Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Davis felt this was her kind of material, and she told Jack Warner that this role would win her a third Academy Award and that he must let her do it. She flooded his office with memos, letters, suggestions, injunctions, all-out demands—to no avail. All through 1947, 1948, and 1949 she kept up the pressure for Frome and Lincoln, but Warner remained adamant.

  Jack’s attitude seems puzzling when viewed from the hindsight of forty years. Her 1946 release, A Stolen Life, had done well at the box office, and so, for that matter, had her other 1946 picture, Deception. He knew she could carry a picture. It was true that he disliked “costume stuff,” but some of her most successful pictures, including her all-time box-office hit, 1939’s The Old Maid, had been period, costume material. So had Juarez. And All This and Heaven Too. And Elizabeth and Essex. Why the change in Jack’s attitude circa 1947–1948?

  Two factors might have influenced him. Times had changed, and the government in 1948 had forced separation of the exhibition and production aspects of the film industry as violations of antitrust statues. This, in turn, had affected the box office. From a high in 1946, the year after the war, the box office had dived by 1948, and television was coming up. Jack and his stockholders were more cautious; the halcyon days of the early to mid-1940s were over. The profits from the war period, when any movie made a neat killing in an entertainment-starved, escapist era, were things of the past.

  Davis’s instincts were true: Ethan Frome and Mrs. Lincoln, properly mounted, directed, and cast, would have advanced her already considerable prestige. But forced to play it safe, she settled, the September after B.D.’s birth, for two unworthy vehicles in a row.

  The discerning critic Walter Kerr once defined the censors’ and Legion of Decency’s effect on the movies as “the tyranny of the well-meaning second rate.”

  Certainly Davis blamed these people specifically for her inability to convert her next picture, Winter Meeting (formerly Strange Meeting), into an honest, convincing motion picture. It was not to be the first—nor the last—time she castigated these “stupid, narrow, esthetically myopic people” for interfering with artistic truth and with the mirroring of life as it is lived and experienced.

  Oddly enough, it was Sherry who had first read the Ethel Vance novel and enthusiastically recommended it to Davis for her first postbaby venture. When she read it, she was equally optimistic about its possibilities, and soon had her friend Catherine Turney preparing a screenplay. Nonetheless there was much about the project that worried her. The Ethel Vance novel had been trenchant, literate, and critically well regarded, but it had elements that Davis knew would not get by the 1948 censors. Complaining at the time to a New York Times interviewer, she lamented the lack of “vitality and honesty” in films because of the censorship stranglehold, adding: “Anyone who attempts to do something that hasn’t been previously tested and approved soon finds that you can’t do this because Mr. Binford [Lloyd Binford, the Memphis panjandrum of censorship] or somebody else won’t approve.”

  In her screenplay, Turney had to deal with the honest discussion of Catholicism versus Protestantism that had distinguished Miss Vance’s work by watering it down to almost nothing. It would have offended the Catholics. Then she had to keep the hero and heroine from going to bed together, another crucial story thread. That, for obvious reasons, also had to go. All in all, Turney had to blur, blunt, or eliminate altogether about seven ideas.

  The result, on screen, was a gutless, tepid, anemic tale of a repressed poetess and a naval hero who is struggling to become a priest. Davis’s character, the daughter of a deceased minister, is a sexually starved sublimator who writes socially conscious poetry and volunteers at a local Manhattan hospital. The hero, handsome, muscular, and intelligent, has a psyche riddled with the horrors he has witnessed in action. He feels undeserving of the medals he has won and guilt-ridden and cowardly because he came back and his comrades didn’t. He feels he is unworthy of the priesthood and is making an attempt to adjust to the realities of the postwar world. Invited to a nightclub dinner session by dilettante sophisticate John Hoyt (in the novel an obvious homosexual, in the screenplay a foppish neuter), the hero (Jim Davis, no relation) rejects the sexy Janis Paige for wrenlike, drab Davis and follows her home to her handsome apartment, where they exchange views on their respective life philosophies (in the novel, he seduces her). She tells him that her adulterous mother caused her minister-father’s suicide. He teaches her compassion, and she phones her hospitalized mother. His vocation revitalized by his power to do good, Jim Davis waves good-bye to Bette Davis and goes off to his own world. Presumably, he gets the priesthood and she gets—her mother?

