Many years later I met Montgomery at a party; he was then living in New York and winning distinction counseling the Rockefellers on their communications arm and fund-raising for Lincoln Center. When I brought up Davis and June Bride, he raised his arm, gave out with a cocked-eyebrow mock scowl, and replied, “Please, friend, spare me!”
But after I had informed him that I made a point of questioning every former Davis associate for the book I hoped one day to write on her, he sighed, and said, “Bette Davis is a great tragedienne but a terrible comedienne. She never should have tried comedy; it was poison for her. I have seen her perform most creditably in drama, but in the lighter things, she’s simply—” He searched for the word, and finally came out with it, grinning, “elephantine!” I asked how he felt about her personally in retrospect. “On that, I pass!” was his reply. I wondered if he knew that Davis, on her end, had referred to him as “that superconservative Republican son of a bitch, always with his nose in the air!”
Jack Warner, whose tastes and instincts had often been derided and downgraded by Davis, showed considerable wisdom and discernment in suggesting Stuart Engstrand’s Beyond the Forest as a new picture for Bette in 1949.
“Hell, she has spent years screaming at me that she had to go on loan to RKO to get a really mean, bitchy part she could get her teeth into,” he told Henry Blanke, who produced Forest. “She was a slut and a she-devil in Of Human Bondage, and it made her career, didn’t it? And then she’d rant and rave about how we never found her a gutsy role like that here at Warners, and here we have one! Rosa Moline as Lenore Coffee has written her is every bit as strong and venomous as Mildred in Bondage. She’s a manhater supreme, she does the guy dirt, she’s scheming and climbing and ambitious in the same cheap, sluttish way Mildred is. So why doesn’t she see, for Christ’s sake, that in Rosa she has another Mildred! And it’s how the public wants to see her. In Podunk they see her as a man-hating slut, ready to cut every guy’s balls off—here’s her chance to strut her stuff in her own inimitable style. They’ll eat it up!”
Blanke and Lenore Coffee tried to get across Warner’s thoughts on Forest to Davis, but she was having none of it. “I’m too old for Rosa! Brother, I was fifteen years younger when I did Mildred! I was twenty-six then; I’m forty-one now. How’ll I look young enough? Give it to Virginia Mayo—she’ll be great in it!” Mayo, a Warners contract player on the sluttish side, was then twenty-eight years old.
Still seething over missing out on Ethan Frome and Mrs. Lincoln, Davis was determined to give everyone concerned as hard a time as possible on Beyond the Forest. “She was just impossible at times,” King Vidor said. “Here I was trying to help her give a performance worthy of her best efforts in a role that, in my opinion, was admirably suited to her, and she was fighting the whole idea of it, all the way, damn it!”
When I discussed Beyond the Forest with King Vidor, he was ambivalent about both the picture and Davis. “She did some really wonderful things in that,” he told me. “I particularly admired a scene played entirely in pantomime, wordless from start to finish, in which Bette surreptitiously tried on a mink coat that the Ruth Roman character had left on a chair. The way she luxuriated in the feel of that mink, as she stood on a chair and preened in it in front of a mirror—she made it so vivid, so lifelike!
“Of course she overplayed at times,” Vidor recalled, “but I think it was an excess of zeal more than anything else. She wanted to transform the material, get a good picture out of it by hook or by crook. And remember that we were fighting the Legion of Decency and the Production Code all the way—Bette was in absolute despair because that damned Code wouldn’t allow her [Rosa] to go to an abortionist, for instance. When she did sneak over to one, the Code people insisted that the name on the office door carry the title of attorney rather than doctor—foolish stuff like that.”
I told Vidor that I felt Beyond the Forest had a lot of vitality and bite—the kind he had given to pictures like Ruby Gentry some years later—and that it contained one of Davis’s more vivid performances.
“But it didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped,” he added, “first because of those damned Code restrictions, which were forever interfering with the believability of the goings-on, and because of the hyped-up desperation of all participants.”
Max Steiner gave Beyond the Forest one of his darker, more sinister scores, and his variations on the song “Chicago” were one of his happier inspirations.
