by James Spada
With Mildred out of his life, Philip begins a fulfilling relationship with Sally, a gentle, caring, decent young woman. Then he learns that Mildred is dying of tuberculosis. Still in bondage to his obsession, he goes to see her. He gives her some money, but she succumbs to the ravages of the disease and dies in the hospital where Philip is an intern. He is finally free to love and be loved by Sally.
Bette didn’t care that dozens of actresses had turned the role down before it was offered to her; she was thrilled to be offered such a strong dramatic opportunity. Her joy was short-lived: Jack Warner refused to lend her out. “It’s a terrible role for anybody who wants a career in Hollywood,” Warner told her. “You’ll destroy any film following you ever had. You’ll never live it down.”
What Bette feared she would never live down was the succession of second-rate movies and cardboard characters she’d been forced to play, and she was willing to take a risk with Mildred. She couldn’t see how such a vivid role could hurt her career, no matter how unsympathetic the character. She suspected Warner was being petty. How could he lend her out to play Mildred, she asked sarcastically in her memoirs, when he “needed me desperately for such historic milestones as The Big Shakedown and The Man with the Black Hat”?
She wouldn’t take no for an answer. One morning Warner walked into his office at sunrise and found Bette sitting in the waiting room.
“What can I do for you, Miss Davis?” he asked.
“Let me play Mildred,” Bette replied.
Warner again refused, and Bette appeared at J.L.’s door just about every morning for months. Finally, he relented—mainly, Bette felt, to get rid of her. In fact it was a classic Hollywood quid pro quo that turned the trick: RKO would lend Warner Irene Dunne only if they could have Bette. “The role may hurt you,” he told her, mentioning neither the trade-off nor the fact that RKO was paying Warners $2,250 a week for her services. “The public may recoil from Mildred, associate her with you, and back off from you—but go ahead and hang yourself if you must.”
Jack Warner wasn’t alone in his concern about Bette’s playing Mildred; Ham and Ruthie both counseled her against it. But she would not be dissuaded, and she plunged herself into preparation for the role. To master Mildred’s Cockney accent she hired an Englishwoman as an assistant, and soon began to speak like a born East Ender. “I drove my family wild,” Bette laughed. Ham put up with it at first, but grew more and more irritated. When Bette fell into the accent in bed one night, he packed an overnight bag and left the house.
Of Human Bondage began production on February 12, 1934, on a soundstage on the RKO lot in Hollywood, and Bette quickly became aware that she was not a popular girl among her fellow actors. The cast was largely English, and to a man and woman they resented an American actress playing Mildred—unmindful of the fact that RKO was unable to find any English actress willing to play the role.
Leslie Howard, the handsome, aristocratic Britisher cast as Philip, was already a major star, although his most indelible screen performance wouldn’t come until five years later when he played Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. Bette found him “as cold as ice” on the set, resentful of her casting, dismissive of her ability to pull off the role, and unattracted to her physically. Bette was hurt by all of it. “I had admired him for years. I wanted him not only to like me as a person but to approve of me as an actress.” Bette realized that neither was the case when she saw Howard sitting on the edge of the set, reading a book, and looking up disinterestedly whenever he had to feed her a cue line.
Howard’s attitude changed the moment he saw the first daily rushes. Not only was he amazed at Bette’s complete disappearance into her character, but he saw that her performance could easily steal the picture from him if he remained so nonchalant. He didn’t.
Bette’s total metamorphosis into Mildred Rogers, more evident with each day of filming, astounded everyone—including Bette. Her upbringing, she said, “was what you’d call protected,” and she was appalled when she realized that she was able to understand Mildred’s “vileness” and “machinations.” That she not only felt compassion for the character but could actually empathize with her left her “ashamed.”
Mildred’s vilest moment comes when Philip refuses her sexual advances and she turns on him ferociously:
“Yew cad, yew dirty swine! I never cared for yew—not once! I was always makin’ a fool of yuh! Yuh bored me stiff. I hated yuh! It made me sick when I had to let yuh kiss me! I only did it because yuh begged me. Yuh hounded me, yuh drove me crazy, and after yuh kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth!… You know what you are, you gimpy-legged monster?! You’re a cripple, a cripple, a cripple!”
The viciousness and abandon Bette brought to this monologue left the cast and crew gasping, and shocked audiences into horrified silence. No actress before her had allowed herself to be so raw, so bilious, so hateful on screen. What had Bette called upon from within herself to deliver these lines with such indelible bitterness? In her memoirs, she admitted that “I was always Bette Davis,” no matter what role she was playing, and she clearly drew upon her own emotions in that scene. It reveals a woman with deep-seated fury at the world around her.
If Bette in Of Human Bondage was the first actress to allow herself to be so emotionally naked on screen, she was also the first to insist that she look exactly as she should. For her death scene, Bette asked John Cromwell if she could do her own makeup. He agreed. “I let Bette have her head,” he said. “I trusted her instincts.”
