Miss D and Me

June 5, 2017
Bette Davis was demanding and a perfectionist, Sermak writes in her lively memoir about being the two-time Oscar-winning actress’s personal assistant. As Sermak writes, Davis valued loyalty and discretion in employees and work was her salvation. These may not be earth-shattering revelations, but Sermak’s story concentrates less on the famous star and more on her own maturation while employed by Davis from 1979 to 1985. Hired as a “girl Friday,” Sermak soaked up the life lessons Davis imparted, such as how to give a firm handshake and how to stand out from the crowd. The prickly-turned-warm relationship between these two women unfolds on movie sets, the hospitals where Davis recovers from a stroke, and during a scenic road trip through France. There are also tense episodes surrounding Davis’s relationship with her family, especially her daughter, B.D., who secretly writes a tell-all memoir about mama. This nice-not-nasty book is not going to satisfy fans of TV’s Feud looking for gossip—there is only one real dig at Joan Crawford, Davis’s famous bête noire—but it will appeal to those who want an insider’s view of Davis, even if the focus is mainly on the insider. Agent: Joy Tutela, David Black Literary Agency (Kathryn Sermak); Linda Loewenthal, Loewenthal Company (Danelle Morton).

June 15, 2017
A chronicle of the last years of a cinema legend as told by her personal assistant. Would anyone familiar with Bette Davis' reputation as headstrong and independent be surprised to learn that she yanked out the bushes of a Long Island beachfront property she rented for a weekend because she didn't like the way they looked? Sermak, co-executor of Davis' estate, was a 22-year-old Southern California native in 1979 when she jettisoned a plan to pursue a career in clinical psychology and took a job as the 71-year-old actress's personal assistant. This book covers the years in which Sermak was Davis' live-in assistant, accompanying her to film sets, cooking her meals, and staying by Davis' side during and after the star's 1983 mastectomy and stroke. (The author movingly renders these scenes.) Davis was as much a mentor to Sermak as an employer. She told her to change the spelling of her first name because "one of the big battles in life is to stand out from the crowd," gave her lessons on posture, and even hired a butler to teach her the protocol for a formal dinner. One might have expected this book to be a hagiography, but, refreshingly, the author shows not only Davis' kindness, but also her cruelty, as when she rudely declined a dinner invitation from Sermak's mother. The author gets bogged down in extraneous detail, with rambling accounts of conversations and long descriptions of the meals she and Davis enjoyed. However, the book is a poignant portrait of an aging screen icon reduced to taking her medicine with swigs of Ensure Plus and struggling to live her life with the grandeur to which she had become accustomed. Sermak writes of Davis' tutelage, "she was training me for a world that was fading from view." The author ably documents Davis' growing realization that, long before her death in 1989, her time was already passing.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.