Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 13

IN SKYWARD, A made-for-television movie directed by Ron Howard in 1980, Davis plays an aging pilot who teaches a paraplegic girl (Suzy Gilstrap) how to fly against the wishes of her overly protective parents. It was shot at an airstrip outside of Dallas. "The film was a pleasant one to make except for the intolerable heat and electrical storms," Davis wrote. Pleasant for her, perhaps, but not for everyone else. "G.o.dd.a.m.n!" one of Davis's Texan drivers later declared. "I drove her for one day and asked for somebody else. That mean ol' gal-she was the nastiest thing we had down here since we drove the snakes out."5 "I got my first taste of h.e.l.l with her," drawled Skyward's production coordinator, Betty Buckley. Before Davis arrived in Dallas, Anson Williams, Howard's sidekick from the sitcom Happy Days and one of Skyward's producers, asked Buckley to stock Davis's refrigerator.

She drank Belle scotch and Belle vodka-it's imprinted on my brain, since I had to get what she wanted. Anson was kind of pacing up and down going, "I've got better demographics than she does" because of Happy Days. As he was running out the door, I asked him what she smoked, and he said, "I don't know-Columbian?" At one point Paul Lynde was in town and called to invite her to something, so I picked up the phone and said, "Miss Davis, you have an invitation . . ." I never even got to the Paul Lynde part. She just screeched, "There will be no social engagements on this picture!" [Then she threw the telephone.] I could actually hear it hitting the wall. At other times I'd call her to say that dailies were at 7:30 or 6:00 or whenever they were, and she would say, "Oh, thank you-thank you so much," and be just delightful and lovely. She was either gracious or terrifying.

John Kuri, another of Skyward's producers, has more positive memories.

We were working outside at an airport. It was so hot that the legs of the director's chairs were sinking into the tarmac. [Davis was quite anxious, since she was in her seventies, and every day's newspaper featured accounts of elderly people dying from the heat.] She gave us an edict: "I will not work when the temperature gets over 100." It was kind of funny because the temperature never got under 100.

Our special effects guy created a wonderful air conditioning rig which sat right behind her director's chair. We got one of the taller chairs for Bette, and a large umbrella, and Bette would sit there and hold court. [c.o.c.ktail hour began at 11:00 or 11:30.] She enjoyed martinis. She was just a major diva sitting there in the sun under the umbrella with the air conditioning going, her cigarette in one hand, her drink in the other.

I'm not trying to imply that she was inebriated. By no means was she that. She was very professional. But she did enjoy her drinks and made no bones about it. She was a tremendous pro. She hit her marks, she did everything we needed, she did it beautifully-she was a real sport and a pleasure to work with.6 Betty Buckley remembered the way it all ended: "On the last day of the shoot she told the producers she was going to leave the set when it got to be noon or 100 degrees, whichever came first. The producers got hysterical and were calling Lloyd's of London to figure what to do. They were filming the climax when the parents pull up and jump out of their car yelling and screaming at her character. There was drama all over the set-in front of the camera, behind the camera. . . . We got everything filmed by noon and said a collective, 'Goodbye, Miss Davis,' and she was gone."

Davis later let it be known that she thought the idea of casting Suzy Gilstrap, herself a paraplegic, was "cruel if not exploitative." Not only did she deplore "this kind of realism," but she felt it was wrong of Ron Howard to give Gilstrap a taste of a world "it was obvious she could never be a part of."7 Gilstrap went on to become a vice president at Howard's production company, Imagine.

IN HIS 1982 interview with Davis in Playboy, Bruce Williamson asked her whether she thought Hollywood's golden age was better than the contemporary world of American moviemaking. The old days were a lot of hard work, Davis replied, then added, "Maybe the difference is that the world is less golden. We're in a mess, and our scripts reflect it. Everything gets bigger and more vicious: terror in the streets, dismembered hands floating around. I am truthfully horrified by all the violence and blood on the screen."8 One can see why she was attracted to Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last, an old-fas.h.i.+oned costume melodrama about the deliciously trauma-ridden early years of Gloria Vanderbilt. Directed for television by Waris Hussein, Little Gloria stars Angela Lansbury as Gloria's aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; Christopher Plummer as her charming but derelict father, Reggie Vanderbilt; Glynis Johns as her flamboyant maternal grandmother, Laura Fitzpatrick Morgan; Maureen Stapleton as her nanny; and Lucy Gutteridge as Gloria's mother. Bette plays Gloria's paternal grandmother, Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt.

"Say horrible things about Bette Davis? That's the last thing I would do!" Waris Hussein declared in a shocked tone of voice when asked to spill some dirt.9 "She was not in any way horrendous. The problem is that she was a hugely professional woman. And anybody who crossed her on an amateur level, or gave her false information, or made bad excuses, got the bad end of her professional anger."

When Hussein and his producers were trying to cast the leads, Hussein suggested Bette Davis. n.o.body took the suggestion seriously because Davis's character had only eighteen pages in a two-hundred-page script. "Look," Hussein proposed, "let's see what she says. All she can do is turn us down." When they met, he asked her what tempted her to take the role. "And she said, 'I'll tell you this: I've never accepted an 18-page script in my life, but Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt was one of the richest women in America-that was a huge temptation. And the script appeals.' "

They rehea.r.s.ed for ten days in New York, but without Bette; Hussein was told that Davis didn't want to rehea.r.s.e. Bette arrived from Los Angeles on the first day of shooting and checked into the Wyndham Hotel. Hussein got a phone call-would he go and see her after finis.h.i.+ng the shoot? He said he would as soon as he wrapped.

I went over and-I'll never forget-I was walking down this long corridor from the elevators, and there framed against the doorway, standing there waiting for me, was Bette Davis. For me, this was a legend.

She doesn't say h.e.l.lo, she doesn't say anything. She walks me into the room; we sit down; and I'm looking at her hair-she's got a silver-gray wig on with huge sort of bouffant rolls on either side. She said, "What are you looking at?" I said, "I'm looking at your hair, Miss Davis, because it looks very . . . I can see what you're . . . you're trying to show me how Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt would look. . . . But it's very '40s to me." And she said, "40s? 40s?! I was the 40s!"

