Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  In Broken Dishes Meek plays a milquetoast worm who turns on his tyrannical battle-ax of a wife with the aid of his feisty daughter, played by Davis. As Elaine, the intrepid daughter, Davis makes a speech in Act III in which she tells off her mother and her friends in fine, rousing style. The audience cheered her loudly at curtain time, and as Blanche Yurka had, the generous Mr. Meek, though technically the star, called her out for curtain calls with him. Davis remembered that prior to the opening, Meek had lost his life’s savings in the disastrous Wall Street crash of October 1929, yet came on and played his role with all his customary squirrelly sharpness that same night. She later called it “one of the most prime examples of the old saw about the show must go on that I was ever to witness. The memory of it was to sustain me in later years when I felt too sick to get out of bed, yet forced myself to drive to work where I knew the cast and crew and director of an expensive production that depended on my presence were waiting.”

  Of her performance in Broken Dishes, the New York World reporter declared: “Here is a young woman born for the theatre. The play is slight and even a little worn in its worms-turning plotting, but Miss Davis and Mr. Meek make it seem fresh and new—and yes, even meaningful.”

  Broken Dishes turned into a big hit. Young women and men wrote Davis fan letters telling her they recognized themselves in her character and in her family troubles. It ran for 178 performances into the spring of 1930, and Davis’s name was enlarged in the ads and on the billboards. She was now a well-known Broadway personality, mentioned frequently in the gossip columns. Success was sweet, though she and Ruthie knew she had as yet a long way to go. Occasionally they would take the subway from their East Fifty-third Street apartment down to the Village, to look in at the latest Provincetown production. Davis loved the Village, and for a while contemplated taking a permanent apartment in one of the ancient nineteenth-century houses on Patchin Place. Ruthie and Bobby felt she ought to stay as close as possible to her Broadway theater, however.

  It was at this time that a Samuel Goldwyn talent scout saw her in Broken Dishes and got her her first screen test. Goldwyn was casting his new Ronald Colman movie, The Devil to Pay, and the scout felt she might be right for a role in it. Davis made the long trip to the Astoria studios in Queens more than once because of delays in scheduling and false-alarm photographic experiments, but the test that eventually resulted left the Hollywood Powers-That-Were feeling that Bette Davis had no future in films. “Her features are too irregular. She isn’t glamorous or beautiful enough. She is a problem to light and she doesn’t have enough ‘s.a.’” (1929 parlance for sex appeal), Goldwyn’s scouts told him. Reportedly he went to see her test himself, and came out barking, “Who in hell did this to me? She’s a dog!” Some twelve years later he would find himself shelling out $385,000 to get that same “dog” on loanout for a picture.

  Davis for her part reacted indifferently to the screen test results. Her ambition was to be a success on the stage, which she was, and she shared with many of her colleagues a suspicious, indeed disdainful attitude toward the West Coast movie factories. She shrugged it all off without a thought. She was far more excited when her beloved “Madame,” Grandmother Favor, the materfamilias, came to see her in Broken Dishes and with uncharacteristic effusiveness pronounced her granddaughter a signal success and a credit to the long line of Favors and Davises.

  After Broken Dishes closed on Broadway, Davis went on a tour with it, then returned to the Cape for her third season. Another tour of the popular Broken Dishes was projected for the fall, but while she was in Washington, she was asked to replace the actress who played Alabama in The Solid South, starring the redoubtable old theater luminary Richard Bennett. He was the father of Joan, Barbara, and the Constance with whom Davis would one day be compared in Hollywood, a once-handsome man now gone to colorful seed via drink and dissipation who was nevertheless still a stage personality to be reckoned with. His outrageous improvisations and insulting, raging asides kept audiences as entertained as his still-excellent acting exhilarated them. Rouben Mamoulian, later the prestigious Hollywood director of Garbo and Dietrich among others, directed, and his battles with old Bennett kept the rehearsals in a constant uproar.

  Bennett insisted on approval of everyone with whom he appeared, and when Davis arrived at rehearsal after a tiring trip from Washington, he barked, “You’re another of those young kids who think your eyes will do your acting for you, eh?” Davis, tired from being on the train all night, drew herself up in twenty-two-year-old dudgeon and gave Bennett and the onlookers a preview of Mildred and Margo Channing by barking back, “I don’t need this! I can always go right back to Washington, Mr. Bennett!”

