So heartbroken, helpless Kate loses her young man to the predatory, flashy Pat. But because Bill is more truly Kate’s soul mate than Pat’s, though he doesn’t realize it, he is to find, in time, only misery with the sexy twin who cheats on him with other men, spends his money prodigally, and proves crassly insensitive to his deeper needs.
“Do you really know Bill?” the bereft Kate warns Pat before the imminent wedding. “Do you understand what kind of person he is, what he dreams of doing? When Bill’s kind fall in love, they mean it!” But Pat scornfully brushes Kate off and merrily waltzes away with her bedazzled bridegroom—and soon enough has him boiling in a witches’ brew of hurt and disgust.
For a time Bill continues to be deluded about his wife, and during that time the rejected Kate, cast into the darkness of loss and longing, endures all the horrors of being unwanted and occasionally patronized by Bill.
But all had begun well, Kate recalls, when she first stepped from a taxi onto the ferry landing to find she had missed the last boat to the island. At the beginning of the film, there is rich expectancy in the air, fed and fostered by the expressive Steiner score. One feels something important and meaningful is about to happen to this shy, drab, but gifted and prescient young woman—and it does, when Ford gives her a lift to the island in his launch.
Kate recognizes her soul mate in Bill at once, and later she maneuvers ingeniously to get out to lighthouse-keeper Eben Folger’s (played by Walter Brennan) island where Bill works. An amateur painter, Kate convinces old Folger to pose for her daily. One night fog prevents her from returning home, so she wanders to the top of the lighthouse where Bill is working, and they stand outside in the swirling fog.
“It’s like the end of the world,” Kate whispers, looking out into the mist. “If it were the end of the world, then people could say all the things they wanted to say; then they would have the courage to say them.” She has his attention now. “For instance?” he asks. “Honest things.” “Such as?” She looks at him directly. “Such as telling you I didn’t particularly want to paint Eben.”
Alerted, suddenly gentle and compassionate, Bill asks quietly: “Then why did you go to all that trouble?” “Because I wanted to see you again,” she replies. And, with the foghorn punctuating every few sentences, she adds: “Lonely people want friends, but they have to search terribly hard—it’s difficult to find—” “Other lonely people,” he finishes for her with a quiet intensity.
And so, because he is lonely, and because he likes and respects Kate, Bill takes up with her for a time. Their favorite dating spot is a cliff with a magnificent view of the Atlantic; there, he shares his quiet thoughts with her.
“This is your proper place,” Kate tells Bill. “Funny, you are the first person to understand that,” he tells her, and promises he will never leave.
But one day on the dock, he encounters the vixenish Pat. He thinks she is Kate, of course, and she proceeds to make him her own with all the self-confident brazenness and aplomb that Kate lacks. Soon enough, Bill is confessing to the amused Pat that “you’ve changed—before, there seemed to be something lacking—it’s as though you were a cake—without the frosting.” “They say I’m well frosted,” Pat snaps back. “I’ll say!” is Bill’s boyish rejoinder.
Later Bill discovers the deception, but by then Pat has hooked him. And so playgirl Pat gets the boy and drab painter Kate must suffer as bridesmaid through an elaborate wedding ceremony in New York. As Kate, Davis conveys wordlessly, in the high pantomimic style that is purely hers, the agony of a soul incomplete and unfulfilled. Her expressive face and eyes convey the consternation and fright of a nonswimmer who, emotionally speaking, has ventured beyond her depth—a bereft spirit deprived of the feel of solid beach-sand beneath her feet. She is drowning in an endless ocean of unrequited love.
Meanwhile she takes up with an indigent artist, Karnak (Dane Clark), who is as rough, tough, and direct as Bill was shy and tentative. A talented individualist; given to no-nonsense realism—“Man needs woman; woman needs man—it all starts with that—art, music, the works!”—Karnak tries to loosen Kate up by seducing her, and when she resists he snarls, “Always running away—no wonder you lost that guy!” On another occasion he barks, “Women like you want the grand passion! You want a guy to smother himself for you!” “Yes we do!” a finally feisty Kate lashes back, and then, when one of Karnak’s fierce kisses obviously leaves her cold, she exits with the line, “I’m sorry, Karnak; I guess it’s the grand passion or nothing!”
