by Ed Sikov
Where Bette was methodical as a worker, Errol was anarchic and devil-may-care. For Davis, filmmaking was work, and work was good, and good was virtue and practicality in equal measure. For Flynn making movies was a sport of no more consequence than a good athletic screw. One might assume that there was immediate friction between the two stars, but there wasn’t. “The most beautiful person we’ve ever had on the screen” is how Davis described him years later. “He openly said he knew nothing about acting, and I admired his honesty because he was absolutely right.”2
Bette’s confidant, Warner’s makeup chief, Perc Westmore (Perc being pronounced as in Percival), was amazed at the rapport between the two stars. According to his nephew, Frank Westmore, “It baffled Perc when Bette Davis, the queen supreme of the Warner Bros. lot, raved about ‘Errol’s charm and enchanting ways’ all during the filming of their first movie together, The Sisters, but Bette later explained that she adored working with Flynn ‘because he never really worked. He was just there.’ ”3
The Sisters is a competent and reasonably involving melodrama punctuated by surprisingly effective if archaic special effects. The story begins in 1904 in Silver Bow, Montana, where three sisters—Louise (Davis), Helen (Anita Louise), and Grace (Jane Bryan)—prepare to marry under the seemingly watchful but effectively impotent eyes of their parents (Beulah Bondi and Henry Travers). Louise meets the dashing writer Frank (Flynn) at a Teddy Roosevelt election-night party; they’re married within the week, and off they go to San Francisco, where Frank finds work as a low-level sportswriter while trying to write his cherished novel. But his interests really lie in drink. (The makeup department’s effort to make Flynn look like a down-at-his-heels drunk is not a success. His smooth, painted-on five-o’clock shadow fails to soften his chiseled jaw and cheekbones, and what with the delicate, derelict-suggesting darkening under his eyes he ends up looking sexier than ever.) Louise miscarries. Frank takes a slow boat to Singapore, leaving Louise alone just as the 1906 earthquake hits. She winds up in a kindly Oakland whorehouse but returns quickly to her job as a department store owner’s assistant. The boss (Ian Hunter) falls in love with her, but she returns to Montana on a family emergency, and at a Taft inauguration ball Frank shows up, she forgives him, and they reconcile, though the actual ending of the film is a stilted shot of the three overly illuminated sisters standing in a row in the middle of a crowded dance floor gazing blankly off into nowhere as the camera cranes back and up.
Like Leslie Howard before him, Flynn made overtures to Davis, but once again she spurned them. “I confused him utterly,” Davis wrote in The Lonely Life. “One day he smiled that cocky smile and looked directly at me. ‘I’d love to proposition you, Bette, but I’m afraid you’d laugh at me.’ I never miss the rare opportunity to agree with a man. ‘You’re so right, Errol.’ He bit his lip, waved his arm through the air and bowed in mock chivalry like Captain Blood. He was extremely graceful in retreat.”4 She failed to explain why she turned him down.
There was the inevitable dustup with the director, Anatole Litvak, a personally dashing womanizer but just an average-Joe director. What the critic David Thomson writes of Litvak’s late career applies equally to some of his early work: “Litvak solemnly puts his actresses through the motions of ordeal.”5 In the earthquake scene in The Sisters, he told Bette to stand in position in her upper-floor apartment set, and, at his command, the set fell to pieces around her as she screamed, flailed her arms, and stayed precisely on target. “If I had been a fraction of an inch off my position, that would have been that,” Bette later wrote. “As it was, a splinter from a crystal chandelier flew in my eye.” Bobby Davis Pelgram happened to be on the set that day, “knitting serenely in a corner” until the earthquake hit. “Tola Litvak!” Bobby screamed after he called “Cut.” “You are a son of a bitch!”6
Oddly, Bette and Bobby decided that Litvak had gotten personal by pulling this stunt; he was out to get her, Bette believed. And in the manner of all paranoiacs, she came up with what was, to her, a plausible reason: the cheap bastard was saving money by not hiring a stunt double.7 It’s curious that throughout her life Davis claimed to be striving for truth and realism but remained, in this instance at least, so resistant to performing physical action in its real, spatial context. Litvak films the collapse of the building mostly in master shot. The camera is far enough away from Bette that we continually see the full extent of the devastation, but it’s close enough to register the fact that it’s Bette Davis herself who risks being hurt or even killed by a shifting floor or falling bricks. That’s what gives the scene its tension and bite, and Litvak was wise not to spoil the effect by shooting a stand-in’s faceless form from so far away that it wouldn’t matter who she was.
