by Ed Sikov
Bette kept an autograph book to register those who came backstage during the New York run. The first signatory is “Mike Merrill, your ever loving son.” Others include Anita Loos, Dakin Williams, Natalie Schafer, B. D. Merrill (“your ever lovin’ daughter”), Glenda Farrell, Kaye Ballard, Teresa Wright, Ann Sheridan, Joan Bennett, Olivia de Havilland, Fredric March, Margot Merrill (who printed her name in a legible but childish hand), Mike Merrill again, right below Margot, and, in an outsized flourish that dominates the lower half of one page, “Love to Bette—Joan Crawford.”27 Telegrams flew in, too, from such notables as Ray Stark, Leland Hayward, Spencer Tracy, Dore Shary, Terence Rattigan, Bobby (“Hang this above the steam pipes and know that I am there with you and only you on this opening night . . . I love you for all the greats you are. Great mother, great aunt, great great sister, great dad and my best friend. Pocket full of miracles for you on opening night and every night thereafter”), Johnny Dall, Farley Granger, Mike Levee, and finally one that reads, “Darling Bette—Please let me do the movie version. Bless you—and love—Tallulah.”28
Despite the mean if funny critical fanfare in Chicago, The Night of the Iguana was a success in New York, but Bette began missing performances—according to Audrey Wood, without explanation. Wood’s theory is that Davis began to resent the amount of time her character was offstage: “When you have been a great film star, it must be difficult to sit backstage in your dressing room for protracted periods in which there is nothing to do but to wait for your next entrance.”29
Shelley Winters saw the show after hearing some negative buzz. “Bette Davis seemed to be shooting her lines right at the audience, facing squarely front and not talking to Margaret or Patrick at all,” Winters later wrote. “She was getting uproarious laughs, but I knew she wasn’t that kind of actress. What the hell was going on? Only in the scenes when Bette was alone with Patrick was there any communication. Those scenes were powerful. Why had she just stood on the stage and shouted out her jokes?”
Davis left the show in disgust in early April 1962, and Winters agreed to take over the role. She attended a matinee during the interim, when Maxine Faulk was being played by Davis’s quite experienced understudy, Madeleine Sherwood. When the announcement was made that Sherwood was appearing that afternoon in Davis’s place, “half of the audience stood up simultaneously and rushed to the box office to get their money back.” (Sherwood had the guts to yell out from the stage, “Come on, ladies! Give me a chance! I’m really very good, and the play is terrific!”)
“The first time I walked into my dressing room backstage at the Royale,” Winters continued, “written on the mirror in very red lipstick were the following words: ‘SHELLEY—AFTER YOUR FIRST OR POSSIBLY SECOND PERFORMANCE you will find out why i left this show. bette davis.’ ” Winters noted that Sherwood hadn’t “washed Bette’s message to me off the mirror. So whatever was going to happen to me must have happened to Madeleine, too.”
She figured it out soon enough. As Winters explained it, Williams had written Maxine Faulk as a comic role to relieve the relentless sadness of an alcoholic going to “his almost certain death, like the iguana that is tied up under our stage veranda.” And the laugh lines Williams gave to Faulk depended on timing—everyone’s, not only the actress delivering them. According to Winters, “Margaret Leighton or Patrick O’Neal would say the setup of my joke and then move slightly for a few seconds, keeping the eye of the audience so the audience was not looking at me or even listening. . . . It’s a wicked British stage trick.” It took Winters about three performances to understand exactly why Davis had gotten fed up enough to leave the show.30
Williams saw things differently. “Bette Davis quit the show and Shelley Winters went in,” the playwright wrote to his friend Maria St. Just. “It is hard to say which was worse but at least La Davis drew cash and La Winters seems only to sell the upper gallery.”31
But Shelley got the last laugh. At one performance she became so enraged at her fellow actors’ antics that she pushed a cocktail cart across the stage so hard that it “knocked Patrick O’Neal over and he knocked Margaret Leighton over as he fell. The audience either liked this stage business or felt they deserved it,” she wrote.32
NEUROSIS, HYSTERIA, AND paranoia are defining features of Davis’s acting style, the film scholar Martin Shingler points out—“the fidgity fingers; the cracks in her voice and leaps to a shrill, high pitch; the roving eyes suspiciously scanning her immediate environment.” But Davis’s performance style is complicated, as was her psyche. “In contrast,” Shingler adds, “there’s the absolute restraint, the steady, steadfast glare; the straight back; the ability to subdue all the tics and mannerisms, suggesting a high level of self-control.” Davis’s public image was similarly split: “Her star persona shifts from her famous furies to her absolute level-headedness about herself and the industry she worked in.”33
