Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Bette Davis noted that she received thousands of letters from men and women all over the country after Now, Voyager was released, citing similar real-life stories of domineering parents, wounded self-image, frustration in love, disappointments in the search for self-realization. She took deep pride in the knowledge that she and the other artists associated with the film had helped to illuminate the deepest needs and wishes of the human heart. She won the permanent gratitude and respect of many in 1942, including me. I emerged from that Lynn, Massachusetts, theater determined to be me, not what others expected of me; to forge my way to the individual fulfillments my destiny had designed for me. If one of the functions of true art is to enlighten, clarify, and inspire, then Now, Voyager qualifies for such a designation. Not that the film was perfect. Yes, there was a lot of wish-fulfillment in it; yes, luck favored her with wealth and other opportunities to fulfill herself. But these minor flaws are not important; what is important is the positive thrust of the picture’s theme, the buoyancy, the hopefulness of its spirit.

  There is a scene in Now, Voyager that is one of my all-time favorites (and I’ve been seeing movies for sixty years). Early on in the picture, Davis, living in a drab, bleak upper room of a great Boston mansion, tyrannized by her pathologically domineering mother, is being driven toward madness by emotional starvation and wounded self-esteem. Her sister-in-law, frightened and concerned for the overweight, unattractive spinster’s emotional welfare, has brought the compassionate psychiatrist Claude Rains to the house, and he has persuaded Davis to show him her room. Suddenly she takes a photograph album from her youth out of the desk drawer. Wild-eyed and tense, bitter and sardonic, she forces him to look at it with her. Flipping through the pages, she says, “You wouldn’t have known me then—I was twenty, then. . . .” Max Steiner’s music swells grandly and suddenly, bathed in cameraman Sol Polito’s radiant white light, blurring and rippling montage effects usher in a startlingly dramatic flashback scene in which Davis is making youthfully fervent love on a sunny, windswept deck with a handsome young ship’s officer in a white uniform, played by the then twenty-seven-year-old Charles Drake. “It was the proudest moment of my life,” her voice-over later proclaims. The young man in the white uniform, now vanished irretrievably into the past, represents lost fulfillment, catharsis, freedom, self-realization, ultimate happiness . . .

  Later in the scene, Davis tells Rains of how her mother did not think the man, whom she had met on a cruise up the west coast of Africa, “suitable for a Vale of Boston.” “What man is suitable? She’s never found one!” she cries. She goes on to tell Rains of her mother’s assorted tyrannies and cruelties, and he leaves her weeping to go down and castigate the dragon in the Marlborough Street drawing room, countering her fierce and arrogant protestations of “a mother’s rights” with, “A child has rights! To make her own decisions! To grow and blossom in her own particular soil.”

  Later in the film, Davis, liberated by her love for Henreid, but aware that he is beyond her reach because he is married, says, “Shall I tell you what you’ve given me—first, a little bottle of perfume made me feel so important . . . and then your flowers came, and I knew you were thinking of me. I could have walked into a den of lions. In fact, I did, and the lion didn’t hurt me!”

  Casey Robinson’s literate and tasteful dialogue, much of it from the Prouty novel, is one of the picture’s salient features. He argued bitterly in later years with Davis’s assertion that she had to rewrite the dialogue as she went along. He insisted, in no uncertain terms, that not a word was changed from his original script. The truth lies somewhere between, probably, as Davis had a notable propensity for meddling with dialogue and situations so they would suit what she conceived to be the most salable and appealing aspects of her mystique. Indeed she was quite a meddler in any and all areas, as director Irving Rapper told me in 1957. When I asked him to sum up, in one word, what it had been like to work with her, he hissed, “Tough!” He then went on to tell of their endless arguments over every detail, and how he went home every night angry and exhausted. Unfortunately, fine talent that he was, Irving Rapper did not command her ultimate trust and respect as Goulding and Wyler did. Something in the Davis-Rapper chemistry prevented her from falling in with him. In this, as in the other pictures they were to do, he found her bullying and hounding a misery.

  John Loder, who played with great dignity and conviction the Boston aristocrat, Elliott Livingston, whom Charlotte jilts because, as she tells her enraged mother, “I don’t love him,” had some interesting memories of the film when I interviewed him in 1970. “She put her whole heart and being into that film. She had a passion and an artistic conviction I have never encountered in another actress. Going into a scene with her was like going into a hot furnace—and somehow, instead of getting burned by the flames, you came out of it purged, cleansed; you felt you had learned something.”

