Part 4 (2/2)

As for Ruthie, she believed her work was done and expected to be supported in increasingly grand style. Bette writes, ”She, who had worked for me like a demon-had known no sacrifice great enough-now relaxed into luxury. . . . To Mother, Hollywood was a playground and movie actresses spent their days floating through an atmosphere of Chanel-scented flattery, adoration, and glamour. I don't believe that Ruthie ever believed I worked once I arrived.”27 This was a problem.

In 1937, money-along with husband, sister, and mother-continued to impress itself on Bette's everyday psyche. She downplays it in her various memoirs, but this was a time of continuing financial panic on her part. Warners ”greeted me with open arms,” Davis writes in The Lonely Life, and ”graciously relieved me of their share of the damages. I didn't have to pay the King's ransom to Sir Patrick, and Sir William's retainer was shared by my employers who fulfilled Mr. Arliss' prophecy and bent over backwards to be nice.”28 But in point of fact, Jack Warner used Bette's debts as a sword of Damocles. He was not in the mood to forgive anything, especially lucre. On January 6, 1937, Bette wrote a note to Warner asking for an advance of $14,000 to cover her legal bills. Rather than ”relieving” her of her share of the damages, Warner arranged for a Bank of America loan that Bette would pay back in weekly installments against her salary.29 Also in January Warners refused to waive its legal costs, which included internal billing from Warners' New York office: New York charged Burbank over $15,000 for the time it spent on Bette's case.30 She was still being paid far less than her peers, and insultingly so. Leave aside the fact that Louis B. Mayer personally took in almost $1.3 million in 1937; he was the boss of bosses and earned accordingly. But major talent wasn't doing too badly either. According to the Hollywood Citizen Examiner, Greta Garbo earned $472,499 that year. Irene Dunne made $259,587, Katharine Hepburn $238,703. If the Citizen Examiner's figures are correct, Bette Davis made only $53,200-about $155,000 less than the ice skating queen Sonja Henie.

