by Ed Sikov
Joan, meanwhile, was driving Bette crazy with kindness. Someone began sending a single rose to Davis on the set every day. “If you’re going to send roses, for God’s sake send a dozen or more,” Bette muttered. When she found out they were coming from Crawford, she thought she’d retch.51
She retaliated by signing Crawford’s copy of The Lonely Life with the following inscription: “Joan, Thanks for wanting my autograph. Bette.”52
Sheilah Graham reported that Joan, always the company gal, showed up one day with a cooler full of Pepsi for the cast and crew; the next day Bette appeared with an even larger cooler full of Coke.53
Bette was blunt: “We were polite to each other—all the social amenities, ‘Good morning, Joan,’ and ‘Good morning, Bette’ crap. Thank God we weren’t playing roles where we had to like each other. She was always so damn proper. She sent thank you notes for thank you notes!’”54
As Curtis Bernhardt once observed, the two actresses employed opposing strategies to get to a similar place onscreen: “Crawford was a typical film actress. When she needed to play an emotional scene, the director had to take her aside and tell her a sad story. Tears came to her eyes and you let her go out and play the scene. Bette would immediately use tears if I said I wanted them. She was completely professional. I would call Crawford an amateur actress. But Crawford was very good as such. Bette, of course, never shed real tears in an emotional scene. Crawford shed real tears.”55
Sexually, they were opposites as well. Vincent Sherman, who slept with each of them, tells the story of Crawford watching her own film Humoresque in a screening room with him in preparation for Sherman’s The Damned Don’t Cry and becoming so “stimulated by her own eroticized image” that she stood up in the middle of the film, “raised her dress, and quickly pulled off a pair of silk panties she was wearing.” “Was it possible,” Sherman asks, “despite my efforts to keep it quiet, that someone had whispered to her that Bette Davis and I had had an affair and she was out to accomplish what Davis had not: have me get a divorce and marry her?” Sherman sums it up: “Sex for Bette was a biological need, while for Joan it was primarily an ego trip.”56
IN SUNSET BOULEVARD, Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), Norma Desmond’s chauffeur and former husband, drives her—in her lengthy and fabulous Isotta Fraschini—through Paramount Pictures’ ornate Bronson Avenue gate, the elegant architectural symbol of one of world cinema’s preeminent institutions. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?—filmed on the cheap—was shot across the street.
The Producers Studios, on the other side of Melrose Avenue from Paramount, has been described as “ramshackle,” but that’s overstating the case.57 Now called Raleigh Studios, it has been a working lot since 1914, providing relatively inexpensive accommodations to independent filmmakers such as Aldrich and Stanley Kramer as well as television series such as Ronald Reagan’s Death Valley Days. Aldrich and company shot Baby Jane there from July 9 through September 12, 1962, with the exteriors of the Hudsons’ two-story Spanish Revival house filmed on location in the Wilshire district at 172 South McCadden Place near the corner of Highland and Beverly.58
According to Bob Thomas, Joan got $40,000 and 10 percent of the producer’s net profit, but Bette had a more immediate need for cash and agreed to $60,000 with only 5 percent of the profit.59 Aldrich’s biographers Alain Silver and James Ursini disagree; according to them, Crawford got 15 percent while Davis got 10 percent.60 And Aldrich himself cited a different base figure for Joan: $25,000.61 No matter; the point is, Baby Jane was relatively cheap to shoot, and the two stars settled for less up front than they had earned in their prime.
Baby Jane was made so inexpensively that Aldrich couldn’t afford process shots for Jane Hudson’s drive through Hollywood, so Bette herself got behind the wheel one day and drove, with Ernie Haller crouched in the backseat or perched on the hood with his camera.62 But artistic considerations played into Aldrich’s decision, too. It was a full twelve years after Eve Harrington and Addison DeWitt strolled toward the camera on a soundstage floor while images of a New Haven sidewalk were projected behind them, and by 1962, rear projection was beginning to look more than a tad artificial. By placing the preposterous Jane Hudson in a real car wending her way in traffic down real Los Angeles streets, Aldrich renders her even more terrifying: the drive visually forces Jane to be plausible in her demented absurdity.
