Bette Davis (43 page)

"What did she say?" Bette would ask whenever Vik Greenfield returned from an errand at B.D.'s house. "Did she say anything about me?"

"No,'' her assistant regularly assured her. ' 'We didn't talk about you at all."

"She's a better friend to you than she is to me," Bette would sigh, with great bitterness.

In truth, Greenfield recalls, "Of course we always talked about her! Anybody that knew her, you'd talk about her because Bette was so impossible."

Constantly at loggerheads with her daughter and her son-in-law, Bette, as recorded in her diary, filled long lonely days with increasingly detailed cleaning and cooking rituals that often baffled and amused casual observers, who could scarcely comprehend the degree of unbearable agitation they represented. People often wondered how the legendary movie star spent a typical day when she was not working; but close friends noted the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive behavior—the endless overly intense cleaning, checking, preparing, and rearranging—that devoured so much of Davis's

time. "When Bette was depressed she didn't see people," says Dori Brenner. "She hid and literally polished the brass." Hour upon hour was devoted to compiling long, detailed lists of canned and frozen foods and cleaning materials: lists that Davis repeatedly reviewed and checked off. Something as simple as a tuna fish lunch for Vik Greenfield involved hours of elaborate, pointless preparation beginning as early as the night before, when Bette would carefully arrange the ingredients on the kitchen counter; again and again, she would be drawn back to the kitchen to confirm that everything was in its place. "Every time she would pass the food on the counter, she would have to touch each of item—the obligatory laying on of the hands," recalls Charles Pollock. "Checking them for some reason or other." And she would endlessly rearrange the items on the counter, moving a soup can here, a tuna can there, in quest of some strange ideal order that only Bette seemed to comprehend.

As is often the case with obsessive-compulsive personalities, Bette's overemphatic neatness and organization in some areas stood in marked contrast to a lack of personal hygiene. "Bette never looked after herself properly,'' recalls Vik Greenfield.' 'In her house she would hardly take a bath a week, let alone wash her hair." When Bette was Charles Pollock's houseguest in Los Angeles, Pollock was initially baffled by her mysterious failure to spend much time in the bathroom, where, the maid reported, the tub and towels were clearly not being used. Finally, Davis seemed to notice Pollock's curiosity about her peculiar disinclination to take a bath or shower. "I don't bathe very often, but I'm not dirty," she made a great point of telling him. "I don't smell, do I?"

The personal and professional crisis that had caused Bette to move to Connecticut made her home there a less than optimal environment for Margot Merrill. ' 'They should never have allowed Margot to stay with her on holidays," says Vik Greenfield, whom Bette regularly assigned to watch her retarded daughter when she came to Twin Bridges at Christmas and for a few weeks each summer. "She was very cruel to that child." And according to Dori Brenner: "Bette didn't give Margot any loving or kindness, at least not that I saw. Bette had no patience. We're not talking about a woman with little patience. We're talking about a woman with no patience. When I was there one weekend when Margot was there, I was horrified. Bette was more exasperated than usual and just yelled at her and pushed her around." Asked why Bette brought Margot to Twin Bridges, only to mistreat her, Brenner explains: "Bette in many

ways went by the book. 'Okay, I've got to do it, I'll do it.' It certainly wasn't out of any compassion."

"The school would call and say, 'When is Margot going to visit again?' " recalls Margot's sister, B.D. "Mother would suddenly become aware that this was supposed to happen. She'd hem and haw and fuss and finally come up with a time." Whatever abuse she suffered at Bette's hands, the teenager always seemed anxious to spend time with Bette and Vik at Twin Bridges. "Even though it was very unpleasant, Margot never remembered it was unpleasant," says B.D., to whom Margot often turned in confusion when Bette insisted on reminding her that she was adopted—a concept she seemed to have considerable difficulty comprehending.

Scattered throughout Bette's diary for this period are the dates when Margot is due to arrive for a visit—almost always followed by the date when her daughter is scheduled to return to her school. And repeatedly around those dates one discovers Bette's frantic reminders to herself to replenish her supply of Miltown tranquilizers.

