James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Twelve takes later, Bette took Wyler aside. “What do you want me to do differently?” she pleaded. “I’m doing it exactly the same way every time!”

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” Wyler replied, and put Bette through her paces thirty-three more times. By then she was exhausted, irritable, and certain Wyler was a madman. “Okay, that’s fine,” he announced, and the day’s shooting wrapped.

  What was fine? Bette still didn’t think she’d changed her performance an iota, and she demanded to see a selection of takes. That night, as she sat in a small projection room with Wyler and watched herself on screen, she realized she was in the best directorial hands of her career: to her amazement, she could see vast improvement in the later takes, improvements she didn’t even realize she was making.

  “How is this possible?” she marveled. “You didn’t even tell me what you wanted.”

  “I am not a dramatic coach, Bette,” Wyler responded. “I can only direct actors, I can’t teach them how to act. I knew you could give me what was right for the character, even if it took a while. I trust your instincts.”

  That night Bette went home in a happy daze. Here was a brilliant director who believed in her talent and was willing to spend whatever time was necessary to get the best possible performance out of her. She thought she must be dreaming: this was the filmmaking experience she had so desperately longed for.

  Based on an unsuccessful stage play that had starred Bette’s stock company nemesis Miriam Hopkins, Jezebel told the story of Julie Marsden, a spoiled New Orleans heiress whose fiance, the handsome but stuffy young banker Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda), breaks off their engagement after Julie spitefully attends the 1850 Olympus Ball wearing red instead of the white required of single women—a shocking breach of etiquette that brings shame and humiliation on herself and Pres. He leaves for New York, and she pines away for him until she hears that he has returned. She throws a huge party, humbles herself before him, and asks forgiveness. Then he tells her he is married.

  Her machinations to win Pres away from his wife result in the murder of a family friend—who loves Julie—in a duel with Pres’s brother. Julie is able to redeem herself only when Pres is stricken by yellow fever during a raging epidemic, and she accompanies him to a quarantined island after she tells his wife that she knows “he loves you, not me” but that she, being a native of Louisiana and accustomed to its people’s habits and idioms, can best nurse him back to health. She promises that when Pres gets well she will see that he is reunited with his wife, and she means it.

  What Bette considered the “triteness” of Jezebel’s plot is not evident in the finished picture, thanks to both her richly modulated performance and the inspired direction of William Wyler. When the director began to shoot the Olympus Ball scene, a dramatic centerpiece of the picture, it had been sketched out by the screenwriters in just one line. Wyler turned it into a three-act mini-play fraught with tension, as Julie arrives delightedly expecting to cause a sensation and instead is greeted by shocked silence and ostracism by her friends and neighbors. Pres, determined to teach her a lesson, marches with her onto the dance floor, shooting daggers with his eyes at anyone who would dare say a word. As they dance, the other revelers shrink away from them until they are alone in the middle of the vast hall.

  “Take me home, Pres,” Julie pleads, realizing she has made a terrible mistake. Grim-faced, Pres holds her ever more tightly and they twirl across the floor like solitary figures on a music box. When the band leader interrupts the music, Pres insists he start up again. Finally the song is over and Julie rushes from the ball, thoroughly disgraced.

  The assistant director had allotted half a day’s filming for the five-minute scene; Wyler took five days before he was satisfied with it. Bette was tired but delighted; Henry Fonda was tired and irritated. He kept reminding Wyler that he had a clause in his contract that allowed him to leave the set by the second week of December to be with his wife in New York when she gave birth. “I don’t see how this thing is going to be finished by then at this rate,” he kept sputtering.

  Bette not only didn’t complain about the retakes, she seemed to thrive on abuse from Wyler that would have sent her stalking off the set if it had come from another director. “Don’t wiggle your ass so much!” he commanded one afternoon. Another time he barked, “Do you want me to put a chain around your neck? Stop moving your head!”

