In August, fanzine writer Ruth Waterbury said she feared for Joan Crawford's hard performance in
The Women.
"She is being as brittle and brutal as Bette Davis at her brittle best," said Waterbury. "But when we accept Bette Davis with free admiration for this type of feminine piracy, will we like Joan as one?"
In September the critics gave thumbs up to Joan's first turn as a bitch. "Norma's 'good woman' is another bit of typecasting, but Joan Crawford as the husband-stealing chippie deserves high praise," said the New York
Post.
"Crawford steals the show from the all-woman cast," said the New York
Times.
"She makes you dislike her," said Wanda Hale of the
Daily News.
"This may not please some of Joan's adoring fans, but it should make Hollywood sit up and take renewed interest in her acting ability."
The Women
was one of M-G-M's top-grossing films of 1939 (second in profit to
Gone with the Wind).
The satisfaction for Crawford was enormous. "It was a double victory for Joan," said Cukor. "It provided her comeback, and proved she could indeed act." It also sent her rival Norma Shearer into retirement, Adela Rogers St. John believed. "Norma never bounced back again. I think she grew tired with the fighting and the jockeying for first place. When Irving Thalberg was alive he protected her from all that. She wasn't like Joan or Bette, who thrived on elbowing their way to the front of the line."
8
The 1940s Begin
O
n New Year's Eve 1939, while most of America was celebrating the end of the thirties, a decade of Depression, the New Deal, labor strikes, and union bloodbaths, a discreet, select group of Los Angeles citizens gathered at the Bel Air home of Guida and Basil Rathbone to contribute to the British War Relief. Among the stars who responded to the cause were Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Bette bought two tickets to the Anglo sit-down dinner and dance; Joan, with typical largesse and generosity, bought six. Bette arrived alone; Joan came with five escorts, all male.
Although a tent, with red-white-and-blue-decorated tables, had been set up on the Rathbones' spacious front lawn, a rainstorm came pelting down early in the evening and the guests were moved indoors. Crawford and her five male companions were seated at a table set up in the Rathbones' large California room when Bette entered, carrying her plate of food, a red linen napkin, and her silverware. Joan, spotting Davis, waved and called to her. "Bette! Bette darling!" said Joan. "Come join us." Bette, feigning deafness and swinging her famous slender hips, sashayed toward the bar. Balancing her plate, she hoisted herself onto a leather stool and smiled at the bartender. She ordered a bourbon on the rocks, opened her silver cigarette case, took out a cigarette, and tapped the end three times on the edge of the bar. After lighting the cigarette, she inhaled, and exhaled while surveying the room. Her eyes finally came to rest on Joan Crawford, still seated with her five attentive swains and still trying to get
her
attention. "Christ! What a
silly
bitch," said Bette, waving Joan away. Then, lifting her glass, she wished the handsome bartender "a
very
Happy New Year."
On January 14, 1940, a party was held in Bette's honor at the Trocadero nightclub, where she was proclaimed Woman of the Year by
Redbook.
Two weeks later she was named Queen of the Movies by
Life
(with Mickey Rooney as her King), and a third Oscar nomination (for
Dark Victory)
came in February.
The citation that elicited the most pleasure, and mirth, to Bette came from yet another source: Hollywood's Press Association, who voted her the Female Actress Best Liked by Interviewers. Appearing in the second spot was Joan Crawford.
It was Crawford who had always been the pro with the press. From the first time she saw her name in print, in 1925, she was hooked on the extra fame and power that the media provided. She knew their importance. The press became her personal pipeline to all those millions of fans who couldn't eat, sleep, or breathe unless they knew every last detail of what their idol was doing. And Joan was never shy about giving news, major or minor, about herself. She was available day or night, at work or at play, for reporters and photographers. They were grateful for her cooperation and thoughtfulness. Through Katharine Albert she learned how to court the members of the fourth estate. She memorized reporters' names, the names of their wives, and other personal data. "She had a file system," said a former secretary. "In it she kept a record of everyone's birthday, important anniversaries, number of children, favorite foods and delicacies, and the topic of conversation last spoken for public consumption."
