Would the mother of the mystery guest please sign in and disown your child.
April 5, marked what would have been the 106th birthday of Bette Davis. As usual I pulled up her Wikipedia entry and snuggled up to savor her story like the blockbuster biography that it was when I got to the part about her daughter, our mystery guest, B. D. Hyman. I had forgotten that the ungrateful daughter raised in a privileged Hollywood royalty setting had written a Mommie Dearest type of account of her upbringing.
All this would have been salacious had any of it been true as everyone that ever new the private life of Bette Davis came forward to refute it including her two adopted children. Everyone truly believed Joan Crawford to be the monster that her daughter's book made her out to be but I don't recall anyone having the same feelings about Bette. Just watch Now Voyager and the way poor Charlotte Vale treats Dr. Jeremiah Duvaux Durrance's little girl with such kindness, "Tina, Tina, Tina." This could have been an excellent acting job but I so want to believe it to be who she was in real life.
Bette as expected by anyone who ever saw her movies disowned the ungrateful child saying in her memoir, "I am still recovering from the fact that a child of mine would write about me behind my back, to say nothing about the kind of book it is. I will never recover as completely from B.D.'s book as I have from the stroke. Both were shattering experiences."
A final thought is that B. D. Hyman has a link to her own Wikipedia page listed on Bette Davis's page. I found that distasteful but, it's where I found the external link to her ministry website and clicked over to see what she looked like. I was not pleasantly surprised as you could imagine.
Thanks to everyone for playing along. A special thanks to Muscato for not giving it away...I half way expect to see a comment stating something about the time he actually met her. And to Jason for sheepishly identifying her first. It's rare to stump you guys!
