On Mother’s Day, 1985, Bette Davis’ daughter published a book. Davis was 77 years old. She had survived a mastectomy. Then a series of strokes that left part of her face frozen in a way that required her to relearn how to form certain words. Then a broken hip. Three separate catastrophes in less than two years, each one capable of killing a woman her age.
None of them did. The book was called My Mother’s Keeper. The author was B.D. Hyman, born Barbara Davis. Sherry, Davis’s only biological child, age 37. It reached the New York Times bestseller list within weeks. It described Bette Davis as emotionally abusive, compulsively manipulative. A heavy drinker who once locked herself in a bedroom and staged a fake suicide attempt, then came out the next morning and told her eight-year-old daughter, I hope that taught you a good lesson.
Davis was alive when it was published. She read it. In a 1987 interview, Davis said one sentence about the experience. We will come back to it at the end because to understand what those words cost a woman who had survived everything Hollywood had thrown at her for 50 years, you need to understand the three children first.
There were three of them, one biological, two adopted, and the three stories taken together, across forty years, form a portrait of a woman who could command any room in the world and could not hold her own family inside one. Every date in this documentary is verified. Every quote has a source. This is not a takedown.
It is a reckoning. And it starts not in Hollywood, and not with B, D. It starts in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1915 with a father walking out of a door, and a seven-year-old girl who would spend the next 80 years performing for people who had already left. Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born on the 5th of April, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Her father, Harlow Morell Davis, was a patent attorney. Precise, controlled, the kind of man who documented things with accuracy and expressed them with brevity. Her mother, Ruthie, was his exact opposite. Expansive, creative, emotionally alive in the way that some mothers are alive to the point of overwhelming every room they walk into.
In 1915, Harlow Davis left. Bette was seven years old. Her sister Barbara was six. There was no dramatic scene that the record has preserved. No breaking point. He simply reorganized his life to no longer include them. Sent money, honored legal obligations, and disappeared from the daily texture of two small girls’ childhoods with the quiet efficiency of a man who had decided the arrangement no longer suited him.
Ruthie moved the children to Crestalbon, a boarding school in Lanesboro, Massachusetts, described in every biography as Spartan, and went to New York to work as a governess, then as a portrait photographer. She was warm and resourceful, and entirely unable, at that specific moment in history, to provide what two daughters in a boarding school needed most.
What she gave instead was something that proved more durable. An absolute, unqualified belief that Bette was exceptional. That her eyes were extraordinary. That the stage was the only place large enough to hold what she was. Bette believed her. And she was right. What Bette Davis became the drive, the need for total authority over every room she occupied, the legendary inability to allow anyone else the final word, is not, in retrospect, difficult to explain.
A child who watched her father walk away without looking back spends the next 80 years building a version of herself that no one can walk away from. At 28 minutes, we’ll look at what that cost the people who couldn’t leave. By 1929, she was on Broadway. By 1930, she was in Hollywood. She was 22 years old, and had not yet made a single film that mattered, and she knew it.
The gap between what she understood herself to be, and what the industry was offering her, was the defining condition of those early years. She closed it the only way she knew how, by refusing to accept it. The early years at Warner Brothers are a study in a specific kind of persistence. Her first significant screen test was evaluated by director William Wyler, in terms that have been quoted in every Davis biography since terms that assessed her appearance and found it insufficient for the kind of femininity the studio was selling in 1930. She was given minor parts. She was placed in films that did not require her to do the thing she could do. Carl Laemmle at Universal had considered terminating her contract before a cinematographer intervened to note with the minimum commitment that a studio executive would act on that she had lovely eyes. She filed that away. Of human bondage in 1934 changed everything.
Davis played Mildred Rogers’ vulgar, self-destructive, actively unsympathetic, with a ferocity that forced every critic who had ignored her to stop and look. The Academy did not nominate her. What followed has no direct precedent in Oscar history. An industry-wide write-in campaign organized by colleagues who understood they had watched something that deserved acknowledgement.
She won the following year, for Dangerous. She won again for Jezebel in 1938. In 1936, Warner Brothers offered her a series of parts she considered beneath her talent. She sued to break her contract. She lost completely, publicly, in a London court. She returned to the studio. She made the best work of the first decade of her career, which is the response available to someone who cannot win the argument, but can win everything that comes after it.
By the mid-1930s, Davis was in her late 20s and had been married once to her school friend Harmon Nelson, a musician, in 1932. The marriage lasted six years. She was later candid, in interviews… About two pregnancies during this period that she had not continued. Both terminated. Her reasoning, stated publicly without the defensive scaffolding that most public figures construct around admissions of this kind, was uncomplicated.
