by Ed Sikov
When Davis cuts loose in the film’s climactic scene, it’s scenery chomping—loud, attention grabbing, histrionic. She gives Mildred the feral rage of a cornered animal, and the scene is justifiably famous. But it makes full sense only because Davis has been willing to debase herself all along. To set up Philip’s revelation, Cromwell cuts to a close-up of Mildred from Philip’s point of view: her eyes are languid; her mouth is slightly gaping. She is leaning forward in the drearily inviting stance of a cheap hooker. Philip has good reason to tell Mildred at last that she disgusts him; Bette Davis had never before been allowed to make herself so repulsive onscreen.
“Me?” she says, rolling her shoulders. “I disgust you? You. You! You’re too fine!” She begins to turn away from him but reels back and spits, “You won’t have none of me, but you’ll sit here all night looking at your naked females! You cad! You dirty swine!” She’s clutching her hands together just below the bottom of the screen, then jerks her right arm out briefly. “I never cared for you—not once! I was always making a fool of ya. Ya bored me stiff! I hated ya! It made me sick when I had ta let ya kiss me. I only did it because ya begged me!” Davis is doing all of this with piercing vocal rage but very little physical action; she’s once again gripping her hands together to contain herself physically—to fire it all out through her voice. “Ya hounded me—ya drove me crazy!” She wheels around but returns to face him again. “And after ya kissed me I always used to wipe my mouth. Wipe my mouth!” This is when she chooses the precise physical gesture: grossly, even obscenely, she employs the back of her arm to demonstrate the wiping. “But I made up for it! For every kiss I had a laugh . . .! We laughed at ya, because you were such a mug, a mug, a mug!” She hurls a plate to the floor. “You know what you are, you gimpy-legged monster?!”
Unfortunately for Bette, Cromwell cuts away from her at the height of her wrath to Howard to get his stricken reaction: “You’re a cripple! A cripple! A cripple!”
As the film critic Martin Shingler observes, “This is not Davis in a rage but an actress in motion, presenting fury through her shoulders, neck, torso, her arms and hands, her eyes and her mouth, through her voice and her breathing.”50 Davis is one of melodrama’s greatest dancers.
In the following scene, a knife cuts through a painting, and the camera pulls back to reveal Mildred in a garish black outfit with feathered collar. She’s breathing heavily, having laid the room to waste. Her mouth is lolling. “You love these things. You love what they’re meant to be.” Davis snarls the words with rancid sarcasm. “You want to be a doctor!” she snaps as she rips pages out of his medical textbook. Then she goes through the desk drawers until she finds Philip’s bonds. Throughout all of this, remarkably, Davis’s face is entirely obscured by a jauntily louche hat with a tacky oversized fabric flower, but she’s performing with her whole body so her face doesn’t need to be visible. “This’ll take ya through medical school,” she says as she sets the bonds on fire and leaves them burning in an ashtray. She stomps out of the room, leading with her shoulders.
Of Human Bondage is the first defining moment in Bette Davis’s career, and it’s psychologically perverse, to say the least. Motion pictures finally gave her the sweet chance to force millions of people to despise her.
CHAPTER
5
THE FIRST OSCAR
“DEAR GOD! WHAT A HORROR!” IS Davis’s description of the picture Jack Warner stuck her in after she returned to the studio after shooting Of Human Bondage. Housewife was yet another Warners programmer—something to fill the screen for the allotted seventy minutes while the audience finished its popcorn.1 George Brent and Ann Dvorak are young marrieds, Bill and Nan, with a son named Buddy; Bette is the sophisticated advertising copywriter who tries to break them up. They’re all old friends, but ambitious Pat (Bette) has gone off and seen the world and returned a successful and sophisticated career woman. At lunch with Nan, Pat sends back her duck because the dressing is made with sauterne rather than Chablis. “It’s not nearly as good as the canard sauvage I had in Paris,” she casually drops to an intimidated-looking Nan. Of course she steals Bill away, but Bill becomes so hardened and distracted by his affair with the modern Pat that he runs Buddy over with the car. That changes his tune but quick. He returns to Nan, leaving Pat to go off and drink her dinner with an aging cosmetics executive named Duprey.
Buddy recovers.
