by James Spada
The Star provided Bette with yet another “comeback,” bringing with it her ninth Oscar nomination (along with Joan Crawford, who had choreographed a small comeback of her own in Sudden Fear). Bette lost the award to Shirley Booth in Come Back, Little Sheba, a film she had turned down, and once again her career resurgence proved short-lived. She didn’t make another film for more than three years.
Bette stood in front of Margot’s crib and shrieked uncontrollably. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” It was four in the morning, and she was at the end of her rope. Every night, the baby screamed and cried, rattling the bars of her crib. “Nights were something to dread,” Bette said. “Five minutes after we had put her to bed she would be up shaking the crib bars and screaming. We would take turns putting her down, telling her it was time to shut her eyes and go to sleep. By two or three o’clock in the morning, exhausted from lack of sleep, she would be in a nervous rage. And sometimes, I am afraid, we were too.”
It wasn’t just Margot’s nightly screaming fits that worried Bette. The child seemed “different” somehow; her behavior was unsettling. First she ran away from her governess, not too alarming an event. But then she tried to strangle the family kitten. Bette left her alone in the car for a few minutes, and when she returned Margot had removed all her clothes. “Children often strip, and often run away,” Bette’s friends would reassure her as they laughed at Margot’s antics. But she wasn’t convinced. “There was something about the way Margot did these things, and the frequency with which she did them, that worried me. She seemed driven.”
Bette tried to put her mind at rest about Margot. She told herself this was a phase, that the child would come around. But at night, lying in her bed, listening to Margot’s wails, fear would gnaw at her and “all the disturbing thoughts I had pushed away during the day would come floating to the surface.”
The Merrills had a happy distraction from Margot’s problems in January 1952 when they adopted another child, the boy Gary had always wanted. Fair-skinned and blond-haired, the infant came to them at five days of age, and they named him Michael Woodman Merrill. His ancestry, according to Gary, “was good on both sides, probably better than either Bette’s or mine.”
Bette doted on the placid, well-behaved Michael, whom she called “Woody” for a time; throughout his youth she treated him as a little prince, sparing him her anger and vitriol. Not so B.D., who by five had developed a willful personality uncomfortably reminiscent of her mother’s. The clashes between them, even at B.D.’s young age, were vivid. B.D. was “a hardheaded, stubborn little girl,” Gary recalled, “who was prone to come up with stories not based on fact.” Bette didn’t seem to mind that, but when B.D. would dig in her heels and defy her mother, Bette would treat her as an adult rather than a child, prompting verbal fireworks that depleted both of them but did little to set B.D. straight. “B.D. needed a great deal more disciplining than she had received,” Gary thought.
All of this turned Bette into a wreck. Her career, the safety valve she had always relied upon when her home life threatened to undo her, had come to a dead halt, and she had no escape from B.D.’s temper tantrums and Margot’s bizarre, frightening rages. Ruthie’s and Bobby’s failed marriages had left them more emotionally and financially dependent on Bette than ever. Early in 1952, Bette was close to distraction.
Then, a blessed reprieve: the young producer Mike Ellis offered her the singing and dancing lead role in a Broadway revue, Two’s Company. “I was not a little apprehensive,” she admitted. She hadn’t appeared on stage in over twenty-two years. She was neither a singer nor a dancer. Still, she had no choice but to accept the offer, because her expenses, as usual, were enormous; Gary’s income, although high, wasn’t always enough. She needed the money. She was also eager to return to the East Coast—“I wanted the children to be brought up in my beloved East.” She hoped that if the family “got out of Hollywood our personal situation might change. I would have done anything for that.”
Bette picked up the family and moved to Manhattan, where she furnished a Beekman Place penthouse with enough of their belongings to make it feel a little like home. Then she embarked on what was arguably her greatest professional challenge, her spirit infused with optimism for her life and career.
