James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  She had been suspended briefly several times before, but this was the longest layoff yet, and she was worried about the standard clause in her contract that allowed the studio to add the months of suspension to her total term of service. At this rate she could remain a slave to Warner Brothers for the rest of her life.

  Still, she wouldn’t relent. If she didn’t insist on better treatment, she felt, she would be “in bondage for years, with no choice but to work in bad pictures and with bad directors—so that soon I would have no career at all.” On June 6, Bette met with Warner in his office and told him that she wanted a new contract that would grant her a salary increase, the right to do radio work and make outside pictures, and approval of her scripts and cameramen.

  Warner told her that he couldn’t grant any of her creative requests but he assured her, once again, that he was always on the lookout for “good stories” for her. He would agree, he said, to give her a new seven-year contract that would raise her pay immediately to $2,000 per week and increase it every year until she was making $3,500 a week—but only if she would agree to do God’s Country and the Woman.

  Bette said she’d think about it. When Warner called her ten days later, she told him that he would have to talk to her attorney, Dudley Furse. At two-thirty on the excessively hot Thursday afternoon of June 18, Warner met with Furse and Bette’s business manager, Vernon Wood. The two men sat in front of Warner’s massive oak desk along with Warner’s outside lawyer, Ralph Lewis, and in-house counsel, R. J. Obringer. After the five men commiserated for a while about the heat, Furse said that Bette was happy with the financial offer Warner had made to her, but that she still insisted on the creative concessions she had asked for.

  “I cannot do that, gentlemen,” Warner replied. As Wood began to speak up in argument, Warner interrupted him with a loud slap of his hand on his desktop. “It is amazing to me,” Warner boomed while beads of sweat popped out of Furse’s forehead, “that we can take a totally unknown individual like Bette Davis, spend money and time to groom her into a star, and pay her extremely high salaries, only to have her walk out on her contract and make outrageous demands. What are we supposed to do, give in to her whims whenever she has them?! This kind of nonsense is going to destroy this industry. Every actor in Hollywood will ‘walk out’ of their contracts if we give in to Bette Davis and there won’t be any motion picture industry left! I will increase her salary, gentlemen—her pictures have made a lot of money for us—but I will not give an inch on any of her other demands!”

  The quintessential Bette Davis character—Margo Channing in All About Eve, 1950.

  One-year-old Ruth Elizabeth Davis on an outing with her mother Ruthie, left, and her nurse, Mrs. Hall, spring 1909.

  A revealing Davis family portrait, 1910—outgoing “Betty” plays to the camera while her shy baby sister “Bobby” looks sad and stern father Harlow scowls.

  By the age of nine, Betty was already head and shoulders above her eight-year-old sister, literally and figuratively.

  A rare 1917 photo of Betty with her father, who was thirty-one. Shortly afterward, he was out of her life for good.

  Recovering from the burns she suffered when a candle set her Santa Claus costume on fire, 1919.

  Her first stage triumph, as The Moth, 1925. Afterward, her mother and sister looked at her “as if they’d never seen me before.”

  Bette’s acting school roommate, Virginia Conroy, shocked her when she lit up a cigarette.

  Bette’s first screen test, made while she was at acting school, with classmates Ted Scharf and Ginny Conroy in 1928. Nothing came of it for any of the participants.

  On Cape Cod in the summer of 1928, Bette and her puppy Boojum pose with, left to right, Ginny Conroy, Ruthie, and Bobby.

  A dramatic moment with Grover Burgess in The Earth Between, Bette’s off-Broadway New York debut, spring 1929.

  A striking portrait of Bette that she sent to Broadway casting agents throughout 1929 and 1930.

  Bette arrives in Hollywood with Boojum and Ruthie on December 13, 1930. A Universal representative left the train station without her because he hadn’t seen anyone who looked “remotely like an actress.”

