Part 4 (1/2)

MR. WARNER: Yes.

SIR WILLIAM: When she was married, did your company present her with a doc.u.ment which she was to sign, giving an undertaking not to divorce her husband for three years?

MR. WARNER: I have never heard of it.

SIR WILLIAM: You have a brother, Harry Warner?

MR. WARNER: Yes.

SIR WILLIAM: Was there a proposal that a photograph should be taken of the lady, her husband, and Harry Warner, with the lady handing over to Mr. Harry Warner the undertaking saying that she would not divorce her husband for three years?

MR. WARNER: I can't believe that anything of the kind occurred.

SIR WILLIAM: Did Miss Davis indignantly decline to do anything of the sort?

MR. WARNER: I am sure my brother never made any such proposal, or ever thought of it.

Could Bette have made up this belittling incident out of whole cloth, or did Jack Warner commit perjury?

Sir William did get Warner to acknowledge one key point: ”I admit that an actress could become heartbroken if she had to play parts that were not fitted to her,” the mogul testified.43 Bette was not called to the stand.

The a.s.sociated Press, dateline London, October 19, 1936: ”Bette Davis, the American film actress, was enjoined today from making an English movie. Justice Sir George Branson in King's Bench Division decided in favor of Warner Bros. of Hollywood in an injunction suit to prevent Miss Davis from working in a future picture for Toeplitz Productions, Ltd., a British organization.”

”When the news came I was walking on the beach in utter melancholy. Jack Warner had won a three-year injunction or the duration of my contract (whichever was the shorter). I was his, and if he exercised his options, my inhuman bondage stretched to 1942.”44 Bette and Sir William were expecting at the worst an injunction limited to one year; the three-year term of the injunction shocked them.45 Warner, always the jokester, claimed that after his court victory Sir Patrick pitched his son-in-law for a screen test and then handed him a screenplay written by himself.46 The outcome was no surprise to Ludovico Toeplitz, who had tried to bail out as early as the end of August. Almost two months before the case went to court-and, strangely, a week before he threw the party at Claridge's-the producer wrote to Bette, who was then staying at the Tudor Close Hotel in Rottingdean, and informed her that, having heard the opinion of both his British and American counsel, ”we are advised emphatically that the contract between yourself and Warner Bros. is valid. . . . Warner Bros. will certainly be able to obtain an injunction in the English courts restraining you from performing. . . . You are not and never have been in a position legally to enter into any contract to play for us . . . and we must proceed at once to recast the part contemplated to be played by you.”47 One scarcely needs to paint Bette Davis's rebellion against Jack Warner in broad Oedipal strokes to make the point that it was driven as much by irrational pa.s.sion, a deep-seated need to prove an impossible invincibility against a Goliath-like adversary, as it was by practical, professional concerns. Her defeat was a personal humiliation played out on a worldwide stage, and it was doubly devastating for her to lose her case against Jack Warner the man as well as Jack Warner the head of the studio. But there was one key reversal to the Freudian theme. Harlow successfully abandoned her; Warner accomplished what was, for her, even more excruciating: he kept her tethered to him.

