Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  In January 1930, Broken Dishes shifted to the Theatre Masque (later renamed the Golden) on West Forty-fifth Street and continued running for a total of 178 performances before closing in April 1930 to prepare for a tour. The production moved in May to the Wilbur Theatre in Boston and then went on hiatus for the summer, which Bette spent doing stock at the Cape Playhouse.

  Broken Dishes picked up again in September 1930, with performances in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. On September 25, the cast made a personal appearance at the Rosedale Airport. “The entire company is enthusiastic about aviation,” an ad declared.

  During the play’s run in Washington, Bette got a call from the play’s producer, Oscar Serlin, who wanted to replace the ingenue in his new production, Solid South, starring Richard Bennett, a notoriously temperamental actor (and the father of Constance, Joan, and Barbara). She took the job.40

  Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Solid South opened on October 14, 1930, at the Lyceum Theatre. Bette played “Alabama” Follensby; Bennett was her grandfather, the major. Jesse Royce Landis played her widowed mother. “Richard Bennett Called Bette Ham, Got Face Slapped,” a later gossip headline trumpeted. “Are you another of these young ham actresses?” Bennett reportedly asked Bette when they met, so she slapped him.41 Davis herself tells a much more benign version in The Lonely Life: Bennett said, “So! You’re one of those actresses who think all they need are eyes to act. My daughters are the same.” “Mr. Bennett,” Bette properly responded, “I’m very happy to return to Washington immediately.” “You’ll do,” Bennett replied, laughing. According to Bette, “from then on in, he and I were the best of friends.”42

  Solid South was not so solid. The critic John Mason Brown wrote that the play “came bearing no more direct relation to actuality than a cartoon does to life.” Burns Mantle called the play “a somewhat ironic, deliberately satirical, fairly extravagant study of a slightly demented major.”43 The critics were especially hard on Bennett, but Davis wasn’t spared either. “This attempt to learn a Southern speech fell very flat with Miss Bette Davis, sweet Broadway child that she may be,” the New Republic observed. “She [and Owen Davis Jr.] struggled with the problem of how to be interesting as nobodies. . . . Miss Davis achieved that cereal quality that the roles of pure girls on Broadway are taken to represent.”44

  Solid South closed in November, and Davis didn’t appear again on Broadway for another twenty-two years. After all, as a gossip columnist had noted a few months earlier, “Talkies want Donald Meek of Broken Dishes. Also want Bette Davis.”45

  CHAPTER

  3

  A YANKEE IN HOLLYWOOD

  A CHUBBY, OVERLY CHEERY FATHER from the Booth Tarkington Midwest takes a newspaper from the paperboy at the front door of his house at Universal Pictures and walks into a large dining room. The camera swings back and to the left to reveal a very blonde, very young Bette Davis carefully setting plates on the table, her elbow cocked, her hand placing the plates on the table just so. “He’s up all right,” Davis carefully intones in a voice deeper and a pace more measured than one expects. “I dumped him out of bed.” And out of the scene she goes.

  Aside from some lost screen tests, this is Davis’s first appearance on celluloid. The moment is electrifying—not because of her performance’s inherent artistry (she’s going through the paces of a secondary character’s entrance, though with the extreme focus of bright sunlight hitting a prism), but because a glorious fifty-eight-year film career radiates out from it. All the characters she played, and all the characters she became, bloom from this single generative bud. The film is called Bad Sister.

  She arrived in Hollywood in December 1930, along with Ruthie and Boogum the dog, having been promised the lead in Universal’s adaptation of Preston Sturges’s hit Broadway comedy Strictly Dishonorable, or so she later said, and when she was cast instead as the good sister in Bad Sister, Universal having changed its mind, she necessarily took it personally.

