Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Ethel was more restrained than Tallulah Bankhead had been when Davis copped her stage roles as movie vehicles. She had not liked being passed over one bit, but realized she was hardly 1944 box-office fodder in a leading role in films, and accepted the inevitable with good grace. However, when asked what she thought of Davis playing her role, she snapped, “She’s too young for it!”

  Davis had caught Barrymore’s performance in Chicago. She recalled that the audience gave her an ovation as she sat in the audience and that Barrymore looked out sourly at the proceedings from behind the curtain. It is true that she was only thirty-six when she played Miss Moffat, and the part had been written by Emlyn Williams to celebrate a teacher who was at least sixty. That was approximately Barrymore’s age when she acted in the play. In future years Davis expressed the wish that she could have tackled the role at a more mature age. In fact, she was to do so, in a short-lived 1974 stage musical, Miss Moffat, which played out of town but never made it to Broadway. At that time Davis was sixty-six.

  The story deals with the efforts of a heroic teacher in a Welsh mining village to inspire a gifted but recalcitrant young miner, played by the newcomer John Dall, to further his education. She inspires him to study hard and is instrumental in winning him an Oxford scholarship, which he almost throws away when a worthless, illiterate girl, Joan Lorring, snares him into fathering an illegitimate baby. Somewhat unrealistically, Davis assumes custody of the child and sends Dall to Oxford, after forcing him to realize that his duty to his genius outweighs every other consideration.

  John Dall had played only so-so parts on the stage. His part was originally written for Richard Waring, who had been Davis’s brother Trippy in Mr. Skeffington, but to the sorrow of all concerned, Waring was drafted into the service and Warners couldn’t pull strings to release him for the part he was “born to play,” as Davis regretfully put it.

  Dall was handsome and talented, but he was not the most masculine figure in the world. Homosexual, he lived with his mother, whom he escorted to premieres. They were known unkindly as “The Dalls.” Reportedly Dall had had no interest in what he called “butching it up” in the army, and had even told them about his sexual predilections when called up for service. “The way I like men, I’d have disrupted the morale anyway,” he said. “They’re better off without me.”

  After he was signed, Dall gave a number of gushy fan-magazine interviews about how “thrilled” he was to be acting with “a lady I have so long admired and sought to emulate [sic!].” He told them over and over how “kind” and “motherly” and “understanding” Davis was. Such was not the case with Irving Rapper and cameraman Sol Polito, who started getting nervous when Dall disappeared with some of the more attractive members of the professional Welsh Chorus, brought in to sing returning-from-the-mine songs—an inappropriate Hollywood touch. Mildred Dunnock, Rosalind Ivan, and Rhys Williams from the stage version were on hand, and while their styles did not blend easily at first with Davis’s under Rapper’s nervous direction, they all managed to accommodate eventually, and with consummate professionalism. In fact it was John Dall’s style that worried Rapper—and Davis—more than the stage professionals’. As more than one account has it, Dall was absurdly unconvincing in scenes which called for macho marching in and out. Davis solved the problem by telling Rapper to tell the errant Dall to “think of soldiers marching in manly fashion on the parade field.” This helped somewhat. Certainly Dall, a talented and sensitive actor, gave a good account of himself—that is, when his attention was not diverted to cruising the more attractive choir members. A large stage at Warners was drafted as the setting for the Welsh village, and Nigel Bruce, as the squire, counterpoised Davis’s Miss Moffat very well in what constitute the liveliest scenes in the film.

  Dall told many interviewers during 1944 and 1945 that he expected The Corn Is Green to “catapult” him into “great stardom.” That it didn’t do, given his reckless homosexual amours and his drinking and general unreliability. He had some good chances after that, most notably in Hitchcock’s Rope, in which he was convincing enough playing a homosexual who murders for a lark. Farley Granger (on whom Dall developed a fierce crush during the shooting) was his co-star along with James Stewart, top-billed. Jimmy, incidentally, emitted a shocked, “Really?” when I told him Rope had been one of his more compelling performances. Dall died, disappointed and largely forgotten, in 1971, at fifty-three. But still he had been luckier than the hapless Waring; at least he got his main chance.

