James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  “I must have four hundred dollars,” she blurted.

  Milliken pulled out his wallet and peeled off four hundred-dollar bills. “What are you going to do with the money?”

  Ruthie told him and promised to repay the loan within a few weeks. Milliken went off to his tennis match and Ruthie walked back to the Plaza, wondering what she would tell Bette: she knew her daughter would be furious that she had borrowed the money. As she passed a Western Union office, a plan struck her. She walked in and asked the young man on duty to print a message on their yellow paper, and give it back to her rather than send it. He eyed her skeptically but did as he was asked. Ruthie took the telegram and envelope, put the four hundred dollars inside, and slipped it under their hotel room door. Within a few seconds she heard a shout from Bette. She had read the message: “Am sending money your mother asked to borrow. Dad.”

  Late that afternoon, Bette and Ruthie drove the phaeton up Alta Loma Terrace and moved their luggage into their new home.

  The next day, Bette’s first at Universal, was not nearly as propitious, perhaps because Ruthie wasn’t there to smooth everything out. Bette knew that word had spread about “the Davis girl’s arrival,” and she noticed that a number of people made excuses to be in Universal founder Carl Laemmle’s outer office while she was there, just to get a gander at her. She sensed she was in trouble when Laemmle’s twenty-two-year-old son, Junior, a handsome man renowned for his appreciation of beautiful women, stuck his head out of his office door, took a look at her, and retreated back inside without so much as a word.

  Bette knew she was a far cry from the beautiful, glamorous, often exotic girls who populated Hollywood movies. Junior Laemmle saw, she said, “a girl without makeup, one who had never been to a beauty parlor and whose eyebrows were thick and unplucked, whose long hair was wound up in back and broken only by two curls at her face.” Bette had thought she was fairly good-looking (many of the New York theater critics had made a point of how “pretty” she was), but she sensed by the reactions of Junior Laemmle and the other men who came and went through the office that—by Hollywood standards, at least—she wasn’t.

  Her insecurities peaked when she met the elder Laemmle, whose face remained stony while he sized her up in his office. After a few perfunctory exchanges, the sixty-three-year-old film pioneer told her that she would be notified when she was to report to work on a production. Bette didn’t know it, but Laemmle had decided immediately that she was wrong for the provocative role he had planned to give her in Strictly Dishonorable.

  In the meantime, she toured the studio, met with publicity men, wardrobe mistresses, and makeup artists, and was introduced to some of the other actors and actresses on the lot. To her, Universal Pictures seemed the apex of Hollywood studios. In November, Carl Laemmle’s personal freedom had won the third Best Picture Academy Award for All Quiet on the Western Front, and Bette was convinced the studio would offer her films just as prestigious. She couldn’t know, of course, that Universal wouldn’t win another top Oscar for forty-three years. All Quiet on the Western Front had been an aberration, a fleeting break in the studio’s long line of Western, crime, and (starting in 1931) horror programmers. Laemmle Senior believed in saving money above all else, and had such a propensity for hiring his relatives that the humorist Ogden Nash was inspired to write a couplet: “Uncle Carl Laemmle / Has a very large faemmle.”

  Universal’s production values were minimal, and the studio expended little effort grooming stars. (They had none, except for Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in their monster makeup, until Deanna Durbin in the late ’30s.) Universal was probably the worst studio Bette could have signed with, but as 1931 opened, she was blissfully ignorant of the fact.

  During the next few weeks, she posed for a seemingly endless series of still photographic tests, during which the photographer struggled to find the perfect lighting and angles to make Bette look as much as possible like America’s idea of a movie star. In between photo sessions, she waited around the house for a summons from the studio. Finally it came. They wanted to do another screen test—this time of her “gams,” the cinematographer told her. She had never heard the word. “Your legs,” he explained. “The studio wants to see if you’ve got good legs.”

  “What have legs got to do with acting?”

  The man sighed. “You don’t know Hollywood, do you?”

