Bette Davis (13 page)

"Mr. Kinnell tells me that he believes you would be an excellent choice for leading lady in the picture." Bette fondly imitated the sixty-three-year-old Arliss's English accent and courtly manner, as she recounted the successful interview to Ruthie and Bobby that night at Alta Loma Terrace. Ruthie wasted no time unpacking their bags at the glorious news that Bette had been offered a $300-a-week, one-picture contract with Warners.

Arliss was an anomalous character at Warner Bros., where he had been summoned in 1929 to play Benjamin Disraeli, a role he had first done on Broadway in 1911. At Warners, he artfully intimidated studio personnel with the carefully constructed persona of an august English gentleman: "Mr. George Arliss," as he insisted on being billed ("Sir George," as he was often mistakenly addressed). For effect, Arliss's batman regularly followed him around the film set. As part of his act, Arliss made a great show of taking his tea at exactly 4:00 p.m. , whether or not the director was ready for a break. At hardworking, no-nonsense Warner Bros., where speed and efficiency were expected to take precedence over all, this was curious behavior. But the box office appeal of Arliss's kitsch

impersonations of Disraeli and Alexander Hamilton won him the right to certain on-set eccentricities.

"Countless thousands have waited for his masterpiece!" blared the Warner Bros, publicity machine about The Man Who Played God, adapted from a Gouverneur Morris short story about a celebrated musician (Arliss) who loses his hearing. Notwithstanding the six films she had made under her Universal contract, Bette was billed as "a newcomer to the screen": "Bette Davis, the young woman with the sad face." She portrayed the musician's young fiancee, Grace, who falls in love with another man but fears running off with him lest she devastate the old maestro. Before the critics had had an opportunity to upbraid her for speaking just a bit too swiftly for comprehension, at Arliss's urging, Warner Bros, signed Bette to a twenty-six-week contract (renewable for up to five years). Her starting salary was $400 a week, $100 more than she had been paid for The Man Who Played God.

"Me—as I really was," Bette would say of a photograph from this period showing her with eyes downcast: a shy, reticent, oddly fearful creature, so entirely unlike the virago she was to become at the height of her fame that it is difficult to reconcile the two. To understand what Bette was like in these early days in Hollywood, it is essential to keep in mind that, by contrast with the screaming fits of temper in which she regularly indulged at home, her public demeanor was characterized by a surprising degree of timidity and trepidation. In this lonely period, her old friend from New England Ellen Batchelder was one of the few outsiders she and Ruthie permitted to enter their lives on a regular basis.

Two years before this, when Ellen had gone backstage after a performance of Broken Dishes in New York, Bette had shown great pleasure at seeing her but failed to invite her home to visit Ruthie, as Ellen had hoped to do. Nor had there been any concrete suggestion of meeting again soon. That Bette's attitude was different in California suggests how sharply her circumstances—and needs-had altered in the interim. From the time she learned that Ellen was nearby teaching dance and physical education, Bette eagerly invited her to stay with them almost every weekend in Los Angeles. She and Ruthie would drive out to Pasadena to pick Ellen up and would take her home afterward. Ellen's comforting presence must have reminded Bette of a time when she had been (or appeared to be) perfect master of her situation, so different from her life in Hollywood, where everything seemed frightening and beyond her control.

Such were Bette's emotions in the days following December 24, 1931, when she signed her first multipicture contract with Warner Bros. For the moment, however, whatever anxiety Bette may have experienced about her future at Warners was as nothing compared to her uneasiness about her first big Hollywood party. She had been invited to a New Year's Eve gathering at the home of actress Lois Wilson, in Beverly Hills. The thirty-six-year-old Wilson, whose long lists of credits included James Cruze's silent classic The Covered Wagon, had played Bette's mother in John Stahl's Seed, the younger actress's second picture at Universal.

