I feel a little better about my own career blunders when I remember that Bette committed the mother of all passes. Twice! To persuade her not to leave the studio after the end of her contract, Jack Warner promised her the leading role in the movie version of a novel he’d just optioned.
“I’ll bet it’s a pip,” she said, and walked out. She hadn’t heard of Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller, Gone with the Wind. David O. Selznick acquired it from Warner and asked her to do the picture, but it was with Errol Flynn, so she turned it down again. Bette told me it was the worst mistake of her career, and she always bristled at the mention of the film. (GWTW’s director, Victor Fleming, declined a percentage of the profits, predicting that it would be “one of the biggest white elephants of all time.”) But Bette got a consolation prize: She made Jezebel instead and won the Oscar for it. People said the part was inferior to the great Southern heroine Scarlett O’Hara, but I’m not so sure when I look at what Bette did with it.
Bette had a dark, gritty sense of humor, and once you found it, she had a great laugh. She had eccentric, endearing little gestures like striking kitchen matches on the furniture. At the mention of a bad movie she’d say, “If you didn’t see it, congratulations.” Yes, she was cantankerous, and yes, she had a short fuse.
I heard the stories: that she would cuss like a sailor and call people terrible names when she was angry, that she took out her frustrations on whomever she was with.
She admitted it: “When I was most unhappy, I lashed out rather than whined,” she said.
She couldn’t stand actors who weren’t as professional as she was. She bemoaned their lack of voice training and complained that you couldn’t hear half of them across the set. Was it unprofessional of Bette to lash out at other actors and directors? I never asked her that, but if I had, she probably would have said, “No, I only corrected them when they deserved it.” She disliked people who opposed her, but despised anyone who gave in to her. And if a director was incompetent or indecisive—a “weak sister”—she’d roll right over him.
She wore the “difficult” label like a badge of honor. “Until you’re known in my business as a monster,” she said, “you’re not a star.” She believed that if you didn’t dare to make enemies, you’d never be a success. She understood that the audience cares only about the finished product, and if she fought the director, it was for the good of the film.
Bob Aldrich said that Bette had objected to the casting of Victor Buono in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and tried to get him fired. It wasn’t personal, she just thought Victor was too “grotesque” for the film. But halfway into shooting she changed her mind and was big enough to tell the actor: “I want you to know that at the beginning I thought you weren’t right for the picture and I did everything I could to convince Bob not to use you, but now I want to apologize because you’re wonderful.”
As a workingwoman in a man’s world, Bette learned to protect herself because nobody else would. One of the things she had to overcome was the double standard that still exists. “When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man,” she said. “But when a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch.”
I liked being with Bette and we always had a good time together. I think part of the reason that we got along was that I wasn’t intimidated by her. Someone once asked me whether we would have had the same rapport if we’d known each other in her prime. In her prime . . . I would have taken a run at her.
—
ONE NIGHT Bette and I arranged to meet at a party. I got there first, and everyone was talking about Joan Crawford, who had died that afternoon. When Bette arrived she made a beeline for me.
“Well, the cunt died today!” she said.
I was talking with the movie critic Arthur Knight, and concerned about Bette’s candor in front of a journalist, I said, “Bette, I don’t believe you know this gentleman. He writes the ‘Sex in Cinema’ column for Playboy.”
Bette quickly added, “But she was always on time.”
She was only slightly less blunt for publication, telling reporters: “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good!” and “The best time I ever had with Joan was when I pushed her down the stairs in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I only regret that I didn’t get to slap her around more.”
Bette told me that Aldrich couldn’t get the money to make Baby Jane because he insisted on starring “two old bags.” So they had to shoot the whole picture in three weeks on a rock-bottom budget, with tiny salaries for Bette and Joan, who took percentages. Baby Jane was a big hit and the old bags made a fortune.
