Bette Davis (48 page)

1 opposite effect: invisibly, ineluctably binding her to her mother, forever after identifying B.D. Hyman as Bette Davis's faithless daughter, the one who wrote "that book."

Prior to the mastectomy and stroke, Bette had appeared healthier and more robust than she had in years. Friends agreed that her recent professional successes had given her a new air of physical confidence and vigor. But when she returned to Los Angeles now, she seemed to have undergone a shocking metamorphosis. The perpetual grimace that she was so anxious to conceal from others was the least of it. Frail and painfully emaciated, Bette seemed to have shrunken to a fraction of her former size. To make matters worse, not long after she was installed at Colonial House she called Peggy Shannon to announce that she had broken her hip. The accident had occurred while she was trying to remove her bra. She had called for help, and when no one came immediately she decided to do it herself: a difficult undertaking in her feeble condition. "I struggled and I got so mad that when I finally was able to take off the bra, I threw it toward my television," Bette told Shannon. Spinning around, she fell on the floor and broke her hip.

There followed an intensive program of physical therapy to help her walk again, as well as to regain her capacity for normal speech in the aftermath of the stroke. Unwilling to allow people to see her ravaged state, Bette recoiled from the prospect of returning to the television series Hotel. Whatever joy she had once experienced in

i anticipation of having her own series, and however desperately she needed the income now, Bette refused Aaron Spelling's repeated invitations to resume work. Spelling was anxious to get Davis back on the series and made every effort to accommodate her needs. He went so far as to suggest that she appear on-camera in a wheelchair. Shooting schedules and scripts could all be revised to suit her, so

! long as she would come back to work. Bette repaid Spelling's generosity by publicly lambasting his series, which she snidely suggested they rename "Brothel." She claimed to have withdrawn from Hotel on account of what she derided as its racy plot lines, but her real motive for leaving was what friends recognized as her terror of going on-camera in her current condition. Bette's role on the series went to Anne Baxter, who had once played Eve Harrington to Davis's Margo Channing in All About Eve.

Following Bette's surgery, friends noted a substantial change in her attitude toward her young assistant, Kathryn Sermak. Dori Brenner perceived that the reins started to change hands "as Bette grew weaker and weaker physically—and also emotionally." And

according to Stephanie Landsman, who had spent time with Davis at New York Hospital, Bette became desperate when Kathryn was gone—palpably terrified that the assistant would fail to return despite daily notes from Kathryn reassuring ' 'Miss D." of how much she loved, adored, needed, and understood her; and referring to herself as the ailing actress's stepdaughter.

Kathryn's brief absence in Paris seemed only to have endeared her to Bette all the more (especially as B.D. hardly danced attendance on her mother during her illness). "She needed her in the worst way," says Robin Brown of Bette's deep attachment to the assistant who had shown such devotion in the hospital. "I think that she developed a relationship with Kathryn that was highly emotional."

At Colonial House, Peggy Shannon was saddened and astonished to see her once imperious friend repeatedly defer to the young assistant. "Miss Davis used to order her around and everything," says Shannon, "but then when Miss Davis was sick, she took over with such power. I saw it." Charles Pollock, too, was perplexed by the strange new dynamics: "When I used to go over to visit Bette or have dinner with Bette, Kathryn would either sit in her room, sit in the kitchen, or sit someplace else. She was not part of the party." But now all that seemed to have changed. "Bette was like nothing, and Kathryn was Bette," says Pollock. "Kathryn made ninety percent of the conversation. She sat there drinking and having the hors d'oeuvres. ... As B.D. said, 'She became Mother.' "

At length, much as Bette seemed to have feared, the young assistant who had showered her with attention in the months since her operation decided to live on her own for a while. Once again Kathryn's absence made Bette feel the need for her all the more desperately. Assorted maids, cooks, nurses, and secretaries followed in swift succession at Colonial House, but no one seemed to do.

Robin Brown had declined Bette's suggestion that they live together again, as in the twenties. Peggy Shannon, too, turned down Bette's repeated invitations to move in with her, but that did not keep Davis from making what was for her perhaps the ultimate appeal for companionship. "Now, Peggy Shannon, have you ever thought about your burial?" Bette would say after a few drinks. "Well, I have that beautiful crypt, and it holds eight. B.D. and the kids aren't going to be buried there. Their life is on the East Coast.''

