Bette Davis (39 page)

panic she happened to be experiencing. (This obsessive checking and counting with the fingers as a means of allaying anxiety suggests the tantalizing possibility that two of the actress's signature on-screen gestures—the expressive opening and closing of the palm and the rapid grazing of the fingertips with the thumb—may have had their origin in a form of compulsive finger-counting.) On May 6, 1958, moments before Bette, B.D., and Bobby set sail from New York for Europe, as they waved goodbye to Robin from the deck of the ocean liner Independence, Bette's charm bracelet slipped off her right arm and fell onto a wooden buffer between the ship and Pier 84, at West Forty-fourth Street. Although Robin feared that it had disappeared into the water, a longshoreman retrieved it. As the Independence was already on its way out to sea, the steamship company dispatched a tugboat to return the bracelet to the frantic movie star.

Which was just as well; as indicated in Bette's fretful, uneasy diary for this period, the journey that followed gave much cause for anxiety. W 7 hile Michael stayed in Maine with his father, "the three B's" (as Bette called them) were off for two months in Europe. Davis had signed on to portray a decrepit bedridden countess in The Scapegoat, with Alec Guinness, in England; and to appear in a cameo role as Empress Catherine in John Paul Jones, to be shot in Spain. Bette had high hopes for neither film, but they were all she was being offered at the moment, and as she never tired of announcing, she needed the money to support herself and her children, as well as her mother and sister. Amid a good deal of apparently self-soothing talk about her makeup (always a sure sign that Davis was feeling especially anxious), the fifty-year-old actress quietly recorded her daily panic, even terror, at the thought of appearing on-camera.

When Gary Merrill married Bette Davis, shortly after the making of All About Eve, he perceived her as being at the peak of her career. He made no bones about looking forward to the prestige and publicity he would enjoy as her husband. ' 'But at the point she divorced him," her daughter points out, "her career was kaput. That's basically the reason he didn't put up much of a fuss." For her part, Bette probably would have remained with Merrill for some time still; but as B.D. reached puberty and blossomed into what her friend Gay Bersteeg calls "a gorgeous Amazon," Gary's rough treatment of her—the senseless beatings and random attacks—took on a disturbing new aspect. Perceiving herself as a young woman who could no longer tolerate Gary's violent abuse, B.D. astonished

her mother with an ultimatum that, friends say, the unusually self-reliant twelve-year-old would have been perfectly capable of carrying out. "Mother, I know it's not all the time, but I'm not going to live this way. Either he goes or I'm going to find somewhere else to live. I can't face this again."

The Merrills had meantime signed on to do a cross-country tour of The World of Carl Sandburg, in which they read selections from the author's poetry and prose. According to Jerry Merrill, although husband and wife lived apart during the tour and scarcely spoke to each other, onstage they made every effort to give no sign of the marital discord that had caused them to separate.

Gary Merrill failed to appear in Superior Court in Portland, Maine, on July 6, 1960, when, seeking a divorce, Bette told Judge Charles A. Pomeroy of her husband's "cruel and abusive treatment' ' of her for the past ten years. Declaring the children's welfare her primary concern, Bette argued the impossibility of their enjoying "a normal and wholesome life" so long as they were permitted to see their mother regularly "treated in this manner." The husband's brutalities were attested to by Bette's friend Robin Brown, who told Judge Pomeroy that she had observed Gary abuse Bette in front of the children, who were palpably affected by it.

