She was a screen bitch before it was fashionable to be one. She was a strong, opinionated, assertive actress in an industry dominated by men when her peers were still cowering under the thumbs of the terrifying studio heads such as Jack Warner, Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer. And she was not beautiful in the accepted Hollywood way
at all. All told, Bette Davis was an enigmatic, fascinating, fabulous and exasperating movie star and the screen has not seen her like since. Few can rival the amazing body of work she created. Nominated an unprecedented 11 times for a Best Actress Oscar, she won twice and was as commanding an actress as the movies have produced. She was magnificent, exasperating,
luminous and bellicose in equal measure, a blazing talent, a terrifying force of nature with a peculiar way of talking and stressing certain words. Considering that she smoked a couple of packets of cigarettes every day of her adult life, it was remarkable that she survived to the relatively ripe old age of 81. Born Ruth Elizabeth Davis (she took the Bette from Balzac’s novel Cousin Bette)
in Lowell Massachu-setts on April 5, 1908, a fiery Aries, she more than lived up to that astrological sign throughout her life and a career that spanned six decades. I was privileged to work with Davis on my first Hollywood movie, The Virgin Queen (1955), in which she played the shaven-headed monarch Elizabeth I. Each morning the make-up department shaved her hairline back several inches and covered her face in thick white make-up. With her bright ginger wig, stiff steel corseted costume and 16th-century ruff so high that she could barely move her head, she seemed every inch the powerful, legendary queen. These costumes were terribly uncomfortable (I was wearing a modified version of the steel corset), which probably added to Bette’s bad humour, but the costume team of Charles Le Maire and Mary Wills did such a great job in creating an authentic look that their work was nominated for an Oscar.
The regally imposing effect of Bette’s costume was somewhat marred by her stalking up and down the set chainsmoking. Of course most people smoked then, including myself. I was playing one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Beth Throgmorton, who is secretly in love with Sir Walter Raleigh, with whom Queen Liz is also secretly in love. It sounds like the plot of a modern
soap, but it is historically correct. The other five handmaidens, all aged between 18 and 21, were terrified of Bette, who had a habit of barking angrily at us for even minor infractions such as chewing gum. One day in a confrontational scene with her I was supposed to lace up her shoe with a satin ribbon. When I knelt to do so her foot seemed to take on a life of its
own on each take. It wriggled as if it had Restless Leg Syndrome and finally kicked me across the set. The irascible Hungarian director Henry Koster yelled at me: “Vat’s wrong vit you? You’re 30 years younger. Grab ze old bag’s ankle and do it up, for God’s sake.” A glimmer of a smile flickered across Bette’s face as I was embarrassed before the entire team but I gritted my teeth and on the next take, knelt down, grabbed the foot, wedged it so firmly between my strong young knees that she
couldn’t move it, and did it up, yelping my lines, while she threw daggers at me. After that she left me alone to giggle in the corners with the handmaidens. I learnt several lessons from working with Davis. I learnt that it is important to always to be kind and polite to younger actors who are often frightened and insecure, particularly around big stars. As an actress
I studied her at work, noting how expertly she took control of a scene. Sometimes she wouldn’t even move a muscle, just flash those amazing eyes. She was able to interpret her feelings by a flicker of an eyelash or a slight intake of breath. I remember one of her lines in The Virgin Queen. Although it was Elizabeth I speaking, it epitomised Bette’s entire life:
“It is I who make the policy of this room, I and I alone.” Bette made the policy of any room or arena she ever walked into. I crossed swords with her again a number of years later at the Night of a 100 Stars gala in New York. By now I had achieved some success in Dynasty. Bette and I were thus sharing a dressing room with Ginger Rogers, Jane Russell and
Lillian Gish – legends all, but none so much as Bette Davis. I was wearing a low-cut, backless, armless and slit-to-the-thigh silver lamé gown, created by the Dynasty designer Nolan Miller. Bette, attired somewhat like the Giles grandma, sat in an armchair smoking heavily and looking me up and down as I primped before the mirror. Then, in that amazing, clipped, unmistakeable voice, she sneered: “M’dear, you almost have that dress on.” “Yes, and the skirt needs a little adjusting, would you mind pulling down the hem, Bette dear?” The great diva arose with great dignity and a smouldering cigarette and yanked at the dress. The following morning she rang the designer to complain: “How could you let that Collins
