Bette Davis (38 page)

Bobby's speech was like nothing B.D. had ever heard before. And for Bobby, too, her own words came as something of a shock, so different from the meek subservience to Bette that she had shown all her life. Bobby's elation was short-lived, however; Bette stormed into the room, ftirious that Bobby had dared to raise her voice to B.D. Within seconds, Bobby's newfound strength disappeared entirely. With Bette marching about, angrily demanding to know what had been going on, it seemed to B.D. that Bobby actually shrank physically. "Yes, Bette. Yes, Bette," Bobby muttered softly, retreating into a corner while the indignant Bette held forth.

Easy as it was for Bette to control her financially dependent younger sister, the actress appeared to take perverse pleasure in humiliating her before the children and, worse, before Bobby's own daughter, Fay. With B.D. for an audience, Bette loudly and angrily reminded Fay of all the money she had spent through the years to keep Bobby in a series of mental hospitals. Suddenly the actress launched into a heartless impersonation of Bobby in the midst of one of her breakdowns, bouncing off walls and weeping noisily and without restraint. "That's what your mother was," Bette screamed when she was done, "and she'd still be there today if it weren't for me!"

Although Bette regularly alluded to her sister's bouts of mental illness, for many months she refused to acknowledge that there might be something wrong with her adopted daughter, Margot, whose disturbing behavior included an attempt to choke a pet kit-

ten, as well as nightly screaming fits that lasted until dawn. Initially, each instance of aberrant behavior was met with some new rationalization. When the child bolted in an apparent attempt (the first of many) to run away from Bette, Gary soothed his anxious wife with the remark' 'How fast Margot runs.'' And when, waiting in a parked car while Bette chatted with a neighbor, Margot suddenly started to strip off her clothes, the neighbor assured Bette that children often did such things. Even the attempted strangulation of the cat was explained away by someone's pointing out that, having yet to develop a moral sense, children are often cruel to animals.

However much she was capable by day of denying her adopted daughter's condition, at night, as Margot screamed and shook the bars of her crib in a third-floor bedroom, Bette could hardly put her out of her thoughts. She later said that Margot had seemed "driven," her inexplicable cruelty and restlessness "almost as if she was possessed by a demon." Bette recalled often praying to keep her temper—and her sanity. But her prayers were not answered; the actress was often observed shrieking uncontrollably at Margot, almost as if she thought she could "bully" the child into being normal. Margot's incessant repetition of words—"Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi"—drove Bette to distraction; as did Margot's random attacks on Michael, whose baby hair she yanked out in tufts. Once, Bette discovered two-year-old Margot and one-year-old Michael near the well-stocked bar, where she and Gary often collided. To her unutterable horror, Bette saw broken glass everywhere and Margot watching her brother weep at the sight of his bloody arms and hands.

Bette began endlessly to photograph Margot, in what appears to have been a last desperate attempt to assuage her anxieties. In hopes that the camera would somehow yield the truth about her adopted daughter, she relentlessly probed Margot's face for some sign of normality. Bette may have taken comfort, however fleeting, in many of these images, for the photographs tend to show a sweet, lovely, angelic child without the faintest sign of anything disturbing or abnormal about her. But then one comes upon two very different pictures (what motivated Bette to take them?) tucked away among the others. The first shows Michael cringing facedown in a beach chair, as Margot pummels him from above; the second focuses on the little boy as he screams in pain from her blows.

After two-year-old Margot wreaked havoc in her room, smashing everything she could get her hands on, Gary took her to Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Doctors conducted a week-long battery of tests before they pronounced the Merrills' adopted daughter

"brain damaged." A number of possibilities raced through Bette's thoughts. Perhaps Margot's condition had been caused by drugs her unwed mother had taken in an attempt to induce an abortion; perhaps it had been the excessive pressure of the doctor's forceps during a difficult delivery; or perhaps the trouble dated back to a nursery accident soon after her adoption. Whatever the cause of Margot's condition, one of the doctors recommended that the Merrills send their daughter to the Lochland School in Geneva, New York, where she could be educated with other retarded children.

