Part 7 (2/2)

The production didn't get off to an easy start. Warner Bros. bought the screen rights to John Van Druten's play about two old friends, each a successful writer, for $75,000. Rosalind Russell and Irene Dunne are said to have been briefly considered for the role of Kit Marlowe, the more cerebral of the two authors, but the role was clearly Davis's almost from the start.

Her clout was greater than that of the film's first director. Originally a.s.signed to direct Old Acquaintance, Edmund Goulding worked on early drafts of the script (which is credited to Van Druten and Lenore Coffee), but Davis's demands got to him, as did the prospect of dealing with an encore performance of the Davis-Hopkins feud. What had animated Goulding's The Old Maid artistically had debilitated Goulding personally. As Vincent Sherman, who ended up directing the picture, said, ”I was told later that Goulding had gone through The Old Maid with these two ladies, and he just felt he wasn't up to it.”49 Goulding dreaded the bickering and one-upwomans.h.i.+p, Hopkins's upstaging and Davis's complaints, and according to Matthew Kennedy he tried to avoid the whole thing by suggesting Constance Bennett or Janet Gaynor or Margaret Sullavan instead of Hopkins for the role of Millie, to no avail.50 Bette called Norma Shearer personally and asked her to costar with her. Shearer talked with Goulding about it, a.s.suming she was to play Kit, but Goulding corrected her-”But, Norma, Bette wants you to play the b.i.t.c.h who writes the tras.h.!.+”-and Shearer wanted no part of it.51 One story has it that Davis herself became exasperated and said, ”Get Miriam. At least she can do it.”

Goulding, says Sherman, was also chafed by Davis's ability to overrule his choice of cinematographer. Henry Blanke told Goulding he was going to a.s.sign Tony Gaudio, only to turn around and give the job to Bette's choice, Sol Polito. Irritated and unnerved, Goulding sent a telegram to Jack Warner: ”This is no temperamental or childish whim but very solid and businesslike conviction that I am either working for Warner Bros. or Miss Davis, and there is a difference.”52 Goulding appears to have realized, however, that the picture hinged on Davis, not himself, and he became so upset that, as Kennedy writes, ”he stressed himself right into another health crisis. In October, he was hospitalized with a bad flu, had his contract suspended, recovered his health, then suffered a relapse in December. There was a rumor circulating through studio gossip that he faked a heart attack, but he didn't fake anything. It's true that he left Old Acquaintance with nary a backward glance, but he was genuinely sick.”53 Irving Rapper was briefly mentioned as Goulding's replacement, but Sherman ended up taking the job.

There's a bland, underwritten male role in Old Acquaintance-that of Millie's husband, Preston Drake-so naturally George Brent was announced for it. But Brent joined the Coast Guard, and the part was handed to Franchot Tone, who turned it down.54 (The Warner Bros. archives contain Tone's unsigned contract for $60,000.) John Loder-Elliot Livingston, Charlotte Vale's short-term fiance in Now, Voyager-was cast instead.

Sherman began shooting Old Acquaintance on November 11, 1942, starting with scenes between Hopkins and Loder. Bette was finis.h.i.+ng up a vacation in Palm Springs. A few days later she appeared at the studio with her new agent, Lew Wa.s.serman. (”I've had most of them from time to time,” Bette once said of agents. She had at least eighteen of them during her career.55) They watched Hopkins's rushes, and according to Sherman, Bette called him an hour later from the projection room, saying, ”I just think it's marvelous! I don't know how you got Miriam to do all those things-they were wonderful!”56 She reported to the studio the following morning and began shooting. That's when the fun and games started.

”I hadn't been in the business long enough to realize that there were so many tricks that could be played,” Sherman later admitted. ”Let's say for instance the two of them were sitting on the sofa in the living room. I'd make an over-the-shoulder scene. Well, Miriam came to me once and said, 'Do you mind if I use this long cigarette holder for this character?' I said no, I think that's right for her. Well, the camera's back of her and I'm shooting across her shoulder on Davis, and Miriam would take a puff of the cigarette and hold the cigarette right across Davis' face. And I said, 'Oh, Miriam, please, honey.' She said, 'Oh! I was just trying to match up what I did before.' And Davis knew, of course, and would burn.”

