Bette Davis (23 page)

vivid, quick-witted woman—a la Tallulah Bankhead or Ruth Gordon—by whom Bette had consistently been intimidated in New York. Where Bette tended to recoil from bright, clever, verbal people, Hopkins was famous for surrounding herself with them in her jewel-box town house on New York's Sutton Place. But the nimble star of Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living had not had a success since Wyler's These Three in 1936. With her career in eclipse, the Goulding film—with its woefully ramshackle script and ill-conceived characters—meant far more to Hopkins than it did to Bette, who needled her rival by regularly proclaiming her keen desire to be finished with The Old Maid as soon as possible, in order to get on to her next film assignment: the glorious Lynn Fontanne role in Elizabeth the Queen,

"Make every effort to rush this along," Hal Wallis urged the ever harried director, from whom the studio made scant attempt to conceal its intention simply to keep Bette working in The Old Maid until Elizabeth the Queen was ready. No matter that even Casey Robinson realized there were major structural problems in The Old Maid script yet to be solved. By this point, Bette Davis was far too valuable to Warner Bros, to be left idle for even the briefest interlude.

Handed the still unfinished screenplay, Goulding decided to shoot in continuity, in an effort "to build characterization." But nothing could solve the problem of the midpoint fifteen-year ellipsis, after which the spirited Charlotte returns, inexplicably, as a "testy, bitter" old maid.

In the first part of the film, Charlotte has secretly had an illegitimate daughter, whose identity she conceals—even from the child— by presenting her as a foundling. Only Charlotte and Delia know that Tina's father was the man whom both cousins once loved, making for perpetual hostility between them. In the scene just prior to the midpoint ellipsis, the wealthy Delia, anxious to claim Tina for her own, has invited Charlotte and the child to move into her house, but Tina's echoing Delia's other children by calling her "Mummy" makes it most unlikely that Charlotte will consider the proposal.

Hence the peculiar absence of dramatic logic in what follows, as fifteen years pass away, and—without explanation or motivation— we discover that Charlotte and Tina have been living in Delia's house all this time; with Tina having become virtually a daughter to Delia, while Charlotte has mysteriously metamorphosed into a withered old woman.

Goulding and Robinson are known to have been acutely aware

of this fundamental script problem, which no one dared discuss with Bette for fear of her reaction.

On Monday, April 17,1939, the production was already five days behind schedule when Goulding shot the scene just prior to the midpoint, even as Robinson was still frantically churning out pages for the ill-conceived "old maid" segment. There is no record of what Bette might have been thinking as she faced the prospect of somehow embodying this abrupt and totally unmotivated change in her character. There are, however, references in the Warner Bros, files to the actress's having suffered a "bad fainting spell" on the set, at 3:50 p.m. on April 17, as the time for her on-screen metamorphosis drew near: presumably the latest of the hysterical illnesses with which Bette routinely reacted to feelings of disquiet and apprehension.

When the studio doctor arrived on the scene, he declared that "her pulse was way up" and sent her home, where she remained in Ruthie's care for the next three days.

"I have been studying the lady and, in my opinion, she is in a rather serious condition of nerves,'' producer Robert Lord told Hal Wallis on May 5, the penultimate day of shooting on The Old Maid, "At best she is frail and is going into a very tough picture when she is a long way from her 'best. * " Hence Lord's urgent suggestion that, to protect itself, Warner Bros, take out "some kind of health insurance policy" on Bette for the duration of Elizabeth the Queen.

"If she folds up, we stop shooting," warned the anxious producer, foreseeing the economic consequences should the overworked, exhausted actress break down for a prolonged period, as the studio knew her sister Bobby had done.

Even as Bette appeared to teeter at the edge of a nervous collapse, at Ruthie's instigation she launched a new offensive against Jack Warner when her lawyer, Oscar Cummins, reported that Warners intended to change the name of Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen to The Knight and the Lady, as if to shift the drama's emphasis from Elizabeth to her beloved Lord Essex (ineptly portrayed by Errol Flynn).

