Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Personally, Jack Warner was a bit of a dandy—a failed stand-up comic in blue yachting blazers, ascots, white flannels, and brilliant patent leather shoes, always with the one-liners, which often dropped like lead. When he met Albert Einstein, he made a joke about his relatives. With Madame Chiang Kai-shek and a roomful of Chinese, it was about forgetting to pick up his laundry.

  He and his brother Harry, who ran the finances, were as different as two brothers can be. Jack was vulgar, Harry was subdued; Jack was crass, Harry was contained. Harry was devoted to his wife and children; Jack, who was married to the beautiful and patrician Ann, still screwed around on the side. Jack and Harry detested each another.

  At Warner Bros., pretty much the only prestige pictures the studio sent out in the very early 1930s starred George Arliss, an unlikely movie star with a face like that of a misshapen orangutan—the cheeks too wide, the jaw too narrow, the lips too thin, nothing on one side matching anything on the other. Arliss was also getting on in years; in 1931 he was a well-seasoned sixty-three. But two of Arliss’s sober, ennobling biopics—Disraeli (1929) and Alexander Hamilton (1931)—were good moneymakers for the studio, and for that reason alone Arliss was respected by film critics and studio bookkeepers alike. He’d made a silent picture in 1922 called The Man Who Played God, and in late 1931 he was preparing a sound version:

  A celebrated concert pianist (Arliss) suffers sudden deafness after an explosion. Sequestered and miserable in his apartment high above Central Park, he begins spying on people with the aid of binoculars; reading their lips, he learns of their troubles and solves them from above, at first in mockery of God, but later in redemptive imitation. (One of the people Arliss assists is an especially boyish Ray Milland.) Davis plays his protégée, who lets herself become engaged to him out of an oddly appealing kind of pity, though he nobly sets her free at the end.

  Bette, in high melodramatic mode in The Lonely Life, claims that she was reeling from the demeaning tawdriness of the corpses, closets, and offscreen screams of The Menace and hovering on a crumbling brink of despair and a defeated retreat to the East when, lo, the saving clarion bell of her telephone rang. The caller identified himself as George Arliss. Bette, believing him to be a prankster friend, responded with a fake British accent until she became convinced that it was, in fact, the great actor himself calling her in for an audition. Bette, according to Bette, had been recommended to Arliss by the actor Murray Kinnell, with whom she had appeared in The Menace.

  Jack Warner later said no, that wasn’t what happened at all. According to Warner, a midlevel executive named Rufus LeMaire (né Gold-stick) “dropped in one morning with his familiar scowling and battered face and said: ‘Jack, there’s a very talented little girl over at Universal named Bette Davis. I first saw her in some New York shows, and I caught her in a bit in Bad Sister.’ ” Bette retorted by pointing out that her role in Bad Sister was more than a “bit”—it was the second lead—and by insisting that Kinnell, not LeMaire/Goldstick, was indeed the pivotal figure in her hiring by and eventual ensconcement at Warner Bros. Never one to be left out of a praise-earning situation, Darryl Zanuck took some of the credit for moving Bette Davis to Warner Bros. as well. Zanuck was a Warners executive at the time: “We sent [Arliss] a newcomer named Bette Davis—I didn’t think she was very beautiful—and he called back and said, ‘I’ve just heard one of the greatest actresses.’ ”20

  By the time this who-gets-the-credit contretemps played itself out years after the fact, Bette Davis and Jack Warner had been snapping and squawking at each other for decades—two headstrong supersuccesses who’d grown to depend on each other for nurturing hatred and backhanded support.

  Warner Bros.’ legal files tell a less passionate story of The Man Who Played God and Bette Davis’s formal relationship with the studio:

  Davis’s first contract with Warners is dated November 19, 1931, and specifies her salary at three hundred dollars per week. There’s an addendum designed to put little starlets in their place: “Where black, white, silver, or gold shoes and hose will suffice, artist is to furnish same at her expense.”21

  An interoffice memo specifies that The Man Who Played God officially began production on November 27; Davis, however, had already been on the payroll as of November 18, and she finished shooting her role precisely one month later.22 The film required no retakes.

