by Ed Sikov
Bette was complimentary about Muni in a backhanded kind of way: “Muni was brilliant. Utterly. Articulate. A real intellectual. But he was his own worst enemy. Why did he hide behind the characters so much? . . . He could have accomplished his purpose without that rubber face.”6
Bette’s three mad scenes are measured, altering between shifty-eyed paranoia and filtered-lensed catatonia with makeup by Perc Westmore. Agitated, she storms into the chambers of Louis Napoleon (Claude Rains) and demands that he revoke his orders to pull his troops out of Mexico. She’s elegantly dressed in a dark velvet gown with white fur collar and cuffs, but it’s the gauzy, trailing scarf that falls from her hat that enhances her distracted quality as it flies around her head with every gesture. When she sees that Napoleon is set in his plans and has betrayed Maximilian, she hautily shrieks, “What else might a Hapsburg have expected from a bourgeois Bonaparte!” Her voice cracks: “You charlatan!”
She then faints, wakes up crazy, and accuses Louis Napoleon of trying to poison her; she comes to believe that Napoleon is Satan in a subsequent scene. Finally, in her last scene, Dieterle cuts away from Maximilian about to face the firing squad to an evocative shot of Carlota in her chambers, wandering to the window, throwing it wide, and reaching out, saying and then screaming, “Maxl!”
There was originally to be more of Maximilian and Carlota, but it was Muni’s picture all along—the title makes that point succinctly—so when Muni demanded more scenes to tip the balance in his favor, Warner Bros. acquiesced, and a number of Davis’s and Aherne’s scenes ended up on the proverbial cutting-room floor.
THE OLD MAID started shooting on March 15, 1939. It’s a complex Edith Wharton plot: On the day Delia Lovell (Miriam Hopkins) is to marry the stiff Jim Ralston (James Stephenson) at the dawn of the Civil War, her old fiancé, the reckless Clem Spender (George Brent), returns from a two-year absence. He’s crushed by the wedding, so Delia’s sister Charlotte (Bette) consoles him—intimately. Clem joins the Union army and dies. Charlotte turns a stable into a home for war orphans, including a little girl named Tina (who grows up to be played by Jane Bryan). Tina is short for Clementina; she’s Charlotte’s illegitimate daughter, but it’s a big secret. Delia invites Charlotte and Tina to live at the Ralston mansion. Fifteen years pass. Charlotte has become a carping biddy. Tina, who calls Delia “Mummy” and her real mother “Aunt Charlotte,” falls in love with someone presentable. Delia adopts her to give her propriety and a fortune; Charlotte threatens to reveal the truth on the eve of the wedding. But at the brink she realizes she can’t go through with it, and so, like the great Stella Dallas, she masochistically effaces herself and lets her daughter wed in ignorance.
In The Lonely Life, Bette was delightfully catty about her costar: “Miriam is a perfectly charming woman socially. Working with her is another story. On the first day of shooting, for instance, she arrived on the set wearing a complete replica of one of my Jezebel costumes. It was obvious she wanted me to blow my stack at this. I completely ignored the whole thing. Ensuing events prove she wanted even more to be in my shoes than in my dress.” And: “Miriam used and, I must give her credit, knew every trick in the book. I became fascinated watching them appear one by one. . . . Keeping my temper took its toll. I went home every night and screamed at everybody.” And: “Once, in a two-shot favoring both of us, her attempts to upstage me almost collapsed the couch we were sitting on. . . . If her back had had a buzz saw that allowed her to retreat beyond it, I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised.”7
On Monday, April 17, Bette fainted at 3:50 p.m. A doctor was summoned; he found her pulse to be abnormally high and sent her home. Davis stayed out Tuesday and Wednesday as well, at which point Miriam declared that she was sick, too, damn it, and departed for home. Friday, April 28 saw a discussion between Hopkins, Goulding, and the unit manager, Al Alleborn. The subject: Hopkins’s evolving, rejuvenating makeup. Goulding had noticed that Miriam was coming onto the set looking younger and younger by the day, and he wasn’t pleased. Hal Wallis responded by ordering Perc Westmore not to deviate from the makeup design that he and Goulding had originally approved. Hopkins registered her displeasure by showing up on time the next day but immediately claiming illness and leaving for home.8 The film finally wrapped on Saturday, May 6, ten days behind schedule.