The film was shot from April 11 to May 7, 1934, though Bette, most displeased by the lackluster role she was being forced to play after Mildred Rogers, didn’t show up until April 18. She was inspired to appear only after a series of hostile telegrams from Warner Bros. that pointed out that she did not in fact have script approval and was forced to play any damned role the studio put her in.2
Adding insult to insult, Warners immediately assigned Bette to a secondary role in The Case of the Howling Dog. Bette rebelled again, this time refusing to appear at all. She stuck to her refusal even after a slew of wires and phone calls from the boys in the front office. At one point, Jack Warner himself telephoned her at home. Ham answered and told the head of the studio that Miss Davis was busy. She’d call him back, Ham said. She didn’t.3
The Case of the Howling Dog, the first film adaptation of an Erle Stanley Gardner legal-mystery novel, was to feature Warren William as Perry Mason and Mary Astor as the defendant, Bessie. It’s all about multiple wives and dogs and corpses buried under the garage. Bette was supposed to be Della Street, Mason’s ever-competent, mostly-in-the-background secretary.
And so she walked out. That Warners easily replaced her with a first-timer named Helen Trenholme indicates the meatlessness of the role. Trenholme made only one more film before retiring from the screen.
Davis was refusing to honor the terms of her contract, so the studio slapped her on suspension. Had Of Human Bondage not opened on June 27, 1934, to rave reviews, Davis might have remained on suspension for the rest of her tenure at the studio. But it was quite humiliating to Jack Warner to be widely seen as a clueless vulgarian and artless hack who kept sticking a brilliant actress—who, according to Life’s review of Of Human Bondage, had given “probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress”—in silly parts in silly movies or, in her current situation, kept her sequestered from the camera altogether.4
Bordertown was the result. Warner took Bette off suspension and paired her with the magnetic Paul Muni, who was an even bigger Warners star than James Cagney. Warner seemed to be getting the point at long last.
The film began shooting on August 17, 1934. Johnny Ramirez, fresh out of a storefront law school in downtown Los Angeles, swiftly gets disbarred after punching out the opposing counsel. He abandons his weeping mamacita and resurfaces, far to the south, as the bouncer, later the co-owner, of a bordertown casino run by good old Charlie Roark (Eugene Pallette). A ritzy white sedan pulls up at the curb. “Hello, Johnny!” says a familiar voice—Bette is Mrs. Marie Roark. She’s one hot number, and visually, too: the cinematographer, Tony Gaudio, is fond of bouncing intense light off of Marie’s brilliantly blonde hair. When Charlie heads off to L.A. to see his dentist, Marie makes her move on Johnny, but he spurns her. So when Charlie gets back with his new dentures, she bumps him off by leaving him drunk in the garage with the motor running.
After a brief interlude of guilt-free serenity, Marie starts to crack up, and Bette plays it up with flitting eyes and hair-clutching fingers. But Hal Wallis thought she wasn’t going nutty enough quickly enough. After seeing rushes of the scene in which Marie visits the construction site of Johnny’s new casino, Wallis was annoyed: “It’s about time she’s starting to crack. . . . She plays it like Alice in Wonderland.”5
There was a lengthy, loud fight on the set. The subject: cold cream. One scene finds Marie waking up in the Roarks’ vast baroque bed, and Bette decided to play it with an eye toward realism by smearing cold cream all over her face and applying curlers to her hair. The film’s tubby director, Archie Mayo, threw
a fit. Fits being contagious, Bette threw one, too, as did Hal Wallis. In Bette’s words, they “screamed at each other for four hours.”6 “You can’t look like that on the screen!” Wallis roared. Bette replied, equally loudly, that she looked precisely the way her character would look in bed in the morning. “Muni stood up for me,” Bette later claimed, but she lost the fight anyway.7
She won a more important one, however. In a courtroom scene late in the film—mad Marie has falsely accused Johnny of forcing her to murder Charlie—Mayo directed Bette to go completely bonkers in what she later described as “the fright-wig, bug-eyed tradition.”8 Davis dug in her heels and refused. Wallis was again summoned to the soundstage to mediate. “If you want me to do it obviously, silent picture style, then why don’t we bring back silent picture titles, too?” Bette argued. Her idea was to play her scene on the witness stand all but catatonically at first and grow increasingly distracted as the scene progressed. Although her performance isn’t especially subtle, it works. Given the twitches and spasms of her earlier scenes, for Davis to have ratcheted up Marie’s looniness to the shrieking level demanded by a hack like Archie Mayo would have provoked derisive hoots. Davis held her audiences to a higher standard, and they appreciated it.
