James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  After flowers, an apology, an increase in her profit participation, and a promise from Aldrich that her billing would be the same size and on the same line as Crawford’s (and accompanied by an asterisk to indicate “Alphabetical Order”), Bette calmed down. Finally, on May 31, after a month’s delay so that Crawford could attend a Pepsi-Cola sales convention in Hawaii, the cast and crew headed off to the Baton Rouge location. “I hope we live through it,” Aldrich muttered.

  Bette made no attempt to show the slightest civility toward Joan Crawford. If she had to work with the woman, she had apparently decided, she could at least make her life miserable. “After the business with the Oscar,” Bette’s assistant Vik Greenfield recalled, “this was war.” It was a war of attrition and a war of words. The film’s publicist, Charles Moses, recalls that “Joan would take an awfully long time making up in the morning. Bette was there before she was needed, and I was with her when she’d make stinging comments about how long Joan took in makeup.” Bette was just as likely to remind anyone within earshot that, despite the fact that Joan claimed to be the same age as Bette, “She’s five years older than me if she’s a day!”

  And while Bette looked forward to her Scotch every afternoon, she couldn’t abide Joan’s secret gulps during working hours. “Crawford was a boozer!” she told friends. “Vodka was her life support system.”

  Bette, popular with the cast and crew, lost no opportunity to put Crawford down or alienate her from the rest of the company. The reporter Len Baxter observed the filming, and he recalled an instance when Bette apparently pulled “partner” rank with Aldrich and sat in front of the camera while Joan was playing a scene that did not involve her. As Baxter observed, “A director doesn’t permit an actor to sit in front of the camera, directly in another actor’s line of vision, unless the actor is part of the scene.”

  Bette’s intentions soon became clear. She watched Joan go through the scene, then turned to Aldrich and said loudly, “You’re not going to let her play it like that, are you?” Trembling, Joan rushed off the set and back to her trailer.

  After hours, Bette hosted parties for the company and pointedly excluded Joan. During one such gathering, held in Bette’s bungalow directly across from Joan’s, Crawford drove off to dine at a local restaurant with her personal maid.

  Joan, drinking heavily and growing more paranoid by the day, became convinced that everyone was in league against her. When Bette struck up a friendship with the character actress Agnes Moorehead, a kindred spirit flamboyantly enacting Charlotte’s hillybilly housekeeper Velma, Joan imagined that their every giggly conversation was at her expense. She wasn’t entirely wrong. Moorehead later confided to friends that she and Bette had “ganged up on Crawford psychologically.”

  Miserable, afraid once again that Bette would steal the picture, Crawford called Aldrich at his hotel room past midnight one evening and told him that she wanted to do retakes on some of her scenes. “He said I was overreacting,” Joan recalled, “that my work was fine. But then I heard a second voice, talking loudly beside him. I knew immediately who it was. It was Miss Davis. She was there, in Mr. Aldrich’s bed.”

  It’s far more likely that Bette was there just to fill Aldrich’s ears with her own problems, as Joan had wanted to do, but now Crawford was close to hysteria. She demanded that Aldrich beef up her part, and when he refused, she called her attorney and asked whether she had a legal way out of her contract. He told her she didn’t, but Joan had a few tricks left. When she flew back to Los Angeles on June 13 (alone; the rest of the company had left while she was sleeping in her bungalow), she went straight from the airport to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. As Bette had done so often in the past, Joan now claimed that stress and exhaustion had left her ill.

  Bette and many others were certain Joan was faking, especially when her doctors couldn’t seem to tell just what was wrong with her—the diagnoses ranged from dysentery to “an intermittent cough” to pneumonia. Charles Moses, however, believes she was genuinely ill. “The thing that did her in was that she drank heavily, which made her perspire profusely, then she’d go from her frigid trailer into the muggy Louisiana heat, then onto the soundstage that she kept so refrigerated, and she’d stand in front of these fans that were as big as a house. I stood next to her, freezing, and I figured I’d get sick. She’d just stand there and stand there. I thought, She’s gonna get pneumonia. And, of course, she did.”

