Bette Davis (27 page)

From the time they first worked together on Jezebel, Wyler had been acutely aware of what he called Bette's "mannerisms": any gratuitous bits of physical business that did not serve to express character. Eventually Wyler's repeated threats to tie Bette's head back to stop it from twisting about madly had even become something of a joke between them (unusual for Bette, who by all accounts found it difficult to laugh at herself). But where she had

allowed Wyler to curb her excesses during the filming of Jezebel and The Letter, the stardom that those films had helped her to attain made Bette substantially less malleable now.

"She had been another person when they made Jezebel" explains Talli Wyler. "By the time of The Little Foxes, everything was different. Because she had experienced such enormous success in the interim, Bette's ego had grown a lot bigger. She and my husband had always worked so well together in the past that I think, in a way, it really shocked both of them that they fought so hard now."

This time the actress bristled whenever Wyler urged her—as he recalled—"to be simple and dignified and not resort to a lot of gestures and accentuated speech and tricks that are just plain bad.'' While many of Bette's mannerisms were actually quite "good," he declared, especially when her role was that of a "high-strung or worried woman," Regina Giddens, as written by Hellman, "didn't call for that stuff."

But most of all, Wyler told her he wanted to be certain that she was planning to play Regina Giddens on-screen, and not simply 4 'Bette Davis.'' In short, whatever the degree of stardom that Bette had undeniably attained by this point, her director was anxious that she continue to regard herself, and to function, as an actress. This, however, Bette struck him as being peculiarly afraid of doing, as if failing to repeat whatever had brought her success in the past might cause her to lose that success now.

"Bette was a woman very terrified of letting go of whatever she had," explains her friend Dori Brenner. "There came a point in her career where she began to imitate herself as an actress and to refuse to know that she was doing that."

And says veteran Warner Bros, script supervisor Meta Carpenter, "She had never learned to weigh the advice she was being given. It always had to be: 'I know what I'm doing! I'll do what I want to do! I'm controlling my life, and this is the way it's going to be!' "

"For heaven's sake, why don't you get Tallulah Bankhead for the part?" Bette finally exploded at her director, whose ceaseless criticism is recorded in studio papers as having caused her to grow ill. Even during the making of The Little Foxes, the influence that Bankhead's performance may or may not have had on Bette's was already something of a vexed question, which curiously persists to this day. Apparently at Wyler's urging, after Bette had finished the film, The Bride Came C. O.D. , she was en route to New Hampshire for a month's vacation with Farney when she stopped in Cleveland

to see The Little Foxes, then in the final throes of its by now somewhat controversial national tour.

The road show was widely thought to have degenerated into almost a parody of its former self, as Lillian Hellman grew increasingly agitated by what struck her as Bankhead's cocaine-induced overacting, in contrast to the more expert and restrained performance the actress had turned in on Broadway. Even now, however, there lingered the magnificent gusto and voluptuousness that Tal-lulah had brought to the play, quite in keeping with the dramatist's intentions regarding Regina Giddens, of whom Hellman would say, * 'When I wrote it, I was amused by Regina—I never thought of her as a villainous character—all I meant was a big sexy woman'': in short, someone quite like Tallulah. Long afterward, Hellman would savor her own special excitement when first she heard Tallulah's ' 'deep thrilling offstage laugh'' prior to the actress's entrance in Act One: "a laugh that had affected the audience like an electric current."

Set in the American South in 1900, The Little Foxes chronicles the internecine struggles within the Hubbard family as Regina (now Mrs. Horace Giddens) and her two no less rapacious brothers, Ben and Oscar, try to put together a business deal with Chicago businessman William Marshall. After Regina's ailing estranged husband refuses to give her the money she needs to be part of the deal, she allows him to die by refusing to get his medicine when he suffers what proves to be a fatal attack.

Ina Claire and Judith Anderson had both reportedly turned down the female lead in Hellman's stage play on the grounds that it was too "unsympathetic," when, on the advice of director Herman Shumlin, the role was offered to Bankhead (whose "scarlet" reputation is said to have worried the playwright from the first). Although her prior appearances on Broadway had done much to advance her reputation as a formidable personality, Tallulah had yet to establish herself as a serious actress until February of 1939, when the critics extolled the "extraordinary variety" of her Regina Giddens, a character at once "seductive and dangerous," "charming and unscrupulous."

