Bette Davis & Me

I first met Bette Davis when I was a toddler. My mother introduced me not to the legendary star but as Mrs. Merrill, the mother of one of my schoolmates. We were all backstage at the Wynflete School in Portland, Maine after our school play. I had a starring role while Bette’s son Michael, who she adopted with the actor Gary Merrill, played a secondary one. Mummy was proud but, later in life, I was told Bette wasn’t amused. Bette married Gary in 1950 and she dutifully moved to Cape Elizabeth, Maine to be with him and bring up their two children for nearly ten years. Merrill appeared in many films including the iconic All About Eve, which starred Bette Davis. Others in the film included Marylin Monroe, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, and Celeste Holm. The two fell madly in love and Bette married Gary, the last of her four husbands. My father and Gary were golf and drinking buddies and members of the Portland Country Club. I remember my mother donning a blonde wig and a Charles James dress to go to a “come as a movie star” party at the club with the Merrills. Mummy went as Marylin Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire and Bette went as, well, Bette Davis. Not surprisingly they won the top prize. The next parental adventure didn’t go as well and ended up with Gary being booted from our snooty private club. On that infamous day, after several rounds of golf and too many rounds at the bar with my father, Merrill found all the showers in the men’s locker room were taken so he wrapped himself in a towel and staggered to the women’s locker room causing pandemonium and the expulsion – it was, after all, the ’50s!

Years later, after the Merrills divorced and I lost track of Michael, I ran across Bette at Cinandre; we both had the same hairdresser, the much-beloved and talented Eugene. Much to my surprise, Bette remembered everything, and we laughed about those times while getting shampooed. I was working for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and knew a juicy scoop when I bumped into one; we agreed to the first of several interviews, excerpts of which appear below. I also interviewed Gary Merrill for Interview and, although I was tempted to run it as a companion piece, you’ll have to settle for a few bitchy quotes.

Mummy always said Bette was one of the wittiest and wisest people she’d ever known, and I think you’ll reach the same conclusion after you read this piece. I also suggest you read her blindingly honest autobiography The Lonely Life and it goes without saying you should binge her movies starting with the immortal All About Eve, the best film ever made about life on Broadway.  God really doesn’t make them like the divine Miss Davis anymore.

All Hail Bette Davis!

Excerpts from these interviews were first printed in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1972.

What I didn’t ask Bette Davis was how many years she spent in psychoanalysis; as no movie star with her history could possibly be as well adjusted to the past, present and future as she is without help.

I interviewed Miss Davis at New York’s New School before a film seminar conducted by my friend, the critic John Gruen. I’ve included the best bits from our conversations with the legendary film star. Bette was vivacious and demonstrative, dispatching everyone’s questions between cigarettes, back in the days when smoking was still fashionable.

What was she wearing? Azure satin gloves and shoes, cocktail dress, bag, and her own hair. She looked great, frankly fifty, but timeless with her blood-red lips and nails. She was witty and stinging; but you already missed the best part, because her gestures, intonations, and timing tell her story in a way peculiar to Bette Davis. It was like she just walked out of All About Eve, sat down and started talking.

Bette Davis is a woman who, through some ninety motion pictures, has engaged her image into some corner of all of our psyches. In each of us there is a Bette Davis; somewhere there lurks this lady because she has taught us, on the screen, how to suffer, how to walk, how to talk, how to smoke. She has taught us how to be incredibly bitchy and she has taught us something about the nature of independence. Because in most of the films in which Miss Davis has appeared, she has always reigned supreme, not merely as a star but also as an individual; as a woman who was able to somehow survive.

 

Miss Davis, you have said that you were born between a clap of thunder and a streak of lightning; your mother said that the gods were going mad. 

After that, my mother went mad, but it is true that I was born during a thunderstorm.

Shall we talk about that cliched subject, mother?

 

Yes, it’s very sad that it has become a cliched subject in our country. Today if you’re a mother or a grandmother you’re rather ashamed, you’re either too old or too bossy or too much in the way. But I had an extraordinary mother in that she believed in me from a very early age. There is a cliche among theater people that if your mother was an important part of your life then she was a stage mother. Well, Ruthie wasn’t a stage mother – she just believed I would make it, and she believed it much more than I ever did as a young woman of nineteen starting out in the theater. In fact, I didn’t believe that I would ever make it at all for she was a glorious, glorious mother.

