Broadway Babylon (33 page)

To Logan’s amazement, Davis didn’t appear at all during the first act he sat through. When he went backstage during intermission, Robbins informed him, “She won’t come on. She says her first-act scenes aren’t good enough, so she just told the stage manager to cut them tonight.”

Logan asked, “But doesn’t she have any sympathy for the audience? That they paid to see her?”

Robbins shrugged.

The material was improved, and the commercially successful tour reached New York. However,
Two’s Company
ran only ninety performances, several without its star, who claimed she wasn’t well enough to appear consistently. Eventually it was announced Davis might have an infected wisdom tooth. Her producers hoped that after the tooth was extracted, she would return full time to the sell-out show. But she never came back, and
Two’s Company
closed prematurely, losing most of its initial cost.

Perhaps to cover for her, it was stated that Davis had had an operation on her jaw that necessitated her leaving the show. Joshua Logan later wrote that such was not the case. When his memoirs
Movie Stars, Real People, and Me
were published in 1978, Bette Davis sued for defamation, since he portrayed her as not only volatile but capricious about her work, at least on the stage.

B
ETTE’S NEXT VENTURE
, in 1959, comprised readings of poetry by Carl Sandburg, with her husband (and
All About Eve
costar) Gary Merrill. Although she and Merrill chose to separate during their tour—the stormy marriage involved much mutual drinking and even fisticuffs—Davis never missed a performance, with or without Merrill, who was replaced onstage by Leif Erickson.

In 1961 Bette returned to Broadway in Tennessee Williams’s
The Night of the Iguana
, playing the frank and lusty Maxine, a hotel proprietor in love with Patrick O’Neal as a defrocked minister turned travel guide in Mexico (the 1964 screen version starred Richard Burton and Ava Gardner). The manic-depressive Joshua Logan raved about Bette’s performance, later recalling that he immediately made plans to have his friends see her in the play. “But before I could arrange it, Bette Davis left the cast. There were rumors that she was sick again; there were other rumors that she wasn’t sick at all. Whatever, Bette Davis was no longer in the cast. Cause unknown.”

Several observers have said that anyone hiring Bette Davis to star in any stage venture after her erratic history in
Two’s Company
and
Iguana
was begging for trouble, since her abrupt departures inevitably hurt the box office. Yet Logan, a leading stage and screen writer-director, chose to cast her—in a musical, yet—as Miss Moffat. The project was based on Davis’s semi-classic 1945 film
The Corn Is Green
, but the locale was switched from Wales to the American South and Miss M.’s prize pupil, Morgan Evans, changed from a coal miner to a black field hand. The composer was Albert Hague, who’d scored the stage hits
Redhead
and
Plain and Fancy
plus the TV classic
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
. (Hague later gained fame as Mr. Shorofsky on the TV series
Fame
.)

Emlyn Williams, who’d written the semi-autobiographical
The Corn Is Green
and costarred in the play, was the lyricist and the book’s coauthor with Logan. “This will either be another hit on the order of
The Sound of Music
,” he
predicted, “or a fiasco. Of course it could land somewhere in between, but wouldn’t that be dull?”

Miss Moffat
had been intended for Mary Martin, a musical star. But after her manager-husband died, she no longer felt like working. Sans songs, the stage role of the dedicated teacher had been shouldered by Sybil Thorndike, Ethel Barrymore, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blanche Yurka. Davis loved the idea of resurrecting a screen triumph during the ’70s, when most of her offers were for TV movies.

“Bette didn’t realize how difficult theater can be,” said Williams, “and she didn’t consider the musical challenges as challenges.” She’d sung briefly in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962) and other pictures, and insisted she had an excellent singing voice. She also told Logan and Williams that if Rex Harrison could talk-sing his way through a major musical like
My Fair Lady
, so could she.

“Bette kept saying that all the circumstances were now perfect.… She was so excited,” noted Williams, “and it was contagious. She said she’d been too young at thirty-six when she did
The Corn Is Green
, and now in her sixties she was just the right age,” close to that of Ethel Barrymore, who’d starred in
The Corn Is Green
on Broadway.

