by James Spada
Observers were surprised that Crawford had been overlooked, but 1962 had been a strong year for female performances. Bette’s competitors were Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker; Katharine Hepburn in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Lee Remick for Days of Wine and Roses.
Of all the Baby Jane legends, the most apocryphal is one perpetuated by Bette, who claimed that Joan, devastated at having been overlooked, actively campaigned to deny her costar the Oscar. “She told people not to vote for me,” Bette huffed to friends.
Walter Blake never heard anything like that, and he doubts it happened. “For one thing, Joan Crawford didn’t have that kind of influence in this town at that time. There were just as many Academy voters who disliked her as disliked Bette. And besides, both of them were hungry for money. Joan was smart enough to know that if Bette won the award it would boost the picture’s box-office take—from which Joan was making more than Bette.”
If Joan didn’t lobby against Bette, she did make sure that she’d have the last laugh on her. She telephoned all the nominees and offered to accept the award for them if they weren’t able to attend the ceremonies. As luck would have it, three of the actresses were absent that night. Joan’s chances looked good.
Bette, decked out in a flattering Edith Head gown, her face temporarily lifted with tapes under her wig, left Honeysuckle Hill late in the afternoon of April 8 convinced she would win her third Oscar. She later said that before she left she had placed a rose between her first two Oscars—“those two tarnished boys”—and said, “Tonight, you’re going to have a young brother.”
When Anne Bancroft’s name was announced as the winner, Bette said, she “nearly dropped dead. I sat there backstage and I heard her name and I thought, ‘It isn’t mine.’ I was paralyzed with shock.” Bette’s disappointment turned to anger when, seconds later, Joan Crawford glided past her with a murmured “Excuse me,” strode on stage to one of the night’s most enthusiastic ovations, and accepted Bancroft’s Oscar.
Although Bette had every right to expect that she might win, she should have realized that Baby Jane was not the kind of serious, uplifting, noble cinematic effort the Academy traditionally prefers to honor. (Bancroft had, after all, played Helen Keller’s teacher Annie Sullivan.) Never a good loser, Bette carped (just as she had in 1951) that someone who perfects a performance on Broadway and then transfers it to film (as Bancroft had) has an unfair advantage over another actor who creates a character in a matter of weeks. And she continually blamed Crawford’s meddling for her loss of the last Oscar for which she would be nominated.
At home after the ceremonies, her misery “had loads of company,” Bette said. “It was an amazing experience. We all came back, Robert Aldrich and about ten of us and you should have seen us standing around like numbskulls. My children were there and they said, ‘Oh, Mother, this is ridiculous’—and they never get involved in my career. It was a sad experience, it really was.
“That was the last amount of emotion I will give to the Academy Awards. I really don’t care anymore. Quite honestly, I hope I’m never nominated again.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
B.
D. was miserable. She and Bette were in Cannes for the presentation of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? at the city’s annual film festival, and their traveling companion Viola Rubber had arranged for an escort to take B.D. to the screening. When Viola told her that her date, Jeremy Hyman, was an executive of Seven Arts, she envisaged a squat, bald, cigar-chomping mogul who would only bore her and keep her from enjoying the company of “all those lecherous Frenchmen.” B.D. was sure she’d get a great deal of attention from the Gallic charmers after several of her mother’s press profiles called her “a statuesque, green-eyed blond beauty.” She dreaded spending the evening with someone who could only be a middle-aged toad.
Jeremy Hyman wasn’t very excited either about the prospect of escorting Bette Davis’s sixteen-year-old daughter that evening. He couldn’t help but imagine he’d have an obnoxious child with braces and pigtails on his arm all night. When he knocked on the door of Bette’s suite and B.D. opened it, he looked over her shoulder to find the gawky adolescent he expected. When B.D. introduced herself, Jeremy couldn’t believe his eyes. His date could have been at least twenty-one—and a pretty, blond, bosomy twenty-one-year-old at that.
She was equally astonished. Jeremy, twenty-nine, was tall and handsome, and had a charming English accent. As he offered B.D. his arm and began to escort her out the door, both of them overheard Bette mutter to Viola, “My God, Viola, what have you done?! The son of a bitch looks like Leslie Howard! I thought you said he was a producer.”