The tension between Hopkins and Davis was no secret at the time. Indeed, Warners used it for the sake of publicity. As Life reported in August 1939, “The fact that Davis and Hopkins dislike each other intensely not only added to their pleasure in making the picture, but also proved so mutually stimulating that Hal Wallis, Warner Bros. production chief, plans to team them again in Devotion.”* Life was astute in appreciating that both actresses used their enmity as a kind of recreation. Davis herself was quoted as saying, “The jealousy was completely one-sided. I have never been jealous of an actor I was working with in my life.”9
She went much further about Hopkins later: “Actors went through torture working with her because she was a pig about it.”10
THE PRIVATE LIVES of Elizabeth and Essex is the protracted title with which Warner Bros. saddled Davis’s next film, an expensive ersatz-historical costume drama filmed in Technicolor. Davis plays Elizabeth I, Errol Flynn her arrogant sometime consort Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex. The production was fraught with tensions, breakdowns, and ill feelings. Flynn—whose name Michael Curtiz tended to pronounce as “Earl Flint”—drunkenly crashed his car midway through filming and came away with facial scars. Olivia de Havilland, fresh from the pressure of filming Gone with the Wind, threw a fit on the set one day and caused much memo writing. In one pivotal scene Bette slapped Errol on the face so hard, her fist laden with jewelry, that he never forgave her. The film is at best a curiosity.
Elizabeth and Essex is based on Maxwell Anderson’s 1930 blank-verse play, Elizabeth the Queen, which ran on Broadway for 147 performances and starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Like Fontanne, Bette Davis could have torn into the role of Elizabeth and still have spoken the poetry, but Flynn—whom Bette called “the only fly in the ointment”—was out of his depth.11 “I can’t remember lines like that,” he complained to Curtiz, so the screenwriters Aeneas MacKenzie and Norman Reilly Raine rewrote them out of verse and into fairly inelegant Hollywood prose. Davis had advocated casting Laurence Olivier to no avail. She later claimed that during her scenes with Flynn she was playing in her mind to Olivier.
* Devotion wasn’t made until 1946 and ended up starring Olivia de Havilland and Ida Lupino. Davis and Hopkins were paired together in 1943 in Old Acquaintance.
Davis had just turned thirty-one when she began filming Elizabeth and Essex. Having been aged to about fifty for the later scenes of The Old Maid, she was now prepared to let Perc Westmore transform her not only into a sixty-year-old but a most recognizable sixty-year-old with a forehead even higher and bonier than Bette’s own. The press reported at the time that Westmore “was horrified” at Davis’s insistence on being completely bald in one scene—she was evidently talked out of it—but he later took some of the credit for Davis’s radical transformation, though he was quick to praise Bette’s gumption: “Here was a gal—I don’t care what the part—who would go along with the make-up I decided on. When she played Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth and Essex I shaved her head halfway back!”12
With less than a week of rest after wrapping The Old Maid, Bette was back at the studio on May 11 to start shooting Elizabeth and Essex. According to her lawyer at the time, Oscar Cummins, Hal Wallis promised her not only a long rest period after she finished but also “a modern picture” as her next project. Wallis contentiously responded that he’d promised nothing, it was just a discussion, there was no formal agreement about anything.13 (In fact, Davis took a long, restorative, life-changing trip East after finishing the film.)
Some of the difficulties surrounding Elizabeth and Essex might have been diminished, or at least played out at a lower volume, had Davis been given more than five d
ays off between pictures. An imbroglio about the film’s title was already raging at the end of April. Warner Bros. wanted to change Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen to The Knight and the Lady to give Errol Flynn more prominence, but that presented a contractual problem: if the film was considered to be a “man’s picture,” Flynn got top billing over Davis. Bette took an extreme position on the matter: syntactically, she argued, the title The Knight and the Lady indeed made it a man’s picture, so she really couldn’t appear in it at all. “The present title is obviously one to give the man first billing. I feel so justified in this from every standpoint that you force me to refuse to make this picture unless the billing is mine,” she wrote to Jack Warner. Warner offered to give Davis top billing but still wanted to keep The Knight and the Lady. Davis refused: “I could not accept first billing with the present title as it is a man’s title. Therefore the title will have to be changed.” Warner telephoned Davis at her table at the studio commissary on May 6, the day she finished The Old Maid, and informed her that she would get top billing, that The Knight and the Lady would definitely not be used, and that the picture might end up being called Elizabeth and Essex. This was not the end of the discussion.