  Taken aback, then amused and intrigued, Bennett told her she was going to be just fine as Alabama. The Solid South is a rather chaotic mélange of farce and melodrama, and Bennett hogged the action as a flamboyant old colonel who dominates his plantation and his children and drives everyone to distraction. As his daughter Alabama (a preview of her screen work), Davis was the perfect loving and tender plantation belle. Her light o’ love in the play was handsome, sensitive Owen Davis, Jr., with whom she “fell in crush,” as she put it to Ruthie, for a while. He was the son of the playwright who later wrote Jezebel.

  Bennett, ever the cutup, would fall out of character periodically to demand a cigar “if I am to keep concentrating on this damned pap!” One night, when the audience refused to respond to his comic sallies, he went to the footlights and barked, “I suppose I’ll have to tell you fools a dirty story to get you to laugh! You have no taste! You’re stupid as all get out! If you can’t enjoy what you’re seeing, then get up and leave!”

  Bobby thought Owen Davis, Jr. “a dreamboat” and kept teasing Bette about him. “And think, if you married him you wouldn’t even have to change your name!” she giggled, which won her a slap from her sister. Probably the Owen Davis, Jr., encounter would have developed had he not been romantically preoccupied elsewhere, or so her friends felt. He was the latest of a dozen young men she encountered during her theater period. One young man of impeccable aristocratic lineage gave her a rush for a while, then pulled out by writing her a Dear John letter that stated his parents didn’t approve of actresses and he couldn’t see her anymore. But luckily for her emotional health as of 1930, Davis’s mind was primarily on her career ambitions. And Ham was always there, an augury for the future.

  Possibly because the public tired of Richard Bennett’s unreliable shenanigans, The Solid South closed after only thirty-one performances. Again at liberty, Davis was contacted by talent scout David Werner of Universal Pictures. The studio was about to cast a film version of Preston Sturges’s Strictly Dishonorable, and she seemed right for the lead, he told her. Again she went across the river to Astoria to test. But this time she took more care with her grooming and makeup, and she passed the test—minimally. “They’ll fix you up out there to look better,” Werner told her, with a minimum of tact, as he presented her with a contract for $300 a week, with three-month options. “You’re not the most sexy or glamorous girl I’ve sent out West, but you’ve got intensity,” he said. “I think you’ll go a long way in Hollywood.”

  3

  Hollywood

  AFTER A THREE-DAY train trip that they recalled as “dusty, messy, and endless,” Davis and Ruthie arrived in Hollywood on December 13, 1930. That thirteenth was not a good omen, Bette told her mother, as they alighted from the train. Ruthie rejoined that a fortune teller had said that the name Bette Davis would one day be known all around the world, and maybe—just maybe—movies would make that possible. After all, wasn’t movie star Charlie Chaplin known all around the world? “I’m not a comedian, Ruthie,” Davis sniffed disdainfully.

  The Hollywood of late 1930 was still reeling from the Talkie Revolution of the year before. In 1927, the year Jolson’s The Jazz Singer debuted, silence was still king. By 1929 the overwhelming majority of pictures talked—or squawked—or squealed—depending on the quality o
f the sound recording in a given studio. Many a romantic star who had specialized in kinetic face-making accompanied by full orchestra went down the chute when his or her voice turned out to be a Bronx honk or a Southern drawl of the less euphonious kind. Talkies had spelled death to great stars like Norma Talmadge and John Gilbert, though the latter was rumored to have been a victim of a sound-tampering plot on the part of his MGM boss Louis B. Mayer in order to kill his expensive contract. The scene was changing, though. Great silent stars like Mabel Normand and Lon Chaney would die in 1930. Garbo had triumphed in Anna Christie, fans were enchanted by her deep, compelling Swedish inflections. An influx of musicals had run their course, and new talkie personalities like Clark Gable were about to burst onto the screen with maximum impact.

