Part 3 (1/2)

For Warner Bros., pictures like The Big Shakedown were staple entertainments-”programmers,” products to be planned, manufactured, s.h.i.+pped, shown, and forgotten except as numbers on a balance sheet. But for Bette Davis, each programmer was hideously special: one by one, they offered all the full-throttle anxieties of Hollywood moviemaking with none of the high-inducing creative satisfaction. After shooting eighteen pictures in three years, Davis was still clocking in as per her contract, putting in long days under hot lights, taking orders she didn't respect, watching lesser actresses get meatier roles in better movies.

Davis's driven imagination extended to her recollections, especially when there was scorn involved. ”In Fas.h.i.+ons of 1934, I played a fas.h.i.+on model in a long blonde wig and with my mouth painted almost to my ears,” Davis wrote in a Colliers magazine article in the mid-1950s. ”Imagine me as a fas.h.i.+on model! It was ridiculous. My leading man, William Powell, thought so, too.”33 She went a little further in The Lonely Life: ”I was glamorized beyond recognition. I was made to wear a platinum wig. . . . The bossmen were trying to make me into a Greta Garbo.”34 Actually, Davis plays a dress designer in Fas.h.i.+ons of 1934, not a model; it's her eyes, not her mouth, that Warners' makeup department decided to elongate; her hair had been platinum for most of the pictures in this early phase of her career; the Fas.h.i.+ons wigs aren't particularly long . . . and n.o.body at Warner Bros. could possibly have been under the delusion that Bette Davis was to be the new Garbo.

Fas.h.i.+ons of 1934 doesn't suit Davis well; in that she was correct. But that's because she has next to nothing to do. Her role is a lackl.u.s.ter reprise of the graphic designers she played in So Big and Ex-Lady, except that this time she's drawing knockoffs of women's gowns and standing in the background looking glum. William Powell plays a debonair schemer who gets Davis's character involved in a counterfeit couture business.

Fas.h.i.+ons of 1934 comes to delirious if incomprehensible life in a musical number. Wrapped in one of Orry-Kelly's less successful designs, an oversized wing-framed cape constructed out of black feathers (the effect is that of a hefty hunchbacked vulture), an ersatz grand d.u.c.h.ess launches into a tortured solo, ”Spin a Little Web of Dreams.” A chorus girl backstage falls asleep after opening a window next to a pile of ostrich feathers. A tiny bit of feather drifts in the air until it is caught onstage-another stage, a much grander stage-by one of twenty or thirty befeathered blonde harpists plucking the rhinestone strings of human harps. Stone-faced women dressed in white ostrich feathers serve as the columns. And with this, the drab functionality of the director, William Dieterle, gives way to the gloriously demented genius of Busby Berkeley. Huge feather fans pump and sway on a series of vast, multi-tiered sets. Overhead shots turn feather-armed women into gigantic, undulating chrysanthemums. Brilliant lights glare off the coifs of identical chorines dressed in ostrich feather bikinis as the camera swings around them, unrestrained by mundane considerations like story logic or character development. A battalion of white-feathered oarswomen row a galley-with feathered oars-across a fabric sea. Then the backstage chorine wakes up, and it's all over, and unfortunately, Bette Davis is nowhere near any of the fun while it lasts.

Bette's own black Scottie, Tibby, makes a cameo appearance sitting on a hatbox and being carried into a cab, but beyond getting her dog on-screen, Bette's performance in Fas.h.i.+ons of 1934 is one of her most rote.

JIMMY THE GENT, Davis's next picture, is a lopsided screwball comedy, with Jimmy Cagney's character far outweighing Bette's in both screen time and narrative interest. Jimmy Corrigan (Cagney) is a shady private investigator who specializes in finding the heirs to unclaimed millions. Bette plays his former employee who has moved on to a nominally more respectable firm. It's a Warner Bros. comedy, which is to say it's purposefully dark and blunt. The film opens with a grimly comical montage of various millionaires violently dying: a motorboat wrecks, a s.h.i.+p capsizes, a plane crashes, a jockey breaks his neck, all entertainingly ill.u.s.trated by spinning newspapers heralding the lurid and exciting deaths.

