Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 8

Two days later, Bette caused a fuss when she intervened in Sherman's attempt to film a close-up of Richard Waring. "How can you do it when we haven't played the master scene?" Bette demanded. She was referring to one of the most conventional-and dull-ways of composing a scene on celluloid: the director plunks the camera down at the greatest possible distance from the action and runs the scene in its entirety so that later, in the cutting room, the editor will have something to fall back on if the director is so inept that shots taken from closer distances don't match with one another. Some directors never play the master scene. But Bette thought she knew how everyone should do everything and didn't hesitate to say so.

October 30: "Today Bette Davis was opposed, and still is, to our shooting the interior of the cafe with Rains and the child until they have shot more script preceding this. It seems as though they sit down and rewrite and rehea.r.s.e each scene before it is shot, and I suppose she wants to have her finger in even the scenes in which she does not appear."

November 4: "There was absolutely no progress made on this set yesterday afternoon except to establish a new entrance for Bette Davis into this scene. The producers were familiar with the sequence and were on the set but they seemed just about as able to do something as n.o.body. I surely would not want to have my own money in any picture being made the way this picture is being made for Warner Bros. There isn't a d.a.m.n thing that can be done about it as long as Bette Davis is the director."

By November 9, the production was ten days behind schedule: "I am wondering if it would be possible to speed up the next Bette Davis picture by making it a Bette Davis production, where she would understand that all these delays and slowly progressing through a script at one page or less a day would cost her a little bit of money. . . . If you don't like the suggestion just forget I made it, but it sure is tough on a unit manager to sit by with a show that goes like this where she is the whole band-the music and all the instruments, including the bazooka."

By the end of the week, Mattison reported a new glitch: "We are in somewhat of a dilemma concerning the matter of our producers refusing to have anything to do with the picture. Miss Davis is not only the director, but she is now the producer also. Nevertheless, we will keep on going."

By the beginning of December, Claude Rains was getting cranky. He objected to the nasal, hoa.r.s.e voice of the child actor Sylvia Arslan; "It seems Mr. Rains is getting to be an old woman," Mattison remarked.42 Bette was felled by a very serious eye problem on December 9. "I prefer to believe that on the set during Skeffington my eyewash was filled with aceteyne by mistake," she coldly noted in The Lonely Life. "Aceteyne is a corrosive liquid that dissolves adhesives. It almost dissolved my eyes. I screamed in agony." Perc Westmore rushed to her aid and washed her eyes out with castor oil.43 She couldn't film that day, which Sherman spent rewriting more of the Epsteins' now thoroughly disfigured screenplay.

By January 7, the production was a full month behind schedule. Shooting continued at its snail's pace, and according to Mattison, "the air was very tense. However, Miss Davis warmed up in the afternoon," and the pace picked up. "The balance of the script is now out, and there have been scenes added. I am sure that when the Epsteins see it they will be spinning on their heads like tops."

Julius Epstein, asked later about how it was to work under Vincent Sherman on Mr. Skeffington, replied with a laugh, "No, actually, it was Bette Davis who directed it. She took control of everything." Jack Warner sent the Epstein brothers an angry memo during the production asking why the picture was taking so long to film. "Because Bette Davis is a slow director" was their response. At one point, Sherman and the Epsteins requested some retakes, but Bette refused. The three men took the matter to Jack Warner, who responded by shouting, "Who the f.u.c.k does she think she is?" and storming onto the soundstage in a rage, shouting about having built the studio from the ground up-until he saw Bette. "Bette, darling!" Warner said, giving her a warm hug, and that was the end of the retakes controversy.44 Mr. Skeffington required Bette to age from a young beauty to a pathetic old woman who cannot accept her physical decline. Davis demanded not only to achieve the effect through performance but by way of increasingly c.u.mbersome makeup. At first, Sherman let her have her way. She tested the makeup on January 11, 1943. But the layers of rubber and powder soon began to look absurd, and Sherman was compelled to talk to Perc Westmore about it.

I said, "Perc, she's getting to look like a mummy, for G.o.d's sake, and it's wrong. I have to stay away from the close-up stuff, and I shouldn't be away from it. Please ease up on it. Don't say anything to her." Well, next morning I hear click, click, click-her heels coming onto the stage the way she walks, you know, and I can feel her standing on the edge of the set behind me. I looked round, and she said, "How dare you speak to Perc Westmore behind my back and tell him to change my makeup?! Why did you do it? Why didn't you speak to me about it?" I said, "For the same reason that you're acting this way now. It's gotten so difficult to talk to you. You seem to resent anything that I tell you. You challenge me and I don't want to go through the arguments, so I went to Perc and I told him that I think it's getting too heavy and I want him to go easy on the makeup, and Mr. Warner agrees with me." Well, she got angry and she walked away.45 "We came to the elderly part after f.a.n.n.y Skeffington had had the illness," Sherman continued. "That morning when she came down she looked so hideous I said to her, 'Bette, I'm very upset. I think that the woman should be affected, but I don't think she should become so hideous that it's hard to look at her.' She said, 'Don't worry about it. My audience likes to see me do this kind of thing.' I said, 'Well, I think it's hideous-it's too much.' "46 Davis persisted with the monstrous makeup even in the face of the physical toll it took on her. Around this time someone-Hal Wallis? Jack Warner himself?-lit into Sherman, a fact recorded by Frank Mattison as follows: "You can tell by the report of pages covered and setups made yesterday that it did pay to slap Vince Sherman's ears down. Perhaps if someone had the guts to sit down on him a little more often we could even improve our schedule and shooting."

By the nineteenth, despite the fact that she was the one who insisted on its use, Davis was complaining about the makeup and how irritating it was to her skin. It didn't help matters when, the following day, she took her rubber face home with her at the end of the day and forgot to bring it back in the morning. By February 1, she was out sick again, no doubt from the effects of the latex.

The mask and foundation and cakey powder were brutally uncomfortable, especially under the bright lights. Her face began to itch, but she had to suppress any reaction while the cameras were rolling. "Toward the end of the day," Sherman later recalled, "as we'd complete the last shot, she'd often tear the makeup from her face hysterically."47 Davis then lodged objections to certain Orry-Kelly gowns, which Kelly redesigned to her satisfaction.

On Valentine's Day 1944, Frank Mattison was in despair: "I hope to h.e.l.l this picture gets over pretty soon-it's driving me nuts!"

h.e.l.l responded positively to Mattison's wish: Mr. Skeffington wrapped on February 21, two months behind schedule. Mattison called Davis in her dressing room after shooting was over. She told him she was pleased with the way everything turned out, but, according to Mattison, she was "depressed because it had come to an end."

CHAPTER.

15.

COMMANDERS IN CHIEF.

