Bette Davis (41 page)

fore it had really begun, in order to bask in the rapturous reception of her admirers. Better to claim victory while she still could.

Strange to say, by the time Iguana had reached New York, the violent offstage conflict between Davis and her co-stars had infused their performances with a furious, primitive energy that, however much the production had strayed from what Williams had had in mind, contributed to a powerful and disturbing theatrical experience. ' 'We didn't act it: we lived it,'' says Patrick O'Neal to explain the production's curious success on Broadway. ' 'Dumb as the choice was for our personal health and well-being, it made the play work at a level it's never worked at again. It had Bette actually living Maxine; it had Maggie becoming Hannah; and me self-destructing all over the universe to be Shannon.''

After the premiere, physically and mentally exhausted by the strain of these many months of preparation ("the longest and most appalling tour I've ever had with a play," Williams would recall), the author fled to the Silver Seas Hotel in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. There he wrote to Bette Davis, pleading with her not to withdraw from the play, as she had been seriously threatening to do as early as December 29, when the New York critics almost uniformly extolled The Night of the Iguana, with some recording their surprise that a star of Davis's magnitude would have accepted so "peripheral" and even "minor" a role, and one reviewer asking bluntly, "But didn't she read the script?"

As in past letters to Bette, Williams played the consummate diplomat: telling her how much he loved and admired her and how thrilled he was by her opening-night ovation, the likes of which he could not recall ever having witnessed before. Then, with a distinct edge to his words, Williams warned of the grave consequences of quitting Iguana. Despite the good reviews, Bette's departure would almost certainly close the show: a professional setback that the playwright and the actress could ill afford at this point in their troubled careers. We know from an April 15, 1962, letter to his friend Maria St. Just, written after Bette had been replaced by Shelley Winters, that he did not admire Davis's performance as Maxine Faulk, much as he appreciated the many tickets that her name on the marquee was capable of selling; hence, perhaps, the scarcely repressed desperation with which, in the earlier letter, the playwright struggled to charm and cajole La Davis into staying on.

Williams pressed all the buttons he could think of. Besides gently alluding to Corsaro's banishment (without mentioning that it had been done at Bette's behest), he broached the thorny subject of Bette's conflict with Patrick O'Neal, whose slight varia-

tions from one performance to another she perceived as attempts to sabotage and embarrass her before her fans. Arguing that O'Neal's variations were really the actor's efforts to improve his performance, comparable to the playwright's script revisions, Williams implored Bette to try as hard as she could to understand O'Neal's personal turmoil and thus to transcend the corrosive anger that was making it impossible for her to work with him.

Instead, pleading serious dental problems, Bette demanded to be released from her run-of-the-play contract. At intervals she seemed to suffer fainting spells that precluded her appearing in the play as scheduled. In one especially alarming instance, she passed out in the bathroom, and company members were unable to open the door because she had fallen against it. That April, although Davis finally managed to win her release on the grounds that she was physically unable to continue, not everyone in the company believed that she was really ill. "It was all bullshit!" says Patrick O'Neal. "She was simply trying to get out of the play."

That Bette was hardly as weak as she claimed became evident on her final day as a member of the Iguana cast in April. "I'm soooo happy that you're all such a congenial group!" she bellowed at her grimly silent fellow actors. "I'm soooo happy that everyone thinks Maggie is so charming and Patrick is so brilliant! I'm sorry I had to irritate you for so long with my professionalism. You obviously like doing it your way much better. Well! Now you can, my dears!"

With that, Bette Davis stormed out of the Royale Theatre, and Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana, never to return.

Several months later, Frank Corsaro, summering on Fire Island, wandered into a little beachfront bar. He had chosen a stool and made himself comfortable when he saw Gary Merrill drunkenly staring and pointing at him. Merrill stumbled to his feet and lurched toward Corsaro, who was ready to pick up one of the barstools to protect himself against Bette's famously violent ex-husband.

"You're Frank Corsaro, aren't you?" said Merrill, slurring his words as he hovered ominously over the director.

"Yes, I am, Mr. Merrill," Corsaro replied.

"Why didn't you just belt her?"

"What?!"

