Bette Davis (32 page)

"Don't worry about it!" the actress insisted when she saw Sherman's look of horror. "My fens love for me to do something like this."

So there it was: the principal motive for Davis's tendency, thenceforth, to lay it on thick; to encrust her performances with bizarre costumes, wigs, and makeup, and (no less constricting) the curiously mannered technique of an artist in self-imposed decline.

"Audiences can make you rather vulgar as an actor," John Giel-gud has said. "They are sometimes inclined to like very often the

things that are not best about you and do not know the very best things that you do."

So, too, there was something in Bette that was recoiling from what was best about her as an actress. Where once she had been content to communicate wordlessly, to exercise her powers as an artist with a unique capacity for expressive gesture and movement, now she insisted on ' 'bloating" the Mr. Skeffington script—as Julius Epstein says—with page after page of unnecessary dialogue, whose sole purpose was to declare her character a great lady, the actress a star.

On February 17, 1944, after 107 days of shooting, Sherman finished filming Mr. Skeffington, 59 days behind schedule. It was universally agreed that time and again Bette's erratic behavior had slowed the production's pace to the point of absurdity—but what to do about it? Jack Warner could scarcely box the ears of an actress who, from Jezebel on, had been nominated for Academy Awards five years in a row. Little as Warner cared to admit it, for the moment Bette's phenomenal box office appeal required him to come to terms with her at almost any cost. In consolation, Davis was almost certain to lose that leverage a few years down the line. Warner and his executives assumed that Bette needed only to turn forty for her immense popularity to begin to evaporate. Then they could deal with the termagant less gingerly than they needed to now.

"I am wondering if it would be possible to speed up the next Bette Davis picture by making it a Bette Davis Production, where she would understand that all these delays and slowly progressing through a script at one page or less a day would cost her a little bit of money," declared Frank Mattison during the filming of Mr. Skeffington.

This precisely reflected Jack Warner's thinking when, the previous June, he had signed a new five-year, fourteen-picture contract with the actress, whose usefulness to the studio, he calculated, would have been considerably diminished by the time five years had passed and Bette was forty-one. Set to go into effect after Davis finished Mr. Skeffington, the contract provided for her to shoot nine films directly for Warner Bros, and another five under the auspices of her own newly formed production company, B.D. Inc. Of the nine Warners' films, Bette would receive $115,000 for each of the first five and $150,000 for each of the four studio productions to follow.

But it was the five B.D. Inc. films that constituted Bette's triumph. Here at last was the creative freedom that she seemed des-

perately to have wanted for so long. Although, as in the past, the actress had no story approval on the nine films she was to make directly for Warners, The B.D. Inc. projects were essentially hers to choose. Warner reserved the right to veto anything he found particularly objectionable, although that seemed most unlikely to occur. In die B.D. Inc. films, Bette's role as producer would allow her to make the kinds of creative decisions and exert a degree of control that the studio had hitherto denied her. Besides all this, in addition to her salary Bette was to receive a portion of the profits earned by the five B.D. Inc. films. All in all, the new deal certainly appeared to be everything she had longed to achieve—and more.

But it was hardly anything like generosity that prompted Jack Warner to sign the new contract. His sole concern was to keep Bette working at full spate. As always at Warners, quantity, not quality, was all. The degree of stardom that Bette Davis had attained by this point made it necessary only for her name to appear on the marquee for audiences to pour into the theater. Thus the studio's interests would be best served by her making as many films as possible—good, bad, or indifferent—before she passed forty and, presumably, lost her allure. In short, Warner's scarcely concealed motive in signing Bette's new contract was to get the most out of his star before she was all used up.

Still, the new contract presented abundant opportunities to the actress. Aside from building experience as a producer, Bette Davis had the chance to take her film acting career in whatever unprecedented directions she might choose. The kinds of films she produced and appeared in under the auspices of B.D. Inc. would be limited only by her own imagination and artistic aspiration.