The paternal nurturing she craved arrived in the form of George Arliss, who visited her in Rottingdean. A man of great personal charm, Arliss was also a seasoned veteran of the theater and cinema. He was consoling, but he was also practical. She was compelled to return to Warner Bros., he told her. But she was an actress, and it was her choice as to how she played the scene. He sent a note a few days later: ”Dear Miss Davis . . . I was so happy to have that little visit with you. I admire your courage in this affair, but when you have found out just what you can do, then I would suggest that you review the thing dispa.s.sionately and choose the course that is likely to be best for you in the long run.” Thoughtfully, he sent her a gift along with the card-a slew of cigarettes from Lewis of St. James Street.48 ”This was the last time I ever saw Mr. Arliss,” Davis writes in Mother G.o.ddam. Arliss's paternal role was lost neither on Davis nor on Arliss himself: ”He was a wise and beautiful man. I think he loved me as a father hopefully would. I have a signed photograph of him. The inscription reads: 'with adopted fatherly affection.' ”49 SIR WILLIAM JOWITT had made the point in court that it would be difficult for both parties to resume their creative relations.h.i.+p: ”If Mr. Warner and Miss Davis both had the tact and consideration of angels, it would be putting a very great strain on them if, after all this, she is going back to work for them.”50 Sir William was right; it was a terrible strain. For Bette, if not for Jack Warner. Bette met with one of Warners' British lawyers, who reported back to the studio that she had respectfully offered several suggestions on how to proceed. Convinced that Arthur Edeson's cinematography for The Golden Arrow wasn't as good as it might have been, she once again asked that Sol Polito, Ernie Haller, or Tony Gaudio photograph her films if at all possible. She asked the studio, in the lawyer's words, ”to let her appear in two good substantial parts as her next two films”-not an unreasonable request from the year's Best Actress winner, let alone one of Bette's caliber. She ”seriously suggests that the maximum advantage can be obtained from her acting if her appearances are limited to four films a year.” (As a point of comparison, Meryl Streep hasn't appeared in four films in a single year since 1979, the year she won an Oscar for her performance in Kramer vs. Kramer.) Bette mentioned her desire to be loaned out to other studios more frequently, but Warners' lawyer cut off that part of the conversation. And finally, she asked if the studio would waive its claim against her for the costs of the trial. She hadn't yet paid her own counsel's fees, which amounted to 3,000, and she didn't have the money.51 (Whitney Stine calculates ”a mean total of $103,000.”)52 Jack Warner had no intention of waiving the studio's claim against Davis. After all, she lost. And now she had to pay. He and his staff sought a ”collectable amount equivalent to a judgment . . . which we can, if we so desire, enforce against her here,” meaning back in Burbank when Davis returned to work.53 As for Bette's own legal costs, she urged her solicitors not to approach Toeplitz for payment. The solicitors' idea was to have Warner Bros. pay them directly out of Bette's weekly salary, though they did timidly float the idea that Warner Bros. might pay their fees in addition to its own, an idea Warners' counsel found ”preposterous” and ”impertinent.”54 Interviewed at her hotel in Rottingdean, Davis, wearing blue beach pajamas and smoking a cigarette, called her defeat ”a sock in the teeth.” ”I'm a bit bewildered,” she went on. ”I didn't make any plans for a hundred percent defeat. I thought at least that it would have been a partial victory for me and for everybody else with one of these body-and-soul contracts. Mind you, I didn't fight it as a test case for the whole film industry. I fought it for myself and for my career. . . . Instead of getting increased freedom, I seem to have provided-at my own expense-an object lesson for other would-be 'naughty young ladies.' ”55 She got a cable two days later: ”Clock in steeple strikes one come home love Ham.”56 The episode turned out not to be the total loss Davis felt it to be at the time. It provided her with vital publicity, the key element of which was precisely that it was not dictated by Warner Bros.' publicity department. She had despised not only the apparent indifference of her casting but also the way she had been marketed. She hated the early fas.h.i.+on shoots, the dyeing of her hair, the cereal ads. . . . It was hardly her idea to present herself as Constance Bennett's secondhand look-alike. Even Warners' best promotions for Davis were in some ways more damaging to her psyche than her worst scripts because they tried to sell her as being someone she wasn't. So although she lost the case, by taking such a belligerent stance against Warners in the full, bright glare of the English-speaking press, she adroitly bypa.s.sed the studio's publicity machine and created a new persona for herself on her own terms: a strong-willed independent thinker as confrontational as any man.57 It worked. Not only did Warners give her better, more suitable scripts upon her return to Burbank, but the studio's publicists began to exploit her pugnacious, ready-to-erupt persona themselves-to the studio's advantage as well as to Davis's.58 Contentiousness became her legacy. As the Economist put it on the occasion of her death, ”The two cigarettes lit by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager-one for him, one for her-were as nothing compared to the two fingers she gave to the head of the studio, Jack Warner, in the high court in London in 1936.”59 But once again, that's skipping ahead. When the Cunard White Star RMS Aquitania departed Southampton on Wednesday, November 4, bound for New York, one of the pa.s.sengers listed on the roster was ”Mrs. R. E. D. Nelson.”60 And Mrs. Nelson wasn't very happy.

