Bette Davis (15 page)

"Before Maugham"—as Bette liked to say—she would have dutifully reported for work as ordered, no matter how detestable she found the script: reserving for Ruthie and Bobby, and later her husband, Ham, the brunt of the violent dissatisfaction she dared not display at the studio lest her option be dropped when next it was due. Now, eaiiy that April of 1934, as if inspired by her character Mildred's combativeness, Bette gave her first public demonstration of displeasure since arriving in Hollywood. She refused to report for "wardrobe fittings and other necessary preparation" for Housewife.

Warner Bros, fired off a telegram to remind Bette of her legal obligation. Her contract included no provision for script approval; she must perform any role the studio chose to assign. TTie wire was followed by several sterner warnings, which ultimately seemed to persuade her to report to work on April 18, more than ten days after she had been due.

Still, the precedent had been set. Thenceforth, if Bette Davis disapproved of a project, Warner Bros, was going to hear about it.

In the aftermath of playing Mildred, Bette's attitude toward Ham also seemed to change. Like Maugham's vulgar cockney waitress, Bette appeared to take perverse pleasure in cruelly upbraiding and humiliating a worshipfiil husband whose adoration suddenly struck her as the most loathsome form of weakness. In this she received ample encouragement from Ruthie, who made no pretense about having returned to Los Angeles in time to share her daughter's long-awaited glory. Where once Ham Nelson's presence had seemed expedient to Ruthie, that was no longer the case now that she intended to come back into Bette's life on a daily basis.

Bobby was left in professional care in Massachusetts (where the young woman had been receiving shock treatment and other therapy), while Ruthie appeared in California on Bette's twenty-sixth birthday. With her she brought a photograph album she had compiled of her daughter's life and career "before Maugham." When Ham perused the album—as Ruthie must have known he would— he discovered picture after picture of Bette's loving reunion with

Charlie Ansley: a mother's malicious comment on her daughter's having probably married the wrong man.

Before long, Ruthie's ceaseless carping about Ham's lack of ambition caused him temporarily to flee, until his mother-in-law returned to New England in May. He came back in time to serve as Bette's buffer in her latest conflict with Warner Bros. She had finished filming Housewife on May 5, only to find herself swiftly assigned to another unwanted role, as Delia Street in the first Perry Mason film, director Alan Crosland's The Case of the Howling Dog. This time, however, Bette would not accede to pressure from the studio.

On June 13, 1934, on his wife's instructions, Ham refused to accept Warners' telegram ordering her to report for wardrobe fittings the next day. All afternoon Bette dodged the studio's telephone calls. Finally, at six-thirty that evening, Jack Warner called Bette himself, only to be told by her husband that "Miss Davis is busy" and would call him back later—which she foiled to do.

Instead, on June 14, while Bette remained in seclusion with Ham, she sent her agent, Mike Levee, to Burbank to inform Warner Bros, that she declined to appear in The Case of the Howling Dog, on the grounds that the low-budget thriller was far beneath the standard she had already attained in Of Human Bondage. For this infraction Bette anticipated suspension without pay, for a period to be tacked on at the end of her contract. In hopes of returning to the Warners payroll as quickly as possible without risk of actually having to do the Perry Mason film, she waited until Alan Crosland had replaced her with another actress—contract player Helen Trenholme—before writing to say that she agreed to come back to work on June 25.

Studio records show that her stratagem was quickly recognized for what it was. Warners extended her layoff until July 14, by which time a new assignment would presumably await her (although there was no guarantee of its being any more satisfactory to Bette).

Before then, however, the June 27 release of Of Human Bondage considerably altered Bette's status at Warner Bros. Critics extolled her Mildred Rogers as "easily her finest performance" {New York Times) and "probably the best performance ever recorded on die screen by a U.S. actress" {Life).

Following some initial embarrassment and perplexity in Bur-bank—why had Davis been allowed to give "her finest performance" at RKO?—Jack Warner cast her opposite the studio's premier actor, Paul Muni, in director Archie Mayo's Bordertown. The film was set to go into production on August 17, with Bette's role to commence on August 31.

