Part 2 (1/2)

The season was nearly over when Laura Hope Crews showed up to appear in A. A. Milne's Mr. Pim Pa.s.ses By. Crews told Bette-who had made it naggingly clear to everyone all summer long that she would be much happier onstage than handing out programs-that she would be granted a small role in the show if she learned to play the song ”I Pa.s.sed By Your Window.” The only trouble was that n.o.body but Crews knew the song, and Crews wasn't singing. Spurred by a pleading and histrionic Bette, Ruthie scoured the Cape and found what may have been the only copy of the obscure melody in the possession of a church organist in Hyannis who agreed to teach it to Bette on his piano. ”We stayed there until three in the morning while I learned the music,” Bette recalled.27 Crews (who went on to achieve her greatest fame as Aunt Pittypat Hamilton in Gone with the Wind) found Bette to be fidgety onstage-no surprise there-and commanded her to keep her arms at her sides, still. Immobility was impossible for Bette Davis, especially in the earliest stage of her career. ”Came the day of dress rehearsal and its accompanying excitement. The play ran off well and I kept myself in hand until the third act. Then, involuntarily, I moved my arm perhaps twelve inches. A slap brought my arm down to its proper limp position and I turned to see [Crews], impa.s.sive and unconcerned, continue with her lines. My face burned, and I must have counted to ninety-five before I regained control of myself. . . . The blow may have been a major tragedy when it was delivered. Time and a degree of success have made it seem awfully unimportant,” though not so immaterial as to escape retelling in several of Davis's memoirs.28 Bette returned to Rochester in the fall of 1928, this time with Ruthie and their atrociously named dog, Boogum, the three of them having deposited Bobby at Denison College in Ohio on their roundabout trip from Cape Cod to upstate New York. Cukor and his producing partner, George Kondolf, had formed the Temple Players, named after the Rochester theater in which their plays were to be performed, and they hired Bette to appear in the company's first production: a vaudeville story called Excess Baggage. In Bette's words, the play was about ”a tightrope walker and his pretty wife, who stood about in spangles.”29 Wallace Ford played the tightrope walker; Miriam Hopkins was the pretty wife.

Bette was enchanted with Hopkins-at first. ”Miriam was the prettiest golden-haired blonde I had ever seen,” Davis later wrote. ”I will never forget her before a performance-emerging from a shower and simply tossing her curly hair dry. She was the envy of us all.”30 But Davis soon grew resentful of Hopkins, as the other actors also did, for Hopkins had an annoying compulsion to steal scenes by whatever means necessary. An actor would speak, and Hopkins would pointedly move during the middle of the line; an actress would build to an important gesture, and Hopkins would beat her to it-anything to distract the audience's attention from her fellow performers.

Hopkins didn't particularly take to Bette, either. One day during a rehearsal, she stopped in midscene, pointed to Bette, and screeched, ”She's stepping on my lines! The b.i.t.c.h doesn't know her place! I'm the star of this show-not that little n.o.body!”31 Other productions at the Temple Players included Cradle s.n.a.t.c.hers (one Rochester newspaper printed a photo of ”the little blonde who is seen in this week's production”); Laff That Off; The Squall; The Man Who Came Back; and Yellow, which had a cast of forty and starred Louis Calhern. Bette played Calhern's girlfriend-an odd bit of casting on Cukor's part, since Calhern was six foot four and thirteen years older than Bette. As Calhern put it, ”She looks more like my kid than my mistress.” Other trouble was brewing as well. As Bette herself admitted, ”I was apt to be a know-it-all. When Mr. Cukor criticized my work, I would always have a reason as to why I did it my way. I alibied.”32 There was still another problem: Bette's puritanical rect.i.tude. She grew into a famously and frankly foulmouthed woman, a cigarette-dragging, liquor-swilling curser, but even at the age of seventy-four, and speaking to Playboy (of all publications), she couldn't bring herself to speak of the publicly unspeakable: ”I didn't live up to what was expected in those days of a stock company ingenue, who had other duties-you know what I'm talking about. Socializing. Socializing very seriously, let us say, with people in the company. That was just not my cup of tea.”33 And so, during a final rehearsal for Yellow, ”the stage manager came to me and said, 'We won't need you after this show.' It was so abrupt, so without warning, that I did not have time to be angry. All I could do was ask a simple, 'Why?' 'Cukor says you won't be needed any more,' he repeated, and nothing I said brought additional information.”34 Louis Calhern saw no need to mince words. Bette Davis, he said, just wouldn't ”put out.”35 It obviously wasn't George Cukor who expected s.e.xual favors from Bette. It was his straight producer, George Kondolf. But long after the actress had become a movie star and the director one of Hollywood's most successful creative forces, Bette continued to blame Cukor for her dismissal. And Cukor grew increasingly cranky at the mention of it. ”She does not let me forget it,” he once complained to the gossipmistress Sheilah Graham. ”She keeps telling the story! I find it a great bore.”36 Bette returned to New York and found a tiny apartment on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village with her friend from Ogunquit, Robin Simpson. ”Bette's mother was around, too, I remember,” Robin's sister Reggie later recalled. ”It must have been a little crowded.”37 The two young women later moved to midtown: an apartment on East Fifty-third Street.