  A scene from Bette’s first film, Bad Sister, 1931. Universal chief Carl Laemmle said she had “about as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville.” Summerville is at the far right in this picture.

  A breakthrough after six dreadful films: The Man Who Played God with George Arliss for Warner Brothers, 1932. The studio soon put her under contract.

  In August 1932, Bette married her boarding-school sweetheart, Harmon O. (“Ham”) Nelson. When she first met him, Bette recalled, she found herself “wading in those velvety brown eyes.”

  One of Bette’s earliest Hollywood portraits, 1931.

  With Leslie Howard in the film that gave Bette her first great dramatic opportunity, Of Human Bondage, 1934.

  Five indifferent films later, Bette finally had another juicy role as the alcoholic actress in Dangerous with Franchot Tone, 1935. (Nickens)

  The highest accolade: Bette wins an Academy Award for Dangerous in 1936, along with Best Actor Victor McLaglen. She nicknamed the statuette “Oscar,” Ham’s middle name, because its backside reminded her of Ham’s.

  After too many dreary roles, Bette walked out on her Warner contract in the fall of 1936 and fled to England, where the studio sued her for breach of contract. She lost the case.

  The movie—and the man—that changed Bette’s professional life: on the set of Jezebel with director William Wyler, 1937. During filming, she and Wyler began a tempestuous extramarital affair.

  The Oscar Bette thought she deserved—Best Actress of 1938 for Jezebel. Spencer Tracy was chosen Best Actor for Boys’ Town.

  As Julie Marsden in Jezebel, Bette was more controlled—and more beautiful—than ever before on screen.

  September 1938: Bette meets millionaire Howard Hughes at a Hollywood fund-raiser. Their indiscreet affair brought Bette and Ham’s marriage to a bitter end.

  With Errol Flynn in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Although she was sexually attracted to Flynn, she resisted becoming “another notch on his belt.”

  With George Brent in the popular 1939 tearjerker Dark Victory. Bette had been attracted to Brent for years, and they began an affair.

  Divorced from Ham, Bette dines out with her mother in Hollywood, circa 1940. Ruthie’s extravagance with Bette’s money caused heated arguments between the two.

  Bette and her second husband, Arthur Farnsworth, make the Hollywood scene in 1941. The marriage was marred by Farnsworth’s furtive drinking.

  The venomous Regina Giddens of The Little Foxes gave Bette a meaty role, but the contentious filming marked the end of her professional relationship with William Wyler. (Neal Peters Collection)

  According to notes made by Obringer, Warner calmed down when conversation turned to the fine points of his financial offer to Bette, and the meeting ended on an amiable note as Furse and Wood assured Warner that he was being tremendously fair and that they would do their best to persuade Bette to accept his offer and return to make God’s Country and the Woman.

  She refused, and with that she made it clear that her main concerns were creative, not monetary. Convinced that he would not be able to sway Bette any other way, Warner began a press campaign designed to pressure her through public disapproval. The studio quietly leaked the word to columnists that Bette was making $5,000 per week and expressed outrage at her dissatisfaction with this salary at the height of the Depression. The gossipist Louella Parsons, always the ally of the studios in conflicts of this kind, wrote dismissively on June 20 that Bette was just “pouting about money and other things.”

  Bette was, of course, making less than one-third what the studio claimed, but still she wasn’t likely to garner much sympathy among the masses: the average annual salary in America was only slightly more than Bette made in a single week. Her contention that her problems with the studio had nothing to do with
money, on the other hand, was no less deceptive than Warner’s exaggeration of her salary. In fact she had been badgering Warner for a raise for months; she argued that her Academy Award had brought prestige to the studio, and her name was now, as she put it, “directing people into the theaters.” Her recent films had grossed between $400,000 and $800,000 at the box office, princely sums in those days, and Bette felt she deserved a heftier share of the profits.

