by James Spada
Finally, Britain’s horror factory Hammer Films came to the rescue with The Nanny, about an emotionally disturbed woman responsible for the accidental death of one of her charges and now quite dangerous to the little girl’s brother as well. Bette traveled to England in the spring of 1965 to make the film with the forty-two-year-old director Seth Holt, a high-strung bundle of neuroses who died of alcoholism six years later. Bette, he claimed, almost finished him off much earlier.
“She got the flu during shooting,” he told Lawrence Quirk, “and sometimes she’d stay away altogether, holding up shooting while she sent in day-to-day reports on her condition—‘It’s worse!’—‘It’s better!’—‘Oh God, I’ve relapsed!’—and so forth, and when she was on the set, still sniffling and coughing, she was drinking out of everyone’s glasses and wheezing in her co-actors’ faces.… Oh, it was hell! Then she was always telling me how to direct. When I did it her way, she was scornful; when I stood up to her, she was hysterical. I managed some kind of middle course and got through the film and stayed calm.”
Whenever Holt felt Bette was overacting, he told her so. “I act larger than life,” she retorted, “that’s what my audiences paid me for all these years. If they wanted ordinary reality they’d go out and talk with their grocer!” According to Holt, Bette refused to watch the day’s rushes because “she hated to look at herself. I’d ask her what did it matter since she was made up and dressed to be a frumpish, unattractive, middle-aged nanny anyway—and she was fifty-seven or so… but I couldn’t get her to look at those rushes. If I had, I might have made her realize that she was pouring it on too much.”
Ironically, when The Nanny was released in November, most critics praised Bette for her restraint. Judith Crist’s comment in the New York Herald Tribune was typical: “In this, her fourth venture into the Hitchcock-cum-horror milieu, Miss Davis is out for character rather than hoax and comes up with a beautifully controlled performance as a jealous and voracious nursemaid… it is her performance and four complementary ones that give this film its distinction.”
Bette told a BBC interviewer that she was proud of The Nanny because it was “a complete departure from anything I’ve ever played. It is very easy to say, ‘Well, you know, she’s always the same.’ This is not true. This I will never accept from any critic.… One of the things over the years that critics have repeatedly referred to have been my ‘mannerisms.’ Well, that depends on what part I’m playing. I can show you just as many parts where I don’t flutter one eyelid, ever!”
The Nanny was a moderate success, but Bette did not receive another film offer for two and a half years. In 1965, the producers of the ABC-TV series The FBI considered her for a role, but first they wanted the Federal Bureau of Investigation itself to ascertain her “suitability” to appear on the program. The Bureau’s report, dated November 29, concluded that “it will not be possible to utilize Bette Davis in connection with our series”—which effectively blacklisted her. The reason, the report states, was that the FBI’s files on Bette “reflect that during the 1940’s she participated in the activities of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee on the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America, all of which have been cited as communist fronts.… In the past, she has been personally acquainted with numerous communist sympathizers and Party members and over the years has been a close associate and personal friend of [name deleted] who was a Communist Party member from 1939 to 1945.… In 1962, Bette Davis participated in a banquet sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union which was given for the purpose of encouraging support for a drive to abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities.”
Bette’s FBI dossier also lists as worthy of security consideration the fact that she took part in the Negro Victory Committee’s War Bond Drive in Los Angeles’s Pershing Square on December 31, 1942, along with Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, and others, and the fact that “The Daily People’s World, a West Coast Communist newspaper, in its issue of 3/27/43, has a photograph of Bette Davis, Robert Rossen, and Arch Oboler, who were stated to be discussing the ‘Free World Theater’ radio program under Oboler’s direction, which was being heard every Sunday on the Blue Network.”
It is unlikely that Bette ever knew of the FBI’s skewed view of her undoubtedly innocent activities, or of her blackballing from the FBI series. Had she known, one can well imagine her reaction.
During this deadly lull in her career after The Nanny, Bette decided to move to Westport, Connecticut, near Weston, where B.D. and Jeremy had recently purchased a house. She was very excited about the prospect. At last, she could be close once again to her beloved daughter.
