Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  The party guests thought this hilarious, but Davis faced them all down. “The man is a great artist,” she declared firmly, “and you people demean yourselves, not him, by relaying such unkind stories.” Years later she would come similarly to the defense of another great actor she fervently admired. According to Jerry Asher, as of 1939 her attitude toward homosexuals was, “We all carry some variety of infirmity or sorrow with us—let’s treat each other kindly. None of us is getting out of our human condition alive!”

  The year 1939 was to bring Charles Laughton one of his greatest roles—the pitiful, grotesquely deformed Quasimodo in the remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (Lon Chaney had been memorable in the silent version.) Davis saw the film and told Jerry Asher: “Charles is a great artist—he understands the depths of the human heart. Only a man of sorrows could play Quasimodo like that man did!” Jerry relayed her words to Laughton, who responded with an affectionately grateful telegram of thanks.

  15

  The Fourth Warner Brother—and Farney

  AFTER COMPLETING THE Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in mid-summer 1939, Davis decided she needed a vacation—a long one. Despite the fact that she had completed six pictures in a row with little or no vacation between assignments, Jack Warner wanted her to go immediately into another picture, ’Til We Meet Again. A soapy, saccharine remake of One Way Passage, the 1932 Kay Francis–William Powell hit dealt with a condemned criminal and a dying woman who meet on an ocean liner and vow to meet again though both are fated to die. It was a big hit with the matinee ladies in Depression 1932. Warner, however, failed to see that the material was worn and outdated and that it too closely resembled Dark Victory and was thus anathema to Davis, who had had enough dying for some time to come, and kept pressing it on her, to her annoyance and distraction.

  She lit off for the East and told the studio in no uncertain terms that she wanted four or five months off. Considering that The Old Maid was just going into release that August of 1939, and that the Elizabeth-Essex picture would not premiere for four months, Jack Warner’s desire to keep Davis on the treadmill does seem greedy and demanding—two qualities for which he was well known both before and after 1939.

  But Davis, fed up, proved elusive as she wandered the New England states, trying to reestablish old ties in Massachusetts with people she had outgrown and no longer had anything in common with. She drove up through New Hampshire and stopped off at little inns along the coast, walking beaches for hours. At this point she knew she was the first lady of the screen, although her salary was still inadequate. Artistically, she had achieved all her major objectives, with one film, The Old Maid, playing to enthralled audiences and winning critical superlatives—and another due out in some months, in which, as Queen Elizabeth, she would be placed on a par with Lynn Fontanne.

  But none of this gave her any satisfaction. What did it mean to be dubbed Popeye the Magnificent, the First Lady of the Screen, or the Fourth Warner Brother when at thirty-one she was feeling old and emotionally depleted. She had lost Ham via a bitter, recriminative divorce; her romances with Wyler and Litvak had gone nowhere, and Wyler had married Margaret Tallichet, closing the door on her for good; George Brent had been nurturing and sustaining and understanding, but only to a point. She was lonely and rootless, and the future that should have looked so bright seemed instead to offer only downhill journeys and ever grimmer vistas.

  Was it true what her relatives and friends said of her, that she insisted on wearing the pants, being the “man of the family” as she had had to be for Ruthie, for Bobby, for eight years now—for longer than that, really, since the day in her early youth when Harlow Morrell Davis had taken himself out of their lives and forced her to fill his shoes. Her ruthlessness, assertiveness, and will to win, triumph, and dominate were ever at war with her need to lean, the longing to look up to a strong, noble, decent, independent-spirited man whose career—in his own sphere—would match hers.

  It was in this mood of inner conflict that her lonely journey ended at Peckett’s Inn in Franconia, New Hampshire—a place Ruthie had fondly recommended as soothing, rustic, yet warm and hospitable.

