“HELLO!”
On an Arctic iceberg or in the middle of Macy’s, the voice on the phone could have belonged to only one person. Part Fanny Skeffington and part Margo Channing, but all Bette Davis.
“Come on Tuesday. I should have the papers signed by then. What? You’re not calling about the mortgage? Oh, the interview! Well, I’m a basket case before noon. For years I had to be on the set at dawn, now when I don’t work my greatest luxury is sleeping late. So come for lunch. My dear, I’m terribly sorry, I thought you were from the bank. My address—now don’t laugh—is One Crooked Mile. Just ask anybody. They all know the house.”
They did, too. One Westport resident told me it is impossible to go for Sunday drives without seeing the cars lined up to get a peek at her behind the curtains. And I don’t blame them. There never has been—and never will be—anyone quite like her. In a business where stars are killed off as fast as Indian extras, she is one of the few genuine legends still left to the imagination. To people like my father, who never go to movies (“Why go, when you can see Bogart and Davis on the late show?”) she is one of the only names left on a marquee that doesn’t have to be explained. And to legions of kids, discovering the magic of her films all over again, she is zero cool. The whole banana. They go away raving (At her best, she is devastating) or they go away laughing (At her worst, she is merely the best Bette Davis caricature out of all the other stars who’ve built careers doing Bette Davis caricatures), but they never go away bored. Because Davis is an original in an industry full of stand-ins. Froggy-eyed, lipstick-slashed or glowing like a Tiffany lamp, she is exciting enough, even when photographed through gauze, to make the nubile youth cultists about as interesting as a withered logarithm.
There she stands, in the door of her Connecticut farmhouse, waving her by-now practically petrified cigarette, saying, “Call me Bette or we’ll never be friends.” Swamp fevers, gunshot wounds, bubonic plague, the deaths of countless lovers, the brain tumor to end all brain tumors, car accidents, shipwrecks, beatings at the hands of the syndicate and suicide on the Chicago train tracks—she has survived them all and, most amazing, the wear doesn’t show. “Nobody knows what I look like because I never looked the same way twice.” Today, it can be said with all immodesty, she looks sensational. She was wearing tight black-and-white checked wool slacks, loafers, a boy’s button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a little gold doggie pinned to her lapel. Her hair is finally back to its natural soft walnut color after Tennessee Williams made her dye it Popsicle orange a few years ago for her Broadway appearance in Night of the Iguana, and she wears it exactly as she did when she played twins in A Stolen Life. Unlike most star ladies her age, she has never had a face lift, yet she looks younger than any of them. “I could’ve been lying in bed with maribou feathers, but I decided what the hell, might as well see me exactly as I am. I’ll be 61 years old the first week in April of ’69—but don’t send flowers—I’ll be in bed all day. I only look as old as I feel, and I’m having a ball.”
Lunch was ready. Yankee stew with grits, artichokes (and a lecture on how to cook them), fresh fruit with kirsch and cornbread sticks “courtesy of Aunt Jemima—everything else I cooked myself.” We ate from old pewter plates on a big wooden country kitchen table with a revolving lazy susan filled with spices and flowers and the two things that are never far from wherever she happens to be, her ashtrays and cigarettes (“If there is any truth to that cancer rumor, my dear, I’ve got it already!”). She talked a blue streak about her children (B.D., 21, who lives with her husband in nearby Weston; Margo, 18, a retarded daughter who has been in a special school in Geneva, New York, since she was three; and Michael, 17, in his senior year at Loomis, near Hartford), Hollywood (“I was always a Yankee girl at heart—it was never a cozy town anyway, unless you did the social thing, which I never did—even at the height of my career, I always came back East between pictures.”) and, most important, her latest film for Twentieth Century Fox, The Anniversary, made in London, in which she makes a real Davis entrance from the top of a staircase with a scarlet patch over one eye to the tune of “Anniversary Waltz,” celebrates her husband’s death with firecrackers, blackmails one son, exposes the second as a transvestite, drives the third son’s girl into hysterics by placing a glass eye under her pillow, and threatens the life of her daughter-in-law by paying her off each time she has a baby, knowing secretly she has a heart condition. If you think she’s something with both eyes, wait until you see that one Davis eye doing the work for two.
