Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Unfortunately Shumlin didn’t follow his advice and the results show this only too blatantly. Davis throws many scenes off balance with her upfront posturings and standard gestures; it is obvious she resents—too late—her passive character as written and has decided that if she can’t be flamboyant and bitchy she’ll grab attention any other way she can. She had gone into Watch on the Rhine only a scant ten days after finishing Now, Voyager in June 1942, and many of her mannerisms and stances belong more to Charlotte Vale than to Sara Muller, the drab but valiant wife.

  Bosley Crowther, who had often commented on Davis’s scene-hogging and scenery-chewing, couldn’t help giving her a patronizing pat on the back for being a good girl when he wrote in The New York Times that “[the] wife, played by Bette Davis, is a model of human selflessness.” The National Board of Review Magazine, predecessor to Films in Review, naïvely missed the point of the entire thing, praising Davis’s overplaying and stage-front hoggings of the action with the somewhat inappropriate words: “Bette Davis subdues herself to a secondary role almost with an air of gratitude [sic!] for being able at last to be uncomplicatedly decent and admirable. It’s not a very colorful performance but quiet loyalty and restrained heroism do not furnish many outlets for histrionic show and Miss Davis is artist enough not to throw in any extra bits of it to prove that she is one of the stars.” The reviewer must have been asleep or wearing blinders, for that is precisely what Davis did try to do. Only the script and direction (Hal Wallis had frantically begged Shumlin to “hold her down” as tactfully as possible) had forestalled her attempts—and then only partially.

  Both Geraldine Fitzgerald and Donald Woods had memories of Davis in Watch on the Rhine decades later. Fitzgerald said she knew Davis was unhappy with the picture. “Her intentions were of the best but the role was too subdued and unworthy of, and unsuited to, her great gifts and I know she regretted doing it—but by that time too much film had been shot and it was too late.” Fitzgerald added, “I always enjoyed working with Bette and we did a lot of socializing at our respective homes. She and Farney were wonderful hosts; I always have felt that was, on balance, the happiest of her marriages. Not that they didn’t have their problems, but she seemed more at peace with him than with the others.”

  Fitzgerald and Woods both opined that Shumlin should not have been imported from the theater to repeat as director, and that the job should have been given to someone like Irving Rapper (Fitzgerald’s suggestion in retrospect) or even Michael Curtiz (Woods’s surprise nominee).

  Donald Woods, who had worked with Bette back in the thirties at Warners, said, “I have always tried to get along with people I work with; fighting and fussing is not my metabolism. Bette consumed so much energy fighting with people I have often marveled that there was any left to use before the cameras. Yes, she overacted; that was the standard complaint about her; but she always contended that that was what the public paid her for.” He remembered her snorting: “If they want some sweet little girl simpering all over the place, let them get Marian Nixon or Jean Parker or someone. That is not for me!” To which Donald Woods intoned, “Amen!”

  Davis next agreed to sing a special number in Thank Your Lucky Stars, one of Warners’ all-star extravaganzas aimed at raising service morale and money during World War II. Jules Stein had suggested that each star be paid fifty thousand dollars for his/her stint, and that it be promptly donated to the Hollywood Canteen. Produced by Mark Hellinger and directed by David Butler, it featured a fast-paced, kaleidoscopic screenplay by Norman Panama, Melvin Frank, and James V. Kern based on a story by Everett Freeman and Arthur Schwartz.

  Truth to tell, much of the show was boring, brightened only by several numbers by the talented Dinah Shore, including the title song, and a surprisingly well parodied “Blues in the Night” by John Garfield. Hattie McDaniel and Willie Best were amusing in a bouncy number, “Ice Cold Katie,” but Ann Sheridan flopped as a torcher with “Love Isn’t Born It Is Made,” and Errol Flynn was dispirited singing a pub song in what he thought was a rowdy Irish manner. Jack Carson and Alan Hale in another number came across—for the first time in their careers—as tedious bores, as did Olivia De Havilland and Ida Lupino in a falsely jazzy vaudeville number for which both ladies lacked the zest and wit.

