James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Bette marveled anew at Miriam’s cache of tricks and stratagems designed to upstage her. As they exchanged dialogue, Miriam never looked directly at Bette; her eyes would wander as though she were impatient for her costar to stop speaking so that she could say her next line. During a scene on a couch, Hopkins continually slid farther and farther back on the seat cushion until Bette had to face away from the camera in order to look at her. It took twenty takes before she would stop it. Often when Bette had a highly emotional scene with Hopkins and gave a wonderful take, Miriam would spoil it by announcing that one of her buttons had popped or one of her hairpins had fallen out. The ruses changed, but the goal was always the same—to keep Bette off balance, to make sure she didn’t give too good a performance.

  Within a week Bette was so enraged that she would go home at night and “scream at everybody”—but she never blew up at Miriam. Bette knew that in her attempts to sabotage her, Hopkins was actually sabotaging herself. Cast as a hard, vengeful woman, Miriam chose to play her with sweetness and Southern charm in the hope of gaining audience sympathy. But Bette could see that Miriam was turning her character into a mushy nonentity, and in the process handing the picture to her. Although she worried that the film as a whole might be hurt by the weakness of Hopkins’s characterization, by now Bette disliked Miriam so much she had adopted one of Jack Warner’s favorite attitudes: Go hang yourself!

  Despite all this strife, The Old Maid was the third of Bette’s string of 1939 successes—and her biggest moneymaker to that date. The critics cheered the film and her performance, her third indelible characterization in three and a half months. Frank Nugent wrote in The New York Times, “Miss Davis has given a poignant and wise performance, hard and austere on the surface, yet communicating through it the deep tenderness, the hidden anguish of the heartbroken mother.”

  Although she badly needed a rest after making three films in a row, just one week after The Old Maid wrapped Bette reported for work on a grueling costume drama: the film version of Elizabeth the Queen, Maxwell Anderson’s blank-verse play about the relationship between Elizabeth I of England and Lord Essex. Her costar was Errol Flynn. She had fought with Jack Warner for months over the project, her first and only color film at Warner Brothers. She had been unhappy with her second billing under Paul Muni in Juarez, but capitulated because Muni was, after all, the title character. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again. When Flynn balked at Anderson’s original title (which excluded Essex), Warner suggested The Knight and the Lady or Essex and Elizabeth. Bette rejected both because Flynn’s role was given precedence. Warner finally came up with a title Bette liked: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. At this point she demanded top billing, and Flynn let her have it: his main concern was money, and he was getting twice as much of it as she was for the picture.

  Bette was unhappy about Flynn’s casting as Essex; she knew he wouldn’t do the role justice and lobbied for Laurence Olivier. “Mr. Flynn had no right to play Essex whatsoever,” she felt. “He wasn’t that kind of actor. He just wasn’t up to the gorgeous blank verse of this play.” But Warner was unsure about the commercial potential of the film and wanted Flynn’s proven box office strength to complement Bette’s. They stood fast on Flynn.

  Worried about her costar and the exigencies of so big a picture and so demanding a role, Bette was overwrought as production loomed. Concerned, the film’s associate producer, Robert Lord, sent a memo to Jack Warner on April 30. “How about health insurance on Davis?” he wrote. “Once she starts shooting we have no work without her. If she folds up, we stop shooting. I have been studying the lady and in my opinion she is in a rather serious condition of nerves. At most she is frail and she is going into a very tough picture when she is a long way from her best.”

  As a precaution, Warner tested the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald as Elizabeth, but Hal Wallis refused to consider anyone but Bette. Production began on May 24, and there was immediate friction between Bette and the front office when she insisted that her makeup man, the redoubtable Perc Westmore, shave her head, since Elizabeth was rumored to have been partially bald. There was no way the studio would allow her to appear in any scene without hair, but Bette convinced them that if Westmore shaved a few inches off her hairline and she wore a wig, it would be clear that she was bald without putting the audience off. Bette had studied the Holbein portraits of Elizabeth, and when she posed for her first makeup and hair tests, she was amazed at how much she resembled the monarch.

