Bette Davis (35 page)

Accompanied by Bobby and the nursemaid, the Sherrys repaired to a rented house at Lake Arrowhead to celebrate New Year's Eve, 1949. Although Bobby timidly suggested holding the festivities in the early evening, Bette seemed appalled at the idea of a New Year's party taking place at any time other than the stroke of midnight. She also had very specific ideas about how they were to celebrate: with paper hats, party favors, and decorations, which Bobby was

ordered to purchase and set up in the living room. Meanwhile Bette, all frantic nervous energy, went out with Sherry to the movies to see Twelve O'Clock High. In their absence, Bobby, who had spent a lifetime tirelessly laboring to please her difficult older sister, worked herself up into a frenzy of delight over the impending New Year's celebration. She rushed about the living room, excitedly putting up the decorations, arranging and rearranging the noisemakers and party hats so that everything would be just right when Bette returned.

What neither Bobby nor the nursemaid could have known (until they heard Bette ranting about it later) was that Bette and Sherry had had a violent fight at the movie when she repeatedly goaded him with remarks about how attractive she found one of the film's actors, Gary Merrill. The couple continued to quarrel bitterly all the way home.

Minutes before midnight, as Bobby waited in the front hallway to witness the look of pleasure on Bette's face when she saw the elaborate party decorations, the elder sister threw open the front door, glanced contemptuously about the living room, and shrieked, "You didn't do it right!"

Bette swiftly tore apart all her sister's work: the place settings, the hats and noisemakers, the lovingly arranged cakes and sweets, everything. "We'll just have to wait another hour while I do it over myself!" the actress angrily declared. Knowing how much all this had meant to Bobby, the nursemaid cast a nervous glance in her direction. Clearly unable to handle her sister's heartless cruelty, Bobby appeared to have gone "back into her shell like a little turtle."

"She hadn't told me she was going to a party," Sherry explained to reporters in April 1950, after his coming to blows with Bette's co-star in Payment on Demand, Barry Sullivan, caused Bette to move for divorce again. The occasion had been a combination wrap party and early forty-second birthday celebration for Bette, on April 3, at the RKO commissary, after which she and Sullivan had gone off to talk and drink in the dressing room.

"When she didn't come home to dinner, I called the studio," said Sherry. "Everyone else had left the party and there was no answer in her dressing room. I was worried. I drove out and found her. The studio gateman let me right in. She refused to go home. I was mad. I was jealous. She said I was a fool, that it was my imagination, that nothing happened. I blew my top. Any husband, any red-blooded man would have done the same."

"Where's your sense of humor?" asked the thirty-eight-year-old Sullivan, inviting Sherry to join them for a drink. "We're just relaxing."

"I don't want to hit you," Sherry replied. "You have to be photographed tomorrow.''

"Don't let that bother you," said Sullivan, a moment or two before the jealous husband knocked him down.

Bette, meanwhile, had summoned a trio of studio policemen; but they kept their distance when the bodybuilder warned that he would hurt them if they came too close. When one of the guards tried to sneak up from behind, Sherry caught him and told him to get back with his friends.

Finally, Bette agreed to leave with her husband; but when she got into her chauffeur-driven automobile, Sherry warned the driver that he planned to tail him all the way back to Laguna Beach. If they tried to elude him, he would ram them from behind.

The next morning, Bette silently departed with B.D. and the nursemaid, leaving Sherry to tell reporters:' 'My wife is a troubled, mixed-up girl. She has never been really happy. She is not alone in this. All artistic people have great problems. I tried to help her as much as I could, but I can't go any further alone. I am too close to her and I lack the knowledge. If she would join me in consulting my psychiatrist, Dr. Frederick Hacker, I am positive that our marital problems could be worked out. But whether she continues with me or not she ought to have the treatment. If she does not, she will be a miserable woman all her life."

"Dear boy, have you gone mad?" Edmund Goulding warned Joseph Mankiewicz, who was set to direct Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve. "This woman will destroy you, she will grind you down to a fine powder and blow you away. You are a writer, dear boy. She will come to the stage with a thick pad of long yellow paper. And pencils. She will write. And then she, not you, will direct. Mark my words."

