Bette Davis (51 page)

Following her mother's death, B.D. had told Charles Pollock that she was relieved to be free of Bette at long last. The fierce lifelong struggle with her mother seemed to be over. But it is hard not to see the powerful aftershock of that struggle in the troubles that beset B.D. and her family even now that her mother was gone. In B.D. 's embrace of her great-grandmother Eugenia's evangelical zeal, in the impassioned Pentecostal pronouncements in which she cloaked herself before Bette's friends, one hears a daughter still raging against her mother, one observes a woman desperately struggling to resolve a conflict that, even now, seems to cast its shadow over her.

B.D. is correct when she characterizes Bette as a "destructive

force"—for that is what the Favor women's famous driving force largely became. In Ruthie, Eugenia's evangelical zeal became a vague but no less ardent aspiration to assert and express herself, to become something in the world of men. Precisely what that something might be remained frustratingly unclear to Ruthie until at length she transferred her dreams to Bette, whose fulfillment the mother claimed in place of her own.

In the thirties and forties, Bette Davis inspired America with dynamic portraits of strong-willed women who scorned the passive roles traditionally accorded to their sex. Long after World War II, when Davis's indomitable characters had provided an important model of female strength, the enduring power of the Davis screen image continued to stir filmgoers with its eloquent message of a woman's capacity for transforming herself and the world around her.

Confusing the actress with her image, the woman with some of the characters she played on-screen, Bette Davis's biographers have tended to view her as a woman who struggled, who fought for her art against the mighty studio system and won. In most tellings, if Bette Davis was almost always at war in the course of a turbulent career of more than half a century, it was for better parts, better directors, better films; and above all, it was to enhance her options as an actress and a woman. On examination, however, the facts tell a less inspiring story. Anxious as we may be to discover in Bette Davis's life the example of a woman's courageous struggle to expand the boundaries of her art and to demand the opportunities that have been unjustly denied her, all we really find is an endless series of irrational, misguided, all too often self-destructive battles, to which the woman ultimately sacrificed her prodigious gifts as an actress.

There can be litde question that Davis's performances in Jezebel and The Letter are among the finest acting ever recorded on film. Viewed in the context of the rest of Davis's career, however, there is also something terribly sad about them: suggesting as they do all that Bette was capable of as an actress and failed to achieve in the years that followed the perverse and self-consuming conflict with Wyler during the making of their third film together. By the time of The Little Foxes, Bette had fearfully dug in her heels. Unlike Fontanne, Cornell, and the other stage actresses she had once admired, Bette, upon attaining the stardom she and Ruthie had hungered for, saw no reason to take risks in order to perfect her craft as Wyler urged her to do. Thenceforth, for Bette Davis it would be strictly a question of staying on top, of remaining a star, of making

certain that her portrait was up front where it belonged; the hollow struggle to accomplish that preoccupied her virtually until the day she died. Anyone tempted to believe that Davis left Warner Bros, in search of more challenging acting opportunities need only consult the long list of mostly inferior films on which she repeatedly squandered her talents in the years that followed. Even the magnetic personality and matchless screen presence Davis brought to the most execrable of productions did not camouflage the sorry spectacle of a great talent pigheadedly wasted.

More and more, in the absence of anything even approaching artistic aspiration, Davis's ferocious energies were absorbed by the offstage histrionics with which she gleefully subverted films and plays good, bad, and indifferent. The Night of the Iguana and Two s Company; The Whales of August and Wicked Stepmother— it was all somehow the same to Bette, whose ceaseless war footing the public continued fondly to regard as betokening the same irrepressible spirit Davis had shown in her legendary court battle with Warners.

Davis had waged that battle mainly over money and power, not over better films, as history has tended to record. Although, like Cagney's fight with Warners, Bette's struggle against her contract did have the effect of chipping away at the studios' all-embracing control over the individual actor; and although, in 1936, her contentious persona did project a socially useful image of a woman boldly and unabashedly speaking up for herself, before very long Davis's pugnacity had calcified into a mannerism as self-indulgent and gratuitous as any of the nervous, unnecessary, ticlike gestures Wyler lamented in her acting.

