When I talked with Barry Sullivan in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel one afternoon in 1964, his memories of his one film appearance with Davis were vivid. “She was really the most talented individual I have ever acted with,” he said, “and wonderful to you if she liked you. If she didn’t like someone, she had ways of showing it—and believe me, they were mean ways. Diabolically inventive, in fact! Luckily for me I was one of those she liked. I remember being worried because my character was rather gentle, passive, and easygoing by nature and I was afraid I’d look wishy-washy up against her characterization that was so driving and vicious by comparison, but she showed me ways to subtly suggest the inner fierceness and resentment and manly sense of outrage my character was actually feeling, and miraculously it registered later on screen. I always felt Bette would have made a great director. She was full of suggestions, and Curt Bernhardt, who had worked with her before, had a knack of letting her have her head on things he agreed with, and pulling her up short when their ideas diverged. She was always reasonable if she realized someone else’s idea was better than hers.”
I asked him if he had been romantically attracted to her. “They said I was!” he laughed. “But much as I admired her, she wasn’t my cup of tea that way. Her husband, whom she was in the process of divorcing, thought I was fooling with her, though, and he came on the set and knocked me down. He [Sherry] had a terrific inferiority complex—the ‘Mr. Davis’ stuff and all that—and no sense of humor.” He recalled Davis came to his dressing room later to apologize for Sherry’s behavior. “Bette had a humble, gracious side to her that not many people saw,” he said.
Davis was delighted to work with the great stage star Jane Cowl, (who curiously had originated the role of Kit Marlowe in the 1940 stage version of Old Acquaintance, the role Davis played in the 1943 film). Davis had seen Cowl often on the stage and did everything she could to make her comfortable. They talked of doing another film, but Cowl, then sixty-three, was in the first stages of the cancer that killed her shortly after the film was completed. Manning and Bernhardt had written some excellent dialogue for Cowl in the telling scene in which, old and drifting, she is living on a remote island and keeping a man young enough to be her grandson. Warning Davis that she faces a similar fate, Cowl moans eloquently, “When a woman grows old, loneliness is an island and time is an avalanche!”
Not that the writers stinted on Davis’s dialogue, one famous example being: “When you love a man and lose him, you may think it makes you an individual again—but it doesn’t! It makes you a nothing!”
Davis continued her sister-daughter friendship with Betty Lynn (from June Bride), who played her daughter in Payment. Betty worshipped her, and was protective of her during the shooting. As Leo Tover chucklingly told me, “Davis, to cop from the old saw, when she was good with people she was very, very good—and when she was bad, she was horrid!”
Victor Young whipped up a perfect Bette Davis score for Payment on Demand. “I studied her carefully,” he later said, “as I know Max [Steiner] did, and I tried to express the highs and lows of her personality in musical terms. I think I largely succeeded, as she was nice enough to tell me several times.”
Except for the name change and the butchered ending, which she howled about for many years thereafter, Davis, on balance, held Payment in Demand in high regard. “The situations were adult and believable—and how I needed those at the time!” she recalled.
20
Renaissance—and Gary Merrill
THE YEAR 1950 brought Davis a great new film role—and a fourth husband.
Davis was five days away from finishing Payment on Demand when she got a call from Darryl F. Zanuck. It seems he was in a serious bind. Claudette Colbert had been scheduled to star in All About Eve, but had hurt her back skiing in Switzerland and had to cancel out. Zanuck asked her if she could take over the role of Margo Channing. Davis asked to see the script, and Zanuck sent it over immediately. She read it at once and called to tell him she was born to play that part. He told her she would have to start in only ten days—five days after her last scene in Payment was shot, because they had rented the Curran Theatre in San Francisco for important interior shots. She told him she’d be on hand.
Years later Bette Davis had this to say about All About Eve: “I can think of no project that from the outset was as rewarding from the first day to the last. It is easy to understand why. It was a great script, had a great director, and was a cast of professionals all with parts they liked. It was a charmed production from the word go. After the picture was released, I told Joe [Mankiewicz, the screenwriter-director of Eve], he had resurrected me from the dead. He had, in more ways than one. He handed me the beginning of a new life professionally. I also say a thank you to Claudette Colbert for hurting her back. Claudette’s loss was my gain. On what changed circumstances are whole lives changed. No broken back—no Gary Merrill.”
