Part 12 (1/2)

I forwarded David Merrick's interest to her agent, Martin Baum, who called me and said that Miss Davis wanted to meet me. We went out for dinner to talk about it. We went to a place called The Leopard. It was a townhouse in the East 50s-very elegant. The lady who owned it was an Italian princess named Goia Cook. She'd been married to an actor, Donald Cook. [Cook appears with Davis in The Man Who Played G.o.d.] When we arrived, she took Bette Davis's coat, and she kept coming over to chat. Miss Davis got very irritated and said, ”Who is that hat check girl?” I said, ”Miss Davis, she's not the hat check girl. She's the owner of the restaurant, and she's a princess.” That didn't wash. As far as Bette was concerned, she was the hat check girl.

I asked for the wine list and ordered wine. Apparently that was an enormous break-through. She was having dinner with some friends, including [her lawyer] Harold Schiff, the following night, and she said to me, ”Oh thank G.o.d! You ordered wine! I know [Schiff] won't order wine. It's so nice to go out with a young man who takes control.” At the end of the dinner, she said I could bring Gower Champion to see her. [Champion was the director and ch.o.r.eographer of h.e.l.lo, Dolly!]

She was very nice to Gower, though she treated him rather like a schoolboy. She told him she'd seen the play, she'd loved it, she loved his work, she loved him, and then she said, ”But I'm not going to do your musical. It's a fifteen-minute show. But I would like to work with you some other time. Good afternoon.” And that was that. She thought it was a fifteen-minute show-the ”h.e.l.lo, Dolly!” number. My feeling was, ”but what a fifteen minutes it would have been.”7 The Killing of Sister George was another no-go for Davis. ”The producers told me that they were going to make a movie of it,” Dame Eileen Atkins remembered.

And they said, ”We're not going to use Beryl Reid [who costarred with Atkins on Broadway], but we want to use you, and we want a big American Hollywood star for Beryl's part.” Katharine Hepburn turned it down out of hand. I was also supposed to meet Angela Lansbury, only it never got far-she also turned it down out of hand. The only person who didn't turn it down out of hand was Bette Davis. They wanted her to meet me to see if she would like to work with me.

It was at a party. My producers brought me over. Andy Warhol was standing there as well. [As Atkins approached, Bette let fly a zinger:] She looked at Andy Warhol and said, ”Why the h.e.l.l don't you do something about your skin?”

I was just stunned that anyone could be that rude. But the thing was, I can remember thinking that she was quite right to be rude to Andy Warhol.

I think Bette Davis made a big mistake by not doing The Killing of Sister George. I think she'd have been wonderful in the part. But none of them would play a lesbian. I think they all thought they'd ruin their reputations by playing a fully blown, male-type lesbian. She was an out-and-out ”Eat my cigar! Drink my bathwater!” lesbian, and they got very nervous. In the end they had to have Beryl, so therefore they had to find a star for my part.8 Susannah York took Atkins's role in the movie, which was directed by Robert Aldrich.

IN 1965, DAVIS filmed a pilot for a sitcom series to be called The Decorator. The gimmick, apart from Bette herself, was that her character, Liz, moves into her clients' homes and solves their personal problems while redesigning their rooms-a blend of June Bride's Linda Gilman with a more overtly benign Sheridan Whiteside from The Man Who Came to Dinner. Mary Wickes played Liz's wisecracking a.s.sistant, Viola. In the first (and only) episode, we meet Liz in the darkened bedroom of her chic Malibu beach house. Viola is trying to rouse her from a hangover. ”My head feels like an old combat boot,” Liz groans. ”It was a di-vine party. I liked everything about it after the second martini-especially something British with a lot of gray going for it in the temples.” Her new client soon shows up-an Oklahoma judge played by Ed Begley-and before the half hour is over, Liz has defied the judge's wishes by convincing his daughter to sneak away by bus and elope with her hunky but impoverished boyfriend. We later learn that Liz has sent them to honeymoon at her own house in Malibu, where, in the final scene, Mary Wickes delivers a line seemingly written with the express purpose of propelling a mouthful of coffee out of one's nose: ”It was quite unnerving having to meet your honeymooners at the terminal. All those sailors, my dear! I've never been in a bus station in my life!”

