Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Marlene Dietrich generally worked the cooking detail, though Johnny Carson, then a navy cadet, fondly recalled dancing with her. Dietrich once appeared fresh from the set of Kismet, still clad in gold paint. “I had never seen two thousand men screaming in a state of near mass hysteria,” Bette observed, adding that “Marlene was one of the most generous in the amount of time she spent at the Canteen.” The Gabor sisters were waitresses, as were Kay Francis and Greer Garson. (Zsa Zsa once commented of Bette’s taste in clothing, “Vell, she doesn’t have very much dress zense.”)38 Joan Crawford showed up one night and was instantly surrounded by fans and autograph seekers. Davis broke it up: “Hello, Joan,” she said after muscling her way through the crowd. “We need you desperately in the kitchen. There are dishes to be washed.”39 It was nothing personal. That would come later. Bette merely saw the need to clean up stacks of dirty plates and glasses, and Crawford happened to be nearby.

  Bing Crosby and his three small sons showed up and sang on Christmas Eve. “There was not a dry eye in the Canteen,” Davis remembered. “Roddy McDowall came night after night, helping us out as a busboy. Mrs. John Ford, the director’s wife, was in charge of the kitchen from the night the Canteen opened to the closing night. Saturday was Kay Kyser’s night. I cannot remember Kay and his band ever missing one Saturday, even though sometimes it was necessary to fly the band back from some distant engagement.”40

  Davis issued instructions to the Canteen’s volunteer hostesses on how to treat the men, particularly the wounded ones. “Forget the wounds, remember the man,” Davis’s printed instructions read. “Don’t be over-solicitous, nor too controlled to the point of indifference. Learn to use the word ‘prosthetics’ instead of ‘artificial limbs.’ Never say, ‘It could have been worse.’ And when he talks about his war experiences, listen, but don’t ask for more details than he wants to give.”41

  One soldier showed up the day before the Canteen opened and found a familiar-looking woman sweeping the floor. “Say,” he said, “you look like you were Bette Davis.” Bette told him that she still was. “Well, lady,” the GI replied, “your pictures certainly stink, but you look like sweetness and light now.”42

  DAVIS MAY HAVE urged other stars and studio to eschew war-themed propaganda in favor of sex, but she herself agreed to appear in Warner Bros.’ adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play Watch on the Rhine, and she did so largely as a favor to the studio; her presence certainly helped sell the overtly political film. Tactlessly, she made her pronouncements about the national need for onscreen sex in June, just as the sex-free Watch on the Rhine began shooting.

  The play, which opened on April 1, 1941, and ran for 378 performances (closing in February 1942), is set in 1940, before the United States entered the war, and it concerns an ardently anti-Nazi German, Kurt Muller; his American-born wife, Sara; their three children; Teck de Brancovis, an oily Rumanian count who has been currying favor with the Nazis; and Teck’s wife, the pretty but naive Marthe.

  Although both Paul Henreid and Charles Boyer were screen-tested for Kurt, the role ultimately went to the Hungarian-born Paul Lukas (né Pál Lukács). Margaret Sullavan and Irene Dunne were briefly considered for Sara, but Hal Wallis ultimately asked Bette to play the part—“for name value,” she later explained.43 There was, however, a contretemps about her casting. Bette argued, strenuously, that she should not get top billing. Watch on the Rhine, she said, belonged to Paul Lukas, so his name should come first. On May 14, Warner Bros.’ Roy Obringer reported to Jack Warner that he had been arguing about the issue with Dudley Furse, Bette’s lawyer, and that Furse had taken Warners’ case to Bette once again but had failed to change her mind. “While she is willing to do the picture, Lukas has the choice part and she does not want to appear ridiculous by taking first position billing,” Obringer reported. “I am sure she will permit us to bill her first,” Hal Wallis confidently told Obringer the following day.44 Eventually, she did.

