by Ed Sikov
Addison DeWitt’s eyes are shining. As a gay man (albeit of the Hollywood-enforced closeted type), he’s riveted by Margo and everything she stands for. “You’re maudlin and full of self-pity!” he cries with golden admiration. “You’re magnificent!”
Davis always said she understood Margo Channing, but she cited the wrong reasons. “Though we were totally unalike,” she wrote in The Lonely Life in a failed attempt to deflect the obvious parallels, “there were also areas we shared.” She brings up the scene with Karen Richards in the front seat of the Richardses’ out-of-gas car in which “Margo confesses that the whole business of fame and fortune isn’t worth a thing without a man to come home to. . . . And here I was again—no man to go home to. The unholy mess of my own life—another divorce, my permanent need for love, my aloneness. Hunched down in the front of that car in that luxurious mink, I had hard work to remember I was playing a part. My parallel bankruptcy kept blocking me, and keeping the tears back was not an easy job.”39
But she got it wrong, her continual assertions of the emptiness of single womanhood serving as a cover for other less culturally acceptable deficiencies. For one thing, she was scarcely alone at the time she filmed that scene, immersed as she was in a torrid affair with her costar. It’s the other half of the scene that registers as clinically autobiographical on Davis’s part:
“So many people,” Margo begins. “Know me,” she adds, with Davis concluding the sentence peculiarly after a full stop. “I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me.”
“You’re Margo—just Margo,” Karen, Mrs. Lloyd Richards, graciously offers.
“What is that? Besides something spelled out in lightbulbs, I mean. And something called a ‘temperament.’ That consists mostly of swooping about on a broomstick and screaming at the top of my voice. Infants behave the way I do, you know. They carry on and misbehave. They’d get drunk if they knew how. When they can’t have what they want. When they feel unwanted. Or insecure. Or unloved.”
Flashes of unwantedness and insecurity and a craving for love plagued Bette Davis her entire life and propelled her into the dueling self-medications of liquor and acting. She believed that she could fulfill herself with marriages, but they never worked. Again, it’s curious that the passage Davis cites as mirroring her own emotional state was filmed at precisely the hot beginning of her relationship with Merrill. She was divorcing, yes, but she was far from being alone and unloved at the time. More self-revealing of Davis is Margo’s “temperament,” the witchlike cruelty, the acting out, the shouting at family and friends, the drinking. One wishes for her own sake that she’d have been able to calm down, but then she wouldn’t have been Bette.
If there is one thing wrong with All About Eve, it’s that Margo’s decision to marry Bill at the end of the film depressingly represents the triumph of marital convention over what we’ve loved about the character all along: her aggressive independence, her boozy wit, her prickliness, her hands-off-me-I’ll-do-it-myself spikiness. There’s logic behind the nuptials; the career Margo promises to curtail to marry Bill isn’t like law or medicine, jobs in which middle-aged practitioners are at the height of their authority and prowess. It’s acting, where the roles for women begin to dwindle just as the humiliation of losing them grows. The sequence in which Margo eyes a bowl of chocolates and finally yields to one with a ravenous chomp remains the most effective demonstration ever filmed of the price actresses pay in hunger alone. In this light, Margo’s choice to marry Bill is more reasonable—self-protective, even. And convincing. It’s little wonder that Bette Davis saw it as her own personal solution as well as Mankiewicz’s artistic one. And yet, given Davis’s own thorny nature, it’s even less surprising to discover that her much coveted domesticity led to an artistic decline. As bittersweet as it is, the closure offered by Margo’s marriage with Bill at least has the virtue of being somewhat satisfying.
AFTER MAKING AN initial screen test with Anne Baxter for All About Eve, Gary Merrill showed up again at the Fox lot for a makeup test. That’s when he met his future wife: “There, being turned this way and that on a stool, as though she had just been picked up from a counter at a jewelry store, was the Queen, Bette Davis. I was appalled. The makeup people should have been pampering her, remarking on her abilities and skills, but instead they were twirling her around, rather callously examining her facial lines. I guessed they were trying to see if our age difference would be too noticeable.”40 By the time they’d spent a day shooting All About Eve on location in San Francisco, the two actors were in love.
