by James Spada
Her doctor, Vincent Carroll, performed a biopsy, and within just a few hours the terrible word came from the lab: the tumor was malignant; Bette had breast cancer. Carroll went to Colonial House to break the news to her in person. The only way to stem the cancer, he said, was for her to undergo a radical mastectomy.
In the hope that Bette might have more privacy away from Hollywood, her attorney Harold Schiff arranged for the surgery to be performed at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. Frightened, she flew East with Kath, the young assistant holding her hand all the time. On June 9, Bette went under the surgeon’s knife, and after the operation her doctors assured her that the cancer had been successfully arrested. As she thought back on the fact that Bobby had lived productively nearly fifteen years after her mastectomy, Bette’s fears of death or permanent disability eased. “Thank God I discovered the tumor when I did,” she said. “Any further delay and I might have been riddled with cancer.… I had been lucky in my life. Now I was lucky again.”
But her luck didn’t hold. Nine days after the surgery, just as she was about to be released from the hospital, Bette was hit by a mild stroke. Within a week three more embolisms tore at the veins in her brain, each more serious than the one before, the last leaving her partially paralyzed, her left hand knotted, the right side of her face twisted and dragging, her speech slurred.
Physically ravaged, Bette remained as sharp mentally as ever, and as she lay in her hospital bed, a prisoner of her failing body, she was able to comprehend fully her terrible condition. “I was panicked at the thought that I might be an invalid the rest of my life,” she wrote. “Over and over, lying there, I asked, will I ever be able to work again? Acting had been my life. I wouldn’t want to live if I could never act again.”
Kath sat by Bette’s side day and night, holding her feeble, gnarled hand, whispering to her, “We’ll make it.… We’ll make it.” For the first time in her life, Bette wasn’t sure. Her legendary strength and iron will seemed to have been cruelly snatched away; her body would no longer do what she wanted it to do. She felt like a prisoner in a torture chamber. Always fiercely independent, now she couldn’t do anything herself. Her body, it seemed, had given up the fight. Bette almost did too. “Many times I wasn’t strong,” she recalled. “At seventy-five I probably didn’t have many more years to live anyway. What was the point of the long struggle ahead? To learn to walk again? To unknot my left hand so I could use it again? I gave up so often during those weeks.”
This unfathomable new defeatism in the Iron Lady she had known frightened Kath far more than Bette’s physical condition. She was sure that Bette would come around, would respond to her constant reassurances, but finally there seemed to her some hellish conspiracy at play to make everything as difficult as possible for Bette. A few days after the final stroke, she developed an intense, maddening itch all over her body. Writhing and squirming, she scratched herself raw, raising ugly welts on her skin until she was in such pain she couldn’t bear to be touched.
The doctors weren’t sure what had caused Bette’s itching. It might have been an allergic reaction to her medication, but it could also have been a symptom of alcohol withdrawal. In any event, the result was that Bette became infuriated with the hospital staff and verbally abused anyone who dared come near her. Her behavior, which drove away nurse after nurse in exasperation, delighted Kath, who was beginning to see some of the old “Miss D.” fight she admired so much coming back in Bette.
“I’m absolutely convinced,” Robert Lantz says, “that what kept Bette alive from that moment on was the rage, the fury that this should happen to her—that she should be physically handicapped.” The doctors, Bette felt, treated her like a child and lied to her; the nurses “dared” to tell her what to do and “never took their eyes off me. Every time I moved an arm, a leg, or even an eyelash, they made a note of it. I felt as if I were in prison!” She thought the nurses were having great fun telling her what to do. “One nurse told me to say ‘please’ when I asked her to do something! She should consider herself lucky to be in one piece today.”
Kath hadn’t moved from Bette’s side since the surgery. She stretched out at night on the sofa next to Bette’s bed, frequently sleepless from her boss’s jumpy itching and screams of pain. When Bette was too weak to fight the nurses and doctors herself, Kath would do it for her. “Had the illness occurred earlier in our relationship,” Kath said, “I doubt that I would have been strong enough or tough enough to fight for her, when necessary, against the wishes of her nurses and sometimes her doctors.”
