In a review, The Washington Post wrote that Hyman depicted Davis “as a salty-tongued, egomaniacal, heavy-drinking performer who steamrollered over anyone in her career path. It was an unflattering portrait, but hardly the genuine catalogue of horrors contained in Mommie Dearest.”
Among Hyman’s most sensational claims, per Hook Magazine:
According to her daughter's memoirs, Bette Davis specialized inemotional cruelty. She staged "suicides" as punishment for perceivedmistreatment by her children. When B.D. was eight, her motherpretended to take an overdose, locking herself in her bedroom. Thedistraught child slept outside her door. And the next morning,"...[Mother] looked down at me at with a triumphant expression on herface. 'I hope that taught you a good lesson,' she said."
The irony of My Mother’s Keeper—and the follow-up book from Hyman, Narrow Is the Way—was that Davis’s daughter wrote them after becoming a born-again Christian. Hyman claimed that she published the book “because I love [my mother] and I want to reach her.” (And not, she insisted, for the $100,000 advance she was paid.) “I could have written the manuscript and sent it to Mother and not published it,” Hyman told People in 1985. “She wouldn’t have read it.”
The book was released just in time for Mother’s Day, but the timing was more cruel for another reason still. Per The Washington Post, “The then 77-year-old Bette Davis just had recovered from a broken hip, a mastectomy and a devastating stroke. So much for Christian charity.”
Despite her failing health, Davis sat for interviews after the release of My Mother’s Keeper to contradict her daughter’s book. Asked about a possible reconciliation in a 1987 interview with Bryant Gumbel, Davis replied, “We can hardly have a close relationship like that after a book like that is written about you. I lost her. . .Realizing she had written this book about me was as catastrophic as the stroke.”
Davis also published an open letter to Hyman in her 1987 memoir This n That, beginning, “Dear Hyman, I am now utterly confused as to who you are or what your way of life is. [Your book] is a glaring lack of loyalty and thanks for the very privileged life I feel you have been given.”
As for the title of Hyman’s book, Davis wrote, “If my memory serves me right, I’ve been your keeper all these many years. I am continuing to do so, as my name has made your book about me a success.”
Asked that same year whether she considered herself a good mother, Davis told Gumbel, “I think I was. . .I loved my children very, very much. . .I think I was a good mother. My son does too. That’s a comfort, that one child agrees.” Indeed, Michael Merrill stopped speaking to B.D. after she wrote the book, and co-founded the Bette Davis Foundation, awarding scholarships to aspiring actors, in his mother’s honor.
