by James Spada
When Bette showed up at the Curran Theatre, where the interior stage scenes were to be filmed, her voice had come back only enough to leave it coarse and husky. She apologized to Mankiewicz, but he loved it. “It’s just the whiskey-throated voice Margo should have,” he told her. “If your throat improves, make sure you keep your voice deep throughout the picture.”
Hollywood can be a serendipitous place. Film lore is rife with stories of the tortuous paths traveled by screenplays and their characters before they met up with the actor or actress who would so memorably bring them to life that it would become impossible to imagine another performer in the role. Judy Garland played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz only after 20th Century-Fox refused to make Shirley Temple available to MGM for the part; Vivien Leigh wasn’t chosen to play Scarlett O’Hara until after filming on Gone With the Wind had begun; Barbra Streisand won the Broadway role of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl only after Mary Martin, Anne Bancroft, and Carol Burnett passed; Liza Minnelli got the chance to play Sally Bowles in Cabaret only because Streisand turned it down.
There are many other such happy accidents, but few more resonant than Bette and Margo, a pair destiny seemed determined at first to keep apart. Although Bette was Joe Mankiewicz’s first choice, her work on The Story of a Divorce overlapped the late-winter 1949 start date Darryl Zanuck had set originally for Eve. Mankiewicz’s second choice, Claudette Colbert, was under contract to Fox and available. She signed to do the picture, but she ruptured a vertebra filming a violent jungle rape scene in Three Came Home and was forced to bow out. “I cried and cried,” Colbert recalled. “I was in agony with my back and in emotional despair at losing such a plum role.”
Mankiewicz then sent the script to Gertrude Lawrence, the great theater musical comedy star (Private Lives), who was ten years older than Margo Channing and hadn’t made a film in thirteen years. Lawrence’s attorney, the redoubtable Fanny Holtzman, intercepted it and told Mankiewicz that she thought Gertrude might be interested, but he’d have to make some changes. “For one thing,” Holtzman said, “the character drinks too much. I would prefer she not drink at all. And in that party scene where she’s at the piano, don’t you think that would be a nice time for Gertie to sing a song?”
“You mean like ‘My Bill’?” Mankiewicz asked mockingly.
“Well, it has been done,” Holtzman replied.
“I know it’s been done, but it ain’t gonna be done by me, Miss Holtzman,” Mankiewicz said just before he hung up.
By now the start date had been put back several months, and with The Story of a Divorce nearing completion, Bette Davis suddenly became available. Thus was another actress melded with a role that was absolutely perfect for her.
The morning Bette’s signing to play Margo was announced, Joe Mankiewicz got calls from several of her directors warning him of the most dire consequences. He recalled Edmund Goulding’s the most vividly. Goulding had directed four of Bette’s films, including Dark Victory and The Great Lie. “Have you gone mad?” Goulding asked. “This woman will destroy you, she will grind you down to a fine powder and blow you away. You are a writer, dear boy. She will come to the stage with a thick pad of long yellow paper. And pencils. She will write. And then she, not you, will direct. Mark my words.”
Forewarned and wary, Mankiewicz watched Bette closely as she arrived on the set the first day. She was carrying nothing but the script; she didn’t look around to check out the camera angles or the lighting setup. “Bette didn’t even glance at the set,” Mankiewicz recalled. “She lit a cigarette and opened the script—not, I noticed at once, to the scene [of hers] we were doing that first morning.”
Mankiewicz called a rehearsal. “Bette was letter perfect. She was syllable perfect. There was no fumbling for my words; they had become hers—as Margo Channing. The director’s dream: the prepared actress.” Over the next few days, he saw no temperament from Bette, no attempts to change his words, no bridling at his direction. He was astonished—either Ed Goulding was crazy or this actress was an impostor.