The career would not have survived the alternative. Years later, when the children she did have began to define her legacy more than the films, the arithmetic of that calculation would look considerably different. In 1951, Bette Davis and Gary Merrill brought home a baby girl. She was three weeks old. Her name was Margot.
And from the first weeks in the house on the hill, something was wrong. We’ll be at that story by 14 minutes. By 1940, she was the highest paid woman in the United States. That is not a critical observation. That is a tax record. She had outlasted bad contracts, bad films, a lawsuit she lost in a foreign country, and one marriage she had walked away from.
She was 32. She had not yet met the man who would give her three children and cost her everything she had built around herself to survive. In 1950, Bette Davis made all about Eve. She was 42 years old. Her career had been through a genuine decline. The late 1940s had produced parts she should not have accepted, and a period in which the industry’s attention had reorganized itself around younger faces.
She had not disappeared. But she had become, in the industry’s estimation, a quantity that was known, and therefore could be managed rather than chased. All About Eve is still described, by critics writing today, as one of the finest performances in the history of American film. She played Margot Channing, a stage actress at the edge of brilliance and the beginning of age, magnificent and frightened, and unwilling to let anyone see the fear, with the understanding of a woman who knew exactly what that edge felt like from the inside. Her eighth Academy Award nomination, She Did Not Win, She had already won twice. Ten nominations across her career, the most of any actor at that point in history. She had sued the most powerful studio in Hollywood, lost, and gone back to work. She was, by any available measure, a monument. And in 1950, the year All About Eve was released, the year she reached the summit, she married Gary Merrill, her co-star from the film.
In 1951, they brought home a baby girl. Her name was Margot. The family tried at first to take care of her at home. Margot Mosher Merrill was adopted by Betty Davis and Gary Merrill on the 6th of January 1951. The family tried. That detail is confirmed, and it matters because the version of this story that collapses it into a single cold decision does not match the record.
They tried to care for her at home. For approximately two years, Margot lived with her parents and her older sister, B.D., and, from 1952, her younger brother, Michael. There were doctors, there were assessments. There was, by every account, a period in which the house held all five of them, and the outcome was not yet fixed.
When Margot was three years old, she was diagnosed with brain damage, damage that the medical record, per the documentation that exists, indicated had occurred at birth. Davis later described the decision to place Margot in the Loughlin School in Geneva, New York, as the most difficult she had ever made.
Margot was three years old. There is a second thread in the Merrill household that runs alongside Margot’s story and intersects with it at a point we’ll reach at 22 minutes. Davis later said she had feared for her children’s safety. The record of what Gary Merrill did in that house will tell you exactly what she meant.
Margot Merrill spent most of her life at the Lachlan School in Geneva, New York. She outlived her mother by 33 years. She died on the 9th of May, 2022, in Boston. Peacefully, the family said. She was 71 years old. She never gave an interview. She never appeared in a documentary about her mother. She is not the subject of a book.
She is the daughter who lived entirely outside the story that everyone tells about Bette Davis and that is, itself, the story. We are going to tell it, starting at 11 minutes. Don’t go anywhere. The Loughlin School sits in Geneva, New York, in the Finger Lakes region. Flatland, agricultural, the kind of place where the sky is very large and the pace of things does not organize itself around urgency.
It was founded in 1947 by a woman named Florence Stewart, who believed that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities deserved structured, dignified care rather than institutional warehousing. It is still operating today. Margot Mosher Merrill arrived there around 1,954. She was approximately three years old.
The decision did not happen overnight. That is the detail the biographical record confirms, and that the narrative version of this story most often discards. Betta Davis and Gary Merrill did not look at their daughter and make a swift calculation. They tried. There were assessments, and there were adjustments, and there was a period in which the house in Maine held all five of them, Davis, Meryl, B, D, Margot, and from 1952, Michael and the question of what Margot needed and whether they could provide it was still open. When the assessment came back confirming brain damage, damage that had occurred at birth, the question closed. Davis described the decision to place Margot at Loughlin as the most difficult she had ever made. That is a statement from a woman who had sued the most powerful studio in Hollywood, lost publicly in a London court, and returned to work the following Monday without revision. The sentence carries weight precisely because of who said it.
I want to stop here because the word institution appears in several accounts of this story, and it tends to do a specific kind of damage when it lands. Loughland was not a warehouse. It was a specialized residential school with a structured therapeutic program, designed to support people with developmental disabilities in ways that mid-century medicine and most mid-century families were not equipped to provide within a working household.
