Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 2

The season was nearly over when Laura Hope Crews showed up to appear in A. A. Milne's Mr. Pim Pa.s.ses By. Crews told Bette-who had made it naggingly clear to everyone all summer long that she would be much happier onstage than handing out programs-that she would be granted a small role in the show if she learned to play the song "I Pa.s.sed By Your Window." The only trouble was that n.o.body but Crews knew the song, and Crews wasn't singing. Spurred by a pleading and histrionic Bette, Ruthie scoured the Cape and found what may have been the only copy of the obscure melody in the possession of a church organist in Hyannis who agreed to teach it to Bette on his piano. "We stayed there until three in the morning while I learned the music," Bette recalled.27 Crews (who went on to achieve her greatest fame as Aunt Pittypat Hamilton in Gone with the Wind) found Bette to be fidgety onstage-no surprise there-and commanded her to keep her arms at her sides, still. Immobility was impossible for Bette Davis, especially in the earliest stage of her career. "Came the day of dress rehearsal and its accompanying excitement. The play ran off well and I kept myself in hand until the third act. Then, involuntarily, I moved my arm perhaps twelve inches. A slap brought my arm down to its proper limp position and I turned to see [Crews], impa.s.sive and unconcerned, continue with her lines. My face burned, and I must have counted to ninety-five before I regained control of myself. . . . The blow may have been a major tragedy when it was delivered. Time and a degree of success have made it seem awfully unimportant," though not so immaterial as to escape retelling in several of Davis's memoirs.28 Bette returned to Rochester in the fall of 1928, this time with Ruthie and their atrociously named dog, Boogum, the three of them having deposited Bobby at Denison College in Ohio on their roundabout trip from Cape Cod to upstate New York. Cukor and his producing partner, George Kondolf, had formed the Temple Players, named after the Rochester theater in which their plays were to be performed, and they hired Bette to appear in the company's first production: a vaudeville story called Excess Baggage. In Bette's words, the play was about "a tightrope walker and his pretty wife, who stood about in spangles."29 Wallace Ford played the tightrope walker; Miriam Hopkins was the pretty wife.

Bette was enchanted with Hopkins-at first. "Miriam was the prettiest golden-haired blonde I had ever seen," Davis later wrote. "I will never forget her before a performance-emerging from a shower and simply tossing her curly hair dry. She was the envy of us all."30 But Davis soon grew resentful of Hopkins, as the other actors also did, for Hopkins had an annoying compulsion to steal scenes by whatever means necessary. An actor would speak, and Hopkins would pointedly move during the middle of the line; an actress would build to an important gesture, and Hopkins would beat her to it-anything to distract the audience's attention from her fellow performers.

Hopkins didn't particularly take to Bette, either. One day during a rehearsal, she stopped in midscene, pointed to Bette, and screeched, "She's stepping on my lines! The b.i.t.c.h doesn't know her place! I'm the star of this show-not that little n.o.body!"31 Other productions at the Temple Players included Cradle s.n.a.t.c.hers (one Rochester newspaper printed a photo of "the little blonde who is seen in this week's production"); Laff That Off; The Squall; The Man Who Came Back; and Yellow, which had a cast of forty and starred Louis Calhern. Bette played Calhern's girlfriend-an odd bit of casting on Cukor's part, since Calhern was six foot four and thirteen years older than Bette. As Calhern put it, "She looks more like my kid than my mistress." Other trouble was brewing as well. As Bette herself admitted, "I was apt to be a know-it-all. When Mr. Cukor criticized my work, I would always have a reason as to why I did it my way. I alibied."32 There was still another problem: Bette's puritanical rect.i.tude. She grew into a famously and frankly foulmouthed woman, a cigarette-dragging, liquor-swilling curser, but even at the age of seventy-four, and speaking to Playboy (of all publications), she couldn't bring herself to speak of the publicly unspeakable: "I didn't live up to what was expected in those days of a stock company ingenue, who had other duties-you know what I'm talking about. Socializing. Socializing very seriously, let us say, with people in the company. That was just not my cup of tea."33 And so, during a final rehearsal for Yellow, "the stage manager came to me and said, 'We won't need you after this show.' It was so abrupt, so without warning, that I did not have time to be angry. All I could do was ask a simple, 'Why?' 'Cukor says you won't be needed any more,' he repeated, and nothing I said brought additional information."34 Louis Calhern saw no need to mince words. Bette Davis, he said, just wouldn't "put out."35 It obviously wasn't George Cukor who expected s.e.xual favors from Bette. It was his straight producer, George Kondolf. But long after the actress had become a movie star and the director one of Hollywood's most successful creative forces, Bette continued to blame Cukor for her dismissal. And Cukor grew increasingly cranky at the mention of it. "She does not let me forget it," he once complained to the gossipmistress Sheilah Graham. "She keeps telling the story! I find it a great bore."36 Bette returned to New York and found a tiny apartment on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village with her friend from Ogunquit, Robin Simpson. "Bette's mother was around, too, I remember," Robin's sister Reggie later recalled. "It must have been a little crowded."37 The two young women later moved to midtown: an apartment on East Fifty-third Street.

The comedy Broken Dishes served as Bette's Broadway debut: harried husband Donald Meek grows a backbone after he gets plastered enough to square off against what one critic described as his "brigadier-general wife," with Bette playing his sympathetic daughter. After tryouts on Long Island and at Werba's Brooklyn (a theater at the corner of Flatbush and Fulton), Broken Dishes opened at the Ritz Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street on November 5, 1929. "Miss Davis was easy on the eyes," wrote the reviewer for the Evening World.38 "Bette Davis, a young actress who would be a better one if she elected to spell her Christian name less self-consciously, is a member of the cast," another critic opined.

The Evening Graphic's "Daily Physical Culture Page" of November 5, 1929, featured a triptych of Bette and Ellen Lowe, one of her cast mates, demonstrating a series of exercises. "Should a man propose to a girl on his knees?" Lowe asks in a bubble in the first frame as Bette suspends herself in a sort of a crab posture with her back and torso flat. "I should think the girl would like it." Bette, now upright and stretching her left leg out, replies. "But if the man doesn't?" "Then he can ask her to get off, can't he?" Ellen bizarrely answers as Bette s.h.i.+fts legs.39 "Physical culture" indeed. It was a glorified skin show. Broadway's publicity was every bit as cra.s.s as Hollywood's.

In January 1930, Broken Dishes s.h.i.+fted to the Theatre Masque (later renamed the Golden) on West Forty-fifth Street and continued running for a total of 178 performances before closing in April 1930 to prepare for a tour. The production moved in May to the Wilbur Theatre in Boston and then went on hiatus for the summer, which Bette spent doing stock at the Cape Playhouse.

Broken Dishes picked up again in September 1930, with performances in Baltimore and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. On September 25, the cast made a personal appearance at the Rosedale Airport. "The entire company is enthusiastic about aviation," an ad declared.