Davis was never particularly fond of Jimmy the Gent-neither she nor most critics ever appreciated her genuine if offbeat talent for comedy-but the movie has found its share of fans. The critic Otis Ferguson wrote, ”If this wasn't the fastest little whirlwind of true life on the raw fringe, then I missed the other one.”35 And the critic and screenwriter Andrew Bergman (Blazing Saddles) called it ”simply a great American comedy” and ”the funniest film of Cagney's career.” Jimmy the Gent may not be Bringing Up Baby or The Awful Truth, but it has its moments, one of which Cagney himself engineered in irritated response to his own casting. As Bergman noted, Cagney's head resembles that of Sluggo:36 Cagney: ”When I heard I was going to play another one of those guys, I said to myself, 'They want another of those mugs, I'll really give them a mug.' So I had my head shaved right down to the skull except for a little top knot in front, and I had the makeup man put bottle scars all over the back of my head. The opening shot was of my back to the camera, with all those scars in sharp focus. . . . Hal Wallis, who was running that part of the studio at the time, took my haircut as a personal affront. 'What is that son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h trying to do to me now?' he said. To him, for G.o.d's sake.”37 Both Cagney and Davis tend to speak quickly even in the most laconic of movie circ.u.mstances. In Jimmy the Gent, they spit their lines like bullets. ”They got a stiff down there that sounds swell,” says Cagney. Says Bette, ”You can go down deeper, stay under longer, and come up dirtier than any man I've ever known!” Smartly, she delivers this screwball line not in outrage but as cold fact.

Cagney recalled Davis as being unhappy during the filming of Jimmy the Gent: ”Her unhappiness seeped through to the rest of us, and she was a little hard to get along with.”38 Cagney's biographer, Doug Warren, went further, describing her personal reaction to her costar as one of ”contempt.”39 A convoluted murder mystery, Fog Over Frisco introduces Davis in a racy nightclub where criminals aren't unfamiliar. The men at the bar hear several loud bangs and instinctively duck. The director, William Dieterle, cuts to a bunch of balloons, behind which Bette's face emerges in close-up as she pops them one by one with a pin. She's a good-time girl, this Arlene Bradford-socialite, fas.h.i.+on plate, and trafficker in stolen bonds. Her staid financier father (Arthur Byron) is appalled simply by her nightlife: ”You promised to turn over a new leaf after your last scandalous escapade,” he chastises over the breakfast table the next morning, faux-elegantly p.r.o.nouncing the last word to rhyme with act of G.o.d. But the leaf never turns. All too soon-the whole movie runs all of sixty-eight minutes-Arlene turns up as a corpse in her own rumble seat, and by the end, her responsible stepsister, the extraordinarily named Valkyr (Margaret Lindsay), fresh from a kidnapping, has to explain the whole tangle in voice-over. The suspicious, snooping butler is really a cop; both a fiance and a yacht each have two names; there's something about a secret code. . . .

Fog Over Frisco was fun for Davis, who had kind things to say about it in retrospect. For one thing, its production was supervised by Henry Blanke, whom she admired. He was, she later wrote, ”a producer of infinite taste, an understanding man, whatever our problems. He was a great contributor to the Warner product during the great Hal Wallis years at Warner Bros. He was an enormous contributor to my personal career. The part in Fog Over Frisco was one I adored. It also was a very good script, directed superbly by Dieterle.”40 The film was shot with characteristic Warner Bros. efficiency from January 22 to February 10, 1934.

Two days before shooting began, Bette Davis underwent her first abortion. Ham told the studio that she was suffering from sunstroke and the flu and needed a few days' rest.41 WHILE SHOOTING 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, in the late summer of 1932, the screenwriter Wilson Mizner handed Bette a W. Somerset Maugham novel called Of Human Bondage and suggested she read it with an eye toward playing the disreputable antiheroine.42 Mizner was himself a colorful character. His voice was thin, his dentures were loose, and his hands were battered into stumps, a condition he attributed to ”hitting wh.o.r.es up in Alaska.”43 He evidently appreciated Maugham's Mildred Rogers from several perspectives.

A few months later, when the director John Cromwell screened Cabin in the Cotton-he was thinking of casting Richard Barthelmess in something-he saw Davis if not for the first time then at least from a fresh perspective.