While Bette Davis liked to think of herself as a Hollywood rebel, she differed in important ways from a quarrelsome, recalcitrant figure like Orson Welles, who, like Davis, spent much of his working life in a perpetual state of siege. But where Welles was always fighting for something, Davis only knew how to fight against—and therein lay all the difference.

Bette Davis: Stage, film, and television credits

STAGE

BROADWAY (Cukor-Kondolf Company, Rochester, N.Y., 1928; dir. George

Cukor) Summer theater productions (Junior Players and Cape Playhouse, Dennis,

Mass., 1928) Repertory (Cukor-Kondolf Company, Rochester, N.Y., 1928) THE EARTH BETWEEN (Provincetown Playhouse, New York, 1929; dir.

James Light) Blanche Yurka Ibsen Tour, 1929

Summer theater productions (Cape Playhouse, Dennis, Mass., 1929) BROKEN DISHES (Broadway, 1929; dir. Marion Gering) Summer theater productions (Cape Playhouse, Dennis, Mass., 1930) BROKEN DISHES (tour, 1930)

SOLID SOUTH (Broadway, 1930; dir. Rouben Mamoulian) TWO'S COMPANY (tour, Broadway, 1952-53; dir. Jules Dassin) THE WORLD OF CARL SANDBURG (tour, Broadway, 1959-60; dir. Norman Corwin) THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (tour, Broadway, 1961-62; dir. Frank Corsaio) MISS MOFFAT (tour, closed in Philadelphia, 1974; dir. Joshua Logan) BETTE DAVIS IN PERSON AND ON FILM (tour, first performance 1973)

FILMS

(Note: Years cited indicate release dates)

BAD SISTER (Universal, 1931; dir. Hobart Henley)

SEED (Universal, 1931; dir. John M. Stahl)

WATERLOO BRIDGE (Universal, 1931; dir. James Whale)

WAY BACK HOME (Radio Pictures, 1932; dir. William A. Seiter)

THE MENACE (Columbia, 1932; dir. Roy William Neil)

HELL'S HOUSE (Capital Films Exchange, 1932; dir. Howard Higgins)

THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD (Warner Bros., 1932; dir. John Adolphi)

SO BIG (Warner Bros., 1932; dir. William A. Wellman)

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US (First National/Warner Bros., 1932;

dir. Alfred E. Green) THE DARK HORSE (First National/Warner Bros. ,1932; dir. Alfred E. Green) CABIN IN THE COTTON (First National/Warner Bros., 1932; dir. Michael

Curtiz) THREE ON A MATCH (First National/Wamer Bros., 1932; dir. Mervyn

LeRoy) 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (First National/Warner Bros., 1933; dir. Michael Curtiz) PARACHUTE JUMPER (Warner Bros., 1933; dir. Alfred E. Green) THE WORKING MAN (Warner Bros., 1933; dir. John Adolphi) EX-LADY (Warner Bros., 1933; dir. Robert Florey) BUREAU OF MISSING PERSONS (First National/Wamer Bros., 1933; dir.

Roy Del Ruth) FASHIONS OF 1934 (First National/Warner Bros., 1934; dir. William Die-

terte) THE BIG SHAKEDOWN (First National/Wamer Bros., 1934; dir. John Francis Dillon) JIMMY THE GENT (Warner Bros., 1934; dir. Michael Curtiz) FOG OVER FRISCO (First National/Wamer Bros., 1934; dir. William Die-

terle) OF HUMAN BONDAGE (RKO, 1934; dir. John Cromwell) HOUSEWIFE (Warner Bros., 1934; dir. Alfred E. Green) BORDERTOWN (Warner Bros., 1935; dir. Archie Mayo) THE GIRL FROM TENTH AVENUE (First National/Wamer Bros., 1935;

dir. Alfred E. Green) FRONT PAGE WOMAN (Warner Bros., 1935; dir. Michael Curtiz) SPECIAL AGENT (Cosmopolitan/Warner Bros., 1935; dir. William Keigh-

ley) DANGEROUS (Warner Bros., 1935; dir. Alfred E. Green) THE PETRIFIED FOREST (Warner Bros., 1936; dir. Archie Mayo) THE GOLDEN ARROW (First National/Wamer Bros., 1936; dir. Alfred E.

