Bette Davis and Lillian Gish made a strange pair indeed when they co-starred in The Whales of August, her first theatrical film in seven years. It was shot for eight weeks on location in Maine in the fall of 1986 and was released a full year later. At the time they made it Lillian Gish was ninety and Davis was seventy-eight, yet Gish played the younger sister. She looked younger, too, as Davis’s assorted illnesses and the considerable weight loss she had sustained left her looking ravaged.
Playing with them were Vincent Price, Ann Sothern, Harry Carey, Jr., and Mary Steenburgen, with Tisha Sterling playing her mother, Ann Sothern, as a girl.
In his October 16, 1987, review, the New York Times critic called The Whales of August “a cinema event, though small in scale and commonplace in detail,” adding, “It’s as moving for all the history it recalls as for anything that happens on the screen.” Earlier he had said of the Gish-Davis combine that they “together exemplify American films from 1914 to the present.” Gish, who had spanned the silent and sound eras, becoming a star in Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, went on to starring roles in the 1920s that made her, for a time, the screen’s most prestigious star. Her later career in sound films brought her added fame as a character actress and won her, in 1970, a special Oscar.
In Whales, Davis and Gish are two elderly sisters who have vacationed in Maine for decades. Davis is crabby, withdrawn—and blind. Gish is sunny, outgoing, and solicitous. They interact with their own brands of sarcasm and putdown, though Davis’s is the sharper and meaner. “Busy-busy-busy,” she crabs at Gish, whose forbearance and humorous flexibility approach the saintly as she applies herself night and day to making her disabled but unappreciative sister comfortable. Price is on hand as a Russian émigré of aristocratic pretensions who is put down in short order by Davis. Ann Sothern is a friend and neighbor, sunny and ebullient, and Harry Carey, Jr., is present as a perennial handyman. There are flashbacks to their youth—old loves and old regrets are paraded—and Gish’s memories are more enriching and consoling to her because she is a widow of philosophical bent. Her life is serene while Davis’s is dark and withdrawn. Most of the action is centered on the installation of a window that will give a picture-frame view of the bay: Gish wants it; Davis doesn’t. She prefers their closed-in life just as it is. So slight is the story line, that the dénouement involves Davis’s assent to the installation of the window.
This lack of action makes the film a strangely uninvolving, tepid affair. Most of the critical huzzahs seemed to come as kudos to the film history the two stars represent and the legendary quality of their famous faces. The picture itself, its story, its direction, its photography were shunted into secondary coverage—where, frankly, it belonged.
Lindsay Anderson directed, from a David Berry screenplay based on his play.
Most of the publicity (the picture being so forgettable) centered around how Davis and Gish got along—and the reports were not good. Davis started the ball rolling by demanding first billing, which Gish agreed to without demur. Then, as one writer put it, “Bette flew into Maine on a four-jet broomstick.” The setting might have been Casco Bay but the atmosphere became Witchway-dour. Davis was distant and cold with Gish from first to last. Often she wouldn’t even look at her and played out their scenes as if in a vacuum.
Hurt at first, Gish resorted to sympathy and concern that to an enraged Davis emerged as lofty condescension. Gish’s references to Davis did not help, either: “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.”
Irritated with the “bear and forbear” sweetness-and-light attitude Gish had adopted, Davis waited to get in her innings. When someone commented how wonderful Gish had been in a close-up, she snapped, “She ought to know about close-ups. Jesus, she was around when they invented them! The bitch has been around forever, you know!”
Even Gish had her breaking point, and soon she was jabbing back, only her technique was stiletto to Davis’s meat-cleaver. “I just can’t hear her,” she commented helplessly to director Anderson, forcing Davis to speak louder. But onscreen their contrasting personalities somehow registered to good effect. One writer waxed flowery about the Davis-Gish juxtaposition: “Bette crawls across the screen like a testy old hornet on a windowpane, snarling, staggering, twitching—a symphony of misfiring synapses. Lillian’s performance is as clear and simple as a drop of water filled with sunlight.”