Ellen Batchelder recalls Bette's acute agitation about the prospect of the party. Bette was going without a date, and she feared that she wouldn't know any of the other guests at what she presumed would be a star-studded evening. She was determined to look glamorous, and Ruthie's proposal to sew her a dress was quickly rejected. Nor, as far as Bette was concerned, could there be any question of Ruthie's other strategy: dragging her to one of the Hollywood thrift shops Ruthie haunted, in search of the gaudily embroidered Oriental robes she was forever pressing on her daughter. This time Bette insisted on their all going to Magnin's to select the most sophisticated and extravagant gown she could afford, something that would catch the eye of every man in the room. All too quickly she seemed to have forgotten the humiliation she had suffered when William Wyler cruelly remarked on her' 'chest dress.'' Once again, as Bobby and Ellen watched in wonder, Bette chose a costume with a neckline to draw attention to her large breasts.

The night of December 31, as Bette dressed for Lois Wilson's party, Mrs. Davis came in to warn her, as she so often had done in the past: "A stiff prick has no conscience." For all Bette's ceaseless trifling with her young beaux back east, Ruthie wanted her daughter to understand that she must be a good deal more careful with the worldly men she met in Hollywood, who could scarcely be treated so coyly. Ruthie and Ellen dropped her off in Beverly Hills, and Bette announced that she would probably not call to have them pick her up until sometime the following morning. Bette then braced herself to make her entrance at her first Hollywood party.

Much as she had dreaded, inside the crowded living room she discovered not a single familiar face. She ended up lingering painfully beside a window on the fringes of the party. She was too scared to speak to anyone until finally a man who introduced himself as Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., then the husband of Joan Crawford, came up to her as she stood alone and awkward. As she later described the incident to Ellen, before she quite realized what was

happening, Fairbanks had deftly slipped his hand inside her dress, grabbed hold of one of her breasts, and said, " You should use ice on your breasts the way Joan Crawford does." Recoiling from his touch, Bette rushed to a telephone to summon her mother to come for her at once, all thought of a daring and exciting late-night departure quickly forgotten.

"I can't depend on anyone!" Bette cried, so angry that she barely seemed to know what she was saying or doing. "This house is a pigpen!"

Ellen Batchelder had come for a weekend at the house Ruthie had rented on Toluca Lake, to discover a clearly distraught Bette sweeping out a closet with a dustpan and broom.

"Look at me! I have to clean up these floors!" Bette shouted at Ellen, who quickly surmised that she and her mother had just had one of their "terrible brawls."

A good many of these brawls were ostensibly about Ruthie and Bobby's purported failure to keep the house as clean as Bette expected. As Bobby would later recall, the moment Bette came home from Warner Bros., she would put on a white glove and run her hand along the furniture to check that all was dusted properly.

The new house had been decorated in what Ruthie called true Yankee style by its Massachusetts-born owner, actor Charles Far-rell, Janet Gaynor's co-star in a successful series of romantic films beginning with Seventh Heaven in 1927. To Mrs. Davis's great delight, a model of the Mayflower perched on the fireplace mantel, near a lamp whose shade had been stenciled with a map of Massachusetts. Outside, weeping willows drooped over a private lake, where mute swans regularly glided past.

But Ruthie and her girls knew scarcely any peace here, for by this time Bobby's state of mind had begun to deteriorate considerably. Where doctors had once attributed Bobby's nervous prostration to the effects of her having perhaps studied too hard at school, it became evident now that her condition was far more serious than anyone had suspected. According to Ellen Batchelder, at times Bobby grew violent. She would suddenly shout and hit at Ruthie or whoever else happened to be around. Then, just as abruptly, Bobby would revert to her normal, withdrawn self. It seemed to Batchelder that Bobby's torment was the result of having been "thwarted" all her life as she and Ruthie tried to live through Bette.

For her part, Bette had her own apparently overwhelming pressures to deal with just now, and Ruthie seemed determined to prevent Bobby's illness from infecting her sister's career.

Sipping tea with George Arliss had hardly prepared Bette for the assembly-line style of production that caused Warner Bros, to be dubbed "the Ford of the movies." Reporting for work at the 135-acre Burbank studio on January 22, 1932, Bette found herself assigned to two films simultaneously. On her first day she was put to work portraying a flapper in director Alfred E. Green's The Rich Are Always with Us, starring Ruth Chatterton and George Brent; and the day after that, January 23, she plunged into the role of a young artist in William Wellman's So Big, with Brent and Barbara Stanwyck.

For maximum efficiency, Warner Bros, scheduled Bette to shoot her scenes with Wellman by day and with Green by night—all for the same $400 weekly salary they would have had to pay her were she making only one film at a time.