  “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” the Bette Davis number, however, was a surprise hit and eventually ended up on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade and other popular song surveys. So the fans and flacks and press all waited impatiently through the more mediocre and perfunctory numbers for Davis’s appearance—and she did not disappoint.

  Wearing a pink print Orry-Kelly creation and with her hair becomingly coiffed, Davis first appears outside a night spot, looking hesitant. The war has left her desolately manless and she is out on the town alone. She enters the club and finds all the men are either old, one-foot-in-the-grave decrepits or pimply-faced kids. Her song is torched and belted in mock despair with Davis talking as much as singing it, using the throaty inflections and the standard mannerisms her fans had come to expect. Indeed her very faults become sterling assets here—she is no songstress, but the heavy-handed, phonily dignified stance she adopts is perfectly designed for caricature—and then along comes a young kid, played by a jitterbug contest winner and amateur actor, Conrad Weidel, who proceeds to rush Davis into a wild jitterbug, twirling her around and bouncing her up and down in a routine that would have exhausted the most intrepid sixteen-year-old, male or female.

  Davis later recalled that young Weidel was terrified of her. “If I hurt you or drop you, Miss Davis, the top guys will probably put me in a cement mixer,” he quaked, but she said, “Forget about who I am or who you think I am, get all that out of your mind, let your instincts come to the fore, and just do it, boy!”

  This young Weidel proceeded to do, and so expertly and intently that, as Davis later said, “He made me look like the dancer I distinctly was not, never have been, and never will be!”

  The number became the hit of the movie and was widely discussed in all the reviews. The Fourth Warner Brother had let her hair down in no uncertain terms, and the public lapped it up. Too heavy-handed to be a first-rate comedienne-chanteuse, Davis had nonetheless triumphed on sheer going-against-type grit. The critics agreed, and one of Davis’s most perceptive if candid critics, James Agee, wrote in The Nation of “a cruel-compassionate sort of interest in watching amateurs like Bette Davis do what they can with a song.”

  Davis was very taken with the number, and sang it often in later years.

  In Old Acquaintance, which began in the late fall of 1942, Davis was reunited with her old rival, perennial nemesis, and unrequited lover Miriam Hopkins. Lenore Coffee did the screenplay based on the John Van Druten play, which had run on Broadway in 1940–1941 with Jane Cowl and Peggy Wood in the leads. In this Miriam is a bitch who writes commercially profitable novels and Davis is a novelist who is high on critical prestige and low on sales. Davis scintillates in Old Acquaintance as a bachelor girl with a penchant for loving unattainable men, including her longtime-pal Hopkins’s husband, John Loder, and a handsome young man-about-town, Gig Young, who is, she feels, ten years too young for her.

  Old Acquaintance was a great hit with the critics and the public when it was released in November 1943. Edmund Goulding, who had guided the girls with great success through The Old Maid four years before, had been scheduled to direct, and he had even gotten involved in writing the screenplay. Soon, however, he was caught in the preproduction crossfire between Davis and Hopkins, both actresses on the defensive and wary about appearing once more against a background of tense confrontations, bitchy ripostes, and one-upmanship scene-stealing ploys, chiefly on Hopkins’s end.

  After Miriam screamed at Eddie Goulding over the phone one time too many, Eddie had a big fat heart attack and was carried off to the hospital, “like Hamlet being carried offstage,” as Henry Blanke unkindly remarked. Word got around that, for all Eddie’s grunting and groaning and fainting fits in the
hospital, his attack was largely psychosomatic; this was proven true enough when, relieved of the Davis-Hopkins assignment, he recovered in rapid order and was soon putting the finishing touches on the Charles Boyer–Joan Fontaine film, The Constant Nymph, which he had begun earlier in 1942. In that picture Fontaine, as a shy, sensitive young girl, spends all her time mooning over Boyer, a composer twice her age who is involved with the more full-blown and aggressive Alexis Smith. As director, Goulding was afforded the chance to spend all his time mooning over Boyer, and as he told George Cukor years later, “It was so much more restful contemplating Charles’s majestic presence than refereeing Bette and Miriam.”