First, however, the new contract stipulated that Bette must make a film entirely of the studio's choosing. Her initial Warners' assignment was most promising: she was to play Miss Moffat, the idealistic schoolteacher in a Welsh mining village, in Emlyn Williams's The Corn Is Green, a role that Ethel Barrymore was considered to have made her "masterpiece" when she played it on Broadway in 1940. But to the studio's amply recorded perplexity, Davis approached the Barrymore role with what seemed like paralyzing trepidation. Perhaps the same anxiety of influence that had afflicted Bette during the filming of The Little Foxes was vexing her now. Hence perhaps the loss of voice that—to general amazement-caused her to fail to appear on the first day of shooting, June 21, 1944. Instead, as noted by unit manager Eric Stacey, Bette sent word through a secretary to director Irving Rapper that laryngitis was keeping her in Laguna Beach. Not until the sixth day of shoot-

ing, June 26, did Davis arrive on the set. Four days later, it became obvious that Bette's vexation of spirit threatened to bring down the entire production, as she insisted on obscuring her face and form with an absurdly awkward wig and thirty pounds of padding, as if with a security blanket. It seems incredible that an actress noted for articulacy of gesture would deliberately constrain her movements with a corset and great quantities of padding, but this is what Bette adamantly insisted on doing.

Refusing once again to comprehend her character from within, as Wyler had urged her to do, Davis repeated her by now familiar error of starting with, and rather overdoing, Miss Moffat's superstratum—with the lamentable result that her portraiture was as stiff and unyielding as was Davis in her relations with Rapper and producer Jack Chertok. Production reports show that, confronted with Bette's peculiar obstinacy about wearing the helmetlike wig she had selected, both men repeatedly sought gendy to dissuade and "pacify" her; although, at one point, the usually more affable Irving Rapper was heard to groan with despair, "What she needs is a psychiatrist, not a director." But the studio files also show that, in the end, it was entirely for Bette to decide whether or not she wore her wig on-camera.

So much power did she wield that there was little anyone could do or say should Davis suddenly, blithely announce that she was leaving die set early because she had a date. "As you will notice, they did not shoot the last scene, which was ready at 5:30—they only rehearsed," recorded Eric Stacey on August 4. "This was due to the fact that Miss Davis did not want to remain and make the scene after having worked on it for an hour and a half as she had an appointment at the Canteen." Repeatedly, Bette disappeared from the Warners lot to rendezvous with her new "beau"—as she called wealthy New York real estate man Lewis A. Riley, then a corporal in the army Signal Corps. Although Bette's preoccupation with Riley threw new obstacles in the path of completing principal photography on The Corn Is Green, Jack Warner's notes to her from this period indicate that he warmly encouraged the romance-presumably on the theory that a new man in her life might calm her.

That Davis's perpetual war footing was viewed at Warners largely in sexual terms becomes clear on examination of studio memos and production reports, with their references to the actress's menstrual cycle and snide allusions to what was imagined to be her sexual frustration. Unfortunately, the arbitrariness and even irrationality that all too often characterized Bette's on-set outbursts made it easy to ascribe her biliousness to sexual causes and to assume that all

that was really needed to relax her were the amorous attentions of Sherman, Riley, or some other man. Having easily won the battle over the wig, Bette seemed to lose interest in Rapper's film. Sadly, it was enough for her now to establish the character's facade. In the absence of any desire to perfect her craft, perhaps it was only natural that Bette's attentions would wander, causing her to find whatever excuses she could to steer clear of the film set to be with Riley. On Saturday, August 5, when a small flap attached to a lighting fixture came loose and grazed her head, Bette wildly overreacted. Although she is recorded to have attended a studio party that evening and to have gone out on the town the night after that, by Monday morning Bette was citing a head injury as her latest reason for failing to appear on the set. She intended to take a week off to be with her beau in anticipation of his departure for Fort Benning, Georgia, so Bette asked her physician to notify Warners that she had sustained "a slight concussion" and needed "a complete rest." That Davis was hardly as ill as she claimed became clear when the producer successfully persuaded her to return to work: The sooner they finished filming, the sooner she could be with her beau. The moment Riley left for Georgia Bette suddenly became most anxious to do whatever she could to expedite the film's progress. After three months spent chronicling Bette's numerous infractions, by September 6 unit manager Stacey found himself writing: "This company's progress, as for the last four days, has been excellent due no doubt to the fact that Miss Davis wants to get away."