  With the sting of this rejection still raw, Bad Sister (then called Gambling Daughters) began filming on the cusp of the new year. Mousy Laura Madison (Davis) plays second fiddle to her wild sibling, Marianne (Sidney Fox), who is courted not only by rich, dumpy Wade Trumbull (Bert Roach) but also by Dr. Dick Lindley (Conrad Nagel, top billed). The coquettish Marianne toys with Wade, draws Dick in her sights, then cuts a date with Dick short when Humphrey Bogart shows up as the flashy Val Corliss. Marianne runs off to Columbus with Val, who ditches her in a cheap hotel; she returns home to find demure Bette/Laura engaged to Dick and, contrite in her state of sin, gratefully marries fat Wade in the end.1

  Conrad Nagel reported that Universal’s Carl Laemmle Jr. didn’t see what we all now see—we can’t help but see—in Bad Sister. Laemmle, said Nagel, called Davis and Bogart into his office “one at a time, and told them they had nothing to offer. They were colorless. No fault of theirs. They just didn’t photograph. He suggested they go back to New York.”2 Young Laemmle’s advice was lunacy, obviously, but how could he have foreseen the rich, smoky history these two then-inexperienced actors would create over time? When Hobart Henley, the film’s director, cuts to a grinning Bogart after Val’s lengthy roadster cuts Marianne and Dick off at the curb, it causes a jolt equal to Bette’s own first shot. Bogart’s face, with its newly emerging contours, shocks with sheer familiarity, as does Bette’s.

  A Bad Sister legend casts Bette as the naive young puritan she certainly was. (“I was the Yankee-est, most modest virgin that ever walked in,” she once said.)3 There’s a scene in the film in which Bette’s character, Laura, diapers her other sister Amy’s newborn son, Amy having died melodramatically in childbirth. Bette, sensing trouble over her absolute inexperience with bodies unlike her own—she was a prim twenty-two at the time—asked whether the prop baby was a boy or a girl. The camera wasn’t going to get close enough to care, but she was, and did. It was a boy—not surprising, since the script drives home the baby’s sex with a scene of Grandpa running down the street yelling, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” But according to Bette, she had no idea what the baby would turn out to look like under its diaper, and the cast and crew lined up to watch in sophisticated amusement as the Yankee-est virgin who ever walked in reacted with a deep blush at her first sight of a penis.

  If Conrad Nagel was right, it was Bogart who put them all up to it. “That dame is too uptight,” Bogart told Nagel, adding, “What she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to do it.”4 Bette, also in Nagel’s telling, thought Bogie was “uncouth.”5 She was correct.

  The problem with this entertaining tale, even in Davis’s own version, is that the scene itself is explicitly about Laura’s sexual awakening and the embarrassment it causes her. Dick enters the room as Laura adjusts the diaper and, revealing his love for her for the first time, bends down and kisses her on the lips. And she blushes—not from the shock of seeing the baby’s penis, but from the first stirring of her own sexuality. If there is any meaning at all to this anecdote, it lies not only in the fact that Bette Davis saw her first penis while a 35mm camera was running and lights were blasting in her face but also that she used her personal humiliation for the sake of her character, something she would do throughout her film career.

  “She has about as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville.” This was Laemmle Jr.’s response to Bette Davis’s screen debut. Davis claimed actually to have heard him make the remark.6 Mean, yes; funny, terribly. Slim Summerville, the former Keystone Kop who plays one of Laura’s father’s business associates in Bad Sister, was a skinny, bent beanpole with a large comedy nose. But what the twenty-two-year-old Laemmle thoroughly missed was Davis’s carnality. It comes out even in the restrained Laura of Bad Sister. Beneath the surface of Davis’s New England reserve is raw, unsatisfied appetite—physical drive as well as emotional ambition. Variety got that point early on in its review of Bad Sister: as Laura, the anonymous critic wrote, Davis was “the very essence of repression.”7 Barely suppressed rage would become Davis’s st
ock-in-trade, but her bottled-up frenzies were as sexual as they were emotional.

  By the time she shot Bad Sister, she’d already been run through the gauntlet of Universal men in a demeaning episode that hammered home a sad fact she hadn’t expected at all: that Hollywood moviemaking was largely about whether the men who made the pictures wanted to fuck the women they paid to act in them. Davis was suspicious when they told her she was to appear for yet another screen test, this one for an unnamed part in a likewise unspecified project. They told her to lie down on a couch, after which a succession of fifteen of Universal’s contract actors got on top of her. Then they acted. “I wasn’t even a woman,” Bette later wrote; “I was a mattress.”8 Gilbert Roland gave Bette second thoughts, if only for the sake of a joke she could employ many years later on talk shows: “I must say, after he kissed me I thought, ‘This is not so bad.’ ” Roland also reportedly said something on the order of: “Don’t worry—we’ve all gone through it,” though one doesn’t imagine that Universal’s pretty starlets ever lined up to lay a piece of freshman veal-cake in front of a screen test crew.9

  This, along with the Strictly Dishonorable disappointment, was Davis’s welcome to Hollywood.