Vidor found it amusing that the film had become something of a cult classic. Cult classic status, he felt, was always a wryly amusing mixture of admiration and contempt.
I asked Vidor what he thought of Davis’s argument that she was too old for the role, that twentyish Mayo was more suited to it. “In the first place,” Vidor rejoined, “Mayo, at any age, wasn’t a powerful enough actress to carry the part. And in the second place, I know for a fact that in every state of this damned Union there are still attractive women in their early forties who want to chuck hubby and take off for more excitement in a bigger town. There’s a desperation many women know in their early forties, when they’re afraid life is passing them by, and Davis, I knew, could convey this desperation superbly—in fact, in many scenes in Forest, she did just that! But I could never make her understand the obvious logic in this; she was a stubborn one! When I joined Henry Blanke one day in her dressing room and made the points we thought salient—that it was a fine variation on Mildred and that women of forty-one were desperate for new experiences, she just dismissed it all. ‘Don’t give me that shit,’ she screamed. ‘Warner just thinks Forest would be less expensive than Frome and Lincoln, he wants something trashy and cheap that he thinks will sell to the lowbrows. I didn’t work all these years for better pictures to be relegated, at this stage, to horseshit like this!’”
The irony regarding the financing of the picture, of course, consists in the fact that Forest wound up costing every bit as much as Frome or Lincoln would have. It was just one of the many ways in which Davis got a revenge of sorts on Warner.
Ruth Roman recalls being frightened to death of Davis. “I was twenty-four at the time, and the way she looked at me in our first scene—like she wanted to kill me! Her eyes narrowed into slits and she looked at me as if to say, ‘What the hell right have you to look so young and pretty when I’m the star of this damned film!’
“In the scene, I had just showed up in town and was standing on the railroad station platform. Davis was supposed to look me over jealously and curiously. I must say, when I saw the sequence later on the screen, she certainly made it real. Too real. It all gave me the creeps.”
I asked if Ruth would have wanted to work with Davis again. “I’ll pass on that,” she said.
In 1965 Joseph Cotten, one of Davis’s good friends, expressed his admiration for her and said she had been a cooperative, concerned, delightful co-worker in Beyond the Forest. “I know she was having problems with the script, with King Vidor, with Jack Warner, with practically everyone, but there must have been something in our mutual chemistry that kept us calm and cordial with each other from the first scene to last.” Cotten felt she had done some excellent work in the picture and blamed the censorship for the unrealities that cropped up.
“Bette is a really great artist,” he said, “and I and my wife hold her in the greatest affection. I was on loan, and not a regular member of the Warner family, but she made me feel thoroughly at home at all times. I know others have found her temperamental and difficult, but maybe she had her reasons for acting as she did. I do know that she was always intolerant with mediocrity and false or slipshod work. She was a perfectionist, yes, but to me she was always fair and kind.”
Lenore Coffee told me that fear of censorship was the main roadblock to her screenwriting efforts on Beyond the Forest. “The remarkable thing is that Bette, by sheer personality force and sensual innuendo, got across so much that we couldn’t express in words. And I felt that some of her all-time best acting could be found
in scenes in that picture. She even made a lot of ‘What a dump!’” She threw the line away but highlighted it in reverse. (Edward Albee featured the line in his 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, citing its source and winning immediate response from an appreciative audience.)