CHAPTER.

7.

”IN THE WARNER JAIL”

”I LOVE MY HUSBAND BECAUSE HE Doesn't Treat Me Like a Star!”-the t.i.tle of a 1936 fanzine article ill.u.s.trated with photos of the Nelsons' modest vine-covered, two-story house on busy Franklin Avenue. There were gables, striped awnings, and a picket fence. A driveway ran on the side. During the course of the reporter's visit, Bette turned to her modest husband, Harmon, and said, ”Aren't you getting just a little tired of all this racket?”

”Not yet,” he replied.1 But by the end of the year Ham Nelson was indeed getting sick of the racket-his wife's emotional clatter more than the traffic on Franklin-and when Bette checked into a suite at the Algonquin after disembarking from the Aquitania, she found her husband less than enthusiastic about returning with her to Los Angeles. He'd found work with Tommy Dorsey's band and planned to stay in New York.2 It was with Ruthie that Bette would travel west, Mother having gotten as far as New York on her way to rescue Bette from Great Britain when Bette cabled that she was coming back to the States on her own.

Davis didn't put an especially good face on things in New York. Unbowed if not downright belligerent, she bluntly told the reporters who collected at the Algonquin that she was heading back to Hollywood to ”serve five years in the Warner jail.” She explained her sense of anxious resignation: ”When I was a young thing and not very wise I signed the contract which ties me up to 1942. I'll be an old woman by 1942, but I'm going back, and I'll be there in a week or so, and all I can say is the h.e.l.l with it.”3 By ”old woman,” Bette Davis meant that in 1942 she would be thirty-four.

”She told me that her main worry for years in Hollywood was paying the rent,” said the writer Dotson Rader, who got to know Davis in the 1980s.

First and foremost, it was a job to her. The whole fight she had with Jack Warner was over the fact that she felt that the parts she was being forced to play were destroying her future ability to make money-to get work. The point at which she rebelled against Warner was the point at which women in Hollywood, then and now, were beginning to age-late 20s, early 30s. She was aware of that, and she wanted to establish to her audience that her appeal was not based on s.e.x. All [Warners] looked at was the short term-what the box-office was on this picture. They weren't interested in what the star of the picture might be making ten years later, or if the picture was going to help the star find work in ten years. [Hollywood is] a completely short-term-driven industry, so it's in conflict with the real long-term interests of individual actors or directors-the creative people. Bette Davis was one of the first people not only to realize it but to act on it-to try to protect herself.4 Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Nelson arrived in Los Angeles on the Santa Fe Chief on Wednesday, November 18.5 Having had the width of the continent to consider her public image, Bette was less hostile in the press this time around. She wasn't chastened. She may have been twenty pounds thinner after her legal and emotional ordeal, but she'd never be chastened.6 She was politic: ”I'm just a working girl-not a crusader,” she told the L.A. scribes. ” 'Work, work, and more work' is my motto from now on.” She wrote a personal note to Jack Warner saying that she was ”ready, willing, and able” to return to the lot and expressed her hope that she would be put back on salary as soon as Warner received the letter, which, reflecting a characteristic sense of urgency, she had hand-delivered. The boss's response was to order her to be back at the studio on Monday, November 23, at 11:30 in the morning.7 Her next picture, Marked Woman, was already in preproduction.