During the play's run in Was.h.i.+ngton, Bette got a call from the play's producer, Oscar Serlin, who wanted to replace the ingenue in his new production, Solid South, starring Richard Bennett, a notoriously temperamental actor (and the father of Constance, Joan, and Barbara). She took the job.40 Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Solid South opened on October 14, 1930, at the Lyceum Theatre. Bette played "Alabama" Follensby; Bennett was her grandfather, the major. Jesse Royce Landis played her widowed mother. "Richard Bennett Called Bette Ham, Got Face Slapped," a later gossip headline trumpeted. "Are you another of these young ham actresses?" Bennett reportedly asked Bette when they met, so she slapped him.41 Davis herself tells a much more benign version in The Lonely Life: Bennett said, "So! You're one of those actresses who think all they need are eyes to act. My daughters are the same." "Mr. Bennett," Bette properly responded, "I'm very happy to return to Was.h.i.+ngton immediately." "You'll do," Bennett replied, laughing. According to Bette, "from then on in, he and I were the best of friends."42 Solid South was not so solid. The critic John Mason Brown wrote that the play "came bearing no more direct relation to actuality than a cartoon does to life." Burns Mantle called the play "a somewhat ironic, deliberately satirical, fairly extravagant study of a slightly demented major."43 The critics were especially hard on Bennett, but Davis wasn't spared either. "This attempt to learn a Southern speech fell very flat with Miss Bette Davis, sweet Broadway child that she may be," the New Republic observed. "She [and Owen Davis Jr.] struggled with the problem of how to be interesting as n.o.bodies. . . . Miss Davis achieved that cereal quality that the roles of pure girls on Broadway are taken to represent."44 Solid South closed in November, and Davis didn't appear again on Broadway for another twenty-two years. After all, as a gossip columnist had noted a few months earlier, "Talkies want Donald Meek of Broken Dishes. Also want Bette Davis."45

CHAPTER.

3.

A YANKEE IN HOLLYWOOD.

A CHUBBY, OVERLY CHEERY FATHER from the Booth Tarkington Midwest takes a newspaper from the paperboy at the front door of his house at Universal Pictures and walks into a large dining room. The camera swings back and to the left to reveal a very blonde, very young Bette Davis carefully setting plates on the table, her elbow c.o.c.ked, her hand placing the plates on the table just so. "He's up all right," Davis carefully intones in a voice deeper and a pace more measured than one expects. "I dumped him out of bed." And out of the scene she goes.

Aside from some lost screen tests, this is Davis's first appearance on celluloid. The moment is electrifying-not because of her performance's inherent artistry (she's going through the paces of a secondary character's entrance, though with the extreme focus of bright sunlight hitting a prism), but because a glorious fifty-eight-year film career radiates out from it. All the characters she played, and all the characters she became, bloom from this single generative bud. The film is called Bad Sister.

She arrived in Hollywood in December 1930, along with Ruthie and Boogum the dog, having been promised the lead in Universal's adaptation of Preston Sturges's. .h.i.t Broadway comedy Strictly Dishonorable, or so she later said, and when she was cast instead as the good sister in Bad Sister, Universal having changed its mind, she necessarily took it personally.

With the sting of this rejection still raw, Bad Sister (then called Gambling Daughters) began filming on the cusp of the new year. Mousy Laura Madison (Davis) plays second fiddle to her wild sibling, Marianne (Sidney Fox), who is courted not only by rich, dumpy Wade Trumbull (Bert Roach) but also by Dr. d.i.c.k Lindley (Conrad Nagel, top billed). The coquettish Marianne toys with Wade, draws d.i.c.k in her sights, then cuts a date with d.i.c.k short when Humphrey Bogart shows up as the flashy Val Corliss. Marianne runs off to Columbus with Val, who ditches her in a cheap hotel; she returns home to find demure Bette/Laura engaged to d.i.c.k and, contrite in her state of sin, gratefully marries fat Wade in the end.1 Conrad Nagel reported that Universal's Carl Laemmle Jr. didn't see what we all now see-we can't help but see-in Bad Sister. Laemmle, said Nagel, called Davis and Bogart into his office "one at a time, and told them they had nothing to offer. They were colorless. No fault of theirs. They just didn't photograph. He suggested they go back to New York."2 Young Laemmle's advice was lunacy, obviously, but how could he have foreseen the rich, smoky history these two then-inexperienced actors would create over time? When Hobart Henley, the film's director, cuts to a grinning Bogart after Val's lengthy roadster cuts Marianne and d.i.c.k off at the curb, it causes a jolt equal to Bette's own first shot. Bogart's face, with its newly emerging contours, shocks with sheer familiarity, as does Bette's.

A Bad Sister legend casts Bette as the naive young puritan she certainly was. ("I was the Yankee-est, most modest virgin that ever walked in," she once said.)3 There's a scene in the film in which Bette's character, Laura, diapers her other sister Amy's newborn son, Amy having died melodramatically in childbirth. Bette, sensing trouble over her absolute inexperience with bodies unlike her own-she was a prim twenty-two at the time-asked whether the prop baby was a boy or a girl. The camera wasn't going to get close enough to care, but she was, and did. It was a boy-not surprising, since the script drives home the baby's s.e.x with a scene of Grandpa running down the street yelling, "It's a boy! It's a boy!" But according to Bette, she had no idea what the baby would turn out to look like under its diaper, and the cast and crew lined up to watch in sophisticated amus.e.m.e.nt as the Yankee-est virgin who ever walked in reacted with a deep blush at her first sight of a p.e.n.i.s.

If Conrad Nagel was right, it was Bogart who put them all up to it. "That dame is too uptight," Bogart told Nagel, adding, "What she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to do it."4 Bette, also in Nagel's telling, thought Bogie was "uncouth."5 She was correct.

The problem with this entertaining tale, even in Davis's own version, is that the scene itself is explicitly about Laura's s.e.xual awakening and the embarra.s.sment it causes her. d.i.c.k enters the room as Laura adjusts the diaper and, revealing his love for her for the first time, bends down and kisses her on the lips. And she blushes-not from the shock of seeing the baby's p.e.n.i.s, but from the first stirring of her own s.e.xuality. If there is any meaning at all to this anecdote, it lies not only in the fact that Bette Davis saw her first p.e.n.i.s while a 35mm camera was running and lights were blasting in her face but also that she used her personal humiliation for the sake of her character, something she would do throughout her film career.

"She has about as much s.e.x appeal as Slim Summerville." This was Laemmle Jr.'s response to Bette Davis's screen debut. Davis claimed actually to have heard him make the remark.6 Mean, yes; funny, terribly. Slim Summerville, the former Keystone Kop who plays one of Laura's father's business a.s.sociates in Bad Sister, was a skinny, bent beanpole with a large comedy nose. But what the twenty-two-year-old Laemmle thoroughly missed was Davis's carnality. It comes out even in the restrained Laura of Bad Sister. Beneath the surface of Davis's New England reserve is raw, unsatisfied appet.i.te-physical drive as well as emotional ambition. Variety got that point early on in its review of Bad Sister: as Laura, the anonymous critic wrote, Davis was "the very essence of repression."7 Barely suppressed rage would become Davis's stock-in-trade, but her bottled-up frenzies were as s.e.xual as they were emotional.