Produced by Henry Blanke, and based on the novel by Stuart Engstrand, the story deals with the bored and miserable Rosa Moline, wife of the town doctor in a stultifying Wisconsin community, who longs to escape “beyond the forest” to the Big Town, Chicago, personified by a millionaire who has a hunting lodge nearby and with whom she is having an adulterous affair. Later she goes to Chicago to find him, and when she is rejected, she returns in defeat to her patient husband (Cotten), by whom she later becomes pregnant. Then back comes millionaire David Brian, and again she plans to lasso him. He is more amenable this time, having been disillusioned by a society girl who despised his humble origins. When her husband’s friend (Minor Watson) threatens to expose her plan, Davis kills him during a hunting party. An expert shot, she aims with lethal efficiency, later claims it was an accident, and is cleared. After trying to get an abortion, she throws herself down an embankment so she will miscarry, and later dies of peritonitis as she attempts to catch a train back to Chicago. Such is the basic plot, and Davis dresses up the proceedings with impassioned bravura. Made up garishly, her mouth smeared and her eyes rheumy, she is a horrible figure indeed as she staggers out of the house and toward the tracks to her doom. In a graphically realistic scene in Chicago after the millionaire’s rejection, she staggers through the rain while prostitutes jeer at her from windows and bar attendants refuse to seat her. She slithers and squirms in the best Davis style as she intones, “If I don’t get out of this town, I hope I die!” and cites the undertaker as the best thing around: “He carries them out!” When one charitable housewife tells another at the post office that the town is tough on Rosa, her friend snaps, “She’s tough on the town!”
Film critic William Schoell, in the film newsletter Quirk’s Reviews, expertly nailed down the revisionist upgrading of Beyond the Forest (a critical failure in 1949) in the 1980s. His August 1986 retrospective review read in part:
“It has been said that it was in this film (in which she utters the classic line, ‘What a dump!’) that Davis began to get set into her famous mannerisms and speech patterns and perhaps this is true. But she also gives, in her own larger-than-life way, one of the most impressive and strongest performances of her career. The scenes in the middle of the film, when she does run off to Chicago only to be rebuffed by Brian (and to discover that she wasn’t really the urban sophisticate who could take the town by storm that she supposed she was), illustrate how good she can be at getting across loneliness, fear, and frustration. Her facial expressions mirror the conflicting, tormented emotions of her character perfectly. Davis is equally good in the final scenes, as her fever gets worse and she becomes delirious, literally dragging herself to the track in a futile attempt to catch another train to Chicago. This is an actress who, at her best, has the mesmerizing quality of a volcano.”
According to Schoell: “The main problem with the story line is that Rosa Moline must be turned into a villainess because she refuses to conform to the values of Middle America. She wants a more exciting life, husband and environment, instead of the utterly drab ones she has been offered. She isn’t interested in having children, in being maternal. She, in fact, tries at one point to get an abortion (horrors!) and even gives herself a miscarriage that doesn’t work out by jumping out of a car and diving down an embankment (thereby getting the infection that eventually kills her). Naturally audiences of that day (1949) had to believe that anyone so lacking in wifely, womanly virtues would find it an easy step from abortion to murder. [The murder] is the only really ‘evil’ thing she does, and insures that whatever audience sympathy she may have garnered will be lost. This old-fashioned attempt to turn what could have been a tragic heroine (of sorts) into a murdering witch served to assure the 1949 audiences that any woman not content to stay home in dreary domestic bliss and raise babies was a most unnatural and evil creature who deserved only death and disdain. . . . it’s a shame that its dated, conservative 1949-ish ambience prevents this film from finally getting the attention it deserves.”
To add insult to injury, the Production Code bluenoses insisted that Warners insert a long, lugubriously puritanical foreword after the main titles to the effect that it was good for the collective public’s souls to observe monstrous evil acted out, so that in recognizing its hideous face, they would be inspired to turn away and follow righteous paths!
Davis asked for a release from her Warners contract, conditional on her finishing Beyond the Forest. Her request was granted.
Payment on Demand had originally been titled The Story of a Divorce, appropriately enough, since shortly after its completion Davis finalized her own divorce from Sherry. Her old associate, Curtis Bernhardt, watched her Warners flounderings and the termination of her contract after Beyond the Forest and came up with an idea for a story he knew instinctively would be exactly right for Davis’s talents and temperament. He and Bruce Manning turned it into a screenplay, and it was produced by Manning and Jack H. Skirball for an RKO release with Bernhardt directing.
Davis undertook it with high hopes in early 1950—hopes that were justified. It turned out to be one of her better pictures, a study of the twenty-year course of a marriage, with Davis playing an ambitious, driving, unscrupulous woman who forces her more easygoing husband, Barry Sullivan, into an upwardly mobile career that culminates in wealth and success as a corporation lawyer and steel executive. Disgusted throughout with his wife’s corner-cutting expediencies, social climbing, and general ruthlessness, Sullivan suddenly asks her for a divorce.
