Show Business: Just a Dame from New England

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In Beyond the Forest (1949) she was forced to play a small-town Wisconsin woman who longs to escape to Chicago. The result was calamity. "If I had been that girl," she says, "she'd have got to Chicago 15 years earlier. There would be no way you could have kept her there." Davis has portrayed remarkably restrained women, like Paul Lukas' wife in Watch on the Rhine. Yet even in a quiet role, she radiates energy, like a quasar, an astronomical phenomenon that is so powerful that everything around it looks dim. She calls Greta Garbo the greatest person who ever performed before a camera, and all her life she has wondered why she can't look "like this gorgeous Miss Katharine Hepburn." But the only actress she finds comparable to herself is the late Anna Magnani. "There's only one of us in each country," she observes.

Tallulah Bankhead thought that the one in this country was Tallulah. She was furious when the movies of three of the Broadway plays she had been involved in­Jezebel, Dark Victory and The Little Foxes­were given to Bette in Hollywood. "Tallulah once came up to me at a party and said, 'You took three parts away from me. And I played them all so much better than you did.' I looked at her and said, 'I agree.' She simply melted out of that room," Davis laughs gleefully. "She always insisted that Margo Charming in All About Eve was based on her. It's not true; Margo wasn't based on any single person. But there was a resemblance when I made the movie. I had laryngitis and it gave me the same croaky voice that she had." (Davis was second choice for the part, coming in only after Claudette Colbert developed back trouble.)

Margo Charming, the temperamental Broadway star, was the quintessential Davis character: tough but vulnerable, infuriating but magnetic. Character and actress seemed one, and it is hard even now to believe that she was acting. "In fact," she insists, "I am not a Margo Charming-type actress. When I'm not working, I'm just a dame who came from New England. I'm very domestic, a total hausfrau. I adore keeping house and I love cooking. Always have."

These days Bette keeps house by herself in one of the oldest apartment buildings in Hollywood. She tried marriage four times, but was once widowed and thrice divorced. Her last marriage, to Actor Gary Merrill, her co-star in Eve, ended 20 years ago, and she has never considered a fifth. "I liked being a wife and I worked very hard at being a good one," she says. "But I was also a very hard working woman. I had to go for marriage or career, because whatever I do I like to do it the best I can. And I could not do both the best I could. My one regret is that I am by myself at this age. It would be very nice to be living with a husband I had known for 20 or 30 years. That's the great reward, two people who have made it and become great friends." Her chief comfort is her children, and she visits them often: B.D., 32, who lives with her husband and two boys in Pennsylvania; Michael, 28, a lawyer who is married and lives in Boston, and Margot, 29, who was brain-damaged at birth and lives in an institution in upstate New York.