The comedy Broken Dishes served as Bette's Broadway debut: harried husband Donald Meek grows a backbone after he gets plastered enough to square off against what one critic described as his ”brigadier-general wife,” with Bette playing his sympathetic daughter. After tryouts on Long Island and at Werba's Brooklyn (a theater at the corner of Flatbush and Fulton), Broken Dishes opened at the Ritz Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street on November 5, 1929. ”Miss Davis was easy on the eyes,” wrote the reviewer for the Evening World.38 ”Bette Davis, a young actress who would be a better one if she elected to spell her Christian name less self-consciously, is a member of the cast,” another critic opined.

The Evening Graphic's ”Daily Physical Culture Page” of November 5, 1929, featured a triptych of Bette and Ellen Lowe, one of her cast mates, demonstrating a series of exercises. ”Should a man propose to a girl on his knees?” Lowe asks in a bubble in the first frame as Bette suspends herself in a sort of a crab posture with her back and torso flat. ”I should think the girl would like it.” Bette, now upright and stretching her left leg out, replies. ”But if the man doesn't?” ”Then he can ask her to get off, can't he?” Ellen bizarrely answers as Bette s.h.i.+fts legs.39 ”Physical culture” indeed. It was a glorified skin show. Broadway's publicity was every bit as cra.s.s as Hollywood's.

In January 1930, Broken Dishes s.h.i.+fted to the Theatre Masque (later renamed the Golden) on West Forty-fifth Street and continued running for a total of 178 performances before closing in April 1930 to prepare for a tour. The production moved in May to the Wilbur Theatre in Boston and then went on hiatus for the summer, which Bette spent doing stock at the Cape Playhouse.

Broken Dishes picked up again in September 1930, with performances in Baltimore and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. On September 25, the cast made a personal appearance at the Rosedale Airport. ”The entire company is enthusiastic about aviation,” an ad declared.

During the play's run in Was.h.i.+ngton, Bette got a call from the play's producer, Oscar Serlin, who wanted to replace the ingenue in his new production, Solid South, starring Richard Bennett, a notoriously temperamental actor (and the father of Constance, Joan, and Barbara). She took the job.40 Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Solid South opened on October 14, 1930, at the Lyceum Theatre. Bette played ”Alabama” Follensby; Bennett was her grandfather, the major. Jesse Royce Landis played her widowed mother. ”Richard Bennett Called Bette Ham, Got Face Slapped,” a later gossip headline trumpeted. ”Are you another of these young ham actresses?” Bennett reportedly asked Bette when they met, so she slapped him.41 Davis herself tells a much more benign version in The Lonely Life: Bennett said, ”So! You're one of those actresses who think all they need are eyes to act. My daughters are the same.” ”Mr. Bennett,” Bette properly responded, ”I'm very happy to return to Was.h.i.+ngton immediately.” ”You'll do,” Bennett replied, laughing. According to Bette, ”from then on in, he and I were the best of friends.”42 Solid South was not so solid. The critic John Mason Brown wrote that the play ”came bearing no more direct relation to actuality than a cartoon does to life.” Burns Mantle called the play ”a somewhat ironic, deliberately satirical, fairly extravagant study of a slightly demented major.”43 The critics were especially hard on Bennett, but Davis wasn't spared either. ”This attempt to learn a Southern speech fell very flat with Miss Bette Davis, sweet Broadway child that she may be,” the New Republic observed. ”She [and Owen Davis Jr.] struggled with the problem of how to be interesting as n.o.bodies. . . . Miss Davis achieved that cereal quality that the roles of pure girls on Broadway are taken to represent.”44 Solid South closed in November, and Davis didn't appear again on Broadway for another twenty-two years. After all, as a gossip columnist had noted a few months earlier, ”Talkies want Donald Meek of Broken Dishes. Also want Bette Davis.”45

CHAPTER.

