James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Lindsay Anderson found that Bette’s contrariness extended far beyond the superficial. “She wasn’t very open to suggestions. She had a sense of rivalry about it. I remember her saying, ‘Oh, that’s twice I’ve given in to Anderson today.’ Which is nonsense. It was sort of a game with her, and not a helpful game. Reason didn’t really come into it. It was temperamental and emotional. I said to her, ‘You mustn’t waste your energy fighting unnecessary battles.’ The unit was absolutely on her side, extremely respectful. We did everything we could to make it enjoyable, but she was dead set against that. She didn’t want it to be enjoyable. It was tragic, really.”

  When Lillian Gish threw a dinner party for the cast and crew, Bette left after a few minutes of idle chatter. Feeling obliged, Bette hosted a gathering of her own, but spent the entire time sitting in a corner, chain smoking and ignoring her guests.

  As the filming drew to a close, Anderson noticed an odd shift in Bette’s attitude. “Suddenly she was being friendly to everyone. She would come to the set even after she was through shooting and just hang around and be very pleasant. I realized that she didn’t want to leave the island, didn’t want the job to end. Because it was work, and work was everything to her.”

  The Whales of August was released a year after production wrapped, in October 1987. Perceived as an art film, it had limited distribution, and its reviews were respectful. Gish garnered the best notices for her magical presence; she was able to convey more emotion in one glance than most actresses can through pages of dialogue. As one critic pointed out, Bette provided a strong counterpoint with her best performance in years: “Bette crawls across the screen like a testy old hornet on a windowpane, snarling, staggering, twitching—a symphony of misfired synapses. Lillian’s performance is as clear and simple as a drop of water filled with sunlight.”

  Bette might have basked in this small triumph, but instead she reacted with petty jealousy to Gish’s acclaim. When she learned that she and Gish would share a title card at the beginning of the film, she insisted that she have her own card, flashed before Lillian’s. When she sensed that Gish’s performance was being hailed as the better of the two, she refused to attend the movie’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival along with Gish and Lindsay Anderson. When she was told that the New York premiere had been scheduled on Lillian’s birthday, she stayed away from that, too, telling the press her decision was based on “self-preservation.”

  Finally, Ann Sothern recalls, whenever Bette was asked to autograph photos of herself and Lillian in the film, “she would sign her name in big black letters—right over Lillian’s face.”

  Bette’s lack of support for The Whales of August may have hurt its chances at the box office, where it did only moderate business. Lindsay Anderson, however, thinks there was a more elemental force at work against the film’s popular appeal. “The public likes to see Bette Davis in Now, Voyager or All About Eve. They don’t want to be reminded of what life does to us, as it did to her, the age and the suffering.” In Japan, Anderson points out, the elderly are far more revered than in Western cultures, and there the film did quite well.

  There was much talk early in 1988 that both Bette and Lillian would win Oscar nominations as Best Actress, and Bette was badly disappointed when only Ann Sothern was cited, in the Supporting Actress category. At home in Idaho, Sothern received a call from Bette the morning the nominations were announced. “She didn’t really congratulate me,” Sothern recalls. “What she did say was, ‘Now, listen, if you can’t get to L.A. for the ceremonies, I’ll accept your award for you!’”

  THIRTY-FOUR

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  obert Lantz couldn’t believe what he had just heard. After nearly twenty years as his client and his friend, Bette had met secretly with another agent, Michael Black of ICM, and was about to switch her representation. Lantz was stunned and hurt, not so much by the fact that Bette wanted to move on as by her lack of candor about it.

  Lantz had made heroic efforts on Bette’s behalf throughout 1987, but the cause was hopeless. No producer would hire her, either because of the way she looked or because they feared she would be uninsurable. Bette fervently hoped to star in the movie version of the stage success Driving Miss Daisy, as a cantankerous Southern dowager; the role went instead to Jessica Tandy (who was only a year younger than Bette but in far better health). She flirted with the idea of appearing in the film version of the ensemble piece Steel Magnolias, but the play didn’t have a role for a woman Bette’s age.

