Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  “Thank God for this play,” Davis declared. “It’s going to save me from those flea-bitten films. The last one I read they had me hanging in a closet. Miss Moffat has saved me—saved me.”

  Except that the next morning Logan was called to her suite and found her lying flat on her bed refusing to move, let alone perform the show that night, or ever again. Doctor’s orders. “I was walking naked through hell,” Logan observed.

  They summoned a well-known orthopedist, who announced, “It is absolutely impossible for her to walk onto the stage tonight or to think of continuing playing or even getting to her feet for another six weeks to three months. During that time she mustn’t move.” And so Miss Moffat closed.

  A muddy-sounding bootleg recording of Miss Moffat’s opening night floats around the twilight netherworld of Bette Davis collectors. One clearly hears the audience rooting for Davis; she gets a sustained round of applause at her entrance and appreciative laughs and clapping throughout the show. But the relative weakness of the score and one young actor’s cutesy sing-song delivery leave sour notes in the ear even without Davis flubbing her lines. The extent of that particular aspect of the disaster is difficult to confirm; audience members’ coughs come across more clearly on the recording than any of the dialogue. The songs are faint; the dialogue is unintelligible.

  Fish run in schools, geese in gaggles, but theater queens come in shrieks, and Miss Moffat, like Two’s Company, has provided superbly amusing schadenfreude to shrieks of queens who never saw or heard the show. But Dorian Harewood sells his bluesy numbers with passion, and Davis is so predictably off-key when she sings that it’s not only forgivable but lovable. It’s a charming sort of croaking, and it’s precisely what audiences wanted—and expected—to hear from her. Had it not been for Davis having been seized with extreme attacks of anxiety that manifested themselves in back pain horrific enough to convince two orthopedists of its authenticity, the show might well have been one of her greatest tours de force. But Davis herself killed it, and that’s a fact.

  “The audience stood up cheering and screaming every night,” she told Rex Reed about a year after Miss Moffat’s failure, “but I knew it wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted me to be a bitch, not a middle-aged schoolteacher.” (This is preposterous. They simply wanted her to be Bette Davis.) “The songs were wonderful. I sang them all and I was good at it, but it was nothing but hell. I had to carry the burden of the rewrites, and I spent three weeks in a hospital traction from the nerves and tension.” Routinely, she blamed her director: “Joshua Logan finished me off in two weeks. He was terrified of the critics and started changing things on opening night in Philly. I had one year on the road to do those changes, but I couldn’t work ten hours a day and play a different show at night. They wanted me to learn forty pages in four days. I had to get my health back before I could concentrate on that kind of work. So we closed it down. I will never go near the stage again as long as I live.” (Vik Greenfield, who ran lines with Davis in Philadelphia, confirmed that Logan kept throwing script changes at her throughout the play’s short run.)

  “I think theater is a dog’s life—grueling,” Davis told the critic Bruce Williamson seven years later. “And I’m too selfish. I find eight shows a week absolutely inhuman, plus I cannot be replaced. Someone like me, from motion pictures, cannot have an understudy because the box office for picture people is astronomical. Astronomical. If you don’t appear, customers just get up and turn in their tickets. Therefore, you have a monkey on your back and aren’t allowed even a small case of flu. It’s frightening. So you sit around between shows and worry about your health—I find that a very stupid way to live.”22

  SHE HAD MUCH more success the year before Miss Moffat—and for several years thereafter—with An Evening with Bette Davis, the first of a series dreamed up and produced by the veteran film publicist John Springer: Legendary Ladies of the Movies. It debuted at New York’s Town Hall on West Forty-third Street on February 11, 1973. The idea was to present classic film clips from the star’s career for the first half of the program and then bring the star herself out onstage to field questions from her adoring fans.

  John Springer’s son, Gary, remembers Bette’s opening night vividly.

  My dad came out and did a little introduction, and then there was a good hour or so of film clips that he’d put together, then intermission, and then there were maybe fifteen more minutes of film clips, ending of course with, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” And onstage walked Bette.

