by Ed Sikov
Mr. and Mrs. Merrill continued with The World of Carl Sandburg, however, and took the show on tour: Lowell, Massachusetts, and upstate New York, and all the way west to Los Angeles and San Francisco, thirty-two cities in all. The strain of appearing as a loving couple onstage while being unable to bear each other’s presence off—they stayed in separate wings of hotels while touring—wore thinner and thinner. It finally snapped when Bette had Gary served with divorce papers. The separation agreement gave Gary visitation rights with the children but took away his right to appear in The World of Carl Sandburg in New York. Barry Sullivan took over initially for a swing through Florida before the show opened in New York with Bette and Leif Erickson.58 The show’s married-couple appeal vanished, and The World of Carl Sandburg closed. For Gary, though, it was good while it lasted: “It was the high spot in my career.”59
Though the Merrills might have endured another reconciliation after splitting again in the summer of 1959, the stresses of The World of Carl Sandburg set a match to the couple’s long-smoldering pile of used-up and discarded passion. Bette filed for divorce on May 3, 1960.60 “Not long after our divorce, I ran into Joe Mankiewicz at a party,” Bette recalled. “For years I had been asking him to write a sequel to All About Eve, telling what had happened to Margo and Bill. I said, ’You can forget about the sequel, Joe. Gary and I played it and it didn’t work.’ ”61
CHAPTER
20
TROUBLES AND A TRIUMPH
THE GHOSTWRITER SANDFORD DODY, WHO got to know Bette’s children as well as Bette herself while he was working with her on The Lonely Life, offered this precise description of Michael Merrill at ten: “If B.D. had her mother’s confidence and outgoing personality, manly little Michael kept his own counsel. Though amiable, he seemed a rather grave little boy and perhaps a trifle tentative. I felt a depth in him, a self-containment unusual in one so young.” By that point, Michael’s parents had divorced, and Gary was a visitor rather than an active father. “Bette adored both kids and enjoyed roughhousing with Michael,” Dody went on, “partially to give him the kind of tough, physical affection a father who was not absent might supply, and also, I’m certain, because she enjoyed it.” And then this: “Mother and son would sometimes roll all over the floor, wrestling and laughing gaily, though I always felt that the boy was conscious that he was romping with a leopardess simply in the mood for play, a leopardess who might in a change of mood devour him.”1
After the divorce, Gary took up with Rita Hayworth, a romance that sparked a particularly jealous and threatened sort of rage in Bette, who acted out by attempting to revoke Gary’s visitation rights. After escorting Mike and B.D. to see The Sound of Music onstage along with Rita and her children, Yasmin Khan and Rebecca Welles, Gary pulled up in front of Bette’s house to drop the kids off only to encounter Bette leaning out an upstairs window and screaming, “using language a hardened sailor would have thought music to his ears, ‘That’s not a fit woman for my children to be with! You and that whore shouldn’t be together with young children,’ and on and on.”2
According to Merrill, Florence Stewart of the Lochland School had once advised him to “keep that little boy away from his mother as much as possible.”3 But now Bette was bent on keeping Mike away from his father. “The following day,” Merrill continued, “Bette went off to see her lawyers to try to get my visitation rights with Mike revoked. And she did.” For a time. After protracted legal wrangling, a judge awarded Gary visits with Mike every other weekend in addition to half of Mike’s school vacations.
Losing her quest to deny Gary any visitation rights at all, Bette responded with drastic theatricality by sending Mike to live with him permanently. By the end of the school year, however, Bette changed her mind, and Michael Merrill was returned to her custody.4
That summer, the summer of 1962, Mike spent a month with his father in New England. “And while he’s been with the boy, he promised to stop drinking,” Hedda Hopper bleated, obviously getting her information from Davis. “Rita has not been with him for the month,” Hopper added.5 At one point, father and son found themselves in Maine. “We looked across the cove at our old house. I glanced at Michael and saw tears in his eyes,” Gary recalled.6
IN THE LATE spring and early summer of 1961, Frank Capra remade his 1933 film Lady for a Day as Pocketful of Miracles. Based on a Damon Runyon story, the film traces the exploits of a benign bootlegger, Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford), who helps transform a beggarwoman, Apple Annie (Davis), into a presentable society matron when Annie’s daughter, Louise (Ann-Margret), arrives from Europe. Louise has grown up in a Spanish convent, you see, and has no idea that her mother lives on the streets.