 

There you were, twentyish, and on the stage, and someone said you might have a chance in pictures, but most said you wouldn’t and to forget it.

Everybody in the theater was tested by Hollywood; because this was the beginning of talking pictures, and whether they liked the way we looked or not, we did know how to talk. Everybody from Broadway was signed as an experiment. I was on Broadway for about three years, the scouts came and saw me, tested me, and signed me. My contract was for three months, with a three-month option, at a fantastic sum of money, nothing. I really didn’t want to go to Hollywood; I loved the theater, but it was an opportunity, and I thought that one must take advantage of opportunities as a young unknown performer. When many of us got there, after examples of such glorious beauty as say, Miss Harlow, after all those fabulous looking women in motion pictures, we were the shocks of the earth. They did not know what in the world to do with us. And I was particularly peculiar to them, because I didn’t have bleached hair – they called me the little brown wren because I was ash blonde, which was sort of brown. I didn’t have any belief that you wore lots of makeup in life, you only wore that to work as an actress. I didn’t think that there was any necessity to go around terribly naked and sexy so, I was just an ordinary Yankee girl who loved acting. It took me a long time to get anywhere because I was an utter, utter mystery to what Hollywood had been; it was the real Revolution.

 

 You reigned in Hollywood for eighteen years.

Well, no, I was there for eighteen years. And I finally had the good fortune to make money for them, it’s all business, theater is to make money, it’s not just to amuse oneself, and motion pictures are to make money. Hopefully, the product is something you’re proud of. I finally gave them back their investment in me, for which I was very grateful, I never thought I’d be able to.

 

What about the hassles over bad scripts, and bad directors; that became so bad that you sued Warner Brothers and fled to England.

And lost everything. . . but that was in the very beginning, the first ten years, the last eight were great. I wanted good directors and scripts, that’s the only reason I ever walked out. I was not getting good directors and I was not getting good scripts and motion picture is absolutely a director’s medium. The actor when they finish the film is not in control of what you see on the screen, because from then on they edit it, they cut it, they can take the thing dearest to your heart and decide to cut it out; so the actor is not in control of that finished product. Good directors and scripts were what I wanted and finally, they were good to me.

 

It became legend that you were absolutely impossible to work with because you were a hellion, a woman who demanded things and got them.

There is no way that anyone who gets there will not be known as a monster; until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a STAR. Don’t smile at this Couri, it’s a very serious point; I’ve never been a monster, I’ve never fought for anything in a treacherous way, I’ve never fought for anything except for the good of the film and not always for just what I was doing in it. No, no, I will not take that from you. And this is not my reputation at all, in California. You can talk to any member of those gorgeous crews; ooh they were for me. And I’ll tell you one thing I always did, I went to the head man, I never bugged some poor little man on the set who behaved badly, I never was late for work, I never walked off the sets, I never did all those things I finally became famous for. Until this kind of reputation happens to you, nobody cares. I had to learn to be tough. I was not brought up as a woman to be tough, but this is a business and if you don’t fight for yourself, it doesn’t matter what business, if you want to become the head of Ford Motor Co., if you’re not Mr. Ford, you can’t do it by smiling and saying, “Yes sir”,  you must fight for what you believe in, and I think the world has forgotten to fight for what they believe in, it’s a namsy pamsy world. I don’t care what the business or the concern; whether it’s fighting for your children or against them. The fight has gone OUT of America and it’s shocking.

 

In many of the roles that you have portrayed on the screen, there is always the character that you portray, and then there is always Bette Davis as well. Now

there are some who say that you bury yourself in your role and sacrifice everything for it, and others who say you just portray it as you do it.

 

This is a very interesting subject; there is an integral part of every human being, whether you write or whether you act, that cannot be completely disguised, it is an essence of your personality. I have probably played more different kinds of women than almost anybody because that was always my love and desire – to play different people. There is that essence of a human being that can never be disguised. However, you will never become a star if you don’t have that essence in every part that gets the public to know you, if in every part you are so completely different that they have to look at the credits and say, “Was that Bette Davis?”. No Good!  The public doesn’t get to know and love you unless there is an essence of you that can never be disguised, otherwise, you’re always a different person. And that has been a great criticism of mine from many, many critics that I was always the same, truthfully for my pride’s sake I must say it is not true, but there was an essence there.

