Many have wondered how Davis got Mildred’s character across as convincingly. Her life, they reasoned, had always been protected: She had the safety of a contract while others starved at the depths of the Depression; she had a mother who had protected her at every point from the harsher realities; she was safely married, after twenty-four years of prim virginity, to a “nice young man” who seemed harmless. What they failed to see was the enormous reservoir of anger Davis had stored up over many years: anger at the father who had deserted her; anger at the poverty that had forced her mother to work so hard; anger at the Warner overlords who frustrated her best career instincts; and, the year she made Of Human Bondage, anger at her husband and her mother, for forcing her to abort two babies “so as not to deflect your career energies, Bette.” All that anger she concentrated in Mildred.
She also drew upon her sense-memory—of the hours she had spent as a waitress at school in order to earn money, of her envy of girls who had ample allowances and a solicitous mother and father. And as Mildred made Philip pay for all the indignities men had rained upon her, so Davis made Howard pay for the deserting father, the tyrannical studio overlord, the weak husband who had failed in his traditional role.
The result of all this was a performance that debuted at Radio City Music Hall on June 28, 1934, to critical acclaim and audience shock—shock that evolved, in short order, into a half-horrified, half-admiring awareness of an exciting new star, one of an entirely different order and makeup—an authentic original.
Davis always remembered the reactions of Ham and Ruthie when they came home after seeing a preview of the film. They entered the house, she recalled, in stunned silence, and when she pressed them for their reaction they told her the role would either make her or break her.
They didn’t have to wait long for the answer to that.
The critics outdid themselves in superlatives. They noted that she didn’t care how she looked; her clothes were dirty and torn; her badly applied makeup made her look like a cheap slattern; her walk was a defeated slouch.
One of the most salient examples of Davis’s uncompromising realism is a scene at the end of the picture, when Philip discovers her in the last stages of tuberculosis. She looks so horrifying in that scene that children and sensitive adults in the audience put their heads down behind the seats. Her eyes are deeply shadowed, her face gray and wan, her mouth twisted by disease and suffering, hate, malevolence, and frustration. It is a look of corruption and rot, the look of a partially decomposed corpse. Only Davis would have dared to look like that in glamour-silly, conventional 1934. Only a genius could have gotten away with it. And she did.
Some critics missed the point and accused her of overplaying Mildred. John Cromwell told me: “When it came to these final, ultimate, crucial scenes, I let Bette have her head; I trusted her instincts. A director can guide—but the artist has to dredge up truth from within herself. And that is what Bette gave us in Of Human Bondage—the truth, which in life is often just that—a brutal, horrible overstatement. Have people not written that life is stranger than fiction—and even more overstated? Well, that’s what Bette gave us, in that picture!”
Life said of Davis’s Mildred: “It is perhaps the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress.” A respectful and surprised Film Weekly reviewer wrote: “Few people realized that she had the ability to understand and interpret the role so successfully.”
Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times topped all other critical aces, writing: “An enormously effective portrayal is that of Bette Davis as Mildred Rogers. . . . at the first [Radio City Music Hall] showing yesterday of this picture, the audience was so wrought-up over the conduct of this vixen that when Carey finally expressed his contempt for Mildred’s behavior, applause was heard from all sides.” Hall licked his chops over the “climactic episode, which recalls an incident in Kipling’s The Light That Failed. This sorry specimen of humanity slashes Carey’s efforts at art, destroys his medical books and furniture, and even burns his bonds and private papers, leaving the apartment as though it had been struck by a tornado!”
If Davis had expected to get the Ruth Chatterton star treatment back at Warners, she was speedily disillusioned. It was back to the salt mines and the drek, to her continued anger and frustration. Later, when she was being noised about for an Academy Award nomination, the powers at Warners told their people to vote for other actresses—her hit was made outside the home lot, why let RKO get any breaks? The three 1934 nominations—Norma Shearer in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Grace Moore in One Night of Love, and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night—did not include Davis, who reflected bitterly that Columbia had wanted to borrow her for the Colbert role. (Many years later, Davis would triumph in a role that Colbert bowed out of because of an accident. Fate, unpredictable and quixotic as always, made eventual amends.)
