Bette Davis (45 page)

It having been mentioned that the film Vm No Angel, in which West portrays a lion tamer, had been on TV recently, Mae took the floor.

"I always wanted to be a lion tamer, from a child up," she addressed the room. "I had an obsession to get in that cage with the lions. And then for my second picture they said, 'What do you wanna do next, Mae? Anything you wanna do!' 'Cause they knew I'd write it, they said, 'We wanna spend a lot of money on your next picture.' So I said, 'What about a circus story? You can spend a lot of money on that.' I thought: Well, here it goes now: I'll just get in that cage with the lions! That was my one ambition. It had been in my mind for so long—like an obsession: you wanna do it, you have to do it."

Here Pollock emerged from the kitchen, to discover Bette and the escorts listening in rapt silence as Mae recounted her big day at Madison Square Garden.

"I think they had about six or eight lions," said Mae, "and they had me sittin' there waitin' for about twenty minutes. I said, 'Well, here I am! I'm ready!' And the director comes over and he says, 'We're thinkin' of gettin' a double for you.' I said, 'What do you mean, a double! I'm gonna go in there!' So he said, 'One of these lions almost took the trainer's arm off". We just took him to the hospital.' I said, 'Well, get the lion that did it, and get it out of the cage, 'cause I'm goin' in!' So the director said, 'We don't know which one did it. There's a couple of lions in there, and they all look alike!' So I said, 'Go over and look for the one that has blood on him.' I just sat there and insisted on goin' in, 'cause this was built up in me since my father took me to Coney Island to see the lions. In my mind, I used to dream about bein' in a cage with the lions and with that whip—get them to jump over here and do that!— oh, it fascinated me so! Even when the director told me that they almost chewed the trainer's arm off, I said, 'Well, get that one out!' So they finally got that one out, and I said, 'Okay, wash off that blood!' And they cleaned it all up. And they were still tryin' to talk me out of it—but they couldn't, 'cause this was what I wanted to do for so many years! I had to do it! Finally, I got in there, and I had them snarlin' and jumpin' this way and that!— and I'm crackin' that whip!"

"Bartender!" called Bette, requesting a refill, then returning to

Mae. "It is such fun! I have admired you. It's incredible, the movie business! Let's face it, I can't say I haven't made it!"

"You certainly have," said Mae.

"And I'm not going to say you haven't made it," Bette went on. "You see, there were reasons we made it. We're just special people!"

"It's called originality," came a small voice from the sofa.

"It's called originality," Bette echoed. "It's called originality. We have made it! And to meet you is an absolute ball!"

"Bette, what's your reaction to people doing imitations of you?" asked one of the escorts. "Professionals."

"Oh, that's the greatest compliment you can have!" Bette replied. "Eventually they become asinine, how they imitate you. But if you're not imitated—boy, you've not made it!"

"Because you're not an original," said the escort.

"That's right!" said Bette. "I do an imitation of Mae West, you know. Oh, yes, if you're not imitated, youVe had it."

"I think we have a difference of opinion here," said the escort, casting a glance in Mae's direction. "I think Mae doesn't like imitations, right?"

"I like them," said Mae, trying to be diplomatic, "but not too much."

"You threatened to sue one of your imitators," said the escort, egging her on.

"Well, this one guy," said Mae, "he was a fan of mine. I let him live in my beach house. My three-hundred-thousand-dollar home. Fine boy, you know. I gave him a wig. I gave him a gown. He used to try them on. I wasn't living at the beach at that time, I was living in my apartment—so I'd go down there, and he'd have my wig and my gown on, and finally he had worked up this imitation of me. Terrible! I think he also does you, Bette. Who else does he do, boys?"

"He does Carol Channing!" said the escorts.

"That's right," said Mae. "Carol Channing and Tallulah."

"Who is dead now!" Bette declared of her old nemesis. "So they should stop doing her!"

"He does Bette Davis," said one of the escorts. "He does Tallulah Bankhead. And he does you."

"Well, we're naturals to do!" said Bette. "We have a definite style."

"I stopped him!" said Mae.

"You can legally do that?" asked the escort.

"Sure," said Mae. "You see, he isn't doing me, 'Mae West.'