  She later explained why. “Your professional life is short and if you do not make enough to protect yourself after the public is tired of you, you will be broke and jobless when your career is ended.… Your pay must equal that of other performers whose popularity and drawing power are comparable to your own.… I make these observations gratuitously because money was not a point at issue.”

  Of course it was, but when Bette refused to accept the raise Warner offered her without other concessions, she made it clear that the quality of her films was the main issue for her. If Jack Warner wasn’t willing to grant her more control over that quality, she would just have to sit out this suspension.

  Bette’s layoff might have gone the way of the others—with her return to work amid glowing promises of better scripts—had it not been for the appearance of Ludovico Toeplitz, an Italian producer working in England. Toeplitz convinced Bette that Jack Warner did not have the right to keep her from working, and that furthermore she should be working for him—for $60,000 a film.

  She decided to do so, and thereby set in motion a series of events that led her to flee the United States under cover of night and face a groundbreaking—and personally devastating—lawsuit in Britain.

  NINE

  B

  ette heard a sharp rap on the ship cabin’s door. She jumped out of bed and scurried into the bathroom to hide as Ham got up and opened the door to a young porter who announced, “There’s a cable for Mrs. Nelson!” Ham signed for the wire, and once the messenger was safely gone, Bette came out and read some words of encouragement from Ruthie. For the entire trip, Bette said, “I spent all my time hiding in the johnnie so that Warner Brothers couldn’t serve me with papers.”

  Bette had signed a contract with Ludovico Toeplitz to star in two of his productions, including one with Maurice Chevalier as her costar. She liked the projects and she had admired Toeplitz’s work, which included Elisabeth Bergner’s Catherine the Great and The Private Life of Henry VIII, which won a Best Actor Oscar for Charles Laughton in 1933. Toeplitz, a dapper man with a beard that made him resemble England’s King George V, produced quality films, and he promised Bette everything Warner wouldn’t: top-notch production values, first-rate directors, script approval.

  He also came through with his promise of $60,000 per film, nearly a year’s salary for Bette under her Warner contract. When the studio threatened to seek a court order against her deal with Toeplitz, the producer assured her that they wouldn’t be able to win one because he planned to make the pictures in England. As long as she could get out of the United States without being served legal papers, Bette was assured, she’d be home free.

  She went to great lengths to avoid process servers. She and Ham flew from Los Angeles to Vancouver at midnight one Saturday, since legal service couldn’t be made on Sunday, with Bette wearing a Garboesque hat pulled down to cover half her face. “Every time the plane stopped in the U.S.,” she recalled, “I felt like a convict.” The Nelsons then took a train across Canada—where they felt safe from American authorities—and sailed from Montreal to Britain aboard the Duchess of Bedford, where Bette cowered in the bathroom whenever there was an unexpected knock on the door. She needn’t have—Warner Brothers didn’t know she had left the country until she surfaced in Scotland.

  The ship docked at Greenock on August 18—Bette and Ham’s fourth anniversary—and Bette was in a carefree mood. She was convinced that nothing would stand in the way of her films with Toeplitz; even if the case went to court, she was advised, she would win it. She was excited to visit a foreign country for the first time, and she looked upon this sojourn as a second honeymoon, one that might salvage her deteriorating marriage. Six thousand miles away from Hollywood, she reasoned, “we might find ourselves again.”

  The visit began well. She and Ham rented a car and toured Scotland; they gaped at centuries-old castles, bicycled over heather-dotted hills, and played darts in village pubs. Bette made an emotional pilgrimage to Wales, her Davis ancestral home, but couldn’t find any relatives. Then she and Ham trekked south to England, where they stayed at the beach resort of Brighton “to watch the people” on their way to London. There, they stayed at the Savoy Hotel and Bette met with Toeplitz and the director Monty Banks to discuss I’ll Take the Low Road, her first project. By now the English press had latched onto the story of Bette’s flight from Hollywood, and she was startled by the enormous play it received on Fleet Street’s front pages: “I had not realized how well known I was abroad.”