AFTER RUNNING HER SCENES IN Hollywood Canteen at the end of June 1944, Bette began shooting Warners' adaptation of Emlyn Williams's play The Corn Is Green, a melodrama about a middle-aged woman, Miss Lily Moffat (Davis), who inherits property in a hardscrabble Welsh mining town and sets herself to the task of educating its children. She takes a particular liking to young Morgan Evans, whose intellect impresses her, and whose life she considers far too valuable to be spent hacking coal out of the earth. But the youth's seemingly inexorable path to a scholars.h.i.+p at Oxford is blocked when, in a moment of indiscretion, he kisses a floozy, the daughter of Miss Moffat's housekeeper. Soon enough, she's with child.

Irving Rapper was a.s.signed to direct the picture, and Rapper wanted Richard Waring for the role of Morgan Evans. Waring had made a great impression as the obnoxious Trippy in Mr. Skeffington, but he was drafted before The Corn Is Green began filming. According to Davis, Warners "tried in every way" to delay his entry into the service so he could appear in it, but to no avail. John Dall was cast in his stead.

With Mr. Skeffington safely behind her, and the traumatic guilt over Farney's death receding, Bette began The Corn Is Green in a better frame of mind. But no Davis picture could be free of tension, and in this case, she became convinced, obstinately, that her own hair was all wrong for Miss Moffat, and she refused to shoot any scenes without first filming tests of a wig. Rapper thought she was far too vexed about her character's appearance and attempted to convince her not to wear the hairpiece Perc Westmore concocted at her behest-a rounded red affair with streaks of gray. Rapper lost the battle, of course; there was simply no arguing with her on the point. Even after the wretched rubber f.a.n.n.y Skeffington mask, Davis was determined to alter her natural appearance in the mistaken belief that in order to get into certain characters she needed to wear a disguise. The wig is attractive but unnecessary, though if it helped Davis achieve the precision and honesty she sought for Miss Moffat, perhaps it was indispensable after all. What Davis really needed, Rapper snapped to the production manager Eric Stacey, was a psychiatrist, not a director.1 Davis also insisted that the film be shot in strict continuity. Stacey advised Rapper to go along with this demand, saying that he didn't think it was "worthwhile upsetting her for such a small item since she is so much better on this picture than she has been on former pictures." (He was referring to her behavior, not the quality of her performance.) And continuity shooting was easy enough to achieve on The Corn Is Green, since despite a number of scenes set out of doors, there was no location filming to schedule around. In fact, there wasn't even any back lot construction. The town of Glansarno was built indoors on Soundstage 7, an odd decision that partially explains the film's hermetic and stagebound quality.

Adding to the artificiality, Glansarno's miners are a peculiarly energetic and musical lot. Early in the film, Miss Moffat asks the minister, Mr. Jones (Rhys Williams), how many children under seventeen there are in the town, and Jones replies, "Around here they're only children until they are 12. Then they are sent away to the mine. And in one week, they are old men." But Rapper doesn't direct the boys to play it that way. The Corn Is Green presents these prematurely "old men" as a pack of cheerful and boisterous teenagers who burst rousingly into song at every opportunity, even on their way home at the end of a long, tough s.h.i.+ft in the coal mine. To cap it all, Warners insisted on dubbing in a professional Welsh choir, the Saint Luke Choristers, over the real boys' voices. This, to Davis, rightly, "was wrong. It made the film very 'Hollywood.' A direct recording of the actors who played the miners, many of whom did not have perfect voices, would have given reality to the songs."2 The filthy, ought-to-be-exhausted young miners merrily end their grueling workdays in what sounds like a recording studio. The audible presence of a particularly bright soprano doesn't help.

Shooting went reasonably smoothly, mainly because Rapper let Davis have her way on most issues. But on the afternoon of Sat.u.r.day, August 5, a barn door (the hinged metal flap used to focus a lighting unit) fell off a small light and hit Bette on the head. Complaining of a headache, Davis was sent home, but she was well enough to attend a party at Jack and Ann Warner's house that night.

Still, on Monday morning she called in sick. She showed up on Tuesday but talked of having some X-rays done-not by the studio's doctors but by her personal physician, who then reported that she had suffered a slight concussion and needed to rest. She called in sick again on the tenth. "I have had a little talk with Miss Davis," Eric Stacey reported to the front office, "and she seems to be in a mental condition that looks pretty good. In other words, she has realized that the best thing to do about a situation like this is to go back to work and not think about it too much."3 They all agreed that she would film until the seventeenth at noon and then take four or five days off.

The Corn Is Green appeared either near the end or at the very end of Orry-Kelly's tenure at Warner Bros.; there's a dispute. He's credited as the costume designer for her next picture, A Stolen Life, but Davis herself claimed that he didn't actually design her wardrobe for that film.

Kelly served in the army after designing Davis's costumes for Old Acquaintance-Milo Anderson designed Hopkins's wardrobe-and returned to do Mr. Skeffington at Bette's request. But he quarreled with Jack Warner once too often upon his return and found that he'd lost his base of support. Kelly was known for having a hot temper anyway, and there was nothing like a year's absence to call his indispensability into question. Kelly left Warners in 1946, joined Twentieth Century-Fox in 1947, and later opened his own couture studio. He went on to design one more film for Davis: The Star in 1952.

According to Milo Anderson, who worked with Kelly at Warners, Bette "didn't like him as a person, but she kept using him to design her films because she knew she needed him." "She and Kelly did not like each other," David Chierichetti agrees. "They fought a lot. One of the things they fought over was her bras. She had these long b.r.e.a.s.t.s that hung down to her waist. He wanted to give her bras that had underwires in them to push them up, but she thought that the metal would give her breast cancer."

