PARK Magazine

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and then you would be able to play any part you
wanted. Why won’t you let Eugene bring out
the real Bette Davis all over again?
(Laughing) No, as much as I love him and I know
he can do extraordinary things, I won’t do it. It’s true
you can look much younger than you do, more so certainly
than getting up at dawn and looking in the
mirror. There are magic things, you can go and have
your facelifted, but with a career as long as mine who
am I kidding? Then to me, there is such an overemphasis
in our country, that nobody is anything unless
they’re just unlined, beautiful, skinny, smelling great.
You know, sincerely, I think one should grow old the
way one should grow old.
Why did you reveal all those intimate details
about yourself and others in your book?
I didn’t reveal any of the intimate things in my life.
About ten more people have to be dead. You see I don’t
believe in really intimate things, but I do believe one
thing and that is that you must tell in your book things
that haven’t been in the press. The average biography
or autobiography of motion picture people you read
in the newspapers for a thousand years and they tell
you nothing more, and therefore you learn nothing
about the person. I never ever hurt anybody in that
book by being too intimate. I never told the whole story
of anything because I didn’t believe in it, and I wouldn’t
want my children to read it if I had to write it. Or perhaps
you’re talking about how hard I was on myself. If
you’re not rough on yourself in an autobiography, you
cannot be rough on anybody else. And it’s a very fine
line, things that I wanted to really praise myself for the
most, modesty did prevent. That’s for somebody else
to write. One day I’ll write an intimate book.
Then come and see me again, Couri.
The Oscars have come under a lot of fire lately;
exactly what do you think the benefit of winning
it is?
The biggest thrill of your life, when your own industry,
when the people you work with honor you, anybody
who can stand up there and receive one of those nice
young men Oscars and not be thrilled is dead. Really,
inside they have lost enthusiasm, they’ve lost everything.
You have said that you don’t like yourself, have
you or did you grow to like yourself more as your
career progressed?
Success helps you, personally, privately. I never did
like myself very much. And I think a lot of actors enjoy
character parts because they can be other people; it
must be something like this. For all the characters I’ve
played I must have hated myself. I never was terribly
fond of myself; I still am not terribly fond of myself.
You often play roles that are very wicked ladies,
bad girls.
It’s a very divided career in this, honestly, about fiftyfifty.
But people remember wickedness more than they
remember goodness, newspapers couldn’t sell a copy
with all good news. People are fascinated by wickedness,
but oh so many. Now, Voyager, Dark Victory were
all charming, basically normal people. I always wondered
why I enjoyed playing wicked parts, but interestingly
there is more to play because there’s something
so definite. That was one thing I always believed about
it; I always tried to make you see why they had become
such wicked people. That’s very important, there has
to be a reason, nobody is just wicked.