by James Spada
As Sir Patrick Hastings began his opening arguments for Warner Brothers, Bette caught his eye and felt a shiver. She faced a formidable opponent, and she quickly realized that not just her studio but the entire motion picture industry was aligned against her. Hastings’s characterization of Bette’s complaints against Warner, delivered in a booming baritone that filled the enormous chamber from corner to corner, made her want “to kill him”:
“This really is a case of great importance to this industry, because [Bette’s] contract… is the common form… on which most big film companies in America engage most big film stars.… What this young lady is seeking to do, in effect, is to tear up the contract.…
“A series of defenses have been put forward of this nature: It is said, ‘You (the plaintiffs) broke your contract; you wanted me to play more than six hours a day; you either give me too many films or too few.’
“Regarding these, I venture to suggest that your lordship will doubtless come to the conclusion that this really is rather a naughty young lady and that what she wants is more money.”
Bette fairly jumped out of her seat at that last remark, but her lawyer grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “That’s just what he wants,” Sir William whispered to her. “He wants you to blow up so he can point out to the judge that you’re an unstable, irresponsible woman.”
She had to bite her lip again and again to keep from screaming as Sir Patrick mocked her. “Miss Davis has characterized her employment at Warner Brothers as ‘slavery.’ The ‘slavery’ had a silver-lining because the ‘slave’ was, to say the least, well-remunerated.” He cited her salary, incorrectly, as $1,350 a week and added with a smile, “If anybody wants to put me into perpetual servitude on that basis of remuneration I shall be prepared to consider it.”
When Sir Patrick concluded his harangue, Bette ran the gauntlet of press and fans outside the courtroom and returned to her hotel. She was shaken. She had expected, no matter what the outcome of the trial, to be treated with respect as a serious artist concerned over the direction of her career. To be belittled as “a naughty young lady” left her uncomprehending. Her only comfort came from the knowledge that the next morning, Sir William Jowitt would present her side of the story.
Sir William’s opening sentence sent a shock wave through the courtroom: “Your lordship, I will call no witnesses.” The press and observers gasped and then groaned, eager as they were to see Bette’s “performance” on the witness stand. Clearly, Sir William felt it ill-advised to serve up his emotional client to the opposition. Sir Patrick was so angry not to have the chance to grill Bette that he tore off his white wig and threw it across the room—a very dramatic gesture in a British courtroom.
Bette felt vindication near as Sir William addressed piece by piece the unfair aspects of her contract. He pointed out that Bette was required to do anything the studio requested of her, including making political appearances, but that she couldn’t appear publicly without their permission. She was not allowed to work for another company, but Warner Brothers could lend her out to anyone without consulting her. She was required to work as many hours a day as her director thought necessary, six days a week. She had no say in the roles she played, nor in any aspect of any production. If she refused to play a role, she could be suspended, and the length of the suspension would be added to the term of the agreement. This, Sir William argued forcefully, could amount to “a lifetime of servitude.”
Now they can see what I’m up against, Bette thought as Sir William ticked off clause after restrictive clause. Surely Mr. Justice Branson will see that it’s wrong.
After Sir William concluded his opening remarks, Jack Warner took the stand. Under examination by barristers for both sides, Warner told the court that Bette’s refusal to work for him had already cost his company huge sums of money. “We generally have many films of the artist already produced but not yet exhibited,” he explained. “If the artist ‘walks out’ the value of the films depreciates greatly.” Warner claimed that theater owners would be less inclined to exhibit a Bette Davis picture after her walkout, but presented no evidence to back up this dubious assertion.
Warner wasn’t entirely honest on the stand. Asked whether Bette had ever complained to him about the quality of her film roles, he replied, “No one ever complained to me that her parts were unsuitable.” Under cross-examination by Sir William, he “admitted” that “on one or two occasions, she did. Sometime in 1935 she said words to the effect that her part was not so big.”
To prove that Bette’s main concern was more money, Sir Patrick put into evidence a letter Bette had written Warner earlier in the year. “In reference to our talk today,” she wrote, “it seemed to me our main problem is getting together on the money. You, as head of your firm, naturally know what your concern can afford. I have no desire to be off your list and I feel sure you do not wish it either. I also know that you have the right to keep me from working—a great unhappiness to me because I enjoy working.… I am the kind of person who thrives under change… mentally a change does me good, makes me do better work. I also am ambitious to become known as a great actress—I might, who can tell?
“As a happy person I can work like hell,” she went on, “as an unhappy one I make myself and everybody around me unhappy. Also, I know, and you do too, in a business where you have a fickle public to depend on, the money should be made when you mean something, not when the public has had time to tell you to go to hell.”
Sir William got Warner to concede that Bette was “seriously and deeply interested in her acting,” and that any actress might be “heartbroken” if made to play parts that were unsuited to her. But he denied that she had ever been forced to appear in a substandard picture, and pointed to the fact that he had paid $110,000 for the film rights to The Petrified Forest, the highest purchase price for a play to that date.