  Offers simply didn’t come in to Lantz’s office, and when he repeatedly told Bette he had nothing for her she became convinced that he wasn’t working hard enough. “She didn’t understand that she was no longer employable,” Lantz recalls sadly. “She weighed seventy-five pounds or something. It was too difficult. She was too difficult.”

  When Lantz got confirmation that Bette was shopping for a new agent, he wrote her a note. “Bette, we are such close friends,” he told her. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable if you talk to any other agent. We are released from one another. I am always here for you, for anything, but let’s end it.”

  Lantz’s heart broke. “She was one of the three or four people in the world that I could have called at four in the morning if I had trouble of any kind,” he felt, “and she would have been there for me. She was remarkable.” Lantz was further disheartened when Bette failed to respond in any way to his note. They were never in contact with each other again.

  If Bette was convinced that with the proper representation she could work steadily, she had no delusions about her inability to tend to her personal needs without assistance. Kath Sermak flew back from France occasionally to visit, but Bette missed her on a daily basis for countless practical and emotional reasons. The pain in her joints, the frustration of dealing with her often recalcitrant body, the maddening idleness—all of this was bad enough. Add the crushing loneliness that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her, and Bette often felt she wouldn’t be able to go on.

  Holidays proved especially difficult, but she was still too bitter at Gary to join Michael and his family’s celebrations. Christmas of 1987, she went instead to her friend Robin Brown’s house in Westport, and her young friend Doug Troland stopped by to visit. “It was Christmas Day evening,” Troland recalls, “and when Bette opened the door I could tell her hip was giving her trouble; she was limping. She escorted me down to the little room Robin had put her in and I was really shocked. It was a tiny, desolate room with an electric heater and it was so cold that Bette kept her mink coat on. We sat down to talk and we were almost knee to knee, the room was so small. Bette went on and on about how Robin wouldn’t light a fire in the house. She was funny about Robin, I never knew if she really liked her or not. Anyway, we were sitting there and Bette gestured around this tiny hole-in-the-wall and said, ‘Well, here we are. Who would have thought that you and I would end up like this?’ I wondered what she meant by that, ‘you and I.’ She was clearly talking about herself.”

  Bette constantly searched for a permanent companion throughout the late 1980s. Her old chum Peggy Shannon stayed with her off and on until Peggy herself fell ill and had to be hospitalized. Bette then approached Betty Lynn, who had remained friendly with her after they appeared together in June Bride and Payment on Demand four decades earlier. Lynn and Bette paid Peggy Shannon a visit in the hospital, and as they left Lynn was taken aback when Bette offered her a salary to move in with her. “I realized she needed someone to be with her, and that she was probably quite lonely. But as fond as I was of Bette, I just couldn’t see myself working for her in that way.”

  Doug Troland lived on the East Coast, and when Bette made plans to spend an extended period of time in Westchester, she offered him $300 a week to be her live-in assistant. It was then that Troland realized that over the prior several months Bette had been putting him through an elaborate series of tests to see whether he would be suitable as her consort. The first was when she invited him to her hotel suite fo
r a dinner with several executives from the publishing house that planned to bring out her second volume of memoirs. There was no reason for Bette to invite Troland to the dinner except to gauge how he would handle himself in a business situation of that kind.

  He failed the first test. “I arrived wearing a nice sweater—I had always dressed casually around Bette—and when she opened the door she said, ‘Didn’t anybody ever tell you that you’re supposed to wear a jacket and tie in a hotel?’ I had had many, many visits with her in hotels and had never dressed up. I didn’t realize until later that this visit was a grand audition for me.”

  Troland did better with the second test. “I sensed that Bette expected me to keep my thoughts to myself during the discussions about the book, and I did.” After the other guests left, Bette put the young man to the final trial. “We were sitting alone in the suite and she was across from me. I noticed this glittering diamond by her shoe that kept catching my eye. Finally I said, ‘Oh, what’s this, Bette?’ and picked it up. It was one of her earrings. I know it sounds far-fetched to say that Bette was trying to see if I’d steal it, but she did things like that.”