  Crawford wasn’t too sick to talk to reporters. She told Sidney Skolsky that all the cast and crew members had sent her flowers, cards, and get-well wishes—except Bette. She confided to Hedda Hopper that she was reworking the script. “It will be a much better movie when I’ve recovered.”

  All of Joan’s script changes gave her more to do and made her look and act more glamorous, and Aldrich rejected them. Still, when Joan returned to work on July 20, she stepped onto the 20th Century-Fox lot confident that her role would be augmented. Instead, in the middle of a scene between Joan and Joseph Cotten (who was playing Charlotte’s doctor), Bette announced that she was “cutting some dialogue”—all of it Joan’s—because “these lines hold me up.”

  Joan whirled around and stalked off the set. She returned, but over the next few days she complained that she was “weakened” and left the studio every day at noon. Close to the end of his patience, Aldrich hired a private detective to follow Crawford and see whether she remained at home over the weekend. The investigator reported that she left her apartment in a two-tone brown Rolls-Royce on Saturday at 5 P.M., but that he lost her at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. When Aldrich showed the detective’s report to Bette, she snorted, “She gave the fool the slip!”

  Joan continued to limp through her work, constantly pleading for time off and complaining of illness, until she was rushed back to the hospital with a relapse of whatever it was that ailed her. Finally, on August 4, Aldrich suspended Charlotte production and started to look for a replacement. “I kept up with her condition,” Bette said, “by reading [the gossip columnist] Hedda Hopper, who received frequent bulletins from Joan from under her oxygen tent.”

  Aldrich approached Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck to play Miriam but, Crawford told another gossip maven, Louella Parsons, “both are friends of mine and wouldn’t dream of taking a job away from me.” Vivien Leigh was far less gracious when she was asked by the press if she’d be interested in the role. “I could just about look at Joan Crawford’s face at seven o’clock in the morning,” she reportedly said, “but I couldn’t possibly look at Bette Davis’s.” Bette snapped back, “I will never make this with Miss Leigh. She would be more difficult than Miss Crawford. And wrong for [the Southern] Miriam—her British accent is absurd!” (Bette seemed to have forgotten that Leigh won two Academy Awards playing American Southerners.)

  Walter Blake says that none of these women was ever offered the role. “Olivia De Havilland was the only actress we approached. Bob Aldrich flew to Europe to meet with her personally and show her the script. The other names were just bandied about for publicity.”

  In mid-August, still hospitalized, Joan Crawford heard on the radio that she had been officially replaced by Olivia De Havilland. “I wept for thirty-nine hours,” she told friends. Publicly she meowed, “I’m glad for Olivia. She needs a good picture.” As if to rub it in, Bette made a great show of greeting Olivia at the airport and throwing her arms joyously around her new costar as she disembarked from the airplane.

  “I looked forward to working with Bette again,” Joan Crawford said several years later. “I had no idea of the extent of her hate, and that she planned to destroy me.… I still get chills when I think of the treachery that Miss Davis indulged in on that movie.”

  Bette was far more congenial with Olivia, who had worked with Bette at Warners and had had a good relationship with her. She never let Bette’s domineering personality get under her skin. “I am not a competitive person,” she said. “If I am attacked, I simply refuse to fight bac
k. I never said a word to her. I just did my scene, with a look that said, ‘I will not fight you; I will not accept your challenge.’ Bette understood.”

  Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte was completed in October 1964 and released in New York in March 1965. Less original and gorier than Baby Jane, the film served mainly as a showcase for some of the hammiest acting ever captured on film. Agnes Moorehead flies way over the top as Velma, but her histrionics are at least entertaining, while Joseph Cotten’s are barely sufferable. De Havilland acquits herself well as the duplicitous Miriam, but the subtlest and most affecting performance is delivered by Mary Astor in a small role as Charlotte’s lover’s widow—and, it turns out, his murderer.