  There she met Arthur Farnsworth, a handsome, thirty-four-year-old assistant manager at the inn. Kind, manly, hospitable, soothing, understanding, Farnsworth came from an excellent old Vermont family. He had a little money and would some day inherit more. He had been a professional flier until he was hurt in an accident which he would not discuss. In 1939 his divorce from Boston socialite Betty Jane Aydelotte (who also had an airline pilot’s license), was finalized. He didn’t want to talk about her either.

  Like Davis, Farnsworth in 1939 was in a state of life-pause, trying to find himself. The position at Peckett’s Inn was on the menial side, but it was undemanding, and it gave him time to think. Davis fell in love with him almost at once. She chose to ignore the facts that gradually emerged about him, such as he was something of a mother’s boy, mother being a dragon from one of Vermont’s most aristocratic families, who would have given Gladys Cooper’s brutal Boston dowager in Now, Voyager, a run for her money. His father, it appeared, was a milquetoast dentist very much henpecked by the materfamilias, and his siblings were unimaginative, unremarkable, soft types from all appearances.

  But Davis saw only what she chose to see—the chunky, well-developed body, the clipped Yankee accent that bespoke his aristocratic lineage, the quiet, unassuming man’s-man aura. Farney actually had little to say but she chose to believe that it was the laconic attitude of a true man. Though well educated, Farney was a being of passive intellect, with no capacity for self-analysis, with no strong moral sense, and, had she been able to realize it, he was something of a high-class hustler—though gigolo was the term more in fashion then.

  He told her he was still intensely interested in flying. He would later take a good position with Minneapolis Honeywell and would serve as liaison during World War II between aircraft plants and the government. He had sustained some head wounds while flying, making him subject to periodic epileptic seizures that would keep him out of World War II service.

  Determined to cast him as the Man She Had Always Sought, Davis took Farney to bed within a week—and there found him most adept, expert, and far superior to gangling, bumbling, masturbatory Ham—or even the Messrs. Brent, Wyler, Hughes, and Litvak.

  Handsome, muscular, beautifully endowed, always ready, accommodating—pliable yet manly Farney—who could ask for anything more, given her mood?

  Next she began to feel the need to put down roots, so she bought a run-down old house called Butternut near Littleton, New Hampshire. She called in a moonlighting crew of Warner carpenters from Hollywood to fix it up (Jack Warner was fit to be tied when he heard) and began planting and painting and becoming the rooted New Englander she had decided to be, totally and completely and unstintingly—for a few months.

  And there was Farney to play house with her; sitting in a big armchair by the fireside, pipe in mouth, striding about in sexy, manly boots, helping her lift things, sawing wood, planning rooms. It was a movie fantasy come true, and though she didn’t realize it, that was what she was after—a perfect Bette Davis movie. Setting: Butternut. Leading Man: Farney. Director: Bette Davis, who else? Screenwriter, too. Only Max Steiner’s appropriate motifs were missing; in lieu of them she played classical music, which Farney also loved.

  Meanwhile Jack Warner came calling. In surprisingly lèse-majesté style—indeed his wife, Ann, thought it déclassé—Jack came to New York and stooped to following her all the way to New Hampshire. He was desperate to get her into a new picture. What would it be? What did she want? Davis airily and frostily discussed ideas for new pictures while the studio tycoon worked up an unaccustomed sweat. Despite herself, she felt contempt for him for coming to her; she had always gone to him before. She liked him haughty, disdainful, argumentative. Now she looked him over with a critical eye—a middle-aged, paunchy, soliciting creature who bargained with her, to his disadvantage, as if
his life depended on it. He had still one card to play—or rather not play—to keep her continued respect. He would not raise her salary. She had to be satisfied with the lousy $3,000 a week. “We’ll wait and see on that,” he repeated over and over.

  She toyed with several ideas. One that intrigued her, oddly enough, was a remake of Garbo’s 1930 Anna Christie, with, of all people, James Cagney opposite her in the role Charles Bickford played. The Garbo talkie had been too primitive, she told Jack, too strained. It had been a hit only because it was Garbo’s first talkie appearance. She would do it better, she said; she would make the points O’Neill had intended.

