Hollywood icon who became my secret best friend
The heart-warming story of how a star-struck Scottish schoolgirl sent a fan letter to a legend at the height of her fame... and formed a bond that was to last a lifetime
THE diminutive woman looked around anxiously as she waited in the hotel lobby. Secretary Olive Geddes had arranged to meet her longstanding pen pal several weeks beforehand but, now she was here, she was deeply nervous.
Suddenly there was a commotion and across the carpet of this small hotel on the island of Mull strode Bette Davis, looking every inch the glamorous Hollywood star, albeit one slightly out of her comfort zone on a chilly Hebridean island in 1971.
‘I could hardly believe it when she walked up to the reception desk,’ Geddes, from Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, recalled many years later. ‘She then turned round, saw me and came across to speak. We went downstairs to the bar to chat.
‘I thought that we would chat for about ten minutes but three hours later we went back to the reception and all these film people were standing about, wondering who was keeping Miss Davis from her dinner. And, despite it being a howling gale, she came outside to wave me off.’
The story of how an unmarried Scottish secretary became best friends with an icon of the silver screen is one that is as curious as it is endearing.
For was there ever a movie star as remote, as icily unapproachable as Bette Davis?
And yet to Geddes, who died last month at the age of 95, she was just Bette, a woman she was to meet several times following that first encounter in the early 1970s, who she counted as her dearest friend, and with whom she continued a regular correspondence for more than 50 years.
In fact, it was a chance trip to the cinema as a schoolgirl in 1939 to see a double bill of a Claudette Colbert film and The Sister, starring Davis and Errol Flynn, which first s parked Geddes’s interest in the actress.
She was hypnotised by Davis’s screen presence and her beauty, and would take e the bus to Glasgow or Edinburgh to catch the latest releases, rather than waiting for them to arrive at the smaller cinema in Falkirk.
In between times Geddes would pore over magazines, in particular Picturegoer, for gossip and images of the actress, imagining the glamorous lifestyle she must be living more than 6,000 miles away from rainy Grangemouth.
Starstruck, and just 14 years old at the time, Geddes decided to write her idol a letter.
‘I wrote to her care of Warner Brothers studios,’ Geddes said, ‘and got a signed photograph back.
‘I don’t know what made her start to write back to me personally, perhaps because I used to give her a critique of every new film. If there was something I didn’t like, I would tell her.’
The correspondence, which started to clatter through Geddes’s letterbox regularly, postmarked Los Angeles, is even more astonishing when you consider just how famous Davis was at the time.
The actress, then 31 years old, was riding high in the Hollywood star r system. She had won her first Academy Award, playing a down on her r luck actress, four years before in the movie Dangerous, followed by a second in 1938 for the film Jezebel.
IN 1937 she had launched a landmark case against Warner r Brothers Studio in an attempt to f r ee herself f r om her r contract. While she lost the case, it propelled her to the very top of the heap in Hollywood, with every one of f her movies (which were churned out at the rate of one a year) becoming a commercial and critical hit.
By 1940 she was Warner Bros’ most profitable star, and was given all l their most important roles, many of f them frosty, difficult and unlikeable women – something she seemed to excel at playing.
Davis’s personal life was also in a state of flux when Geddes’s first letter landed on her desk in 1939.
She had recently split from her first husband, a dance band leader named Harmon Oscar Nelson. The union had been roundly sneered at in tinseltown, as Nelson earned a pittance in comparison to Davis’s income.
Davis had also had several abortions. When they split, Nelson complained that she ‘read too much’ and thought ‘her work was more important than her marriage’.
Perhaps the only legacy that was to emerge from the union was the tale, never entirely proven, that Davis had come up with the nickname ‘Oscar’ for her two little gold statuettes after naming them after her husband.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s Geddes would write faithfully to Davis every time a new film came out, earnestly listing everything she had liked and disliked.
Instead of being horrified, Davis was entranced. Indeed, there must have been few people in Hollywood who would dare take the great Bette Davis down a peg or two. Geddes’s no-nonsense approach, however, clearly appealed to the star.
But it was to be more than 30 years before they actually met in person. Geddes had neither the desire nor the means to travel to Los Angeles, while Davis was often busy filming.
By the 1970s though, Davis’s career had stalled. Having finally released herself from her Warner Bros contract she had gone freelance, working for various Hollywood studios and even appearing on Broadway.
