James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  A few weeks into rehearsals, sensing that her part would never be expanded and that O’Neal and Leighton were stealing the show, Bette exploded. She forgot her lines in the middle of a difficult scene, O’Neal muttered something, and that was it. “She went crazy and paranoid,” O’Neal recalled, “and accused Frank and me of hurting her, sabotaging her performance.”

  “I’m sick of this Actors Studio shit!” she screamed. O’Neal, slack-jawed, just watched her as she ranted and raved. By now, he was a nervous wreck, drinking too much, wondering whether he would ever survive this experience. He bolted out of the theater in the middle of Bette’s harangue and went straight to Max Jacobson, the same “Dr. Feelgood” Bette had relied on during Two’s Company. “In order not to kill her,” O’Neal told his wife, “I got the shot.”

  When O’Neal left the theater, Bette stormed off to her dressing room. Corsaro took a deep breath and followed her a few minutes later. He found Chuck Bowden on his knees in front of her, begging her to return. “It was a tableau,” Corsaro says, “a scene right out of a movie.”

  Bette came back after Tennessee gave her further assurances of a meatier role. Corsaro saw that the playwright “was rather frightened of her, and he knew the dilemma he was in. He had gotten the theater on the strength of her name. He had to keep her happy, and he yessed her to death. But it was clear to everyone except her that any rewriting Tennessee was going to do would be of a very minor kind.”

  Bette quit twice more before out-of-town tryouts began (once she fled to a friend’s house in Connecticut), but she was wooed back both times with flowers and telegrams and assurances that the play needed her desperately. Finally, with “fear and trepidation,” as Corsaro put it, the company traveled to Rochester, New York, for their first performance before an audience on November 3. Bette had asked to open in Rochester, where she had appeared on stage professionally for the first time thirty-five years earlier. It was the start of one of the longest out-of-town tryout tours Corsaro had ever been involved in—four days in Rochester, four weeks in Detroit, five weeks in Chicago. The tour was so long, Corsaro explains, because of Bette’s insecurity about her role, and the producers hoped the extra time would allow her to grow completely comfortable in the part before she brought it to Broadway.

  During the train ride from Manhattan to Rochester, Bette asked Patrick O’Neal to come to her compartment for a chat. He dreaded the encounter, but instead of the harridan he expected, he found a charming, flirtatious Bette, apparently eager to make amends. “You know, Patrick,” she cooed, “in Rochester your dressing room and mine are on one side of the stage, and Margaret’s is on the other.”

  “Yes?” O’Neal didn’t get the point.

  “Just don’t forget what side of the theater you’re dressing on.”

  As he recalled it, “It was like a scene out of All About Eve. She wanted me to be her ally against Margaret. I was terrified at the thought and immediately had my dressing room moved to the other side. Very adult behavior.”

  The first performance of The Night of the Iguana in Rochester was a disaster; the audience laughed at just about every line in a play that wasn’t a comedy. Some of the laughter was warranted, Bruce Glover felt—especially during one mishap that remains vividly in his memory, both as a comic moment and as an example of Bette’s discomfort on stage. “The gal who played my wife came out for one scene bouncing a beach ball, and it got away from her. It bounced up in the air and came down smack on Bette’s head. It bounced back off her head and went up another eight feet, so it must have made quite an impact on her. It came down and bounced again before the girl retrieved it. It was a rather amazing moment. The girl was terrified that Bette Davis would have her fired.”

  What astonished Glover and everyone else in the company was that Bette didn’t react one bit when the ball hit her. She didn’t laugh, didn’t go with the moment and grab for the ball, didn’t try to make it appear as though the accident was a part of the script. “She just stood there like the icon she was, without moving a muscle or expressing any awareness of the ball,” Glover marveled.

  “If that had happened to Geraldine Page,” Patrick O’Neal says, “she’d still be bouncing that ball.”

  The first night in Rochester convinced Corsaro that the play needed a lot of fine-tuning, but the next day Bette wasn’t available to rehearse. She had, she claimed, fallen and sprained her ankle backstage the previous night, and she was confined to a wheelchair. Her understudy was forced to go on in her place the second night—with script in hand.

