Just a Dame from New England

By Gerald Clarke

Bette Davis celebrates 50 years in films

Her guest has spilled some coffee on the table, and quicker than you can say Oops! the little woman in trousers and a rakish jockey cap has mopped up the mess. "There, that's fine," she says, looking down in satisfaction. "Viva towels are so much better than Bounty." Then, listening to herself, she laughs, hoots, cacklesthere are no mere giggles from this lady. "I sound like a television commercial, don't I?"

Not really, not ever. The famous lines of Bette Davis are as fixed in the national consciousness as the Pledge of Allegiance. There is Margo Charming in All About Eve warning her friends to fasten their seat belts because "it's going to be a bumpy night." There is Regina in The Little Foxes telling her dying husband: "I hope you die soon. I'll be waiting for you to die." In a different mood, Charlotte Vale at the fadeout of Now, Voyager: "Oh, Jerry. Don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." Put all of her characters together and you could almost fill Carnegie Hall. But it is still impossible to imagine her sounding like anyone but Bette Davis.

With a few exceptions, like Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, most of the great figuresthe faces and the voices from the '30s and the '40sare either dead or in retirement. But as she celebrates her 72nd birthday this week, and her 50th year in films this year, Davis, trim, vigorous and in buoyant good health, is still busy. She won an Emmy last year playing a mother who finally reconciles with her daughter in a CBS special called Strangers; in her entire career she has probably never given a better or more poignant performance. Last month she played a poor woman who befriends a black teen-ager in another CBS special, the unfortunately titled White Mama; next week she will be seen in a Disney sci-fi thriller, The Watcher in the Woods. And if The Thorn Birds is ever made, she will probably play Mary Carson, a rich Australian dowager.

"Oh," she says, "I wouldn't stop working for anything! But I'm very stubborn about parts. I am not going to sink into playing little old grandmothers, maiden aunts or cameos. If the audience sneezes or blinks in a cameo, you're gone." Davis underlines her words, punctuating with exclamation points and various marks that are not found in the grammar books. If she says no, she follows it with two or three others. In real life, as in the movies, she is almost never without a cigarette, which she uses like a baton to orchestrate her words. Toscanini could not conduct more effectively than she does with a few waves of her Philip Morris.

From her mother Ruthie she inherited her drive and single-minded ambition. Divorced when Bette was seven, Ruthie supported Bette and her sister by working as a photographer in Boston. When Bette showed ability as an actress, Ruthie immediately enrolled her in an acting school in New York City. "There was no such word as can't for my mother," Davis says. "There isn't for me either. I believe there are no short cuts. None! If you want to do something, do it!"

Hollywood also taught her to be stubborn. When she arrived there in 1930, fresh from a now forgotten Broadway play called Solid South, nobody could quite remember why she was hired. Unusual looking, with pretty but slightly bulging eyes, she was not at all like the sultry beauties of the time, the Jean Harlows and the Dolores Del Rios. "I had a terrible time. Remarks were made about me. Like, 'Who would want her at the end of the picture?' Or, 'She has about as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville'the character actor. In one movie, Fashions of 1934, they gave me a Garbo wig, a Garbo mouth and huge lashes. I looked like somebody dressed up in mother's clothes. But it was a great break because I learned from the experience. I never let them do that to me again. Ever!"

She is, however, grateful for those early filmssuch as Bureau of Missing Persons, Parachute Jumper, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing and Housewifebecause they gave her her craft. Once she had mastered that, and won an Academy Award for Dangerous (1935), she was constantly banging on the door of Jack Warner, the head of the studio, demanding better roles. Finally, in disgust at his refusal, she bolted and tried to break her contract. "Just before I left, Mr. Warner sent for me. 'Please, don't leave,' he said. 'I've just optioned a great book for you. It's called Gone With the Wind.' 'I bet it's a pip!' I said and walked out of his office." There is an explosion of laughter and she adds: "You make a few little mistakes like that along the way, you know."