FOR THE MOST part, Warner Bros. learned its lesson from Bette's infamous walkout, and the studio offered her parts that suited her or, at least, failed to enrage her. But in the summer of 1937, Warners announced that her next picture would be Busby Berkeley's Hollywood Hotel, costarring d.i.c.k Powell. Bette rebelled. Vociferously. Not coincidental to her rage was that she was being forced to play the dual role of a temperamental movie star who disappears after being denied a role she coveted and the double who takes over for her to serve the studio's publicity needs.31 That she did not play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind was one of her most bitter disappointments, and she rankled at the mention of the film for the rest of her life. According to Bette, Warner Bros. optioned the rights to Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's novel just before it was published in June of 1936, and Jack Warner offered to cast her as Scarlett if only she'd just ”be a good girl” and play the lady lumberjack in G.o.d's Country and the Woman.32 Bette writes she hadn't yet heard of Gone with the Wind and left Warner's office with the exit line ”I bet it's a pip.”33 Warner's own account differs slightly: ”For some reason that now seems obscure to me, I was not too eager to make this picture, although I had an opportunity to bid on the film rights of Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's novel, and could have had it for a mere $50,000. It may be that the antic.i.p.ated $5,000,000 cost cooled my enthusiasm. . . . In any case, I did not nail down an option, and Selznick got it. This was Bette's first setback, for I would have given her Scarlett.”34 Whether Bette's walkout and the studio's lawsuit was the absolute cause or just a contributing factor, Jack Warner lost interest in making Gone with the Wind precisely while Davis was wrangling with him in the British courts. By August 1936, Selznick had picked up the rights, and by September he'd chosen a director: George Cukor. ”Shades of Rochester,” Bette later complained. ”He still saw me as the girl in Broadway, and whatever his ancient grievance, his thumbs were still down.”35 Selznick's memos and contemporary news items indicate that Selznick was strongly considering Miriam Hopkins (G.o.d forbid), Tallulah Bankhead, and Joan Crawford, but not particularly Bette Davis. At one point Tallulah was the front-runner and was screen-tested. Paulette G.o.ddard was tested as well, as was Vivien Leigh. Other stars and starlets were considered, too, if only by their press agents and acquiescent Hollywood reporters: Jean Arthur, Diana Barrymore, Joan Bennett, Marguerite Churchill, Claudette Colbert, Frances Dee, Ellen Drew, Irene Dunne, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Susan Hayward, Boots Mallory, Jo Ann Sayers, Norma Shearer, Margaret Sullavan, Margaret Tallichet, Lana Turner, Claire Trevor, Arleen Whelan, and Loretta Young. Even less likely candidates included Mrs. Jock Whitney, Betty Timmons (Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's niece), and Lucille Ball.36 In June 1937, Cinema Arts joked that the only two actresses who hadn't been mentioned as serious contenders for the role of Scarlett O'Hara were Martha Raye and s.h.i.+rley Temple.37 ”Everybody's second cousin was tested, and I was used as the touchstone,” Bette claimed. ”That was how right I was. It was insanity that I not be given Scarlett. But then, Hollywood has never been rational.”38 The Hollywood Citizen News asked various directors to voice their opinions on the matter: Mervyn LeRoy, evidently having changed his mind about Bette's prospects, picked her as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, with Irene Dunne as Melanie; George Stevens suggested Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant; Archie Mayo wanted Miriam Hopkins and Gary Cooper.39 Bette herself received a telegram: ”We are delighted to inform you we have unanimously voted you the ideal choice [for] Scarlett O'Hara.” Unfortunately for Davis, the telegram was not signed ”David O. Selznick and staff” but rather ”a.s.sociated Cinema Fans of Westchester, Inc.”40 Davis was indeed the choice by public acclamation: of all the women mentioned over the course of the casting contest, Davis scored highest in the fan magazine polls cited by Gavin Lambert in his essay on the making of Gone with the Wind: ”Bette Davis was easily the most popular candidate, with 40 percent of the vote.”41 She had one more chance, and-for once-both Davis and Warner agreed on the circ.u.mstances. Warner: ”Before Selznick decided on Vivien Leigh, he came to me with a proposition to lend him Bette Davis and Errol Flynn as a costarring package for the picture. Bette was fond of Errol . . . but she was also realistic about Errol's limited acting talent. She refused to have any part of the deal, and that was her last chance for the part.”42 Davis was more succinct: ”The thought of Mr. Flynn as Rhett Butler appalled me. I refused.”43 Davis and Warner may have agreed about Selznick's proposal, but Selznick himself took a rather different view of who refused whose proposal about what. The producer wrote a lengthy letter to Ed Sullivan, then the Hollywood columnist for the New York Daily News, correcting the supposed misreporting on his beloved project, the crown jewel of his career: ”Certainly you ought to know that Warner Bros. wouldn't give up Bette Davis for a picture to be released through MGM, even had we wanted Miss Davis in preference to a new personality. Warner Bros. offered me Errol Flynn for Butler and Bette Davis for Scarlett if I would release the picture through Warners-and this would have been an easy way out of my dilemma. But the public wanted Gable.”44 (Unlike Flynn, the magnetic Clark Gable had both looks and substance; audiences adored his rugged insouciance in such hits as It Happened One Night and Mutiny on the Bounty, and when Gone with the Wind was published, it was Gable's name that was on everybody's lips to play Rhett Butler.) Whether Bette Davis had a real shot at Scarlett O'Hara is therefore debatable at best, but the crucial fact is that she believed she did, and this was the context in which she was told to appear as a loser movie star in Hollywood Hotel.

The film was scheduled for production from early August to early November, after which she would go directly into Jezebel, which was exactly the kind of meaty, dramatic picture she had been demanding all along. In July, after learning of her casting in Hollywood Hotel, Bette and Ham took a beach vacation to Carpinteria, just south of Santa Barbara, but Bette did not relax. On July 17, she wrote a lengthy handwritten letter to Jack Warner begging him not to force her to do Hollywood Hotel. She was exhausted, she wrote. The picture was a comedy-”a farce”-and she wasn't right for it. She suggested her old friend Joan Blondell. She was getting only four weeks' vacation after doing four ”very hard pictures.” She weighed only 104 pounds. Surely he understood.45 Chatter ensued; memos flew. Roy Obringer told Warner he'd talked to her lawyer, Dudley Furse, who told him that Bette was up North somewhere suffering from a bad case of sunburn, but that her business manager, Vernon Wood, had talked to her and advised her to do the film on the theory that she should get away from all the heavy roles she'd done. According to Wood, Bette was planning to plead one more time, but after that she'd go ahead and do it if that's what Warner wanted.