Finally, in the summer of 1984, Kathryn agreed to join Bette in Malibu as her secretary during the writing of the slender memoir

This 'N That with Michael Herskowitz. Davis lived in a rented beach house, the assistant in a nearby apartment. Planned as a tell-all about the men in her life, the book had evolved into an account of the actress's recent illness and recovery. Davis would dedicate the volume to her secretary and even pose with her for the back cover photo; Kathryn appeared with her employer on the book tour.

At Ashdown Farm, B.D. was in considerable turmoil as she worked on the manuscript that would become My Mother's Keeper. No matter how powerful the anger and rage she had long felt against her mother, B.D. was well aware of the harrowing ordeal Bette had just undergone in New York. She had seen for herself her mother's ravaged body. And through regular telephone contact, B.D. knew of Bette's further ordeal in Los Angeles after she broke her hip. It would be one thing for the daughter to write a venomous attack were Bette strong and healthy, quite another to do this to a sickly, petrified, seventy-six-year-old woman fighting to put her life back together.

While B.D. was secretly transferring to paper all her pent-up fury at Bette, she was constrained in her telephone conversations with her invalid parent to avoid mention of what she was doing, even as she listened to Bette's slightly slurred accounts of her arduous recovery. All this cannot have been easy for B.D., who had long sustained a powerful, passionate love/hate relationship with her overbearing mother.

This was not just any child taking up the cudgel against any parent. This was Bette Davis's B.D.—the daughter this powerful, possessive woman cherished above everyone and everything else on earth.

"People say Miss Davis's career came first," observes Peggy Shannon. "No! B.D. came first! She idolized this girl. This girl was her life."

B.D. shared her gnawing doubts with her husband Jeremy, who encouraged her to keep writing. Having sold his interest in the trucking firm that fall, after a period of sustained discord with his business partner, the man whom B.D. describes as "the leader" in their family would take an active role in the production of My Mother's Keeper. According to B.D., Jeremy worked with her to help relive the agonizing scenes of domestic violence experienced at Gary Merrill's hands, which she had hitherto preferred to banish from her thoughts.

Besides her ambivalence about what she was about to do to her mother, other pressures drove B.D. to the crisis point. Her own

poor health caused her to fear that she would become a semi-invalid before long. Torn ligaments in her back, bone spurs, colitis, varicose veins, and obesity were among the problems that plagued B.D. in this period, driving her to seek relief in muscle relaxers and painkillers. So severe was her back pain that she dared not raise her arms or bend over; and yet, fueled by the driving force that appears, in one form or another, to have possessed all the Favor women, she often crawled about on all fours to toil in her vegetable garden. Despite these severe physical limitations, B.D. regularly moved hay bales, cared for her horses, and undertook other heavy farm work.

Her elder son's mood disorder was the source of further anxiety and heartache. Ruthie had spent time in a sanitarium many years before, Bobby had had a long history of mental problems, and now Ashley was experiencing regular bouts of depression. Although (like his aunt Bobby) Ashley had suffered from depression from early childhood, it had seemed to his mother that his spirits were improving when, in 1981, B.D. allowed the boy to appear as an actor in the television film Family Reunion, starring Bette Davis. After this, B.D. blamed Ashley's worsening condition on his collisions with his grandmother (who complained to friends that the boy reminded her of B.D. 's husband, Jeremy, hence her persistent ill treatment of him). By the time Ashley was fourteen, his highs and lows were a fact of life in the Hyman family, whose physician warned that he could, without proper help, become a full-scale manic-depressive before he turned twenty.

Such were the problems weighing upon B.D.—ambivalence about the book she was writing, dread of her impending semi-invalidism, anxieties about her son—when, on January 19, 1984, in the midst of a snowstorm, a man arrived at Ashdown Farm to make a routine delivery. Falling into animated conversation with the couple, the visitor happened to mention that he was a born-again Christian. As B.D. told the visitor, she had often watched the Reverend Ernest Angley engage in miraculous acts of faith healing on TV. Perhaps it was the uninhibited histrionics of the televangelists—then at their peak of national popularity—that lured Bette Davis's daughter; or perhaps it was a throwback to the religious fervor of her great-grandmother Eugenia, whose long-ago rejection by Ruthie had made Bette's career possible. Four days after the stranger's visit, B.D. Hyman declared herself a born-again Christian; and a little more than a month after that, on March 9, 1984, while watching evangelist Pat Robertson on die Christian Broadcasting Network's

700 Club, B.D. claimed to have been cured of her excruciating back pain.

Three weeks later, when the Hymans made a pilgrimage to one of the Reverend Ernest Angley's Pentecostal healing services in Akron, Ohio, B.D. was hoping for a cure for her myriad other ailments; but also for Ashley's depression and the partial deafness he suffered. At Grace Cathedral, the Hymans watched in wonder as Reverend Angley applied his famous healing touch to people who had arrived in wheelchairs and on stretchers, some of them cancer patients, to a little girl with five personalities and a man with a withered hand and, finally, a woman who was said to have been in a coma for six weeks until the minister caused her to rise from her stretcher and take a short walk accompanied by her nurse, while the congregation swayed and spoke in tongues all around them.