He's doing 'Diamond LiT—the characterization that I created and own. It's copyrighted! You can imitate anyone, you can imitate the President, anybody. But when he takes the characterization that I copyrighted, then he's infringing on my property, see? He's imitating the character that I created. That's the characterization. I don't do that in real life."

"Obviously, sitting here tonight, you don't," said Bette. "Sitting here tonight, you don't."

"No, I don't. So I stopped him. I had the lawyers write a letter and stop him."

"Have you seen some imitations of you, Bette, that you like and some that offend you?" asked one of the escorts.

"Miss West will tell you," Bette replied, "if you can't be imitated, you have not made it. I will never fault any imitation."

"Thirty minutes of 'Mae West!" Mae continued. "And he was using all my material!"

"I don't see it like that," said Bette. "If they imitate you, you're lucky!"

"It was an act that I did in Las Vegas," said Mae, a note of exasperation creeping into her voice. "They filmed it, and he played me—all this great material I had!"

"And if they don't imitate you in this world—boy, you ain't got no status!" said Bette.

"See, this boy that I'm talking about," said Mae, "he did thirty minutes of 'Mae West.' Thirty minutes! He took a book that I have out, The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West, with all my wisecracks, all the clever lines that I put in my pictures. That book, I don't know if you ever read it. He took all of that material—and you want him to imitate you for thirty minutes? Do you know what that means? All of my material! All the stuff out of my brains! I used to maybe take a day to think of some great line, and here he was out there repeating it and getting good money for it!''

"Bette," called one of the escorts, "can you do an imitation of Mae?"

"Ohhh, not really," said Bette.

"Can you do the Mae West character, Bette?"

"Anything she wants to say." Mae laughed.

"Come on, do it," said the escort. "Can you do it well? Mae would be—"

Whereupon the other escort turned to Mae and asked, "Mae, have you ever thought about doing Bette Davis?"

"No!" said Bette. "There's no way she did!"

"Well," said Mae, taking Bette's measure, "I'd have to watch what she's doin', and then maybe after—"

At that moment, their host having announced that dinner was ready at long last, the two escorts rushed to lift Mae from her eighteenth-century chair; and Vik Greenfield, to help Bette from hers.

"Chuck is one of the great cooks!" Bette called across the Di-rectoire table to Mae. "You're going to have a great dinner tonight. We're so thrilled you came here! I can't tell you!"

"This picture," Mae told Pollock, as she paused to admire the Belgian painting of the dog dressed as a hotel concierge. "I think I've seen it before. So impressive! So interesting!"

"And now," Bette declared to no one in particular, as they all made their way to the dinner table,* 'we must divide Miss West and me among the men!"

began drinking herself under the table as never before—the new house seeming to grow more squalid by the day.

After several unsuccessful stabs at launching a television series, Bette stunned her friends by accepting the lead role in Miss Moffat, the musical version of The Corn Is Green. Director Joshua Logan planned to take the show on a nine-month tour before landing on Broadway in the fell of 1975. Her decision to accept the role was a curious gesture on Bette's part, in light of her miserable experiences in Two's Company and The Night of the Iguana, after which she had vowed never to appear in a stage play again.

The role had been intended for Mary Martin, who dropped out after the death of her husband; offered to Katharine Hepburn, who politely declined; and then to Bette, who proclaimed that Miss Moffat would be her "swan song." *'Thank God for this play," Davis told Joshua Logan. "It's going to save me from those flea-bitten films. The last one I read, they had me hanging in a closet. Miss Moffat has saved me—saved me."

Summoned from California to travel with heron tour, Vik Greenfield—who on the basis of sustained close daily contact knew Bette's habits and disposition better than most—sniffed trouble from the outset. "Bette tried never to show her fear," he says. "Remember, she was a ram—headfirst and thought about it later. But very early I said to myself, 'Bette's never going to make this—she doesn't have the stamina for it anymore.' " As early as the rehearsal period in New York, that August of 1974, the actress recorded in her diary her private fears about how much exertion would be required of her at their first stop, in Baltimore.

"Bette looked as if she hadn't been oiled properly," Greenfield recalls. "The jerky movements, the suddenness of her attack, made her seem rather like the Tin Man."