Bette would smile when she recalled how she tortured Crawford, like the time she and Joan were sitting on the set between takes, Joan knitting quietly and Bette methodically crossing out huge chunks of the script.
“Whose lines are you cutting?” asked Joan.
“Yours!” said Bette, making Joan burst into tears.
When Joan sent a single rose as a peace offering, Bette told her: “If you’re going to send roses, for God’s sake, send a dozen or more.”
And when Joan asked for a signed copy of Bette’s book, The Lonely Life, Bette wrote: “Joan, Thanks for wanting my autograph. Bette.”
“I tried to like her, but I couldn’t,” Bette said.
By the time they made Baby Jane in 1962, they’d been feuding for decades, and it was no publicity stunt. They truly despised each other. In one scene, Bette was supposed to simulate kicking Joan in the head but “accidentally” made contact, tearing a gash in Joan’s scalp that needed stitches.
Joan was married to the chairman of Pepsi-Cola at the time, so Bette had a Coke machine installed on the set.
The famous beach scene had to be shot on a sound stage because Crawford’s contract required that everything be kept at fifty degrees. “Vodka was Joan Crawford’s life support system,” Bette explained. “And when your body is saturated with booze, you perspire in the heat.”
I once asked Bob Aldrich, “You know, you’re great with men—The Dirty Dozen, The Longest Yard. What the hell was it like working with Crawford and Davis together?”
“Same thing,” he said. “Two men.”
Bob told me a story. There’s a scene where Bette serves Joan a rat for breakfast. It’s the most powerful scene in the picture, all because of Bette. She told the prop man, “Get me a real rat. I don’t want a rat from the house. I want a New York City river rat. I want a rat the size of a dog!”
They used a prop rat in rehearsal and slipped the real one in for the take. Joan’s reaction is electrifying, and in my opinion it’s her greatest moment on the screen . . . because she wasn’t acting!
The feud started when Bette rebuffed advances from Crawford, who, Bette swore, had had affairs with Greta Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, “and every other female star at MGM except Lassie.”
Even so, I’d always assumed that it was just the natural rivalry between two great movie stars. Hadn’t Bette dismissed Crawford as a no-talent “glamour puss” whose success depended on her looks? Hadn’t she said that Crawford “hay-ayted” being number two? And hadn’t she told me of her own resentment when Crawford finally eclipsed her by signing a seven-year, $200,000-a-picture contract with Warner Bros., Bette’s home studio?
Then one night Bette told me the real reason: Crawford had kept her from marrying “the love of my life,” she said.
In 1935, while shooting Dangerous at Warner’s, Bette fell hard for her leading man, Franchot Tone. I was never able to figure out what Franchot had, but he sure had a way with the ladies. It may have been that he was such a gentleman, because most men thought Bette wanted to be talked to like a truck driver.
She loved everything about Franchot: his looks, his name, his elegance. But he was already engaged to Crawford and madly in love with her.
“They met every day for lunch, and he’d r
eturn to the set with lipstick all over his face,” Bette said. “He made sure we all knew it was Crawford’s lipstick. He was honored that this great star was in love with him. I was jealous, of course.”
Crawford married him soon after the picture wrapped.
Bette failed to see her presumption in blaming Crawford for taking her own fiancé away: “She took him from me,” she said. “She did it coldly, deliberately, and with complete ruthlessness. I’ve never forgiven her for that and never will.”
Not long after Baby Jane wrapped, Bette placed a “situation wanted” ad in Variety:
ADVERTISEMENT
MOTHER OF THREE—10, 11 & 15—DIVORCEE. AMERICAN. THIRTY YEARS EXPERIENCE AS AN ACTRESS IN MOTION PICTURES. MOBILE STILL AND MORE AFFABLE THAN RUMOR WOULD HAVE IT. WANTS STEADY EMPLOYMENT IN HOLLYWOOD. (HAS HAD BROADWAY.)
