Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  One of the main reasons Jack Warner lent Davis was so that he could get Gary Cooper (for Sergeant York) from Goldwyn. He had chuckled initially to himself, delighted with the money; as it evolved, it was Davis who did the chuckling—she had put two top producers in their place. Revenge was sweet, she found.

  Meanwhile Miriam Hopkins, who had been the other choice for Regina, was still smarting because Davis had fobbed off her romantic addresses. When she heard that Davis and Wyler were arguing and that Davis had walked off the set, she was gleeful. “That part I was born for!” she told one and all, and hung close to her phone, awaiting a call from Goldwyn and/or Wyler. The call never came. Davis, after calming her nerves and listening to her physician’s advice to take it one day at a time, went back to finish her work. Determined to be as tough on Wyler as he had so often been on her, she told him the role would be played her way or else. She was too powerful in 1941 to refuse; Wyler and Goldwyn knuckled under. When Goldwyn, somewhat lamely, tried to interfere with the costumes, Davis brushed him off curtly.

  Davis had decided, especially after seeing Bankhead’s interpretation, that she would have to play the part as written by Lillian Hellman (who also did the screenplay), to wit: icy, heartless, venomous, formidable, unyielding, and ruthlessly cold. Regina has spent her life competing with her crass, business-oriented brothers, Oscar and Ben (Carl Benton Reid and Charles Dingle). They have always disregarded her because she is a woman, and she is out to even the score. Married to a kind and gentle man, Horace Giddens (Herbert Marshall), who has a heart condition, she is disillusioned with his lack of ruthlessness, and when her nephew Leo steals $75,000 worth of bonds to use in a business deal her brothers have cooked up, she is enraged when her husband wants to claim he lent Leo (Dan Duryea) the bonds. In a scene noted for its passive viciousness, Davis lets her husband die on the stairs after refusing to get his heart medicine.

  Davis then blackmails her brothers into giving her two thirds of the deal they are making in exchange for her $75,000 input. Her daughter, Alexandra (Teresa Wright), a good-hearted girl who loves her father, overhears the conversation and flees her mother’s house in anger and disgust, with boyfriend Richard Carlson, a town newspaperman who has tried to enlighten her on “the little foxes”—the Giddenses—“who spoil the vines.” In the final shot, Davis is seen behind the curtains on the second floor, watching Wright’s and Carlson’s flight. She knows she is alone, despised, and feared—with a corpse in the nearby bedroom. As she withdraws from behind the curtains, her face registers the sure awareness that she is on her own henceforth, in every respect. But one somehow feels she will survive and prosper. Her cold words to Wright as she is about to leave telegraph this: “I’d like to keep you with me, Alexandra, but I won’t make you stay.” She even seems glad to note that her hitherto sweet and passive daughter is not, after all, “made of sugar water.”

  Davis’s most famous speech in the film is addressed to her husband, when her plans have been thwarted. “I hope you die! I hope you die soon! I’ll be waiting for you to die!” This is a woman who has been kept down for many years—first by her rapacious brothers, then by a loveless marriage to a man she thought “would give me the world” and who turns out to have all the limitations of “a bank clerk.” Adversity has made her cold, monstrous. Money and power alone, she feels, bring security. Trust no one. Davis’s character has also been disillusioned by watching how Oscar has treated Birdie (Patricia Collinge, in a masterly portrayal), a sweet, sensitive southern gentlewoman driven to drink by the boorish crassness of the people around her. Unlike Birdie, Regina, a woman of more spirit and ruthlessness, has decided that if she can’t lick ’em, she’ll join ’em—and better than that, lick ’em again.

  Oddly enough, William Wyler, usually so preceptive about characterization, missed the point of Regina’s character—her dehumanization at the hands of her environment, her single-minded, hate-motivated, self-protective ruthlessness. Willie thought Regina should demonstrate some womanly, vulnerable, sympathetic elements, that she should even be somewhat sexy. Davis tried to point out to him that if her character had had sex appeal her manless life would be inexplicable to audiences. And had she been vulnerable or sympathetic in some aspects of her character, her murderous, stop-at-nothing ruthlessness would not have rung true.

