In 1985, on Mother’s Day, the daughter of Bette Davis published a book. Davis was seventy-seven years old. She had survived a hysterectomy, a series of strokes that left part of her face paralyzed and forced her to relearn how to speak certain words, and a broken hip. Three separate disasters in less than two years, any one of which could have killed a woman her age.

None of them did. The book was called My Mother’s Keeper. Its author, B. D.

Hyman, born Barbara Davis, was the only biological child of Bette Davis and was thirty-seven years old. Within weeks, the book reached the New York Times bestseller list. It portrayed Bette Davis as emotionally abusive, compulsively manipulative, and alcoholic. It described a mother who once locked herself in her bedroom, staged a fake suicide attempt, and emerged the next morning to tell her eight-year-old daughter, “I hope this taught you a good lesson.

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Davis was alive when the book appeared, and she read it. In an interview in 1987, she said one sentence about that experience. To understand the cost of those words to a woman who had survived everything Hollywood had thrown at her for fifty years, one must first understand the story of her three children. One biological, two adopted, their stories collectively over forty years form a portrait of a woman capable of commanding any room in the world, yet unable to contain her family in a single place.

The story does not begin in Hollywood. It begins in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1915, with a father walking out the door. Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born on April 5, 1908. Her father, Harlow Morrell Davis, was a patent attorney, precise and disciplined.

Her mother, Ruthie, was his opposite—expansive, creative, emotionally vibrant. In 1915, Harlow left. Bette was seven, her sister Barbara six. There was no dramatic scene, no turning point.

He simply reorganized his life so that they were no longer part of it. He sent money, met his legal obligations, and disappeared from the daily life of two small children. Ruthie placed the girls in Crestalban, a strict boarding school in Lanesborough, Massachusetts, and went to New York to work as a governess and portrait photographer. She was devoted and resourceful, but she could not provide what two daughters in boarding school desperately needed.

What she gave instead was something more durable: an unshakable belief that Bette was exceptional, that her eyes were magnificent, that the stage was the only place big enough for who she was. Bette believed her. She was right. What Bette Davis became—driven, needing absolute control over every room she entered, incapable of letting anyone else have the last word—is not difficult to explain in retrospect.

A child who watched her father walk away without looking back spent the next eighty years building a version of herself that no one could ignore. By 1929 she was on Broadway. By 1930 she was in Hollywood. At twenty-two, she had not yet made a single film of value, and she knew it.

She bridged the gap between what she knew herself to be and what the film industry offered her by refusing to accept it. Her early years at Warner Brothers demonstrated a particular kind of perseverance. Her first major screen test, evaluated by director William Wyler, was deemed inadequate for the kind of femininity the studio was promoting in 1930. She was given secondary roles and placed in films that did not require what she did well.

Carl Laemmle at Universal considered terminating her contract before a cinematographer intervened, with minimal commitment, noting that her eyes were beautiful. Davis kept that observation in her memory. The 1934 film Of Human Bondage changed everything. Davis played Mildred Rogers—vulgar, self-destructive, utterly lacking in empathy—with a ferocity that forced every critic who had dismissed her to stop and reconsider.

The Academy did not nominate her. What followed had no direct precedent in Oscar history: a collective nomination campaign organized by her peers in the industry, who recognized they had seen work deserving of honor. She won the following year for Dangerous. She won again for Jezebel in 1938.

In 1936, Warner Brothers offered her a series of roles she considered beneath her talent. She filed a lawsuit to break her contract and lost the case publicly in a London court. She returned to the studio and delivered the best work of her first professional decade. By 1940, she was the highest-paid woman in the United States.

That is not a critical observation; it is a tax record. She was thirty-two years old. She had not yet met the man who would give her three children. In 1950, Davis starred in All About Eve.

