From The Washington Post:
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. “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. In a gratifyingly brief but persuasive bit of psychologizing, Sikov writes, “Davis’s torn nature suggests that she may have had a borderline personality, one that shifts between the commonly neurotic — anxiety, depression, emotional outbursts — and a baldly psychotic inability to perceive the point at which reality stops and paranoid fantasy takes over.”
But the real secret to her career and her life, Sikov suggests, is that “Bette Davis didn’t give a goddamn.
More here.