After a few weeks, Bette insisted that Kath take some time off and fly to Paris to visit her beau. Vik Greenfield, with whom Bette had maintained a long-distance relationship over the years, suggested that his sister, Stephanie Landsman, take Kath’s place. Stephanie found the job a trial. She constantly had to pull Bette back into bed when she would try to drag herself off to harangue or fire the night nurse, whom she considered incompetent. Still, Landsman’s overriding memory of the experience was how “desperately frightened” Bette was.
In My Mother’s Keeper, B.D. described herself as “terribly shaken and very worried” about Bette during this period and says it was because of Bette’s “continuing protests that she didn’t want visitors” that she did not go to the hospital to visit her mother—whom she had just a few months earlier profusely thanked for saving her home and told “I love you very much”—until almost three weeks after her surgery. When she finally did make the drive from Pennsylvania to see Bette, she said, “she looked frighteningly small and sad and my heart went out to her.”
The rest of B.D.’s memory of the visit centered around how posh her mother’s room was (“If it hadn’t been for the hospital bed and the equipment around it, I would have thought myself in a hotel suite,” she wrote) and Bette’s dreadful behavior. When a physical therapist came in to check on her progress, according to B.D., Bette screamed at her. “Don’t touch me you bitch!… You fucking idiot!… None of you are worth a shit in this place!… You don’t know what you’re doing!… Keep your filthy hands to yourself! Christ! Jesus! Fuck!”
At one point, B.D. said, Bette pushed her tray of food onto the floor. When she asked her mother why she was still smoking, “she screamed at me to mind my own business and claimed that the doctors had said it was perfectly all right.” The only time B.D. saw her mother behave well, she averred, was when an attractive young doctor came to look in on her. In anticipation of his visit, Bette had her hair brushed and arranged as neatly as possible, applied fresh makeup, and put on a pretty bed jacket. “Gone the vicious, crumpled, foul-mouthed invalid,” B.D. wrote. “Enter the wide-eyed, gutsy star. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.” B.D. did not visit her mother again, although Bette remained in the hospital for nine weeks.
During this period Bette found that “just the mention of any kind of food made me sick,” and she began to lose weight dangerously. The doctors decided to feed her intravenously, and hooked her up to a large machine she nicknamed Bertha. “I couldn’t even lift my arm without being conscious of her.… She became a kind of jailer.”
Fear still dominated Bette’s emotions. When her doctors told her that she had improved enough so that her care could be continued on an outpatient basis, she refused to leave the hospital. “They seemed to be trying to kick me out of my room, which I did not understand,” she said. Every time someone asked her when she was going, Bette would snap, “I am the only person who will know when I am ready to leave.”
Her hospital room, of course, represented a safe harbor for Bette, who was terrified of the difficulties that would face her in the outside world. Would she be able to function as she had before? What if she were alone and suffered another stroke? How would people react to her twisted face and emaciated body? She had had a taste of things to come in the last regard when a friend visited her soon after her strokes and started to cry. “That wasn’t Bette Davis lying there,” she later heard
he had said. “She was gone.”
Bette was finally persuaded to vacate her room (which she insisted she was “bumped” from because the Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos had demanded it for his son), and she took a suite in the Hotel Lombardy on East Fifty-sixth Street for herself and Kath Sermak for her recuperation. During B.D.’s hospital visit, and several more times over the telephone, Bette had dropped unsubtle hints that she would like to recuperate at Ashdown Farm; she had, after all, paid for an addition on the house that included a suite of rooms for herself. B.D. did not extend an invitation.
Bette, screaming and cursing all the time, made slow and agonizing progress at the Lombardy toward regaining her ability to walk and speak clearly with a daily regimen of painful physical therapy. Her appetite returned, and she was delighted when her attorney Harold Schiff told her that her pencil-thin legs had begun to flesh out and return to a semblance of their former shapely glory. Now, she was starting to believe Kath’s cheerleading: “We’ll make it!”
