Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Character actor Allen Jenkins told me in an interview many years later: “I was in that film, and Bette’s unhappiness with it was a depressing thing to watch. We’d have coffee sometimes. She was very democratic with her crew and her fellow actors, and I remember her saying that Glenda Farrell had the meaty part as a shady lady and she’d rather have two minutes on screen in a character with bite than an hour and a half simpering and cooing, as she did in this. She was really p—— off with it all, and I didn’t blame her.”

  Davis and Jimmy Cagney—Warners’ other stormy-petrel rebel—had become friends, and they were delighted to be cast together in Jimmy the Gent, (formerly Always a Gent), based on an original story, The Heir Chaser, by Laird Doyle and Ray Nazarro, who had Jimmy—and nobody else—in mind when they wrote it. Jimmy had just come off one of his numerous Warner suspensions and he characterized Gent as “crapola—but slightly better-class crapola than usual.” Davis, who adored Jimmy and felt he was one of the best actors in Hollywood, had lamented through the years that they had not gotten a better vehicle in which to play; they later did one other, with equally unfortunate results.

  Jimmy the Gent is about an opportunist (Cagney) who specializes in tracking down heirs to missing estates, then sharing in the take. His secretary-girlfriend, Davis, deplores Jimmy’s corner-cutting business practices, and leaves him in disgust, allying herself with his business rival, Alan Dinehart, whom she believes to be honest, upright, conservative, and a gentleman.

  Jimmy then sets out to emulate Dinehart, polishing up his speech, sporting more conservative apparel, holding “tea parties” for his staff of mugs, etc. Davis is unimpressed, so Jimmy then decides to show up Dinehart for the crook he is, with predictable results.

  The film ran what was, for a 1934 Warner product, a typical 66 minutes, and Michael Curtiz directed at his usual frantic, slam-bang pace, which emerged on the screen as fast, furious, riveting, and highly entertaining to the fans who lapped up fast action stuff with no regard to quality dramatics, of which Jimmy the Gent had none.

  Jimmy Cagney always felt highly simpatico with Davis, whom he recognized as a fellow striver for quality. At that time he was in a better position to give the stubborn Warner bosses what-for as he made a bigger salary than Davis and his box-office clout was something to be reckoned with.

  A tough street kid from Manhattan, Jimmy had struggled up in vaudeville and had had success on Broadway, doing things the hard way all along, and he was more than a match for the Warners. He was the perfect Depression-era hero, not only as a gangster but in various incarnations of the feisty, enterprising common man buffeted by fate who always lands on his feet, four-square. He told me about Davis in 1961:

  “You know, Bette came from old Yankee stock, pretty patrician background, but was she a fighter! Working with her in Jimmy the Gent was like baking in a hot oven—it got pretty humid in there but you couldn’t wait to see how the cake turned out! She was a really wonderful talent, and I don’t know how she stood all those second-rate parts—some of them a cut above bits—that for years they inflicted on her. I think it was the Warners’ way of disciplining her for her hotheaded complaints but she was such a trouper that she delivered on each and every assignment no matter how lousy the lines and situations. I was lucky in that I was a lead, later a star, from almost the beginning, so I understood her exasperation better than most. She had the current on from the moment she arrived on the set and she never let up. The vitality of that woman! Words can’t convey it.”

  As did Davis, Cagney heartily regretted that neither found a good vehicle to do together—the two they did do being distinctly second- and third-rate.

  “Jimmy had a vitality that matched my own, and he had wonderfully unpredictable little twists and catches and surprises in his technique that kept me on my toes,” Davis said later. “What a joy he was to play with! No placidity and false hauteur or phony poise about him! He was very much himself, at all times, so real, so true—would that I had had more Jimmy Cagneys to play with!”

  In retrospect, Bette Davis seemed to hold Fog Over Frisco in higher esteem than some of the other Warner products she was doing at the time. “I loved my part, William Dieterle directed me expertly, I looked fine, and was very pleased with the film,” she told fan magazine writer Katherine Albert. Davis’s opinion of Fog Over Frisco is puzzling in retrospect, for on reviewing it years later I found it standard Warners melodrama at the usual breakneck speed. The film is wholly undistinguished, and Davis isn’t on screen much; Margaret Lindsay and Donald Woods, ostensibly her supports, log more camera time.