In 1981 Claudette Colbert told me that she had cried for days when she realized the golden opportunity she had missed. With her usual honesty and candor, Colbert told me: “Bette said Eve rescued her from the doldrums. I was in some doldrums of my own at that time where my career was concerned, and I would have loved to be rescued. But it was not to be. I will always remember the year 1950 not only for the months-long pain I went through with my bad back—it took forever to mend—but for the emotional upsetment, indeed despair, I felt over losing such a plum role.” Colbert, with characteristic generosity, added, “Bette was wonderful as Margo, though. I know how much it meant to her at the time, because she was having her full share of personal and professional woes. It was good to watch the law of compensation work for her.”
Joe Mankiewicz was on a high in 1950; the year before, he had won critical plaudits (including Oscar honors) for his Letter to Three Wives, and he had just concocted a screenplay based on a story, “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary Orr, that had won the enthusiasm of Darryl Zanuck. Mankiewicz had done duty as a producer at MGM earlier. His screenplays tended to smack more of theater than film; they were wordy and prolix and there was talk-talk-talk through many scenes that should have been cinematized, but even his flaws worked for him with Eve. With expert photography by Milton Krasner, a sharp, rousing musical score by Alfred Newman, and inspired costumes by Edith Head and Charles LeMaire that suited each of the main characters according to their personalities, All About Eve was a class production from the word go, and there was much advance excitement over it.
In the film, Davis plays Margo Channing, just turned forty and insecure despite her eminence as a Broadway star. She is in love with thirty-two-year-old director Gary Merrill and feels the age difference has her at a disadvantage. Her best friend Karen (played wisely and warmly by the sparkling Celeste Holm) introduces her to the stagestruck Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), who insinuates her way into Margo’s confidence with flattery and an overstated, wide-eyed obsequiousness that has Margo’s dresser and confidante (Thelma Ritter) suspicious. First as Margo’s secretary and then as her understudy, Eve furthers her own purposes, and when the innocently supportive Karen, who feels Margo has treated Eve with imperious insensitivity, maneuvers Eve into a one-time appearance in Margo’s role by delaying the star in a faked auto mishap (she empties the gas tank), Eve proceeds to climb higher and higher, blackmailing Karen by threatening to tell Margo what she has done, winning the lead in Karen’s husband’s play and seducing him in the bargain. The only one besides the Thelma Ritter character who sees through Eve’s machinations is Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) and he alone gets the last word—of a sort—with ambitious Eve. At the end Eve gets a dose of her own medicine. She is about to take on as assistant a young girl who is just as rapacious as Eve.
It was on the set of All About Eve that Davis met and fell in love with the man who was to become her fourth husband, Gary Merrill. Handsomely rugged, a fellow New Englander, and a newly acclaimed actor whom she had admired the year before in Twelve O’Clock High, Gary was just the tonic Davis nee
ded after her debacle with Sherry.
Also, she liked the fact that Merrill had a mind of his own. Far from fawning, obsequious or “politely” considerate, he called the shots as he saw them. Once, she needed a light for her cigarette and stood waiting. He didn’t take the signal, and she had to light up on her own. When she accused him of rudeness—hands on hips, the famous eyes flashing angrily—he told her that his character would never have lit Margo Channing’s cigarette. She saw the logic of that, and liked and respected him all the more for it. Here, she felt, was a man of strength and purpose and true masculinity. She liked his directness and assertive ways. Soon it was apparent to Mankiewicz and his cast that Margo Channing and Bill Sampson were falling in love with each other off as well as on screen.
