Bette Davis: A Studied Madness

"I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache." -Bette Davis

"Players should be immortal, if their own wishes or ours could make them so; but they are not. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness. The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves." —William Hazlitt (English literary critic)

SATAN MET A LADY (1936) - 15 July
In the second screen version of The Maltese Falcon, a detective is caught between a lying seductress and a lady jewel thief. Dir: William Dieterle Cast: Bette Davis, Warren William, Alison Skipworth.
BW-74 mins

JIMMY THE GENT (1934) - 17 July
An unscrupulous detective makes a killing locating missing heirs. Dir: Michael Curtiz Cast: James Cagney, Bette Davis, Allen Jenkins. BW-68 mins. Source: www.tcm.com

"Many actors claim to enjoy playing villains and thugs, bitches and tramps, but few have ever equaled Bette Davis’s capacity to risk generating an audience’s thoroughgoing contempt, let alone openly invite it. Bette Davis didn’t give a goddamn. She dares us to hate her, and we often do. Which is why we love her." -Ed Sikov

If Conrad Nagel was right, it was Bogart who said: “That dame is too uptight,” adding, “What she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to do it.” Bette, also in Nagel’s telling, thought Bogie was “uncouth.”

Bette Davis’s first contract with Warners is dated November 19, 1931, and specifies her salary at three hundred dollars per week. There’s an addendum designed to put little starlets in their place: “Where black, white, silver, or gold shoes and hose will suffice, artist is to furnish same at her expense.” Darryl Zanuck took some of the credit for moving Bette Davis to Warner Bros. Zanuck was a Warners executive at the time: "We sent [Arliss] a newcomer named Bette Davis—I didn’t think she was very beautiful—and he called back and said, ‘I’ve just heard one of the greatest actresses.’"

Bette enters her first scene in her film, 'The Rich Are Always with Us,' in constant motion—shifting her body, biting her lines, not exactly twitching but scarcely standing still. It was partly a conscious performance, but it also resulted from real intimidation. The film’s top-billed star, Ruth Chatterton, was then in the Hollywood pantheon, and Bette was terrified of her. Davis’s bitchy description of Chatterton’s entrance onto the set is well worth quoting: “Miss Chatterton swept on like Juno. I had never seen a real star-type entrance in my life. I was properly dazzled. Such glamour! She was absolutely luminous and radiated clouds of Patou and Wrigley’s Spearmint.” But Bette’s jumpy energy endures today as a unique performance style, while Chatterton’s too-too glamour diction has long grown musty.

Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck cast Bette in her first truly great role: that of the southern belle Madge in Cabin in the Cotton. Davis turns to Barthelmess on the dusty porch of the general store, her eyes tilt appreciatively down his body and back up again, and she says, “Cute! I’d like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair. Bye!” In later years, Davis used this line as a comedy routine—a piece of supposedly nonsensical Hollywood dialogue she could trot out on talk shows and in interviews to get the interviewer and audience on her side.

Davis worked on 'Cabin in the Cotton' from May 17 through June 9. The following day she began shooting 'Three on a Match' with the director Mervyn LeRoy; she finished that one on the thirtieth. Davis’s part is by far the smallest and least meaty of the three. Making matters worse for Davis, Three on a Match is the film that inspired Mervyn LeRoy to utter a prediction he came to regret: “I made a mistake when the picture was finished. I told an interviewer that I thought Joan Blondell was going to be a big star, that Ann Dvorak had definite possibilities, but that I didn’t think Bette Davis would make it.” It was remarks like that which prompted Davis to dispatch unbelievers to an icy hell of contempt.

