Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Possibly, from his own standpoint, the harried Huston was right in letting her “go,” as he put it. Had he taken her on, in addition to his other concerns, he might not have lasted on the picture, given her studio clout. It is amusing, in view of his countless macho posturings in later years, to discover Huston in the role of pussycat, vis-à-vis Davis. What Wyler, Mike Curtiz, or Goulding would have found intolerable in her, he swallowed wholesale, to Davis’s contempt. Years later, when told of his bullying, macho attitudes with other co-workers, she snorted, “Well, the one time I had him, the son of a bitch was putty in my hands!” And so he was.

  Granted that the Ellen Glasgow novel was complex, with a host of subplots and subcharacters, Koch had his hands full hacking a main story line out of a novel that should never have been filmed.

  To be as brief as possible about the plot, Davis is the bad sister and Olivia De Havilland is the good sister in a genteel but impoverished Virginia family. Davis steals her sister’s husband, serious, milquetoasty Dennis Morgan, and later he commits suicide from guilt. De Havilland and dad Frank Craven and mom Billie Burke forgive the errant woman and home she comes. Soon she is off her mourning act, for now she is out to win back the lawyer, George Brent, whom she had jilted for Morgan. Now romantically involved with De Havilland, he spurns Davis, who rushes off and is killed driving too fast. The final scene finds De Havilland and Brent learning of the death and drawing close together—at peace, at last.

  All of this might have jelled had the doings not been limned so melodramatically both in Davis’s acting and in the hapless Koch’s script. Davis and Huston both liked, and later cited, the depiction by Ernest Anderson of a decent, self-educated black man whom Davis tries to pin the accident on and who is later exonerated. Davis always claimed that blacks of the period were gratified to play a decent exemplar instead of the loony Stepin Fetchits and the saccharine servant types so often portrayed. This point is valid enough, and Anderson’s and his mother’s (Hattie McDaniel) quiet, poignant underplaying are the best things in the film.

  An amusing sidelight, one of the film’s rare touches of individuality and imagination: Huston, for fun, put some unbilled “guest stars” into a roadhouse sequence, including his dad, Walter Huston, as a bartender, and John’s “gang” from The Maltese Falcon—Bogart, Astor, Greenstreet, Lorre, Ward Bond, Barton MacLane, and Elisha Cook, Jr., as customers. But one must look sharp to see them.

  Not all critics agreed with Rob Wagner. Film reviewer and author William Schoell is among the film’s defenders, writing in 1974: “[The picture] is a powerful, absorbing drama of sibling rivalry, selfishness, suicide and incest. . . . sometimes it lacks enough depth and impact in its presentation, but it is constantly on the verge of exploding like a powder-keg and many scenes have intrinsic power. . . . Surprisingly enough, much of it is not at all dated. The near-final scene between Davis and Charles Coburn (excellent in his dramatic role as Davis’s uncle here) is brutally effective and brilliantly rendered.”

  Davis was delighted to be back again in a picture with her good friend, Olivia De Havilland, though for the third time in a row they were cast as rivals in love. Davis had originally wanted Olivia’s role, but had been talked out of it by the film’s producer, Hal Wallis, who pointed out to her that she had been the passive good girl in The Man Who Came to Dinner opposite Ann Sheridan’s flamboyant bitch, and now she had to switch roles or her fans would think she had lost her guts. Faced with this challenge, Davis said no more about the good-sister part but instead occupied herself with working up an inappropriate hairstyle featuring wind-blown bangs that caused laughter later at a studio preview and making up her face garishly, the main feature being a Cupid’s-bow mouth (a departure) which she thought would give variety but only disappointed fans who whispered—and wrote in—“Why steal Crawford’s act? Let her lipstick and rouge to the nines!”

  De Havilland, too, was relieved that her assignment went uncontested, for she felt that playing a flamboyant bitch went against her established image. If pushed to take it, she would have flatly refused.

