by James Spada
Bette had, in fact, underplayed her “mad scene”; Jack Warner and the film’s director, Archie Mayo, wanted her to chew the scenery and act as they felt audiences expected a “nut” would. Bette argued that the crack-up would be far more effective if it was subtle, and she told them, “Believe me, I know something of psychopathic women. I’ve seen it.” Her performance, based more on nervous mannerisms and sudden unexpected movements, was clearly inspired by her experiences with Bobby’s breakdowns.
The dramatic reprieve of Bordertown didn’t last long, however, and Bette once again was maddened by the pictures Warner told her to do. Whether she was playing challenging roles in trashy pictures (The Girl from 10th Avenue) or dull, secondary parts in above-average productions (Special Agent), it galled her that she was still so often merely a feminine cog in the machinery of Warner’s men’s pictures. She was well aware that she wasn’t being showcased by Warner the way she would be at another studio—MGM, for instance. She knew she had the potential to become one of the screen’s premiere stars, and that with that would come the finest roles from Broadway and literature. But she felt so misused that she suspected Jack Warner and his executives of deliberately sabotaging her career: “It seemed that they wanted me to fail.”
Finally, a year after her triumph in Of Human Bondage and after incessant pleading by Bette, her studio finally gave her another challenging role. The film was Dangerous; and this time the character, Joyce Heath, was an alcoholic, self-destructive former Broadway star who believes she is a jinx to all who meet her. Dan Bellows, a handsome young architect (played by Franchot Tone, on loan from MGM), falls in love with her, helps her to dry out, and finances her stage comeback. He proposes to her, but she has a husband she’s never mentioned, and he won’t give Joyce a divorce. In a scene of high melodrama, she deliberately drives herself and her husband into a tree, crying, “It’s going to be your life or mine! If you’re killed, I’ll be free.… If I’m killed, it won’t matter any longer… and if we both die—good riddance!”
Joyce escapes injury, but her husband is paralyzed. Racked with guilt, she pushes Bellows away from her with despicable behavior and vows to take care of her husband. From the hospital, she can see Bellows leave a church after marrying another woman.
The script for Dangerous (loosely based on the tragic life of the stage and silent film star Jeanne Eagels, who died of a drug overdose in 1929 at the age of thirty-five) was a dramatic hodgepodge replete with much soap-opera silliness. But it gave Bette a meaty, rangy role to play. Joyce is seen wandering the streets in a drunken haze as the picture opens, then becomes desperate for alcohol at Bellows’s country home. The character goes through anger, girlishness, vindictiveness, psychosis, remorse, and rehabilitation. The character, if not the plot, was complex and finely layered.
Dangerous brought Bette together with Franchot Tone; and with her marriage so unsatisfying, she was ripe for infatuation. The thirty-year-old leading man, aristocratically handsome, with his mellifluous voice and a sophisticated demeanor more British than American, was catnip for the ladies, and he dutifully romanced as many of them as he could fit into his schedule. Bette admitted that she “fell in love” with Tone during the filming, and her passion was returned. For the first time, Bette became enmeshed in an extramarital affair—with the man who was now engaged to marry Joan Crawford.
The career of the strikingly handsome MGM actress had long tweaked Bette. She considered her rival less talented than herself, and envied the quality scripts, strong directors, and high production values that MGM routinely gave her. As jealous as she was of Crawford’s image as a beautiful and glamorous star, Bette’s decision to become sexually involved with Crawford’s fiance might well have carried a dollop of malice. Crawford was alerted to the liaison, but she was working long hours at MGM to finish I Live My Life, and there was little she could do. Clearly, the much-celebrated later feud between Davis and Crawford had its genesis in Franchot Tone’s dalliance with Bette.
One afternoon during Dangerous production, the film’s producer, Harry Joe Brown, walked through the open door of Bette’s dressing room and stopped dead in his tracks. There were Bette and Franchot in what he delicately described as “a very tight position.” When they saw Brown, neither seemed perturbed. Tone just laughed, and Bette asked him to close the door when he left. Later, Brown recalled, “they were all over each other on the set.”
