Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  During the first weeks, Kaplan admitted, Bette was prickly and difficult toward Gish. “No one had ever been difficult with Lillian in her entire career,” said Kaplan. But he refused to call it feud, in large measure because it was entirely one-sided. Davis was simply anxious: The Whales of August was her first important picture in quite some time; her role was slightly less important than Lillian’s; and the familiar compulsion to compete reared its head.

  John Springer’s son Gary recalled that “at one point Miss Gish said, ‘Why doesn’t she like me?’ It was hard to watch. She even yelled at my father. She said, ‘I know you like Miss Gish better than me.’ He said, ‘That’s not true at all, Bette.’ And she said, ‘Well you didn’t say hello to me.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s because you were yelling at somebody else and I didn’t want to get near you.’ He felt bad at the end, because she was closing off everybody.”21

  Still, as Mike Kaplan noted, Davis immersed herself fully in the production. She loved the gossip and the grind, and she was never more alive than when the cameras were rolling and she was doing the work she loved. Davis was the only one of the major actors who went to dailies; according to Kaplan, Gish never watched dailies in her life, and at this point in her long life she needed to rest after shooting. Davis, however, attended the screenings every night. Once she saw how good they were in general—and how good Gish was in particular—she realized the impossibility of stealing anything from her costar, and her behavior improved. Somewhat.

  “She always needed a foil,” said Kaplan, echoing countless other producers, writers, directors, and fellow actors through the course of Davis’s career. “Lindsay became the foil she needed for about a month during shooting. She would invariably question things he wanted to do, they’d discuss it, he’d suggest something, and she’d say no, and then she’d do it in the end. There were serious tiffs and not-so-serious tiffs. I think she needed the drama to get through it.” For instance, Davis argued with Anderson about whether or not her character, Libby, should move to the window at one point. Anderson didn’t see why, since Libby was blind, but Davis insisted. “Lindsay,” she stated emphatically. “Blind people are sensitive to heat. She’s drawn to the heat.”22

  As Anderson later commented, “Lillian’s first instinct is to try to give the director what he asks for. Her professional attitude comes from those days with D. W. Griffith. Bette tries to dismiss the director.”23 “Lillian just shakes her head,” Anderson noted in his diary. “ ‘Poor Bette,’ she says. ‘How she must be suffering. What an unhappy life she’s led.’ ”

  “In fact,” Ann Sothern said, “ ‘poor Bette,’ who wasn’t well, was a holy terror, crabby and irascible.”24

  Several of Davis’s more repeatable comments during the production of The Whales of August have assumed a legendary air. “Lillian doesn’t need to rest,” Davis declared one day. “She was in si-lent pictures.” Her meaning remains obscure.

  Charles Busch recalled another of Davis’s bon mots: “There’s that famous quote when Gish did a close-up and Davis said, ‘Why of course it’s good—she invented it!’ ” But as Busch went on to note, “People use that as an example of her being bitchy, but I’m sure she meant it as a compliment. In a way, Lillian Gish did invent the close-up.”25

  She paid her respects to Ann Sothern, too, in her own strange way. “She would call and compliment me,” Sothern told Aljean Harmetz of the New York Times. “She would say abruptly, ‘Ann, I just saw the rushes—it’s the nuts!’ and hang up.”26

  It had been nearly forty years since she left the security of Warner Bros., not only the long-term contracts that guaranteed both work and income, but the comfort and security of vast soundstages in which exteriors could be constructed and filmed. As Lindsay Anderson’s friend and biographer Gavin Lambert wrote, “She was not used to going out on location, as she reminded anyone who would listen, because ‘locations always used to come to me.’ Her most frequent response to any suggestion that Lindsay made was an emphatic ‘Rubbish!’ Occasionally she agreed with a grudging nod, and once announced to the crew, ‘That’s twice I’ve given in to the director today. I must be slipping.’ Finally she provoked Lindsay to say, ‘You’re not taking over this picture, Bette,’ which provoked her to walk off the set and refuse to come back until he apologized.”27

  Anderson sent Lambert a postcard from Maine after six weeks of shooting: “Bette has gone full circle, from suspicion and hostility to paranoia to (proclaimed) friendship and admiration. I think she is essentially mad.”28

  “In the end,” Kaplan concluded, “after all the ‘This isn’t the Maine I knew,’ and ‘The house isn’t as big as I thought it was going to be’—all the little scrambles we had with her that weren’t so little when we were going through them—she was the last actor to leave the island.”

