Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 10

"The most difficult day of my life was the day I was dressing Margot, three years old, in a sailor suit and a sailor hat [and told her] about the lovely school she was going to," Bette said. Gary escorted Margot to Lochland by plane; Bette stayed home with B.D. and Michael. "The setting was lovely," Merrill later recalled-"a big old Victorian house on a sloping lawn near a lake. But G.o.d it was depressing."31

CHAPTER.

19.

ONSTAGE, ONSCREEN,.

AND ON TV.

IN THE SPRING OF 1952, BETTE, GARY, AND the children were still living near the heart of Hollywood in what Gary called "a terrific, old, wooden California-style house" at the corner of Camino Palmero and Franklin. The Los Angeles Times's Radie Harris wasn't nearly as impressed, dismissing the neighborhood as "unfas.h.i.+onable."1 In any case, it was there that a friend of Gary's, the theatrical designer Ralph Alsw.a.n.g, called from New York with an idea: his office mates, Jimmy Russo and Mike Ellis, wanted to produce a revue called Two's Company. They wanted someone like Beatrice Lillie or Gertrude Lawrence or Mary Martin-none of whom they could get. Alsw.a.n.g suggested Bette. "I had been approached to follow Judy Garland into the Palace, and I gave it some serious thought," Bette told Radie Harris in August after she signed on to Two's Company. "I knew I didn't want to do the usual 'in-person' appearance of reenacting scenes from my movies, nor did I want to do anything heavy and dramatic. I thought it would be fun to try a variety act-if I could get the right material. Famous last words!"

"Vernon Duke played me the score he had written to Ogden Nash's lyrics, and I adored it," Davis went on. "Jerome Robbins, than whom there is none better, is going to stage the show." Costumes would be done by Miles White. "We won't come in until we're sure it's in perfect shape. That's why we're trying it out first in Detroit-far from the Sardi's scuttleb.u.t.t."2 The Merrills left Los Angeles for New York in September and moved into a Beekman Place triplex. Bobby Davis came along. "Bless her heart," Gary Merrill wrote-"always reliable in emergencies. In times of stress, Bette had a tendency to take out her frustrations on whomever she ran into first. Frequently this was Bobby, who, by her presence, enabled the children to be once removed from Bette's short circuits."3 Bette and Gary invited everyone over to the triplex for c.o.c.ktails to get acquainted. The evening appeared to go very well and eventually everyone left, except for Ralph Alsw.a.n.g, whereupon Bette abruptly announced that she couldn't possibly work with Jerome Robbins. As Merrill later explained, Davis thought that Robbins would concentrate "on the ballet numbers and forget about her."4 Robbins stayed on, but tensions between him and Davis soon became obvious. "They were rehearsing a big production number based on Sadie Thompson from Somerset Maugham's Rain," recalled Sheldon Harnick, who wrote one of Two's Company's songs.

It was a big musical number with Bette and other dancers and singers onstage. Jerome Robbins was trying to teach her a very simple dance step. Robbins. . . could be so severe with his people that many of them hated him. I was not one of them; I liked him a lot. But he created a lot of hostility in the company. So anyway, he was trying to teach Bette how to do this simple step, and finally he said, "Let me demonstrate it for you."

I think it was because of nervousness, but she just started to scream at him, "You're trying to make me look like a horse's a.s.s, and I won't stand for it!" And she stomped off-stage and went to her dressing room. I looked at the company, and because so many of them disliked Robbins, I could see them trying to conceal their giggles. They were very pleased by the whole thing. Mike Ellis came out and said, "Jerry, you have to go apologize to her." Robbins said, "What did I do? I was just . . ." "You've got to go apologize to her." It was not an easy thing for Robbins to do. But he did. He went offstage and shortly after that she came back out and began to rehea.r.s.e again.

Two's Company set out on a preview tour in mid-October. The first stop was Detroit. "I only had one song in the show," Harnick continued, and they didn't pay for me to go out of town. I paid for myself so I could be there opening night. Davis had a song-her first song-called "Good Little Girls." It was the kind of song like "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," where each additional chorus had an additional couple of lines in it, so it got very long. I never saw her get through the song. She always fumbled at some point-she blew it. So I was worried about it. The way she was introduced, she was in a magician's cabinet, and the magician opened the door to the cabinet and showed the audience it was empty, and then he closed the door, waved his wand over it, said some magic words, he opened the door, and there was Bette. She stepped out of the cabinet, and everybody applauded. Then she went into "Good Little Girls."

As she got to about the third or fourth chorus, where it began to get longer, I detected a sense of hesitation. I thought, "Oh my G.o.d, she's going to blow it again. She doesn't know it well enough. And she's nervous-it's opening night." And suddenly, she fainted. She just fell to the floor. I thought, "Oh, what is this? Is this new staging?"

The audience thought that it was part of the show-until the lights went up and a stagehand came out in his s.h.i.+rtsleeves. Shortly after that, Mike Ellis came out and announced to the audience that Miss Davis had fainted. She claimed that the magician's cabinet was so airless that she was suffocating, and that's why she fainted. But I'm sure it was because she got to the part where she knew she didn't know the lyrics and just collapsed. It was very smart.

Then she did something even smarter. Mike told the audience she needed just a little bit of rest and then she would go on with the show, and everybody applauded. He then went into the wings and brought her out, and she looked at the audience and said, "Well, you can't say I didn't fall for you," which was charming.5 Two's Company still wasn't working for reasons that went beyond Davis's opening-night jitters, and Robbins asked her for permission to bring Joshua Logan and the writer Paul Osborn to Detroit to try to help. "The show started and continued, and I kept waiting for Bette Davis to appear," Logan recalled in his memoirs. "Finally, the first act was over and she had still not appeared onstage once, although in the program she had been listed at least six times. I couldn't decide whether I was more frustrated or infuriated." During the intermission, Robbins explained to Logan what the matter was: "She won't come on. She says her first-act scenes aren't good enough, so she just told the stage manager to cut them tonight."

"In the second act she appeared three times and was marvelous each time," Logan continueed. "She was all that I dreamed Bette Davis might be in a musical." Logan and Osborn went backstage to see Bette after the show, "but the only one we got to see was Gary Merrill." Davis refused to meet with them. So they headed back to New York.6 Ogden Nash took a more felicitous tone.

It happened in Detroit, And let who will be clever.

The pa.s.sion in my life came late, But Bette late than never.7 The troupe moved to Pittsburgh, where the Press was unimpressed: Two's Company "lacks two main essentials for a show of its type-comic punch and zingy tunes." New cast members came and went; sketches were shuffled around or dropped altogether. The troupe moved to Boston.

