by James Spada
There were whispers that Margot was insane, that she had been placed in a straitjacket and confined to a third-floor bedroom where she screamed and howled all night. The rumors gave Witch-Way the gothic aura of a mad doctor’s isolated mansion. Unfortunately, the gossip wasn’t that far afield of the truth.
An evocative study of Bette as the transformed spinster Charlotte Vale in one of her most popular films, Now, Voyager, 1942.
A lovely Davis portrait of the period.
In 1942, Bette helped found the Hollywood Canteen for America’s World War II soldiers. Here she helps serve cake to a serviceman at its New York counterpart, the Stage Door Canteen
Director Vincent Sherman shows Bette how he wants her to resist a man’s advances in Old Acquaintance. In real life, the situation was quite the reverse as Sherman tried to keep an amorous Bette at bay.
An hysterical Miriam Hopkins lights into Bette, who remains maddeningly calm in Old Acquaintance, 1943. The on-set dynamics between the two stars were similar.
Haggard, Bette testifies at the Los Angeles inquest into the mysterious death of her husband in August 1943.
Bette plunged immediately back into work on Mr. Skeffington in September. During filming, Vincent Sherman finally agreed to have an affair with Bette.
In November 1945, a lonely Bette takes her third husband, William Grant Sherry, an artist seven years her junior. Flanking the newlyweds are Sherry’s mother, Marion, left, and Ruthie.
Eighteen months later, the Sherrys’ daughter Barbara Davis is christened in Hollywood. Bette’s sister Bobby wears Bette’s old wedding outfit.
A ridiculous publicity still from a ridiculous movie, Beyond the Forest, Bette’s final Warner Brothers picture. She dubbed her last line on her last day at the studio: “I’ve got to get out of here!”
B.D. Sherry makes her film debut with her mother in Payment on Demand, filmed in 1949. By this time Bette’s marriage was disintegrating.
Bette on the set of her comeback film, All About Eve, with director/writer Joe Mankiewicz and costars Anne Baxter and Celeste Holm, 1950.
Inset: Bette leaves her hand-and foot-prints in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, November, 1950.
Bette as the irrepressible, volcanic Margo Channing, one of her most indelible screen creations.
March 1951: Bette leaves for England with her new husband Gary Merrill, B.D., and newly adopted baby Margot. Also along were, clockwise from upper left; Margot’s nurse “Coop,” B.D.’s governess Gladys Young and Bette’s maid Dell Pfeiffer.
Unable to find work in Hollywood, Bette returns to Broadway in the musical review Two’s Company, 1952. The show was a disaster.
The Merrills with Margot and B.D. on the beach near their home in Malibu in 1952. Not much later, Margot was institutionalized after she was diagnosed as mentally retarded.
In the mid-fifties, Bette cuts Margot’s hair during one of the girl’s visits home.
Gary and Bette whoop it up at a party, circa 1955. By now their marriage was crumbling amid drinking bouts and outbursts of violence.
Bette as the dumpy housewife Agnes Hurley in The Catered Affair, 1956. “She looks old enough to be my mother,” Joan Crawford sniffed.
Fourteen-year-old B.D. poses with her newly divorced mother in 1961. Two years later, B.D. would marry a man nearly twice her age.
In The Night of the Iguana on Broadway, 1962. The backstage strife made the plot of All About Eve seem like Little Women.
Joan Crawford and Bette as the Hudson sisters in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962. The filming was rife with feud-fueled problems.
Bette poses with her adopted son, Michael Merrill, and his bride, Chou Chou Raum, at their wedding in May 1973. With them is the bride’s mother, Alix Snow.
Yet another try at the stage for Bette, in Miss Moffat, 1974. The show never made it to Broadway.
With Gena Rowlands in the critically acclaimed TV drama Strangers, 1979. Bette won an Emmy for her performance.
Bette and her grandson, J. Ashley Hyman, in Family Reunion, 1981. The experience, his mother said, was a nightmare for him, but others tell a different Story.