“Well,” says Bette, “it may not be the greatest movie ever made, but it’s a good old-fashioned Bette Davis movie and I do get the best of everybody in the end. And it was a challenge. She’s a completely non-sequitur woman who never listens to anything anyone says, like playing a prosecuting attorney. The eye patch was absolute torture. I couldn’t get my balance for a month. Then I got all the light in one eye. The only time I took the damn thing off was at lunch and it blistered the skin around my eye. But it is most definitely not a horror film. I waited two years for a part like this. Let’s face it. Nobody is writing scripts for older women. Everything is youth-oriented now. When I was 15 or 20 years younger, I got all of Miss Bankhead’s or Miss Barrymore’s parts from the stage, but if you want to stay with your profession, you have to stay up with the times. This is the age of horror films. The world is pretty horrible. So I did four or five stinking pieces of crap in a row, like that thing where I played Susan Hayward’s mother. I don’t even remember the name, but it paid for my daughter’s wedding. And I did some Westerns on TV, even though I can’t stand all the shooting, but I kept up with the times, which is more than I can say for most of the other dames—and let’s face it, there weren’t many in our class to begin with. I never did care terribly about my appearance. If my career was different from the other ladies, that had a lot to do with it from the beginning. I could always make myself look different. It was expected of me, and that’s why I was offered a lot of smashing parts, because they knew I could do them. Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty, but I fought for realism. Even in The Catered Affair, one of the best films I ever made, I made myself look blown-up and flabby by thinking fat and covering my arms with white powder. It takes courage to do that in our industry. That’s why I went on a p.a. tour after Baby Jane—people were so amazed to see I wasn’t falling down. I used to hate my face when I was young, but now I’m glad. It’s been a blessing. But I never kidded myself into thinking the crap I made was really art in disguise. And I’ve never seen any of those films. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane was a challenge and fun. Anniversary was fun. Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte was fun up to a point, then it became ridiculous. But I always hated the crap, and I was always right. Every now and then it turns up on TV to remind me I didn’t fight hard enough. But all that is over now. I’m not rich, but I don’t need money as much now as I used to, so I no longer need to make crap. I could’ve made literally half a million in the last six months just doing vignettes. I won’t play vignettes for small salaries. I tried that and they ended up putting my name above the marquee anyway, so I learned my lesson. You want to know what’s ruined this business? Actors. They’ll walk across the screen for anything, but I’m the only one of those dames who kept her price. My price for putting my name on that marquee is $200,000 and ten percent of the gross and I won’t even talk to anybody for anything less because when they see me on the screen they’re seeing 37 years of sweat. They pay for my experience and if that loses its importance I might as well get lost. I was offered the lead in Oh Dad, Poor Dad and I said if Bette Davis goes Off-Broadway that means the value of everyone else my age goes down. I was offered the mother in Cool Hand Luke. Another vignette. Jo Van Fleet played both of those parts, but I wouldn’t. I was offered the touring company of Killing of Sister George, but I would’ve been stuck with somebody else’s interpretation and staging with no time to make it mine. I was offered the madam in Everything in the Garden. Did you see it? If Edward Albee’s name hadn’t been on it, I wouldn’t have believed he had anything to do with it. The biggest disappointment was not getting the film of Virginia Woolf or my part in the film of Iguana. Those heartbreaks nearly killed me. And I don’t really like the stage. The actors you have to work with. Don’t get me started on the Actors Studio. There was one actor in Iguana who took an entire day to figure out the motivation for taking off his shoe. I finally stood up onstage and yelled, ‘Why don’t you just take the goddam shoe off? It’s just a shoe!’ So. I do roles that are star roles in films I can still do for my price, and to do that I have to sometimes do crap, but I’ll tell you one thing—I still know the crap when I see it. I’ve fought like a bull deer to keep that image flying.”
Anyone going to a Bette Davis interview expecting a shocking fan-magazine revelation of the true-life behind-the-scenes scandals during the days when Hollywood movies were the Great American Pastime will be disappointed. She is tough, but she is too much of a lady to be a tattletale. Later, after a few Scotches, she may tear loose with a few unprintable sizzlers about everyone from Susan Hayward to Alec Guinness, but she never rats on her friends for publication. “That was the biggest problem writing my book, The Lonely Life. It was absolute torture, like going to an analyst. But I wrote it. I disapprove of autobiographies—they mustn’t be too modest, mustn’t be too conceited, and then there are lots of other people involved too, and you have to know when to name names and when to protect people’s reputations. Oh, the things I could’ve printed about Errol Flynn! But I’ve always believed in looking ahead, not back, so there were many incidents in my life I had forgotten and I had to haul them out again. But I felt obligated to tell people things they didn’t know, not just put together a lot of newspaper and magazine clippings written by someone else, and I felt another obligation to tell people today what it’s like going into the fame area. Also, I didn’t want to tell so much that my children would have to go into class and have all the other kids say, ‘So that’s what your mother did!’ But I must admit I came off worse in that book than anyone else.
