Wicked Stepmother (film), 579–581
Wild Duck, The (Ibsen), 9–10, 17–20
William, Warren, 62, 63–65, 68–69, 136, 150, 152
Williams, Anson, 551
Williams, Emlyn, 357–358, 433–434, 537
Williams, Rhys, 359, 360–361, 364
Williams, Tennessee, 483–484
Willis, Mary, 455
Wilson, Janis, 312, 313, 324–325
Winchell, Walter, 374, 446
Windust, Bretaigne, 396–398, 399, 401, 402–403
Winter Meeting (film), 394–399
“Wisdom of Eve, The” (Orr), 418
Wood, Natalie, 440, 530
Wood, Sam, 319–321
Woods, Donald, 106–107, 322, 326–327
Woolley, Monty, 297, 298
Working Man, The (film), 85–87
World of Carl Sandburg, The (play), 480–481
World War II, 304, 309–311, 327, 338, 344–349, 565–566
Worth, Irene, 421
Wright, Teresa, 291–292, 294
Wyler, William
award ceremony with Davis, 543
casting decisions of, 273, 288–289
Davis’s affair with, 190–198, 258, 533
directing style with Davis, 169, 217, 253, 266, 269, 271–273, 462–463
directorial instincts of, 29, 248–249, 290–294
Wylie, I. A. R., 435
Wynn, Keenan, 435, 561
Young, Gig, 329, 334
Young, Victor, 416
Yurka, Blanche, 9, 17–21
Zanuck, Darryl, 51, 62–68, 79–80, 91, 288, 417, 421, 451, 453–454
Zeidman, Ben, 45–46
Zimbalist, Sam, 463, 464
Photo Section
Even as a baby those eyes popped (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
As a lifeguard in her teens—already taking charge (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
With sister Bobby—the two had a lifelong love-hate relationship. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Carl Laemmle, Jr.’s, “little brown wren,” 1931 (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
The drab sister comforted by Emma Dunn in Bad Sister (her first movie), 1931 (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Blond and glamorous, Warner-style, 1932 (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
George Arliss, with Davis in The Man Who Played God, 1932, accelerated her rise. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Davis fell in love with George Brent, center, in The Rich Are Always With Us, 1932, but star Ruth Chatterton, left, made him her hubby for a while. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Caught between sexy Gene Raymond and creepy Monroe Owsley in Ex Lady, 1933 (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Getting together with William Powell her one and only time in Fashions of 1934 (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Leslie Howard was afraid she’d steal his picture, Of Human Bondage, 1934. She did. (Collection of Doug McClelland)
Unprettily realistic in Of Human Bondage (that’s Reginald Denny propping her up), she made her starring mark. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
She shot off so many sparks in Dangerous, 1935 (here with Pierre Watkin), that she copped her first Oscar. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
With first husband, Harmon “Ham” Nelson, at the 1936 Oscar event Ham was humiliated by her achieving greater success than he. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
The famous ball scene in the naughty red gown in Jezebel, 1938, with a disgusted Henry Fonda and white-garbed debutantes looking on (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
She patronized the young actor she called “Little Ronnie” Reagan, here with her and Geraldine Fitzgerald in the famed Dark Victory, 1939. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Donald Crisp, Brian Aherne, Davis, and Gilbert Roland sense trouble in Juarez, 1939. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Davis put down Errol Flynn as an actor, but they did very well together in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 1939. Years later she admitted he was a better actor than she had thought. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
The sparks flew between Davis and Miriam Hopkins in the famous wedding-gown scene in The Old Maid, 1939. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Divorced from Ham, she tried a second marriage to Arthur Farnsworth in 1940, with sister Bobby in attendance. He left her a widow in 1943. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Rumors about a relationship between her and co-star Mary Astor in The Great Lie, 1941, were unfounded, or so she insisted. Here she shares a cigarette with Astor. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
James Cagney gave Davis the cactus treatment in their comedy attempt, The Bride Came COD., 1941. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Up the staircase—and up to no good—in The Little Foxes, 1941 (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
In her superhit Now, Voyager, 1942, she tells John Loder, right, that “the world is a small place, but Boston is a large one.” That’s Ilka Chase in the middle. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
The famous flashback scene from Now, Voyager with handsome Charles Drake (Collection of Lawrence J. Quirk)
Don’t be fooled by this cuddly shot on the set of Old Acquaintance, 1943. Davis and Hopkins hated each other. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Giving them Bette Davis–style hell at a bond-raising event during World War II. Her blunt but effective calls for patriotism got results. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Made up as a woman famed for her beauty in Mr. Skeffington, 1944 (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
With Jack Carson and Jane Wyman in Hollywood Canteen, 1944. Davis had an eye for the cuter servicemen, who reciprocated her interest. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
During one of her brief truces with Jack Warner in 1945 (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Only thirty-six at the time, she played a middle-aged schoolteacher who inspires a miner to literary greatness in The Corn Is Green, 1945. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Her favorite co-star Claude Rains, as a temperamental composer, stole the picture from her in Deception, 1946. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
William Grant Sherry, husband number three, and Davis with daughter B.D. at her christening, 1948. (Collection of Lawrence J. Quirk)
