MISS D & ME: 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.