  “He certainly was my first professional father,” Bette later claimed of the benign George Arliss, though given her own father’s nature the honor might as well be shared by Arliss’s doppelgänger, Jack Warner.23

  Davis gives a surprisingly giggly performance at first, but she tones it down for her first serious scene with Arliss. She knows when to move from girlish naïveté to a woman with the presence of mind to be loved by a genius. Later in the film, when she squares off with her character’s new beau at the edge of a brook, Davis’s edgy neurosis first breaks through. “Harold” makes his obvious move, but Bette rears back, grabs at her hair, and releases it—suppressed tension bursting out in a flashing spasm—and lunges at him.

  Later, in a scene set in Central Park in full binocular view of Arliss, Davis speaks in a newly clipped delivery, and one finally begins to hear the voice that sustained her stardom well after she stopped making quality pictures: “He’s put his faith in me! And I won’t be a quit-ter!”

  It’s not just Bette’s platinumed hair that makes her seem modern in these early films. It’s her stance and spiky attitude—the skittish physical energy and sharp, staccato speech. Bette enters her first scene in her next film, The Rich Are Always with Us, in constant motion—shifting her body, biting her lines, not exactly twitching but scarcely standing still. It was partly a conscious performance, but it also resulted from real intimidation. The film’s top-billed star, Ruth Chatterton, was then in the Hollywood pantheon, and Bette was terrified of her.

  Davis’s bitchy description of Chatterton’s entrance onto the set the first day of shooting is well worth quoting: “Miss Chatterton swept on like Juno. I had never seen a real star-type entrance in my life. I was properly dazzled. Her arrival could have won an Academy Award nomination. Such authority! Such glamour! She was absolutely luminous and radiated clouds of Patou and Wrigley’s Spearmint.”24

  The scene takes place in a restaurant, and Bette’s character comes up to the table Chatterton shares with her costar, George Brent. Bette was so flustered by her proximity to America’s reigning glamour queen that she simply couldn’t get her lines out. Brent, too, was jittery, his coffee cup rattling on its saucer. Bette then blurted to Chatterton, “I’m so damned scared of you I’m speechless!”25 But Bette’s jumpy energy endures today as a unique performance style, while Chatterton’s too-too glamour diction has long grown musty. Referring to a game of roulette, Chatterton announces, “With this wheel—and this gamblah—you haven’t got a chaunce!” “I cahn’t help it,” Chatterton’s character later intones, and that was precisely the problem with Chatterton’s career.

  Davis started shooting So Big the day after she began The Rich Are Always with Us. Davis later said she filmed Rich during the day and So Big at night. She finished her work in both films in all of a week and a half. Directed by William Wellman, So Big is Warners’ adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel.

  But Davis’s role in So Big is so small. The film belongs to Barbara Stanwyck. Poor Selina (Stanwyck), left destitute by the death of her gambler father, becomes a country schoolteacher in a Dutch farming community outside of Chicago. She marries stolid Pervus and bears a son, Dirk, whom she calls “So Big.” (“How big is my son?” “So big!”) Young Roelf, a neighbor boy she has tutored, feels stultified by farm life and runs off to become a world-famous sculptor in Europe. Pervus dies. Dirk grows up to be a snob; he’s humiliated by his mother’s having become an asparagus magnate. He hires Dallas O’Mara (Davis), an elegant and high-priced graphic artist, to come up with an ad campaign for his bond trading company and falls in love with her. Roelf
returns from Europe as George Brent, and in a final speech, Dallas explains to Dirk that his mother is noble, a subject worthy of great art.

  Davis’s delivery of the closing moral is peculiar. “There,” Dallas says. “That’s what I mean when I say I want to do portraits. Not portraits of ladies with pearls . . . but portraits of men and women who are really distinguished looking—and distinguishedly American, like your mother.” Dallas is sitting at a slight angle and facing to the right (where Selina and Roelf are standing by the window, Selina’s face hit by a convenient ray of sunshine). Davis’s manner of speaking matches her dialogue in confidence and grace. But Bette can’t help herself: she’s wringing her hands furiously as she speaks, unable to keep them from contradicting what she’s saying. These jangled, barely suppressed nerves are Davis’s own, not Dallas’s.