  Loder felt that Davis had imparted ultimate conviction to her role because “she had innate breeding. I know she won her initial reputation as a hellcat, as a shrew, but if you look closely, even in those roles she achieved the classy effects that only a thoroughbred could manage.”

  Paul Henreid, who became a star thanks to his role as the lover, Jerry Durrance, had lavish words of praise in 1964 for Davis. Remarking more than once that she had remained friends with him and his family over the many years since, he recounted: “I know she had wanted an American actor for the role. I was an Austrian, had worked with Max Reinhardt, was as continental as could be, complete with a heavy accent that I later toned down with hard work. She was appalled with my test. They had put me in a fancy smoking jacket, brilliantined my hair, made me up so thickly I looked like a department store dummy. She asked me what I thought of it. I said I felt I looked all wrong.”

  Davis, as he recalled, thereupon ordered another test. “Show the guy in his natural state,” she ordered. The results satisfied her as she recognized his fine, sensitive acting gift. “She was the soul of kindness to me all through the shooting, as she was to all the cast,” Henreid said. “I have never understood these stories of how difficult she was to other cast members. On the contrary, she would fight their battles with the director.”

  The oft-discussed scene in which Paul lights two cigarettes, then passes one to Davis, has been claimed as an original inspiration by many, including Olive Higgins Prouty, Irving Rapper, Hal Wallis, and Henreid himself. But it wasn’t that original. George Brent had done the same thing ten years before with Ruth Chatterton in The Rich Are Always With Us. Reportedly he picked up the habit in that picture and had done it for Davis a number of times since. (“It must have been thousands of times, as she smoked like a chimney!” Jerry Asher later said.) It appears then that it was Davis, tutored years before by Brent, who finally came up with the idea after other cigarette-lighting methods in that scene had been found awkward and cumbersome.

  Charles Drake, who appeared with Davis in the famous flashback scene, recalled that he was “just a kid, had only been in films a short time, and I was really in awe of Bette. She was thirty-four or so to my twenty-seven, but damned if they didn’t dress her up to look the twenty she was supposed to be—and younger than that! But it wasn’t just the way they made her up and dressed and coiffured her. She, being a genius, had suggested herself into the persona of a young girl, and so lifelike she was that I felt I really was with a very young girl!”

  Drake also recalled that Rapper had been rough with him because of his inexperience but “Bette was just swell—always reassuring and kind and going to bat for me with Rapper.” He snapped “no comment” when questioned as to the rumors that Davis had gotten overly lost in her part and had developed an offscreen crush on him. But his blush and his silence conveyed much.

  It has also been rumored that Davis was more than a little interested in Paul Henreid despite the fact both of them were married at the time. He, too, has always refused to discuss this with interviewers. Where Drake barked “no comment,” Paul p
ut it with a little more continental suavity. “It is ungentlemanly to discuss personal matters concerning a lady, especially one who has been such a good friend to me and my family,” was his rejoinder to me when I ventured upon the subject. A word to the wise, or a sentence, being sufficient, I did not pursue it.

  Only a few months before her death in 1971, Gladys Cooper was appearing in London in a version of The Chalk Garden. Then eighty-three, her acting style unimpaired, she was delightful in the play, and later we talked in her dressing room. Of Davis she said, “She was and is so gifted. I have always felt sad that the theater was robbed of her talent so consistently through the years. I know she did stage things, but she had a major, unlimited gift, had an inner flame, a gorgeous intensity. Much of what she was given to do in Hollywood was unworthy of her talents. She could have played Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen. Some thought her limited; I always felt she limited herself, by agreeing to some most unworthy vehicles. I studied her closely during Now, Voyager and there was absolutely no limit to what she could have accomplished. Though she was the star and I the supporting player, she was so gracious, so civilized, so kind—and oddly, so humble. She told me she reverenced my talent, that it was a privilege to play with me. She was a woman who, no matter what Hollywood did to her, always had a great innate breeding. And such strength! More strength than most men I’ve known!”

  It was Jerry Asher, a close friend of mine who had been a studio publicist and had written many fan magazine stories, including ones for my Screen Stars and Movie World in the 1960s, who gave me a startling “first” that I have yet to see in print and which I have never used until this book. He swore it was true.

