Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER.

5.

THE FIRST OSCAR.

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

Buddy recovers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a blandness to Davis's performance in Special Agent, however, that goes beyond the Code's repressive moralism. She makes Julie a bit too comfortable with the bind she finds herself in as both a thug's Gal Friday and a G-man's stoolie-fiancee. "Maybe I won't end up in the morgue," she glibly observes toward the end of the movie. Then again, Special Agent's writing-the screenwriters are Laird Doyle and Abem Finkel-is fairly low-grade even for a studio never known for its literary aspirations. With Davis and Brent each tied up with string inside the hideout, a cop outside actually utters the line "Whatever you do, keep your men under cover, or those kids in there are goners!"

IT IS TIME to introduce Joan Crawford's broad-shouldered silhouette to the drama, if only to pry her quickly away from it, Bette Davis's life and art being far more compelling than her overworked feud with Crawford. Davis's next picture, Dangerous, costarred Franchot Tone, to whom Bette was quite attracted but who was in love with Joan, who over the years generated increasing friction with Bette, friction that led to the triumph of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? but that proceeded to get so out of hand that Joan fled the production of Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte midway through filming, and witty Bette pasted an eight-by-ten glossy of Joan with her eyes whited out and her teeth blackened in her 1964 sc.r.a.pbook. . . . Forget the resurrection of Christ. For gay men of a certain age, this is the greatest story ever told.

This particular reiteration begins with Dangerous's supervisor, Harry Joe Brown, supposedly witnessing a s.e.xually liberated Bette Davis giving Franchot Tone a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b in one of their dressing rooms. Brown told Crawford's biographers Lawrence Quirk and William Schoell that "when they saw me they didn't seem to give a d.a.m.n."9 At the same time, everyone connected with Dangerous noticed that Tone kept showing up after lunch covered in Crawford's lipstick, and that Bette was terribly jealous. Moreover, Joan was really bis.e.xual and always wanted a piece of Bette, and the virgin-est Yankee who ever walked in could, by 1935, give adulterous head to her male costar but Bette would have no part of a lesbian affair for the rest of her life, and that is supposedly one of the foundations of the Homeric feud.

Moving on. Davis didn't like the script for Dangerous, at least at first. "It was maudlin and mawkish with a pretense at quality, which in scripts, as in home furnis.h.i.+ngs, is often worse than junk."10 It was the work of Laird Doyle, who called it Hard Luck Dame. Davis's derision notwithstanding, it's one of Doyle's better efforts. But as was often the case, Davis's lack of respect for the script, even misplaced, only served to fuel the fire of her performance. Some actors need, as they say, to believe in the material-to maintain the touchingly naive faith that the characters they play are not in fact fict.i.tious. Davis, a supreme stylist, often did better when she thought the script was c.r.a.p and the characters phony. Her Yankee ethos was st.u.r.dy and effective: she believed that it was her duty to make a bad script or a shaky character work, so she pushed herself all the harder and made her artistic decisions all the more adroitly. As Brigid Brophy writes, "She is actually good in bad parts. . . . Miss Davis needed her bad scripts as sorely as they needed her; they were what she needed to wrestle through in pursuit of that 'truth' and 'realism' (her words) which to her are 'more than natural.' "11 The story of a once superb, now derelict Broadway actress-what Jeanne Eagels might have become if she hadn't overdosed on chloral hydrate in 1929-Dangerous won Davis her first Academy Award.12 This Oscar is usually considered to be just the consolation prize for not even having been nominated for Of Human Bondage. (The 1934 winner was Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night, one of the record-breaking five Oscars awarded to that film; the other nominees were Norma Shearer for The Barretts of Wimpole Street and the opera singer Grace Moore for One Night of Love.) But Dangerous also has something else going for it in terms of Academy tastes: this time, Davis's calculating schemer finds salvation in the end. Mildred Rogers dies a pitiful, disgusting death-syphilis barely disguised as consumption. The hard-luck dame of Dangerous, on the other hand, finds redemption not only from alcoholism but from egocentrism as well-quite a feat for any actress, and consequently one the Academy found Oscar-worthy.

