by Ed Sikov
ROBERT E. SHERWOOD’S GANGSTER MELODRAMA, The Petrified Forest, opened on Broadway on January 7, 1935, and starred Leslie Howard as an effete British writer who has actually written nothing at all. Humphrey Bogart costarred as a grim killer heading for an existential as well as geographic border. By October, Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves’s adaptation was in production at Warner Bros.
The studio bought the property for Howard and Edward G. Robinson, Bogart having all but abandoned Hollywood after his minor role in Three on a Match, Warners having forgotten him, never really having seen him in the first place. Robinson, perhaps out of pride, later claimed that he didn’t relish the idea of playing yet another gangster and purposely backed out of the project. But of greater impact was Leslie Howard’s incessant lobbying for Bogart to play the role of Duke Mantee again. “No Bogart, no deal,” reads one cable from Howard to Jack Warner.13
It was a slow-going production, especially for Warner Bros., where actors and technicians alike were essentially human sprockets whose chief purpose was to yank movies through production as briskly as the front office could spur them. Shooting began on October 14.14 By the end of the month the production was three days behind schedule, and Hal Wallis was becoming aggravated. Wallis was a man of exacting taste and had a nagging compulsion to care. Unlike some of his colleagues at Warners, Wallis understood that crafting a motion picture could take time, that getting it right was as important as getting it in the can. But even Wallis was losing patience after hearing reports that Leslie Howard had been showing up on the set anywhere from thirty to ninety minutes late every day and feeling no particular need to explain himself. Then Bette got a sore throat on a Friday, skipped that day’s shoot, and refused to come in on Sunday to make it up. She sprained her ankle on the morning of November 22.
The Petrified Forest went into overtime for another reason, too: its director, Archie Mayo, shot a great deal of unusable footage, the most ludicrous of which was a close-up of Bogart with a mounted moose head in the background. Mayo had framed the shot in such a clumsy way that the moose appeared to be growing out of Bogart’s head. Wallis was especially enraged by this boo-boo because Mayo really had only had one interior set to work with—the roadhouse dining room—and should have known his way around it. The production finally closed on November 30, a full eleven days behind schedule.
Aside from some lunar-looking desert locations, which were filmed at Red Rock Canyon near Las Vegas, The Petrified Forest takes place at a last-chance gas station/barbecue joint somewhere in the pasteboard Southwest of a Warners soundstage in Burbank, with strategically rolling tumbleweeds indicating the raw timelessness of artificiality. Bette’s character, Gabby, yearns to leave this drab middle-of-nowhere for the excitement and vibrant culture of France, but she’s stuck there with her ineffectual father and a fidgety old coot named Gramps—stuck, that is, until Leslie Howard’s Alan Squier appears out of nowhere and discovers the means for her to depart. The agent of her exit is Duke Mantee, a can-do American man of action who, in this perversely modern work, takes the form of Bogart’s morbid, murdering criminal, a refreshing contrast to Howard’s tired but florid uselessness.
HOWARD: I began to feel the enchantment of this desert. I looked up at the sky, and the stars seemed to be mocking me, reproving me. They were pointing the way to that gleaming sign and saying, “There’s the end of your tether! You thought you could escape and skip off to the Phoenix Palace, but we know better!” That’s what the stars told me. And perhaps they know that carnage is imminent, and that I’m due to be among the fallen. Fascinating thought!
BOGART (snarling): Let’s skip it.
GRAMPS: It certainly does feel great to have a real killer around here again!
Davis is in muted form again in The Petrified Forest, understating her naively romantic Gabby to an extraordinary degree. It’s her most modest and generous performance to date. She employs no tics, displays no dynamism. Her Gabby is a girl of not particularly profound dreams who may or may not make it to Europe in the end, so lacking is she in the ambition and drive that were essential to Bette’s own personality. It’s safe to assume that underplaying Gabby was a conscious decision on Davis’s part, a deliberate act of actorly generosity that kept the central drama of the piece between Howard and Bogart—beautiful Old World fatigue and manly, pointless New World achievement. Sol Polito, the film’s cinematographer, takes a similar view of the drama. He’s fascinated by Bogart’s crags and scruff and doesn’t do much to overemphasize Bette’s porcelain-like complexion.
