James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Bette’s melancholy over the deaths of her marriage and her mother weren’t alleviated by her return to work in a major Hollywood film, Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles. Based on a Damon Runyon short story, the film cast Bette as Apple Annie, a drunken Depression-era street peddler whose daughter Louise (Ann-Margret), whom she hasn’t seen since infancy, is returning to New York to introduce her fiancé to Annie. For years, Annie has been writing to Louise, sending her money and leading her to believe that she is a wealthy socialite. Frantic, Annie enlists the help of mobster Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford), who believes that the apple he has bought from Annie each day has brought him good luck and protected him from his enemies.

  Dave rents a Park Avenue suite, hires a staff of servants, has Annie made over by fashion experts, convinces an alcoholic judge to pose as her husband, and rounds up a coterie of hoods to pose as Annie’s guests at a swell party. The elaborate charade succeeds; Louise is promised a dowry by her fiancé’s wealthy father; Dave the Dude and his moll Queenie (Hope Lange) begin to think of marriage; and the alcoholic judge promises Annie he’ll go on the wagon if she’ll marry him.

  Capra had filmed the same story in 1933, when its sentimentality and rags-to-riches theme affected audiences and made it a great hit. In 1961, the story was less likely to appeal to the day’s more sophisticated audiences. Although it was her first major film offer from Hollywood in years, Bette accepted the assignment “not too enthusiastically” and primarily for the money. She had her doubts about her character. “Apple Annie lacked reality to me,” she said. “I had to find a way to make it real and yet fit myself in the fairy-tale spirit of the picture. It was like walking a tightrope.”

  The production of Pocketful of Miracles, according to Frank Capra, was “shaped in the fires of discord and filmed in an atmosphere of pain, strain and loathing.” Things got off on the wrong foot almost immediately, when Glenn Ford asked that Bette be moved from the star’s dressing room next to his so that Hope Lange, his girlfriend, could have it. Bette professed not to care—“You can put my dressing room at the end of the row if you like”—but studio executives were too smart for that, and Bette stayed right where she was. “It should have been this way,” she conceded. “I was his costar. The request for my removal from the ‘second’ dressing room only showed Mr. Ford’s bad manners and lack of professionalism.”

  The bad blood between Bette and both Glenn Ford and Hope Lange (neither of whom spoke to her except in their scenes together) worsened when Ford suggested in an interview that he had been responsible for Bette’s “comeback.” When she heard about his comment, she exploded. “Who is that son of a bitch that he should say he helped me have a comeback! That shitheel wouldn’t have helped me out of a sewer!”

  The atmosphere on the set continued to be, in Joseph Mankiewicz’s wonderful phrase, “very Macbethish.” Feeling embattled and outnumbered, Bette allowed her temperament to rush anew to the fore, and Capra developed crippling migraine headaches every day around noon. Asked about his star, he said he felt her behavior was prompted by “insecurity and delicate-spirited fears, especially after having been off the screen for so long.” Hope Lange, for one, wasn’t buying it. “Bette Davis,” she retorted, “is about as delicate-spirited as a tank!”

  As Bette had feared, Pocketful of Miracles was not a hit. Audiences failed to respond to its old-fashioned sentiment, and most reviewers found Bette’s performance either one-dimensional or hammy. She preferred to forget the entire experience, she said, and she never did see the finished picture.

  Bette had received no new film offers after she completed Pocketful of Miracles early in the summer, and her finances were at a low ebb. She had sold Witch-Way after the divorce and leased a townhouse on East Seventy-eighth Street for the New York run of The World of Carl Sandburg (which she kept while she also rented in California). Both Michael and B.D. were in private schools; Bette was still supporting Bobby; and she had paid for all the expenses of Ruthie’s burial and reburial. The unexpectedly short run of Sandburg had left her strapped, and the money from Pocketful of Miracles and the advance on her autobiography hadn’t gone very far. (The Lonely Life was a bestseller when it was released in the fall of 1961, but Bette wouldn’t see any additional royalties from it for about eighteen months.)

