by Ed Sikov
Davis didn’t put an especially good face on things in New York. Unbowed if not downright belligerent, she bluntly told the reporters who collected at the Algonquin that she was heading back to Hollywood to “serve five years in the Warner jail.” She explained her sense of anxious resignation: “When I was a young thing and not very wise I signed the contract which ties me up to 1942. I’ll be an old woman by 1942, but I’m going back, and I’ll be there in a week or so, and all I can say is the hell with it.”3
By “old woman,” Bette Davis meant that in 1942 she would be thirty-four.
“She told me that her main worry for years in Hollywood was paying the rent,” said the writer Dotson Rader, who got to know Davis in the 1980s.
First and foremost, it was a job to her. The whole fight she had with Jack Warner was over the fact that she felt that the parts she was being forced to play were destroying her future ability to make money—to get work. The point at which she rebelled against Warner was the point at which women in Hollywood, then and now, were beginning to age—late 20s, early 30s. She was aware of that, and she wanted to establish to her audience that her appeal was not based on sex. All [Warners] looked at was the short term—what the box-office was on this picture. They weren’t interested in what the star of the picture might be making ten years later, or if the picture was going to help the star find work in ten years. [Hollywood is] a completely short-term-driven industry, so it’s in conflict with the real long-term interests of individual actors or directors—the creative people. Bette Davis was one of the first people not only to realize it but to act on it—to try to protect herself.4
Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Nelson arrived in Los Angeles on the Santa Fe Chief on Wednesday, November 18.5 Having had the width of the continent to consider her public image, Bette was less hostile in the press this time around. She wasn’t chastened. She may have been twenty pounds thinner after her legal and emotional ordeal, but she’d never be chastened.6 She was politic: “I’m just a working girl—not a crusader,” she told the L.A. scribes. “ ‘Work, work, and more work’ is my motto from now on.” She wrote a personal note to Jack Warner saying that she was “ready, willing, and able” to return to the lot and expressed her hope that she would be put back on salary as soon as Warner received the letter, which, reflecting a characteristic sense of urgency, she had hand-delivered. The boss’s response was to order her to be back at the studio on Monday, November 23, at 11:30 in the morning.7 Her next picture, Marked Woman, was already in preproduction.
TIMELY, TOPICAL, AND atypical, Marked Woman is generic Warner Bros. at its tense, 1930s best. It’s the fictionalized story of the gangster Lucky Luciano and his notorious prostitution ring, though thanks to the Production Code the ladies are nominally hostesses at a shady if glamorous nightclub. The real Lucky, whose name was originally Salvatore Lucania, moved to New York from Sicily with his family at the age of nine; he was only a year older than Bette.8 Luciano was a gangster’s gangster and had the underlings to match—thuggish men with nicknames like Cockeyed Louis and Charlie Spinach.9 Warner Bros., always looking for an angle, actually hired one of Luciano’s former goons, Herman “Hymie” Marks, to play a bit part as a gangster, though Hal Wallis worried that Hymie didn’t look nearly menacing enough to play one onscreen.10
There’s a scene in Marked Woman in which Bette, as Mary Dwight, convinces Humphrey Bogart’s self-righteous prosecutor (based on Thomas Dewey) that she’s ready to sing. It’s a duplicitous gesture, since Mary is still protecting the Luciano character (renamed Vanning for the film, though he retains a thick Italian accent). Vanning has not yet thrown her kid sister down a flight of steps, an act that finally gives Bette’s Mary a good reason to turn on him. At this point she’s still the tough nightclub hostess in the employ of the mob, which is to say that she’s a Code-approved hooker. And this smart whore is putting on an act, though we’re not yet aware of that fact. Her voice pitching toward feverishness, Bette hurls herself into a chair and bursts into tears, but rather than daubing at her nose with a petite piece of lace as a lesser actress would do, she digs into her nostrils with a decidedly unladylike fury. Lloyd Bacon, the director, films her from an unflattering angle: Mary is bending over the desk, using it as support in her moment of breakdown, and Bacon shoots the top of her head straight on, making her nose the primary focus. It’s purposely ugly looking, but the electricity of the scene comes from Bette, who certainly could have played it more demurely and with fewer excretions. In exhaustion and apparent defeat, Mary leans back in her chair, cleans her nails on the now-wet handkerchief, and agrees to testify against Vanning. But the moment Bogart moves safely out of range, she shifts her eyes to their edges, and we see that Mary is actually a cool and cunning liar planning to commit perjury and wreck the prosecutor’s case. This, it turns out, has been Davis performing a performance of hysteria, a redoubled acting job and one of the best scenes in her career.
