Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 9

But the cruelty continued. The day after Sherry threw me down the stairs and onto the front lawn, I did not return home from work. I moved into my dressing room at Warners. Actually, it was a two-story apartment planned for me by Perc Westmore, my makeup man and trusted friend. It had a bedroom upstairs and a living room and a makeup room downstairs. The perfect setting, I decided, in which to kill myself. I was quite serious. I didn't want to live this way any longer. How could I deal with such a man? I was even afraid to divorce him. . . . I laid out my best nightgown. I planned every detail. The next morning, when I was due on the set at nine o'clock, there would be a dramatic moment when they broke into my dressing room and found me there. And on the set they would whisper . . ."Bette Davis is dead." For years I had sometimes taken a sleeping pill when I couldn't sleep. I got out all I had and lined them up on the bedside table. And then I started laughing. I laughed myself silly. I said, "This is ridiculous."29 Sherry promised to see a psychiatrist, and they reconciled. But, she went on, she "left him for good when one evening, for no reason at all, he threw a silver ice bucket at me. I was holding B.D. in my arms. She was six months old. I had told Sherry if he ever showed any violence toward B.D. I would leave him. I did, once and for all."30 Davis's chronology is off, however. If B.D. was indeed six months old when Bette left Sherry, the split would have occurred in November 1947. In fact, the couple remained unhappily married for quite some time thereafter.

Sherry, perhaps needless to say, painted a different picture of the marriage than Bette did. According to him, she thwarted his ambitions, ridiculed him, made him feel small, all in a perverse effort to provoke him into taming her. He told a story of an argument the couple had over the family's finances, with Bette needling him about his worthlessness-he was leeching off of her, he couldn't earn a dime on his own, he was basically her kept boy-to the point that he turned the dining table over on top of her. "She was under the table," Sherry said, "with dishes, lettuce, crystal on top of her. I walked out of the room, and I don't know how she got out from under that mess." They worked it out s.e.xually later that night. "She loved it, you see," Sherry explained. "She had to dominate her men, and when they didn't let her, she liked it."31 BETTE VISITED NEW YORK City in October 1948. She wanted to stay at the St. Regis, but she became upset when the hotel wasn't able to provide her with four adjoining bedrooms until three days after her arrival. She had changed reservations four times by October 15, and as a frustrated Warners' employee put it in a telegram to the studio, "frankly St. Regis does not care whether she stops there or not-simply trying to accommodate her as favor to Warner Bros." (As it turned out, she spent only October 18 and 19 at the St. Regis and moved to the Hamps.h.i.+re House through the twenty-eighth.)32 Late that year, Lew Wa.s.serman was trying to get Warner Bros. to agree to yet another new contract for her-a seven-year deal with one picture per year-even though the old contract had another year to go.33 "Bette began showing up in my office surrounded by the MCA [Music Corporation of America] group," Jack Warner writes, and every time we talked about a new script she would say sweetly: "Jack, can I have a copy for Lew?" "I'd be happy to, honey," I would say, "but I did not engage Lew Wa.s.serman to read scripts. I want you to read it." But Lew would get his copy, and he would come back claiming to have read it and reporting that we flunked our Wa.s.serman test. What he really meant was that his fifth cousin Amanda had read it, and on their recommendation he would decide it wasn't good enough for Bette Davis. Before long the ten-percenters had Bette so confused that it affected her story vision, and she was laying bigger eggs than an ostrich. [If Davis was indeed laying eggs during the mid-to late 1940s, she was continuing to lay them in a familiar nest in Burbank with the a.s.sistance of Warner Bros. screenwriters, Warner Bros. producers, Warner Bros. directors, and Jack L. Warner himself.] I simply couldn't take it. Or them. I finally cracked down, and barred the MCA blackbirds from the lot-a move no one had ever dared to make in Hollywood. I kept them outside peeking through fence knotholes for quite a while, but eventually they sneaked in with the connivance of other studio executives, or by conning my brother Harry.

When they pushed me too far, I told Bette I was through. We settled her contract, and I was relieved to see her go elsewhere with her cortege. Thereafter many of the Davis pictures were flops, and the sun went down on her s.h.i.+ning sky.34 Bette's exit from Warner Bros. was much more complicated than either Warner or Davis ever publicly acknowledged. During the first week of January 1949, Lew Wa.s.serman suggested to Jack Warner that Bette make a film called Storm Center, from a script by Richard Brooks. Warner thought it wasn't a bad idea-the heroine witnesses a KKK murder in the South and helps the DA solve the case-and proposed Raoul Walsh as director. Wa.s.serman abruptly proceeded to ridicule the notion of Walsh directing the picture and offered instead to tear up Davis's contract.

Warner was willing to entertain the idea of setting Bette free-for a price. He claimed his company had advanced Davis a total of $224,000 during various times she hadn't worked over the years, and he offered to sell Davis her contract for that amount. Warner told Wa.s.serman that he'd rather make Storm Center with Davis and Walsh than get rid of Bette altogether, but Wa.s.serman responded by telling Warner that Davis actually didn't want to make Storm Center after all. What she really wanted, the agent said, was to be released from her contract. (The film in question was made under the t.i.tle Storm Warning in 1951; Davis did make a film called Storm Center in 1956, but it was based on a different property.) On January 6, Wa.s.serman and Warner agreed that if Davis paid Warner $124,000 and waived her claim to the $100,000 the studio was still holding against A Stolen Life, she could leave Warners for good.35 So at the end of January 1949, Bette Davis and Warner Bros. signed a brand-new contract for four pictures at the precisely specified rate of $10,285.72 per week for "a period of not less than fourteen consecutive weeks with respect to each motion picture produced hereunder." The contract also gave Davis the right to make one outside picture per year.36 There was a touch of absurdity in the middle of it. "The Octopus and Miss Smith is, as I'm sure you know, out of the question," Bette wrote in a note to Jack Warner in mid-January while contract discussions were taking place. "I could not possibly reconcile myself to this type of comedy. . . . For you and I to end it all over The Octopus and Miss Smith seems entirely unnecessary."37 (The comedy was made as The Lady Takes a Sailor with Jane Wyman and Dennis Morgan.) And meanwhile Albert Warner was obsessing over the repayment of certain expenses from Davis's October trip to New York. "If it's the last act as treasurer of W.B. I will see that she pays," he scrawled on one of the many memos written on the subject. At the end of February, the studio sent Davis a bill for $735.27.38 "BEYOND THE FOREST?" Bette Davis said in response to an interviewer's question in early 1949. "No, I haven't made it. Probably I'm not going to make it. It is a great book, a wonderful story, but they can't make a word of it-not a word. If they make it at all they'll have to change it so completely that it won't even resemble the book."39 Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Stuart Engstrand's racy novel in the summer of 1948, and the censor Joseph Breen immediately rejected the very idea of making a movie out of it "because of its treatment of adultery and l.u.s.t."40 Jack Warner gave the go-ahead to develop it anyway and a.s.signed Lenore Coffee the task of writing the script. Not surprisingly, Breen summarily rejected Coffee's first draft in late February 1949. "This is a story of a woman who coldly and maliciously conspires to wreck her own marriage," Breen explained. "Pursuing these means, she employs l.u.s.t in a savage and debased way. More than that, she will not stop short of murder . . . or of attempted abortion." And furthermore, Breen concluded, the ending didn't provide a strong enough voice for traditional morality.41 Beyond the Forest is the inflamed tale of Rosa Moline, an ambitious woman stuck in a small town in Wisconsin, her unsatisfying marriage to the bland village doctor, her l.u.s.t-ridden affair with another man, and her insatiable drive to escape it all for the big city, Chicago. It's Madame Bovary played as pulp fiction. "That was a terrible movie," Davis flatly, wrongly, declared many years later. "It didn't have to be. Primarily it was terrible because they insisted on putting me in it. I was too old for the part, and I was temperamentally wrong. I mean, I don't think you can believe for a moment that if I was so determined to get to Chicago I wouldn't just have upped and gone years ago."42 (She's got a point there, though the same question might also be asked about why the stifled Leslie Crosbie doesn't simply leave Herbert Marshall and his boring rubber plantation in The Letter.) Bette thought that Virginia Mayo would have been a better choice as Rosa Moline, and she was appalled at Warners' choice of Joseph Cotten to play the husband, Louis-not because she didn't like Cotten, but because she did. "Who would leave that darling, lovely man?" she once commented. "The character in the book was a Eugene Pallette type-a horrible, rich, fat man in a little town," she added.43 In Bette's theory, Pallette would be easy to ditch; Cotten would not.

