Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  For the role of Bill Emerson, Bernhardt and Davis chose a twenty-nine-year-old ex-marine, Glenn Ford, whose blend of ruggedness and glamour made it possible for him to be convincing not only as a lighthouse mechanic but also as a socialite’s presentable businessman husband, the former the object of Kate’s love, the latter the recipient of Pat’s disregard.

  A Stolen Life works not despite its gimmick but because of it; it’s doubly riveting to watch Bette Davis act in tandem with Bette Davis, especially at the spectacular moment when she lights a match and hands it to herself in a simple, uninterrupted two shot. She plays Kate and Pat as believable identical twins, the differences between them noticeable enough by the audience but not at all by the other characters—especially not by Bill Emerson, the man with whom both sisters fall in love. Had Davis’s performances been any broader, Bill would end up looking like a fool—a too-naive husband unable to tell the difference between the woman he should have married and the one he actually did. Had her performances been any subtler, the melodrama would lose its punch, since Kate’s repression and Pat’s sensuality would have run together into an undefined and meaningless intermingling. As she was when at her best, Davis makes clever but restrained decisions: Pat tends to look out of the corner of her eyes, revealing her calculating nature, while Kate’s brows knit in attentiveness as a way of establishing both her intelligence and her hang-ups. The Bosworth twins are two of her most nuanced performances.

  A Stolen Life’s production was plagued by illnesses. Glenn Ford called in sick March 3, 4, and 5; Davis went out on the sixth and stayed out so long that the whole production shut down on the twelfth and didn’t pick up again until she returned on the nineteenth. Then came the boils. On April 10, Bette showed up at the studio with facial abscesses so severe that she couldn’t apply her makeup. Her “face looks so bad . . . all broken out,” the production manager, Al Alleborn, noted in his production log. The production ground to a halt till the fourteenth. Despite these delays, A Stolen Life was running only ten days behind schedule, but then on May 1 Bette took sick again and stayed out for three more days. Jack Warner was particularly annoyed at Bette’s absence on the first because she’d managed to appear at a Hollywood Democratic Committee meeting the night before.46

  At some point, Curtis Bernhardt walked off the picture. His dispute was with Warner Bros., not Bette. The Warners archives contain the draft of a letter from the front office to Davis informing her that Michael Curtiz was taking over the direction of A Stolen Life despite her objections. But Bernhardt resolved the dispute, returned to work, and finished the picture.

  Davis credits the success of the special optical effects to the camera operators Russell Collings and Willard Van Enger. Bernhardt cites the cinematographer Sol Polito. Polito became ill late in the filming, and Ernie Haller took over; both men are named in the film’s opening credits, though Polito’s name is larger because he did most of the shooting. Bernhardt didn’t mince words in an interview with Mary Kiersch: “Polito was a sweetheart. Haller was a ruthless, ambitious man.”47

  There was location shooting in Monterey in mid-June—the lighthouse scenes had already been shot in Laguna Beach, where Warners actually built a Cape Cod–style lighthouse because a suitable one didn’t exist on the Southern California coast—and by the time the filming concluded at the end of July, A Stolen Life had run over schedule by thirty-three days. Davis and Ford returned to the studio for a few days of retakes in January 1946, and the film was released in May.

  A Stolen Life was an unusually expensive production for Warner Bros., but it still made money. According to studio records, its negative cost was $2,217,410. But by July 1947, the film had taken in over $4 million at the box office—by any standard a big success.48

  THE HOLLYWOOD DEMOCRATIC Committee meeting Bette Davis attended on May 1, 1945, was not an organization devoted to advancing the Democratic Party but rather to support the broader goals of a democratic society, and as such it—and Bette—came under the scrutiny of the FBI. Davis had attracted the bureau’s notice at least as early as 1943, but it amounted to little. The FBI recorded the fact that an article in the California Eagle (“a Negro newspaper,” the entry specifies) stated that Bette—along with Ethel Waters, Clarence Muse, and Hattie McDaniel—was scheduled to appear at a war bond drive sponsored by the Negro Victory Committee of Los Angeles. Another entry in the file notes that her picture had appeared in the Daily People’s World, “a West Coast Communist newspaper.”