From Bordertown, Warners pushed Davis into an odd, small movie—The Girl from 10th Avenue—which finds Bette as a shopgirl who distracts a jilted society fellow, Geoffrey (Ian Hunter), from his misery. One night they get both drunk and married. They plan to move to South America. His friends treat her like a golddigging whore. They fight and make up. That’s it. The most remarkable aspect of The Girl from 10th Avenue is that it was the fourth filmed version of the property. This one was shot in March 1935.
Her next film was no masterpiece, but it wasn’t embarrassing, either. In 1931, United Artists and Howard Hughes made The Front Page, a speedy newspaper comedy with Pat O’Brien and Adolphe Menjou. In 1935, Warner Bros. made Front Page Woman, with Bette Davis and George Brent—a proto–His Girl Friday with Brent in the Cary Grant role and Davis in Rosalind Russell’s. Like the original Front Page, two rival reporters threaten to best each other, and like His Girl Friday, they’re a guy and a gal in prickly love. As a hard-headed 1930s newspaperwoman (though she faints after witnessing her first electrocution), Davis gets to develop her independent, driven persona: the career woman who doesn’t give a damn if she ends up single. And she even manages to wear one of those skinny, weasel-like furs with the head still on it without looking camp.
Front Page Woman began shooting in mid-April 1935 and was released in July, around the time Special Agent started up. “I like you,” says the eponymous agent (George Brent) to Davis over a dinner table. “You don’t ask asinine questions at a ball game, you don’t get lipstick on a guy’s collar, and you carry your own cigarettes.” That’s the way he proposes to her. Since her character is just that kind of gal, she takes him up on the offer.
George Brent is a star whose luster has faded over the decades to the point that his popularity in the 1930s verges on the inexplicable. Brent was handsome but not sharply or memorably so. What once seemed dashing is now dulling. His masculinity, dependable and solid in the 1930s, looks merely stolid in retrospect. Special Agent was the fifth film Davis made with the affable if wooden star. She’d go on to make six more, and although two of them are among Davis’s finest (Jezebel and Dark Victory)—and as much as she liked him personally—Brent ended up hampering her films more than he helped them. Davis once said that Brent’s onscreen energy never matched his real-life vigor. After all, this man was a trained pilot and used to buzz the studio for laughs. Still, Brent’s virile charm rarely registered on celluloid, where it mattered most.
In Special Agent, Davis plays a gangster’s bookkeeper. It’s a mark of the early post–Production Code era in which the film was scripted and produced that Davis’s Julie remains entirely above reproach despite the central role she plays in the criminal activities of a vicious, murdering thug (Ricardo Cortez). Julie is yet another in a string of Davis’s smart women with jobs, apartments, and Orry-Kelly wardrobes. That her lifestyle comes by way of concealing a gangster’s profits from the government is an issue Special Agent both takes for granted and downplays; Warners wouldn’t abandon its down-and-dirty scenarios entirely, but the imposition of the Code in 1934 meant that the studio couldn’t flaunt them either.
There’s a blandness to Davis’s performance in Special Agent, however, that goes beyond the Code’s repressive moralism. She makes Julie a bit too comfortable with the bind she finds herself in as both a thug’s Gal Friday and a G-man’s stoolie-fiancée. “Maybe I won’t end up in the morgue,” she glibly observes toward the end of the movie. Then again, Special Agent’s writing—the screenwriters are Laird Doyle and Abem Finkel—is fairly low-grade even for a studio never known for its literary aspirations. With Davis and Brent each tied up with string inside the hideout, a cop outside actually utters the line “Whatever you do, keep your men under cover, or those kids in there are goners!”
IT IS TIME to introduce Joan Crawford’s broad-shouldered silhouette to the drama, if only to pry her quickly away from it, Bette Davis’s life and art being far more compelling than her overworked feud with Crawford. Davis’s next picture, Dangerous, costarred Franchot Tone, to whom Bette was quite attracted but who was in love with Joan, who over the years generated increasing friction with Bette, friction that led to the triumph of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? but that proceeded to get so out of hand that Joan fled the production of Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte midway through filming, and witty Bette pasted an eight-by-ten glossy of Joan with her eyes whited out and her teeth blackened in her 1964 scrapbook. . . . Forget the resurrection of Christ. For gay men of a certain age, this is the greatest story ever told.