  It doesn’t matter. The speech as written is less convincing than it might be, especially because Stanwyck’s Selina is nothing if not agriculturally noble throughout the film. But Davis’s own, uncontrollably anxious hands give her character’s words a surprising and unsettling dimension—that of an artist’s irrepressible self-doubt.

  AFTER SO BIG and The Rich Are Always with Us, she shot The Dark Horse, a lame political satire, in March and early April 1932. Warren William engineers the rise of a buffoon politico. The bizarre Guy Kibbee is the buffoon, and Bette wastes her time as William’s wise-gal girlfriend. Then, over the vocal, heavily accented objections of the director Michael Curtiz—“Goddamned nothing no good sexless son of a bitch!”—Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck cast Bette in her first truly great role: that of the southern belle Madge in Cabin in the Cotton.26 Madge is the flashy, spoiled daughter of the plantation owner for whom Richard Barthelmess’s well-meaning Marvin works. Marvin has a peckerwood girlfriend, but the dazzling and aggressive Madge quickly takes Marvin’s mind off fidelity.

  Curtiz, whom the critic Neal Gabler describes as “feral,” was abusive to Bette personally, barking at and needling her in heavily Hungarian-accented tones, but he lights her with great finesse. Her face seems to be the source of sunshine rather than its target, and her brilliant blonde hair radiates hot energy.27 In the context of this glowing heat, Davis turns to Barthelmess on the dusty porch of the general store, her eyes tilt appreciatively down his body and back up again, and she says, “Cute! I’d like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair. Bye!”

  In later years, Davis used this line as a comedy routine—a piece of supposedly nonsensical Hollywood dialogue she could trot out on talk shows and in interviews to get the interviewer and audience on her side. But as she delivers it in the film, it’s not silly at all. And its meaning couldn’t be clearer: Bette’s sex-hungry Madge is suggesting to the shocked but susceptible Marvin that a kiss from her would lead to much more—that they’d end up rolling around in the road. There would be dirt involved.

  Warners certainly kept its actors busy. Davis worked on Cabin in the Cotton from May 17 through June 9. The following day she began shooting Three on a Match with the director Mervyn LeRoy; she finished that one on the thirtieth.

  Three childhood friends—Vivian, Mary, and Ruth—meet in New York after ten years. Vivian (Ann Dvorak) has married well, Mary (Joan Blondell) has become a showgirl after serving time in a reform school, and Ruth (Davis) is an earnest secretary without much to do. The film’s title—drawn from the World War I superstition that the third soldier to light a cigarette from a single match would be shot, the flame’s duration enabling German soldiers to draw an accurate bead—spells doom for one of the characters. Davis never liked Three on a Match, calling it a “dull B-picture.”28 But how dull can it be to watch Ann Dvorak turn from a Park Avenue matron into a derelict hophead in little over an hour?

  True, Davis’s part is by far the smallest and least meaty of the three. Ruth stands on the sidelines as Vivian degenerates. Making matters worse for Davis, Three on a Match is the film that inspired Mervyn LeRoy to utter a prediction he came to regret: “I made a mistake when the picture was finished. I told an interviewer that I thought Joan Blondell was going to be a big star, that Ann Dvorak had definite possibilities, but that I didn’t think Bette Davis would make it.” It was remarks like that which prompted Davis to dispatch unbelievers to an icy hell of contempt.29

  CHAPTER

  4

  AN ACTRESS IN MOTION

  IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE TO LEARN THAT Hollywood was a terrifying place—even for Bette Davis, whose rocklike spine belied a most insecure mental framework, especially about her erotic impulses. The boy-madness of Newton High School, Cushing Academy, and the various boyfriends and would-be fiancés in New York and Rochester to the contrary notwithstanding, young Bette Davis was profoundly inexperienced sexually, as her humiliating exposure to a naked baby boy revealed to the cast and crew of Bad Sister. Add to this the tremendous pressure of shooting film after film for directors who had neither the time nor the inclination for nurturing, and the tension of never knowing exactly who her new friends were, and her mother’s omnipresence, and her sister’s instability, and her own fears about her mind, family, money, and art, and Davis’s first marriage begins to make more sense.

