James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  When The World of Carl Sandburg got to San Francisco, Bette and Gary stayed in separate rooms at the same hotel they had occupied during the making of All About Eve. Margo Channing and Bill Sampson had had a “bumpy night” that lasted ten years. Bette had recently told Joe Mankiewicz, “You never warned me about the sequel,” but maybe he had. At one point in the script, Margo says, “Bill’s in love with Margo Channing. He’s fought with her, worked with her, loved her… but ten years from now—Margo Channing will have ceased to exist. And what’s left will be… what?”

  Perhaps it was the memory of their unlimited dreams of happiness in 1950 that led Bette and Gary to shed the civilities they had carried with them from town to town and unleash, as Bette put it, an “explosion [that] could be heard around the world.”

  Gary left the show in San Francisco, and went to Hollywood to make a movie, his first in six years. He was replaced by Barry Sullivan, and later Leif Erickson stepped in. Bette didn’t have the same chemistry with either man that she had had with Gary, and the box office suffered. The show drew only mixed reviews in New York and closed after several months.

  At that point, Bette filed for divorce from Gary. “There was no longer any point in even trying,” she wrote in her memoirs. “I am sure I have been uncompromising, peppery, untractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile and ofttimes disagreeable. I stand accused of it all. But at forty I allowed the female to take over. It was too late. I admit that Gary broke my heart. He killed the dream forever. The little lady no longer exists.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  O

  n July 6, 1960, Bette stood before a judge in the Portland, Maine, superior court, her stance weary, her eyes downcast, and heard that she had been granted a divorce from Gary on the grounds of “cruel and abusive treatment.” Her complaint had accused him of “excessive drinking, physical cruelty and irresponsibility.” The judge granted Bette custody of B.D., Margot, and Michael, but allowed Gary visitation rights at “reasonable times and places.” He was ordered to pay Bette $1 a year in alimony, $250 a month in child support for B.D. and Michael, and $200 a month for Margot.

  This set the stage for nearly four years of ugly court battles between Bette and Gary, which began on July 31, 1961, after she petitioned the superior court of Santa Monica to strike all of Gary’s visitation rights.

  The court documents in the case reveal a furious struggle between Bette and Gary, carried out on both coasts, over his visitation rights to Michael, now nine, who became an unwilling pawn in his parents’ attempts to wreak revenge on each other. In the 1961 filing, Bette charged that Michael and B.D.’s scheduled five weeks of vacation with their father would “disrupt the acclimation of the children in their schools and social life in the East… disturb them and make them recalcitrant and difficult to manage and supervise.” For these reasons, she said, she was seeking to have the vacation rescinded. The court denied her request.

  Undeterred, Bette was relentless a year later in her efforts to prevent Gary from seeing Michael, who was scheduled to spend one half of the 1962 Christmas holiday with his father. (B.D. had told the court that she didn’t want to spend time with Gary, and she wasn’t made to.) On November 26, Bette’s attorney informed the court that “Michael [does] not wish to spend any of the Christmas vacation with the defendant [Merrill] nor alternate weekends with him.… He prefers to be at home with his mother and sister and it is more pleasant for him and he particularly wants to spend the entire Christmas vacation at home. Barbara and Bette Davis Merrill told me that he [Gary] has been intoxicated at many occasions and has committed acts of physical violence on these occasions.”

  The judge delayed a decision, and in December Bette’s tactics hardened. She filed a court brief to say that “Gary is not a fit and proper person to have visitation rights with any of the children away from the home. He drinks to excess and becomes violently drunk on many occasions. He has been notoriously associating with at least one woman [Rita Hayworth] to whom he is not married and has travelled with her extensively, which has been highly publicized and proved to be a source of great embarrassment and humiliation to the children.” Gary offered only this lame response: “It is untrue that I was intoxicated in the summer of 1962.”

  In a later statement, Bette attempted to show that Gary’s house was “an unsuitable abode” for a child. “[It] is in an area which is cold, damp and foggy, which would be injurious to Michael’s health. [Gary] does not have anyone to care for Michael’s cooking, laundry or transportation. The beach building is not in an area which is for the best interest of a minor child. He is not a fit person to care for Michael.”

