by Ed Sikov
23
BETRAYAL
IN THE SUMMER OF 1976, BETTE DAVIS traveled to Colorado to play Mildred Pearce—not the old Crawford role (which is spelled Pierce), but rather the mother of Aimee Semple McPherson, the Pentecostal preacher who faked her own kidnapping in 1926, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930, and committed suicide in 1944. The Disappearance of Aimee is essentially a courtroom drama, the story of McPherson’s trial on charges relating to the ersatz kidnapping. McPherson was originally to have been played by Ann-Margret, but she dropped out and Faye Dunaway took the role.*
“I can imagine no circumstances under which I would work again with Miss Dunaway,” Davis sniffed in This ’n That. “It is possible she feels the same about me, but I believe I have the stronger claim.” According to Davis, she’d wanted to play Aimee herself twenty-five years earlier, but “at the time no studio would touch the story; the censors would never permit a film about a woman who was the head of a church and was also a whore. So I ended up later playing her mother.
“We filmed The Disappearance of Aimee in Denver, in the summer, and day after day Miss Dunaway kept the cast and crew waiting. She had a fondness for riding around town all night in a chauffeur-driven limousine, sipping champagne in the back seat. [Dunaway showed up late] while nearly two thousand extras sweltered in a church that could not be air-conditioned. . . . To help pass the time, I went onstage and sang ‘I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy’ from Baby Jane.”1
* McPherson’s mother’s nickname was Minnie and she married James Kennedy; thus Davis’s character is called Minnie Kennedy in the film.
The film’s director, Anthony Harvey, had been a Davis fan since his youth in Britain. He and his mother would see any Davis picture that came out, so he was especially excited by the prospect of directing her. “I just loved working with Bette,” Harvey said,
because she had a wonderful, dark sense of humor—gritty, gritty, very straightforward. The very first time I met her, she said, “You know something? That cameraman of yours—we’ll have to get someone else.” And I said, “Bette, if you get someone else I have to leave.” Then she saw some of the tests and thought they were pretty good. She said, “I don’t know if he’s a great photographer, but he sure is a looker.” He was a marvelous cameraman, actually—Jim Crabe.
We were shooting in this exhausting place, but she was always there at 6 in the morning, long before anyone else; knew all her lines; tremendous!2
Predictably, there was one other altercation. Davis’s hairdresser, Peggy Shannon, had concocted—obviously at Davis’s behest—what Harvey described as an “All About Eve wig,” and it wasn’t at all right for the part. “My fans expect me to look like that,” Davis argued, but Harvey stood his ground. Harvey sat outside her trailer reading a book for about two hours, and finally Peggy Shannon came out and said, “Miss Davis would like you to see her.” “And there she was looking absolutely great, with perfectly marvelous hair of her own, and that was that. In both occasions—the cameraman and the wig—I thought, you know, she admired you if you were stubborn and stood up to her.”
Davis plays McPherson’s mother understatedly, giving the charismatic Dunaway the lioness’s share of the histrionics. But Aimee’s mother does have one notable moment. Standing in front of her daughter’s vast congregation while Aimee goes missing, she leads the crowd in a hymn, and she’s remarkably on-key: “In the sweet. By and by. We shall meet—on that byoo—tee—ful—shore.” The Disappearance of Aimee aired on NBC in November 1976. Harvey last saw Davis sometime in the 1980s. He was driving down Sunset Boulevard on the western edge of West Hollywood, and there she was—standing right in the middle of traffic. “It was near Doheny, down from where she used to live, and she was looking for a taxi. So I pulled up. She said, ‘Oh, I’m fine—don’t worry about me.’ And, very reluctantly, I drove off.”
TWO ADORABLE SNUB-NOSED children, Tia and Tony (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann), arrive from outer space in a large metal frisbee in the opening scene of Return from Witch Mountain, an unremittingly bad Disney picture from 1978. The villains, Letha (Bette) and Dr. Victor Gannon (Christopher Lee), kidnap the kids to utilize their skills at levitation in a terroristic attempt to take over a plutonium plant. The boy executes his tricks without apparent strain, but whenever Tia wants to make something move, she jams her hands against her temples and squints as though she’s suffering a terrific migraine.
