Bette Davis (26 page)

After Leslie hastily concocts an absurd story about having invited Hammond to her cottage to seek his advice on a gift for her husband, the murderess realizes the ineptitude of this newest lie and falls into a faint. Wyler follows this with a piquant little scene in the prison's first aid room, where, by contrast with the bold full-body acting she had just been called upon to do, Davis must accomplish everything with scarcely more than her left arm (extended upward and poised against the wall) and the crown of her head, as this is all we are permitted to see of her as she lies in shadow on a cot with her lawyer hovering above. When the lawyer informs Leslie that her letter to Hammond is in the possession of his Chinese wife, her reaction takes the form of a dancelike "succession": a

subtle fluid movement through Davis's upper body that starts in the fingers of her left hand as they curl slowly into her palm, followed by an agonized flexion of the wrist, then a small shudder at the back of her head as at length we hear a low mournful sound issue from her throat.

"Can't we go back to plantation for the end?—-so Leslie can be at the same place where she loved and killed Hammond?" Wyler had scribbled on the second draft script in April 1940.

The idea did not find its way into the finished film, however. As it is, the third ' 'confession'' sequence takes place in Howard Joyce's house, where a party is to be given in honor of Leslie's acquittal. It is here that Leslie's husband, Robert Crosbie, discovers the contents of her letter to Hammond; and here that she tells the truth about the murder at long last, in a scene whose nuances of blocking and editing echo those of Leslie's first "confession" (providing the satisfying sense of balance that Wyler presumably had once hoped to achieve by returning to Leslie's cottage at the end).

At the time his stage play was first produced, Maugham had experienced considerable trepidation about whether audiences would sit for another long narrative from Leslie in the final moments of Act Three. After two or three rehearsals, he replaced her final account of the murder with what he called a "throwback" scene, in which (the stage having darkened for a moment) we cut back to the night of the murder, to observe the actual quarrel that led to Leslie's shooting her lover. Maugham believed that the realistic reenactment of Leslie's final meeting with Hammond avoided the "tediousness" inherent in her simply retelling the tale in the form of a dramatic monologue.

Robert Stevenson seems to have been attracted to this approach in the pre-Warner Bros, treatment he prepared for Wyler in August 1939; but where the treatment proposes the possibility of using "flashback construction," Wyler scrawled an emphatic "no!" in the margin: anticipating similar objections to the flashback in Howard Koch's second draft screenplay (Wyler's April 1940 annotation: "no flashbacks"), according to which Leslie would recall the murder in a voice-over, while the actual events leading up to Hammond's death were shown on-screen in "pantomime."

Wyler does not appear to have shared Maugham's fear that another long narrative from Leslie might bore the audience. Possibly because from die first Wyler had envisioned doing The Letter with Davis (with whose capacity for expressive movement he was abundantly well acquainted), he repeatedly declined to insert a flashback

in place of Leslie's third "confession," believing that its dramatic interest was far less the rather lurid events she recounted than her manner of recounting them.

How does a woman tell her husband that she has made a cuckold of him? Where Katharine Cornell is said to have played the scene all anguish for what she has done, Bette's Leslie is harsher, more sadistic: sister to her Mildred in Of Human Bondage (except that Leslie's "good breeding" makes the violent passions that erupt here so much more astonishing). To judge by his notes, Wyler seems from the first to have encouraged Bette in this interpretation: so much so that at one point, he demanded that she play it rather more "strongly" than she was prepared to do. Having conceived of everything in the film as leading ineluctably to the moment when Leslie tells her husband that she still loves the man she killed, Wyler instructed Bette to look Robert in the face as she hurls these appalling words at him: the first direction of Wyler's that Bette is recorded to have resisted, on the grounds that any woman would look away upon uttering a truth so harsh.

Although, in due course, Bette deferred to her director's judgment and delivered the line as instructed, the disagreement quietly marked a major turning point in their working relationship.

her daughter at Riverbottom would soon be home to Arthur Farns-worth as well.