  Davis played the role as Bankhead had played it—hard, cold, intent only on money and power. In trusting her own instincts (which turned out to be right), in forcing her will on Wyler, she alienated him professionally and to some degree personally—for keeps. He never again invited her to appear in one of his films. (In 1949 Hopkins appeared in The Heiress, a Wyler film, but in a supporting role.)

  Davis had many objections to the picture while making it. She felt that the Giddens home (pre-financial breakthrough) should have a seedy, worn look to it, and that went for her clothes too, but Goldwyn managed to have his way on that—the home looked Hollywood rich. Neither he nor Wyler liked her rice makeup, which caused her face to look fortyish. “But that’s what I am, in this picture!” Davis told Goldwyn. “I’m the mother of a grown daughter, for Christ’s sake!” Goldwyn backed down on that one.

  “Sam Goldwyn had good taste in some ways,” Davis said later. “He knew good stories, but he did tend to want to gloss up pictures where gloss was distinctly not called for.” Davis enjoyed regaling friends with a particularly hilarious sample of the far-famed Goldwynesque tendency to malapropisms. When one of his money men had warned him that The Little Foxes might be too caustic to appeal to the film public, Sam had rejoindered, “I don’t care what it costs—I want it!”

  Many of the performers who had appeared in the stage version were on hand for the film version—an added burr in the Bankhead posterior. They all went on to major character-player careers in movies, including Carl Benton Reid and Charles Dingle (Regina’s brothers), Dan Duryea (who was to have a nice career playing variations on the sleazy Leo), and Patricia Collinge.

  Years later, Richard Carlson told me that the tension on the set had been “bloody murder. Bette and Willie really went at it. Teresa [Wright] asked me one time if anybody’d survive the carnage. I wondered myself, for a while.” Carlson, who had appeared earlier in 1941 in Back Street with Margaret Sullavan, compared Maggie and Bette thus: “They were both strong, tempermental ladies, but Maggie tended to underplay more. Bette went for the big effects. But they came out even, in my books!” Teresa Wright recalled bursting into tears one day on the set while Willie and Bette yelled scatological insults at each other. Later Bette comforted her with the words, “This, too, shall pass. Keep calm.”

  Davis had the satisfaction of knowing she was right after all in the way she chose to interpret Regina. Even the not easily pleased Bosley Crowther of The New York Times sat up and made nice for her in this. “The Little Foxes will not increase your admiration for mankind,” he wrote. “It is cold, cynical. But it is a very exciting picture to watch. . . . [Davis’s] performance is . . . abundant with color and mood.” Howard Barnes of The New York Herald-Tribune really warmed the cockles of Davis’s heart, and redeemed the decision she had made over Wyler’s objections, when he wrote, “Bette Davis matches Miss Bankhead’s splendid portrayal in the play.”

  The Little Foxes won equal approbration abroad. The British critic Dilys Powell wrote, “[The Little Foxes] is enormously helped by its chief player: Bette Davis has never given a finer performance than as the cold murderess.”

  The Little Foxes silences, once and for all, the frequent over-the-years carpings that Davis was limited to personality extensions, and could not lose herself in a characterization. Her Regina is well thought out, beautifully controlled, wisely conceived, and artistically disciplined in a manner that would make any first-class actress in any medium proud. It is regrettable that Davis had such difficulty in finding roles and characterizations truly worthy of her range and unique gifts. Often in the future, when she did find them and wanted to put them on the screen, the overlords of the stu
dio nixed them as “too costumy,” or “too expensive,” or “too counter to the current public taste.”

  As she often stated, Davis believed throughout her career that the public would pay to see good, intelligent, subtle work done with creative conviction and artistic discipline. It is a wonder that she got so many good pictures into the theaters, despite front-office obstructionism. Hal Wallis told her that he couldn’t stand the pictures she particularly prized and was proud of doing, “but as long as the public pays to see them we’ll keep grinding them out.”

  Back at Warners after her Goldwyn-Wyler ordeal, Davis found herself confronted with one of Jack Warner’s ironic inconsistencies. He refused to let her do Cassie, the mentally ill, forlorn creature of King’s Row, because the part was too short, even though she and Ida Lupino both craved it. Then he readily agreed to cast her in another secondary part in The Man Who Came to Dinner, knowing she’d help sell it.

