Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 6

Davis's control in The Letter is only in part a matter of repression. She plays Leslie Crosbie as a bored, stifled housewife forced to expend her libido in the creation of a crocheted white coverlet. Still, her Leslie is also a sociopath, a calculating killer and remorseless liar, ceaselessly putting on acts for those around her because authentic emotions-other than murderous rage, that is-are not part of her psychological makeup. Even as Leslie fires the gun repeatedly at Hammond's dead body in the opening moments of the film, her face is stonelike, her feelings impossible to penetrate, and it's this ambiguity that makes it possible for audiences to question Leslie's motives from the beginning, even while we give her some benefit of the doubt.

There is a marvelous extended moment when Leslie's cold sociopathology, her wish to appear sympathetic while lacking all feeling, and Davis's generosity as an actor come together in overlapping, complementary silhouettes. When Joyce tells Robert that he has paid $10,000 for the letter, Wyler handles much of the scene in a single shot lasting about a minute and a half. Joyce is slightly out of focus on the left, with Robert sitting in the middle of the couch and Leslie slumped in the corner on the right. With the camera remaining static, Leslie performs the role of both the exhausted but exonerated innocent and the cunning killer, all with a minimum of gestures or words. A slight s.h.i.+ft of the eyes, a studied rearrangement of the hands, even an absence of movement altogether-all reveal the inner workings of Leslie's mind as the truth of her duplicity finally dawns on her gullible husband. And the balletlike interaction of Davis and Marshall demonstrates the difference between, on the one hand, two fine screen actors playing off each other toward a mutually satisfying end, and Miriam Hopkinslike upstaging on the other. Bette's subtle gestures compel our attention-and she's literally upstage of Marshall while she's performing them-but not at the expense of her costar, who plays it all with equal understatement. If anything it's Marshall's scene more than Davis's.

This is William Wyler's direction at its un.o.btrusive best as well. He lets the audience see the couple's imminent destruction without breaking them up into cra.s.s individual shots. We see the marriage collapse in a shower of tacit lies and their tense exposure in what is effectively a ninety-second two-shot, with an out-of-focus third wheel on the side serving as catalyst.

Curiously, Wyler himself had second thoughts about The Letter once he saw it in an a.s.sembled cut. The normally resolute director was convinced that he'd created a far too thoroughly unsympathetic Leslie Crosbie, and he was worried that audiences would react badly to his film as a result. The film's production notes reveal that after seeing the film with Hal Wallis, Wyler requested permission to reshoot and reconstruct the whole ending, and Wallis was inclined to let him do it as long as he stuck to a prearranged plan and didn't "start wandering [and] bringing in four or five alternate things."9 Wyler asked the screenwriter Howard Koch (who was working with the uncredited Anne Froelick) to rewrite these final scenes to provide a more compa.s.sion-inspiring Leslie.

This time it was Davis who prevailed. Alarmed that he was tinkering with something she knew was working fine as it was, she requested a screening of Wyler's initial cut. If Bette Davis was going to soften the character she'd struggled to make hard-edged, at least she wanted to see what she'd done before it was destroyed.

To what she oddly calls her "shame," she burst into tears at the end. After composing herself, she argued that what she called "the intelligent audience" would understand what she and Wyler were doing, and that if they filmed the rewritten scenes they would risk losing everyone.10 They did reshoot the final bedroom scene between Davis and Marshall on October 16 and 17, as well as a scene involving James Stephenson and Frieda Inescort (who plays Stephenson's wife, Dorothy Joyce), but this was scarcely the wholesale new ending Wyler had proposed.

When the annual Oscar nominations were announced, Davis found herself nominated for a third year in a row. After winning in 1938 for Jezebel, she was nominated in 1939 for Dark Victory but lost, of course, to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind. The critic Janet Flanner describes the logic: "As Hollywood abbreviates the paradoxes, in Victory, which was Davis's tops, she had to lose the Oscar to Leigh, who got it on The Wind because Davis had just got it on Jezebel because she hadn't got it on her next-to-tops Bondage because she had to lost it to Colbert in One Night, which was why Davis had got her original Oscar on Dangerous in the first place."11 Warners didn't do much campaigning for Davis this time. Its own gigantic-budget All This and Heaven, Too was up against The Letter in the Best Picture category, though Bette did get a nod as "Best Dressed Gal of the Week" for her "clever, self-designed slacks suit with a new kind of military aspect."12 At the ceremony, which was held at the Biltmore Hotel on February 27, 1941, the emcee Bob Hope noticed Bette in the audience and quipped, "Bette drops in on these affairs every year for a cup of coffee and another Oscar." But she didn't walk away with one that year. Ginger Rogers snared it for Kitty Foyle.

TONY GAUDIO HAD faced an unexpected problem during the filming of The Letter in the summer of 1940. Like any fine cinematographer, he had a sharp eye for shapes and shadows. So it wasn't surprising that he noticed that Bette was pregnant.

Gaudio "kept looking at me sideways," Davis later told her confidant, Whitney Stine. "Obviously, I couldn't have the baby, and I was upset as h.e.l.l. I had already had two abortions. I was only 32 and thought to myself that, if I married again and wanted to have a baby, my insides might be in such a mess that I couldn't. I cried and cried, but I knew what I had to do. (Where was that d.a.m.n pill when I needed it?) I went to the doctor on a Sat.u.r.day and showed up for scenes on Monday wearing a formfitting white eyelet evening dress for a scene. And that d.a.m.n Tony said, 'Jesus, Bette, it looks like you've lost five pounds over the weekend!' "13 Davis never revealed the ident.i.ty of the father, but that may be because she didn't know herself.

Bette reserved her most consistent affections for her dogs, who could be trusted to provide her a constant flow of all the simple love in dogdom. In the late 1930s she acquired a Pekingese she named Popeye after a fan magazine applied the cartoon moniker to Bette.14 (Actually Bette told the writer Gladys Hall that she herself thought her eyes resembled those of a bullfrog.)15 There was also Sir Cedric Wogs, a white Sealyham terrier sometimes called "Ceedie," sometimes "Wogs."16 Her favorite remained Tibby, the female black Scottish terrier. No wonder. A guide to dog breeds describes the Scottie: "This breed has unusual variable behavior and moods-it can get moody and snappish as an adult. It is inclined to be stubborn and needs firm, gentle handling from an early age or it will dominate the household."17 Bette once had a director's chair made for Tibby, complete with the pooch's name emblazoned on the back. A poodle, too, arrived sometime along the way. Ham's Doberman moved out along with Ham.