BETTE DAVIS
c/o MARTIN BAUM
G.A.C. REFERENCES UPON REQUEST
She later claimed that the ad was a “rib” on the Hollywood system. She said she was kidding the stuffed shirts who financed movies, the men in New York who had a list of “bankable” actors. But I’m not so sure. Though Bette never stopped working throughout her long career, I think she was afraid that the parts would dry up. Every actor has that fear.
In their heyday, big studios like MGM and Warner Bros. ran the industry. They were like small cities, each with its own sound stages, prop and wardrobe departments, commissaries, and even hospitals. They kept screenwriters and directors on their payrolls. They controlled actors through exclusive long-term contracts, using them not just for films but also for advertising and publicity, putting them in ads without their consent and sending them on dates with other actors.
If you were a big star like Bette and the studio didn’t have a decent script for you, they’d send over a piece of crap that you’d have to turn down for fear of ruining your career. The studio would then suspend you without pay and add the time to the end of your contract. You had no control over the use of your own name and likeness, no script approval, no say about directors, costars, costumes, makeup . . . or anything else.
Very few stars had the guts to buck the system. Olivia de Havilland sued Warner’s to prevent them from adding suspension time to the seven-year contract. She won the suit, and the seven-year limit became a part of the California Labor Code known as the De Havilland Law.
Bette told me that she was in a constant state of war with Jack Warner, who put her in a series of terrible pictures. Desperate to break the contract, she accepted two films in England. The studio sued her in an English court and won, but Jack Warner—maybe admiring her guts, maybe seeing the value of all the trial publicity and her new image as a feisty, independent woman—paid her legal bills and began sending her scripts with better parts: Judith Traherne in Dark Victory (1939), the public’s favorite of all her pictures and Bette’s favorite, too; Leslie Crosbie in The Letter (1940); Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager (1942), which includes that famous piece of business where Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes and hands one to Bette while gazing into her eyes, in those days a tipoff to the audience that they’d slept together.
Bette played Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes (1941) only because Jack Warner owed Samuel Goldwyn a $400,000 gambling debt and gave him the use of Bette in the film in payment.
But her most famous role is probably Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950), Joe Mankiewicz’s biting satire about an aging Broadway star and the scheming young actress who tries to steal her life. Eve was a critical and commercial smash and maybe the greatest film about the theater ever made.
Claudette Colbert had signed to star as Margo Channing but injured her back two weeks before the cameras rolled. Gertrude Lawrence was Mankiewicz’s second choice, but she refused to smoke or drink on-camera and insisted on singing in the picture. Marlene Dietrich was briefly considered, but when Bette suddenly became available, Mankiewicz jumped at the chance, despite warnings from fellow directors that it would be suicide to work with her. The only encouragement came from Willy Wyler, who had directed Bette in three pictures (Jezebel, The Letter, and The Little Foxes). He predicted Mankiewicz would enjoy the experience, and in fact the diva and the writer-director got on beautifully. He praised her as “a director’s dream: the prepared actress,” and she thanked him for giving her the key to the character when he said that Margo Channing is “a woman who treats a mink coat like a poncho.”
—
WHEN SHE WAS SEVENTY-FIVE, Bette had a mastectomy, and then a stroke a week later. The doctors told her she’d never work again, but they didn’t know Bette. She wasn’t a quitter. “Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” she liked to say.
She kept working and smoking. She did a one-woman show that opened with clips from her films. After the “fasten your seat belts” scene from All About Eve, the lights would come up, Bette would come onstage, puff on a cigarette, scan the auditorium, and say, “What . . . a . . . dump!” I don’t think I ever saw Bette without a cigarette. It was her trademark at a time when just about everyone smoked, a constant prop that gave her a whole arsenal of gestures. She even smoked in the dentist’s chair.
The cancer eventually came back, and she died in 1989 at eighty-one. It says on her gravestone: “She did it the hard way.” That’s true.
Bette’s greatest romance was with her work, and she sacrificed her family life for the sake of her career. But she was a lot more sensitive than people imagined.