  Bette wasn’t offended. “Willie corrected a lot of my bad habits.… When he picked away at me, I knew he was right. I’d been with too many directors who didn’t give a damn about performances, just so they finished on time.” She gladly worked as hard as Wyler demanded, but she still longed for some indication that he was pleased with what she was giving him. She told him that she was an actress who “desperately needs the approval of my director” and would he please let her know when she’d given him a good take? The next day, after each shot he bellowed, “That was marvelous, Miss Davis, just marvelous!” Bette laughed and told him to “go back to being noncommittal!”

  Bette let Wyler run roughshod over her because she knew he was as much a perfectionist as she, was as dedicated to his craft as she was to hers. For the first time, she had a director who was strong enough to match her in every way. He wasn’t the namby-pamby sort she’d worked with so often in the past; and he was the antithesis of Ham Nelson, who in contrast seemed to her weak-willed, vacillating, and given to whining. Professionally, she admired and respected Wyler. Personally, she was falling in love with him.

  The film’s assistant editor, Rudy Fehr, knew that something was up between Bette and Wyler the night he and Warren Low, the editor, waited for the two of them to come to the projection room and review the day’s rushes. Just as the impatient Low was about to leave, Fehr recalled, Bette and Wyler came in “with lipstick smeared all over their mouths. They looked ridiculous. They should have looked in the mirror before they came in. This happened practically every night after that. They obviously were doing some heavy petting in somebody’s dressing room before they came to review the rushes.”

  “I adored Willie,” Bette admitted. “He was the only male strong enough to control me.” That was enough for her. Like many another woman before her, Bette was attracted to Wyler in spite of his looks. His short stature and blunt features had earned him the sobriquet “The Golem,” after the ugly clay monster in the German horror film of the same name. But Wyler, thirty-six, Jewish, born in Alsace-Lorraine, was one of those men who drew women to him through the sheer force of his personality and rock-solid masculinity. The latter was a stimulating quality for many women who lived and worked in a community teeming with milquetoasts and pretty boys unsure of their sexuality. “Willie was enormously attractive,” Bette said. “The sexual sparks were there from the beginning.”

  Wyler had first been given the chance to direct by the nepotistic Universal chief Carl Laemmle, a distant cousin. Derided at first as little more than one of “Laemmle’s parasites,” Wyler proved himself a talented director in the early ’30s, and quickly established himself as a no-nonsense sort prone to bluntness. While she was at Universal, Bette had had one encounter with Wyler she never forgot.

  Sent to audition for him in 1931 for a role in A House Divided, she had nothing to wear, and one of the wardrobe mistresses threw her into a tight-fitting, low-cut cocktail dress—the only outfit she had in size eight. “I was embarrassed,” Bette recalled. “Girls in New England didn’t dress that way, even for fun.” Wyler took one look at her and said loudly enough so that everyone on the soundstage could hear him, “What do you think of these dames who show their tits and think they can get jobs?” Bette had felt like crawling home.

  When she found out that Jack Warner wanted to borrow Wyler from Sam Goldwyn to direct Jezebel, she smelled revenge. She would meet with him, remind him of what he had said to her years earlier, and refuse to work with him. He didn’t remember any of it, but he apologized profusely, told Bette they were both more mature now, and assu
red her that he was eager to work with an actress of her accomplishments. She was totally disarmed.

  Both their working relationship on Jezebel and their romance were volatile. Again and again, just as she had with her mother, Bette tested Wyler’s mettle with temper tantrums, arguments, fits of exasperation. Unlike Ruthie, Wyler matched her strength for strength, never gave an inch, and eventually forced her to his will. By turns he would be sarcastic and aloof, charming and treacherous, and she delighted in the fact that Wyler was able to exert control over her in spite of her every wile, something no one before him had ever been able to do. She adored him for it. Eventually, she and Wyler developed a kind of shorthand so that she often knew what he wanted from her without his uttering a word. At other times, he’d drive her to exhaustion as she tried to decipher what he wanted; then he would give a small suggestion that “turned the whole scene around and made it live,” Bette said. “When I wasn’t hating him, I was loving him.”