In "Divorce Is Making Her Miserable," Gladys Hall reported that Bette left the Coldwater Canyon house after splitting up with Nelson and moved into a furnished rental in Beverly Hills with her friend Ruthie Garland. An unsourced clipping in one of Davis's sc.r.a.pbooks identifies Garland as "an old friend from Boston"; check the credits for The Sisters and you'll find that Bette got her an acting job: the small role of Laura Watkins. (It's Garland's only screen credit.) Every Wednesday they had dinner at the counter at Steven's, a diner near the Warners lot that was operated by another Bostonian, Steven Draper.18 What Gladys Hall failed to report was that the other Ruthie, Bette's mother, had moved in with Bette first. But their relations.h.i.+p was fraught with tension, and Mother quickly moved out again in a huff. There were two different postdivorce rentals: one on North Rockingham and one on Beverly Grove.19 And the January 1939 Screen Guide claimed that Bette had moved in with Bobby and her husband.20 Wherever she was living, the Yankee-est girl who ever came down the pike had let loose. Bette finally launched the affair she'd always wanted with George Brent-whose second marriage had ended, as it had begun, in 1937-but it didn't last very long. "Our secretaries were so busy courting each other for us that it was inevitable that they would take over our romance," Davis wrote.21 She also had a brief fling with Anatole Litvak, of all people; after the shouting matches came l.u.s.t. The ever-overheated Lawrence Quirk has Miriam Hopkins, "still riddled with lesbian hankerings for Davis," telephoning Bette in a fury and threatening to name her as correspondent in Hopkins's divorce proceedings against Litvak.22 The only indication in Davis's personal sc.r.a.pbooks that Litvak was anything more than just one of her many directors occurs in a graffito added to a clipping about Bette attending the Warner Club Sixth Annual Dinner Dance at the Biltmore Hotel on February 17, 1940. Her escort was Litvak, after whose name Bette has appended a handwritten "!"23 In the late summer of 1939, a more long-lasting relations.h.i.+p began. In late July, after finis.h.i.+ng The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Ess.e.x (and before starting All This and Heaven, Too), Bette headed for Mountainville, New York, to spend two weeks with her friend Peggy Ogden. On August 14, the two women left by car for New England. The Boston Globe caught up with her on the Cape, in Dennis. "Mostly I am eating lobsters and clams," Bette declared. Davis also said that she was blissfully free of Warners' publicity department, going so far as to claim that her contract contained a clause that forbade any studio publicists to come within one hundred yards of her when she wasn't shooting a film.24 "After two weeks of roaming, seeing old friends whom I no longer had anything in common with, nor they me, I went to an inn in Franco-nia, New Hamps.h.i.+re," Bette later wrote. "It was called Peckett's."25 Franconia was, and remains, a small Yankee village about two-thirds of the way up New Hamps.h.i.+re toward Quebec. It's about ten miles from the Connecticut River, which divides New Hamps.h.i.+re from its neighbor, Vermont. About three miles in the other direction is the northwestern edge of White Mountain National Forest. Robert Frost once had a farmhouse there. The closest town of any size is Littleton, the population of which was then 5,000.

The a.s.sistant manager at Peckett's Inn was a thirty-three-year-old divorce named Arthur Farnsworth. Handsome, cultured, manly but refined, Farnsworth was more than just the a.s.sistant hotelier; he was an experienced pilot and aeronautic engineer-rather like Howard Hughes, only not crazy. He was also an accomplished violinist. Descending from praiseworthy Yankee stock and bringing along equally fine manners, Farney was a most acceptable beau for Bette during her time in Franconia.

The more stable relations.h.i.+p Bette began while in Franconia was with the land itself. She bought what she called "one hundred and fifty acres of rocky, rolling land" on Sugar Hill. (She later revised the figure upward to two hundred acres.)26 "It was here that I came out of my blue funk-here that I felt happy for the first time in years. New Hamps.h.i.+re and Farney were a tonic for me. I kept extending this rare vacation, hating to leave."27 The property had a name, which Bette kept: b.u.t.ternut.

In March 1940, the Hollywood press was all abuzz. Arthur Farnsworth and his sister were currently Bette's houseguests, and the sweet promise of nuptials filled the gossip columns. But one famous scribe wasn't so sure: "It wouldn't surprise me if she does marry, but I doubt it will be to Farnsworth," Louella Parsons noted.28 Louella may have been on to something. In late April, after finis.h.i.+ng work on All This and Heaven, Too, Bette set sail on the Monterey for a tenday vacation in Hawaii. Initially, the press reported that she was accompanied only by her friend Robin Byron.

Dateline: Honolulu, April 29: "Hundreds of people" greeted Bette Davis as the s.h.i.+p pulled into the dock. "Take off those dark gla.s.ses, Bette!" reporters shouted. "And Bette did and shouted back, 'h.e.l.lo, everybody!' Wearing a white linen sailor dress with navy blue trim and a pert little sailor hat, Bette repaid her fans for waiting long on the hot crowded dock. She stood out on her lanai suite so everybody could see her, talked across to the crowds, jingled her gobs and gobs of charm bracelets, and smiled for pictures." "She wants to take hula lessons," one reporter announced. Still another tracked Bette down a few days later and found her in "a bright red and white Tahitian print holoku she had purchased that afternoon." Davis had taken "a trip around the island, with a stop at Janet Gaynor's beach home for a swim, and of course a luau," at which Bette sampled poi with lomi lomi salmon. She'd also purchased a carved ivory pikake necklace for Ruthie.29 The journalists quickly discovered a much juicier detail: Bette was traveling with another friend besides Robin Byron. "Just the publicity director, not a boyfriend," Bette announced when asked who the short, good-looking, dark-haired man was-the one who was hanging around Bette's lanai. Thirty-one-year-old Robert Taplinger was indeed Warners' head of publicity. But with Farney having gone back East, and with Bette in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she was free to explore her coworker's other talents.

One member of the fourth estate was less than impressed with Bette's latest choice. "From outward appearance, you might think he was just a shoe clerk or something."

Dorothy Kilgallen, May 6: Warners is "tearing its hair over Bette Davis's sudden and serious romance with Robert Taplinger, the press agent, but she just giggles, and what can they do?"

Jimmie Fidler, May 8: "Arthur Farnsworth, Boston hotel Midas, is burning wires to Bette Davis in Hawaii, checking her 'romance' with a studio press agent."

Reporters swarmed when Davis and Taplinger-and Robin Byron-arrived back in Los Angeles on May 13. Bette flatly denied that the couple was planning to be married.30 Hedda Hopper noted that she was still going out on the town with Taplinger on June 1. Toward the end of the month, Sidney Skolsky broke the news that a single gardenia was arriving for her on the set of The Letter every day; there was no card, no note, but everybody knew it was from Taplinger.

After The Letter wrapped, Bette headed east for a three-month vacation. She arrived at Boston's South Station at noon on July 27 and was promptly greeted by what the Boston Traveler described as a crowd of 1,000 "unruly autograph seekers and hero-wors.h.i.+ppers, mostly young girls." With a ten-man police escort, she was swept along by the crowd to a waiting car and "whisked to the Ritz Carlton" for a press conference, at which she announced that her next film would be Calamity Jane. Davis was apparently of two minds about Calamity Jane. She wrote in Mother G.o.ddam that she "would have adored to play this character. Always one of my dreams, one that didn't come through."31 At the time, however, she told Modern Screen, "There's been some talk of Calamity Jane, which I politely trust I shall not do."32*

Bette had taken the train east with Robin Byron. Bob Taplinger had arranged for a special dinner on board with champagne, an empty chair for Bob, and a note: "Don't wait for me." Davis didn't. The affair was over.