Muni was reputed to wield more power than any other actor at Warners. He had complete story and script approval and a lordly fee of $50,000 per film, based on the vast box office appeal of his Scarface and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. But the thirty-nine-year-old actor was not powerful enough to push through Iris choice of Carole Lombard for the role of the high-strung murderess Marie Roark in Bordertown. Jack Warner's selection of Bette Davis for the part betokened the studio boss's sudden realization that Bette might be a more valuable asset than anyone at Warners had thought.

In the aftermath of her first two skirmishes with the studio, there may also have been a subtle, perhaps unconscious element in casting Bette as what screenwriter and staff producer Robert Lord called a "psychopathic woman," whose pugnacity leads only to madness and self-destruction. Where Mildred Rogers had spurred Bette to assert herself publicly as she had never done in Hollywood before, Marie Roark taught a harsher lesson. Enacting Marie's descent into flailing, self-consuming frenzy, the actress played out what might happen to any woman who reaches too aggressively for what she wants.

Jack Warner seemed to have honestly believed that he was making amends to the actress by awarding her a plum role in Border-town. That his ironic commentary on Bette's newfound recalcitrance was probably unconscious suggests how deeply ingrained was the popular association between female boldness and the "psychopathic."

"Believe me, I know something of psychopathic women," Robert Lord insisted to Hal Wallis, the associate executive in charge of production, who wanted one of Bette's scenes reshot "in a more emotional-hysterical way" than Mayo seemed to have directed it.

For her part, Bette feared Mayo and Lord were demanding that she seem too much the "raving lunatic" on screen. Aiming for a more finely nuanced depiction of mental illness, Davis based such affecting details as the abrupt, groping hand play and other nervous tics on sustained observation of her sister's breakdowns.

"To Miss Bette Davis for her work in Dangerous, I—" The audience at the March 5, 1936, Academy Awards ceremony, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, drowned out the rest of D. W. Griffith's speech with torrents of applause and stamping feet as Bette made her way to the speaker's platform to accept the Best Actress award.

The day had started out unhappily. Her newly retained attorney, Martin Gang, of Gang and Kopp, had informed her that at a March

3 meeting, Jack Warner and his staff—including studio general counsel Roy Obringer—had refused Gang's March 2 proposal that Bette be lent out again to RKO, to portray Queen Elizabeth opposite Katharine Hepburn in John Ford's adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson play Mary of Scotland,

Bette had been desperate to accept the recently proffered role, not least for the opportunity to appear with Hepburn. Her fellow Yankee's New England background had caused Bette and Ruthie to monitor obsessively every step of the rival actress's far more successful Broadway and Hollywood career. They had been painfully aware of Hepburn's 1932 New York stage triumph in The Warrior's Husband, her widely praised film debut in A Bill of Divorcement, with John Barrymore, her Academy Award for Morning dory, as well as this year's nomination for Best Actress (in competition with Bette) for RKO's Booth Tarkington adaptation, Alice Adams.

All this, while Warner Bros, persisted in using Bette Davis (fresh from her searing performance in Of Human Bondage) in such banalities as The Girl from Tenth Avenue, Front Page Woman, and Special Agent, whose sole raison d'etre could only have been to return more than their negative and distribution costs.

A new seven-year contract—dated December 27, 1934, and providing for Bette's weekly salary to rise from $750 to $1,350—had seemed temporarily to appease her; as had two somewhat better (although still not quite satisfactory) roles—as a faded actress modeled on Jeanne Eagels, in Alfred E. Green's Dangerous, and as a sensitive waitress in Archie Mayo's adaptation of Robert Sherwood's fashionable drama The Petrified Forest.

But the fuss and fume started again on November 29, 1935, when, with only a day to go before Bette finished The Petrified Forest, Warners ordered her to report back on December 2, to begin work on Hollywood's latest attempt to film Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, William Dieterle's Satan Met a Lady.

The following day, pleading illness and nervous exhaustion, Bette wired Jack Warner her vehement objections to doing another film so soon after The Petrified Forest. On December 2, when a studio physician, Dr. Carl Conn, appeared at 6:00 p.m. at Bette's home to report on her condition to the Warners' general counsel, Ham declined to let him in, saying only that Mrs. Nelson was expected to be out all evening. Eighteen minutes later, Bette sent another wire to Jack Warner, to whom she denied ever having claimed to be ill (the November 30 telegram notwithstanding): hence her refusal to allow the studio physician to examine her.

