B. D. Hyman
| B. D. Hyman | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Barbara Davis Sherry May 1, 1947 Santa Ana, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer, minister |
| Spouse(s) | Jeremy Hyman (December 31, 1963-present); 2 sons |
| Parent(s) | William Grant Sherry (1914-2003) Bette Davis (1908-1989) |
B. D. Hyman (born May 1, 1947) is an American author and pastor.
Born Barbara Davis Sherry in Santa Ana, California, she was the daughter of film star Bette Davis and artist William Grant Sherry and was adopted in 1950 by Davis's fourth husband Gary Merrill. She took back her own last name, Sherry, upon turning 16 years old, claiming she wished to distance herself from Merrill. She appeared briefly as an infant in her mother's film Payment on Demand (1951). Under the stage name B.D. Merrill, she played a minor role as the next door neighbor's daughter in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), in which her mother co-starred with Joan Crawford.
B.D. met Jeremy Hyman, the British nephew of Seven Arts owner Elliott Hyman on a blind date for the film's showing at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963, and the couple wed when B.D. was sixteen and Jeremy was 29. Her mother Bette Davis gave her consent and publicly supported this "underage" marriage. The couple remain wed after fifty plus years and have two sons, Ashley and Justin.
Hyman wrote two books highly critical of her mother, My Mother's Keeper (1985) and Narrow Is the Way (1987). My Mother's Keeper brought Hyman considerable condemnation for the timing of its publication since Davis was in ill health after suffering a stroke during the book's publication process, even though writing of the book had been completed well before the stroke. My Mother's Keeper chronicled a difficult mother-daughter relationship and depicted scenes of her mother as an overbearing alcoholic. Several of Davis's friends commented that the depictions of events were inaccurate; others with first-hand knowledge vehemently disagreed. In her 1987 memoirs "This 'n That", Davis wrote a "letter" to her daughter in which she alleged inaccuracies in Hyman's book.
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