James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Dazed, Logan left the suite and called Bette’s doctor, who admitted that he had not examined her. “All I know is that when patients say they can’t play a show, I’m powerless as a doctor to tell them to go up on the stage and play it.”

  Logan knew that he couldn’t replace Bette without the play suffering badly at the box office. Angry and desolate, he announced to the company that he was closing Miss Moffat. “The blackest juices began to flow through my head and heart. On that gloomy afternoon I couldn’t for one second weep for poor Bette Davis on her bed of pain. I didn’t have time because I was feeling too sorry for myself… Emlyn… Albert Hague… and that great, blameless cast. What of them and their jobs gone askew?”

  Bette was able to convince the show’s insurance doctors that her legs were actually paralyzed, and the financial backers recouped some of their investment. But the cast was devastated, especially the hopeful young performers whose big break this show would have been. “We all cried,” Rudy Lowe remembered. “What hurt us the most was that Bette didn’t care enough to say good-bye to us. It was like a parent was leaving, and she didn’t say good-bye. But we loved Bette in spite of everything. We really did.”

  Vik Greenfield feels that the poor chemistry between Bette and Logan sabotaged the show. “When I saw Bette in rehearsals, I thought to myself, My God, she can’t really do it—she can’t cut the mustard. I felt sorry for Joshua Logan, but he and Emlyn Williams both hid behind anybody’s apron strings they could find. If only they had come forward and reasoned with her and explained things to her, maybe the show would have made it. She got the script, she learned the script, then the next night they were giving her new lines to learn for the next performance. You can’t do that to a movie actress, who’s used to being able to retake a scene if she messes up. Logan and Williams finally toppled the pedestal from under the statue and in many ways it was their fault.”

  Mike Ellis, the producer of Two’s Company, had followed the ups and downs of Miss Moffat with more than passing interest. “You know,” he says, “in 1961, when Chuck Bowden wanted Bette Davis to do Iguana, he called and said to me, ‘Tell me about Bette.’ So I told him everything, and later I heard he had told someone that we just hadn’t known how to handle her. Then the phone rang again in the early seventies, and this time it was Josh Logan, and he said, ‘Refresh my memory about Bette Davis.’ So I refreshed him, and the next thing I knew he announced that he would be directing her in Miss Moffat. So there is a record there that indicates it is possible to have troubles with Bette Davis.”

  “My great energy had deserted me,” Bette said to explain the Moffat fiasco. “I was exhausted. For the first time I realized that I was an old woman.” She returned to My Bailiwick—“fully recovered” from her back problem, according to B.D.—and remained out of the public eye until March 1975. Then she took her show of reminiscences, An Informal Evening with Bette Davis, to Australia, returning with suitcases full of sheepskins and kangaroo coats for family and friends, and a stuffed toy lamb for her grandson Ashley.

  “I am up to my ears in debt and taxes,” she said, “and that’s why I come out of my house in Connecticut every few years and work. I can hole up just so long, then I gotta get out and stir things up again. It’s half for income, and half for me.” Her one-woman show was a perfect showcase for her: no lines to learn, no meddling directors, no grueling rehearsals. Just La Davis, soaking up the adoration of the audience and answering questions, some posed with such reverence that she might have been the Delphic Oracle. Her answers, however, were never ambiguous, and the audiences loved it. Who, one woman asked her, was her favorite husband? “Obviously I had no favorite since I dumped them all!” she cackled. When another wondered whether she had ever had a face-lift, Bette asked her to come to the lip of the stage. Then she put her face inches from the woman’s and asked, “If I had ever had a face-lift, would I look like this?!”

  “When I started, I was scared,” Bette said as she prepared to take the show to England, Scotland, and Wales late in 1975, “but now I love it. Nobody will ever know what love and applause means to me. Move on, never get repetitious, learn how to handle the audience—those are the things I believe in. I always walk out and say, ‘What a dump!’ and that brings down the house. Then they know it’s not going to be a pompous evening; it’s going to be a ball!”

