Bette Davis (22 page)

Before long, Bette had fabricated another spurious story to mitigate her pain and humiliation over Wyler's marriage. In the version that Bette would tell through the years, the director married Margaret Tallichet only after he had sent a letter to Davis, with whom he had had a lovers' quarrel. According to Bette, she had been so

angry with Wyler at the time that she foolishly allowed a full week to pass before she opened his letter, on October 22. In a true ' 'movie moment," even as she was reading the director's ultimatum that unless she agreed to many him within the week he would marry Talli instead, Bette claimed to have heard a radio announcement of Wyler's wedding.

All of which was quite impossible, of course, as there had been no recent lovers' quarrel between them. Wyler had ended his affair with Bette after Jezebel. Nor had there been any opportunity to resume the romance that summer, while Wyler was in Europe, or in the fall, when the director's friends knew him to be deeply involved with Talli. Still, much as we know Bette to have made it all up, if her story retains a faint ring of truth, perhaps it is because we feel somehow that we have heard it before. We have seen Bette in circumstances strangely similar to these: in love with a man whom she longs to marry, losing him through an act of headstrong foolishness, repenting her error only to discover that it is too late-he has married another woman. In Jezebel, when Julie Marsden realizes that Pres has married Amy, she knows that he cannot truly love his bride. Amy must be his second choice, Pres having married her only because Julie—his first choice, the one he really loves-blundered and let him go.

Her mind spinning with the lies she had fabricated about Hughes and Wyler, and with the hurt and perplexity that had driven her to invent them, as well as with the guilt she continued to experience about having betrayed Ham with both men, Bette returned to work during the week of October 25, and Edmund Goulding found her more insecure than ever about her ability to give a convincing performance of Judith Traherne's transformation. Considering how she felt about herself at the moment, enacting Judith's newly discovered fineness and courage was about the last thing she believed herself capable of doing. By the end of the week, convinced that she would not be able to do the character justice, Davis asked to meet with Hal Wallis on the evening of Saturday, October 29, to beg him to release her from the film.

"Here is this gallant little figure all alone, who can't tell anybody what the problem is and won't dare let anyone feel sorry for her," said Goulding, directing Bette in the role of Judith Traherne by giving her what Geraldine Fitzgerald describes as "images of her character's inner self." After Hal Wallis declined Bette's desperate request to leave the film, Goulding devoted himself to helping the actress somehow bridge the gap between her badly tarnished self-

image and the strong, noble character she was called upon to portray. "Goulding worked very hard at building up Bette's ego," Fitzgerald recalls. "That was one of his most valuable gifts as a director: his ability to give an actor confidence."

By the fourth week of filming, Goulding was not alone in his attempts to repair Davis's bruised ego. In the days that followed Wallis's refusal to release her from Dark Victory, Bette suddenly found herself the object of George Brent's persistent attentions. Before the week was up, she and her leading man had embarked on a scarcely concealed love affair. At times Bette seemed oddly anxious to flaunt her involvement with Brent, to let people know that they were sleeping together. The following Saturday, November 5 (exactly a week since she had met with Wallis), Davis and Brent were recorded to have repeatedly dissolved in uncontrollable laughter over some faintly suggestive lines in the script, so that a simple scene in which Dr. Steele visits Judith in her hospital bed had to be shot ten times.

Neither her director nor her leading man seemed entirely capable of soothing her, however, during the fifth, sixth, and seventh weeks of filming, as Bette reacted with hysterical illness to the divorce negotiations with Ham. Repeatedly, she failed to appear on the set, causing the entire production to grind to a halt as Goulding scrambled to rush actors from their homes to shoot scenes other than the ones he had rehearsed and arranged the night before.

As the originally scheduled closing date of November 12 approached, it became increasingly evident that Bette would not be finished with Dark Victory in time to begin her role as the Empress Carlota in director William Dieterle's Juarez, starring Paul Muni as the Mexican freedom fighter. The "prestige" production's $1.75 million budget made everyone on the Warners lot anxious that all go without a hitch. Hence the foreboding tone of studio memoranda devoted to what quickly came to be known as "the Bette Davis situation"—as shooting began on the Paul Muni superproduction, with Bette still struggling to finish with Goulding, despite recorded absences of three and a half days that very week.