The lengthy shape of Davis's bosoms was certainly not lost on Jack Warner, who once ordered the producer Sam Bischoff to "be sure that Bette Davis has her bulbs wrapped up. If she doesn't do it, we are either going to retake, or put her out of, the picture-and if you talk with her you can tell her I said so."4 (Since the film in question was The Case of the Howling Dog, which she refused, her unwrapped bulbs were the least of Warner's problems.) "Leah Rhodes said that one time Kelly bought a boned bra for Bette and tried to get her to wear it, but she threw it at him," says Chierichetti. "One day Kelly came back to the office and said to Leah, 'Oh, if somebody could just give me some idea how to break her bust!' He'd push it up as much as he could, but then he'd put something above it to take away attention. She wore a lot of corsages. In The Petrified Forest she's not wearing a bra underneath that waitress outfit. The outfit has a very loose waist. It looks like it's just fullness in the dress, but actually that's where her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were."5 JOHN DALL, WHO went on from The Corn Is Green to give a more convincing performance in Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's perverse Rope, was complimentary to Davis in a 1945 interview: "In that scene where I had to tell her off, for instance, in some shots the camera was on me alone. But Bette always stood right behind the camera, facing me, giving the scene the same acting as if she were before the camera. She really listened to what I was saying and fed me my lines with the same intensity she would have if the camera had been on her."6 Davis had wanted Ida Lupino to play the role of the floozy, which ultimately went to the less subtle but suitably appalling Joan Lorring. "Bette fought like mad," Lupino later said, "but I was committed to another picture-I'd already done wardrobe fittings and things. It would have been very exciting to do a picture with her. I didn't know her very well. I met up a couple of times with her and some people. Tremendous wit, this woman has. Great sense of humor-and about herself, too. I found her to be a charming woman, you know-not a frightening dragon lady or the queen."7 Davis finished shooting The Corn Is Green on September 13, 1944. When the film was approaching its release in March 1945, Warners' publicity department created an especially absurd advertis.e.m.e.nt, given Miss Moffat's sensible, tailored wardrobe: "I remember my battle to keep Warners from displaying The Corn Is Green with ads consisting of a picture of me playing the Welsh schoolmistress in black satin decolletage."8 Irving Rapper was also flattering to Davis in an interview, but he was even more complimentary to himself, and with less reason: "At the end of the second act, which we retained in the film, there is a moment when the schoolteacher in the Welsh mining village conveys to the audience that she has dreamed-that she somehow clairvoyantly knew-that her star pupil's main historical question in the big examination would be all about Henry VIII. . . . Bette tossed the moment away, and there was a bit of an argument. I simmered down for five days, and finally I said to her, 'Bette, I saw the cut stuff, and I am very sorry to tell you that wasn't the way it should have been done.' And she said, 'Do you really think so?' And I said, 'Yes.' And she agreed to do it again. You could get through to her even though she had enormous power at the studio; she was its queen."9 But Rapper's self-congratulation inadvertently points out the central problem with The Corn Is Green: its staginess. Given that Miss Moffat's clairvoyance is scarcely the point of that scene, Davis's less drastic delivery was the right choice to make. Morgan Evans wins a scholars.h.i.+p to Oxford because of his own intellect and his teacher's diligence in developing it, not because Miss Moffat possesses powers of divination. Rapper, who had been so spot-on in his direction of Now, Voyager, plays the scene too theatrically, tracking in so quickly on Davis's too-triumphant line reading that Miss Moffat appears to be the recipient of a direct communication from G.o.d. Rapper then tracks forward on Dall only to turn and aim the camera pointlessly out the window.

The Henry VIII incident ill.u.s.trates the way Davis's instincts-the dramatic impulses that bypa.s.sed conscious decision making and personal antagonisms and went straight to vocal delivery and physical gesture-deserved more trust, not only by Davis's directors but by Bette herself. When she bickered over directions, she was often wrong. When she played a scene without intervention, including her own, she was on surer ground.

On Thursday, September 21, 1944, 20,000 people-including Bette, Orson Welles, Helen Keller, Sinclair Lewis, and the current vice president of the United States, Henry Wallace-gathered at Madison Square Garden for a pro-Roosevelt rally. Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term of office, this time against the former federal prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who was then governor of New York. (Dewey was the model for Humphrey Bogart's character in Marked Woman.) Fredric March read several telegrams from movie stars, including this one from Eddie Cantor: "I once sang a song, 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' I don't want to sing it again. That's why I am voting for Roosevelt!"

When Bette took the stage, she told the roaring crowd that all the women who remembered the desperate poverty they'd suffered during the 1930s must surely hope that those days remained in the past. The war's tide had turned, and although fighting would continue another eight months in Europe and another eleven months in Asia, the Allies were clearly making headway at last. Bette made the point that by winning the war "against those b.l.o.o.d.y, wicked villains who would relegate women to the bawdy slavery of the brothel or the humdrum inferiority of the kitchen," American women were learning a lesson in independence. Women no longer hesitated to use their hard-won voting rights, she declared, and they knew that to protect their own newfound freedom and security they would certainly vote for Roosevelt.10 On October 19, Davis was the Roosevelts' guest at the White House, along with a crowd of other ardent Democrats. Tea, followed by dinner, began at 5:30 p.m.11 As Davis later wrote, she found herself "in line with hundreds of others. At last I reached the great man. As I prepared to file past him, I felt like a little girl being given a diploma. I wanted to curtsy as he automatically extended his hand. When his eyes met mine, he threw back his head in that famous gesture of his and laughed. 'And how did you get into this mob, Miss Davis?' 'I wrote, Mr. President, asking to meet you and I received this invitation.' " Roosevelt, Davis claimed, was appalled that Davis hadn't received a more personal summons, one that hadn't been solicited by the guest herself, and he asked if she would be in Was.h.i.+ngton a while. Bette told him she was heading to Georgia to visit friends.12 The "friends" Bette planned to visit in Georgia were singular, not plural: Corporal Lewis A. Riley of the Army Signal Corps, the unit in charge of military communications and the production of training films. Davis had met Riley in Los Angeles. Now he was stationed at Fort Benning. "He's a n.o.body," Ann Warner warned her. "You are a famous woman. Why throw yourself away on a good-looking set of muscles in khaki?"13 The question need not be dignified with an answer.

Dateline Atlanta, September 27 (AP): "Bette Davis, screen actress, was quoted by the Atlanta Const.i.tution today as denying published reports that she came South to marry Cpl. Lewis A. Riley, who is stationed at Fort Benning. 'I am not going to marry anyone,' the newspaper quoted her in a story from Phenix City, Alabama, which is near the Army post."14 Davis's presence on the outskirts of Fort Benning was hardly a secret to the locals. According to Photoplay's Pauline Swanson, autograph seekers camped at Bette's gate once the address of her vacation home was printed in the papers. Even the padlock and the owner's four dogs roaming the premises failed to daunt their enthusiasm. One enterprising fan made friends with one of the dogs-a collie-and sent a note to Bette attached to its collar. Bette has a sense of humor, and such enterprise deserves recognition, so she sent the dog back to the gate bearing the coveted autograph.

Otis Taft, a Columbus grocer, bragged that Bette had ordered supplies from his store. By nightfall everyone in town knew that Miss Davis had ordered "twenty-five dollars worth of groceries for one day! Fancy groceries, too!"15 Bobby Pelgram joined Bette in Georgia for a time. According to Pauline Swanson, Bobby "tried valiantly to discourage the reporters and photographers who descended on the house, but Bette at last had to make an appearance and posed for photographs wearing a red and white plaid s.h.i.+rt and navy blue knee-length shorts. . . . Bette took to life in Phenix City like a native. She carried wood from the back yard for the fireplace and the wood-burning cook stove. She learned to make biscuits on the old iron stove without burning them and mastered a wood-smoked steak. She bought hip boots and overalls and joined her farmer neighbors in fis.h.i.+ng expeditions and c.o.o.n and possum hunts."16 What with the overalls and the possums and Riley's muscles, it was all terribly rustic.