With Gary presumably gone from her life, Bette appeared to pin her hopes for emotional fulfillment on B.D., as Ruthie had once done with Bette. "Bette just worshiped B.D.," explains Ellen Batchelder, whom Davis asked to stay with her at Witch Way that summer after the divorce. To an old friend like Ellen, who had long ago observed the dynamics of Bette's turbulent, passionate relationship with Ruthie, history appeared to repeat itself in the all-too-familiar fights between Bette and her own spirited, willful, much-beloved daughter. It seemed to Ellen's daughter Gay Ber-steeg that at times Bette's adoration could be so intense as to require B.D. to "defend herself" against it. "Bette would run your life if you let her, so B.D. had to somehow come up with what B.D. is," says Bersteeg. As for Margot, when she visited at Witch Way that summer, on vacation from the residence where she spent most of the year, Bette went off with B.D. and Gay, leaving the younger girl with Ellen and the maid. Margot ran upstairs in disappointment, and soon after Bette and the girls had gone, Ellen heard "a terrible commotion" on the second floor. Rushing upstairs to see what was wrong, she traced the loud, crashing noises to the music room, where, to her horror and amazement, she discovered Margot furiously hurling records in every direction to express her anger at having been left behind.

* * *

"Homemaker," said Bobby, on July 1, 1961, when asked her mother's most recent position of employment. Asked how long "Mrs. Davis'' had held her current position (after her divorce from Otho Budd, Ruthie had reverted to Harlow's name), Bobby answered, "Life." Ruth Favor Davis, her death certificate tells us, was seventy-five years old when she died of coronary thrombosis after a serious illness of three months. Unable to maintain the house on Sleepy Hollow Lane in Laguna Beach in which Bette had installed her in the 1940s, Ruthie had recently moved to an apartment on Ramona Street near Bobby. (Bette was paying for both quarters, having long ago accepted that her mother and sister could not live under the same roof.)

Struck by the realization that Ruthie had died on the anniversary of her first wedding, Bobby wondered aloud whether it might be possible to bury their mother beside their father in Maine. Bette told her not to be so stupid: didn't Bobby know that the empty grave beside Harlow was reserved for another woman? And so it was that on Monday, July 3, 1961, Ruthie was buried at Fairhaven Memorial Park in Orange, California. Bette later told Robin that when the silver casket that had been Ruthie's deathbed request disappeared into the earth, she could scarcely believe that she would never see or speak to her mother again.

"Goddamn you!" Bette told Ellen Batchelder, to whom she complained of her loneliness in this period. "When you got married I gave you and Dean six months, and here you are still together—and IVe been through four husbands already. Goddamn you!"

"You know very well that you deliberately chose the four dumbest men you could have," her old friend replied. "Why don't you find a nice man to support you for a change?''

Instead Bette remained as preoccupied as ever with Gary Merrill, with whom, now that they were divorced, she made a great point of maintaining what she called "amicable relations," despite (some might say because of) his tongue-lashings and beatings to which he continued periodically to subject her. Nor, court records show, did he spare B.D., at whom he drunkenly hurled obscenities during a Father's Day dinner in Los Angeles, to which Bette had invited him on June 18, 1961. Accusing Bette's daughter of having the mind of a seven-year-old, Merrill raved that B.D. would never be able to attract a man. When a call came for B.D. during his visit, Merrill grabbed the receiver from her and hung up, lest she be distracted from his boozy tirade. As Gary raised his hand to strike her, the

fourteen-year-old rushed out of the room. He then turned his rage on her mother, who almost certainly would have continued their "amicable relations" had her ex-husband not publicly humiliated her—or so Bette seemed to perceive it—by embarking soon afterward on a much-publicized aflair with Rita Hayworth.

Reports of the couple's drunken revels (which included Merrill's repeatedly battering Hayworth, much as he had beaten Davis and her daughter) drove Bette to file a motion in Maine's Cumberland County Superior Court to deprive her ex-husband of the right to visit B.D., Michael, and Margot. Although Bette claimed that this was to protect them from their father's "physical violence when in a state of intoxication," it was no secret that her real motive was to punish Merrill for his "notorious association" with the Love Goddess, which Davis cited in court papers as "a source of great embarrassment and humiliation to the children."