Margot's condition placed a new strain on Bette and Gary's already troubled marriage. Identifying Margot as his daughter (while B.D. was Bette's), Gary bristled at her being labeled brain damaged and retarded. When they visited the Lochland School, Gary recoiled at the sight of two children with Down's syndrome, who were part of the group Margot would join should she be sent there. By contrast with these children, with their broad, flattened skulls and epicanthic folds at the eyelids, Margot's outwardly normal physical appearance was all Gary could think of.

Back at Witch Way, Bette huddled with Ruthie, who urged her to return Margot to the hospital where she had been born almost three years before and annul the adoption. If Bette refused to follow her mother's advice, it was less out of compassion for Margot than for fear of the bad publicity that would result were she simply to give the child back. And so it was that, with Bette campaigning to send Margot to Lochland, Gary suddenly announced that Bette could do as she pleased with B.D., but his daughter was to remain at Witch Way, where she belonged.

Although Gary believed that Margot would be best served by their all acting as if nothing were wrong with her, he agreed to hire a full-time nurse and to restrain her at night with a straitjacket to keep her from hurting herself out of bed. But even Gary would reluctantly come to admit that the arrangement was not feasible. Even in a normal, reasonably tranquil and supportive household, Margot would have had considerable difficulty. In the fractious, violent, alcohol-soaked atmosphere of Witch Way, a child with Margot's severe disabilities probably never stood a chance.

When at length the decision was reached to send Margot away to school, Bette seemed to withdraw emotionally from her adopted daughter, as if in preparation for putting the child out of her thoughts. Dori Brenner points out that for Bette, Margot was basically "eliminated" from the age of three. "What Bette didn't want to think about, she didn't think about," says Brenner. As the time for Margot's departure approached, Bette, declaring herself

unable to face the eight-hour drive to Geneva, proposed that Gary take the three-year-old there himself. Bette would say goodbye to her in Maine. Nor did Bette change her mind when Gary rented a plane for the trip; she was, she reminded him, afraid to fly.

In Gary's absence, Bette told herself that life at Witch Way would be much better now that Margot was gone. Yet no sooner did Merrill return than it became obvious that sending the child away was only going to exacerbate the tensions between them. Bette hoped that Gary's agreeing to adopt B.D. would bring him closer to her ' 'real" daughter and soothe his pain over Margot. Instead the adoption seemed to have the opposite effect. Gary resented B.D. all the more, as if Bette had pressed him to adopt her daughter in place of his own.

"It was a regular thing," says B.D. Hyman of the violence she suffered at Gary Merrill's hands. "He was drunk most of the time, and he'd just decide he was bored and was going to create some action. So he'd precipitate something. . . . Whenever he was around, there was no way of relaxing. It was like having a pent-up animal that at any minute was just going to suddenly zip around and attack." B.D. quickly learned that even so simple an action as crossing the kitchen could pose formidable difficulties if Gary was seated at the table, reading the newspaper. If she walked directly past Merrill's chair, he might suddenly jump up, drop the paper, and smack her with his fist—for no apparent reason other than that beating her and her mother seemed to give him pleasure. Violence was just as likely if she took the long way across the kitchen, quietly making her way around the other side of the table. Then, too, Gary might jump to his feet, angrily asking Bette's daughter why she was "creeping around," before he threw himself in her path and knocked her to the floor. At least the child would have braced herself for those beatings. Far worse were the attacks that occurred in the middle of the night when B.D. would be awakened by the sound of Gary kicking open her bedroom door. "He was bored, felt like hurting something, and I was there," says B.D., whose repeated complaints about Gary's brutalities her mother steadfastly denied.

For all her immense passion for B.D., Bette remained curiously unprepared to face up to Merrill's increasingly abusive treatment of her daughter. B.D. recalls: "It was a very strange mixture. I was her possession. I was the daughter, the child she finally had, the one thing that couldn't leave her. She owned me. I was hers, and she was obsessively doting." Still, when it came to B.D.'s complaints about Gary Merrill, Bette stubbornly refused to listen

to her daughter. "She would not acknowledge that his brutality extended to me," says B.D. "She just couldn't accept that. She didn't want to part with him, and I was her precious darling. Mother had her own reality. She was very powerfiiUy able to separate the truth from what she believed—this was no problem for her. So she denied in her own mind that he ever hurt me—that made it okay. She would just say, 'No, you're making this up. This isn't possible. I wouldn't let that happen to you. Forget it. You obviously fell down the stairs.' "