The end credits go a long way toward explaining how that line got there. Before he wrote The Boys in the Band in the late 1960s, the playwright Mart Crowley was working as Natalie Wood's secretary. As the writer Dominick Dunne told the critic Michael Giltz, ”I was the vice-president of Four Star, this studio owned by Charles Boyer, d.i.c.k Powell and David Niven-three of the cla.s.siest guys ever in Hollywood.” [The fourth star was Ida Lupino.] ”The script came in by a famous writer and she [Davis] hated it-she hated it. We were supposed to start shooting two days hence, and I went to Mart Crowley because he's hilarious and camp and I said, 'Mart, rewrite this.' He had written before; he wasn't going to be a secretary to Natalie forever. And he rewrote it, and it was so hilarious and so exactly right for Bette Davis. It was a great pilot but it didn't sell.”9 Dunne was overly generous in calling the original scriptwriter ”famous.” Cy Howard is best known for having written My Friend Irma. But he was correct in his a.s.sessment of The Decorator. If one can ignore the distracting canned laugh track, the show is genuinely amusing. Most remarkable of all is Davis's relaxed, in-your-living-room performance. Still, within the confines of a 1960s sitcom on the small screen, her Liz is certainly flamboyant. In the precredits sequence, the designer-hiding behind fas.h.i.+onably oversized sungla.s.ses, still trying to get over the hangover-charmingly bullies a little girl into adding a moat to the sandcastle the child has built on the beach outside Liz's fabulous house. ”I don't need a decorator,” the girl pouts. ”Don't be absurd,” the snood-wearing Bette snaps. ”Ehhh-vrybody needs a decorator!”

Mart Crowley remembered many entertaining details:10 ”The lot itself had been Republic Studios. Outside my office window were Trigger's hoofprints, just to let me know where I was.

”I wrote the a.s.sistant as a man,” Crowley casually dropped. ”I suggested Paul Lynde. She thought it was funny, but the network said, 'No way are we having a gay character on the screen.' They didn't even call him gay; they called him much worse things. I just did it to take the edge off the Eve-Arden of it all, you know? Yet another wisecracking sidekick?”

As for the sailors-at-the-bus-station line, Crowley could barely believe it either. ”Good G.o.d! What was the state of my brain by the time I got to that line? It's funny for a woman who has a profile that looks like it belongs on a nickel to say it, but it would have been hilarious for Paul Lynde.”

The Decorator pilot was actually shot, clearly at Davis's insistence, by her favorite Warner Bros. cinematographer, Ernie Haller. And of course she brought in her own makeup person-a man who specialized in temporary rejuvenation. As Crowley recalled: She had a very famous makeup man, Gene Hibbs, who invented the glue-on tabs with the hooks in them. You smash all the hair down under a wig cap, then glue these awful gauzes with hooks in them all around, and then attach rubber bands over the top and back of the head and the neck to pull everything back, and then you slap a wig on top of it.

The set was tense as h.e.l.l, because she was just not moving as fast as you have to move in television. It was going over schedule and over budget. She was slow to get out of the dressing room; she was slow between shots. She was used to the director saying ”Cut” and then they'd light for an hour. In TV, they're ready to go in ten minutes, and she just could not work at that pace. [Her att.i.tude was] ”I'm gonna show them. I'll be out when I'm ready-don't knock on that door one more time.” It's like Judy Garland's line in I Could Go On Singing: someone says, ”Jenny, Jenny, they've been waiting an hour,” and Judy screams, ”I don't care if they're fasting!”

She was very disappointed that The Decorator didn't go. No, not disappointed-hurt. Very hurt.

The Viola character in The Decorator didn't come by her name accidently. ”Bette had a manager called Violla Rubber,” Lionel Larner explained.

Violla was tied into all her deals. [If they wanted Bette Davis,] they also had to take Violla Rubber for $400 a week. Martin Baum would say to me, ”Trust me. She'll earn her money-it will be worth it.”

She was like a gym mistress-a sort of old maid British spinster. She wore tweed skirts and brogue shoes like those ladies you see in British movies of the 1940s with feathers in their hats going 'round the park. Violla was also kind of tricky. She was manipulative-that would be the word. A little two-faced and manipulative. And controlling. She had two sides: one that Miss Davis would see, and one that other people would see.11 Alvin Rakoff remembered Violla Rubber well from his initial meeting with Bette about The Anniversary. ”Violla was very much her protector; that's what she was there for. Every time I said something that she thought Bette would disagree with, Violla would kick me under the table. I left that evening with a lot of bruises.”12 BETTE'S CLOSEST FRIENDs.h.i.+PS were both enduring and strained in equal measure. Her friends were loyal to her, by and large, though they had to put up with a lot, particularly when alcohol came into play. ”She wasn't the nicest person to be friends with,” Vik Green-field admitted. ”It was fine when she was fine, but if she felt lousy or mean, she took it out on you. As a friend of mine once said, 'Bette defies friends.h.i.+p.' She defied it. How she had any friends I don't know, to be quite honest.”13 Davis's oldest friend was Robin Brown-the former Marie Simpson, from West Virginia via Ogunquit. ”I knew Robin very well,” Greenfield said. ”She was a very nice woman. Quiet, intelligent, small-she was only about 5'2”.” Robin's size may have helped; she could look Bette directly in the eye. ”Robin was a very good friend to Bette. And Bette wasn't awfully nice to her at times. Her husband, Albert Brown-everybody called him 'Brownie'-was a very nice man. Bette always behaved herself more when Brownie was around. Robin told me once that she used to say to Brownie, 'We're going to dinner with Bette tonight,' and he'd say, 'Do we have to?' You had to guard every word you said around her. It was tough.”