She was forty-two. Her career had experienced a real decline; the late forties had produced roles she should not have accepted. Critics still describe her performance as Margot Channing, a stage actress on the edge of brilliance and aging, as one of the finest in American film history. She was nominated for her eighth Oscar.

She did not win. In 1950, the year All About Eve was released, she married Gary Merrill, her co-star. In 1951, they adopted a daughter, Margot. The family initially tried to care for her at home.

For about two years, Margot lived with her parents, her older sister B. D. , and from 1952, her younger brother Michael. Doctors visited.

Medical evaluations were conducted. When Margot was three, she was diagnosed with brain damage that records indicate occurred at birth. Davis later described the decision to place Margot at Lakeland School in Geneva, New York, as the hardest decision of her life. Margot was three years old.

Gary Merrill filled the space left by Margot’s absence. He was an alcoholic. Multiple biographies, interviews, and ultimately the divorce proceedings themselves confirm this. Davis cited his alcoholism and violent temper as grounds for the separation.

The divorce was filed in 1960. There is a specific incident, confirmed in Ed Sikov’s biography Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis, that seems to have been the moment she decided to end the marriage. It did not involve Davis herself. B.

D. , then twelve or thirteen, had a young friend visiting the house. Gary Merrill struck the child—not Davis, not one of his own children, but a ten-year-old guest who was in the wrong room at the wrong time. It was the moment violence crossed the boundary of the marriage and touched a child who had nothing to do with any of it.

Davis filed for divorce. She agreed to an arrangement described by multiple sources at the time as unusual, which indicates how urgently she needed out: she paid alimony. He left. The children remained.

B. D. Davis was fifteen when the divorce occurred. She grew up in a household organized entirely around her mother’s career.

Every rhythm—hours, meals, the emotional climate of any given week—was determined by Davis’s schedule, her projects, her needs. B. D. was, by all accounts preserved, a match for her mother.

Same presence, same intelligence, same ability to occupy a space without asking permission. In 1962, Davis cast B. D. in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

, the film that relaunched her career at fifty-four. B. D. played Liza Bates, the neighbor girl.

She was fifteen. According to the critical consensus of the time, she performed well. In 1963, Davis took B. D.

to the Cannes Film Festival. Through an introduction arranged by mutual friends, B. D. met a man named Jeremy Hyman.

He was twenty-eight, British, wealthy. B. D. was sixteen.

Davis knew about the relationship. She had every authority available to a woman in her position—at the height of her comeback, a single mother of a sixteen-year-old—to say this was inappropriate. She said the opposite. She supported the relationship, allowed Hyman access to B.

D. , and contributed financially and publicly to the wedding on January 4, 1964. B. D.

was sixteen, about to turn seventeen. Davis attended, smiled in photographs, and told interviewers that Hyman was exactly the kind of man she had hoped her daughter would find. They settled in rural Pennsylvania, started a family, and built a life that by external standards was entirely successful. They gradually moved away from Bette Davis’s orbit.

B. D. converted to evangelical Christianity in the late 1970s. The conversion reframed her understanding of her childhood around the language of sin and redemption.

Davis did not understand this shift—documented initially not as hostility, but as incomprehension. Davis organized her sense of meaning around work, not faith. Two languages without shared rules. In September 1983, Davis underwent a hysterectomy.

She was seventy-five. She was working, because she had always been working. Days after the surgery, before her recovery was complete, the clots began. Not one stroke, but a series.

Each one disrupted the systems that constituted Bette Davis as a performer: her speech, the instrument she had trained for fifty years, the precision of expression that had earned her two Oscars and ten nominations. The strokes targeted those tools. Davis relearned. She underwent speech therapy, working with the same will that had beaten Warner Brothers and outlasted Joan Crawford, trying to recover what the strokes had taken.

She did not recover everything. Then she broke her hip. Three catastrophes in less than two years. When B.

D. Hyman’s literary agent sold the manuscript, My Mother’s Keeper was published on May 14, 1985. B. D.

was thirty-seven. Davis was seventy-seven. She was alive. She read it.