  Bette was mortified the next day as the cameraman continually prodded her to hike up her skirt “just a little higher.” Finally he stopped when he saw her discomfort, and asked her to do some emoting. She mimed happiness, sadness, fright. In between, unaware that the camera was running at all times, she mugged outrageously, made faces, stuck her tongue out. When she saw the finished film, complete with her childish antics, she ran out of the screening room in tears. She hated everything about what she’d just seen on the screen. “I can’t bear it,” she cried to Ruthie when she got home. “We’ll pack up tonight. I’ll never be seen on the screen again.”

  Ruthie calmed her down. “The test they made in New York was good, wasn’t it?” Bette had to admit she had liked that one. “You’ll get used to it,” Ruthie murmured consolingly. “They’ll learn how to photograph you and you’ll be all right.” Bette felt a little better but her mood remained melancholy. She heard from the studio again a few days later, when she was told to be on the soundstage the next morning to test for a new movie. Thrilled, she arrived early and stared, mouth agape, as she roamed around the enormous hangar that housed the sets, the huge scaffolding that held the lights, the disassembled bits of scenery and backdrop that littered every inch of the building’s periphery.

  She was puzzled when she wasn’t given any script sides to read. Instead, she was told to lie down on a divan. James Hall, a young actor popular as one of the stars of Hell’s Angels, approached the divan, knelt by it, made an impassioned speech of undying love for Bette, then kissed her lustily. Hall slipped away, and a breathless Bette heard the director call out, “That’s fine. Okay, who’s next?”

  Who’s next?! Before Bette could react, the first of a succession of fifteen varyingly well-known actors knelt beside her, each repeating the lines and the passionate kiss. It didn’t take Bette long to realize that she wasn’t the actor being tested. “I might as well have been a dummy for all the good it did me. My face was hidden every time.” Of the fifteen men, only the matinee idol Gilbert Roland sensed her dismay. “Don’t be upset,” he told her. “This is the picture business. We’ve all gone through it. Just relax!”

  At the end of the morning, Bette went home to Ruthie and sobbed with abject misery. She felt abused and degraded by what she’d just been through. The studio obviously hated her. She was sorry she’d come to Hollywood. She missed her friends and the theater and New York. She hated the “obscenely” warm weather; she wanted it to “feel like Christmas.” And on and on. Ruthie, as usual, tried to buck her up with assurances that everything would turn out for the best, but Bette remained in a blue mood for weeks.

  Finally, Universal decided on a picture for her: Booth Tarkington’s The Flirt. Bette loved the idea of playing a spoiled rich girl who runs off with a smooth con man. But then she heard that Sidney Fox had been cast as the girl, and that she would play her virtuous sister, a role she thought far less interesting than the colorful title character. Bette already resented Fox, who had played the role she’d been promised in Strictly Dishonorable, and this didn’t help matters. Bette later claimed that Junior Laemmle and the twenty-one-year-old actress were romantically involved, and that Fox’s minimal talent didn’t warrant her casting in such important roles. She may have been right: Fox made just eleven movies in Hollywood, the last in 1934. She died at thirty-two of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

  The title of The Flirt was changed to Bad Sister, and while Bette enjoyed working with Conrad Nagel and Humphrey Bogart, she loathed playing virtue. “I think it was that picture that gave me a horror of nobility. Ever since then I have fought again
st portraying saccharine characters. Give me the part of a vixen and I’m happy.”

  Still, she had finally appeared in her first motion picture, and on the day of a preview screening, she was “all adither.” She and Ruthie drove sixty miles east of L.A. to San Bernardino, a sleepy community of citrus farms, and took rear balcony seats in the town’s only theater to avoid being recognized. As the film progressed, Bette sank lower and lower in her seat. She and Ruthie left before the film ended, and Bette cried all the way home.

  “Everything about me was wrong,” she recalled. “I regarded myself as a hopeless mess.… My face was proportioned wrong. My mouth was too small. To overcome this they had smeared on make-up so that it looked like a tunnel. When I am embarrassed I smile crookedly, and for 7000 feet of film my mouth was distorted.… My clothes were bad and my hair was abominable.”