”Robin spent a lot of time with her over the years,” said Brown's sister, Reggie Schwartzwalder (the widow of the legendary Syracuse football coach Ben Schwartzwalder). ”She was always very cautious about what she said about Bette; she never admitted anything that wasn't admirable about her.”14 ”My sister was a private nurse,” Greenfield continued.

Bette asked her to nurse her after the mastectomy. I said to Stephanie, ”Don't do it. Don't do it. You'll rue the day.” And of course she rued the day. Bette wouldn't allow Stephanie to ring her husband from the hospital. Robin asked Stephanie if she should come up and see Bette, and Stephanie said of course. When Robin got there, Bette shrieked at her: ”What are you doing here? Get out!” That's to her oldest friend in the world.

They fell out when Bette, after the operation, went up to Connecticut to stay with Robin in her house, and she accused Robin of trying to get rid of her by not setting the heat high enough. That more or less ended the friends.h.i.+p.

The actress Ellen Hanley, who had met Bette during the run of Two's Company (John Murray Anderson brought her into the show), became friendly again with Bette when they both lived in western Connecticut in the late 1960s and '70s. Hanley saw the best in Bette: ”She was very proud of being a Yankee. She loved American holidays, so every time there was a holiday like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, she wanted to do things. She loved to cook and be a homemaker. Her homes were beautiful; everything was lovely, lovely. I still use some of her recipes. There's a meatloaf: it's got poultry seasoning in it, and red wine and eggs and all that stuff.”15 Hanley fondly remembered visiting Twin Bridges, the Westport house Bette lived in from 1965 to 1973, and Bette's contribution to the surrounding landscape. A river ran behind the house, but a merely natural body of water wasn't enough for the industrious Davis. As Hanley noted, ”She and Vik Greenfield had physically moved rocks and stones and made a swimming hole there. My kids loved to go there.”

But there was tension, too, and it usually appeared with the first drink of the day. ”I saw that if she had a drink at lunch-I think it was screwdrivers she liked to have at lunch-there would be an instant personality change. Not into any kind of meanness at that point. It's difficult to describe. My point is that she would have a snap change when she drank. But she was still the Bette I knew and loved.

”She was getting older, and her stardom days were over-that had to be difficult. It caused her a lot of anxiety.”

Hanley described the day Bette was left at Hanley's place while Hanley helped her brother move into a new house nearby. ”When we got back, Bette was annoyed with me because we had been gone so long and she wasn't included. While we were gone, she had emptied my food closet and had gone through all my spices and said to my daughter, 'Why does your mother have two jars of rosemary? She only needs one!' She went through all kinds of things and cleaned out my closet. I was very annoyed. It was noontime, and I think she'd had a drink or two.”

It was to Ellen Hanley that Bette turned at a particularly dark moment in the early 1970s. It's a story Hanley never before told anyone out-side her immediate family, and it goes a long way toward explaining the increasing bitterness and rage that Bette felt-and expressed-from that point on. ”One morning in 1973 she called me [wanting] to know if I could come down and be with her. She said she had to do something, and she didn't want to be alone to do it. I said, 'What is it? What's the matter?' ” Someone had sent Bette a liquor-sized carton of letters written over many years by Ruthie to a friend-one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's sisters. The box had been found in the attic by the new owners of the Millay sister's house in Maine, and they thought that Bette would want them.

According to Hanley, Bette was terrified of what she would find in that carton.

The closer it came to arriving, the more frightened she got. Their relations.h.i.+p must have been very complicated, but you never got an inkling of that from Bette, really. She never said a word against her mother-and we talked about a lot of things over the years. She never said, ”Ugh, my mother was this, my mother was that.” Never. Actually, she rarely talked about Ruthie.

