James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  For a few moments, Bette and Ruthie sat there speechless. Then Bette roiled into action and was dressed and ready within fifteen minutes. Driving over the hills of Laurel Canyon to the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, Bette marveled at her good luck. An Arliss film was a prestige production, peopled with actors with stage backgrounds, and always an event picture. This could be her big break! She drove onto the twenty-three-acre complex and felt overwhelmed. She had never seen a studio so large, with its seven huge soundstages and its rambling back lot. This place could be a factory, she thought.

  As she walked into Arliss’s office, Bette was scared, her nerves on the brink of snapping. But a few minutes later, as she sat across from Arliss, she felt oddly unafraid. “I was meeting my own kind,” she explained. “A citizen of the theater.” Arliss told Bette that Murray Kinnell, who had appeared in The Menace with her at Columbia, had recommended her after Arliss had unsuccessfully tested twenty other young actresses to play the major role of his fiancée in The Man Who Played God. Bette wasn’t sure what to say until candor got the better of her. “I don’t know how he could tell from my work in that terrible picture,” she said.

  Arliss laughed. “Discernment,” he replied. “A sixth sense.”

  When Bette told him that she had been on the stage for three years, Arliss allowed as how that was long enough to “wear off the rough edges.” He then sat silently, appraising this young girl. Staring back at him, she was struck anew by his bemonocled, skeletal face, the skin so taut she suspected that there was a great knot of it at the nape of his neck. His eyes seemed to bore into her. “Universal had asked to see my legs,” Bette remembered thinking. “Mr. Arliss was examining my soul.”

  She passed the inspection. “The part is yours,” Arliss announced. “Go to the casting office right away. They will take you to the wardrobe department.” Bette felt faint with joy and thanked Arliss profusely. She tried to retain her dignity, but by the time she got to the casting office, she was hugging strangers and shouting, “I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!”

  Warner Brothers offered her a one-picture contract at a salary of $300 a week, with an option for further employment if the studio wished. Ruthie thought she should have been paid more—after all, Universal had paid her $450 a week—but Bette was less interested in her salary than the opportunity. She signed the contract on November 18, 1931. Its only unusual clause stipulated that she was required, for some unfathomable reason, to provide her own shoes and stockings for the film—“Black, white, silver or gold will suffice.”

  Bette was so overjoyed to be working with George Arliss that she never paused to think that she, at twenty-three, had been chosen to play the fiancée of a sixty-three-year-old man.

  The Man Who Played God is the story of a brilliant concert pianist, Montgomery Royale (Arliss), who loses his hearing when a bomb goes off near him in Paris. He returns to New York, at first bitter and suicidal, but then he begins to study the people in Central Park below his window, reading their lips through binoculars. Royale learns of their problems and sends them anonymous gifts, “playing God” by helping them. He soon also sees his fiancée, Grace, talking with a young man in the park, and he learns that she loves the young man yet feels that she must remain with Royale because of his disability. Unselfishly, he asks her to break off the engagement, and she agrees. Royale then turns to a woman closer to his age who has loved him for many years.

  Arliss had played Royale nine years earlier in a silent film version, and even then the age difference between him and Grace was a potential problem. In 1922 there had been a twenty-year difference between Arliss and his leading lady; now the gap was forty years. Arliss felt it important that Grace be seen as a character who was infatuated with Royale’s artistry, who loved him as a person but also worshiped him as a musical hero. There would be no intimation of a physical affair; Grace would have to be played as naive, loyal, and sacrificing. Arliss’s problem had been to find an actress who could play these characteristics without seeming dumb, silly, or opportunistic. Bette, he thought, could do it.

  He wasn’t disappointed. After he saw the final cut of the film, Arliss turned to Bette, released his monocle, and said, “My dear, not even I saw all the dimensions you gave to Grace. Thank you!” In his autobiography Arliss wrote, “I felt rather humbled that this young girl had been able to discover and portray something that my imagination had failed to conceive. She startled me because quite unexpectedly I got from her a flash that illuminated mere words and inspired them with passion and emotion.”