THE GREAT LIE isn't great as much as it's outlandish: The das.h.i.+ng multimillionaire flier Peter Van Allen drunkenly marries the tempestuous concert pianist Sandra Kovak, but Sandra is a little vague about legalities; her divorce papers haven't actually been filed yet, so they aren't really married after all. Pete, sober for a change, goes on to marry his old sweetheart, the plain but wealthy Maggie, only to disappear over the jungles of Brazil, never having been told that during his weekend of inebriated illegal marriage he has impregnated Sandra, who is convinced by Maggie to bear the child, little Pete, who is raised by Maggie as her own son until Pete the father turns up alive, and Sandra threatens to reveal the truth to win both Petes back, and Maggie actually tells the truth and wins both Petes back, and Sandra loses the ball game. Surprisingly, Bette plays Maggie rather than Sandra.

* Jerry Wald's script for Calamity Jane, although written with Ann Sheridan in mind, was handed instead to Bette, but the film didn't get made until 1953, by which point it had become a Doris Day musical.33 Another of Bette's abortive projects around this time was the crime drama Danger Signal, which she emphatically didn't want to do; it was eventually made by Robert Florey in 1945.

"Before I started The Great Lie I wasn't very excited about it," Davis told an interviewer at the time of the film's release in the spring of 1941. "I had just come back from a vacation in New Hamps.h.i.+re [and] was still wondering what to do when I got some of my fan mail. A lot of it ran in this vein-'Why can't you be nice for a change?' I also remembered [that] someone, while I was in New Hamps.h.i.+re, said, 'Why, you're young!' Everyone apparently had the idea that I was an old woman due to the many older characters I played. . . . I guess I do need happier roles for a change. I don't kill anyone in this picture."34 It was scarcely news that Davis wasn't thrilled by The Great Lie. Hal Wallis was enraged when he read in Harrison Carroll's syndicated column in mid-November 1940-the film was then in the middle of shooting-that Bette didn't think it was terribly important: "This is just another motion picture," she blithely told Carroll. Wallis advised Jack Warner thenceforth to have the publicity department "keep people away from her."35 Warners had been developing the property-Polan Banks's bestselling potboiler, January Heights-since early that year. Warners was all over the map in terms of choosing a director. In late January, Hal Wallis was considering two: Curtis Bernhardt and William Dieterle.36 Less than a month later, Jack Warner was adamant: "Let us have it definitely understood that Vincent Sherman will be put on January Heights as the director."37 Bette added her two cents sometime later: she wrote to Wallis that yet another choice, Lloyd Bacon, simply wasn't right for the picture. Maybe they could borrow Garson Kanin from RKO, but "Eddie G. is the one if he would do it."

Goulding needed convincing. In late September Wallis ordered Henry Blanke to "keep after Goulding and have him start active preparation." Goulding started working on it later that week.38 Warners originally a.s.signed the script to the writer Richard Sherman, but Sherman took so long with it that they handed it over to Lenore Coffee in June. And still n.o.body liked it very much. Blanke was afraid that the story was so contrived that any alteration in the already-unstable plot might cause the whole thing to collapse. At one point they even killed little Pete.

George Brent was cast, appropriately enough, as the flier, Peter Van Allen. (The critic Matthew Kennedy describes Brent's character all too well: "He isn't much more than a hard-drinking sperm donor.")39 But the part of Sandra was up for grabs. Rosalind Russell met with Goulding over c.o.c.ktails in late September. Warners' casting director, Steve Trilling, scheduled a meeting with Joan Crawford and tried to sell her on the project by telling her the story verbally, pointedly avoiding showing her the script itself.

Tallulah Bankhead was mentioned. So was Vivien Leigh. Barbara Stanwyck turned it down because she didn't want to play an unsympathetic character at that particular time. "I'm dying to do Sandra!" Constance Bennett wired Hal Wallis in mid-October. Sylvia Sydney and Jane Wyatt were screen-tested, as was Anna Sten.

According to Mary Astor, Bette called her on the phone in December 1940 and asked her to play the role. "She personally wanted me for the part, she said, and she apologized for asking me if I would mind taking a test. 'A few idiots have to be convinced.' "40 Astor is slightly off on her chronology. January Heights, aka Far Horizon, aka The Great Lie, began filming on November 1 with the role of Sandra yet to be cast, though Astor's screen tests had taken place the previous week. Astor started shooting on November 15.

Thanks to Davis's intervention, Astor's Sandra Kovak is by far the juicier role. As Goulding described her, "She is brandy, men, and a piano"-the last on which she persistently pounds the thunderous chords of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat Minor as a way of burning up her overabundant energy. She's flamboyant, catty, and gorgeously gowned. Brent's Pete tells Bette's Maggie in contrast, "You smell of hay and horses and suns.h.i.+ne," a signal to stop breathing if there ever was one.41 As Astor wrote in her memoirs, Davis "was sullen and standoffish" at first. She watched nervously as Davis "smoked furiously and swung her foot in the angry rhythm of a cat's tail."42 After a few days of shooting, Davis just couldn't take it anymore. "Hey, Astor!" she announced. "Let's go talk a minute." They adjourned to Bette's dressing room. "She flopped on the couch and said, 'This picture is going to stink! It's too incredible for words. . . . I've talked to the writers and to Eddie, and everybody's satisfied but me, so it's up to us to rewrite this piece of junk to make it more interesting. All I do is mewl to George about "that woman you married when you were drunk" and "please come back to me" and all that c.r.a.p. And that's just soap opera.' "43 Davis's idea was frankly self-effacing. It meant building up the fiery, elegantly nasty Sandra character at the expense of her own. "Bette and I [became] as simpatico as a pair of dancers as we worked out the story," Astor wrote.44 When Astor won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, Bette sent her a cable: "We did it. Congratulations, baby." "People have said that I stole the picture from Bette Davis, but that is sheer nonsense. She handed it to me on a silver platter."45 Which is why, no doubt, Astor thanked two people in particular in her Oscar acceptance speech: Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky.46 The t.i.tle continued to be a matter of contention. Bette hated the last one the studio settled on. "I beg you not to call it The Great Lie," Bette told Jack Warner, because "the lie is not a great one" and "it gives away the whole story before anyone sees the picture." Goulding suggested one she thought she'd pa.s.s along to Jack: Aren't Women Fools? Warners stuck with The Great Lie.47 The Great Lie is great fun to the extent that Mary Astor is a great b.i.t.c.h. Orry-Kelly went out of his way to make Bette look dowdy-at one point he sticks her in a bizarre bonnet that makes her look like a cross between Little Bo Peep and Elvira Gulch-but he gives Astor the full treatment, with innumerable chic hats and furs and slinky black gowns. Her high international style only adds to her bite; the emotional stakes are always raised just that much higher when the vicious b.i.t.c.h looks fabulous.

Amusingly, when Maggie and Sandra adjourn to Arizona for Sandra's pregnancy-it looks a lot like the set for The Petrified Forest-they become a bickering married couple squabbling over ham and pickles, cigarettes and sleeping pills. Maggie even takes to wearing pants. As Sandra delivers her baby, the trousered Maggie paces back and forth on the porch like any other anxious father-to-be.

It's a fine moment onscreen as far as lesbian subtexts go, but the drama queen takes center stage in Sandra's mad scene, which comes complete with a howling desert windstorm, a well-barked "You make me sick!" directed at Maggie (the killjoy certainly deserves it), a marvelously histrionic attempt to set the house on fire by hurling a kerosene lamp against the wall, and an excellent full-volume shriek. Unfortunately, down-to-earth Maggie methodically slaps Sandra twice in the face, and it's all over.