Bette went on to beseech Warner to grant her a much-needed

hiatus nonetheless. Instead the studio boss suspended her, but when Bette quietly showed up for work on December 6, Warner just as quietly canceled the suspension.

In February 1936, not long after Bette had been astonished to learn of her nomination as Best Actress for her merely adequate performance in Dangerous when she had not been nominated the year before for Of Human Bondage, she dispatched attorney Martin Gang to press her claims with the studio for a fresh contract. She wanted additional money and a limit to the number of films Warners could compel her to make each year, plus a guaranteed yearly holiday of three consecutive months. In addition, she pressed for the right to do an outside picture during that three-month holiday period (e.g., Mary of Scotland). All of this received an icy reception in Burbank. To end the conversation, Roy Obringer needed merely to produce the valid seven-year contract Bette had signed with Warners barely fifteen months before.

As the Academy Awards approached, the only thing likely to revive Bette's spirits would be Jack Warner's approval of the loan-out to RKO. Certain that Hepburn was going to win the Best Actress award for Alice Adams (in Davis's view, justifiably so), Bette initially planned to be out of town at the time of the ceremony, on vacation with Ruthie in Honolulu. Besides, although they could never really prove it, Bette and her mother had privately blamed her failure even to be nominated for an Academy Award for Of Human Bondage on Jack Warner. They believed he had steadfastly blocked it because the film had been produced at a rival studio. Although Bette's name had not appeared among the nominees in 1935, there had been a much-talked-about write-in campaign on her behalf, which suggested the strong sentiment in Hollywood that Davis's Mildred Rogers had been richly deserving of Academy recognition. In 1936, her nomination for Dangerous was widely perceived as a consolation prize for the previous year's injustice.

Only under pressure from Jack Warner (who had communicated his displeasure about the Honolulu trip to the actress's agent on February 27) did Bette finally agree to put in an appearance at the Biltmore Hotel—probably in hopes that this sudden spurt of coop-erativeness would induce Warner to approve the loan-out to RKO.

But when March 5 started with the call from her attorney informing her of Warner's refiisal to allow her to appear with Hepburn in the John Ford film, Bette only naturally felt scant enthusiasm for attending the Academy Awards ceremony that night: as suggested by the dowdy navy-and-white print dress she chose as her silent statement on the occasion.

At a table near the dance floor, a forlorn and dispirited Bette Davis spent much of the evening seated beside her husband, more appropriately dressed in white tie and tails.

It seemed to Bette that the fine print of her seven-year contract left her powerless, ineffectual. As if she were in servitude to Warner Bros., she had even had to request Obringer's permission to join Ruthie in Hawaii two days later, on March 7. And what hope could she have of salvaging her career when, even as Jack Warner was refusing to loan her out for Mary of Scotland, she had been squandering her abilities on the latest trifle to which he had assigned her: as a cashier who impersonates a cosmetics heiress, in Alfred E. Green's The Golden Arrow,

But then out came the sixty-one-year-old Griffith to announce the Best Actress award. Dramatically rattling the phlegm in his throat, he read not Hepburn's name, but Bette's.

As the spotlight found her rising from her seat and excitedly making her way to the speaker's platform, Bette must have realized that at one fell swoop everything had changed. Warner Bros, hadn't had an Academy Award-winning actor since George Arliss's Disraeli in 1930. Never before had a Warners actress been named. As Bette clutched the gold figurine, a new sense of power surged through her: all she had to do was exert it.

The Academy Award symbolized everything Ruthie had worked for during the long years of hardship. But when Bette received the award, Ruthie was on vacation in Hawaii. Then word arrived from Bette that she was canceling her plans to join her mother; instead she would head east to celebrate with old friends and family. Feeling suddenly unloved and unappreciated, Ruthie composed a petulant three-word telegram to her daughter, anyone love me? she wired from Honolulu, lest Bette forget what she owed her mother for sacrificing everything to help her reach this moment of triumph.