How was the experience of working, however briefly, with a Hollywood legend?
Oh, I had a wonderful time with Bette, even though you might not think that from the way our association ended. Yes, Bette left the picture, but it wasn’t because of any problems between her and me. We had a great time during pre-production, and even during the week that we shot, we had some fun together. I had bought Bette a little charm bracelet for her birthday, and every day she would come to the set wearing it. She’d always raise her wrist up and jingle the bracelet at me to make sure that I saw it. She liked me a lot and was always hanging onto me. She was constantly either holding my hand or hugging me or giving me a kiss. In fact, Bette wouldn’t leave the set at the end of each day unless I gave her a kiss goodbye. The production assistant would come to me and say, “Miss Davis is ready to go home.” I’d say, “Okay, fine. Please tell Miss Davis I’ll see her tomorrow.” They would then say, “No, she won’t leave until she says goodnight to you.” I would then have to go to wherever Bette was, and she would grab me with both hands — digging her fingernails into my skin — and give me a big wet kiss on the cheek. She would then make a point of telling me how much she had enjoyed the day’s shooting. Then, and only then, would she go home. Of course, I never dreamed that anything was the matter with Bette because she was going out of her way to be nice. Bette was “an old pro” in the truest sense of the term. At the beginning of shooting, she came to me and said, “I arrived on the set this morning at seven o’clock and nobody was here.” I said, “Bette, the call was for eight o’clock. You got here a half an hour before everybody else did. No wonder nobody was here. If you arrive on set tomorrow at seven o’clock, no one will be here then either.” Bette just had to get there before anybody else, but then she’d get annoyed because nobody was there to welcome her. She just had to do things her way.
How did you persuade her to do things your way?
I tried to establish a good relationship with her very early on. During pre-production, Bette came to my house, and we spent some time together discussing the script and her character. She actually put a few cigarette burns into my furniture, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I never got anything repaired and would proudly point them out to people and say that Bette Davis was responsible for those holes! [Laughs] Bette would also have certain ideas, like her character having red hair. She’d call me up, tell me her idea, and then immediately hang up — just like that! There was no small talk; she’d state her opinion and was gone. Even though we were comfortable with each other, Bette still could get irascible. The closest we ever came to a fight was when we had the fashion show over at the Western Costume Company. Bette was trying on all the various outfits that our costume designer, Julie Weiss, had prepared for her to wear in the picture. Like a model, Bette came tottering out dressed in each outfit. She would do her little turns whilst trying her best not to fall down, which she somehow managed. When Bette had finished parading, she asked, “Well, what do you think?” I said, “I don’t know. Everything is fine, but it all looks the same. Every outfit is black. Why don’t we put some color into it? Maybe some scarves, a handkerchief, or even a belt or sash.” Suddenly, Bette got furious and said, “Right, everything has got to go! We have to start from scratch and do it all over again!” I said, “No, we don’t have to do that. We just have to dress it up a little bit.” I remember she was staring intensely at me with those flashing eyes. I said, “Bette, you asked me to give you my opinion. Well, I’m giving you my opinion.” She then softened slightly and said, “Okay, fine.” I mean, you just had to be firm with her. You certainly couldn’t back down because if you did she would smell blood and start running the whole show. As I said, she liked to do things her way, but after a while she conformed and did things my way. I paid no attention whenever she started something.
So, Davis was relaxed on set when you started shooting?
She seemed to be. When we were making the film, we had a beautiful dressing room prepared for Bette and I’d put flowers in there every day. I had taken a guesthouse behind the house that we were shooting in, and fashioned it into a very elaborate area for her. It was gorgeous and had plenty of space for her to lounge around in. I would occasionally visit Bette there and discover that she’d vanished. She would get a chair and sit in the middle of the set when the crew were up on ladders, fastening lights to the ceiling. Cables and lights would be hanging down all around her and she’d just sit calmly beneath them. I’d say, “Bette, if these lights fall they are going to kill you. Why can’t you stay in your lovely dressing room?” She said, “Oh, I like to see what’s going on.” And there she would remain, sitting in the middle of everything, smoking continuously like a chimney. This may sound hard to believe, but Bette would smoke Vantage cigarettes and we would have to get her about ten packs a day. She’d go through them all, and we’re talking about 200 cigarettes here! It seems impossible that anyone could smoke that much in a day, but she did. We had a production assistant that would take the cigarettes out of the boxes and put them in ashtrays and glasses. There would be twenty cigarettes in one glass and twenty cigarettes in another glass, positioned all around the set so that Bette wouldn’t have to reach into the packet to get one out as she hated fumbling for her cigarettes. She’d smoke one and would immediately segue into the next one, and the next one, and so on. Bette could smoke all day long, constantly, without stopping. Understand, this was a woman who’d had cancer and mastectomies and strokes, but she was still smoking a prodigious amount of cigarettes. I’d say, “Bette, you are doing yourself serious harm. Can’t you stop smoking?” She’d say, “Larry, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have a cigarette in my hand.” If you look at Wicked Stepmother now, Bette is basically killing herself before your very eyes. Watching that movie is almost like watching the perfect anti-smoking commercial.
