by Ed Sikov
But as with many tales of Hollywood glory, there is another version of the double-lighting bit. “Mr. Wallis did not come onto the set at all,” Irving Rapper insisted. “And it was my idea, not that of Henreid, who has gone on taking credit for it ever since.”16
Rapper, who had just directed The Gay Sisters, was one himself. Like Edmund Goulding, Rapper appreciated, with whatever degree of consciousness, that so-called women’s pictures were also appealing to a certain strain of man. Now, Voyager suggests a gay man’s quest for self-acceptance as much as it explicitly tells of an independent, free-thinking woman’s emergence from a state of self-loathing and sexual inhibition. Bette Davis is his embodiment as well as hers.
Because overt expressions of homosexuality were explicitly forbidden by the Production Code, Hollywood had to inscribe gayness delicately, if at all. Here, it’s an oh-so-proto-gay character actor, the ever-fluttering Franklin Pangborn, who scurries onto the scene just in time to introduce Charlotte to Jerry. Like Eric Blore’s many onscreen performances (including that of Leslie Howard’s manservant in It’s Love I’m After, whom Bonita Granville spies through the keyhole declaring his love to Howard—they’re really acting out a theatrical scene), Pang-born’s appearance is a wink at a knowing gay audience. He’s the ship’s busy-bee social director, as gay a job as a hairdresser or florist. “Ah, Miss Beauchamps! Here you are! We’ve been waiting for you!” Pangborn squeals. (Charlotte is traveling under an assumed name.) Then, in a flurry: “Miss Beauchamps! Miss Beauchamps? Allow me to introduce Mr. Durrance. . . . You’re travelling alone, and he’s travelling alone, and, and so, that’s splendid!” Pangborn pops up at the end of the cruise, too. As Lisa and June stand by at the pier, flabbergasted by Charlotte’s transformation from dowdy spinster to chic socialite, a couple starts to bid Charlotte good-bye, but Pangborn scurries into the shot and stops them: “Don’t anybody say good-bye! Not anybody! Just ‘au revoir!’ ” His rapid-fire line delivery is breathless and funny, like a machine gun shooting violets: “It is a sad time, isn’t it, but I want to tell you one thing—there was no lady on this cruise that was as popular as you were. Au revoir!”
Eve Sedgwick may have founded queer theory on the concept of the epistemology of the closet, but gay men know the ontology of theater equally well—the being of acting, the essential reality that only stylization can fully reveal. Bette Davis remains its prime exemplar in the cinema, with fussy, prissy, witty character actors like Pangborn and Blore serving as grace notes. In Now, Voyager, as elsewhere, Davis’s theatricality hints at something existentially honest; her mannerisms express core emotional truths. Charles Busch describes it in the practical terms of a working actor and playwright: “What I find interesting about her is that while she’s the most stylized of all those Hollywood actresses, the most mannered, she’s also to me the most psychologically acute. You see it in Now, Voyager in the scene on the boat when she starts to cry, and she’s playing it in a very romantic style. Henreid says, ‘My darling—you are crying,’ and she says, ‘These are only tears of gratitude—an old maid’s gratitude for the crumbs offered.’ It’s very movie-ish, but the way she turns her head inward, away from the camera, is very real.”17
In the instance Busch so perceptively describes and appreciates, Davis uses her melodramatic mannerisms and breathy, teary vocal delivery as well as her seemingly spontaneous nuzzling into Henreid’s chest to express the undeniable legitimacy of self-pity. It’s not a pretty emotion, but Davis somehow makes it so. Through Davis’s elevating, sublimating stylization, this woman’s secret shame becomes beautiful.
Stanley Cavell, referring to melodramas of female abnegation, Now, Voyager in particular, astutely asks, “Is it that the women in them are sacrificing themselves to the sad necessities of a world they are forced to accept? Or isn’t it rather that the women are claiming the right to judge a world as second-rate that enforces this sacrifice; to refuse, transcend, its proposal of second-rate sadness?”18 In light of Cavell’s observations, it’s little wonder that Bette Davis became an icon for several generations of gay men, who learned through bitter experience the severe limits mainstream culture imposes on rebellious selves. But gay men also learned that they could, through wit and style and camp, rise above this oppressive, second-rate world and, inside at least, be the men they were meant to be. Bette Davis helped make this transcendence possible. They knew they couldn’t shoot for the moon, but they didn’t have to. They had a star.
