Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  The plot of the 1936 version is confusing, at best: Valerie (the Davis character) winds up murdering Skipworth’s contact man so she can get the ram’s horn. She later prevents William’s Spade from picking up the $10,000 reward by turning herself in to the train’s washroom attendant, in the hope of benefiting herself. When Jack Warner saw the results (poorly directed by William Dieterle, who couldn’t make head nor tail of the assorted shenanigans) he found the plot so confusing that he ordered a reediting by Warren Low, which held up the picture’s release by some months.

  The young New York Times critic Bosley Crowther (in later years one of my guides and mentors) certainly spelled it all out clearly and concisely in a pricelessly accurate—and acid—review that is worth quoting at some length, nailing down as it does the assorted ineptitudes of Satan Met a Lady and Davis’s unjust treatment by all hands. Crowther wrote:

  “So disconnected and lunatic are the picture’s ingredients, so irrelevant and monstrous its people, that one lives through it in a constant expectation of seeing a group of uniformed individuals appear suddenly from behind the furniture and take the entire cast into protective custody. There is no story, merely a farrago of nonsense representing a series of practical studio compromises with an unworkable script.”

  Bosley continued: “Without taking sides in a controversy of such titanic proportions, it is no more than gallantry to observe that if Bette Davis had not effectually espoused her own cause against the Warners recently by quitting her job, the Federal Government eventually would have had to step in and do something about her. After viewing Satan Met a Lady, all thinking people must acknowledge that a ‘Bette Davis Reclamation Project’ (BDRP) to prevent the waste of this gifted lady’s talents would not be a too-drastic addition to our various programs for the conservation of natural resources.”

  Bos Crowther was thirty-one when he wrote those words. Years later, a ripe sixty, he recalled the horror he and his critical confreres felt when Satan premiered in New York. “God, it brought out the knight to the rescue in all of us males and the protective mother in the female reviewers. We all got together and sent the notices en masse to England and Davis.”

  To Jack Warner’s surprise, the Davis-in-rebellion infection spread to others involved with the ill-fated project. Warren William, a proficient actor who had hitherto been a Warner “reliable” (meaning he’d take any piece of garbage thrown him by the studio uncomplainingly), stood up to Jack Warner like a man one day and told him “no more!” Warner could break his contract, put him on suspension, do what he wanted, but he, too, would not see his talent so “monstrously debased and perverted,” as he grandiloquently put it. Next, director William Dieterle marched up to the inner sanctum and declared he would join Davis as far away as England himself, if necessary, if the talents he had honed so carefully in Europe and America were not put to more felicitous use. “Christ, that bitch has started an epidemic of rebellion!” Warner groaned.

  10

  The Great Rebellion—and the Return

  WITH SATAN MET a Lady finally in the can, Davis went back to Laguna Beach and waited tensely for Jack Warner’s next move. It came soon enough. She was sent a script called God’s Country and the Woman, about a male lumberjack and a female lumberjack who set up rival lumber companies and spend their time alternately feuding and romancing. Warner sent a note adding that the film would be directed by William Keighley, would co-star one of her favorite men, George Brent, and moreover would be in Technicolor. Since color was still in its primitive stages in 1936, Davis was unimpressed. She refused the role and went on an extended strike. Her instinct proved correct. When God’s Country finally debuted on the screen later that year it was a so-so movie, and one reviewer noted that George Brent’s hair, in the sloppy color process, looked quite purplish!

  As an added inducement to do God’s Country, Jack Warner had called Davis into his office and mentioned a new novel by Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, which he was optioning. Not realizing that she was turning down one of the future great sellers of 1936, and disenchanted with Jack’s promises and false alarms, she snorted. “I’ll bet that’s a pip!” It was a reaction that she was to regret for years to come.

  Back to her fortress on Laguna Beach she went and proceeded to reject several more scripts. Warners finally put her on a three-month suspension, and she began giving out such items to the press as: “If I don’t fight now for stronger roles in better pictures, there will be nothing left of my career. I haven’t fought my way this far just to gradually fade away in a welter of mediocrity!”

