by James Spada
The reviews didn’t help Bette’s self-confidence. Although the New York Journal American critic found her “brash and beguiling,” the majority of the reviewers considered Margaret Leighton’s acting far more impressive. The most influential of the critics, Walter Kerr of The New York Times, could muster only the faintest praise: “…in the coarse and blowsy effrontery of her flat-footed walk… there is some tattered and forlorn splendor.” And Howard Taubman of the Herald Tribune was cruel. Bette, he wrote, “made much of her shocking flame-colored hair and her unbuttoned shirt that shows the flaccid flesh down to her waist.”
Now, every performance was torture for Bette, and in another odd parallel with Two’s Company, she began to have dental problems. “I had to reposition her teeth,” Dr. Ivin Prince recalls, “because they were moving inside her mouth. They were spread out all over. She had to wear an orthodontic appliance, and for most people it would have taken at least a week to get used to it. But Bette had tremendous agility with her lips and tongue, and she went back on stage with it just like it wasn’t there.”
Prince recalls that during her visits Bette would wail to him about how “terrified” she was of the play. “She would tell me that she felt nauseous and ready to throw up, that’s how scared she was.”
While she was seeing Dr. Prince, Bette announced that she would be leaving The Night of the Iguana as soon as the four months of theater-party bookings were fulfilled. Tennessee Williams, afraid that the show would close without Bette as its star, frantically tried to call her at her hotel to talk her out of leaving. She deftly avoided him, but the next day Williams tracked her down at Prince’s office. “Tennessee Williams came barrelling in,” Prince recalls, “and started screaming at Bette that she would never work on Broadway again if she left the show so soon. Then she screamed back at him, and all the time I’m trying to work on her mouth. It was very emotional. By then I had had enough of Night of the Iguana, and I guess she had, too.”
Bette did leave Iguana in April 1962, after four months and 128 performances. By this time, according to Corsaro, the cast members “had really grown to hate her. They had to keep their mouths shut to such an extent. She had made them feel like shit.”
Word had spread around New York of the tension between Bette and Margaret Leighton; Bette reportedly called Leighton “a bitch” and added, “She’s soooo congenial, she makes me sick.” On Bette’s last night in the production, she received three telegrams from Leighton telling her what a pleasure it had been to work with her. Bette was smug until she found out that Leighton had received similar telegrams signed “Bette Davis.” They had all been sent by Noel Coward—because, he said, “They are two such silly bitches.”
By her final performance, Bette was sick to death of The Night of the Iguana. She had been devastated to discover that she was not being considered for the film version, and she believed that most of the cast and crew had been in concert against her all along. According to B.D., Bette told the assembled company as they bade her farewell, “I’m soooo happy that everyone thinks Maggie is so charming and Patrick so brilliant! I’m sorry I had to irritate you for so long with my professionalism. You obviously like doing it your way much better. Well! Now you can, my dears!”
The Night of the Iguana was named the best American play of 1961-1962 by the Critics’ Circle, and Margaret Leighton won the Tony Award as Best Actress. (Bette wasn’t nominated.) The show ran another five months on Broadway after Shelley Winters took over the role of Maxine Faulk.
Over the past thirty years, Frank Corsaro, now the artistic director of the Actors Studio, has tried to fathom what he calls “the nightmare” of directing this show. Corsaro places the bulk of the blame with Bette, who he believes had a subconscious wish to fail. “In a terrible way, this woman was not supposed to succeed. All her life, she had had that demon. She was angry, angry to such a great degree, and at whom—her father? Who knows?
“I think she represented something of the motion picture horror. The movies have created terrifying children who have become stars. Bette Davis’s vanity was profound, and it had to be, because it masked a vulnerability that was just as profound. There is something terrifying about an industry that can create a false image of personal success and leave people clawing for the rest of their lives to live up to it.”
A few months after Bette left the show, Frank Corsaro rented a summer house on Fire Island to recuperate. Sitting in a local bar one night, he noticed a man in a corner staring at him. He couldn’t see who he was through the dark, and couldn’t imagine why anyone would be watching him so fixedly. Then the shadowy figure got up and started toward him, and he saw that it was Gary Merrill. Corsaro thought, Am I gonna have a fight with this guy? He steeled himself as Merrill approached.