This particular reiteration begins with Dangerous’s supervisor, Harry Joe Brown, supposedly witnessing a sexually liberated Bette Davis giving Franchot Tone a blow job in one of their dressing rooms. Brown told Crawford’s biographers Lawrence Quirk and William Schoell that “when they saw me they didn’t seem to give a damn.”9 At the same time, everyone connected with Dangerous noticed that Tone kept showing up after lunch covered in Crawford’s lipstick, and that Bette was terribly jealous. Moreover, Joan was really bisexual and always wanted a piece of Bette, and the virgin-est Yankee who ever walked in could, by 1935, give adulterous head to her male costar but Bette would have no part of a lesbian affair for the rest of her life, and that is supposedly one of the foundations of the Homeric feud.
Moving on. Davis didn’t like the script for Dangerous, at least at first. “It was maudlin and mawkish with a pretense at quality, which in scripts, as in home furnishings, is often worse than junk.”10 It was the work of Laird Doyle, who called it Hard Luck Dame. Davis’s derision notwithstanding, it’s one of Doyle’s better efforts. But as was often the case, Davis’s lack of respect for the script, even misplaced, only served to fuel the fire of her performance. Some actors need, as they say, to believe in the material—to maintain the touchingly naive faith that the characters they play are not in fact fictitious. Davis, a supreme stylist, often did better when she thought the script was crap and the characters phony. Her Yankee ethos was sturdy and effective: she believed that it was her duty to make a bad script or a shaky character work, so she pushed herself all the harder and made her artistic decisions all the more adroitly. As Brigid Brophy writes, “She is actually good in bad parts. . . . Miss Davis needed her bad scripts as sorely as they needed her; they were what she needed to wrestle through in pursuit of that ‘truth’ and ‘realism’ (her words) which to her are ‘more than natural.’ ”11
The story of a once superb, now derelict Broadway actress—what Jeanne Eagels might have become if she hadn’t overdosed on chloral hydrate in 1929—Dangerous won Davis her first Academy Award.12 This Oscar is usually considered to be just the consolation prize for not even having been nominated for Of Human Bondage. (The 1934 winner was Claudette Colbert for It Hap
pened One Night, one of the record-breaking five Oscars awarded to that film; the other nominees were Norma Shearer for The Barretts of Wimpole Street and the opera singer Grace Moore for One Night of Love.) But Dangerous also has something else going for it in terms of Academy tastes: this time, Davis’s calculating schemer finds salvation in the end. Mildred Rogers dies a pitiful, disgusting death—syphilis barely disguised as consumption. The hard-luck dame of Dangerous, on the other hand, finds redemption not only from alcoholism but from egocentrism as well—quite a feat for any actress, and consequently one the Academy found Oscar-worthy.
Don Bellows (Franchot Tone), a successful society architect, goes slumming downtown one night with his indefatigably cordial fiancée, Gail (Margaret Lindsay), and notices the on-the-skids actress Joyce Heath sitting alone in the corner downing her thirtieth shot of gin. He gives Gail the slip and takes Joyce to his magnificent upstate farm for a week of rehabilitation, and soon he’s financing Joyce’s triumphant return to Broadway and ditching Gail, who takes her rejection with perfect poise. But Joyce’s jinx, the hard luck of the original title, returns in the form of a secret husband who won’t give her a divorce, so she hustles him into Don’s car, speeds into the night, and crashes into a convenient tree.
One might assume that such desperate melodrama would entice Bette Davis into a paroxysm of scenery chewing in an attempt to distract her audience from the plot’s preposterousness. But, if anything, she underplays almost every scene, a strategy that gives Joyce Heath a measure of dignity that isn’t inherent to the material. Here, Davis’s struggle is to make it all look easy. There’s a moment toward the end, when Joyce must selflessly act selfish for Don’s own good: “You’re no longer important to me. Your importance ended when the show closed,” she says. The lines are cruel, but Davis plays the scene so coolly that there’s only the barest indication that Joyce is being duplicitous. Or is she? Ernie Haller’s lighting is flattering to Davis but not unduly glamorizing, and Bette relies on it to catch the glint in her eyes—the shine that reveals the performance behind the performance, the lie Joyce tells that convinces Don to leave her. It’s the seasoned performance of a twenty-seven-year-old actress with twenty-seven films under her still-tiny belt.