Bette did her second-round pleading the following week. The role was no good, she wrote. ”There is no living actress such a fool,” she declared. And she'd have to do a musical number in the Hollywood Bowl sequence-it was, after all, a Busby Berkeley film-and she knew she'd be terrible at it.46 Warner Bros. responded that day. There would be no further discussion; Bette Davis would do Hollywood Hotel.

The following day, G. Horace Coshow, M.D., of Carpinteria telephoned the studio. Bette had come down with sunstroke, he said, and he was taking her to the hospital. She would require one month to recover. A few days later, Warners slapped Bette on suspension.

Her secretary, Bridget Price, took over the conversation with the studio. (The critic Janet Flanner described Price as ”a tall, intaglio-faced English lady, an old friend of Mrs. Davis.”47 Intaglio: a design carved into the surface of metal or stone.) She had seen Bette, Bridget wrote to Jack Warner, and could honestly report that Bette was suffering from second-degree burns. She was a.s.sured, however, that Bette would recover over time. By the way, Bridget wrote, she had told Bette that she had seen the previews for It's Love I'm After and loved them but was surprised to see that Bette had been given second billing to Leslie Howard when, after all, she had been billed equally with Mr. Howard above the t.i.tle on previous occasions. Bette agreed that Bridget should write to Mr. Warner about this problem immediately. Bette would do it herself, of course, but for the fact that Dr. Coshow had ordered her to rest.48 Warner waited several weeks before replying that Miss Price was mistaken: Bette Davis was in fact billed above the t.i.tle on the same line as Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland.

But she never did Hollywood Hotel.

By November, Bette was back at work beginning to film Jezebel when the gossip columnist Radie Harris reported-in an article called ”The Fear That Is Haunting Bette Davis”-that Bette had in fact suffered ”a complete nervous collapse” over the summer in addition to a bad case of sunburn.49 Bette took the occasion of her own nervous breakdown and her fear of losing her mind completely to reveal her sister Bobby's recurring mental illness. This was an unusually frank admission from a movie star, but it wasn't very nice to Bobby.50 BETTE'S WEDDING RING had been stolen after only a week of marriage. Ham bought her a new one at Christmas 1932-”a very lovely band of platinum and diamonds,” according to Mayme Ober Peake-but the loss of the original one was portentous.51 The marriage wasn't working. ”There was no equity in our drives nor in our sense of sovereignty. That was the core of all our troubles,” Bette admits in The Lonely Life.52 There was another problem, too: ”It is small wonder that Ham was both dazzled, bewitched, and then exhausted with my crises. I always had one.”53 Ham Nelson was a sporadically employed musician married to a dynamic, overwrought, increasingly famous movie star who operated under emotional and professional strains he couldn't alleviate. When he took a job in San Francisco in 1934 and earned one hundred dollars a week, he found housing in a low-rent bungalow-10 Mission Auto Court, to be exact.54 (On one trip to visit him, Bette got a speeding ticket for going seventy miles an hour in a forty-five-mile zone near Livermore.)55 It was all very amusing for the press to run stories about how the movie star visited her husband in an auto court, but Ham found the attention paid to the couple's income disparity more difficult to stomach.

