Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  BEFORE SHE MADE All About Eve in 1950, and the name Eve Harrington entered the language as a deadeye term for a faux innocent with a game plan, Bette filmed a melodrama called The Story of a Divorce; the title was changed just before its release in 1951 to Payment on Demand. Joyce Ramsey (Bette), the ambitious wife of a successful lawyer, is shocked when, after a long day at the office, her husband, David (Barry Sullivan), arrives home to his usual cocktail only to inform her that the marriage is over. Joyce spends the rest of the film concluding that despite the tepid affair David has launched out of boredom, it’s really her fault after all. Davis told the critic Bruce Williamson that Payment on Demand was “among the best bloody films ever done about this driving kind of American woman—oh, that was written for me!”14

  The director, Curtis Bernhardt, recalled that Bruce Manning, the screenwriter, and he “sat down to discuss writing a script for Bette Davis. . . . Bette then lived in Laguna Beach. I went down there and told her the story. I remember her response: ‘I would jump through flaming hoops to make this film!’ At that time Bette and I were on good terms. A Stolen Life had been a walloping success and she trusted me.”15

  Payment on Demand is a hard-edged, downbeat, honest film—Bette’s grasping wife isn’t a showy harridan, Barry Sullivan’s fed-up husband isn’t self-righteous about it—and Bernhardt directs it with a blend of sensitivity and technical invention. Joyce reviews her life in a series of flashbacks, and as Bernhardt described it, “When we reverted to the past, the foreground became dark, the background lit up, and the walls disappeared, because the walls were actually transparent. But you couldn’t discern that when they were illuminated for foreground action. They were like screens. As soon as you took the light off them and moved into the background the walls vanished.”16

  All About Eve was shot, edited, and released to great acclaim—and Bette had divorced Sherry and married Gary Merrill—before Payment on Demand hit the screens in mid-February 1951. “Originally we had an uncompromising ending where the two just separate—they’re finished,” Bernhardt noted. “I think it stopped at the daughter’s wedding—maybe while they’re sitting at opposite ends of the table. But Radio City Music Hall suggested that we change it before they played it. So we had a big meeting with Bruce Manning, Mr. Skirball [one of the film’s producers], myself, and Howard Hughes, who was then the owner of RKO. I could see what they meant because American audiences go for upbeat films. And this was 100 percent downbeat. So we tried to soften it by leaving it open, by letting the audience speculate on whether the man and wife ever get together again.”17

  Davis’s recollections were harsher: “Howard Hughes was the producer, and he messed around with the ending. We had the perfect ending, where she’s got her husband back and starts all over again telling him what he should do about his career and so forth, and he gets up and walks out. Marvelous! But Hughes wouldn’t let us do that. He also insisted we call it Payment on Demand, a very cheap title, and made us end with a touching reunion at the front door. I begged him not to redo the ending, but I remember Hughes saying, ‘Doesn’t every woman still want a roll in the hay?’ And I said, ‘No—this is not her big drive after 35 years.’ ”18

  The film was set to open at Radio City on February 15, 1951, but Hughes made the decision to order the new ending at practically the last minute. Davis and Sullivan were called in on February 13 to shoot the revised final scene on the front porch—a scene that is not “touching” as much as it’s demoralizing, for no matter what the role demands, it’s always sad to watch Bette Davis eat crow. The footage was immediately processed and edited into the last reel, which was flown to New York on one of Hughes’s TWA jets and handed over to a jittery projectionist, who was already unspooling the beginning of the movie by the time the ending arrived.19

  * * *

  THE CAST AND crew of Payment on Demand threw Bette a party on April 5, 1950, her forty-second birthday. After cake and champagne were served, Bette was given an ostrich egg inscribed “Thanks for being a good egg.” The party degenerated quickly, though, when Sherry showed up and got into a shoving match with the two security guards who’d tried to bar his entrance, Bette having requested that they keep her husband out. Then Barry Sullivan made the mistake of trying to reason with the belligerent ex-fighter and all-too-spurned husband. “Where’s your sense of humor? The cast and crew are giving your wife a birthday party,” Sullivan told him. “Stay out of it,” Sherry answered. “I don’t want to hit you because you have to be photographed tomorrow.” According to Bette, “Sullivan said, ‘Don’t let that bother you.’ Before he could say anything else, Sherry knocked him down.”