But she was devastated every time she looked in a mirror. She was still pitifully thin; her mouth twisted badly, one of her legs dragged behind her as she walked. Under no circumstances, she told Kath, was anyone to be allowed to see her in this condition, only to react with shock and pity. That was the main reason she turned down Aaron Spelling’s pleas to return to Hotel. In spite of the money, and Spelling’s offer to accommodate her in every possible way, she simply couldn’t let anyone see her until she was much further improved. Call after call came from close friends eager to pay a visit, but Kath always had to put them off. Bette’s friends deeply resented Kath for this; they blamed her for “isolating” Bette rather than realizing that she was only doing what Bette had told her to do.
According to B.D., Bette still didn’t want even her to visit, and she didn’t go to the Lombardy until early in September, when Bette called and asked her to come before she returned to Los Angeles. B.D. agreed, and there ensued a lengthy exchange of telephone calls during which B.D. said she couldn’t come except when her husband could drive her, since she had been having trouble with her back. “I don’t want that bastard to bring you in,” B.D. quotes Bette. “I don’t want to owe him any favors.”
“I can assure you he doesn’t bring me to see you as a favor to you,” B.D. replied. “He does it because I ask him to, that’s all.”
“You mean that’s the only way you can get here? If he doesn’t bring you, I can’t see you?”
“That’s right.”
Finally Bette sent a car to pick B.D. up, and another protracted negotiation began about the day and time. When B.D. asked that the car be there for her at 7:30 A.M., Bette asked, “Why so early?”
“So that I can be back in time to see Justin before he goes to bed,” B.D. replied.
“Jesus! That won’t give us any time together.”
“We’ll have four hours. I’m confident we’ll be able to say all we have to in four hours.”
“God, you’re a cold bitch!” Bette exploded before she hung up the phone.
The visit, free of the usual fireworks, was remarkably mundane considering that out of it B.D. came to a momentous decision. She wanted to “reach out” to her mother, she has said, and on the ride back to Pennsylvania she decided that the best way to do that would be to write a book about her.
Despite the bailout from Bette that had saved their home in 1983, the Hymans faced considerable financial trouble throughout 1984. No longer in the trucking business, Jeremy had very little income; B.D. had taken to fashioning Christmas wreaths that she sold to local shops and businesses for $200 apiece. With Bette unable to work while she recovered from her devastating illnesses, her own finances dwindled, and she was no longer able to help her daughter and son-in-law. By the spring of 1985, although B.D. had received a $100,000 advance the prior September for the book she had written about Bette, the Hymans’ monetary situation had again turned so grim they left their farm and moved to the Bahamas.
They had bought Ashdown Farm in 1976 for $38,500, with a $25,600 mortgage. By 1984, the mortgage on the property totaled approximately $100,000 and the Hymans couldn’t make the payments. As Jeremy’s friend David Keeler, the publisher of the nearby Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, Rocket Courier, recalls it, “Jeremy told me that he didn’t tell the bank he was leaving and running out on his mortgage. He just left. He explained to me that the bank would get enough money by reselling the house to cover the debt. Sometime after they left, a business associate of mine who’s on the board of directors of the bank asked me if I knew where Jeremy Hyman was. I told him I knew he had moved to the Bahamas, but I wasn’t sure where.…”
Doris Pitcher recalls that late in 1984 R. G. Rohrbach, a loan officer of the United Penn Bank, told her that Jeremy had sent him a registered letter containing the key to his house and an executed deed that turned the farm back over to the bank. Rohrbach asked Doris and Jim if they would mind going over to the Hymans’ place to see if they were there. “So we got in our car and took a ride over the hill,” Doris says, “and we saw that everyone was gone, the animals were all gone and everything was all closed up. Everything that could be was padlocked.”
George Ryan, who sometimes worked for Jeremy, adds, “They up and packed and took off in a hell of a hurry. The sheriff came here, hunting for them. They owed numerous people from the business. Jeremy left a hell of a debt behind. He shafted the bank, he shafted people in the area, and there are a lot of people pretty upset. If he hadn’t shafted everybody, he’d still be here. Really, because if he would have done right by the hay hauling, he could have done well for himself.”
