Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Davis later explained her kindness to Bryan during Marked Woman thus: “I made up my mind that, when possible, I would remember what it had been like when I first started and secure players dared me to crash the gate of the Establishment. [Bryan] was excellent in the film.”

  Davis always called Marked Woman “a good picture,” and “satisfactory in every respect.” Possibly her enormous relief over resuming a steady career with Warners and Jack Warner’s helping her with her British legal expenses overshadowed her objective appraisal of a poor picture. In 1988, inexplicably, Marked Woman was one of a group of Davis films released to videocassette stores in connection with the celebration of her eightieth birthday. It acquired some class on that occasion in the company of The Old Maid, The Corn Is Green, The Letter, Mr. Skeffington, and other Davis fare of a later period that far surpassed Marked Woman in every respect. Many wondered why Marked Woman had been chosen over, for instance, All This and Heaven, Too or The Sisters or Old Acquaintance. The explanation may lie in the fact that Marked Woman got more publicity and press coverage than the better films because of the Luciano case.

  In 1937 some reviewers overrated the picture and Davis’s performance. The New York Sun rhapsodized about how Marked Woman was “culled right from the front page headlines, a tabloid story come true,” and Variety gushed about the film’s star, “She is among the Hollywood few who can submerge themselves in a role to the point where they become the character they are playing.” The latter review, in retrospect, seems quite off-base, as Davis, as before noted, comes on more like a haughty society girl slumming than a put-upon prostitute.

  For her next 1937 “postreconciliation” picture, Davis found herself co-starring for the first time with Edward G. Robinson. They were hardly a mutual admiration society, and their relations during Kid Galahad were professionally correct but cool. In his autobiography, Robinson indicated that he found Davis callow, overly dependent on mannerisms, and insufficiently trained in technique and projection. Davis in her autobiography made fun of Robinson, calling him a kind of male prima donna who protested to the director, during his final death scene in Galahad, that Davis was doing too much weeping as she hovered over him. According to her, that was precisely the way the character would have behaved; according to him, she was overacting all over the place.

  In later years, Robinson’s attitude toward Davis had not mellowed, despite her vastly increased fame and many awards. In 1968 he told me: “I guess she improved later, especially after Wyler and Goulding put some discipline into her. But I always felt she had her distinct limitations.” Davis’s attitude toward Robinson, circa 1962, was: “He always had a high opinion of himself, and last time I met him he had just as inflated a self-estimate as ever!”

  Nonetheless they acted well together in Kid Galahad, directed by Mike Curtiz, with a script by Seton I. Miller based on a Francis Wallace novel. The story is about fight promoter Robinson, who sponsors a naïve, innocent, and idealistic youngster, Wayne Morris, and grooms him for the boxing championship. Davis, who plays Robinson’s torchsinging girlfriend, labels the boy “Kid Galahad” because of his courtly attitude toward women and proceeds secretly to fall in love with him. When Morris wins the heart of Robinson’s protected and naïve sister, Jane Bryan, and Robinson finds out about it at the same time he learns Davis is in love with Morris, he sets Morris up in a bout he has promised rival Humphrey Bogart the kid will lose. Later Robinson has a change of heart and helps the kid win the fight via wise ringside tactical advice. Meanwhile Davis has coped with her unrequited and undeclared feelings for Morris by leaving the racket to become a nightclub singer. Bogart guns down Robinson in a fight later, and then Robinson plays the death scene which was the source—or one of the sources, rather—of his long-running fuss with Davis. In the final scene after Robinson’s death, Davis walks sadly beneath a poster of champion Morris, and then down an alley.

  Inexplicably, Davis seemed to think well of Kid Galahad, though she has a knockabout role in a knockabout fight epic which, to be fair, Mike Curtiz directed for maximum excitement and melodramatic impact. She gave out interviews to the press in early 1937 that sounded suspiciously like rationalizations for her appearance in what was essentially just another Warner actioner. In some of the interviews, she went on about the necessity of acting a variety of parts to exhibit her range and claimed that Kid Galahad was one of those pictures that won her audiences she might not otherwise have reached. But the unspoken question by interviewers and fans alike was, were these the audiences she was after at that point in her career? Davis never did offer a satisfactory answer to that. Humphrey Bogart, who never got along with her but understood her struggles to get better film fare, opined later that she was probably putting a brave face on the matter, trying to come out as a good sport and a team player—real-life roles unsuitable to the Bette Davis everyone was on to by that time.