IN 1940, FLUSH with home owners.h.i.+p in New Hamps.h.i.+re and a raise to $4,500 a week, Bette bought a house in Glendale. As an article in Look noted, Davis had lived in at least twenty-five different places over the course of the last decade alone. Evidently it was time to alight. The house she chose, located at 1705 Rancho Avenue, was a Tudor located on the banks (what banks there were) of the Los Angeles River, where a flood two years earlier had "washed the neighbors away."48 She reportedly paid $50,000 for it and dubbed it Riverbottom.49 Riverbottom wasn't a large house. Janet Flanner pointed out in the New Yorker that it was "probably the only two-bedroom, two-acre estate in the film colony."50 It was homey, not grand-Flanner called it a "peak-roofed Hansel and Gretel" house-and featured exposed beams holding up a high ceiling on the first floor; a brick patio; and a cozy breakfast room with a white dinette set. Davis's sc.r.a.pbooks are rife with pictures of the house, one of which Bette charmingly labeled "my first home in California." One photo shows a brick sidewalk with a floral border; another a circular brick raised planter in the backyard. The house sported not only a swimming pool but a stable, so naturally Bette bought a horse to go along with it. She labeled one sc.r.a.pbook picture "Laddie, my Arabian horse, Ruthie, and me, riding ring at Riverbottom"; Bette and her mother are seen being pulled around the driveway in a carriage.51 But her domestic preoccupation remained b.u.t.ternut and its complete renovation. Ruthie had been supervising things for several weeks by the time Bette arrived in August 1940 to see what had gone on in her absence. She traveled with Robin Byron and stayed at the nearby estate of the novelist Ernest Poole.

When it was completed, b.u.t.ternut became a rambling, three-sectioned white house with a relaxed living room with a white couch and a red brick fireplace; a large, functional kitchen with wood cabinetry painted white; and an unfortunate early American dining room with overly quaint wallpaper featuring a Huck Finnlike boy repeated ad infinitum all over the room. The living room fireplace chimney was unusual in that it served to heat the kitchen; the flue traveled under and across the kitchen floor before heading to the roof. Bette's bedroom had its own 3,500-pound fireplace suspended by girders from the ceiling and a big couchlike bed in the center of the room. There was a large screened-in porch, too, along with servants' quarters. Bette loved it. Her nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away.52 Davis arrived back in Hollywood in early October. After filming the revised scenes for The Letter, she began making The Great Lie.

She married Farnsworth on New Year's Eve, 1940, at her friend Jane Bryan's ranch in Rimrock, Arizona. (Jane Bryan was now Mrs. Justin Dart.) Farney had been proposing for quite some time, and finally Bette agreed. Whitney Stine describes the scene: "Three cars left Los Angeles on Monday morning, December 30, occupied by Davis, Ruthie, her hairdresser Margaret Donovan, [Donovan's] boyfriend Perc Westmore, dog Tibby, Lester Luisk [sic], cousin John Favor, and houseguest Ruth Garland. They picked up the marriage license in a driving rain in Prescott, Arizona. The weary travelers finally drove into the ranch on Tuesday afternoon. Sister Bobby and her husband flew in from Los Angeles with Dart in his private plane. The wedding was held that night." Farney had flown himself in from New England.53 There was no honeymoon. Davis had to start work on her next picture.

As a publicity stunt, The Great Lie's world premiere took place on April 5, 1941-Bette's thirty-third birthday-in Littleton. ("Warner Bros. did this for me at my request. The purpose of the premiere was to raise money for the Littleton Hospital," Davis later wrote, but the studio got great press no matter what.)54 Warner Bros. installed Davis-themed street signs all over town. For the duration of the gala, the All Saints Episcopal Church, for instance, was located at the corner of Dangerous and Dark Victory. Whitney Stine, always with an eye toward wardrobe, reports that "Davis, in a white blouse and felt skirt, and Farnsworth, in a plaid s.h.i.+rt, and brown corduroy suit, hosted a c.o.c.ktail party at the Iron Mine Inn in the afternoon."55 The New York Times rather snidely claimed that "crowds of celebrities and curious swelled this quiet community five times its normal size of 4500, and everybody stayed up way past the usual bedtime and liked it a lot."56 The governors of both New Hamps.h.i.+re and Vermont turned up. Life chronicled the event with a four-page spread. ("A birthday ballet is rendered by nervous s.h.i.+rley Walters of Littleton, aged 5," one caption reads.) The prescreening stage show featured a 200-pound plaster of paris birthday cake, which was perilously suspended by safety cables above certain unnamed dancers-possibly including nervous little s.h.i.+rley Walters-and then lowered to the stage. There was also a 103-pound edible cake baked by a man named Gerald Cork.u.m.57 But "the birthday gifts she most appreciated were cookies, candy, and preserves bestowed on her by Littleton people," Life glowed. And the town mortician gave Bette a bag of b.u.t.ternuts.58

CHAPTER.

12.

BREAKDOWN AND RECOVERY.

"IT WAS CALLED A COMEDY," DAVIS WRITES dismissively of The Bride Came C.O.D.1 And for once her a.s.sessment of humor is correct. The Bride Came C.O.D. is the worst screwball comedy ever made.

It's a cla.s.sic, abrasive screwball setup: a madcap heiress (Davis) becomes engaged to the wrong guy, a slick and conceited bandleader (Jack Carson). Her father is Eugene Pallette. (Pallette, whose voice is like an adenoidal foghorn, plays Carole Lombard's father in My Man G.o.dfrey and Henry Fonda's father in The Lady Eve and Gene Tierney's father in Heaven Can Wait.) Croaking, three-hundred-pound Dad hires a fast-talking, in-debt flier (James Cagney) to kidnap his dizzy daughter to keep her from getting married. Heiress and flier bicker and, by bickering, end up falling in love.

The Epstein brothers, Philip G. and Julius J., certainly knew how to fas.h.i.+on a script; they wrote Casablanca the following year, and they'd already written two little-known but perfectly serviceable screwball comedies, both for Barbara Stanwyck: The Bride Walks Out and The Mad Miss Manton. They'd even adapted No Time for Comedy, one of the higher-toned S. N. Behrman plays that Bette found preferable to It's Love I'm After. But with The Bride Came C.O.D., they fail to provide a single funny line. The closest they come to comedy is a near obsession with Bette's rump. They keep landing her, squarely and gluteally, on p.r.i.c.kly pear cacti. She jumps off the plane after Cagney crash-lands it in the desert-ha ha, she parks her rear on a p.r.i.c.kly pear. She crashes an old jalopy, goes flying out of the vehicle, and lands bottom-down on, yes, a cactus. In the meantime, Cagney has sling-shotted a rock directly at her behind. And guess where she comes to rest after parachuting from an airplane? It's demeaning, and not because Bette's a.s.s is sacrosanct. It's demeaning because n.o.body-not Davis, nor Cagney, nor the Epsteins, nor the director, William Keighley-can figure out a way to make any of it funny. Ernie Haller's silvery, high-contrast desert cinematography is the only reason to see the film.

