Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  In his July 5, 1940, review, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote: “Alert to the opportunity, Miss Davis and Mr. Boyer put all the ‘soul’ they possess into the playing . . . under the slow-paced direction of Anatole Litvak, they carry through mainly on one somber key—Miss Davis with her large eyes filled with sadness and her mouth drooping heavily with woe; Mr. Boyer with his face a rigid mask, out of which his dark eyes signal pain.”

  In a prologue and epilogue, Davis has to win her spurs with some witchy schoolgirls in America who learn about her past; when the teacher tells her pupils about all the hurt and horror she endured, they cry over her as a heroine—it is a saccharine but somehow effective touch.

  The role of Leslie Crosbie in Somerset Maugham’s The Letter had already been played by a bevy of distinguished actresses by the time Davis finally essayed it in 1940. Gladys Cooper had originated it in a London play in 1927. Later Katharine Cornell had played it in New York. By 1929 it was a Hollywood movie with the great Jeanne Eagels, who died soon after its release.

  One of Maugham’s more trenchant and biting stories, it deals with the wife of an English plantation manager in Malaya who murders her lover while her husband is away. She is tried for the crime but pleads self-defense, saying the dead man was a mere acquaintance who had made sudden advances. Her defense attorney is suspicious of her, and later his assistant brings him a copy of the letter she had written the deceased, in which she begs him to see her. This throws a different light on the case, and the attorney is forced to spend the unknowing husband’s life savings—$10,000—to recover the letter from the murdered man’s bitter and revengeful Eurasian wife.

  Later, Leslie Crosbie is exonerated at the trial; her defense attorney, who has suppressed the letter out of friendship for the husband, is guilt-ridden and bitter. When the husband asks about the missing money, with which he had planned to buy property, Leslie is forced to tell him the truth. He forgives her, but is deeply hurt. Later, under stress, she confesses that “with all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” He leaves her, disgusted and appalled, and she goes into the garden to meet her doom at the hands of the murdered lover’s wife.

  Such is the plot of The Letter, and it is melodramatic and lurid. But in the 1940 film version it was admirably scripted by Howard Koch, photographed to wonderful atmospheric effect by Tony Gaudio (on whom Davis had insisted), and directed by William Wyler with a painstaking, multiple-take thoroughness that had by then become his trademark, and that won the picture, and Davis, Academy Award nominations for 1940.

  The Letter contains one of Davis’s greatest performances. She played Leslie Crosbie not in the emotional, throat-clutching way Jeanne Eagels had in the earlier picture but in a tense, taut, controlled manner that heightened the tension enormously. And in this second picture with Wyler, she submitted, despite the usual arguments, to his ideas and came through with a polished, disciplined, subtle performance that could not have been bettered.

  Her romance with Wyler was several years in the past by 1940, so they worked together as professionals who thoroughly respected each other. She still found his methods nerve-racking and annoying, and there were a number of shouting matches on the set, but when she saw the rushes, with their flattering camera angles and shrewd highlighting of her best features, as well as the sterling characterization Wyler had forced out of her by his usual endless retakes and demanding methods, all she could feel was a profound gratitude.

  Davis was later to pay tribute to Wyler as one of the very few directors whom she could trust completely, and to whom she would subordinate her own instincts and judgment. “That is a very rare quality in a director; I had so few of them I really respected and trusted. I had implicit confidence in Willie in that picture. In our last picture (The Little Foxes) we might have had creative differences, but in those first two I allowed his will to prevail and later blessed him for handling me with such disciplined firmness.”

  James Stephenson, the English actor who had been playing small supporting roles in Warner films, including Davis’s The Old Maid and Elizabeth and Essex, came into his own under Wyler’s guidance in The Letter, and in his role as the doubting, disillusioned defense attorney he wound up getting critical acclaim almost equal to Davis’s own. Unaccustomed to Wyler’s methods, Stephenson, a product of London theater training, at times revolted vociferously (as had another English actor, Laurence Olivier, from whom Wyler forced a performance that made him an international star). Several times he walked off the set. Davis later recalled that each time he did that, she went after him, promising that if he returned and submitted to Wyler’s methods, it would mean the great breakthrough he had not yet found in America. Later, Stephenson tendered Davis heartfelt thanks for her support.