As Celeste Holm later recalled, “That first night we all went for drinks at the Fairmont, where they had a bar that went around and around. Everybody was showing off. Bette had taken one look at Gary and Gary had taken one look at Bette, and something had happened.”41 “And from then on she didn’t care whether the rest of us lived or died,” Holm continued. “Why, I walked onto the set the first or second day and said, ‘Good morning.’ And do you know her reply? She said, ‘Oh, shit—good manners.’ I never spoke to her again—ever. Bette Davis was so rude, so constantly rude. I think it had to do with sex.”42 “It was not a very pretty relationship,” Holm said on another occasion. “They laughed at other people. Bette and Gary formed a kind of cabal, like two kids who had learned to spell a dirty word.”43
“I started falling in love with him when I observed how he could relax in bed all day long for two solid weeks,” Bette later said.44 She was aroused by Merrill’s laziness but enraged by it, too. He was erotic but passive. He worked up a sweat when he had to and slacked off the rest of the time. His headstrong nature, which matched her own, went hand in hand with a fuck-it-all attitude toward his career. This she could never understand. His contradictions provoked her. For his part, Merrill found Davis at age forty-two to be an intensely erotic woman. “From simple compassion, my feelings shifted to an almost uncontrollable lust,” Merrill declared. “I walked around with an erection for three days.” The writer Kenneth Geist once asked Merrill about his attraction to Davis, and Merrill replied, “Don’t you understand? I thought if I got a hard-on I had to marry the woman!”45 The wedding took place in Juárez in July 1950, after All About Eve was in the can, after which the Merrills headed for a honeymoon in Maine.
Gary had a much greater desire to forge a family than did any of Bette’s other husbands. He made their marriage contingent upon having more children. As Bette later wrote, Sherry’s three-year alimony payments were almost up when Merrill offered to adopt B.D. “He tried to get Sherry’s permission. Sherry said for $50,000 he would give his approval. When we refused, he sued to get custody of her. A judge in Maine, a stern, old-fashioned Yankee judge, threw the case out of court when he learned that Sherry had received alimony from me. . . . I asked my lawyer what options we had left. He suggested I withhold Sherry’s last month’s alimony check. For that final check, Sherry gave Gary permission to adopt B. D. Sherry married the nursemaid, had children, and now has grandchildren.”46
RUTHIE DAVIS PALMER, meanwhile, had sent a telegram to Bette in April: “Married Captain O. W. Budd in Immanuel Community Church, Las Vegas.”47 But Mother’s second and third marriages were even shorter than her daughter’s; this one was over by the end of 1951.
Bette and Gary stayed for part of their honeymoon in a primitive cabin on Westport Island off the midcoast of Maine. The blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein, a friend of the oddball-loving Gary’s, had arranged the deal with the landlord, whom Bernstein described as “an old Communist.” Bernstein prepared the cabin by hiding the landlord’s collected editions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in a closet and stacking firewood in front of the door to bar entry, his theory being that “this was not exactly movie star reading, at least not in that day and age.” After Bette and Gary arrived, Bernstein and Merrill went out for about two hours and returned to find that Bette had turned the ramshackle cabin into a model 1950 home, albeit with a leftist twist. The aproned Bette—full of domestic fury
built upon a kindling of characteristic nervous energy—had built a fire, polished the furniture, dug up doilies from somewhere and draped them on the couch, prepared “martinis and a plate of canapés,” and restocked the bookcase with all the Marxist classics, which she had painstakingly unearthed by restacking the firewood away from the closet door. “I don’t know whether she even read the books; it was more as if she had simply accepted the challenge of disinterring them,” Bernstein commented.
“They stayed for two weeks,” Bernstein recalled, “drinking a lot, fighting when they drank too much. . . . Once, awakened late at night, I heard loud, drunken voices from a boat on the water and asked Bette the next day if they were the ones. She was furious at me for thinking she would be that loud in public. She told me icily that she had better manners than that. Before they left, she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the cabin floor. They thanked me for the cabin and said they had had a swell honeymoon.”48
Davis and Merrill were a mismatch well suited to each other. Bernstein described the couple’s bristlingly complementary nature: “Gary was passive and easygoing and a thinker; Bette was a doer. He dampened his fires with drink; liquor only aroused her. He had no ambition, but he had an integrity she admired and respected.” Bette Davis’s marriage to Gary Merrill would be her longest lasting as well as the most disruptive to her career.