"What can God do for you, son?" the Reverend Angley asked Ashley Hyman.

When die fourteen-year-old disclosed that he was partially deaf and suffered from depression, the minister began by cupping the afflicted ear with his palm and shouting, ' 'In the name of the Lord, come out!"

"He stared straight into my eyes." Ashley would recall the moments leading up to his sudden faint onstage. "First I could see red lines running from his eyes into mine, and there was a burning sensation in my head. He stood there, with his arms folded, and stared at me. Then the red lines turned blue, and my head suddenly felt cool. Rev. Angley stepped toward me, tapped my forehead gently with the palm of his hand and shouted ' Yayah.' "

' 'That's my son!'' called B.D., as members of the ministry caught the boy in their arms and placed him on the floor, where he lay unconscious, experiencing what he would recall as a glorious vision of a white-robed Jesus who walked on a lake before ascending to Heaven.

"Hallelujah!" the Reverend Angley greeted Bette Davis's weeping, laughing daughter. ' 'Now what can God do for you, Momma?''

Back at Ashdown Farm, B.D. was confident that the healing service had indeed cured her son's depression. When B.D. talked to her mother on the telephone, she reported the miraculous relief from colitis, calcium deposits in the ankles, and varicose veins she claimed to have undergone at Grace Cathedral—but not something else that had happened there: the Reverend Angley's declaration in the midst of his service that it was essential for families to cast out relatives who brought discord and unhappiness to the family unit, which B.D. gratefully interpreted as a sign from the heavens that,

for all her doubts about writing her tell-all book, she must press on with the enterprise.

Hence, it would seem, B.D.'s curious claim, in a January 4, 1985, letter to Vik Greenfield, that God had helped her to write My Mother's Keeper.

"Mother was a destroyer," says B.D. Hyman, some five years after the publication of her book, "and the thing that amazes me is that I wasn't destroyed. It is a miracle. Since having in the last several years developed a really amazing relationship with the Lord—and I'm not discussing religion; I'm just talking about a one-on-one relationship with God—I do truly believe that the only reason is that God protected me. Whatever his reasons are I have no idea— I don't have any great destiny. But the Lord graciously protected me.

In September 1984 (a year after she decided to write her book), B.D. signed a contract that provided for a $100,000 advance and spring '85 publication. By contrast with Bette's self-promulgated image as devoted mother—an image that she no doubt believed to be entirely correct— My Mother's Keeper depicted her as drunken, cruel, abusive, and manipulative. Particularly scathing was the largely accurate portrait of Davis's violent marriage to Gary Merrill. The Hymans having decided to sell Ashdown Farm and take off for the Bahamas before the book was published and the fireworks started, Jeremy headed south on October 2, in search of a new home.

On October 22, purportedly in hopes of influencing her mother to become a born-again Christian, so that a happy ending might be appended to My Mother's Keeper— of whose existence Bette remained ignorant—B.D. came to New York. Davis was en route to England to make the television film Murder with Mirrors, her first acting assignment since leaving New York Hospital. She had undergone months of intensive physical therapy, but Bette was nonetheless fearful of what the cameras would reveal. Qualms similar to those that caused her to turn down Hotel— fans seeing the fecial drag and other aftereffects of the stroke—tortured her now.

Would she have the necessary stamina for film work? Were her speech and gait sufficiently repaired? And more important—for she had experienced some alarming memory lapses of late—would she be able to remember her lines?

Almost certainly the very last thing on Bette's mind just now would have been the blow that awaited from B.D., who—telling herself that her mother seemed substantially recovered from the

worst effects of the stroke, if still a bit wobbly from her broken hip—highlighted her final meeting with her mother by declaiming the Sermon on the Mount from a green leather-bound Bible on whose cover she had had "Ruth Elizabeth Davis" engraved in gold leaf.

