Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  During the filming Davis fell in love with handsome, aristocratic Franchot Tone, who had come to movies in 1932 from the stage. For some three years he had lent his superior talents to so-so leading-man roles at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and had appeared in pictures with Joan Crawford, whom he eventually married.

  The origin of the famous Bette Davis–Joan Crawford feud can be found in this man. By 1935, Tone had already won for himself an homme fatal reputation in New York, with a rumor that identified him as the father of a young married stage actress’s son—a son who grew up to become briefly a prominent film player before retiring into another profession. The similarities in physical appearance and acting styles were so pronounced that this unacknowledged son quit show business rather early in life. It was also said that when the actress’s husband found out the truth, he beat up both his wife and Tone. This was not the first, or the last, touch of melodrama in Tone’s life. Joan Crawford’s directors were shocked more than once to see Crawford arriving on the set with assorted bruises from quarrels with Tone. She finally divorced him in 1938 when she found him déshabillé with a young starlet in his MGM dressing room. In 1951, when he was forty-seven, Tone got his face beaten so thoroughly in a brawl with toughie actor Tom Neal over his third wife, Barbara Payton, that he had to have plastic surgery.

  In 1935, when Tone was thirty-one and Davis twenty-seven, she fell very much in love with him. He was not the handsomest actor in town—his head was oddly shaped and his features hardly of the sculptured kind—but he exuded a polished masculine aura and had a voice that drove women to distraction; it “sucked off the consonants and jerked off the vowels,” translation being that it was rich, deep, and attractively varied tonally.

  Joan Crawford, who married Tone before the release of Dangerous, was aware that things were heating up between Tone and Davis over on the Warner lot, but as she was busy winding up a picture at MGM, she was in no position to supervise the goings-on. Davis took full advantage of the situation.

  “She was hot for Tone; no question of that!” the film’s producer, Harry Joe Brown, later said. “They were all over each other on the set, and later in her dressing room. Davis was so careless (or maybe she was being a showoff) that she would leave the door ajar and one time I came by to talk about the new set we were striking and found them in, well, a very tight (translate that compromising) position. And when they saw me they didn’t seem to give a damn! I remember that Franchot just laughed, and told me to shut the door when I went out. I beat it out of there fast. Tone was just about to marry Joan Crawford, and Bette was still married to that jerk Ham Nelson, and, well, it was pretty thick.”

  Davis seemed to have little regard for the moral-turpitude clauses in her contract. She probably should have, since the Legion of Decency and the Hays Office at the time were riding fierce and high on the better-publicized personalities, and “romantic” episodes carried on too blatantly could mean the finish of a career.

  Speculation as to what Harry Joe Brown actually stumbled upon in Davis’s dressing room that day has its amusing aspects, as it was well known that one of Franchot Tone’s favorite sexual positions was “getting serviced”—or, more bluntly, fellated. In fact, that was what Joan Crawford reportedly found him enjoying when, three years later, she caught him with the starlet—and promptly filed for divorce.

  MGM executive Eddie Mannix, who knew Tone well, told me that Tone had confided jokingly that he liked to get fellated more often than not because it was one way to avoid getting a woman pregnant. “I had enough abortions and illegitimate pregnancies in New York to last me a lifetime,” Tone laughed. “A lot of truth is, as always, spoken in jest,” Mannix chuckled.

  Director Alfred E. Green opined that Tone, knowing he was a good actor, one of the best of the MGM stable, “resented being shunted to secondary status and discovered that the only way to be Top Man was in proving his sexual and romantic prowess with one dame after another.” Once, over a few drinks, he confided to Green that at Cornell, where he had maneuvered himself into the presidency of the Dramatic Club, he had been known as the “Campus Jack the Ripper.” “Of course the only ‘ripping’ I did was girls’ panties in the backseats of cars,” he grinned.

  So galling did he find the failure of MGM to acknowledge his talent with worthwhile starring parts that, according to Joan Crawford, he worked off his humiliation and despair by beating her up at home. “I put up with the beatings but the dressing-room infidelity was too much,” Joan later told Anita Loos.