Green) SATAN MET A LADY (Warner Bros., 1936; dir. William Dieterle) MARKED WOMAN (Warner Bros., 1937; dir. Lloyd Bacon) KID GALAHAD (Warner Bros., 1937; dir. Michael Curtiz) THAT CERTAIN WOMAN (Warner Bros., 1937; dir. Edmund Goulding) IT'S LOVE I'M AFTER (Warner Bros., 1937; dir. Archie Mayo) JEZEBEL (Warner Bros., 1938; dir. William Wyler)

THE SISTERS (Warner Bros., 1938; dir. Anatole Litvak)

DARK VICTORY (Warner Bros., 1939; dir. Edmund Goulding)

JUAREZ (Warner Bros., 1939; dir. William Dieterle)

THE OLD MAID (Warner Bros., 1939; dir. Edmund Goulding)

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (WarnerBros., 1939;

dir. Michael Curtiz) ALL THIS AND HEAVEN TOO (Warner Bros., 1940; dir. Anatole Litvak) THE LETTER (Warner Bros., 1940; dir. William Wyler) THE GREAT LIE (Warner Bros., 1941; dir. Edmund Goulding) THE BRIDE CAME C.O.D. (Warner Bros., 1941; dir. William Keighley) THE LITTLE FOXES (RKO, 1941; dir. William Wyler) THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER (Warner Bros., 1941; dir. William

Keighley) IN THIS OUR LIFE (Warner Bros., 1942; dir. John Huston) NOW, VOYAGER (Warner Bros., 1942; dir. Irving Rapper) WATCH ON THE RHINE (Warner Bros., 1943; dir. Herman Shumlin) THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (Warner Bros., 1943; dir. David Butler) OLD ACQUAINTANCE (Warner Bros., 1943; dir. Vincent Sherman) MR. SKEFFINGTON (Warner Bros., 1944; dir. Vincent Sherman) HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN (Warner Bros., 1944; dir. Delmar Daves) THE CORN IS GREEN (Warner Bros., 1945; dir. Irving Rapper) A STOLEN LIFE (Warner Bros., 1946; dir. Curtis Bernhardt) DECEPTION (Warner Bros., 1946; dir. Irving Rapper) WINTER MEETING (Warner Bros., 1948; dir. Bretaigne Windust) JUNE BRIDE (Warner Bros., 1948; dir. Bretaigne Windust) BEYOND THE FOREST (Warner Bros., 1949: dir. King Vidor) ALL ABOUT EVE (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1950; dir. Joseph L. Mankiew-

icz) PAYMENT ON DEMAND (RKO, 1951; dir. Curtis Bernhardt) ANOTHER MAN'S POISON (Eros/United Artists, 1952; dir. Irving Rapper) PHONE CALL FROM A STRANGER (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1952; dir.

Jean Negulesco) THE STAR (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1952; dir. Stuart Heisler) THE VIRGIN QUEEN (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1955; dir. Henry Koster) STORM CENTER (Phoenix Productions/Columbia Pictures, 1956; dir. Daniel Taradash) THE CATERED AFFAIR (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956; dir. Richard

Brooks) JOHN PAUL JONES (Samuel Bronston Productions/Warner Bros., 1959; dir.

John Farrow) THE SCAPEGOAT (Du Maurier-Guinness/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1959; dir.