Davis began shooting The Bride Came C.O.D. on January 8, 1941, a week after marrying Farney. He was protected from the press and Warners' publicists at first-he could stay home at Riverbottom while Bette was at the studio-but when the production moved to Death Valley in mid-January for the desert and western ghost town location shooting, he accompanied his bride and was much more on public display. It was his first exposure to the intrusive necessities of Hollywood stardom, but according to Davis he handled it with aplomb.

The company stayed at the Furnace Creek Inn, the 1927 mission-style hotel built by the Pacific Borax Company in the desert basin below the western slopes of the Funeral Mountains. The ghost town location was forty miles away. They filmed in the heat of the day, which makes it all the more remarkable-and implausible-that Davis is forced to wear a fur-collared coat through much of the film, though that's not nearly as far-fetched as the extraordinary smokeless campfire that Davis's character builds deep in an abandoned mine. The production wrapped on March 13, and the film was released in July.

THE LITTLE FOXES, Lillian h.e.l.lman's acidic play about an avaricious southern family in the 1900s, had opened on Broadway in February 1939 and played just shy of a year. Tallulah Bankhead led the cast as the heartless Regina Giddens who schemes with-and against-her two brothers for controlling interest in a new cotton mill. Davis's old friend Frank Conroy played Regina's sickly husband, Horace. Regina was a role tailor-made for Tallulah, but like Dark Victory it was also perfect for Bette, and by the summer of 1940, word had gotten out in Hollywood that Sam Goldwyn was planning to borrow Davis from Warner Bros. to play Regina under the direction of William Wyler. Louella Parsons claimed to have known it all along. "I printed some six months ago that Sam was literally moving heaven and earth to get Bette to play the role that Tallulah Bankhead created on the stage," Louella crowed on July 22.2 Goldwyn struck a rather complicated deal with Warner for Bette's services, and Warner agreed at least in part because he owed his rival a gambling debt. These men didn't play penny ante; Jack owed Sam a whopping $425,000.3 At first, it was a simple transaction. Goldwyn would lend Gary Cooper to Warner Bros. for Sergeant York, and Warner would lend Davis to Goldwyn for The Little Foxes; Warners would pay Davis, Goldwyn would pay Cooper, and that was it. But Goldwyn suddenly threw Miriam Hopkins into the mix. Goldwyn wanted Warner to take over his commitment to Hopkins, and so, Goldwyn reasoned, if he paid Cooper $150,000 and Hopkins $50,000, then Davis would end up costing him $200,000. But what would Warner Bros. do with Hopkins? Jack wanted to know. Goldwyn was vague, telling Warner, "You have a big studio and should have no difficulty" in finding something for Miriam to do.

On August 2, more than a week after Louella's bugle alert, Warner impatiently told Goldwyn it was Cooper for Davis as they had originally agreed or no deal. The final agreement was a slight compromise: Cooper went to Warners for $150,000, Davis went to Goldwyn for $150,000, and one or the other studio could use Hopkins under her existing contract with Goldwyn.4 But according to Davis and other sources, Goldwyn ended up paying her $385,000 for The Little Foxes. Not only that, but "Mr. Warner, on my steely request, gave me Warners' share of the deal."5 As the Hollywood historian Arthur Marx explains, "At the time, the standard practice was for the star to pocket the difference between the loan-out fee and the amount that the studio was paying the star," but Bette apparently got to keep it all.6 Tallulah's shadow loomed much larger than it had over Dark Victory. "I hadn't seen her in Foxes," Davis told James McCourt, "and when they signed me, I didn't want to." But Goldwyn told her and Farney to stop in Cleveland on their way back to Los Angeles from New Hamps.h.i.+re and see Bankhead perform the play. Unfortunately, they ended up getting lost en route and saw the play one evening later than planned. Bankhead was not pleased. "I had to go back and see her," Davis told McCourt, "and she was just livid."7 From Bette's perspective, Bankhead played Regina as a coldly greedy conniver, sinister from the start-an interpretation that made perfect sense, given the merciless thrust of h.e.l.lman's cleverly mean-spirited script. But Davis thought that Wyler wanted her to see Bankhead's Regina precisely so that she would come up with something different-something softer, easier to take. In Bette's version of the story, both Goldwyn, a hardheaded mogul, and Wyler, an equally tough director ("ruthless" was how the New York Times described him at the time), were terrified of this supremely toxic character-a woman who, by virtue of her vile nature, possessed the immoral authority to threaten ticket sales.8 Wyler and Goldwyn were convinced, Davis believed, that audiences would reject The Little Foxes unless the antiheroine of the piece-a woman who sits notoriously still in the climactic scene while her husband suffers a fatal heart attack, deliberately refusing to fetch the medicine that would save his life-wasn't just a little bit likable.

Davis had already had this argument with Wyler over Leslie Crosbie in The Letter; they would be pandering to the stupid by tenderizing the killer dame, and she was sick of it. That Wyler indeed wanted to take the edge off The Little Foxes gets some support from the fact that h.e.l.lman herself added the character of David Hewitt, the love interest for Regina's daughter, Alexandra, to the screenplay, specifically as a way of adding a touch of youthful romance to the otherwise harsh story. Goldwyn asked for opinions: Wyler loved it, but everyone else thought the juvenile love story just watered the whole thing down.9 "She thought I was making her play the part like Tallulah Bankhead," Wyler later argued.

I was not. It was the story of this woman who was greedy and high handed, but a woman of great poise, great charm, great wit. And that's the way Tallulah had played it on the stage. But Bette Davis was playing it all like a villain because she had been playing b.i.t.c.hes and parts like that. This is what made her at Warner Bros.-Jezebel and things like that. But she was playing Regina with no shading . . . all the villainy and greediness of the part but not enough of the charm and wit and humor and s.e.xiness of this woman. So, anyway, she thought when I tried to correct her that I was trying to make her imitate Tallulah Bankhead, which I was not. . . . We had terrible disagreements over the way we saw Regina, so things were kind of cool between us.10 Wyler was wrong on two points: Davis doesn't play Regina as a one-dimensional villain, and his relations with Davis weren't "cool." Not at first. They were fiery hot, like the late Santa Ana winds that blew through Los Angeles in late April and early May 1941, when The Little Foxes went into production. Raymond Chandler once described the Santa Anas as burning, parching currents that "come down through the mountain pa.s.ses and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."11 Add to Chandler's list of Santa Ana jitters, itches, and murderous women the heat of blazing movie lights in a barnlike sound studio; the pressure of a running, whirring camera; and a series of ten-pound period-piece Edwardian gowns, and the result for Bette was catastrophic.

The temperature skyrocketed as early as the wardrobe and makeup tests, when Bette was subjected to unhelpfully contradictory advice. Wyler would voice one opinion, someone else quite the opposite, and Bette was caught in the middle, a position that preyed on her insecurities. When Wyler criticized her, she took it personally. Which is the way he meant it. She'd brought Perc Westmore along to Goldwyn to do her makeup, and she showed up one day with her face covered with aging makeup made of calcimine, a whitewash made of zinc oxide and water. "You look like a clown," Wyler told her.12 "Later on they photographed a dinner scene," Warners' Roy Obringer reported to Jack Warner-because of the loan arrangement, Warner Bros. had a stake in Bette's ability to complete the picture- and Davis, on account of her sick and hysterical condition, didn't get into the scene properly, and Wyler criticized the scene and . . . stated it was the lousiest dinner scene he had ever witnessed and possibly they had better get Bankhead.