Bette felt deeply ambivalent about becoming Ham Nelson ’s wife. Yes, she loved him; yes, she thought they had a good chance to be happy together. But she was worried. “I was afraid for Ham, afraid of what Hollywood would do to his career, afraid of putting him in a position of being a star’s husband.” In The Lonely Life, Bette asserts that she and Ham spent their honeymoon helping Warner Bros. plug its big, modern, glossy musical 42nd Street. She arrived in Boston as a hometown heroine on March 8, 1933; a crowd of 10,000 people braved a driving rain to greet her at the station. Bette’s wedding night wasn’t nearly so blissful. As she told her friend, the writer Jerry Asher, Ham’s provincial naiveté extended to matters sexual. He had never been with a woman before; it was, she told friends, months before she had “trained” him to please her: “The lust I had feared was natural and beautiful. I was released.”

Davis was never particularly fond of Jimmy the Gent—neither she nor most critics ever appreciated her genuine if offbeat talent for comedy—but the movie has found its share of fans. The critic Otis Ferguson wrote, “If this wasn’t the fastest little whirlwind of true life on the raw fringe, then I missed the other one.” Andrew Bergman (Blazing Saddles) called it “simply a great American comedy” and “the funniest film of Cagney’s career.” Cagney recalled Davis as being unhappy during the filming of Jimmy the Gent: “Her unhappiness seeped through to the rest of us, and she was a little hard to get along with.” Cagney’s biographer, Doug Warren, went further, describing her personal reaction to her co-star as one of “contempt.”

It’s pure speculation, but one wonders whether Bette Davis would have had the January 1934 abortion (a studio doctor performed the procedure, quickly and safely, in a medical setting) had 'Of Human Bondage' not been presenting itself imminently as her first potential masterpiece. “Harmon didn’t even know she was pregnant,” insists Anne Roberts Nelson, Ham’s second wife. “It was Ruthie who talked her into it." At stake was something even more central to Bette’s life than her mother: her art. Mildred Rogers was the first truly important role Bette wanted. 'Of Human Bondage' began shooting toward the end of February 1934, at RKO’s studios in Hollywood on the corner of Melrose and Gower.

Bette’s Cockney accent is layered, impure—a low-class twang unsuccessfully masked by pretension. Mildred Rogers (from W. Somerset Maugham’s semiautobiographical novel) is one of the most unsympathetic characters ever transferred to film. A sullen, slatternly, barely literate Cockney waitress, she coldly manipulates Philip Carey, the shy, sensitive, club-footed artist-turned-medical student who obsessively loves her. Davis herself claimed never to have understood Philip’s fierce attraction to Mildred. She believed in Mildred’s vile nature; one has no doubt that Davis nailed this character so squarely because she saw something of herself there —the manipulative ambition, if nothing else. But for Davis, Philip’s “whimpering adoration in the face of Mildred’s brutal diffidence” was unfathomable. Davis is one of melodrama’s greatest dancers. Davis snarls the words with rancid sarcasm. “You want to be a doctor!” she snaps as she rips pages out of his medical textbook.

“This’ll take ya through medical school,” Mildred says as she sets the bonds on fire and leaves them burning in an ashtray. 'Of Human Bondage' is the first defining moment in Bette Davis’s career, and it’s psychologically perverse, to say the least. Bette found Howard “as cold as ice” on the set, resentful of her casting. Howard’s attitude changed the moment he saw the first daily rushes. Life magazine called it “probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress,” and to this day it remains one of the best. Davis once wrote of her performance, "My understanding of Mildred's vileness - not compassion but empathy - gave me pause. I barely knew the half-world existed. And yet Mildred's machinations I miraculously understood when it came to playing her? I suppose no amount of rationalization can change the fact that we are all made up of good and evil."

The script for Dangerous (loosely based on the tragic life of the stage and silent film star Jeanne Eagels) was a dramatic hodgepodge. But it gave Bette a meaty, rangy role to play. Dan Bellows, a handsome young architect (played by Franchot Tone, on loan from MGM), falls in love with her, helps her to dry out, and finances her stage comeback. The story of a once superb, now derelict Broadway actress —what Jeanne Eagels might have become if she hadn’t overdosed on chloral hydrate in 1929— won Davis her first Academy Award. This Oscar is usually considered to be just the consolation prize for not even having been nominated for 'Of Human Bondage.' Bette admitted that she “fell in love” with Tone during the filming, and her passion was returned.