Don Bellows (Franchot Tone), a successful society architect, goes slumming downtown one night with his indefatigably cordial fiancee, Gail (Margaret Lindsay), and notices the on-the-skids actress Joyce Heath sitting alone in the corner downing her thirtieth shot of gin. He gives Gail the slip and takes Joyce to his magnificent upstate farm for a week of rehabilitation, and soon he's financing Joyce's triumphant return to Broadway and ditching Gail, who takes her rejection with perfect poise. But Joyce's jinx, the hard luck of the original t.i.tle, returns in the form of a secret husband who won't give her a divorce, so she hustles him into Don's car, speeds into the night, and crashes into a convenient tree.

One might a.s.sume that such desperate melodrama would entice Bette Davis into a paroxysm of scenery chewing in an attempt to distract her audience from the plot's preposterousness. But, if anything, she underplays almost every scene, a strategy that gives Joyce Heath a measure of dignity that isn't inherent to the material. Here, Davis's struggle is to make it all look easy. There's a moment toward the end, when Joyce must selflessly act selfish for Don's own good: "You're no longer important to me. Your importance ended when the show closed," she says. The lines are cruel, but Davis plays the scene so coolly that there's only the barest indication that Joyce is being duplicitous. Or is she? Ernie Haller's lighting is flattering to Davis but not unduly glamorizing, and Bette relies on it to catch the glint in her eyes-the s.h.i.+ne that reveals the performance behind the performance, the lie Joyce tells that convinces Don to leave her. It's the seasoned performance of a twenty-seven-year-old actress with twenty-seven films under her still-tiny belt.

ROBERT E. SHERWOOD'S GANGSTER MELODRAMA, The Petrified Forest, opened on Broadway on January 7, 1935, and starred Leslie Howard as an effete British writer who has actually written nothing at all. Humphrey Bogart costarred as a grim killer heading for an existential as well as geographic border. By October, Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves's adaptation was in production at Warner Bros.

The studio bought the property for Howard and Edward G. Robinson, Bogart having all but abandoned Hollywood after his minor role in Three on a Match, Warners having forgotten him, never really having seen him in the first place. Robinson, perhaps out of pride, later claimed that he didn't relish the idea of playing yet another gangster and purposely backed out of the project. But of greater impact was Leslie Howard's incessant lobbying for Bogart to play the role of Duke Mantee again. "No Bogart, no deal," reads one cable from Howard to Jack Warner.13 It was a slow-going production, especially for Warner Bros., where actors and technicians alike were essentially human sprockets whose chief purpose was to yank movies through production as briskly as the front office could spur them. Shooting began on October 14.14 By the end of the month the production was three days behind schedule, and Hal Wallis was becoming aggravated. Wallis was a man of exacting taste and had a nagging compulsion to care. Unlike some of his colleagues at Warners, Wallis understood that crafting a motion picture could take time, that getting it right was as important as getting it in the can. But even Wallis was losing patience after hearing reports that Leslie Howard had been showing up on the set anywhere from thirty to ninety minutes late every day and feeling no particular need to explain himself. Then Bette got a sore throat on a Friday, skipped that day's shoot, and refused to come in on Sunday to make it up. She sprained her ankle on the morning of November 22.

The Petrified Forest went into overtime for another reason, too: its director, Archie Mayo, shot a great deal of unusable footage, the most ludicrous of which was a close-up of Bogart with a mounted moose head in the background. Mayo had framed the shot in such a clumsy way that the moose appeared to be growing out of Bogart's head. Wallis was especially enraged by this boo-boo because Mayo really had only had one interior set to work with-the roadhouse dining room-and should have known his way around it. The production finally closed on November 30, a full eleven days behind schedule.

