by Ed Sikov
As Walter Bernstein so accurately described it, drinking lulled Gary but inflamed Bette. Her compulsion to cause scenes worsened with liquor. Davis always painted herself as the rare kind of star who simply had no use for the Hollywood social scene, but that was not the only problem; the producer William Frye claims that Bette caused so many public scenes upon her return to Hollywood in 1957 that she simply wasn’t welcome in the social whirl. She kept to herself in part because she wasn’t interested in glad-handing but also because regular glad-handers were afraid of her. One evening Frye escorted Bette, Gary, and the director Herschel Daugherty to a restaurant, the Ready Room. Cocktails were served. Daugherty, a little tipsy, made the mistake of pointing his finger at Bette to reinforce a point. The Ready Room wasn’t a top-drawer establishment, unlike the staid, country-clubby Chasen’s; it was the kind of place that might accommodate a liquor-fueled temper tantrum, which Davis swiftly supplied. “Don’t you dare put your finger in my face!” she shrieked at Daugherty. “I never want to see you again!” Gary Merrill beat a hasty exit with an exasperated “I’ve had it,” but Davis stayed in her seat, deviously pleased with what she’d wrought. “Cleaned this place out pretty good, didn’t I? Now let’s go someplace!” She and Frye kept the evening alive by heading to Mocambo.31
According to Merrill, the move back to Los Angeles was meant to “let it be known we were on the scene. Our professional lives were enhanced by this move, but our personal lives weren’t.”32 To say the least. In June 1957, Davis filed a separation action in Santa Monica Superior Court through her lawyer David Tannenbaum, charging “grievous mental suffering” and “extreme cruelty.” She sought custody of the children and support for herself and the kids. Bette, asked to confirm the breakup, gave one reporter a bit of verse from James Russell Lowell’s “Legend of Brittany”: “Fit language there is none for the heart’s deepest things.” Asked to respond, Gary echoed Othello: “Rude am I in my speech and little blessed with the soft phrase of peace.” The accompanying photo was captioned “Just ten days ago Bette Davis visited hubby Gary Merrill on Hollywood set with daughter Barbara and son Michael.”33
Merrill returned to Maine.
Bette, on the other hand, prepared to stay in Los Angeles for rehearsals for a theatrical adaptation of Look Homeward, Angel; she was to play Eliza Gant with Anthony Perkins cast as the son Eugene. She rented a house on Bundy Drive in Brentwood. But on the day she moved in, she opened a door and plunged forward into what she thought was a closet but was in fact the stairs to the basement, breaking her back. Three years later, Bette sued for damages; the jury awarded her $65,700. As the Examiner put it, “The Oscar-winning film star burst into tears as the jury’s verdict favoring her was read in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Carlos. M. Teran.”34
She had been offered a guest spot on a Lucy and Desi Comedy Hour episode called “The Celebrity Next Door,” but the staircase accident prevented her from appearing in it. The accident cost Davis a reported $20,000 fee, not to mention equal billing with Ball and Arnaz. “First she wanted a lot of money, which we gave her,” Lucy later said. “Then she wanted a private plane to take her out here from Connecticut or Maine or wherever the hell she lived. And then she wanted this, that, and the other thing. She knew I wanted her, and she knew I’d give her anything she wanted. So after everything was all set, she went ass over teakettle in her house and broke something, and that was the end of that.”35 Bette was replaced by Tallulah Bankhead at her most obnoxious; after calling Desi a “fat pig,” Tallulah actually spat at the director, Jerry Thorpe.36
(“There’s a great story about Lucy and Bette Davis on a flight together,” Ball’s friend and biographer Jim Brochu says. “There was a lot of turbulence. And all these stars from Warner Bros. and Columbia—everybody—was on this plane. Bette said to Lucy, ‘My god, with all these stars on board, who would they list first if we all died?’ And Lucy said, ‘Don’t worry, Bette. It’ll be you.’ ”)37
Davis spent four months in the hospital, then recuperated at Bobby’s house in Laguna Beach until she was ready to make the trip back to Maine, and Gary.38
“That was the end of our trial separation,” Merrill wrote. “It was an extremely painful time for her, but she was a tough lady.”39
In the scrapbooks, pictures of Gary disappear around 1958.
