Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  In the early 1930s, Howard Hughes’s interest in Hollywood cooled for a time, and he put all his energies into aviation. Soon he was winning fame and respect as an aircraft designer and builder, and as a pilot and developer of advanced airplanes. He broke speed records in 1935 flying a plane of his own design, and then broke his own record two years later.

  The year Bette Davis and Howard Hughes met, he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for flying around the world in a little over ninety hours. In a few years he would return to films, making the sexy and sensational The Outlaw, more famous for the young Jane Russell’s cleavage than for its cinematic qualities. His life was a combination of aircraft designing and testing, erratic film production (he would delay his film releases for years, as in the case of The Outlaw), and temperamental, eccentric reclusiveness that was not, as his detractors claimed, a male Garbo act but rather the result of his increasing hearing problems, his “loner” idiosyncrasies, and something else—a homosexual side that filled him with guilt and self-hatred. His tastes ran to handsome young airline mechanics and garagemen whom he often took flying—disappearing with them to one of his many retreats for weeks on end. Unable to be faithful to any one young man for long, he would tire of them, pay them off, sometimes set them up in businesses—then move on, satisfying his endless curiosity with other males in an endlessly compulsive manner that only added to his guilt, confusion, and self-rage as the years went on. He managed to avoid overt scandals or blackmail, and was well liked and respected by the men who had been his lovers.

  He was also given to “front” involvements with women, and had acquired a reputation as a Hollywood lothario, being seen with its most beautiful women. He married several times, most notably to lovely actress Jean Peters, but his sexual orientation continued along confused bisexual lines, with frequent forays into homosexual involvements.

  Hughes also suffered from impotence, especially with women. In forcing himself to live up to what was essentially a false macho image, he tended toward premature ejaculation and was a chronic masturbator, often finding it necessary to masturbate his way through sex with his female partner. If women were halfway attractive and found him attractive, he was always able to gratify them, after a fashion, though narcissism drove him on rather than heterosexual desire for the woman as a sex object.

  The only actress up to 1938 with whom he felt at all at ease was Katharine Hepburn, a woman with an unorthodox, individualistic approach to life. They were a heavily publicized off-and-on “romance,” though many of her friends felt that she functioned solely as good pal, good listener, fellow eccentric with whom he could identify comfortably. Hepburn liked to wear pants, too, which appealed to Howard. It fit his buddy image of her.

  The occasion for his meeting with Davis in the summer of 1938 was an event for the Tailwaggers, an organization for stray, lost, and abandoned canines, for which dog-lover Davis did much fund-raising. Invited to be guest of honor at a Beverly Hills Hotel Tailwaggers event, he found himself sitting next to Davis at dinner, and a spark was ignited. Davis later described Hughes as “extremely attractive and one of the wealthiest men in the West—or East for that matter . . . his influence and cooperation were a great help to me, but this interest proved to be directed toward me rather than the cause at hand.”

  Hughes and Hepburn were temporarily apart, mainly for geographical reasons, and he was lonely and rootless—and manless—when he met Davis. She, too, was in a state of emotional flux. Her marriage to Ham Nelson was winding down, more with a whimper than a bang. Her loneliness had driven her into an intense but short-lived affair with Anatole Litvak. Litvak was married to Miriam Hopkins, but it was an on-again, off-again thing, temporarily off, so he and Davis comforted each other for a time. “Loneliness—pure and simple loneliness—drove me into that,” Davis later said.

  By the time Hopkins was on to the liaison, it had already subsided, but she did not forgive Davis for seeing her husband. The two were divorced the next year, and Hopkins felt that Davis had trifled with Litvak just to spite her. In fact, Davis had gotten the impression that Hopkins’s marriage was winding down and headed for the exit door, just as hers was.

  So the Litvak thing was over conclusively (though he and Davis would work together again), and now she was bedding down with Hughes at her Coldwater Canyon home. “She was like a greedy little girl at a party-table who just had to sample other women’s cupcakes,” Hopkins later screamed. “First she wanted my husband and then she wanted Hepburn’s boyfriend, and her own husband was all but forgotten!”