B.D. saw Jeremy smile slightly, and the two of them told each other how much they had dreaded the date and how pleasantly surprised they now were. As the evening progressed, Bette couldn’t miss the look in B.D.’s eyes, and B.D. thought her mother seemed “in distress.” For months, Bette had talked about how much she enjoyed traveling with her daughter, and B.D. suspected she would be delighted if they remained exclusive companions for the rest of their lives. Clearly, B.D. decided, Jeremy represented a threat to Bette’s plans.
The couple had the good luck to be seated at a separate table from Bette’s at the after-screening dinner, and in the course of the evening they found themselves alone on a balcony overlooking a glorious view of a valley. Years later, B.D. rapturously recalled their first kiss. “I saw shooting stars, heard bells and, when we finally stepped apart, I felt dizzy.” She and Jeremy didn’t realize it at the time, B.D. said, but they had already fallen in love.
Bette’s agitation grew the next morning when B.D. left the suite at 8 A.M., wearing a revealing bikini, to meet Jeremy for a swim. She sensed a real potential for trouble here. She had treated B.D. as an adult practically since her infancy, and the girl’s intelligence and strength of character had made her just about Bette’s equal since she was twelve. Many of Bette’s friends thought that not only had she spoiled B.D. dreadfully, but she had allowed the child far too much latitude. Bridget Price told Virginia Conroy in 1962 that B.D. “is too old for her years—only fourteen and Bette allows her to drink whiskey and soda and smoke, go on dates, etc. Do you wonder there are juvenile delinquents?”
B.D. had begun to date at twelve, and among her escorts was the handsome actor George Hamilton, eight years her senior. According to B.D., after each date Bette would accost her at the front door and demand to know if she was still a virgin. B.D. interpreted this either as Bette’s attempt at a vicarious thrill or a way actually to push B.D. into her first sexual encounter. She doesn’t seem to have considered that Bette might have had a motherly concern that B.D., sexually provocative beyond her years, could be taken advantage of. (B.D. has never said whether she lost her virginity during this period, but she did write obliquely that she had “been a woman since I was twelve when I had, at her instigation, begun dating.”)
Bette seemed mostly concerned that her daughter not be hurt as B.D. spent more and more time with Jeremy Hyman in Cannes. At one point she warned her daughter, “You’re going to get kicked in the teeth just like I always did. You’re much too young for a man like that to take seriously. He’s either playing you along and you’ll be dumped, or he wants you because you’re my daughter. Take my word for it… I know about these things.”
When B.D. dismissed her mother’s concerns and continued to see Jeremy, according to her, Bette changed her tactics. Aware that B.D. and Jeremy had a date one afternoon, Bette stalled, lingered, and changed plans during a morning in Nice with B.D. until she missed her rendezvous in Cannes with Jeremy. When the two finally did meet up, the atmosphere was tense until B.D. proved that she had telephoned Jeremy with word that she would be late—a message he had not received.
B.D. was appalled at Bette’s attempts to keep her away from Jeremy, but others were equally amazed that Bette allowed the two to spend any time alone together at all. As Bette’s friend Judith Crist put it, �
�She was just a little girl.”
That was of no concern to Jeremy. After he took B.D. to a romantic dinner in St. Paul de Vence, they strolled the grounds of the Colombe d’Or, a medieval citadel-turned-hotel. On a stone bench in the midst of glorious gardens, Jeremy told B.D. that he loved her. He asked her not to respond, but to think about what he had said. On the drive back to Cannes, B.D. was afraid that at any moment she would awaken from this dream.
Back at Honeysuckle Hill, B.D. moped and pined for Jeremy. After Cannes they had spent a marvelous four days in London (where Bette had met with Carlo Ponti to discuss his new film), and B.D. had told Jeremy she loved him. When Bette agreed to make The Empty Canvas for Ponti, B.D. was ecstatic: it meant she would be returning to London, and Jeremy, in a few months.
