Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis Page 16

  Davis reported that she “collapsed,” sick, in her dressing room after the show. That’s when Harlow made his entrance. “He was as formal as ever and even more elegant,” she wrote in The Lonely Life. Characteristically, Bette’s father complimented the play and the other actors but said nothing about her or her performance.30 “I didn’t realize then how captive he was in his role,” Bette went on, rather too benignly. “I didn’t realize how inarticulate he could be, for all his brilliance. His voice became even more formal, more impersonal. He was always the gentleman. ‘Would—would you care—to go out with me and have a little supper?’ ” She declined his offer and sent him on his way, a pitiless reaction she described with vague regret.31

  Having paid her father back with a harsh rejection of her own, she turned on her mother.

  Bette had to learn both roles while suffering through the hysterical measles, and she was never one to suffer in silence: “I have always loathed being read to, and Ruthie sat at my bed and read [the scripts] over and over until I thought I’d go mad. I couldn’t eat. I was weak, irritable, and Mother became my victim. I threw the scripts across the room, howling in despair.”32

  Ruthie, the object of Bette’s unconscious blame all along, responded by doing a bit of acting out herself: she neglected to set the alarm clock on the first day of rehearsals for The Wild Duck, a not-so-subtle act of sabotage. Bette, plied full of Ruthie’s odd measles remedy—milk and Virginia Dare wine—responded by taking her hysteria to a more feral level: “I went berserk. I bit Mother on the shoulder. My teeth dug into her flesh right through her woolen dress.”

  They arrived at the rehearsal an hour late. Cecil Clovelly greeted them in a cold rage. “Get out, Mother! And stay out!” Bette shrieked.33

  Biographers thrive on episodes like this—tight incidents that pull together the essential strands of our subjects’ psyches into a rope strong enough for us to hang them with it. And we tend to characterize the hanging not as a murderous impulse on our part—we’re never at fault—but as an act of suicidal self-exposure on the part of our subjects. In this case, Bette herself supplied the facts; we simply present them. With The Wild Duck, Davis hands us a situation so clinically exact, so dramatically telling, that the interpretation forms itself. To return to Janet Malcolm’s metaphor, it’s Davis who parades herself naked before the keyhole, and all we are doing, her chroniclers and readers, is crouching down in a spying posture and watching in titillated awe as she makes a spectacle of herself for our entertainment. If anything, the moment when she bites her mother and draws blood is our cue to stand up from our squatting position at the keyhole and brazenly peer into the room because our subject has thrown the door wide-open for us.

  There is no doubt that the role of Hedvig held especially painful consequence for Bette. She and Ruthie had actually seen Blanche Yurka perform The Wild Duck in Boston in January 1926, with the ill-fated Peg Entwistle as Hedvig.* The play certainly struck a chord in her, and Bette later claimed that she decided then and there that the role would be hers someday.34 “He’ll never come home to us again,” Hedvig cries. “I think I’ll die from all this! What did I do to him? Mother, you’ve got to make him come home! . . . Yes, I’ll be all right—if only Daddy comes back.”35

  The resonances between The Wild Duck and Bette’s own family go beyond the paternal abandonment that sends the girl into a paroxysm of guilt and self-recrimination. Hedvig’s father is a professional photographer, but it is her mother, Gina (played by Yurka), who does the careful, painstaking work of retouching. Hjalmar, like Harlow, believes that he sees the world with the clarity of a lens, but Gina understands not only the need to turn raw reality into a more beautiful fantasy but that this artistic process requires hard, straining work. She teaches this skill to Hedvig.

  * After a disappointing career, Entwistle committed Tinseltown’s most symbolic suicide by jumping off the letter H of the “Hollywoodland” sign in 1932.

  What Bette Davis made of Hedvig’s breakdown scene is legendary. “Bette Davis was by no means an accomplished actress at the time,” Yurka once recalled. “Her mother, frankly, was a pain in the neck, and it’s a miracle she didn’t sink Bette’s career from the outset. She was endlessly and sentimentally fussing over her. She was a weak, silly creature. . . . The show-biz mother to end all! Even Bette, overeager and full of tears and tantrums, was a maddening handful. But one gets an instinct in this business. I knew Bette would be a great Hedvig. She would attack the part—not with technique but with her nerves and her heart.”36

  Yurka underrehearsed Bette in Hedvig’s breakdown scene. “It was a risky thing to do with such an inexperienced youngster,” Yurka said, “but I followed my hunch and merely told her to let herself go when she came to the spot. But on opening night, even I was not prepared for the torrent of emotional intensity which rocked that frail body as she lay downward on the sofa, crying her heart out.”37

  But one is mistaken to think that Bette was crying out to Harlow in that scene; Hedvig is not pleading with her father because her father has already left. She’s crying out to her mother and, more important, blaming herself.