In later years, Bette liked to say that Willy had sent her to see Bankhead in The Little Foxes to ensure that she would give "a different interpretation of the part." According to Davis, when she saw Tallulah in Cleveland, however, she realized at once that the stage actress "had played it the only way it could be played." Hence the discord that blighted her work with Wyler in The Little Foxes, in which, disregarding the director's objections, Bette in-

sisted on portraying Regina Giddens in the manner of Tallulah. "Miss Hellman's Regina was written with such definition that it could only be played one way," said Bette in her 1962 memoir: a version of the Wyler-Davis conflict that has turned up in almost all subsequent accounts.

But in a September 9, 1941, interview published in the New York World-Telegram shortly after the film was completed, the usually laconic Wyler sounded off publicly on the Tallulah question; his comments indicate that, at the time, Davis was adamant about wanting to avoid all comparison with Tallulah's interpretation. "Bette thought I was having her ape Tallulah Bankhead, who had done the part on the stage. Yet it's impossible to say the lines, wear the same period costumes and use a similar locale without having some similarity to the play. I couldn't say, 'Let's not do it at all because Tallulah did it'; that would have thrown out the whole play. Boy did it irritate me to read that I was making her copy Tallulah! That wasn't true. I was just making her play Regina Giddens and not Bette Davis when the camera started. She was inordinately frightened of the charge of mimicry.''

Asked about all this many years afterward, Talli Wyler replies: "As I remember, he wanted Bette to have more of the quality that Tallulah Bankhead had had on the stage: a quality of lustiness and sexuality. Tallulah had played it as if she was really enjoying herself! That's the kind of performance he wanted to get from Bette, but she had an entirely different idea and insisted on playing it her way, so that the whole experience became quite miserable for both of them."

Which takes us to the crux of Bette's dispute with her director— and why, in later years, she seemed to block out of her thoughts die painful objections he had had to an interpretation that struck him as shrill and sexless: lacking in precisely the intoxicating variety that (whatever its lapses) Tallulah's stage performance had so abundantly possessed.

While—in an apparent effort to differentiate her performance from Bankhead's—Bette seemed perversely determined to expunge all carnality from her character, Wyler agreed with Hellman on Regina's fundamental sexiness: like the playwright, Wyler wanted to be "amused" by Regina Giddens. Where once he had taught Bette to pace herself and to allow a gesture sequence to grow and gather momentum, now he urged her to do the same with the development of her character. Only if Bette first allowed the audience to be charmed and amused by Regina would the impact of her subsequent perfidy be felt as deeply as Hellman had meant it to be.

* * *

Southern California was experiencing the sultriest spring it had known in years. Temperatures exceeded one hundred degrees on the Goldwyn soundstage where Willy Wyler and Bette Davis were filming The Little Foxes.

"Let me alone," the director growled at his wife when he came home after a day's shooting. Asked how things had gone with Bette, he growled again. "I don't want to talk about it. I had it all day. I don't want it here."

Even asleep, Wyler moaned and tossed about, fiercely grinding his teeth all through the night.

Beneath her voluminous flounced skirt and layers of petticoats, Bette wore a corset laced so firmly that it required two wardrobe ladies to pull the cords. Compelling her to breathe with her ribs rather than with the full diaphragm, the corset seemed only to exacerbate what Bette's attorney, Dudley Furse, privately characterized as her "hysterical condition."

From the outset there had been unanticipated problems with the film script when Bette grew extremely agitated over the fresh point of attack Hellman had devised: adding new scenes at the beginning of the story in an attempt to open it up for the screen. Where the stage play had begun just as the Hubbards' dinner party is drawing to a close, allowing the actress portraying Regina instantly to make her mark with her "deep thrilling offstage laugh" (with which Tal-lulah had enthralled Hellman) and flirtatious banter with Mr. Marshall, the film script begins on the morning of the party as Regina's daughter, Zan (Teresa Wright), flirts with the handsome David (a character Hellman created for the screenplay), followed by a scene showing Zan having breakfast with her mother.