Now, that seemed an eternity away, and Bette apparently felt sympathy for B.D.’s romantic anguish. When Jeremy called three days after they had left London and proposed marriage, Bette got on the phone and—to her daughter’s great surprise—told him, “It’s about time! B.D.’s miserable without you!” Joyful and overwhelmed, B.D. made plans for an engagement party in six weeks, when Jeremy would be able to fly to California.
Bette’s friends were stunned by the news. How could she allow her teenage daughter to marry a man almost twice her age? Over the years, Bette gave a variety of reasons for her decision. She told Judith Crist that B.D. was “the kind of girl who better be married at sixteen”—meaning, Crist thought, that she feared that the amply developed, sophisticated B.D. was likely to “get in trouble” unless she had a marriage certificate.
Bette told several friends that she was well aware that Jeremy was a father figure to B.D., and that this had in fact helped to sway her in favor of the marriage. “She never even knew Sherry, for crissakes,” Bette said. “And Merrill was no father. She hated him. Maybe she could use a daddy in her life. Christ knows I could have!”
She didn’t say quite the same thing to reporter Godfrey Winn, but she did stress that she considered Jeremy’s age a plus: “I [would not] have approved,” she said, “if the boy she wanted to marry had been almost as young as herself. I would have fought it tooth and nail. I consider this modern craze for marrying almost in the teens is asking for trouble. Barbara fell in love with somebody much older than herself… not only mature, but suitable in every way.”
According to B.D., Bette’s private opinion of Jeremy Hyman was quite different. During a vicious, totally unexpected fight while the engagement party preparations were underway, Bette railed against Hyman for not trying to “woo me over” and accused B.D. of caring for nothing but her “precious little love affair.”
“You don’t give a damn about me,” she spat. “Well, let me tell you something, young lady… if I wanted to I could take him away from you right now!”
B.D. recalled that she turned red with fury. “Good God, Mother, are you out of your mind? One minute you can’t stand Jeremy… the next minute you’re going to take him away from me! Well, if you want to show your future son-in-law what a weirdo you are, go ahead and try it! But if you think he’s one of those sycophants I used to get stuck with who went out with me in order to be able to fawn all over you, you’re in for a hell of a shock!… Go ahead and try it! I dare you!”
With that, Bette began to sob and pleaded, “Don’t do this to me, B.D.… not today. You know that all I want is the best for you. I know all about men… they’re shits, every one of them. I just don’t want you to get kicked in the teeth like I always was. Have it your way, but you just wait and see… he’ll dump you. Then you’ll realize that the only person who really loves you is me. You wait and see.”
To this day, B.D. believes that the only reason Bette agreed to her marriage was that she was certain it was doomed and fully expected B.D. to come “crawling home” to her in six months. Equally convinced that the union would last forever, B.D. happily looked forward to her engagement party at the Bel-Air Hotel, and her wedding day, which she and Jeremy agreed would be January 4, 1964.
In the meantime, Bette went back to work. The picture, to be called Dead Pigeon, brought her back to the Warner Brothers lot for the first time in fourteen years. Very much a throwback to the melodramas she had done at the studio in the ’40s, the story concerned a pair of murderous twins, one a wealthy socialite, the other the bankrupt owner of a bar who kills her sister and assumes her identity. The story resembled A Stolen Life in many ways, and just to complete the connection to Bette’s past, her two-time costar Paul Henreid signed on to direct, and both Jack Warner and Steve Trilling were involved in the production.
Warner didn’t like the film’s title, and he asked his story department to come up with some alternates. Among those proffered were Scream!, The Golden Girls, Duel Me Deadly, The Fake and the Phony, Hate the Sin, and The Murder of Myself Happily, all these were forsaken for the film’s final title, Dead Ringer.
By all accounts, Bette was an angel on this production; her affection and regard for Paul Henreid seemed to make the difference. “I understood her temperament and her peculiar gifts,” Henreid recalled. “I knew what she thought was effective for her.” The film’s assistant director, Phil Ball, was amazed at Bette’s patience every morning during the nearly three hours it took to prepare her to face the cameras. “Bette had to go through extensive makeup. There was a lot of face lifting and that sort of thing. But she was a pro. She was always ready. Of all the actresses I’ve ever worked with, Bette was the most professional. I’m talking about acting ability, being on time, cooperating, her attitude, the whole nine yards. Totally professional.”