Davis was also fighting with Hal Wallis about a dress: “I forgot to drop you a line before I left about the costume you turned down for Elizabeth. I insist on wearing it.”
Robert Lord, the film’s associate producer, was concerned enough about Bette’s emotional state that he suggested that the studio take out an insurance policy on her health. Miss Davis, Lord wrote, “is in a rather serious condition of nerves. At best she is frail and is going into a very tough picture when she is a long way from her best.” Jack Warner vetoed the idea.14
Bette didn’t show up for filming on Monday, June 19; she phoned in complaining of a sore throat. Her physician—now a Dr. Culley—told her that it was laryngitis and that she’d be out until Thursday at the earliest. The production shut down completely. As a production manager noted, “We can do absolutely nothing on this picture until Miss Davis returns.” On Wednesday, Dr. Culley informed the studio that Miss Davis was still ill and, by the way, she’d read about Flynn’s having wrecked his car off Sunset Boulevard and not being able to appear before the cameras for a week or maybe two because of facial abrasions. The studio informed the doctor “that most of it was publicity and that we expected Flynn by Saturday or Monday at the latest,” at which point Dr. Culley acknowledged that “it would be possible for Miss Davis to be in by Saturday or Monday.” This innocuous statement led to a testy conversation between Oscar Cummins and Warners’ counsel Roy Obringer, with Cummins forced to assure Obringer that Flynn’s injury had nothing to do with Bette’s absence, that Culley’s remarks were “uncalled for,” and that although Bette felt truly terrible about being unable to work, the studio surely must appreciate that it wasn’t mere laryngitis but ruptured blood vessels in her throat that kept her from being able to perform.15
With both Davis and Flynn indisposed, each in his or her own special way, the production didn’t get back into gear until the twenty-seventh. The title issue reared up again on the thirtieth. Warners, evidently fixated on certain crucial words, was now proposing The Lady and the Knight. And Bette was having none of it, dramatically: “I find myself so upset mentally and ill physically by the prospect of this title,” she wired Jack Warner, “that unless this matter is settled in writing I cannot without serious impairment to my health finish the picture.”
There were only a few more days to go as far as wrapping the troubled production was concerned, and Flynn’s lack of professional training wasn’t helping. It hadn’t helped all along. The production reports are peppered with such notations as “If Flynn knows his lines today we should finish” and “[Mr. Flynn had] considerable difficulty with his lines” and “Mr. Curtiz can make fast time until he gets with Errol Flynn, and then we slow down to a walk.”
Flynn’s difficulties had begun with the impossible verse of the script and worsened when Bette slapped him with a fistful of rings. In the finished film, the slap occurs very quickly; Curtiz immediately cuts in to a closer shot of Flynn, and it appears in the take he used that Davis’s hand is free of jewelry. In any case, Flynn chronicled the initial slap in his marvelously titled memoir, My Wicked, Wicked Ways: “Joe Louis himself couldn’t give a right hook better than Bette hooked me with. My jaw went out. I felt a click behind my ear and I saw all these comets, shooting stars, all in one flash. . . . I felt as if I were deaf.” Flynn claimed that he approached Bette privately in her dressing room, but that she cut him off before he had a chance to complain: “Oh, I know perfectly well what you are going to say. If you can’t take a little slap, that is just too bad! If I have to pull punches, I can’t do this. That’s the kind of actress I am—and I stress actress! Would you mind shutting the door?” According to Flynn, he went back to his dressing room and threw up.16
In the scene between Elizabeth and Essex in the Privy Chamber before Elizabeth orders his head chopped off, Elizabeth having had enough of Essex in much the same way Davis had of Flynn and Jack Warner had of Davis, Flynn found it impossible to speak his already simplified dialogue. “We lost considerable time because of Mr. Flynn’s continual blowing up in his lines,” the production manager noted with despair. “We made 20 takes, all on account of Flynn. Mr. Curtiz dismissed him at 5 pm as it was absolutely impossible to accomplish any more than he had already done.”17
The gossip columnist Harrison Carroll was quick to report that Flynn, rising after delivering the line “Am I not as worthy to be king as you to be queen?” had caught his cape under his heel and landed on his ass.18
Olivia de Havilland, who plays Lady Penelope Gray, was creating her own havoc as well. She’d shown up on the set on May 24 but immediately announced that she couldn’t film anything because she was too caught up with shooting retakes for Gone with the Wind and she certainly couldn’t play two characters simultaneously. Shouting ensued. Jack Warner himself finally convinced her to shoot at least some of her scenes on schedule. “I had another display of temperament late Saturday afternoon from Miss de Havilland,” the exasperated production manager wrote on June 10, “to wit—at 5:15 pm when we started to rehearse a scene between her and Miss Fabares [Nanette Fabray playing the girlish Margaret Radcliffe under the original spelling of her name], she informed Mr. Curtiz that she positively was going to stop at 6:00 pm, but Mr. Curtiz told her that unless she stayed and finished the sequence he positively would cut it out of the picture. Miss de Havilland expressed herself before the company, and Mr. Curtiz came right back with the result that she made a display of hysterics before the company and it became necessary for me to dismiss the company at 6:15 without shooting the sequence.” The production manager dryly added that “inasmuch as this sequence was inserted at Miss de Havilland’s request, I believe we should not shoot it and uphold Mr. Curtiz in the matter.”