Things were scarcely any better when Bette's turn came to work with Corsaro. As the elegant and ethereal Margaret Leighton rejoined her fellow players in the bleachers, Bette strutted past the renowned English actress without a word or glance of acknowledgment. Taking her place beside the tall, gaunt, darkly handsome Patrick O'Neal, whose evasive, haunted eyes barely hinted at his raging fear and insecurity, Bette bristled with impatience when Corsaro, noted for his distinguished work with the Actors Studio, made a few preliminary comments to try to help them "feel their way" through the text. Before the director quite realized what was happening, Davis had hurled herself behind him, where, grabbing his shoulders and laughing raucously, she made a great show of rubbing her breasts against his back, in her latest attempt to undermine his authority before the other actors.

Bette's fierce antipathy toward Corsaro harked back to his early opposition to Tennessee Williams's having offered her the role of Maxine Faulk. What Bette had failed to understand, however, was that Corsaro had been opposed not to her per se but to her being cast principally because she was a major star whose name would ensure the acquisition of a good theater and attract the large theater parties so important to a play of this sort. Although the fifty-year-old Williams continued to be widely regarded as America's finest living playwright, the author of The Glass Afe-nagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire had not had an unequivocal hit on Broadway since Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in 1955. The plays of the intervening years— Orpheus Descending, Garden District, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Period of Adjustment—had caused some commentators to speak of an artist in decline: a perception Williams was especially keen to overturn in 1961 with what he suspected was his best play in years, perhaps the last great drama he had it in him to write.

By any standard, the other major female role in The Night of the Iguana, the itinerant artist Hannah Jelkes, who, accompanied by her ancient grandfather, Nonno, appears suddenly at Maxine's hotel, was clearly the more substantial (the "star part," as Patrick O'Neal calls it). But even when Katharine Hepburn declined to portray Hannah on Broadway, there was never any question of offering the richer, more rewarding role to Bette. Williams believed that, given the rigorous demands of the complex, lyrical passages he had written for Hannah, Davis would almost certainly have proved inadequate to the task of supporting the text. Even in her very best films, the playwright found nothing to suggest that Bette Davis could give Hannah's long, poetic speeches the subtle shades

of color and expression they required. Not a word of this, of course, did Williams or his go-between, Violla Rubber, communicate to Bette, whose participation in the production was all the more essential without Hepburn. From the first, there were persistent whispers at the Actors Studio, where the Iguana production had been in development for two years, that in the earliest stages of Williams's discussions with Davis, the actress had not been shown a full-length text, only Maxine's lines, which, of course, would have made it impossible for Bette to gauge the weight of her role relative to others.

"When she discovers that the play is not really about Maxine Faulk, we're going to have a great storm on our heads!" Frank Corsaro groaned after his initial tense meeting with Bette, who, seeming to view Iguana as the big comeback her career desperately needed just now, mistakenly believed Maxine to be a role as important as Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie or Blanche Dubois in 4 Streetcar Natned Desire. When, having studied Iguana in its entirety, Bette expressed her as yet vague disappointment to the playwright, Williams, in the interests of getting his play on, was not above allowing Davis to believe he might indeed do something to "develop" her character. Corsaro, by contrast, could give her no such assurances: hence Bette's violent resentment of the director, her need to contradict and humiliate him at every turn. Intimate with every nook and cranny of Williams's play after two years of working with it at the Actors Studio, Corsaro knew that Maxine Faulk was—and could only be—the "tertiary role," the drama's principal conflict being the war between Hannah Jelkes's spirtuality and the carnality embodied by the defrocked minister, T. Lawrence Shannon. Through it all, the ribald widow Faulk is litde more than a colorful onlooker to this furious battle of souls at the Costa Verde Hotel: hardly what Bette had had in mind or been led to believe.

