James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Several of Bette’s friends have said that they did not recognize an event they had attended from B.D.’s description of it. Doug Troland, a friend of Bette’s during the last twenty years of her life, says, “So much of the book is out of context. And B.D. knows that many of those statements of Bette’s were said just as a way to let off steam in an amusing way. So, it’s B.D.’s way of telling the truth, but not really.”

  The actor Robert Wagner, a longtime friend of Bette’s, is more blunt. “The book was just a total fabrication. It’s just not true. And I’m telling you, I was there.”

  Why, the public wondered, did B.D. do this to her mother? Most scoffed at her protestations that she wouldn’t have published the book if Bette were dead because she had written it only to forge a reconciliation with her. The overwhelmingly nasty tone of the book effectively obliterated that argument; surely B.D. couldn’t have expected that to write secretly and then publish such a scathing portrait of her mother would make Bette open her arms to her.

  Most observers, of course, assumed that B.D. did it just for the money; My Mother’s Keeper was an international bestseller and probably brought B.D. over $1 million in royalties. Some felt another factor could have been her religious conversion, which had convinced her that Bette was a sinner and expendable in her life. “I think Jesus got her,” Robert Wagner says. “Jesus got her and sent her the wrong way. It’s hard for me to believe from the times I was around Bette and B.D.—who was totally devoted to her mother and vice versa—that she could change that quickly, in a matter of a year, without some kind of outside influence.”

  Bette wondered too, of course. She didn’t read the book until months after its publication, but she heard about most of the worst of it, and she asked her friend Don Ovens, “Why did she do this to me? You knew her all those years when she was a kid, Don. What made her do it?”

  “The money,” he replied. “That hundred-thousand-dollar advance was what did it.”

  “But Don,” Bette said softly, “I would have found a way, somehow, if she needed money, to get it for her.”

  Bette suspected that Jeremy had been the driving force behind the book, and she may have been right. Diana Brown, a neighbor of the Hymans’, typed the final manuscript, and she recalls that she never once met B.D.—it was always Jeremy who brought her new pages and discussed the manuscript with her. “He told me not to say a word to anyone about what was in the book,” Diana recalls. “He said if anything got out he’d know where it came from.”

  When B.D.’s close friend Josie Hamm was asked, “How involved was Jeremy in the book?” she replied unhesitatingly, “He wrote the book.” Then she caught herself and said, “She wrote it and he sort of like edited it.” (B.D. later wrote that Jeremy did some “editing, and rewriting where necessary,” but he only shared in the copyright, not in the credit for authorship.)

  Bette herself may have had the last word on why B.D. decided to write My Mother’s Keeper the day she visited her ravaged mother at the Lombardy Hotel. “B.D. thought I was going to die,” Bette told a friend. “That’s why she wrote that book. But 1 fooled her!”

  B.D. expected to encounter a backlash against the book during her promotional tour. “The lions were loose in the arena,” she wrote in Narrow Is the Way. “And now the Christian had to make her entrance.” Other Christians welcomed her with unquestioning acceptance (and sad cluck-clucks about her miserable life with Bette) on such shows as Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, but the “lions” were far more numerous, more skeptical, and well armed with B.D.’s own past statements about her mother. On a Sixty Minutes segment about the book, Mike Wallace rebroadcast an interview with B.D. that had originally run along with the show’s profile of Bette in 1980. Wallace’s doubts about the veracity of My Mother’s Keeper stemmed from what B.D. had said to him five years earlier. “Was she a tough mother?” Wallace had asked.

  “In certain ways,” B.D. replied.

  “What ways?”

  “Discipline, manners. It was worth your life to forget a ‘please’ or a ‘thank you.’ And things that I consider important in raising my own children, really. As far as fun things went, she was totally lenient.”

  “Like?”

