In the spring of 1988, the legendary Bette Davis flew to New York for dental surgery. She never returned to the set of her final film, leaving behind a production in chaos, a director embroiled in a bitter war of words, and a cinematic legacy that ends not with a bang, but with a confused, bitter whimper.
The film was ‘Wicked Stepmother‘, a low-budget horror-comedy written specifically for Davis by cult director Larry Cohen. For Davis, an 80-year-old two-time Oscar winner who had recently survived a mastectomy and a stroke, the role of a chain-smoking witch was meant to be a fun return to work. Instead, it became the only movie she ever voluntarily abandoned. “I would be ashamed to have people think I sanctioned something like this,” Davis told the Los Angeles Times months before the film’s 1989 release. “People will be horrified at the footage on me.”
The War of Words Behind ‘Wicked Stepmother’
The battle lines were drawn immediately. According to Davis, the problems started the moment filming began. She accused Cohen of being more interested in “dolly running around” and rehearsing the camera than the actors. She claimed the script was filled with “vulgar moments” and that no one bothered to notice that her dentures were slipping, making her look “uncomfortable—and I was”.
“He never rehearses actors,” Davis fumed in one of her final interviews. “He just rehearses the camera”.
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Cohen, however, tells a different story. He claims the departure had nothing to do with artistic differences and everything to do with mortality. In a 2012 essay titled ‘I Killed Bette Davis,’ he alleged that the star was far sicker than she let on. When she left for a dentist she trusted in New York, Cohen says doctors discovered she needed multiple teeth extracted, a traumatic procedure for a woman who had dropped to just 75 pounds.
“In her condition, she could never have faced the camera,” Cohen wrote. “But she couldn’t admit that publicly. To have left the movie for medical reasons might’ve made her uninsurable. Without insurance, she’d never work again”. Davis vehemently denied this. “I was perfectly able, had the conditions been right, to return to the film. Perfectly able,” she insisted.
How Hollywood Saved a Disaster Movie
With the lead actress gone and a million-dollar insurance claim looming, Cohen faced an impossible task. Davis had shot only one week’s worth of footage, which was roughly fifteen minutes of screen time.
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Rather than scrap the project, Cohen deployed one of the most infamous narrative band-aids in cinema history. He wrote a new character, the witch’s daughter (played by Barbara Carrera), and inserted a plot point where the two share a body. When one is present, the other is trapped inside the body of a house cat.
“This isn’t clever writing; this is desperation duct-taped into a plot twist,” one modern critic later wrote. The result is a jarring cinematic experience. Davis vanishes from the screen halfway through the story, replaced by a younger actress and a meowing feline, leaving audiences confused and critics vicious.
‘Wicked Stepmother’ opened briefly in February 1989 to disastrous reviews and a box office gross of just $70,580, a pittance compared to its $5 million budget. Davis died eight months later, on October 6, 1989.
Why Bette Davis Never Watched ‘Wicked Stepmother’
Davis never watched the finished film. In an interview with Leonard Maltin around the time of its release, she seemed resigned but defiant. Asked if it was embarrassing to admit she walked off the job, Davis replied, “The lesser of the two evils was my courage in not returning”.
She held out hope for a revival. “I am praying on my knees every day to get a good script in 1989,” she said. That script never came.
For fans, ‘Wicked Stepmother‘ remains a painful footnote, an undignified end for the star of ‘Jezebel‘, ‘All About Eve‘, and ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?‘ It is the rare film that lives up to its name, a wicked trick played on the legacy of one of Hollywood’s greatest icons by the very business she helped build.
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