Bette Davis, as the dust jacket on her 1962 autobiography The Lonely Life suggests, needs no introduction. She was a Star. The Fourth Warner Brother. She chose her own epitaph - "She did it the hard way." Bette never let the stroke she suffered a few years prior to her death stop her. When she did die, it was from breast cancer, in Paris on October 6, 1989.
According to her biographer James Spada (More Than A Woman
, 1993) Bette's beloved assistant Kath Sermack chose for her the most elegant casket in France: a mahogony and gold leaf paneled number aptly titled "The Empress." Bette is dressed for eternity in a black evening gown that Kath described as being similiar to what Bette wore when she had been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Film Society of the Lincoln Center six months earlier.
Spada also notes that the six-foot statue atop the family crypt was selected by Bette years earlier. It was said that she thought it resembled her daughter, B.D. Hyman. One can only assume that choice was made prior to Hyman's Mommie Dearest wanna-be tell-all, My Mother's Keeper, published in 1985.
Bette was laid to rest with her mother, Ruth Favor Davis and sister Barbara Davis Berry at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, a stone throw from the Warner Bros. studios, on October 12, 1989 after a simple, private service in the mortuary chapel.
Update: Here's the background story on Bette's epitaph, as told to biographer Charlotte Chandler (The Girl Who Walked Home Alone, 2006) by Bette herself:
Joe Mankiewicz [writer-director of All About Eve] once told me, "Bette, on your tombstone will be inscribed, 'She did it the hard way.'" When he said that, I took it as a very large compliment. I was totally flattered. Totally. I thought it meant I hadn't slept my way to the top, that I was a real actress. I liked that. I'm not ready for my epitaph, yet!
Then, I rethought what Joe said. Now I think what he meant was that if there was a hard way to do something, I'd choose it - for myself and everyone around me. But I had my standard for the film. Excellence. I couldn't let anything get in the way of that. I never made it harder for anyone else than I did for myself. You know, I'm not quite as feisty as people think.
Someday I mean to call dear Joe and ask him what he meant. Joe is the kind of person who would do crossword puzzles in ink. One think he was right about. I probably don't really enjoy anything if it's too easy. I enjoy challenges. When something is difficult, it doesn't stop me; it challenges me to go on.
The one word I'd never want on my tombstone is "quitter."
