Madame Sin was the beginning of our friendship. When we’d finished the picture, her daughter BD called me and said, “We’re setting up an appearance for Mom on This Is Your Life, and I want to be sure she looks good. Could you help us set it up?”
The cover story we devised involved a photo sitting to promote Madame Sin at John Engstead’s studio. I was going to be there with Frank Westmore, my makeup man and dear friend for thirty-five years, and Frank would be making her up for the photo session. Well, at the appointed moment, out stepped Ralph Edwards. “Hellooooo, how are you?” he said. “Well, this could be anybody’s life. It could be yours, Frank Westmore, or it could be yours, Robert Wagner, or it could be yours, Bette Davis.” I had this terrible sinking feeling that they had turned on me. But then Edwards said, “Bette Davis, this is your life!” and I was off the hook. Or so I thought.
After the surprise opening, we were supposed to get in our cars and go down to the studio, where the show proper was being taped. But as soon as we got in the car, Bette turned on me. “You son of a bitch! You fucking son of a bitch!!”
“Now, Bette….”
“Oh, fuck you!” She was just furious about being tricked into it because she didn’t like being tricked into anything.
The taping itself went fine; Olivia de Havilland was there, Bette’s first editor was there, I was there. And then Ralph Edwards said, “And here’s a person whose life you saved. Jay Robinson!”
And out came Jay Robinson, who had made a brief splash years before when he flounced around as Caligula in The Robe and Demetrius and the Gladiators. Jay Robinson made a little speech about how Bette had sent him a letter when he was in prison and by doing so saved his life. “I’d like to read that letter,” he said. “It was the only thing that sustained me.” And he pulled out the letter and read this very touching excerpt. Bette told Jay that he was the most wonderful actor she’d ever known and working with him was one of the highlights of her career and so forth. It ended with: “You will always be the closest thing in my life.”
And the audience went, “Aaaahhhh,” at Bette being so kind to a young actor in trouble. With the show over, we all piled into limos and headed over to the Bel-Air Hotel for the cocktail party that always followed a taping of This Is Your Life. As I got there, I come across Bette standing outside, smoking a cigarette as only she could, radiating rage to a distance of about twenty feet.
“Bette,” I said, “what’s wrong? The show went well, and that letter you sent to Jay Robinson was so touching, such a fine thing to do.”
“I never wrote that letter!” she yelled. “I don’t know who Jay Robinson is! I never met him until tonight!” Well, I looked around, and of course Jay Robinson hadn’t come to the party, because he knew Bette would kill him. I began to laugh hysterically. That just got her angrier. “Oh, Robert,” she said, “you laugh at idiotic things!”
That was the way our relationship went. She had something of a crush on me, and she was always getting angry, and I was always laughing at her and flirting with her and cajoling her out of her anger. When we went to Philadelphia to do the Mike Douglas Show, she locked herself in her room because she was under the impression that we were supposed to have had dinner the night before and she thought I’d stood her up. I told her, “Bette, if we were supposed to have dinner, we would have had dinner,” and proceeded to jolly her out of it.
Another time I visited her in Westport, where she was living, and we went into town for lunch. We arrived at the restaurant about 1:45, after the crowd had left. We walked in past a group of men who’d obviously had a three-martini lunch, and one of them said, “Jesus Christ, Bette Davis—a face that would stop a clock!”
That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that she heard him.
We sat down, and she was understandably upset. “What do you think?” she asked me. “Should I get my face done?” All the actresses of Bette’s age—Ann Sothern, Lucille Ball, and so forth—utilized a system devised by a makeup man named Gene Hibbs that involved a system of rubber bands hidden by wigs that tightened their faces. It was a light, mechanical kind of face lift. At the end of the day, the wigs came off, the rubber bands were removed, and the faces would fall.
Obviously, this was very tender territory, but I decided to forge ahead. “I think it would be a great idea, Bette.”
“You do?”
“Sure. And while they’re doing the face lift, they can do your lips too.”