Aside from some lunar-looking desert locations, which were filmed at Red Rock Canyon near Las Vegas, The Petrified Forest takes place at a last-chance gas station/barbecue joint somewhere in the pasteboard Southwest of a Warners soundstage in Burbank, with strategically rolling tumbleweeds indicating the raw timelessness of artificiality. Bette's character, Gabby, yearns to leave this drab middle-of-nowhere for the excitement and vibrant culture of France, but she's stuck there with her ineffectual father and a fidgety old coot named Gramps-stuck, that is, until Leslie Howard's Alan Squier appears out of nowhere and discovers the means for her to depart. The agent of her exit is Duke Mantee, a can-do American man of action who, in this perversely modern work, takes the form of Bogart's morbid, murdering criminal, a refres.h.i.+ng contrast to Howard's tired but florid uselessness.

HOWARD: I began to feel the enchantment of this desert. I looked up at the sky, and the stars seemed to be mocking me, reproving me. They were pointing the way to that gleaming sign and saying, "There's the end of your tether! You thought you could escape and skip off to the Phoenix Palace, but we know better!" That's what the stars told me. And perhaps they know that carnage is imminent, and that I'm due to be among the fallen. Fascinating thought!

BOGART (snarling): Let's skip it.

GRAMPS: It certainly does feel great to have a real killer around here again!

Davis is in muted form again in The Petrified Forest, understating her naively romantic Gabby to an extraordinary degree. It's her most modest and generous performance to date. She employs no tics, displays no dynamism. Her Gabby is a girl of not particularly profound dreams who may or may not make it to Europe in the end, so lacking is she in the ambition and drive that were essential to Bette's own personality. It's safe to a.s.sume that underplaying Gabby was a conscious decision on Davis's part, a deliberate act of actorly generosity that kept the central drama of the piece between Howard and Bogart-beautiful Old World fatigue and manly, pointless New World achievement. Sol Polito, the film's cinematographer, takes a similar view of the drama. He's fascinated by Bogart's crags and scruff and doesn't do much to overemphasize Bette's porcelain-like complexion.

"I hope you don't mind my staring at you like that," Davis said to Michael Caine many years later, around the time of Alfie (1966). "But when I saw you I thought of Leslie Howard. You remind me so much of him." "I was very slim in those days," Caine reports, "with long blond hair, and other people had told me before that I resembled him." Bette continued: "Did you know that Leslie screwed every woman on every movie he was ever in, with the exception of me? I told him that I was not going to be plastered on the end of a list of his conquests." ("I made what I considered to be a sort of approving moral grunt," says Caine. "The reason I was staring at you," Davis continued, "was that I was thinking what difference would it have made now if I had." Caine describes the last part as having had "a sort of a wistful tone about it.")15 BETTE LEFT THE set of The Petrified Forest on Friday, November 29, 1935, and sent her lawyer to Jack Warner's office the following day. The reason: she had just received a letter ordering her to appear three days later for wardrobe discussions for the next picture the studio had pitched her into: The Man in the Black Hat, Warners' second attempt at making a murder mystery of one of Das.h.i.+ell Hammett's novels. Warner declined to be in his office on Sat.u.r.day when the lawyer arrived, so Bette fired off a telegram: she had worked for six weeks straight on The Petri-fied Forest, she noted, and she felt that she needed two or three weeks to recuperate rather than start another film on Monday. "I have been ill several times on the picture as it is," she told Warner, and so really she had no choice but to refuse to appear at all in The Man in the Black Hat.