The children get separated when Davis whisks Tony away for kinky experimentation—she strips the boy to the waist before binding him to a table—leaving Tia stranded in a bad part of town. Tia promptly gets involved in a gang fight among multiracial nine-year-olds, all of whom are quite amazed when she telekinetically clobbers the bad ones with a bunch of garbage cans. Later, after being chloroformed, Tia, too, finds herself strapped to a gurney. “I’ve put her into a state of comatose neutralization,” says Christopher Lee, referring inadvertently to most of the audience as well. Luckily, Tia manages to escape and enlists the aid of Alfred the friendly goat, who runs off to Tia’s new friends and communicates a necessarily obscure message.
Bette participates gamely in this awful exercise, and it’s just plain sad to see a great star working at such sorry stuff solely for the sake of employment. The cute kids levitate her at the end of Return from Witch Mountain, which features neither a witch nor a mountain. They hoist her up and hang her in midair. “I’ve lost my faith in science,” the star of Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, The Letter, Now, Voyager, and All About Eve sadly remarks, aloft.
BETTE HAD ONE reservation about accepting the role of Mrs. Van Schuyler in the 1978 Death on the Nile: the director, John Guillermin, planned to shoot on location in Egypt. “But what if they start a war while I’m there?” she asked her agent, Robbie Lantz. “They wouldn’t dare,” Lantz replied.3
“She was a terrific pro,” said Guillermin.4 “I just adored her. The first day, we were shooting on location in a real boat on the Nile. (That’s how we started; we finished up at Pinewood Studios later.) And Bette was sitting there, all made up and ready in costume, and I was sitting on the rail of the riverboat. I was in shorts, naturally. She was looking at me. I said, ‘What’s up, Bette?’ And she said, ‘You’ve got nice legs.’ From that moment on, she was a darling. Everybody liked her and had a lot of laughs with her.”
Death on the Nile, adapated by Guillermin and Anthony Shaffer from Agatha Christie’s novel, presents a collection of disparate characters dying from a series of creatively lethal acts. It features, in addition to Bette, an international cast of stars: Maggie Smith, Peter Ustinov, Mia Farrow, David Niven, Angela Lansbury, George Kennedy, and Jack Warden.
Davis was seventy years old in 1978. “She had a little bit of a problem sometimes remembering her dialogue,” Guillermin continued. “She’d make pauses that didn’t exist in the script. But she was such a consummate pro that they were pregnant pauses, and she got away with it. She did it so well you’d think it was the way the damn thing was written.” Guillermin didn’t approach Death on the Nile’s screenplay as though it had been written by God or Billy Wilder: “It didn’t matter whether she got the fucking dialogue right. If the scene is right, the dialogue doesn’t mean a fuck if it’s saying the same thing.”
Given the number of stars crammed together on a Nile riverboat, there was bound to be friction among the all-star egos, but as Guillermin saw it the tensions weren’t generated by Bette. “Maggie was difficult,” Guillermin noted. “She had had a very expensive wig made in London and got terribly upset after Mia saw the wig and said that it was the color of her hair. I had to tell Maggie that she couldn’t wear that wig, and she hated me for the rest of the film.” Was there tension between Olivia Hussey and Bette? “No, not with Bette. With Mia.” Hussey is said to have reprimanded Farrow’s child, “and Mia got really angry and went for her physically. I don’t know—I think it was the girl that Woody married later. Anyway, Mia wasn’t pleased, and I don’t blame her. If anybody smacked my child I
’d give them a smack back.” (Bette herself claimed that Hussey stopped speaking to her after Davis complained about having to listen to Hussey’s Eastern religious chanting.) What about B. D. Hyman’s claim that there was trouble between Davis and Ustinov? “That’s absolute bullshit. I never saw Bette and Peter having anything but fun together. He was very much a gentleman and had a wonderful sense of irony. They used to kid each other mercilessly.
“She had this heavy period stuff on, you know—her wardrobe. And of course it was Egypt—115 in the shade some days and no breeze. I’m amazed that she was on time every day at her age, never missed a day, never was sick, never complained. As you can see, I liked Bette,” Guillermin concluded.
