Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 4

MR. WARNER: Yes.

SIR WILLIAM: When she was married, did your company present her with a doc.u.ment which she was to sign, giving an undertaking not to divorce her husband for three years?

MR. WARNER: I have never heard of it.

SIR WILLIAM: You have a brother, Harry Warner?

MR. WARNER: Yes.

SIR WILLIAM: Was there a proposal that a photograph should be taken of the lady, her husband, and Harry Warner, with the lady handing over to Mr. Harry Warner the undertaking saying that she would not divorce her husband for three years?

MR. WARNER: I can't believe that anything of the kind occurred.

SIR WILLIAM: Did Miss Davis indignantly decline to do anything of the sort?

MR. WARNER: I am sure my brother never made any such proposal, or ever thought of it.

Could Bette have made up this belittling incident out of whole cloth, or did Jack Warner commit perjury?

Sir William did get Warner to acknowledge one key point: "I admit that an actress could become heartbroken if she had to play parts that were not fitted to her," the mogul testified.43 Bette was not called to the stand.

The a.s.sociated Press, dateline London, October 19, 1936: "Bette Davis, the American film actress, was enjoined today from making an English movie. Justice Sir George Branson in King's Bench Division decided in favor of Warner Bros. of Hollywood in an injunction suit to prevent Miss Davis from working in a future picture for Toeplitz Productions, Ltd., a British organization."

"When the news came I was walking on the beach in utter melancholy. Jack Warner had won a three-year injunction or the duration of my contract (whichever was the shorter). I was his, and if he exercised his options, my inhuman bondage stretched to 1942."44 Bette and Sir William were expecting at the worst an injunction limited to one year; the three-year term of the injunction shocked them.45 Warner, always the jokester, claimed that after his court victory Sir Patrick pitched his son-in-law for a screen test and then handed him a screenplay written by himself.46 The outcome was no surprise to Ludovico Toeplitz, who had tried to bail out as early as the end of August. Almost two months before the case went to court-and, strangely, a week before he threw the party at Claridge's-the producer wrote to Bette, who was then staying at the Tudor Close Hotel in Rottingdean, and informed her that, having heard the opinion of both his British and American counsel, "we are advised emphatically that the contract between yourself and Warner Bros. is valid. . . . Warner Bros. will certainly be able to obtain an injunction in the English courts restraining you from performing. . . . You are not and never have been in a position legally to enter into any contract to play for us . . . and we must proceed at once to recast the part contemplated to be played by you."47 One scarcely needs to paint Bette Davis's rebellion against Jack Warner in broad Oedipal strokes to make the point that it was driven as much by irrational pa.s.sion, a deep-seated need to prove an impossible invincibility against a Goliath-like adversary, as it was by practical, professional concerns. Her defeat was a personal humiliation played out on a worldwide stage, and it was doubly devastating for her to lose her case against Jack Warner the man as well as Jack Warner the head of the studio. But there was one key reversal to the Freudian theme. Harlow successfully abandoned her; Warner accomplished what was, for her, even more excruciating: he kept her tethered to him.

The paternal nurturing she craved arrived in the form of George Arliss, who visited her in Rottingdean. A man of great personal charm, Arliss was also a seasoned veteran of the theater and cinema. He was consoling, but he was also practical. She was compelled to return to Warner Bros., he told her. But she was an actress, and it was her choice as to how she played the scene. He sent a note a few days later: "Dear Miss Davis . . . I was so happy to have that little visit with you. I admire your courage in this affair, but when you have found out just what you can do, then I would suggest that you review the thing dispa.s.sionately and choose the course that is likely to be best for you in the long run." Thoughtfully, he sent her a gift along with the card-a slew of cigarettes from Lewis of St. James Street.48 "This was the last time I ever saw Mr. Arliss," Davis writes in Mother G.o.ddam. Arliss's paternal role was lost neither on Davis nor on Arliss himself: "He was a wise and beautiful man. I think he loved me as a father hopefully would. I have a signed photograph of him. The inscription reads: 'with adopted fatherly affection.' "49 SIR WILLIAM JOWITT had made the point in court that it would be difficult for both parties to resume their creative relations.h.i.+p: "If Mr. Warner and Miss Davis both had the tact and consideration of angels, it would be putting a very great strain on them if, after all this, she is going back to work for them."50 Sir William was right; it was a terrible strain. For Bette, if not for Jack Warner. Bette met with one of Warners' British lawyers, who reported back to the studio that she had respectfully offered several suggestions on how to proceed. Convinced that Arthur Edeson's cinematography for The Golden Arrow wasn't as good as it might have been, she once again asked that Sol Polito, Ernie Haller, or Tony Gaudio photograph her films if at all possible. She asked the studio, in the lawyer's words, "to let her appear in two good substantial parts as her next two films"-not an unreasonable request from the year's Best Actress winner, let alone one of Bette's caliber. She "seriously suggests that the maximum advantage can be obtained from her acting if her appearances are limited to four films a year." (As a point of comparison, Meryl Streep hasn't appeared in four films in a single year since 1979, the year she won an Oscar for her performance in Kramer vs. Kramer.) Bette mentioned her desire to be loaned out to other studios more frequently, but Warners' lawyer cut off that part of the conversation. And finally, she asked if the studio would waive its claim against her for the costs of the trial. She hadn't yet paid her own counsel's fees, which amounted to 3,000, and she didn't have the money.51 (Whitney Stine calculates "a mean total of $103,000.")52 Jack Warner had no intention of waiving the studio's claim against Davis. After all, she lost. And now she had to pay. He and his staff sought a "collectable amount equivalent to a judgment . . . which we can, if we so desire, enforce against her here," meaning back in Burbank when Davis returned to work.53 As for Bette's own legal costs, she urged her solicitors not to approach Toeplitz for payment. The solicitors' idea was to have Warner Bros. pay them directly out of Bette's weekly salary, though they did timidly float the idea that Warner Bros. might pay their fees in addition to its own, an idea Warners' counsel found "preposterous" and "impertinent."54 Interviewed at her hotel in Rottingdean, Davis, wearing blue beach pajamas and smoking a cigarette, called her defeat "a sock in the teeth." "I'm a bit bewildered," she went on. "I didn't make any plans for a hundred percent defeat. I thought at least that it would have been a partial victory for me and for everybody else with one of these body-and-soul contracts. Mind you, I didn't fight it as a test case for the whole film industry. I fought it for myself and for my career. . . . Instead of getting increased freedom, I seem to have provided-at my own expense-an object lesson for other would-be 'naughty young ladies.' "55 She got a cable two days later: "Clock in steeple strikes one come home love Ham."56 The episode turned out not to be the total loss Davis felt it to be at the time. It provided her with vital publicity, the key element of which was precisely that it was not dictated by Warner Bros.' publicity department. She had despised not only the apparent indifference of her casting but also the way she had been marketed. She hated the early fas.h.i.+on shoots, the dyeing of her hair, the cereal ads. . . . It was hardly her idea to present herself as Constance Bennett's secondhand look-alike. Even Warners' best promotions for Davis were in some ways more damaging to her psyche than her worst scripts because they tried to sell her as being someone she wasn't. So although she lost the case, by taking such a belligerent stance against Warners in the full, bright glare of the English-speaking press, she adroitly bypa.s.sed the studio's publicity machine and created a new persona for herself on her own terms: a strong-willed independent thinker as confrontational as any man.57 It worked. Not only did Warners give her better, more suitable scripts upon her return to Burbank, but the studio's publicists began to exploit her pugnacious, ready-to-erupt persona themselves-to the studio's advantage as well as to Davis's.58 Contentiousness became her legacy. As the Economist put it on the occasion of her death, "The two cigarettes lit by Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager-one for him, one for her-were as nothing compared to the two fingers she gave to the head of the studio, Jack Warner, in the high court in London in 1936."59 But once again, that's skipping ahead. When the Cunard White Star RMS Aquitania departed Southampton on Wednesday, November 4, bound for New York, one of the pa.s.sengers listed on the roster was "Mrs. R. E. D. Nelson."60 And Mrs. Nelson wasn't very happy.