He also experienced the cla.s.sical jealousy of the star's spouse, forever having to sit through movies watching richer, better-looking, more famous men make love to his wife. Michael Curtiz overheard the couple bickering at a screening of Front Page Woman, with Ham accusing Bette of being a little too believable in her onscreen attraction to George Brent and stomping off hissing ”Horses.h.i.+t!” after Bette explained that she was simply doing her job.56 He may or may not have known about the fling with Franchot Tone, but he became enraged when he learned that the male starlet Ross Alexander was attempting to cover his attraction to men by ostentatiously proclaiming his attraction to Bette. ”I'll kill him,” Ham is said to have responded and promptly beat Alexander up in a studio men's room. Alexander didn't let up on his quest for Bette, though, and Bette replied by ridiculing his masculinity, leading Alexander to call her ”a merciless b.i.t.c.h.” Shortly thereafter, in late December 1936, Alexander picked up a hitchhiker for s.e.x. The hitchhiker tried to blackmail him, and the studio had to intervene. Haunted by this humiliation, Alexander committed suicide on January 2, 1937. Bette was wracked with guilt.57 Her relations.h.i.+p with Ham was also strained by two pregnancies, both aborted. ”I had two during my first marriage,” Davis acknowledged to Playboy's Bruce Williamson in 1982. ”I don't want to talk about my marriages, but-well, that's what he wanted. Being the dutiful wife, that's what I did. And I guess I will thank him all my life. Because if I'd had those two children. . . . I see myself at 50, with the children all grown up, wondering whether or not I ever would have made it. I think there's nothing sadder, and I'm sure I'd have given it all up if I'd had children earlier.”58 Bette may have been sure, but Ham Nelson surely wasn't. And it was Ham Nelson who saw his wife's fierce ambition and rock-bottom dedication to acting at the closest possible range.

Bette and Ham moved-again-in 1937, this time to 1700 Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, a hacienda-style house complete with a swimming pool, a tennis court, and an acre of land.59 But by the time Jezebel went into production in November, Ham was spending most of his time in New York, having taken a job as an agent.60 ”He was too honorable to trade on my position in pictures, which would have been easy for him to do, and I know the gulf between our earnings discouraged him,” Bette later wrote. ”That, more than anything else, licked him.”61

PART TWO.

VICTORIES.

CHAPTER.

8.

THE SECOND OSCAR.

CALLING BETTE'S SPOILED, HEAD-strong Julie Marsden ”Jezebel” is a bit harsh. The biblical Ahab's Baalwors.h.i.+pping wife slew a variety of perfectly decent prophets and thus offended the Lord so mightily that He arranged for her to be hurled out of a window by eunuchs and her corpse to be devoured by dogs. Julie Marsden just wears the wrong dress to a southern society ball. Still, in the humid and overwrought New Orleans in which William Wyler's elegant film is set, an inappropriate gown is a breach so d.a.m.ning that Julie must dispatch herself to a leper colony to regain her honor.

To say that Jezebel is vintage Bette Davis is to praise what vinophiles love in a fine old wine-not the bright, fresh berry but the subtle rankness of controlled decay. The fact that Jezebel was adapted from a Broadway bomb is as key to the film's appeal as Wyler's meticulous direction. In the first of their three collaborations, Wyler and Davis extract an essential, rich spirit from an essentially inferior grape.

Wyler first encountered the property in December 1933, when he saw Miriam Hopkins star in one of the thirty-two performances of the ill-fated play. He saw it neither as fine theater nor as a project for Davis, whom he'd dismissed and forgotten two years earlier. For Wyler, Jezebel stood poised as a potential vehicle for his then-wife, the volatile Margaret Sullavan. Wyler suggested to his distant cousin, Carl Laemmle Jr. at Universal, that the studio buy the rights and possibly even turn the play, a melodrama about a headstrong antebellum belle, into a musical of the old South. But the play quickly closed, and Junior ignored Wyler's proposal.1 Warner Bros. expressed interest in Jezebel in 1935, but the studio wasn't thinking about starring either Sullavan or Hopkins but rather the Patou-infused, spearmint-emitting Ruth Chatterton. The rights to the play, by Owen Davis Sr., were held jointly by Guthrie McClintic, its producer, and Miriam Hopkins, its star. McClintic was eager to cash in, but the sensibly pigheaded Hopkins was willing to sell only if Warners promised her the lead. Walter McEwen, of Warners' story department, got around that little problem by employing a time-honored Hollywood strategy: he simply lied. McEwen told Hopkins she'd get first crack at the role once the studio had a screenplay, all the while pus.h.i.+ng the picture not for Chatterton but for Davis, whom Hopkins now despised.2 Miriam had been jealous of Bette as early as Rochester; with Davis now an Oscar winner, Hopkins's enmity had only grown.