“I especially enjoyed working with Maggie Smith, who played the companion to my rich dowager,” Davis wrote in This ’n That. “Maggie and I felt a few more scenes between us would have been an addition to the film. The relationship between our characters was hilarious.” The aristocratic Bowers (Smith) has been reduced to servitude—she’s Mrs. Van Schuyler’s companion, nurse, and prison matron—and she takes her frustrations out on Mrs. Van Schuyler. Guillermin’s firm denial to the contrary notwithstanding—“no, no, absolutely not!”—there really is a hint of sadomasochism to the mistress-slave relationship. Not only do they enjoy mutual verbal abuse at every opportunity, but the mannish, suited Bowers wrenches the femme-y old lady roughly by the arm toward what she calls her “massage” and yanks her again when it’s time for bed. These precious moments are the closest Bette Davis ever came to playing any kind of lesbian, let alone a kinky one.
IN SKYWARD, A made-for-television movie directed by Ron Howard in 1980, Davis plays an aging pilot who teaches a paraplegic girl (Suzy Gilstrap) how to fly against the wishes of her overly protective parents. It was shot at an airstrip outside of Dallas. “The film was a pleasant one to make except for the intolerable heat and electrical storms,” Davis wrote. Pleasant for her, perhaps, but not for everyone else. “Goddamn!” one of Davis’s Texan drivers later declared. “I drove her for one day and asked for somebody else. That mean ol’ gal—she was the nastiest thing we had down here since we drove the snakes out.”5
“I got my first taste of hell with her,” drawled Skyward’s production coordinator, Betty Buckley. Before Davis arrived in Dallas, Anson Williams, Howard’s sidekick from the sitcom Happy Days and one of Skyward’s producers, asked Buckley to stock Davis’s refrigerator.
She drank Belle scotch and Belle vodka—it’s imprinted on my brain, since I had to get what she wanted. Anson was kind of pacing up and down going, “I’ve got better demographics than she does” because of Happy Days. As he was running out the door, I asked him what she smoked, and he said, “I don’t know—Columbian?” At one point Paul Lynde was in town and called to invite her to something, so I picked up the phone and said, “Miss Davis, you have an invitation . . .” I never even got to the Paul Lynde part. She just screeched, “There will be no social engagements on this picture!” [Then she threw the telephone.] I could actually hear it hitting the wall. At other times I’d call her to say that dailies were at 7:30 or 6:00 or whenever they were, and she would say, “Oh, thank you—thank you so much,” and be just delightful and lovely. She was either gracious or terrifying.
John Kuri, another of Skyward’s producers, has more positive memories.
We were working outside at an airport. It was so hot that the legs of the director’s chairs were sinking into the tarmac. [Davis was quite anxious, since she was in her seventies, and every day’s newspaper featured accounts of elderly people dying from the heat.] She gave us an edict: “I will not work when the temperature gets over 100.” It was kind of funny because the temperature never got under 100.
Our special effects guy created a wonderful air conditioning rig which sat right behind her director’s chair. We got one of the taller chairs for Bette, and a large umbrella, and Bette would sit there and hold court. [Cocktail hour began at 11:00 or 11:30.] She enjoyed martinis. She was just a major diva sitting there in the sun under the umbrella with the air conditioning going, her cigarette in one hand, her drink in the other.
I’m not trying to imply that she was inebriated. By no means was she that. She was very professional. But she did enjoy her drinks and made no bones about it. She was a tremendous pro. She hit her marks, she did everything we needed, she did it beautifully—she was a real sport and a pleasure to work with.6
Betty Buckley remembered the way it all ended: “On the last day of the shoot she told the producers she was going to leave the set when it got to be noon or 100 degrees, whichever came first. The producers got hysterical and were calling Lloyd’s of London to figure what to do. They were filming the climax when the parents pull up and jump out of their car yelling and screaming at her character. There was drama all over the set—in front of the camera, behind the camera. . . . We got everything filmed by noon and said a collective, ‘Goodbye, Miss Davis,’ and she was gone.”
Davis later let it be known that she thought the idea of casting Suzy Gilstrap, herself a paraplegic, was “cruel if not exploitative.” Not only did she deplore “this kind of realism,” but she felt it was wrong of Ron Howard to give Gilstrap a taste of a world “it was obvious she could never be a part of.”7 Gilstrap went on to become a vice president at Howard’s production company, Imagine.
