by James Spada
Others among Bette’s friends have made the inevitable All About Eve comparison, but there is no question that whatever benefits Kath Sermak derived from her association with Bette Davis, she was a rock of loyalty to a woman who desperately needed help and companionship if she were ever to regain a semblance of the productive, independent life she had led for so many years. Bette knew she could count on Kath, and she treasured that security.
She certainly couldn’t count on her daughter, who never visited Bette in California after her illnesses. They did speak on the telephone every Sunday, but B.D. monopolized some of the conversations by proselytizing to her mother to renounce Satan and accept the Lord Jesus Christ as her personal savior. For B.D. and Jeremy, early in 1985, had “seen the light” and become born-again Christians.
Many of their Pennsylvania neighbors were surprised by the conversion “B.D. had a mouth on her,” Carol Andras recalls. “You know how some people have mouths like truck drivers? That’s the way she was.” Another neighbor, Nancy Lohman, recalls a St. Valentine’s Day party at which B.D., “quite overweight,” wore a light pink skin-tight dress that left “everything hanging out.” And according to David Keeler, Jeremy had frequently made jokes about the Born Agains in the neighborhood before his own revelation. “B.D. seemed more changed by it than he did,” Keeler thought. “Jeremy continued to curse and drink, and he was always trying to quit cigarettes.”
The Hyman family’s newfound belief in the Almighty—and His nemesis, Satan—was total and all-encompassing. When Ashley, now a strapping teenager, stayed out all night partying at a local disco, his mother confronted him upon his return and demanded an explanation. “It was Satan, wasn’t it?” the impressionable, melancholy youngster said. “Boy, did he have me fooled. God wouldn’t tell me to do those things, but I didn’t stop to think about it.” In the winter of 1984, B.D. and Jeremy had attempted to drive to Ohio to attend a Pentecostal healing service conducted by the television evangelist Ernest Angley, known for laying his hands on his followers’ foreheads, screaming “Yea-yah!,” and exorcising the demons that had created their illnesses. The Hymans had traveled halfway to Akron when a sudden snowstorm forced them to return home, but a few days later they were able to make it without incident to another of Angley’s services. “Satan had apparently been foiled in his attempt to keep us away,” B.D. concluded.
When B.D. went to Angley to be cured of chronic back pain, she brought Ashley along so that he could be rid of his partial deafness and depression. When Ashley walked on stage, the Reverend Angley placed his hand on Ashley’s left ear and shouted, “In the name of the Lord, come out!”
Moments before he fainted, Ashley recalled, he could see an arc of red light running from Angley’s eyes to his, and he felt a burning sensation in his head. “Then the red line turned blue, and my head suddenly felt cool. Reverend Angley stepped toward me, tapped my forehead gently with the palm of his hand, and shouted, ‘Yea-yah.’”
When B.D. saw Ashley fall into the arms of one of Angley’s ministers, she screamed out, “That’s my son!” and rushed onto the stage. While he was unconscious, Ashley claimed, he saw a glorious vision of Jesus, resplendent in a white robe, walking on a lake before He rose to Heaven.
Ashley’s hearing problem was cured, but apparently by a much more earthbound method. While Doc Petersen was examining the boy, who complained of a runny nose, he discovered a pencil eraser lodged in his ear. When he removed it, Ashley’s hearing improved markedly.
One morning while watching Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, B.D. heard a special healing prayer directed at “a woman in her thirties with a severe lower-back problem.” “I cried and thanked Jesus and claimed my healing,” she wrote. Then she jumped off the bar stool she was sitting on in the kitchen and felt no pain in her back. Testing it, she did some turns and saw that for the first time she had a full range of movement. What she has described as serious ligament damage in her back had been cured. “It was the first of many miracles with which we were to be blessed.”
“Oh, hell’s bells!” Doc Petersen exclaimed when he was asked about B.D.’s miracle cure. “She just had a backache. It wasn’t serious.”