  Before Bette took the show to Great Britain, she completed her first American theatrical film in five years, a supernatural thriller that gave her top billing over Oliver Reed and Karen Black. Her agent, Robert Lantz, recalled that while Bette “had to work,” she also had “an absolute rule that she would not go under the title. No cameos for Bette Davis. There were plenty of producers in Hollywood who were willing to pay her $100,000 to appear for a few minutes in their film, just to use this name celebrated the world over. Unh-unh. Not for Bette. She wasn’t in a position not to work, but she wouldn’t sell out. And it wasn’t an ego trip. She really felt she had a deal with the public that when a marquee said, ‘Bette Davis,’ they really would see Bette Davis.”

  Burnt Offerings provided her with the billing and a substantial role, but as a vehicle it was barely above the movie she had turned down in which she would have been “hanging in an attic!” The story of an evil house that destroys its occupants was murky and riddled with horror-genre cliches, but in it Bette offers a fascinating microcosm of the Davis talent and persona. At the outset of the film, playing Oliver Reed’s aunt, she is very much the public Bette Davis, spouting pronouncements in her clipped speech as though she were broadly imitating herself. Later, however, when she is defeated by the house and nearing death, she is astonishingly touching and real in her vulnerability, providing a reminder of the tremendous stores of acting talent she could still call on whenever she decided to jettison all the patented Bette Davis trappings.

  The filming of Burnt Offerings, Bette claimed, nearly did her in. The child actor Lee Montgomery, who played Oliver Reed and Karen Black’s son in the picture, recalls that the daughter of the film’s director, Dan Curtis, committed suicide shortly after production began by flinging herself out of a window. “We had that in our picture, too—at the end, Oliver Reed gets thrown out of an attic window. So we had to shut down for quite a while, and when we started up again it was very weird. People were kind of superstitious. It definitely tainted things.”

  Bette offered a long list of her problems with Burnt Offerings to Rex Reed in an interview published during filming. “This film has been amateur night in Dixie,” she railed. “I said I’d never do another horror film after Baby Jane; and here I am in the biggest horror of them all!

  “The director’s daughter on this film committed suicide and we had to shut down for a week. Then the cameraman was fired because we couldn’t see one thing on the screen, the rushes were so dark. That cost us two weeks of retakes. Karen Black showed up six months’ pregnant, so they had to remake her clothes because they didn’t fit. She changes her makeup in the middle of a scene, so nothing matches on the screen, she sleeps all day, never goes to rushes to see what she looks like, and you can’t hear one bloody thing she says on the set.… Oliver Reed comes piling into the hotel at 5 A.M., and he’s on the set at 6 with the hangover of the world. He fell down a mountainside the other night playing bagpipes!”

  Bette hated what she called the “TV mentality” of the “New Hollywood.” She was “appalled by the lack of discipline in current film making. There’s practically no rehearsal, and the sloppy attitude on the set is unbelievable. These people who have been bred on television production have no sense of pacing or style.… It’s all just get it in the can.”

  The interview angered Curtis, who accused Bette of sabotaging the film. She battled furiously with him from then on, upsetting him so badly after one confrontation that he walked off the set for two days. When Bette later heard he had gone to the men’s room and vomited, she purportedly said, “Good—it got the damned puke out of him. Let’s hope he took a crap, too—
he was full of it when I talked to him!”

  Bette didn’t do much talking to anyone after that, and all the principals vowed never to work with her again. Lee Montgomery, who was twelve when he appeared in Burnt Offerings, remembers that whenever there was a problem, “Bette would say something, and if it wasn’t changed, she’d just leave. She didn’t have the patience to debate a subject. She demanded such an excellence, and it wasn’t always there.”

  But Montgomery’s strongest memory of Bette was that she treated him with kindness. “She would bring me to her room and we would play chess. She would chain-smoke and drink. She took a real liking to me. I spent a lot of time with her, and she told me stories.” Montgomery remembers most vividly the day he was punch-drunk from working too many hours. “There was a lot of pressure to finish the picture because of budget problems, and they kept getting permits from my tutor to go beyond the eight-hour limit with me. This one night I was just drunk from lack of sleep, and I kept falling and screwing up, and everybody was laughing hysterically every time. Bette came on to the set, saw what was happening, and said, ‘This is enough! Enough! He’s been working too long, this kid. I’m taking him home.’ And she grabbed me and took me home. She really stood up for me. She was a real sweetheart.”

