B.D. and Gary never liked one another. She felt he was cold to her because she was another man’s child—and one who had cost them money. Michael was the one he adored. He considered Michael his true child. She remembered that after one of the more vicious domestic battles between Gary and her mother, Gary cried with Michael in his arms all night, crooning that he and Daddy might have to live elsewhere someday.
So unwanted and unloved by Gary did B.D. consider herself that when she came of age she insisted on resuming her original name, Barbara Davis Sherry, and setting aside any legal claim Gary might ever have on her.
Though Davis was a generous and indulgent mother to B.D., there was obviously always a coolness, a subtle alienation between them. B.D., as her own book reveals, was resentful about many things: the absent true father, Sherry, the constant domestic turmoil; Davis’s cold, authoritarian ways; her frequent absences from home. She recounts the peace and quiet at Witchway when Merrill’s brother Jerry and his wife stayed with the children while Gary and Davis were off on film assignments. Then she had known the atmosphere of a normal home. Then there had been an ambience of quiet domestic love.
Bette and Gary she came to associate with high-powered careerism, outrageous self-centeredness, and a love of turmoil and trouble.
Davis recalled the Merrill of those years at Witchway as rebellious, restless, drunken, often mean-spirited. She said that Gary saw life as some kind of jail he had to break out of, while she saw life as a coliseum where constant battle against a multitude of enemies had to be waged unrelentingly. It is obvious from her own words on the matter that B.D., for all the luxury, privilege, travel, gifts, the neurotic, ever-repeated protestations of love, felt essentially uneasy with her mother. She was, indeed, a bird of a different feather, as she was to prove.
After a three-year absence, the year 1955 brought Davis back to the screen.
Davis’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in The Virgin Queen is superior to her acting in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex sixteen years before. She had been thirty-one when she made the earlier film; she was now forty-seven. Much had happened to her between 1939 and 1955 and it showed up on the screen. In the new picture, Elizabeth was nearly fifty; in the earlier film she had been in her sixties. At forty-seven Davis could obviously empathize with and physically resemble her historical counterpart far more authentically than she had been able to do at thirty-one in the other film.
Robert Downing, in Films in Review, caught the improvement, stating: “Miss Davis’ latest portrayal of Elizabeth I is better. . . . In The Virgin Queen Elizabeth is an elderly, watchful, suspicious, carping, greedy, lonely, proud, vicious and dangerous woman.” Downing went on to observe: “Davis portrays all these human facets and royal ones as well. Her performance is a composition of shrewd intuitions about the complex sovereign who ruled an island kingdom that was being metamorphosed into an empire.”
The plot this time around had Sir Walter Raleigh (Richard Todd) ingratiating himself with the queen while refusing her advances in order to win his dream of captaining three ships to the New World in search of riches. He adds insult to injury by falling in love with a court lady (Joan Collins), whom he marries. Davis first has him imprisoned, but later relents and sends him to the New World with his lady, taking comfort in the fact that her standard is waving from the mast.
Todd was extremely nervous in his first day of shooting and continually flubbed his lines in a court scene in which he approaches the formidable presence on the throne. Realizing his discomfiture was due to his fear of her, she later told him, “Under this getup, I’m on your side, Mr. Todd.” He relaxed somewhat after that, but this was not to be one of Richard Todd’s better screen performances. In my December 1955 Films in Review career study of Davis, I noted, “[Davis] played her role so effectively she took the picture away from Todd.” Todd had little to say about The Virgin Queen in later years, other than to note that it had originally been meant to be “his” picture, with the original title Sir Walter Raleigh. Darryl Zanuck later changed it to The Virgin Queen in deference to Davis’s feelings (some said her heavy hints that amounted to strong demands) after he had ordered screenwriters Harry Brown and Mindret Lord to build up her role.
Henry Koster, the talented German director who had guided Deanna Durbin to fame at Universal and who shot the first CinemaScope film, The Robe, in 1953, was assigned to this CinemaScope and DeLuxe color production because of his proven expertise in the new form. CinemaScope presented special problems, as it tended to be wavery around the edges and forced the actors to retain their characterizations and line readings longer, as on the stage, because the camera could not move in and out for close-ups and medium shots as fluidly. This Davis found disconcerting. She also engaged in a number of pitched battles with cameraman Charles G. Clarke, a testy old veteran of the D. W. Griffith days who had excellently photographed many creditable films of both the silent and sound periods.
Fifty-six years old in 1955 and every bit as autocratic and demanding and perfectionist in his chosen sphere as Davis was in hers, he showed little patience with her demands for special angles and lighting, feeling she was being self-centered and on her usual star trip. She told him what Tony Gaudio and Ernie Haller had done to favor her sensitivity to lighting, but an exasperated Clarke, in Henry Koster’s words, “proved to be every bit as much a bitch as she was” and production was held up while the two argued at length, often at the top of their voices.