If The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex matched in art what it provided in stress for its director, actors, and producers, these gossipy tales would give way to more profound pleasures. But despite Davis’s nervy, complex performance, the film doesn’t hold together. Orry-Kelly outdoes himself with a jewel-toned metallic satin gown with a severely cinched waist and great volumes of hooped hemline in the scene in which Davis plays a testy game of chess with de Havilland. Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score is nothing if not majestic. And Anton Grot’s set design is charmingly perverse, ranging from an expectedly grand throne room to Elizabeth’s bizarre quarters in the Tower, which call to mind a vast and gloomy mausoleum. The world Grot created for Elizabeth is a distorted magic kingdom, the deformity reaching its apogee in the Tower scene when a mysterious, orange-lit staircase suddenly unfolds in the stone floor to provide access to the dungeon in which the queen’s lover lies. Given that this love story ends in an execution, Grot’s design is especially inspired.
But Flynn, adept at derring-do, is a simple Essex, a pinup schemer. His one-dimensionality
is especially striking compared to Davis’s weighty if fidgety Elizabeth. Whether she’s imperiously flicking her wrist or waving her arm, displaying flashes of melancholy as well as rage, Davis inhabits the difficult, iron-willed monarch even (or perhaps particularly) when she’s expressing the character’s profound self-doubts. She leans ungainly against the arm of Elizabeth’s throne, making herself look awkward and her character exhausted under the weight of her authority. She gives Elizabeth a slight, elderly shake of the head, the natural tremble of declining health, all the while delivering her lines with supreme confidence and a masterly, elegant vocal inflection that registers as the queen’s English without being a Streep-like technical tour de force. It is to Mildred Rogers’s Cockney as silk is to linen.
There is a particularly vivifying moment toward the end of the film in which the wormish courtier Cecil (Henry Daniell) pleads to his politically threatened, romantically torn queen, “If we do nothing, both you and your kingdom are at the mercy of Essex!” And Davis decides to play it down. With dismissive flutters of her heavily bejeweled hands, and with a tone of superb distraction, she turns away from him and replies, with an acidic calmness, “Little man, little man—leave me alone.” It’s instants like this that turn a coloring-book Tudor epic into something truly regal, however momentarily. As for Davis’s contempt for Flynn’s putative ineptitude, she ended up changing her mind. He may not have been Laurence Olivier, but he was still Errol Flynn. After seeing the film again late in life, Bette told Olivia de Havilland, “Damn, he’s good! I was wrong about him.”19
ON HER FIRST day as a teacher in New York City, prim Henriette Deluzy-Desportes (Davis) becomes slightly unhinged when she learns that her spoiled students know her secret shame: she was once a notorious French jailbird. (“How do you spell Conciergerie?” one especially snotty girl demands.) She cancels the day’s French lesson and tells them her sad tale. In flashback, Henriette becomes the governess for the children of the Duc de Praslin (Charles Boyer) and his wife (Barbara O’Neil), a beautifully groomed harridan. Monsieur le Duc hates the crazy Duchesse and falls in chaste love with Henriette. The mad Duchesse accuses Henriette of having an affair with the Duc, and after a series of screamingly tight close-ups, the Duc kills the Duchesse and drinks poison. Thanks to a kindly Methodist minister, Henry Field (Jeffrey Lynn), Henriette finds a teaching job in New York, and this regeneration brings us back to the present, by which point Henriette’s schoolgirls are all weeping uncontrollably and begging Henriette’s forgiveness. The film ends with the promise of Henriette’s marriage to the minister: All This and Heaven, Too.