  Which leaves Bette. Surrounded by excess, she wavers between admirable restraint and shameless scenery-chewing and manages to make Cousin Charlotte a sympathetic and three-dimensional creation. Like Baby Jane, the picture divided the critics, many of whom lamented the falling standards of American cinema while others championed the film, often because of Bette’s contributions. Kenneth Tynan thought Charlotte had been “yanked to the level of art by Miss Davis’s performance as the raging, aging Southern belle; this wasted Bernhardt, with her screen-filling eyes and electrifying vocal attack, squeezes genuine pathos from a role conceived in cardboard.”

  The film was another big hit, and although Bette bridled when one critic labeled her “Hollywood’s grande-dame ghoul,” she reveled in her fourth box-office success in three years. The film enjoyed some surprising respect, too; it captured a remarkable seven Oscar nominations. (Agnes Moorehead was cited as Best Supporting Actress, but Bette was overlooked.) Another of the nominations was for the title tune as Best Song, and Bette was hurt when the Academy turned down her offer to sing it at the awards ceremony.

  She had already been disappointed when the studio chose Al Martino to sing the song over the film’s end credits, and further annoyed when Patti Page’s version became a top-ten hit. “They should have let me record that song with a group like the Brothers Four,” Bette said. “They haven’t had a hit in a long time, and if they could have done ‘Charlotte’ with me, it would have been the biggest hit in the world!”

  Bette wouldn’t give up. Before she embarked on another publicity tour of East Coast theaters to promote the film, she told Aldrich she wanted to sing the song on stage after the film. According to Charles Moses, Aldrich shouted at Bette, “You can’t do it! You’ll ruin the picture. What will the critics say?!”

  “He had all kinds of reasons,” Moses recalls, “and they had a big fight over it. I was just standing there, and I sensed that Bette was about to say, ‘Okay, Bob, fine.’ But he wouldn’t stop. He kept berating her: ‘You’re not going to sing it. If you do I’m going to cut the trip short and send you home—blah, blah, blah.’ He didn’t have to do that. I wanted the floor to give way. That was the big break between them. She hated him after that.”

  A few days before Christmas 1964, Bette entertained two teenage fans at Honeysuckle Hill, where she held forth in her grandest grande dame manner on everything from her career to the future of cable television. The names of the two young ladies have not come down to us, but a tape recording of the encounter survives, and it reveals Bette in an expansive mood, her highly definite opinions growing more and more hyperbolic with each freshened glass of Scotch.

  The conversation began with Bette discussing, with typical enthusiasm, her latest project—a television series pilot she had just finished for Aaron Spelling, The Decorator, in which she played an interior designer who insists on living with her clients before she will agree to redo their homes. “She really is basically a character like Margo Channing,” Bette announced to the delighted fans. “She has never married, and she’s bright enough to know she’s too bright to marry.… It really is a show of enormous scope. I think television is where people see you as you are.… I’m really enthused about this whole thing.” (The Decorator wasn’t picked up as a series. Its pilot, which costarred Mary Wickes, is mildly amusing, but it is a long stretch to call it “a show of enormous scope.”)

  Bette revealed that she had “a habit” of never missing Bonanza or The Dick Van Dyke Show, which she called “the most tasteful, beautiful show that will ever be! I wouldn’t miss it for a million dollars’.” Cable television, she emphasized, “truly will be the death of the theaters. There isn’t any question about it. When you think about it, three quarters of the theaters in the nation have gone anyway. It’s an antediluvian thing.… There will be some theaters left in cities for kids. They’ll show Westerns for the kids, because they enjoy going. But that will be all!”

  Her next prediction came closer to the mark: “I think there will be a resurgence of better movies if we have [cable], because they will dare to gamble again.”

  When one of the fans mentioned the recently released My Fair Lady while Bette poured herself another drink, she let loose with a diatribe against Jack Warner’s decision to cast Audrey Hepburn in the role Julie Andrews had created on stage. Then she added, “If you take Gypsy, and not let Miss Merman play it, that’s a sin. Because it’s a wonderful record of a performance that movies give us that the theater never has.”

  The other fan piped up, “They always think they know what the public wants. I wonder if they really do.”

  “Well, it’s no use asking what the public wants,” Bette replied, “because I don’t think the public knows what it wants until it sees it. And I think to always encourage the public to have opinions is ridiculous. The public doesn’t know one thing about making movies!