Ford, with whom Bette had made A Stolen Life, made an inopportune remark that set Bette off. “During the third week of shooting,” Capra recalled, “Glenn Ford gave a columnist an interview, to wit: He felt so grateful to Bette Davis for having started him on his path to success that he had demanded Miss Davis be rescued from obscurity and be given the role of Apple Annie in his starring film. Well, I don’t know what Bette Davis did the day she started Glenn on his career, but I sure know what she did when she read Glenn’s interview. She flashed, and sparked, and crackled like an angry live wire thrashing in the wind: ‘Goddamdest insult. . . that sonofabitch Ford . . . helping me make a comeback . . . that shitheel . . . wouldn’t let him help me out of a sewer . . . shouldn’t have come to Hollywood . . . I hate it. . . hate Apple Annie . . . hate the picture . . . hate you most, Capra, for bringing me out here.’ ”7 Bette also mentioned to a reporter visiting the set—a sound-stage at Paramount—that she had seen Lady for a Day and didn’t understand why Capra didn’t simply rerelease it.8
Davis was in the final stages of shooting Pocketful of Miracles when Ruth Favor Davis, briefly Palmer, briefly Budd, died on July 1, 1961. It would have been her fifty-third wedding anniversary had she not divorced Harlow Davis and married and divorced Robert Palmer and married and divorced Otho Budd.
Ruthie’s caregiver in her final months was Bobby, of course; Bette had to work.
Ruthie was in labor for twenty-one hours before she gave birth to Bobby and never let Bobby forget it. It wasn’t until the mid-1940s, according to Bette, that Bobby grew deaf to the “oft-repeated horror” story. As Bette saw it, Ruthie never identified with Bobby in any way. “Love, yes,” Bette noted less than convincingly, but not empathy.9 But Ruthie’s distance was a defensive posture, her identification with Bobby too powerful to be conscious. Ruthie herself had suffered from depression during her marriage to Harlow and at one point checked herself into a sanitarium when the girls were very small.10 Bobby’s psychological troubles always threatened to shine an unwelcome light on Ruthie’s darkest corner. It was easier for her to take credit for Bette’s success and remind Bobby of how difficult she’d been to produce.
Except for a brief time in East Hampton, New York, in the late 1940s, Ruthie lived on Ramona Avenue in Laguna Beach in an elegant home that was bought, paid for, and lavishly furnished by Bette, who always said publicly that she owed her mother everything, given the toils Ruthie endured to pay for her daughters’ clothing, let alone their private school education.11 (“I didn’t want a career for myself,” Ruthie told an interviewer once. “I wanted money to give the girls things. . . . Agirl can so easily acquire an inferiority complex if she is shabbily dressed.”)12 But Bette overstated Ruthie’s case drastically. Her mother was an emotional drain as well as a financial one, Lady Bountiful in reverse. By any reasonable measurement, the rewards flowed to Bette’s mother, not from her, for most of her life.
Bette maintained, both in private and in public, that Ruthie’s early sacrifices for her daughters were commensurate in anguish and strain with thirty years of high pressure, do-or-die acting work on her own part. In fact, of course, Bette paid a far greater price psychologically than Ruthie paid physically, photographic chemicals not being nearly as caustic as movie reviewers, directors, and studio bosses. One can only wonder at
the degree of conscious irony in Davis’s mind when she showed up at Ruthie’s seventy-second birthday party in 1957 dressed as an aproned maid.13
Ruthie adored being the mother of a superstar, attending premieres, giving interviews, receiving gifts and money from Bette. In May 1957, she was herself the star of an episode of This Is Your Life, the sentimental journey into the lives of ordinary as well as famous people conducted by Ralph Edwards. Bette flew in with B.D. from Maine; Bobby was there, along with her daughter, Fay; Mrs. Robert Peckett, of Peckett’s Inn, showed up from New Hampshire, too. (Mrs. Peckett bought Butternut from Bette shortly thereafter.)14
When Ruthie died, Sandford Dody recalls, he and Davis were in the middle of composing The Lonely Life. Bette telephoned him, hysterical. She couldn’t go on with the project, she said, weeping. She couldn’t bear it. She did, of course. But she toned down the more ambivalent passages about her mother—an understandable response on the one hand, a mother’s death leading to idealization, but incomprehensible on another. Bette was finally free to speak her mind about the selfless-turned-selfish woman who had dominated her life through four marriages, but Ruthie’s departure for eternity only served to kick in Bette’s guilt.15*
Davis appears to have felt no similar guilt about Bobby. If anything, age made her increasingly hostile to her younger sister. “Bette was angry a good part of the time, and I really can’t tell you why,” Chuck Pollack said. “She didn’t trust anybody; that was one of the worst things. She had no one, not even her sister. Her poor sister. She treated her like a dog.”16
Bobby had her own daughter, Fay, to care for in the 1940s and early 1950s, but even then Bobby found time—and the presence of mind—to care not only for Bette’s children but for Bette herself. It was Bobby who escorted B.D. to Maine to spend part of Bette and Gary’s honeymoon with them, Bobby who accompanied Bette and B.D. to Europe in 1958.
