James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  The Wicked Stepmother began principal photography on April 25, 1988, at a large house in the manicured Hancock Park section of Los Angeles. Cohen made sure, despite his tight budget, that Bette was treated like Hollywood royalty. Her dressing trailer was furnished with a small kitchen, a VCR, and a microwave oven. Worried about her frailty, Cohen offered to have a bed installed as well. “I’ve never lain down between takes!” Bette exploded. “Who do you think I am?!”

  Colleen Camp, cast as Bette’s daughter-in-law, recalls a similar reaction when she asked Bette if she could get her a chair. “If I want a chair I’ll get it!” she barked.

  “At first I was taken aback and intimidated,” Camp says. “I was just trying to be nice. But then I realized this was her way of preserving her dignity, her way of saying, ‘I’m not an invalid. If I need a chair, I can get it myself.’”

  This fierce need of Bette’s to let everyone know she was independent had an unhappy result one afternoon. As she walked from her trailer to the house with Kath, she slipped and fell to the ground. Cohen, aware of her angry reactions to offers of help, was loath to embarrass her; he shooed people away and let Bette fend for herself. She refused help even from Kath and struggled for what Cohen remembers as twenty minutes to get up. Colleen Camp thinks it was more like five minutes, “but that’s a long time in a situation like that.”

  Finally, several grips stacked some wooden crates next to her and Bette used them to struggle to her feet. She limped back to her dressing room, where a nasty bruise quickly colored on her hip. Cohen went to her trailer and told her she wouldn’t have to work that afternoon, but she insisted she could. “She did work later that day,” Cohen recalls, “and she did a fine job.”

  Cohen found touching Bette’s desire to soak up every bit of the film-making ambience she loved. “She would come out long before she was needed to where the gaffer was hanging the lights and the grips were climbing ladders and stand in the middle of all this chaos. The men would walk around her and say, ‘Excuse me, Miss Davis,’ and barely miss her head with a ladder or a cable. And I’d say to her, ‘Bette, what are you doing in the middle of everything?’ And she’d say, ‘I always like to see what’s going on. I don’t like being in my dressing room.’”

  After little more than a week of filming, Bette decided she didn’t like being in The Wicked Stepmother either. She was appalled at what she saw of herself in Cohen’s “dailies” and walked out of the picture. Although Cohen had taken every care to make Bette look good, and had staged the action so that she needed to move from one place to another as little as possible, Bette was shocked at her wizened appearance. In The Whales of August, she had accepted the way she looked because she was playing a frail, embittered woman. In The Wicked Stepmother, she had tried to appear elegant and stylish, but her wardrobe did little to disguise her feebleness, and the most careful camera work couldn’t hide the deeply etched lines in her face or her twisted mouth. “I agonized over my appearance,” she admitted. “Terrible! I looked so bad that [I knew] no producer would want to hire me after the film was released.”

  Bette left for New York, ostensibly to seek her dentist’s care for a cracked denture that had impaired her ability to speak, but within a few days she called Cohen and told him, “I’ve made a dreadful mistake. I’m not coming back.” Soon thereafter, Harold Schiff and Michael Black called the director and placed the blame for Bette’s departure squarely on him. “They said Bette had complained that when she fell down, I wasn’t sympathetic enough,” Cohen recalled. “And they said, ‘She got hurt, you electrocuted her, you gave her shocks and she hurt her eye.’” The accident had occurred during a scene where Bette’s character, in the first indication that she’s a witch, places a cigarette in her mouth and it lights with no help from her. On the first take, the special effects device that provided the flame had flared up in Bette’s face, and Cohen had told her that he didn’t want to risk redoing the effect; he would add it optically later on. But she insisted on doing it twice more, both times coming close again to injury. “Schiff and Black blamed me for all this,” Cohen says, “even though Bette wouldn’t hear of doing it any other way.”