  With Ham now in New York most of the time, where he worked as an artist’s representative at the Rockwell-O’Keefe talent agency, Bette and Wyler spent their evenings together, usually at his place, where she would cook a simple dinner and they would go over her scenes for the following day. She listened raptly as Wyler explained to her why, in his opinion, none of her previous movies had come close to tapping her talent. “Those were performances, Bette,” he told her. “You were acting, and acting very well. But I never got the sense that you were those people. A great actress becomes the part she is playing, and that’s achieved not by overwrought mannerisms but by an understanding of the subtleties of the character.”

  “I think I truly understand Julie,” Bette whispered.

  “I think you do too, Bette.”

  She was now deeply in love with Wyler, and terrified that Ham would hear about their affair. When she recalled her husband’s reaction to an imagined liaison with Ross Alexander, she shuddered to think what he might do if he found out about her and Wyler. It was a blessing Ham was in New York so much; as long as he stayed back East she wouldn’t have to deal with him—or with the increasingly tenuous state of their marriage.

  If Bette was thrilled by Wyler’s demands for retake after retake, the Warners front office was not. Hal Wallis, now the Warner Studio’s production chief, sent a memo to Jezebel’s associate producer, Henry Blanke, complaining about Wyler’s excesses on one scene: “Wyler is still up to his old tricks.… With all of the care he used in making closeups, certainly he must expect that we would use the greater portion of the scene in closeup. Yet, he takes the time to make sixteen takes of a long shot. What the hell is the matter with him anyway—is he daffy?”

  Jack Warner thought so, and when Wyler fell nearly a month behind schedule and several hundred thousand dollars over budget, he threatened to bring in William Dieterle to replace him. Beside herself when she heard this, Bette went to Warner and pleaded with him to let Wyler finish the job: “He’s making a great movie, Jack. I promise you it will make a lot of money. And it will establish me as a box-office draw, I’m sure of it.”

  “That’s all well and good, Bette,” Warner replied, “but what good will it do if the thing costs so much we wind up losing money no matter how well it does?”

  Finally, Bette said, “If you don’t fire Mr. Wyler, I will work every night until nine or ten o’clock, and be ready to shoot the next morning at nine—whatever it takes to finish.”

  Warner agreed, but Bette’s willingness to work late solved only a few of the picture’s problems. Chief among them was Henry Fonda’s looming December 17 deadline, which forced Wyler to shoot the actor’s scenes in bunches, out of continuity. When Fonda left the set to join his wife Frances back East (where she gave birth to daughter Jane on December 21), Bette had to perform her closeups without her costar to react to, a difficult task for any actor.

  The workload took its toll on Bette’s health. A scene where Julie defies a quarantine and tramps through a swamp to get to Pres in New Orleans was filmed at midnight; when it was completed, Bette was drenched, shivering, and exhausted; she caught a “miserable cold” that put her in bed for two days. Wyler was under so much pressure to finish the picture that he asked Bette to work on New Year’s Day, 1938.

  During the filming of another difficult scene that day, Bette received a telegram: her father had suffered a massive heart attack in Boston. He was dead.

  TEN

  B

  ette lay alone in her bedroom in the sprawling new house she and Ham had recently moved into at 1700 Coldwater Canyon and thought of her father. As she listened to the sound of rain beating against the roof and windows, she told friends, she felt strangely detached, as though the memories drifting through her mind were scenes from someone else’s life. She would think of the rare happy times, those Christmases when Harlow would put on his Santa suit and shout “Ho! Ho! Ho!” as he handed her and Bobby their gaily wrapped presents. Then her mind would sharpen and flash on one of his cruelties and she would shiver with the memory of his steely glare. Then anger would course through her as she thought of his cavalier treatment of Ruthie, and the financial hardship he had allowed his ex-wife and daughters to suffer.

  Mostly, she cried. Each new memory—of Ruthie’s gaunt face as she hunched over her negatives, of Harlow’s awkward backstage attempts to reach out to her, of Bobby’s silent year in a mental hospital—would wash a new wave of sorrow over her. How could her father have been so unfeeling? Why had he kept Bobby waiting for hours the one time she visited his Boston office, and then granted her an audience of only ten minutes? Why had he come to visit her and Ham in Hollywood only once, and then refused to give her any compliments on her achievements?