Those glorious Bette Davis eyes widened, and she stared at me. “My lips? What’s wrong with my lips? And what would people think?”
“Oh, Bette, who gives a shit what people think?”
After a great deal of back and forth, she eventually got the face lift, and we went out for dinner so she could show it to me.
“Well,” she said, “what do you think?”
“I think it looks great,” I told her.
“Great? You think this looks great? But what about this? And what about that….” She was unhappy. And this naturally combative woman was off on another diatribe.
Like many people of any given generation, she grew landlocked by age and lost touch with what was going on around her. Late in her life I picked her up to take her to a party at Roddy McDowall’s. Now, I didn’t know this, but Frank Zappa’s daughter Moon Zappa was an enormous Bette Davis fan. Moon found out I was taking Bette to a party and was in her car across the street watching for us. At the light, she pulled up alongside us and yelled out my name. I put the window down and yelled, “Hi, Moon. How are Dweezil and Ahmet?” She assured me they were great, I introduced her to Bette—which was the real reason for the whole exercise—the light changed, the car windows went up, and off we went.
Bette sat there staring at me. “What the fuck are you talking about? Moon and Dweezil and Ahmet? Who are these people? Why do they know you?”
Bette’s life was her work. Her basic character was that of a tough, loving broad from New England. When she had a script to study, she became totally involved and totally animated. She had tried hard to make the domestic side of her life work, but it hadn’t happened. The only truly trustworthy thing in Bette’s life was her talent. She was a very good cook, loved houses, and also had a tremendous sense of humor. And from what I have been given to understand by several men who knew, she was an extraordinary lover who could take a man over the moon and back.
But Bette was extremely demanding, and I’m sure she would have been exhausting on a regular basis. She had one habit that drove me crazy: she would hang up the phone before you were finished talking to her. Let’s say you would agree to pick her up at seven. She would say, “All right,” and then without saying anything else she would hang up and you would find yourself saying good-bye to empty air. It was maddening, rude, and also funny—peremptory behavior she probably believed was the star’s prerogative. I came to call this the Bette Davis Hang-Up, and she did it all the time.
When her daughter BD wrote My Mother’s Keeper, a calculated, vicious book about her, it was without doubt the worst thing that happened to Bette in her entire life. It was a very primal betrayal—Bette had financially supported BD for her entire life—but Bette’s devastation had nothing to do with money. Her daughter was the true love of Bette’s life. Bette never once stinted on anything for BD, and to see all the love and hope she had lavished on her wasted, flushed down the toilet by the rage of an ungrateful, unsuccessful child destroyed Bette, as it would have anybody. She would allude to it every once in a while, but she was the sort of woman who carried her pain inside rather than present it for public consumption.
I stayed close to Bette, although she never exactly mellowed. After she came back from Maine, where she shot The Whales of August with Lillian Gish, all she could talk about was how difficult Gish was. “She can’t hear!” she’d say. “Impossible, impossible woman!” Patience had never been Bette’s strong suit, and now she had even less. “Speak up!” she’d yell at Lillian. “You’re too old to be doing
this. Why don’t you just stop?” Lindsay Anderson, the director, thought Bette was deranged. As if Bette didn’t want to be out there in front of a camera until she was one hundred too.
When Bette died in 1989, I helped arrange the memorial service on stage 9 at Warner Bros., where she had made so many of her great pictures. There were enormous stills of her hung all around the stage, and as Roddy McDowall, James Woods, and Bob Osborne got up and spoke about Bette, a black, dark stage gradually became infused with love. By the time Angela Lansbury gave her extraordinary eulogy, we all knew that a remarkable, one-of-a-kind artist and human being was gone, but we were lucky—Bette had made the life of everybody on that stage better and richer, even if all they knew of her was what she embodied in her movies. At the end of the service, I turned out the ghost light on the stage. She was buried at Forest Lawn in Hollywood, which looks down at the Warner Bros. studio—just the way she wanted it.
