PARK Magazine

‘‘I SAID, “NUTS!” AND
WALKED OUT OF THE
OFFICE. WHEN I CAME
BACK FROM ENGLAND A
YEAR LATER, I CERTAINLY
KNEW WHAT GONE WITH
THE WIND WAS. YES, BIG
MISTAKE, BIG MISTAKE.’’
this as part of the pleasure of having
gotten where you wanted to get.
And the tortures?
The tortures that I had were in
my personal life, not the result of
my stardom. That’s been rather
glorious. A torturous personal life
might happen whether or not you
become famous. Your life could
be that way, some peoples are,
but I don’t blame fame at all. I
can’t blame my profession for what
happened in my personal life. If
I was a fool in my personal life, I
can’t blame acting for that.
Yet in your autobiography
THE LONELY LIFE, you do
blame your profession to a
certain extent on the rather
unhappy time you did have
in your personal life. You
were married four times,
first to Mr. Nelson, second to
Mr. Farnsworth, third to Mr.
Sherry, the painter, and
lastly to the actor Gary Merrill.
Your marriage to Mr. Sherry produced a
daughter B. D., and later you adopted two other
children. Wasn’t the reason none of these
marriages worked out was because it was
impossible for the man to continue to be Mr.
Davis?
That is the one area in which...there is a problem
there. There’s no question about it, there is a forfeit
there. There is no man who really likes this, with all
the good intentions of the famous women, no matter
what profession she’s in, this is a murderous situation
for a man, and I certainly believed in marriage and in
all sincerity never married without believing in it, and
I think that it is the ideal way of life and at this age, I
realize that I should never have expected that it was
going to work because I understand now that which
I didn’t understand years ago.
You said in your book that you bring out violence
in men.
I didn’t find one of them violent enough. Maybe if
they had been more violent, we would have made it.
They became defeated by it, and it wasn’t my fault. It
isn’t any woman’s fault in my spot. I chose the wrong
men, and this can happen to any woman. Love is a
big joke on all of us. We can make terrible mistakes
while we’re in love. Think of the men that pick women
because sexually they’re just divine and when the sex
is gone, they look at them one day and say, “My God,
who is that?” No, this is the fooler of mankind and
one has to be very wise about it. I chose very foolishly,
but how can one regret this choice? I believe in one
thing in this world, out of everything comes some
good, even if you just learn something. But out of this
marriage, which was not a very easy one for me, because
he (Mr. Sherry) was a very childish type of human
being, came this marvelous daughter who has been
the greatest fun of my life.
You have often said that many male leads were
much more vain and their egos were bigger
than any woman’s.
Erroll Flynn was the most charming man in the
world; if he sat right here beside us, I could say he was
never an actor and he would admit it. But he was just
heaven, beautiful, and women adored him and that’s
important too. . . Steve McQueen. . . It wasn’t until Steve
McQueen that great white hope for a marvelous man
in our business, came along that we had any. Once I
asked him, “Why do you ride those motorcycles like
that and maybe kill yourself?”, and he said, “So I won’t