James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  “Is it someone whose work you know?”

  “It’s somebody I know very well.”

  By now Jarvis was suspicious. “Bette, who is this boy?”

  “Well,” Bette said, “you don’t have to accept him. You and the director can audition him. It’s my grandson Ashley.”

  Jarvis liked the idea. “I’d love to audition him,” she said. “There would be the automatic rapport you’re supposed to have with this boy’s character… and besides, the publicity would be great!”

  Ashley had done some acting at school, and had expressed an interest in pursuing the craft professionally. “He was thrilled with the idea,” Jarvis recalls. “He thought it would be a lark, and being away from home and school would be an even greater lark.” Bette told John Shea, the actor cast as her former-student-turned-lawyer who helps her fight the mall, that she wanted Ashley to have the role because his earnings would help his parents send him to college, something she didn’t feel they could afford to do on their own.

  Ashley, eleven, was a big enough boy to play thirteen, and Lucy Jarvis was impressed by his audition. “He was awkward, but it was just the kind of awkwardness that you would find in a young boy that lived in a rural area.” But he was clearly an amateur, and Jarvis felt he would need very close supervision and rehearsals before filming began. Bette assured her that “I will certainly be there to do what has to be done, and I’ll go over the lines with him every night.”

  Filming began on Long Island in the late fall of 1980. In My Mother’s Keeper, B.D. paints an unremittingly grim picture of the three months Ashley spent at work with his grandmother: she made his life miserable, she bossed him unmercifully, she criticized him and shouted at him at every turn. According to B.D., Bette wouldn’t allow Ashley to call home unless she was present because he was “a liar and a sneak and he’s telling you I’m a monster,” and the boy was terrified and demoralized by the entire experience.

  Those involved with the production, however, tell quite a different story. John Shea was impressed by the patience and understanding Bette showed with Ashley. “I spent many many hours sitting in her trailer with them. She coached him line by line, scene by scene all the way through the film. She never raised her voice to him, never criticized him, never abused him in any way. She got him the job, over much more experienced Hollywood kids, as a favor to him and his mother, and when they started to work she realized he really wasn’t equipped for the job. So she started to practice his line readings with him, word for word. She tried to protect him from failure, to make sure he wasn’t fired, which could have happened. She was very proud of him, and would reward him when he did well. Honestly, I thought she was great with him.”

  Lucy Jarvis agrees. “There was no question that Bette and Ashley had a warm, loving relationship. When I read that part of B.D.’s book I was in a state of shock! I was thinking very seriously about calling up the publisher and raving that it was just a crock—and how could they allow her to say things that were lies just to make the book interesting? Bette tutored him night and day so that he’d be as good as possible. She was strict, of course, but so would any coach have been. He had to learn his lines and how to toe his marks and all the professional gimmicks that help an actor give a good performance. He knew nothing of that, and Bette taught it all to him. And she was delighted that when he wasn’t filming he would have access to tennis courts and an indoor pool.

  “When the show was over we gave him the bicycle he rode in the story, and he was very excited about that. And he knew that all this wonderful stuff was happening to him because of his grandmother. He loved her for it.”

  While Lucy Jarvis saw no problems between Ashley and his grandmother, she did have some of her own with Bette. During the preproduction period, producer and star got along famously. “Bette and I were very good friends during the whole preparation phase. I spent a lot of time with her, and we saw eye to eye politically, so we were very friendly. I gave her a pillow inscribed ‘No guts, no glory,’ and she just loved it.”

  About a week before filming began, however, there was a distinct change in Bette’s attitude toward her producer. “She announced to me,” Jarvis recalls, “that the day we start shooting I would become her enemy. ‘It’s the director and the star against the producer,’ she said, and that was that. When I came on the set the first day, I said, ‘Good morning, Miss Davis.’ She looked at me and scowled and said, ‘Good morning,’ then she walked right by me as though I really was the enemy. It was not easy for me.”