I adored her—not in spite of her prickliness, but because of her prickliness. It was such a large part of what made her Bette Davis. She had a terrible need for love, as we all do, but she was wired in such a way that it was hard for her to ask for it. Actually, it was impossible. She could give love, but it was very hard for her to receive it, even though, outside of the opportunity to act, it was the only thing that really mattered to her. Bette’s tragedy was that she never fully received the thing she needed the most.
ELEVEN
“I MISSED HER LOVING ME.”
With my friend and mentor Darryl Francis Zanuck on the set of The Longest Day. (THE LONGEST DAY © 1962 TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
I set up shop in London, where Kate Hepburn helped me get a house. After a month or two, the situation with Natalie hadn’t appreciably altered. She was still involved with Warren, and the press was whooping it up like jackals, with me as the prey. In Hollywood, we hadn’t had any contact after the separation—everything was handled through intermediaries—but she was never out of my head.
In September 1961, I called her from the apartment of the producer James Woolf. I told her that I had an opportunity to be in a movie, but that a movie, any movie, was less important to me than being with her.
“I’m supposed to go to Florida,” she said. I knew that Warren was making a movie there with John Frankenheimer.
“What do you want to do?” I asked her.
There was a pause, and she finally said, “I’m going to Florida.” I hung up. It had all been awkward; I would much rather have talked to her face-to-face. There was nothing else to say, and now there was nothing else to do. The legalities were all handled through third parties, and for a long time we were out of contact. When she was nominated for an Oscar for Splendor in the Grass, I wrote her a note: “I hope with all my heart that when they open the envelope, it’s you.”
God help me, I was still in love with her. During all the time we were apart, she never left me. Every person has a favorite lover, the person who transforms your life and makes it better than it ever had been before. For me, that was Natalie.
Leaving meant she didn’t have the problem of dealing with me and feeling guilty—about Warren, about her career going up and mine coming down. I didn’t miss the public us, the “RJ and Natalie” thing. That never entered the picture. I missed her loving me. She was one of those girls who had a gift for life. She was the sort of woman everybody loved, a wonderful human being with great humor and empathy, and we had found everything together. Other than Barbara Stanwyck, she was the first woman who lived up to my idea of what a woman could be.
But I had to face reality. Natalie filed for divorce in April 1962, and it was granted that same month. I stayed in Europe, and my attorney didn’t contest it. We had been married three years and seven months—not a long time, but up to that point, the best years of my life.
The second picture under my deal at Columbia was The War Lover, with Steve McQueen. It was all right, although Steve and I both felt it could have been better. Neile, Steve’s wife, was on the set, and she was a great stabilizing force for him. Steve had just finished The Magnificent Seven for John Sturges and was approaching stardom cautiously. Steve didn’t like Shirley Ann Field, and I did, a lot, especially offstage, so I worked with her in most of her scenes. She was a lovely girl who had caught a big break with Olivier on The Entertainer and didn’t really follow it up, but she helped take my mind off Natalie for a time.
I found Steve very self-conscious, and very competitive, even about small things. For instance, Steve was about five-nine, smaller than me, so he made sure to never have his wardrobe hanging next to mine where anybody could see it. It’s the sort of thing that strikes me as wasted effort—why not use that emotional energy for something constructive? Steve was such a complicated man: always looking for conflict and never really at peace. That kind of personality can be very wearing, to say the least.
But Steve was a good friend at a difficult time in my life. The subject of Natalie came up often, and he knew I was brokenhearted. He was very sympathetic, and I grew to like Steve a lot; I think he trusted me as much as he trusted anybody, which wasn’t all that much.
Later, when I was married to Marion, my second wife, the four of us became close, and Steve and I would ride our motorcycles in the desert together, then have dinner and drink. He loved antique airplanes; he had a hangar near Santa Barbara where he kept his biplanes.
