Bette Davis (14 page)

"T\irn your back and look at those snapshots for a minute while I get into something restful," says Bette coquettishly, with the Southern accent she modeled after her friend Robin's.

As Madge Norwood, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy Southern planter, she has just lured one of her father's sharecroppers, young Marvin Blake (played by Richard Barthelmess), to her bedroom, where she plans to seduce him. A glimpse of Madge undoing the sash of her dress is followed by a shot of Marvin nervously, distractedly looking through the photographs, as Madge suddenly starts to sing off-screen.

We cut again: this time to a tight close-up of Madge's face and naked shoulders, as her arms seem to reach behind her, apparently undressing herself beneath the frame, in off-screen space.

Unremarkable in itself, the shot is of special interest on account of the peculiar expressiveness Bette imparts to her shoulder movements . Her background in interpretive dance had taught her to communicate depth of feeling by animating the shoulders (Ted Shawn: "No intensity of emotion is possible without the movement of the shoulders"), as her dancer's physical training has allowed her to engage the eye with subtle articulations of muscle and collarbone, made visible beneath the skin.

The seduction sequence in Cabin in the Cotton caused something of a sensation at Warner Bros., where Bette Davis had been in serious danger of finding herself dismissed. Although her December 24,1931, contract gave the studio the right to retain her services as an actress for a total of five years, nothing compelled them to do so. Whatever the reasons for their displeasure, after the twenty-six weeks guaranteed in her contract it would be perfectly legitimate for them to decline to pick up her option and be done with her. But now Bette's watershed performance in the Curtiz film made that most unlikely.

Although Paul Green's brusque and insubstantial screenplay about the conflict between sharecroppers and wealthy planters in

"the new South" seemed to provide scant opportunity for the actress playing Madge Norwood, Bette uses every precious second of screen time to draw attention to herself with what she had learned from Martha Graham to call "full-body acting": twisting hips and shoulders, flexing elbows, clenching and unclenching fists—boldly thrusting herself at the camera and at us.

Her performance lacks variety, however. Almost everything is acted at the same level of intensity, with no apparent attempt to modulate her effects: a serious flaw in her craft that would persist for a good many years to come.

Still, of one longed-for effect the young actress could be absolutely certain: On June 16, 1932, a week after she had completed Cabin in the Cotton, Bette received word that Warner Bros, was indeed picking up her option, apparently on the orders of Jack Warner, who declared himself delighted with her' 'transformation'' in the Curtiz film.

Photographs of Bobby taken at Zuma Beach, north of Malibu, where Mrs. Davis had rented a vacation cottage for them in the summer of 1932, show a frail, wild-eyed, emaciated figure, whom Ruthie had come to fear as a source of potential embarrassment to Bette, should one of Bobby's violent outbursts occur in public. Bobby's eruptions often began by her becoming almost catatonic, as she curled up in the fetal position. Then suddenly she would leap to her feet and rush about, screaming uncontrollably at the top of her lungs, until someone restrained her. Hesitant to commit her younger daughter to a mental institution in California, where the news might cause a scandal that could jeopardize Bette's film career, Ruthie decided to take Bobby to Massachusetts. There they could also count on the comfort and support of her family. But what to do about Bette in the meantime?

Aside from worrying about who would care for older daughter in their absence, Ruthie made no secret of her anxieties that without a mother's supervision, twenty-four-year-old Bette might succumb to the abundant temptations in Hollywood and lose her virginity before marriage. Ruthie's anxieties had recently redoubled when Bette came back from a studio-sponsored trip to New York to publicize The Dark Horse and complained of the ceaseless pressure leading-man Warren William had exerted on her to sleep with him.

Thus the unprecedented effusiveness with which Ruthie greeted Bette's old admirer Ham Nelson when he turned up at their door in Zuma Beach, after his graduation from Massachusetts Agricultural College. In hopes of reviving his romance with Bette, and perhaps

even of eventually asking her to marry him, Ham had signed on to play the trumpet at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles that summer.