  All this tension and drama was put to the service of a small movie that climaxes with the addition of a picture window to an old cottage. If the anxiety, if not downright agony, of filming The Whales of August yielded but one lasting image of Bette Davis, it is this: Libby lying in bed, skeletal, her face hollow, the late afternoon sun blasting in through the window as she caresses her own cheek. Davis’s brutal boniness slices cleanly through the gesture’s sentimentality, as she no doubt knew it would. She gets up and walks, limping, to a chest of drawers, removes and opens a box of keepsakes, clutches a pocketwatch, then a lock of dark hair, which she touches to her face. Her character’s gesture is as delicate and intimate as the lock itself, but her command of the luminous silver screen—the sheer might of Bette Davis photographed in motion—is as purely, grandly overpowering as ever.

  OBITUARY

  AWARRIOR TO THE END, BETTE DAVIS died on the night of Friday, October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly, a Paris suburb. She was eighty-one years old. The cause of her death was metastasized breast cancer.

  Plaques, citations, and statuettes were not rarities for Miss Davis, who fought her way to a total of ten Academy Award nominations in the Best Actress category. They were for her leading roles in Dangerous; Jezebel; Dark Victory; The Letter; The Little Foxes; Now, Voyager; Mr. Skeffington; All About Eve; The Star; and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?—though she won for only Dangerous and Jezebel. In addition to the Oscar nod for All About Eve, Miss Davis was nominated as Best Actress by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the New York Film Critics Circle, which actually awarded her the prize, as did the Cannes Film Festival.

  In later years, she earned three Emmy nominations for her work in television: Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter in 1980; White Mama in 1981; and Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last in 1983; she won the Emmy for Strangers.

  Miss Davis was never the recipient of a Golden Globe, though she was nominated for both All About Eve and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The Hollywood Foreign Press Association did, however, present Miss Davis with its Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1974—an irony, since Mr. DeMille was one of Hollywood’s most notoriously reactionary figures and Miss Davis one of its most consistently liberal.

  Her honors stretched from the 1930s through the 1980s. In 1937, the Venice Film Festival awarded her the Volpi Cup for best cinema actress of the year for her performances in Kid Galahad and Marked Woman. She snared both the Redbook Trophy and the Popularity Crown “Queen of the Movies” award in 1939. In 1941, she won the Golden Apple, the Women’s Press Corps’ coveted citation for “Most Cooperative Actress” in Hollywood. Participating in Hollywood’s publicity machinery was simply part of the battle for Miss Davis, who fought to maintain her career long after a less combative celebrity would have been content to rest on her laurels and call it quits.

  Miss Davis was the recipient of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 1977—the first woman so honored—and an honorary César Award, France’s most prestigious national film award, in 1986.

  The year 1989 not only saw Miss Davis win the lifetime achievement award at the San Sebastian Film Fest
ival only days before she died but also the American Cinema Award, an event organized by the impresario David Gest. The ceremony was held on January 6 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Miss Davis’s unlikely fellow honorees were Clint Eastwood and Julio Iglesias. Veteran hoofers from the Hollywood Canteen, which Miss Davis cofounded in 1942, danced a salute to her; they included Buddy Ebsen, Eddie Bracken, Joan Leslie, June Haver, Donald O’Connor, George Murphy, and June Allyson. Also performing that evening were Robert Goulet, Donna Summer, Toni Tennille, and Kim Carnes, who sang her 1981 hit single, “Bette Davis Eyes,” which celebrated the mysterious allure of the actress’s most notable features.

  On April 24, 1989, Miss Davis was the subject of yet another gala tribute, this one from the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Stylists at an elegant Manhattan hair salon were jittery with excitement that day when they learned that a 3:30 p.m. appointment had been secured by Miss Davis. At precisely 3:30, a hatbox appeared at the salon’s door, containing Miss Davis’s wig and a set of precise instructions. James Stewart, AnnMargret, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Joseph Mankiewicz were on hand at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall to toast her at the ceremony. Miss Davis later attended the after-party at the celebrated Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York’s Central Park. According to one eyewitness, the moment Miss Davis stood up from the table and turned her back in preparation for departure, a shriek of queens descended upon the detritus she left behind and seized every lipstick-and-cigarette-ash-stained item they could lay their hands upon. The eyewitness, the actor and literary agent Edward Hibbert, snatched the coffee cup.

