Geena Davis’ mother had a favorite story to tell.
When Davis was 1 year old, her mother took her to church where they lived in Wareham, Massachusetts, a place that Davis jokes is most notable for being “on the way” to Cape Cod. After fidgeting and fussing on her mother’s lap, Baby Geena managed to clock her head on the pew in front of them. The loud thud echoed throughout the church, and the congregation whipped their heads around in a stunned silence—bracing for the child to unleash screams of pain. But, as her mother often bragged, it never happened. Davis stayed silent.
Even at 1 year old, Davis embodied the family-instilled training: “I’d passed some sort of cosmic test in which I had maintained decorum and invisibility,” she says.
In her new book Dying of Politeness: A Memoir, the Oscar-winning actress chronicles her lifetime overcoming that training. She had grown up, as she writes, “a cripplingly polite New Englander who was much too tall to hide”—a far cry from the Hollywood trailblazer who was described in a 2013 headline as “The Most Badass Badass to Ever Badass.” So much of her life existed within that tension: being shy and taught to never be a bother, even if it means failing to stand up for yourself; and being someone who is enthusiastic, strong, and, certainly, opinionated.
Throughout the book, she works through formative experiences when she diminished or failed to fight for herself, but also the “little flashes of confidence” that marked the milestones of her impressive career.
There are the occasions when she felt, as a child, she might actually die of politeness, like the time her 99-year-old great uncle drove her family home from a dinner. Even while he routinely veered into oncoming traffic, narrowly missing head-on collisions, her parents refused to say a word, instead strategically moving 8-year-old Geena to the seat in the car that might be least dangerous in the event of an accident.
She also relives disturbing memories of the neighbor who used to invite her inside while she worked her route delivering newspapers, and molested her. When, at age 10, she told her mother about the touching, she blew a gasket and forbade her from going to the neighbor’s house again. There was no trip to the police or report of sexual assault, though—something that Davis is grappling with now.
There are the showbiz stories of the director who made her straddle his lap during an audition, and an anecdote about Bill Murray’s toxic on-set behavior when they were co-stars. She also examines the ways in which she would lose parts of herself in relationships in order to be the woman she thought her partners wanted her to be. But along the way, with the help of some life experience and the inspiring example of Susan Sarandon while shooting Thelma & Louise, she found the voice that helped her become the Most Badass Badass: a woman who changed Hollywood both on screen and off.
“I feel like I did it for little Geena,” Davis tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed in a recent Zoom interview, explaining why she decided to write Dying of Politeness. “She went through so much. And ideally, people would relate to the idea of giving away your power. I felt like women—and anyone—can relate to not feeling like you can live authentically in certain situations. That was the bane of my existence. It was my mode of existence for the way I grew up. What does everybody else want me to be? And how can I negate what I want as much as possible?”
It’s understandably emotional for Davis to talk about what happened with her neighbor. She has crystal-clear memories of that year of her life, which had been so fanciful. She would disappear into the woods on a stretch of the paper route where there were no houses and scream songs, feeling unfettered and free in a way she was taught not to be at home. The innocence of it all is in stark contrast to the trauma she experienced.
She knew that her mother lost her mind when she told her the ways that her neighbor had been touching her. “But I didn’t know anything about it was bad at all. I had no sense that there were parts of me that were private. I just asked her because, after a while, it just seemed weird. Like why did he hug this way and why would he be interested in touching that particular part?”
Because her mother didn’t explain what was bad about it, outside of her horrified reaction, Davis thought that she herself had done something terrible to elicit such a response. “Later in my childhood, in my teens, to realize what it was that had happened was stunning.” Her voice breaks and her eyes start to well with tears. “Then to revisit it now and realize what I went through is kind of sad.”
It’s a strange thing that maybe many people can relate to. There are foundational experiences we have that, when they happen, we don’t recognize as traumatizing in the moment. When we look back at them from a more enlightened place, it can be healing to process them with the wisdom we have now. It also can hurt more—to realize that you weren’t able to process the experience in a healthy way when it happened.
“Somebody pointed out something really interesting about that,” she says. She was telling the story of the neighbor to a friend, explaining that she “didn’t have the strength to be able to” address it when she was younger. “They said, ‘Well, why did you feel like it was your responsibility? That the way to change that situation was you would have been different, instead of for them to have to be different?’ It was, ‘if only I knew how to deal with this horrific situation,’ rather than, ‘if only that person hadn’t done that to me.’”
Dying of Politeness is, in many ways, a diary of epiphanies that Davis has had over her life and career. Why she felt so sheltered growing up. Why it was smart to study for a year in Sweden when she was a teenager. Why she needed to be fearless when moving to New York City to become a model. Why what that director forced her to do wasn’t OK. Why she should feel comfortable making demands on set. Why she’d need to fight for gender equity in Hollywood. And, most importantly, why it’s OK to give less fucks.