But attempts to break into television did not go well, and in 1971, single, overweight, and with four marriages behind her, she found herself on Mull to film scenes for Madame Sin, a campy spy thriller meant as a pilot for a possible TV series for US channel ABC, starring Robert Wagner and Denholm Elliot.
In it she played a supervillainess who, for reasons never made entirely clear, decamps to the Highlands and launches an audacious plan to steal a Polaris submarine. It was never picked up.
Nevertheless, Davis saw in the trip to Mull a chance to finally meet her longstanding pen pal. Perhaps not entirely mindful of the distances involved, Davis asked Geddes to travel from Grangemouth to meet her at the hotel she was staying at on the island for a drink.
Recalling the encounter years later, Geddes says she was particularly nervous about meeting her friend.
‘I realised that, after writing to each other for more than 30 years, we were finally going to meet,’ she said.
‘I was scared that I would get tongue-tied when I met her.’
In the event, however, Davis was charming and friendly, Geddes felt entirely relaxed in her company, and the time flew by.
A couple of years later Davis was back in Scotland, this time staying at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh while performing her onewoman show. Geddes received a summons by telegram to come and meet her.
Duly arriving, she discovered that Davis had reserved a room for her in the glamorous hotel. The actress was reportedly astonished when Geddes announced that she would not, in
fact, be able to stay, as she had to get home to her cat.
Not long afterwards there was another encounter, this time in London, where Davis was performing her one-woman show at the Palladium. She wrote to Geddes asking if she could make it.
‘ I told her I had relatives in London and would stay with them, but she replied that I was to have accommodation on her floor in the hotel,’ Geddes recalled.
Geddes arrived at the Grosvenor hotel in Park Lane, where the check-in desk had been told to expect her. She was shown to the penthouse f l oor, where Davis herself was staying.
A reserved woman who never lived ostentatiously, she later said she loved the experience, but never quite got over the hotel charging 75p for a portion of peas (£6.33 in today’s money). Davis treated Geddes like a queen during the visit, and asked her to watch the show from the wings.
Indeed, it was while she was standing there, peeking out onto the stage that one cheeky audience member shouted out, ‘Is that your real hair?’
Davis replied: ‘Yes it is. And these are my real eyes, my real teeth and my real t***.’
WHILE the two might appear on the surface to have very little in common, there was a deep bond. Geddes critiqued Davis’s work, but also praised her. They shared confidences, and both spent many of their years alone, Davis never remarrying after her final marriage broke down in 1960. Davis also treasured the fact that Geddes never capitalised on their friendship, once writing to her: ‘ How can I thank you for years of loyalty?’
Geddes was born into a singleparent family in 1925, raised along with her four siblings by their mother Elspeth, a seamstress.
The family lived in a tenement and dragged sacks of coal up five floors to their flat, and occasionally took in sailors as lodgers in order to keep afloat financially.
Davis, too, came from a similar environment, with her parents separating when she was seven years old and her mother having to work in order to make ends meet.
Geddes worked as a shelf-stacker in the Co- op before being promoted to cashier, eventually taking a job as a secretary at the coachbuilder firm Walter Alexander.
Like Davis she was independent and liked to do things her own way, often taking coach holidays by herself, and even booking trips in single cabins on cargo ships, travelling to places such as Norway and South Africa.
One family member remarked that she preferred to keep herself to herself, and did not make friends easily. She liked to wear men’s cl othes, f i nding t hem more comfortable, and kept her hair cut short. She never married, and although Davis married four times she never found true happiness, and was alone for many years before her death.
In 1989 Davis’s letters, which had been regular as clockwork for over 50 years through the little letterbox in Grangemouth, suddenly stopped. Geddes learnt from a neighbour that Davis had died, aged 81, after the breast cancer she had beaten several years earlier had returned.
Geddes missed her friend terribly, but held on to her letters, as well as the cornucopia of Bette Davis memorabilia she had collected over the years. Through a contact in the local paper she met another Davis superfan and the two would meet each week to share their memories of the star.
SHE continued to live in Grangemouth independently until 2016, when she had a f all i n her garden which broke two bones in her neck, and spent nine months in hospital.
Although she spent a further year at home after her release, in 2018 she moved to a care home in Larbert. She died there on November 11, surrounded still by her Davis memorabilia.
Once, a reporter asked Geddes whether Davis, with all her wealth and generosity, had ever given her a gift. She shook her head, saying: ‘She gave the gift of friendship.’