“I hope you don’t mind my staring at you like that,” Davis said to Michael Caine many years later, around the time of Alfie (1966). “But when I saw you I thought of Leslie Howard. You remind me so much of him.” “I was very slim in those days,” Caine reports, “with long blond hair, and other people had told me before that I resembled him.” Bette continued: “Did you know that Leslie screwed every woman on every movie he was ever in, with the exception of me? I told him that I was not going to be plastered on the end of a list of his conquests.” (“I made what I considered to be a sort of approving moral grunt,” says Caine. “The reason I was staring at you,” Davis continued, “was that I was thinking what difference would it have made now if I had.” Caine describes the last part as having had “a sort of a wistful tone about it.”)15
BETTE LEFT THE set of The Petrified Forest on Friday, November 29, 1935, and sent her lawyer to Jack Warner’s office the following day. The reason: she had just received a letter ordering her to appear three days later for wardrobe discussions for the next picture the studio had pitched her into: The Man in the Black Hat, Warners’ second attempt at making a murder mystery of one of Dashiell Hammett’s novels. Warner declined to be in his office on Saturday when the lawyer arrived, so Bette fired off a telegram: she had worked for six weeks straight on The Petri-fied Forest, she noted, and she felt that she needed two or three weeks to recuperate rather than start another film on Monday. “I have been ill several times on the picture as it is,” she told Warner, and so really she had no choice but to refuse to appear at all in The Man in the Black Hat.
Warner responded by insisting that the studio’s own doctor verify the state of Bette’s health and sent him to her house on Franklin Avenue at 6:00 p.m. on Monday. Bette found it simply impossible to be home at the time, and in any event, she tartly observed in a subsequent communication with her boss, she refused to be examined by Warners’ doctor on the grounds that she had not actually claimed to be sick but had merely requested a rest, having been sick previously. Warner slapped her on suspension as of Tuesday. The contretemps was resolved in Warner Bros.’ favor on Friday when Bette reported to the wardrobe department for costume discussions for The Man in the Black Hat, whereupon she was promptly taken off suspension.16
The Man in the Black Hat went through several title changes before it was released in late July 1936—Hard Luck Dame, Men on Her Mind, The Man with the Black Hat, and finally Satan Met a Lady. Hammett’s original title—The Maltese Falcon—would have been better, but Warners had already used it for the first go-round in 1931 with Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez. Besides, in this version they’d changed the eponymous falcon into a treasure-filled ivory horn, Roland’s Trumpet, which would have made a poor title. (Roland’s Trumpet has to do with an ancient instrument, Charlemagne, Saracens, a cache of invaluable jewels. . . . )
Satan Met a Lady is terrible. The New York Times appears to have had the inside track on the mess when it called the film “merely a farrago of nonsense representing a series of practical studio compromises with an unworkable script.”17 However poor the original script may have been, though, Warners’ editor Max Parker assembled an initial cut that Warners’ executives—at least one of whom had approved the script, after all—found particularly incomprehensible, so they brought in Warren Low to recut the picture.18 (Satan Met a Lady was the first of eight Bette Davis films Low edited. According to Davis, Low was “the greatest editor at Warner Bros
. I owe him a lot. He used to fight for me when something of mine was going to be cut that would hurt my performance.”19) But the end result was still a fiasco. Attempting to ride the coattails of MGM’s The Thin Man, the director, William Dieterle, makes feeble attempts at blending mystery with comedy, but they don’t work. With the spectacle of Bette whipping a gun out of a smart, tailored jacket and forcing Warren William out of her luxe apartment—not to mention Arthur Treacher stabbing a couch to death with a dagger and busty Alison Skip-worth turning up as the notorious Madame Barabbas—the whole enterprise should have been a lot more fun.