Undaunted by the romances with Litvak and Taplinger, Farney stepped up his campaign as soon as Bette and Robin returned to Franconia at the end of July. (Bette was not due back at Warners until November, to film Goulding's The Great Lie.) Now that his divorce was about to be final, the hotel desk clerk with "a taste for good living" wasted no time proposing marriage. Bette Davis offered a quicker path to fortune than waiting for Mother Main to die. Where Ham Nelson had dreaded being "Mr. Bette Davis" for the rest of his life, Arthur Farnsworth clearly relished the prospect.

Robin Brown recalls being "surprised" when she learned that Bette and Farney were to be married on December 31, 1940, in Rimrock, Arizona; but hardly as surprised as Jack Warner must have been when, no doubt expecting one of the actress's usual diatribes, he opened his latest letter from Bette to discover a terse announcement that she had gotten married. Although Bette went on for several lines more to request time off from the studio, not once did she mention the name of her bridegroom, whom Louella Parsons identified in the papers the next day as a "wealthy Boston businessman," while other equally bewildered reporters described him as "a childhood friend" or, more simply, "Arthur Farnsworth of Boston.'' Bette's initially obscure second husband became a public presence soon enough, however, when that spring she utilized a month's vacation with him at Butternut to publicize the premiere of The Great Lie.

At the time of the wedding, Jack Warner had feared that Bette was about to use her new husband and home in New England as a means of escape from Hollywood. Did her marriage to a pipe-smoking "country squire" with leather patches on his elbows presage some fresh struggle with the studio?

That this was not the case became evident when, in mid-March, she called Warners' publicity director Charlie Einfeld to propose a charity benefit premiere of The Great Lie in Littleton, New Hampshire, on April 5, her thirty-third birthday: scarcely the behavior of someone who viewed New England as a refuge from Hollywood.

On the contrary, Bette seemed quite content, even anxious, to bring Hollywood with her to New England.

"The night of the big premiere, we arranged for all the lights in Littleton, New Hampshire, to go out at exactly the same time," recalls Bob William, Davis's publicist at Warners. Then moments later, the townspeople were dazzled by the sight of Bette and Farney leading a torchlight parade toward the theater. It was a spectacle

calculated to be entirely unlike anything the little New England town had ever witnessed.

"Let's do something vital and strong even if you're not on the screen all the time," Willy Wyler had said to Bette during the filming of The Letter.

He meant Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, whose first draft screenplay the playwright had shown him by May of 1940. Wyler told Bette that he had immediately thought The Little Foxes ideal for her when he saw it on Broadway the year before, with Tallulah Bankhead in the role of Regina Giddens. But when Bette read Hell-man's film script she was a good deal less enthusiastic than he, her principal objection being that Regina was off-screen far too often. Quite simply, it seemed to Bette that she had worked much too hard at becoming a star to accept a role in which she was not stage center almost all die time.

Nonetheless, at the time of The Letter Bette remained very much under Wyler's influence, so that when the director assured her that her craft was strong enough by now for her to carry a film like The Little Foxes, she agreed to approach Jack Warner with the proposal that he loan her out to Samuel Goldwyn, who owned the Hellman screenplay.

Bette was still shooting The Letter when she talked to Warner about The Little Foxes, following up with a letter dated July 10, 1940 (ten days before the end of filming), in which she made it clear that her sole interest in portraying Regina Giddens was yet another opportunity to work with Wyler. She stated that if some other director were assigned, she would not want to do it. So pleased was Bette with her work with Wyler on The Letter that in the event that she was allowed to make The Little Foxes, she offered to waive her three-picture-a-year deal with Warner Bros, to allow an additional film. This was scarcely the kind of concession Jack Warner was accustomed to receiving from her.

Initially, as in the past, Warner showed scant interest in loaning her out. Hadn't they gone to war over precisely this issue before; and hadn't Bette lost? Indeed, now more than ever, perhaps, Bette Davis represented an important form of capital to the studio. Yet so far was he from wanting to make her unhappy that (as alluded to in her July 10 letter) Warner even offered to try to purchase The Little Foxes from Goldwyn, in order for Bette to do the picture at Warner Bros.

