Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  In 1957, a year after the release of Storm Center, I wrote a magazine piece called “Hollywood’s Neglected Genius,” in which I stated that the film studios’ failure to find decent roles for Davis was a waste of her great talents. This elicited a letter from a congressman asking if, in my opinion, Bette Davis was a Communist! I replied that I most certainly did not believe so, that she might be a liberal Democrat, a member of the loyal opposition, but as loyal an American as anyone could be.

  During filming in California, Davis mistakenly believed that producer Blaustein and director Taradash were snubbing her when they did not accept her invitations for dinner after the day’s shooting, and some hollering on the set resulted. Later she realized that they were spending the nights nervously rewriting the script to make the characterizations more believable and the dramatic elements more compelling. Davis did not get along well with the little boy, Kevin Coughlin, who burns the library. There was some trouble getting him to cry on cue, and when she saw his mother pinching and hitting the boy to get him to react properly on camera, she was horrified.

  Henry Hart’s Films in Review had some serious reservations about Storm Center when it opened that summer of 1956.

  “[The] script is replete with irrelevancies, changed intentions, and implausible melodrama,” the magazine stated, “and is altogether synthetic. Bette Davis’ performance as the middle-aged librarian is adequate, but does not elicit the sympathy it should. Miss Davis’ failure to win the audience is due more to the gauche things the script obliges her to do and say than to the asperity which recently has increasingly infected her performances.”

  Time magazine put its finger on the problem as well as any publication, stating:

  “Storm Center is paved and repaved with good intentions; its heart is insistently in the right place; its leading characters are motivated by the noblest of sentiments. All that writer-director Taradash forgot was to provide a believable story. . . . Storm Center makes reading seem nearly as risky a habit as dope.”

  Davis was to be troubled over Storm Center for some years to come. One of her co-actors who appeared with her in the film later told me:

  “It could have been a fine picture; if the points had been made more clearly in the writing and direction, every thoughtful member of the audience would have seen it for what it was—a thoroughly pro-American discussion of the necessity of free speech. But it was all too murky, too confused. I know Bette was worried about it. I don’t think Danny Taradash was following his own convictions and writing from his heart, all the way. He was too afraid he would be misunderstood, politically. The irony,” the actor stressed, “was that if he had written straight ahead out of deep conviction, as I am sure he really wanted to, he would have given us all real roles to act, realistically, and he would have made his points, among them being that political censorship, be it Communist or Democratic, of films, plays, books, whatever, is dangerous to our individual liberties. That is what attracted that loyal American, Bette Davis, to it, and it is a shame that she wasn’t supported by better writing and surer direction, and she’d have made her point just fine!”

  Davis’s fundamental problem in her next picture, The Catered Affair, was her miscasting as Aggie Hurley, an Irish-American Bronx housewife who wants to give daughter Debbie Reynolds the elaborate formal wedding that she had missed when she married cabdriver Ernest Borgnine.

  Not only was Davis not Irish (and her assumed Irish-Bronx accent was wobbly at times), she also, unfortunately, overacted her role and overstated her character, with the result that this is not one of her more notable performances.

  When the film was released, critics on both coasts picked up on the miscasting and the overacting. The Los Angeles Times reported: “Miss Davis, required to be realistic in a role that is alien to her—from the dumpy figure to the dropped ‘g’s’ of her speech—summoned all her admirable resources to meet the challenge. But the more she succeeded in meeting it, the more she became a triumphant Bette Davis first and a beaten Mom Hurley second.”

  The New Yorker critic felt that The Catered Affair was “a confused and wearying account of a family squabble in the Bronx,” adding, “In the role of the mother, Bette Davis is done up to resemble a fat and slovenly housewife, but even so she conveys the impression that she’s really a dowager doing a spot of slumming in the Bronx.”

  With the lack of objective self-criticism that was to pop up often during her career, Davis always opined, and doubtless felt, that The Catered Affair contained one of her best performances. She was blind to the “set, official, first-ladyish” mannerisms James Agee had noted and the querulous crabbiness and humorlessness throughout that kept her performance from winning the audience sympathy that the role should have elicited. At forty-seven she was right for the part age-wise, but her fussy, domineering, inflexible approach to the simple tale of Aggie Hurley’s frustration had more of the elements of the Queen Elizabeth she had recently played than those of a frustrated Bronx housewife who is denied her last pathetic dream.

