Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis
Page 20
Budgeted at $1,075,000, the melodrama was written—lengthily—by Casey Robinson and directed just as time-consumingly by Anatole Litvak. The producer David Lewis had wanted Greta Garbo to play Henriette; others at Warners advocated Helen Hayes.20 Litvak considered casting his estranged wife, Miriam Hopkins, as the Duchesse, saying, “The Duchesse de Praslin is a heartless and venomous bitch. Miriam will be perfect.”21 But Barbara O’Neil—who plays Scarlett’s mother in Gone with the Wind—was cast instead. As Bette points out, this “didn’t help matters. As she was conceived for the film, the Duc’s revulsion with her was not convincing. His wife was in actuality a sloven and a horror with none of the exterior beauty that was Miss O’Neil’s.”22
Shooting began on February 8, 1940. Hal Wallis told Litvak the following day that he’d gotten off to a good enough start but that Davis looked “pasty and tired” in the scene in which Henriette interviews for the governess job, and, by the way, Wallis didn’t like the way Davis kept moving her hands in that scene, either. That night, Jack Warner saw Litvak and Olivia de Havilland coming out of the studio café together at 2:15 a.m. “I told him it would be very funny if Goulding had to finish his picture,” witty Warner told Wallis. Warner thought it would be a good idea to have another director ready to go on the picture because of Litvak’s characteristically slow pace.23
Bette and Litvak clashed often. They had wildly different conceptions of Henriette, for one thing. All This and Heaven, Too is based on a novel by Rachel Field, Henriette’s great-niece; her great-uncle was the kindly minister. Field, Robinson, and Litvak all believed in Henriette’s innocence, but in The Lonely Life Bette claimed that she’d read the Marquis de Sade’s book about the case as well as Field’s novel and that despite her growing friendship with Field, Bette thought de Sade had it right. Henriette and the Duc “must have been lovers,” Davis wrote. “It was impossible for me to believe that they were not.” Sandford Dody, who helped Davis write The Lonely Life, reiterated the point in his own memoir: “She informed me that she didn’t for one moment believe that they were not lovers. Though in fairness to Bette, who preferred using the Marquis de Sade as a historical source and not the governess’ niece, Rachel Field, who was only the author, there was precedent for such a conceit.”24 (What neither Davis nor Dody explain, however, is the fact that the Marquis de Sade had been dead for thirty-two years before Henriette met the Duc.)
There was another point of tension between Litvak and Davis. Litvak showed up every day with elaborate written plans for shooting. Davis, without a trace of irony, later commented that Litvak’s shot designs were, “more times than not, not the way I had envisioned it. He was a very stubborn director.”25
Litvak was already prone to raising his voice, but according to the actor Basil Rathbone, Bette Davis “was the only one who could give him as good as he gave. A friend of mine told me you could hear Davis and Litvak screaming at each other all the way to Santa Monica when they got going.”26
All This and Heaven, Too was Bette Davis’s forty-second motion picture. Not only did she think she knew best how to make movies, but she was unable to keep herself from letting everybody know it, including her director, her producer, and the head of the studio.