By the time she shot Bad Sister, she'd already been run through the gauntlet of Universal men in a demeaning episode that hammered home a sad fact she hadn't expected at all: that Hollywood moviemaking was largely about whether the men who made the pictures wanted to f.u.c.k the women they paid to act in them. Davis was suspicious when they told her she was to appear for yet another screen test, this one for an unnamed part in a likewise unspecified project. They told her to lie down on a couch, after which a succession of fifteen of Universal's contract actors got on top of her. Then they acted. "I wasn't even a woman," Bette later wrote; "I was a mattress."8 Gilbert Roland gave Bette second thoughts, if only for the sake of a joke she could employ many years later on talk shows: "I must say, after he kissed me I thought, 'This is not so bad.' " Roland also reportedly said something on the order of: "Don't worry-we've all gone through it," though one doesn't imagine that Universal's pretty starlets ever lined up to lay a piece of freshman veal-cake in front of a screen test crew.9 This, along with the Strictly Dishonorable disappointment, was Davis's welcome to Hollywood.

BAD SISTER ATTRACTED little notice, and neither did Bette Davis. But Karl Freund, who shot the picture, told Carl Laemmle that Davis's eyes were marvelous. This, according to Bette, was the only reason Universal renewed her contract when her first three-month option came up.10 By that point she had made her second movie, Seed. Adapted from what was called a "novel of birth control" by its author, Charles G. Norris, Seed actually has little concern with contraception. The only trace of it is the fact that Bart Carter, a frustrated writer, has five children who create such a racket that he can't work on his novel. Bette plays one of his daughters. Rather than moving her toward prominence, Seed only pushed her farther into the background.

Davis didn't come any farther forward in her third film, Waterloo Bridge. An elegantly conceived and beautifully executed melodrama, Waterloo Bridge was the director James Whale's first film with Universal; he went on to make the great horror trio Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, and Bride of Frankenstein at that studio, not to mention the glorious musical Show Boat. Waterloo Bridge takes place in London during World War I. An expatriate American, Myra (Mae Clarke), can find no more work as a chorine and starts turning tricks. She picks them up on the bridge. During an air raid, she meets a kindly, callow soldier (Kent Dougla.s.s) when both of them stop to help an old lady pick up her spilled potatoes. Roy, nineteen, blond, and upper crust, gives Myra money to pay her overdue rent; she takes it, but in a fit of pique and guilt throws it back at him. They make up, but Myra-especially in Mae Clarke's twitchy performance-becomes increasingly troubled to the point of a marvelous histrionic breakdown scene in her sleazy apartment.

Bette, who plays Roy's pet.i.te sister, makes her first appearance with her back to the camera and generally stays that way until the end of the scene, when she shouts in her deaf father's ear that Roy wants to bring his new girlfriend up to the manor for a visit. She has a few more lines in the film-"Oh! You must come to Camden with us! It's perfectly lovely!"-and disappears.

(We know Myra is doomed at the end when Whale cuts to a bird's-eye shot of her strolling across Waterloo Bridge while the low buzz of zeppelins plays on the soundtrack. Within seconds, Myra gets. .h.i.t by a perfectly aimed bomb, thereby freeing our boy Roy from having to marry the deranged hooker after he returns from the war.) Davis made the papers during the production of Waterloo Bridge, but not because of her talent. According to the June 29 Boston Traveller, Bette was "rushed to her home from the studio last week" with an attack of appendicitis, though she wasn't operated upon.11 Her absence from the set necessitated some rescheduling, with Whale working nights, as well as the need for a few retakes in July.

Waterloo Bridge was released in September. And Laemmle was still unimpressed. "Her s.e.x appeal simply ain't," he said.12 In August 1931, Universal sent Davis on loan to RKO for the cornball Way Back Home. Based on the popular radio program Seth Parker, which chronicled the benign meddlings of a wise Maine farmer, the film is a strenuously homespun morality tale. Bette plays a country ingenue with a harsh father; Seth, with his jutting little white beard and folksy insights, sets things right at a festive taffy pull.

One might a.s.sume that none of this bunk was quite Bette's speed. The hard-bitten image we have of her is true, but only partly so; she had a sentimental streak, too. Bette actually liked Way Back Home. Her director, William Seiter, treated her well, something she hadn't necessarily experienced in Hollywood at that point, or beyond, and she appreciated the way J. Roy Hunt photographed her. Perhaps the most important aspect of the production was the makeup department's innovative treatment of her features. Bette Davis came away from Way Back Home with a new mouth and, consequently, a reformed face. Because RKO's makeup artist Ern Westmore decided to eschew the glamorous bee-stung convention of the period-this movie was, after all, set in backwoods Maine-he instead drew Davis a more linear set of lips, with the lower lip a bit fuller and wider than its natural shape. The result of the new, straight mouth was clear-a fresh emphasis on her greatest features: two enormous, captivating eyes.

Davis was growing frustrated with Universal. Her cattlelike casting, combined with the relative lack of care and craft in the picture making (she underappreciated Waterloo Bridge, probably because her part was so tiny), fed into her lifelong impatience in the face of mediocrity and half-a.s.sedness. She also resented the fact that the studios traded their contract players to other studios without the players' consent to play characters they didn't want to play at the whim of bosses who didn't care.

"There was something lower than bottom," Bette later wrote, "and Mr. Laemmle sent me there"-specifically as a loan to Bennie F. Zeidman of B. F. Zeidman Productions. Undirected by Howard Higgin, h.e.l.l's House-the original t.i.tle of which was, appropriately enough, Misguided-begins with a touching scene between a country mother and her son, Jimmy (Junior Durkin), but swiftly turns mawkish when Mother steps away from the camera for a moment and gets run over by a car. Freshly orphaned, Jimmy heads for the city, where he meets the slick bootlegger Kelly (Pat O'Brien), who hires him to take liquor orders. Jimmy gets arrested after literally one minute on the job and gets s.h.i.+pped off to a perfectly dreadful reform school, where he meets the sickly Shorty (Junior Coghlan-there was a vogue for "Juniors" in 1931). Naturally, Shorty dies. Unnaturally, Shorty speaks to Jimmy from beyond the grave at the end when Jimmy, sprung from the reform school, asks rhetorically, "How is it now, Shorty?" and, much to his amazement, Shorty answers him in voice-over: "Okay, big boy!" Fade out.

It's ghastly. Davis plays the bootlegger's moll, Peggy. Fighting her way upstream in this filthy creek, she manages to play Peggy with a breezy self-confidence and, of all things, a kind of transparent naturalism that contrasts markedly with Pat O'Brien's early-talkie stiltedness. One rarely thinks of Bette Davis in terms of the naturalism of her performance style, so deeply has Davis's cigarette-waving, dialogue-chopping delivery been etched in the public imagination. But what Davis brought to the screen in 1931, even in the lousy h.e.l.l's House, was a fresh, unblinkered vitality, a kind of see-through stylization that allows us to know the character while appreciating the actress's craft.

Then Universal loaned her out to Columbia for The Menace. "I was a corpse!" Davis declared to d.i.c.k Cavett many years later. "All I did was fall out of a closet!"13 She gets the gist right but the details wrong: Ronald Quayle (Walter Byron) undergoes extensive plastic surgery, including the removal of his fingerprints and the installation of an entirely new face, and returns to England under an a.s.sumed name to avenge his father's killing. Bette plays his girlfriend, who faints after finding a cadaver hanging on a hook in a closet.