In one of the Hollywood melodramas in which Bette Davis had achieved stardom in the thirties and forties, The Night of the Iguana would have been a simple love triangle, with Maxine and Hannah fighting each other for the man they both love. Assuming that this was how, in rewrites, Tennessee Williams was going to "fix" the play in her favor, Bette sought to help things along by trying to launch a Hollywood-style feud with the actress playing Hannah. "We don't have to be friends to work together, do we?" Davis lashed out at Margaret Leighton when Corsaro introduced them, shortly after the thhty-nine-year-old English actress arrived in New York on October 3. Bette's acute self-consciousness about her own

coarse, gouty physical condition—the result of a decade of hard drinking and brawling with Gary Merrill—caused her to view the slender, graceful, fine-featured actress, fourteen years her junior, with scarcely concealed jealousy. Although she lacked Bette's far-reaching fame and box office appeal, Leighton was unquestionably the more seasoned and expert stage performer. At the Old Vic, she had appeared to great acclaim in Arms and the Man, Richard HI, King Lear, Cyrano de Bergerac, Henry IV, and Uncle Vanya. From the first, much as Davis tried to bait the rival actress to create a passionate conflict between them that would somehow carry over into the play, Leighton serenely resisted being drawn into a catfight with Bette, whose indelicacies she wisely preferred to ignore.

This led Bette to set her sights on thirty-three-year-old Patrick O'Neal, who, by his own account, was then every bit as much at the end of his rope as the tormented ex-minister he had been portraying for the past two years in workshop productions of Iguana. Having come under the sway of the notorious Dr. Max Jacobson and his dangerous "speed" injections, the ambitious young actor was himself perilously close to a real breakdown when without the faintest encouragement Bette Davis suddenly seized upon him to replace her recently divorced husband. Bette was coy and girlish at first when O'Neal, twenty years her junior, visited her rented East Seventy-eighth Street town house, where, to his amazement, he glimpsed Gary Merrill silently, mysteriously entering the front door and disappearing upstairs. Unable to attract O'Neal's interest, Bette soon turned ugly, publicly venting her rage at him and his dedication to the Actors Studio. Accustomed to arousing Gary Merrill's passion by taunting and provoking him to hit her, Bette seemed to have been trying to do the same with Patrick O'Neal, who in fact tended to recoil fearfully from her abuse.

Davis's attempts to send O'Neal over the edge had been escalating since the day at the Algonquin Hotel, in early October, when the Iguana company held its first, informal reading of the play. This appeared to be the moment when, whether or not she admitted it to herself, Bette felt oddly shut out, grasping that the most vital onstage action was the wistful, achingly beautiful dialogue Williams had written for Hannah and Shannon. Much as Bette struggled to conceal her anxieties, Leighton and O'Neal could hardly fail to be alarmed by the star's flailing, almost palpable desperation. Before long, during calamitous rehearsals at the Shubert Theatre that Frank Corsaro recalls as "nightmares," it became obvious that, madly marching back and forth behind them, Bette was going to do everything she could to undermine her co-stars. This left the

director little choice but to meet secretly with Leighton and O'Neal at night in the darkened theater to work on Shannon's long key encounter with Hannah without Davis there to harass them.

Perhaps Bette had heard about the secret rehearsals, perhaps she was jealous of what she imagined to be O'Neal's burgeoning relationship with Margaret Leighton, or perhaps she was hysterical about the play, Williams's failure thus far to come up with the promised rewrites, or her own mortifying inability to get a handle on the small role she already had. Probably it was a combination of these factors that caused her to explode suddenly, without apparent provocation, while she was rehearsing with Corsaro, whom she accused of having colluded with Patrick O'Neal and the Actors Studio to destroy her. "She went crazy and paranoid, and accused Frank and me of hurting her, of sabotaging her performance," recalls O'Neal. As he watched Bette Davis rant and curse at him, O'Neal's thoughts began to spin with images of murder: thoughts that caused him to flee the rehearsal lest he grow violent with the shrieking actress. "It was just so outrageous that I went crazy," says O'Neal, "and ran right out of the theater, down Shubert Alley, and went straight to Max [Jacobson] and got a shot. As I used to say, 'In order not to kill her, I got the shot.' I was so outraged!"