Joseph Cotten thought as little of Beyond the Forest as Bette did. "As for me," he wrote in his beautifully named memoir Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, "I will admit to having stumbled into several trashbins here and there, but never into quite such an important trashbin."

Ironically, a scene in Beyond the Forest became one of Bette Davis's most iconic. Edward Albee made it so.

MARTHA: What a dump. Hey, what's that from? "What a dump!"

GEORGE: How would I know what . . .

MARTHA: Aw, come on! What's it from? You know. . .

GEORGE: . . . Martha . . .

MARTHA: WHAT'S IT FROM, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE?

GEORGE (wearily): What's what from? [ . . .]

MARTHA: Dumbbell! It's from some G.o.dd.a.m.n Bette Davis picture . . . some G.o.dd.a.m.n Warner Bros. epic [ . . .] Bette Davis gets peritonitis in the end . . . she's got this big black fright wig she wears all through the picture, and she gets peritonitis, and she's married to Joseph Cotten or something. [ . . .] Bette Davis comes home from a hard day at the grocery store . . .

GEORGE: She works in a grocery store?

MARTHA: She's a housewife; she buys things. . . . And she comes home with the groceries, and she walks into the modest living room of the modest cottage modest Joseph Cotton has set her up in . . .

GEORGE: Are they married?

MARTHA (impatiently): Yes. They're married. To each other. Cluck! And she comes in, and she looks around, and she puts her groceries down, and she says, "What a dump!"

George and Martha never recall the name of the picture in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George suggests Chicago, but as Martha insultingly observes, "Chicago was a 'thirties musical starring little Miss Alice Faye. Don't you know anything?"44 But Martha, too, gets it wrong. Bette isn't coming home from a hard day at the grocery store at all but rather emerging from her upstairs bedroom. She strolls down the stairway of the finest house in town-it's nothing but the best for Rosa Moline-and she's filing her nails with an air of distraction, and she walks into the expansive living room she's decorated to the nines using every nickel of modest Joseph Cotten's meager income, and she says, offhandedly and without biting any of her words, "What a dump."

If Martha had remembered Beyond the Forest more distinctly, she might also have imitated one of Bette's later lines. "I know you're not interested in my work, but I just saved a woman's life," Rosa's doctor husband remarks. To which Rosa, lying on a wicker porch couch and twisting the ends of her black fright wig, responds in crisp and singsong sarcasm, "Saved it for what?"

Lenore Coffee made several key changes to the script before shooting began. First she turned Dr. Moline and his rustic friend Moose into stronger voices for morality, a s.h.i.+ft that all but demanded the casting of someone like the saintly-looking Cotten over Eugene Pallette, a croaking tub of lard. Coffee also combined several of the men with whom Rosa has affairs into one: Neil Latimer, an industrialist from Chicago. Warners cast David Brian as Latimer. "And then the lover," Bette later raged, "that big boring blond actor-what's he called?-was so dull you could understand it even less."45 True, David Brian is no Errol Flynn, but he's beefy enough to suggest that he satisfies Rosa s.e.xually in ways that modest Joseph Cotten cannot. In any case, the whole point of Rosa Moline's character is that her decisions are, in every sense of the word, bad. As Warner Bros. put it in its twin taglines for the film, "She's a midnight girl in a nine o'clock town!" And: "n.o.body's as good as Bette when she's bad!"46 Davis was vacationing in Sarasota Springs, Florida, in mid-March when Henry Blanke airmailed her a draft of Coffee's script; the production's proposed start date was set for May 2. Bette showed up at the studio that day, but not for filming. Instead, she told the director King Vidor along with Blanke and Steve Trilling that she liked neither the script nor her casting. When informed of the discussion's tenor as well as its content, Jack Warner took it that she was refusing to do the picture and informed Lew Wa.s.serman that the decision was not hers to make. So on Wa.s.serman's advice, Bette sent a telegram to Warner saying that she wasn't technically refusing the role but simply spelling out her problems with it. Shooting began on Tuesday, May 24.

Given Davis's contempt for the picture, it comes as a surprise to learn that King Vidor found her rather easy to work with: "Bette Davis was full of ups and downs as an actress. She had a temperament that changed quickly from hot to cold all through the picture. She was pleasant to work with, though. She was cooperative and helpful. There was one point where she became very high-strung and she was almost impossible to work with for two days, but once she got over this, it wasn't so bad." Vidor was amazed at "what she could do to enhance her acting performance by using her eyes. She evidently did a lot of thinking about her character."47 "I had rehea.r.s.ed a scene where she was dancing," Vidor recalled, "and I think she was also embracing David Brian. He was rather large and I had the camera in such a way that you could just see about half of Bette Davis's face. You could just see her eyes as she turned. During the take they turned differently, and I said, 'Why don't you do it again so that we can see more of your face.' She got upset and made an absolutely tremendous speech, one of the best performances I've seen. At the end of her speech, I said, 'That's fine with me if you don't want to do it again. I'd just as soon not see your face.' That worked quite well. There was a quiet hush over the stage the rest of that day, but I got the scene shot the way I wanted to eventually. It was almost like child psychology."48 Vidor provides her with a most dramatic entrance. After a rather lengthy voice-over sets the scene in the small sawmill town of Loyalton, Wisconsin, and after a series of static shots of quiet, nearly empty streets, Vidor cuts to a courtroom with equally static shots of an immobile crowd of quiet, bland midwesterners all staring solemnly toward the judge. Suddenly Bette stands up into the image, and shouts, "Why should I kill him!? Will someone tell me that? Why should I want to? It was an accident!" She punctuates the line by impulsively scratching the back of her neck, the effect of which is to give an itchy toss to the hideous black wig.