The Menace is preposterous. Bette later said, "I looked like an ostrich through the whole thing-ungainly, sad, and startled. We made it in thirteen days."14 In truth, she looks nothing like an ostrich. A bored starlet with too much talent for the dreck in which she's stuck, yes. But not an ostrich. She's right about the production's swiftness, though; The Menace filmed from October 30 to November 16, 1931, and there was no work on Sundays.

JACK L. WARNER CAME from nothing, which is to say Youngstown, Ohio. The enormous family-two parents, twelve children-took cold-water baths in a tub on the front porch. They p.a.w.ned the family horse to buy a Kinetoscope: a four-foot-high cabinet with an eyepiece on top through which customers who paid the customary nickel could watch a moving picture. A few years later, Jack and his brothers bought a movie theater in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. One led to several; some failed. They began making their own product-stuff to project on the screen so the people who bought tickets would have something to look at. This business led them to Southern California.

Warner had, one would have to say, a strong personality. When Al Jolson accepted a special Oscar for The Jazz Singer, he remarked, "I don't know what Jack Warner's going to do with this statue. It can't say yes.' "15 By 1931, Warner, then thirty-nine, together with his brothers Harry and Albert, ran the most factory-like of the five major Hollywood studios, a compact lot in Burbank where, in the words of the producer David Lewis, "films were edited, previewed, and s.h.i.+pped like sausages" to theaters that were, conveniently enough, mainly owned by the Warners.16 They were rich tightwads in a town of rich tightwads. Fortune once called Jack "a bargain-counter dictator," a description Warner himself repeated with pride.17 Warners' pictures were usually inexpensive to set up and easy to shoot. And they moved. One producer remembered that Warners' editors would cut out single frames from every scene, just to make them play that much quicker.18 Another recalled being told at a meeting that Warners couldn't possibly compete with MGM, for instance, because of MGM's huge roster of stars, "so we had to go after the stories-topical ones, not typical ones. The stories became the stars. . . . We used to say 't-t-t: timely, topical, and not typical'-that was our slogan. . . . We were all searching frantically, looking through papers for story ideas."19 Personally, Jack Warner was a bit of a dandy-a failed stand-up comic in blue yachting blazers, ascots, white flannels, and brilliant patent leather shoes, always with the one-liners, which often dropped like lead. When he met Albert Einstein, he made a joke about his relatives. With Madame Chiang Kai-shek and a roomful of Chinese, it was about forgetting to pick up his laundry.

He and his brother Harry, who ran the finances, were as different as two brothers can be. Jack was vulgar, Harry was subdued; Jack was cra.s.s, Harry was contained. Harry was devoted to his wife and children; Jack, who was married to the beautiful and patrician Ann, still screwed around on the side. Jack and Harry detested each another.

At Warner Bros., pretty much the only prestige pictures the studio sent out in the very early 1930s starred George Arliss, an unlikely movie star with a face like that of a misshapen orangutan-the cheeks too wide, the jaw too narrow, the lips too thin, nothing on one side matching anything on the other. Arliss was also getting on in years; in 1931 he was a well-seasoned sixty-three. But two of Arliss's sober, enn.o.bling biopics-Disraeli (1929) and Alexander Hamilton (1931)-were good moneymakers for the studio, and for that reason alone Arliss was respected by film critics and studio bookkeepers alike. He'd made a silent picture in 1922 called The Man Who Played G.o.d, and in late 1931 he was preparing a sound version: A celebrated concert pianist (Arliss) suffers sudden deafness after an explosion. Sequestered and miserable in his apartment high above Central Park, he begins spying on people with the aid of binoculars; reading their lips, he learns of their troubles and solves them from above, at first in mockery of G.o.d, but later in redemptive imitation. (One of the people Arliss a.s.sists is an especially boyish Ray Milland.) Davis plays his protegee, who lets herself become engaged to him out of an oddly appealing kind of pity, though he n.o.bly sets her free at the end.

Bette, in high melodramatic mode in The Lonely Life, claims that she was reeling from the demeaning tawdriness of the corpses, closets, and offscreen screams of The Menace and hovering on a crumbling brink of despair and a defeated retreat to the East when, lo, the saving clarion bell of her telephone rang. The caller identified himself as George Arliss. Bette, believing him to be a prankster friend, responded with a fake British accent until she became convinced that it was, in fact, the great actor himself calling her in for an audition. Bette, according to Bette, had been recommended to Arliss by the actor Murray Kinnell, with whom she had appeared in The Menace.

Jack Warner later said no, that wasn't what happened at all. According to Warner, a midlevel executive named Rufus LeMaire (ne Gold-stick) "dropped in one morning with his familiar scowling and battered face and said: 'Jack, there's a very talented little girl over at Universal named Bette Davis. I first saw her in some New York shows, and I caught her in a bit in Bad Sister.' " Bette retorted by pointing out that her role in Bad Sister was more than a "bit"-it was the second lead-and by insisting that Kinnell, not LeMaire/Goldstick, was indeed the pivotal figure in her hiring by and eventual ensconcement at Warner Bros. Never one to be left out of a praise-earning situation, Darryl Zanuck took some of the credit for moving Bette Davis to Warner Bros. as well. Zanuck was a Warners executive at the time: "We sent [Arliss] a newcomer named Bette Davis-I didn't think she was very beautiful-and he called back and said, 'I've just heard one of the greatest actresses.' "20 By the time this who-gets-the-credit contretemps played itself out years after the fact, Bette Davis and Jack Warner had been snapping and squawking at each other for decades-two headstrong supersuccesses who'd grown to depend on each other for nurturing hatred and backhanded support.

Warner Bros.' legal files tell a less pa.s.sionate story of The Man Who Played G.o.d and Bette Davis's formal relations.h.i.+p with the studio: Davis's first contract with Warners is dated November 19, 1931, and specifies her salary at three hundred dollars per week. There's an addendum designed to put little starlets in their place: "Where black, white, silver, or gold shoes and hose will suffice, artist is to furnish same at her expense."21 An interoffice memo specifies that The Man Who Played G.o.d officially began production on November 27; Davis, however, had already been on the payroll as of November 18, and she finished shooting her role precisely one month later.22 The film required no retakes.

"He certainly was my first professional father," Bette later claimed of the benign George Arliss, though given her own father's nature the honor might as well be shared by Arliss's doppelgnger, Jack Warner.23 Davis gives a surprisingly giggly performance at first, but she tones it down for her first serious scene with Arliss. She knows when to move from girlish navete to a woman with the presence of mind to be loved by a genius. Later in the film, when she squares off with her character's new beau at the edge of a brook, Davis's edgy neurosis first breaks through. "Harold" makes his obvious move, but Bette rears back, grabs at her hair, and releases it-suppressed tension bursting out in a flas.h.i.+ng spasm-and lunges at him.

Later, in a scene set in Central Park in full binocular view of Arliss, Davis speaks in a newly clipped delivery, and one finally begins to hear the voice that sustained her stardom well after she stopped making quality pictures: "He's put his faith in me! And I won't be a quit-ter!"