To B.D.’s way of thinking, her religious conversion offered justification for her decision to write a book about her mother. After hearing Ernest Angley tell his congregation that good Christians should “cast out” any member of the family (“be it mother, father, brother, sister, son”) who “brought disharmony to the family unit,” she decided that that’s exactly what she should do with Bette.
“My daily prayers for a sign… as to the right or wrong of publishing my book had been answered,” she wrote. At that point, she felt, God told her to write the book. For all the divine help she received in her labors, which lasted nearly eight months, B.D. never once mentioned the endeavor to her mother.
In the spring of 1984, Kath persuaded Bette to escape from the burning smog and heat of Los Angeles by renting a beach house in Malibu for the summer. For Bette, the seashore was like a loving embrace; so many of her happiest memories centered around the ocean. The soothing sea air seemed to make her physical therapy a little easier, and she made new progress every day. “I learned to walk again by dragging myself through the sand on a beach near Malibu.”
That September, Bette’s most fervent hope became a reality—she got an offer of work. She was aware that most of Hollywood had written her off, and finding an insurance company willing to guarantee her services to a studio or network was very difficult. But producers Alan Shane and George Eckstein came through for her, asking that she costar with Helen Hayes in a made-for-TV movie version of Agatha Christie’s Murder with Mirrors.
She was fraught with fear. How would the public react to her appearance? She knew that eventually she would have to let people get used to her. The best way to do that, she felt, was under the controlled conditions of a movie role. She wanted to take the part, but then she was hit by a far more elementary doubt. “By now my feelings were divided equally between the desire to work again and the fear that I would be unable to make it.” When she accepted the role, she said, “I was in a state of high excitement one minute, and terror the next.”
Another of her fears was that she wouldn’t be able to remember her lines. Although her role as John Mills’s sickly wife was a small one, she set out to memorize the entire script. When she had it down cold after two weeks, she felt for the first time that she might be able to see this through.
Murder with Mirrors was to be filmed in England, and in order to make the trip less grueling Bette first flew to New York, where she and Kath stayed in a hotel for a few days. While she was there, Harold Schiff came up to see her—and so did B.D. Schiff had heard talk that B.D. was writing some kind of book about her mother, and his suspicions about its contents were aroused when he called to confront her with the rumor and she danced around the issue. In order not to set back Bette’s recovery, he had said nothing to her, and he watched through narrowed eyes as B.D. effusively greeted her mother in her hotel room. “You look marvelous?’ she gushed at Bette. “It’s wonderful to see you looking so well after all you’ve been through.”
When Schiff left a few minutes later, B.D. gave Bette a gift—a green-leather-bound version of The Living Bible with “Ruth Elizabeth Davis” engraved in gold on the cover. “That’s great,” Bette muttered as she took the book from B.D.’s hands. “I’ll have to read it sometime.” Suddenly B.D. began to recite from the book; she recounted the story of the Sermon on the Mount and then “shared” Pat Robertson’s teaching on the Beatitudes. When she finished, she urged her mother to embrace Jesus. Bette would have none of it. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If God is so much love and it’s automatic for Jesus to heal everyone, why do I still get pain in my hip? I prayed and prayed.”
B.D. explained that Jesus’s healing wasn’t automatic—that one must reach out to God first. Then she added, “Can’t you see that He’s giving you another chance, more time,
to realize your need for Him? Your cancer was localized, your stroke was mild and—”
“Mild!” Bette exploded. “You think my stroke was easy? Jesus! I slaved my guts out to get over that stroke. Brother! What do you mean? I went through therapists weekly. I wore them out because I worked so hard. Why should I be thankful?” The conversation went on like this, with B.D. appalled when Bette “used Christ as a profanity” and Bette arguing that she wasn’t a sinner—“I’m a good girl. I always have been.”
According to B.D., she had tried to convince her mother of the error of her ways, but she had once again failed. Had Bette seen the light, B.D. professed, she would not have published her book, which she had completed and for which she had already been paid the full $100,000 advance.1
A week later, Bette and Kath were ensconced in London’s Savoy Hotel, where they rested for a few days before motoring to the large estate outside London where Murder with Mirrors was to be filmed. “The first day back on the set was a day of pure terror for me,” Bette recalled. “I wondered if I would have the strength to last the day.”