Where Lynn Fontanne had easily dominated the Broadway production over the no less brilliant acting of her husband, Alfred Lunt, as Essex, Bette and Ruthie feared that, with its record of unabashed preference for male action, Warners intended to make this Flynn's picture, not hers. Despite Jack Warner's assurances, their fears were not entirely without foundation. Studio interoffice

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memoranda, which Bette and Ruthie are unlikely to have glimpsed, repeatedly refer to "getting Bette into the Flynn picture."

When Oscar Cummins's persistent telephone calls to Jack Warner were unavailing, Bette, then in the final throes of filming The Old Maid, took matters into her own hands. She sent a telegram to Warner on April 28 (and, more angrily, on May 1), refusing to portray Elizabeth unless she was guaranteed top billing and a more suitable title. Bette, who had suffered from apparently psychosomatic chest pains since Juarez, informed Warner that the prospect of the title The Knight and the Lady had caused her to become "so upset mentally and ill physically" that she feared long-term "serious impairment" to her health.

With Warner's promising her top billing over Flynn, Bette agreed that as soon as she finished The Old Maid, on May 6, she would appear for costume and makeup tests for Elizabeth the Queen (sub-sequendy retitled The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) on May 9 and 11. While Flynn and director Michael Curtiz started filming on May 11, Bette would not be due until May 24, which would afford her some much-needed rest.

All was apparentiy well, until Bette appeared for the May 9 tests, only to discover that Flynn's salary for the picture had been budgeted at $41,300 to her $35,000. And worse, Flynn twice rejected invitations from the actress-—whom he described as "not physically my type' '—to join her in her dressing room after work for a drink.

"We don't want to make Davis up as a female Frankenstein," said Hal Wallis, appalled at the actress's concept of the role, in which she sought even to outdo Lynn Fontanne in creating a ' 'miraculous reincarnation" of the homely queen. "This is the impression I get from the tests she has made so far and I want to stop that immediately. After all, we have a story that we are going to try and make into a great love story, and this is not going to be possible if we try to do it with Flynn, as handsome as he looks in his clothes, in love with an ugly woman.''

Where Lynn Fontanne had been widely admired in theatrical circles for her daring physical characterization of Elizabeth, Warners feared that Bette's gargoyle face and partially shaved head (to give the effect of baldness beneath a garish red wig) would strike film audiences as ludicrous and absurd.

Wallis worried no less about how Bette might react to his reservations about the gnarled physiognomy she and makeup artist Perc Westmore had devised—hence Wallis's order to Westmore to alter

the actress's makeup without a word to her about what he was doing.

Mingling as it did * 'the body of a weak and feeble woman'' with "the heart and stomach of a king," the role of Elizabeth should have been a good fit; but sad to say, for all Bette's preoccupation with Elizabeth's outward appearance, she utterly failed to give her character a suitable gestural style. Tlie bizarre outpouring of tics with which, at intervals, Davis undeniably occupies the eye is no substitute for the dramatic intensity and delicacy of feeling the actress playing "our dread Virago" must convey in her every creaking, agonized movement.

Bette had seen precisely such a performance of Elizabeth in November of 1930, shortly before she came to Hollywood; and we may know something of what she saw from the glittering fragment of title Lunt-Fontanne production that exists as prelude to their 1931 film of Ferenc Molnarls The Guardsman. The film opens as the Maxwell Anderson play is drawing to a close at the Burg Theatre in Vienna. Elizabeth has condemned her beloved Essex to die; and we see them in their final moments together. Here is the famous grotesque makeup—the putty nose and sagging flesh—with which Fontanne gave the illusion of decrepitude. But here, too, is the sudden strange limpidity and grace of movement—the eloquent half-gestures and aborted reachings—with which she embodied her character's hopeless craving (and inner conflict: can she put to death the man she loves, no matter how great a threat to England he poses?), gestures that seem all the more poignant by contrast with Elizabeth's withered, immobile carriage, stooped with age and despair.

Beside this, Bette's more frenzied treatment of the same scene seems mannered and ineffectual: all tics and big showy movements (precisely the sort of thing Wyler had warned against), with none of Fontanne's nuance and poetry. Moments before the execution of Lord Essex, where Fontanne repeatedly reaches out to Lunt, aborting the gesture before they actually touch, Bette Davis simply throws her arms around Errol Flynn and clings to him tightly: encapsulating the subtle intellectual pleasure of the one performance and the all-too-frequent banality of the other.