Robert Hamer) POCKETFUL OF MIRACLES (Franton/United Artists, 1961; dir. Frank

Capra) WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (Seven Arts-Aldrich Associates/Warner Bros., 1961; dir. Robert Aldrich) DEAD RINGER (Warner Bros., 1964; dir. Paul Henreid)

THE EMPTY CANVAS (Joseph E. Levine/Embassy, 1964; dir. Damiano

Damiani) WHERE LOVE HAS GONE (Joseph E. Irvine/Paramount, 1964; dir. Edward Dmytiyk) HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (Aldrich Associates/Twentieth

Century-Fox, 1964; dir. Robert Aldrich) THE NANNY (Seven Arts-Hammer/Twentieth Century-Fox, 1965; dir. Seth

Holt) THE ANNIVERSARY (Seven Arts-Hammer/Twentieth Century-Fox, 1968;

dir. Roy Ward Baker) CONNECTING ROOMS (London Screen/Hemdale, 1971; dir. Franklin Goll-

ings) BUNNY O'HARE (American-International, 1971; dir. Gerd Oswald) THE SCIENTIFIC CARDPLAYER (LO SCOPONE SCIENTIFICO) (Dino

De Laurentiis/CIC, 1972; dir. Luigi Comencini) BURNT OFFERINGS (PEA/ United Artists, 1976; dir. Dan Curtis) RETURN FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN (Walt Disney/Buena Vista, 1978;

dir. John Hough) DEATH ON THE NILE (Paramount, 1978; dir. John Guniermin) WATCHER IN THE WOODS (Walt Disney/Buena Vista, 1980; dir. John

Hough) THE WHALES OF AUGUST (Alive/Circle Associates, 1987; dir. Lindsay

Anderson) WICKED STEPMOTHER (MGM Videotape, 1988; dir. Larry Cohen)

SELECTED TELEVISION

MADAME SIN (ITC Productions, 1971; dir. David Greene)

THE JUDGE AND JAKE WYLER (Universal, 1972; dir. David Lowell Rich)

SCREAM, PRETTY PEGGY (Universal, 1973; dir. Gordon Hessler)

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF AIMEE (Tomorrow Entertainment, 1976; dir.

Anthony Harvey) THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME (Universal, 1978; dir.

Leo Penn) STRANGERS: THE STORY OF A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER (Chris-Rose Productions, 1979; dir. Milton Katselas) WHITE MAMA (1980; dir. Jackie Cooper)

SKYWARD (GE Theater/Major H-Anson Productions, 1980; dir. Ron Howard) FAMILY REUNION (NBC, 1981; dir. Fielder Cook) A PIANO FOR MRS. CIMINO (CBS, 1982; dir. George Schaefer) LITTLE GLORIA . . . HAPPY AT LAST (NBC, 1982; dir. Waris

Hussein) HOTEL (ABC/Aaron Spelling Productions, 1983; dir. Jeny London) RIGHT OF WAY (HBO/Post-Newsweek Video, 1983; dir. George Schaefer)

MURDER WITH MIRRORS (Hanjeno/Warner Bros. TV, 1985; dir. Dick

Lowry) AS SUMMERS DIE (1986; dir. Jean-Claude Tramont)

Acknowledgments

Allegra Huston, my editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London, first suggested that I write a biography of Bette Davis. This book would not have been possible without Allegra's intelligence, counsel, and support. She was there for me every step of the way. I am deeply grateful for all she has done.

Also at Weidenfeld, I would like to thank George Weidenfeld for his continued support of my work; and Natalina Bertoli for her help and good cheer.

At Summit Books in New York, I want to thank Jim Silberman, who was confident that it would be possible to write a serious biography of a movie star and who shared my belief that Bette Davis merited such a book. Also at Summit, I would like to thank Dominick Anfuso, who took over the editing after Jim's departure and made many helpful suggestions; and Cassie Jones, who assisted with important details.

Lois Wallace has been the best agent anyone could want. I will always be grateful for her support and cool head in moments of crisis. Also at the Wallace Literary Agency in New York, Tom Wallace was a source of much help and excellent advice, particularly at the inception of this book.