  Bette expected Universal to tear up her contract, which was about to expire, and she was amazed when Laemmle not only renewed it but raised her salary to $450. She later learned that they had indeed decided to drop her before Karl Freund, the cinematographer on Bad Sister, urged them to keep her on. His reason? “Davis has nice eyes.”

  “While his words saved my career,” Bette recalled, “they were as cruel as can be uttered about a girl who thinks that she is fairly easy to look at and who has the hope that somebody will regard her as a capable actress.”

  Matters did not improve for Bette during the second half of 1931. She made two more pictures, Seed, a bad film in which her part was so negligible that no critic commented upon it, and Waterloo Bridge, a better movie in which she again had little to do: her name appeared in the cast list just before “Old Woman.”

  After he screened Waterloo Bridge, Carl Laemmle turned to his son and said, “What audience could ever imagine the hero going through hell and high water just to kiss her at the fadeout?” Junior had made his own assessment of Bette after Bad Sister: “She has about as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville.”1 Bette already knew that around the lot she had been unkindly dubbed “the little brown wren,” and when she heard about the younger Laemmle’s remark, she was crushed. “I didn’t recover for a long time.”

  Universal was ready to drop Bette when the RKO producer Pandro Berman asked to borrow her services for Way Back Home, a cornspun film based on the popular “down-home Yankee” radio character Seth Parker. Laemmle was pleased to comply; the studio always made a profit whenever they lent out one of their contract players. While Way Back Home turned out to be a rather silly film that drew lambasts from most critics, it was the first picture in which Bette felt she looked good. The cinematographer, J. Roy Hunt, took care with her and offered her “the first encouragement I had had, as to my face on the screen. I was truly overjoyed.”

  Bette’s hair was bleached a light blond for the role, and she felt the look became her. Still, she wrote a friend that it made her “a little sick” that she had to do it. The lighting was flattering, and she did look pretty in the film. She also gave a charming performance, which was generally overlooked in the mass of bad reviews.

  The picture was shot on location in Santa Cruz, California, and its production was resonant for Bette. Not only was she playing a smalltown New Englander in a film replete with Yankee customs like taffy pulls, barn dances, and singing bees, but Santa Cruz provided her with her first look at pine trees in almost a year. “I’ve missed those so much ever since I left home,” she told Ginny Conroy. “They don’t have any in Hollywood.”

  Way Back Home also proved to Bette that while she might not seem sexy to her bosses, she possessed animal magnetism enough for a number of men. Her love interest in the picture, Frank Albertson, a handsome twenty-two-year-old leading man, was “obviously in love with her,” according to the film’s director, William Seiter. “She handled him very gently, onscreen and off.”

  Albertson acknowledged that he had had “a crush” on Davis. “She was very warm and sweet. I know people think of her as a fussy, man-hating dynamo, but she wasn’t like that then, not at all. I really felt the love scenes.”

  Now that she was a budding movie star, Bette felt she needed to become a part of the Hollywood social scene. The studio arranged for her to be invited to her first Beverly Hills soiree, and she and Ruthie shopped at Magnin’s to find her a slinky, sophisticated, low-cut evening gown that would show those movie people just how sexy Bette Davis could be.

  Bette had also decided that if she were truly to become a sophisticate, she would have to smoke and drink. “I thought if I learned to swear and smoke cigarettes, they would think I was an actress.” She did both at this party, trying to project a worldliness she didn’t possess, but if she had hoped her newly adult persona would attract virile and handsome men to her side, she was very disappointed. Standing self-consciously alone in the middle of the room for nearly an hour, she finally retreated to a window along a far wall, painfully reminded of her wallflower days at Newton High. Suddenly, a beautiful young man introduced himself. He was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the estranged husband of Joan Crawford.

  Bette chatted with him a few moments, and before she knew what had happened, Fairbanks had slid his hand into her dress, fondled one of her breasts, and then told her, “You should use ice on your nipples the way Joan Crawford does.” Flustered, Bette pulled away from him and ran to a telephone to call Ruthie.

