went to Judy Holliday. Bette was crushed, and she wasn’t very gracious about the reasons she thought Holliday had won; she complained that it wasn’t fair to pit an actress who had honed her performance for two years on Broadway against someone, like her, who had created the role of Margo with ten days’ notice. More to the point was the fact that Bette and Anne Baxter were the first two actresses ever nominated for starring roles in the same film. “Bette lost because Anne Baxter was nominated,” Joe Mankiewicz says. “Annie lost because Bette Davis ditto. Celeste Holm lost because Thelma Ritter was nominated, and she lost because Celeste ditto.”

  But it has to be said as well that Bette’s unpopularity hurt her just as much as did all these other factors. Too many directors, writers, producers, and technicians in Hollywood had spread stories—fair or unfair—about what a monster she could be on a set, and the movie community dislikes few more than temperamental superstars. Considering Bette’s reputation in the film colony, there was little chance she’d ever win another Oscar.

  Bette took some solace in the fact that Eve won six Oscars, including Best Picture (the first time a Davis film had been so honored), and she was thrilled that Mankiewicz, for the second year in a row, was chosen Best Director and Best Scenarist. According to George Sanders, however, Bette was bitter that he alone among the cast won an Oscar.

  Sanders recalled that he and Bette hadn’t gotten along too well during filming. “I matched her snarl for snarl and bite for bite. Of course it was great for the picture, as it made for some nice confrontational conflict.… Later, when she lost the Oscar and I won for Best Supporting Actor, I met her at a party and she turned her back on me without a word. I couldn’t resist the temptation to purr over her shoulder, ‘Sour grapes, Bette?’ and do you know what she did? She turned around and spit at me!”

  All About Eve was kept in the public mind for months by a highly publicized “feud” between Bette and Tallulah Bankhead, who claimed that Bette’s performance was little more than an imitation of her. On her national radio show, Tallulah missed few opportunities to get in digs at Bette, both about Eve and the fact that her rival had played several roles on film that Tallulah had originated on Broadway. When she was asked if she had seen All About Eve, Tallulah replied, “Every morning when I brush my teeth.” She called the film All About Me. In the middle of a recitation of her career achievements, her cohost asked, “And what happened next?”

  “Bette Davis,” Tallulah sighed.

  There’s no question that Bette looks, sounds, and acts like Tallulah Bankhead in All About Eve. The long hair
, the cut of her cocktail gowns, the self-mocking, world-weary sophistication, even her huskier-than-usual voice, all call Bankhead to mind. And yet both Joe Mankiewicz and Bette denied that Margo Channing owes anything at all to Tallulah. Bette’s hair just happened to be that length when filming began. Her taffeta gowns, designed by Edith Head and Charles LeMaire, were the height of 1950 fashion. Her husky voice was a result of her throat injury after the fight with Sherry. “There was no intentional imitation of anyone,” Bette assured a reporter at the time. “I feel in this picture I played myself more than any part I ever played in the last ten years. Maybe Miss Bankhead and I are alike, you see. That could happen.”

  In any event, Bette as Margo never fails to summon up memories of Tallulah, and Bankhead was able to parlay the controversy into radio ratings. Finally, in a backhanded sort of way, Bette had given a boost to a career that her mere presence in Hollywood had prevented from blossoming on screen.

  “I would make the most ghastly mother that ever lived,” Bette told a reporter in 1937. “I am not the maternal type and I know it.… I’m horribly possessive. I love the feel of things being mine. I could never adopt a child because I would have to feel that the child belonged to me, was my own flesh and blood or not at all.”

  Marion Richards hadn’t thought Bette a very good mother to B.D.; the child’s bizarre behavior didn’t change until the governess began to treat her like a human being worthy of attention. “Mother always said that I was the one thing in her life she loved the most,” B.D. later said. “The operative word there was ‘thing.’”