Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  By January 7, the production was a full month behind schedule. Shooting continued at its snail’s pace, and according to Mattison, “the air was very tense. However, Miss Davis warmed up in the afternoon,” and the pace picked up. “The balance of the script is now out, and there have been scenes added. I am sure that when the Epsteins see it they will be spinning on their heads like tops.”

  Julius Epstein, asked later about how it was to work under Vincent Sherman on Mr. Skeffington, replied with a laugh, “No, actually, it was Bette Davis who directed it. She took control of everything.” Jack Warner sent the Epstein brothers an angry memo during the production asking why the picture was taking so long to film. “Because Bette Davis is a slow director” was their response. At one point, Sherman and the Epsteins requested some retakes, but Bette refused. The three men took the matter to Jack Warner, who responded by shouting, “Who the fuck does she think she is?” and storming onto the soundstage in a rage, shouting about having built the studio from the ground up—until he saw Bette. “Bette, darling!” Warner said, giving her a warm hug, and that was the end of the retakes controversy.44

  Mr. Skeffington required Bette to age from a young beauty to a pathetic old woman who cannot accept her physical decline. Davis demanded not only to achieve the effect through performance but by way of increasingly cumbersome makeup. At first, Sherman let her have her way. She tested the makeup on January 11, 1943. But the layers of rubber and powder soon began to look absurd, and Sherman was compelled to talk to Perc Westmore about it.

  I said, “Perc, she’s getting to look like a mummy, for God’s sake, and it’s wrong. I have to stay away from the close-up stuff, and I shouldn’t be away from it. Please ease up on it. Don’t say anything to her.” Well, next morning I hear click, click, click—her heels coming onto the stage the way she walks, you know, and I can feel her standing on the edge of the set behind me. I looked round, and she said, “How dare you speak to Perc Westmore behind my back and tell him to change my makeup?! Why did you do it? Why didn’t you speak to me about it?” I said, “For the same reason that you’re acting this way now. It’s gotten so difficult to talk to you. You seem to resent anything that I tell you. You challenge me and I don’t want to go through the arguments, so I went to Perc and I told him that I think it’s getting too heavy and I want him to go easy on the makeup, and Mr. Warner agrees with me.” Well, she got angry and she walked away.45

  “We came to the elderly part after Fanny Skeffington had had the illness,” Sherman continued. “That morning when she came down she looked so hideous I said to her, ‘Bette, I’m very upset. I think that the woman should be affected, but I don’t think she should become so hideous that it’s hard to look at her.’ She said, ‘Don’t worry about it. My audience likes to see me do this kind of thing.’ I said, ‘Well, I think it’s hideous—it’s too much.’ ”46

  Davis persisted with the monstrous makeup even in the face of the physical toll it took on her. Around this time someone—Hal Wallis? Jack Warner himself?—lit into Sherman, a fact recorded by Frank Mattison as follows: “You can tell by the report of pages covered and setups made yesterday that it did pay to slap Vince Sherman’s ears down. Perhaps if someone had the guts to sit down on him a little more often we could even improve our schedule and shooting.”

  By the nineteenth, despite the fact that she was the one who insisted on its use, Davis was complaining about the makeup and how irritating it was to her skin. It didn’t help matters when, the following day, she took her rubber face home with her at the end of the day and forgot to bring it back in the morning. By February 1, she was out sick again, no doubt from the effects of the latex.

  The mask and foundation and cakey powder were brutally uncomfortable, especially under the bright lights. Her face began to itch, but she had to suppress any reaction while the cameras were rolling. “Toward the end of the day,” Sherman later recalled, “as we’d complete the last shot, she’d often tear the makeup from her face hysterically.”47

  Davis then lodged objections to certain Orry-Kelly gowns, which Kelly redesigned to her satisfaction.

  On Valentine’s Day 1944, Frank Mattison was in despair: “I hope to hell this picture gets over pretty soon—it’s driving me nuts!”