In England, Bette's anxieties, as always, got the better of her, causing her to lash out at cast and crew lest they perceive her as weak. "She shunned me and everyone else who tried to help," co-star Helen Hayes would recall. "She couldn't stand anyone she considered a rival, though no one was trying to compete with her. Her physical condition made her hypersensitive to any potential charges that she was no longer capable of playing the role or any other role. She refused to take a nap between scenes, because that might confirm what she feared people suspected: that she was too much the invalid to be the great star and consummate actress she had once been. Bette drove herself mercilessly; she was her own worst enemy, at least during this production."

But she could keep up her front no longer when, in November, word about B.D. 's book reached her from New York, where rumors of what Bette Davis's daughter had done to her were rife. Already weak, fearful, defensive, and insecure, entirely unprepared for anything like this, Bette reacted as if she had been bludgeoned. On the telephone, she pleaded unsuccessfully with her daughter not to publish the book. Filming was still in progress when she crawled into bed and remained there, ruminating endlessly about B.D.'s betrayal. Perhaps even worse than the humiliation she would experience when the memoir was published was the thought that B.D. had been secretly, insidiously planning and working on the book through their many conversations in the past year: conversations that now seemed horribly tainted. How could her daughter have sat there with her in New York, while preparing that terrible violation? After this—her friend Robin Brown recalls—Bette would feel that there was no one left whom she could trust.

With both sides gearing up for a possible legal struggle, Vik Greenfield suddenly emerged as an important player, his experience as Bette's longtime assistant (the man who had indeed seen and heard "all") rendering him an invaluable potential witness for either camp. Having agreed to corroborate B.D.'s account (which, like most of Bette's friends, he thought harsh but, sadly, all too accurate), Greenfield soon found himself summoned back to work for Bette.

Politely, he declined to abandon his current, considerably more tranquil situation as companion to an elderly invalid gentleman. On

January 5, 1985, B.D. wrote Greenfield from her new home in the Bahamas, in an apparent effort to keep him in her camp. Reminding him of all the terrible things her mother had said about him behind his back, B.D. warned him to be careful, as Bette was prepared to do whatever was necessary to halt publication of the book. B.D.'s letter is sprinkled with references to her mother's satanic character and powers; and to B.D.'s hope that God—who had helped her to write the book and was already showing an interest in its sequel-would also help Bette to profit from reading My Mother's Keeper by agreeing to admit her sins.

Although the public was stunned by the reports of brutality and domestic violence in My Mother's Keeper, many of Bette s friends and associates sadly recognized a good deal of truth in the daughter's account. Still, not one of Davis s friends, even those who continued to profess great fondness for B.D., believed she was right to pummel her aged, ailing mother in print.

"It was really an obscene book, in my opinion," says Robin Brown. "I cannot believe that she would write that book. Bette adored this girl—she was her life! I thought it was an absolutely brutal thing to do."

"You read B.D.'s book and you keep saying to yourself, 4 Yep! Right! On the nose!' " says Dori Brenner. 4k It is a correct portrait—yet it's so profoundly disturbing to me that B.D. did it. I can understand why she had to write it. But then you think: Stick it in a drawer; don't publish it!"

"B.D. had to write that book," says Charles Pollock. "It was a catharsis for her. She had to get out all that poison in her system. But I think her timing was terribly wrong. Much as I like B.D., I have to say she exercised poor taste and poor judgment. She should have had a little more sense and waited until after her mother was dead. Well, Bette had only herself to blame for what B.D. did to her. Bette created the woman who wrote that book, exactly as Ruthie had created her."

"People said Mother was a very emotional person who felt things very deeply—but she didn't," says B.D. Hyman. "Mother just played roles. She spent her whole life saying I was the only thing she ever loved—not 'person' but 'thing'—and then when I did something that made her furious, when I wrote the book, she just decided I didn't exist anymore. And from that moment until she died, I didn't exist.'' After My Mother f s Keeper, much as B.D. may have expected her mother "to call, to scream, to yell, to insist on at least getting together in the same place at the same time so that she could scream at me," to the daughter's astonishment that isn't

what happened at all. "She just turned it off," says B.D. " 'Okay, B.D. is now the enemy. That's it. Don't bother me anymore.' And she never wanted to go past that. Now, if you really love someone and they do something that hurts you deeply, you want to at least try and understand. Even if you can never see the reason, even if you can never forgive them, you want to understand what on earth happened. ... If you cared that much, then your rage would be absolute, but you'd have to deal with it. You couldn't just throw a temper tantrum and then shut it off. That's what she did. Very strange."

