by James Spada
In Boston, Jules Dassin left the show, and the producers asked the elderly John Murray Anderson to step in; Bette agreed to allow this only with the proviso that any criticisms her former teacher might have of her performance be given to her in private and not in front of the cast. Anderson didn’t keep the bargain. Much to Bette’s chagrin, after a few days of observation he told a number of the cast members that he hadn’t thought Bette had much talent when she came to his school in 1928, “and this just proves how right I was.”
Distrustful of everyone by now, Bette relied only on herself and her entourage. “Whenever an artistic decision had to be made,” Ellis says, “she always fell back on her own instincts and resources and they were always wrong. She wouldn’t listen to me or Jerry or whomever. No, she was going to do it her way. Then she’d be proven wrong and she’d be very angry. It’s too bad, because if she had just done what they said, it would have been tremendous.”
By now, the cast of Two’s Company had pretty well had it with Bette. “She was quite a disappointment,” Florence Brooks-Dunay felt. “Really, she was a wreck.” When May Muth rehearsed a new scene with her, she found that Bette didn’t know her lines, so she prompted her. “Don’t you ever throw me a line!” Bette hissed. “She almost killed me!” May recalled.
To May, Bette seemed jealous and possessive whenever Gary would visit. “She didn’t like him being too friendly with the girls. We all got the message that if he came over to say hello, we were to fly.” Bette got along much better with the men in the show, according to Buzz Miller. “She was just terrific with the dancing boys, who worshipped her. She was warm and appreciative. I guess she figured they were no threat. I mean, they weren’t after Gary Merrill.”
Miller feels that much of the resentment the cast felt toward Bette was generated by her entourage. “She had Viola Rubber around her, and everybody wanted to stick pins in her. Bette had all these henchladies and advisers who kept rushing into her dressing room and pumping her with nonsense. They just stirred the pot and made her go absolutely nutty. No one was allowed near her. If she’d had some good gypsy folk around, she could have just laughed it off and gone on.”
Miller was amazed at how inconsistent Bette could be. “The cast would hang around in the wings and watch her every night, because it was unbelievable—you never knew how she’d be. She would do a scene and it would be so absolutely fabulous that we were all awestruck. Or it would be so terrible that we were awestruck. Like the last song, ‘Just Like a Man.’ When she did it badly, it was just so embarrassing that everyone would just sneak out of the theater. But once in a while she would do it and just annihilate you, she was so terrific.”
As the New York opening night loomed, Bette’s terror grew. She was drinking, Ellis noticed, and she broke into screaming matches with Gary in her dressing room night after night. She was still feeling tired unto death, and now she was frequently nauseated as well. She felt so exhausted the day before the New York opening that she went to see Dr. Max Jacobson, who was gaining a reputation as “Dr. Feelgood” because of his extraordinarily energizing vitamin injections. Within a half hour of her shot, Bette felt peppier than she had in months, and the effect didn’t wear off for eight hours. Thrilled, she asked Jacobson if he could come to her Beekman Place apartment before every show and give her an injection. “Of course,” he replied.
With as much optimism and energy as she could muster, Bette opened in Two’s Company at the Alvin Theatre on December 15. The audience, packed with her most rabid fans, cheered, stomped, and applauded her every move, and when the show was over Bette was convinced that the seemingly impossible had happened: she had a hit.
The critics were more discriminating, and all but one had deep reservations about the show. The influential Walter Kerr’s opinion was typical: “It’s always fun to see a distinguished actress unbend, and in Two’s Company Bette Davis unbends all over the place. She trucks right out and lets herself be tossed into the air by four or five chorus boys. She ties an old bandana around her hair, drapes herself in a moth-eaten sweater, and slouches in sneakers through a sketch about tenement passion. She blacks out her teeth, jams a corncob pipe in her mouth, and lets loose with the yowls of a hillbilly ballad. Indeed, Miss Davis unbends so much that there’s some doubt in my mind whether she’ll ever be able to straighten up again. The trouble with this business of encouraging a serious performer to let her hair down, climb off the Hollywood pedestal, and rough it up with the lowbrow comics is that it all adds up to a single joke.… Unless the performer has hitherto unsuspected and thoroughly genuine talents of the music-hall sort—which Miss Davis would not seem to possess—the descent from Parnassus thins out into a stunt.… It’s a lot like listening to Beethoven’s Fifth played on a pocket comb. You marvel that it can be done at all. And five minutes is just about enough of it.”