  Herbert Marshall is very fine as Davis’s deceived husband, loving and loyal throughout the trial of someone he loves and believes innocent, heartbroken, disillusioned but still forgiving when he finds out the sordid and pathetic truths of his wife’s infidelity. In the 1929 Jeanne Eagels film version, Marshall, curiously enough, had been the murdered lover. In the 1940 version, he was played by a hapless young actor named David Newell, who is seen only momentarily stumbling out onto the porch to die in the dirt below the steps of the plantation house.

  In the London play, the action had ended with Leslie’s words, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed,” a fitting curtain on a stage production free of censorship, but the Hollywood Production Code people demanded that Davis be punished for her sins. Accordingly, Howard Koch had to write a scene in which she goes out to meet her death at the hands of the Eurasian wife of the victim. Then, something had to be done about “punishing sufficiently” murderess number two, so as Gale Sondergaard, who played the role, leaves the scene with a confederate, she is accosted by a policeman. Davis recalled later that there was great concern at the studio that such bowdlerization might injure the realistic approach Wyler was trying to achieve, but the feared minus turned into a plus, when it was revealed that the haunting camera effects, the dramatic play of light and shadow, and the musical inspirations of Max Steiner had added, in Davis’s own death scene, an exciting new dimension to the proceedings.

  The Maugham story proved so popular that it was remade several times—each time with inferior results. A rather hasty, slapdash, melodramatic version called The Unfaithful appeared in 1947, directed by Vincent Sherman with, of all people, Ann Sheridan in the Davis role. (Ann, likable as she was, in no way measured up to Davis’s interpretation; she lacked the depth, passion, and technique for it.) As late as 1982, a telemovie version, directed by John Erman, featured Lee Remick in yet another of the roles that were beyond her depth. To this day, the Davis version stands as the definitive one—and deservedly so.

  In one breathtakingly sinister scene, guided by Wyler from start to finish with painstaking professionalism, Gale Sondergaard receives Davis at her dwelling. She has demanded that her husband’s murderer come in person to get the letter in exchange for the $10,000. As Wyler directs the scene, Davis advances toward Sondergaard, who is standing on an elevated level. The widow’s eyes glitter with hatred; they stare at each other for what seems an eternity; Davis, eyes widening, fearful yet determined, waits for the evidence that would potentially damn her. Sondergaard slowly extracts the letter from her sleeve and contemptuously throws it on the floor, forcing Davis to stoop to retrieve it. This is a salient example of the excruciating tension Wyler could inject into a scene, editing out of it anything extraneous or superfluous.

  In future years, whenever she spoke of The Letter, Davis mentioned the enormous contribution Stephenson and Sondergaard had made. “It always meant so much to me,” she said more than once, “to have fine actors playing opposite me; they gave me something sterling to play against, and enhanced my own performance accordingly.”

  At this point Davis was still “between husbands,” and though her romance with Farney was catching fire despite the three thousand miles that separated
them most of the time, she was not immune to the manly charms of one particular actor named Bruce Lester, who was, as she later recalled in somewhat sugary terms for her, “the essence of winsome sweetness.” Lester had several good scenes with her—he was an assistant to the defense attorney who commiserated with her, being ignorant of her guilt—and she went out of her way to put him at ease and ensure that he would give a creditable performance.

  Soon they were seen lunching together and leaving alone in her car after the day’s shooting ended, and rumors of a Bette Davis–Bruce Lester romance began circulating. Lester, of whom little was to be heard thereafter, was a very sincere, decent young man who was not at all sure that acting was what he really wanted. Later he praised Davis for her encouragement and concern at that point in his life. The romance, such as it was, seems to have come to nothing. “She found Bruce attractive and sweet, but he was a bit tame for her speed,” Jerry Asher later said.

  The New York Times reviewer extolled The Letter, when it opened in New York on November 22, 1940, as “a superior melodrama, compounded of excellent acting, insinuating atmosphere and unrelaxed suspense,” with Davis described as “a strangely cool and calculating killer who conducts herself with reserve and yet implies a deep confusion of emotions.” Stephenson came off as “superb,” and of Wyler the review stated, “His hand is patent throughout.”

  Davis could be generous, helpful, and sympathetic to co-actors she really liked and admired. The British actor James Stephenson, who had given such a sterling account of himself in The Letter as her defense attorney, was one of them.