On November 6, the evening before the election, Davis was back in Hollywood, where she took part in a pro-Roosevelt radio broadcast produced by Norman Corwin, along with Tallulah Bankhead, Judy Garland, Paulette G.o.ddard, Humphrey Bogart, and Olivia de Havilland. The broadcast is said to have pushed a million votes to Roosevelt, who went on to win handily with over 53 percent of the popular vote and 81.5 percent of the electoral vote.17 Davis quickly returned to Georgia and Corporal Riley. At the end of November, she received an invitation to join the president for Thanksgiving dinner at his Warm Springs estate, about thirty-five miles north of Fort Benning. Many of the guests were wheelchair-bound. Some were navy men with war wounds, but most suffered from polio or infantile paralysis. Much to the annoyance of White House staffers as well as the head of the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, Basil O'Connor-but to the retrospective surprise of no one-Bette managed to seat herself next to the president for most of the evening and couldn't be pried away.18 As Roosevelt's personal aide, William D. Ha.s.sett, put it in his diary entry for November 28, 1944, "A movie actress managed to ingratiate herself past the administrator of the Foundation and sat beside the President to the amazement of all. She was accompanied from Columbus by a hunky escort whom she introduced as Corporal Reilly [sic], to the disgust of the authentic Michael [F. Reilly, head of the Secret Service], who declared with heat that he [Lewis Riley] did not belong to the Montana-Irish Reillys. Doc O'Connor furious. We suppressed all the pictures."19 Davis never names Riley in any of her memoirs, but she does include this comment: There was, she writes, "a man I thought I might marry. He had been in Europe for the duration and was being transferred from the European theater to j.a.pan. . . . Before he left he asked me to wait for him. I said if that was what he really wanted, he should put a diamond on my finger. Which he did not, and as I knew I would, I grew tired of living my life in a mailbox . . . and did the 'Dear John' thing. A friend of my ex-beau was with him when he received the letter and told me he was very upset. I was pleased."20 IN NOVEMBER OF 1945, Ruthie finally remarried. The sixty-year-old divorcee chose Robert Woodbury Palmer, a fifty-three-year-old businessman from Belmont, Ma.s.sachusetts. A Boston newspaper clipping in the Davis archives offers several eyebrow-raising details: Palmer "was divorced 10 days ago in Reno from Mrs. Helen Bush Palmer" and "is reported to have met Mrs. Davis only a few weeks ago." The clipping goes on to report that the former "Mr. and Mrs. Palmer resided for several years in Belmont. They were married 32 years. They have two children." And then the final kick: "News of the engagement announcement came as a complete surprise to the Palmer friends here, many of whom did not know he had divorced Mrs. Palmer."

The wedding took place in Palm Springs on November 24 at 4:00 p.m. at the Smoke Tree Ranch. Bette, the matron of honor, wore a white Hawaiian print with a lei.21 The couple honeymooned at the legendary Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.22 Bette Davis to Wed on Coast Tomorrow Hollywood, November 28 (UP): Bette Davis, screen star, will be married on Friday at Laguna Beach to William Grant Sherry, 30-year-old artist and former professional prizefighter, whom she met for the first time a month ago, her studio announced today. The ceremony will be performed by the 37-year-old actress' uncle, the Rev. Paul Gordon Favor, in St. Mary's Episcopal Church in the presence of a few relatives and friends. . . . Miss Davis will be given in marriage by her stepfather, Robert Woodbury Palmer, it was made known here yesterday. Mr. Palmer wed Miss Davis' mother last week. Miss Davis' sister, Barbara Pelgram, will be an attendant."23 Bette Davis Wedding Barred by a Church Hollywood, November 29 (AP): Forbidden the use of an Episcopal church for the ceremony because she was once divorced, Bette Davis will marry William Grant Sherry tomorrow noon in the Chapel of Mission Inn, a hotel at Riverside. Miss Davis and Mr. Sherry obtained a marriage license at Santa Ana this afternoon. . . . The ceremony will be performed by Rev. Francis C. Ellis, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Riverside."24 Bride Fl.u.s.tered at Ceremony in Chapel of Mission Inn Los Angeles, November 30; Special to the New York Times: Bette Davis, film actress, and William Grant Sherry, artist and erstwhile pugilist, were married at 3:30 P.M. today in the St. Francis Chapel of the Mission Inn at Riverside. . . . The bride, whose only attendant was her sister, Mrs. Barbara Pelgram of Laguna, appeared somewhat fl.u.s.tered as she was escorted to the altar by her new stepfather, Robert Woodbury Palmer of Palm Springs and Boston. Although she has appeared before motion picture cameras in many wedding scenes, she admitted to a friend at the ceremony that "this is altogether different."

Bette met Sherry at Ruthie's house, Windswept, in Laguna Beach in October, Sherry having recently been discharged from the marines. When Hedda Hopper got a look at him sometime after the wedding, she was delighted with what she saw: "In a suit you couldn't possibly guess what a handsome Greek G.o.d he was. Now he'd run up fresh from the sea with the water still glistening on his mahogany tanned skin. He has an even, confident, ingratiating smile, kindly but masculine as a left hook."25 Hopper's final metaphor was sadly prophetic. Sherry used that left hook, and more, on Bette with some regularity. It began on their honeymoon when he hurled a trunk at Bette and threw her out of the car.26 The manly beauty that entranced both Davis and Hopper is not evident in photographs, which show a tall trim man with a sharp, lengthy nose, a forehead even more prominent than Bette's, a drastically receding hairline, and a jutting and slightly upturned chin. Sherry resembled Fearless Fosd.i.c.k, only with Bob Hope's nose. But by all accounts he was muscular, as was Corporal Riley, to whom Davis sent her Dear John letter after deciding to marry Sherry.

The press got wind of the movie star's impending marriage to the ex-marine thanks to Sherry's mother, an elevator operator at the Pantages Theater Building in San Diego. Mrs. Sherry saw no need for secrecy when her son privately declared his intention to marry Bette after the first of the year, so naturally she told her friends, some of whom called reporters. The wedding was pushed up to late November.

Ruthie was, as Bette put it, "aghast" that Sherry's mother was an elevator operator, though Ruthie of all people should have appreciated the practical problems faced by working women. Hitting closer to the mark, Ruthie also thought that Sherry was a dangerous golddigging hustler. Ruthie "was violently against our marriage," Davis wrote. "It turned out she was right. But for the wrong reasons."27 Bette's sister agreed with Ruthie. "I was furious when I heard that Bobby had hired a detective to investigate Sherry behind my back," Bette writes. "It was as if my family were saying that at the grown-up age of thirty-five I could not make up my own mind. Bobby finally told me she had had Sherry investigated and I must not marry him. I refused to read or hear about the report the detective gave her; one can only guess at what it discovered: his temper, his inability to support himself, his desire to marry money. After we were married, a friend said that Sherry had told his Marine buddies in San Diego that his ambition when he left the Marines was to marry a wealthy woman. This information came a little late."28 Bette's anger at her mother and sister was misplaced; Ruthie and Bobby weren't questioning Bette's decision-making skills in general but rather the specific-and disastrous-course of action she was taking by marrying a man she barely knew. But everyone made nice at the wedding in Riverside. Bobby attended Bette like the dutiful sister she was. Bette's stepfather of less than a week was indeed the father subst.i.tute who escorted her down the aisle, with Bette wearing a simple checked suit with a netting-trimmed hat. Sherry's mother was there, as was his eleven-or twelve-year-old brother. Bette's cousin John Favor and his wife were guests. So were the Westmores: the chubby makeup man Perc and his volatile wife, the hairdresser Maggie Donovan.