  Gary defended his residence: “This house is right on the beach front [in Malibu] and consists of three bedrooms completely furnished with all the necessary facilities. I am renting it for $4,000 a month. It is well heated and insulated.” Gary then produced a loving note Michael had written him to prove that his son did want to be with him.

  When the judge refused to curtail Gary’s Christmas visitation rights, Bette asked that she be allowed to take Michael on a Christmas vacation to La Quinta, a resort near Palm Springs, during a period that would have sharply cut into his time with Gary. On December 21, she requested a hearing on the issue, and appeared with Michael in tow. Before making a decision, the judge took Michael into his chambers and spoke to him privately. When he again took his seat at the bench, the judge sternly instructed both Bette and Gary not to ask Michael what had occurred. The gist of the conversation could easily be guessed at, however, after the judge ruled that Michael must stay with Gary from December 26 to January 1, and that Bette would not be allowed to take him to La Quinta.

  The ruling, the judge stated, was contingent on Gary’s “not [being] under the influence of intoxicating liquor during that period and the defendant shall not subject himself to unpleasant notoriety or publicity.”

  Again, Bette was undeterred. On Christmas Eve, she demanded an emergency hearing and told the court that Michael was very upset at the prospect of spending Christmas vacation with Gary and had wanted to tell the judge why at the last hearing, but was not permitted to do so. She then produced a map that Michael had drawn that she claimed was an escape route to a hideout on Gary’s Malibu property that he planned to use if he was forced to spend the holidays there!

  Unconvinced, the judge declared that the visitation plan would remain in effect, and Michael spent the week with his father, apparently without incident. In January, another court hearing was held at Bette’s insistence, at which Gary’s weekly and Easter visitation rights were not only upheld but extended.

  Over the next two years, Bette and Gary filed court briefs eight times. Bette continued to attempt to deny Gary visitation rights; Gary charged that Bette had violated the court order by refusing to allow him to see Michael; both filed “nuisance” charges against the other on several occasions.

  Finally, Bette brought out the big guns: she hired Fred Otash, the private detective to whom Peter Lawford had gone for help the night Marilyn Monroe died, to follow Gary while Michael was in his custody and gather hard evidence of his irresponsibility. One of the items Otash gave to Bette was a photograph of Gary that showed him passed out, fully clothed, on his hotel bed, a half-empty bottle of liquor on a chest at the foot of the bed.

  According to Otash, one of his men discovered Merrill in a sexual tryst with a male politician from Maine. This information did not turn up in court documents, but other observations by one of Otash’s men, Michael Parlow, did. In a March 1964 petition by Bette to once again strip Gary of his visitation rights, Parlow contended that he had observed that “on January 24, Merrill left Michael in [their] room [at the Newporter Inn in Newport Beach, California] at 10:07 P.M. and returned the following morning at 7:18 A.M., and Gary was partying and drinking at various public places in the Newport Beach area but away from the Newporter Inn. On Saturday, February 1, 1964 from 9:45 P.M. to 7:20 A.M. he did the same thing.… On January 25 in the early mornin
g, about 3 A.M., he had been drinking alcoholic beverages on and off the entire day and he entered a public highway and failed to observe two stop signs and one red light.”

  Parlow also reported that on February 1, Gary “engaged in a vulgar conduct in the presence of a minor child while pretending to sell a coat to a female from Chicago,” and that on February 3, he was seen “associating with a young female in a room near where Michael had been left alone.”

  Despite all this sordid evidence, Bette was never able to curtail Gary’s visitation rights, in part because of his impassioned rejoinders. “Unfortunately,” he said in one, “these repeated court appearances can have only the effect of causing great unhappiness to my son Michael who like any other boy loves both his mother and his father and can only be upset by the constant and recurring court appearances which are neither of his choosing or within his control. For visitations I have flown in from San Francisco, New York and even from San Juan, Puerto Rico to be with my son. I know my son enjoys these visitation periods and only the gravest emergencies would prevent my being with him on these occasions.”

  Gary claimed that the “incidents” in Newport Beach were “grossly untrue, exaggerated and misinterpreted. A warm close relationship has developed between Michael and myself over the past year and I know that the court will recognize that this relationship is in the best interest of Michael.”