3.

A YANKEE IN HOLLYWOOD.

A CHUBBY, OVERLY CHEERY FATHER from the Booth Tarkington Midwest takes a newspaper from the paperboy at the front door of his house at Universal Pictures and walks into a large dining room. The camera swings back and to the left to reveal a very blonde, very young Bette Davis carefully setting plates on the table, her elbow c.o.c.ked, her hand placing the plates on the table just so. ”He's up all right,” Davis carefully intones in a voice deeper and a pace more measured than one expects. ”I dumped him out of bed.” And out of the scene she goes.

Aside from some lost screen tests, this is Davis's first appearance on celluloid. The moment is electrifying-not because of her performance's inherent artistry (she's going through the paces of a secondary character's entrance, though with the extreme focus of bright sunlight hitting a prism), but because a glorious fifty-eight-year film career radiates out from it. All the characters she played, and all the characters she became, bloom from this single generative bud. The film is called Bad Sister.

She arrived in Hollywood in December 1930, along with Ruthie and Boogum the dog, having been promised the lead in Universal's adaptation of Preston Sturges's. .h.i.t Broadway comedy Strictly Dishonorable, or so she later said, and when she was cast instead as the good sister in Bad Sister, Universal having changed its mind, she necessarily took it personally.

With the sting of this rejection still raw, Bad Sister (then called Gambling Daughters) began filming on the cusp of the new year. Mousy Laura Madison (Davis) plays second fiddle to her wild sibling, Marianne (Sidney Fox), who is courted not only by rich, dumpy Wade Trumbull (Bert Roach) but also by Dr. d.i.c.k Lindley (Conrad Nagel, top billed). The coquettish Marianne toys with Wade, draws d.i.c.k in her sights, then cuts a date with d.i.c.k short when Humphrey Bogart shows up as the flashy Val Corliss. Marianne runs off to Columbus with Val, who ditches her in a cheap hotel; she returns home to find demure Bette/Laura engaged to d.i.c.k and, contrite in her state of sin, gratefully marries fat Wade in the end.1 Conrad Nagel reported that Universal's Carl Laemmle Jr. didn't see what we all now see-we can't help but see-in Bad Sister. Laemmle, said Nagel, called Davis and Bogart into his office ”one at a time, and told them they had nothing to offer. They were colorless. No fault of theirs. They just didn't photograph. He suggested they go back to New York.”2 Young Laemmle's advice was lunacy, obviously, but how could he have foreseen the rich, smoky history these two then-inexperienced actors would create over time? When Hobart Henley, the film's director, cuts to a grinning Bogart after Val's lengthy roadster cuts Marianne and d.i.c.k off at the curb, it causes a jolt equal to Bette's own first shot. Bogart's face, with its newly emerging contours, shocks with sheer familiarity, as does Bette's.

A Bad Sister legend casts Bette as the naive young puritan she certainly was. (”I was the Yankee-est, most modest virgin that ever walked in,” she once said.)3 There's a scene in the film in which Bette's character, Laura, diapers her other sister Amy's newborn son, Amy having died melodramatically in childbirth. Bette, sensing trouble over her absolute inexperience with bodies unlike her own-she was a prim twenty-two at the time-asked whether the prop baby was a boy or a girl. The camera wasn't going to get close enough to care, but she was, and did. It was a boy-not surprising, since the script drives home the baby's s.e.x with a scene of Grandpa running down the street yelling, ”It's a boy! It's a boy!” But according to Bette, she had no idea what the baby would turn out to look like under its diaper, and the cast and crew lined up to watch in sophisticated amus.e.m.e.nt as the Yankee-est virgin who ever walked in reacted with a deep blush at her first sight of a p.e.n.i.s.

If Conrad Nagel was right, it was Bogart who put them all up to it. ”That dame is too uptight,” Bogart told Nagel, adding, ”What she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to do it.”4 Bette, also in Nagel's telling, thought Bogie was ”uncouth.”5 She was correct.

