After his experiences with her during the Jezebel shooting, Henry Fonda, too, had written her off. In the years to come, he would refuse, several times, to act with her again. Her penchant for playing men against each other, her willfulness and perversity that had made her so perfect for Julie Marsden, her fierce temper and manipulative bitchery were elements he needed like a hole in the head. He immersed himself in marriages—several more of them—and fatherhood—and all Bette Davis was accorded was a friendly nod and a polite word when their paths crossed. Not that she cared. She had seen all the rabbits in Fonda’s hat, and to her he was past tense.
Davis did not like the advertising campaign on Jezebel—featuring her in a low-cut gown and the screamy legend, “She’s meanest when she’s lovin’ most!” “I hate that line—it cheapens the picture’s theme,” she told George Brent—who had been an also-ran among Davis’s men in Jezebel, and, as usual, couldn’t have cared less. “Yes, Bette,” the imperturbable George shot back, “but ain’t it the truth about you!” For this he was rewarded with a drink in his face, but he only laughed. Shortly she was laughing with him.
The critics, as expected, went wild over Davis and Jezebel. Typical of the response to the film was that of Film Weekly, which enthused:
“The performance is Bette’s decisive victory. She handles it as though, having brought her enemies to their knees, she has decided to be merciful. By the pure power of imaginative acting she gives a performance as vivid and inspiring as any star display of personality—and on an infinitely deeper layer of truth. Never before has Bette so triumphantly proved her point that a woman’s face can be appealing and moving even when not preserved in peach-like perfection. Never again can her claim be denied that it is possible on the screen for acting to transmute personality.”
Davis now stood on an eminence that filled her with deep satisfaction. Had she but known it, there were even greater eminences to come. But for the moment, she rested content. Not so Miriam Hopkins. They could hear her teeth grinding clear out to Pacific Palisades.
Davis always keenly regretted that Harlow Morrell Davis did not live to see her reach the uppermost heights. He died in January 1938 in Boston while she was still struggling to finish Jezebel. This, above all, was a picture she had particularly wanted him to see, given its superior workmanship and the disciplined performance Wyler had forced out of her.
To the day of his death he was snippy, distant, patronizing. When her father had visited California some years before, he had condescendingly dismissed her husband Ham as “a nice young boy.” His references to the early films she had done were usually along the lines of “fleeting, careless exercises.” Of Human Bondage he had thought “hysterical” and “excessive,” her Oscar-winning Dangerous “trashy, tasteless.” He implied—strongly—his Yankee, starchy disapproval of her “garish blondined hair,” her “low-cut, unladylike clothing.” When a friend at his Boston office had shown him a June 1936 copy of Photoplay, with Davis highlighted in a “glamour pose,” he had tossed it into the wastebasket. “A stage career would have been more dignified,” he tartly observed.
Work was all that mattered to him—work and his papers and his legal reading. An efficient and well-paid patent attorney, he withdrew from social life, nursed his asthma, and finally collapsed and expired suddenly, at fifty-four, of a heart attack. Davis bitterly recalled him as loving but one creature in the world, his vicious, sharp-toothed Chow dog, whom he enjoyed setting on people to shake them up, frighten them. That was Harlow Morrell Davis’s idea of uproarious fun.
Davis threw herself into the remaining shots of Jezebel, feeling little regret that the schedule prevented her attending the Boston funeral. Later, with the picture done, she cried for days—cried for the father who might have been, the father whose coldness and rejection of her had affected her so strongly.
With Jezebel completed in late January 1938, Davis had her doctor tell Warners that she desperately needed a couple of months off. She had lost weight and her nerves were ragged. While on temporary medical leave in February and March, she was sent several scripts she thought were inferior and refused to do. One, about a successful theater star who rejoins her unwanted husband when he leaves prison, was called Comet Over Broadway. Davis considered it soapy and superficial—just the kind of thing she had been trying to escape. It was later assigned to Kay Francis, whose fortunes were slipping at Warners because she refused to negotiate her expensive contract downward. Kay eked out the remainder of her term at Warners in B pictures. (Years later, Davis visited Francis when she was doing stock in New England; they reminisced about the Warner days. “I wanted the money,” Francis told her. “I wanted the career,” Davis rejoined.)