Of the two performances, Gish’s is the better. She is open, honest, clear in her technique; she gets across much compassion, humanity—and resignation—in her performance. And in one scene in which she is recalling her lost husband, she offers a deeply moving rendition of aged loneliness evoking happier days.
Director Lindsay Anderson found Davis a trial to direct and didn’t mind telling the world. He recalled testily that when he tried to help her portrayal by suggesting she read a line differently or employ a more emphatic gesture, she would snap, “That’s nonsense!” Lindsay later opined: “I think [Davis] sees the world as the enemy, and you have to go through a process with her.” He ascribed her intractable prickliness “part to temperament and part to the experience of having to fight all those years in Hollywood.”
When I interviewed him concerning the film in the fall of 1987, Anderson did a variation of what Irving Rapper had said years before. Rapper had snapped “Tough!” when I asked him what it was like to direct Bette Davis. Thirty years later, Anderson said crisply, “Difficult. Very difficult.”
Davis showed her disdain for Gish in other ways. When a preview of the film was held in New York on Gish’s ninety-first birthday, Davis was absent. “Let her hog the attention!” she told a reporter in Los Angeles, three thousand miles from what she called “the Gish event.” Both ladies were deeply disappointed at not getting Academy Award nominations. To their great surprise, a supporting nomination for the film went to Ann Sothern, whose role, while hearty and humorous and vital, was rather peripheral to the main action. Later, with a cattiness that for once had more subtle overtones, Davis said she thought Sothern had gotten the nomination because people in Hollywood felt sorry for her because she had been crippled by a bad fall.
Davis did not think well of Whales of August. She thought the title (which refers to the disappearance of the whales from the Maine coast) “awkward and obscure” and said the story as written was not strong enough to allow her a meaningful characterization.
Many feel that if, in the years 1986 through 1989, Bette Davis had spent just one tenth as much time on acting as she did on peregrinating between Europe, New York, and Hollywood, partying, accepting awards, and giving endless interviews to the press on anything and everything, she might have given at least four image-enhancing performances that would have made her a candidate for good parts.
After B. D. Hyman’s My Mother’s Keeper emerged in 1985, with a frank recounting by B.D. of her mother’s darker side, Davis turned into a whirling dervish of largely profitless activity, backed up and supported as always by her faithful sidekick Kathryn Sermak, and cheered on by her contingent of loyal friends and admirers, including Robert Wagner, Roddy McDowall, and columnist Robert Osborne of The Hollywood Reporter, a helpful and compassionate man, who kept her comings and goings continually before his readership.
In 1987 Davis was out with her book, This ’n That, a second autobiography of a sort following upon the 1962 The Lonely Life. Disjointed and superficial, the book conceals more than it reveals about her recent life, but she did respond to B.D.’s criticism, commenting on her generosity to her and her husband in tough times and calling B.D. a great purveyor of fiction.
Gary Merrill joined the Bette-book sweepstakes in 1988, and while castigating B.D. for her attacks on her mother, proceeded to make some of his own, reminding the world that he had paid for Margot’s schooling since 1965 and commenting that Davis kept her distance from her and from her grandchildren by Michael and Charl
ene Merrill. One gossip columnist called Gary’s book Wifey Dearest.
A cute commercial for Equal sweetener, a dietary sugar substitute, was made by Davis in November 1988, and aired in the first months of 1989. Lip-synching the distinctive Davis voice is a little girl of no more than ten, done up in a Margo Channing hairdo and gown and lipsticked and rouged à la the original. She is sitting in imperious command at a restaurant table and orders a waiter to bring her “the finest chianti.” When he asks for her driver’s license she tells him to bring her iced tea instead. When he asks how she likes it, she tells him, in true grandedame style, “I’m letting it breathe!”
During 1988 and 1989, Wicked Stepmother, known as “The Bette Davis Picture That Wasn’t,” created a great deal of fuss and feathers. References to it appeared in columns and magazine and newspaper articles at the rate of one every other day.
