Bette Davis (37 page)

The interlocutory divorce decree went through without a hitch, and two days later, on Friday, July 28, having secured a Mexican divorce in the morning, Gary Merrill became Bette Davis's fourth husband that afternoon (nine days before Sherry married Marion Richards, on August 6).

"An hour after I had married him, I knew I had made a terrible mistake,'' Bette told her assistant, Vik Greenfield, years afterward. A sudden panic seized her as she and Gary began the long drive from Juarez, Mexico, to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Bobby and B.D. were waiting for them in a rented honeymoon cottage.

This probably accounted for Bette's tantrums along the way. "Each time we checked into a place," Merrill recalled, "something was wrong with it, and out we'd go. I'd be tired, saying, 'What the hell, it's a bed/ But no, it had to be better. Before the trip was over, my normally easygoing attitude was wearing thin, and I began to wonder."

"I'm horribly possessive," Bette told interviewer Gladys Hall in 1938. "I love the feel of things being mine. I could never adopt a child because I would have to feel that the child belonged to me, was my own flesh and blood or not at all."

But now, twelve years later, on their way to Gloucester in Bette's black Cadillac convertible, she lectured Gary on her desire to adopt a pair of companions for her " real'' daughter (much as Ruthie liked to say that she and Harlow had conceived Bobby to keep their first child from being spoiled). "Mother didn't adopt two children," says B.D. Hyman. "She bought them for me to play with, the way you'd go out and get a puppy for your child."

Although Gary went along with Bette's plan to speak to a doctor in Maine about acquiring the healthy child of an unwed mother, he stipulated that they adopt a boy first, and—if Bette wanted—a girl second.

"Wrong fucking sex!" Merrill recalled having shouted into the phone when, on January 11, 1951, Bette called him in Key West, Florida, where he was filming on location, to announce that, contrary to plan, she had adopted a five-day-old giii—whom they agreed to call Margot, after Margo Channing (the character Bette desperately longed to emulate now with Gary by recognizing that there was more to a woman's life than her career).

Bette and B.D. were staying with Robin and Brownie, her husband, in Westport, Connecticut, when Bette arranged to pick up Margot, whom she described as "a real live doll" and "a present" for B.D— as Bobby had seemed a gift from Harlow and Ruthie. "I

had to go into the living room and sit down and close my eyes," B.D. recalls, "and there was this big 'present'!"

Soon after little Margot's arrival, Bette began to notice that the baby cried a good deal more than B.D. had—and differently somehow.

Knowing Bette's tendency to whip herself into a frenzy by turning things over and over in her thoughts beyond the point of reason, friends reassured her that all children are different.

Back in California, the Merrills settled into a Malibu beach house, which Bette had insisted on renting immediately when she learned that Richard Barthelmess had once lived there. Although her husband assumed that this was because Barthelmess had been Bette's co-star in her first important film, Cabin in the Cotton, it is tempting to speculate that she may have been thinking of the press clipping about Barthelmess that her beau Fritz Hall had sent her in 1927. Preserved in one of the Victorian scrapbooks that Bette continued to cart about nearly a quarter of a century afterward, the article told of how, at Barthelmess's insistence, his fianc6e, Kath-erine Wilson, had abandoned her theatrical career to marry him: Fritz Hall's way of pleading with Bette to do the same.

Whether Bette was conscious of it or not, there was a certain irony in her selection of the Barthelmess house as the place where she would prove—or try to—that with Gary Merrill she could sustain both a film career and a family life.

At the Malibu beach house, Ruthie began to photograph the Merrills with their new baby. In the countless baby pictures Ruthie had once taken of Bette's "real" daughter, B.D., the child was almost always shown alone or with her mother, or—now and then—with Bette and Bobby: almost never with Sherry, whom Ruthie despised. By contrast, Ruthie's photographs of Margot for this period show her preponderantly with B.D., Bette, and Gary: the family Margot's adoption symbolized to Bette.

"She had hoped that she could have a regular family life," recalls Gary Merrill's brother, Jerry. "They adopted two children, and she hoped that this thing would work. And in the beginning, it worked pretty well. But it was very tough for her. . . . The only time Bette was ever happy, regrettably, was when she was working. It was sad to see it. . . . She tried as hard as she could to have a family life—I admire her for trying—but she couldn't handle it."