For the first time, Bette became enmeshed in an extramarital affair—with the man who was now engaged to marry Joan Crawford. One afternoon during 'Dangerous' production, the film’s producer, Harry Joe Brown, walked through the open door of Bette’s dressing room and stopped dead in his tracks. There were Bette and Franchot in what he delicately described as “a very tight position.” When they saw Brown, neither seemed perturbed. Later, Brown recalled, “they were all over each other on the set.” Tone returned Bette’s passion, but not her love. For him, she was just another in a long line of conquests.

When the filming ended, so did the affair, and soon thereafter Tone married Joan Crawford. Crawford was alerted to the liaison, but she was working long hours at MGM to finish I Live My Life, and there was little she could do. Clearly, the much-celebrated later feud between Davis and Crawford had its genesis in Franchot Tone’s dalliance with Bette.

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. Privately she called him “mush mouth.”

Bette and Ham Nelson moved into the Park Lane Hotel, whereupon Ham decided he’d had enough and announced that he was departing for New York to find work as a musician. Bette was surprised and upset. “It wasn’t often I needed him,” she writes with brutal honesty in her autobiography The Lonely Life. “This was the only time.” 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 “Horseshit!” after Bette explained that she was simply doing her job. After their divorce in 1938, Ham went to New York, where he took a job with the advertising firm of Young and Rubicam.

Bette had lost both her husband and Howard Hughes, but she still, after a fashion, had William Wyler. They had drifted apart, he’d spent time in Europe, but it was clear that his love for Bette had not waned. The fights with Bette didn’t destroy his ardor—he wanted to marry her. "I was in no way the hostess that he wanted a wife to be,” said Bette.

“I earned the Oscar I received for Jezebel,” Davis later wrote. “The thrill of winning my second Oscar was only lessened by the Academy’s failure to give the directorial award to Willy. He made my performance. He made the script. Jezebel is a fine picture. It was all Wyler.”

Like Leslie Howard before him, Flynn made overtures to Davis, but once again she spurned them. “I confused him utterly,” Davis wrote about The Lonely Life. “One day he smiled that cocky smile and looked directly at me. ‘I’d love to proposition you, Bette, but I’m afraid you’d laugh at me.’ I never miss the rare opportunity to agree with a man.

It was no secret that filming Dark Victory was nerve-wracking for Bette almost to the point of debilitation. The columnist Dorothy Manners reported that after the divorce, Bette tried to recuperate from the stress at “La Quinta, at Palm Springs, at all the other hideaways she sought.” When Davis began shooting the film, Manners noted, “she was a sick girl mentally and physically.” But Wallis, having seen the dailies, knew that the camera—in its cold, close, mechanical way—was picking up something ineffably honest about Davis’s own anguish. “Stay sick,” he said.

In The Lonely Life, Bette was delightfully catty about her costar: “Miriam [Hopkins] is a perfectly charming woman socially. Working with her is another story. On the first day of shooting, for instance, she arrived on the set wearing a complete replica of one of my Jezebel costumes. It was obvious she wanted me to blow my stack at this. I completely ignored the whole thing. Ensuing events prove she wanted even more to be in my shoes than in my dress.” Bette knew that in her attempts to sabotage her, Hopkins was actually sabotaging herself. She went much further about Hopkins later: “Actors went through torture working with her because she was a pig about it.”

Davis’s control in The Letter is only in part a matter of repression. She plays Leslie Crosbie as a bored, stifled housewife forced to expend her libido in the creation of a crocheted white coverlet. Still, her Leslie is also a sociopath, a calculating killer and remorseless liar, ceaselessly putting on acts for those around her because authentic emotions are not part of her psychological makeup. Even as Leslie fires the gun repeatedly at Hammond’s dead body in the opening moments of the film, her face is stonelike, her feelings impossible to penetrate.