Although he had enjoyed an amiable correspondence with Bette that led him to suspect she might be favorably inclined toward him, little had he anticipated the vigorous encouragement he would receive from her mother. But by this time Ruthie had concluded that under the less than ideal circumstances, Bette's quick marriage to the innocent, malleable, good-natured New Englander might be best for all concerned. Although, fresh out of college as he was and with no prospects to speak of, Ham would obviously be in way over his head in a marriage to Bette, Mrs. Davis theorized that his lack of a career made him a perfect mate for her daughter, whose needs would always come first.

Bette was a good deal less certain about what was best for her. Much as she admitted to a physical attraction to Ham, the idea of marriage terrified her. Always in her mind was the unhappy precedent of Ruthie and Harlow's failed union, and she repeatedly cited her parents' experience as her excuse whenever Ham—or Ruthie— pressed his case with her.

At length, however, Bobby's rapidly deteriorating condition brought matters to a head. Ruthie announced that on August 19, she and her younger daughter would return to Massachusetts, accompanied by Ruthie's sister, Mildred, who had come west to assist her.

Still, Bette held out until two days before Ruthie and Bobby's departure before she capitulated to all the pressure and somewhat reluctantly agreed to become Mrs. Harmon Oscar Nelson, Jr. A wedding party was hastily convened (including Mildred and the intermittently violent Bobby) for the drive to Yuma, Arizona, where no waiting period would be required for a marriage license.

On Thursday, August 18, 1932, after a Baptist minister, the Reverend J. L. Goodman, pronounced them man and wife, Bette and Ham spent their wedding night at the Farrell house on Toluca Lake. Bette's exultant mother occupied the next room. She left for New England early the next morning.

Years in Sing Sing. Scarcely present on-screen in the LeRoy film, Bette found herself with little more to do in Curtiz's bleak prison drama. The principal dramatic action (and screen time) went to Spencer Tracy, as was the custom at unabashedly male-oriented Warner Bros.

Bette's second film under Curtiz's (in her case) perfunctory direction typifies the actress's problems at a studio as yet unwilling or unable to find projects suited to her abilities. The quintessential Warners film was cut to be "fast and snappy": perhaps too much so for Bette's gestural style of acting, whose nuances tended to get lost in the interstices between shots.

While it has often been said that in the aftermath of Cabin in the Cotton no one at Warner Bros, could determine quite how to use Bette Davis to her best advantage, one discovers scant evidence that—at this point, at least—anyone there really had the faintest interest or enthusiasm for doing so. Instead, as in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Bette would repeatedly find herself slotted into largely standardized roles, in this case the gangster's "fast-talking, hardbitten moll," Fay.

Not that there was some dark conspiracy against the actress, some devious plan to hold her back or thwart her career. Warner Bros, just had a bottom-line concern with using one of its employees in ways the studio deemed most profitable.

At this point, Bette and Ham had decided to stay on at the rented vacation cottage in Zuma Beach, from which every morning at five he drove her to Warner Bros. Typically, the young husband then spent most of the day in his bride's dressing room, waiting to take her home. Much as Ruthie had calculated, Ham took her and Bobby's place with Bette, who now daily vented her pent-up rage and frustration in private with her husband.

Ham's perpetual unemployment became an object of some derision at the studio when Bette had emergency surgery to remove her appendix at Wilshire Osteopathic Hospital in October. She was compelled to ask Warner Bros, for an advance against salary in order to pay the bill. She had little choice but to explain that she shouldered "the entire burden for her family's upkeep," which encompassed two households: hers and her husband's on the West Coast, Ruthie's and Bobby's in Dover, Massachusetts. For his part, Ham took no pleasure in being supported by his wife. Mortified by his status as a kept man, he looked for work and finally landed a series of engagements as a dance-band pianist. Eventually he also worked as a nightclub orchestra leader in such popular spots as the Blossom Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and the Colony

Club. As far as Bette was concerned, however, her husband's employment created even more of a problem. The conflict between his night hours and her own exhausting daytime schedule suddenly made it impossible for Ham always to be there for her when she needed him.

She accused him of every mean fault; she said he was stingy, she said he was dull, she said he was vain, selfish; she cast virulent ridicule on everything upon which he was most sensitive. . . . She kept on, with hysterical violence, shouting at him an opprobrious, filthy epithet.