  Just before Troland left, Bette offered him the job as her assistant. “She wanted to feel comfortable around whoever lived with her, and we had a very comfortable relationship. It might seem boring, but often it consisted of us just sitting in the kitchen watching a game show. It was totally the kind of normal interaction that goes on between people. I sensed from the beginning that that was the role she wanted of me.”

  Still, Troland turned Bette down. “I was terrified of the prospect,” he says. “I could see myself locked up with her, and while that may sound fascinating to most people, I knew that after one week it would turn into a very different experience. And she was ill. I remember having to find her medication for her, and I didn’t want that responsibility. I also thought she needed a woman who could help her get dressed and that kind of thing.”

  Kath Sermak came back into Bette’s employ in the spring of 1987 after she ended her romance in Paris and resigned her position with the fashion designer Patrick Kelly. Bette was overjoyed, particularly because she was set to embark on a publicity tour to promote her new book, entitled This ’n That, which she had written with Michael Herskowitz.

  Robert Lantz had shopped the book around to a number of New York publishers, and at first Bette signed a contract with E. P. Dutton. They rejected the manuscript. “Bette refused to write a ‘kiss and tell’ book,” Lantz recalls, “which was the kind most publishers wanted. She also didn’t think people would be interested in an in-depth study of her work process, her relationship with certain directors, how she made creative decisions, that kind of thing.”

  Such a volume could have been more compelling than This ’n That, an uninspired hodgepodge that was missing more than just the second apostrophe. A disjointed collection of opinions, reminiscences, and proclamations, the book jumps around from Bette’s hospital stay and Kath Sermak’s tireless devotion to her experiences with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, her one-woman stage appearances, and the Hollywood Canteen. There are few revelations of a controversial nature, and when Bette retraces personal material she had already covered in The Lonely Life, she imparts very little fresh information.

  Book buyers who hoped for a blistering response to My Mother’s Keeper were disappointed. Bette treats her daughter kindly throughout the book, but at its conclusion she does write an odd note in which she takes issue with some of B.D.’s facts—but only those that involve her career; she ignores her daughter’s far more damaging revelations about her private life.

  Only in a postscript to the note does Bette get in anything close to a dig: “I hope someday I will understand the title My Mother’s Keeper. If it refers to money, if my memory serves me right, I’ve been your keeper all these many years. I am continuing to do so, as my name has made your book about me a success.” Also included in the final pages are several negative reviews of the book and letters of support to Bette, including one from Mia Farrow.

  Bette appeared on a number of national talk shows to hype This ’n That, and she never failed to introduce Kath from the audience. She sang her young assistant’s praises as Kath, sometimes dressed elegantly in a skin-tight black satin dress and a single red satin glove, stood and accepted applause from the audience. If Kath wasn’t with her for some reason, Bette would show the back of the book—a full-page picture of the two of them—and talk about her companion’s loyalty and devotion. Bette clearly wanted to let Kath know how much she appreciated her so that she wouldn’t leave again, and she apparently wanted the public to know that if her daughter couldn’t stand her, this attractive, capable young woman could.

  Despite the shortcomings of This ’n That, Bette’s popularity propelled it to number five on The New York Times bestseller list. When the publisher called her with the news, she snapped, “Why isn’t it number one?”

  Absent from the bestseller lists of 1987 was Narrow Is the Way, B.D.’s second effort, this time with Jeremy sharing authorship (and with a back-cover endorsement from Pat Robertson). In even more sanctimonious, self-serving tones than she used in My Mother’s Keeper, B.D. details the travails of writing that book, her mother’s reaction, her confrontational publicity tour, and—in a text replete with startling statements about Jesus and Satan—the story of her conversion to born-again Christianity. One wit couldn’t resist the temptation to dub the book Narrow Is the Mind.