On September 13, Bette completed her brittle and woefully unimaginative performance in The Corn Is Green. After that, according to the new contract, she was free to undertake her first independent B.D. Inc. production. But instead of remaining in Los Angeles to begin work on the first of the films whose artistic direction was entirely hers to determine, she followed Corporal Riley to Fort Benning and, with her sister, Bobby, rented a house in nearby Phenix City, Alabama.

On September 20, the actress gave a birthday party for her beau in Atlanta, to which she invited all the men in his company. Thenceforth there was no concealing Bette Davis's presence in Georgia, or her reason for being there. Many years before this, Bette had relished the status of most popular giii in Newton and Ogunquit— and now again, although she was there as Riley's girlfriend, she seemed thrilled by all the bedazzled attention his buddies lavished upon the movie star in their midst. So far was Bette from wanting to downplay her star status among them that in December she wired

Jack Warner, asking to borrow a print of Jezebel to screen for the boys at Fort Benning.

Bette's sustained absence from Hollywood was a topic of considerable delight to Warner. He had expected her to waste no time exercising the creative freedom he had just given her and to launch into her first independent production with her usual monstrous zeal. That Bette was scarcely going to use her new freedom as her past audaciousness may have led people to anticipate had already been suggested by her curious choice for the first B.D. Inc. project: a remake of actress Elizabeth Bergner's 1939 Stolen Life, One certainly would have expected that during all these years of struggle, an actress of Bette Davis's caliber would have stored up numerous ideas for films she longed to appear in, characters she wanted to portray. That so many of the films Davis had made at Warners had been hopelessly trivial could hardly be blamed on her when, time and again, it was the studio that had assigned her to do them. Surely with Bette's theatrical background there were any number of serious dramas she planned to adapt for the screen now that she had finally won the power to do so. Warner had even been warily, reluctantly prepared for Davis to propose something from Ibsen or O'Neill. If that was the price he had to pay to keep her churning out more popular and profitable fare, so be it.

Instead, contrary to all expectation, Bette seized upon the Berg-ner remake. It was a story as thin and vapid as any she had ever been compelled to film. The years of working at Warners had caused her to absorb and assimilate its cut-rate aesthetic. Although they would hardly have cared to admit it, Bette and her presumed adversaries at the studio often thought as one.

According to the actress, friends who had seen Bergner's Stolen Life had recommended it to her as a likely vehicle. She had ordered a print from New York, screened it only the night before, and promptly written to Warner to announce her decision to film the story of twin sisters, one good and one bad, who fall in love with the same man. While the script was being written and the production prepared, Bette made the astonishing decision to abdicate responsibility as producer and remain in Georgia with Corporal Riley, who awaited combat orders. Having first squandered the opportunity to make a film different from any the studio would have dared to undertake on its own, now she was tossing away the right to exercise creative control over her first B.D. production.

' 'Your not being here makes it rather awkward in getting this film prepared," Jack Warner wired Davis on December 14, 1944. Not that Warner was encouraging Bette to return before the preliminary

details of her February production were completed by other hands. "Hope you are having a wonderful time and that everything is really the life of Riley with you," Warner added, content for the figurehead producer to remain in Georgia until they were ready for her.

Bette showed little more interest in taking charge in any meaningful way when shooting started, on Wednesday, February 14, on location in Laguna Beach. Following the usual gratuitous clashes with director Curtis Bernhardt, who protested that what she really wanted was not a director but a "yes-man," Bette astonished everyone by going wild on her own first independent production. By February 22, Tenny Wright was reporting that despite her own money being at stake, Davis was proving every bit as uncooperative and recalcitrant as ever. When unavoidable technical snags caused two days to be lost at the outset, the actress-producer was indignant at the suggestion that she appear for work on Sunday. By March 2 —according to ritual—Bette was out sick for a week, which, as recorded by unit manager Al Alleborn on March 10, caused the entire production to grind to a halt until she returned. When at long last, on July 28, 1945, A Stolen Life finished filming, thirty-three days behind schedule (almost all of the delay on account of Davis), no one at Warners could quite comprehend why she would have chosen to sabotage her own enterprise. Even Bette seemed not to understand why the long-awaited experience of producing had proved so entirely unsatisfying.