  Many wondered why the forceful, no-nonsense Richard Brooks, who directed, did not pull a William Wyler and give Davis a solid Dutch-uncle talk about her approach to the role. Brooks, forty-three at the time he did Catered Affair, and later the husband of actress Jean Simmons, had a reputation as a man’s man with a catnippish appeal to women. Starting as a sports reporter and radio writer, he did screenplays before marine service in World War II. His 1945 novel, The Brick Foxhole, about antihomosexual bigotry (a startlingly advanced theme for its time), was later made into a tough-minded, no-nonsense movie called Crossfire, with anti-Semitism substituted for the gay theme Hollywood was not yet up to handling. After writing several more novels, Brooks debuted as a director with a political thriller, Crisis, in 1950. By 1955 his Blackboard Jungle, about crime in city schools, added to his cachet as a powerful realist of the cinema.

  With Davis in The Catered Affair, however, Brooks turned, oddly enough, soft and sentimental. He spent many hours on the set reminiscing with her about her great films with Wyler and Goulding. Davis, always a pushover for handsome, sexy, and strong men, fell in love with Brooks. She told friends she felt she had found another Wyler. She was wrong in both instances. Brooks, much as he admired her, did not return her erotic interest.

  For one thing, she was overweight and forty-seven, and Brooks’s preference went to young, slim women. For another, he was not temperamentally suited to cater to her demanding nature and her neurotic needs, as he conceived them. Nor was he equipped at the time to be a Wyler and take a firm hand with her. Far from attempting to tone down her mannerisms and grossly overstated line readings, he gave her, in general, a free rein. The result was a ruinous performance on most counts.

  In 1957 producer Sam Zimbalist said of the Brooks-Davis rapport—or lack of it:

  “Richard was much too soft with her, catered to her illusions about herself. I personally had reservations about casting Davis in this, and so did Paddy Chayefsky. Paddy’s original teleplay called for an actress who could be simple, sincere, somewhat beaten down but inarticulately valiant, but in a drab, understated way. Davis gave the role grand opera, Queen Elizabeth, everything that was wrong for it. I asked Richard why he let Davis get away with it. He said, ‘I felt sorry for her; she had been ill for years, she needed praise, help.’ ‘Bull!’ I replied, ‘you should have been cruel only to be kind; she might have given a great performance if you had given her a double dose of the Wyler treatment—toned her down, got her to understate. You couldn’t have made her Irish, no, but you could have made her real!’”

  When I talked with Paddy Chayefsky on the set of The Goddess in 1958, he felt that Davis’s overplaying had thrown The Catered Affair hopelessly off balance and changed its tone for the worse. “Ernie Borgnine was as real in it as he was in my Marty,” Paddy said. “Everyone else fit in just fine—it was Davis who was all wrong! She was all signed and into the picture when I saw some of the rushes and realized how wrong she was—but I
just wasn’t up to a battle, knowing how nasty she could be. And I sure as hell felt Brooks would handle her in such a way that she would be an asset to the film. Instead, given her head the way she was, she turned out to be its major liability!”

  There was some amusement over the choice of perennial bachelor and international sophisticate Gore Vidal to do the screenplay for such a simple, homely story. “Gore knew about as much about the Bronx way of life as I knew about Florentine vases,” Zimbalist said. “I didn’t really want him, felt he was all wrong, that he put in precious, effete, bitchy touches that didn’t belong there. This further hampered Davis’s performance. A prima-donna bitch writing for a prima-donna bitch, that was Gore and Bette, and he should have been writing some goddamned spinoff of All About Eve or The Star for her, not Irish Bronx stuff. Chayefsky agreed with me, but felt Gore was a name, and swallowed it.”

  Chayefsky’s version of this was: “In retrospect I should have fought to do the screenplay myself. Gore and I mixed like oil and water—he spoke a different language from me; we lived in separate worlds in more ways than one. But the studio wanted him, and he had some inside pull, and that’s how the cookie crumbled. Crumbled is the word for it.”

