Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Davis gave her all to the scene, shot in the tank, where the twins’ boat overturns in a storm. Tremendous waves were simulated mechanically. Tons of water came coursing down through a chute, accompanied by gargantuan splashes and tidal waves. At one point she almost drowned when the crew failed to pull her out in time after she went overboard as the bad twin. She insisted, nonetheless, on doing all the shots herself, and again and again she got knocked out of the boat. A double was on hand for this and other shots, but Davis didn’t use her, even though memos from the front office warned her that she was endangering her health and life by going to such extremes.

  During the shooting, writer Elliot Paul was sent by Photoplay to catch up with Bette. She was very excited about a current Russian discovery [since discredited]—a serum that would permit people to live several hundred years. One of its features was that it could arrest the aging process at any age the patient chose. At thirty-seven Davis felt the ideal age for a woman was thirty-five to forty. “By that time,” she told Paul, “she knows enough so that her face is interesting, not like a magazine cover.” She added, “Think what a wonderful inspiration [it would] be to an actress to know that after she has studied and worked fifty years to learn her trade, instead of being discarded, her looks and energy will be preserved and can be used to the best advantage another century or more.”

  Obviously carried away, Mr. Paul rhapsodized for Photoplay readers that the Davis face of 1945 was “a mirror reflecting changing emotions. To say that it is supremely beautiful is as true as to say that it is sometimes harsh and strained. It all depends on the moment.”

  Davis never produced again. Warners felt she was dissipating her energies and should concentrate on acting. She agreed.

  19

  Sliding Downward with Sherry

  IT’S LIKE GRAND Opera—only the people are thinner!” That is how one critic summed up the lurid, highly melodramatic, and distinctly overblown Deception, which Davis shot in the spring and summer of 1946. Later the picture was dubbed Conception by some careless Davis chroniclers who claimed B.D. was conceived during the shooting. Since the picture was finished by August 1946 and released in October, the nine-month count between August 1946 and B.D.’s birth in May 1947 doesn’t check out. B.D. was conceived in the weeks after Deception’s completion.

  Deception was a lurid bit of business about a concert pianist (Davis) who tries to conceal from her cellist lover (Paul Henreid), who was separated from her by the war, that she has been the mistress (kept in high style, too, with a penthouse and lavish clothes and gifts) of famous composer Claude Rains. Rains, angered by her marriage to Henreid, threatens to reveal all to her husband after he (Rains) has led an orchestra highlighting one of his own works with Henreid as the guest cellist. In a panic, Davis shoots Rains to silence him, then confesses the whole shoddy business to Henreid. They agree they must go to the police; it is just after Henreid’s triumph playing Rains’s cello concerto, and as they leave his dressing room for the exit, one of the onlookers gushes to Davis, “You must be the happiest woman in the world tonight!” The look Davis gives her has gone down in cinematic history as the most pregnantly campy she has ever bestowed and is often imitated by Davis fanatics and impressionists.

  The film is indeed operatic, and Claude Rains as the tormented, egomaniacal composer Hollenius almost steals the picture from his co-stars. (In an unusual tribute to his performance, he was honored with his name above the title in the credits as the third star—“an honor he was long overdue,” said good friend and fervent admirer Davis later.)

  Cynical, jaded, despairing, yet haughtily brittle, Rains overplays in the best sense of that overused term, limning his viciously egocentric character with masterly dispatch. When Davis, who has come to beg him to remain silent about their affair, says, “Hollenius, what are you?” after he makes a pass at her, Rains ripostes, “What you’ve made me!” He is the most genuine character in the film. Henreid spends most of the picture looking troubled, perturbed, and increasingly suspicious, while Davis does frequent rechargings on her hysterical, agonized, pop-eyed “he must NOT learn the truth” shtick.

  Even so, Davis has her moments. When she comes, gorgeously gowned and accoutred, with a gun in her purse to use on Rains if she cannot ensure his silence, and he tells her that he fears death and had a dream about it the night before, she hisses, “So you are afraid to die, Hollenius!” And later, when she shoots him with theatrical éclat at the top of a flight of stairs and he falls all the way down, her eyes pop, her chest heaves, and her breath comes in short gasps that would have done credit to any of the high tragediennes of the theater.

