James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  And the closeness she had always shared with Ruthie made her very uneasy about being alone. After Ham left, Bette begged her mother to come and stay with her. Ruthie obliged, but their relationship was more fractious than ever. They fought about matters large and small: Ruthie was spending too much money, Bette was being surly and unpleasant, Ruthie was trying to control Bette’s life, Bette didn’t appreciate her mother’s wisdom and concern for her.

  Quickly enough, Bette realized that she could no longer live with her mother. Ruthie went back to her own home, hurt and angry, and a new friend of Bette’s, Ruth Garland, moved in to take her place as Bette’s companion.

  Bette had lost both her husband and Howard Hughes, but she still, after a fashion, had William Wyler. They had drifted apart, he’d spent time in Europe, but it was clear that his love for Bette had not waned. One would have thought he’d have been wary of her. He had already been through a short, volcanic marriage to the neurotic, temperamental actress Margaret Sullavan, who had been married to Henry Fonda. Wyler was obviously attracted to vibrant, mercurial women, and even while Bette was buffeted by the Hughes debacle and Ham’s divorce action, he continued to see her, making love to her one day and battling viciously with her the next. The fights with Bette didn’t destroy his ardor—he wanted to marry her.

  For months, Bette told him that she couldn’t give him an answer yet—she was too upset, too confused. That was true, as far as it went, but that was only part of it. As much as Bette loved Wyler, admired him, and enjoyed being subjugated to him, she also feared him. She worried that the strength of his personality would overwhelm hers, that she would be consumed by him and lose the independence she so loved. Moreover, her intelligence told her it would be a mistake to marry a man so much like her father.

  In October, Bette and Wyler fought badly and didn’t speak to each other for weeks. Finally, she received a note from him. Still in a snit, she tossed it aside: I’ll show him! Several days passed before she opened it, and what she read shocked her. Wyler had asked her one more time to marry him, and had given her this ultimatum: if she didn’t respond within two days, he would marry another woman. Bette was beside herself. Could Willie really mean it? She had lost Ham and Howard Hughes. She couldn’t lose Willie. Fear him she might, but somewhere deep in her heart she felt that he was the only man she had ever truly loved. She couldn’t lose him!

  Bette spoke to friends about how desperate she felt at that moment. Frantic, she telephoned Wyler at his home, at the studio, at his club. No one would tell her where he was. She left urgent messages. She called his friends, and they seemed oddly reluctant to talk to her. After half a dozen calls, Bette grew frenetic, pacing back and forth across her living room, puffing violently on her cigarette, the knot in her stomach tightening with the fear that something was terribly wrong. Nervously, looking for some distraction, she turned on the radio. She didn’t like the music, and was about to turn the set off when the news began. The announcer read the report that the well-known director William Wyler had married the beautiful starlet Margaret Tallichet, who had been tested as Scarlett O’Hara for Gone With the Wind.

  Bette stood by the radio, staring blankly ahead, and mechanically turned the knob to shut it off. She closed her eyes for a few minutes, then sank onto the sofa. She felt too numb to cry.

  * * *

  1 In order to have the film finished by then, Henry Blanke had asked John Huston, who had worked on the script, to direct the scene in which Julie’s admirer and Pres’s brother duel, thereby freeing Wyler to complete his scenes with Bette. It was Huston’s first stab at directing.

  PART THREE

  “The Fourth Warner Brother”

  ELEVEN

  B

  ette glided into the grand ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles for the eleventh annual Academy Awards presentations on February 23, 1939, and soaked in the applause that erupted around her. She was surrounded by what can only be called an entourage—ten people, including her mother, her cousin John Favour,1 her Aunt Mildred, Ruth Garland, and Robert Pelgram. (Bobby, newly pregnant, felt under the weather and stayed home.)

  Bette’s attire this evening was the antithesis of her controversial look of three years earlier. This time, she was every inch the movie star in a stylish brown net gown with a tight bodice and full skirt, topped off with ostrich feathers that billowed up around her shoulders and a bird of paradise sewn across the front.