  What Miriam did not noise abroad was her own increasing lesbian attraction to Bette. The fact that instead of reciprocating, Davis trifled with her husband galled her. Shortly she would share close quarters with the woman she found so disturbing, but only in a professional context. Even on that level, the fireworks were to be Fourth of July-ish.

  Meanwhile Davis was discovering that the tall young man she had naked in bed with her was more complex sexually than she had imagined. She had taken on more than she had bargained for. During their intimate sessions he confessed to her his homosexual leanings, and when his premature ejaculations and impotence became too pronounced, he begged her to perform fellatio and swear and use scatological language so that he could close his eyes and imagine she was a man! Since there was a lot of the masculine and the aggressive in Davis, and since she could summon the language of the locker room regularly and didn’t hesitate to use it, she managed to give the harried Howard his illusion—and his properly timed and executed orgasm. Then, after providing him with his homosexual fantasy, the feminine would come out in her, as per his request, and she would make hot milk for him and hold him in her arms until he fell asleep.

  Matters progressed along these lines for some months—until Ham Nelson returned from the East, where he had been for months. Aware of the Hughes involvement, Ham sneaked in one day while Davis and Hughes were out taking a drive, and thoroughly bugged the living room and bedroom. After obtaining his evidence, the disillusioned and harried Ham, feeling despised and unwanted, knowing that his marriage was coming to an end, broke in on Hughes and Davis while they were in bed and proceeded to blackmail Hughes for a cool $70,000. At first Hughes, humiliated and frightened by the personal revelations in the recordings, planned to hire the 1938 equivalent of a hit man to kill Ham, until Ham informed him that he had notified the police to pick up Hughes if he were found dead. Hughes forked over the $70,000.

  The result of all this was that the coup de grace was applied once and for all to the six-year marriage between Bette Davis and Harmon Oscar Nelson, and it also spelled kaput for her liaison with Hughes, who counted himself lucky not to be named correspondent in the divorce complaint filed by Ham against Bette. Anatole Litvak also heaved a sigh of relief.

  Davis brooded over the $70,000 that Ham had cost Hughes, and borrowed the money and paid him back. Hughes felt great respect for her for doing this, and their friendship survived, even though he high-tailed it back to good pal Katharine Hepburn in short order.

  In a deposition filed in December 1938, Ham Nelson charged, among other things, that Davis had been casually indifferent to him, had refused to perform her wifely duties (read “in bed”), curtly ignored the friends he brought to the house, and gave her mother, sister, and other relatives, professional associates, and even the servants, the time she should have given him, her husband. He then went into detail about how she told him she didn’t want him around anymore and had spoken to him “bitingly, caustically, cruelly.” All this and much more along the same lines.

  The property was divided down the middle, including the bank accounts, as per the California equal-property law. Ham then left quickly for New York, where he had been offered a position with Young and Rubicam, the advertising agency. Despite the lurid and hurtful parting, they remained long-distance friends—of a sort.

  13

  1939: The Great Year

  NEW YEAR 1939 brought Davis to an all-time high pro
fessionally, with four films that were moneymakers as well as artistic successes. Privately, the year began miserably for her.

  Davis had begun Dark Victory (released in early 1939) with physical health depleted and emotional health prime fodder for a psychiatrist. Ham was divorcing her after blackmailing her lover, Hughes. Anatole Litvak, whose continental charm and vivacity and love of partying had revived her spirits, was put off by the grim, drab offscreen life Davis led, as she pinched pennies to cope with Ruthie’s extravagance and Bobby’s sanitarium fees. Her frequent spells of depression, her psychosomatic complaints, her fear of press exposure, all combined to affect her nervous system disastrously.

  Her woes were compounded when Miriam Hopkins, as always seething with jealousy over Davis’s preemption of Jezebel, phoned to remind her that she was still the wife of Litvak. After threatening to name Davis corespondent in her divorce suit against Litvak, Miriam, still ridden with lesbian hankerings for Davis, was calmed down by Jack Warner, who signed her to a new contract. She had been off the screen for over a year, and was raring to go. Jack promised her top vehicles, possibly a co-starrer with Davis herself. “If I get into a picture with that husband stealer,” Hopkins raged, “I’ll show her what acting is really about!”