  Davis had desperately wanted John Barrymore to play with her in The Man Who Came to Dinner. She had seen the play in New York and felt it should be a movie. Warners purchased the George S. Kaufman–Moss Hart play for a record $250,000, and though Davis was told her role was distinctly secondary, she said she didn’t care and wanted to be part of the proceedings.

  The real reason for her enthusiasm was her fervent hope that she would get to act with Barrymore. Davis had never played with any of the Barrymores, and here was her big chance. At her insistence, Warners tested John extensively for the role, but his health had failed badly by then, and he couldn’t remember his lines, reading them from a cue card.

  Davis was appalled at this development, but for a time refused to admit defeat. But when Jack Warner and director William Keighley showed her some of the Barrymore rushes, and she saw for herself how pathetic he looked, how wan and ill, and how devoid of his usual spark, and the way his eyes wandered to the off-camera blackboard on which was written his dialogue, she cried, out of sheer vexation at having her will thwarted and out of pity for a once-great actor now heading obviously for the exit door, in life as in his career. Barrymore would be dead within months, succumbing to a multiplicity of ailments at age sixty—four months after the January 1, 1942, release of The Man Who Came to Dinner.

  Davis gave up her fight for Barrymore for good when her dog bit her on the nose, resulting in much bloodiness and swelling. Terrified, she fled Hollywood for the East, where she rested at Butternut until she healed. Taking advantage of her preoccupation with her nose, Jack Warner quietly dropped Barrymore and took on Monty Woolley, who had played Sheridan Whiteside on the New York stage. A distracted Davis did not immediately object to Woolley—not immediately.

  Back in Hollywood with the famous nose back in shape, Davis began fussing in her usual manner over the script and the photography and everything else connected with Dinner. Monty Woolley, as she well knew, was giving a fine performance as the hysterical, egoistic Sheridan Whiteside, modeled, as everyone knew, on the effeminate, individualistic, brazen critic Alexander Woollcott (who even played the role himself in one production).

  The cast was good: Ann Sheridan as a flighty actress, Jimmy Durante for comic relief, and a handsome new actor, Richard Travis, as the male foil for the romantic competitiveness of Sheridan and Davis.

  Contrary to rumor, there was no bitchy Davis-Hopkins flak between Davis and Sheridan. To begin, Annie Sheridan (one of George Brent’s wives—fleetingly) was a rather hearty, uncomplicated, friendly woman offscreen, with a minimum of ego and temperament and a talent that was sparkling and flashy—but distinctly limited, as Davis well knew. Result: No sense of competition from the Sheridan quarter, hence Davis could relax on that score. “Annie just didn’t rub her wrong—in fact, flattered her by asking advice on the timing of her lines, stuff like that. Davis ate it up; she loved playing God,” as Keighley put it later.

  The role of Maggie Cutler, true, was secondary, and Davis as a quiet, self-contained secretary made a rather drab contrast to the flamboyant, dressed-to-the-nines character played by Sheridan, but this aspect Davis didn’t seem to mind. “Funny that,” Hal Wallis told me in 1962, “because it was like her first film, Bad Sister, in a way—here she was the drab wren up against the flashy peacock! Bette was full of surprises, and her not minding her status on this picture was one of them. Of course we were all grateful to her for helping hype the film at the box office. Any picture with her name on it at that time was bound to sell—and big!”

  Some of her friends, circa 1941, were of the opinion that Davis was more given to handing soapy trash to fellow actors like Mary Astor, as in The Great Lie, and playing second fiddle to Woolley in Dinner because of her newfound felicity with Arthur Farnsworth. It was a relatively serene period in her life.

  Bosley Crowther of The New York Times handed Davis a critical posie in his review, writing, “One palm should be handed Bette Davis for accepting the secondary role of the secretary, and another palm should be handed her for playing it so moderately and well.” A saddened John Barrymore, reportedly heartbroken over losing a role that might well have let him exit from life with flying colors, congratulated both Woolley and Davis with a gracious telegram.

