In 1980, age seventy-two, Davis was telling the press that she was returning to live in Hollywood permanently. She spoke a lot about the elaborate pink mausoleum she had erected at Forest Lawn Cemetery, emphasizing that it was so situated so that it looked down directly on her old stamping grounds, the Warner lot in Burbank. She buried Ruthie there in 1961, and now her sister Bobby, dead from cancer, was duly installed in the monument. She told Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes that it comforted her to think about the crypt reserved for her beside Ruthie and Bobby, and that one of her reasons for “staying put” in Los Angeles was to be near it, thus saving people the trouble of making “that long trip across the country with me.”
To reporters who interviewed her that year, she seemed to show as practical and realistic an attitude toward death as she always had toward life, saying it had become a familiar phenomenon, with so many relatives and friends dead, and that one had to make ready for it sensibly. “But one doesn’t have to sit around waiting for it, either,” she added, “I intend to go right on working. Work is my morale source. And work keeps me from thinking too much.”
As of that year, Davis seemed realistic regarding her family. Though she claimed that she had never tried to interfere with B.D.’s affairs, she seemed wistful because their paths had diverged and said often that she loved B.D. more than anyone in the world. Her attitude toward Michael and Charlene, ensconced in the Boston area, was equally resigned. She had long since accepted the fact that he felt closer to Gary than to her, and Gary’s proximity in Maine, his political activities, his continuing work as an actor and as a voice-over for commercials kept him busy and happy and ready and able to visit the Michael Merrills whenever the spirit moved him.
As Gary revealed later, he had been supporting Margot at her school for a number of years. Davis tried to put her in a series of what can only be called “boarding homes” in order to cut down on expenses as her income became more uncertain. When he heard of it, Gary tracked Margot down and put her back in the school where she had been most happy and where she had felt most secure. By 1980 Margot was almost thirty, and Gary recalled that when he had told Davis he was taking her back to her old school, she yelled, “Okay, then you pay for her!”
At seventy-two Davis could hardly be called a model of balance and mellowness. There was still much she was bitter about. Michael and Charlene dutifully visited with her, but she sensed their quiet determination to live lives of their own. B.D. and Jeremy, with their two boys Ashley and Justin, had also drifted apart from her, though, as she noted, whenever they needed financial help they didn’t hesitate to ask. She realized that she and Jeremy would never get along, and she had also come to accept that B.D. had a successful marriage, had no beefs with her husband, enjoyed motherhood and domesticity, and showed no hint of her mother’s restlessness and unease with the male sex.
In her book, My Mother’s Keeper (1985), B.D. later recalled her mother’s mischievous attempts to set her up for adulterous involvements when she visited her and her impatience with Jeremy’s “English macho” attitude toward his wife and family, which, B.D. declared, suited her just fine. But B.D. finally lost patience when Davis tried to insinuate—without a shred of evidence—that Jeremy was cheating on her. B.D. wasn’t buying the “men are shits” line—then or ever.
Davis doubtless thought she was being revolutionary when she did White Mama in 1980. In this CBS-TV movie, Davis co-stars with a young black actor, Ernest Harden, Jr., in a story about a down-and-out widow who is too proud for welfare and too young for social security, and who tries to augment her income by taking in a vagrant black youth in order to get a state stipend for his room and board.
Of course the two start off disliking each other intensely, and “White Mama” is the derisive epithet he throws at her. She wants him to get an education and make something of himself. He wants to win purses in boxing matches so he can take off and get away from her. Harden gets stabbed in a street fight and disappears, and Davis, penniless, becomes a bag lady wandering the streets of New York. Then they get back together, and Harden fights a match to win enough money to pay Davis’s rent for a year, after which he goes in the army.
Some of Davis’s friends felt she was trying to make up for having let down Dorian Harewood, the promising young black actor-singer, when she defected from the aborted Miss Moffat six years before by giving Ernest Harden, Jr., the benefit of her experience. But it didn’t work out that way, and young Harden found that White Mama was not the breakthrough he had hoped for.
