Bette Davis (50 page)

"I saw her lying there on the ground," says Cohen, who had stepped indoors for a moment, then glanced out the window, to observe Davis (who had often seemed to lose her balance on the set) stumble and fell in the courtyard of the house where they were filming, as her assistant and others rushed to help her. "I didn't know if I should go over there or not. I felt maybe I should stay away from her so as not to embarrass her."

Davis angrily declined offers of help as she struggled in vain to return to her feet. That even Kathryn was turned away suggested how important it was to Bette to be able to get up by herself. To admit the need for assistance would be to accept how sick she was— and that Bette was most unwilling to do. For some twenty minutes she lay on the ground, repeatedly trying to rise by her own strength, then falling again. Finally, the grips stacked up empty apple crates, which Bette grabbed onto, slowly, painfully clawing her way back onto her feet.

On examination, it was discovered that Bette had a large welt on her side. "She came in, and I told her that she could go home," Cohen recalls. ' 'But she said she wanted to continue.'' When Davis had to go upstairs, where Cohen was shooting, she insisted on walking up without help.

Afterward, when the director went to talk to Bette alone, he was amazed to see her suddenly burst into tears. "I couldn't believe it," says Cohen. "That was the most vulnerable I ever saw her."

"I don't know what to do!" Davis wept. "I don't know if I'm any good in this part. I must see the dailies. I must see how I look.''

There was one important problem. Time and again in the unedited dailies, she was seen to lose her balance, to forget her lines, or to fumble with her broken dentures. Cohen had already informed his producer that before the dailies were sent to the distributor, MGM, he wanted to remove any moments that might prove embarrassing to Davis. "I wanted them to see her as smooth as possible," says the director, "so I wanted to get in there and edit the

dailies." But now, with Davis desperately insisting on seeing all the footage at once, there was—as Cohen explains—no time to take out the things she would not want to see. Cohen arranged a private screening on Saturday.

There was no denying the brutal evidence of what Bette saw. As the unedited footage made all too clear, she was simply in no condition to do film work anymore: a horrifying prospect to a woman who had thriven on work, and, at this point, had little else in life to sustain her. It was hardly the poor quality of the film that vexed her now, as Bette later liked to suggest; she had made plenty of bad pictures before. It was the sobering, terrifying knowledge of what she looked like in the unedited dailies that drove her to do something that even Bette Davis had never done in the course of her long and tempestuous film career.

"I'm sorry," said Bette when she called the director on Sunday, the day after she had examined the footage. "I made a terrible mistake and am leaving the picture." Before Cohen could say a word to stop her, she hung up—leaving him to salvage his film by rewriting the script to allow the Bette Davis character miraculously to metamorphose into the young actress Barbara Carrera.

Though Bette persistently implied that she had withdrawn from Wicked Stepmother because of the film's ineptitude, it was really the sight of her own tottering, fleshless figure on-screen that had caused her to flee. In the months that followed, that flight took Bette around the world as she poured her remaining strength into collecting a succession of international honors and awards. To hold in one's hand some of the private, strangely funereal photographs that Kathryn took of the infirm actress—"a tiny broken sparrow," as one friend described her—is to wonder why, in this ruinous condition, Bette continued to haul herself from one award ceremony to another. Throughout her life, work had been her refuge. Now, much as she struggled to suggest that the public appearances were a strategy to keep herself visible, to show that she was still vigorous and ready to go on-camera again, all this was really a substitute for the film work of which she was scarcely any longer capable. The essentially pointless peregrinations helped banish from her thoughts the lonely void her life had become.

Where once she and Wyler had meticulously timed and choreographed her every second on screen, now it was the obsessive details, the empty rituals, of her public appearances that soothed and absorbed her. Kathryn was drafted to play the directorial role: precisely noting each move Bette was to make, leaving nothing to

chance. Typically, in anticipation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's tribute to Davis on April 24, 1989, Bette studied Polaroid photographs of each corridor she would be expected to traverse, along with handwritten descriptions of the turns, steps, and platforms to be encountered en route. As in Ruthie's 1928 letter to her daughter on the eve of Bette's departure for Rochester, here were meticulous, reassuring instructions for everything she was to say and do, down to so seemingly spontaneous a gesture as the blowing of a kiss or the turning of her left side, her face still slightly askew, to the camera.

