by James Spada
Gladys Young, the woman who replaced Marion Richards as B.D.’s governess, found the four-year-old “spoiled rotten.” Bette, she says, “never disciplined the child. We were staying at a fancy hotel once, and I took B.D. for a walk in these beautiful, formal gardens. She rushed up to a rose bush and started to pick a flower. I said, ‘No, B.D., don’t pick that because that sign says, ‘Do not pick the flowers.’ B.D. was a lot like her mother, so she pouted. I never touched her, but I disciplined her very well.”
Later that evening, when Bette, Gary, and B.D. came back from dinner, B.D. was carrying an armful of roses. “Look! Mommy let me pick the roses!” she cried. As Gladys put it, “That was how well Bette disciplined her.”
After Gladys left Bette’s employ, a later nurse told her that B.D. “simply runs wild and behaves like an absolute little pig at the table—so disgusting I can hardly eat. I’ll be relieved when I don’t have to have my meals ever again with her.”
Bette often had little time or patience for B.D.; she usually relegated her care to governesses. When she was in a maternal mood, she would smother the little girl with love, treating her like the doll she had thought her sister Bobby to be when she was eighteen months old. Sometimes, when Bette wasn’t available to B.D., the child would manifest symptoms of illness. Betsy Paul was a Laguna Beach neighbor of Ruthie and Bobby’s, and she remembers an occasion when Bobby threw a party for about eight people. Bette was there (Gary was away on a film), and her cousin Sally Favour was baby-sitting B.D. at her nearby house. About an hour into the party, Sally called to say that B.D. was having a bad asthma attack. Bette picked up the phone and said, “Well, just put her to bed, that’s all you can do.”
Sally called back three times within the next hour to report that B.D. was getting worse and that Bette should come over. Bette decided not to, and Betsy Paul’s husband David was concerned. “She may be having anxiety because she needs you,” he told Bette. “That very often causes it.”
“Well,” Betsy Paul recalled, “you never saw such a fight, my God. Bette was just furious with my husband. Finally Sally called a fourth time and David said, ‘Bette, I really think you should go and get B.D.’ And Bette said, ‘Well, if you feel that way, you go and get her!’”
David went, and brought B.D. back to Bobby’s house. “We all gave her a hug,” Betsy says, “and Bette tucked her in bed, and when we all went in to say goodnight, she was perfectly fine. There was no more of that gasping for breath.”
Bette’s hot-and-cold mothering left B.D. confused and rebellious, and often her behavior was designed to gain her mother’s attention, whether positive or negative. Every six months, “as if on schedule,” Bette said, she would have to spank B.D. “She would push me and push me and push me and finally wham! You’ve got to give your children a little bit of hell; if your children don’t hate you from time to time when they’re growing up, then you’re not doing a very good job.”
Shortly after their marriage, the Merrills decided that Gary should adopt B.D. Bette called William Grant Sherry to ask his permission, but he was reluctant. When she persisted, he told her that Gary could adopt B.D. if he paid him $250,000. “That was the dumbest thing I ever did,” Sherry says, denying that he wanted money to give up B.D. “Bette kept asking me to do this, and I thought, This is ridiculous, so I threw out this absurd figure—an amount I knew she didn’t have—just to let her know that there was no way I was going to let that child have his name.”
In his memoirs, Gary Merrill claimed that Sherry “settled for $5,000” and B.D. became Barbara Davis Merrill. Now that Gary had a daughter, he wanted a son. Bette’s doctors had told her after B.D.’s birth that she could have no more children, so they agreed to adopt a boy as soon as the proper arrangements could be made.
In January 1951, Gary was in the Virgin Islands making a film when Bette called him bubbling with excitement. “You’re the proud father of a beautiful baby girl!” she announced.
“Wrong fucking sex!” he replied.
According to Gary, “Bette hadn’t consulted me, but went ahead on her own, and her high-handed way of doing it irritated me.” Still, when Gary returned and saw the newborn child, he melted. “She was a little blonde doll.”
