Bette and the Kinky Tycoon
Always a lover of dogs, Bette Davis had been asked to be the hostess of a fund-raiser for Tailwagger's, a hospital and shelter for stray canines in Los Angeles. She agreed and told the organization that they should take advantage of her newfound popularity by publicizing the event, through the pages of
Life
magazine. The fundraiser became a black-tie dinner-dance at the Beverly Hills Hotel and, with the prestige and exposure of the national magazine behind it, some of Hollywood's biggest stars attended. Other concerned dog-lovers present were Errol Flynn, Randolph Scott, Norma Shearer, Jimmy Stewart, Miriam Hopkins, Joel McCrea, Joan Blondell with husband Dick Powell, and Lupe Velez with husband Johnny Weissmuller. After dinner the guests, led by Bette, were playing musical chairs when a late arrival appeared. It was the millionaire-turned-pilot-turned-movie-producer, Howard Hughes, wearing a rumpled tuxedo.
Since he was a lover of neither dogs, formal affairs, nor
Life
magazine, the presence of the eccentric young man at the well publicized event surprised many. But Hughes had his motives. He was to the 1930s and 1940s what Warren Beatty would be to the 1960s and 1970s. Rich, handsome, and well endowed, the tycoon was an avid collector of women. Not just pretty women, but gorgeous, talented, famous women. A partial list of his celebrity scores during the thirties includes Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, Dolores Del Rio, Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Paulette Goddard, and Katharine Hepburn, but
not
Joan Crawford. Howard once expressed his desire to date Joan, in front of her current husband, Doug Fairbanks, Jr. "He boasted, in his quiet Texas drawl, that he could offer her 'a
very
big present' if she went out with him," said Doug, Jr., who never liked him after that. Joan disliked Hughes for her own reasons. He was indiscriminate, she felt: "Howard would fuck a tree if it moved," she said.
At the Tailwagger's party that night, Hughes was introduced to Bette and agreed to pose with her for the
Life
photographer. He apologized for missing the dinner. He was working on a plane, he said, for the government. With that, Bette took Howard by the arm and brought him into the hotel's huge kitchen, where she ordered a four-course meal for his sustenance.
Hughes sent Bette flowers the next day, and called the day after. He asked her if she would be interested in seeing his twin-motored monoplane, in a hangar outside of Los Angeles. She was. On the way home that evening they stopped for supper. She was surprised to find how shy and self-conscious he was. He never made a pass. Driving her home, he asked if he could call her again. She gave him her direct number at the studio.
"A bat by night," Hughes had different moves and strategies for different women. Hedy Lamarr said he had offered her ten thousand dollars to pose nude for a rubber dummy he wanted to mold and then sleep with. "Why not sleep with me, the real thing," Hedy asked. "Because you are too good for me," he replied. Another M-G-M starlet of this period, Lana Turner, said that when Hughes was pursuing her he expressed his "preference for oral sex." She politely said she wasn't interested. "That didn't seem to bother him," said Lana. "He'd come to my house just to sit and talk with my mother."
On his third date with Bette Davis he confessed that his love for her could never be physically consummated. He explained that his recently terminated romance with the haughty and independent Katharine Hepburn had lowered both his self-esteem and his sexual performance. Author Charles Higham said Hughes suffered from "recurrent ejaculatory impotence." The condition was so acute that no cure seemed possible. The challenge to Bette was irresistible.
Their affair was brief but memorable. They met at his hotel for drinks and quiet conversation. During the day Howard would sometimes fly over and buzz her house with his plane, a daring tactic he had also used on Hepburn. Bette became brave also. She told close friends of her romance with the adventurous tycoon, and that she managed to help him overcome his impotence. For her own dark reason, she also told her husband, perhaps to torment him. One night, according to Higham, while Hughes was visiting Bette at home, Ham was outside, parked in a sound truck on a side street. He had the house bugged. "After listening awhile to his wife and Hughes struggling to achieve some sort of a climax," Ham went running into the house. He burst into the bedroom. Hughes swung at him. Bette went into hysterics. Ham told the couple he had recorded their lovemaking and, to cover his grief plus miscellaneous expenses, he was charging the tycoon seventy thousand dollars for the recordings. "Deadly afraid of his potency problems being made known to his macho friends," the San Francisco
Examiner
reported that Hughes considered hiring a professional killer to take care of Ham, who advised friends that if he were killed, the tycoon would be responsible. So the money was paid, the recordings were destroyed, and Hughes' affair with Bette was terminated.
