by Ed Sikov
Goulding needed convincing. In late September Wallis ordered Henry Blanke to “keep after Goulding and have him start active preparation.” Goulding started working on it later that week.38
Warners originally assigned the script to the writer Richard Sherman, but Sherman took so long with it that they handed it over to Lenore Coffee in June. And still nobody liked it very much. Blanke was afraid that the story was so contrived that any alteration in the already-unstable plot might cause the whole thing to collapse. At one point they even killed little Pete.
George Brent was cast, appropriately enough, as the flier, Peter Van Allen. (The critic Matthew Kennedy describes Brent’s character all too well: “He isn’t much more than a hard-drinking sperm donor.”)39 But the part of Sandra was up for grabs. Rosalind Russell met with Goulding over cocktails in late September. Warners’ casting director, Steve Trilling, scheduled a meeting with Joan Crawford and tried to sell her on the project by telling her the story verbally, pointedly avoiding showing her the script itself.
Tallulah Bankhead was mentioned. So was Vivien Leigh. Barbara Stanwyck turned it down because she didn’t want to play an unsympathetic character at that particular time. “I’m dying to do Sandra!” Constance Bennett wired Hal Wallis in mid-October. Sylvia Sydney and Jane Wyatt were screen-tested, as was Anna Sten.
According to Mary Astor, Bette called her on the phone in December 1940 and asked her to play the role. “She personally wanted me for the part, she said, and she apologized for asking me if I would mind taking a test. ‘A few idiots have to be convinced.’ ”40
Astor is slightly off on her chronology. January Heights, aka Far Horizon, aka The Great Lie, began filming on November 1 with the role of Sandra yet to be cast, though Astor’s screen tests had taken place the previous week. Astor started shooting on November 15.
Thanks to Davis’s intervention, Astor’s Sandra Kovak is by far the juicier role. As Goulding described her, “She is brandy, men, and a piano”—the last on which she persistently pounds the thunderous chords of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat Minor as a way of burning up her overabundant energy. She’s flamboyant, catty, and gorgeously gowned. Brent’s Pete tells Bette’s Maggie in contrast, “You smell of hay and horses and sunshine,” a signal to stop breathing if there ever was one.41
As Astor wrote in her memoirs, Davis “was sullen and standoffish” at first. She watched nervously as Davis “smoked furiously and swung her foot in the angry rhythm of a cat’s tail.”42 After a few days of shooting, Davis just couldn’t take it anymore. “Hey, Astor!” she announced. “Let’s go talk a minute.” They adjourned to Bette’s dressing room. “She flopped on the couch and said, ‘This picture is going to stink! It’s too incredible for words. . . . I’ve talked to the writers and to Eddie, and everybody’s satisfied but me, so it’s up to us to rewrite this piece of junk to make it more interesting. All I do is mewl to George about “that woman you married when you were drunk” and “please come back to me” and all that crap. And that’s just soap opera.’ ”43
Davis’s idea was frankly self-effacing. It meant building up the fiery, elegantly nasty Sandra character at the expense of her own. “Bette and I [became] as simpatico as a pair of dancers as we worked out the story,” Astor wrote.44 When Astor won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, Bette sent her a cable: “We did it. Congratulations, baby.” “People have said that I stole the picture from Bette Davis, but that is sheer nonsense. She handed it to me on a silver platter.”45 Which is why, no doubt, Astor thanked two people in particular in her Oscar acceptance speech: Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky.46
The title continued to be a matter of contention. Bette hated the last one the studio settled on. “I beg you not to call it The Great Lie,” Bette told Jack Warner, because “the lie is not a great one” and “it gives away the whole story before anyone sees the picture.” Goulding suggested one she thought she’d pass along to Jack: Aren’t Women Fools? Warners stuck with The Great Lie.47
The Great Lie is great fun to the extent that Mary Astor is a great bitch. Orry-Kelly went out of his way to make Bette look dowdy—at one point he sticks her in a bizarre bonnet that makes her look like a cross between Little Bo Peep and Elvira Gulch—but he gives Astor the full treatment, with innumerable chic hats and furs and slinky black gowns. Her high international style only adds to her bite; the emotional stakes are always raised just that much higher when the vicious bitch looks fabulous.
