Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  “She thought I was making her play the part like Tallulah Bankhead,” Wyler later argued.

  I was not. It was the story of this woman who was greedy and high handed, but a woman of great poise, great charm, great wit. And that’s the way Tallulah had played it on the stage. But Bette Davis was playing it all like a villain because she had been playing bitches and parts like that. This is what made her at Warner Bros.—Jezebel and things like that. But she was playing Regina with no shading . . . all the villainy and greediness of the part but not enough of the charm and wit and humor and sexiness of this woman. So, anyway, she thought when I tried to correct her that I was trying to make her imitate Tallulah Bankhead, which I was not. . . . We had terrible disagreements over the way we saw Regina, so things were kind of cool between us.10

  Wyler was wrong on two points: Davis doesn’t play Regina as a one-dimensional villain, and his relations with Davis weren’t “cool.” Not at first. They were fiery hot, like the late Santa Ana winds that blew through Los Angeles in late April and early May 1941, when The Little Foxes went into production. Raymond Chandler once described the Santa Anas as burning, parching currents that “come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”11 Add to Chandler’s list of Santa Ana jitters, itches, and murderous women the heat of blazing movie lights in a barnlike sound studio; the pressure of a running, whirring camera; and a series of ten-pound period-piece Edwardian gowns, and the result for Bette was catastrophic.

  The temperature skyrocketed as early as the wardrobe and makeup tests, when Bette was subjected to unhelpfully contradictory advice. Wyler would voice one opinion, someone else quite the opposite, and Bette was caught in the middle, a position that preyed on her insecurities. When Wyler criticized her, she took it personally. Which is the way he meant it. She’d brought Perc Westmore along to Goldwyn to do her makeup, and she showed up one day with her face covered with aging makeup made of calcimine, a whitewash made of zinc oxide and water. “You look like a clown,” Wyler told her.12

  “Later on they photographed a dinner scene,” Warners’ Roy Obringer reported to Jack Warner—because of the loan arrangement, Warner Bros. had a stake in Bette’s ability to complete the picture—

  and Davis, on account of her sick and hysterical condition, didn’t get into the scene properly, and Wyler criticized the scene and . . . stated it was the lousiest dinner scene he had ever witnessed and possibly they had better get Bankhead.

  Davis gradually got more hysterical and ill due to the constant change of makeup and wardrobe and the criticism and finally made up her mind that she had better get off the lot. [The source of his information was Davis’s lawyer, Dudley Furse.] However, this situation was quieted down, and Goldwyn stated he would not need her from May 12 up until last Wednesday, the 21st. At this time Davis actually became ill and nervous and was much exhausted. Her doctor, Dr. Moore, advised her that she should not attempt to work but needed rest. It then appears that Goldwyn and Espy [Goldwyn’s controller, Reeves Espy] stated that they actually didn’t need Davis and could shoot around her from the 21st [until] June 5.13

  Whitney Stine reported that Davis actually did walk out on May 12—Furse was putting the best face on the situation—and when she did, Hollywood lit up with rumors: “(1) She was pregnant. (2) She was divorcing her husband. (3) She was feuding with Wyler. (4) She was feuding with Sam Goldwyn. (5) She was being replaced by Miriam Hopkins. (6) She was being replaced by Katharine Hepburn. (7) She was taken off the film because she could not stack up to the original New York actors. (8) It was 100 degrees on the sound stage, and the star collapsed from the heat. (9) She walked off the set because Wyler disliked her long eyelashes.”14 “It’s a sit-down strike, not a nervous collapse,” Erskine Johnson declared in the Los Angeles News. And Mayme Ober Peake was emphatic: Bette was definitely not expecting a visit from the stork.15

  Douglas Churchill of the New York Times took the long view: “The outbursts were little different from those that marked the filming of Jezebel.”16

  But they were different. Two earlier pictures and a failed love affair with the “ruthless” Wyler; a high-profile performance riding on an extreme amount of money; a most frustrating inability to blame Jack Warner for anything that went wrong; and most of all a lack of confidence in her director’s vision coupled with her own Yankee intransigence—all conspired together to hurl Bette Davis into another nervous breakdown, Erskine Johnson’s bland claim of a “sit-down strike” to the contrary notwithstanding. It took several doctors as well as personal assurances from both Wyler and Goldwyn, offered directly over the phone, to calm her down and enable her to go back to work.