Davis visited. The family maintained contact. The decision was made by a woman who had been told, clearly, by doctors, that Margot’s needs could not be met inside the configuration of a career household run at the pace Davis required to remain solvent and employed. That does not make it painless. It makes it real.
Margot Merrill lived at Loughlin for most of her life. She lived quietly. She did not give interviews. She did not appear in any documentary about her mother. When Davis’s biographers interviewed people who had known the family, Margot appeared briefly a name, a date, a diagnosis, and then the narrative moved on to the people who generated more material.
She died on the 9th of May, 2022, in Boston. She was 71 years old. She had outlived her mother by 33 years. Lachlan had given her a life that was, by the evidence available, stable and cared for. That is not the dramatic sentence. But it is the true one, and in a story where almost nothing will remain simple for long, simplicity deserves to be recorded before we leave it.
The household that remained B.D. and Michael, Davis’s career running at a pace that required her to be absent with regularity, and Gary Merrill occupying the space her absences created was, by the consistent testimony of every source that addresses it directly, a household organized around a specific kind of deterioration.
Meryl drank. That is confirmed across multiple biographies, multiple interviews, and ultimately the divorce proceedings themselves, in which Davis cited his drinking and violent temper as the grounds for separation. He was not a man who drank quietly. He was a man who drank in the way that some men drink, when they understand, at some level, that the territory they occupy does not belong to them married to the highest-earning actress in Hollywood history, living in a house that ran on her money and her reputation and her authority, a quality of dominance that left no room in the frame for anyone who needed to believe they were also essential. That understanding, when it cannot be spoken, tends to find other expressions. All about Eve had brought them together. In the film she played a woman at the edge of magnitude, and he played the man who loved her and could not quite contain the complexity of what that meant. Critics praised their chemistry.
The chemistry was real. What the film did not, could not account for, is what that same dynamic looks like a decade later, in a house in Maine, with children and a career that had continued to be entirely hers, and a marriage that had failed to become theirs. B. D. was the child who witnessed the most of what was happening in that house.
She was the eldest born in 1947, which made her seven when Margot was placed at Loughland, and twelve when the household entered the period we are about to reach. She was also, by everyone who documented her as a child, unmistakably her mother’s daughter, the eyes, the presents, the The quality of authority in a room that had bypassed Margot entirely and landed in BD with full force.
We will come to what she did with that inheritance, but first, what she lived inside of. In the years before the book Before Everything, B.D. said things about her mother in public that read very differently from what came later. She sat across from Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, and described Bette Davis in words that were not the words of a daughter building a case.
We will reach that interview at 28 minutes. The distance between what she said then, and what she published after, is the most revealing gap in this entire story. The other child in that house was Michael Merrill, the youngest, adopted in 1952, the one who grew up to become a lawyer and a film producer, and ultimately the executor of his mother’s estate.
He is the child who stayed, will be with him at 33 minutes. The divorce was filed in 1960. Davis cited Gary Merrill’s drinking and his violent temper. There is a specific incident in the biographical record confirmed in Ed Seekoff’s Dark Victory, the life of Bette Davis, that appears to have been the moment she decided the marriage had ended.
It did not involve her, it involved B.D., who was 12 or 13, and a young friend who had come to the house to visit. Gary Merrill struck the child. Not Davis. Not one of his own children. A ten-year-old who was a guest who had come to see BD, and was present in the wrong room at the wrong moment of the wrong evening.
Davis was not there when it happened, she was told. The record confirmed through accounts given later by people who had access to that household indicates that this was the line, not the drinking, which had been accumulating for years. Not the temper directed at her, which she had absorbed and managed and documented mentally for a decade.
The moment the violence crossed the boundary of the marriage and touched a child who had no stake in it whatsoever… Hold that for a moment against everything she had survived. Four marriages, the Warner Brothers lawsuit, the London court, the career decline, and the comeback. The industry’s persistent rediscovery that 42 was old.
She had absorbed Gary Merrill’s drinking, and the specific quality of vigilance that comes from living alongside a man who drinks in that particular way. The watchfulness, the reading of rooms, the constant low-level calculation of when the evening might turn. She had absorbed all of it. She drew the line at a ten-year-old.
She filed for divorce. She agreed in an arrangement that multiple sources noted at the time as unusual, and that tells you something about how urgently she needed the exit to pay him alimony. She paid. He left. The children stayed. Barbara Davis, Sherry B.D., was fifteen when the divorce was finalized. She had grown up inside a specific kind of education, the education available to a child raised by a monument.
