Bette Davis (49 page)

On repeated occasions, as actor Vincent Price recalls, "Lillian did come back at Bette,'' whom she impishly pretended not to hear when she did, so that director Lindsay Anderson was constantly obliged to repeat Davis's lines. ' 4 I think this rather surprised Bette,'' says Price, to whom it seemed that Davis had vastly underestimated Gish's strength.

"She must be a very unhappy woman," Gish sighed to Ann Sothern as they watched Bette lash her tail and paw the ground with rage. And another time, Gish was heard to remark: "That face! Have you ever seen such a tragic face? Poor woman! How she must be suffering! I don't think it's right to judge a person like that. We must bear and forbear." Lindsay Anderson—noted for the films This Sporting Life, If . . , and O Lucky Man!— had correcdy assessed David Berry's charming, if rather slight, screenplay as requiring a certain' 'mythic casting,'' lest the enterprise dissipate into a mere "film for TV." The exceptionally fine cast Mike Kaplan assembled made this by far the best assignment Bette had had in years: a prospect that left her secretly "petrified," her agent Marion Rosenberg recalls. As always, however, Bette worked hard to conceal her fear (from others and perhaps from herself) with the usual off-screen histrionics.

"Bette was so ridiculous in so many ways," says Mike Kaplan.

He repeatedly deferred to such pointless demands as having her Winnebago turned so that it would face away from the other actors' trailers lined up besides hers—Davis's sole reason being that "she just wanted to be different."

1 'All this kind of behavior went out twenty-five years ago!'' Ann Sothern laughs. "There aren't movie stars like that anymore. Actors just get on with it.''

Cast and crew quickly learned that to offer Bette one's arm to lean on was like showing a red rag to a bull. When, in order to shoot beside the water, cast members had to descend a particularly steep hill, Gish and Sothern were carried down on a sedan chair. Davis would not hear of it. "I'll get down myself!" she snapped, unwilling to show what she perceived as weakness. With the producer beside her, Bette was slowly, precariously making her way down to the shore when she stumbled and wrenched her already fragile hip. "She was in pain all that night," Kaplan recalls, "and all because she didn't want to be like the others."

Unlike other cast members, Bette insisted on attending the rushes every evening. More often than not, she arrived in a state of intoxication that caused her tongue to wag all the more uninhibitedly. "She'd talk all the way through them," recalls Harry Carey, Jr., "raising Cain and yelling, 'That should have been different! Why did you allow that?' "

Lindsay Anderson had spoken to Mike Kaplan of the sense of dread he experienced every time he saw Davis coming up the road toward him; but in his dealings with her on the set, he displayed what Carey describes as a John Ford-like "toughness." In one scene, where Bette insisted on getting up and walking over to look out the window while saying her lines, Anderson objected, "But, Bette, your character is supposed to be blind."

It was an exchange not unlike the violent quarrels she had had in 1941 during the filming of The Little Foxes, as William Wyler struggled to explain that an actor's movements on-screen must be motivated by character, while Davis stubbornly persisted in her fondness for eye-catching movement and gesture for their own sake. More than four decades had passed since The Little Foxes, but to judge by Bette's argument with Lindsay Anderson, she had learned nothing in the interim.

"This scene needs some movement!" cried Davis. "I will not sit here in this chair!"

"I want you to," said the director.

"Well, I won't!"

"Bette, let's get one thing straight," said Anderson. "There's one director on this picture, and that's me."

A torrent of expletives poured from Bette's lips as she limped off the set—only to return quietly some ninety minutes later, after which, without further discussion or ado, Davis followed the director's orders.

And she was wise to do so. Thanks to Anderson's impeccable direction, The Whales of August was Davis's finest performance in decades, a reminder of the subtle effects and restrained expressive style that had distinguished her acting at its best and had been woefully absent from her film work for far too long. No sooner had they finished filming, however, than Bette learned that she and Lillian were to be billed on a single card. Swelling with fury, Davis insisted that she deserved her own card, before Gish's. "It was all nonsense," says Kaplan. "She wanted first position and wasn't embarrassed about asking for it. With Bette, all that stuff meant a lot."