Even so, Cromwell was shocked when he saw Bette walk onto the set. Her skin was sallow, her hair dry and strawlike, her eyes sunken and hollow and underscored by dark pouches. In short, exactly as a dying woman would look. Everyone told Bette that she had overdone it, but she wouldn’t budge. “I made it very clear,” Bette recalled, “that Mildred was not going to die of a dread disease looking as if a deb had missed her noon nap. The last stages of consumption, poverty and neglect are not pretty and I intended to be convincing-looking.” It was unheard-of in 1934 for a star to look bad on film willingly (afterward most actors were still loath to do it), but Bette got her way.
When Leslie Howard first saw her makeup, Bette recalled, he smiled slowly at her and said, “Damn!”
In April, Ham went to a public preview of the film in Santa Barbara. Bette stayed home, too nervous to join him. “I was afraid to go because the reaction to that picture meant so much to me,” she said soon afterward. “I didn’t sleep, naturally. I lay awake, every nerve tense. I worked myself into a lather.” When she heard Ham’s car in the driveway around midnight, she bolted out of bed and rushed down the stairs. When he came through the front door, Bette tried to read his face. She couldn’t. His expression was blank, and he said nothing to her for several long seconds.
Bette thought she’d burst. “Well?! Can’t you say something?!” she shrieked.
Ham finally told her that her performance had been painful for him to watch, and he feared it would be so for others too. “I doubt that it will do your career much good,” he told her. “It might even do you harm.” Bette knew Ham was being brutally honest, and she went to the next preview to see if he was right. “I was stunned. I was so much nastier than I had expected. So unforgivably mean. And I looked so ghastly.” The two-month wait until the picture opened and she would find out whether she had destroyed her career was almost too much for her to bear.
When the film debuted in New York on June 28, Ham was proven right. Audiences were dumbstruck by Mildred’s tirades against Philip, shivered and averted their eyes from her horribly dissipated appearance at the end, and actively despised her. Mordaunt Hall, the film critic for The New York Times, wrote that “at the first showing yesterday of the picture, the audience was so wrought up over the conduct of this vixen that when Carey finally expressed his contempt for Mildred’s behavior, applause was heard from all sides.”
It took a while—an agonizingly long while for Bette—but at last it became
clear that the critics were able to separate their loathing for Mildred from their admiration for Bette’s achievement. Life magazine called it “probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress,” and to this day it remains one of the best.
The strongest indication of Bette’s accomplishment in Of Human Bondage is the impact her performance retains even now. While the film itself, stagy and contrived, dates badly, Bette’s acting is just as impressive today as it was in 1934. She brought everything she was, and everything she had learned, to bear for Mildred. She uses her body sinuously early in the film, utilizing her Martha Graham training to the fullest; later she harnesses all the nervousness and kineticism of her own personality to imbue Mildred with an electricity that rivets the viewer’s eyes to her. Her vicious tirade against Philip, although it has become familiar because it is shown so often at Davis tributes and in various documentaries, can still shock with its power. Even Bette’s reaction in a much quieter moment—when Philip tells her she has tuberculosis and her body crumples as she emits three soft sobs—sends chills down the spine.
As Bette put it without a trace of modesty, “Bondage made movie history”—and not only because of her groundbreaking histrionics. When the Academy Award nominations for 1934 were announced on February 5, 1935, both the film and Bette’s performance were ignored. Only three actresses—Claudette Colbert, Norma Shearer, and Grace Moore—were nominated, in accordance with Academy rules at the time. Bette’s omission created such an uproar among the many who admired her performance that when the ballots were mailed to the seven hundred voters the Academy announced that they would, for the first time, be allowed to write in a name other than one of the three nominees. Even so, Bette came in fourth; Claudette Colbert won the award for It Happened One Night—in a role Bette had turned down to play Mildred.
Bette always maintained that Jack Warner actively campaigned against her selection, had even sent letters to his employees ordering them not to vote for her, because he was peeved at having been proven wrong, and because he didn’t want another studio to make too much money with one of his players. That makes little sense; Warner was too shrewd a businessman not to realize that an Oscar for Bette would only increase her future value to him, no matter what film won her the award.
What more probably worked against Bette was the Academy’s rules at the time. Nominees in each category were chosen not by all the members of a particular branch (acting, directing, writing, etc.) as they are today, but rather by committees made up of selected members of each branch. The Academy, then and for years afterward, was a very conservative organization, and committee members chosen by its president were likely to be just as conservative. Like some others, they may have been uncomfortable with the way Bette as Mildred had etched out the raw underbelly of a certain segment of humanity, and felt it “unbecoming” of the Academy to nominate her performance. It Happened One Night, by contrast, was a lighthearted, likable story that was far more popular with mainstream audiences. It received five nominations and won them all.
Still, the uproar over what many pundits called Bette’s “unconscionable” snub—and the suspicion by some that the vote could not have been completely honest—helped prompt changes in the rules the following year. Starting with the ninth annual awards in 1936, all members of each branch were allowed to vote on nominations, and five nominees were allowed for each award (ten for Best Picture). The Academy also enlisted the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse to tabulate the ballots beginning in 1937.
