On Bette Davis
"What a woman. What a broad. The alpha and the omega of broads."
June 4, 2017
Cambridge, Massachusetts
I was 23 years old
I brought up Terry Gross (he was on Fresh Air last month, an interview that—shocker—brought me to tears) and he said how much he loved her recent interview with Gabourey Sidibe. He was shocked to hear I don’t watch Empire. But then David Sedaris asked me if I watched Feud: Bette and Joan. And I just about creamed.
Not only was I actively obsessed with Feud but, while I was waiting online, I heard him talking about TV with someone and I made a mental note to bring it up. And lo! He talked about how much he loves Jackie Hoffmann, that she used to be in all the plays he and Amy put on. He told me about this amazing old clip of Joan Crawford reading some book. He loved Jessica Lange’s performance but I said I preferred Susan’s. He said he can’t forgive her for her politics. I disagreed. But I met him halfway and said she could have cooled it with her Bette Davisian consonants.
“Beau-TEE-ful,” I imitated.
He got such a kick out of that. Laughed, laughed, laughed. Now mind you, with my vantage point at the end of tonight’s line, I was privy to very nearly every interaction he had. How brief he sometimes was, how distracted he could occasionally get. Maybe he just didn’t have the burden of keeping people waiting, what with there hardly being anyone left behind me. Regardless—he talked to me for every bit of five minutes. And then, when he slid my signed book back toward me, he extended his hand. A handshake! From David Sedaris! And as I floated away, I heard him repeat to himself, “Beau-tee-ful.”
April 5, 2023
Brooklyn, New York
I am 29 years old
Twelve years old and all alone in my childhood bedroom, contorting my prepubescent body into angles that looked more “faggoty pony” than usual, I was so close. Sensing it in my still-growing pained bones that it wasn’t long now until I accomplished what I’d set out to do. I could feel it. Any moment now. It was coming. I’d have the rap from Madonna’s “Vogue” committed to memory. Fellas that were in the mood, indeed. I’d imagine my parents would have preferred their son was actually masturbating behind those closed doors and, if it’s any comfort, that would come later. But for now, it was Madonna. I was just beginning to really fall in love with her, studying her one pirated song at a time, piecing together her music and image and persona into something I’d soon hold dearer than a loved one. Coming to understand her as this quintessential postmodern pop star long before I understood what “postmodern” might mean. Dipping my own toe into the postmodern every time I pouted my way through “Grace Kelly, Harlow, Jean/Picture of a beauty queen.” Introduced to all these names not as movie stars—but as lyrics. So, of course, what did I know, how could I have guessed I was manifesting my very own future every time I joined in on the rap, professing, in perfect time, “Bette Davis/We love you!”
Fundamental, albeit a little obvious, All About Eve was the first Bette Davis movie I ever watched. I was in college, and a senior at that, so forgive me for being a slow learner. Granted, I was also an English major who graduated without reading a single work of Shakespeare. That sayeth a lot, I think. Because for someone who never felt much kinship with kids my age, I seemingly never had much interest in the classics either. Never paying much attention to all the works that originated those supposed 36 dramatic plots or to all the great minds whose artistry was already reduced to copies of a copy of a copy by the time I came along—and ignored them all together. Take the most famous line from the movie, the most famous line from most any movie. “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!” I already knew it, of course, but only because it was included at the very beginning of a YouTube video I watched a lot in high school: Gwyneth Paltrow singing “Bette Davis Eyes” in Duets. Fire up the Xerox! But then, finally, I watched Bette in All About Eve. And I breathed pure oxygen.
“What a woman,” I said to myself, I’m sure. What a broad, really. The alpha and the omega of broads, Miss Bette Davis. And, as if it needs stating, there’s no kind of woman I love more. Beautiful and brash, hysterically arch and achingly human, someone who got the French provincial office and a book full of clippings and four husbands by age 42. The shapes she cuts, the marks she hits like dance, the downturned lips and massive eyes, her Transatlantic Ts and Massachusetts Rs, that Yankee work ethic, and her right hand punctuating all of the above with its curling plume of smoke. Seeing her play Margo Channing, there were stars in my eyes. And even the times I’ve watched it again since, still I’m slack-jawed, my mouth agape with this dopey expression of awe. Laughing one moment at a punchline delivered expertly from a true vaudevillian. And the next, I’m making that sad little tsk sound, finding myself hum a mournful hmm at this force on my television screen. Five feet three inches of sheer determination and divine femininity, fashioning the cloth from which every woman I’ve ever loved was cut. A star who was born, on this day, 115 years ago.
That said, I could count on one hand the number of Bette Davis movies I’ve seen. I know she won her two Academy Awards for Dangerous and Jezebel, that her finest performance is in Now, Voyager, that her co-star in The Watcher in the Woods would go on to become a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills—but all without watching a single one of them. I have no excuses. Especially when I’ve developed the habit, and shamelessly, of referring to myself as a “20th Century Homosexual.” As evidenced. But unlike all the actual gay men who really were born decades before me, gay men who magically felt all the same affection I do for women like Bette (or Madonna) (or, frankly, my mother), I don’t have to wait for Of Human Bondage to play on late night TV, or for The Letter to screen at some downtown art-house. Here I am, alive for this digital embarrassment of riches, with a kind of access to the past that’s never been so simple, or so cheap. One click and I’m anywhere. No thank you. After all, I don’t love a woman whose gravestone reads “She did it the hard way” for nothing.
So instead of working through her filmography, far more often, I’m devoting those same hours to watching her 1971 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. And it is a performance. Bette Davis as Bette Davis. Not as a copy, but as 100% bona fide the real thing. I’ve watched it too many times to count. Often enough that I know bits and pieces by heart. Anticipating the first cigarette she pulls from her purse, knowing just when she asks for water. A fan who sees himself just as discerning and disciplined as the subject of affection herself. A boy who would be a broad, or so he dreams. More likely, I’ll always play the Dick Cavett, and that’s okay. Dick who ends their interview by saying they really stomped on the mold when they made her. Suddenly leaning forward, nearer than ever and filling the frame, all glamor and grace, she says, “Well, it’s a good thing!” Oh, it is. Bette Davis—we love you.