by James Spada
The next thing B.D. recalled is hearing Bette and Gary talking to the police in the living room. Bette was hysterical. She told the officers that Gary had attacked her, and showed them her neck bruises. Gary, according to B.D., twirled a drink, winked at the two men, and told them, “A domestic quarrel. You know how that is.” The police told Bette that they could do nothing unless she filed formal charges. She didn’t want to do that, she said—there would be bad publicity. Couldn’t they do something informally? No, they told her. Bette never pressed charges.
These terrible rows frightened and deeply disturbed B.D. Michael, however, seemed to take them with an almost preternatural calm. It helped that Gary, while he had come to despise B.D., doted on Michael, considering him “his” son while B.D. was “her” daughter, and always shielded him from the violence. Jerry Merrill recalled the day that his daughter visited Witch-Way to play with Michael, and Bette and Gary got into a fight. “My daughter started to cry, and Mike just said, ‘Don’t cry. You come with me. We’ll go to my room and hide. Don’t worry about a thing.’ Mike knew exactly what to do.”
Shaken by the violence of her relationship with Gary, emotionally barren and sexually frustrated, Bette became desperate for the love and attention of her children. When she didn’t think she had gotten enough of that, B.D. recalled, she would cry and wail. “Neither of you care a damn about me! Well, we’ll just see how you feel after I’m gone.”
To prove her point, according to B.D., Bette staged several mock suicide attempts when she and the children were alone in the house. The first time, B.D. was frantic and Michael in tears after Bette threw an empty bottle of Nembutal sleeping pills on the hallway floor, announced that she had swallowed them all, and locked her bedroom door. B.D. became hysterical. She pounded on the door and screamed, “Mommy, Mommy, please open the door! I do love you… of course I love you… you know that. Let me in… don’t die… oh, please don’t die!”
There was no response, and finally, exhausted, B.D. fell asleep in front of the door. The next morning Bette emerged. “I hope that taught you a good lesson,” she announced. “I deserve better from you. I love you more than anything and I expect you to love me in return.”
Never again would she believe such a scene, B.D. vowed.
By the end of 1954, Bette hadn’t worked for two years, and she itched to get back before a camera. “She was the type of person who, unless she was working, was not really happy,” Jerry Merrill believed. But it was more than that. Gary’s contract had been dropped by 20th Century-Fox earlier that year, and he had done only some sporadic television work over the prior six months. With Margot at Lochland and B.D. in private school, with Ruthie and Bobby still dependent on her, and with the expenses of running the sprawling property that comprised Witch-Way, Bette needed to go back to work to keep the bills paid.
Happily, she had an offer she loved: to reprise her role as Queen Elizabeth I in 20th Century-Fox’s CinemaScope and Technicolor production The Virgin Queen. Early in 1955 she took B.D. with her to California (leaving Michael in Maine with Gary), rented a house in Los Angeles, and returned to the Fox lot, where she had last worked on The Star. She felt she could now do even further justice to Elizabeth—in 1939 she had been thirty-one playing sixty; in this screenplay she would, at forty-seven, be playing Elizabeth at fifty.
If anyone had expected that Bette would be chastened by Hollywood’s lack of interest in her and would soften her film making temperament, they were wrong. Instead, her terror at facing the cameras again, and her determination to make this film the hit that would put her back on top, prompted her to argue with director Henry Koster over everything from blocking to interpretation. She railed against cinematographer Charles G. Clarke for not taking the care with her that Ernie Haller had, and she froze out her beautiful young costar (and rival for Sir Walter Raleigh’s affections) Joan Collins.
“I tried to be understanding and flexible,” Collins said, “and keep out of the way of her icy glares and sharp tongue as much as possible—offscreen that is. She would finish a scene in which she was telling me off, and I always felt she wanted to keep right on going after Mr. Koster yelled ‘Cut!’ So I would turn and walk away quickly as soon as my stint was completed.”
