Bette Davis (36 page)

Long before Margo Channing tells her guests to fasten their seat belts, this small, significant gesture has given us ample warning that, indeed, it's going to be a bumpy night.

But what gave All About Eve its massive impact was less Bette's nimble and affecting portrait of Margo Channing than the film's watershed revision of the Bette Davis image. The most potent symbol of wartime female independence and self-sufficiency appeared suddenly to accept and even to recommend the retrograde sexual politics of the 1950s. Casting off the boldness and daring that Davis's powerful female characters had once adamantly insisted upon, Margo Channing loudly declared herself unable to live without her man: a declaration rendered all the more astonishing by Margo's vividly established sauciness and theatricality. At one fell swoop, in admitting that, yes, a woman must choose between happiness and a career, Margo seemed to undo all that Bette's gutsier characters had proved about a woman's capacity to function bravely and effectively on her own. Successful in the world as she may have been until now, Margo finally—wisely, the film insists—accepts that the time has come for this powerfal, independent woman to

stop fighting, step back, and let her husband take care of her. According to Mankiewicz's quintessential postwar male fantasy, for a woman to choose ambition and career over the man in her life is to condemn herself to the barren, pathetic, lonely fate of Eve Harrington. The hitherto headstrong, rebellious female like Margo who accepts domestic bliss with a powerful male protector is by far the wiser.

Had Claudette Colbert or some other actress portrayed Margo, All About Eve would scarcely have resonated as it did with "Battling Bette" in the role. Even before they had gone off to war, American men had been known to wince and recoil at the castrating viragos Davis portrayed on-screen; from the outset of her stardom, Bette's audience had been principally female. In the postwar years, the Davis image had seemed even more repugnant to these same American men—who rejoiced at Bette Davis's capitulation and disavowal of past follies in All About Eve, the first of her major films to exert a strong appeal on male moviegoers.

Still trembling, Bette seemed unsure of how to respond.

"I don't want these bodyguards here when I'm talking to you," Sherry went on.

"No," said Bette. "They have to—"

"I want them out of the room!" he snapped, angry again.

Bette instructed the bodyguards to wait outside while she and her husband talked for the first time since her lawyers had asked the Santa Monica court, on May 10, to grant custody of B.D. to the actress, with Sherry retaining "reasonable rights of visitation."

Sherry had recently poured out his heart in a letter to Bette's friend Robin, in which—amid a sudden spate of references to God and prayer and how he and Bette belonged together—the beleaguered husband announced that he had decided not to fight the divorce. Still, he declared himself confident that the divorce from Bette was just God's way of helping them and that God would soon no doubt bring them back together as husband and wife.

When the bodyguards were gone, Sherry quietly explained that he was lonely and wanted to talk things over. Bette suggested that he take their daughter to die zoo for the afternoon. Perhaps they could have their talk afterward. But when he returned with the child several hours later, the security men blocked Sherry from entering as they briskly ushered his daughter indoors. One of the guards handed Sherry a note from Bette, declaring that she was afraid of him and did not want him to come around anymore. He could have two hours with B.D. every Tuesday and Thursday, but no more.

As always in their relationship, Bette seemed by turns genuinely frightened of her irascible husband and perversely anxious to stir him up. Sherry was living in their house on Ocean Way in Laguna Beach when Bette invited Gary Merrill to Laguna to meet Ruthie, who, on April 27, had stunned her daughter by eloping to Las Vegas with a sixty-three-year-old retired pottery packer named Otho W. Budd. (Ruthie would divorce Budd eighteen months later on the grounds that he had proved "indifferent" to her.) Although it was natural for Bette to want to see the man her mother had married, bringing Merrill along was a curious decision. As if recklessly determined to provoke a confrontation with her husband, or perhaps just exhilarated by the danger of it all, Bette was observed about Laguna Beach with Gary, carousing in his yellow Oldsmobile convertible, and kissing and laughing late at night outside Ruthie's beach house.