  Bette tried to secure a restraining order against Gary twice more, and each time it was denied. The last court record of these battles is March 9, 1964, at which time Bette apparently gave up and allowed Gary to see Michael at the times originally set by the court.

  In his autobiography, Gary says that Bette “shattered all my dreams, with her disdain for everyone’s feelings but her own, her insensitivity, and her often humiliating insistence on having her own way. She did not care who was cut down with the sharp scythe of her tongue, she was self-righteous in her desire to be the queen, and she demeaned everyone who opposed her will. She had totally cut herself off from others. I finally understood why she had chosen The Lonely Life as the title of her [autobiography]—and she was welcome to it. I began to laugh at the marvelous joke. I felt a sense of liberation when I realized that Bette had been as big a fool as I.”

  Bette’s decision to write her memoirs was prompted more by financial necessity than by a desire to share her most intimate memories with the public. With a contract already signed, she and Sandford Dody, a well-regarded ghost writer, began a lengthy collaboration late in 1960 that exhausted and perplexed the writer. After a promising beginning, as he and Bette sat in the den of her Manhattan townhouse, a fire popping in the fireplace, Bette inexplicably began to goad Dody, and she drew him into a heated disagreement over, of all things, the television commentator David Susskind. When Bette couldn’t get Dody to agree that Susskind was brilliant, she exploded. “Bette was being Bette in one of her own films,” Dody recalled. “She was having one of her famous ‘let him have it’ outbursts. She was seething, contemptuous, lethal.”

  When Dody continued to buck her, she “pulled out all the stops. Smoke and flame were escaping from her every orifice. Eyes were rolling, hands were flying, cigarettes waving.… Expletive followed expletive. Her range of invective was endless.… I was frightened.… This was a sorceress, and if at the end of her maledictions I was not dead or turned to stone, I was surely going to be out of a job. This was not a scene one survived, much less forgot.”

  But Dody never backed down, and finally Bette stopped screaming and sat silently for half an hour. Dody moistened his dry lips and ventured a question. She answered it. After an interruption by a phone call she returned to the den, stoked the fire, and turned to him. “You’re not in awe of me, are you, Sandy?” she said.

  “As an actress, as an artist, yes. Perhaps I am,” he replied. “As a woman and a subject, no. If I were we would have a lousy book.”

  Bette walked over to him and extended her hand. “We will never have another argument, my dear,” she said.

  They never did, but Dody soon found himself frustrated by Bette’s unwillingness to be completely frank about her life in Hollywood. Loquacious about her early years in New England and New York, she turned tight-lipped about her glory days; after more than half the book, she has only just won her first Oscar, and the rest of the memoir glosses over the very material her fans most wanted to know about. She is frank about two of her abortions, but mentions nothing about her affairs with Hughes, Wyler, Brent, or anyone else.

  She was honest with Dody about her ambivalent feelings toward her mother, and in June he sent her half the manuscript. When Bette called him on July 1 (even though he was on vacation), he was sure it was because she’d loved what she read so much she just couldn’t wait to tell him.

  “Bette! How are you, darling? How did you ever find me—”

  “Sandy,” she sobbed. “Ruthie—Ruthie just died. That marvelous woman whom we’ve destroyed! Ruthie—gone! We can’t, just can’t go on with the book. Ohhhhhhhh!” Then she hung up.

  Ruthie had died of coronary thrombosis at 8 A.M. in her home at 655 Ramona Street in Laguna Beach, with Bette and Bobby at her side. She was seventy-five years old. Bette was devastated; although her relationship with her mother had been mercurial and strained, she was convinced she wouldn’t be able to function without her. Just as she had when her father died, Bette tortured herself with her conflicting memories of Ruthie’s honesty and deceit, her sacrifices and extravagances, her strength and her childishness. Scenes of life with Ruthie rushed past her mind’s eye: watching her make pies that filled the Winchester house with marvelous aromas; the exhausted Ruthie sitting in the audience at her graduation from Cushing; Ruthie hunched over her negatives in Norwalk; Ruthie coaching her night and day for her role in The Wild Duck; Ruthie dragging her out of the shower to take George Arliss’s phone call.