  Bette was applauded so lustily because there was little doubt that she would again win as Best Actress. Jezebel had received four other nominations, including Best Picture (a first for a Davis film), but William Wyler had been overlooked for a Best Director nomination. Four hours into the ceremony, after Fay Bainter had been chosen as Best Supporting Actress for Jezebel, Bette accepted her second Oscar in three years. “This is the happiest night of my life,” she told the crowd and an international radio audience. “I am especially proud because I loved Julie so, but in accepting the award let me ask the man who made Julie what she was to stand up and take a bow.” She gestured to Wyler, who responded to the spotlight and applause and kissed Bette as she returned to her crowded table. She later said that to win this Oscar was far sweeter because, unlike her first, she felt that she had really earned it.

  As tumultuous and distressing as her personal life had been over the past year, Bette’s career had had the forward momentum of a tidal wave. Jezebel had been a huge commercial and critical success; so too had The Sisters when it was released in October 1938. The enormous success of Dark Victory the following April would cement Bette’s position in the front rank of movie stars—and convince Jack Warner once and for all of what he had in Bette Davis.

  The ad copy for Dark Victory, although pretentious as only Hollywood self-congratulation can be, was a clear sign that at long last her studio appreciated Bette: “Out of the blazing fires of her genius, the screen’s most gifted actress has created a gallery of unforgettable women. Now Bette Davis, the winner of two Academy Awards, comes to you in the climax of all her dramatic triumphs. In the role she waited eight years to play. In the greatest picture of a woman’s love that the world has yet seen.”

  The “eight years” was a stretch, since Dark Victory had played on Broadway with Tallulah Bankhead only five years earlier. And unmentioned in the ad, of course, was the fact that it had taken Bette two years of battle with Jack Warner before he agreed to let her do the picture. Warner felt that the story of Judith Traherne, an insouciant society girl who bravely battles an inoperable brain tumor, was “too downbeat” to appeal to the masses. He told Bette, “When you’re just getting into high gear, why go morbid on your audience? All those women out there want to see you making love, fulfilling their dreams vicariously. Then you conk out on them!” But Bette pestered Warner more than she had since Of Human Bondage, and when Casey Robinson brought in a strong script and Edmund Goulding, one of Warner’s top directors, expressed interest, Warner gave in—but not before he told Bette, as he had when he lent her to RKO for Of Human Bondage: “Go ahead and hang yourself if you want to!”

  Dark Victory turned out to be the archetypal tearjerker and the quintessence not only of a “woman’s picture” but a “Bette Davis picture” as well. Judith Traherne’s carefree high spirits give way to bitterness and cynicism when she realizes her condition is terminal, but she soon faces reality, marries the doctor who has tried to help her, and faces death with quiet valor.

  Keeping Judith free of self-pity was a struggle for Bette, she later said, because she was feeling so much of it herself: “Judith did not know what self-pity was. It was Ruth Elizabeth, damn her. She was calling the shots.” But the strength and courage of the character helped keep Bette’s own emotions on a more even keel, and the depletion she felt after all that had happened to her left her “docile,” on and off the set.

  Ruthie found this new Bette “refreshing,” and so did the film crew. By this juncture in her career Bette was convinced that if her film
s and her performances were to be top-notch, she would have to fight—and fight and fight and fight—for every creative idea she had. Even when she respected her director, there still might be differences in their approaches to her characterization, her playing of a scene, even just a line of dialogue. She rarely backed down. If she thought her director weak or lacking in creativity, her fear that the film would be a disaster could turn her into a harridan—demanding, intractable, temperamental, sometimes even irrational.

  A cinematographer who had worked with Bette several times told the journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns that when Bette felt threatened, the tension on her sets was unbearable: “She is the most exacting star, the most ruthless I have ever known. She sees everything, watches everything, will never put up with mistakes, says what comes into her head, never pulls a punch, screams and weeps and drives everybody to distraction. She can be fury or angel or clown, which doesn’t make her popular—but does make her the finest dramatic actress I ever photographed.”