Bette's work in this period afforded her scant satisfaction. Because, by chance, All About Eve had been released before the inept Payment on Demand, Davis's departure from Warners had initially seemed to all the world a shrewd decision, providing Bette with the

opportunity to select fine projects like the Mankiewicz film. All About Eve seemed to presage a vital new phase in Bette's film career, yet nothing of the sort followed. Having failed to revive her credentials as a serious actress when she had had the chance to do so with her independent production company, now again she chose unwisely, appearing with Merrill in such worthless fare as Irving Rapper's Another Man i Poison and Jean Negulesco's Phone Call from a Stranger; and on her own in Stuart Heisler's The Star. For all Bette's insistence on the freedom to pick her own projects, as in the past the actress displayed an inability to use that freedom judiciously in the service of her art.

"I was singing away," said Bette on Sunday, October 19, 1952, in Detroit, "then all of a sudden somebody was slapping my face hard and a voice was saying, 'Get up, Bette, get up.' I had blacked out completely."

The occasion was the out-of-town premiere—at Detroit's Shubert Theatre—of the ramshackle musical revue Two's Company, in which, at her husband's instigation, Davis was set to open on Broadway in two months. As Bette prepared to make her entrance by popping out of a magician's box, she felt a sudden sensation of whirling—but then she heard her cue, leapt from the box, and had barely begun her first song, "Good Little Girls Go to Heaven," when she collapsed to the stage with what one witness described as "a terrific bone-jarring bang."

As fellow cast members stood about, frozen, a stagehand rushed out to drag her into the wings. Having observed all this from the audience, Gary Merrill—now on his way backstage—assumed that his wife had suffered a fatal heart attack.

Within five minutes of regaining consciousness Bette was back onstage, straightening her hair and her dress as she put the audience at ease by remarking,' 'Well, you couldn't say I didn't fall for you.

"On the musical stage she is less an actress than a personality," Brooks Atkinson would say of Bette in Two's Company when she opened in New York on December 15, 1952. "Miss Davis's personal valor is not a substitute for experience in one of the theatre's most exciting genres; and this episode in her career is likely to be a wounding one."

Since her mysterious collapse in Detroit, Bette had never entirely regained her stamina. For the first few weeks of the New York run, she required revivifying injections from Dr. Max Jacobson, or "Dr. Feel Good," as he was known.

By March, however, Davis had more wisely turned to a promi-

nent oral surgeon, Dr. Stanley Behrman, who, after removing an infected wisdom tooth, diagnosed her as suffering from osteomyelitis of the jaw: the painful bone disease that had caused Ruthie to collapse in East Orange, New Jersey, in the fall of 1922 (although in her autobiography, The Lonely Life, Bette oddly insists that before 1953, she had never heard of osteomyelitis). "Apparently, the infection has been spreading for months," the doctor told reporters, in anticipation of operating on the left side of Bette's lower jawbone. "It has been draining into her neck and shoulder, causing pain that was often severe."

Two days later, on March 10, Two's Company closed after eighty-nine performances.

Within the week, Bette underwent two and a half hours of surgery at New York Hospital, during which nearly half her jaw was removed, enough being left to allow all the bone to grow back. But that would take a year—during which Bette vowed to remain far from stage and screen, to allow her health to be restored.

fully quiet fourteen-room house, where only the ocean's roar could be heard, Witch Way seemed the picture of domestic tranquility. Bette appeared to be away, presumably having taken with her B.D., Margot, and young Michael Woodman Merrill, the son the Merrills had adopted in 1952 when he was five days old. At first glance, there was nothing to suggest that Witch Way, decorated with the same battered Yankee furniture that Bette's mother had purchased years before for Riverbottom, was a movie star's home. But as Gary poured a first round, the cab driver's eye alighted on an incongruous thirteen-and-a-half-inch-tall, gold-plated statuette, which he recognized at once as one of Bette Davis's Academy Awards. Gary saw the driver excitedly examining Bette's Oscar but said nothing about it, as the convivial, increasingly boozy conversation turned to other subjects. After several hours and a good many drinks, when the driver thanked Merrill for his hospitality and prepared to leave, Gary suddenly stopped him at the door.

"Here, take this home with you," he said, thrusting his wife's Academy Award into the bewildered man's hands. "We don't need this around here anymore."

