James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Much of the friction between Bette and B.D., as before, centered around Jeremy. In My Mother’s Keeper, B.D. wrote that Bette constantly belittled Jeremy as lazy, a poor provider, a “slave driver” who took advantage of his wife. These accusations, B.D. insisted, were entirely untrue and motivated only by Bette’s jealousy over her daughter’s happy marriage, something that had always eluded her.

  A number of the Hymans’ Pennsylvania neighbors, however, feel that Bette’s opinion of Jeremy was close to the mark. George Ryan occasionally hauled hay for Pitcher and Hyman Hay Dealers, Inc., which Jeremy had bought into for a down payment of $275. Ryan first met Bette when he went over to the Hymans’ to get his paycheck. “Jeremy said he didn’t have enough money to give me my check,” Ryan says. “It was only ten or fifteen dollars, but he didn’t have it. Bette Davis was there, and she gave me some money. Whenever B.D. wanted anything, all she had to do was ask Mommy. Every time they cried, she handed them money.”

  David Keeler became friendly with the Hymans early in 1978, and saw them close-up for a number of years. In David’s opinion, “Jeremy’s a little boy. He’s never really grown up. He would never do much of anything. He’d waste days, really. He was out and about a lot, he was like the gentleman gadfly. He’d hang out at the restaurants and the shoe store—he was always hanging around the stores.”

  Leslie Santos, who worked at her parents’ Creekside Market, tells of an occasion when a neighbor brought the Hymans a load of wood as a gift. “When they delivered it, Jeremy didn’t even lift a finger to help unload the wood.” The neighbors, Leslie stressed, considered this “a slap in the face of generosity.”

  David Keeler was disturbed as well by what he saw of Jeremy’s treatment of his son. “He would lose his temper with Ashley easily,” Keeler recalls. “He could be real verbally abusive. He put the kid down a lot, really did a number on his self-esteem. I took them out fishing one time, and every time the kid would do something, Jeremy would criticize it. It was embarrassing.”

  “No one liked Jeremy,” Fran Frystak avers. “One man said to me, ‘If they hadn’t moved when they did, we would have had to burn them out.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ And he said, ‘No.’ They couldn’t stand him—they thought he was very arrogant.”

  According to Doris Pitcher, “Jeremy was always griping about Bette. He griped if they were watching television and she called—no matter what it was, he griped. And B.D. seemed to resent her mother so much. She resented being sent to a girls’ boarding school—she wanted to be raised at home by her parents. She resented her stepfather. She resented her mother’s lifestyle. Everything was Bette’s fault. Everything. She seemed so bitter. I remember her saying that one year when she was a kid they spent the whole summer eating things made out of seaweed because Bette was on a seaweed kick. But she didn’t say it in a laughing, funny way. She was very bitter about it.”

  B.D. resented just as deeply Bette’s continual, vociferous denigration of Jeremy to anyone who would listen. George Ryan recalled that Bette would say of her son-in-law, “He’s cheap, lazy, he won’t work, he won’t do anything. He’s a no-good lazy sonofabitch.” B.D. hated this kind of talk from Bette, and she despised what she saw as her mother’s meddling in her family’s affairs. Bette’s visits became more and more strained; according to B.D. her mother spent one stay “constantly drunk, dropped lighted cigarettes all over everything… was rude to everyone and then, and then, having tormented me for the entire four days and made it a period of abject misery”—Bette said that she had had a wonderful time and would stay a few days longer.

  B.D. recounts that at this point she had a startling thought: perhaps what to her was “intolerable nastiness” was to Bette merely her way of conducting her life. If this really was a revelation, B.D. may have been the last person who knew Bette to have it. Any new awareness she gained, however, didn’t change her attitude toward her mother. She continued to harangue Bette bitterly about her visits, telling her that she had not been invited, wasn’t welcome, and only got in everyone’s way. Is it any wonder Bette telephoned her chauffeur in tears so often?