So I said, "Miss Davis, I appreciate that. The thing is, I suggest that the hair would be much closer to the face, because we're dealing with the '20s." Without further ado, she said, "Did you hear what the man said?" And there, hiding in the corner, was her a.s.sistant. They went off and fussed around for around fifteen minutes and came back with her hair pushed much closer to the head. I said, "That's perfect. That's really right." And she said, "Good. Now I know what you're doing."

"Why didn't you ask me to come to rehearsals?" Davis demanded. Hussein responded that he'd been told that she didn't want to rehea.r.s.e. "That's absolute nonsense. That is the producers trying to economize on bringing me over and keeping me in a hotel for ten days. Did anyone ask me whether I wanted to do it? I understand now what kind of people you're working for." She bore a robust resentment against the producers for the rest of the production; after she determined precisely who the enemy was, she was firmly on Hussein's side.

Davis had an agreement in her contract that at six o'clock precisely she would leave the set, whether or not she was in midsentence. "I was told to understand that, and I did," Hussein said.

Except one day we had a very elaborate banquet scene, and we were shooting in the Flagler mansion [the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum in Palm Beach], and we had only one day to shoot this very expensive scene, and I had to progress from a lengthy long shot toward her. She watched me setting the whole thing up, and she summoned me over and said, "Mr. Hussein." She never called me Waris-only Mr. Hussein-and I called her Miss Davis. She said, "Can I have a word with you? You're not going to finish with me by 6 o'clock, you know." I said, "I think I can." She said, "You can try. But I can tell you right now you're not going to finish it." I jokingly said, "What time do you think I'll finish with you, Miss Davis?" She said, "10 o'clock."

At 6 o'clock precisely-we had not gotten anywhere near finis.h.i.+ng-she summoned me over and said, "Now, look. I could get up and leave-right now-and that would screw up your entire schedule. But I'm not going to. Because I think you deserve to finish this scene. However. I do not want those men over there"-she pointed to the producers, who were in a huddle-"I don't want them to think I am doing them any favors." And, you know, at exactly 10 o'clock she finished.

She knew her lights; she knew her situation. She even said to me, "The right side of my face is not my best side because it's falling down. If you'd be kind enough to ask the cameraman to be aware of that, and I'll also talk to him." She would walk on the set and say, "I love it, Tony [Tony Imi, the cinematographer]-that's great. Just help me with a little bit of light over here, and there." That's a lady who knew her art.

There are long-standing rumors that Davis was difficult on the set, especially to Angela Lansbury, but that wasn't the case, said Hussein.

If ever there was a more difficult person to work with, it wasn't Bette Davis-it was Glynis Johns. She was a bundle of neuroses. We had a sequence where they were all at a lunch table together. Glynis was playing an extravagant South American woman and was very over the top, and I had to keep bringing her down. There was a storm brewing, and we had an exterior shot, and I thought "I have to just get through this quietly, quietly," and Bette sat there watching Glynis do her number. She had all her reaction shots to do with Glynis. The looks on her face, the subtle variations of contempt for this character-as well as the actress-were all in the film! She utilized the situation as it grew. Later, she took me aside and said, "Mr. Hussein. I want to let you know that I thought you were magnificent with Miss Johns. I thought she was being very difficult in view of the fact that we were about to be rained on."

Little Gloria aired on NBC on October 24 and 25, 1982. Davis has two particularly delightful lines-one for her delivery of it, the other for its irony. "These Morgan girls have, as I believe the expression has it, been around," Davis tells Plummer over tea, p.r.o.nouncing been as bean. And at the end of the tracking shot Hussein describes as having taken until 10 o'clock to shoot, the camera ends up on Bette, draped in yet another of the designer Julie Weiss's all-black gowns. "When a family's divorces begin to outnumber its marriages," Davis says, "we must question the intelligence of its romantic choices."

IN 1983, DAVIS starred in the pilot of Hotel, Aaron Spelling's trashy TV series. The series got picked up, but the mastectomy and the stroke and Bette's irascible distaste for the scripts she read kept her from continuing with it. She told Spelling that she would return to Hotel in January 1984 but later wrote, "[My] decision, while sincere, was motivated by my desire to go back to work, not by my opinion of the product. . . . After watching the episodes each week I thought that Hotel should have been called Brothel."10 Bette's daughter was outraged at her mother's intransigence: "I cringe thinking that she turned down $100,000 a day," B.D. Hyman told the Hollywood columnist George Christy in 1985. "I did everything but physically shake her."11 "I DON'T BLAME the daughter-don't blame her at all," Bette said in the early 1980s, referring to Christina Crawford. "She was left without a cent living in a motor home in Tarzana, and I doubt she could have written this if it weren't true. One area of life Joan should never have gone into was children. She bought them-paid thousands for them-and here was a role she was not right for. No, I don't blame Christina Crawford. I don't think anyone would invent her book. You couldn't just make it up." Then: "I've never behaved like . . . well, I doubt that my children will write a book."12 My Mother's Keeper came out in the spring of 1985, just in time for Mother's Day. It was, as People magazine reported at the time, a "portrait of Davis as a mean-spirited, wildly neurotic, profane and pugnacious boozer who took out her anger at the world by abusing those close to her." B.D. was clear about her motives in writing it: "After I found the Lord," she said, "I realized there was a chance of a miracle in the literal sense with Mother. For Mother to change, she has to discover G.o.d through facing herself in this book. I want her to go to heaven."13 B.D. and her husband, Jeremy, went on to write a sequel, Narrow Is the Way, chronicling their religious awakening and bad-mouthing Bette at every opportunity.

It was Robbie Lantz and Harold Schiff who broke the news to Bette that B.D. had written the tell-all.

Harold and I agreed that we could not tell her on the phone. We had to go there. I have to tell you it was one of the worst moments of my life. To tell any mother, whether it's Bette Davis or not, that her child has written a book like that-to tell any mother that her child has turned on her. But Bette was one of those people who had to hear the truth. You could only tell her the truth, pleasant or unpleasant. Harold and I were absolutely flat and direct about it. She was shocked and distraught in equal measure, but she also appreciated that she had two friends who understood.

I wouldn't want to suggest . . . that I would have liked her for a parent. She must have been overwhelming. But she did love the girl. She made enormous financial sacrifices for her.14 Davis, her cancer seemingly in remission but still debilitated from the stroke, was preparing to leave for England to film the made-for-television film Murder with Mirrors when she learned that B.D. had betrayed her in the name of the Lord. According to B.D., Bette responded by calling and writing angry letters, all the while insisting on seeing the ma.n.u.script, a request B.D. denied. "How dare you do this to me? I'm a very famous woman," B.D. claims Bette said, though clearly Davis's fame was only one of her concerns at that point. "Did you do it for the money?" Bette inquired.