“A real live doll” was Bette’s description of the girl, whom the Merrills decided to name Margot after Margo Channing. The day she brought the baby home, Bette had B.D. go into the living room, sit down, and close her eyes. When she opened them, B.D. recalled, “there was this big ‘present’!” Just as young Bette had had when her sister Bobby was born, B.D. now had her own “big doll.”
On February 15, 1951, The Story of a Divorce—retitled Payment on Demand—opened in New York after a long delay. Bette was unhappy about the title change (she thought it made the film sound like a cheap melodrama), and she was angry that Howard Hughes had forced her to reshoot the ending. Rather than have her character abandoned again by her husband when she reverts to her bitchy ways, the new scene leaves their reconciliation up in the air, with a happy ending a distinct possibility. Bette hated all of it, but critics and audiences didn’t seem to mind. Typical were The Hollywood Reporter critic’s comments: “If Payment on Demand has been withheld from release until the Bette Davis hit in All About Eve had been cemented, it wasn’t necessary. The picture… stands on its own firm feet, and Miss Davis on the powerful range of her acting talent. It’s a superb part and the actress plays superbly, reading nuances of the modern woman into it that her fans will recognize and understand.”
Publicly, Bette’s comeback had lost none of its steam, but privately she was worried that she hadn’t been sent a decent script since Eve. To her relief she finally got a film offer she could accept—from, of all people, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. He wanted Bette to star in Another Man’s Poison as a murderous English mystery writer who lives in a murky mansion on the Yorkshire moors. Neither Bette nor Gary much liked the script, but the film’s coproducer, Daniel Angel, offered Bette “nearly the whole world,” as Gary put it, and promised to give Gary a part and transport the entire family—including Bette’s long-time maid and cook Dell Pfeiffer, Margot’s nurse “Coop,” and B.D.’s governess Gladys Young—to England. When he also agreed to allow Irving Rapper, a favorite of Bette’s, to direct, the Merrills agreed. Bette found herself excited about returning to England, which she had loved so much despite the unhappy outcome of her trial in 1936.
“We were a small troop,” Gary recalled, “and took up a good deal of space—just about the entire top deck of the Queen Elizabeth” when it set sail from New York to Southampton on March 21. The ship arrived on March 26, and Gladys Young was amazed at the mob scenes the Merrills created when they arrived at the Savoy Hotel in London. She wrote in her diary that “crowds of fans pushed and crowded until a London Bobby had to escort us. Autograph hunters, Bette Davis Fan Club members, etc. Very exciting.” At another point “the crowds of people in front of the hotel had to be dispersed by the police before the Merrills came out to their car. Most all day there are little groups of people standing around, hoping for a glimpse of them.”
Bette had been warned that the English press had become increasingly hard on American stars visiting their shores, so she decided to court them and opened the hotel suite to the Fleet Street reporters. She provided hors d’oeuvres and alcohol, and patiently answered questions for several hours. The next day, Gary recalled, all the papers “sang the same song—about rich American actresses with hundreds of pieces of luggage, fur coats, and a mention or two about kids and ‘Mr. Davis.’” Bette was further hurt by their characterization of her as “a middle-aged matron” and, two days later, their barbs about her Oscar loss to Judy Holliday.
After a few weeks in London, the Merrills moved into what was meant to be their permanent home while in England, the grand manor-hotel Great Fosters, a former Tudor palace built in 1550 by King Henry VIII in Egham, Surrey, about eighteen miles outside London. An imposing structure amid acres of lush, manicured topiaries and
gardens, Great Fosters boasted ornate rooms with enormous stone fireplaces, decorated with priceless antiques and elaborately ornamented twenty-foot ceilings. It had been a fitting residence for a king, and it offered the same opulence to Bette (whom Gary now called “The Queen”) and her entourage.
The Merrills were in Great Britain for three months, and Gladys Young recalls that it was a tempestuous and debilitating period for all concerned. “B.D. was only four, and she was forced to witness so many disgusting exhibitions of drinking and violent quarrels between Bette and Gary, all of them started maliciously by Bette.”
The battles usually followed drinking bouts, Gladys says. “It was obvious to me that Bette’s intent was to get her husband drunk. Her capacity was much greater than his and she’d keep pouring double martinis down his gullet as rapidly as possible. I didn’t think about it at the time, but now I realize that her masochistic aim was to get him to the point where he would lose control and quarrel with her. Then she would remain in pretty good fighting trim long after he was fair to becoming hysterical.