The trouble was, it was RKO that would be making Of Human Bondage, not Warner Bros. Davis claimed to have shown up at Jack Warner's office every day along with Warner's shoes.h.i.+ne boy: ”I spent six months in supplication and drove Mr. Warner to the point of desperation-desperate enough to say 'Yes'-anything to get rid of me.”44 When Warner at last relented and agreed to the loan, he did so with a certain you've-made-your-bed att.i.tude, not comprehending why any of his actresses would ever want to play a dislikable creature like Mildred. As Bette later noted, ”If my memory is correct, he said, 'Go and hang yourself.' ”45 It's pure speculation, but one wonders whether Bette Davis would have had the January 1934 abortion had Of Human Bondage not been presenting itself imminently as her first potential masterpiece. ”Harmon didn't even know she was pregnant,” insists Anne Roberts Nelson, Ham's second wife. ”It was Ruthie who talked her into it. If Bette couldn't work because she was pregnant, the meal ticket was gone.”46 But it wasn't just Ruthie's financial support that was at stake, though Mother's comfort-all her housing, clothing, food, and entertainment expenses, not to mention her mad money, for after she moved with Bette to Hollywood in 1930 she didn't work another day in her life-did indeed rest squarely and heavily on Bette's shoulders. At stake was something even more central to Bette's life than her mother: her art. Mildred Rogers was the first truly important role Bette wanted.

Of Human Bondage began shooting toward the end of February 1934, at RKO's studios in Hollywood on the corner of Melrose and Gower, and continued through April 9. At first, Leslie Howard and his English friends were sn.o.bby toward the little loaner from Warner Bros. ”There was lots of whispering in little Druid circles whenever I appeared,” she later noted.47 But Howard's agent at the time, Mike Levee, took Howard aside in his dressing room and said, ”If you're not very careful, that girl will steal the picture,” to which Howard rather self-servingly responded, ”Do you know something, Mike? If I am very careful, she will steal the picture,” thereby giving himself much of the credit for Bette's eventual triumph.48 Davis's eagerness for audiences to hold her character in contempt is not the only turning-point aspect of Of Human Bondage. It's here that Bette really begins to deliver her lines like punches. We're introduced to Mildred in the restaurant where she works as a waitress. Philip (Howard), who has a club foot and walks with a p.r.o.nounced limp, is seated at a table with a friend. Philip makes a smart remark when Mildred strides over to his table, and Mildred responds, ”I don't know what you mean.”

Bette's c.o.c.kney accent is layered, impure-a low-cla.s.s tw.a.n.g unsuccessfully masked by pretension. But beyond the skillful inflection, the moment is historic because Bette Davis (to borrow the novelist Blanche McCrary Boyd's marvelous phrase) has started to speak in italics, in this case highly imitable iambs.

Throughout the film, Mildred replies to each of Philip's invitations with, ”I don't mind,” a line Bette reads with increasingly irritating condescension, a vocal recognition of what we're asked to see as Mildred's pathetic attempt to rise above her station. It's an accent noticeable as an actress's impression of c.o.c.kney, not a accurate mimic's impersonation. Bette Davis demands to be recognized as Bette Davis, the stresses her vocal signature writ large.

Vocalization aside, Mildred is also about movement-a display of physical, one could even say carnal, confidence. It's the swing and strut of a particularly common wh.o.r.e. In the initial flirting conversation with Howard, Bette c.o.c.ks her head back and forth in opposing diagonals, s.h.i.+fting her shoulders as she does so. ”I don't know whether I will or whether I won't,” she announces (in response to Philip's invitation to let him find her a reason to smile). When Philip walks away from the table, Cromwell dwells on his limp not for the audience's sake but for Mildred's. There's a shot of Philip walking past her, a shot of Mildred casting her eyes downward, a shot of Philip's legs walking away against a bare checked floor, and finally a shot of Mildred's reaction. ”Ha,” she says with a knowing cluck, but Davis undermines Mildred's superiority by s.h.i.+fting her eyes away to the left, a minute register of her own self-consciousness and a subtle recognition of Mildred's as well.

