Bette Davis (42 page)

At Honeysuckle Hill, Bobby's melancholic presence in a room above the garage—"the crow's nest," as they called it—served as yet another omen to B.D. of the grim future that seemed to face her if she allowed her mother to control her life (including, perhaps, Bette's grandiose plans for her daughter's acting ca-

reer). "Bobby was convinced by Mother that she was nothing without Mother/' says her niece B.D. "She couldn't survive, she needed Mother, and so she was going to have to get on the ground and kiss Mother's feet every day that Mother would deign to care about her."

More and more, the teenager began to sense that Bette was planning a similar fate for her: "Mother's view of what she wanted from me was to be at her feet, have a few failed marriages, a whole bunch of affairs that ended in disaster, a few children along the way that I would bring home." It seemed to B.D. that, as she had done with Bobby, Bette wanted her to feel "emotionally incapable of existing without her." And says Bette's friend Charles Pollock, a Los Angeles antiques dealer: "Bette's ideal situation would have been to have B.D. at her beck and call for the rest of her life. Remember Now, Voyager? Bette wanted to make B.D. into an 'Aunt Charlotte' to keep her company and do her bidding in her old age."

It can only have confused the fifteen-year-old B.D. that, having repeatedly denied Gary Merrill's brutalities toward her daughter, Bette now pressed her to testify against the actor in Santa Monica Superior Court on January 16, 1963, as Davis renewed her efforts to keep him from seeing Michael and Margot.

Bette's attorney Murry Chotiner had already reported to Superior Court Judge Edward R. Brand that, in interviews with the children on November 26, he had learned from B.D. that Merrill had "been intoxicated on many occasions and committed acts of physical violence on those occasions"; and from Michael (who had spent intervals with his father since the divorce) that, preferring to be at home with his mother and sister, the ten-year-old "did not wish to spend any of the Christmas vacation with the defendant, nor alternate weekends with him."

When, in due course, Gary accused Bette of using the children as pawns, Bette responded by citing specific occasions when Merrill had been dangerously intoxicated in the presence of his son. Private detective Michael Parlow gave testimony that chronicled Merrill's carousing and womanizing at the Newporter Inn in Newport Beach, California, while the boy was in his custody. According to the detective, Gary would leave the ten-year-old alone in his room all night while he indulged in drunken revels in and around the hotel until seven the following morning.

Merrill had done himself no favors some months before by engaging in a violent quarrel with Rita Hayworth that caused them to be ejected from Au Petit Jean restaurant, where, by chance, Judge Brand happened to be dining. "I have seen this distinguished person behave in a nauseating manner in public," the judge declared in court on November 29, as Gary turned various shades of crimson. "He and his female escort [Hayworth] used language that would be disturbing in a brothel."

Nor did it help Merrill to be publicly accused of having "sadistically" burned a young model's ankles with a lighted cigar at 3:00 a.m. on February 11, in Mike's Pool Hall in the North Beach section of San Francisco.

Still, the judge found himself ruling in favor of Gary's being allowed to see and spend time with a son he clearly loved. Whereupon, according to Merrill, Bette suddenly called his lawyer with instructions that the boy would be delivered to them in two hours. "I couldn't figure out why," Merrill would recall. "When Mike got there, I learned he wasn't just coming for the afternoon, he was coming to live with me. Bette hadn't gotten her way in the trial, so she threw Mike at me like a loaf of bread. The limo drove up, and there was little Mike with his bags. Instead of leaving for New York as I had planned at that time, I stayed in Malibu for four months until Mike finished school. I drove him to school every morning and picked him up in the afternoon. About the time school ended, Bette had pulled herself together and took Mike back to live with her."

"I'm not an actress," B.D. told reporters in London, scarcely seven months after Bette had announced the teenager's plans to pursue a film career. "I did have a very small part in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and I enjoyed that greatly. But although I thought of acting as a possibility, I finally didn't like it as a career. I decided to get married."

This was no idle teenage fantasy. Bette Davis had mysteriously consented to allow her sixteen-year-old daughter to marry twenty-nine-year-old Jeremy Hyman, a vice-president of Seven Arts, the production company that had backed What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (as well as having invested in the stage production of The Night of the Iguana, whose film rights the company had acquired). Asked why she was rushing into marriage at so young an age, when all four of her mother's had failed, B.D. replied, "Mummy's marriages don't reflect on mine for a large reason: She was a career

woman, dedicated, even married to a career. I don't have that. I'm me. I've chosen the career of homemaker."