  Davis had a few good moments in spite of Brooks’s pussycat direction, Vidal’s sly digs at the very life-style Chayefsky was trying to portray with human realism, and her own self-destructive overacting and hopeless miscasting.

  For instance, toward the end of the picture, when Aggie Hurley realizes that there will be no big wedding, that her daughter and son will be leaving, that relative Barry Fitzgerald will be marrying the woman he has long dallied with and will also leave, and that she and Borgnine will be alone together, stuck with each other till death, she goes into her bedroom and has an epic crying spell. Davis insisted that she work up the crying spell according to her own instincts; she told Brooks that she could do it only once. After meditating and preparing herself psychologically for hours, she did it in one take, perfectly. It is the most convincing, authentic moment in the film.

  Barry Fitzgerald, the brilliant Abbey Theatre veteran who had won an Oscar for his role as a priest in Going My Way in 1944 (his star, Bing Crosby, won Best Actor honors for the same film), is one of the major assets of The Catered Affair because he has the right look, the right tone, and the right attitude. And Dorothy Stickney, who plays the widow who finally wins his hand, plays her role the way Davis should have played hers—simply, sincerely, honestly, and with wise understatement. The Fitzgerald-Stickney scenes and the romantic scenes between Debbie Reynolds and fiancé Rod Taylor are in the correct mood as, for that matter, is Ernie Borgnine when he is not encumbered by Davis’s presence. And Madge Kennedy and Robert Simon are also absolutely right as Taylor’s parents.

  One of Davis’s greatest admirers was the actor Ray Stricklyn, who appeared with her in The Catered Affair. As Ray recalls it:

  “Upon arriving in Hollywood in late 1955, I recall the first movie set I was taken on (by my agent) was at Columbia. Miss Davis was shooting Storm Center. I was in awe seeing the Great One working. I didn’t meet her, however. Little did I know, a short time later, that I would be cast to play her son in MGM’s The Catered Affair. My agent arranged an interview for me with director Richard Brooks at the studio. I don’t remember having to read for the role of Eddie but I do remember Brooks chatting with me and, finally, saying: ‘Yes, you’ll be fine—except that you’re prettier than Debbie Reynolds.’ Laughs were exchanged and that’s how I was cast.

  “Though I had done a small role in The Proud and the Profane (Paramount) and a featured role in Crime in the Streets (Allied Artists), this was to be my third movie and my best break so far—certainly in terms of prestige. Just working with Davis, Ernest Borgnine, Debbie, and Barry Fitzgerald was a thrill for a novice movie actor. Plus Richard Brooks directing! If I recall correctly, we had a few days of rehearsal—a rarity—before we started shooting the film. I’d already heard rumors that Brooks usually had a whipping boy on each film—usually the youngest one in a film—and I was afraid that just might be me. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case. Debbie Reynolds, surprisingly, seemed to attract most of his attention and ire.

  “This was at the height of Debbie’s publicity buildup and, more important, her upcoming marriage to Eddie Fisher. And, of course, Fisher was tremendously popular and the trade papers were constantly filled with the fabulous deals he was making with the networks, record companies, etc. I remember Debbie coming onto the set sporting a [reportedly] $10,000 engagement ring—which she forgot to remove when we were shooting a scene. Since we were portraying a poor Bronx family, the sparkler didn’t set too well with Brooks. ‘Cut!’ he screamed, and Brooks, in colorful language (to say the least) berated Ms. Reynolds for her lack of concentration. He seemed to be constantly needling her—about her relationship with Fisher, ‘all the money’ she’d have [once she married him], etc.”

  Ray Stricklyn felt that Brooks was doing this to get the performance he wanted out of her, and according to him, Brooks succeeded, because he thought it her best screen performance. Reynolds later recalled the rough treatment she got from Brooks in her autobiography. She felt he had not wanted her for the role, and held her abilities in low esteem—an attitude he did not trouble to hide from her or others. Davis, she recalled, was concerned, encouraging, and protective.