  De Havilland gave a fine, controlled, womanly, and wise depiction of the decent Roy. (Glasgow had given the women men’s names: Davis was Stanley. This annoyed Wallis, but Davis thought it cute and insisted the names be retained.) De Havilland’s problems with the picture lay elsewhere, for once again, as in the case of Errol Flynn, she found herself the focus of male passion. John Huston fell head over heels in love with her and made no secret of it. This gave a gleeful Davis plenty of excuses to “protect” Olivia from his advances (Olivia, to be sure, was glad of the protection) and to accuse Huston of favoring Olivia in scenes, especially in close-ups. All in all, Davis kept Huston on the defensive throughout the shooting, driving him up the wall, and bullying Mr. Macho unmercifully. Indeed, it took a war—World War II—to save him from her.

  When Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941, the film was still weeks away from completion. Huston was suddenly called to Washington on War Department business, and Raoul Walsh was called in to shoot some scenes, including the climactic one where Davis realizes that her uncle, Charles Coburn, has incestuous desires for her. Walsh had no reason to put up with Davis’s tantrums and moods, and made it plain. A far more experienced director than Huston was at that time, he was more interested in pleasing Jack Warner, who held his knack for speedy shooting in high esteem, and Davis was told to get off her ass and get with it. She had already held up shooting for various reasons that fall of 1941, including a plane trip to Farney in Minneapolis when her hapless mate had contracted pneumonia. Once back, she kept everybody on edge, and Walsh had had enough of it. By January 1942, the picture was in the can, by hook or by crook, mostly hook. Henceforth, Walsh was never one of Davis’s favorite people.

  Davis’s ill-disguised antipathy for John Huston had other roots. She felt he had traded on the name of his father, Walter Huston, again and again, and that his early roustabout, rootless, wandering existence, punctuated with occasional schooling and acting jobs, had been that of a spoiled, irresponsible brat rather than that of an authentic rebel. “He was a weakling dropout—I was the true rebel who rose above my environment,” she once told Wallis. Huston, again thanks to his father’s connections, had later gotten writing jobs and had worked on Jezebel and Juarez. As a screenwriter Huston always worked in tandem with others. “He contributed the sass, his co-authors contributed the substance,” was yet another of Davis’s nasty cracks about Huston. About his infatuation for De Havilland during the In This Our Life shooting, Davis sneered: “He fawned on her like a lapdog. I like a man who asserts his feelings honestly. He is a vanilla ice-cream cone, that man!”

  In later years, she said she had felt The Maltese Falcon was a one-time fluke, thought that in 1941 Huston was a dilletantish also-ran, and expressed her surprise that he had gone so far as a director, “considering that the man never has had, and never will have, a recognizable style of any kind!” She added that she only accepted him for In This Our Life because everyone “was raising so much hell about Falcon—I thought I’d see what this so-called boy wonder was like close up. I found out!”

  Decades later, on the set of The Night of the Iguana (the film version of a play in which Davis had starred), I asked Huston (who had had his revenge by bumping Davis in favor of Ava Gardner for the movie) what Davis had been like to work with in In This Our Life. By then all puffed up with success and critical recognition, Huston barked: “She was a hell-raising bitch! I know she’s never liked me and all I can say is fuck her!” Which represented the sum total of what I could get out of John Huston regarding Bette Davis.

  De Havilland always recalled the picture rather fondly, and when I asked her about it in 1964, when she was doing yet another picture with Davis (Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, for which Davis expressly requested her) she enthused about Davis, was stonily silent about John Huston, and lavishly praised Charles Coburn, Billie Burke (cast against usual type in a dramatic role as Davis�
�s languishing mother), and Frank Craven (“Such solid, true performers,” she repeated several times).

  She smiled and laughed in delight when I told her that my favorite De Havilland scene in In This Our Life was the one in which, having gone to Baltimore to comfort the melodramatically widowed Davis after Morgan’s suicide, she discovers Morgan’s picture among her sister’s bedclothes; with a poignant, understated pathos she gently turns the picture over, the gesture implying sadly that that phase of her life is now finally, irrevocably concluded.

  Certainly Coburn outdoes himself as the bullying, arrogant uncle who has cheated her father in business and whose incestuous passion for niece Davis is pathetically quenched when his doctor tells him he has only weeks to live. And Billie Burke and Frank Craven, fine actors both, are deeply touching as the downtrodden, defeated, and regretful parents.