Davis herself claimed never to have understood Philip's fierce attraction to Mildred. She believed in Mildred's vile nature, of course; one has no doubt that Davis nailed this character so squarely because she saw something of herself there-the manipulative ambition, if nothing else. But for Davis, Philip's ”whimpering adoration in the face of Mildred's brutal diffidence” was unfathomable. As an actor's issue, this was ”Howard's problem and not mine,” she later wrote, but it's telling that Davis refused to acknowledge in herself what Maugham treats as essential to the human condition: self-destructive desire.49 The ”bondage” of the t.i.tle is the helpless submission of drastically unreturned love. Could it possibly be that Davis never felt such an emotion? Or is it that she just refused to own up to it in public?

When Davis cuts loose in the film's climactic scene, it's scenery chomping-loud, attention grabbing, histrionic. She gives Mildred the feral rage of a cornered animal, and the scene is justifiably famous. But it makes full sense only because Davis has been willing to debase herself all along. To set up Philip's revelation, Cromwell cuts to a close-up of Mildred from Philip's point of view: her eyes are languid; her mouth is slightly gaping. She is leaning forward in the drearily inviting stance of a cheap hooker. Philip has good reason to tell Mildred at last that she disgusts him; Bette Davis had never before been allowed to make herself so repulsive onscreen.

”Me?” she says, rolling her shoulders. ”I disgust you? You. You! You're too fine!” She begins to turn away from him but reels back and spits, ”You won't have none of me, but you'll sit here all night looking at your naked females! You cad! You dirty swine!” She's clutching her hands together just below the bottom of the screen, then jerks her right arm out briefly. ”I never cared for you-not once! I was always making a fool of ya. Ya bored me stiff! I hated ya! It made me sick when I had ta let ya kiss me. I only did it because ya begged me!” Davis is doing all of this with piercing vocal rage but very little physical action; she's once again gripping her hands together to contain herself physically-to fire it all out through her voice. ”Ya hounded me-ya drove me crazy!” She wheels around but returns to face him again. ”And after ya kissed me I always used to wipe my mouth. Wipe my mouth!” This is when she chooses the precise physical gesture: grossly, even obscenely, she employs the back of her arm to demonstrate the wiping. ”But I made up for it! For every kiss I had a laugh . . .! We laughed at ya, because you were such a mug, a mug, a mug!” She hurls a plate to the floor. ”You know what you are, you gimpy-legged monster?!”

Unfortunately for Bette, Cromwell cuts away from her at the height of her wrath to Howard to get his stricken reaction: ”You're a cripple! A cripple! A cripple!”

As the film critic Martin s.h.i.+ngler observes, ”This is not Davis in a rage but an actress in motion, presenting fury through her shoulders, neck, torso, her arms and hands, her eyes and her mouth, through her voice and her breathing.”50 Davis is one of melodrama's greatest dancers.

In the following scene, a knife cuts through a painting, and the camera pulls back to reveal Mildred in a garish black outfit with feathered collar. She's breathing heavily, having laid the room to waste. Her mouth is lolling. ”You love these things. You love what they're meant to be.” Davis snarls the words with rancid sarcasm. ”You want to be a doctor!” she snaps as she rips pages out of his medical textbook. Then she goes through the desk drawers until she finds Philip's bonds. Throughout all of this, remarkably, Davis's face is entirely obscured by a jauntily louche hat with a tacky oversized fabric flower, but she's performing with her whole body so her face doesn't need to be visible. ”This'll take ya through medical school,” she says as she sets the bonds on fire and leaves them burning in an ashtray. She stomps out of the room, leading with her shoulders.

Of Human Bondage is the first defining moment in Bette Davis's career, and it's psychologically perverse, to say the least. Motion pictures finally gave her the sweet chance to force millions of people to despise her.

CHAPTER.

5.

THE FIRST OSCAR.