By the time Hopkins sold the rights in January 1937, McEwen was actively developing the role for Davis. He enthusiastically told the head of production, Hal Wallis, that Bette would ”knock the spots off the part of a little b.i.t.c.h of an aristocratic Southern girl.”3 It's not particularly curious that various forms of the word b.i.t.c.h keep popping up in Warner Bros. memos on Jezebel; the term is not unrelated to Bette's emerging persona, both onscreen and off-, let alone the character of Julie Marsden. The director Edmund Goulding, handed the script for comment and possible employment as director, responded that ”although it is quite possible to put a vivid picture upon the screen, that picture can only tell the story of the triumph of b.i.t.c.hery. . . . Julie is rather like one of some naughty children writing obscene things on a wall, and then when the other runs away, she will stay there and tell you that she did it, and so what?” Goulding had ideas for improving the evolving script according to his own tastes, but a Warners producer, Lou Edelman, told Hal Wallis in July 1937 that Goulding's ideas were pointedly old-fas.h.i.+oned and would result in ”the biggest and most complicated piece of tripe that has ever been put on the screen.”4 With Goulding out, Wallis approached Wyler, then under contract at Goldwyn, with an offer: $75,000 and a twelve-week shooting schedule. Wyler, dissatisfied with what he felt was the lackl.u.s.ter way Goldwyn had been promoting him, was especially interested in Warners' promise of extensive personal publicity.5 Bette reacted with mixed feelings to Wyler's hiring for Jezebel. As pleased as she was by his stature-Wyler was by far the most highly regarded director she'd been asked to work with so far-his reputation for high craftsmans.h.i.+p didn't erase the lingering humiliation she felt after their first meeting. In 1931, Universal had called Davis in for a screen test with Wyler for his film A House Divided. The wardrobe department stuck her in a tight and tawdry number with a too-revealing top. As Davis later wrote, she felt she looked ”common”: ”Hot and embarra.s.sed, I was rushed down to the set where the dark little director stopped brooding long enough to glare at me and say to one of his a.s.sistants, 'What do you think of these girls who show their t.i.ts and think they can get jobs?' ”6 Obviously Wyler didn't think much of these ”girls”; Davis didn't get the role.

”I was now in a position to refuse to work with Mr. Wyler,” Davis wrote in The Lonely Life. ”I asked for an appointment to talk to him. Revenge, they say, is sweet. It has never been thus for me. Mr. Wyler, not remembering me or the incident, was, to put it mildly, taken aback when I told him my grim little tale of woe. He actually turned green. He was genuinely apologetic, saying he had come a long way since those days. I could not help but believe he was sincere.”7 Filming began on October 25, 1937.8 Jezebel begins with a simple but breathtaking display of grandness and scope, as Wyler lengthily tracks his camera down a New Orleans boulevard, past shops, street carts, carriages, pa.s.sersby, buildings, and still more street stalls and carriages, until it comes to rest facing the imposing facade of a large and busy hotel. Graceful and subtle, the shot demonstrates what the great theorist of film realism Andre Bazin so admired about Wyler's style: the image's continuity reveals the luxurious entirety of a city block, lending weight and authenticity to what audiences would otherwise perceive, however unconsciously, as cut-apart wooden backlot construction in Burbank.

Wyler was equally painstaking with Davis's entrance as Julie Marsden, though it's not nearly as grand a sequence. The scene occurs at Julie's plantation, where-much to the delighted shock of her guests-she is late to her own party. (”Her own party! In her own house!”) Wyler cuts from the interior, with all the guests atwitter, to the street outside. A dark, skittish horse rides up at a gallop. The rider, a woman clad in a tight-waisted, big-cuffed habit and feathered hat to match the spirited horse, brings it to a halt outside the gate, forces it-against its will-to turn and enter, and rides into the courtyard. Handing the horse off to a child slave, she heads to the door only to turn back at the sound of the horse struggling against the boy's nervous handling. She advises the boy not to be scared. ”Yes'm, Miss Julie, but he bites!” ”Then you just plain bite him back,” she declares-apparently an act she wouldn't hesitate to commit herself. Julie scoops her hem up from the back with her riding crop, turns toward the camera in an arrogantly premature curtain call, and sweeps into the mansion.