She looks monstrous, a fact not lost on the Hollywood Reporter, which commented in its review that "photographically, Bette Davis has never looked worse; she affects the most grotesque makeup and the strands of stringy black hair hardly belong to a small town belle out to land a man." But the Reporter missed a key point of Beyond the Forest: Rosa Moline is scarcely a "belle." She's a tramp. Davis does look horrible, but it's not just the wig, which exposes far too much of her high forehead. Her lipstick is lurid, her mascara equally extreme. And Davis's face itself has broadened and shows its age. (Bette had turned forty-one in April.) What Perc Westmore disguised in Winter Meeting and June Bride he enhanced in Beyond the Forest: not only was Davis no longer oddly attractive; she'd suddenly become downright ugly while losing none of her carnality.

What Davis achieved under Vidor's direction in Beyond the Forest is much more intriguing and courageous than either the Reporter or Davis herself appreciated. As with the wretched Mildred in Of Human Bondage, Davis had the guts to compel audiences to see a contemptible, evil woman as being not only contemptible but repulsive and venal, too. Davis successfully makes us hate her.

And as a result, we adore her. In an early scene, Rosa picks off an innocent porcupine with a single rifle shot. Her husband's geezer friend Moose disapproves, but Rosa couldn't care less. "I don't like porkies," she cracks. "They ir-ritate me."

"I don't want people to like me," she informs her callow husband a little later. "Nothing pleases me more than when people don't like me." Then, with a smirk-"Means I don't belong." Davis's voice rises to an abnormally high pitch on the word nothing, and she drags it out, too- "nuuuhhh-thing." By way of this mannerist, showy, theatrical device, we catch the extent of Rosa's perversity. Rosa Moline is the hearty appetizer served before the main course of Baby Jane Hudson.

But perversely, as with Baby Jane, Rosa Moline presents Bette Davis at her most authentic. Beyond the Forest is exactly the kind of film that must be seen to be believed, and the belief it inspires is in the essential truth of camp. Like Vidor's previous film, The Fountainhead, Beyond the Forest achieves a peculiar but no less worthy goal: melodrama that periodically teeters over the edge into dark comedy. Davis appreciated the value of such a weird, on-the-precipice tone, however little she was aware of the fact. Her fidgety gestures may be tragically clownish, but they're no less tragic for it. Her vocal delivery artificially calls attention to itself as a way of conveying a more ephemeral honesty than invisible naturalism could possibly express. When Davis held a script in contempt, as she clearly held Beyond the Forest's, she worked all the harder to make it work, the consequence being that by the time Rosa attempts to get an abortion, throws herself off a cliff, and comes down with the peritonitis, Davis has chewed every bit of scenery she could get her mouth around and spat it all out. The performance is electrifying.

Rosa Moline dies in feverish dementia while staggering and then crawling in the dirt toward a departing train. One pays her the greatest honor by laughing. In awe.

DAVIS MADE HER exit from Warner Bros. after a row over a medicine bottle, or, more precisely, over the direction Vidor gave her on how to hurl one. As Rosa lies in bed at the end, her temperature rising to the point of altering her skin tone to a rich, sweaty-ripe brown-it now matches that of Jenny, the Molines' surly, gum-chewing Indian maid-Louis tries to give her a shot of what one presumes is an antibiotic to combat what Albee's Martha calls peritonitis. In her delirium, she smacks the medicine away. Bette did it her way. Vidor told her to do it his way. She demanded that he be fired. Jack Warner refused. She asked to be released from her contract, won the release, returned to the set, and did it Vidor's way.

Vidor was unaware of Davis's demand that Warner fire him until later, when Harry Warner told him the story. "They didn't want to tell me because they thought I'd take it out on her or that it would affect our work together. . . . As it turned out, she came up to me at dinner on that last night of work and told me how much she had enjoyed working with me, and that if I ever had any stories she could do, to please let her know. . . . She was preparing herself for freelancing, and if I came up with a good story, she would like to play in it."49 According to Davis, her last professional act at Warner Bros.-after eighteen years and fifty-two pictures-was to loop the line "I can't stand it here anymore."50 She got her wish, though by her own account she drove off the lot for the last time in tears. The trouble was, she couldn't stand it anywhere.

PART THREE.

ONGOING.

CONFLICTS.

CHAPTER.

17.

FAST FORWARD.

IN MAY 1983, BETTE, THEN SEVENTY-FIVE, stepped out of the shower, dried herself off, and felt a lump on her breast.1 She checked into New York Hospital under an a.s.sumed name and underwent a mastectomy on June 9. Nine days later she suffered a debilitating stroke. Her doctors told her she'd never work again, but her lawyer, Harold Schiff, disagreed. "You just don't know Bette Davis," he said.2 The doctors were wrong. Work was to Bette Davis as human blood is to vampires: hot, fresh, nouris.h.i.+ng, and vital for survival. She made twenty-four feature films after she left Warner Bros. in August 1949; over a dozen made-for-televsion movies; several TV pilots; and a number of guest appearances on existing series. She starred in two stage musicals: one in the 1950s, the other in the 1970s. During the latter decade she also performed a one-woman show all over the United States as well as in London, New Zealand, and Australia; and she appeared on countless talk shows until the end of her life.

The mastectomy and stroke slowed her down, but only temporarily. Davis recovered and shot three and a half more pictures before she died in 1989: Agatha Christie's Murder with Mirrors and As Summers Die, both made for television; Lindsay Anderson's The Whales of August; and Larry Cohen's ill-fated Wicked Stepmother, out of which she walked after a few weeks of filming, saying that she had no choice but to do so "for the good of my future career."