Jim Brown
The minute I met Jim Brown, on the set of 100 Rifles (1969), I felt competitive toward him, and he sensed it. He told me that he got that a lot. It’s the gunfighter thing, the same crap that champion boxers have to deal with.
I asked the director, Tommy Gries, God bless him, if I could choreograph the stunts, and he said okay. “But how the hell are you gonna fight Jim Brown?” he said.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said, “but I’ll get to know him.”
One day I asked, “Jim, are you afraid of anything?”
“Only two things,” he said, “horses and heights.”
I fought him on horseback. At the edge of a cliff.
In the course of the shoot, I learned Jim’s story. He was born on St. Simons Island, Georgia. At age eight he moved to Great Neck, Long Island, where his mother worked as a domestic for a Jewish couple who encouraged Jim to develop his athletic abilities. He went to the mostly white Manhasset High School, where he earned thirteen letters in five different sports, then to Syracuse University, where he was All American in football and lacrosse. To this day people say he’s the greatest lacrosse player who ever lived.
Jim was drafted number one by the Cleveland Browns and was their star fullback from his first game as a rookie. At six-two, 230 pounds, with a 32-inch waist, he had a combination of speed and power in one package that made him an elusive and punishing runner and a brilliant receiver out of the backfield. He led the NFL in rushing eight of his nine seasons, averaging 5.2 yards a carry. He’s the only rusher in history to average more than a hundred yards per game over an entire career, and he still holds the record for consecutive games without a fumble (twelve). And he never missed a start.
Jim always did that thing of standing up slowly and dragging himself back to the huddle after a carry. He called it “getting up with leisure.” People think he did it to make the defense think he was injured, so that the next time he got the ball he could really run over them. But Jim told me it was for the opposite reason. He said he did it whether he was hurt or not, so the defense wouldn’t notice when he really was hurt.
He always made sure that anyone who tackled him never forgot how much it hurt. When they tried to grab him, he’d swing his free arm like a steel hammer. Before we did our first fight scene, I said, “Let me see that thing you throw,” and he used it to put me on my ass. I looked up at him and we both laughed.
“That’s quite an axe you’
ve got there,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “I used it to keep them from killing me. And it fed me very well.”
—
IN 1966, while working on The Dirty Dozen in London during the off-season, Jim retired from professional football. He was only thirty and at the peak of his career, but he decided to quit on top, with his legacy intact.
Always an intimidating figure, Jim was proud and uncompromising at a time when African-Americans were supposed to know their place, and I get the sense that for a long time he was treated unfairly by the powers that be because he was considered “uppity.”
—
WE WERE IN WASHINGTON, D.C., at a party for the cast of 100 Rifles, and Jim said, “I can tell you what’s about to happen. The politicians will get drunk and put their arms around Jim Brown and tell him how liberal they are. Jim Brown will say to Burt Reynolds, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ and we will get the hell out of here.”
“Why wait?” I said.
We drove to the Lincoln Memorial. At night, deserted and lit from behind, it had an eerie, awe-inspiring quality to it. We stepped over the ropes and walked up the steps. Suddenly there were policemen everywhere. They ran up the stairs and grabbed us, Jim a little more roughly, I thought, but he kept his cool.
One cop had him by the arm and, realizing that it felt more like a leg, said, “Hey, wait a minute. You’re Jim Brown!”
“What if I wasn’t?” Jim said.
The officer had no answer for that, except to apologize and politely escort us to our car.
For as long as I’ve known him, Jim has worked for the betterment of the African-American community through his Amer-I-Can Program, which counsels prison inmates and teaches life skills to inner-city kids. He’s an honest man and a man of conscience. He doesn’t care what people think of him, and he doesn’t bite his tongue. He tells you exactly what’s on his mind, so if you don’t want to hear it, don’t ask him.
But Enough About Me: A Memoir Page 7