Davis and Howard in this are a famous theatrical couple (modeled on the Lunts) who seem madly in love to their fans but who privately fight and reconcile endlessly. Engaged to be married, their relationship is so tempestuous it threatens to explode at any time. Complications ensue when Knowles asks Howard to disillusion his fiancée, De Havilland, who has a passionate crush on him, by behaving so boorishly as his family’s houseguest that she will be cured for keeps. But his fey misconduct only attracts De Havilland all the more—especially when he boorishly flirts with her and she mistakes it for genuine courtship. All is finally straightened out when Davis appears and pretends to be Howard’s wife and the mother of his children. Affronted by his “caddish deceitfulness,” De Havilland rebounds into the arms of the waiting Knowles.
Aware that a third appearance with Howard spelled prestige, Davis nonetheless felt that her role had a secondary feel, that De Havilland’s role had more color—and got more footage—and that Howard hogged the best comedy scenes. Recent viewings of the film do tend to confirm her feeling that she was lost in a crowd, in more ways than one. She was also irritated by the fact that Howard was billed over her. Despite Hal Wallis’s earnest protestations that the film was a refreshing “change of pace” for her, that she was in “glamorous” company, that the Robinson screenplay was sparkling and witty, and that the production had all the “gloss-feel” of an MGM or Paramount project, she was not convinced.
Even the inclusion of an early scene in which she and Howard play the potion scene from Romeo and Juliet did not impress her, especially as it was done comedy-style with the passionate protestations undercut by hissing antagonisms—some of them comic—between the principals. Reminded that only a short year before, Howard had played this scene seriously with Norma Shearer over at MGM in the elaborate production of Romeo and Juliet, Davis huffed: “Norma got the best of it—she got him serious, and in full acting fettle—I got him when he was only clowning the scene! Must I always accept second best?”
The arguments between Davis, Warner, and Hal Wallis over the billing continued after shooting was over. Of her four 1937 pictures she had had top billing in two—Marked Woman and That Certain Woman—and now was playing second fiddle to Howard, as she had to Eddie Robinson in Kid Galahad. She didn’t like it one bit, and didn’t let them forget it.
“It isn’t the billing—it’s the picture, the quality of the picture, Bette,” Jack Warner kept insisting at one session. Rising to go, she lashed back, “The picture falls short—for me—on both counts!”
Even she was surprised by some of the good reviews the picture got, and which Wallis hastened to show her. “So?” she sneered. “There’s more mention of Howard and De Havilland and even Eric Blore than there is of me!”
After calling It’s Love I’m After “a rippling farce, brightly written and deftly directed,” Frank Nugent in The New York Times went on to cite the “agreeable change for Mr. Howard and Miss Davis. It fares extremely well at their hands.” Still, a dissatisfied Davis found the review cold comfort.
11
Bette O’Hara?
THE REASONS WHY Bette Davis didn’t get to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind remain complicated to this day. Everyone has his or her own story, including Davis.
In the spring of 1936 Jack Warner told her to be “a good girl” and make God’s Country and the Woman for him, in return for which he would give her a crack at what he called “a great new book” he had optioned. Davis was unimpressed, snorted, “I bet it’s a pip!” and stormed off for London and her lawsuit. The irony in this was that Jack, at long last, was holding out to her a role and a picture that would have been perfect for her, had she only stopped long enough to investigate further. There was, it is true, a solid rationale for her attitude at that moment. But because Jack had sent her so many false alarms about future roles, Davis reasoned that he was hoodwinking her again with another tantalizing chimera—just to enlist her immediate cooperation with the project in hand.
While she was in London, up to her ears in legal difficulties, Gone With the Wind had been published to great acclaim, and Jack Warner, in an attack of bad judgment, had sold the option rights to David O. Selznick. Several considerations may have motivated him—Davis’s scorn for it (even though she had not read it and knew nothing about it) and his own feeling that GWTW production costs would overstrain the Warner budget, given its length and complexity.