By far the most disturbing entry in Bette's diary comes on February 14, 1968, shortly after seventeen-year-old Margot has completed her first Christmas visit to Twin Bridges. To read Bette's private diatribe on what she describes as her retarded daughter's perverseness and deviousness is to make the blood run cold, especially when one reaches the horrifying pronouncement that rough physical discipline is the only thing the lying black Irish giii understands. Tragically refusing to grasp Margot's mental limitations for what they were, Bette all too clearly viewed her adopted daughter's misbehavior as a deliberate assault on her.

At T\vin Bridges, Bobby no longer occupied the place in Bette's life that she once had. With B.D. married and Michael away at school, Bette had decided that her sister's services were no longer needed. Bobby moved to Arizona with her daughter. There, Bobby developed breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. After the operation, Bette traveled to Phoenix with Vik Greenfield, who noted with horror Bette's rough treatment of Bobby, despite her recent medical ordeal. No sooner did Bette arrive than she launched into one of her usual tirades against her ailing sister, who seemed resigned to the fact that Bette was probably incapable of behaving any other way. From then on, while Bette continued to send her money and to see her on occasion, Bobby's poor health ruled out all thought of her resuming her former role in Bette's household.

"When you think of all those years when Bette was sitting there

alone in Connecticut," says Don Brenner, "you have to wonder— what did she wake up thinking at four o'clock in the morning?''

Although Vik Greenfield's presence in the apartment above the garage at Twin Bridges assuaged her barely concealed terror of being alone at night, Bette flung herself into a series of ill-conceived, often unconsummated love affairs with younger men whom her assistant describes as being mostly "of dubious qualities and talents—and obviously looking for a meal ticket." Her seduction routine hardly varied. When the man arrived at TWin Bridges, Bette would be waiting for him, drunkenly posed on a chaise longue in a manner that allowed her gradually to disclose the absence of any underwear. Time and again, friends like Robin Brown and Dori Brenner would discreetly inform Bette that one or another of these men was almost certainly homosexual. "Oh, no!" she would cry; or, "I'm going to be the one to change him!" In her raging loneliness, Davis actually proposed marriage to a number of these unattainable young men. Hungry for the attention and adulation they provided, Bette forced herself to overlook what, on some level, she knew perfectly well: that her "suitors," as she called them, incessantly gossiped about her with each other, often making merciless fun of the woman they purported to worship.

Scarcely more fulfilling was the actress's sparse professional life in this period, limited usually to a single more or less dismal film a year. By her own account, had she not desperately needed the money, Davis almost always would have turned down such unrewarding assignments as The Anniversary (another horror film, made in England in 1967), Connecting Rooms, Bunny O'Hare (1971), Scientific Card Player (shot in Italy in 1972), and Burnt Offerings (1976). To shore up her finances, several times in the Connecticut years Bette tried and failed to launch a new television series: the pilots Madame Sin in 1971, The Judge and Jake Wyler in 1972, and Hello Mother Goodbye in 1973.

"The fun has gone out of my work," she told Vik Greenfield, while shooting Connecting Rooms in England with Michael Redgrave in January 1969. "I do it now only because I have to." Similar sentiments appear in a January 1969 letter to Robin Brown, in which Bette declares herself uninterested in acting anymore but sorely in need of funds after a two-year hiatus from film work. ' 'I 'm a basket case!" she would nervously scream at her assistant before appearing on the set—and she seemed hardly more confident of her powers at day's end, when, as Greenfield recalls, "The minute she got to the dressing room, out came the bottle."

Davis welcomed her role as an impoverished cellist in Connect-

ing Rooms because it came soon after she learned that B.D. was pregnant. Her diary and her correspondence with Robin are filled with lists of projected gifts for B.D. and Jeremy (although in a letter to Robin she wonders whether her daughter isn't pleased to be rid of her for the time being) and for the baby—Bette is confident it will be a girl—at whose birth that spring she eagerly anticipates being present.

But Ashley Hyman, born on June 19, 1969, was not the granddaughter Bette had expected; nor, to her chagrin, was she present at his birth, Jeremy having failed to call from the hospital until afterward.

Eighteen-year-old Margot was visiting Twin Bridges when B.D. gave birth. She kept asking B.D. if Ashley—whom Bette called "love pot"—was her "real" baby: had somebody else had him, who couldn't keep him? According to B.D., her sister' 'went wild'' over the new baby, wanting to sit and hold him as long as B.D. would allow. But Margot's wonderment soon turned to agitation; she inquired if she was ready to get married yet and have children of her own.