“From that point on, the very staid English people who were also staying at the hotel would stand down in the garden among the peonies and sweet Williams, mouth agape, listening to the unspeakable language which was wafted down to them from the Merrills’ suite. Eventually the booze got to her, and then she’d go on a crying jag, with throaty sobs and accusations. She’d tell him he wasn’t as good in bed as her third husband, and the poor guy would tell her he never claimed to be. Millions of people considered Bette a superb actress for her realistic portrayals of the bitchiest of bitches, but—she wasn’t acting!”
The battles grew so disruptive that the manager of Great Fosters approached Douglas Fairbanks to complain. “We hate to do this,” the man said, “it’s very embarrassing, and we’re very honored to have these distinguished people, but they imbibe so much and then they argue so much and in such a loud voice that we’ve lost several customers—they’ve moved out on us. I’m going to have to ask you to move them to another hotel.”
Chastened, the Merrills returned to the Savoy, but the situation didn’t improve. They fought on and off the set, and their on-set battles—usually over Gary’s laziness while Bette labored to improve the script—did little to endear them to the cast and crew. Neither did the fact that Bette, in the midst of the postwar British meat rationing, had steaks flown in every few days from New York. “She would eat them on the set, in front of everybody,” Fairbanks recalls. “I advised her not to do it. I thought it was indiscreet, but she pooh-poohed the idea, and continued to do it her way—defiantly. It was not very popular.”
Bette was even less popular at home. According to Gladys Young, “She was so miserable to everybody. She used to drive Margot’s nurse Coop crazy. Whenever Coop was out of the house, Bette would rearrange everything in Margot’s room—her diapers, her blankets, her bottles, everything. When Coop got back she could never find anything and it would take her hours to put everything back where she wanted it. That was just Bette’s sadistic personality at work.
“Finally Coop became so fed up with the treatment she was getting from Bette that she and Dell Pfeiffer went out to the nearest pub and had a few beers. Coop was feeling no pain when they got back, and she said, ‘I’m gonna tell that bitch what I think of her.’ And I said, ‘Oh please don’t, go to bed, Coop.’ But she wrote her a letter and went upstairs, slipped it under Bette’s door, and banged on the door. She hoped to get away before Bette got to the door, but Bette never walked, so you could hear her run to the door and she opened it before Coop could get away. She read the letter, then gave Coop one hour to get ready and leave to go back to the U.S.”
Gladys found it wearing on her physical and mental health to work for Bette. Despite the fact that Gladys was ill one day, Bette insisted that she take B.D. for a walk. Gladys tried to explain that she was unwell and experiencing bladder problems, but Bette would hear none of it. Finally Margot’s nurse said, “For God’s sake, can’t you see the woman’s sick? I’ll take B.D. out.”
Gladys longed to tell Bette off the way Coop had, but she didn’t want to be shipped back to the States without a job. When the Merrills returned to California in July, however, both Gladys and Dell—who had worked for Bette for over fifteen years—took their leave. “Dell was wonderful and she adored Bette,” Gladys recalled. “But Bette could be very unkind to her and one day she came into my room and she was almost crying and I said, ‘Why do you work for a woman like Bette Davis? What did Lincoln do for you people?’ And she straightened up and said, ‘He made it possible for us to taste of the tree of life.’ And I said, ‘Well, you’re sure as hell grovelling in the roots when you work for Bette Davis.’ And I made her promise she’d quit, and she did.”
Gladys wrote a letter to Bette on July 11, explaining that her doctor had advised her not to return to the Merrill house until she had “regained the weight I have lost, and the general state of health I was enjoying when I left for England.”
Bette responded with a snippy letter telling Gladys she had made a wise decision because she was “physically and mentally” unsuited to be a governess. She argued that weight loss was seldom an indicator of poor health and that Gladys wanted to lose weight anyway. She concluded that she and Gladys did not get along because one “definite” person should work with another.
