Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  In her autobiography she wrote: “I only argue with their eventual choice [for Scarlett] because it was not I. Nor do I detract one whit from Miss [Vivien] Leigh’s beautiful performance when I say that I still wish I had gotten my hands on it!”

  But, after a fashion, Bette Davis was to have the last word—and the last laugh—after all. Her next film, Jezebel, from the Owen Davis play, gave her not only an equally strong southern vixen role, but won her the 1938 Academy Award—which was announced smack in the middle of the shooting of Gone With the Wind in early 1939.

  An elated Davis was to say later: “Julie Marsden, the Jezebel in question, was a blood sister of Scarlett’s. Willful, perverse and proud, she was every inch the southern belle. She had the same cast-iron fragility, the same resourcefulness, the same rebellion. Julie was the best part I’d had since Mildred.”

  12

  Jezebel, Oscar II, and Wyler

  JEZEBEL WAS THE picture that transformed Davis’s life and career—and she almost didn’t get to do it. It seems Miriam Hopkins, who had done it as a Broadway play in the 1933–1934 season, was hell-bent on doing the film version as well, and moreover she owned joint rights to it with producer Guthrie McClintic. She was jealous of Davis and still fighting the initial lesbian attraction she had felt toward her a decade before in Rochester. The idea of Davis taking over Julie Marsden, the strong-minded southern belle who learns humility and self-sacrifice the hard way, filled her with fury.

  Davis wanted Jezebel. And Warners, spurred on by her, tricked Miriam into surrendering the rights by promising that Julie’s stage originator would be the first to be considered for the role if and when they ever got around to producing it. Grabbing the $12,000 offered, Miriam failed to read the fine print of the agreement—it didn’t state absolutely that she would get the role, just promised her top consideration. Miriam’s oversight in this regard, given her tenacity and determination where matters of crucial importance to her were concerned, remains a mystery. Since she was forever on her financial uppers, she may have needed the money up front. But the role was now Davis’s.

  Davis meanwhile worked her way through Kid Galahad and That Certain Woman more cheerfully than usual, knowing, as she did, that Hal Wallis and his associate producer, Henry Blanke, had writers Clement Ripley and Abem Finkel hard at work on the script. When Ripley’s and Finkel’s best inspirations fell short of the solid, tight, flowing script Wallis wanted, he brought in Walter Huston’s writer son, John, who helped shape up the continuity and sharpened the characterizations. With It’s Love I’m After finally out of the way, Davis looked forward to her first costume picture—and her first chance at a quality production—the kind she had always longed for and had never gotten in all her six years at Warners.

  Jezebel is the story of Julie Marsden, a willful New Orleans belle, circa 1852, the orphaned heiress to a fortune who demands her way in all matters great and small. In love with stuffy, play-by-the-rules Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda), a rising bank executive, she keeps him maddeningly off balance with her assorted perversities and rebellious quirks. Genuinely in love with Pres, but unable to control her egoistic ways, Julie alienates him fatally when she wears a red dress to the all-white Olympus ball. Taking his stern revenge, Pres forces her to dance alone with him to a waltz from which the others withdraw in shock and disgust. Then he deserts her.

  Playing second fiddle to Pres is Buck Cantrell (George Brent) who is also in love with Julie but is more realistic and tolerant about her foibles. Devastated by Pres’s withdrawal, Julie holes up in her country place and later gets her hopes up when he returns—but with a new wife, a northerner (Margaret Lindsay). Enraged and frustrated, willful and perverse once again, Julie precipitates a duel between Buck and Pres’s brother (Richard Cromwell) in which Buck is killed, defending what he thinks is Julie’s honor. Julie’s protective and loving Aunt Belle (Fay Bainter), saddened and disillusioned, tells Julie she is “thinking of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God.” Later Pres falls ill of yellow fever, and Julie rushes to nurse him in New Orleans. When he is being taken off to a quarantine island, Julie persuades Amy, his wife, to let her go with him, because without her toughness and tenacity he will surely die. Julie Marsden becomes “clean” again and redeems herself.

  Jezebel has many scenes that only Davis could play.