  During The Man Who Came to Dinner, Davis worked with someone from her distant past. Best known for her Aunt Pittypat in Gone With the Wind, Laura Hope Crews had had a small role (as a whorehouse madam) in Davis’s The Sisters in 1938, but the two had barely worked together. When Crews was hired for The Man Who Came to Dinner (in a small role that was later cut) she was in decline at sixty-two, and in fact would die within the year.

  Since she had some scenes with Davis in the picture, Crews was somewhat nervous, considering the reversal in their fortunes, and feared, as she told friends, that Davis, noted for her temper and arrogance, might pull the “star bit” and take revenge for the slap-and-pushing that then-star Crews had given ingenue Davis in stock thirteen years before.

  But Davis showed she was above such tactics, and that she harbored no ill will; rather, she went out of her way to be kind and considerate, made sure that a chair was provided for her, along with refreshments, and even let her lie down in her own dressing room on one occasion when Miss Crews felt faint.

  Asked about this at the time by a fan book writer, Davis said, “I want that kind of consideration when I am old and sick—those times come to all of us.”

  At the end of shooting Miss Crews came to Davis’s dressing room, silently pressed a box into her hand, and was gone. In it Davis found an exquisite, jewel-encrusted watch.

  Bette fascinated me. There is something elemental about Bette—a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears.” Thus spoke John Huston of Bette Davis in his autobiography. He added, “The studio was afraid of her, afraid of her demon. They confused it with overacting. Over their objections, I let the demon go.”

  Huston’s final sentence is ambiguous—until one views the picture he directed her in, In This Our Life. Then it is obvious that he did indeed let the demon go—berserk! Davis overacts all over the place in John Huston’s second film as a director, made on the heels of his triumph in the noirish Sam Spade melodrama The Maltese Falcon (Warners’ third try at the story; Davis had been in version II). In This Our Life is a melodramatic mélange indeed. Neither he nor Davis liked the script. She claimed that the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Ellen Glasgow, on which it was based, had been cheapened and vulgarized, emphasizing phony melodrama at the cost of the carefully written character delineations Miss Glasgow had created. Glasgow, who met Davis after seeing the picture, couldn’t have agreed more. In fact, she out-Davised Davis in her angry excoriation of the picture. Davis, who was used to bullying writers, met her match in Glasgow. Trying to weather the onslaught of temperament from the outraged authoress, she ventured, “You should have been an actress, Miss Glasgow—you’re so volatile!” “If I had chosen acting over writing,” the authoritarian Glasgow retorted, “I wouldn’t be the overacting ham you are!” As al
ways, when her bluff was called, Davis backed off.

  Glasgow was a better film critic than she knew, for Davis didn’t realize that whatever the weaknesses of the script, her own overblown, actressy portrayal had aggravated matters. The outraged authoress was one of the few with the guts to tell her so.

  The reviewer for Script, Rob Wagner, would have warmed the cockles of Miss Glasgow’s acerbic and righteously indignant heart, for he wrote:

  “Considering the extensive acclaim vouchsafed Miss Davis’ past histrionic excesses, it is no small wonder that the lady favors assignments which permit her to bug her eyes, twitch her hands and maneuver the lower extremities as though in performance of some esoteric Charleston. Unfortunately, Stanley Timberlake, as conceived in the Ellen Glasgow novel, provides no legitimate reasons for theatrical hanky-panky. Nothing daunted, the star promptly dismembered the character, reassembled it in the image and likeness of many of her past portrayals. In so doing, the integrity of the Glasgow work disappeared.”

  Wagner spoke truly, for In This Our Life is a catalog of all Davis’s most unrestrained acting tricks, idiosyncrasies, and histrionic mischiefmaking. If ever she had needed Willie Wyler, she needed him for that picture. As it was, Huston was a young director (then thirty-five) who was only on his second picture and was still feeling his way along with charts and drawings for every single scene. In addition, he was interpreting a script in which he had little faith but which he did not want to walk out on for fear of offending his pal, the screenwriter Howard Koch. Davis knew instinctively she could have her own way and use her own ideas throughout.