CHAPTER.

7.

"IN THE WARNER JAIL"

"I LOVE MY HUSBAND BECAUSE HE Doesn't Treat Me Like a Star!"-the t.i.tle of a 1936 fanzine article ill.u.s.trated with photos of the Nelsons' modest vine-covered, two-story house on busy Franklin Avenue. There were gables, striped awnings, and a picket fence. A driveway ran on the side. During the course of the reporter's visit, Bette turned to her modest husband, Harmon, and said, "Aren't you getting just a little tired of all this racket?"

"Not yet," he replied.1 But by the end of the year Ham Nelson was indeed getting sick of the racket-his wife's emotional clatter more than the traffic on Franklin-and when Bette checked into a suite at the Algonquin after disembarking from the Aquitania, she found her husband less than enthusiastic about returning with her to Los Angeles. He'd found work with Tommy Dorsey's band and planned to stay in New York.2 It was with Ruthie that Bette would travel west, Mother having gotten as far as New York on her way to rescue Bette from Great Britain when Bette cabled that she was coming back to the States on her own.

Davis didn't put an especially good face on things in New York. Unbowed if not downright belligerent, she bluntly told the reporters who collected at the Algonquin that she was heading back to Hollywood to "serve five years in the Warner jail." She explained her sense of anxious resignation: "When I was a young thing and not very wise I signed the contract which ties me up to 1942. I'll be an old woman by 1942, but I'm going back, and I'll be there in a week or so, and all I can say is the h.e.l.l with it."3 By "old woman," Bette Davis meant that in 1942 she would be thirty-four.

"She told me that her main worry for years in Hollywood was paying the rent," said the writer Dotson Rader, who got to know Davis in the 1980s.

First and foremost, it was a job to her. The whole fight she had with Jack Warner was over the fact that she felt that the parts she was being forced to play were destroying her future ability to make money-to get work. The point at which she rebelled against Warner was the point at which women in Hollywood, then and now, were beginning to age-late 20s, early 30s. She was aware of that, and she wanted to establish to her audience that her appeal was not based on s.e.x. All [Warners] looked at was the short term-what the box-office was on this picture. They weren't interested in what the star of the picture might be making ten years later, or if the picture was going to help the star find work in ten years. [Hollywood is] a completely short-term-driven industry, so it's in conflict with the real long-term interests of individual actors or directors-the creative people. Bette Davis was one of the first people not only to realize it but to act on it-to try to protect herself.4 Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Nelson arrived in Los Angeles on the Santa Fe Chief on Wednesday, November 18.5 Having had the width of the continent to consider her public image, Bette was less hostile in the press this time around. She wasn't chastened. She may have been twenty pounds thinner after her legal and emotional ordeal, but she'd never be chastened.6 She was politic: "I'm just a working girl-not a crusader," she told the L.A. scribes. " 'Work, work, and more work' is my motto from now on." She wrote a personal note to Jack Warner saying that she was "ready, willing, and able" to return to the lot and expressed her hope that she would be put back on salary as soon as Warner received the letter, which, reflecting a characteristic sense of urgency, she had hand-delivered. The boss's response was to order her to be back at the studio on Monday, November 23, at 11:30 in the morning.7 Her next picture, Marked Woman, was already in preproduction.

TIMELY, TOPICAL, AND atypical, Marked Woman is generic Warner Bros. at its tense, 1930s best. It's the fictionalized story of the gangster Lucky Luciano and his notorious prost.i.tution ring, though thanks to the Production Code the ladies are nominally hostesses at a shady if glamorous nightclub. The real Lucky, whose name was originally Salvatore Lucania, moved to New York from Sicily with his family at the age of nine; he was only a year older than Bette.8 Luciano was a gangster's gangster and had the underlings to match-thuggish men with nicknames like c.o.c.keyed Louis and Charlie Spinach.9 Warner Bros., always looking for an angle, actually hired one of Luciano's former goons, Herman "Hymie" Marks, to play a bit part as a gangster, though Hal Wallis worried that Hymie didn't look nearly menacing enough to play one onscreen.10 There's a scene in Marked Woman in which Bette, as Mary Dwight, convinces Humphrey Bogart's self-righteous prosecutor (based on Thomas Dewey) that she's ready to sing. It's a duplicitous gesture, since Mary is still protecting the Luciano character (renamed Vanning for the film, though he retains a thick Italian accent). Vanning has not yet thrown her kid sister down a flight of steps, an act that finally gives Bette's Mary a good reason to turn on him. At this point she's still the tough nightclub hostess in the employ of the mob, which is to say that she's a Code-approved hooker. And this smart wh.o.r.e is putting on an act, though we're not yet aware of that fact. Her voice pitching toward feverishness, Bette hurls herself into a chair and bursts into tears, but rather than daubing at her nose with a pet.i.te piece of lace as a lesser actress would do, she digs into her nostrils with a decidedly unladylike fury. Lloyd Bacon, the director, films her from an unflattering angle: Mary is bending over the desk, using it as support in her moment of breakdown, and Bacon shoots the top of her head straight on, making her nose the primary focus. It's purposely ugly looking, but the electricity of the scene comes from Bette, who certainly could have played it more demurely and with fewer excretions. In exhaustion and apparent defeat, Mary leans back in her chair, cleans her nails on the now-wet handkerchief, and agrees to testify against Vanning. But the moment Bogart moves safely out of range, she s.h.i.+fts her eyes to their edges, and we see that Mary is actually a cool and cunning liar planning to commit perjury and wreck the prosecutor's case. This, it turns out, has been Davis performing a performance of hysteria, a redoubled acting job and one of the best scenes in her career.

"So long, chump," is her exit line to Bogart after the trial.

