Bette Davis (19 page)

But even as Bette was establishing herself in the popular imagination as what one exultant Warners' executive dubbed "a female

Cagney," the studio was quietly doing all it could to see to it that her tangle of debts emanating from the court case guaranteed that she behave herself. Jack Warner appeared to show sincere concern when, on January 6,1937, Bette scrawled a nervous note imploring him to advance $14,000 against future salary, to cover the British legal bills, which she described as having caused her "tremendous worry for some time now.'' Six days later, Warner personally guaranteed a Bank of America loan in that amount, which the actress agreed to pay back in twenty $700 weekly installments (to be withheld from her salary). In private, however, Warner expressed glee at the indebtedness that would tie Bette to the studio all the more tightly when her share of Warners' legal bills came due.

"All this is entirely up to Miss Davis to pay," Warner told legal staffer R. W. Perkins. "We are going to exact from her the just costs of the case."

For all Warner's bluster with the boys, however, studio correspondence indicates that he feared asking Bette for the money, lest she revolt anew before completing the swift succession of four or more films he had already scheduled for her. Although Warner Bros, had wasted no time paying in full its British legal bills, Jack Warner asked Denton, Hall and Burgin to make a show of billing her directly, in order that-—as Obringer explained to Perkins—"the onus of being harsh and cruel in the matter would be removed from us."

Much as the studio recognized that Bette was at this point "financially embarrassed," Obringer declared that as far as Warner Bros, was concerned, "this is her own problem."

"Bette Davis suffered a sunstroke which will keep her confined to a hospital in Carpinteria, California, for at least four weeks,'' Ham told reporters. He refused to say more about Bette's mysterious disappearance in August 1937, shortly after the studio reluctantly suspended her anew—on July 29—for failure to report to work on what was to have been her fifth film since her return from England in November.

Until now, Bette seemed to have mended her ways, appearing, as ordered, in four films in swift succession— Marked Woman, then Michael Curtiz's Kid Galahad, Edmund Goulding's That Certain Woman, and Archie Mayo's It's Love I'm After, As early as March, however, the actress had quietiy resisted attending wardrobe fittings for the Goulding film. She had asked that they be postponed to give her time to recover after the punishing work schedule to which she

had adhered since November, as well as from the lingering strain of her legal battle.

From La Quinta Hotel, in Indio, California, where she had fled for rest and seclusion, on March 18 Bette wired Hal Wallis her plea for a week off, lest overwork all too quickly transform her into "a jittery old woman." Anxious to show no weakness in the face of Bette's first small sign of recalcitrance since the court judgment, the studio agreed to give her only two days more. In response, on March 19 her attorney, Dudley Furse, notified Wallis that Bette's physician had ordered her to rest on account of low blood pressure and overall delicate health. Bette claimed to have damaged her health when, in an attempt to show a new attitude, she had pressed ahead to finish Marked Woman though stricken with the flu. According to Furse, the physician warned that if Bette refused (or was not allowed) to follow his advice and take to her bed immediately, he would "not be responsible for the consequences."

Although in due course Bette returned to work as ordered, by the time she had completed the Goulding and Mayo films that July she was done to 104 pounds. She was scarcely in condition to press on to yet another film, and in a desperate, rambling letter dated July 17, 1937, she begged Jack Warner to excuse her from the comedy Hollywood Hotel.

Ruthie had rented a beach house for them in Santa Barbara, where she intercepted all calls to her daughter, who, like Bobby before her, appeared to be suffering from a complete nervous collapse.

Besides overwork, crushing debt, and residual depression over her failed legal case, a number of other factors contributed to Bette's repining spirit: principal among them was dissatisfaction with a salary that, she never tired of reminding herself, would have been so much higher now had she accepted Jack Warner's June 1936 offer.

Interestingly, Warner appears to have recognized the beneficial effects that a well-deserved salary increase or cash bonus would have had on Bette at this juncture, but he feared changing so much as a comma in her current contract, let alone salary figures. "We are not permitted to make any changes, in any form, shape or manner in the contract," he had warned Obringer in the aftermath of the English ruling. "If we do, it means that we violated the judgment and all our work has been in vain."

