{"id":116091,"date":"2026-04-05T08:00:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T12:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=116091"},"modified":"2026-04-04T15:49:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T19:49:20","slug":"happy-birthday-bette-davis-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=116091","title":{"rendered":"“I\u2019d marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me and guarantee that he\u2019d be dead within a year.” — Bette Davis"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tumblr_n1t1gvARIg1qazanuo1_500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI was thought to be \u2018stuck up\u2019. I wasn\u2019t. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.\u201d<\/big><\/p>\n

It’s her birthday today. <\/p>\n

First up: For Film Comment<\/i>, I wrote a piece about “back-ting”<\/a> – acting with your back to the camera and\/or audience. Bette Davis HEAVILY figures in it. Because she was a Back-tress of the highest order.<\/p>\n

From James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, an indispensable work of not only film criticism but cultural commentary and observation. <\/p>\n

Here is Baldwin on the effect that seeing Bette Davis on the screen for the first time had on him as a small boy. A white schoolteacher (female, although everyone called her “Bill”) befriended young James and introduced him to cinema, theatre, and literature. She took him to see a Bette Davis movie. <\/p>\n

My father said, during all the years I lived with him, that I was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, and I had absolutely no reason to doubt him. But it was not my father’s hatred of my<\/i> frog-eyes which hurt me, this hatred proving, in time, to be rather more resounding than real: I have my mother’s eyes. When my father called me ugly, he was not attacking me so much as he was attacking my mother. (No doubt, he was also attacking my real, and unknown, father.) And I loved my mother. I knew that she loved me, and I sensed that she was paying an enormous price for me. I was a boy, and so I didn’t really too much care that my father thought me hideous. (So I said to myself – this judgment, nevertheless, was to have a decidedly terrifying effect on my life.) But I thought that he must have been stricken blind (or was as mysteriously wicked as white people, a paralyzing thought) if he was unable to see that my mother was absolutely beyond any question the most beautiful woman in the world.<\/p>\n

So, here, now, was Bette Davis, on that Saturday afternoon, in close-up, over a champagne glass, pop-eyes popping. I was astounded. I had caught my father, not in a lie, but in an infirmity. For, here, before me, after all, was a movie star: white:<\/i> and if she was white and a movie star, she was rich<\/i>: and she was ugly<\/i>…Out of bewilderment, out of loyalty to my mother, probably, and also because I sensed something menacing and unhealthy (for me, certainly) in the face on the screen, I gave Davis’s skin the dead-white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock, but I was held, just the same, by the tense intelligence of the forehead…Eventually, from a hospital bed, she murders someone, and [Spencer] Tracy takes the weight, to Sing Sing. In his arms, Davis cries and cries, and the movie ends. “What’s going to happen to her now?” I asked Bill Miller. “We don’t know,” said Bill, conveying to me, nevertheless, that she would probably never get over it, that people pay for what they do.<\/p>\n

I had not yet heard Bessie Smith’s “why they call this place the Sing Sing?\/Come stand here by this rock pile, and listen to these hammers ring,”<\/i> and it would be seven years before I would begin working on the railroad. It was to take a longer time than that before I would cry; a longer time than that before I would cry in anyone’s arms; and a long long long long time before I would begin to realize what I myself was doing with my enormous eyes – or vice versa. This had nothing to do with Davis, the actress, or with all those hang-ups I didn’t yet know I had: I had discovered that my infirmity might not be my doom; my infirmity, or infirmities, might be forged into weapons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s one of my favorite things ever written about Davis.<\/p>\n

\n\"bette-davis-3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nAnd speaking of the “ugly” thing, which gets a lot of traction still: I do want to point you to my friend Farran Nehme’s gorgeous essay on Bette Davis’ face. The Face of Bette Davis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are so many unforgettable roles of such astonishing diversity she makes Meryl Streep look like a slacker: Of Human Bondage<\/i>, Petrified Forest<\/i>, All About Eve<\/i>, The Letter<\/i>, Now, Voyager<\/i>, Jezebel<\/i>, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane<\/i>, Marked Woman<\/i>, The Star<\/i>, Dark Victory<\/i>, Strangers<\/i> (the TV movie she did with Gena Rowlands in the 70s – the whole thing is on Youtube, people) … more, more, more. I love her in her early pre-Code cheese-cake phase too, before she became a star (Three on a Match<\/i> where she is golden and pale and adorable). <\/p>\n

She paved the way for other serious actresses who wanted to do quality films, and wanted to guide their own careers. Her fights with studios are still legendary. <\/p>\n

She didn’t break the mould. She created it. It’s still hers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI was thought to be \u2018stuck up\u2019. I wasn\u2019t. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.\u201d It’s her birthday today. First up: For Film Comment, I wrote a piece … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,4,39],"tags":[2695,269],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116091"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116091"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191243,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116091\/revisions\/191243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}