Enter, or reenter, John Murray Anderson, Bette's flaming drama teacher from 1926. Anderson, who had directed many circuses over the years and harbored a particular fondness for freaks, was an inspired choice to pull Two's Company together.8 "Murray was the king of revues," said Harnick. "He had done many of them, and he'd been around for decades-a man of great taste. You always pictured him with a gla.s.s of champagne in his hand-or a martini."9 Gary Merrill remembered that Anderson took one look at Two's Company in its present form and p.r.o.nounced it "more amateurish than a Princeton Triangle show."10 Tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, tweaking, cutting, reigniting ensued, all voiced with what Harnick called Anderson's "aspish wit." "What he did was miraculous," Bette declared.11 "I was never able to do the original opening song again," Bette later admitted. "I was just plain frightened of it. . . . Jerome Robbins planned a new opening for me finally. We rehea.r.s.ed it for a day or so and then put it in the show after the Boston opening. It was a success-'Just Turn Me Loose on Broadway' became my opening number."12 Collier's covered the production with a photo spread: "In haglike garb, Miss Davis crouches before the footlights, brings down first-act curtain of Two's Company singing rowdy hillbilly ballad." The picture shows Bette looking like an Ozarks witch with long tangles of gray hair poking out from beneath a raggedy black hat. Another photo presents her in the hag getup sitting in a chair next to an "x.x.x" jug of corn likker. Another caption: "In song and dance parody 'Roll Along Sadie,' Bette Davis cuts loose in hip-swinging, gum-chewing take-off on tropic siren Sadie Thompson." The photo shows Davis wearing a brilliant yellow hat and skirt set off by an orange and black feather boa and a long string of pearls.13 After a delay of almost two weeks, Two's Company opened at the Alvin Theater in New York on December 15. Congratulatory telegrams flew in: Irving Rapper; Joshua Logan; Kim Hunter; Janis Paige ("your number one fan"); Edith Head; "Ruthie, B.D. and Margot and Michael and Klaus and Tinker Belle and Aunt Bobby"; "Lenny Bernstein"; Joan Blondell; Yul Brynner; Richard Widmark; Don Siegel; Bob Taplinger; Jule Styne; Abe Burrows; Glenda Farrell; Kay Thompson; Kay Francis; "Lilli and Rex"; Gary ("All I can say is that I love you and I think you are wonderful in this show-your husband"); Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle; Michael Todd; and one most surprising one: "Believe me, I wish all that is fine for you tonight!-Miriam Hopkins."14 Walter Winch.e.l.l went out of his way to plug Two's Company. One of Bette's sc.r.a.pbook pages contains a total of nine Winch.e.l.l columns praising the show. "One sourpuss fussed, 'She can't sing or dance,'" Winch.e.l.l reported, but "that's worth the price of admission!" "There is no coincidence in the two Ts in the star's first name," another column roared. "They stand for Terrific Trouper! There are two Ts in Bette and two in Talent."15 The New York run played to sold-out houses and mild if not downright hostile reviews. "The ovation was, to say the least, heartwarming. The reviews were bloodcurdling," Davis wrote.16 Greta Garbo showed up to see the show one night, Marlene Dietrich another.

Appearing as the high-profile star of a Broadway revue was taxing enough, but Davis felt an unusual exhaustion and kept popping Dexedrine to get her through the performances. She sought medical help, but her physicians found no reason for her lack of energy until, on March 7, one of her wisdom teeth became inflamed. She was examined by Art Carney's dentist brother; Dr. Carney referred her to Dr. Stanley Behrman, who diagnosed her with osteomyelitis, an acute bone inflammation of the jaw. Two's Company closed the following night.

Walter Winch.e.l.l promptly reported that Bette Davis had cancer.

"Your recent statements about me are utterly without foundation," an enraged Bette wired Winch.e.l.l. "Have authorized my physician at NY hospital to answer any questions you may care to put to him, and to examine hospital's and pathologist's reports. I am sure you have no wish to hurt me. Accept my a.s.surances that I do not have cancer. Please retract on broadcast. Bette Davis."17 By way of a retraction, Winch.e.l.l printed the telegram in his column.

Two's Company has developed a reputation as one of Bette Davis's stinkers, a humiliation, a camp cla.s.sic of the mean-spirited-cackle variety. But according to Sheldon Harnick, that's unjustified. "I felt that the show was mixed. It wasn't brilliant, but it had a number of things in it that were great, including three absolutely wonderful dances that Jerome Robbins ch.o.r.eographed. They starred Maria Karnilova, who later became our Golde in Fiddler on the Roof, and Nora Kaye. The dances alone would have made this show worth seeing. I guess they hadn't found as much terrific material as they wanted, and consequently there were letdowns in the show-sketches or songs that didn't work. But it was not a bad show. I think if she had been able to do the show, just her name alone would have kept it running, and they would have had a very good run. There was a lot that was entertaining."18 BOREDOM AND A dual need for cash and attention brought Davis back to Hollywood from Maine in 1955.

"You must be out of your mind to work with Bette Davis," Curtis Bernhardt told the director Henry Koster after reading in the trades in early 1955 that Koster and the producer Charles Brackett had cast Davis in The Virgin Queen. Bernhardt ranted in a way he never did in public: "I worked with her-the most impossible thing! I was ready for the insane asylum-for the sanitarium!" Koster wanted to know what exactly Davis had done to enrage Bernhardt, and the director of A Stolen Life and Payment on Demand answered, "Well, she argues and she's impossible! Don't take the picture! Tell them you don't feel well or something, because if you like your health, you won't work on a picture with Bette Davis."19 Davis invited Koster to tea, and Koster informed her that if there was to be trouble, he'd rather not do the picture at all. "She laughed," Koster later reported, "and said, 'If you know your business, there won't be any arguments. But if I feel a director guides me into something where I think he's absolutely wrong, then I'll argue 'til my last drop of blood.' " Evidently Davis approved of Koster's vision, because Koster came away from the experience saying that he and Davis "were the best of friends all the way through."20 She reserved her enmity for The Virgin Queen's cinematographer, Charlie Clarke. According to Koster, Davis "couldn't stand" him. She was justifiably annoyed by Clarke's tendency to make what Koster called "funny remarks" during rehearsals. "She had had her head shaved" for the role, Koster said, and Clarke would say such things as 'Gee, you scare me with that billiard-ball head.' She got mad, because she was trying to get into the mood of the scene."21 One can hardly blame her, though at the same time she'd had her hairline shaved back precisely to be unnerving.