There was so much public anger over the slight against Davis that a write-in campaign was begun for her. The result was that, by missing out, Davis garnered more publicity for what many considered the best actress’s performance in 1934 than Colbert racked up as the eventual winner. This resulted in Davis getting, for the 1935 Dangerous, the first of a series of legendary “consolation prizes”—an Oscar for a performance in a film from a previous year that had somehow been forgotten. Also, the Academy rules were changed to allow for a more authentic expression of the industry’s will at Oscar time, with Price-Waterhouse delegated to assure correct and authentic vote tabulations.
There has been much debate as to whether Bette Davis dubbed the Academy Award “Oscar” because the statuette had a backside just like Ham’s, whose middle name was Oscar.
In the course of researching this book a little-known fact has emerged that bears further exploration—an instance that seems not to have appeared in previous books on Bette Davis. In the May 1935 Photoplay magazine story, “The Girl They Tried to Forget,” Kirtley Baskette reported, “Hollywood championed [Davis] so vigorously [for the 1934 award] that for a while the whole town seemed to be one giant indignation meeting. Editorials, articles, telegrams, telephone calls bombarded the austere Academy until, I am sure, like the bewildered author in Once in a Lifetime, its members concluded that ‘It couldn’t all be a typographical error.’” Even Baskette’s postman, he wrote, thought the Academy’s slight was “a darn outrage,” and that Baskette ought to have Photoplay “give ’em the devil!” The little-known fact was Baskette’s assertion that by the spring of 1935, the Academy had given Davis a “belated” award, a “special citation.” If this is so, then Davis had kept this recognition quietly hidden away somewhere.
Back at Warners from RKO, Davis was handed another “sausage.” Housewife was a picture that Davis absolutely despised, before, during, and after appearing in it, and for many years thereafter she took the name of Housewife in vain, along with director Alfred Green and screenwriters Robert Lord and Lillie Hayward. Her dissatisfaction may also have been due to the fact that the usually dependable Orry-Kelly must have been on mental furlough when he designed her costumes for this, and a cameraman with whom she seldom worked, William Rees, lighted her rather poorly and made her eyes bulge and her jaw stick out more sternly than usual.
Frank S. Nugent in The New York Times confirmed her opinion of the hapless Housewife as he enraged her with such observations as:
“A characteristic of a poor boxer is that he telegraphs his punches. In Housewife the dramatic punches are not merely telegraphed, but radioed. And the most unexpected element of the film is the bewildering regularity with which the unexpected fails to happen. . . . Mr. Brent and Miss Dvorak do as well as anyone might expect, but Miss Davis is a trifle too obvious as the siren.”
Housewife, which I reviewed over fifty years later, is every bit the mess everyone claimed it was. It contains a grab bag of every 1934 Warner cliché conceivable. The errant husband (Brent) neglects his wife (Dvorak) for a sexy former girlfriend (Davis). The husband is given his comeuppance when he acci
dentally injures his little son, who winds up in the hospital. After some suspense, the boy turns out to be okay. Wife is hurt because she has helped her husband to his success and now he is out on the town with swinger Davis. She takes her revenge by seeing John Halliday, one of her husband’s clients. Finally, the husband realizes that his ad agency success is due to his wife. All principals end up in court where the husband sees the light. Exit siren, back to the little woman, and so forth.
Davis pours it on thick as the would-be home-wrecker, acting with more careless obviousness than was her usual wont (one wonders where director Alfred Green was during her apparently self-directed excesses). Brent and Dvorak are reasonably on top of things, but the experienced character actor John Halliday steals whatever there is to steal as the fourth member of the romance ring.