At one point, Hopkins suggested that she and Davis figure out their own blocking for a scene. Sherman agreed to try it. ”The two ladies played the entire five pages practically riveted to the center of the room,” said Sherman, neither of them providing the other with a chance to do anything unch.o.r.eographed. They were literally unwilling to give an inch, a fact Sherman found entertaining but unproductive. He pointed out to them their five-page-long immobility. ”Bette, realizing it was true, broke into a hearty laugh. Miriam did not find it the least bit amusing.”

”Ladies,” Sherman announced, ”sometimes I feel I'm not directing this picture, I'm refereeing it! Bette roared with laughter, which only endeared her to me. Once again, Miriam was not amused.”57 ”I can, in all honesty, say I never lost my temper with Miriam on the set,” Davis wrote. ”I kept it all in until I got home at night. Then I screamed for an hour at least.”58 Farney seems to have taken it with aplomb and alcohol.

There is a scene toward the end of Old Acquaintance in which Kit's long-simmering and well-earned frustration with Millie's self-dramatization becomes intolerable. Violence ensues. Davis described it in The Lonely Life as a slap, but in fact it's an extended shake of Millie's shoulders. ”Now, Vincent,” Bette said on the morning the scene was to be shot, ”I'm going to shake Miriam just as I have to do it. There's no way I can fake that. I hope she doesn't try to pull anything and start complaining about it, so just warn her that I'm going to do it.”

”Vincent,” Hopkins said to her director, ”I know that she has to shake me, but I got up this morning with this terrible thing in my neck, and I hope she won't overdo it because I know she doesn't like me, but she doesn't have to overdo it.”59 According to Bette, spectators gathered on the catwalks above the soundstage. A reporter from Life got wind of it and tried to cover the story with a photographer, but they were barred from the set.

As Humphrey Bogart said of Bette and her wallop, ”Unless you're very big she can knock you down.”60 Hopkins was not very big, and to make matters worse, she relaxed her body so completely when Bette began to shake her that, as Sherman describes it, ”her head began to wobble about grotesquely like a doll with a broken neck.”61 Davis stormed off the set in a rage and slammed the door for good measure but was coaxed back for a second take, during which Hopkins, at Sherman's insistence, forced herself to resist the shaking enough to look human. As Sherman notes, ”it was done well enough to be all right, and that's all there was to it.”62 But that is exactly the problem with the scene, and with the film as a whole: it was done well enough to be all right, but that's all it is. Sherman plays that particular scene for comedy, but it's not very funny. And the notorious enmity between the two actresses, which might have lent their characters' rivalry some real bite, ended up being so controlled that it barely registers at all. The joyous contempt the two actresses felt for each other, the recreational loathing Life had appreciated in 1939, was reined in to get the picture in the can, and Old Acquaintance suffers for its absence.

Jack Warner asked Sherman, Davis, and some crew members to work late on a Sat.u.r.day in mid-February and finish the whole thing up. They agreed and worked till 2:00 a.m. Davis asked Sherman to drop her off at Ruthie's house on Laurel Canyon, but as they were driving down Ventura Boulevard toward the canyon they spotted an open hamburger joint and stopped for a bite to eat. ”It's been fun working with you in spite of the trouble with Miriam. But you handled her beautifully, and I love you!” Bette said. ”I love you, too,” Sherman replied. ”Then her voice changed. She became subdued and solemn as she took my hand. 'You don't understand. I mean, I really love you.' ”63 Bette was infatuated. And married. Sherman, a good-looking and intelligent man, was interested and married. Nothing came of it-yet.

Sherman dropped Bette off at Ruthie's house around 3:00 a.m. and was astounded to see Ruthie appear on her doorstep in her bathrobe the minute the car pulled up and call out, ”Is that you, Bette Davis? Do you know what time it is? Get into this house at once!”

”Yes, Mother.”64

CHAPTER.

14.

FOR THE BOYS.

WHILE OLD ACQUAINTANCE WAS IN the early stages, still under the direction of Edmund Goulding, Warners arranged for Bette to see Irving Rapper's The Gay Sisters with an eye toward casting the role of Rudd Kendall, the young navy lieutenant with whom Kit Marlowe enjoys an affair and, toward the end, decides to marry. There is a character in The Gay Sisters named Gig Young; the role was played by an actor who was born with the name Bryant Fleming, and who had acted under the name Byron Barr. The trouble was, there was another young actor in Hollywood named Byron Barr-the second Byron Barr appears as Nino Zachetti in Double Indemnity-so Bryant Fleming decided to take his character's name in The Gay Sisters and began a long career under the name Gig Young.