  Erich Wolfgang Korngold went all out with a highly charged, lushly operatic score that highlighted all the melodramatic doings with expert selectivity. In fact, it is Korngold’s own concerto that Henreid “plays.”

  The picture holds up well when seen today, but more than a few 1946 critics considered Deception overwrought, overstated, and over-colored in all departments.

  Davis was extremely unwell through much of the shooting, which began in April, and due to delays because of her assorted accidents, health collapses, and temperamental demands, dragged on and on through the summer. She and Jack Warner exchanged a series of angry telephone calls, telegrams, and even on-set arguments, and she argued frequently with Irving Rapper.

  Davis has always claimed that the picture was theatrically false from start to finish and that it should have followed the plotline of the original play more closely. To her, the only creditable thing about the proceedings was the performance of her idolized Claude Rains.

  The screenplay, by John Collier and Joseph Than, was based on a play that had gone through several incarnations even during its theatrical existence. A two-character play called Monsieur Lambertier, designed for Parisian audiences, had been written in 1927. The title was later changed to Satan, then to Jealousy. Eugene Walter had then refurbished it to accommodate Fay Bainter and John Halliday. A Paramount film version, titled Jealousy, followed in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels and Fredric March. In the 1940s it was retitled Obsession and, under the refurbishment efforts of writer Jane Hinton, starred Eugenie Leontovich and Basil Rathbone.

  The screenwriters revamped the stage piece completely and added a third character, writing in a number of juicy scenes tailored to the more flamboyant aspects of Rains’s rich talents. Davis insisted later that she had wanted the piece kept a two-character affair; this seems inexplicable, as it was she who led the cheering for the scene-stealing Rains of the screen version.

  Davis, who had studied piano as a child, even wanted to play Beethoven’s “Appassionata Sonata” herself when it was required for a scene, but got talked out of it, wisely and tactfully, by Rapper who pointed out the public would think she was faking anyway, so why bother?

  Irving Rapper, who always had a love-hate relationship with Davis, enjoyed telling one story about her in The Celluloid Muse: Hollywood Directors Speak. It seems that Davis, who had been ill, harried, and prone to accidents during the shooting, was particularly angry at Ernie Haller for not making her look more attractive. “Have you seen the rushes?” she asked. Rapper nodded and followed her into the projection room, where she and Haller were having a loud yelling session. Ernie had not been able to erase the ravages to her face caused by her misfortunes—to say nothing of her age in 1946—thirty-eight.

  Davis reminded Haller at one point that he had photographed her very flatteringly in Jezebel in 1938. “Why can’t you photograph me like that?” she demanded. Ernie, basically a civilized man who preferred stilettos to meat cleavers when delivering ripostes, topped her ace with his rejoinder: “Bette, I was eight years younger then!” Davis got his point immediately, flustered about a bit, and then gave out with one of her standard manic laughs. “Do what is humanly possible for a thirty-eight-year-old hag, then, Ernie,” she snapped, and made a quick exit.

  Haller was one of those who later made the point that if you gave her a sound argument
and countered her protestations with a convincing answer, she was the first to concede.

  When I interviewed Rapper on several occasions over the years, his love-hate attitude toward Davis continued to surface. “Deception was probably the toughest assignment I had with her,” he said, “because her morale was shot, both at home and at the studio, and she was more than usually snappish and unreasonable. I tried to be understanding and flexible with her but boy, did she try my patience!”

  Rapper recalled Jack Warner coming down to the set with producer Henry Blanke and telling him he didn’t know how he got on with Bette without having a heart attack. “I’m a good listener,” Irving replied, “and I keep detached, and I try to throw in a laugh now and then to relax her.” “Well, that goddamned budget is going through the roof and we’re weeks over schedule, and it isn’t any goddamned laughing matter to me!” Jack Warner barked.