In late September 1938 Davis sent a telegram to the International News Service. She told them that she and her husband had "decided to take a vacation from each other." There would be no divorce. "I am a New England Yankee, we don't believe in divorce," she said. On November 22 a second telegram was sent. "There will not be any reconciliation," it said. "Harmon will apply for a divorce." "Why her husband will sue for divorce was not revealed by the actress," the news agency stated. "And she could not be reached to amplify her terse statement."
Bette did not want a divorce. Nelson did. He filed, on the usual charges, "irreconcilable differences," making no mention of Bette's adultery. "He was my first real love," she stated later. "I remained in love with him for a long time afterwards, and was bitterly disappointed that I had failed at marriage."
But consolations followed—professional and financial. Bolstered by her success in
Jezebel
and the imminent release of her second smash film,
Dark Victory,
Bette was the first major star signed by a new, aggressive agency called MCA. Its founder, future power broker Jules Stein, would make his first client one of the highest-paid stars in Hollywood. In February 1939, along with Spencer Tracy, Bette also received the town's highest honor, the Oscar, for
Jezebel.
Her victory was twice as sweet the second time around. She said she was never surer of herself professionally. "I was now a sovereign state demanding my own tithe—a member of the commonwealth. I had never been able to keep my mouth shut, but now mine was a voice that couldn't be ignored." Her problem with Warner's before was script quality. Now she wanted cash.
"No more peanuts!
No more haggling.
Jezebel
was a success and was bringing in the loot. I wanted my share. I
got
it."
7
Joan Falls and Rises
LETTERS IN
PHOTOPLAY
"Bette Davis is one of the
greatest natural stars the screen
has ever produced. She certainly
shows up those beautiful but
dumb actresses who are only
interested in showing off their
shapely limbs, their soulful eyes
and carefully coiffured hair."
-ESME BERSACH, TOPEKA,
KANSAS
A Prayer for Joan:
"It
distresses me to see my idol,
Joan Crawford, kept down on the
lower rung of greatness. I send
this prayer that the producers
will stop teaming her with
Gable and Robert Montgomery
in chattering, noisy, fun-loving
girlish parts, and cast her with
someone like Fredric March."
—BOBBIE JO NATFORD,
MACON, GEORGIA
I
n 1938, while Bette Davis' star was rising, Joan Crawford's was on the decline. Voted number one at the box office the previous year, she had now sunk to below the top forty. It was the fault of her studio, Joan felt. They were not aggressively merchandising her films anymore. M-G-M put the blame on Joan, and her ever-evolving image.
"From jazz flapper to sophisticated clothes-horse, she's changed her celluloid skin a full half dozen times," said one publication. "Her fans are having a hard time keeping track of the many different Joans."
The trouble began with the star's marriage to Franchot Tone, Metro believed. He screwed up the formula. They had a hot streak going with Joan and her rags-to-riches shop girl-on-Park-Avenue series. Then Tone told her she had the makings of a great
artiste,
that she could be Bernhardt, Garbo, and Helen Hayes rolled into one. And Joan, obsessed with self-improvement, eager for fresh applause, and always anxious to bury yesterday's persona, went along eagerly with her new husband's plans.
"You can take a whore to culture, but you can't make her think," said Dorothy Parker, a frequent Crawford-Tone guest in 1935. That was the year Joan had a new clause inserted in her Metro contract. It stipulated that she could get away from Hollywood six months every year. That would enable the Tones to tolerate "the superficial life you are forced to live here. It wouldn't bother us because we would have something bigger and finer waiting for us in the outside world," said Joan.
In 1936 Joan told the press that she and Franchot were building a small theater in the east wing of her mansion. This would be used to showcase the couple, in serious plays by Ibsen and Shaw, for the after-dinner entertainment of their friends. "How
wonderful,"
said Bette Davis, when told of Crawford's plans to play Shakespeare. "We are all so thrilled that Joan has learned how to read."
"I'd like to slap their faces," said Joan when told of the comments on her highbrow aspirations. "What do they expect me to do? Stay like Peter Pan? Remain the same boring, monotonous person all my life?"