The source material for Mankiewicz's loquacious backstage drama had been Mary Orr's short story "The Wisdom of Eve," which IWentieth Century-Fox story editor James Fisher had spotted in a back issue of Cosmopolitan magazine and passed on to Mankiewicz as "something unusual." Based on an incident in the life of stage and screen star Elisabeth Bergner, who had once foolishly taken a guileful young actress under her wing, Orr's story focused on understudy Eve Harrington, who employs her cunning to deprive an aging Broadway actress of her stage role—and her husband.

An aficionado of theatrical lore and personalities, Mankiewicz, on April 29, 1949, urged Fox production head Darryl Zanuck to purchase the Orr story as a potential vehicle for Susan Hayward.

Ten months later, in February of 1950, with the writer-director's enthusiastic approval, Zanuck signed Claudette Colbert to play the flamboyant leading lady—rechristened Margo Channing by Mankiewicz, whose screenplay had very substantially fleshed out the character and oiled her tongue.

Not long afterward, when Colbert suffered a herniated disk that compelled her to withdraw reluctantly from All About Eve, there was talk of hurriedly replacing her with Gertrude Lawrence or In-grid Bergman. Speed was of the essence, as filming was set to begin in mid-April at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, whose management was able to make the premises available for a brief time only.

When both Lawrence and Bergman were ruled out, Bette Davis's name came up as a possible Margo Channing, but she was then in the midst of filming Payment on Demand at RKO and unlikely to be finished in time for the mid-April start date. In addition, Bette was known to harbor considerable ill feeling toward Zanuck. In 1941, when she had resigned as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the furious Zanuck had warned Davis that she would never work in Hollywood again. This accounted for the actress's grim satisfaction when, nine years later, Zanuck offered her All About Eve.

Bette would co-star with Gary Merrill, the bushy-browed, faintly simian thirty-four-year-old actor over whom she had quarreled with Sherry on New Year's Eve.

RKO agreed to expedite the production schedule for Payment on Demand, and Zanuck signed Bette in early March, with shooting set to begin in San Francisco on April 15—less than two weeks after she left Sherry (had she deliberately provoked the fistfight on the RKO lot?) and announced her intention to seek a divorce.

In April 1950, accompanied by her daughter, B.D., governess Marion Richards, and a bodyguard to protect them all against Sherry, Bette arrived in San Francisco to shoot All About Eve. When the governess took B.D. to the Curran Theatre, where filming was under way, they would watch Bette "flirt like crazy" with Gary Merrill. The actor was married, but he seemed flattered to find himself the object of the star's ardor. Before long Davis and Merrill began spending nights together at the hotel, while Bette's daughter shared a room directly below with Richards. The governess recalls hearing the actress's bed "going up and down" all night.

When Sherry sent a conciliatory telegram from Laguna Beach,

begging her to call off the divorce, Bette sarcastically read the telegram aloud, to the howls of an appreciative audience that included Gary and fellow cast members George Sanders and Anne Baxter. Despite her repeated claims that she was terrified of her estranged husband, Bette seemed oddly anxious to flaunt her sexual relationship with Gary, almost as if she longed for Sherry to hear about it and react. To avoid giving Sherry ammunition in the divorce case should his lawyers secure the testimony of Bette's bodyguard, Merrill usually made some perfunctory effort to leave Bette's room before the bodyguard arrived in the morning. On one occasion, seemingly desperate for someone to acknowledge that Gary had spent the night, Bette summoned B.D.'s governess to her room moments after the actor had gone; the smell of his sweat still hung in the air. When Richards arrived, she was embarrassed to discover a stark naked Bette Davis standing beside the rumpled bed whose creaky springs had kept governess and child awake for much of the night. As Bette smoked and talked about inconsequential matters, without making any effort to put on a robe, Richards decided to focus her eyes on Bette's face and to pretend that everything was quite as it should be.

"I'm forty and maybe a bit more—I have had a highly successful and gratifying public identity, which, since age four, has also functioned as my private identity, but which is not me—and when that public identity, that alias, ceases to exist, which will be any day now, I just don't know what the hell will be there in its place—and I love a man who, in turn, can love only the identity which I am about to lose because he has never known any other as me." Thus Joseph Mankiewicz characterized Margo Channing's crisis in All About Eve, as she ponders how to respond to the affections of her younger lover, director Bill Sampson (Merrill). The crisis seems obliquely to have reflected Bette's own, as (by her own account) she wondered with whom Gary Merrill was falling in love that April in San Francisco: Bette Davis or Margo Channing.