  Dashiell Hammett wrote the script with some help from Hellman, and it stuck closely to the plot of the play. The Production Code office voiced a choice objection: Kurt’s killing of Teck—in other words, a member of the Resistance killing a Nazi sympathizer—not only went without punishment but was clearly justified. This, to the Production Code Administration, was wrong. That the wormy Teck deserves what he gets is the moral linchpin of the play, but the vigilant Hays Office, consumed with its own sense of dumbed-down propriety, was compelled to find a way around Hellman’s hardheaded ethical question. The hero of the piece could still kill the villain, the PCA ruled, as long as Warners made it crystal clear that the Nazis ended up murdering the hero in the end. Hellman thought the suggestion was inane and offensive. Warner Bros. agreed.45

  Herman Shumlin, who had directed the Broadway production, was signed to direct the film, which was shot between June 9 and August 22. The part of Marthe went to Geraldine Fitzgerald; George Coulouris reprised his portrayal of Teck. Bette had taken an interest in young Janis Wilson during the filming of Now, Voyager and recommended her for the role of Babette, Sara’s daughter.46

  “It was not ever my favorite part, except for one speech about being alone at night,” Davis told Dick Cavett in 1971, whereupon Cavett played the clip: “I don’t like to be alone at night. I guess everybody in the world has a time they don’t like. Mine is right before I go to sleep. And now it’s going to be for always—all the rest of my life.”47 It’s the understated Davis we see throughout Watch on the Rhine, and never more so than when she’s delivering these lines with a sad smile. There are no hand-wringing, hair-clutching, neck-bending revelations of inner turmoil; just a woman letting herself know that she will forever spend her life’s worst moments alone.

  “STORIES OF WOMEN are always box-office,” Bette declared in a 1945 note to Jack Warner. “Witness the lousy picture Old Acquaintance. (I’m sure you agree with this opinion privately and not for publication.)”48

  Davis may have been a bit hyperbolic with the word lousy, and Warner’s private opinion of the movie is unrecorded. But Bette’s assessment is more or less on target. Given Davis’s pairing with Miriam Hopkins, Old Acquaintance ought to be livelier, pricklier. Hopkins and Davis were more than capable of generating the crackling onscreen chemistry born of authentic, deep-seated hatred, and yet the picture is sluggish in a paradoxically brittle sort of way. Rich and Famous, George Cukor’s 1981 remake starring Jacqueline Bisset in the Davis role and Candice Bergen in Hopkins’s, is much snappier.

  The production didn’t get off to an easy start. Warner Bros. bought the screen rights to John Van Druten’s play about two old friends, each a successful writer, for $75,000. Rosalind Russell and Irene Dunne are said to have been briefly considered for the role of Kit Marlowe, the more cerebral of the two authors, but the role was clearly Davis’s almost from the start.

  Her clout was greater than that of the film’s first director. Originally assigned to direct Old Acquaintance, Edmund Goulding worked on early drafts of the script (which is credited to Van Druten and Lenore Coffee), but Davis’s demands got to him, as did the prospect of dealing with an encore performance of the Davis-Hopkins feud. What had animated Goulding’s The Old Maid artistically had debilitated Goulding personally. As Vincent Sherman, who ended up directing the picture, said, “I was told later that Goulding had gone through The Old Maid with these two ladies, and he just felt he wasn’t up to it.”49 Goulding dreaded the bickering and one-upwomanship, Hopkins’s upstaging and Davis’s complaints, and according to Matthew Kennedy he tried to avoid the whole thing by suggesting Constance Bennett or Janet Gaynor or Margaret Sullavan instead of Hopkins for the role of Millie, to no avail.50

  Bette called Norma Shearer personally and asked her to costar with her. Shearer talked with Goulding about it, assuming she was to play Kit, but Goulding corrected her—“But, Norma, Bette wants you to play the bitch who writes the trash!”—and Shearer wanted no part of it.51 One story has it that Davis herself became exasperated and said, “Get Miria
m. At least she can do it.”

  Goulding, says Sherman, was also chafed by Davis’s ability to overrule his choice of cinematographer. Henry Blanke told Goulding he was going to assign Tony Gaudio, only to turn around and give the job to Bette’s choice, Sol Polito. Irritated and unnerved, Goulding sent a telegram to Jack Warner: “This is no temperamental or childish whim but very solid and businesslike conviction that I am either working for Warner Bros. or Miss Davis, and there is a difference.”52 Goulding appears to have realized, however, that the picture hinged on Davis, not himself, and he became so upset that, as Kennedy writes, “he stressed himself right into another health crisis. In October, he was hospitalized with a bad flu, had his contract suspended, recovered his health, then suffered a relapse in December. There was a rumor circulating through studio gossip that he faked a heart attack, but he didn’t fake anything. It’s true that he left Old Acquaintance with nary a backward glance, but he was genuinely sick.”53 Irving Rapper was briefly mentioned as Goulding’s replacement, but Sherman ended up taking the job.

