Part 7 (1/2)

A PRESCRIPTION.

FOR INDEPENDENCE.

IN 1925, THE NOVELIST OLIVE HIGGINS Prouty suffered an emotional collapse. She had been conflicted about her life as a writer for some time. Despite her commercial successes with novels and short stories, Prouty was nonetheless forcing herself to hew to a strictly conventional life as wife and mother, taking pains to make it seem as though her popular fiction had been, as she described it, simply ”dashed off at spare moments” during days devoted to making a suitable home for her husband and kids in Brookline, Ma.s.sachusetts. But the creative spark that enlivened her wouldn't be stifled, and indeed its ceaseless ignition was so great that after her daughter Olivia died of encephalitis in 1923, Prouty fought through her grief by writing Stella Dallas, the story of the world's most embarra.s.sing but ultimately self-sacrificial mother. Still, nagging guilt over her daughter's death and her own insistent creative drive finally cornered her, and she broke down. She sought treatment at a sanitarium, which she later called ”an educational inst.i.tution from which I 'graduated.' ” Her psychiatrist discharged her with a prescription for independence: he advised Prouty to rent office s.p.a.ce outside her house and work five days a week on her writing. She went on to chronicle the agony of a nervous breakdown and the painful struggle for recovery in two subsequent novels: Conflict, which was published in 1927; and Now, Voyager, which came out in 1941.1 Like Stella Dallas, Now, Voyager was a hit, though not as much of one as Prouty and her publisher had hoped. When Warner Bros. made its bid for the film rights on the basis of an advance copy and the recommendation of its West Coast story editor, Irene Lee, the studio offered $50,000 if the book sold 50,000 copies by May 1, 1941, or, as Prouty later wrote, ”$40,000 if it didn't. It didn't!”2 She drew her t.i.tle from Whitman's two-line poem ”The Untold Want” in Leaves of Gra.s.s.

The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,

Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.3

For Prouty's heroine, psychotherapy launches her on a journey of self-discovery that leads her out of common, drab, imposed expectations-and their concomitantly fierce, necessarily unfulfilled desires-and onto a s.h.i.+p of her own making and guidance. Now, Voyager is a coming-out story.

Hal Wallis sent a copy of the book to Ginger Rogers, hoping to interest her in the leading role: Charlotte Vale, who begins the story as a repressed Boston spinster stifled into a state of neurotic agitation by the hateful, spiteful mother who never wanted her in the first place, and ends it as an independent, self-knowing woman of the world. But Edmund Goulding, whom Warners a.s.signed the task of writing the first treatment in preparation for directing the picture, preferred Irene Dunne. One can only imagine Bette Davis's rage when she picked up the Herald-Examiner one day and read in Louella Parsons's column that Dunne was being loaned to Warners by Columbia for Now, Voyager. ”I became apoplectic,” she later wrote.4 Ginger Rogers kept pus.h.i.+ng for the role, commenting later of Bette's irritation, ”One thing that really irked her was that I was getting more money per film than she was.”5 Goulding then became ill and was replaced, inaptly, by Michael Curtiz, who wanted either Rogers or Norma Shearer. ”I'm under contract here!” Bette raged to Hal Wallis. ”Why can't I play Charlotte Vale? As a New Englander, I understand her better than anyone else ever could!” Wallis took the idea to Jack Warner, and Warner wisely agreed.6 Now, Voyager is as unimaginable without Bette Davis as Gone with the Wind is with her.

Curtiz dropped out-possibly because he didn't want to work with Davis again, or maybe he just didn't like the idea of directing a weepie. His replacement, a former dialogue director named Irving Rapper, held to the latter view: ”My great teacher Michael Curtiz was originally supposed to have directed this picture but didn't like it as a subject and preferred to do an action picture.” Rapper went on: ”I insisted upon casting Now, Voyager myself; I was starting to sail high, and they gave me my head. So I hired Claude Rains to play the psychiatrist [Dr. Jaquith] and Gladys Cooper, whom Hal Wallis had never heard of, to play the mother.”7 Although he had appeared in a number of pictures since emigrating in the mid-1930s, Paul von Hernreid-who had recently de-Germanized his name to Paul Henreid-was a newcomer to Warners. According to Henreid, Jack Warner got it in his head to turn Henreid into a continental-accented cross between George Brent and Leslie Howard, with Bette correctly describing Warner's proposed concoction as also including a smidgen of Charles Boyer. Henreid's screen test for the role of Jerry Durrance, the unhappily married man with whom Charlotte falls in love, was thus a fiasco, the studio hairdresser having been advised to pomade Henreid's hair down to the scalp, with Perc Westmore adding lipstick, rouge, and mascara, and the costumer topping off the ensemble with a satin smoking jacket. Henreid was mortified.