  Corsaro found the whole episode suspect, especially since Bette had appeared at a party after the performance in apparently perfect health. “Someone found out that it was only a minor sprain—she didn’t need to be in a wheelchair. It was her way of getting sympathy, because the first reviews had come in that morning, and Margaret Leighton got the best notices. Bette was worried that her involvement in the show had been a big mistake.”

  By now, others in the company felt the same way. Corsaro hastily called a meeting of everyone except Bette, and Margaret Leighton broached the question of whether Bette should be replaced. “She really was very disruptive at this point,” Corsaro felt. “She never allowed the play to take on any momentum. She insisted on revisions, revisions. We all thought the problems she was causing for the company would only get worse. By this time, she had created great dissatisfaction between her and Patrick, and there was a wall of politeness between her and Margaret. We all wondered, What are we gonna do?” The producers refused to fire Bette because without her they would have no theater. And so the Night of the Iguana company plodded on to Detroit, all the time hoping against the odds that matters would improve.

  Not surprisingly, they didn’t. Bette began to drink, and her behavior grew erratic, irrational. Suddenly Corsaro realized that there was a subterranean reason for this that had nothing to do with the size of her role or her distrust of the Method; it was the character Bette was playing. Maxine was a woman who was over the hill, losing her looks and sex appeal, desperate for a man, and all of this hit a little too close to home for Bette. “It was the role of a woman who was being rejected, constantly rejected,” Corsaro explains, “and Bette was over fifty, she had just divorced Gary Merrill, she wasn’t getting film offers. And here she was making plays for Patrick O’Neal that he wasn’t responding to. I’m sure the part had an insidiously negative effect on her, and she got more and more frightened as she realized that her role wasn’t going to be padded, and that Margaret Leighton was getting the best reviews. She was afraid that she was going to make a fool of herself.”

  In order to stand out more vividly on stage—and perhaps to prove that she still had sex appeal as well—Bette began to play Maxine far more sexily than Williams had written her. She dyed her hair flame red and wore a denim shirt open to the waist—a decision Corsaro thought was all wrong, especially when reviewers made cruel comments about her exposed flesh. Bruce Glover agreed with Corsaro. “Bette already had this little-old-lady body. She had a pot belly, boobs that were out of shape and had to be pushed up. If she’d used it to delineate the character, okay, but that wasn’t why she did it. It was really Bette Davis trying to be beautiful.” Despite the negative reaction, Bette did not change her wardrobe.

  With O’Neal out as a conquest possibility, according to Bruce Glover, Bette made some overtures to his young understudy, Mike Basilione. “I can’t say whether it was a sexual thing,” Glover says, “but I know that she at least was lonely and wanted attention, and she wanted Mike as her escort. He was very unhappy because he felt he was being manipulated; he was made to feel that one way of holding his job was to be friendly to Bette.”

  By this time the company had divided into enemy camps, with Bette, Chuck Bowden, and Viola Rubber on one side, and everyone else on the other. Bette tried to get Corsaro in her camp, but he felt he had to retain some objectivity. “By this time I realized that Bette’s participation in this show could destroy it. It was li
ke being trapped in a nightmare. Everything was going wrong. One of the reasons Tennessee wasn’t giving her the rewrites she wanted was because he was having vicious fights with his lover, Frank Merlo. He kept announcing ‘It’s over between us!’ Then he got bit by his dog, Satan, and he was hobbling around on crutches.…”

  Despite everything, Corsaro thought Bette gave a good performance on opening night in Detroit. “She was nervous, she was edgy, but that made her actually quite alive, and she was good. When she started to settle into the role, she became more of a caricature of Bette Davis. I could never make her understand the distinction.”

  Corsaro had come to realize that “there were twenty-five minutes of utter lard in the show that would have to be cut in order for this delicate play to emerge properly.” He dreaded the thought, because in order to make the cuts he would have to truncate Bette’s part. He was certain that would create fireworks, and so were the producers. “They told me I couldn’t do that, that Bette was in a good mood, we can’t upset her.” Corsaro talked to his agent, Audrey Wood, and told her that unless he was allowed to make the cuts, the success of the play was in jeopardy. “I told her we had to go directly to Tennessee and get his okay. If we got that, the producers would have to shut up.”