 

You won two Academy Awards, one in 1935 for a movie called DANGEROUS. 

The most dreadful movie. I won it for Of Human Bondage which they didn’t give me the year before.

 

The second Oscar was in 1938 for JEZEBEL.

 

That one I will accept, that was an honest win.

 

But you did not win it for GONE WITH THE WIND. . .but you were going to play Scarlett??

 

It was bought for me by Warners. This was when I finally revolted because I wanted good directors and good writers. Mr. Warner sent for me in a last-minute desperate plea to please not leave, to

stay, he had just bought me the most marvelous book, and I said, “I’ll bet!” He said, “Yes it’s by Margaret Mitchell, it’s called Gone with The Wind.” I said, “Nuts!” and walked out of the office. When I came back from England a year later, I certainly knew what Gone with The Wind was. Yes, big mistake, big mistake.

 

 

Bette, tell me what the rewards and tortures of stardom are.

 

The reward for recognition in a field you love enough to work in for over forty years is the fact that you made it. Being in the public eye – and this would apply to any politician, not to just Hollywood people – you are often judged unfairly, it hurts. Whatever you do is commented on, and if it’s not the way you felt about it, you just have to take it, and this is a discipline. But there should be no complaints when you go into a business where fame is involved. If you are going to run for the presidency of the United States, every member of the press is not going to be charming to you for the next four years and you must accept this as part of the pleasure of having gotten where you wanted to get.

 

And the tortures?

 

The tortures that I had were in my personal life, not the result of my stardom. That’s been rather glorious. A torturous personal life might happen whether or not you become famous. Your life could be that way, some peoples are, but I don’t blame fame at all. I can’t blame my profession for what happened in my personal life. If I was a fool in my personal life, I can’t blame acting for that.

 

Yet in your autobiography THE LONELY LIFE, you do blame your profession to a certain extent on the rather unhappy time you did have in your personal life. You were married four times, first to Mr. Nelson, second to Mr. Farnsworth, third to Mr. Sherry, the painter, and lastly to the actor Gary Merrill. Your marriage to Mr. Sherry produced a daughter B. D., and later you adopted two other children. Wasn’t the reason none of these marriages worked out was because it was impossible for the man to continue to be Mr. Davis?

 

That is the one area in which…there is a problem there. There’s no question about it, there is a forfeit there. There is no man who really likes this, with all the good intentions of the famous women, no matter what profession she’s in, this is a murderous situation for a man, and I certainly believed in marriage and in all sincerity never married without believing in it, and I think that it is the ideal way of life and at this age, I realize that I should never have expected that it was going to work because I understand now that which I didn’t understand years ago.

 

You said in your book that you bring out violence in men.

 

I didn’t find one of them violent enough. Maybe if they had been more violent, we would have made it. They became defeated by it, and it wasn’t my fault. It isn’t any woman’s fault in my spot. I chose the wrong men, and this can happen to any woman. Love is a big joke on all of us. We can make terrible mistakes while we’re in love. Think of the men that pick women because sexually they’re just divine and when the sex is gone, they look at them one day and say, “My God, who is that?” No, this is the fooler of mankind and one has to be very wise about it. I chose very foolishly, but how can one regret this choice? I believe in one thing in this world, out of everything comes some good, even if you just learn something. But out of this marriage, which was not a very easy one for me, because he (Mr. Sherry) was a very childish type of human being, came this marvelous daughter who has been the greatest fun of my life.

 

 You have often said that many male leads were much more vain and their egos were bigger than any woman’s.

 

Erroll Flynn was the most charming man in the world; if he sat right here beside us, I could say he was never an actor and he would admit it. But he was just heaven, beautiful, and women adored him and that’s important too. . . Steve McQueen. . . It wasn’t until Steve McQueen that great white hope for a marvelous man in our business, came along that we had any. Once I asked him, “Why do you ride those motorcycles like that and maybe kill yourself?”, and he said, “So I won’t forget I’m a man and not just an actor.” You know in back of this is a very big truth. Rather odd people become actors and they are vain; they are much vainer than women.

 

I smell smoke. Where’s the fire? Tell me everything, all about the co-stars that you didn’t like, like Robert Montgomery.