For any female Hollywood star over the age of fifty to speak without irony of her "future career" might strike one as clinically crazy. After all, Norma Desmond, the demented star of Sunset Boulevard, was barely into her fifties, and to put it in the kindest possible light, her comeback ("I hate that word!") is quixotic at best. But the octogenarian Bette Davis didn't even see Wicked Stepmother as the end of the line. "I'm not a vain person," she explained. Still, she'd seen some of the rushes and commented, "At 80 years old I don't want to look the way I looked. It seriously could be the end of anybody ever hiring me again."3 She was a h.e.l.lion-on the sets of her films, at the homes of her friends, at New York Hospital at the time of the mastectomy and stroke. One can only begin to imagine the acid rage she hurled at nurses and interns, errants and innocents, in the days following her surgery and stroke. "After a stroke you have a very short fuse with people" was the excuse she offered to a visitor to her hospital suite. "Bette," the friend responded, "you've always had a short fuse with people. Don't blame it on your stroke."4 Still, she managed to display proper etiquette to a neighbor down the hall. Robert Lantz, the agent who represented Davis in the 1970s and '80s, tells the story: "At the end of the corridor on the 16th floor were two special suites, what we now call a junior suite at a hotel-a bedroom and a sitting area with sofas. Bette was in one. In the opposite one was Mrs. Richard Nixon. Now Bette was, like Myrna Loy, a militant Democrat. I came to visit her, and because there were so many flowers, she said to me, 'Do you think I should send some flowers to Mrs. Nixon?' I said, 'If you think you should, you should.' She told me the next day that she had sent the flowers with a note that said, 'We're neighbors, and I hope these please you.' Mrs. Nixon sent back a very nice letter but said she was allergic to flowers. But how nice it was of Bette to have offered. I mean, very few people would have had the manners, especially with somebody she hated as much as Bette hated the Nixons."5 The breast cancer metastasized; that's what got her in the end. She died on October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, where she was taken after falling ill at the San Sebastian Film Festival in late September. Her att.i.tude all along was a mix of denial and concern for what she refused to stop calling her "future career." Before leaving for San Sebastian, she told her friend Robert Osborne, "I hope this will prove to the world I'm not dying. The only thing that's making me sick are all those awful reports and rumors about how ill I'm supposed to be. Where do they start? And how do you get them to stop?"6 It was the stroke, not the cancer, that defined Bette Davis's public persona in the last five years of her life. Or, more precisely, it wasn't the stroke itself that defined Bette in the end but rather her vitally stubborn persistence in the face of it-her refusal to withdraw tastefully behind a veil of privacy despite the obvious physical damage the stroke had wrought. Davis was not one to go gently into retirement. In fact, she didn't retire at all. Just as she compelled the world to look at her before half of her mouth went slack, Davis craved attention afterward with the same degree of dynamic daring. Bette Davis wasn't a quitter. "Old age is not for sissies," she famously declared.

The small woman became minuscule. By the end of 1983 she weighed only ninety-two pounds. But in spite-literally, in angry spite-of her wizened body, wrinkled face, and droop-mouthed speech, Bette Davis kept acting, appearing in public, showing up on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show and at awards ceremonies, surviving, too ornery to die, too driven to sit still, too proud to recede into muted seclusion.

By that point she had a loyal helpmate, secretary, surrogate daughter, go-fer, adviser, factotum, and slave by the name of Kathryn Sermak, whom Davis hired in June 1979 to accompany her to London for the filming of The Watcher in the Woods, a trying-to-be-spooky Disney tale in which she plays a reclusive landlady.7 Luckily, Sermak, then twenty-two, had studied psychology at UCLA before taking the job.

"I asked if you could boil an egg," Bette once recalled. "And I believe I asked you your astrological sign. You told me that you were a Libra. Almost to my own surprise, I said, 'You have the job.' "8 Davis believed increasingly in the authority of astrology as she aged. She was, of course, an Aries. And what an Aries she was. "The fire element of Aries brings a.s.sertive I energy," a popular astrology guide states. "This is a flaming drive and the desire to do something! The Aries will is full of tension and pa.s.sion-the I brings a need for independence." So far, so accurate; this description of the Aries temperament could have been written specifically as a zodiacal biography of Bette Davis. "Aries coincides with spring time," the sketch continues, "when seeds germinate in an outpouring of energy and growth. This sign has an instinctive ident.i.ty, early extroversion, spontaneity, and a very direct approach." But all is not well in the garden. Aries carries with it a fundamental danger: " 'Fire' can rage out of control! Aries' cardinal-sign a.s.sertiveness can become too willful. Then we have wild spring weather-a storming nature and a pa.s.sion for power. Spontaneity can become impulsive, as only a sign ruled by energizing Mars can be!"9 Aside from weathering her boss's fiery storms, Kathryn Sermak did much more than boil Bette's eggs. She answered Bette's mail, conveyed messages, nursed. "She was wonderful with Bette," says Robbie Lantz. "I don't think she called her anything but 'Miss Davis.' She was just remarkable." During Davis's nine-week hospitalization, Sermak-whom Davis called Kath-spent every night with her until even Bette had to admit that her crankiness was "beginning to take its toll," so with Bette's encouragement she flew to Paris to visit her boyfriend. During the week she was away, Kath sent Davis a gardenia every day, each accompanied by a card with a little poetic inscription and a smiley face: "A gardenia a day while I'm away, love & kisses." "Gardenia number two, because I need understand and adore you." "Gardenia number three sends love to thee, I believe in you for I love you." "Gardenia number five, remember April five, je vous envoyer mille braisse." "Gardenia number seven, you are my heaven, miss you like mad, will be so glad to see you, your crazy stepdaughter."10 Davis's own children were decreasingly involved in her life, though at the time of the mastectomy and stroke, it was not out of malice. By 1983, B.D. had been married for nineteen years to a former film executive, Jeremy Hyman, who had recently gone into the trucking business; they and their two children had their own lives to live in eastern Pennsylvania, though it was Bette who paid many of their bills. In addition, Bette had adopted two children during the early years of her fourth marriage-to Gary Merrill, her costar in All About Eve. Michael Merrill, a st.u.r.dy and good-looking guy who graduated from the University of North Carolina and went on to law school at Boston University, married Charlene "Chou Chou" Raum in 1973, opened up a legal office in Boston, and had two children of his own. Another adopted child, dark-haired Margot Merrill, was discovered early on to be mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded, and after much soul searching and grief, Davis and Merrill sent her away to live at Lochland, a home for the developmentally disabled in Geneva, New York, where she has remained more or less consistently ever since.

And so it was Kathryn Sermak who a.s.sumed the role of the loving and selfless daughter with the aged, increasingly needy, and cantankerous Bette Davis for the last ten years of her life, especially after B.D. published a harsh tell-all book, My Mother's Keeper, in 1985. She wrote it, B.D. explained, as an act of Christian charity. That and a $100,000 advance.11 Sermak, who calls Bette "Miss Davis" to this day, described the way she and Bette celebrated holidays together in her portion of This 'n That. On Was.h.i.+ngton's Birthday, Kath wrote, "she serves cherry pie to go with dinner-and once she dressed like Martha Was.h.i.+ngton. On St. Patrick's Day we dressed like leprechauns." One Easter Kath bought Bette a rabbit. "She adored the rabbit, whom we named Mr. Brier, but the amount of traveling we did forced us to give him away."12 Sermak was, and remains, fiercely loyal to Davis. She was reluctant to be interviewed for Dark Victory and ultimately declined. She polarized Davis's friends, some of whom admired the support and care she provided Bette, while others came to distrust her immensely. From 1965 to 1977, Davis lived in Connecticut and needed a place to stay when visiting Los Angeles; she found her home away from home with Chuck Pollack, a designer and antiques dealer who lived on North Orlando Drive. "I knew Bette for about fifteen years," Pollack recalled. "We were very close. Then she brought in that terrible girl, and the girl started to cut off all of Bette's real friends. She started to cut Bette down to where Bette had only her. And Bette was desperate not to be left alone, so the girl had full control. The girl got exactly what she was after. She ended up being the recipient of half of Bette's estate."