George Brent’s marriage to Ruth Chatterton came apart the year Housewife was released, and Davis seemed to be living offscreen her role of home-breaking siren now that George was about to join the legions of the free. In reality, she did not break up the marriage and Chatterton was certainly not anyone’s idea of a housewife!
During Housewife, according to Alfred Green, Brent was easing out of the Chatterton marriage as gracefully as possible, and while he continued having affairs with unknowns who could be kept at a distance, the upfront spectacle of co-star Davis following him back to his dressing room and maneuvering herself next to him for lunch in the commissary unnerved him somewhat—especially as he knew Ham Nelson’s temper tantrums by reputation. Davis claimed it took her until the late 1930s to get Brent interested in her, so her frustration over his lack of response must have given her psychic overload during the making of the ill-fated Housewife.
In January 1935, Jack Warner finally released Bordertown, the picture Davis made just before Of Human Bondage.
Bordertown stands out among the standard Davis-Warner products of the time because in it she is given the opportunity to act. It is the picture that decided Jack Warner, once and for all, to let Davis take the role of Mildred in Of Human Bondage, because, along with his executives, he could not help but be impressed with what she did as Marie Roark, the cheap-minded, sluttish, sex-starved wife of a fat, messy casino owner in a Mexican border town.
It is a mystery why Bordertown was held for release until six months after Of Human Bondage, which debuted in June 1934. According to director Archie Mayo, Jack Warner intuitively knew Bondage would send Davis back to his studio a more important name, and Bordertown, in which she also had a strong role, would make a worthy follow-up (and this despite the film that fell between, the abysmal Housewife).
Bordertown is actually Paul Muni’s film, for it showcases him vividly as an ambitious Mexican-American who takes a job in Eugene Pallette’s casino–night spot after encountering racial discrimination and ridicule in his law practice. He helps Pallette make the venture a success, and then scornfully rebuffs Pallette’s wife, Davis, when she sets her sights on him. In a famous and, at the time, uniquely conceived murder scene, Davis lets the garage door close on her drunken husband, asphyxiating him with carbon monoxide fumes. Later, she falsely implicates Muni in the murder because she is jealous of his attentions to society girl Margaret Lindsay.
In this scene, Davis elected to demonstrate advancing mental illness while on the witness stand with subtle eye movements and facial tension. Archie Mayo, who liked his melodrama hot and hollery, argued with her about this, as did Jack Warner. They wanted her to go all-out hysterical and chew the scenery, feeling it was what audiences expected of a “loony,” but Davis challenged them to let the scene stand at a theater preview; if the audience didn’t like it, she’d do a retake. The audience liked it, and the scene survived.
Viewed many years later, the scene seems truncated and inadequate. Davis is not given enough dialogue and business to make it effective, partly the fault of Mayo and the screenwriters, Lillie Hayward and Manuel Seff. It seems to be over in a flash, without natural progression or development. A compromise between the two approaches would have been most effective.
It is in the earlier scenes, in which Davis strides about, wild with frustration over Muni’s unresponsiveness, sassy to her hapless servant, enraged over his cold contempt when he discovers she has literally killed for him, that she gets across all the manic viciousness that makes her so arresting. The mystery is if Jack Warner was that impressed with her after viewing Bordertown that he let her go over to RKO for Bondage, then why did he throw her back into gutless drek—with a few exceptions—for the next two years?
This was Davis’s first picture with Paul Muni, a brilliant actor of consummate ego and authority. He was a product of the Yiddish stage, and had later triumphed on Broadway. Muni prepared his roles with great care, never hesitating to disguise his appearance and personality in order to create an authentic character. Painstaking, thorough, filled with the genius that best expresses itself by taking infinite pains, Muni was trying to get across the frustrations and strivings of an ambitious Mexican-American determined to rise above his origins and do his people proud.