  The critics weren’t kind to Burnt Offerings, or to Bette, when the film was released in August 1976. The Variety reviewer felt that Davis “doesn’t have much to do. Her role is that of a weak and pathetic old woman, hardly the kind of thing she does best. Unkind lighting and costuming make her resemble Baby Jane Hudson.” Russell Davies in the London Observer wrote, “Bette Davis… keeps squawking around the place, doing her game old aunt act in the lay-or-get-off-the-nest tones of a veteran hen.”

  The results of Bette’s next picture were far more satisfying. The Disappearance of Aimee, a made-for-television movie directed by the estimable British director Anthony Harvey (The Lion in Winter), concerned the charismatic Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s mysterious one-month vanishing act in 1926. Bette had wanted to play McPherson in the 1940s, but the production code made it impossible to deal honestly with the likelihood that Aimee’s month had been spent not as a kidnap victim (as she claimed), but rather in a love nest with a married man (as several witnesses attested).

  Now, Bette was cast as Aimee’s mother, and while she loved the script, she clearly resented Faye Dunaway, who was playing the fiery, much larger role of Aimee that Bette had always coveted, and who a few months later would win the Best Actress Oscar of 1976 for Network. “Whoever played Aimee wouldn’t have seemed right to Bette,” Anthony Harvey says. “She just had a gut feeling that she’d always wanted to play that part.”

  Bette began “testing” Harvey from the outset of the three-week shoot in Denver. “She appeared on the first day with a sort of All About Eve wig and tremendous makeup,” Harvey recalls, “and I said, ‘Look, you have the most wonderful hair, Miss Davis, and you have marvelous skin. You don’t need all this makeup.’ She said, ‘Well, I’ve always done it and this is how I’m going to do it.’ So I sat outside her caravan for an hour until she finally called me back. She had taken it all off and she looked marvelous. She didn’t need all that stuff.”

  After a morning of filming, Bette went to Harvey and demanded he replace the cameraman, Jim Crabbe. He realized he was being tested, and he felt it was imperative that he show some strength. “If Jim goes, Bette, I go,” he told her. “He’s a brilliant cameraman.” Bette backed off, saying, “Well, I don’t know if he can light me, but he sure is a looker.”

  “About two days later,” Harvey recalls, “she saw the rushes and realized that Crabbe was bloody good… but she found it hard to look at herself after that. When you’ve reached a certain age, it must be tough. She just came in to check the first few dailies and she felt happy enough to not come again.”

  Bette’s relationship with Faye Dunaway strained intensely under the weight of their differing working styles, and what Davis saw as Dunaway’s lack of professionalism. “They worked in totally different ways,” Harvey recalls. “Faye liked to build up her character [as filming progressed] and perhaps do more takes. Bette had a totally different way of working. She was there early, knew every line, was tremendously professional.”

  Dunaway, Bette later complained to friends, “drives around in her limousine all night drinking champagne, and she’s a mess in the morning.” Bette grew furious when her costar would arrive on the set late and unsure of her lines. According to Judith Crist, “Bette didn’t give a damn if someone who was working with her was drunk, disorderly, high on drugs or anything else. But by God, you show up on time, and you do what you have to do, and then you go out and get drunk and disorderly. It was a dark period for Faye Dunaway, but Bette had no tolerance for anything that interfered with the work.”

  When Anthony Harvey set up a two-shot of Bette and Faye in a courtroom, by the time he looked through the view finder Bette was no longer in the frame. “She had quite subconsciously moved away [from Dunaway]. But she never said anything unkind or made any sort of scene in front of anyone.” One afternoon, while a huge audience of local extras waited for over an hour in sweltering heat for Dunaway to arrive for a revival meeting scene, Bette sang “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” for them in what Harvey considered “a wonderful and scratchy voice. She sort of entertained the troops. It was great.”

  Harvey completed The Disappearance of Aimee in just under a month. It turned out to be a fascinating film, with brilliant performances by both Davis and Dunaway, and won high ratings and critical praise when it was aired over NBC as a twenty-fifth anniversary presentation of the “Hallmark Hall of Fame.”