TWENTY-NINE
B
ette found a house just two miles from the Hymans, on Crooked Mile Road in Westport, which she christened Twin Bridges. A charming cottage that reminded her pleasantly of Witch-Way, it was also close to Loomis, the boarding school in which Michael had enrolled. Bette was thrilled to be so close to B.D.; she bubbled over with plans for shopping trips and pajama parties. Maybe she didn’t have to lose her daughter after all.…
B.D. was having none of it, and neither was Jeremy. In her 1985 memoir, My Mother’s Keeper, B.D. presents a litany of scenes of Bette’s “interference” in her marriage. Viewed objectively, Bette’s actions could just as easily be interpreted as genuine concern and generosity. When Bette sent steady gifts of clothes from Bergdorf Goodman, B.D. told her to stop because her closets were full. When Bette expressed concern about a cold B.D. had and insisted on sending over a doctor, B.D. and Jeremy saw it as unconscionable meddling.
B.D. had completely submerged herself in her marriage, and Bette didn’t like it. She resented Jeremy’s dominance over his wife, and she hated B.D.’s total deference to him. For a daughter of hers to behave that way in a marriage was unfathomable to Bette. “I was upset for her and by her,” she wrote in her 1987 memoir This ’n That. “From the beginning, she did whatever Jeremy told her to do. B.D. was a daughter who knew her mother well. She was discerning enough to know how sad and hurt I would be by these decisions.”
According to B.D., Bette made little attempt to hide her dislike for her son-in-law, even in public. Privately, she tried to convince B.D. that Jeremy was cheating on her, something that B.D. never believed. As B.D. attempted to distance herself from her mother, Bette grew terrified of losing her, and clung to her all the more fiercely.
Inexorably, the relationship between Bette and B.D. deteriorated. Jeremy considered his mother-in-law “the rudest, most importune person I’ve ever encountered, or ever hope to.” She didn’t really love B.D., he insisted. “The only emotions she truly understands are hate and jealousy.” As the Hymans pushed Bette away, she tried more and more fiercely to convince B.D. that her marriage had been a mistake. The situation grew so volatile that B.D. couldn’t spend more than a few hours with Bette before the conversation collapsed into vitriol and accusations.
In 1969, as B.D. prepared to give birth to her first child, Bette excitedly talked about “taking care of everything” in the delivery room. The thought made B.D. shudder, and she told Jeremy not to inform Bette when she went into labor. It was only after the birth of Jeremy Ashley Hyman on June 19 that Bette knew she had a grandson. She later wrote that her joy was dampened because B.D. had shunned her at so important a moment, and she blamed Jeremy. “While I did not ever ask for the same consideration she gave her husband, I did hope that every now and then she would say, ‘I can’t do this to Mother.’”
From B.D.’s perspective, Bette was envious of her marital happiness and jealous that she no longer had B.D. at her beck and call. Others who knew Bette and the Hymans, however, tell a different story. Alix Snow, the mother of the woman Bette’s son Michael later married, lived down the street from Bette. “Any wrong that came between Bette and B.D.,” she says, “was B.D.’s fault. Bette tried very hard to be friends with her daughter and her son-in-law, and
B.D. half the time rejected her.… But Bette was always helping B.D. out financially, and B.D. didn’t reject that. She had no pride whatsoever. Jeremy started this home-maintenance business, and as far as I could see, their only customer was Bette Davis! She had a perfectly fine kitchen, and all of a sudden Jeremy’s men were redoing it. Oh, Bette paid and paid and paid.…”
Alix Snow considers Bette “one of the most generous women I’ve ever met. Whenever she was here, she would give so much of her time to the local charities. We have a museum of nature, and every year they have a fundraiser. Bette would spend two or three hours there in the evening, being helpful, being seen, talking to people. She was a tremendous draw, and she helped raise thousands of dollars.”