"That's what I did! I just gave her the biggest belt she ever got and knocked her on the floor and walked out on her. That's what you should have done!"

garnered by the actresses' snipes at each other suggests die extent to which Baby Jane's popularity may be ascribed to the public's morbid fascination with the spectacle of two old movie queens colliding on and off screen.

With this gargoyle of a film Davis's Hollywood career would pass from kitsch to camp: that is, from the earnest banalities on which by and large she had stubbornly wasted her talents to ostentatious self-parody and burlesque. This is all the more disturbing when one recalls the precious handful of films— Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Letter, All About Eve— in which Bette Davis had established herself as among our best screen actresses. Whether Bette knew that in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Robert Aldrich was asking her to enact a grotesque debasing caricature of herself is impossible to say. But she plunged into this selfconsciously meretricious project with gusto, when only a few months before she had thrown away the opportunity to act in an important new drama by America's best playwright and thereby to signal her availability for other serious roles. This recalled the obstinacy she had demonstrated during and after The Little Foxes, when, as Meta Carpenter recounts, Bette's inability to weigh the advice of others caused her to behave in frequently self-destructive ways that declared: I know what I'm doing! I'll do what I want to do! I'm controlling my life, and this is the way it's going to be!

Having wantonly sabotaged The Night of the Iguana, Davis returned to Hollywood, insisting that "the only reason anyone goes to Broadway is because they can't get work in the movies." In one of many gratuitous public diatribes against Patrick O'Neal and Margaret Leighton, Davis told Hedda Hopper, "They are not to be believed. It's not like a movie, where you know you'll have only a few weeks with them—in a play it goes on for months. I don't understand that kind of person—I couldn't cope with it. I'd have been really ill if I'd continued in it."

In Hollywood, however, there was soon new cause for agitation when Bette discovered that, although Warner Bros, was set to distribute Baby Jane, Jack Warner had declined to allow Aldrich to shoot on the Warners lot. Ostensibly studio space was all booked up, but Davis interpreted Jack Warner's refusal as a lack of interest or faith in the project and perhaps even a deliberate snub to the onetime queen of the Warners lot. It seemed to Bette that Jack Warner's forcing her to work at the humbler Producers Studio on Melrose Avenue was supposed to be her comeuppance for past sins.

Nor, to Bette's chagrin, had financing for her comeback film been particularly easy to acquire. Aldrich had already unsuccessfully

shopped the Davis-Crawford package around town when Elliott Hyman's independent production company, Seven Arts, agreed to bankroll Baby Jane as a low-budget quickie to be completed in no more than thirty days for under a million dollars.

That Davis had little idea of the immense box office success that awaited Baby Jane upon its release that fall is suggested by her having astonished and even irritated a good many people in Hollywood when, shortly after completing the Aldrich film on September 12, she advertised in trade publications in search of new film roles:

MOTHER OF THREE-10, 11 & 13— DIVORCEE. AMERICAN. THIRTY YEARS EXPERIENCE AS AN ACTRESS IN MOTION PICTURES. MOBILE STILL AND MORE AFFABLE THAN RUMOR WOULD HAVE IT. WANTS STEADY EMPLOYMENT IN HOLLYWOOD. (HAS HAD BROADWAY.)

Although Betty apparently believed that the industry would be amused by the idea of a major star's advertising for work like this, the gesture backfired badly. Not only did the advertisement fail to attract any substantial offers but Bette's attention-seeking device had the unintended effect of further tarnishing her image as a serious actress.

That hardly mattered to Bette when, the following month, audience reaction to Baby Jane's October 20 preview suggested that the film was going to be far more successful than anyone had even remotely imagined. It is a curious irony of Bette Davis's career that for all her many famous collisions with Jack Warner, she shared his view that the best films were the ones that attracted the largest audiences and made the most money. However much Bette Davis thought of herself—and was widely thought of—as a Hollywood rebel, during her years at Warner Bros, she had fundamentally, no doubt unconsciously, internalized its values. By now the only thing separating Bette and her old nemesis Jack Warner was that he was still in a position of power within the studio, while she was outside, longing to be allowed back in.

Hence the utter earnestness, the strange sincerity of feeling, with which Bette would solemnly declare Baby Jane Hudson "a great role" as she toured the United States to publicize the Aldrich film,

whose brisk ticket sales convinced her that it was indeed among the best films she had ever made.