"She was a road-show Eve Harrington," Davis's earlier a.s.sistant, Vik Greenfield, piped in. Greenfield had introduced Davis to Pollack and was living in Pollack's guest cottage at the time of the joint interview. "Yes," Pollack continued. "It was like Bette found her own Eve. The girl wormed her way into her confidence, and little by little, she got rid of almost all of Bette's close friends. I was a friend, and Vik had worked for her and was always friendly toward her. Vik was out of the picture, I was out of the picture, and several more were out of the picture. So there was n.o.body left but her and Bette and the adopted son. The daughter cut herself out with that book."13 The desperate race Davis ran throughout her life against self-doubt and a morbid fear of idleness is infectious to the point that her biographer, heaving and winded by his subject's furious pace, has found it impossible to endure the marathon without pulling a Rosie Ruiz: breaking ranks, ducking into the literary equivalent of the Boston T, speeding ahead, and crossing the finish line before the race is truly over. So we return to our place in the pursuit: Bette has just driven out of the Warners' lot in 1949 and still has forty years to go. But strict chronology doesn't necessarily reflect the life being chronicled. Cut loose from the indentured (albeit lucrative) servitude to Jack Warner and the studio system in general, Davis was if anything too free-free to pursue a purely domestic life for which she wasn't naturally suited; free to make movies far worse and more demeaning than any of the Warners programmers she decried; free to drink away her days when she wasn't working and become obnoxious and mean; free to be truly impossible. The story of Bette Davis's life is still a race, but it is at times a nonlinear one-a race, one might say, against time.

BEFORE SHE MADE All About Eve in 1950, and the name Eve Harrington entered the language as a deadeye term for a faux innocent with a game plan, Bette filmed a melodrama called The Story of a Divorce; the t.i.tle was changed just before its release in 1951 to Payment on Demand. Joyce Ramsey (Bette), the ambitious wife of a successful lawyer, is shocked when, after a long day at the office, her husband, David (Barry Sullivan), arrives home to his usual c.o.c.ktail only to inform her that the marriage is over. Joyce spends the rest of the film concluding that despite the tepid affair David has launched out of boredom, it's really her fault after all. Davis told the critic Bruce Williamson that Payment on Demand was "among the best b.l.o.o.d.y films ever done about this driving kind of American woman-oh, that was written for me!"14 The director, Curtis Bernhardt, recalled that Bruce Manning, the screenwriter, and he "sat down to discuss writing a script for Bette Davis. . . . Bette then lived in Laguna Beach. I went down there and told her the story. I remember her response: 'I would jump through flaming hoops to make this film!' At that time Bette and I were on good terms. A Stolen Life had been a walloping success and she trusted me."15 Payment on Demand is a hard-edged, downbeat, honest film-Bette's grasping wife isn't a showy harridan, Barry Sullivan's fed-up husband isn't self-righteous about it-and Bernhardt directs it with a blend of sensitivity and technical invention. Joyce reviews her life in a series of flashbacks, and as Bernhardt described it, "When we reverted to the past, the foreground became dark, the background lit up, and the walls disappeared, because the walls were actually transparent. But you couldn't discern that when they were illuminated for foreground action. They were like screens. As soon as you took the light off them and moved into the background the walls vanished."16 All About Eve was shot, edited, and released to great acclaim-and Bette had divorced Sherry and married Gary Merrill-before Payment on Demand hit the screens in mid-February 1951. "Originally we had an uncompromising ending where the two just separate-they're finished," Bernhardt noted. "I think it stopped at the daughter's wedding-maybe while they're sitting at opposite ends of the table. But Radio City Music Hall suggested that we change it before they played it. So we had a big meeting with Bruce Manning, Mr. Skirball [one of the film's producers], myself, and Howard Hughes, who was then the owner of RKO. I could see what they meant because American audiences go for upbeat films. And this was 100 percent downbeat. So we tried to soften it by leaving it open, by letting the audience speculate on whether the man and wife ever get together again."17 Davis's recollections were harsher: "Howard Hughes was the producer, and he messed around with the ending. We had the perfect ending, where she's got her husband back and starts all over again telling him what he should do about his career and so forth, and he gets up and walks out. Marvelous! But Hughes wouldn't let us do that. He also insisted we call it Payment on Demand, a very cheap t.i.tle, and made us end with a touching reunion at the front door. I begged him not to redo the ending, but I remember Hughes saying, 'Doesn't every woman still want a roll in the hay?' And I said, 'No-this is not her big drive after 35 years.' "18 The film was set to open at Radio City on February 15, 1951, but Hughes made the decision to order the new ending at practically the last minute. Davis and Sullivan were called in on February 13 to shoot the revised final scene on the front porch-a scene that is not "touching" as much as it's demoralizing, for no matter what the role demands, it's always sad to watch Bette Davis eat crow. The footage was immediately processed and edited into the last reel, which was flown to New York on one of Hughes's TWA jets and handed over to a jittery projectionist, who was already unspooling the beginning of the movie by the time the ending arrived.19 * * *

THE CAST AND crew of Payment on Demand threw Bette a party on April 5, 1950, her forty-second birthday. After cake and champagne were served, Bette was given an ostrich egg inscribed "Thanks for being a good egg." The party degenerated quickly, though, when Sherry showed up and got into a shoving match with the two security guards who'd tried to bar his entrance, Bette having requested that they keep her husband out. Then Barry Sullivan made the mistake of trying to reason with the belligerent ex-fighter and all-too-spurned husband. "Where's your sense of humor? The cast and crew are giving your wife a birthday party," Sullivan told him. "Stay out of it," Sherry answered. "I don't want to hit you because you have to be photographed tomorrow." According to Bette, "Sullivan said, 'Don't let that bother you.' Before he could say anything else, Sherry knocked him down."

The incident made the papers. Sherry sought sympathy: "I'm tired of being pushed around," he announced. "She was the breadwinner and I was the housewife. . . . I have dinner ready when she gets home. I take off her shoes and bring her slippers and a drink. I press her dresses when her maid isn't here. But . . . I'm a man who needs a lot of affection. When she comes home from work, she always says she's too tired."20 Sherry used to send her flowers every week, too, until Bette discovered that she was paying for them.21 As for the lack of s.e.x, Sherry was right. Davis admitted to Vik Greenfield that she and Sherry didn't sleep together very often. "The birth of B.D. was almost immaculate conception" was how she rather uncharitably put it.22 Bette later claimed that Sherry, meanwhile, was getting his daily dose of affection from B.D.'s nanny, twenty-one-year-old Marion Richards.23 On June 7, 1950, the Superior Court of the State of California approved an agreement giving Davis custody of B.D., with Sherry given limited visitation rights.24 On July 3, Judge Eugenio Calzada Flores of the First District Court in Jurez, Mexico, granted Bette a divorce, the couple having already reached a property settlement in which Davis agreed to pay Sherry alimony for three years.25 The Laguna Post ran a cla.s.sified ad on November 16, 1950: "Handyman-Odd Jobs Done Efficiently by William Grant Sherry-Phone 4-3626."26 An anonymous reader sent the clipping to Hedda Hopper with a note: "From an old admirer who does not want slimy mouth Lousyella to beat you to the gun."