In the end, although Bette seemed to have convinced herself that it had been she who finally persuaded Warner to loan her out for

The Little Foxes, the decisive factor appears to have been Warners' desire to borrow Gary Cooper from Goldwyn for the upcoming Sergeant York.

Somewhat reluctantly agreeing to do what he had steadfasdy refused even to consider in the past, Jack Warner made certain that the fine print of his December 23, 1940, preliminary letter of agreement with Goldwyn contained a clause prohibiting his rival from using Bette Davis's name in any general announcement of artists appearing in Goldwyn productions. Warner did not want Bette's prestige and publicity value to be used to any further advantage to Warners' competitor than was absolutely necessary.

And to assure that Bette would return to Warner Bros, as valuable an asset as she was when they loaned her out, Warner instructed general counsel Roy Obringer to stipulate that Goldwyn accord Bette full "star billing" in connection with The Little Foxes: adding that this was "for Davis' own protection as well as ours."

Something else repeatedly occupies the eye in the various legal papers and agreements prepared in connection with Bette's loan-out: the name Tallulah Bankhead. Again and again it is stipulated in one way or another that Bette Davis is being sent off to Goldwyn to appear in the Tallulah Bankhead role, so firmly and decisively had the stage actress managed to identify herself with the character of Regina Giddens after 408 performances at the National Theatre on Broadway and a very extensive road tour that would span some two years and 25,000 miles.

In Hollywood, there had been no great sense of Bette's having portrayed the Katharine Cornell role in The Letter or the Lynn Fontanne role in Elizabeth the Queen; even Bette, who had seen, admired, and borrowed liberally and, it would seem, unabashedly from both actresses' Broadway performances, appeared to suffer no particular anxiety of influence with regard to them. But, as presaged by the repeated impish appearance of her predecessor's name in the legal file on The Little Foxes, for Bette Davis, Tallulah Bank-head's already legendary portrayal of Regina Giddens would be another matter altogether: vexing, inhibiting, even somehow mocking her at nearly every turn.

In the beginning, Bette had not seen the stage production; certainly not when Wyler first persuaded her to talk to Warner about it; or even during the time when Warner and Goldwyn were hammering out their agreement. As late as March 11, 1941, when Goldwyn vice-president Reeves Espy agreed to Warner's final demand that Davis be ' 'accorded sole star credit'' and that her name appear above the film's title in the identical-size type (and that no other

actor in the film be billed in type larger than 75 percent the size used for Bette), she seems still to have avoided seeing Bankhead in the role.

On April 14, 1941, Bette arrived at Goldwyn with an entourage including costume designer Ony-Kelly, makeup man Perc West-more, and hairdresser Maggie Donovan, all of whom she had brought with her from Warner Bros, to execute the rather specific ideas she had worked up about how Regina Giddens must look.

As tests of makeup and wardrobe for The Little Foxes began, Wyler expressed grave reservations about the "dead white, masklike" physiognomy (as he described it to Talli) with which Bette insisted on encumbering her character. It seemed to Wyler that by queerly covering her face with calamine, Bette had turned Regina Giddens into a "grotesque" rather than the complex, multifaceted character Tallulah Bankhead had discovered in Hellman's play. Before long, Jack Warner and Hal Wallis had been apprised that Wy-ler's abiding disapproval of the numerous makeup and wardrobe tests had greatly upset Bette, who seemed to grow increasingly "sick and hysterical" with each passing day.

At times it seemed to Wyler that Bette was out of spirits over finding herself at age thirty-three cast in the role of a forty-year-old woman, with a lovely daughter mature enough to conduct a serious romance of her own; and that Bette intended the grotesquerie of her makeup somehow to distance her from the part. Or perhaps, he speculated, the outlandish mask Bette had fashioned for herself was meant to lure attention away from the other players, to an actress who continued to fear the audience's somehow forgetting her on account of Hellman's having left Regina off-screen so much of the time.

That Bette's first major conflict with Wyler during the filming of The Little Foxes had to do with her makeup and other externals anticipated the larger discord that would erupt between them, as the actress persisted in building Regina Giddens from the outside, while her director repeatedly urged her to try to grasp her character from within.