Davis’s judgment concerning Comet Over Broadway was vindicated when the picture, upon release, got poorly reviewed. The other script she thumbed down was a trivial affair called Garden of the Moon. A capsule review of this programmer read as follows: “Nightclub owner Pat O’Brien and bandleader John Payne have a running feud. There is time out for numerous Busby Berkeley numbers.” Margaret Lindsay played O’Brien’s girlfriend, the part Davis refused. “It would have been nice to work with my friend Pat again, but not in that!” Davis said. Garden of the Moon also got forgettable reviews.
For refusing to work in Comet and Garden, Davis was put on suspension. Her father’s death had shaken her, and her affair with Wyler was at a temporary impasse. She was exhausted and depressed, and Ham was increasingly getting on her nerves with his lack of career drive and his passive torpors that alternated with anger. Suspensions were hard in those days. They meant loss of salary—one of the studio’s ploys for keeping actors in line. Davis showed determination and courage in holding out for something better, however, and eventually, it came.
After four months of idleness, Davis began shooting The Sisters in June 1938. The film was in production through August. Anyone who doubts that Bette Davis could be as warm, supportive, womanly, tender, and sympathetic as any actress one would want to name should see her in this. Life magazine’s October 31, 1938, review says it as well as any, commenting as it does on the “extraordinary grace, sensitivity and distinction” of her performance.
Davis later said, “I was delighted with this part because it was a change of pace. My ambition always has been . . . for variety in the kinds of parts I play. My career has proved this. I was always challenged by a new type of person to play.”
In this she is one of three sisters in a Montana town—the eldest and most stable. Henry Travers and Beulah Bondi are her parents. Jane Bryan (in her second film with Davis) is one of her two sisters, who marries a conventional hometown boy, Dick Foran. The other sister, Anita Louise, is a pretty, flighty type who marries a middle-aged man, Alan Hale, for his money, finally finding happiness with a younger man after Hale’s death. Davis falls in love with and marries an improvident, emotionally immature San Francisco newspaperman, Errol Flynn, who is a disappointed novelist, and in a burst of self-hate Flynn ships out for the Orient, leaving wife Davis pregnant. After refusing the romantic attentions of businessman Ian Hunter, Davis returns home, helps her sisters in their various adjustments, and is later followed by a repentant Flynn, whom she still loves, and whom she readily forgives.
These are the bare bones of the plot, but Davis’s fine, vital acting, supported by a bevy of fine character actors (Travers, Bondi, Donald Crisp, Lee Patrick, Laura Hope Crews) turns The Sisters into a major dramatic event.
Davis later maintained that she was glad to be in an Errol Flynn picture (he made twice as much money as she did, $4,500 to her $2,250 per week) because she knew that he had the box-office clout to put the picture over big. Handsome and extremely popular with the public, Flynn had excelled as adventurers and heroic figures, and his Robin Hood film was one of the big grossers of 1938. In private life, married since 1935 to actress Lili Damita, he was unstable, hard-drinking, and a compulsive womanizer and rake in all areas, later adding drug abuse to his repertoire.
A mountebank adventurer from his youth in Australia, he had been expelled from many schools, had sailed the seas in his own boat, had sampled many vocations, including gold prospecting, and after a few bit parts had fallen into stardom, with a minimum of effort on his part, in the 1935 Captain Blood, in which he was a derring-do adventurer who set women’s hearts fluttering from coast to coast.
Sexually insatiable, Flynn had also gone the bisexual route, and it was rumored that several young men he had seduced had killed themselves over him after his subsequent desertion. Many young women, too, were in his thrall, but the woman he reportedly loved most deeply, his co-star Olivia De Havilland, eluded his advances to the end.