  Considering she was thirty-six in a sixty-year-old role, Davis shows much spirit and authority. She was greatly alarmed, however, in early August 1944, when an arc-light cover landed on her head; had she not been wearing a heavy wig, she might have been killed. “Not all crew members liked her; she could be a wear and tear,” Hal Wallis later told me. “Was it an accident? Who knows?”

  Some of the more interesting memories of The Corn Is Green came from Joan Lorring, who, in a 1988 interview for this book, said:

  “The story of how I got to play Bessie Watty is a long and involved one, but the final link had to do with Rhys Williams, who played Mr. Jones in the film and, being Welsh, was also technical advisor. At this point I had been interviewed and rejected a couple of times for the role. One morning Mr. Williams’s car broke down and he hitched a ride to Warners with an actor named Casey MacGregor. He mentioned to Casey that he was working on the film version of The Corn Is Green and that they were having great trouble casting the important role of the little strumpet, Bessie. Casey said, ‘I just worked with a girl in a play about the Brontës you should see. She played Charlotte and her name is Joan Lorring.’

  “Mr. Williams submitted my name, but Warners couldn’t find me! Finally, the agent who had submitted me the other times did so again and they tested me. Jack Warner didn’t want me at first; he favored Andrea King, a new contract actress he was hoping to build. But Bette Davis, who was going to star, saw my test and asked for me, as did Irving Rapper and producer Jack Chertok. I got it.”

  Joan Lorring recalled that Davis was rather private and aloof on the set, “but I was only in my teens then and was very retiring, too.” Lorring remembered, “One day I came to the set not fully prepared. Oh, I’d studied my lines but when we started shooting I started going up [fluffing lines]. And Bette, in a no-nonsense, nonjudgmental way, said to this timorous girl who would have collapsed at outright disapproval, ‘Do you know how much it costs to shoot for ten minutes?’ The amount was staggering. She went on, ‘Everyone has to come with his equipment. The electricians. The sound men. No one can come without the tools he needs. And we come with our tools: our words.’ She wasn’t angry. It was explanatory. It was illuminating for me! There was nothing I wouldn’t have done for that woman. I have only had one or two teachers in my life about whom I felt as strongly and positively as I did about Bette Davis.”

  Lorring went on to recall that she had a real problem with the seduction scene with John Dall. “I’d never been kissed, didn’t know where the noses went, didn’t know where anything went! Now I had to seduce this young man. We did it, but later on we had to come back and shoot it again. By the time we got to the big final scene with Bette, where I tell her, ‘I’m going to have a little stranger,’ we were two or three weeks behind schedule—partly, I felt, because of me. Pink slips were coming down daily.

  “Making matters worse, I had to tell Bette off in the scene. I had such respect for her—where was all the contempt and rage going to come from? First we did her close-ups for that scene. It was Friday and Bette was always given Saturdays off so she could go and rest at her Laguna home. To me, they said, ‘We’ll do your close-ups on Saturday.’ When I got there the next morning, Saturday, there was Bette in gray wig, make-up, and costume so she could play her off-camera scene with me for my close-ups. She had a book in her hands—she was always reading; stacks of books were always being delivered to her dressing room.”

  According to Lorring, Bobby Vreeland, the first
assistant director, informed her of Davis’s special intercession that helped her get the part. Vreeland explained about the close-ups also. It seems that after she had done her own stint, Davis was told by Vreeland that he’d see her on Monday. Davis wanted to know when they were doing Lorring’s close-ups, and when he informed her that they’d be done the following day, Saturday, she said, “I’ll be there. I’ll be a son of a bitch if I’ll leave that girl all alone!” Joan Lorring was particularly grateful for this act of consideration because, as she recalled it, “Irving Rapper, the director, was prone to exploding on the set, and this was her chance to be protective of me so I’d not be affected by any of this temperament.”

  Lorring also recalled that Billy Roy, who played a young coal miner in the picture (and who later became a piano accompanist for Julie Wilson and other singers), did a devastating, highly accurate imitation of Bette that was in great demand at his friends’ get-togethers. At the closing party, Billy worked up the courage to do the imitation for Bette for the first time. There were a lot of people around, and the collective breath was tensely held while everyone waited for the Great One’s reaction. She sat there, all done up in her wig and costume, looking formidable and stern as all get out. Then, when the rash young Billy came to the hesitant stop, Davis’s booming laugh came, and as Lorring remembered, “She literally laughed herself off the chair.”

