Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Davis had heard about Sanders from Fonda years before when they worked at Warners, and at the time Eve was shooting, she told Jerry Asher that Sanders was more bitchy to work with than Miriam Hopkins and that he had upstaged her at every opportunity. “He won that goddamned award at my expense!” Davis screamed to Asher. “I’d like to see him and Miriam go at it in a picture together—brother, would that be the Battle of the Bitches to watch!”

  Reportedly Marilyn Monroe used to vomit after her scenes with Davis. But for all her fear, she gave a fetching performance. The role of Miss Carswell, the also-ran who, as Sanders’s character puts it, belongs back in the Copacabana nightclub rather than on any stage, was, of course, ideally suited to Monroe’s distinctly limited but nonetheless kinetic screen persona. Even so, she tended to be awkward in her scenes with Davis, as if afraid lightning was going to hit her any moment. At times it did. Gregory Ratoff told me in 1956 that Davis went out of her way to make cutting remarks to Marilyn about her entrances and exits, in one, as Ratoff recalled, Davis yipped at her, “I know and you know and everyone knows that kitten voice of yours is goddamned lousy—and it’s lousy because you never trained it as a real actress does—a shame you never had stage training!” After such observations, Marilyn went away to cry as well as vomit, according to Ratoff. Ratoff, who had himself directed, felt that Mankiewicz let his delight in Davis’s superb playing as Margo blind him to her objectionable ways off camera. “I would have tried to bring her to heel,” he told me. “She always respected directors who drew the line with her, but Mank was a one-man Bette Davis Admiration Society and I think she secretly laughed at him for it!”

  Celeste Holm has always been relatively reticent about working with Davis but it was common knowledge that she cordially disliked her. She told friends that Davis was always bristling to get the last word, on screen and off, and that she used all kinds of attention-getting tricks. In the famous automobile scene, in which Davis lets her hair down about love and men, it is true that Margo was supposed to dominate the action, but Holm felt she hogged it all unduly.

  Anne Baxter later irritated Davis mightily by taking over the Margo Channing role from Lauren Bacall in the stage version, Applause. Davis deigned to visit Anne in her dressing room after a performance and infuriated the latter by purring, “I think you did rather well considering all the—er—limitations you had to work with.” Baxter later told a friend, “I couldn’t for the life of me figure out whether she meant my limitations or the show’s or what? I don’t think I wanted to know, either—I was angered enough as it was!”

  One All About Eve co-worker who did seem to get along well with Davis was Thelma Ritter, who played her dresser. “I like Bette and she likes me,” Thelma told me in 1963 between takes on a film called Move Over, Darling. “Maybe it’s because I’m homely and she has always thought of herself as homely—how she hates to watch herself on the screen!—and when we worked in Eve there was so much humor between us, both in our lines and in our chemistry off screen, that she relaxed with me. I don’t think she thought of me as competition, thought I complemented her, since we were such different types. There’s no nonsense about her—none at all. She was so darned happy to be doing that role and knew it would help her a lot after something of a downslide she’d been through, and I was just the kind of no-nonsense good companion and boon buddy she needed. She was always nice in what she said of me to others, and I never had a single rough word with her. I think I amused and entertained her—at least, I hope I did!”

  Sanders felt that Davis and Merrill were in love at first sight. “The chemistry was there—he looked solid and manly and take-chargeish, and they had their acting careers in common, and she didn’t conceive of him as a leech or weakling as she did that painter she was in the process of divorcing. Later, his manly assertiveness, as I understand, got to be a pain in her behind, but it lasted ten years so there must have been something that kept them together besides the kids.”

  For All About Eve there was a total of fourteen Academy Award nominations, with Mankiewicz winning for Best Director and Best Screenplay and with George Sanders toting off the Best Supporting Actor award. Davis won the New York Film Critics Award and an Oscar nomination for Eve, but lost to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, there being speculation that Judy had sneaked in because Anne Baxter’s nomination for Best Actress split up the vote. Also, Gloria Swanson had made a major comeback in Sunset Boulevard, and a number of votes went her way, confusing the issue still further. It was one of the great disappointments of Davis’s career, as she said later, she had been positive she would get an Oscar for Margo.

