James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Even Bette thought this argument absurd—the difference was four days—but when Jeremy accused Allan of trying only to court the press with an exclusive, Bette turned on him furiously: “He has only my best interests in mind!” she bellowed. It was an argument that did little to comfort B.D. or Jeremy. When Allan made the announcement it served mostly to confuse the wedding guests, who wondered whether the January 4 ceremony was still on.

  Despite all this, Barbara Davis Sherry’s wedding to Jeremy A. Hyman went off without a hitch. B.D. wore a dress made with velvet from Lyons and rose-point lace from Venice; the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was lavishly festooned with pine branches and pink carnations.

  Bobby’s daughter Ruth, now twenty-four, was a bridesmaid, and she remembered the wedding as “gorgeous, just gorgeous. It was huge—my aunt spent a fortune! B.D.’s veil was specially made in France. There were ice sculptures everywhere. I was so impressed to meet Rock Hudson, and Rosalind Russell and Henry Fonda were there, too. It was a big, beautiful wedding. And all my aunt could talk about was these fabulous sheets she’d bought for B.D. as a surprise for her wedding night.”

  When the Hymans got to the Beverly Hills Hotel, they found that Bette had meticulously prepared their honeymoon suite. Flowers filled every corner, the bar was stocked with champagne, canapés had been set out. The “fabulous sheets” were black silk, trimmed and monogrammed in white. On the bride’s side of the bed Bette had carefully laid out a white satin peignoir trimmed with marabou feathers, and matching slippers. For Jeremy, she offered white silk pajamas trimmed in black. And in a witty nod to the practical considerations of married life, Bette placed a hammer on one pillow and a screwdriver on the other. Both were tied with white satin bows. “All of mother’s forethought was greatly appreciated,” B.D. later wrote. “It was a wonderful end to a most memorable occasion in our lives.” The next day, the Hymans left for their honeymoon aboard a fishing boat in the Florida Keys.

  With love so much in the air around her, Bette showed a renewed interest herself in romance during 1964. After her divorce from Gary, she had not only renounced marriage, but had called sex “God’s joke on humanity. It is man’s last desperate stand at superintendency. The whole ritual is a grotesque anachronism, an outdated testament to man’s waning power.”

  Thus B.D. was taken aback when Bette called her at the New York apartment she and Jeremy had leased to say that she was serious about a new man. “I’ve found true love again at last, B.D.! Isn’t that wonderful?” she gushed. “And he’s twenty-seven. Three years younger than Jeremy. Can you imagine?”

  B.D. kept her own counsel about the wisdom of this relationship, but she began to worry when a friend of Bette’s called her to say that the young man in question was homosexual and urged B.D. to “do something before your mother makes a complete fool of herself.” The next call was from Bette, who announced that she was moving into the man’s Malibu beach house. That was followed by another call from a different friend of Bette’s to let B.D. know that the man’s beach house was a shack overrun by transients and drug addicts. Back and forth via long-distance calls, B.D. learned that Bette was cavorting on the beach in a bikini, attending “hippie parties,” and otherwise behaving in a ridiculous manner.

  When Bette called to say that she intended to marry this gentleman, B.D. snapped that if she wanted “to marry a homosexual, it’s entirely up to you.”

  “Brother!” Bette boomed. “You really want to spoil things for me, don’t you? Well, maybe he was once, but he isn’t now. All he needed was a real woman.”

  Within a few days, Bette called back in tears to say that she had quarreled violently with the man and they had broken up. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, blowing her nose, “I’ll get over it. It’s not the first time I’ve been kicked in the teeth and it probably won’t be the last. Men are shits… you’ll see.”

  Bette’s longtime assistant Vik Greenfield recalled that despite this unsavory episode, her romantic ardor didn’t cool throughout the next decade. Nearing sixty, terribly lonely, Bette too often deluded herself that clearly homosexual men were her “suitors.” Whenever anyone pointed out that the men were unlikely to be interested in her sexually, she would announce, “I’m going to be the one to change him.” Some of the men, according to Greenfield, were “obviously looking for a meal ticket,” and led Bette on while cruelly mocking and imitating her in front of their friends. Others were simply delighted to meet and go to dinner with a woman they had long idolized, and were shocked when Bette would suddenly propose marriage after a few platonic “dates.”