Bette was devastated by the reviews, particularly because they affected the box office. When the initial surge of Davis fans began to wane after about six weeks, the show played to less-than-capacity audiences, and Bette was forced to agree to have her weekly guarantee reduced from $3,000 to $100 in order to help keep the show open. Her mood wasn’t improved two months after Two’s Company opened when another movie star, Rosalind Russell, won rave reviews (and, ultimately, a Tony Award) with her Broadway musical comedy debut in Wonderful Town. “When Rosalind Russell made such a hit with the critics,” Buzz Miller recalled, “that was the crowning blow. And that’s when she really got sick.”
She had been feeling worse and worse for weeks; even Dr. Jacobson’s injections did little to help her now. She missed performances, and everyone involved with the show suspected that she wasn’t ill at all, but only trying to get out of her contract. Several doctors told her she had a low-grade infection and prescribed penicillin, but the drug was of little help. Finally Bette insisted that the antibiotic be stopped, and at that point her jaw began to ache and the left side of her face swelled so badly that she was barely recognizable. She missed the matinee performance on Sunday, March 8, and called in an oral surgeon that afternoon.
Dr. Stanley Behrman came to see Bette at the Beekman Place apartment and from the looks of her suspected that she had a badly infected tooth. “I told her that she had to go to the hospital immediately so that we could drain the infection and see exactly what was wrong,” Behrman recalls. Bette told him that she had to do an Actors’ Equity benefit performance that evening. He strongly advised her not to do it. “I have to,” Bette insisted. “If I don’t everyone will think I’m afraid to perform in front of my peers.”
Behrman made her promise that she would meet him at New York Hospital after the benefit. In pain, her face and lymph nodes swollen, Bette went on, and after the show—at midnight—Behrman did a complete set of X-rays of her mouth. What he saw shocked him. “Instead of the infected tooth I expected to see, it looked like the moths had been at her jaw. The whole left side was just riddled with holes.”
For months, Behrman realized, Bette’s body had been fighting osteomyelitis of the jaw, a potentially life-threatening bacterial infection that had been eating away at the bones around her teeth. (It was the same disease that had afflicted Ruthie in 1921.) The penicillin had checked the infection only enough so that it could slowly destroy her jaw, and Dr. Jacobson’s injections had allowed her to “run on empty,” further endangering her health.
Behrman told Bette that he would have to perform surgery on her jaw the next day, and she remained in the hospital overnight. Blood tests while she was there showed that her body was suffused not only with the infection from her jaw but also with amphetamines, “speed” drugs that provide artificial energy, and can be addictive and debilitating to the body. Dr. Jacobson’s injections, it turned out, had been more than just vitamins, and could have cost Bette her life. According to Dr. Behrman, when Bette insisted that the penicillin be stopped, she also told Dr. Jacobson that she no longer wanted his “Feelgood” injections. “But he insisted,” Behrman recal
ls, “and she had to lock him out of her apartment to keep him away from her.”1
Bette’s stay in the hospital caused quite a stir. “People lined up in the halls when they heard she was there,” Behrman marvels, “and her X-rays were stolen by somebody as a souvenir.” A worried Gary Merrill spent the night in Bette’s room, and the next morning he told Behrman, “That woman in there is my wife, the mother of my children, she’s a housewife and that’s how she should be treated.” Meaning, Behrman felt, that he should treat her as he would any other patient. “There’s a tendency sometimes to treat someone like that with kid gloves—‘Well, I won’t do this test because it’s going to be uncomfortable’ or whatever. Merrill wanted us to do whatever we had to in order to get Bette well again.”