Bette ”hit the ceiling” when she saw the tests. ”She turned to Rapper and Hal Wallis and shouted, 'What did you do to that man? How can I act with him? He looks ghastly-like some floorwalker in a department store! You are two of the most miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!' ”

Davis was more than relieved to learn that Henreid himself hated the way he looked, too, and a strong, enduring friends.h.i.+p resulted-one of the few Davis enjoyed with a male co-star. (Another was with Claude Rains.) ”There was something about her manner, flirtatious and friendly, flattering and yet honest, that made you think of her as an immediate friend and a solid master of her craft,” Henreid later wrote. ”I found her a delight to work with, and we got along famously. . . . She has remained a dear, close friend-and always a very decent human being.”8 To round out the cast, Ilka Chase was hired to play Lisa Vale, Charlotte's sympathetic sister-in-law, with Bonita Granville playing Lisa's casually cruel daughter, June. (Granville also appears as the shrill and obnoxious child in It's Love I'm After.) Juanita Quigley, who had appeared in such films as John Stahl's Imitation of Life-under the name ”Baby Jane,” coincidently-was tested for the role of Tina, Jerry Durrance's troubled daughter, but the part went instead to plain Janis Wilson, an unknown.9 In fact, Wilson was so unknown that her appearance in Now, Voyager is uncredited.

Three of the central dramatis personae have claimed credit for the excellence of the unashamedly melodramatic script: Bette Davis: ”It was a constant vigil to preserve the quality of the book as written by Olive Higgins Prouty. . . . I used Miss Prouty's book and redid the screenplay in her words as we went along. . . . My script was scratched to pieces. I'd sit up nights and restore scenes [that] were right just the way she had written them.”10 Olive Higgins Prouty: ”I took part in the writing of the film. . . . There wasn't a single page that escaped my comments in red type. Sometimes I added an extra page or two. . . . The few portions of my suggestions that were accepted made the effort worthwhile.”11 Casey Robinson: ”There was a small annoyance in the beginning in that Hal Wallis kept sending the material back to the author, and we used to get a few letters from Prouty picking on this little point or that. . . . As I say, this was an annoyance, but it was no more than a mosquito bite. . . . I've never read Bette Davis's book, but there was never, never one word changed in any of the scripts that I wrote for her-by Miss Davis, by a director, by anybody-and that is a flat statement, a true statement, and final.”12 Now, Voyager began shooting on April 7, 1942, and finished on June 23, with some retakes on July 3. The production went fairly smoothly. Bette missed a day or two of shooting a week and a half into the production because of laryngitis, but there seem to have been no major tantrums. Minor ones, yes. Practically daily. Ilka Chase describes Davis as ”a fine, hard-working woman, friendly with members of her cast, forthright and courteous to technicians on her picture, and her director's heaviest cross. She will argue every move in every scene until the poor man is reduced to quivering pulp.” Dark storm clouds hovered on only one particular day; Chase calls it ”a morning of heavy weather.” They were shooting on the Vale mansion set. Davis was inevitably out of makeup fifteen minutes ahead of schedule, Chase reports, and ”the occasion of which I speak was no exception. She was ready but remained closeted in her portable dressing room, a brooding Ajax, while the set simmered in a miasma of gloom.” Irving Rapper ”sat in his canvas chair staring moodily at his fingertips” as everyone else milled around trying not to make the situation worse. Finally Bette emerged from her dressing room. ”Gone the comradely smile, the cigarette breezily proffered. Hers was a mien blighted yet austere. Here, you said to yourself, is one who has suffered; here is a woman who has sampled the dregs and found them bitter.”

The a.s.sistant director explained Davis's despondency to Chase sotto voce: ”Last night she saw In This Our Life.”13 World War II intruded briefly on the production of Now, Voyager. During some location shooting at Laguna Beach in May, a navy officer appeared to be stalking the star. Davis was a bit concerned but decided to approach him directly and ask if he wanted an autograph. ”No,” young Edward Hubbell replied; ”I'm sorta here to censor the Pacific Ocean.” Hubbell's job was to make sure that the film didn't reveal any details of the sh.o.r.eline.14 Davis begins Now, Voyager looking hideous. Warner Bros.' theatrical trailer for the film featured only the glamorous swan phase of Charlotte's life, pointedly leaving out the ugly duckling overture, so contemporary audiences had no preparation for the mess they were about to encounter. Rapper reveals Charlotte Vale first by her hands as they nervously dispose of two cigarette stubs in a wastebasket, then by her orthopedically stockinged legs and frumpy, flat-heeled shoes as she ventures tentatively down her mother's imposing staircase. These isolated body parts hesitate and start to turn back before proceeding-an effective way of getting across Charlotte's fearful shyness. Rapper's slow revelation is a clever tease for what's to come, but more subtly the sequence fragments Charlotte visually as a way of expressing her disjointed emotional state. Only then does Rapper reveal her wholly in long shot as she comes around the corner and into the drawing room. And oh, she's a fright. Here's Bette Davis with bushy eyebrows and mouse-colored hair pulled back in a hank. She's wearing an ugly oversized print dress filled out by cotton batting. It's the most extreme uglification that Davis had ever done, and it's gasp inducing. It's also a point of intense audience identification, since most of us feel precisely that way at one point or another in our lives.

