If the battle of the sexes has become a war unto death, then I have been through it all. From drummer girl to Five-Star General—Retired, if you please.
I was handed the responsibilities of a man at twenty. Being little girl, sister, aunt and daughter to a mother was difficult. It was impossible to put my foot down. She had done so much for me.
Once the pattern is set, that’s it. Bobby’s daughter—no luckier than Ruthie, Bobby or I in marriage—has recently made me a grandfather. At this moment of writing, my obligations include three generations. Papa now has seven children and a horse. The only future marriage I would even remotely consider would be with Paul Getty.
I know now that my marriages—all of them—were a farce. What always started out in rehearsal to be a dream romance always ended in tuppenny melodrama. Each was different and all were the same. Variations on the same theme. As usual, the trouble started with those major considerations—the script and the casting.
Most men came to me with muscles flexed. It is a role as popular as Hamlet and just as rarely well played. All my marriages were charades. And I was equally responsible. The role of little woman was just as synthetic for me. I suppose I came pre-shrunk. The posture was absurdly belittling and brought further diminishing returns. But I always fell in love. That was the original sin.
Certainly modern woman in her agonized freedom has not lost the need of mastering. The female has gained more strength than the male. He, it seems, has lost his. When a man is challenged by an equal, he seems to retreat.
I have needed taming and I always looked for a Petrucchio. But I never let one take me on. I made it difficult, all right. But so did Kate. There wouldn’t be much of a contest if the end were predetermined. Yes. I confess I found one man in my life. But he never tamed me because I flew like a bat out of hell.
It is impossible to know what would have happened had I allowed a husband to hold the purse strings. Early events made it impossible. My pride and independence precluded the chance later. I never learned to take. It has been a great fault not shared by some of my mates. I could never ask a man for anything. A man wants to be needed. But I couldn’t be dependent in any way. That above all, I think, was my classic crime.
Without financial dependence on her husband, a woman loses patience more quickly, the areas of boredom loom larger. Unlike her mother and grandmother, she doesn’t shrug her shoulders and make the best of things. She sets about to make them better. Today, more and more women are saying, “I’ve had it.”
I do not say they are happier than their mothers or wiser; but facts are facts. A successful workingwoman cannot have the same set of values and reactions as her sheltered nineteenth-century grandmother. Power is new to women. We undoubtedly misuse it. I have been in the front ranks. Many who have lost the feminine thing and been forced to, aggress in order to survive. The swing toward a matriarchal society is here again.
If it is true that I was strengthened by my father, most men today are weakened by their mothers.
In all of my marriages there was no equality in incomes. This never bothered me until the inequity was taken for granted. I was old-fashioned enough to believe that a mate shared everything. Who ever heard of one partner prospering, the other languishing? What was mine was his. But I am lured to paraphrase the famous “but what’s his is his.” I discovered that when a husband made one hundred dollars a week, he never so much as offered to pay the gas and electric bills. He simply bought himself some more clothes. The thought would have been enough. It would have replaced the deed with me. But it was never offered.
Perhaps I wanted to run the show; but if that is so, then they all allowed it. Men usually balk at being the male while accusing you of robbing them of their virility.
It is said that it is virtually impossible to rape a woman. I contend that it is equally impossible to emasculate a man. It has taken all these years for me to realize that men and women must come to each other whole. It is only then that one and one make a unit. The fractions add up to nothing.
Each in a marriage must make a contribution. Of course. What was that old song? “You’re the cream in my coffee…you’re the salt in my stew”? How great and how true. One has a right to expect such a complement. I was always eager to salt a good stew. The trouble was that I was expected to supply the meat and potatoes as well. This is the farce of our epoch and most wives know it. Now the celebrated woman, the rich woman, the strong woman, finds everything compounded.
Many men, like me, have been rejected by their fathers. I became my own years ago; but now, in the maze that is the modern emotional relationship, men find their fathers in women. Now, with the solitary exception of General Eisenhower, I am the least likely father symbol extant. I have been screaming this into the wind all my adult life. But the fates decreed otherwise.
The high-powered male wants peace when he gets home. The man of action wants a place to lick his wounds, a tender mate to soothe his fevers. He deserves these ministrations. Classically, the man is the soldier, the woman his nurse. But there are high-powered females today who need the same solace after dark.
She spends her days in the same arena fighting just as hard. She is strung to her highest pitch when she returns home. But if she reasonably expects the same considerations, she becomes a monster. Man or woman, a human being cannot discard the habit of authority and station for naked slavery. But miracles are expected of a woman. She is expected to be a quick-change artist. If she loves her home, she takes care of it. Nothing could ever stop me from running my house. It is second nature for me to clean and cook. But on my terms. I cannot be a servant but the keeper of the house.
Well, I tried. I tried everything. I attempted to be all things to all men and found that it was simply an extension of my daily struggle—one more strain. I found I was now acting twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Marriage is the toughest contract of them all.
Like Julie in Jezebel I had to remain in charge and when the man allowed it, I lost all respect for him. I certainly made it impossible. The “Whats” matter in this world, not the “Whys.” No matter the reasons. I was a hellion and I made my bed. It has taken me all these campaigns to realize that if my husbands were weaklings, it was I who attracted them. The one man—that one Petrucchio—I was petrified of. Ruth Elizabeth had one goal all her life—to find a real man. Bette Davis ran interference all the way.
I am that new race of women. But there is a new species of man as well. Unlike the leaners, he is sufficient unto himself. Our era has given him frozen foods and a thousand and one available services that make a woman around the house expendable.