  Bette loved working with Arliss; his habit of completely rehearsing a film before the cameras rolled reminded her pleasurably of the theater and resulted in an on-time, one-month shooting schedule. Later she said that Arliss “was like a father to me.” Not only had he filled for a while the void that Harlow had left in Bette’s life, but he did it, she said, as “the first major fosterer of my creative life.” Bette’s complex feelings about Harlow, and her use of them in her characterization of Grace, once again added texture to one of her performances.

  Warner executives were as impressed by Bette’s acting as Arliss had been. Hal Wallis, one of the studio’s top producers, recalled that “anyone who could hold her own with George Arliss in a scene and not look like a prop was outstanding in my book. Indeed, there were moments when you weren’t looking at Arliss, you were looking at her instead.… She didn’t just act with her eyes. She acted with her whole body.… She was alive; she jumped out of the screen.”

  Bette considered The Man Who Played God the most important picture of her career, and it may well have been. Not only did it keep her in Hollywood; it elevated her standing as an actress overnight. The picture’s popularity (it grossed nearly $1 million) brought her to the attention of far more film fans than had ever seen her before. And most importantly, it marked the beginning of her relationship with Warner Brothers. As soon as filming wrapped, the studio offered Bette a five-year contract, with renewal options twice a year. Her salary would start at $400 a week and rise to $1,250 a week if all the options were exercised. Thus began one of the longest, most mutually rewarding, and most tempestuous professional associations in Hollywood history. “The greatest eighteen years of my life,” Bette called it.

  Warner Brothers Pictures, Inc. was less than nine years old in 1932, but it had already carved out a major niche for itself in Hollywood with pioneering forays into sound production. In 1926, the studio had released Don Juan, the first film to include synchronized music and sound effects, and a year later had an enormous success with The Jazz Singer, which thrilled audiences with bits of dialogue and songs—and made it clear that talkies were the cinematic wave of the future.

  Formed in 1923 by four brothers, Harry, Albert, Jack, and Sam, the company gained profitability with its sound breakthroughs and a combination of meager budgets and major showmanship. As Bette signed her contract on Christmas Eve, 1931, she felt that she had at last found a hospitable home in Hollywood. Jack L. Warner, thirty-nine, soon became the studio’s head of production,3 and in him Bette found another surrogate father. As a paternal figure, “J.L.” Warner was more Harlow Davis than George Arliss. He ran his studio with a whip hand, insisted that productions be lean, mean, and snappy, and excelled at keeping recalcitrant children in line. His son, Jack Junior, describing Warner, could have been talking about Harlow Davis: “He existed behind a self-made wall. Besides, a lot of him wasn’t that nice to now. At times he gloried in being a no-good son of a bitch.”

  Bette’s relationship with Warner, like that with her father, wavered between love and hate. At the outset, however, Bette was convinced that the Warner studio’s no-nonsense approach to production would be compatible with her no-nonsense style of acting, and that their appreciation of her would translate into better films than she had been offered at Universal. Occasionally this was so. But for the most part, at first, the studio provided Bette with scripts that were not much better than the ones she had hated in the past
. Her first picture as a Warner contract player, So Big, starring Barbara Stanwyck, offered her little to do and brought mixed reviews; one critic was moved to call Bette’s acting “unusually competent.” Bette later said that her part as Dallas O’Mara, an idealistic young artist, was one of her favorites because Dallas had “a naturalness similar to my own personality… even though my career was dedicated to character parts from the beginning, every now and then I selfishly wanted an audience to know what kind of a person I really was. Anyway, the kind of person I felt I was.”

  Bette’s afterthought is revealing, because Dallas was in fact quite unlike Bette Davis. In fact, Bette was so terrified of Stanwyck that she was a bundle of nerves on the film, and her unnaturally kinetic behavior irked the star badly. When Bette forgot her lines in the middle of a scene, lit a cigarette, and complained, “It all makes me so jittery, the pace of this scene,” Stanwyck shot back, “You make yourself jittery! Try to fit into things!” Stanwyck later told William Wellman, the film’s director, that Bette was “an egotistical little bitch. Why doesn’t she relax, for Christ’s sake! She’ll get her turn. There’s plenty of room at the top for talent in Hollywood.”