Only naturally, the omnipresent assistant and the extent of her control over the wraithlike star elicited a good deal of comment and speculation. Press reports noted the curious "role reversal" in which Davis and her secretary intermittently engaged. "Kathryn appears to be a masterful minder who enjoys the role," wrote English journalist Maureen Cozens. "It made a strange contrast to see the forceful star switch from holding court on her own account very ably, wittily, at times cuttingly, then turn hesitantly to the very up-front assistant to ask 'what should we do?' from time to time." And repeatedly, in describing Bette's enigmatic relationship with Kathryn—who, in the end, seemed even to emulate the actress's speech and gestures—friends evoke Margo Channing's relationship with Eve Harrington in All About Eve. "It's interesting how life imitates art," says Dori Brenner, "and how Eve Harrington came back to haunt Bette Davis." And declares Peggy Shannon (the skeptical, protective Birdie to Kathryn's Eve?): "This girl took her whole personality, everything, from her." But as Brenner and others close to Davis seem to recognize, there is also a strong sense in which Bette herself was pulling the strings from first to last. Perhaps in seeming to lose control to her increasingly powerful assistant, Bette was attempting, as she so often had in the past, to lend drama, to give a more satisfying shape and substance, to her own life by recasting it in terms of an old movie plot. "I think it's a two-way street," says Brenner. "Bette never did anything she didn't want to do."

And says B.D. Hyman, as always uncannily in touch with a good many of her mother's most obscure motives: "Kathryn became what I was supposed to be. Mother found a willing victim. . . . She became an extension of Mother. She dressed like Mother. She talked like Mother. She had the same phraseology. . . . She just became totally drawn in, totally as if she were possessed by the presence of my mother, and became what I was supposed to be. And Mother indeed did call Kathryn her daughter at the end."

On several occasions in this last period, B.D. attempted unsuccessfully to contact Bette. "I had called Mother a couple of times just because I thought I ought to when I was in California," she recalls. "Mother knew I was on the phone, because I could hear her voice in the background, but I never even got past Kathryn."

The daughter's mistake, according to several of Davis's friends, was her failure to present herself at Bette's door. "B.D. could have cut Bette's throat, but if she went to her door and Bette opened it, Bette would have fallen into her arms, sobbing," insists Vic Greenfield. "You've got to realize they were two strong women. Neither was going to bend. But Bette would have bent if she had seen B.D. face-to-face. Eye-to-eye. She adored B.D.!"

There had been no reconciliation between mother and daughter when, in the summer of 1989, Bette was diagnosed as suffering from cancer again and secretly underwent radiation treatments in Los Angeles: an experience that seemed to drain the last sap from her. Her starveling appearance having given rise to tabloid reports that she was dying of self-inflicted malnutrition, Bette asked Rick Rosenberg whether she should publicly disclose her latest bout with cancer.

"They say I'm starving myself, but it's not the truth!" Bette told Rosenberg, producer of Strangers and As Summers Die, when they met to discuss a small film role he wanted to offer her. "Should I hold a press conference and tell them about the cancer?"

"No, don't worry about it," the producer counseled Davis.

On the way to dinner with Rosenberg, Bette and her assistant asked to stop off first for a drink at the Saint James's Club in Hollywood, where the producer watched as, with enormous effort, Davis slowly dragged herself up the stairs to the lobby.

"See, we won! We won!" crowed Bette, clawlike fingers excitedly indicating a large photograph of her, displayed among star portraits in the lobby.

"What did you win?" asked Rosenberg, as all heads turned to watch Bette Davis on her way to the bar.

"I'll tell you," said Bette, clearly savoring all the attention, although much of it was doubtless morbid fascination with her deathlike appearance. "I was here a couple of weeks ago, and they had my photograph way in the back. I talked to the manager, and they moved it up for me. I wanted to return unannounced to see if they had moved it back after I left, or if it was still in front, where it belongs."