“You’re Frank Corsaro, aren’t you?” Merrill demanded.
“Yes,” Corsaro replied warily.
“Why didn’t you just belt her?” Merrill thundered. “I knocked her on her ass. That’s what you shoulda done!”
PART FIVE
“Survivor”
TWENTY-SIX
W
alter Blake, the personal assistant to the Hollywood director Robert Aldrich, slid out of his cab in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York. It was early summer, 1962, and he was a man with a mission: to persuade Bette Davis to star in Aldrich’s film version of Henry Farrell’s novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a thriller about a mentally unbalanced former child star living in mutual fear and loathing with her crippled sister in a decaying Hollywood mansion. In his briefcase, Blake carried a check for $25,000 made out to Bette.
“Bob Aldrich already had Joan Crawford signed to play the sister in the wheelchair,” Blake recalls, “and he really wanted Bette to play Baby Jane. Bette was broke after she left Night of the Iguana, and she was staying at the Plaza on good will and credit. We heard she was in hock to them for $30,000.”
The check Blake carried with him amounted to just about all the money Aldrich had, but he figured hard cash would be the best incentive he could offer Bette to make the movie. She knew about and liked the property, but she didn’t want to work with Crawford, who had come backstage with Chuck Bowden and Paula Laurence after a performance of Iguana to try to talk her into making the film with her. Bette was unreceptive. “Let’s make this quick, Joan,” she snapped. “I’m leaving for the country in five minutes.”
Crawford told her about the project and purred, “I’ve always wanted to work with you.” Bette looked at her and thought, This woman is full of shit.
Paula Laurence recalled that after Crawford left, Bette ranted and raved that she had wanted to buy the property, that she couldn’t stand the idea of working with Crawford, that she was suspicious of the whole enterprise. “If she thinks I’m going to play that stupid bitch in the wheelchair,” she bellowed just before she left the theater, “she’s got another think coming!”
And so Walter Blake’s job now was to get Bette’s commitment to make Baby Jane—by whatever means possible. “We knew she needed money, so we figured that if we got her to sign the back of the check, legally she’d have to do it.” Blake first telephoned Bette at the Plaza, and the reception he got wasn’t warm.
“Walter who?’ Bette barked. “Never heard of you.”
“I knew you at Warner Brothers, Miss Davis.”
“Oh yeah. Waddya want?”
“I’ve got something that you’re going to like.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
Blake persuaded Bette to let him come up to her posh suite, where he found her in slacks and a middy shirt, her hair in a sloppy topknot, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. When he showed her the Baby Jane script, she only glanced at the title. “I know about this. Who’s gonna direct?”
“Robert Aldrich.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“He’s directed nine films, Miss Davis—Apache, Autumn Leaves, The Angry Hills—”
“I never heard of him! I bet he stinks
. Who’s producing?”
“I will be.”
“I bet you stink, too!”
By now Blake feared he had made a huge blunder. “Miss Davis,” he concluded as soothingly as possible, “perhaps we should meet again after you’ve read the script. Call me when you’re finished with it and we’ll talk—I’ll take you to dinner.”
“Can you afford it?” Bette asked as she showed Blake the door.
Bette found that she loved the way Luke Heller’s script beautifully fleshed out the novel’s dark, unsettling tale: as a vaudeville headliner circa 1917, precocious child star Baby Jane Hudson had played to packed houses. Resplendent in blond ringlets and flouncy crinolines, she belted out maudlin ditties like “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” (whose address was “Heaven above”) to rapturous audiences. As obnoxious and spoiled offstage as she is cloying on, she completely overshadows her dark-haired, brooding sister Blanche.
By 1935, the sisters’ roles have reversed; Blanche has become a top movie star, while Jane, her childhood charms vanished, gets film jobs only because of her sister’s power. Jane is consumed with jealousy, then devastated by guilt when she blames herself for a car wreck that leaves Blanche permanently crippled.