Mankiewicz told Bette about the warnings, and added that while he had expected Lady Macbeth, she was more like the virtuous Portia of The Merchant of Venice. Bette just snorted, then laughed. (“Her snort and her laugh,” Mankiewicz said, “both should be protected by copyright.”) Then she responded. “I am neither Lady Macbeth nor Portia.… But yes, I suppose my reputation, based upon some experiences I’ve had, is pretty much as advertised.… [But] you’re a writer, you’re a director, you function behind the camera. You do not appear upon the screen, forty feet high and thirty feet wide.… Me, I’m an actress, and I do appear upon that screen, that big. What I say and do, and how I look, is what millions of people see and listen to. The fact that my performance is the end result of many other contributions as well, matters to them not at all. If I make a horse’s ass of myself, on that screen, it is I—me—Bette Davis—who is the forty-feet-by-thirty-feet horse’s ass as far as they’re concerned.”
Bette added that Mankiewicz’s script—tight, gripping, sparkling on every page—was “heaven” because most scripts were damaged by compromise, and when she had a bad script she could turn only to the director for “salvation”: “With his help, you think, it’ll turn out fine. Or, at least, hold together. Then, one morning, the director drops by your dressing room… and in a very strange voice asks what you think of the scene you’re about to do that day, and do you really like it? That does it for me.… Bells and sirens go off inside me. I know at once that he doesn’t like the scene—that he doesn’t know what to think about it. Invariably, rehearsal proves me right. The director can’t make up his mind whether we’re to stand, sit, run, enter, or exit; he hasn’t the foggiest notion of what the scene is all about or whether, in fact, it’s a scene at all.… Pretty soon there’s quite a gathering [of producers and executives] on the set, throwing worn-out clichés at each other.”
Bette took a deep breath and continued with her aria. “By this time, I am back in my dressing room. Fully aware that the result of it all, nine times out of ten, will be a botched-up, abortive scene which will wind up with me as a thirty-by-forty-foot horse’s ass on the silver screen. So yes, I’m afraid there have been times—and probably will be again—when the responsibility for what I say and do on the screen is one I feel I must meet by myself.”
It took Mankiewicz only a few days to realize that the mutual admiration society between Bette and himself had inspired her to contribute layers to Margo Channing that no other actress could have. His only direction to her had been that Margo Channing was a woman who would “treat her mink coat like a poncho.” Bette’s first appearance on screen indelibly establishes Margo’s character—without a line of dialogue. As Addison DeWitt describes her undraped entrance into show business at the age of four, she looks up with a heavy-lidded, cynical world-weariness that lets us know immediately that this woman has seen it all. Her long hair falls sexily around her bare shoulders. She takes out a cigarette and deftly lights it herself with a lighter—Margo Channing waits for no man. She pours herself a drink, and Addison DeWitt offers her some seltzer from a bottle. As if she has done this a million times before, she pushes the bottle away to prevent the dreaded diluting liquid from sullying her liquor and gives Addison a small smile, as if to say, “You know better than that.”
None of this is in the script exactly the way Bette enacts it. Mankiewicz had written that Addison offers Margo the water and she “looks at it, and at him, as if it were a tarantula and he had gone mad.” Bette’s weary gesture, wonderfully offhand, characterizes Margo instantly—as, in a different way, does the cigarette. Mankiewicz’s screenplay doesn’t mention that Margo smokes, but to have Bette Davis’s first scene in a film where she plays an actress so prominently involve a cigarette, her most famous film prop over the past ten years, telegraphs to the audience that there might just be a dollop or two of Bette Davis in Margo Channing. That subtext lends immediate electricity to her characterization, the sparks from whic
h never wane throughout the movie’s two-hour-eighteen-minute running time.
It is startling to realize that Bette completed her role in All About Eve in three and a half weeks. The entire film had only a six-week shooting schedule; the solid script, Mankiewicz’s sure-handed direction, and Bette’s confidence in both helped keep things moving smoothly. What makes the brevity of Bette’s contributions so breathtaking is not only the enormity of Margo Channing’s impact on the Bette Davis legend (she is remembered for Margo more than for any other character), but the equal impact the film had on Bette’s personal life. For it was on the set of All About Eve, of course, that she met Gary Merrill.