On June 20, Bette arrived at the hospital with her camera, to begin taking the usual quantities of photographs. According to Bette's diary, even Sherry and his wife, Marion, were sent copies. And it was in this period that Bette unearthed photographs she had once taken of young Margot at Witch Way to reassure herself that, contrary to her worst fears, the child was normal—photographs that she now quiedy placed in the trash.

But this was only a prelude to Bette's astonishing decision to wash her hands finally of Margot. After years of disputes about the girl, Bette signed over custody to Gary Merrill, despite the fact that she had often accused him of failing to monitor their adopted daughter properly while she was in his care. "That was the unpredictability of Bette!" says Vik Greenfield. "One minute she was upset that Merrill had been irresponsible toward Margot when the girl was staying with him, and the next minute she didn't want custody and turned it all over to him.''

When Gary assumed custody of Margot, Bette struck B.D. as, quite simply, "relieved to unburden herself." "Mother had abrogated her responsibility, and that was it," says B.D. of Bette's decision. "She didn't have to bother anymore."

"Miss Davis, have you ever had a face-lift?" a young man called out during the lengthy question-and-answer period of Bette's one-woman show: a melange of film clips and predictable banter with

the audience in which the actress opened at New York's Town Hall in February 1973. Bette exhaled a great dragon plume of smoke, then descended into the auditorium, where, hovering above the questioner, she looked hard into his eyes and shouted, "Brother! Does this look like a face that's been lifted?"

By now it seemed to a good many of Bette's associates that she had despaired of even attempting to function as a serious actress. She appeared to prefer to incarnate the travesty figure whom one commentator wistfully described as ' 'an amalgam of all her screen roles plus all her impersonators.'' Onstage in the one-woman show and at home in Connecticut, Bette sought to retreat from the painful reality of her current circumstances by endlessly, mechanically repeating the stories of her Hollywood glory days.

usual obsessiveness—began to plan every tiny detail of the evening. The only request that Pollock declined to indulge was that there be a roaring New England-style fire in the fireplace as Mae entered; he thought it inappropriate for the ninety-degree weather.

"How do you do?" said the arriving Mae West, who—like Davis—had no idea that the bartender was tape-recording their every word, the microphone concealed behind the ice bucket.

' 'Nice to know you,'' Pollock replied staring in disbelief at West's heavy white wool trousers, sweater, and jacket, as Bette eyed the tantalizing pile of logs in the fireplace, which Pollock had forbidden her to ignite.

"I can't believe it!" Bette screeched, a new surge of enthusiasm overcoming her as Pollock seated Mae in one of a pair of eighteenth-century French Regence chairs, facing a nineteenth-century Belgian painting of a dog dressed as a hotel concierge. "That you're here! I really mean it! There are few people in my life—in our industry—that I have felt are this great, and you are one!"

Suddenly a show tune could be heard in the background, Vik Greenfield having turned on the stereo.

"Listen, Mae! They're playing your record!" said Bette, collapsing into the other eighteenth-century chair.

"No, no," said one of Mae's escorts, discreetly trying to point out Davis's error. "That's not. . ."

"You know," Bette went on, ignoring him, "Mr. Pollock said, 'Would Miss West be insulted if she heard her record being played when she came in?' And I said, 'Records? I'd be thrilled to death if you played my records when I walked into a house!' "

"This is nice," said Mae, changing the subject, her voice barely a whisper beside Bette's trumpet tongue.

"Oh! This house!" Bette interjected, lifting a fresh drink from the tray Vik Greenfield was passing around to Mae's escorts. "It was a horrible little Spanish house! The front door was here. A staircase went up there. And the fireplace . . . Everything! Mae, have you been in Chuck's antique shop?" No answer. "Ever been to it?" No answer. "Know about Chuck's antique shop?" Still no answer. "Welllllllll! It is verrrrrry sophisticated!"

"I love this picture," said Mae, softly. "The dog. What's he got in his hand—a letter?"

"It's a dog as the concierge of a hotel delivering a letter to a guest," Pollock explained.