  In My Mother’s Keeper, B.D. writes that Bette returned to the Frystaks’ motel after one of their arguments, drank herself “blotto” in the restaurant, and regaled the other guests with a bitter denunciation of Jeremy. “That never happened!” Fran says emphatically. “Never! I went to our attorney about it, but he said there was nothing we could do.”

  On March 1, 1977, Bette received one of the highest honors of her career, the prestigious Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. She was the first woman recipient, and the televised event was a lovefest. William Wyler joked that if Bette had the chance she would drop everything at that very moment to redo a scene in The Letter that she and Wyler had disagreed about (she nodded in agreement); Jane Fonda reminded Bette that it was her birth that made it necessary for Bette to recite her lines to a stand-in rather than to Henry Fonda in Jezebel; Olivia De Havilland good-naturedly complained that Bette “got the roles I always wanted.”

  It was a thrilling evening for Bette, but her joy must have been leavened considerably by B.D.’s refusal to attend the event. Bette was the first recipient not surrounded by loved ones at the ceremony, and as Fran Frystak watched the special on television she felt saddened that there were no family members with Bette at her table. (Michael had wanted to attend but couldn’t.) When she next spoke to B.D., Fran asked her, “Why didn’t I see you at the awards show with your mother?”

  “I wouldn’t go out there for that,” B.D. replied.

  For Bette, the best thing about the AFI tribute was that it seemed to spur a thrilling resurgence in her career, one that more than filled the void in her life left by her daughter’s disdain. Soon after the telecast she began to receive regular offers of work; the requests to Robert Lantz for her services were so frequent that she was sometimes faced with a happy choice among three or more attractive alternatives. Late in 1977 Bette had agreed to travel to London and Egypt to appear as a dowager in the film version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile when she was offered the starring role in Universal’s TV miniseries of Tom Tryon’s thriller novel Harvest Home.

  She wanted to do both films, but because Death on the Nile had a firm location start date, Lantz knew that Bette could accept the TV assignment only if the production were completed before she was scheduled to leave for London. He also knew that such assurances were virtually impossible for a studio to give because of the myriad delays that can stall a production. When Lantz told Bette about this, she suggested that he call Lew Wasserman, who had been her agent before Lantz and was now the head of Universal, and ask him to make an exception.

  Lantz blanched. “You want me to call Lew Wasserman about a thing like that?”

  “Yes,” Bette replied. “I’ve always had huge respect for him, and I think he has respect for me. Just tell him, ‘This is the dilemma.’ They want me, I would like to do it, but I have to have a stop date.”

  Nervously, Lantz called Wasserman, and he was astonished by the reply. “Robbie, I’ll tell you something,” Wasserman declared. “We’ve never given it, we will never give it, it’s out of the question.” Then he paused and concluded, “But we will give it to Bette Davis.”

  According to Lantz, “Wasserman knew that Bette would work through the night, would do whatever it took, to make sure that she made that stop date. And sure enough, five days into preproduction, she called to say that I had to tell Lew that the way things were going, she didn’t think the production would be finished on time.” Lantz phoned Wasserman about Bette’s concerns, and got a call back two days later.

  “I made an inquiry,” Wasserman told Lantz, “and she’s right. Everything will be changed. I’m very grateful to her, she’s terrific.”

  Bette worked through most of the night on her last day of shooting on The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, then boarded a special plane that took her to Westport to pack for the trip to London for
her Death on the Nile costume fittings. The next morning she left for London. “All this at her age,” Lantz marvels. “She met the designers at the hotel in London that night. She fitted all day Saturday and Sunday. And she arrived on the set in Egypt exactly as promised. She didn’t have to do this, nor did she charge anybody an extra penny.”

  On August 7, 1977, B.D. gave birth, three weeks prematurely, to another son, whom the Hymans named Justin. Once again B.D. didn’t inform Bette that the delivery was imminent. “Mother was convinced that we had done it on purpose,” B.D. wrote, implying that they would have told her had there been time. But the man who delivered the baby, “Doc” Petersen, recalls otherwise. “Jeremy didn’t want to tell her until after the fact. She always had to be there when B.D. had a problem, and Jeremy didn’t think it was necessary to have her.” Dr. Petersen recalled Jeremy asking him, “Do you want to see a scene from Dark Victory out in the lobby?” Petersen assumed this meant Jeremy thought Bette would only be melodramatic and disruptive.