Publicity for the film posed similar difficulties. First, Bette refused to attend the film's world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Gish and Lindsay Anderson were scheduled to appear. At Cannes, The Whales of August was hailed as a historic occasion: a meeting of two great actresses, representing the silent and the sound eras. While critics extolled both performances, slightly more attention and acclaim went to Gish. "There was a bit more interest in Lillian than there was in Bette,'' says Kaplan,' 'and she thought we were planning it that way." Angrily declining to attend the film's American premiere in New York on account of its having been scheduled to fail on Lillian Gish's birthday, Davis publicly blasted both Anderson and Gish (and took a few gratuitous potshots at the film), even as she was announcing plans for her own premiere of The Whales of August, at the Deauville Festival in September.

All of which had the effect of shifting press attention from the film's artistic merits to the mad, one-sided feud between Davis (who insisted to reporters that her refusal to attend the New York premiere had been "simply a matter of self-preservation") and Gish. It was a disaster for a small, serious film of this type, which needed exactly the right media attention to discover its natural audience. After many years of churning out great numbers of inferior films, Bette had finally found herself with a director and a company of actors capable of operating at a level of artistic enterprise appropriate to her abundant gifts as an actress. Whatever discord may have existed on the set, after the reviews she and the film received

at Cannes there could be no doubt of what they had all achieved together and—more important—what The Whales of August was about to do for Davis's critical reputation. Bette's talk of "self-preservation' ' aside, that she proceeded to run her own presumably long-awaited triumph into the ground by willfully subverting the film's publicity suggests a fundamental negativity, a need to attack and demolish so intense that she was willing to destroy herself in the process.

After filming The Whales of August, Bette went to Paris to spend the holiday with Kathryn, who was working there for the young American fashion designer Patrick Kelly. Much as she had lamented to Ann Sothern and others what B.D. had done to her, the actress's other favorite subject appeared to be the loss of her devoted assistant. "She was always saying, 'I should have introduced her to more people. I should have done this for her and I should have done that for her,' " Sothern recalls.

In the spring, Kathryn returned to accompany Davis on the rather curious publicity tour for the memoir This TV That. From first to last, Bette accorded Kathryn a bewildering prominence in the publicity. There was something exceedingly odd about the spectacle of the decrepit movie star appearing on television accompanied by the obscure, mostly silent young woman dressed in a starlet's skin-tight black satin dress with one bare shoulder and a single red satin opera length glove. Who was she? Why was she on a talk show when it was Bette doing all die talking?

On one program where the assistant did not appear, Bette insisted on showing her picture to the camera and singing her praises in absentia. Bette seemed somehow to be promoting her assistant's career—but as what? "If Kathryn had been an aspiring actress or someone that Bette was grooming to be something, it would have been different," says Marion Rosenberg. "But she wasn't. She was exactly what she was. What Bette was extolling her for being basically was a servant."

There was a strange subtext to Bette's often embarrassing public appearances with the young woman, whose devotion to her during her illness and afterward the actress seemed never to tire of recalling. Although Davis promoted This TV That as an account of her illness, it was no secret that if people were rushing to read the book, it was for Bette's response to My Mother's Keeper. Except for a few evasive, unsatisfying pages, Bette hardly addressed her daughter's book in This TV That; not so on the publicity tour, which sometimes seemed to be addressed to no one on earth but B.D., whose younger, more devoted, glamorous, and slender replace-

ment Bette endlessly pushed forward as proof that, yes, she had a new daughter now.

There was considerable upset among Bette's friends about the garish outfits by Patrick Kelly that she wore on talk show interviews with Joan Rivers, David Letterman, and others. Announcing that Kathryn worked for Kelly—who happened to be in New York now in search of backers—Bette appeared on the Letterman show in a dress Kathryn was said to have brought from Paris: a short, form-fitting black knit with tiny buttons in many colors over the left breast to give the effect of a large heart. Her hat was a black felt beanie with an upturned brim cut into crownlike points, on which were sewn more buttons, red, yellow, blue, and white. An outfit that might have appeared whimsical on a twenty-year-old model seemed merely gaudy and ridiculous on the sickly seventy-nine-year-old actress. One friend compared Bette's costumes of this period to the silly little suit worn by the monkey who accompanies an organ grinder.