  Later on we had people write questions and pass them through, but on opening night, as soon as Bette walked onstage, every gay man in the audience ran to the stage screaming, ‘Bette! Bette! I want to be you!’ They had Baby Jane dolls. They had Bette dolls. Some were dressed as Bette. It was the campiest thing!

  They managed to quiet everybody down, and my dad did maybe a twenty minute interview with Bette. Then they opened it up to questions, and again it was just mass hysteria. They were laying palm fronds at her feet—it was such an experience.23

  She had only to stand there in velvet and satin, her hair in a blond pageboy, her lips done in a bright shade of red, and bask in her own glory. “What can I say?” she asked after the crowd finally grew quiet. “You have had a long session with me. Some of them were bad years, and some were glorious years. But, oh. . . I would go through all the bad times again for what you just did for me.”24

  Springer and Davis knew they were onto something good, and they began booking tours around the country, to England, and to Australia. Whatever she said onstage got laughs and applause.

  QUESTION: How do you stay so young?

  ANSWER: I’m really 14 years old half the time.

  QUESTION: How do you think of yourself as a legend?

  ANSWER: In a coffin.25

  During the question-and-answer portion of the show at the Palm Springs High School auditorium, a voice called out from the audience, “Who was your favorite producer at Warner Bros.?” “She got off her stool, walked to the edge of the stage, peered into the darkness, and called back, ‘Hal Wallis? Is that you, Hal?’ ” Wallis’s widow, Martha Hyer Wallis, continues:

  She said, “You know you gave me my best roles at the studio,” and she named them and thanked him.

  We had drinks with her after the show and, later, she came to dinner at our home in Rancho Mirage. Age had mellowed both Bette and Hal, but she still seemed driven—typically wired. I made sure that she was the center of attention, respected, revered—no other guests better known or with bigger egos. But she never seemed to relax. She was wound so tight she seemed to vibrate—tense, taut, very Margo Channingish.26

  While in London on the Legendary Ladies tour, Davis cut a record with the help of the composer Roger Webb and the lyricist Norman Newell. After an afternoon’s worth of studio time, Webb invited Davis to dinner along with his wife. “She arrived with two cartons of cigarettes, drank her way through an awful lot of booze, and totally ignored me,” Margot Webb remembered. “She got on very well with the boys, Roger and Norman, but she didn’t speak a word to me through the dinner. I thought, ‘This is awful, I feel I ought to say something to her.’ I wasn’t allowed to call her Bette, though Roger and Norman were, so I said, ‘Miss Davis, during the show, a young man asked you what I thought was quite an impertinent question.’ She said, ‘What was that?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he asked you if you wore underwear during love scenes on a film.’ She turned around to me and said, ‘You stupid ———cow.’ (I won’t tell you the language she used, but you can imagine what the word was.) She said, ‘You’ve been in the business long enough. You should know.’ And that was all she said to me.”27

  Mrs. John Springer recalled a similar antagonism toward women, particularly spouses. She accompanied her husband into the VIP lounge at Kennedy Airport on one occasion only to be greeted by Bette angrily shouting, “No wives! No wives!”28

  LATE BETTE DAVIS offers few pleasures. For every delic
ate, watchable The Whales of August there are five Scream Pretty Peggys. Jimmy Sangster cowrote the script for that one, a made-for-television horror movie starring Davis as the reclusive mother of a creepy, Norman Bates–like sculptor (Ted Bessell) who hires coeds to clean their mansion. The film, described by its own director as “a second-rate thriller based on cliché ideas,” aired on ABC in November 1973.29 Bette herself was succinct: “Scream Pretty Peggy? She never even screamed.”30

  She was equally dismissive of another schlocky-scary effort: “I was in one really bloody film, which turned out much bloodier than indicated in the script. That was Burnt Offerings, and if you haven’t seen it, congratulations.”31

  The Judge and Jake Wyler, another failed series pilot, aired as a made-for-television movie in early December 1972. Davis played a hypochondriacal retired judge-turned-private-investigator; Doug McClure was Judge Meredith’s ex-con sidekick. Vik Greenfield, who accompanied Davis to a number of shoots during his employment as her assistant, recalls only one occasion when she blew up: During the filming of Jake Wyler, McClure showed up late one day and was obviously hungover and having a hard time. But Davis didn’t take it out on him. She took it out (naturally) on the director, David Lowell Rich.32

