James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Bette had not been Josh Logan’s first choice to play Lily Moffat; he turned to her only after Mary Martin bowed out because of her husband’s death and Katharine Hepburn turned the part down. Bette had had some doubts about this offer—after The Night of the Iguana, she had vowed never to work on stage again—but she always thought she had been too young to play Miss Moffat in 1945, and she was enchanted by the new show’s unusual concept: Emlyn had switched the locale from a Welsh mining village to the American South, and the student Miss Moffat helps is black. What finally convinced her, she told Logan, was the quality of Emlyn Williams’s book. “This is a part with good words,” she said. “The theater is so dependent on good scripts. And even at my age, I have a deep, deep desire always to play the lead. In the last script I was asked to read I ended up being hung in an attic. Hung in an attic! I want to tell you, I’ve played a lot of funny parts in my career, but I said, ‘Bette, you’re never going to be seen hanging in an attic!’”

  She expressed some doubts to Logan that she would be able to do justice to the songs, but he assured her that they were easily within her range and ability as a vocalist. She asked him to come to Westport with the score, just to be sure. Bette tried out the songs for the first time at a high school near her home that had a suitable piano. Logan later recalled his amazement that Bette seemed far more interested in her chauffeur’s reaction to her performance than Logan’s: “She kept looking over at him rather than at me.”

  Comfortable with the music, Bette signed on, and tryouts began for the key costarring roles. Most important was the casting of the student, Morgan Evans. During Dorian Harewood’s audition, Logan felt the handsome actor had a strong singing voice but had interpreted the character in the wrong way. He was about to discuss this with Harewood when the show’s coproducer, Eugene Wolsk, approached and whispered, “Tell him to go. She doesn’t like him.”

  Instead, the director asked Harewood to meet him at eleven the following morning for further discussions. At five minutes to eleven the next day, Bette telephoned Logan. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “That boy in the pink shirt, I think you should work with him. Anybody who sings with that much drama must have some actor in him.”

  Harewood got the part, and showed so much talent in rehearsals that the entire company was sure the play would make him a superstar. Optimism infused everyone, and none more than Bette, who bubbled over with enthusiasm. “I want to do a year on the road with the show,” she burbled to Eugene Wolsk. “A year in New York, then a year in London. Then the movie. And then, that’s it. I’ll be seventy and ready to retire.” On this schedule, Bette’s salary-and-proflt-participation income of between $15,000 and $25,000 per week would accumulate into a sizable nest egg.

  Abrim with energy and excitement, Bette plunged into rehearsals in August 1974. “At the beginning, she was fine,” Rudy Lowe recalls. “But then something happened. I don’t know what it was—nobody knows what happened—but I remember something seemed to click in her head, and like night and day, she switched.”

  “I don’t understand what this woman wants!” Josh Logan cried to Rudy Lowe as they walked down Forty-sixth Street together. “What did I do? What have I done to this woman? What do you think is going on?”

  Lowe didn’t know how to respond. “Here I was an eighteen-year-old kid and Josh Logan is asking me for advice on how to handle Bette Davis! We were having problems with Bette, and Josh was a very nervous man—he was manic depressive—and he had a pocketful of change that he always played with when he was nervous. So he’s walking down Forty-sixth Street jingling his change and wondering what to do about Bette.”

  As so often before in her stage endeavors, Bette’s enthusiasm had quickly turned to fear that she was out of her league in a Broadway show and headed for embarrassment. Her understudy, Anne Francine, feels flatly that “she was scared. In the movies she was queen, and on stage she wasn’t. She couldn’t sing at all. It was embarrassing. And she had no stage technique, so she was frightened. Nothing could be more contrary to her emotional makeup than to be frightened. She was used to doing the frightening!”

