Bette Davis (46 page)

After the Wyler tribute, Bette was in despair over the wreckage of both her career and her personal life, when she heard early rumors that the American Film Institute was considering her to follow Wyler as the fifth—and first female—recipient of the Life Achievement Award. If Bette was not as enthusiastic at the prospect as her friends had expected her to be, it was because she had also heard that Katharine Hepburn had been the AFI's first choice. From a number of industry sources Davis gleaned that only when Hepburn had discouraged the AFI's overtures had attention turned to her. To make matters worse, there was no concealing that, on account of the self-inflicted devastation of Davis's acting career, she was an

extremely controversial selection for the award. Important dissenting voices questioned whether such an honor ought to be bestowed on an actress whose recent film work had been so abysmally undistinguished. Despite these objections, and despite the vast quantities of trash that cluttered Davis's filmography, there remained the core of great films she had made with Wyler and others to testify that, whatever blunders she may have made in the course of her career, Bette Davis was indeed one of Hollywood's finest actresses and richly deserving of the award. Debates over her acting aside, the Bette Davis image as a model of female power, efficacy, and independence continued to exert a strong hold over the imagination of American women—making her a particularly apt choice as first female recipient of the AFI award. Long after the war years, such exhilarating Davis characters as Judith Traherne and Charlotte Vale still provided clear, compelling, upbeat images of a woman's capacity for far-reaching growth and transformation.

Defensive as always, Bette protested to Charles Pollock and other friends that she didn't really want the AFI to honor her. But as anyone who knew her well could easily see, Bette was terrified that, in the end, the AFI would designate another recipient. Rumors that she had been second choice after Hepburn seemed particularly nettlesome to Bette, who, much as she had long struggled to deny it to herself, had to have recognized by now the vastly different roads the two actresses' careers had taken.

In March 1977, escorted by Charles Pollock, Bette attended the AFI award dinner, where she was beside herself with excitement when Willy Wyler delivered a testimonial to her. Wyler was obviously joking when, referring to their dispute over the end of The Letter (should Leslie look away or not?), die director said that Bette would doubdess return to Warners immediately if given the opportunity to reshoot the scene her way. Where Wyler had meant to allude, affectionately but poignantly, to what he perceived as perhaps the beginning of the end of her career—the moment where she started to resist merely for the sake of resisting—Davis failed to grasp the irony of his remarks. Nodding vigorously, Bette seemed to be saying that yes, she would do it all over again exacdy as she had in the past. The intervening decades had taught her nothing.

With the Life Achievement Award came a welcome new status in Hollywood, where Davis began to receive offers to appear in "quality" television dramas, whose focus on social and family problems provided excellent opportunities for an actress of Bette's years. In an Emmy Award-winning performance in director Milton Katselas's Strangers (1979), Davis portrayed a lonely old woman

attempting to come to terms with the dying daughter from whom she had been estranged for more than two decades. In George Schaefer's A Piano for Mrs. Cimino (1982), Davis appeared in a story about the rights of the elderly to manage their own affairs; while in Schaefer's Right of Way (1983), she co-starred with James Stewart in a drama about rational suicide. Roles in these and other successful television productions marked a major turnaround in Bette's fortunes, providing substantially more income and prestige than the shoddy films to which, by and large, she had devoted herself in recent years.

Whether these television roles allowed Davis to resuscitate her gifts as an actress is another matter. In them, all too often she reminds us of a wax-museum figure—the physical likeness is there, but also a disconcerting bloodlessness. Looking at these films in the context of Davis's career, one can scarcely ignore the irony of an actress noted for expressive gesture and movement metamorphosing into one of the "talking heads" of issue-oriented television drama. In a way, Davis's television work in this period may even have encouraged some of her worst tendencies as an actress: the desire to "bloat" her performance with pompous, unnecessary dialogue that Julius Epstein had decried in the forties.

