James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  In his memoirs, Gary Merrill recalled Miss Stewart’s observation that Margot was “the most pathetic child at the school because she was just bright enough to know what she was missing. She wanted to have babies, hold a job, get married—all the things normal people do—and she knows she can’t.”

  Margot’s fascination with the opposite sex, Barbara Huebner says, borders on the “unhealthy,” and it has gotten her into some trouble. By the time she was sixteen, she had developed into a lovely young woman with, as Gary’s friend Bob Jurgenson observed, “the body of a twenty-year-old but the mind of a child of eight. Gary was very concerned that she might be badly taken advantage of, and he tried to keep a tight rein on her. But she became harder and harder to control. Once while she was visiting Gary, she climbed out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night and was found hitchhiking along the side of the road.”

  In 1967, when Margot was sixteen, Gary took her with him on a vacation trip to Florida. When she returned to Lochland, she told anyone who would listen that she had wandered away from Gary, met a man, and had her first sexual experience in a secluded spot on the beach. “That’s all Margot talked about,” the Lochland housemother, Mary Beardsley, recalls. “But nobody believed her because she said that the young man was Joe Namath. We all knew that her hero was Joe Namath, so everybody scoffed.” Mary and her husband Al, however, don’t doubt that the incident occurred. According to Al, “She was very explicit about what happened. She couldn’t have told me what she told me unless she had really had that experience. The only part that she made up was about Joe Namath.”

  A few years later, Margot ran away from the school and was gone overnight. “She got picked up by some truck drivers,” Mary remembers, “and she wound up over in Canandaigua [a neighboring town]. Gary Merrill and Miss Stewart were beside themselves. Thank God, the men who picked her up didn’t seem to have hurt her in any way.”

  Margot’s habit of saying whatever came to mind often proved embarrassing, particularly since what was usually on her mind was sex. Josie Hamm recalled Margot approaching her handsome young gardener and saying, “I’m Juliet. Are you my Romeo?” According to Barbara Huebner, “People come here [to Lochland] and the first thing Margot will ask the men is, ‘Are you married?’ If they say no, she’ll ask, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ If they say they’re married, she’ll ask if they have any sons, and are they married. And she has been known to ask an attractive man sitting next to her on an airplane—right out of the blue—whether she could have his baby.”

  Bette found it very difficult to spend any prolonged periods of time with Margot. With her own wit so lightning fast, she had no patience for Margot’s meandering mind, slow responses, and silly fantasies. She would treat Margot as though she were an intellectual equal, and when Margot didn’t measure up Bette would lash out at her. Bette’s friend Roy Moseley recalled that Bette, angry at Margot for not combing her hair, brushed it for her so violently “I thought she was going to break her neck.” On another occasion, Bette ordered Margot to do something and the girl snapped, “You’re not my mother! You can’t say this to me!”

  “Of course I’m your mother!” Bette bellowed. “What do you think I’ve been doing all these years? Where would you be without me? Who do you think paid for you? Who do you think paid for all your clothes?” Then, Moseley recalled, Bette hit her. Judging from entries about Margot in Bette’s diary, she seemed, amazingly, not to comprehend her adopted daughter’s mental limitations. Rather, she took Margot’s behavior as a personal affront and she wrote of Margot’s “perverseness” and “deviousness,” concluding that “rough physical discipline is the only thing the lying black Irish girl understands.”

  Till the end of her life, Bette claimed that she paid all of Margot’s expenses at Lochland, that she brought her home to the family as often as possible, and that she visited the school regularly. None of this is true. From 1965 until his death in 1991, Gary paid the bills, and the staff members at the school remember only Gary visiting Margot after the 1960s.

  Frequently, Bette failed to send for Margot when the girl was scheduled to make a visit to Connecticut. Margot, excited, would wait for someone to come for her, but the Lochland staff would hear nothing from Bette for so long that one of them would finally have to call her to make arrangements for the visit. Almost invariably, according to Mary Beardsley, Margot would return early. “She was always hustled back ahead of time from visits with her mother. If two weeks were planned, she’d be sent back at the end of the first week. And she’d be very upset by things that had happened while she was there. Margot always felt very tense when she went to visit her mother; she wanted to do the right thing. And if she didn’t do what Bette expected her to do, Bette would get frustrated and shout at Margot or cuss her. Whenever Margot got back from Bette’s, she always had a new vocabulary of curse words. And she’d be crushed that her mother treated her that way.”