By 1937, Selznick was conducting a worldwide search for the right performer to play Rhett Butler, the soldier of fortune with a sexual magnetism and self-assurance women fear but take to like catnip; and Scarlett O’Hara, the willful southern beauty all men desire. Perverse, ambitious, and a born survivor, Scarlett resists Rhett’s love for her until near the end—only to lose it—for a time; tomorrow, in her famous words, being another day.
By mid-1937, Davis had read the novel several times and was vividly aware of all the hoopla Selznick had generated about the search for the “absolutely right” Scarlett and Rhett. She was primed for another chance and determined to get it. Jack Warner knew how badly she wanted Scarlett, and at first, to punish her for all the hell she had put him through in London the year before, told her that no loanouts was one of the conditions she had agreed to. David O. Selznick thought Davis a possibility, but he wondered: Could he get her, and what would Jack Warner’s terms be if he did?
Jack came up with a proposition: He would lend Davis for Scarlett if David would accept Errol Flynn as Rhett. Jack reasoned that if he had to lend, why not get two major stars back instead of just one—his shrewd showman’s instinct told him GWTW would be a star-enhancing blockbuster for all concerned. Davis led all fan polls and thousands during 1937 had written in proclaiming the Fiery Filly from the Burbank lot the Perfect Fiery Filly of GWTW. But David had his reservations, and so did George Cukor, the man who, at that time, it appeared, would direct. Yes, she had the temperament, the iron-strong character, the survivalist toughness, the passionate tenacity required to pursue the gentle southern aristocrat, Ashley Wilkes, who would spend the entire picture rebuffing her. No one, indeed, was more equipped temperamentally and creatively than Davis to be arch-unrequited lover, survivor, mover and shaker in rebuilding the commerce of the shattered postwar South. Yes, they agreed, she had it all—except for one element. Did she have the ravishing beauty, the kinetic sex appeal to keep masterful, strong-minded, tough realist Rhett Butler chasing her for ten-odd years? On that matter, there was reason to entertain doubt.
Word of this one reservation got back to Davis at Warners. She was the first to admit she was striking rather than beautiful, but she maintained, in several impassioned calls to Selznick, that she could compensate for that with passion, with fire, with sheer personality force. And, as she later demonstrated in other pictures of her great period, careful camera work and clever makeup could give her an illusion of beauty. Selznick was won over, but George Cukor’s verdict was late in coming in.
Davis maintained for years that Cukor had a bias against her; he still saw her as the drab little wren he had known in Rochester a decade before. This argument scarcely holds water, however, as Cukor, a brilliant man who missed nothing, had noted her outstanding performances of the past few years. Davis was wrong about Cukor, who agreed with Selznick that she could make personality seem like “nine tenths of it” and that this Scarlett could be no kitten but a tigress-in-the-making who had to telegraph her personality right off the bat, in reel one.
Meanwhile, to keep the publicity mills grinding and the suspense at fever pitch, Selznick kept throwing out leads, hints, and even publicity releases attesting to the fact that he was considering many other actresses. There was Miriam Hopkins, an authentic southerner, even to the state where GWTW was set. Born in Bainbridge, Georgia, she would have the accent down pat. But Miriam would be thirty-six or so when they finally got around to shooting—a bit long in the tooth for a character who was to age from sixteen to twenty-eight. Fiery, yes; bitchy, most certain
ly; a strong character, undoubtedly, but just too old. Hopkins fought for the role. Had she not done the first color epic, Becky Sharp, in 1935, and would GWTW not be in color? Had she not demonstrated that she could dominate a cinematic transcription of a great novel, so was she not a proven quantity? Again the verdict came in: too old. Jack and George couched it slightly more tactfully when they told her; “mature” was the adjective employed. But this didn’t prevent the Bainbridge Bitch from smashing furniture and pulling down drapes in the hotel suite where she had tensely awaited the decision.
Then there was Margaret Sullavan, also a southerner, in this case from Virginia. In 1935 she and Randolph Scott had co-starred for Paramount in So Red the Rose from the Stark Young novel, which had a plot and Civil War–period ambience similar to GWTW’s. Scott, too, was under consideration for the role of the courtly, elusive Ashley Wilkes—the role Leslie Howard later got. Maggie wanted the role, but, as it turned out, she married Leland Hayward and proceeded to have two children in a year and a half, which left her at the time looking somewhat worn and pudgy.