It's not just Bette's platinumed hair that makes her seem modern in these early films. It's her stance and spiky att.i.tude-the skittish physical energy and sharp, staccato speech. Bette enters her first scene in her next film, The Rich Are Always with Us, in constant motion-s.h.i.+fting her body, biting her lines, not exactly twitching but scarcely standing still. It was partly a conscious performance, but it also resulted from real intimidation. The film's top-billed star, Ruth Chatterton, was then in the Hollywood pantheon, and Bette was terrified of her.

Davis's b.i.t.c.hy description of Chatterton's entrance onto the set the first day of shooting is well worth quoting: "Miss Chatterton swept on like Juno. I had never seen a real star-type entrance in my life. I was properly dazzled. Her arrival could have won an Academy Award nomination. Such authority! Such glamour! She was absolutely luminous and radiated clouds of Patou and Wrigley's Spearmint."24 The scene takes place in a restaurant, and Bette's character comes up to the table Chatterton shares with her costar, George Brent. Bette was so fl.u.s.tered by her proximity to America's reigning glamour queen that she simply couldn't get her lines out. Brent, too, was jittery, his coffee cup rattling on its saucer. Bette then blurted to Chatterton, "I'm so d.a.m.ned scared of you I'm speechless!"25 But Bette's jumpy energy endures today as a unique performance style, while Chatterton's too-too glamour diction has long grown musty. Referring to a game of roulette, Chatterton announces, "With this wheel-and this gamblah-you haven't got a chaunce!" "I cahn't help it," Chatterton's character later intones, and that was precisely the problem with Chatterton's career.

Davis started shooting So Big the day after she began The Rich Are Always with Us. Davis later said she filmed Rich during the day and So Big at night. She finished her work in both films in all of a week and a half. Directed by William Wellman, So Big is Warners' adaptation of Edna Ferber's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel.

But Davis's role in So Big is so small. The film belongs to Barbara Stanwyck. Poor Selina (Stanwyck), left dest.i.tute by the death of her gambler father, becomes a country schoolteacher in a Dutch farming community outside of Chicago. She marries stolid Pervus and bears a son, Dirk, whom she calls "So Big." ("How big is my son?" "So big!") Young Roelf, a neighbor boy she has tutored, feels stultified by farm life and runs off to become a world-famous sculptor in Europe. Pervus dies. Dirk grows up to be a sn.o.b; he's humiliated by his mother's having become an asparagus magnate. He hires Dallas O'Mara (Davis), an elegant and high-priced graphic artist, to come up with an ad campaign for his bond trading company and falls in love with her. Roelf returns from Europe as George Brent, and in a final speech, Dallas explains to Dirk that his mother is n.o.ble, a subject worthy of great art.

Davis's delivery of the closing moral is peculiar. "There," Dallas says. "That's what I mean when I say I want to do portraits. Not portraits of ladies with pearls . . . but portraits of men and women who are really distinguished looking-and distinguishedly American, like your mother." Dallas is sitting at a slight angle and facing to the right (where Selina and Roelf are standing by the window, Selina's face hit by a convenient ray of suns.h.i.+ne). Davis's manner of speaking matches her dialogue in confidence and grace. But Bette can't help herself: she's wringing her hands furiously as she speaks, unable to keep them from contradicting what she's saying. These jangled, barely suppressed nerves are Davis's own, not Dallas's.

It doesn't matter. The speech as written is less convincing than it might be, especially because Stanwyck's Selina is nothing if not agriculturally n.o.ble throughout the film. But Davis's own, uncontrollably anxious hands give her character's words a surprising and unsettling dimension-that of an artist's irrepressible self-doubt.

AFTER SO BIG and The Rich Are Always with Us, she shot The Dark Horse, a lame political satire, in March and early April 1932. Warren William engineers the rise of a buffoon politico. The bizarre Guy Kibbee is the buffoon, and Bette wastes her time as William's wise-gal girlfriend. Then, over the vocal, heavily accented objections of the director Michael Curtiz-"G.o.dd.a.m.ned nothing no good s.e.xless son of a b.i.t.c.h!"-Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck cast Bette in her first truly great role: that of the southern belle Madge in Cabin in the Cotton.26 Madge is the flashy, spoiled daughter of the plantation owner for whom Richard Barthelmess's well-meaning Marvin works. Marvin has a p.e.c.k.e.rwood girlfriend, but the dazzling and aggressive Madge quickly takes Marvin's mind off fidelity.

Curtiz, whom the critic Neal Gabler describes as "feral," was abusive to Bette personally, barking at and needling her in heavily Hungarian-accented tones, but he lights her with great finesse. Her face seems to be the source of suns.h.i.+ne rather than its target, and her brilliant blonde hair radiates hot energy.27 In the context of this glowing heat, Davis turns to Barthelmess on the dusty porch of the general store, her eyes tilt appreciatively down his body and back up again, and she says, "Cute! I'd like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair. Bye!"

In later years, Davis used this line as a comedy routine-a piece of supposedly nonsensical Hollywood dialogue she could trot out on talk shows and in interviews to get the interviewer and audience on her side. But as she delivers it in the film, it's not silly at all. And its meaning couldn't be clearer: Bette's s.e.x-hungry Madge is suggesting to the shocked but susceptible Marvin that a kiss from her would lead to much more-that they'd end up rolling around in the road. There would be dirt involved.

Warners certainly kept its actors busy. Davis worked on Cabin in the Cotton from May 17 through June 9. The following day she began shooting Three on a Match with the director Mervyn LeRoy; she finished that one on the thirtieth.

Three childhood friends-Vivian, Mary, and Ruth-meet in New York after ten years. Vivian (Ann Dvorak) has married well, Mary (Joan Blondell) has become a showgirl after serving time in a reform school, and Ruth (Davis) is an earnest secretary without much to do. The film's t.i.tle-drawn from the World War I superst.i.tion that the third soldier to light a cigarette from a single match would be shot, the flame's duration enabling German soldiers to draw an accurate bead-spells doom for one of the characters. Davis never liked Three on a Match, calling it a "dull B-picture."28 But how dull can it be to watch Ann Dvorak turn from a Park Avenue matron into a derelict hophead in little over an hour?

True, Davis's part is by far the smallest and least meaty of the three. Ruth stands on the sidelines as Vivian degenerates. Making matters worse for Davis, Three on a Match is the film that inspired Mervyn LeRoy to utter a prediction he came to regret: "I made a mistake when the picture was finished. I told an interviewer that I thought Joan Blondell was going to be a big star, that Ann Dvorak had definite possibilities, but that I didn't think Bette Davis would make it." It was remarks like that which prompted Davis to dispatch unbelievers to an icy h.e.l.l of contempt.29

CHAPTER.

4.

AN ACTRESS IN MOTION.

IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE TO LEARN THAT Hollywood was a terrifying place-even for Bette Davis, whose rocklike spine belied a most insecure mental framework, especially about her erotic impulses. The boy-madness of Newton High School, Cus.h.i.+ng Academy, and the various boyfriends and would-be fiances in New York and Rochester to the contrary notwithstanding, young Bette Davis was profoundly inexperienced s.e.xually, as her humiliating exposure to a naked baby boy revealed to the cast and crew of Bad Sister. Add to this the tremendous pressure of shooting film after film for directors who had neither the time nor the inclination for nurturing, and the tension of never knowing exactly who her new friends were, and her mother's omnipresence, and her sister's instability, and her own fears about her mind, family, money, and art, and Davis's first marriage begins to make more sense.