In reverse, Bette Davis preferred to keep a cool distance from the members of the press. She was from Boston, she said, and she was brought up to believe a lady's name should appear in a newspaper only when she was born, was married, or died. But she was also an actress, and at the start of her career in Hollywood she soon learned that success meant fame, which required free publicity.
In her starlet days she did the essentials—posing for pictures and giving good copy, most of it fabricated by Warner's publicity staff. After her court defeat in England, and her eventual elevation to stardom with
Jezebel,
Bette announced she was drawing up new ground rules with reporters. She'd talk to the guys and gals of the press room, but she'd do it
her
way. Unlike Joan Crawford and the other stars of the day, she did not want to be briefed on what to say, how to say it, or the detailed background of the people she was to meet. "Just give me their names," she instructed. "I don't have to know who they're married to or what they had for breakfast this morning." When they met there would be no kissy-kissy either, no false intimacy and promises of eternal friendship after the piece was put to bed. "I had no time for pleasantries," she explained. "I said what was on my mind and it wasn't always printable."
"I hate ass-kissers and yes-men," she told
Collier's.
"I love and respect
all
the wonderful people I work with, regardless of rank," said Joan Crawford.
"How to be friends with your ex-husbands," said Joan in
Modern Screen.
"Friendly divorces are bunk!" said Bette Davis in
Photoplay.
"People do not divorce unless they hate each other immensely, unless they are fighting cat and dog, tooth and talon, claw and fang." Taking Joan to task for her affectionate display with Franchot Tone on the eve of their recent divorce, Bette observed: "Look what happens after they have made their public declaration of divorce. They go to the Trocadero that night and in a dim corner you find them all wrapped like a pretzel,
avec
photographers. A columnist, the next day, declares it is the dawn of a new understanding, the 'birth of a beautiful friendship!' The whole thing is a forced unnatural attitude. You can't tell me that any man who has really loved a woman, or vice versa, can really be friends again after a divorce. And kidding about it is like tying a pink ribbon on a machine gun."
(In the same piece Bette said, "I do wish somebody would take a week off and define 'mental cruelty' for me. The other day I saw where a woman said it was mental cruelty because her husband called her 'a little squirt!' I thought to myself,
'Baby,
you should hear some of the things
I've
been called. And for good and sufficient reason too.'")
Due to her frankness and colorful maledictions, interviews with Bette were avidly sought—and carefully read by many, including Joan Crawford. "She is so doggone honest. She really says what's on her mind," said Joan.
It was during this period that Joan warmed to Bette. "She began to talk about her a lot," said publicist Harry Mines. "I remember being at Joan's house when she would show Bette's movies, sometimes two in one night."
"I went through three hankies," said Joan, giving her reaction to Bette's
Dark Victory.
"I couldn't stop crying for an hour after the movie ended."
"Joan always cries a lot," said Davis. "Her tear ducts must be very close to her bladder."
Bette had no time for the likes of Crawford. "She went out of her way to avoid her," said Joan Blondell. "We were all at Marion Davies' beach house one night. I was with my husband, and Bette was with her mother. All was light and gay until Crawford swept into the party. You just couldn't
miss
her in those days. I loved to watch Joan putting on the dog. She was
it,
positively radiant and beautiful and all those adjectives wrapped into one. Bette was dour. When Joan glided towards us, Bette did a quick about-face and exited out the French doors to the beach."
Adela Rogers St. Johns believed that Crawford wasn't interested in a close friendship with Bette Davis. "She knew that Bette didn't like her, and Joan, as the world's most popular and powerful star, felt it was her duty to win her over. Certainly she tried hard enough. One day she asked me to arrange a meeting at the grill in the Roosevelt Hotel, one Saturday afternoon. I called Bette. She and I were working on a story, so when I mentioned lunch she agreed. Very casually I mentioned that Joan Crawford would be joining us.