Exactly a week before the company was scheduled to proceed to Baltimore, Bette claimed to have injured her back during rehearsal. True to form, the following day, August 29, she checked into Hark-ness Pavilion, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center—whereupon her physician called Joshua Logan to announce the possibility of a herniated disk. The Baltimore engagement's having been canceled on Bette's account, the management moved up the out-of-town opening to Philadelphia in October.

On September 20, Bette checked herself out of the hospital and drove to Connecticut, where she was soon sending word to her by now exasperated director that she had mysteriously injured herself yet again. To her daughter B.D., however, it seemed that, as Bette had often been known to do, she had quite simply willed herself to

get sick—an estimate with which Vik Greenfield agrees: ' 'That was just Bette's usual sick act; take my word for it, it was all mental and all an act."

"Don't you tell me my line!" Bette shouted, on opening night in Philadelphia, when one of the children in the cast whispered her dialogue to her as the confused actress seemed to fumble for words. "I know it! You're a naughty little boy!" Elsewhere, to her director's dismay, Bette left out bits of dialogue; repeated lines she had spoken only a moment before; and, worse, protested at another actor's ineptitude directly to the audience, only to realize her mistake and apologize immediately thereafter. Still, it seemed to Logan that Bette's performance improved as the days passed, the star's occasionally forgetting or misplacing lyrics amply compensated by her ability to attract audiences to the show.

This accounts for Logan's fit of agitation when Davis summoned the director to her hotel suite to announce that she was quitting the show. "Bette, I know this sounds silly to you," Logan reasoned, "but for your own sake you can't commit this kind of professional suicide. You've become sick and made two important productions suffer before. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars of other people's money lost because of it and dozens of actors put out of work. You mustn't be blamed for that again, Bette. This might be the end of your stage career.''

"I can't help it. I'm in pain," said Davis. Logan kissed her on the forehead, only to realize afterward that the actress seemed to have "flinched a little" at his touch.

Embittered and alone, Bette returned to Connecticut, where My Bailiwick seemed smaller and more unsatisfying than ever. Vik Greenfield's departure in the aftermath of Miss Moffat had opened an immense chasm in her day-to-day life. Once again they had quarreled, and once again Bette had been too proud to attempt to patch things up with him—but this time the exasperated secretary would not be coming back.

With only the bottle and the occasional fan for daily companionship, more and more Bette set her sights on B.D., who feared that her mother had returned to Weston with renewed hopes of breaking up her marriage and forcing B.D. to move in with her. As her mother tended to do, B.D. responded to the pressure by becoming ill. Among other ailments, the daughter developed a serious case of colitis, which she blamed on stress from the daily tussle with Bette. B.D.'s feelings of panic are understandable when one considers that on several occasions when Bette failed to get her way with her daughter, she pretended to attempt suicide. If the daughter

would not give herself over to Bette out of love and devotion, perhaps she would do it for reasons of guilt and fear. Finally, Bette's tactics backfired. Instead of luring B.D. back to her, Bette drove her daughter and son-in-law to sell their house in Weston and flee to rural Laceyville, Pennsylvania. They purchased a secluded property called Ashdown Farm. It was either leave Connecticut or allow Bette to destroy their marriage and force B.D. to become what Bobby had been; for B.D., as for her mother, there was no middle ground.

Bette had further occasion to reflect on the shambles of her life when the American Film Institute invited her to speak in honor of William Wyler, who was to be the fourth recipient of its Life Achievement Award in March 1976 (previous honorees were John Ford, James Cagney, and Orson Welles). Living in solitude now, for hours on end she would stare at her face in the mirror, thinking of what could be done to make herself presentable enough to see Willy again. The actress's diary records in detail her plans to hire a makeup man in Los Angeles, who would devote an entire day to painting her face and rigging up the painful straps concealed beneath her wig to give the effect of a face-lift. To Bette, Wyler symbolized both the professional and the personal dreams that, for all her years of violent struggle, had never come to fruition. The speech she prepared for his award ceremony came dangerously close to publicly declaring her feelings for him. "A director has to be your father," Bette wrote, "your analyst, possibly the man at that moment you fall in love with. Willy was all these people to me." At the last minute, a final hysterical look in the mirror seems to have convinced her that the "Bette Davis" mask of her one-woman show was not an image she wished Willy Wyler to see. Pleading illness, Bette sent her speech and her regrets—she would not be able to attend Willy's celebratory dinner after all.