 

Well, we had an unfortunate experience . . . yes, some stories. . . I feel it’s our private family business; we did not get along, no. But I think that Mr. Montgomery had a smashing career and I’m not going to sit here and say what I think.

 

I hear you didn’t get along with Alec Guinness in THE SCAPEGOAT. 

 

Where do you get all these stories? I don’t think it’s a very interesting story. It was a very bad film, he was never meant to play a straight part, Mr. Guinness. This was in, what was it called, The Scapegoat.  The whole situation was just unfortunate, he wasn’t very pleasant to me; he made it difficult for me. And who knows why he did, often actors are going through something difficult and they’re just not in a very good mood and with me he was not in a very good mood.

 

 

You say you consider William Wyler your passion.

 

Yes, my passion, the greatest director for an actor, at least he certainly was in my mind, and I think that his record in Hollywood is extraordinary.

 

 

 Yet you feel that your performance in THE LITTLE FOXES is not your best and you blame Mr. Wyler for it and then there was Miss Bankhead. 

 

The real argument was, you see Miss Bankhead in The Little Foxes was absolutely sensational in the New York theater, as a matter of fact, I begged Mr. Goldman, I said, “Please let Miss Bankhead record this on the screen.” It didn’t work – he wanted me to do it. And Mr. Wyler did not want me to play it the way Miss Bankhead did. Miss Bankhead played it the way Miss Hellman wrote the play, and there is only one way to play Regina, which is the way Miss Bankhead played it and Mr. Wyler fought me very much on this, to play it in a different way and I couldn’t see it in a different way. So, it made it an unpleasant experience.

 

In OF HUMAN BONDAGE,  we find you playing a slut, a girl of the streets, a mean, bitchy waitress.

 

Well, you see that was the only reason I was given this part. On that day in California, this was actually the first leading woman’s part in a film. That was a totally unpleasant ugly, bitchy woman. And I was given this because none of the established women of that day would play this part. It was the first time; it was a first. And naturally, this was the beginning of my career because it was such a marvelous part, and it was the kind of part that fascinated me. I have to tell you that I was a Yankee girl, I never really understood Mildred at all, I really don’t understand any man who would put up with her for five minutes. I used to go to male friends of mine and say, “If you ever kept on going out with a woman who treated you like this,” and it was very interesting. With every human being I now know in my own life, there has been one situation when a male or a female has been involved with another human being even though they knew that it was no good but couldn’t get away. And that’s what Mr. Marr wrote about. But at that age, I didn’t understand it entirely.

 

You had leading ladies as co-stars.

 

You are going right into Miriam Hopkins. I’ve never been dishonest about Miss Hopkins; I don’t think there was ever a more difficult female in the world, but Miss Hopkins has died since I was last asked this question and I just think that’s the end of the conversation.

 

Joan Crawford is still living. 

 

That’s all press, Miss Crawford and I on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, never, we are far too professional, both of us. And I’m going to tell you something, we made this film, Joan and I, in three weeks, that’s all the money they would give for us to make it with. Truthfully, we couldn’t get backing, everybody told Mr. Aldrich that if they would recast these two broads, we’ll give you some money. Seriously. And Mr. Aldrich insisted on making it with us. And Joan one day suggested that we should put up on the set a sign that said, “With this schedule, we haven’t got time not to get along.” We got along absolutely; this is just ridiculous.

 

There was a time, prior to WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE when you couldn’t get good scripts and you placed an ad in Variety.

 

No, no, not prior to Jane. I took that ad out while I was making Jane, finally employed with plenty of money, that was not an ad as was mistaken by the general public. That was an ad ribbing a banker who had lists of people that they would employ and would not employ, and I took it out completely with tongue in cheek. If I say so myself it was brilliantly done. I took it like a newspaper employment ad, and I even printed a picture of myself and said mother of three children, etc., and sort of described my life. No, it was a rib. But a diabolical rib because these lists were terrible. How can you know if you can make money in a film if you’re not given a chance to make a decent film?  And this still goes on today.

 

That is one of the tragedies and one of the ironies of having achieved such unbelievable stardom: having made so much money for the studios, then having to be in the position, as time passes and as one gets older, to have to struggle for good scripts and parts. How do you deal with this?