Meanwhile young Joan Collins, then twenty-one and being groomed for stardom at Twentieth Century–Fox (she would play Evelyn Nesbitt in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing at Fox that same year), was having her own problems with Davis. Some thirty years later, Collins laughed that she got her earliest lessons in how to play the bitchy, demanding, vixenish Alexis in her long-running Dynasty TV series from testing her mettle against Davis in The Virgin Queen.
According to Koster, Herbert Marshall, and others in the cast, Joan aroused the same jealousies and insecurities in Davis that Eve Harrington and Barbara Lawrence, her pretty young rival in The Star, had. At that time she was fresh and dewy and her offscreen romances were already the talk of the town. Davis had yelled at “agent” Warner Anderson in The Star, “Just how do you keep that fresh, dewy quality in this town?” and here right in front of her was an archexemplar of just that.
Collins said she tried two approaches with the icy, ominous Davis. “I realized it was silly of her to envy me my youth and freshness in actuality when she was made up old and withered and bewigged anyway, and it fit her character perfectly to resent my taking handsome young Raleigh away from her. So I tried to be understanding and flexible—and keep out of the way of her icy glares and sharp tongue as much as possible—offscreen that is. She would finish a scene in which she was telling me off, and I always felt she wanted to keep right on going after Mr. Koster called ‘cut!’ So I would turn and walk away quickly as soon as my stint was completed. I’d go to a corner of the set and recharge my batteries, so to speak, for the next onscreen-offscreen encounter.”
Her second technique for countering Davis? “Olivia De Havilland had had a role in the earlier picture similar to mine, but the script allowed her to be sassy and mean and humiliate Elizabeth, poking fun at her appearance and so forth, but I had to be servile, begging her for Raleigh’s life and protesting my love for him and so forth, so my only recourse was to smilingly, indifferently ignore her attitudes and snippings—I let it roll off me, I never reacted to her digs and carpings—I think that infuriated her more than anything else I could have done!”
Henry Koster recalled that he must have been lucky, his European sophistication plus a certain modicum of tact, got him through the project without a major blowout with Davis. “Clarke and the CinemaScope process were drawing most of her fire—I guess she didn’t have much energy left over to take me on, too!” He didn’t escape completely, however. When, in Davis’s opinion, he failed to direct a court scene with the majesty and solemnity
she thought it required, she shot at him: “Mr. Koster, this is not one of your Deanna Durbin musicals or whatever they were. This we should re-do!” Instead of arguing, Koster re-did the scene at a “slower, more majestic” pace, with the fussy Clarke grumbling, “Prima donnas, all of them!” behind the cameras.
Producer Charles Brackett later told Zanuck: “I didn’t think matters would go as easily as they did, actually. I think she yelled at me only three times!”
Anxious to get the picture properly launched, Davis asked Zanuck and Brackett to give the film a world premiere in Portland, Maine. They acceded, reluctantly. It was to be her first premiere in her New England stamping grounds since The Great Lie in 1941. Portland’s Strand Theatre was drafted for the occasion on July 22, 1955. Newspaper publisher Jean Gannett led off with a clambake in the afternoon, and over a hundred personalities and press people flew in from New York and other communities. This was followed by a cocktail party at Witchway, with the Merrills, children, and entourage on their very best behavior, although Conrad Nagel, one of the guests, later recalled that Merrill’s face looked puffy as if he had a fierce hangover, and Davis looked tense “and more shockingly overweight than I had ever seen her.” He wondered if Davis was eating more than she should at the time because of her marital problems. The children, however, with their ready, bouncy charm, made up for the slightly Macbeth-ish aura of their elders.
After the party was dinner at the Eastland Hotel. Then came the theater, the lights, the crowds, estimated at 15,000 by the Portland police. A contented Davis quipped: “Hollywood Boulevard was never like this!”
Soon, however, Davis was firing telegrams and letters and phone calls to Hollywood, complaining that a picture of her as Margo Channing was being used for ad illustrations. “It’s The Corn Is Green all over again!” she hollered to (or rather, at) Merrill. “They’ll sex it up and bitch it up, as usual—they’re incorrigible!” Chastened Twentieth ad officials removed the Channing picture, but the ad copy still implied all manner of sexual delights, both aspired to and fulfilled. This elicited more protests from Maine, but this time the studio held firm.
“They threw the film away with bad promotion,” she later said, “first those silly, sexy, inappropriate ads, and then the complete failure to book it and sell it as they should have!”
While The Virgin Queen was in production, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences asked Davis to present the Best Actor award at the ceremonies of 1955.
Delighted with the honor, Davis still hesitated because her hair had been shaved back two inches to simulate Elizabeth’s baldness and she had cut it so short for the totally bald scenes (she wore a bald piece also) that no matter how she arranged it, she would look eccentrically coiffed. After experimenting with several wigs, all of which looked artificial, ill-fitting, and inappropriate, she appealed to Mary Willis, who had designed her costumes for The Virgin Queen.
“I thought it over very seriously from all angles,” Mary Willis later related, “and finally I came up with an idea that met Miss Davis’s hearty approval. First I whipped up a dignified black gown that had a sixteenth-century look to it with its flounces and sweeps; then I devised an Elizabethan cap that had a peak, and jewels placed strategically. I figured that would do it!”