With this, although it is doubtful that either mother or daughter sensed quite what was happening, the history of the four women Eugenia, Ruthie, Bette, and B.D. approached full circle. Where once the vague idea of a theatrical career had symbolized little Ruthie Favor's longing to escape her mother's plans for her to have a husband and family of her own, now it was precisely in marriage that B.D. sought to escape Bette's no less constricting agenda.

"Having a mother who was so consuming a presence—would there ever be any room for anybody else?" asks Dori Brenner. "I mean, with Bette there was no more oxygen left in the room. So the healthiest thing that B.D. did was to say, 'Here's an exit. I'm taking it!' "

B.D. had discovered her husband-to-be at the Cannes Film Festival, where Bette was in attendance in spring 1963 to promote What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? On the day of the screening, Seven Arts (run by Jeremy's uncle Elliott Hyman) was to send an escort to look out for B.D. while her mother was occupied with publicity duties. When Jeremy appeared at their seventh-floor suite at the Carlton at the appointed hour, Bette assumed that the tall, slender Englishman was there for her—or so she later admitted to Charles Pollock.

Although Hyman had been assigned to squire the sixteen-year-old about for a single evening, in the ten days that followed they spent as much time together as decorum—and Bette—would allow. Back in Los Angeles, Davis had encouraged her daughter to date young men who B.D. often feared were really more interested in her famous mother than in her. Not so with Jeremy, who, aside from being crisply polite to Bette, showed none of the usual obsequiousness.

According to Davis's longtime assistant Vik Greenfield, Bette perceived herself as somehow in "competition" with B.D. for young men. It was as if the mother were intent on proving that she could take her daughter's boyfriends from her if she wished. "I think the reason that B.D. was really mad for Jeremy was that he never looked at her mother in any way at all," says Greenfield of B.D.'s instant attachment. "In fact, he barely tolerated her."

"What am I going to do about this?" Bette asked Robin Brown upon their return to the United States. Mother and daughter had stopped to visit with the Browns in Connecticut, where B.D. has-

tened to present herself to Jeremy's Westport relatives. Bette told Robin that after having known Hyman for less than two weeks, B.D. had stunned her mother by flatly declaring, 'This is the man I'm going to marry!'' Much as Bette lamented that age sixteen was far too young to marry, it was already clear to her that B.D. was "absolutely determined'' to have her way.

At this point, Bette's sole consolation was that as far as she knew, Jeremy had yet to propose; but soon after they returned to Honeysuckle Hill, Hyman called from London to ask for the teenager's hand in marriage.

4 'It's about time! B.D.'s miserable without you," Bette told her future son-in-law when he asked to speak to her after B.D. had accepted his proposal. But to Robin, Bette quietly confessed her frustration over finding herself unable to do anything to stop the marriage; and later, to her hairdresser and traveling companion, Peggy Shannon, she confided her distaste for Jeremy on the grounds that he was an Englishman and a Jew.

The question remains: Why did Bette allow B.D. to marry Jeremy Hyman? She had only to decline to give her written permission, and Hyman would have been short-circuited in his attempts to marry Bette's underaged daughter. Here it is B.D. herself who best comprehends her mother's curious motives in approving die admittedly unconventional marriage: "That was easy because she knew I'd be back!" says the daughter. 'That was just to show me. As she said, she always believed in letting her children make their own mistakes." B.D. believed that her mother gave the marriage no more than six months, after which Bette was certain that the teenager would come "crawling home." Thus, from the first, B.D. appears to have viewed her marriage at least partially in terms of a lifelong struggle with her mother. To allow that marriage to falter at any point would be to prove that Bette had been right all along.

With B.D. and Jeremy set to be married at All Saints Episcopal Church on January 4, 1964, Bette signed on to appear in the film Where Love Has Gone, based on a novel by Harold Robbins, to finance the cost of the wedding and the reception, at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Thus began a long-term pattern (observed by Peggy Shannon and Robin Brown, among others) of Bette doing certain films expressly to pay for this or that extravagant gift for B.D. and her husband.