The Virgin Queen finds Elizabeth at forty-eight; Davis herself was on the brink of forty-seven in March 1955, when she shot her scenes. (She'd played the monarch at sixty in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Ess.e.x.) The film concerns Walter Raleigh's quest to convince Elizabeth to fund his exploration of the New World, Elizabeth's unrequited love for Raleigh (played by Richard Todd), and her jealousy of one of her ladies-in-waiting (Joan Collins), who eventually marries the explorer. "It had been three years since I'd been in front of a camera," Davis noted. "I was sure of nothing. Least of all myself. The first day was a nightmare for me. I heard Henry Koster, the director, say, 'Okay, let's try a take,' and I heard my voice: 'Mistress Throckmorton, is this your pet swine? I see you cast pearls before him.' "22 (Joan Collins is ticking off pieces of advice for Richard Todd using a strand of pearls to make her points. She breaks the strand and sends the pearls cascading to the floor just as Elizabeth enters.) Davis gives a thoughtful, muted performance, except for one self-defeating decision. The Virgin Queen gives the lie to an old saying: if it walks like a duck and acts like a duck, it isn't a duck at all but rather Elizabeth I as portrayed by Bette Davis, whose bandy-legged waddle was compared by one critic to that of Groucho Marx. Another wag had her "walking not on one artificial leg but on three," while two others compared her to "a saddle-sore jockey" and "an overhearty lacrosse captain in a red wig."23 It's a shame she felt the need to add such a pointless tic to an otherwise restrained rendition.

Little Michael Merrill paid his first visit to a movie set on one of the eleven days Bette worked on The Virgin Queen. Gary brought him over to the Fox lot to see what his parents did for a living. "I was doing a scene in which I, as Queen Elizabeth, had to rant and rave at Sir Walter Raleigh, played by Richard Todd," Davis wrote in Collier's just before the film's release. "After a few minutes of listening to my tirade, Mikey turned to Gary with a puzzled face and asked, 'Why is Mummy yelling at that man instead of you?' "24 The Virgin Queen received its world premiere in Portland, Maine, on July 22, 1955, a benefit for the Portland Children's Theater, in which the Merrills had taken an interest. The newspaper magnate Jean Gannett threw a clambake in the afternoon. Guests included Bette's Bad Sister costar Conrad Nagel; the comedian Tom Ewell, fresh from The Seven Year Itch; the former pinup girl Jinx Falkenberg; and the actress Faye Emerson.25 After the clams came c.o.c.ktails at Witch Way, the Merrills' rambling house on the sh.o.r.e, followed by a buffet dinner-cold cuts and potato salad-at the Eastland Hotel. (Why Bette and Gary dubbed their house Witch Way requires no explanation.) The film was to start at 9:00 p.m. at the Strand Theater, which held 1,900 people. A half an hour before showtime there were 10,000 people milling around in front of the Strand. Unfortunately, the planned gag of a fan blowing up Bette's skirt when she introduced Tom Ewell failed to come off.26 DAVIS FILMED FOUR more feature films in the 1950s: Richard Brooks's The Catered Affair, with Ernest Borgnine, and Daniel Taradash's Storm Center, both in 1956; and John Farrow's John Paul Jones and the British film The Scapegoat, with Alec Guinness, both in 1959. She found more employment on television dramas, with decidedly mixed results. She was still big; it was the picture that got small, and for the most part Davis plays her television roles that way. They're performances designed for the living room rather than the movie palace.

Davis's role in The 20th Century-Fox Hour's "Crack-Up," billed at the time (February 8, 1956) as marking her television drama debut, was actually just reused footage from Phone Call from a Stranger. But in the spring of 1957, Bette appeared in two new television dramas: General Electric Theatre's "With Malice Toward One" and Schlitz Playhouse's "For Better, for Worse." The malice of the former's t.i.tle is wholly understandable: Bette plays an unpublished novelist, an accountant by day, who attends a writer's conference only to have her beloved ma.n.u.script savaged by a pretentious and mean-spirited New York editor. So, following the lead of her fictional protagonist, she buys a gun and threatens to shoot him if he doesn't publish it. "The editor was really the murderer," Bette's character thoughtfully explains. "He took the work I loved and threw it in my face like a piece of trash." It's an inspirational tale.

"For Better, for Worse" features Davis as John Williams's compulsively lying new wife, a former actress who finds that the simplest way out of a touchy situation is to make up a tale. First it's half a bottle of scotch gone missing; later there's the little matter of a hit-and-run accident. Ray Stricklyn plays Davis's stepson; Stricklyn had played her son in The Catered Affair and went on later to become her friend and publicist.

After making "Footnote on a Doll" for Ford Theatre (in which she played Dolley Madison) and "Stranded" for Telephone Time, both in 1957, Davis returned to General Electric Theatre in 1958 for "The Cold Touch," which aired on April 13. Set in Hong Kong, filmed in Hollywood, it's a convoluted drama about a kidnapped husband. "Oh, you'll never get away with it-never!" Davis cries as she attempts to understand the plot. Highlights include Bette climbing out on an eighth-story ledge in high heels and a hilarious performance by Jonathan "Dr. Smith" Harris-in full Fu Manchu makeup-as "Hong Kong Sam," a shady figure from whom Davis's distraught character seeks a.s.sistance. Also in 1958 was Studio 57's "Starmaker," the tepid tale of a Broadway agent (Davis) and one of her clients, a nervous young actor whose father, a Barrymore-like ham, intimidates him into giving a terrible opening-night performance. Gary Merrill plays Davis's playwright husband. "Starmaker" was designed as a pilot for a series called Paula, named after Davis's character, but it wasn't picked up. It might have ended even earlier: "The night before Gary and I started the actual filming on Paula," Bette recalled, "our living room at the Chateau Marmont, where we were staying, caught on fire. Had not someone in a nearby room seen the smoke billowing out our window, we would have been asphyxiated by morning. I often wondered why I was saved."27 In early 1959, Davis filmed an episode of Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k Presents. Called "Out There-Darkness," the tale features Bette as an Upper East Side matron who falsely accuses her elevator operator of mugging her. It's not one of the series's best programs; the story is muddled, through no particular fault of the director, Paul Henreid. "It was the first time I directed Bette," Henreid remembered. "She was remarkably easy to work with, intelligent and very quick to grasp what you had in mind."28 Perhaps because of the weakness of the teleplay, Davis is even more p.r.o.ne than usual to delivering line readings eccentrically, laying peculiar stresses on odd words and breathing before she finishes her sentences. It was a strategic way of putting her personal stamp on a generic script, but it could veer toward the absurd. At one point, Eddie, the elevator operator, calls her "Ma'am." "Oh, Ed-die," Bette enunciates. "You make me feel so an-cient! Like some-thing out of Charles."

Breath.

"d.i.c.kens!"

The mind reels at the fact that Bette Davis appeared in three episodes of Wagon Train. In the legendary "Ella Lindstrom Story," she plays a widowed mother of seven with an eighth on the way, except it turns out to be a malignant tumor. Legend has it that the episode begins with a covered wagon's flap opening and a familiar face popping out, saying, "I yoost want to get my gir-ls to Californ-eye. A!" The reality is less camp but still fun. Ella is in fact the Boston-born widow of a Swede; Mr. Lindstrom died on the wagon train about a month before our story begins. As if the premise needed any more sentimentality, the last of the seven children, little Bo, is deaf and dumb on account of Ella's having come down with the measles while carrying him. After a doctor in Dodge City diagnoses the supposedly eighth pregnancy as cancer, Bette asks Ward Bond, "How much time did . . . how much time did he say I would have to live?" "Five or six weeks, maybe less," says Bond. "He was sure?" "He was sure," at which point Davis hurls herself to the dusty ground and wails, "My babies! My babies!"

