Barbara Leaming certainly scoured the primary sources for her information on screen legend Bette Davis. She went through Davis' personal scrapbooks, letters, diaries and business documents for a fuller picture of the life of one of the premiere actresses of cinema's golden age. The biography is very slow to get going. Leaming wants to set a tone as to the matriarchal line, starting with Bette's grandmother, who refused her mother, Ruthie, an opportunity to work on the stage, thus "causing" Ruthie to feed all her artistic dreams into Bette's career. There's a very convoluted and snail-like stretch of armchair psychology here, and elsewhere in the book, regarding motivations and behaviors, that grows quite tiresome. There are a lot of conclusions that Leaming draws regarding Davis' behavior, and the meanings of certain things in her scrapbooks, which made me think "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but whatever." The other problem I had with the book itself is the minute study of how Bette will curl her fingers in a certain scene of a certain film and how it harks back to something she studied in dance class ten years before. A bit of this is fine, but to go on for three pages regarding Davis' arm movements in one scene from "Jezebel" is just the tiniest bit ridiculous. However, I'll move on to what I learned about Bette herself. Unlike some who make up fantasies about what they'd like a person's life to reflect, write a novel and call it biography, Barbara Leaming really dug deep into the primary sources. When the primary source conflicted with an interviewee's recollection, or with Bette's memoirs, she used the primary source. Excellent use of materials, and marvelous cooperation from many of Bette's intimates, including two of her children, even though those children knew that they might not be seen in the best light. When Leaming gets into these documents, she really gets to the truth of Bette Davis' life and career. There was only one story that I flat out didn't believe, as it didn't seem to be backed up by anything other than Bette Davis' story-telling, and was completely opposite to everything I've heard regarding the other person in the anecdote, but otherwise, Leaming researched meticulously. The portrait Leaming paints is not a pretty one. Bette Davis, as written by Leaming, is not a woman I would have wanted to know or work with. Leaming sometimes refers to her as "mercurial," but in my reading I didn't find that to be accurate. Mercurial people are sometimes kind, which is what makes their unpleasant behavior surprising. Here, Bette Davis is unrelentingly selfish and mean. She's held up in interviews and history to be the "consummate professional," but studio records show her continuously staying home "ill" when things weren't the way she wanted them to be on her films. Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland would get flack for actually being ill many years later, but Bette was doing it in the 30s, simply as part of a very expensive temper tantrum. Yes, Bette founded the Hollywood Canteen, but she fussed and fumed, in writing, that Warners should pay her for her appearances on bond drives and other WWII-related philanthropic events, when other actors and actresses were giving up their fees, and even their lives, to do the work. She supported her family financially, but when she found out her new brother-in-law was a recovering alcoholic, she sent him two cases of booze as a wedding gift.She was a brat as a baby (and was never properly corrected in her behavior, but coddled as the golden child, to the detriment of her younger sister, Bobby), she was a brat as a teenager, she was a brat as an employee at Warners, and remained a brat into her golden years. Her behavior during the torturous production of Night of the Iguana makes for particularly unpleasant reading. She told outright lies as to the behavior of the people she hurt, which, given the copious amount of documentation to the contrary that she herself collected which showed the truth, is itself inexplicable.The saddest anecdote in the book had to do with Bette's final departure from Warner Brothers after 18 years there. Not a single person turned out to say goodbye and wish her well as she left the gates for the last time. She was quite hurt by this, and didn't understand why, after all her years at the studio, she was being ignored. Leaming posits that after all the years of tantrums, sick-calls, contract battles and lawsuits, her co-workers were simply happy to see her go, and I believe this. It is often the most ill-behaved people who are the most surprised when they are treated unkindly in return. Bette Davis seems never to have learned that her own behavior caused her loneliness. I learned a great deal about Bette Davis through reading this book. The book's sources are impeccable and thus, overall, I'm inclined to believe it. I wish I could read this book and say that this sad, vindictive, ugly person must have been the victim of a mean-spirited biographer, but I can't, and it's a pity.
I've read five Bette Davis biographies and find it impossible to rate one higher than the others. Inescapably, many details are rehashed across all of them. This one I liked, not much more or less than the others I've read. However, if I were recommending which ones to include in your coverage (there are so many), this would make my list.All the fabulous comical caricatures have redefined our memories of this wonderful actress. Just watch her actual films, though, and you'll rediscover that she was nowhere near as over the top as you might have recalled, she had far greater dramatic subtlety and nuance than her impersonators have led us to believe. As a woman she was renowned for being earthier than her professional nemesis Joan Crawford and boasted of that, making her perhaps the more arrogant of the two yet no less adorable. I like to make my own mind up about the subjects of biographies and usually can. That Bette Davis was no saint becomes clear enough after covering a few biographies, that she was no monster either is also clear. She was a fascinating woman and a great, great star.
