“... Broadway, in Cactus Flower and Applause, a musical adaptation of All about Eve. Bacall took the Bette Davis role, and won a Tony. A decade later she won another one for the musical Woman of the Year. By then she was a New York fixture, living in a magnificent apartment in the Dakota building at 72nd Street and Central Park West. There had been another ...”

“... Scarlett was both an everywoman, and a frustratingly elusive character to cast. Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Paulette Goddard: all of them were nearly right, yet none quite captured the required quality. Through a mixture of cunning, determination and strategic good luck, Vivien Leigh nabbed the role in a way that might have appealed to ...”

“... like a rough sleeper and at worst, with anything involving cotton prints or ankle socks, it’s Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Second on the list of things Miller has given up in old age is sex. It is in fact, she says, ‘the main thing’ that she doesn’t want any more, but it takes her some time to get round to spelling this out. It ...”

“... her essay on this early and oddly literal version of the ‘secretary to the stars’ phenomenon, Bette London describes how Owen tried to appropriate the immense popular power of her late employer. ‘You know I am as active here as on earth . . . I shall work very hard, as there is much to do,’ the dead Northcliffe dictated to his living secretary. ‘I ...”

“... The Eyes, striking illustrations of Nazis measuring noses, and an amazing fullpage photograph of Bette Davis from the Museum of Modern Art archives. This encyclopedia is full of surprises, of unexpected juxtapositions. It is the product of imaginative minds and of leading scholars not afraid to challenge the orthodoxies: the bibliographies are bold too, and ...”

“... Devil, and vibrates as he recalls Paul Henreid taking a smoke from his own lips and passing it to Bette Davis (Now, Voyager). With approval, he cites the mass meeting of young women at Teheran University; every pouting lip framing a cigarette in protest at a Khomeini fatwah against smoking for females. In spite of the misogyny of certain styles of smoking ...”

“... two other vignettes in the poem, might easily be imagined as of a brooding hothouse sort, like a Bette Davis movie. Eberhart has long been interested in a similar paradox about cancer cells. The interest perhaps goes back to his mother’s death from cancer when he was 18, and to the strong influence we are told that this had on his poetic career. In a ...”

“... of these chapter digests continues a running joke: ‘Muhammad Ali was Jewish’ (Chapter 2); ‘Bette Davis was Jewish’ (Chapter 3); ‘John Lennon was Jewish’ (Chapter 4); and so on. The text often blooms into a special boxed feature, such as: ‘The Joke about the Pope and the Chief Rabbi’ (this takes a whole page) or: Haggadah (Pop Quiz ...”

“... wearing the same outfit, breaks the scene up. This scene is mirrored in Big Business (1988), when Bette Midler meets her unknown identical twin, wearing an identical suit, in a powder room in which a series of mirrors is separated by a series of open spaces, and the two of them play the mirror scene until they realise they are twins. Mistaking someone else ...”

“... proximity to ancient memories was one evening in New York when I’d found myself sitting next to Bette Davis. And I add confidently that this will be the only occasion when the audience will ever hear Bette Davis and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle included in the same sentence. 8 November. Listen to The Archive Hour on Radio ...”

“... forms of celebrity femininity: he writes about the heartaches of Joan Crawford, Jane Fonda and Bette Davis; imagines Barbara Hutton taken in a white silk crib to the White House followed by five hundred devotees; pictures Marlene Dietrich moving ‘majestically down the avenue to guard over/the war-torn refugees, waifs who lined the house’. Barbara ...”

“... Peace, ‘the wing beneath’ presumably meaning ‘the wind beneath my wings’ and courtesy of Bette Midler in Beaches.) Here, though, there is no equivalent to the Friend and the narrating is done in a free indirect style that channels each family member in turn, an awkward arrangement, particularly in scenes featuring more than one of them. A novel with ...”

“... in vitro. It has also been claimed, for instance by a group of researchers led by Beatrice Hahn, Bette Korber and Paul Sharp, that Aids could not have started in the 1950s, because their calculations reveal that the first HIV infection (the so-called ‘Eve virus’) must have existed in the 1940s or 1930s. However, in Science last July, Jon Cohen, the ...”

“... as herself in the biopic Claretta starring Claudia Cardinale. In the 1940s, Myriam had dark Bette Davis eyebrows and artfully curled hair, like Claretta’s. When she got married in the 1940s to a rich textiles magnate, Mussolini did everything he could to ensure that she had a perfect wedding, taking more notice of her marriage – as one leading ...”

“... Son, Carrie and Robert went to the movies, Annye tagged along: ‘They liked to see Mae West and Bette Davis, and I was a nuisance, always running to the bathroom and wanting popcorn.’ She remembers Robert singing cowboy songs, like Gene Autry’s ‘That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine’, and cracking jokes ‘about Ol’ Massa’. ‘He wasn’t ...”