  “It’s the same thing with children,” Bette railed on, building a head of steam. “Do you say to a child every meal, ‘What do you want for dinner?’ If they say it to us, we don’t know! What do we do when we go to restaurants? We look at the menu for hours! Somebody should just bring the dinner on!”

  After freshening her drink again, Bette talked about the tour she had done to promote Baby Jane. “People just couldn’t believe that I was walking—that I wasn’t ninety years old. I’ve run into people myself who’ve been in the business thirty, thirty-five years, and I think, ‘I can’t believe they’re still alive!’ And then I say to myself, ‘Well, you’re still alive, so I guess they are!’”

  When the conversation turned to Bette’s singing, she called the studio executives who hired Al Martino to sing “Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte” “absolute fools” for not giving it to her. “And they made a mistake on the Baby Jane soundtrack too! They should never have let that girl sing ‘I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy.’ They should have let me sing it the way I sang it in the movie. It was the biggest mistake in history!”

  Changing the subject, one of the fans complained about the cuts made in the TV version of Mr. Skeffington. “It is sinful!” Bette cried. “Sinful! It would be an interesting lawsuit, wouldn’t it? For me to say, ‘You’re ruining my career with these cuts—you’re wrecking the memory of these films.’ I wonder what would happen. I bet I’d win it.”

  After Bette returned from the bar with yet another drink, one of the girls asked her if she had caught Joan Crawford’s recent appearance on What’s My Line? and added, “She did the whole thing in a Southern accent.”

  “Well, my deah,” Bette drawled in response. “She did the whole Suth-in bit with us, you know. She was all Suth-in. Was her hair white? Or did she have a turban? Did she say ‘Bless you’? Did she say, ‘Bless you, John,’ ‘Bless you, Arlene’? I’m sure she did. She says ‘Bless you’ to everybody! She’s such a doll! She’s just as sweet as…” Bette caught herself at this point and left the sentence unfinished. Later, she deigned to give Joan a little credit. “Whatever I say about Miss Crawford, she’s a star. And whenever she appears, it’s an occasion. And a star must make it an occasion when she appears. The easiest part of our job is the acting. That’s the gravy, all alone on that soundstage. The greatest job is learning how to behave publicly. Now, Miss Crawford knows she’s a star, in big quotes. And she’s one of th
e few left. No question about it.”

  Asked “Would you ever go back to Broadway?” Bette replied, “I hate theater. But you know, I may. I’d love to do a musical version of All About Eve. There’s been a lot of talk, but Fox won’t release the rights. It would be one of the great musicals of all time! ’Cause I adore musicals!”

  She also professed to “adore” the pop music of the day. “I think the Beatles are great. I have nothing against this kind of music.” But, she added, “The dancing is revolting. The Watusi and the whole thing. It’s all gotten down to a thing that’s psychotic. I went to Pussycat Au Go Go. I’ve never seen anything like what I saw there. Half the kids are hopped-up. I know that they had dope. They had all the gestures of beating each other up. It wasn’t dancing at all. And the music was revolting!”

  As the interview wound down, the girls mentioned a twenty-five-year-old male fan of Bette’s who had spent hours showing them his photo collection. “Is he a normal boy?” she asked. “Because, you know, at my age pansies are the ones who are the fans… it’s unbelievable.”

  “Why do you think that’s so?” one of the girls asked.

  “Oh, my dear, because I’m a strong woman.”

  “Isn’t it disgusting?”

  “No, it isn’t disgusting. You just have to get used to it. I tell you, outside the theater in New York—nothing but pansies. Unbelievable. There was this little boy—twelve years old. This is what he is. His mother warped him somewhere down the line. He’s a pansy at twelve! Of course he is or he would not be obsessed with this kind of thing at twelve years old! If I had a son that did this at twelve years old, I’d kill myself!”

  After her recent spate of box-office successes, Bette reasonably expected that her career would continue to flourish. As so often in the past, she was badly disappointed. She had no offers after Charlotte in the fall of 1964, and she was forced to sell Honeysuckle Hill with its huge mortgage payments and move into a much smaller apartment in Beverly Hills.