Now, Voyager is much more astute about the positive healing effects of psychotherapy than it is about the process. When Dr. Jaquith enters the Vale mansion, he taps his pipe against a vast urn to remove ashes and bits of unburned tobacco. The racket greatly disturbs the elderly Mrs. Vale, but Dr. Jaquith doesn't care. What he tells the butler neatly sums up his vision of psychiatry: ”Messy things, pipes. I like 'em.” But the film's depiction of Charlotte's actual treatment at Cascade, Dr. Jaquith's country clublike sanatorium, elides the raw, even filthy work of regaining mental health in favor of a productive weaving session. Still, Robinson in his screenplay, Rapper in his direction, and Davis in her performance all appreciate the tentative nature of the results. Charlotte emerges from Cascade looking fabulous on the outside but remaining wobbly within. Hal Wallis wisely had Rapper cut a scene he'd filmed of a newly discharged Charlotte being refas.h.i.+oned at a beauty salon, thereby intensifying the big reveal at the top of the gangplank of a cruise s.h.i.+p heading for South America. In an echo of Charlotte's introductory sequence, Rapper begins with a fragment-her feet and legs, now shapely and clad in fine silk stockings and high heels-only this time he unveils her in a single, unified shot that cranes up rapidly past a tailored black suit all the way to Charlotte's newly plucked eyebrows, shaped lips, and chic new broad-brimmed hat. And yet as the shot and the costuming make clear, she's still Charlotte Vale, with all the h.o.m.onym implies; far from being fully brought to light, this is a woman still partially hidden, her eyes only briefly visible, her face concealed not only by the hat's brim but also through a veil of exquisite fine black netting.

A bit of business in Now, Voyager became an instant sensation when the film was released in the fall of 1942 and remains one of the most delightful screen gimmicks of all time. According to Paul Henreid, Casey Robinson's script instructed him at one point ”to offer Bette a cigarette, take one myself, light mine, then take her cigarette out of her mouth, give her mine, and put hers between my lips.” Henreid practiced the routine with his wife, Lisl, but neither of them could get it right, and it became farcical. Then they tried it the way they did it themselves when driving: Henreid put two cigarettes in his mouth, lit them both, and handed one to his wife.

Bette went for the idea. The bit was not only simpler and cleaner but also a h.e.l.l of a lot more romantic. They took it to Irving Rapper, who hated it. Bette, always p.r.o.ne to overruling her director, insisted that Hal Wallis come down to the soundstage right away and see it for himself. Wallis appeared, witnessed it, and approved it. In fact-at least according to Henreid-Wallis liked it so much he had Casey Robinson add two more occasions for the couple to perform it later in the film. In the completed Now, Voyager, the double cigarette lighting occurs three times: first at the airport in Rio when Charlotte and Jerry part after their five-day affair (and as the film historian Tom Phillips points out, we're all mature enough to a.s.sume that they've slept with each other); next when Charlotte agrees to marry the pleasant but bland Elliot Livingston and Jerry inadvertently proves to Charlotte how wrong her decision is by putting two cigarettes in his mouth and lighting them; and finally in the film's closing moments, just before Jerry asks Charlotte if she will ever be happy, and Charlotte responds with one of the most eloquent expressions of sublimated desire in all cinema: ”Oh, Jerry-don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars!”