  Not all of Bette’s songs were easily sung, Francine recalls. “One song would have been difficult for anybody. I don’t know what Hague was thinking when he wrote it. Maybe he wrote it for Mary Martin. But you couldn’t even suggest to Bette that she wasn’t a great singer. She did the song in rehearsal, and Josh always told us to give her every encouragement, keep her spirits up. So I told her that I liked what she’d done with the song, that she sang it rather like Rex Harrison did his songs in My Fair Lady—meaning that she had wisely talked the song instead of sung it. She looked at me and said, ‘Don’t be silly. Rex Harrison couldn’t sing!’

  “Well, you didn’t contradict Bette Davis. The worst part of it all was that it was a great role and she had done it so well in the movie, but she simply couldn’t do it on stage. She had to have that camera, that small space. She couldn’t fill a huge theater. It was not her milieu.”

  As Emlyn Williams constantly handed her rewritten sides, Bette’s fear increased, and her behavior turned dreadful. “She hated rehearsing,” Anne Francine saw, “because she hated to learn. She couldn’t learn new lines very well. She would throw a tantrum when she was given new material.”

  Rudy Lowe recalls that Bette was “very jealous of Anne Francine, because Anne was prepared to go on at the drop of a hat and do a great job. She had the fire, and it was as if Bette’s credo was ‘Come hell or high water, you, woman, are not going to set foot on that stage.’”

  “Bette was very suspicious of me,” Francine concurs. “Josh Logan said to me, ‘She needs someone to be friendly with her.’ But a star doesn’t want her stand-in at her shoulder every minute, because it’s like you’re waiting for her to slip on a banana peel.” Bette didn’t make it easy for her understudy to learn the part; she practiced her numbers privately, forcing Francine to hide under a piano one day while Bette rehearsed in order to learn a new song. “I’d sort of sneak around.… I’d stand outside doors listening to what was happening.”

  If Bette seemed tired, or couldn’t remember her lines, or complained of a backache, Josh Logan would suggest that she take a break, and one of his assistants would call out, “Francine as Moffat!” signaling that the rehearsal would go ahead without Bette. Whenever Bette heard “Francine as Moffat!” Anne recalls, “this strange look would come over her face. So I asked them not to do that—just let me know I was needed somehow. We tried to spare her anything that would smack of undermining her. She had to be the queen—and as far as I was concerned, she was. I was ready to let her walk on my head if she had wanted to, if it would have helped her.”

  Rudy Lowe soon noticed that Bette was drinking during rehearsals, which didn’t help matters. “She had this silver flask with her all the time, and I guess we all figured it was water. But one day she knocked it over, and you could smell the booze. She’d do strange things. The one time I thought she was really drunk she took off her wig during a rehearsal and handed it to one of the dancers. Now, this wasn’t her Miss Moffat wig but her own wig—that’s why we were all so shocked.”

  In the middle of another rehearsal, according to Lowe, Bette locked herself in her dressing room and wouldn’t come out. “She and Logan were fighting constantly at this point. He said that she was making incredible demands and he thought she was crazy. She was threatening not to go on with the show. Then she started saying he was crazy. I overheard them both screaming ‘You’re crazy!’ at each other.”

  Miss Moffat was scheduled to begin its out-of-town tryouts at the Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore on September 9. On August 28, Bette checked herself into the Harkness Pavilion at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, complaining of pains in her lower back and legs.

  “That was just Bette’s usual sick act,” says Vik Greenfield, who came back to work for Bette for the Miss Moffat tour. “Take my word for it, it was all mental and all an act.”

/>   Many of the Moffat company agreed, but Rudy Lowe felt Bette’s woes were genuine. “She had to ride around on a big bike—not the Schwinns we have now, but an authentic, period bike that was heavy even for us. And she had costumes with all this heavy bracing in them. So she was dragging along a lot there. I remember one day in rehearsal someone said, ‘Oh, she just doesn’t want to go on,’ and I said, ‘No, I think she’s got a problem.’ I didn’t know if it was brought on through her psychosis or whatever, but I knew there was a problem that was genuine. I think she brought the problem on, but I don’t think she was faking.”