The heroic but pragmatic Ella insists on going on with the wagon train and forces the kids to ingratiate themselves among various families who will then become their foster parents. She's terribly upset over the fate of little Bo, however: "As for school, or boarding him out, I'd ra-ther see him dead!" (The critic Brigid Brophy captured this tendency well when she described Davis's "unique method of expelling the words as though snubbing them.")29 Bond then acts as unlikely cupid for the oldest girl, Inga, and an attractive cowboy named James; they become engaged at the end and pledge to raise little Bo. There's no death scene for Bette. We simply see the wagon train heading off into the distance at the end.

Bette appeared on Wagon Train again in "The Elizabeth McQueeney Story," playing what the script delicately calls "an impresario." Yes-of a wh.o.r.ehouse. She introduces herself to Ward Bond as "Madame Elizabeth McQueeney" and says she's heading out West to start "a girl's finis.h.i.+ng school." Asked why girls would want to go out West, she flatly answers, "men." "I am an impresario," she announces; "any woman is an impresario if she chooses to entertain a man." "You'll be entertaining a lot of men," Bond remarks. "I am a lot of woman," Bette replies.

She did a third episode of Wagon Train in 1961, "The Bettina May Story," and an episode of The Virginian in 1962 in which she appears in the first shot as a bank teller, nose upturned in disgust at the robbers who are cleaning out the bank. Bette's expression also registers as personal contempt for the sad fact that she's stuck in yet another TV western.

DAVIS'S DRINKING, IN play since the Farney years, deepened during her marriage to Merrill. One August early in the relations.h.i.+p Bette threw a surprise birthday party for Gary-a barbecue. At the end of the meal she presented him with an iced cardboard-prop cake that said, instead of "Happy Birthday," "f.u.c.k You!" "I think that was the party where Jim Backus and I wound up in Margot's playpen," Merrill managed to recall.30 As Walter Bernstein so accurately described it, drinking lulled Gary but inflamed Bette. Her compulsion to cause scenes worsened with liquor. Davis always painted herself as the rare kind of star who simply had no use for the Hollywood social scene, but that was not the only problem; the producer William Frye claims that Bette caused so many public scenes upon her return to Hollywood in 1957 that she simply wasn't welcome in the social whirl. She kept to herself in part because she wasn't interested in glad-handing but also because regular glad-handers were afraid of her. One evening Frye escorted Bette, Gary, and the director Herschel Daugherty to a restaurant, the Ready Room. c.o.c.ktails were served. Daugherty, a little tipsy, made the mistake of pointing his finger at Bette to reinforce a point. The Ready Room wasn't a top-drawer establishment, unlike the staid, country-clubby Chasen's; it was the kind of place that might accommodate a liquor-fueled temper tantrum, which Davis swiftly supplied. "Don't you dare put your finger in my face!" she shrieked at Daugherty. "I never want to see you again!" Gary Merrill beat a hasty exit with an exasperated "I've had it," but Davis stayed in her seat, deviously pleased with what she'd wrought. "Cleaned this place out pretty good, didn't I? Now let's go someplace!" She and Frye kept the evening alive by heading to Mocambo.31 According to Merrill, the move back to Los Angeles was meant to "let it be known we were on the scene. Our professional lives were enhanced by this move, but our personal lives weren't."32 To say the least. In June 1957, Davis filed a separation action in Santa Monica Superior Court through her lawyer David Tannenbaum, charging "grievous mental suffering" and "extreme cruelty." She sought custody of the children and support for herself and the kids. Bette, asked to confirm the breakup, gave one reporter a bit of verse from James Russell Lowell's "Legend of Brittany": "Fit language there is none for the heart's deepest things." Asked to respond, Gary echoed Oth.e.l.lo: "Rude am I in my speech and little blessed with the soft phrase of peace." The accompanying photo was captioned "Just ten days ago Bette Davis visited hubby Gary Merrill on Hollywood set with daughter Barbara and son Michael."33 Merrill returned to Maine.

Bette, on the other hand, prepared to stay in Los Angeles for rehearsals for a theatrical adaptation of Look Homeward, Angel; she was to play Eliza Gant with Anthony Perkins cast as the son Eugene. She rented a house on Bundy Drive in Brentwood. But on the day she moved in, she opened a door and plunged forward into what she thought was a closet but was in fact the stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt, breaking her back. Three years later, Bette sued for damages; the jury awarded her $65,700. As the Examiner put it, "The Oscar-winning film star burst into tears as the jury's verdict favoring her was read in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Carlos. M. Teran."34 She had been offered a guest spot on a Lucy and Desi Comedy Hour episode called "The Celebrity Next Door," but the staircase accident prevented her from appearing in it. The accident cost Davis a reported $20,000 fee, not to mention equal billing with Ball and Arnaz. "First she wanted a lot of money, which we gave her," Lucy later said. "Then she wanted a private plane to take her out here from Connecticut or Maine or wherever the h.e.l.l she lived. And then she wanted this, that, and the other thing. She knew I wanted her, and she knew I'd give her anything she wanted. So after everything was all set, she went a.s.s over teakettle in her house and broke something, and that was the end of that."35 Bette was replaced by Tallulah Bankhead at her most obnoxious; after calling Desi a "fat pig," Tallulah actually spat at the director, Jerry Thorpe.36 ("There's a great story about Lucy and Bette Davis on a flight together," Ball's friend and biographer Jim Brochu says. "There was a lot of turbulence. And all these stars from Warner Bros. and Columbia-everybody-was on this plane. Bette said to Lucy, 'My G.o.d, with all these stars on board, who would they list first if we all died?' And Lucy said, 'Don't worry, Bette. It'll be you.' ")37 Davis spent four months in the hospital, then recuperated at Bobby's house in Laguna Beach until she was ready to make the trip back to Maine, and Gary.38 "That was the end of our trial separation," Merrill wrote. "It was an extremely painful time for her, but she was a tough lady."39 In the sc.r.a.pbooks, pictures of Gary disappear around 1958.

The Merrills returned to Hollywood in the early spring of that year. During the first week of April, a realtor showed them an oddly familiar-looking house; they quickly realized that it was the house in which Lana Turner's daughter had stabbed her mother's lover to death only a few days before. "The real estate agency had been so anxious to rent it that the bloodied mattress hadn't been removed before people began to troop through," Merrill writes. (Point of information: Johnny Stompanato died on the floor, not the bed.)40 They took, instead, an Art Deco mansion on Hanover Drive in Brentwood at $750 a month. It offered, Merrill writes, a "living room, a den, bar, and tennis court-typical Hollywood excess."41 After attending a producer's party, Bette wryly remarked to her husband that "they're all fatter and richer and stupider than ever."42 One of the first projects Davis was offered was an episode of the television series Suspicion called "Fraction of a Second." John Brahm directed; Bill Frye produced. On the first day of shooting, Bette called Frye at five in the morning and said she couldn't film that day because she was sick. The so-called illness was in fact a ma.s.s of bruises and scratches, the result of a violent physical struggle between the Merrills the previous night. Bette sc.r.a.ped her face on the driveway-or Gary sc.r.a.ped it for her-and was in no shape to go before the cameras.43 She showed up for filming the following day, the cameraman shot her good side, and she continued making the picture.