Merrill appears to have done his best to shield his adopted son from the family violence, reportedly going so far as to lock the boy in his room to keep him from observing the beatings to which Bette and her daughter were subjected. In time, as one Merrill relative observed, the boy seemed automatically to retreat to his room at the first sign of conflict between his parents. "Come with me— we'll go up here," Michael resignedly told a young cousin who was visiting Witch Way for the afternoon, when, as always, Bette and Gary began to quarrel. Michael calmly escorted the cousin to an upstairs bedroom, whose door he kept locked until the fighting seemed to subside. "Okay, now we can go out," said Michael, evidendy accustomed to handling circumstances such as these.

Before long, in her frantic attempt to deny her husband's abuse, Bette found herself paying people to keep silent about events in the Merrill household. Sorely in need of funds on account of Gary's disinclination to work on a steady basis, Bette had resumed activity in Hollywood, where she appeared, to little effect, in the occasional bad film: Henry Koster's The Virgin Queen, in 1955; Daniel Tara-dash's Storm Center and Richard Brooks's The Catered Affair, both in 1956. The Merrills were living temporarily in Emerald Bay, California, when, confident that Gary would be absent for the weekend—he was out of state and not due to return until the following week—B.D. invited a girlfriend to sleep over. There could be no question of B.D.'s having friends to her home when Gary was about, to humiliate her with casual nudity and drunken violence. Saturday night, B.D. and her friend were quietly amusing themselves when B.D. heard Gary swagger in the front door and begin fighting noisily with Bette. Within moments, Merrill had found the girls and administered a particularly severe beating, which left B.D.'s friend badly bruised and emotionally shaken. Clearly, she could not remain in the house for the rest of the night, and it fell upon Bette to return the tearful child to her parents. Desperately pleading with them not to summon the authorities, Bette offered to pay a large sum for their discretion. Although the furious parents

were anxious to report the incident to the police, and possibly even to file a lawsuit, they finally agreed to consider Bette's offer, but only after a physician had examined the child to determine whether Gary had abused her sexually. B.D. never again risked inviting friends.

On October 9, 1957—four months after she had filed in Santa Monica Superior Court for "separate maintenance'' from Gary Merrill, whom after seven years of marriage, she charged with "extreme cruelty"—Bette wrote a wistful letter to Robin Brown about her feckless recent attempts to start a new life for herself and the children. Not long after walking out on Gary, Bette had signed to appear on Broadway that fall in a dramatization of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, rehearsals for which would take place in Los Angeles. Having rented a house in Brentwood, Bette opened what she presumed to be a closet door and plunged headlong down a ladder-type stairway to the basement.

A concussion and severe spinal injuries compelled her to withdraw from the play, send the children back to Maine (where they would live with Gary's brother Jerry), and move into Ruthie's house on Sleepy Hollow Lane in Laguna Beach. Bobby and her seventy-two-year-old mother would care for Bette there while she lay in bed waiting for her back to mend and wondering—as she told Robin-why she had not yet lost her mind.

By Christmas, she and the children were back together at Witch Way. And life with Gary resumed as in the past. "He came close to killing her a couple of times," says Bette's daughter, who had taken to hurling herself between them when Gary seemed to grow too dangerously violent with her mother. According to B.D., on several occasions a fearful Bette fled to Robin's house in Connecticut, where Gary, enraged at finding himself abandoned, quickly tracked her down. In the middle of the night he rushed about outside the house, drunkenly banging on windows and shouting, "I want to see Bette! I want to see Bette!" while Davis screamed uncontrollably, "I don't want to see him!"

One of Bette's favorite possessions was a jangling gold charm bracelet that Farney's mother had given her. At the onset of anxiety, Bette liked to fiddle with the gold charms on her right wrist, swiftly counting them one by one, as if to check that each was in its proper place. More often than not, hardly would Bette finish counting when she would start all over again: a comforting anodyne process, whose speed and duration appeared to correspond to the degree of