Katharine Hepburn, a favorite of Cukor’s, was in the running for a while, but she was not beautiful in the way Scarlett would have to be, and her angular, New England aura did not fit into GWTW’s ambience, as Cukor finally conceded. Tallulah Bankhead also got a shot at it, but again, as in the case of Hopkins, she looked, at thirty-five, too old and worn. Alabama-born, she could have gotten the accent right, but that was not enough to carry the day for her. Then things got ridiculous, with Joan Crawford stating she would like a crack at it (Selznick and Cukor groaned and sent her a tactful no). Susan Hayward, only eighteen at the time, was tested, but found too immature. And on and on it went, with Selznick’s suspenseful “search” reaping maximum publicity, to his continued delight.
Norma Shearer was next in the running. The great MGM star would prove, with Marie Antoinette, that she could dominate a lengthy period picture, complete with lavish costumes and settings. Selznick seriously considered a deal with MGM by which he would borrow her and Clark Gable as a Scarlett-Rhett package. Shearer was beautiful, authoritative, emotionally compelling—but she had two strikes against her. Born in 1900, she, too, would have seemed somewhat mature at thirty-seven for Scarlett. When her fans got wind of her flirtation with the role, they wrote in so many letters to MGM and Selznick to the effect that their idol was “too ladylike,” “too nice a person” to play bitchy, sexy, vixenish Scarlett that Miss Shearer gracefully withdrew.
Meanwhile Clark Gable was leading all these polls for Rhett hands down, a mile ahead of such competitors as Fredric March (at forty too old and not sexy and insolent enough for Rhett), Ronald Colman (too long in the tooth at forty-five and too civilized and British), Warner Baxter (again, too old and insufficiently forceful). Gary Cooper was considered, but again the chemistry and personality qualities didn’t seem quite right.
Which brought David and George back to Errol Flynn again—as one half of the package with Davis, courtesy of Jack Warner.
In his heart of hearts, Jack knew that Errol, handsome, rakish, and charming, and sexy as he could be, lacked the “X” factor for Rhett. But he was thinking of how GWTW would send the money-making Errol back to Warners an even bigger moolah-producer. It was Davis who did not want Flynn as Rhett. She told Jack Warner that Errol might be dashing and charming enough in schlock adventure like Captain Blood and Charge of the Light Brigade, but a commanding, dominating figure like Rhett called for a man, not a boy, and to her that was what Flynn was: a charming, flirtatious, sexy, cute boy. What she didn’t tell Jack was that she had had a yen for Errol since he had first shown up in late 1934. Charismatic, sexy, winning, yes, but treacherous, untrustworthy, and a teasing tormentor of women, that was Davis’s personal evaluation of Flynn. She had seen what he did to other women—he wouldn’t wind her around his little finger.
The result was that Davis flatly refused to do Scarlett if Flynn did Rhett. It is hard to believe, after all these years, that she would have given up a role practically written for her just because of Flynn. She later said several times over the years that his inevitably inept, lightweight performance would have pulled down the quality of her own performance—but would it have? The future would reveal that in the two pictures Jack Warner (with his sense of consummate, if crudely implemented, irony) was to cast her in opposite Flynn, she pulled him up rather than the reverse—so why didn’t it occur to her in 1937 that she could have done this for Flynn with GWTW?
Possibly she was not sure, in 1937, that she could carry two people through one picture. Jezebel, though imminent, was still in the future. She had not yet ascended to major clout with critics and public and full self-awareness of her powers. Or possibly, she was falling in love even then with Flynn, (who, like herself, was married), and didn’t want the emotional overkill or strain or whatever she imagined the risk would entail.