  Davis once described Ham Nelson as “tall, lean, dark curly-haired, with a funny nose and beautiful brown eyes.” By “funny nose,” she meant that it was a too-broad mismatch for his otherwise preppy-cute face. Barbara Leaming goes so far as to call him an “Ichabod Crane sort of fellow,” but he was nothing of the sort. Ham was a pleasantly slim, boyish man with a narrow waist, a hairless chest, a handsome head of very dark hair, and those deep brown eyes.

  At Cushing, the young musician had learned to play the trumpet and serenaded Bette with an odd, all-too-prophetic tune: “Taps.” “By then, of course, I was wading in those velvety brown eyes. I was truly in love. So was he,” she writes. But when Bette was at drama school in New York, within striking distance of Yale, she ditched him in favor of Fritz Hall—that is, until John Murray Anderson announced in the press that Miss Bette Davis was “the perfect modern Venus,” which displeased both her father and her Ivy League beau, who was looking for a more wifely type to accompany him into his family’s business.1 Ham, on the other hand, found the Venus remark hilarious and wrote to her “with appropriately irreverent remarks that made [her] roar.”2

  In 1929, while performing with George Cukor’s company in Rochester, she took still another new boyfriend, a businessman named Charles Ainsely. Of Ainsely, Bette cryptically writes, “He would always park at the end of the street, but other than that, we couldn’t have been more satisfied.” But the satisfaction was brief; the relationship didn’t last terribly long, since Bette didn’t last long in Rochester. (Ainsley reappeared rather briefly shortly after Bette finished filming The Dark Horse. She and Charlie—and Ruthie and Bobby—traveled to Palm Springs and Yosemite National Park in April 1932. But Ainsley went back to Rochester, and the second phase of the affair turned out to be no more productive than the first.)

  And then there’s the mysterious telegram in one of the scrapbooks: addressed to Bette, then living at Carlton Terrace at Broadway and 100th Street in New York and dated September 27, 1930, it reads in its entirety, “Goodby forever—Pierre.”

  When Bette moved to Los Angeles three months after Pierre’s terse farewell and found herself separated from her past by the vast breadth of the continent, Harmon Nelson began to be more than just her high school sweetheart. He was a comfortable, true friend in a world of pressure, paranoia, and other people’s sexual hijinks—a link to a past that may have seemed stable by comparison and that promised a similar, familiar future. “Only Ham’s letters kept me sane through this period,” Bette writes of her first year in Hollywood.3 So when Ham Nelson decided to move west after he graduated from Massachusetts State College (later renamed the University of Massachusetts at Amherst), they soon married, as much to be able to have sex with each other right away as to build a sustainable life together over the long haul.

  Their reunion wa
s put off by several weeks by the fact that while Ham was traveling west, Bette was heading east on a Warner Bros. promotional tour with Warren William, her Dark Horse costar. They crisscrossed the country “like curtain pulleys,” Davis writes.4 Tensions with the studio were beginning to build. Her manager, Arthur Lyon, told Warners that Bette was making the trip grudgingly, considering it a “gratuitous concession.” And in a telegram to the Warners executive Rufus LeMaire, Davis herself sarcastically noted the studio’s cheapskate nature: “Just to show you that I am a pal of the Warners have not been drinking fifteen chocolate milks per day at their expense.”5 To top it off, she had to spend a good deal of time and energy fending off the sexual overtures of Warren William.6

  While Bette was in New York, Ham took a job as a trumpeter for the orchestra of the Tenth Olympiad, which began on July 30, 1932, at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Bette returned to Los Angeles, and on August 18, Bette and Ham and Ruthie and Bobby and Aunt Mildred and cousin Donald and two poodles piled into a car and drove to Yuma, Arizona. They left the city after midnight. Bette picks up the story for the reporter Gladys Hall of Modern Screen.