Gladys had to laugh. “I’ve never wanted to lose weight in my life. Bette was so deluded; she could never ever admit that she might have been at fault, for anything. But it got so bad that the Frosch Employment Agency in Beverly Hills blacklisted her. They wouldn’t send any help over to her any more. She had to go out to the hinterlands to get help.”
Bette’s unhappiness with Another Man’s Poison had helped put her in such a foul temper in England. She had tried to improve the script during shooting, but nothing seemed to work. She had hoped that in spite of everything Irving Rapper would make a great picture. He didn’t. Merrill called him “a real run-of-the-mill” director, which angered Bette, who feared it was true. Worst of all, she was afraid that after two excellent comeback films she would again be caught in a turkey.
She was right. When the picture opened on January 7, 1952, it was met by scathing reviews and lukewarm box office. As she had before when struggling with a sub-par script, Bette had attempted to make up for its deficiencies through sheer acting power. The critics, however, were less willing than ever to accept her more mannered histrionics. The Hollywood Reporter reviewer commented, “The melodramatic gamut seldom has experienced the workout it is given in Another Man’s Poison, a wild and fanciful saga.… Bette Davis, queen of the vixens, combs her hair, lights cartons of cigarettes, snaps her fingers and bites her consonants, and it all adds up to a performance you’d expect to find from a night club impersonation of the actress.”
The feeling in Hollywood that Bette’s comeback had petered out was reinforced by her next effort, Phone Call from a Stranger. It wasn’t a bad film, but Bette’s role in it amounted to less than fifteen minutes. Gary was the star, and Bette asked the producer to let her play the small but flashy role of an invalid. “I have never understood why stars should object to playing smaller parts if they were good ones,” she told the press. Left unsaid, of course, was that she had no other offers, and she was being paid $35,000 for a role originally budgeted at $1,500. “The producers got back more than that in publicity alone,” Gary said, “the ‘star playing a bit part.’” But despite all of Bette’s protestations, the cameo appearance only served to reinforce the feeling in Hollywood that Bette Davis could no longer land a starring role.
Two months after Phone Call from a Stranger was released, with Gary swamped with film offers and Bette getting none, she decided to make her television debut on Jimmy Durante’s variety show. Appearing live from Los Angeles, she first read a commercial (“It takes two cans of Pet Milk”) and then did her best at farce in a fifteen-minute skit with Durante. The Daily Variety critic wasn’t kind. “That her c
oming-out in the channel set was not too auspicious can be traced to an apparent nervousness… and a lack of sufficient elasticity to ‘unbend.’”
“I was scared to death,” Bette admitted. “That I got through it at all was a source of great wonderment to me!”
Bette was spared more television chores when she was finally offered a meaty part, the title role of Margaret Elliott in The Star, an overblown Hollywood saga about a washed-up, self-destructive Oscar winner obsessed with regaining her star stature. The script had been written by Katherine Albert, a disgruntled former employee of Joan Crawford’s, and Bette was gleeful not only to have a good part but to be able to do a sendup of her least favorite actress. “Joan was famous for saying ‘Bless You’ to everybody in that pious way of hers,” Bette laughed, “and I actually got to say that in the script!”
Bette seems not to have realized that Margaret had more in common with her than with Joan Crawford. She is unbending, hates producers, rails against the “tripe” she’s been forced to do. Moreover, she is sick of supporting her parasitic sister and her husband, and Bette plays the scene in which Margaret refuses to give them their monthly stipend (because she hasn’t got the money) in such an overwrought manner that one can easily imagine she wasn’t acting at all, but thinking about spendthrift Ruthie and dependent Bobby.
The Star isn’t a very good picture. Its script is full of implausibilities, its production values are cheapjack, and its ending, in which Margaret decides to give up a juicy role that would mean her comeback to marry the man who truly loves her, is far too facile. Bette’s performance is typical of the kind she had often given since the late ’40s—overheated and caricatured one minute, nuanced and affecting the next. As Time’s critic put it, “Her performance as an ex-first lady of the screen is first-rate.… It is a marathon one-woman show and, all in all, proof that Bette Davis—with her strident voice, nervous stride, mobile hands and popping eyes—is still her own best imitator.”