CHAPTER
18
WIFE AND MOTHER
IN NOVEMBER 1950, THE TRADES IN BOTH Hollywood and London announced that Gloria Swanson, whose career had just been revitalized by Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, would take the leading role in the British murder mystery Another Man’s Poison. But in December Gloria went into a Broadway revival of Twentieth Century opposite José Ferrer. She asked for a postponement of Another Man’s Poison but was released from her contract instead. By February 1951, Bette not only had taken the role (for what one British paper called a “staggering salary” estimated at £40,000, which included a stake in the film’s profits) but had also demanded that the male lead, originally to have been played by Leo Genn, be given to Gary Merrill.1
Neither Bette nor Gary was fond of the script they’d been sent. “Then [the producer] Daniel Angel appeared on our doorstep,” Merrill wrote. “He walked with canes because he had been afflicted with polio; this made him seem Rooseveltian, which quite affected us.”2 The presence of the playwright and actor Emlyn Williams (The Corn Is Green) in the cast impressed them, too. According to Merrill, “Bette was going to involve herself in some script revision with Emlyn Williams’s help.” The director, at Bette’s behest, was Irving Rapper, whom Merrill later dismissed as “a real run-of-the-mill talent.”3
The Merrills, accompanied by four-year-old B.D., the newly adopted, two-month-old Margot, two nannies, and Bette’s longtime housekeeper Dell, traveled to England on the Queen Elizabeth, arriving to harsh words from the British press. One reporter called Bette a “middle-aged matron”; another set Gary off by calling him “Mr. Bette Davis.”4 Merrill was especially annoyed because Davis had welcomed these reporters into their Queen Elizabeth suite when the ship docked at Southampton and plied them full of drinks and hors d’oeuvres, only to be shocked when the same reporters sniped “about rich American actresses with hundreds of pieces of luggage, fur coats, and a mention or two about the kids and ‘Mr. Davis.’ ”5
Another Man’s Poison began shooting in April 1951 and continued through June. Interiors were shot at Nettleford Studios in Walton-on-Thames, just southwest of London, with exteriors shot on location in the North Yorkshire villages of Settle, Malham, and Tarn. The Merrills took up residence at Great Fosters, the landmark hotel in Surrey that Elizabeth I and her father, Henry VIII, had used as a hunting lodge.6
During the production, Bette and Gary dined at the Lord Chancellor’s apartment at the Houses of Parliament, the current Lord Chancellor being Sir William Jowitt, who had represented her in the 1936 Warner Bros. lawsuit. They also went to John Gielgud’s house one evening for dinner, showing up late because of filming. Alec Guinness was upstairs when they arrived. Guinness made his appearance sporting a mustache for the title role in Hamlet, and Davis didn’t recognize him, thanks to Merrill’s having told her that he was the ale heir.7
“Emlyn rewrote many scenes for us, which gave it some plausibility, but we never cured the basic ills of the story,” Bette wrote of Another Man’s Poison. The New Statesman called Davis’s performance “a blaze of breathtaking absurdity.” Merrill, the Socialist Leader sniped, “wanders about looking like a cross between Tarzan and Frankenstein.”8
Bette and Gary were in England standing around a radio on the night the Oscars were awarded for the previous year’s films. Bette was nominated for All About Eve, Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard. Davis was also competing against Anne Baxter for All About Eve as well as Eleanor Parker for Caged and Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday. When Broderick Crawford opened the envelope and announced that Holliday had won, Davis was magnanimous: “Good,” she said. “A newcomer got it. I couldn’t be more pleased.”9
* * *
THE MERRILLS WERE back in Hollywood in 1952 when Bette filmed The Star, a melodrama about an on-the-skids Hollywood actress. It should have been tailor-made for a post–Margo Channing Bette Davis at her most scenery ripping, but aside from two or three scenes it’s pretty drab. Davis plays Margaret Elliot, an Oscar-winning star who’s gotten a bit long in the tooth for the romantic leading roles that made her famous and now has trouble finding work. She’s spent her fortune incautiously on her needy sister and belching brother-in-law and her twin nephews’ saxophone lessons, not to mention the three films she financed personally to ruinous returns. Having not made a movie in three years, she’s forced to auction off her property, after which, in the film’s best scene, she returns to her cheap apartment, throws her sister and brother-in-law out the door, grabs her Academy Award as though it was her only friend, takes a few quick breaths, and announces, “Come on, Oscar—let’s you and me get drunk!”