  Nonetheless she could take deep satisfaction in the glowing reviews she received for her performance. Alton Cook in The New York World-Telegram & Sun reported, “[Miss Davis] demonstrates what a vivid, overwhelming force she possesses. She plays a fading stage star with a sardonic humor so vicious it suggests that Miss Davis must have hated that character above all others on earth. Beneath that, there is also a wise understanding of the lady that leaves an audience finally idolatrous of both role and Bette.”

  In The New York Morning Telegraph, Leo Mishkin reported: “All About Eve is a movie in which Bette Davis gives the finest, most compelling performance she has ever played out on the screen.”

  In retrospect, Davis regarded All About Eve as one in a parade of what she called “my false new dawns.” Within two years she found herself in yet another career rut—followed, in due time, by yet another renaissance.

  Meanwhile there was a new man in her life, and there were big decisions to be made.

  Bette and Gary Merrill were married in Juarez, Mexico, on July 28, 1950. He divorced his first (and only previous) wife, Barbara Leeds, in the morning, and was married to Bette in the afternoon. Her divorce from Sherry had come through just in time for the nuptials.

  It was as they drove across country to New England, where they planned to spend their honeymoon, that Gary and Bette first sensed their different attitudes toward life. He was laid back, easygoing, a make-do man. She was nervous, perfectionist. Davis fussed about poor accommodations along the way, whereas his attitude was, “If there’s a bed in it, it’ll do.” He also lacked her competitiveness. He had had a so-so career on the stage, his chief hit, in 1946, being Born Yesterday with Paul Douglas and Judy Holliday, and he tended to fall into roles through luck or connections.

  Gary had served in Army Special Services during the war, and had appeared in the films This Is the Army in 1943 and Winged Victory in 1944. After his discharge from the service in 1945, he did voice-overs, radio shows, and stage work, narrated the film The Quiet One in 1949 and acted in Slattery’s Hurricane the same year. His first real break came in the Gregory Peck film Twelve O’Clock High as an Eighth Air Force squadron commander who has too much compassion for his men and is replaced by disciplinarian Peck.

  Gary had not been all that much in love with his first wife, who was an actress, claiming he just needed someone to hang on to, and had ended the marriage without regret. He enjoyed the pleasures of life. He liked to drink, he liked to fish and drive around and take it easy in general. He often said he didn’t have Bette’s drive, was as good a sport when he lost as when he won. His attitude made Davis impatient. She had a high opinion of his acting gifts but said he wasted his opportunities because of his laziness. They did have in common their New England origins. Gary was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1915 and had been schooled at Loomis School in Connecticut and, briefly, at Bowdoin. After dropping out of college he had taken up acting in New York drama school productions and little theater plays, but right from the start he had schlepped along, often subsidized by his parents. By his own admission parts came to him because of his good looks, good voice, and easy charm. He had had his share of affairs, including a red-hot one in New York with Mercedes McCambridge.

  He later explained his attraction to strong, driving women: “I don’t like to be dominated; I give as good as I get, but I do like to see
what makes these aggressive women tick. It’s curiosity, I guess. Also their aggression translates well in the sack; they’re never boring there!”

  Gary and Bette honeymooned in Massachusetts and Maine. Ruthie was pleased because Gary’s Yankee ancestry matched the Davises’, his mother being one of the Andrewses who had come over on the Mayflower.

  Soon Gary was called away to do two films—Decision Before Dawn in Germany and The Frogmen in the Virgin Islands. He was continuously busy working over the next four years. Before they married Davis had told him there could be no children because of her abortions in the thirties and her cesarean in 1947. They agreed to adopt some. Gary wanted a boy first, then a girl. All was arranged by their lawyer, but Bette, in typical high-handed fashion, presented him with a little girl, named Margot (with a t) for her Eve character, when he returned from filming. A year later they adopted a boy, Michael. Gary and others felt that Davis’s sudden desire to adopt was a belated expression of her long-standing guilt over the earlier abortions.

  Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was having a turn at movie producing in England, and he and his partner, Daniel Angel, offered Bette and Gary a chance to co-star again in a film to be called Another Man’s Poison, based on the play Deadlock by Leslie Sands. Davis’s old standby, Irving Rapper, was hired as director, and the screenplay was written by Val Guest. Robert Krasker was set as photographer.

  Fairbanks’s motivations for offering Davis the role seem confused in retrospect. He never really liked her. In his autobiography he refers to their one film together in 1933, Parachute Jumper, thus:

  “I didn’t . . . appreciate my new young leading lady . . . she was not particularly pretty; in fact, I thought her rather plain, but one didn’t easily forget her unique personality. She was Bette Davis. We got on well enough, although she thought director Al Green’s sense of humor as infantile as the story we were obliged to act out.”

  Fairbanks remembered her in that early film as “always conscientious, serious . . . devoid of humor of any kind.”

  Later in his book, Fairbanks erroneously claims that in 1938 Davis was box-office poison along with Dietrich, Hepburn, and other stars. The truth is in that period she was approaching her box-office zenith. He also refers to her as “fresh from the stage” in Parachute Jumper when in actuality she had been acting in films for a couple of years.

  The most likely reason for his hiring her for Another Man’s Poison eighteen years later was that she was on a box-office and critical high after the success of two pictures in a row—All About Eve and Payment on Demand.

  If Fairbanks had held any kind of grudge against Davis over the years, he couldn’t have taken a better revenge than he did in luring her into a film widely regarded as one of her all-time turkeys. It not only garnered bad reviews, but did only moderately at the box-office due to unfortunate distribution practices.

  Fairbanks, it is obvious, realized his own mistake in commissioning Another Man’s Poison under his production aegis, as his reference to it in his autobiography is: “Our only interest was to get the damned thing over with!”

  Davis and Merrill were, however, heartened when Emlyn Williams, the author of The Corn Is Green, one of her great successes six years before, was cast in the film. Davis’s respect for him was unreserved, and she even convinced him to work with her and Merrill on a script they regarded as eminently unsatisfactory. The talented Williams’s input did strengthen the story somewhat, but the basic incredibilities implicit in it doomed the efforts of all—even the talented Irving Rapper, who had directed The Corn Is Green in 1945, and who enjoyed comparing notes with Williams on it during production. Williams also provided Davis with a pleasant bonus: He introduced her to the original of Miss Moffat. Meeting this legendary woman, Davis later claimed, was one of her few consolations during shooting.

  The story of Another Man’s Poison is wildly melodramatic. Davis is a famous mystery writer who loves both her horse, Fury, and a handsome young engineer (Anthony Steel), whom she has stolen away from her wimpy secretary, Barbara Murray. “Do you love Larry?” Murray asks timidly. “I want him!” Davis snaps back.

  Complications ensue when Davis’s ex-convict husband reappears to blackmail her. Davis promptly kills him, fearful that she will lose the engineer. Then another convict, Gary Merrill, a pal of the deceased, shows up. After confessing to the murder, Davis convinces Merrill to hide the body in the lake. Merrill decides to stick around, and then kills her horse. “I loved that horse!” she yowls in her second major speech of the film. A veterinarian who has been treating her horse and who is given to philosophical, urbane comments (Williams has this thankless role) suspects there is monkey business going on. Davis tries to kill Merrill by sending him out in a jeep with faulty brakes. When this maneuver fails, she poisons him. Upon learning that the police are dragging the lake for the convict she and Merrill have hidden, Davis faints. Williams tries to revive her with a glass of the same poison she used to kill Merrill, and in the last shot—the best thing in the picture—Davis, realizing she herself will die, begins laughing with manic hysteria as the camera closes in, lingering on her face and wild eyes as she laughs—and laughs—and laughs . . .

