Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Toeplitz flew to Los Angeles, met with Bette, and offered her the leads in two films: I’ll Take the Low Road, to be filmed at Ealing Studios in London, and a film with Chevalier to be filmed in France. I’ll Take the Low Road was to costar Kent Douglass—the callow soldier in Waterloo Bridge, who was now performing under the name Douglass Montgomery—and Nigel Bruce. The director was to be Monty Banks, the story that of an American woman who tries to land a title by marrying an English nobleman (Bruce) but ends up marrying a Yank (Montgomery).27 Bette would be paid in pounds—£20,000 per film, to be exact, which was in the neighborhood of $50,000. She accepted.28

  Fearing the service of an injunction barring her from acting in anything but a Warner Bros. production, she and Ham stealthily flew to Vancouver late on a Saturday night, took a Canadian Pacific train to Banff, played a round of golf—Bette shot a 125—got back on the train, and chugged across the Canadian plains to Montreal, where they boarded the Duchess of Bedford and set sail for Scotland.29 They arrived at the Firth of Clyde, an estuary outside Glasgow, on August 18.

  Bette was immediately accosted by reporters. Wearing “white flannel trousers, white sandal shoes, and a camel hair coat,” she told the assembled journalists of her status: “At the moment I am one of the unemployed.” Ham said he wanted to play golf at St. Andrews.30 Bette said she wanted to buy a West Highland terrier.

  They headed for London, where they checked into Claridge’s and where Bette was served with an injunction; Warner Bros. had offices in the United Kingdom, so the matter could—and would—be decided in the British courts.31

  On Wednesday, September 9, Toeplitz threw a party in Bette’s honor—press included—at Claridge’s. Monty Banks told one of the reporters about I’ll Take the Low Road: “This picture needs five children, and one of them’s got to be a baby that can hold its breath.”32

  “I’ve just realized my life’s ambition!” Bette blurted to the Sunday Express. “I’ve just spoken to Noël Coward!” “I didn’t exactly meet him,” she had to admit. “I spoke to him on the telephone. I told him how much I admired his work. He roared with laughter—seemed to think I was kidding!”33

  She and Ham tooled around the kingdom. As the Daily Express reported, “She has drunk beer, played darts in a public bar in Garstang, exchanged philosophies with a pig drover, John Weston, on the road to the lakes, driven about in a second-hand car, bought a pair of clogs to practice clog-dancing, and declared to all she met, ‘This is the life!’ ”34 Bette found the lake district pretty but wasn’t especially impressed. “We’ve got some far bigger mountains in America,” she rather too competitively told a reporter. The Nelsons leisurely drove as far as Torquay on the southern coast of Devonshire, which Bette particularly loved, and back to Somerset. From there they headed south to Rottingdean, a village on the coast of East Sussex, then left for Paris for costume fittings.35

  William Randolph Hearst, dissuaded from traveling to Berlin to try to talk some sense into Hitler, went instead to his castle at St. Donats in Wales, where he was joined by Jack and Ann Warner. Warner and Toeplitz had already met in Venice. The meeting ended in shouting; Hearst’s Welsh castle was a relief. But as Warner later wrote, “And it was in this peaceful haven that the process servers handed me the bad-news paper from Bette Davis. She had filed suit in London and had retained a distinguished barrister, Sir William Jowitt. Ann and I moved into a London hotel, and she suggested in her own diplomatic way that it might be wise to settle the case. She was very fond of Bette—so was I—and she could foresee a great flood of perhaps unpleasant publicity. But there was a principle at stake—whether a highly paid star could dictate to a studio, and make only those pictures that pleased him or her. If Bette were to win, all the studio owners and executives in Hollywood would get trampled in the stampede.”36

  Bette and Ham moved into the Park Lane Hotel, whereupon Ham decided he’d had enough and announced that he was departing for New York to find work as a musician. Bette was surprised and upset. “It wasn’t often I needed him,” she writes with brutal honesty in The Lonely Life. “This was the only time.”