  The actor Richard Tate was an exception. In his late twenties, handsome, he gravitated toward Bette at a noisy Hollywood party in the mid-’60s. After a few minutes of conversation, they moved to a quieter corner of the room and Tate told Bette that he had just come out of a five-year relationship with the actress Merle Oberon, just three years younger than Bette. Shortly after, Tate found himself “totally shocked” to realize that Bette was sexually interested in him. “She started telling me how empty her love life was because her career overpowered her intimate world so much. She said how much she adored her fans, but what vacant lovers they were. And before long it occurred to me that she was saying, ‘Let’s do it, baby!’”

  Tate offered to take Bette home to Honeysuckle Hill, and when they got there she nervously invited him in. She fixed him a drink and sat next to him on the couch. After some coy conversation and a few more drinks, Tate ran his fingers through her hair and kissed her. She stood up, tugged his hand, and said, “Let’s go into the bedroom.” When they got there, Tate recalls, “she started to direct me—‘This is acceptable, and that’s not, we can’t do this, but we can do that.’ I was being choreographed. Which I didn’t adjust well to at all.”

  After what Tate describes as “our first burst of energy,” during which he felt manipulated, he told Bette that she was too “rigid” in matters of sexuality. “I told her she had to break down those walls. I wanted her to be feminine, and not manipulate sex, just let it happen, and trust that it will happen without her controlling it. She was driving me to distraction and I went outside to smoke a joint. Then I told her she should ‘grass out’ with me.”

  Tate shared the marijuana with Bette. “After that,” Tate says, “she was less rigid—and I was more rigid! I was the first one to turn her on to grass—which broke down many of her inhibitions.” The couple spent the next three days together, during which Tate “functioned as a sex therapist,” teaching Bette to enjoy many of the preliminaries she had avoided before; goading her on to “Enjoy it!”

  Richard Tate’s rendezvous with Bette Davis, in his words, was no more than “a four-night stand.” They drifted apart after that, but whenever they would run into each other at some Hollywood function or another, Tate could always count on a smile and a wink from Bette.

  She accepted her next film project primarily to pay the enormous bills for B.D.’s wedding. Where Love Has Gone was the highly publicized producer Joseph E. Levine’s big-budget film version of Harold Robbins’s bestseller, loosely based on the Lana Turner/Johnny Stompanato/ Cheryl Crane murder scandal of seven years earlier. Bette didn’t much like John Michael Hayes’s script, but her relatively small part as a manipulative dowager would require just a few weeks’ work, and Levine was paying her $125,000.

  When Susan Hayward signed to costar as Bette’s daughter, she became only the fourth actress of equal stature to play opposite Bette in her long career. Among her precursors—Miriam Hopkins, Anne Baxter, and Joan Crawford—only Baxter hadn’t wound up in a feud with Bette. Hollywood observers held their breath and waited for the fireworks to start.

  They weren’t disappointed. B.D. recalled that from the outset her mother had been “loudly vocal about her dissatisfaction with the whole project,” and this put Susan Hayward on tenterhooks from the first day of filming. The film’s director, Edward Dmytryk, recalled that “Susan was scared to death of Bette. Susan was
a very difficult person to know. She was very reserved, nervous and withdrawn. Bette mistook that, apparently, for rudeness. They were exact opposites.”

  Bette’s vociferous demands for script revisions further alienated Hayward, who was certain that her costar’s main goal was to enlarge her own part and truncate hers. Threatened, insecure, Hayward insisted on a private meeting in Levine’s office and presented him with an ultimatum: “If the script is changed, I walk.” Levine then issued a dictum of his own: not one word of the script will be altered. At this, the bad blood between Bette and Hayward completely curdled.