Even more, studio records show Warner's immense trepidation about suspending Bette now that she had failed to report for work on Hollywood Hotel. This was scarcely out of concern for the ac-

tress's delicate mental state, however. As Bette seems never to have realized at the time, Warner Bros., for fear of raising the general issue of the Hollywood suspension clause, had technically waived its right to add time on to the end of her contract. And now, when a team of Warner Bros, lawyers studied the waiver Mr. Justice Branson had required, they could not determine whether the studio had waived its right to add time on to her contract solely for the June 19,1936, suspension or for all subsequent suspensions as well, though most of the Warners' legal staff leaned toward the latter conclusion. Hence Jack Warner's anxiety that Bette or her attorneys would sniff the considerable advantage this legal ambiguity afforded her.

On July 29, when Bette's failure to report for work compelled Warner to demonstrate firmness by prompdy suspending her, he quietly directed his legal staff to word the suspension notice as vaguely as possible, lest she or her advisers perceive the loophole that the British court case appeared to have opened.

Bette spent the rest of the summer in seclusion at Santa Barbara, where Ruthie (newly converted to Christian Science) read aloud to her for hours on end from Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The readings, with their emphasis on spiritual healing, appeared to soothe the troubled movie star—but not enough, apparendy, to prevent her from indulging in a bit of malice against her now happily married sister. Bobby had put her miserable past behind her and had recently embarked on a round-the-world cruise with her rich, handsome husband. Not long after Bette had agreed to report back to the studio to meet with director William Wyler in anticipation of working with him in Jezebel, the press discovered the isolated beach house where she and Ruthie had gone into hiding several weeks before. Bette now publicly disclosed the nervous collapse that Ruthie and Ham had initially been anxious to cover up, and—to her mother's horror—she disclosed something more: the hitherto carefully concealed history of mental illness that had plagued her sister. Bette claimed that the example of Bobby's past mental problems made her fear growing so ill herself that she might never work again.

before. Prone to work-related insomnia, stomachaches, and teeth grinding, as well as to persistent fears that his errors as a director would be preserved on celluloid, Wyler could empathize with Bette's lifelong inability to expunge certain obsessive thoughts from her mind. Her oft-repeated tale about her childhood experience of finding herself unable to enjoy the circus after she had noticed a crooked seam down the center of a carpet hardly seemed peculiar to a director whose nickname, "Forty-Take" Wyler, hinted at the deeply ingrained, almost manic perfectionism that some observers mistook (frequently with Wyler's encouragement) for simple insecurity.

"When he can't get a scene exactly as he wants it, he almost loses his mind,'' Bette said approvingly to a reporter who had come to interview her on the set of Jezebel Not surprisingly, called upon to characterize Wyler's directorial skills, Bette used a metaphor that summoned up images of cleaning and ordering: "You have the feeling that at the end he'll have everything strung out in just the order and sequence they should be,'' said Bette, hanging imaginary clothes on an air line as the reporter watched in apparent bafflement.

By contrast with the actors who found Wyler's methods maddening, Bette responded much as she had to the endless hours of posing for Ruthie's pictorialist camera portraits in New York, sixteen years before: the repetition temporarily allayed her fears about things suddenly spinning out of control.

"In the pictures she did at Warners prior to Jezebel, Bette had tremendous energy and a striking personality, but I don't think she was a terribly good actress," says director Vincent Sherman. "It was Willy Wyler who taught her something about films and film acting that she hadn't realized before: that the most effective moments in a film were the silent moments."

"At that point Bette did not yet consider herself a successful actress," explains the director's widow, Talli Wyler. "She knew how much she didn't know. Therefore she was much more malleable and open to guidance than she would have been later in her career."

And says Bette's friend, actress Dori Brenner: "Wyler demanded things of her as an actress, and that to Bette was very attractive."

So attractive that before long it was no secret at Warner Bros, that Bette had embarked on an extramarital affair with her (then single) director, whom co-workers observed on more than one occasion slipping out of her dressing room, his face smeared with lipstick from her kisses.