  In her first scene she is wearing a riding outfit, shocking the conventional ladies gathered at her house for tea. Flamboyant and defiant, she establishes Julie’s character straight off. She enters the fateful ball brazen and arrogant, flouncing her red dress in everyone’s face. But then as Pres humiliates her by forcing her to dance, she falters, descends into frantic mortification—a wonderfully delineated midscene character shift. In the scene where she learns Pres will be returning, her depression is superseded dramatically by hopeful energy as she orders the servants to prepare the house.

  In scenes where she is playing the men against each other, and brazenly making advances to Pres, she is electric, willful, perverse, determined. She presides over a dinner party, ironic, detached, embittered. And in the final scene, as she selflessly concedes to Amy that Pres loves his wife, not her, but that she is the only one who can save his life on the quarantine island, her passionate feelings are controlled and indeed transcended by the self-immolation that is new to her—and strangely exalting and fulfilling. Later she rides through the streets in a cart with Pres’s head in her lap, a look of sacrificial determination and ecstasy on her mobile features—as bravura an ending as any star could wish.

  For the rest of her life Davis credited William Wyler with helping her achieve the performance she gave. At first, when told that he would direct the picture on loan from Sam Goldwyn, she was annoyed, remembering the little man at Universal years before who had said, “What do you think of these dames who show their chests and think they can get jobs!” She asked for an interview with Wyler and confronted him with his ancient malfeasance. He told her he didn’t even remember the occasion, that six years had gone by and he—and she—were different people, seasoned Hollywood veterans now. His honest, direct rejoinder won Davis over, and soon they were working together on the set of Jezebel.

  William Wyler was like no man Bette Davis had ever met. He was born in Germany in 1902, where he had initially been interested in studying the violin. A distant relative of Carl Laemmle’s, he had traded on the connection to come to America in 1922, at age twenty, and functioned in a variety of studio jobs—publicity writer, casting director, grip, and assistant director—but was dismissed scornfully for some years as “just another of Carl Laemmle’s parasitical relatives.” Since Laemmle’s nepotism was a running joke in the industry, this was a cruel designation indeed.

  Presently, however, Wyler demonstrated that he was very much his own man. He became a production assistant on the epic Ben-Hur at MGM, soon began turning out two-reel Westerns, and then in the early thirties graduated to directing dramas. After working successfully with John Barrymore in Counsellor at Law (1933) and with Margaret Sullavan (for a while his wife) in The Good Fairy (1935), Wyler truly came into his own creatively with the acclaimed These Three and Dodsworth (1936) in which his painstaking, meticulous method enhanced enormously the already considerable talents of actresses Miriam Hopkins in the first and Ruth Chatterton and Walter Huston in the second.

  The latter pictures were produced by Samuel Goldwyn, who, despite his often ridiculed malapropisms, was a man of shrewd and instinctive taste. Wyler had just completed Goldwyn’s Dead End when he was assigned Jezebel over at Warners in 1937.

  At first he and Davis fought bitterly on the set. As usual, she was testing her director’s mettle and his manhood and spirit as well; she found Willie Wyler a fine brand of tempered steel, and her initial aggravation at being checkmated and outmaneuvered gave way gradually to an overwhelming respect for his methods. She realized that at last she had found the director who could discipline the best out of her. He told her to stop moving he
r head, to stop wiggling her pelvis. He convinced her to scale down her mannerisms and refine her acting ploys without sacrificing any of the energy that gave her performances distinction. He made her do a scene over and over until he got the distillation of her emotion that gave the scene its impact. He drilled her and rehearsed her and drove her mad—and kept her coming back for more.

  Here, she realized, was the one man to whom she could surrender her entire being. All her life she had been haunted by a longing for a man whose mastery over her could fulfill her completely as a woman. But then there was the masculine side of her personality—her willfulness, egoism, and strength. She fought her new mentor tooth and nail but finally rejoiced in the submission he forced upon her. Soon she was in love with Willie Wyler.