Tone returned Bette’s passion, but not her love. For him, she was just another in a long line of conquests that had begun in college, when he was called Jack the Ripper—for all the panties he’d torn off young women in the back seat of his car. When the filming ended, so did the affair, and soon thereafter Tone married Joan Crawford—who never forgave Bette for diddling with her fiance.
Although the production values on Dangerous were typically Warner cheapjack, Bette’s acting knocked the film up a few rungs, and the critics raved. Grace Kingsley said in the Los Angeles Times that Davis “seems actual flesh and blood in Dangerous. That’s how penetratingly alive she is and how electric, varied as to mood and real her performance in the picture.” André Sennwald in The New York Times thought that “This Davis girl is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting of our screen actresses.”
More and more, audiences and critics had begun to notice and comment on Bette’s oddly nervous mannerisms, especially in moments of high drama. She seemed sometimes like a puppet on a string, or a toy wound too tightly. Some viewers loved this kinetic quality about Bette, others found her jerky movements off-putting. E. Arnot Robertson, in Picture Post, gave Bette an interesting and perceptive notice for Dangerous, one that harkened back unknowingly to her Salem ancestry: “I think Bette Davis would have been burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago. She gives the curious feeling of being charged with power that can find no ordinary outlet.”
This time, between the quality of the performance and the Academy’s chagrin over her Bondage snub, there was no denying Bette the Best Actress prize. On February 7, 1936, she became the first Warner Brothers actress nominated for the award, and on March 5 she won it. Bette later recalled that as she stood behind the podium, clutching the fifteen-inch-tall gold-plated man, she peered down at her mother, sitting between Bobby and Ham. Ruthie looked proud and regal, beaming as the applause rose around her. Bette thought to herself, If I don’t quiet the audience down and accept the award, Mother will! To hear Bette tell it, she might not have minded: “In a sense, it was Ruthie’s triumph and I knew it.”
When Bette returned to her table, she inspected the statuette and noticed something intriguing about it: the well-built man holding the scepter had a backside that reminded her of Ham’s. Harmon O. Nelson’s middle name was Oscar, and although he hated it (and hadn’t told Bette until after their marriage what the “O” stood for), she decided to call her award “Oscar.” The press picked up on it, and a nickname was born.
Bette was brought back to earth in her moment of triumph by a confrontation in the ladies’ room with an irate Ruth Waterbury, the editor of Photoplay. Waterbury harangued Bette about her attire, a loose-fitting, simple dress with a small print and wide white lapels: “How could you? A print! You could be dressed for a family dinner. Your photograph is going around the world. Don’t you realize? Aren’t you aware? You don’t look like a Hollywood star!” Oh, that again! Bette thought. By the end of the tirade Waterbury had backed Bette up against the pink-tiled walls like the object of a firing squad.
Waterbury later said she suspected that Bette had purposely dressed down to show her disdain for the award, but Bette denied that. The dress “was very simple,” she recalled, “and very expensive.” But with the evening’s attire formal—Ham wore white tie and tails, Ruthie an evening dress and fur—Bette did look a bit like the hired help. She didn’t care. She was determined to carve out an individualistic niche for herself in Hollywood, despite all the dire predictions of professional disaster hurled her way. The determination sprang l
argely from her conviction that she needed to be different to succeed, but there was also about it a soupçon of in-your-face contrariness. What Ruth Waterbury had really told her in that powder room, Bette suspected, was that she was no longer free to do exactly as she wished. Her reaction? “Never say this to a Yankee.”
Harlow Davis sat across from Bette and Ham and sipped the soup that Bette’s maid, Dell Pfeiffer, had served them. Harlow had come to Los Angeles on company business, and he telephoned Bette to ask if he could take her to dinner and meet her husband. Flustered, Bette asked him if he would like to come to her home for supper, and he agreed. During the meal, her hands shook so badly she couldn’t hold the spoon without splashing the soup; finally she pushed the bowl away.