Davis gradually got more hysterical and ill due to the constant change of makeup and wardrobe and the criticism and finally made up her mind that she had better get off the lot. [The source of his information was Davis's lawyer, Dudley Furse.] However, this situation was quieted down, and Goldwyn stated he would not need her from May 12 up until last Wednesday, the 21st. At this time Davis actually became ill and nervous and was much exhausted. Her doctor, Dr. Moore, advised her that she should not attempt to work but needed rest. It then appears that Goldwyn and Espy [Goldwyn's controller, Reeves Espy] stated that they actually didn't need Davis and could shoot around her from the 21st [until] June 5.13 Whitney Stine reported that Davis actually did walk out on May 12-Furse was putting the best face on the situation-and when she did, Hollywood lit up with rumors: "(1) She was pregnant. (2) She was divorcing her husband. (3) She was feuding with Wyler. (4) She was feuding with Sam Goldwyn. (5) She was being replaced by Miriam Hopkins. (6) She was being replaced by Katharine Hepburn. (7) She was taken off the film because she could not stack up to the original New York actors. (8) It was 100 degrees on the sound stage, and the star collapsed from the heat. (9) She walked off the set because Wyler disliked her long eyelashes."14 "It's a sit-down strike, not a nervous collapse," Erskine Johnson declared in the Los Angeles News. And Mayme Ober Peake was emphatic: Bette was definitely not expecting a visit from the stork.15 Douglas Churchill of the New York Times took the long view: "The outbursts were little different from those that marked the filming of Jezebel."16 But they were different. Two earlier pictures and a failed love affair with the "ruthless" Wyler; a high-profile performance riding on an extreme amount of money; a most frustrating inability to blame Jack Warner for anything that went wrong; and most of all a lack of confidence in her director's vision coupled with her own Yankee intransigence-all conspired together to hurl Bette Davis into another nervous breakdown, Erskine Johnson's bland claim of a "sit-down strike" to the contrary notwithstanding. It took several doctors as well as personal a.s.surances from both Wyler and Goldwyn, offered directly over the phone, to calm her down and enable her to go back to work.

The New York Times's Thomas Brady was on the set the third week of June, and his description of Davis's performance casts doubt on both Davis's and Wyler's accounts of the core dispute: Regina's nature. "Miss Davis seemed intent last week on interpreting her role with gayety and daring; Wyler wanted subtle repression. . . . Miss Davis was icy in deferring to his wishes, and each was monstrously patient with the other. When one scene reached its eighth or ninth take, Mr. Wyler told Miss Davis she was rattling off her lines. Her response was cool enough to make the set suitable for a Sonja Henie skating spectacle."17 Perhaps Wyler was right after all; the Santa Anas had pa.s.sed, and an Arctic chill moved in for the duration of the filming. Davis finished shooting on July 3.18 "I ended up feeling I had given one of the worst performances of my life," Davis recalled.19 Lillian h.e.l.lman was evidently ambivalent about the film. She wrote to Arthur Kober after seeing the film and called it a "fine picture as pictures go, but it should have been better, and I think w.i.l.l.y did a bad job."20 It didn't "hit hard enough," she felt. But late in life, she told Austin Pendleton, who directed a 1980 Broadway production with Elizabeth Taylor, that "the one that came closest to what I intended was w.i.l.l.y Wyler's film."21 Davis is noticeably less self-a.s.sured in The Little Foxes than she should be. Her clashes with Wyler produced a kind of nervous indecision in place of the calculatedly suppressed drive that is both Regina's hallmark and Bette's own. After Horace (Herbert Marshall) returns from an extended hospitalization in Baltimore with the pallor and physical slackness of the imminently dead, Regina greets him by bursting gaily through a pair of enormous sliding doors and dismissing his illness by remarking with a forcedly mild tone, "It sounds almost like a holiday. . . . And here I was, thinking you were in pain."

"I was thinking about us," Horace feebly replies, to which Regina responds, clipping her words like scissor shears as she rises to leave, obviously bored: "About us. About you and me. After all these years." She is literally looking down on him when she concludes, "Well. You can tell me everything you thought. Some day." It's one of Davis's most effective line readings precisely because it's so unredeemably nasty-glib sarcasm about the future directed at a man she knows is actively dying.

The matter-of-fact tone Davis deploys when delivering one of the film's most quotable lines is terrifying in its simplicity: "I hope you die. I hope you die soon. I'll be waiting for you to die." Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but Davis correctly understands in this instance that poison works best at room temperature.

The film's set piece-Regina gazing in lethal pa.s.sivity while Horace suffers his heart attack-derives at least some of its force from Davis's and Wyler's contradictory approaches to Regina. Bette is lounging, even slouching on the couch when Horace drops the medicine bottle and gasps for her help. From the time Horace forces himself up from his wheelchair, Wyler handles the sequence in only two shots, both of which focus on Regina, the second somewhat closer than the first. Critics who describe this sequence as deep focus miss the point; the cinematographer Gregg Toland, obviously at Wyler's behest, keeps his lens focused on Davis and her murderous gaze while Marshall-remaining visible throughout-increasingly loses clarity as well as physical strength in the background.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell, appreciating the thrust of Davis's performance, nevertheless errs when he describes Regina as "watching her husband die, as if her gaze deprives him of life." Cavell's larger point about the power of the female gaze is right on the money, but in fact Regina isn't watching Horace at the moment in question. (Moreover, he doesn't die-not yet, anyway.) She's depriving him of vitality by refusing him any human connection at all-not his medicine, not her attention. Her authority comes from her steadfast refusal to engage him by watching him suffer.

LOUELLA PARSONS NOTED in October 1940 that Bette had dined twice with the playwright George S. Kaufman during a stopover in New York on her way back to Hollywood from b.u.t.ternut. They talked about adapting The Man Who Came to Dinner, his current Broadway comedy hit, into a film. Upon her return to Hollywood, Bette began lobbying for Warner Bros. to cast her in the picture, but she was told rather peremptorily that her request was premature.22 She wanted to play a central role but an unusually sober one for her: that of the eponymous houseguest's secretary, a sophisticated New Yorker who falls in love with a small-town midwestern newspaperman.

Bette had to meet with Kaufman in New York because, as Ann Kaufman Schneider notes, "my father, of course, never bothered to go out to California. He never had anything to do with movies. He'd had quite a lot of trouble in 1935 with Mary Astor-their affair and all that stuff. He fled, literally, and didn't go out there again for years. He sold the picture rights [to The Man Who Came to Dinner] and that was it. It was a very good, unglamorous, unneurotic part for Bette."*

* In 1935, during a bitter custody battle with her recently divorced husband, portions of Mary Astor's personal diary, including intimate details of her ongoing affair with the then-married Kaufman, were released to the press, and Kaufman was all but hounded back to New York from Hollywood.