My mother tells me that my grandfather, like many men around the country in 1942, began lighting two cigarettes at a time thanks to the suave Paul Henreid. (Unfortunately for my grandfather, my grandmother didn't smoke.) Equally charmed by the routine, fans grew pushy and began accosting Henreid, demanding that he perform the cigarette routine for them on the spot. A drunken woman charged up to him at the New York restaurant Voisin and noisily called for a command performance. Henreid told Bette about the incident later, and Bette gave him a piece of blunt advice: ”I tell people like that, 'Leave me alone. I don't know you, and you don't know me.'” Henreid was aghast. ”But that's so rude!” To which Davis replied matter-of-factly, ”Believe me-rudeness is the only thing that works in a situation like that.”15 But as with many tales of Hollywood glory, there is another version of the double-lighting bit. ”Mr. Wallis did not come onto the set at all,” Irving Rapper insisted. ”And it was my idea, not that of Henreid, who has gone on taking credit for it ever since.”16 Rapper, who had just directed The Gay Sisters, was one himself. Like Edmund Goulding, Rapper appreciated, with whatever degree of consciousness, that so-called women's pictures were also appealing to a certain strain of man. Now, Voyager suggests a gay man's quest for self-acceptance as much as it explicitly tells of an independent, free-thinking woman's emergence from a state of self-loathing and s.e.xual inhibition. Bette Davis is his embodiment as well as hers.

Because overt expressions of h.o.m.os.e.xuality were explicitly forbidden by the Production Code, Hollywood had to inscribe gayness delicately, if at all. Here, it's an oh-so-proto-gay character actor, the ever-fluttering Franklin Pangborn, who scurries onto the scene just in time to introduce Charlotte to Jerry. Like Eric Blore's many onscreen performances (including that of Leslie Howard's manservant in It's Love I'm After, whom Bonita Granville spies through the keyhole declaring his love to Howard-they're really acting out a theatrical scene), Pang-born's appearance is a wink at a knowing gay audience. He's the s.h.i.+p's busy-bee social director, as gay a job as a hairdresser or florist. ”Ah, Miss Beauchamps! Here you are! We've been waiting for you!” Pangborn squeals. (Charlotte is traveling under an a.s.sumed name.) Then, in a flurry: ”Miss Beauchamps! Miss Beauchamps? Allow me to introduce Mr. Durrance. . . . You're travelling alone, and he's travelling alone, and, and so, that's splendid!” Pangborn pops up at the end of the cruise, too. As Lisa and June stand by at the pier, flabbergasted by Charlotte's transformation from dowdy spinster to chic socialite, a couple starts to bid Charlotte good-bye, but Pangborn scurries into the shot and stops them: ”Don't anybody say good-bye! Not anybody! Just 'au revoir!' ” His rapid-fire line delivery is breathless and funny, like a machine gun shooting violets: ”It is a sad time, isn't it, but I want to tell you one thing-there was no lady on this cruise that was as popular as you were. Au revoir!”

Eve Sedgwick may have founded queer theory on the concept of the epistemology of the closet, but gay men know the ontology of theater equally well-the being of acting, the essential reality that only stylization can fully reveal. Bette Davis remains its prime exemplar in the cinema, with fussy, prissy, witty character actors like Pangborn and Blore serving as grace notes. In Now, Voyager, as elsewhere, Davis's theatricality hints at something existentially honest; her mannerisms express core emotional truths. Charles Busch describes it in the practical terms of a working actor and playwright: ”What I find interesting about her is that while she's the most stylized of all those Hollywood actresses, the most mannered, she's also to me the most psychologically acute. You see it in Now, Voyager in the scene on the boat when she starts to cry, and she's playing it in a very romantic style. Henreid says, 'My darling-you are crying,' and she says, 'These are only tears of grat.i.tude-an old maid's grat.i.tude for the crumbs offered.' It's very movie-ish, but the way she turns her head inward, away from the camera, is very real.”17 In the instance Busch so perceptively describes and appreciates, Davis uses her melodramatic mannerisms and breathy, teary vocal delivery as well as her seemingly spontaneous nuzzling into Henreid's chest to express the undeniable legitimacy of self-pity. It's not a pretty emotion, but Davis somehow makes it so. Through Davis's elevating, sublimating stylization, this woman's secret shame becomes beautiful.

Stanley Cavell, referring to melodramas of female abnegation, Now, Voyager in particular, astutely asks, ”Is it that the women in them are sacrificing themselves to the sad necessities of a world they are forced to accept? Or isn't it rather that the women are claiming the right to judge a world as second-rate that enforces this sacrifice; to refuse, transcend, its proposal of second-rate sadness?”18 In light of Cavell's observations, it's little wonder that Bette Davis became an icon for several generations of gay men, who learned through bitter experience the severe limits mainstream culture imposes on rebellious selves. But gay men also learned that they could, through wit and style and camp, rise above this oppressive, second-rate world and, inside at least, be the men they were meant to be. Bette Davis helped make this transcendence possible. They knew they couldn't shoot for the moon, but they didn't have to. They had a star.