  Hell responded positively to Mattison’s wish: Mr. Skeffington wrapped on February 21, two months behind schedule. Mattison called Davis in her dressing room after shooting was over. She told him she was pleased with the way everything turned out, but, according to Mattison, she was “depressed because it had come to an end.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  COMMANDERS IN CHIEF

  AFTER RUNNING HER SCENES IN Hollywood Canteen at the end of June 1944, Bette began shooting Warners’ adaptation of Emlyn Williams’s play The Corn Is Green, a melodrama about a middle-aged woman, Miss Lily Moffat (Davis), who inherits property in a hardscrabble Welsh mining town and sets herself to the task of educating its children. She takes a particular liking to young Morgan Evans, whose intellect impresses her, and whose life she considers far too valuable to be spent hacking coal out of the earth. But the youth’s seemingly inexorable path to a scholarship at Oxford is blocked when, in a moment of indiscretion, he kisses a floozy, the daughter of Miss Moffat’s housekeeper. Soon enough, she’s with child.

  Irving Rapper was assigned to direct the picture, and Rapper wanted Richard Waring for the role of Morgan Evans. Waring had made a great impression as the obnoxious Trippy in Mr. Skeffington, but he was drafted before The Corn Is Green began filming. According to Davis, Warners “tried in every way” to delay his entry into the service so he could appear in it, but to no avail. John Dall was cast in his stead.

  With Mr. Skeffington safely behind her, and the traumatic guilt over Farney’s death receding, Bette began The Corn Is Green in a better frame of mind. But no Davis picture could be free of tension, and in this case, she became convinced, obstinately, that her own hair was all wrong for Miss Moffat, and she refused to shoot any scenes without first filming tests of a wig. Rapper thought she was far too vexed about her character’s appearance and attempted to convince her not to wear the hairpiece Perc Westmore concocted at her behest—a rounded red affair with streaks of gray. Rapper lost the battle, of course; there was simply no arguing with her on the point. Even after the wretched rubber Fanny Skeffington mask, Davis was determined to alter her natural appearance in the mistaken belief that in order to get into certain characters she needed to wear a disguise. The wig is attractive but unnecessary, though if it helped Davis achieve the precision and honesty she sought for Miss Moffat, perhaps it was indispensable after all. What Davis really needed, Rapper snapped to the production manager Eric Stacey, was a psychiatrist, not a director.1

  Davis also insisted that the film be shot in strict continuity. Stacey advised Rapper to go along with this demand, saying that he didn’t think it was “worthwhile upsetting her for such a small item since she is so much better on this picture than she has been on former pictures.” (He was referring to her behavior, not the quality of her performance.) And continuity shooting was easy enough to achieve on The Corn Is Green, since despite a number of scenes set out of doors, there was no location filming to schedule around. In fact, there wasn’t even any back lot construction. The town of Glansarno was built indoors on Soundstage 7, an odd decision that partially explains the film’s hermetic and stagebound quality.

  Adding to the artificiality, Glansarno’s miners are a peculiarly energetic and musical lot. Early in the film, Miss Moffat asks the minister, Mr. Jones (Rhys Williams), how many children under seventeen there are in the town, and Jones replies, “Around here they’re only children until they are 12. Then they are sent away to the mine. And in one week, they are old men.” But Rapper doesn’t direct the boys to play it that way. The Corn Is Green presents these prematurely “old men” as a pack of cheerful and boisterous teenagers who burst rousingly into song at every opportunity, even on their way home at the end of a lo
ng, tough shift in the coal mine. To cap it all, Warners insisted on dubbing in a professional Welsh choir, the Saint Luke Choristers, over the real boys’ voices. This, to Davis, rightly, “was wrong. It made the film very ‘Hollywood.’ A direct recording of the actors who played the miners, many of whom did not have perfect voices, would have given reality to the songs.”2 The filthy, ought-to-be-exhausted young miners merrily end their grueling workdays in what sounds like a recording studio. The audible presence of a particularly bright soprano doesn’t help.

  Shooting went reasonably smoothly, mainly because Rapper let Davis have her way on most issues. But on the afternoon of Saturday, August 5, a barn door (the hinged metal flap used to focus a lighting unit) fell off a small light and hit Bette on the head. Complaining of a headache, Davis was sent home, but she was well enough to attend a party at Jack and Ann Warner’s house that night.