”DEAR G.o.d! WHAT A HORROR!” IS Davis's description of the picture Jack Warner stuck her in after she returned to the studio after shooting Of Human Bondage. Housewife was yet another Warners programmer-something to fill the screen for the allotted seventy minutes while the audience finished its popcorn.1 George Brent and Ann Dvorak are young marrieds, Bill and Nan, with a son named Buddy; Bette is the sophisticated advertising copywriter who tries to break them up. They're all old friends, but ambitious Pat (Bette) has gone off and seen the world and returned a successful and sophisticated career woman. At lunch with Nan, Pat sends back her duck because the dressing is made with sauterne rather than Chablis. ”It's not nearly as good as the canard sauvage I had in Paris,” she casually drops to an intimidated-looking Nan. Of course she steals Bill away, but Bill becomes so hardened and distracted by his affair with the modern Pat that he runs Buddy over with the car. That changes his tune but quick. He returns to Nan, leaving Pat to go off and drink her dinner with an aging cosmetics executive named Duprey.

Buddy recovers.

The film was shot from April 11 to May 7, 1934, though Bette, most displeased by the lackl.u.s.ter role she was being forced to play after Mildred Rogers, didn't show up until April 18. She was inspired to appear only after a series of hostile telegrams from Warner Bros. that pointed out that she did not in fact have script approval and was forced to play any d.a.m.ned role the studio put her in.2 Adding insult to insult, Warners immediately a.s.signed Bette to a secondary role in The Case of the Howling Dog. Bette rebelled again, this time refusing to appear at all. She stuck to her refusal even after a slew of wires and phone calls from the boys in the front office. At one point, Jack Warner himself telephoned her at home. Ham answered and told the head of the studio that Miss Davis was busy. She'd call him back, Ham said. She didn't.3 The Case of the Howling Dog, the first film adaptation of an Erle Stanley Gardner legal-mystery novel, was to feature Warren William as Perry Mason and Mary Astor as the defendant, Bessie. It's all about multiple wives and dogs and corpses buried under the garage. Bette was supposed to be Della Street, Mason's ever-competent, mostly-in-the-background secretary.

And so she walked out. That Warners easily replaced her with a first-timer named Helen Trenholme indicates the meatlessness of the role. Trenholme made only one more film before retiring from the screen.

Davis was refusing to honor the terms of her contract, so the studio slapped her on suspension. Had Of Human Bondage not opened on June 27, 1934, to rave reviews, Davis might have remained on suspension for the rest of her tenure at the studio. But it was quite humiliating to Jack Warner to be widely seen as a clueless vulgarian and artless hack who kept sticking a brilliant actress-who, according to Life's review of Of Human Bondage, had given ”probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress”-in silly parts in silly movies or, in her current situation, kept her sequestered from the camera altogether.4 Bordertown was the result. Warner took Bette off suspension and paired her with the magnetic Paul Muni, who was an even bigger Warners star than James Cagney. Warner seemed to be getting the point at long last.

The film began shooting on August 17, 1934. Johnny Ramirez, fresh out of a storefront law school in downtown Los Angeles, swiftly gets disbarred after punching out the opposing counsel. He abandons his weeping mamacita and resurfaces, far to the south, as the bouncer, later the co-owner, of a bordertown casino run by good old Charlie Roark (Eugene Pallette). A ritzy white sedan pulls up at the curb. ”h.e.l.lo, Johnny!” says a familiar voice-Bette is Mrs. Marie Roark. She's one hot number, and visually, too: the cinematographer, Tony Gaudio, is fond of bouncing intense light off of Marie's brilliantly blonde hair. When Charlie heads off to L.A. to see his dentist, Marie makes her move on Johnny, but he spurns her. So when Charlie gets back with his new dentures, she b.u.mps him off by leaving him drunk in the garage with the motor running.