Charles Boyer, meanwhile, kept listening to war news on his dressing room radio—France and Great Britain had declared war on Germany in early September 1939—and became so agitated that Litvak had no choice but to mention it on the set. “Yes,” Boyer admitted, “the war news is destroying my ability to concentrate.” He got rid of the radio, but his mood didn’t improve. A doctor had to be called to the set on two occasions to treat his nervous condition, and he lost ten pounds during the production. But although Boyer eventually decided that he liked neither the film nor his own performance, he did appreciate that his misery fit the role.27
With All This and Heaven, Too, Warner Bros. had in mind a vast, romantic epic. Gone with the Wind was released at the end of 1939, and Jack Warner wanted the world to know that he could produce a picture every bit as gargantuan as Selznick’s blockbuster, albeit without Technicolor and the Civil War. Not only did the budget skyrocket to a reported $2.5 million, but Warner insisted that in all internal memos the film be referred to as ATAHT, a shameless attempt to ape Selznick’s GWTW. Warner publicists put out the fact that ATAHT featured sixty-seven sets, whereas GWTW had but fifty-three.28 “The picture was overproduced,” Litvak later acknowledged. “You couldn’t see the actors for the candelabra, and the whole thing became a victory for matter over mind. Bette Davis was the world’s most expensively costumed governess. I’ll tell you what was wrong with the picture: Gone with the Wind was wrong with it.”29
Hal Wallis decided early on that he didn’t like what he thought was Bette’s overly precise enunciation, and in the second week of shooting he told Litvak to coax her out of it. Almost a month later he was still complaining about Bette’s speech, which in point of fact is not as radically clipped as Wallis found it to be. Wallis’s broken record still wasn’t fixed by the first of April. “I’m certainly surprised at her insistence and persistence in doing this,” he wrote to Litvak, “when she knows of our objections and when it is so obviously a forced manner of speaking.” Wallis wasn’t wild about Litvak’s pace, either, though Goulding was never brought in to replace him, as Warner had threatened. The production was already behind schedule on February 19, in part because the children kept flubbing their lines. “I don’t like the way things are going at all,” Wallis complained in mid-March. “One and two scenes a day, doing things over and over again from many angles, etc.” By mid-April, Wallis was even more impatient and fired off a memo to the producer David Lewis about how upset he was that Litvak had spent an entire day on crane shots of the gendarmes escorting Bette into the Duc’s mansion and up the stairs to see the dying Boyer. The picture wrapped on April 20, 1940—a full twenty days behind schedule.30
“Warners are in a quandary,” Louella Parsons announced in her Examiner column on May 9. “And they’d like to ask your advice, Mr. and Mrs. Public! All This and Heaven, Too, previewed today, runs 20,000 feet in length—approximately 23 reels. Bette Davis and Charles Boyer and Jeffrey Lynn are so good that Warner bosses hesitate about cutting a foot from Rachel Field’s book. What to do is the question.” If Parsons’s figures are correct, this initial cut of All This and Heaven, Too ran at least three hours and twenty minutes. The film was previewed again in June with only twenty minutes having been cut. By the time of its general release in July, it ran 144 minutes. And it still drags under the weight of its own sense of significance.
All This and Heaven, Too’s gala world premiere took place at a 1,500-seat, mission revival heap called the Carthay Circle Theatre on June 13, 1940. It was the first premiere Bette had attended since Seed in 1931, which was also, coincidentally, held at the Carthay Circle. (Not coincidental for ATAHT’s publicity purposes was the fact that GWTW also received its West Coast premiere at the Carthay Circle.) A crowd estimated at 15,000 cheered as Bette arrived accompanied by Ruthie, her cousin John Favor, Bobby and Robert Pelgram, Warners’ publicity chief Robert Taplinger, and her old friend Robin Byron. (Byron was the former Ogunquit waitress Marie Simpson, who had changed her name to Robin and married Arthur “Bunny” Byron Jr. in 1930, divorcing him in 1939. In an odd coincidence, Bunny Byron’s father, the actor Arthur Byron, had appeared as Bette’s father in Fog Over Frisco; he’s the one who refers to Bette’s “escapade.”)
Bette’s putative escort for the evening was Ham’s friend and her own current agent, Lester Linsk. The Los Angeles Times chronicled Davis’s outfit in swooning detail: She was “gowned in a white organdy Holoku, copied from a native Hawaiian costume, fashioned with a high neckline, with full skirt and train carried over one arm and posed over a white taffeta slip. A white ermine bolero, white shasta daisies in her hair, and a necklace and bracelet of rubies set in antique gold made up her accessories.”31 “There’s no question that the Hollywood premiere, so often satirized, i
s an exciting affair,” Bette later commented. “If you are in the picture being premiered, it is difficult not to feel like a queen. Certainly it wasn’t difficult for Ruthie to be the Dowager Empress.”32
CHAPTER
11
MORE BATTLES AND TWO RETREATS
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE LETTER, William Wyler’s moody camera stalks laterally to the right past the tamed jungle foliage of a rubber plantation’s garden. A white cockatoo perches on a fence. A gunshot shocks the bird into flight as, in the far background, a man staggers out of a colonial bungalow and onto the porch. A woman closely follows him—a woman holding a gun. She fires again as he staggers down the steps. For reasons that aren’t clear, Wyler cuts to some startled but irrelevant plantation workers before cutting back to a closer shot of the porch and steps. The man falls out of focus toward the camera as the woman, now sharply revealed to be Bette Davis, strides across the porch and halfway down the steps, her face a mask of determination as she fires again and again, six times in all. Her arm is outstretched, her unwaveringly locked elbow preventing any recoil. The camera tracks forward as she drops the gun. She stares at the body until the close-up, her mouth a frown of contempt and spent rage.
Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter opened in London in 1927, starring Gladys Cooper as the killer, Leslie Crosbie. The first Broadway production opened in 1929 with Katharine Cornell in the lead. There was a Paramount film that year as well: the great and greatly troubled Jeanne Eagels played opposite Reginald Owen, with Herbert Marshall in the small but key role of Geoffrey Hammond, the man Leslie kills. It’s a story of adultery, murder, and deceit set in the exotically unnerving world of a Malaysian rubber plantation outside of Singapore. Leslie Crosbie shoots Geoff Hammond and claims she was defending her honor against his drunken advances. Her naive, hardworking husband, Robert, convinces his friend Howard Joyce to defend her, but Joyce is suspicious of her story. Joyce’s Chinese legal clerk connivingly mentions a letter Leslie wrote to Geoff telling him to meet her the night of the killing—a stark contradiction of Leslie’s earlier claim that Hammond had shown up that night, both unannounced and drunk. Against his better moral judgment, Joyce agrees to buy the letter for $10,000. The seller is (depending on the version) either Li-Ti, Hammond’s carnal Chinese mistress, or Mrs. Geoffrey Hammond, his tarted-up Eurasian wife. In every rendition, the Other Woman insists that Leslie personally bring the money to her. To no one’s surprise, Leslie is acquitted of murder, but Robert doesn’t know that she has spent all his savings on the letter. Joyce sets him straight; only then does Leslie confess.
The rarely screened 1929 version, directed by Jean de Limur, provides a remarkable contrast to Wyler’s 1940 film. Made well before the imposition of the Production Code, Limur’s The Letter has all the moody exoticism and much of the visual elegance of Wyler’s, and it isn’t forced to downplay the lurid and the depraved. The scene in which Jeanne Eagels’s Leslie Crosbie has to deliver the money in person to Li-Ti takes place in Li-Ti’s disreputable saloon, which features a graphic snake fight, drunken sailors, and a bamboo cage full of women. It’s expressly about Leslie’s racial and sexual humiliation at the hands and, literally, the feet of Li-Ti, who not only brings in a Chinese john during the transaction just to make Leslie feel her own prostitution more keenly but who, after throwing the damning letter on the floor, cries out, “White woman at Chinese woman’s feet!” She cackles as Leslie stoops to pick it up, all to the rich amusement of the whores in the bamboo cage. At the end of Limur’s film, Leslie asks Robert to send her away, but he refuses, saying that her punishment is to stay with him in a world she detests.
In April 1938, when Warner Bros. first thought of buying the film rights from Paramount, the studio asked Hollywood’s chief censor, Joseph Breen, for his reaction before cutting the deal. Two days later, Breen rejected the property in its entirety. After all, Maugham’s play as well as Limur’s film contained “adultery without compensating moral values,” not to mention miscegenation and an unpunished murder brought about by a perversion of justice.1 Actually, these were easy problems to solve. Turning the Chinese mistress into a Eurasian wife would minimize the miscegenation, not to mention eliminating the illicit nature of the relationship, and punishing Leslie in some definitive manner or other would solve the Production Code’s chief concern by demonstrating to any audience members considering killing their lovers in a fit of enraged jealousy and unfulfilled lust that such a crime would not ultimately pay.
At the end of 1939, Edmund Goulding was briefly considered to direct The Letter, but Warners found his ideas “a trifle radical.”2 Bette was announced as the film’s star in January. (According to her grandson and biographer, Sheridan Morley, Gladys Cooper was, however misguidedly, “more than a little irritated” that she didn’t win the role she’d originated onstage, though at the age of fifty-two Cooper should have realized she was a bit long in the tooth for Leslie Crosbie.)3 The other players were in flux. George Brent was offered the role of Robert Crosbie, but he preferred the role of the lawyer, Howard Joyce, which was taken by James Stephenson. Raymond Massey was considered briefly. The role of Robert Crosbie was eventually given to Herbert Marshall—a nice twist, given that he’d been Geoff Hammond in the Paramount version.