Having promised to call Rick Rosenberg about the new film role

after she returned from Europe, Bette left for Spain on September 13. Whether she sensed that she was dying is impossible to say, but there can be no question that she was horribly ill and failing badly as she allowed herself to be painted and bewigged for her public appearances at the San Sebastian film festival. Bette and her assistant lingered for several days at their hotel, where Bette developed what was initially thought to be flu.

Far too weak to return to the United States, Bette heeded her doctors' advice that she fly to Paris on Tuesday, October 3, to check into the American Hospital in Neuilly. A private jet was hired, but Bette would not even consider the proposal that she be carried aboard on a stretcher. She demanded that she be dressed and made up to give the impression that nothing was wrong. In Neuilly, the hospital staff initially expressed the hope that Bette would be strong enough to fly home in a few days, but scarcely a day had passed before her rapidly deteriorating condition made that most unlikely. And so it was that on Friday, October 5, 1989, with only her hired companion at her side, Bette Davis died at the American Hospital at the age of eighty-one. Although Kathryn would later make a great point of insisting that in her final days Davis never once uttered B.D.'s name, anyone who knew Bette well would find it hard to believe that on her deathbed she failed to think of her beloved daughter and the tragic events that had separated them.

Six days later, according to Bette's long-standing plan, she was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial with Ruthie and Bobby. The marble statue modeled on B.D. served as a poignant reminder that Bette Davis's daughter was not there to mark her passing.

EPILOGUE

"I always said Bette would come out on top no matter what she did, but it didn't work out that way at the end," says Robin Brown of her lifelong friend.

And of Bette's last years, her daughter B.D. declares: "She had her fame and her public; that's what she wanted, and that's what she had. And that's all she had."

In the months prior to Gary Merrill's death from cancer on March 5, 1990, a Merrill family member wrote to B.D. at her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, to suggest that she might want to go to Falmouth, Maine, to visit him in his last days. B.D. replied that although God had permitted her to forgive Gary, she had no interest in seeing or speaking to him again. Merrill's will pointedly excluded B.D. by name, "for reasons which I am sure she will understand." Gary appointed Michael Merrill as trustee of the Margot Merrill Irrevocable Trust, to which Bette had contributed when she signed over custody of their adopted daughter, who continued to reside at a special facility for the retarded.

On December 30, 1990, a little over a year after her mother's death, B.D. wrote to Vik Greenfield that shortly after Thanksgiving, doctors had discovered cancerous tumors on her ovary and informed her that she had a limited time to live. Although her condition degenerated rapidly, Bette Davis's daughter refused to enter a hospital. She preferred to remain at home and pray to God to heal her.

According to B.D., on December 7, 1990, her prayers were an-

swered—the cancerous tumors disappeared, and her health was miraculously restored.

B.D.'s news about her long-troubled son, Ashley, was considerably darker. Early on, the boy had expressed a serious interest in following in his grandmother's footsteps by becoming an actor. His unhappy experience working with Bette in the television film Family Reunion notwithstanding, Ashley persisted in his desire for an acting career. Even after the irrevocable split with Bette occasioned by the publication of My Mother's Keeper, Ashley had retained his interest in dramatics and participated in the amateur productions of a little-theater group in the Bahamas. In time, however, immersed as he was in the world of evangelism and uninhibited religious fervor to which his parents had attached themselves, the young man exchanged his theatrical ambitions for a desire to become a minister. According to B.D., Ashley had been studying to be a minister when a bout with manic depression landed him in a Virginia mental hospital, where lithium treatments gradually improved his condition. T\vo years later, although Ashley was still hospitalized, he was able to spend weekends and holidays with his family. Thwarted for the time being in his career plans, Ashley, according to his mother, was bringing the message of born-again Christianity to his fellow patients, many of whom were said by B.D. to have found God through the young man's evangelism.

Less than a year had passed before B.D. was declaring, much as she had in 1984, that God had healed Ashley. At Christmas of 1991, to the astonishment of her mother's friends, B.D. contacted Vik Greenfield to announce that once again a miracle had occurred to restore Ashley's health. She also reported her twenty-two-year-old son's marriage to a young woman called Mary, who had recently devoted her life to Jesus after witnessing Ashley's latest miraculous cure.