Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  She was still being paid far less than her peers, and insultingly so. Leave aside the fact that Louis B. Mayer personally took in almost $1.3 million in 1937; he was the boss of bosses and earned accordingly. But major talent wasn’t doing too badly either. According to the Hollywood Citizen Examiner, Greta Garbo earned $472,499 that year. Irene Dunne made $259,587, Katharine Hepburn $238,703. If the Citizen Examiner’s figures are correct, Bette Davis made only $53,200—about $155,000 less than the ice skating queen Sonja Henie.

  FOR THE MOST part, Warner Bros. learned its lesson from Bette’s infamous walkout, and the studio offered her parts that suited her or, at least, failed to enrage her. But in the summer of 1937, Warners announced that her next picture would be Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood Hotel, costarring Dick Powell. Bette rebelled. Vociferously. Not coincidental to her rage was that she was being forced to play the dual role of a temperamental movie star who disappears after being denied a role she coveted and the double who takes over for her to serve the studio’s publicity needs.31

  That she did not play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind was one of her most bitter disappointments, and she rankled at the mention of the film for the rest of her life. According to Bette, Warner Bros. optioned the rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel just before it was published in June of 1936, and Jack Warner offered to cast her as Scarlett if only she’d just “be a good girl” and play the lady lumberjack in God’s Country and the Woman.32 Bette writes she hadn’t yet heard of Gone with the Wind and left Warner’s office with the exit line “I bet it’s a pip.”33 Warner’s own account differs slightly: “For some reason that now seems obscure to me, I was not too eager to make this picture, although I had an opportunity to bid on the film rights of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, and could have had it for a mere $50,000. It may be that the anticipated $5,000,000 cost cooled my enthusiasm. . . . In any case, I did not nail down an option, and Selznick got it. This was Bette’s first setback, for I would have given her Scarlett.”34

  Whether Bette’s walkout and the studio’s lawsuit was the absolute cause or just a contributing factor, Jack Warner lost interest in making Gone with the Wind precisely while Davis was wrangling with him in the British courts. By August 1936, Selznick had picked up the rights, and by September he’d chosen a director: George Cukor. “Shades of Rochester,” Bette later complained. “He still saw me as the girl in Broadway, and whatever his ancient grievance, his thumbs were still down.”35

  Selznick’s memos and contemporary news items indicate that Selznick was strongly considering Miriam Hopkins (God forbid), Tallulah Bankhead, and Joan Crawford, but not particularly Bette Davis. At one point Tallulah was the front-runner and was screen-tested. Paulette Goddard was tested as well, as was Vivien Leigh. Other stars and starlets were considered, too, if only by their press agents and acquiescent Hollywood reporters: Jean Arthur, Diana Barrymore, Joan Bennett, Marguerite Churchill, Claudette Colbert, Frances Dee, Ellen Drew, Irene Dunne, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Susan Hayward, Boots Mallory, Jo Ann Sayers, Norma Shearer, Margaret Sullavan, Margaret Tallichet, Lana Turner, Claire Trevor, Arleen Whelan, and Loretta Young. Even less likely candidates included Mrs. Jock Whitney, Betty Timmons (Margaret Mitchell’s niece), and Lucille Ball.36 In June 1937, Cinema Arts joked that the only two actresses who hadn’t been mentioned as serious contenders for the role of Scarlett O’Hara were Martha Raye and Shirley Temple.37

  “Everybody’s second cousin was tested, and I was used as the touchstone,” Bette claimed. “That was how right I was. It was insanity that I not be given Scarlett. But then, Hollywood has never been rational.”38

  The Hollywood Citizen News asked various directors to voice their opinions on the matter: Mervyn LeRoy, evidently having changed his mind about Bette’s prospects, picked her as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, with Irene Dunne as Melanie; George Stevens suggested Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant; Archie Mayo wanted Miriam Hopkins and Gary Cooper.39 Bette herself received a telegram: “We are delighted to inform you we have unanimously voted you the ideal choice [for] Scarlett O’Hara.” Unfortunately for Davis, the telegram was not signed “David O. Selznick and staff” but rather “Associated Cinema Fans of Westchester, Inc.”40 Davis was indeed the choice by public acclamation: of all the women mentioned over the course of the casting contest, Davis scored highest in the fan magazine polls cited by Gavin Lambert in his essay on the making of Gone with the Wind: “Bette Davis was easily the most popular candidate, with 40 percent of the vote.”41