The Merrills returned to Hollywood in the early spring of that year. During the first week of April, a realtor showed them an oddly familiar-looking house; they quickly realized that it was the house in which Lana Turner’s daughter had stabbed her mother’s lover to death only a few days before. “The real estate agency had been so anxious to rent it that the bloodied mattress hadn’t been removed before people began to troop through,” Merrill writes. (Point of information: Johnny Stompanato died on the floor, not the bed.)40 They took, instead, an Art Deco mansion on Hanover Drive in Brentwood at $750 a month. It offered, Merrill writes, a “living room, a den, bar, and tennis court—typical Hollywood excess.”41 After attending a producer’s party, Bette wryly remarked to her husband that “they’re all fatter and richer and stupider than ever.”42
One of the first projects Davis was offered was an episode of the television series Suspicion called “Fraction of a Second.” John Brahm directed; Bill Frye produced. On the first day of shooting, Bette called Frye at five in the morning and said she couldn’t film that day because she was sick. The so-called illness was in fact a mass of bruises and scratches, the result of a violent physical struggle between the Merrills the previous night. Bette scraped her face on the driveway—or Gary scraped it for her—and was in no shape to go before the cameras.43
She showed up for filming the following day, the cameraman shot her good side, and she continued making the picture.
Frye was later appalled to see in the rushes that Brahm had shot a critical scene of Bette with her back entirely to the camera. Bette had insisted, Brahm insisted. Frye complained to Bette, who answered, “Goddamn it, I was acting before you were even thought of!” Still, they reshot it Frye’s way for the sake of comparison. Davis remained silent during the screening of the two versions, then left the screening room without a word. Things remained chilly between them thereafter, but she ultimately agreed to use Frye’s take.
Variety’s critic was hardly on the edge of his seat: “This Suspicion spends close to sixty minutes telling events that never occurred—events apparently imagined by a woman in the ‘fraction of a second’ before she’s killed by a load of lumber which falls on her. They call this a suspense series, but the only note of suspense arising here is why they ever made the picture.”44
The final shooting day of “Fraction of a Second” was April 5, 1958—Bette’s fiftieth birthday. When the production wrapped at 5 o’clock, Frye heard a familiar voice cry, “Where’s that producer who thinks he knows everything? Tell him to get his ass into my room for a drink!” Frye, along with Brahm and the camera operator, enjoyed tension-free cocktails in Bette’s dressing room until Frye realized that she had no other plans for the evening, at which point he organized an impromptu birthday party for her at his Coldwater Canyon house. Gary Merrill, it seems, was nowhere to be found.45
Merrill acknowledged a pronounced level of violence in the marriage, but one gets the sense that he still understated it: “Some of our arguments were whoppers, the noise level so intense that I’m surprised we could speak the next day. Once, she threatened to call the police, and I told her to go ahead. When they arrived I was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, laughing, while she screamed at them to do something. They said they didn’t get involved in domestic quarrels.”46 Another time, back East, they were “walking along a snowy path. Somehow an argument started. I don’t recall what it was about, but I do remember that I just got tired of having her scream in my ear. She slapped me, so I pushed her into a snow bank. I am not a wife beater, but ours was not a smooth marriage.”47 Michael Merrill said, “I don’t doubt that there was physical violence. She was very volati
le and could get angry at a moment’s notice. . . . By the same token, when he was in that manic period, he could be exactly the same way. People go, ‘Oh, he was so laid back.’ Are you kidding? Sometimes he was not laid back.”48
Neither of them knew how to manage money and so were continually strapped for cash. She never invested hers; she never got a chance to do so, so busy was she buying gifts for her family: Ruthie, mostly, but Bobby, too, not to mention B.D., who—according to practically everybody who knew the family—got almost anything she asked for. One of her many agents, Jules Stein, had once offered to manage her money for her, but she declined: “You can handle my jobs; I’ll handle my money.”49 The family finances were further strained when the IRS socked Gary for $50,000 in back taxes. It wasn’t malfeasance on Merrill’s part; he simply hadn’t gotten around to paying them.50 When they were living at the Chateau Marmont, Davis recalled, “At least once a day, or so it seemed, I would answer a knock on the door and find a bill collector standing there. Some poor young man who would hang his head and stammer, ‘I hate to do this to you.’ I would hold out my hand and say, ‘Quite all right.’ ”51
ON APRIL 28, 1958, Louella Parsons noted that “Bette Davis had no more set foot in her home in Maine after weeks on the Coast than she started packing to be ready to sail May 6 on the S.S. Independence for Spain and John Paul Jones. The bid from producer Sam Bronston for her to play Catherine the Great—$50,000 in nonrecession money—was too much to turn down. . . . Bette has just four days’ work as Catherine. It’s called a guest appearance, such as Mike Todd introduced in 80 Days.”52
In a little more than two hours, the film traces John Paul Jones’s rise from an impoverished family in Scotland, where he hurls an egg in the face of a British officer, to the commander of the first U.S. ship to be saluted by a foreign country (France) during the American Revolution. He scuttles a major portion of the British fleet; utters his most famous line, “I have not yet begun to fight!”; and travels to Russia, where Catherine the Great offers to hire him.