Every room her mother entered reorganized itself around her mother. Every conversation adjusted its register. The people who came to the house were directors and writers and producers who had opinions about craft and ambition that they delivered with the confidence of people who had earned that confidence because they had.
B. D. had been, since she could form complete sentences, the daughter of the most famous actress in the world. She was also, by every account that has preserved her, her mother’s match. Not a copier match. The same quality of presence. The same intelligence. The same capacity for occupying a room without asking permission.
In 1962, Davis cast her in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The film that relaunched Davis’s career at 54, and placed her, opposite Joan Crawford, back at the center of an industry that had been in the process of forgetting her, B.D., played Liza Bates, the neighbor girl. She was 15. She was, by the critical consensus of the time, good in it, not the director’s daughter, good for a teenager, good.
The film was a commercial success. Davis received her 10th Academy Award nomination. B.D. received the education of watching her mother, at 54, refuse to be finished. The following year, 1963, Davis brought B.D. to the Cannes Film Festival. B.D. was 16. Through an introduction arranged by mutual friends, she met a man named Jeremy Hyman.
He was 28. He was British. He was wealthy. And Davis, who had every power in this situation to say no, said yes. She supported the relationship publicly and warmly. She attended the wedding. She posed for photographs. Everything that follows in this story, the book, the disinheritance, the sentence Davis said in 1987 begins, in some sense, with that decision.
We’ll be in Cannes in three minutes. Don’t go anywhere. In the spring of 1963, Bette Davis brought B.D. to the Cannes Film Festival. B.D. was 16 years old. She was already what she had always been, her mother’s match in presence, her mother’s equal in the capacity to fill a room. She had appeared in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In the previous year.
She had been reviewed. She had been noted. She was, by every account, a young woman who understood her own weight in a room and had been raised by the woman who had taught the industry what that looked like. At Cannes, through an introduction arranged by mutual friends, she met a man named Jeremy Hyman.
He was twenty-eight years old. He was British. He came from money, the kind of money that does not announce itself because it does not need to. He was in the film industry in a producing capacity. He was, by the evidence preserved in the biographies, genuinely smitten. B. D. Was sixteen. I want to be precise about what happened next, because the version of this story that positions Davis as either the architect of this relationship or its helpless bystander is too clean for what the record actually shows. Davis knew. She was present. She had every power available to a woman of her authority, at the peak of a career comeback, as the single parent of a sixteen-year-old girl to say, This is not appropriate, not yet. Let this be what it is, and see what it becomes in two years, when she is eighteen. She did not say that, she said the opposite,
She supported the relationship. She allowed Hyman access to B.D. across the months that followed Cannes. She contributed to the wedding, the 4th of January 1964, when B.D., there was 16 turning 17 financially and publicly. She attended. She posed for photographs. She told interviewers that Hyman was exactly the kind of man she had hoped her daughter would find.
Why? The biographers who address this directly offer several interpretations, none of them flattering and none of them simple. The one that has the most structural consistency with everything else in Davis’s life is the least comfortable. That a woman who had been left by her father at seven… Who had spent fifty years building a version of herself that no one could abandon, recognized in her daughter’s attachment to an older, stable, the wealthy man something that looked like safety, and confused her own emotional register for her daughter’s best interest. That is not malice. It is something more difficult to assign a verdict to. They married on the 4th of January 1964. Davis paid for the wedding. She gave a speech. She smiled in every photograph. B. Dee was 16 years old. Jeremy Hyman was 28. They moved to rural Pennsylvania.
They started a family. They built a life that was, by the external measures available, entirely functional. And they moved, by degrees, entirely out of Bette Davis’s orbit. The distance between B.D.’ ‘s life in Pennsylvania and her mother’s life in Hollywood was not only geographical, B. D. had grown up inside a household organized entirely around a career.
Every rhythm in that house, the hours, the meals, the emotional climate of any given week, had been set by Davis’s schedule, Davis’s projects, Davis’s needs. This is not a criticism. It is the structural reality of a single-parent household run by a woman whose work required her to be fully present on set for months at a time, and whose income required that she accept roles that kept her in production almost continuously.
There was no version of Bette Davis’s career that was compatible with the kind of daily, Ambient, unstructured parental presence that BD, who was perceptive and sensitive, and watching everything had needed, and had documented, internally, as absent. In Pennsylvania, B.D. built the opposite. A farmhouse, a husband who was home, children who were raised with structure and routine, and a mother who was physically present.