Davis brought to the role of Margo Channing all her seasoned discipline and charisma, as well as the wisdom she had accumulated about matters of the heart. Like Margo, Davis had had her full share of disillusionment, in love, in career, with people, and with life in general. And when she got down to making perhaps her most famous speech of the film in the stalled car with Celeste Holm, she spoke words that applied to her own life poignantly and pointedly. For at that point she was a forty-two-year-old woman alone again, with a three-year-old child, a threatened career, insecure and worried about the future. She conveyed all of this in that scene.
“Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on the way up the ladder—so you can move faster—you forget you’ll need them again when you go back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common whether we like it or not. Being a woman . . . and in the last analysis nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner—or turn around in bed—and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office—or a book full of clippings. But you’re not a woman. Slow curtain. The end.”
Davis’s continuing bitter feud with Tallulah Bankhead, more on Tallulah’s side than hers—burst into flame again when Tallulah saw the film and claimed Davis was “taking revenge” on her, imitating her hairdo, her flamboyant life-style, and her voice. Davis and Mankiewicz protested that not Bankhead, but Elisabeth Bergner and her one-time protégée Irene Worth were the true models for Margo and Eve, but Bankhead refused to be pacified. She phoned both Zanuck and Mankiewicz and threatened a legal suit, which, in the long run she did not pursue. “That bitch stole my best stage roles for films, and now she is holding me up to public ridicule with her imitations of me!” Bankhead screamed at Zanuck in one of her hour-long coast-to-coast calls. Davis contacted Bankhead via letter, telegram, and telephone, all unanswered and unacknowledged, to explain that her voice had sounded the way it did because she had had laryngitis and throat trouble during much of the shooting, and that might have caused Tallulah to note a vocal similarity. But nothing mollified Tallulah, who continued to make capital of her complaints for years to come. Certainly Tallulah’s then press agent, Richard Maney, got a lot of mileage out of it. It was well known that Tallulah’s desire for a running publicity gimmick had more to do with the extended feud against Davis than any honest outrage or hurt feelings. “And it did wonders for Bette Davis’s publicity, too,” Maney later observed.
All About Eve is replete with brilliantly witty lines, courtesy of Mankiewicz: “Eve would ask Abbott to give her Costello.” “She’s like an agent with one client.” “Not until the last drug store has sold the last pill” (Davis’s retort to hypochondriacal producer Gregory Ratoff’s claim to be a dying man). “When will the piano realize that it has not written the concerto?” (playwright Hugh Marlowe’s crack at Davis, to which she replies that she has to rewrite and rephrase the dialogue to keep the audience from leaving the theater). And of course, “Fasten your seat belts—it’s going to be a bumpy night!”
Davis always rhapsodized that she and the cast got along swimmingly and that everything was “a dream to do from start to finish.” But there were tensions and hostilities that went unreported and, by her at any rate, publicly unacknowledged.
Some cast members, like George Sanders, later cued me in on the less glamorous doings behind the scenes of All About Eve.
When I discussed Davis with George Sanders in 1970, he was sixty-four and nearing the end of a jaded, dissolute, totally cynical and disillusioned life. Two years after our talk, at sixty-six, he took an overdose of sleeping pills in a Marbella, Spain, hotel, leaving behind a note that expressed his boredom with life and his fundamental contempt for his fellow human beings. One friend said of him at the time of his suicide, “At least George went out with colors flying. To the end he maintained his superior, condescending, contemptuous attitude toward life and people. Had George been a Catholic, which luckily for the Catholic Church he wasn’t, he would have been no ‘deathbed’ Catholic, begging mercy for his sins after having done what he damn well pleased all his life. He’d probably have left a lengthy letter for the pope and cardinals telling them all that was wrong with their policies and their politics. That was George. A lot of people didn’t like his truths—but the funny thing was, they were true truths, for all their malice and abrasiveness.” Sanders married four times. Two of his wives were the Gabor sisters Zsa Zsa and Magda, another the actress Benita Hume, whom he inherited from Ronald Colman after the latter’s death. He published an autobiography in 1960, Memoirs of a Professional Cad. According to his close friend Brian Aherne, who later wrote about Sanders in a book of his own, he was as much a personal cad as a professional one. “He gossips, he attacks people viciously, he has no respect for man nor beast—but what an interesting man!” Aherne once said of him to me.