Frank Westmore, Perc's brother, recalls Perc telling him about being at Bette's house just before Bette was to marry Sherry. Donovan spied the handwritten guest list and noticed that it said only "Perc Westmore." With a shriek, Donovan yanked Bette into a nearby closet and locked her in. As Bette pounded on the door demanding to be released, Maggie forced Perc to amend the offending doc.u.ment to read "Mr. and Mrs. . . . ," and only then did she let Bette out of the closet. "I was afraid of that Maggie," Bette later admitted.29 IN 1944, WARNERS bought the film rights to James M. Cain's 1941 novel Mildred Pierce and offered it to Bette, but she turned it down; she's said to have disliked the idea of playing the mother of a sixteen-year-old.30 Others considered for the role of the hardworking pie baker and excessively indulgent mother were Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and Rosalind Russell.31 Warners eventually settled on Joan Crawford, who won an Oscar for her performance. Davis was more intrigued by the prospect of filming Anna and the King of Siam, but Warners refused to loan her to RKO, and the role went instead to Irene Dunne opposite Rex Harrison.32 Michael Curtiz wrote to Mrs. Sherry in care of the Plaza Hotel in Laredo, Texas, in mid-December 1945; the Sherrys were still on their honeymoon. Curtiz had just returned from New York, where he showed Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse the screen test Bette had made for the role of the amiable but iron-willed Vinnie Day, the mother in Lindsay and Crouse's long-running Broadway comedy Life with Father. Curtiz was "heartbroken" to have to tell her that they'd rejected it-and Bette-calling the performance (in Curtiz's words) "too powerful, too dominating, too superior and without any naivete."33 After testing Rosalind Russell, Rosemary DeCamp, and even Mary Pickford, Curtiz ultimately made the film with Irene Dunne and William Powell.34 Bette was also considered for the lead in Jean Negulesco's Humoresque, but by the time the film went into production in December of 1945, Joan Crawford had taken that role as well.35 In 1944, shortly after Mr. Skeffington was edited and screened for Jack Warner, Bette ran into Vincent Sherman and told him that Warner was pleased with the way their film had turned out. "I'm glad he was, but I'm not," Sherman said. Mr. Skeffington had turned out to be n.o.body's picture, he told her-not hers, not his. They had been talking about teaming up again on a remake of A Stolen Life, a 1939 British melodrama starring Elizabeth Bergner as twin sisters and Michael Redgrave as the man who marries the wrong one, but Sherman insisted they'd have to reach some kind of understanding before proceeding. "She said something about 'Do you want me to be like one of those little girls who's just starting and you tell them everything to do?' I said no, no, I've never been that kind of director, I don't have that kind of ego. . . . Well, she got very upset, and I said I wouldn't work that way, and we just never did anything together after that. I'm sorry about it."36 Bette saw an early studio screening of My Reputation, a Barbara Stanwyck melodrama, and she liked the way the German emigre Curtis Bernhardt had directed it. (Although My Reputation wasn't released until 1946, it finished shooting in January 1944.) She decided he'd be perfect to direct A Stolen Life. "A producer at Warner called me and said that Miss Davis had insisted on having me as director," Bernhardt later said. "I read the script and thought it was G.o.dawful. I went back to the producer and said that it was awful for this, this, and this reason. He said, 'You know, you're right.' I don't recall now what the original problems with the script were, but when the producer went up to Jack Warner and asked for a new writer, Miss [Catherine] Turney, Warner asked why. He gave the reasons, and Warner asked how long he had been on the script. When he answered, 'about four months,' Warner said, 'You're fired.' "37 (Bernhardt didn't name either the producer or the original screenwriter in question.) In mid-December 1944, while Bette was just outside the gates of Fort Benning with Corporal Riley, Warner sent her a telegram in care of the Williams Lumber Co., Columbus, Georgia. He suggested a.s.signing the producer Mark h.e.l.linger to A Stolen Life. In addition to being the proposed star, Bette was the film's producer, the deal for A Stolen Life having been inked as the first production under the B.D. Productions label. But as Warner pointed out in his telegram, "Your not being here makes it rather awkward in getting this film prepared." "Hope you're having a wonderful time and that everything is really the life of Riley with you," he cutely added. But Bette was displeased at the h.e.l.linger suggestion, perhaps because she believed she could handle the producer's function herself when she returned to Hollywood, and so A Stolen Life was left adrift without an executive in charge.38 After Davis returned from the South, she began looking at wardrobe designs. "I went to a showing of Miss Davis's costumes," Bernhardt later recalled.

The whole staff that she'd a.s.sembled was there, and I walked in as the new director. The costume designer was a friend of hers. [Bernhardt appears to be referring to Orry-Kelly, but Davis, in Mother G.o.ddam, insisted that she "did not have Orry-Kelly to help" her on A Stolen Life.39 Precisely who designed the dual wardrobes for the twins remains unclear.] Whenever a new costume would come out, she would rave, "Isn't that wonderful! It's glorious!" etc. After the third time of "wonderful, glorious," I asked her very softly, "Excuse me, Miss Davis. Don't you think these costumes are a little theatrical?" I thought I was very diplomatic, but my words had the opposite effect. She burst out in a flood of insults. "Theatrical? Theatrical! Let's stop talking that way, Mr. Bernhardt." She went on for ten minutes until I finally said, "Thank you, Miss Davis," and got up and walked out. She asked me where I was going. I said, "You don't need a director, you need a yes-man." She said, "That's not true," ran after me, grabbed me firmly by the hand, and led me back. That was my first encounter with Miss Davis. After that, her att.i.tude was a little more demure.40 When confronted by Bernhardt's anecdote, Davis offered the following objection: "I never believed in yes-men. I despised them."41 True enough, but not enough. Davis despised those "weak sisters" who refused to stand up to her, but she also raged against those who did. In a way, Bette Davis thought she could walk on water, but her first step turned any lake into a sheet of exceedingly sheer ice that only she could stride upon. Others, their tread either too heavy or too timid, fell through.

"Later on," Bernhardt claimed, "Bette was fired as producer, and I produced it. It's an argument between her and me. She never did produce it, but her name is on it as producer and she claims that she produced it. For tax reasons, she had her own company, B.D. Productions. . . . It was a stupid argument because there is no producer at a major studio. Everything is handled by departments. The expenses are handled by the finance department, the cutting by the editing department, the writing by the story editor who a.s.signs the writers."42 Obviously Bernhardt never worked with Hal Wallis, who oversaw virtually every aspect of the films he produced. Wallis never produced departmentally or by committee. But Wallis left Warners for Paramount in the spring of 1944.43 And given that A Stolen Life was the first B.D. production, it's unlikely that Wallis would have been in charge of it even had he stayed.