  The New York Times’s Thomas Brady was on the set the third week of June, and his description of Davis’s performance casts doubt on both Davis’s and Wyler’s accounts of the core dispute: Regina’s nature. “Miss Davis seemed intent last week on interpreting her role with gayety and daring; Wyler wanted subtle repression. . . . Miss Davis was icy in deferring to his wishes, and each was monstrously patient with the other. When one scene reached its eighth or ninth take, Mr. Wyler told Miss Davis she was rattling off her lines. Her response was cool enough to make the set suitable for a Sonja Henie skating spectacle.”17

  Perhaps Wyler was right after all; the Santa Anas had passed, and an Arctic chill moved in for the duration of the filming. Davis finished shooting on July 3.18 “I ended up feeling I had given one of the worst performances of my life,” Davis recalled.19

  Lillian Hellman was evidently ambivalent about the film. She wrote to Arthur Kober after seeing the film and called it a “fine picture as pictures go, but it should have been better, and I think Willy did a bad job.”20 It didn’t “hit hard enough,” she felt. But late in life, she told Austin Pendleton, who directed a 1980 Broadway production with Elizabeth Taylor, that “the one that came closest to what I intended was Willy Wyler’s film.”21

  Davis is noticeably less self-assured in The Little Foxes than she should be. Her clashes with Wyler produced a kind of nervous indecision in place of the calculatedly suppressed drive that is both Regina’s hallmark and Bette’s own. After Horace (Herbert Marshall) returns from an extended hospitalization in Baltimore with the pallor and physical slackness of the imminently dead, Regina greets him by bursting gaily through a pair of enormous sliding doors and dismissing his illness by remarking with a forcedly mild tone, “It sounds almost like a holiday. . . . And here I was, thinking you were in pain.”

  “I was thinking about us,” Horace feebly replies, to which Regina responds, clipping her words like scissor shears as she rises to leave, obviously bored: “About us. About you and me. After all these years.” She is literally looking down on him when she concludes, “Well. You can tell me everything you thought. Some day.” It’s one of Davis’s most effective line readings precisely because it’s so unredeemably nasty—glib sarcasm about the future directed at a man she knows is actively dying.

  The matter-of-fact tone Davis deploys when delivering one of the film’s most quotable lines is terrifying in its simplicity: “I hope you die. I hope you die soon. I’ll be waiting for you to die.” Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but Davis correctly understands in this instance that poison works best at room temperature.

  The film’s set piece—Regina gazing in lethal passivity while Horace suffers his heart attack—derives at least some of its force from Davis’s and Wyler’s contradictory approaches to Regina. Bette is lounging, even slouching on the couch when Horace drops the medicine bottle and gasps for her help. From the time Horace forces himself up from his wheelchair, Wyler handles the sequence in only two shots, both of which focus on Regina, the second somewhat closer than the first. Critics who describe this sequence as deep focus miss the point; the cinematographer Gregg Toland, obviously
at Wyler’s behest, keeps his lens focused on Davis and her murderous gaze while Marshall—remaining visible throughout—increasingly loses clarity as well as physical strength in the background.

  The philosopher Stanley Cavell, appreciating the thrust of Davis’s performance, nevertheless errs when he describes Regina as “watching her husband die, as if her gaze deprives him of life.” Cavell’s larger point about the power of the female gaze is right on the money, but in fact Regina isn’t watching Horace at the moment in question. (Moreover, he doesn’t die—not yet, anyway.) She’s depriving him of vitality by refusing him any human connection at all—not his medicine, not her attention. Her authority comes from her steadfast refusal to engage him by watching him suffer.

  LOUELLA PARSONS NOTED in October 1940 that Bette had dined twice with the playwright George S. Kaufman during a stopover in New York on her way back to Hollywood from Butternut. They talked about adapting The Man Who Came to Dinner, his current Broadway comedy hit, into a film. Upon her return to Hollywood, Bette began lobbying for Warner Bros. to cast her in the picture, but she was told rather peremptorily that her request was premature.22 She wanted to play a central role but an unusually sober one for her: that of the eponymous houseguest’s secretary, a sophisticated New Yorker who falls in love with a small-town midwestern newspaperman.

