Bette Davis (40 page)

None of which seemed to have been a very great secret in Rochester, where, the day after an understudy replaced Bette in both the matinee and evening performances of The Night of the Iguana, one local newspaper reported that Davis was "suffering from a wrenched knee as well as a secondary part."

"I fully expected that we might actually close in Rochester," says Paula Laurence, the wife of Iguana producer Charles Bowden. "I didn't see how we could possibly go on with this."

Meanwhile, having failed to make Patrick O'Neal her ally, Bette suddenly turned her attentions to the director, to whom she placed a conciliatory telephone call from the hospital. "I was her only 'pal' by that time," says Corsaro. "She spoke to me in a manic way about the rest of the cast, who were all against her. She was violent about them, and yet she had a kind of manic joy about it all."

Davis's failure to appear at two out of three scheduled performances in Rochester, coupled with resentment over the star's "obstreperous behavior" in New York, drove exasperated company members to meet secretly to discuss the problem. "We realized that the play's future was at the mercy of a woman who was obviously manifesting personal illness,'' Corsaro explains. -' A decision had to be arrived at whether or not she should be replaced, and of course everybody agonized." When the meeting concluded, with Corsaro's impassioned plea that they cast a new Maxine Faulk as soon as possible, word of it drifted to Bette, who, from her sickbed, angrily declared her intention to continue with the Iguana company on to Detroit, Chicago, and finally Broadway. From this point on, however, Davis notified the management, her being required to hobble about on crutches would preclude train travel with the others, hence the chauffeur-driven limousine she required.

One can only imagine Bette's astonishment when, leaving Roch-

ester, she was ushered into the limousine, to discover that, in what Audrey Wood described as "a most kind and thoughtful gesture," Margaret Leighton had volunteered to ride with her to Detroit.

Frank Corsaro was meeting with Tennessee Williams in the rear of the deserted Shubert Theatre in Detroit to discuss the twenty to twenty-five minutes of cuts, many of them from Maxine's lines, that die director deemed necessary before they took Iguana to Broadway. Both men were rendered speechless by the sight of a seemingly delirious Bette Davis, who, clutching a basin of water and a rag, appeared suddenly onstage. Oblivious to their presence in the furthermost reaches of the auditorium, Bette wandered about the moldering tropical veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel for a moment or two before abruptly dropping to her knees to scrub the floor with a queer, obsessive fervor.

"I didn't believe what I was seeing!" Corsaro recalls. "We were absolutely transfixed and puzzled. It was really very pathetic—and even rather touching.'' Neither man suspected, as only Bette's closest friends and family members knew, that when her emotions were most disordered, she often sought to pacify herself through frenzied, apparently pointless cleaning rituals, such as the one Williams and Corsaro had happened upon. Listening to the actress cry softly as she washed the veranda, Corsaro felt a pang of embarrassment at having unintentionally violated her privacy. Instead of sneaking out of the theater, the director left Williams in the rear of the auditorium and hesitantly approached the stage to let Bette know they had been there all along.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, the actress continued to moan and sob as Corsaro climbed up onto the veranda to comfort her. "Nobody likes me," she bawled uncontrollably when the director asked why she was crying. "What am I doing that's wrong? I'm trying my damnedest!"

If Bette was this upset about Williams's having failed to build up her role, Corsaro shuddered to think how she would react to the news that at the director's urging, her part was soon to be made even smaller.

For fear that Davis would abandon Iguana before they even landed on Broadway, Williams hesitated to make the cuts he and the director had talked about that day in Detroit. Soon afterward, however, when they opened at the Blackstone Theatre in Chicago, the playwright knew he could procrastinate no longer. After reading a devastating review from his longtime fervent champion, drama critic Claudia Cassidy, Williams finally gave Corsaro the go-ahead to

announce the cuts to the assembled company. As the director detailed the material to be excised, Leighton, O'Neal, and the other actors darted nervous glances at Bette, who responded with what seemed like unprecedented tranquility.

Shortly after Bette left the theater, however, word came from her representatives that, from this moment on, if Tennessee Williams was going to make any changes in the text, it had better be to augment the role of Maxine Faulk. And there followed a spate of communications from Bette to various newspaper columnists, to whom she bitterly complained of her fellow actors' ineptitude, with Patrick O'Neal the target of her most virulent derision.

