Bette Davis (25 page)

Almost always it is the visual—or potentially visual—things that Wyler seizes upon. Marking off Stevenson's notes on Leslie Crosbie's incessant lacework, he anticipates the presence of this motif in the film, as well as the importance the film will place on Leslie's hands to convey inner turmoil, by contrast with her outward air of control. It tells us a good deal about Wyler's priorities that in the finished film, he eschews the very elaborate lacemaking process as Stevenson describes it for something far simpler: preferring to use gesture to reveal character rather than for purely decorative effect.

With evident excitement, Wyler scratches numerous lines beside what Stevenson proposes as the theme of the play: the difficulty of guessing what is going on inside someone else's head, even someone you might think you know well.

Wyler's preoccupation with this theme, and how the actress playing Leslie Crosbie must embody it, is carried over in his annotations on Howard Koch's second draft script for The Letter, dated April 10, 1940. The director's handwritten notes emphasize what he at one point calls the' 'great deliberateness" of Leslie's gestures. Where early in the screenplay Koch characterizes Leslie as addressing someone "with perfect control," Wyler underscores the description for emphasis. Several lines later, where the actress's instructions read: "her control slipping a little," Wyler first underscores "a little," then changes "a" to "very"; and then, evidently still dissatisfied with this characterization, he crosses out the directions altogether, apparently preferring Bette at least temporarily to maintain the appearance of "perfect control" established moments before.

Wyler's marginalia suggest that for him, part of the "action" of The Letter must be the subtle alterations in Leslie Crosbie's manner as we come closer and closer to the truth of what happened in her cottage on the night of the murder. Only when we are almost exactly midway through the script (having reached the pivotal scene, in which Leslie's lawyer suddenly confronts her with disturbing questions about the incriminating letter) do the director's marginal notes indicate that Wyler is finally willing to allow her "perfect control" to show some cracks: "This is first time she lies badly," Wyler remarks of Leslie's nervous speech when asked about the existence of the letter. "Up to this point she has played it as if truly innocent—with a straight, frank and convincingly honest countenance—no by-play, etc."

Whatever anxieties Wyler may have had about whether Bette would want to work with him again were soon dispelled when she ac-

cepted the role of Leslie Crosbie with an enthusiasm that she rarely allowed herself to express at Warner Bros. Aside from the personal associations the Maugham play had long held for her, Bette possessed a fair idea of what Wyler had done for her career in the past and was most anxious to be directed by him again.

Still, much as Wyler seemed to have anticipated, Bette's personal feelings about him were distinctly mixed. For all that she had been through with various lovers in the interim, Bette continued to harbor a good deal of resentment toward Wyler for so abruptly terminating their affair at the end of Jezebel. Whereas he reportedly had regarded their relationship as littie more than a "fling," Bette had clearly attached far more importance to it at the time than he— and even seemed briefly to have held out hopes for some sort of future with the director.

Now and for the rest of her life, she would wonder whether Wyler had been sincere when, in the third week of shooting Jezebel, he had tantalized her with the role of Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Not long after she expressed interest in the part to Jack Warner, Samuel Goldwyn had snatched up the Hecht-MacArthur script, and "Bette's" role had gone to die unlikely Merle Oberon. Had Wyler, in putting her up to seeing Warner about the Bronte project, merely been using her to generate interest in Goldwyn's camp?

To make matters worse—although it is doubtful that Wyler knew she had become pregnant in the course of their affair—there was the problem of Bette's lingering bad feelings about her second abortion, especially now that Wyler had only recently become a father. The summer before, Talli had given birth to their first child, whom they called Cathy (after the role in Wuthering Heights that Wyler had promised to Bette!).

By contrast with the domestic happiness Wyler had so successfully built for himself since Jezebel, Bette's personal life seemed a pitiful shambles, particularly after Litvak's standing her up in Honolulu: a painful humiliation Bette feared Wyler would have heard about from Litvak or another of the men in their garrulous set.