Juarez was in its tenth day of shooting when, on Tbesday, November 29, unit manager Al Alleborn appeared on the Dark Victory set to see what could be done about at least getting Bette fitted for her Carlota costumes; but Bette refused on the grounds that finding herself dressed as her next character would diminish her concentration on the role of Judith. Three days later, she refused again when Juarez producer Henry Blanke showed up on Goulding's set to pressure her to accede to the unit manager's request. For this

show of firmness, Bette appears to have paid an emotional price. After Blanke departed, the actress seemed to experience a breakdown in the middle of a close-up where Judith prepares to die.

"Miss Davis was taken hysterical in the scene," recorded unit manager Bob Ross, in apparent bewilderment, on December 3. "She cried very heavily and it was very difficult and very trying to get the scene."

Despite these and similar scenes in which Bette's emotional turmoil was all too apparent, by the time she had completed Dark Victory, on December 5, Goulding seemed confident that, against all odds, the actress had turned in one of her strongest performances. Much as one misses the nuances of gesture, the complex choreography, discovered in Jezebel, watching her meticulous beat-by-beat delineation of Judith's growth and change is an exhilarating experience. If Dark Victory was destined to become one of her most popular films, it was undoubtedly because of its clear, compelling, upbeat image of a woman's capacity for far-reaching transformation, for overcoming obstacles and facing reality with a courage and bravery she never knew she possessed. For decades thereafter, female filmgoers regularly identified Bette Davis with her inspiring portrait of Judith Traherne: a mixed blessing for the actress, who continued privately to despair of the frustrating disparity between this most beloved of her film characters and the desperate, frightened, unfulfilled woman she knew herself to be.

ance until January 9, when he would film his scenes separately from those of Bette and Brian Aherne (as her husband, Emperor Maximilian, the French puppet in Mexico). Still the studio's most powerful artist, Muni, with his contractual right of story and script approval, could demand revisions in the painstakingly crafted script by John Huston, Aeneas MacKenzie, and Wolfgang Reinhardt.

To establish a contrast between Maximilian, the imposed foreign emperor of Mexico, and Juarez, the "father" of the Mexican Republic, the screenwriters had made Aherne's character an eloquent speaker, while Muni was given what Huston described as an "Indian taciturnity'' that made his every word count.

But Muni did not see that way at all. A glance at the script disclosed that he had fewer lines than Aherne. Muni had yet to appear on the set of Juarez when he threatened to walk out of the big-budget picture if the screenwriters failed to give him more dialogue than Aherne—or if Muni's brother-in-law was not commissioned to do it for them.

Bette knew nothing about all this as she began hurriedly shooting her scenes on December 12.

Anxious to wield some of the power she believed Jezebel and Dark Victory had given her, she allowed scarcely a day to pass before she refused to do a scene as ordered—insisting, Alleborn reported to production manager Tenny Wright, that she didn't know the scene well enough. The production came to a standstill while Bette repaired to her dressing room to work up some "business." Dieterle frantically ordered Brian Aherne to the still department to have portraits made, for want of anything else to do.

But this was the least of the beleaguered film's problems. Alleborn chronicled the growing anxiety that Bette would explode when she realized that, even as she and Aherne were busy filming their scenes, Muni was daily hacking away at the script to diminish their importance.

By December 28, precisely as feared, Bette grew intensely suspicious and upset when Dieterle informed her that there was no need to shoot one of her big scenes in the script, as it was out of the picture for now. When no one dared to explain why, she demanded to talk to Henry Blanke, who was shooting tests of Muni at the time.

Anxious to avert the inevitable fireworks as long as possible, Alleborn decided to try to keep Blanke off the set until late in the day, so that at least that afternoon's work might be peacefully concluded before Bette discovered what Muni was up to; and, worse, that there was nothing she could do about it.

The dispiriting experience of finding herself slowly, relentlessly edged out of Juarez, so that in the end her performance was a mere fragment of what it might have been, led Bette to demand both female leads—a dual role as Charlotte and Delia Lovell—in her next Warners' film: Goulding's The Old Maid, based on Zoe Akin's Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatization of the Edith Wharton novel. It seemed to Bette that portraying the two contrasting cousins, rivals in love, would be a stunning tour de force, worthy of an actress who, meanwhile, would pick up her second Academy Award, on February 23, 1939, for Jezebel.