  Bette finally got the message from B.D. and Jeremy. She would not stay where she wasn’t wanted. In December 1978 she left Connecticut and moved to West Hollywood, California, where she bought an apartment at Colonial House, a lovely brick high-rise on Havenhurst Drive just below Sunset Boulevard, for $195,000. Bette’s move back to Hollywood was a “fantastic relief” to B.D., an assurance that her nearly seventy-year-old mother wouldn’t “darken our doorway” as frequently as she had when she lived on the East Coast.

  B.D.’s “relief” was Bette’s heartbreak. Ruthie was dead, Bobby was ill with cancer, her daughter had rejected her. She felt like the lonely old lady she had feared for so long that she would become. She was terrified of being alone; when she first moved into Colonial House she asked her friend and former hairdresser Peggy Shannon to stay with her, and Shannon lived with Bette for three months. After Peggy left, if she wasn’t working, Bette did little but sit around the apartment, suffused with loneliness, her losses and rejections hurting so acutely that she would often burst into tears.

  She drank to great excess, and her behavior echoed that terrible period in Westport when she lost all motivation, drank herself numb, and threatened to commit suicide. The screenwriter Ginny Cerilla was a resident of Colonial House, and one day she found Bette passed out in front of her door, surrounded by empty liquor bottles she was apparently taking to the trash disposal, a spilled Scotch on the rocks near her hand. Ginny took the bottles to the disposal, then helped Bette, conscious again and spewing invective at her, back into her apartment.

  In June 1979, however, redemption came to Bette’s door in the person of Kathryn Sermak. The pretty twenty-two-year-old brunette had been sent by an employment agency to interview for the job of accompanying Bette to England as her assistant while she made a film. A graduate of the University of Southern California, she had wanted to be a clinical psychologist. But now she just needed a job, and since she had been an au pair for a year while she studied in Paris, she figured she could handle this assignment.

  When Bette greeted her, Kath was impressed that she had “such a strong handshake for a woman.” The interview lasted less than ten minutes; Bette asked her what her birth sign was, and whether she could boil an egg. She seemed satisfied by the responses (“Libra and yes”) and hired Kathryn on the spot. Bette later told her that the quick decision was based on “a hunch.”

  When they returned from England, where Bette filmed the Disney feature Watcher in the Woods, Bette asked Kath to continue on and move into her apartment. Bette liked the young woman’s efficiency and her pliable personality, and she became her mentor. Bette, Kath later wrote, “is, was and always will be a teacher. This I know: I learned from her every day.”

  Whenever she made a mistake, according to Kath, Bette would correct her. “Just don’t make the same mistake again,” she learned. When Bette once overheard Kath’s side of a telephone conversation, she pointed out to her that she had said “Okay” fifteen times. “Every time you say ‘Okay’ from now on,” Bette declared, “you’ll have to give me a quarter.” Within two weeks Kath had broken the habit.

  Bette’s friends soon came to realize that for Bette, Kath Sermak was taking the place of B.D. Many of them didn’t like it; some felt that Kath had insinuated herself into a superstar’s life, others felt that Bette was taking unconscionable advantage of Kath. They cringed when she would verbally abuse the girl, or force her into total subservience; they were shocked to see Kath dressed in a black velvet chauffeur’s outfit, complete with cap, waiting to take Bette home from a restaurant.

  Whatever outsiders thought of the relationship between Bette and Kath, it was clearly tremendously important and advantageous to both of them. And over the next ten years, as Bette’s relationship with her daughter disintegrated even further, Kath Sermak would become the most important person in her life.