"DEAR BOY, HAVE you gone mad? This woman will destroy you. She will grind you down to a fine powder and blow you away! You are a writer, dear boy. She will come to the stage with a thick pad of long yellow paper. And pencils! She will write. And then she, not you, will direct-mark my words. And you may quote me, dear boy." That's Edmund Goulding warning Joseph Mankiewicz of what he was getting himself into by replacing the injured Claudette Colbert with Bette Davis in his upcoming production of All About Eve.

Mankiewicz told Davis about Goulding's advice near the end of the location shooting in San Francisco in April 1950. Bette was amused. As Mankiewicz put it, she emitted "that inimitable Davis snort-then she laughed. Her snort and her laugh should both be protected by copyright."27 To paraphrase the great theater critic Addison DeWitt: for those of you who do not read, attend the theater, watch black-and-white films, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to rehea.r.s.e the story of All About Eve. Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), nee Gertrude Slojinsky, worms her way into the good graces of her idol, the theatrical legend Margo Channing (Davis). She's perfect, Eve is. Obvious, too, to everyone but the main characters of the film, each of whom initially falls, each in his or her own way, for Eve's overdone performance of sincerity. Only Margo's dresser, Birdie (Thelma Ritter), sees through Eve's act to the hungry but icy self-promotion at its core. Eve's tale is told in flashback form. We meet the central players, theater people, at an august banquet at which Eve receives the coveted Sarah Sid-dons Award. The rest of the film explains how Eve has manipulated her way there by conning Margo and Margo's friends: her director and younger lover, Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill); her longtime playwright, Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe); her best friend, Karen, Mrs. Lloyd Richards (Celeste Holm); and the ascerbic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). By the end, everyone but DeWitt has been burned by Eve.

All About Eve is one of the best, richest movies ever made, and Davis gives one of her finest performances in it. As a consequence, critics have chronicled the film with an unusual degree of detail. It is a masterpiece that deserves to be treated like a fine single-malt scotch, aged in wood and served neat, but, instead, tales of its making have been dumped in quant.i.ties more suited to Thunderbird. Still-and speaking as a Davis drunk-one can never get enough.

There are, for instance, the eminently repeatable Tallulah Bankhead anecdotes, Bankhead being self-evidently one of Davis's models for Margo Channing. On her radio show, Tallu announced, "Don't think I don't know who's been spreading gossip about me and my temperament out there in Hollywood, where that film was made-All About Eve. And after all the nice things I've said about that hag. When I get a hold of her I'll tear every hair out of her mustache."28 It was all a joke, Bankhead later explained: "The gossips and the gadabouts made a great to-do about Bette Davis's characterization of a truculent actress in All About Eve. These busybodies said Miss Davis had patterned her performance after me, had deliberately copied my haircut, my gestures, my bark, and my bite. For comedy reasons this charge was fanned into a feud on my radio show. I was supposed to be seething with rage over the alleged larceny. In superficial aspects Miss Davis may have suggested a boiling Bankhead, but her over-all performance was her own." All very gracious, until the zinger: "I had seen Miss Davis play Regina Giddens on the screen, thus knew I had nothing to worry about."29 "Bette and I are very good friends," Bankhead once said. "There's nothing I wouldn't say to her face-both of them."30 As it happened, Bankhead was enraged to find that the literary Margo Channing wasn't actually based on her. Mary Orr, who penned the short story "The Wisdom of Eve," from which Mankiewicz built his film, told of performing a Theatre Guild on the Air radio adaptation of the piece with Bankhead as Margo in November 1952. During a rehearsal, Tallulah asked Orr whether she had in fact been the inspiration for Margo. No, the writer said; she'd based Margo on the actress Elisabeth Bergner, who had indeed suffered her own compliant-factotum-turned-ruthless-compet.i.tor. As Orr later said, "This made her so mad she never spoke to me again, except on the air."31 For the record, Mankiewicz claimed improbably that he based his Margo on the eighteenth-century actress Peg Woffington.32 Darryl Zanuck's biographer, George Custen, covered the film's casting saga: Marlene Dietrich was Zanuck's first choice for Margo Channing, though his handwritten notes on a script draft also mention Claudette Colbert and Barbara Stanwyck. Mankiewicz was adamantly against Dietrich, so Zanuck signed Colbert in February 1950. Colbert then ruptured a disc on the set of the film Three Came Home-her character was supposed to be fighting off a prison guard rapist, and Claudette fought a little too hard-and had to bow out, at which point they approached the English musical-comedy star Gertrude Lawrence, who responded by demanding that Margo's drunk scene be removed or rewritten. "Rather than listen to the endless versions of Liebestrume the self-pitying (but always theatrical) Margo keeps asking her hired pianist to play, Lawrence insisted on singing a torch song," Custen reported. "Mankiewicz refused."33 Ingrid Bergman was briefly considered, but the role went to Davis, Colbert's broken back being one of the best things that ever happened to world cinema.

Zanuck wanted his contract actress Jeanne Crain to play Eve, but Crain had the nerve to get pregnant, leaving Mankiewicz free to cast his own choice, Anne Baxter. Zanuck also reportedly advocated putting John Garfield in the Bill Sampson role and Jose Ferrer in Addison De-Witt's; the parts were taken by Gary Merrill and George Sanders.

Davis stepped into the role at next to the last minute-the Curran Theatre in San Francisco had been rented for two weeks of location shooting and had a show already booked thereafter-but she immediately hooked into the character, planning bits of business and line deliveries in advance. For one of the Curran Theatre scenes, Edith Head designed for Bette what David Chierichetti calls a "gray suit with a high white collar and a big bow of the same material. This replaced a simpler blouse, which Edith had made and tested, because Davis knew ahead of time that she wanted to fiddle with the collar during an angry scene. She also instructed Edith to make the suit loose enough so Gary Merrill could push her over onto a bed on the stage of the theater. At a meeting in Edith's office, Davis suddenly ran across the room and threw herself onto a divan. When Edith protested that there was no such action in the script, Davis said, 'Yes, but that's what I'm going to do.' "34 According to Sam Staggs in All About "All About Eve," the junkie's guide to the movie, Edith Head did base Margo's wardrobe on Tallulah Bankhead and her style. Staggs quotes Head as saying, "I steeped myself in Tallulah, and everything looked as if it was made for her, yet the clothes complimented Bette. She is such a good actress that she makes clothes belong to her." He also has Head colorfully remarking of Bette, "She has a walk like a whiplash."35 Gary Merrill told a comical story about Marilyn Monroe, who plays Addison DeWitt's eye-popping, dumb-as-dirt escort to the grand party at Margo's colossal apartment and also shows up briefly at the theater for an audition. Bette hosted a dinner party in San Francisco the night before she and Marilyn filmed their brief encounter in the theater lobby. "The party went on quite late," Merrill said, "but Marilyn excused herself early because she had to work the next morning. We all knew the scene Marilyn had to work on the next morning was really Bette's scene and that Marilyn had only a few lines. . . . Bette had more, but she was an experienced actress and accomplished the scene with little bother. It had to be done in ten takes, however-Marilyn kept forgetting her lines."36 Marilyn's lines are, in toto: "Like I just swam the English Channel. Now what?" and "Tell me this, do they have auditions for television?"