Bette’s barrister then turned to her work schedule, and Warner denied that she had to work late into the night very often. “Few people work more than eight hours a day,” he said. “I think Miss Davis’s record-sheets will show that she averaged five or six hours a day over twenty-five weeks.” But he added that Bette’s request for a 6 P.M. quitting time could make it “impossible” to complete a film on schedule.
Bette squirmed restlessly in her seat, frustrated by all this discussion of what she saw as peripheral issues. But Sir William was attempting to prove, point by point, that Bette’s contract made her “a piece of chattel,” that it was unfair, and thus the contract should be declared invalid.
As he closed his questioning of Warner, Sir William showed him a drawing of a scantily clad Bette in a poster for one of her movies. “Would you like to see a woman you were fond of portrayed to the public like that?”
“If she is a professional artist,” Warner replied, “it is part of her duty.”
“If she undertakes to act for you, it is for you to select what sort of films she should act in, and I suppose it is for you to select what sort of posters are prepared to portray the part she plays?”
“No, not exactly. There is a committee in New York to pass all posters and there is nothing lewd, licentious or vulgar allowed to be posted.”
“Whatever part you choose to call upon her to play, if she thinks she can play it, whether it is distasteful and cheap, she has to play it?”
“Yes. She must play it.”
Sir William’s closing argument on Friday afternoon, October 16, left Bette certain she would win her case. “I do not suppose,” he said, “that any artist can turn on his inspiration as one turns on a tap. His mood and inspiration have to suit. It is a contract which can be rendered tolerable and bearable by a human being only if the persons for whom the artist is working show tact, good temper and consideration.” Implicit, of course, was that Jack Warner had shown none of those qualities in his dealings with Bette. Mr. Justice Branson promised to announce his decision the following Monday, and as Bette left the courtroom she shot Jack Warner an unsubtle
“So there!” expression.
She left London for the weekend, staying at an inexpensive cottage in Brighton (where she had to put a shilling in a meter to turn on the heat). The wait threatened to unravel her. She paced up and down the seashore, smoking furiously, the icy late-fall winds off the Atlantic Ocean biting at her face. She ran the testimony over and over again through her mind. She was, she has said, “a wreck,” deeply melancholy about being alone, fearful that she might lose the case, furious with Jack Warner for his smooth lies and Warner’s barrister for his blustery derision. The hours seemed like years to Bette before Monday dawned, and she remained at the beach rather than appear in court to hear the decision.
Sir William knew the case was lost when Mr. Justice Branson, in a preface to his decision, described the circumstances that had led to the lawsuit: “In June of this year Miss Davis, for no discoverable reason except that she wanted more money, declined to be further bound by the contract, left the U.S.A., and in September entered into an agreement in this country with a third person.”
Bette was appalled by the fact that her artistic frustrations had been completely dismissed by the judge, but she would have lost the case no matter how sympathetic the court had been to her reasons for breaking the contract. For Justice Branson based his decision on a bedrock legal tenet: a contract is a contract. Warner Brothers had asked for a very narrow decision—whether Bette could legally work for someone else in spite of the clauses in her contract that forbade it. The court said no. She had signed the document, Branson noted, “with her eyes open,” and contracts would be worthless if their provisions could be violated at will and without penalty.
Branson did agree with precedents that contractees could not be forced to perform under a contract, and said that while Bette would not be “compelled” to go back to work for Warner Brothers, she “might be tempted to” considering her salary. In either event he stressed that her contract’s “negative covenants”—such as those that forbade her to work for a competitor—were fair and reasonable, and he agreed with Jack Warner’s assertion that Bette’s walkout could adversely affect the profitability of her already finished product.
The court granted Warner an injunction against Bette’s working for anyone else in England, but for just three years. Bette could return to Britain in 1939 and work, for Toeplitz or anyone else, but that was a moot point; she could not afford to remain idle and unpaid for thirty-six months.
What was left of Bette’s spirit crumpled when she got all this news. She told the press the decision was “a real sock in the teeth. I’m a bit bewildered.… I thought at least that it would have been a partial victory for me and for everybody else with one of these body-and-soul contracts.… I suppose I have been made an example of as a warning to anybody else.”
Over the next few days, bundled up in sweaters, Bette could be seen trudging desolately along the beach at Brighton. Sir William told the court that Bette would appeal, and Branson stayed the execution of the injunction. By now Bette had lost nearly twenty-five pounds, felt weak and sickly, and couldn’t face another day alone. She cabled her mother in California and asked her to come and lend her moral support. Ruthie packed her bags.
Just before she left, Ruthie got a call from Ham, and to her shock, he asked to speak to Bette. “She’s not here,” Ruthie replied, her voice dripping with anger and sarcasm, “she’s in England!” She was appalled that Ham could be so oblivious of Bette’s plight not to know that she was still out of the country. She wanted, she later said, to kill him.
