Celebrity Smash-Up: Semple Minds!

Before Miss Bette Davis passed away in October of 1989, the cigarette-thin movie legend made the rounds of countless talk shows. She was not only promoting her 1987 book This 'n That, in which she responded to her daughter's incendiary, unflattering memoir My Mother's Keeper, but also let loose on several other people who'd rubbed her the wrong way during her monumental career. She took special care to pummel the long-dead Miriam Hopkins (who memorably costarred with Davis twice in The Old Maid, 1939, and Old Acquaintance, 1943.) She then aimed her sites at Miss Faye Dunaway, who had starred in the 1976 Hallmark Hall of Fame production The Disappearance of Aimee, with Davis on board as her mother.

Aimee was the depiction of but one chapter in 1910s-1930s evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson's storied life. A monumentally popular figure who could fill auditoriums (with hordes lined up outside) as she spoke in tongues, faith-healed and preached the gospel, she eventually used radio to get her message across to, literally, millions of intrigued listeners (and visitors to her newly-constructed Angelus Temple.) She also became heavily involved in charity and disaster relief efforts. But the flamboyant minister also had a big-time scandal hit in May of 1926. She went missing from a California beach and was presumed dead for over a month before being discovered in an Arizona town near the Mexican border, weary and claiming to have been kidnapped!

Her return to Los Angeles in the wake of this bizarre scenario attracted between 30,000 and 50,000 spectators; more than the number of people who had greeted President Woodrow Wilson seven years prior during his visit to L.A. It eventually came to be that Semple McPherson was brought before a Grand Jury because she was suspected of having run off with a male lover and made up her tale of woe. The charges were dropped due to lack of evidence, but a feeling of uncertainty about it prevailed.

A 1931 film The Miracle Woman, starring Barbara Stanwyck, had been inspired by Aimee and the 1939 novel (and later 1975 film) Day of the Locust also contained a fictionalized version of her persona. Geraldine Page played the role in the movie. Jean Simmons had played a similar type of role in 1960's Elmer Gantry (based upon a 1927 novel.) Prior to (or after) all of these projects, Bette Davis had also hoped to throw her hat in the ring as the flamboyant evangelist during her tenure at Warner Brothers, but nothing ever came of it.

Simmons (inset) and Page in their Semple drag.

By 1976, a television project was planned to illustrate the events of Aimee's disappearance which, still today, isn't a completely solved mystery. Ann-Margret was approached to portray the superstar sister of salvation and when she was still attached to the project, Davis signed on to play her ever-present mother, a woman of considerable backbone herself. Davis had played A-M's mother in the young girl's movie debut Pocketful of Miracles (1961) and had remained fond of her since. But soon enough Ann-Margret dropped the role and that's when Faye Dunaway was contacted to play it.

Ann-Margret not long after the period during which she nearly played Aimee Semple McPherson.

Things were chilly between the two head-strong actresses from the start. Dunaway was at the time one of Hollywood's go-to leading ladies who'd enjoyed a string of commercially and often critically successful films from 1967's Bonnie and Clyde on. She rarely did TV and when she did it was to film a stage adaptation or take part in a prestige project like this one promised to be. She'd just had another hit with the 1975 thriller Three Days of the Condor opposite Robert Redford.

Davis had seen many highs and lows over the long haul. A two-time Oscar-winner, she had suffered a decade of declining parts since 1964 when she did Where Love Has Gone and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, both of which included highly-charged, phlegmatic conflicts with her fellow leading actresses (Susan Hayward and Joan Crawford - who was replaced by Olivia de Havilland) respectively. Her most recent work had included failed TV pilots and movie-of-the-week thrillers, though she did have Burnt Offerings (1976) in the can which offered a modicum of big screen success.

Davis, already disappointed at not getting to work with Ann-Margret again and dejected that a role she had always wished to play was being - in her eyes - phoned in by an unprofessional star, dug in her heels pretty swiftly on the set.

The telefilm's director, Anthony Harvey of the Lion in Winter (1968), would block scenes before the camera then turn around to find Davis (forgive the expression) social-distancing from Dunaway! She didn't want to appear too close to the still-young movie actress and draw unfair comparisons.

Though it's true that Davis never feared looking awful on film if it benefited the role or the project (one only need watch her final moments in Burnt Offerings for proof!), she still had enough vanity to want to look good some of the time, especially in the authentic 1920s costumes that Edith Head had rounded up for the production. She was lit in a way for Aimee that was later adopted for her appearance in Disney's The Watcher in the Woods (1980), with a flood of key lighting directly in front of the camera.

Bette sporting reduced makeup for a nighttime scene.

Dunaway had developed a documented tendency of showing up late onto film sets for whatever reason. (She might say due to preparation, but most people believed it was endless obsessing over her appearance.) She incurred the wrath of William Holden one day during The Towering Inferno (1974) when she held up filming to perfect the goddess-like look she was sporting there.