IN MAY 1942, while Bette was filming Now, Voyager, the columnist Sidney Skolsky put out an amusing tidbit: Farney had begun speaking to Bette in an Austrian accent to counter the European charms of Paul Henreid.19 The Henreids and the Farnsworths socialized often. Henreid found Farney to be “the perfect husband for Bette. He didn’t interfere with her professional life but let her do as she pleased, and we could sense the warmth and love between them.”20 “Our light was a low one but steady,” Davis wrote in The Lonely Life. “He didn’t have an ounce of jealousy. He never questioned me about anything I did. He let me run my own life.”21
In January, after spending their anniversary in the California desert, in part to improve Farney’s health, Bette and Farney had headed for Butternut, with a stopover in New York for a Red Cross benefit radio broadcast with Helen Hayes. Also that month, the trade gossip columnist Harrison Carroll debunked what he called “stork rumors” for Bette.22
The renovation of Butternut continued with the building of an immense barn. The structure was designed for neither livestock nor hay, though it did feature a windowed circular silo on the side. There was a large picture window on the end, and an open balcony ran along half the structure. Inside was one great room on the first floor with a kitchen area on one end and a living room space on the other. The kitchen had a huge brick fireplace, the living room a squared, built-in couch done up in red upholstery. The second floor was more traditional in look and furnishings: there were defined bedrooms as well as a library. The Farnsworths had moved some of their furniture from Riverbottom, including a large four-poster bed. Their caretaker, Phil Bilodeaux, and his family now lived on the property in the cottage Davis built for them.
The Farnsworths returned to New York in time for a huge benefit for the Navy Relief Fund at Madison Square Garden on March 10; the party was still rocking at midnight and raised over $160,000. Bette also showed up at the Stage Door Canteen on West Forty-fourth Street. Taking the mike from a wisecracking comedian, she announced, “I can’t sing or tell stories, but I’ll be glad to dance with anyone who cares to dance with me.” Scores of the soldiers and sailors took her up on the offer for about half an hour.
The Farnsworths planned to stop in Chicago to see Ethel Barrymore appear in the Emlyn Williams play The Corn Is Green—it was more of a professional call than a social one—but Bette got so sick to her stomach that she had to be carried off the train. She and Farney checked into the Blackmore Hotel, where she was examined by doctors who diagnosed the malady as ptomaine poisoning; evidently she’d eaten something contaminated. To make matters worse, one of her trunks went missing. She reported the loss of a fur coat, several suits and dresses, and lingerie she valued at $2,000. After more than a year went by with neither the trunk being found nor restitution having been offered; she ended up suing the New York Central Railroad and the Pullman Company.
Farney and Bette parted in Chicago, Farney heading back to Minneapolis, Bette for Los Angeles.
BETTE DAVIS WAS finally earning the money she deserved. According to the studio’s annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in May 1942, Warner Bros. had paid her $271,083 the previous year. (Satisfyingly for Bette, this was $11,000 more than Hal Wallis earned.) She was still making less than the top male stars—Cagney took in a whopping $362,500 in 1941, $5,000 more than Clark Gable—but it was a vast improvement over what she’d made earlier.23 Still, these top wage earners actually banked little of their earnings. The Revenue Act of 1941 capped the top tax bracket at $200,000, at
which point anyone earning that or more would owe a whopping 90 percent of his or her income to the government. To avoid what would have amounted to working for the U.S. Treasury, major movie stars had a choice: they could reduce the number of films they made, thereby reducing both their income and their tax liability, or they could move away from contracts and salaries toward one-picture deals with profit-sharing plans. Their income would thus be taxable as capital gains at a rate of 25 percent.24 Indeed, Bette made far fewer pictures per year after 1941, and she did eventually launch her own production company.
