by Ed Sikov
Creating appropriate publicity proved to be difficult. Gil Golden, a Warners publicity executive in the New York office, complained that he and his staff had had to do “a lot of fooling around and a lot of dangerous faking of heads and bodies—Montgomery from one still and Davis from another” because none of the unretouched stills conveyed the fact that June Bride was a comedy. The publicist Marty Weiser responded from the Burbank office: “Davis absolutely refused to pose for any laughing/happy stills and kept remarking that she didn’t want to look like the ‘June Bride.’ ” Bette seems to have been uncharacteristically uncooperative: “She acted as though she was doing us the greatest favor in the world by giving us the few stills she did. However, I asked Morgan [the still photographer on June Bride] to shoot Davis laughing off-stage whenever the occasion arose.”25
Edith Head, borrowed from Paramount at Bette’s request, designed Davis’s wardrobe for June Bride. Head had helped Davis build her own wardrobe on Winter Meeting; she simply accompanied Bette on a shopping trip to the department store I. Magnin, though Bette herself credited her favorite Magnin saleswoman, Bertie Strauser. Head received no credit for helping Davis choose her Winter Meeting costumes, but the film contains an inside joke: Bette’s hairstyle in the early scenes is a direct copy of Edith’s.26
A postwar comedy, June Bride trades in contemporary concerns about women’s newfound independence clashing with men’s frustrated expectations. Carey hasn’t returned from World War II; in fact his back-story tells us that he left for Berlin after the war ended in order to avoid settling down with Linda. But however, and whenever, he got there, Carey—like a lot of GIs—has indeed returned from Europe to find his ex-girlfriend thriving without him, both professionally and personally. Bette plays the role of a sophisticated, dynamic, intelligent New York editor as though she was born to do it. Still, the film’s happy ending is anything but. It’s merely sad to see Linda quit her job to become Mrs. Carey Jackson, but it’s nothing short of nauseating to watch, aghast, as she literally picks up his suitcases like a Pullman porter and agrees to tote them behind her man wherever he leads.
JUST AFTER NEW YEAR’S, 1948, one of Hedda Hopper’s sources told her that Bette was considering selling the house at Laguna Beach and buying a 750-acre “spot” in Hidden Valley, north of Malibu. The source also said that Ruthie said that Bette and Sherry were thinking about adopting a baby boy from a Chicago orphanage.27 By February, Hopper’s informant was hearing more accurate buzz about marital discord between the Sherrys, but he assured Hopper that he’d investigated the matter and found the rumors to be “just a bit of smog.” “It is fact, however, that the Laguna house is on the market for $100,000,” he went on, adding that “Bette and Bill are interested in a large ranch near Escondido—Vista to be exact.”28 Vista is south of Laguna.
The couple didn’t move. Bette did. “I hoped fatherhood would be good for Sherry and for a time it was,” Bette wrote in This ’n That, her follow-up to The Lonely Life.
But the cruelty continued. The day after Sherry threw me down the stairs and onto the front lawn, I did not return home from work. I moved into my dressing room at Warners. Actually, it was a two-story apartment planned for me by Perc Westmore, my makeup man and trusted friend. It had a bedroom upstairs and a living room and a makeup room downstairs. The perfect setting, I decided, in which to kill myself. I was quite serious. I didn’t want to live this way any longer. How could I deal with such a man? I was even afraid to divorce him. . . . I laid out my best nightgown. I planned every detail. The next morning, when I was due on the set at nine o’clock, there would be a dramatic moment when they broke into my dressing room and found me there. And on the set they would whisper . . .“Bette Davis is dead.” For years I had sometimes taken a sleeping pill when I couldn’t sleep. I got out all I had and lined them up on the bedside table. And then I started laughing. I laughed myself silly. I said, “This is ridiculous.”29
Sherry promised to see a psychiatrist, and they reconciled. But, she went on, she “left him for good when one evening, for no reason at all, he threw a silver ice bucket at me. I was holding B.D. in my arms. She was six months old. I had told Sherry if he ever showed any violence toward B.D. I would leave him. I did, once and for all.”30 Davis’s chronology is off, however. If B.D. was indeed six months old when Bette left Sherry, the split would have occurred in November 1947. In fact, the couple remained unhappily married for quite some time thereafter.