Bette looks supremely confident catching the hem with her crop, but in fact the scooping bit nearly did her in. Over and over Wyler made her repeat it, and she had no idea why. She'd practiced it beforehand, after all, and she thought she had it down. Concerned, Bette begged Wyler to tell her precisely how to do it, what he wanted, would he just explain it to her, please? But the autocratic Wyler refused specificity. ”I'll know it when I see it” was his terse response. Only when Wyler did eventually see it on take 48 did he move on to the next shot. Trying hard to understand what had occurred, Davis demanded to see the rushes. According to her, when she saw the approved take she realized that Wyler was right; the one he used was the most naturally self-possessed, the least studied. ”He wanted a complete establishment of character with one gesture,” she later explained. He got what he wanted.

Wyler was an expressive director, but only onscreen. The man himself gave little coaching to his actors, and Bette, who thought she required his approval, grew alarmed. Having dismissed most of her earlier directors as workmen at best, hacks at worst, she rarely needed their endors.e.m.e.nt; she didn't respect them enough to care what they thought of her. But with Wyler, she was thrown. Here was a director-a creative picture maker who was carefully, technically piecing Jezebel together, shot by shot, in a manner Davis had never seen before. And he gave her nothing.

Being Bette, she said something. ”After about a week, I went up to him and said, 'I may be very peculiar, Mr. Wyler, but I just have to know if what I'm doing pleases you in any way. I just have to know, after every scene if possible.' So the entire next day, he went, 'Marvelous! Marvelous!' And I couldn't stand it. I said, 'Please-go back to your old ways.' ”9 Wyler recognized some of Davis's mannerisms for what they were: itchily nervous and beyond her control, expressions not of a character's psychology but of her own anxiety. So he compelled her to stand still when Julie had no reason to move. His order was reminiscent of Laura Hope Crews's, but he was male, so Bette took it better. ”Do you want me to put a chain around your neck?” he barked one day during filming. ”Stop moving your head!”10 Wyler also coaxed her out of playing too many scenes at full throttle. Regarding many of her earlier films as deficient-shallow scripts, artless directors-Davis often tried make up for their lack by pumping her characters harder, subst.i.tuting adrenaline and tics for the substance she knew was missing from the material. Wyler, in contrast, radiated confidence in both himself and the film he was making, and he encouraged Bette to play Julie with more moderation. ”She comes in during the morning eager to do it right, maybe to overdo it,” Wyler wrote in a memo to Hal Wallis and the a.s.sociate producer Henry Blanke, ”and I tell her to take it easy. I tell her a scene is important, but not every scene, so she learns not to act everything at the same pressure, as though her life depends on it.”11 William Wyler successfully dominated Bette Davis, so naturally she fell in love with him. Ham was conveniently in New York.

”Her love affair was the talk of the studio,” Wallis later declared.12 It was clear to everyone around Warner Bros. that Jezebel's star and director were acting out their pa.s.sion. One night the editor Warren Low and the a.s.sistant director Rudy Fehr were waiting in the projection room for Davis and Wyler to arrive and see the day's rushes. The two were late. Low grew impatient and was about to leave when the director and his star finally showed up-with ”lipstick smeared all over their mouths,” Fehr recalled. ”They looked ridiculous. They should have looked in the mirror before they came in. This happened practically every night after that. They obviously were doing some heavy petting in somebody's dressing room before they came to review the rushes.”13 ”Our romance was doubly difficult because we could not be seen in public,” Davis once said, the Warners lot evidently not counting as a public s.p.a.ce.14 When they weren't at the studio working, they were essentially housebound and spent many evenings together at Wyler's place, where his a.s.sistant, Sam, made home-cooked dinners for them.