Jimmy Stewart with Bette in their TV film, Right of Way, 1982. The two studio era veterans adored each other. (Nickens)
Bette in a scene from her first TV series, Hotel, 1983. She filmed only a few episodes before she was stricken with breast cancer and a series of strokes.
Three years later, Bette makes a miraculous comeback in Murder with Mirrors, a TV movie costarring Helen Hayes—whom she totally intimidated.
With Vincent Price, Lillian Gish, and Ann Sothern in The Whales of August, 1986. Whenever she autographed this picture, Bette scrawled her name over Lillian’s face.
Bette is attended to during filming of her last picture, The Wicked Stepmother, in 1988. She walked off the set after two weeks.
One of Bette’s last public appearances, at the American Cinema Awards, January 1989. She collapsed at her table that night, and nine months later, ravaged anew by cancer, she died in Paris.
Michael Merrill with his wife Chou Chou, their sons Matthew and Cameron, and their dog Tam in October, 1991.
For Margot’s behavior had become increasingly erratic and disturbing. The two-and-a-half-year-old’s nightly disturbances had grown longer and louder. She spoke only rarely, and when she did she would repeat a word—“Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”—until she drove Bette to distraction. Worst of all, she frequently grew violent now. She pushed over furniture, lashed out in anger at her nannies, her parents, her siblings. She viciously hit Michael and pulled his hair out in chunks. She indeed had to be restrained with a straitjacket while she slept, for her own protection. What finally convinced Bette and Gary to seek professional help for Margot was the terrible day Bette heard the crash of breaking glass and raced into the den. There, in front of the bar, stood Margot. Next to her, on the floor, sat Michael—bleeding amid shards of shattered cocktail glasses.
In despair, Bette and Gary took their little girl to New York’s Presbyterian Hospital for examination, and after a week of tests they heard the devastating news—Margot was retarded, a result of brain damage she had sustained either at birth or afterward. She would never achieve an IQ above 60. There was little that could be done for her, the doctors said, and they recommended that she be sent to the Lochland School, an institution for the retarded in Geneva, New York.
Frantic, Bette called Laguna Beach and spoke to Ruthie, who suggested that Margot be returned to the adoption agency as “damaged goods.” Bette couldn’t bring herself to do that, and when she told Gary she thought the doctors were right about the institutionalization, he snarled, “You do what you please with your daughter, but not with mine! Margot will not be shut away in a mental home!” He brought her home from New York determined to give her a chance at a normal family life.
B.D., in her memoir My Mother’s Keeper, wrote that Bette and Gary now began to have “vicious” fights about who was “to blame” for Margot’s condition. B.D. recalled that Bette maintained that the doctor who delivered Margot must have misused his forceps; Gary argued that a nurse Bette had “then fired for drunkenness” had dropped Margot on her head and caused the injury. (Since Coop was the only nurse Bette fired for “drunkenness,” Gary must have meant her.)
This placing of blame may have been Bette and Gary’s way of diverting suspicion from themselves. Gladys Young, who was with the Merrills in England when Coop supposedly dropped Margot, is adamant that nothing of the sort ever happened. She denies as well that Coop was a drinker, except for the night she returned home from a pub not drunk but “fortified,” and was fired after telling Bette off in a letter.
Gladys Young’s suspicion is that either Gary or Bette dropped Margot—or, more disturbingly, that one or the other of them struck her in frustration with her nightly crying spells. Although Gladys never saw either of them hit Margot, she says that “we all did feel that with Bette’s short fuse, she was capable of striking Margot
and causing a problem.” Nancy Smith, who replaced Coop, wrote to Gladys when she heard the news. “She said to me, ‘Poor little Margot. That’s what we thought might happen,’” Gladys recalled. “And eight years later, Nancy mentioned Margot again in a letter to me, reminding me that Margot was so normal and responsive as a baby, and so joyous.”