  And then there was Bobby, still in Bette’s shadow, still in Bette’s employ, still the butt of Bette’s cavalier mistreatment. “My mother was just totally devoted to her,” Bobby’s daughter Ruth Bailey recalls. “She was a very passive type of person. My aunt was very dynamic. My mother worked for her and she tried to make everything peaceful in the house.” She was rarely successful. “My aunt was abusive to everybody. It wasn’t just my mother. That’s just the way Bette was.”

  If Bobby didn’t do something to Bette’s satisfaction, Ruth says, Bette would “go into screaming fits. If she didn’t like a meal my mother had prepared, she would turn on her viciously and say something like, ‘Gee, this is a real good dinner you cooked! What kind of a can did you get it out of?’”

  Bette’s assistant Vik Greenfield liked Bobby. “She was everything Bette wasn’t, and nothing Bette was,” he says. “You would never dream that they were sisters. Bette was very quick witted, and Bobby was slow, and that irritated Bette. Bette would make pronouncements like, ‘Of course, you know, she was in and out of mental institutions. And I paid for it all!’ But it never dawned on her why Bobby was like that. Not for a moment. Bobby being ill was an affront to Bette, rather than something that had happened to Bobby that Bette should feel sympathy for.”

  Ruth Bailey saw that her mother would become angry whenever Bette told an interviewer that she “supported” Bobby. “My mother worked for every dime. She had taken care of B.D. and Michael, she had full charge of them sometimes. She worked like a dog for Bette. And when Bette said these things, it was very upsetting to her, but she never said anything to Bette about it. What can you say? You can’t fight City Hall.”

  Late in 1968, Bobby decided that she had had enough of Bette, and she moved to Phoenix to live with Ruth and her family, which by then included two sons—one of whom was a Bette Davis fan and collector. Bette sent Bobby $400 a month, which Ruth considers “a retirement fund. My mother more than earned it through the years.” And Bette would call her every other day when she wasn’t working; they would talk about the latest intrigues on the soap operas, the latest events in their lives. “They talked like anybody else would talk,” Ruth recalled. “Sister talk.”

  Bette had hired Vik Greenfield as her live-in assistant in 1968. He continued to work for her off and on for six years, and they remained in touch for the rest of her life. At their first meeting, she told the young Englishman she appreciated the fact that he didn’t seem to be afraid of her, and had not brought up her career: “You know when to keep your mouth shut.”

  Greenfield moved into Twin Bridges and began a daily routine that included bringing coffee and a newspaper to Bette’s bedroom every morning. “She’d get herself ready and come down and putter around in the kitchen and make lunch for the both of us,” he recalls. “I was usually working around the grounds, or going out on errands, or going back and forth to B.D.’s.”

  Bette loved her home, Greenfield realized, and “she was a great homemaker. She knew how to do everything properly. Beds were properly made and properly t
urned down, ironing was done to a tee. Her tables were beautifully laid. Bette was the best hostess in the world—until the guests arrived.”

  It was then that Greenfield saw another side of her. “She was very unsure and nervous and would be drinking, and if someone said the wrong thing Bette’s behavior could be disgraceful. She just drank too much. She drank just about all day, and sometimes she would be so embarrassing at parties. The next morning she might say, ‘I was a good girl last night, wasn’t I?’ and I’d look at her in total disbelief. Or she’d say, I was a bad girl. I’ve got to send them flowers.’

  “You just rolled with the punches with Bette. It wasn’t like that every day. There were some very pleasant periods, some good laughs. She had absolutely no sense of humor about herself, but you could make her laugh, and she had a rather harsh, raucous laugh. She was very childlike—not childish, but childlike. She loved parties, she loved wrapping presents, she loved surprises. She loved all of that and when it was happening she really enjoyed herself.”