B.D. and Jeremy had been receiving lavish gifts and direct financial support from Bette for years. Gary Merrill, who doesn't come off very well in My Mother's Keeper, thought that B.D. wrote the book to get back at her mother for refusing to pay for something: "I surmised that B.D. must have wanted something Bette couldn't afford," a thought that occurred to Robbie Lantz and Chuck Pollack as well.15 "As long as Bette was making money and she could get things from her, she took, took, took," Pollack said of B.D. "She had no taste-no sense. To write the book while her mother was still alive! Bette was very ill. She probably was hoping that she would die before the publication, but who knows? She's not a very nice person."16 Ellen Hanley remembered, "Harold Schiff called me on the phone one time and said, 'Ellen, you've got to tell Bette that she cannot let B.D. charge any more on her credit card.' He said, 'There is no money. She cannot keep doing it.' "17 Gary Merrill acknowledged at the time that "there are kernels of truth in [the book], but multiplied. Bette and I were both big drinkers, and sure-I slapped her and B.D. We had physical fights, but not much more than the average family. Usually Bette pushed me first or something. I'm a lazy slob. I wouldn't start a fight." Merrill also made a point of denying that he ever called B.D. "a little s.l.u.t," as B.D. claimed. "Christ!" Merrill said. "She doesn't have enough gumption to be a s.l.u.t."18 My Mother's Keeper is a sour, whiny book written by a spoiled child who grew up and found Christ. B.D.'s accounts of Bette's temper, her drinking, her ill treatment of Bobby and Margot are believable enough, but her sanctimoniousness and take-it-for-granted privilege counterbalance whatever Bette or Gary did or didn't do to her. For instance, Bette never hid the fact that she, like most parents of her generation, used spanking as punishment. "Be a f.a.n.n.y-spanking disciplinarian until your kids are ten-then they'll turn out all right," Bette told Look in 1962, a point on which she was quite evidently wrong.19 B.D., though-like many parents of her generation-saw it as child abuse.

"B.D. had fastened on an item on display which she thought she must have," Gary recalled, "but Bette refused to buy it. Aware that people were noticing her famous mother, B.D. decided a tantrum might help change Bette's mind-and proceeded to perform. Bette yanked her around, gave her a good one, and marched B.D. out of the store. It was a mother's appropriate reaction to an embarra.s.sing scene created by a manipulative eight-year-old."20 "If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent," Bette once said.21 B.D.'s prolific accounts of the abuse she endured-from the harrowing (Bette's theatrical threats to commit suicide, threats that were issued in front of her children) to the laughable (the museums and churches B.D. was forced to tour while accompanying Bette to Spain)-have been echoed by enough people that, on whole, one has to agree with certain aspects of B.D.'s characterization: Bette Davis could be a drunk, and a nasty one; she picked fights for the h.e.l.l of it; and she could be very mean.

An independent observer-Don Owens, Kaye Ballard's manager-establishes that B.D. didn't have it easy. Owens was invited, along with Ballard and the composer Fred Ebb, to a dinner party at Bette's East Seventy-eighth Street town house in 1960 or 1961. B.D. was about thirteen. Owens describes Bette drinking so heavily-martinis-that her sister Bobby had to wipe Bette's lipstick off her nose, where she had drunkenly smeared it. Then, at the dinner table, in front of Michael, Bobby, and the guests, Bette humiliated B.D. by forcing her to tell everyone what her current career aspiration was. B.D., knowing what was coming, clearly didn't want to, but Bette forced her to say it-"a horse doctor"-whereupon Bette threw her head back and cackled. B.D. quickly asked to be excused from the table. (Bobby then ended the meal by handing out checks to the guests. Bette told her that, no, they weren't giving out checks that night, after which Bobby told the guests to go into the kitchen and wash the dishes. Bette explained that Bobby had just been released from a mental hospital.)22 In short, one ends My Mother's Keeper feeling sorry for everyone, but B.D.'s spectacular breaking of the fifth commandment ends up backfiring. We feel sorrier for Bette than for B.D. in the end.

Knowing the end of the story gives a certain poignance to various items in Davis's sc.r.a.pbooks: An elaborate hand-made Valentine with cut-out, pasted-on red hearts: "Dear Mommy-Valentine's Day is loads of fun, if only you think it is, and if you think so, I will think so too! To the sweetest mother in all the world, from B.D."23 A 1964 photo of the dining room at Honeysuckle Hill, the house in Bel-Air; the room is dominated by an enormous portrait of B.D. in an evening gown, her hair piled high. Photos of Christmas at Twin Bridges, 1967-Mike putting an angel at the top of the tree, Bette roasting her traditional goose-and a notation in Bette's daybook: "Wednesday December 27: order 4 doz white roses-for Hymans anniversary-wrap presents for them-make goose a la king."24 "Wednesday August 11, 1971-Ashley's outfit, steak knives for Jeremy, nightgowns."25 Here are a few shots of B.D.'s twenty-first birthday party: balloons are tied to an overhead light; B.D. wears a pink top hat.26 There's the baby shower Bette threw for B.D. before the birth of B.D.'s first son, Ashley; B.D. is in a flowing chartreuse gown with matching eye shadow.27 (Ashley was born on June 19, 1969; B.D.'s second son, Justin, was born on August 7, 1977.) And finally photos of the extravagant twentieth anniversary party Bette threw for B.D. and Jeremy at La Scala in Beverly Hills; guests included R. J. Wagner and Rock Hudson.28 The party took place on January 4, 1984. By the end of that year, Bette had found out about B.D.'s book and had stopped talking to her.