Michael, as he had for years, remained unscathed by the battles between his mother and his sister. If there is one unassailable observation to be made about Bette and B.D., it is that their temperaments were too alike for emotional explosions not to have taken place. The opposite was true of Michael. Sixteen in 1968, he almost never saw his mother’s wrath because he was a born conciliator and exerted a calming influence on her—unlike his sister, who seemed almost to enjoy putting a torch to Bette’s dynamite.
When Michael came home from boarding school on weekends and holidays, there were no scenes, no arguments, no counterparts to Bette’s oft-repeated accusation that B.D. was “a cold bitch.” Michael was quiet, courteous, respectful of his mother, deferential to others. As Alix Snow says, “Michael is the most polite young man. He will kiss you when he arrives, he will pull a chair out for you and hold the door. He is so proper. He’s so honest. It amazes me because it’s so constant. So either it was the schools he went to or Bette did something right…”
On a snowy day in 1968, Michael, home from school for Christmas vacation, met Alix’s daughter Chou Chou Raum, a lovely sixteen-year-old brunette who would later do some modeling. As her mother recalls it, “Chou had just gotten her driver’s license, and it was so snowy I didn’t want her to take the car. But finally I relented, and she got about five hundred feet from the house and the car skidded into a ditch. She was afraid to come home, so she sat on the sidewalk crying, not knowing what to do. All of a sudden Michael stopped his car and said, ‘May I help you?’ And there was Chou looking at this beautiful blond Adonis.”
Chou Chou already had a date for a school dance, but she asked Michael to come with her as part of a foursome. “Chou Chou and Michael were forever talking and dancing,” Alix recalled, “and soon they were together and their dates were with each other.” Bette invited Chou to Twin Bridges for a day-after-Christmas breakfast, and Chou met the famous movie star who lived down the road for the first time. A few days later, Bette asked Alix and her husband Donald Snow to visit, and they found her completely charming. “She was so hospitable to us,” Alix recalled. “She loved to cook, and she always wore an apron and sometimes even a hat. It’s funny when someone is so famous and you see them in such a casual way.”
Michael and Chou Chou courted steadily for the next two years, and Bette heard some murmurs of marriage plans. She liked Chou, she told Michael, and she had no objections to the marriage, but couldn’t they wait until they were twenty-one? Reluctantly, Michael agreed. Then he got Bette’s permission to accompany Chou and a group of their friends on a six-week road trip throughout Europe.
Just before they left, Michael and Chou Chou made a trip to Maine with her parents to visit Gary Merrill. “He lived at Falmouth Foreside,” Alix recalls, “right on a beautiful little pond. It was a lovely house, looked like something out of Wuthering Heights.” When Michael took Chou outside to show her around, Alix mentioned to Gary that she was a little nervous about her daughter’s getting so serious, even about as fine a boy as Michael. “Don’t worry,” Gary replied. “They won’t get married. They’ll go on that trip to Europe, they don’t have much money, it’ll be one car full of boys and one car full of girls, and when they get through that ordeal, that will be the end of that.”
Of course, it wasn’t. At the end of that summer of 1968, Michael went away to college in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Alix vividly remembers Michael and Chou standing in her driveway, tearfully saying good-bye to each other. “Michael drove away, and it’s an eleven-and-a-half-hour trip to Chapel Hill. Eleven and a half hours later, he’s on the phone with Chou and they have an hour-and-a-half conversation. So I said to my husband, ‘That European trip didn’t help one bit!’ It was obviously stronger than that, and at that point I was all for the marriage.”
After Michael’s graduation in 1973, he told Bette that he and Chou Chou were ready to be married. When she asked him to wait until he finished law school, he calmly reminded her that she had originally told him he could marry when he reached twenty-one. (B.D., one suspects, would have flown into a rage and created another battle royal.) True to her word, Bette offered her blessings, and she sent Chou a handwritten note signed “with love.” Later, she gave the couple an engagement present—two diamonds that Michael then had fashioned into an engagement ring.
The wedding was set for Chou Chou’s birthday, May 20, and Alix asked Bette if she would like to be involved with the preparations. She said no, that was up to the mother of the bride. “I did it for B.D.,” Bette told her, “now you can do it for Chou.”