Although early die next morning the cabdriver sheepishly returned the Oscar to Witch Way before Bette came home and discovered it was missing, perhaps in some strange sense Gary had been right; perhaps on some level Bette was anxious to be rid of the Oscar and all it symbolized, for she had plunged into the role of wife and mother with all the fervor and single-mindedness she had once applied to her greatest movie characterizations. But as so often with Bette's acting, it was the "externals" of home life that preoccupied her in Maine: the endless, obsessive cleaning and arranging, the overzealous preoccupation with minutely detailed household schedules, the enthusiastic participation in the PTA and other local groups, and the myriad domestic trappings with which Bette Davis struggled to create the guise of a happy, contented family.

But there was neither happiness nor contentment at Witch Way, at least not as most families would define those words. Family members like Jerry Merrill could see that an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, was the longest Bette could be with other people before the explosions started. On visits to Witch Way, as the hour mark approached, Gary's brother would pick himself up and head for another room to avoid the inevitable, often gratuitous brawling on which Bette and her fourth husband appeared to thrive. Although Bette and Gary clearly did not flinch from going head-to-head in front of others (and even seemed to enjoy having an audience), the

worst fighting took place when only the children were there to see and hear.

According to B.D. Hyman, Gary saw nothing wrong in beating up his wife; to him such violence was "perfectly normal." Nor, according to her daughter, did Bette object to Gary's brutalities-far from it. "Mother had this peculiar relationship with Gary," says B.D. "She liked being brutalized. I think it was the only way she could understand a male-female relationship. And Gary was certainly very obliging on that score."

As she had done with Sherry, Bette often sought to provoke Gary to the physical violence she appeared to confuse with ardor. She goaded him with reminders that he failed to earn as much money as she at acting and with merciless mockery of his inability to satisfy her in bed. As her daughter watched in horror and perplexity, Bette would shove and push at Merrill until he showed some interest at last and knocked her to the floor with his fist. Whereupon Bette would let loose bloodcurdling shrieks of pain, accompanied by seemingly desperate pleas: "Don't hit me! I can't stand it!" At such moments, difficult as it was for the child to understand, Bette seemed honestly to have forgotten that she had brought the beating on herself.

The Merrills often drew the children into their quarrels, with Bette tending to target Michael as her husband's surrogate, while Gary (by his own account) did the same with B.D. To Jerry Merrill, it seemed that Bette regarded Michael as primarily Gary's son. Indeed, she often made a great point of distinguishing between her adopted children and her "real" daughter, B.D., about whom she spoke in what her friend Don Brenner describes as a "totally different register."

Not surprisingly, perhaps in imitation of her parents' perpetual belligerency, B.D. was in the beginning frequently at odds with her younger brother. "I was a very overbearing older sister, apparently, '' she admits. ' 'I used to play dreadful tricks on him and take terrible advantage." Still, as far as Bette was concerned, "If I wanted to abuse my brother, that was perfectly fine—after all, she'd bought him for me." According to B.D., the boy "was told that he had no right to irritate Mother in any way whatsoever and no right to complain about anything I did to him."

Much as Bette had once done to Bobby, B.D. taunted and tormented her essentially helpless younger sibling until the day when, appalled at this vision of history monstrously repeating itself, Bobby worked up the courage to intercede on Michael's behalf. She, after all, knew what it was to suffer a spoiled older sister's ceaseless

abuse and to lack the protection of a parent who ought to have known better. Bobby had often observed B.D. gleefully exploiting Michael at Witch Way; but Bette had almost always been present, making it impossible for the eternally downtrodden Aunt Bobby to protest. On one occasion, however, Bette was nowhere in sight when B.D. hid one of Michael's toys, plunging the poor child into a fit of agitation. Accustomed as she was to Bette's undiscriminat-ing approval, B.D. was stunned when her usually silent aunt angrily took her to task for this latest act of cruelty.

"Hey now, this is not a way to behave," Bobby reprimanded B.D., with a firmness and resolve she had never shown before. "Your little brother is in there crying, and you have no right to do that. You just did something that was downright mean. You taunted him and hid his favorite toy and won't tell him where it is. He's frustrated and hysterical, and you have no right to treat somebody like that. So you'd just better get hold of yourself, young lady, or you're in big trouble!"