Robert Montgomery was better at comedy than she was in June Bride, 1948, and she hated him for it—and for his political beliefs. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Beyond the Forest, 1949, with Joe Cotten, was ridiculed on its release, but is now an admired cult film. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Marilyn Monroe was scared stiff of Davis in All About Eve, 1950, but Anne Baxter and George Sanders hold their own here. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Davis with her mother, Ruthie, at the Hollywood premiere of All About Eve (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Davis and Mr. Bette Davis number four, Gary Merrill, celebrate her forty-third birthday in 1951 in England on the set of their ill-advised flop, Another Man’s Poison. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Davis returned to Broadway in Two’s Company, 1952, but succeeded only in proving that she was no musical-comedy star. Here she attempts a Sadie Thompson takeoff. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
After two years of illness, she reprised Queen Elizabeth I in The Virgin Queen, 1955. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
She won good reviews as Maxine in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana on Broadway in 1961—but Ava Gardner played her role in the 1964 movie version. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Inappropriately cast as an apple seller, Apple Annie, in Pocketful of Miracles, 1961, here she clowns for co-star Glenn Ford on the set. (Collection of Doug McClelland)
Davis and Joan Crawford (with Jack Warner here) paired for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962—one more round in their famous feud. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Director Robert Aldrich referees the contenders during a break in the shooting of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Collection of Doug McClelland)
B. D. was already a
cting independent by 1963, here, and was then married in 1964. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Davis plays twins in the murderous melodrama Dead Ringer, 1964. She played twins eighteen years before in the romance A Stolen Life. (Collection of Doug McClelland)
Joe Cotten, Davis, director Bob Aldrich, and Crawford discuss the script of Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, 1965. Later Crawford backed out, to be replaced by Davis’s choice, Olivia De Havilland. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Davis and De Havilland square off as feuding sisters in Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. (Collection of Doug McClelland)
Christian Roberts, as her son, watches as Davis manipulates a statue of a peeing boy in The Anniversary, 1968. The picture was a dud. (Collection of Lawrence J. Quirk)
Davis and Michael Redgrave did not fare well with Connecting Rooms, 1969. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Madame Sin, 1972, was one of Davis’s more colorful roles. Robert Wagner co-starred in this TV movie. (Collection of Doug McClelland)
In the poorly received Bunny O’Hare, 1971, with Ernest Borgnine (Collection of Doug McClelland)
Davis at sixty-eight in Burnt Offerings, 1976. She had a supporting role. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Matching wits in The Scientific Cardplayer, 1972, with Silvana Mangano, Joseph Cotten, and Alberto Sordi (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
She grande-damed it with the best of them in Death on the Nile, 1978, here with Maggie Smith and Angela Lansbury in the rear. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Skyward, 1980, was one of her many television dramas. Here she is with co-star Suzy Gilstrap. (Collection of Doug Clelland)
Grandson Ashley Hyman had a rough time acting with “loony” Davis in the TV movie Family Reunion, 1981 (Collection of Doug McClelland)
She did the first segment of the hit television series Hotel, 1983, with James Brolin and Connie Sellecca, but had to withdraw because of illness. (Collection of Doug McClelland)
Davis, seventy-four in 1982, enjoyed the role of matriarch Mrs. Vanderbilt in the television movie Little Gloria, Happy at Last. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
Lillian Gish found Davis a trial to work with in The Whales of August, 1987. (Collection of Douglas Whitney)
About the Author
LAWRENCE J. QUIRK was one of the nation’s leading film authorities who wrote over twenty books on film and the media and many articles about Bette Davis over a forty-three-year period. Quirk was the editor and publisher of the film journal Quirk’s Reviews, the director of the James R. Quirk Memorial Film Symposium, and the donor of the prestigious James R. Quirk Awards to deserving film figures. He died in October 2014.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Lawrence J. Quirk
Lauren Bacall: Her Films and Career
The Complete Films of Ingrid Bergman
James Stewart: Behind the Scenes of a Wonderful Life
The Kennedys in Hollywood
Totally Uninhibited: The Life and Wild Times of Cher
Some Lovely Image (A Novel)
Norma: The Story of Norma Shearer
The Films of Gloria Swanson
Jane Wyman: The Actress and the Woman
The Complete Films of William Powell
Margaret Sullavan: Child of Fate
Claudette Colbert: An Illustrated Biography
The Films of Myrna Loy
The Films of Robert Taylor
The Films of Warren Beatty
The Films of Ronald Colman
The Films of William Holden
The Great Romantic Films
The Films of Paul Newman
The Films of Fredric March
Robert Francis Kennedy
The Films of Joan Crawford
Bette Davis: Her Films and Career
Copyright
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS. Copyright © 1990 by Lawrence J. Quirk. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1990 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2018.
Cover design by Alicia Tatone
Cover photograph © Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images
* * *
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Quirk, Lawrence J.
Fasten your seat belts: the passionate life of Bette Davis / Lawrence J. Quirk.
p.cm.
ISBN: 0-688-08427-3
1. Davis, Bette, 1908–1989. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.D32Q57 1990
791.43’028’092—dc 20
[B]
* * *
Digital Edition JUNE 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-288305-6
Version 05172018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279553-3
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