While I was making The War Lover, Darryl Zanuck called and asked me to be in The Longest Day, his epic about D-Day. He didn’t have to ask twice. Working on The Longest Day was great fun, but it was also one of those films filled with a purpose—to tell a great story that had never been told before. I was thrilled to find that my scenes were to be shot at Point du Hoc, and Darryl directed them himself. Most of the actors were on “favored-nation status”—meaning we all got the same money—so there was very little competitiveness.
It was all very felicitous; I had been through such a terribly dark time, and it seemed that the clouds were lifting. It was at this time that I flew from London to Paris to shoot my scenes for The Longest Day. I was rushed through customs, and there were about three hundred people to meet me at the Georges V. Hey, I’m an actor. I love it; I think I’m doing just great. I took my sweet time getting through the crowd, signing autographs and milking it, and I finally got to the front desk. I said that I’d like my suite, and the man behind the desk said, “What’s your name?” I looked at him somewhat coldly and said, “Robert Wagner.”
That night I went out with Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor, who were taking a break from the early stages of Cleopatra. We had a sensational time. Too sensational. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was thoroughly blitzed. I walked up to the desk and asked for my key. The man behind the desk said, “What’s your name?” I grabbed him by the lapels and said, “You son of a bitch, my name is…” And then I looked at him through my alcohol haze and realized that this was not the same man. And then I looked around the lobby carefully and realized that this was not the Georges V. I dropped the man’s lapels, apologized profusely, then found my way to the right hotel. Easily one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.
I know that Eddie Fisher ended up as something of a joke, but he had a wonderful way with women, and on the basis of the times I spent with them, he and Elizabeth were good together. The thing about Eddie professionally was that he had absolutely no sense of rhythm, which makes singing pretty difficult. He started drinking because he thought it would relax him and make him as loose as Dean Martin. He could never understand how guys like Dean did what they did. But then, they had rhythm.
The Longest Day reunited me with Mother Mitchum, who was as he had been. We were walking down the Champs-Élysées together when a woman came up to him and said, “Mr. Cooper, would you autograph my passport?” He took her passport and wrote, “Fuck you, Gary Cooper.”
The thing about Mitchum was that you never knew which direction he would go. He was extremely bright, and his respons
es could be variable: he could laugh something off, or he could get very dark and wintry. Like the time in the 1940s when he got caught smoking marijuana. Now, when has a movie star actually done time, before or since? But Mitchum was not just bright, he was brave as well. When he got busted, he said, “Fuck it,” took the fall, and did the time. As far as he was concerned, it was no big deal.
I think that element of authentic strength and danger was what made him so compelling on screen. The general theory about Mitchum was that he really didn’t give a shit. Not true. He gave a shit—he just didn’t want to get caught giving a shit.
The thing about the movie business is that it’s full of legendary characters, not all of whom are famous. One of the reasons The Longest Day was such great fun was Ray Danton. Ray was one of those actors who put his energy into his life, not his career. At the time we did The Longest Day, Ray was shacked up in a hotel with two very beautiful girls. There were two-way mirrors in the bedroom, and the hotelier was making a great deal of money charging people to watch Ray make love to two women at once. Ray never knew how much money this guy was making off his remarkable prowess!
Years went by, and Ray was now directing television. He directed a couple of episodes of Switch with Eddie Albert and me. Sharon Gless and Ray hit it off professionally, and she kept him with her as her star rose on television. When Ray developed terrible kidney problems, she kept him working on Cagney and Lacey. Ray no longer had the stamina to direct, but he could hold script, and Sharon made sure that Ray always had a job so he could keep his medical benefits.
It goes without saying that Sharon is a special lady. Occasionally, things happen in this business that make you realize there are people who live by a higher law than the one of the jungle.
When I got to London, I started taking out Joan Collins again. Joan was always companionable, always fun. As a matter of fact, I was the one who introduced Joan to Anthony Newley, whom she eventually married. We had gone to see Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, which Tony wrote and in which he starred, and that brought Joan and me to a screeching halt. I asked Joan to come to Rome with me, but she didn’t want to go because (a) she didn’t like to fly, and (b) she wanted to be with Tony Newley.
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