“I care more about what my children think than anyone else, and I’ve always done my best to shield them from being Bette Davis’ children. I never had any problems with B.D. She was always much taller and more mature than the other children her age. But Margo, who was a perfectly beautiful, normal baby until she was three, developed a brain defect and I had to place her in an institution. If you don’t think I don’t sit around here in this house crying my eyes out night after night about the fact that my child is a vegetable, you are out of your mind. The worst part of it is that she is only half a vegetable. She looks beautiful and acts like a young lady, but then suddenly something will happen and she will digress back into the world of a child again. On her last birthday I took her to New York and really pulled out the stops—nightclubs, the works—and everybody wanted my autograph everywhere we went, and then in the car going home she turned to me and said, ‘Mama, can I have your autograph too?’ And you have to laugh and cry at the same time. That play Joe Egg was right. You laugh or you won’t survive the tears in life. She wants a baby and she talks about nothing but getting married, and it will never happen. You think that doesn’t tear a mother’s heart out? And now the thing that is eating me up inside is what I’m going to do when I die to protect my children from taking on that responsibility. I’ll never do it to them. So don’t go around thinking Bette Davis lives the life of a glamorous movie star. My life is anything but roses.”
She refilled her glass and led the way through rooms with fireplaces and antiques and friendly flowers nodding happily in pots and vases, walls of books, plaques, citations and awards, lighting her cigarettes by striking big kitchen matches under the tables and chairs of whatever room she’s in with enough gusto to start another Chicago Fire. She’s not a scrapbook collector (“They only gather dust”), but there were her two Oscars, primly guarding the mantel, sharing the smell of nutmeg and cloves with an orange tree, a Volpi cup sent by her biggest fan, Mussolini, the first magazine silver cup ever awarded to a Hollywood movie star (“What does it say? Oh yes, Redbook—oh God, what they started!”), her Emmy award, citations from the Mexican government for her work in the illiteracy campaign, a silver cigarette case from Frank Sinatra, some John F. Kennedy buttons, stuffed ladybugs the child next door rides on, golf clubs (“I played for years until I broke my back”), lamps made out of old milk cans, Sarah Bernhardt ashtrays, a plaque from the Hollywood Canteen (“Not many things I’m proud of in my life—that was one of them”).
We curled up in overstuffed easy chairs in front of the fire in a glass room overlooking the snow melting in the Saugatuck River, and she talked some more. “You asked me about success. There’s a theatre in Greenwich Village where every time they show All About Eve you can’t hear one word I say because of this cult that says all my dialogue aloud from memory. Edward Albee told me that. Isn’t that spooky? I’d like to go the next time and see that. But that’s not success. I wouldn’t faint if all the best tables at Sardi’s were taken when I got there and I had to take the worst. This was never one of my goals in getting there. Success is something you don’t think about until it happens. I was fresh from the stage and I just wanted to work. It took many years of work and sweat to get the other. But during all the getting-there years there was a challenge which young people today don’t seem to have. I had to eat, earn a living. That was a reason. I had a five-year plan. I was all prepared to become the best secretary in the world if Hollywood didn’t work out in five years. I learned there is no short cut to anything. Now I know my favorite years have been as a mother, and I’m still learning. You should hear them on politics—it’s fascinating. At 16, I never knew such a thing existed. I raised my children to condition themselves to accepting my career as part of them. They visited all my sets, knew it was hard work. My home was never an actress’ home, I never considered myself special. And now neither of them has any desire to act and I could not be more grateful. B.D. was in Payment on Demand as a child and she had a small part in Baby Jane because I thought it would be fun for her. She got it out of her system. Any woman is most fortunate if she isn’t driven by something she has to prove. To some, it’ll be a shock to discover Bette Davis is no longer driven, that she likes living in the country. Puccini! I went to his farm outside Pisa. It was a funny, simple little house. That’s the way most of us want to live.
