This spring, I am watching and writing about Bette Davis movies, and I thought I’d kick it off with a post about Bette herself.
I don’t know why it has taken me so long to watch Bette Davis movies, considering her connection to the area I live in.
Bette Davis’s daughter, B.D. (Barbara Davis) Sherry Hyman used to own and live on a farm about 30 minutes from where I live now. Sadly, Bette did not have a good relationship with her daughter after the daughter wrote two scathing books about Bette.
If you are of a certain age, you may remember the books and the fallout from them in the 1980s.
I personally didn’t pay attention to celebrity drama when I was a child, so I didn’t know about it until recently.
I’ll get to that a little further in the post, but for now, let’s start at the beginning of Bette’s life.
Hadley Hall Meares wrote this for Vanity Affair in 2020, “Opinions? Bette Davis had a few. Born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in 1908, the legendary movie star was a tireless perfectionist and workaholic with little patience for those who did not share her vision. Consequently, her 1962 autobiography The Lonely Life and its 1987 follow-up, This ‘N That, are not short of opinions—many hard-edged, but a few remarkably tender. As her autobiographies prove, there was so much more to Davis’s wild life even than what we saw in 2017’s Feud, which charted her fabled dispute with co-star Joan Crawford.”
Bette was born to Ruth (Favor) and Harlow Morrell Davis. When she was seven years old, her father divorced her mother, and her mother raised Bette and her younger daughter Barbara on her own.
Bette began acting in school productions at the Cushing Academy in Massachusetts in her teens. She then did a summer in a small theater in Rochester, New York, before moving to New York City, where she attended the John Murray Anderson/Robert Milton School of Theatre and Dance. In 1929, she made her stage debut at Greenwich Village’s Provincetown Playhouse in The Earth Between.
Her first Broadway appearance was at the age of 21 in the comedy Broken Dishes. Her first movie appearance was a very small role in 1931’s Bad Sister with Hollywood’s Universal Pictures. In 1932, though she landed a deal with Warner Brothers and her career took off, with her breakout film being The Man Who Played God. After that she filmed 14 films over the next three years! They sure turned them out back then!
Bette was blonde when she first started out, by the way. Her hair was naturally a honey blonde but studio executives made it very blonde in the early 30s, which she didn’t like. Gradually, her hair darkened, or she darkened it to become the familiar brunette we saw later in her career.
In 1934, Bette was loaned to RKO Pictures for Of Human Bondage, a drama based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham and co-starring British actor Leslie Howard. This movie brought Davis her first Oscar nomination.
Bette’s performance in the movie as “the vulgar, cold-hearted waitress Mildred” would kick off many roles in her career as strong-willed, sometimes unlikable women. Many people interpreted who Bette was in real life based on the roles she played.
Over a career that spanned 60 years Bette made a long list of well-acclaimed films, including All About Eve, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, and Dark Victory.
She won her first Academy Award in 1935 for playing a troubled actress in Dangerous. Her second was for Jezebel in 1938. She was nominated eight more times but never won another one.
Bette was high praised by many of her peers with exception to one — her nemesis and co-star from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Joan Crawford — who said these following things about her:
“I’m the quiet one and Bette’s explosive. I have discipline, she doesn’t.”
“She has a cult, and what the hell is a cult except a gang of rebels without a cause. I have fans. There’s a big difference.”
“Sure, she stole some of my big scenes, but the funny thing is, when I see the movie again, she stole them because she looked like a parody of herself, and I still looked like something of a star.”
The pair had a hate/hate relationship for years with Bette saying this about Joan when she died: “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
Bette certainly acted confident, bold, and mouthy most of the time, but even she had doubts at times.
According to the site Golden Derby, Bette was once so worried about her career she took an ad out in Variety magazine: “Mother of three 10, 11 and 15-Divorcee. American. Thirty years’ experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. Has had Broadway. References upon request.”
Bette was married four times. She married Harmon Nelson in 1932 and they divorced in 1938. She married Arthur Farnsworth in 1940 and that marriage lasted three years before Farnsworth tragically died in a freak accident.
Her next marriage was to William Grant Sherry, and was for five years. Her last was to Gary Merrill, which lasted the longest but was also said to be violent, bitter, and full of domestic violence.
She had Barbara “B.D.”, with Sherry and adopted two children, Michael and Margot, with Merrill. Margot was discovered to be brain damaged at 3 and Bette put her in a special home, but still supported her financially, and often brought her home for long periods for visits with family.