* * *

Interoffice memoranda show that as early as 1935, Hal Wallis had considered Owen Davis's Broadway play (which had featured Miriam Hopkins as the perversely obstinate Julie Marsden) as a potential vehicle for Bette Davis. But when Wallis's executive assistant, Walter MacEwen, read Jezebel, he declared that while Bette could undoubtedly "play the spots off the part of a little bitch of an aristocratic Southern girl,'' Julie's character was far too unsympathetic to appeal to audiences. "Maybe I'm a Pollyanna," MacEwen told Wallis, "but I suspect that box office history . . . would prove that audiences prefer to sympathize with their leading characters. . . . In other words, while Bette Davis receives acclaim for nasty supporting roles, I doubt if a picture built solely around her in an unsympathetic part would be so well liked."

The consensus at the studio seemed little different two years later when, in an unabashed effort to cash in on the ballyhoo surrounding David Selznick's search for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara in die film version of Gone With the Wind, Warner Bros, finally purchased the rights to Jezebel, whose female protagonist once again struck most people Wallis showed the project to as hopelessly unsympathetic. In a detailed six-page memo to Wallis, director Edmund Goulding warned that while Bette Davis would be more likely than most other actresses to win public acceptance in so negative a role, audiences would nonetheless have immense difficulty identifying with her character.

Unlike Goulding and the others, Wyler seemed to have no such problems with Julie Marsden when Warner Bros, borrowed him from Samuel Goldwyn to direct Jezebel (although at length he did appoint his friend John Huston to "represent" him in the rewrites he deemed necessary in the last half of Abem Finkel and Clements Ripley's screenplay, where Julie's character experiences a "regeneration through suffering"). Wyler's troubles on the picture came later, as Wallis and company repeatedly balked at the seemingly languorous pace necessary to achieve what unit manager Bob Fellows described as Wyler's "screwy shots." Fellows's production reports to studio manager Tenny Wright formed a litany of complaint against Wyler's multiple takes and endless hours of rehearsal.

"Is this possible?" Hal Wallis would ask in bewilderment after an entire day produced only a single shot. Wallis was anxious to speed up the production to allow Bette's co-star Henry Fonda (as her fiance, Pres Dillard) to finish in time to return to New York, where his wife, Frances, was due to give birth in late December. By prior agreement, Fonda would be available for a maximum of

eight weeks, so from the first Wyler was working with a time lock. But Wyler's differences with his hosts at Warner Bros, cut deeper: At an economy-minded studio, which prided itself on making fast-paced films at a fast pace, "Forty-Take" Wyler could only have seemed an exotic and incomprehensible creature.

Two days during the second week of shooting, Thursday and Friday, November 4 and 5, serve to suggest the kind of meticulous work Wyler did with Bette and its cost: a single intricate sequence that, according to studio records, put the production an entire day behind schedule. The sequence occurs inside Julie's home in New Orleans, where she has just arrived late for a party in honor of her forthcoming marriage. (The preceding exterior shot, in which she catches the train of her riding habit with her crop and sweeps it up over the shoulder with a Fulleresque ripple of voluminous fabric, would be filmed much later). In the script, Julie's last-minute decision to shock everyone by wearing her riding habit to the party prefigures the decision that brings about her ruin: wearing a red gown to the Olympus Ball; but equally indicative of character is the camera movement through the party that Wyler and cameraman Ernest Haller devised to show how the willfiil and "imperious" Julie (as the script describes her) has always successfully pushed her way through life—until now.

Before she sweeps into the drawing room, however, Wyler lingers characteristically on the brief anticipatory scene in the script, where Julie is said to "toss" her riding crop to the butler. Uncle Cato, as she hurries through the entrance hall. As in the sequence in Mme. Poulard's fitting room, Wyler is concerned with giving greater clarity and exactness to Bette's motions so that they do not all simply blur into one another. Whereas Hal Wallis undoubtedly would have had his director shoot this small, seemingly inconsequential linking scene as briskly as Julie is supposed to pass through it, Wyler does something that Bette seemed not to have experienced at Warner Bros, before. He articulates her motions by situating them in relation to surrounding architectural details as she traverses a series of three interior frames, her pace measured by contrast with that of the buder struggling to catch up from behind. First there is the front doorway, then the entrance hall's curtained archway, and finally (as Haller's camera pulls back to reveal) the column beside which she pauses, half turns, and steps back slightiy to hand the riding crop to the butler. All this Wyler shot nine times (a single error of timing could ruin the entire take), with what he perceived as the collateral benefit of slowing Bette down in order to make her performance more various.