Warner responded by insisting that the studio's own doctor verify the state of Bette's health and sent him to her house on Franklin Avenue at 6:00 p.m. on Monday. Bette found it simply impossible to be home at the time, and in any event, she tartly observed in a subsequent communication with her boss, she refused to be examined by Warners' doctor on the grounds that she had not actually claimed to be sick but had merely requested a rest, having been sick previously. Warner slapped her on suspension as of Tuesday. The contretemps was resolved in Warner Bros.' favor on Friday when Bette reported to the wardrobe department for costume discussions for The Man in the Black Hat, whereupon she was promptly taken off suspension.16 The Man in the Black Hat went through several t.i.tle changes before it was released in late July 1936-Hard Luck Dame, Men on Her Mind, The Man with the Black Hat, and finally Satan Met a Lady. Hammett's original t.i.tle-The Maltese Falcon-would have been better, but Warners had already used it for the first go-round in 1931 with Bebe Daniels and Ricardo Cortez. Besides, in this version they'd changed the eponymous falcon into a treasure-filled ivory horn, Roland's Trumpet, which would have made a poor t.i.tle. (Roland's Trumpet has to do with an ancient instrument, Charlemagne, Saracens, a cache of invaluable jewels. . . . ) Satan Met a Lady is terrible. The New York Times appears to have had the inside track on the mess when it called the film "merely a farrago of nonsense representing a series of practical studio compromises with an unworkable script."17 However poor the original script may have been, though, Warners' editor Max Parker a.s.sembled an initial cut that Warners' executives-at least one of whom had approved the script, after all-found particularly incomprehensible, so they brought in Warren Low to recut the picture.18 (Satan Met a Lady was the first of eight Bette Davis films Low edited. According to Davis, Low was "the greatest editor at Warner Bros. I owe him a lot. He used to fight for me when something of mine was going to be cut that would hurt my performance."19) But the end result was still a fiasco. Attempting to ride the coattails of MGM's The Thin Man, the director, William Dieterle, makes feeble attempts at blending mystery with comedy, but they don't work. With the spectacle of Bette whipping a gun out of a smart, tailored jacket and forcing Warren William out of her luxe apartment-not to mention Arthur Treacher stabbing a couch to death with a dagger and busty Alison Skip-worth turning up as the notorious Madame Barabbas-the whole enterprise should have been a lot more fun.

In late 1935 and early 1936, while Warner Bros. was shoehorning Bette Davis into Satan Met a Lady, John Ford, at RKO, was preparing a much more elegant picture: Mary of Scotland, with Katharine Hepburn as Mary. Bette coveted the role of Elizabeth, Mary's rival. One of her lawyers, Martin Gang, went so far as to tell Warner Bros. that RKO was ready to cast her in Mary of Scotland if Warners would agree to the loan, but Warners turned down the request. Ford's biographer Scott Eyman astutely ascribes the decision to Warners' "corporate ego" not being able to "risk another Davis success at another studio" after her triumph in Of Human Bondage. That said, Ford himself wanted Tallulah Bankhead to be Elizabeth but ended up choosing Fredric March's wife, Florence Eldridge. (A much more unlikely candidate for Elizabeth I-Ginger Rogers-also campaigned for the role.) Bette's own account of her disappointment puts the blame on Ford, not Jack Warner. Davis claimed she was granted a meeting with Ford, who (in the words of Whitney Stine, another of her biographers) gruffly "told her she talked too much and ended the appointment."20 So instead of playing Elizabeth of England for one of the greatest directors in the world, Davis ended up having to turn herself into an ersatz cosmetics heiress for Alfred E. Green in The Golden Arrow, yet another film she despised.

The Golden Arrow is a screwball comedy about an heiress and a reporter, only the heiress isn't really an heiress but a working girl plucked out of the "cas.h.i.+er's cage of a hick town cafeteria" in order to pose as the madcap Daisy Appleby of the face cream Applebys. Davis could play comedy well when asked to, and personally she was a very funny lady, but she never got comedy in the way Hepburn or Jean Arthur or Irene Dunne did. These other actresses were willing to demean themselves for laughs; Davis was only willing to do it for drama's sake. She found screwball comedy unbecoming on principle in ways other screwball stars never did, and it hampered her ability to let loose.

Davis and George Brent each acquire black eyes near the end of the film, then get into a cab. "The international hilarity this was supposed to provoke was further insured by a three-shot in which the hackie himself had not one but two s.h.i.+ners," Davis writes in The Lonely Life. "The whole affair was a black eye as far as I was concerned."21 It's brittle, perhaps, but not bad. Screwball comedies are often about the irrepressible theatricality of life and the enchanting impossibility of love-the black eyes lovers inevitably get in pursuit of each other. But at this point in her tenure at Warner Bros., Bette Davis wasn't inclined to find such stuff funny. She wanted tougher meat to chew. She saw herself as a serious actress, not a clown. And to her, the makeup department's black eye was just another symbol of Jack Warner's abuse.