Sanders had pulled his punches on some people in his autobiography—by which I mean he was mildly disdainful when he could have been all-out vituperative. And he could certainly be that, too.
Circa 1970, Sanders just didn’t give a damn what he said about anybody, and what he had to say to me about Davis, especially during their All About Eve encounter, was far from flattering. As Edward G. Robinson had done before him, Sanders felt Davis was a sloppy actress who fell back too often on mannerisms and standard tricks, and that she prima donna-ed viciously to the detriment of her fellow players.
“She was lucky with Eve in that she had the benefit of a wonderful script and an understanding director in Joe Mankiewicz—and she has herself deigned to admit it,” Sanders said, “but she was a very difficult person to work with, and without that script and Joe’s professionalism, she would have taken all of us to the devil within a week of shooting. She upstaged Anne Baxter at every turn, and drove Anne to distraction. She was supposed to be playing a woman of forty who was jealous of a much younger woman, Anne’s character, and she played it as if it were happening to her personally. Anne caught the underlying tensions and the viciousness, and it is to her credit that it spurred her to act even better than she would have with a gracious co-star.
“And that poor Monroe child—Marilyn—Marilyn was terrified of her! She was very nervous in all her scenes with Davis, and understandably so. During one scene in a theater lobby involving Monroe, Davis, and me, Davis whispered to me after a shot—within poor Marilyn’s hearing—‘That little blonde slut can’t act her way out of a paper bag! She thinks if she wiggles her ass and coos away, she can carry her scene—well, she can’t!’”
Sanders found this all the more amusing because the pot was calling the kettle black—Davis, too, was wiggling her fanny and calling upon all her standard vocal tricks. “Her lack of fundamental graciousness toward her co-players disgusted me,” Sanders sneered. “Hugh Marlowe was another player who was scared to death of her. In a scene where they are having a shouting match from stage to auditorium, Davis unleashed so much venom that the poor man forgot his lines completely!”
I asked Sanders how he himself had coped with her. “I think she got my message loud and clear—that I was not putting up with her nonsense. I matched her snarl for snarl and bite for bite. Of course it was great for the picture, as i
t made for some nice confrontational conflict, and I must confess I found it sort of an exhilaration. Later, when she lost the Best Actress Oscar for Eve and I won as Best Supporting Actor, I met her at a party and she turned her back on me without a word. I couldn’t resist the temptation to purr over her shoulder, ‘Sour Grapes, Bette?’ and do you know what she did? She turned around and spit at me!”
It was not well known that George Sanders played both sides of the street sexually and that he was among the admirers of Tyrone Power, an actor notoriously generous with his favors to both sexes. Once when Henry Fonda asked Ty why he was known as “Mr. Round Heels,” he replied, with a kind of backhanded wisdom, “Why frustrate people? If I’m feeling horny at the time, and I like them, I’ll oblige them. Usually, once their curiosity is satisfied, they cool down and we resume as friends.” “But doesn’t it exhaust you to be such a giver,” Fonda asked. “No, it exhilarates me, and it does wonders for my ego,” the indefatigable Power replied.
Henry Fonda could be cruel and cynical at times, and when Power died in 1958 at forty-four after an intense dueling scene with Sanders while they were on location in Spain for Solomon and Sheba, Fonda joked around that Sanders had probably worn him out in the sack as well as on the set. The word got back to Sanders when Yul Brynner (who had taken over Power’s role) jokingly told him that Fonda had warned him to refuse tea in Sanders’s dressing room if he wanted to finish the picture alive. “He refers to you as the man who killed Ty Power with love,” Brynner told Sanders. For this he was rewarded with a nick on the arm in the first dueling scene—the one Power’s heart attack had interrupted. Sanders never spoke to Fonda again, but he made nasty remarks about Fonda’s own sexuality, citing his impotence with first wife Margaret Sullavan and a later wife’s suicide, one of his milder observations being that Fonda was a “Don Juan homosexual who has to prove himself with one woman after another.”
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 37