When she discovers that he has been seeing a gentle, womanly schoolteacher (Frances Dee) who proffers the love and tenderness that his domineering, success-crazy wife has forgotten about, Davis takes him for all he has in a bitter divorce that leaves her with their two daughters (Betty Lynn and Peggie Castle), the property, and the money. Chastened by loneliness, however, Davis takes a trip and discovers the rootless, heartbreaking pattern of life for middle-aged divorcees after dallying with a married womanizer (John Sutton) and watching a friend (Jane Cowl) pitifully supporting a parasitical poet on a tropical island. She returns ready to resume with her husband, whom she sees again at their daughter’s wedding.
Davis was later fit to be tied when Howard Hughes, the boss at RKO, insisted that she, Sullivan, and director Bernhardt return for a day to reshoot a new ending. In the earlier dénouement, which she thought was realistic and true, she was her old domineering, demanding self at a breakfast table scene; the leopardess had not changed her spots. Instead, Hughes forced a more muted ending on her, in which she told her husband, who had suggested reconciling, that she would take him back when he had a chance to think matters over. Hughes added insult to injury shortly thereafter by changing the title to Payment on Demand—which, Davis snickered, sounded like a quickie flick about blackmailers and underworld types. She pointed this out to him, but he refused to budge. “That was his stubborn, feminine side,” Davis said later. “He stuck to his guns not because he didn’t see the logic of my argument but because his ego demanded that he have the last word. I was so mad at that moment that if I had had a gun handy, I might have ended matters on my terms—it would have been worth getting the electric chair for!”
But regardless of the name change and the phony ending, Payment on Demand won considerable praise from the critics and more than made back its $1,800,000 budget. In fact, it turned quite a nice profit. Shot from January to April 1950, Payment wasn’t released until February 1951. Using his head, for once, Hughes decided to cash in on what was bound to be a smash, All About Eve—begun only ten days after Payment finished—by following close upon Eve’s heels.
The Hollywood Reporter felt that “if Payment on Demand has been withheld from release until the Bette Davis hit
in All About Eve had been cemented, it wasn’t necessary. The picture, completed before the 20th-Fox comedy drama, stands on its own firm feet and Miss Davis on the powerful range of her acting talent. It’s a superb part and the actress plays superbly, reading nuances of the modern woman into it that her fans will recognize and understand.” The Los Angeles Times even rated it higher than the picture that preceded it by four months, declaring: “This is no such flashy performance as she gave in All About Eve. It is much finer grained.”
B.D., almost three, played Davis’s small daughter in an early sequence. She appeared in another of her mother’s pictures years later, but as Davis declared, almost in relief, “It didn’t seem to push her toward acting, and that was a mercy, too, all things considered, as I did not want her to go through all I had!”
Bernhardt and the cameraman, the great Leo Tover, devised a brilliant flashback sequence (when I talked to Tover in 1960, he generously credited the idea to Bernhardt) to show Davis and Sullivan as teenagers. In order to disguise their mature bulges and lines (Davis was then forty-two, Sullivan thirty-eight) he placed them middle ground in an impressionistic mélange of light and shadow. Then Tover darkened the foreground, lit up the background, and used specially made transparent walls for illumination. The careful arrangement of shadows gave Davis and Sullivan marvelously youthful appearances by shedding brilliant light on their faces and disguising their necks and chins with dark shadows. Bernhardt wondered years later why that technique wasn’t used again. When I asked Tover if he or Bernhardt or both had patented it, he said he couldn’t recall.
“That woman [Davis] understood lighting better than most lighting professionals,” Tover told me. “Of course she had worked with the best, colleagues I greatly admired, like Ernie Haller and Sol Polito and Gaudio, and she must have picked up a hell of a lot from them because she knew all the lingo and all the terms. I would have been annoyed with her after she called, ‘Watch that lighting, get the boom back there, Leo!’ just once too often, but she was usually right. I learned from her during that picture!”
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 36