Part of the problem lay in the impersonal, icy script, which threw together a series of events without offering any enlightening insights into the strange juxtaposition of aged white widow and rebellious black youth.
The critic at TV Guide sensed the underlying trouble with the movie and noted that Davis “doesn’t sentimentalize the role, but, in going so far to the opposite, hard-bitten extreme, she closes out sympathy.”
In the less sophisticated 1930s, a woman as masculinely aggressive, feisty, and “ballsy” as Davis was bound to excite gossip along certain lines. Rumors about her alleged lesbianism were rife from the beginning of her career. As early as 1932, she was extravagant in her praise of Katharine Hepburn, who had just made a sensational debut in A Bill of Divorcement with John Barrymore. She often commented on Hepburn’s high-cheeked “beauty” and expressed much curiosity about the actress’s myriad friendships with women such as Laura Harding. Of course, Hepburn, too, was the subject of rumors, as she had deserted her first and only husband, socialite Ludlow Ogden Smith. She contented herself with her family and a series of women friends. Even her famous liaison with Spencer Tracy smacked of the intimacy of two male buddies rather than lovers. Circa 1936 Davis had been most anxious to get the role of Queen Elizabeth in Hepburn’s Mary of Scotland, but director John Ford laughed her off, and Jack Warner refused to lend her to RKO, because he felt the role, a one-scener, was too small for her.
Davis was, it is true, more likely the object of lesbian addresses than the instigator, as in the cases of Miriam Hopkins and Joan Crawford, both of whom she spurned, but rumors about her and Mary Astor, dating from their appearance together in 1941’s The Great Lie, continued to proliferate. Decades later, while primping together in a powder room, Liz Taylor asked Davis about Astor and Davis vigorously denied any involvement, insisting she liked men.
Then there were Davis’s friendships with such younger women as Jane Bryan and Betty Lynn, with whom she had appeared in films, and with whom she remained permanently friendly. She seemed to have been more a sister or motherly figure to them, but still the rumors continued.
As late as 1979, when Davis was seventy-one, there were unfounded rumors about her and twenty-two-year-old Kathryn Sermak, a beautiful young woman, and by all accounts heterosexual, whom she hired as a secretary-companion for her trip to England during Watcher in the Woods. Sermak remained with Davis for ten years. Patient, understanding, and, according to Davis, devoted as B.D. had not been, her presence and her supportiveness seemed literally to have prolonged Davis’s life.
Davis’s second Disney film, Watcher in the Woods, was a confused affair, a blend of gothic horror and science fiction, that wound up with three endings—one original, the other two reworkings, and none of them offering a clear resolution to the mystery.
The story is murky horror nonsense about an American composer and his wife who come to England and rent an old estate whose owner, the reclusive, eccentric Mrs. Aylwood (Davis), lives in the caretaker’s cottage. The couple’s two children, a seventeen-year-old girl and her ten-year-old sister, promptly become aware that something is wrong. Strange things begin occurring—a ghostly image of a blindfolded girl in a mirror, a light in the lake nearby, the older daughter’s awareness that someone or something is continually watching her from the woods. The younger girl gets a puppy with the strange name Nerak—Karen spelled backwards. Karen was Mrs. Aylwood’s daughter, who disappeared in a flash of lightning thirty years before.
Davis gathers her daughter’s grown playmates together to reenact the secret society initiation in which her daughter vanished, which results in the three aforementioned endings, one abrupt, the second featuring a strange, shapeless creature, and the third a jumble of science-fiction special effects.
I was at the first preview of the picture in early 1980. I wrote: “Among other inanities, the final reel was not finished in time so the film ended with unseemly abruptness for preview audiences and critics—what kind of undisciplined, self-indulgent production sloppiness is this?”
Disney then sent out press releases to the effect that new endings and special effects were being tried. The picture was released with another ending late in 1980, and yet another in 1981. Audiences and critics proved equally indifferent to all three dénouements.