  Certainly, the object of her deepest, most profoundly felt passion was no pretty boy. Small, chunky, homely, Wyler was so unprepossessing in appearance that actor Charles Bickford later called him “the Golem”—a singularly unattractive creature in one of the German horror films of the 1920s. Yet under all the ugliness and blunt incivility and brutal directness and unbending will was a supreme ladies’ man. In the final analysis, Wyler possessed in full measure the supermasculinity that many of the pretty boys and lotharios could only assume on the surface Wyler had substance. He made her husband look whiny and adolescent by comparison. She and Wyler became lovers. Guilty and frightened, knowing that a full knowledge of her flagrant infidelity could drive the high-strung Ham to violence or worse, Davis was in a state of constant schizoid tension during the filming of Jezebel—the ecstasy of her passionate affair with Wyler was countered by the ominous specter of Ham’s possible retaliation if he discovered the liaison.

  The guilty lovers did not spend all their time in bed. Over coffee, over dinners she hastily prepared, Wyler went over and over her role with her; again and again he drilled and rehearsed her. She recalled that he was the first to point out that she had not fully matured as an actress because, up to 1937 her playing had been too intense, too overwrought, too undisciplined, that often she had “made too much of a good thing.” He gave her insights into her creative processes that gave her a new perspective on her talent.

  There was one fly in the ointment, however. Wyler’s painstaking measures, his endless confabs with photographer Ernie Haller, his determination to showcase his now willing and pliable Galatea to maximum effect was taking the picture way over schedule and over budget. While pleased with the few rushes Wyler made available to him, Jack Warner began to find the protracted shooting schedule outrageous. He threatened to fire Wyler and bring in William Dieterle. Davis went to Warner personally. She told him that Wyler was ekeing out, slowly but surely, protractedly but purposefully, a great picture that would give her a whole new persona. “All that is all very well, Bette,” Jack Warner told her, “but what good is it if the costs mount to the point where we lose money?”

  Davis saved Wyler’s and her neck at that point. She offered to work until midnight to finish the film—midnight every single night. She offered Warner everything but the kitchen sink to keep Willie Wyler on the picture. Warner grudgingly acceded, and Wyler stayed. But the problems proliferated.

  Henry Fonda presented quite a few of them. His wife, Frances, was having a baby, and he wanted to be back in New York by Christmas week. The picture had been dragging on for months. Now Fonda wanted his role shot out of continuity so that he could get the hell out and back home. Davis’s already frayed nerves were exacerbated by having to defer to Fonda’s schedule.

  Then the willfulness and perversity and odd attacks of self-destructiveness, so characteristic of Davis at times, caused her to make a stupid error. Worn ragged by Wyler’s perfectionist demands, she quarreled with him. She convinced herself that since he had had her physically, he was beginning to take her for granted. So she decided that a nice, juicy, hell-raising flirtation with Fonda was in order. She sensed that Fonda, sexually frustrated, three thousand miles away from his expectant wife, was responding to this new Bette Davis. She and Hank had never made it in the long-ago as kids, and nothing had happened during That Certain Woman either, but now Bette Davis was coming into her own, and she felt that Fonda was a prize long overdue her.

  As curious as the next man, unaware that part of Davis’s strategy was to keep masterful Wyler from taking her for granted, Fonda fell into a brief affair with his dynamic, irresistible co-star. They began meeting secretly. She stood Wyler up after hours. It delighted her to see the Golem suffer and sweat it out on the set each day, guessing as he did that she and Fonda had gone wild at the latter’s apartment the night before. Soon she was playing each man against the other, and it amused her that Wyler was particularly tough with Fonda during the famed ballroom scene, making him dance and dance and dance to his tune until Fonda was ready to drop from exhaustion. Wyler began muttering about “these pretty boys who can’t take the heat.”

  Meanwhile, the fateful December deadline on which Fonda had insisted was fast approaching. One night, forced to go home to Ham, who had just arrived in town after one of his out-of-town engagements, Davis got a long-distance call from New York. It was Frances Brokaw Fonda. Frances, who had a society background but knew how to roll with the bitches when necessary, let her have it. “I know what you’re doing with my husband, you bitch,” she screamed at Davis. “I’m going to have his baby shortly, and you’re keeping him out there for your own sluttish purposes. Now finish up that shooting and let him go, or, baby or no baby, I’ll take the first train and scratch your bug-eyes out!”

  Davis had always had a good instinct for worthy feminine rivals. Something about Frances’s intense hysteria and unbridled anger told her to pull in her horns (her instincts turned out to be right, for Frances Brokaw Fonda was to prove unstable in the years to come; the mother of Jane and Peter wound up committing suicide and became the subject of lurid headlines).

