PARK Magazine

ICON
ALL HAIL
BETTE
DAVIS!
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.