  The doctors couldn’t say definitively what was wrong with Bette; her X-rays were negative, and they thought she might have a slipped disk. In any event, they told Logan, her hospitalization would continue for at least three weeks, maybe eight. “This would be enough to destroy us financially,” Logan recalled.

  With the members of the Miss Moffat company, faced with unemployment, moving through their days “like robots,” and the producers facing financial ruin, Bette called Logan and Wolsk and asked them to come to her hospital room. When they arrived they found her sitting up in bed, with her leg in traction, wearing a nightgown, a shawl, and Miss Moffat’s straw boater on her head. “It gave her a cocky and humorous look,” Logan recalled, “and pumped up more hope than almost anything else she said or did.”

  Eugene Wolsk got down to cases immediately. “Bette, please be frank,” he pleaded. “Do you want to continue with this or not?”

  “Of course!” Bette sang out. “I love it! I’m passionately in love with it. I must do it! If you can wait for me, fine. If you can’t, then I’ll understand.”

  “If you want to do it,” Wolsk assured her, “we’ll wait as long as is humanly possible, so don’t worry about it. Just try to get well.”

  Bette remained in the hospital for nearly a month, while the Baltimore segment of the road tour was put back to December and the Philadelphia run (already scheduled to begin on September 23) became the show’s new opening date. That date had to be put back to October 4, but to the immense relief of everyone, Bette announced herself ready and able to return to work in time for it.

  A few days before she was due to resume rehearsals, Bette’s attorney Harold Schiff told Logan that she had injured her back again. Logan asked how, and Schiff said the injury happened after she drove up to Connecticut to visit B.D. “We were astounded,” Logan recalled, “that sick as her doctors had said she was, she would take the chance of that long automobile ride. Again we realized she was shooting with our dice.”

  Finally, with the opening put back yet again to October 7, Bette told Logan she was well enough to return to rehearsals in Philadelphia. When Anne Francine returned to the theater for the first run-through with the recovered Bette, she arrived early and walked onto a darkened stage. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed someone sitting on the other side of the stage, silent, enveloped in darkness. Then she saw the flash of a cigarette lighter and she knew it was Bette Davis. “Oh, Miss Davis, it’s Anne,” she called into the shadows.

  “I know,” Bette said.

  “It’s wonderful that you’re back. How are you?”

  “I feel terrible,” Bette replied, then fell silent again.

  Francine’s heart sank. “I thought, Dear God, it’s going to go on.”

  At a preview on October 4, Bette Davis performed Miss Moffat for the first time in front of a paying audience. To Joshua Logan’s surprise, she was terrific, and he felt newly confident he had a hit and that Bette would be wonderful in it. “She seemed more sure of herself, her performance was more clear-cut… and her music was handled in a much better way: she spoke a bit, sang a bit, spoke a bit, sang a bit, close to the way we had agreed… she seemed to be a happy, stimulated woman. Oh God, if we could only have frozen that evening.”

  No one was more relieved by Bette’s new professionalism than Dorian Harewood, who had found it impossible to develop a rapport with her during rehearsals because of her maddening habit of stopping dead in the middle of a scene if she forgot her lines, or repeating a line she had just said, or criticizing the dialogue even as she spoke it. Now that they were in front of audiences, Harewood was certain, Bette would never do that again, and as they moved the show toward Broadway they would be able to create a stronger reality in their exchanges, build genuine emotion in their relationship.

  Opening night in Philadelphia proved him wrong. To his and everyone else’s mortification, Bette behaved as though this performance (the first to be attended by influential critics as well as the public) was just another dress rehearsal. As Josh Logan recalled, “[Bette] was quite often difficult to hear. She repeated lines in lyrics or left them out entirely. She forgot dialogue she had never forgotten before.… At one point she turned to the audience and said, to our horror, ‘How can I play this scene? Morgan Evans is supposed to be onstage. Morgan Evans, get out here!’ Poor Dorian Harewood, who still had minutes to wait before entering, nevertheless ran on and looked at her for a cue.… Almost at once she realized she had made a mistake. She turned to the audience at once and said, ‘I was wrong. I want you to know that. It wasn’t his fault.’

