by Ed Sikov
There are a couple of other people who could drink me under the table, but she was the only woman who could. Her capacity for booze was just amazing. She would insist on pouring the drinks. She’d pour you a tumbler—not a highball—of pure vodka with a piece of ice.2
Mart Crowley vividly recalled a dinner party he attended at Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner’s place, with Bette in an increasing state of hostile inebriation.
They had to be careful who they asked to dinner with Bette Davis. They’d ask me—she knew me, she’d worked with me, she liked to dance with me! But Natalie knew what a handful she was, and she didn’t have a lot of patience with it. [One night] it was just Bette, R.J., Natalie, and me. Davis was very much in her cups and flirting like mad with R.J., and Natalie was rolling her eyes and about to say “I’ve got to go to bed” and get out of there. And Bette, who was well on her way and in a cantankerous mood, said something about the only roles she was being offered at the time were actresses. She said, “I played a movie star once—a washed-up movie star—in a picture called The Star.” And then she said to Natalie in the most condescending, sarcastic way: “Of course you’re too young to re-mem-ber.” And Natalie very cooly said, “Bette. I played your daughter in that movie.” Bette was so stunned and shocked. She didn’t have the Noël Coward savoir faire to plunge right on with an “Of course you did, my dear.” She didn’t know what to say. In fact, I don’t even think she knew if it was true or not.3
“BETTE DAVIS WAS very funny,” Roddy McDowall once observed, “but she didn’t have a sense of humor.”4 McDowall knew that she was fully capable of coming out with hilarious statements, but according to him she didn’t even know they were a scream, let alone why. Chuck Pollack, too, insisted that Davis generally didn’t realize that what she said was funny. “She wasn’t really witty,” he said. “She would give incorrect responses to questions, which turned out to be what people thought was amusing. Like those shows she did. The audience would ask questions, and she would misunderstand them. She’d get it totally off, and the answer would be disconnected. As far as the audience was concerned, they were fans, so she could have stood there and read the telephone book and they would have loved it.” Pollack was present at one of the London shows. “They loved her—everything she said. She never let herself be stumped. She’d just give preposterous answers to questions she hadn’t understood, and the audience loved it. But after the show, she said to me, ‘Chuck, I have no idea why they laughed.’ ”5
James McCourt described it more cerebrally: “She had intuitive thrusts.” She was a natural performer, and she’d feed off her audience’s reaction. “She’d say something, and some time along the line she’d get that it was funny.”6 Vik Greenfield put it another way: “She’d get a bee in her bonnet. But it would be the wrong bee.”7
Greenfield related the story of accompanying Davis to a political rally at Madison Square Garden that had been organized by Shirley MacLaine. Carol Channing came toddling over and greeted her, saying, “Bette! I’m Carol Channing!” To which Bette replied, “Of course you are,” and marched right past her.
Martha Wallis told a signal anecdote.
I remember one evening when Hal was honored by the industry at some event that took place at the old Palace Theatre near Hollywood and Vine. Bette was to introduce and present him with the award. She stood at the podium while Hal sat directly behind her onstage. She talked on and on, praising him and telling wonderful stories about their working together. She finished to great applause, then went back to Hal, took him firmly by the hand, and led him off the stage.
He stopped, pulled away from her gently, and said, “Uh, Bette? I think I’m supposed to say something, too.”
The audience roared. Grinning from ear to ear, Bette went back to the podium and said, “Now you see what he had to put up with at Warner Bros.!”8
Bette’s response certainly proved that she could think on her feet, let alone joke her way out of a bad situation. But the laughter she generated was rooted in inadvertence.