  Stricklyn added: “I don’t remember having any particular problems myself—the role certainly wasn’t demanding.” (Stricklyn had next to no scenes, in fact, and was given no opportunity to establish his character in the ones he did have.) He remembers Davis as “the complete pro.” He recalls coming to the set the morning after the Academy Awards that year—Anna Magnani had won for The Rose Tattoo and Ernest Borgnine for Marty—to find that Davis had attached a large sign reading ITALIANS GO HOME! to Borgnine’s dressing room door. This was a rather typical example of Davis’s sometimes outré sense of humor, and she ran the risk of giving ethnic offense. But as Stricklyn recalled, “She seemed quite fond of Borgnine and she was a great admirer of Magnani’s.”

  Stricklyn said that at the wrap party for the picture, “Debbie proved the main attraction by doling out outlandish gag gifts to the cast and crew.” She gave Davis a ratty old fox stole, Stricklyn a draft card, and Brooks a pair of ear muffs so that, in her words, “He wouldn’t have to listen to himself talk,” as well as a bank ledger book so he could keep better track of his money. “So she got her little digs in after the film was completed,” Stricklyn summed up.

  Stricklyn had not seen the last of the Great One. Some years later she did a Schlitz Playhouse television segment called For Better, For Worse. “Apparently my name was one of the juveniles submitted for her approval, and she, I was told, said, ‘Get Stricklyn.’ So again I played her son—adopted, I believe—in this half-hour segment. It was a much larger role than I had in The Catered Affair and the wonderful character actor John Williams played my father. I had several scenes with Davis, in which she tries to take the blame for a driving accident in which I’d killed someone.

  “The final night of shooting at the old Revue Studios, only Davis and I were working, doing a shot in a Thunderbird convertible on the process stage. This time we had a lot of time together on the set, and our relationship grew more intimate. We worked late—till around nine P.M.—and when we finally finished she asked me into her dressing room for a drink. While her sister, Barbara, packed up Davis’s belongings we sipped several scotches. Davis said she’d rented a beach house (she was married to Gary Merrill at the time). We must’ve talked for over an hour and finally we heard someone shout, ‘Miss Davis, we’re closing up!’ So we said our farewells—certainly reluctantly on my part.”

  Stricklyn continued, “It was raining when I left the sound stage to go to my car. As I was driving down the deserted studio streets, another car, headlights flashing, stopped me. It was Bette and Barbara. She rolled down her window, as I did, and she suddenly said, ‘What are you doing this
weekend?’ It was a Friday night. I said nothing in particular. ‘How would you like to spend the weekend at our house in Newport Beach? I’m having a small dinner party and you can be Barbara’s daughter’s date.’ I quickly hopped out of my car, got her address and phone number, and said I’d be down the next day. I was elated, to be sure.

  “She’d also said that Gary wouldn’t be there, as he was rehearsing a Playhouse 90 with Claire Trevor” (a role, incidentally, Davis had accepted and then reneged on).

  Young Ray Stricklyn said the weekend was “enchanted. We lolled on the beautiful white beach, with her daughter B.D. and young son Michael. Later that night [Saturday] we dined at a Mexican restaurant with about five other people—her doctor, his wife, Barbara, etc. On Sunday evening she was cooking in . . . the children were there and Barbara and her daughter and myself. It seemed a wonderful, relaxed evening and the drinks were flowing.”

  Ray particularly remembered what happened after the dinner party. “We went back to the house. It was maybe eleven P.M. and the two of us had a nightcap and turned on television. For me it was a scene out of a Joan Crawford movie—the pounding of the ocean outside—a fire roaring in the fireplace—Davis in her robe, stretched out on the couch, and me sitting at her feet on the floor. To me, a scene right out of Candida.”

  A Warner movie came on TV. It was Dust Be My Destiny with John Garfield and Priscilla Lane. When the credits rolled, Davis suddenly said, “‘There goes my whole life,’ referring to the listings of the Warners people who’d made the movie, the crew, the wardrobe people, the makeup people, etc. There seemed a tinge of sadness in the remark. Then she asked me what I thought of Garfield. I quickly said I’d liked him as an actor very much [Garfield had died in 1952]. ‘Overrated,’ she commented. She said Claude Rains was her favorite actor—‘such a wonderful actor!’”