Some of the happiest hosts I know are bachelors. The whole point of marriage has been blunted. If a woman doesn’t need a provider and a man doesn’t need her homemaking, then half the reason for their alliance is gone. If either ever reveals a talent for auto-reproduction, there will never be another marriage ceremony.
The act of sex, gratifying as it may be, is God’s joke on humanity. It is man’s last desperate stand at superintendency. The whole ritual is a grotesque anachronism, an outdated testament to man’s waning power. It’s all we’ve got and so we make the best of it. It is not, however, sufficient reason for matrimony.
It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies. I think I’ve known this all my life. No one could ever share my drive or my vision. No one has ever understood the sweetness of my joy at the end of a good day’s work. I guess I threw everything else down the drain.
But they all settled, my husbands, and enjoyed the fruit while they tried to cut down the tree. Every last one of them resented his position without trying to change it. A better way to say it—the responsibility always shifted to me. Since they were all bigger than I physically, there was a way of punishing me.
My father unfortunately balked at beating me. My husbands did not. I have always been terrorized by physical violence. The indignity of it humiliates me. This was their ammunition. And I evidently drove them to use it.
Their inadequacies, their feeling of secondary position in the household, always led to resentment, bitterness and jealousy. When they yelled for Daddy and I answered, they lashed out at me in fury.
Why did they always stay to the bitter end? Why didn’t they leave as they so often threatened to? I suppose, like children, they were afraid to leave home.
I am not a chameleon. All my life I fought dishonesty and misrepresentation. I remember my battle to keep Warners from displaying The Corn Is Green with ads consisting of a picture of me (playing the Welsh schoolmistress) in black satin décolletage. Well, I found my husbands’ advance publicity fraudulent. The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone’s concern and like vampires they suck our life’s blood.
It is the strong who need care. It is they who need constant replenishment. It is the strong who are vulnerable. But “Don’t worry about her. She can take care of herself!” is what you hear from the beginning. It is the strong for whom I will do anything. It is they who need consideration.
Like Gulliver, I have been used as the Lilliputians’ landscape. I have been walked over always. I have survived it because I survive everything; so far—anyway.
Of course, I replaced my father. It was my Pyrrhic victory. I am responsible. Every spark grows to consume itself. It is true. I became my own father and everyone else’s. Ruthie knew this. I think she saw it start very early. And this is why she eventually handled me as she had her first husband. She was every inch the wife that Harlow Morrell Davis reckoned with and eventually abandoned. I never could.
This is all true but there is another strata beneath this one. It is hell to dislike a parent. I longed to love my father. I respected his intellect, his power. I wanted this in a man beyond my fear of it.
In Rome a couple of years ago, I met Magnani once more. That brilliant, lonely woman. She fixed her gaze on me one day.
“Ah, Bette Davis! How I envy you. You have everything—a career and a husband!”
I couldn’t tell her then we were in the same boat. Now she knows.
If I ever hear that marriage ceremony again I will scream with laughter. And I would wear black. That ceremony for me is interred with the corpse of Ruth Elizabeth. This is not to say that I will not fall in love again. Love I cannot escape. But one is soon enough released from its bondage. No more of Thoreau’s quiet desperation.
No more long-term contracts. I am free and we all know what solitude that brings. But I have always been alone, really. I should have known enough to travel light; because no one could really come with me on my trip. I fought this knowledge for years and now I face it squarely.
My children however are the dividends I miraculously earned with all my wildcat schemes. But how strange that the circle has come full round. I am exactly where Mother was at the beginning. Alone with my children—alone against the world. But I have had my fulfillment in my career. Ruthie never did—either in love or work. She sacrificed everything for me.
“I don’t like it that you’re going to be alone in the house, Mommy. Who’s going to be with you when B.D. and I are away at school?”
Ten-year-old Mike. I felt my face begin to crumble. And that’s exactly why I sent him off to school. I do not intend to use my children as crutches. At this moment, the world of children is the only sane and gratifying one to me. The silence of the house is painful. These occasional weekends are nothing. I cannot wait until Christmas. We’ll all be together again. This will be the second Christmas without Ruthie. Without our “weeping gifts.” But I have my work and I’ll be fine.
My children will never see vulnerability and sacrifice. This is the tie that binds as no other—and forever. I want them bound to no one, not even to me. And I am all right. I’ll be fine! I keep saying it over and over!
The Williams play was my first without Ruthie. There are going to be so many firsts from now on.
Our out-of-town tryout of Iguana opened in Rochester. Rochester! It’s almost too pat. A flood of memories carried me from my dressing room to that stage on opening night. Cukor and Broadway, Ruthie and the striped wallpaper, the beginning, the prelude to all this. How ironic that I should return to Rochester. I recalled my train trip with the cast—my first separation from her.
“Remember, darling. Study the part of Pearl…she’s going to have an accident.”
I stood waiting for the curtain to go up. All the old nerves were there. Then I felt my spine stiffen.
Western Union never sent it; but it was telegraphed all the same. No one can ever convince me it wasn’t.
“Remember, darling—I’m in the front row.”
Mother was there. I saw her, back at Cushing when I graduated, smiling gaily in that old flowered hat that was supposed to hide her developer-poisoned face. I saw her sitting there spunky and proud. I could never let her down. My cue came. “Curtain up, light the lights, we’ve got nothing to hit but the heights.”
I made my entrance. Maxine Faulk said, “Shannon! Hi Baby—I’ve been expecting you here.”
Everything did come up roses.