  “My mother could fritter away half a million dollars a year without even trying,” B.D. wrote. As in My Mother’s Keeper, she didn’t mention that some of that money was spent on her and her family.

  It’s unlikely that Bette ever read Narrow Is the Way, but shortly after its publication she got word that Gary Merrill was in the midst of writing his autobiography. “Christ!” she boomed. “What more can they say about me?!”

  Larry Cohen sat amid the cheering audience in the hotel ballroom and watched Bette Davis slowly climb the stairs to the stage and accept one of the many lifetime achievement awards she received in 1988. As she spoke to the audience with a touching combination of feistiness and feebleness, Cohen felt both admiration and pity for her. All this is very nice, he thought, but I’ll bet she’d much rather somebody gave her a job. The writer/director/producer of such low-budget films as Black Caesar, It’s Alive!, and The Stuff, Cohen decided to write a film expressly for Bette. He did so several months later—during a week-long stay within a Hawaiian nudist colony.

  The result was The Wicked Stepmother, a black comedy with supernatural overtones. His story, Cohen says, was built on a basic premise: “Imagine Bette Davis moving into your house, and she won’t go away.…” Cohen submitted the script to Bette through Robert Lantz, who turned it down without showing it to her. A few months later, he resubmitted it to Bette’s new agent, Michael Black. Black passed it along, but strongly suggested to Bette that she not do it. Weeks passed, and then Cohen got a telephone call from Bette, who told him that the script had given her “a lot of laughs.” Delighted, Cohen suggested that they get together at Colonial House to discuss the project.

  When Cohen and his associate Peter Sabiston saw Bette, he remembers, “Peter was virtually in shock because she was so tiny and thin and drawn and she limped, she dragged her foot. But the spark was there, the pep was there, the humor was there.” Cohen was touched that Bette “hung on to me—if she liked you she would be affectionate and hold your hand and that sort of thing.” Afterward, Sabiston advised Cohen not to hire Bette, but Cohen thought she’d be perfect for the film. She agreed to make it for a salary of $250,000, and Cohen acquiesced to her demand that Kath Sermak be brought on board as a producer: “I figured what the hell—it will make Bette happy and Kathryn was sharp and extremely capable.”

  MGM agreed to finance the film within a modest budget even though they doubted that Bette still had any box-office appeal; according to Cohen, the studio figured they’d make their money back with a limite
d theatrical release and a quick turnaround into video stores.

  Although Cohen found Bette “very friendly and affectionate” during the preproduction phase, her habit of “stirring things up” was also very much in evidence. After she met with the film’s cinematographer, Daniel Pearl, he was ready to quit. She refused to film her wardrobe tests in Cohen’s home as planned, and told Pearl that if she didn’t like the way he captured her on film, she’d have him fired. Shaken, Pearl telephoned Cohen and said, “Larry, I can’t work with this woman. She hates me!”

  Cohen called Bette and began warily, “I understand you had a meeting with the photographer.”

  “A very nice guy,” she burbled. “I like him!”

  When it came time to choose her wardrobe, Bette asked Cohen for his input. “We did the wardrobe down at Western Costume,” he recalls, “and she had all their employees terrorized. I sat there and she came out and modeled each outfit for me. Everything was black. Finally she asked me, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Everything looks too much the same. Can’t we put a little sash with some color here, or a handkerchief there?’”

  Bette’s head flew back in fury. “Well then, let’s throw it all out and start from scratch!” she bellowed. Cohen tried to soothe her. “No, Bette, all we have to do is add a few accessories—” When she started to interrupt him, Cohen stood up. “Bette, you asked me to come down here because you wanted my opinion, right?” Bette narrowed her eyes and said, “Yes!”

  “Well, I’m giving you one!” Cohen concluded firmly, and Bette acquiesced.

  “Everyone was looking at me in horror but I learned that that’s the only way to deal with her,” Cohen explains. “She needed someone to hold their ground. She scares people too easily and then she doesn’t have any respect for them. After that we got along fine.”