  Luckily for Davis, Tone showed her only his romantic and sexual skills. It was a typical run-of-picture arrangement: For him, when it was over, it was over; for her, it was a keen regret. Going home to spineless Ham after a day of on- and off-screen romancing with dynamic Tone left her deeply frustrated.

  “I am positive that the mutual hatred between Davis and Crawford began then and there, with the Tone thing,” publicist Jerry Asher, a close friend of all three, told me in 1965. “Joan resented his fiddling with Bette, even after they married, and Bette resented the fact that Joan had established top priority in the Tone scheme of things. Of course nobody thought about the fourth party, poor Ham. What he thought was obviously of less than zero import!”

  But the Christmas audiences of 1935 found the Davis-Tone combination in Dangerous most kinetic, and quite a few fan letters came into Warners suggesting that they be reteamed. “But Joan was having none of that—she kept him strictly under wraps at MGM and in their Brentwood home,” Jerry said, “and Bette seethed, and not in silence, either!”

  According to Asher, who often swam and exercised with him, Tone was extraordinarily well endowed where it counted, even in a flaccid state. “His women must have found him a real jaw breaker,” Jerry laughed.

  9

  The First Oscar—and Its Aftermath

  DAVIS ROSE FROM a sickbed to attend the 1936 Academy Award dinner, at which she received her Oscar for Dangerous from the great D. W. Griffith, a special award winner himself on that occasion for his many masterpieces of the silent era.

  There was some criticism of her casual attire, considering the sumptuousness of the occasion. The male winner, Victor McLaglen (for The Informer) was all done up in white tie and tails, and all the women were in evening gowns, while Davis wore a plain print dress with unbecoming wide lapels. Ill-fitting, the kind of garment one would put on for a casual afternoon of shopping, it aroused the ire of Ruth Waterbury, now the editor of Photoplay.

  During the evening Ruth took Bette into the ladies’ room and let her have it for coming to the dinner dressed the way she was. Ruth told me she had felt Davis was slighting the Academy people for giving her a consolation prize for a picture of which she was not fond in place of one for the earned winner, Of Human Bondage. “I think she did it deliberately,” Ruth recalled. “It was her way, possibly unconsciously, of telling the Academy it wasn’t all that important in her scheme of things.” Davis later said her mother, too, reproved her for her attire. She remembered having nothing appropriate to wear, so she elected the print, though her mother was dressed magnificently. One wonders why Ruthie didn’t take charge before the event and insist that Davis be dressed as befit a winner, especially since they had dressed together that night.

  Davis accepted her belated recognition with modesty, saying the true winner for 1935 should have been Katharine Hepburn for Alice Adams. Her admiration for Hepburn’s appearance, her acting style, her manner of living, was always unbounded, though decades later, when Hepburn had garnered four Oscars to her two, Davis was to tone down her praise considerably.

  Davis opened the year 1936 with another lead opposite Leslie Howard.

  In retrospect, it is somewhat difficult to understand why Davis was so enthusiastic about winning the role of Gabrielle Maple in The Petrified Forest, the film version of the hit Broadway play starring Leslie Howard. The play also brought Humphrey Bogart, as coldblooded gangster Duke Mantee, into major prominence; he repeated his role onscreen, to added acclai
m.

  Probably the prestige elements of the play appealed to Davis, who reasoned, most likely that a less-than-strong role in a “prestige” production was still better than a lead in a turkey or an also-ran soaper. The role of Gabrielle, however, could have been played by a number of contract actresses—Margaret Lindsay, for instance, for she is a waitress at an Arizona gas station-restaurant who dreams of a painting career and a sojourn in Paris. It’s a dreamy role, free of any really strong confrontational situations. Had Davis not been so anxious for a “big” picture, she would doubtless have refused the part. Jack Warner realized this if she did not and was half-embarrassed, half-scornful when she thanked him profusely for Forest. “I think I like Bette better when she’s fightin’ and fussin’. Gratitude and sugariness are not her thing,” he remarked to Hal Wallis.

