Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Came dawn and we were still a hundred miles from Yuma, which was hundreds of miles more than we had thought. The thermometer registered 107 in the shade! Ham and I had not spoken one word the whole way. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, “This is horrible—I won’t go on.” Ruthie stopped me. She sensed the furies boiling and said, “Let’s not go on,” which was, of course, the one divinely inspired thing to say, for the mule in me immediately gave a back kick of the heels and told Ham to step on the gas. We arrived in Yuma. Everyone was soaked to the skin. . . . I kept muttering, “This is so awful it’s funny!” When asked whether this was my first marriage, I said, “My third.” That got back to the studio! . . . I wore a two-piece beige street dress that resembled the sands of the Arizona desert after the rain it never gets, brown accessories, and two limp gardenias. I kept thinking of the picture I’d always had of myself as a bride—dewy and divine in white satin and orange blossoms, coming up a white-ribboned aisle to the strains of Mendelssohn.7

  In The Lonely Life, Bette asserts that she and Ham spent their honeymoon helping Warner Bros. plug its big, modern, glossy musical 42nd Street. Warners’ publicist Charles Einfeld had cooked up a brilliant cross-promotional deal with General Electric: the General Electric 42nd Street Express, a gold-and silver-foil-wrapped train that crossed the country displaying Warners’ movie stars and the latest GE home products. The train was outfitted, as the Boston Post put it, with “perfect General Electric housekeeping equipment and Malibu Beach sun lamps, platinum blondes, and Tom Mix’s new horse, King.”8 (Aside from King and Mr. Mix, other stars on board included Bette, Glenda Farrell, Laura La Plante, Joe E. Brown, Lyle Talbot, Leo Carrillo, and the Olympic swimming gold medalist Eleanor Holm.) Taking off from Los Angeles, the train chugged through San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore; made it to Washington, D.C., in time for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration; then headed to Philadelphia and Boston. It ended up in New York City.

  Despite the luxurious trappings of the train, Warners worked its stars hard as they made their way across the continent. Along the route, the actors, actresses, and horse had to make personal appearances in department stores, show up at parades, open model General Electric kitchens in appliance stores. “We visited 32 cities in 32 days and felt like monkeys in a zoo,” Davis writes.9

  She arrived in Boston as a hometown heroine on March 8, 1933; a crowd of 10,000 people braved a driving rain to greet her at the station. When she emerged from the train, her hair “a long gold bob curled at the ends” (according to the Post), an especially loud cheer erupted.

  It made a good story to say that the General Electric 42nd Street Express served as the couple’s honeymoon venue, but in point of fact, Bette Davis made four films between wedding and honeymoon: 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which she began shooting as a newlywed on August 25, one week after the wedding, and finished on September 14; Parachute Jumper (September 21 to October 17); Ex-Lady (December 12 to 31); and The Working Man (January 14 to February 1, 1933).10 She also—finally—had her appendix removed. From the Illustrated Daily News, October 22, 1932: “After being ill for years, Bette Davis, blonde actress, will be operated on this morning at Wilshire Osteopathic hospital for appendicitis.”* It was soon after wrapping The Working Man that the 42nd Street Express honeymoon began. And Bette Davis was beginning to get tired.

  * It’s unclear that Davis actually had acute appendicitis in June 1931, when she had to leave the set of Waterloo Bridge; the left-lower-quadrant pain she felt may simply have been presumed to be appendix related. It’s worth noting, however, that the risk of dying from a surgically acquired infection was higher in those days, and her doctors may have taken a watch-and-wait approach rather than risk surgery. There is also the possibility that she had what is known as chronic appendicitis, in which the body is able—for a time, at least—to contain the inflammation.

  But at last she had a sex life. And she loved it. Sex didn’t have to be about procreation or even obligation, Bette discovered. It was healthy exercise—a way to get rid of nervous tension. Before the wedding, she writes, Ruthie had “found me more high strung than ever. ‘You can’t go on like this. You and Ham have been in love for years. Marry him!’ ” Ruthie had spent years dissuading Bette from engaging in casual sex with this sage advice: “A stiff prick has no conscience.”11 Mother may have been an upright Yankee, but apparently she could be as salty as seawater.