  Bette was visiting the Hymans on her way back from England in July 1979 when she received word that her sister Bobby had died of a heart attack after a long bout with recurring cancer that had begun with a mastectomy fifteen years before. B.D. recalled that Bette fell into a chair, stricken by the news, and rocked back and forth in agony as she cried, “What am I going to do? Oh no! Bobby’s dead! I can’t go on. I want to die, too.”

  When Bette learned that Bobby’s wish had been to be cremated, she insisted instead that she be buried next to Ruthie in the Forest Lawn family plot, and Bobby’s daughter Ruth agreed. Bette paid for the funeral, something for which Ruth was tremendously grateful because “I wouldn’t have been able to.” But she didn’t attend the funeral, ostensibly because she had to begin a new film the next day. But Ruth feels the real reason was that Bette didn’t want to attract attention away from Bobby at her memorial. At Bobby’s wedding to David Berry, Bette had stood outside the chapel while the vows were exchanged so that her sister wouldn’t have to share any of the spotlight during a moment that should be uniquely one’s own. “My aunt knew that anybody who came to my mother’s funeral would spend the whole time staring at her. I would have been uncomfortable about that. I’m glad she didn’t come—it was a very smart thing that she didn’t.”

  Again work took Bette’s mind off her sorrow. In the three years between 1978 and 1980, she starred in two feature films (Watcher in the Woods and another Disney production, Return from Witch Mountain) and three made-for-television movies (Strangers, White Mama, and Skyward. )

  Strangers, aired in May 1979, costarred her with Gena Rowlands as an estranged mother and daughter who painfully come to love each other again when the daughter returns home with a terminal illness. The performance won Bette an Emmy Award as Best Supporting Actress. She and Rowlands, one of her generation’s great actresses, struck up a friendship. Rowlands sensed that life had left Bette “worn and tired, and that her work, while it was the most important thing in her life, was not yielding the consolations that she had hoped for. We had many talks, and I found her more objective about herself than her publicity would lead one to believe.”

  That objectivity forced Bette into the realization, as the 1970s came to a close, that she would have to undergo a face-lift—despite all her protestations that she would never do so. “Professionally I had to do it,” she admitted to Mike Wallace off the air during a Sixty Minutes profile of her in January 1980, “although personally it went against my grain. The way they shoot today, they don’t take the time to light older people properly. I’m at the point where I can’t wear [face lift] straps for fifteen hours at a time, and my skin can’t tolerate makeup an inch thick. It’s difficult enough to get parts at my age. Without lifts I looked a hundred and ten on camera.”

  The lifts had been torture for Bette. Sometimes it was rubber bands pulling hair tufts back across her head to pull up the skin, sometimes it was clear tape attached to her skin just under her wig line and stretched back across her scalp. Either way it was uncomfortable, itchy, painful—and when the tape was ripped off at the end of a day Bette thought she’d
scream in agony.

  Bette considered the surgery worth it, even with its recuperative period of pain and swelling and discoloration, because it promised to end all that and improve her looks permanently. But once she had healed, she was disappointed that the difference in her appearance wasn’t nearly as dramatic as she had hoped it would be. According to her doctor, she’d waited ten years too long for the procedure to do much good. Still, she did look better, and the psychological lift proved more potent than the physical as she looked forward to the 1980s with renewed enthusiasm.

  Bette was sure she had the perfect young actor with whom to costar in her latest project. Early in 1980 she had been offered the lead role in another TV miniseries, Family Reunion, about a retired schoolteacher from the town of Winfield, which her family had founded, who travels around the country with one of her former students, a thirteen-year-old boy, to visit her widely scattered relatives. When she returns, she finds that a powerful conglomerate—headed up secretly by her nephew, a senator—is trying to build a shopping mall on the extensive Winfield land. She gathers the family together at a reunion and is ultimately successful in stopping the mall.

  In preliminary meetings with the show’s producer, Lucy Jarvis, Bette piped up that she had a boy in mind to play Miss Winfield’s young traveling companion. “Wonderful,” Jarvis enthused. “Is it someone you’ve worked with?”

  “Well, no, not exactly,” Bette replied.