After My Mother's Keeper was published, letters of support and sympathy came in from friends such as Burt Reynolds, Meryl Streep, and Sally Field, but Bette was consoled only so much. At first she was deeply hurt. Then, characteristically, she got mad-very, very mad. She devoted a sizable portion of This 'n That to telling B.D. off. (This 'n That was published in 1987 by G. P. Putnam's Sons; it was written with the a.s.sistance of Katheryn Sermak and Michael Herskowitz.) There are no mind-blowing wire hanger scenes in B.D.'s book, but that doesn't mean it has no camp value. "There's one funny part in My Mother's Keeper," Charles Busch pointed out. "B.D. tells her mother about letting Jesus into her life, and Davis says something like 'I wouldn't let any man run my life!'-as though Jesus was an agent at William Morris."29 Davis had an equally good line outside the book. "Jeremy's become a Christian, too, right?" she asked B.D. one day while they were still speaking. "That means he'll go to heaven, too, right? Well," she said, "if that b.a.s.t.a.r.d wants to be there, I'm not going."30

CHAPTER.

24.

WAR'S END FOR BETTE DAVIS, ALCOHOL AND CIGArettes were props in both senses of the word: they b.u.t.tressed her against her nerves and served equally well as reliable bits of business, things to do with her hands. According to her friend Chuck Pollack, "We had a lot of fun, especially early in the day before she started drinking."1 When did she start drinking? "Early in the day. She would drink orange juice with vodka, and by the time it got around to lunch it was just vodka, and it was vodka for the rest of the afternoon until c.o.c.ktail hour, when she switched to what she considered the hard stuff-scotch."

The good times, Pollack went on to say, were mostly times when Bette wasn't drinking. When she had a job to do, an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, for instance, she didn't touch a drop all day long. Instead, she'd spend the time preparing herself to appear as the grand movie star she was. "She came off beautifully on all those shows," Pollack observed. "She'd done them a million times, and she knew exactly what the answers were. When she was working, she was a different person because she didn't drink. She was much easier to cope with."

Liquor made her feel better, but her behavior got exponentially worse. Pollack offered some examples: She would offer to help in the garden-I'd be pruning-and she'd just chop up a plant and kill it. People would send over bouquets of flowers. She'd sit there drinking and smoking, with those nervous little hands twitching away, and she'd start picking the buds off, one by one. By the end of the day there would be no flowers left.

She would pick fights with people and be absolutely horrible. She'd ask me to have people over for c.o.c.ktails, and then she couldn't wait to attack somebody and make a scene. People in the movie business, friends of mine-it didn't make any difference to her. If they looked cross-eyed and she decided she wanted to attack them, she did-for no reason. She'd become argumentative, insulting, sarcastic. Finally she'd just say, "Why don't you go home?" We'd all sit there with our mouths hanging open thinking, "My G.o.d, what just happened?"

One such evening occurred when Pollack invited Carroll O'Connor and his wife to dinner along with Louis B. Mayer's granddaughter, Barbara Wyndham. Bette was filming a television movie at the time-Pollack didn't recall which one-and she brought home a birthday cake from the set. Having been baked to serve as a prop, it was a gaudy affair, iced in bright Technicolor. Barbara Wyndham made the mistake of calling it ugly. The remark provoked Davis into an instant and violent rage; she screamed at Wyndham about what a rude and ungrateful person she was. Carroll O'Connor tried to calm her down, but to no avail.

When Pollack invited Mae West one evening, it proved to be just as disastrous, if much less loud. For whatever reason, the prospect of meeting Mae West frightened Bette; she was anxious all day, started drinking early, and was violently drunk-falling-down drunk-by the time West arrived. It was August in Los Angeles, but Bette insisted that Pollack light a fire in the fireplace. "I tried to stop her," he recalled, "but two minutes later there was a fire blazing. She was so drunk that she picked up a paper napkin-not a cracker-and smeared it with caviar and handed it to Mae." As was often the case, however, once dinner was served and she got some food into her, she returned to a state that approximated presentability.

The writer Dotson Rader, who interviewed her for Parade in 1983, experienced Bette's extended c.o.c.ktail hours at her apartment from time to time. "She'd call me up and say, 'Can you come over for dinner tomorrow night?' " Rader remembered.

She'd call at 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock in the morning and say, "I've been up since six. Cooking. For dinner!" Well, I'd show up, but there was never any dinner.

Once there was an old lady there-Bette Davis's hair-dresser. She opened the door-Bette was off getting ready-and offered me a drink and hors d'oeuvres, "hors d'oeuvres" being Ritz crackers with a roll of American cheese on them and a stuffed olive on a toothpick-and not even standing up straight but lying on its side. Anyway, she brought me this little plate and a vodka, and then she sat in a little French chair against the wall and never said another word. That's the only time I ate anything at Bette Davis'.

Miss Davis came into the living room where I was sitting with this mousy little hairdresser. Bette was a tiny little woman, but she had this sort of Death Ray Look that was terrifying. She walked in, paused a moment to give you time to collect yourself-you were supposed to be awestruck at the vision that presented itself. So she paused, smiled at me, and then That Look came over her face-a look of ill-contained rage. She marched over, grabbed the hors d'oeuvres plate with two hands-not one hand, but two, the way you'd grab a tray-and marched back over to the table where the hors d'oeuvres were, slammed the plate down, and turned on the poor little hairdresser and started screaming at her. "This is my party! He's my guest! I'm the hostess! This is my house! How dare you? How dare you?!" She put the olive back where it was, paused a moment, and came back over to me carrying the original hors d'oeuvres tray, and asked if I'd like one.

There are a couple of other people who could drink me under the table, but she was the only woman who could. Her capacity for booze was just amazing. She would insist on pouring the drinks. She'd pour you a tumbler-not a highball-of pure vodka with a piece of ice.2 Mart Crowley vividly recalled a dinner party he attended at Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner's place, with Bette in an increasing state of hostile inebriation.