  Apprised of Miriam’s carryings-on, Warner and Wallis only laughed. “If the Hopkins dame wants to work up an ongoing bitch feud,” Jack Warner chortled, “let her! It’ll make for great publicity if we pair them in a picture” (a prophesy that was to come true). Meanwhile Hopkins prepared to divorce the only-too-willing Litvak without naming Davis, as per Jack Warner’s express plea. Litvak later said, “Marriage with Miriam—an affair with Bette—I’ve had enough of crazy, temperamental women to last me for years—now I need a rest, no?” All agreed he did.

  Davis was so overwrought and ill during the first weeks of Dark Victory’s schedule that she begged Wallis to release her from the assignment, claiming she was sick and wasn’t doing justice to the role. But Wallis had just seen the first rushes. “For God’s sake, stay sick, Bette,” he said, “you’re doing just wonderfully!”

  Jack Warner, Hal Wallis, and Hal’s associate producer, David Lewis, then held separate conferences with director Edmund Goulding and leading man George Brent. “It’s up to you guys to keep the lady on an even keel,” Hal announced. “Eddie, you work with her—and George, you play with her—and it’ll keep her excited, amused, and on the ball!” As it turned out, neither man needed much persuasion; they had gotten the same idea on their own.

  This was Edmund Goulding’s second picture with Davis. She had responded well to him in That Certain Woman. Now, convinced that her role of the dying heiress Judith Traherne would bring her to the fullness of her talent and the public acclaim she deserved, he worked with her carefully, soothingly, planing down her overacting, keeping her gestures and expressions controlled and on target. Goulding worked differently from Wyler; as in That Certain Woman, his approach was gentle, feminine, empathetic. Instead of threatening and yelling and dominating as Wyler had done, he worked along with her, giving her the benefit of his intuition, making her laugh gleefully at his clowning—acting out with the leading man the impassioned lovemaking he expected from Davis. By subtle indirection and gentle persuasion he got from Davis a performance every bit as disciplined as Wyler could have.

  The two directors’ styles varied widely. One persuaded and guided gently; the other drove and disciplined—both worked equally well. Even so, Davis took careful handling. If driven too far too fast she went haywire and stomped off to her dressing room. But finally, as the weeks went on, she began to lose herself in, Judith Traherne, and from then to the end of shooting, work for her was a delight, and an escape from her overwhelming personal concerns.

  George Brent did his bit offscreen as well as on, complementing Goulding’s professional mentoring admirably: During the shooting of Dark Victory, Davis won a prize she had sought for six years—a reciprocation of Brent’s feelings. The deep sympathy and concern that he came to feel for Davis as he watched her offscreen disasters accumulating broadened into a love for her that eventually became sexual as well. The two became lovers. The soothing romantic and physical addresses from a man she had always felt deeply for, acted out night after night at his place or at her Coldwater Canyon house, gave Davis an emotional release and sensual catharsis that added greatly to her portrayal of Judith. Delighted that she was in such good hands, Jack Warner and Hal Wallis swore columnists Louella and Hedda to secrecy regarding the romance, since the moral turpitude clauses that Hays and the Legion of Decency might have insisted be implemented could have ruined Davis’s career.

  Dark Victory had originally been a Tallulah Bankhead 1934 Broadway play that ran only fifty-one performances before closing. But David O. Selznick had been intrigued with it and bought it for $50,000. He toyed with pairing Garbo and Fredric March in it, along with other potential stellar combinations, but eventually lost interest, and in January 1938 sold it to Warners, which at first considered it as a vehicle for Kay Francis. But Kay was superstitious about playing a dying woman, and while it lay around, Davis found a script, fell in love with it, and pressed hard for it.