Nonetheless, her overweight figure, the hastily designed dress, and the odd-looking cap drew negative, if muted, comments from the audience, until Davis explained her hair problem for her newest role. At the time Davis also wondered how the Hollywood audience would react to her after her three years away. She needn’t have worried. The wave of applause that greeted her warmed her heart—and it went on at length.
Marlon Brando turned out to be the actor in her envelope, for his role in On the Waterfront. These two performers from different eras and sporting radically different styles did not seem completely at ease together on the great stage. Whatever she may have thought about “method” acting (and she had plenty to say about it at a later point), Davis was gracious to Brando on that occasion: “I . . . was thrilled that Marlon Brando was the winner. He and I had much in common. He too had made many enemies. He too is a perfectionist.”
Her next film, Storm Center, proved to be an apt name for what was happening to Davis in real life.
After resting in Maine that summer of 1955, Davis proceeded to make a career mistake. Producer Julian Blaustein offered her a screenplay by Daniel Taradash and Elick Moll called The Library. It had been written some years before by the liberal Taradash, who had reacted strongly against the Red-baiting of Senator Joe McCarthy’s committee and the Communist witch hunt.
Circa 1952, Mary Pickford had almost signed to do the picture, as she had been assured it would be a great comeback for her, but when columnist Hedda Hopper, a fervent anti-Communist, and other conservatives asked why she had considered something so un-American, the great silent and early-talkie star, an Oscar winner for the 1929 Coquette, got cold feet and backed out. Attempts were then made to enlist the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and Loretta Young for the part, but both actresses shied off from the theme. Result: The project remained for some years in limbo.
And what was this theme? Well, it seems that a loyal, dedicated, hard-working head librarian in a small New England town, Alicia Hull, who is the widow of a World War I soldier killed in action, is pressured by the library overseers and the city council to remove a controversial book from her shelves: The Communist Dream. They feel it is subversive because it tries to put a positive light on Communist aims and ideals. Hull thinks the book is preposterous, its ideas unsound and unrealistic, but she decides to keep it on her shelves in the interests of American principles of free speech. For her pains she is labeled a Communist sympathizer and removed from her position. Later, when an impressionable child who had worshipped Hull for her learning and inspiration to him is swept up in the anti-Red hysteria and burns the library, the town realizes what they’ve been doing, asks Hull back, and together they pledge to rebuild the library.
Davis, a Democrat with pronounced liberal leanings, felt that the picture had much to say about true Americanism and the necessity for society to be free and open to all opinions and points of view. The times, however, were not conducive to liberal thought in this regard. She won the ill-will of Hedda Hopper and others of the super-right in Hollywood, and there were numerous mutterings among the politically conservative that she had recklessly endangered her career with such an ill-timed message. It is significant that she did not work in a feature film for three years after making what eventually was retitled Storm Center.
When the furor over the picture began Davis said, “I am one of the loyal opposition. The principle of free speech is being extolled in this film—not pro-communism—the book in question is downgraded and discredited by my character in the book—but the right in a free country to air one’s opinions without fear of the consequences.”
Harry Cohn was approached to do the film for Columbia and he blew hot and cold on it, but finally agreed. Taradash, Davis, and others took small salaries, gambling on the picture’s eventual success. The picture was shot quickly in the early fall of 1955, but the studio nervousness over its theme became apparent when it was shelved upon completion and not released until July 1956, almost a year later. Even that release was limited, and the film did not even open in New York until October.
Martin Quigley, the publisher of Motion Picture Herald, the most conservative of Roman Catholics (he had helped draft the Production Code and had figured prominently in the formulation of the Legion of Decency), was most concerned about Storm Center in the summer of 1956. He was anxious that its message be correctly understood as anti-Communist, and behind the scenes urged Blaustein and Taradash to make changes. They acceded, somewhat nervously and uncertainly, and this accounts for the erratic release schedule, with an early showing in Philadelphia in July but the New York opening delayed.
I was assigned to review Storm Center (I was then film critic for Mr. Quigley’s Motion Picture H
erald and Motion Picture Daily), and Mr. Quigley discussed the film at length with me in his office. He had never interfered with me before, and would not again, but this film plainly had him worried. He asked me what I thought of it. I stressed that while its point was well taken—there must be free speech in a free America—the theme was fuzzily presented, and the picture itself was not very good. I later stated these opinions in my review. Even Bette Davis, in her autobiography, wrote that she didn’t think it turned out to be a very good picture, not because of the theme, but because of the way it was handled.
Obviously Davis regretted having done the film for the reasons she gave. But that three-year period in which she was not offered decent feature roles has ominous implications. It was widely rumored that Hedda Hopper and her friends did not forgive Davis for doing the picture and applied pressure to keep her from getting decent offers after her next picture, The Catered Affair (which was released before Storm Center). Davis continued to suffer the aftereffects of this unfortunate venture clear up to 1961, when she finally made a decent comeback in Pocketful of Miracles, and an even bigger one in 1962 with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 40