  Bette had to meet with Kaufman in New York because, as Ann Kaufman Schneider notes, “my father, of course, never bothered to go out to California. He never had anything to do with movies. He’d had quite a lot of trouble in 1935 with Mary Astor—their affair and all that stuff. He fled, literally, and didn’t go out there again for years. He sold the picture rights [to The Man Who Came to Dinner] and that was it. It was a very good, unglamorous, unneurotic part for Bette.”*

  * In 1935, during a bitter custody battle with her recently divorced husband, portions of Mary Astor’s personal diary, including intimate details of her ongoing affair with the then-married Kaufman, were released to the press, and Kaufman was all but hounded back to New York from Hollywood.

  According to Parsons, Davis and Kaufman discussed the possibility of building up the part of the secretary, Maggie Cutler, so it more closely matched that of Sheridan Whiteside, the imperious radio commentator and critic who slips and falls on the icy front steps of a businessman’s house in Ohio and ends up staying for a month and commandeering everyone’s personal lives in addition to the living room, dining room, and library. The actual film adaptation would not be done by Kaufman and Hart, though; as Ann Schneider notes, her father and his writing partner took the rights money and banked it and left the rewriting to others, namely Julius and Philip Epstein.

  Hal Wallis and Jack Warner floated various ideas for the cast and director; Bette’s winning the role of Maggie Cutler was far from certain. Wallis wanted Jean Arthur or Myrna Loy. On Broadway, Sheridan Whiteside was being played to rave reviews by Monty Woolley, but nobody knew who Woolley was outside of New York and Yale, where he taught drama, so he wasn’t considered for the film. Bette strongly advocated John Barrymore and took it upon herself to write to Spencer Berger, the Barrymore family’s factotum: “I’d love to do that play with Mr. Barrymore—any play with Mr. Barrymore—but I think this one would be excellent for the screen with him. So let’s hope my bosses agree.”23 The idea of the great, thundering John Barrymore was appealing enough for Warners to give him a screen test in May 1941, but as Hal Wallis later noted, “I couldn’t risk it. The dialogue . . . was tremendously complicated, and Barrymore was drinking so heavily that he had to read his lines from cue cards.”24

  Charles Laughton was eager to do the role and was screen-tested, too, but as his agent told Warners, he knew “that the test wasn’t up to par.”25

  Cary Grant was interested. In fact, he said, he’d do the film for free as long as Warner Bros. kicked in $125,000 to the British War Relief Fund. Grant’s participation piqued the interest of Howard Hawks in directing the picture.26

  Others considered for Sheridan Whiteside, if only by their press agents, were Fredric March and Robert Benchley. Charles Coburn put himself out of the running by refusing to make a screen test.27 Mary Astor was tested for the role of Lorraine, the flashy actress who tries to steal Bert Jefferson, the reporter, away from Maggie. Ronald Reagan was considered for Bert, and Danny Kaye was mentioned as Banjo, the antic Hollywood comedian modeled after Harpo Marx.

  At the end of March, Jack Warner invited a young hotshot actor-director to dinner at his house to discuss the project. The Man Who Came to Dinner rather than The Magnificent Ambersons might well have been Orson Welles’s second film. Welles had finished shooting Citizen Kane—it hadn’t been released yet—and was nosing around for a new project. The dinner went well, and Warner and Welles came to a tentative agreement: Welles would play Sheridan Whiteside for $100,000, but if he also directed the film he’d get $150,000. The two men mapped out the rest of the cast: Ann Sheridan would play Lorraine, and Barbara Stanwyck, Paulette Goddard, or Carole Lombard would be Maggie. If he didn’t direct it himself, Welles said, he wanted either Hawks or Leo McCarey.

  Jack Warner and Hal Wallis gave the role of Maggie to Bette at a meeting in June while Davis was still shooting The Little Foxes, and the film started shooting the following month. Grant was out; Monty Woolley was in. Reagan was out; Richard Travis was in. Danny Kaye and Mary Astor were out; Jimmy Durante and Ann Sheridan were in. Welles, of course, was very much out, and in his place, absurdly, was William Keighley: from Citizen Kane to The Bride Came C.O.D.