Determined to prove his attractiveness to any and all comers, men and women, Flynn tried to proposition Davis as soon as shooting began, but was summarily turned down. A number of Davis’s friends and career associates have maintained that Davis was physically and romantically attracted to Flynn, always had been, but knew his reputation as arch trifler and heartless narcissist and had heard her fill of the stories of suicides, broken hearts, and assorted agonizings that this beau homme sans merci had left in his wake. Pride in her was stronger than passion, and just as she had refused to surrender to Wyler’s stronger personality, so she refused now to surrender to Flynn’s rakish but compelling charm. But the stories that she was secretly in love with Flynn date from their work together in The Sisters. And she acted her scenes with him with a compelling sincerity and sensitivity that surprised everyone viewing the rushes, including martinet director Anatole Litvak, then the husband of temperamental Miriam Hopkins.
Litvak, a Russian refugee whose biggest hit had been Mayerling, the 1937 French film starring Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux as the ill-fated Archduke Rudolf (the Austrian crown prince) and Marie Vetsera of the famed 1889 suicide pact, was a sadist on the set, demanding thorough rehearsals and endless setups and retakes. His fussy efforts, however, were not always justified, as Wyler’s were, and did not always achieve the same felicitous results. He drove Davis mercilessly through the two- to three-minute San Francisco earthquake scene, which turned out to be Warners’ somewhat pallid and inadequate answer to MGM’s more tumultuous and detailed rendition of the same famed 1906 event in San Francisco. By refusing to allow her a double in the sequence where the walls and ceilings of her apartment collapse around her, he endangered her life. Her usual stubborn pride and perfectionism drove Davis to stick out the dangerous shots, and when she played them with steely determination, Litvak’s sadistic glee turned gradually to reluctant, then ever more fervent admiration, which before the year was out would lead to an intense, albeit brief, liaison between them.
Flynn, who knew women, knew instinctively that Davis was attracted to him, but was refusing to be his game-of-hearts patsy. His initial cavalier approach to his scenes with her, in which the devilish, amiably contemptuous gleam in his eye was readily apparent, gave way as shooting progressed to a serious, concentrated performance as he found himself playing back to her the intensity of her banked passion for him. “He was certainly one of the great male beauties of his time,” Davis later said, “but a terrible actor—not because he didn’t have the basic talent, but because he was lazy, self-indulgent, refused to take his work seriously, and tended to throw away his lines and scenes.”
Davis resented that Flynn was more popular with the 1938 fans than she was and making twice as much money. In her view, she worked hard and carefully while he sauntered through his stints, and to her that was unjust. In addition, Warners had exacerbated her attitude by at first telling her the billing would be “Errol Flynn in The Sisters, with Bette Davis” because her contract up to that point did not provide for her above-title billing in all instances.
She managed to dissipate one nagging humiliation by standing firm on the matter of billing, so that eventually it read “Errol Flynn and Bette Davis in The Sisters.” Considering that Warners knew Jezebel to be an enormous hit as of the summer of 1938 (the box-office returns since March were already in), it is amazing that they did not have the foresight to co-star her above the title without her urging.
In a 1964 interview with me, Hal Wallis, the film’s producer, explained Warners’ anger with Davis’s high-handed refusals of other scripts and her walkouts, absences, endless temper tantrums, and myriad demands. “That was their way of punishing her; for instance, keeping her on tenterhooks about the co-starring billing with Flynn. In my opinion, their business instincts would have dictated their giving her that top billing before the picture went out to theaters, but meanwhile they enjoyed giving her a dose of her own medicine.”
Hal Wallis recalled Jack Warner saying of the attendant fuss over the billing, “That dame needs to be brought up short now and then; she’s an egomaniac and I like to get her sweating at times.” Wallis also opined that Davis’s friendship with Warner’s diplomatic and kindly wife, Ann, who more than once went to bat for her, was as responsible for Davis’s getting the last word with Warner as her own feisty determination was. But Wallis added, “To be fair, all Ann’s protective friendship and help would have gone for nothing if Davis hadn’t had the requisite fighter instincts on her own, and boy, did she have enough of that to spare!”