Whoever or whatever caused Margot’s injury and retardation, it soon became clear that she could not remain at Witch-Way. She continued to endanger Michael, and it was impossible for the Merrills to keep a governess for more than two weeks. Finally Gary agreed to enroll Margot in the Lochland School, after being assured that it was a small, loving environment in a Victorian mansion. He was impressed that the school’s proprietor, Miss Florence Stewart, would not agree to take Margot until she had come to Witch-Way to meet the Merrill family.
Lochland would remain Margot’s home for the rest of her life. At the school, Bette felt, “Margot could be brought along slowly with children of her own capacities. In that way she wouldn’t have the pain of competing throughout her formative years with normal children who would be too advanced for her and therefore add to her frustrations. It was heartrending to part with her, but we felt that not only for her own future, but for the future of our other two children, we must.”
Bette couldn’t bring herself to accompany Gary and Margot to Lochland; instead she carefully dressed the little girl in a sailor suit and kissed her good-bye at the Portland airport. When he arrived at Lochland, Gary was relieved to see that the school was indeed more like a home, a tree-shaded, three-story clapboard structure reminiscent, in fact, of Witch-Way. But he was disturbed to see the obviously retarded Down’s Syndrome children at the school who would become Margot’s new family; Margot’s condition couldn’t be the same as theirs. “As I looked at her after saying good-bye,” he reminisced, “she looked so pretty, so normal—but, of course, she was not.”
At Lochland, however, Margot quickly calmed down and came to seem more normal, and it became clear that her violent outbursts had been a reaction to the tumult that had surrounded her at Witch-Way, the angry words and the nasty fights between Bette and Gary that she was subjected to so often. Al and Mary Beardsley worked at the school when Margot arrived, she as a housemother and he as a speech therapist. Neither could not recall a single incident of violence involving Margot. “She was outgoing and wanted attention,” Al says, “but that was all. Her speech wasn’t perfect, so I worked with her on that.” According to Mary, Margot responded very well to the patient, caring instruction and attention she received at Lochland. “She fit into the school very well. I don’t remember any conflict with the other children.”
In stark contrast to Margot’s placid new life at Lochland, the atmosphere at Witch-Way grew ever more violent, ever more bizarre. Although Bette liked to call herself “a hausfrau” and “the little woman,” she had lost none of her obstinate willfulness. As she had with Sherry, Bette loved to goad and belittle Gary. His brother Jerry recalls sitting with Bette at his place and listening to her “taking off on my brother” for the better part of an hour. “Finally I flipped and told her off, and she walked out the door. It was very difficult to stay with Bette for more than an hour, because she’d make some comment that made absolutely no sense, and if you didn’t agree with it, you were done with. If something was undeniably white, she’d say, ‘No, it’s black.’ So you couldn’t deal with her. I’m an easygoing sort of guy, but after an hour with Bette I’d have to leave the room.”
Bette, with her obsessive-compulsive attitude about order and cleanliness, ran roughshod over everyone on the domestic front as much as she had on a film set. One New Year’s Eve, Bobby had carefully prepared table settings for a party, strung banners, hung balloons. Bette arrived after most of the guests, took one look at the room, and announced, “You’ve done it all wrong, Bobby! Jesus! Do I have to do everything around here!” The guests waited a half hour while Bette rearranged everything—which, in their view, had been perfectly okay the way Bobby had it.
When Bette purchased a new house for her mother in Laguna Beach, Ruthie’s friends and neighbors helped her move in. The house was smaller than the one Ruthie had left, and she had some big wood pieces. Everyone struggled to find just the right place for everything, and finally, about eleven at night, all were convinced the arrangement was perfect. Exhausted, they started in on pizza and beer. At that point, Ruthie’s friend Betsy Paul recalled, Bette swept in wearing a mink coat. “She took one look at the place and announced, ‘It’s all wrong! We’ll have to do it again!’ Whereupon we spent two more hours moving things around to Bette’s satisfaction. And you know what? When we were done everything was exactly where it had been before Bette barrelled in.”