ONE OF THE most lurid sections of Charles Higham’s Bette: The Life of Bette Davis concerns her brief affair with Howard Hughes, the peculiar and fantastically wealthy aeronautics designer, flier, filmmaker, and, at the time of Bette’s affair, on-again off-again lover of Katharine Hepburn. Hughes, Higham asserts as we return to our demeaningly squatting position at the bedroom door’s keyhole, “suffered from recurrent ejaculatory impotence,” and Bette, “who was not beautiful and thus was not threatening, told her friends she managed to help him overcome his impotence. She was sweet and kind and good to Hughes—she set his mind free of anxiety.”8
Higham goes on to tell what seems to be an over-the-top story involving a jealous and maddened Ham Nelson returning from New York, wiring their bedroom on Coldwater Canyon Drive for sound—“with the aid of a well-known private detective”—and sitting alone in a sound truck up the road listening to his wife and Hughes making what was, for Hughes at least, psychotherapeutic love. As Higham reports, Ham “suddenly could endure no more. He raced down to the back door, let himself in with a key, and burst into the bedroom. Hughes tried to punch Ham in the face. He flubbed it.” The enraged Ham then threatened to blackmail both Bette and Hughes—Bette by revealing her adultery to the press, Hughes by hawking the aural evidence of Hughes’s sexual dysfunction to the highest bidder. Bette, Higham writes, “became hysterical as Ham ran out.”
The story turns even more thrilling when Higham asserts that Hughes “hired a professional gangster to kill Ham but then learned that Ham had advised the police that if he were murdered, Hughes would be responsible for the killing” and called the goon off. Hughes is said to have paid Ham $70,000 to destroy the recording, Bette is said to have repaid Hughes by taking out a loan, and Hughes—by all accounts, the multimillionaire actually took her money—was kind enough to send her a flower every year on the anniversary of the blackmail loot’s repayment.9
Lawrence Quirk, in Fasten Your Seat Belts: The Passionate Life of Bette Davis, and James Spada, in More Than a Woman: An Intimate Biography of Bette Davis, supply more details of the affair: Bette met Hughes while she was selling raffle tickets at a benefit for the Tailwaggers, an organization that cared for lost or abandoned dogs, at the Beverly Hills Hotel in September 1938. Bette had headed the Tailwaggers since June. (“All my life I’ve been animal crazy, especially over dogs,” Bette said around this time. “But only when I became president of the Tailwaggers did I become acutely aware of the problems of dogdom.”)10 They began their affair at Hughes’s Malibu beach house, where Hughes once romantically “covered his bed with gardenias and made love to her amid the intoxicatingly rich aroma of the exotic flower.”11
Spada provides the exact date of the stealth recording—September 22, 1938—but claims that instead of Higham’s “well-known private detective,” Ham enlisted the aid of his turncoat brother-in-law, Robert Pel-gram. In this version there is no sound truck with its cumbersome (and consequently suspect) trail of wires leading out of the house, across the lawn, up the street, and into a parked vehicle. Instead, according to Spada—who got his information from Bobby and Robert Pelgram’s daughter, Fay—the crafty brothers-in-law drilled holes in the floorboards and ran wires from the bedroom to the basement, where they installed the
recording device, all during the day while Bette was distracted at the studio. Spada also provides the detail that the flower Hughes sent every year was a red rose.
Although it seems so out of character for Ham Nelson to have become a frenzied blackmailer, Vik Greenfield, Bette’s personal assistant in the late 1960s to mid-1970s, swears that the incident really took place as Quirk and Spada described it. “It’s true,” Greenfield stated. How did he know? “Because Bette told me,” he placidly answered.12
The Hollywood press knew only about the tension in the marriage, not the affair with Hughes or the blackmailing. A clipping dated August 30, 1938, almost a month before the crisis, already finds Bette and Bobby (amusingly called Mrs. Pilgrim) at a Glenbrook, Nevada, divorce resort. Another quotes Bette in “righteous wrath” saying, “I am in Nevada for a vacation—not a divorce!” Another reports, erroneously I imagine, that Ham had actually joined her at Glenbrook. Still another touchingly reveals that Ham called his wife “Spuds.”