  “Oh, we never had curfews. I was allowed to date who I pleased. She totally trusted my judgment as to who my friends were, where I went and with whom, because she felt that at a certain age—a fact that I agree with—your children have gleaned all they can from their parents.…”

  After B.D. explained that Bette had let her marry at sixteen because she “believed in allowing me to make my own judgments, my own mistakes,” Wallace commented, “You’re making this sound like a storybook—”

  “No, no. We had arguments, we certainly did.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Wallace said. “But no real disadvantages to having been the daughter of Bette Davis?”

  “None. None that I found.”

  Later in the interview, Wallace asked, “Now, Bette Davis was a huge and busy star… did she have time for you?”

  “Yes. She made time. Part of the reason was that she had me travel with her almost everywhere, all the time. And I guess part of the reason also was that when she was home, she was home. She wasn’t too busy. She wanted to be with her children, to do things with us.”

  “Was she a star at home?”

  “No, never, never. She was in blue jeans and work shirts and she was a working mother when she was at home. She was in her kitchen. She was tidying up the house. She was weeding the garden and planting bulbs. She was a mother.”

  One “lion” B.D. apparently hadn’t expected to encounter was Gary Merrill, whose portrait in My Mother’s Keeper was no less devastating than Bette’s. Seventy years old, long retired in Maine, Merrill picketed his local bookstore in Portland, carrying a placard that read, “Please boycott My Mother’s Keeper.” He then placed an ad in The New York Times urging readers not to “shell out twenty bucks for this book.” He did no television interviews until he agreed to respond on CNN to some of B.D.’s charges in the book. When she appeared on the network, they ran the film of Gary’s comments and asked for her reaction. According to her, he continually chanted “cruelty and greed, cruelty and greed” when asked why B.D. wrote the book, and kept laughing “maniacally.”

  “Memories from childhood flooded in on me,” she wrote. “Abuse, threats, drunkenness, beatings. I recoiled as I would from a psychopath stabbing repeatedly at his victim.”

  Ultimately, it mattered little how much truth My Mother’s Keeper did or did not contain, because a consensus quickly developed among the public and those who knew both Bette and B.D. that B.D. should not have published it under any circumstances. “It was so dishonorable,” Robert Lantz says. “I once said to Harold Schiff that even assuming everything in B.D.’s book is one hundred percent true, she shouldn’t have published it during her mother’s lifetime.”

  B.D.’s friend Josie Hamm, while stressing that “I’m really on the side of B.D. on this,” says, “I didn’t like the book. I just think it was so strong that it shouldn’t have been written when it was. The book killed Bette. That was absolutely the end. She didn’t understand how her daughter, who she loved more than anything, could do such a thing to her.”

  What was most disturbing to friend and foe alike about B.D. was that she had kicked her mother when she was down. The book may have backfired, however. Far from tarnishing Bette’s public image (as Mommie Dearest had Joan Crawford’s), the overriding effect of My Mother’s Keeper was to generate sympathy for Bette and forever brand B.D. as “the ungrateful daughter who betrayed Bette Davis.”

  Before too long, B.D. stopped being hurt and let the criticism roll off her back. In Narrow Is the Way, she describes Jeremy reading several “truly vile” articles about the book aloud to her while imitating the homosexual author Truman Capote’s high-pitched voice because he “had long held an unshakable conviction, which I wholeheartedly shared, regarding the nature of the majority of my mother’
s most ardent fans.” Jeremy’s little impression reduced his wife to “helpless laughter” and “chang[ed] forever my reaction to the utterances of the most strident among my detractors.”

  Bette couldn’t bring herself to read B.D.’s books for months, but when she finally did she felt as though she had been kicked in the face. “Bette wasn’t one to cry,” Don Ovens knew. “She never wanted you to see her that way. The only time I ever saw her cry in all the years I knew her was in my living room as we talked about what B.D. had done to her. She said she could get over the stroke and over the cancer, but she could not get over what B.D. had done to her. And I really think what B.D. did played a big part in her death.”