To put it in psychiatric terms, Davis’s torn nature suggests that she may have had a borderline personality, one that shifts been the commonly neurotic—anxiety, depression, emotional outbursts—and a baldly psychotic inability to perceive the point at which reality stops and paranoid fantasy takes over. Davis’s temper was, it might go without saying, legendary, and behind it lay not only a deep-seated rage against authority, at root antipaternal, but also a compulsion to disrupt the outside world so that it matched her convulsive interior. A history of unstable relationships with men; an impulsive streak; a raw incapability to control anger; a destructive tendency to undercut her directors’ interests purely for the sake of undercutting them; a disrupted, itinerant childhood; paternal abandonment; increasing alcoholism . . . Davis’s character traits come straight out of a diagnostic manual.*
Davis also shifted drastically between two other poles: the obsessive-compulsive and the hysterical. The woman who recalled with candor her childhood upset at the uneven seam in the circus’s red carpet was the same woman whose hot crying jags led to the shutting down of The Little Foxes. The Bette Davis who routinely polished all the silver and brass in her house as a way of expending nervous energy was the same Bette Davis who threw fits, swore filthily, called people vile names. Robbie Lantz recalled meeting Bette Davis for the first time in Westport: “She showed us the house. On the landing, she had railings made of brass—very shiny. I said, ‘Somebody comes to keep this spotless?’ And she said, ‘No. I do it.’ This gave me a clue to certain things.”34 Did the suppression of her hysteria lead to the compulsive brass polishing, or did the unquenchable need to keep everything in perfect order lead to the regular breakdowns?
* The manual happens to be Disordered Personalities by David J. Robinson, M.D., second edition.
The origins of Bette Davis’s double nature are clear enough—Ruthie on the one hand, Harlow on the other—but Ruthie was herself a mix of obstinacy and neurosis. In their unpublished, jointly written memoir, her brother Paul Favor asks Ruthie to name the traits that led Ruthie to “see drama in Bette,” and Ruthie tellingly responds: “What he really means is that she had a very bad temper. Yes, this is true, but I know now that I did not understand how to manage it. We were too much alike. She cannot take correction. She is perfectly sure she is right, and so am I. They just do not mix. Many people have asked me why did I let her have her own way. Well, I couldn’t help it.”35 In other words, Bette’s theatricality went hand in hand with its diametric opposite: unshakable conviction.
As Shingler notes, Davis’s mix of righteousness and combustibility served to “make her a frightening figure for those who worked with her. It also made her more enigmatic and intriguing for audiences and fans. It probably also frightened her.”36 Bette Davis was scarcely easy to live with, perhaps least of all by herself. Still, her nuttiness led directly to one of the greatest performances of her career, an all-stops-pulled portrait of degenerated talent and family resentment spun out of control. And for better or worse (mostly worse), the performance was so brilliant that it set the tone of the rest of her career.
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“I’ve written. A letter. To Daddy! His address is heaven above. . . .”
IT’S TIME FOR What’s My Line? again. Now it’s November 11, 1962. The first guest, Mimmi Paulsen, is a shipboard radio operator in a black cocktail dress. The second, Dell Winders, is a toothy, outdoorsy type from Philadelphia. He’s a porpoise trainer. Nobody gets either of them.
After a pitch for the folks at home to get tested during Diabetes Week, the panelists—Dorothy Kilgallen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Art Linkletter—put on their blindfolds before Bette Davis makes her entrance. This time, the signing arm is clad in long-sleeved velvet and graced by a charm bracelet. So far so good, but to loud applause from the audience, Davis strides to her seat and we see that the dress is a disaster: a full-length gown with a drastic Empire waist combined with a plunging neckline. The sleeves are tightly fitted, a satin bow calls further attention to the too-high waist, and the skirt is of densely gathered chiffon. It’s too girlish for a woman of fifty-four, mutton dressed as lamb in a prom dress. She has gotten thick.