By this point, Bette's worst fears had been realized: she discovered that O'Neal had spurned her advances on the train to Rochester only to make an alliance with Margaret Leighton shortly thereafter. Driven wild by her sense of isolation, the jealous actress began calling O'Neal at all hours of the night to be certain that he was not with Leighton. In desperate hopes of escaping Davis, of whom he admits to having been "scared to death,'' O'Neal fled to an obscure hotel where she would be unable to track him down. "The poor man was falling apart!" Corsaro recalls. "He had allowed her to get to him, and he was a bundle of nerves."

Frustrated by her inability to discover the young actor's whereabouts, Bette repeatedly demanded that she and O'Neal go over their scenes together; in these turbulent sessions, Corsaro found himself functioning more as a referee than as a director. Day after day, Corsaro watched as O'Neal silently took Bette's invective and abuse, until finally, one afternoon, something seemed to snap in the actor. Waving his fists, he angrily informed Davis exactly what he and everyone else in the company thought of her. As O'Neal raged on, Davis's eyes brightened; she was triumphant at having aroused this show of passion at long last. "He let her have it in no uncertain terms, and she stood there smiling, loving every single minute of it," Corsaro recalls. "She really was the queen of the S and M club!"

Bette's happiness was short-lived. At Warner Bros, in the thirties and forties, Davis's box office appeal had given her license to grind writers and directors beneath her chariot wheels; why—she seemed to think—should Tennessee Williams be any different? Bette failed to understand that in Williams's world, the text, not the star, came first. Desperately as he may have needed Davis's name on the marquee, and willing as he may have been to hint that, yes, he might at length be inclined to embellish her role, unlike most of the people she had encountered in Hollywood, Williams regarded his prin-

cipal responsibility as being to the play's artistic integrity. Patrick O'Neal points out that in a film, Bette might very well have gotten the changes she wanted. "She could have walked off the set," says the actor. ' 'She could have threatened to leave the studio. She could have gone to bed with the director. All the things that she did do. But she couldn't do that here. The setup was different. Don't forget, Tennessee Williams was a great playwright/' According to O'Neal, no matter what Williams may have indicated to Bette when they were drinking and "hanging out," he was simply not going to alter the play to suit her.

Whether Williams was prepared to admit it to her face was another matter. Sensing the importance of Bette's accepting once and for all that her role was now basically as she would be expected to perform it in New York, Corsaro decided to create a confrontation between Williams and Davis, where the playwright would be impelled openly to declare his intentions to her. At the Blackstone Theatre, Corsaro was working with Davis, with Williams observing intently from the stalls, when the director broke in to declare that she had better come to terms with the role as currently written; there was to be no new material for her character. "Tennessee, do you feel otherwise?" Corsaro turned to the playwright, who, put on the spot, had little choice but to agree, whereupon Bette coolly, silently drifted off the stage.

To remind Williams and the others that the show's continued existence depended on her, Bette began deliberately to miss performances. As if to strain everyone's nerves to the limit, at the last possible moment the actress would gleefully declare her unwillingness to go on. In the theater, the announcement that Miss Davis's understudy was to appear in the role of Maxine Faulk at that performance would lead crowds of ticket-holders to line up for refiinds at the box office, where one of Bette's employees recorded their numbers with a clicker.

When it became evident that Williams was not about to budge on the rewrites, with less than two weeks to go before New York, Bette launched an all-out campaign to fire the director who had so vehemently opposed augmenting her role. Unlike her other enemies, Margaret Leighton and Patrick O'Neal, Corsaro was now expendable. He had done his work directing the play; the show could go on without him. But not without Bette, who flew into a violent rage when she learned that although Corsaro had been instructed not to deal with her directly, he was still in the theater, quiedy monitoring rehearsals from the rear and sneaking notes backstage to the other cast members. Bette demanded that, thence-

forth, Corsaro be barred from the theater; and in terror of her walking off again, Williams reluctantly agreed. While the Iguana company lingered for its final week in Chicago, Corsaro returned alone to New York, it having been agreed that in consideration of his many months on the production, he would of course retain billing as director. Whereupon Bette called members of the New York press to make it known that the director had been expelled.