“So long, chump,” is her exit line to Bogart after the trial.
Later in the film, Mary turns against Vanning for real, kid sister having been tossed down said steps. She threatens him: “I’ll get you,” she spits, fixing him with a stare more sharp than bug-eyed, “even if I have to crawl back from my grave to do it!” Vanning responds by having his boys rough her up—badly. A newspaper headline roars from the screen: “Clip Joint Hostess Near Death from Attack!” You want to laugh—and you may, because it’s mid-1930s Warner Bros. distilled to its entertainingly blunt essence—but the driven and artful actress who plays the clip joint hostess makes something valid out of it by shocking us with her character’s injuries. On the day she filmed the scene, Bette decided that she’d had enough of the type of glamorous beating she’d endured under Michael Curtiz’s timorous eye in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. From Bette’s perspective, a new year had turned. It was 1937, and Warners’ executives, producers, directors, and makeup artists still didn’t get it. She alone did. The script called for Mary to be thrashed and knifed and scarred for life, but as Bette later described herself after she came out of makeup that morning, “I don’t think I ever looked so attractive. Lilly Daché herself could have created that creamy puff of gauze at the peak of her inspiration. It was an absolute gem of millinery.” According to Davis, she “smiled sweetly” and left the studio, supposedly for lunch.11
She went instead to her physician, Dr. F. Le Grand Noyes, to whom she explained the plot turn and who she asked to bandage her as though she had, in fact, been kicked hard, punched repeatedly, and knife-gashed in the cheek.
Bette may have added a few contusions of her own before showing up at Hal Wallis’s office, where Wallis greeted her at the door, saw her swollen eyes, outrageously broken nose, brown abrasions, and acres of bloody gauze, and burst into laughter. “Okay, you get your way,” the producer told her—“all except that broken nose. You can’t have that.”12
Bette Davis looks proudly, defiantly ghastly onscreen in this scene in Marked Woman. A bandage is taped to her right cheek, another wrapped around her head; there are blackened eyes looking out through hollow sockets and bruises everywhere, and she holds the left side of her mouth morbidly rigid. This was the antithesis of Hollywood convention. It was a radical blend of stylization and brutal realism—Bette Davis pulling a majestic, disturbing stunt for the sake of art, all the while demanding to be recognized as Bette Davis, a creative force of nature. Her ghastliness must have registered even more powerfully at the time because nobody in 1937 expected it, especially on the face of an Oscar-winning female movie star who was expected to look glamorous no matter what.
When Marked Woman was released in April, Warners’ head of publicity and advertising, S. Charles Einfeld, was ecstatic. Writing to Jack Warner, Einfeld went on and on about how well audiences, particularly women, were responding to Davis in the picture: “You hear women say, ’There’s a gal who doesn’t need a lot of junk all over her face,’ and ‘Bette Davis is a female Cagney.’” Einfeld warned Warner against continuing to attem
pt to further glamorize his strange, bullheaded star but instead to let her play up her strengths: her nervous vitality, her bold decision making, her refusal of convention and inappropriate lip gloss.13
Marked Woman wrapped on January 19, 1937, two days behind schedule, and Bette immediately went into her next picture, Kid Galahad, which wasn’t nearly as challenging. A grinning hunk of blond beefcake, a bellhop named Ward (Wayne Morris, in his film debut), doubles as bartender at a party thrown by a boxing manager, Donati (Edward G. Robinson), and his girlfriend (Davis), whose nickname, no kidding, is “Fluff.” Donati’s rival is played by Humphrey Bogart and is saddled with the nickname “Turkey.” One of Turkey’s boys insults Fluff, and Ward chivalrously decks him. So begins his career as the boxer Kid Galahad. Fluff is a singer, which leads to a delightful scene in which Bette, cigarette in hand and draped on a piano in a black sleeveless top and big-sequined skirt, lip-synchs “The Moon Is in Tears Tonight.” Aside from the fight scenes, it’s the highlight of the film.
