Bette Davis (47 page)

In the silence of the dining room, Bette, who had pointedly requested a private interview, wasted no time in getting to the point. Fixing her gaze on the widow, she began to speak in a slow, deliberate, portentous manner that convinced Mrs. Wyler that Bette had carefully written and rehearsed what she had to say. "Talli," the actress declared, "I want you to know that during the forty-three years of your marriage, Willy and I did not have an affair.''

Although it did not occur to Talli Wyler at the time, this strange meeting with Bette Davis eerily, unmistakably recapitulated die scene toward the end of Jezebel where, persuading Amy to allow her to accompany Pres to the leper island and thereby to claim him in death, the duplicitous Julie Marsden tells Amy what she wants to hear: that it is his wife, not Julie, whom Pres loves. That Davis would replay this scene with the grieving Mrs. Wyler suggests the extent to which, by now, the story of Jezebel and her short-lived personal relationship with its director had become inextricably tangled in her thoughts.

"How did Bette expect me to react to a line like that?" Talli Wyler would wonder years afterward. "I honestly don't remember how I answered her, or whether I answered her at all. But I can tell you what I was thinking: 4 I never for one moment thought you were having an affair with my husband, Bette Davis. Last thing on my mind!' Isn't it wild that she would say something like that to me a few days after he died? To this day I have no idea whether she was telling me that out of some insane idea of kindness, or whether she was actually trying to put a doubt in my mind. Could any woman be that twisted and cruel?"

At the time of the memorial service, Mrs. Wyler had yet to hear the spurious story about the unopened marriage proposal that Bette had quietly been telling for so many years that even she had come to believe it. Thus the pang Talli Wyler experienced when, the year after her husband's death, the marriage proposal story started to

appear in print. With Wyler gone, only Bette could declare the story untrue; and she certainly had no intention of doing that, as it was she who had disseminated it in the first place. No matter that the story gave great pain to Wyler's widow, who only much later discovered that Davis had been its source. This false version of events had obliterated Bette's feelings of rejection when Wyler long ago terminated their affair, and as always with Bette, her own feelings were all that counted.

So it was when, that same year, Ham Nelson's widow, Ann, read for the first time the equally untrue account of Ham's having blackmailed Howard Hughes after discovering the tycoon's liaison with Bette. Like Mrs. Wyler, Mrs. Nelson had no idea that Bette was herself the source of the painful story about her late husband, who had suffered permanent brain damage after falling off a roof in 1971 and died four and a half years later. In 1982, when Ann Nelson contacted Bette about the blackmail story, the actress made a great show of commiserating with her. But for all the indignation she expressed privately to Ham's widow, Davis declined to denounce the story in public. It was with this spurious version of events that Bette had long ago allayed her own guilt about deceiving her husband, by portraying him as having wronged her.

A year later, having listened on numerous occasions through the years as Bette endlessly, indignantly repeated her melodramatic account of Ham's blackmail of Howard Hughes, Charles Pollock could scarcely conceal his surprise when, in the course of drawing up a guest list for the seventy-fifth-birthday party he was planning for her, Bette matter-of-factly added the name of Ham Nelson's widow.

"Joan and I really don't know one another well," said Bette when asked about Christina Crawford's portrait of her mother, Mommie Dearest. "The book makes her a monster, I suppose, but one gets the feeling Christina couldn't have made it up, could she? No one could. I've often said to my daughter, 'What are you going to write about me?' and she said, 'Nothing,' and I say, 'Thank God!' "

Living at a great distance from each other, Bette and B.D. seemed to have established a tense truce, which was violated whenever the actress appeared at Ashdown Farm—sometimes in the company of Robin Brown, who noted B.D.'s strict "rules" for her mother's behavior during these visits, including repeated attempts to proscribe Bette's chain-smoking. Charles Pollock points out that no matter what B.D. might do or say to her, Bette persisted in blaming everything on Jeremy, whom she continued to regard as "the fly in

the ointment, the hated villain who was creating all these awful problems between her and her daughter."