  There’s a bland, underwritten male role in Old Acquaintance—that of Millie’s husband, Preston Drake—so naturally George Brent was announced for it. But Brent joined the Coast Guard, and the part was handed to Franchot Tone, who turned it down.54 (The Warner Bros. archives contain Tone’s unsigned contract for $60,000.) John Loder—Elliot Livingston, Charlotte Vale’s short-term fiancé in Now, Voyager—was cast instead.

  Sherman began shooting Old Acquaintance on November 11, 1942, starting with scenes between Hopkins and Loder. Bette was finishing up a vacation in Palm Springs. A few days later she appeared at the studio with her new agent, Lew Wasserman. (“I’ve had most of them from time to time,” Bette once said of agents. She had at least eighteen of them during her career.55) They watched Hopkins’s rushes, and according to Sherman, Bette called him an hour later from the projection room, saying, “I just think it’s marvelous! I don’t know how you got Miriam to do all those things—they were wonderful!”56 She reported to the studio the following morning and began shooting. That’s when the fun and games started.

  “I hadn’t been in the business long enough to realize that there were so many tricks that could be played,” Sherman later admitted. “Let’s say for instance the two of them were sitting on the sofa in the living room. I’d make an over-the-shoulder scene. Well, Miriam came to me once and said, ‘Do you mind if I use this long cigarette holder for this character?’ I said no, I think that’s right for her. Well, the camera’s back of her and I’m shooting across her shoulder on Davis, and Miriam would take a puff of the cigarette and hold the cigarette right across Davis’ face. And I said, ‘Oh, Miriam, please, honey.’ She said, ‘Oh! I was just trying to match up what I did before.’ And Davis knew, of course, and would burn.”

  At one point, Hopkins suggested that she and Davis figure out their own blocking for a scene. Sherman agreed to try it. “The two ladies played the entire five pages practically riveted to the center of the room,” said Sherman, neither of them providing the other with a chance to do anything unchoreographed. They were literally unwilling to give an inch, a fact Sherman found entertaining but unproductive. He pointed out to them their five-page-long immobility. “Bette, realizing it was true, broke into a hearty laugh. Miriam did not find it the least bit amusing.”

  “Ladies,” Sherman announced, “sometimes I feel I’m not directing this picture, I’m refereeing it! Bette roared with laughter, which only endeared her to me. Once again, Miriam was not amused.”57

  “I can, in all honesty, say I never lost my temper with Miriam on the set,” Davis wrote. “I kept it all in until I got home at night. Then I screamed for an hour at least.”58 Farney seems to have taken it with aplomb and alcohol.

  There is a scene toward the end of Old Acquaintance in which Kit’s long-simmering and well-earned frustration with Millie’s self-dramatization becomes intolerable. Violence ensues. Davis described it in The Lonely Life as a slap, but in fact it’s an extended shake of Millie’s shoulders. “Now, Vincent,” Bette said on the morning the scene was to be shot, “I’m going to shake Miriam just as I have to do it. There’s no way I can fake that. I hope she doesn’t try to pull anything and start complaining about it, so just warn her that I’m going to do it.”

  “Vincent,” Hopkins said to her director, “I know that she has to shake me, but I got up this morning with this terrible thing in my neck, and I hope she won’t overdo it because I know she doesn’t like me, but she doesn’t have to overdo it.”59

  According to Bette, spectators gathered on the catwalks above the soundstage. A reporter from Life got wind of it and tried to cover the story with a photographer, but they were barred from the set.

  As Humphrey Bogart said of Bette and her wallop, “Unless you’re very big she can knock you down.”60 Hopkins was not very big, and to make matters worse, she relaxed her body so completely when Bette began to shake her that, as Sherman describes it, “her head began to wobble about grotesquely like a doll with a broken neck.”61 Davis stormed off the set in a rage and slammed the door for good measure but was coaxed back for a second take, during which Hopkins, at Sherman’s insistence, forced herself to resist the shaking enough to look human. As Sherman notes, “it was done well enough to be all right, and that’s all there was to it.”62

  But that is exactly the problem with the scene, and with the film as a whole: it was done well enough to be all right, but that’s all it is. Sherman plays that particular scene for comedy, but it’s not very funny. And the notorious enmity between the two actresses, which might have lent their characters’ rivalry some real bite, ended up being so controlled that it barely registers at all. The joyous contempt the two actresses felt for each other, the recreational loathing Life had appreciated in 1939, was reined in to get the picture in the can, and Old Acquaintance suffers for its absence.