  In her later life, Bette regretted that Ruthie hadn’t just given her approval for the young couple to go ahead and have sex: “Would that she had been that wise. Would that Ham and I had been.” The latter sentence, the afterthought, is shocking as such, for by adding it, Bette ranks her mother’s control ahead of Ham’s, let alone her own. “I was hopelessly puritan, helplessly passionate, and, with Ruthie, decided that I had better marry before I became Hester Prynne.” Ham, being Ham, went along: “He was not against the idea.”

  It came as a surprise to Bette that making love was fun and relaxing: “The lust I had feared was natural and beautiful. I was released.” But Davis doesn’t dwell on her sexual liberation in The Lonely Life. Instead, she quickly sketches in a few storm clouds on the horizon: “I now had the work and the man I loved—the best of two worlds. It never occurred to me that they would or could collide.”12

  Did Bette really imagine that the quiet and unassuming Ham Nelson, by osmosis—by simply becoming her husband—would develop a powerful professional libido to match her own? She registers disappointment that he didn’t. His Olympics trumpeting job ended with the Olympics, and no other work was forthcoming. Ham was still unemployed by mid-October, and Bette was supporting her husband along with her mother and sister. In fact, she couldn’t afford the appendix surgery without help from Jack Warner, who personally approved a kind of loan: “Due to financial difficulties, surgeon’s bills, and the necessity for Miss Davis to carry the entire burden of her family upkeep, Mr. Warner has approved our advancing Miss Davis during the period that she is laid off her weekly salary” (which was then $400 a week) beginning October 22.13 By the end of November, Bette owed the studio $1,800, which was taken out of her salary at $150 a week. The raise to $550 she got in December was thereby rendered meaningless for the duration.

  Added to the financial stress was the domestic: the wife would return home fiery from a day of high-pressure Hollywood filmmaking and find the husband relaxing in his slippers and smoking a pipe.14 She resented it. And he resented that she resented it.

  DAVIS BEGAN SHOOTING 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, with gowns by Orry-Kelly, at the end of August 1932. Stark and hard-edged to a point—the gowns are lovely—the film tells the story of a criminal’s redemption, which he achieves perversely by taking the rap for a murder he didn’t commit. James Cagney was originally to have starred, but he was spending the summer on suspension from Warners while he fought for a better deal: $3,000 a week instead of the $1,250 he was then being paid.15 Spencer Tracy, on loan from Fox, was cast in Cagney’s stead.

  The title refers to the cumulative number of years served by all the prisoners at Sing Sing, not to an abnormally long sentence meted out to Spencer Tracy, whose character, Tommy Connors, has been sent up the river for five to thirty. It’s a measure of the era’s social realism and Warner Bros.’ particular brand of it that there’s no question about Tommy’s guilt. He’s a thug, albeit a charming one, and his rap sheet proves the point with a string of armed robberies and assaults behind him. Bette plays his moll.

  Tracy already admired Davis—he’d actually seen Hell’s House—and he told her so when they met. He went even further, saying that he thought she was the most talented actress in town. “Damn right,” Bette answered with characteristic bravado, “but who are we against so many?”16 “We were an awful lot alike,” Davis later said of Tracy. “We weren’t the best-looking people on the lot, but we knew we were talented and we weren’t getting the parts we deserved. We also weren
’t just going to sit back and take it.”17

  James Cagney, never one to sit back and take it either, saw a rather less flattering similarity: “They were both incipient thyroid cases. Early in life Spence did have a serious thyroid problem, and anyone with thyroid trouble is in trouble. Spence’s problem was a slightly unsettled personality. He was a most amusing guy, a good companion who told great stories beautifully—but there was always the tension that was tangible. You can feel the stress in such people.”18

  Davis’s oddball looks in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing made a great impression on a young James Baldwin, who recalled seeing the film with the immediacy of a fresh slap in the face: “So, here, now, was Bette Davis, on that Saturday afternoon, in close-up, over a champagne glass, pop-eyes popping. I was astounded. . . . For, here, before me, after all, was a movie star: white: and if she was white and a movie star, she was rich: and she was ugly. . . . Davis’s skin [had] the dead-white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock, but I was held, just the same, by the tense intelligence of the forehead, the disaster of the lips: and when she moved, she moved just like a nigger.”19

  Baldwin is wildly excessive in his description of Davis’s skin tone. The cinematographer, Barney McGill, is no Ernest Haller or Sol Polito, but his lighting doesn’t turn Davis even close to sickly. Still, Baldwin gets her physicality to a tee: the coordinated, full-body energy as well as the unexpected, even dreadful beauty of her face.