Later in the film, Mary turns against Vanning for real, kid sister having been tossed down said steps. She threatens him: "I'll get you," she spits, fixing him with a stare more sharp than bug-eyed, "even if I have to crawl back from my grave to do it!" Vanning responds by having his boys rough her up-badly. A newspaper headline roars from the screen: "Clip Joint Hostess Near Death from Attack!" You want to laugh-and you may, because it's mid-1930s Warner Bros. distilled to its entertainingly blunt essence-but the driven and artful actress who plays the clip joint hostess makes something valid out of it by shocking us with her character's injuries. On the day she filmed the scene, Bette decided that she'd had enough of the type of glamorous beating she'd endured under Michael Curtiz's timorous eye in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. From Bette's perspective, a new year had turned. It was 1937, and Warners' executives, producers, directors, and makeup artists still didn't get it. She alone did. The script called for Mary to be thrashed and knifed and scarred for life, but as Bette later described herself after she came out of makeup that morning, "I don't think I ever looked so attractive. Lilly Dache herself could have created that creamy puff of gauze at the peak of her inspiration. It was an absolute gem of millinery." According to Davis, she "smiled sweetly" and left the studio, supposedly for lunch.11 She went instead to her physician, Dr. F. Le Grand Noyes, to whom she explained the plot turn and who she asked to bandage her as though she had, in fact, been kicked hard, punched repeatedly, and knife-gashed in the cheek.

Bette may have added a few contusions of her own before showing up at Hal Wallis's office, where Wallis greeted her at the door, saw her swollen eyes, outrageously broken nose, brown abrasions, and acres of b.l.o.o.d.y gauze, and burst into laughter. "Okay, you get your way," the producer told her-"all except that broken nose. You can't have that."12 Bette Davis looks proudly, defiantly ghastly onscreen in this scene in Marked Woman. A bandage is taped to her right cheek, another wrapped around her head; there are blackened eyes looking out through hollow sockets and bruises everywhere, and she holds the left side of her mouth morbidly rigid. This was the ant.i.thesis of Hollywood convention. It was a radical blend of stylization and brutal realism-Bette Davis pulling a majestic, disturbing stunt for the sake of art, all the while demanding to be recognized as Bette Davis, a creative force of nature. Her ghastliness must have registered even more powerfully at the time because n.o.body in 1937 expected it, especially on the face of an Oscar-winning female movie star who was expected to look glamorous no matter what.

When Marked Woman was released in April, Warners' head of publicity and advertising, S. Charles Einfeld, was ecstatic. Writing to Jack Warner, Einfeld went on and on about how well audiences, particularly women, were responding to Davis in the picture: "You hear women say, 'There's a gal who doesn't need a lot of junk all over her face,' and 'Bette Davis is a female Cagney.'" Einfeld warned Warner against continuing to attempt to further glamorize his strange, bullheaded star but instead to let her play up her strengths: her nervous vitality, her bold decision making, her refusal of convention and inappropriate lip gloss.13 Marked Woman wrapped on January 19, 1937, two days behind schedule, and Bette immediately went into her next picture, Kid Galahad, which wasn't nearly as challenging. A grinning hunk of blond beefcake, a bellhop named Ward (Wayne Morris, in his film debut), doubles as bartender at a party thrown by a boxing manager, Donati (Edward G. Robinson), and his girlfriend (Davis), whose nickname, no kidding, is "Fluff." Donati's rival is played by Humphrey Bogart and is saddled with the nickname "Turkey." One of Turkey's boys insults Fluff, and Ward chivalrously decks him. So begins his career as the boxer Kid Galahad. Fluff is a singer, which leads to a delightful scene in which Bette, cigarette in hand and draped on a piano in a black sleeveless top and big-sequined skirt, lip-synchs "The Moon Is in Tears Tonight." Aside from the fight scenes, it's the highlight of the film.

Although they were two of the more intelligent and liberal actors in town, there was no love lost between Davis and Robinson. "All of us girls at Warners hated kissing his ugly purple lips," Bette said in retrospect.14 Privately she called him "mush mouth."15 As for Robinson, he reportedly told Hal Wallis, "This Davis girl-she's hopeless! She's an amateur. She's totally out of place in this picture." Robinson got the first part wrong, but he may have had a point about Davis's casting, which once again relegated her to the sidelines.16 "Neither recognized the other's talent," Wallis later observed.

There was still friction between Davis and Michael Curtiz. Davis has a particularly d.a.m.ning story to tell in The Lonely Life: "I will never forget Wayne's knocking out a fighter in a take. 'Fake fight! Retake! Fake fight-awful!' Curtiz screamed-but it was difficult to redo because Wayne's opponent was unconscious. He had knocked him out cold."17 Another tale finds Bette stopping in the middle of a take and barking at her director, "Mike! Watch me! Stop watching the camera!"18 She was mistaken, of course. Film direction isn't solely about monitoring performances. But soon enough she would learn that a director-a real director, one with ideas to express and the stubborn dynamism to get them on celluloid-would care as much about where the camera was moving as he would about the actress toward whom it happened to be pointing at the moment. After that, everyone else would look like hacks.

"IT WAS A farcical comedy," Davis writes dismissively of It's Love I'm After, "but Leslie [Howard] and I had a romp, and I was out of the gutter and in Orry-Kelly's latest gowns."19 She goes on to say that she would have preferred to do humor of a higher nature-a Philip Barry or S. N. Behrman property, a Holiday or The Philadelphia Story or No Time for Comedy.

But she's wrong. As great as they are, those films don't have the purposefully uncomfortable bite of It's Love I'm After, with the admitted exception of the opening punch in The Philadelphia Story. In fact, Davis and Howard are both superbly p.r.i.c.kly, not to mention eminently believable, as scene-hogging actors embroiled in a long and th.o.r.n.y affair. It's a shame that Davis failed to appreciate her own knack for getting complicated laughs onscreen.

In screwball comedies, characters' fluid ident.i.ties lead to emotional liberation as they discover that lying pretense reveals its own higher truth. Playacting lets Cary Grant and Irene Dunne fake their way back to two happy marriages in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. In It's Love I'm After, the fact that Joyce and Basil are both hammy actors is what enables them to rediscover their love. They see each other for what they are-and aren't. Their squabbling recalls the great Carole LombardJohn Barrymore fights in Twentieth Century, though here there's an added complication: a mooning young heiress played by Olivia de Havilland. While Davis's Joyce and Howard's Basil look at each other and see nothing but greasepaint, which they love, de Havilland's naive Marcia looks at Basil and sees nothing but love, which Basil quickly grows to despise.

Although the part of a tempestuous actress seems to have been tailor-made for Bette Davis, Casey Robinson, one of Warner Bros.' better screenwriters, said that it was only fortuitous casting: "We just happened to cast Bette in It's Love I'm After. It wasn't written for her."20 But it certainly could have been.

