Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  DARK VICTORY BEGAN shooting on October 10, 1938, under the hawklike eyes of Hal Wallis. Two weeks later, the producer was irate. The film was falling behind schedule. He complained bitterly to Goulding about what he considered to be the abominably long time it took to film two shots. One of them, representing only nine seconds of screen time, took Goulding and his cinematographer an hour and a half to shoot. “You can tell Ernie Haller for me that any other cameraman on the lot could have made the shot in half the time or less,” Wallis fumed.24

  There was also a fresh chill in the air between Goulding and Davis, Bette considering her director to be artistically irresolute. According to the New York Times, Goulding also kept Bette in the dark, as it were, about the nature of Judith’s illness, the theory being that she would appear more believably happy during the first part of the film. Bette is said to have been annoyed, and justifiably so; a director of Goulding’s experience might have given an Oscar-winning actress more credit for being able to act.25 Then again, the detail itself is suspect. Bette presumably had read the play before pitching it again and again to Warner Bros. In any event, Judith is acutely if secretively aware that there’s something awfully wrong with her from the beginning. She enters the film in failed denial.

  Prunella Hall was pleased to report in her Screen Gossip column not only that Bobby Davis Pelgram’s two English setters, Daffy and Don, but Bobby herself were all appearing in the film. According to Prunella, the volatile Daffy refused to let anyone else handle her, so Bobby donned a maid’s uniform, went before the cameras, and was so nervous about her performance that she yanked her older sister’s zipper in the wrong direction and momentarily choked her.26 (Coincidently, Louella Parsons informed her readers—erroneously, of course—that Warner Bros. had cut a deal with Sigmund Freud to be a consultant on the film.)27 Bobby’s scene must have ended up on the cutting-room floor, but the dogs play a key role: they humanize Judith, who responds to them with more consistent affection than she displays toward any of her other friends, including the man she marries.

  It was no secret that filming Dark Victory was nerve-wracking for Bette almost to the point of debilitation. She didn’t start off well in any sense of the word. The columnist Dorothy Manners reported that after the divorce, Bette tried to recuperate from the stress at “La Quinta, at Palm Springs, at all the other hideaways she sought,” but that these escapes didn’t really help. When Davis began shooting the film, Manners noted, “she was a sick girl mentally and physically.”28 Then, after just a week of filming, and having pleaded for the role for months, she begged Hal Wallis with equal gusto to find someone else. The role was too much for her, she told him; she was ill, upset, hysterical; she couldn’t bear it; he simply had to replace her. But Wallis, having seen the dailies, knew that the camera—in its cold, close, mechanical way—was picking up something ineffably honest about Davis’s own anguish. “Stay sick,” he said.29

  She never was one to hide her neurosis successfully, if she was able to hide it at all, and everyone connected with the production was aware that she was especially fragile. “It’s up to you guys to keep the lady on an even keel,” Wallis told Goulding and her costar, George Brent. “Eddie, you work with her—and George, you play with her—and it’ll keep her excited, amused, and on the ball.”30

  She missed at least three days of filming in late November because of an unspecified illness. And on December 3, the day the company filmed the gardening scene, in which Judith comments that the sky is clouding over but feels the warmth on her hand and realizes that she is going blind and will die within hours, Bette became particularly overwrought. As one production manager reported to another, “Miss Davis was taken hysterical in this scene and they had difficulties in getting it. She cried very heavily and it was very difficult and very trying for everybody to get the scene.”31 By this point late in the filming Bette empathized with Judith so overpoweringly that she couldn’t help sobbing at her imminent death, knowing all the while that histrionic tears were all wrong for the character. And her intensely frustrating inability to get it right only made her all the more hysterical. Goulding didn’t pressure her but instead let her play the scene again and again until finally, dry-eyed, Davis gave the result they both wanted.32 Bette was characteristically hard on herself when describing her performance in this scene to Gladys Hall: “I went into the scene and knew that it was putrid. I wasn’t being the character of the girl in Dark Victory, you see. I was just being Bette Davis weeping over my own heartache.”33

  “WHY, THE TEAR jerker is an art in itself!” Goulding declared to the New York Times around the time of the film’s release. “There is a certain psychiatric technique to it. You see, no one will cry about anyone who cries about himself. In Dark Victory, I wrote into the picture a character in the person of Geraldine Fitzgerald who did all the crying for Miss Davis. If Miss Davis had wept, no one would have wept with her, but Miss Fitzgerald was in the position of the audience, weeping behind Miss Davis’ back, and that gave Miss Davis a clear course of martyrdom.”34 (Judith has a good friend in the play, but Fitzgerald’s character is indeed Goulding’s creation.)