The problem with this entertaining tale, even in Davis's own version, is that the scene itself is explicitly about Laura's s.e.xual awakening and the embarra.s.sment it causes her. d.i.c.k enters the room as Laura adjusts the diaper and, revealing his love for her for the first time, bends down and kisses her on the lips. And she blushes-not from the shock of seeing the baby's p.e.n.i.s, but from the first stirring of her own s.e.xuality. If there is any meaning at all to this anecdote, it lies not only in the fact that Bette Davis saw her first p.e.n.i.s while a 35mm camera was running and lights were blasting in her face but also that she used her personal humiliation for the sake of her character, something she would do throughout her film career.

”She has about as much s.e.x appeal as Slim Summerville.” This was Laemmle Jr.'s response to Bette Davis's screen debut. Davis claimed actually to have heard him make the remark.6 Mean, yes; funny, terribly. Slim Summerville, the former Keystone Kop who plays one of Laura's father's business a.s.sociates in Bad Sister, was a skinny, bent beanpole with a large comedy nose. But what the twenty-two-year-old Laemmle thoroughly missed was Davis's carnality. It comes out even in the restrained Laura of Bad Sister. Beneath the surface of Davis's New England reserve is raw, unsatisfied appet.i.te-physical drive as well as emotional ambition. Variety got that point early on in its review of Bad Sister: as Laura, the anonymous critic wrote, Davis was ”the very essence of repression.”7 Barely suppressed rage would become Davis's stock-in-trade, but her bottled-up frenzies were as s.e.xual as they were emotional.

By the time she shot Bad Sister, she'd already been run through the gauntlet of Universal men in a demeaning episode that hammered home a sad fact she hadn't expected at all: that Hollywood moviemaking was largely about whether the men who made the pictures wanted to f.u.c.k the women they paid to act in them. Davis was suspicious when they told her she was to appear for yet another screen test, this one for an unnamed part in a likewise unspecified project. They told her to lie down on a couch, after which a succession of fifteen of Universal's contract actors got on top of her. Then they acted. ”I wasn't even a woman,” Bette later wrote; ”I was a mattress.”8 Gilbert Roland gave Bette second thoughts, if only for the sake of a joke she could employ many years later on talk shows: ”I must say, after he kissed me I thought, 'This is not so bad.' ” Roland also reportedly said something on the order of: ”Don't worry-we've all gone through it,” though one doesn't imagine that Universal's pretty starlets ever lined up to lay a piece of freshman veal-cake in front of a screen test crew.9 This, along with the Strictly Dishonorable disappointment, was Davis's welcome to Hollywood.

BAD SISTER ATTRACTED little notice, and neither did Bette Davis. But Karl Freund, who shot the picture, told Carl Laemmle that Davis's eyes were marvelous. This, according to Bette, was the only reason Universal renewed her contract when her first three-month option came up.10 By that point she had made her second movie, Seed. Adapted from what was called a ”novel of birth control” by its author, Charles G. Norris, Seed actually has little concern with contraception. The only trace of it is the fact that Bart Carter, a frustrated writer, has five children who create such a racket that he can't work on his novel. Bette plays one of his daughters. Rather than moving her toward prominence, Seed only pushed her farther into the background.

Davis didn't come any farther forward in her third film, Waterloo Bridge. An elegantly conceived and beautifully executed melodrama, Waterloo Bridge was the director James Whale's first film with Universal; he went on to make the great horror trio Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and Bride of Frankenstein at that studio, not to mention the glorious musical Show Boat. Waterloo Bridge takes place in London during World War I. An expatriate American, Myra (Mae Clarke), can find no more work as a chorine and starts turning tricks. She picks them up on the bridge. During an air raid, she meets a kindly, callow soldier (Kent Dougla.s.s) when both of them stop to help an old lady pick up her spilled potatoes. Roy, nineteen, blond, and upper crust, gives Myra money to pay her overdue rent; she takes it, but in a fit of pique and guilt throws it back at him. They make up, but Myra-especially in Mae Clarke's twitchy performance-becomes increasingly troubled to the point of a marvelous histrionic breakdown scene in her sleazy apartment.

Bette, who plays Roy's pet.i.te sister, makes her first appearance with her back to the camera and generally stays that way until the end of the scene, when she shouts in her deaf father's ear that Roy wants to bring his new girlfriend up to the manor for a visit. She has a few more lines in the film-”Oh! You must come to Camden with us! It's perfectly lovely!”-and disappears.