  One day Lorring and Davis were looking at rushes. Lorring was sitting directly in front of the star. Suddenly a huge close-up of Lorring appeared on the screen. In those days Lorring held the firm opinion that her face would stop clocks, and she proceeded to slide so far down in her seat from sheer mortification that she landed on the floor, bottom first.

  She looked up to see Davis standing over her, whispering, “When I was young and first came to this studio, there was a beautiful girl also under contract whose mother thought her the most gorgeous thing ever. Every time she’d see her on the screen she’d exclaim, ‘Isn’t she beautiful!’ The girl’s name was Anita Louise. She’s forgotten. I’m still here!”

  Lorring closed the interview with the proud recollection that for The Corn Is Green she won an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

  Mildred Dunnock was another who held Davis’s talents and character in high esteem. She told me, “I had had more stage experience than Bette, and knew that play well, but she gave her role the kind of disciplined dedication I associated with only the finest stage actresses. Oh, she could be imperious and definite about the effects she wanted, yes, but she was the star and the picture was riding on her box-office draw, and I couldn’t blame her for that. She could be tough about what she wanted, but she was always fair, and could always be reasoned with, and could be resilient and flexible if someone gave her reasonable arguments and backed them up.”

  Rhys Williams remembered that, oddly, Davis wasn’t too facile with the bicycle she had to ride in her opening scene. When it proved too awkward to bring off, she said to Irving Rapper, “Oh, the hell with it!” and entered with the bike beside her while she walked. Later she had to ride the bike across a bridge and, according to Rhys, “We were all wondering if she’d make it, but she did.”

  She said to Rhys one day, “God damn this goddamn bike! If Ethel Barrymore in the play hadn’t used it for her trademark entrance, I wouldn’t have bothered with it at all, but everyone who saw the play or heard about it expected it, and I didn’t want to disappoint anybody!”

  Rosalind Ivan remembered that Davis did have a disconcerting way of telling everyone what to do, including the grips, the cameraman, and director Rapper, who frequently lost patience and told her he was directing the picture, not she.

  “Well, you’re doing a damned lousy job of it,” Davis yelled at him. “Why do I have to do everybody’s work for them?”

  “Maybe if you’d concentrate on your part and your lines you’d keep out of other people’s hair,” Rapper yelled back. After a parting shot—“I’ve had it with you, Bette. Go to hell!”—Rapper began to walk off the set.

  “You go one step farther toward that door, you son of a bitch, and you’re fired!” Davis screamed.

  “Only Jack Warner can fire me, Bette; you know that. But he won’t have to; I quit. I’ve had enough of your tantrums and your sadistic bullying!”

  “Tantrums! Sadistic! Listen, you no-talent third-rater, you ought to go down on your knobby knees in gratitude that you’re directing a Bette Davis picture!”

  “I’m not directing; you are, Bette!” And so it went.

  James Agee proved not only percipient but uncannily prophetic in his review of The Corn Is Green for The Nation.

  Agee wrote in part: “I like and respect Miss Davis as a most unusually sincere and hardworking actress, and I have seen her play extremely well; but I did not find much in this performance to bring one beyond liking, respect, and, I am afraid, a kind of sympathy which no healthily functioning artist needs. It seems to me she is quite limited, which may be no sin but is a pity, and that she is limiting herself beyond her rights by becoming more and more set, official and first-ladyish in mannerism and spirit, which is perhaps a sin as well as a pity.”

  Agee continued: “In any case, very little about her performance seemed to me to come to life, in spite of a lot of experienced striving which often kept in touch with life as if through a thick sheet of glass. To be sure, the role [of Miss Moffat] is not a deeply perceived or well-written one, and the whole play seems stolid and weak. I have a feeling that Miss Davis must have a great deal of trouble finding films which seem appropriate, feasible, and worth doing, and I wish that I, or anyone else, could be of use to her in that. For very few people in her position in films mean, or could do, so well. But I doubt that anything could help much unless she were willing to discard much that goes with the position—unless, indeed, she realized the absolute necessity of doing so.”