There was some b.i.t.c.hiness during the production of All About Eve, but compared to the grinding agitation, sabotage, reaction formation, and development of hysterical physical symptoms that characterized Bette at her worst, All About Eve was actually made without much fuss. Despite Fox-generated publicity to the contrary, Davis got on well with Anne Baxter during the shoot. "The studio tried to play that up all during the filming," Baxter later declared, "but I liked Bette very much. She'd come on the set and go 'Ssssssss' at me, but it was just a joke between us."37 Bette had no reason to fly off the handle at anyone for any reason. She knew the role was great, the dialogue superb, the director expert and resolute. "You know as well as I that there is nothing more important to an actress than a well-written part-and a director who knows what he wants and knows how to ask for it," she told Mankiewicz at the time. "This [Eve's script] is heaven. But as often as not the script has been a compromise of some sort. And the director can't make up his mind whether we're to stand, sit, run, enter, or exit. He hasn't the foggiest notion of what the scene is all about or whether, in fact, it's a scene at all."38 MARGO CHANNING IS Bette Davis at her smoky best. Mankiewicz introduces Margo sitting at a table at the Siddons Awards. She reaches for a cigarette, taps it twice on the table, lights it, and inhales deeply in the first few seconds of her first shot. She then reaches off-screen for a bottle of booze, pours a couple of healthy glugs in a gla.s.s only partially visible on the lower right corner of the screen, and dismissively pushes away with the back of her hand her unseen tablemate's attempt to water it down. Then she smirks.

Tallulah aside, Margo is Bette Davis. It's as efficient an introduction to her character as her opening shots in Jezebel, only this time the director is introducing Davis herself as well as the character she is playing: a boozy, tobacco-stained broad who's not so much past her prime as proudly attenuating it. The only thing missing is the foul mouth.

When Karen Richards escorts Eve into Margo's dressing room, Margo extends her hand dramatically to Eve, the cold cream smeared all over her face unable to dim her theatrical grandeur. "How do you do, my dear," she regally announces, prompting Thelma Ritter, as Birdie, to mutter "oh, brother," the first of her many sober commentaries. "Oh, brother!" Birdie repeats a moment or two later after Margo introduces her preposterously as her "dear friend and companion." An old vaudevillian, Birdie has seen Margo play the role many times before. "All of a sudden she's playin' Hamlet's mother," Birdie observes.

The party Margo throws in honor of Bill's birthday is not only one of All About Eve's highlights but as seminal a scene in movie history as Rhett Butler's parting shot to Scarlett O'Hara. Margo is already breathing fire early in the scene when she asks the producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff) what would happen if he dropped dead, a line Bette delivers, casually dragonlike, while exhaling cigarette smoke. Lloyd Richards observes that there's something "Macbethish" in the air. "What is he talking about?" Margo asks, Bette giving the simple line a poisonous edge. "We know you," the well-bred Karen remarks. "We've seen you like this before. Is it over or is it just beginning?" Margo responds by gulping down her fourth martini with the same hand that holds a half-smoked cigarette, while in the other an olive lies impaled on a toothpick. She plops the olive into the emptied gla.s.s, turns to leave-leading with a broad sweep of the shoulder-and the camera pans with her as she heads for the stairs. She climbs a few and, with her hands on the bannister, turns, smirks again, pauses for dramatic effect, and issues her cla.s.sic advis.e.m.e.nt: "Fasten your seatbelts-it's going to be a b.u.mpy night."

After a brief, rich scene with Marilyn Monroe and her walker, George Sanders, Birdie enters with a look of concern and a hefty cup of coffee. She offers it to a morose Margo, who is seated on the piano bench, her eyes cast down into the abyss of yet another martini gla.s.s as the strains of Liszt's Liebestrume lend the party a funereal touch. Birdie's coffee becomes the receptacle into which Margo drops another toothpicked olive with a flamboyantly drunken gesture. Later, when Margo and Lloyd emerge from the kitchen, Bette inflects Margo's drunkenness with a more hostile tone. Margo confronts Eve and bites her with what appears to everyone else to be an outrageously rude remark, but to the audience at this point in Eve's increasingly tedious humble act, it's more than justified: "Please stop acting as if I was the Queen Mother." This prompts Bill to provide Margo with a setup: "Outside of a beehive, Margo, your behavior would hardly be considered either queenly or motherly." "You're in a beehive, pal, don't you know?" Margo retorts, Bette slurring her words just slightly. "We're all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night." She faces Eve and snaps, "Aren't we, honey?"

Addison DeWitt's eyes are s.h.i.+ning. As a gay man (albeit of the Hollywood-enforced closeted type), he's riveted by Margo and everything she stands for. "You're maudlin and full of self-pity!" he cries with golden admiration. "You're magnificent!"

Davis always said she understood Margo Channing, but she cited the wrong reasons. "Though we were totally unalike," she wrote in The Lonely Life in a failed attempt to deflect the obvious parallels, "there were also areas we shared." She brings up the scene with Karen Richards in the front seat of the Richardses' out-of-gas car in which "Margo confesses that the whole business of fame and fortune isn't worth a thing without a man to come home to. . . . And here I was again-no man to go home to. The unholy mess of my own life-another divorce, my permanent need for love, my aloneness. Hunched down in the front of that car in that luxurious mink, I had hard work to remember I was playing a part. My parallel bankruptcy kept blocking me, and keeping the tears back was not an easy job."39 But she got it wrong, her continual a.s.sertions of the emptiness of single womanhood serving as a cover for other less culturally acceptable deficiencies. For one thing, she was scarcely alone at the time she filmed that scene, immersed as she was in a torrid affair with her costar. It's the other half of the scene that registers as clinically autobiographical on Davis's part: "So many people," Margo begins. "Know me," she adds, with Davis concluding the sentence peculiarly after a full stop. "I wish I did. I wish someone would tell me about me."

"You're Margo-just Margo," Karen, Mrs. Lloyd Richards, graciously offers.

"What is that? Besides something spelled out in lightbulbs, I mean. And something called a 'temperament.' That consists mostly of swooping about on a broomstick and screaming at the top of my voice. Infants behave the way I do, you know. They carry on and misbehave. They'd get drunk if they knew how. When they can't have what they want. When they feel unwanted. Or insecure. Or unloved."

Flashes of unwantedness and insecurity and a craving for love plagued Bette Davis her entire life and propelled her into the dueling self-medications of liquor and acting. She believed that she could fulfill herself with marriages, but they never worked. Again, it's curious that the pa.s.sage Davis cites as mirroring her own emotional state was filmed at precisely the hot beginning of her relations.h.i.+p with Merrill. She was divorcing, yes, but she was far from being alone and unloved at the time. More self-revealing of Davis is Margo's "temperament," the witchlike cruelty, the acting out, the shouting at family and friends, the drinking. One wishes for her own sake that she'd have been able to calm down, but then she wouldn't have been Bette.