  The file picks up a bit of steam in 1945 with duly recorded notations of Bette’s having joined the Hollywood Independent Citizens’ Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP), the result of a merger between the Hollywood Democratic Committee and a similar East Coast group. Bette, Greer Garson, and Katharine Hepburn became members of another committee, the purpose of which was to award screenwriters whose work, in the FBI’s words, combined “mass entertainment appeal with mature treatment of national and international issues,” always a suspect endeavor. And Bette’s nomination—along with Lena Horne, Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson—for an Interracial Film and Radio Guild Award was the subject of another notation.

  The most ludicrous entry, with names whited out by the FBI before being released through the Freedom of Information Act, runs in its entirety as follows: “ was present on 4/26/45 during a conversation between in which informed that the meeting Sunday would have to be prompt as has a meeting at Bette Davis’s house.”

  The FBI file chronicles Davis’s decidedly mixed feelings about the Hollywood Democratic Committee and HICCASP.49 The bureau’s informants were often wrong: one of them assumed that the “Beth Davis” who gave generously to the Communist Party in Rhode Island referred to “Bette Davis, the movie actress.” Another claimed when Bette was elected as a HICCASP officer that she was “a CPA line follower” (meaning someone who rotely spouted the Communist Party line). Neither was true. More accurate is this entry: “ on 6/24/45 reported a conversation between and Jack Lawson [a leftist screenwriter and member of the Communist Party of America who was later sentenced to prison after refusing to name names while testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities] in which told Jack that ‘this Bette Davis thing’ is more serious than he thought and he was inclined to believe she thinks the Committee is too radical.” (The “Bette Davis thing” appears to refer to Davis’s vocalizing her opinion and, typically, causing a commotion.) In August 1945, an informant told of attending a dinner party at which someone had mentioned his surprise at the growth of communism in the film industry, prompting Davis to state that “she would not associate with any organization that has a Communist in it. She said she would leave an organization if she knew there was a Communist in it.” The informant “described Davis as an emotional type who is lonely.”50

  During a studio workers’ strike in October 1945, the strikers told one of the FBI’s rats that they thought it would be great publicity “if they could stop some big star like Bette Davis—keep her out by a picket line.” According to Jack Lawson, Bette was most unsympathetic to the plan. And Mary Ford, the director John Ford’s wife and a very active worker at the Hollywood Canteen, remembered that several members of the Canteen’s board, among them Bette, Jules Stein, Bob Hope, and Kay Kyser, were so concerned about a perceived leftward push by other board members (foremost John Garfield) that they held what Ford’s biographer Joseph McBride calls “secret meetings at her house on Odin Street to make decisions without involving leftists.”51 Davis was a liberal Democrat, but that’s as far left as she went.

  With the war over, and its mission accomplished, the Hollywood Canteen closed on November 22, 1945, with a farewell celebration starring Bob Hope and Jack Benny. In recognition of her efforts, Bette was presented with a gold pin in the shape of the Canteen’s crest, with her initials set in diamonds and rubies.52 The FBI got wind of Bette’s (and two or three other names, all whited out) desire to “take over one million doll
ars” of the Canteen’s remaining funds over the objections of the Canteen’s union supporters “and have themselves appointed trustees in perpetuity.” According to Davis, the figure was only $500,000, and she was scarcely grabbing the money for herself and her fellow board members. In any event, the controversy ended when Jules Stein formed the Hollywood Canteen Foundation, which invested the leftover money under his supervision and continued to contribute to service members’ causes and other charities as late as 2003.