  Once again, however, Broadway beckoned to rescue Bette’s career. She was rightly wary about the stage after the fiasco of Two’s Company and the disappointment of The World of Carl Sandburg, but this time the project seemed tailor-made to Bette’s talents, and a surefire candidate for success. The Night of the Iguana was a new drama by Tennessee Williams, one of America’s greatest living playwrights, who had written some of the most unforgettable female characters in the history of Broadway. Bette accepted the offer, and she wasn’t coy about her reasons: “Actors always say, I am returning to the stage to refine my craft,’” she told a reporter. “But that’s a bunch of BS. No one leaves movies for the stage unless they can’t get work. And I’m no exception.”

  The Night of the Iguana was far more than a poor substitute for a movie role. Her character, the vulgar, predatory, over-the-hill seductress Maxine Faulk, was one of the more vivid creations of the playwright’s imagination. And not only would Bette create this typically strong, colorful Williams character on stage, but there was a good probability the show might lead to a major movie comeback for her as well. Since 1950, eight Williams plays had been turned into movies and had earned their female stars ten Academy Award nominations and three Oscars. Bette knew there was already interest in the play from Hollywood studios, and she found the prospect very exciting.

  She began rehearsals in New York in the fall of 1961, more excited about a project than she had been for years. Over the next eight months, the backstage vitriol, chicanery, and fireworks of Night of the Iguana would make the plot of All About Eve seem like Little Women.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I

  n the late summer of 1961, Frank Corsaro, the director of The Night of the Iguana, sat in a New York nightclub with Tennessee Williams and the show’s producer, Chuck Bowden, and talked about how much difficulty they were having booking a theater for the show.

  “They all tell me that we have to have a blockbuster name to star,” Bowden said, “or we’ve got no theater.”

  Corsaro was astonished. “No theater for a Tennessee Williams play?!”

  Williams looked up from the drink he was stirring and drawled, “Ya only ah-uz good as ya last show in this town.” The playwright’s last two plays had been flops, and now the theater owners wanted more of a guarantee than just his name.

  “We’ve approached Bette Davis,” Bowden announced, perking up. “She’s interested in playing Maxine. It would be fantastic to have her—just incredible!”

  Corsaro was skeptical. “Has she read the play?”

  “Well, no,” Bowden replied cautiously. “But I have sent her some material.”

  “What do you mean, some material?” Corsaro asked. “Didn’t you send her the script?”

  “No. I just sent her… because Tennessee’s rewriting it, you know… so I thought I better just send her… material.”

  “In other words, you just sent her her sides?”

  “Well, something like that. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea.”

  “What wrong idea?” Corsaro shot back. “You’re sending this lady material that is going to be the third lead. You’re using this woman’s name to get a theater and you’re giving her a tertiary role? Do you think she’s going to buy this?”

  “Well, Frank,” Tennessee piped up. “Ah think ah can work with the part, yuh know, give her some mo-ah things ta do—”

  “I don’t care what you do, Tenn, it’s always going to be a tertiary role. Or else you’re gonna have to write a whole different play.”

  “No, no, no,” Bowden protested. “Trust us on this, Frank, it’ll work out.”

  “I’m warning you,” Corsaro said, “you’re gonna have enormous t
rouble. I hear she’s difficult under the best of circumstances. If you mislead her on this, just to get a theater on her name, you’re going to have pandemonium.”

  The Night of the Iguana had its genesis in the late ’50s when Corsaro, who had scored a success on Broadway with A Hatful of Rain, was asked to direct several one-act plays in Spoleto, Italy. Corsaro was a friend of Tennessee’s, and he asked him if he had a one-act to contribute. Williams sent him twenty-one pages, and the minute Corsaro read them, he says, “I realized that this was a full-length play in the making. Once I got to Italy, I asked Tennessee if he could send me more, and he did. He kept sending page after page until I had a ninety-one-page script, which is a very long one-act.” Still, Corsaro staged the drama in Spoleto.