  At first, according to Cohen, Schiff and Black led him to believe that despite Bette’s unhappiness she would return to the picture when her dental work was completed. He shot around her for about a week, but then he was informed that she wasn’t coming back. Her doctor added to her litany of complaints when he told Cohen that the stress she’d been under had brought her weight down to seventy-five pounds. Curious to see what Bette’s weight had been before filming began, Cohen was amazed to learn that she had somehow evaded the full medical exam required for insurance purposes. “She had managed to bamboozle and intimidate the insurance doctor to such a degree that he hadn’t even weighed her,” Cohen marvels. “Weighing someone is the most elemental aspect of a medical exam!”

  With Bette irretrievably gone, Cohen scrambled to refashion his script so that he would be able to use the fifteen minutes of footage he had of Bette and adequately explain her absence from the rest of the picture. His solution was to have her character metamorphose into a beautiful young woman played by Barbara Carrera, but the movie was never the same. “The original script was very funny,” Colleen Camp thought. “It was disheartening for Larry to try to rewrite it. It didn’t make the sense it made originally.”

  The Wicked Stepmother did prove to be a disjointed, unfunny misfire when it was released directly to video in 1989. Some of the solutions forced on Cohen by Bette’s departure have an air of desperation about them: in one instance an obviously mechanical cat puffs on a cigarette to indicate that the wicked stepmother’s malevolent soul has taken over the family pet. Bette, present only in the film’s first half hour, clearly tried very hard to play her character with the broad strokes required of farce. But her physical limitations lend her movements and speech the eerie quality of slow motion. In spite of her comely red wig and stunning fashions, the camera is dreadfully cruel to her, revealing the sunken contours of her nearly cadaverous face; in close-up, it is sometimes painful to watch her.

  Bette was furious that the footage she had shot was used at all in the film, but there was nothing she could do about it legally. Instead, she took to the airwaves—notably on Entertainment Tonight—to denounce the movie and Larry Cohen. “I was perfectly willing to take the blame,” Cohen says. “I was really on her side. I tried to give her a job… she was basically uninsurable and couldn’t work anymore. I guess I should have expected the inevitable to happen.”

  Aware now that she would never make another film, Bette busied herself with a round of talk-show appearances. Trading quips with Johnny Carson, Joan Rivers, Larry King, and David Letterman, she reiterated long-held opinions about predictable topics like the studio system, Joan Crawford, Jack Warner, and Faye Dunaway. The only subjects she deemed off limits were her private agonies of the past few years, including B.D.’s book.

  Viewers, at first shocked by Bette’s withered exterior, were astounded by the undiminished sharpness of her mind as she rattled off her lightning-fast, irascible opinions, and her appearances were great successes. But the director Lindsay Anderson, for one, found them uncomfortable to watch. “She was popular on the chat shows because she was so bitchy,” he felt. “I always disliked that because she was encouraged to behave badly. And I’d always hear her described by that awful word, feisty.”

  Prodded by Kath Sermak, Bette was now something of a fashion maverick. For her television and other public appearances, she sported daring Patrick Kelly outfits: a black suit with oversized rainbow-colored buttons, a flashy red dress with three prominent question marks splashed across the front; wide-brimmed hats atop a fluffy blond wig. Some observers found the fashions (supplied her gratis as a way to publicize Kelly’s line) a tad ridiculous on a woman of eighty. Others, remembering her matronly look of recent years, applauded the colorful garb as a refreshing change of pace.

  “At that point,” o
ne fashion maven opined, “she couldn’t have looked natural or grandmotherly no matter what she did because of her ravaged appearance. So she went for a very theatrical, contemporary look that I’m sure helped lift her spirits and that made her look much more ‘with it.’ She was the walking personification of the old adage—If you can’t hide it, paint it red.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Y

  ou can’t listen in,” Bette roared. “You’ll have to wait in the dining room!” She was about to be interviewed by the young writer and designer Gregory Poe for City magazine, a slick, oversized fashion and arts periodical published in Paris. While she had taken an instant liking to Poe, she didn’t want his editor in on the conversation. “She banished the poor woman to the dining room for three and a half hours,” Poe recalls. “She had to sit on a chair in the corner like Dennis the Menace.”