  For all his talent and gay sensibility, Goulding’s “psychiatric technique” fails him as far as the ending of Dark Victory is concerned. As finely, honestly heartbreaking as the ending is—it’s certainly one of the most emotionally commanding last reels in American film—its heart and its art owe infinitely more to Davis than to Goulding, who keeps trumping up sentiment in all the wrong places. Once she realizes the end is imminent, Judith methodically sends Dr. Steele, now her husband, off to Philadelphia. (George Brent’s sluggishness actually works to his character’s advantage here, since it makes it possible for audiences to believe that this dedicated neurosurgeon remains oblivious to his wife’s swiftly oncoming blindness. Casey Robinson had advocated casting Spencer Tracy as Dr. Steele instead of Brent, and one can only wonder how Tracy, much the better actor, would have handled the role.)35 She also dispatches Ann, who goes running tearfully down the street toward an unspecified destination. Alone, as she has planned to be at the end, Judith feels her way into the house and begins to climb the stairs.

  Geraldine Fitzgerald, who plays Ann, recalled that the set “had been beautifully lit with a kind of heavenly glow shining on Bette as she slowly climbed the stairs. Suddenly she stopped and turned around and came down the stairs, this time very matter-of-factly (almost clumping down, you could say) and said to Eddie Goulding, ‘Is Max Steiner going to underscore this scene?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Goulding. ‘Of course not! We all know how you feel about that!’ ‘Good,’ said Bette, ‘because either I’m going up the stairs or Max Steiner is going up the stairs, but we’re goddamn well not going up together!’ ” (“I hate to remember,” Fitzgerald added, “but I think the scene was underscored and she had the Vienna Boys Choir accompanying her.”)36

  In fact, Steiner’s underscoring is mercifully quiet—at first—as Judith ascends the stairs, gripping the banister for support. She crosses to her bedroom and closes the door behind her. But neither Goulding nor Judith’s maid, Martha, takes the hint. Judith wishes above all else to be supremely alone, but Goulding cuts from the heroine sequestering herself in her bedroom to die to a shot of Martha looking stricken on the landing. He even tracks forward on this heretofore undistinguished character, giving her much more emotional weight than she either deserves or requires. If Judith’s best friend, Ann, has been the audience’s surrogate thus far, Goulding proceeds—most unfairly—to turn her maid into a gawking neighbor craning to get a better look at who’s being carted into the ambulance at the house next door.

  Goulding still doesn’t let up. After Martha stares at the closed bedroom door, not only does she open it and enter, but her first impulse is, ridiculously, to draw the drapes—in the room of a woman who obviously no longer cares and can no longer see.

  Goulding then pans with Martha as she crosses right to reveal a final surprise. Flying in the face of everything we know
about her until this moment, Judith Traherne suddenly becomes religious: there she is, on her knees at the side of the bed, devoutly praying. It’s Hollywood piety at its most intolerably phony. The free-spirited Judith has evinced absolutely no interest in God throughout the film, but now Goulding forces her to experience death as the foxhole in which atheism vanishes.

  And Geraldine Fitzgerald was only partially correct: this is when the angelic choir comes in. That a sense of authenticity survives such hokum is a testament to Bette Davis’s measured, sure-footed performance.

  Judith pulls herself onto the bed and says, “I don’t want to be disturbed,” but Martha persists in trying to make herself useful and begins removing what she considers to be extraneous items from the bed: a jacket, a sweater, a blouse. Martha then tucks Judith in with a comforter Judith has not requested and, at long last, makes her exit.

  But Goulding’s inexplicable fixation on his heroine’s extraneous maid is so overpowering that he simply can’t resist cutting to yet another shot of her. We see her looking stricken again, this time at the door. Finally, she closes it with herself on the other side. Good riddance, and amen.