IN MAY 1942, while Bette was filming Now, Voyager, the columnist Sidney Skolsky put out an amusing tidbit: Farney had begun speaking to Bette in an Austrian accent to counter the European charms of Paul Henreid.19 The Henreids and the Farnsworths socialized often. Henreid found Farney to be ”the perfect husband for Bette. He didn't interfere with her professional life but let her do as she pleased, and we could sense the warmth and love between them.”20 ”Our light was a low one but steady,” Davis wrote in The Lonely Life. ”He didn't have an ounce of jealousy. He never questioned me about anything I did. He let me run my own life.”21 In January, after spending their anniversary in the California desert, in part to improve Farney's health, Bette and Farney had headed for b.u.t.ternut, with a stopover in New York for a Red Cross benefit radio broadcast with Helen Hayes. Also that month, the trade gossip columnist Harrison Carroll debunked what he called ”stork rumors” for Bette.22 The renovation of b.u.t.ternut continued with the building of an immense barn. The structure was designed for neither livestock nor hay, though it did feature a windowed circular silo on the side. There was a large picture window on the end, and an open balcony ran along half the structure. Inside was one great room on the first floor with a kitchen area on one end and a living room s.p.a.ce on the other. The kitchen had a huge brick fireplace, the living room a squared, built-in couch done up in red upholstery. The second floor was more traditional in look and furnis.h.i.+ngs: there were defined bedrooms as well as a library. The Farnsworths had moved some of their furniture from Riverbottom, including a large four-poster bed. Their caretaker, Phil Bilodeaux, and his family now lived on the property in the cottage Davis built for them.

The Farnsworths returned to New York in time for a huge benefit for the Navy Relief Fund at Madison Square Garden on March 10; the party was still rocking at midnight and raised over $160,000. Bette also showed up at the Stage Door Canteen on West Forty-fourth Street. Taking the mike from a wisecracking comedian, she announced, ”I can't sing or tell stories, but I'll be glad to dance with anyone who cares to dance with me.” Scores of the soldiers and sailors took her up on the offer for about half an hour.

The Farnsworths planned to stop in Chicago to see Ethel Barrymore appear in the Emlyn Williams play The Corn Is Green-it was more of a professional call than a social one-but Bette got so sick to her stomach that she had to be carried off the train. She and Farney checked into the Blackmore Hotel, where she was examined by doctors who diagnosed the malady as ptomaine poisoning; evidently she'd eaten something contaminated. To make matters worse, one of her trunks went missing. She reported the loss of a fur coat, several suits and dresses, and lingerie she valued at $2,000. After more than a year went by with neither the trunk being found nor rest.i.tution having been offered; she ended up suing the New York Central Railroad and the Pullman Company.

Farney and Bette parted in Chicago, Farney heading back to Minneapolis, Bette for Los Angeles.

BETTE DAVIS WAS finally earning the money she deserved. According to the studio's annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in May 1942, Warner Bros. had paid her $271,083 the previous year. (Satisfyingly for Bette, this was $11,000 more than Hal Wallis earned.) She was still making less than the top male stars-Cagney took in a whopping $362,500 in 1941, $5,000 more than Clark Gable-but it was a vast improvement over what she'd made earlier.23 Still, these top wage earners actually banked little of their earnings. The Revenue Act of 1941 capped the top tax bracket at $200,000, at which point anyone earning that or more would owe a whopping 90 percent of his or her income to the government. To avoid what would have amounted to working for the U.S. Treasury, major movie stars had a choice: they could reduce the number of films they made, thereby reducing both their income and their tax liability, or they could move away from contracts and salaries toward one-picture deals with profit-sharing plans. Their income would thus be taxable as capital gains at a rate of 25 percent.24 Indeed, Bette made far fewer pictures per year after 1941, and she did eventually launch her own production company.

