Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Over the course of the previous year, Davis and her agent, Mike Levee, had been fighting with Warner Bros. over Bette’s right to perform on radio dramas. Jack Warner, who called Levee “a little dynamo . . . who had once had a job as an assistant cameraman at Paramount and had lately turned agent,”39 took the firm position that the studio had the contractual right to approve everything Davis did, including radio broadcasts.40 For example, she didn’t want to do a radio adaptation of Dangerous but, instead, an adaptation of Aesop’s fable The Lion and the Mouse. After much back and forth, Warners finally agreed to let Bette perform The Lion and the Mouse but only with the understanding that there would be a big plug for Dangerous both before and after the broadcast.41

  In addition, it was Warner Bros. and the studios that controlled the advertising racket—stars plugging cigarettes, stars hawking soft drinks, stars shilling for Max Factor or Buick or BO-busting Mum—and the stars whose pictures graced these products in print ads had nothing to say about what they were peddling. As the Oscar historians Mason Wiley and Damien Bona report, Jack Warner responded to Davis’s winning the highest award in world film acting by “leasing her face to Quaker Puffed Rice.” “Breakfast fit for a queen of the screen,” the ad trumpeted.42

  And then there was the question of money.

  In 1935, at Warner Bros., Kay Francis made $115,000. Paul Muni got $50,000 per picture; approval rights for story, role, and script; sole star billing onscreen and in all advertising; loan-outs only on consent; and the right to appear onstage whenever he chose.43

  Jimmy Cagney made just under $150,000. And Cagney was grousing about it—for good reason. His films were raking it in at the box office, but Warners still had him bound to a contract that paid him only a small percentage of the studio’s take. Audiences were paying to see Cagney’s pictures not because Warner Bros. made them; they were paying to see Cagney. For Cagney, $150,000 was a paltry fraction of what he deserved.

  Bette Davis made all of $18,200 that year. Even toothy Guy Kibbee earned more than two and a half times what Bette Davis did.44

  The major studios were under attack on other fronts as well. Cagney filed his suit on February 7, 1936. Two weeks later, the attorney general of the United States filed suit in federal court against Warner Bros., Paramount, and RKO on the grounds that the studios were conspiring to monopolize interstate commerce in motion pictures by controlling not only the production and distribution of their films but also their exhibition by their outright ownership of theaters or the bullying contracts they forced on independently owned houses. This was a limited suit involving only a few theaters in St. Louis; the government’s major victory didn’t come until 1948 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., et al., which effectively killed the studio system by forcing the majors to divest themselves of their theaters. Still, the government scored a significant victory in late April 1936 when the studios agreed to the government’s demand that they stop preventing their competitors from doing business, and the suit was dropped.45

  The stars, however, were still seething—over salaries, over control of their public images, over the long-term contracts that once seemed to offer security but that in practice turned them into indentured servants. Every time Jack Warner unilaterally slapped Bette Davis or James Cagney on suspension for perceived infractions, that time was tacked onto the end of their contract. It was like punishing a child by telling him he couldn’t listen to his favorite radio program for a week, and if the child was especially temperamental, a week would easily turn into a month, a month into a year, and eventually the eight-year-old would find himself banished from the family radio until he was twenty-seven. To Davis and Cagney and others, this was an absurd way to treat the very artists whose names and talents brought in the bucks in the first place. It was time for a fight.

  CHAPTER

  6

  UP IN ARMS

  SATAN MET A LADY; THE GOLDEN ARROW; the Best Actress award as a consolation prize for not winning for a picture produced by a studio other than Warner Bros.; a restrictive contract; shilling unwillingly for cereal; working; working harder; earning less than Guy Kibbee. . . this is the context in which Jack Warner told Bette Davis that her next role would be that of a lady lumberjack.

  The film was to be called God’s Country and the Woman. Jo Barton, the owner of Barton Logging Co., falls in love with Steve Russett (George Brent), a rival logger who has taken a menial job at Barton. Forest greenery would play a major role; there would be, in the words of Sunset Boulevard’s Joe Gillis, “a lotta outdoors stuff.”