IN HIS 1982 interview with Davis in Playboy, Bruce Williamson asked her whether she thought Hollywood’s golden age was better than the contemporary world of American moviemaking. The old days were a lot of hard work, Davis replied, then added, “Maybe the difference is that the world is less golden. We’re in a mess, and our scripts reflect it. Everything gets bigger and more vicious: terror in the streets, dismembered hands floating around. I am truthfully horrified by all the violence and blood on the screen.”8
One can see why she was attracted to Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last, an old-fashioned costume melodrama about the deliciously trauma-ridden early years of Gloria Vanderbilt. Directed for television by Waris Hussein, Little Gloria stars Angela Lansbury as Gloria’s aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; Christopher Plummer as her charming but derelict father, Reggie Vanderbilt; Glynis Johns as her flamboyant maternal grandmother, Laura Fitzpatrick Morgan; Maureen Stapleton as her nanny; and Lucy Gutteridge as Gloria’s mother. Bette plays Gloria’s paternal grandmother, Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt.
“Say horrible things about Bette Davis? That’s the last thing I would do!” Waris Hussein declared in a shocked tone of voice when asked to spill some dirt.9 “She was not in any way horrendous. The problem is that she was a hugely professional woman. And anybody who crossed her on an amateur level, or gave her false information, or made bad excuses, got the bad end of her professional anger.”
When Hussein and his producers were trying to cast the leads, Hussein suggested Bette Davis. Nobody took the suggestion seriously because Davis’s character had only eighteen pages in a two-hundred-page script. “Look,” Hussein proposed, “let’s see what she says. All she can do is turn us down.” When they met, he asked her what tempted her to take the role. “And she said, ‘I’ll tell you this: I’ve never accepted an 18-page script in my life, but Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt was one of the richest women in America—that was a huge temptation. And the script appeals.’ ”
They rehearsed for ten days in New York, but without Bette; Hussein was told that Davis didn’t want to rehearse. Bette arrived from Los Angeles on the first day of shooting and checked into the Wyndham Hotel. Hussein got a phone call—would he go and see her after finishing the shoot? He said he would as soon as he wrapped.
I went over and—I’ll never forget—I was walking down this long corridor from the elevators, and there framed against the doorway, standing there waiting for me, was Bette Davis. For me, this was a legend.
She doesn’t say hello, she doesn’t say anything. She walks me into the room; we sit down; and I’m looking at her hair—she’s got a silver-gray wig on with huge sort of bouff
ant rolls on either side. She said, “What are you looking at?” I said, “I’m looking at your hair, Miss Davis, because it looks very . . . I can see what you’re . . . you’re trying to show me how Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt would look. . . . But it’s very ’40s to me.” And she said, “40s? 40s?! I was the 40s!”
So I said, “Miss Davis, I appreciate that. The thing is, I suggest that the hair would be much closer to the face, because we’re dealing with the ’20s.” Without further ado, she said, “Did you hear what the man said?” And there, hiding in the corner, was her assistant. They went off and fussed around for around fifteen minutes and came back with her hair pushed much closer to the head. I said, “That’s perfect. That’s really right.” And she said, “Good. Now I know what you’re doing.”
“Why didn’t you ask me to come to rehearsals?” Davis demanded. Hussein responded that he’d been told that she didn’t want to rehearse. “That’s absolute nonsense. That is the producers trying to economize on bringing me over and keeping me in a hotel for ten days. Did anyone ask me whether I wanted to do it? I understand now what kind of people you’re working for.” She bore a robust resentment against the producers for the rest of the production; after she determined precisely who the enemy was, she was firmly on Hussein’s side.
Davis had an agreement in her contract that at six o’clock precisely she would leave the set, whether or not she was in midsentence. “I was told to understand that, and I did,” Hussein said.
Except one day we had a very elaborate banquet scene, and we were shooting in the Flagler mansion [the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum in Palm Beach], and we had only one day to shoot this very expensive scene, and I had to progress from a lengthy long shot toward her. She watched me setting the whole thing up, and she summoned me over and said, “Mr. Hussein.” She never called me Waris—only Mr. Hussein—and I called her Miss Davis. She said, “Can I have a word with you? You’re not going to finish with me by 6 o’clock, you know.” I said, “I think I can.” She said, “You can try. But I can tell you right now you’re not going to finish it.” I jokingly said, “What time do you think I’ll finish with you, Miss Davis?” She said, “10 o’clock.”