Following the This TV That tour, Kathryn went back to France, where Bette joined her in September to attend the Deauville Film Festival. On September 2, 1987, Davis had changed her will: Kathryn Sermak was designated to split Bette's estate with adopted son Michael Merrill, now an attorney in Boston. Sermak returned to the United States to live and work with Bette, whom she faithfully accompanied until her death.

*'What's the worst thing that can happen to you? You come home and find that Bette Davis has married into the family,'' says director Larry Cohen, describing the premise of Bette's final film, Wicked Stepmother, whose script Cohen wrote with Davis in mind. "This family leaves their old widowed father behind and goes to Hawaii for two weeks. And when they come back, the first thing the father says is, 'I got married!' 'Oh my God, to whom?' Then Bette Davis comes out and says, 'Call me Mom!' "

Following her luminous performance in The Whales of August, Davis's agreeing to appear in Cohen's low comedy was a mistake from the outset. There was probably a certain perverse element in her decision to do Wicked Stepmother, comparable to the way she had sought to subvert and cancel out The Night of the Iguana with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? But it was also the case that Cohen seemed to be the only person in Hollywood willing to hire her at the moment. According to Marion Rosenberg, Robert Lantz, weary of the actress's abuse, had dropped Bette from his agency's client roster, leaving her without her longtime agent to bring in

offers. To make matters worse, Davis's ugly and irrational public display regarding The Whales of August left a good many producers afraid to work with her lest she stage a similar self-immolation during the publicity for their film. Although Davis sought futilely to attach herself to movie versions of Steel Magnolias and Driving Miss Daisy, her sole concrete offer was Wicked Stepmother, which came with the incentive of providing a credit as associate producer for Kathryn. After Bette had made a commitment to appear in the film, her new agent, Michael Black at ICM, advised her against the ill-conceived project; but she pressed on anyway, hoping that Cohen would start shooting on April 5,1988. Bette told the director that when the press asked how she was going to spend her eightieth birthday, she wanted to shoot back: "Working."

As it happened, filming was postponed, and Bette celebrated in seclusion with Kathryn at a hotel in San Ysidro. The assistant hand-lettered a birthday dinner menu with a border of tiny red hearts, the word "Darling" scrawled in large letters on the bottom. To judge by Kathryn's copious photographs of the wizened actress, one can only wonder who ate Xhtfoie gras et caviar, saumonfume, roast squab with bacon, spinach flan, pomme de terre, and gdteau speciale listed on the menu. Five years earlier, surrounded by friends and professional associates, Bette had seemed robust, optimistic, and on top of the world at her seventy-fifth-birthday party. Not so at her eightieth, which she passed with her paid companion, and a magician and a flute player hired to entertain them in their hotel suite.

Looking at the small, shriveled figure seated forlornly on an immense bed as her large, incredibly sad eyes gaze into Kathryn's camera, it is not too much to suppose that Bette may already have been wondering whether she was in any condition to make yet another film. Indeed, when she and Kathryn appeared on the set of Wicked Stepmother, it became painfully obvious that her physical and mental capacities had diminished to a point that would make it difficult for her to complete the film satisfactorily.

"Don't you dare give me my line!" Bette shrieked when Larry Cohen's script girl gently tried to help her. "I'm famous for never forgetting my lines! How dare you!"

"That was tough," the director recalls, with evident sympathy for Davis's plight. ' 'She didn't know her lines. She was great when she was talking, but when she was doing the lines that were written, she'd slow down quite a bit. You could see that she was having trouble and that she was angry at herself because she was having trouble."

To Cohen's further dismay, the bridgework in Davis's mouth had broken and kept slipping as she struggled to speak her lines. Repeatedly she tried to conceal her tongue's efforts to readjust the false teeth. "She had to pause in the middle of a line to shift her teeth," the director explains. "This distracted her to such a degree that she couldn't concentrate on what she was doing." But still, Davis pretended that nothing was wrong, blithely smoking five packs of Vantage cigarettes a day and making flirtatious remarks to the director and other men on the set—until one incident made it impossible to keep up the pretense that all was as it should be.