  Not long afterward, Judith Crist invited Bette and Anthony Harvey to take part in a symposium at Tarrytown, New York, to discuss the film. “Is she coming?” Bette asked. Crist replied that she had no commitment from Dunaway, and that she suspected Faye would attend only if Bette couldn’t.

  To Crist’s delight, both actresses showed up. She remembers the evening as a vivid example of “the old star power and the new star power.” Bette, looking grand and elegant, wore a black evening gown and white gloves, and a tasteful minimum of jewelry. Faye wore chiffon lounging pajamas in what Crist calls “an exotic print,” and when Crist helped her up on the stage she realized “she had absolutely nothing on underneath.”

  During the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked both actresses, “What kind of relationship was there between mother and daughter?” Bette stared the questioner down before she bellowed, “Didn’t you see the film? It’s right there in the movie!” Faye responded dreamily with a question of her own: “What was your impression?”

  “Faye had this ditzy seventies approach of ‘What do you think?’—as if it mattered,” Crist recalls. “And I was just ebullient about the whole evening because I thought, There’s no way you could have a sharper contrast between two generations of actresses. It was just a fabulous evening.”

  PART SIX

  “The Lonely Lady”

  THIRTY-ONE

  T

  he neighbors were being too nice to Bette, and B.D. didn’t like it. In June 1976 the Hymans had moved to a mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse in Stevens Township in northeastern Pennsylvania, about thirty miles south of the New York state line. They named the property Ashdown Farm, and according to B.D., Bette immediately began to visit every three weeks or so, “not only uninvited but unwanted.”

  During her visits, Bette stayed at the nearby Edgeville Court Motel, owned by Stan Frystak and his wife Fran. The Frystaks were shocked one day when B.D. called them to complain, as Fran recalls it, that “her mother liked Stanley and me too much, and that we shouldn’t make a fuss over her. I said we treat her like any customer that comes in—we treat all our customers well. She was nice to us, so we were nice to her. B.D. said we were being too nice to her. How can you be too nice to someone? If it was my mother and she was staying at a motel and I knew the people
were being nice to her, I’d call and thank them.”

  The Frystaks liked Bette, and they resented the way B.D. and Jeremy treated her. “Every time she came to visit,” Fran recalls, “her car would be loaded down with things for B.D. But she stayed here rather than up there, because they fought all the time. It was bad. I think it was a case of, if Bette didn’t do what her daughter wanted, she would just start abusing her.”

  One day after Bette had gone to visit B.D., Eran answered the phone to find the actress in tears. Between sobs, she asked to speak to her chauffeur, Bob Bernstein, who was staying in the room adjacent to hers. “She was crying very hard, and when I told her Bob was in the shower and didn’t answer my knocks, she said, ‘Please go back and keep pounding. Tell him to come up here and get me!’”

  According to Bernstein, “There were many times when I would pick up Bette from B.D.’s and she would be very upset and agitated. But she kept a stiff upper lip, and she attempted to preserve the stability of the family. It’s not as if she went up there just to feud. She was always helping them. She helped them expand the house, she put in a pool for them. Jeremy accepted her financial help, but then he begrudged her for it. He had no choice but to accept it, because he was strapped.”

  Doris Pitcher and her husband Jim went into the hay hauling business with the Hymans in 1978, and she recalls that “One summer Bette gave them a present of a pond that cost ten or twelve thousand dollars. The year before that it had been the swimming pool, and then there was the kitchen. It was beautiful, with a cathedral ceiling. Above it there were two bedrooms and a bath where Bette was supposed to stay when she visited them. The Hymans always seemed to want something from Bette. Jeremy wasn’t the kind of man to be ashamed that his mother-in-law helped him. He expected it. It was like B.D. felt, ‘I’m her kid, she should.’ If B.D. wanted a new winter coat, her mother got it. If B.D. wanted certain things for the kids, they got it. Her mother paid for Ashley’s boarding school and that was $10,000 a year. And I don’t think B.D. was ever appreciative. Even though Jeremy couldn’t stand Bette, he expected her to help out his family.”