Although she was “heartbroken” not to win an award many people had assured her she couldn’t lose, Bette knew that the tremendous play the press gave her snub generated as much favorable publicity as a victory might have. In some respects, she actually felt relieved. “It was just as well,” she mused shortly afterward. “It would have looked like fast work—too fast. Not good for me.”
With or without what was then called “the Academy statuette,” Bette felt she had finally convinced Jack Warner of her abilities, and she was certain he would rush to put her into first-rate motion pictures with topflight production values and juicy, full-dimensional roles. She was wrong, and it didn’t take long before she began to think of her employment at Warners as a nightmarish bondage of her own.
EIGHT
H
am and Bette lay in bed on a chilly evening in the spring of 1934. Their second-floor bedroom was illuminated only by the flames in the fireplace and Bette’s small bedside lamp, under which she was reading the latest script that Warner Brothers had ordered her to do. As Ham drifted off to sleep beside her, a frown hardened on Bette’s face. She read a few more pages of the script, then started to leaf through it quickly. Finally she threw it across the room.
“Christ!” she bellowed, startling Ham out of his slumber. “I can’t believe they still want me to do crap like this!”
Ham turned to her groggily. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s shit, that’s what’s wrong with it!” Bette fumbled for a cigarette and lit it, then crossed her arms and stared hard into the fire. “This character they want me to play has nothing to do! She’s unnecessary. It’s just another Warner Brothers gangster epic. All they want me for is window dressing. Well, I’m not going to do it!”
“If you don’t do it,” Ham replied, turning his back to her, “they’ll suspend you. Now go to sleep.”
The scene was not an isolated one, and it illustrates a number of Bette Davis’s problems at this time. Professionally, she was often so frustrated she felt like screaming. Bette had expected that after Jack Warner had seen her work in the soon-to-be-released Of Human Bondage, he would take her much more seriously as an actress. Instead, he stuck her in a melodrama called Housewife, of which she later said, “Dear God, what a horror!” When J.L. told her in June 1934 that her next role would be as Della Street in a Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Howling Dog, she refused to report. As Ham had warned her, she was immediately placed on suspension.
Bette’s professional troubles spilled over into her personal life and affected her marriage. She resented Ham’s increasing lack of interest in her career. “He had no idea how time-consuming and enervating it was,” she said. “There were times when he was as distantly related to my present crises as a fur trader on the Yukon.”
Ham shared her resentment, to a degree she never imagined. His wife was no longer the woman he had married three years earlier; Hollywood had changed her. He had never heard Bette swear until her battles with Jack Warner began. She had never smoked until she came to Hollywood; now she “smoked like a chimney” as Ham put it, lifetimes removed from the nineteen-year-old girl who was shocked by Ginny Conroy’s first puff. Worst of all for Ham, Bette was so wrapped up in her career that she often neglected him. Even when he wasn’t working—and his employment was sporadic—he rarely got to interact with Bette in any meaningful way. She left for the studio at six in the morning and often worked until eight or nine at night. Then she would lie in bed and study her script for the next day’s shooting, and put out the lights by 11 in order to get a full night’s sleep. Ham wondered whether Bette cared more about her career than she did him; that she pooh-poohed the idea did little to calm his anxiety.
He would never have admitted it to Bette, but Ham had ambivalent feelings about her ambition. He wanted her to succeed to whatever degree she desired, but he worried that every advance in her professional standing would put a further wedge between them, take up more of her time, increase the discrepancy between their incomes. What Bette interpreted as Ham’s indifference to her career was just as much cold fear that he would lose the woman with whom he had expected to spend the rest of his life.
One has to feel compassion for Ham Nelson’s classically show-business predicament, even if elements of it have become cliché. None was more so than the romantic and sexual jealousy that now tugged at him whenever Bette was in close proximity to one of the many handsome, often sexually profligate leading men wi
th whom she interacted. He had known nothing of Bette’s infatuation with George Brent, but when the Nelsons attended a screening of Front Page Woman, which paired the two once again, he seethed at the doe-eyed way she stared at Brent through most of the picture. The film’s director, Michael Curtiz, was sitting behind them and recalled this exchange: “You must be in love with that guy the way you ogle him constantly,” Ham hissed in a too-loud whisper.
Bette took a deep breath. “But Ham, I’m paid to be an actress, and you have to look interested in your leading man.”
“Horseshit!” Ham shot back, and walked out of the room.
Bette’s suspension over her refusal to do The Case of the Howling Dog lasted just two weeks; after her astonishing reviews for Of Human Bondage, Warner at last gave her a meaty role as a mentally unbalanced housewife in a Paul Muni picture, Bordertown, which she began to film in August 1934. Her performance—especially in a scene where her character goes mad on the witness stand—won critical praise. “The most interesting phase of the picture,” The New York Times critic noted, “is Bette Davis’s performance as a cheap and confused wife who murders her husband and then degenerates under the strain.… Miss Davis plays the part with the ugly, sadistic and utterly convincing sense of reality which distinguished her fine performance in Of Human Bondage.”
