Bette Davis’ life was one of the major train wrecks in Hollywood history, and it was her hand that was on the throttle. Married four times and divorced three (one died); multiple love affairs; at least three abortions; battles royal with producers, directors and anyone else in authority; fragile relationships with her three children — all that defines, in part, Bette Davis.
One of the greatest film actresses of the mid-20th century, two Oscars (and eight other nominations), numerous unforgettable films — “Jezebel,” “Now, Voyager,” “The Little Foxes,” “All About Eve,” “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” — that, too, defines Bette Davis. She was “as singular and commanding a figure as world cinema has ever produced,” Ed Sikov writes in “Dark Victory,” his new biography of the actress.
Sikov’s book joins a crowded shelf of Davis biographies; there have been at least a dozen since her death at 81 in 1989. Sikov, author of other Hollywood books, including a life of Billy Wilder, focuses his lively work on her movies because “they define her legacy.” This results in plenty of plot synopses, sometimes wearying but fortunately leavened by juicy anecdotes.
She was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Mass. Her lawyer father and photographer mother divorced when she was 7, and she, her mother and younger sister lived a peripatetic existence throughout her girlhood, jumping from town to town and school to school.
As early as drama school in 1927 and in subsequent stock company work, she displayed a standoffish, doesn’t-fit-in manner. There was a reason for this other than her New England-derived desire for rectitude. In the easy-morals milieu of the theater, where directors expected actresses to do more than act, Davis would not “put out,” according to fellow thespian Louis Calhern.
She got over such shyness fairly quickly after she arrived in Hollywood and signed her first Warners contract in November 1931. In referring to the legendary casting couch, Davis once described a bizarre screen test in which “I wasn’t even a woman. I was a mattress.”
Early on, the author says, she manifested the characteristic Bette Davis mannerisms: assertive stance, spiky attitude, skittish physical energy and sharp, staccato speech. But it was in 1934’s “Of Human Bondage” — another of her memorable films — that she began to deliver lines like punches, speaking, as another writer has remarked, in italics. “I don’t know what you mean,” Davis says to “Bondage” co-star Leslie Howard.
Sikov goes on at length about Davis’ status as a gay icon. Whether that affects his attitude toward her I cannot say, but the fact is it approaches veneration. Of the ease with which Davis can be imitated, he scolds: “Mimicking Bette Davis without reverence is like staring at the Sistine Chapel without awe.” Oh.
His title he took from one of her most famous films because her personal “Dark Victory” is that she knowingly “sacrificed her personal life for the sake of her work, and it hurt.” His own evidence, however, suggests that raging vanity ran neck-and-neck with sacrifice in affecting her personal life.
Not that he soft-pedals Davis’ disagreeableness. She was perpetually angry. She fought constantly, all the while realizing that not all the battles were worth fighting.
A friend said, “Bette defies friendship.” Lindsay Anderson, director of her last completed film, “The Whales of August,” said, “She’s difficult because she’s Bette Davis, not because she’s a star. She has an initial hostility to life and people that she has had all her life.”
Davis distrusted male control yet at the same time admired and demanded it. She fought with Jack Warner of Warner Bros. for 18 years. The irony is that, upon leaving Warners in 1949 after 52 films, the subsequent four decades of her career were not necessarily better artistically than the previous two had been.
“Dark Victory” is, all in all, a thorough and entertaining biography. Sikov possesses a gift for neat encapsulations of personalities and events.
On the other hand, he is capable of clunkers. He says of Jack Warner’s family, “They pawned the family horse.” Maybe so, but I’d not like to see, or smell, the pawnshop that would take a horse in trade.
Also, occasionally he rests serious assertions upon slender reeds of documentation, such as physical abuse of Davis by her third husband. That apparently is based upon little more than her autobiography.
Davis was tough, determined and did what she wanted. Toward the end of her life she said, “Old age isn’t for sissies.” In her case, neither, it would seem, were the ages leading up to it.
Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer and author of the novel “Invisible Hero.”
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Nonfiction
Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis, by Ed Sikov, $30