One expects it. Scripts are basically written about younger women. One doesn’t want to work as much anymore; I certainly don’t want to make five and six films a year. You do lament the quality of scripts today, but I do not expect at my age to find many where I’m the leading character. And I don’t expect it, and I’m not sad about it; I could wish we would never have to grow old. You know I think that if every woman could stop at thirty-five and every man at forty-five it would be a heavenly life. But that’s not the way it is planned, and you prepare for this. You know that it is going to happen. You don’t fight against it, while you lament that you are older, you must accept this because that’s the way it is.

 

Sometimes one is parodied or even parodies oneself. There are even people who have tried very hard to imitate Bette Davis. The Bette cults are endless, acts are built around you. 

 

But this is the sincerest form of flattery. Wouldn’t it be horrible if they didn’t, really? For years nobody ever characterized me, and it worried me to death. Sincerely, until you find people that imitate you there’s nothing that’s definite about you. And for ten years nobody ever did an imitation of me, then you know they made up for it.

 

THE LONELY LIFE, are you alone now?

 

Of course, I’m very alone, I’m not alone because I have children, but I live alone. But you’re never alone if you have children, even though you see them very seldom… So of course, I’m lonely, but my book was not called A Lonely Life, it was called The Lonely Life. Because I feel people in the arts, whether it’s in the theater or sculpting or painting or writing, they are a people who as I say in my book, who travel light. Also, if they are ambitious to get there, they do not have time for many friendships, friendships take time, and it’s a life where you dedicate thirty or forty years to get where you want. I think it’s a life where you are within yourself, very alone many times. But this was not a pathetic title, The Lonely Life, because many people misunderstood it. I know so many artists, it’s just a lonely life.

 

How has the movie business changed, and has it changed for the better or for the worse?

Look what’s happening in the world; theater reflects the world. Authors write about lots of things that are happening in the world. So, motion pictures and plays, and books are all different from what they were forty years ago when I started. We didn’t have any of these problems, we did not have the drugs or even the racial thing like we have today. We didn’t have anything like this so naturally, we’re going to have different kinds of stories and different kinds of acting, and we’re going to have different kinds of characters in films played by different kinds of people. They do not stand still, the arts. Theater reflects the world, and the films are reflecting what’s happening on the outside.

 

It was during World War II that you and John Garfield started the Hollywood Canteen.

 

Yes, Johnny and I started it; and ran it for four years. It was an extraordinary experience, a lot of work, but I am proud of it. The guys were coming through and Hollywood was an interesting place to them. They wanted to see lots and lots of actors, so we decided that they should, and they did.

 

How do you prepare for your roles on the screen?

 

I never did really prepare. I had lots of thoughts about it, but I would just sort of start, and be the person. Somebody once asked my beautiful friend, the brilliant actor Claude Rains, what his method was and he said, “I learn the lines and pray to God.” And Spencer Tracy said the same thing. It’s an instinct you have about what you think the character is, and some people have an easier time becoming somebody else.

 

In ALL ABOUT EVE, you brought every facet of your gift into play, you were everything that everyone expects Bette Davis to be.

 

This is probably true, yet there isn’t anyone more remote in character from me than Margo Channing. I’m not that kind of an actress at all, in life, not at all. I’m sort of a dungaree kid over the kitchen stove, sincerely. But to play Margo Channing was like being given a new lease on life. It is the essence of what every woman really goes through who becomes a great star like Margo Channing. She said it all in that gorgeous car speech. When she says, “I act like a witch riding around on a broom,” to be an actor you’ve got to have a childlike quality because it’s really like playing dolls. You’re always pretending to be something you are not; you basically don’t like yourself, so you love to be somebody else, that’s really what acting is all about. And this whole speech incorporated all that from Mr. Mankiewicz. These are the sacrifices of fame. But every woman in the world, no matter how famous, still wants the same thing, a man, no question.

 

And curiously you found your man in real life, at that time Gary Merrill was your co-star and the man you married. 

 

Yes, I did.

 

And afterward? (Ms. Davis is now giving me a naive, deadly, and silent look.) Back to  ALL ABOUT EVE or APPLAUSE … you sing and dance, why didn’t you play Margo on the stage?

 

Actually, six or seven years before they finally did it, I did try to get somebody to write the musical for me. But there were enormous complications with the rights with Fox and then when it did come along it was too late. When I first started to think about doing it, I was fiftyish and so it would have been fine, but it was a little late.