  While she sulked in Laguna, off salary and ever more tense and angry, Davis got an offer from a British producer. Ludovico Toeplitz had been born in Italy and migrated to England, where Alexander Korda had discovered him and had hired him as associate producer for such films as the Charles Laughton Oscar-winning smash, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and the Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.–Elisabeth Bergner, Catharine the Great (1934). Both films had been shown widely in America, and Davis was impressed with them. Toeplitz later went on to produce his own films, including a Maurice Chevalier vehicle, Beloved Vagabond. He had watched Davis’s well-publicized problems with Warners from afar, and offered her the equivalent in American dollars of $50,000 to star in I’ll Take the Low Road, which he planned to shoot in England and Italy with Douglass Montgomery as her co-star (thus reuniting her with the one-time “Kent Douglass” of the 1931 Waterloo Bridge). Toeplitz promised her top quality, careful direction, solid production values, and above all, script approval.

  Davis, who had been turned down in her earnest request to play the Olivia De Havilland role in Anthony Adverse—the lavish, tasteful, and expensive costumer starring Fredric March—consulted with Ruthie and Ham about the Toeplitz offer. Anxious to get back to work, excited about making her first trip abroad to new people and new surroundings and what she told the press was “a potential new start, a clean slate,” Davis rushed ahead without getting wise legal counsel, signed the contract, and in the summer of 1936 set sail for England with Ham.

  Once he had her in London, Toeplitz told Davis that he wanted their association to be an extended one, and offered her yet another $50,000 to follow the picture with Montgomery with the lead opposite Maurice Chevalier in a picture to be made in France. Excited and happy, Davis agreed to this, also. Toeplitz took her and Ham on the town to celebrate. They had a pleasant meeting with Montgomery, and Davis, who had always liked the handsome actor, told him it would be thrilling to play opposite him. This euphoric period of merry socializing and happy plans was presently interrupted by word from Warners’ British lawyers.

  Davis was informed that she faced an injunction from Warners forbidding her to work for any other company. The terms of her original contract were read to her; she was in a legal straitjacket. Not satisfied with long-distance dealings and anxious for a pleasant European vacation with his wife, Ann, Jack Warner proceeded to join everybody in England, where he intensified his demands. Toeplitz put up a weak bluff at first, declaring to Jack, on advice of his barristers, that Davis was in a foreign country now, and American contracts were invalid. Soon the quarrels grew more personal, as the feisty Toeplitz lectured the bristly Jack Warner on the low quality of most of his films and his “stupid” waste of a “great star’s” talents in mediocre fare such as The Golden Arrow. The result was that an angry Jack Warner, now really out for blood, went into the English courts hell-bent on forcing Davis to come back home and adhere to the terms of her Warners deal.

  Warner hired Sir Patrick Hastings, one of the sharpest legal eagles in Britain, paid him an enormous sum in advance, and urged him to present a watertight case. Davis’s counsel, Sir William Jowett, recommended to her by Toeplitz and Montgomery, began preparing her defense, but he was expensive—more expensive than her limited funds could stand. Sir William, who was wealthy, offered to give her a reduced fee or do the work on faith or credit, whichever she preferred. Pride forced her to pay him a fee she cou
ld ill afford—$10,000.

  Davis settled down on a country estate near London and waited. After remaining with her a while, Ham returned to the United States to grab any musician’s job he could find, given the drain on her finances. Davis took long walks in the English countryside, smoked endlessly, and tried to follow as best she could Sir William’s hair-splitting legal arguments.

  Soon it was time for court, and Sir William proved no match for Sir Patrick Hastings. Flush with the small fortune Warner Brothers had paid him and fully aware there might be more profitable Warner business for him in England if he delivered the verdict Jack demanded, Hastings proceeded to portray Bette Davis as a naughty, spoiled girl who had been raised to fame in America and was being well paid and pampered by a great studio while all around her people were barely surviving during a depression.