The film was shot in June 1937. As Variety reported on the ninth, Bette was slightly injured when she fell into the orchestra pit between takes of the Romeo and Juliet death scene, during which the two hams snipe at each other not-so-sotto voce while laboriously dying. Luckily for Bette, she was padded for the real-life pratfall: her "heavy wig absorbed part of the shock."21 WHAT WITH THE frequent moves and absent father, neither of the Davis sisters had had an easy time of it, but at least the older daughter had gotten her mother's attention. Ruthie and the girls' old apartment in Newton featured innumerable photos of Bette, taken by an adoring Ruthie, but not a single one of Bobby. Mother and daughters spent the summer in Provincetown before the girls went to North-field Academy. Bobby, walking on the beach after a storm, found a broken toy sailboat and spent the next few days painstakingly repairing it, only to watch, heartbroken on the beach, as the infinitely more self-a.s.sertive Bette grabbed it and launched it into the surf, where it vanished. Bobby, a family friend once declared, was treated as though she was "the little stepchild."22 For reasons that aren't entirely clear, Bobby transferred from Denison to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, but her emotional state drove her to drop out and move out West with Bette and Ruthie; this was during the early days at the house on Alta Loma. Ellen Bachelder, a friend of the Davises at that time, recalled that Bette held a tight grip on herself at the studio and kept it all in until she got home, whereupon she would blow up at Ruthie and Bobby. After the Davises moved to the Tudor-style house on Toluca Lake, Bachelder arrived one day to find Bette furiously sweeping out closets, enraged that neither Ruthie nor Bobby had done the housework properly. Bobby told Bachelder that Bette would come home from a day under the lights and in front of the cameras, put on a pair of white gloves, and run her fingers along the furniture and woodwork to a.s.sess the degree of meticulous dusting that had, or hadn't, occurred during her absence.

The strain of life, let alone life with her overachieving sister, became too much for Bobby. She would periodically become violent instead of simply melancholy, shouting at both Ruthie and Bette and even slapping and punching them. Her energy spent, Bobby would then suddenly become silent and sullen again.23 In 1934, Ruthie moved Bobby back East-specifically to a sanitarium in Ma.s.sachusetts-where she received various treatments including electroshock therapy. Ruthie returned to Los Angeles on April 5, Bette's birthday, and stayed for about a month; Ham wisely moved out for the duration.

Bobby returned to Los Angeles later that year and touchingly told the press, "I want to be an actress, just like my sister."24 Her ambition appears to have been mainly for show, for as Bette herself noted, "Bobby, now fully recovered and with infinite lucidity, had started to call me the Golden Goose."25 In 1935, to her own relief more than her mother's or sister's, Bobby, then twenty-five, fell in love for the first time. Like her sister, she picked someone she knew from back East, someone familiar-in her case "little Bobby Pelgram" from Ogunquit, Maine. He was now the das.h.i.+ng Robert Cole Pelgram, twenty years old, a handsome socialite and flier. When Pelgram asked Bobby to marry him, Bobby had no hesitation. But she was still not her own woman: she chose her older sister's anniversary as the day of her own wedding. Bobby, Pelgram, Ham, and Bette drove down to Tijuana on August 18 for the ceremony.

The Los Angeles Examiner reported in mid-June 1937 that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cole Pelgram had recently departed on a belated honeymoon, setting sail on the SS Virginia for a seven-month cruise through the Panama Ca.n.a.l to Europe, Egypt, India, China, j.a.pan, and Hawaii. Bette thoughtfully had their stateroom adorned with gardenias and sweet peas.26 As much as it must have relieved Bette of the financial burden of supporting her sister as well as her mother and her husband, Bobby's marriage appears to have sparked some resentment on Bette's part; the grudging Lady Bountiful was no longer the center of Bobby's dependent life, as troubled as it sometimes was. Moreover, Bobby never had to work. Bette did.

As for Ruthie, she believed her work was done and expected to be supported in increasingly grand style. Bette writes, "She, who had worked for me like a demon-had known no sacrifice great enough-now relaxed into luxury. . . . To Mother, Hollywood was a playground and movie actresses spent their days floating through an atmosphere of Chanel-scented flattery, adoration, and glamour. I don't believe that Ruthie ever believed I worked once I arrived."27 This was a problem.

In 1937, money-along with husband, sister, and mother-continued to impress itself on Bette's everyday psyche. She downplays it in her various memoirs, but this was a time of continuing financial panic on her part. Warners "greeted me with open arms," Davis writes in The Lonely Life, and "graciously relieved me of their share of the damages. I didn't have to pay the King's ransom to Sir Patrick, and Sir William's retainer was shared by my employers who fulfilled Mr. Arliss' prophecy and bent over backwards to be nice."28 But in point of fact, Jack Warner used Bette's debts as a sword of Damocles. He was not in the mood to forgive anything, especially lucre. On January 6, 1937, Bette wrote a note to Warner asking for an advance of $14,000 to cover her legal bills. Rather than "relieving" her of her share of the damages, Warner arranged for a Bank of America loan that Bette would pay back in weekly installments against her salary.29 Also in January Warners refused to waive its legal costs, which included internal billing from Warners' New York office: New York charged Burbank over $15,000 for the time it spent on Bette's case.30 She was still being paid far less than her peers, and insultingly so. Leave aside the fact that Louis B. Mayer personally took in almost $1.3 million in 1937; he was the boss of bosses and earned accordingly. But major talent wasn't doing too badly either. According to the Hollywood Citizen Examiner, Greta Garbo earned $472,499 that year. Irene Dunne made $259,587, Katharine Hepburn $238,703. If the Citizen Examiner's figures are correct, Bette Davis made only $53,200-about $155,000 less than the ice skating queen Sonja Henie.