  The incident made the papers. Sherry sought sympathy: “I’m tired of being pushed around,” he announced. “She was the breadwinner and I was the housewife. . . . I have dinner ready when she gets home. I take off her shoes and bring her slippers and a drink. I press her dresses when her maid isn’t here. But . . . I’m a man who needs a lot of affection. When she comes home from work, she always says she’s too tired.”20

  Sherry used to send her flowers every week, too, until Bette discovered that she was paying for them.21 As for the lack of sex, Sherry was right. Davis admitted to Vik Greenfield that she and Sherry didn’t sleep together very often. “The birth of B.D. was almost immaculate conception” was how she rather uncharitably put it.22

  Bette later claimed that Sherry, meanwhile, was getting his daily dose of affection from B.D.’s nanny, twenty-one-year-old Marion Richards.23

  On June 7, 1950, the Superior Court of the State of California approved an agreement giving Davis custody of B.D., with Sherry given limited visitation rights.24 On July 3, Judge Eugenio Calzada Flores of the First District Court in Juárez, Mexico, granted Bette a divorce, the couple having already reached a property settlement in which Davis agreed to pay Sherry alimony for three years.25

  The Laguna Post ran a classified ad on November 16, 1950: “Handyman—Odd Jobs Done Efficiently by William Grant Sherry—Phone 4-3626.”26 An anonymous reader sent the clipping to Hedda Hopper with a note: “From an old admirer who does not want slimy mouth Lousyella to beat you to the gun.”

  * * *

  “DEAR BOY, HAVE you gone mad? This woman will destroy you. She will grind you down to a fine powder and blow you away! You are a writer, dear boy. She will come to the stage with a thick pad of long yellow paper. And pencils! She will write. And then she, not you, will direct—mark my words. And you may quote me, dear boy.” That’s Edmund Goulding warning Joseph Mankiewicz of what he was getting himself into by replacing the injured Claudette Colbert with Bette Davis in his upcoming production of All About Eve.

  Mankiewicz told Davis about Goulding’s advice near the end of the location shooting in San Francisco in April 1950. Bette was amused. As Mankiewicz put it, she emitted “that inimitable Davis snort—then she laughed. Her snort and her laugh should both be protected by copyright.”27

  To paraphrase the great theater critic Addison DeWitt: for those of you who do not read, attend the theater, watch black-and-white films, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to rehearse the story of All About Eve. Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), née Gertrude Slojinsky, worms her way into the good graces of her idol, the theatrical legend Margo Channing (Davis). She’s perfect, Eve is. Obvious, too, to everyone but the main characters of the film, each of whom initially falls, each in his or her own way, for Eve’s overdone performance of sincerity. Only Margo’s dresser, Birdie (Thelma Ritter), sees through Eve’s act to the hungry but icy self-promotion at its core. Eve’s tale is told in flashback form. We meet the central players, theater people, at an august banquet at which Eve receives the coveted Sarah Sid-dons Award. The rest of the film explains how Eve has manipulated her way there by conning Margo and Margo’s friends: her director and younger lover, Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill); her longtime playwright, Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe); her best friend, Karen, Mrs. Lloyd Richards (Celeste Holm); and the a
scerbic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). By the end, everyone but DeWitt has been burned by Eve.

  All About Eve is one of the best, richest movies ever made, and Davis gives one of her finest performances in it. As a consequence, critics have chronicled the film with an unusual degree of detail. It is a masterpiece that deserves to be treated like a fine single-malt scotch, aged in wood and served neat, but, instead, tales of its making have been dumped in quantities more suited to Thunderbird. Still—and speaking as a Davis drunk—one can never get enough.

  There are, for instance, the eminently repeatable Tallulah Bankhead anecdotes, Bankhead being self-evidently one of Davis’s models for Margo Channing. On her radio show, Tallu announced, “Don’t think I don’t know who’s been spreading gossip about me and my temperament out there in Hollywood, where that film was made—All About Eve. And after all the nice things I’ve said about that hag. When I get a hold of her I’ll tear every hair out of her mustache.”28

  It was all a joke, Bankhead later explained: “The gossips and the gadabouts made a great to-do about Bette Davis’s characterization of a truculent actress in All About Eve. These busybodies said Miss Davis had patterned her performance after me, had deliberately copied my haircut, my gestures, my bark, and my bite. For comedy reasons this charge was fanned into a feud on my radio show. I was supposed to be seething with rage over the alleged larceny. In superficial aspects Miss Davis may have suggested a boiling Bankhead, but her over-all performance was her own.” All very gracious, until the zinger: “I had seen Miss Davis play Regina Giddens on the screen, thus knew I had nothing to worry about.”29