They had to be careful who they asked to dinner with Bette Davis. They'd ask me-she knew me, she'd worked with me, she liked to dance with me! But Natalie knew what a handful she was, and she didn't have a lot of patience with it. [One night] it was just Bette, R.J., Natalie, and me. Davis was very much in her cups and flirting like mad with R.J., and Natalie was rolling her eyes and about to say "I've got to go to bed" and get out of there. And Bette, who was well on her way and in a cantankerous mood, said something about the only roles she was being offered at the time were actresses. She said, "I played a movie star once-a washed-up movie star-in a picture called The Star." And then she said to Natalie in the most condescending, sarcastic way: "Of course you're too young to re-mem-ber." And Natalie very cooly said, "Bette. I played your daughter in that movie." Bette was so stunned and shocked. She didn't have the Nol Coward savoir faire to plunge right on with an "Of course you did, my dear." She didn't know what to say. In fact, I don't even think she knew if it was true or not.3 "BETTE DAVIS WAS very funny," Roddy McDowall once observed, "but she didn't have a sense of humor."4 McDowall knew that she was fully capable of coming out with hilarious statements, but according to him she didn't even know they were a scream, let alone why. Chuck Pollack, too, insisted that Davis generally didn't realize that what she said was funny. "She wasn't really witty," he said. "She would give incorrect responses to questions, which turned out to be what people thought was amusing. Like those shows she did. The audience would ask questions, and she would misunderstand them. She'd get it totally off, and the answer would be disconnected. As far as the audience was concerned, they were fans, so she could have stood there and read the telephone book and they would have loved it." Pollack was present at one of the London shows. "They loved her-everything she said. She never let herself be stumped. She'd just give preposterous answers to questions she hadn't understood, and the audience loved it. But after the show, she said to me, 'Chuck, I have no idea why they laughed.' "5 James McCourt described it more cerebrally: "She had intuitive thrusts." She was a natural performer, and she'd feed off her audience's reaction. "She'd say something, and some time along the line she'd get that it was funny."6 Vik Greenfield put it another way: "She'd get a bee in her bonnet. But it would be the wrong bee."7 Greenfield related the story of accompanying Davis to a political rally at Madison Square Garden that had been organized by s.h.i.+rley MacLaine. Carol Channing came toddling over and greeted her, saying, "Bette! I'm Carol Channing!" To which Bette replied, "Of course you are," and marched right past her.

Martha Wallis told a signal anecdote.

I remember one evening when Hal was honored by the industry at some event that took place at the old Palace Theatre near Hollywood and Vine. Bette was to introduce and present him with the award. She stood at the podium while Hal sat directly behind her onstage. She talked on and on, praising him and telling wonderful stories about their working together. She finished to great applause, then went back to Hal, took him firmly by the hand, and led him off the stage.

He stopped, pulled away from her gently, and said, "Uh, Bette? I think I'm supposed to say something, too."

The audience roared. Grinning from ear to ear, Bette went back to the podium and said, "Now you see what he had to put up with at Warner Bros.!"8 Bette's response certainly proved that she could think on her feet, let alone joke her way out of a bad situation. But the laughter she generated was rooted in inadvertence.

Not always, though. "I suppose the dead birds with mayonnaise were kind of unattractive," Bette once acknowledged, referring to the famous scenes in Baby Jane. "And the rat," she added. But they played well into her own sense of humor. "Not long after Baby Jane opened," Davis continued, "I gave a c.o.c.ktail party in New York and had the head chef at the Plaza Hotel make a pate for me in the shape of a rat. Everyone got a big laugh out of it-this awful rat made of pate served on a huge silver platter, looking a lot like the one in the film. Oh, I tell you, it was heaven when I lifted the top off."9 Davis's wit was as extraordinary as her presence of mind, but as often as not the laughs she pulled resulted from gaffes, illogical twists that made sense anyway. At other times she knew d.a.m.n well what she was saying. Anthony Harvey, her director on The Disappearance of Aimee, fondly recalled her delight in telling friends during the 1980s, "Lit-tle Ron-nie Rea-gan. Terrrrr-ible actor. Now he's Pres-ident. G.o.d!"10 "The laaaaaast movie I made with Joan was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" she used to say. "I played Baby Jane. She played whatever."

What difference does consciousness of comedy make in the end? Bette Davis was highly quotable and, in her own way, brilliantly funny. One evening during the filming of The Whales of August, the cast and crew were sitting around the dinner table when Davis started ragging on Crawford. After a while, Lindsay Anderson decided he'd heard enough, and he slammed his hand on the table and told Davis bluntly that Crawford had been a friend of his and he wasn't going to listen to any more. To which Davis, not missing a beat, calmly replied, "Just because a person's dead doesn't mean they changed."

ON MARCH 1, 1977, the American Film Inst.i.tute awarded Bette Davis with its Life Achievement Award at a black-tie ceremony at the Beverly-Hilton Hotel. She was the first female recipient of the award; the previous winners were John Ford, James Cagney, Orson Welles, and William Wyler. Over a thousand people watched clips of Davis's films and heard tributes from such notables as Jane Fonda, who emceed the event; Henry Fonda; Olivia de Havilland; George Stevens Jr.; and Cicely Tyson. After accepting the award, Davis credited four men who particularly helped her career: George Arliss, Jack Warner, Hal Wallis, and William Wyler. She concluded by honoring Ruthie: "How her eyes would have sparkled if she could have been here tonight."11 Davis's escort that night was Ray Stricklyn, who had played her son in The Catered Affair and who was then working as a publicist in the Hollywood office of John Springer and a.s.sociates. "She adored Ray," Stricklyn's lover, David Galligan, said. "She was an absolute harridan with me, but she was a p.u.s.s.ycat with him." Galligan, who also worked at Springer, recalled that there were innumerable requests for interviews at the time of the AFI award. Stricklyn told him to decline them all on Davis's behalf, with one exception: Galligan was to call Davis about doing an interview for a charity for mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded children.

"She answered: 'Hel-lo?' " Galligan remembered. "As soon as I started talking I knew I was losing steam. I could feel my voice shaking. 'Oh, hi, Miss Davis, this is John Springer a.s.sociates . . .' 'What do you want?' And I said, 'I was wondering-I have all these requests. . .' 'Why did you call me?' 'Well, there's one in particular that's from a r.e.t.a.r.ded children's . . .' 'Why would you think I'd be interested in that?! Don't ever call me again!' And she slammed down the phone."12 Stricklyn accompanied Davis not only to the AFI award but also, the following evening, to the opening of Geraldine Fitzgerald's nightclub act at Studio One, a gay club in West Hollywood. Chuck Pollack, Olivia de Havilland, Robert Osborne, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Henreid were also there to witness Bette being mobbed by a group of gay fans.13 As early as 1942, in an extraordinary article in the Ladies Home Journal, Bette openly wished that she had a "sissy" husband-one who would do the housework and shopping and cooking for her, all the while appreciating the finer things in life.14 By the 1970s, she was much more explicit. "Let me say, a more artistic, appreciative group of people for the arts does not exist," Bette Davis told the Advocate in 1977. She was referring, of course, to gay men. "And conceited as it may sound, I think a great deal of it has to do with their approval of my work-the seriousness of my work. They are more knowledgeable, more loving of the arts. They make the average male look stupid."15 When visiting Los Angeles in the dozen or fifteen years before she moved back to Hollywood in 1977, she usually stayed with Chuck Pollack. "She liked to sit in the kitchen-a big country kitchen. That was what she considered her style," Pollack remembered. "She loved to play housewife-dressing very plainly and wearing no makeup unless she was being interviewed. In the morning, she was plain old Ruth Elizabeth. By noon, she had become Bette Davis. By c.o.c.ktail hour, she was the imperial Bette Davis. One morning I said to her, 'You're all your characters rolled into one.' She couldn't stop laughing."

