Indomitable Bette Davis--Triumphant as 80 Approaches

Bette Davis was born at home on a stormy night “between a roll of thunder and a flash of lightning,” as her mother later told her.

“That’s how I started,” the actress said the other day; the very elements, she decided long ago, were announcing that no ordinary child had been delivered. It’s hard to disagree, and you can’t fault the timing of the cues.

That was April 5, 1908, and on her 80th birthday the actress will by present plan be working again, preparing to be in a new Larry Cohen thriller, after more than 60 years on stage and screen.

She has abandoned the East Coast and settled permanently into a memento-warmed apartment in a splendid and historic building in Hollywood. “I’ve never been all that fond of Southern California weather and I miss the East. But I decided I’d become too much of a hermit. I needed to get back in the world.”

The will to survive is a steel thread that runs through her life from the setbacks of her early career, and the thread is miraculously intact.

She has come through a mastectomy and a severe and temporarily crippling stroke. She has written a best seller, “This ‘n’ That,” which is partly an account of her fight back after the stroke and partly a scathing rebuttal to the unflattering portrait of her in “My Mother’s Keeper” by her daughter B. D. (Barbara Davis) Hyman. Davis’ book is just out in soft-cover (Berkley: $3.95) and is selling nicely.

Her performance as Lillian Gish’s blind sister in the current “The Whales of August” is doubly revealing. It leaves no doubt that the treasons of the body have left their traces, in weight loss and some difficulty in walking. But the role, and Davis’ total command of it, also suggests that her imperious and feisty intelligence is in place and undiminished.

During a conversation in her apartment one recent afternoon, Davis lit cigarettes frequently and dramatically, with a flair and an explosive puff that is part of her screen identity.

“My terror after the stroke,” she said, “was, ‘Will I ever work again?’ I love it so, always have. The real reason I wrote the book was to let people know that they can recover from a stroke, but it’s a lot of work.”

Davis’ longtime secretary-companion, Kathryn Sermak, who worked on the book, spoke up to note that the actress continues to improve.

“At the start,” Davis said of her career, “I gave myself five years. If it hadn’t worked I wouldn’t have stayed. You really must make it or it’s miserable, hanging on. It’s so important to love it.”

She had had what she calls “the usual signs,” doing well in school plays and tasting the pleasures of performance. She studied dancing for a while. “But I’m glad I didn’t continue. It’s every day . Dancers can never take a holiday. As an actress you do have holidays.”

She worked for the pre-Hollywood George Cukor in a stock company in Rochester, N.Y., and he famously fired her.

“We did a talk show once, and he went on and on about the why of it. I said, ‘George, in 30 years in Hollywood you’ve never hired me out here!’ And it’s true I never worked with him. But of course, he worked mostly at Metro and I was at Warners all those years.”

Davis was not sorry to leave Rochester.

“I was the ingenue of the company, and there were certain requirements of a personal nature for the ingenue in those days. But I lived in an apartment with my mother, which took care of that .”

She appeared in a successful comedy on Broadway and on the strength of it was screen-tested for Samuel Goldwyn.

“I’m told that he looked at it and said, ‘Who did this to me?’ ” She tested for Universal and was signed, although Carl Laemmle was said to have said, “She has as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville.”

At Universal she made “Bad Sister” with a cast that included Humphrey Bogart. They were both let go. “But the saying was that being fired by Universal was a sure sign you were going to be a success.” (Latter-day Universal players who were let go include Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood.)

She moved to Warners, where at one low point she played a dead body in “The Menace.” But then she was cast opposite George Arliss in “The Man Who Played God” and left no doubt that she was a dazzling young actress. When she did the slatternly waitress Mildred opposite Leslie Howard in “Of Human Bondage” in 1934, she left no doubt that she was a movie star.

Ironically, she was not nominated as best actress but received her first Oscar the next year for the less-remembered “Dangerous.”

For all her 19 years of combat with Warners, she misses many aspects of those days.

“They knew the value of publicity. It could mean as much to your career as what you did on the screen. Each of the studios had 50 people in publicity. The men who ran the studios were tough, but they knew their business. They were in touch with the audience. They were gamblers; they took chances.”

Great actors, Bette Davis included, are sometimes said to possess a life-force that is beyond ordinary human animation. What grows clear is that for some actors, Bette Davis included, acting is a life-giving force worth many times its weight in nutrients and nostrums.

In the matter of her 80th birthday, Davis says: “I haven’t quite decided what to do on the day. On my 70th I put a black wreath on the front door. But to be working on your 80th birthday, that’s quite something.”