Bette’s fears and uncertainties, as usual, exacerbated her battle-ready mindset. Helen Hayes, considered the first lady of the American theater, was cast as the wily amateur sleuth Miss Marple, and she was excited to hear that Bette had arrived on the set. “I saw her and said, ‘Hello!’ and put out my hand to shake hers. Bette looked right through me, and my hand dropped. I just continued on my way. A little later, our eyes met and I raised my hand in a little wave and she said, ‘What’s that for?’ I said, ‘I’m saying hello.’ And she said, ‘You said that before!’ Oh God. She was just terrifying!”
Hayes realized the strain Bette was under, and a few days later she made another effort to engage her costar in conversation. “I told her I had admired her so in The Disappearance of Aimee. But when I mentioned it to her, all I got was this flood of invective about Faye Dunaway. I hadn’t mentioned Dunaway, but that’s all that came from mentioning that picture. Well, it went on like that. I was just nervous as a kitten around her.”
All the more reason for Hayes to be taken aback when, on the last day of shooting, Bette turned to her after they had completed a scene and said, “You’re a beautiful person.”
“Well!” Hayes recalled. “It was like I’d been made a Dame of the British Empire or something!”
Bette wasn’t happy with the rushes she saw of Murder with Mirrors. Playing a frail, sickly woman, she was unable to present any real vitality on the screen, and her tightly marcelled period hairdo and thinly penciled eyebrows did little to soften the harsh contortions of her stroke-ravaged face. When she returned to the United States, she decided to appear with David Hartman on Good Morning, America dressed in a fashionable outfit and spouting her usual peppery opinions. Her fans, although delighted to have her back, were shocked by her appearance, and saddened by the knowledge that Bette Davis was now only a weak shadow of the energetic, no-nonsense, hell-raising Margo Channing persona they had loved for so many years.
* * *
1 When she had earlier asked Jeremy what they would do if Bette found salvation after the book was sold, B.D. wrote, his solution had been that if there was still time before publication they’d wrap another book into it, that is, “tell the story of how a couple of dumb agnostics came to Jesus and brought the great lady with them.” If there wasn’t time, they would simply tell the story as a sequel.
THIRTY-THREE
H
arold Schiff and Robert Lantz sat in grim silence as their car wended its way out of Manhattan, across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and into Queens. It was November 1984 and they were headed to Long Island, where Bette had rented a cottage for a seashore vacation before she returned to Los Angeles. As much as the two men dreaded it, the time had come for them to tell Bette that her daughter was about to release My Mother’s Keeper, a devastating tell-all book about her.
“When I got the confirmation that such a book was about to come out, and the kind of material that was in it,” Lantz recalls, “I knew what we had to do. I talked to Harold and we both felt strongly that, simply as friends, we had to face her. This could not be sprung on her by somebody else. So we drove out to tell her—because the worst thing of all would have been if she thought that her two trusted associates had not had the guts to let her know about this.”
Bette was puzzled and a little worried when she learned that both her agent and her lawyer were coming to discuss something with her in person; her instincts told her that they had more on their minds than the latest offer for a television movie. Still, she couldn’t have been less prepared for what they did tell her. “I don’t know how to describe it,” Lantz says. “It was worse than telling her B.D. had died. This was terrible. It was such a deep betrayal. She didn’t believe it at first. She just would not believe it.”
Bette paced back and forth, puffing frantically on one cigarette after another, as she listened to Lantz and Schiff. Her disbelief turned to confusion, then sorrow, and finally profound anger. “She was in a rage. In a rage?’ Lantz recalls. “And rage is a mild word for it. We knew the most difficult thing would be for her to keep quiet, not to comment publicly. It took hours for us to convince her.”
Emotionally drained, Schiff and Lantz left Bette after they had promised her they would try to intercede and prevent publication of the book. Back in his office, Schiff called B.D. and tried to “make a deal,” but she stood fast. Bette then called her niece Ruth Bailey. She asked Ruth to call B.D. and plead with her not to release the book.