  It wouldn’t be the last time that sheer, gut-wrenching terror in Bette would be misunderstood as ego and temperament.

  So Big proved memorable for Bette, mainly because it introduced her to George Brent, a handsome twenty-eight-year-old who had fled Ireland in 1921 to escape British retribution for his revolutionary activities. After a Broadway stage career, he won great popularity in Hollywood as a suave, if less than charismatic, leading man. Bette had first noticed Brent back in New York a year earlier, and she had immediately developed an “all-time crush” on him.

  Her heart ached on the set of her next picture, The Rich Are Always With Us, which also featured Brent, because she could only watch helplessly as he fell in love with the film’s star, Ruth Chatterton. A legend of the theater, Chatterton scored a success in movies at thirty-nine with her rich voice and her sophisticated manner. Bette was so terrified by her the first day of filming that she was unable to speak her first line. Chatterton simply stared at her “in a superior sort of way” and waited for her to say something. Finally Bette blurted out, “I’m so damned scared of you I’m speechless!”

  According to Bette, this “broke the ice,” and she found Chatterton surprisingly willing to help her after that. But the burgeoning romance between Brent and Chatterton left her with “a saddened heart,” and she wept bitterly when she heard that the couple had been married.

  Bette was heartsick as well over something else in 1932: Jack Warner was putting her into more and more B films, quickies made on minuscule budgets and cut to run just over an hour. In most of them Bette provided mere window dressing for the studio’s patented “male-oriented” stories about politics (Dark Horse), mobsters in prison (20,000 Years in Sing Sing), and pilots (Parachute Jumper).

  B picture directors took scant care to make a leading lady look her best; flattering close-ups of the actresses were rare. Still, Bette had one opportunity to shine, in a B+ picture, The Cabin in the Cotton, which paired her with Richard Barthelmess. She played Madge Norwood, the flighty daughter of a wealthy planter for whom Barthelmess goes to work. Amid chicanery by her father to cheat his sharecroppers, their threats of rebellion, and Barthelmess’s efforts to force his boss into fairness toward his tenants, Bette’s character, at once seductive and coy, flirts and vamps outrageously toward Barthelmess. The script gave Bette one of her all-time favorite lines: “Ah’d like t’ kiss ya, but ah just washed mah ha-ir.”

  Bette adored this vixenish Southern belle, and she used her Martha Graham training to give her movements a sensual, serpentine quality that worked well for the character. But the film’s director, Michael Curtiz, didn’t seem to appreciate what she was doing. He hadn’t wanted her for the role in the first place; the studio’s production chief, Darryl Zanuck, had forced her on him. Curtiz “made my life hell” during the shoot, Bette recalled. While she thought she was doing a great job conveying Madge’s simmering sexuality Curtiz would crouch behind his camera and grumble about her under his breath. Once she overheard him sputter, “Goddamned-nothing-no-good-sexless-son-of-a-bitch!”

  “What with Barthelmess’s wife sitting beside the director appraising our love scenes and Curtiz’s heckling,” Bette recalled, “it’s a wonder I made it.” She went home every night, she said, “irritated, exhausted and hungry… ready to explode… eager to be soothed by a well-run household and a soft-spoken wife.”

  Despite all of this, Madge Norwood emerged as Bette Davis’s first memorable screen characterization, and film critics sat up and took real notice of her for the first time. Regina Crewe in the New York Journal American called Bette “that flashy, luminous newcomer,” and added that she “romps off with first honors, for hers is the most dashing and colorful role.… The girl is superb.”

  But Warners immediately lumbered her with another dud, Three on a Match, a sixty-three-minute marvel with a great deal of cigarette smoking and heavy-handed melodrama in which she played a stenographer. She costarred with Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak; the director, Mervyn LeRoy, made constant mention of the stellar future that awaited Blondell while pointedly ignoring Bette. This, Bette said, “hardly encouraged me in my daily work.” She had come to realize that “something in me created resistance in these men.” She was certain that what she called her “background and assurance” caused resentment among her male colleagues. “They were used to empty, passive slates they could scribble on,” she felt—and they didn’t like the fact that this young starlet had her own very definite ideas about acting.