Bette loved Peckett’s Inn, a rustic retreat at Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. Arthur Farnsworth Jr. (manager and host of the inn) was handsome, charming, and exceptionally well mannered, and he came from a good family. “I really think Ruthie found it hard not to like him,” Bette conjectured. The wedding took place on the eve of the new year 1941 in Rimrock, Arizona, at the ranch of Bette’s friend, the former actress Jane Bryan.

When Goldwyn asked Wyler, who was under contract to him, to direct The Little Foxes, Wyler told the mogul that the only woman in Hollywood who could do Regina Giddens justice was Bette Davis. The philosopher Stanley Cavell, appreciating the thrust of Davis’s performance, describes Regina as “watching her husband die, as if her gaze deprives him of life.” Bette later said that all of her husbands “loathed my brightness.” When she was angry, Bette would turn into a harpy, cruelly goading Farnsworth until he couldn’t take it any longer and hit her. Farney died on August 25, 1943. He had collapsed while walking down Hollywood Boulevard two days earlier and never regained consciousness.

“There was something about her manner, flirtatious and friendly, flattering and yet honest, that made you think of her as an immediate friend and a solid master of her craft,” Paul Henreid later wrote. “I found her a delight to work with, and we got along famously... She has remained a dear, close friend—and always a very decent human being.” 'Now, Voyager' began shooting on April 7, 1942, and finished on June 23, with some retakes on July 3. After finishing 'Now, Voyager' Bette traveled in June to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, to accept an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in the name of her father, who had graduated from Bates thirty-five years earlier. Naturally, Harlow Morrell Davis had been valedictorian of his class.

'Beyond the Forest' is the inflamed tale of Rosa Moline, an ambitious woman stuck in a small town in Wisconsin, her unsatisfying marriage to the bland village doctor, her lust-ridden affair with another man, and her insatiable drive to escape it all for the big city, Chicago. It’s Madame Bovary played as pulp fiction. “I know you’re not interested in my work, but I just saved a woman’s life,” Rosa’s doctor husband remarks. To which Rosa, lying on a wicker porch couch and twisting the ends of her black fright wig, responds in crisp and singsong sarcasm, “Saved it for what?”

When William Grant Sherry heard the rumors about his estranged wife and Gary Merrill, he sent Bette a telegram pleading with her to reconcile with him. “It was a beautiful, tender, sweet letter,” Marion Richards recalls. "And what does Bette do? She reads it aloud in front of the entire cast, laughing all the time, until finally everyone wasOn October 19, 1949, three months after she left Warner Brothers, and three days after Beyond the Forest opened to disastrous reviews, Bette Davis sued for divorce from her third husband William Grant Sherry. howling. The only one who didn’t go along with ridiculing it was Anne Baxter. She was offended by the whole thing."

Bette’s first appearance in "All About Eve" (1950) on screen indelibly establishes Margo’s character—without a line of dialogue. As Addison DeWitt describes her undraped entrance into show business at the age of four, she looks up with a heavylidded, cynical world-weariness that lets us know immediately that this woman has seen it all. Apparently, Gary Merrill’s name hadn’t rung a bell to Bette when Darryl Zanuck originally told her over the phone that Gary would be her Eve leading man, but when she met him she was as impressed as ever by his rugged good looks, and pleasurably stirred by his unforced masculinity and lack of pretension.

Bette and Gary Merrill were married in Juárez, Mexico, on July 28, 1950. Immediately they embarked on their honeymoon trip, a cross-country drive from Mexico to Massachusetts. Years later, Bette admitted that she had fallen in love with Bill Sampson and Gary had fallen in love with Margo Channing—“and we woke up with each other.” On June 6, 1960, she filed a divorce action in Santa Monica Superior Court, charging that Gary had treated her with “extreme cruelty” and “wrongfully inflicted upon [her] grievous mental suffering.” She asked that Gary be ordered to pay her child support and alimony. The judge granted Bette custody of B.D., Margot, and Michael, but allowed Gary visitation rights at “reasonable times and places.”