  The next day, as they rehearsed a scene, Hayward suggested a change in Bette’s blocking. To everyone’s astonishment, Bette reacted by tearing off her gray wig and throwing it in Hayward’s face. “Why don’t you just play both roles?” Bette hissed. Susan whirled around and started off toward her dressing room, muttering, “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!”

  Bette folded her arms and planted her feet apart. “What did you say, Miss Hayward?”

  Susan wheeled around. “Bitch!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “That’s what you are! An old bitch!”

  Bette remained speechless as Hayward left the soundstage, and the next day, apparently chastened, she sent Hayward a note asking for her help to improve their “stinking, lousy script.” Hayward ignored the overture, and she and Bette never spoke to each other again except while acting.

  Mike Connors, cast as Hayward’s husband, recalled that “they were both on the defensive. Bette felt insecure up against a ten-years-younger woman, Susan, who was better looking and, moreover, the star of the film.… And Susan, who was sullen and defensive anyway, found that hers and Davis’s temperaments were too much alike.… I remember it, and so did Eddie Dmytryk, as an atmosphere of armed truce—and a mean, icy truce it was, too.”

  Bette happily left the Paramount lot when she completed her work in Where Love Has Gone, but a few months later Levine ordered her back for an additional scene: he wanted her to lose her mind and slash her daughter’s portrait at the end of the film. Bette was appalled; such an action would be grossly out of character for the woman she had played, who had been in total control all her life. When she refused to film the scene, Paramount took her to court. “I am completely unable and incapable of performing the additional scene as it is presently written,” Bette told the court. The judge decided in her favor, and as B.D. recalled it, “she thumbed her nose at all of them with great satisfaction.” Levine convinced Susan Hayward to slash Bette’s portrait instead, which she did with something close to glee.

  Bette was proven right about Where Love Has Gone. Like so much of Joseph E. Levine’s output, it proved crass, vulgar, and sensationalistic. But Levine’s great genius was hype and promotion, and both helped make the film a box-office winner. The reviews, though, were disdainful. “The story,” Newsweek’s critic wrote, “is a typical Harold Robbins pastiche of newspaper clippings liberally shellacked with sentiment and glued with sex.… Still, Bette Davis is splendid, with her eyes rolling and her mouth working and her incredible lines to say. Sitting in the ugliest chair in Hollywood, she lowers her teacup and pronounces, ‘Somewhere along the line the world has lost all its standards and all its taste.’… The gang at Embassy and Paramount are probably congratulating themselves on their monumental restraint and good taste—simply because they didn’t try to cast Lana Turner in the leading role.”

  Just weeks after she completed her scenes in Where Love Has Gone, Bette steeled herself for a new movie. It was an assignment once again abrim with temperamental minefields: a reunion with Joan Crawford.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  B

  ette sat on the chartered flight that was taking her and other cast and crew members to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to film Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the “blood cousin” to Baby Jane that Robert Aldrich had concocted with Henry Farrell and screenwriter Lukas Heller. Directly behind her, the young actor William Campbell, cast as an aggressive tabloid reporter in the film, excitedly tried to watch every move of the woman he had unabashedly idolized for years.

  “The stewardess came around with drinks,” Campbell recalls, “and of course, on a chartered flight they weren’t those little ponies they give you on commercial flights. I had a glass of wine, and then I heard Bette tell the girl, ‘I want a double Scotch. And not much water. As a matter of fact, forget the water. There’s water in the ice!’”

  When the stewardess returned with an old-fashioned glass full of Scotch, Campbell peered through the space between the seats in front of him to see Bette reach into her purse and pull out a small case covered in paisley material. “I thought the case contained her reading glasses,” Campbell says. “But it was a flask! She opened it up and laid in another shot!”

  Bette may have felt she needed the fortification to face another picture with Joan Crawford, who had decided to take the train from Los Angeles to Baton Rouge rather than spend any more time than necessary in close proximity to Bette. Neither actress relished the idea of working again with the other, but both realized there was potentially a great deal of money to be made. Still, Robert Aldrich faced headaches from the minute he began negotiations with the two wary superstars.