  “I won’t do it!” Bette roared. “Satan Met a Lady was bad enough, but this is absolute tripe!”1

  But it will be in Technicolor, Jack Warner said.

  No, said Bette.

  “The heroine,” Bette writes in The Lonely Life, “was an insufferable bore who scowled while everyone kept yelling ‘Timber!’ . . . If I never acted again in my life, I was not going to play in God’s Country. It was now a matter of my own self-respect.”2

  Bette never knew it, but it might have been far worse. Warner Bros. memos reveal that in April, when Mike Levee was pushing hard for a new contract for Bette with new terms and payments and end dates, Hal Wallis was advising Jack Warner to stick her in a picture—any picture—as quickly as possible and not even wait for God’s Country and the Woman. Wallis wanted Davis and Levee to know precisely who was boss.3 It was like a bad joke: “Why would Hal Wallis stuff his studio’s most talented actress into a throwaway quickie directed by a hack?” Answer: “Because he could.”

  Warner didn’t take Wallis’s advice, but he wasn’t about to be pushed around by any little Best Actress winner either: “The shiny new Oscar she had won for Dangerous began to look like the Statue of Liberty to her, and she said she wouldn’t work for us any more unless she had story approval,” he later wrote.4

  “As a friend of Bette, I hope she won’t cut off her nose to spite her pretty face,” Louella Parsons opined.5

  Bette Davis was not about to take career advice from a gossip columnist, however powerful Parsons may have been been. She knew she worked hard, which in Hollywood terms meant not only that she performed before the camera in film after film, month after month, year after year, but that she performed before the stills photographer for every film, too. And showed up for wardrobe fittings. And makeup tests. She obliged the studio’s publicists when they set up interviews; she obliged the journalists and made nice with professional tattlers like Parsons. What she had little knack and less inclination for, however, was socializing with the in crowd. She preferred to go home and read. She and Ham would, from time to time, go out to nightclubs and restaurants, but she wasn’t the type of movie star who strove to be photographed out on the town. She was careful not to make enemies, but she didn’t go out of her way to make friends with big shots for the sake of her career.

  And her mouth grew increasingly big. In late March 1936, Bette took her trip to New York instead of joining Ruthie in Honolulu. Upon her arrival on the twenty-fifth, she immediately mouthed off in the press about the National Legion of Decency, the Catholic watchdog organization that devoted itself to protecting the morals of the nation’s moviegoers by rating movies on a scale from A to C, A being acceptable for all, C being condemned. Infamously, the Legion had condemned Charles Laughton’s The Private Life of Henry VIII because it saw the picture as sanctioning divorce.6 Right-wing religious zealots were trying to put clamps on artistic freedom, and Bette Davis—an increasingly liberal Roosevelt Democrat who actually believed in the practice of liberty as well as the concept—was outraged. From the New York World-Telegram: “They would make all the women marry all the men in the movies. There would never be any illegitimate children on the screen—even if the story is based on a great classic. And there would be very little real life in the movies if they had their way. We aren’t making pictures for children. We’re making them for adults.”7

  For the New Yo
rk Times, she pitched a marvelous script: “Her idea is to have Laughton and herself cast as costermonger and fishwife in a scummy waterfront hovel, with the domestic air filled with Billingsgate and dead fish. Florence McGee or maybe Bonita [Granville] would be their child—and a mean, no-account brat, too, according to the script Miss Davis has in mind. Anyway, after the necessary hour or so of unmitigated nastiness all around on the screen, daughter would knock off both her parents by stabbing them with a broken gin bottle in a moment of pique and then dope herself to death in an opium den at the screen age of about 13.”8 Freed from the shackles of Warners’ press office, Bette Davis was having herself a marvelous time.