  Harlow’s reaction to Bette’s casting was equally overheated. The routinely unemotional Harlow is said to have panicked at his daughter’s imminent appearance in a play that so closely mimicked their own lives. All three members of the fractured Davis triangle felt the magnitude of the moment. Ruth Elizabeth Davis was giving the performance of her life.

  As electrifying as these revelations may be, the most significant aspect of Bette’s appearance in The Wild Duck is precisely that: her appearance. No one—not her director, not the other actors, not the audience, and perhaps not Bette herself—was prepared for the firestorm of anguish that Bette threw at them on opening night. That degree of raw naturalism was extreme, shocking. It was an outpouring of deeply personal agony that, as the critic Martin Shingler has noted, Bette had long tried to hold in check. But as Shingler pointed out, this was the theater, and through the repetition of theater Bette learned to formalize her own despair: “Having to do this night after night for the entire run of the play, Davis developed the technique of drawing upon her own contained neurosis, hysteria and paranoia, channeling them into her performances.”38 Davis had performed before, but now she was an actress. Like the burning episode at Crestalban, it took an extreme situation to bring out her essential nature.

  Bette Davis maintained throughout her public life that her father’s abandonment meant little to her, that she never grieved his absence, and that her initial response to her parents’ separation—“Now we can go on a picnic and have a baby”—was not only artlessly childlike but essentially honest.39 Ibsen provides the key to Davis’s denial in The Wild Duck: Dr. Relling, the Ekdahls’ downstairs neighbor and the play’s voice of compassion, maintains an unshakable belief in what he calls “the life-lie,” the fantasy that enables one to go on in the face of empty despair: “The life-lie, don’t you see? That’s the animating principle of life.” It was this denial that enlivened Bette Davis and enabled her to turn hurt into art. It was a lie deeply dug and all-but-fully covered, and it drove her to act. Ceaselessly.

  Harlow showed up for the opening night in Boston, as did Uncle Myron and Aunt Mildred, Ruthie’s longtime friends the Woodwards, and a number of Bette’s old schoolmates. (Her beau Charlie Ainsely chose that moment to give her a fresh taste of abandonment by having a note delivered to Bette breaking off their brief engagement. As Bette described it, Ainsely’s father was blamed: “disapproved of actresses . . . we were too young. . . knew I would understand . . . and forgive . . . helpless against them . . . so sorry!” This before the curtain went up.) At the end, there was a curtain call for Yurka, then the whole cast, after which Yurka took Bette’s hand and brought her to the edge of the stage, and exited, leaving Bette alone onstage. She was in tears: “I was alone—onstage and everywhere; and that’s the way it was obviously meant to be. . . . This was the true beginning of the one, great,
durable romance of my life.”40

  BETTE WAS EITHER unable or unwilling to leave the set of Jezebel to attend Harlow’s funeral, which was held on January 3 at the Mt. Auburn Crematory Chapel in Cambridge, though she did request that she be allowed not to return to work until later that afternoon.41 She was always the proper Yankee. (The Boston Post misunderstood the rent, fraught nature of Harlow’s family when it announced that “Miss Davis wired her mother, Mrs. Minnie Stewart Davis, from Hollywood to say that she would not be able to attend the services. . . .”)42