  Michael Curtiz, Bette’s old nemesis, was assigned to direct the picture. (It was Curtiz who had muttered in 1932 that Bette was a “goddamned-nothing-no-good-sexless-son-of-a-bitch.”) She savored the chance to work with him again from her new position of power, and in short order the two had their first clash—over her costumes. Curtiz thought they were too big and bulky; Bette and the designer, Orry-Kelly, knew they were historically accurate. When Hal Wallis sided with Curtiz, Orry-Kelly made a new, scaled-down wardrobe for the tests. Once filming began, Bette switched back to the original, larger outfits. No one noticed, and she had little further trouble with Curtiz. Whenever he forgot just whom he was dealing with, Bette would remind him with a sharp “Shut up, Mike! Shut up and let’s get on with it!”

  She had much more trouble with Flynn. Feckless as usual, hurt by her ill-concealed dissatisfaction with him as a costar, and stung once again by her resistance to his advances, Flynn childishly bedeviled Bette at every turn. He pinched her behind, yawned broadly or made rude gestures off camera while she emoted, aped the heavy walk she was forced into by her cumbersome costumes. Bette usually ignored him, but she lost her composure one afternoon and threw a candelabrum at him when he said she walked “like she had shit in her panties” and asked, “Shall I help you to the porcelain throne awaiting you in your dressing room, Your Majesty?”

  By now, Bette strongly disliked Flynn. “He was just not my kind of actor.” To get herself through the experience, she imagined Laurence Olivier emoting with her in scene after scene.

  Despite her trials, Bette took the time to help a frightened newcomer in the cast. Nanette Fabray, an eighteen-year-old appearing in her first movie, admitted she “knew nothing about markings or positionings or what one is supposed to do when the camera is on.”

  Fabray remembers that the set was so hot during shooting that Curtiz would call breaks every few hours to keep the soundstage’s fire sprinklers from going off. The cast and crew would disperse to their air-conditioned dressing rooms or the commissary to cool down. Bette remained on the stifling set and gave the lovely ingenue playing her lady-in-waiting some pointers. “Bette was wearing these enormously heavy costumes,” Fabray recalled. “The heat must have been unbearable for her. And yet in her very first scene with me, when I kept missing my marks and didn’t know where to look, she very patiently sat in her chair after the others had left for a break and gave me some very quick acting lessons. I didn’t realize until later how unusual it was for someone in her position, under such terrible conditions, to take the time to stay on a set and work with me. She was just wonderful.”

  Fabray was struck by the fact that Bette had a retinue of people around her at all times to do her bidding—even someone whose only job was to light her cigarettes. Years later, she asked Bette why she had needed all these attendants. “I think I was being a little sarcastic, you know, maybe a little jealous,” Fabray recalled. “But her answer stunned me. She said, ‘All the people around me wouldn’t have had jobs if I didn’t have them do all those unnecessary things.’”

  The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex was released on December 1, and proved to be Bette’s fourth smash hit of the year. The critics, as usual, raved. As Frank Nugent put it in The New York Times, “Bette Davis’s Elizabeth is a strong, resolute, glamour-skimping characterization against which Mr. Flynn’s Essex has about as much chance as a beanshooter against a tank.”

  By now, the same could be said of Jack Warner. Bette Davis in 1939 had the kind of year
actresses dream about: an Oscar, four diverse and juicy leading roles, four movies that among them won nine Oscar nominations and brought in over $3 million in profits for the studio. There was no doubt now that Bette was a bona fide superstar, and the results of a national poll had proclaimed her, at thirty-one, “The Queen of Hollywood.” Best of all to Bette, the critics were close to unanimous in the opinion that she was now America’s finest actress. It was almost as though these brilliant twelve-plus months had erased all the struggles and indignities Bette had suffered in Hollywood for the prior nine years. So great was her power now that she was dubbed “the fourth Warner Brother,” and that brought her no end of delight.