  Howard, of course, was in his element as the dreamy vagrant whose idealism and impracticality have condemned him to outsider status. And Bogart, as the gangster who kidnaps Davis, Howard, father Porter Hall, grandfather Charley Grapewin, and a couple of travelers and holds them prisoner, got more out of the film than anyone else; in fact, it led him to a Warner Brothers contract.

  Robert E. Sherwood’s rather turgid and pretentious play was revamped for the screen by Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves. Leo Forbstein’s orchestrations helped composer Bernhard Kaun (of whom not much was heard thereafter) get his musical effects across, and the location shooting and realistic gas-station set on a huge Warner stage created the right atmosphere, but there was no denying that the strong Mantee confrontations were a major selling point in both play and film.

  Davis sent out mixed signals over the years about her personal relationship with Howard during the making of this, their second film together. Certainly he had gained respect for her since Bondage, as she had given a number of striking performances, but according to Dick Foran and director Archie Mayo, he alternated between ignoring her and making crude passes. Davis claimed that in one romantic scene he actually nibbled on her arm while hugging her. She may have confused this with some acting ploy on his part, because Howard told others that she was not his type. Since he was a notorious womanizer (Olivia De Havilland was to have a time of it fending him off during the third Davis-Howard film, It’s Love I’m After, a year later), one is inclined to believe Howard’s side of the story.

  The poetic observations about outsiders and insiders aside, The Petrified Forest, both on stage and on film, seemed to demonstrate Sherwood’s philosophical and dramatic confusion more than anything else, and Davis’s evident efforts to bring Gaby Maple alive can be seen in the finished film. This was simply not the kind of forceful role in which she could shine; true, in earlier and later films she would play sensitive, warm women, but these roles had more depth and solidity written into them. Gaby is, after all, a dreamy young girl longing for space in which to actualize her poetic inspirations, and as written, it is a pallid supporting role for the two strongly written male characters.

  Davis, as usual, expressed her dislike for Bogart, whom she found crude, overbearing, and sullen, but this might have been a reflection of her annoyance that he had the better role. Dick Foran told me in 1964 that he felt very self-conscious in the role of her rejected suitor, a former football player. “I never felt I was a big-league actor,” he confessed, “and I was out of my league with Davis, Howard, and Bogart. I could tell that Bette was not her best self; she was ill a lot, and sustained some injuries on the gas-station set that threw her off form for days, and I just didn’t think she was all that happy with the picture. One reason was that she had a real craving to be front and center all the time, and she got shunted aside for the main action, I felt. True, she gets to hold Howard in his death scene after he was shot by Bogart, but he hogged that scene.”

  The New York Times tried to look at the bright side of Davis’s characterizational shift in Forest, but there is a strong hint of the patronizing and soothing in Frank Nugent’s observation that “Bette Davis . . . demonstrates that she does not have to be hysterical to give a grand portrayal.”

  Archie Mayo in 1966 remembered that Davis was difficult to direct because she was frustrated with Gaby’s essential passivity. “Passivity and sweetness were not that girl’s strong cards,” he laughed, “and after she got into the picture I think she realized that she was getting short-changed. She tried to blame me for it, but it was the screenwriters she should have gone after!”

  Davis found it humiliating that her next film should be called, of all things, Cream Princess. She thought the title vulgar and highly suggestive and railed that the Legion of Decency and the Production Code rushed in to censor everything else but didn’t raise an eyebrow at that title!

  The title was applicable, after a fashion, since it was based on a play by Michael Arlen about a cosmetics heiress (cream, you see) who is actually a waitress masquerading as the heiress because the firm’s publicity man thinks her well-publicized romantic adventures will help sales. She is interviewed by a no-nonsense newsman, George Brent, and persuades him to marry her so that he can finish his novel, long postponed for financial reasons, and she can be free of the importunings of such fortune hunters as impoverished Count Gulliano (Ivan Lebedeff). Of course in time her imposture is discovered, but the smitten Brent couldn’t care less and whisks her off to his mountain cabin so he can finish that novel and break her in to hausfrau ways.