All this Bette was determined to conceal from Wyler when she and Robin Brown returned from Honolulu, more than three weeks before she was set to begin work on The Letter, on May 27, 1940. Much as Bette privately dreaded meeting Talli and hearing all about the Wylers' new baby, she braced herself to behave with perfect equanimity throughout, lest her former lover be allowed to perceive her agitation. Bette knew that the affair with Wyler during the making of Jezebel was no secret at Warners; but now she was anxious that others see their relationship as "businesslike."

Whether Wyler understood her struggle to hide her turbulent feelings about seeing him again is impossible to say; but there can be no question that the struggle fed into the intense performance he got from her in The Letter. During the first week of shooting, Bette seemed to get through it all fairly well: even Talli Wyler's visit to the set, when Willy presented her to Bette for the first time. But then, as the week drew to a close, Bette was appalled to discover that she might quite possibly be pregnant again, whether by Arthur Farnsworth, Anatole Litvak, or Bob Taplinger she had no idea.

Was it her imagination that during the second and third weeks of filming, cameraman Tony Gaudio kept casting "sideways" glances at her? As Bette would have learned by now, cameramen, having trained themselves to be acutely sensitive to anything that affected the physical appearance of the people they photographed, often intuitively monitored such ostensibly private matters as menstrual cycles and pregnancies. Although not a word on the subject passed between them, Bette was racked with anxiety that Gaudio sensed she was pregnant—and, far worse, that he might tell Willy Wyler about it.

Intent on masking her distress from co-workers, in private Bette cried endlessly at the prospect of a third abortion, which—she recalled years afterward—she feared would make it impossible for her to have a baby should she ever marry again. Still, after she saw a doctor on Wednesday, June 5, to confirm her pregnancy (having called in sick at the studio, Warner Bros, records show), Bette declared that she knew what she "had to do." And so it was that, on Saturday, June 15, a free day during the third week of filming, Bette underwent a third abortion.

Aside from the fact that she was free that Saturday, the timing must have seemed optimal, since according to Wyler's production schedule, Bette was not due to go in front of the cameras again until Thursday, June 20, for the sequence in which, dressed in a form-fitting white eyelet evening dress, Leslie steals off with her attorney to retrieve the incriminating letter. Bette had hoped to handle the abortion secretly, but the moment she appeared on the set in the white eyelet dress, she heard Tony Gaudio exclaim, "Jesus, Bette, it looks like you've lost five pounds over the weekend!"

During the making of Jezebel, Bette had taken immense comfort in what she found to be the soothing repetitiveness of Wyler's notorious multiple takes. Now she learned the pleasures (and, more important for her art, the theatrical effect) of another kind of rep-

etition: the subtle but precise echoing and modulation of gestures and moves from one sequence to another. Although Bette's own annotations on the script for Jezebel show her beginning to pencil in connections between shots, all evidence indicates that she continued to conceive of her role largely in terms of individual sequences, leaving the overall unity of the piece to her director.

All this changed by the time of The Letter, whose complex structure, based on three interlocking "confession" sequences (Leslie's intricately woven "web of lies," as Katherine Cornell had described it), required Bette to develop what Wyler taught her to call ' 'unity of conception.''

In his preliminary notes, Wyler repeatedly scrawled "the end" beside Leslie's astonishing admission to her husband that she still loves the man she killed. His words indicate that for the director, this was the point toward which all the film's action is inescapably headed and in relation to which all must be played (notwithstanding the additional scenes that eventually were tacked on to satisfy the Production Code Administration's demand that Leslie be punished for her sins).

Thus, at the time of Leslie's first' 'confession,'' when she claims to have killed Hammond after he attempted to force himself upon her, although we cannot yet be certain that she is lying, the actress playing Leslie must at all times be conscious that her character has indeed fabricated the entire story, however successfully she puts it across to her listeners, who include her husband, her lawyer, and the callow young district officer whose unhappy task it is to arrest her.

At the time of the New York stage production in 1927, one reviewer had written of Katharine Cornell in this scene that the actress managed to tell her tale "as though at every instant a crack might open in the lacquer of falsehood." Indeed, this scene was one of the principal reasons Cornell took the role.