  A courtly gentleman to his fingertips, Stephenson had come over from England several years before, after languishing at Warners’ Teddington Studios near London, which had produced a string of cheaply made and badly done programmers (films) for the British market exclusively. Davis took note of him when he played a very small part as Miriam Hopkins’s husband, James Ralston, in The Old Maid, and felt that his finely honed talents were being wasted. She was instrumental in casting him in The Letter, over Wyler’s initial objections. Stephenson, he told her, was too staid and British to play the intense defense attorney. Later, after Stephenson gave an excellent account of himself, Wyler uncharacteristically admitted he was wrong.

  Due to Davis’s pleas to the front office, Stephenson was then given a good role with Ronald Reagan in International Squadron, about Royal Air Force heroics, and then, again via Davis’s wire-pulling, he wound up as the lead in Shining Victory, a 1941 drama about a Scottish doctor conducting psychiatric research in a Scottish sanitarium, whose love for Geraldine Fitzgerald complicates his life.

  Shining Victory represented a first in the directorial career of Irving Rapper, a talented jack-of-all-trades who had been born in London in 1898 and came to New York at age eight. After directing the Washington Square Players, Rapper moved on to Broadway as both actor and director, and then went to Hollywood, where he was an assistant director and writer and dialogue coach, working, circa 1939, on Davis’s Juarez.

  Shining Victory, based on A. J. Cronin’s Jupiter Laughs, was Rapper’s first directorial assignment, and he was determined to make the most of it. Crediting Stephenson, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Donald Crisp, Barbara O’Neil, and other fine players with cooperating “magnificently” with him, as he later told me, Rapper went on to direct top Warner films, even directing Davis in some of her more notable future vehicles.

  Davis had had some interesting conversations with him on the set of Jezebel (he had served as dialogue director) and thought him creatively gifted and personally stimulating (both denied a romance).

  As a good-luck gesture to Stephenson and Geraldine Fitzgerald, Davis appeared in Shining Victory made up as a nurse for a bit part in which she delivers a letter. There are three versions of this incident. Rapper claims he didn’t recognize her at first, but allowed her to rehearse the scene anyway. Davis claims he was in on the joke from the beginning. Hal Wallis claims the whole thing was a gag and the scene in question was never photographed, only rehearsed. Some claim to have seen Davis in the finished film; others look for her in vain. But there is proof the scene exists, whether or not photographed. A studio still shows Davis, coiffed severely, in a starched, bibbed, and white-collared nurse’s uniform, sporting what appears to be a pince-nez with a string attached around her neck, handing a letter to actress Hermine Sterler, who looks severe and mannish in a jacket and tie. Whether her bit in Shining Victory, photographed, merely rehearsed, whatever, belongs in the Bette Davis canon is still being debated.

  To Davis’s and his other admirers’ great grief, James Stephenson, still only in his forties, died suddenly in 1941, just as his Warner career was getting into high gear. “All that struggle, and just as things were breaking for him—this,” was Davis’s terse but deeply felt statement to the press at the time.

  In October 1940, with great reluctance, Davis accepted a project Hal Wallis had proffered. It was based on a popular novel by Polan Banks called January Heights. The title was later changed to Far Horizon, and finally to The Great Lie. Lenore Coffee was assigned to write the screenplay, with Edmund Goulding directing and Hal Wallis and Henry Blanke doubling up on the producing duties.

  Davis was disgusted with the screenplay. “It’s soap-opera drivel and it stinks in all departments!” she complained to Goulding, Wallis, and anyone else who would listen. Writer Lenore Coffee, a nervous, reclusive, high-strung person, had a time of it coping with Davis’s late-night phone calls and screaming entreaties to make the script more “human, presentable, decently playable!”

  Davis’s instincts about the story were right. In this one she is a “nice” society girl with a Maryland plantation. She is in love with playboy flier George Brent (who also thought the script stank, but couldn’t care less as long as he was paid on schedule), who jilts her to marry high-strung pianist Mary Astor. When Mary finds out her prior divorce wasn’t final, so they’re not married, she decides she is too busy to go through the ceremony again because a concert is coming up in Philadelphia.

  A disgusted George walks out and back to Bette, who forgives and marries him. Then he goes to South America on an air survey and is lost in the jungle, presumed dead. Astor then discovers that she is to have Brent’s baby—but it will interfere with her career and image, so Davis tells her she wants the baby, offers Mary an annuity, and suffers with her through the pregnancy out in the Arizona desert, where Mary retreats so her public won’t know she’s enceinte. When the baby is delivered, Davis takes it home, Mary resumes her career, and presto chango! Brent isn’t dead after all. He comes back to Davis, who lets him think the baby is hers—her great lie.