  One gets the sense that Ham Nelson appreciated his own expendability better than Bette did. Hence his departure. “I saw Ham off at Southampton and stood bewildered on the dock as his ship pulled away. . . . His salary, assuming he was to get work, would be negligible in comparison to the moral support I craved at that moment. I was never so wretched as when I crawled back to my cell at the Park Lane.”37

  THE HIGH COURT of Justice, King’s Bench Division. Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., v. Nelson. October 14, 15, and 16, 1936.

  Sir William Jowitt for Bette Davis, Sir Patrick Hastings and Mr. Norman Birkett for Warner Bros., Mr. Justice Sir George Branson on the bench.

  Davis, through Sir William, argued that it was in fact Warner Bros. who breached the contract—that, as the Times described it, the studio had “required her to play unsuitable parts and had frequently required her to work for excessive periods in the day, such periods constantly exceeding 14 hours; and that they had further required her to make an unreasonably large number of films in 1935,” and this breach by Warners freed her to “tender her services to persons other than the plaintiffs.”38 Sir William described the contract as “a life sentence.” The restrictions on her activities were absurd, he argued. For example, the contract gave the studio the exclusive right to photograph her: “That means that she ought not to allow her husband to take a snapshot of her in the garden,” though Sir William hastily noted that Warner Bros. had never attempted to enforce its rights in this regard. Sir William himself veered into the absurd by contending, as the Daily Telegraph related, “that as the contract stood Miss Davis could not become a waitress at a restaurant, an assistant in a hairdresser’s shop in the wilds of Africa—if they had hairdressing establishments there—and could not engage in any other occupation, whether for love or money.”39

  Sir Patrick took a different stance. “I think, m’lord, this is the action of a very naughty young lady,” he said. “There is a gentleman whose name I cannot pronounce—a Mr. Toeplitz, I think. I suggest that Miss Davis has been bribed and has been unwise enough, flattered by the offer, to say, ‘I will take it if I can get away from Warner Bros.’ ”40 (Toeplitz’s lawyer was displeased by Sir Patrick’s accusation of bribery—a criminal offense, after all.) Sir Patrick went on to argue that contracts like Davis’s were standard in the film industry. He ridiculed Bette’s claim of “slavery” by citing her steadily increasing salary at Warners, which, by 1942, would be nearly £600 pounds a week. “If anybody wants to put me into perpetual servitude on that basis of remuneration, I shall prepare to consider it,” he said.41

  Alexander Korda took the stand as an expert witness. “If a film star walks out during the making of a picture, the loss is considerable,” the producer testified.

  MR. BIRKETT: Take a production like, say, Romeo and Juliet. If Juliet “walks out,” is it possible to continue the picture exactly where she “walks out,” or do you have to start it all over again?

  MR. KORDA: We have to start all over again.

  But of course Bette had never appeared before the cameras on God’s Country and the Woman, so the entire exchange was irrelevant.

  Sir William, on cross-examination, asked Korda, “If a producer transfers an actress against her will, it would be hard on her?” “An actress does not always understand her will or what she wants to do,” Korda replied, much to the amusement of the spectators and, one assumes, the seething rage of Bette Davis.42 “But sometimes she does?” Sir William countered. “Yes,” Korda acknowledged.

  When Jack Warner took the stand, Bette almost felt sorry for him, so intimidated did he appear by the formality and gravity of a British courtroom. One exchange between Sir William and Warner is especially curious.

  SIR WILLIAM: You have every reason to believe she is very happily married?

  MR. WARNER: Yes.

  SIR WILLIAM: When she was married, did your
company present her with a document which she was to sign, giving an undertaking not to divorce her husband for three years?

  MR. WARNER: I have never heard of it.

  SIR WILLIAM: You have a brother, Harry Warner?

  MR. WARNER: Yes.

  SIR WILLIAM: Was there a proposal that a photograph should be taken of the lady, her husband, and Harry Warner, with the lady handing over to Mr. Harry Warner the undertaking saying that she would not divorce her husband for three years?

  MR. WARNER: I can’t believe that anything of the kind occurred.

  SIR WILLIAM: Did Miss Davis indignantly decline to do anything of the sort?

  MR. WARNER: I am sure my brother never made any such proposal, or ever thought of it.

  Could Bette have made up this belittling incident out of whole cloth, or did Jack Warner commit perjury?

  Sir William did get Warner to acknowledge one key point: “I admit that an actress could become heartbroken if she had to play parts that were not fitted to her,” the mogul testified.43

  Bette was not called to the stand.