Goulding approved of Young's casting in Old Acquaintance, but Vincent Sherman didn't see his appeal and tried to get someone cast in his place. But Davis had taken a liking to him and insisted that he play Rudd Kendall. She also seduced him.

Farney was often out of town working for Honeywell and the war effort, and though Young was also married, he convinced his wife, Sheila, that the reason he was staying late at the studio was because of delays caused by Davis and Hopkins and their tempers, an excuse Sheila certainly found plausible. Although Old Acquaintance did run significantly behind schedule, Gig Young was actually spending his off hours in Bette's dressing room at the studio or at Riverbottom when Farney was in Minneapolis.

The affair was rather brief; it ended when Young joined the Coast Guard shortly after Old Acquaintance wrapped in mid-February, though the two remained good friends for the rest of Young's life. They greeted each other with a particular shtick: ”Gig Young!” Bette would cry upon seeing him. ”Bette Davis!” Young would respond. ”She's not a professional charmer,” Young said of Davis many years after their affair was over. ”I like that kind of honesty.”1 Soon after Old Acquaintance wrapped, Bette departed, without Farney, for a vacation in Mexico.

BEGINNING WITH PARAMOUNT'S Star Spangled Rhythm, released at the tail end of 1942, Hollywood gave wartime America a spate of puttin'-on-a-show movies featuring a given studio's stable of stars playing themselves. In Star Spangled Rhythm, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Lamour, Paulette G.o.ddard, Veronica Lake, Alan Ladd, and other Paramount leading lights turned up onstage at a navy benefit, with Eddie Bracken playing a sailor and Betty Hutton playing the Paramount switchboard operator with whom he falls in love. MGM got in line with Thousands Cheer. Described by the critic Damien Bona as ”arguably the worst A picture of the 1940s,” Thousands Cheer featured Gene Kelly as an army private and the ”MGM Star Parade,” including Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Red Skelton, Eleanor Parker, Lucille Ball, Lena Horne, Donna Reed, June Allyson, and ”introducing in his first appearance on the screen, Jose Iturbi.” Universal weighed in with Follow the Boys, which, as Bona points out, remains notable for being the only film in history to star both Orson Welles and Maria Montez. Marlene Dietrich, W. C. Fields, and the Andrews Sisters also appeared.

Warner Bros. brought forth two such cavalcades: Thank Your Lucky Stars, which began filming in October 1942 but wasn't released until the following September; and Hollywood Canteen, made in two batches and released on December 31, 1944. The latter film had gone into production in November 1943, but the Screen Actors Guild put a stop to the filming by demanding that all the stars be paid their full salaries no matter how brief their appearances were. The issue was settled in late April 1944 when the Guild agreed that a week's salary was a reasonable minimum payment for those actors who worked on a per-picture basis. The problem was, Hollywood Canteen was not originally designed to showcase only Warners' talent, and other studios refused to loan their stars to Warners under the new conditions. What's more, the New York Times reported, a total of nine other all-star films had been in the planning stages at other studios, but all were dropped thanks to the new rules. Filming on Hollywood Canteen resumed on June 5, 1944.2 Davis filmed her sequence during the last week of June.3 Hollywood Canteen finds Bette acting more or less unself-consciously as herself at the Canteen, introducing acts and presenting prizes and a cake to the lucky ”Slim,” the millionth man to enter the club. According to the actress Joan Leslie, with whom ”Slim” wins a date, Davis had trouble being Davis. ”I just can't do this!” Bette cried after repeatedly flubbing lines that had been scripted to make her sound like herself. ”If you give me a gun, a cigarette, and a wig, I can play any old bag. But I can't play myself!” ”Everyone laughed,” Leslie continued. ”This broke the tension on the set and allowed the scene to proceed smoothly, as this super, sophisticated lady probably knew it would.”4 ”A very pleasant pile of s.h.i.+t for wartime audiences” is how Joan Crawford described Hollywood Canteen.5 A group of enlisted men responded with even less praise. The film, they wrote to Warners, was ”a slur on the intelligence and ac.u.men of every member of the armed services.”6 Still, Hollywood Canteen was a huge hit and became one of Warners' top-grossing films of 1945.7 Thank Your Lucky Stars is by far the more entertaining of the two films, if for no other reason than Bette Davis enters it singing.