FOR THE MOST part, Warner Bros. learned its lesson from Bette's infamous walkout, and the studio offered her parts that suited her or, at least, failed to enrage her. But in the summer of 1937, Warners announced that her next picture would be Busby Berkeley's Hollywood Hotel, costarring d.i.c.k Powell. Bette rebelled. Vociferously. Not coincidental to her rage was that she was being forced to play the dual role of a temperamental movie star who disappears after being denied a role she coveted and the double who takes over for her to serve the studio's publicity needs.31 That she did not play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind was one of her most bitter disappointments, and she rankled at the mention of the film for the rest of her life. According to Bette, Warner Bros. optioned the rights to Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's novel just before it was published in June of 1936, and Jack Warner offered to cast her as Scarlett if only she'd just "be a good girl" and play the lady lumberjack in G.o.d's Country and the Woman.32 Bette writes she hadn't yet heard of Gone with the Wind and left Warner's office with the exit line "I bet it's a pip."33 Warner's own account differs slightly: "For some reason that now seems obscure to me, I was not too eager to make this picture, although I had an opportunity to bid on the film rights of Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's novel, and could have had it for a mere $50,000. It may be that the antic.i.p.ated $5,000,000 cost cooled my enthusiasm. . . . In any case, I did not nail down an option, and Selznick got it. This was Bette's first setback, for I would have given her Scarlett."34 Whether Bette's walkout and the studio's lawsuit was the absolute cause or just a contributing factor, Jack Warner lost interest in making Gone with the Wind precisely while Davis was wrangling with him in the British courts. By August 1936, Selznick had picked up the rights, and by September he'd chosen a director: George Cukor. "Shades of Rochester," Bette later complained. "He still saw me as the girl in Broadway, and whatever his ancient grievance, his thumbs were still down."35 Selznick's memos and contemporary news items indicate that Selznick was strongly considering Miriam Hopkins (G.o.d forbid), Tallulah Bankhead, and Joan Crawford, but not particularly Bette Davis. At one point Tallulah was the front-runner and was screen-tested. Paulette G.o.ddard was tested as well, as was Vivien Leigh. Other stars and starlets were considered, too, if only by their press agents and acquiescent Hollywood reporters: Jean Arthur, Diana Barrymore, Joan Bennett, Marguerite Churchill, Claudette Colbert, Frances Dee, Ellen Drew, Irene Dunne, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Susan Hayward, Boots Mallory, Jo Ann Sayers, Norma Shearer, Margaret Sullavan, Margaret Tallichet, Lana Turner, Claire Trevor, Arleen Whelan, and Loretta Young. Even less likely candidates included Mrs. Jock Whitney, Betty Timmons (Margaret Mitch.e.l.l's niece), and Lucille Ball.36 In June 1937, Cinema Arts joked that the only two actresses who hadn't been mentioned as serious contenders for the role of Scarlett O'Hara were Martha Raye and s.h.i.+rley Temple.37 "Everybody's second cousin was tested, and I was used as the touchstone," Bette claimed. "That was how right I was. It was insanity that I not be given Scarlett. But then, Hollywood has never been rational."38 The Hollywood Citizen News asked various directors to voice their opinions on the matter: Mervyn LeRoy, evidently having changed his mind about Bette's prospects, picked her as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, with Irene Dunne as Melanie; George Stevens suggested Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant; Archie Mayo wanted Miriam Hopkins and Gary Cooper.39 Bette herself received a telegram: "We are delighted to inform you we have unanimously voted you the ideal choice [for] Scarlett O'Hara." Unfortunately for Davis, the telegram was not signed "David O. Selznick and staff" but rather "a.s.sociated Cinema Fans of Westchester, Inc."40 Davis was indeed the choice by public acclamation: of all the women mentioned over the course of the casting contest, Davis scored highest in the fan magazine polls cited by Gavin Lambert in his essay on the making of Gone with the Wind: "Bette Davis was easily the most popular candidate, with 40 percent of the vote."41 She had one more chance, and-for once-both Davis and Warner agreed on the circ.u.mstances. Warner: "Before Selznick decided on Vivien Leigh, he came to me with a proposition to lend him Bette Davis and Errol Flynn as a costarring package for the picture. Bette was fond of Errol . . . but she was also realistic about Errol's limited acting talent. She refused to have any part of the deal, and that was her last chance for the part."42 Davis was more succinct: "The thought of Mr. Flynn as Rhett Butler appalled me. I refused."43 Davis and Warner may have agreed about Selznick's proposal, but Selznick himself took a rather different view of who refused whose proposal about what. The producer wrote a lengthy letter to Ed Sullivan, then the Hollywood columnist for the New York Daily News, correcting the supposed misreporting on his beloved project, the crown jewel of his career: "Certainly you ought to know that Warner Bros. wouldn't give up Bette Davis for a picture to be released through MGM, even had we wanted Miss Davis in preference to a new personality. Warner Bros. offered me Errol Flynn for Butler and Bette Davis for Scarlett if I would release the picture through Warners-and this would have been an easy way out of my dilemma. But the public wanted Gable."44 (Unlike Flynn, the magnetic Clark Gable had both looks and substance; audiences adored his rugged insouciance in such hits as It Happened One Night and Mutiny on the Bounty, and when Gone with the Wind was published, it was Gable's name that was on everybody's lips to play Rhett Butler.) Whether Bette Davis had a real shot at Scarlett O'Hara is therefore debatable at best, but the crucial fact is that she believed she did, and this was the context in which she was told to appear as a loser movie star in Hollywood Hotel.

The film was scheduled for production from early August to early November, after which she would go directly into Jezebel, which was exactly the kind of meaty, dramatic picture she had been demanding all along. In July, after learning of her casting in Hollywood Hotel, Bette and Ham took a beach vacation to Carpinteria, just south of Santa Barbara, but Bette did not relax. On July 17, she wrote a lengthy handwritten letter to Jack Warner begging him not to force her to do Hollywood Hotel. She was exhausted, she wrote. The picture was a comedy-"a farce"-and she wasn't right for it. She suggested her old friend Joan Blondell. She was getting only four weeks' vacation after doing four "very hard pictures." She weighed only 104 pounds. Surely he understood.45 Chatter ensued; memos flew. Roy Obringer told Warner he'd talked to her lawyer, Dudley Furse, who told him that Bette was up North somewhere suffering from a bad case of sunburn, but that her business manager, Vernon Wood, had talked to her and advised her to do the film on the theory that she should get away from all the heavy roles she'd done. According to Wood, Bette was planning to plead one more time, but after that she'd go ahead and do it if that's what Warner wanted.

Bette did her second-round pleading the following week. The role was no good, she wrote. "There is no living actress such a fool," she declared. And she'd have to do a musical number in the Hollywood Bowl sequence-it was, after all, a Busby Berkeley film-and she knew she'd be terrible at it.46 Warner Bros. responded that day. There would be no further discussion; Bette Davis would do Hollywood Hotel.

The following day, G. Horace Coshow, M.D., of Carpinteria telephoned the studio. Bette had come down with sunstroke, he said, and he was taking her to the hospital. She would require one month to recover. A few days later, Warners slapped Bette on suspension.

Her secretary, Bridget Price, took over the conversation with the studio. (The critic Janet Flanner described Price as "a tall, intaglio-faced English lady, an old friend of Mrs. Davis."47 Intaglio: a design carved into the surface of metal or stone.) She had seen Bette, Bridget wrote to Jack Warner, and could honestly report that Bette was suffering from second-degree burns. She was a.s.sured, however, that Bette would recover over time. By the way, Bridget wrote, she had told Bette that she had seen the previews for It's Love I'm After and loved them but was surprised to see that Bette had been given second billing to Leslie Howard when, after all, she had been billed equally with Mr. Howard above the t.i.tle on previous occasions. Bette agreed that Bridget should write to Mr. Warner about this problem immediately. Bette would do it herself, of course, but for the fact that Dr. Coshow had ordered her to rest.48 Warner waited several weeks before replying that Miss Price was mistaken: Bette Davis was in fact billed above the t.i.tle on the same line as Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland.

But she never did Hollywood Hotel.