It was a very upsetting morning. It was really frightening for her to open that box. I said to her, ”Do you want me to open it?” and she said, ”No. I will open it.” And then she started reading the letters to me. Bette was extremely devastated. Some of them were just about what Ruthie was doing that week, but there were others of a sarcastic nature. She wrote as though Bette was a ch.o.r.e and a pain, calling her ”the Queen Bee” and other things. Bette was so upset. She never came across this before-that her mother was writing so critically about her and in such a derogatory sense to someone she herself didn't know.

She was devastated, and hurt, and angry. In the midst of it she fixed herself a screwdriver. She was furious-absolutely furious. The whole thing came falling in on her that morning. She looked across the room at me and screamed, ”Can you believe this? Can you believe this?! After all I did for her!”

LATER THAT YEAR, Bette Davis sat for several portrait sessions with Don Bachardy. The first occurred in Westport on November 1, several weeks after Davis met Bachardy at a party thrown by Roddy McDowall in Hollywood. ”I realized right away that if I was going to get on with her, if I wasn't going to become one of her victims, I had to stand up to her,” Bachardy remembered.16 ”She had contempt for people who gave way to her.” Bachardy's stance didn't stop Davis from issuing an ultimatum for the second sitting; she gave him precisely one hour and not a minute more. ”She did relent,” Bachardy reported. She saw that I was trying to keep to the limitation she set, and she said, 'Well, you know, you can go on working.' But she didn't tell me soon enough.

”I didn't dare to ask her to look directly at me because, when I began to peer into her face, I saw her intense shyness and uncertainty. She hides her vulnerability with an outward show of strength and independence, but I suspect that if anyone made the mistake of cowering before her, she would be merciless.”

There was initial tension-”she managed to be restless and rigid”-but she loosened up with cigarettes and drinks. But the liquor continued to loosen her beyond what Bachardy needed; it killed her concentration. She began chatting and moving her head constantly. ”As I gradually lost control of my drawing, it became a sad, almost mournful version of her,” Bachardy noted. Bette thought it captured her well: ”That's the best,” she told the artist.

”There was one drawing of her that she wouldn't sign-which was so odd coming from Bette Davis, who was so eager to make a grotesque out of herself for a part, and in fact she was likely to go way too far. I was surprised that she would object to the second drawing as 'cruel,' but it was just a bit more factual than the other two I did that day.”

Davis then proceeded to prepare one of her prized homemade dinners: a frozen chicken pot pie and canned beets, which she boiled for half an hour before serving.

”Drink eased her shyness, and it also brought out her susceptibility to self-pity,” said Bachardy. ”She complained of loneliness but cited her own perversity as the cause. She was often too impatient to endure having other people around her, and she sent them away, only to find that she was alone again. Narrowing her eyes and fixing them on a slim white cat sleeping on a kitchen chair, she exclaimed: 'I never thought I'd wind up with a cat!'

”I'd imagined that in her movies she exaggerated herself for the camera. Now I realized she was keeping herself down.”

Another sitting took place on December 4, at Chuck Pollack's house on North Orlando Drive in West Hollywood. ”I kept my drawing simple and was determined not to worry about a flattering likeness. But the uncompromising face that gradually formed on the paper scared me.” The drawing shows precisely the steely look masking vulnerability that Bachardy describes, the familiar painted mouth a dark crescent, the set jaw, the heavy, weary eyes. Davis took one look at the rendering and declared, ”Yup-that's the old bag.”

The sittings went well enough for Bachardy to invite Davis to dinner with him and his lover, Christopher Isherwood. But she turned him down. ”I think she was, like a lot of bullies, also a coward,” Bachardy reflected. ”I think she was scared of meeting Chris-of being in company that might outdistance her.” There was no reason to think that Isher-wood would have been anything less than friendly to her. ”He wasn't a combative person, but she most certainly was. I think she was just afraid of meeting a literary figure who might make demands on her-I mean, just asking her what she'd read lately. She took cover when she felt threatened, and she didn't have any idea what he was like, and rather than find out, she just refused to come.”

