Mother Goddam

THE LONELY LIFE (315 pp.)--Bette Davis--Pufnam ($5.75).

MARLENE DIETRICH'S ABC (189 pp.)--Marlene Dietrich--Doubleday ($3.95).

When Bette Davis first arrived in Hollywood, she was (by her own account) a mousy, 22-year-old virgin with knobby knees, a pelvic slouch, and cold blue bugeyes that radiated intelligence. "She has as much sex appeal," lamented her first studio boss, "as Slim Summerville." But in three overworked decades and some 70 overwrought roles, Bette earned two Oscars, $3,000,000. and a reputation as the first U.S.-born actress to make the movie moguls respect talent and independence in a star. In an age of vamps, she became the Compleat Vixen. But in this autobiography, Bette can (and does) brag: "I brought more people into theatres than all the sexpots put together."

Tamable Shrew. With the ruefulness implicit in her title, but also with honesty and a bitchy bonhomie that seldom adorn such Sunset sagas, Bette Davis, now 54, pictures herself as Mother Goddam, a tamable shrew who never found her Petruchio. Her four marriages suffered inevitably from income-patibility. In 1946, Bette Davis earned more ($328,000) than any other woman in the U.S.; one ex-husband, clearing out with the pretty nursemaid, even sued for alimony. Says she: "The only future marriage I would even remotely consider would be with Paul Getty." But she admits that her own rapturous intensity simply "exhausted" most of her mates. "Many men." she protests, "find their fathers in women. I am the least likely father symbol extant."

Ruth Elizabeth Davis--her stage name was borrowed from Balzac's La Cousine Bette--was born in Lowell. Mass., the daughter of an unamiable patent attorney who was divorced from his wife when Bette was seven. Supported by her mother, Bette won two dramatic scholarships in Manhattan, took off for Hollywood with her mother and sister in 1930.

Lady Brando. The potentates at Universal were articulately querulous. Said one: "What audience would ever believe that the hero would want to get her at the fadeout?" The turning point of her career came in 1934 when she peroxided her hair and stole the show as Mildred, the mean little waitress in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. Says Davis: "She was the first leading-lady villainess ever played on a screen for real. I was the female Marlon Brando of my generation.''

Though she became known as "the Fourth Warner Brother." Stonewall Davis had to fight for literate scripts and intelligent directors. In her most distinguished films--notably, The Old Maid, The Letter, The Little Foxes, All About Eve--she played grueling, unsympathetic parts that most other actresses would shun. Today, living in California and Maine, Mother Goddam admits that she has been "uncompromising, peppery, untractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile and ofttimes disagreeable." In a line that only Bette Davis could deliver, on or off screen, she concludes: "I suppose I'm larger than life."

Another show business dowager being heard from currently in print is Marlene Dietrich. Having gracefully graduated from showing her figure in public to the role of public figure (as a glamorous grandmother and crony of the late Ernest Hemingway), Dietrich tries to cash in on both images in Marlene Dietrich's ABC. As a result, the book is a kind of uneasy cross between Poor Richard's Almanack and a Lorelei's Advice to the Lovelorn.

Samples:

Age: ". . . The famous wisdom that is supposed to be ours in age doesn't help us a bit."

Brassiere: "In America something strange has happened. A man will turn his head, or whistle, if that is his fashion, on seeing an obvious contraption, a clearly outlined steel construction under a dress or, even worse, a sweater. This is rather touching and only proves what an idealist man is."

Dishwashing: ". . . No woman should make her man wash dishes."

Eggs: To scramble, use "room-temperature eggs . . . beat with a fork, not with an egg beater."

Gentleman: "A man who buys two of the same morning paper from the doorman of his favorite night club when he leaves with his girl."

Grumbling: ". . . is the death of love."

Virtue: "... Losing your virtue might be considered virtuous by the fellow you lost your virtue to ... You have to make your own laws about that. . ."

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