'Sweet!'
said Bette. And what will we talk about? The color of nail polish?'"
Glamorous Bette
''It
seemed to me that each one
coveted what the other
possessed. loan envied Bette's
incredible talent, and Bette
envied loans seductive glamour."
—GEORGE CUKOR
In 1940 the idea of Bette and Joan getting together to exchange beauty secrets was not a remote possibility. This was the year when the new glamorous, sophisticated Bette was launched in the pages of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair,
with extensive fashion layouts and "make over tips" also featured in
Photoplay, Modern Screen,
and
Motion Picture
magazines.
The transformation was deliberate on Bette's part. Having portrayed three unattractive characters in a row, in
The Old Maid, Juarez,
and
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
("Christ! This will play hell with my love life," she moaned after her head and eyebrows were shaved for the latter film), Bette told a reporter she was ready to forsake art and show the world herself as she truly was—young and very attractive. "While I'm young, I want to
be
young," she said, flinging her arms outward to express vim and vigor. "I've proved to myself I can play those older heavier roles. So from now on I intend, and you can tell everyone I said so, to play only young parts in the future."
With the cash pouring in from her movies, the staff at Warner Bros. were told to do everything possible to glamorize her appearance, as befitted the Queen of the Lot.
George Hurrell, the portrait photographer whose talent captured the luminous charms of Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, and Joan Crawford at M-G-M, was wooed to Warner's by Bob Taplinger, director of publicity. One of his first assignments was to transform Bette Davis into a vision of beauty and high chic. On hand to assist the photographer were a team of stylists, her own hairdresser, makeup artists, a dresser, and two "personal shoppers."
Truckloads of clothes arrived by the hour for Bette's fashion sessions with Hurrell. The racks of clothes included linen suits, cashmere sweaters, cocktail dresses, evening gowns; furs of mink, Baum Martin, a sable, silver foxes, silk culottes, and polka-dot lounge wear; but "no slacks or swimsuits."
"Accessories make the costume," the star declared, making her choice from the boxes of shoes, gloves, hats, scarves, and from trays of rings, bracelets, pins, and earrings.
Her hair, which went from platinum to mousy light brown to jet black (for
Juarez)
to bald (for
Elizabeth and Essex),
was now back to its natural light brown. Her skin—"glowing and blemish free"—owed its radiance, not to sex, like Joan's, but to a regimen faithfully adhered to by the star. "I always massage my face with cold cream, while sitting in a hot bath softened with bath oil," she told
Pageant.
After she dried off with a large cotton towel, "for stimulation, and for daintiness, a brisk rub-down with eau-de-cologne" followed.
"You don't have to be beautiful," Bette told
Cosmopolitan,
noting that "Joan Crawford, who is far from beautiful, had maintained and even increased her popularity throughout nearly a decade." As Lucille LeSueur, Bette went on to say, Joan resembled "a self-satisfied village siren," but through diet and mental development she had "swept complacency away."
Bette neglected to add that her inner glow and extra glamour were stimulated by her desire to please the new man in her life. His name was George Brent. He had stepped in when Spencer Tracy decided not to do
Dark Victory.
"He was the longest real romance I ever had with an actor," said Bette. "I was his girl for years."
Brent was no stranger to Bette. She had admired him back in 1932 when they appeared together in
The Rich Are Always with Us. "I
was fascinated and in love with George, but he didn't want me," she said. "I had to wait a few years before he felt the same way—when we made
Dark Victory."
Their affair lasted through the picture and "for a long time afterwards." It was conducted in private, however, because her divorce from Harmon Nelson was not final, and because "gazing adoringly into each other's eyes or dancing cheek to cheek at smart dinner clubs is all right for others, but definitely
not
for me," said the private Miss Davis.
The discretion suited Brent too. It enabled him to court others, including Marlene Dietrich and Ann Sheridan, whom he later married. (When asked why her marriage to George only lasted ten months, the irrepressible Sheridan replied, "Brent bent.")