  “The audience, under her spell, cheered and applauded, and laughed all through it, forgiving, even enjoying, any mistake. Bette went on. ‘It was my own stupid fault, and Dorian had nothing to do with it. Go back, Morgan, and we’ll start over.’ He did, to more laughter and prolonged applause. The scene finally got going, but by that time the audience had lost its way. The evening was growing longer and longer. And the mistakes less amusing.”

  At another point, a seven-year-old cast member, aware that Bette had forgotten her lines, whispered them to her. “I was just stepping onstage when the boy told Bette her lines,” Rudy Lowe recalled, “and she stopped the show cold and said, ‘I remember my lines, dear!’ And I went, ‘Oooooh.’ Things like that happened all the time. Once she was singing a song, forgot the lyrics, and started all over from the beginning. The cast didn’t know what to do when she did things like that. We didn’t know how to play it. Because if you covered for her—which everybody does for everybody sometime or other—she might embarrass you. So you were on pins and needles. You didn’t know what you should do.”

  Josh Logan knew what he should do when he read the scathing reviews the next morning—he set about to rewrite and rework the show. He called the cast together that afternoon and announced cheerily, “Well, we’ve done it! We’ve opened, and now we can really get down to work!”

  Anne Francine marvels at what happened next. “Bette looked at him and said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Well, now we know where the weaknesses are, and we can change things and really start building—’ And before he finished she just said quietly, ‘I’m not going to learn one new line. I’m not changing one damn thing.’ And all of us were in total shock! There must have been fifty people in the theater, and you could feel the silence and shock from everybody.”

  That night, Harold Schiff informed Logan that not only were there to be no rewrites for at least a week, but there were also to be no rehearsals for anyone. This, to Logan, “was unique in my experience of ultimatums.”

  After a few performances at which there were no changes, Bette seemed happier and more at ease in the role. The Philadelphia audiences seemed to like the show, even with its faults, and they clearly loved Bette as Miss Moffat. Logan was certain that if he could work out the kinks, the play would be a tremendous success. “She seemed to be getting better and better as the week went on. She seemed to be in a state of euphoria. The audience could always get her in that mood.” On Thursday night Logan went to her dressing room, where she ecstatically reiterated her commitment to see the show through to New York, London, and beyond. “Miss Moffat has saved me,” she exclaimed. “Saved me!”

  “I felt closer and warmer to her than ever before,” Logan recalled. Then he mentioned that of course there would still have to be some adjustments in the show, just to
fine-tune it.

  The next day, Bette summoned the director to her hotel suite. He found her lying on her bed, fully clothed, her eyes unfocused and wandering as though she were in a daze—looking, he said, “like an alabaster queen on an alabaster coffin.” She asked him if the doctor had phoned him. “Doctor?” Logan warily replied. “No, Bette—what doctor?”

  “The doctor in New York. Hasn’t he told you that I can’t play it anymore?”

  “Play what? You mean Miss Moffat?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But who told him to call me?”

  “I did. I can’t play it anymore. There’s no use talking.”

  Logan was dumbstruck for a moment, then found his voice again. “You mean you’ve decided without actually going to see another doctor here that you’re not going to play it anymore? That means tonight or the next night?”

  “Or any night.”

  Logan felt as though he were “walking naked through hell.” Finally he said, “Bette, I know this sounds silly to you, but for your own sake you can’t commit this kind of professional suicide. You’ve become sick and made two important productions suffer before. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars of other people’s money lost because of it and dozens of actors put out of work. You mustn’t be blamed for that again, Bette. This might be the end of your stage career.”

  “I can’t help it. I’m in pain. What can I do?”

  “You can’t do anything, I suppose, except perhaps wait a few days and maybe come back for—”

  “I’m not coming back—ever. I can’t. The doctor will tell you I can’t. So let everyone know, will you?”