 

Did you see it with Ms. Bacall?

 

Yes, she’s a great friend of mine and enjoyed it very much.

 

Then Anne Baxter took over.

 

I thought she was absolutely marvelous in it too. And it was an extraordinary experience for Anne who played Eve, some twenty years later to be playing Margo. I stayed backstage and I couldn’t believe it, I thought, it can’t be twenty-one years. Anne played it so terribly, terribly well. It was fate for her to play both parts.

 

What do you feel about performers in politics?

 

I think the performer, who is very well known, must be terribly sure of his or her facts. Really knowledgeable about what is being advocated, because you can have an enormous influence on people, and therefore it becomes a dangerous weapon, otherwise it’s simply up to the individual if you believe in something then there’s no reason why not, but this I think has sometimes not been too well managed.

 

How do you feel about seeing yourself on the TV?

 

It’s an odd experience. It’s like seeing somebody else. It fills you full of a certain amount of regrets, physically. I always thought I was absolutely hideous during my entire career. Little did I know, compared to today, I was a raving beauty. I never could stand myself, at all. Now I just sit there and say, “My God!”

 

 Is there any film for which you feel you should have won an Oscar but didn’t?

 

Ah-ha! BABY JANE. There are certain performances that are suitable for an Academy Award, and when I lost out with Jane, never had I had a shock like that before. I thought, the year of Margo Channing, that if I lost, I would have lost with great, great graciousness to Miss Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, which was marvelous. However, I did feel that someone who had done a play for that many years, it’s not that big an accomplishment as starting from scratch on the screen and play the character, so I was a little bitter.

 

Which line in BEYOND THE FOREST did you enjoy delivering the most?

 

You’re talking about, “What a dump.” This line only became famous through Mr. Edward Albee, because literally, all I did in that film, and I checked on this because I became fascinated, was as I was dusting a table, in the quietest voice in the whole world, say, “What a dump”. And I might also add that that’s the only reason that that film will ever be thought of again.

 

Every star has his disappointments and one of yours must have been not playing in WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF. You have stated that you went to Mr. Albee and said, “I would kill for that part!”

 

Yes, it was true, but Edward had nothing to do with that. Edward had given up all rights, he might have been able to help me if he had had anything to say. Interestingly enough, Mr. Warner wanted me very much to have this, he begged the producer, Lee Miller, but he would have no part of it, for me. You can understand his enormous temptation with the Burtons, I can’t quarrel. I can be heartbroken and wish I had had it because it would have been in these ten years just one of the great things for me, I was the right age and everything. But you can understand his temptation. I can, but I hate him for it.

 

 

Cosmetic deception is something that has been highly developed, especially for the big screen. And experts, including your hairdresser Eugene of Cinandre, who has cut your hair for years, has told me that they can make you appear young and glamorous very easily and then you would be able to play any part you wanted. Why won’t you let Eugene bring out the real Bette Davis all over again?

 

(Laughing) No, as much as I love him and I know he can do extraordinary things, I won’t do it. It’s true you can look much younger than you do, more so certainly than getting up at dawn and looking in the mirror. There are magic things, you can go and have your facelifted, but with a career as long as mine who am I kidding? Then to me, there is such an overemphasis in our country, that nobody is anything unless they’re just unlined, beautiful, skinny, smelling great. You know, sincerely, I think one should grow old the way one should grow old.

 

Why did you reveal all those intimate details about yourself and others in your book?

 

I didn’t reveal any of the intimate things in my life. About ten more people have to be dead. You see I don’t believe in really intimate things, but I do believe one thing and that is that you must tell in your book things that haven’t been in the press. The average biography or autobiography of motion picture people you read in

the newspapers for a thousand years and they tell you nothing more, and therefore you learn nothing about the person. I never ever hurt anybody in that book by being too intimate. I never told the whole story of anything because I didn’t believe in it, and I wouldn’t want my children to read it if I had to write it. Or perhaps you’re talking about how hard I was on myself. If you’re not rough on yourself in an autobiography, you cannot be rough on anybody else. And it’s a very fine line, things that I wanted to really praise myself for the most, modesty did prevent. That’s for somebody else to write. One day I’ll write an intimate book.

Then come and see me again, Couri.