The Golden Arrow began shooting on Monday, January 20, 1936.22 "Am dead," Davis telegrammed to Hal Wallis at the end of the third week of filming. She called in sick on Friday, February 7, citing "eye strain shooting in blazing sun and glare of water and reflectors."23 (There are several scenes set on a yacht.) Fighting with Warner Bros. was becoming integral to Bette Davis's life, as necessary as acting and more satisfyingly vital than her husband. Although the Academy nominated her for the Best Actress award for Dangerous, Davis's increasing compulsion to turn everything into an iron-clad bone of contention led her to issue a threat: she would not attend the awards dinner as one of Warners' s.h.i.+ning lights, the studio's Best Actress nominee, but would instead fly off to Honolulu for a vacation with Ruthie. Davis eventually agreed to attend the dinner and go to Hawaii two days later. Still, it must have rankled her that she had specifically to request permission for the trip from Jack Warner.24 (As it turned out, she ditched Ruthie in Honolulu but traveled to New York instead, prompting Ruthie to send a guilt-tripping three-word telegram to her daughter: "Anyone love me?")25 ON MARCH 5, 1936, in a banquet hall at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, D. W. Griffith announced that the winner of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' award for Best Actress was Bette Davis for Dangerous. "There was a shout from my table and everyone was kissing me," Davis writes in The Lonely Life. But as she walked to the stage to accept the award, self-doubt erupted. She knew: "It's a consolation prize. This nagged at me. It was true that even if the honor had been earned, it had been earned last year. There was no doubt that Hepburn's performance [in Alice Adams] deserved the award."26 In those days, the Academy released the results of the voting after all the awards were presented. The president of the Academy, Frank Capra, revealed later that evening that Katharine Hepburn had in fact come in second, with Elisabeth Bergner coming in third for the British drama Escape Me Never.27 A genius well on his way down, Griffith was stern as he handed the statuette to Bette: "You don't know how lucky you are, young lady." "I do," Bette replied. Griffith, not convinced, kept on going: "At your age, to be where you are-making all that money, fame, and everything!"28 Bette later claimed to have christened Oscar Oscar; according to her, he had no name before she bestowed one upon him. She observes hilariously in The Lonely Life that the statuette was "a Hollywood male and, of course, epicene." (The book is generously spiced with references to Hollywood pretty boys as "sisters.") The golden statuette's a.s.s, however, "was the spit of my husband's. Since the O. in Harmon O. Nelson stood for Oscar, Oscar it has been ever since."29 Davis's claim startled Margaret Herrick, the Academy's former director and its first librarian, who thought she'd named it after her uncle. The veteran Hollywood scribe Sidney Skolsky, too, was under the impression that he'd done the naming two years earlier in one of his columns.30 So, in her annotations to Mother G.o.ddam, Whitney Stine's first biography of Davis, Davis withdrew her claim: "A sillier controversy never existed. I don't feel my fame and fortune came from naming Oscar 'Oscar.' I relinquish once and for all any claim that I was the one-so, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the honor is all yours."31 According to Mayme Ober Peake, Bette wore to the ceremony "a simple navy blue frock with white polka dots and pique trim."32 According to Bette, "It was very expensive." But a fan magazine reporter took the occasion of the Best Actress's trip to a Biltmore ladies' room to berate her for her atrocious lack of sense, let alone taste: "How could you? A print! You could be dressed for a family dinner. Your photograph is going round the world. Don't you realize? Aren't you aware?' "33 What she was aware of was her relatively low income and her strict contractual obligations to Warner Bros. She was acutely cognizant of the lack of control she exerted over her persona; the relentless conveyer belt of thirty-one films she had cranked out in only six years in Hollywood; and the fact that Warners wasn't giving her the best scripts, the best directors, the best anything. Jack Warner seemed-to Bette-to have no idea how to manage her increasingly successful career, and she begrudged it, ever more feverishly.