  One particular studio memo—the one about Bette’s late call on the third—also contains this alarming addendum: “I hope to get some definite information today regarding a second unit from Blanke, and also if and when Dieterle is to take this picture over.” Warners’ front office had been growing increasingly disturbed by Wyler’s budget-killing pace. “Wyler has averaged a little better than 2 pages per day for 25 days,” the production manager Bob Fellows wrote on November 24. “He has shot approximately 56 pages of script up to yesterday. . . . Not quite a third of the script. . . . I do not believe anyone is aware of just how slow Mr. Wyler is.” “Wyler made one of his screwy shots last night,” Fellows ratted on December 9—“13 takes on a scene—a long shot of Brent [sic]—purpose being to show Brent swatting a mosquito on his wrist, which was very ridiculous.”43 (Actually, it’s Fonda, not Brent, who gets the mosquito bite, and it was scarcely ridiculous for Wyler to have striven for perfection because it is precisely the moment when Fonda’s character gets infected with yellow fever.) The budget was rising: from an initial $783,000 to $1,073,000.44

  It was for this reason that an exasperated Jack Warner threatened to take Wyler off Jezebel and install the journeyman but essentially vision-free William Dieterle in his place. Bette, emotionally fragile under the best of circumstances and coping, however obliquely, with Harlow’s death, was hardly in the mood to stand back and let the malignant father figure Warner fire her benevolently domineering lover, so she stomped into Warner’s office and threw a fit. Wyler was retained, though Warner did bring John Huston in on January 8 to film some second-unit stuff involving Julie’s trek through the swamps with Eddie Anderson. The film wrapped on January 17, 1938, though some additional footage was shot on February 4.

  Already overheated, Jezebel ends with Preston, feverish with yellow jack, preparing to be quarantined on the island of the lepers along with his healthy, dutiful, dull-as-soap Yankee wife, Amy (Margaret Lindsay, still indefatigably gracious). There’s a pivotal scene on the staircase of Julie’s mansion in which Julie convinces Amy to let her, Julie, escort Pres to the leper colony on the grounds that only Julie is tough enough, and vicious enough, to ensure Pres’s survival. Amy is unconvinced. “Help me make myself clean again, as you are clean,” Julie embarrassingly begs, her dignity all but gone.

  Amy demands to know if Preston still loves Julie. And Julie, still the essence of duplicity in Bette’s expert performance, replies: “We both know. . . . Pres loves his wife. . . . Who else would he love? Not me, surely. I’vedone too much against him.”

  This response is convincing only to the new Mrs. Dillard, the dullard. We see that Julie is still the lying, manipulative bitch we have admired all along, however little the desperate Julie herself may be aware of the fact. It’s a spectacular performance on Davis’s part, one of the most vocally nuanced and subtly emoted she ever gave. The final shots of the film, book-ending the opening tracking shot, find Julie on a cart full of wretched, feverish bodies, Pres’s head on her lap, the camera moving with her as she heads in Pyrrhic triumph through the torchlit streets toward her perfectly selfish self-sacrifice.

  BETTE’S AFFAIR WITH William Wyler ended soon after Jezebel wrapped in early February 1938. Davis was too high-strung for Wyler; she reminded him too much of his ex, Margaret Sullavan. “We fought and made up and fought and made up and fought and made up,” Bette later confessed. “We were both miserable.” For Davis, Wyler became the great man who got away: “Looking back, I should have married Willy after my divorce . . . and then taken the chance that it would work out. It just well might have, but of course that’s hindsight. After four husbands, I know that he was the love of my life. But I was scared silly. As good as we were together, I was afraid that I couldn’t handle the bit at home. I was in no way the hostess that he wanted a wife to be.”

  Bette appears not to have perceived her own rejection, at least not in public. In point of fact, Wyler wasn’t at all interested in marrying Bette. It was he who ended the affair; she was abandoned once again. According to Wyler’s biographer, Jan Herman, Wyler and his friends, the agent Paul Kohner and his wife, Lupita, would be spending a quiet evening at Wyler’s house when Davis would call. “Many times we would be having dinner with Willy,” Lupita Kohner recalled to Herman—“just the three of us—Paul, Willy, and myself. The telephone would ring. Sam would come in and say to him, ‘Miss Davis is calling.’ Willy’s answer was, ‘Later.’ He would ignore the call.”45

  Bette was descending once again into a state of nervous exhaustion. Her physician, Dr. Noyes, told Warner Bros. that she was in no shape to start another picture in the near future. “She is going on grit alone,” Noyes said. “She is not actually medically ill,” he went on to add, “but her general physical and emotional makeup is such that if we rush her into another picture she will be in danger of collapse.” Jack Warner wisely gave her some time to herself.