TIMELY, TOPICAL, AND atypical, Marked Woman is generic Warner Bros. at its tense, 1930s best. It's the fictionalized story of the gangster Lucky Luciano and his notorious prost.i.tution ring, though thanks to the Production Code the ladies are nominally hostesses at a shady if glamorous nightclub. The real Lucky, whose name was originally Salvatore Lucania, moved to New York from Sicily with his family at the age of nine; he was only a year older than Bette.8 Luciano was a gangster's gangster and had the underlings to match-thuggish men with nicknames like c.o.c.keyed Louis and Charlie Spinach.9 Warner Bros., always looking for an angle, actually hired one of Luciano's former goons, Herman ”Hymie” Marks, to play a bit part as a gangster, though Hal Wallis worried that Hymie didn't look nearly menacing enough to play one onscreen.10 There's a scene in Marked Woman in which Bette, as Mary Dwight, convinces Humphrey Bogart's self-righteous prosecutor (based on Thomas Dewey) that she's ready to sing. It's a duplicitous gesture, since Mary is still protecting the Luciano character (renamed Vanning for the film, though he retains a thick Italian accent). Vanning has not yet thrown her kid sister down a flight of steps, an act that finally gives Bette's Mary a good reason to turn on him. At this point she's still the tough nightclub hostess in the employ of the mob, which is to say that she's a Code-approved hooker. And this smart wh.o.r.e is putting on an act, though we're not yet aware of that fact. Her voice pitching toward feverishness, Bette hurls herself into a chair and bursts into tears, but rather than daubing at her nose with a pet.i.te piece of lace as a lesser actress would do, she digs into her nostrils with a decidedly unladylike fury. Lloyd Bacon, the director, films her from an unflattering angle: Mary is bending over the desk, using it as support in her moment of breakdown, and Bacon shoots the top of her head straight on, making her nose the primary focus. It's purposely ugly looking, but the electricity of the scene comes from Bette, who certainly could have played it more demurely and with fewer excretions. In exhaustion and apparent defeat, Mary leans back in her chair, cleans her nails on the now-wet handkerchief, and agrees to testify against Vanning. But the moment Bogart moves safely out of range, she s.h.i.+fts her eyes to their edges, and we see that Mary is actually a cool and cunning liar planning to commit perjury and wreck the prosecutor's case. This, it turns out, has been Davis performing a performance of hysteria, a redoubled acting job and one of the best scenes in her career.

”So long, chump,” is her exit line to Bogart after the trial.

Later in the film, Mary turns against Vanning for real, kid sister having been tossed down said steps. She threatens him: ”I'll get you,” she spits, fixing him with a stare more sharp than bug-eyed, ”even if I have to crawl back from my grave to do it!” Vanning responds by having his boys rough her up-badly. A newspaper headline roars from the screen: ”Clip Joint Hostess Near Death from Attack!” You want to laugh-and you may, because it's mid-1930s Warner Bros. distilled to its entertainingly blunt essence-but the driven and artful actress who plays the clip joint hostess makes something valid out of it by shocking us with her character's injuries. On the day she filmed the scene, Bette decided that she'd had enough of the type of glamorous beating she'd endured under Michael Curtiz's timorous eye in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. From Bette's perspective, a new year had turned. It was 1937, and Warners' executives, producers, directors, and makeup artists still didn't get it. She alone did. The script called for Mary to be thrashed and knifed and scarred for life, but as Bette later described herself after she came out of makeup that morning, ”I don't think I ever looked so attractive. Lilly Dache herself could have created that creamy puff of gauze at the peak of her inspiration. It was an absolute gem of millinery.” According to Davis, she ”smiled sweetly” and left the studio, supposedly for lunch.11 She went instead to her physician, Dr. F. Le Grand Noyes, to whom she explained the plot turn and who she asked to bandage her as though she had, in fact, been kicked hard, punched repeatedly, and knife-gashed in the cheek.

Bette may have added a few contusions of her own before showing up at Hal Wallis's office, where Wallis greeted her at the door, saw her swollen eyes, outrageously broken nose, brown abrasions, and acres of b.l.o.o.d.y gauze, and burst into laughter. ”Okay, you get your way,” the producer told her-”all except that broken nose. You can't have that.”12 Bette Davis looks proudly, defiantly ghastly onscreen in this scene in Marked Woman. A bandage is taped to her right cheek, another wrapped around her head; there are blackened eyes looking out through hollow sockets and bruises everywhere, and she holds the left side of her mouth morbidly rigid. This was the ant.i.thesis of Hollywood convention. It was a radical blend of stylization and brutal realism-Bette Davis pulling a majestic, disturbing stunt for the sake of art, all the while demanding to be recognized as Bette Davis, a creative force of nature. Her ghastliness must have registered even more powerfully at the time because n.o.body in 1937 expected it, especially on the face of an Oscar-winning female movie star who was expected to look glamorous no matter what.