Not always, though. “I suppose the dead birds with mayonnaise were kind of unattractive,” Bette once acknowledged, referring to the famous scenes in Baby Jane. “And the rat,” she added. But they played well into her own sense of humor. “Not long after Baby Jane opened,” Davis continued, “I gave a cocktail party in New York and had the head chef at the Plaza Hotel make a pate for me in the shape of a rat. Everyone got a big laugh out of it—this awful rat made of pate served on a huge silver platter, looking a lot like the one in the film. Oh, I tell you, it was heaven when I lifted the top off.”9
Davis’s wit was as extraordinary as her presence of mind, but as often as not the laughs she pulled resulted from gaffes, illogical twists that made sense anyway. At other times she knew damn well what she was saying. Anthony Harvey, her director on The Disappearance of Aimee, fondly recalled her delight in telling friends during the 1980s, “Lit-tle Ron-nie Rea-gan. Terrrrr-ible actor. Now he’s Pres-ident. God!”10
“The laaaaaast movie I made with Joan was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” she used to say. “I played Baby Jane. She played whatever.”
What difference does consciousness of comedy make in the end? Bette Davis was highly quotable and, in her own way, brilliantly funny. One evening during the filming of The Whales of August, the cast and crew were sitting around the dinner table when Davis started ragging on Crawford. After a while, Lindsay Anderson decided he’d heard enough, and he slammed his hand on the table and told Davis bluntly that Crawford had been a friend of his and he wasn’t going to listen to any more. To which Davis, not missing a beat, calmly replied, “Just because a person’s dead doesn’t mean they changed.”
ON MARCH 1, 1977, the American Film Institute awarded Bette Davis with its Life Achievement Award at a black-tie ceremony at the Beverly-Hilton Hotel. She was the first female recipient of the award; the previous winners were John Ford, James Cagney, Orson Welles, and William Wyler. Over a thousand people watched clips of Davis’s films and heard tributes from such notables as Jane Fonda, who emceed the event; Henry Fonda; Olivia de Havilland; George Stevens Jr.; and Cicely Tyson. After accepting the award, Davis credited four men who particularly helped her career: George Arliss, Jack Warner, Hal Wallis, and William Wyler. She concluded by honoring Ruthie: “How her eyes would have sparkled if she could have been here tonight.”11
Davis’s escort that night was Ray Stricklyn, who had played her son in The Catered Affair and who was then working as a publicist in the Hollywood office of John Springer and Associates. “She adored Ray,” Stricklyn’s lover, David Galligan, said. “She was an absolute harridan with me, but she was a pussycat with him.” Galligan, who also worked at Springer, recalled that there were innumerable requests for interviews at the time of the AFI award. Stricklyn told him to decline them all on Davis’s behalf, with one exception: Galligan was to call Davis about doing an interview for a charity for mentally retarded children.
“She answered: ‘Hel-lo?’ ” Galligan remembered. “As soon as I started talking I knew I was losing steam. I could feel my voice shaking. ‘Oh, hi, Miss Davis, this is John Springer Associates . . .’ ‘What do you want?’ And I said, ‘I was wondering—I have all these requests. . .’ ‘Why did you call me?’ ‘Well, there’s one in particular that’s from a retarded children’s . . .’ ‘Why would you think I’d be interested in that?! Don’t ever call me again!’ And she slammed down the phone.”12
Stricklyn accompanied Davis not only to the AFI award but also, the following evening, to the opening of Geraldine Fitzgerald’s nightclub act at Studio One, a gay club in West Hollywood. Chuck Pollack, Olivia de Havilland, Robert Osborne, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Henreid were also there to witness Bette being mobbed by a group of gay fans.13
As early as 1942, in an extraordinary article in the Ladies Home Journal, Bette openly wished that she had a “sissy” husband—one who would do the housework and shopping and cooking for her, all the while appreciating the finer
things in life.14 By the 1970s, she was much more explicit. “Let me say, a more artistic, appreciative group of people for the arts does not exist,” Bette Davis told the Advocate in 1977. She was referring, of course, to gay men. “And conceited as it may sound, I think a great deal of it has to do with their approval of my work—the seriousness of my work. They are more knowledgeable, more loving of the arts. They make the average male look stupid.”15
When visiting Los Angeles in the dozen or fifteen years before she moved back to Hollywood in 1977, she usually stayed with Chuck Pollack. “She liked to sit in the kitchen—a big country kitchen. That was what she considered her style,” Pollack remembered. “She loved to play housewife—dressing very plainly and wearing no makeup unless she was being interviewed. In the morning, she was plain old Ruth Elizabeth. By noon, she had become Bette Davis. By cocktail hour, she was the imperial Bette Davis. One morning I said to her, ‘You’re all your characters rolled into one.’ She couldn’t stop laughing.”