  A STOLEN LIFE was a financial success, but both Warner Bros. and Bette Davis understood that B.D. Productions wasn’t really such a good idea after all, so on February 4, 1946, they agreed to a new set of terms for Davis’s continued employment at the studio. First, Warners and B.D. Productions were released from any prior obligations; in short, Davis’s company was no longer under any legal compulsion to produce more films and was now solely in the business of cashing any remaining proceeds from A Stolen Life. (Davis owned 80 percent of B.D. Productions; the remaining shares were divided between Jules Stein, Dudley Furse, and Ruthie; the company was finally liquidated at the end of September 1947.)53 The new contract with Warners was to run for 172 weeks, thus ending around the middle of 1949, and it covered no more than eight films. Davis was to be paid $6,000 per week for the first sixty-six weeks and $7,000 per week for the remainder. The new contract also granted Bette the right to make an unlimited number of guest appearances on the radio as long as the programs on which Bette appeared weren’t adaptations of films produced by other studios.54

  “I am so terribly anxious for you to buy the Mary Lincoln story,” Davis wrote in a note to Jack Warner around this time. “I am so desperately anxious to have you own this,” she repeated. Davis pitched the heroine of the piece as a combination of a power-behind-the-throne kingmaker, Scarlett O’Hara, and “even the Back Street type of woman—the discarded woman.” She also expressed interest in developing it as a theater piece, but she was certain that Warner wouldn’t permit it.55 The idea went nowhere.

  Early in 1946, when Warners bought the film rights to Philip Wylie’s novel Night unto Night, Variety speculated that the studio intended it for Bette, but the role ultimately went to Viveca Lindfors, in her American debut, opposite Ronald Reagan. In May, Warners announced that it intended to star Bette in a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1925 Lady Winder-mere’s Fan, based on the Oscar Wilde play, but Warners sold the rights to Fox the following year, and the role eventually went to Jeanne Crain.

  Liberty reported that after her current film, Deception, Davis’s next project would be Ethan Frome.56 Liberty also relayed some amusing details about the party Warner Bros. held for its employees at some point in 1946. The highlight of the evening was Bette’s appearance, as herself, in a skit called “The Strange Career of Bette Davis.” Robert Alda played the role of Jack Warner. “I can’t hire you, my girl,” Alda’s Warner told the aspiring starlet. “You can’t even spell Betty correctly. I’m sure you aren’t very bright.” But by the time the skit ended, Bette was firmly ensconced in Jack Warner’s chair, her feet on his desk, and one of his cigars in her mouth. Warner himself laughed very hard at the little comedy, but then several hundred of his employees were eyeing his reaction at the time.57

  CHAPTER

  16

  DECEPTIONS

  DAVIS FILMED DECEPTION FROM LATE April through mid-September 1946; the production, under Irving Rapper’s direction, ran well over a month beyond schedule. The property began as a two-actor play called M. Lamberthier by Louis Verneuil, which played on Broadway in 1928 under the title Jealousy and starred Fay Bainter and John Halliday. It concerned a temperamental artist who becomes madly jealous of his new bride’s wealthy former lover and patron. When Paramount adapted it into a 1929 melodrama for Jeanne Eagels and Fredric March, the director, Jean de Limur, opened it up by bringing the ex-lover onto the screen as well as several secondary characters. He also introduced retribution in the form of a shooting: the artist kills the ex-lover.

  Warner Bros. originally acquired the rights with the idea of casting Barbara Stanwyck and Paul Henreid, but Bette ended up in the Stanwyck role. Claude Rains rounded out the cast as the rich, witty, demonic former lover. The most significant change Warners made to the property in all its various incarnations was to make all three central characters intensely musical: Christine (Bette) is an accomplished if largely unsung pianist; Karel (Henreid) is an émigré cellist who suffered the war in Europe but survived, albeit in a weakened state; and Hollenius (Rains) is a flamboyant composer and conductor. And for once Max Steiner didn’t write the score; Warners gave the commission to Erich Wolfgang Korn-gold, the Austrian émigré known for his Richard Strauss–like late romantic style, soaring melodic invention, and dense chromatic harmonies. The pulsing musicality of Deception is one of the film’s most effective devices, for at their operatic best, the three characters are guided by passions so powerful that they can’t be tied down by mere words.