In the middle of filming, Gary and Michael flew to California and visited Bette on the set. It was Michael’s first experience on a soundstage, and Bette called it “a wonderment” that he recognized her with her shaved head and eyebrows and bejeweled scullcap. While Mike stood and watched Bette, as Elizabeth, verbally lash Richard Todd as Raleigh, he turned to Gary and asked, “Why is Mommy mad at that man instead of you?”
When Bette returned to Maine in May 1955, the violence in the Merrill home resumed. B.D. recalled that Gary not only beat her and Bette, but that on one terrible, drunken night she found him terrorizing her quarterhorse mare, Sally, with a length of barbed wire, forcing the animal to smash into the walls of her stable until she had injured her knees. Frantically trying to stop the attack, B.D. opened the stable door, allowing the horse to escape, and Gary went back to the house. B.D. then saw that Sally had lacerations on her neck, shoulders, and face from the barbed wire. When she told her mother about the incident the next morning, Bette dismissed it, saying, “Gary’s an idiot. He was roaring drunk and probably decided to go for a ride in the middle of the night.”
“If that were the case, Mother, why was he in her stall slashing at her with barbed wire?”
Bette started to walk back to the house. “He probably mistook it for a lead rope,” she replied.
While Bette was able to shrug off Gary’s more bizarre behavior, the neighbors weren’t. Most of them had liked him at first, had appreciated his down-to-earth friendliness and humor. But before long they turned against him. A neighbor, Jenny Sprague, tells of the day that she and her husband, Shaw, were horseback riding along a one-lane dirt road through the woods near their home. Suddenly Gary came roaring down the road in a convertible. He stood up on the seat and waved his arms, leaving the steering wheel unattended. It was all that Jenny and Shaw could do to keep their horses from rearing. “Shaw was furious,” Jenny recalled. “In fact, he told Gary never to come near our house again, and he didn’t.”
Stories about Gary’s eccentricities proliferated in Cape Elizabeth. He would show up at the country club wearing no shoes and cloves of garlic around his neck. He wore kilts while playing hockey, and at certain moments observers noticed that he wasn’t wearing any underwear. When Bette and Gary attended a college football game between Colby and Bowdoin, Gary’s alma mater, Gary arrived wrapped in a raccoon coat and carrying a large suitcase. Another Bowdoin alumnus, Frederick Goddard, watched Gary take a portable bar out of the suitcase, unfold it, and set up a row of liquor and glasses. Then, Goddard recalls, “He filled a baby’s nipple bottle with booze and sucked on it for most of the game. Miss Davis did not appear amused.”
Gary would make no movies between 1954 and 1960, and he appeared on just one television show between 1956 and 1957. “I didn’t mind,” he said. “I was living where I wanted to and loving every minute of it.” The family’s bills were still prodigious, however, and the Merrills needed money. (Gary had to borrow $50,000 from a wealthy neighbor to pay back taxes.) Once again, rather than “the little woman,” Bette became the breadwinner, and she belittled Gary as “lazy,” “a worthless husband,” “a terrible provider.” In 1956 she made two movies, The Catered Affair, in which she played the dumpy wife of a Bronx cab driver, and Storm Center, in which she played a dumpy librarian fighting censorship. Like The Virgin Queen, neither of these films made much of an impact at the box office, and Bette’s stature as a movie star dropped to an all-time low. She did not play a lead role in a motion picture for another five years.
In 1940, Bette had predicted that “when I retire from pictures, I’m going to be a nice, plump, comfortable-looking middle-aged lady.” By 1956 her prophecy had come true, but the problem was that she had not retired from pictures, an
d her appearance hurt her career. She looked frumpy now, every bit her forty-eight years, and she was no longer considered for the kinds of romantic leads that her contemporaries Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, and Barbara Stanwyck were still able to play because they had kept themselves in shape.
Television, however, proved a godsend for her. The relatively new medium was eager for big Hollywood names to attract viewers, even if they were over the hill, and shows like Schlitz Playhouse, G.E. Theater, and U.S. Steel Hour gave Bette the chance to play some interesting roles and make between $5,000 and $10,000 for a week or two of work. Television helped keep Bette creatively fulfilled, paid the bills, and gave her an occasional respite from her increasingly troubled marriage.