  Alfred E. Green, constantly heckled and put-upon by the annoyed and frustrated Davis, made a noble effort to direct things for lively results, W. Franke Harling and Heinz Roemheld poured on a rich musical score that was better than the film deserved, and Charles Kenyon’s screenplay tried hard for wit and sass—but to no avail.

  Cream Princess eventually retitled by an embarrassed Warners to the more sanitary—but also inexplicable—The Golden Arrow, was a monumental dud. Again Davis fans cross-country wrote in to ask why she wasn’t given better material. Davis, in one of her characteristic fits of sudden, impulsive temper, even invaded Jack Warner’s office with a basket of such letters and dumped them on the floor in front of him. “Later rumors had it that I dumped them right on his desk,” she recalled to Ruth Waterbury in 1955, “but it wasn’t true. I felt the floor was equally effective. I think he even read some of them, too, not that that did me any good.”

  What made The Golden Arrow and its banal shenanigans even more humiliating was the fact that just six weeks before its release, she had won the Academy Award for Dangerous—and here she was, following that signal triumph with one of the most banal, silly, trivial pictures of her career.

  “The Golden Arrow was definitely one of the deciding factors in my Big Revolt Against Warners later in 1936,” she said later. “I figured that if after all this time, Arrow was the best I could get, some drastic measures were being called for.”

  As usual, the Davis-Brent scenes were acted with great bravura and dispatch and a warm simpatico that glowed from the screen. “If only the dialogue and situations had supported them, but they didn’t!” the San Francisco Examiner critic lamented.

  Motion Picture Herald tried to be kind and tactful—to Davis as well as the picture—in its review, but the between-the-lines alarm and concern for the ever-brightening star is apparent: “In her first motion picture since winning the Academy Award for the best performance of 1935, Bette Davis departs abruptly from the dramatic role and undertakes a straight comedy characterization heavily underscored with romance with the same brisk manner and swift utterance that has marked her other work. . . . The story is actionful and swift-moving and at no point approaches the serious.”

  Davis was also disappointed, during the picture, in George Brent’s continuing lack of responsiveness or, perhaps, prudence. His standard putdown, circa 1936, was “You’re a married woman, Bette.”

  In her autobiography Davis refers to the ill-fated Satan Met a Lady thus: “When the company scheduled [the film], a Dashiell Hammett remake that was not to achieve any quality until John Huston directed
it years later under the title The Maltese Falcon, I was so distressed by the whole tone of the script and the vapidity of my part that I marched up to [Jack Warner’s] office and demanded that I be given work that was commensurate with my proven ability.” Put off—for the time being—by more of Jack’s promises, she reluctantly proceeded with the picture.

  Satan Met a Lady went through three titles before it settled in: The Man in the Black Hat, Hard Luck Dame, and Men on Her Mind. It had been made under its original title, The Maltese Falcon, for the first time in 1931, with Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as the Mystery Woman. (Decades later it was shown on television under the title Dangerous Female, so as to avoid confusion with the 1941 version.) In 1936 the Davis-William version, with its endless title changes, was made. Then in 1941, John Huston’s masterpiece clinched Humphrey Bogart’s superstardom and won added plaudits for Mary Astor, who won a supporting Oscar that year for her role in Davis’s The Great Lie.

  Appearing with Davis and William was Alison Skipworth, who played the role that “Fat Man” Sidney Greenstreet later made immortal—an interesting characterizational sex change. A ram’s horn encrusted with priceless gems was the pièce de résistance instead of the legendary falcon that figured in the other two versions. Marie Wilson was given full rein in one of her standard comedy turns as Sam Spade’s devoted and protective secretary. Warren William was not too felicitously cast in the role that Bogart later made his own, and his Sam Spade (renamed Ted Shane in Satan Met a Lady) lacks the realistic toughness and cynicism that Bogart so expertly limned. Davis’s role was badly written and poorly motivated, and her comings and goings seem erratic and confusing. One bright note for Davis, however: Warren William had obviously lost interest in her and addressed hardly ten words to her throughout the shooting, as she later, half-ruefully, half-relievedly recalled. “Of course I was twenty-eight years old by then,” she laughed self-deprecatingly, “and everyone knew he liked them really young and really fresh!”