According to Parsons, Davis and Kaufman discussed the possibility of building up the part of the secretary, Maggie Cutler, so it more closely matched that of Sheridan Whiteside, the imperious radio commentator and critic who slips and falls on the icy front steps of a businessman's house in Ohio and ends up staying for a month and commandeering everyone's personal lives in addition to the living room, dining room, and library. The actual film adaptation would not be done by Kaufman and Hart, though; as Ann Schneider notes, her father and his writing partner took the rights money and banked it and left the rewriting to others, namely Julius and Philip Epstein.

Hal Wallis and Jack Warner floated various ideas for the cast and director; Bette's winning the role of Maggie Cutler was far from certain. Wallis wanted Jean Arthur or Myrna Loy. On Broadway, Sheridan Whiteside was being played to rave reviews by Monty Woolley, but n.o.body knew who Woolley was outside of New York and Yale, where he taught drama, so he wasn't considered for the film. Bette strongly advocated John Barrymore and took it upon herself to write to Spencer Berger, the Barrymore family's factotum: "I'd love to do that play with Mr. Barrymore-any play with Mr. Barrymore-but I think this one would be excellent for the screen with him. So let's hope my bosses agree."23 The idea of the great, thundering John Barrymore was appealing enough for Warners to give him a screen test in May 1941, but as Hal Wallis later noted, "I couldn't risk it. The dialogue . . . was tremendously complicated, and Barrymore was drinking so heavily that he had to read his lines from cue cards."24 Charles Laughton was eager to do the role and was screen-tested, too, but as his agent told Warners, he knew "that the test wasn't up to par."25 Cary Grant was interested. In fact, he said, he'd do the film for free as long as Warner Bros. kicked in $125,000 to the British War Relief Fund. Grant's partic.i.p.ation piqued the interest of Howard Hawks in directing the picture.26 Others considered for Sheridan Whiteside, if only by their press agents, were Fredric March and Robert Benchley. Charles Coburn put himself out of the running by refusing to make a screen test.27 Mary Astor was tested for the role of Lorraine, the flashy actress who tries to steal Bert Jefferson, the reporter, away from Maggie. Ronald Reagan was considered for Bert, and Danny Kaye was mentioned as Banjo, the antic Hollywood comedian modeled after Harpo Marx.

At the end of March, Jack Warner invited a young hotshot actor-director to dinner at his house to discuss the project. The Man Who Came to Dinner rather than The Magnificent Ambersons might well have been Orson Welles's second film. Welles had finished shooting Citizen Kane-it hadn't been released yet-and was nosing around for a new project. The dinner went well, and Warner and Welles came to a tentative agreement: Welles would play Sheridan Whiteside for $100,000, but if he also directed the film he'd get $150,000. The two men mapped out the rest of the cast: Ann Sheridan would play Lorraine, and Barbara Stanwyck, Paulette G.o.ddard, or Carole Lombard would be Maggie. If he didn't direct it himself, Welles said, he wanted either Hawks or Leo McCarey.

Jack Warner and Hal Wallis gave the role of Maggie to Bette at a meeting in June while Davis was still shooting The Little Foxes, and the film started shooting the following month. Grant was out; Monty Woolley was in. Reagan was out; Richard Travis was in. Danny Kaye and Mary Astor were out; Jimmy Durante and Ann Sheridan were in. Welles, of course, was very much out, and in his place, absurdly, was William Keighley: from Citizen Kane to The Bride Came C.O.D.

"I felt the film was not directed in a very imaginative way," Davis later noted with remarkable understatement. "For me it was not a happy film to make."28 Asked if she had any trouble with Bette during the making of The Man Who Came to Dinner, Ann Sheridan was dismissive: "Oh, no. Very, very little. She wasn't happy about a lot of things . . . but this had nothing to do with me. I adored her. Wouldn't dream of fighting her at all-so she got very nice. She was just temperamental. Who isn't now and then?"29 This was a period of physical as well as emotional distress for Davis; she kept suffering mishaps. In April she's said to have mildly poisoned herself by drinking household ammonia in the mistaken belief that it was potable spirits of ammonia. In May was the nervous breakdown. In late July she fell down some steps leading to a soundstage and broke a small bone. And however temperamental she may have been during the production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, the greatest uproar was caused not by Bette but by a dog. Mike, a Scottie, got a little too boisterous in mid-September and bit Bette Davis squarely on the nose.

"The dog was too highly bred," Ruthie Davis told the press. "He was strange to us, and it just happened." Mike seems to have had a thing for noses; he'd bitten Farney's the week before just after Farney climbed into bed at night.30 Bette's injury was severe enough to send her home-all the way to b.u.t.ternut. She left Los Angeles around September 17. Warners expected her back at the beginning of October, but the bite marks were slow to heal. "Scab not off nose yet," Bette wired Wallis from b.u.t.ternut on the second, "and nose still very red. Am hoping it will be all right by Thursday when I get in."31 She returned to the studio on Friday, the tenth, and the production wrapped at the end of the following week.

The Man Who Came to Dinner is disappointing even without imagining what Orson Welles would have done with it. Monty Woolley is quite amusing as the hammy Whiteside, but Keighley has a penchant for cutting to medium shots or close-ups of him just when he's at his stage-training broadest. Still, Woolley's acerbic verbal delivery is up to Kaufman and Hart's snappy dialogue. Asked by Bert how he thinks Ohio women "stack up," Sheridan Whiteside responds, "I've never gone in for stacking women up so I really can't say." (Woolley had a sharp wit of his own. One night while cruising the New York streets for trade with his friend Cole Porter, they pulled the car up next to a sailor, who asked with superb candor, "Are you two c.o.c.ksuckers?" "Now that the preliminaries are over," Woolley quickly replied, "why don't you get in and we can discuss the details?")32 For Bette, Maggie Cutler was a refres.h.i.+ng change from the needling neurotics, suppressed hysterics, and cold sociopaths she'd been playing for several years. Her restraint plays well against Ann Sheridan's showy, divine Lorraine. Hal Wallis made an apt observation: "It was like her first film, Bad Sister, in a way-here she was, the drab wren up against the flashy peac.o.c.k! Bette was full of surprises, and her not minding her status on this picture was one of them."33 For Bette, the problem is not Maggie Cutler's little-brown-wrennishness; in fact, the urbane Maggie sports some of Orry-Kelly's most wearable suits. The trouble is that she's forced to fall in love with Richard Travis, whose toothy grin is as annoyingly omnipresent as Maria Sch.e.l.l's in The Brothers Karamazov. Travis is a blandly handsome blond, not muscular enough to be beefcake, not magnetic enough to be watchable. As Maggie notes while munching on a hot sweet potato at a fake-looking soundstage skating pond, "Funny thing is-you are sort of attractive in a" (pause) "corn-fed sort of way." She's right. Whether or not he's enough to give up her career and move to Ohio for is something else again.