  John Shea watched “big fights” on the set between Bette and Jarvis “until Bette just had her banished. She flung her arm somewhere in the direction of New York City and bellowed, ‘Be gone with you!’” Shea, however, had a very different experience with Bette. When the handsome young actor met the star in her dressing room, the first thing she said to him after “How do you do?” was “Do you smoke?” Shea didn’t and never had, but he sensed that he had better say yes. “Good,” Bette chirped. “Because I can’t stand men who don’t smoke!” When she handed him a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls, he took two out of the pack and lighted them both at the same time. “She laughed and immediately we were friends.”

  Shea found himself studying Bette, and he thought she was a fascinating woman. “She would sit up straight with her legs crossed just so and look up at me with these startling blue eyes and she’d blink them and look to the side. Over the course of time I realized that she was being unquenchably flirtatious. It was almost an unconscious thing, something she simply embodied. It was part of her vitality, and it’s a force few people have. Bette Davis had this fire that I think was sexual and that I saw even when she was an old woman in her seventies. At times it made her seem like a seventeen-year-old girl—the years would just wash away and you’d see that spirit still alive in her. This was very powerful to me.”

  Family Reunion was aired over two nights in April 1981. Most critics noted that the story could have been told just as well in half the time, and that Ashley’s performance was wooden and more awkward than the script called for. (He did, however, acquit himself far better than his mother had in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) But Bette gave one of her most subdued and touching performances as Elizabeth Winfield, and the film was a ratings success. “Bette was very believable as a prim New England schoolteacher,” John Shea thought. “I had seen her work and I knew that she could fall back on mannerisms, begin to parody herself. So what I would do was simply get down and stare at her while we were rehearsing in her trailer and force her—us—to transcend the preconceptions and just talk as teacher and student who were now friends. Because what I found was that if you didn’t engage her, if you weren’t bold enough to penetrate her persona, then she would fall back on mannerisms.

  “She was just like a Maine lobster,” Shea concluded. “Really formidable and crusty on the surface, but once you broke through, she was as sweet and tender as she could be.”

  “Remember the most steadfast friend is your work,” Bette told Gene Shalit in 1980. “My work has been the big romance in my life. No question about it. It really stands by you. You have disappointments in your work, and your ups and downs, but it is there when all else fails.”

  To Bette’s great joy, the spate of offers that had come her way in the late ’70s continued through the early ’80s; while they were all for television movies, the projects were prestigious. In 1982 she played the matriarch Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt in the film version of Barbara Goldsmith’s biography of Gloria Vanderbilt, Little Gloria… Happy at Last, and gave one of her finest performances as a woman struggling with senility in A Piano for Mrs. Cimino.

  In 1983 Bette costarred with another legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Jimmy Stewart, in Right of Way, a touching drama about an elderly couple who decide to commit suicide together when the wife develops a terminal illness. Bette and the laconic Stewart, also seventy-five, were delighted to be working with each other, and the production was a charmed one. For
Stewart it was “just a wonderful experience.… It’s something I’ll never forget. I can’t say enough about Bette. Her charm and her wonderful ability and her wonderful attitude toward the acting profession—it all made something that was very worthwhile. It was one of the finest experiences I’ve had in my whole career as an actor.”

  Bette told the press that she “would have given anything to have met him when we were younger,” but Stewart had been under contract to MGM and their paths never crossed. “He didn’t marry until late, forty-one I think; if we had worked together before that, I would have leapt at him.”

  At the start of filming, Davis and Stewart seemed a little in awe of each other, and observers noticed that while Bette was being unusually low-key in her readings, Stewart was delivering his lines with an unaccustomed clip. “By God,” a visitor to the set murmured, “they’re imitating each other!”

  “I never felt out of sync with Jimmy,” Bette said. “People think that he is slow and I am fast, but the important thing is, he’s a consummate actor who is always honest.” Stewart concurred: “I never thought there was a contrast.”