She knew she wasn't being cast in the best of the studio's productions. In 1935, for instance, Michael Curtiz tested her for the haughty Arabella Bishop in his swashbuckling epic Captain Blood, which starred the unearthly beautiful and athletic newcomer Errol Flynn. She was enraged when Olivia de Havilland got the role instead. The producer Robert Lord had suggested Bette for the lead in Give Me Your Heart, a melodrama, but Warners cast Kay Francis instead. Davis was actually announced for the role of Julia in Another Dawn, but again Kay Francis took the role, this time opposite Errol Flynn; it was a melodrama about a woman who marries a British pilot after the love of her life is killed in a plane crash. (Coincidently, the screenwriter, Laird Doyle, died in a plane crash shortly before the film was released.)34 According to Stine, Bette craved the lead in Anthony Adverse, but Olivia de Havilland landed the part.35 Stine also quotes Silver Screen's "Projections-Bette Davis": "She would like to play the Helen Mencken role in Congai some day, and the Miriam Hopkins role in Jezebel, and the Florence Reed role of Mother G.o.ddam in The Shanghai Gesture-although she is quite sure that if by any fluke this stage play ever reached the screen, she would be called Mother Goodness Gracious. In other words, our little Bette craves something with guts, and wishes to leave the sweets to the sweet."36 What Warners bought for her was something called Mountain Justice, a convoluted story about a woman's crusade against ignorant hillbillies.37 Warners also bought the rights to C. S. Forester's 1935 novel The African Queen as a vehicle for Bette, but the studio quickly forgot about the project, and it's not even clear whether Davis ever knew the studio had ever had her in mind for it.38 Over the course of the previous year, Davis and her agent, Mike Levee, had been fighting with Warner Bros. over Bette's right to perform on radio dramas. Jack Warner, who called Levee "a little dynamo . . . who had once had a job as an a.s.sistant cameraman at Paramount and had lately turned agent,"39 took the firm position that the studio had the contractual right to approve everything Davis did, including radio broadcasts.40 For example, she didn't want to do a radio adaptation of Dangerous but, instead, an adaptation of Aesop's fable The Lion and the Mouse. After much back and forth, Warners finally agreed to let Bette perform The Lion and the Mouse but only with the understanding that there would be a big plug for Dangerous both before and after the broadcast.41 In addition, it was Warner Bros. and the studios that controlled the advertising racket-stars plugging cigarettes, stars hawking soft drinks, stars s.h.i.+lling for Max Factor or Buick or BO-busting Mum-and the stars whose pictures graced these products in print ads had nothing to say about what they were peddling. As the Oscar historians Mason Wiley and Damien Bona report, Jack Warner responded to Davis's winning the highest award in world film acting by "leasing her face to Quaker Puffed Rice." "Breakfast fit for a queen of the screen," the ad trumpeted.42 And then there was the question of money.

In 1935, at Warner Bros., Kay Francis made $115,000. Paul Muni got $50,000 per picture; approval rights for story, role, and script; sole star billing onscreen and in all advertising; loan-outs only on consent; and the right to appear onstage whenever he chose.43 Jimmy Cagney made just under $150,000. And Cagney was grousing about it-for good reason. His films were raking it in at the box office, but Warners still had him bound to a contract that paid him only a small percentage of the studio's take. Audiences were paying to see Cagney's pictures not because Warner Bros. made them; they were paying to see Cagney. For Cagney, $150,000 was a paltry fraction of what he deserved.

Bette Davis made all of $18,200 that year. Even toothy Guy Kibbee earned more than two and a half times what Bette Davis did.44 The major studios were under attack on other fronts as well. Cagney filed his suit on February 7, 1936. Two weeks later, the attorney general of the United States filed suit in federal court against Warner Bros., Paramount, and RKO on the grounds that the studios were conspiring to monopolize interstate commerce in motion pictures by controlling not only the production and distribution of their films but also their exhibition by their outright owners.h.i.+p of theaters or the bullying contracts they forced on independently owned houses. This was a limited suit involving only a few theaters in St. Louis; the government's major victory didn't come until 1948 with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., et al., which effectively killed the studio system by forcing the majors to divest themselves of their theaters. Still, the government scored a significant victory in late April 1936 when the studios agreed to the government's demand that they stop preventing their compet.i.tors from doing business, and the suit was dropped.45 The stars, however, were still seething-over salaries, over control of their public images, over the long-term contracts that once seemed to offer security but that in practice turned them into indentured servants. Every time Jack Warner unilaterally slapped Bette Davis or James Cagney on suspension for perceived infractions, that time was tacked onto the end of their contract. It was like punis.h.i.+ng a child by telling him he couldn't listen to his favorite radio program for a week, and if the child was especially temperamental, a week would easily turn into a month, a month into a year, and eventually the eight-year-old would find himself banished from the family radio until he was twenty-seven. To Davis and Cagney and others, this was an absurd way to treat the very artists whose names and talents brought in the bucks in the first place. It was time for a fight.