But despite the title of her first book, Bette Davis found solitude difficult if not impossible to bear. “She couldn’t be left alone—couldn’t stand to be by herself,” observed Pollack. “She had to have attention every second, like a child. She was very, very needy.” She proposed marriage to Pollack, who she knew was gay. Was she serious? “She was,” said Pollack—“at the moment.” From time to time she would even present herself sexually to Pollack, who never responded the way she wanted him to. “She never got clear about why a man would want a man. She didn’t understand that it wasn’t a choice.” She did, however, tell Pollack about a female magazine writer Bette had known for a long time—a writer who had offered Davis the chance to experiment with a lesbian relationship. Bette declined.
Davis also proposed marriage to her equally gay personal assistant, Vik Greenfield. Once again, she was perfectly serious—at the moment. “But she’d have gotten cold feet” before going through with it, Green-field insisted.
Whitney Stine claimed that Davis proposed to him as well. Stine also declined. (Stine suffered a heart attack and died on October 11, 1989, five days after Davis.)
Davis’s need for gay men’s companionship—with Davis being only semiconscious of the men’s sexual orientation—was long-standing. While living at Twin Bridges, Davis involved herself with any number of younger men far beneath her in intelligence and, certainly, wealth. The task of informing Bette that one or another was obviously gay fell to her oldest friend and current Westport neighbor Robin Brown. “Oh, no!” Bette would protest; “I’m going to be the one to change him.”16
Dotson Rader recalled the evening they got to talking about Making Love.
I’d seen it on cable. I was crazy about Michael Ontkean, and I asked her if she’d met him. She said no. I said, “Oh, he’s so gorgeous. There’s a movie you’ve got to see—Making Love.” I told her what it was about. “Oh, that movie! I know that movie!” She said she could only watch it up to a point— “when they started doing whatever it is that they do!” She said she appreciated the fact that she had a big gay following—she didn’t understand it, but she appreciated it—and she realized that one of the reasons for the longevity of her career was that gay men found her sympathetic. She was aware that drag queens “did” her, and she thought it was all rather jolly. But she never understood what gay men saw in her.
She also didn’t understand what they actually did in bed. She said, “I find it shocking. Do they actually do that?” From that point, there was a discussion—in a very specific, explicit way—about what two men do in bed. There was an undeniable prurience in her interest, but at the same time she assumed a posture of almost Puritanical shock and disgust. It wasn’t “deer in the headlights” exactly, but . . . She couldn’t stand what she was seeing, but she couldn’t look away either. I don’t know how much of a pose it was, but I do remember she was very emphatic about the fact that until Making Love she had no idea what gay men did. Which I find impossible to believe. I was surprised at the vividness of her questions. She was very keenly interested in the physical mechanics of male sex.
. . . I think that’s pretty much how she continued to see the world: there were men who were prissy, and there were men who were pansies, but she didn’t connect the word “pansy” with a sexual act.
On several occasions she tried to put the make on me. She had a big chaise, where she would sit. Someone else would have patted the cushion. She would slap it. “Oh, come and sit over here.” I’d go over and sit down, and her hand would end up on my thigh—which was fine with me.17
“The very first celebrity I heard from when The Boys in the Band was a success was Bette,” Mart Crowley declared. “I was out of money and staying on a friend’s couch. God knows how Violla tracked me down, but the phone rang, and a voice said, ‘Bette Davis! Oh, I’m so happy for you—all the reviews—divine! What are you doing right now? We’ve got to have a drink!’ ” Crowley went over to the Plaza, where Bette was staying. “She said, ‘What have you read?’ I said ‘Myra Breckenridge.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘It’s a novel by Gore Vidal, and by the way, there’s a very good part in it for you—a woman agent. Her name is Letitia, and she could be very funny. . . . ’ ’Vi-ol-la! Vi! Gore Vidal! (What’s it called?)’ ‘Myra Breck . . .’ ‘Myyyyy-ra Breck-en-ridge! Get a copy!’” And yet, Crowley said, with all this, the subject of homosexuality was never discussed between them.18
“THE END WAS a remarkable Bette Davis movie, with a really good part in it for her,” said Robbie Lantz.