"The fact that the picture was a success is a miracle in my life," Bette told reporters, sounding a bit like Baby Jane herself talking of her comeback. "It's not to be believed. Perhaps it was the great law of compensation after ten hellish years. All I want now is a chance to prove my talent is still there for the big-million-dollar pictures." At other moments, Bette publicly crowed over what she imagined to be Gary Merrill's upset about her triumphant return to Hollywood: "The thing that's bugging Merrill is that I have a successful picture," she told Hedda Hopper. "He spent eleven years hoping I'd never work again."

After many years of distancing herself from the Hollywood milieu (even when she was in residence there) by emphasizing her status as a Yankee dame with austere New England tastes, now Bette decided to signal her return to film stardom by installing herself in grand style at Honeysuckle Hill, a charming white colonial house on Stone Canyon in Bel Air, whose purchase was facilitated by a $75,000 loan from Jack Warner. On January 25, 1963, Baby Jane was in its third lucrative month in local theaters across the nation when Bette signed a contract with Warner to appear in a dual role as twin sisters in The Dead Pigeon (later retided Dead Ringer), set to start shooting that summer. Correspondence between studio representatives and Davis's lawyer Tom Hammond indicates that although Warner reserved the right to collect his $75,000 by deducting the amount from Bette's paychecks for Dead Ringer, the studio was already fully confident that Baby Jane was going to make enough money for the actress to repay her loan out of the 10 percent share of the film's net profits that Aldrich had agreed to in her contract (at a time when Baby Jane appeared unlikely to make much money at all).

With everything suddenly seeming to be going her way again, Bette felt confident of winning her third Oscar that April of 1963, when the other nominees for Best Actress included Katherine Hepburn for Long Day's Journey into Night, Geraldine Page for Sweet Bird of Youth, Lee Remick for Days of Wine and Roses, and Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker. Many years before this, Bette had been known to cast a jealous glance at Hepburn's career; but now she seemed not to realize the strongly contrasting levels of ambition signified by Hepburn's appearing in the screen version of the Eugene O'Neill play at a moment when Davis was thrilled to be doing Baby Jane and publicly trading barbs with Joan Crawford. Had Bette made the contrast with Hepburn for herself, perhaps she

would have realized the wrongheadedness of her current strategy for retrieving her position in the film industry. Repeatedly Davis would insist on doing essentially trivial roles that—as in the old days at Warners—had been expressly tailored for her. As long as she recoiled from the kinds of demanding dramatic material in which actresses like Hepburn and Page delighted (roles that required the actress to stretch to their requirements rather than the other way around), there was really no place for Davis's career to go. By and large, the leading roles in commercial features that Bette coveted were routinely assigned to younger actresses: a fact she seemed as little prepared to accept as she was Anne Bancroft's being awarded the Oscar at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 8.

With What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? came the opportunity to launch B.D. in an acting career. Aldrich cast Bette's tall, buxom fifteen-year-old daughter in a small role, as the giii who lives next door to the depraved Hudson sisters. Since the move to Los Angeles, B.D. 's exceptionally mature manner and physical appearance allowed her frequently to operate on her mother's behalf. With no adult to accompany her, Bette's daughter had rented a temporary house for them to live in, enrolled her brother at Black Foxe Military Academy, and selected Honeysuckle Hill for their permanent residence. Bette, who encouraged B.D. to date at the age of twelve, appears to have viewed the idea of a film career for B.D. as a means to bind her daughter to her, as the pair gave interviews, traveled, and talked of making more films together in the near future.

"I'm always surprised when people ask how we get along—as if she'd swallow me, or something," said B.D. in Look magazine in December 1962. "I always say we're great friends."

In private, however, finding herself swallowed up by her mother was precisely what the teenager had begun to fear when Bette purchased a pink marble mausoleum in Forest Lawn Memorial Park. The actress grandly announced her intention to be buried there with B.D., Bobby, and Ruthie (whose silver casket she had ordered dug up from Fairhaven Memorial Park and moved here). Outside the mausoleum hovered a statue of "a goddess," sculpted to resemble Bette's daughter.