By November, Bette was back at work beginning to film Jezebel when the gossip columnist Radie Harris reported-in an article called "The Fear That Is Haunting Bette Davis"-that Bette had in fact suffered "a complete nervous collapse" over the summer in addition to a bad case of sunburn.49 Bette took the occasion of her own nervous breakdown and her fear of losing her mind completely to reveal her sister Bobby's recurring mental illness. This was an unusually frank admission from a movie star, but it wasn't very nice to Bobby.50 BETTE'S WEDDING RING had been stolen after only a week of marriage. Ham bought her a new one at Christmas 1932-"a very lovely band of platinum and diamonds," according to Mayme Ober Peake-but the loss of the original one was portentous.51 The marriage wasn't working. "There was no equity in our drives nor in our sense of sovereignty. That was the core of all our troubles," Bette admits in The Lonely Life.52 There was another problem, too: "It is small wonder that Ham was both dazzled, bewitched, and then exhausted with my crises. I always had one."53 Ham Nelson was a sporadically employed musician married to a dynamic, overwrought, increasingly famous movie star who operated under emotional and professional strains he couldn't alleviate. When he took a job in San Francisco in 1934 and earned one hundred dollars a week, he found housing in a low-rent bungalow-10 Mission Auto Court, to be exact.54 (On one trip to visit him, Bette got a speeding ticket for going seventy miles an hour in a forty-five-mile zone near Livermore.)55 It was all very amusing for the press to run stories about how the movie star visited her husband in an auto court, but Ham found the attention paid to the couple's income disparity more difficult to stomach.

He also experienced the cla.s.sical jealousy of the star's spouse, forever having to sit through movies watching richer, better-looking, more famous men make love to his wife. Michael Curtiz overheard the couple bickering at a screening of Front Page Woman, with Ham accusing Bette of being a little too believable in her onscreen attraction to George Brent and stomping off hissing "Horses.h.i.+t!" after Bette explained that she was simply doing her job.56 He may or may not have known about the fling with Franchot Tone, but he became enraged when he learned that the male starlet Ross Alexander was attempting to cover his attraction to men by ostentatiously proclaiming his attraction to Bette. "I'll kill him," Ham is said to have responded and promptly beat Alexander up in a studio men's room. Alexander didn't let up on his quest for Bette, though, and Bette replied by ridiculing his masculinity, leading Alexander to call her "a merciless b.i.t.c.h." Shortly thereafter, in late December 1936, Alexander picked up a hitchhiker for s.e.x. The hitchhiker tried to blackmail him, and the studio had to intervene. Haunted by this humiliation, Alexander committed suicide on January 2, 1937. Bette was wracked with guilt.57 Her relations.h.i.+p with Ham was also strained by two pregnancies, both aborted. "I had two during my first marriage," Davis acknowledged to Playboy's Bruce Williamson in 1982. "I don't want to talk about my marriages, but-well, that's what he wanted. Being the dutiful wife, that's what I did. And I guess I will thank him all my life. Because if I'd had those two children. . . . I see myself at 50, with the children all grown up, wondering whether or not I ever would have made it. I think there's nothing sadder, and I'm sure I'd have given it all up if I'd had children earlier."58 Bette may have been sure, but Ham Nelson surely wasn't. And it was Ham Nelson who saw his wife's fierce ambition and rock-bottom dedication to acting at the closest possible range.

Bette and Ham moved-again-in 1937, this time to 1700 Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, a hacienda-style house complete with a swimming pool, a tennis court, and an acre of land.59 But by the time Jezebel went into production in November, Ham was spending most of his time in New York, having taken a job as an agent.60 "He was too honorable to trade on my position in pictures, which would have been easy for him to do, and I know the gulf between our earnings discouraged him," Bette later wrote. "That, more than anything else, licked him."61

PART TWO.

VICTORIES.

CHAPTER.

8.

THE SECOND OSCAR.

CALLING BETTE'S SPOILED, HEAD-strong Julie Marsden "Jezebel" is a bit harsh. The biblical Ahab's Baalwors.h.i.+pping wife slew a variety of perfectly decent prophets and thus offended the Lord so mightily that He arranged for her to be hurled out of a window by eunuchs and her corpse to be devoured by dogs. Julie Marsden just wears the wrong dress to a southern society ball. Still, in the humid and overwrought New Orleans in which William Wyler's elegant film is set, an inappropriate gown is a breach so d.a.m.ning that Julie must dispatch herself to a leper colony to regain her honor.

To say that Jezebel is vintage Bette Davis is to praise what vinophiles love in a fine old wine-not the bright, fresh berry but the subtle rankness of controlled decay. The fact that Jezebel was adapted from a Broadway bomb is as key to the film's appeal as Wyler's meticulous direction. In the first of their three collaborations, Wyler and Davis extract an essential, rich spirit from an essentially inferior grape.

Wyler first encountered the property in December 1933, when he saw Miriam Hopkins star in one of the thirty-two performances of the ill-fated play. He saw it neither as fine theater nor as a project for Davis, whom he'd dismissed and forgotten two years earlier. For Wyler, Jezebel stood poised as a potential vehicle for his then-wife, the volatile Margaret Sullavan. Wyler suggested to his distant cousin, Carl Laemmle Jr. at Universal, that the studio buy the rights and possibly even turn the play, a melodrama about a headstrong antebellum belle, into a musical of the old South. But the play quickly closed, and Junior ignored Wyler's proposal.1 Warner Bros. expressed interest in Jezebel in 1935, but the studio wasn't thinking about starring either Sullavan or Hopkins but rather the Patou-infused, spearmint-emitting Ruth Chatterton. The rights to the play, by Owen Davis Sr., were held jointly by Guthrie McClintic, its producer, and Miriam Hopkins, its star. McClintic was eager to cash in, but the sensibly pigheaded Hopkins was willing to sell only if Warners promised her the lead. Walter McEwen, of Warners' story department, got around that little problem by employing a time-honored Hollywood strategy: he simply lied. McEwen told Hopkins she'd get first crack at the role once the studio had a screenplay, all the while pus.h.i.+ng the picture not for Chatterton but for Davis, whom Hopkins now despised.2 Miriam had been jealous of Bette as early as Rochester; with Davis now an Oscar winner, Hopkins's enmity had only grown.

By the time Hopkins sold the rights in January 1937, McEwen was actively developing the role for Davis. He enthusiastically told the head of production, Hal Wallis, that Bette would "knock the spots off the part of a little b.i.t.c.h of an aristocratic Southern girl."3 It's not particularly curious that various forms of the word b.i.t.c.h keep popping up in Warner Bros. memos on Jezebel; the term is not unrelated to Bette's emerging persona, both onscreen and off-, let alone the character of Julie Marsden. The director Edmund Goulding, handed the script for comment and possible employment as director, responded that "although it is quite possible to put a vivid picture upon the screen, that picture can only tell the story of the triumph of b.i.t.c.hery. . . . Julie is rather like one of some naughty children writing obscene things on a wall, and then when the other runs away, she will stay there and tell you that she did it, and so what?" Goulding had ideas for improving the evolving script according to his own tastes, but a Warners producer, Lou Edelman, told Hal Wallis in July 1937 that Goulding's ideas were pointedly old-fas.h.i.+oned and would result in "the biggest and most complicated piece of tripe that has ever been put on the screen."4 With Goulding out, Wallis approached Wyler, then under contract at Goldwyn, with an offer: $75,000 and a twelve-week shooting schedule. Wyler, dissatisfied with what he felt was the lackl.u.s.ter way Goldwyn had been promoting him, was especially interested in Warners' promise of extensive personal publicity.5 Bette reacted with mixed feelings to Wyler's hiring for Jezebel. As pleased as she was by his stature-Wyler was by far the most highly regarded director she'd been asked to work with so far-his reputation for high craftsmans.h.i.+p didn't erase the lingering humiliation she felt after their first meeting. In 1931, Universal had called Davis in for a screen test with Wyler for his film A House Divided. The wardrobe department stuck her in a tight and tawdry number with a too-revealing top. As Davis later wrote, she felt she looked "common": "Hot and embarra.s.sed, I was rushed down to the set where the dark little director stopped brooding long enough to glare at me and say to one of his a.s.sistants, 'What do you think of these girls who show their t.i.ts and think they can get jobs?' "6 Obviously Wyler didn't think much of these "girls"; Davis didn't get the role.