Amusingly, when Maggie and Sandra adjourn to Arizona for Sandra’s pregnancy—it looks a lot like the set for The Petrified Forest—they become a bickering married couple squabbling over ham and pickles, cigarettes and sleeping pills. Maggie even takes to wearing pants. As Sandra delivers her baby, the trousered Maggie paces back and forth on the porch like any other anxious father-to-be.
It’s a fine moment onscreen as far as lesbian subtexts go, but the drama queen takes center stage in Sandra’s mad scene, which comes complete with a howling desert windstorm, a well-barked “You make me sick!” directed at Maggie (the killjoy certainly deserves it), a marvelously histrionic attempt to set the house on fire by hurling a kerosene lamp against the wall, and an excellent full-volume shriek. Unfortunately, down-to-earth Maggie methodically slaps Sandra twice in the face, and it’s all over.
IN 1940, FLUSH with home ownership in New Hampshire and a raise to $4,500 a week, Bette bought a house in Glendale. As an article in Look noted, Davis had lived in at least twenty-five different places over the course of the last decade alone. Evidently it was time to alight. The house she chose, located at 1705 Rancho Avenue, was a Tudor located on the banks (what banks there were) of the Los Angeles River, where a flood two years earlier had “washed the neighbors away.”48 She reportedly paid $50,000 for it and dubbed it Riverbottom.49
Riverbottom wasn’t a large house. Janet Flanner pointed out in the New Yorker that it was “probably the only two-bedroom, two-acre estate in the film colony.”50 It was homey, not grand—Flanner called it a “peak-roofed Hansel and Gretel” house—and featured exposed beams holding up a high ceiling on the first floor; a brick patio; and a cozy breakfast room with a white dinette set. Davis’s scrapbooks are rife with pictures of the house, one of which Bette charmingly labeled “my first home in California.” One photo shows a brick sidewalk with a floral border; another a circular brick raised planter in the backyard. The house sported not only a swimming pool but a stable, so naturally Bette bought a horse to go along with it. She labeled one scrapbook picture “Laddie, my Arabian horse, Ruthie, and me, riding ring at Riverbottom”; Bette and her mother are seen being pulled around the driveway in a carriage.51
But her domestic preoccupation remained Butternut and its complete renovation. Ruthie had been supervising things for several weeks by the time Bette arrived in August 1940 to see what had gone on in her absence. She traveled with Robin Byron and stayed at the nearby estate of the novelist Ernest Poole.
When it was completed, Butternut became a rambling, three-sectioned white house with a relaxed living room with a white couch and a red brick fireplace; a large, functional kitchen with wood cabinetry painted white; and an unfortunate early American dining room with overly quaint wallpaper featuring a Huck Finn–like boy repeated ad infinitum all over the room. The living room fireplace chimney was unusual in that it served to heat the kitchen; the flue traveled under and across the kitchen floor before heading to the roof. Bette’s bedroom had its own 3,500-pound fireplace suspended by girders from the ceiling and a big couchlike bed in the center of the room. There was a large screened-in porch, too, along with servants’ quarters. Bette loved it. Her nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away.52
Davis arrived back in Hollywood in early October. After filming the revised scenes for The Letter, she began making The Great Lie.
She married Farnsworth on New Year’s Eve, 1940, at her friend Jane Bryan’s ranch in Rimrock, Arizona. (Jane Bryan was now Mrs. Justin Dart.) Farney had been propo
sing for quite some time, and finally Bette agreed. Whitney Stine describes the scene: “Three cars left Los Angeles on Monday morning, December 30, occupied by Davis, Ruthie, her hairdresser Margaret Donovan, [Donovan’s] boyfriend Perc Westmore, dog Tibby, Lester Luisk [sic], cousin John Favor, and houseguest Ruth Garland. They picked up the marriage license in a driving rain in Prescott, Arizona. The weary travelers finally drove into the ranch on Tuesday afternoon. Sister Bobby and her husband flew in from Los Angeles with Dart in his private plane. The wedding was held that night.” Farney had flown himself in from New England.53 There was no honeymoon. Davis had to start work on her next picture.