"I often hoped he would marry
me,"
Bette complained, stating that her larger success caused jealousy on George's side. Columnist Hedda Hopper believed the green-eyed monster was in Davis' corner. At the apex of their affair, it was Hedda who said in her column, "Current gossip is that Greta Garbo is flinging the well-known eye at George Brent. Joan Crawford is also said to have considered him a very personable young man."
The eventual split came from a beauty poll endorsed by George. When Brent was asked by a magazine to name the ten most glamorous women in Hollywood, his list included: Dolores Del Rio, Kay Francis, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Norma Shearer, Irene Dunne, Joan Blondell, and Margaret Cartew (a starlet at Fox). When Davis, omitted from her lover's roster, heard of this, she screamed. "It was very harmless stuff, but not to Bette," said Bob Taplinger. "When she read the list, she had a fit. After all, she had gone to a lot of trouble to become glamorous. She was also having an affair with the guy, and she couldn't make his list? It was over for George after that."
"It wouldn't have
worked,"
Bette subsequently surmised. "He was an
actor.
I always said I would never marry actors. He was very
actory—
beautiful wardrobe, and he'd dye his hair."
After replacing Brent with Charles Boyer in her new film,
All This and Heaven Too,
Bette had a brief affair with the film's director, Anatole Litvak, recently estranged from his wife, Miriam Hopkins. The two spent weekends at Litvak's beach house in Malibu (the same house where Joan Crawford, as Mildred Pierce, would allow herself to be seduced by Zachary Scott), and during January 1940 Jimmie Fidler reported that "Bette and the Hungarian hit Ciro's at least twice a week." It was at the latter night spot, a short time later, that Litvak, intoxicated, appeared with the splendid, also tipsy, Paulette Goddard. "Sitting at a ringside table, he took out her breasts and kissed them passionately," Clifford Odets wrote in his Hollywood journal, detailing how the frisky director, banished to the outer sanctum of the bar, "suddenly disappeared, and finally was discovered under the bouffant skirt of Miss Goddard, on his knees." Hearing this report, and sensing that his intentions toward her weren't entirely honorable, Bette Davis terminated her affair with Litvak, and was seen for a while with Tom Lewis (who would wed Loretta Young), and with Warner's publicist, Bob Taplinger, who sent her "a gardenia a day." She also told
Photoplay
that she was hankering for an evening of dancing with Joan Crawford's popular escort, Cesar Romero, but "Bette was too shy to call him on the telephone."
In spite of her outward happiness, Bette was inwardly a lonely person,
Modern Screen
decided in September 1940. "She suffers much and can only bring peace of mind at a great cost."
She was going crazy because she was living in a house full of women, Bette explained. There was Dell, her maid, "who took all my explosions with the resignation of a Sicilian who lives in the shadow of Mount Etna." There was her sister, Bobby, who lived in the shadow of Mount Bette. "I was always the leader and Bobby was the weak follower," she said. "Bobby always wanted to be a star. Some people said she had more talent than I, but she never had my
guts.
She was a bore and a taker. She used to call me 'the Golden Goose.' When she began to realize that she wasn't going to amount to anything she had a nervous breakdown. It cost me a
fortune
to make her well. When she recovered she ran off and married an alcoholic, without my permission. [As a wedding present, Bette sent the couple a case of liquor.] After the birth of Bobby's daughter, she had another breakdown. It became very tiresome."
The third and most formidable female in Bette's house was her "beloved Ruthie." But she too had changed. With Bette's success, it was Mama who went Hollywood. "She had done her job and done it well," Bette told writer Joan Dew. "Now she was going to rest on my laurels, and rest in elegance. She not only became my daughter, she became a spoiled daughter. She was lovely, fractious, indolent and increasingly self-absorbed. She always spent more than I could earn, and she was indifferent to my daily struggles. I don't think she believed I worked a day once I arrived."
Adding to her pique, the star had become increasingly discontented with the citizens of Hollywood. "Their values shocked me. Their serious interests evaded me. The town was awash with outsized egos and rampant flunkies. There wasn't a fistful I could even have a conversation with; and none I respected."