By April 1940, Wyler had signed on. He made two requests: to work with Howard Koch on the script for ten days, and to borrow the cinematographer Gregg Toland from Goldwyn. He got the first but was denied the second; The Letter would be shot by one of Warners’ best cinematographers, Tony Gaudio (though Ernie Haller was always Bette’s favorite).
Shooting began on May 27, 1940, with the exterior of the Crosbie bungalow on Stage 7, and it proceeded smoothly and certainly more swiftly than Wyler’s filming of Jezebel. At first, the only real tension had to do with Wyler’s having directed Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson to play one of their scenes in such low-key tones that Jack Warner couldn’t hear their dialogue.4 They had to retake the final close-up of Gale Sondergaard (as the Eurasian wife) because, after viewing the rushes, everyone could plainly see her wig line. Hal Wallis also asked Wyler to reshoot the scene in which Mrs. Hammond views her husband’s dead body in the rubber drying shed because, according to Wallis, it looked like it took place in a laundry.5
This time, it was the pace of the piece rather than Wyler’s endless retakes that began to annoy Hal Wallis, who, at the end of June, urged Wyler to pick up the tempo: “The action of the principals seems to be almost labored,” he memoed, “and so slow [as to be] self-conscious.” Wallis could scarcely complain about the production falling behind schedule because it was precisely on-target until July 15. When the production wrapped on the nineteenth, it was only three days behind schedule and was, remarkably, $35,000 under its budget of $700,000.
The last-minute delay was caused by Bette, who chronicled the battle she launched with Wyler over the script’s most quotable line: “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” As the film historian John Simons has noted, the line applies equally well to Pat Garrett’s feelings for Billy the Kid in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 western, but in this case it’s Leslie Crosbie telling her husband that she can no longer endure their marriage—that the fact that she plugged Hammond with all six rounds from a pistol has changed nothing in terms of her desire. “I couldn’t conceive of any woman looking into her husband’s eyes and admitting such a thing,” Davis explained. “I felt it would come out of her unbeknownst to herself, and therefore she would not be looking at him.”
Wyler disagreed. Shouting ensued. Bette responded by walking off the set.
“I might have been Hollywood’s Maria Callas, but Willy Wyler was the male Bette Davis,” she later commented. “I could not see it his way, nor he mine. I came back eventually—end result, I did it his way. I lost, but I lost to an artist. The Letter was a magnificent picture due to Willy. . . . So many directors were such weak sisters that I would have to take over. Uncreative, unsure of themselves, frightened to fight back, they off
ered me none of the security that this tyrant did.”6
Davis may not have been able to imagine a woman looking directly at her husband and declaring her undiminished desire for the lover she murdered, but Jeanne Eagels certainly did. Vindictively and bordering on hysteria, Eagels spits the line as a vicious curse on both herself and her husband. As the critic Dan Callahan describes her, she’s “a wild animal in a steel trap howling at her captors.”7 It’s much more disturbing than either Davis’s original impulse or Wyler’s more conventional staging. And it’s the clincher line of the film; Limur fades out immediately after Eagels hisses it.
Davis’s initial interpretation does make a certain marital sense—but not as Davis herself has played Leslie all along. She once said that “the big trick is don’t do too much emotion as the character, because your audience will never feel as much. You’ve taken all of it away from them by doing too much.”8 Leslie Crosbie either represses her guilt or doesn’t feel much of it at all; in either case, Davis’s restraint leaves her audience free to supply it on their own. The critic Lawrence O’Toole claims that Davis “did not want to repeat Jeanne Eagels’ extraordinary turn as the plantation owner’s wife—a performance on the verge of hysteria due not only to Eagels’ genius but also to the fact that she was suffering from the last stages of heroin addiction at the time she played it.” But O’Toole gives Eagels’s smack habit too much credit; her performance is more nuanced and controlled than any a truly strung-out junkie could give.