  The film was released at the very end of 1951 and was handicapped by a saturation booking in New York that ran through early 1952. The run unfortunately coincided with the popular A Streetcar Named Desire, and exhibitors chose this film over Poison—which also cut into the profits.

  Davis and Merrill returned to America disgusted with the entire project—and at this point Fairbanks’s evident dislike for her personally was heartily reciprocated. They never worked together again. “The only thing decent that came out of that mess,” Davis later said, “was the wonderful friendship that evolved with Emlyn Williams. If only he and I could have worked on something decent!”

  The reviews, from critics either stupefied or disgusted, ran along such lines as (Hollywood Reporter): “Bette Davis, queen of the vixens, combs her hair, lights cartons of cigarettes, snaps her fingers and bites her consonants, and it all adds up to a performance that you’d expect to find from a nightclub impersonation of the actress,” and (New Statesman and Nation): “She does, in the cant phrase, The Lot . . . no one has ever accused Bette Davis of failing to rise to a good script; what this film shows is how far she can go to meet a bad one.”

  A number of critics questioned Davis’s judgment in appearing in a small role in Phone Call From a Stranger, which starred Gary Merrill. Produced by Nunnally Johnson for Twentieth Century–Fox and directed by Jean Negulesco, with a screenplay by Johnson based on a play by I. A. R. Wylie, the story is an episodic affair in which Merrill, the sole survivor of a plane crash, goes about consoling, Good Samaritan style, the relatives of those who have perished in the crash. Having had occasion to hear their stories while the plane was en route from New York to Los Angeles, he restores a son’s faith in his father (Michael Rennie), a drunk driver, by telling him he was on his way to confess to having killed some people in an accident, he builds up pathetic showgirl Shelley Winters to her husband and shrewish mother-in-law by leading them to think she was about to star in a big Broadway musical.

  Merrill’s last visit is to Marie Hoke (Davis), who had been described by loud, vulgar salesman Keenan Wynn as a bathing beauty. He finds her a helpless invalid, and she tells him she had an accident while running away with another man and that Wynn had forgiven her and then lovingly taken care of her for years, his raffish appearance belying his sterling inner nature. After this revelation, Merrill, with Davis’s encouragement, phones his own wife, from whom he has separated because he suspects her of adultery, to tell her he forgives her and will return.

  Nunnally Johnson drowned everyone in soapsuds in this film, including Davis, who, confined to bed with a pulley to raise herself, looks frumpy and unattractive, plump and matronly (at forty-three) and overacts considerably.

  Some years later, while interviewing director Jean Negulesco, I found myself arguing with him about
Davis’s overdone, overcooked, and overstated performance. “She and Joan Crawford were in that period at the time,” he protested. “Both were overacting all over the place and there was nothing you could do with them. I tried to get Bette to tone down, said she was overembroidering lines that were very simple and direct, but she wouldn’t listen. She prided herself, for heaven’s sake, on wearing a shapeless nightgown and bathrobe in the scene, and in knitting away, Granny-style, but it was all so actressy, so overdone! But you couldn’t tell her what to do—no, sir!”

  Negulesco felt Davis took the brief role just so she could be with Merrill. “That was still the early phase of their marriage, and she was still ga-ga about him. In fact, that was the third film they did together in a year and a half, and they were Bette’s idea, not his. I think he wanted to establish his professional independence apart from her, and with other leading ladies. I don’t think she realized that. Not then, anyway.”

  Davis has always maintained that she played Marie Hoke because she was more interested in the part than in its length. She thought Hoke was solid and true as a character. “And I wasn’t just stuck in a bed, remember,” she told Katherine Albert. “I had a swimming scene, where I injure myself, then I’m in an iron lung in the hospital. There was range and depth.”

  The critics were condescending, with “flashy play-acting” the term used by Time to describe Davis’s performance. Screen Slants noted that Davis had overdone her scenes, with the critic remarking, “We know Miss Davis wants to give her fans steak rather than hamburger, but must she do the steak up to a blackened crisp?”