“Today all the fun is gone in making movies. In the old days, we had time to be individuals. You don’t even get to know the men on the crews any more and I always knew my crews. How do you think I got all those great camera angles? I was right there behind the camera lining up the shots! In Anniversary I was the only American on the set, so when the Fourth of July came I had a jacket of stars and stripes and a top hat made out of the American flag for a big joke and I remember feeling guilty because I was afraid I was taking up 15 minutes of everyone’s valuable time. In the old days at Warners we were like a football team—everyone felt important but we still had fun and some of that came through on film. We all had a style. I’ve tried to answer to myself many times how things changed. I think it’s more gimmicky now. If you make a film in Budapest, for God’s sake let’s see Budapest. Performances used to count for more, films were photographed more in detail. Nobody traveled. I never went on a location in my life except once or twice for a day or two at a time. Everything was created right there on the set and there was a dedication among performers to sell their product. Now those films like Dark Victory are considered old-fashioned, but they are still the ones audiences love because they got to know the people onscreen. Today they cast films, they don’t write films. They never say, ‘We’ll write this for Suzy Glutz,’ they buy it and then ask Suzy Glutz if she’ll be in it.
“Scripts were developed for stars in my time. Bogey and I made our first one together—an awful little thing called Bad Sister—I played the good sister, my dear. (Enormous roar.) I always wanted to do a real film with him but in those days one star really had to carry it alone and they were not eager to waste us on each other’s properties. So I never worked with Cooper, Gable, Grant—any of the real kings of the screen. They had their films and I had mine. Sometimes we were treated badly and then we’d walk out. Do you know they never recorded ‘They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,’ which I introduced in Thank Your Lucky Stars? And I put that song on the top of the Hit Parade. The damn fools. Once I walked out on suspension for nine months and I remember in the last conversation I had with Jack Warner he said, ‘Please don’t go, Bette, we’ve got this new book for you called Gone with the Wind and I turned around, leaned across his desk, and said, ‘Yeah, and I’ll just bet it’s a pip!’ I had lunch one day recently in the old Warner’s commissary with Olivia de Havilland and I said, ‘Oh Livvie, what ghosts there are in this room!’ and she said, ‘Yeah, and wouldn’t you just know we’d outlive them all?’”
I had already missed the early train, so she phoned the market and sat cross-legged on the floor, cooking lamb chops in the open fireplace while her two Oscars frowned down, remembering swankier evenings. “You asked me about mistakes. If I had to do it all over again the only thing I’d change is that I would never get married. But then I wouldn’t have my kids and without them I would die. But my biggest problem all my life was men. I never met one yet who could compete with the image the public made out of Bette Davis. You think being a well-bred Yankee girl brought up with a moral sense of right and wrong, it doesn’t kill me to admit I was married five times? I am a woman meant for a man. I get very lonely sometimes at night in this big house—there’s nothing glamorous about that. But I never found a man who could compete. I sat here two nights ago in my living room all alone and watched a film I made with Gary Merrill while we were married. Same billing, everything. At the end the announcer said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been watching Phone Call from a Stranger starring Bette Davis, Shelley Winters and Gary Davis!! So help me God. And that’s what men had to put up with. And I don’t blame the men. I was a good wife. But I don’t know any other lady in my category who kept a husband either, unless she married for money or married a secretary-manager type where there was no competition. That’s a price I’ve paid for success, and I’ve had a lot of it.
“What am I going to do next? I’m going to get into my Mustang and drive to Yale and ask them if they’ll hire me as a teacher, because I’m bored and that’s the only thing I haven’t done yet, and if they will, I’m going to teach those kids how to act without all this Actors Studio crap and all this self-indulgence actors have today. I’ll be rough as a cat, but they’ll learn discipline, because that’s the only way to survive. I survived because I was tougher than everybody else. Joe Mankiewicz always told me, ‘Bette, when you die they oughta put only one sentence on your tombstone—She did it the hard way! And he was right. And you know something else? It’s the only way.”
She waved goodbye in the farmhouse door and I could see her silhouette in the moonlight, like the end of Now Voyager, lit by the stars and the torch on the tip of her inextinguishable cigarette. Seconds later, on the way to the station in the taxi, the world seemed duller already.