  At one point, Davis, convinced that only an All-American-boy type would be right for the role of Jerry Durrance in Now, Voyager, seriously considered Ronald Reagan for the part! She ordered a screening of the Sam Wood–directed King’s Row, which had been shot in 1941 but not released until early 1942. The future president, who has always singled out the role of Drake McHugh as his all-time favorite, made a big forward leap in front-office respect and approbation as the result of fan reaction to him in this. His Drake was a touching study of a fundamentally decent young man in a small town in 1900, who loses his inheritance through embezzlement and is forced to give up his loose ways and find a job on the railroad. The doctor-father of a girl he had once loved, who thought him at the time a vulgar womanizer and hell-raiser, deliberately amputates Drake’s legs after a railroad accident which has actually left him unscathed. When Reagan’s Drake awakens and realizes he has lost his lower limbs, he shouts out the famous words, “Where’s the rest of me?”—the line forever associated with him. Director Sam Wood had guided Reagan, then thirty, through a far more sensitive portrayal than he had ever given, and it was much discussed around the lot.

  Davis, who admired Reagan’s then wife Jane Wyman, also a Warner actress, had come to know them fairly well. In later years she was to speak of Reagan disparagingly, calling him “Little Ronnie Reagan” and expressing her wonder that “Little Ronnie,” an “also-ran in the Warner acting ranks,” had made it to governor of California—and then president. As in the case of Robert Montgomery, she had disliked his conservative views, and her rock-ribbed Democratic liberalism had resented his eventual conversion from Democrat to Republican. Indeed, it was only after his kind remarks concerning her in 1987 during the Kennedy Center Awards (she was one of the honorees) that she began to speak well of him, commenting on his graciousness that evening.

  But in 1942, according to Jerry, the thirty-four-year-old Davis had spotted in the thirty-year-old Reagan many of the solid, decent, manly qualities she felt were required for the character of Now, Voyager’s Jerry Durrance.

  According to Asher, who had an impishly wicked tongue, Davis had also taken full note of Reagan’s charms (pictures of him in swimsuits flexing his muscles could be seen as late as 1942 in many a fan magazine) and with her propensity for finding other women’s husbands all the more attractive because they were possibly unattainable, she got it into her head that he would be interesting to play to for the months the film would require to complete.

  According to Jerry, it was Jack Warner who talked her out of it. “One swallow doesn’t make a summer,” Jack huffed, “and just because Sam got a good performance out of the kid in King’s Row doesn’t mean he’s up to playing your lover in a class-A production like Now, Voyager!” Davis asked Warner to test him; he laughed her off. Then she asked Hal Wallis and Irving Rapper about it. They thought the idea was a hoot and a howl. “Bette Davis and Ronald Reagan in Now, Voyager? You gotta be kidding, lady,” was the gist of their responses. So the idea came to nothing, especially after Davis spotted Henreid. Reagan, who probably heard about it, would doubtless have accepted Jack’s putdown with good humor. As late as 1988 he was telling how, when Jack heard he was running for governor, he yipped. “Chuck Heston for governor; Reagan for best friend!”

  Watch on the Rhine had been a distinguished 1941 Broadway play about a dedicated undergrounder who counters the Nazi threat, and it brought many honors to that fine Hungarian actor Paul Lukas, who had wasted his talents for years in trivial Hollywood films (Wyler’s Dodsworth being one of the notable exceptions in 1936).

  In 1942 Warners bought the play, and, surprisingly, considering the customs of the time in Filmville, assigned the play’s star to the movie. But Jack Warner and his minions worried about Lukas’s lack of box-office clout. While he was instantly recognizable to film fans who had watched him partially redeem weak pictures and enhance strong ones, Warner felt none of them would go out of his or her way to plunk down cold cash for a Paul Lukas starrer. Warner thereupon persuaded Davis to take the secondary role of his noble, self-sacrificing, supportive, and loyal wife, who brings her resistance fighter husband and their children to Washington after years of foiling and frustrating the Nazis in numerous European locales.

  In Washington, all goes well for a while, the weary idealists rest from their labors, and then George Coulouris, a fellow guest, a Rumanian count with Nazi connections, discovers their secret and threatens to expose them to the German embassy officials. Lukas takes him to the garage, kills him, and before driving off with the body leaves his wife and children to the care of her mother, Lucile Watson, and brother, Donald Woods. The latter, shocked out of their complacent isolationism, wish him Godspeed.