  The assistant director of Right of Way, Steve Tramz, was impressed by the patience and caring that Bette showed toward Stewart during the production. “There were moments when Jimmy would lose his concentration, or he might muff a line and he’d look at her as if to say, ‘I’m up,’ and she’d pat him on the head and smile and say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’ There was no temperament at all. These were professionals who had been at it for years, and they nurtured each other to make a good show.”

  When Bette felt secure on a film set, she could be an angel. Not only did she like and admire Stewart, but she had worked with the film’s director, George Schaefer, on A Piano for Mrs. Cimino, and felt totally safe in his capable hands. Thus happy and content, Bette extended her magnanimity on this film to everyone. Schaefer recalls that Bette treated the young actress Melinda Dillon, playing her daughter, with equal generosity. One morning Bette pulled him aside and asked, “Have you seen Melinda’s hair today? It’s in these little curly-curls and it looks absolutely dreadful. I’m not gonna say a word.” A few minutes later Schaefer followed Bette onto the set and saw her off in a corner with Dillon. “For crissakes, Melinda!” she thundered. “You’re not going to leave your hair like that, are you?” Dillon changed the style.

  Later, during a scene, one of Melinda’s face-lift straps broke during what Schaefer considered a good take. While the necessary repairs were being made, he grew visibly impatient. “Melinda didn’t need those things,” he says. “She used them to smooth out wrinkles that I couldn’t even see. But she had a thing about it.”

  Once the take was reshot and the crew took a break, Bette came to see Schaefer in his dressing room. “George,” she said, “I went through that same phase. I used to put those lifts on. You can’t imagine what a psychological help it is. You mustn’t be upset with Melinda.”

  “Melinda worshiped her,” Schaefer recalls, “and I just fell in love with her when we did Mrs. Cimino and Right of Way. She took direction beautifully. I have very few reminiscences beyond a lovely, warm glow and a regret that we didn’t get to do more together.”

  In 1983, B.D. and Jeremy needed Bette’s help. Their hay hauling partnership with the Pitchers had evolved into an interstate trucking company the year before, and a truckers’ strike earlier in the year, they told Bette, had pushed the company near to insolvency. The Hymans were perilously close to defaulting on a $100,000 mortgage they had taken out on their farm.

  As she had so often in the past, Bette came through for her daughter despite everything. She brought the mortgage payments up to date and continued to pay them for several months thereafter, saving the home the Hymans had come to love so much. But according to Jeremy’s partners, Jim and Doris Pitcher, the facts of the situation were not as B.D. and Jeremy had represented them to Bette. “There was no truckers’ strike in 1983,” Jim Pitcher says. “The last one had been in 1980, and it didn’t affect us much at all.”

  To this day, neither of the Pitchers can understand why the company ran into such problems; both believed it was doing more business than later showed up when they reviewed the books. Jim recalls several shipments that apparently were never entered and says, “I loaded one truck myself up in Portland, Maine, with a shipment going to Portland, Oregon, and there’s absolutely no record of it on the books, anywhere.”

  Doris recalls the day that Jeremy was in her home going through the company mail and left the room to take a phone call. Doris began to rifle through the letters, some of which contained checks in payment of loads that had been hauled. “Jeremy came back into the room and very crudely snatched the checks and envelopes out of my hand and said, ‘Leave these alone, this is none of your business.’ We were in my house and we were partners with Jeremy and everything Jim and I had was riding on the business, including our house. Who had a better right? But he acted like it didn’t have anything to do with me.”

  Jim’s expertise was in the trucking end of the business, and today he says that whatever happened was his fault for leaving the financial matters to Jeremy and not paying more attention to them. Everything seemed to blow up during the summer of 1983, when Pitcher and Hyman couldn’t pay their bills or meet their payroll. Jeremy approached the Pitchers’ son-in-law with a proposal that he lease the company’s fleet of trucks, but Jim, not seeing why the young man should take on the company’s debt, advised him against the move.

  “Jeremy was furious about that,” Jim says. “He came by our house and left a highly charged note on our door saying we had tried to stop a deal that would have saved the business. He was so overwrought about this that he went driving away like a crazy man and ran his car off the road into a ditch.”