  “Bette and I are very good friends,” Bankhead once said. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t say to her face—both of them.”30

  As it happened, Bankhead was enraged to find that the literary Margo Channing wasn’t actually based on her. Mary Orr, who penned the short story “The Wisdom of Eve,” from which Mankiewicz built his film, told of performing a Theatre Guild on the Air radio adaptation of the piece with Bankhead as Margo in November 1952. During a rehearsal, Tallulah asked Orr whether she had in fact been the inspiration for Margo. No, the writer said; she’d based Margo on the actress Elisabeth Bergner, who had indeed suffered her own compliant-factotum-turned-ruthless-competitor. As Orr later said, “This made her so mad she never spoke to me again, except on the air.”31 For the record, Mankiewicz claimed improbably that he based his Margo on the eighteenth-century actress Peg Woffington.32

  Darryl Zanuck’s biographer, George Custen, covered the film’s casting saga: Marlene Dietrich was Zanuck’s first choice for Margo Channing, though his handwritten notes on a script draft also mention Claudette Colbert and Barbara Stanwyck. Mankiewicz was adamantly against Dietrich, so Zanuck signed Colbert in February 1950. Colbert then ruptured a disc on the set of the film Three Came Home—her character was supposed to be fighting off a prison guard rapist, and Claudette fought a little too hard—and had to bow out, at which point they approached the English musical-comedy star Gertrude Lawrence, who responded by demanding that Margo’s drunk scene be removed or rewritten. “Rather than listen to the endless versions of Liebesträume the self-pitying (but always theatrical) Margo keeps asking her hired pianist to play, Lawrence insisted on singing a torch song,” Custen reported. “Mankiewicz refused.”33

  Ingrid Bergman was briefly considered, but the role went to Davis, Colbert’s broken back being one of the best things that ever happened to world cinema.

  Zanuck wanted his contract actress Jeanne Crain to play Eve, but Crain had the nerve to get pregnant, leaving Mankiewicz free to cast his own choice, Anne Baxter. Zanuck also reportedly advocated putting John Garfield in the Bill Sampson role and José Ferrer in Addison De-Witt’s; the parts were taken by Gary Merrill and George Sanders.

  Davis stepped into the role at next to the last minute—the Curran Theatre in San Francisco had been rented for two weeks of location shooting and had a show already booked thereafter—but she immediately hooked into the character, planning bits of business and line deliveries in advance. For one of the Curran Theatre scenes, Edith Head designed for Bette what David Chierichetti calls a “gray suit with a high white collar and a big bow of the same material. This replaced a simpler blouse, which Edith had made and tested, because Davis knew ahead of time that she wanted to fiddle with the collar during an angry scene. She also instructed Edith to make the suit loose enough so Gary Merrill could push her over onto a bed on the stage of the theater. At a meeting in Edith’s office, Davis suddenly ran across the room and threw herself onto a divan. When Edith protested that there was no such action in the script, Davis said, ‘Yes, but that’s what I’m going to do.’ ”34

  According to Sam Staggs in All About “All About Eve,” the junkie’s guide to the movie, Edith Head did base Margo’s wardrobe on Tallulah Bankhead and her style. Staggs quotes Head as saying, “I steeped myself in Tallulah, and everything looked as if it was made for her, yet the clothes complimented Bette. She is such a good actress that she makes clothes belong to her.” He also has Head colorfully remarking of Bette, “She has a walk like a whiplash.”35

  Gary Merrill told a comical story about Marilyn Monroe, who plays Addison DeWitt’s eye-popping, dumb-as-dirt escort to the grand party at Margo’s colossal apartment and also shows up briefly at the theater for an audition. Bette hosted a dinner party in San Francisco the night before she and Marilyn filmed their brief encounter in the theater lobby. “The party went on quite late,” Merrill said, “but Marilyn excused herself early because she had to work the next morning. We all knew the scene Marilyn had to work on the next morning was really Bette’s scene and that Marilyn had only a few lines. . . . Bette had more, but she was an experienced actress and accomplished the scene with little bother. It had to be done in ten takes, however—Marilyn kept forgetting her lines.”36 Marilyn’s lines are, in toto: “Like I just swam the English Channel. Now what?” and “Tell me this, do they have auditions for television?”