  She had one more chance, and—for once—both Davis and Warner agreed on the circumstances. Warner: “Before Selznick decided on Vivien Leigh, he came to me with a proposition to lend him Bette Davis and Errol Flynn as a costarring package for the picture. Bette was fond of Errol . . . but she was also realistic about Errol’s limited acting talent. She refused to have any part of the deal, and that was her last chance for the part.”42 Davis was more succinct: “The thought of Mr. Flynn as Rhett Butler appalled me. I refused.”43

  Davis and Warner may have agreed about Selznick’s proposal, but Selznick himself took a rather different view of who refused whose proposal about what. The producer wrote a lengthy letter to Ed Sullivan, then the Hollywood columnist for the New York Daily News, correcting the supposed misreporting on his beloved project, the crown jewel of his career: “Certainly you ought to know that Warner Bros. wouldn’t give up Bette Davis for a picture to be released through MGM, even had we wanted Miss Davis in preference to a new personality. Warner Bros. offered me Errol Flynn for Butler and Bette Davis for Scarlett if I would release the picture through Warners—and this would have been an easy way out of my dilemma. But the public wanted Gable.”44 (Unlike Flynn, the magnetic Clark Gable had both looks and substance; audiences adored his rugged insouciance in such hits as It Happened One Night and Mutiny on the Bounty, and when Gone with the Wind was published, it was Gable’s name that was on everybody’s lips to play Rhett Butler.)

  Whether Bette Davis had a real shot at Scarlett O’Hara is therefore debatable at best, but the crucial fact is that she believed she did, and this was the context in which she was told to appear as a loser movie star in Hollywood Hotel.

  The film was scheduled for production from early August to early November, after which she would go directly into Jezebel, which was exactly the kind of meaty, dramatic picture she had been demanding all along. In July, after learning of her casting in Hollywood Hotel, Bette and Ham took a beach vacation to Carpinteria, just south of Santa Barbara, but Bette did not relax. On July 17, she wrote a lengthy handwritten letter to Jack Warner begging him not to force her to do Hollywood Hotel. She was exhausted, she wrote. The picture was a comedy—“a farce”—and she wasn’t right for it. She suggested her old friend Joan Blondell. She was getting only four weeks’ vacation after doing four “very hard pictures.” She weighed only 104 pounds. Surely he understood.45

  Chatter ensued; memos flew. Roy Obringer told Warner he’d talked to her lawyer, Dudley Furse, who told him that Bette was up North somewhere suffering from a bad case of sunburn, but that her business manager, Vernon Wood, had talked to her and advised her to do the film on the theory that she should get away from all the heavy roles she’d done. According to Wood, Bette was planning to plead one more time, but after that she’d go ahead and do it if that’s what Warner wanted.

  Bette did her second-round pleading the following week. The role was no good, she wrote. “There is no living actress such a fool,” she declared. And she’d have to do a musical number in the Hollywood Bowl sequence—it was, after all, a Busby Berkeley film—and she knew she’d be terrible at it.46 Warner Bros. responded that day. There would be no further discussion; Bette Davis would do Hollywood Hotel.

  The following day, G. Horace Coshow, M.D., of Carpinteria telephoned the studio. Bette had come down with sunstroke, he said, and he was taking her to the hospital. She would require one month to recover. A few days later, Warners slapped Bette on su
spension.

  Her secretary, Bridget Price, took over the conversation with the studio. (The critic Janet Flanner described Price as “a tall, intaglio-faced English lady, an old friend of Mrs. Davis.”47 Intaglio: a design carved into the surface of metal or stone.) She had seen Bette, Bridget wrote to Jack Warner, and could honestly report that Bette was suffering from second-degree burns. She was assured, however, that Bette would recover over time. By the way, Bridget wrote, she had told Bette that she had seen the previews for It’s Love I’m After and loved them but was surprised to see that Bette had been given second billing to Leslie Howard when, after all, she had been billed equally with Mr. Howard above the title on previous occasions. Bette agreed that Bridget should write to Mr. Warner about this problem immediately. Bette would do it herself, of course, but for the fact that Dr. Coshow had ordered her to rest.48 Warner waited several weeks before replying that Miss Price was mistaken: Bette Davis was in fact billed above the title on the same line as Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland.