But despite the t.i.tle of her first book, Bette Davis found solitude difficult if not impossible to bear. "She couldn't be left alone-couldn't stand to be by herself," observed Pollack. "She had to have attention every second, like a child. She was very, very needy." She proposed marriage to Pollack, who she knew was gay. Was she serious? "She was," said Pollack-"at the moment." From time to time she would even present herself s.e.xually to Pollack, who never responded the way she wanted him to. "She never got clear about why a man would want a man. She didn't understand that it wasn't a choice." She did, however, tell Pollack about a female magazine writer Bette had known for a long time-a writer who had offered Davis the chance to experiment with a lesbian relations.h.i.+p. Bette declined.

Davis also proposed marriage to her equally gay personal a.s.sistant, Vik Greenfield. Once again, she was perfectly serious-at the moment. "But she'd have gotten cold feet" before going through with it, Green-field insisted.

Whitney Stine claimed that Davis proposed to him as well. Stine also declined. (Stine suffered a heart attack and died on October 11, 1989, five days after Davis.) Davis's need for gay men's companions.h.i.+p-with Davis being only semiconscious of the men's s.e.xual orientation-was long-standing. While living at Twin Bridges, Davis involved herself with any number of younger men far beneath her in intelligence and, certainly, wealth. The task of informing Bette that one or another was obviously gay fell to her oldest friend and current Westport neighbor Robin Brown. "Oh, no!" Bette would protest; "I'm going to be the one to change him."16 Dotson Rader recalled the evening they got to talking about Making Love.

I'd seen it on cable. I was crazy about Michael Ontkean, and I asked her if she'd met him. She said no. I said, "Oh, he's so gorgeous. There's a movie you've got to see-Making Love." I told her what it was about. "Oh, that movie! I know that movie!" She said she could only watch it up to a point- "when they started doing whatever it is that they do!" She said she appreciated the fact that she had a big gay following-she didn't understand it, but she appreciated it-and she realized that one of the reasons for the longevity of her career was that gay men found her sympathetic. She was aware that drag queens "did" her, and she thought it was all rather jolly. But she never understood what gay men saw in her.

She also didn't understand what they actually did in bed. She said, "I find it shocking. Do they actually do that?" From that point, there was a discussion-in a very specific, explicit way-about what two men do in bed. There was an undeniable prurience in her interest, but at the same time she a.s.sumed a posture of almost Puritanical shock and disgust. It wasn't "deer in the headlights" exactly, but . . . She couldn't stand what she was seeing, but she couldn't look away either. I don't know how much of a pose it was, but I do remember she was very emphatic about the fact that until Making Love she had no idea what gay men did. Which I find impossible to believe. I was surprised at the vividness of her questions. She was very keenly interested in the physical mechanics of male s.e.x.

. . . I think that's pretty much how she continued to see the world: there were men who were prissy, and there were men who were pansies, but she didn't connect the word "pansy" with a s.e.xual act.

On several occasions she tried to put the make on me. She had a big chaise, where she would sit. Someone else would have patted the cus.h.i.+on. She would slap it. "Oh, come and sit over here." I'd go over and sit down, and her hand would end up on my thigh-which was fine with me.17 "The very first celebrity I heard from when The Boys in the Band was a success was Bette," Mart Crowley declared. "I was out of money and staying on a friend's couch. G.o.d knows how Violla tracked me down, but the phone rang, and a voice said, 'Bette Davis! Oh, I'm so happy for you-all the reviews-divine! What are you doing right now? We've got to have a drink!' " Crowley went over to the Plaza, where Bette was staying. "She said, 'What have you read?' I said 'Myra Breckenridge.' 'What's that?' 'It's a novel by Gore Vidal, and by the way, there's a very good part in it for you-a woman agent. Her name is Let.i.tia, and she could be very funny. . . . ' 'Vi-ol-la! Vi! Gore Vidal! (What's it called?)' 'Myra Breck . . .' 'Myyyyy-ra Breck-en-ridge! Get a copy!'" And yet, Crowley said, with all this, the subject of h.o.m.os.e.xuality was never discussed between them.18 "THE END WAS a remarkable Bette Davis movie, with a really good part in it for her," said Robbie Lantz.

She got an invitation to the San Sebastian Film Festival. They were going to honor her. I have a photo of her that was taken there. It's heartbreaking-she was so frail. The second or third night of her stay-it was a triumph for her, that festival-she became ill. And Kathryn Sermak called the hotel doctor, who came and examined Bette and said to Kathryn, "Miss Davis is dangerously ill. She should go to the hospital."

Bette said, "I'm not going to any hospital in San Sebastian. You must be crazy."

So they hired a plane to take her to the American hospital in Paris. The doctors examined her. Kathryn was waiting, and they told her, "Miss Davis is going to die. She has only hours to live. What should we do?" Kathryn knew the only way to deal with Bette. So the doctors went in and said whatever they had to say. Bette thanked them. They left the room. And Bette said to Kathryn, "We have a lot to do. I have to sign all the checks. You have to cancel the dinner date on Friday night. You have to get Harold Schiff on the phone, and that will be difficult because he's away from New York. . . . "

When she finally got Harold on the phone, she said, "I won't be able to get out of this one."

And then she died. "Fasten your seatbelts," James Woods told the crowd at her memorial service. "It's going to be a b.u.mpy eternity."

Davis's last film was Wicked Stepmother, which she only half completed before walking out; the director, Larry Cohen, replaced Bette by having her witchy character turn herself into Barbara Carrera.