When Marked Woman was released in April, Warners' head of publicity and advertising, S. Charles Einfeld, was ecstatic. Writing to Jack Warner, Einfeld went on and on about how well audiences, particularly women, were responding to Davis in the picture: ”You hear women say, 'There's a gal who doesn't need a lot of junk all over her face,' and 'Bette Davis is a female Cagney.'” Einfeld warned Warner against continuing to attempt to further glamorize his strange, bullheaded star but instead to let her play up her strengths: her nervous vitality, her bold decision making, her refusal of convention and inappropriate lip gloss.13 Marked Woman wrapped on January 19, 1937, two days behind schedule, and Bette immediately went into her next picture, Kid Galahad, which wasn't nearly as challenging. A grinning hunk of blond beefcake, a bellhop named Ward (Wayne Morris, in his film debut), doubles as bartender at a party thrown by a boxing manager, Donati (Edward G. Robinson), and his girlfriend (Davis), whose nickname, no kidding, is ”Fluff.” Donati's rival is played by Humphrey Bogart and is saddled with the nickname ”Turkey.” One of Turkey's boys insults Fluff, and Ward chivalrously decks him. So begins his career as the boxer Kid Galahad. Fluff is a singer, which leads to a delightful scene in which Bette, cigarette in hand and draped on a piano in a black sleeveless top and big-sequined skirt, lip-synchs ”The Moon Is in Tears Tonight.” Aside from the fight scenes, it's the highlight of the film.

Although they were two of the more intelligent and liberal actors in town, there was no love lost between Davis and Robinson. ”All of us girls at Warners hated kissing his ugly purple lips,” Bette said in retrospect.14 Privately she called him ”mush mouth.”15 As for Robinson, he reportedly told Hal Wallis, ”This Davis girl-she's hopeless! She's an amateur. She's totally out of place in this picture.” Robinson got the first part wrong, but he may have had a point about Davis's casting, which once again relegated her to the sidelines.16 ”Neither recognized the other's talent,” Wallis later observed.

There was still friction between Davis and Michael Curtiz. Davis has a particularly d.a.m.ning story to tell in The Lonely Life: ”I will never forget Wayne's knocking out a fighter in a take. 'Fake fight! Retake! Fake fight-awful!' Curtiz screamed-but it was difficult to redo because Wayne's opponent was unconscious. He had knocked him out cold.”17 Another tale finds Bette stopping in the middle of a take and barking at her director, ”Mike! Watch me! Stop watching the camera!”18 She was mistaken, of course. Film direction isn't solely about monitoring performances. But soon enough she would learn that a director-a real director, one with ideas to express and the stubborn dynamism to get them on celluloid-would care as much about where the camera was moving as he would about the actress toward whom it happened to be pointing at the moment. After that, everyone else would look like hacks.

”IT WAS A farcical comedy,” Davis writes dismissively of It's Love I'm After, ”but Leslie [Howard] and I had a romp, and I was out of the gutter and in Orry-Kelly's latest gowns.”19 She goes on to say that she would have preferred to do humor of a higher nature-a Philip Barry or S. N. Behrman property, a Holiday or The Philadelphia Story or No Time for Comedy.

But she's wrong. As great as they are, those films don't have the purposefully uncomfortable bite of It's Love I'm After, with the admitted exception of the opening punch in The Philadelphia Story. In fact, Davis and Howard are both superbly p.r.i.c.kly, not to mention eminently believable, as scene-hogging actors embroiled in a long and th.o.r.n.y affair. It's a shame that Davis failed to appreciate her own knack for getting complicated laughs onscreen.

In screwball comedies, characters' fluid ident.i.ties lead to emotional liberation as they discover that lying pretense reveals its own higher truth. Playacting lets Cary Grant and Irene Dunne fake their way back to two happy marriages in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. In It's Love I'm After, the fact that Joyce and Basil are both hammy actors is what enables them to rediscover their love. They see each other for what they are-and aren't. Their squabbling recalls the great Carole LombardJohn Barrymore fights in Twentieth Century, though here there's an added complication: a mooning young heiress played by Olivia de Havilland. While Davis's Joyce and Howard's Basil look at each other and see nothing but greasepaint, which they love, de Havilland's naive Marcia looks at Basil and sees nothing but love, which Basil quickly grows to despise.