”THEY SHOULD HAVE changed the t.i.tle to The Corn Was Green,” Emlyn Williams quipped of the ill-fated Miss Moffat, Joshua Logan's 1974 musical adaptation of Williams's play.17 Originally planned for Mary Martin, Miss Moffat became a Bette Davis vehicle after Martin's husband, Richard Halliday, died suddenly and Martin withdrew. Logan sent a script to Katharine Hepburn, who, according to Logan, ”felt it wasn't right for her.”18 (Hepburn did go on to film George Cukor's nonmusical film adaptation of The Corn Is Green in 1979.) Williams, Logan, and the composer Albert Hague then drove to Weston, Connecticut, where Davis was living in a house she called ”My Bailiwick,” and pitched the idea to Davis, who agreed to do it after hearing the songs. ”She thought it was her answer to Katharine Hepburn doing Coco,” Chuck Pollack explained.19 The show's topical, mid-1970s gimmick was to s.h.i.+ft the setting from the Welsh mining town to the South, and to turn Morgan Evans into a young African-American. Davis was more than interested. ”We had numbers of conferences, talks on the phone, and I began to realize her true brilliance, her originality of thought,” Logan wrote in his memoirs.20 Logan's account of the tanking of Miss Moffat is credible, albeit in a self-serving way. He begins by insisting that he cast Bette Davis in a musical and expected her to speak her songs the way Rex Harrison did in My Fair Lady, but by his own account he didn't tell Davis about this strategy until well into the show's development-whereupon, to Logan's apparent astonishment, Davis responded contrarily and testily. She insisted on singing, he reported.

Two weeks into rehearsals she changed her mind. One of her numbers was called ”The Words Unspoken Are the Ones That Matter.” ”Without any warning, she began to act the song-gave it the full Bette Davis hot talent-and the cast and I were moved to tears and applause. . . . None of us could have believed then that she would never perform it that way again.”

When Miss Moffat was ready for its first run-through, Logan invited more than a dozen people to come and watch, including some of the show's investors. The problem was, he didn't bother to inform his notoriously high-strung star. Davis reacted poorly to the surprise audience and, no surprise, ended up giving a terrible performance.

That's when the first hysterical symptoms appeared: Bette started walking around with a p.r.o.nounced limp. The next day she saw a doctor, who suspected a slipped disk and had her check into Columbia Presbyterian. ”As it turned out, we never really found what was causing her pain,” Logan noted, unable to imagine that one source might have been himself.

Davis's doctors put her in traction for three weeks, but after a few days she called Logan, invited him to the hospital for a visit, and told him that she wanted to continue with the show. The hospital actually permitted them to schlep a piano into her room so she could work on her songs.

Rehearsals continued without the show's star for another week, after which the company took a two-week break before setting up shop in Philadelphia for the first tryouts. Bette, released from the hospital, was able to perform the first preview as scheduled on a Friday night in early October. As Logan described it, she ”entered without her script for the first time and got an ovation at the end of the performance that I had never heard before for anyone. The entire audience rose as one, calling out, applauding, whistling, cheering, and they would have gone on for an hour had she allowed them to. But she bowed slightly and left the stage, only to be forced to return three or four times before they would quiet down. It was almost like a revivalist meeting.”

Davis gave another great performance on Sat.u.r.day. ”Her music was handled in a much better way,” according to Logan. ”She spoke a bit, sang a bit, spoke a bit, sang a bit, close to the way we had agreed.” Robbie Lantz agrees that Davis was on target in Miss Moffat: ”I saw it in Philadelphia. She was good. She was always good. She was sometimes over the top-she needed a good director-but she was unendingly interesting.”21 But, Logan claimed, Miss Moffat's opening night-Monday, October 7, 1974-was disastrous owing to an acute attack of stage fright. Davis mumbled lines and repeated lyrics or skipped them altogether, he writes. ”She forgot dialogue she had never forgotten before, then giddily repeated what she had just said. At one point she turned to the audience and said, to our horror, 'How can I play this scene? Morgan Evans is supposed to be onstage. Morgan Evans, get out here!' ” Dorian Hare-wood, playing Morgan, is said to have rushed onto the stage ”prematurely, as he knew, and a surprised Bette then turned to the audience and said, 'I was wrong. I want you to know that. It wasn't his fault.' The audience, under her spell, cheered and applauded and laughed all through it, forgiving, even enjoying, any slip, any mistake. Bette went on. 'It was my own stupid fault, and Dorian had nothing to do with it. Go back, Morgan, and we'll start over.' ”

Later in the show, a child actor, thinking that she needed help, whispered one of her lines to her. ”Don't you tell me my line!” Bette shouted at the kid. ”I know it! You're a naughty little boy!”

Things improved, however, climaxing on Thursday evening with a truly magnificent performance. Logan went backstage to see her after the final curtain and found her ”in a state of euphoria. The audience could always get her into this mood. In her dressing room she told me how much she loved the play, how she wanted to tour it all year and then play at least a year in New York and a year in London, and she said, 'And then we'll make the picture. We'll make this whole picture all over again, with music.' ”