Before the book, B. D. had sat for an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. In that interview, she spoke about her mother with complexity, but with warmth, acknowledging difficulty and also love.

Then the book described Bette Davis as a woman who staged a suicide attempt in front of her eight-year-old daughter and called it a lesson, a compulsively manipulative and emotionally abusive woman who used her children as props in her own theater. The book reached the New York Times bestseller list. Two years later, in 1987, Bryant Gumbel asked Davis directly about the experience of reading her daughter’s account. Davis said: “The realization that she wrote this book about me was as catastrophic as the stroke itself.

” Not the lawsuit. Not Joan Crawford. Not the career decline. The stroke—the event she had spent two years rebuilding from, word by word—was the measure she chose.

Davis responded with a published letter, part of a book of her own. The letter told her daughter, in language confirmed by her will and cited in every biography covering the period, that B. D. had committed a heinous act.

The tone was moral, not legal: a mother telling her daughter, in writing, for the public record, that what had happened was wrong. Gary Merrill, the man who had lived in that house, told CNN that B. D. Hyman’s motivations were cruelty and greed.

Michael Merrill, the adopted son, made no public statement. He simply stopped speaking to B. D. Hyman.

The break was total and, by all documented accounts, permanent. In the final years of her life, Davis revised her will. The estate—the films, the photographs, the earnings of fifty years of work—went to Michael Merrill; to Kathryn Sermak, her assistant and companion through the hysterectomy, strokes, broken hip, and the years after the book; and to Harold Schiff, her business manager. B.

D. Hyman received nothing. B. D.

’s children, Davis’s grandchildren, received nothing. Margot Merrill was also excluded from the will, confirmed by UPI reports in 1989. No reason was publicly given for Margot’s exclusion. The daughter who could not speak for herself was not mentioned in the final document either.

In September 1989, Davis traveled to Spain. She was eighty-one. Metastatic breast cancer had already spread through her body, beyond the point where any intervention could change its course. She knew it.

The San Sebastián International Film Festival had invited her to receive the Donostia Award, a lifetime achievement honor. She accepted, went, and walked onto the stage. Photographs exist. The disease is visible on her face.

Everything else is familiar—the posture, the bearing of someone who does not know how to surrender. She collapsed in Spain and was taken to the American Hospital in Paris, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. On October 6, 1989, Bette Davis died of breast cancer. She was eighty-one.

She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills. On her headstone, at her request, are five words: “She did it the hard way. ”

B. D.

Hyman was excluded from the funeral arrangements. The family that remained—Michael, Sermak, the small circle Davis had ultimately trusted—organized the burial without her. B. D.

said she loved her mother. She was not invited to say goodbye. Gary Merrill outlived Davis by fourteen months. He died on December 5, 1990.

Margot Merrill outlived her mother by thirty-three years. She died peacefully on May 9, 2022, in Boston, at seventy-one. She never gave an interview. She never appeared in a documentary about her mother.

She lived her entire life outside the story everyone tells about Bette Davis. Of the three children—B. D. , who wrote the book; Michael, who stayed silent; and Margot, who lived quietly in Geneva, New York, for seventy-one years and died without a single recorded interview—the one who was entirely removed from the circle of Bette Davis’s life is the one who was never the center of this story.

The available records suggest a woman who received care, was known in her community, and lived seven decades in a stable environment with people who understood her needs. The only child completely absent from the chaos was not unhappy, according to any account. A seven-year-old girl in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1915 watched her father reorganize his life to exclude her and devoted the rest of her existence to building a persona no one could ignore. Then her daughter, present in her life at full force, sat before Mike Wallace and praised her, and later wrote the book.

The stroke took her voice. The book took something she believed was more durable: her conviction that the work had been worth it. Bette Davis is buried in Hollywood Hills. On her gravestone: “She did it the hard way.

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