  The Times also reported, obviously getting its information directly from Bette, that she was refusing to do retakes on The Golden Arrow and was planning to send her studio a series of wires: “am in jail as dangerous character stop,” “quarantined stop have measles stop,” “and a few more just saying ‘stop.’ ”

  She headed to Boston on April 3, arriving at Boston’s South Station at dawn. She thought she’d be making a quiet entrance, but Warner Bros. had arranged a rather more public greeting: the platform was teeming with reporters. “Smile, Miss Davis!” a photographer shouted. “Now wave your hand!” Bette was having none of it. “Oh, please!” she snapped. “Do let’s be original! Suppose you take a picture of someone leaving a train without waving a hand—just this once.”

  That afternoon, a thousand guests attended a special luncheon in her honor at the Brae Burn Country Club in Newton.9 (A telegram in the Davis archives notes the contact she made with her father: “Congratulations and best wishes thank you for calling—Harlow M. Davis.”)10

  She was back in New York by April 7 when she received a message from Mike Levee, who told her that he’d notified Warners in writing of their demands but that he didn’t put in writing the fact that she was threatening to refuse to return to work without changing her contract because this would have been what he called “exceedingly bad strategy.” Levee advised her to stay in New York as long as she wanted, but he suggested that she rethink her refusal to do retakes for The Golden Arrow. As to her willingness to work for Warner Bros. beyond those retakes, however, Levee told Bette that it was entirely her choice.

  By the time she left for New York, Davis had been trying to get Warners to agree to a new contract for at least a month. Her lawyer, Martin Gang, had met with Jack Warner in March with no success. What she wanted was reasonable—to her: a limit to the number of Warner pictures she would make in a given year; a vacation for three consecutive months; and, by the way, the right to do pictures for other studios during that time.11

  In their memoirs, both Davis and Warner are clear about the situation regarding God’s Country and the Woman—perhaps too clear. The reality is more nuanced. On May 24, Bette did a radio interview with Edwin Schallert and told his listening audience that her next film would indeed be God’s Country and the Woman, that it was going to be in Technicolor, and that she was eager to see herself in color onscreen.12 On June 6 and again on June 8, Bette requested meetings with Jack Warner. She told the Warners executive Roy Obringer that she wanted to be on the Shell Chateau radio program on June 20—and she willingly agreed to plug God’s Country as part of the agreement.13

  Warner sent her the continuity script on June 18 and told her to report to Orry-Kelly the following day for costume discussions.14 Bette’s response—a telegram to Warner—suggests that it wasn’t God’s Country that stuck in her craw; it was Warner’s refusal to give her a new and more favorable contract. That, not “Timber!” is what really kept her from playing the lady lumberjack: “It has just come to my attention that Mike Levee has heretofore assured you that I would do the forthcoming picture without a change of contract. There has just been delivered to me a letter from Mr. Levee to that effect and I assume that a copy of it will come to your attention. Such representation to you by him was unauthorized and irrespective thereof a review of my actions since February would certainly be inconsistent with any such alleged promise. Bette Davis.”15

  The taste of crow in his mouth, or worse—familiar flavors on the Hollywood palette—Levee told Roy Obringer later about his role in the whole affair. As Levee replayed it for Obringer, he’d advised Bette not only to do God’s Country but to put herself in an “amiable” frame of mind. This, he believed at the time as well as in retrospect, was a far better tactic to use than Martin Gang’s hostile and demanding one, and so he, Levee, had dismissed Gang by letter on May 21. According to Levee, Bette had told him personally that she’d go ahead and do God’s Country as long as Levee would see to it that her cooperation led to a new contract. But as soon as she got home that day, Levee claimed, she sent Levee a wire ordering him to take no further action. Bette Davis planned to handle the matter herself.16 “This was an independent revolt of my own,” Davis later wrote. “I was forced into some very definite action for the future of my career.”17 As she acknowledged to Dick Cavett many years later, “I never was one to go for advice much.”18