  Jezebel opened at Radio City Music Hall on March 10, 1938. Business was brisk, and the reviews were mainly positive, particularly in terms of Bette’s performance. Some critics carped at the ending, deriding Julie’s self-sacrifice, but Davis herself emerged not only unscathed but enhanced in the public eye. The film made money; Jezebel took in $1.5 million on its initial release. She even made the cover of Time. But Davis, characteristically, credited Wyler: “Willy really is responsible for the fact that I became a box-office star.”46 Warners continued to exploit Bette in ways that must have galled her. For instance, Photoplay featured an early promotion for Jezebel in the form of a product ad in which Davis offered a purported but patently inane quote: “The easiest, most delightful way I know to protect daintiness is to bathe with Lux Toilet Soap!”47

  When the Oscar nominations were announced in early 1939, Bette found herself in the company of Margaret Sullavan, among others, in the Best Actress category. Jezebel was nominated as Best Picture (along with nine other films, including Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion).48 Wyler didn’t make the cut in the Best Director category, and neither did Henry Fonda for Best Actor. Fay Bainter, however, was a double nominee: first for Best Supporting Actress for Jezebel and then for Best Actress for White Banners.

  The ceremony was held at the Biltmore Hotel on February 23. Bette arrived with an eight-man escort that included Wyler. Having been chastised for the pedestrian dress she wore to accept her Oscar for Dangerous three years before, Bette took more care this time. Mayme Ober Peake was ecstatic: “Bette, wearing her new short, softly-waved haircut for the first time in public, was a stunner in brown net, made with a very full bouffant skirt and tight bodice. Across the front of the bodice was inset a bird of paradise!”49

  Jezebel—and Grand Illusion—lost the Best Picture award to Frank Capra’s bland You Can’t Take It With You. Fay Bainter won for Best Supporting Actress; and finally, at the tail end of the awards, Sir Cedric Hardwicke announced that the Best Actress of 1938 was Bette Davis.

  She thanked the Academy but singled out William Wyler and insisted that he stand and take a bow. “I earned the Oscar I received for Jezebel,” Davis later wrote. “The thrill of winning my second Oscar was only lessened by the Academy’s failure to give the directorial award to Willy. He made my performance. He made the script. Jezebel is a fine picture. It was all Wyler.”

  Onstage, in front of her peers, Bette’s nervous exhaustion vanished. She was confident, radiant, proud. “I was never surer of myself professionally than at this moment.”50

 
; CHAPTER

  9

  “A GIRL WHO DIES”

  THE SISTERS WENT INTO PRODUCTION ON the morning of Monday June 6, 1938, and continued for almost nine weeks, ending at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday August 6.1 Bette was paired for the first time with the magnificent Errol Flynn, a man far more gorgeous than any of the actresses playing the title characters.

  By the age of twenty-nine, Flynn had lived a life that would have been considered delinquent if it hadn’t been so exotic and enviable and Flynn himself had been homely. He was born in Hobart, Tasmania. Sent to Australia’s finest prep schools, he was inevitably expelled; sailing to New Guinea at sixteen to take a government job, he embarked instead on a private quest for gold ore. The gold hunter then turned sailor, then tobacco plantation overlord, after which he became the most naturalistic of actors because he never knew quite what he was doing other than compelling audiences to gaze upon him in a kind of dazzled wonder.

  By the age of twenty-four, he was in England with the Northampton Repertory Company. At twenty-six, he was a movie star in Hollywood with Captain Blood. By the time The Sisters went into production, he was Warners’ baddest bad boy—thrilling audiences by swashbuckling his way through hits like The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Adventures of Robin Hood, all the while pulling off his tights offscreen for a series of many women and even a few men on a frighteningly tight timetable that led to the expression “in like Flynn,” the suggestion being that it took him mere moments to get where he wanted.

  Flynn wasn’t afraid to offend his directors and producers, not to mention Jack Warner himself, with his chronic lateness and unpredictability, nor was he reluctant to pick fights on the set, the most notorious of which was his refusal on the set of Captain Blood to let the makeup department shave Ross Alexander’s hairy armpits for Alexander’s spread-eagled flogging scene because he, Flynn, took too much sexual pleasure in them offscreen, a point Flynn pursued loudly and in the most colorful language until the director, Michael Curtiz, backed down and left Alexander’s armpits alone.