Bereft of secrets

The moment she drawled, "I'd like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair" in the 1932 film "Cabin in the Cotton," Bette Davis became two things: a movie star and an icon of camp. She would remain both for the next 57 years of her life. And beyond.

When a star is so easily caricatured, the task of the biographer is to locate the person behind the distortions. In his smart, witty new biography, Ed Sikov makes an effort to do that, and his conclusion is pretty much that with Davis what we saw, exaggerations and all, is what was really there.

"Nervousness, hysteria and paranoia are defining features of Davis's acting style," Sikov observes. And the boundary between her art and her life was permeable.

But the real secret to her career and her life, Sikov suggests, is that Davis "dares us to hate her, and we often do. Which is why we love her."

"Dark Victory" is a refreshingly unsentimental and unapologetic biography, one in which the inevitable bits of tittle-tattle -- about Davis' marriages (four) and affairs (including Howard Hughes) and family life (scathingly depicted in her daughter B.D. Hyman's book, "My Mother's Keeper") -- don't seem unduly sensationalized.

At one point, Sikov quotes Janet Malcolm: "Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world." By now, however, there are few secrets about Bette Davis that haven't been dumped out and viewed. The best that Sikov can do is mediate among the stories that have been told by and about Davis and choose which ones are most plausible.

What Sikov also brings to his Davis biography is point of view: that of a gay man who acknowledges her iconic significance for many gays. He examines such touchstone films as "Dark Victory" and "Now, Voyager" for their influence on gay culture. Davis is the quintessential "drama queen" in these movies, and Sikov observes that "it's the pent-up energy of concealment and its imminent breakdown that provide the gay regent with much of her authority." She "became an icon for several generations of gay men, who learned ... that they could, through wit and style and camp, rise above this oppressive, second-rate world and, inside at least, be the men they were meant to be."

Davis triumphed in the era of the "women's picture" -- the Depression and war years, when movies were the great escape. And she thrived -- eventually -- in the tense symbiosis of the studio system. Warner Bros. treated her shabbily for a long time: In 1935, when she made "Dangerous," for which she won her first Oscar, she earned less than character actor Guy Kibbee. She rebelled, the studio sued, she lost. And in 1937 she was still being paid significantly less than other stars, such as Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and even Sonja Henie. But eventually, her success at the box office brought the studio around.

Davis made dozens of movies, and Sikov seems to have watched them all. She had, as he comments, a talent for overcoming "shallow scripts, artless directors ... by pumping her characters harder, substituting adrenaline and tics for the substance she knew was missing from the material."

Sikov's book is a valuable guide to an essential career.