Davis once described Ham Nelson as "tall, lean, dark curly-haired, with a funny nose and beautiful brown eyes." By "funny nose," she meant that it was a too-broad mismatch for his otherwise preppy-cute face. Barbara Leaming goes so far as to call him an "Ichabod Crane sort of fellow," but he was nothing of the sort. Ham was a pleasantly slim, boyish man with a narrow waist, a hairless chest, a handsome head of very dark hair, and those deep brown eyes.

At Cus.h.i.+ng, the young musician had learned to play the trumpet and serenaded Bette with an odd, all-too-prophetic tune: "Taps." "By then, of course, I was wading in those velvety brown eyes. I was truly in love. So was he," she writes. But when Bette was at drama school in New York, within striking distance of Yale, she ditched him in favor of Fritz Hall-that is, until John Murray Anderson announced in the press that Miss Bette Davis was "the perfect modern Venus," which displeased both her father and her Ivy League beau, who was looking for a more wifely type to accompany him into his family's business.1 Ham, on the other hand, found the Venus remark hilarious and wrote to her "with appropriately irreverent remarks that made [her] roar."2 In 1929, while performing with George Cukor's company in Rochester, she took still another new boyfriend, a businessman named Charles Ainsely. Of Ainsely, Bette cryptically writes, "He would always park at the end of the street, but other than that, we couldn't have been more satisfied." But the satisfaction was brief; the relations.h.i.+p didn't last terribly long, since Bette didn't last long in Rochester. (Ainsley reappeared rather briefly shortly after Bette finished filming The Dark Horse. She and Charlie-and Ruthie and Bobby-traveled to Palm Springs and Yosemite National Park in April 1932. But Ainsley went back to Rochester, and the second phase of the affair turned out to be no more productive than the first.) And then there's the mysterious telegram in one of the sc.r.a.pbooks: addressed to Bette, then living at Carlton Terrace at Broadway and 100th Street in New York and dated September 27, 1930, it reads in its entirety, "Goodby forever-Pierre."

When Bette moved to Los Angeles three months after Pierre's terse farewell and found herself separated from her past by the vast breadth of the continent, Harmon Nelson began to be more than just her high school sweetheart. He was a comfortable, true friend in a world of pressure, paranoia, and other people's s.e.xual hijinks-a link to a past that may have seemed stable by comparison and that promised a similar, familiar future. "Only Ham's letters kept me sane through this period," Bette writes of her first year in Hollywood.3 So when Ham Nelson decided to move west after he graduated from Ma.s.sachusetts State College (later renamed the University of Ma.s.sachusetts at Amherst), they soon married, as much to be able to have s.e.x with each other right away as to build a sustainable life together over the long haul.

Their reunion was put off by several weeks by the fact that while Ham was traveling west, Bette was heading east on a Warner Bros. promotional tour with Warren William, her Dark Horse costar. They crisscrossed the country "like curtain pulleys," Davis writes.4 Tensions with the studio were beginning to build. Her manager, Arthur Lyon, told Warners that Bette was making the trip grudgingly, considering it a "gratuitous concession." And in a telegram to the Warners executive Rufus LeMaire, Davis herself sarcastically noted the studio's cheapskate nature: "Just to show you that I am a pal of the Warners have not been drinking fifteen chocolate milks per day at their expense."5 To top it off, she had to spend a good deal of time and energy fending off the s.e.xual overtures of Warren William.6 While Bette was in New York, Ham took a job as a trumpeter for the orchestra of the Tenth Olympiad, which began on July 30, 1932, at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Bette returned to Los Angeles, and on August 18, Bette and Ham and Ruthie and Bobby and Aunt Mildred and cousin Donald and two poodles piled into a car and drove to Yuma, Arizona. They left the city after midnight. Bette picks up the story for the reporter Gladys Hall of Modern Screen.

Came dawn and we were still a hundred miles from Yuma, which was hundreds of miles more than we had thought. The thermometer registered 107 in the shade! Ham and I had not spoken one word the whole way. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, "This is horrible-I won't go on." Ruthie stopped me. She sensed the furies boiling and said, "Let's not go on," which was, of course, the one divinely inspired thing to say, for the mule in me immediately gave a back kick of the heels and told Ham to step on the gas. We arrived in Yuma. Everyone was soaked to the skin. . . . I kept muttering, "This is so awful it's funny!" When asked whether this was my first marriage, I said, "My third." That got back to the studio! . . . I wore a two-piece beige street dress that resembled the sands of the Arizona desert after the rain it never gets, brown accessories, and two limp gardenias. I kept thinking of the picture I'd always had of myself as a bride-dewy and divine in white satin and orange blossoms, coming up a white-ribboned aisle to the strains of Mendelssohn.7 In The Lonely Life, Bette a.s.serts that she and Ham spent their honeymoon helping Warner Bros. plug its big, modern, glossy musical 42nd Street. Warners' publicist Charles Einfeld had cooked up a brilliant cross-promotional deal with General Electric: the General Electric 42nd Street Express, a gold-and silver-foil-wrapped train that crossed the country displaying Warners' movie stars and the latest GE home products. The train was outfitted, as the Boston Post put it, with "perfect General Electric housekeeping equipment and Malibu Beach sun lamps, platinum blondes, and Tom Mix's new horse, King."8 (Aside from King and Mr. Mix, other stars on board included Bette, Glenda Farrell, Laura La Plante, Joe E. Brown, Lyle Talbot, Leo Carrillo, and the Olympic swimming gold medalist Eleanor Holm.) Taking off from Los Angeles, the train chugged through San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore; made it to Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., in time for Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration; then headed to Philadelphia and Boston. It ended up in New York City.

Despite the luxurious trappings of the train, Warners worked its stars hard as they made their way across the continent. Along the route, the actors, actresses, and horse had to make personal appearances in department stores, show up at parades, open model General Electric kitchens in appliance stores. "We visited 32 cities in 32 days and felt like monkeys in a zoo," Davis writes.9 She arrived in Boston as a hometown heroine on March 8, 1933; a crowd of 10,000 people braved a driving rain to greet her at the station. When she emerged from the train, her hair "a long gold bob curled at the ends" (according to the Post), an especially loud cheer erupted.

It made a good story to say that the General Electric 42nd Street Express served as the couple's honeymoon venue, but in point of fact, Bette Davis made four films between wedding and honeymoon: 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which she began shooting as a newlywed on August 25, one week after the wedding, and finished on September 14; Parachute Jumper (September 21 to October 17); Ex-Lady (December 12 to 31); and The Working Man (January 14 to February 1, 1933).10 She also-finally-had her appendix removed. From the Ill.u.s.trated Daily News, October 22, 1932: "After being ill for years, Bette Davis, blonde actress, will be operated on this morning at Wils.h.i.+re Osteopathic hospital for appendicitis."* It was soon after wrapping The Working Man that the 42nd Street Express honeymoon began. And Bette Davis was beginning to get tired.