Davis started shooting it in May 1988, then quit after one week to go to New York for dental surgery. After that, she took off for Europe, sending word that her health would not permit her to resume for a while. She said that after the surgery she had sustained severe weight loss—from eighty-eight to seventy-five pounds. Soon Davis declared that she had decided to withdraw altogether from the film because director Larry Cohen was concentrating too much on the camera effects and not enough on her. She also said he made her look “terrible.” “People will be horrified at the footage on me,” she declared. “For the good of my future in films I had no choice but to withdraw.”
Blind to the fact that even before the weight loss she had looked like a skeletal gargoyle (“Of Human Bondage’s Mildred: Age 80,” as one commentator put it unkindly but accurately), she blamed Cohen and his photographer, saying, “I’m not a vain person [really] but at eighty years old I don’t want to look the way I looked. It seriously could be the end of anybody ever hiring me again!”
Larry Cohen proved to be a patient man, his patience doubtless sweetened by the waves of publicity the project was receiving thanks to Davis’s loud complaining.
After it became apparent that Davis would not under any circumstances be persuaded to fulfill her commitment for an additional two weeks of filming, Larry Cohen rewrote the script, utilizing the roughly twenty minutes of film Davis had shot to accord her a “cameo” role as a wicked witch who marries herself into a family of innocents and proceeds to wreak all kinds of mayhem. In the earlier version she metamorphosed a household cat into ravishing Barbara Carrera. Davis’s loss turned out to be Carrera’s gain, for in the updated script Davis becomes Carrera, who then goes on playing her part throughout.
Cohen’s publicity cake was further sweetened when he revealed that the insurance company had paid him a handsome million dollars to compensate him for Davis’s precipitate exit. Many in New York and Hollywood felt that Davis made a serious mistake in walking out. “She should have finished the film no matter how much she disliked her role or the way she was handled. Then she could have bitched about it to high heaven afterward without getting herself labeled a quitter,” one commentator noted.
Davis complained that Cohen had ignored her suggestions on how she should play her role and said that when she saw the rushes she was horrified by her performance and her appearance. Columnists had a field day for months with the Cohen-Davis feud, with Cohen underplaying beautifully, calling her a wonderful woman and a fighter whom he greatly respected. He claimed that he had written the role especially for Davis, and that if she had seen the completed picture with her role amplified as he had planned, she would have been more sanguine about it. Cohen also got the last word: “Many people give Bette Davis dinners and awards but very few give her jobs. I gave her a job!” The film finally made videocassettes in November 1989.
25
The Lioness in Winter
AS OF 1989 Davis was a frequent print subject. Her appearance continued to arouse much concern, as her face looked ghoulishly skeletal under the garish makeup and flashy blond wig. The awards kept coming in—a Kennedy Center tribute in late 1987 which she felt had been withheld for years because of her liberal Democratic convictions. (Whenever they had sent her a questionnaire asking for her recommendation of a winner, she had always written in: “Me!”) In between bouts with Larry Cohen over Wicked Stepmother, she managed, in summer 1988, to wing off to the Villa d’Este in northern Italy, where she picked up yet another award for her artistic achievements at Campione Casino, near Lake Como. In April 1989 she was at last honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center with a lavish tribute followed by a VIP party at Tavern on the Green. Earlier in 1989 she was honored, with Clint Eastwood and Julio Iglesias, at the American Cinema Awards in Hollywood, which benefited the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital. At this last function, she alarmed her friends and fans by fainting briefly. Liz Smith revealed that after all these decades she had finally added longtime friend Olivia De Havilland to her crowded enemies list because, Davis claimed, Olivia had “upstaged” her when she got a French government tribute in 1987.
A more ominous note was struck when a tabloid detailed her afflictions: a hip that had failed to heal properly and that kept her in constant pain; a sapping of her strength that had her wondering if she could ever work again; her disappointment over getting no solid job offers; her dashed hopes of playing the cosmetician Helena Rubinstein, a role she insisted she was “born” to create.