"Well, anyway, now we can go on picnics and have a baby sister!" Bette had exclaimed in 1918 when Ruthie told her and Bobby that their father had abandoned them. And now again, sixty-seven years later, in swiftly, resolutely cutting her beloved B.D. out of her life, Bette mimicked Harlow Morrell Davis's Yankee mask of indifference, a public role she had learned to play early on in the face of unspeakable rejection.

In private testimony to her feelings, however, her personal papers contained a thick file of B.D.'s interviews and reviews. "Look, I know it's upsetting that B.D. published that book, but it's not that bad," Peggy Shannon said, trying unsuccessfully to soothe her. "It's all stories I Ve heard you tell. It's nothing people don't already know."

By the fall, Bette was able briefly to lose herself in work on a new television film, As Summers Die, shot on location in Georgia. As she admitted to screenwriter Michael DeGuzman, committing a part to memory posed formidable new difficulties in the aftermath of her stroke. She apologized in advance, anticipating difficulties in case of any changes in the script. Davis's benign manner with the screenwriter was in marked contrast to her harsh treatment of the local maid she had hired—-"just someone else to beat on," as producer Rick Rosenberg describes the good-natured Georgia woman. Yet when the film wrapped on the day before Thanksgiving, to allow people to fly home to be with their families, Bette seemed in no hurry to leave the motel—or the maid at whom she had quivered with rage from first to last. "This was so sad," the producer recalls. "Bette literally didn't have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving and ended up having it alone in her room with the maid."

As indicated in a June 10, 1985, letter to Vik Greenfield, as early as her nationwide tour to promote My Mother's Keeper, B.D. was anxious to learn whether her mother had read it yet. Although the

book was supposed to have freed B.D. from Bette, it was evident that she was as inextricably tied to her mother as ever. Again that summer she wrote from Grand Bahama Island to express her surprise that Bette had not called her. Had Greenfield heard anything about what Mother was up to? And yet again, at Christmas, B.D. was writing to declare her sadness at how lonely Bette must be by now, Davis having steadfastly (foolishly, in B.D.'s view) refused to be in touch with her daughter.

These letters suggest that, having long been told by an adoring mother that she could do anything, B.D. hardly grasped the import of what she had just done to Bette.

On Grand Bahama Island, the Hymans had settled into a Federal house on Sea Breeze Lane, where B.D. had launched a career painting horse portraits, while (according to B.D.'s letters) Jeremy was doing the greater part of the writing on Narrow Is the Wa\\ the sequel to My Mother's Keeper that B.D. had announced during her book tour. For all that, B.D. appears not to have discovered the tranquility she may have hoped for. The old conflicts with her mother seem to have been revived in discord with Ashley, whom B.D. believed to be Satan's latest means of access into her marriage. The young man's capacity to infuriate her caused B.D. to compare him to Bette, who, ironically, had been know to lash out at poor Ashley because he supposedly reminded her of Jeremy.

Bette fared little better than her daughter in the troubled wake of My Mother's Keeper. Kathryn's 1985 departure to pursue an independent life in Paris came as a new source of unhappiness. In search of companionship, Bette flew east for a visit with Robin, in whose Connecticut home she wandered about with Kathryn's photograph clutched to her chest

Who could ever criticize Lillian Gish? It's like criticizing the Statue of Liberty!"

"Hello, Bette," said Gish when they met for the first time on the tiny set, where there was only a single chair at the moment.

"Hello, Miss Gish." Bette made a great point of refusing to function on a first-name basis.

"Do you want to sit down?" Gish softly asked the younger actress, who responded with scarcely concealed rage.

"Bette was immediately offended that Lillian had asked her to sit down," Kaplan recalls. From then on, Davis was persistently rude to her co-star, as if Gish had committed some grave offense against her. "No one had ever been that way to Lillian," says the producer. "It was unbelievable!"

Part of what Marion Rosenberg describes as Davis's "appalling behavior" to Gish was her endlessly complaining about Lillian's hearing problem. When actor Harry Carey, Jr., greeted Gish on the set, Davis barked, "You'll have to yell. She can't hear a damn thing!"—although, as Carey points out, Gish, standing a few feet away, could clearly hear that cruel comment. Still, says the actor, "Lillian just closed her mind to Bette and went her own merry way; Bette had no effect on her."