If there is one thing wrong with All About Eve, it's that Margo's decision to marry Bill at the end of the film depressingly represents the triumph of marital convention over what we've loved about the character all along: her aggressive independence, her boozy wit, her p.r.i.c.kliness, her hands-off-me-I'll-do-it-myself spikiness. There's logic behind the nuptials; the career Margo promises to curtail to marry Bill isn't like law or medicine, jobs in which middle-aged pract.i.tioners are at the height of their authority and prowess. It's acting, where the roles for women begin to dwindle just as the humiliation of losing them grows. The sequence in which Margo eyes a bowl of chocolates and finally yields to one with a ravenous chomp remains the most effective demonstration ever filmed of the price actresses pay in hunger alone. In this light, Margo's choice to marry Bill is more reasonable-self-protective, even. And convincing. It's little wonder that Bette Davis saw it as her own personal solution as well as Mankiewicz's artistic one. And yet, given Davis's own th.o.r.n.y nature, it's even less surprising to discover that her much coveted domesticity led to an artistic decline. As bittersweet as it is, the closure offered by Margo's marriage with Bill at least has the virtue of being somewhat satisfying.

AFTER MAKING AN initial screen test with Anne Baxter for All About Eve, Gary Merrill showed up again at the Fox lot for a makeup test. That's when he met his future wife: "There, being turned this way and that on a stool, as though she had just been picked up from a counter at a jewelry store, was the Queen, Bette Davis. I was appalled. The makeup people should have been pampering her, remarking on her abilities and skills, but instead they were twirling her around, rather callously examining her facial lines. I guessed they were trying to see if our age difference would be too noticeable."40 By the time they'd spent a day shooting All About Eve on location in San Francisco, the two actors were in love.

As Celeste Holm later recalled, "That first night we all went for drinks at the Fairmont, where they had a bar that went around and around. Everybody was showing off. Bette had taken one look at Gary and Gary had taken one look at Bette, and something had happened."41 "And from then on she didn't care whether the rest of us lived or died," Holm continued. "Why, I walked onto the set the first or second day and said, 'Good morning.' And do you know her reply? She said, 'Oh, s.h.i.+t-good manners.' I never spoke to her again-ever. Bette Davis was so rude, so constantly rude. I think it had to do with s.e.x."42 "It was not a very pretty relations.h.i.+p," Holm said on another occasion. "They laughed at other people. Bette and Gary formed a kind of cabal, like two kids who had learned to spell a dirty word."43 "I started falling in love with him when I observed how he could relax in bed all day long for two solid weeks," Bette later said.44 She was aroused by Merrill's laziness but enraged by it, too. He was erotic but pa.s.sive. He worked up a sweat when he had to and slacked off the rest of the time. His headstrong nature, which matched her own, went hand in hand with a f.u.c.k-it-all att.i.tude toward his career. This she could never understand. His contradictions provoked her. For his part, Merrill found Davis at age forty-two to be an intensely erotic woman. "From simple compa.s.sion, my feelings s.h.i.+fted to an almost uncontrollable l.u.s.t," Merrill declared. "I walked around with an erection for three days." The writer Kenneth Geist once asked Merrill about his attraction to Davis, and Merrill replied, "Don't you understand? I thought if I got a hard-on I had to marry the woman!"45 The wedding took place in Jurez in July 1950, after All About Eve was in the can, after which the Merrills headed for a honeymoon in Maine.

Gary had a much greater desire to forge a family than did any of Bette's other husbands. He made their marriage contingent upon having more children. As Bette later wrote, Sherry's three-year alimony payments were almost up when Merrill offered to adopt B.D. "He tried to get Sherry's permission. Sherry said for $50,000 he would give his approval. When we refused, he sued to get custody of her. A judge in Maine, a stern, old-fas.h.i.+oned Yankee judge, threw the case out of court when he learned that Sherry had received alimony from me. . . . I asked my lawyer what options we had left. He suggested I withhold Sherry's last month's alimony check. For that final check, Sherry gave Gary permission to adopt B. D. Sherry married the nursemaid, had children, and now has grandchildren."46 RUTHIE DAVIS PALMER, meanwhile, had sent a telegram to Bette in April: "Married Captain O. W. Budd in Immanuel Community Church, Las Vegas."47 But Mother's second and third marriages were even shorter than her daughter's; this one was over by the end of 1951.

Bette and Gary stayed for part of their honeymoon in a primitive cabin on Westport Island off the midcoast of Maine. The blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein, a friend of the oddball-loving Gary's, had arranged the deal with the landlord, whom Bernstein described as "an old Communist." Bernstein prepared the cabin by hiding the landlord's collected editions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin in a closet and stacking firewood in front of the door to bar entry, his theory being that "this was not exactly movie star reading, at least not in that day and age." After Bette and Gary arrived, Bernstein and Merrill went out for about two hours and returned to find that Bette had turned the ramshackle cabin into a model 1950 home, albeit with a leftist twist. The ap.r.o.ned Bette-full of domestic fury built upon a kindling of characteristic nervous energy-had built a fire, polished the furniture, dug up doilies from somewhere and draped them on the couch, prepared "martinis and a plate of canapes," and restocked the bookcase with all the Marxist cla.s.sics, which she had painstakingly unearthed by restacking the firewood away from the closet door. "I don't know whether she even read the books; it was more as if she had simply accepted the challenge of disinterring them," Bernstein commented.

"They stayed for two weeks," Bernstein recalled, "drinking a lot, fighting when they drank too much. . . . Once, awakened late at night, I heard loud, drunken voices from a boat on the water and asked Bette the next day if they were the ones. She was furious at me for thinking she would be that loud in public. She told me icily that she had better manners than that. Before they left, she got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the cabin floor. They thanked me for the cabin and said they had had a swell honeymoon."48 Davis and Merrill were a mismatch well suited to each other. Bernstein described the couple's bristlingly complementary nature: "Gary was pa.s.sive and easygoing and a thinker; Bette was a doer. He dampened his fires with drink; liquor only aroused her. He had no ambition, but he had an integrity she admired and respected." Bette Davis's marriage to Gary Merrill would be her longest lasting as well as the most disruptive to her career.

CHAPTER.

18.

WIFE AND MOTHER.

IN NOVEMBER 1950, THE TRADES IN BOTH Hollywood and London announced that Gloria Swanson, whose career had just been revitalized by Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, would take the leading role in the British murder mystery Another Man's Poison. But in December Gloria went into a Broadway revival of Twentieth Century opposite Jose Ferrer. She asked for a postponement of Another Man's Poison but was released from her contract instead. By February 1951, Bette not only had taken the role (for what one British paper called a "staggering salary" estimated at 40,000, which included a stake in the film's profits) but had also demanded that the male lead, originally to have been played by Leo Genn, be given to Gary Merrill.1 Neither Bette nor Gary was fond of the script they'd been sent. "Then [the producer] Daniel Angel appeared on our doorstep," Merrill wrote. "He walked with canes because he had been afflicted with polio; this made him seem Rooseveltian, which quite affected us."2 The presence of the playwright and actor Emlyn Williams (The Corn Is