Frye was later appalled to see in the rushes that Brahm had shot a critical scene of Bette with her back entirely to the camera. Bette had insisted, Brahm insisted. Frye complained to Bette, who answered, "G.o.dd.a.m.n it, I was acting before you were even thought of!" Still, they reshot it Frye's way for the sake of comparison. Davis remained silent during the screening of the two versions, then left the screening room without a word. Things remained chilly between them thereafter, but she ultimately agreed to use Frye's take.

Variety's critic was hardly on the edge of his seat: "This Suspicion spends close to sixty minutes telling events that never occurred-events apparently imagined by a woman in the 'fraction of a second' before she's killed by a load of lumber which falls on her. They call this a suspense series, but the only note of suspense arising here is why they ever made the picture."44 The final shooting day of "Fraction of a Second" was April 5, 1958-Bette's fiftieth birthday. When the production wrapped at 5 o'clock, Frye heard a familiar voice cry, "Where's that producer who thinks he knows everything? Tell him to get his a.s.s into my room for a drink!" Frye, along with Brahm and the camera operator, enjoyed tension-free c.o.c.ktails in Bette's dressing room until Frye realized that she had no other plans for the evening, at which point he organized an impromptu birthday party for her at his Coldwater Canyon house. Gary Merrill, it seems, was nowhere to be found.45 Merrill acknowledged a p.r.o.nounced level of violence in the marriage, but one gets the sense that he still understated it: "Some of our arguments were whoppers, the noise level so intense that I'm surprised we could speak the next day. Once, she threatened to call the police, and I told her to go ahead. When they arrived I was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, laughing, while she screamed at them to do something. They said they didn't get involved in domestic quarrels."46 Another time, back East, they were "walking along a snowy path. Somehow an argument started. I don't recall what it was about, but I do remember that I just got tired of having her scream in my ear. She slapped me, so I pushed her into a snow bank. I am not a wife beater, but ours was not a smooth marriage."47 Michael Merrill said, "I don't doubt that there was physical violence. She was very volatile and could get angry at a moment's notice. . . . By the same token, when he was in that manic period, he could be exactly the same way. People go, 'Oh, he was so laid back.' Are you kidding? Sometimes he was not laid back."48 Neither of them knew how to manage money and so were continually strapped for cash. She never invested hers; she never got a chance to do so, so busy was she buying gifts for her family: Ruthie, mostly, but Bobby, too, not to mention B.D., who-according to practically everybody who knew the family-got almost anything she asked for. One of her many agents, Jules Stein, had once offered to manage her money for her, but she declined: "You can handle my jobs; I'll handle my money."49 The family finances were further strained when the IRS socked Gary for $50,000 in back taxes. It wasn't malfeasance on Merrill's part; he simply hadn't gotten around to paying them.50 When they were living at the Chateau Marmont, Davis recalled, "At least once a day, or so it seemed, I would answer a knock on the door and find a bill collector standing there. Some poor young man who would hang his head and stammer, 'I hate to do this to you.' I would hold out my hand and say, 'Quite all right.' "51 ON APRIL 28, 1958, Louella Parsons noted that "Bette Davis had no more set foot in her home in Maine after weeks on the Coast than she started packing to be ready to sail May 6 on the S.S. Independence for Spain and John Paul Jones. The bid from producer Sam Bronston for her to play Catherine the Great-$50,000 in nonrecession money-was too much to turn down. . . . Bette has just four days' work as Catherine. It's called a guest appearance, such as Mike Todd introduced in 80 Days."52 In a little more than two hours, the film traces John Paul Jones's rise from an impoverished family in Scotland, where he hurls an egg in the face of a British officer, to the commander of the first U.S. s.h.i.+p to be saluted by a foreign country (France) during the American Revolution. He scuttles a major portion of the British fleet; utters his most famous line, "I have not yet begun to fight!"; and travels to Russia, where Catherine the Great offers to hire him.

Mikey cried on Bette's departure from Maine on May 3-his mother had been there only a week-but the trip to Europe was as much a vacation from Gary as it was a girls' retreat for Bette, B.D., and Bobby-"the three Bs," as Bette called them in her travel diary. "Heaven to have Bobby-am really so happy." This was one of Bobby's stable periods, and, tellingly, she devoted it to the care of her sister and niece.

The crossing was pleasant-"drank mult.i.tudinous martinis," "had nap." Bette called Ruthie s.h.i.+p to sh.o.r.e on Mother's Day. The Independence landed at Gibraltar, after which the three Davis girls traveled to Crdoba and Seville ("really magnificent-linen sheets! The works! Birds, flowers, donkeys. All so as it should be") before arriving in Madrid. Bette's diary is full of praise for B.D.'s behavior ("fantastic," "absolutely terrific"), though on at least one occasion she felt the need to give the eleven-year-old a sleeping pill to put her down for the night. B.D. attended a bullfight in Madrid: "a horse was gored, but all in all she loved it."53 Bette met John Farrow and Robert Stack, the director and star of John Paul Jones, on May 15. May 16 began with a meeting with the film's dressmaker, after which Davis was off to the studio to select her wig, then back to the hotel for lunch with Bobby and B.D., and then they all embarked on a tour of the city. A side trip to see Cervantes's birthplace occurred the following day. They drove to Toledo the day after that. Davis was in her element in Spain, enthusing about everything she experienced: the art, the architecture, the flowers. . .

Her Catherine the Great costume dress wasn't finished by the morning of the twenty-second-"have never been so nervous"-but it was completed by 7:00 p.m. and shooting began. Work went on until 9:00 p.m. and continued the following day and the twenty-fourth as well.

The Bs then flew to Rome; "had doctor give me pills for flight," Bette noted; they made her feel "lousy." It was sightseeing all day on the twenty-ninth. The Pantheon, the Coliseum, Vatican City: "Saw the Pope from Vatican Square at noon-a goose pimply experience! Like an angel on high!" The thirtieth brought a trip to Cinecitt to see the chariot race being filmed for Ben-Hur, after which she enjoyed dinner with her old Warners producer Henry Blanke and Anna Magnani. "Divine!"

By the third of June they were in Venice; on the sixth they drove to Milan, saw the cathedral, then headed to the airport and flew to London. They ended up in Henley-on-Thames.

Diary entry, June 9: "Invited to Monaco for the week-end-big do with the Grimaldis-think I'll skip it!"