The movie strings itself along on a plot, but it's deliberate twaddle involving hard-to-take Eddie Cantor and his equally excruciating look-alike, a Hollywood tour guide who helps two fresh-faced kids (Joan Leslie and Dennis Morgan) break into s...o...b..z. That the comedy is mainly about how wretched Cantor is-how stale his routines are, how bug-eyed and ”repulsive” he is physically-is a testament to Cantor's self-deprecating good nature, though toward the end of the film when he turns up in a psycho ward and gets strapped to a gurney, you might find yourself hoping that the onscreen surgeon will actually go through with the lobotomy he threatens to perform. In any event, Thank Your Lucky Stars features Edward Everett Horton and S. Z. ”Cuddles” Sakall playing a pair of producers who enlist Warner Bros.' stars as entertainment for the big war benefit they're throwing at a Hollywood theater-the kind of marvelous, supernatural stage that quadruples in size when necessary to accommodate vast cinematic musical numbers. John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Hattie McDaniel, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino, Dinah Sh.o.r.e, Ann Sheridan, Jack Carson, and Alan Hale all appear as themselves.

Nothing in Bette Davis's career to this point can prepare you for the sublimely ridiculous moment when she opens her dark lipsticked mouth and-well, okay: sings is not the right word. Davis delivers Frank Loesser and Arthur Schwartz's witty, forced-rhymed ”They're Either Too Young or Too Old.” As she remarked about her singing voice to d.i.c.k Cavett many years later, ”It has more personality than vocal ability, shall we say.”8 However little she appreciated it on a conscious level, her appearance in Thank Your Lucky Stars marks the first time in her career that Bette Davis knew that to get the job done, to make the sequence work-to be bedrock honest as an actress-she had to turn herself into self-parody: They're either too young, or too old, They're either too gray or too gra.s.sy green, . . .

The battle is on, but the fortress will hold, They're either too young or too old.

The sheer ghastliness of Davis's singing voice is precisely what sells the song. It's not that she's gamely attempting to sing while acknowledging that she can't. No, she transcends mere singing by parodying her speaking voice at its most mannered and italicized, all the while hovering toward but generally missing the musical notes that, for a lesser talent, would have formed the structure of the song. Davis played it smarter. To give an honest performance of herself playing a musical comedienne, Davis knew she had to turn cartoonish. The absurd jitterbug she does with a GI in the middle of the routine is so fast and frenzied-he hurls her around with utter abandon, lifting her far off her feet and flinging her around like a yo-yo-that it might as well serve as a Looney Tunes sequence.

In terms of Bette Davis caricatures, Warners' animation department had already beaten her to the punch. The enormity and depth of Davis's well-like eyes had attracted the attention of Friz Freleng and his Merrie Melodies crew as early as 1936 with The CooCoo Nut Grove, which catches a brief glimpse of Davis seated at her own table at the eponymous nightclub. (Freleng took it easier on Davis than he did with Katharine ”Miss Heartburn” Hepburn, whom he depicts as a whinnying horse complete with elongated equine teeth and hooves.) The following year, in She Was an Acrobat's Daughter, Freleng drew a vast-eyed Bette overplaying a scene from The Petrified Florist with an effeminate Leslie Howard before an audience of rude and boorish animals until an obnoxious duck-child commandeers the projector and sends The Petrified Florist unspooling into chaos. Freleng brought Bette into his 1940 Malibu Beach Party as well, along with Jimmy Cagney, George Raft, Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, and Spencer Tracy.

In Fred ”Tex” Avery's animated 1941 Hollywood Steps Out, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Stewart, and the inevitably mocked Leopold Stokowski all appear at Ciro's, but Davis's reserved table is notably empty. They're waiting for her, but she doesn't show up; as the film critic and animation expert Hank Sartin notes, Avery is slyly riffing on Bette's frequent absences from the studio owing to suspensions.9 In Chuck Jones's 1942 Fox Pop, released under the Looney Tunes label, Bette shows up briefly in the window of the chic Hollywood restaurant Chiro's wearing a fas.h.i.+onable silver fox fur.