  With her professional life so full of ups and downs, so emotionally draining, and so fraught with ego destruction, Bette longed more than ever to be “soothed by a well-run household and a soft-spoken wife.” Ruthie tried her best. When Bette came home from a day at the studio, exhausted and overwrought, her mother would hand her a martini to calm her down, draw her bath, lay out her robe. Ruthie tried to make Bette’s life easier, but more often than not their personalities would clash as they always did and she would infuriate her daughter in the process.

  So that Bette wouldn’t have to suffer through the heat of another stifling Los Angeles summer, Ruthie convinced her to rent a cottage at the seashore in Zuma Beach, near Malibu, and to trade in the phaeton for a secondhand Auburn for the ride to and from Hollywood every day. Before long the three musketeers were together again when Bobby left the University of Wisconsin on the advice of a doctor and moved back in with her mother and sister. She had not been able to handle the pressures of advanced college work, and when she came to Hollywood she was once again nervous, melancholy, and withdrawn. A local physician confirmed that Bobby needed prolonged rest and should not return to school.

  Part of Bette was pleased by this family reunion, but another part of her longed for freedom after so many years of daily life with her mother and sister. Even more, she pined after the intimate company of an attentive man. In a matter of weeks, her wish came true: in the late spring of 1932, Ham Nelson re-entered her life.

  * * *

  1 Summerville was a lanky forty-year-old character comedian with a hangdog expression.

  2 Durkin’s career foundered after Hell’s House, and he made just five more films before he was killed in an automobile accident at twenty. A fellow child star, Jackie Coogan, survived the crash.

  3 Harry Warner was the president of the studio, Albert its treasurer. Sam, whose idea it had been to pursue sound production, died the day before The Jazz Singer opened.

  SEVEN

  E

  vening fog rolled in off the Pacific Ocean and enveloped Bette’s Zuma Beach house. Inside, she sat at the dinner table with Ruthie, Bobby, and her Aunt Mildred and cousin Donald, who were visiting from Newton. All evening long, she had felt ganged up on. First one, then another of her relatives pleaded with her to listen to her mother. Ruthie had rallied everyone to her la
test crusade: to convince Bette that the sensible thing for her to do was marry Ham Nelson. The only person at the table with misgivings was Bette.

  Nelson had come out to California late in June 1932, after he was graduated from college, and Bette had been “thrilled” to see him again. She had found him more attractive than ever, especially since he had lost little of the boyish charm and New England provincialism she had fallen in love with. As they had on Cape Cod four years ago, they fell back easily into a pleasant, comfortable relationship. Now, the inevitability of their ultimate marriage, which they had “sensed” in Cape Cod, stared them in the face.

  Ham was all for it. Whenever he and Bette were alone—during long drives up the California coast, or as they sipped wine in a fancy restaurant or a milk shake with two straws in a soda shop on Hollywood Boulevard—Ham would say to her, “I think we ought to be married while I’m here.” Bette would invariably reply, “Oh, I think that would be sort of silly.…”

  They volleyed back and forth like this for most of the summer. When Ruthie became aware of the debate she immediately urged Bette to accept Ham. She felt that marriage—and a regular sex life—might calm her daughter’s chronic jitters. Finally, the matter came to a head.

  Ham was staying with the Davises at the beach cottage (sleeping, of course, in a separate bedroom), and on August 16, he sat in the living room with Bette and Ruthie and their visiting relatives and listened as Ruthie listed yet again all the reasons Bette should marry him. It was time she got married, Ruthie said. She had always loved Ham, and if she didn’t accept him now he might return East and never ask again. And then wouldn’t she be sorry? Bette listened silently, thoughtfully. A little embarrassed that Ruthie was saying all these things in front of Ham, she still sensed that her mother was right. “I knew how sorry I’d be if I didn’t marry Ham,” she recalled.