Logan planned a forty-four-week cross-country tour, leading up to a Broadway opening for
Miss Moffat
in fall 1975. The highly strung director required constant changes and rewrites, which didn’t sit well with the film-trained Davis. The songs reportedly included some gems, but the relocated plot was shaky. During rehearsals, Bette always had a script in hand, “a paper security blanket,” said Logan. “It became a game with all of us to try to get it away from her.”

Logan had assumed the star was nervous about carrying a musical, and some insiders whispered that the lyrics were inferior to the music. But when the director tried to assuage Bette’s supposed fears about musicalizing, she “almost bit my head off.”

“Nervous about music? I’m a musician! I understand everything there is to know about music! And I’m very,
very
good at it, so don’t say such things.” To Logan’s regret, Davis decided to flat-out sing her songs rather than talk-sing them.

According to Logan, she soon started to limp, claiming that she’d pinched a nerve in her spine several months back. The doctor whom she visited at Logan’s suggestion explained that spinal conditions don’t show in X-rays because cartilage doesn’t photograph. It would require dye to be injected into her spinal column for a milogram, a painful procedure. Looking back, Logan wrote, “I feel we should have insisted on the milogram, for as it turned out we never really found what was causing her pain.”

On stage, Bette began asking other actors to exit or enter more quickly—
to camouflage her own problems?
wondered Logan. Suddenly, her doctors announced she would have to be hospitalized for three to eight weeks. When Logan and Williams visited Davis in hospital, she was asked whether she honestly wanted to continue with the show? Ever the trouper (certainly in public), she proclaimed, “Of course! I love it. I’m passionately in love with it. I must do it,” but added that if they couldn’t wait for her to recuperate, she’d understand.

Logan and company decided to wait for her and meanwhile to work around her. Three weeks later, she returned for rehearsals for the opening in Philadelphia, arriving on a Sunday. Logan was miffed that, “We did not hear from her until the day was over.” Her lawyer showed up and said Miss Davis had slightly injured herself over the weekend. “When, where, and how?” asked Logan.

When she’d gone up to Connecticut to visit her grandson, said the lawyer. “But it was very minor, and she’ll be all right tomorrow morning.” The show opened a week from that morrow.

Logan later offered in his book, “We were astounded that, sick as the doctors had said she was, she would take the chance of that long automobile ride. Again we realized she was shooting with our dice.”

T
HE SHOW OPENED
, an event that drew Bette Davis fanatics from New York and farther afield. The star “got an ovation at the end of the performance that I had never heard before for anyone,” recalled Emlyn Williams. “They would have gone on for an hour had she allowed them to.” Her performance improved during the first week but sagged notably the second. “She was quite often difficult to hear. She repeated lines in lyrics or left them out entirely. She forgot dialogue she had never forgotten before, then giddily repeated what she had just said.”

Rather famously, during one performance Davis stopped the proceedings and addressed the audience, “How can I play this scene? Morgan Evans is supposed to be onstage.”

She loudly called, “Morgan Evans, get out here.”

Actor Dorian Harewood had minutes to go before his entrance, but ran out onto the stage, looking to Bette Davis for a cue. She then realized her mistake and admitted, “I was wrong. I want you to know that. It wasn’t his fault.” The audience applauded and cheered. The diva could do no wrong. Bette, as was her wont, elaborated. “It was my own stupid fault, and Dorian had
nothing
to do with it. Go back, Morgan, and we’ll start over.”

The play was sometimes longer than at other times, up to seventeen minutes, due to Bette’s slip-ups. During one scene, after she tripped over her lines leading up to a song, she turned sharply to one of the children onstage. The
child, thinking Miss Davis needed help, whispered her line to her. The star snapped, “Don’t you tell me my line! I know it! You’re a naughty little boy!”

Prior to the Broadway opening, Logan, as was
his
wont, grew increasingly nervous and made further changes in the dialogue—despite almost everyone’s advising him that
Miss Moffat
was sure to be a hit. One night he received an ultimatum from Bette’s agent and lawyer. “I was to make no changes for a week so that she could get her mind and thoughts organized. Also, we were not allowed even to rehearse the other actors, which was unique in my experience of ultimatums.”