Mikey cried on Bette’s departure from Maine on May 3—his mother had been there only a week—but the trip to Europe was as much a vacation from Gary as it was a girls’ retreat for Bette, B.D., and Bobby—“the three Bs,” as Bette called them in her travel diary. “Heaven to have Bobby—am really so happy.” This was one of Bobby’s stable periods, and, tellingly, she devoted it to the care of her sister and niece.
The crossing was pleasant—“drank multitudinous martinis,” “had nap.” Bette called Ruthie ship to shore on Mother’s Day. The Independence landed at Gibraltar, after which the three Davis girls traveled to Córdoba and Seville (“really magnificent—linen sheets! The works! Birds, flowers, donkeys. All so as it should be”) before arriving in Madrid. Bette’s diary is full of praise for B.D.’s behavior (“fantastic,” “absolutely terrific”), though on at least one occasion she felt the need to give the eleven-year-old a sleeping pill to put her down for the night. B.D. attended a bullfight in Madrid: “a horse was gored, but all in all she loved it.”53
Bette met John Farrow and Robert Stack, the director and star of John Paul Jones, on May 15. May 16 began with a meeting with the film’s dressmaker, after which Davis was off to the studio to select her wig, then back to the hotel for lunch with Bobby and B.D., and then they all embarked on a tour of the city. A side trip to see Cervantes’s birthplace occurred the following day. They drove to Toledo the day after that. Davis was in her element in Spain, enthusing about everything she experienced: the art, the architecture, the flowers. . .
Her Catherine the Great costume dress wasn’t finished by the morning of the twenty-second—“have never been so nervous”—but it was completed by 7:00 p.m. and shooting began. Work went on until 9:00 p.m. and continued the following day and the twenty-fourth as well.
The Bs then flew to Rome; “had doctor give me pills for flight,” Bette noted; they made her feel “lousy.” It was sightseeing all day on the twenty-ninth. The Pantheon, the Coliseum, Vatican City: “Saw the Pope from Vatican Square at noon—a goose pimply experience! Like an angel on high!” The thirtieth brought a trip to Cinecittà to see the chariot race being filmed for Ben-Hur, after which she enjoyed dinner with her old Warners producer Henry Blanke and Anna Magnani. “Divine!”
By the third of June they were in Venice; on the sixth they drove to Milan, saw the cathedral, then headed to the airport and flew to London. They ended up in Henley-on-Thames.
Diary entry, June 9: “Invited to Monaco for the week-end—big do with the Grimaldis—think I’ll skip it!”
There was a press party on the twelfth, lunch with Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios on the thirteenth. On June 15 Bette noted how much she enjoyed Irish coffee: “can’t wait to make it at home for Gary.” (This is an odd notation, considering the fractious state of the marriage at that point.)
She was in Paris on June 18, where she had dinner with Alec Guinness and the director Robert Hamer in preparation for her next film, The Scapegoat, in which she was to play Guinness’s drug-addicted mother. Guinness was a changeling genius, a supreme technician whose most notable tour de force was to play all eight members of the doomed d’Ascoyne family in the great Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Davis, Guinness, and Hamer returned to London, where makeup and fittings for The Scapegoat occurred on June 23 and 24. Shooting began on the twenty-fifth.