If the argument over who actually produced A Stolen Life is, as Bernhardt put it, "stupid," it's not because Bernhardt's explanation is any sounder than Davis's. In The Lonely Life, Davis wrote: "I was no more allowed to be a real producer than the man in the moon," suggesting that she was somehow kept from exercising any authority by some nefarious unnamed force emanating from the Warners front office. And yet she went on to admit that "as star in the dual role, I simply meddled as usual. If that was producing, I had been a mogul for years."44 But when faced with Bernhardt's a.s.sertion that she didn't produce A Stolen Life at all, she bristled: "We were coproducers," she insisted.45 Shooting began on Valentine's Day 1945.

For the role of Bill Emerson, Bernhardt and Davis chose a twenty-nine-year-old ex-marine, Glenn Ford, whose blend of ruggedness and glamour made it possible for him to be convincing not only as a lighthouse mechanic but also as a socialite's presentable businessman husband, the former the object of Kate's love, the latter the recipient of Pat's disregard.

A Stolen Life works not despite its gimmick but because of it; it's doubly riveting to watch Bette Davis act in tandem with Bette Davis, especially at the spectacular moment when she lights a match and hands it to herself in a simple, uninterrupted two shot. She plays Kate and Pat as believable identical twins, the differences between them noticeable enough by the audience but not at all by the other characters-especially not by Bill Emerson, the man with whom both sisters fall in love. Had Davis's performances been any broader, Bill would end up looking like a fool-a too-naive husband unable to tell the difference between the woman he should have married and the one he actually did. Had her performances been any subtler, the melodrama would lose its punch, since Kate's repression and Pat's sensuality would have run together into an undefined and meaningless intermingling. As she was when at her best, Davis makes clever but restrained decisions: Pat tends to look out of the corner of her eyes, revealing her calculating nature, while Kate's brows knit in attentiveness as a way of establis.h.i.+ng both her intelligence and her hang-ups. The Bosworth twins are two of her most nuanced performances.

A Stolen Life's production was plagued by illnesses. Glenn Ford called in sick March 3, 4, and 5; Davis went out on the sixth and stayed out so long that the whole production shut down on the twelfth and didn't pick up again until she returned on the nineteenth. Then came the boils. On April 10, Bette showed up at the studio with facial abscesses so severe that she couldn't apply her makeup. Her "face looks so bad . . . all broken out," the production manager, Al Alleborn, noted in his production log. The production ground to a halt till the fourteenth. Despite these delays, A Stolen Life was running only ten days behind schedule, but then on May 1 Bette took sick again and stayed out for three more days. Jack Warner was particularly annoyed at Bette's absence on the first because she'd managed to appear at a Hollywood Democratic Committee meeting the night before.46 At some point, Curtis Bernhardt walked off the picture. His dispute was with Warner Bros., not Bette. The Warners archives contain the draft of a letter from the front office to Davis informing her that Michael Curtiz was taking over the direction of A Stolen Life despite her objections. But Bernhardt resolved the dispute, returned to work, and finished the picture.

Davis credits the success of the special optical effects to the camera operators Russell Collings and Willard Van Enger. Bernhardt cites the cinematographer Sol Polito. Polito became ill late in the filming, and Ernie Haller took over; both men are named in the film's opening credits, though Polito's name is larger because he did most of the shooting. Bernhardt didn't mince words in an interview with Mary Kiersch: "Polito was a sweetheart. Haller was a ruthless, ambitious man."47 There was location shooting in Monterey in mid-June-the lighthouse scenes had already been shot in Laguna Beach, where Warners actually built a Cape Codstyle lighthouse because a suitable one didn't exist on the Southern California coast-and by the time the filming concluded at the end of July, A Stolen Life had run over schedule by thirty-three days. Davis and Ford returned to the studio for a few days of retakes in January 1946, and the film was released in May.

A Stolen Life was an unusually expensive production for Warner Bros., but it still made money. According to studio records, its negative cost was $2,217,410. But by July 1947, the film had taken in over $4 million at the box office-by any standard a big success.48 THE HOLLYWOOD DEMOCRATIC Committee meeting Bette Davis attended on May 1, 1945, was not an organization devoted to advancing the Democratic Party but rather to support the broader goals of a democratic society, and as such it-and Bette-came under the scrutiny of the FBI. Davis had attracted the bureau's notice at least as early as 1943, but it amounted to little. The FBI recorded the fact that an article in the California Eagle ("a Negro newspaper," the entry specifies) stated that Bette-along with Ethel Waters, Clarence Muse, and Hattie McDaniel-was scheduled to appear at a war bond drive sponsored by the Negro Victory Committee of Los Angeles. Another entry in the file notes that her picture had appeared in the Daily People's World, "a West Coast Communist newspaper."

The file picks up a bit of steam in 1945 with duly recorded notations of Bette's having joined the Hollywood Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP), the result of a merger between the Hollywood Democratic Committee and a similar East Coast group. Bette, Greer Garson, and Katharine Hepburn became members of another committee, the purpose of which was to award screenwriters whose work, in the FBI's words, combined "ma.s.s entertainment appeal with mature treatment of national and international issues," always a suspect endeavor. And Bette's nomination-along with Lena Horne, Orson Welles, Norman Corwin, and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson-for an Interracial Film and Radio Guild Award was the subject of another notation.

The most ludicrous entry, with names whited out by the FBI before being released through the Freedom of Information Act, runs in its entirety as follows: " was present on 4/26/45 during a conversation between in which informed that the meeting Sunday would have to be prompt as has a meeting at Bette Davis's house."

The FBI file chronicles Davis's decidedly mixed feelings about the Hollywood Democratic Committee and HICCASP.49 The bureau's informants were often wrong: one of them a.s.sumed that the "Beth Davis" who gave generously to the Communist Party in Rhode Island referred to "Bette Davis, the movie actress." Another claimed when Bette was elected as a HICCASP officer that she was "a CPA line follower" (meaning someone who rotely spouted the Communist Party line). Neither was true. More accurate is this entry: " on 6/24/45 reported a conversation between and Jack Lawson [a leftist screenwriter and member of the Communist Party of America who was later sentenced to prison after refusing to name names while testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities] in which told Jack that 'this Bette Davis thing' is more serious than he thought and he was inclined to believe she thinks the Committee is too radical." (The "Bette Davis thing" appears to refer to Davis's vocalizing her opinion and, typically, causing a commotion.) In August 1945, an informant told of attending a dinner party at which someone had mentioned his surprise at the growth of communism in the film industry, prompting Davis to state that "she would not a.s.sociate with any organization that has a Communist in it. She said she would leave an organization if she knew there was a Communist in it." The informant "described Davis as an emotional type who is lonely."50 During a studio workers' strike in October 1945, the strikers told one of the FBI's rats that they thought it would be great publicity "if they could stop some big star like Bette Davis-keep her out by a picket line." According to Jack Lawson, Bette was most unsympathetic to the plan. And Mary Ford, the director John Ford's wife and a very active worker at the Hollywood Canteen, remembered that several members of the Canteen's board, among them Bette, Jules Stein, Bob Hope, and Kay Kyser, were so concerned about a perceived leftward push by other board members (foremost John Garfield) that they held what Ford's biographer Joseph McBride calls "secret meetings at her house on Odin Street to make decisions without involving leftists."51 Davis was a liberal Democrat, but that's as far left as she went.