With her fondness for beginning a role by discovering the character's externals, Bette instandy seized on Mankiewicz*s description of Margo as * 'a woman who treats a mink coat like a poncho'' as key to the character's frisky, easygoing, unmistakably Tallulah-esque glamour.

Although Mankiewicz and Davis adamandy denied it, Margo looks, sounds, and acts so much like Bette's husky-voiced doppel-ganger that it is difficult to believe the effect was entirely unintentional. Hitherto Bette had merely appropriated Bankhead's stage

roles, claiming them for herself—and for posterity—on-screen; now she seemed to snatch the rival actress's soul as well.

Mankiewicz introduces Margo Channing in a silent soliloquy that allows Davis to establish her character's pungent personality through the deftly choreographed movements of her eyes. Davis's opening shot derives its satisfying rhythm from the interaction between drama critic Addison DeWitt's acerbic voice-over narration and the play of Bette's eyes as she listens to an old actor's long-winded speech (mostly unheard by us) before Margo's nemesis, Eve Harrington, receives the Sarah Siddons Award. The camera has been scanning the dining hall of the Sarah Siddons Society as DeWitt introduces us to a number of the film's principal characters; we are still watching producer Max Fabian when we hear Margo's name uttered for the first time—dramatically anticipating the cut to Davis.

For a moment her heavily lidded eyes remain downcast, tantaliz-ingly inaccessible—until the critic recalls Margo's first stage appearance. Thereupon Bette slowly, majestically looks up, a spare gesture of astonishing power and intimacy (and considerable irony: although Margo's gestures seem to respond to the critic's remarks, she cannot hear them—they are directed to us).

One can think of few other screen actresses since the silent era capable of making so exhilarating an entrance by means of the eyes alone.

Henceforth, although there is a good deal of other byplay (the lighting of a cigarette, the pouring of a drink), the beats of the shot are subtly punctuated by Davis's eyes, glancing modestly downward (when the critic alludes to her nudity onstage at the age of four); and up again, opening wide and holding in place for a long silent moment that italicizes DeWitt's final remarks on Margo's stardom.

Again, in a succeeding shot, moments before Eve accepts her award we cut back to Margo Channing: eyes downcast and head slightly bowed to conceal die tempest within.

Here as elsewhere in All About Eve, in her portrayal of a woman's struggle to master unruly feelings Davis proves herself capable of modulating her dramatic effects as she had scarcely done on-screen in years.

There are lapses: principally the familiar tendency to rant. But more often than not, Davis holds us with fine bits of physical business that crisply express the tension between emotion and restraint. Dressing to go down to her party, Margo learns from her faithful assistant, Birdie (who detests Eve), that Bill has been downstairs

for twenty minutes without coming up to see her. There follows a wonderful mute dialogue between them: not a word more needs to be spoken; Margo knows he has been talking to Eve. An eloquent gulp of her drink tells all. Unwilling to disclose too much of her pain to Birdie (who is well aware of it anyway), Margo slowly makes her way to the door. Hardly does she close it behind her, however, when she breaks into a mad dash along the hallway and down a staircase, stopping abruptly before she comes into potential view of Bill and Eve. As Margo composes herself, Davis allows us to see the tumultuous emotions surging into her fingers, whose sudden strange, writhing movements make them resemble an octopus's arms.

Much as she had feared, there indeed are Bill and Eve, deep in conversation. Promptly dismissing the younger woman, Margo frantically propels herself about the room, ostensibly checking that all is ready for her guests: cigarettes; lighters; and a covered dish of candies, to which (in a brilliant piece of byplay invented by Mankiewicz) she returns three times as she and Bill argue about Eve. The first time she lifts a candy to her mouth, decides against it, puts it back. More pacing, and again she finds herself drawn to the candy dish—only to summon the will to resist once more. The third time, however, overcome by feelings of desperation that have been building throughout the sequence, she flings the candy in her mouth.