ICON
ALL HAIL
BETTE DAVIS!
E
xcerpts from these interviews were first printed in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1972. What I didn’t ask Bette Davis was how many years she spent in psychoanalysis; as no movie star with her history could possibly be as well adjusted to the past, present and future as she is without help. I interviewed Miss Davis at New York’s New School before a film seminar conducted by my friend, the critic John Gruen. I’ve included the best bits from our conversations with the legendary film star. Bette was vivacious and demonstrative, dispatching everyone’s questions between cigarettes, back in the days when smoking was still fashionable. What was she wearing? Azure satin gloves and shoes, cocktail dress, bag, and her own hair. She looked great, frankly fifty, but timeless with her blood-red lips and nails. She was witty and stinging; but you already missed the best part, because her gestures, intonations, and timing tell her story in a way peculiar to Bette Davis. It was like she just walked out of All About Eve, sat down and started talking. Bette Davis is a woman who, through some ninety motion pictures, has engaged her image into some corner of all of our psyches. In each of us there is a Bette Davis; somewhere there lurks this lady because she has taught us, on the screen, how to suffer, how to walk, how to talk, how to smoke. She has taught us how to be incredibly bitchy and she has taught us something about the nature of independence. Because in most of the films in which Miss Davis has appeared, she has always reigned supreme, not merely as a star but also as an individual; as a woman who was able to somehow survive.
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