She converted to born-again Christianity in the late 1970s, a shift that reorganized her existing framework for understanding her childhood around a language of sin and redemption that was, for her, genuinely meaningful. And that gave her a moral vocabulary she had not previously possessed. Davis did not understand the conversion.
That is documented not as hostility, initially, but as incomprehension. Davis was not a woman who organized her sense of meaning around faith. She organized it around work. These are not incompatible positions in the abstract, but in the specific terrain of a mother and daughter trying to maintain a relationship across forty years of accumulated distance.
They are two languages with no shared grammar. Here is what the record, taken as a whole, suggests. Harlow Morell Davis left in 1915. Bette Davis was seven years old. The response she constructed over the following 80 years, the drive, the need for total authority, the inability to allow anyone else the final word, the discomfort with vulnerability in any form, was a child’s architecture, built at seven and maintained with extraordinary discipline for the remainder of her life.
The cost of that architecture is this. You build yourself into something no one can abandon, and in doing so you become something that some people, the people who needed the softness underneath, cannot stay close to for long. B.D. had spent her childhood reaching for the softness. Davis had spent her childhood learning to wall it off.
Neither of them chose this. Neither of them had enough information, for most of their lives together, to understand the dynamic they were inside. The book that came later, the document that turned this private history into a public event, did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from forty years of a daughter reaching for a mother who had been conditioned, since 1915, to be unreachable.
That does not excuse what the book did. It explains where it came from. In September 1983, Bette Davis had a mastectomy. She was 75 years old. She had been working, she was always working, and the diagnosis arrived the way these things arrive, not at a convenient moment, not in a period of rest, but in the middle of the machinery of a career that had never learned how to stop running.
She went into surgery. She came out of surgery. And within days before the recovery from the mastectomy had completed itself, the strokes began. Not one stroke. A series of them. Each one, a small interruption to the systems that made Bette Davis, who she was, the diction that had been studied and built over fifty years, the precision of expression that had won her two Oscars and ten nominations, the quality of presence that had reorganized every room she walked into since she was twenty-two, the strokes took aim at the instrument. She relearned. That is the documented response. She went into speech therapy and she worked, with the same quality of will that had defeated Warner Brothers. And outlasted Joan Crawford, and survived a London court judgment against her at recovering what the strokes had taken. She did not recover all of it. What she recovered, she rebuilt from raw material, through effort, at 75.
Then she broke her hip. Three catastrophes in less than two years. Any one of them capable of killing a woman her age, none of them did. In 1987, Davis sat across from Bryant Gumbel on the two-day show. She was 79 years old. She had survived the mastectomy and the strokes and the broken hip, and two years of what she had experienced as the worst thing any of them had done to her.
She said one sentence that collapsed everything, the career, the architecture, the 80 years of building herself into something unreachable, into a single admission. We will reach that sentence at 37 minutes. What you need to understand first is what she had just read. She was still in recovery, still rebuilding her speech, still navigating the specific exhaustion of a body that has been asked to survive the unsurvivable three times in sequence when B, D. Hyman’s literary agent sold the manuscript.
My Mother’s Keeper was published on the 14th of May, 1985. B. D. was 37 years old. Davis was 77. She was alive. She read it. Before the book, there had been a television interview. B. D. Hyman had sat across from Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, the programme, the audience, the format, that in 1983 still carried the weight of authoritative public record and described her mother.
The segment has been documented by multiple sources and reviewed in the aftermath of the book’s publication, specifically because of the distance between what B.D. said then and what she published two years later. What she said on 60 Minutes was not the testimony of a daughter building a case. She spoke of her mother, with complexity, yes, but with warmth, with acknowledgement of difficulty and also of love, with the kind of honesty that accepts that a person can be complicated and still be yours.
Mike Wallace’s segment was not a soft interview. He was not a man who allowed people to perform unchallenged. And B.D., on camera, in 1983, was not performing the role she would inhabit in print two years later. Then the book. My mother’s keeper described Bette Davis as a woman who had staged a fake suicide attempt in front of her eight-year-old daughter and called it a lesson.
A woman who was compulsively manipulative and emotionally abusive, who had used her own children as props in the theatre of her self-presentation. Who had been drunk and cruel and present, only in the way that very large things are present, filling every room, leaving no oxygen for anyone else. It reached the New York Times bestseller list.
It was reviewed, it was discussed, it was purchased, in large numbers, by people who had spent fifty years watching Bette Davis be magnificent, and who were now being offered an account of what that magnificence had cost from the only person in the world withstanding to provide it. Davis was seventy-seven years old.