  Davis countered that it wasn’t money she wanted, or rather more of it, as Sir Patrick had snidely implied, but a chance to do roles that would fulfill her acting talents, and in pictures that had at least some pretensions to quality and good workmanship. The battle raged back and forth, and the British press was full of it, day after day. In America the case was also followed closely, and many Hollywood performers awaited the outcome in the hope Bette might achieve a pioneering breakthrough as the first actor to defy a great studio—and win. Of course Jimmy Cagney had been doing variations on this for some years, but he was a big star, so he fought on more equal terms than the contract-imprisoned Davis, who had not yet achieved major stature. Performers in America wanted to know if the average actor could get away with it. The answer turned out to be no.

  In presenting his final judgment, the justice presiding over the case declared that Davis had violated her contract, and that Warners had adhered to it. He curtly reminded Davis that she was well paid, had been given a measure of fame many other young women would have envied (essentially parroting Sir Patrick Hastings’s and Jack Warner’s shrewdly presented arguments), and should stop being naughty and rebellious. He told her to go back to Hollywood and work out her legally binding contract. He brushed off Davis’s protestations about the unsuitable roles because he felt that artistic differences over the quality of product were too nebulous and too much a matter of individual opinion to be within the province of the court. As further punishment, Davis was charged with Warners’ court fees as well as her own, for having, he implied, made a nuisance of herself and wasted the court’s time.

  Infuriated, Davis wrote the justice a letter explaining her side but the judge dismissed it as “inadmissible evidence” and cited his decision as irreversible. Photos of Davis taken by the British tabloids as she went in and out of court show a wan, gray, thin young woman with weariness and woe written all over her face. When she contemplated the legal costs, which ran up to forty-five thousand dollars total, her despair was deep indeed.

  Then, once again, her good and wise friend George Arliss asked her to tea. She poured out all her frustrations and miseries to her kind and understanding fellow artist, telling him she was twenty-eight years old and would be “an old woman” by the time her contract ended, and what then? Arliss listened, and then gave her some good advice: “Go back to Hollywood and accept the decision, my dear,” he counseled. “Be a graceful loser, a sportsmanlike one. Your prospects may be brighter than you think.” Reluctantly she agreed, and set sail for America and Hollywood.

  Soon after, Arliss, who was now making films in England and would never again make a Hollywood film, went to see Jack Warner.

  Jack, who continued to feel enormous respect for Arliss’s great artistry, listened with an open mind to what Arliss said, which was, in effect, that Warner had in Davis a great potential artist who was more than entitled to the prestige treatment. Surely if he could give class treatment to glamour stars like Kay Francis, whose acting skills were limited, he could do the same for a gifted young woman like Davis who had been heavily favored for the 1934 Oscar for Bondage, and who had won it in 1935 for Dangerous. Build her up gradually, Arliss counseled, find the best vehicles you can for her, and then watch her go! Arliss clinched the argument for profit-minded Jack Warner by reminding him that well-made pictures with prestigious stars did make money—lots of it—if the overall approach was right.

  That November of 1936 Davis returned to America. Downhearted and tired, unaware of Arliss’s earnest advice to Warner and the producer’s assurances that he would pay more careful attention to the career fortunes of “a potentially great star,” as Arliss had dubbed her, she stopped off briefly in New York, where Ruthie and Ham awaited her. Ham told her he hoped to get more band work and was cutting records that might go over; he felt that for the moment New York was the place for him, especially in view of their tight finances. Ruthie backed him up. Agreeing without protest, Davis made the long three-day train trip across the country, avoiding reporters in Chicago and other major cities. When she and Ruthie arrived back at Warners, she was heartened by the understanding and cordial atmosphere she found on all sides. Then Jack Warner (who had preceded her there) called her into his office, smilingly told her bygones were bygones, that he was assuming the major portion of the legal costs, and that he had a new, stronger picture for her—Marked Woman. “In a way I had won,” she said later. “Jack had seen my point.”