That must have been very distressing to witness.
It was, but you know what? Bette was always on time and she always tried her best. Unfortunately, on top of it all, she also had serious dental problems. Now, anybody could have had dental problems, but she had them before the picture started and didn’t tell us about it. Bette didn’t confide in me because she didn’t want to delay the production. I would have been happy to have delayed the picture so that she could have gotten her teeth fixed. Bette actually had a broken bridge in her mouth. She had a terrible time trying to get the lines out without stopping to readjust her teeth. We were wondering why her performance was so eccentric because she would often stop in the middle of a speech. Of course, she was merely trying to get her teeth back in place. I mean, you can’t act if your teeth are falling out. It’s hard to say the lines if they are continually being dislodged. Finally, her teeth had disintegrated to such a degree that she couldn’t work anymore. So, Bette left, and the situation only became clear to me when I received a letter from her dentist, explaining that she’d gone to New York and her prognosis was not good. Bette not only needed a new bridge to be built but also needed six teeth extracted. This meant she would not be available for work for between ninety and 120 days. Then, I received another letter stating that Bette was down to just 70 lbs and had lost all the weight because she was unable to eat during her treatment. Again, she knew this was a problem before she came to work but had kept it to herself. This caused a disaster later on. But if Bette had just told me about these problems, I would have postponed the picture for a time. However, being Bette, she would not admit that anything was the matter. She was afraid of anything that made her look old, vulnerable, or incapacitated. She thought such perceptions of her would mean she’d be unable to get any insurance and would never work again. By keeping her dental problems to herself, she only compounded them, because when it finally came down to it, Bette simply couldn’t get the dialogue out of her mouth. Naturally, that is a serious issue for any actor. So, we had to make a decision. We’d talked several times about re-shooting the whole picture and recasting the part of the witch with s
omebody like Lucille Ball. [1] When we contacted Ball’s agent about the possibility of her replacing Bette, we discovered that she was in the hospital in critical condition. In fact, Ball actually died shortly thereafter. We then briefly considered Carol Burnett [2] for the role. Finally, I said, “Look, we have fifteen minutes of Bette Davis in the can and I think we should keep this material. We are not going to do anything theatrically with this movie, but every video store in America has a Bette Davis section and the chances are we’ll sell thousands and thousands of videos. A lot of people are Bette Davis fans and they will want to see this picture. I think this is virtually the only way we can make the money back. Let me rewrite the script and turn Bette’s character into Barbara Carrera. I mean, she is a witch after all. She could very easily turn herself into somebody else entirely.” So, that’s exactly what we did. I didn’t throw the footage away and we kept Bette in the picture.
Despite her truncated role as Miranda, Davis still featured largely in the film’s advertising and had prominent billing. Were you in any way embarrassed or concerned about trading on her name and image after all that had gone on?
No, not at all. I mean, yes, I did have some thoughts about it, but there were other considerations, too. What’s interesting is Bette had been in movies, like Phone Call from a Stranger, [3] in which she had played even smaller parts than she did in Wicked Stepmother. So, I wasn’t ashamed to put the film out with her name on it. Bette had done several cameo roles in various movies before, and her involvement in my picture was now effectively reduced to an extended cameo due to these events. Ultimately, the weakest parts of Wicked Stepmother are the scenes that feature Bette because she looked so terrible. It’s a shame, but we actually ended up using a lot less of Bette than we could have for that reason. You’d have thought we would have wanted to use every single frame of Bette Davis, but we simply couldn’t. It was better if we minimised her role and just got on with the story. The unused material only amounts to a couple of minutes here and there, and is probably sitting somewhere over in the MGM vaults, if somebody hasn’t already thrown it out.
Even though Davis is clearly vulnerable and ravaged by illness, she is still a fascinating presence that seems to permeate Wicked Stepmother.