As Bette waited to be operated on Monday morning, she asked May Muth to pay her a visit. When May arrived, Bette begged her to take her side against the producers, whom she was convinced would think she was faking. “She asked me to go back and tell everybody she was really ill,” Muth recalls. “But I wasn’t about to get into the middle of it. She was going to win no matter what, and I wasn’t going to speak against the producers, who I loved. I don’t think she was faking it, I just feel that she didn’t want the show to keep running without her.”
Behrman was faced with a difficult problem when he operated on Bette’s jaw. He had to remove large areas of diseased bone and marrow while preserving Bette’s teeth and keeping her jaw intact. “Ordinarily, I would do this operation from the outside and collapse the bone. But that would have scarred her and perhaps even have caused her face to cave in. So I did it the hard way. I went in from inside her mouth. I had to remove nearly half the jaw, but I left enough so that all of the bone would grow back. It’s a great deal more painful that way, but it would eventually be as if nothing had happened.”
After the surgery, Behrman packed the cleaned-out areas with what he describes as “a thin strip of gauze covered with Vaseline that was miles and miles long.” Most of it encircled her main jaw nerve, and the first few times he changed it, Bette was under general anesthetic. Afterward, the changes were done while Bette was awake, and they put her in agony. She rarely complained. “She was an incredible lady,” Behrman thought. “A gal of steel in some ways.”
The day after the surgery, Behrman wrote to Ellis and Russo to say that for Bette to return to work “in the next three to four weeks” would be “hazardous” to her health. The producers considered several replacements, but on Monday, March 16, they accepted the inevitable and posted a closing notice for the cast and crew. Two’s Company had played ninety performances, and lost money. “It took me seven years to get out of debt,” Mike Ellis says. “I had bill collectors following me all over town.”
The entire experience was “excruciating” for Ellis, “a nightmare.” He places the blame largely with Bette. “If she had just trusted the people involved with the show and had done what they wanted her to do, she would have made it.” Bette, of course, felt differently. When Ellis ran into her and Gary at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami in 1956, “Bette took one look at me and ran out of the theater.”
For her part, Bette never entertained the idea that she was responsible for the failure of Two’s Company, or that she was in any way deficient as a singer, dancer, or farceur. In January 1953 she took part in the recording of the original-cast album of the show, which contained only the songs, not the sketches, so that she appeared on only two or three cuts. Years later she was asked to explain the commercial failure of the album. “They made the biggest mistake in the world on that album!” she cried. “I’m not on it!”
* * *
1 In the 1960s, after he had treated President and Mrs. Kennedy, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr., Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, Marlene Dietrich, and many others with his “vitamin injections,” Jacobson had his medical license revoked.
TWENTY-THREE
B
ette lay in her hospital bed, restless, uncomfortable, her jaw aching miserably. She thought the radio might take her mind off the pain, and she switched it on. Within a few minutes, Walter Winchell began his nationally syndicated gossip report, “Coast to Coast,” with words that sent an icy finger of fear down Bette’s spine: “Bette Davis has been operated on for cancer of the jaw.”
Nearly hysterical, she called Dr. Behrman at home. “Do I have cancer, Doctor?” she asked, her voice shaking with fear. “You must tell me if I do.”
“No, Bette, you don’t have cancer,” Behrman replied. “What you had was an infection, not a tumor.”
Bette’s relief soon turned to fury at Winchell. She told Gary to demand a retraction in Winchell’s daily newspaper column, but he cautioned that more people would read the retraction than heard the original item and think Bette really did have cancer. The story, however, refused to die, and other columnists, including Dorothy Kilgallen, picked it up. “One young doctor in town who wanted publicity told the press that I had missed the diagnosis and that Bette had cancer,” Behrman recalled. “My mother pulled me aside and said, ‘You can tell me the truth. Walter Winchell wouldn’t say it unless it was true.’ It got so crazy that we took out the slides and studied them again, just to make sure.”
Finally Gary persuaded Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of the New York Post, to print a prominent article that accurately described Bette’s illness. Winchell then admitted in print that he had been misinformed. “It certainly helped,” Bette recalled, “although no retraction ever completely does it. The rumors persisted.”