* It's unclear that Davis actually had acute appendicitis in June 1931, when she had to leave the set of Waterloo Bridge; the left-lower-quadrant pain she felt may simply have been presumed to be appendix related. It's worth noting, however, that the risk of dying from a surgically acquired infection was higher in those days, and her doctors may have taken a watch-and-wait approach rather than risk surgery. There is also the possibility that she had what is known as chronic appendicitis, in which the body is able-for a time, at least-to contain the inflammation.

But at last she had a s.e.x life. And she loved it. s.e.x didn't have to be about procreation or even obligation, Bette discovered. It was healthy exercise-a way to get rid of nervous tension. Before the wedding, she writes, Ruthie had "found me more high strung than ever. 'You can't go on like this. You and Ham have been in love for years. Marry him!' " Ruthie had spent years dissuading Bette from engaging in casual s.e.x with this sage advice: "A stiff p.r.i.c.k has no conscience."11 Mother may have been an upright Yankee, but apparently she could be as salty as seawater.

In her later life, Bette regretted that Ruthie hadn't just given her approval for the young couple to go ahead and have s.e.x: "Would that she had been that wise. Would that Ham and I had been." The latter sentence, the afterthought, is shocking as such, for by adding it, Bette ranks her mother's control ahead of Ham's, let alone her own. "I was hopelessly puritan, helplessly pa.s.sionate, and, with Ruthie, decided that I had better marry before I became Hester Prynne." Ham, being Ham, went along: "He was not against the idea."

It came as a surprise to Bette that making love was fun and relaxing: "The l.u.s.t I had feared was natural and beautiful. I was released." But Davis doesn't dwell on her s.e.xual liberation in The Lonely Life. Instead, she quickly sketches in a few storm clouds on the horizon: "I now had the work and the man I loved-the best of two worlds. It never occurred to me that they would or could collide."12 Did Bette really imagine that the quiet and una.s.suming Ham Nelson, by osmosis-by simply becoming her husband-would develop a powerful professional libido to match her own? She registers disappointment that he didn't. His Olympics trumpeting job ended with the Olympics, and no other work was forthcoming. Ham was still unemployed by mid-October, and Bette was supporting her husband along with her mother and sister. In fact, she couldn't afford the appendix surgery without help from Jack Warner, who personally approved a kind of loan: "Due to financial difficulties, surgeon's bills, and the necessity for Miss Davis to carry the entire burden of her family upkeep, Mr. Warner has approved our advancing Miss Davis during the period that she is laid off her weekly salary" (which was then $400 a week) beginning October 22.13 By the end of November, Bette owed the studio $1,800, which was taken out of her salary at $150 a week. The raise to $550 she got in December was thereby rendered meaningless for the duration.

Added to the financial stress was the domestic: the wife would return home fiery from a day of high-pressure Hollywood filmmaking and find the husband relaxing in his slippers and smoking a pipe.14 She resented it. And he resented that she resented it.

DAVIS BEGAN SHOOTING 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, with gowns by Orry-Kelly, at the end of August 1932. Stark and hard-edged to a point-the gowns are lovely-the film tells the story of a criminal's redemption, which he achieves perversely by taking the rap for a murder he didn't commit. James Cagney was originally to have starred, but he was spending the summer on suspension from Warners while he fought for a better deal: $3,000 a week instead of the $1,250 he was then being paid.15 Spencer Tracy, on loan from Fox, was cast in Cagney's stead.

The t.i.tle refers to the c.u.mulative number of years served by all the prisoners at Sing Sing, not to an abnormally long sentence meted out to Spencer Tracy, whose character, Tommy Connors, has been sent up the river for five to thirty. It's a measure of the era's social realism and Warner Bros.' particular brand of it that there's no question about Tommy's guilt. He's a thug, albeit a charming one, and his rap sheet proves the point with a string of armed robberies and a.s.saults behind him. Bette plays his moll.

Tracy already admired Davis-he'd actually seen h.e.l.l's House-and he told her so when they met. He went even further, saying that he thought she was the most talented actress in town. "d.a.m.n right," Bette answered with characteristic bravado, "but who are we against so many?"16 "We were an awful lot alike," Davis later said of Tracy. "We weren't the best-looking people on the lot, but we knew we were talented and we weren't getting the parts we deserved. We also weren't just going to sit back and take it."17 James Cagney, never one to sit back and take it either, saw a rather less flattering similarity: "They were both incipient thyroid cases. Early in life Spence did have a serious thyroid problem, and anyone with thyroid trouble is in trouble. Spence's problem was a slightly unsettled personality. He was a most amusing guy, a good companion who told great stories beautifully-but there was always the tension that was tangible. You can feel the stress in such people."18 Davis's oddball looks in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing made a great impression on a young James Baldwin, who recalled seeing the film with the immediacy of a fresh slap in the face: "So, here, now, was Bette Davis, on that Sat.u.r.day afternoon, in close-up, over a champagne gla.s.s, pop-eyes popping. I was astounded. . . . For, here, before me, after all, was a movie star: white: and if she was white and a movie star, she was rich: and she was ugly. . . . Davis's skin [had] the dead-white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock, but I was held, just the same, by the tense intelligence of the forehead, the disaster of the lips: and when she moved, she moved just like a n.i.g.g.e.r."19 Baldwin is wildly excessive in his description of Davis's skin tone. The cinematographer, Barney McGill, is no Ernest Haller or Sol Polito, but his lighting doesn't turn Davis even close to sickly. Still, Baldwin gets her physicality to a tee: the coordinated, full-body energy as well as the unexpected, even dreadful beauty of her face.

20,000 Years in Sing Sing is hard and fast-moving, exactly what one thinks of when someone mentions Warner Bros. in the 1930s. But as tough as this prison drama is-and as much as Michael Curtiz complained about Davis's lack of common s.e.x appeal-Warners and Curtiz simply could not bring themselves to depict their leading lady as anything other than glamorous, even when her character has been physically brutalized. The result is unintentionally comical. The story has Sing Sing's warden releasing Tommy (Tracy) on his own recognizance so he can visit Bette's said-to-be-dying Fay, who, resisting the advances of a goon, has leaped from a speeding car. Curtiz's men are real. He understood that prisoners sweat when they pound boulders into pebbles in the yard; their uniforms are soaked with it. But his women are trumped-up, one-dimensional dream images-even "G.o.dd.a.m.ned nothing no good s.e.xless son of a b.i.t.c.h" Bette Davis. Absurdly, Tommy bursts into Fay's room to find a remarkably scar-and-contusion-free Fay lying calmly in bed, bathed in gentle light, with an Isadora Duncanlike white satin scarf wrapped around her neck to serve as a bandage and matching white satin wrist wraps to complete the ensemble. Warners' grittiness had its limits.

