Bette Davis’ Final Days Were Heartbreaking — Her Daughter Wasn’t There

In October 1989, an 81-year-old woman with two Oscars lay dying in a hospital outside Paris, and the daughter she raised did not come. Bette Davis started as Ruth Elizabeth Davis in a Lowell, Massachusetts mill town, raised by a mother who retouched portraits for a few dollars a print after her father walked out. Rejected in New York, buried in bit parts at Universal, she forced her way up at Warner Bros., stunned critics in Of Human Bondage, survived a write-in Oscar scandal, and won two Academy Awards by 30. The woman who beat studios and courtrooms could not win at home. Four marriages, a daughter named Barbara she called B.D., an adopted daughter, Margot, placed in a specialized school, and a comeback in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane that fed a run of horror roles. After a mastectomy in 1983 came a cascade of strokes that dropped her under 80 pounds and stole the voice and control she had built over 50 years. While she relearned how to hold a fork, B.D. was writing My Mother's Keeper, a 1985 memoir that painted her mother as a monster and climbed the bestseller lists as Bette lay wrecked. Bette answered in print, disinherited her, and kept working through the César, the Kennedy Center Honors, and one last trip to Spain. She died in Neuilly-sur-Seine with her assistant Kathryn Sermak at the bedside, not her daughter, under a headstone that reads five words: she did it the hard way.