  At this point, as Irving recalled, Jack sent Henry over to Davis’s dressing room to report Jack’s feelings on the matter and he could hear the famous voice all over the sound stage hollering, “Tell that son of a bitch to go straight to hell!”

  Paul Henreid, one of Bette’s good friends, preferred to talk about the clever hand work done for him during his “cello playing.” According to Paul two cellists were on hand—one used his right hand for the bowing, the other the left to hold the instrument—then the scene was shot at three-quarter angles to heighten the illusion. “It was perfect!” he said. “I couldn’t get over it.” Once I had guided Paul, a kind and good-natured man, through his lavish praise of Rains, Haller, Korngold, and all other parties involved, I lured him into observing that “Bette was under great strain through that picture. I and my wife were close friends and we knew what she was going through. You will never get me to say anything unkind about a woman I and my family love dearly and cherish for her many acts of kindness toward us, but—well, her morale was not high, and the strain showed on the screen.” Henreid, too, remembered her concern over the way the camera revealed her ravaged physical and mental state. “But on that I have no comment,” he said.

  Claude Rains, in the end, marched off with the good reviews. “If you want to call his flamboyant measures hammy,” the New York Post chuckled, “you must add that they have quality, flavor and the so-called inner flame.”

  At home, Davis’s domestic troubles with Mr. Bette Davis III matched her career worries.

  Once Sherry was safely Mr. Bette Davis, as she was to recall, Dr. Jekyll promptly became Mr. Hyde. On their way to Mexico for their honeymoon (where she was also to receive an award from the Mexican government) he threw her out of the car during an argument. Later, on their honeymoon night, he threw a trunk at her. She began to wish that she had read Bobby’s detective’s report. The condition that had kept him in the marine hospital seemed to be something he was unreservedly acting out now that he was “home safe.”

  Back in California, they purchased a beautiful home on Wood’s Cove, at Laguna Beach, high above the sea. The quarrels and the beatings were constant. She found herself saddled with someone who matched her in artistic temperament—but didn’t have the talent to go with it. Frustrated in his Sunday painting, unsuccessful as a dilettante physiotherapist, annoyed because he was not seated up on the dais beside her at industry parties, Sherry turned ever more abusive.

  After the outbursts he would be contrite, humble, gentle. Davis urged him to see a psychotherapist to learn to control his rages. Sherry agreed, but this did little good. When Ruthie saw some of the bruises on Bette’s back and chest, she indulged in a round of I told you so’s. Sherry’s mother confessed that she had wanted to warn Davis about him before the wedding, but she was too afraid of Sherry; it seems he had hit her, too.

  Meanwhile, love—of a sort—was in the air. Ruthie and Bobby decided it was time for them to get married, too. Ruthie chose a gentle, middle-aged specimen named Robert Palmer—yet another short-term marriage, as it turned out. Bobby, who was in one of her periods of relatively good mental health, married an innocuous man named David Berry. Davis laughed, “Now we’re Mrs. Sherry and Mrs. Berry!”

  For almost a year, Bette, Bobby, and Ruthie struggled on with their new marriages—each finding her own brand of disenchantment. Ruthie realized that she was too old, too set in her ways, too conditioned to being Bette Davis’s chief parasite to acclimate herself to some nobody male’s needs. Bobby’s uncertain mental health took a turn for the worse yet again—and Mr. David Berry’s term came, in time, to an end. But Palmer and Berry, as Ruthie later said, at least had their marbles, pussycats though they might have been, whereas Sherry was mad as a hatter.

  A year later, pregnant by Sherry, Davis began entertaining hopes that a child would calm him down, make a man of him, give him something to live for, focus his energies. For a while—a short while—her hopes seemed confirmed.

  Barbara Davis Sherry—named for Bobby at Bobby’s frantic insistence, though Davis hated the name Barbara—was born by cesarean section in Santa Ana, California, on May 1, 1947. During the eighth month of Davis’s pregnancy, the doctors had told her vaginal delivery was risky—something to do with one abortion too many in the Ham days—and that she could pick the date. May Day was her choice.