Davis’s mix of righteousness and combustibility served to make her a frightening figure for those who worked with her. It also made her more enigmatic and intriguing for audiences and fans. It probably also frightened her. Bette Davis was scarcely easy to live with, perhaps least of all by herself. Still, her nuttiness led directly to one of the greatest performances of her career, an allstops-pulled portrait of degenerated talent and family resentment spun out of control. And for better or worse, the performance was so brilliant: Jane Hudson in 'What ever happened to Baby Jane?' (1962), that it set the tone of the rest of her career. Bette asked Robert Aldrich whether he’d ever fucked Joan Crawford. “If you had,” Davis stated, “then you couldn’t be fair to both of us.” “The answer is no —not that I didn’t have the opportunity,” Aldrich responded.

Davis appreciated the finer, creepier points of Jane Hudson better than Aldrich. She insisted not only on applying her own makeup but on designing it. “What I had in mind no professional makeup man would have dared to put on me. I felt Jane never washed her face—just added another layer of makeup each day. I used a chalk-white base, lots of eye shadow—very black—a cupid’s-bow mouth, a beauty mark on my cheek and a bleached blond wig with Mary Pickford curls.”

"There is no feud," Bette told Mike Connolly of the Hollywood Reporter after the first week of filming. "We wouldn't have one. A man and a woman yes, and I can give you a list, but never two women—they'd be too clever for that." Bette Davis: "Joan and I have never been warm friends. We are not simpatico. I admire her, and yet I feel uncomfortable with her. To me, she is the personification of the Movie Star. I have always felt her greatest performance is Crawford being Crawford."

“My character in Jane was a bigger star, and more beautiful than her sister. Once you've been as famous as Blanche Hudson was, you don't slip back and become a freak like Miss Davis preferred to see her character. Blanche also had class. Blanche had glamour. Blanche was a legend," said Crawford in 1973. "Blanche was a cripple," Bette Davis argued, "a recluse. She never left the house or saw anybody yet Miss Crawford made her appear as if she lived in Elizabeth Arden's beauty salon." "Sisters under the celluloid..." was how Bob Downing of Variety described them. Crawford's was sleek and shimmering "with scarcely a jarring note," while Bette's had "flashes of venom.... It is the truer reflection of a human being." "In the very last shot of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bette Davis goes off to buy an ice cream cone for her sister. Almost magically, the grotesque makeup and wrinkles disappear from her face as she does a dance of liberation." —Cinéma Fantastique Magazine

-Playboy: Do you still feel that the Oscars you received are not those you wanted and most deserved?

-Davis: Yeah, I should have gotten one for Baby Jane. Definitely. I hadn’t thought there was a doubt in the world, and that was a huge disappointment. I felt I should have had it, no matter who else was up. I’d say I won honestly for Jezebel. But Dangerous… You know, there was just no comparison between that and Of Human Bondage. Well, the entire town thought I would win for Bondage, but It Happened One Night swept everything that year, and everyone said it was a cheat. -Bette Davis: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview), 2012

Aldrich: "I was at the beach, playing cards with Bette, and twenty minutes before the scene was shot she asked for some time by herself. She walked down the beach alone, and when she came back there was this glow on her face. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. It came from within her and reflected on her face." Bette's genius also reflected on Joan Crawford's ego. Bette Davis was a far better actress than Joan Crawford, they both knew it, and by faking infirmity in such an obvious and theatrical way [to get off 'Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte'] Crawford proved it.

Sources: "Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis" (2008) by Ed Sikov, "Bette Davis: More Than a Woman" (kindle, 2013) by James Spada, and "Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud" (kindle, 2014) by Shaun Considine