Davis's last appearance as a Warner Bros. caricature came in 1946 with Hollywood Daffy, in which Daffy jumps off a bus at Hollywood and Vine and jubilantly cries, ”Hollywood! The thit-y of the thin-ema at latht!” He immediately heads to ”Warmer Brothers Studios” and attempts, with increasingly violent results, to crash the front gate. Animated Bette, of course, has no such difficulties. ”Good morning, Miss Davis!” says the security guard (in one of Mel Blanc's most nasal voices). ”So you think I'm mean to you,” the cartoon Bette snaps, clutching a script as she marches through the gate. ”You think I'm cruel. Mad. Selfish. Domineering! (To the guard:) Good morning. Well. You're right. I'm all that. And heaven, too.” (Bette's voice was most likely not provided by Mel Blanc, but rather by Bea Benaderet, Warners' go-to gal for female cartoon voices in the 1940s.)10 But the funniest Davis-related moment in any Warner Bros. cartoon occurs without Davis herself being onscreen. In Bob Clampett's 1946 Bugs Bunnystarring The Big Snooze, in the middle of a speech in which a theatrically desperate Bugs begs a fed-up Elmer Fudd not to leave him, he looks straight at the audience and confides, ”Bette Davis is going to hate me for this.”11 The joke is doubly comical. Not only is Bugs playing an overwrought Bette Davis scene-the drag-loving Bugs is almost as much of a gay icon as Bette-but Elmer is threatening not only to leave Bugs but to leave Warner Bros. Disgusted with his deal, especially the fact that he's constantly playing the same role, Elmer has ripped up his contract and thrown it on the ground. Fudd had an excellent role model in Bette Davis.

HAVING RENOVATED b.u.t.tERNUT to their satisfaction, Bette and Farney turned their decorating attentions to Riverbottom. They hired the designer Mac Mulcahy to redo almost everything; Mulcahy finished his work in the spring of 1943. The breakfast room was done over in Early American style with a corner cupboard and dark wood table and chairs. The sitting room was made even more informal than it had been before, with new built-in bookshelves and overstuffed chairs, although the large full-color map of the world hanging on one wall was a bit schoolmarmish.

The original dining room design had featured all-too-scenic wallpaper-horses on a hunt running through fields-and a long, dark dining table set off by white chairs. Mulcahy installed knotty pine paneling and a matching dining table and chairs and added cheerful pink and white draperies and a huge breakfront displaying china and pewter cups. The living room's original layout-two long couches facing each other-was transformed into a more casual room by way of easy chairs surrounding a large circular coffee table. The master bedroom, which once featured a high four-poster bead with white cover and canopy, now sported a new, long, low bed with a plaid bedspread and matching drapes, wall-to-wall carpeting, and a recovered chaise.12 Riverbottom was newly homey, but it wasn't the home of a traditional couple. After completing Old Acquaintance, Bette went off to Mexico with her friend the Countess Dorothy di Fra.s.so while Farney continued to spend time in Minneapolis and elsewhere on the road doing notably unchronicled work for the military. (Di Fra.s.so was the daughter of the millionaire Bertrand Taylor. Known for giving lavish parties, she was a fixture on the Hollywood scene in the 1930s and '40s. Her t.i.tle came from her second marriage, to Count Carlos di Fra.s.so.) Bette, meanwhile, was battling Warners for a new contract. ”My trip to Mexico was of long duration,” she wrote. ”I was in contractual difficulty with Warner Bros. I had never demanded a salary raise or limitation of films per year, and I felt the time had come. I informed the studio I would not return until my contract met these demands.”13 The contract she won, dated June 7, 1943, covered nine films over five years at $115,000 per film for the first five and $150,000 for the final four. In a separate pact, Warner Bros. and Davis agreed that five of these films would be produced by her new production company, B.D. Inc., with Davis finally achieving some measure of contractually based control over the selection and development of stories and, indeed, all production matters, though the final decisions would remain the studio's. For the first three B.D. Inc. pictures, Davis would get the first $125,000 of gross receipts, with Warners getting the next $232,000; any remainder would be split as follows: 35 percent to Davis and 65 percent to Warner Bros. For the remaining two B.D. Inc. films, Davis would get the first $150,000.14 There were the usual number of misfires and false alarms. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Bette was set to star in th

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