  In this, Davis is a reckless society girl with an obvious death wish who enjoys engaging in illegal bond transactions with an underworld king (Irving Pichel) who runs a night spot. Lindsay, her stepsister, sets out to find out how deeply Davis is involved. It seems that the Davis character has also involved her fiancé, Lyle Talbot, in her malfeasances. When the nightclub operator learns she has attempted to betray him, he kills her, later kidnaps Lindsay, but receives his comeuppance in the end.

  These are the bare bones of the plot of Fog Over Frisco, and as noted before, there is nothing to distinguish it from a dozen other Warner products of its ilk. Davis’s high opinion of the film may be influenced by the fact that Tony Gaudio did photograph her flatteringly, and her wardrobe was becoming, but the Robert N. Lee and Eugene Solow screenplay, based on George Dyer’s original story, seem highly unworthy of Dieterle’s obviously infinite pains. Margaret Lindsay and Donald Woods come out well in the final result, and when told thirty years later that Davis held Fog Over Frisco in relatively high esteem, Lindsay, too, expressed her puzzlement. She told me:

  “I never understood why she took such a small part—she just wasn’t in evidence that much—and while I know she liked to play bad girls, this particular girl was not, in my opinion, all that interesting. I liked my part and was surprised that I got more to do than Bette, but I, for one, don’t look back on it as any landmark for me, her, or anyone else connected with it!”

  The critics at the time shared Lindsay’s view rather than Davis’s. “A veneer of theatricalism prevails throughout,” Variety said. “The story, in the way it’s brought to the screen, never quite strikes a convincing note.” Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times felt that the basic story lacked credibility.

  William Dieterle never held the picture in high esteem, claiming it was one of a series of trivial potboilers foisted on him by the studio in what he considered “that unfortunate era” before he finally won the “big” Warner subjects he felt he deserved.

  Even in material he considered drek, Dieterle could be a martinet in a European style that got on Davis’s nerves as much as Curtiz’s more vulgar, often scatalogical approach. This did not stop her from working well with him in what he called his “big” era later.

  Lyle Talbot in 1960 recalled Davis lost in a trance studying her script and practicing nuances of her speech and inflections “as if she had been handed a Shaw or Shakespeare assignment. Her absolute dedication was unnerving. Her self-involvement came on to me as a kind of selfishness—true, she worked well with other players and the crew, but I always felt her mind was solely on herself and the effect she was producing.”

  Talbot added, significantly, “I always felt she must be a tough woman to be married to.”

  7

  Of Human Bondage—and Recognition

  THE PICTURE THAT was to transform Davis’s life and career almost didn’t happen. In early 1934 Jack Warner absolutely refused to lend her out for the role of the slatternly, sadistic waitress, Mildred, in RKO’s production of Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage. For six months she begged him for the loanout; as she recalled, she’d show up at his office every morning “with the shoeshine boy.” Meanwhile she continued on the Warner chain gang with one mediocre role after another in execrable, slipshod, second-rate pictures. Wild with fury and frustration, she moved sullenly from set to set, doing her job, hunting frantically for
anything in the cardboard characters and scripts that she could develop into something real and human.

  Then, at long last, in the spring of 1934, two things happened that swung the balance in her favor. Jack Warner wanted RKO to lend him Irene Dunne for a muscial, Sweet Adeline. John Cromwell, who was to direct Of Human Bondage, urged producer Pandro Berman to offer Jack an exchange: Davis for Dunne. The second factor was Jack Warner’s reluctant but still admiring reaction to the rushes he had seen of Davis’s vicious, murderous Marie Roark in Bordertown. He told his associates that he felt Davis could handle Mildred and that while it was a gamble, if she made the grade in the role she would be more valuable to the studio—and so would Bordertown. He called her in, and to her indescribable joy, told her the loanout had been arranged. “The role may hurt you—the public may recoil from Mildred, associate her with you, and back off from you—but go and hang yourself if you must!” he growled. Shrewdly, he postponed Bordertown’s release for six months.