(We know Myra is doomed at the end when Whale cuts to a bird's-eye shot of her strolling across Waterloo Bridge while the low buzz of zeppelins plays on the soundtrack. Within seconds, Myra gets. .h.i.t by a perfectly aimed bomb, thereby freeing our boy Roy from having to marry the deranged hooker after he returns from the war.) Davis made the papers during the production of Waterloo Bridge, but not because of her talent. According to the June 29 Boston Traveller, Bette was ”rushed to her home from the studio last week” with an attack of appendicitis, though she wasn't operated upon.11 Her absence from the set necessitated some rescheduling, with Whale working nights, as well as the need for a few retakes in July.

Waterloo Bridge was released in September. And Laemmle was still unimpressed. ”Her s.e.x appeal simply ain't,” he said.12 In August 1931, Universal sent Davis on loan to RKO for the cornball Way Back Home. Based on the popular radio program Seth Parker, which chronicled the benign meddlings of a wise Maine farmer, the film is a strenuously homespun morality tale. Bette plays a country ingenue with a harsh father; Seth, with his jutting little white beard and folksy insights, sets things right at a festive taffy pull.

One might a.s.sume that none of this bunk was quite Bette's speed. The hard-bitten image we have of her is true, but only partly so; she had a sentimental streak, too. Bette actually liked Way Back Home. Her director, William Seiter, treated her well, something she hadn't necessarily experienced in Hollywood at that point, or beyond, and she appreciated the way J. Roy Hunt photographed her. Perhaps the most important aspect of the production was the makeup department's innovative treatment of her features. Bette Davis came away from Way Back Home with a new mouth and, consequently, a reformed face. Because RKO's makeup artist Ern Westmore decided to eschew the glamorous bee-stung convention of the period-this movie was, after all, set in backwoods Maine-he instead drew Davis a more linear set of lips, with the lower lip a bit fuller and wider than its natural shape. The result of the new, straight mouth was clear-a fresh emphasis on her greatest features: two enormous, captivating eyes.

Davis was growing frustrated with Universal. Her cattlelike casting, combined with the relative lack of care and craft in the picture making (she underappreciated Waterloo Bridge, probably because her part was so tiny), fed into her lifelong impatience in the face of mediocrity and half-a.s.sedness. She also resented the fact that the studios traded their contract players to other studios without the players' consent to play characters they didn't want to play at the whim of bosses who didn't care.

”There was something lower than bottom,” Bette later wrote, ”and Mr. Laemmle sent me there”-specifically as a loan to Bennie F. Zeidman of B. F. Zeidman Productions. Undirected by Howard Higgin, h.e.l.l's House-the original t.i.tle of which was, appropriately enough, Misguided-begins with a touching scene between a country mother and her son, Jimmy (Junior Durkin), but swiftly turns mawkish when Mother steps away from the camera for a moment and gets run over by a car. Freshly orphaned, Jimmy heads for the city, where he meets the slick bootlegger Kelly (Pat O'Brien), who hires him to take liquor orders. Jimmy gets arrested after literally one minute on the job and gets s.h.i.+pped off to a perfectly dreadful reform school, where he meets the sickly Shorty (Junior Coghlan-there was a vogue for ”Juniors” in 1931). Naturally, Shorty dies. Unnaturally, Shorty speaks to Jimmy from beyond the grave at the end when Jimmy, sprung from the reform school, asks rhetorically, ”How is it now, Shorty?” and, much to his amazement, Shorty answers him in voice-over: ”Okay, big boy!” Fade out.

It's ghastly. Davis plays the bootlegger's moll, Peggy. Fighting her way upstream in this filthy creek, she manages to play Peggy with a breezy self-confidence and, of all things, a kind of transparent naturalism that contrasts markedly with Pat O'Brien's early-talkie stiltedness. One rarely thinks of Bette Davis in terms of the naturalism of her performance style, so deeply has Davis's cigarette-waving, dialogue-chopping delivery been etched in the public imagination. But what Davis brought to the screen in 1931, even in the lousy h.e.l.l's House, was a fresh, unblinkered vitality, a kind of see-through stylization that allows us to know the character while appreciating the actress's craft.

Then Universal loaned her out to Columbia for The Menace. ”I was a corpse!” Davis declared to d.i.c.k Cavett many years later. ”All I did was fall out of a closet!”13 She gets the gist right but the details wrong: Ronald Quayle (Walter Byron) undergoes extensive plastic surgery, including the removal of his fingerprints and the installation of an entirely new face, and returns to England under an a.s.sumed name to avenge his father's killing. Bette plays his girlfriend, who faints after finding a cadaver hanging on a hook in a closet.