When Davis starred as the first female president of the United States in the ABC drama series Commander in Chief, veteran actress Polly Bergen co-starred in 10 episodes. She remembers being stunned by how casually Bergen, then in her mid-seventies, would curse and make racy comments on set. When Davis asked her about it, Bergen replied. “Oh honey, when you get old, you just don’t give a fuck anymore.” Laughing, Davis says, “I realized, oh, I’m going to be a salty old bitch. I’m going to say whatever the fuck I want.”
There are juicy Hollywood stories in the memoir. There’s the time when she was a model and went to Los Angeles for the first time. Jack Nicholson invited her and a few other girls over for lunch to “talk shop,” gave them tuna sandwiches and milk, and later called Davis to proposition her. (She turned him down with a line given to her by Dustin Hoffman.)
It’s thrilling to read about her experience filming The Fly, and then falling in love with Jeff Goldblum while making it. After their breakup, she ran into Warren Beatty. “What a shame… you know, I rode in an elevator with you two once,” he said to her, “and you were such a cute couple that I thought, ‘You know what? I’m not even going to fuck her.’”
It’s fascinating to learn that the pairings of Holly Hunter and Frances McDormand, Jodie Foster and Michelle Pfeiffer, and Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep were all attached to Thelma & Louise before she and Sarandon joined. Billy Baldwin was originally cast in Brad Pitt’s role; George Clooney, Mark Ruffalo, and Grant Show all read with Davis when it was time to replace him, but Pitt was so charming and handsome that it actually made Davis flustered. He got the part.
In more casting what-ifs, Debra Winger was originally supposed to star in A League of Their Own, but quit when Madonna was cast.
And, apparently, Davis was the first person to ever say “suck my dick” in a movie, in the film The Long Kiss Goodnight, opposite Samuel L. Jackson.
Then, of course, there’s the Bill Murray incident.
When Davis auditioned for the 1990 film Quick Change, Murray asked her to meet him in a hotel suite with other executives. After she arrived, he insisted that she lay on the bed and try out a massager he had just gotten called “the Thumper.” She genially said no, but he was insistent. As uncomfortable as it made her, she obliged. She later found out it was a test to see if she would be “compliant;” he was concerned that she might have an ego after winning her Oscar.
Later, when they were filming the movie, Davis was told to wait in her trailer before heading to set because of a wardrobe issue. Seconds later, Murray arrived, violently banging on the door. He screamed at her to leave the trailer and continued to bark and shout at her as they walked to set, in front of 300 people. “I was shaking all over, dying from shame,” she says.
An excerpt of Dying of Politeness featuring that anecdote went viral ahead of the book’s release. “It was all timing,” Davis says. “When I wrote it, I thought, ‘This is not going to be news to anybody, that Bill is problematic.’ But the same day the book comes out, a new revelation comes out about his behavior.” (He had allegedly straddled and kissed a younger woman during production of a new film.)
“There are very few instances in the book where I bust anyone,” Davis says. “It really wasn’t any kind of goal of mine to settle scores or anything.”
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of candor.
She has an impressive self-awareness of the kind of career she was able to chart. It’s not just that she landed major lead roles throughout the ’80s and ’90s, it’s that they were all interesting women: offbeat, complex, somewhat dark, and, yes, badass.
“As my career progressed, I went all the way from playing a soap star in her underwear in Tootsie, to a housewife-turned-road warrior in Thelma & Louise, to a baseball phenomenon in A League of Their Own, to the first female president of the United States in Commander in Chief, and more,” she writes.
And then it all stopped.
“It was stunning, because I was very well aware and heard people talk about how female actors fall off a cliff at age 40 and you don’t get as much work anymore,” she says. “I thought, but surely if that’s true I’m an exception, because who gets to be a pirate and road warrior and a dead housewife, you know, all the incredible things I get to be? And then I hit 40. Almost as soon as there was a four in front of my age, it also happened to me.”
“It just brought home how out of your hands an acting career is,” she says. “Unless you can write Rocky and star in it, you’re really limited to what comes your way. The feeling was of loss of control, that it wasn’t something that you could change. It kind of felt like forced retirement, I have to say.”
At one point during an acting dry spell, she considered taking a full-page ad out in the newspaper, with a giant photo of herself and the caption, “NOT FOR NOTHING, BUT I HAVEN’T RETIRED, YOU KNOW.” While doing research for Dying of Politeness, she found out that Bette Davis had actually done that very thing in The Hollywood Reporter, posting a classified ad that read,“Thirty years’ experience as an actress in motion pictures. Wants steady employment in Hollywood.”
Davis, obviously, loved that. “Maybe I’ll still do it one day.”
The actress will next be seen in the Netflix horror anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. In recent years, she won honorary Emmy and Academy Awards for her work crusading for parity, visibility, and representation in Hollywood with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. The last time we spoke, Davis was releasing the documentary This Changes Everything, a companion film to her work with the institute. “Geena Davis changed Hollywood,” we wrote. “Now give her more parts.”
Davis starts laughing when reminded of this. “Now it can be, ‘Give her more parts, for God’s sake! What the hell is going on? You should have listened to me the first time.’”