With the war over, and its mission accomplished, the Hollywood Canteen closed on November 22, 1945, with a farewell celebration starring Bob Hope and Jack Benny. In recognition of her efforts, Bette was presented with a gold pin in the shape of the Canteen's crest, with her initials set in diamonds and rubies.52 The FBI got wind of Bette's (and two or three other names, all whited out) desire to "take over one million dollars" of the Canteen's remaining funds over the objections of the Canteen's union supporters "and have themselves appointed trustees in perpetuity." According to Davis, the figure was only $500,000, and she was scarcely grabbing the money for herself and her fellow board members. In any event, the controversy ended when Jules Stein formed the Hollywood Canteen Foundation, which invested the leftover money under his supervision and continued to contribute to service members' causes and other charities as late as 2003.

A STOLEN LIFE was a financial success, but both Warner Bros. and Bette Davis understood that B.D. Productions wasn't really such a good idea after all, so on February 4, 1946, they agreed to a new set of terms for Davis's continued employment at the studio. First, Warners and B.D. Productions were released from any prior obligations; in short, Davis's company was no longer under any legal compulsion to produce more films and was now solely in the business of cas.h.i.+ng any remaining proceeds from A Stolen Life. (Davis owned 80 percent of B.D. Productions; the remaining shares were divided between Jules Stein, Dudley Furse, and Ruthie; the company was finally liquidated at the end of September 1947.)53 The new contract with Warners was to run for 172 weeks, thus ending around the middle of 1949, and it covered no more than eight films. Davis was to be paid $6,000 per week for the first sixty-six weeks and $7,000 per week for the remainder. The new contract also granted Bette the right to make an unlimited number of guest appearances on the radio as long as the programs on which Bette appeared weren't adaptations of films produced by other studios.54 "I am so terribly anxious for you to buy the Mary Lincoln story," Davis wrote in a note to Jack Warner around this time. "I am so desperately anxious to have you own this," she repeated. Davis pitched the heroine of the piece as a combination of a power-behind-the-throne kingmaker, Scarlett O'Hara, and "even the Back Street type of woman-the discarded woman." She also expressed interest in developing it as a theater piece, but she was certain that Warner wouldn't permit it.55 The idea went nowhere.

Early in 1946, when Warners bought the film rights to Philip Wylie's novel Night unto Night, Variety speculated that the studio intended it for Bette, but the role ultimately went to Viveca Lindfors, in her American debut, opposite Ronald Reagan. In May, Warners announced that it intended to star Bette in a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1925 Lady Winder-mere's Fan, based on the Oscar Wilde play, but Warners sold the rights to Fox the following year, and the role eventually went to Jeanne Crain.

Liberty reported that after her current film, Deception, Davis's next project would be Ethan Frome.56 Liberty also relayed some amusing details about the party Warner Bros. held for its employees at some point in 1946. The highlight of the evening was Bette's appearance, as herself, in a skit called "The Strange Career of Bette Davis." Robert Alda played the role of Jack Warner. "I can't hire you, my girl," Alda's Warner told the aspiring starlet. "You can't even spell Betty correctly. I'm sure you aren't very bright." But by the time the skit ended, Bette was firmly ensconced in Jack Warner's chair, her feet on his desk, and one of his cigars in her mouth. Warner himself laughed very hard at the little comedy, but then several hundred of his employees were eyeing his reaction at the time.57

CHAPTER.

16.

DECEPTIONS.

DAVIS FILMED DECEPTION FROM LATE April through mid-September 1946; the production, under Irving Rapper's direction, ran well over a month beyond schedule. The property began as a two-actor play called M. Lamberthier by Louis Verneuil, which played on Broadway in 1928 under the t.i.tle Jealousy and starred Fay Bainter and John Halliday. It concerned a temperamental artist who becomes madly jealous of his new bride's wealthy former lover and patron. When Paramount adapted it into a 1929 melodrama for Jeanne Eagels and Fredric March, the director, Jean de Limur, opened it up by bringing the ex-lover onto the screen as well as several secondary characters. He also introduced retribution in the form of a shooting: the artist kills the ex-lover.

Warner Bros. originally acquired the rights with the idea of casting Barbara Stanwyck and Paul Henreid, but Bette ended up in the Stanwyck role. Claude Rains rounded out the cast as the rich, witty, demonic former lover. The most significant change Warners made to the property in all its various incarnations was to make all three central characters intensely musical: Christine (Bette) is an accomplished if largely unsung pianist; Karel (Henreid) is an emigre cellist who suffered the war in Europe but survived, albeit in a weakened state; and Hollenius (Rains) is a flamboyant composer and conductor. And for once Max Steiner didn't write the score; Warners gave the commission to Erich Wolfgang Korn-gold, the Austrian emigre known for his Richard Strausslike late romantic style, soaring melodic invention, and dense chromatic harmonies. The pulsing musicality of Deception is one of the film's most effective devices, for at their operatic best, the three characters are guided by pa.s.sions so powerful that they can't be tied down by mere words.

In his memoirs, Paul Henreid claims that the Production Code Administration was alarmed about Deception's proposed ending, in which Davis's character goes back to her husband. The PCA insisted on punishment for her earlier affair, Henreid insisted; it was the PCA that imposed the violent ending in which Christine shoots and kills Hollenius, leading to what Henreid calls "a thoroughly unbelievable situation, and the entire picture suffered from it." But de Limur's film features a killing as well. What Warners s.h.i.+fted was the character who commits the crime, Bette already having proven herself to look magnificent while firing a pistol at a man she's loved. Davis, too, blamed the PCA, but for a slightly different problem: "Deception was completely ruined by censors.h.i.+p," she told an interviewer. "We wrote the last scene, in which I had to confess my crime, ten thousand ways, but they were all so phony we never did get a solution."1 After only a week of filming, Bette crashed her car on the way to Laguna; another car forced her off the road, and she slammed into a tree. She called the studio after getting home and said she'd have to wait to see her doctor before she knew whether she could report for work the following day. The next day, Sat.u.r.day, May 4, she was having dizzy spells and didn't come in. Dr. Wilson told the studio on Monday, the sixth, that Bette was flat on her back and had to stay that way for at least two days to provide time for yet another physician, Dr. Penny, to go over the X-rays he had ordered. Irving Rapper and Henry Blanke visited her at home, but they only saw Sherry; Bette remained sequestered in her room. They reported back to Jack Warner, though, that she must have "had a terrific blow from the looks of the car," the winds.h.i.+eld having shattered where she hit her head. But the X-rays showed nothing serious, and she was back at work on Wednesday, the eighth.2 She was out with a cold on the twenty-third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth-Davis's maid had called in to report the illness-and although she reported for work on the twenty-seventh, she came down with strep throat on the thirty-first. Dr. d.i.c.ke, the studio physician, was concerned that possibly the damp air of Laguna Beach was the real culprit rather than Streptococcus pyogenes, but Paul Henreid was sick as well.