  Still, on Monday morning she called in sick. She showed up on Tuesday but talked of having some X-rays done—not by the studio’s doctors but by her personal physician, who then reported that she had suffered a slight concussion and needed to rest. She called in sick again on the tenth. “I have had a little talk with Miss Davis,” Eric Stacey reported to the front office, “and she seems to be in a mental condition that looks pretty good. In other words, she has realized that the best thing to do about a situation like this is to go back to work and not think about it too much.”3 They all agreed that she would film until the seventeenth at noon and then take four or five days off.

  The Corn Is Green appeared either near the end or at the very end of Orry-Kelly’s tenure at Warner Bros.; there’s a dispute. He’s credited as the costume designer for her next picture, A Stolen Life, but Davis herself claimed that he didn’t actually design her wardrobe for that film.

  Kelly served in the army after designing Davis’s costumes for Old Acquaintance—Milo Anderson designed Hopkins’s wardrobe—and returned to do Mr. Skeffington at Bette’s request. But he quarreled with Jack Warner once too often upon his return and found that he’d lost his base of support. Kelly was known for having a hot temper anyway, and there was nothing like a year’s absence to call his indispensability into question. Kelly left Warners in 1946, joined Twentieth Century-Fox in 1947, and later opened his own couture studio. He went on to design one more film for Davis: The Star in 1952.

  According to Milo Anderson, who worked with Kelly at Warners, Bette “didn’t like him as a person, but she kept using him to design her films because she knew she needed him.” “She and Kelly did not like each other,” David Chierichetti agrees. “They fought a lot. One of the things they fought over was her bras. She had these long breasts that hung down to her waist. He wanted to give her bras that had underwires in them to push them up, but she thought that the metal would give her breast cancer.”

  The lengthy shape of Davis’s bosoms was certainly not lost on Jack Warner, who once ordered the producer Sam Bischoff to “be sure that Bette Davis has her bulbs wrapped up. If she doesn’t do it, we are either going to retake, or put her out of, the picture—and if you talk with her you can tell her I said so.”4 (Since the film in question was The Case of the Howling Dog, which she refused, her unwrapped bulbs were the least of Warner’s problems.) “Leah Rhodes said that one time Kelly bought a boned bra for Bette and tried to get her to wear it, but she threw it at him,” says Chierichetti. “One day Kelly came back to the office and said to Leah, ‘Oh, if somebody could just give me some idea how to break her bust!’ He’d push it up as much as he could, but then he’d put something above it to take away attention. She wore a lot of corsages. In The Petrified Forest she’s not wearing a bra underneath that waitress outfit. The outfit has a very loose waist. It looks like it’s just fullness in the dress, but actually that’s where her breasts were.”5

  JOHN DALL, WHO went on from The Corn Is Green to give a more convincing performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s perverse Rope, was complimentary to Davis in a 1945 interview: “In that scene where I had to tell her off, for instance, in some shots the camera was on me alone. But Bette always stood right behind the camera, facing me, giving the scene the same acting as if she were before the camera. She really listened to what I was saying and fed me my lines with the same intensity she would have if the camera had been on her.”6

  Davis had wanted Ida Lupino to play the role of the floozy, which ultimately went to the less subtle but suitably appalling Joan Lorring. “Bette fought like mad,” Lupino later said, “but I was committed to another picture—I’d already done wardrobe fittings and things. It would have been very exciting to do a picture with her. I didn’t know her very well. I met up a couple of times with her and some people. Tremendous wit, this woman has. Great sense of humor—and about herself, too. I found her to be a charming woman, you know—not a frightening dragon lady or the queen.”7

  Davis finished shooting The Corn Is Green on September 13, 1944. When the film was approaching its release in March 1945, Warners’ publicity department created an especially absurd advertisement, given Miss Moffat’s sensible, tailored wardrobe: “I remember my battle to keep Warners from displaying The Corn Is Green with ads consisting of a picture of me playing the Welsh schoolmistress in black satin décolletage.”8