  Early in September, Toeplitz sent Bette to Paris for costume fittings, and she felt a connection to France as strong as she had to Wales; she had gone from the homeland of the Davises to that of the LeFievres in a matter of weeks. “I had the most incredible feeling of at-homeness there.” She loved the French food, so much lighter than the British, which had put weight on her with its heavy, meaty breakfasts, shepherd’s pies, and Devonshire creams. When she left Paris she found she had lost the ten pounds she’d gained.

  By the time she left England again, she would wish she had the weight back.

  Bette got the bad news the moment she got back to London. While she had been in Paris, Jack Warner had sailed to England and met with Toeplitz in an attempt to convince him that his contract with Bette was illegal. The producer was adamant that he had every right to use her in pictures made outside the United States. Warner wasted no time; he retained one of Britain’s most celebrated barristers, Sir Patrick Hastings, and obtained a preliminary injunction that restrained Bette from working for Toeplitz until the case could be heard in the English courts.

  Bette had been sure the matter would never come to this, and she was both frightened and infuriated. As she usually did when challenged, she dug in her heels. She was Davis against Goliath, and this was no time to back down: her career as an actress, she was sure, rested on her determination to stay the course.

  Her first setback came when the barrister she had hired to represent her, Sir William Jowitt, asked for a $10,000 retainer in advance, as was the British custom. Bette was at a loss: she hadn’t been paid for months by the studio, she wouldn’t be paid anything by Toeplitz until she began work for him, and she didn’t have the money. Ham decided to return to the States since there had been some talk of a musical gig for him in New York before he left, and he told Bette he couldn’t let the opportunity pass. If things turned out badly, he reminded her, they might well have nothing to live on except his income.

  Bette understood his position intellectually, but emotionally she was crushed. The second honeymoon she had hoped for hadn’t materialized; it was clear that her problems with Ham couldn’t be solved by a change of scenery. And, rationally or not, she felt deserted by her husband at the moment she needed him most. She had supported him all the way, and now he was leaving her to “face the fight of my life alone.” Any income he might make in New York, she felt, would be “negligible in comparison to the moral support I craved at that moment.” As she stood and watched his steamer leave the dock at Southampton, she felt dazed and more alone than she ever had before. Fear, loneliness, emotional pain gripped her—then, contempt for what she saw as Ham’s bailout. “It was the most tragic day of my life.”

  Bette returned to London and took a tiny inside-court room at the Park Lane Hotel—because she needed quiet, she told the manager, but in fact it was to save money. She stayed in bed most of the time, surrounded by her unopened steamer trunks, crying. What was she to do? Ham had urged her to give up the fight and return home, and so had everyone else whose advice she sought. But she couldn’t br
ing herself to do it. She felt she was right, and to give up just because the odds were long went against every ounce of Yankee in her.

  Immensely relieved when Sir William agreed to forgo the advance payment, Bette girded herself for the trial, which began on Wednesday, October 14, in the King’s Bench Divisional Court. She recalled feeling tremendous awe as she sat in the huge courtroom, intimidated by its imposing aura, its heavy oak benches redolent with history, and its black-robed, white-bewigged barristers presided over by the redoubtable Mr. Justice Branson. She soaked in the atmosphere, excited in spite of everything, and told herself this was the greatest drama of her life.

  While Bette drank in the details around her, everyone else’s eyes were glued to her. The British press had worked itself into a lather over the case, and Bette’s every move and comment had been reported breathlessly for weeks. Reporters noted she looked wan and thin as the trial opened, easily fifteen pounds lighter than she’d been when she arrived. And despite all the stuffy British tradition of the proceedings, the press gave the trial something of a carnival atmosphere with its daily reports of Bette’s attire: much was made of the fact that she wore the same blue-and-red checked tweed coat and matching beret three days in a row. Fashion sticklers noted, however, that she did change her shoes.