Rex Reed - Conversations In The Raw

Copyright 1969 by Rex Reed

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.

The first edition of this book was published by The World

Publishing Company, Cleveland, Ohio.

The ebook edition of this book is published by

Devault-Graves Digital Editions, Memphis, Tennessee.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 78-88593. Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-9882322-7-3

Bette Davis, Ruth Gordon, Jane Wyman, Myrna Loy, Uta Hagen, Simone Signoret, Patricia Neal, Zoe Caldwell, Stars Fell on AlabamaAgain, Oskar Werner, Colleen Dewhurst, Irene Papas, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Albert Finney, Jean Seberg, Mart Crowley, Burt Bacharach, George Sanders, James Earl Jones, Tennessee Williams Took His Name Off It, Oliver Reed, Jon Voight, Offering the Moon to a Guy in Jeans, Carol White, Patty Duke: 1968/1969 1967/1966 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

Ingrid Bergman: Reprinted from Playbill magazine, Metromedia Inc., January 1968.

The articles listed below, reprinted by permission of Fairchild Publications, Inc., first appeared

in Womens Wear Daily: The Academy Awards4/12/68; The Golden Globe Awards

2/16/68; Miss USA5/24/68; Mickey Mouses Birthday Party1/3/69; Paint Your

Wagon8/2/68.

Joseph Losey: Reprinted by permission of Status magazine.

Omar Sharif, Leslie Caron: Reprinted from This Week magazine. Copyrighted 1968 by

United Newspapers Magazine Corporation.

China Machado: Reprinted from Cosmopolitan magazine. Copyrighted 1968

by The Hearst Corporation.

Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey: 1968 by The Hearst Corporation. All rights reserved.

Reprinted from the July 1968 issue of Eye magazine.

Malibu: Reprinted by permission of Holiday, 1969 Perfect Publishing Co.

Other Devault-Graves Editions

Ebooks by Rex Reed

Do You Sleep In The Nude?

People Are Crazy Here

Valentines & Vitriol

For

Floy Dean,
who knows why

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the editors of The New York Times, Holiday, Womens Wear Daily, Cosmopolitan, Playbill, and This Week for permission to reprint most of the material in this book the way it was originally written instead of, in some cases, the way it was later published.

HELLO!

On an Arctic iceberg or in the middle of Macys, the voice on the phone could have belonged to only one person. Part Fanny Skeffington and part Margo Channing, but all Bette Davis.

Come on Tuesday. I should have the papers signed by then. What? Youre not calling about the mortgage? Oh, the interview! Well, Im a basket case before noon. For years I had to be on the set at dawn, now when I dont work my greatest luxury is sleeping late. So come for lunch. My dear, Im terribly sorry, I thought you were from the bank. My addressnow dont laughis One Crooked Mile. Just ask anybody. They all know the house.

They did, too. One Westport resident told me it is impossible to go for Sunday drives without seeing the cars lined up to get a peek at her behind the curtains. And I dont blame them. There never has beenand never will beanyone quite like her. In a business where stars are killed off as fast as Indian extras, she is one of the few genuine legends still left to the imagination. To people like my father, who never go to movies (Why go, when you can see Bogart and Davis on the late show?) she is one of the only names left on a marquee that doesnt have to be explained. And to legions of kids, discovering the magic of her films all over again, she is zero cool. The whole banana. They go away raving (At her best, she is devastating) or they go away laughing (At her worst, she is merely the best Bette Davis caricature out of all the other stars whove built careers doing Bette Davis caricatures), but they never go away bored. Because Davis is an original in an industry full of stand-ins. Froggy-eyed, lipstick-slashed or glowing like a Tiffany lamp, she is exciting enough, even when photographed through gauze, to make the nubile youth cultists about as interesting as a withered logarithm.

There she stands, in the door of her Connecticut farmhouse, waving her by-now practically petrified cigarette, saying, Call me Bette or well never be friends. Swamp fevers, gunshot wounds, bubonic plague, the deaths of countless lovers, the brain tumor to end all brain tumors, car accidents, shipwrecks, beatings at the hands of the syndicate and suicide on the Chicago train tracksshe has survived them all and, most amazing, the wear doesnt show. Nobody knows what I look like because I never looked the same way twice. Today, it can be said with all immodesty, she looks sensational. She was wearing tight black-and-white checked wool slacks, loafers, a boys button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a little gold doggie pinned to her lapel. Her hair is finally back to its natural soft walnut color after Tennessee Williams made her dye it Popsicle orange a few years ago for her Broadway appearance in Night of the Iguana, and she wears it exactly as she did when she played twins in AStolen Life. Unlike most star ladies her age, she has never had a face lift, yet she looks younger than any of them. I couldve been lying in bed with maribou feathers, but I decided what the hell, might as well see me exactly as I am. Ill be 61 years old the first week in April of 69but dont send flowersIll be in bed all day. I only look as old as I feel, and Im having a ball.

Lunch was ready. Yankee stew with grits, artichokes (and a lecture on how to cook them), fresh fruit with kirsch and cornbread sticks courtesy of Aunt Jemimaeverything else I cooked myself. We ate from old pewter plates on a big wooden country kitchen table with a revolving lazy susan filled with spices and flowers and the two things that are never far from wherever she happens to be, her ashtrays and cigarettes (If there is any truth to that cancer rumor, my dear, Ive got it already!). She talked a blue streak about her children (B.D., 21, who lives with her husband in nearby Weston; Margo, 18, a retarded daughter who has been in a special school in Geneva, New York, since she was three; and Michael, 17, in his senior year at Loomis, near Hartford), Hollywood (I was always a Yankee girl at heartit was never a cozy town anyway, unless you did the social thing, which I never dideven at the height of my career, I always came back East between pictures.) and, most important, her latest film for Twentieth Century Fox, The Anniversary, made in London, in which she makes a real Davis entrance from the top of a staircase with a scarlet patch over one eye to the tune of Anniversary Waltz, celebrates her husbands death with firecrackers, blackmails one son, exposes the second as a transvestite, drives the third sons girl into hysterics by placing a glass eye under her pillow, and threatens the life of her daughter-in-law by paying her off each time she has a baby, knowing secretly she has a heart condition. If you think shes something with both eyes, wait until you see that one Davis eye doing the work for two.

Well, says Bette, it may not be the greatest movie ever made, but its a good old-fashioned Bette Davis movie and I