As a publicity stunt, The Great Lie’s world premiere took place on April 5, 1941—Bette’s thirty-third birthday—in Littleton. (“Warner Bros. did this for me at my request. The purpose of the premiere was to raise money for the Littleton Hospital,” Davis later wrote, but the studio got great press no matter what.)54 Warner Bros. installed Davis-themed street signs all over town. For the duration of the gala, the All Saints Episcopal Church, for instance, was located at the corner of Dangerous and Dark Victory. Whitney Stine, always with an eye toward wardrobe, reports that “Davis, in a white blouse and felt skirt, and Farnsworth, in a plaid shirt, and brown corduroy suit, hosted a cocktail party at the Iron Mine Inn in the afternoon.”55 The New York Times rather snidely claimed that “crowds of celebrities and curious swelled this quiet community five times its normal size of 4500, and everybody stayed up way past the usual bedtime and liked it a lot.”56 The governors of both New Hampshire and Vermont turned up. Life chronicled the event with a four-page spread. (“A birthday ballet is rendered by nervous Shirley Walters of Littleton, aged 5,” one caption reads.) The prescreening stage show featured a 200-pound plaster of paris birthday cake, which was perilously suspended by safety cables above certain unnamed dancers—possibly including nervous little Shirley Walters—and then lowered to the stage. There was also a 103-pound edible cake baked by a man named Gerald Corkum.57 But “the birthday gifts she most appreciated were cookies, candy, and preserves bestowed on her by Littleton people,” Life glowed. And the town mortician gave Bette a bag of butternuts.58
CHAPTER
12
BREAKDOWN AND RECOVERY
“IT WAS CALLED A COMEDY,” DAVIS WRITES dismissively of The Bride Came C.O.D.1 And for once her assessment of humor is correct. The Bride Came C.O.D. is the worst screwball comedy ever made.
It’s a classic, abrasive screwball setup: a madcap heiress (Davis) becomes engaged to the wrong guy, a slick and conceited bandleader (Jack Carson). Her father is Eugene Pallette. (Pallette, whose voice is like an adenoidal foghorn, plays Carole Lombard’s father in My Man Godfrey and Henry Fonda’s father in The Lady Eve and Gene Tierney’s father in Heaven Can Wait.) Croaking, three-hundred-pound Dad hires a fast-talking, in-debt flier (James Cagney) to kidnap his dizzy daughter to keep her from getting married. Heiress and flier bicker and, by bickering, end up falling in love.
The Epstein brothers, Philip G. and Julius J., certainly knew how to fashion a script; they wrote Casablanca the following year, and they’d already written two little-known but perfectly serviceable screwball comedies, both for Barbara Stanwyck: The Bride Walks Out and The Mad Miss Manton. They’d even adapted No Time for Comedy, one of the higher-toned S. N. Behrman plays that Bette found preferable to It’s Love I’m After. But with The Bride Came C.O.D., they fail to provide a single funny line. The closest they come to comedy is a near obsession with Bette’s rump. They keep landing her, squarely and gluteally, on prickly pear cacti. She jumps off the plane after Cagney crash-lands it in the desert—ha ha, she parks her rear on a prickly pear. She crashes an old jalopy, goes flying out of the vehicle, and lands bottom-down on, yes, a cactus. In the meantime, Cagney has sling-shotted a rock directly at her behind. And guess where she comes to rest after parachuting from an airplane? It’s demeaning, and not because Bette’s ass is sacrosanct. It’s demeaning because nobody—not Davis, nor Cagney, nor the Epsteins, nor the director, William Keighley—can figure out a way to make any of it funny. Ernie Haller’s silvery, high-contrast desert cinematography is the only reason to see the film.
Davis began shooting The Bride Came C.O.D. on January 8, 1941, a week after marrying Farney. He was protected from the press and Warners’ publicists at first—he could stay home at Riverbottom while Bette was at the studio—but when the production moved to Death Valley in mid-January for the desert and western ghost town location shooting, he accompanied his bride and was much more on public display. It was his first exposure to the intrusive necessities of Hollywood stardom, but according to Davis he handled it with aplomb.
The company stayed at the Furnace Creek Inn, the 1927 mission-style hotel built by the Pacific Borax Company in the desert basin below the western slopes of the Funeral Mountains. The ghost town location was forty miles away. They filmed in the heat of the day, which makes it all the more remarkable—and implausible—that Davis is forced to wear a fur-collared coat through much of the film, though that’s not nearly as far-fetched as the extraordinary smokeless campfire that Davis’s character builds deep in an abandoned mine. The production wrapped on March 13, and the film was released in July.