  With his heroine alone at last, Goulding gets to the heart of the matter in just a few seconds: a brilliant head-and-shoulders shot of Judith lying on her side, in solitude and at peace. A close-up would have been intrusive, the visual equivalent of Martha’s pestering. A more distant shot would have lacked depth of feeling. The shot holds for only a few moments before—in an inspired touch—the image goes out of focus and blacks out, a visual trope that precisely expresses Judith’s diminishing experience of vision, light, and life.

  Cut to the racetrack.

  In one of Goulding and Robinson’s least inspired ideas, Dark Victory originally had a happy ending. Judith still died, of course; there was no miraculous cure. But her death did not originally serve as the final scene. No, Goulding and Robinson cut away from Judith dying quietly, in dignity and solitude, to a horserace, with Judith’s horse charging down the stretch in the lead. Cut to Bogart’s Michael in out-of-character tears. Cut to the triumphant Challenger with a wreath of flowers around his neck. Cut to Ann and Steele in Judith’s old box at the track, where Ann urges the dispirited Steele to return to his medical mission. “Your work can’t stop now!” she insists. “We can’t let her courage have stood for nothing!” Making a bad scene even worse, Casey Robinson gave Steele one of the most ineloquent final lines in all cinema: “All right,” he says.37 The end.

  As David Lewis described it in a November 4 memo to Hal Wallis, Goulding wanted “to take the edge off Judith’s death and [let audiences] leave the theatre with the feeling of entertainment and optimism.”38 To his profound discredit, Wallis concurred, and they shot the scene. After seeing what appears to have been a fairly polished rough cut, Wallis offered some guidance. For one thing, he counseled, “shorten the long shot holding on Davis at the bed after the maid leaves.” In that he was right. But there was more: “See if you can find some close-ups of a dark horse that we can cut into the race where Ann says ‘Look, he’s winning,’ and where the boy talks to the Colonel about the horse—about three cuts of him in the proper spots”—as though Dark Victory was really the tale of a conquering steed. But even Wallis found one shot to be overly jubilant: “Take out the cut of putting the wreath on the horse,” he advised.39

  The film previewed on March 7, 1939, complete with the Challenger and “all right” ending. Lo: it didn’t work. Wallis’s assistant made the point simply, even plaintively to his boss two days later: “I do not know how the picture could end any better than by having the girl die as she did.”40 It was that ending, the truncated one, that Warner Bros. released to extraordinary acclaim and tears of melodramatic fulfillment. If only they could have edited out the maid.

  THE TRAILER FOR Dark Victory proved to be something of a milestone. Against a close-up of an assertively unglamorized Bette looking solemnly to the right, the crawl began: “In the career of every great actress, one role lives forever as her finest creation. Warner Bros. now proudly present [sic] the most exciting star on the screen in a story that lights the full fires of her genius. The portrait of a free soul!” Beyond trumpeting the earnestness and depth of Davis talent, which was by then irrefutable, the studio was finally fully exploiting what it had tried so hard to dampen or deny: the “free soul” in question could have just as easily been Bette as Judith Traherne. Warners at last appreciated and was willing to sell a film based on the fact that its fierce and neurotic star was indeed the rebellious and unconventional woman the public well knew her to be offscreen as well as on-.

  At the same time, Warner Bros. could only go so far. “Which type of make-up for you?” the Dark Victory pressbook asked. “With medium skin and light blonde hair, Bette Davis is an outstanding example of this type beauty. Below are her make-up suggestions: powder—peach; rouge—blush; mascara—brown; lipstick—blush; eye shadow—purple.” And: “ ‘A clear, lovely skin is the blonde’s most precious beauty asset,’ states Bette Davis, the exquisite blonde star of Dark Victory, which will open at the Radio City Music Hall on Friday.”41 Apparently nobody told Warners’ publicists that Bette hadn’t been blonde, either onscreen or off-, for several years.