  She had heard that he had tossed a copy of Photoplay with her picture on the cover into a trash can and grumbled to a coworker that “a stage career would have been more dignified.” In spite of herself, she laughed, recalling how little he had encouraged her stage acting in the first place. Maybe if her father had lived to see Jezebel he would have finally given her some credit.…

  She longed for the father he might have been. She knew that with Jezebel so far behind schedule it would be very difficult for her to attend his funeral in Boston, and she felt oddly relieved. She was exhausted, fighting a bout of bronchitis and a still-lingering cold, and she knew she would never be up to the rigors of a funeral three thousand miles away. When angry memories flooded back, she was glad she was bound to finish Jezebel—“I wouldn’t go if I could!” Then she would sob at the thought that she held such ambivalent feelings about her own father’s funeral. In the end, she didn’t go.

  Bette’s return to work on Jezebel diverted her emotions somewhat, but she was close to collapse. Filming dragged on through January, and her physician wrote to Jack Warner that Bette would have to be given at least two months off once shooting was completed. “She is going on grit alone,” he warned. “She is not actually medically ill, but her general physical and emotional makeup is such that if we rush her into another picture she will be in danger of collapse.”

  Jezebel finally wrapped on the 17th of January, a month behind schedule and hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget.1 Depleted, Bette fairly crawled down to Laguna Beach, where she holed up, exhausted and depressed, and deftly avoided Warner messengers bearing new scripts. Adding to her state of near collapse was the volatility of her relationship with Wyler. She had been testy and irritable the last month or so of filming, and the two had frequently descended into arguments on the set. While Bette admired Wyler’s strength, he could only dominate her so far—then the masculine side of her personality would rear back, unwilling to be completely tamed by any man. “We fought and made up and fought and made up and fought and made up,” Bette said. “We were both miserable.”

  Her reflections on her father’s death had made Bette sense how much like Harlow William Wyler was. The director’s stern, uncompromising ways, his talent and intelligence, his taciturnity, his reluctance to praise her�
�all of it reminded Bette of Harlow. As contemptuous of psychoanalysis as she was, she was intelligent enough to figure out that in her relationship with Wyler she was seeking a loving version of Harlow Davis. The realization served only to make her more ambivalent about Wyler.

  The release of Jezebel on March 10 offered Bette and Wyler a happy respite from their troubled relationship; the film was a major success (it took in $1.46 million at the box office, for a profit of nearly $400,000) and Bette’s performance in it was lavishly praised by the critics. Wyler’s attempts to tone down his star’s more overwrought mannerisms led her to the most controlled, sustained characterization of her career, so that the few instances in the film when Bette is allowed free rein have far greater impact. One such moment stands out: when Julie learns that Pres has been stricken with yellow fever, she pleads to be allowed into New Orleans to see him. Outwardly she seems under control, but Bette expresses all of her character’s terror and frustration by frantically opening and closing her left hand. It’s a riveting and highly effective moment.

  James Hamilton of the National Board of Review praised Jezebel’s writing, direction, and photography and added, “At the center of it is Bette Davis, growing into an artistic maturity that is one of the wonders of Hollywood.… Her Julie is the peak of her accomplishments so far, and what is ahead is unpredictable, depending on her luck and on the wisdom of her producers.”

  Her producers, to Bette’s great chagrin, still sorely lacked wisdom when it came to her career. As he had with Of Human Bondage and Dangerous, Jack Warner failed to follow up Bette’s triumph in Jezebel with scripts that would build on her accomplishments. The first movie he offered her was Comet Over Broadway, a soapy backstage drama she refused to do; she was put on suspension. The second, Garden of the Moon, had a plot that was described thus: “Nightclub owner Pat O’Brien and bandleader John Payne have a running feud. There is time out for numerous Busby Berkeley numbers.” Bette remained on suspension rather than play O’Brien’s girlfriend.