  But she never did Hollywood Hotel.

  By November, Bette was back at work beginning to film Jezebel when the gossip columnist Radie Harris reported—in an article called “The Fear That Is Haunting Bette Davis”—that Bette had in fact suffered “a complete nervous collapse” over the summer in addition to a bad case of sunburn.49 Bette took the occasion of her own nervous breakdown and her fear of losing her mind completely to reveal her sister Bobby’s recurring mental illness. This was an unusually frank admission from a movie star, but it wasn’t very nice to Bobby.50

  BETTE’S WEDDING RING had been stolen after only a week of marriage. Ham bought her a new one at Christmas 1932—“a very lovely band of platinum and diamonds,” according to Mayme Ober Peake—but the loss of the original one was portentous.51 The marriage wasn’t working. “There was no equity in our drives nor in our sense of sovereignty. That was the core of all our troubles,” Bette admits in The Lonely Life.52 There was another problem, too: “It is small wonder that Ham was both dazzled, bewitched, and then exhausted with my crises. I always had one.”53

  Ham Nelson was a sporadically employed musician married to a dynamic, overwrought, increasingly famous movie star who operated under emotional and professional strains he couldn’t alleviate. When he took a job in San Francisco in 1934 and earned one hundred dollars a week, he found housing in a low-rent bungalow—10 Mission Auto Court, to be exact.54 (On one trip to visit him, Bette got a speeding ticket for going seventy miles an hour in a forty-five-mile zone near Livermore.)55 It was all very amusing for the press to run stories about how the movie star visited her husband in an auto court, but Ham found the attention paid to the couple’s income disparity more difficult to stomach.

  He also experienced the classical jealousy of the star’s spouse, forever having to sit through movies watching richer, better-looking, more famous men make love to his wife. Michael Curtiz overheard the couple bickering at a screening of Front Page Woman, with Ham accusing Bette of being a little too believable in her onscreen attraction to George Brent and stomping off hissing “Horseshit!” after Bette explained that she was simply doing her job.56 He may or may not have known about the fling with Franchot Tone, but he became enraged when he learned that the male starlet Ross Alexander was attempting to cover his attraction to men by ostentatiously proclaiming his attraction to Bette. “I’ll kill him,” Ham is said to have responded and promptly beat Alexander up in a studio men’s room. Alexander didn’t let up on his quest for Bette, though, and Bette replied by ridiculing his masculinity, leading Alexander to call her “a merciless bitch.” Shortly thereafter, in late December 1936, Alexander picked up a hitchhiker for sex. The hitchhiker tried to blackmail him, and the studio had to intervene. Haunted by this humiliation, Alexander committed suicide on January 2, 1937. Bette was wracked with guilt.57

  Her relationship with Ham was also strained by two pregnancies, both aborted. “I had two during my first marriage,” Davis acknowledged to Playboy’s Bruce Williamson in 1982. “I don’t want to talk about my marriages, but—well, that’s what he wanted. Being the dutiful wife, that’s what I did. And I guess I will thank him all my life. Because if I’d had those two children. . . . I see myself at 50, with the children all grown up, wondering whether or not I ever would have made it. I think there’s nothing sadder, and I’m sure I’d have given it all up if I’d had children earlier.”58 Bette may have been sure, but Ham Nelson surely wasn’t. And it was Ham Nelson who saw his wife’s fierce ambition and rock-bottom dedication to acting at the closest possible range.

  Bette and Ham moved—again—in 1937, this time to 1700 Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, a hacienda-style house complete with a swimming pool, a tennis court, and an acre of land.59 But by the time Jezebel went into production in November, Ham was spending most of his time in New York, having taken a job as an agent.60 “He was too honorable to trade on my position in pictures, which would have been easy for him to do, and I know the gulf between our earnings discouraged him,” Bette later wrote. “That, more than anything else, licked him.”61

  PART TWO

  VICTORIES

  CHAPTER

  8

  THE SECOND OSCAR

  CALLING BETTE’S SPOILED, HEAD-strong Julie Marsden “Jezebel” is a bit harsh. The biblical Ahab’s Baalworshipping wife slew a variety of perfectly decent prophets and thus offended the Lord so mightily that He arranged for her to be hurled out of a window by eunuchs and her corpse to be devoured by dogs. Julie Marsden just wears the wrong dress to a southern society ball. Still, in the humid and overwrought New Orleans in which William Wyler’s elegant film is set, an inappropriate gown is a breach so damning that Julie must dispatch herself to a leper colony to regain her honor.