And yet . . . although she looks every year of her age, she’s also glamorous and attractive. There are big bags under her eyes, but the neck and face are fine. The hair, thinner and coarser than it was when she was in her prime, is cut just short of her shoulders and suggests Margo Channing with soft waves around her face. She’s undeniably sexy and vibrant. Bette Davis has been a movie star for thirty years.
Bennett Cerf knows who she is even before she sits down, probably because Joan Crawford had been on the show a few weeks earlier promoting the same movie. “Well,” he says, “that was a spectacular ovation that you received, Mr. or Miss Mystery Guest! Uh, would it be possibly because you have made a great name for yourself in motion pictures?”
“Yes,” Davis replies in a weirdly squeaky voice.
“Do you have a new picture just out?” Linkletter asks.
“Yes.”
Arlene Francis knows the answer, too: “Boy, try to fake that voice—the most impersonated voice in America! Have you just done a picture with a vis-à-vis who is also a big name in the picture business?”
“Yes,” squeals Bette, who clearly knows what’s coming.
Cerf provides the coup de grâce: “Would the vis-à-vis be a lady who has also been a Mystery Guest here within the past month named Miss Joan Crawford?”
“Altogether now,” the host, John Daly, says—“one, two, three . . . ,” and the panelists cry in unison, “Bette Davis!”
“I’ve just come back from Miami,” Cerf remarks (pronouncing it Miama), “and it seems to me your picture’s playing in every motion picture theater in Florida—it’s all over the place!”
“Well, you know,” Bette replies, “we were chosen by motion picture theater owners as a sort of a test run—what they call preview engagements. We were very fortunate we were chosen. We opened in 137 theaters in Manhattan alone, 22 of which I have done in three days in a Greyhound bus.”
“You have won two Academy Awards, if memory serves me right,” says Daly.
“Very old boys and very tarnished,” Davis modestly replies, “a long time ago—oh, they’re so tarnished!” (She’d probably polished the gold plate right off of them.)
“I think a bright, shiny new one is what is necessary and will be forthcoming,” Daly adds.
“Well, I think my two old boys would be pretty pleased,” Davis responds, “but you never know.”
The picture in question is, of course, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The night Joan Crawford signed Bette’s autograph book backstage after a performance of Night of the Iguana, she told Davis of a novel she had just read—one that could be adapted into a film for both of them. It was written by Henry Farrell and concerned two strange sisters, one considerably stranger than the other. The Hudson girls had once been movie stars but now live in simple baroque despair on the fringes of Hollywood. Blanche is in a wheelchair, the result of a car accident; Jane is off her rocker, the result of the American film industry.
As Davis recalled of Crawford’s suggestion, “She said she had sent it to Robert Aldrich with hopes that he would direct it. He had phoned her from Italy, where he was finishing a film, to say he had acquired the rights to the book.”37 Several weeks later, Aldrich arrived at Bette’s townhouse on East Seventy-eighth Street. Bette first asked him which part was hers.38 Then she asked him whether he’d ever fucked Joan. “If you had,” Davis stated, “then you couldn’t be fair to both of us.” “The answer is no—not that I didn’t have the opportunity,” Aldrich responded.39
Davis was between agents at the time, said Martin Baum: “I was Bob Aldrich’s agent, and Bob suggested her for the part of Jane Hudson. I volunteered to be her agent for that job, and she allowed me to sign her.”40
Bill Frye claims some credit for the genesis of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? He came across Farrell’s novel while searching for new material for his new series Thriller. It was too complex for a TV show, he decided, but it would make a great feature. According to Frye, he gave a copy of the novel to Davis and to Olivia de Havilland as well, with the idea of casting de Havilland as the invalid sister; Frye thought Ida Lupino would be an ideal director for the project. He took the package to Lew Wasserman at Universal (Wasserman had ceased being an agent and became head of MCA, which bought Universal), but when Wasserman learned that Frye wanted to cast Davis, he declined to give the project the go-ahead. (Wasserman had recently seen Davis in “The Bettina May Story” on Wagon Train and, according to Frye, disliked her performance.) “You’ll never believe it,” Davis told Frye later, “but Crawford gave me a copy of the book with a note suggesting I play the younger sister. I told her never. The only part I’m interested in is Baby Jane.”41*
“I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with her until I saw the wardrobe,” Davis told James McCourt. “The minute I did, she came to me like that.”42 In one way, at least, Davis appreciated the finer, creepier points of Jane Hudson better than Aldrich. She insisted not only on applying her own makeup but on designing it. “What I had in mind no professional makeup man would have dared to put on me,” she remarked in This ’n That. “One told me he was afraid that if he did what I wanted, he might never work again. Jane looked like many women one sees on Hollywood Boulevard. . . . I felt Jane never washed her face—just added another layer of makeup each day. I used a chalk-white base, lots of eye shadow—very black—a cupid’s-bow mouth, a beauty mark on my cheek and a bleached blond wig with Mary Pickford curls.”43 The effect is hideous.
