Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Also in 1941, Bette expressed interested in Mrs. Parkington, then only a one-page treatment written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Louis Bromfield: Susie Graham runs a cheap boardinghouse in Leaping Rock, Nevada, until she marries Major Augustus Parkington, moves to New York, enters high society, travels to Paris, meets the Prince of Wales. . . . But MGM won the bidding war for the property in July, and the film was eventually made in 1944 with Greer Garson.59 In addition, Edmund Goulding considered casting Bette as the jealous wife in The Constant Nymph, but the part was ultimately taken by Alexis Smith.60 Bette turned down The Hard Way for Vincent Sherman and was replaced by Ida Lupino.61

  It may seem obvious, but it bears stating directly: sustaining the stardom she fought for was at least as emotionally draining for Bette as scrapping her way into it in the first place. Hollywood filmmaking is often called a high-stakes game, but Davis never thought of it that way. It was high stakes, all right, but it was never a game. It was a crusade, with all the righteousness and potential for glory the word carries with it. And as in a military battle, one false move—another bad script, an intransigent and misguided director, an unflattering wig, a silly costar—could result in a mortal injury.

  One role Bette particularly coveted was that of wild Cassandra Tower in the melodrama King’s Row. It’s a lurid small-town story set in the nineteenth century: Cassie, who was eventually played by Betty Field, has a hot affair with Robert Cummings, but her father, Claude Rains, thinks she’s insane and poisons her. (We learn only by reading Henry Bellamann’s racy novel that Cassie’s father has been having an incestuous relationship with her for years.) Then he shoots himself. Later in the film, Ronald Reagan famously gets his legs vengefully and pointlessly amputated by Charles Coburn. As Hal Wallis reported to Roy Obringer, “Bette Davis pleaded to be allowed to play this part,” but as Wallis explained later, “We all felt the picture would be thrown off balance because of her fame and talent.” King’s Row ended up being one of Reagan’s favorite pictures, so much so that he titled his autobiography after a line he delivers in the film: Where’s the Rest of Me? (After her divorce from Reagan, Jane Wyman was heard to say, “At least I’ll never have to see that damn King’s Row again.”)62

  Radio dramas continued to provide something to do in Bette’s off hours, which were few. On a Sunday night in March 1941, for instance, Davis was heard opposite Brian Aherne in a thirty-minute adaptation of Jane Eyre on CBS’s The Gulf Screen Guild Show. She’d done several earlier Screen Guild Shows—including Can We Forget with George Murphy and Robert Montgomery in January 1939, and Ballerina, Slightly with Accent with William Powell in March 1940—with all the stars’ salaries going to the Motion Picture Relief Fund.63 In April 1942, Davis returned to the Screen Guild Show airwaves for an adaptation of the Joan Crawford melodrama AWoman’s Face; her costar was Warren William.

  In January 1942, Bette did a episode of the DuPont Company’s Cavalcade of America, which aired on NBC. The series’s point was to soften the public image of the large munitions company by way of stirring dramas about American history; Bette’s program, An American Is Born, concerned a refugee who wanted her baby to be born in the United States. She’d also been heard on Lux Radio Theater at least once a year since 1936. Notable performances included Another Language with Fred Mac-Murray in 1937 and Forsaking All Others with Joel McCrea in 1938, after which she began reprising some of her film roles in radio adaptations: Dark Victory with Spencer Tracy in 1940, The Letter with Herbert Marshall, and All This and Heaven, Too with Charles Boyer and Bea Benaderet, both in 1941.

  As far as her public image was concerned, Bette was still putting up with a lot of bullshit. As the Hollywood correspondent Ann Masters asserted, “Bette Davis says that a fine exercise for slimming the ankles and strengthening the arches is to walk pigeon-toed.”64

  CHAPTER

  13

  A PRESCRIPTION

  FOR INDEPENDENCE

  IN 1925, THE NOVELIST OLIVE HIGGINS Prouty suffered an emotional collapse. She had been conflicted about her life as a writer for some time. Despite her commercial successes with novels and short stories, Prouty was nonetheless forcing herself to hew to a strictly conventional life as wife and mother, taking pains to make it seem as though her popular fiction had been, as she described it, simply “dashed off at spare moments” during days devoted to making a suitable home for her husband and kids in Brookline, Massachusetts. But the creative spark that enlivened her wouldn’t be stifled, and indeed its ceaseless ignition was so great that after her daughter Olivia died of encephalitis in 1923, Prouty fought through her grief by writing Stella Dallas, the story of the world’s most embarrassing but ultimately self-sacrificial mother. Still, nagging guilt over her daughter’s death and her own insistent creative drive finally cornered her, and she broke down. She sought treatment at a sanitarium, which she later called “an educational institution from which I ‘graduated.’ ” Her psychiatrist discharged her with a prescription for independence: he advised Prouty to rent office space outside her house and work five days a week on her writing. She went on to chronicle the agony of a nervous breakdown and the painful struggle for recovery in two subsequent novels: Conflict, which was published in 1927; and Now, Voyager, which came out in 1941.1