  BAD SISTER ATTRACTED little notice, and neither did Bette Davis. But Karl Freund, who shot the picture, told Carl Laemmle that Davis’s eyes were marvelous. This, according to Bette, was the only reason Universal renewed her contract when her first three-month option came up.10

  By that point she had made her second movie, Seed. Adapted from what was called a “novel of birth control” by its author, Charles G. Norris, Seed actually has little concern with contraception. The only trace of it is the fact that Bart Carter, a frustrated writer, has five children who create such a racket that he can’t work on his novel. Bette plays one of his daughters. Rather than moving her toward prominence, Seed only pushed her farther into the background.

  Davis didn’t come any farther forward in her third film, Waterloo Bridge. An elegantly conceived and beautifully executed melodrama, Waterloo Bridge was the director James Whale’s first film with Universal; he went on to make the great horror trio Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and Bride of Frankenstein at that studio, not to mention the glorious musical Show Boat. Waterloo Bridge takes place in London during World War I. An expatriate American, Myra (Mae Clarke), can find no more work as a chorine and starts turning tricks. She picks them up on the bridge. During an air raid, she meets a kindly, callow soldier (Kent Douglass) when both of them stop to help an old lady pick up her spilled potatoes. Roy, nineteen, blond, and upper crust, gives Myra money to pay her overdue rent; she takes it, but in a fit of pique and guilt throws it back at him. They make up, but Myra—especially in Mae Clarke’s twitchy performance—becomes increasingly troubled to the point of a marvelous histrionic breakdown scene in her sleazy apartment.

  Bette, who plays Roy’s petite sister, makes her first appearance with her back to the camera and generally stays that way until the end of the scene, when she shouts in her deaf father’s ear that Roy wants to bring his new girlfriend up to the manor for a visit. She has a few more lines in the film—“Oh! You must come to Camden with us! It’s perfectly lovely!”—and disappears.

  (We know Myra is doomed at the end when Whale cuts to a bird’s-eye shot of her strolling across Waterloo Bridge while the low buzz of zeppelins plays on the soundtrack. Within seconds, Myra gets hit by a perfectly aimed bomb, thereby freeing our boy Roy from having to marry the deranged hooker after he returns from the war.)

  Davis made the papers during the production of Waterloo Bridge, but not because of her talent. According to the June 29 Boston Traveller, Bette was “rushed to her home from the studio last week” with an attack of appendicitis, though she wasn’t operated upon.11 Her absence from the set necessitated some rescheduling, with Whale working nights, as well as the need for a few retakes in July.

  Waterloo Bridge was released in September. And Laemmle was still unimpressed. “Her sex appeal simply ain’t,” he said.12

  In August 1931, Universal sent Davis on loan to RKO for the cornball Way Back Home. Based on the popular radio program Seth Parker, which chronicled the benign meddlings of a wise Maine farmer, the film is a strenuously homespun morality tale. Bette plays a country ingenue with a harsh father; Seth, with his jutting little white beard and folksy insights, sets things right at a festive taffy pull.

  One might assume that none of this bunk was quite Bette’s speed. The hard-bitten image we have of her is true, but only partly so; she had a sentimental streak, too. Bette actually liked Way Back Home. Her director, William Seiter, treated her well, something she hadn’t necessarily experienced in Hollywood at that point, or beyond, and she appreciated the way J. Roy Hunt photographed her. Perhaps the most important aspect of the production was the makeup department’s innovative treatment of her features. Bette Davis came away from Way Back Home with a new mouth and, consequently, a reformed face. Because RKO’s makeup artist Ern Westmore decided to eschew the glamorous bee-stung convention of the period—this movie was, after all, set in backwoods Maine—he instead drew Davis a more linear set of lips, with the lower lip a bit fuller and wider than its natural shape. The result of the new, straight mouth was clear—a fresh emphasis on her greatest features: two enormous, captivating eyes.

  Davis was growing frustrated with Universal. Her cattlelike casting, combined with the relative lack of care and craft in the picture making (she underappreciated Waterloo Bridge, probably because her part was so tiny), fed into her lifelong impatience in the face of mediocrity and half-assedness. She also resented the fact that the studios traded their contract players to other studios without the players’ consent to play characters they didn’t want to play at the whim of bosses who didn’t care.

