The Full Biography
Bette Davis. Actress. Two-time Academy Award winner. The Warner Bros. contract player who refused to stay decorative.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a pair of eyes that have already decided you are wasting her time, and a line delivered as if the ash on the cigarette were part of the grammar. The year was 1950. The picture was All About Eve. Margo Channing says to fasten your seatbelts. What the still cannot show is Ruth Elizabeth Davis of Lowell, Massachusetts, a girl with no studio face, a decade of fighting Jack Warner, ten Oscar nominations, a daughter’s book, a mastectomy, strokes, and a last year in France that she refused to play as a fade.
She was born on April 5, 1908, in Lowell. Her parents’ marriage ended. Her mother, Ruthie, took Bette and her sister Bobby and bet on the daughter’s will. School plays. The John Murray Anderson school in New York. Broadway enough to be noticed. In 1930 Universal brought her west and did not know what to do with a young woman who photographed like an argument. She was no one’s ingénue. Carl Laemmle’s studio let her go. Warner Bros. picked her up. That contract would become the other great plot of her life.
The door is Of Human Bondage (1934), on loan to RKO: Mildred, a waitress who is cruel because the script finally allowed a woman to be. The town noticed. Warner noticed it had a star it had not designed. Dangerous (1935) brought the first Academy Award for Best Actress. She called it a consolation prize for the Mildred they had not nominated. Jezebel (1938) brought the second, a red dress in a wrong-color ballroom, opposite Henry Fonda. Between and after came the Warner run that is the real cathedral: Dark Victory, The Old Maid, The Letter, Now, Voyager, Mr. Skeffington. She played women who wanted too much and paid in public. Audiences, especially women, recognized the invoice.
Jack Warner wanted product. Davis wanted parts. In 1936 she sailed to England and tried to break the contract, arguing that seven years of bad scripts was not a life. She lost in the British courts. She came home and, unlike many who lost, did not soften. The pictures got better because she had made indifference expensive. Olivia de Havilland would win the seven-year point in California. Davis had already shown the town that a woman might sue it and still be asked to work Monday.
All About Eve (1950), for Joseph L. Mankiewicz at Fox, is the second act the public remembers as the first. She was forty-two, playing forty, which in that business was a form of courage. Anne Baxter is the younger appetite. George Sanders is the critic who enjoys the blood. Davis is the star who can see the knife and still finish the scene. The “bumpy night” line belongs to Margo. The voice belongs to Davis. She did not win the Oscar. Judy Holliday did. The clip outlived the envelope.
Old age ain’t no place for sissies.Bette Davis
Universal had already dropped her before Warner knew what it had. The early-1930s pictures — The Man Who Played God, Cabin in the Cotton, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing — treated the eyes as a problem to photograph around. Of Human Bondage (1934), on loan to RKO from Maugham and John Cromwell, is Mildred Rogers, a waitress who is cruel because the script finally allowed a woman to be. A write-in Oscar campaign started because the studio had not submitted her. Dangerous (1935) brought the first official statue. She called it a consolation prize. Jezebel (1938), for William Wyler, brought the second: a red dress at a white-gown ball, opposite Henry Fonda, a will the South would not forgive. Jack Warner wanted product. She wanted parts. The English lawsuit of 1936 did not free her. It made indifference expensive. The Warner cathedral is longer than two Oscars. Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory (1939) put her in a dying heiress opposite George Brent and Humphrey Bogart. The Old Maid (1939) and The Letter (1940), from Maugham, asked her to be cruel in public. Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager (1942) is Charlotte Vale, a woman who takes off a mother’s glasses and learns a cigarette can be a grammar. Mr. Skeffington (1944) opposite Claude Rains. William Wyler’s The Little Foxes (1941) made her Regina Giddens, a woman who would let a husband die on a staircase. The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) opposite Errol Flynn. A Stolen Life (1946). Beyond the Forest (1949) is the picture that contains “What a dump,” a line the culture kept as if it were Margo’s. She played women who wanted too much and paid in public. Audiences, especially women, recognized the invoice. All About Eve (1950), for Joseph L. Mankiewicz at Fox, is the second act the public remembers as the first. She was forty-two, playing forty, which in that business was a form of courage. Anne Baxter is the younger appetite. George Sanders is the critic who enjoys the blood. Davis is the star who can see the knife and still finish the scene. The “bumpy night” line belongs to Margo. The voice belongs to Davis. She did not win the Oscar. Judy Holliday did, for Born Yesterday. The clip outlived the envelope. The Star (1952) brought another nomination as an actress the town had already used up. The Virgin Queen (1955). Storm Center (1956). The Catered Affair (1956) opposite Ernest Borgnine. Pocketful of Miracles (1961), for Frank Capra, is a last studio smile before the grotesque. The turn is not Eve. The turn is the 1960s, when the leading parts dried and she took the grotesque without asking to be loved for it. Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), opposite Joan Crawford, is a horror picture about leftover fame. The feud the columns wanted was real enough to photograph and simple enough to oversell. Davis needed the work. Crawford needed the work. The audience needed to see two cathedrals crack. Dead Ringer (1964) let her play twins. Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) followed, after Crawford left and Olivia de Havilland stepped in. Seth Holt’s The Nanny (1965), for Hammer, put her in a uniform the children would not survive. The Anniversary (1968). Connecting Rooms (1970). Dan Curtis’s Burnt Offerings (1976). She kept working on television, in thrillers, in anything that paid and had a character in it. She liked to say she would not retire while she still had her legs and her makeup box.