Early in 1957, the Merrills’ financial situation had turned so dire that Bette insisted that Gary go back to work. They closed up Witch-Way and rented a house in Malibu in order to be closer to the center of television production, and Gary did eighteen guest shots over the next two years, while Bette did seven. Together they earned over $100,000 in each of those years, money they used to pay for B.D.’s and Michael’s enrollment in the Chadwick School in Rolling Hills, as well as Bobby’s move from Laguna Beach to a house nearby so that she could be at Bette’s beck and call on a moment’s notice.
On the surface, ten-year-old B.D.’s life seemed to be a charmed one—private schools, a pet horse, riding lessons, the finest clothes. But she was constantly buffeted by the battles of her parents, and she had become extremely wary of Gary. B.D. was very much like Bette—intelligent, willful, short-fused, sharp-tongued—and Gary by now directed as much of his anger at her as he did his wife. Aware that Gary might turn on her violently at any time, B.D. tried to avoid him, and she never had friends over to the house when he was home. Once, when she did invite a girlfriend to stay over for a weekend, she waited until Gary was out of town and not expected to return for a week, just to be sure. To her horror, on Saturday night she heard a drunken Gary stagger unexpectedly into the house. He began a nasty quarrel with Bette, then headed upstairs. When the violence in B.D.’s bedroom was over, her friend was bruised and hysterical. Bette drove her home to her parents and pleaded with them not to press charges against Gary. Furious, they insisted they would. Bette offered them a large sum of money for their silence. They agreed—but only after their daughter was examined by a doctor to make sure she hadn’t been sexually abused.
This was the last straw for Bette. On June 6, she filed a divorce action in Santa Monica Superior Court, charging that Gary had treated her with “extreme cruelty” and “wrongfully inflicted upon [her] grievous mental suffering.” She asked that Gary be ordered to pay her child support and alimony.
When the story made the papers, Ray Stricklyn, a young actor Bette had befriended when he played a small role with her in The Catered Affair, went to see her at Columbia Studios, where she was playing (for the second time on television) Mary Todd Lincoln. Stricklyn wasn’t surprised that the Merrills were divorcing—he had spent a boozy weekend with them a year earlier in which they reminded him most of Edward Albee’s slashingly vitriolic couple George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But he was fond of Bette, and he wanted to offer her some condolence.
“The moment she saw me,” Stricklyn recalled, “she rushed into her dressing room and began to sob, almost uncontrollably. No longer was she the tough, brittle dame.… She reached for a Kleenex and began wiping away the smeared mascara.” Bette apologized to Stricklyn for losing control, then sank into the chair in front of her makeup mirror. “She stared at her own reflection for a long time. Then, shakily, began to apply fresh eye makeup. Suddenly, she stopped, and moaned. ‘Ooooooh, Ray, at my age, having to start all over again. Four husbands! I’ll never marry again.’ Then, quick as a flash, she was back on the set—too professional to ever hold up shooting—heaping venom on Abraham Lincoln.”
Bette dropped the divorce action a few weeks later. When B.D. asked her mother why she didn’t leave Gary, Bette cried, “I can’t! I won’t face being alone again. I’ve been alone since my father walked out on me when I was a little girl like you. Nothing I did pleased him either.… What goes on with Daddy and me… doesn’t make any difference. All men are the same in the long run… the bastards can’t stand a bright, strong woman.”
The reconciliation proved rocky; B.D. recalled that Gary “came close to killing [Bette] a couple of times.” Bette felt it best for her to spend more time apart from Gary; he remained at Witch-Way while she lived as much as possible in California. Bette was thrilled in late 1957 when she received an offer to star in a Broadway version of Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel, and she rented another house, this one on Bundy Drive in Brentwood, to prepare for the Los Angeles rehearsals of the show.
Strolling through the new house one day, Bette opened the door to what she thought was a walk-in closet. She reached for the light switch, stepped inside, and fell ten feet to a concrete basement floor. She suffered a concussion and serious spinal cord bruises, and had to withdraw from the play. Miserable with disappointment and pain, she filed a lawsuit against the owners of the house (which she won) and took to bed at Ruthie’s house in Laguna. There, as she had so often in the past, she turned herself over to Bobby’s ministrations and Ruthie’s pep talks. They did little good. Bette was totally dispirited; she wondered that, with everything she’d been through for the past eight years, she hadn’t lost her mind.
The close proximity to Bobby and Ruthie, at first a blessed relief, soon threatened to unravel her. Bobby’s mood swings infuriated her, as did Ruthie’s incessant chattering, and she found herself screaming at them both within days, heaping upon them the kind of vitriol they were now used to and took in their usual stoic, resigned way.
Mother and sister nursed their unhappy patient back to health and even temper well enough so that in May 1958 she, B.D., and Bobby left the United States aboard the ocean liner Independence in order for Bette to make two motion pictures in Europe. John Paul Jones cast her in a small cameo as Catherine the Great; The Scapegoat gave her a showier, but not much larger, role as a bedridden dowager addicted to cigars and morphine. Neither film was truly worth Bette’s time, either in terms of remuneration or role. But she was eager to get away from Gary for a while, she had had no other offers, and she looked forward to seeing Europe once again. “The three Bs,” as Bette called them, motored through most of Spain, visiting cathedrals and monuments at each stop. “Mother was riveted by every detail,” B.D. recalled, “and in the same way that she attacked acting or gardening in Maine, she applied her energy and enthusiasm to being a tourist. No stone was left unturned, her feet were never tired, and she missed nothing.”
The filming of John Paul Jones in Spain left Bette less satisfied. She thought the film’s star, Robert Stack, was “the dullest actor who ever lived.” Bette was sure the film would be a dud, and she wasn’t surprised when it enjoyed only scant distribution in the United States. In England, she was disappointed to find that The Scapegoat was little more than a showcase for the distinguished actor Alec Guinness in a dual role. There was scant rapport between the two stars, according to Guinness, who recalls that “All invitations I sent to her for lunch or dinner were declined. I think she was suspicious of me in some way, but I can’t imagine why.” B.D.’s recollection of her mother’s opinion of Guinness offers a clue: “He’s overbearing, egotistical, haughty, snotty, insensitive to play opposite and a dreadful actor.”
Both John Paul Jones and The Scapegoat were greeted by mixed reviews, as were Bette’s performances. The films made little money, and Bette’s film career had again ebbed to a new low. When she returned to the United States, no movie offers awaited her, and she made the difficult decision to try her hand at series television. She filmed a pilot, “The Elizabeth McQueeny Story,” that was aired as an episode of Wagon Train on October 28, 1959. To Bette’s chagrin, after she had deigned to offer herself for a series, the pilot was not picked up.
She ha
d no choice but to look again to the stage. The writer/producer Norman Corwin approached both the Merrills to tour the country in a reading of works by Carl Sandburg. Bette was unfamiliar with most of Sandburg’s writing, but her ignorance turned to enthusiasm after she immersed herself in his poetry and prose. Gary was enthusiastic, too, and Bette wanted to prove that she could succeed on the stage. They agreed to do the show, which would begin in Maine, and Bette moved back into Witch-Way as rehearsals began. In the back of her mind she hoped that working together this way would bring her and Gary closer and revive their marriage.
The experience had exactly the opposite effect. The couple began to fight almost immediately, and by the time rehearsals had begun in earnest, she had moved out of the house. “It didn’t make the tour an easier one,” she admitted, “but a contract is a contract and there was no out.” Norman Corwin recalls no strife between Bette and Gary during the tour (which took them from Maine to the West Coast), possibly because by then both had accepted the fact that their marriage was over and there was little reason to continue battling.
The World of Carl Sandburg was a hit, especially in Hollywood, where Bette’s old friends came out in force—not, as she had feared, to gloat over the fact that she was “through in pictures,” but to cheer her. Her mother, now seventy-four, was in the front row as she had been so often before, and she looked surprisingly frail and elderly to Bette that night. Staring into Ruthie’s eyes as she took her curtain call, Bette reveled in the thunderous applause. “It was also Ruthie’s night,” she wrote. “Her little girl was back in the chips.”