  Characteristically for a woman who forcefully spoke her mind even when she was out of it, Miss Davis’s last will and testament, dated September 2, 1987, minced no words: “I give, devise and bequeath . . . Fifty (50%) of my residuary estate to my son, Michael Woodman Merrill [and] Fifty (50%) of my residuary estate to Kathryn Sermak. . . . I declare that, except as otherwise provided in this will, I have intentionally and with full knowledge omitted to provide herein for my daughter, Margot Mosher Merrill, my daughter, Barbara Davis Hyman, and/or my grandsons, Ashley Hyman and Justin Hyman.” There were, in fact, no other provisions in the will pertaining to Miss Merrill, Mrs. Hyman, or Mrs. Hyman’s sons.

  Miss Davis bequeathed her jewelry to Miss Sermak, her clothes to her son’s wife, the former Chou Chou Raum (though the will curiously misspells her name as “Shu Shu”). She left a painting, a pearl and sapphire watch, and a portrait of herself to her oldest friend, Robin Brown, from whom she had become more or less estranged in the years immediately preceding her death. Her silver flatware was divided between the two principal heirs: two place settings went to Miss Sermak, the rest to Mr. Merrill. Miss Davis left to her niece, Fay Forbes—the daughter of Miss Davis’s troubled younger sister, Barbara—a set of six silver condiment holders that had been a gift from Miss Davis’s mother, Ruth Favor Davis Palmer Budd. Most of the actress’s furniture and other possessions, specifically including her cookbooks and handwritten recipes, were left to Miss Sermak.1

  Miss Sermak sold the most valuable of those possessions: Miss Davis’s two Oscars. The restaurant chain Planet Hollywood initially bought the one Miss Davis won for Dangerous, but the director Steven Spielberg later purchased it for $207,500 at a 2002 Sotheby’s auction and promptly donated it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Mr. Spielberg went on to buy the Jezebel Oscar for $578,000. It, too, was returned to the Academy.2

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1. Warner with Jennings, p. 147.

  2. Bogart, p. 230, quoting a 1953 London Daily Mirror interview.

  3. Ellen Hanley to Ed Sikov (ES), June 2, 2006.

  CHAPTER 1. AN INFANT’S ALBUM

  1. The Bette Davis Collection, the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University (BU), scrapbook 62: Ruth Elizabeth Davis’s baby book.