But there were significant exceptions: most notably Katselas's efforts to render her performance in Strangers more visual by cutting out pages of dialogue to compel Davis to act with her face and body. This tactic met with mixed results; while Davis's absence of speech in the opening sequence, where she encounters her estranged daughter for the first time in more than twenty years, focuses our attention on her face, one misses the silent soliloquy, the mute dialogue with her daughter, that would provide some clue to what the embittered old woman may be thinking or feeling. Watching this sequence, one senses that the director has attempted to give Davis the space to show what she can do but that the actress has resisted in fear. Vastly more satisfying is the scene where, following an altercation with her daughter, the mother flees to her room, slams the door behind her, and allows all the violent, painful long-buried emotions to pulse through her entire body in a cinematic moment of rare expressivity and power.

Bette's growing visibility and status in the industry convinced her once again to forsake New England for Hollywood, where, accompanied by Charles Pollock, she inspected and purchased a condominium on the fourth floor of the charming old Colonial House apartments off Sunset Boulevard. With B.D. gone from Connecti-

cut, Bette had no reason to remain there. On August 7, 1977, B.D. had given birth to her second son, Justin Hyman, which seemed to make Bette feel her daughter's absence all the more strongly. Far from Connecticut, perhaps Bette would be able to block out of her thoughts the painful fact that B.D. had decamped for Pennsylvania to escape her mother'is unbearable presence.

Bette's loneliness and fear of living by herself traveled with her to Los Angeles, where her crony Peggy Shannon, a film industry hair stylist, stayed with her for three months to help her unpack and set up the apartment. Bette, obviously frightened, wondered to Shannon whether she would be safe in the building. In the beginning, she set up only part of the apartment, to test herself. Although Shannon's busy schedule precluded her staying on with her friend, she spent many nights at Colonial House, decorating the walls of the new apartment (as Ruthie used to do) with Bette's vast collection of personal photographs—a large painted portrait of her beloved if increasingly elusive daughter B.D. serving as centerpiece.

In contrast with the no-nonsense professional persona Davis constructed for her television work in this period, she showed considerably less self-control at home. Neighbors were treated to exhibitions of loud, drunken, violent behavior. According to screenwriter Ginny Cerilla, a member of the condominium's board of directors, Bette's tirades could regularly be heard through the bathroom vents; and there were complaints about the actress's stomping back and forth all through the night, interfering with her neighbors' sleep. Before daybreak one Monday morning, Cerilla had just returned from her Malibu beach house to her third-floor apartment when she heard a loud crash on the floor above. Going upstairs to investigate, she discovered Bette Davis, dressed in pajamas and a robe, lying facedown, out cold in the fourth-floor hallway. Scattered beside her were the empty whiskey, gin, and vodka bottles she had been on her way to discard; their remaining contents had leaked out and were permeating the carpet. On its side, about two inches from her hand, lay the remains of a Scotch on the rocks; it, too, had seeped into the hallway rug.

"Miss Davis," Cerilla called as she scurried to clean up the mess. The screenwriter had just picked up the bottles and put them in the trash, when suddenly, without warning, Bette leapt at her "like a cat on a binge," screeching loudly as she dug her nails into her neighbor's flesh.

"Listen, you old biddy, you're getting into bed," said Cerilla as she nudged the incoherent Davis into her apartment. "You stay in here until Peggy gets here, and I don't want to hear another word.''

"Who the fuck . . . ? I'm Bette Davis!" the actress screamed as Cerilla closed the door behind her.

In June 1979, it seemed as if Bette's loneliness was about to be mitigated. She hired twenty-two-year-old Kathryn Sermak as a secretary and traveling companion and, shortly thereafter, live-in assistant: the first person to agree to reside with her on a permanent basis since Vik Greenfield's defection. The shy, quiet young woman had professed ignorance of Bette Davis and her career when she arrived for an interview with the actress, who was about to leave for England to film Watcher in the Woods. Peggy Shannon, originally scheduled to accompany Davis abroad, was forced to stay behind to undergo back surgery, whereupon Bette had summoned an employment agency to provide a last-minute replacement.