Constantly stopping and starting her like this is part of what gives the whole whirlwind sequence a kind of dance rhythm. Hardly has she handed Uncle Cato the riding crop and plunged forward when she abruptiy stops again, this time at the entrance to the drawing room, a fourth interior frame. The pause is accentuated by a cut to a closer camera position of her back as—arms extended, elbows flexed, fingers curled into palms—she boldly greets the crowd who stare in astonishment at her riding habit.

1 'Terribly sorry to be late,'' she says, twisting her torso from side to side, her fingers opening exuberantiy as she adds, "I had trouble with the colt."

This opening of the fingers timed to coincide with her second sentence may seem a small bit of business, especially since it all takes place so quickly (and so much happens immediately afterward) that we may scarcely have registered it; but it is with precisely such subtle effects that Bette and her director create their vivid portrait of Julie Marsden.

' 'The most powerful of all gestures is that which affects the spectator without his knowing it," Delsarte is supposed to have said: a cherished notion for Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and those other exponents of interpretive dance from whom Bette had absorbed much of her gestural vocabulary long before she came to Hollywood. During the making of Jezebel, Wyler would try to strip away all the unnecessary business that he called Bette's "mannerisms" (once he even threatened to put a chain around her neck to stop her head from bobbing with nervous energy), in order that each of her remaining gestures serve as a forcefid expression of character.

Davis is particularly effective as she dashes from guest to guest in the drawing room, especially in the deft passage where Julie struggles to explain her costume to a pair of staring harpies, Mrs. Kendrick and Mrs. Petion. Their disapproval is clearly communicated in the grimness of their countenances. Although neither woman utters a word against her so long as she is with them, the strong subtext of censure visibly affects Julie's body as her hands suddenly slip below frame, so that even as she jabbers on politely to the ladies, her agitation throbs in off-screen space, in the frenzied, as yet mysterious activities of her hands: gestures felt all the more deeply for their remaining mostly unseen. Only when Julie's right hand nervously tugs the bunched train of her riding habit over her shoulder do we reconstruct her left hand's having just gathered up the fabric before placing it in her right; but by then Julie has greeted her friend Molly beyond the two ladies and swept out of

frame suddenly to meet her, leaving only Mrs. Kendrick and Mrs. Petion to vent their outrage as the camera lingers on them just long enough to frustrate our curiosity about where Julie has gone.

Continuing the single, serpentine long take, whose complicated blocking and refraining required Wyler to shoot it twelve times, the camera catches up with Julie, whom Molly is wishing all the best in marriage, as the bride-to-be nervously fiddles with the elaborate lace collar of her friend's dress. We find ourselves scarcely paying attention to Molly's words, so enthralled are we by Julie's strangeness of gesture (and the barely submerged fears and emotions it suggests). Apparently drawing on Bette's own lifelong tendency to express inner feelings of restlessness through compulsive straightening, rearranging, and touching, she and Wyler give Julie Mars-den an abundance of such psychologically revealing movements throughout the film.

"I can't bear my face," Bette was heard to utter in horror after watching rushes for Jezebel. "I can't stand it!"

Although it is barely visible in the finished film, a rather large pimple that erupted on Bette's face in late November was the subject of immense agitation on the set of Jezebel, where work was impeded for approximately a week and a half on its account. On November 26, Bob Fellows reported that Dr. Franklyn Ball, a Hollywood dermatologist, had been summoned to examine the pimple, which the unit manager described to his superiors as "pretty swollen." In the days that followed, further memoranda indicated that Bette's pimple had left Wyler "unable to make any close-ups" of her; as well as the determination that makeup not be applied until her face had had a chance to "heal over properly."