  Because of her “weakened condition” while she was filming Dark Victory—and because she felt confident in the hands of director Edmund Goulding, whom she called “a true genius of film-making”—Bette was a self-described “doll” on the set. The twenty-seven-year-old acting neophyte Ronald Reagan certainly thought so. In Hollywood just eighteen months after a career as a sportscaster in Des Moines, he was a Warner contract player and had been cast as one of Judith’s feckless society “boyfriends,” Alec; his main scene with Bette was in a nightclub, where Judith purposefully gets drunk after learning of her malignancy. Although Bette told David Hartman in 1981 that Reagan at the time seemed to her a “silly young kid,” he remembers her with fondness. “She was not only a great star and probably our greatest actress, but also a professional of the highest order.”

  Reagan recalls that Bette took his side in a dispute with Edmund Goulding over the nightclub scene. “Mr. Goulding wanted me to play my character as if he were the kind of guy…” He paused to consider the most delicate way to put it. “The kind of guy who wouldn’t care if a young lady were undressing in front of him. And he wanted me to encourage Bette to get even drunker. I felt that this man had real affection for Bette and would have done just the opposite. He would have wanted to help her, not encourage her to feel even worse. Goulding definitely disagreed, so when we took a break I went to Bette and told her how I felt. And she was wonderful. She agreed with me completely. In fact she said, ‘That would be better for me, too.’ So she went to talk to Goulding, and he didn’t know that I was listening, but he told her to do it the way I wanted. Then he came to me and [instead of admitting that Reagan had been right] told me that Bette wanted me to play it that way.”

  Reagan never told Bette of his distress at the overall interpretation of Alec’s character that Goulding wanted from him. “I wondered why he didn’t come to me,” she said. “Alec as written was a wimp. I should have insisted on a rewrite. Dammit! But I was a mess emotionally at that time.… I had my hands full.”

  Especially so because Bette was now embroiled in yet another affair. George Brent played the doctor who loves and marries Judith despite her terminal condition, and Bette was still smitten with the reliable leading man who had attracted her on the set of So Big six years earlier. Brent finally reciprocated her feelings after his divorce from Ruth Chatterton. At that point Brent’s affection for Bette and his sympathy for her personal problems turned to sexual attraction, and they began an affair about a month before Bette’s divorce was final. The studio prevailed on Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons not to reveal the relationship (mainly because Bette was afraid Ham might use it against her in court), and the couple were able to carry out their trysts without too much fear of public discovery.

  She was deeply fond of Brent. “He was a charming, caring, and affectionate man, with a wonderful sense of humor. When he became infatuated with me, I was delirious. After Ham, I needed a strong man like George.” But she was amused to find that Brent, only thirty-five, had prematurely gray hair that he had darkened for years. “He used to stain my pillowcases with hair dye!”

  Once Bette’s divorce was final, she was immensely relieved that she could at last be public with her affection for a man other than Ham Nelson. “We went to a lot of Hollywood places together,” she said, “even the racetrack, which, in those days, was about the most public place you could go.” The studio, she recalled, was “delighted” with the romance; Hal Wallis felt it was making Bette’s performance all the better, and the publicity would surely help the box office.

  Dark Victory opened in New York on April 20, and the next day Bette had the best reviews of her career. Frank Nugent in The New York Times called Judith Traherne “a great role—rangy, full-bodied, designed for a virtuosa, almost sure to invite the faint damning of ‘tour de force.’” And Davis in the role, he added, “is enchanted and enchanting,” playing Judith with “eloquence, tenderness and heart-breaking sincerity.” The New Yorker observed that “the bravados of her agonies will touch the nation’s heart,” and Time magazine’s critic wrote that “Dark Victory, if it were an automobile, would be a Rolls Royce with a Brewster body and the very best trimmings.… It puts [Bette Davis] well up in line for her third Academy Award.”