Bailey, who hadn’t spoken to her cousin in years, made the call. While B.D. seemed pleased to hear from her, she told her blithely that the book was “on the presses” and there was no way she could stop it. “But I’ll send you an autographed copy when it comes out,” B.D. chirped. “I never got a copy,” Bailey says.
Finally, Bette called her daughter herself. In Narrow Is the Way, B.D.’s follow-up book to My Mother’s Keeper (in which she details her religious conversion), she describes the shouted conversation that ensued. According to B.D., Bette’s voice was at first frail and broken—a ploy, she felt sure, for sympathy—but it very quickly turned harsh and accusing. “Just tell me why?” Bette cried. “Was it for the money?” Not surprisingly, B.D. didn’t answer this basic question. Instead she tried to convince her mother that the book was written in an attempt to reach out to her. “I suppose you wrote a book about how much you love your mother,” Bette goaded sarcastically. “I wrote it because I do love you,” B.D. responded.
The exchange continued in a similar vein until Bette abruptly hung up. Relieved that the inevitable confrontation was behind her, and depressed mainly because her faith had not kept her from feeling the same old anger and resentment at her mother, B.D. threw herself into finishing work on the book and then into the preparations for her national publicity tour to promote its publication—scheduled for Mother’s Day, 1985.
B.D. says she was horrified and indignant when People magazine headlined its story about her book “Bette Dearest.” If this is true, she may have been the only person in America who didn’t see similarities between My Mother’s Keeper and Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford’s disturbing, sordid tale of life with her mother Joan.
While the Bette who emerges in B.D.’s book isn’t nearly the physical sadist Crawford apparently was, the portrait B.D. paints is hardly more flattering. She recounts with great detail the most private conversations between herself and Bette. She chronicles numerous fights between Bette and Gary Merrill. She inventories the drinks Bette took, the foul words she uttered, the many instances in which her mother’s selfish irrationality clashed with B.D.’s eminent reason.
The Bette Davis described in My Mother’s Keeper is a lying, self-deluded shrew, an alcoholic who loves to create ugly, embarrassing scenes in public, tyrannizes B.D. and her family, and lives in a reality entirely of her own design. She is a humorless obsessive/compulsive who can’t abide being anything less than t
he center of attention and is deeply jealous of her daughter’s happy marriage. Nowhere in the book does B.D. mention the enormous largesse that Bette directed at her and her family.
B.D. seems to have considered her mother a prime example of Satan’s handiwork. “Mother was a destroyer,” she said. “And the thing that amazes me is that I wasn’t destroyed. It is a miracle.… I do truly believe that the only reason is that God protected me.”
My Mother’s Keeper also makes it clear that except for those times when B.D. says she was pushed beyond endurance by Bette’s words or actions, she was a long-suffering paragon of patience, an understanding and loving daughter, a helpful wife and devoted parent who was often driven to distraction—and nervous illness—by the dreadful harridan of a mother whom she professed simply to want to love and who thwarted that effort at every turn.
The truth, of course, is far more complex. While B.D.’s portrait of Bette is in many ways accurate, a number of the incidents she recounts in the book are apparently badly skewed by her perceptions of her mother’s motivations, her own self-image, and everything that had passed between them for the preceding forty years. Although some of B.D.’s stories in which Bette gets drunk at a party and either makes a fool of herself or strikes out rudely at B.D.’s friends have been confirmed by guests, others have been denied by those present at the gatherings.
What seems clear is that B.D.’s prior experiences with Bette colored her reaction to everything her mother did. Like many adult children of alcoholics, B.D. would cringe in embarrassment at behavior that others saw as good-natured and amusing. Her stomach would knot as she watched Bette drink and carry on, certain that the evening would ultimately end in disaster—while Bette’s guests often had a fine time with a witty, effervescent hostess. What others recognized in Bette as good-natured put-downs, B.D. interpreted as mortifying insults.