  Still, she remained wary. She knew how much she had had to fight her studio for every tiny concession; she knew that they thought of her as “uppity” and wanted to “keep her in her place.” She was convinced that she would always have to fight, that she couldn’t let her guard down for a minute or the studio might still force her to play a female lumberjack. By now that was very unlikely, but Bette was never convinced it was impossible. Since her arrival in Hollywood she had honed to rapier sharpness her “me against them” attitude, and no matter how wonderful her roles, no matter how much success she achieved, it was so deeply ingrained in her that she never was able to relinquish it.

  What she had learned, more than anything else, was that if she were to get anywhere in her battles with the members of Hollywood’s exclusive, all-male circle of moguls, she would have to prove herself equal to the fight. She refused to charm them, win them over with her feminine wiles, make them feel sorry for her, or sleep with them. She preferred to win their respect, the same regard they automatically gave any man. The only way to do that, she knew, was to be tougher than the women of her day were supposed to be—to stand her ground, to go up against them without flinching. In short, to fight like a man.

  Bette had been tickled when she heard the old stage adage “An actor is something less than a man; an actress is more than a woman”—so much so that she had it inscribed on her silver cigarette case. What it had originally meant is unclear. Perhaps it referred to the fact that all actors have to be in touch with both their masculine and feminine natures in order to give their best performance; perhaps it mocked those whose sexual preferences leaned toward their own gender.

  To Bette, it meant just one thing: to succeed in her profession, an actress must be stronger, more ambitious, pushier, more belligerent than society expected—or most men wanted—her to be. Katharine Hepburn, looking back over her career, said, “I have lived my life as a man.” Bette took that old adage on her cigarette case to heart. To stay on top, she was convinced, she would have to remain “more than a woman.”

  * * *

  1 This branch of the family reverted to the English spelling of “Favor.”

  TWELVE

  R

  uthie knocked softly on the door to the guest room of the Laguna Beach house Bette had recently bought for her. She hadn’t heard a sound from Bette all day, and she was worried. When her raps went unanswered, Ruthie gently turned the knob and entered. The room was dark, the curtains drawn against the afternoon sun. Ruthie walked over to the four-poster bed and looked down at her daughter. Bette was awake, but she lay stock-still, her eyes fixed straight above her as though she were in a hypnotic trance. Ruthie sat down on the edge of the bed and took Bette’s hand. “Sweetheart,” she murmured, “you should get up now. Dell’s made some wonderful sandwiches. Why don’t you come down and eat?” Bette just shook her head. “I’m tired, Mother. I want to rest.” Her daughter had been like this for over a month, and Ruthie was getting scared.

  Ever since she had completed the grueling filming of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in the summer of 1939, Bette Davis might as well have been a zombie. She had done six pictures in a row with very little rest in between, and she was close to a physical breakdown. “I just went to bed,” she recalled, “and slept fourteen hours a day. My friends and family thought there was something seriously wrong with me. I began to worry myself.”

  Jack Warner, with his usual insensitivity, hadn’t helped much when he told Bette her next film would be ’Til We Meet Again, and that he wanted her to begin work on it immediately. She had refused. The film wasn’t in the same league as her last six triumphs, and she would once again be cast as a dying heroine. (How quickly these moguls change their minds about what the public wants to see, Bette thought bitterly.) She had also told Warner she must have four to six months off, and hadn’t waited for J.L. to stop sputtering before she set off for Laguna Beach, where she ignored the increasingly frantic phone calls from Warner and his minions.

  What worried Ruthie now was that Bette seemed to have fallen into a clinical depression. None of the tried-and-true methods that had perked Bette up in the past did any good now. She had little appetite; by September she had lost nearly twenty pounds. She seemed unable to summon up the strength to do much of anything except agonize over the failure of her marriage. “I was wearing myself out, thinking of Ham and the breakup, which never should have happened, because I wasn’t the type.”