Although the part of a tempestuous actress seems to have been tailor-made for Bette Davis, Casey Robinson, one of Warner Bros.' better screenwriters, said that it was only fortuitous casting: ”We just happened to cast Bette in It's Love I'm After. It wasn't written for her.”20 But it certainly could have been.

The film was shot in June 1937. As Variety reported on the ninth, Bette was slightly injured when she fell into the orchestra pit between takes of the Romeo and Juliet death scene, during which the two hams snipe at each other not-so-sotto voce while laboriously dying. Luckily for Bette, she was padded for the real-life pratfall: her ”heavy wig absorbed part of the shock.”21 WHAT WITH THE frequent moves and absent father, neither of the Davis sisters had had an easy time of it, but at least the older daughter had gotten her mother's attention. Ruthie and the girls' old apartment in Newton featured innumerable photos of Bette, taken by an adoring Ruthie, but not a single one of Bobby. Mother and daughters spent the summer in Provincetown before the girls went to North-field Academy. Bobby, walking on the beach after a storm, found a broken toy sailboat and spent the next few days painstakingly repairing it, only to watch, heartbroken on the beach, as the infinitely more self-a.s.sertive Bette grabbed it and launched it into the surf, where it vanished. Bobby, a family friend once declared, was treated as though she was ”the little stepchild.”22 For reasons that aren't entirely clear, Bobby transferred from Denison to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but her emotional state drove her to drop out and move out West with Bette and Ruthie; this was during the early days at the house on Alta Loma. Ellen Bachelder, a friend of the Davises at that time, recalled that Bette held a tight grip on herself at the studio and kept it all in until she got home, whereupon she would blow up at Ruthie and Bobby. After the Davises moved to the Tudor-style house on Toluca Lake, Bachelder arrived one day to find Bette furiously sweeping out closets, enraged that neither Ruthie nor Bobby had done the housework properly. Bobby told Bachelder that Bette would come home from a day under the lights and in front of the cameras, put on a pair of white gloves, and run her fingers along the furniture and woodwork to a.s.sess the degree of meticulous dusting that had, or hadn't, occurred during her absence.

The strain of life, let alone life with her overachieving sister, became too much for Bobby. She would periodically become violent instead of simply melancholy, shouting at both Ruthie and Bette and even slapping and punching them. Her energy spent, Bobby would then suddenly become silent and sullen again.23 In 1934, Ruthie moved Bobby back East-specifically to a sanitarium in Ma.s.sachusetts-where she received various treatments including electroshock therapy. Ruthie returned to Los Angeles on April 5, Bette's birthday, and stayed for about a month; Ham wisely moved out for the duration.

Bobby returned to Los Angeles later that year and touchingly told the press, ”I want to be an actress, just like my sister.”24 Her ambition appears to have been mainly for show, for as Bette herself noted, ”Bobby, now fully recovered and with infinite lucidity, had started to call me the Golden Goose.”25 In 1935, to her own relief more than her mother's or sister's, Bobby, then twenty-five, fell in love for the first time. Like her sister, she picked someone she knew from back East, someone familiar-in her case ”little Bobby Pelgram” from Ogunquit, Maine. He was now the das.h.i.+ng Robert Cole Pelgram, twenty years old, a handsome socialite and flier. When Pelgram asked Bobby to marry him, Bobby had no hesitation. But she was still not her own woman: she chose her older sister's anniversary as the day of her own wedding. Bobby, Pelgram, Ham, and Bette drove down to Tijuana on August 18 for the ceremony.

The Los Angeles Examiner reported in mid-June 1937 that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cole Pelgram had recently departed on a belated honeymoon, setting sail on the SS Virginia for a seven-month cruise through the Panama Ca.n.a.l to Europe, Egypt, India, China, j.a.pan, and Hawaii. Bette thoughtfully had their stateroom adorned with gardenias and sweet peas.26 As much as it must have relieved Bette of the financial burden of supporting her sister as well as her mother and her husband, Bobby's marriage appears to have sparked some resentment on Bette's part; the grudging Lady Bountiful was no longer the center of Bobby's dependent life, as troubled as it sometimes was. Moreover, Bobby never had to work. Bette did.