Sherry, perhaps needless to say, painted a different picture of the marriage than Bette did. According to him, she thwarted his ambitions, ridiculed him, made him feel small, all in a perverse effort to provoke him into taming her. He told a story of an argument the couple had over the family’s finances, with Bette needling him about his worthlessness—he was leeching off of her, he couldn’t earn a dime on his own, he was basically her kept boy—to the point that he turned the dining table over on top of her. “She was under the table,” Sherry said, “with dishes, lettuce, crystal on top of her. I walked out of the room, and I don’t know how she got out from under that mess.” They worked it out sexually later that night. “She loved it, you see,” Sherry explained. “She had to dominate her men, and when they didn’t let her, she liked it.”31
BETTE VISITED NEW YORK City in October 1948. She wanted to stay at the St. Regis, but she became upset when the hotel wasn’t able to provide her with four adjoining bedrooms until three days after her arrival. She had changed reservations four times by October 15, and as a frustrated Warners’ employee put it in a telegram to the studio, “frankly St. Regis does not care whether she stops there or not—simply trying to accommodate her as favor to Warner Bros.” (As it turned out, she spent only October 18 and 19 at the St. Regis and moved to the Hampshire House through the twenty-eighth.)32
Late that year, Lew Wasserman was trying to get Warner Bros. to agree to yet another new contract for her—a seven-year deal with one picture per year—even though the old contract had another year to go.33 “Bette began showing up in my office surrounded by the MCA [Music Corporation of America] group,” Jack Warner writes,
and every time we talked about a new script she would say sweetly: “Jack, can I have a copy for Lew?” “I’d be happy to, honey,” I would say, “but I did not engage Lew Wasserman to read scripts. I want you to read it.” But Lew would get his copy, and he would come back claiming to have read it and reporting that we flunked our Wasserman test. What he really meant was that his fifth cousin Amanda had read it, and on their recommendation he would decide it wasn’t good enough for Bette Davis. Before long the ten-percenters had Bette so confused that it affected her story vision, and she was laying bigger eggs than an ostrich. [If Davis was indeed laying eggs during the mid-to late 1940s, she was continuing to lay them in a familiar nest in Burbank with the assistance of Warner Bros. screenwriters, Warner Bros. producers, Warner Bros. directors, and Jack L. Warner himself.] I simply couldn’t take it. Or them. I finally cracked down, and barred the MCA blackbirds from the lot—a move no one had ever dared to make in Hollywood. I kept them outside peeking through fence knotholes for quite a while, but eventually they sneaked in with the connivance of other studio executives, or by conning my brother Harry.
When they pushed me too far, I told Bette I was through. We settled her contract, and I was relieved to see her go elsewhere with her cortege. Thereafter many of the Davis pictures were flops, and the sun went down on her shining sky.34
Bette’s exit from Warner Bros. was much more complicated than either Warner or Davis ever publicly acknowledged. During the first week of January 1949, Lew Wasserman suggested to Jack Warner that Bette make a film called Storm Center, from a script by Richard Brooks. Warner thought it wasn’t a bad idea—the heroine witnesses a KKK murder in the South and helps the DA solve the case—and proposed Raoul Walsh as director. Wasserman abruptly proceeded to ridicule the notion of Walsh directing the picture and offered instead to tear up Davis’s contract.
Warner w
as willing to entertain the idea of setting Bette free—for a price. He claimed his company had advanced Davis a total of $224,000 during various times she hadn’t worked over the years, and he offered to sell Davis her contract for that amount. Warner told Wasserman that he’d rather make Storm Center with Davis and Walsh than get rid of Bette altogether, but Wasserman responded by telling Warner that Davis actually didn’t want to make Storm Center after all. What she really wanted, the agent said, was to be released from her contract. (The film in question was made under the title Storm Warning in 1951; Davis did make a film called Storm Center in 1956, but it was based on a different property.)