"I was now in a position to refuse to work with Mr. Wyler," Davis wrote in The Lonely Life. "I asked for an appointment to talk to him. Revenge, they say, is sweet. It has never been thus for me. Mr. Wyler, not remembering me or the incident, was, to put it mildly, taken aback when I told him my grim little tale of woe. He actually turned green. He was genuinely apologetic, saying he had come a long way since those days. I could not help but believe he was sincere."7 Filming began on October 25, 1937.8 Jezebel begins with a simple but breathtaking display of grandness and scope, as Wyler lengthily tracks his camera down a New Orleans boulevard, past shops, street carts, carriages, pa.s.sersby, buildings, and still more street stalls and carriages, until it comes to rest facing the imposing facade of a large and busy hotel. Graceful and subtle, the shot demonstrates what the great theorist of film realism Andre Bazin so admired about Wyler's style: the image's continuity reveals the luxurious entirety of a city block, lending weight and authenticity to what audiences would otherwise perceive, however unconsciously, as cut-apart wooden backlot construction in Burbank.

Wyler was equally painstaking with Davis's entrance as Julie Marsden, though it's not nearly as grand a sequence. The scene occurs at Julie's plantation, where-much to the delighted shock of her guests-she is late to her own party. ("Her own party! In her own house!") Wyler cuts from the interior, with all the guests atwitter, to the street outside. A dark, skittish horse rides up at a gallop. The rider, a woman clad in a tight-waisted, big-cuffed habit and feathered hat to match the spirited horse, brings it to a halt outside the gate, forces it-against its will-to turn and enter, and rides into the courtyard. Handing the horse off to a child slave, she heads to the door only to turn back at the sound of the horse struggling against the boy's nervous handling. She advises the boy not to be scared. "Yes'm, Miss Julie, but he bites!" "Then you just plain bite him back," she declares-apparently an act she wouldn't hesitate to commit herself. Julie scoops her hem up from the back with her riding crop, turns toward the camera in an arrogantly premature curtain call, and sweeps into the mansion.

Bette looks supremely confident catching the hem with her crop, but in fact the scooping bit nearly did her in. Over and over Wyler made her repeat it, and she had no idea why. She'd practiced it beforehand, after all, and she thought she had it down. Concerned, Bette begged Wyler to tell her precisely how to do it, what he wanted, would he just explain it to her, please? But the autocratic Wyler refused specificity. "I'll know it when I see it" was his terse response. Only when Wyler did eventually see it on take 48 did he move on to the next shot. Trying hard to understand what had occurred, Davis demanded to see the rushes. According to her, when she saw the approved take she realized that Wyler was right; the one he used was the most naturally self-possessed, the least studied. "He wanted a complete establishment of character with one gesture," she later explained. He got what he wanted.

Wyler was an expressive director, but only onscreen. The man himself gave little coaching to his actors, and Bette, who thought she required his approval, grew alarmed. Having dismissed most of her earlier directors as workmen at best, hacks at worst, she rarely needed their endors.e.m.e.nt; she didn't respect them enough to care what they thought of her. But with Wyler, she was thrown. Here was a director-a creative picture maker who was carefully, technically piecing Jezebel together, shot by shot, in a manner Davis had never seen before. And he gave her nothing.

Being Bette, she said something. "After about a week, I went up to him and said, 'I may be very peculiar, Mr. Wyler, but I just have to know if what I'm doing pleases you in any way. I just have to know, after every scene if possible.' So the entire next day, he went, 'Marvelous! Marvelous!' And I couldn't stand it. I said, 'Please-go back to your old ways.' "9 Wyler recognized some of Davis's mannerisms for what they were: itchily nervous and beyond her control, expressions not of a character's psychology but of her own anxiety. So he compelled her to stand still when Julie had no reason to move. His order was reminiscent of Laura Hope Crews's, but he was male, so Bette took it better. "Do you want me to put a chain around your neck?" he barked one day during filming. "Stop moving your head!"10 Wyler also coaxed her out of playing too many scenes at full throttle. Regarding many of her earlier films as deficient-shallow scripts, artless directors-Davis often tried make up for their lack by pumping her characters harder, subst.i.tuting adrenaline and tics for the substance she knew was missing from the material. Wyler, in contrast, radiated confidence in both himself and the film he was making, and he encouraged Bette to play Julie with more moderation. "She comes in during the morning eager to do it right, maybe to overdo it," Wyler wrote in a memo to Hal Wallis and the a.s.sociate producer Henry Blanke, "and I tell her to take it easy. I tell her a scene is important, but not every scene, so she learns not to act everything at the same pressure, as though her life depends on it."11 William Wyler successfully dominated Bette Davis, so naturally she fell in love with him. Ham was conveniently in New York.

"Her love affair was the talk of the studio," Wallis later declared.12 It was clear to everyone around Warner Bros. that Jezebel's star and director were acting out their pa.s.sion. One night the editor Warren Low and the a.s.sistant director Rudy Fehr were waiting in the projection room for Davis and Wyler to arrive and see the day's rushes. The two were late. Low grew impatient and was about to leave when the director and his star finally showed up-with "lipstick smeared all over their mouths," Fehr recalled. "They looked ridiculous. They should have looked in the mirror before they came in. This happened practically every night after that. They obviously were doing some heavy petting in somebody's dressing room before they came to review the rushes."13 "Our romance was doubly difficult because we could not be seen in public," Davis once said, the Warners lot evidently not counting as a public s.p.a.ce.14 When they weren't at the studio working, they were essentially housebound and spent many evenings together at Wyler's place, where his a.s.sistant, Sam, made home-cooked dinners for them.

The love affair didn't lead Wyler to ease up on Davis at work. "That handsome, homely dynamo, Wyler, could make your life a h.e.l.l," she wrote in The Lonely Life. "I met my match."15 She quoted him admiringly (in retrospect) as saying, "I want actors who can act. I can only direct actors-I can't teach them how to act."16 Wyler trusted that Davis and her costar, Henry Fonda, could act, and his faith left him free to pursue an indescribable, undirectable quality in every shot, no matter how many takes it took. His efforts put a strain on both Davis and Fonda.