  Like Stella Dallas, Now, Voyager was a hit, though not as much of one as Prouty and her publisher had hoped. When Warner Bros. made its bid for the film rights on the basis of an advance copy and the recommendation of its West Coast story editor, Irene Lee, the studio offered $50,000 if the book sold 50,000 copies by May 1, 1941, or, as Prouty later wrote, “$40,000 if it didn’t. It didn’t!”2

  She drew her title from Whitman’s two-line poem “The Untold Want” in Leaves of Grass.

  The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

  Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.3

  For Prouty’s heroine, psychotherapy launches her on a journey of self-discovery that leads her out of common, drab, imposed expectations—and their concomitantly fierce, necessarily unfulfilled desires—and onto a ship of her own making and guidance. Now, Voyager is a coming-out story.

  Hal Wallis sent a copy of the book to Ginger Rogers, hoping to interest her in the leading role: Charlotte Vale, who begins the story as a repressed Boston spinster stifled into a state of neurotic agitation by the hateful, spiteful mother who never wanted her in the first place, and ends it as an independent, self-knowing woman of the world. But Edmund Goulding, whom Warners assigned the task of writing the first treatment in preparation for directing the picture, preferred Irene Dunne. One can only imagine Bette Davis’s rage when she picked up the Herald-Examiner one day and read in Louella Parsons’s column that Dunne was being loaned to Warners by Columbia for Now, Voyager. “I became apoplectic,” she later wrote.4

  Ginger Rogers kept pushing for the role, commenting later of Bette’s irritation, “One thing that really irked her was that I was getting more money per film than she was.”5

  Goulding then became ill and was replaced, inaptly, by Michael Curtiz, who wanted either Rogers or Norma Shearer. “I’m under contract here!” Bette raged to Hal Wallis. “Why can’t I play Charlotte Vale? As a New Englander, I understand her better than anyone else ever could!” Wallis took the idea to Jack Warner, and Warner wisely agreed.6 Now, Voyager is as unimaginable without Bette Davis as Gone with the Wind is with her.

  Curtiz dropped out—possibly because he didn’t want to work with Davis again, or maybe he just didn’t like the idea of directing a weepie. His replacement, a former dialogue director named Irving Rapper, held to the latter view: “My great teacher Michael Curtiz was originally supposed to have directed this picture but didn’t like it as a subject and preferred to do an action picture.” Rapper went on: “I insisted upon casting Now, Voyager myself; I was starting to sail high, and they gave me my head. So I hired Claude Rains to play the psychiatrist [Dr. Jaquith] and Gladys Cooper, whom Hal Wallis had never heard of, to play the mother.”7r />
  Although he had appeared in a number of pictures since emigrating in the mid-1930s, Paul von Hernreid—who had recently de-Germanized his name to Paul Henreid—was a newcomer to Warners. According to Henreid, Jack Warner got it in his head to turn Henreid into a continental-accented cross between George Brent and Leslie Howard, with Bette correctly describing Warner’s proposed concoction as also including a smidgen of Charles Boyer. Henreid’s screen test for the role of Jerry Durrance, the unhappily married man with whom Charlotte falls in love, was thus a fiasco, the studio hairdresser having been advised to pomade Henreid’s hair down to the scalp, with Perc Westmore adding lipstick, rouge, and mascara, and the costumer topping off the ensemble with a satin smoking jacket. Henreid was mortified.