Davis’s essential femininity and nurturing womanly spirit shone through The Sisters. It is one of her most affirmative parts, and she is admirably convincing not only in the love scenes with Flynn but in her efforts to help her sisters and in her gentleness with her unrequited lover and boss, Ian Hunter.
Jack Warner, so often cast as Davis’s arch antagonist, is credited with a most perceptive remark about Davis. “She always acts better when she’s in love, and though she’d have killed me for saying so, I felt she was in love with Flynn all through the shooting, but she’d be damned if she let him or anyone else know it!”
But revival prints of The Sisters demonstrate Davis’s feeling for Flynn only too clearly. All through the picture he is the naughty boy, childish, contrary, and unreliable; he deserts her when she is pregnant to ship out to the Orient; his self-hatred over his career failures triumphs over his need for her character’s maternal nurturing and wifely devotion. With self-loathing, he leaves her to what he thinks is a better fate with a stronger, more prosperous man, but eventually he returns to seek again her loving ministrations and enduring concern.
In actual life that is how Davis saw Flynn, and that is yet another reason why their scenes together are ultimately convincing. She loves him, yes, but has no illusions about him. She surrenders to his boyish parasitism in the film, and even takes him back after his desertion—but offscreen she secretly loved but overtly scorned Flynn, derided and avoided him. She sensed the vulnerability he had aroused in her, and she resisted it with all her might. But the fact she was drawn to him as an onscreen vis-à-vis is attested to by her willingness to co-star with him again the next year.
Davis garnered some fine reviews for this, her second period film, (set in 1904–1909). Variety called her “scintillating” and the film “superbly made.” “Her acting is a joy,” said The Hollywood Reporter. And by mid-1938 there was to be yet another man in her life—an eccentric original if ever there was one!
Howard Hughes was thirty-two years old in 1938, the year he and Davis met. He had won fame as the producer of the aviation film Hell’s Angels, which launched Jean Harlow into stardom in 1930. At age eighteen, in 1924, he had inherited the Hughes Tool Company, founded by his father, which manufactured oil drilling equipment. Canny, shrewd, and a workaholic, young Hughes guided the firm to even greater successes, and at twenty, in 1926, he went into the film business, his first production being Everybody’s Acting, a silent directed and acted by Marshall Neilan. Mickey Neilan, who knew Hughes well and worked with him for some years, described him to me in 1952: “Howard was a shy, strange fellow. He lived deep within himself. He was handsome but he didn’t think he was. He saw himself as a great gangling buffoon of a guy. He was very self-conscious of his height. I
tried to assure him that height was the most attractive thing a man could have, that women liked literally to ‘look up’ at a swain, the higher the better, but he told me I was just trying to make him feel better about himself. With the girls I introduced him to, he was very insecure. He would be courtly and considerate, but he wouldn’t follow through. I took him to a madame one time when he was about twenty-one; I figured a good hoedown in a classy whorehouse with gals who knew how to make a guy happy would loosen him up. But he told me prostitutes disgusted him, that he was afraid of catching diseases from them. Howard was not a happy guy. He didn’t know how to enjoy life. We had a falling out at the time of Hell’s Angels. He’d promised to let me direct it, then reneged after I had done a lot of work on it. We drifted apart after that.”
Mickey failed to mention that his chronic alcoholism, which was interfering with his work increasingly, had been the real cause of his dismissal from the Hell’s Angels project. He did other films after that but his career went steadily downhill. His wife, Blanche Sweet, who divorced him because of his drinking (and also because Mickey had spent her fortune extravagantly), told me that she always liked Howard. He was, she said, “so very serious for so young a man. He didn’t like drinkers and irresponsibility, and he was very cautious and shrewd about hanging on to and building further the fortune his dad left him.” Blanche always felt that Howard “was nursing some secret sorrow, some hidden wound.” She remembered him at parties, age twenty-two or so, staring with intent melancholy into the distance, oblivious to all around him. Howard’s uncle, the writer Rupert Hughes, called him “the family oddball.”
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