By September 17, the rumors hadn’t abated. The columnist Harrison Carroll quoted Ham as saying, “We’ll just have to wait for developments.” On September 20, Bette said, “There is no use denying that we are having difficulties.” If Spada’s date is correct, the difficulties worsened considerably on the twenty-second, and on September 27, Carroll reported that the couple had separated, with Ham moving out of the Coldwater Canyon house and into the home of “L. Linsk, a fellow associate in the Rockwell-O’Keefe Agency.” Bette was still calling it “a marriage vacation.”
Mayme Ober Peake weighed in. She quoted Bette: “I found one thing in England I hope to keep forever—peace of mind. A good licking is good for the soul.”13
Ham filed divorce papers on November 22, alleging among other things that Bette was prone to give more attention to her books than to her husband. From the Complaint for Divorce, dated November 22, 1938, Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr., plaintiff, versus Ruth Elizabeth Nelson, defendant: “Defendant has insisted on occupying herself with reading to a totally unnecessary degree, and upon solicitation by plaintiff to exhibit some evidence of conjugal friendliness and affection, defendant would become enraged and indulged in a blatant array of epithets and derision.”14 When the matter came before Judge Thurmand Clarke on December 6, the proceedings contained the following snippet of dialogue:
JUDGE CLARKE: Did she do a great deal of reading?
HAM: Yes. To an unnecessary degree.
Judge Clarke granted the divorce.
Bette received an unsigned letter from an irate woman. Because of Bette’s divorce, the former fan wrote, her husband and sons refused to see any more of her movies ever again. “They all hate you and I think you belong in hell and I hope you go there,” she explained.15
Bette saved this letter for the rest of her life.
HOW WOULD YOU feel if you were told you had only six months to live? This was the reporter Gladys Hall’s question to Bette Davis at the time of Dark Victory’s release. “I would resent it horribly,” Bette replied before shifting from decorous indignation to out-of-control rage: “I’d hate to! I’d scream, ‘Why should this happen to me?’ I’d go crazy, wild, mad! I’d try hard to deaden my agony with insane sedatives. I’d try to forget by any means I could lay my frantic hands to—drinking, love affairs, noisy nightmares, anything to dull the edges of the essential nightmare.”16 No doubt the increasingly histrionic Davis would have reacted precisely as she said she would at the time. Her divorce from Ham had made her especially vulnerable to the emotional shakes she barely restrained even at the best of times. But, as almost always, the actress in her won out. In Dark Victory, she plays her character’s impending death much more delicately. Judith Traherne is a marvelous blend of nobility and the jitters, and Bette related to her intensely. Many years later, with the critical distance afforded by age and experience, she called Judith Traherne “my favorite—and the public’s favorite—part I have ever played.”17
The original play, by George Emerson Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, starred the gravel-throated Tallulah Bankhead and ran for only fifty-one performances late in 1934. Although the critics loved Bankhead, the play got emphatically mixed reviews. Brooks Atkinson, for instance, called it “a curious stew of mixed vegetables.”18 Still, the melodrama was appealing enough to Gloria Swanson, who pitched it to Columbia’s Harry Cohn as a vehicle for herself. Cohn wasn’t as impressed as Swanson was and took a pass.19 At around the same time, David O. Selznick bought the rights with an eye toward casting Greta Garbo and Fredric March; the two stars were about to make Anna Karenina, a project Selznick considered too similar to Garbo’s other costume dramas. When Garbo turned him down, he offered the role to Merle Oberon, but Dark Victory stayed dormant.20
Davis learned of the property early in 1938, and in characteristic fashion, she made a nuisance of herself over it with the front office. She cajoled to no avail until, finally, one Warners producer expressed interest: David Lewis, an associate producer of The Sisters and the boyfriend of the director James Whale. Together, they approached Edmund Goulding, who had made Grand Hotel. His old-fashioned treatment of Jezebel to the contrary notwithstanding, Goulding knew the value of a good melodrama. The threesome of Davis, Goulding, and Lewis convinced Jack Warner to buy the rights from Selznick for $50,000, though Warner himself couldn’t understand why anybody would “want to see a picture about a girl who dies.”21
It’s telling that Bette Davis received the most sympathetic responses from Lewis and Goulding, a gay man and a bisexual, rather than Jack Warner or Hal Wallis. If there is such a thing as a gay sensibility, however imprecise and indefinable it may be, Dark Victory embodies it, at least in part. The writer Jeff Weinstein once offered a definition that stands the test of time: when asked whether there was such a thing as a gay sensibility and whether it had any influence on mainstream culture, Weinstein answered that, no, there is no such thing as a gay sensibility, and yes, it has had an enormous influence on popular culture. Dark Victory is a classic case in point.