Karnak, a Davis inspiration both in the writing and casting, has distinct similarities to the masculine and direct painter William Grant Sherry, who was then courting Davis. Oddly enough, in real life, the crass painter attracted her more than the passive idealist—possibly because he represented more of a challenge. Sherry reportedly did not like “his” persona as acted and spoken by Clark.
Bette Davis as unrequited lover proceeds to give herself a salient and definitive thespian workout in a subsequent scene that her fans and admirers have long delighted in. Bill, oblivious to what he has done to her, calls from Boston and asks if she will help him do some shopping in New York. With a fresh glow in her cheeks and a sprightly gait, Kate rushes to meet him at a department store. But it turns out he only wants to use her to model a birthday-present negligée for Pat. Kate holds up the negligée. “It will look wonderful on Pat,” Bill enthuses. Later he is happily writing the check for the negligée and rattling on, ignorant of Kate’s feelings, about how much he loves Pat and how they look forward to his new job in Chile. Earlier she had tried to reach out to him, saying, “Bill, I can’t think of you away from the island, somehow.” “I had to do something to make more dough,” he replies offhandedly. She realizes then that he is totally oblivious to her and is longing only for his reunion with his wife. Grasping the pathetic futility of her presence there, she pleads an upcoming engagement and leaves. Steiner, with his usual inventiveness, concocted for this sad little scene a bittersweet, lilting theme, slight but compelling, that complemented Davis’s emotions aptly.
Then, suddenly, she and Pat are in a sailboat (Pat has shown up on the island to join her after what appears to have been a spat with Bill) when bad weather overtakes them (a wonderfully graphic scene shot completely in a tank at the Warner studio) and Pat drowns. Kate allows herself to be mistaken for Pat and gets a chance to “steal” her sister’s life. It is then that she learns how Pat had hurt Bill with her blatant infidelities and insensitivity to his feelings, and that they were on the verge of a divorce. Kate sees the misery in his handsome face, and when she asks him for another chance to restore his ideals, she mourns instinctively for the heartbreaking difficulties that lie ahead. Kate/Pat and Bill make a try of it, but more revelations of Pat’s sordid two-timing life keep emerging, including an enraged lover (Bruce Bennett), who had arranged to divorce his wife for Pat.
And so, feeling that Bill will never again trust or love her while he thinks she is Pat, Kate runs away to the island. Bill, realizing at last who she is, follows her there, and high on the cliff where they had first communed, with the fog encircling them yet again and the sea pounding on the rocks beneath them, Bill tells Kate that he wants her to come home to him, that he realizes Pat was all wrong for him, that Kate had known all along what he didn’t, that she had suffered so much for both of them. And then Bill enfolds Kate in his arms and says the long-delayed words that this weary, heart-sore wanderer had waited to hear: “Oh Katie, I love you so much!” Fadeout to one of Steiner’s lushest musical alarums. The closing shot is one of the most famous in the Davis still-photo pantheon. Eloquent in its romantic lushness, it showcases both Davis and Ford to maximum advantage.
Bette Davis knew that A Stolen Life would appeal to those weary pilgrims of the soul who have far to go, and long, before their private homelands of the heart appear in the distance. And she sought to convey that, for those denied the ultimate reward, beauty and valor can still be found in the search, and in the
courage to continue that quest, despite all discouragements.
She defended the picture vigorously, and she has had her allies, myself among them. Even the hard-boiled Walter Winchell, who would not be taken in by man, beast, nor movie, called A Stolen Life “short on logic but long on heart appeal.” “The public liked it,” Davis once said, “and the popular heart is more true a judge of a picture than an army of critics.” In recent years filmic commentators have begun to understand what Davis was trying to convey and revisionism is upgrading it.
In a 1988 interview, Dane Clark told Doug McClelland: “Yes, I was in it, but I never saw A Stolen Life. I play an artist Bette Davis puts up in her home, but in the original script there was a scene where the two of us finally get to go out of the house together. She was the producer and for some reason she cut the scene out—maybe she wanted to concentrate on the romantic stuff with Glenn Ford. Anyway, I remember thinking it important to the story, and certainly to my part, and refused to see the picture.