  The great studios such as MGM, Paramount, and United Artists were importing stage stars by the carload, and Ruth Chatterton, Clive Brook, Kay Francis, and other Broadway luminaries were talking their way into expensive contracts and an ecstatic screen following. Warners had made a breakthrough with crime films.

  Universal Pictures was among the second-raters of late 1930, along with RKO and Columbia, though all three would shortly move up to more prestigious status. Universal had made a breakthrough with the splendid All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the Erich Maria Remarque novel. The fresh new horror cycle, Frankenstein and Dracula among them, also enriched Universal’s coffers that year and the next. Under old Carl Laemmle, one of the original film pioneers, and his young son, Carl Laemmle, Jr., Universal had big plans for the future, and importing prominent stage players was part of their program.

  But Davis was in trouble from the start. The man assigned to meet her went back to the studio claiming no one had gotten off the train who looked even remotely like an actress. Apprised of his blunder, he rushed back in time to escort the bewildered Bette and Ruthie to their hotel. The photograph that the Universal camera aide took that day at the Plaza Hotel tells the story clearly enough: Davis seems shy and tentative, her smile hesitant. Ruthie, drably attired in a nondescript cloche hat and a drab black coat, like Bette, seems more determined in her look but still doubtful.

  Carl Laemmle, Jr., whose taste ran to more glamorous, “obvious” examples of feminine appeal, thought Davis drab and unappetizing. He assigned Strictly Dishonorable to Sidney Fox—a more blatant sexpot—considered Davis, “since we’re stuck with her,” for Walter Huston’s A House Divided, then changed his mind. While waiting outside his office one day, Davis heard him tell an aide, “That Davis dame has about as much appeal as Slim Summerville”—the ultimate ignominy, since Slim was an angular, homely, stupid-looking comedian whose stocks in trade were his befuddled look and awkward, shambling mannerisms. But the ultimate insult came from the House Divided director, William Wyler. The wardrobe department forced her to wear an extremely low-cut dress for her test, and Wyler guffawed, “What do you think of these dames who show their chests and think they can get jobs!”

  Next she was called in to an office that didn’t have a name or department heading on the door, where she was informed in no uncertain terms that the name “Bette Davis” sounded like a servant or a nurse, and that something more glamorous had been concocted for her. “Bettina Dawes” was the inspiration unveiled. Davis, surprising them with a hitherto unseen burst of spirit, informed them that she refused to go through life with a name that sounded like Between the Drawers. Then she imperiously walked out. When her rejoinder—and her attitude—were reported to Junior Laemmle, he decided to let her keep her name. And the glimmer of a suspicion that there might be more to her than her appearance suggested hit him briefly, but shortly disappeared, unfortunately for Davis.

  At a loss for the moment to know what to do with Bettina-Determined-to-Stay-Bette, they sent her to the photo gallery to pose in all manner of outfits—swim suits, negligees, street clothes. The photographs left them unimpressed. Davis spent the final weeks of 1930 reading about Richard Bennett’s glamorous daughter Constance in Photoplay—she had ascended to a $30,000-a-week salary range and was the envy of every actress in Hollywood. Since the only screen actress up to that time that Davis had ever taken seriously was Greta Garbo, whose screen image enchanted her, she went with Ruthie to advance screenings of Inspiration, the new Garbo film, and when it went to theaters, followed it there. For hours she studied Garbo’s peculiar chemistry, her mannerisms, her facial expressions, the odd, intriguing way the camera had of making love to her.

  At the studio, they were keeping her busy on a couch, while some twenty men lay on top of her playing love scenes to test their on-camera “capabilities.” They came and they went, “like wooden soldiers” as she later told Ruthie, and only the courtly Gilbert Roland had the taste and tact to whisper to her, just before he imposed his 170 pounds on her bosom, “It will be okay. Really! Everybody out here has to go through this at the beginning.”

  The dictionary defines the word “lugubrious” as “exaggeratedly or affectedly mournful”—and that is the word The New York Times used in March 1931 to describe Bette Davis’s performance in her first picture. Davis was heartened somewhat when told she would appear in a film version of Booth Tarkington’s The Flirt, but then she discovered that she was to play the good sister, Laura, quiet, unassuming, virtuously predictable—and dull as dishwater.