After finishing Now, Voyager, Bette traveled in June to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, to accept an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in the name of her father, who had graduated from Bates thirty-five years earlier. Naturally, Harlow had been valedictorian of his class.25
Characteristically outspoken, and scarcely intimidated by any petty instructions she might have been given by Warners’ publicity men, she’d been offering opinions on the war’s impact on American culture, not to mention Americans’ love lives, for some time already. “What the moving pictures need is more sex and fewer preachments,” she preached to the Oakland Tribune. Hollywood was turning out blunt propaganda, and Davis had confidence in little of it. “There are too many war and Nazi pictures,” she declared. “It’s sex—or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof—that the public wants.”26
Meanwhile, the monthly advice column she wrote and signed for Photoplay often answered questions about how far young American women should go in the war effort. It’s likely that these columns were actually penned by publicists or Photoplay staffers, but they do put across Davis’s voice and tough-mindedness. “Don’t Be a Draft Bride” was the title of her column in January 1941. “The kindness you think you were doing [by marrying a soldier on his way into the military] would turn into a hideous boomerang for both,” Bette advised an anxious letter writer. “Far kinder—and wiser—to say no now, thereby serving your country as well as your two selves.”27 (By which she meant the girl and the boy, not that the girl had multiple personality disorder.) She gave similar advice to “Eleanor J.” in December 1942, though this time the letter writer had already married the draftee only to find that she wanted to date her old flame in his absence. “It seems selfish for a boy to want to marry just before he leaves for camp,” Davis wrote. “This is just a man’s way of putting a girl on the shelf for the duration although he can do nothing for her—not even offer her companionship. It is, in fact, a type of hoarding.” As for Eleanor’s old flame, Bette advised, “Beware of propinquity.”28
She’d helped sell $40,000 worth of war bonds during her trip to New England in January, but the September tour aimed much higher. A coordinated effort between the Treasury Department and the Hollywood War Activities Committee, September’s “Stars Over America” was the culmination of a nine-month drive by such big names as Davis, Walter Pidgeon, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Ronald Colman, Janet Gaynor, Ginger Rogers, Edward Arnold, Gene Tierney, Andy Devine, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Wyman, Greer Garson, Veronica Lake, Hedy Lamarr, Irene Dunne, Paulette Goddard, Myrna Loy, and Charles Laughton. In September alone, “Stars Over America” sold $775 million worth of bonds, including $86 million raised at a huge rally at Madison Square Garden.
Bette Davis was righteously angry about what she saw as the nation’s lack of commitment to the war effort, and she didn’t hesitate to let the public know it. “I think it is outrageous that movie stars have to wheedle and beg people into buying bonds to help their country,” she told one reporter. “But if that’s the way it is, I’m going to squeeze all I can out of everyone.”29 She visited cities and towns in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas, appearing in large civic auditoriums, schools, Rotary meetings, and even private homes. She was on a mission, and Bette Davis on a mission was unstoppable. She badgered a group of factory workers into buying more bonds by informing them that they had better give at their “top level—or you’re not my idea of an American.” Advised to be little more discreet, Bette held even faster to her approach: “It lights fires under their asses,” she declared.30
Jack Warner told her she was taking the wrong tack, but his pleading was to no avail. “Jack,” she responded, “you and your brother in New York just sit around and count the money I make for you. I’m the one who has to deal up front with the public, and I know what I’m doing.”31
Her stop in St. Joseph, Missouri, brought in $177,000. She appeared before a crowd of 250 at the Hotel Robidoux, gave a short speech, and raised $77,000 in the first ten minutes; the rest of the pot came pouring in at the town auditorium. “Isn’t this a wonderful country to fight for?” she asked the enthusiastic crowd. In Kansas City alone she helped raise as much as $650,000. Her pace was frenetic. She arrived in Tulsa from Springfield on Monday, September 14, and immediately drove to Muskogee for a speech at an ironworks and a rally at a movie theater, then back to Tulsa that afternoon for a visit to a Douglas Aircraft factory, where she sold a portrait of herself as Jezebel’s Julie Marsden for $250,000. In the evening was another rally at the 18,000-seat Skelly Stadium, where she sold a single autograph for $50,000. On Tuesday morning she drove two hours to Oklahoma City for a civic luncheon, stopped by the offices of a publishing company in the afternoon, and appeared at a bond rally at the Municipal Auditorium that evening. She took the train back to Los Angeles on Wednesday morning, promptly came down with a bad cold, and had to be hospitalized.32