* The Lonely Life was published in 1962 to positive reviews and solid sales.
Bobby was there, too, when Bette became ill during the last night of Two’s Company; it was Bobby who accompanied Bette to the hospital. And when Ray Stricklyn, who appeared with Davis in The Catered Affair and “For Better, for Worse,” tells in his memoirs of how, during the filming of the latter in 1957, when Bette took a palpably seductive attitude toward him despite their considerable difference in age, Bobby hovers in the background of the tale: at 10:00 p.m., when the director finally called it a night, there was Bobby in Bette’s dressing room, dutifully packing the star’s clothes and preparing the star for her exit.17
By 1971, Bobby was living in Phoenix. She showed up for Bette’s own episode of This Is Your Life (which was taped on February 2, 1971, and aired on March 7), along with Edith Head, William Wyler, Robert Wagner, Benny Baker (who’d been onstage with Bette in one of the Cukor plays in Rochester), Olivia de Havilland, Sally Sage Hutchinson (Bette’s longtime stand-in), and Ted Kent (the editor of Bad Sister).18 But the two Davis girls became increasingly estranged as the 1970s went on. Bette was living in Hollywood when she was told that Bobby was dying of cancer in Arizona. “Let her come and visit me,” Bette responded. The sisters never saw each other again. Bobby died in 1979.19
CIGARETTES WERE TO Bette Davis what a bottle of Southern Comfort was to Janis Joplin or a half-unbuttoned black shirt is to Tom Ford: a mundane prop elevated by sheer force of personality to the level of a stylized autograph. Davis smoked eminently onscreen—Charlotte Vale’s romanticized oral fixation in Now, Voyager; the pungent fumes of Margo Channing—but, if anything, she was even better known in real life as the world’s most famous nicotine addict. Only Winston Churchill and his cigars could come close, but Davis takes the prize if only because she inhaled.
Her friends, family, and coworkers necessarily grew accustomed to Davis’s acrid exhalations, but they put up with them because, after all, she was Bette Davis, and cigarettes—the gestures they enabled, the attention they called to the hands and mouth, the full fire-breathing drama—were her stock-in-trade. “She used smoking in a way I’d never seen before. It was a signature,” said Dr. Ivin Prince. Dr. Prince knew Davis intimately. He was her dentist.20
She came to him first in the mid-1950s with a mouth full of out-of-position teeth, many of which were loose. She couldn’t close her mouth because the uppers hit the lowers. The cause of this dental disaster was the osteomyelitis that had forced Two’s Company to close. Years of smoking hadn’t helped.
Dr. Prince’s office was located on the ground floor of the Imperial House, an apartment building on the Upper East Side. He also treated one of the Imperial House’s most famous residents. “I never mentioned to Bette that I was also treating Joan,” Dr. Prince said, though he did eventually reveal the fact after Crawford died. Bette was amused.
“When she laughed, you could hear it half a block away. Patients in the waiting room would hear Bette Davis laughing—there was no mistaking her. She was the kind of person who—when she liked and trusted you—was wonderful. But there weren’t many such people in her life. She was always lovely with my staff. She wasn’t always lovely with her staff.” Dr. Prince remembered that Davis smoked not only in the waiting room but even in the dentist’s chair. “She pretty much did what she wanted,” he noted.