With only a week to go before Broadway, Davis apparently continued to believe that getting rid of the director would allow her to take charge at long last. "I think if she had taken a truth serum," says Patrick O'Neal, "she would have said, 'Yes, I confess, it's going to be a play about Maxine.' "

"No, no, no, baby—stand over there," Tennessee Williams called up to the stage of die Blackstone Theatre. He was struggling to take over some of the directorial chores, even as his dependence on alcohol, pills, and the ministrations of Dr. Max Jacobson—the same "Dr. Feel Good" who had been treating Patrick O'Neal—hastened what O'Neal sadly calls the playwright's ineluctable "progression into darkness." It had hardly helped Williams's already precarious state of mind that in the course of the tour, his yellow-eyed black Belgian shepherd, Satan, had bitten him clean to the bone on both ankles, causing painful swelling and infection; or, worse, that the playwright seemed increasingly at odds with his devoted companion, Frank Merlo.

Williams's letters to the Iguana company are shot through with a sense of sadness over what he perceived as an impenetrable wall that had materialized between playwright and cast; a barrier that, perhaps, could only be overcome by Williams's committing to paper his thoughts on the work that remained to be done if his vision of the play was to be realized. Most problematic of all, it would seem, was the peculiar turn Bette's characterization had taken in recent weeks as she had endeavored to foreground Maxine Faulk by making her more striking in manner and appearance. Hence the brassy makeup, the too carefully coified and lacquered wig, the heavily boned push-up brassiere (designed to be worn beneath a blue work shirt unbuttoned to the waist), and the array of fussy mannerisms with which Bette was widely thought to have encumbered her performance, in unabashed disregard of the playwright's specifications.

To read the ineffably delicate letter in which Williams attempts to correct Davis's misconception of the character is to be reminded of William Wyler's strictures during the filming of The Little Foxes,

urging the headstrong actress to try to grasp her character from the inside, instead of all too quickly assembling her from without. Now Davis was bestowing a tense, angular, self-conscious physicality on Maxine Faulk, the very antithesis of the easygoing natural grace, the freedom and openness of spirit, that Williams had envisioned. But where, in 1941, Wyler had suspected that the dead-white masklike physiognomy Bette constructed for Regina was a thirty-three-year-old's way of distancing herself from her forty-year-old character (and also, perhaps, of luring the audience's attention away from the other actors), in 1961, Davis's ketchup-colored wig, her stiff brassiere and overpainted face, betokened the fifty-three-year-old actress's unease about portraying a character Williams describes as being in her middle forties. Painfully insecure about her looks as she was, Bette seemed to Patrick O'Neal to be trying to transform herself into the woman who "gets the guy" and "wins" Shannon at the end of the play.

From first to last, despite the playwright's repeated attempts to correct her, Bette persisted in misinterpreting the play and her character. As written by Williams, Maxine knows all along that she does not need to fight Hannah for Shannon, who spends much of the play struggling desperately to avoid taking a drink. Confident of Shannon's fundamental dissoluteness, Maxine need only wait for the moment when, inevitably, he starts drinking again. He will be hers to claim after that. As Patrick O'Neal explains, when Shannon goes down to the beach with Maxine at the end, it isn't because Maxine "won"; it's because Shannon has given up and is being "sentenced to hell."

On the evening of December 28, 1961, as Bette Davis prepared to make her entrance in the Broadway premiere of The Night of the Iguana, she knew that her legion of admirers had filled the Royale Theatre, especially the least expensive seats in the balcony. She knew that when she swaggered out onto the veranda of the Costa Verde Hotel, her fans would erupt in the wild cheers and applause that had regularly greeted her in Rochester, Detroit, and Chicago. But she also knew that, as had happened every night of the out-of-town run since that fateful first performance in Rochester, when she fell and injured her knee, by evening's end it would be Margaret Leighton who received the loudest and most enthusiastic ovation by far, while Bette Davis was invariably condemned to the brutal indignity of polite, even slightly embarrassed, applause. And so it was that, opening night in New York, seconds after she made her entrance, Bette allowed herself the luxury of stopping the play be-