All of which would seem hardly worth mentioning now were it not for the production's being thirteen and a half days beyond schedule, making it increasingly unlikely that Wyler would be finished with Henry Fonda in time for the actor's scheduled departure on December 18. There were already whisperings about Warner Bros, that Wallis was seriously thinking of replacing Wyler with a more efficient director.

Since Wallis and his staff openly and unanimously blamed Wyler for the production's tardiness, they were not amused when, with a scant two weeks left to finish up with Fonda, the director insisted on shooting a two-page scene involving only Bette and George Brent, as Buck Cantrell, Pres's erstwhile rival for Julie's affections. In this scene, Julie incites Buck against Pres, who has startled everyone by returning from New York with his new wife, Amy (whom

he has secretly married in the year since the Olympus Ball). The unit manager fired off a report blasting Wyler for wasting time with material that could have been postponed until after Fonda's departure. But even with the loss of his male star looming days ahead, Wyler was clearly far more concerned with the nuances of Bette's performance, which he believed he could best serve by filming the scene now in order to sustain the emotional line built up in related scenes she had just completed with Fonda.

Wyler may also have sensed the disastrous effects that too much wildly discontinuous shooting (and the abrupt and violent emotional transitions that went with it) might have on Bette's already overwrought nerves. Besides her pimple, a variety of ailments, including involuntary contractions of the leg muscle that reportedly made it "very difficult for her to walk," all seemed to attest to Bette's intensely agitated state of mind during the making of Jezebel Indeed, after Fonda left to join his wife in New York (Wyler's having finished with him a day ahead of schedule, as it turned out), Bette was recorded to have suffered a hysterical fit when repeatedly called upon to shoot substantially out of continuity.

Tb judge by Bette's correspondence in this period, a major source of upset was guilt over her extramarital affair. On several occasions she refused to allow Wyler to drive her home on his motorcycle, lest her husband suspect what was going on between them. Although their liaison was certainly no secret at Warner Bros., Bette managed to conceal it from Ham, whose blind devotion had nonetheless come to repel and sicken her to the point that she could scarcely bear to be alone with him anymore. Far from looking forward to time off for Christmas and New Year's Day, Bette dreaded the thought of separation from Wyler. His presence had become such a necessity for her that on the pretext of watching him work, she regularly came to the set to be with him even when the scene he was directing didn't include her.

But she was at home on Franklin Avenue with Ham on New Year's Day when word came from Ruthie's sister, Mildred, that Bette's fifty-two-year-old father, Harlow Morrell Davis, had suffered a fatal heart attack at the home he shared with his wife, Minnie Stewart Davis. For her part, Bette had never publicly acknowledged Minnie's existence, telling her best friend, Robin Brown, that Harlow's relationship with his former nurse and mistress had been merely "a marriage of convenience," as Bette privately insisted on calling it. Since her visit to Boston in the spring of 1936 after winning an Academy Award for Dangerous, Bette had

been acutely aware of Harlow's precarious physical condition following his first heart attack, in 1935.

And then, at the end of the first week of shooting on Jezebel, news of a second massive heart attack had come through Ruthie, who was still regularly collecting her monthly $200 checks from Harlow. Thus Bette's father was almost certainly much in her thoughts throughout the making of Jezebel-— and, concurrently, her affair with Wyler, in which her betrayal of sweet, unsuspecting Ham seemed to recapitulate Harlow's betrayal of Ruthie so many years before. Harlow continued under the care of Boston physician Dr. George Lynch until his death at 6:00 a.m. on New Year's Day.

For Bette, there could be no question of attending her father's funeral, as Jezebel was already desperately behind schedule.

On January 3, 1938, Bette's father was cremated at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Minnie shipped his ashes to Augusta, Maine, where the frozen ground prohibited burial in the Davis family plot until April.

"What the hell is the matter with him anyhow—is he absolutely daffy?" asked Hal Wallis, upon learning that on January 6, Wyler had done sixteen takes of the shot in which Julie learns that Pres is to return from New York, where he has spent the year since breaking their engagement.