In late 1935 and early 1936, while Warner Bros. was shoehorning Bette Davis into Satan Met a Lady, John Ford, at RKO, was preparing a much more elegant picture: Mary of Scotland, with Katharine Hepburn as Mary. Bette coveted the role of Elizabeth, Mary’s rival. One of her lawyers, Martin Gang, went so far as to tell Warner Bros. that RKO was ready to cast her in Mary of Scotland if Warners would agree to the loan, but Warners turned down the request. Ford’s biographer Scott Eyman astutely ascribes the decision to Warners’ “corporate ego” not being able to “risk another Davis success at another studio” after her triumph in Of Human Bondage. That said, Ford himself wanted Tallulah Bankhead to be Elizabeth but ended up choosing Fredric March’s wife, Florence Eldridge. (A much more unlikely candidate for Elizabeth I—Ginger Rogers—also campaigned for the role.) Bette’s own account of her disappointment puts the blame on Ford, not Jack Warner. Davis claimed she was granted a meeting with Ford, who (in the words of Whitney Stine, another of her biographers) gruffly “told her she talked too much and ended the appointment.”20
So instead of playing Elizabeth of England for one of the greatest directors in the world, Davis ended up having to turn herself into an ersatz cosmetics heiress for Alfred E. Green in The Golden Arrow, yet another film she despised.
The Golden Arrow is a screwball comedy about an heiress and a reporter, only the heiress isn’t really an heiress but a working girl plucked out of the “cashier’s cage of a hick town cafeteria” in order to pose as the madcap Daisy Appleby of the face cream Applebys. Davis could play comedy well when asked to, and personally she was a very funny lady, but she never got comedy in the way Hepburn or Jean Arthur or Irene Dunne did. These other actresses were willing to demean themselves for laughs; Davis was only willing to do it for drama’s sake. She found screwball comedy unbecoming on principle in ways other screwball stars never did, and it hampered her ability to let loose.
Davis and George Brent each acquire black eyes near the end of the film, then get into a cab. “The international hilarity this was supposed to provoke was further insured by a three-shot in which the hackie himself had not one but two shiners,” Davis writes in The Lonely Life. “The whole affair was a black eye as far as I was concerned.”21
It’s brittle, perhaps, but not bad. Screwball comedies are often about the irrepressible theatricality of life and the enchanting impossibility of love—the black eyes lovers inevitably get in pursuit of each other. But at this point in her tenure at Warner Bros., Bette Davis wasn’t inclined to find such stuff funny. She wanted tougher meat to chew. She saw herself as a serious actress, not a clown. And to her, the makeup department’s black eye was just another symbol of Jack Warner’s abuse.
The Golden Arrow began shooting on Monday, January 20, 1936.22 “Am dead,” Davis telegrammed to Hal Wallis at the end of the third week of filming. She called in sick on Friday, February 7, citing “eye strain shooting in blazing sun and glare of water and reflectors.”23 (There are several scenes set on a yacht.)
Fighting with Warner Bros. was becoming integral to Bette Davis’s life, as necessary as acting and more satisfyingly vital than her husband. Although the Academy nominated her for the Best Actress award for Dangerous, Davis’s increasing compulsion to turn everything into an iron-clad bone of contention led her to issue a threat: she would not attend the awards dinner as one of Warners’ shining lights, the studio’s Best Actress nominee, but would instead fly off to Honolulu for a vacation with Ruthie. Davis eventually agreed to attend the dinner and go to Hawaii two days later. Still, it must have rankled her that she had specifically to request permission for the trip from Jack Warner.24 (As it turned out, she ditched Ruthie in Honolulu but traveled to New York instead, prompting Ruthie to send a guilt-tripping three-word telegram to her daughter: “Anyone love me?”)25
ON MARCH 5, 1936, in a banquet hall at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, D. W. Griffith announced that the winner of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ award for Best Actress was Bette Davis for Dangerous. “There was a shout from my table and everyone was kissing me,” Davis writes in The Lonely Life. But as she walked to the stage to accept the award, self-doubt erupted. She knew: “It’s a consolation prize. This nagged at me. It was true that even if the honor had been earned, it had been earned last year. There was no doubt that Hepburn’s performance [in Alice Adams] deserved the award.”26 In those days, the Academy released the results of the voting after all the awards were presented. The president of the Academy, Frank Capra, revealed later that evening that Katharine Hepburn had in fact come in second, with Elisabeth Bergner coming in third for the British drama Escape Me Never.27