  Bette “hit the ceiling” when she saw the tests. “She turned to Rapper and Hal Wallis and shouted, ‘What did you do to that man? How can I act with him? He looks ghastly—like some floorwalker in a department store! You are two of the most miserable bastards!’ ”

  Davis was more than relieved to learn that Henreid himself hated the way he looked, too, and a strong, enduring friendship resulted—one of the few Davis enjoyed with a male co-star. (Another was with Claude Rains.) “There was something about her manner, flirtatious and friendly, flattering and yet honest, that made you think of her as an immediate friend and a solid master of her craft,” Henreid later wrote. “I found her a delight to work with, and we got along famously. . . . She has remained a dear, close friend—and always a very decent human being.”8

  To round out the cast, Ilka Chase was hired to play Lisa Vale, Charlotte’s sympathetic sister-in-law, with Bonita Granville playing Lisa’s casually cruel daughter, June. (Granville also appears as the shrill and obnoxious child in It’s Love I’m After.) Juanita Quigley, who had appeared in such films as John Stahl’s Imitation of Life—under the name “Baby Jane,” coincidently—was tested for the role of Tina, Jerry Durrance’s troubled daughter, but the part went instead to plain Janis Wilson, an unknown.9 In fact, Wilson was so unknown that her appearance in Now, Voyager is uncredited.

  Three of the central dramatis personae have claimed credit for the excellence of the unashamedly melodramatic script:

  Bette Davis: “It was a constant vigil to preserve the quality of the book as written by Olive Higgins Prouty. . . . I used Miss Prouty’s book and redid the screenplay in her words as we went along. . . . My script was scratched to pieces. I’d sit up nights and restore scenes [that] were right just the way she had written them.”10

  Olive Higgins Prouty: “I took part in the writing of the film. . . . There wasn’t a single page that escaped my comments in red type. Sometimes I added an extra page or two. . . . The few portions of my suggestions that were accepted made the effort worthwhile.”11

  Casey Robinson: “There was a small annoyance in the beginning in that Hal Wallis kept sending the material back to the author, and we used to get a few letters from Prouty picking on this little point or that. . . . As I say, this was an annoyance, but it was no more than a mosquito bite. . . . I’ve never read Bette Davis’s book, but there was never, never one word changed in any of the scripts that I wrote for her—by Miss Davis, by a director, by anybody—and that is a flat statement, a true statement, and final.”12

  Now, Voyager began shooting on April 7, 1942, and finished on June 23, with some retakes on July 3. The production went fairly smoothly. Bette missed a day or two of shooting a week and a half into the production because of laryngitis, but there seem to have been no major tantrums. Minor ones, yes. Practically daily. Ilka Chase describes Davis as “a fine, hard-working woman, friendly with members of her cast, forthright and courteous to technicians on her picture, and her director’s heaviest cross. She will argue every move in every scene until the poor man is reduced to quivering pulp.” Dark storm clouds hovered on only one particular day; Chase calls it “a morning of heavy weather.” They were shooting on the Vale mansion set. Davis was inevitably out of makeup fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, Chase reports, and “the occasion of which I speak was no exception. She was ready but remained closeted in her portable dressing room, a brooding Ajax, while the set simmered in a miasma of gloom.” Irving Rapper “sat in his canvas chair staring moodily at his fingertips” as everyone else milled around trying not to make the situation worse. Finally Bette emerged from her dressing room. “Gone the comradely smile, the cigarette breezily proffered. Hers was a mien blighted yet austere. Here, you said to yourself, is one who has suffered; here is a woman who has sampled the dregs and found them bitter.”

  The assistant director explained Davis’s despondency to Chase sotto voce: “Last night she saw In This Our Life.”13

  World War II intruded briefly on the production of Now, Voyager. During some location shooting at Laguna Beach in May, a navy officer appeared to be stalking the star. Davis was a bit concerned but decided to approach him directly and ask if he wanted an autograph. “No,” young Edward Hubbell replied; “I’m sorta here to censor the Pacific Ocean.” Hubbell’s job was to make sure that the film didn’t reveal any details of the shoreline.14

  Davis begins Now, Voyager looking hideous. Warner Bros.’ theatrical trailer for the film featured only the glamorous swan phase of Charlotte’s life, pointedly leaving out the ugly duckling overture, so contemporary audiences had no preparation for the mess they were about to encounter. Rapper reveals Charlotte Vale first by her hands as they nervously dispose of two cigarette stubs in a wastebasket, then by her orthopedically stockinged legs and frumpy, flat-heeled shoes as she ventures tentatively down her mother’s imposing staircase. These isolated body parts hesitate and start to turn back before proceeding—an effective way of getting across Charlotte’s fearful shyness. Rapper’s slow revelation is a clever tease for what’s to come, but more subtly the sequence fragments Charlotte visually as a way of expressing her disjointed emotional state. Only then does Rapper reveal her wholly in long shot as she comes around the corner and into the drawing room. And oh, she’s a fright. Here’s Bette Davis with bushy eyebrows and mouse-colored hair pulled back in a hank. She’s wearing an ugly oversized print dress filled out by cotton batting. It’s the most extreme uglification that Davis had ever done, and it’s gasp inducing. It’s also a point of intense audience identification, since most of us feel precisely that way at one point or another in our lives.