  Restless Mary gets the idea that if George knows the child’s hers, she will get him back. So she shows up at the plantation and goads Davis into telling him the truth. But George makes it plain it is Davis he loves and offers to let Mary take the baby. Mary doesn’t, parades in to play Tchaikovsky (unaccountably) for arriving guests, and all is joy and peace.

  Davis’s agitation and disgust with the script were apparent from the first day of shooting. Astor thought it was her she was mad at; she was wrong. Davis had wanted her for the role from the beginning, not only because she was a skilled pianist who could make the concert shots look believable, but because she had the hauteur, spitefulness, egomania, and bitchiness to make Sandra, the pianist, thoroughly believable. Astor had had a checkered career in films up to this time. She had been married a few times, one of which had ended in a nationally publicized scandal. Her diary had been found in 1936 and headlines had yakked about its alleged detailings of wild lovemaking with well-known men, among them the ugly but supersexy playwright George S. Kaufman. Astor’s husband, Dr. Franklin Thorpe, had attempted to use all the publicity to rob Mary of her daughter. During that time, she was appearing as the “good” woman opposite Ruth Chatterton’s bitchy, philandering wife of Walter Huston in Dodsworth. The press made hay pointing out the contrast between the good onscreen Mary and the
naughty offscreen Mary. Oddly enough, it didn’t hurt her career; her notoriety sold tickets. “So the Astor dame got in a scandal—they’ll want to see her, cluck about her, wonder about her,” realistic Jack Warner told his minions. “If there’s a part up her street we’ll use her some time.”

  Mary had never been a major star. From 1936 to 1940 her career had schlepped along in pictures with such apropos titles as Paradise for Three, No Time to Marry, There’s Always a Woman, Woman Against Woman, and similar drekky soap. Fans viewing her in more sophisticated fare like Midnight, with Claudette Colbert, found it hard to believe that this chic, ruefully sophisticated world-weary brunette had ever been a virginal leading lady to John Barrymore when he had played dashing Don Juans in the 1920s. Rumor had it he had seduced her despite her watchful parents, and that had begun her checkered career as siren par excellence.

  This, then, was the woman confronted with Davis, who had chosen her over a field of candidates including Anna Sten, Sylvia Sidney, and even Miriam Hopkins. One day on the set Davis let loose with a whoop of disgust, threw her script down, told director Goulding and photographer Tony Gaudio to hold everything, and called Astor into her dressing room for what the latter thought would surely be a dressing down. Instead Davis said she wanted to work with her on the hopeless script and juice it up by injecting some wild, bitchy, realistic woman-to-woman rivalry. Together they went over the story line by line and between them worked up situations so lively and compelling that Eddie Goulding commended it as “material that only women could have thought up—but it plays, oh how it plays!”

  One outstanding example was the tug-of-war the girls act out on the forbidding, isolated ranch where Astor goes to have her baby. Davis has to keep her eating right, playing double solitaire with her to quiet her nerves, slapping her when she becomes hysterical. Spoiled, selfish, and a prima donna to the core, Astor hates all the nasty, messy details of pregnancy. Used to her booze and her smoking, she has to do without both, and in one hilarious scene (a Davis-Astor inspiration) in which she begs for a drink, Davis tells her the doctor will allow but one ounce of brandy and Astor growls, “Who ever heard of an ounce of brandy?” Another time watchdog Davis catches her gorging in the kitchen, and disciplines her amusingly. Finally, while Astor is being delivered, Davis, in mannish attire, strides up and down outside the ranch house in a perfect imitation of an expectant father. This scene made Goulding nervous. “It’s too—well, lesbian in tone, Bette,” he protested. “The Production Code people and some of the more bluenosey public may pick up on it.” Davis drew herself up to her full height, threw away her lighted cigarette (six crewmen jumped to put it out when it fell near flammable material), and spit out at Goulding, “Are you implying that I have lesbian tendencies, Miss Director?” But Goulding, who could be as bitchy a queen as anyone, hissed back, “The audience might think so, Mr. Davis!” “Well let them!” she screamed back. “There’s enough strangling, nitpicking censorship as it is, and if it adds a little paprika so much the better!” Miss Goulding and Mr. Davis glared at each other for a full minute, and then burst into laughter.