Eight days later, Bette resumed rehearsing. Her performance improved, she forgot less material, and she enthused that she looked forward to touring all year, then playing it “at least a year in New York and a year in London,” capped by making the—inevitable, she believed—film version.

But the next morning, Joshua Logan was summoned to Bette Davis’s hotel suite and escorted into her bedroom, where she lay stiffly in bed. “Has the doctor phoned you?” she asked.

“Doctor? No, Bette. What doctor?”

“The doctor in New York. Hasn’t he told you that I can’t play it anymore?

The upshot was, in spite of Logan and company’s pleas and threats—“You can’t commit this kind of professional suicide”—Davis was leaving the show. Even if she suddenly got well or improved dramatically? “I’m not coming back—ever. I can’t. The doctor will tell you I can’t.” When Logan called the doctor to ask whether Davis was really incapable of playing
Miss Moffat
, he replied, “I wouldn’t know without another exam. All I know is that when patients say they can’t play a show, I’m powerless as a doctor to tell them to go up on the stage and play it.”

After her abrupt departure from
The Night of the Iguana
, Bette had vowed never to work on stage again. This time she publicly insisted she was through with Broadway. “Josh reminded her that she’d lost backers hundreds of thousands of dollars and dozens of actors and crew their jobs in two prior, important productions,” said Emlyn Williams. “What I wondered was why, unless Josh savored the drama and placing himself in the spotlight, he’d signed Bette to
Miss Moffat
at all. Any number of more qualified actresses of a certain age would have given their eye teeth to do the part.”

Logan, in his book, would question Bette’s psychology and whether she was masochistic underneath the tough façade or whether she even liked her own personality. Davis’s assistant and paid best friend Vik Greenfield revealed, “She tried never to show her fear. Remember, she was a ram [Aries]—head-first and thought about it later. But very early I said to myself, ‘Bette’s never going to make this—she doesn’t have the stamina for it anymore.’ ”

Before opening, Bette confided to her diary her trepidations about the heavy exertion that would be exacted from her. Despite her public bravado, insiders said she was afraid of the show, all the more so since it was a musical. In interviews, she would go on to say the songs had been her favorite part
and
she’d done them beautifully.

Williams pointed out, “She’d really been away too long from the stage to get right back in the swim. She was so hopeful, but it was a bad fit. Two things Bette almost never blames for a failed project are herself or the material. Rarely, she’ll say she was wrong for the material. More often, she’ll turn to the Hollywood habit of blaming the director.” (Williams had already worked with Davis on screen.)

Rather than find a new star, the stunned and appalled Joshua Logan had closed the show. In point of fact, most of its glowing notices had centered on Bette Davis; nostalgia was taking off in the 1970s. The play and its music were less warmly received, and the shift from Wales to the Deep South was not universally welcomed—some felt the concept would have worked better during the 1960s, around the time of the interracially themed film and Kate Hepburn—starrer
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Yet privately, Logan opined to friends, “We were ahead of our time and our movie star was half out of her mind.” In 1983 he helmed a revival of
Miss Moffat
that starred Ginger Rogers, a non-friendly rival of Davis. It played two weeks in Indianapolis, of all places, with a mostly non-Equity cast. Then it died, unmourned.

I
N
1975, B
ETTE
T
OLD
I
NTERVIEWER
Rex Reed, “It was a mistake. The audiences stood up cheering and screaming every night, but I knew it wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted me to be a bitch, not a middle-aged school teacher.” Indeed, when she did return to the stage, as herself in her one-woman show that toured extensively and successfully, Davis played up the bitchiness that audiences had come to expect and relish. After a lengthy yet riveting series of film clips, mostly from the 1930s and ’40s, Bette took the stage—her entry line, after the applause died down, was, “What a dump!”—and answered fans’ questions in a bold, at times outrageously frank, manner.

In Reed’s
New York Daily News
interview, Davis made no secret of her antipathy for Logan. Explaining at length why she’d left
Miss Moffat
, she overlooked her ailing back and fingered her director. Reed wrote that Bette “became enraged when she talked about” the musical and the mercurial Logan, who was furious after reading the piece. He set about refuting each point in his second volume of memoirs, the one over which Bette sued—eventually dropping her suit (as most stars do).