TWENTY-TWO
O
n the stage of the Alvin Theatre in New York, the boys and girls of the chorus—Broadway’s gypsies—were rehearsing a sketch for Two’s Company. They had been told that at some point that day they would finally meet Bette Davis, the star of the revue, and their excitement was palpable. In the middle of a complicated routine, the show’s producers, James Russo and Mike Ellis, walked down the middle aisle and announced, “Bette Davis is here and we’d like you to meet her.”
Swathed in mink despite the mid-June heat, Bette swept in with her best Margo Channing flourish and called “Hello!” She bounded up the steps to the stage and removed her coat. Florence Brooks-Dunay, one of the dancers, recalls that as Bette greeted them and shook hands, “she dragged her mink coat across the filthy, dusty stage. It was a very Hollywood thing to do, and pretty shocking.”
Then, as quickly as she had come, Bette was gone. “She said, ‘Hello,’ and out she flew,” May Muth, her understudy, says. “We weren’t sure if she was embarrassed or didn’t want to be introduced to us, or what. She certainly wasn’t very loving toward us.”
Bette’s involvement with Two’s Company came about by accident. Late in 1951, Russo and Ellis, neophyte producers, had been approached by Charlie Sherman, a Broadway and television comedy writer, about producing a Broadway revue, and he suggested Judith Anderson as the star. After several meetings, she decided that she would not be up to the musical numbers, and passed. Aware that they needed a big star to put the show over, the pair’s ears perked up when Ralph Alswang, a scenic designer who shared an office with them, put a call through to his friend Gary Merrill early in February. “Hey, Ralph,” Russo called over, half in jest, “ask Gary if Bette would like to do a musical revue in New York.”
Bette’s reply—“Sure, if the material is right”—sent Russo and Sherman whirling across the country in a borrowed car to present the project to Bette in person. “Charlie sat in the back seat with a typewriter the whole time,” Ellis recalls, “putting this thing together. When they got to California they spent three hours auditioning the material for Bette, and she was rolling on the floor with laughter. She told them she wanted to do it.”
In the meantime, Vernon Duke and Ogden Nash were fashioning the music and lyrics, and when Bette heard them she told Ellis she thought they were “heaven.” On March 11, Ellis wrote her to explain the format of the show. “It is our plan to have you run through a gamut of characters, from wealthy and sexy types to thoroughly slatternly housewife characters.… Also, since the nature of the show is intimate, with the emphasis on the sketches, there will be at least once in the show when you’ll come on in the middle of someone else’s sketch and say nothing more than ‘Dinner is served.’ We are most anxious to retain the small, intimate format, with everyone on a friendly basis helping everyone else throughout the show, except that you will be the star.”
After Bette made her verbal commitment to the producers, telling them that “Gary says it’s about time I got off my ass,” serious negotiations began. Bette asked for approval of the choreographer and all cast members. The choreographer, in her view, was the most important person in the equation, and should the producers’ first choices, Michael Kidd or Jerome Robbins, be unavailable, she felt it was “of the utmost importance to my security” to have veto power over any alternate choice. “I must get along with, be understood by, and believe in the man who has this job in the show.”
As to the cast members, Bette was blunt. “If an actor were fine in every way for everyone else, and there was some reason why I did not click with him, I would want the freedom of having the right to ask you to change him.” She assured Russo and Ellis that she had only used such discretion “once
in twenty years” and had no intention “of being the Hitler of any production, all rumors to the contrary. Nor am I the type, in case of an argument, who argues just for the sake of winning my point.”
Bette signed a standard run-of-the-play contract with Russo and Ellis on June 11 that guaranteed her $3,000 a week against 10 percent of the gross weekly box-office receipts. Riders to the agreement granted Bette all the approvals she had asked for and an additional 5 percent of the net profits. The producers also agreed to provide her with first-class transportation for herself, her three children, two nurses, and a maid.
“I just can’t tell you how excited the boys are about the whole idea!” Ellis said in a letter to Bette. “We will have a long, pleasant and enthusiastic relationship with this show and possibly many others. It’s marvelous!”
Bette went into rehearsals in July for the scheduled October 20 opening, working with director Jules Dassin, choreographer Jerome Robbins, and costars Hiram Sherman, Nathaniel Frey (later replaced by David Burns), and Nora Kaye. Almost at once, everyone in the cast realized that Bette, the legendary Hollywood star of whom they were in awe, was all wrong as the star of a musical comedy revue. According to Florence Brooks-Dunay, “She was unattractive and klutzy. Her line readings were impossible. Everything-was-the-same. I mean, the woman had no range. And really no sense of humor. Or if she had one, it didn’t come out on stage. She was obviously much more comfortable in front of a camera.”
Shortly into rehearsals, Bette too realized that she was ill equipped to handle the material, and Jules Dassin saw that she had become “terribly nervous and afraid.” She began to tinker with the production, much to Mike Ellis’s annoyance. “She used to sit there and try to rearrange the routine of the show. And we’d tell her we couldn’t do that because this scene has so and so in it and he’s also in the next scene and there would be no time for the costume change. She had no feeling for that sort of thing. It was very difficult.”
Because Bette had no experience in musical comedy, she was easily influenced by the retinue of people she had gathered around her for advice. As Dassin remembers it, “Someone said to her, ‘You mean, you’re rehearsing without props?!’ So, by God, one Sunday she came to rehearsal with a truck full of furniture and props—just because she was quite lost.”
Bette had expected that to work with a director and a choreographer of the stature of Dassin and Robbins would make up for her deficiencies, and she was shocked that she drew so little support from either of them. This shook whatever confidence she had left. “I must admit,” says Dassin, “that I was not much use to her during all of this. First, I hated the material. Second, I was being hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee. They sent guys to rehearsals every two minutes telling me that I had to come to Washington.”
Dassin had been blacklisted a year earlier along with many other artists for alleged leftist ties during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist “witch hunts,” but Ellis and Russo wanted him because they thought he had the strength “to handle a star.” When they told Bette that there might be problems hiring Dassin because of the blacklist, Bette replied, “Fuck ’em.” He still remembers Bette fondly for that, but in the end his harassment by the HUAC process servers cost her much needed directorial support.
Why did Dassin agree to direct Two’s Company if he “hated” the material? “I had something to prove—that the whole blacklisting thing was phony and that with my name up in lights, there would be no American Legion demonstrations outside the theater and all that.” Moreover, Dassin had hoped to convince Bette to lobby for better songs and sketches and to bring in outside help. He told her, “Look, you can get the best people in the world to write for you. I’ve contacted Noel Coward, and he said he would be delighted.” But, Bette protested, she liked the material. “That was the tragic mistake,” Dassin says. “It was a lot of junk.”
Even more devastating to Bette than Dassin’s distractions was the indifference of Jerome Robbins, the brilliant, mercurial choreographer who had burst on the Broadway scene in 1944 with On the Town and scored triumphs with High Button Shoes and, most recently, The King and I. Bette was sure she was in the best of hands, and that if anyone could help her turn her “klutziness” into grace it was Robbins. She was sorely disappointed.
Rather than focus his attention on Bette, as she reasonably expected he would, Robbins left her to her own devices after the first few weeks of rehearsal. “Jerry may have felt that Bette was hopeless as a dancer,” Mike Ellis mused, “and that he should concentrate on Nora Kaye and Maria Karnilova, the lead dancers in the show, who were no slouches. Bette was not the most graceful woman in the world, and choreographers tend to like to work with dancers.”
Dassin agrees. “Jerry, in my deficiency, really should have taken over more. But he didn’t. He was much more concerned with the ballet than anything else.” Even when Robbins did pay attention to Bette, his approach grated on her, as it did some of the others. Buzz Miller, one of the dancers, points out that “Jerry was not very helpful to anyone. He’s a perfectly delightful person off-stage, but when he’s working, he can’t help himself, he’s just a monster. Everything that comes out of his mouth is a put-down.”
On September 23, with the October 20 opening date already unreachable, Bette refused to work with Robbins any longer and threatened to walk out of the show. Advance ticket sales had been tremendous, primarily on Bette’s name, and Ellis and Russo were desperate to keep their star happy. Ellis wrote a contrite, comforting letter to Bette for Robbins’s signature. (“I was a better writer than Jerry,” Ellis explains.) In it he told her, “I want you to know that the only reason I signed for this show was because of you and I have a clause in my contract to that effect. I believe, now more than ever, that you will be marvelous and I am more excited about the idea of working with you than with any other star I’ve worked with. If I have not seemed to demonstrate that to you, I ask you to forgive me.… I feel that your numbers will present no problems to you. I suppose it’s because I’m so sure of that and not at all worried that I have given the impression that the numbers are being slighted.” The letter went on to assure Bette that Robbins would hire an assistant to free him up “so that I can devote as much time to you as you feel you need,” and that “your success in this show is so important to me that I have withdrawn from my next assignment, Carnival in Flanders.”
The letter placated Bette, as did Ellis’s hiring of Viola Rubber, a former Broadway producer whose job, in Ellis’s words, was “to do nothing but try to keep things with Bette running smoothly.”
Bette’s new sanguinity lasted only until the beginning of out-of-town tryouts. She had been feeling tired and run-down, and moments after her entrance for the first public performance of Two’s Company in Detroit on October 19, she collapsed to the stage floor with what one observer called “a terrific bone-jarring bang.” As Gary jumped out of his seat, a stagehand dragged Bette into the wings and slapped her face hard. “Get up, Bette,” he pleaded. “Get up.”
She regained consciousness and within five minutes was back on stage with a comment that brought the house down: “Well, you can’t say I didn’t fall for you.” She got through the rest of the show without incident. “If there’s one word to describe Bette Davis,” Jules Dassin observes, “it has to be trouper.”
Over the next few weeks, Bette continued to feel terrible. Her lack of energy was completely alien to her; the only thing she could attribute it to was the grueling work of taking a major show to Broadway. As worried as she was about the way she felt, that wasn’t her most gnawing concern—she was terrified that Two’s Company was headed for disaster. “She realized we were in bad shape during the out-of-town tryouts,” Jules Dassin recalls. “She lost faith in herself and the material. She thought people would laugh, and they weren’t laughing.”
Bette had asked Bobby to travel with her during the out-of-town tryouts in her customary position as personal maid and factotum, and Bobby ministere
d to her one night in Detroit when she felt too sick to go on. By now, the producers were wary of Bette, and they suspected her illness was feigned, merely an attempt to pressure them into something or other she wanted. Her star power was so important to the show, they knew, that if she didn’t appear the revue would never work. “We had a conference,” Ellis recalls. “Everybody was there—me, Jimmy Russo, Vernon Duke, Ogden Nash, Jerry Robbins. And we sat around saying, ‘What should we do?’ It was hard to know what to do because we didn’t know what she was going to do. So I said, ‘I’ll find out.’”
Ellis called Bette’s room and Bobby picked up the phone. “How is Bette feeling?” he asked.
“Oh, Miss Davis isn’t feeling well at all,” Bobby told him. “Miss Davis is really quite sick.”
Ellis was concerned. “Has she seen a doctor?”
“Oh, Miss Davis is much too sick to see a doctor,” Bobby replied. “I didn’t know what to say to somebody who made a remark like that,” Ellis says. “And I’m not usually tongue-tied.”
As the show plodded through Boston toward the latest Broadway opening date, December 15, the petrified Bette adopted a wartime footing and began to enlist allies, pitting one camp against the other. According to Mike Ellis, “Her allegiance would move from person to person as she felt less secure,” and she was deeply suspicious now of anything Ellis tried to do to improve the show. When he asked the esteemed director Joshua Logan (Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific) for a critique, she refused to complete her performance. “Bette had eight appearances in the show,” Ellis recalled, “and when she found out Logan was there she only performed three and then left. Logan had one of the two or three best minds in the American theater and he came not because of Jimmy Russo or me—he came because of Bette Davis. Then she refuses to perform. And that’s the way it went.”