  To say that Jezebel is vintage Bette Davis is to praise what vinophiles love in a fine old wine—not the bright, fresh berry but the subtle rankness of controlled decay. The fact that Jezebel was adapted from a Broadway bomb is as key to the film’s appeal as Wyler’s meticulous direction. In the first of their three collaborations, Wyler and Davis extract an essential, rich spirit from an essentially inferior grape.

  Wyler first encountered the property in December 1933, when he saw Miriam Hopkins star in one of the thirty-two performances of the ill-fated play. He saw it neither as fine theater nor as a project for Davis, whom he’d dismissed and forgotten two years earlier. For Wyler, Jezebel stood poised as a potential vehicle for his then-wife, the volatile Margaret Sullavan. Wyler suggested to his distant cousin, Carl Laemmle Jr. at Universal, that the studio buy the rights and possibly even turn the play, a melodrama about a headstrong antebellum belle, into a musical of the old South. But the play quickly closed, and Junior ignored Wyler’s proposal.1

  Warner Bros. expressed interest in Jezebel in 1935, but the studio wasn’t thinking about starring either Sullavan or Hopkins but rather the Patou-infused, spearmint-emitting Ruth Chatterton. The rights to the play, by Owen Davis Sr., were held jointly by Guthrie McClintic, its producer, and Miriam Hopkins, its star. McClintic was eager to cash in, but the sensibly pigheaded Hopkins was willing to sell only if Warners promised her the lead. Walter McEwen, of Warners’ story department, got around that little problem by employing a time-honored Hollywood strategy: he simply lied. McEwen told Hopkins she’d get first crack at the role once the studio had a screenplay, all the while pushing the picture not for Chatterton but for Davis, whom Hopkins now despised.2 Miriam had been jealous of Bette as early as Rochester; with Davis now an Oscar winner, Hopkins’s enmity had only grown.

  By the time Hopkins sold the rights in January 1937, McEwen was actively developing the role for Davis. He enthusiastically told the head of production, Hal Wallis, that Bette would “knock the spots off the part of a little bitch of an aristocratic Southern girl.”3 It’s not particularly curious that various forms of the word bitch keep popping up in Warner Bros. memos on Jezebel; the term is not unrelated to Bette’s emerging persona, both onscreen
and off-, let alone the character of Julie Marsden. The director Edmund Goulding, handed the script for comment and possible employment as director, responded that “although it is quite possible to put a vivid picture upon the screen, that picture can only tell the story of the triumph of bitchery. . . . Julie is rather like one of some naughty children writing obscene things on a wall, and then when the other runs away, she will stay there and tell you that she did it, and so what?” Goulding had ideas for improving the evolving script according to his own tastes, but a Warners producer, Lou Edelman, told Hal Wallis in July 1937 that Goulding’s ideas were pointedly old-fashioned and would result in “the biggest and most complicated piece of tripe that has ever been put on the screen.”4

  With Goulding out, Wallis approached Wyler, then under contract at Goldwyn, with an offer: $75,000 and a twelve-week shooting schedule. Wyler, dissatisfied with what he felt was the lackluster way Goldwyn had been promoting him, was especially interested in Warners’ promise of extensive personal publicity.5

  Bette reacted with mixed feelings to Wyler’s hiring for Jezebel. As pleased as she was by his stature—Wyler was by far the most highly regarded director she’d been asked to work with so far—his reputation for high craftsmanship didn’t erase the lingering humiliation she felt after their first meeting. In 1931, Universal had called Davis in for a screen test with Wyler for his film A House Divided. The wardrobe department stuck her in a tight and tawdry number with a too-revealing top. As Davis later wrote, she felt she looked “common”: “Hot and embarrassed, I was rushed down to the set where the dark little director stopped brooding long enough to glare at me and say to one of his assistants, ‘What do you think of these girls who show their tits and think they can get jobs?’ ”6 Obviously Wyler didn’t think much of these “girls”; Davis didn’t get the role.