Ham carried the day, engaging Harlow in conversation as Bette sat silently, conflicted emotions churning inside her, angry that Ruthie and Bobby had refused to join them but understanding their reluctance, especially as the evening progressed. As so often before, her father seemed incapable of giving her a compliment. When the subject turned to Bette’s career, Harlow said he thought her acting in Of Human Bondage had been “hysterical.” While Bette looked away, Ham said, “But surely you enjoyed Dangerous! Of course you know Bette won the Academy Award for her performance.”
“Yes,” Harlow conceded, “that was a good job. But I did think the movie was trashy and tasteless.”
It went on like that for the rest of the evening, and by the time Harlow left Bette’s stomach was in knots. “Christ, he’ll never change!” Bette railed at Ham, who tried to soothe her by saying that her father was obviously a cold and supercilious man and she shouldn’t let him get to her. It was scant comfort.
When Harlow returned to Boston, he wrote Bette a note. He thanked her for dinner and added, “Your husband is a nice young boy.” How contemptuous he can be! Bette thought. How superior!
As 1936 approached, Bette’s career was building in an ever-increasing crescendo, and she should have been the happiest girl in the world. She wasn’t. Her problems with Ham had mounted in direct proportion to her successes; the financial disparity between them increased every time she got a raise, and she was now making $1,350 a week. Ham had given in a little; he and Bette now lived in Greta Garbo’s former house in Brentwood. There were more of the creature comforts that Bette felt she simply had to have in order to project the “proper image’” of a movie star—servants, fancy clothes, grand transportation. (Forgotten in these instances, it seems, was her often vociferous determination to resist the trappings of stardom.) Clearly, Bette could be as complex and contradictory as her better characters. And the more his wife needed, the less Ham was able to supply her with it.
They both had begun to fear that theirs was, as Bette put it, a “misalliance,” but neither would admit it. Each hoped that their problems would somehow go away, but instead the chasm between them widened. In her memoirs, Bette called the marriage at this point “antiseptic”—surely a death knell for any romantic union.
Still, the thought of his wife with another man enraged Ham. He had heard whispers about Bette and Franchot Tone, but refused to believe them. Now, in retrospect, he wasn’t so sure, and his jealousies exploded early in 1936 when a young Warner contract player, Ross Alexander, developed an obsession for Bette, undeterred by her marital status. A handsome, well-built, bisexual twenty-eight-year-old, Alexander was tortured by his homosexual yearnings and compensated for them with indiscreet and desperate pursuits of strong-willed women, despite his marriage to the actress Anne Nagel. While Bette was vulnerable to romantic overtures, she sensed Alexander’s sexual confusions and shied away from him. She turned down his advances with a flip riposte (“I’m a married woman!”), but Alexander was persistent. He constantly maneuvered for a role in one of Bette’s pictures, and told anyone who would listen that if he could only do a love scene with her she would respond to him “like a wildcat.”
Word spread around the lot about Alexander’s interest and Bette’s lack of it, and he never was given a role in a Davis movie. Instead, he left a florid love note pinned to her dressing room door. As Alexander’s luck would have it, Ham made a rare visit to the studio that day and found the letter inside an envelope marked, “To my beloved one, Bette.” Alexander, in his ardor, had written the note in a way that implied that Bette returned his passion and that their love had been consummated. Nelson hit the roof. He confronted Bette on the set and waved the note in her face. “I want you to explain this!” he shouted.
As the cast and crew first grew quiet, then pretended not to pay attention, Bette pulled Ham off to the side behind some scenery and read the letter. As she crumpled it in her hand she told Ham, “That queer is having pipedreams. He’s trying to prove his manhood—or something—and he knows I see right through him.”
“I’ll kill him for this,” Ham sputtered.
“Deal with him as you like,” Bette haughtily replied as she whirled around and started back to the set. “Just get him off my fucking back!”
When Nelson found Ross—in a men’s washroom—he picked him up by the lapels and slammed him into a wall. “It’s my wife you’re writing mush notes to,” Ham shouted, “and she wants no part of it. Leave her alone!” Alexander tried to punch his way out of the clinch, but Ham was bigger and Ross wound up on the floor, his eye so blackened he couldn’t start his next picture for weeks. When Alexander didn’t let up in his pursuit, Bette started to taunt him about his insecure manhood.