After a brief interlude of guilt-free serenity, Marie starts to crack up, and Bette plays it up with flitting eyes and hair-clutching fingers. But Hal Wallis thought she wasn't going nutty enough quickly enough. After seeing rushes of the scene in which Marie visits the construction site of Johnny's new casino, Wallis was annoyed: ”It's about time she's starting to crack. . . . She plays it like Alice in Wonderland.”5 There was a lengthy, loud fight on the set. The subject: cold cream. One scene finds Marie waking up in the Roarks' vast baroque bed, and Bette decided to play it with an eye toward realism by smearing cold cream all over her face and applying curlers to her hair. The film's tubby director, Archie Mayo, threw a fit. Fits being contagious, Bette threw one, too, as did Hal Wallis. In Bette's words, they ”screamed at each other for four hours.”6 ”You can't look like that on the screen!” Wallis roared. Bette replied, equally loudly, that she looked precisely the way her character would look in bed in the morning. ”Muni stood up for me,” Bette later claimed, but she lost the fight anyway.7 She won a more important one, however. In a courtroom scene late in the film-mad Marie has falsely accused Johnny of forcing her to murder Charlie-Mayo directed Bette to go completely bonkers in what she later described as ”the fright-wig, bug-eyed tradition.”8 Davis dug in her heels and refused. Wallis was again summoned to the soundstage to mediate. ”If you want me to do it obviously, silent picture style, then why don't we bring back silent picture t.i.tles, too?” Bette argued. Her idea was to play her scene on the witness stand all but catatonically at first and grow increasingly distracted as the scene progressed. Although her performance isn't especially subtle, it works. Given the twitches and spasms of her earlier scenes, for Davis to have ratcheted up Marie's looniness to the shrieking level demanded by a hack like Archie Mayo would have provoked derisive hoots. Davis held her audiences to a higher standard, and they appreciated it.

From Bordertown, Warners pushed Davis into an odd, small movie-The Girl from 10th Avenue-which finds Bette as a shopgirl who distracts a jilted society fellow, Geoffrey (Ian Hunter), from his misery. One night they get both drunk and married. They plan to move to South America. His friends treat her like a golddigging wh.o.r.e. They fight and make up. That's it. The most remarkable aspect of The Girl from 10th Avenue is that it was the fourth filmed version of the property. This one was shot in March 1935.

Her next film was no masterpiece, but it wasn't embarra.s.sing, either. In 1931, United Artists and Howard Hughes made The Front Page, a speedy newspaper comedy with Pat O'Brien and Adolphe Menjou. In 1935, Warner Bros. made Front Page Woman, with Bette Davis and George Brent-a protoHis Girl Friday with Brent in the Cary Grant role and Davis in Rosalind Russell's. Like the original Front Page, two rival reporters threaten to best each other, and like His Girl Friday, they're a guy and a gal in p.r.i.c.kly love. As a hard-headed 1930s newspaperwoman (though she faints after witnessing her first electrocution), Davis gets to develop her independent, driven persona: the career woman who doesn't give a d.a.m.n if she ends up single. And she even manages to wear one of those skinny, weasel-like furs with the head still on it without looking camp.

Front Page Woman began shooting in mid-April 1935 and was released in July, around the time Special Agent started up. ”I like you,” says the eponymous agent (George Brent) to Davis over a dinner table. ”You don't ask asinine questions at a ball game, you don't get lipstick on a guy's collar, and you carry your own cigarettes.” That's the way he proposes to her. Since her character is just that kind of gal, she takes him up on the offer.

George Brent is a star whose l.u.s.ter has faded over the decades to the point that his popularity in the 1930s verges on the inexplicable. Brent was handsome but not sharply or memorably so. What once seemed das.h.i.+ng is now dulling. His masculinity, dependable and solid in the 1930s, looks merely stolid in retrospect. Special Agent was the fifth film Davis made with the affable if wooden star. She'd go on to make six more, and although two of them are among Davis's finest (Jezebel and Dark Victory)-and as much as she liked him personally-Brent ended up hampering her films more than he helped them. Davis once said that Brent's onscreen energy never matched his real-life vigor. After all, this man was a trained pilot and used to buzz the studio for laughs. Still, Brent's virile charm rarely registered on celluloid, where it mattered most.

In Special Agent, Davis plays a gangster's bookkeeper. It's a mark of the early postProduction Code era in which the film was scripted and produced that Davis's Julie remains entirely above reproach despite the central role she plays in the criminal activities of a vicious, murdering thug (Ricardo Cortez). Julie is yet another in a string of Davis's smart women with jobs, apartments, and Orry-Kelly wardrobes. That her lifestyle comes by way of concealing a gangster's profits from the government is an issue Special Agent both takes for granted and downplays; Warners wouldn't abandon its down-and-dirty scenarios entirely, but the imposition of the Code in 1934 meant that the studio couldn't flaunt them either.