  Davis’s interminable filmography certainly presents her biographers with a challenge. Barbara Leaming, for example, solves the problem by covering The Anniversary, Connecting Rooms, Bunny O’Hare, Lo Scopone Scientifico (an Italian comedy), and Burnt Offerings as well as the TV pilots Madame Sin, The Judge and Jake Wyler, and Hello Mother, Goodbye! in a single paragraph. In the same spirit, then, and with the same literary goal. . .

  In January 1970, she turned up on an episode of her friend Robert Wagner’s hit series It Takes a Thief, in which she played the world’s greatest lady jewel thief who was then reduced to poverty. This led to 1972’s Madame Sin, which costarred Wagner (who also served as executive producer) and concerned Bette’s character’s diabolical attempt to take over the world. As the title character, Bette is made up rather like Gale Sondergaard in The Letter.

  As the Davis encyclopedist Randall Riese drily puts it, “The Dark Secret of Harvest Home was shot on location in Mentor, Ohio, and starred Bette as a witch with a pitchfork in a very strange neighborhood.”33 There’s a cult involved. The five-hour, two-part made-for-television movie aired on NBC on January 23 and 24, 1978.

  In 1980 she made White Mama, the story of an aging white woman and her friendship with an African-American boy from the ghetto. APiano for Mrs. Cimino and Right of Way were both made in 1982. The former found Bette as the aging owner of a music store; the latter costarred Jimmy Stewart and was about the right of an elderly couple to end their lives on their own terms.

  In Agatha Christie’s “Murder with Mirrors” Miss Marple, played by Helen Hayes, helps her old friend Carrie (Davis) save her family’s estate—and herself—from covetous, murderous forces. Murder with Mirrors aired on CBS on February 20, 1985. As Summers Die aired on HBO on May 18, 1986. Jamie Lee Curtis has said that her primary motivation in taking the role in As Summers Die was to play opposite Bette Davis; “How many actors of my generation can say that?” Curtis asked. Someone once asked her what first came to mind when hearing Davis’s name, and Curtis answered, “Heat. I have to qualify this. I was president of the homeowners association at the Colonial House in West Hollywood where she lived. I would get calls from her. ‘Hello. Jamie. This is Bette Davis. It’s too cold. I want the heat.’ I’d say, ‘Miss Davis, I understand you are chilly, but it’s July. I can’t in good conscience go to the board of directors and say that we’re going to turn on the heat and charge people for heat in July in Southern California. I really would suggest you get a heater or plug ins.’ She’d answer, ‘It’s too expensive on my electric bill.’ ”34

  Although it’s one of Davis’s more highly regarded made-for-television dramas and in fact won her an Emmy Award, Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter is just an even more lackluster On Golden Pond. Bette is the ornery, resentful mother; Gena Rowlands is the daughter who ran away from home twenty-one years earlier and returns with terminal cancer. Given the film’s reputation, Davis’s performance is surprisingly uninspired. Mistaking shouting for emotional depth, she punches her lines and stomps around in sensible Yankee slacks and milks a predictable breakdown scene of the sort that earns honors for familiar actresses whose best years are behind them. Strangers aired on CBS in May 1979.

  “I wanted badly to win that Emmy,” Davis admitted. “I felt I deserved it, if not for the performance I gave, then for the difficulty of the part and the hardships of the filming. The setting was a Rhode Island summer, but we worked in the bitter winter cold of Montecito, in northern California.”35 The older Davis got, the better Warner Bros. looked in retrospect.