  Now that her mother was gone, Bette was racked with guilt. How could she have resented Ruthie’s well-intentioned meddling in her life, or the indulgences she allowed herself when Bette was the highest-paid woman in the United States? “How dared I not understand that this cultivated, talented woman had given up everything for me; and then—only after my success was assured—exacted a price that could never nearly approximate her value?”

  Bette always knew that she could count on Ruthie, no matter what, and that knowledge had provided her with a psychological crutch for fifty years. Now she was gone, and Bette knew that she would miss her desperately.

  The orderly, organized Ruthie who had given Bette a detailed letter of instructions when she departed for the Cukor stock company in Rochester also left instructions to be followed after her death. “I intend to die as extravagantly as I have lived,” she wrote. “I want my casket to be one of those silver things.” Bette smiled when she read this, and later said that Ruthie could have had gold if she wanted it, but she was in no position financially to grant this last wish. Instead, she buried her mother in an oak casket at the Fairhaven Memorial Park in Orange, California. Later she decided she would rather have Ruthie moved to an elaborate crypt she had purchased for the family in Forest Lawn—overlooking Warner Brothers Studios. She would, she vowed, be buried right alongside her mother.

  Bette’s niece Ruth Bailey feels that “Ruthie would have had a screaming fit if she’d known that they had dug her up and took her way up there. But I always laughed, because there’s no way I want to be buried there—with Bette and Ruthie arguing like crazy!”

  At first shattered by Bette’s apparent decision to shelve her autobiography, Sandford Dody was persuaded to go ahead with his work, and by the time he was finished Bette was in a more sanguine mood about publishing it. Still, Dody was not prepared for what happened when he submitted the final manuscript to her. She began to edit the book “with a butcher knife,” he recalled. “Stories that she had told me with great feeling either disappeared or were changed radically.… Chunks—pages long—were removed, only a line or two replacing them with a ricke
ty bridge between the remaining thoughts.”

  Most of Bette’s cuts concerned Ruthie. When Dody protested, Bette snapped, “Just don’t ever confuse my darling Ruthie with Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother! Ruthie might have pushed but she was nothing like Rose, and never interfered with my work. Mother was a lady!”

  Ruthie’s death did little to change the curious relationship between Bette and Bobby. In 1959, while Bobby was hospitalized with appendicitis, tests revealed that her emotional disturbances, always vaguely called “nervous breakdowns,” were actually a manifestation of manic-depressive syndrome. Her condition finally understood, Bobby was prescribed the relatively new drug Lithium to control her mood swings. According to her daughter Ruth, Bobby was “fine after that.”

  But still she was meek, withdrawn, and completely subservient to her sister, and their relationship continued to puzzle and concern Bette’s friends. Their most frequent description of the sisters’ interaction was that Bette treated Bobby “like a servant.” (According to B.D., Bette once snapped at her for doing some work Bette wanted Bobby to do: “I pay her to do a job!”) One anecdote is particularly revealing—and disturbing. Don Ovens, a longtime friend of Bette’s, recalled a memorable dinner party at Bette’s in the early ’60s. Present were Bette, Bobby, B.D., Michael, Ovens, the lyricist Fred Ebb, and the actress Kaye Ballard. During lively cocktail conversation, Bette frequently, almost compulsively, applied fresh lipstick without looking into a mirror, and as her cocktail count mounted she unknowingly painted the tip of her nose bright red. Without a word, Bobby walked over to her and wiped off the misdirected lipstick. Bette didn’t stop talking for a second.

  When dinner was over, Bobby got up from the table, walked into the kitchen, and reappeared carrying small square slips of paper in her hand. She circled the table and put one square next to each guest’s plate. On each she had written a dollar amount. “Bobby!” Bette thundered. “I told you we are not giving out dinner checks tonight!” Bette barreled around the table retrieving the squares and explained that her sister had recently been hospitalized. Bobby fled back into the kitchen, then reappeared shortly later to announce that the dishes were ready to be washed. Again, Bette responded harshly and Bobby retreated once more, never to be seen again that evening.