There was a press party on the twelfth, lunch with Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios on the thirteenth. On June 15 Bette noted how much she enjoyed Irish coffee: "can't wait to make it at home for Gary." (This is an odd notation, considering the fractious state of the marriage at that point.) She was in Paris on June 18, where she had dinner with Alec Guinness and the director Robert Hamer in preparation for her next film, The Scapegoat, in which she was to play Guinness's drug-addicted mother. Guinness was a changeling genius, a supreme technician whose most notable tour de force was to play all eight members of the doomed d'Ascoyne family in the great Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Davis, Guinness, and Hamer returned to London, where makeup and fittings for The Scapegoat occurred on June 23 and 24. Shooting began on the twenty-fifth.

"My costar is a terror," Davis reported in her diary. Guinness "never looks or gives a reaction," she complained. There was slight improvement by July 1: "Still get panicked working with A.G.," she wrote, though she did admit that playing one scene was "a pleasure." But later, she went on, she "did all close-ups at 6 o'clock and had a terrible time. Can never explain to anyone why it bothers me so much. . . . Ached so much that evening-thought I would die."

The magic of Europe was wearing thin. She was getting sick of European food, Bette wrote in her diary. She longed for a hamburger.

By July 9, Bette's shooting for The Scapegoat was completed. She purchased an eleven-month-old red Yorks.h.i.+re puppy for Mike. She picked him up in Kent and named him Lord Mountbatten before sailing home with Bobby and B.D. on the Queen Mary on July 10.

The Scapegoat was never one of Bette's favorite films. Alec Guinness "cut my part into such shreds that my appearance in the final product made no sense at all," she claimed. "This is an actor who plays by himself, unto himself. In this particular picture he played a dual role, so at least he was able to play with himself."54 Matters weren't helped by her director's p.r.o.nounced alcoholism. According to Piers Paul Read, Guinness's biographer, Robert Hamer went on a particularly hard bender when Davis arrived. As Guinness himself wrote in his diary at the time of Bette's death, I loaded her with flowers-which she accepted. But she refused all invitations to dinner etc. and had no desire to chat. She despised all the British film crew, told me Robert Hamer wasn't a director and knew nothing of films (admittedly Robert was on the way down and deep in drink trouble) and she obviously considered me a nonent.i.ty-with which I wouldn't quarrel greatly. But she was not the artist I had expected. She entirely missed the character of the old Countess, which could have been theatrically effective, and only wanted to be extravagantly over-dressed and surrounded, quite ridiculously, by flowers. She knew her lines-and spat them forth in her familiar way-and was always on time. What is called a professional. A strong and aggressive personality. After the film was shown (a failure) she let it be known that she considered I had ruined her performance and had had it cut to a minimum.55 But it wasn't just Guinness who thought Davis's part deserved to be truncated. Apart from the fact that he was mostly drunk, Robert Hamer didn't think Davis was very good: "May I say that in my opinion any modification in the performance of Bette Davis will be to our advantage," he wrote in notes to Michael Balcon; Hamer suggested cutting the Countess's court testimony by half. Daphne du Maurier, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, agreed: she requested that "the scenes in which Miss D appears [be] reduced in length if possible."56 IT'S AUGUST 28, 1960, and the panelists are blindfolded: time for the Mystery Guest segment on What's My Line? A white-gloved hand graced by a diamond bracelet appears and signs a famous name on the chalkboard, and, to a fine ovation, Bette strides to her seat. Joey Bishop asks the first question: "Are you in the entertainment business?"

A high-pitched "Oui."

"Are you in pictures?" Arlene Francis inquires.

"Oui."

Bennett Cerf is next: "Have you also appeared in the legitimate theater?"

"Oui."

"Are you in a picture that is currently appearing on Broadway or in the major first-run houses?" Dorothy Kilgallen wants to know.

"Non."

Arlene Francis follows up: "Are you in a show that is about to appear on Broadway?"

Bette, amused, answers, "Oui."

And Bennett Cerf gets it: "Would the show that you are going to do have anything to do with Mr. Carl Sandburg?"

"Oui!"

Unfortunately, despite the What's My Line? plug and related ballyhoo, the Broadway run of The World of Carl Sandburg lasted only twenty-nine performances. It opened at Henry Miller's Theatre on September 14 and closed on October 8.

Norman Corwin had approached Davis and Merrill in April 1959 with the idea of adapting the popular poet's work for the stage. But by the time the play was ready for rehearsals at a grange hall in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the couple had essentially parted. "We'd meet in the morning, rehea.r.s.e all day, then go our separate ways," Merrill reported.57 After previews at Bowdoin College in September, The World of Carl Sandburg had its world premiere at the State Theater in Portland. It played to a sold-out crowd, including Edmund Muskie and Carl Sandburg himself, who commandeered the stage after the show and went on so long with one of his tales that Merrill privately told him afterward to stick to the writing and let Gary and Bette do the performing.

Mr. and Mrs. Merrill continued with The World of Carl Sandburg, however, and took the show on tour: Lowell, Ma.s.sachusetts, and upstate New York, and all the way west to Los Angeles and San Francisco, thirty-two cities in all. The strain of appearing as a loving couple onstage while being unable to bear each other's presence off-they stayed in separate wings of hotels while touring-wore thinner and thinner. It finally snapped when Bette had Gary served with divorce papers. The separation agreement gave Gary visitation rights with the children but took away his right to appear in The World of Carl Sandburg in New York. Barry Sullivan took over initially for a swing through Florida before the show opened in New York with Bette and Leif Erickson.58 The show's married-couple appeal vanished, and The World of Carl Sandburg closed. For Gary, though, it was good while it lasted: "It was the high spot in my career."59 Though the Merrills might have endured another reconciliation after splitting again in the summer of 1959, the stresses of The World of Carl Sandburg set a match to the couple's long-smoldering pile of used-up and discarded pa.s.sion. Bette filed for divorce on May 3, 1960.60 "Not long after our divorce, I ran into Joe Mankiewicz at a party," Bette recalled. "For years I had been asking him to write a sequel to All About Eve, telling what had happened to Margo and Bill. I said, 'You can forget about the sequel, Joe. Gary and I played it and it didn't work.' "61

CHAPTER.

20.

TROUBLES AND A TRIUMPH.