  On June 19, another of Davis’s lawyers, Dudley Furse, sent a letter to the studio setting out Bette’s terms for a new contract: five years, with one original year and four options to follow; the first year at $100,000, the second at $140,000, the third at $180,000, the fourth at $200,000, and the fifth at $220,000; a limit on the number of films per year set at four; three consecutive months of vacation, with the right to do a fifth picture on her own during that vacation; the right to do four radio programs of her own choosing; the right to be photographed by her favorite cinematographers, Tony Gaudio, Ernie Haller, or Sol Polito, “if reasonably possible”; a 6:00 p.m. quitting time; her name above the title and the first to be listed in the credits if the film was principally a woman’s story; if the film was mostly a man’s story, then she would grant her leading man the right to first billing.19

  Jack L. Warner would have none of it. On June 20, he slapped Bette on suspension and gave away her role in God’s Country; the suspension would last as long as it took her replacement, Beverly Roberts, to complete the film. Bette, covering her legal tracks as well as displaying good New England manners, replied briefly and promptly: “I am sincerely sorry we could not get together. I would have enjoyed very much playing Jo Barton.”20

  A longer, more passionate letter followed the next day: “When I saw you in your office the other day you assured me you would do all the things I wanted anyway with the exception of the loan-out, so it is hard for me to understand why you won’t put it in writing.” Davis discussed her ambition—to become “a great actress”—and she simply asked to be able to take good parts when they came along. She’d even take less money than she asked for, she told Warner, if only “you would give me my ‘rights.’ You have asked me to be level headed in this matter. As a happy person, I can work like hell. As an unhappy one, I make myself and everyone around me unhappy.”

  A lack of self-knowledge was never Bette’s Davis’s chief problem. “I am an essentially high-strung person,” she noted. She went on: “I know and you do, too, [that] in a business where you have a fickle public to depend on, the money should be made when you mean something, not when the public has had time to tell you to ‘go to hell.’ ” She concluded reasonably: “If you can see your way to giving me my rights clauses, the loan-out, you see, would balance the decrease in what you pay me. I am sure we can get together on the money.”21

  In the middle of all of this, she asked Warner for permission to do The Rudy Vallee Hour in Texas on July 9. The Warners executive Roy Obringer advised Jack Warner not to give Bette permission to do anything at all.22

  On June 23, 1936, Davis and her business manager, Vernon Wood, met with Warner, Wallis, and Obringer at the studio. Warner told Bette that he would consider a new seven-year contract for her if she agreed to perform in God’s Country and the Woman—Beverly Roberts, the replacement, could easily be replaced—and that the terms of this contract would be $2,000 per week for the first year, wi
th options covering the following years at $2,500 for the second year, $2,750 for the third, $3,000 for the fourth, $3,250 for the fifth, $3,500 for the sixth, and $4,000 for the seventh. Davis objected primarily to the contract’s duration and requested that it be for only five years. According to Obringer, Bette left the meeting saying she would think about it and she wasn’t heard from again.23

  That wasn’t entirely true. Bette called the studio at some point and told a functionary that she’d be happy to let someone else use her dressing room while she was on strike. But Jack Warner refused. “I want it left just as it is,” the boss said.24

  One of the key points Bette Davis failed to grasp in her noble, quixotic rebellion was the sheer might of the corporation she was bucking. The massive amount of material in the Warner archives at the University of Southern California—the vast number of pieces of paper, let alone the verbal content of the pages—silently but powerfully demonstrates not only that Bette’s was a steeply uphill battle on legal grounds alone but also that the entire machinery of Warner Bros.’ legal, business, and records departments was ready to be deployed against her. It wasn’t only the Burbank studio and its paper pushers, either. The corporation men in New York, the people Billy Wilder used to call “the money boys,” were turning their guns on her as well.

  No American producer would possibly be willing to take on Warner Bros. by contracting with Bette Davis to star in a film. Enter the colorful impresario Ludovico Toeplitz, whom Davis called an “Anglo-Italian mogul,” the uncredited producer of Laughton’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (credit went to the film’s director, Alexander Korda) and, most recently, Maurice Chevalier’s The Beloved Vagabond. Toeplitz was a bearded, round-faced man who resembled the actor Sebastian Cabot.25 Jack Warner called him “Mephistopheles.”26