  The Associated Press, dateline London, October 19, 1936: “Bette Davis, the American film actress, was enjoined today from making an English movie. Justice Sir George Branson in King’s Bench Division decided in favor of Warner Bros. of Hollywood in an injunction suit to prevent Miss Davis from working in a future picture for Toeplitz Productions, Ltd., a British organization.”

  “When the news came I was walking on the beach in utter melancholy. Jack Warner had won a three-year injunction or the duration of my contract (whichever was the shorter). I was his, and if he exercised his options, my inhuman bondage stretched to 1942.”44 Bette and Sir William were expecting at the worst an injunction limited to one year; the three-year term of the injunction shocked them.45

  Warner, always the jokester, claimed that after his court victory Sir Patrick pitched his son-in-law for a screen test and then handed him a screenplay written by himself.46

  The outcome was no surprise to Ludovico Toeplitz, who had tried to bail out as early as the end of August. Almost two months before the case went to court—and, strangely, a week before he threw the party at Claridge’s—the producer wrote to Bette, who was then staying at the Tudor Close Hotel in Rottingdean, and informed her that, having heard the opinion of both his British and American counsel, “we are advised emphatically that the contract between yourself and Warner Bros. is valid. . . . Warner Bros. will certainly be able to obtain an injunction in the English courts restraining you from performing. . . . You are not and never have been in a position legally to enter into any contract to play for us . . . and we must proceed at once to recast the part contemplated to be played by you.”47

  One scarcely needs to paint Bette Davis’s rebellion against Jack Warner in broad Oedipal strokes to make the point that it was driven as much by irrational passion, a deep-seated need to prove an impossible invincibility against a Goliath-like adversary, as it was by practical, professional concerns. Her defeat was a personal humiliation played out on a worldwide stage, and it was doubly devastating for her to lose her case against Jack Warner the man as well as Jack Warner the head of the studio. But there was one key reversal to the Freudian theme. Harlow successfully abandoned her; Warner accomplished what was, for her, even more excruciating: he kept her tethered to him.

  The paternal nurturing she craved arrived in the form of George Arliss, who visited her in Rottingdean. A man of great personal charm, Arliss was also a seasoned veteran of the theater and cinema. He was consoling, but he was also practical. She was compelled to return to Warner Bros., he told her. But she was an actress, and it was her choice as to how she played the scene. He sent a note a few days later:

  “Dear Miss Davis . . . I was so happy to have that little visit with you. I admire your courage in this affair, but when you have found out just what you can do, then I would suggest that you review the thing dispassionately and choose the course that is likely to be best for you in the long run.” Thoughtfully, he sent her a gift along with the card—a slew of cigarettes from Lewis of St. James Street.48

  “This was the last time I ever saw Mr. Arliss,” Davis writes in Mother Goddam. Arliss’s paternal role was lost neither on Davis nor on Arliss himself: “He was a wise and beautiful man. I think he loved me as a father hopefully would. I have a signed photograph of him. The inscription reads: ‘with adopted fatherly affection.’ ”49

  SIR WILLIAM JOWITT had made the point in court that it would be difficult for both parties to resume their creative relationship: “If Mr. Warner and Miss Davis both had the tact and consideration of angels, it would be putting a very great strain on them if, after all this, she is going back to work for them.”50

  Sir William was right; it was a terrible strain. For Bette, if not for Jack Warner. Bette met with one of Warners’ British lawyers, who reported back to the studio that she had respectfully offered several suggestions on how to proceed. Convinced that Arthur Edeson’s cinematography for The Golden Arrow wasn’t as good as it might have been, she once again asked that Sol Polito, Ernie Haller, or Tony Gaudio photograph her films if at all possible. She asked the studio, in the lawyer’s words, “to let her appear in two good substantial parts as her next two films”—not an unreasonable request from the year’s Best Actress winner, let alone one of Bette’s caliber. She “seriously suggests that the maximum advantage can be obtained from her acting if her appearances are limited to four films a year.” (As a point of comparison, Meryl Streep hasn’t appeared in four films in a single year since 1979, the year she won an Oscar for her performance in Kramer vs. Kramer.) Bette mentioned her desire to be loaned out to other studios more frequently, but Warners’ lawyer cut off that part of the conversation. And finally, she asked if the studio would waive its claim against her for the costs of the trial. She hadn’t yet paid her own counsel’s fees, which amounted to £3,000, and she didn’t have the money.51 (Whitney Stine calculates “a mean total of $103,000.”)52