Her penultimate film provides a far more fitting send-off. In September 1986, seventy-eight-year-old Bette Davis and ninety-two-year-old Lillian Gish traveled to Cliff Island off the coast of Maine to film The Whales of August with Lindsay Anderson. The film is both slight and majestic-a slender story magnified by two superb actresses with thunderingly resonant histories and the weathered, iconic faces to prove it. Ann Sothern, Vincent Price, and Harry Carey Jr. rounded out the cast.

It was on board an airplane to Maine when Bette was about to start shooting The Whales of August that she last saw Gary Merrill. She came over to his seat to say h.e.l.lo, but he wouldn't look up from the book he was reading. He died of lung cancer on March 5, 1990, five months after Bette.

"Bette Davis could be extremely difficult, extremely funny, demanding, eccentric, thoroughly professional, irritating, and even charming when she wanted to be," one of the film's producers, Mike Kaplan, observed.

In the beginning, we spoke about going back to Maine, and she was just filled with glee and delight. Once we got there, though, things changed. It wasn't the Maine she remembered, and she got temperamental. And the closer we got to shooting, the more insecure and compet.i.tive she became.

She insisted on first billing. She was always concerned about her star position. We did get into a bit of a row because Lillian's contract had her in second position on the t.i.tle card but raised slightly above Bette. We went back and forth. She said she'd never shared a t.i.tle card with anyone in her life, and I had to point out that she had second position with James Cagney in The Bride Came C.O.D.

[There was a scuffle over her dressing room trailer:] We had Winnebagos for the four stars, and they were placed on a ball field down the road from the set house. Bette's was first, then Lillian's. Lillian didn't care. They were all parallel. Bette was there for about a week before she wanted hers turned in a perpendicular direction from the others. So we turned the Winnebago around so it was at a right angle to everyone else's. She used it for about two days and never went back into it. [Instead] she commandeered the spare room on the set-the one her character used all the time.19 "Half of Bette Davis is a real solid trouper, and half is the victim of some temperamental compulsion," Lindsay Anderson shrewdly observed. "She's difficult because she's Bette Davis, not because she's a star. She has an initial hostility to life and people that she has had all her life."20 During the first weeks, Kaplan admitted, Bette was p.r.i.c.kly and difficult toward Gish. "No one had ever been difficult with Lillian in her entire career," said Kaplan. But he refused to call it feud, in large measure because it was entirely one-sided. Davis was simply anxious: The Whales of August was her first important picture in quite some time; her role was slightly less important than Lillian's; and the familiar compulsion to compete reared its head.

John Springer's son Gary recalled that "at one point Miss Gish said, 'Why doesn't she like me?' It was hard to watch. She even yelled at my father. She said, 'I know you like Miss Gish better than me.' He said, 'That's not true at all, Bette.' And she said, 'Well you didn't say h.e.l.lo to me.' And he said, 'Well, that's because you were yelling at somebody else and I didn't want to get near you.' He felt bad at the end, because she was closing off everybody."21 Still, as Mike Kaplan noted, Davis immersed herself fully in the production. She loved the gossip and the grind, and she was never more alive than when the cameras were rolling and she was doing the work she loved. Davis was the only one of the major actors who went to dailies; according to Kaplan, Gish never watched dailies in her life, and at this point in her long life she needed to rest after shooting. Davis, however, attended the screenings every night. Once she saw how good they were in general-and how good Gish was in particular-she realized the impossibility of stealing anything from her costar, and her behavior improved. Somewhat.

"She always needed a foil," said Kaplan, echoing countless other producers, writers, directors, and fellow actors through the course of Davis's career. "Lindsay became the foil she needed for about a month during shooting. She would invariably question things he wanted to do, they'd discuss it, he'd suggest something, and she'd say no, and then she'd do it in the end. There were serious tiffs and not-so-serious tiffs. I think she needed the drama to get through it." For instance, Davis argued with Anderson about whether or not her character, Libby, should move to the window at one point. Anderson didn't see why, since Libby was blind, but Davis insisted. "Lindsay," she stated emphatically. "Blind people are sensitive to heat. She's drawn to the heat."22 As Anderson later commented, "Lillian's first instinct is to try to give the director what he asks for. Her professional att.i.tude comes from those days with D. W. Griffith. Bette tries to dismiss the director."23 "Lillian just shakes her head," Anderson noted in his diary. " 'Poor Bette,' she says. 'How she must be suffering. What an unhappy life she's led.' "

"In fact," Ann Sothern said, " 'poor Bette,' who wasn't well, was a holy terror, crabby and irascible."24 Several of Davis's more repeatable comments during the production of The Whales of August have a.s.sumed a legendary air. "Lillian doesn't need to rest," Davis declared one day. "She was in si-lent pictures." Her meaning remains obscure.

Charles Busch recalled another of Davis's bon mots: "There's that famous quote when Gish did a close-up and Davis said, 'Why of course it's good-she invented it!' " But as Busch went on to note, "People use that as an example of her being b.i.t.c.hy, but I'm sure she meant it as a compliment. In a way, Lillian Gish did invent the close-up."25 She paid her respects to Ann Sothern, too, in her own strange way. "She would call and compliment me," Sothern told Aljean Harmetz of the New York Times. "She would say abruptly, 'Ann, I just saw the rushes-it's the nuts!' and hang up."26 It had been nearly forty years since she left the security of Warner Bros., not only the long-term contracts that guaranteed both work and income, but the comfort and security of vast soundstages in which exteriors could be constructed and filmed. As Lindsay Anderson's friend and biographer Gavin Lambert wrote, "She was not used to going out on location, as she reminded anyone who would listen, because 'locations always used to come to me.' Her most frequent response to any suggestion that Lindsay made was an emphatic 'Rubbis.h.!.+' Occasionally she agreed with a grudging nod, and once announced to the crew, 'That's twice I've given in to the director today. I must be slipping.' Finally she provoked Lindsay to say, 'You're not taking over this picture, Bette,' which provoked her to walk off the set and refuse to come back until he apologized."27 Anderson sent Lambert a postcard from Maine after six weeks of shooting: "Bette has gone full circle, from suspicion and hostility to paranoia to (proclaimed) friends.h.i.+p and admiration. I think she is essentially mad."28 "In the end," Kaplan concluded, "after all the 'This isn't the Maine I knew,' and 'The house isn't as big as I thought it was going to be'-all the little scrambles we had with her that weren't so little when we were going through them-she was the last actor to leave the island."