  John Cromwell, then, was the first director to showcase Davis in a major, blockbusting role. He had had extensive Broadway experience before he came to films in 1928 as actor, director, and producer, but gradually specialized in directing and by 1934 had built up a solid reputation as a fine technician and sensitive director of actors, as in Lionel Barrymore’s Sweepings (1933) and Irene Dunne’s The Silver Cord, made the same year. He had taken note of Davis’s unusual charisma in Cabin in the Cotton and Ex-Lady, among others, and felt she would be ideal for Mildred and would have the courage to play her without inhibition or punch-pulling. Again George Arliss worked behind the scenes to clinch the assignment for her, getting his friend Somerset Maugham to view, via prints shipped to England, the work done by Davis with Arliss. Maugham sent Berman his unqualified approval of Davis as Mildred.

  Maugham did not just go out of his way to please his friend Arliss or to get the ambitious young lady at Warners her crucial break. Of Human Bondage was a novel as close to his heart as, in a radically different context, David Copperfield had been to Charles Dickens. Both had put much autobiographical soul-searching into their books. Maugham, who suffered from a speech impediment from youth, had made his character, Philip, a club-footed cripple. Like Philip, he had undergone—more than once, in Maugham’s case—all the humiliations of unrequited love for an unworthy object—in Maugham’s instance, another man. It was this evocation of his own past that gave Of Human Bondage the bitter reality and authenticity that won it an enthralled readership.

  Screenwriter Lester Cohen made the transcription of Maugham’s autobiographical agony as accurate and true as the radically different cinematic medium permitted. Considering that he wound up with only 83 minutes in which to get across all the complexities of Maugham’s deeply felt novel, Cohen’s screenplay emerges commendably workmanlike.

  Philip Carey, Maugham’s thinly disguised alter ego, has abandoned painting in Paris to study medicine in London, if doomed to be a second- or third-rate artist, he is determined to become a first-rate doctor. In a tearoom he meets Mildred Rogers, a sluttily attractive but illiterate and surly waitress. He develops an obsession for her. Blind to her pathetic shortcomings of character and sadistic flirtatiousness, he pursues her, though she makes no bones about finding his crippled state repellent and rebuffs his romantic addresses. During the course of the action she jilts him for two men, a crass-spirited salesman who leaves her pregnant and deserts her and a more attractive medical student with whom she runs off. Meanwhile two warmly kind young women develop an interest in Philip, though he has been too wounded and distracted by Mildred to reciprocate. Also, his self-image has been so harmed that he does not recognize that their romantic interest in him is authentic.

  Still masochistically hung up on Mildred, Philip takes her in when she is down and out, and when he rebuffs the physical advances she makes as a sort of payment for his kindness, recognizing as he does that there is no affection or true commitment in them, she taunts him for his deformities, destroys his apartment, including the bonds that are putting him through medical school, and disappears yet again.

  Then two bright things happen for Philip. He receives an inheritance that will assure his future as a doctor, and he begins a wholesome relationship with a decent young woman. But he has not heard the last of Mildred. He learns that she is dying of tuberculosis in a charity ward. Her death frees him of his obsession, and he is able to go on to his real life, personally and professionally.

  Such is screenwriter Cohen’s boiled-down cinematic version of the Maugham novel which, to Cohen’s credit, captured all the psychological essentials of what Maugham was trying to say about the human bondage of unrequited obsession for an unworthy object.

  In 1968 John Cromwell, age seventy-nine, told me what he had seen in twenty-six-year-old Bette Davis, some thirty-four years before, that made him as anxious to cast her as Mildred as she was to play her. “Mildred was a role that many actresses of the time backed off from in horror. She was a slatternly sadist, unsympathetic in the extreme, and her clothing and her postures and her general look were all seedy, pathetic, and sleazy-looking in the way no nineteen thirty-four glamour girl would ever deign to approximate. Bette Davis didn’t give a damn about any of that! She wanted to give honest characterizations—unadorned, brutally true and honest, if possible—and at Warners they were dolling her up in blond wigs and fancy clothes and drowning her in glitz and schmaltz and gangster-action stuff and all the rest of it.

  “There was an actress under all that phony overlay and she knew it and I knew it and, to his credit, my producer, Pandro Berman knew it. So did Maugham. So did George Arliss.”