  There was some bitchiness during the production of All About Eve, but compared to the grinding agitation, sabotage, reaction formation, and development of hysterical physical symptoms that characterized Bette at her worst, All About Eve was actually made without much fuss. Despite Fox-generated publicity to the contrary, Davis got on well with Anne Baxter during the shoot. “The studio tried to play that up all during the filming,” Baxter later declared, “but I liked Bette very much. She’d come on the set and go ‘Ssssssss’ at me, but it was just a joke between us.”37 Bette had no reason to fly off the handle at anyone for any reason. She knew the role was great, the dialogue superb, the director expert and resolute. “You know as well as I that there is nothing more important to an actress than a well-written part—and a director who knows what he wants and knows how to ask for it,” she told Mankiewicz at the time. “This [Eve’s script] is heaven. But as often as not the script has been a compromise of some sort. And the director can’t make up his mind whether we’re to stand, sit, run, enter, or exit. He hasn’t the foggiest notion of what the scene is all about or whether, in fact, it’s a scene at all.”38

  MARGO CHANNING IS Bette Davis at her smoky best. Mankiewicz introduces Margo sitting at a table at the Siddons Awards. She reaches for a cigarette, taps it twice on the table, lights it, and inhales deeply in the first few seconds of her first shot. She then reaches off-screen for a bottle of booze, pours a couple of healthy glugs in a glass only partially visible on the lower right corner of the screen, and dismissively pushes away with the back of her hand her unseen tablemate’s attempt to water it down. Then she smirks.

  Tallulah aside, Margo is Bette Davis. It’s as efficient an introduction to her character as her opening shots in Jezebel, only this time the director is introducing Davis herself as well as the character she is playing: a boozy, tobacco-stained broad who’s not so much past her prime as proudly attenuating it. The only thing missing is the foul mouth.

  When Karen Richards escorts Eve into Marg
o’s dressing room, Margo extends her hand dramatically to Eve, the cold cream smeared all over her face unable to dim her theatrical grandeur. “How do you do, my dear,” she regally announces, prompting Thelma Ritter, as Birdie, to mutter “oh, brother,” the first of her many sober commentaries. “Oh, brother!” Birdie repeats a moment or two later after Margo introduces her preposterously as her “dear friend and companion.” An old vaudevillian, Birdie has seen Margo play the role many times before. “All of a sudden she’s playin’ Hamlet’s mother,” Birdie observes.

  The party Margo throws in honor of Bill’s birthday is not only one of All About Eve’s highlights but as seminal a scene in movie history as Rhett Butler’s parting shot to Scarlett O’Hara. Margo is already breathing fire early in the scene when she asks the producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff) what would happen if he dropped dead, a line Bette delivers, casually dragonlike, while exhaling cigarette smoke. Lloyd Richards observes that there’s something “Macbethish” in the air. “What is he talking about?” Margo asks, Bette giving the simple line a poisonous edge. “We know you,” the well-bred Karen remarks. “We’ve seen you like this before. Is it over or is it just beginning?” Margo responds by gulping down her fourth martini with the same hand that holds a half-smoked cigarette, while in the other an olive lies impaled on a toothpick. She plops the olive into the emptied glass, turns to leave—leading with a broad sweep of the shoulder—and the camera pans with her as she heads for the stairs. She climbs a few and, with her hands on the bannister, turns, smirks again, pauses for dramatic effect, and issues her classic advisement: “Fasten your seatbelts—it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

  After a brief, rich scene with Marilyn Monroe and her walker, George Sanders, Birdie enters with a look of concern and a hefty cup of coffee. She offers it to a morose Margo, who is seated on the piano bench, her eyes cast down into the abyss of yet another martini glass as the strains of Liszt’s Liebesträume lend the party a funereal touch. Birdie’s coffee becomes the receptacle into which Margo drops another toothpicked olive with a flamboyantly drunken gesture. Later, when Margo and Lloyd emerge from the kitchen, Bette inflects Margo’s drunkenness with a more hostile tone. Margo confronts Eve and bites her with what appears to everyone else to be an outrageously rude remark, but to the audience at this point in Eve’s increasingly tedious humble act, it’s more than justified: “Please stop acting as if I was the Queen Mother.” This prompts Bill to provide Margo with a setup: “Outside of a beehive, Margo, your behavior would hardly be considered either queenly or motherly.” “You’re in a beehive, pal, don’t you know?” Margo retorts, Bette slurring her words just slightly. “We’re all busy little bees, full of stings, making honey day and night.” She faces Eve and snaps, “Aren’t we, honey?”