  The absurdities, incongruities, and unlikelihoods implicit in Turney’s bowdlerized version of the far more honest and incisive Vance original (Winter Meeting, the novel’s title, became Strange Meeting and then Winter Meeting again—symptomatic of the studio’s censorship concerns) doomed the picture with critics and public alike, and started a distinct downward trend in Davis’s career.

  Sadly enough, there was much that was admirable about the picture. Ernest Haller caught the ambience of the poetess’s apartment and Connecticut farm very well (though Davis, possibly in an effort to look suitably drab and repressed, eschewed the mascara and eyeliner and smooth makeup, making her look very much her forty years—a mistake in box-office terms, given the romantic theme). She did manage to get off some shrewd and telling observations about loneliness and frustration (not wildly popular movie themes at the time).

  Bretaigne Windust, a director from the New York theater who had never worked with Davis before (he had directed such stage hits as Life With Father and Arsenic and Old Lace) proposed to make a “new Bette Davis” out of his star, toning down her mannerisms (but not creatively and selectively, as had Wyler) and draining much of her surface emotion. This turned out to be a mistake, as Davis later complained, for her “scenery-chewing,” as Bosley Crowther termed it, would have helped to make the finished result far more entertaining and exciting. Her explanation for letting Windust get away with it? “B.D. had made a drastic change in my life. I had no desire to give up my career, but somehow it didn’t matter as much. My life seemed full without it. I had won my battle. I had reached my peak—inside. . . . I had had my Matterhorn. Now I was satisfied to be nestled in my little chalet. From Matterhorn to Jungfrau. . . . I had turned my back to warm some milk and my defenses were down. My claws had been manicured for the nursery.”

  Of Windust she said scornfully: “He wanted to bring a new Bette Davis to the screen. He would have been smarter to leave the old one alone.” As it turned out, she was putty in Windust’s hands and followed his every suggestion with an accommodating flexibility that was new to her. She even let Windust ruin the performance of her handsome new leading man, Jim Davis, who had been languishing in second-rate films over at MGM and who considered Winter Meeting his big chance. Davis later recalled in exasperation that the color and vitality that Davis had revealed in his test never showed up in any of the Windust-directed scenes. Windy, as she nicknamed him, adopted an overanalytical, nitpicking approach that dampened and defused both the Davis performances.

  Windy, a cultivated Princeton man who had been one of the founders of the famed University Players in Falmouth, Massachusetts, loved to reminisce on the set about working in those early days on the Cape with the likes of Henry Fonda, Josh Logan, and Jimmy Stewart. His unfamiliarity with screen technique also exasperated producer Henry Blanke and photographer Ernie Haller, with the result that the shooting dragged through the fall of 1947 as he arranged fresh setups and retakes and other nonsense that Davis, anxious to get home to her baby, overlooked with a forbearance she never would have shown pre-B.D.

  Windust never won distinction as a film director, and his only decent effort, The Enforcer, had to be fixed up by the far more cinema-wise Raoul Walsh, who did not get the credit. He did few films and died forgotten in 1960 at fifty-four—his chief distinction today being that he sidetra
cked the Davis career at a crucial point and nipped Jim Davis’s romantic-lead prospects in the bud. Jim Davis went on to do many actioners and other low-budgeters, but he did not attain any measure of stardom until he played Jock Ewing on TV’s Dallas. Within a few years, he died in 1981 at sixty-six.

  In a double magazine interview, “Davis by Davis—Bette by Jim—Jim by Bette,” in the March 1948 issue of the fan magazine Motion Picture, the Davises made the Warner publicity department happy by sparing the errant and meddling Windust his just chastisement and talking, honestly but affirmatively about working together.