She had already been captivated by his charms on the silver screen four months earlier in the Oscar-nominated World War II drama Twelve O’Clock High. So much so that after she and Sherry attended an industry screening in Hollywood in December, they got into a nasty argument over Bette’s effusive talk about how “attractive” Merrill was. Apparently, Merrill’s name hadn’t rung a bell to Bette when Darryl Zanuck originally told her over the phone that Gary would be her Eve leading man, but when she met him she was as impressed as ever by his rugged good looks, and pleasurably stirred by his unforced masculinity and lack of pretension. During an early scene, Bette waited for Merrill to light Margo’s cigarette. He didn’t. Finally she said, “Well, aren’t you going to light my cigarette?”
“I don’t think Bill Sampson would light Margo’s cigarettes,” Merrill replied, and Bette knew he was right. She also sensed that Gary Merrill wouldn’t light her cigarette either, and she liked that. This fellow Merrill, she thought, might have possibilities.
He, too, was intrigued. He found Bette a “magnetic” woman with a “compelling aura of femininity. I was irresistibly drawn to her. My first feeling of compassion for this misunderstood, talented woman was quickly replaced by a robust attraction. Before long we were holding hands, going to the movies, and doing other things together. From simple compassion, my feelings shifted to an almost uncontrollable lust. I walked around with an erection for three days.”
The two made little effort to hide their ripening romantic feelings. Following a scene in which Bill comforts Margo after she reads a scathing Addison DeWitt attack on her, they remained locked in an embrace for so long that Mankiewicz called out, “Cut! Cut! This is not swing and sway with Sammy Kaye!”
When William Grant Sherry heard the rumors about his estranged wife and her leading man, he sent Bette a telegram pleading with her to reconcile with him. “It was a beautiful, tender, sweet letter,” Marion Richards recalls. “And what does Bette do? She reads it aloud in front of the entire cast, laughing all the time, until finally everyone was howling. The only one who didn’t go along with ridiculing it was Anne Baxter. She was offended by the whole thing. As was I. I knew Grant was doing whatever he could to save his marriage. But when I saw Bette do that, I knew there wasn’t the slightest chance they would ever reconcile.”
According to Marion, the attraction between Bette and Gary didn’t become a physical affair until All About Eve filming wrapped, but they seem to have made up for lost time after that. Bette’s lease on the Beverly Hills house expired May 1, and she, B.D., Marion, and their “big, black bodyguard” began “running around” when they returned from San Francisco: “We stayed at Joe Mankiewicz’s house, at other producers’ houses,” Marion says. “After the picture was finished we were living in Katharine Hepburn’s house in Beverly Hills.”
It was there that Marion became aware that Bette and Gary Merrill were sexually involved. “B.D.’s and my bedroom was just below Bette’s. Gary would come over and I’d hear the bed going up and down all night. Then you could hear him leaving in the morning. He wouldn’t stay for breakfast, he would leave.”
Bette and Gary continued their indiscreet behavior despite the fact that Sherry could easily have used it against Bette in a custody battle for B.D. Marion Richards feels that Bette was so proud of her hot new romance that she couldn’t help but flaunt it. Lest Marion miss the implications of Gary’s visits, Bette called her to her bedroom one morning moments after Gary had left. With the musky scent of her lover’s sweat still heavy in the air, Bette stood before Marion stark naked and discussed inconsequentialities. She made no move to cover herself. Marion stared at her face and prayed to be dismissed from this bizarre command appearance.
Gary’s nocturnal visits to Bette’s bedroom were possible only because, weeks earlier, he had loudly announced at a party—in front of his wife—that he would marry Bette Davis if she’d have him. The next day, the woman he had married nine years earlier, the former actress Barbara Leeds, threw him out of their Malibu house. “All hell broke loose,” Barbara recalls. “We had had separations and reconciliations for years. He was a real womanizer. I knew about his affair with Mercedes McCambridge. We broke up over that one—and I had my pregnancy terminated as a result—but we got back together just before he went into Born Yesterday on Broadway. But when he said that about Bette at that party, I’d had it. That was it.”