THE GHOSTWRITER SANDFORD DODY, WHO got to know Bette's children as well as Bette herself while he was working with her on The Lonely Life, offered this precise description of Michael Merrill at ten: "If B.D. had her mother's confidence and outgoing personality, manly little Michael kept his own counsel. Though amiable, he seemed a rather grave little boy and perhaps a trifle tentative. I felt a depth in him, a self-containment unusual in one so young." By that point, Michael's parents had divorced, and Gary was a visitor rather than an active father. "Bette adored both kids and enjoyed roughhousing with Michael," Dody went on, "partially to give him the kind of tough, physical affection a father who was not absent might supply, and also, I'm certain, because she enjoyed it." And then this: "Mother and son would sometimes roll all over the floor, wrestling and laughing gaily, though I always felt that the boy was conscious that he was romping with a leopardess simply in the mood for play, a leopardess who might in a change of mood devour him."1 After the divorce, Gary took up with Rita Hayworth, a romance that sparked a particularly jealous and threatened sort of rage in Bette, who acted out by attempting to revoke Gary's visitation rights. After escorting Mike and B.D. to see The Sound of Music onstage along with Rita and her children, Yasmin Khan and Rebecca Welles, Gary pulled up in front of Bette's house to drop the kids off only to encounter Bette leaning out an upstairs window and screaming, "using language a hardened sailor would have thought music to his ears, 'That's not a fit woman for my children to be with! You and that wh.o.r.e shouldn't be together with young children,' and on and on."2 According to Merrill, Florence Stewart of the Lochland School had once advised him to "keep that little boy away from his mother as much as possible."3 But now Bette was bent on keeping Mike away from his father. "The following day," Merrill continued, "Bette went off to see her lawyers to try to get my visitation rights with Mike revoked. And she did." For a time. After protracted legal wrangling, a judge awarded Gary visits with Mike every other weekend in addition to half of Mike's school vacations.

Losing her quest to deny Gary any visitation rights at all, Bette responded with drastic theatricality by sending Mike to live with him permanently. By the end of the school year, however, Bette changed her mind, and Michael Merrill was returned to her custody.4 That summer, the summer of 1962, Mike spent a month with his father in New England. "And while he's been with the boy, he promised to stop drinking," Hedda Hopper bleated, obviously getting her information from Davis. "Rita has not been with him for the month," Hopper added.5 At one point, father and son found themselves in Maine. "We looked across the cove at our old house. I glanced at Michael and saw tears in his eyes," Gary recalled.6 IN THE LATE spring and early summer of 1961, Frank Capra remade his 1933 film Lady for a Day as Pocketful of Miracles. Based on a Damon Runyon story, the film traces the exploits of a benign bootlegger, Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford), who helps transform a beggarwoman, Apple Annie (Davis), into a presentable society matron when Annie's daughter, Louise (Ann-Margret), arrives from Europe. Louise has grown up in a Spanish convent, you see, and has no idea that her mother lives on the streets.

Ford, with whom Bette had made A Stolen Life, made an inopportune remark that set Bette off. "During the third week of shooting," Capra recalled, "Glenn Ford gave a columnist an interview, to wit: He felt so grateful to Bette Davis for having started him on his path to success that he had demanded Miss Davis be rescued from obscurity and be given the role of Apple Annie in his starring film. Well, I don't know what Bette Davis did the day she started Glenn on his career, but I sure know what she did when she read Glenn's interview. She flashed, and sparked, and crackled like an angry live wire thras.h.i.+ng in the wind: 'G.o.ddamdest insult. . . that sonofab.i.t.c.h Ford . . . helping me make a comeback . . . that s.h.i.+theel . . . wouldn't let him help me out of a sewer . . . shouldn't have come to Hollywood . . . I hate it. . . hate Apple Annie . . . hate the picture . . . hate you most, Capra, for bringing me out here.' "7 Bette also mentioned to a reporter visiting the set-a sound-stage at Paramount-that she had seen Lady for a Day and didn't understand why Capra didn't simply rerelease it.8 Davis was in the final stages of shooting Pocketful of Miracles when Ruth Favor Davis, briefly Palmer, briefly Budd, died on July 1, 1961. It would have been her fifty-third wedding anniversary had she not divorced Harlow Davis and married and divorced Robert Palmer and married and divorced Otho Budd.

Ruthie's caregiver in her final months was Bobby, of course; Bette had to work.

Ruthie was in labor for twenty-one hours before she gave birth to Bobby and never let Bobby forget it. It wasn't until the mid-1940s, according to Bette, that Bobby grew deaf to the "oft-repeated horror" story. As Bette saw it, Ruthie never identified with Bobby in any way. "Love, yes," Bette noted less than convincingly, but not empathy.9 But Ruthie's distance was a defensive posture, her identification with Bobby too powerful to be conscious. Ruthie herself had suffered from depression during her marriage to Harlow and at one point checked herself into a sanitarium when the girls were very small.10 Bobby's psychological troubles always threatened to s.h.i.+ne an unwelcome light on Ruthie's darkest corner. It was easier for her to take credit for Bette's success and remind Bobby of how difficult she'd been to produce.

Except for a brief time in East Hampton, New York, in the late 1940s, Ruthie lived on Ramona Avenue in Laguna Beach in an elegant home that was bought, paid for, and lavishly furnished by Bette, who always said publicly that she owed her mother everything, given the toils Ruthie endured to pay for her daughters' clothing, let alone their private school education.11 ("I didn't want a career for myself," Ruthie told an interviewer once. "I wanted money to give the girls things. . . . Agirl can so easily acquire an inferiority complex if she is shabbily dressed.")12 But Bette overstated Ruthie's case drastically. Her mother was an emotional drain as well as a financial one, Lady Bountiful in reverse. By any reasonable measurement, the rewards flowed to Bette's mother, not from her, for most of her life.

Bette maintained, both in private and in public, that Ruthie's early sacrifices for her daughters were commensurate in anguish and strain with thirty years of high pressure, do-or-die acting work on her own part. In fact, of course, Bette paid a far greater price psychologically than Ruthie paid physically, photographic chemicals not being nearly as caustic as movie reviewers, directors, and studio bosses. One can only wonder at the degree of conscious irony in Davis's mind when she showed up at Ruthie's seventy-second birthday party in 1957 dressed as an ap.r.o.ned maid.13 Ruthie adored being the mother of a superstar, attending premieres, giving interviews, receiving gifts and money from Bette. In May 1957, she was herself the star of an episode of This Is Your Life, the sentimental journey into the lives of ordinary as well as famous people conducted by Ralph Edwards. Bette flew in with B.D. from Maine; Bobby was there, along with her daughter, Fay; Mrs. Robert Peckett, of Peckett's Inn, showed up from New Hamps.h.i.+re, too. (Mrs. Peckett bought b.u.t.ternut from Bette shortly thereafter.)14 When Ruthie died, Sandford Dody recalls, he and Davis were in the middle of composing The Lonely Life. Bette telephoned him, hysterical. She couldn't go on with the project, she said, weeping. She couldn't bear it. She did, of course. But she toned down the more ambivalent pa.s.sages about her mother-an understandable response on the one hand, a mother's death leading to idealization, but incomprehensible on another. Bette was finally free to speak her mind about the selfless-turned-selfish woman who had dominated her life through four marriages, but Ruthie's departure for eternity only served to kick in Bette's guilt.15*

Davis appears to have felt no similar guilt about Bobby. If anything, age made her increasingly hostile to her younger sister. "Bette was angry a good part of the time, and I really can't tell you why," Chuck Pollack said. "She didn't trust anybody; that was one of the worst things. She had no one, not even her sister. Her poor sister. She treated her like a dog."16 Bobby had her own daughter, Fay, to care for in the 1940s and early 1950s, but even then Bobby found time-and the presence of mind-to care not only for Bette's children but for Bette herself. It was Bobby who escorted B.D. to Maine to spend part of Bette and Gary's honeymoon with them, Bobby who accompanied Bette and B.D. to Europe in 1958.