Six things most people never knew
- Warner did not invent her. Universal dropped her. The eyes that would define a studio were, at first, a problem the first studio could not cast.
- She sued to get off the lot in 1936 — and lost. The English case is the rehearsal for every subsequent legend of Davis versus the front office.
- Ten nominations, two competitive Oscars. The count is not trivia. It is a thirty-year argument with the Academy about what a leading woman is for.
- She was the first woman to preside over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 1941 she took the presidency and resigned inside two months when she decided the job was ceremonial. She would not be a gavel in a gown.
- Her daughter B. D. Hyman published My Mother’s Keeper in 1985. Davis answered, in print and in interviews, with a cold that fans still argue about. The years after sixty include that book. Omitting it is a kindness she did not ask for.
- After a mastectomy and strokes in 1983, she went back to work. Murder with Mirrors (1985), opposite Helen Hayes, was shot in English weather she called one of the wonderful days of her life. She had learned to walk again. She brought the makeup box.
She married four times. The last marriage, to Gary Merrill, came out of All About Eve and ended as those sets do when the lights go off. She had a daughter, B. D., and adopted children. Motherhood was not her best-reviewed role. She did not pretend otherwise in the way celebrity memoirs pretend. She smoked as if the century had dared her. The cigarettes are not a cute prop. They are how the medical file begins.
The later years
In 1977 she received the AFI Life Achievement Award — the first woman so honored — and used the night as a working actress uses a good close-up: precisely. Television movies paid because features had fewer rooms for a woman past sixty who would not play cute. John Guillermin’s Death on the Nile (1978) put her on a steamer as Mrs. van Schuyler. Disney’s Return from Witch Mountain (1978) and The Watcher in the Woods (1980) used the eyes as weather a child could still fear. She published memoirs, including The Lonely Life (1962) and This ’n That (1987), the second of which had to exist in part because B. D. Hyman’s My Mother’s Keeper had already been a 1985 climate. She was not interested in being understood. She was interested in being accurately quoted. The Kennedy Center Honors came in 1987. Lincoln Center gave her a tribute in 1989 that she attended as a working fact, not as a relic.
1983 was the medical turn. A mastectomy. Then, within weeks, strokes that paralyzed the left side of her face and arm and slurred the most famous diction in American pictures. Kathryn Sermak, her assistant, became the practical household: therapy, travel, the logistics of a will that refused to sit down. Davis came back on camera with the damage visible and unhidden. Murder with Mirrors (1985), opposite Helen Hayes, was shot in English weather she called one of the wonderful days of her life. She had learned to walk again. She brought the makeup box. That is not bravery as a poster. That is a professional who had always thought the face was an instrument, not a product.
Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August (1987) is the last picture that still looks like a part. She played Libby Strong, opposite Lillian Gish as her sister Sarah, in a Maine house at the end of a summer — Vincent Price and Ann Sothern in the same frame. The film is Davis, not Hepburn. Gish was the other cathedral in the room. Davis took the harder sister, the one who would not be sweet about going blind, and finished the job. Wicked Stepmother (1989) is a mess she left before it was finished. She was already ill. In 1989 she traveled to Spain for the Donostia Award at San Sebastián, then to France.
The last year was travel as work. San Sebastián gave her the Donostia Award. She went. France was next. Sermak handled the stairs, the cigarettes, the will that refused to sit down. B. D.’s book remained in print. Davis remained in the file as the woman who answered it without asking to be pitied. She had already written This ’n That. She had already finished Libby Strong in Maine. She had already put the makeup box back on after the left side of the face quit. She died on October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Breast cancer, metastasized. She was eighty-one. The epitaph she wanted, and got on her tombstone at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, is a working sentence: “She did it the hard way.” Lowell is the first room. Warner is the fight. Margo is the clip. Maine, in The Whales of August, is the last part that still had a character in it. Paris was the last address. What she did after the strokes was not a fade. It was the same job she had taken in 1934: show up, refuse to be decorative, leave the room with the invoice visible. Lowell is still the first weather. Warner is still the fight. Maine, opposite Gish, is still the last part that had a character. The makeup box is still the method. The hard way is still the epitaph.
After she was gone
Margo Channing still teaches a certain kind of young actress what a staircase can do. Baby Jane still teaches a certain kind of audience what leftover fame smells like. The Davis eyes are a Halloween mask and a graduate seminar, which is a strange afterlife and an earned one. Sermak wrote her own account. The daughter’s book remains in print. The films remain louder than both.
She came out of Lowell with a mother who had bet the rent, lost a British lawsuit, won two Oscars, ran a studio presidency for a minute, played the monster when the ingénue parts died, and walked back onto a set after the left side of her face had quit. If you only remember the seatbelts, you have the clip. If you remember the English court, the ten nominations, the daughter’s book, and the makeup box after the strokes, you have her.
Portrait: Alexander Kahle (1886-1968) for RKO Radio Pictures · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons