INTRODUCING
LIFE WITH THE INVINCIBLE BETTE DAVIS
For ten years Kathryn Sermak was at Bette Davis’ side first as an employee and then as her closest friend, and in MISS D AND ME she at last tells the story of the great star’s harrowing but inspiring final years, a story fans have been waiting decades to hear.
MISS D AND ME is a story of two powerful women, one at the end of her life and the other at the beginning. As Bette Davis aged she was looking for an assistant, but she found something more than that in Kathryn: a loyal and loving buddy, a co-conspirator in her jokes and schemes and a bright and willing assistant whom she trained never to miss a detail. Kathryn Sermak helped the two-time Oscar winner’s renaissance in her later years and in her recovery from her debilitating stroke. Kathryn also witnessed daughter Barbara Hyman’s humiliating public betrayal of her mother, and how that blow nearly killed Miss D.
The frame of this story is a four-day road trip Kathryn and Miss D took from Biarritz to Paris during which they disentangled their ferocious dependency. The book fulfills Kathryn’s promise to Miss D in the hours before she passed that when she told their story she would start in Biarritz. Although there have been dozens of biographies about Bette Davis, none has the fierce intimacy and true heart of MISS D AND ME.
ON SALE SEPTEMBER 12, 2017. PREORDER YOUR COPY OF MISS D AND ME TODAY!
"THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MOTTO OF MINE: ATTEMPT THE IMPOSSIBLE IN ORDER TO IMPROVE YOUR WORK."
- BETTE DAVIS
THE LONELY LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Bette Davis
Originally published in 1962, The Lonely Life is legendary silver screen actress Bette Davis’s lively and riveting account of her life, loves, and marriages–now in ebook for the first time, and updated with an afterword she wrote just before her death.
As Davis says in the opening lines of her classic memoir: “I have always been driven by some distant music–a battle hymn, no doubt–for I have been at war from the beginning. I rode into the field with sword gleaming and standard flying. I was going to conquer the world.” A bold, unapologetic book by a unique and formidable woman, The Lonely Life details the first fifty-plus years of Davis’s life–her Yankee childhood, her rise to stardom in Hollywood, the birth of her beloved children, and the uncompromising choices she made along the way to succeed. The book was updated with new material in the 1980s, bringing the story up to the end of Davis’s life–all the heartbreak, all the drama, and all the love she experienced at every stage of her extraordinary life.
The Lonely Life proves conclusively that the legendary image of Bette Davis is not a fable but a marvelous reality.
THIS 'N THAT
by Bette Davis
Originally published in 1987, a collection of anecdotes as well as opinions pro and con on a wide range of subjects by legendary actress Bette Davis–now in ebook for the first time!
A woman of strong appetites and opinions, Bette Davis minces no words. In frank, no nonsense terms she talks about the stroke that nearly killed her, and inspires us with the story of her subsequent recovery from cancer–a lively and encouraging account shot through with the star’s unique blend of spunk and wit.
Davis was famous for being as unsparing of herself as she was of others. Among the “others” of this book are President Ronald Reagan, who was a contract player at Warner Bros. when she was; Joan Crawford, her costar in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Humphrey Bogart; Marilyn Monroe; Elizabeth Taylor; and Helen Hayes, Bette’s costar in her first film after her illness, Murder with Mirrors. She also talks about her deep friendship with her longtime assistant, Kathryn Sermak, who nursed Davis back to health after her stroke and ushered her back into acting when Davis’s doctors thought all hope was lost.
As Davis says, “If everyone likes you, you’re doing your job wrong.” This is a unique and controversial book by one of the most incandescent and unconventional acting talents of all time, as magnetic and supremely talented as the lady herself.