In fact, Wyler demanded even more retakes of Fonda's shots than he did of Davis's. The production began to drag; costs were rising, as were rumors. A concerned Hal Wallis asked Henry Blanke, "Do you think Wyler is mad at Fonda or something because of their past? It seems that he is not content to okay anything with Fonda until it has been done ten or eleven takes. After all, they have been divorced from the same girl [Margaret Sullavan], and bygones should be bygones." Some people even proposed, wrongly, that Bette was enjoying affairs with both men and that Wyler was demanding Fonda's retakes out of jealousy.17 Wallis, accustomed to Warners' relatively compliant and workmanlike directors-men who, unlike Wyler, didn't have much of a vision-grew increasingly exasperated as Wyler kept shooting more and more footage. Wallis was himself a master craftsman, but this was ridiculous; Wyler was wasting celluloid. He complained about Wyler's multiple takes of Donald Crisp leaving the house and Davis coming down the stairs: "The first one was excellent, yet he took it sixteen times. What the h.e.l.l is the matter with him anyhow-is he absolutely daffy? . . . Wyler likes to see these big numbers on the slate. Maybe we could arrange to have them start with the number six on each take, then it wouldn't take so long to get up to nine or ten."18 Bette, on the other hand, appreciated the care Wyler was putting into Jezebel, as much as her own retakes unnerved her. Compared to all the Special Agents she'd made, let alone the h.e.l.l's Houses, Jezebel was bliss-artistically, at least.

Dissatisfied with Clements Ripley and Abem Finkel's screenplay, Wyler brought John Huston on to do some rewriting. The production was under a specific time constraint, too: Henry Fonda signed his Jezebel contract with the provision that he would be finished filming by December 17 so he could travel to New York to be with his wife for the birth of their first child. What with Wyler's seemingly endless shooting, that deadline was fast approaching, and the picture had fallen nearly a month behind schedule. As Wallis unpleasantly remarked, "The little n.i.g.g.e.r boy will be a full-grown man by the time Wyler finishes the picture."19 Jezebel's centerpiece is the fifteen-minute Olympus Ball scene, an elaborate and largely dialogue-free spectacle during which Julie's engagement to Preston Dillard (Fonda) crumbles in the face of the couple's conflicting but mutual obstinacy. The ball, to which all New Orleans society women are expected to wear virginal white, slams to a halt when Julie arrives in flaming red. As written, the scene took up but a few lines of description. This verbal brevity led an a.s.sistant director to schedule it for half a day's work. But as Davis later remembered it, "w.i.l.l.y took five days!"20 They began on November 9 and finished on the fifteenth.21 The gowns for Jezebel are credited to Orry-Kelly, but he didn't design the key dress. "Milo Anderson told me that he did the red dress in Jezebel," said the costume expert David Chierichetti. "Orry-Kelly was an Australian citizen, and while his immigration was being processed he had to go back to Australia and stay there for a while. So Anderson finished Jezebel, including that famous dress. I said to Anderson, 'Didn't it bother you that Kelly was given credit for your work?' And he said, 'No, it's quite a compliment, isn't it? They kept renewing my contract, and that's all I cared about.' "22 Wyler begins the Olympus Ball sequence with a reverse crane shot that begins on the reigning king and queen of the ball and travels over the heads of the orchestra and the dancers on the dance floor and ends on an immense crystal chandelier, with a balcony packed with people watching the spectacle in the background. Its precision reflects the gracious regimentation of the partygoers, who are all dressed according to the rigidly refined standards of New Orleans society. A subsequent shot taken from just above the floor reveals swirling hoop skirts, all in white, and the martial steps and black trousers of the men. It's into this arch, uniformed gentility that Julie makes her brazen entrance with Preston.

Davis plays it birdlike-part peac.o.c.k, part vulture. Wyler's camera tracks with them as they make their way through the ballroom, Pres glaring, Julie gliding with an air of haughty triumph tinged with increasing surprise and chagrin as she senses the magnitude of her miscalculation. She asks to leave. "We haven't danced yet," the priggish Pres responds.

Wyler cranes above them as they waltz, the crowd slowly making s.p.a.ce around them. Julie, who loses her composure and self-possession entirely while being yanked around the dance floor, suddenly looks homely and small in high angle. "Pres," she begs. "Let me go. Take me out'a heah!"-complete with a touch of whimpering in Davis's line delivery. Pres stays silent.

On the surface, the tensions of the Olympus Ball seem absurd and arcane. Julie's dress is truly strumpetlike, but the other women's pristine, lacy gowns look more like babies' christening outfits than something an adult would wear. By my standards, Julie's rebellion is worthy of praise, not condemnation. But the underlying psychology of the scene is still bracing, particularly in light of Bette's own combustible nature. Julie, after all, has chosen the outrageous red dress in malicious anger-specifically to spite Pres for not having left a business meeting in order to accompany her to a fitting. In this way Julie plays out Bette's own ambivalence toward male authority. Like Davis herself in both her marriage and her work, Julie insists that a man offer his opinion, and when he contradicts her, she acts out against her own self-interest-in Julie's case by impulsively choosing precisely what Pres would have rejected, just to prove a point, however d.a.m.ning it may be to her. Julie is as sure of her belief in the scarlet gown as Bette was of her decision to leave Warner Bros. for Ludovico Toeplitz.

The pressure of making Jezebel for a domineering man she loved took its toll on Davis. She became depressed and frightened. Somatic symptoms appeared early on. She was sick on November 2 and 3. She had a charley horse on one of the days scheduled for the Olympus Ball. After shooting exteriors on the back lot in the rain, she developed bronchitis and a bad cold. While attempting to film the shot in which Julie, seated at her bedroom vanity, employs the old southern trick of tapping her cheeks with a hairbrush to make them blush, Bette was so overly energetic with the bristles that her slaps caused bruises and she had to take several days off while her face healed.

The Warner Bros. archives at the University of Southern California contain an all-too-lengthy discussion between executives of how Bette opened a pimple one weekend and had put some kind of salve on it, but then realized that this was the wrong thing to do, so she consulted a specialist who worried that there might be a hole left in Bette's cheek, so the physician began applying solutions to wash it out. He "will attempt to remove the core tonight, sterilize it, and apply a salve so that makeup can be applied," a detail-oriented memo writer noted on November 30.23 Wyler wasn't shooting Jezebel in sequence, either. Eschewing continuity for the sake of convenience or artistic interest was, and remains, standard filmmaking practice, but Davis wasn't used to it and it disrupted her sense of Julie's development. "Davis had hysterics last night because we were shooting so much out of continuity," a production manager noted on December 21. On December 29, after eleven hours of shooting a number of shots out of sequence, Bette became panic-stricken and broke down in tears.24 Jezebel was so far behind schedule that the company spent New Year's Day working. That's when Bette received word that her father had died at his home in Belmont, Ma.s.sachusetts.

"BIOGRAPHY IS THE medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world," Janet Malcolm writes in The Silent Woman, her masterful book-length essay on Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the imperfect craft of writing about other people's lives. "The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. . . . The reader's amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole."25 For Bette Davis's biographers, one of the most evocative and resonant scenes in Davis's life plays itself out in a luxury suite called The Wild Duck, 1929. It's just down the hall from the musty and rarely opened Broken Dishes, but it is to Broken Dishes what the queen's bedchamber is to a crawl s.p.a.ce next to the servants' quarters. In the literary lives