  By early 1942 Davis had started to think with her customary hard-headedness about salary increases and a scaling down of her constant work. When In This Our Life finally ground to a halt, she prepared to observe her annual twelve-week layoff period without salary.

  The publicity department then asked her to do all the usual chores that a completed picture required—interviews with the press, photo sessions. This she was happy to do without salary, as per the agreement, realizing that the publicity people had to do their jobs as she did hers.

  When she arrived at the photo gallery, she was informed by a studio representative that she couldn’t do the publicity work because she was technically on layoff, and the studio would have to pay her if she did any work at all. After telling the representative that she was doing the work gratis, she raced wildly to Jack Warner’s inner sanctum and let him have it in no uncertain terms, claiming that his representative had ordered her off the lot as if she were a bit player, not, as she yelled at Jack, “your biggest moneymaker—and your most underpaid one!” She was a star now, she continued, and refused to be pushed around, especially when she was giving him a day of free work, had been glad to do it, and then was told to leave.

  “You’ll pay for this disrespect!” she screamed as she left Warner’s office. “Oh brother, how you’ll pay!” She raced off on a vacation to Mexico, and for weeks refused phone calls, telegrams, or letters from Burbank. Warner was frantic. “What does the woman want now?” he asked her agent. He found out soon enough. Davis wanted a new contract that stipulated a small fortune for each picture, the pictures to be kept to three pictures maximum per year, plus all the star “perks” that “those pampered bitches at MGM [Crawford] are getting!” Frantic to get his biggest asset back from Mexico, Jack Warner, eating humble pie, gave in to every demand.

  17

  War Bonds, Now, Voyager, and the Canteen

  FROM 1942 ON, Davis was in the forefront of all patriotic activities, especially bond-selling tours. A new program was instituted, with the cooperation of the government and the studios, to take advantage of the tremendous appeal of Hollywood personalities in furthering the war effort. The United States had officially entered World War II on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, when Davis’s idol Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress with his famous “a day that will live in infamy” speech. Davis had written Washington at once, saying that, as a popular star with a wide following, she stood ready to do all she could.

  She did not have to wait long. When In This Our Life finished shooting in early 1942, she was assigned to the “Stars Over America” contingent of personalities who would fan out through every state in the Union, addressing crowds, signing autographs, selling war bonds, and offering film mementos at auction, with proceeds going to the war effort.

  Davis worked tirelessly at this, as did many other top stars. Assigned at first to the Iowa territory, she drew such crowds there that she went on at government request to Missouri, where she sold a phenomenal number of war bonds and got an arm-and-wrist ache from signing countless autographs. Next, she went on to Oklahoma, where the Okies fell in love with her, and soon she was swinging around at barn dances, visiting private homes, and speaking endlessly at fairs and rotary meetings and schools all over the state. With her usual asperity she told reporters, “I think it outrageous that movie stars have to wheedle and beg people into buying bonds to help their country, but if that is the way it is, I’m going to squeeze all I can out of everyone!” She won a mixed reaction for her zeal in an Oklahoma City factory when she gave the workers a harangue about “doing what you can, to the level you can—or you’re not my idea of an American!” Farney, who had just been put in charge of training films that Disney made for the Minneapolis Honeywell aircraft, suggested by phone that a little more tact might be in order when it came to speeches and dealing with the press, and she yelled over the thousand miles that separated them, “It lights fires under their asses! It gets them reacting and acting! Somebody has got to wake these people up to the fact that they’re fighting for their lives! It’s all or nothing!”

  Even Jack Warner, whose business, after all, was to sell Bette Davis pictures to millions of adoring fans, counseled her that press reports had her yelling like a training sergeant at privates in state after state. “These are your fans, Bette,” he insisted, “They want you warm, gracious, kindly, and they want the personification of what they see on screen. Don’t get hateful. Don’t get strident. Don’t disenchant them!”