  “I felt the film was not directed in a very imaginative way,” Davis later noted with remarkable understatement. “For me it was not a happy film to make.”28

  Asked if she had any trouble with Bette during the making of The Man Who Came to Dinner, Ann Sheridan was dismissive: “Oh, no. Very, very little. She wasn’t happy about a lot of things . . . but this had nothing to do with me. I adored her. Wouldn’t dream of fighting her at all—so she got very nice. She was just temperamental. Who isn’t now and then?”29

  This was a period of physical as well as emotional distress for Davis; she kept suffering mishaps. In April she’s said to have mildly poisoned herself by drinking household ammonia in the mistaken belief that it was potable spirits of ammonia. In May was the nervous breakdown. In late July she fell down some steps leading to a soundstage and broke a small bone. And however temperamental she may have been during the production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, the greatest uproar was caused not by Bette but by a dog. Mike, a Scottie, got a little too boisterous in mid-September and bit Bette Davis squarely on the nose.

  “The dog was too highly bred,” Ruthie Davis told the press. “He was strange to us, and it just happened.” Mike seems to have had a thing for noses; he’d bitten Farney’s the week before just after Farney climbed into bed at night.30

  Bette’s injury was severe enough to send her home—all the way to Butternut. She left Los Angeles around September 17. Warners expected her back at the beginning of October, but the bite marks were slow to heal. “Scab not off nose yet,” Bette wired Wallis from Butternut on the second, “and nose still very red. Am hoping it will be all right by Thursday when I get in.”31 She returned to the studio on Friday, the tenth, and the production wrapped at the end of the following week.

  The Man Who Came to Dinner is disappointing even without imagining what Orson Welles would have done with it. Monty Woolley is quite amusing as the hammy Whiteside, but Keighley has a penchant for cutting to medium shots or close-ups of him just when he’s at his stage-training broadest. Still, Woolley’s acerbic verbal delivery is up to Kaufman and Hart’s snappy dialogue. Asked by Bert how he thinks Ohio women “stack up,” Sheridan Whiteside responds, “I’ve never gone in for stacking women up so I really can’t say.” (Woolley had a sharp wit of his own. One night while cruising the New York streets for trade with his friend Cole Porter, they pulled the car up next to a sailor, who asked with superb candor, “Are you two cocksuckers?” “Now that th
e preliminaries are over,” Woolley quickly replied, “why don’t you get in and we can discuss the details?”)32

  For Bette, Maggie Cutler was a refreshing change from the needling neurotics, suppressed hysterics, and cold sociopaths she’d been playing for several years. Her restraint plays well against Ann Sheridan’s showy, divine Lorraine. Hal Wallis made an apt observation: “It was like her first film, Bad Sister, in a way—here she was, the drab wren up against the flashy peacock! Bette was full of surprises, and her not minding her status on this picture was one of them.”33 For Bette, the problem is not Maggie Cutler’s little-brown-wrennishness; in fact, the urbane Maggie sports some of Orry-Kelly’s most wearable suits. The trouble is that she’s forced to fall in love with Richard Travis, whose toothy grin is as annoyingly omnipresent as Maria Schell’s in The Brothers Karamazov. Travis is a blandly handsome blond, not muscular enough to be beefcake, not magnetic enough to be watchable. As Maggie notes while munching on a hot sweet potato at a fake-looking soundstage skating pond, “Funny thing is—you are sort of attractive in a” (pause) “corn-fed sort of way.” She’s right. Whether or not he’s enough to give up her career and move to Ohio for is something else again.

  JAMES MCCOURT AND Bette Davis were discussing the distinctive swing-stride of her walk when McCourt mentioned James Baldwin’s famous line: “Bette Davis walks like a nigger.” “Yes, they told me,” Davis replied. “What do you say back to that?”34

  Unlike Davis herself, Baldwin was a great admirer of In This Our Life, in which Davis’s toxic belle frames a black legal assistant–chauffeur for her own hit-and-run. “Bette Davis, under the direction of John Huston, delivered a ruthlessly accurate (and much underrated) portrait of a Southern girl,” Baldwin wrote. “She thus became, and, indeed, remained, the toast of Harlem because her prison scene with the black chauffeur was cut when the movie came uptown. The uproar in Harlem was impressive, and I think that the scene was reinserted; in any case, either uptown or downtown, I saw it. Davis appeared to have read, and grasped, the script—which must have made her rather lonely—and she certainly understood the role. Her performance had the effect, rather, of exposing and shattering the film, so that she played in a kind of vacuum.”35