Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (35 page)

Joan stared at her. "No. You can't. It's my line and my exit. I close the door."

"But I don't know what to do with my hands," Hope argued.

"Again there was a pause," said reporter Dinte. "Again Joan's eyebrows raised. And then this icy voice, at which top directors, famous leading men and wealthy producers have all trembled, said loud and clear: 'I suggest you find something to do with them, dear.'"

Much to Joan's chagrin, the director, Jean Negulesco, sided with Lange, and the scene went to her. Negulesco also cut a subsequent sequence between Crawford and model-actress Suzy Parker. "That scene was the reason I took the movie," said Joan. "It was set late at night in Amanda's apartment. She had been drinking. She was all alone in life. No man, no family, just a career. Certainly I knew a few things about that predicament, and I gave it everything I had."

"I have just come from the
Actors Studio, where I saw
Marilyn Monroe. She had no
girdle on. Her ass was hanging
out. She is a disgrace to the
industry."

—JOAN CRAWFORD TO
PHOTOGRAPHER EVE ARNOLD

"I should have never come back
to Hollywood! I hate all of you!
And Apple Annie most of all! I
must have been out of my mind
to come back here."

—BETTE DAVIS, 1916

In 1959 Bette Davis sat for a year in Hollywood without working. "Oh yes," she recalled, "I had a chance to go to Mexico, to play Burt Lancaster's
mother
[in
The Unforgiven
]. I turned it
down.
I'll be damned if I play Burt Lancaster's mother after 30 years in the business."

The following year, after Helen Hayes rejected the role of bag lady Apple Annie in
Pocketful of Miracles,
the part went to Davis. On the opening day she posed in costume, serving strawberry cheesecake to the producer-star, Glenn Ford, and his costar, Hope Lange. A week later Sheilah Graham reported the first signs of discord on the set. "You could hear a pin drop when Hope Lange asked to have the dressing-room next to Glenn Ford's—because the lady in that room was Bette Davis!"

"Mr. Ford wanted his girl, Hope, next to him," said Bette, who moved to the smaller trailer, then blasted Ford for his "bad manners and lack of professionalism."

Trying to make amends, the actor-producer gave an interview saying he had always been grateful to Bette for giving him his start in pictures, with
A Stolen Life,
in 1946. He was now repaying the favor by putting her in this picture, hoping it would be a comeback for her. "Who is that son of a bitch that he should say he helped me have a
comeback!"
Bette raged in reply. "That shitheel wouldn't have helped me out of a
sewer!"

The filming went downhill after that, said director Frank Capra, who regretted not trying to understand Davis better. "I didn't see that she needed consolation and reassurance after so long away. That she was in fact vulnerable, living on her nerves. She'd only become a monster to take care of herself in a monstrous business. Underneath she was a neurotic woman, deeply afraid and uncertain of everything except her own genius."

She was coming out of a bad cycle, she said later, the end of her ten black years. Her marriage to Gary Merrill was almost finished. He fell out of love with her when she became a housewife, she believed.

"That's nonsense," said Merrill in 1988. "I gave her the best ten years of her life. But she was never a playmate, she would never play golf. She never wanted to leave the house."

Photographer Phil Stern recalled staying with the couple in Maine. "Bette asked me to work on the Edmund Muskie campaign. My wife and I stayed in their house, and Davis was never still. She was a fanatic about cleaning. She went around all day with a rag in her hand, dusting the lamps and the furniture. She drove everyone crazy."

"You're not Harriet Craig," Gary Merrill would yell at her, "so sit down, for chrissake."

Bette had a compulsion to create her own dramatic scenes, Merrill continued. "When she decided to become 'the little woman,' she threw herself into it with energy, wanting everyone else to play their part in her drama. When that didn't happen, her short circuits would blow everything apart."

Gary was a good actor, but "a lazy son of a bitch," said Bette. And when he drank, he had an explosive temper.

So did Bette, he stated. "After a few martinis
(in vino veritas)
the shouting matches began. The noise level was so intense I'm surprised we could speak the next day."

There were some laughs, the pair agreed. He hated birthdays, so she surprised him once with a party and a prop cake. Across the top she had inscribed, "Fuck You." And they had fun with the kids and the animals, which included dogs, cats, chickens, a horse, a burro, a goat in heat, and some pet sheep which eventually ended up on the dinner table. "The children named the sheep but weren't upset when the time came for lamb chops or mutton stew," said Merrill. "They would say, calmly, 'I wonder if we're eating Mark or Luke.'"

Merrill frequently beat her up, Bette complained.

"Bullshit," said Merrill.

He had a cute trick in wintertime, she insisted. "Gary took delight in pushing me out of the car into a twenty-foot snowdrift in the middle of the night. Then he would drive off screaming with laughter."

"That happened only once," said Merrill. "We were walking along a snowy road one day and had an argument. I don't remember what it was about, but she kept screaming in my face. She slapped me, so I pushed her into a snowbank."

"He was a natural character, always up to some prank," said Phil Stern. "Once we were at the airport in Maine and he spotted William Buckley dressed in a suit and tie, standing at a pay phone. Gary was carrying this walking stick, and he went up and poked Buckley in the ass. 'Hey, William Buckley, you big fucking faggot,' Gary yelled at him, then poked him again. Buckley turned around, red livid with anger. He called for the police. A security guard came up, and when he saw it was Gary he said, 'Mr. Merrill, behave yourself.' They all knew him."

At home, the children were not immune from their parents' rages. "Bette was apt to take her frustrations and disappointments out on Michael," said Merrill. "In retaliation, I used B.D. as a target for my discontent."

"All my husbands beat me. I don't seem to bring out the best in men," said Bette, finally separating from Merrill in the spring of 1960. The split was amicable, she insisted.

"If a man is willing to give up his house, control of his kids, and everything else, divorce isn't much of a problem," her ex-spouse claimed. "I let go of all of it." He did retain visitation rights to his son, Michael, and B.D. He was dropping them off at Bette's house in Los Angeles when an upstairs window "flew open with a bang." Sticking her head out of the window, Bette saw Gary's lovely companion, Rita Hayworth, and "commenced to scream and yell, using language a hardened sailor would have thought music to their ears." She kept it up for about five minutes, Merrill recalled. "I thought, 'Isn't that just like Davis! She wants everything her way. She doesn't want me, but she doesn't want me to be happy with anyone else either!'"

He yelled right back, of course, "but the shit had hit the fan." The next day Bette went to court and tried to have his visitation rights revoked. "If you fight me," she warned the actor, "it will be the dirtiest fight in history."

Merrill fought. "If I didn't she would tell the kids for the rest of their lives that their father didn't give a damn about them."

Bette had Merrill followed by a photographer, who took pictures when he was with son Michael. In court, Bette produced the pictures and told the judge that Gary was a drunk. He had committed acts of violence and was "having an affair with a woman to whom he was not married."

Hayworth's name was mentioned, and the details of their unconventional romance came up in court. The couple were often seen walking around Beverly Hills with no shoes on. They had an open brawl at the restaurant Au Petit, in front of Rita's eleven-year-old daughter, Yasmin, Bette's lawyer said, providing a witness. "I heard Rita screaming Bette's name at Gary and then the punches came. It was awful," Jean Louis, the owner of the restaurant, testified in court.

On that evidence, Bette demanded she be given full custody of her son, with visitation rights of one hour every Christmas for Merrill.

The judge refused her request.

"I am starting a campaign to do away with all men," Bette told Hedda Hopper.

"My son, Michael, showed up at my door one day," said Merrill. "When Bette couldn't have full custody of him, she packed up his things and said, 'Go live with your father.' She later abandoned our daughter Margot. She stopped paying for her care in 1965. Maybe I did fall in love with Margo Channing, but Bette shattered all my dreams."

"Talk about life imitating art," said
All About Eve
creator Joe Mankiewicz. "Bette came up to me very drunk at a party two years after the divorce and she said, 'Mankiewicz, you son of a bitch. You never told me the sequel.'"

Throughout the winter of 1961 Bette and Joan were both living in New York, in the same East Side neighborhood. The two never met, because each was busy indoors, dictating her memoirs to a professional writer. That summer, in need of more money, Bette decided to return to the Broadway stage. She heard of a new Tennessee Williams play—
The Night of the Iguana—and
solicited a part. The lead of the refined traveling spinster was already taken by the accomplished British actress Margaret Leighton, which meant that Bette would have to take the secondary role of the boozy, bossy landlady, Maxine Faulk. "None of us had originally thought of her for the part," said literary agent Audrey Wood. "Who could have expected her to subordinate herself to a character role that was nowhere near the equivalent of the leads she played in her halcyon days at Warner's?"

In signing up, Bette did not consider her role as peripheral. She demanded top billing and the star dressing room at all theaters. In Rochester, when the play opened, the performances were rough but the audience and critics seemed receptive. The following morning, when the reviewers gave most of their praise to the incandescent Miss Leighton, Bette checked out of her hotel and was taken to a hospital in a wheelchair. "It seemed our costar had fallen backstage, the night before," said Audrey Wood. "Why this hadn't come out sooner, or why she had attended the opening night party, ostensibly in good physical shape, I cannot explain."

Bette traveled by limousine to the next performance stop, Chicago, where she immediately found fault with the director, Frank Corsaro. Censuring his theatrical training, she insisted he be barred from rehearsals. "He stayed out of the theatre," said Tennessee Williams, "but remained in Chicago. But Bette complained she could sense his lingering presence in the city, and said that he must be sent back to New York and 'that goddamn Actors Studio, which had spawned him.'"

During the previews in New York, Bette, with newly dyed red hair, appeared for some performances and missed others. "That happened so often that customers buying preview tickets would ask, with justification, 'Is Miss Davis going to be playing in this performance?'" said Audrey Wood.

She did show up for opening night, December 28, 1961. Making her entrance onstage, Bette was greeted with an ovation from her fans in the balcony. She halted the play, turned to them, and raised her hands above her head, in a classic prizefighter's gesture.

The following morning she hit the canvas again, KO'd by the big-league critics who found Margaret Leighton to be poignant and magnificent; "she reaches new levels in her illustrious career," said Howard Taubman in the New York
Times.
Bette as Maxine, "freshly widowed but not exactly shattered by grief, made much of her shocking flame-colored hair and her unbuttoned shirt that shows the flaccid flesh down to her waist," said the New York
World Telegram.

Throughout her protracted absences, costar Margaret Leighton remained patient and kind to Bette. After the New York reviews, Davis turned on Leighton, calling her "a bitch ... soo congenial ... she makes me
sick."
Fellow actor Patrick O'Neal was also frequently tongue-lashed. In retrospect, Audrey Wood realized that Bette should never have taken the part. "Maxine, her character, is offstage for long periods during the play. When you have been a great film star, it must be difficult to sit backstage in your dressing room, with nothing to do but wait for your next entrance."

Early in January, one night after the show, there was a knock on Bette's dressing-room door. There was a lady to see her, she was told.

"I don't know any," said Bette.

She strode to the door and pulled it open; standing there, dressed in sables and jewels, was an angel of mercy, a savior come to rescue her from this rotten play with an exciting new film project.