  Soon the talk moved to the best-selling All This and Heaven, Too—about a governess in an aristocratic household in 1847 Paris who becomes involved in a scandal. This intrigued her somewhat. Jack Warner went back to Hollywood with the understanding that, come January 1940, All This and Heaven, Too, provided the script measured up, would be it.

  She and Farney continued to play house at Butternut and then back in Hollywood, where they began redecorating and refurbishing Riverbottom, a house in Glendale that her real estate agents, knowing her taste for all that was redolent of New England, had found for her. Farney began commuting back and forth on his aircraft assignments. Suave and undemanding and weak, he left her pretty much on her own.

  Davis opened the new year 1940 with All This and Heaven, Too, a lush, romantic costume drama that co-starred her with Charles Boyer. Davis always praised him unreservedly, calling him at various times “that romantic, beautiful actor” and “a joy to work with, professional to the core.” Certainly in the elaborate film version of the best-selling Rachel Field novel about her great-aunt Henriette DesPortes’s involvement in a famous Parisian murder scandal of 1847, the Davis-Boyer combo, supported by such sterling performers as Barbara O’Neil (fresh from her role of Scarlett’s mother in Gone With the Wind), Jeffrey Lynn, Harry Davenport, Helen Westley, and Walter Hampden, exuded star glamour at its zenith.

  The story is about Davis’s term as governess in the Parisian mansion of the duc and duchesse de Praslin. When Davis wins the four children’s affection and the love of the husband, the pathologically jealous duchess dismisses her and is then murdered by the duc when he discovers that she has refused the governess a letter of recommendation, with the result that she is living in abject poverty.

  This handsomely produced story ran up a budget of $1,400,000, a respectable sum for 1940, and ran, before cutting, for 23 reels—cut down to 143 minutes for general release in July 1940.

  Boyer returned Davis’s compliments in a 1966 interview, and his comments about her are worth repeating at some length. He told me:

  “She was, in my opinion, the most gifted American actress on the screen. She had enormous reserves of emotion, a splendidly disciplined technique, and could convey so much with gestures and expressions. I felt a little guilty when we started All This and Heaven, Too because my role as the amorous, eventually murderous, husband was much more flamboyant and impassioned, whereas Bette had to be restrained and subdued through most of the action. As befit her depiction of a reserved, disciplined governess who did not dare call her feelings her own, she had to maintain an outward restraint. This was indeed a feat of tightrope walking for an actress who had won her much-deserved fame portraying passionate, electric characters. I told her of my feelings of guilt over having what in my opinion was the showier, hence easier, role, and she brushed them aside. I remember her telling me that it was a privilege to appear with an actor (I repeat her words, certainly not mine) so accomplished and distinguished, and that it meant so much to her to work with performers who could play back to her, on their own level and in their own style, the feelings she was attempting to convey.”

  Boyer added, “I had heard much about her temperament, and how difficult she was supposed to be. I found none of that. We worked together amicably and harmoniously from start to finish. I know she and Tola [director Anatole Litvak] had their artistic differences, but I always felt both of them were concerned for the good of the picture, and even though their concepts were different, they were sincerely expressed. All in all, it was a most happy blending of talents.”

  Barbara O’Neil gave a superb performance as the neurotic, possessive, paranoid, and obsessively jealous duchesse de Praslin; hers was the most bravura part of all, and she gave it the full juice, indeed out-Bette-ing Bette in their scenes together. Davis confessed that she regretted not having the role of the duchesse herself, as it was a very showy role, but she decided on the quieter, more repressed Henriette, in the final analysis, because it gave her a chance to showcase yet again the warm, womanly, self-contained persona that was also very much a part of her (as in The Sisters) and she felt that this had not had much airing in her four most recent roles—a dying heiress, a mad empress, a bitter old maid, and a flamboyant queen. It was time to remind audiences yet again that this other Bette Davis incarnation was still in good working order.