After three days of filming, Aldrich told her to tone it down; it was too much. “If you change my makeup,” Bette claimed she told her director, “you’ll have to recast me, because if I play Jane I will continue to wear this makeup.”44 Aldrich relented, though according to him, when Davis herself saw the film she was aghast at what she’d wrought. “She’d never seen the complete picture before seeing it with me at Cannes, and I don’t think she was prepared for the experience of seeing it among lots of people,” Aldrich said. “About five minutes into the picture I heard this quiet but kind of desperate sobbing beside me and turned to her wondering what the hell was the matter. ‘I just look awful,’ she wept. ‘Do I really look that awful?’ ”45
According to Bette, Joan had precisely the opposite impulse. Crawford wanted to look glamorous: “her hair well dressed, her gowns beautiful, and her fingernails with red nail polish. For the part of an invalid who had been cooped up in a room for twenty years, she wanted to look attractive!” Crawford launched an argument with Aldrich the morning they were set to film Blanche hobbling her way down the stairs. Aldrich wanted her to remove her nail polish. “You have taken everything else away from me,” Joan moaned, bereft. “You’re not taking away my nail polish!”46
* It’s at best unclear whether Blanche is younger than Jane. The opening scene suggests that she is older.
“In her vanity she was consistent,” Davis observed. She offered an especially ludicro
us example: “As part of her wardrobe, Miss Crawford owned three sizes of bosoms. In the famous scene in which she lay on the beach, Joan wore the largest ones. Let’s face it—when a woman lies on her back, I don’t care how well endowed she is, her bosoms do not stand straight up. And Blanche had supposedly wasted away for twenty years. The scene called for me to fall on top of her. I had the breath almost knocked out of me. It was like falling on two footballs.”47
B.D., who plays the Hudson sisters’ teenage neighbor in a bit of stunt casting (apart from an uncredited appearance as a toddler in Payment on Demand, this was her only professional acting job), told Look that, as the reporter described it, “the most revealing difference in the personalities of the two women is that Miss Crawford lights her cigarettes with a dainty, ultrafeminine gold lighter, whereas her mother fiercely strikes enormous cowboy matches on the sole of her shoes.”48
Bob Thomas, one of Crawford’s biographers, overheard the following dialogue on the set one day.
DAVIS: Of course you know, Joan, that everybody is trying to work up a feud between us.
CRAWFORD: I know, dear, and isn’t that ridiculous? We’re much too professional for anything like that.49
As conventional as the observation may be, the fact is that the tortures the Hudson sisters inflict upon each other in the film—Blanche applies graciousness in the face of infirmity as though it was a painful wrestling hold while Jane, more elemental, chains her sister to the bed and starves her to death—played out in precisely the way Crawford politely denied. Davis fondly told of the day she and Joan were sitting together on the set—Joan serenely knitting—when Bette industriously began crossing out huge portions of the screenplay. “Whose dialogue are you cutting, Bette?” Joan asked. “Yours,” Bette answered, whereupon Joan burst gratifyingly into tears.50 She wasn’t really eliminating Joan’s lines, Bette confessed to Vik Greenfield; she only performed the routine to upset Joan.