She adored Franklin Roosevelt and hated anyone who didn’t. And she was deeply, morally offended: by Hitler, by fascism, by complacency. As Bette wrote to a friend, despite the fact that she found “great enthusiasm” and “raised millions of dollars” and enjoyed “probably the most satisfying experience I’ve ever had,” she was still disheartened. It wasn’t the fact that the temperature hovered around one hundred degrees; nor was it “the strain of being polite and charming 24 hours a day—you know, a rebel can’t bear that!” It was that the midwesterners she met struck her as being profoundly out of touch: “In spite of this outward show of ‘God Bless America,’ such nonsense they are hanging on to with the belief that the war will never touch them personally, so why worry?”33
At the time she wrote those words, Bette Davis was about to see her own major work for the war effort come to fruition. She and John Garfield began imagining the Hollywood Canteen at a table in the Warners commissary soon after the war started. “Johnny Garfield sat down at my table during lunch,” Bette later wrote. “He had been thinking about the thousands of servicemen who were passing through Hollywood without seeing any movie stars. Garfield said something ought to be done about it. I agreed, and then and there the idea for the Hollywood Canteen was born.”34 New York’s Stage Door Canteen was up and running, but there was no similar venue for the GIs who shipped out through Los Angeles. So with the help of Jules Stein, the head of the Music Corporation of America, many other stars, and—as Davis was always quick to point out—“the forty-two unions and guilds that made up the motion picture industry,” they took over a building at 1415 Cahuenga Boulevard and set up a large nightclub for service members. Alfred Ybarra, an MGM art director, supervised the decoration and provided items that (in his view anyway) MGM no longer needed. Other studio artists also chipped in with time, labor, and studio property. Bob Taplinger, who had moved from Warners to Columbia, organized a fund-raiser: the premiere of Columbia’s comedy-drama The Talk of the Town, followed by dinner at Ciro’s.
On opening night, October 3, 1942, spectators paid one hundred dollars each to sit on bleachers and watch 2,000 servicemen enter through a door over which was inscribed “Through these portals pass the most beautiful uniforms in the world.” Five thousand soldiers had to be turned away for lack of room. Civilians, stars included, had to use the side entrance.35
Just as she’d been as a Girl Scout leader in New York City, Davis was a taskmaster, but she only worked others as hard as she pushed herself. As Hedy Lamarr later
recalled, “One night after a rough day at the studio, I went right home and to bed. I was dozing off when Bette called. Several actresses who had promised to work that night for one reason or another couldn’t make it. I protested, but Bette was insistent. I told her that the way I looked I’d do more harm than the enemy.” Bette brushed Lamarr’s exhaustion aside, and Lamarr soon found herself reporting for duty at the Canteen. “I went to the kitchen and helped put some sandwiches together, and then I saw about two hundred unwashed cups piled in the sink. Bette smiled and said, ‘I washed the last few hundred. Now it’s someone else’s turn.’ ”36 Davis handed the job over to Lamarr, telling her that a guy standing nearby would dry them, thereby introducing Hedy to her next husband, John Loder. They married within the year.
Bette’s can-do or, better, must-do style engendered some resentment among the Canteen’s leaders, just as her take-charge attitude had inspired antipathy at the Academy. The Hollywood Victory Committee, led by Jimmy Cagney, insisted that Davis’s policy of calling stars herself was inappropriate and that henceforth she would have to go through the committee to get celebrities to show up. Bette pointed out that the committee had agreed to let her and her team call people at the last minute if necessary, and that the terms of this agreement were clearly spelled out in the past minutes. “Regrettably,” Cagney replied, “the minutes of that meeting have been lost.” Bette responded with a volley of unveiled threats: unless the committee reversed its idiotic decision, she’d call the press, call the unions, call the guilds, close the Canteen. . . . She got her way.37