Precisely as B.D. appeared to have hoped, her durable marriage served as a strong statement to Bette. "There is no doubt that she was wildly jealous of the fact that B.D. had managed to establish a solid and permanent marriage," says Marion Rosenberg. "She never made any bones about it. She was just always furious at the fact that B.D. had accomplished something that she could never do."

B.D., however, continued to feel powerfully threatened by the specter of Bette's domination. Hence the Valium with which she soothed herself during her mother's visits, and the chronic colitis and other stress-related ailments she persisted in attributing to Davis's attempts to meddle in every aspect of her domestic life. Bette's interference included violent criticism of B.D. 's methods of dealing with her sons, Ashley (who had recendy been diagnosed as suffering from "depressed child syndrome," which, if left untreated, could escalate into full-scale manic depression) and Justin.

When one of the boys fell down and scraped his knee, B.D. needed only to cuddle him and wipe the tears away for Bette to pace back and forth and shout, "You're making your sons into sissies! They've got to be men! They Ve got to learn to be tough!"

While Davis complained to Peggy Shannon and others that Jeremy Hyman had made a "slave" of her daughter, B.D. quietly wondered about what she perceived as her "emotional bondage" to her mother, who, even now, continued to dream of their being buried together with Ruthie and Bobby in the pink marble mausoleum at Forest Lawn. In 1980, Bette had been visiting Ashdown Farm when word came from Phoenix that her sister had died of a cancer-induced coronary. Bette's initial outpouring of grief quickly changed to anger when she learned that Bobby had made a deathbed request to be cremated. Bette insisted that they bury her as planned in die mausoleum; but she declined to attend the funeral, as she was about to start work on a new film.

She seemed to have reached a new equanimity in her personal life as well. Although she continued to lament the loss of her beloved daughter to marriage, Bette believed herself finally to have come to terms with B.D., for whose most recent wedding anniversary, three months previously, she had given a black-tie dinner at La Scala restaurant in Los Angeles, where the Hymans had happily mingled with Rock Hudson, Robert Wagner, and other film personalities. And it certainly seemed to Bette that she had managed to cement her relations with her daughter and son-in-law when, upon their return to Pennsylvania shortly after the anniversary party, an eleven-day nationwide strike by the Independent Truckers Association in February imperiled Jeremy's business. Flush with her earnings from Right of Way and from the pilot for Hotel, Bette had been quick to offer financial assistance, for which B.D. had written to thank her mother: "I will never not be indebted to you for helping us through this frightening time and saving our home."

According to Peggy Shannon, mother and daughter talked on the telephone every Sunday. Although B.D. unquestionably remained Bette's emotional focus, her physical absence left Davis to become increasingly attached to Kathryn Sermak, who basically functioned as Bette had always hoped her daughter would one day agree to do.

But if Davis entered her seventy-sixth year with what seemed like well-justified optimism, all was hardly as she thought. Much as she believed herself to have struck a delicate balance with B.D., the daughter, unbeknownst to Davis, persisted in feeling overwhelmed and was even now quietly seeking a way to expunge her mother from her life. And although Bette was widely thought by the friends and professional associates who attended her birthday celebration to look the fittest she had in years, scarcely a month after the party, she was diagnosed as being gravely ill. That May, after a typically calamitous visit to Ashdown Farm, Bette had turned up in Westport, where Robin Brown (a widow since 1974) was about to leave for Maine to open her summer cottage. They agreed that Bette would remain in Brown's Westport home while Robin was briefly in Maine; but by the time Robin returned, her friend had departed. Bette had discovered a lump in her left breast while showering one morning, whereupon, without a word of explanation, she rushed back to Los Angeles to see her physician.

On June 9, 1983, Bette underwent a radical mastectomy at New York Hospital. Kathryn remained in her room day and night, tending to her needs and fighting with the hospital staff on the star's behalf, as she had learned to do by watching Bette fend for herself in better circumstances. Davis's illness appears to have been a

transforming experience for her young assistant. "I was a mild, almost docile person when I came to her," Sermak would recall. "Had her illness occurred earlier in our relationship, I doubt that I would have been strong enough or tough enough to fight for her, when necessary, against the wishes of her nurses and sometimes her doctors."