“Bette did offer to do one thing,” Alix recalls. “She said she’d arrange to have a fabulous photographer there to record everything. Well, apparently she forgot, because there was no photographer—all we have are the snapshots that the guests took.”
According to Alix, Bette caused not a whit of discord during the engagement and wedding—but B.D. did. Chou Chou had decided that she first wanted an intimate, family-only engagement party, to be followed by a larger celebration. Alix sent B.D. an invitation, and B.D. told her that she had a previous commitment and couldn’t come. Alix was not pleased. “Now, this isn’t something you invite someone to overnight. There was plenty of time for her to get out of whatever other commitment she had. This was her brother, her one and only brother’s engagement. And she didn’t come.”
Angry at what she considered an unpardonable snub, Alix didn’t invite B.D. to the larger second party, and she was prepared to exclude her from the wedding as well. “But I decided that maybe I was wrong—this was Bette Davis’s daughter and who was I? So I did send her an invitation to the wedding. She never even replied to it. I heard from someone else that she had no intention of coming.”
Loath to upset Bette, Alix telephoned B.D., apologized for everything, and asked her to attend. “She did not come,” Alix says. “After the ceremony, Bette drove up to Westport and pleaded with B.D. to come to the reception, if only for Michael’s sake. She refused. And then she told everybody that I never even invited her. She chose not to come. I begged her on the phone, Bette went to see her, and she made the decision to stay home.”
B.D. did, however, send Michael and his bride a wedding present. “She sent them a hammock,” Alix recalls. “It was a good hammock, but we were all kind of confused because they were planning to move into an apartment in Boston. Where could they have used a hammock?”
B.D.’s failure to attend was the only sour note in an otherwise lovely wedding. Bette and Gary Merrill sat next to each other in the front pew, and Alix recalled that Bette was “completely charming” the entire day. “She wore a beautiful blue embroidered full-length gown, simple lines, and she looked stunning. I was very pleased to have her there.”
Bette reacted to Michael’s marriage so differently from the way she had reacted to B.D.’s that she could have been another woman altogether. According to Alix Snow, “She didn’t interfere. She just wanted to have a pleasant relationship with him and Chou. She didn’t assert herself at all. And she was so generous to them. For their honeymoon, she sent them to a Caribbean island for as long as they wanted to stay, the finest hotel, everything paid. And she spent $5,000 once to help them put in a natural border of already-grown evergreens to create a little p
ark on their property for their kids.
“They never asked Bette for help, she always offered it. And after Michael established himself as a successful lawyer, he would only accept small gifts, tokens of love from Bette, that she was thrilled to give him and his family.”
B.D. and Jeremy, on the other hand, frequently needed financial help from Bette, and this added to the friction and discord in their relationship. In light of her largesse, Bette reasonably expected to be treated well, to be welcomed into their home. But the Hymans seemed to detest needing Bette’s help, and looked on a good deal of it as an attempt to buy their love. Bette grew more and more resentful of their lack of appreciation, and angrier and angrier at Jeremy for what she saw as his shortcomings as a provider for her daughter. As B.D.’s close friend Josie Hamm puts it, “I’m sure Bette, like any mother, would have preferred to have a son-in-law she didn’t have to help.” And Bette’s anger at Jeremy deepened as she watched his control over B.D. grow, saw the way she waited on him, subjugated her personality to his, obeyed his every command.
“The funny thing about Bette,” Alix Snow says with a chuckle, “was that she adored Chou for taking such good care of Michael. All the things she didn’t like B.D. doing for Jeremy she loved for my daughter to do for Michael.”
Bette’s third child was rarely a part of her life now. Still at the Lochland School, Margot turned twenty in 1971, and she had learned some self-sufficiency. Like other residents of the school, she was able to take the bus back and forth to a simple job every day, keep up her room, cook for herself and others. “Margot is what would be called mildly retarded,” says Barbara Huebner, who took over the directorship of the school from Florence Stewart. “She reads, she writes, but she has a very, very short attention span—she could never read a book, or even a short story. She dreams a lot, fantasizes about having a husband and a home.”