  When Bette got wind of Corsaro’s plans, he recalled, “She started to feel that we were all in conspiracy against her. And then, I swear to God, she started to go to the newspapers and spread stories about the play and the cast. Slanderous statements—she was convinced by this time that O’Neal and Leighton were having an affair, so most of her barbs were aimed at them.”

  O’Neal knew that “she had kind of a press game going on. We didn’t have access to the press, but she did. It was just another way for her to exert control.” Corsaro asked Margaret Leighton what she was going to do about Bette’s behavior, and she replied, “I will not do anything about it. I will play my role, and I will not interfere in any way. You made an attempt to change this person, but you couldn’t, and therefore we must take the consequences.” Corsaro felt Leighton was so sanguine because “by this time she knew she pretty much had the play wrapped up herself.”

  Tensions heightened as the Detroit tryout continued. According to Corsaro, “There were terrible problems, always a blow-up for whatever reason. The theater became like a battlefield. I went to talk with her, to try to ameliorate things, and I realized that this woman was like a ticking bomb. And then a very strange moment happened.”

  It was two or three weeks into the Detroit run. Corsaro, Tennessee Williams, and Chuck Bowden were in the empty theater one afternoon, discussing the show’s many problems, when they noticed a cleaning lady carrying a bucket of water walk out on the stage and begin to mop the set. This is odd, Corsaro thought, and he looked at the woman more closely. It was Bette. “There she was, looking like a charwoman, with a pail of water and a mop, swabbing the floor. The three of us looked at each other and said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” Corsaro took a deep breath and told the others, “Let me talk to her.”

  He walked up on the stage and waited a few minutes for Bette to finish swabbing the floorboards. Then the two of them went backstage, behind the set. “She became the most pathetic child I’ve ever seen. She broke down in tears and cried out, ‘Nobody likes me. Nobody likes me!’ She was just self-lacerating. And I saw that I was really dealing with an eight-year-old girl. I thought, Is this the impenetrable secret one has to find to deal with this woman? That under all that defensiveness was this rather pathetic child?”

  The Night of the Iguana limped into Chicago, and the reviews were scathing. As Corsaro recalled it, “The critic Claudia Cassidy, long a champion of Tennessee’s, said that the acting was terrible, the directing was awful, everything was awful. Everyone knew that something had to be done, and I finally got Tennessee to agree to cut twenty-five minutes. Then came the dreadful day when I had to take the cuts to Bette.” To his utter amazement, she accepted them without complaint. “There was not a peep out of her.”

  Bette didn’t fight the changes because by now she wasn’t just worried that the play might not showcase her properly, she was terrified that it could turn into an ignominious Broadway flop. After she reviewed the cuts, she called a meeting at the theater in Chicago that included Corsaro, Bowden, Viola Rubber, and Tennessee Williams. To everyone’s shock, she demanded that Patrick O’Neal be replaced. His habit of improvising and experimenting with reactions and phrasing, she argued, was throwing off her concentration.

  Corsaro was speechless. “This was maybe three weeks before we were supposed to open on Broadway. It was insane. Patrick O’Neal had been with this show from the very beginning, and he had been just brilliant. But his performance was suffering because of her. He couldn’t stand everything that was going on around him, and he started to act like Shannon offstage, drinking and holing himself up in his hotel room. He didn’t tell anyone his phone number, you couldn’t reach him. He was completely incommunicado, hiding out from Bette Davis.”

  O’Neal wasn’t so isolated that word of this meeting didn’t reach him in a flash, and he turned up at the theater within minutes. Corsaro had never witnessed a scene quite like it. “Patrick went after her and almost killed her. He had to literally, physically be held back from strangling her. He called her everything in the book—‘You filthy cunt!’ He was wild, and she just stood there with a smile on her face. She seemed to be pleased that she had finally gotten a rise out of him. She was getting her vengeance.”