 

The Oscars have come under a lot of fire lately; exactly what do you think the benefit of winning it is?

 

The biggest thrill of your life, when your own industry, when the people you work with honor you, anybody who can stand up there and receive one of those nice young men Oscars and not be thrilled is dead. Really, inside they have lost enthusiasm, they’ve lost everything.

 

You live in Westport, Conn. now, you raised your children in Maine. Why the woods and not the city??

I love the country.

 

What do you do there?

 

Wash, cook, iron, talk to your mother. Really, I’m a very domestic woman. Thank God I love all this because it fills in many, many hours, you can forget everything trying to cook a new dish.

 

 

You have said that you don’t like yourself, have you or did you grow to like yourself more as your career progressed? 

 

Success helps you, personally, privately. I never did like myself very much. And I think a lot of actors enjoy character parts because they can be other people; it must be something like this. For all the characters I’ve played I must have hated myself. I never was terribly fond of myself; I still am not terribly fond of myself.

 

You often play roles that are very wicked ladies, bad girls.

 

It’s a very divided career in this, honestly, about fifty-fifty. But people remember wickedness more than they remember goodness, newspapers couldn’t sell a copy with all good news. People are fascinated by wickedness, but oh so many. Now, Voyager, Dark Victory were all charming, basically normal people. I always wondered why I enjoyed playing wicked parts, but interestingly there is more to play because there’s something so definite. That was one thing I always believed about it; I always tried to make you see why they had become such wicked people. That’s very important, there has to be a reason, nobody is just wicked.

 

Directors are becoming stars and the attention is no longer all on the actor, do you approve of this trend?

 

You have one beautiful new director, Mr. Mike Nichols, and he is not doing that. You sit there and say, “Oh look what that director did.”  You notice his people and that’s really what theater is all about. If there is any difference that is a vast difference today, and it is not the actor’s fault, because the director is so often starring himself. At the end of a play or a film, you should not say, “What a director!” you should say, “What a play!” and then that is his compliment.

 

                    Bette’s Last Husband:  Gary Merrill / Maine Man  

 

On another day I found my way to Prout’s Neck, one of Maine’s most scenic summer colonies, to visit with actor, politician, philosopher, iconoclast Gary Merrill, whose main claim to fame is having been Bette Davis’s husband. They lived “hot and heavy” and legendarily for eight years in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, next to my Uncle Dewey’s house Dans la Maison “Witch-Way,” named after Bette, naturellement.

 

They met, married, and fell in love, or to hear it now (from either side), into purgatory, while filming All About Eve. Today (1972) they are divorced, she’s in Connecticut. . . he in Maine. . . and in the Grand Hollywood manner, Gary Merrill admits that Bette moved, “Because she didn’t feel the state was big enough for both of us.  Recently, I understand, she was asked to come back and take part in a Portland Player’s Children Production. She said she would do it only if I was out of state. I was and she did it,” said Merrill.

 

Behind all the serious political talk was the twinkle of youth, and one knows that Gary knows how to have a good time. After a little chat about his exploits with my father, I launched into what I really wanted to know. “Bette Davis told me that if the men in her life had been more violent it might have been better.”

 

“Oh, shit! You might say that there isn’t room for two people to be violent with her around, though I knocked her around a little, so what’s she complaining about?” “Do you ever see her?” I asked.

“I see her every four years at our son’s graduations, and more recently at his wedding.”

“What about your rumored reconciliation?”

“Oh, Shit!”

“What do you think of her as an actress?”

“She’s a good actress, but not all that she’s cracked up to be she’s always DAVIS. She can’t disappear into anything; this is a PERSONALITY thing in our world of movies. In England, they were more interested in the theatre, in playing and being something. There is nothing Davis does that ain’t Davis whether it’s the Queen of England or whatever she’s doing. She did Phone Call From A Stranger pretty well, she played a paralyzed person, but leave her on her feet and she’ll throw a part all out of whack. She has to be a star, so she does crap, there aren’t that many parts for people when they get older.”

 

“Would you please finally put an end to all this gossip about you wanting each other dead and buried?” I blurted out!  

 

“Well, I remember one day when it was going hot and heavy over at the Cape and she looked me right in the eye and said, “Wouldn’t you be happy if I were dead and you had the house and children all to yourself?” and I said, “Yup!!”

 

The End