She was in ongoing recovery. She had relearned how to form words that the strokes had temporarily taken from her, and now she read, in print, her daughter’s version of her. She had survived four marriages. She had survived the Warner Brothers lawsuit. She had survived the London Court judgment, and the career decline, and the comeback, and Joan Crawford, and the mastectomy, and the strokes, and the broken hip.
The Bryant-Gumbel interview came two years later, 1987. By then she had had time to read it, sit with it, understand its scope. When Gumbel asked her directly about the experience of reading her daughter’s account, Davis said, Realising she had written this book about me was as catastrophic as the stroke itself.
Not the lawsuit? Not Crawford. Not the decline. The stroke, the event she had spent two years rebuilding herself from word by word, was the measure she reached for. What Davis did next, the open letter, the will, the specific language she used in the final document that distributed everything she had built, is the last act of this story.
We’ll be there at thirty-three minutes. But first, the son, who said nothing publicly, handled everything privately, and is the reason Bette Davis’s estate exists in the form it does today. And B.D., after the book, gave another interview. Not immediately, years later. In it, she said something about her mother’s death that was against every expectation this story has constructed, not what you would predict from a woman who had written My Mother’s Keeper.
We will reach that at 36 minutes. Don’t go anywhere. There is a third child in this story. He has not appeared much yet, which is, itself, the most telling thing about him. Michael Merrill was adopted by Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in 1952. He was the youngest. He grew up in the same household that B.D. Grew up in the same absent father, the same drinking, the same specific quality of vigilance that life with Gary Merrill required of every person who shared his address.
He was a child in that house during the same years. B. D. was a child in that house, watching the same events organize themselves around the same center of gravity. He became an entertainment lawyer, then a film producer, based in Boston. He organized his professional life at a careful distance from Hollywood close enough to the industry to understand it, far enough from it to remain his own person inside it.
He gave almost no interviews about his mother during her lifetime. He gives almost none now. When My Mother’s Keeper was published in 1985, Michael Merrill made a decision that he has never publicly reversed. He stopped speaking to BD. Not a cooling of relations, not a period of distance that later thawed.
He ended contact. The break was complete and, based on everything in the documented record, permanent. He did not comment on the book to the press. He did not counter BD’s account in public. He did the thing that is, in some ways, more final than any statement. He chose silence in BD’s direction and continued everything else.
There is a version of Michael Merrill that biographers construct as the good son, the one who stayed, the contrast to the one who left. I want to be careful with that framing, because it is too simple for what the record actually shows. He was not the good son, as opposed to the bad daughter. He was a person who had grown up inside the same household, experienced a version of the same childhood, arrived at adulthood with a different set of conclusions, and acted on them with a consistency that never required public performance. Davis trusted him completely. That is not a minor thing. She was a woman who had spent fifty years learning, repeatedly, that trust was a liability. By the end of her life, the list of people she trusted completely was very short. Michael was on it. Her assistant Catherine Sermack was on it. The rest of the list was not long. When Davis revised her will in the final years of her life, the document reflected the arithmetic of what the family had become.
The estate, the films, the photographs, the royalties from fifty years of work that had made her the highest-paid woman in America went to Michael Merrill, to Catherine Sermack, who had been her assistant and companion through the mastectomy and the strokes and the broken hip and the years that followed the book, to Harold Schiff, her business manager, B. D. Hyman received nothing.
B. D.’ ‘s children, Davis’s grandchildren, received nothing. Margot Merrill, confirmed by UPI reporting from 1989, was also cut from the will. The reasoning in Margot’s case has never been publicly stated and I will not assign one, because the record does not provide it, and this documentary does not invent.
What the record provides is the fact the daughter who could not speak for herself was not provided for in the final document either. A will is not a statement of love. It is a legal instrument. But in the absence of a conversation, and Davis, by 1987, had no conversation left to have with B.D. It is what remains.
It is the last document in which a person can organize their understanding of who, in the end, they believed had been faithful to them. Davis organized it clearly. Michael. Cermak. Schiff. She had always been precise about what mattered and what did not. In 1987, Davis published her own book. She called it This and That, a title that manages, in four words, to perform exactly the quality of control she had always required over the narrative.
Breezy, in command, not visibly wounded. The book contained, among other things, a letter to B.D., She did not publish a formal rebuttal. She did not commission a lawyer to fact-check my mother’s keeper point by point. She wrote a letter addressed to her daughter, published in a book available for purchase in airport terminals and department stores across the country, that said, in language confirmed by her estate, and cited in every biography that covers this period, that B.D.
had done a very terrible thing. That is the confirmed paraphrase. The full letter has been cited across multiple sources with minor variations in transcription. What every source agrees on is the register. Not the legal language of a woman protecting her reputation, and not the wounded language of a woman asking to be understood.