A genius well on his way down, Griffith was stern as he handed the statuette to Bette: “You don’t know how lucky you are, young lady.” “I do,” Bette replied. Griffith, not convinced, kept on going: “At your age, to be where you are—making all that money, fame, and everything!”28
Bette later claimed to have christened Oscar Oscar; according to her, he had no name before she bestowed one upon him. She observes hilariously in The Lonely Life that the statuette was “a Hollywood male and, of course, epicene.” (The book is generously spiced with references to Hollywood pretty boys as “sisters.”) The golden statuette’s ass, however, “was the spit of my husband’s. Since the O. in Harmon O. Nelson stood for Oscar, Oscar it has been ever since.”29
Davis’s claim startled Margaret Herrick, the Academy’s former director and its first librarian, who thought she’d named it after her uncle. The veteran Hollywood scribe Sidney Skolsky, too, was under the impression that he’d done the naming two years earlier in one of his columns.30 So, in her annotations to Mother Goddam, Whitney Stine’s first biography of Davis, Davis withdrew her claim: “A sillier controversy never existed. I don’t feel my fame and fortune came from naming Oscar ‘Oscar.’ I relinquish once and for all any claim that I was the one—so, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the honor is all yours.”31
According to Mayme Ober Peake, Bette wore to the ceremony “a simple navy blue frock with white polka dots and pique trim.”32 According to Bette, “It was very expensive.” But a fan magazine reporter took the occasion of the Best Actress’s trip to a Biltmore ladies’ room to berate her for her atrocious lack of sense, let alone taste: “How could you? A print! You could be dressed for a family dinner. Your photograph is going round the world. Don’t you realize? Aren’t you aware?’ ”33
What she was aware of was her relatively low income and her strict contractual obligations to Warner Bros. She was acutely cognizant of the lack of control she exerted over her persona; the relentless conveyer belt of thirty-one films she had cranked out in only six years in Hollywood; and the fact that Warners wasn’t giving her the best scripts, the best directors, the best anything. Jack Warner seemed—to Bette—to have no idea how to manage her increasingly successful career, and she begrudged it, ever more feverishly.
She knew she wasn’t being cast in the best of the studio’s productions. In 1935, for instance, Michael Curtiz tested her for the haughty Arabella Bishop in his swashbuckling epic Captain Blood, which starred the unearthly beautiful and athletic newcomer Errol Flynn. She was enraged when Olivia de Havilland got the role instead. The producer Robert Lord had suggested Bette for the lead in Give Me Your Heart, a melodrama, but Warners cast Kay Francis instead. Davis was actually announced for the role of Julia
in Another Dawn, but again Kay Francis took the role, this time opposite Errol Flynn; it was a melodrama about a woman who marries a British pilot after the love of her life is killed in a plane crash. (Coincidently, the screenwriter, Laird Doyle, died in a plane crash shortly before the film was released.)34
According to Stine, Bette craved the lead in Anthony Adverse, but Olivia de Havilland landed the part.35 Stine also quotes Silver Screen’s “Projections—Bette Davis”: “She would like to play the Helen Mencken role in Congai some day, and the Miriam Hopkins role in Jezebel, and the Florence Reed role of Mother Goddam in The Shanghai Gesture—although she is quite sure that if by any fluke this stage play ever reached the screen, she would be called Mother Goodness Gracious. In other words, our little Bette craves something with guts, and wishes to leave the sweets to the sweet.”36
What Warners bought for her was something called Mountain Justice, a convoluted story about a woman’s crusade against ignorant hillbillies.37
Warners also bought the rights to C. S. Forester’s 1935 novel The African Queen as a vehicle for Bette, but the studio quickly forgot about the project, and it’s not even clear whether Davis ever knew the studio had ever had her in mind for it.38