  Jack Warner had no intention of waiving the studio’s claim against Davis. After all, she lost. And now she had to pay. He and his staff sought a “collectable amount equivalent to a judgment . . . which we can, if we so desire, enforce against her here,” meaning back in Burbank when Davis returned to work.53 As for Bette’s own legal costs, she urged her solicitors not to approach Toeplitz for payment. The solicitors’ idea was to have Warner Bros. pay them directly out of Bette’s weekly salary, though they did timidly float the idea that Warner Bros. might pay their fees in addition to its own, an idea Warners’ counsel found “preposterous” and “impertinent.”54

  Interviewed at her hotel in Rottingdean, Davis, wearing blue beach pajamas and smoking a cigarette, called her defeat “a sock in the teeth.” “I’m a bit bewildered,” she went on. “I didn’t make any plans for a hundred percent defeat. I thought at least that it would have been a partial victory for me and for everybody else with one of these body-and-soul contracts. Mind you, I didn’t fight it as a test case for the whole film industry. I fought it for myself and for my career. . . . Instead of getting increased freedom, I seem to have provided—at my own expense—an object lesson for other would-be ‘naughty young ladies.’ ”55

  She got a cable two days later: “Clock in steeple strikes one come home love Ham.”56

  The episode turned out not to be the total loss Davis felt it to be at the time. It provided her with vital publicity, the key element of which was precisely that it was not dictated by Warner Bros.’ publicity department. She had despised not only the apparent indifference of her casting but also the way she had been marketed. She hated the early fashion shoots, the dyeing of her hair, the cereal ads. . . . It was hardly her idea to present herself as Constance Bennett’s secondhand look-alike. Even Warners’ best promotions for Davis were in some ways more damaging to her psyche than her worst scripts because they tried to sell her as being someone she wasn’t. So although she lost the case, by taking such a belligerent st
ance against Warners in the full, bright glare of the English-speaking press, she adroitly bypassed the studio’s publicity machine and created a new persona for herself on her own terms: a strong-willed independent thinker as confrontational as any man.57

  It worked. Not only did Warners give her better, more suitable scripts upon her return to Burbank, but the studio’s publicists began to exploit her pugnacious, ready-to-erupt persona themselves—to the studio’s advantage as well as to Davis’s.58 Contentiousness became her legacy. As the Economist put it on the occasion of her death, “The two cigarettes lit by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager—one for him, one for her—were as nothing compared to the two fingers she gave to the head of the studio, Jack Warner, in the high court in London in 1936.”59

  But once again, that’s skipping ahead. When the Cunard White Star RMS Aquitania departed Southampton on Wednesday, November 4, bound for New York, one of the passengers listed on the roster was “Mrs. R. E. D. Nelson.”60 And Mrs. Nelson wasn’t very happy.

  CHAPTER

  7

  “IN THE WARNER JAIL”

  “I LOVE MY HUSBAND BECAUSE HE Doesn’t Treat Me Like a Star!”—the title of a 1936 fanzine article illustrated with photos of the Nelsons’ modest vine-covered, two-story house on busy Franklin Avenue. There were gables, striped awnings, and a picket fence. A driveway ran on the side. During the course of the reporter’s visit, Bette turned to her modest husband, Harmon, and said, “Aren’t you getting just a little tired of all this racket?”

  “Not yet,” he replied.1

  But by the end of the year Ham Nelson was indeed getting sick of the racket—his wife’s emotional clatter more than the traffic on Franklin—and when Bette checked into a suite at the Algonquin after disembarking from the Aquitania, she found her husband less than enthusiastic about returning with her to Los Angeles. He’d found work with Tommy Dorsey’s band and planned to stay in New York.2 It was with Ruthie that Bette would travel west, Mother having gotten as far as New York on her way to rescue Bette from Great Britain when Bette cabled that she was coming back to the States on her own.