  It is true that the role of Fluff is a sympathetic one, and that Davis has ample opportunity to demonstrate poignantly and winningly her “unrequited lover” persona. She also may have been trying to cover up in another respect, because she gave an interview to a fan mag in which she said that if she appeared particularly convincing in her love scenes, it did not mean that she was necessarily in love with her onscreen partners.

  The interviews caused snickers among those in the know, because it was obvious that Davis had developed a genuine temperature over handsome, muscular twenty-three-year-old Wayne Morris, who became a star after the release of Kid Galahad. Morris was perfect for the role, for he was a clean, decent kid offscreen who later became a World War II hero as a Navy aviator, earning four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals. Discharged as a lieutenant commander, he went back to films but never recovered his initial flush of fame. In 1959, when he was forty-five, he died of a heart attack while watching aerial maneuvers from a carrier.

  But in 1937 Wayne was at the top of the movie heap with Galahad and had his pick of eager young ladies, on and off the studio lot. “Bette really fell for him,” her friend Jerry Asher remembered. “She was living her unrequited love off as well as on screen; it imparted a particular poignancy to her performance. Jack Warner always said Bette played love scenes best when she was actually in love, and she was overwhelmed by Wayne.” Two things saved her, because he was obviously unaware of her feelings. First, she was twenty-nine to his twenty-three, and Wayne, as was well known, liked girls in their late teens or early twenties. Second, she was technically still a married woman, and fooling with other men’s wives went against the young Wayne’s code. Another factor was also a saving grace; when shooting was over they went on to other films. “And then the fact that she didn’t have one kiss, not one clinch with him throughout Kid Galahad gave her no memories of what she was potentially missing,” Jerry Asher laughed.

  Edward G. Robinson was, in his way, as fretful as Davis over his continued assignment to slam-bang action and crime fare. His protest was to result in a costume treatment later on. A distinguished product of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Theatre Guild, Robinson had won his spurs on Broadway and in the Theatre Guild’s classical repertory, but found himself in a rut of his own when the smash success of Little Caesar in 1930 inspired his Warner bosses to keep him in gangster and action fare.

  I recall that when I interviewed him many years later, I asked why his own inability to escape type-casting for so long had not rendered him more simpatico toward Davis’s own struggles, and he replied instantly, and with some spirit, that he had come to Hollywood with many years of stage training and seasoning behind him while she had had a bare three years in the theater. “If she had gotten seven to ten years of theater work, like Chatterton and others had, she’d have come to films more prepared,” he snapped. That was the last sentence, to my knowledge, that he was to accord posterity on the subject of Bette Davis because he died soon after.

  Kid Galahad was to be the subject of no less than two unfortunate remakes. One, The Wagons Roll
at Night, in 1941, had a circus rather than a boxing setting, with Bogart, this time as the Robinson character, Sylvia Sidney, and Eddie Albert. The other, in 1962, inappropriately cast Elvis Presley as a singing fighter. Television retitled the 1937 picture The Battling Bellhop to avoid confusion with the indifferent but eventually more popular Presley version.

  In the reviews, Davis got singled out occasionally, but usually found herself congratulated en masse with Robinson, Morris, and the others. The New York Times nailed down Kid Galahad aptly enough with the words: “a good little picture—lively, suspenseful, and positively echoing with the bone-bruising thud of right hooks to the jaw.”