The register was moral. A mother telling a daughter, in writing, for public record, that what had been done was wrong. Davis was 79 years old. She had rebuilt her speech after a series of strokes. She had survived everything the previous six years had thrown at her. And she had watched her daughter’s account of her life spend weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, available to anyone who had ever bought a ticket to one of her films.
The letter was her answer. Not, this didn’t happen. Not, you misremember. Something closer to, you knew what you were doing, and I know it too. Gary Merrill, who had lived inside that household, who had been the violence that Davis eventually paid money to be free of, told CNN that BD’s motivations were cruelty and greed.
That is a statement from a man whose own record in that house was not uncomplicated. It is also a statement that tells you something about the consensus that formed, in the family that remained, around what the book had been. Michael Merrill said nothing publicly. He simply stopped speaking to B.D., and continued being the executor of a career that had outlasted four marriages, one lawsuit, and one daughter’s best-selling account of its collateral damage.
B.D. Hyman did not retract the book. She has never, in any documented interview or public statement, indicated that she regrets its publication in the terms that Davis’ defenders demanded. She deepened her commitment to her faith. She wrote a second book, a religious memoir that did not involve her mother.
She remained in Pennsylvania with Jeremy Hyman. She continued the life she had built in the direction away from Hollywood, which had always been, in some sense, the point. What she said publicly about her mother’s death when it came, in October 1989, was not what this story built as it has been around the architecture of betrayal would predict.
She spoke of grief, she spoke of love complicated, unresolved, adult love of the kind that does not require the other person to have been uncomplicated in order to be genuinely mourned. She had written a book that her mother called catastrophic. Her mother had disinherited her and her children. Her brother had stopped speaking to her.
She had been excluded from the funeral arrangements, confirmed across multiple accounts, in the final act of a family that had decided, formally, that she was outside it. And she said she loved her mother. Hold that, we will come back to it. In September 1989, Bette Davis travelled to Spain. She was 81 years old.
The metastatic breast cancer that would kill her within weeks was already at work in her body, was, by that point, past the stage at which any intervention would alter what was coming. She knew this. The people around her knew this. She went anyway. The San Sebastian International Film Festival had invited her to receive the Donostia Award, an honorary lifetime achievement recognition, the festival’s acknowledgement that a career of sufficient magnitude deserves to be witnessed while the person who built it is still alive to receive the acknowledgement. She accepted. She went. She appeared on the stage. There are photographs from San Sebastian. They have been published in the years since, and they carry the specific quality of images that were taken without full knowledge of how close to the end they were. Davis stands in the photographs the way she had always stood, with the posture of someone for whom capitulation is not a vocabulary item.
The illness is present in her face. So is everything else. She had rebuilt her speech after strokes. She had survived a mastectomy and a broken hip. She had watched her daughter’s account of her life reach the bestseller list and responded with a published letter. She had revised her will. She had attended a film festival in Spain at 81 with metastatic cancer in her body because there was an award, and she had earned it, and she intended to receive it.
I have been careful throughout this documentary not to perform sentiment on top of the facts, because the facts are sufficient, and sentiment would be a reduction, but I want to say one thing directly here. What Bette Davis did in September 1989 was not bravery in the inspirational sense. It was not a statement.
It was the logical continuation of a character that had been built over eighty years, since 1915, since a father walked out of a door and a seven-year-old girl decided, without the language for the decision, without the capacity to name it yet, that she would never again be the person waiting in the room when someone left.
She went to San Sebastian because she had been invited and because she went to things she was invited to. She had always gone. She had never stopped. She became ill in Spain. She was transported to the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. On the 6th of October 1989, Bette Davis died. The cause was breast cancer.
The metastasis had completed what the strokes had not, what the mastectomy had not, what four marriages and one lawsuit and one daughter’s book had not. She was 81 years old. She had been working. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills. On her gravestone, by her own request, confirmed in multiple interviews across the final decade of her life, is this.
She did it the hard way. She had said it about herself for years, not as boast, not as complaint, but as the cleanest summary available for a career that had required, at every stage. The kind of persistence that does not arrive naturally, and cannot be performed for long. You either have it, or you stop.
She had it. She did not stop. Now, go back to the Bryant Gumbel interview. 1987, two years before San Sebastian. Davis is 79 years old, and she has just survived three medical catastrophes, and she has just read her daughter’s account of her life, and she has just revised her will, and she is sitting across from a journalist, and he asks her about the book.