  Greenfield was surprised to see another side of Bette as well. As meticulous as she could be about her home, she oftentimes seemed unconcerned about her personal hygiene. “Bette never looked after herself properly,” he said. “In her house she would hardly take a bath a week, let alone wash her hair.” When a friend with whom she was once staying seemed disturbed by the fact that she hadn’t used her bath towels, she said to him, “I don’t bathe very often, but I’m not dirty. I don’t smell, do I?”

  His most lasting impression of Bette, Greenfield says, was that she was a sad, lonely woman. He was astonished one day when she proposed marriage to him. “She wasn’t serious, really, there was no romance between us. She just said, ‘Oh, well, we might as well get married.’ It was the statement of the day. Bette proposed to everybody so you took it for what it was worth.

  “The tragedy of Bette was that she never found a man to sort of sit on her. She never found happiness, she never found fulfillment. She was, in my opinion, the unhappiest person I ever met. And your heart goes out to people like that in many ways. I think she was borderline manic-depressive—there were highs and there were lows. She could be impossible, but she just didn’t know how to stop herself. She had no self-control whatsoever. It was as if the train started and just couldn’t stop. And once you understood that about her, whatever she did—however tiresome it could be—you could always end up liking her. Not because she was famous, but because you realized that at the bottom of it all there was a very lonely, very frightened little girl.”

  As early as the late 1940s, Bette had told her friend Betty Lynn that her greatest fear was that she would “wind up as a lonely old lady, in a house up on a hill.” By the early 1970s, with Ruthie dead, B.D. and Michael married, Bobby living in Phoenix, her career at a virtual standstill, Vik Greenfield no longer in her employ, and no romantic involvements to divert her energies, Bette’s worst fear had become reality. B.D. recalled that Bette was fond of telling the press, “In the final analysis, work is all there is. Family doesn’t last… they all go off. Human relationships… ha!… they’re a joke. All there is is work, and I’m damn lucky to have it.”

  No trace can be found of any interview in which Bette said anything quite that intemperate, only that she found work the most fulfilling thing in her life now. And that was the problem. Bette had made just three films in the eight years since The Nanny, two of them obscure European dramas barely released in the United States. The third, Bunny O’Hare, in which she and Ernest Borgnine played geriatric bank robbers disguised as hippies, was arguably the artistic nadir of her career.

  Financially strapped again, Bette made three more attempts at the security of a television series between 1972 and 1974. In Madame Sin, a two-hour movie of the week produced by and costarring Robert Wagner (who became a lifelong friend), she played a power-hungry, half-Chinese woman living in a Scottish castle filled with spy gadgetry. In The Judge and Jake Wyler she was cast as a retired jurist who fights crime with the help of a young parolee, and in Hello Mother, Goodbye! she was the domineering parent of an aerospace engineer who moves back in with Mom after quitting his job. None of these pilots was picked up for a series, and Bette did only one other TV movie, Scream, Pretty Peggy, a cheapjack throwback to Baby Jane and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, aired in 1973.

  Bette made some money during this period with a personal-appearance tour of college campuses; she showed clips from her movies and answered questions from the audience, but the net effect of the experience was to depress her with the thought that she was a has-been who could merely reminisce about her long-ago glory days. She was surprised by a “This Is Your Life” tribute to her on the set of Madame Sin, at which Bobby (looking much like Edith Head in heavy-rimmed glasses and square pageboy-and-bangs hairdo), William Wyler, Olivia De Havilland, and Victor Buono sang her praises, but the exercise left Bette unsettled. “I felt like I had just attended my own funeral,” she said later.

  By the end of 1973 Bette’s money was so low that her attorney Harold Schiff told her she would have to sell Twin Bridges. She had made only $26,000 in 1972, and when she turned sixty-five in April 1973 she applied for her Social Security benefits. She moved into a smaller house even closer to B.D., in Weston, and dubbed it My Bailiwick. To save face, she said that she had moved because, with Michael married, Twin Bridges was just too big. But privately she grieved at the loss of the house she had loved so much, and at her reduced circumstances.