The story then jumps to 1962. The aging Hudson sisters are mutually dependent. They live on income from Blanche’s investments, but Blanche, confined to a wheelchair in an upstairs bedroom, must rely on Jane for her food and her contact with the outside world. Still racked with remorse about the accident, Jane has become mentally unstable and a heavy drinker. She often retreats into a fantasy world fueled by her memories of her youthful stardom. Dressed in outlandish outfits copied from her days as a vaudeville moppet, her makeup troweled on, her blond wig in ringlets, she drunkenly performs “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” in the mirrored music room as though she were fifty years younger.
Jane’s descent into madness is hastened when she finds out that Blanche has secretly sold the house, and they must be out in six weeks. She cuts Blanche off from the outside world, stops bringing her food (except for her dead parakeet, and later a rat), and physically brutalizes her. At the same time she pathetically plans to stage a comeback.
When the cleaning lady discovers Blanche starved, gagged, and trussed up, Jane bashes the woman’s head in with a hammer. Frantic that she’ll be found out, Jane lugs her sister, now nearly comatose, into the car and drives her to the Santa Monica beach. As Blanche nears death, she confesses that it was she who caused the car crash when she tried to run Jane down. Completely gone now, Jane responds dreamily, “You mean all this time we could have been friends?”
Leaving Blanche to die on the sand, Jane joyfully performs her old dance routine on the sand as a crowd gathers and the police descend.
Bette was a bit put off by the script’s Grand Guignol excesses, but she knew that Baby Jane Hudson was a great part, and that the movie could be a big hit, especially with younger audiences of the kind that had flocked to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. More importantly, Bette had no other offers—and she needed the money. She called Blake. “I read the thing,” she said curtly. “I’ll be playing Jane, right?”
Blake said yes, of course, then Bette barked, “So who’s the other broad?”
“We don’t know yet,” Blake lied. He recalled, “I couldn’t tell her it was Crawford because they were enemies. I had to get her signature on that check and then tell her, when she couldn’t back out.”
“I have a check with me for $25,000, Miss Davis,” Blake said, “and I can give it to you if you’ll sign on the back that you’ll do the movie.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars for a movie!” Bette exploded. “Are you crazy?!”
“It’s just a down payment, a binder to say that you’ll do the movie. We can negotiate your salary, what you’ll get up front, all of that.”
“Oh,” Bette replied, and Blake saw that he had been right: Bette did need the money. She took the check, and agreed to fly to Hollywood with him the next day to meet with Aldrich. Two days later, Bette walked into the production meeting with Aldrich, saw Joan Crawford sitting next to the director, turned on her heel, and walked out. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she hissed at Blake. “I won’t work with her.”
“Well, Bette, you’ve got to,” Blake replied. “We just paid you $25,000.” When she realized Blake was right, Bette went back into the meeting, seething over Joan’s pious attitudes and ladylike airs. “There was no hello or good-bye,” Blake recalls. “The two of them together were like a Nazi and a Jew.”
Bette agreed to a salary advance of $60,000 (including the $25,000 she had already received), 10 percent of the worldwide gross profits, and $600 per week in living expenses. Crawford, in a shrewd gamble that later rankled Bette, took only $30,000 up front but 15 percent of the profits and weekly living expenses of $1,500.
Once Bette’s participation was set, she made it clear to Aldrich what was paramount on her mind. During an early meeting, she turned to the rotund, forty-four-year-old director and asked, “Have you slept with Joan?”
“No,” he replied. “But not for any lack of trying on her part.” Bette liked Aldrich’s honesty, and she felt confident that Crawford’s penchant for seducing her directors in order to get preferential treatment from them would go unsatisfied this time around.
Unlike Bette, the fifty-eight-year-old Crawford was a striking beauty who had kept herself in good enough physical condition to play romantic leads through the 1950s. But she hadn’t made a film since 1959, the year her husband, Pepsi-Cola mogul Alfred Steele, died. Steele had left her with little except a mountain of debt and a position on the board of his company. “I was lonely,” Joan said to explain why she jumped at the chance to do Baby Jane. “I was worse than lonely, I was bored out of my skull. And I needed the money.” Like Bette, Joan had a deep-seated need to work. “Inactivity is one of the great indignities of life,” she said. “The need to work is always there, bugging me.”