During 1980 and 1981, Davis gave out interviews casting her own bolts of lightning on the production, the camerawork, the writing, and her dialogue—all of which she branded as execrable. The director, John Hough, the screenwriters, Brian Clemens, Harry Spalding, and Rosemary Anne Sisson, were all excoriated, as was Technicolor photographer Alan Hume and composer Stanley Myers. Carroll Baker, David McCallum, and their onscreen girls, Lynn-Holly Johnson and Kyle Richards, the unfortunate actors involved, were somehow spared.
But Davis failed to realize that her own performance left much to be desired. I wrote in my review:
“I am second to none in my admiration for Miss Davis. But the Bette Davis of 1980 is not the Bette Davis of 1940, and it isn’t age that has done it. Her work in recent years has been oddly off-kilter. Her latter-day directors have been afraid of her and she has been given too loose a rein, with the result that she has over-played, over-attitudinized and postured outlandishly. There is also something oddly unpleasant, stiff and withdrawn about her personality onscreen in recent years; it shows up in TV work of hers like Strangers and White Mama, too. Unlike Helen Hayes, who has matured benignly, Davis seems to look out at the world through baleful blue spectacles, at least in her performances.”
I went on to make the point that if Davis would just relax before the camera and allow the humane, sensitive, and aware personality that graced so many of her films of the thirties and forties to shine through, she could flower in her old age, as grand old troupers like May Robson, Jessie Ralph, Alma Kruger, and others such as Helen Hayes and Lillian Gish have done. And I expressed my puzzlement that this onetime aspect of her wasn’t waxing far stronger now that she was older; in fact it seemed somehow dimmed. I closed with the observation that her audiences needed the benefit of her mature insights and the accumulated wisdom of her seven decades, yet she wasn’t giving them to viewers, and I wanted to know why.
After passing over Carroll Baker and David McCallum perfunctorily, Rex Reed, in his New York Daily News notice, continued with, “And that leaves Bette Davis, looking like Beulah Bondi with a hangover, one eye on the camera and the other eye on her paycheck.”
Another Daily News writer, Kathleen Carroll, seemed equally baffled by Davis, and after noting that she played with “her usual flourish,” went on to say that Davis was “delivering each of her lines with such biting force she tends to resemble an angry duchess who’s been forced to mingle with the servants.”
Carroll also observed, “[It is] a somewhat tantalizing, but ultimately ridiculous suspense movie; [it] not only completely ignores the fate of the little girl who appears in the opening sequence, it offers only a garbled explanation as to just who this creature is who likes to spy on young girls, particularly blonde teenagers.”
Wherever Davis went during 1980 and 1981 she was forced to explain why she had bothered to appear in Watcher in the Woods. She gave many reasons: She was short of money; she thought the script was intriguing, at least on paper; she felt that with Technicolor and other production furbelows the picture might at least turn out to be “photographically handsome.” And when reasonably tactful observations were offered concerning her overacting she gave out with her usual rationalization that she had to “play the damned thing larger than life to keep what audience there was from leaving the theater!”
But even she eventually conceded that the picture had been “unfortunate.”
In 1981 Davis’s private and professional lives intersected briefly, when her eleven-year-old grandson, J. Ashley Hyman, made his first and only appearance with his grandmother in Family Reunion. NBC-TV telecast this four-hour drama over two nights in April 1981. At first it seemed a cute idea to put Ashley in his grandmother’s telemovie—think of the press attention it would attract. But Bette and Ashley did not hit it off, and B.D. later said she thought his grandmother’s handling of him was “old-fashioned,” “cold,” and “strict.” While Ashley had some fun with his role, he told his parents upon his return, “Never again!” and declared his grandmother “real looney tunes” with her erratic, unpredictable behavior and sudden changes of mood. He was also disconcerted by her quarrels with fellow actors, and the prima donna attitudes he had never before encountered firsthand.
In this movie Davis is a retired schoolteacher who has never married and is something of an institution in her new England town. The usual villainous conglomerate wants to tear up sections of Winfield, as the town is named, to build a shopping mall. Davis gets an unlimited-fare bus ticket and goes around the country rallying members of the Winfield clan (her family founded the town) to show some family spirit and return en masse to defeat the forces of crass commerce. All ends well, of course.