On January 6, Wasserman and Warner agreed that if Davis paid Warner $124,000 and waived her claim to the $100,000 the studio was still holding against A Stolen Life, she could leave Warners for good.35
So at the end of January 1949, Bette Davis and Warner Bros. signed a brand-new contract for four pictures at the precisely specified rate of $10,285.72 per week for “a period of not less than fourteen consecutive weeks with respect to each motion picture produced hereunder.” The contract also gave Davis the right to make one outside picture per year.36
There was a touch of absurdity in the middle of it. “The Octopus and Miss Smith is, as I’m sure you know, out of the question,” Bette wrote in a note to Jack Warner in mid-January while contract discussions were taking place. “I could not possibly reconcile myself to this type of comedy. . . . For you and I to end it all over The Octopus and Miss Smith seems entirely unnecessary.”37 (The comedy was made as The Lady Takes a Sailor with Jane Wyman and Dennis Morgan.)
And meanwhile Albert Warner was obsessing over the repayment of certain expenses from Davis’s October trip to New York. “If it’s the last act as treasurer of W.B. I will see that she pays,” he scrawled on one of the many memos written on the subject. At the end of February, the studio sent Davis a bill for $735.27.38
“BEYOND THE FOREST?” Bette Davis said in response to an interviewer’s question in early 1949. “No, I haven’t made it. Probably I’m not going to make it. It is a great book, a wonderful story, but they can’t make a word of it—not a word. If they make it at all they’ll have to change it so completely that it won’t even resemble the book.”39
Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Stuart Engstrand’s racy novel in the summer of 1948, and the censor Joseph Breen immediately rejected the very idea of making a movie out of it “because of its treatment of adultery and lust.”40 Jack Warner gave the go-ahead to develop it anyway and assigned Lenore Coffee the task of writing the script. Not surprisingly, Breen summarily rejected Coffee’s first draft in late February 1949. “This is a story of a woman who coldly and maliciously conspires to wreck her own marriage,” Breen explained. “Pursuing these means, she employs lust in a savage and debased way. More than that, she will not stop short of murder . . . or of attempted abortion.” And furthermore, Breen concluded, the ending didn’t provide a strong enough voice for traditional morality.41
Beyond the Forest is the inflamed tale of Rosa Moline, an ambitious woman stuck in a small town in Wisconsin, her unsatisfying marriage to the bland village doctor, her lust-ridden affair with another man, and her insatiable drive to escape it all for the big city, Chicago. It’s Madame Bovary played as pulp fiction. “That was a terrible movie,” Davis flatly, wrongly, declared many years later. “It didn’t have to be. Primarily it was terrible because they insisted on putting me in it. I was too old for the part, and I was temperamentally wrong. I mean, I don’t think you can believe for a moment that if I was so determined to get to Chicago I wouldn’t just have upped and gone years ago.”42 (She’s got a point there, though the same question might also be asked about why the stifled Leslie Crosbie doesn’t simply leave Herbert Marshall and his boring rubber plantation in The Letter.) Bette thought that Virginia Mayo would have been a better choice as Rosa Moline, and she was appalled at Warners’ choice of Joseph Cotten to play the husband, Louis—not because she didn’t like Cotten, but because she did. “Who would leave that darling, lovely man?” she once commented. “The character in the book was a Eugene Pallette type—a horrible, rich, fat man in a little town,” she added.43 In Bette’s theory, Pallette would be easy to ditch; Cotten would not.
Joseph Cotten thought as little of Beyond the Forest as Bette did. “As for me,” he wrote in his beautifully named memoir Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, “I will admit to having stumbled into several trashbins here and there, but never into quite such an important trashbin.”
Ironically, a scene in Beyond the Forest became one of Bette Davis’s most iconic. Edward Albee made it so.
MARTHA: What a dump. Hey, what’s that from? “What a dump!”
GEORGE: How would I know what . . .
MARTHA: Aw, come on! What’s it from? You know. . .
GEORGE: . . . Martha . . .
MARTHA: WHAT’S IT FROM, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE?
GEORGE (wearily): What’s what from? [ . . .]
MARTHA: Dumbbell! It’s from some goddamn Bette Davis picture . . . some goddamn Warner Bros. epic [ . . .] Bette Davis gets peritonitis in the end . . . she’s got this big black fright wig she wears all through the picture, and she gets peritonitis, and she’s married to Joseph Cotten or something. [ . . .] Bette Davis comes home from a hard day at the grocery store . . .