Oh, absolutely. Her presence seems to linger over the film even when she isn’t on screen. Despite her age and poor health, when she started talking she was still Bette Davis. She still retained that special something that all the true Hollywood greats have. Bette always had incredible anecdotes to tell. She knew I loved to hear about the old days at Warner Bros., so she kept regaling me with these wonderful stories about her career and experiences with the studio. She told me several times how much she liked me, which I can’t emphasise enough because Bette didn’t have a good thing to say about any of her other directors. She once told me that she thought all of the directors at Warner Bros. were useless, with the exception of William Wyler. Bette claimed that she always had to direct herself and that most of the directors were afraid of her. She actually once said to me, “Larry, I don’t want you to be afraid of me because I think you’re a great guy.” I said, “Don’t worry, Bette, I’m not afraid of you. I’ve directed a lot of your contemporaries, like Celeste Home, Evelyn Keyes, and Sylvia Sidney, and I got along with all of them. I’m just enjoying the opportunity to work with you.” And that was the truth. Bette was delightful and was very affectionate towards me. Sadly, it just developed into a sorry situation.
Surely you met with some opposition to casting Davis before shooting started?
Oh, sure. Bette looked so frightening and fragile people actually said to me, “How are you going to make a movie with this woman?” When I first visited her at Havenhurst, my agent accompanied me. Bette was recovering from several strokes and cancer operations at the time, and had lost a lot of weight and was walking with a limp. At one point, my agent took me outside and said, “You cannot make a picture with her in that condition. Are you crazy?” I don’t know, maybe I was crazy, but I really believed that I could make the movie with Bette. So, I just persevered with the project, as I had done when people told me I couldn’t make a movie about J. Edgar Hoover. But I must also say that if we had not secured Bette for the picture, we would never have gotten Wicked Stepmother made in the first place. Having her in it was what convinced MGM to put up the money, but I was able to get the dough we needed without them ever seeing her, not once. I’m thinking that if they had seen her beforehand, MGM probably wouldn’t have handed over the $2.5 million.
At what point did the MGM executives see her?
They didn’t get a look at Bette until after we began shooting. They started viewing the dailies and as soon as they saw her they were in complete shock: “Oh my god, look at her! She’s so frail and old!” What can you say? It was very sad. I mean, this project was a triumph of will power. I wanted to make a movie with Bette, and I insisted I was going to do it, and I did do it. Even though she eventually left, I still made a picture with Bette Davis. Whatever the circumstances were, there are a lot of great directors who can never make that claim. I remember that Bette was later quoted in The New York Times as saying, “I have dealt with many directors in my career, but in Larry Cohen I have finally met my Waterloo!” [Laughs] I thought that was cute. I found out that Bette was appearing at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, so I sent a bouquet of flowers to her hotel with a card saying: “From your Waterloo.”
How did the rest of the cast react to Davis’ departure?
At first, nobody knew why Bette had left, as the cast weren’t privy to her dental problems, and neither was I. Many excuses were given as to the reasons why she left, some suggesting she’d been badly treated on set and had suffered a fall and got hurt. All of this was complete nonsense. Bette later admitted this herself when she did the deposition, a sworn statement she had to give for the insurance company. She testified under oath and finally told the truth: her dentures had broken before the movie began and she thought she could get through it and make do with the situation. Being a perfectionist, Bette was mortified that her teeth kept slipping out. She was proud and it drove her crazy that she wasn’t able to deliver a performance that met her own high standards. So, Bette had to leave, but she didn’t want to admit it to anybody. At first, her lawyers came in and claimed she had been mistreated. Bette also made some unfortunate statements that painted the wrong picture. The cast didn’t know anything about this until later. They all thought that the film was going to shutdown and they would receive their walking papers. They had their contracts, so they would have been paid, meaning the insurance company and the completion bond company would have had to eat the entire cost of the picture. I was able to save everybody that money by rewriting the script and changing the premise around: Miranda was now able to use her powers as a witch to transform herself into a beautiful young woman named Priscilla. That way, we were able to finish the movie. Oddly enough, Wicked Stepmother actually went into profits and the completion people and the insurance company got their money back, as well as a substantial profit.
Was Priscilla always a separate character in the story? I know that shortly before vanishing from the film, Miranda announces her daughter’s arrival.
Yes, Priscilla was always in there and Barbara Carrera was always going to play her. In the original script, Bette had a daughter, who comes to visit her, and the two of them were to feature in the story together. Again, in the revised version, it was a way out for me to have Bette turn into her daughter. So, it really wasn’t that much of a change other than taking Bette out of the picture and giving her scenes to somebody else. That was for the best. When Bette later heard we were keeping some of her footage in the film, she was rather upset about it. She hadn’t seen Wicked Stepmother, but she decided to speak out against the movie anyway. I guess Bette felt like she was trapped in a film that she didn’t want to be in. She went on Entertainment Tonight, and also spoke to The New York Times, and made some disparaging remarks. Later,
she came back on TV again and said some things that were not so bad and were rather complimentary to me, actually. She had calmed down a bit at this point and had accepted the fact that we were going to use the footage.
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