CHAPTER.

6.

UP IN ARMS.

SATAN MET A LADY; THE GOLDEN ARROW; the Best Actress award as a consolation prize for not winning for a picture produced by a studio other than Warner Bros.; a restrictive contract; s.h.i.+lling unwillingly for cereal; working; working harder; earning less than Guy Kibbee. . . this is the context in which Jack Warner told Bette Davis that her next role would be that of a lady lumberjack.

The film was to be called G.o.d's Country and the Woman. Jo Barton, the owner of Barton Logging Co., falls in love with Steve Russett (George Brent), a rival logger who has taken a menial job at Barton. Forest greenery would play a major role; there would be, in the words of Sunset Boulevard's Joe Gillis, "a lotta outdoors stuff."

"I won't do it!" Bette roared. "Satan Met a Lady was bad enough, but this is absolute tripe!"1 But it will be in Technicolor, Jack Warner said.

No, said Bette.

"The heroine," Bette writes in The Lonely Life, "was an insufferable bore who scowled while everyone kept yelling 'Timber!' . . . If I never acted again in my life, I was not going to play in G.o.d's Country. It was now a matter of my own self-respect."2 Bette never knew it, but it might have been far worse. Warner Bros. memos reveal that in April, when Mike Levee was pus.h.i.+ng hard for a new contract for Bette with new terms and payments and end dates, Hal Wallis was advising Jack Warner to stick her in a picture-any picture-as quickly as possible and not even wait for G.o.d's Country and the Woman. Wallis wanted Davis and Levee to know precisely who was boss.3 It was like a bad joke: "Why would Hal Wallis stuff his studio's most talented actress into a throwaway quickie directed by a hack?" Answer: "Because he could."

Warner didn't take Wallis's advice, but he wasn't about to be pushed around by any little Best Actress winner either: "The s.h.i.+ny new Oscar she had won for Dangerous began to look like the Statue of Liberty to her, and she said she wouldn't work for us any more unless she had story approval," he later wrote.4 "As a friend of Bette, I hope she won't cut off her nose to spite her pretty face," Louella Parsons opined.5 Bette Davis was not about to take career advice from a gossip columnist, however powerful Parsons may have been been. She knew she worked hard, which in Hollywood terms meant not only that she performed before the camera in film after film, month after month, year after year, but that she performed before the stills photographer for every film, too. And showed up for wardrobe fittings. And makeup tests. She obliged the studio's publicists when they set up interviews; she obliged the journalists and made nice with professional tattlers like Parsons. What she had little knack and less inclination for, however, was socializing with the in crowd. She preferred to go home and read. She and Ham would, from time to time, go out to nightclubs and restaurants, but she wasn't the type of movie star who strove to be photographed out on the town. She was careful not to make enemies, but she didn't go out of her way to make friends with big shots for the sake of her career.