  Bette’s head was swimming with all this praise as she ate lunch in the Warner commissary the day after Dark Victory opened, to strong box office. She was aware that all eyes were on her, some filled with admiration, some with envy. One contract player after another came to her table to congratulate her. Bette later said that she felt like running to the middle of the room and shouting, “By damn, I was right! Everyone in America wants to see a story where the heroine dies in the end! I’ve won my battle, and I just may win my third Oscar!”

  Dark Victory was only the first of four superlative Bette Davis films released in 1939. Each of them brought in over $1.6 million in ticket receipts, and in each Bette provided a vivid and distinct characterization. The sweeping historical drama Juarez, released five days after Dark Victory, cast Bette as Carlotta, the wife of Austria’s Archduke Maximilian, who is installed by Napoleon III through a rigged election as the emperor of Mexico. Benito Juarez, the rightfully elected president, wages a rebellion that ends in Maximilian’s death and Carlotta’s descent into madness.

  Edwin Schallert, in the Los Angeles Times, called Juarez “magnificent,” and James Hamilton in the National Review said of Bette, “[She] subdues her strikingly individual characteristics to a portrayal of the Empress Carlotta that is not only touching but overtoned with premonitions of her eventual tragedy, and her final flitting away into the darkness of madness is the most unforgettable moment in the picture.”

  Bette offered a starkly different portrayal in her next film, The Old Maid, costarring Miriam Hopkins. As a Philadelphia society girl with a terrible secret—she has a love child by a man recently killed in the Civil War—Bette was given the opportunity to play a woman who ages twenty years and displays a wide range of emotions.

  To say that relations between Bette and Miriam Hopkins were strained during the filming of The Old Maid would be an understatement. They remembered each other vividly from the Cukor/Kondolf stock company, and each was wary. Miriam resented Bette, galled by the fact that a woman who had been an ingenue when she was a leading lady was now the biggest star in Hollywood.

  Miriam was bitter too about losing the Julie Marsden role in Jezebel to Bette—she had created the character on stage. At first she had held the screen rights to the play along with its producer, Guthrie McClintic, and he was ready to sell them to Warner Brothers. When Hopkins heard that they wanted the vehicle for Bette, she balked, insisting that she would not sell the rights to anyone unless she played Julie. Finally, assured by Warners that she would be given first consideration, she sold her share for $12,000. But the agreement didn’t guarantee Hopkins the film, and when Bette was cast she flew into a rage. Her mood soured further when the film was such a big hit, and it positively curdled when Be
tte won the Oscar for it.

  On The Sisters, her next picture after Jezebel, Bette had added insult to injury in Miriam’s view when she had a brief affair with her director, the Russian-born Anatole Litvak—who was Miriam’s husband. His marriage, like Ham and Bette’s, was crumbling, but that did little to assuage Miriam’s anger. She still had a sexual hankering for Davis, and for Bette to dally with her husband—well, that was too much. Bitterly, she characterized Bette as “a greedy little girl at a party-table who just had to sample other women’s cupcakes. First she wanted my husband and then she wanted Hepburn’s boyfriend [Howard Hughes], and her own husband was all but forgotten!”

  Hopkins threatened to name Bette as corespondent in her divorce action against Litvak, but Jack Warner talked her out of that potential disaster. When his divorce was final, Litvak shook his head thinking back on events. “Marriage with Miriam—an affair with Bette—I’ve had enough of crazy, temperamental women to last me for years. Now I need a rest, no?”

  Around this time Warner Brothers signed Hopkins to a picture-to-picture contract, promising her high-quality vehicles and hinting at a possible costarring stint with Davis. “If I get into a picture with that husband-stealer,” Hopkins sputtered, “I’ll show her what acting is really about!”

  That set the stage for the first working relationship between the two women in ten years, The Old Maid. Bette knew she was in for trouble on the first day of shooting, when Hopkins swept onto the set wearing one of Bette’s costumes from Jezebel. Bette refused to give Miriam the satisfaction of a blowup and simply ignored this flagrant provocation. Her sanguinity, however, didn’t rub off on Miriam. “Ensuing events,” Bette said, “prove[d] she wanted even more to be in my shoes than in my dress.”