  After a few days off the picture with one of her standard psychosomatic ailments, Davis went back to the set, was putty in Wyler’s hands for the remainder of her scenes in Jezebel, kept the puzzled Hank Fonda at arm’s length, and got him back to New York and Frances in time for Jane Fonda’s birth on December 21, 1937. Many years later, when Jane Fonda was on hand for an award given Bette, Bette reminded her of how her imminent birth had wreaked havoc on the Jezebel set (she didn’t reveal the other aspects) and Jane, amused yet somehow uneasy, tendered her an apology for arriving so unpropitiously.

  All the fuss and feathers resulted, however, in the finest picture Davis had done to date. It won her the 1938 Academy Award (to Miriam Hopkins’s manic anger and despair—she threw chairs around her New York drawing room the morning after the award was announced). Fay Bainter, so touching and eloquent as the understanding Aunt Belle, won the Best Supporting award. Davis regretted heartily that William Wyler did not get a directorial Oscar (he made up for it later with signal honors from the Academy) and gave him full credit for the film and everything and anything in it, including her own performance.

  In her autobiography, Davis said of Wyler: “The thrill of winning my second Oscar was only lessened by the Academy’s failure to give the directorial award to Willie. He made my performance. He made the script. Jezebel is a fine picture. It was all Wyler. I had known all the horrors of no direction and bad direction. I now knew what a great director was and what he could mean to an actress. I will always be grateful to him for his toughness and his genius.”

  Davis received the 1938 award in company with her old friend and former co-star Spencer Tracy, who won his own second Oscar for his performance as Father Flanagan, the priest who rescued homeless boys, in Boys Town. It was a proud moment for them both. “We’ve come a long way since 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Bette,” he smiled. “A long way indeed, Spence,” she smiled back. “And it wasn’t just luck. A hell of a lot of hard work brought us here tonight.”

  As for Ruth Waterbury’s injunctions of 1936 concerning the proper attire for a star on Academy Award night, Davis
made sure that there would be no screams from the formidable Ruth that time around. “[She] must have been delighted,” Davis later reported, “because I was dressed to the nines for the Academy dinner this time—a brown net dress with aigrettes at the neckline. It was the beginning of the halcyon years. The proof of the pudding would be the scripts to follow—and the directors. I was never surer of myself professionally than at this moment.”

  Of Fay Bainter she said, “[Her] contribution to the film and to my performance was enormous. It just wouldn’t have been the same picture without her.” Many years later, Fay Bainter said, “No woman ever worked harder for that award than Bette. Wyler was tough, and he made her sweat it out, but the results, as she admitted, were worth it. And how was she to work with? I’ve heard all those stories about what a termagant she was supposed to be, but she never showed me her claws once—in fact she was a perfect lamb.”

  Her involvement with Wyler, while it developed through two more admirably executed films, turned to ashes by 1939. They were to part, then reconcile, then part again for keeps. After what he had gone through in his short but tempestuous marriage with wildcat Maggie Sullavan, Wyler had no taste for new variations of feminine neurosis. He was excited and stimulated by Davis, by the enormous creativity he had found in her and had brilliantly tempered and released, by the spitfire unpredictability and passionate sexuality, but he knew he couldn’t live with it, day by day, with any semblance of peace or even rationality. Between the two strong natures there was constant friction. On a movie set their disparate inner fiercenesses blended admirably; off set they proved destructive—in permanent terms. Writer Ruth Waterbury later said of the Wyler-Davis duo:

  “That was the contradiction in her. She longed for a strong man to take charge of her life but when she found him, she couldn’t scale down her own temperament in order to be comfortable with him.” Still, Wyler and Davis almost married once she was free of Ham. One day, after a fight, she found a note from him in a sealed envelope on her hall table. Angry and perverse-spirited, she left it there for days. When she did open it, she learned that he had given her a twenty-four-hour ultimatum: Marry him or forget about it for keeps. Since she hadn’t answered, he went off with actress Margaret Tallichet to the nearest available marriage mart. At first she regretted the lost chance; later, more philosophical, she realized it wouldn’t have lasted any longer than his marriage had to that other fiery filly, Margaret Sullavan.