Cut to a shot taken from the backseat of her car. Her hand reaches away from the steering wheel and dips below the bottom of the image. When it reemerges it’s clutching Oscar, which it wedges onto the dashboard behind the rearview mirror. The hand disappears but quickly returns, this time grasping a bottle of whiskey. “To absent friends,” Maggie toasts before swigging from the bottle.
As her sheets blow ever more swiftly to the wind, Maggie takes us on a tour of the movie stars’ homes: Mitzi Gaynor’s, Jeanne Crain’s, Barbara Lawrence’s. (“Thaaaat looks like the kind of monstrosity that Barbara Law-rence would choose!”) She pulls up at her own former mansion and delivers a maudlin, self-pitying speech, roars off in the car, sideswipes a convertible, and gets pulled over by the cops. Next thing you know, she’s in the slammer. “Everybody knows who I am—I’m Margaret Elliot!” she testily, drunkenly informs her cell mate as she clutches the bars as though she’s in a women’s prison picture. “What a coincidence,” the fellow jailbird remarks. “I’m Snow White.”
Salvation is found in the form of Jim Johannson (Sterling Hayden), a former builder turned actor turned shipyard owner, who bails her out. After some disappointingly calm melodrama—Maggie’s short-lived attempt to earn a living as a lingerie shopgirl at May’s; a shoplifting episode involving eau de cologne; and a disastrous screen test (“I’ve rented a small chicken farm from some people named Garfield, and I run it alone, and there’s been a murder, and I’ve seen it, and the Garfield family is involved in it, and I know it . . . and that’s the test scene!”)—Maggie rushes back to Jim’s place along with her all-too-unscarred teenage daughter, Gretchen, played by Natalie Wood, and another happy 1950s family forms at the expense of a formerly strong woman’s character and career.
Natalie Wood claimed that her fear of deep water began when making The Star; she was all of fourteen at the time. There’s a scene on Jim Johannson’s yacht; Jim takes Maggie and Gretchen out for some redemptive fresh air. The director, Stua
rt Heisler, insisted that Wood herself, not a stunt double, dive off the yacht. “I went into hysterics that must have been heard all the way to Catalina,” Wood later recalled. “Bette Davis heard me screaming and came out of her dressing trailer to find out what the commotion was. It was the only time I ever saw Bette’s legendary temperament surface, and it was not in her behalf. When she discovered what was going on, she shouted at the director, ‘If you make Natalie do that, I’ll walk off the picture. Who do you think she is—Johnny Weissmuller?’ A double was sent for pretty fast.”10 Wood’s sister, Lana, later noted that Natalie “always said that it was Bette Davis who first caused her to realize that speaking up—and out—wasn’t a bad thing to do.”11 Whatever diving footage was shot ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Davis—much later—asserted that Margaret Elliot was a thinly veiled Joan Crawford. The Star, she pointed out, “was written by the Eunsons—Katherine Albert and Dale Eunson, two of the best writers in the business. She, in particular, was a fan magazine writer who’d done most of the stories about Crawford.” Bette claims to have played up the in-joke on the set: “I kept saying ‘Bless you’ to the crew—all that sort of thing she did. Oh, yes—that was Crawford. I often wondered if she ever realized it, but I never, never knew.”12 But there’s something slightly suspicious about Davis’s glee: her feud with Crawford hadn’t really begun at that point. The two women’s mutual loathing didn’t achieve its full force until the 1960s. They were rivals in the 1940s and ’50s, true, but only to the extent that every major star saw every other major star as a threat. Crawford and Davis actually had a lot in common: each had left the studio that had been her bedrock (Crawford’s was MGM); each had achieved a monumental, vindicating success afterward (Crawford’s was Mildred Pierce).