  20,000 Years in Sing Sing is hard and fast-moving, exactly what one thinks of when someone mentions Warner Bros. in the 1930s. But as tough as this prison drama is—and as much as Michael Curtiz complained about Davis’s lack of common sex appeal—Warners and Curtiz simply could not bring themselves to depict their leading lady as anything other than glamorous, even when her character has been physically brutalized. The result is unintentionally comical. The story has Sing Sing’s warden releasing Tommy (Tracy) on his own recognizance so he can visit Bette’s said-to-be-dying Fay, who, resisting the advances of a goon, has leaped from a speeding car. Curtiz’s men are real. He understood that prisoners sweat when they pound boulders into pebbles in the yard; their uniforms are soaked with it. But his women are trumped-up, one-dimensional dream images—even “goddamned nothing no good sexless son of a bitch” Bette Davis. Absurdly, Tommy bursts into Fay’s room to find a remarkably scar-and-contusion-free Fay lying calmly in bed, bathed in gentle light, with an Isadora Duncan–like white satin scarf wrapped around her neck to serve as a bandage and matching white satin wrist wraps to complete the ensemble. Warners’ grittiness had its limits.

  It’s easy to mock a Bette Davis movie called Parachute Jumper. Had John Wayne starred in The Tiniest Ballerina, it would seem similarly ludicrous. But Parachute Jumper turns out to be one of Davis’s better pictures of the period, a fast-moving Hawksian buddy movie, though without Hawks’s character-building intelligence and visual grace. Davis, of course, didn’t see it that way. “Damn it,” she bitterly remarks in The Lonely Life. “I was good as the moll [in Sing Sing] and my notices made that clear. My reward was a little epic called Parachute Jumper.”20 Her costar, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., shared Bette’s derision. For Fairbanks, it was a “punishment” meted out to him by Warner Bros. for not being a good little studio toiler. Davis “thought director Al Green’s sense of humor as infantile as the story we were obliged to act out,” Fairbanks went on. “She was always conscientious, serious, and seemed devoid of humor of any kind. But then, there was not much to be humorous about. It was a job, and she attacked it with integrity. . . . Our only interest was to get the damned thing over with.”21 They started shooting Parachute Jumper on September 21, 1932, and finished three and a half weeks later.

  It’s true that Davis isn’t stretched in any way in Parachute Jumper. Her wisecracking character’s southern accent comes straight from Cabin in the Cotton. And Al Green doesn’t give her much worthwhile physical business. Still, the film has energy. It’s funny and irreverent, and it benefits from its hard-edged pre-Code amoralism: two drug-and booze-runners, the heroes of the piece, shoot down the border patrol and escape without punishment.*

  “AN ECSTASY OF poor taste.” “A piece of junk.” “My shame was only exceeded by my fury.”22 To hear Davis rant, her next picture, Ex-Lady, is a tawdry, smirky skin show—a sixty-five-minute leer. But that’s Davis’s puritanism enunciating itself retrospectively. Warner Bros.’ pressbook, as not-to-be-believed as it may be, is more to the point. Referring to her randy, sexually liberated character, Davis is said to have said, “What she wants, of course, is freedom. She will never be satisfied until she has every right that a man has. . . . The exceptional woman should have the same opportunities and the same freedom to develop them that the exceptional man has.”

  The decision to cast Davis in Ex-Lady was one of Darryl Zanuck’s last at Warner Bros.—he and Harry Warner had battled over the latter’s Depression-based decision to cut employee salaries by half—and Zanuck was gone by the time shooting began. It cost $115,000 and took all of three weeks to film, from December 12 through 31, 1932.23 But the picture took in more $283,000 and can only be considered a success.24

  * Beginning in July 1934, Hollywood studios were forced to submit all scripts to a central censoring agency, the Production Code Administration, for approval. The first general principle of the Production Code sums up the nature of the enterprise: “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.”

  Davis’s scorn for Ex-Lady might be inexplicable if there wasn’t such a notable rift between the movie’s appreciation of free love and the impossibly conventional domesticity she was attempting to achieve while filming it. She believed she could be a Hollywood star during the day and head home to be a transplanted Yankee wife every evening.