"We're not running any museum," ran the refrain at Warner Bros., where the dictum was that even a rudely done film could yield a profit if made quickly and cheaply enough. At its best, Warner Bros, austerity was capable of producing films as brisk as the pace at which they had been made. But neither The Rich Are Always with Us nor So Big showed anything or anyone at his best-certainly not Bette Davis, who (much as she had at Universal) persisted in her fear of venting her displeasure at the studio.

Ellen Batchelder recalls this as an especially trying period for Bette, who complained of being repeatedly stepped on at Warner Bros, because she was "a little New Englander." Bette's nightly screaming fits eventually drove Ruthie secretiy to rent an apartment of her own, in anticipation of moving out with Bobby. On the eve of Ruthie's departure, Bette discovered her mother's plans. She grew more frantic than ever, tearfully demanding that Ruthie and Bobby give up the new apartment and remain with her as always.

"You be careful!" Bobby screamed, gesturing to the visitor as if he were in danger. "Don't go near her—she's got syphilis!"

At which Bobby pointed at her mother, who sank back in humiliation before the latest doctor she had summoned to Toluca Lake to see what could be done about her increasingly agitated and irrational younger daughter.

Bobby's outburst may have been occasioned by Ruthie's incipient romantic interest in Robert Woodbury Palmer, a skinny, bespectacled thirty-nine-year-old businessman from Belmont, Massachusetts.

Palmer spent part of the year on a ranch in Palm Springs, in southern California, where Ruthie had suddenly taken to visiting

him. More often than not, she brought along Bobby, who violently objected to what she seemed to consider Ruthie's betrayal of Harlow.

For once, Bette's and Ruthie's positions were reversed. Bette watched in bewilderment while her forty-six-year-old mother' 'pursued" a man seven years her junior.

With the exception of Ellen's weekly visits, Bette's fundamental solitariness in Hollywood persisted. She had developed "a kind of schoolgirl crush" on George Brent when they worked on two films together and was thrilled to discover that the suave twenty-eight-year-old Irishman lived in a house across the lake.

Just how innocent Bette still was is clear from the fact that when Ellen Batchelder dropped by one day, Bette excitedly took her down to the lake. There the two young women hid behind some bushes and took turns trying to catch a glimpse of Brent through Bette's binoculars.

This voyeurism typified the stultifying passivity that seemed to have mysteriously overcome Bette since her arrival in Hollywood. By the time of her twenty-fourth birthday, on April 5, 1932, she had completed nine films, and not one of them provided so much as a glimmer of the virtuoso acting that had once been her single-minded goal. That goal had seemed almost within reach at the time of The Earth Between and The Wild Duck, but it often appeared quite hopelessly beyond her now.

This is probably why Ruthie reacted as she did to a letter Bette received from her erstwhile fiance, Rochester businessman Charlie Ansley, who had broken off their engagement at the time of The Wild Duck. When Ansley wrote to Bette asking to see her again, Ruthie did everything she could to encourage the reunion. Charlie's reappearance would take Bette back to the period of her theatrical successes. Bedazzled by the appearance of his former girlfriend in the movies, Charlie would scarcely have comprehended the downward slide of her career since last he had encountered her: all the better, perhaps, for restoring her former boldness and self-regard.

With Ruthie orchestrating and photographing the event, Bette's reunion with the former suitor took place at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs. Bette, her mother, and her sister had gone there on holiday after the April 9 completion of her fourth lusterless performance for Warner Bros., in director Alfred E. Green's political satire The Dark Horse.

Like Junior Laemmle before him, production chief Jack Warner was already grumbling about what he perceived as the actress's "bland" appearance on-screen. Ruthie's photographs of Bette and

Charlie Ansley in Palm Springs, and later in Yosemite National Park, in eastern California, are the more remarkable for the distinct metamorphosis they record. Here are Bette and Charlie riding horseback at Smoke Tree Ranch; and here, exploring Yosemite Falls in the Sierra Nevadas. After Bette's many months of debilitating rejection in Hollywood, the attention and adulation from Charlie Ansley seem to have revived her sense of herself—happily, in ample time to carry over electrically into her next film, Michael Cutiz's Cabin in the Cotton,