  All of this combined to push Bette into a crushing depression. She drank heavily; according to B.D. she was often insensible by ten in the morning. Her obsession with cleanliness and neatness deteriorated until her home had become a “pigsty,” with dirty dishes piled high in the sink, plates of uneaten food on her bedstands, clothes strewn everywhere. “The bed was an indescribable mess,” B.D. recalled, “with cigarette burns and overflowing ashtrays, dropped bits of food and spilled whiskey all around it.”

  B.D. cleaned the mess and tried to shake Bette out of her stupor, but nothing seemed to work. B.D. was convinced that all of this was an act for her benefit, to push her into leaving her family and becoming Bette’s full-time companion. Suffering from colitis, she tried to keep a distance from Bette, but her mother’s behavior, she said, worried her to the point of serious illness. Finally, as she had done when B.D. was a child, Bette announced that she was going to end it all. “Tomorrow I’ll be gone,” she told B.D. over the phone. “Just remember me with love.”

  B.D. had vowed never again to “fall for” such histrionics as she had the first time, and she ended up ignoring Bette’s threat. Within a few days, Bette called and invited her to lunch. She was sober, the house was immaculately clean, and Bette chattered and gossiped as though nothing had happened.

  When B.D. brought up Bette’s behavior, she didn’t want to hear about it. B.D. pressed the issue. “I will not go through anything like this again,” she said. “If you pull another of your phony suicides, I’ll walk away. To use your own words, you’ll no longer have a daughter.”

  “I always knew you were a cold bitch!” Bette sputtered. “Jesus! There was nothing phony about it. I wanted to die!”

  “Bullshit!”B.D. bellowed. “All you wanted was for me to feel totally responsible for you… to leave my family, like Aunt Bobby left hers, and come home to keep poor Mommy company. I know it and you know it and I won’t allow myself to be put in this position again.”

  The luncheon ended with neither woman conceding a point; when Bette apologized, B.D. thought, it was “without a trace of sincerity.” When B.D. left, she gave her mother a peck on the cheek, and Bette said, “I’m glad to know you were so worried about me. It helps to know that you love me so much.”

  The entire tawdry episode left Bette convinced that she would have to return to work again as soon as possible or lose her mind. But there were no film or television offers. The depth of her desolation can be gauged by the fact that she accepted the next offer that came her way: the sta
rring role in a Broadway musical.

  THIRTY

  B

  ette sat on the floor of Joshua Logan’s penthouse apartment over-looking Manhattan’s East River, surrounded by the cast members of Miss Moffat, the big-budget Broadway musical version of her 1945 film The Corn Is Green. Logan, the brilliant director of such classic shows as Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific (as well as the films Picnic, Bus Stop, and Camelot), wanted the company, many of them young Broadway neophytes, to meet Bette, who was set to reprise her role as the schoolteacher who helps an impoverished but talented student. On the strength of her name, advance ticket sales had been tremendous, and everyone was in an upbeat mood. Bette laughed and joked with her young costar, Dorian Harewood, and the other performers, among them Nell Carter and Dody Goodman.

  Rudy Lowe, an eighteen-year-old newcomer at the time, remembers the evening vividly. “It changed my conception of Bette Davis. She sat on the floor with everybody else, she played around, she was very, very nice—like someone’s grandmother. She wasn’t like the Bette Davis you know from the movies. I guess she wanted us to be free with her. We talked about life, general things, and a few people asked her questions about her film career, but she didn’t talk much about that. She was just trying to get to know everybody and be nice and be part of the group.”

  How could the show fail? With Bette reprising one of her most beloved film roles, with Joshua Logan directing, with Emlyn Williams, the author of the original play, writing the book and lyrics, and Albert Hague, the Tony Award-winning composer of Redhead, supplying the music, the show seemed like such a sure bet that Logan, who was also coproducing, had very little trouble raising the $500,000 capitalization he needed. Among the show’s investors—“angels” in Broadway parlance—were RCA Records (which expected to produce the original-cast album), Bette’s attorney Harold Schiff, Mrs. Oscar Hammerstein, the Hollywood producer Robert Evans, and Arlene Francis.