  A longtime Davis fan, Poe soaked in the ambience of Bette’s Colonial House condominium and picked up quickly on the interaction between Bette and Kath Sermak. “Kath was as nasty to me as Bette was polite,” he felt. “I realized she really was an ‘Eve Harrington’ employee, and it was frightening. They had a very difficult relationship: Kath was overprotective, and Bette would scream at her in front of other people. But you could also see that they liked each other a great deal.”

  As Poe strolled through the apartment, he was struck by all the cigarette burns on the dining room table and the burn holes in the living room carpet. Then he sat across from Bette while she launched into a lengthy reminiscence. “She gesticulated and the cigarette she was holding flew out of her hand and ended up in the middle of the living room floor. I didn’t say a word—you can’t just interrupt her and say, ‘I’m sorry but your apartment is on fire!’

  “She wasn’t aware that anything had happened, but Kathryn just came and picked up the cigarette and gave it back to her. She said, ‘Oh, that’s where it went!’ I was amazed because she came so close to so many would-be disasters in the time I was there. At this point in her life she was a bit on the addled side. But the minute I would ask her about certain technical aspects of her films she would remember them like it was yesterday. It was a little difficult looking at her because her face was twisted a bit, but she was so there for me. She never looked away; she always looked into my eyes. I thought she was terrific. I really liked her.”

  It was harder and harder now for Bette to get around. Her bones ached, her body wouldn’t always do what she wanted it to do. A new fear gnawed at her, a terror that if she didn’t keep busy, if she didn’t have something to do or somewhere to go, that she would simply shrivel up and die. She accepted every plausible invitation that came her way for an interview or a public appearance, and she especially jumped at the chance to accept an award for her lifetime of contributions to the cinema.

  Although Kath sometimes had to browbeat her just to get her going in the morning, Bette traveled tens of thousands of miles throughout 1988 and into 1989 in order to gather honors from film and performing arts societies around the world. Within an eighteen-month period, she received the Kennedy Center Honor (presented to her by her Dark Victory coworker, the then U.S. President Ronald Reagan), the Legion of Honor from France, the Campione d’ltalia from Italy, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center Lifetime Achievement Award.

  In January 1989 Bette had to travel just fifteen minutes by car from Colonial House to attend the American Cinema Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, at which she was to be feted along with Clint Eastwood and Julio Iglesias. Resplendent in a white brocade gown and a fur pillbox hat, Bette thrilled the crowd with her entrance into the hotel’s Grand Ballroom.

  Lynn Barrington, an aspiring actress, was seated at a table near Bette’s, and she recalls the evening vividly. At first she was bedazzled by Bette—“she was so tiny and elegant looking, like a sparkly little doll.” But as the dinner progressed, Barrington was appalled by Bette’s table habits. “I’ve never seen anyone literally puff on a cigarette, take a belt of booze and eat a mouthful of food all at the same time. Puff, drink, eat. It was gross. She would take a drag on the cigarette while she was chewing!”

  After about half an hour of this, Bette slumped forward onto the table and collapsed. “It’s a good thing someone had removed the plate of food from in front of her,” Barrington says, “or she would have fallen face-first into her dinner.”

  Three hotel employees picked Bette up and carried her out of the ballroom. According to Barrington, “They carried her perfectly flat, as though she were levitating or something. Just as they passed my table, her hat and wig fell off. Without missing a beat, one of the men reached down, picked them up and plopped them back on her head. Mercifully, the lights were low and there was activity on the stage, so most of the people in the audience didn’t see any of this.”

  Shocked and saddened by this spectacle, Barrington was further amazed about forty minutes later when Bette, although clearly exhausted, returned to her table and lit up a fresh cigarette. As the long evening drew to a close, Robert Wagner helped Bette up to the stage to accept her award, and Barrington thought he looked very concerned. “He knew she had collapsed earlier and he must have been worried about her tripping or something. His concern for her was obvious to everyone.”