GEORGE: She works in a grocery store?
MARTHA: She’s a housewife; she buys things. . . . And she comes home with the groceries, and she walks into the modest living room of the modest cottage modest Joseph Cotton has set her up in . . .
GEORGE: Are they married?
MARTHA (impatiently): Yes. They’re married. To each other. Cluck! And she comes in, and she looks around, and she puts her groceries down, and she says, “What a dump!”
George and Martha never recall the name of the picture in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George suggests Chicago, but as Martha insultingly observes, “Chicago was a ’thirties musical starring little Miss Alice Faye. Don’t you know anything?”44
But Martha, too, gets it wrong. Bette isn’t coming home from a hard day at the grocery store at all but rather emerging from her upstairs bedroom. She strolls down the stairway of the finest house in town—it’s nothing but the best for Rosa Moline—and she’s filing her nails with an air of distraction, and she walks into the expansive living room she’s decorated to the nines using every nickel of modest Joseph Cotten’s meager income, and she says, offhandedly and without biting any of her words, “What a dump.”
If Martha had remembered Beyond the Forest more distinctly, she might also have imitated one of Bette’s later lines. “I know you’re not interested in my work, but I just saved a woman’s life,” Rosa’s doctor husband remarks. To which Rosa, lying on a wicker porch couch and twisting the ends of her black fright wig, responds in crisp and singsong sarcasm, “Saved it for what?”
Lenore Coffee made several key changes to the script before shooting began. First she turned Dr. Moline and his rustic friend Moose into stronger voices for morality, a shift that all but demanded the casting of someone like the saintly-looking Cotten over Eugene Pallette, a croaking tub of lard. Coffee also combined several of the men with whom Rosa has affairs into one: Neil Latimer, an industrialist from Chicago. Warners cast David Brian as Latimer. “And then the lover,” Bette later raged, “that big boring blond actor—what’s he called?—was so dull you could understand it even less.”45 True, David Brian is no Errol Flynn, but he’s beefy enough to suggest that he satisfies Rosa sexually in ways that modest Joseph Cotten cannot. In any case, the whole point of Rosa Moline’s character is that her decisions are, in every sense of the word, bad. As Warner Bros. put it in its twin taglines for the film, “She’s a midnight girl in a nine o’clock town!” And: “Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad!”46
Davis was vacationing in Sarasota Springs, Florida, in mid-March when Henry Blanke airmailed her a draft of Coffee’s script; the production�
�s proposed start date was set for May 2. Bette showed up at the studio that day, but not for filming. Instead, she told the director King Vidor along with Blanke and Steve Trilling that she liked neither the script nor her casting. When informed of the discussion’s tenor as well as its content, Jack Warner took it that she was refusing to do the picture and informed Lew Wasserman that the decision was not hers to make. So on Wasserman’s advice, Bette sent a telegram to Warner saying that she wasn’t technically refusing the role but simply spelling out her problems with it. Shooting began on Tuesday, May 24.
Given Davis’s contempt for the picture, it comes as a surprise to learn that King Vidor found her rather easy to work with: “Bette Davis was full of ups and downs as an actress. She had a temperament that changed quickly from hot to cold all through the picture. She was pleasant to work with, though. She was cooperative and helpful. There was one point where she became very high-strung and she was almost impossible to work with for two days, but once she got over this, it wasn’t so bad.” Vidor was amazed at “what she could do to enhance her acting performance by using her eyes. She evidently did a lot of thinking about her character.”47
“I had rehearsed a scene where she was dancing,” Vidor recalled, “and I think she was also embracing David Brian. He was rather large and I had the camera in such a way that you could just see about half of Bette Davis’s face. You could just see her eyes as she turned. During the take they turned differently, and I said, ‘Why don’t you do it again so that we can see more of your face.’ She got upset and made an absolutely tremendous speech, one of the best performances I’ve seen. At the end of her speech, I said, ‘That’s fine with me if you don’t want to do it again. I’d just as soon not see your face.’ That worked quite well. There was a quiet hush over the stage the rest of that day, but I got the scene shot the way I wanted to eventually. It was almost like child psychology.”48