Ham agreed to meet Ruthie in New York, and she was somewhat placated by his obvious despair as they waited on a windswept dock for Ruthie to board the ship. “Bette promised me she’d come home,” he complained. “What can you expect?” Ruthie told him. “There’s a lot at stake.” Just as she stepped on the gangplank, she was handed a cable. It was from Bette: “Don’t sail. Coming home. Meet me in New York.” Ruthie gave the paper to Ham and when he read it he threw it in the air, grabbed Ruthie, and spun her around. “I knew she couldn’t do that!” he exulted. “I knew it!”
Bette had decided to drop her appeal and accept the court’s verdict for a number of reasons. First among them were her rapidly mounting legal costs. The court had ordered her to pay the studio’s expenses as well as her own, and she already owed $15,000. An appeal would bring the total close to $25,000, and Bette didn’t have it. She was losing $1,600 a week by not working, and if the case dragged along through appeals her losses could spiral to $50,000. On top of that, Sir William was less than confident that an appeal would be successful.
She finally made up her mind to accept defeat graciously after George Arliss—at Jack Warner’s behest—paid her a visit in Brighton. “Go back,” he advised her. “You haven’t lost as much as you think. Go back and gracefully accept the decision. See what happens. I think good things. If in time you feel you’re being treated unjustly, put up another fight. I admire your courage in this affair, but now—go back and face them proudly.”
Bette knew Arliss was right, and she sailed to New York in November She had a brief reunion with Ham, but he decided to stay in Manhattan, where he had cut a record with Tommy Dorsey and was exploring a career change into artists’ management.
Bette and Ruthie arrived back in Los Angeles aboard the Santa Fe Chief on November 18, and a chastened Bette told the press, “I’m just a working girl—not a crusader. ‘Work, work, and more work’ is my motto from now on.… Whatever I am asked to do I shall willingly do.” Two days later she had a letter hand-delivered to Jack Warner, informing him that she was “ready, willing and able” to resume work at his studio. It was her understanding, she added hopefully, that her salary would be resumed as soon as Warner received the letter. Warner told her to be back at the studio on Monday morning at eleven-thirty.
To her great joy, Bette discovered upon her return to the lot that her battle of Britain had brought her at least one victory: increased respect from her studio. The fray had proven to them that Bette had the courage of her convictions, and it was equally clear that without her services, they would be poorer at the box office. To her surprise, Jack Warner “bent over backwards to be nice” once she reported back to work. He agreed to guarantee personally a $14,000 loan so that Bette could pay her legal expenses, and after she had paid half of the $10,000 she owed Warner Brothers for their court fees he told his legal department in a memo that it was not his wish to “try and collect the 5,000-odd dollars involved from Miss Davis,” but that he would like to retain the right to collect in the future. He never did.
Warner also increased Bette’s salary to $2,000 a week, as he had promised to do back in June, never again insisted that she bleach her hair, and—best of all to Bette—he sent her a script she loved, Marked Woman, in which she was to play a call girl who works for a gangster (modeled after Lucky Luciano) who has her viciously beaten when she informs on him. Bette has called the film “excellent” and “satisfactory in every respect.” It is neither, but in comparison to God’s Country and the Woman it’s a masterpiece. Bette must have been blinded to the film’s shortcomings by her sheer relief that she had a solid, fairly well-written script to play.
The film was well reviewed and successful at the box office (it took in $1.15 million), and with her next few films there was no question that Bette’s product had improved immeasurably. She may have disliked working with Edward G. Robinson on Kid Galahad (“All of us girls at Warners hated kissing his ugly purple lips”), but the film was called “easily the best fight picture ever screened” by Film Daily; and it grossed $1.5 million. That Certain Woman, in which she costarred with her erstwhile love object Henry Fonda, struck many reviewers as so much soap opera, but audiences liked it and Variety thought that Davis’s performance “displays screen acting of the highest order.” It’s Love I’m After reteamed her with Leslie Howard in a madcap comedy that The New York Times called “a rippling farce, brightly written and deftly directed… an agreeable change for Mr
. Howard and Miss Davis and it fares well at their hands.”
These last two films grossed nearly $1 million apiece, and Bette’s skein of box-office winners at Warner Brothers reached twenty-seven. Still, she had yet to appear in an A movie with a big budget, a world-class director, and high-level production values throughout. With her next picture, all that would change—and so would Bette Davis’s life. She was about to enter the rarefied stratum of superstardom—by playing a beautiful, self-centered, willful socialite in the antebellum South. It wasn’t Gone With the Wind; Bette had lost the opportunity to play Scarlett O’Hara when Jack Warner sold the rights to the project to David O. Selznick. But for Bette it was the next best thing: Jezebel.
From the first day of shooting in the fall of 1937, Bette knew that this film—and this director—would be different. William Wyler watched her closely as she strode through her first appearance in the picture, a scene in which Julie arrives late for her own formal-dress engagement party and sweeps in still wearing her riding clothes. At Wyler’s suggestion Bette had practiced lifting her long skirt insouciantly with her crop as she entered the house in order to establish immediately her imperious, rebellious nature. She mimed the gesture on the first take exactly as she had practiced it, and she was pleased. But Wyler asked her to do it again. And again. And again.