  Davis couldn’t resolve a related set of dueling expectations, this one about housing. She claimed to want to settle down, but in practice she did everything she could not to do so. Several years later—1941, to be exact—Bette, Ruthie, and Bobby Davis sat down one evening and enumerated the total number of apartments and houses that they had lived in: there were more than seventy-five of them. When they moved to Hollywood in December 1930—having done time in Lowell, Newton, Peterborough, various towns on Cape Cod, East Orange, Norwalk, and New York City—they first rented a Tudor cottage on Alta Loma Terrace near the Hollywood Bowl. Their occupancy didn’t last long.25 By the summer of 1931, the Davises had moved into a Hollywood Hills house owned by Douglas Fairbanks’s cameraman. “It happened to be the first shown the Davises by an agent,” wrote Mayme Ober Peake of the Boston Globe. “They looked no further, but leased it on the spot.” Peake was fascinated by Bette’s bedroom, “with its little rustic balcony—a cloistered cell in its simplicity compared with the average movie star’s boudoir! I saw more books—good books—than anything else.”26 Davis was, indeed, an avid reader, a characteristic Ham Nelson failed to admire. According to Ham, books took precedence over him.

  By mid-April 1932, Bette, Ruthie, and Bobby were living just around the corner from the Warners’ lot in Charles Farrell’s house at 9918 Toluca Lake Avenue, an expansive Tudor number with a large yard leading down to the water. By the end of June, they’d moved again—this time to 135 Zuma in Malibu.27 This was what Bette considered her “honeymoon house,” though soon after the wedding she and Ham and Ruthie and Bobby moved into a house at 1217 Horn Avenue, just north of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

  At least the Horn Avenue house actually comprised two buildings—as Bette describes it, “a white, ivy-covered little English house” in front for the newlyweds and a guesthouse in the back for the bride’s mother and sister. It appears to have been a mix of need and obligation that kept Bette Davis from setting her mother and sister up in their own house somewhere across town. As she puts it in The Lonely Life, “It was undeniable that I preferred being a cap
tive, rebellious Palomino to a free one. Ham was in a most awkward situation.”28

  Luckily for Ham, Bobby had another nervous breakdown and moved back East with Ruthie, the strain of Bette’s marriage having triggered something more or less obvious in the sad and dependent younger sister. Bobby’s face, always favoring Harlow to its own detriment, was beginning to look drawn and strained. Barbara Leaming describes Bobby’s emotional state: “Bobby’s eruptions often began by her becoming almost catatonic, as she curled up in the fetal position. Then, suddenly, she would leap to her feet and rush about, screaming uncontrollably at the top of her lungs until someone restrained her.”29 Ruthie felt that she and Bobby needed the support of family—family who weren’t fighting to become movie stars, that is—and so they headed back to Massachusetts.

  Bette and Ham moved again and again—first to one of Greta Garbo’s old residences on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, then to a sizable Spanish Colonial Revival house at 906 North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, and then to an unassuming but comfortable house at 5346 Franklin Avenue in Los Feliz.30

  She and Ham were still living in the house on Horn Avenue when she made Ex-Lady in December 1932. The film finds Davis cast once again as a glamorous illustrator: Helen Bauer is Dallas O’Mara from So Big, yanked away from Hardie Albright and his mother’s asparagus farm and reaching even greater success in New York, where she belongs. Her boyfriend, Don (Gene Raymond, whose hair is nearly as bleached as Bette’s), has a key to her apartment; that’s the first sign of Helen’s radicalism. As she explains in a late-night conversation with Don, “Nobody has any rights about me except me.” (“How about a Welsh rarebit!” she immediately offers in a brilliant non sequitur.) There’s some melodramatic filler involving Helen’s unctuous, unrequited suitor, Don’s married girlfriend, and other distractions, and in the end the marriage survives. But Ex-Lady’s pleasure lies not in its story or its secondary characters but rather in the cool, matter-of-fact sophistication of Davis’s performance: her elegance of movement, her hips slung slightly forward as she strides; the expression of exquisite boredom she affects in a dull dinner party scene; the slow, deliberate way she chews in that scene while listening to her tablemate drone on.