  “Jack, I know what I’m doing,” she shot back. “You and your brother in New York just sit around and count the money I make for you. I’m the one who has to deal up front with the public, and I know what I’m doing! The only way to get them to contribute, to develop enthusiasm, is to let ’em have it straight, no holds barred!”

  Actually, the public seemed to like Davis’s partriotic harangues and pep sessions and rallies. She knew her public better than the Warner people did. Playing bitches like Mildred, she told her aides, was what had made her a star, not fluttering, sugar-water roles. They expected her to be feisty and vivid. They expected to get stirred up. And stir them up she would.

  Jack Warner and others were later forced to admit that her tactics paid off. She wound up selling a total of two million dollars’ worth of bonds in two days. And over two weeks, she sold many more.

  In Tulsa, Oklahoma, as she later reported, her autograph alone sold to a well-heeled oil man for $50,000. At an aircraft factory she sold a picture of herself as Jezebel—a bitch, not a nice girl, she reminded Warner—for a cool quarter of a million dollars worth of bonds.

  In April 1942 Davis began work on a picture that was to become one of her most successful and admired. Now, Voyager is one of my three personal Bette Davis favorites and was one of her own great favorites. The Bette Davis image is given a thorough workout in this fine drama.

  Now, Voyager, adapted from a fine Olive Higgins Prouty novel of 1941, her third in a series about the fictional Vale family of Boston, was directed by Irving Rapper, the talented Warners writer who had moved on to directing. Casey Robinson, one of the screen’s most expert writers of dramas highlighting women and their concerns, offered his best inspirations here. Hal Wallis produced with his usual energy and taste. Sol Polito photographed with great technical skill and creative sensibility. Orry-Kelly was on hand yet again to dress the women with flawless taste. Robert Haas’s perceptive feeling for ambience and locale was in full flower here. And Max Steiner won one of his many Academy Awards with a rich, evocative score.

  And the brilliant talents of fine actors—Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, John Loder, the amusing comedians Franklin Pangborn and Frank Puglia—hold their own against the women—Gladys Cooper’s domineering Boston matriarch, Ilka Chase’s understanding sister-in-law, Lee Patrick’s incisive ship’s passenger, Janis Wilson’s pathetic misfit child, and Bonita Granville’s bitchily bullying niece.

  And at the center is Bette Davis, in full artistic maturity at age thirty-four, in the Class-A picture she had so often dreamed of during her mid-1930s potboiler phase.

  The well-known story deals with t
he repressed, miserable, overweight, and squirrel-spectacled Charlotte Vale, frustrated spinster daughter of a Boston Brahmin family. She is dominated by starchy, unloving materfamilias Gladys Cooper. Eventually she is rescued from a lifetime of loneliness and desolation by psychiatrist Claude Rains, who cites for her the words of one of life’s most famous outsiders—the poet Walt Whitman: “Untold want, by life nor land ne’er granted, now, voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find. . . .”

  And so freshly caparisoned, beautifully made up, gorgeously coutured, glasses discarded, but with confidence and self-esteem still lacking, Davis goes, courtesy of a Rains-Chase conspiracy, on a South American cruise, and meets Paul Henreid, a Prince Valiant unhappily married to a self-centered hypochondriac. She learns the fulfillment of reciprocal love and returns to the Marlborough Street matriarch ready to do battle. She bests her, inherits all the family money, then helps Henreid’s child, Janis Wilson, a blighted thirteen-year-old, toward happiness. Somewhat masochistically self-denying, Charlotte tells Henreid’s Jerry that she will take care of the girl and he must stay with his wife, the famous closing lines being: “Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon—we have the stars!”

  The universal appeal of Now, Voyager has never been commented upon sufficiently. Too much has been made of it as gay camp, feminine wish-fulfillment, fairy-tale unreality. To many, then and now, Now, Voyager has pointed the way upward, to a greater self-understanding. Certainly in 1942 it burst as a white light on my nineteen-year-old consciousness. To many women and men in movie houses across the United States, it imparted a message of hope; it said yes, you can slough off the dross of negative surroundings, futile human associations, defeatist atmospheres; yes, you do have the right to search for love.