  Meanwhile, a search for Goulding’s successor was on, and producer Henry Blanke and Jack Warner considered a number of candidates. Irving Rapper was asked about it but he pleaded his imminent entrance into the navy. In actuality, as he told Blanke later, he wasn’t up to a double dose of female temperament. Directing Davis, he said, he could handle, but two bitches in one film, no thank you! Blanke next approached Vincent Sherman, a former actor and screenwriter who began directing for Warners in 1939. Jack Warner had been pleased with the way Sherman had handled the Ida Lupino melodrama The Hard Way, which was released in 1942 to good box office and considerable reviewer acclaim. Sherman, after some initial misgivings, decided to give Old Acquaintance a try, though he wasn’t wild over the script.

  Davis had never worked with Sherman and knew nothing about him, but when he showed her rushes of Hopkins that he had shot without her (illness had delayed Davis’s arrival on the set) she was so pleased with the way Sherman highlighted Miriam’s more unsympathetic qualities—her shrillness, bitchery, viciousness, and hysterias—that she forgot about her indisposition and reported for work the next day.

  According to Hal Wallis, Davis was not happy about working with Hopkins again. She knew Miriam was ideal for the part of the self-centered purveyor of best-seller trash who neglects husband and daughter in her pursuit of success, but she also was aware instinctively that Miriam still harbored romantic feelings for her and, if thwarted again as she had been in The Old Maid, would repay Davis for her rebuffs by trying to take the picture away from her.

  Sherman, a man’s man who was not gay and who did not enjoy, as Goulding did, the bitchy quarrels of neurotic women, was appalled when Miriam began pulling out her scene-stealing tricks one by one. Unable to get any of the personalized attention off-set that she craved from Davis, she began blowing smoke in Davis’s face, using her hands and arms to distract from Davis’s speeches, leaning far back in a two-shot that was supposed to favor them both—all the tricks (and a few new ones) that she had employed in The Old Maid to sublimate her thwarted love and assuage her hurt pride at being the outsider on a lot where Davis was the Fourth Warner Brother.

  Later on, after the picture was released, the lilting, bittersweet romantic leitmotif that Franz Waxman had dreamed up for the picture was turned into sheet music, and Davis was infuriated when she learned that Hopkins had reportedly influenced lyricist Kim Gannon to underline the lesbian aspects of the relationship between the characters of Millie and Kit. When she saw a window display of the sheet music, which featured the girls in a buddy-buddy, affectionate moment, Davis hit the roof. She raised all kinds of hell trying to force the Warner attorneys to kill the sheet music release, but too much money had been invested in it and the studio lawyers refused.

  Soon Miriam was accusing the hapless Sherman of giving Davis more close-ups, and he spent hours in her dressing room while she screamed and cried, assuring her that he was interested in the overall result, not in favoring anyone. Then it was time to film the now-famous moment in the movie where Davis, sick of Hopkins’s bitchery and false accusations that Davis had filched her husband years before, quietly puts her parcels on a chair, walks over to Miriam, and shakes her thoroughly, throwing her on a couch and exiting while Miriam pounds angrily on the sofa and yowls her lungs out. Everyone knew about the tension between Davis and Hopkins, though not everyone knew all that was behind it, and the press demanded to be on hand when the scene was shot. Jack Warner, to his credit, felt that this would be vulgarizing things too much even for his taste, and ordered the set closed. But the crew members and anyone else who was able to sneak on from neighboring sets were on hand, with sweating palms and bated breath. Davis, of course, sick of Hopkins’s “sleazy, swarmy overtures” and bitchy, egotistical scene-stealing ploys, proceeded to give the performance of her life, shaking Miriam with a vicious thoroughness and throwing her on the couch with such force that instead of pounding the couch and yowling in the first shot, as she had been directed to do, Miriam just collapsed and cried. She had more than a little of the masochist in her, however, and realizing that she had aroused a sadism in Davis born of the latter’s frustration and exasperation with her, Hopkins forced her through five or six takes, her eyes registering the wild enjoyment of Davis’s punishing hands.