Sherry apparently was still oblivious of his wife's liaison with Gary Merrill, but Gary's wife, actress Barbara Leeds, learned of the affair when, at a party soon after the All About Eve company

returned from San Francisco, he drunkenly boasted of his hopes to marry Bette. On April 30, Mrs. Merrill left the couple's Malibu beach house in anticipation of filing for divorce in Los Angeles Superior Court on June 7.

With Gary's wife gone, Bette wanted to spend some time with him in Malibu as soon as they were finished filming All About Eve. Their week at the beach was marred by heavy drinking and raucous nightly quarrels, as B.D. and her nursemaid tried to sleep in an adjoining room.

Even during the day, when considerably less alcohol was consumed, things seemed to spin wildly out of control. One afternoon, Bette took a knife down to the beach to scrape mussels from the rocks. Trembling with excitement, she brought the shellfish back to the house, where she and Gary cooked them in an enormous pot, all the while talking about how hungry they were. There was a peculiar air of urgency about her as, barely able to wait until the mussels were ready, she began removing them from the pot, greedily stuffing them in her mouth and beckoning to Merrill to do the same. Bette devoured the mussels far too quickly, gulping them down almost as if she were starving. And Gary seemed equally insatiable, barely uttering a word as he pulled the shellfish from the steaming pot and crammed them in his mouth lest Bette get more than he. Gary was hovering over the stove, about to scoop up a fresh portion, when, at the table behind him, Bette suddenly doubled up and became violendy ill, screaming with agony as she spewed undigested mussels on the kitchen floor. As the governess watched in horror, Bette shook and wept for a few minutes before Gary disgustedly picked her up in his arms and deposited her in the tiny bedroom, where she lay for hours, groaning that she was dying.

"You're not my type—I'm not interested in you," Marion Richards replied when, on the verge of being divorced from Bette, Sherry began to write love letters to the astonished young nursemaid—who dared not mention it to her employer.

Although Bette had planned to establish residence in Nevada in order to divorce her husband there, by this time she had become enthralled with the symbolism of getting a "quickie" divorce in Juarez, Mexico, on Independence Day, July 4.

"Marion, will you do me a favor?" Bette asked the governess before leaving for Mexico. "B.D. 's father wants her to go down to Laguna Beach while I'm away. Will you take hei?"

"Oh, no, I don't want to!" said Richards, afraid to explain why.

"Marion, please. It's only going to be for about four or five days."

"No, no. Couldn't Barbara . . . couldn't she do it?"

"No, Marion. My sister has to take care of Fay. Please, I want you to do it. Don't worry, it won't be so bad."

"Well, okay."

"Good! I'll call Sherry and tell him. I'm sure he'll be delighted!"

With the nursemaid still beside her, Bette called Sherry, who, calculating that Bette would do exactly the opposite of whatever he appeared to want, pretended to object to the idea of Marion's being sent for die weekend with the child.

On July 4, when reporters knocked on his door in Laguna Beach for a reaction to Bette's having just divorced him, Sherry, instead of launching into one of his usual maudlin tirades, exhibited rare felicity: "I shall set off a great big firecracker in honor of my own independence."

Besides his daughter, waiting for him inside was Marion Richards, who, contrary to her expectations, suddenly found herself "a little bit flattered'' to have Bette Davis's ex-husband take an interest in her. "I realized there was a kind of sweetness about him," says the governess, to whom Sherry opened his heart with stories of his brutal, derisive father; of being repeatedly bullied and beaten up in youth; and finally of his decision to become a bodybuilder in order to protect himself.

With Bette and Gary set to go to New England for an extended holiday, the governess had already given her employer notice that as soon as they left, she planned to seek another position, in her native Pasadena. But now, when Sherry stunned and perplexed her by suddenly proposing marriage, Richards--who says that she had yet to enter into a physical relationship with him—found herself scarcely able to reply.

"No one is very happy, really, about a divorce," Bette told reporters at the Los Angeles airport upon her return from Mexico. "It's the end of one era in your life and sometimes the beginning of another. Who knows?''

1 'Now that you're divorced, do you plan to marry again?'' called one reporter.

"One thing at a time," she replied. "I have no plans to marry anyone."

"How about Gary Merrill?" shouted another voice from the crowd.