In August 1939, as Bette Davis and Jack Warner struggled anew over her contract—with Davis asking for a two-picture yearly limit and Warner insisting on a minimum of four—the actress angrily declared that only if she were lying in her coffin would Warner be likely to recognize the justness of her demands.

When it became evident that the studio boss was not about to budge, Davis and her representatives proposed that Warners hire a "board of medicos" to determine the number of films she could safely make each year. On August 29, the studio general counsel recorded his horror at the prospect of having to seek the doctors' permission "any time we want Davis to appear in a picture."

Unbeknownst to Warner Bros., by that date Bette had already reluctantly abandoned the idea, when at least one of her personal physicians showed "a distinct lack of enthusiasm" for testifying on her behalf. In the course of lowering her voice for the role of Queen Elizabeth, Bette claimed to have ruptured several blood vessels. But when her business manager, Vernon Wood, approached the physician who had treated her three times for laryngitis, Dr. Cully's "rather disappointing" response was that if Bette would only stop smoking, her condition would be "largely relieved."

Davis did have cause to complain of fatigue at this moment. Virtually without letup, she had worked to complete a remarkable series of box office successes: Jezebel, The Sisters, Dark Victory, Juarez, The Old Maid, and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. The unique combination of Warners' relentless assembly-line approach to filmmaking and Bette's phenomenal drive and stamina allowed the seemingly omnipresent Davis to dominate the American dramatic cinema of this period. Of Bette's two major potential rivals, Greta Garbo made her last important motion picture. Ninotchka, in 1939 and would abandon film acting after the disastrous Two-Faced Woman in 1941, and Katharine Hepburn was then devoting most of her energies to romantic comedy—leaving Davis virtually without peer in the field of serious screen drama. Had Katharine Cornell overcome her gnawing terror of film acting and accepted Irving Thalberg's invitation to come to Hollywood, or had Lynn Fontanne pursued her film career instead of forsaking the cinema with the famous line ' 'We can be bought, but we cannot be bored!" who can tell what competition either far more formidable actress might have provided? But Davis had no such competition as she and her studio worked at full blast to turn out the six films that, however much they varied in artistry and ambition, forcefully staked her claim as Hollywood's preeminent dramatic actress.

Months after her confession to Teddy Newton that for the first time in her life she needed to take stock, Bette went east for a six-week vacation as soon as The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex finished filming, on July 6.

First she visited Robin (newly divorced) and other friends from

New York theater days; then, accompanied only by her black Scottish terrier, Tibby, she drove her yellow wood-paneled station wagon to New England, where she visited old haunts in Dennis, Newton, Ogunquit, and Peterborough.

At intervals, she fired off long, rambling letters to Jack Warner; more often than not, her rapid scrawl filled both sides of the lightweight, tissue-thin paper she favored—giving her correspondence the curious air of a palimpsest, in which one layer of writing scarcely conceals another beneath it.

Page after page, the message is the same: She has shrunken to a mere eighty pounds. She is fighting for her health, for her life. Having completed five films this year—finishing one role, only to start another soon afterward—for the first time in her career she doesn't care if she ever makes another picture. She will not, she cannot, return to Burbank unless the studio agrees to reduce her work load.

And whatever his answer, will Mr. Warner please refrain from contacting her directly—as hearing from him upsets her very much.

On August 29, when Bette did not report to work as ordered, there was considerable debate at Warners about whether the actress was really as "ill and tired" as she purported—with Roy Obringer speaking for most when he described Bette's claims of "incapacity" as "pretty far fetched."

Even as Bette was conjuring up images of decayed health and premature death, the photographs in her scrapbooks for this period suggest the elation and boundless energy with which she pursued the good life—as her mother described it—in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where, at Ruthie's suggestion, she had taken up residence in a tiny cottage at Peckett's Inn in pastoral Franconia. Bette has a new look now: the twill trousers and tweeds associated with the Eastern "horsey" set. Here she is, in full riding regalia, galloping along some remote mountain trail; and here, presenting prizes at the Littleton Horse Show; and here, perching atop an open-air car, surrounded by a group of attractive, fun-loving new friends.