The Girl Who Walked Home Alone - a review of the new bio of Bette
Life, Bette Davis states in the first pages of The Girl Who Walked Home Alone, happens in no particular order - a belief that no doubt inspired her to pick Charlotte Chandler as co-author of this at-long-last released autobiography.
At the time that the interviews that comprise this book began, Chandler was coming off a best selling profile of Groucho Marx, then in his final years; a series of random reminiscences that could have been titled Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man. Ironically, however, despite Miss Davis' contention and Chandler's trademark puzzle-piece style, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone is as chronological as a set of encyclopedias.
While it may be a glaring contradiction it is not an unwelcome one - particularly by avid biography readers continually frustrated by Chandler's catch as catch can style.
Under Chandler's unmistakable bouffant may well hide a perpetually running tape recorder; her style consists of transcriptions of ice-flow sized chunks of dialogue directly from the designated horse's mouth.
The only personal touch she appears to have brought to this book is the title, a line she remembered from an old chestnut of Groucho's ("I always take out two girls. I hate to see a girl walk home alone.") Davis felt the punch line described herself to a T, the woman perpetually looking for love but never locating it.
The book then, at its heart - a broken one - is really about Davis' search for love, a journey thwarted by the Freudian precedent set by her alcoholic father, who left her, her sister and her mother when Bette was still young. Bette, therefore, suffered marriage after unhappy marriage, each with a different Mr. Unreliable - or was it she who was the unreliable one? As she put it, her idea of a relationship was putting men to a test that she knew they couldn't pass.
Her longest union was with Garry Merrill, her co-star in the classic All About Eve. But despite some clear compatibility, he, too, could not clear Miss Davis' bar.
These relationships are also given as explanations for the formation of the classic Davis character, the woman made of guts and guile, who survives melodramatic turn after melodramatic turn by her tenacity and wit. You very much get the impression that with Davis, what you saw was what, in real life, you got - particularly in her final years, when all hope of finding another man was lost, and the only people left to give that impossible-to-pass test to were the brave fools who would hire her on reputation.
This is Davis in her purest form - purer, even, than in This'n'That, her 80's memoir, or in the Daddy Dearest style book penned by the daughter with whom Davis, as a result, cut ties.
As a psychological portrait, it's a satisfying read. But for the true film aficionado, of course, this is only part of what we look for. The rest - anecdotes about the glory days of Warner Bros, tips on acting, juicy gossip about the personal lives of fellow actors - is only here in extremely small measure. Being worthy of the true movie-lover, then, is a test this book can't pass.
