TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/80/80cappeo.3

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                                                                              April 14, 1980

CINEMA

Just a Dame from New England


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, cackles--there 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 Channing 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 figures--the faces and the voices from the
'30s and the '40s--are 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 used 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 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 films--such as Bureau
of Missing Persons, Parachute Jumper, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing
and Housewife--because 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 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 last 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 in--Jezebel, Dark Victory
and The Little Foxes-- were 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 Channing 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 Channing, 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 Channing--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 hardworking 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 Clayburg,
Marsha Mason and Jane Fonds. 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.
Warner--I never called him Jack--sat 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."

Gerald Clarke