"Ha!" barked Davis, before rushing angrily from the theater, to which she vowed never to return. In the days that followed, Bette, cozily ensconced in her friend Robin Brown's eighteenth-century house in Westport, Connecticut, declined to stir from the tiny upstairs guest bedroom, with its low sloping ceilings, piles of books, and cluster of familiar photographs, when, again and again, Tennessee Williams called to beg her to come back.

On October 30, the train carrying the Iguana company to Rochester was hurtling upstate when, to his perplexity and chagrin, Patrick O'Neal found himself summoned to Bette Davis's Pullman compartment. After putting Tennessee Williams through the torments of the damned by refusing to take his frantic calls or acknowledge the flowers with which he garlanded her Connecticut refuge, "La Davis' '—as the playwright privately called Bette—had finally agreed to come back to work in time for the out-of-town tryouts. She had proved her point; the production's fate obviously depended on her, and she insisted that her own role be enlarged and Margaret Leigh-ton's diminished accordingly. Having reminded everyone that the contract for Broadway's Royale Theatre, where Iguana was officially set to open on December 28, had been signed with her name as guarantee and that large theater parties had been amassed strictly

on the basis of her participation, Bette made no bones about expecting to receive the rewrites from Williams as soon as possible.

To shore up her position further, Bette decided to enlist Patrick O'Neal as her ally, offering to help his career by taking him under her wing as protegd-—and lover. Hence the message from Bette, inviting him to her private compartment. Scarcely having spoken to her since she had hysterically accused him of conspiring to destroy her, the actor proceeded through the train with considerable trepidation. But when he slowly opened the door, O'Neal was astonished to see, not the shrieking, foul-mouthed harpy he had expected, but Margo Channing, the warm, seductive, engagingly vulnerable, unabashedly adult woman Davis had portrayed with such flair in All About Eve. Averting his gaze to the moonlit landscape flitting past behind her, O'Neal heard Bette offer him a drink, then begin to talk in her most velvety tones about their upcoming stint at Rochester's Auditorium Theatre, where, she pointedly reminded him, their dressing rooms were to be on one side of the theater and Margaret Leighton's on the other.

"Don't forget which side of the theater you're dressing on," she reiterated, catching his eye to make certain he comprehended her meaning. Comprehending only too well, O'Neal awkwardly excused himself before Bette could go any further with her planned seduction. Running through the train, the actor searched out the stage manager, to demand, "Put me on the other side!"

By the time the Iguana company rolled into Rochester, they were, as Frank Corsaro describes them, "an embattled group." Enraged and humiliated after O'Neal rejected her advances, Bette became increasingly agitated when she heard that he had moved to a dressing room next to Leighton's. To make matters worse, it became painfully obvious at the cavernous Auditorium Theatre that Bette lacked the vocal technique to work subtly and effectively in so large a house.

"The opening was a raucous kind of success," says Corsaro. "The audience laughed as if they were at a farce. We didn't know what kind of play we had.'' One thing the company did know was that, having come out onstage to acknowledge a thunderous ovation from her fans, Bette could hardly conceal her upset and embarrassment at evening's end when it was Margaret Leighton who received the loudest cheers of praise and appreciation; the applause for Davis was little more than polite.

Before everyone left for the opening-night cast party, Bette stumbled and fell. Although afterward she attended the party "ostensibly in good physical shape" (as Tennessee Williams's agent, Audrey

Wood, would recall), the next morning, with two sold-out performances to go, fellow cast members were shocked and disheartened by the sight of Bette being taken in a wheelchair to an ambulance. While some, like Wood, suspected that Davis's accident had been "subconsciously self-willed," Corsaro and others in the company questioned the seriousness of Bette's injury. "She just tripped over something, and it was an insignificant sprain which she turned into a major problem," says the director. "Rather than accept what it was, she got herself into a wheelchair. It was all her way of describing her rather embattled state. She was begging for attention, she was begging for relief. She was in panic, in total, absolute panic."