The Menace is preposterous. Bette later said, ”I looked like an ostrich through the whole thing-ungainly, sad, and startled. We made it in thirteen days.”14 In truth, she looks nothing like an ostrich. A bored starlet with too much talent for the dreck in which she's stuck, yes. But not an ostrich. She's right about the production's swiftness, though; The Menace filmed from October 30 to November 16, 1931, and there was no work on Sundays.

JACK L. WARNER CAME from nothing, which is to say Youngstown, Ohio. The enormous family-two parents, twelve children-took cold-water baths in a tub on the front porch. They p.a.w.ned the family horse to buy a Kinetoscope: a four-foot-high cabinet with an eyepiece on top through which customers who paid the customary nickel could watch a moving picture. A few years later, Jack and his brothers bought a movie theater in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. One led to several; some failed. They began making their own product-stuff to project on the screen so the people who bought tickets would have something to look at. This business led them to Southern California.

Warner had, one would have to say, a strong personality. When Al Jolson accepted a special Oscar for The Jazz Singer, he remarked, ”I don't know what Jack Warner's going to do with this statue. It can't say yes.' ”15 By 1931, Warner, then thirty-nine, together with his brothers Harry and Albert, ran the most factory-like of the five major Hollywood studios, a compact lot in Burbank where, in the words of the producer David Lewis, ”films were edited, previewed, and s.h.i.+pped like sausages” to theaters that were, conveniently enough, mainly owned by the Warners.16 They were rich tightwads in a town of rich tightwads. Fortune once called Jack ”a bargain-counter dictator,” a description Warner himself repeated with pride.17 Warners' pictures were usually inexpensive to set up and easy to shoot. And they moved. One producer remembered that Warners' editors would cut out single frames from every scene, just to make them play that much quicker.18 Another recalled being told at a meeting that Warners couldn't possibly compete with MGM, for instance, because of MGM's huge roster of stars, ”so we had to go after the stories-topical ones, not typical ones. The stories became the stars. . . . We used to say 't-t-t: timely, topical, and not typical'-that was our slogan. . . . We were all searching frantically, looking through papers for story ideas.”19 Personally, Jack Warner was a bit of a dandy-a failed stand-up comic in blue yachting blazers, ascots, white flannels, and brilliant patent leather shoes, always with the one-liners, which often dropped like lead. When he met Albert Einstein, he made a joke about his relatives. With Madame Chiang Kai-shek and a roomful of Chinese, it was about forgetting to pick up his laundry.

He and his brother Harry, who ran the finances, were as different as two brothers can be. Jack was vulgar, Harry was subdued; Jack was cra.s.s, Harry was contained. Harry was devoted to his wife and children; Jack, who was married to the beautiful and patrician Ann, still screwed around on the side. Jack and Harry detested each another.

At Warner Bros., pretty much the only prestige pictures the studio sent out in the very early 1930s starred George Arliss, an unlikely movie star with a face like that of a misshapen orangutan-the cheeks too wide, the jaw too narrow, the lips too thin, nothing on one side matching anything on the other. Arliss was also getting on in years; in 1931 he was a well-seasoned sixty-three. But two of Arliss's sober, enn.o.bling biopics-Disraeli (1929) and Alexander Hamilton (1931)-were good moneymakers for the studio, and for that reason alone Arliss was respected by film critics and studio bookkeepers alike. He'd made a silent picture in 1922 called The Man Who Played G.o.d, and in late 1931 he was preparing a sound version: A celebrated concert pianist (Arliss) suffers sudden deafness after an explosion. Sequestered and miserable in his apartment high above Central Park, he begins spying on people with the aid of binoculars; reading their lips, he learns of their troubles and solves them from above, at first in mockery of G.o.d, but later in redemptive imitation. (One of the people Arliss a.s.sists is an especially boyish Ray Milland.) Davis plays his protegee, who lets herself become engaged to him out of an oddly appealing kind of pity, though he n.o.bly sets her free at the end.

Bette, in high melodramatic mode in The Lonely Life, claims that she was reeling from the demeaning tawdriness of the corpses, closets, and offscreen screams of The Menace and hovering on a crumbling brink of despair and a defeated retreat to the East when, lo, the saving clarion bell of her telephone rang. The caller identified himself as George Arliss. Bette, believing him to be a prankster friend, responded with a fake British accent until she became convinced that it was, in fact, the great actor himself calling her in for an audition. Bette, according to Bette, had been recommended to Arliss by the actor Murray Kinnell, with whom she had appeared in The Menace.