During Aimee, she allegedly kept over a thousand extras waiting in a sweltering un-cooled auditorium whereupon Davis finally opted to sing "I've Written a Letter to Daddy" in order to keep them occupied during the delay. True as this may be, Davis was certainly off-base when she assessed Dunaway's performance as being phoned in. Dunaway always was - and still is - positively fanatical about every conceivable detail about the characters she portrayed, no matter the project. Once, during the filming of the lightweight romantic caper film The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Steve McQueen was about to question Dunaway about her choice to sport talon-like fingernails. As he approached her, he spied her script which scarcely had a sliver of white space left on it, she had made so many notes regarding her characterization, motivation, subtext, etc... He simply turned and went the other way.

The already tenuous relationship between the intense and often driven Dunaway and the command- eering Davis really came to a head when the date of a climactic scene between the two was imminent and Davis had the scene rewritten in order to shore up her participation. Dunaway, who in truth had already had her sermon speeches rewritten to suit her, declined to accept the new scene as prepared (correctly) citing that she would concede 50/50 between the actresses, but not 90/10 as she perceived Davis' rendition to be. (Davis had earlier attempted this same gambit during Where Love Has Gone, but was told just what she could do with it by an iron-willed Susan Hayward.)

Conditions on location in Denver were positively sweltering, which didn't aid in alleviating tension. None of this was made any easier by the significant lamps used to light the stars. The dressing rooms were air-conditioned, but not the large public venues used for settings. And both ladies were dressed in heavy costumes, Dunaway in flowing, long-sleeved robes with capes and Davis in sturdily built period clothing with hats. Davis invented a fanciful tale told to one writer that her costar was riding around the streets at night in a limo swilling champagne! 

Davis had learned the hard way from Hollywood's greatest scene-stealers how to distract the eye in two-shots. Hence, she made use of a wafting hanky to ensure we noticed her in the courtroom scenes.

No, I mean it...!  Ha ha!

Regardless of both ladies' reputations as actresses and the sometimes showy aspects of their respective roles, The Disappearance of Aimee received no award recognition of any kind. For Davis, the caliber of her television roles did improve (and she was cast in the splendid Death on the Nile, 1978.) She won an Emmy for Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter and picked up two more nominations thereafter.

Dunaway won the Best Actress Oscar for Network (1976) and though she was granted a couple of Golden Globe Awards and further nominations, she had to wait until 1994 to receive her first and only Emmy Award and nomination (for her spectacular appearance on a memorable episode of Columbo opposite Peter Falk.)

Both ladies proceeded to attract horror stories surrounding their interactions with costars along the way. Davis famously clashed with Lillian Gish during The Whales of August (1987) and reportedly mistreated Helen Hayes (!) during Murder with Mirrors while Dunaway found herself being stung by Mommie Dearest (1981) costar Rutanya Alda in a published diary and recently lost a highly promising Broadway gig over reputed verbal abuse towards the crew. Even so, both women's cinematic legacy is permanently assured.

Before Davis passed away, she made multiple television talk show appear- ances, seemingly sharp as a tack and yet clearly reveling in a relentless barrage of attacks on Dunaway (egged on by the bemused hosts) who had, by then, become famous for portraying one of Davis' other irritants, Joan Crawford. Somehow, out of the sands of time, she focused all her venom on this one brief partnership to the delight of gossip mavens.

Davis on Dunaway:  To Johnny Carson when asked who she wouldn't want to work with again -- "One million dollars, Faye Dunaway. Everybody you can put in this chair will tell you exactly the same thing...totally impossible...uncooperative...unprofessional...difficult." To Larry King -- "She's so well known to be this, Faye, she must know it's how we all feel. difficult costar; unprofessional, self-centered"  To Gary Collins -- "[the most] incredibly inconsiderate woman I have ever worked with." "I'll raise my glass never to Miss Faye Dunaway. Never, never."

To her credit, Dunaway did not retaliate in kind. She was justifiably stunned that their just over three-week association had somehow resulted in a volcanic eruption of condemnation a decade later. Her later reaction was thus: "Watching her, all I could think of was that she seemed someone caught in a death throe, a final scream against a fate over which no one has control. I was just the target of her blind rage at the one sin Hollywood never forgives against its leading ladies -- growing old."

She continues, "But I thought it incredibly sad that this woman, who had given a voice to so many classic roles, in her last TV appearance before her death could find so little to talk about beyond a month-long television production with me. It was if in some weird way she was railing against herself." Her rebuttal was, naturally, something of a backhanded indictment cloaked in pity.

Both of these gals have offered me countless hours of entertain- ment, so I take no side definitively in their squabble. Generally, things fall somewhere near the middle in rifts like this. The biggest crime of all is that the movie doesn't seem to exist for viewing in anything but hideous third generation video when it ought to be pristinely presented on DVD so that we can see these two go at it in all their restored glory!