  2. BU, box 22.

  3. BU, scrapbook 32.

  4. Bette Davis, The Lonely Life, p. 19. (Hereafter cited as Lonely Life.)

  5. Ibid.

  6. Williamson, p. 72.

  7. BU, box 9: Paul Favor, “Bette Davis,” section 2, by Ruth Favor Davis, p. 16.

  8. Lonely Life, pp. 12–13.

  9. Bette Davis, “Uncertain Glory,” p. 17.

  10. BU, box 9: Paul Favor, “Bette Davis,” section 2, by Ruth Favor Davis, p. 16.

  11. Ibid., p. 17.

  12. BU, scrapbook 17: Lyle Rooks, “I’m Tired of Hag Roles,” unsourced, undated.

  13. Lonely Life, p. 20.

  14. BU, box 9: Paul Favor, “Bette Davis,” section 2, by Ruth Favor Davis, pp. 17–18.

  15. Leaming, p. 24.

  16. BU, scrapbook 32.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Lonely Life, p. 23.

  19. Ibid., p. 22.

  20. Ibid., p. 21.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid., p. 22.

  24. Madsen, p. 73.

  25. Lonely Life, p. 22.

  26. Ibid., p. 23.

  27. Ibid., p. 20.

  28. Ibid., pp. 12, 24.

  29. Ibid., pp. 24–25; BU, box 9: Paul Favor, “Bette Davis,” section 2, by Ruth Favor Davis, p. 19.

  30. Lonely Life, p. 24.

  31. BU, scrapbook 52.

  32. BU, scrapbook 17: Gladys Hall, “Bette Davis’s True Life Story,” undated.

  33. Lonely Life, p. 25.

  34. Ibid.

  35. BU, scrapbook 32.

  36. BU, box 3, folder 8: Boston Sunday Globe, April 5, 1936.

  37. Lonely Life, p. 26; Bette Davis, “Uncertain Glory,” p. 107; Leaming, p. 31.

  38. Lonely Life, p. 27.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid., p. 28.

  41. BU, box 4.

  42. Lonely Life, pp. 28–29.

  43. Brophy, p. 225.

  44. Lonely Life, p. 29.

  45. Ibid., p. 30.

  46. Leaming, p. 33.

  47. Lonely Life, pp. 33–34.

  48. Leaming, p. 42.

  49. Lonely Life, p. 37.

  50. Bette Davis, “Uncertain Glory,” p. 108.

  51. BU, scrapbook 57.

  52. BU, box 2, folder 3: program for Alice D. Miller and Robert Milton, The Charm School.

  53. BU, scrapbook 63.

  54. BU, scrapbook 57.

  55. James McCourt to ES, January 3, 2005.

  56. BU, box 9: Paul Favor, “Bette Davis,” p. 15.

  57. Lonely Life, p. 23.

  58. Leaming, p. 25.

  59. McCourt, Queer Street, p. 505.

  60. Leaming, p. 25; Davis with Davidson, November 25, 1955, p. 99.

  61. Davis with Herskowitz, This ’n That, p. 97.

  62. Lonely Life, p. 34.

  63. BU, scrapbook 57.

  64. Lonely Life, p. 38.

  65. Ibid., p. 46.

  66. Ibid., p. 47.

  67. Fonda and Teichmann, p. 35.

  68. BU, box 1: Bette Davis’s speech at Loomis School.

  69. BU, scrapbook 57.

  CHAPTER 2. LESSONS

  1. BU, box 9.

  2. Sheldon Harnick to ES, October 15, 2003.

  3. BU, scrapbook 23: Boston Transcript, April 22, 1939; Lonely Life, pp. 51–52.

  4. Leaming, p. 59.

  5. http://www.peterboroughhistory.org/new_page_3.htm; Leaming, p. 46.

  6. Lonely Life, pp. 42–43.

  7. Leaming, p. 47.

  8. http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp55949.

  9. http://www.dancespirit.com/backissues/march02/legends.shtml.

  10. Bette Davis, “Uncertain Glory,” p. 109.

  11. Lonely Life, p. 54.

  12. The Dick Cavett Show, ABC, November 17, 1971.

  13. Lonely Life, p. 54.

  14. Ibid., p. 55.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Bette Davis, “Uncertain Glory,” p. 110.

  17. Lonely Life, p. 54; Shingler, “Malevolence”; http://www.marthagrahamdance.org/us/; and Dawn L
ille, “Martha Graham’s Legacy,” http://www.arttimes journal.com/dance/grahamfour.htm.

  18. McCourt, Queer Street, p. 490.

  19. Lonely Life, pp. 55–56.

  20. Leaming, p. 60.

  21. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (NYPLLC), The Earth Between clippings file.

  22. Lonely Life, p. 77.

  23. BU, scrapbook 4: Paul G. Favor to “Gail,” undated letter.

  24. Lonely Life, p. 82.

  25. Spada, Bette Davis, p. 51.

  26. Leaming, p. 65.

  27. Bette Davis, “Uncertain Glory,” p. 111.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Lonely Life, p. 74.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Spada, Bette Davis, p. 57.

  32. Lonely Life, p. 75.

  33. Williamson, p. 73.

  34. Bette Davis, “Uncertain Glory,” p. 112.

  35. Spada, Bette Davis, p. 59.

  36. Graham, p. 27.

  37. Reggie Schwartzwalder to ES, September 19, 2006.

  38. Lonely Life, pp. 93–94; BU, scrapbooks 4 and 5.

  39. BU, scrapbook 5.

  40. Lonely Life, p. 98.

  41. Boston Evening American, February 21, 1939.

  42. Lonely Life, p. 98.

  43. NYPLLC, Solid South clippings file.

  44. New Republic, October 29, 1930.

  45. BU, scrapbook 5: unsourced clipping.

  CHAPTER 3. A YANKEE IN HOLLYWOOD

  1. Hanson, AFI Catalog, 1931–1940, pp. 111–12.

  2. Meyers, Bogart, p. 41.

  3. Stine and Davis, Mother Goddam, p. 7.

  4. Bogart, p. 52.

  5. Ibid., p. 182.

  6. Stine and Davis, Mother Goddam, p. 13.

  7. Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), clippings file for Bad Sister: Variety, undated clip.

  8. Lonely Life, pp. 109–10.

  9. Williamson, p. 70; Lonely Life, pp. 109–10; The Dick Cavett Show, ABC, November 17, 1971.

  10. Lonely Life, p. 113.

  11. BU, scrapbook 4: Boston Traveller, June 29, 1931.

  12. Stine and Davis, Mother Goddam, p. 13.

  13. The Dick Cavett Show, ABC, November 17, 1971.