The image of Bette Davis that emerges from this highly entertaining biography is of some mad, querulous great-aunt who comes to stay for Christmas, grievously upsets everybody, and then sits there complaining to the last few people who will still listen to her that children have no manners these days. One of Davis’s “jokes” was to get drunk at dinner parties, insult all the guests, and then the next day, by way of apology, send round a crate of rotten vegetables.

Employing a rare but justified cliché, in a showbiz biography that is notably well written for the genre, Ed Sikov observes that they really don’t make stars like her any more. Nowadays, they want to be widely loved, forever youthful and botox-beautiful. Davis’s complex character led her to play shrieking harridans, wicked heroines, ugly old witches. What female Hollywood star now would don make-up to look as hideous as Bette did in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Born as Ruth Elizabeth Davis, she was “an upright bluenose but a flamingly theatrical one”, as Sikov memorably puts it. Her adoring mother recalled that she was born during “a lovely April shower”, whereas Bette’s memoir reckons, “I happened between a clap of thunder and a streak of lightning.” Perhaps she was trying to get the attention of her ice-cold father, Harlow. At his own wedding, when someone threw celebratory rice over them, he roared, “God-damn you! I’ll get you for this!”

Bette was low on sex appeal: striking, with those huge eyes, but never pretty. Although virginal and chilly in image, she was by no means so chaste in reality, getting through four marriages and numerous affairs. During the filming of the 1935 film, Dangerous, she was caught in flagrante, performing what the tabloids delicately refer to as a “sex act” on Franchot Tone, an actor supposedly devoted to Joan Crawford. Hence the start of Hollywood’s longest, most celebrated catfight. Decades later, with poor Crawford dead and buried, Bette continued to savage her at any opportunity. When reprimanded, along the lines of de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, she snapped, “Just because a person’s dead doesn’t mean they’ve changed.”

Another feud was with the redoubtable Tallulah Bankhead, a sterner adversary. “That hag,” Tallulah spat. “When I get hold of her I’ll tear every hair out of her moustache.” Bette once offered Mae West a napkin smeared with caviar. A joke? At other times she’d offer to help someone with gardening, “and she’d just chop up a plant and kill it”. And her secretary Vik Greenfield observed of her, “She’d get a bee in her bonnet. But it would be the wrong bee.” Driving away husbands, lovers and friends, she took refuge with animals, such as Sir Cedric Wogs, her beloved sealyham, who no doubt adored her unconditionally, as required. She also supported the Tailwaggers, a charity for abandoned dogs. “Only when I became president of the Tailwaggers did I become acutely aware of the problems of dogdom.”

A mad old bat she may have been, but the film world no longer produces her like. Her greatest movies, All About Eve and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, are as good to watch as ever. “One can only pause in wonder at the revelation that she was one of Walt Disney’s first choices for the role of Mary Poppins,” says Sikov. The one role she should have played was Miss Havisham. She’d have been marvellous, and hardly had to act at all.

DARK VICTORY: The Life of Bette Davis by Ed Sikov
Aurum £20 pp479

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