After finis.h.i.+ng Now, Voyager, Bette traveled in June to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, to accept an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in the name of her father, who had graduated from Bates thirty-five years earlier. Naturally, Harlow had been valedictorian of his cla.s.s.25 Characteristically outspoken, and scarcely intimidated by any petty instructions she might have been given by Warners' publicity men, she'd been offering opinions on the war's impact on American culture, not to mention Americans' love lives, for some time already. ”What the moving pictures need is more s.e.x and fewer preachments,” she preached to the Oakland Tribune. Hollywood was turning out blunt propaganda, and Davis had confidence in little of it. ”There are too many war and n.a.z.i pictures,” she declared. ”It's s.e.x-or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof-that the public wants.”26 Meanwhile, the monthly advice column she wrote and signed for Photoplay often answered questions about how far young American women should go in the war effort. It's likely that these columns were actually penned by publicists or Photoplay staffers, but they do put across Davis's voice and tough-mindedness. ”Don't Be a Draft Bride” was the t.i.tle of her column in January 1941. ”The kindness you think you were doing [by marrying a soldier on his way into the military] would turn into a hideous boomerang for both,” Bette advised an anxious letter writer. ”Far kinder-and wiser-to say no now, thereby serving your country as well as your two selves.”27 (By which she meant the girl and the boy, not that the girl had multiple personality disorder.) She gave similar advice to ”Eleanor J.” in December 1942, though this time the letter writer had already married the draftee only to find that she wanted to date her old flame in his absence. ”It seems selfish for a boy to want to marry just before he leaves for camp,” Davis wrote. ”This is just a man's way of putting a girl on the shelf for the duration although he can do nothing for her-not even offer her companions.h.i.+p. It is, in fact, a type of h.o.a.rding.” As for Eleanor's old flame, Bette advised, ”Beware of propinquity.”28 She'd helped sell $40,000 worth of war bonds during her trip to New England in January, but the September tour aimed much higher. A coordinated effort between the Treasury Department and the Hollywood War Activities Committee, September's ”Stars Over America” was the culmination of a nine-month drive by such big names as Davis, Walter Pidgeon, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy, Ronald Colman, Janet Gaynor, Ginger Rogers, Edward Arnold, Gene Tierney, Andy Devine, James Cagney, Fred Astaire, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Wyman, Greer Garson, Veronica Lake, Hedy Lamarr, Irene Dunne, Paulette G.o.ddard, Myrna Loy, and Charles Laughton. In September alone, ”Stars Over America” sold $775 million worth of bonds, including $86 million raised at a huge rally at Madison Square Garden.

Bette Davis was righteously angry about what she saw as the nation's lack of commitment to the war effort, and she didn't hesitate to let the public know it. ”I think it is outrageous that movie stars have to wheedle and beg people into buying bonds to help their country,” she told one reporter. ”But if that's the way it is, I'm going to squeeze all I can out of everyone.”29 She visited cities and towns in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas, appearing in large civic auditoriums, schools, Rotary meetings, and even private homes. She was on a mission, and Bette Davis on a mission was unstoppable. She badgered a group of factory workers into buying more bonds by informing them that they had better give at their ”top level-or you're not my idea of an American.” Advised to be little more discreet, Bette held even faster to her approach: ”It lights fires under their a.s.ses,” she declared.30 Jack Warner told her she was taking the wrong tack, but his pleading was to no avail. ”Jack,” she responded, ”you and your brother in New York just sit around and count the money I make for you. I'm the one who has to deal up front with the public, and I know what I'm doing.”31 Her stop in St. Joseph, Missouri, brought in $177,000. She appeared before a crowd of 250 at the Hotel Robidoux, gave a short speech, and raised $77,000 in the first ten minutes; the rest of the pot came pouring in at the town auditorium. ”Isn't this a wonderful country to fight for?” she asked the enthusiastic crowd. In Kansas City alone she helped raise as much as $650,000. Her pace was frenetic. She arrived in Tulsa from Springfield on Monday, September 14, and immediately drove to Muskogee for a speech at an ironworks and a rally at a movie theater, then back to Tulsa that afternoon for a visit to a Douglas Aircraft factory, where she sold a portrait of herself as Jezebel's Julie Marsden for $250,000. In the evening was another rally at the 18,000-seat Skelly Stadium, where she sold a single autograph for $50,000. On Tuesday morning she drove two hours to Oklahoma City for a civic luncheon, stopped by the offices of a publis.h.i.+ng company in the afternoon, and appeared at a bond rally at the Munic.i.p.al Auditorium that evening. She took the train back to Los Angeles on Wednesday morning, promptly came down with a bad cold, and had to be hospitalized.32 She adored Franklin Roosevelt and hated anyone who didn't. And she was deeply, morally offended: by Hitler, by fascism, by complacency. As Bette wrote to a friend, despite the fact that she found ”great enthusiasm” and ”raised millions of dollars” and enjoyed ”probably the most satisfying experience I've ever had,” she was still disheartened. It wasn't the fact that the temperature hovered around one hundred degrees; nor was it ”the strain of being polite and charming 24 hours a day-you know, a rebel can't bear that!” It was that the midwesterners she met struck her as being profoundly out of touch: ”In spite of this outward show of 'G.o.d Bless America,' such nonsense they are hanging on to with the belief that the war will never touch them personally, so why worry?”33 At the time she wrote those words, Bette Davis was about to see her own major work for the war effort come to fruition. She and John Garfield began imagining the Hollywood Canteen at a table in the Warners commissary soon after the war started. ”Johnny Garfield sat down at my table during lunch,” Bette later wrote. ”He had been thinking about the thousands of servicemen who were pa.s.sing through Hollywood without seeing any movie stars. Garfield said something ought to be done about it. I agreed, and then and there the idea for the Hollywood Canteen was born.”34 New York's Stage Door Canteen was up and running, but there was no similar venue for the GIs who s.h.i.+pped out through Los Angeles. So with the help of Jules Stein, the head of the Music Corporation of America, many other stars, and-as Davis was always quick to point out-”the forty-two unions and guilds that made up the motion picture industry,” they took over a building at 1415 Cahuenga Boulevard and set up a large nightclub for service members. Alfred Ybarra, an MGM art director, supervised the decoration and provided items that (in his view anyway) MGM no longer needed. Other studio artists also chipped in with time, labor, and studio property. Bob Taplinger, who had moved from Warners to Columbia, organized a fund-raiser: the premiere of Columbia's comedy-drama The Talk of the Town, followed by dinner at Ciro's.