Variety labeled it “not a family portrait. It’s a cattle call” (whatever that meant). Other critics noted Davis’s usual stiff posturings and cold demeanor, and young Ashley was patted on the back as “pleasing” and “self-assured.” Family Reunion was one of those projects that Davis had been promised might develop as a weekly series, but, as in other cases, nothing came of it.
The whole experience dampened J. Ashley Hyman’s acting ambitions permanently.
The year 1982 brought Bette Davis’s finest performance of the 1980s, a television movie called A Piano for Mrs. Cimino. As Esther Cimino, a music teacher who has reached retirement age, Davis finds that her mental faculties are slipping somewhat. The picture is a trenchant, realistic study of the ravages and displacements, socially, physically, and mentally, that are visited upon a once-proud, sensitive, and still highly intelligent woman who is declared mentally incompetent by her children. She is subjected to a hearing, where her blurred responses prompt the judge to put her in a nursing home, and she begins to deteriorate. However, a granddaughter who loves her rouses her back to life and helps her learn how to live again. Not that she needs all that much rousing, for this is a proud, spunky, resilient woman who gradually wins back her life, her self-respect, and control over her circumstances. Keenan Wynn (who was sixty-six to Davis’s seventy-four when he made Cimino but managed, through his own considerable art, to suggest a much older man) is affecting as the musician who meets her in the nursing home, and with whom she begins a galvanizing semi–love affair.
The part met the woman here. Davis put into A Piano for Mrs. Cimino all her own valor in the face of advancing age and physical attrition. She is in perfect control here, seems to feel the part, to actually live it.
The New York Times said of her in this: “Miss Davis plays Mrs. Cimino with reserve, intelligence, and suitable irascibility, and her initial senility is convincing, too.”
Keenan Wynn later told me: “The pluck of that woman! I could see that her health was not the best but she never complained, was always cheering us on!”
Circa 1982, the television movies were coming thick and fast for Davis. In Little Gloria, Happy At Last, an NBC-TV two-part movie that aired in October 1982, Davis starred as Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, Gloria Vanderbilt’s formidable grandmother. The story, based on Barbara Goldsmith’s best-seller, deals with Gloria’s difficult coming-of-age when, at eleven, she was a pawn in a custody battle between her sybaritic mother and her aunt, played by Angela Lansbury. Maureen Sta
pleton, Christopher Plummer, and Glynis Johns also graced this fine cast.
Davis won a Supporting Actress Emmy nomination for this stint, even though her strong role was brief and her character died before the first of the two parts ended. She does her standard bit as the frosty, haughty, domineering matriarch of the Vanderbilt clan, putting across some strong, biting confrontational scenes. She looks majestic and every bit her seventy-four years here, with lined, haggard face, large veiled and sequined hats, beaded, laced dresses, and choker and pearls.
Reviews cross-country were uniform, calling her “strong,” “forceful,” “formidable,” “keeps you thinking about her straight through Part II, even though her character has died,” and so on. Variety’s critic questioned the taste of the entire enterprise with, “Getting a look at all those pearls, fishknives and furs, and watching Bette Davis get a shot at being imperious again probably makes the venture amusing, but the telefilm, with its awkward exposition and sensationalism . . . pokes around in lots of areas that seem better left undusted.”
Angela Lansbury, a tolerant and relaxed woman in private life, spoke well of Bette, with whom she had a number of scenes. “She knows what she wants to do,” she said, “and she wants a professional atmosphere. I had no problems with her, and I parted from her at the end of shooting with a great respect for her discipline and willingness to work.”
The years 1981 through 1983 were for Davis a pleasant mélange of honors for her acting, some TV work, and lively social events. Settled permanently in Hollywood in a pleasant apartment filled with mementos of her past, Davis was no recluse and went out often to dinners, screenings, and parties, accompanied by good friends like Roddy McDowall, whom she described as “a kind compassionate man who always makes me laugh and still shows his national origin, being an English gentleman through and through.”
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 49