While refusing to let the press photograph her new theater ("Do you allow photographs of your soul?"), Joan did appear with Tone in some home productions, and according to guests she showed genuine talent and promise. Emboldened by their praise and encouragement, she agreed to perform on radio as Elizabeth I, Bette Davis' favorite historical character, which Joan played
before
Bette, with Franchot Tone as the Earl of Essex. She also played Nora in
A Doll's House,
with Basil Rathbone, and although one worthless critic commented that many of Joan's fans who tuned in may have been confused as "to
where
Joan's Nora went, after she slammed the door; to the milliner's or beauty parlor?," the star was content with this brave new step. "Many of my fans never even heard of Ibsen or Maxwell Anderson before, and now they do," she said with smug finesse.
"I
designed my own hair styles
for
No More Ladies. I
experimented with braids for
formal wear, curls for a gay
sequence, maybe a severe
coiffure for the difficult parts—
wouldn't it be silly to play
tragedy in a mass of ringlets?"
—JOAN CRAWFORD
That year movie fans got their first glimpse of the new Joan in
The Gorgeous Hussy.
This was her first costume drama. She played Peggy O'Neal, an innkeeper's daughter who became the friend and confidante of President Andrew Jackson. "Peggy was gorgeous, but no hussy," said the New York
Times,
and Joan agreed. When Jean Harlow dropped by for a visit (the two were now close friends; Joan frequently gave Jean "powders for her nerves"), Crawford took the time to explain her new character. "She was a remarkable woman, very intelligent, and before her time. She was a
suffragette."
"Spell it," said Harlow.
On the set of
The Gorgeous Hussy,
her costar, Melvyn Douglas, described Joan's mammoth new dressing room. It was the perfect facsimile of a New England house, he said, "complete with picket fences, grass mats and a steeply sloping roof; built presumably to withstand the weight of whatever northeastern snows might accumulate inside the studio." Making her grand entrance, in costume, Joan greeted Douglas "in a gracious and distinctly Southern manner, less as if I was a fellow player than a guest in her home." This was a surprise to the actor, who had heard stories of Joan "being a hail-fellow-well-met sort of person whose language was not exactly sanitary." She remained the perfect lady throughout filming, he stated, but when they met again for another film in 1938, "she had again become rough, bluff and hearty."
Joseph Mankiewicz, Crawford's producer and intermittent lover during these years, also remembered the many personas displayed by Joan. "You'd have to watch the way she came in," he told author Kenneth Geist. "If Joan was wearing a pair of slacks, that meant you could slap her on the ass and say 'Hiya Kid. You getting much?' In turn she'd be as raucous as possible. She could come back the next day wearing black sables and incredible sapphires, and by Jesus, you'd better be on your feet and click your heels, kiss her hand and talk with the best British accent you had; but never in any way indicate she was different in any respect from the way she was yesterday because the following day she'd come in in a dirndl or a pinafore and you'd be down on the floor playing jacks with her."
"That was a telling difference between her and Bette Davis," said director Irving Rapper. "Unlike Joan, Bette was seldom affected by the schizophrenia that comes from acting, from playing so many different roles. Bette always had the strength to leave her character behind on the soundstage."
"I never got lost in a role," said Davis. 'Actresses who do that are just plain silly. I had no need to escape into someone else's persona. I was always Bette Davis watching herself become the character."
Although
The Gorgeous Hussy
failed in theaters, Crawford's next venture, playing a frivolous runaway heiress in
Love on the Run
opposite Clark Gable, was a success, and it enabled her to play the grand lady again, in a remake of a Norma Shearer picture titled
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney.
Critic Cecilia Ager, who had earlier taken Bette Davis to task for her sulky starlet performance in
Parachute Jumper,
examined Crawford's Anglo-enunciation as the British Fay Cheyney. "It is comforting to see in
The Last of Mrs. Cheyney,
that Joan Crawford has at last attained the manner she's been striving for," Ager observed. "Now she quietly looks any actor, no matter how English, straight in the eye, confident of the mastered casualness of her own pronunciation. No more do 'beans' for 'beens' jut out from her speech naked and terrified; no more do unresolved trimmings distract from the compact and self-contained silhouette of her clothes. Instead of the mark of self-doubt that used to be-now Miss Crawford goes about doing right things, wearing right things, with deafening poise."
Intent on making two lofty strikes in a row, Crawford followed
Mrs. Cheyney
with
The Bride Wore Red
that same year. Based on the Molnar play,
The Girl from Trieste,
the script was brought to Joan's attention by Franchot Tone. He also recommended a director, Dorothy Arznar, who had recently worked with Katharine Hepburn on
Christopher Strong.