Gary mocked Bette’s housekeeping fervor—“How clean can a place be? You’re not Mrs. Craig; you’re Bette Davis!” He made fun of her in other ways too, taunting her about her spreading waistline, comparing her unfavorably to younger actresses. He even belittled her Oscars and continually tried to remove them from the mantel; once he gave one of them to a puzzled cab driver, who returned it the next morning. Bette retaliated by humiliating Gary outside the home; his friend Bob Jurgenson recalls that Bette told him Gary was “sexually lazy” and that the only time she “got any” was at Christmas and her birthday, “if I’m lucky.”
According to Jerry Merrill, Bette and Gary’s drinking “exacerbated” their frequent quarrels. B.D. has offered a harrowing recollection of a drunken brawl between the two when she was eight. It followed a party at which one of Gary’s friends accused him of sleeping with the friend’s wife. As B.D. listened to the argument from her bedroom she thought of the times she had come down into the living room while Bette was away to find Gary “sprawled” on the couch with a woman.
B.D. listened to the argument, and soon heard the door slam as Gary’s friend left. Then, as they had so many times before, her parents started to fight. “You make me sick!” Bette screeched. “You think you’re such a hotshot with the broads? Hal You haven’t laid me in years. The only time you touch me is when you beat me up. Bastard! That’s all you’re good at!”
“What are you bitching about?” Gary sneered. “Getting slapped around is the only thing you enjoy, you stupid cunt. If it doesn’t do anything for you, why do you beg for it all the time?”
“Oh, my God! That’s what you always say and you know it isn’t true. You know that violence terrifies me. All I want is to be loved like a woman.”
“Bullshit! You’re no woman—you’re a friggin’ ice queen. Without an audience you’re not worth a shit! Maybe if I knocked you on your friggin’ ass on the stage of the London Palladium and then jumped you, you’d perform. Outside of that, a knothole in a tree is more exciting than you!”
B.D. buried her head under her pillow, but she couldn’t drown out the terrible words. “Jesus!” Bette exploded. “You really are something! I suppose all the other men in my life didn’t know what they were talking about? One of them even—”
“Jesus Christ! Are you going to hand me that crap about Howard Hughes screwing you on a bed of gardenias again? He fucked every two-bit twat in Hollywood and you’re proud of holding out for ten bucks worth of gardenias!… The only people who can be around you for long without wanting to kill you are faggots, so don’t waste your time telling me about all the men—”
“So my other three husbands were fags, were they? Well let me tell you something… at least they were men! They—”
“They nothing! They all kicked the shit out of you. You’ve told everybody who would listen to you about it.”
“Stop it! Stop it! I can’t take any more!” Bette screamed, and ran up the stairs to the second-floor landing. When Gary followed, showering her with curses and threats, she frantically whispered for him not to disturb the children. By now B.D. was looking through the crack in her door, and Gary turned toward her bedroom. “Maybe the little slut should come out and see what you get for starting a fight!”
“Gary, get out of my house!” Bette shrieked. “Leave this instant! Leave B.D. out of this for God’s sake!” B.D. scurried back to her bed, but within seconds Gary stumbled into her room. “You want to listen? You might as well have a clear view as well!” He started to laugh as Bette lunged at him and pounced on his back. He knocked her to the floor, and she ran for the stairs—an attempt, B.D. thought, to get Gary out of her bedroom. He grabbed Bette at the top of the stairs and began to strangle her. Frantic, B.D. watched as Gary lifted Bette off her feet. “Mother was making gurgling, choking noises and I couldn’t stand it anymore,” B.D. recalled. She charged at Gary and pounded his back with her fists. “You’re killing her, you’re killing her!” she howled. Gary kicked B.D. away while still strangling Bette, then let her go, whirled around, and knocked B.D. against the wall. Bette fell down the stairs, and B.D., as far as she could remember, passed out.