  A number of Davis-watchers have been mystified by her enthusiasm over the first picture assigned her by Warners after her return from England. Marked Woman, based on the notorious Lucky Luciano case (he was indicted for criminal activities, including prostitution), was just another tough gangster drama, directed by action-genre specialist Lloyd Bacon. Seen fifty years later, it seems hurried, gauche, perfunctory—a sloppy, truncated Hollywood version of the prostitution racket. Due to Production Code restrictions, it wasn’t allowed the honesty the subject required, and the prostitutes were depicted as clip joint “hostesses,” a pack led by Davis, the most intelligent, enterprising, and outspoken of the lot, which included Lola Lane, Isabel Jewell, Rosalind Marquis, Mayo Methot, and Jane Bryan, a veteran of one picture, in her first of several with Davis.

  In this, Davis played Bryan’s protective big sister; Bryan comes from a convent school, gets involved in the shady doings, and is killed, causing Davis to turn on gang boss Eduardo Ciannelli, whose henchmen mark up her face with a double cross on the cheek and assorted bruises. Later, Davis and her girls turn state’s evidence for special prosecutor Humphrey Bogart, and Ciannelli and his crooked vice operations are brought to bay. Ciannelli is later warned that if he takes revenge on the girls, he will forfeit his chance of a parole later.

  Bacon rushed through all of this in 96 minutes. The screenplay by Robert Rosson and Abem Finkel drew heavily on the records of the Luciano trial with its horrific revelations of criminal misconduct and the tyranny of the rackets, but there was a taste of Hollywoodish unreality, and even—horrors—soap!, to the proceedings.

  Part of the problem is Davis’s performance. She is overemphatic and studied, and talks and comports herself with a literacy and ladylikeness that is out of sync with her crude character. Her class and evident intelligence throw the picture off balance; it is as if she has wandered in from a drawing room exercise or a costume drama, at least in manner and spirit. Marked Woman was the most blatant evidence she had yet given in films that her talent and evolving technique far surpassed actioners and gangster epics, and belonged in serious drama and literate, intelligent film fare.

  The other girls—notably Jewell and Methot, who was being courted by her future husband, Humphrey Bogart, during the shooting—are more completely in character than Davis is, and convincingly portray their humble backgrounds and the vulnerability of their pathetic circumstances. Ciannelli, who had all but stolen Winterset the year before with his vicious portrait of an outlaw, is even more sinister in Marked Woman, getting across all the brutality and amorality of the Luciano character with poisonous exactitude.

  One other person besides Davis was out of character in Marked Woman. Her co-star, Humph
rey Bogart, played a virtuous special prosecutor—modeled after Tom Dewey—with a mealymouthed unctuousness and gentleness that went against the persons he had created since his vicious Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. When Bogart lectures Davis about what a bad girl she is, there is an almost comic sense of incongruity—he seems to belong on her side, outdoing her in malfeasances.

  The scene in which the gangsters mark Davis up to teach her a lesson has been overrated, because she is not actually seen during the attack; one of her girls hears her screams through a door. In the next scene, she is bandaged up in the hospital.

  Davis made much of the fact that she went to a doctor to get made up to appear the way a girl beaten and scarred would actually look. The director, cinematographer, and Jack Warner himself tried to make her look prettier so as not to shock cinema audiences, but she went before the camera as she wished to, and made her point successfully. In actuality, she doesn’t look that bad, and many a picture since—and even before—has presented deformity, scarring, and maiming far more graphically, so it seems like fuss and feathers and a tempest in a teapot. But it did, in long-gone 1937, create some excitement among fan-mag and tabloid writers and even the general press.

  Davis had discovered Jane Bryan in a little-theater version of a popular early-thirties Broadway success, Green Grow the Lilacs, and had admired her fresh-faced, individualistic charm so much that she got her signed to a Warners contract. She treated Bryan as a younger sister from then on—some said as a daughter, too—and later married one of her husbands at Bryan’s house. Bryan was never happy in front of the camera (“I was in terror most of the time,” she later confessed) and though she was a gifted actress, she eventually married Justin Dart in 1940 and retired for good. Davis and Bryan were to do even better pictures together after Marked Woman. In a number of interviews, Bryan talked about how kind and understanding Davis was to her, encouraging and soothing her and protecting her from director Bacon, who had a reputation for being rough on neophytes.