  Irving Rapper was also flattering to Davis in an interview, but he was even more complimentary to himself, and with less reason: “At the end of the second act, which we retained in the film, there is a moment when the schoolteacher in the Welsh mining village conveys to the audience that she has dreamed—that she somehow clairvoyantly knew—that her star pupil’s main historical question in the big examination would be all about Henry VIII. . . . Bette tossed the moment away, and there was a bit of an argument. I simmered down for five days, and finally I said to her, ‘Bette, I saw the cut stuff, and I am very sorry to tell you that wasn’t the way it should have been done.’ And she said, ‘Do you really think so?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And she agreed to do it again. You could get through to her even though she had enormous power at the studio; she was its queen.”9

  But Rapper’s self-congratulation inadvertently points out the central problem with The Corn Is Green: its staginess. Given that Miss Moffat’s clairvoyance is scarcely the point of that scene, Davis’s less drastic delivery was the right choice to make. Morgan Evans wins a scholarship to Oxford because of his own intellect and his teacher’s diligence in developing it, not because Miss Moffat possesses powers of divination. Rapper, who had been so spot-on in his direction of Now, Voyager, plays the scene too theatrically, tracking in so quickly on Davis’s too-triumphant line reading that Miss Moffat appears to be the recipient of a direct communication from God. Rapper then tracks forward on Dall only to turn and aim the camera pointlessly out the window.

  The Henry VIII incident illustrates the way Davis’s instincts—the dramatic impulses that bypassed conscious decision making and personal antagonisms and went straight to vocal delivery and physical gesture—deserved more trust, not only by Davis’s directors but by Bette herself. When she bickered over directions, she was often wrong. When she played a scene without intervention, including her own, she was on surer ground.

  On Thursday, September 21, 1944, 20,000 people—including Bette, Orson Welles, Helen Keller, Sinclair Lewis, and the current vice president of the United States, Henry Wallace—gathered at Madison Square Garden for a pro-Roosevelt rally. Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term of office, this time against the former federal prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who was then governor of New York. (Dewey was the model for Humphrey Bogart’s character in Marked Woman.) Fredric March read several telegrams from movie stars, including this one from Eddie Cantor: “I once sang a song, ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ I don’t want to sing it again. That’s why I am voting for Roosevelt!”

  When Bette took the stage, she told the roaring crowd that all the women who remembered the desperate poverty they’d suffered during the 1930s must surely hope that those days remained in the
past. The war’s tide had turned, and although fighting would continue another eight months in Europe and another eleven months in Asia, the Allies were clearly making headway at last. Bette made the point that by winning the war “against those bloody, wicked villains who would relegate women to the bawdy slavery of the brothel or the humdrum inferiority of the kitchen,” American women were learning a lesson in independence. Women no longer hesitated to use their hard-won voting rights, she declared, and they knew that to protect their own newfound freedom and security they would certainly vote for Roosevelt.10

  On October 19, Davis was the Roosevelts’ guest at the White House, along with a crowd of other ardent Democrats. Tea, followed by dinner, began at 5:30 p.m.11 As Davis later wrote, she found herself “in line with hundreds of others. At last I reached the great man. As I prepared to file past him, I felt like a little girl being given a diploma. I wanted to curtsy as he automatically extended his hand. When his eyes met mine, he threw back his head in that famous gesture of his and laughed. ‘And how did you get into this mob, Miss Davis?’ ‘I wrote, Mr. President, asking to meet you and I received this invitation.’ ” Roosevelt, Davis claimed, was appalled that Davis hadn’t received a more personal summons, one that hadn’t been solicited by the guest herself, and he asked if she would be in Washington a while. Bette told him she was heading to Georgia to visit friends.12

  The “friends” Bette planned to visit in Georgia were singular, not plural: Corporal Lewis A. Riley of the Army Signal Corps, the unit in charge of military communications and the production of training films. Davis had met Riley in Los Angeles. Now he was stationed at Fort Benning. “He’s a nobody,” Ann Warner warned her. “You are a famous woman. Why throw yourself away on a good-looking set of muscles in khaki?”13 The question need not be dignified with an answer.