Thanks to Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Scream Queens) and his recent, undoubtedly soon to be award-winning series, Feud: Bette and Joan, there’s been renewed interest in the life of the late, great, Bette Davis. She was a genuine Hollywood legend, an extinct breed to be sure. Davis managed to rack up 10 Academy Award nominations for Best Actress, winning twice. While undeniably talented, her ability to bring life to some of the most hard-edged roles went hand in hand with her obsessive perfectionism. This tendency to “have it her way” led to numerous off-screen battles with directors and studio execs. Most notoriously, she took Warner Brothers head honcho, Jack Warner, to court in an attempt to break free from her contract. She lost that battle, but her fighting spirit never died.
Flash forward to the late 80’s, after struggles with breast cancer and several strokes left her with paralysis on her left side, Bette was still eager to work in film. It was her presenting an award at the Golden Globes that caught the eye of master of horror, writer/director, Larry Cohen (Q: The Winged Serpent, It’s Alive, Maniac Cop). He began concocting an idea that would star the ailing screen legend, and after a week of hammering out the script he was already in the process of trying to woo her into the role, the role of Wicked Stepmother. Bette was to play a witch, Miranda, who has taken over the life of an aging widower and would ultimately prove a major foil to his high-strung adult daughter, Jenny. That was the original concept anyway.
For those who have seen the finished film, you know that Davis only appears in about the first third. It’s a drastic shift in the plot that has Davis morph into a black cat (I think) while her gorgeous daughter, Priscilla (Barbara Carrera), takes over the duties of running the household and ruining Jenny’s life. There’s some mumbo-jumbo about Miranda and Priscilla having to share the same body. Apparently, Priscilla has kept Miranda trapped in the cat’s body the entire time, and…it’s a jumbled mess of plot convolutions that don’t dare begin to save this train wreck. But, you’ve got to give credit to Cohen for trying, I guess. What did happen? Why did Davis leave the project after only a week of the 5-week shooting schedule? Well, it depends on who you ask.
In an interview with the LA Times dated January 3rd, 1989, Bette Davis came out swinging against her former director, Larry Cohen. While the official word at the time was Davis left the production due to emergency dental surgery, Davis protested this version of the story,”People will be horrified at the footage of me…I think that for the good of my future career I honestly had no choice.” Davis was 80 at the time and blamed Larry Cohen for a disastrous production that saw her slip and fall on set, experience blowback from a faulty cigarette gag, and ultimately, she felt he made her look horrid on screen.
Davis continued to thrash Cohen by claiming he had no concern for his actors. “He never rehearses actors…He just rehearses the camera. So we work for the camera. I was very uncomfortable in all the scenes…” Bette stated the final straw was after she demanded to see the dailies, she was shocked at her appearance and the inclusion of scenes that were not a part of the original script that she had signed off on. “Much of that week’s work had, well, to me, many vulgar moments.” Cohen’s account of Bette’s departure is slightly different.
From the same LA Times’ article as well as a lengthy blog post written by Cohen himself in 2012, “I Killed Bette Davis”, Cohen paints a vastly different picture. In his own words, it seems Cohen was eager to work with the aging starlet, to provide her work during a time when her main gig seemed to be appearing on daytime talk shows. Cohen details his efforts to woo Davis onto the picture by providing her a quarter million payday and cast approval. He states that when Davis fell on set she refused to be assisted by anyone in getting back up. Her pride was so much that Cohen attempted to hide as not to further embarrass her by knowing he had witnessed the incident.
The exploding cigarette? It was due to an inexperienced special effects artist who failed having the smoke “magically” ignite itself on two separate takes. Larry wrote he wanted to move on, to “fix it in post”, but the great perfectionist, Davis, insisted they give it another try. That’s when the prop blew up in her hand, yet she never mentioned the accident on set again for the remainder of her time there. In fact, Cohen made it sound as if he and Davis got along swimmingly, sharing inside jokes together, rehearsing for days on end at his home where he stated, “I have plenty of cigarette burns all over my house to prove it.”
So, if it wasn’t the always reliable “creative differences” that drove Davis away from Wicked Stepmother, what was the true reason of her departure? Cohen wrote:
“…Bette was suffering. It wasn’t just the fall; she seemed genuinely uncomfortable, and her line readings were odd. She would take pauses in the midst of sentences that were uncalled for. She began begging me to see the dailies, and I resisted until one afternoon she beckoned me into an empty room in the house and burst into tears. I couldn’t believe Bette Davis was crying. Maybe this was just another tactic, but I couldn’t resist…
…After seeing herself in the dailies that Saturday, she’d rushed to the one dentist she trusted. He informed her that several more teeth needed to be extracted and it would take weeks to create a new set of dentures. In her condition, she could never have faced the camera. But she couldn’t admit that publicly. To have left the movie for medical reasons might’ve made her uninsurable. Without insurance, she’d never work again.”
Was it fear of her “future career” that drove Davis to drag Larry Cohen’s name through the mud? Was it the fact that her doctor wrote a letter to the production of Wicked Stepmother that claimed after Davis’s dental surgery she’d lost an alarming 15 pounds and was not fit to work in her present condition? Or was Davis merely pulling a page from her rival, Joan Crawford’s playbook, and feigning illness to get out of an uncomfortable situation? We may never know the full truth, but Larry Cohen feels he was vindicated.
Bette Davis ultimately was called on to appear in court and testify under oath so that the insurance company could “accurately assign blame for the shutdown and delay of the film.” Cohen was happy with the outcome of the deposition as he writes, “And to her credit, she finally owned up to the truth and completely absolved me of any responsibility for her premature departure.” While that certainly sounds well and good, considering the insurance company had to cough up a million dollars in Davis’s absence, she certainly wasn’t going to get on the stand and say, “I just didn’t like working with Cohen.” Safe to say, the jury is still out on this minor feud at the tail end of Bette Davis’s career. The star passed away only eight months after the film’s release in 1989, making Wicked Stepmother her final screen credit.