Gary was delighted to spend his nights with Bette, but he was getting very nervous about her husband. According to Barbara Merrill, “A few days after we broke up, Gary came pounding at the door of the apartment I’d moved into. He was frantic and screamed, ‘Let me in! Let me in!’ I opened the door and asked him, ‘Good God, what’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Sherry’s got a pistol and he’s trying to get me! I’m being followed! He’s a very dangerous man.’”
Barbara, inured by now to Gary’s penchant for histrionics, simply sighed, “Oh, God,” and let him hide out until he calmed down. Whether or not Sherry actually presented that serious a threat, Bette certainly thought he did. Marion Richards recalls Bette waking her up in the middle of the night and insisting that she come down to the kitchen, where Bette was going to cook them a meal. As she fidgeted over the stove, Bette turned around and said, “I wonder if he’s going to come after us and kill me?” Marion didn’t think he would, and she suspected that Bette’s fears were mere hysterics. “After a few drinks the actress side of her would appear. She’d play these big dramatic scenes. I thought it was very funny.”
While Bette struggled with all this domestic upheaval, her mother decided once again to give marriage a try. On April 24, 1950, the sixty-four-year-old Ruthie eloped to Las Vegas to marry a retired army captain named Otho Williams Budd, also sixty-four. An Arizona native and a pottery packer in Laguna Beach before his retirement in 1947, Budd had been a neighbor of Ruthie’s for several years. When Ruthie telephoned Bette on the Fox lot from Las Vegas to give her the news, Bette was rendered speechless at first. Then she wished her mother luck and promised that she and Gary would come down to visit as soon as they could to meet Bette’s new stepfather.
They drove down the following Sunday, and after meeting Otho Budd they motored through town in Gary’s yellow Oldsmobile convertible, with the top down, kissing and laughing and acting like college kids in love. It would have been enough to provoke Sherry, who lived near Ruthie, to fury, but he never saw them.
Bobby did. With her mother newly married and her sister so obviously in love, Bobby withdrew again into her shell of depression, her two marital failures gnawing freshly at her mind. It was little consolation to her eighteen months later when Ruthie divorced Otho Budd, charging that for over a year Budd had treated her with extreme cruelty and had driven her to “grievous mental anguish” that had impaired her health.
When the divorce was final on December 12, 1951, Bobby had her mother’s full attention again, but this latest domestic collapse made her wonder achingly—Will the Davis women ever find happiness?
The moment she finished shooting All About Eve, Bette went to court to gain custody of B.D. She had never withdrawn the divorce petition she had filed against Sherry the previous October, and she asked the court to decide the question of B.D.’s custody while the divorce action was pending. Apparently beaten down by now, Sherry didn’t appear before the judge or cha
llenge Bette’s request. On May 9, the couple signed an agreement that allowed Sherry only the vague right to “visit [B.D.] at a reasonable time and place.”
Less than a month later, Sherry told Bette’s lawyer, Jerry Geisler—and the press—that he had changed his mind and would contest the divorce because Bette had allowed him to see B.D. only for “two hours on Tuesday and two hours on Thursday. She’s acting so ridiculously. The struggle I’m having to visit my own daughter is becoming so embarrassing I’ll have to go to court to have it adjusted.”
Sherry also said that he still hoped to reconcile with Bette. “She’s acting on impulse. I really should try to hold our marriage together. Her charges are ridiculous. She has me built up in her mind as one of the greatest monsters who ever lived. [But] I went to her house Sunday and told her I came over because I was lonely. She was very pleasant and asked me to take Barbara to the zoo. When I returned two cops were outside to keep me from getting back in. She left a note that said she was afraid of me and I had no right to come in. That’s really laughable.… I’m only concerned about the welfare of my daughter and keeping our family together.”
By now, one of Bette’s main concerns was that Sherry not interfere with her plans to marry Gary Merrill. She began to put pressure on him; she closed out their joint checking account and put both the Laguna Beach house and Sherry’s small nearby studio up for sale. “I had to move into a smaller house down the street,” Sherry recalled. “It was a shack where her sister Bobby had lived. If you drove a nail in the wall to hang a picture, it went through to the other side.”