Although they were two of the more intelligent and liberal actors in town, there was no love lost between Davis and Robinson. “All of us girls at Warners hated kissing his ugly purple lips,” Bette said in retrospect.14 Privately she called him “mush mouth.”15 As for Robinson, he reportedly told Hal Wallis, “This Davis girl—she’s hopeless! She’s an amateur. She’s totally out of place in this picture.” Robinson got the first part wrong, but he may have had a point about Davis’s casting, which once again relegated her to the sidelines.16 “Neither recognized the other’s talent,” Wallis later observed.
There was still friction between Davis and Michael Curtiz. Davis has a particularly damning story to tell in The Lonely Life: “I will never forget Wayne’s knocking out a fighter in a take. ‘Fake fight! Retake! Fake fight—awful!’ Curtiz screamed—but it was difficult to redo because Wayne’s opponent was unconscious. He had knocked him out cold.”17
Another tale finds Bette stopping in the middle of a take and barking at her director, “Mike! Watch me! Stop watching the camera!”18 She was mistaken, of course. Film direction isn’t solely about monitoring performances. But soon enough she would learn that a director—a real director, one with ideas to express and the stubborn dynamism to get them on celluloid—would care as much about where the camera was moving as he would about the actress toward whom it happened to be pointing at the moment. After that, everyone else would look like hacks.
“IT WAS A farcical comedy,” Davis writes dismissively of It’s Love I’m After, “but Leslie [Howard] and I had a romp, and I was out of the gutter and in Orry-Kelly’s latest gowns.”19 She goes on to say that she would have preferred to do humor of a higher nature—a Philip Barry or S. N. Behrman property, a Holiday or The Philadelphia Story or No Time for Comedy.
But she’s wrong. As great as they are, those films don’t have the purposefully uncomfortable bite of It’s Love I’m After, with the admitted exception of the opening punch in The Philadelphia Story. In fact, Davis and Howard are both superbly prickly, not to mention eminently believable, as scene-hogging actors embroiled in a long and thorny affair. It’s a shame that Davis failed to appreciate her own knack for getting complicated laughs onscreen.
In screwball comedies, characters’ fluid identities lead to emotional liberation as they discover that lying pretense reveals its own higher truth. Playacting lets Cary Grant and Irene Dunne fake their way back to two happy marriages in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. In It’s Love I’m After, the fact that Joyce and Basil are both hammy actors is what enables them to rediscover their love. They see each other for what they are—and aren’t. Their squabbling recalls the great Carole Lombard–John Barrymore fights in Twentieth Century, though here there’s an added complication: a mooning young heiress played by Olivia de Havilland. While Davis’s Joyce and Howard’s Basil look at each other and see nothing but greasepaint, which they love, de Havilland’s naive Marcia looks at Basil and sees nothing but love, which Basil quickly grows to despise.
Although the part of a tempestuous actress seems to have been tailor-made for Bette Davis, Casey Robinson, one of Warner Bros.’ better screenwriters, said that it was only fortuitous casting: “We just happened to cast Bette in It’s Love I’m After. It wasn’t written for her.”20 But it certainly could have been.
The film was shot in June 1937. As Variety reported on the ninth, Bette was slightly injured when she fell into the orchestra pit between takes of the Romeo and Juliet death scene, during which the two hams snipe at each other not-so-sotto voce while laboriously dying. Luckily for Bette, she was padded for the real-life pratfall: her “heavy wig absorbed part of the shock.”21
WHAT WITH THE frequent moves and absent father, neither of the Davis sisters had had an easy time of it, but at least the older daughter had gotten her mother’s attention. Ruthie and the girls’ old apartment in Newton featured innumerable photos of Bette, taken by an adoring Ruthie, but not a single one of Bobby. Mother and daughters spent the summer in Provincetown before the girls went to North-field Academy. Bobby, walking on the beach after a storm, found a broken toy sailboat and spent the next few days painstakingly repairing it, only to watch, heartbroken on the beach, as the infinitely more self-assertive Bette grabbed it and launched it into the surf, where it vanished. Bobby, a family friend once declared, was treated as though she was “the little stepchild.”22
For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Bobby transferred from Denison to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but her emotional state drove her to drop out and move out West with Bette and Ruthie; this was during the early days at the house on Alta Loma. Ellen Bachelder, a friend of the Davises at that time, recalled that Bette held a tight grip on herself at the studio and kept it all in until she got home, whereupon she would blow up at Ruthie and Bobby. After the Davises moved to the Tudor-style house on Toluca Lake, Bachelder arrived one day to find Bette furiously sweeping out closets, enraged that neither Ruthie nor Bobby had done the housework properly. Bobby told Bachelder that Bette would come home from a day under the lights and in front of the cameras, put on a pair of white gloves, and run her fingers along the furniture and woodwork to assess the degree of meticulous dusting that had, or hadn’t, occurred during her absence.
