Show Business: Just a Dame from New England

Bette Davis celebrates 50 years in films

Her guest has spilled some coffee on the table, and quicker than you can say Oops! the little woman in trousers and a rakish jockey cap has mopped up the mess. "There, that's fine," she says, looking down in satisfaction. "Viva towels are so much better than Bounty." Then, listening to herself, she laughs, hoots, cackles­there are no mere giggles from this lady. "I sound like a television commercial, don't I?"

Not really, not ever. The famous lines of Bette Davis are as fixed in the national consciousness as the Pledge of Allegiance. There is Margo Charming in All About Eve warning her friends to fasten their seat belts because "it's going to be a bumpy night." There is Regina in The Little Foxes telling her dying husband: "I hope you die soon. I'll be waiting for you to die." In a different mood, Charlotte Vale at the fadeout of Now, Voyager: "Oh, Jerry. Don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." Put all of her characters together and you could almost fill Carnegie Hall. But it is still impossible to imagine her sounding like anyone but Bette Davis.

With a few exceptions, like Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, most of the great figures­the faces and the voices from the '30s and the '40s­are either dead or in retirement. But as she celebrates her 72nd birthday this week, and her 50th year in films this year, Davis, trim, vigorous and in buoyant good health, is still busy. She won an Emmy last year playing a mother who finally reconciles with her daughter in a CBS special called Strangers; in her entire career she has probably never given a better or more poignant performance. Last month she played a poor woman who befriends a black teen-ager in another CBS special, the unfortunately titled White Mama; next week she will be seen in a Disney sci-fi thriller, The Watcher in the Woods. And if The Thorn Birds is ever made, she will probably play Mary Carson, a rich Australian dowager.

"Oh," she says, "I wouldn't stop working for anything! But I'm very stubborn about parts. I am not going to sink into playing little old grandmothers, maiden aunts or cameos. If the audience sneezes or blinks in a cameo, you're gone." Davis underlines her words, punctuating with exclamation points and various marks that are not found in the grammar books. If she says no, she follows it with two or three others. In real life, as in the movies, she is almost never without a cigarette, which she uses like a baton to orchestrate her words. Toscanini could not conduct more effectively than she does with a few waves of her Philip Morris.

From her mother Ruthie she inherited her drive and single-minded ambition. Divorced when Bette was seven, Ruthie supported Bette and her sister by working as a photographer in Boston. When Bette showed ability as an actress, Ruthie immediately enrolled her in an acting school in New York City. "There was no such word as can't for my mother," Davis says. "There isn't for me either. I believe there are no short cuts. None! If you want to do something, do it!"