In December 1933, Bette and Ham were ensconced in a rented house once occupied by Greta Garbo, at 171 San Vicente Boulevard in Santa Monica, when she read W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. Director John Cromwell was planning to film an adaptation of the 1915 novel at RKO.

The portrait of young Philip Carey's sadomasochistic relationship with the vile and abusive Mildred Rogers touched a chord in Bette. She probably recognized something of her own biliousness in Mildred's ceaseless spate of' 'hysterical violence.'' Whether Bette was conscious of it we cannot know, but like Ibsen's Hedvig, Mildred offered the actress an opportunity to unleash reserves of violent emotion long hidden from public view though sadly familiar in private.

On the basis of Bette's performance as the petulant and manipulative Madge Norwood in Cabin in the Cotton, John Cromwell, a forty-five-year-old former Broadway stage actor who had directed more than a dozen films since coming to Hollywood in 1928, had unofficially summoned her to his office at RKO to discuss the Maugham project. Other actresses had already expressed discomfort with the role of the cruelly selfish Mildred Rogers, not least because of the anemic pallor and overall physical grotesqueness that play so large a part in Philip's perverse attraction to the oddly androgynous Mildred (who was widely thought to have been modeled on a crude cockney boy with whom the young Somerset Maugham had been painfiilly obsessed).

Bette was convinced the role could turn everything around for her in Hollywood, and she launched a campaign to persuade Jack Warner to loan her out to RKO. Warner tended to resist loan-outs of his actors. He preferred to reserve his stable of acting talent for his own more than ample production schedule.

By early January of 1934, Bette had nearly worn away the studio

boss's resistance to loaning her out, when she discovered that she was pregnant. The news plunged her into despair, for she felt certain that her pregnancy would cause her to lose what she saw as her great chance.

Before Warner Bros, would even consider talking to RKO about the loan-out, the studio expected her to have begun director William Dieteiie's Fog Over Frisco, which was set to start shooting on January 22. There was no telling how long the negotiations might drag on; or whether Warners might require her to do yet another film or more, before she went off to RKO.

It was in this frame of mind that Bette decided to have an illegal abortion. Although she consulted Ruthie and Ham (and subsequently ascribed her decision to pressure from both her mother and her husband), she appeared to have made up her mind well in advance. On January 20, two days before she was due to start shooting Fog Over Frisco, Bette had her first abortion. Ham notified the studio that Mrs. Nelson would need several days off to recover from sunstroke and flu.

Bette was in her second and final week of work on Fog Over Frisco (in which she played a reckless society girl who becomes involved in a securities theft scheme) when Warners notified her that they had come to terms with RKO. She was due to rep on to their Gower Street studios after a week's break to begin Of Human Bondage on February 14. Leslie Howard would co-star as the obsessed Philip Carey. Although Of Human Bondage would be Bette's twenty-second film, she regarded Mildred as her first substantial dramatic opportunity since Hedvig in 1929. If she failed to create a vivid portrait here, she was unlikely to have such an opportunity' again.

Fortunately, in John Cromwell Bette Davis discovered an able collaborator. He was the first film director to show any sustained interest in adjusting his pictorial effects to the actress's expressive stances and movements. Even in Curtiz's Cabin in the Cotton (the strongest of her film performances thus far). Bette all too often seems to be struggling for the camera's attention. By contrast, in Of Human Bondage, Cromwell frames his shots expressly to emphasize the bold physical details of her tense and volatile performance.

As Bette ! s twenty-sixth birthday approached, less than a week after she was scheduled to finish Of Human Bondage and return to Warners for her next assignment, the actress felt newly confident about her career. Particularly satisfying to her were Mildred's ranting scenes, in which she mercilessly tongue-lashes the adoring

Philip: tirades in which Bette believed herself to have exercised her powers as she had never been encouraged to do on-screen before.

Bette believed herself—and her career—to have been transformed by the experience of playing Mildred, but back at Warners, it was as if nothing had changed. She found herself assigned to what she regarded as yet another trivial role, as the "siren" who tries to break up George Brent's marriage in director Alfred E. Green's Housewife.