  Sherry, his attention focused on the child and on his unaccustomed role as father, changed his tune for a while. He billed and cooed over her, insisted on changing her diapers and warming her bottle. Davis felt uneasy; something about this readiness to take on domestic duties reminded her uncomfortably of Ham. Soon Sherry also began whining à la Ham. He complained to the press that when Davis came home from a hard day at the studio he had her slippers ready, drew her bath, and then cooked her a nourishing meal. Again shades of Ham. All these protestations—public ones, too—smacked of weakness. It seemed he wanted to be Mr. Bette Davis. One night, during a fierce quarrel, he threw a heavy object at her while she was holding B.D. (as she called the child, because she hated the name Barbara). She told him that once the child’s welfare was threatened she had had enough. She moved to the studio and hired bodyguards. He sent her threatening letters. Jack Warner offered to have him beaten up. Davis said no, she’d handle it.

  He begged her for a reconciliation. Ruthie dug up a psychiatrist. Sherry promised he’d go and learn to control his “awful temper,” become a true husband and father. This was in 1949, and Davis gave him one more chance. It didn’t work. Sherry was on the loose again shortly, smashing windows and furniture and frightening the child into hysterical tears. Then Davis learned from her housekeeper that Sherry had fallen in love with B.D.’s nurse and planned to elope with her. Back to court they all went. Davis rehired the bodyguards, secured more restraining orders. Sherry threatened to sue for B.D.’s custody. Davis offered him alimony if he would desist. He promptly accepted and the divorce went through in early 1950—but not before he had appeared on a movie set and threatened to beat up Barry Sullivan, whom he suspected of romancing her. When the divorce was finalized, Sherry married the nurse and eventually wound up with a flock of children and grandchildren. As Ruthie observed, marriage to a nonentity like himself suited him far more comfortably than playing the role of Mr. Bette Davis.

  But Sherry would be heard from again. In order to get the divorce, Davis had guaranteed alimony for three years. (“A wife paying her husband alimony—that was a new one on me!” she later said. “I guess I have to plead guilty to originating that trend!”) Her next husband wanted to adopt B.D., so he asked Sherry’s permission. Sherry put a $50,000 price tag on his daughter, and when Davis refused, he sued for custody. Davis finally got rid of the bloodsucker once and for all when the judge, hearing that Sherry received alimony, threw the case out of court. Her lawyer, having advised her to withhold Sherry’s latest alimony check, then managed to force his agreement to adoption by husband number four.

  Davis had B.D. at age thirty-nine. She was told she could never have another child, either vaginally or by cesarean. Jack Warner sent her a priceless pearl each
year on B.D.’s birthday.

  In the 1947–1948 period, Davis was anxious to get two projects off the ground. She wanted to do a film version of the Edith Wharton novel, Ethan Frome, which had been dramatized successfully and had had a succès d’estime on Broadway. The story dealt with a farmer in nineteenth-century New England who is saddled with a cold, unattractive wife. He falls in love with the gentle hired girl, a relative of the wife’s. When they run away, they are injured in a sledding accident, and the ironic conclusion has the wife carrying the maimed pair through many years and emerging the most sympathetic of the lot. Davis felt she would be perfect for Mattie, the hired girl, and she wanted either Gregory Peck or Gary Cooper for Ethan, and Mildred Natwick (who had made a perfect test) for Zenobia, the wife. Jack Warner was hesitant about the project—not only was it a period drama and he hated “costume stuff,” but the theme seemed too drab and downbeat to be good box office. To Davis’s frustration, he refused to go ahead. For years after she dreamt of doing Ethan Frome, even when she got too old for Mattie; then, she said, she’d do Zenobia. There were no takers.

  The other project was Mrs. Lincoln, which was to be a film version of the often dramatized story of Abraham Lincoln’s wife, who was emotionally unstable, accused of being a Confederate sympathizer because she had relatives in the southern army, and who lost several children to premature deaths. Years after Lincoln’s death, her eldest son committed her to an Illinois mental institution.