Although Bette was heard to make cruel remarks about Kathryn's lack of knowledge and experience, it seemed to Marion Rosenberg, Bette's West Coast agent at the Robert Lantz Agency, that Davis was very much pleased with the young woman's "total subservience." Several of Bette's friends noticed Sermak's apparent willingness to endure Davis's abusive behavior. "It was extremely unusual to find somebody who would put up with any of that," says Rosenberg.

One day when Bette and Dori Brenner were dining with Charles Pollock in Los Angeles, Davis invited her friends to meet the new assistant, who was waiting in Bette's recently acquired black Thun-derbird. When the actress's friends came outside, Brenner recalls their surprise at the sight of the young assistant. '' Here is this girl,'' says Pollock, "and she's done up in a little black velvet suit—pants and little jacket and a chauffeur's cap." Brenner silently wondered why, in 1979, any young woman would allow herself to be dressed up that way.

"How do you stand it?" Stephanie Landsman recalls asking Kathryn when "Miss D.' '—as Sermak faithfully called Davis—was safely out of earshot. Before long, according to B.D. Hyman, Sermak did indeed weary of working and living with Davis. "She used to call me in the middle of the night and say, 'How do I get out of here?' " Although B.D. says that she advised Kathryn simply to pack her bags and walk out, no matter how Bette might rant and rave, Sermak remained in place, becoming increasingly indispensable to the actress, whom she came to call her "role model."

The young woman's malleable nature, her willingness to accept and follow Bette's always precise way of doing things, endeared her to the actress, who throve on having somebody around who

seemed never to disagree with her. As Don Brenner and other intimates could see, Bette assuaged her fears of things going wildly wrong in her life by constructing rigid, often irrational if harmless rules for everything. This was Bette's way of controlling her world.

Not all of Bette's attempts to impose her own order on reality were harmless. Unlike the obsessive rules and rituals with which she sought to comfort herself by eliminating chance and spontaneity from her life, Bette's revisions of the past, the lies and fantasies she constructed about herself and the people she had known, frequently hurt others. Having long ago convinced herself that she was William Wyler's first choice for marriage, that he had married Talli only when he thought Bette had rejected him, in 1981 Bette sought to make a more public and lasting claim on the director, whose death on July 27 allowed her to proceed without fear of his correcting her fantasy with the truth. "He was the love of my life," she told one of her biographers, Whitney Stine, to whom she falsely claimed that when Wyler died, Talli Wyler had called to spare Bette the shock of learning the news on television or in the press.

"I must tell you, I barely knew this woman," says Talli Wyler. "For whatever sad reasons, she seems to have imagined that we were good friends over the years, but that simply is not true. And what she did after my husband's memorial service—we can laugh about it now, but when it was happening, only a few days after my husband died, I could not believe what I was hearing from her!"

On Friday afternoon, July 31, 1981, wearing a trim checked dress and jacket, dark broad-brimmed straw hat, and white gloves, the seventy-three-year-old Davis appeared at the Directors Guild Theater on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard for the Wyler memorial service. Her eyes concealed behind tinted glasses, Bette struck others at the service as peculiarly hostile and unapproachable, as if daring anyone to intrude on her private grief. But the actress gave no clue to what was really on her mind until afterward, when close friends and family repaired to the late director's home on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills to pay their respects to his widow.

Despite its grand size and imposing aura, the Wyler residence was very obviously a family house, a place where children had been raised and love had prevailed. In all the years that Willy and Talli had lived there, Bette Davis had approached the heavy front door and stepped into the entry hall only twice. On the day of the memorial service, as Mrs. Wyler observed the actress make her entrance, she was reminded of how little Bette had had to do with the Hollywood milieu the Wylers had inhabited together for more than

four decades. Davis had always seemed somehow to live at a great distance from the creative people, the leading directors, writers, and actors, who made up the Wylers' social set.

As Willy and Talli's daughter Catherine watched the grim-faced Davis move urgently across the crowded room toward her mother, she could not recall a single occasion on which she had seen Bette in this house, among her parents and their friends. From a distance, the sight of Davis leaning over to whisper something to Talli, who quickly ushered her into the dining room, made Catherine Wyler wonder intently—as she recalls—"what could possibly be going on in there between them.''