On opening night, October 3, 1942, spectators paid one hundred dollars each to sit on bleachers and watch 2,000 servicemen enter through a door over which was inscribed ”Through these portals pa.s.s the most beautiful uniforms in the world.” Five thousand soldiers had to be turned away for lack of room. Civilians, stars included, had to use the side entrance.35 Just as she'd been as a Girl Scout leader in New York City, Davis was a taskmaster, but she only worked others as hard as she pushed herself. As Hedy Lamarr later recalled, ”One night after a rough day at the studio, I went right home and to bed. I was dozing off when Bette called. Several actresses who had promised to work that night for one reason or another couldn't make it. I protested, but Bette was insistent. I told her that the way I looked I'd do more harm than the enemy.” Bette brushed Lamarr's exhaustion aside, and Lamarr soon found herself reporting for duty at the Canteen. ”I went to the kitchen and helped put some sandwiches together, and then I saw about two hundred unwashed cups piled in the sink. Bette smiled and said, 'I washed the last few hundred. Now it's someone else's turn.' ”36 Davis handed the job over to Lamarr, telling her that a guy standing nearby would dry them, thereby introducing Hedy to her next husband, John Loder. They married within the year.

Bette's can-do or, better, must-do style engendered some resentment among the Canteen's leaders, just as her take-charge att.i.tude had inspired antipathy at the Academy. The Hollywood Victory Committee, led by Jimmy Cagney, insisted that Davis's policy of calling stars herself was inappropriate and that henceforth she would have to go through the committee to get celebrities to show up. Bette pointed out that the committee had agreed to let her and her team call people at the last minute if necessary, and that the terms of this agreement were clearly spelled out in the past minutes. ”Regrettably,” Cagney replied, ”the minutes of that meeting have been lost.” Bette responded with a volley of unveiled threats: unless the committee reversed its idiotic decision, she'd call the press, call the unions, call the guilds, close the Canteen. . . . She got her way.37 Marlene Dietrich generally worked the cooking detail, though Johnny Carson, then a navy cadet, fondly recalled dancing with her. Dietrich once appeared fresh from the set of Kismet, still clad in gold paint. ”I had never seen two thousand men screaming in a state of near ma.s.s hysteria,” Bette observed, adding that ”Marlene was one of the most generous in the amount of time she spent at the Canteen.” The Gabor sisters were waitresses, as were Kay Francis and Greer Garson. (Zsa Zsa once commented of Bette's taste in clothing, ”Vell, she doesn't have very much dress zense.”)38 Joan Crawford showed up one night and was instantly surrounded by fans and autograph seekers. Davis broke it up: ”h.e.l.lo, Joan,” she said after muscling her way through the crowd. ”We need you desperately in the kitchen. There are dishes to be washed.”39 It was nothing personal. That would come later. Bette merely saw the need to clean up stacks of dirty plates and gla.s.ses, and Crawford happened to be nearby.

Bing Crosby and his three small sons showed up and sang on Christmas Eve. ”There was not a dry eye in the Canteen,” Davis remembered. ”Roddy McDowall came night after night, helping us out as a busboy. Mrs. John Ford, the director's wife, was in charge of the kitchen from the night the Canteen opened to the closing night. Sat.u.r.day was Kay Kyser's night. I cannot remember Kay and his band ever missing one Sat.u.r.day, even though sometimes it was necessary to fly the band back from some distant engagement.”40 Davis issued instructions to the Canteen's volunteer hostesses on how to treat the men, particularly the wounded ones. ”Forget the wounds, remember the man,” Davis's printed instructions read. ”Don't be over-solicitous, nor too controlled to the point of indifference. Learn to use the word 'prosthetics' instead of 'artificial limbs.' Never say, 'It could have been worse.' And when he talks about his war experiences, listen, but don't ask for more details than he wants to give.”41 One soldier showed up the day before the Canteen opened and found a familiar-looking woman sweeping the floor. ”Say,” he said, ”you look like you were Bette Davis.” Bette told him that she still was. ”Well, lady,” the GI replied, ”your pictures certainly stink, but you look like sweetness and light now.”42 DAVIS MAY HAVE urged other stars and studio to eschew war-themed propaganda in favor of s.e.x, but she herself agreed to appear in Warner Bros.' adaptation of Lillian h.e.l.lman's play Watch on the Rhine, and she did so largely as a favor to the studio; her presence certainly helped sell the overtly political film. Tactlessly, she made her p.r.o.nouncements about the national need for onscreen s.e.x in June, just as the s.e.x-free Watch on the Rhine began shooting.