Jack Warner later said no, that wasn't what happened at all. According to Warner, a midlevel executive named Rufus LeMaire (ne Gold-stick) ”dropped in one morning with his familiar scowling and battered face and said: 'Jack, there's a very talented little girl over at Universal named Bette Davis. I first saw her in some New York shows, and I caught her in a bit in Bad Sister.' ” Bette retorted by pointing out that her role in Bad Sister was more than a ”bit”-it was the second lead-and by insisting that Kinnell, not LeMaire/Goldstick, was indeed the pivotal figure in her hiring by and eventual ensconcement at Warner Bros. Never one to be left out of a praise-earning situation, Darryl Zanuck took some of the credit for moving Bette Davis to Warner Bros. as well. Zanuck was a Warners executive at the time: ”We sent [Arliss] a newcomer named Bette Davis-I didn't think she was very beautiful-and he called back and said, 'I've just heard one of the greatest actresses.' ”20 By the time this who-gets-the-credit contretemps played itself out years after the fact, Bette Davis and Jack Warner had been snapping and squawking at each other for decades-two headstrong supersuccesses who'd grown to depend on each other for nurturing hatred and backhanded support.

Warner Bros.' legal files tell a less pa.s.sionate story of The Man Who Played G.o.d and Bette Davis's formal relations.h.i.+p with the studio: Davis's first contract with Warners is dated November 19, 1931, and specifies her salary at three hundred dollars per week. There's an addendum designed to put little starlets in their place: ”Where black, white, silver, or gold shoes and hose will suffice, artist is to furnish same at her expense.”21 An interoffice memo specifies that The Man Who Played G.o.d officially began production on November 27; Davis, however, had already been on the payroll as of November 18, and she finished shooting her role precisely one month later.22 The film required no retakes.

”He certainly was my first professional father,” Bette later claimed of the benign George Arliss, though given her own father's nature the honor might as well be shared by Arliss's doppelgnger, Jack Warner.23 Davis gives a surprisingly giggly performance at first, but she tones it down for her first serious scene with Arliss. She knows when to move from girlish navete to a woman with the presence of mind to be loved by a genius. Later in the film, when she squares off with her character's new beau at the edge of a brook, Davis's edgy neurosis first breaks through. ”Harold” makes his obvious move, but Bette rears back, grabs at her hair, and releases it-suppressed tension bursting out in a flas.h.i.+ng spasm-and lunges at him.

Later, in a scene set in Central Park in full binocular view of Arliss, Davis speaks in a newly clipped delivery, and one finally begins to hear the voice that sustained her stardom well after she stopped making quality pictures: ”He's put his faith in me! And I won't be a quit-ter!”

It's not just Bette's platinumed hair that makes her seem modern in these early films. It's her stance and spiky att.i.tude-the skittish physical energy and sharp, staccato speech. Bette enters her first scene in her next film, The Rich Are Always with Us, in constant motion-s.h.i.+fting her body, biting her lines, not exactly twitching but scarcely standing still. It was partly a conscious performance, but it also resulted from real intimidation. The film's top-billed star, Ruth Chatterton, was then in the Hollywood pantheon, and Bette was terrified of her.

Davis's b.i.t.c.hy description of Chatterton's entrance onto the set the first day of shooting is well worth quoting: ”Miss Chatterton swept on like Juno. I had never seen a real star-type entrance in my life. I was properly dazzled. Her arrival could have won an Academy Award nomination. Such authority! Such glamour! She was absolutely luminous and radiated clouds of Patou and Wrigley's Spearmint.”24 The scene takes place in a restaurant, and Bette's character comes up to the table Chatterton shares with her costar, George Brent. Bette was so fl.u.s.tered by her proximity to America's reigning glamour queen that she simply couldn't get her lines out. Brent, too, was jittery, his coffee cup rattling on its saucer. Bette then blurted to Chatterton, ”I'm so d.a.m.ned scared of you I'm speechless!”25 But Bette's jumpy energy endures today as a unique performance style, while Chatterton's too-too glamour diction has long grown musty. Referring to a game of roulette, Chatterton announces, ”With this wheel-and this gamblah-you haven't got a chaunce!” ”I cahn't help it,” Chatterton's character later intones, and that was precisely the problem with Chatterton's career.