Aldrich struck a distribution deal with Warner Bros. Jack Warner recalled in his memoirs that he caught a preview of the film in New York at the RKO Theater on Eighty-sixth Street. “There were perhaps 3,000 people in the house, and I thought they’d blow the roof off. I hadn’t heard such screaming and yelling at a preview in years. Baby Jane lit up the skies like a paint-factory fire.”63
The film was an immediate hit upon its release, first in New York on October 31, 1962, a week later in Los Angeles. As the Hollywood Reporter trumpeted, “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? made film history by amassing through the weekend $1,600,000 in film rental, putting the Warner–Seven Arts Association and Robert Aldrich picture into the profit column in less than two weeks.”64 Although the trades reported the film cost $825,000, the actual negative cost was $1,075,664.28.65 Still, the film made money; by the end of August 1963, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? had grossed $3,898,568.55.66 Davis herself claimed that by the late 1980s Baby Jane had pulled in about $10 million.67
CHAPTER
21
“SITUATION WANTED”
IT WAS ONLY NINE DAYS AFTER WHAT EVER Happened to Baby Jane? wrapped that Bette Davis placed her notorious want ad in the trades. Listed under “Situation Wanted, Women” was the following:
MOTHER OF THREE—10, 11 & 15—DIVORCEE. AMERICAN. THIRTY YEARS EXPERIENCE AS AN ACTRESS IN MOTION PICTURES. MOBILE STILL AND MORE AFFABLE THAN RUMOR WOULD HAVE IT. WANTS STEADY EMPLOYMENT IN HOLLYWOOD. (HAS HAD BROADWAY.) BETTE DAVIS, c/o MARTIN BAUM, G.A.C. REFERENCES UPON REQUEST.1
As Martin Baum described his bemused reaction in retrospect, “I was an important agent, she was a big star, and I wasn’t going looking for work for her. That was not exactly the position I expected to be in at that point in my career—or her career. She was never out of work, but she was concerned about where her career was going. So she placed the ad. Everyone was laughing—it was a joke. Bette Davis looking for a job? It didn’t make sense! But she was serious about it. She felt she needed work. It just wasn’t as dire a circumstance as she portrayed it in the ad.2
“I had a good three years representing her,” Baum concluded, “but then she left. She wanted to work more consistently.” (The last film he repped for her was Hush. . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte.) “She was a lovely human being—feisty, a fighter all the way, and had great pride in the work she did. As she grew older, and parts became more difficult to get, she still went in there fighting for what she believed in. I loved her, and I’m honored to have represented her for a little while.”3
“Actually the ad was tongue-in-cheek, but a deep dig as well,” Bette later commented. “The ad was half playful and half serious. After all, I had left a hit play, had finished What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and my book The Lonely Life was just out, so my career was not in jeopardy. If I was truly unemployed, I could never have taken the advertisement.”4
The ad is a prime example of how Bette’s sense of humor could misfire—a less extreme, eminently more comprehensible version of the baskets of rotten vegetables Chuck Pollack says she’d send to friends as her peculiar way of apologizing for her drunken hostility at dinner parties in later years.5 She meant the ad to be a serious joke, a goof with a chip on its shoulder. (How she meant the rotten vegetables remains inexplicable.) But Hollywood took it as an inadvertent joke, and Bette ended up looking foolish in the eyes of fools.
The ad was clearly still on the machers’ minds when, in early 1963, the Academy nominated Bette Davis as Best Actress for Baby Jane. Bette blamed not the Academy but Crawford for her loss. “Joan did everything she could possibly think of t
o keep me from winning,” Bette bitterly recalled. “She campaigned openly in New York, contacting all the Oscar nominees who were in plays in New York that year.”6 By “all,” Bette is referring to two: Geraldine Page, nominated for Sweet Bird of Youth, who was appearing in a revival of O’Neill’s Strange Interlude; and Anne Bancroft, who was nominated for The Miracle Worker and was starring in Jerome Robbins’s production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. The other two nominees were Katharine Hepburn, for Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Lee Remick, for Days of Wine and Roses.
Crawford somehow convinced Bancroft to allow her, Joan, to accept the award on her behalf should she win. And she did, the Academy predictably choosing Helen Keller’s heartwarmingly devoted teacher over an atrocity-committing wackjob who, were she real, could herself have been a member of the Academy.