After more than ample rehearsals of this first "confession" sequence with Wyler (per the director's custom), Bette was all nervous anticipation as they began the filming on Friday, May 31, 1940, at the end of the first week of shooting. Her nervousness was no doubt exacerbated by fears that she might be pregnant and by Tony Gaudio's falling ill barely an hour after they had begun to shoot, so that a replacement cameraman had to be summoned at the last minute.

The entire company had had the previous day off, during which Bette seems to have gone through her script with a pencil, expung-

ing any ellipsis marks and repetitions of words, presumably to make her speech pour out more quickly.

As the lawyer Howard Joyce (actor James Stephenson) will later suggest, for all the effectiveness of her initial presentation, Leslie rather too precisely and meticulously repeats her version of what occurred on the night of the murder every time she relates it (' 'The story she told him the first time he saw her," Maugham writes in his short story, "she had never varied in the smallest detail"): an indication perhaps that it has all been very carefully thought out in advance lest any incriminating contradictions, any cracks in "the lacquer of falsehood," be discovered.

As anticipated in Bette's notations, she plays a good deal of the scene on top of her lines, rushing ahead with her "confession" at full blast, sometimes almost as if she can't stop herself. Her momentum here is assisted by Wyler's uncharacteristically emphatic cutting, making for a total of twenty-one shots, whose rhythms convey the artfulness with which Leslie Crosbie manages to glide through this first version of the killing: by marked contrast to the single languorous long take that dominates the painful second "confession" sequence, as we watch the murderess falter for the first time.

Bette's lying back on a sofa through a fairly large segment of the first "confession" concentrates much of her physical expression in her hands, whose incessant hysterical fidgeting with a handkerchief ("Movement never lies") hints at a truth entirely at odds with the "perfect control" of Leslie's deftly orchestrated speech. As in a Martha Graham dance where movement expresses passionate, irrational depths of the self, Leslie's gestures allude to what she cannot yet say with words ("With all my heart I still love the man I killed"). Following the recounting of the murder, Wyler cuts to a close-up of her right hand as it unconsciously, involuntarily assumes again the strange shape it took in the aftermath of the killing: fingers oddly splayed, as if misshapen by the horror of it all.

While in Maugham's stage play Leslie makes a big point of wanting "to sit upright" before she begins her initial account of the murder, the film's placement of her on a sofa, with the camera hovering (almost obscenely) close above, makes her appear terribly vulnerable: so much so that we may think, Surely she must be innocent, or the most brazen of liars. And there is the added advantage of giving Leslie's speech several beats as she punctuates her account with a series of small, precise movements (all of them to be almost exactly repeated later, at the time of the third "confession"): first sitting up; then rising; then turning her back to her

listeners and to the camera, as if to conceal her face as she reenacts the murder—this last a touch borrowed from Katharine Cornell, who had done it on Broadway to great effect.

"This is the first time she lies badly," Wyler noted of Leslie's second "confession," filmed on Monday, June 10, during the third week of shooting. Only one other person is present: the lawyer who, in the course of visiting her in prison, confronts Leslie with the existence of the incriminating letter. Now we watch her breezy self-assurance about the outcome of her case metamorphose into agonies of apprehension. (Bette's impending abortion, scheduled for the end of the week, and her own desire to conceal her condition, must have made performing this scene in which Leslie vainly endeavors not to give herself away a vertiginous experience.) On account of the especially intricate blocking and refraining required throughout the sequence, which covered some six pages of script, Wyler had rehearsed Davis and Stephenson all day, Saturday, June 8, from nine in the morning until five-thirty at night; running through it all again for two hours and forty-five minutes on Monday morning before shooting a total of fifteen takes (which Lord justified to Wallis with the explanation that' 'Wyler made so many takes with the roving camera because he did not know exactly what speed and movement would cover the dialogue to go over them").

Whereas the cutting rhythms in the first "confession" register the deftness and fluency with which Leslie initially tells her tale, the long take that dominates this second sequence—spanning the time between Joyce's appearance and Leslie's frantic denial that the letter is hers—adds considerable tension and suspense by refusing to mask the agonizing passage of time as Leslie's panic builds to a crescendo. The relentlessly "roving camera" to which Lord refers in his June 10 memorandum heightens our sense of Leslie's frenzied struggle to escape the trap her lawyer has set for her.