Bette even showed patience with Peter Lawford, who had been cast as the gigolo lover of the rich sister. Depressed over his involvement in the death of Marilyn Monroe, ostracized from the Sinatra Rat Pack, mired in an unhappy marriage to President John F. Kennedy’s sister Pat, Lawford drank heavily during production, showed up late, didn’t remember his lines. When Bette finally confronted him about all this, she did so in an unusually gentle way. Peter remembered her as “understanding, kindly, patient—even maternal, if that’s the word. I suspect she felt sorry for me.” He was right. As Bette later said, “I could see that he was having some kind of trouble.… He’s unfortunate, and it’s too bad.”
All of Bette’s patience evaporated, however, whenever Jack Warner showed up. Flush with the success of Baby Jane, still bitter about her long years of battle with the mogul, Bette treated him as haughtily as she had at the height of her career, the $75,000 loan notwithstanding. As Phil Ball remembers it, “Warner would come down to the set, and Bette would run him off! She used four-letter words on him!” Warner just laughed it off and told Trilling, “She’ll never change!”
To some, Dead Ringer turned out a taut little thriller, to others it was “melodramatic hokum.” But it offered Bette another strong acting opportunity, and she made the most of it even as she sometimes veered into self-caricature. Time magazine’s critic had some fun with Davis in his review: “Exuberantly uncorseted, her torso looks like a gunnysack full of galoshes. Coarsely cosmeticked, her face looks like a U-2 photograph of Utah. And her acting, as always, isn’t really acting, it’s shameless showing off. But just try to look away.”
Immediately after she completed Dead Ringer in the early fall of 1963, Bette flew to Rome to appear in Carlo Ponti’s production The Empty Canvas, directed by Damiano Damiani, in which she played the American mother of Horst Buchholz, whose father was an Italian nobleman. What little plot there was revolved around the doomed love of Buchholz, an artist of meager talents, for an amoral model (Catherine Spaak) and his mother’s constant meddling in the affair. Wearyingly existentialist, the film lived up to the title of the Italian novel on which it was based: Boredom.
As with The Night of the Iguana, Bette had been promised that her part would be beefed up, and when she got to Rome she saw that it hadn’t been. Desperate to give her “extremely dull” character “some flavor,” she unilaterally chose to wear a shockingly
blond pageboy wig and speak in a syrupy Southern accent. Barely able to understand Damianis English, she directed herself—and everybody else—throughout the filming. Spaak, she sputtered, “thinks that trading on her looks is acting—well, it ain’t.” The handsome Buchholz, she complained, “went out of his way to thwart me at every turn. He’s the male equivalent of a prima donna.” As far as he was concerned, Bette was “a meddling bitch.”
The Empty Canvas, according to the film critic for The New Yorker, was “one of the worst pictures of this or any other year.” Bette agreed. “What that damned picture needed was a clear, linear, progressive beginning-middle-end plot and a part that I could make credible to audiences. It had neither—and I refuse to accept any of the blame.” Luckily, the film was scantily distributed and did little to tarnish the glow of Bette’s renewed stardom.
Back from Rome, Bette flung herself into the preparations for B.D.’s wedding and vowed that nothing but the best was good enough for her daughter. Her dress would be made to her own design by I. Magnin. The reception would lavishly entertain hundreds of guests at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Their wedding night would be spent at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Bette happily buried herself amid all the details, large and small, of the elaborate wedding she had planned.
Then Jeremy threw her a curve. He had consulted with his tax adviser and been told that if he married before the end of the year, he would save a considerable sum in taxes. He and B.D., he told Bette, would have to be married in a civil ceremony on December 31, then go ahead with the religious ceremony as planned at All Saints’ Episcopal Church on January 4.
Over the next three days, B.D. recalled, “the shit hit the fan.” Bette got hysterical, called her daughter a “barter bride” and “stormed out of the room.” Jeremy suggested they consult with a minister, who told them that as long as the marriage wasn’t consummated before the religious ceremony, he saw no problem. Then Rupert Allan, Bette’s press agent, weighed in with his opinion that he should make an announcement to the press or else some might take the secrecy as an indication that B.D. was pregnant.