  That Certain Woman, Davis’s next film, was notable chiefly for her meeting and working with the brilliant English-born director-screen-writer Edmund Goulding, who would be instrumental in transforming her into one of the screen’s superstars in upcoming films. She later said Goulding was one of the “true geniuses of picturemaking, one of Hollywood’s greatest directors.” On another occasion she said, “He was what we called a ‘woman’s director’ and a ‘star maker.’ There was a certain amount of progress toward stardom for me in [That Certain Woman]. He concentrated on attractive shots of me—in other words, gave me the star treatment. It was the first time I had had this. I was always a member of the cast—a leading member—but not made special in the way Goulding made me special in this film. And in the last scene in chiffon, a large beautiful picture hat, and a glamorous hairdo, I looked really like a movie star.”

  Her opinion of That Certain Woman was not high. “[It] was certainly not one of my favorite scripts . . . there was a falseness to the whole project.” In her autobiography she said, “[That Certain Woman] tasted a bit of soap and recalled Miss Chatterton’s nobility that Barbara Stanwyck eventually inherited.”

  That Certain Woman was a remake of Gloria Swanson’s The Trespasser, which her then-lover Joe Kennedy had produced with notable success in 1929. It won Swanson an Academy Award nomination. Goulding wrote the screenplay for the Swanson version, as he did for the Davis remake. His intentions were certainly of the best; he gambled that Woman would do for Davis in 1937 what Trespasser had done for Swanson in 1929. But times were different. By 1937 the public was sated with this kind of soap opera obviousness, and what had seemed novel and timely in 1929 came off dated and saccharine by 1937, when the vicissitudes of the Depression had made audiences more realistic and less easily carried away. Another factor that Goulding did not take into account was the novelty value of Swanson as a talkie actress; The Trespasser was the first movie in which this great silent star spoke for her fans, and this factor was instrumental in its box-office success.

  But as Davis had indicated, Goulding was a wonderful director for her. He ranks with William Wyler as a Bette Davis director par excellence, though their styles and approaches to her were radically different. Wyler disciplined her, toned her down, made her realistic, Goulding enhanced her femininity, her capacity to move audiences and enthrall them. She needed both approaches in the years coming up, and, to her credit, took full advantage of them.

  Wyler also adopted a masculine approach in his treatment of Davis. He dominated her, delighted the deep-down submissive part of her nature that life and fate had not permitted her to bring to the surface. Goulding, on the other hand, was feminine to Wyler’s masculine; he sought not to dominate and direct her energies but rather to coax out of her the intrinsic womanliness with which Goulding empathized. Both directors were godsends to an artist who had struggled for years to express herself fully and completely.

  Goulding had been born in England in 1891, and went on the stage at twelve, in 1903. By 1914, at age twenty-three, he was wearing the triple hats of actor, director, and playwright in the London theater. From 1914 until 1918 he saw impressive service in the British military forces, and repressed his homosexuality. He reminisced later to close friends that he had been a celibate throughout his military career, his love for other men sublimated and transformed into one-for-all, all-for-one buddyhood.

  After the war, Goulding emigrated to the United States, and his cultured, tasteful, sensitive gifts were soon enlisted in the service of American films. From 1921 on he brought a number of fine dramas to the American screen, and in 1925 he joined MGM, where he won fame for Grand Hotel and the original version of Anna Karenina, titled Love, in 1927 with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.

  Goulding’s homosexual sensibility was to foster many a starring career, including Joan Fontaine’s in the exquisite. The Constant Nymph in 1943, and his love for Tyrone Power helped transform that handsome and sensitive bisexual actor into a star, via his performances in The Razor’s Edge and Nightmare Alley, the latter considered, to this day, Power’s finest performance.

  Though Goulding married (many said in order to have a cover for his homosexual pursuits), his love affairs with men from all walks of life and all types of careers were long the talk of Hollywood’s informed, but the studio overlords and his co-workers admired and respected him, especially since he was essentially kind and affirmative. “He had more friends in Hollywood than any man I ever knew,” Errol Flynn later said of him. Flynn even had an affair with him, as did, for a time, Tyrone Power, who was overwhelmed by the brilliance and artistry of the director who had coaxed from him his best performance. Goulding later initiated the affair between Power and Errol Flynn which was much discussed in Movietown, while it lasted. The lovers trysted at Goulding’s handsome home.