"They always say an actress is going to marry someone right

away." Davis laughed. "You can say I am not romantically interested in Gary. This is just part of the folklore of Hollywood."

Hardly had she left the airport, however, when her cab was observed to stop a quarter of a mile away, so that Bette could transfer to the yellow Oldsmobile convertible in which Gary Merrill had been waiting for her.

"Give me the phone," Sherry said to Marion when Bette called the next day to summon the nursemaid, who fumbled for words to respond. Sherry wasted no time happily informing his ex-wife that he and Marion were going to be married (although according to Richards, she had yet to accept his proposal).

"You son of a bitch!" Bette shrieked into the phone. She was still screaming and cursing wildly when Marion got back on the line—whereupon Sherry took the receiver out of Richards's hand and replaced it on the hook.

"After all the recent divorce unpleasantness was over," Sherry told reporters on July 6, "I suddenly realized that here is a girl who could make my life happy. She is beautiful and calm and spiritual and wants the really worthwhile things in life. She has no complexes."

Asked whether he and Marion had told Bette about their marriage plans, Sherry replied, "I'll leave her a note to let her know about it."

Suddenly it was being said about town that in the innocent-seeming young nursemaid with 4 4 the face of an angel,'' Bette Davis had discovered her real-life Eve Harrington. There was also speculation that Sherry's involvement with the twenty-two-year-old had been going on for some time and that Davis's affair with Gary Merrill was nothing more than a cover-up for her shame over having been abandoned for the much younger woman. To judge by Bette's frantic reaction in the days that followed, the abundant publicity that was being heaped upon her ex-husband's wedding plans must have made them seem like a debasing travesty of her own relationship with Gary.

Further evidence of Bette's state of mind at the time is provided by some of the women who had known her since youth. On several occasions, before stopping themselves to correct their "error," these women talked interchangeably about the marriage of Bette's husband and a nursemaid, Marion Richards, and her father's marriage to the nurse Minnie Stewart. Was memory playing a trick, confounding these two painful experiences, thirty-two years apart in Bette's life? More likely, their almost inevitable intermingling

points up the similarities between the two events: similarities that, whether she was conscious of it or not, must have had a powerful impact on Bette.

Thus, perhaps, the distorted version of Sherry's second marriage that Bette would tell their daughter, B.D., in years to come. According to this account, Sherry had fallen in love with Marion while he was still happily married to Bette, who—like Ruthie with Harlow—seems to have been the last to find out what had long been going on, when her husband suddenly ran off with the nursemaid.

To this Bette added the spurious detail of Sherry and his mistress having tried to take B.D. with them when they fled, and of their having been "foiled in the attempt" by another member of the household staff: clearly a reference to the supposed "kidnap" attempt in April 1950, which even Bette appeared at length to have discounted, but also—it is tempting to conjecture—to what may have been an abandoned daughter's lifelong fantasy that when Harlow ran off with his nurse, he had really wanted to take Bette along but had somehow been prevented from doing so.

It is impossible to know what the fate of Bette's relationship with Gary Merrill might have been had Sherry not provoked her by announcing his impending union with Marion Richards. Gary was still legally married to Barbara Leeds, who—presumably to protect herself financially—was insisting on a California divorce decree. The Merrills' court date was set for July 26, 1950; even with both parties working to expedite matters, their divorce would not be final in California until a year after that.

Bette's frenzied state of mind rendered her scarcely able to wait so long. Her desperation to beat her ex-husband to the altar seems to have led Merrill to arrange to appear as scheduled in Los Angeles Superior Court—where all financial and property claims would be settled according to California law—then to rush off to Judrez for a "quickie" divorce.

Davis's vexation may be imagined when, the day before Gary was due in court, Sherry and Marion were said to have secured a marriage license in Orange County (coincidence or well-timed provocation?); and even more when, in court on July 26, in the presence of a gleeful Hollywood press corps, the current Mrs. Merrill strongly implied that twenty-seven-year-old Anne Baxter had been Gary's first choice for an affair during All About Eve. According to Mrs. Merrill, Gary had seized on Davis only after the younger actress proved to be—in Gary Merrill's words—"madly in love with her husband," actor John Hodiak.