  The story Williams had crafted took place at a seedy Mexican resort run by Maxine Faulk, a blowsy, pot-smoking earth mother past her prime but desperately clinging to her sexual seductiveness. The drama grew out of a love triangle between Maxine and two of her guests: Shannon, a defrocked, alcoholic cleric now working as a tour guide—a man, in Corsaro’s words, “who’s suffering fever, an overdose of everything in his life”—and Hannah, a prim, penniless spinster who has come to Mexico with her dying grandfather.

  Corsaro brought with him to Italy a troupe of Actors Studio members that included Patrick O’Neal, a handsome thirty-four-year-old journeyman actor who created the role of Shannon. Corsaro was very impressed with O’Neal’s work. “What Patrick was doing was really quite spectacular,” he felt. “He was just marvelous.”

  Once Corsaro and his company returned to the United States, they continued to refine Iguana, which by now had taken the standard three-act shape. They performed it at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York and at the Coconut Grove in Miami, and while there were several Maxines and Hannahs along the way, Patrick O’Neal continued to perfect his portrayal of Shannon. As plans coalesced to bring the play to Broadway, Corsaro went to bat for O’Neal to keep the part, despite the fact that he wasn’t a box-office attraction. “He was giving the kind of performance that would have made him a very big star,” Corsaro felt.

  The producers agreed, but with an unknown playing the male lead, it became even more important that a strong box-office name play one of the two women. Enter Bette Davis. She loved Maxine Faulk, a character, she felt, who was “basically an animal, a good, healthy animal. She wants one thing—guys, and this one guy in particular. She’s fairly direct, down-to-earth, uncomplicated. She has enormous laughter.” Much of Williams’s dialogue for Maxine was punctuated by a raucous “Ha!” It was very Bette, and she loved it.

  After his nightclub meeting with Tennessee Williams and Chuck Bowden, Corsaro met with Bette in her East Seventy-eighth Street townhouse to discuss the role. He realized early in the conversation that she “was under the impression that her part was going to be developed. Bowden had managed to get her to sign a contract, which I wouldn’t have done if I were she based on the script at that point.”

  The meeting was a tense one, and Corsaro got the impression that Bette was “terrified,” not at all certain she could play a Tennessee Williams heroine on stage. “She had never done a dramatic role [on Broadway]. She had done that terrible musical in which she flopped so badly. She had a lot of promises from Bowden and Tennessee, but she hadn’t seen anything yet. She was just a mass of fears and uncertainties. By the time we got to rehearsals, she was in a very belligerent mood.”

  When Patrick O’Neal heard that Bette Davis had been signed to appear opposite him, he jumped with joy. “The first time I talked to her, it was on the phone, and I didn’t quite believe it. That Bette Davis voice came over the line and I thought somebody was putting me on.” O’Neal’s wife was as excited as he about the prospect. “Well,” she said, “if you’re ever going to have an affair, that’s the woman I wouldn’t mind you having it with.”

  O’Neal recalls that he felt “the highest possible anticipation,” and he was flattered when Bette told him, “I would like to be in your play,” an apparent concession that his part was the pivotal one. But he soon realized that Bette expected that to change, and he was no more optimistic about that possibility than Frank Corsaro had been. “Tennessee may have had the best intentions in the world, but there was no way that third part was ever going to lift up, because then it would be a whole other story. He could have given her all the pieces of business, all the best positions on stage and all the rest of it, and still that part is a third part. There’s no way to beat that.”

  When she began rehearsals at the Schubert Theatre on West Forty-fourth Street in October 1961, Bette saw that so far Tennessee’s rewrites hadn’t enlarged her role very much. Assurances continued to fly her way, but she remained skeptical. Sensing that her back was being edged toward the wall, she attempted to exert more control over the production—both by acting every bit the temperamental star and by enlisting allies within the company. She insisted that Viola Rubber, who had been one of her “henchladies” during Two’s Company, be named one of the producers of Iguana, and Chuck Bowden agreed.

