Hurricane Bette : BETTE DAVIS: A Biography <i> By Barbara Leaming (Simon & Schuster: $25; 359 pp.) </i> : ME AND JEZEBEL: When Bette Davis Came to Dinner and Stayed <i> By Elizabeth Fuller (Berkley Books: $4.99; 256 pp.) </i>

Egypt was at risk when Bette Davis went down the Nile to film “Death on the Nile.” Had she chosen to fire the full bazooka of her personality at the Great Pyramid, Davis might have stripped some stones from that remarkable pile.

By that point (1977), Davis was herself a great pyramid. But mummified she wasn’t. As Barbara Leaming makes clear in a strong, poignant biography that has truth-telling power, Davis’ rampaging ego was at work almost from the start.

She clawed to the top of Hollywood in its most repressive studio era and gave some great performances, winning two Academy Awards, but then became a gargoyle of gaudy charisma even before she played gargoyle roles. Davis had four bad marriages, alienated the child she loved most, offended many colleagues and wasted major opportunities.

Her life, for all its volcanic fire, was wired too tightly to what Aldous Huxley once called “the personal subconscious with its accumulations of septic rubbish.” As an actress, her brazen, unflinching power--that of a gorilla mated to a coquette--motivated women to loosen their mental corsets, but Davis was in bondage to masochistic conflicts.

Daughter of a frustrated stage mother, Ruth Elizabeth Davis was denied a plush Boston life when her father, a lawyer, opted for divorce and remarriage. The “princess Bettina” grew up angry, envious and combative. Her egg-eyed prettiness was coached into “artful” poses by mother Ruthie, an amateur photographer. They surmounted genteel poverty with the doggedness that builds character and scars souls. Bette never forgave her father.

Tapping into family papers and albums, Leaming makes much of the molding of Davis’ expressive power by Delsarte gesturalism and the “free” dance forms of Isadora Duncan. Her moody voltage had a pouncing allure that she tended to oversell. Like most “natural” actors Davis plugged private furies into public forms, the first being Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck,” which made her as a teen exclaim, “Mother, if I can play Hedvig I shall die happy!” By age 21 she played her to acclaim, but that jejune triumph was followed by servitude as a misused contract player at Universal, and then Warner Bros.

Director William Wyler disciplined her art, crucially in “Jezebel.” Leaming analyzes the startling and subtle effects they achieved. And she digs up the wormy undersoil. They had an affair, Wyler ditched her after filming, Davis tried to spark again on another picture, then never forgave his refusal. And she aborted their child. She was right to distrust Hollywood men. Leaming relates that at Bette’s first “industry” party she suddenly felt Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s hand slipping down her bodice; his response to her shock was, “You should use ice on your breasts the way Joan Crawford does.” (Was that when she first hated Crawford?)

By the time Wyler directed “The Little Foxes,” Davis, somewhat intimidated by Tallulah Bankhead’s stage success, bunkered into empress tactics. After brutal contract disputes with Jack Warner, she felt secure only in roles she could Bettify, and with directors she could steamroll, such as Vincent Sherman and Irving Rapper. A friend said later, “She began to imitate herself as an actress and to refuse to know that she was doing that.”

Didn’t she know? The camp verve that increasingly crusted Davis’ talent has a ham’s glaze of self-awareness. In her topping great role, in “All About Eve,” Davis made romping, chomping virtuosity an end in itself. As Leaming observes, the role of Margo Channing allowed her to be a glorious gladiatrix, but she also sold out feminist hopes, the core of Davis’ appeal to women, as Margo confessed that nothing was so important as winning a man. True to that dumb speech, Davis hitched herself to co-star Gary Merrill for a married marathon of boozed beatings and scream-alongs, an alliance of rare toxicity.

Fanning away the incense of myth, Leaming shows that Davis was not a martyred artist. After winning the chance to set up her own company at Warner’s expense and produce films to her taste, she made a hack melodrama, then folded her tent. Weakly educated, with more guts than taste and no real agenda apart from staying stellar, Davis lacked an artistic strategy. She needed a harness to flourish in top form, but hated harnessing.

Never was the Davis combustion engine more wreckingly employed than on stage in “The Night of the Iguana.” Her fans hooted up theaters, Margaret Leighton got the reviews, and bitter Bette spiraled off to the trash party “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” inanities like “Bunny O’Hare” and the plush coffin of TV. For “The Whales of August,” an old, sick Davis even inflicted her Cruella De Vil manner on Lillian Gish, resenting an icon she couldn’t tarnish. For a time she survived cancer, strokes, and the harsh memoir of her daughter, B.D. Hyman.

“My enthusiasm is exhausting,” said Davis. This book, tense with her bellicosity, is exhausting. A savvy reporter and writer, Leaming lashes together increasingly painful chapters, perhaps pining for the healthier brio that made her “Orson Welles” so stimulating. Welles had tough defeats, but he didn’t seem self-mired like Davis. You feel for her, but well before you say goodnight to Bette you may be reaching for the eye shade and ear plugs.

The tempest of hurricane Bette blows through Elizabeth Fuller’s chatty, amusing “Me and Jezebel.” Introduced by a mutual friend, Fuller (a Davis buff since childhood) took the old star into her Connecticut home for a month in 1985 when Davis was locked out of New York by a hotel strike. Fuller stayed enthralled, though exasperated.

As Bette peppered the house with cigarette butts, gave orders, picked fights and inspired the Fullers’ boy to imitate her earthy war cries, her hostess yearned for Davis to accept her as a sisterly chum, but came to realize that a barracuda does not bond to a goldfish. Fuller, a psychic, staged seances, prompting Davis to jaundiced remarks about Shirley MacLaine. Shriveled but scrappy, Davis signed autographs for fans at MacDonald’s, scorned Hollywood as “Tittyville” and had a dream of Joan Crawford “laughing maniacally while stuffing her bosom with Pullman towels.” And, watching a TV show of B.D. hustling her book of bile, Bette croaked, “Why did my daughter do this to me.”

As Davis-bitch blitzes the burbs, we can’t help enjoying it. Her extraordinary gusto offsets the pathos of what she once called “the lonely life.” At 77 the pyramid was still a volcano.