  Now, Voyager is much more astute about the positive healing effects of psychotherapy than it is about the process. When Dr. Jaquith enters the Vale mansion, he taps his pipe against a vast urn to remove ashes and bits of unburned tobacco. The racket greatly disturbs the elderly Mrs. Vale, but Dr. Jaquith doesn’t care. What he tells the butler neatly sums up his vision of psychiatry: “Messy things, pipes. I like ’em.” But the film’s depiction of Charlotte’s actual treatment at Cascade, Dr. Jaquith’s country club–like sanatorium, elides the raw, even filthy work of regaining mental health in favor of a productive weaving session. Still, Robinson in his screenplay, Rapper in his direction, and Davis in her performance all appreciate the tentative nature of the results. Charlotte emerges from Cascade looking fabulous on the outside but remaining wobbly within. Hal Wallis wisely had Rapper cut a scene he’d filmed of a newly discharged Charlotte being refashioned at a beauty salon, thereby intensifying the big reveal at the top of the gangplank of a cruise ship heading for South America. In an echo of Charlotte’s introductory sequence, Rapper begins with a fragment—her feet and legs, now shapely and clad in fine silk stockings and high heels—only this time he unveils her in a single, unified shot that cranes up rapidly past a tailored black suit all the way to Charlotte’s newly plucked eyebrows, shaped lips, and chic new broad-brimmed hat. And yet as the shot and the costuming make clear, she’s still Charlotte Vale, with all the homonym implies; far from being fully brought to light, this is a woman still partially hidden, her eyes only briefly visible, her face concealed not only by the hat’s brim but also through a veil of exquisite fine black netting.
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  A bit of business in Now, Voyager became an instant sensation when the film was released in the fall of 1942 and remains one of the most delightful screen gimmicks of all time. According to Paul Henreid, Casey Robinson’s script instructed him at one point “to offer Bette a cigarette, take one myself, light mine, then take her cigarette out of her mouth, give her mine, and put hers between my lips.” Henreid practiced the routine with his wife, Lisl, but neither of them could get it right, and it became farcical. Then they tried it the way they did it themselves when driving: Henreid put two cigarettes in his mouth, lit them both, and handed one to his wife.

  Bette went for the idea. The bit was not only simpler and cleaner but also a hell of a lot more romantic. They took it to Irving Rapper, who hated it. Bette, always prone to overruling her director, insisted that Hal Wallis come down to the soundstage right away and see it for himself. Wallis appeared, witnessed it, and approved it. In fact—at least according to Henreid—Wallis liked it so much he had Casey Robinson add two more occasions for the couple to perform it later in the film. In the completed Now, Voyager, the double cigarette lighting occurs three times: first at the airport in Rio when Charlotte and Jerry part after their five-day affair (and as the film historian Tom Phillips points out, we’re all mature enough to assume that they’ve slept with each other); next when Charlotte agrees to marry the pleasant but bland Elliot Livingston and Jerry inadvertently proves to Charlotte how wrong her decision is by putting two cigarettes in his mouth and lighting them; and finally in the film’s closing moments, just before Jerry asks Charlotte if she will ever be happy, and Charlotte responds with one of the most eloquent expressions of sublimated desire in all cinema: “Oh, Jerry—don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars!”

  My mother tells me that my grandfather, like many men around the country in 1942, began lighting two cigarettes at a time thanks to the suave Paul Henreid. (Unfortunately for my grandfather, my grandmother didn’t smoke.) Equally charmed by the routine, fans grew pushy and began accosting Henreid, demanding that he perform the cigarette routine for them on the spot. A drunken woman charged up to him at the New York restaurant Voisin and noisily called for a command performance. Henreid told Bette about the incident later, and Bette gave him a piece of blunt advice: “I tell people like that, ‘Leave me alone. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me.’” Henreid was aghast. “But that’s so rude!” To which Davis replied matter-of-factly, “Believe me—rudeness is the only thing that works in a situation like that.”15