Judith Traherne is already gay in the archaic sense of the word: she’s flippant, merry, a bit boozy. She’s a good-time gal with unlimited wealth and a fabulous wardrobe, and any gay man worth his salt—any gay man d’un certain âge, that is—would happily imagine himself in her pumps. But Dark Victory’s unabashedly amplified, high-stakes melodrama, especially as acted out by Bette Davis, elevates it into the pantheon of gay iconography—the impassioned and exceedingly imitable realm of the drama queen. It’s not just that the queen of both fact and fiction reigns melodramatically, though in this case, of course, she’s awarded a brain tumor and a splendid, heartrending death. More essentially, it’s the pent-up energy of concealment and its imminent breakdown that provide the gay regent with much of her authority. The question of who knows what about one lies at the heart of gay men’s experience—gay men of the twentieth century, at least. The queer theorist Eve Sedgwick calls it “the epistemology of the closet.”
In this light, it’s little wonder that Bette Davis became a gay icon. As the playwright, actor, and actress Charles Busch notes, “She’s wonderful at playing someone with a secret—like the scenes in Dark Victory where she knows she’s dying, and she’s being a horrible bitch to everybody.”22 Cabin in the Cotton’s seductive and bizarre “I’d love to kiss ya but I just washed my hair” may have been her first camp-worthy bit of dialogue, but Davis’s delivery of Judith Traherne’s grandest line is precisely that of the flamboyant gay queen of the dramatic arts. Having discovered the truth about her own mortal illness, Judith lets her doctor and best friend in on the secret they have kept from her by snatching the menu out of the waiter’s hands and, her nostrils flaring, declaring, “I think I’ll have a large order of prognosis negative!” From these glorious moments of subterfuge and its destruction, concealment and revelation, twentieth-century gay men forged their own culture.
That Edmund Goulding asked Ronald Reagan to play gay in Dark Victory adds a minor grace note to the proceedings—minor in
both senses of the word. Not only is Reagan’s faintly asexual character, Judith’s sodden friend, not terribly important to the film’s nature, but the performance is soured by Reagan’s lack of talent. The future president wasn’t enough of an actor to play someone fundamentally unlike himself. As Reagan too euphemistically put it, “The director wanted it to be kind of a—well, as he described it once, a fellow that could sit down in the room while the gals were changing clothes and they wouldn’t mind. And I didn’t really see it that way.” Didn’t, couldn’t, no matter. Goulding’s biographer, Matthew Kennedy, goes so far as to call Reagan’s objection a kind of homosexual panic. “He comes off as a greenhorn actor giving a poor imitation of drunkenness,” Kennedy adds. “His character is watery and forgettable, and Reagan’s refusal to take chances makes him appear insecure both as an actor and as a man.”23
Reagan is unimpeachably straight in the worst possible way—stilted even when drunk. The drama queen, on the other hand, knows exactly when to pour it on and when to play it subtly. She saves herself for her best, most attention-grabbing moments. At other times, it’s all about restraint. In the scene when Judith wanders through Dr. Steele’s emptying office, discovers her own medical file on his desk, and sees the “prognosis negative” conclusion in letters from other consulting doctors, Davis abandons almost all activity and simply lets the camera register her face—slightly tense and sober but nothing more. She permits the celluloid to do the work rather than taking over the job herself. Even when she confronts Steele’s nurse about the meaning of prognosis and negative, thereby confirming her own impending death, she underplays it. The buoyant Judith—partying with her aristocratic friends and parrying with Humphrey Bogart’s strangely Irish horse trainer, Michael—is Davis being mannered; the serious, private Judith is much more the result of Bette’s knowing when to leave well enough alone.