  Such is the plot, and as written and performed, Paul Lukas’s role is the dominant one. Davis, a fervent Democrat and Roosevelt supporter, fell once again into the trap of agreeing graciously to rescue a picture with her proven box-office appeal, and at first came on so humble as to suggest that Paul Lukas should have top billing, given his prominence in the proceedings; Hal Wallis soon talked her out of that.

  Soon, as was usual in Bette Davis pictures, there was trouble aplenty on the set. Even though Lillian Hellman (with co-writer Dashiell Hammett) had opened up the play with additional scenes, and had built up for Davis the part Mady Christians had played so well on the stage, Davis soon came to realize that once again she had made the mistake of taking an unsuitable, secondary role (as in The Man Who Came to Dinner) after struggling for years to get strong starring parts. She could be heard mumbling that she was being “used and exploited” and tried to enlist a haughty, reserved, and unsympathetic Lucile Watson to her cause. Watson, an excellent character actress who had many years of stage experience and who had performed admirably in pictures with such stars as Norma Shearer and Vivien Leigh (neither of whom had outshone her in their scenes together), felt Davis overacted “like a rank amateur” and enraged Davis further by telling her that “more years on the stage would have benefited you enormously, my dear.” When Davis found out, moreover, that Lucile was a rock-ribbed Republican and thought Roosevelt and his works were sheer anathema, the atmosphere froze up even more. The last straw came when Watson, weary of listening to Davis’s complaints about her “limited straitjacket of a role” and about how she wished now that Irene Dunne and Mar
garet Sullavan, who refused the role, had been “suckered into it instead of me,” told Davis crisply, that if she “didn’t feel she was up to it, then get out of it.”

  Instead Davis took to arguing with Herman Shumlin, the distinguished stage director brought out to do Watch because he had directed the play. Shumlin, unfortunately, knew nothing about camera technique, and tried to direct the film as if it were a play. Davis began screaming at him, and the unfortunate man reacted by disappearing to a corner of the set where he quietly drank tea while the crew waited and the costs mounted. Finally Hal Wallis, apprised of Shumlin’s difficulties with cameraman Merritt Gerstad, who wasn’t reacting positively to the harried Shumlin’s talk of blocking and wanted to hear more about angles and close-ups, reassigned the outraged Gerstad and brought in the more tactful and even-tempered Hal Mohr. The experienced photographer wound up co-directing the picture, he would set up the appropriate camera angles while Shumlin rehearsed the actors theater-style; then they’d all get together for the scene itself. Sometimes the ploy worked; often it didn’t. Davis, ever more irritated and annoyed with what she called “unfamiliar, unprofessional methods I’m not used to,” began overacting and overemphasizing her line readings, ostensibly, as she told anyone willing to listen, “because this goddamned mess of a picture needs some pepping up to keep the audience awake.” Soon she was coming on so strong that she was upstaging and outacting Paul Lukas who, considering it was actually his play and his picture, put up with it admirably. “I was so grateful to her for helping the picture with her box-office following, she could do no wrong,” he said years later. “I honestly felt at the time that she was giving the picture some needed excitement.”

  Davis, done up in plain clothing and with few wardrobe changes, all of them drab except for one evening gown, with her hair coiffed unattractively, groused and brooded through the entire shooting. She even managed in the end to offend the gentlemanly, long-suffering Lukas, for when he remarked over coffee during a scene break that he had heard Charles Boyer had been offered his role on the screen but refused it because of his French accent, Davis snapped: “Charles is a great actor; this is beneath him. I’m glad he stayed out of it.” After that, the only allies Davis found on the Watch on the Rhine set were her old pal Geraldine Fitzgerald, who played the informing count’s wife, and little Janis Wilson, who had been Tina in Now, Voyager, and whom Davis had sneaked in as one of her children. She and villain George Coulouris got on well, as Coulouris, a man with a great deal of self-possession and a biting wit, amused and stimulated the restless Davis with his sharp retorts to her needling sallies. Once, when she told him she thought he had overembroidered one of their confrontation scenes, George put her down solidly with, “Overembroidering is your department, Miss Davis!” Laughing raucously at his gall, Davis went to get him a cup of coffee and a bun. “I wish I could get that kind of reaction out of her,” the nervous and despairing Shumlin remarked. “Then for heaven’s sake talk up to her! If you don’t, she thinks you’re soft and turns on you!” Coulouris barked.