She not only lost the role of Scarlett, she also lost her contract battle with Warner Brothers and was forced to return to the studio in 1936. In victory, Warners was surprisingly magnanimous. Pictures of the quality that she had unsuccessfully fought for were suddenly hers: Jezebel (for which she won her second Academy Award), Dark Victory, The Letter, Watch on the Rhine, Mr. Skeffington, The Corn Is Green. When she was 31, she even played an aging Queen Elizabeth in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. But whatever the costume she wore, or whatever the accent she spoke in, she was always Bette Davis. Some actors pour themselves into a character, like plastic filling a mold; in her case the characters poured themselves into her and adjusted to the contours of her unique personality. She could be believable as the dowdy victimized New England spinster in something like Now, Voyager; but audiences knew from the start that Cinderella would get what she wanted in the end. Nobody could imagine one of her characters knuckling under for very long.

In Beyond the Forest (1949) she was forced to play a small-town Wisconsin woman who longs to escape to Chicago. The result was calamity. "If I had been that girl," she says, "she'd have got to Chicago 15 years earlier. There would be no way you could have kept her there." Davis has portrayed remarkably restrained women, like Paul Lukas' wife in Watch on the Rhine. Yet even in a quiet role, she radiates energy, like a quasar, an astronomical phenomenon that is so powerful that everything around it looks dim. She calls Greta Garbo the greatest person who ever performed before a camera, and all her life she has wondered why she can't look "like this gorgeous Miss Katharine Hepburn." But the only actress she finds comparable to herself is the late Anna Magnani. "There's only one of us in each country," she observes.

Tallulah Bankhead thought that the one in this country was Tallulah. She was furious when the movies of three of the Broadway plays she had been involved inJezebel, Dark Victory and The Little Foxeswere given to Bette in Hollywood. "Tallulah once came up to me at a party and said, 'You took three parts away from me. And I played them all so much better than you did.' I looked at her and said, 'I agree.' She simply melted out of that room," Davis laughs gleefully. "She always insisted that Margo Charming in All About Eve was based on her. It's not true; Margo wasn't based on any single person. But there was a resemblance when I made the movie. I had laryngitis and it gave me the same croaky voice that she had." (Davis was second choice for the part, coming in only after Claudette Colbert developed back trouble.)

Margo Charming, the temperamental Broadway star, was the quintessential Davis character: tough but vulnerable, infuriating but magnetic. Character and actress seemed one, and it is hard even now to believe that she was acting. "In fact," she insists, "I am not a Margo Charming-type actress. When I'm not working, I'm just a dame who came from New England. I'm very domestic, a total hausfrau. I adore keeping house and I love cooking. Always have."

These days Bette keeps house by herself in one of the oldest apartment buildings in Hollywood. She tried marriage four times, but was once widowed and thrice divorced. Her last marriage, to Actor Gary Merrill, her co-star in Eve, ended 20 years ago, and she has never considered a fifth. "I liked being a wife and I worked very hard at being a good one," she says. "But I was also a very hard working woman. I had to go for marriage or career, because whatever I do I like to do it the best I can. And I could not do both the best I could. My one regret is that I am by myself at this age. It would be very nice to be living with a husband I had known for 20 or 30 years. That's the great reward, two people who have made it and become great friends." Her chief comfort is her children, and she visits them often: B.D., 32, who lives with her husband and two boys in Pennsylvania; Michael, 28, a lawyer who is married and lives in Boston, and Margot, 29, who was brain-damaged at birth and lives in an institution in upstate New York.

When not working or touring with her one-woman show, Davis reads or sees her friends, only a few of whom, like Paul Henreid, have been in show business. Strangely enough, for a woman who has made nearly 100 movies, she rarely sees a new one. There are a few younger actresses she admires, such as Jill Clayburgh, Marsha Mason and Jane Fonda. There are also a few actors, such as Burt Reynolds, Dustin Hoffman and Alan Bates. But with some exceptions, she does not like the movies she sees today. "In the old days writers knew whom they were writing for," she says. "If they knew which actress was going to play a part, they were inspired. They don't write for anybody today. They just cast things.

"There's no question that there's talent today. But I miss Cooper, I miss Tracy, I miss Gable, I miss . . . a lot of people. That gang is gone, and there's a whole new breed of cat. There was a party a few years ago when Warners was sold. Mr. WarnerI never called him Jacksat on a couch beside me and held my hand. 'We're the last ones left,' he said." Today Bette would be sitting on that couch alone, and she may be there for some time yet. "I don't want to miss anything by dying," she says. "I don't want to miss seeing my grandchildren grow up. I would be furious."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.