Bette returned and worked steadily and calmly through June-until the twenty-second, that is. That's when Steve Trilling paid a visit to Davis in her dressing room. It was about 11:45 a.m., and just before Bette was to film a five-page scene. Knowing how far behind schedule Deception had fallen, Trilling began, would she mind being ready to shoot at 9:00 a.m. instead of 10:00 a.m. and work till 6:00 p.m., not 5:00 p.m.? Bette didn't take the suggestion well. Trilling had a h.e.l.l of a nerve to ask her this, she told him, given her agreement with Warners to arrive by 9:00 a.m. and work until 5:00 p.m. And she couldn't work any harder than she was already working. Then she burst into hysterical tears.

The company was told to be ready to shoot at 9:00 a.m. the following Monday. But on Sunday, Bette's agent, Lew Wa.s.serman, called: Bette won't be in at all on Monday morning, he said. She's sick.

Jack Warner himself sent a telegram that day to Bette's two current addresses: 671 Sleepy Hollow Lane in Laguna Beach and 134 S. Carmelina Drive in Brentwood, Bette having sold Riverbottom after her marriage to Sherry, presumably because it carried too many a.s.sociations with Farney. "We are not responsible for the working hours under which the industry is making its pictures," Warner opined, creatively forgetting that as the head of a major studio it was he who set the industry's policies. Warner then ordered his accounting office to prepare a detailed report of what it cost him not to shoot any scenes for Deception on Monday, June 24. It came to precisely $6,474.83, including ten hours of work by the service porter at eighty-seven cents an hour.

Davis returned to work but went out again, claiming that she had hurt her finger on July 3. The finger was still sufficiently troubled on the fifth to keep her away. This time Warner slapped her on suspension.

Bette arrived on Monday, the eighth, and asked to address the company. There were things the crew ought to know, she said to the a.s.sembled camera operators, sound recordists, makeup people, costumers, electricians, and grips, as well as Rapper and Blanke, who were certainly interested in hearing what their star had to say. She had hurt her finger, she began. She had to have X-rays taken. She was surprised to discover that shooting calls had been issued on the days she had told them she wasn't able to shoot because of the injury. This, to Bette, demonstrated a complete lack of consideration for the crew, and she resented the fact that it might seem to the crew that it was her fault that they'd been called in to work when the producer, the director, and the whole front office knew she couldn't shoot anything at all.

Having gotten this out of her system, Bette spent the day working. Warners rescinded the suspension.

On one unspecified day Ernie Haller was ill and Bette refused to shoot without him. Irving Rapper was more generous to Haller than Bernhardt was; Haller was, in Rapper's words, "a cosmetician's cameraman, very concerned with making the stars look beautiful."3 Davis was never the vainest of movie stars, but she certainly wanted to look as beautiful as possible in a film like Deception. Bette went out sick again on July 30 and 31, but so did Claude Rains.

On August 9, Warner Bros. denied Davis's request to do a broadcast for Cresta Blanca's radio show because Cresta Blanca was a winery and therefore might create an unsavory a.s.sociation in the malleable mind of the public. She took sick again on the tenth. All in all, she was out for a total of 17 days. Deception took 122 working days to complete-46 days longer than planned.

Aside from Claude Rains's entrance-Hollenius disrupts Christine and Karel's wedding party, held at Christine's well-appointed apartment, by dramatically throwing the door open and standing just inside the doorway with his overcoat draped over his shoulders like Dracula's cape-and a spectacularly funny scene at a restaurant, Deception is much less entertaining than it should be. "A party indeed," Rains intones after the wedding reception grinds to a halt at his abrupt and menacing appearance. "That object, I presume, is a wedding cake. Champagne. All very fitting. I infer a husband."

Christine's apartment, designed by Anton Grot, is not only beautiful but prescient. It's a loft located at the top of a Manhattan industrial building. To get to it, one has to take an elevator to the floor below and walk up a dimly lit flight of stairs to the penthouse. It's the height of future style. Inside are several large rooms, obviously cut from one open area, and one wall near the piano consists entirely of angled panes of gla.s.s. According to the historians of 1940s style in Hollywood Howard Mandelbaum and Eric Myers, Grot based his design on Leonard Bernstein's current apartment.4 Hollenius invites Christine and Karel to join him for dinner before Karel performs, his intent being to so unnerve Karel that he will play badly and humiliate himself. Rapper introduces the sequence wittily. As the threesome enters the restaurant, we see a dish being prominently and elaborately flambeed-as though Hollenius carries with him the fires of h.e.l.l in the form of cherries jubilee. Rains is obviously enjoying himself as much as his character does; Hollenius relishes the calculated dithering with which he chooses the entree, the potage, the proper wines. He picks up a dead partridge with the head and feathers still attached, sniffs it, and p.r.o.nounces it worthy, only to worry the issue of its preparation to death. Should it be stuffed with what he p.r.o.nounces "troofles" or served more simply? He selects the troofles. He orders the trout to start. Then changes his mind: woodc.o.c.k, not partridge! All of this drives Karel to precisely the state of distraction Hollenius desires.

In the face of all this theatricality, Bette remains understated. As with Mary Astor's performance in The Great Lie, Rains isn't stealing any scenes because Davis has yielded them to him. Her Christine is remarkably calm for a woman whose lies spiral out of control, and even when she shows up at Hollenius's baroque mansion and a.s.sa.s.sinates him, her tempestuous pianist remains under an eerie sort of self-discipline. It's as though Bette played out Deception's drama by way of her personal turmoil-the frequent absences from the set due to her illnesses, the car crash, the injured finger-and by the time the cameras rolled she had no theatricality left to give.

One of Deception's most delightful details is the severely square-shouldered white fur cape Davis wears when she plugs Rains with the pistol shot. It's not padded as much as framed, and it sits on the back of her neck as if suspended by a curtain rod. Her new designer, Bernard Newman, sets it off by pairing it with an all-black dress. Camp at its best, it's both the height of style and risible, as chic a garment as Davis ever wore and yet as comical in its way as the curtains Carol Burnett wore in her immortal parody of Scarlett O'Hara. ("I saw it in the window and I just couldn't resist.") "I killed him!" Christine confesses to a startled Karel on her knees, the striking fur cape gone tragically missing for the big confession. "Tonight-all the time since you first asked me about him-I've told you nothing but lies. One lie. One small lie at first-to be explained the next day, I thought. And then it was nothing but lies! You see I thought you'd leave me if you knew. I thought you'd give up the concert. I thought you'd have nothing!

"I was wrong. I see that now." That's an understatement.

"Oh, Christine! You must be the happiest woman in the world!" a bystander cries as Christine and Karel make their exit at the end of the film. Unfortunately, Rapper hammers home the irony by tracking into a close-up of Davis-one that's ill-matched to the previous shot to boot. When all is said, done, and shot, Deception doesn't quite work.

THERE