  Jack Warner asked Sherman, Davis, and some crew members to work late on a Saturday in mid-February and finish the whole thing up. They agreed and worked till 2:00 a.m. Davis asked Sherman to drop her off at Ruthie’s house on Laurel Canyon, but as they were driving down Ventura Boulevard toward the canyon they spotted an open hamburger joint and stopped for a bite to eat. “It’s been fun working with you in spite of the trouble with Miriam. But you handled her beautifully, and I love you!” Bette said. “I love you, too,” Sherman replied. “Then her voice changed. She became subdued and solemn as she took my hand. ‘You don’t understand. I mean, I really love you.’ ”63 Bette was infatuated. And married. Sherman, a good-looking and intelligent man, was interested and married. Nothing came of it—yet.

  Sherman dropped Bette off at Ruthie’s house around 3:00 a.m. and was astounded to see Ruthie appear on her doorstep in her bathrobe the minute the car pulled up and call out, “Is that you, Bette Davis? Do you know what time it is? Get into this house at once!”

  “Yes, Mother.”64

  CHAPTER

  14

  FOR THE BOYS

  WHILE OLD ACQUAINTANCE WAS IN the early stages, still under the direction of Edmund Goulding, Warners arranged for Bette to see Irving Rapper’s The Gay Sisters with an eye toward casting the role of Rudd Kendall, the young navy lieutenant with whom Kit Marlowe enjoys an affair and, toward the end, decides to marry. There is a character in The Gay Sisters named Gig Young; the role was played by an actor who was born with the name Bryant Fleming, and who had acted under the name Byron Barr. The trouble was, there was another young actor in Hollywood named Byron Barr—the second Byron Barr appears as Nino Zachetti in Double Indemnity—so Bryant Fleming decided to take his character’s name in The Gay Sisters and began a long career under the name Gig Young.

  Goulding approved of Young’s casting in Old Acquaintance, but Vincent Sherman didn’t see his appeal and tried to get someone cast in his place. But Davis had taken a liking to him and insisted that he play Rudd Kendall. She also seduced him.

  Farney was often out of town working for Ho
neywell and the war effort, and though Young was also married, he convinced his wife, Sheila, that the reason he was staying late at the studio was because of delays caused by Davis and Hopkins and their tempers, an excuse Sheila certainly found plausible. Although Old Acquaintance did run significantly behind schedule, Gig Young was actually spending his off hours in Bette’s dressing room at the studio or at Riverbottom when Farney was in Minneapolis.

  The affair was rather brief; it ended when Young joined the Coast Guard shortly after Old Acquaintance wrapped in mid-February, though the two remained good friends for the rest of Young’s life. They greeted each other with a particular shtick: “Gig Young!” Bette would cry upon seeing him. “Bette Davis!” Young would respond. “She’s not a professional charmer,” Young said of Davis many years after their affair was over. “I like that kind of honesty.”1

  Soon after Old Acquaintance wrapped, Bette departed, without Farney, for a vacation in Mexico.

  BEGINNING WITH PARAMOUNT’S Star Spangled Rhythm, released at the tail end of 1942, Hollywood gave wartime America a spate of puttin’-on-a-show movies featuring a given studio’s stable of stars playing themselves. In Star Spangled Rhythm, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Lamour, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd, and other Paramount leading lights turned up onstage at a navy benefit, with Eddie Bracken playing a sailor and Betty Hutton playing the Paramount switchboard operator with whom he falls in love. MGM got in line with Thousands Cheer. Described by the critic Damien Bona as “arguably the worst A picture of the 1940s,” Thousands Cheer featured Gene Kelly as an army private and the “MGM Star Parade,” including Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Red Skelton, Eleanor Parker, Lucille Ball, Lena Horne, Donna Reed, June Allyson, and “introducing in his first appearance on the screen, José Iturbi.” Universal weighed in with Follow the Boys, which, as Bona points out, remains notable for being the only film in history to star both Orson Welles and Maria Montez. Marlene Dietrich, W. C. Fields, and the Andrews Sisters also appeared.