* The Lonely Life was published in 1962 to positive reviews and solid sales.

Bobby was there, too, when Bette became ill during the last night of Two's Company; it was Bobby who accompanied Bette to the hospital. And when Ray Stricklyn, who appeared with Davis in The Catered Affair and "For Better, for Worse," tells in his memoirs of how, during the filming of the latter in 1957, when Bette took a palpably seductive att.i.tude toward him despite their considerable difference in age, Bobby hovers in the background of the tale: at 10:00 p.m., when the director finally called it a night, there was Bobby in Bette's dressing room, dutifully packing the star's clothes and preparing the star for her exit.17 By 1971, Bobby was living in Phoenix. She showed up for Bette's own episode of This Is Your Life (which was taped on February 2, 1971, and aired on March 7), along with Edith Head, William Wyler, Robert Wagner, Benny Baker (who'd been onstage with Bette in one of the Cukor plays in Rochester), Olivia de Havilland, Sally Sage Hutchinson (Bette's longtime stand-in), and Ted Kent (the editor of Bad Sister).18 But the two Davis girls became increasingly estranged as the 1970s went on. Bette was living in Hollywood when she was told that Bobby was dying of cancer in Arizona. "Let her come and visit me," Bette responded. The sisters never saw each other again. Bobby died in 1979.19 CIGARETTES WERE TO Bette Davis what a bottle of Southern Comfort was to Janis Joplin or a half-unb.u.t.toned black s.h.i.+rt is to Tom Ford: a mundane prop elevated by sheer force of personality to the level of a stylized autograph. Davis smoked eminently onscreen-Charlotte Vale's romanticized oral fixation in Now, Voyager; the pungent fumes of Margo Channing-but, if anything, she was even better known in real life as the world's most famous nicotine addict. Only Winston Churchill and his cigars could come close, but Davis takes the prize if only because she inhaled.

Her friends, family, and coworkers necessarily grew accustomed to Davis's acrid exhalations, but they put up with them because, after all, she was Bette Davis, and cigarettes-the gestures they enabled, the attention they called to the hands and mouth, the full fire-breathing drama-were her stock-in-trade. "She used smoking in a way I'd never seen before. It was a signature," said Dr. Ivin Prince. Dr. Prince knew Davis intimately. He was her dentist.20 She came to him first in the mid-1950s with a mouth full of out-of-position teeth, many of which were loose. She couldn't close her mouth because the uppers. .h.i.t the lowers. The cause of this dental disaster was the osteomyelitis that had forced Two's Company to close. Years of smoking hadn't helped.

Dr. Prince's office was located on the ground floor of the Imperial House, an apartment building on the Upper East Side. He also treated one of the Imperial House's most famous residents. "I never mentioned to Bette that I was also treating Joan," Dr. Prince said, though he did eventually reveal the fact after Crawford died. Bette was amused.

"When she laughed, you could hear it half a block away. Patients in the waiting room would hear Bette Davis laughing-there was no mistaking her. She was the kind of person who-when she liked and trusted you-was wonderful. But there weren't many such people in her life. She was always lovely with my staff. She wasn't always lovely with her staff." Dr. Prince remembered that Davis smoked not only in the waiting room but even in the dentist's chair. "She pretty much did what she wanted," he noted.

One day, Dr. Prince recalled, he heard dramatically raised voices emanating from the waiting room. Bette was scheduled for an appointment, as was another of the dentist's high-profile patients: Tennessee Williams. "I remember them screaming and shouting at one another, oblivious to the fact that there were other people around." According to Dr. Prince, Williams actually employed the most exhausted of tired cliches. "You'll never work in this town again!" the playwright yelled at the star.

Davis had, by that time, ended her run on Broadway as Maxine Faulk in Williams's The Night of the Iguana. "I don't think she enjoyed the experience," Dr. Prince lightly observed. "She told me she would get so nervous before the curtain that she would throw up." But, Bette's dentist added, "She used it. She said she thought her nervousness made her better."

The Night of the Iguana concerns a drunken defrocked minister, Shannon (Patrick O'Neal), who has descended ignominiously to driving a tour bus in Mexico; Hannah Jelkes (Margaret Leighton), a Yankee spinster; and Maxine Faulk, the earthy owner of an Acapulco hotel. Frank Corsaro directed. Rehearsals began in New York in October 1961, and according to Williams's agent, Audrey Wood, they went well. Davis let her feelings about Maxine Faulk be known, however. During one rehearsal, for example, Margaret Leighton entered carrying a suitcase. Bette took it as directed and headed upstage only to stop in her tracks, whirl around, and call out to the dark theater, "Tennessee! I don't think this b.i.t.c.h for one moment would pick up her bag and carry it. I just don't think she would. What do you think?" Williams let her do it her way.21 Trouble started when the company traveled to Rochester for previews. The first performance was, as Wood described it, "rough, but the audience was receptive. . . . There was an opening night party which we all attended, including Bette, and we all went to bed."

The company manager called Wood in her hotel room the following morning to announce that "Bette Davis is being taken in a wheelchair to an ambulance and then to a hospital." It seems she had fallen during the performance but suffered no symptoms until the following day. After two performances with the understudy taking Davis's place, the company moved on to Cleveland. She was driven there by limousine. "Bette recovered, and we went on. Finally, the tour brought us to Chicago," Wood recalled.22 In December, The Night of the Iguana faced the critics. Time was downright mean: "A big, ugly edible lizard called the iguana is, in Mexico, more or less what the Thanksgiving turkey is in the U.S. Mexicans catch iguanas, fatten them up, and serve them on festive occasions. Tennessee Williams' latest play, now in Chicago and headed for Broadway this month, is called The Night of the Iguana. And from all indications last week, despite impressive performances by Margaret Leighton and Bette Davis, it is indeed a ma.s.sive turkey. Chicago critics have carved it up." Time quoted some choice remarks of the Chicago papers: "The Tribune, for example, found the play 'bankrupt . . . barren . . . bleakly dull.' And the Sun Times called it 'something of a dud . . . a swollen vignette . . . vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity, padding for the sake of fill, waterfront humor to patch the gaps and the pulpit for preaching.' "23 Williams wrote a note to Bette while the show was still in Chicago. He advised her, "Everything about [Maxine] should have the openness and freedom of the sea. I can imagine she even smells like the sea." He didn't like Bette's wig at all, and he told her so: "It is too perfectly arranged, too carefully 'coiffed.' It ought to be like she had gone swimming without a cap and rubbed her hair dry with a coa.r.s.e towel and not bothered to brush or comb it." And, he commented, "when she says, 'I never dress in September,' I think she means just that.