  Then again, Warners was only following cultural convention in continuing to sell Davis as an offscreen fashion plate. The following year, for example, the New York–based Fashion Academy named Bette one of America’s twelve best-dressed women. Bette won, naturally, in the “Screen” category. Mrs. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt won for “Society.” And in the “Adventure” category, the winner was the naturalist Osa Johnson, “selected for using scientific knowledge of jungle attire in practical everyday fashion.”42

  CHAPTER

  10

  FEUDS

  DARK VICTORY WRAPPED ON DECEMBER 5, 1938, and despite Davis’s precarious emotional state, the studio gave her only a week off before beginning her scenes for Juarez on the twelfth. Juarez was, for Warners, an Important Picture. The script was two years in the making; 372 sources were consulted. The production designer Anton Grot and his team drew 3,643 sketches and 7,360 blueprints for fifty-four sets including several Mexican villages, the throne room and living quarters of Chapultepec Palace, rooms in a castle on the Adriatic, and rooms in a castle in France.1 A total of fourteen women were said (by Warners’ publicists) to have provided the black hair used to concoct Bette’s wig at a cost of $2,500.2 Shooting began almost two months before Davis set foot on a soundstage and continued until February 8, 1939.

  Mexico elects as its president Benito Juarez (Paul Muni), the brilliant Zapotec who rose from illiterate fieldworker to lawyer, judge, governor of Oaxaca, and radical reform politician, but Louis Napoleon (Claude Rains) installs the glamorous Maximilian von Hapsburg (Brian Aherne) as emperor. Catastrophically liberal for an emperor, poor Max just doesn’t get it. He arrives in Mexico with his wife, Carlota (Bette), expecting great popular support, figures out that he’s a dupe, but soldiers on. He refuses to suppress Juarez, but Juarez stubbornly insists on a Hapsburg-free democracy and keeps on rebelling. Maximilian considers abdicating, but Carlota, not a great political adviser, convinces him not to on the theory that he can save Mexico from its real enemies in Europe if he remains in charge. Maximilian holds an olive branch out to Juarez in the form of the prime ministership. Juarez refuses. Napoleon then undercuts Maximilian by ordering his troops out of Mexico. Carlota travels to Paris and confronts Napoleon but loses her mind, a shift in temperament Orry-Kelly expresses by way of an all-black gown. Juarez and his forces capture Maximilian, who nobly ends up facing a firing squad for the good of Mexico.

  Juarez was directed by William Dieterle, who had directed Fashions of 1934, Fog Over Frisco, and Satan Met a Lady and who nearly took over Jezebel. Dieterle was, as Brian Aherne described him, “a very tall, precise German with dark, burning eyes and strictly formal manners [who] always wore white cotton gloves on the set in case it should be necessary, in ge
tting the exact angle he wanted, to touch the face of a player.”3 The director certainly had the getup; he just didn’t have much talent.

  Aherne didn’t have kind things to say about his leading lady: “I even found Bette Davis attractive when I played Maximilian to her Carlota and, brilliant actress though she is, surely nobody but a mother could have loved Bette Davis at the height of her career.”4 He didn’t elaborate. Perhaps he didn’t have to.

  Juarez is hampered by its most dramatic attempt at scrupulous authenticity: Paul Muni’s makeup. In a misguided quest for strict realism, Muni insisted on precisely mimicking the real Juarez. He and the film’s producers, Hal Wallis and Henry Blanke, traveled to Mexico in August 1938 on a fact-finding mission. Somebody even managed to dig up a 116-year-old man who had fought under Juarez. But Muni went much further than listening to an old soldier’s tales. He demanded that he appear onscreen looking exactly like Juarez. Perc Westmore described the laborious process: “We started by taking photographs of Muni, then painting the likeness of the Indian Juarez over them. We took plaster casts of his face. We had to accentuate his bone structure, make his jaws appear wider, square his forehead, and give him an Indian nose. He had to be darker than anyone else in the picture, so we used a dark reddish-brown makeup, highlighted with yellow.” After seeing the makeup tests, Jack Warner remarked, “You mean we’re paying Muni all this dough and we can’t even recognize him?”5

  Warner was right, but he missed the more critical problem: Muni can barely move his mouth under all the glop, let alone register even the broadest facial expressions. The otherwise brilliant actor forced himself to play the entire film from under an inflexible Zapotec mask, and the result is disastrous.