  In his memoirs, Paul Henreid claims that the Production Code Administration was alarmed about Deception’s proposed ending, in which Davis’s character goes back to her husband. The PCA insisted on punishment for her earlier affair, Henreid insisted; it was the PCA that imposed the violent ending in which Christine shoots and kills Hollenius, leading to what Henreid calls “a thoroughly unbelievable situation, and the entire picture suffered from it.” But de Limur’s film features a killing as well. What Warners shifted was the character who commits the crime, Bette already having proven herself to look magnificent while firing a pistol at a man she’s loved. Davis, too, blamed the PCA, but for a slightly different problem: “Deception was completely ruined by censorship,” she told an interviewer. “We wrote the last scene, in which I had to confess my crime, ten thousand ways, but they were all so phony we never did get a solution.”1

  After only a week of filming, Bette crashed her car on the way to Laguna; another car forced her off the road, and she slammed into a tree. She called the studio after getting home and said she’d have to wait to see her doctor before she knew whether she could report for work the following day. The next day, Saturday, May 4, she was having dizzy spells and didn’t come in. Dr. Wilson told the studio on Monday, the sixth, that Bette was flat on her back and had to stay that way for at least two days to provide time for yet another physician, Dr. Penny, to go over the X-rays he had ordered. Irving Rapper and Henry Blanke visited her at home, but they only saw Sherry; Bette remained sequestered in her room. They reported back to Jack Warner, though, that she must have “had a terrific blow from the looks of the car,” the windshield having shattered where she hit her head. But the X-rays showed nothing serious, and she was back at work on Wednesday, the eighth.2

  She was out with a cold on the twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth—Davis’s maid had called in to report the illness—and although she reported for work on the twenty-seventh, she came down with strep throat on the thirty-first. Dr. Dicke, the studio physician, was concerned that possibly the damp air of Laguna Beach was the real culprit rather than Streptococcus pyogenes, but Paul Henreid was sick as well.

  Bette returned and worked steadily and calmly through June—until the twenty-second, that is. That’s when Steve Trilling paid a visit to Davis in her dressing room. It was about 11:45 a.m., and just before Bette was to film a five-page scene. Knowing how far behind schedule Deception had fallen, Trilling began, would she mind being ready to shoot at 9:00 a.m. instead of 10:00 a.m. and work till 6:00 p.m., not 5:00 p.m.? Bette didn’t take the suggestion well. Trilling had a hell of a nerve to ask her this, she told him, given her agreement with Warners to arrive by 9:00 a.m. and work until 5:00 p.m. And she couldn’t work any harder than she was already working. Then she burst into hysterical tears.

  The company was told to be ready to shoot at 9:00 a.m. the following Monday. But on Sunday, Bette’s agent, Lew Wasserman, called: Bette won’t be in at all on Monday morning, he said. She’s sick.

  Jack Warner himself sent a tele
gram that day to Bette’s two current addresses: 671 Sleepy Hollow Lane in Laguna Beach and 134 S. Carmelina Drive in Brentwood, Bette having sold Riverbottom after her marriage to Sherry, presumably because it carried too many associations with Farney. “We are not responsible for the working hours under which the industry is making its pictures,” Warner opined, creatively forgetting that as the head of a major studio it was he who set the industry’s policies. Warner then ordered his accounting office to prepare a detailed report of what it cost him not to shoot any scenes for Deception on Monday, June 24. It came to precisely $6,474.83, including ten hours of work by the service porter at eighty-seven cents an hour.

  Davis returned to work but went out again, claiming that she had hurt her finger on July 3. The finger was still sufficiently troubled on the fifth to keep her away. This time Warner slapped her on suspension.

  Bette arrived on Monday, the eighth, and asked to address the company. There were things the crew ought to know, she said to the assembled camera operators, sound recordists, makeup people, costumers, electricians, and grips, as well as Rapper and Blanke, who were certainly interested in hearing what their star had to say. She had hurt her finger, she began. She had to have X-rays taken. She was surprised to discover that shooting calls had been issued on the days she had told them she wasn’t able to shoot because of the injury. This, to Bette, demonstrated a complete lack of consideration for the crew, and she resented the fact that it might seem to the crew that it was her fault that they’d been called in to work when the producer, the director, and the whole front office knew she couldn’t shoot anything at all.

  Having gotten this out of her system, Bette spent the day working. Warners rescinded the suspension.