At the Biltmore Hotel, where the eleventh annual Academy Awards banquet was held, Bette's competition for the Oscar for Best Actress included Wendy Hiller for Pygmalion, Norma Shearer for Marie Antoinette, and Willy Wyler's ex-wife, Margaret Sulla-van, for Three Comrades. Four years earlier, Davis's 1935 Academy Award for Dangerous had been widely and correctly perceived as a consolation prize for her having been passed over in 1934 for Of Human Bondage. In 1939, by contrast, Bette's pleasure in being named Best Actress could be unalloyed, confirming as it did the towering status she had achieved in the course of nine years in Hollywood: a preeminence she was working hard to sustain with the prodigious series of box office hits she was in the process of making.

Warner Bros, studio records indicate that even as she was being humored in her belief that she would indeed play both roles in the upcoming The Old Maid, screenwriter Casey Robinson was at work on a script that would render such an arrangement impossible, and negotiations were under way to get Miriam Hopkins to portray Delia to Davis's Charlotte. "I am wondering whether or not when Bette Davis gets a script and finds out she is not to do the dual role we will have any trouble with her," Roy Obringer warned Hal Wallis, in light of Bette's repeated requests to glimpse Robinson's woik in progress.

But there was no explosion from Bette when, in due course, Warners delivered the script to her and she learned that Hopkins was set to co-star. Instead, from the outset, Bette appears to have emulated her phantom nemesis in Juarez. Like Paul Muni, she would work behind the scenes to enhance her role at Hopkins's expense. In this case, however, it was less a question of Goulding's agreeing to build up Bette's role than of his discreetly giving her the greater advantage in ways that Hopkins would scarcely be allowed to comprehend until afterward.

From Wyler, Bette had learned the careful consideration that

must be given to an actor's first appearance in a film: thus the time he and Bette had taken to discover precisely the right gesture—the sweep of a riding crop and billow of black fabric—with which to establish Julie's character in Jezebel.

For two days now—March 15 and 16—Goulding worked with Davis and Hopkins on the script's opening sequence, set in Mr. Painter's "fashionable lingerie shop," where, accompanied by their ancient grandmother, the Lovell cousins have come to buy a trousseau for Delia. They had barely finished filming the eight script pages, when Bette began secretly maneuvering (with all the power two Academy Awards gave her) to cut the lingerie shop sequence, leaving the film to open with die sequence—set in Delia's bedroom—that follows.

But Hopkins knew nothing of this when, on Friday, March 17, Goulding proceeded to shoot the bedroom sequence. As this "second' ' sequence opens with Delia and her maid making some ' 'hurried last minute adjustments to her bridal dress," Hopkins's call was at nine o'clock, an hour earlier than Bette's; Charlotte enters only after one and a half pages of script have been covered. On the assumption that her character would already have been introduced in the lingerie shop, Hopkins played her brief scene with the maid at a considerably lower register than she almost certainly would have done had she suspected that this was to be the audience's first glimpse of her.

By contrast, Bette already knew there was a strong chance the earlier sequence would be excised. Thus the unusually high degree of emotional excitement with which she makes her entrance: palpably overwhelming the rival actress, who later complained of having had little choice but to remain somewhere near the level of intensity she had established before Davis's arrival.

Not until April 12, when Goulding announced his decision to discard the lingerie shop sequence, did Hopkins begin really to grasp what her co-star had done; but already, by the third day of filming, she was regularly, gleeftilly throwing every obstacle she could think of in Bette's path.

Even before this, Hopkins, who portrayed Julie Marsden on Broadway, had bitterly resented Bette for having snatched a triumph from her in Wyler's film. Although they had barely known each other at the time, Hopkins had been the leading lady of George Cukor's Rochester, New York, company when Bette was an ingenue there: another source of enmity now that Bette was unequivocally the more powerful figure in Holly wood—although by no means the more formidable personality. Hopkins was precisely the sort of