The love affair didn't lead Wyler to ease up on Davis at work. ”That handsome, homely dynamo, Wyler, could make your life a h.e.l.l,” she wrote in The Lonely Life. ”I met my match.”15 She quoted him admiringly (in retrospect) as saying, ”I want actors who can act. I can only direct actors-I can't teach them how to act.”16 Wyler trusted that Davis and her costar, Henry Fonda, could act, and his faith left him free to pursue an indescribable, undirectable quality in every shot, no matter how many takes it took. His efforts put a strain on both Davis and Fonda.

In fact, Wyler demanded even more retakes of Fonda's shots than he did of Davis's. The production began to drag; costs were rising, as were rumors. A concerned Hal Wallis asked Henry Blanke, ”Do you think Wyler is mad at Fonda or something because of their past? It seems that he is not content to okay anything with Fonda until it has been done ten or eleven takes. After all, they have been divorced from the same girl [Margaret Sullavan], and bygones should be bygones.” Some people even proposed, wrongly, that Bette was enjoying affairs with both men and that Wyler was demanding Fonda's retakes out of jealousy.17 Wallis, accustomed to Warners' relatively compliant and workmanlike directors-men who, unlike Wyler, didn't have much of a vision-grew increasingly exasperated as Wyler kept shooting more and more footage. Wallis was himself a master craftsman, but this was ridiculous; Wyler was wasting celluloid. He complained about Wyler's multiple takes of Donald Crisp leaving the house and Davis coming down the stairs: ”The first one was excellent, yet he took it sixteen times. What the h.e.l.l is the matter with him anyhow-is he absolutely daffy? . . . Wyler likes to see these big numbers on the slate. Maybe we could arrange to have them start with the number six on each take, then it wouldn't take so long to get up to nine or ten.”18 Bette, on the other hand, appreciated the care Wyler was putting into Jezebel, as much as her own retakes unnerved her. Compared to all the Special Agents she'd made, let alone the h.e.l.l's Houses, Jezebel was bliss-artistically, at least.

Dissatisfied with Clements Ripley and Abem Finkel's screenplay, Wyler brought John Huston on to do some rewriting. The production was under a specific time constraint, too: Henry Fonda signed his Jezebel contract with the provision that he would be finished filming by December 17 so he could travel to New York to be with his wife for the birth of their first child. What with Wyler's seemingly endless shooting, that deadline was fast approaching, and the picture had fallen nearly a month behind schedule. As Wallis unpleasantly remarked, ”The little n.i.g.g.e.r boy will be a full-grown man by the time Wyler finishes the picture.”19 Jezebel's centerpiece is the fifteen-minute Olympus Ball scene, an elaborate and largely dialogue-free spectacle during which Julie's engagement to Preston Dillard (Fonda) crumbles in the face of the couple's conflicting but mutual obstinacy. The ball, to which all New Orleans society women are expected to wear virginal white, slams to a halt when Julie arrives in flaming red. As written, the scene took up but a few lines of description. This verbal brevity led an a.s.sistant director to schedule it for half a day's work. But as Davis later remembered it, ”w.i.l.l.y took five days!”20 They began on November 9 and finished on the fifteenth.21 The gowns for Jezebel are credited to Orry-Kelly, but he didn't design the key dress. ”Milo Anderson told me that he did the red dress in Jezebel,” said the costume expert David Chierichetti. ”Orry-Kelly was an Australian citizen, and while his immigration was being processed he had to go back to Australia and stay there for a while. So Anderson finished Jezebel, including that famous dress. I said to Anderson, 'Didn't it bother you that Kelly was given credit for your work?' And he said, 'No, it's quite a compliment, isn't it? They kept renewing my contract, and that's all I cared about.' ”22 Wyler begins the Olympus Ball sequence with a reverse crane shot that begins on the reigning king and queen of the ball and travels over the heads of the orchestra and the dancers on the dance floor and ends on an immense crystal chandelier, with a balcony packed with people watching the spectacle in the background. Its precision reflects the gracious regimentation of the partygoers, who are all dressed according to the rigidly refined standards of New Orleans society. A subsequent shot taken from just above the floor reveals swirling hoop skirts, all in white, and the martial steps and black trousers of the men. It's into this arch, uniformed gentility that Julie makes her brazen entrance with Preston.