  The terrible year that was 1985 closed with more bad news for Bette when Kath Sermak decided to pursue a new life in France as an assistant to the clothing designer Patrick Kelly. Aware that Kath needed to move on, Bette reacted with equanimity to the news, but now she felt abandoned as well as betrayed. More terrified than ever of being alone, Bette sought the paid assistance of strangers and the live-in companionship of friends. Both arrangements always proved short-lived; few people possessed Kath’s ability to put up with Bette’s demands, her harsh tongue and temper—or her crushing melancholy whenever she dwelled on what B.D. had done to her and realized she would never see her daughter or grandchildren again.

  A blessed respite came with another television movie offer that took Bette to Georgia late in October. As Summers Die cast her as a liberal-minded Southern dowager, circa 1955, who helps a young lawyer defend an impoverished black woman unjustly accused of a crime. With no one to accompany her to the location, Bette hired a local woman to act as her maid. The film’s producer, Rick Rosenberg, called the quiet, gentle woman “just someone else [for Bette] to beat on”; the cast and crew could hear Bette raging against her whenever she returned to her trailer. But the woman remained, and when the filming wrapped the day before Thanksgiving, Bette stayed on after everyone else had gone home to their families for the holiday. She had been invited to join Michael and his family, Margot, and Gary Merrill for Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Michael’s mother-in-law Alix Snow, but she had declined. “She never came to holidays at my house or Michael’s,” Alix explains. “I’m not sure why, but I think it was because she didn’t want to see Gary Merrill. They had had a falling-out over who was to pay for Margot’s care, and there was bad blood between them.” Rather than spend Thanksgiving—that most New England of holidays—with her son and his family in Connecticut, Bette remained on a deserted location in Georgia, munching turkey with the temporary maid she had so often reviled.

  Back in West Hollywood, as the winter of 1985 evolved into the spring of 1986, Bette faced anew the harsh reality that acting offers were not coming in for her. She telephoned Robert Lantz every couple of days—“Why aren’t you sending me any scripts?!”—and Lantz tried to explain as gently as possible that there were few parts for a woman her age; what good roles there were seemed always to go to Jessica Tandy.

  What Lantz didn’t say—and what Bette must have realized in her rare moments of honest introspection—was that most producers in Hollywood considered her unemployable. If there were few roles for an actress nearly eighty, there were fewer still for a frail, painfully thin, obviously disabled woman. The electrifying nervous energy that Bette was famous for, the feistiness that had kept her seemingly forever young, had deserted her, replaced by a limping feebleness that inspired either pity or admiration at her ability to carry on—but in either case made onlookers uncomfortable. If an actor’s greatest asset is his physicality—the body as instrument—then most of Bette’s gifts as a performer had been destroyed by the aftereffects of the illnesses she had endured.

  She went a year without acting. Instead, she drew heavily on the investments Harold Schiff had made on her behalf and met every day with the writer Michael Herskowitz to prepare a second memoir that she hoped would bring in large royalties and serve as something of an answer to My Mother’s Keeper.

  In the summer, a miracle: a film role for which Bette was ideally suited. The producer Mike Kaplan asked her to reconsider a project she had turned down a few years earlier: his film version of The Whales of August, a character study by David Berry of two elderly widowed sisters: sweet-natured, patient Sarah, and the older, blind, embittered, and cantankerous Libby. The slim plot was motivated mainly by a dispute the sisters have about a picture window Sarah wants to install in the living room of the cottage they share for the summer on a nearly deserted island off the coast of Maine. The title referred to the migrating whales that swim past the Sisters’ cottage each year.

  Kaplan had wanted Bette to play Libby opposite Lillian Gish, the nearly ninety-year-old silent film superstar who had worked only sporadically in talkies. Although the project was prestigious, Bette reportedly was incensed at being asked to play Lillian’s older sister, and she turned it down. Kaplan wasn’t able to secure financing for the film, and the movie was abandoned. Kaplan revived the project in 1986, and this time Bette accepted the offer to costar with Gish. She wasn’t any happier about the role, but she knew this was the most important film she had been asked to do in years, and it would be her first theatrical release since 1980. And—no small incentive—she needed the money.