  O’Neal threw a table across the stage and stormed out of the theater. Then Bette demanded to know, once and for all, whether the substantive revisions she had been waiting for were going to be written. There was silence from everyone. “Well?!” Bette shouted. Corsaro turned to Williams. “Tenn,” he said softly, “would you please level with Miss Davis, once and for all?”

  Williams swallowed hard and drawled, “Bette, ah cahn’t make any mo-ah changes. Ah think the play is just fahn the way it is.” Bette’s eyes popped. She glared at Williams, glared at Corsaro. Then she stomped out.

  The changes weren’t made, O’Neal wasn’t fired, and from that point on, according to Corsaro, “it was mayhem. We were talking through lawyers most of the time.” Bette started to miss performances, and Paula Laurence, who was Chuck Bowden’s wife, went on in her stead. Corsaro thought she was “dreadful.” And Bette repeatedly pointed out to Corsaro that without her the play’s audiences dwindled. “She had this young lawyer who looked like her nephew or something,” Corsaro says, “and he started to stand in the lobby holding this little mechanism that he would use to click off the number of people who asked for their money back when they heard that Bette wasn’t performing that night. She’d hold that over our heads and say: ‘I’m the star of this show.’ Oh, it was like a nightmare.”

  The day after the scene with O’Neal, Bette had Corsaro barred from the theater. “She had decided that I was the enemy because I wasn’t willing to do what she wanted. I had tried to talk to her quietly, but she thought I was conning her. All I was trying to do was hold the goddamn show together. But I was to leave the theater and never return. Chuck Bowden supported Bette in this. He took over and it was ‘Yes, Bette, anything for you, Bette.’ He kept giving her these little bits of business for her to do on stage to make her feel better.”

  Corsaro was still the director of record—he hadn’t been fired—and whenever he could, he sneaked into the theater and scribbled notes about the performances that he slipped to the stage manager. “But Bette’s young lawyer saw me and reported me.” Corsaro felt as though he were “caught in the middle of a holocaust,” but his frame of mind improved somewhat when Jerome Robbins sent a note to Audrey Wood. In it he reminded the agent that he had choreographed Bette in Two’s Company and it had been a traumatic experience. “Jerry kept writing notes to Audrey telling her that if Bette had done this, this was the next thing she would do. And by God, it did seem to follow a pattern.”

  The producers
asked the respected director Elia Kazan, in Chicago for a show of his own, to evaluate the play for them. Word got back to Corsaro that in Kazan’s opinion the show was “beautifully directed, and it’s now beginning to take its place, once you keep her quiet. She’s not going to get any better, she’s not going to get any worse. She doesn’t hurt the play. Leave it alone. Leave her alone.” In Corsaro’s opinion, that advice from Kazan prevented things from going haywire once Chuck Bowden took over the directorial reins.

  With tremendous anticipation—and four months of theater-party bookings presold—The Night of the Iguana opened on December 28, 1961, at the Royale Theatre on West Forty-fifth Street. Bette was a mass of raw nerves, totally unsure of what the public’s reaction to her and the play would be. She could not have been less prepared for what happened when she made her entrance: a theaterful of rabid Bette Davis fans rose in unison to give her a thunderous ovation before she had uttered a word. The applause and cheers went on for five minutes (“an eternity,” Bruce Glover felt), and every time Bette tried to say her first line, the cheers would increase rather than die down. Finally, she was forced to break character, walk down to the footlights, and acknowledge the hosannas—which she did by raising her arms over her head in the classic prizefighter gesture. Only then could the show continue. “My entrance followed all of that,” Patrick O’Neal sighed. “And I was greeted by a flat, dead house. It was difficult.”

  The performance went well, but at the end of the show Bette was greeted by another, less pleasant, surprise. Now, it was Margaret Leighton who got the thunderous ovation, and it was clear that the audience felt she had given the better performance. Bette was devastated. Patrick O’Neal noticed that on subsequent nights, Bette actually prompted the tumult that greeted her entrance. “Some part of her brain knew that if she’s gonna get an ovation tonight, she better get it right away. So she encouraged that and got it—and it was so transparent as to be rather touching.”