“I’ll never forget one scene that did get in. As a starving artist, I would read the papers to learn where there was an art show and go there and eat. This is how I meet Bette in the story. I’m this grubby street guy and I go to an art show, gorge myself on the food, meet Bette there and wind up in her house. I began the shooting of the scene like a ravenous animal, stuffing myself with everything in sight. I didn’t realize that I would have to duplicate all the eating for everyone else’s shots. By the second day on this scene I was deathly sick, by the third and final day I was out of my mind, throwing up and green in the face. They were three of the worst days of my life.”
Dane Clark added, “Right after the picture was over and I was home recovering, a delivery truck pulled up in front of my house. The driver brought a huge, beautifully wrapped box up to my door. Inside was all the remaining food from the eating scene, with a note from Bette saying how lovely it had been to work with me. Since Bette Davis was not known for her sense of humor, I was flabbergasted.
“Then there was a very long scene in the picture between Bette and me at her house, where I was giving her painting lessons. We’re talking about techniques. We did a master shot of the two of us, followed by her close-up, which went beautifully. Then it was time for my close-up. Suddenly I heard a little gay guy squeaking out the lines Bette was supposed to be saying. She had gotten bored, I guess, and gone to her dressing room. Now, I’d worked with many big stars, but they all read their lines off camera for me. I got angry and shouted, ‘What is the bullshit? Where’s Bette? I read for her, now she can read for me!’ Curtis Bernhardt, the director, almost had a hemorrhage. I didn’t realize that you didn’t challenge a star who also happened to be the producer. Bernhardt kept saying, ‘Shh! She’ll hear you. She’ll hear you.’ I said, ‘Let her hear me!’ Suddenly, Bette tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Dane, forgive me. I’ve been in this business too long. I’ve forgotten my theatrical manners. Of course I’ll read the lines for you.’”
Walter Brennan, who played the lighthouse keeper, was distantly related to me. He told me of his feelings about her during my 1964 Hollywood visit, where I spent some time with him on a set. “I felt that trying to double as both producer and star was a bit too much for her,” he said. “I noted that it made her tired and irritable at times, and after probably losing sleep all night worrying about stuff apart from her acting, she came to the set looking tired; she was in her mid-thirties then and the camera picks up on lines, bulges—and tiredness.”
Walter laughed. “I was no spring chicken at the time [he was fifty-two] and since I was playing a crotchety old lighthouse keeper anyway, nobody gave a damn how I looked! The older, fuzzier, messier the better! But Bette was playing a highly romantic part and had to project youthfulness, and I remember thinking that she ought to get her sleep and look after number one and maybe ought to leave the nonacting chores to others. I really did feel she was taking on too much, and it showed in her work.”
He added, “She was supposed to be in love with Glenn Ford in the picture, and he was playing a gentle idealist. But when I saw the film later, I thought she sparked up more with Dane Clark, who played a roughie-toughie big-mouthed bohemian painter. She seemed to like take-charge guys who talked up to her, both on and off screen. And I, for one, was not at all surprised when she married, later in the year, a real-life roughie-toughie painter. Now mind you, I wasn’t given to gossip; I left that to Louella and Hedda, but when I heard stories about how Sherry kicked her around and threw things at her, I got the feeling she sort of enjoyed it all, deep down. Something in Bette craved excitement and danger, and I think she got bored in her marriages unless the man gave her some challenge. I’m afraid she often got more than she bargained for, but I’ve never been really surprised that her marriages never lasted. She was too much woman, hellcat-variety, for any man to keep up with. I think she just wore them out. They either took to drink or other women, or beat her up, or all three. And I have always suspected that something deep inside her enjoyed all the chaos, and that she went out of her way to generate it!”