THE LITTLE FOXES, Lillian Hellman’s acidic play about an avaricious southern family in the 1900s, had opened on Broadway in February 1939 and played just shy of a year. Tallulah Bankhead led the cast as the heartless Regina Giddens who schemes with—and against—her two brothers for controlling interest in a new cotton mill. Davis’s old friend Frank Conroy played Regina’s sickly husband, Horace. Regina was a role tailor-made for Tallulah, but like Dark Victory it was also perfect for Bette, and by the summer of 1940, word had gotten out in Hollywood that Sam Goldwyn was planning to borrow Davis from Warner Bros. to play Regina under the direction of William Wyler. Louella Parsons claimed to have known it all along. “I printed some six months ago that Sam was literally moving heaven and earth to get Bette to play the role that Tallulah Bankhead created on the stage,” Louella crowed on July 22.2
Goldwyn struck a rather complicated deal with Warner for Bette’s services, and Warner agreed at least in part because he owed his rival a gambling debt. These men didn’t play penny ante; Jack owed Sam a whopping $425,000.3 At first, it was a simple transaction. Goldwyn would lend Gary Cooper to Warner Bros. for Sergeant York, and Warner would lend Davis to Goldwyn for The Little Foxes; Warners would pay Davis, Goldwyn would pay Cooper, and that was it. But Goldwyn suddenly threw Miriam Hopkins into the mix. Goldwyn wanted Warner to take over his commitment to Hopkins, and so, Goldwyn reasoned, if he paid Cooper $150,000 and Hopkins $50,000, then Davis would end up costing him $200,000. But what would Warner Bros. do with Hopkins? Jack wanted to know. Goldwyn was vague, telling Warner, “You have a big studio and should have no difficulty” in finding something for Miriam to do.
On August 2, more than a week after Louella’s bugle alert, Warner impatiently told Goldwyn it was Cooper for Davis as they had originally agreed or no deal. The final agreement was a slight compromise: Cooper went to Warners for $150,000, Davis went to Goldwyn for $150,000, and one or the other studio could use Hopkins under her existing contract with Goldwyn.4
But according to Davis and other sources, Goldwyn ended up paying her $385,000 for The Little Foxes. Not only that, but “Mr. Warner, on my steely request, gave me Warners’ share of the deal.”5 As the Hollywood historian Arthur Marx explains, “At the time, the standard practice was for the star to pocket the difference between the loan-out fee and the amount that the studio was paying the star,” but Bette apparently got to keep it all.6
Tallulah’s shadow loomed much larger than it had over Dark Victory. “I hadn’t seen her in Foxes,” Davis told James McCourt, “and when they signed me, I didn’t want to.” But Goldwyn told her and Farney to stop in Cleveland on their way back to Los Angeles from New Hampshire and see Bankhead perform the play. Unfortunately, they ended up getting lost en route and saw
the play one evening later than planned. Bankhead was not pleased. “I had to go back and see her,” Davis told McCourt, “and she was just livid.”7
From Bette’s perspective, Bankhead played Regina as a coldly greedy conniver, sinister from the start—an interpretation that made perfect sense, given the merciless thrust of Hellman’s cleverly mean-spirited script. But Davis thought that Wyler wanted her to see Bankhead’s Regina precisely so that she would come up with something different—something softer, easier to take. In Bette’s version of the story, both Goldwyn, a hardheaded mogul, and Wyler, an equally tough director (“ruthless” was how the New York Times described him at the time), were terrified of this supremely toxic character—a woman who, by virtue of her vile nature, possessed the immoral authority to threaten ticket sales.8 Wyler and Goldwyn were convinced, Davis believed, that audiences would reject The Little Foxes unless the antiheroine of the piece—a woman who sits notoriously still in the climactic scene while her husband suffers a fatal heart attack, deliberately refusing to fetch the medicine that would save his life—wasn’t just a little bit likable.
Davis had already had this argument with Wyler over Leslie Crosbie in The Letter; they would be pandering to the stupid by tenderizing the killer dame, and she was sick of it. That Wyler indeed wanted to take the edge off The Little Foxes gets some support from the fact that Hellman herself added the character of David Hewitt, the love interest for Regina’s daughter, Alexandra, to the screenplay, specifically as a way of adding a touch of youthful romance to the otherwise harsh story. Goldwyn asked for opinions: Wyler loved it, but everyone else thought the juvenile love story just watered the whole thing down.9