She languished in the hospital for six more weeks, a long and difficult period that gave her an opportunity to reflect on her past, and her future. “My head was bursting with pain. I wondered if my life was over. Two things sustained me as I lay in the hospital trying to keep control of my life: I thought of my husband and my three children… and I mentally reviewed the long years of my career. Thinking of my family gave me courage; reviewing my career became a fascination. It was almost a form of psychoanalysis.… Each picture brought back a memory—of my continuing fight for independence in Hollywood, of the unhappiness that dogged my personal life, of the good wholesome existence that finally came to me.”
With Gary constantly concerned and attentive, with Bobby reliably supervising the household (“Without her… I don’t know what I would have done,” Bette said), with the children visiting her for an hour every day and B.D. often spending the night in a cot at her side, Bette was able to reflect pleasurably again on marriage and family and forget for a while the drinking and the battles with Gary, the willfulness of B.D., her nagging doubts about Margot. Maybe, she thought, Margo Channing and Bill Sampson might just have a chance.
It took more than a year for Bette’s jaw to heal completely, and longer for the numbness that replaced the pain to disappear. She didn’t even think about working; Gary had enough film offers to keep him busy for the next eighteen months, and this gave Bette her first real chance to see whether she could be truly happy simply as a wife and mother. The Merrills moved from Beekman Place to an inn in Maine, where they remained for six months before moving into a sprawling white clapboard house at Zeb’s Cove in Cape Elizabeth on the Maine coastline.
Bette loved the house, just as she had loved Butternut. “The porches,” she wrote, “the stacked lobster pots, the open fires, the pond for skating in winter, the cove—everything made it the perfect home for a family to be happy in. Its kitchen was my new amphitheatre; and I never wanted to get off the stage!” She named the house Witch-Way because so many people asked “Which way?” when seeking directions and because, as she put it, “A witch lived there—guess who?”
Bette and Gary became a part of their community, much like any other parents. B.D. entered the first grade at Waynflete, a private school fifteen miles away in Portland, and the Merrills joined the PTA. Bette suspected the locals expected Theda Bara “in satin sheaths” when she arrived, but they found instead a surprisingly down-to-earth New Englander. When Gary jo
ined the local ice-hockey team, which played on a nearby pond, Bette would supply the players with cocktails and cheer the team on.
The Merrills maintained a small animal farm on their property; Gary butchered their sheep and pigs for food in the fall and replaced them in the spring. He also caught lobsters from a kayak, and the children combed the beaches for mussels and steamer clams. The first summer, Bette decided that her family should reap the full harvest of the land and water around them and took a recipe from a naturalist cookbook for seaweed pudding. As a blissful Bette ate bowl after bowl of the delicacy, B.D. recalled, the rest of the family choked on every mouthful.
Bette and Gary now presented a heartwarming picture of domestic bliss to the world: the “good wholesome existence” Bette had alluded to. In a series of magazine and newspaper interviews, they spoke about their happiness in Maine. One article, entitled “The Present Is Perfect,” quoted Bette as saying, “This is the only marriage I’ve ever had.” Gary added, “She’s sweet and wifely and I’m sweet and husbandly.” The reporter, Ida Zeitlin, closed the piece with the observation, “Now there’s a house whose warmth is like a welcome. If Bette’s been tops with you for more years than you care to remember, you go away feeling good.”
The reporter had spent a day, seen the performances, and left with a warmed heart. But Bette and Gary’s neighbors and friends knew that things at Witch-Way weren’t as the Merrills would have them seem. Dark rumors swirled around Cape Elizabeth about very odd goings-on in that house. There was the procession of hired help that came and went, each with a new story of violent battles between the couple, of Gary’s drinking and peculiar behavior, of his physical abuse of Bette. One live-in young couple had left the morning that Gary wandered into the kitchen at dawn, said “Good morning” to them, and started to fix himself a martini—stark naked. As the woman ran upstairs in shocked tears, her husband screamed and shook his fist at Gary. Then Bette barreled in, spouting venom at her husband that added considerably to the decibel level. Unbothered, Gary finished his martini and wandered off.