The honors were awarded at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on April 8, 1963, with Frank Sinatra serving as the emcee. According to Davis, all the nominees or their surrogates were backstage in dressing rooms, each with its own television monitor. The Oscar historians Mason Wiley and Damien Bona specify that Bette was ensconced in Sinatra’s dressing room with Olivia de Havilland. Joan was down the hall. Wiley and Bona quote the show’s director, Richard Dunlap, on why he refused to show the television audience the scene backstage: “I couldn’t. It would have been cruel.”7
“When Anne Bancroft’s name was announced, I am sure I turned white,” Bette wrote. “Moments later, Crawford floated down the hall past my door. I will never forget the look she gave me. It was triumphant. The look clearly said, You didn’t win and I am elated!”8
Bill Frye was Bette’s escort that night. Watching Crawford standing there receiving an ovation for an award she hadn’t even won was too much for Davis to bear. “Let’s get out of here!’ ” she demanded and asked to be taken home. But Frye convinced her to go to a party at the Beverly Hilton, where they were joined by Bobby, B.D., Robert Aldrich and his wife, and Olivia de Havilland. All the tables were graced with fifths of booze, and Bette immediately dove for the scotch, filling a glass to the brim. “This is for La Belle Crawford,” she announced. When told that Joan drank vodka, not scotch, Bette replied, “I don’t care what she drinks. This is going into her fucking face.”
Bette didn’t throw the drink but said “I refuse to be in the same room with her. I don’t care how big the room is.” So they all went to Bette’s house, whereupon she began to make scrambled eggs and toast. She was slicing a loaf of bread when Frye, casually seated in a rocking chair, tactlessly remarked on Crawford’s elegant appearance. “What did you say?” asked Bette, who stopped slicing the bread and proceeded to advance upon the startled Frye with the knife in her hand. “What did you say?” she repeated, aiming the blade at his heart. “You make me sick,” she told him and calmly went back to making breakfast.9
AFTER BABY JANE, Davis filmed her episode of The Virginian—“The Accomplice,” which aired on December 19, 1962—and didn’t work again until the fall of 1963, when she agreed to make a film in Italy. “The name of the film was The Empty Canvas,” Bette remarked. “Empty it was.”10
The film’s producer, Carlo Ponti, promised Davis to add more scenes with Davis’s character—the extravagantly wealthy, no-named mother of a depressed young painter (Horst Buchholz)—to give her more pizzazz as well as screentime. But as Davis described it, “[I] arrived in Italy to find that nothing had been done to the script at all. In desperation I decided to use a Southern accent to give some kind of flavor to this extremely dull woman. The blonde wig was also my idea, a further attempt to make her at least a noticeable character in the film. My costar, Horst Buchholz, was anything but easy to work with; in fact, he went out of his way to thwart me at every turn.11
“My first day on the set, I arrive, and here is this completely naked girl—and I mean completely naked—walking around, and the grips and the electricians are ogling her and naturally not getting any work done at all, and I thought I’d taken leave of my senses,” Bette declared a few months after The Empty Canvas’s American release. “Then somebody thinks to introduce me, and the naked lady turns out to be my costar, Catherine Spaak, who has a scene in the picture where her nude body is covered by Mr. Buchholz with ten-thousand lire notes. Quite a change, you see, from the good old days on the Warner lot. . . . Never again. Never another picture in Italy! Remember the Italian title, La Noia? Well, it means The Bore.”12 On that point she’s not trying to be funny, though La Noia actually translates as Boredom; the film is based on the novel by Alberto Moravia.
Bette took one look at her costumes and rejected them all, prompting Carlo Ponti’s wife, Sophia Loren, to escort Davis on a shopping spree at the couture house of Loren’s friend, Simonetti.13 The results range from the fashionable to the ludicrous—the elegant effect of Simonetti’s mid-1960s dresses and suits is destroyed by a hideous fur-trimmed dressing gown that would have looked more at home on Milton Berle.
The Empty Canvas is overripe; Davis’s character is literally introduced in a hothouse sniffing “the most heh-venly dahlias.” Other rank moments include Bette lying bare-shouldered on a massage table receiving a muscular rubdown while smoking, and her casual but hilarious delivery of the line “For godsakes be careful, Dino—there are all kahnds of diseases floatin’ aroun’!”