  The British director Lindsay Anderson brought together his company, which included Vincent Price and Ann Sothern in supporting roles, to Maine’s Cliff Island, across Casco Bay from Cape Elizabeth and Witch-Way, the house that Bette had shared with Gary Merrill thirty years earlier. Whether it was this proximity to a lost dream that affected Bette, or her anger at having to play an enfeebled blind woman, or her fear that she couldn’t do it, she arrived on the set in a foul mood and immediately drew a line in the sandy loam of Cliff Island.

  “She arrived on location,” recalls Vincent Price, “telling everyone within earshot that she wished she was doing the film with Katharine Hepburn instead of Lillian.”

  “She wasn’t very nice to Lillian,” Ann Sothern adds. “I don’t know why. I think she felt threatened because Lillian is a great lady.” Lindsay Anderson felt Bette’s problem with Gish was basic. “Lillian was at least her costar,” he points out. “I don’t think she wanted to share the limelight. There wasn’t anything else. There was nothing precipitated by Lillian. But Bette’s attitude was one of hostility.”

  Gish, whose legendary film career began in 1912, was hard of hearing, and sometimes she was fed her lines through a concealed headset. Whenever this was necessary, everyone on the set was understanding and cooperative—except for Bette, who was driven to distraction. “You try working with a deaf mute!” she exclaimed to Don Ovens.

  Bette would sputter and harangue against her costar, but to no avail. When someone commented that Lillian looked wonderful in a closeup, Bette snapped, “She ought to know about closeups. Jesus, she was around when they invented them!” When someone said hello to Gish, Bette grumbled, “You’ll have to yell—she can’t hear a damn thing!” Gish heard all of Bette’s off-the-cuff cruelties, but Vincent Price noticed that “whenever Bette went into one of her sustained tirades, Lillian would just turn off her hearing aid. That way she was able to just ignore her.” Gish got back a little at Bette for her rudeness by pretending not to hear her line cues, which kept Bette off balance. “This surprised Bette a little,” Vincent Price says. “I don’t think she thought Lillian had it in her.”

  Gish, in fact, felt sorry for Bette. “She must be a very unhappy woman,” she told Ann Sothern, and later she was heard to say, “That face! Have you ever seen such a tragic face? Poor woman! How she must be suffering. I don’t think it’s right to judge a person like that. We must bear and forbear.”

  Lindsay Anderson was less sympathetic. To him, “directing Bette Davis was like playing with a very sharp knife. She met the world like an enemy: to collaborate was to concede. She had the charm of vitality, but there was the threat of cruelty as well. Even if she wasn’t offensive, she conveyed the fact that
at any moment she might be.”

  The harsh weather conditions of the Maine coastline in October worsened Bette’s bad temper. She had undergone minor corrective surgery on her hip just prior to filming, and the cold damp sometimes made it an agony for her to walk. “We should have shot the picture at least two months earlier,” Ann Sothern felt. “Oh, God, it was cold, very cold! And sometimes Bette just couldn’t work.”

  The wind was so fierce during one scene in which Bette and Lillian stand on a hill overlooking the ocean that burly grips had to hold onto the women’s waists, out of camera range, to keep them from toppling over in the gusts. Vincent Price recalled that Bette kept her makeshift dressing room so overheated with three electric space warmers that he nearly passed out after having just one cocktail Bette had prepared for him.

  The first Sunday into production, Bette quit the picture. “There was a terrific hubbub,” Lindsay Anderson recalls, “telephone calls between her and Robbie Lantz and her lawyer. It was total nonsense, really, it wasn’t about anything. It was just Bette churning things up. She was capable of a lot of bullshit.” Bette came back, but she was frantic without Kath Sermak to keep her on an even keel. According to Lindsay Anderson, “There were endless problems of Bette trying to get a companion who would look out for her and cook for her [while being] continually insulted and treated very badly by Bette.”

  Bette was particularly touchy about how the long white wig she wore in the film should be dressed. “She had a couple of hairdressers,” recalls Ann Sothern, but neither pleased her a whit. “She hit one! She just punched her right in the chest. She was terribly upset that Kathryn wasn’t with her.”