And then there was Gable, who was practically set for Rhett, under a loanout deal from MGM. Davis’s feelings toward him were likewise ambivalent. She knew he was totally right for Rhett, but she still held against him a statement he had made in 1935—that his co-star Claudette Colbert was a far better loanout choice for It Happened One Night than Davis would have been. “Claudette has the comedy timing, the expertise,” he had told Frank Capra. “Davis is too heavy, too intense; let her stick to drama; she’s no comedienne. And she isn’t sexy enough to get an audience imagining I would chase her around the country on a bus, as I do in the picture.” Davis had also heard that Gable had reservations about her as Scarlett. “Would Rhett Butler knock himself out for the likes of her?” he laughed to Cukor and Selznick. “Rhett Butler—a man who could command the most beautiful women around to do his bidding?”
George Cukor, who loved fights, saw to it that Gable’s opinion got back to Davis, with predictable results. The King had hit a sore spot—her alleged lack of beauty. Hadn’t she been putting the less-talented “beauties” in their place for six years in Hollywood? she screamed. Just who did that big-eared ape think he was?
In her counterattack, Davis didn’t stop with the legendary ears. A defiant Gable had refused to pin them back, but they still made him self-conscious. She also made fun of his teeth. He had had them fixed early in his MGM career, but under the caps they had rotted clear out of his mouth, so he had the leavings extracted, and since 1931 had sported dentures, top and bottom. Sometimes one or the other slipped, and his speech took on an odd slurry-slurpy quality, which some of his women fans even found sexy. If Franchot Tone had sucked off his consonants and jerked off his vowels, Gable was now doing the same in his own style.
The ears, the teeth. Davis continued to gather ammunition against MGM’s top romantic hearthrob, the idol of millions of women. Davis picked up more information from Carole Lombard, later Gable’s wife. It seemed that Gable had a form of mild phimosis which he refused to correct—his cock, like his ears, he held sacrosanct. The phimosis rendered the foreskin of his uncircumcised cock so painful when he pulled it back that he left it alone most of the time. Inevitably smegma odor accumulated unduly. Lombard, noted for her scatological vulgarisms and flippant obscenities, had even blithely informed a press conference that Gable was not only uncircumcised but that his bedmanship left something to be desired—premature ejaculation being implied. Also, as Carole told Ruth Waterbury, “Pappy’s pee-pee isn’t all that big, whether up or down!”
Since Davis did not feel any particular sexual attraction to Gable, it was consequently all the easier for her to use her accumulated arsenal of retaliatory weapons against a man who, she believed, had shunned, downgraded, and dismissed her qualifications for the role she wanted above all others.
She proceeded to give Ruth Waterbury of Photoplay and Katherine Albert and others variations of the same on-set interview, with Gable as its subject. Since her remarks were unprintable for family or even general publications, they weren’t put down in cold black print. They were widely circulated among the Cinemaland Cogno
scenti, however. After pointing out that she had no regrets about missing out on Gable as a co-star, she spit out, “I can’t stand a man who has fake store teeth and doesn’t keep his uncircumcised cock clean under the foreskin,” adding, “I hear he shoots too soon and messes himself all the time. Great Lover? Great Fake!” Word of this, as Adela Rogers St. Johns and Ruth Waterbury both told me, got back to Gable, and as Adela put it, “Clark didn’t find Bette any laughing matter after that!” But, as it turned out, Gable escaped the worst. George Cukor could have told Davis that his being fired from Gone With the Wind came about not only because Gable felt he was favoring the female stars, but because Cukor knew that Gable had given his famous uncircumcised cock to gay wolf William Haines back in the 1920s when Haines was a star and Gable a bit player, in an effort to get Haines’s backing in his upward climb. Accordingly, it made him nervous to work with Cukor, especially when Cukor lapsed into calling him “dear” and “honey” on the set.
According to Jerry Asher, one hilarious story, very likely true if one knew George, had the scorned director sending Gable a birthday present in 1939, which contained a cake of Lifebuoy soap and a small bottle of Listerine. The accompanying note, according to Jerry, read: “Clark dear—the soap is to clean out the cheese beneath your foreskin and the Listerine is to take away the smell.” Neither George nor anyone else has, it appears, gone on record as to how the voraciously oral Billy Haines coped without Listerine or Lifebuoy. Some secrets remain sacred in Hollywood to the end.
Through the years, Davis continued to rave and storm in interviews and on talk shows and in private and not-so-private conversations about having “missed out on Scarlett—the role of my life!”
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 16