Following surgery, Bette's chances of survival seemed poor. The tumor had been malignant; and more than half a century of heavy drinking and smoking seemed to have diminished her body's resources to repair itself. Overnight her steady supply of alcohol and cigarettes was cut off (although Stephanie Landsman suspected her of sneaking a cigarette now and then), leaving Bette even more overwrought than usual.

And then, nine days after the mastectomy, Bette suffered a minor stroke, which caused a permanent left facial drag and a temporary speech impairment and loss of strength in the left arm and leg.

Doctors declared that Davis would almost certainly never be able to work again, yet the actress was still in possession of her old driving force, as became clear when, again and again, she went to war with her nurses. She felt that some of these women enjoyed giving orders to the famous Bette Davis—a pleasure she was keen to deny them, especially when one nurse instructed her that she must say "please" when she wanted something.

At Bette's urging, Kathryn went to Paris for a brief, much-needed vacation with her boyfriend, and Stephanie Landsman filled in as companion to Davis. She found her "desperately frightened" that the facial distortion and speech impairment would be permanent; and, worse, that her assistant might not return, leaving Bette with no one to take care of her. Having failed to tell Robin and other close friends even of her impending mastectomy, Bette was resistant to visitors in the weeks following her stroke. She clearly feared what people would think when they saw her fecial drag for the first time.

Although she had round-the-clock nurses, Bette wanted Landsman to remain day and night, as Sermak had; but her friend agreed to stay only sixteen hours daily. Sleeping on a sofa in Bette's room, Landsman was frequently awakened by Davis's frenzied "jumping up and down all night." Neither her slurred speech nor her limp kept Bette from dragging herself out of bed to rage against the night nurse, whom she repeatedly fired, only to be persuaded by the weary Landsman to get back into bed and allow the nurse to do her job.

"God, you're a cold bitch!" Bette told B.D., who visited her

mother once during her nine-week stay at New York Hospital and, once again, at Manhattan's Hotel Lombardy that September. Davis, with Kathryn Sermak, had taken up temporary residence at the hotel until she was well enough to go home. By this point Bette could scarcely continue to delude herself that she had come to terms with her daughter. When Bette asked B.D. to visit her at the hotel before she returned to Los Angeles, mother and daughter bickered with equal obstinacy about what days and times would be mutually convenient. B.D. ruled out one date on account of a dentist's appointment and stipulated that no matter what day they might agree upon, she must leave New York early enough to be home before her younger son went to bed—although that would allow her only four hours with her mother.

When B.D. did finally come to New York, Bette hinted that she might like to recuperate at Ashdown Farm, but no invitation materialized. The extent to which even the ailing Bette continued to pose a monumental threat to her daughter is suggested by the strange decision B.D. made on the way back to Pennsylvania, in the chauffeur-driven limousine Bette had provided. She would write a book about her relationship with her mother. "B.D. thought I was going to die," Davis told her old friend Ellen Batchelder after the 1985 publication of My Mother's Keeper. "That's why she wrote that book—but I fooled her!"

To anyone who knows or has talked at length to B.D. Hyman, this can be only a partial explanation for her actions that fall of 1983 as she set to work on the memoir of life with mother that Robin Brown angrily describes as having proved far more devastating to Bette than her cancer and the stroke. To listen to B.D. Hyman talk at full spate for hours on end—humorous, intelligent, ardent, im-agistic, and, above all, strong-willed—one realizes that she is very much her mother's daughter, in full possession of the remarkable driving force that Bette had inherited from Ruthie, and Ruthie from Eugenia. But where Ruthie finally had channeled everything she had into Bette, who in turn put her own ferocious, often self-consuming energies into her career, into her ceaseless rage against one and all, and—for better or worse—into her daughter, B.D. may have lacked an outlet for the boldness that coursed in these women's veins. It found expression now in B.D.'s public, unrepentent cas-tigation of her mother.

"She was competing with her mother,'' says Robin Brown. ' 'She wanted to be somebody.''

If, as B.D. says, she wrote My Mother's Keeper to free herself from Bette at long last, the book's publication would have quite the