As Wyler was quick to recognize, Bette resented a younger actress's being established as the love interest in the opening sequence, as well as Regina's initial appearance in her capacity as Zan's mother. Minor and inconsequential as these new scenes may have appeared to Hellman and others, Bette regarded them as serious obstacles to establishing her character as vividly as she might have liked in the dinner scene that followed.

To make matters worse, the profusion of notes and marginalia regarding the character of Zan in Wyler's annotated script for The Little Foxes suggests that, where Bette's performance in Jezebel and The Letter had received the director's almost single-minded attention, this time he was no less concerned with the work of another actress in the film.

BETTE DAVIS POISONED BY MISTAKE and POISON ACCIDENT PERILS

bette davis, headlines announced during the second week of filming when Bette drank deadly household ammonia, which (after first aid was promptly administered) she said she had mistaken for the sedative her physician had prescribed for agitated nerves.

Not long afterward, word reached Jack Warner that, much to Wyler's chagrin, Bette's unusually overwrought state of mind had already ruined a good deal of the footage that had been shot. Artistic differences aside, there seemed to be a distinct personal subtext to the perpetual collisions with Wyler, from the outset, Bette had scarcely concealed an interest in rekindling her romance with the director, and when it became obvious that he had no intention of reciprocating, she grew moody and petulant.

Worst of all was the filming of the dinnerparty sequence, which— to judge by the copious revisions Wyler scribbled in his annotated script and by the extent to which it all had to be cut down in the finished film—seems to have presented the most inherently troublesome material. The Warner Bros, general counsel reported to Warner and Wallis that Bette's nervous condition had kept her from acting to any great effect in this sequence; whereupon an exasperated Wyler tore into her performance to an extent that seemed only to make her more "hysterical and ill" by the moment.

At length, exhausted from makeup and wardrobe changes, and worn out by Wyler's persistent censure, Bette announced that she had had enough. Let Wyler and Goldwyn replace her with whomever they desired; Bette Davis was walking out of the picture. Before leaving the lot, however, Bette appeared to collapse, which doctors later attributed to the punishing heat coupled with the ill effects of a tightly laced corset.

Warners' December 23,1940, letter of agreement with Goldwyn explicitly left them clear of any liability in the event that Bette failed, refused, or neglected to complete her work on The Little Foxes. On some level, her studio may have feared the trouble that now ensued as Bette flatly declined to return to work, deeming herself ill with exhaustion. Still, there was the matter of the $150,000 Goldwyn had agreed to pay for Bette's services, of which her share was to have been $66,667.72, with the rest going to Warner Bros.: hence Jack Warner's abiding interest in monitoring events at the rival lot, where Goldwyn had reportedly wasted no time sending word to Bette that he was giving her some time off, May 12-21.

Before she was due to return, however, Bette's attorney, Dudley Furse, told Roy Obringer that instead of improving during her days off, her health and spirits seemed to have drastically deteriorated.

Her personal physician, Dr. Paul Moore, had declared her in need of "additional rest" at the rented house in Laguna Beach, where she was being cared for by Farney and Ruthie. Soothed by a series of wheedling telephone calls from Wyler and Goldwyn, Bette appeared to have reneged on her vow to walk out of the picture. According to Furse, both men had promised Bette "different treatment" when she came back to the lot. As a further gesture of conciliation, Goldwyn and Reeves Espy instructed Wyler to shoot around Bette from May 21 to June 5, on the assumption that by then Dr. Moore would have pronounced her well enough to resume work.

There remained Goldwyn's insurance carriers to be dealt with. Following a conversation with Bette's attorney, Lloyd's of London dispatched their own examiner, Dr. Dorrel Dickinson, who promptly seconded Dr. Moore's opinion that she needed to stay in bed for ten days. As Furse was to note, even if Bette was compelled to return to work before June 5, her "present condition" would make her of little use to Goldwyn.

"Silence would scare them more," said Bette, suggesting that Wyler cut the line in which Regina answers her brother Ben's nervous inquiry about the dying Horace.