  This, then, was the man who changed the course of Bette Davis’s career. True, they were not able to make a first-class start, considering the soapy artifices of That Certain Woman, whose weaknesses Goulding fully understood but hoped to improve via good acting and photography. The film reunited, for the first time since their youth, Henry Fonda and Davis, who had come a long way from the aloof boy and lovelorn girl they had been in the backseat of a 1924 auto. Fonda had come into films in 1935, and had made an immediate impact opposite Janet Gaynor over at Fox in The Farmer Takes a Wife. By 1937, when he joined Davis and Goulding on the set of That Certain Woman, Fonda was enjoying a steadily growing reputation as an actor of honest force and humanistic realism, though his greatest days were still a while off. In That Certain Woman he definitely has the weaker role, functioning, along with the skilled Ian Hunter, as one of two leading men for a film built around the female star.

  The sudsy plot, redeemed in many scenes by Davis’s fine acting, has her as a gangster’s widow who gets involved with a weakling playboy, Fonda, whose stern and brutal tycoon father, Donald Crisp, considers her unsuitable as a potential daughter-in-law. They marry, but the father breaks them up on their honeymoon by appealing to Fonda’s weak, dependent nature, and soon she is pregnant and alone. Her lawyer-employer, Hunter, is a married man who falls in love with her and helps her care for her child, whose existence she conceals from Fonda and his father. The latter finds out about the boy when Davis becomes involved in a scandal after Hunter dies in her apartment and the media sneak out photos of Davis and Hunter’s wife at the bedside. Crisp tries to declare her an unfit mother and take the boy from her, but later she gives him up to Fonda and his new, invalid wife. The wife (Anita Louise) later conveniently dies, and Fonda races to southern France where a languishing Davis, in reclusive luxury on the money Hunter has left her, joyfully awaits him.

  As this recital of the basic plot ingredients reflects only too blatantly, That Certain Woman is a grab bag of the most reprehensible romantic cliché conventions, rendered hoary via repeated use. To his credit, however, Goulding’s meticulous direction and his shrewd guidance of Davis’s new star persona redeem the result, to a point.

  Sometimes Goulding let his enthusiasms—and romantic inspirations—carry him away. He was of the school of directors who like to get up and act out the parts, and when he felt Davis and Fonda were not “pitching the woo” in one love scene with what he felt was the required intensity, he pushed Davis aside and worked up a passionate smooching scene with
Fonda that had the latter red-faced and sweating with embarrassment. Gifted with a sense of humor, even about himself, Goulding partook heartily of the ensuing laughter, most of it at his own expense. Everyone liked Goulding; even his more outrageous stunts, as George Brent later recalled, usually elicited the affectionately tolerant “oh that’s just Eddie.”

  Davis appeared in That Certain Woman with the great character actor and supporting-Oscar winner (for 1941’s How Green Was My Valley) Donald Crisp. Crisp, who also pursued a major career in finance, had been an early Griffith actor (Broken Blossoms, Birth of a Nation) and in the 1920s a prominent silent film director before finding his niche as a sterling character support. Years later, he rated The Old Maid as his favorite picture with Davis and That Certain Woman as the worst: “God, the poor girl had fought a losing battle in England the year before to get better pictures, and here we were with her a year later awash in soap! I felt for her, deeply.”

  Frank Nugent in The New York Times summed things up well, writing, “[She] performs valiantly as usual, giving color to a role which, in lesser hands, might have been colorless as the shadows that surround it . . . tragic heroines (Kay Francis included) are invited to move over and make room in their penitential niche for the Mary Donnell whose woes Miss Bette Davis is manfully shouldering [here]. With the hounds of fate baying at her heels, Mary’s progress through the film is pretty much of a nip-and-tuck affair with Mary getting most of the nips.”

  Over the years, Davis had little to say about It’s Love I’m After, her third picture with Leslie Howard. A sparkling comedy, well scripted by the talented Casey Robinson, it had a cast that boasted Olivia De Havilland, (her first picture with Davis), the handsome Patric Knowles, Eric Blore, Spring Byington, and Bonita Granville, and while director Archie Mayo wasn’t the wisest choice for this sophisticated farce, he gave a good account of himself.