  Jack Warner had his doubts—who wants to see a picture about a woman who kicks off? was his reaction. “When you’re just getting into high gear, why go morbid on your audience?” he told Bette. “All those women out there want to see you making love, fulfilling their dreams vicariously. Then you conk out on them!”

  But Davis kept pushing at Warner, repeating over and over that at that point she needed something she could put her heart into, and finally Jack, admitting the role itself was juicy, even if the theme made his flesh crawl, told her, “Okay, go hang yourself!” and the role was hers.

  Casey Robinson, the premier purveyor of strong feminine-interest scripts, really whipped up a pièce de résistance with Dark Victory. The plot is so well known after over fifty years that only a cursory recapitulation is necessary.

  Judith Traherne, a fun-loving heiress on Long Island, likes horses, booze, and men in roughly that order. Sybaritic and shallow, she rides the nags, swills the champagne, romances the guys, and butterflies about her social circle with a hollow indifference tinged with a great love of life and adventure. Then she learns that she is dying of a brain tumor. After the operation she thinks she is cured, falls in love with the doctor, George Brent, who doesn’t have the heart to tell her she has less than a year to live. But when she learns by accident of her death sentence, she turns brittle and bitchy and cynically peregrinative, then valiantly faces reality, marries the doctor, who has fallen in love with her, and gives up her former life to assist him in Vermont with his research. When death comes, she faces it without self-pity. Her affliction and eventual death redeem her spiritually and bring out her best aspects, and hers is truly at the end a victory over the dark.

  Dark Victory, thanks to the script, Goulding’s guidance, and Davis’s concentrated application of her finest artistic instincts, emerges as a triumphant cinematic blending of acting, direction, scripting, and Ernest Haller’s photography. And Max Steiner comes through with one of his more poignant scores, aptly underlining, as only he can, Davis’s emotional crises and eventual catharsis.

  The picture is full of fine scenes, such as Davis’s panic when she realizes the seriousness of her condition: She stares into a mirror, pushing back her chair, rubbing her forehead. When her maid asks her if she had a headache, she barks, “Yes, a BIG headache! Bring me some champagne!” And her expression gets across tellingly the wonderfully mobile synthesis of horror, panic, and emotional devastation that she is feeling at that moment. When she realizes Brent has lied to her about her condition after the first operation, she is scornful, contemptuous (“Having fun with the knives lately, doctor?”), and heartbrokenly disillusioned by what she thinks is only his pity when she thought he had given her his love.

  Then, when she and Brent have reconciled and marry, she is bright, breezy, and busy on the
farm in Vermont where, via mutual agreement, they’ve promised not to think of the Great Inevitable due in months or weeks. Just prior to Brent’s departure for a medical conference in New York (he is researching her disease), Davis is planting hyacinths in the garden with best friend Geraldine Fitzgerald (wonderfully sympathetic and sensitive in her role of Greek Chorus–style supportive) when she recognizes the sudden dimming of her vision that she has been told will precede her demise by only a few hours. The sun is bright but she thinks it has darkened, then recognizes its warmth on her hands. Sudden horror and dismay are shortly superseded by a valiant determination that Brent shall not see her die; she sends him away, mounts the stairs, and to a Max Steiner alarum of angel sounds, prays, then lies on the bed—to a gradual blurring of the film’s focus.

  Throughout, Davis’s technique is sure and strong. She lives the role of Judith Traherne; into it she puts all the struggles and disappointments of her career, all the turmoil and horror of her romantic and marital disasters, all the newfound resignation of a spirit that has transcended adversity through wisdom and serenity. Judith Traherne is one of the screen’s most vivid creations, as filtered through the intense yet disciplined creative gifts of one of the screen’s prime artists.

  The reception of Dark Victory by the critics when it debuted in April 1939 was ecstatic. James Shelley Hamilton in the National Board of Review Magazine (predecessor to Films in Review) wrote, “It’s [Davis’s] show, her special kind of show, all the way through . . . she has never before seemed to be so entirely inside a part, with every mannerism and physical aspect of her suited to its expression.” Frank Nugent in The New York Times wrote: “Miss Davis is superb. More than that, she is enchanted and enchanting.”