girl wear such an outrageously revealing outfit?” Watching her movies, she encapsulated a period of hard, brittle and glamorous sophistication, which covered a great vulnerability. Often, of course, she went over the top in her performances but that was one of the delights in watching her, the unexpected gesture, the toss of the head, the unmistakeable voice. Who can
forget her limpid-eyed longing look to Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager as they puff elegantly on their cigarettes and she whispers in that unique husky voice: “Why ask for the moon Jerry when we have the stars?” Or another memorable scene, from Dark Victory, when she knows she has only months to live as, swathed in furs, she sits with friends at a dinner table studying the menu. Then the waiter asks for her order. She looks at him, saucer eyed and, with the impeccable timing of a
trained actress, says: “I think I’ll have a large order of prognosis negative.” Bette started in movies in November 1931 under contract to Warner Bros for $300 a week. The film was The Man Who Played God, but the studio was not impressed by this short, doe-eyed girl. They tried to give her the glamour-gal treatment anyway, plucking her eyebrows, dyeing her mousy hair platinum blonde and plonking on the false eyelashes. Playing Madge, the sex-hungry daughter of a plantation owner in Cabin in the Cotton,
she throws away another one of her most famous lines. Looking up and down Richard Barthelmess’s body appreciatively she says saucily: “Ah’d like to kiss ya, but ah just washed mah hair.” She trotted this line out on countless talk shows over the years, always to enthusiastic applause. I was at the 1956 Oscars when she presented the Best Actor award to Marlon Brando. It
must have been a touch sad for her to see this brilliant actor receive his well-deserved award for On the Watefront, for, despite 11 nominations, Bette was only to win the Oscar twice, for Dangerous, in 1936, and Jezebel, 1939. Her nominations included Dark Victory in 1940; The Letter in 1941; The Little Foxesin 1942; Now, Voyagerin 1943; Mr Skeffington in 1945, All About Eve in 1951 and The Star in 1953; and, her final one, for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in
1963. It seems tragic and unfair that the academy never recognised Bette’s work with a Lifetime Achievement Oscar that many of her contemporaries, such as Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Barbara Stanwyck and Myrna Loy, all received. Maybe she was too feisty for Hollywood, which then preferred its actresses to be pliable. She was also often at loggerheads with the studio bigwigs, regularly rejecting roles she felt weren’t right for her. On her tombstone is written: “She did it the
hard way.” Watching those nominated films and so many other Davis performances many times, I have sometimes tried to incorporate a touch of her assertive-ness and strength into my roles. When I first read the role of Alexis Carrington on Dynasty I considered how Davis would have approached this character. The part was described to me by my agent as “a real juicy bitch, the kind of gal Bette Davis would have played in her prime”. So much of Alexis seemed to emulate so many of Davis’s roles. Conniving, glamorous, sly, the epitome of the woman scorned, she wasn’t afraid to use her sexual charms to get her own way. Whenever I had thoughts about how to play a scene I’d think: “How would Bette do it?” and the rest was easy.
And when I played an aggressive, manipulative female executive in the TV series Footballers’ Wives, I joked with the actors and crew that I was doing my Bette Davis walk as I strutted up to my protégé, who was trying to escape my clutches, yelling, “You’re nothing, do you hear? Nothing! You’ll never get away from me. You’ll be back, oh yes you will!” I did this, hands
on hips, and admit I was blatantly copying Bette. My favourite performance of hers is the irascible Broadway star, Margot Channing in All About Eve. Bette’s fading actress is a tour de force of pent-up energy, jealousy and seething emotion. When she prepares for her guests to arrive she sneers to her staff as she stalks up the stairs: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s
gonna be a bumpy night.” In this film she berates herself for being old and haggard. She was actually 42 at the time, and in later life she talked about how, on seeing the movie years later, she realised how great looking she really had been. She married Gary Merrill, her fourth husband during this movie and their relationship mirrored the movie, tempestuous in the extreme.
As the centenary of her birthday approaches, her face is on a new stamp in the US in one of the Legends of Hollywood series, proving that the aura Bette Davis left has not diminished. In fact it is becoming enhanced. Young actors, some of whom had never heard of her, study her work avidly. In 1977 the American Film Institute finally recognised her enormous contribution to the art of film when she was the first woman to receive its Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1999 it voted her the No 2 film actress of all time (after Katharine Hepburn). For me she will always be in first place.
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