  British-born Sidney Fox, from Strictly Dishonorable, got to play the girl of the title—which ran through such changes as What a Flirt and Gambling Daughters before Junior Laemmle settled on Bad Sister, reportedly to favor Fox, whom he was grooming for stardom. According to Davis herself, Junior and Sidney had a hot romance going, and this underlay all the favoritism shown her. Fox was to play Marianne, bold, bad, flirtatious, irresistible, and much sought after by the men of a small Indiana town. Charles Winninger was her merchant father and Humphrey Bogart, in films only a year, was the naughty con-man who seduces then abandons Fox. Sadder and wiser, the onetime hey-hey girl marries staid solid-citizen Bert Roach, and drab Laura wins the handsome doctor, Conrad Nagel, who realizes his infatuation for Fox was just that.

  It is interesting that Davis’s first part should showcase her as an unrequited lover—at least until the upbeat ending—as unrequited love was to become one of her specialties. She languishes mightily over the handsome Nagel, who for sixty-two of the sixty-eight minutes the film runs, wastes his sterling, upright emotions on the sluttish Fox.

  Bogart might have been in her first film, and even had some scenes with her, but Davis disliked him from the start, and nothing changed her opinion in later years, even when they did good work together. “How can you act so well with him if, as you say, you dislike Bogie so?” Louella Parsons once asked Davis, who tartly replied, “Because that’s what I am—an actress! I’ll whip up an acting storm with Lucifer himself if it’s worth it to me!”

  Bogart was certainly playing a variant of Lucifer in Bad Sister. First he gets Fox to forge her dad’s signature to an endorsement with which he hopes to raise money to get a factory started, then he absconds with the dough and the daughter—and later abandons her. Some of the Tarkington flavor was retained by Raymond Schrock and Tom Reed, with additional dialogue by Edwin Knopf. The photographer was Karl Freund, famed for his German masterpieces in the silent era, who in 1931 Hollywood found himself mightily flummoxed by the stationary cameras, noisy traffic intrusions, and awkward microphone placements. Freund planted a small mike between Davis’s breasts, which forced her to limit her head movements; she spent most of the time talking down directly into her mammaries.

  Conrad Nagel, who played her love interest, had had a big career in the silents and helped Louis B. Mayer found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences while tutoring Mayer for a more “cultured” accent. Nagel had an excellent voice for talkies, but strangely enough Mayer neglected him in the early talkie era, and his acting career gradually declined. “It’s bad luck to help Louie Mayer—he never forgets to repay favors with unkindness,” Hedda Hopper once said of the MGM mogul, and
Nagel discovered this was only too true. But Adela Rogers St. Johns opined that Nagel had offended Mayer by telling one person too many how he had worked overtime to “refine L. B.’s accent into something civilized.”

  In 1960 Conrad Nagel talked to me at length about Davis and her first film.

  “She was very shy and very insecure. I think she realized she was not wanted by the powers that be, and of course this undermined her confidence. She was, I learned later, completely inexperienced about sex and easily embarrassed. A virgin of twenty-three in distinctly unvirginal Hollywood! That was a phenomenon for nineteen thirty-one!” Nagel laughed.

  Asked for his thoughts on why Davis disliked Bogart so much, he recalled that in one scene with him Davis had to diaper a baby; she had expected it would be a girl; when she discovered that she had to handle a boy’s genitals, doubtless the first male genitals she had ever seen and at twenty-three yet!—she blushed deep red through the scene, which came off gray on screen, as Davis herself recalled. Nagel hypothesized that Bogart was onto her virginity and had rounded up cast and crew to watch her reaction. He seemed to think it was all a big laugh. Bogart could be vulgar, too. “That dame is too uptight; what she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to do it,” he told Nagel.

  “She didn’t understand anything about makeup or eyelining or rouging or the right kind of lipstick for the camera, and nobody went out of their way to enlighten her,” Nagel continued. “She had to stand by and watch all those prissy makeup men buzzing around court favorite Sidney Fox making her look divine; Marie Antoinette in her beginnings must have felt that way about DuBarry!”