It annoyed him no end to be up against Davis, an artist of quite a different stripe, hell-bent on impressing her vivid personality and manic intensity on her characterization. In a sense he had met his match, and Muni resented the competition. Worse, she forced him to play second fiddle because of her vivid interpretation. He told Warner he would never act with her again. “She’s too hoggy, too egocentric, she doesn’t stay within the framework of her role.” Warner saw through his jealousy and insecurity and discounted his remarks. “I mean it—no more pictures with Davis!” Muni yelled. It was to be five years before their names appeared together above a picture’s title, and by then both had ascended to the top rungs of stardom. But they did not appear together in a single scene!
Meanwhile, in January 1935, the picture was playing all across the country, and Muni and his supportive, sustaining wife, Bella, simmered and seethed over such rave reviews as that from The New York Times’s Andre Sennwald, who wrote, “[Davis] plays the part with the ugly, sadistic, and utterly convincing sense of reality which distinguished her fine performance in Of Human Bondage.”
It was Bella Muni who thought up her husband’s answer to this. He went in to Jack Warner and asked for more money and better roles. His overcompensative determination in the face of the Davis’s “threat” brought him, within two years, an Academy Award.
The grosses from Bordertown and the many plaudits for her performance in it having convinced Warners once again she was ready for the “star treatment,” Davis was billed above the title for The Girl From 10th Avenue. For the second time, the gesture was premature because the 69-minute vehicle trotted out to support her restored “status” wasn’t up to the fine and sincere acting she poured into every frame.
This time she is a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, New York’s 10th Avenue, who encounters a society lawyer, Ian Hunter, when he is about to make a scene outside the church where his former fiancée (Katherine Alexander) is marrying another man (Colin Clive). Several plot twists later, Davis marries him on the rebound, they are living in her apartment, and with the help of her ex-Floradora Girl landlady, Alison Skipworth, she is learning the manners of a lady, in preparation for her move to Park Avenue.
But fickle Miss Alexander tries to lure Hunter back, citing her wedding to Clive as a mistake, and Davis decides to make a fight for him, for she has fallen in love. The picture ends with Clive finally convincing Hunter to stay with wife Davis.
Davis had two interesting leading men in The Girl From 10th Avenue. Ian Hunter was a handsome, if placid, British actor who had fought in World War I, made it on the London stage, then went on to Hollywood. He specialized in dancing attendance on the assorted love problems of such soap tragediennes as Kay Francis, and while Davis liked him and appeared with him in more films, she found him too tame for her tastes and failed to reciprocate his obvious interest, to his continuing chagrin. Hunter took his rejection with civ
ilized restraint, which could not be said for the other man in 10th Avenue, Colin Clive, who also developed an interest in her that was more neurotic than genuine. Davis found his advances harder to repel. Clive, also a former English stage actor, had made a hit in the World War I film, Journey’s End, but soon found himself relegated to vividly unwholesome roles in such movies as Frankenstein and Mad Love. In the former he was the scientist who conjures up the monster, in the latter he was the wild-eyed pianist who is given the hands of a murderer after his own are injured and amputated. Roles like these suited Clive far better than soapy romances. He was handsome, but his tense, on-the-edge manner made women in the audience nervous. Like another brother-under-the-skin, Monroe Owsley, he died in 1937, of alcoholism. A tormented and confused bisexual, he had humiliating homosexual episodes which left him demoralized, and as Ian Hunter later recalled, “Colin was a fine actor but he made everyone around him nervous—nervous as hell! One didn’t want to be in the vicinity for what seemed an inevitable blowup, breakdown, or both.”
While Hunter plied Davis with civilized English tea sessions during breaks on the set, Clive, as director Alfred Green recalled, would go off to a far, dark corner and brood and glower. Davis admitted in later years that she found Clive arresting if physically unattractive, at least to her, and he certainly matched her intensity on screen, “though his,” as she put it, “was an altogether different ballgame.” Offscreen, his advances left her feeling “creepy.”
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