It's easy to mock a Bette Davis movie called Parachute Jumper. Had John Wayne starred in The Tiniest Ballerina, it would seem similarly ludicrous. But Parachute Jumper turns out to be one of Davis's better pictures of the period, a fast-moving Hawksian buddy movie, though without Hawks's character-building intelligence and visual grace. Davis, of course, didn't see it that way. "d.a.m.n it," she bitterly remarks in The Lonely Life. "I was good as the moll [in Sing Sing] and my notices made that clear. My reward was a little epic called Parachute Jumper."20 Her costar, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., shared Bette's derision. For Fairbanks, it was a "punishment" meted out to him by Warner Bros. for not being a good little studio toiler. Davis "thought director Al Green's sense of humor as infantile as the story we were obliged to act out," Fairbanks went on. "She was always conscientious, serious, and seemed devoid of humor of any kind. But then, there was not much to be humorous about. It was a job, and she attacked it with integrity. . . . Our only interest was to get the d.a.m.ned thing over with."21 They started shooting Parachute Jumper on September 21, 1932, and finished three and a half weeks later.

It's true that Davis isn't stretched in any way in Parachute Jumper. Her wisecracking character's southern accent comes straight from Cabin in the Cotton. And Al Green doesn't give her much worthwhile physical business. Still, the film has energy. It's funny and irreverent, and it benefits from its hard-edged pre-Code amoralism: two drug-and booze-runners, the heroes of the piece, shoot down the border patrol and escape without punishment.*

"AN ECSTASY OF poor taste." "A piece of junk." "My shame was only exceeded by my fury."22 To hear Davis rant, her next picture, Ex-Lady, is a tawdry, smirky skin show-a sixty-five-minute leer. But that's Davis's puritanism enunciating itself retrospectively. Warner Bros.' pressbook, as not-to-be-believed as it may be, is more to the point. Referring to her randy, s.e.xually liberated character, Davis is said to have said, "What she wants, of course, is freedom. She will never be satisfied until she has every right that a man has. . . . The exceptional woman should have the same opportunities and the same freedom to develop them that the exceptional man has."

The decision to cast Davis in Ex-Lady was one of Darryl Zanuck's last at Warner Bros.-he and Harry Warner had battled over the latter's Depression-based decision to cut employee salaries by half-and Zanuck was gone by the time shooting began. It cost $115,000 and took all of three weeks to film, from December 12 through 31, 1932.23 But the picture took in more $283,000 and can only be considered a success.24 * Beginning in July 1934, Hollywood studios were forced to submit all scripts to a central censoring agency, the Production Code Administration, for approval. The first general principle of the Production Code sums up the nature of the enterprise: "No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin."

Davis's scorn for Ex-Lady might be inexplicable if there wasn't such a notable rift between the movie's appreciation of free love and the impossibly conventional domesticity she was attempting to achieve while filming it. She believed she could be a Hollywood star during the day and head home to be a transplanted Yankee wife every evening.

Davis couldn't resolve a related set of dueling expectations, this one about housing. She claimed to want to settle down, but in practice she did everything she could not to do so. Several years later-1941, to be exact-Bette, Ruthie, and Bobby Davis sat down one evening and enumerated the total number of apartments and houses that they had lived in: there were more than seventy-five of them. When they moved to Hollywood in December 1930-having done time in Lowell, Newton, Peterborough, various towns on Cape Cod, East Orange, Norwalk, and New York City-they first rented a Tudor cottage on Alta Loma Terrace near the Hollywood Bowl. Their occupancy didn't last long.25 By the summer of 1931, the Davises had moved into a Hollywood Hills house owned by Douglas Fairbanks's cameraman. "It happened to be the first shown the Davises by an agent," wrote Mayme Ober Peake of the Boston Globe. "They looked no further, but leased it on the spot." Peake was fascinated by Bette's bedroom, "with its little rustic balcony-a cloistered cell in its simplicity compared with the average movie star's boudoir! I saw more books-good books-than anything else."26 Davis was, indeed, an avid reader, a characteristic Ham Nelson failed to admire. According to Ham, books took precedence over him.

By mid-April 1932, Bette, Ruthie, and Bobby were living just around the corner from the Warners' lot in Charles Farrell's house at 9918 Toluca Lake Avenue, an expansive Tudor number with a large yard leading down to the water. By the end of June, they'd moved again-this time to 135 Zuma in Malibu.27 This was what Bette considered her "honeymoon house," though soon after the wedding she and Ham and Ruthie and Bobby moved into a house at 1217 Horn Avenue, just north of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

At least the Horn Avenue house actually comprised two buildings-as Bette describes it, "a white, ivy-covered little English house" in front for the newlyweds and a guesthouse in the back for the bride's mother and sister. It appears to have been a mix of need and obligation that kept Bette Davis from setting her mother and sister up in their own house somewhere across town. As she puts it in The Lonely Life, "It was undeniable that I preferred being a captive, rebellious Palomino to a free one. Ham was in a most awkward situation."28 Luckily for Ham, Bobby had another nervous breakdown and moved back East with Ruthie, the strain of Bette's marriage having triggered something more or less obvious in the sad and dependent younger sister. Bobby's face, always favoring Harlow to its own detriment, was beginning to look drawn and strained. Barbara Leaming describes Bobby's emotional state: "Bobby's eruptions often began by her becoming almost catatonic, as she curled up in the fetal position. Then, suddenly, she would leap to her feet and rush about, screaming uncontrollably at the top of her lungs until someone restrained her."29 Ruthie felt that she and Bobby needed the support of family-family who weren't fighting to become movie stars, that is-and so they headed back to Ma.s.sachusetts.

Bette and Ham moved again and again-first to one of Greta Garbo's old residences on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, then to a sizable Spanish Colonial Revival house at 906 North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, and then to an una.s.suming but comfortable house at 5346 Franklin Avenue in Los Feliz.30 She and Ham were still living in the house on Horn Avenue when she made Ex-Lady in December 1932. The film finds Davis cast once again as a glamorous ill.u.s.trator: Helen Bauer is Dallas O'Mara from So Big, yanked away from Hardie Albright and his mother's asparagus farm and reaching even greater success in New York, where she belongs. Her boyfriend, Don (Gene Raymond, whose hair is nearly as bleached as Bette's), has a key to her apartment; that's the first sign of Helen's radicalism. As she explains in a late-night conversation with Don, "n.o.body has any rights about me except me." ("How about a Welsh rarebit!" she immediately offers in a brilliant non sequitur.) There's some melodramatic filler involving Helen's unctuous, unrequited suitor, Don's married girlfriend, and other distractions, and in the end the marriage survives. But Ex-Lady's pleasure lies not in its story or its secondary characters but rather in the cool, matter-of-fact sophistication of Davis's performance: her elegance of movement, her hips slung slightly forward as she strides; the expression of exquisite boredom she affects in a dull dinner party scene; the slow, deliberate way she chews in that scene while listening to her tablemate drone on.

With Ex-Lady, Davis got the billing (over her costar Gene Raymond). She got Tony Gaudio's lavish cinematographic attention. She even got writing punchy enough to stand up to her rapidly clarifying screen persona: the independent woman who triumphs on brain power as much as on how she looks in Orry-Kelly. But her emerging life theme was that what she got was never good enough, and not being good enough, it was to Bette's mind dreadful, shameful. Each indignity was another dark blossom on a weedy vine of rage.

WHEN DAVIS WORKED with George Arliss again, he found her less compliant, more creatively self-a.s.sertive. "My little bird has flown, hasn't she?" he observed between takes o