Davis’s estrangement from her family (completely on the outs with B.D.; cordial but distant with Michael in far-off Boston) continued apace. Margot was essentially out of thought and out of mind by then, Gary’s responsibility, with $15,000 per year paid by him to Lochland School for her care. Her apartment with its mementos and New England furnishings was still a West Hollywood rallying place for friends and fans—to a point—but as one friend reported, “She’s not even tending to her patio garden anymore, something that used to give her so much pleasure . . . she’s gotten to the point where she’s almost unreachable. She doesn’t want anyone in her life.”
And then the friend added, “It’s like she’s holed up in her house just waiting to die.”
Unmentioned in the public prints was the cancer that was steadily eating away at her.
She remained close to daughterly and faithful Kathryn Sermak, but realized that at thirty-three Kathryn had a life of her own. And so she kept the reins loose. She had learned, the hard way, the truth of Mrs. Aphra Behn’s famous lines: “I hold my love but lightly, for things with wings held tightly, want to fly.”
Those who watched and waited felt that Bette Davis’s thoughts were often on the beautiful spot in Forest Lawn where Ruthie and Bobby lay. Two of the four husbands (Ham Nelson and Arthur Farnsworth) who had brought her so much grief had preceded her into the Beyond.
The handsome young men whose love she sought even into her sixties were now but dim memories. Though hurt by them, she continued to maintain, right to the end, that it was better to lead with one’s heart and get wounded, than to close up and withdraw, for when one did that, one was no longer alive.
She still had fans, but their adoration, their persistence, their obsession with her and her legend had taken on the quality of a tale told once too often. The friends were there to the end, but they could not truly penetrate her ever-deepening solitude, that profound aloneness that she had predicted for herself decades before as her final chapter.
But there was to be one final hurrah. In September 1989 she left Hollywood for the 37th San Sebastian International Film Festival, where she was to receive an award. Later her attorney, Harold Schiff, told the world that the breast cancer she had been weathering since her 1983 mastectomy had recurred, was metastasizing, and was terminal. “The doctors said,” he added, “let her go on going about her business.”
Davis’s good friend Robert Osborne, the Hollywood Reporter columnist, went along with her desire to put up a brave front for press and public. In his September 1 column he quoted her as saying, “I hope this will prove to the world I’m not dying. The only thing
that’s making me sick are all those awful reports and rumors about how ill I’m supposed to be. Where do they start? And how do you get them to stop?”
V. A. Musetto, the New York Post film critic, was in San Sebastian on September 22 and described her thus: “She was a tiny, pencil-thin old woman who had trouble walking unassisted. But she still had the unmistakable look of a Hollywood queen. Bedecked in a sequined purple gown, she emerged from her car in front of the Victoria Eugenia Theater. In the background could be heard the sounds of police firing tear gas at protesters, who in turn were lobbing bottles and rocks at the cops. But the residents of San Sebastian paid little attention to the street fighting, which these days is a common occurrence in the hotbed of the Basque separatist movement.
“Besides,” Musetto added, “Their minds were really on that fragile 81-year-old woman.”
“Bette! Bette!” The Spaniards’ shouting was—it was obvious to all present—music to her ears. Inside the theater, puffing away furiously on her cigarette, she spread out her arms and shouted back over and over again, despite the effort it evidently cost her, “Muchas gracias! Muchas gracias!”
The next night, when she presented a festival award to Andrei Konchalovsky for his film Homer and Eddie, the director made a gesture that delighted the audience. He went down on his knees before her to accept. Onlookers recalled later that this spontaneous token of his esteem seemed to touch her deeply.
At another point she held a press conference, at which “more than 400 of the world’s journalists gave her a standing ovation,” according to Musetto. She told the assembled reporters that she loved her work, wanted always, always to act. Her favorite roles were those in Dark Victory, Jezebel, Now, Voyager, All About Eve, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She didn’t think Ronald Reagan much of an actor but felt he had been “very good” as president and “made us all very patriotic.” Of her Right of Way co-star Jimmy Stewart she said, “If I had met him way, way back, he would never have escaped me, but it’s too late now.” Relatively gentle with Joan Crawford, she called another co-star, Miriam Hopkins, “a bitch. Impossible to work with.” She hated colorization of her old films, called it “heartbreaking.” And she thought Hollywood’s current movies “very sad.”
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 51