All this tension and drama was put to the service of a small movie that climaxes with the addition of a picture window to an old cottage. If the anxiety, if not downright agony, of filming The Whales of August yielded but one lasting image of Bette Davis, it is this: Libby lying in bed, skeletal, her face hollow, the late afternoon sun blasting in through the window as she caresses her own cheek. Davis's brutal boniness slices cleanly through the gesture's sentimentality, as she no doubt knew it would. She gets up and walks, limping, to a chest of drawers, removes and opens a box of keepsakes, clutches a pocket.w.a.tch, then a lock of dark hair, which she touches to her face. Her character's gesture is as delicate and intimate as the lock itself, but her command of the luminous silver screen-the sheer might of Bette Davis photographed in motion-is as purely, grandly overpowering as ever.

OBITUARY.

AWARRIOR TO THE END, BETTE DAVIS died on the night of Friday, October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly, a Paris suburb. She was eighty-one years old. The cause of her death was metastasized breast cancer.

Plaques, citations, and statuettes were not rarities for Miss Davis, who fought her way to a total of ten Academy Award nominations in the Best Actress category. They were for her leading roles in Dangerous; Jezebel; Dark Victory; The Letter; The Little Foxes; Now, Voyager; Mr. Skeffington; All About Eve; The Star; and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?-though she won for only Dangerous and Jezebel. In addition to the Oscar nod for All About Eve, Miss Davis was nominated as Best Actress by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the New York Film Critics Circle, which actually awarded her the prize, as did the Cannes Film Festival.

In later years, she earned three Emmy nominations for her work in television: Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter in 1980; White Mama in 1981; and Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last in 1983; she won the Emmy for Strangers.

Miss Davis was never the recipient of a Golden Globe, though she was nominated for both All About Eve and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The Hollywood Foreign Press a.s.sociation did, however, present Miss Davis with its Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1974-an irony, since Mr. DeMille was one of Hollywood's most notoriously reactionary figures and Miss Davis one of its most consistently liberal.

Her honors stretched from the 1930s through the 1980s. In 1937, the Venice Film Festival awarded her the Volpi Cup for best cinema actress of the year for her performances in Kid Galahad and Marked Woman. She snared both the Redbook Trophy and the Popularity Crown "Queen of the Movies" award in 1939. In 1941, she won the Golden Apple, the Women's Press Corps' coveted citation for "Most Cooperative Actress" in Hollywood. Partic.i.p.ating in Hollywood's publicity machinery was simply part of the battle for Miss Davis, who fought to maintain her career long after a less combative celebrity would have been content to rest on her laurels and call it quits.

Miss Davis was the recipient of the American Film Inst.i.tute's Life Achievement Award in 1977-the first woman so honored-and an honorary Cesar Award, France's most prestigious national film award, in 1986.

The year 1989 not only saw Miss Davis win the lifetime achievement award at the San Sebastian Film Festival only days before she died but also the American Cinema Award, an event organized by the impresario David Gest. The ceremony was held on January 6 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Miss Davis's unlikely fellow honorees were Clint Eastwood and Julio Iglesias. Veteran hoofers from the Hollywood Canteen, which Miss Davis cofounded in 1942, danced a salute to her; they included Buddy Ebsen, Eddie Bracken, Joan Leslie, June Haver, Donald O'Connor, George Murphy, and June Allyson. Also performing that evening were Robert Goulet, Donna Summer, Toni Tennille, and Kim Carnes, who sang her 1981 hit single, "Bette Davis Eyes," which celebrated the mysterious allure of the actress's most notable features.

On April 24, 1989, Miss Davis was the subject of yet another gala tribute, this one from the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Stylists at an elegant Manhattan hair salon were jittery with excitement that day when they learned that a 3:30 p.m. appointment had been secured by Miss Davis. At precisely 3:30, a hatbox appeared at the salon's door, containing Miss Davis's wig and a set of precise instructions. James Stewart, AnnMargret, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Joseph Mankiewicz were on hand at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall to toast her at the ceremony. Miss Davis later attended the after-party at the celebrated Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York's Central Park. According to one eyewitness, the moment Miss Davis stood up from the table and turned her back in preparation for departure, a shriek of queens descended upon the detritus she left behind and seized every lipstick-and-cigarette-ash-stained item they could lay their hands upon. The eyewitness, the actor and literary agent Edward Hibbert, s.n.a.t.c.hed the coffee cup.

Characteristically for a woman who forcefully spoke her mind even when she was out of it, Miss Davis's last will and testament, dated September 2, 1987, minced no words: "I give, devise and bequeath . . . Fifty (50%) of my residuary estate to my son, Michael Woodman Merrill [and] Fifty (50%) of my residuary estate to Kathryn Sermak. . . . I declare that, except as otherwise provided in this will, I have intentionally and with full knowledge omitted to provide herein for my daughter, Margot Mosher Merrill, my daughter, Barbara Davis Hyman, and/or my grandsons, Ashley Hyman and Justin Hyman." There were, in fact, no other provisions in the will pertaining to Miss Merrill, Mrs. Hyman, or Mrs. Hyman's sons.

Miss Davis bequeathed her jewelry to Miss Sermak, her clothes to her son's wife, the former Chou Chou Raum (though the will curiously misspells her name as "Shu Shu"). She left a painting, a pearl and sapphire watch, and a portrait of herself to her oldest friend, Robin Brown, from whom she had become more or less estranged in the years immediately preceding her death. Her silver flatware was divided between the two princ.i.p.al heirs: two place settings went to Miss Sermak, the rest to Mr. Merrill. Miss Davis left to her niece, Fay Forbes-the daughter of Miss Davis's troubled younger sister, Barbara-a set of six silver condiment holders that had been a gift from Miss Davis's mother, Ruth Favor Davis Palmer Budd. Most of the actress's furniture and other possessions, specifically including her cookbooks and handwritten recipes, were left to Miss Sermak.1 Miss Sermak sold the most valuable of those possessions: Miss Davis's two Oscars. The restaurant chain Planet Hollywood initially bought the one Miss Davis won for Dangerous, but the director Steven Spielberg later purchased it for $207,500 at a 2002 Sotheby's auction and promptly donated it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Mr. Spielberg went on to buy the Jezebel Oscar for $578,000. It, too, was returned to the Academy.2