With Bette’s permission, B.D. married Jeremy Hyman when B.D. was only 16 and Jeremy was 29. The marriage lasted for more than 50 years but many say it was the husband who turned B.D. against her mother. Jeremy died in 2017.
What I feel bad about is that Barbara, B.D., she calls herself a pastor but still publicly shredded Bette in two different books. Maybe Bette was a narcissist and crazy, but the best thing might have been not to write a book about it all, and instead given all that hatred and bitterness to God. That’s just my opinion, of course.
Before writing the books, Barbara commended her mother for how she raised her when she was younger and in a 60-Minute interview said she’d adopted some of those principals for raising her own son. After the first book came out, she tried to explain in interviews that her relationship with her mother was difficult and that was what the books were about, but she also went on talk shows and just verbally eviscerated her mother’s reputation.
I watched one where she even pulled her oldest son into the action, and he described things he said Bette had done to him when he was visiting her.
B.D. received a lot of condemnation about the timing of the release of the first book because Bette had had a mastectomy and suffered a stroke not long before. Shortly after that she broke her hip. Bette’s assistant later wrote a book where she said she and Bette’s lawyers tried to keep the news of the book from her because she was still trying to heal from surgery.
When she did find out, she was shocked, devastated, and felt deeply betrayed by the book.
“Nothing,” Bette’s assistant, Kathyrn Sermak told Vanity Fair in 2017 when her book Miss D and Me came out, “nothing compared to the betrayal of B.D.’s book. That broke her heart.”
Sermak said cinematic portrayals of Bette are inaccurate.
“I will always be grateful to Ryan Murphy for introducing [Davis and Crawford] to a new generation,” Sermak told Vanity Fair about the movie about Bette’s relationship with Joan Crawford. But that Davis is “not the woman I was on 10 years of film sets with. Miss Davis never behaved on film sets like that. She never yelled, she never screamed—at least not around me.”
Bette felt so deeply betrayed by B.D.’s book that she disinherited her from her will. I also can’t imagine why Barbara felt she needed to write another one after writing one already. More money I supposed.
Bette divided her estate between her adopted son Michael Merrill and Sermak, with stipulations that her son take care of her adopted daughter Margo.
Bette also wrote a message to B.D. in her autobiography, written two years before she died, and in part of it she stated:
“As you ended your letter in My Mother’s Keeper – it’s up to you now, Ruth Elizabeth – I am ending my letter to you the same way: It’s up to you now, Hyman.
Ruth Elizabeth
P.S. I hope someday I will understand the title My Mother’s Keeper. If it refers to money, if my memory serves me right, I’ve been your keeper all these many years. I am continuing to do so, as my name has made your book about me a success.”
B.D. once said she wrote the book to get her mother’s attention so they would talk things out. Trust me, there are better ways to do that, and it didn’t work. The two never spoke again.
Before their relationship took a nosedive, Bette frequently visited B.D. and her sons in our tiny, rural area. There are old newspaper articles quoting people from the community I went to high school in who met her when she either visited their store or their motel. She rarely stayed with B.D. because of the friction between them.
“She looked and acted in real life like she did in the movies,” the owner of a local market told a local newspaper. “She was very straightforward, and there was no doubt that when she said something, it was what she meant.”
He remembered Bette being driven around the area in a chauffeured limousine and that she once came into the sporting goods store he used to own to buy a .22-caliber rifle. He said he heard a woman say her mother would be paying for the gun and when he looked up, Bette Davis was standing there.
The owner of a local hotel called Bette “pushy and possessive.” He said she and her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson came in for dinner one night and the grandson sat on his dad’s cowboy hat. The owner’s dad scolded the child, and Bette told the owner off.
“Bette told him to shut up.”
So, maybe the real Bette was a little bit like her on-screen characters after all.
There are a ton of great movies of Bette’s to watch, but for this particular series, I have chosen the following movies:
It’s Love I’m After (April 15th)
A Working Man (April 17th)
Another Man’s Poison (April 20th)
Dark Victory (April 23rd)
Jezebel (April 30th)
Dangerous (May 1)
The Letter (May 7)
Of Human Bondage (May 12)
Now, Voyager (May 21)
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (May 28th)
These are subject to change depending on what life events pop up between now and the end of May.
I’ve already watched The Bride Came C.O.D. and All About Eve and written about them on the blog.
Have you ever watched Bette Davis? Which movies did you see her in?
______
Sources and additional resources:
https://www.biography.com/actors/bette-davis
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/joan-crawford-bette-davis-baby-jane-biography
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