Arznar stated she had been signed to do
The Girl from Trieste
with Luise Rainer. "I was out scouting locations, when I heard Luise Rainer was suspended, for marrying a communist," she said. "Joan would replace her in the movie, which was now called
The Bride Wore Red.
I knew that would be synthetic, but Mister Mayer knelt down, with those phony tears in his eyes, and said: 'We'd be eternally grateful to the woman who brings Crawford back.'"
With Crawford aboard, the Molnar story was rewritten at Mayer's command. The lead character was changed from a jaded prostitute who goes straight, to a beautiful but slightly cynical cabaret singer. It's the story of a girl who steps on a lot of faces to get to the top," Joan explained. With sets by Cedric Gibbons, hairstyles by Crawford, and gowns by Adrian, including the ten-thousand-dollar thirty-five-pound red-beaded title number,
The Bride Wore Red
opened in October 1937.
"Sharp proof of fans' taste was found in its reception," said the Los Angeles
Times;
"it flopped resoundingly." "Nothing can conceal the underlying shabbiness," said the New York
Times,
and a short time later Joan Crawford was voted box-office poison by the National Theater Distributors of America.
"How can I be the Queen one year, then washed up the next?" lamented Joan, although husband-mentor-costar Franchot Tone viewed the poison list (which also included the names of Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich) for what it was—"bullshit." The timing was fortuitous, he told his grieving wife: they would revert to their original plan, to leave Hollywood and live part-time in New York, where they could pursue more prestigious work in the legitimate theater.
"No!" Joan reportedly wailed. "We made those plans when I was a
star.
I can't move to New York and be a nobody."
"Joan Crawford has started
singing opera
in
her dressing
room and the writers next door
are threatening
to
quit."
—SHEILAH GRAHAM, 1939
A month after she was voted box-office poison, Crawford's contract at M-G-M came up for renewal. She was offered a straight one-year deal at three hundred thousand dollars for two pictures. Her agent, after conferring with Joan, passed on the offer. They decided to stall and resell Joan as a brand-new talent—a singing star in the mold of Grace Moore and Jeanette MacDonald.
Crawford could always work her way around a serviceable tune. She told some people she began her career as a singer in New York nightclubs. Also, in the first talkie ever made at M-G-M,
The Passing Show of
1929, she sang "I Got a Feelin' for You" (while pounding the soundstage floor with her tap shoes). Again, in 1931, in
Possessed,
in a restaurant scene Joan sang "multilingual snatches of songs to a trio of dining guests," prompting a nearby patron to ask, "Say, what is this? Ellis Island?"
But it was Franchot Tone who deserved the credit for introducing Joan to "good music." When they married, Joan discovered that Franchot had a well-developed tenor voice. It blended beautifully with her husky contralto. In 1936 their reporter-friend Jerry Asher told her fans in
Modern Screen
that "From 4 to 6 each day the couple sing for Signor Morando, a teacher of classical music." The great popular composer Irving Berlin had witnessed a recent lesson, said Asher, "and came away completely amazed. Stokowski, the famous conductor, was also treated to a recital, and marvelled at their appreciation of good music."
Joan gave up smoking for singing, and resumed her old habit of chewing gum. She also had the walls of her Brentwood music room lined in cork, so her daily vocalizing would not disturb the neighbors. "Sometimes when Franchot writes, Joan plays Bach or sings the Ave Maria," said Sheilah Graham.
With a little coaxing, Joan could be persuaded to sing at her private dinner parties. Louella Parsons told her radio fans of one magical night at Brentwood "when Joan thrilled her dinner guests—Gary Cooper, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Astaire, Noel Coward, and Irene Harvey—with a duet from
Tosca,
sung with Allan Jones and accompanied by the celebrated Viennese conductor, Franz Schuller."
On the sly, Crawford made several secret recordings at Metro, accompanied on the piano by Judy Garland's music teacher, Roger Edens. She carried these disks to New York and played them for the regional leaders of her fan clubs, and for opera singer Geraldine Farrar. Everyone said, "Go for it, Joan."
Back in California, Joan recorded three selections with the M-G-M Symphony Orchestra, again surreptitiously. She gave these records to her agent, Michael Levee, who made an appointment to see Louis B. Mayer. Busy toting up the profits from such recent successful musicals as
Maytime
and
The Girl from the Golden West,
Mayer took the time to hear Levee's new singing discovery.
"Who is she?" asked Mayer, very impressed.
"It's Joanie," said Levee, whereupon Ida Koverman, Mayer's secretary, buzzed to say that Miss Crawford had arrived.