Crushed, he complained to Jerry Asher that Bette was “a merciless bitch.”
“No, Ross,” Asher replied. “She just wants you to get off it.”
Jack Warner, as was the custom in such cases, was the first person notified of Alexander’s suicide. Around Christmas, the actor had picked up a male hitchhiker for sex, and the man had threatened him with exposure unless he was paid handsomely for his silence. Frantic, Alexander unburdened himself to his studio publicist, who along with the Warner lawyers “took care” of the matter. But Alexander was mortified by the disclosure of his indiscretion; and the humiliation he felt at Bette’s treatment of him, added to his shame over his homosexual cravings, proved too much to bear. In January, he fired a bullet into his brain.
Alexander’s death left Bette stunned and guilt-ridden over the way she had treated him. She asked Jack Warner if there was anything she could do, but he advised her only to keep quiet. Even before the police were called, Warner had ordered that Alexander’s house be ransacked and any letters from him to Bette Davis destroyed. The scandal would be bad enough without dragging the Davis girl into it.
While Bette grappled with her romantic problems, her twenty-five-year-old sister finally found some happiness. Bobby fell in love with the fair-haired, boyishly handsome twenty-year-old socialite Robert Pelgram, whom the Davises had known back in Ogunquit as “Little Bobby Pelgram.” He wore navy blazers and white flannel pants, flew his own airplane, and had a charming devil-may-care insouciance that Bobby loved.
Pelgram was Bobby’s first serious suitor; his love for her made her feel for the first time that she, not her sister, was the center of the universe. When Pelgram asked her to marry him, her emotional problems and institutionalization seemed a million years away. Accompanied by Bette and Ham, the couple was married in Tijuana on August 18, 1935—the Nelsons’ third anniversary.
When Jack Warner told Bette that he had cast her opposite Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart in his version of the prestigious stage success The Petrified Forest, she was so thrilled she absolutely gushed her thanks. Warner was embarrassed by her effusiveness, especially since he knew it wasn’t any more demanding a role than the ones she had complained about in the recent past. “I think I like Bette better when she’s fightin’ and fussin’,” he told Hal Wallis.
He didn’t have to wait long to get his wish. Bette had been so eager to appear in a quality production that she failed at first to see her role’s shortcomings, but they became clear to her as filming progressed. Again she wa
s little more than a female addendum to a man’s picture, and her character, an idealistic young truck-stop waitress, offered her thin challenge except the chance to prove, as one critic pointed out, that she did not “have to be hysterical to give a grand portrayal.”
Bette approached the end of her tether with Warner Brothers when her next two films, The Golden Arrow and Satan Met a Lady, returned her to dismal second-rate fare. The final indignity was God’s Country and the Woman, in which Jack Warner expected her to play a female lumberjack. This one forced a noisy confrontation in Warner’s office. Crimson with fury, Bette screamed at him, “I won’t do it! Satan Met a Lady was bad enough, but this is absolute tripe!”
Warner tried to calm her. “Bette, c’mon. You’ll have George Brent as your costar. And it will be in Technicolor!”
“I won’t do it.”
“Listen,” Warner cajoled. “If you’ll be reasonable and do this picture, I promise you a great role when you finish. I’ve just optioned a wonderful novel that isn’t out yet. It’s called Gone With the Wind. You were born to play the heroine.”
“Yeah,” Bette snapped acidly as she spun away from him and headed for the door. “I’ll bet it’s a pip!”
Preproduction began on God’s Country and the Woman in the late spring of 1936, and Jack Warner fully expected Bette to show up for work. Instead, she fled to the house in Laguna Beach she’d purchased as a getaway, and Warner put her on a three-month suspension. It was a blow, because Bette’s expenses were high. She had renegotiated her contract early in 1935, and she was now making $1,600 a week, but somehow it never seemed to be enough. A great deal of the money went to taxes, or to Ruthie to keep up the Hollywood house Bette had bought for her (“More elegant than mine”), or to helping Bobby and her husband out occasionally, or to the ever-growing expenses of keeping up appearances of being a star and paying for two houses of her own. Bette wouldn’t be able to live without her salary for very long.