  “They claim it’s cheaper to shoot on location,” Bette griped to Bruce Williamson. “I claim that we’re all stunt people today—we’re not actors anymore. When we shot Family Reunion, we were outdoors, with the temperature 22 below, trying to act of all things!”36 The four-hour, two-part miniseries, which aired on NBC on November 11 and 12, 1981, finds Davis as a retired Yankee schoolteacher who goes on a genealogical odyssey. Its gimmick was the casting of stars’ offspring: Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson’s daughter Roberta; Don Murray and Hope Lange’s son Christopher; John Garfield’s daughter Julie; Victor Borge’s daughter Frederikke; and Bette’s grandson, J. Ashley Hyman. Bette had been impressed by Ashley’s ability to mimic movie stars, particularly Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Still, Davis writes, “The day we rehearsed our first scene I had no idea what to expect. He was terrific. He hit his marks, remembered his lines, did all the right things.”

  Davis grew concerned, however, about the fact that when Ashley was some distance away from the director, Fielder Cook, he couldn’t hear his instructions. She called B.D. and told her that she wanted to take Ashley to a specialist, to which B.D. is said to have replied, “If you want to waste your money, go ahead.” It turns out Ashley had an eraser jammed up his nose. “Finding this eraser did away with the many headaches he had had for years. No more aspirin daily.” Unfortunately, the misplaced eraser led to partial deafness in Ashley’s left ear.37

  * * *

  “YOU TELL HER.”

  “No, you tell her.”

  This is the conversation Mike Merrill and Vik Greenfield had on the sidewalk of Bette’s Westport house in 1971 after they saw a screening of Bunny O’Hare. Bette, aware of trouble, had sent them as scouts. The news they bore wasn’t encouraging.

  With its inane premise, tacky costumes, irritatingly bouncy early 1970s score, and execution that makes the word shoddy seem like a compliment, Bunny O’Hare really ought to be delightful. But it’s a plain bore, the rock-bottom nadir of Davis’s career. The eponymous Mrs. O’Hare (Bette) awakes one morning to find a bulldozer about to demolish her house at the insistence of the bank. Ernest Borgnine shows up as a used toilet dealer and spirits Bunny’s commode away before the bulldozer knocks the house down, and together they take off in Borgnine’s ramshackle camper. “I betcha didn’t always sell second-hand toilets,” Bunny pleasantly remarks. No, he used to be a bank robber. So they dress up as hippies—Bette in a Peggy Lipton wig and Peggy Cass sunglasses, Borg-nine bearing an uncanny resemblence to Jerry Garcia—and launch a late-in-life of crime. “This is a stickup,” Bunny comments to a startled teller. “I’ve got a gun in my purse. Howdja like to have your guts spilled all over the floor?” It’s not just crap; it’s dull crap.

  There was a preview screening at the Picwood Theatre in Los Angeles on June 24, 1971, but as Whitney Stine remarked, “the showing was poorly attended, probably because many Davis admirers were attending a Gay Liberation Parade on Hollywood Boulevard at the time.”38

  Rumors grew, and Bette, to her professed shock, discovered that Bunny O’Hare’s artistic integrity had been violated—that the producer, Samuel Z. Arkoff, had peremptorily spirited the film away from its auteur, Gerd Oswald,
and had recut it and ordered that additional scenes be shot. Farcically, the case of Bunny O’Hare ended up in litigation when, on August 23, 1971, Davis filed suit in the New York Supreme Court against American International Pictures. She asked for $3.3 million in damages. As Stine phrased it, “AIP made fraudulent misrepresentation to induce her to star in a film designed to be a social documentary with humorous undertones”—Stine reported this with the prose equivalent of a straight face—“and, after the film was finished, transformed it into a substantially different film.” But the feisty Samuel Z. Arkoff was not one to sit idly by and let himself be sued, so on November 1, AIP countersued for $17.5 million.39 The suit was settled out of court for undisclosed terms.

  The auteur took Bette’s side. “I feel that they mutilated the picture completely after I turned in my final cut,” Gerd Oswald told an interviewer as though he were Orson Welles lamenting The Magnificent Ambersons. “They made a different film from that which we had conceived.”40

  Bunny O’Hare did, however, find one prominent admirer. The generous and genial Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, “Certainly not since What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? have I admired [Davis’s] wit, courage, discipline, talent, and guts in quite the same degree as I did yesterday. . . . The gimmick is dreadful, [but] Miss Davis gives a performance that may be one of the funniest and most legitimate of her career.”41

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