  Other critics did not agree. E. Arnot Robertson in Picture Post rhapsodized about Davis’s “impression of inexhaustible vitality under a prim exterior” and stated that only she “could have combatted so successfully the obvious intention of the adaptors to make frustrated sex the mainspring of the chief character’s interest in the young miner.” Otis Guernsey of The New York Herald-Tribune called her interpretation “sharp” and “vital.”

  18

  The Quintessential Bette Davis Movie

  IN LATE 1944 Davis determined to produce her own films. As producer she would enjoy a tax break, but, more important, she would get to exert full control over every aspect of her films, and that appealed to her enormously. She contracted with Warners to do five films in which she would star. She wound up doing only one—A Stolen Life.

  A remake of a 1939 Elisabeth Bergner film, A Stolen Life appealed to the sad, introspective, self-searching mood in which Davis found herself in late 1944. She had been a widow for a year, her romance with Corporal Lewis Riley had fizzled, and she was uncertain about her other involvements, including the one with Sherry. She admitted later that she was more lonely in that period than in any other in her life. Working closely with talented writer Catherine Turney, she put many personal touches and insights into the picture—her great love for New England, her continuing analyses of her inner nature—part dreamy romantic and part egoistic pragmatist—and her continuing enthrallment cum disillusionment with the many ways of love, in which by 1944 she had become one of the world’s great authorities, on screen and off. Production on A Stolen Life began in the spring of 1945. Release was delayed a year, when Warners used it to highlight the twentieth anniversary of sound.

  The project also appealed to her vanity and offered her an exciting challenge, for in A Stolen Life she would be giving her public what her flacks styled “Double Davis”—she would play twins. One, the shy, withdrawn Kate, would be counterpoised against the brazen, aggressive, man-hungry Pat. She knew instinctively that she could do ample justice to both.

  Davis, a true New Englander, had long admired the works of such fe
llow Massachusetts natives as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” and Henry David Thoreau, who had written about the absolute necessity of each human being stepping to the beat of his or her own drummer. One poem in particular, by Emerson, guided her. It went: “Give all to Love; / Obey thy heart; . . . / Nothing refuse. . . . / Let it have scope; / Follow it utterly, / Hope beyond hope; / High and more high / It dives into noon, / With wing unspent, / Untold intent; / But it is a god, / Knows its own path, / And the outlets of the sky. / [Love] was never for the mean; / It requireth courage stout. / Souls above doubt, / Valor unbending.”

  A Stolen Life is one of Bette Davis’s finest pictures (one of my three personal favorites). It displays the then thirty-seven-year-old actress in one of her most sensitive, introspective, and deeply felt performances. It is also one of the most poetic and intense studies of the pangs of unrequited love ever put on the screen, its only peer being Joan Fontaine’s lovely, haunting romance of old Vienna, Letter From an Unknown Woman, which followed it two years later.

  In this, Davis, aided by Max Steiner’s superior musical inspirations, Curtis Bernhardt’s understandingly cooperative direction, and Turney’s literate and probing script, explored the journey that the unrequited lover must take, hopefully into the homeland of the beloved’s heart. Some reach that homeland; most do not, as Davis understood so well. “Not being in love is such a relief,” someone once said, “—like a long journey one doesn’t have to take.”

  As is the case with a few other Davis films, A Stolen Life bears detailed recounting, for it represents a salient example of the all-pervasive effect Bette Davis had on audiences of both sexes at the height of her career and influence. It is a relatively simple story. Wealthy, blue-blooded, identical twin sisters travel to an island off the coast of Massachusetts one summer. (The locale, though shot in California, suggests both Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.) They both proceed to fall in love with a shy, sensitive, yet manly and decent young idealist, an engineer working for a lighthouse offshore. But Glenn Ford’s Bill Emerson (Davis, naturally, gave him the surname of her beloved Ralph Waldo), though intelligent and gentle-spirited, is also a young man of flesh and blood, and he comes to prefer the “frosting on the cake” of sexy, bold, aggressive Patricia to the far more spiritually worthy but outwardly drab Kate.