Davis plays it birdlike-part peac.o.c.k, part vulture. Wyler's camera tracks with them as they make their way through the ballroom, Pres glaring, Julie gliding with an air of haughty triumph tinged with increasing surprise and chagrin as she senses the magnitude of her miscalculation. She asks to leave. ”We haven't danced yet,” the priggish Pres responds.

Wyler cranes above them as they waltz, the crowd slowly making s.p.a.ce around them. Julie, who loses her composure and self-possession entirely while being yanked around the dance floor, suddenly looks homely and small in high angle. ”Pres,” she begs. ”Let me go. Take me out'a heah!”-complete with a touch of whimpering in Davis's line delivery. Pres stays silent.

On the surface, the tensions of the Olympus Ball seem absurd and arcane. Julie's dress is truly strumpetlike, but the other women's pristine, lacy gowns look more like babies' christening outfits than something an adult would wear. By my standards, Julie's rebellion is worthy of praise, not condemnation. But the underlying psychology of the scene is still bracing, particularly in light of Bette's own combustible nature. Julie, after all, has chosen the outrageous red dress in malicious anger-specifically to spite Pres for not having left a business meeting in order to accompany her to a fitting. In this way Julie plays out Bette's own ambivalence toward male authority. Like Davis herself in both her marriage and her work, Julie insists that a man offer his opinion, and when he contradicts her, she acts out against her own self-interest-in Julie's case by impulsively choosing precisely what Pres would have rejected, just to prove a point, however d.a.m.ning it may be to her. Julie is as sure of her belief in the scarlet gown as Bette was of her decision to leave Warner Bros. for Ludovico Toeplitz.

The pressure of making Jezebel for a domineering man she loved took its toll on Davis. She became depressed and frightened. Somatic symptoms appeared early on. She was sick on November 2 and 3. She had a charley horse on one of the days scheduled for the Olympus Ball. After shooting exteriors on the back lot in the rain, she developed bronchitis and a bad cold. While attempting to film the shot in which Julie, seated at her bedroom vanity, employs the old southern trick of tapping her cheeks with a hairbrush to make them blush, Bette was so overly energetic with the bristles that her slaps caused bruises and she had to take several days off while her face healed.

The Warner Bros. archives at the University of Southern California contain an all-too-lengthy discussion between executives of how Bette opened a pimple one weekend and had put some kind of salve on it, but then realized that this was the wrong thing to do, so she consulted a specialist who worried that there might be a hole left in Bette's cheek, so the physician began applying solutions to wash it out. He ”will attempt to remove the core tonight, sterilize it, and apply a salve so that makeup can be applied,” a detail-oriented memo writer noted on November 30.23 Wyler wasn't shooting Jezebel in sequence, either. Eschewing continuity for the sake of convenience or artistic interest was, and remains, standard filmmaking practice, but Davis wasn't used to it and it disrupted her sense of Julie's development. ”Davis had hysterics last night because we were shooting so much out of continuity,” a production manager noted on December 21. On December 29, after eleven hours of shooting a number of shots out of sequence, Bette became panic-stricken and broke down in tears.24 Jezebel was so far behind schedule that the company spent New Year's Day working. That's when Bette received word that her father had died at his home in Belmont, Ma.s.sachusetts.

”BIOGRAPHY IS THE medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world,” Janet Malcolm writes in The Silent Woman, her masterful book-length essay on Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the imperfect craft of writing about other people's lives. ”The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. . . . The reader's amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.”25 For Bette Davis's biographers, one of the most evocative and resonant scenes in Davis's life plays itself out in a luxury suite called The Wild Duck, 1929. It's just down the hall from the musty and rarely opened Broken Dishes, but it is to Broken Dishes what the queen's bedchamber is to a crawl s.p.a.ce next to the servants' quarters. In the literary lives

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