Before leaving for their honeymoon in the Florida Keys and then going on to New York, where Jeremy was to begin work in Seven Arts' New York office, the newlyweds had a suite reserved for the night at the Beveiiy Hills Hotel. Camera in hand, several hours

before the ceremony Bette stole into their rooms, where she lovingly made up die bed in back silk sheets, upon which she laid out the thigh-length white satin robe, trimmed in marabou, that she had selected for her daughter's wedding night.

necticut, where many people were only too eager to listen to a famous actress's stories and take her drunken abuse.

When Bette turned up in Connecticut in October of 1966, she was in a state of personal and professional crisis. For ten months, she lived in Robin's romantic guest cottage. Finally, she bought a home of her own, Twin Bridges, on Crooked Mile in Westport, two miles from B.D. in Weston. Bette insisted to friends that she had come to Connecticut to be near Michael's boarding school, Loomis, Gary's alma mater in West Hartford; but to anyone who knew her well, it was obvious that B.D. was the principal attraction.

"Bette worshiped the ground that B.D. walked on, because, as she never wearied of reminding you, B.D. was her 'only natural child,' " says Charles Pollock. "Half the time, all she would talk about was her B.D. and how proud she was of her. Once Bette got on that subject she just wouldn't stop: 'B.D. did this and B.D. did that.' The only thing Bette didn't like about B.D. was her husband—him she hated." According to Bette's friend Stephanie Landsman (Vik Greenfield's sister), the actress hated Jeremy because he had taken her daughter from her: ' 'Bette was always rather snide with Jeremy. She'd tolerate him for a bit, and then in the course of the evening she'd find something, some little incident, to jump on him for and rile him. Jeremy at that stage was pretty laid back. He'd just smile and not pay much attention to it."

"Have you quite finished, Bette?" the son-in-law would ask, to her evident disappointment and chagrin, it having been her intent to pick a fight with him.

After he abandoned the film business, B.D.'s husband worked as a commodity futures broker and the owner of a home services agency. But to friends like Charles Pollock, Bette complained that Jeremy was "a leech and a ne'er-do-well" who seemed somehow to have cast a spell over her daughter. According to Bette, Jeremy seemed scarcely to appreciate B.D.'s tireless efforts on his behalf. One of Bette's favorite stories about Jeremy told how B.D. had labored for hours to make him a special dessert of napoleon pastries. When B.D. served the pastries, Bette said, the demanding Englishman's only reaction was to take a bite and pronounce, "Not quite up to snuff, dearie."

Bette never seemed to give up trying to create problems between B.D. and Jeremy, much as Ruthie had worked to undermine Bette's marriages. But it seems equally true that on some level B.D. relished doing battle with her mother, whose years of violent collisions with Ruthie these two appeared to recapitulate. "They were all right as long as Bette was not dictatorial and telling B.D. what

to do," says Stephanie Landsman. "The minute she tried to dictate to B.D., B.D. jumped at her. Or if she made a comment that B.D. thought was stupid, B.D. would tell her, 'Don't talk such rot; it's nonsense.' She'd stay pretty quiet afterward. It was as though she was rather in awe of B.D. B.D. was the only person I knew that could really manage her and keep her in tow."

For all Bette's incessant taunting of Jeremy (whom she called "Jer," while he called her "Mudder in Law"), a glance at her diary suggests that she was anxious to please him with gifts precisely calculated to suit his taste (a piece of silver from Asprey's in London; a sweater whose wool must be of a certain weight to meet Jeremy's standards); and when the question arises of giving her daughter an allowance, Bette reminds herself to seek Jeremy's permission first. "Bette gave B.D. everything, anything she wanted," says Robin Brown. For her part, however, B.D. regarded her mother's cornucopia of gifts less as evidence of Davis's generosity than as an unabashed attempt to "buy" her and her husband, much as Bette had bought Bobby's devotion through the years. Like Ruthie, Bette was willing to make sacrifices for her beloved daughter but expected to be paid back. "Ruthie never let Bette forget that what she had done for her in the early years had been at great cost,'' says Dori Brenner. "And in turn, Bette never let anybody around her forget what it had cost her to help them. Bette's generosity always had strings attached. Always."