Bette clearly needed a rest. At her mother's orders, she left Los Angeles for New York. Traveling up the coast, she wandered through New England "like a ghost in my old haunts." She ended up at Peckett's Inn, in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. Dining alone each evening, she became friendly with the handsome young assistant manager, Arthur Farnsworth. They went on drives through the countryside, and he advised her on property she wished to buy. When she left Peckett's Inn, she presented Farnsworth with a plaque for the dining-room wall. It read, "To Arthur Farnsworth, Keeper of Stray Ladies." "That plaque ended up embedded in a rock over a stream in New Hampshire," said Farnsworth's sister, Mrs. Jon De'Besche. "They put Bette's panties over it and had an official unveiling with just the two of them."
Not long after, Farnsworth drove across the country to visit Bette. He proposed, a few times. She eventually accepted. 'At last I found the peace I was searching for," she said. "I had my career and the love of a man I respected."
On New Year's Eve 1940 they were married at the home of a friend in Arizona. Bette wore white. Arriving in Los Angeles, the couple were asked to pose for photographers. "Kiss the bride," one called out. "We would rather
not,"
said Bette. "We are from New England and we don't do those sort of things in public."
"Did you know there were
twenty-five thousand baby girls
christened with the name Joan
this year? Half were called after
me, and the others were named
for Joan of Arc. Isn't that
wonderful?"
—JOAN CRAWFORD, 1940
Hot on the comeback trail, Crawford segued from the all-female cast of
The Women
into the all-male cast of
Strange Cargo.
"Clark Gable, and nine men! I love it," said Joan, who described her role as "a singer-tramp, who escapes from a French penal colony with a bunch of convicts who have only two things on their minds—freedom and sex with me."
Filmed at Pismo Beach and in the "jungles" of Pico National Park, the location shooting was a first for Crawford. With the exception of some early silent films, she had never worked outdoors before. "The sun usually makes me squint and cry," she explained. Another first was the star's decision to go through the greater part of the film without makeup. "Following the recent naturalised look of Irene Dunne and Bette Davis in pictures, Miss Crawford intends to portray her character without so much as a dab of lipstick, rouge, mascara or eye-shadow," said a press report. (She cheated in some scenes, Joan later told
Silver Screen.
"I used Vaseline on my eye-lids, eyebrows, and lips, to retain moisture. And in one scene in the jungle, using the top of an old tomato can as a mirror, I applied some brilliantine to my hair.")
Wearing one dress throughout the twenty-seven days of filming, Joan was a trouper, the director stated. He made no mention of the day in the jungle when Joan, preceded by Gable, passed under a tree with an eight-foot python coiled on a branch overhead. "That son of a bitch is
alive!"
screamed Joan, looking upward. "Yes, but its jaws are shut tight with a rubber band," the director explained. "What happens if the fucking rubber band snaps?" she asked, and refused to repeat the scene.
In April 1940, when
Strange Cargo
was previewed, Joan attended the showing and experienced "a definite sense of achievement" concerning her performance. There was one fault with the film, however: in the opening credits the name of Clark Gable came before hers. Her contract forbade this, and she asked that the prints of the picture be recalled and retitled, so that her name was first. Joe Mankiewicz, the producer, tried to explain that Gable had first billing in his current picture, a little epic called
Gone with the Wind.
His immense popularity as Rhett Butler would help them sell
Strange Cargo,
especially if his name came first.
"I don't give a shit about Rhett Butler or
Gone with the Wind,"
said Joan. "I've got a contract. Either change it or I'll talk to my lawyers."
Telegrams were sent to Harry Rapf, who called L. B. Mayer, who called Joan. It was such a minor matter, Mayer tried to tell Joan. She had been billed second in her last picture,
The Women,
and she got the best notices. "That was
different,"
Crawford said. "I
needed
that role. This time you needed
me.
You asked for Joan Crawford. You got Joan Crawford. And Joan Crawford always comes first on the marquee."