  Bette clutched her award and thanked one and all. Then she announced that because it was January, the audience should join her in a rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” Lynn Barrington’s boyfriend was the conductor of the band, and she could tell from his expression that this hadn’t been planned. “After a shaky start, the band started to play and everyone sang. When it was over, Bette announced that we should sing it again! At the end of the second go-round, my boyfriend made a loud fanfare to discourage another chorus.”

  Rather than return to her table at this point, Bette began to express her thanks again for the award. “She started to ramble,” Barrington recalls, “and Robert Wagner walked over to her and called out to the audience, ‘Bette Davis!’ to encourage applause and move her along. But in the middle of the ovation Bette shouted that she wasn’t through! She continued to ramble on for another five minutes until Clint Eastwood joined Wagner on stage and they practically dragged her off as the audience applauded.”

  Barrington thought Bette’s fans found the whole episode amusing and were delighted just to see her. But others, she said, “felt embarrassed for her and found her both pathetic and obnoxious.”

  In April, although she felt weak, Bette flew to New York to receive the Film Society Award at Lincoln Center. After tributes from James Stewart, Ann-Margret, and others, the audience was treated to a lengthy screening of clips from the most memorable Davis films. The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote of the event, “When she walked onto the stage of the Avery Fisher Hall, she no longer looked like the woman we’d seen in the clips.… The indestructibility of thought and talent which we had been watching on the screen, and which seemed always to be reflected in those distinctive, familiar features, was not recognizable. Instead the ravages of [her] cancer were apparent, as were the rather pathetic and grotesque attempts to ignore them. Then the stranger took the microphone and said the magic words, ‘What a dump!’ Buried deep inside the alien presence, the woman lived. She brought the house down.”

  But it was tougher and tougher now for Bette to call up these fleeting moments of magic. She often felt tired unto death; sometimes, at home, she would fall asleep in the middle of a phrase. Kath became concerned, and urged her to see her doctor. She did, in the summer of 1989, and once again there was bad news: her cancer had recurred. She began secret radiation treatments at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center a few miles from her home, and while the news didn’t get out, the national tabloids took note of her increasingly skeletal appearance and suggested she was purposefully starving herself to death.

  It was true that she rarely ate, but hardly by choice. The last time Doug Troland saw her was at Colonial House with Kathryn. “She was clearly very sick at this point and incredibly thi
n. She mentioned that she would give anything to get her appetite back and gain some weight.” Troland had gone through a minor depression for which he had been prescribed the popular antidepressant drug Prozac, which he found increased his appetite. When he told Bette, “she got all excited and looked into the drug herself. It turned out that there was some reason why she couldn’t take it, but I was struck by the fact that she was convinced that all she needed to do to regain her strength was get her appetite back. I don’t believe she knew she was going to die. I think she figured she’d be out there fighting a lot longer.”

  Bette’s deterioration was evident on television and in magazine photographs, and during 1989 B.D. attempted to contact her by phone several times when the Hymans visited California. Bette wouldn’t take her calls. “Mother knew I was on the phone, because I could hear her voice in the background, but I never even got past Kathryn.” Kath, B.D. thought, had completely supplanted her in the role of daughter. “Kathryn became what I was supposed to be. Mother found a willing victim.… She became an extension of Mother. She dressed like Mother. She talked like Mother.… She just became totally drawn in, totally as it were possessed by the presence of my mother, and became what I was supposed to be. And Mother indeed did call Kathryn her daughter at the end.”

  Bette was in constant pain now, frequently nauseated from the radiation, and losing her already thin hair in clumps. Despite it all, when she received an invitation to be honored at the annual film festival in San Sebastián, Spain, she astonished Kath by saying she wanted to go. Her doctors expressed strong reservations about her ability to make the eight-thousand-mile trip, but they didn’t forbid her to do so.