The play, which opened on April 1, 1941, and ran for 378 performances (closing in February 1942), is set in 1940, before the United States entered the war, and it concerns an ardently anti-n.a.z.i German, Kurt Muller; his American-born wife, Sara; their three children; Teck de Brancovis, an oily Rumanian count who has been currying favor with the n.a.z.is; and Teck's wife, the pretty but naive Marthe.

Although both Paul Henreid and Charles Boyer were screen-tested for Kurt, the role ultimately went to the Hungarian-born Paul Lukas (ne Pl Lukcs). Margaret Sullavan and Irene Dunne were briefly considered for Sara, but Hal Wallis ultimately asked Bette to play the part-”for name value,” she later explained.43 There was, however, a contretemps about her casting. Bette argued, strenuously, that she should not get top billing. Watch on the Rhine, she said, belonged to Paul Lukas, so his name should come first. On May 14, Warner Bros.' Roy Obringer reported to Jack Warner that he had been arguing about the issue with Dudley Furse, Bette's lawyer, and that Furse had taken Warners' case to Bette once again but had failed to change her mind. ”While she is willing to do the picture, Lukas has the choice part and she does not want to appear ridiculous by taking first position billing,” Obringer reported. ”I am sure she will permit us to bill her first,” Hal Wallis confidently told Obringer the following day.44 Eventually, she did.

Das.h.i.+ell Hammett wrote the script with some help from h.e.l.lman, and it stuck closely to the plot of the play. The Production Code office voiced a choice objection: Kurt's killing of Teck-in other words, a member of the Resistance killing a n.a.z.i sympathizer-not only went without punishment but was clearly justified. This, to the Production Code Administration, was wrong. That the wormy Teck deserves what he gets is the moral linchpin of the play, but the vigilant Hays Office, consumed with its own sense of dumbed-down propriety, was compelled to find a way around h.e.l.lman's hardheaded ethical question. The hero of the piece could still kill the villain, the PCA ruled, as long as Warners made it crystal clear that the n.a.z.is ended up murdering the hero in the end. h.e.l.lman thought the suggestion was inane and offensive. Warner Bros. agreed.45 Herman Shumlin, who had directed the Broadway production, was signed to direct the film, which was shot between June 9 and August 22. The part of Marthe went to Geraldine Fitzgerald; George Coulouris reprised his portrayal of Teck. Bette had taken an interest in young Janis Wilson during the filming of Now, Voyager and recommended her for the role of Babette, Sara's daughter.46 ”It was not ever my favorite part, except for one speech about being alone at night,” Davis told d.i.c.k Cavett in 1971, whereupon Cavett played the clip: ”I don't like to be alone at night. I guess everybody in the world has a time they don't like. Mine is right before I go to sleep. And now it's going to be for always-all the rest of my life.”47 It's the understated Davis we see throughout Watch on the Rhine, and never more so than when she's delivering these lines with a sad smile. There are no hand-wringing, hair-clutching, neck-bending revelations of inner turmoil; just a woman letting herself know that she will forever spend her life's worst moments alone.

”STORIES OF WOMEN are always box-office,” Bette declared in a 1945 note to Jack Warner. ”Witness the lousy picture Old Acquaintance. (I'm sure you agree with this opinion privately and not for publication.)”48 Davis may have been a bit hyperbolic with the word lousy, and Warner's private opinion of the movie is unrecorded. But Bette's a.s.sessment is more or less on target. Given Davis's pairing with Miriam Hopkins, Old Acquaintance ought to be livelier, p.r.i.c.klier. Hopkins and Davis were more than capable of generating the crackling onscreen chemistry born of authentic, deep-seated hatred, and yet the picture is sluggish in a paradoxically brittle sort of way. Rich and Famous, George Cukor's 1981 remake starring Jacqueline Bisset in the Davis role and Candice Bergen in Hopkins's, is much snappier.