One day, Dr. Prince recalled, he heard dramatically raised voices emanating from the waiting room. Bette was scheduled for an appointment, as was another of the dentist’s high-profile patients: Tennessee Williams. “I remember them screaming and shouting at one another, oblivious to the fact that there were other people around.” According to Dr. Prince, Williams actually employed the most exhausted of tired clichés. “You’ll never work in this town again!” the playwright yelled at the star.
Davis had, by that time, ended her run on Broadway as Maxine Faulk in Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. “I don’t think she enjoyed the experience,” Dr. Prince lightly observed. “She told me she would get so nervous before the curtain that she would throw up.” But, Bette’s dentist added, “She used it. She said she thought her nervousness made her better.”
The Night of the Iguana concerns a drunken defrocked minister, Shannon (Patrick O’Neal), who has descended ignominiously to driving a tour bus in Mexico; Hannah Jelkes (Margaret Leighton), a Yankee spinster; and Maxine Faulk, the earthy owner of an Acapulco hotel. Frank Corsaro directed. Rehearsals began in New York in October 1961, and according to Williams’s agent, Audrey Wood, they went well. Davis let her feelings about Maxine Faulk be known, however. During one rehearsal, for example, Margaret Leighton entered carrying a suitcase. Bette took it as directed and headed upstage only to stop in her tracks, whirl around, and call out to the dark theater, “Tennessee! I don’t think this bitch for one moment would pick up her bag and carry it. I just don’t think she would. What do you think?” Williams let her do it her way.21
Trouble started when the company traveled to Rochester for previews. The first performance was, as Wood described it, “rough, but the audience was receptive. . . . There was an opening night party which we all attended, including Bette, and we all went to bed.”
The company manager called Wood in her hotel room the following morning to announce that “Bette Davis is being taken in a wheelchair to an ambulance and then to a hospital.” It seems she had fallen during the performance but suffered no symptoms until the following day. After two performances with the understudy taking Davis’s place, the company moved on to Cleveland. She was driven there by limousine. “Bette recovered, and we went on. Finally, the tour brought us to Chicago,” Wood recalled.22
In December, The Night of the Iguana faced the critics. Time was downright mean: “A big, ugly edible lizard called the iguana is, in Mexico, more or less what the Thanksgiving turkey is in the U.S. Mexicans catch iguanas, fatten them up, and serve them on festive occasions. Tennessee Williams’ latest play, now in Chicago and headed for Broadway this month, is called The Night of the Iguana. And from all indications last week, despite impressive performances by
Margaret Leighton and Bette Davis, it is indeed a massive turkey. Chicago critics have carved it up.” Time quoted some choice remarks of the Chicago papers: “The Tribune, for example, found the play ‘bankrupt . . . barren . . . bleakly dull.’ And the Sun Times called it ‘something of a dud . . . a swollen vignette . . . vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity, padding for the sake of fill, waterfront humor to patch the gaps and the pulpit for preaching.’ ”23
Williams wrote a note to Bette while the show was still in Chicago. He advised her, “Everything about [Maxine] should have the openness and freedom of the sea. I can imagine she even smells like the sea.” He didn’t like Bette’s wig at all, and he told her so: “It is too perfectly arranged, too carefully ‘coiffed.’ It ought to be like she had gone swimming without a cap and rubbed her hair dry with a coarse towel and not bothered to brush or comb it.” And, he commented, “when she says, ‘I never dress in September,’ I think she means just that.
“There is so much that’s wonderful in your characterization that it seems a crime to risk its total effect by neglecting the final touches. Yours devotedly, Tennessee.”24
“It was there in Chicago that Bette Davis said she’d not take further direction from Frank Corsaro and ordered him barred from the theatre,” Williams later recalled in his Memoirs. “He stayed out of the theatre but stayed in Chicago; but Bette said she could sense his lingering presence in Chicago and that he must be returned to New York and that goddam Actor’s Studio, which had spawned him.”25 Williams and Charles Bowden took over the direction, though Corsaro remained on the bill.
The Night of the Iguana opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on December 28, 1961. The director Joshua Logan saw the show and admired it, particularly Davis: “She was svelte, handsome, voluptuous, wicked, wise, raffish, slightly vulgar—in fact, she was ideal for the part and gave the play an added dimension.”26