“My costar is a terror,” Davis reported in her diary. Guinness “never looks or gives a reaction,” she complained. There was slight improvement by July 1: “Still get panicked working with A.G.,” she wrote, though she did admit that playing one scene was “a pleasure.” But later, she went on, she “did all close-ups at 6 o’clock and had a terrible time. Can never explain to anyone why it bothers me so much. . . . Ached so much that evening—thought I would die.”
The magic of Europe was wearing thin. She was getting sick of European food, Bette wrote in her diary. She longed for a hamburger.
By July 9, Bette’s shooting for The Scapegoat was completed. She purchased an eleven-month-old red Yorkshire puppy for Mike. She picked him up in Kent and named him Lord Mountbatten before sailing home with Bobby and B.D. on the Queen Mary on July 10.
The Scapegoat was never one of Bette’s favorite films. Alec Guinness “cut my part into such shreds that my appearance in the final product made no sense at all,” she claimed. “This is an actor who plays by himself, unto himself. In this particular picture he played a dual role, so at least he was able to play with himself.”54
Matters weren’t helped by her director’s pronounced alcoholism. According to Piers Paul Read, Guinness’s biographer, Robert Hamer went on a particularly hard bender when Davis arrived. As Guinness himself wrote in his diary at the time of Bette’s death,
I loaded her with flowers—which she accepted. But she refused all invitations to dinner etc. and had no desire to chat. She despised all the British film crew, told me Robert Hamer wasn’t a director and knew nothing of films (admittedly Robert was on the way down and deep in drink trouble) and she obviously considered me a nonentity—with which I wouldn’t quarrel greatly. But she was not the artist I had expected. She entirely missed the character of the old Countess, which could have been theatrically effective, and only wanted to be extravagantly over-dressed and surrounded, quite ridiculously, by flowers. She knew her lines—and spat them forth in her familiar way—and was always on time. What is called a professional. A strong and aggressive personality. After the film was shown (a failure) she let it be known that she considered I had ruined her performance and had had it cut to a minimum.55
But it wasn’t just Guinness who thought Davis’s part deserved to be truncated. Apart from the fact that he was mostly drunk, Robert Hamer didn’t think Davis was very good: “May I say that in my opinion any modification in the performance of Bette Davis will be to our advantage,” he wrote in notes to Michael Balcon; Hamer suggested cutting the Countess’s court testimony by half. D
aphne du Maurier, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, agreed: she requested that “the scenes in which Miss D appears [be] reduced in length if possible.”56
IT’S AUGUST 28, 1960, and the panelists are blindfolded: time for the Mystery Guest segment on What’s My Line? A white-gloved hand graced by a diamond bracelet appears and signs a famous name on the chalkboard, and, to a fine ovation, Bette strides to her seat. Joey Bishop asks the first question: “Are you in the entertainment business?”
A high-pitched “Oui.”
“Are you in pictures?” Arlene Francis inquires.
“Oui.”
Bennett Cerf is next: “Have you also appeared in the legitimate theater?”
“Oui.”
“Are you in a picture that is currently appearing on Broadway or in the major first-run houses?” Dorothy Kilgallen wants to know.
“Non.”
Arlene Francis follows up: “Are you in a show that is about to appear on Broadway?”
Bette, amused, answers, “Oui.”
And Bennett Cerf gets it: “Would the show that you are going to do have anything to do with Mr. Carl Sandburg?”
“Oui!”
Unfortunately, despite the What’s My Line? plug and related ballyhoo, the Broadway run of The World of Carl Sandburg lasted only twenty-nine performances. It opened at Henry Miller’s Theatre on September 14 and closed on October 8.
Norman Corwin had approached Davis and Merrill in April 1959 with the idea of adapting the popular poet’s work for the stage. But by the time the play was ready for rehearsals at a grange hall in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the couple had essentially parted. “We’d meet in the morning, rehearse all day, then go our separate ways,” Merrill reported.57
After previews at Bowdoin College in September, The World of Carl Sandburg had its world premiere at the State Theater in Portland. It played to a sold-out crowd, including Edmund Muskie and Carl Sandburg himself, who commandeered the stage after the show and went on so long with one of his tales that Merrill privately told him afterward to stick to the writing and let Gary and Bette do the performing.