  Bette’s next two films, The Menace and Hell’s House, were again made on loan-out, for two other studios. Both took less than two weeks to film. Bette called the former “a monstrosity; my part consisted of a great many falls out of closets. The picture was made in less than eight days. I knew that I had reached bottom.”

  Hell’s House kept her there, with its hokey story of a naive teenager (Junior Durkin) who unwittingly fronts for a petty bootlegger (Pat O’Brien) and is sent to reform school. Bette played O’Brien’s moll as well as could be expected (complete with platinum hair, moxie, and a heart of gold), but the picture, which one critic rather daintily suggested “projects of having been put together in a slipshod manner,” did her in. Pat O’Brien said he and Bette both knew the results would be dismal and formed a “mutual consolation society” during filming. “It took two weeks to shoot,” O’Brien recalled, “and looked like it had taken a day and a half.”

  Like Frank Albertson, Junior Durkin was soon smitten with Bette. The good-looking, sensitive sixteen-year-old, who received top billing in Hell’s House, had gained popularity early in 1931 playing the title role in Tom Sawyer, which he repeated six months later in Huckleberry Finn. Bette went out of her way to be nice to Durkin, whom she looked on as the brother she never had. It was a shock to Bette, Pat O’Brien recalled, “when I tipped her off that the poor kid, all of sixteen, no less, had fallen hook, line, and sinker for her!”

  Durkin’s infatuation caused him some embarrassment. During a scene in which Bette’s character comforts Durkin, he sprouted an erection that was so noticeable the scene had to be cut from the picture. A few of Durkin’s friends pirated the excised footage and screened it at stag parties—much to their merriment and Durkin’s mortification. He got into a few fistfights over it, and cried to Pat O’Brien, “What do I do?” O’Brien told him not to worry. “So you got a hard-on with Bette Davis in a movie. Great! Proves you’re a man!”2

  Bette “couldn’t imagine” what Durkin saw in her. After her first six films, her insecurities were deeper than ever—about her appearance, her talent, her future. She rightly felt unappreciated and poorly used by Universal, and she knew she was on tenuous footing every time her contract neared renewal. “Failure to me is death,” she said, and she was sure she had failed. Her depression grew so deep that she contemplated suicide.

  In September 1931, Universal dropped her contract. Again, Bette immediately accepted the defeat; in spite of Ruthie’s pleas, she decided she would prefer to return home and admit she’d flopped in movies than to hang on like the thousands before her who had refused to face reality and eventually failed, as Bette p
ut it, “with their money and their friends vanished.”

  This time she wouldn’t be swayed by Ruthie’s importunings. She was in the shower, her bags packed and ready to go, when the telephone rang. The caller told Ruthie that George Arliss would like to speak to Bette about a role in his new film. Ruthie raced into the bathroom and screamed the news at Bette. She was maddeningly unimpressed. This had to be one of her friends pulling her leg—George Arliss was one of the most respected actors in the country; to Bette he “loomed as the greatest figure in the theater.” That he would want her for a movie, with her track record, was absurd. “Oh, Mother,” she answered as she shampooed her hair, “it’s just someone playing a practical joke. I’m never going to make another film.”

  Ruthie pulled Bette out of the shower, frantically wrapped a towel around her, and dragged her to the phone. Dripping wet, she decided to play along with the prank. The voice on the other end of the line said, “Miss Davis, this is George Arliss. Would it be possible for you to come to Warner Brothers immediately for an interview with me for my next film, The Man Who Played God?”

  Bette replied in a ridiculous English accent. “Of course, Mr. Arliss! How jolly decent of you!” She did this again in response to the man’s next three statements, until finally he realized what was happening. “Miss Davis!” he boomed. “This is George Arliss!” Bette gasped—she remembered that intimidating tone from her classes with Arliss at Milton/Anderson. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Arliss,” she stammered. “I really thought…”

  “Never mind that. Can you come now?”

  “Of course—I’ll be right there!”