She got an invitation to the San Sebastian Film Festival. They were going to honor her. I have a photo of her that was taken there. It’s heartbreaking—she was so frail. The second or third night of her stay—it was a triumph for her, that festival—she became ill. And Kathryn Sermak called the hotel doctor, who came and examined Bette and said to Kathryn, “Miss Davis is dangerously ill. She should go to the hospital.”
Bette said, “I’m not going to any hospital in San Sebastian. You must be crazy.”
So they hired a plane to take her to the American hospital in Paris. The doctors examined her. Kathryn was waiting, and they told her, “Miss Davis is going to die. She has only hours to live. What should we do?” Kathryn knew the only way to deal with Bette. So the doctors went in and said whatever they had to say. Bette thanked them. They left the room. And Bette said to Kathryn, “We have a lot to do. I have to sign all the checks. You have to cancel the dinner date on Friday night. You have to get Harold Schiff on the phone, and that will be difficult because he’s away from New York. . . . ”
When she finally got Harold on the phone, she said, “I won’t be able to get out of this one.”
And then she died. “Fasten your seatbelts,” James Woods told the crowd at her memorial service. “It’s going to be a bumpy eternity.”
Davis’s last film was Wicked Stepmother, which she only half completed before walking out; the director, Larry Cohen, replaced Bette by having her witchy character turn herself into Barbara Carrera.
Her penultimate film provides a far more fitting send-off. In September 1986, seventy-eight-year-old Bette Davis and ninety-two-year-old Lillian Gish traveled to Cliff Island off the coast of Maine to film The Whales of August with Lindsay Anderson. The film is both slight and majestic—a slender story magnified by two superb actresses with thunderingly resonant histories and the weathered, iconic faces to prove it. Ann Sothern, Vincent Price, and Harry Carey Jr. rounded out the cast.
It was on board an airplane to Maine when Bette was about to start shooting The Whales of August that she last saw Gary Merrill. She came over to his seat to say hello, but he wouldn’t look up from the book he was reading. He died of lung cancer on March 5, 1990, five months after Bette.
“Bette Davis could be extremely difficult, extremely funny, demanding, eccentric, thoroughly professional, irritating, and even charming when she wanted to be,” one of the film’s producers, Mike Kaplan, observed.
In the beginning, we spoke
about going back to Maine, and she was just filled with glee and delight. Once we got there, though, things changed. It wasn’t the Maine she remembered, and she got temperamental. And the closer we got to shooting, the more insecure and competitive she became.
She insisted on first billing. She was always concerned about her star position. We did get into a bit of a row because Lillian’s contract had her in second position on the title card but raised slightly above Bette. We went back and forth. She said she’d never shared a title card with anyone in her life, and I had to point out that she had second position with James Cagney in The Bride Came C.O.D.
[There was a scuffle over her dressing room trailer:] We had Winnebagos for the four stars, and they were placed on a ball field down the road from the set house. Bette’s was first, then Lillian’s. Lillian didn’t care. They were all parallel. Bette was there for about a week before she wanted hers turned in a perpendicular direction from the others. So we turned the Winnebago around so it was at a right angle to everyone else’s. She used it for about two days and never went back into it. [Instead] she commandeered the spare room on the set—the one her character used all the time.19
“Half of Bette Davis is a real solid trouper, and half is the victim of some temperamental compulsion,” Lindsay Anderson shrewdly observed. “She’s difficult because she’s Bette Davis, not because she’s a star. She has an initial hostility to life and people that she has had all her life.”20