She says, realising she had written this book about me was as catastrophic as the stroke itself. I told you, in the first ninety seconds of this documentary, that we would come back to that sentence. Here is what you now know that you did not know then. She had relearned how to form words after those strokes.
The strokes had taken the instrument, the diction, the precision, the quality of voice that had been built over fifty years, and was the most essential tool she possessed, and she had rebuilt it. Word by word, at 75 years old, through effort that no one who has not done it can fully imagine. That is the measure she reached for.
Not the lawsuit. Not Joan Crawford. Not the career decline. The thing she chose as the unit of comparison for what B.D.’ ‘s book had cost her was the experience of having to rebuild the fundamental capacity to speak. She did not say it with self-pity. She said it with the precision of a woman who had always been accurate about the scale of things.
B. D. Hyman was excluded from the funeral arrangements. The family that remained Michael, Cermak, the small circle Davis had trusted at the end, organized the burial without her. She was not, by that point, inside the definition of family that the remaining parties recognized. She had said she loved her mother.
She was not invited to say goodbye. Gary Merrill outlived Davis by fourteen months. He died the 5th of December, 1990. Whatever he had thought about the book, about the marriage, about the children who had grown up inside both, he took with him. Margot Merrill outlived her mother by 33 years. She died the 9th of May, 2022, in Boston.
Peacefully. She had lived her entire life outside the story that everyone tells about Bette Davis. Here is the question that this story, in almost every version that has been told, does not ask. Of the three children of Bette Davis B.D., who wrote the book, Michael who stayed and said nothing, Margot, who lived for 71 years in Geneva, New York, and died without an interview, without a documentary, without a single published account of her experience.
Which one do we know the least about? And which one, by the evidence available, lived the most stable life? Margot Merrill spent most of her years at the Lachlan School, a place that was built by its founder, on the conviction that people with developmental disabilities deserved structured, dignified care rather than institutional abandonment.
She was not inside the Davis household during the Gary Merrill years. She was not inside it during the Baby Jane comeback. She did not attend the Cannes Film Festival at sixteen. She was not present for the book. She was not in the will. She was not at the funeral. She was also not, by any account that exists, unhappy.
The documentation available, limited as it is, describes a woman who was cared for, who was known by the community around her, who lived for seven decades in a consistent environment with people who understood her needs. The one child who was fully removed from the machinery of Bette Davis’s life was the one child who is never at the centre of this story.
I am not suggesting that Margot’s placement at Loughlin was straightforward, or that the decision Davis made in 1954 was without cost. I am suggesting that the story, this documentary, and every other account of Bette Davis’s children, tells is the story of what proximity to that magnitude cost the people who lived inside it.
Margot did not live inside it, and she lived for 71 years. That is not a resolution, it is a fact. And facts, in a story this tangled, deserve to be placed where they belong. Here is what I said at the beginning of this documentary. I said that one sentence, one sentence from a 1,987 interview, would cost a woman who had survived everything Hollywood had thrown at her for 50 years more than anything else in this story.
And that, to understand what it cost, you needed to understand the three children first. You do now. The sentence was, Realising she had written this book about me was as catastrophic as the stroke itself. What that sentence costs is not the sentence. What it costs is the 80 years behind it. A seven-year-old girl in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1915, who watched her father reorganize his life to no longer include her, and who spent the rest of her life building a version of herself that no one could walk away from. A monument. A career. A name that would outlast everyone who had ever tried to diminish it. And then her daughter, the daughter she had been present for in every way she knew how to be present, sat across from Mike Wallace and praised her, and then wrote the book. The stroke had taken her voice. B. D.’
‘s book had taken something she had believed was more durable. The belief that the work had been worth it. Bette Davis is buried in the Hollywood Hills with five words on her stone. She did it the hard way. She had two Oscars, ten nominations, the highest salary of any woman in America. She outlasted four marriages, a lawsuit she lost in a foreign country, a career decline, a comeback at 54, a mastectomy, a series of strokes, a broken hip, and a daughter’s best-selling account of what the magnitude had cost the people living inside it. She also had three children, one who wrote a book, one who never spoke publicly again, one who lived quietly in Geneva, New York for 71 years and died without a single interview. The one who is hardest to define, hardest to assign a verdict to, is the one in the middle, the one who built the opposite life on purpose, in rural Pennsylvania, and still said she loved her mother.
History has mostly decided what to think about Bette Davis. History is still deciding what to think about all of them.