  Said Jim about Bette: “Bette and I have gotten along fine. If we’ve disagreed about anything, about a scene, for instance, I’ve found that she was usually right and I wrong, simply because she knows more about acting than I do.” Significantly, considering the dismal result, he added, “She has the professional sense [!?] to leave the correction up to Mr. Windust. . . . If I ask for an opinion she gives it, but not until I ask. If she ever suggests anything, it’s done in an off-hand manner, as one trouper to another, not as star to underling.” Jim Davis recalled pleasant days off in Laguna, with Bette relaxing on a chaise longue while Jim and Sherry played pool.

  Said Bette about Jim: “He’s a fighter. He works hard, and has the sense to realize this picture is not the end but merely the beginning of his career. Basically he is a businessman. He was in the oil industry before going into pictures . . . and he’s sold catsup, put up tents for circuses, done a dozen other things . . . he is deeply aware of his present inadequacy. I have never seen anyone try so thoroughly.” In the interview Davis threw one consolatory sop to Windust, citing his thorough rehearsal period before shooting began. (“A lot of fuss for a lousy result,” was her contemptuous summation many years later.)

  When I interviewed Jim Davis on the Dallas set decades later, he denied any romantic interest in Bette but did recall that Sherry, who had been one of those boosting him for the part, was jealous of him, “though I did nothing to provoke it—nothing. Oh, those watchful, crazy eyes of his, though!” Bosley Crowther’s verdict on Winter Meeting: “Interminable.” Jesse Zunser of Cue: “To Catherine Turney goes a wreath, probably cactus, for writing a script that is the talkiest piece of 1948!”

  The steady downward course of Davis’s career continued with her next film.

  June Bride, in its way, turned out to be as great a mistake as Winter Meeting. Tired of battles with the censors and unable to get the Frome and Lincoln projects into high gear, Davis wearily settled for yet another picture with Windust, who proved as unsuited for film comedy as he was for film drama, and again at Davis’s expense, as she desperately needed a good picture to counteract the bad effect of Winter Meeting. June Bride was released in November 1948, the month Truman pulled his surprise victory over Dewey in the presidential election. One amusing sidelight of this was that Warners, which in June Bride had a line citing a stylistic shift from McKinley to Dewey, had to rush in a fresh reel to theaters with Truman substituted.

  In her first comedy since 1941’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, Davis once again exhibited her poor technical and temperamental equipment for comedy. Her timing was nonexistent, she was oppressively arch and heavy-handed when she should have been light and gossamer-humored, and her careful makeup and the handsome costumes of her new designer, Edith Head (whom she highly prized and whose clothes she bought for offscreen wear), did not disguise her obvious forty years.

  The story, even by the standards of 1948, is silly and insubstantial, and halfhearted in its labyrinthine maneuverings. Davis is an editor of a woman’s magazine who wants to shoot a layout of a June wedding in a “typical” Indiana home, and to meet her months-ahead deadline she shoots it in the dead of winter, turning the bride’s home into a shambles via redecorating ideas that don’t turn out and rearranging everyone’s lives to a fare-thee-well, all of which arouses eventual resentment and confusion. Robert Montgomery co-stars as a roving war correspondent assigned as her reluctant assistant in these doings; at one time the two had been romantically involved until Montgomery reneged on it. They keep up a running battle during the Indiana assignment and when Montgomery discovers that the future “happy couple” are not even in love, and in fact have their hearts pointed elsewhere, he encourages them to break things up and rearrange the romances satisfactorily. Davis, enraged at first, finally sees he is right and plans her layouts to match the new pairings.

  These lame and forced doings were written by Ranald MacDougall, a talented writer who was not at his best here. Ted McCord’s photography did not disguise Davis’s years, as one of her favorite lensmen would have done, and she later regretted using him. On the plus side she was delighted to be reunited with the fine actors Fay Bainter of Jezebel fame (who played her other assistant and had nothing worth her talents to show for it) and Jerome Cowan (of The Old Maid and Mr. Skeffington), who played her publisher, also thanklessly. The on-set conviviality between the old friends did not show up on the screen.

  As Jerome Cowan recalled June Bride in 1964: “I was very sorry Bette had elected to do it, but she told me she was desperate at the time and felt a comedy (which was never her strong suit, in my opinion) would represent a ‘change of pace.’ Also I knew she was having troubles at home, and felt, as others did, that since having her baby, her attention was distracted and she was not using her best judgment as to vehicles. Windust had no talent for light comedy (it cried out for a McCarey or La Cava) and the depressing, spiritless atmosphere on the set carried over, regrettably, into the final result on screen.”