  “There was something lower than bottom,” Bette later wrote, “and Mr. Laemmle sent me there”—specifically as a loan to Bennie F. Zeidman of B. F. Zeidman Productions. Undirected by Howard Higgin, Hell’s House—the original title of which was, appropriately enough, Misguided—begins with a touching scene between a country mother and her son, Jimmy (Junior Durkin), but swiftly turns mawkish when Mother steps away from the camera for a moment and gets run over by a car. Freshly orphaned, Jimmy heads for the city, where he meets the slick bootlegger Kelly (Pat O’Brien), who hires him to take liquor orders. Jimmy gets arrested after literally one minute on the job and gets shipped off to a perfectly dreadful reform school, where he meets the sickly Shorty (Junior Coghlan—there was a vogue for “Juniors” in 1931). Naturally, Shorty dies. Unnaturally, Shorty speaks to Jimmy from beyond the grave at the end when Jimmy, sprung from the reform school, asks rhetorically, “How is it now, Shorty?” and, much to his amazement, Shorty answers him in voice-over: “Okay, big boy!” Fade out.

  It’s ghastly. Davis plays the bootlegger’s moll, Peggy. Fighting her way upstream in this filthy creek, she manages to play Peggy with a breezy self-confidence and, of all things, a kind of transparent naturalism that contrasts markedly with Pat O’Brien’s early-talkie stiltedness. One rarely thinks of Bette Davis in terms of the naturalism of her performance style, so deeply has Davis’s cigarette-waving, dialogue-chopping delivery been etched in the public imagination. But what Davis brought to the screen in 1931, even in the lousy Hell’s House, was a fresh, unblinkered vitality, a kind of see-through stylization that allows us to know the character while appreciating the actress’s craft.

  Then Universal loaned her out to Columbia for The Menace. “I was a corpse!” Davis declared to Dick Cavett many years later. “All I did was fall out of a closet!”13 She gets the gist right but the details wrong: Ronald Quayle (Walter Byron) undergoes extensive plastic surgery, including the removal of his fingerprints and the installation of an entirely new face, and returns to England under an assumed name to avenge his father’s killing. Bette plays his girlfriend, who faints after finding a cadaver hanging on a hook in a closet.

  The Menace is preposterous. Bette lat
er said, “I looked like an ostrich through the whole thing—ungainly, sad, and startled. We made it in thirteen days.”14 In truth, she looks nothing like an ostrich. A bored starlet with too much talent for the dreck in which she’s stuck, yes. But not an ostrich. She’s right about the production’s swiftness, though; The Menace filmed from October 30 to November 16, 1931, and there was no work on Sundays.

  JACK L. WARNER CAME from nothing, which is to say Youngstown, Ohio. The enormous family—two parents, twelve children—took cold-water baths in a tub on the front porch. They pawned the family horse to buy a Kinetoscope: a four-foot-high cabinet with an eyepiece on top through which customers who paid the customary nickel could watch a moving picture. A few years later, Jack and his brothers bought a movie theater in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. One led to several; some failed. They began making their own product—stuff to project on the screen so the people who bought tickets would have something to look at. This business led them to Southern California.

  Warner had, one would have to say, a strong personality. When Al Jolson accepted a special Oscar for The Jazz Singer, he remarked, “I don’t know what Jack Warner’s going to do with this statue. It can’t say yes.’ ”15

  By 1931, Warner, then thirty-nine, together with his brothers Harry and Albert, ran the most factory-like of the five major Hollywood studios, a compact lot in Burbank where, in the words of the producer David Lewis, “films were edited, previewed, and shipped like sausages” to theaters that were, conveniently enough, mainly owned by the Warners.16 They were rich tightwads in a town of rich tightwads. Fortune once called Jack “a bargain-counter dictator,” a description Warner himself repeated with pride.17 Warners’ pictures were usually inexpensive to set up and easy to shoot. And they moved. One producer remembered that Warners’ editors would cut out single frames from every scene, just to make them play that much quicker.18 Another recalled being told at a meeting that Warners couldn’t possibly compete with MGM, for instance, because of MGM’s huge roster of stars, “so we had to go after the stories—topical ones, not typical ones. The stories became the stars. . . . We used to say ‘t-t-t: timely, topical, and not typical’—that was our slogan. . . . We were all searching frantically, looking through papers for story ideas.”19