  Most alarmingly, she seemed to lose interest even in her profession, which had been the center of her life for over a decade. “I was overfull of acting,” she said. “I was gorged with it, surfeited with it, exhausted with it.” Her avoidance of the studio’s calls and refusal to open the door to messengers with scripts put her on suspension for the umpteenth time. Finally, her lawyer informed the studio that she would not return to work unless her contract was amended: she wanted to make no more than two films a year, or three if one was a light comedy. Warner refused, and Bette fell ever deeper into melancholia, weary to the bone of her constant struggle with her employer.

  As Ruthie sat on the edge of Bette’s bed and held her hand, she knew that something would have to be done to snap Bette out of this. If not, she feared, Bette might wind up in an institution as Bobby had, miserable and mute, her career at an end.

  “Bette, darling,” Ruthie began as gently as possible, “you can’t go on like this. You simply must get away, do something fun, get your mind off things. This isn’t you. Where’s that spunk of yours that always drives everybody crazy?”

  “Oh, Mother,” Bette whispered, squeezing her hand. “I’m just so tired. Tired of everything. I hate all this Hollywood crap. I wish I could go back to Newton and have no responsibilities and never have to take another phone call from Jack Warner.”

  “So why don’t you?” Ruthie chirped. “You’re on suspension anyway. Go back to Newton. Don’t think of anything except having fun. Fall is just around the corner—think of how beautiful the leaves will be. Think of the crisp apples and the fat pumpkins and the children trick-or-treating. Think of how wonderful the cold night air will feel against your cheeks.”

  Bette looked at her mother, and for the first time in weeks, she smiled.

  Two weeks later, Bette put her dependable old station wagon on a train and headed East. She went first to New York, where she stayed several days to see some Broadway shows and visit friends. Then she drove up to Massachusetts, to begin a sentimental tour of all her old haunts. She went to Newton, to Lowell, to Cape Cod, to Boston, to Ocean Park. She visited Newton High, Mariarden, Cushing Academy, the Cape Playhouse.

  But her memories proved to be only that. “There were gas stations in back yards where I used to play. Strange faces looked out of windows where familiar, friendly faces used to welcome [me]. All the pictures of my childhood I had expected to see again were gone.”

  After two weeks of this, Bette sagged again, more tired and depressed than ever. Her reunions with old girlfriends and schoolteachers upset her; they treated her as though she were an irreplaceable Dresden doll. “I was wondering whether I was still a human being, or whether I was a kind of painted shadow, Hollywood model.… I realized that we can’t go back. There isn’t any ‘back.’”

  She ended up in Maine, sitting atop the huge boulders along the sea
coast and staring out at the ocean, overcome with sadness. She watched the waves crash against the rocks, methodically pulverizing them into tiny grains of sand, and wondered whether that was what was happening to her. She thought again of Ham, and an empty ache returned to her stomach. Why can’t I have what every one of these fishermen’s wives has? she thought. I don’t want to end up alone at fifty—unsafe, desperate, pitiable—without someone who needs me.

  She called Ruthie, who knew the moment she heard her daughter’s voice that Bette’s emotional state hadn’t improved. “If you find yourself falling to pieces, Bette,” Ruthie advised her, “go to Peckett’s. You’ll find rest there.”

  Ruthie was right. Bette loved Peckett’s Inn, a rustic retreat at Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, where she took long walks among the ever-deepening reds and golds of the oak and maple and butternut trees, picked berries, sipped clam chowder, gained weight, and started to recover her emotional equilibrium. Her state of mind was helped along nicely by the attention paid her by the thirty-four-year-old night manager and host of the inn, Arthur Farnsworth, Jr.

  She saw him for the first time during the evening meal her first day there. Across the homey dining room with its red linen tablecloths and rough-hewn wooden walls, she glimpsed an imposing figure of a man as he spoke animatedly with some of the other guests. He was six feet tall, light-haired, robust and handsome in an Arrow-shirt-ad sort of way. His eye caught hers and she was brought up short when he moved quickly over to her table.