  Another negative factor that drastically affected the onscreen effect was Davis’s opinion of co-star Robert Montgomery. She knew he had her cards and spades when it came to comedy timing and the light, fey touches for which he had become famous. He made her seem awkward and heavy in her efforts to keep up with his style and attack, and she hated him for it. Her quarrels with Windust, whom she resented for making her look “wrong, unlike myself” (as she put it) in Winter Meeting, also dissipated her energies. Only young Betty Lynn, who played the bride who runs off eventually with another man, brought out her kinder, gentler, nurturing side. Betty sang her praises constantly; they would do another picture together, and became lifetime friends.

  Montgomery had another count against him: He was a strong conservative Republican and the year before, 1947, he had headed the Hollywood Republican Committee to elect Thomas E. Dewey. He had also testified that year as a “friendly witness” for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Later he became a special consultant to President Eisenhower on television and public relations, honing Ike’s speaking style with admirable results. A no-nonsense, strongly opinionated character, Montgomery had served four terms, beginning in the 1930s, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and had exposed labor racketeering in the movie industry. As Davis had with Warner, Montgomery had conducted a running vendetta with his boss, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, which resulted in his being assigned unsuitable roles later in a career that had begun sparklingly in the early thirties with leads opposite Shearer, Crawford, Garbo, and other feminine luminaries of Leo the Lion.

  By 1948, Montgomery had served creditably in World War II and won the Bronze Star, among other decorations, as a navy PT boat commander. He had also won some fame as a director.

  Davis’s battles with Warner, however, had been over creative issues; Montgomery won Mayer’s ire for political reasons, beginning with his SAG presidency. So the two could find no common ground there. And his vastly superior comic expertise frustrated and angered her. But worst of all, Davis, a dedicated Democrat and Roosevelt-Truman admirer, hated Montgomery’s support of the Republican Dewey. Later, after the picture was released, she had the satisfaction of seeing Truman beat Dewey. Reportedly she sent Montgomery a sarcastic telegram expressing her unmitigated glee—an act to which he did not take kindly.

  So given all this, the relationship between the two stars was either red-hot combative or arctic frigid, dependin
g on whose dander was up or down on a given day. Windust, among his other faults, exhibited a complete inability to mediate between his warring co-stars. As Jerome Cowan remembered it:

  “Montgomery got Bette’s pressure up more than Miriam Hopkins had ever done in the two films they did together, one of which I was in. Bob had a kind of feline, feminine talent for getting under a lady co-star’s skin. I heard Joan Crawford had cordially hated him during their films together at MGM and I could see why. He knew he was better at comedy than Davis and it was like an antelope fighting a grizzly bear—on the antelope’s ground, of course.”

  Years later, in 1961, I asked Henry Blanke, the film’s producer, why Montgomery had ever been cast in June Bride when Davis disliked him on so many counts. “Oh, it seemed like a good idea at the time,” he replied, “and we knew Bob was a fine comedian and felt he might lighten up Bette’s style. Also Bretaigne Windust wanted him, and he and I talked Bette into it. She wanted to know why we didn’t pick some Warner player under contract—she even mentioned Dennis Morgan, and, I believe, Jack Carson, but we made her see that they didn’t have the co-star clout of Montgomery.” Blanke then chuckled. “There was another reason, though we didn’t underline it to Bette. Since she had her baby, she looked much older—fortyish, in fact—and Bob Montgomery was in his mid-forties then and we felt he might make her look younger, somehow. As it turned out, she made him look younger. I think he knew that when he saw the rushes, and it delighted him. He had a mean wit, and he was always trying to deflate Bette.”

  Blanke remembered also that when Davis lapsed, during what were supposed to be light comedy scenes, into some of her more stately, overembroidered posturings, Bob would chirp wickedly, “Bette, my dear, this is not the court of Queen Elizabeth, and certainly not the castle of Lady Macbeth!” According to Blanke, “She hated the guy’s guts after that.”