Davis was baffled by the fact that after shooting each master shot, the director, Damiano Damiani, made no attempt to match anything when shooting different angles and closer distances. “Not only do they not know how to match, the whole concept of matching to a master scene is foreign to them. I began to realize the kind of trouble I was in.” This is what Davis said in public; in private, she called Damiani “an idiot, impolite, boor of an untalented director.”14
“Mr. Buchholz plays my son, you see—an American—with an accent that just screams ‘unter-den-Linden.’ And Miss Catherine Spaak—I never did understand what nationality her character was.”15 The man playing Spaak’s father solved the accent problem easily; his character is mute.
Bette’s out-of-nowhere southern accent caused enough postproduction distress that one of Ponti’s assistants flew to London and asked Davis to return to Rome to redub herself. “He nearly left this room through that window, let me tell you,” she told a visiting journalist. The reason Ponti’s assistant was unnerved was Bette’s response: she would be willing to consider doing the redubbing, she told him—for $50,000. Ponti ultimately decided that Bette’s accent was just fine.
“In a blonde Dutch-boy bob, Bette looks like a degenerate Hans Brinker,” Time claimed in its review.16 Perhaps, though in this case the role of Hans Brinker is being played by an aging drag queen with heavy black lashes, dark red lips, smears of eye shadow, and dramatically shaped brows that are many shades darker than his wig. Hans also waves a long cigarette holder around and wears metallic harlequin glasses.
The Legion of Decency awarded The Empty Canvas a C rating— “Condemned”—calling it “a peep-show excursion with a special appeal to the prurient-minded.”17 But that’s what’s good about the picture. The film’s philosophical aspects are dreary and irrelevent—Michelangelo Antonioni inadvertently parodied by Damiano Damiani. “That’s it,” says Dino (Buchholz) as he gazes moodily at a stretched piece of white cloth. “That’s my masterpiece. There’s nothing worth painting in the whole damn world. The empty canvas says everything worth saying.” Dino has anomie. It’s catching.
Much more entertaining is the abundant sleaze: watching Bette playing Dino’s mother as she pimps her son with a serving girl whose ass he squeezes while she serves him lunch on a silver platter; Cecilia (Spaak) hitching her skirt up to the tune of a 1963 bubble-gum pop song; Dino sporting a tight European swimsuit while morosely regarding a corpselike piece of driftwood on the beach. . . . All the while Cecilia tortures Dino with her affairs with both a formerly elderly, now-dead artist and a muscular Nordic blond whose name, absurdly, is Luciani. At one point, Dino pays Cecilia for a near rape an
d calls her a slut; she loves it. Later, they strip for a toss on Mother’s bed—the bed in which Dino was born. That’s where Cecilia’s naked body serves as the second eponymous canvas for Dino’s lira-based conceptual art. By the time Dino rams his sleek Italian sportscar into a convenient cinder-block wall, you, too, are ready to call it quits.
ALSO IN 1963, Bette covered for Raymond Burr on an episode of the television series Perry Mason when Burr got sick; Davis’s show was called “The Case of Constant Doyle.” The thriller Dead Ringer, filmed in 1963 but released in 1964, was a smooth production. Directed by Paul Henreid, it features Bette killing her twin sister, also played by Bette. And in 1964, she made the film version of Harold Robbins’s potboiler Where Love Has Gone, the most notable aspect of which is that she fought bitterly with her costar, Susan Hayward, to the point that after the last take Bette ripped her wig off, pitched it straight at Hayward’s face, and shouted, “Fuck you.”18
“What film isn’t a struggle? I am so sick of the struggle.” This is Bette writing to Paul Henreid in August 1964, from Honeysuckle Hill, her home at 1100 Stone Canyon Road in Bel-Air. (She moved to Honeysuckle Hill in 1962 from the town house on East Seventy-eighth Street in New York in which she had composed The Lonely Life, after spending a brief interlude in a house on Heather Road in Beverly Hills.) “The history of our film would really fill a book—and it’s an idea—it would be quite a story of a real villainess—Miss C.—unbelievable.”19 She is referring to Hush. . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte, her second Robert Aldrich horror film—one that costarred, for a while, Joan Crawford. But Crawford, in a notorious act of cowardice, checked herself into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and refused to come out. During the entire month of July Crawford worked only four days.20 “I played no scenes with ‘her’ before she retired into the hospital,” Bette told Henreid. Crawford was eventually replaced by Olivia de Havilland.