  Unhappy in her marriage, dissatisfied and angry about her nothing roles at Warners, Davis tackled Mildred with an intensity that astonished her co-workers. In time, it even astonished Leslie Howard, the film’s star. Howard, a major star in 1934, had taken Broadway by storm, played opposite such first ladies of the screen as Norma Shearer and Mary Pickford, and traveled first class all the way. A chronic womanizer, unfaithful to his long-suffering wife, the ethereal, poetic-looking Howard had done some hard living by 1934, when he was forty, but looked ten years younger, Dorian Gray style. He had not been keen on Davis’s assignment to Bondage. To him, this little blond creature, not very pretty nor sexually appealing (at least to his taste) seemed distinctly an also-ran.

  Patronizingly, Howard read books while she acted, feeding her line readings almost as an afterthought. Then he saw the rushes. Startled to realize that he was working with a first-class actress, a vivid original like no one he had ever encountered, Howard snapped to attention. The bored indifference in his eyes changed to concentrated intensity. Driven by professional jealousy, male prima donna that he was, Howard began to play back to her, as one demanding scene followed another. In some of them he was required to react with white-faced, cringing shock to her brutal, vulgar excoriations. What Howard did not realize (or, being a consummate professional, perhaps he did) was that in meeting her halfway, in listening, reacting, and playing back to her on her own level, he was enhancing Davis’s performance.

  On her end, Davis’s ego was affronted by Howard’s lack of sexual interest in her offscreen. Aware at first that he considered her just another conveyer-belt blonde nothing from the Warner sausage factory, she decided if the English Adonis didn’t want her sexually, she would whip him into respecting her professionally. In this latter aim she succeeded.

  Howard had originally been prejudiced against her because she was American. He asked Cromwell and Berman, with so many fine English actresses to pick from, what was so special about her? Why all this fuss about dragging this little nondescript creature over from Warners? They set him right on these points. No English actress would appear in a role so unflattering. And Davis, an authentic New England Yankee, was of English descent. And she had hired a Cockney servant, who stayed with her for eight weeks while Davis got the nuances down pat—she drove Ham up the wall by speaking in a Cockney accent even in bed. />
  But after seeing these rushes, Howard needed no further sales talks from anyone.

  There is a scene, later in Of Human Bondage, that has gone down in film history. An enraged Davis, humiliated by Howard’s rebuff of her crass physical advances, taunts him savagely. The dialogue (on her side), complete with her Cockney accent, is worth repeating:

  “Yew cad, yew dirty swine! I never cared for yew—not once! I was always making a fool of yuh! Yuh bored me stiff! I hated yuh! It made me sick when I had to let yuh kiss me! I only did it because yuh begged me. Yuh hounded me, yuh drove me crazy, and after yuh kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth! But I made up for it. For every kiss I had to laugh! We laughed at yuh! Miller and me! Griffith and me! We laughed at yuh because yuh were such a mug, a mug, a mug! You know what you are, you gimpy-legged monster? You’re a cripple, a cripple, a cripple!”

  In this scene, Davis offered a portrait of concentrated feminine viciousness so startling and electrically malevolent that it struck audiences dumb with shock. Artistically courageous, she refused to give Mildred any redeeming qualities, any phony Hollywood audience sympathy. Mildred was like a force of nature, lightninglike, a demon of hate and malevolence. With her unerring artist’s instinct, Davis knew that mature, responsive, sensitive audiences would sense the underlying bitterness, the deprivations, the kicking around Mildred had taken from a series of men, all of which had given her a contempt for the human race.

  When Philip first meets Mildred, Davis gets across her weariness from being on her feet all day, her bone-tiredness, her cynical distrust of every man who smiles at her. Confronted with the poetic, sensitive cripple, at first she doesn’t know what to make of him. Then her brutalized nature senses that this is a man who’s sweet on her, therefore vulnerable and pliable. Here is a man she can dominate, mistreat, humiliate, one who will come back for more. Above all, Davis’s Mildred sees in Howard’s Philip someone she can pay back, as a helpless, love-castrated symbol of the male sex, for all the mistreatment she has suffered from men all her life because of her poverty, her bottom-step caste. He is someone to use, to take advantage of. She cannot recognize his love as sincere, for he is not like any other man she’s met. To Davis’s Mildred, male tenderness is weakness; sensitivity, effeminate; decency, tame.