In January 1985, a judgment was entered in the New York State Supreme Court against Pitcher and Hyman Hay Dealers in the amount of $11,622. They had been sued for nonpayment by the Tallmadge Tire Company, but the judgment, according to Jim Pitcher, was never satisfied. In April, the National Bank of Wyalusing sued Pitcher and both the Hymans for $915, the balance still owing on a $2,500 business loan the bank made to Pitcher in 1983 with the Hymans as cosigners. The monthly payments had been $231. The bank served papers on Pitcher, but it was unable to serve the Hymans. After locating them on Grand Bahama Island, the bank sent certified letters to each of them. Court records indicate that both letters were returned to the Towanda, Pennsylvania, sheriffs office marked “Unclaimed.”
If many of Jeremy’s acquaintances in Pennsylvania consider him less than a brilliant businessman, B.D. has a startling reputation of her own in the area. In Bette’s memoir, This ’n That; she told the story of returning home from a shopping trip with B.D. and discovering that her young daughter had taken a miniature Teddy bear from the store. She told B.D., Bette wrote, that the next time she would “have to return to the store and admit [she] took something,” and it never happened again. But according to a number of B.D.’s Pennsylvania neighbors, that childhood incident was not a one-time occurrence.
David Keeler’s wife Nancy worked in her father Clyde Tibbie’s store, the J&N Market. While she never saw it, she says that another employee told her that B.D. had shoplifted some film and that whenever Nancy worked there she should keep an eye on her. Carol Andras, the wife of Wyalusing Police Chief George Andras, worked in Honchell’s Market, and although she also never saw B.D. shoplift, she recalls that “other employees who had been working in the store longer than I had” told her that B.D. “used to steal things.” The police were never called, Carol was told, because no one “wanted to make any trouble for Bette Davis.”
On one occasion, B.D. walked into an area market and asked for an item the store had just one of. After she left, the employee who had been there when B.D. came in noticed that the item was gone from the shelf. Thereafter, when B.D. visited the store, they kept an eye on her. Not too long after the first incident, the owner suspected before she left the store that she had shoplifted. He followed her outside and asked to see what was in her purse. He found a bottle of salad dressing and a stick of deodorant. B.D. told him that she h
ad taken the items by accident, and she returned to the store and paid for them.
An acquaintance of the Hymans who prefers to remain anonymous witnessed the confrontation: “I was walking to my car from the market and I saw the owner pull B.D. aside and ask what was in her purse. I heard her say it was an accident, and as they walked back inside he told B.D. never to come back to his store again.” B.D. did continue to shop at the market, and there were no further incidents there.
Back in Los Angeles, Bette’s recovery continued, sometimes more slowly and more painfully than she could bear. It took her three months to learn to use a knife and fork again. When Kath Sermak had to help her tie her shoes or button a blouse, she “felt like a baby again. I hated it!” Her frustration left her with a shorter temper than ever; she went through a succession of cooks, several of whom skulked out of the apartment in the middle of the night rather than face her vitriol the next morning.
Sometimes she turned her anger on herself. In her bedroom one morning in February 1984, she had difficulty removing her brassiere. She called for help, but when no one came immediately she lost her patience and struggled angrily to remove the bra. When she finally did, she turned and flung it at her television set. She lost her balance, fell to the floor, and broke her hip. In the hospital, doctors inserted a pin to help the hairline fracture heal, and Bette’s recovery was set back badly.
Throughout all this, Bette grew increasingly dependent on Kath, and the shy assistant of old had now, in many ways, taken over for her mistress. Bette’s friend Chuck Pollack recalled his amazement at the change in the dynamics between her and Kath. “When I used to go over to visit Bette or have dinner with Bette, Kathryn would either sit in her room, sit in the kitchen, or sit somewhere else. She was not part of the party.” Now, Pollack felt, “Bette was nothing, and Kathryn was Bette. Kathryn made ninety percent of the conversation. She sat there drinking and having the hors d’oeuvres… as B.D. said, ‘She became Mother.’”