With his stars uneasily in place, Aldrich set out to raise money for the picture and was shocked by the chilly reception he encountered. “Four major companies refused even to read the script or scan the budget. Three distributors read the script, looked at the budget, and turned the project down. Two of those said they might be interested if I would agree to cast younger players.”
Finally Aldrich convinced Eliot Hyman, the head of the small British independent company Seven Arts, to finance the picture with Davis and Crawford with a budget under $1 million and a shooting schedule no longer than thirty days. Jack Warner (of all people) agreed to distribute the film.
With Aldrich’s assurances that this picture would be a blockbuster ringing in her ears, Bette decided to make a permanent move back to Los Angeles. With B.D. and Michael, she moved into a low-slung, contemporary, “flashy Beverly Hills house” that B.D. had found for them, complete with a projection room, a volleyball court, pool, and pool house. Bette had wanted a New England-style place, and when she saw this modern structure she said, “Oh, B.D., not another one.”
“You told me to please myself”’ B.D. huffed in reply.
Bette’s fifteen-year-old daughter was more a pampered princess than ever. She had brought her horse Stoneybrook to live with her at Grier, a private girls’ school in Pennsylvania, and then sold the animal when she followed Bette to Hollywood, where her mother made sure she was cast for a part in Baby Jane, as a nosy neighbor’s daughter. Bette let her keep the money she would be paid. B.D. told the press that she had acting ambitions, and although she would be billed in the film as Barbara Merrill, she later petitioned a court to have her name changed back to Barbara Sherry. She told the judge that she intended “to pursue a career in dramatic arts and intends to seek motion picture, television and stage engagements as a singer and actress.”
On July 19, four days prior to the start of filming, Jack Warner hosted a press luncheon for Bette, Joan, and Robert Aldrich in the trophy room at Warner Brothers. The press coverage was tremendous, a
nd there was much anticipation of a pyrotechnic feud between these two “former movie greats.” Warner and Aldrich loved it, aware as they were that any publicity was good publicity. Photos of the two stars ran in newspapers around the world, and Bette pasted one in her scrapbook. Under the photo she scrawled, “W.B. gave a luncheon for the two former queens (only one in my opinion) at the beginning of Baby Jane. The horror is we look alike!”
They didn’t really, of course, and from the outset of filming at the Producer’s Studio on Melrose Avenue, it was clear to cast and crew that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had very distinct personalities as well. Anna Lee, cast as the Hudsons’ nosy neighbor, vividly recalls the two of them. “Joan would arrive at the studio sharp at one minute to nine. Immaculately groomed, she’d come in with her entourage: a makeup man, a hairdresser, a secretary—there were always seven or eight people trailing after her. She would waft very regally into her dressing room and gently close the door.
“A moment or so later, you’d hear Bette clomping down the corridor, all by herself, usually swearing like a sailor about something, using quite obscene language. She’d go thundering into her dressing room and slam the door. I really think her behavior was just to shock Joan. She was definitely needling her. She put a little card up on her dressing room door that said, ‘Of all my relations, I like sex the best.’ She knew it would horrify Joan, who was very straitlaced and didn’t have much of a sense of humor about herself.”
The film critic Judith Crist, who befriended Bette in the mid-1970s, feels that the differences between Bette and Joan ran deep. “They came from totally different classes, and your roots come out. Bette had a stage background, Joan had maybe a burlesque show or two. When you got right down to it, Bette was a lady, and Joan Crawford was not. It was ironic, because Bette would swear and lumber around, and Joan of course was all piety and refinement, but class will show. Joan would pretend to be drinking water when it was really vodka, and she’d drink herself stupid in public. Bette would never do that. And whenever Joan would call me all she’d talk about were the intimate details of her medical problems. She just didn’t have any class.”