  The sterling actor Harry Davenport, a veteran of the stage and numerous fine character performances, was seventy-four in 1940 but still forceful and magnetic as the old servant who tries to warn Henriette of the hideous danger hanging over her in the aristocratic house of jealousy and hate. He is eloquent indeed when he ripostes Davis’s denial that any word or action of love had ever passed between her and the duc with the words, “And your feelings—could they also be shared?”

  Casey Robinson, the sensitive screenwriter who understood the Davis mystique so well, wrote a literate, intelligent screenplay with much scope and solid characterization. He stuck closely to Rachel Field’s novel, even using much of her dialogue, and Field visited with Davis on the set, where they became fast friends discussing the character and motivations of the original Henriette. Had she indeed been a harlot and homebreaker who had seduced the duc and wrought havoc leading to murder? Field felt she was an innocent victim and that there had been no physical affair between her and the duc. Davis shilly-shallied on this; at one time she thought they had committed adultery, at another she felt Field—and Robinson—had told it as it was.

  As shooting progressed, Davis began to understand that she was giving one of her more subtle, restrained, disciplined performances. Boyer, fine artist that he was, expressed tension with his entire body, and the wildest passion in his brooding, expressive dark eyes. She found herself catching fire from the finely honed technique of a co-star who was, for once, her equal in talent and technique. She felt the joy any artist can know when his or her projections are met and reciprocated with creative understanding and esthetic perception. She did not act with performers of Boyer’s quality often—and it meant much to her, as she was often to state.

  Her problems with Anatole Litvak were something else again. She and Tola had, briefly but intensely, been lovers, in bed he was a tender, responsive, sensitive lover; as a director he could be a martinet, demanding, rude, and as insulting and abrasive in his way as Mike Curtiz. He had a heavy-handed, literal directorial style that got on her nerves no end. Tola was also a man for putting it all on paper, going by the book, by the letter, even when some degree of spontaneity and flexibility were called for. And often her instincts were more true than his. When she played the courtroom scene in which she denies her complicity in the murder, she felt she should pull out all the stops, weep passionately, sink down on the railing, gesticulate bewilderedly, like a trapped animal. Tola accused her of trying to make up for her many repressed, restrained scenes by going overboard on that one. He failed to understand that her grief and fear for the duc had caused her normal restraints to give way. Davis finally called Hal Wallis and associate producer David Lewis in to look at the rushes in which she had played it her way. They overruled Tola, and ordered the scene to remain as it was.

  Naturally, this caused further enmity between Litvak and Davis, and soon Boyer, O’Neil, and the other cast members were retreating discreetly beyond earshot as star and director argued out every scene toe to toe and eyeball
to eyeball. Finally Litvak learned the lesson the hard way, that there was no arguing with Davis when she had her mind firmly and finally set. She threatened to have him fired, and the credit for such a major picture was something the still insecure Litvak desperately needed. He threw up his hands, gave in, and Davis did things her way for the rest of the shooting. The root of the problem was that Davis didn’t have the confidence in Litvak’s directorial instincts that she had in Wyler’s and Goulding’s. She found too often that his directions ran counter to her own instincts as to how a scene should be played. The finished result with Henriette played as Davis thought she should be proves her right in this instance (she was not always to be).

  Certainly All This and Heaven Too displays Davis at one of the summits of her achievement, and one of the proudest moments of her life came when she was able to take her mother to the lavish premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre.

  In her autobiography, Davis wrote: “There is no question that the Hollywood premiere, so often satirized, is an exciting affair. If you are in a picture being premiered, it is difficult not to feel like a queen. Certainly it was not difficult for Ruthie to be the Dowager Empress. We giggled quietly at the change that had come over our lives since our arrival in Hollywood seven [sic] years before.”

  There was much praise for the winning youngsters who played the Praslin children, Virginia Weidler, borrowed from MGM, June Lockhart, talented daughter of Gene; Ann Todd, a winsome charmer; and especially little Richard Nichols, a pale, waiflike little fellow straight out of Dickens who was the only performer to outplay Davis herself in some of their scenes together.