Walter said of working with her as an actress: “Remember, in the scenes in A Stolen Life that I played with her, almost all of them early in the picture, she was supposed to be the shy, sensitive sister mooning over Ford. I was never in a scene where Bette let loose in her famous feisty manner. So I can’t relate anything about playing off sparks of the kind for which she was famous. But I found her, in the characterizational mood she was in with me, a wonderfully sensitive and expressive artist. And she had more humor and self-deprecatory impishness than she was credited with. In one scene she had to run down a street after me. She had put on a few more pounds than she should have, and when she caught up with me, she was puffing so hard they had to reshoot. I think she liked my directness. I told her, ‘Twenty pounds off would make you more fleet-footed,’ and she laughed and said, ‘Thirty pounds would be more like it, but I have to shovel it in to keep up my strength for all the work I’m doing on this picture! But thanks for taking ten pounds off what you could have estimated!’”
Catherine Turney, A Stolen Life’s screenwriter, shared interesting memories of the film in a 1977 interview. “Bette had liked my work on My Reputation with Barbara Stanwyck, which was a big hit and quite adult in treatment and concept, considering the Production Code strictures of the time. She asked for me to do A Stolen Life. She also thought my writing and Curt Bernhardt’s direction worked well together.” Turney found Curtis Bernhardt difficult to work with, however. “He was very Germanic and difficult at times. He was a product of the Berlin school of filmmaking, and they were quite sophisticated, those early German film directors.” She remembered that Curt thought Americans of 1945–1946 were hopelessly, indeed laughably, naïve.
Turney also recalled that Curt and producer Henry Blanke taught her a valuable lesson: “Never attack a scene head on, always do it obliquely, if possible. Never have anything on the nose. It makes the audience more curious if you approach your points sideways.” She remembered that Bernhardt insisted she avoid undue sentimentality. “Always there is that thin line between sentimentality and honest sentiment; it is easy to cross it. I’m afraid I did at times.”
Turney recalled how new special effects were tried for A Stolen Life—original ones. “They went way out on a limb. It was difficult. They had to be very precise in the staging of scenes with both sisters. Bette would play one sister, and they would have another actress about her size and height playing opposite her. Then, on Stage Five, where they had the special effects, they would remove the head of the actress and substitute Bette’s head.” Bette, she recalled, got very upset when her head came off. “Now why do they have to do that?” she’d expostulate, nervously lighting a cigarette.
When Davis did such things as light and pass a cigarette to her “twin,” it produced a startlingly novel effect. Bernhardt had warned Turney to write the sequence without regard to the projected effects. “Write it as two characters. Forget
that Bette is playing both. Don’t get involved in that or it will inhibit you.”
Turney always claimed that she liked Davis personally and enjoyed working with her. “She was creative herself, always receptive, always fair, and if you overruled one of her ideas, she’d turn it over in her mind, and if she thought you were right, she’d go along with it.” Turney had also worked with Joan Crawford on Mildred Pierce and Joan passed muster with her, too, though, it was obvious, Turney preferred Davis. She did not like Barbara Stanwyck very well, which secretly pleased Davis, who had had her own run-ins with Stanwyck on the set of So Big many years before. “I admired [Stanwyck] a great deal as an actress,” Turney said, “but I never could get close to her.” Turney felt that Stanwyck didn’t really like women, adding, “I don’t think there is a lot of warmth in her. If you think back on her performances, there isn’t much warmth there.”
Turney’s analysis of Davis’s producer status on A Stolen Life was: “At that time the studio was making deals with some of the big stars so they wouldn’t have to give them raises in salary. They would make them producers in name only, and it allowed them to get capital gains, something taken off their income tax.”
Errol Flynn, among others, served as “producer” on another Turney script, Cry Wolf, but he never functioned in that way, ever, was entirely indifferent to the functions of the job. But Davis took her duties very seriously, to the studio’s considerable annoyance, and was always calling meetings. One meeting went on forever; it related to the dog she was to use in a particular scene. One subject was discussed. What breed of dog should be used, which would be most appropriate for the atmosphere of the scene? Numerous dogs of all breeds were paraded about while the producer-star cogitated furiously. Finally, after much soul-searching, a wire-haired fox terrier was selected. The dog got quite a directorial workout and ended up one of the best actors in the picture!
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 33