  Sherman, finally on to this, took Miriam aside and told her that she was holding up production and there would be just one more take of the “shake and throw” scene—or else. On take nine, Miriam was perfect, and Sherman printed it with a sigh of relief. As for Davis, she later reported, “I had all I could do to keep from venting my full anger on Miriam. Instead, I went home and yelled for an hour. It was The Old Maid all over again!” Farney, who had to bear the brunt of Davis’s delayed outbursts of temper, decided that a business trip east was in order, and for the remaining weeks of shooting, Davis wrecked her home after a day on the set, throwing furniture and vases and pounding pillows with fiendish glee.

  Davis told Henry Blanke that she had known, of course, that Hopkins would act up throughout the shooting. “But she’s perfect for the part, the only one who could do justice to it, and I’ll do anything for the good of a picture!” Davis added, “She’s an excellent actress; it’s a shame she has to bring her private problems into her on-set behavior. She did this with others besides myself, and in time it ruined her career as a star. No one wanted to work with her.” There was an element of truth in this, as after Old Acquaintance Miriam’s screen career went downhill and she never starred above the title again. With the exception of her fine supporting performance in Olivia De Havilland’s 1949 hit, The Heiress, directed by Wyler, her roles in films from 1943 on were secondary and negligible. Miriam did have the last word in 1949 when The Heiress was acclaimed on all sides, and Davis’s Beyond the Forest, which had opened at about the same time, was soundly panned. Reportedly, she couldn’t resist sending Davis a bitchy telegram to the effect that it was better to be number two in a winner than number one in a loser. Again, Davis did her screaming in private.

  Davis always felt that the John Van Druten play should have been left as it was; Lenore Coffee had written earlier scenes in the character’s lives for the movie, and Davis felt they diluted the impact of the drama. Nonetheless, though Coffee and Van Druten did not collaborate personally (she simply expanded on what she found in the original play script), there were some excellent exchanges that boasted considerable literacy and sharpness.

  Hopkins, certainly, had no reason to complain about some of the lines she was given. Reporting on Davis’s earlier confidence that she was in love with and planning to marry Gig Young, ten years younger and a naval officer looking resplendently handsome in his uniform, Miriam purrs venomously, “She wants to be a sailor’s bride—of forty-two!” In another riotously witchy scene, Anne Revere is a perceptive, sharp reporter (a switch from her severe mother of St. Bernadette that same year) interviewing Hopkins on the success of her latest trashy novel. Davis happens in, and Revere forgets where she is and enthuses, “When you turn out a novel, Miss Marlowe, it’s a gem; none of this grinding it out like sausage!” Then, aware of her gaffe, the reporter gasps, “I should cut my throat, I guess!” From the couch Miriam responds, “There’s a knife over there on the table!”

  Davis has many opportunities to enthrall her audience with supercharged dramatic situations
. Her face blanches and her eyes pop out in fine Davis style when her young naval officer, whom she has decided she loves and whose proposal she is about to accept, informs her that he has fallen in love with Hopkins’s young daughter. She turns away from him, and Sol Polito’s camera zeroes in for a close shot that practically goes up her nostrils; her distress and frustration are conveyed most intensely. When Davis, just prior to shaking Hopkins, lets her have it verbally, her voice shakes and her octaves warble and the fierceness in her eyes telegraphs the physical mayhem to come.

  John Loder, Hopkins’s husband in the movies said in an interview years later that the tension on the set was very great, and with the frequent absences of the stars and the constant displays of temperament, he was amazed that the picture ever finished. “I found Bette very warm and responsive in our scenes together, in fact I liked working with her in Old Acquaintance better than in Now, Voyager, for some reason. To be fair, Miriam was a very fine actress, very stimulating and responsive, but I made the mistake of telling Bette that, and she didn’t speak to me for a week!” Of course the picture winds up with the manless friends together by the fireside, calmed and reconciled and Davis’s amusing line about there being times in a woman’s life when only a glass of champagne will help.