And her mouth grew increasingly big. In late March 1936, Bette took her trip to New York instead of joining Ruthie in Honolulu. Upon her arrival on the twenty-fifth, she immediately mouthed off in the press about the National Legion of Decency, the Catholic watchdog organization that devoted itself to protecting the morals of the nation's moviegoers by rating movies on a scale from A to C, A being acceptable for all, C being condemned. Infamously, the Legion had condemned Charles Laughton's The Private Life of Henry VIII because it saw the picture as sanctioning divorce.6 Right-wing religious zealots were trying to put clamps on artistic freedom, and Bette Davis-an increasingly liberal Roosevelt Democrat who actually believed in the practice of liberty as well as the concept-was outraged. From the New York World-Telegram: "They would make all the women marry all the men in the movies. There would never be any illegitimate children on the screen-even if the story is based on a great cla.s.sic. And there would be very little real life in the movies if they had their way. We aren't making pictures for children. We're making them for adults."7 For the New York Times, she pitched a marvelous script: "Her idea is to have Laughton and herself cast as costermonger and fishwife in a sc.u.mmy waterfront hovel, with the domestic air filled with Billingsgate and dead fish. Florence McGee or maybe Bonita [Granville] would be their child-and a mean, no-account brat, too, according to the script Miss Davis has in mind. Anyway, after the necessary hour or so of unmitigated nastiness all around on the screen, daughter would knock off both her parents by stabbing them with a broken gin bottle in a moment of pique and then dope herself to death in an opium den at the screen age of about 13."8 Freed from the shackles of Warners' press office, Bette Davis was having herself a marvelous time.

The Times also reported, obviously getting its information directly from Bette, that she was refusing to do retakes on The Golden Arrow and was planning to send her studio a series of wires: "am in jail as dangerous character stop," "quarantined stop have measles stop," "and a few more just saying 'stop.' "

She headed to Boston on April 3, arriving at Boston's South Station at dawn. She thought she'd be making a quiet entrance, but Warner Bros. had arranged a rather more public greeting: the platform was teeming with reporters. "Smile, Miss Davis!" a photographer shouted. "Now wave your hand!" Bette was having none of it. "Oh, please!" she snapped. "Do let's be original! Suppose you take a picture of someone leaving a train without waving a hand-just this once."

That afternoon, a thousand guests attended a special luncheon in her honor at the Brae Burn Country Club in Newton.9 (A telegram in the Davis archives notes the contact she made with her father: "Congratulations and best wishes thank you for calling-Harlow M. Davis.")10 She was back in New York by April 7 when she received a message from Mike Levee, who told her that he'd notified Warners in writing of their demands but that he didn't put in writing the fact that she was threatening to refuse to return to work without changing her contract because this would have been what he called "exceedingly bad strategy." Levee advised her to stay in New York as long as she wanted, but he suggested that she rethink her refusal to do retakes for The Golden Arrow. As to her willingness to work for Warner Bros. beyond those retakes, however, Levee told Bette that it was entirely her choice.

By the time she left for New York, Davis had been trying to get Warners to agree to a new contract for at least a month. Her lawyer, Martin Gang, had met with Jack Warner in March with no success. What she wanted was reasonable-to her: a limit to the number of Warner pictures she would make in a given year; a vacation for three consecutive months; and, by the way, the right to do pictures for other studios during that time.11 In their memoirs, both Davis and Warner are clear about the situation regarding G.o.d's Country and the Woman-perhaps too clear. The reality is more nuanced. On May 24, Bette did a radio interview with Edwin Schallert and told his listening audience that her next film would indeed be G.o.d's Country and the Woman, that it was going to be in Technicolor, and that she was eager to see herself in color onscreen.12 On June 6 and again on June 8, Bette requested meetings with Jack Warner. She told the Warners executive Roy Obringer that she wanted to be on the Sh.e.l.l Chateau radio program on June 20-and she willingly agreed to plug G.o.d's Country as part of the agreement.13 Warner sent her the continuity script on June 18 and told her to report to Orry-Kelly the following day for costume discussions.14 Bette's response-a telegram to Warner-suggests that it wasn't G.o.d's Country that stuck in her craw; it was Warner's refusal to give her a new and more favorable contract. That, not "Timber!" is what really kept her from playing the lady lumberjack: "It has just come to my attention that Mike Levee has heretofore a.s.sured you that I would do the forthcoming picture without a change of contract. There has just been delivered to me a letter from Mr. Levee to that effect and I a.s.sume that a copy of it will come to your attention. Such representation to you by him was unauthorized and irrespective thereof a review of my actions since February would certainly be inconsistent with any such alleged promise. Bette Davis."15