Bette Davis's Demise

THE GIRL WHO WALKED HOME ALONE

Bette Davis, a Personal Biography

By Charlotte Chandler

Simon & Schuster. 348 pp. $26

"The Girl Who Walked Home Alone" retells an American fairy tale, the fable of 1940s movie star Bette Davis. Some may wonder why, after so many other biographies, this book exists at all. But others, staunch Bette Davis fans, will relish the opportunity to visit her story once again.

Born in 1908, she was a bright little girl whose emotionally withholding father ducked out on the family when she was 7, leaving her with a sacrificing but domineering mother and an out-of-focus little sister who would spend much of her life having nervous breakdowns. But Bette -- as we all know -- was born to succeed. She got summer-stock theater parts and then more theater parts and then went to Hollywood and became a big star, maybe its biggest.

She was on a par with Joan Crawford: strong, larger than life, infused with strange mannerisms, easy to make fun of, even in the early days. She preened and swaggered and smoked her way through chains of cigarettes. She made many, many movies in which she committed some transgressive deed and then was punished for it. She went from passionate to bitchy and, in her older days, made parodies of the persona that in some ways had long been a parody; she played clown hags, homicidal maniacs, witches -- more of the same.

"She brought the modern woman onto the screen," film critic Elliott Sirkin has told me, but perhaps it would be more accurate to describe her as pre-modern: In her life, as in so many of her films, she had a fine career but was spectacularly unlucky in almost every other way, paying in full -- as was expected of a woman in those days -- for wanting to have an identity of her own. She avoided women, mowed down four husbands; her daughter left home to marry at 16 and then wrote a very tough book about her.

Her assumed attitude of scorn, indignation, hauteur, plain old meanness was: Go ahead, unjust world! Do what you will with me! I may have to take it, but I don't have to like it!

American women in the '40s ate it up. They were her avid fans. Perhaps she reflected the dynamic in their lives.

Then, in the early '60s, when Davis was in her fifties, Betty Friedan wrote "The Feminine Mystique," and many women, almost overnight, got another idea: Wait a minute, unjust world! I don't have to take it! Instead of shattering the family china while having yet another tantrum, I can go to community college, join a women's group, get a job. Pitching fits went out of style. Davis and Crawford stopped being idolized by women and slid over into the province of camp.

This book is made up primarily of quotations from personal interviews with Davis and those who knew her. Charlotte Chandler first met Davis in 1980. The actress was in her seventies and would die in 1989. It was Davis who telephoned Chandler, Davis who wished her personal biography to be written, to be a "summing up."