  The moment Bette met Patrick O’Neal, according to Corsaro, it was obvious that “she had the hots for him. She was much taken with Patrick, and she was trying to get at him to develop a romance.” Despite the good-natured green light O’Neal’s wife had apparently given him, he was having none of it. “It all had to do with control,” O’Neal says. “That was a pattern in her life—you go for the leading man, whoever he happened to be. She resented that I didn’t respond. I’ve often said, if I’d been Richard Burton, I’d have just done it and gotten on with it. But I was very young and terrified of being put under her control.”

  Bette took the opposite tack with Margaret Leighton, the lovely, sylphlike, ethereal thirty-nine-year-old British actress who had signed to play Hannah. Leighton had been delayed and arrived three days late for rehearsals. Tardiness was one of Bette’s pet peeves, and the first words she said to Leighton when they were introduced were tart: “I guess we don’t have to be friends in order to work with one another, do we?”

  There was immediate strain between Bette and the rest of the company too, but some of it may not have been her fault. Bruce Glover, hired for a small part in his first Broadway show, was flabbergasted when Chuck Bowden took the cast aside and showed them a corner of the stage where he had placed a desk. “He told us that this was Miss Davis’s area,” Glover recalls, “and we weren’t supposed to impose on her, weren’t supposed to come within five feet of that little area. It was like he was setting up a barrier that made us all pull away. I doubt that she asked him to do that.”

  A few days into rehearsals, Corsaro saw that his predictions of disaster were likely to come true. Bette had long been a critic of the Method approach to acting developed by Stanislavski and taught by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and she now found herself surrounded by Method devotees. “One of the actors had to take his shoe off,” she recalled, “and he spent the whole day working out the motivation for why he had to take it off. Finally I got so exasperated that I yelled, ‘For God’s sake, just take the damn thing off!’”

  The problem, of course, went much deeper. “After about the third or fourth rehearsal,” Corsaro saw, “she began to be aware of the kind of work that was taking place, which she didn’t know how to do. She was afraid of the ease with which these actors worked. They didn’t bang out results, they took their time and developed their characters.”

  It quickly became clear to Corsaro that Bette was jealous of Leighton—not just because her role was larger, but because she was a much more accomplished stage actress. “Margaret Leighton could literally transform herself into another character,” Corsaro says, “but Bette was always Bette. She watched Leighton create this sensitive, many-profiled hysteria in Hannah. The coolness of the woman, her enormous stage technique, intimidated Bette.”

  Patrick O’Neal recalls rehearsing one long scene between himself and Margaret Leighton. “Bette couldn’t wait for this
‘boring’ scene to be over with, and of course it was the best scene in the play! My wife and I shared a maid with Bette, and she reported to us that Bette hated to wait for that ‘vampire’ [Leighton] to finish so she could come back on.”

  As O’Neal and Leighton rehearsed this scene one day, Bette sat in the bleachers that had been set up for the cast on either side of the stage, dressed in slacks and ballet slippers, her glasses balanced on the end of her nose, her script in her lap. Suddenly she got up and began to pace back and forth in front of the bleachers, just feet away from the actors. She puffed on her cigarette, threw her head back and sighed, whirled around each time she came to the edge of the stage and started back across to the other side.

  “She was doing her Bette Davis routine,” Corsaro says, but the actors ignored her billowing smoke and the pounding of her footsteps and went on with their lines. Corsaro couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Bette started doing this whenever she wasn’t part of a scene. It got to the point where I had to rehearse that scene at night, in secret, when Bette wasn’t around. It was the only way I could get through it without disruption.”

  With O’Neal and Leighton creating their characters in a subtle, inward, Method way far beyond her experience, Bette apparently decided, according to Corsaro, “to come on really socko, whammo. And she got really gross. I would try to describe some bit of physical business to her, and she would grab me from behind and rub her tits against my back and say, ‘Honey, you really mean like this, don’t you?’”