  Aldrich had approached Bette first with the script for What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? Like Jane Hudson, Charlotte was a reclusive, unstable middle-aged woman haunted by a violent past. In this instance, she lives in an antebellum mansion outside Baton Rouge, tormented by memories of the ghastly decapitation of her young married lover thirty years earlier. The murder was never solved, and the locals consider Charlotte the killer. She harbors fear that her possessive father committed the crime.

  As Charlotte faces eviction from the family home to make way for a highway, her kind and elegant cousin Miriam arrives and offers solace. But in fact, Miriam has hatched an elaborate plot with Charlotte’s doctor to drive her insane and gain access to her fortune. After she sees “hallucinations” of severed heads and walking zombies provided by her tormentors, Charlotte realizes what they’ve done and kills them. As she is led away by authorities she learns that it was her lover’s wife who killed him all those years ago. Now, at last, she can be at peace.

  The script was shamelessly melodramatic, the shocks blatantly heavy-handed. But once again Bette would have the chance to play a multi-layered character who, while far more sympathetic than Jane Hudson, still had the chance to chew the scenery to shreds every so often. She told Aldrich she’d do the film if he would change the title and find someone other than Joan Crawford to play Miriam.

  Aldrich blanched. “Bette, every studio in town wants to do this picture—with you and Joan. If we get anybody else, they’ll lower the budget, I’ll have less money to pay you, and quite honestly, it won’t do as well at the box office.”

  Bette came around when Aldrich upped her salary from $120,000 to $160,000 (plus 15 percent of the net) and agreed to change the title to Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, lyrics from a theme song Frank DeVol and Mack Davis had already written for the picture.

  Now that he had Bette signed, Aldrich went to work on Joan. Aware of how she felt about Bette, he was sure she would decline the film, and he flew to New York to persuade her to change her mind. He needn’t have bothered; since Baby Jane, Joan had made only the box-office dud The Caretakers and William Castle’s B-movie thriller Strait Jacket, and she was eager for another big hit. She agreed to take a salary of $50,000 and 25 percent of the net profits, then added, “But there is one small request I have to make. In the billing for this picture my name comes first, before Miss Davis.”

  Later that night, all trepidation, Aldrich broached the idea to Bette. “In a pig’s eye!” she exploded. “I will not have my name come second to Joan Crawford, not now, not ever?’ Before he returned to Los Angeles the next day, Aldrich assured Crawford he would work on Bette. When he met with her again, he offered to raise her pay to $200,000 if she’d take second billing. Aldrich could afford it. As Walter Blake reca
lls, “It was the exact opposite of the first picture. After the success of Baby Jane; the studios were throwing money at Bob. He was the new Messiah.”

  When Bette still wouldn’t budge, Aldrich told her, “This is the same amount I’m getting for directing and producing, Bette. So that makes us partners for this picture.”

  Bette’s eyes brightened. “Okay, Bob,” she replied. “I’ll do the picture. And we’ll be partners, like you said. All the way down the line. I’ll hold you to that!”

  Within weeks, Aldrich wished he had kept his mouth shut. When he decided to replace screenwriter Henry Farrell, and did not consult Bette, she fired off a blistering tirade. “You are stubborn and have to be totally in charge,” she wrote. “You do not function well with someone of my type. That was obvious throughout the filming of Baby Jane—and the suicidal desire this put me into many times, was almost more than I was able to bear.

  “The machinations of the new film from the very beginning have been tricky.… I do not wear well with tricks designed to make me do what someone else decides I will do. We have not been partners—and you do not intend that we will be.” She went on to say that Aldrich wanted no more than to remake Baby Jane, and accused him of plotting to sabotage her appearance on film. “No matter what I look like on the set—you can order the cameraman to ‘Fix me up.’

  “I could never trust you again.… I truly do not feel I can work with you again. If you are wise for the good of the film you will re-cast and pay me off. It will be cheaper in the long run.”