JAMES MCCOURT AND Bette Davis were discussing the distinctive swing-stride of her walk when McCourt mentioned James Baldwin's famous line: "Bette Davis walks like a n.i.g.g.e.r." "Yes, they told me," Davis replied. "What do you say back to that?"34 Unlike Davis herself, Baldwin was a great admirer of In This Our Life, in which Davis's toxic belle frames a black legal a.s.sistantchauffeur for her own hit-and-run. "Bette Davis, under the direction of John Huston, delivered a ruthlessly accurate (and much underrated) portrait of a Southern girl," Baldwin wrote. "She thus became, and, indeed, remained, the toast of Harlem because her prison scene with the black chauffeur was cut when the movie came uptown. The uproar in Harlem was impressive, and I think that the scene was reinserted; in any case, either uptown or downtown, I saw it. Davis appeared to have read, and grasped, the script-which must have made her rather lonely-and she certainly understood the role. Her performance had the effect, rather, of exposing and shattering the film, so that she played in a kind of vacuum."35 "It was one of the worst films made in the history of the world," said Bette.36 In This Our Life-which is indeed rent apart by Davis's willfully foul performance-is saddled with a t.i.tle that seems at first notice to mean something but, upon reflection, does not. Based on Ellen Glasgow's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, it's the story of two Virginia sisters, each of whom has, for no discernible reason, a man's name: Stanley and Roy. (Manly names for women were all the rage in 1941: Hedy Lamarr was a Johnny and a Marvin that year, and the eponymous heroines of Frank Borzage's Seven Sweethearts were called Victor, Albert, Reggie, Peter, Billie, George, and most outrageous of all, Cornelius.) Stanley (Davis) is the wild one, Roy (Olivia de Havilland) the good girl. The potboiler story has Stanley running off with Roy's husband (Dennis Morgan), who descends rapidly into shame and despair and ends up killing himself. Stanley returns home after a brief period of convalescent hysteria and brazenly comes on to the earnest lawyer she'd jilted (George Brent), but he's now romancing Roy, however tepidly, so in a fit of pique Stanley gets drunk at a roadhouse, speeds away in her flashy car, runs over and kills a little girl, stops and looks back momentarily before speeding away again, and blames Parry (Ernest Anderson), the black chauffeur, after the police identify her car. (Parry is studying law while working both as the family's driver and George Brent's legal a.s.sistant.) The truth outs, Stanley engages in a terrifically overwrought scene with her corpulent, all-too-loving uncle (Charles Coburn), and drives her car over a cliff. "Yeah, she's dead," an inappropriately bored cop sighs at the end.

Sure, the film is on the silly side despite its liberal racial politics and daring suggestion of the uncle's incestuous desire for Stanley; he actually tells her he's got something in his pocket, and she goes rooting around looking for it. And yet under Huston's sharp-eyed direction (and with Howard Koch's smart screenplay and Ernie Haller's moody, shadowy cinematography), the film rises above its material, as does Davis, who repeatedly voiced her contempt for the thing but left it curiously unexplained other than to say that the novel was better. What James Baldwin admired about Davis in In This Our Life still retains its bite. By "a ruthlessly accurate . . . portrait of a Southern girl," Baldwin means a superficially charming, mercilessly selfish tramp who drives her husband to suicide, ends her mourning by dancing a rhumba, and lays the blame for a crime she knows she committed on an innocent black man, all with a sickening degree of viperish southern narcissism. There is nothing in Davis's performance to convey the slightest sympathy for this spoiled white woman, and Baldwin clearly approved. If Davis became "the toast of Harlem," it was precisely because Stanley Timberlake is one of her most uncompromisingly nasty creations, the epitome of evil white privilege, and, as such, she is enormously entertaining. Listen to her deliver this diatribe to her character's overly indulgent uncle when the scoundrel announces, stunned, that he has been given only six months to live: "All right, so you're going to die!" Stanley rises in a fury of frustrated greed, the unbridled rage of an egomaniac denied her rightful attention. "But you're an old man! You've lived your life! I haven't lived mine-mine's hardly begun! Think of me, Uncle! Think of what'll happen to me if you don't get me out of this. You're not even listening! You don't care what happens to me any more than the others! You'd let me go to prison! All you're thinking about is your own miserable life! Well you can die for all I care! Die!" Scenes like this make life worth living.

"Bette fascinated me," Huston wrote in his autobiography. "There is something elemental about Bette-a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears. The studio was afraid of her-afraid of her demon. They confused it with overacting. Over their objections, I let the demon go."37 Davis was not the only pa.s.sionate player involved in the production. "Huston was and is a most attractive man," Jack Warner recalled, "and during the filming of this Davisde Havilland epic anyone could see that it was cold outside but Valentine's Day on the set. When I saw the first rushes I said to myself: 'Oh-oh, Bette has the lines, but Livvy is getting the best camera shots.' " Huston and de Havilland weren't just having a torrid affair. They were openly living together at the time, and de Havilland herself was showing signs of anxiety, not only about her relations.h.i.+p with the volatile Huston but about constantly finding herself in front of the cameras, having just finished two other films back-to-back before starting In This Our Life without a break. Davis had top billing, but de Havilland was getting the bulk of Huston's lavish photographic attention, and Warner warned him that he'd better "get back on track."

"Huston has a huge heart of lead beneath that fine gray head of his, and in a few hand-picked words he told me to go you know where," Warner noted.

Warner's solution was ingenious if abstruse. He escorted Bette, Huston, de Havilland, and the producer David Lewis into a studio screening room and showed them some rushes, after which he told them, "Tell you what-you all go ahead and finish the picture as is. We'll get our money out of it because these kids will draw, but I won't go to the preview."

"You won't go to the preview?" Bette snapped.

"No," I said.

And Bette caught my little pop fly to the infield, and suddenly she used all the four-letter words, and some that were new to me, on Lewis. She came close to tearing out every seat in Projection Room No. 5, and she would have given everyone a punch in the nose if I hadn't interfered.38 Living on the emotional edge had become as natural to Bette Davis as her means of coping with it: shouting and swearing. But there was an added reason for panic as the production got under way. Farney, in Minnesota doing some consulting work for Minneapolis Honeywell on the basis of his aviation expertise, had developed a bad case of lobar pneumonia, his second in less than a year. He was rushed to Abbott Hospital, where, on Monday, October 20, his fever spiked to 106.

Bette was called at the studio, and she quickly left for Minneapolis. With the help of Howard Hughes, who provided an airplane on short notice, she flew via Kansas City and Des Moines before reaching Rochester, Minnesota; she drove the rest of the way. She found Farney in critical condition but beginning to respond to the sulfa drugs his doctors were administering. She and Farney's mother, Lucille-a st.u.r.dy, stocky Yankee gal with spectacles-checked into the Curtis Hotel.39 "Farney not out of danger yet-doctor thinks by end of week will definitely know," Davis cabled Warners. "Am so sorry about Farney and of course understand," Hal Wallis replied. At first, she planned to take the Super Chief back to Los Angeles, but then she decided to fly, which she hated to do, so much so that Farney's doctor forbade her to get back on a plane. As Dr. J. C. Davis of Minneapolis explained in a wire to the studio, her trip to Minnesota had "exhausted her due to her inability to relax in the plane with the result that it has required four days for her to recuperate." She arrived on the Super Chief on the thirtieth and proceeded straight to the studio in Burbank.40 Because of Farney's illness, In This Our Life was behind schedule even before Huston started shooting it, and by mid-December, Jack Warner was irate. Referring to the footage Huston was cranking out every day, Warner told the director on the seventeenth, "[I think you] can just exactly double what you are taking."41 That was the day Bette caused a further delay by falling ill. "She is confined to bed with the flu," Dr. Paul Moore told the studio.4