  Less than two weeks later, Jeremy resigned from the corporation. “He left us with all the debt—we owed about two hundred thousand dollars,” Doris says. As a result, the Pitchers lost their home within a few years. Today, however, they are remarkably free of bitterness. Jim, in fact, called his former partner several years later when a load he was hauling took him near the Hymans’ new home. “I asked Jeremy if we could meet at a certain place for lunch. He said, ‘But that’s fifty miles away.’ I said, ‘So what?’ Now Jeremy used to talk all the time about some Mafia guy he supposedly knew who would break people’s legs with baseball bats if they didn’t pay their debts. So I said to him, ‘Don’t worry, Jeremy, I won’t take my baseball bat to you.’ Well, he just said he couldn’t see me and hung up.”

  The Hymans were effusive in their thanks to Bette for saving Ashdown Farm for them. Jeremy sent Bette a note in which he praised her “immense generosity” and told her she had “saved the day for our business and did wonders for our personal morale.”

  B.D. was positively rapturous in her gratitude. “I will never not be indebted to you for helping us through this frightening time and saving our home,” she wrote. “I sincerely hope that our boys will look back at their childhoods in Pennsylvania as fondly as I do my childhood in Maine, and that it will stand them in good stead with a basis of good and real values as it did Mike and I. I love you very much.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  “I

  ’ve signed to do a part in a series called Hotel,” Bette barked into the phone at B.D. early in 1983. “I play the owner and have to appear in seven episodes a year. It’s at Fox studios on a soundstage instead of location all the time and I only film for one day per show. But I hate it! I’m broke and I have to do it for the money. Shit! They’re paying me a hundred thousand dollars for each show… but I’m doing this… because I need the dough. Christ! I’m sick about it.”

  Bette didn’t think much of the show’s premise. It was an Aaron Spelling series based loosely on Arthur Hailey’s bestselling novel, and—judging by the few scripts she had seen—was little more than typical lowest-common-denominator Spelling fare, a landlocked version of his popular but critically maligned Love Boat.


  Still, B.D. couldn’t believe Bette was unhappy with the offer. She tried to talk her mother out of her reservations, reminding her of all the amenities Spelling had promised her and the fact that she would make $700,000 a year for a few days’ work. “B.D. would get into violent arguments with Bette on the phone when Bette didn’t want to work,” Doris Pitcher recalls. “She’d say, ‘If I don’t get her to do this…’ It was like the world was coming to an end if she couldn’t get her mother to do such and such. Obviously, B.D. was so concerned because if her mother wasn’t working there would be no money.”

  Bette finally accepted Spelling’s offer, because the salary he had offered her simply couldn’t be overlooked. Moreover, the working conditions were marvelous (the Fox lot was just a few miles from her condominium), and for the first time in years the show would allow Bette to portray a stylish, successful woman in a glamorous setting. “She said she wanted to make one more picture where they dressed her up,” her friend Don Ovens recalls. “Where she didn’t have to be a bag lady.”

  After Bette filmed the pilot and one episode of Hotel in May, she was no more pleased with it than she had been at the outset. She felt particularly frustrated because her part was so minimal that rewrites hardly seemed worth it. She thought the scripts were “garbage,” and she wondered about Aaron Spelling’s motives in paying her so well. Although it seems unlikely that a producer with Spelling’s track record would need to trade on Bette Davis’s fame to guarantee the success of his new series, Bette convinced herself that that was exactly what he had done. Robert Lantz had spoken of Bette’s implicit pact with her fans never to be “cameo-ized.” Doing Hotel, Bette feared that she had betrayed that conviction.

  With two episodes behind her, Bette flew back to Westport early in June to visit a friend, Robin Brown. One morning, while showering, she noticed a lump in her left breast. She had always felt, with her usual bravado, that “cancer would never dare come near me,” but ever since Bobby’s mastectomy she had examined herself regularly. Deeply worried, she left Robin Brown’s immediately, leaving no word, and flew back to Los Angeles.