The strain of life, let alone life with her overachieving sister, became too much for Bobby. She would periodically become violent instead of simply melancholy, shouting at both Ruthie and Bette and even slapping and punching them. Her energy spent, Bobby would then suddenly become silent and sullen again.23
In 1934, Ruthie moved Bobby back East—specifically to a sanitarium in Massachusetts—where she received various treatments including electroshock therapy. Ruthie returned to Los Angeles on April 5, Bette’s birthday, and stayed for about a month; Ham wisely moved out for the duration.
Bobby returned to Los Angeles later that year and touchingly told the press, “I want to be an actress, just like my sister.”24 Her ambition appears to have been mainly for show, for as Bette herself noted, “Bobby, now fully recovered and with infinite lucidity, had started to call me the Golden Goose.”25
In 1935, to her own relief more than her mother’s or sister’s, Bobby, then twenty-five, fell in love for the first time. Like her sister, she picked someone she knew from back East, someone familiar—in her case “little Bobby Pelgram” from Ogunquit, Maine. He was now the dashing Robert Cole Pelgram, twenty years old, a handsome socialite and flier. When Pelgram asked Bobby to marry him, Bobby had no hesitation. But she was still not her own woman: she chose her older sister’s anniversary as the day of her own wedding. Bobby, Pelgram, Ham, and Bette drove down to Tijuana on August 18 for the ceremony.
The Los Angeles Examiner reported in mid-June 1937 that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cole Pelgram had recently departed on a belated honeymoon, setting sail on the SS Virginia for a seven-month cruise through the Panama Canal to Europe, Egypt, India, China, Japan, and Hawaii. Bette thoughtfully had their stateroom adorned with gardenias a
nd sweet peas.26
As much as it must have relieved Bette of the financial burden of supporting her sister as well as her mother and her husband, Bobby’s marriage appears to have sparked some resentment on Bette’s part; the grudging Lady Bountiful was no longer the center of Bobby’s dependent life, as troubled as it sometimes was. Moreover, Bobby never had to work. Bette did.
As for Ruthie, she believed her work was done and expected to be supported in increasingly grand style. Bette writes, “She, who had worked for me like a demon—had known no sacrifice great enough—now relaxed into luxury. . . . To Mother, Hollywood was a playground and movie actresses spent their days floating through an atmosphere of Chanel-scented flattery, adoration, and glamour. I don’t believe that Ruthie ever believed I worked once I arrived.”27 This was a problem.
In 1937, money—along with husband, sister, and mother—continued to impress itself on Bette’s everyday psyche. She downplays it in her various memoirs, but this was a time of continuing financial panic on her part. Warners “greeted me with open arms,” Davis writes in The Lonely Life, and “graciously relieved me of their share of the damages. I didn’t have to pay the King’s ransom to Sir Patrick, and Sir William’s retainer was shared by my employers who fulfilled Mr. Arliss’ prophecy and bent over backwards to be nice.”28 But in point of fact, Jack Warner used Bette’s debts as a sword of Damocles. He was not in the mood to forgive anything, especially lucre. On January 6, 1937, Bette wrote a note to Warner asking for an advance of $14,000 to cover her legal bills. Rather than “relieving” her of her share of the damages, Warner arranged for a Bank of America loan that Bette would pay back in weekly installments against her salary.29 Also in January Warners refused to waive its legal costs, which included internal billing from Warners’ New York office: New York charged Burbank over $15,000 for the time it spent on Bette’s case.30
