Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Davis needed all the reassurance she could find in co-star O’Brien’s friendship, for Hell’s House, originally known as Juvenile Court, was a real horror. The last of the quickie films for which she had been haplessly shunted around by the Laemmles, it displayed her as Peggy, the girlfriend of flashy bootlegger Matt (O’Brien), who takes advantage of hero-worshipping teenager Jimmy (Junior Durkin) by letting him take the rap for one of his own offenses. Junior winds up in reform school (Hell’s House, of course), where the goings-on are as Dickensian as poverty-row producer Ben Zeidman and fly-by-night director Howard Higgin could make them. At the horror-pit, Jimmy befriends frail Shorty, (played by another young actor named Junior—in this case Junior Coghlan) who is dying, in properly bathetic style, of a heart ailment. A crusading newspaper publisher, Morgan Wallace, exposes conditions at the reform school, and all turns out well when the cowardly O’Brien, egged on by indignant girlfriend Davis, finally acts like a man and accepts the responsibility for the crime he had foisted on the innocent Junior Durkin.

  Junior Durkin was sixteen when he made Hell’s House. A promising young juvenile with a sensitive face and manner, he had been a hit in Huckleberry Finn earlier in the year, but after that found himself a “has-been,” and made only a few films after Hell’s House before his death at twenty in a car crash of which his good pal, the famed child star Jackie Coogan, was the only survivor.

  “Junior was an unlucky kid,” Pat O’Brien later said of him. “He was too boyish and innocent to graduate into leading-man status, and of course that early death was tragic. But he was so down, so disappointed over failing to make it when he loved acting so, that maybe death came as a mercy, terrible and sad as that sounds.”

  O’Brien remembers young Durkin developed a tremendous adolescent crush on Davis, who, on and off the screen, adopted a big-sisterly, protective attitude toward him. “I think Junior, who could be very winsome and sweet, was the brother she had always wished she had,” O’Brien remembered. “She and her mother went out of their way to be nice to him, and I think it came as a real shock to her when I tipped her off that the poor kid, all of sixteen, no less, had fallen hook, line, and sinker for her!”

  While the picture was shot on peanuts in less than two weeks, producer Zeidman and director Higgin found it necessary to cut one scene in which Davis puts her arms around Junior to comfort him. “And they hated to cut it,” Pat O’Brien later laughed, “because even two minutes of film loomed large in their budget, but for Christ’s sake, the kid had a hard-on in his pants when Bette hugged and kissed him, and the camera caught it!”

  Junior Coghlan and some of his pals, according to O’Brien, rescued the few feet of film from the cutting room wastebasket and for some years enjoyed showing it at their stag parties. “It so embarrassed Junior Durkin,” according to O’Brien, “that he got into some fist fights trying to recover it. He came to me about a year later over it. ‘What do I do?’ he wailed. ‘Laugh about it, and go around congratulating yourself. So you got a hard-on with Bette Davis in a movie—great—proves you’re a man!’”

  O’Brien couldn’t resist passing the news about her young co-star’s “humiliation” on to Davis, who found it amusing, in a self-deprecatory way. “Hell,” O’Brien remembered her saying, “it isn’t as if I were Jean Harlow or Connie Bennett or Lombard. Why, I was still a virgin then! If I got the poor kid excited, I guess I have to take it as a compliment. But I hadn’t even dyed my hair a provocative blond at that time—I can’t imagine what he saw in me!”

  O’Brien laughed that a lot of adult males later would have commended adolescent Junior Durkin’s taste circa 1931. “They were calling her a drab, sexless wren over at Universal, couldn’t wait to get rid of her,” O’Brien chortled, “but that horny kid saw what nobody else saw—no flies on him!”

  Hell’s House languished on the second- and third-bill poverty-row circuits but, unaccountably, got a New York release in early 1932. New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall wrote: “The direction of the film is old-fashioned. Pat O’Brien gives a forced performance. Young Durkin’s playing is sincere and likewise that of Bette Davis.” Weekly Variety dismissed the proceedings thus: “It merits only the attention of the second runs—the lesser ones. . . . [It] projects as having been put together in a slipshod manner.” O’Brien’s summation of Hell’s House was: “The only thing solid about it was Junior’s hard-on—and that was cut!”

  Back at Universal they had news for Davis. With her latest option expired, she was let go.

  4

  Warner, Zanuck—and Arliss

  IT IS ALWAYS darkest just before the dawn, as the hoariest but most enduring of clichés has it, and the end of her thankless Universal and loanout year was to usher in, for Bette Davis, the beginning of a bright new career at that most vital and enterprising of studios—Warners.

  In the new year, 1932, she would encounter three men who would greatly change the direction of her career.

  The first, Jack L. Warner, one of four brothers of Polish-Jewish ancestry, had emigrated from Canada to New York. With his brothers, Harry, Albert, and Sam, Jack struggled up in the film business from the nickelodeons he ran circa 1910 to the short films he began producing in 1912. In 1917 the Warners produced their first successful film, My Four Years in Germany, and by 1925 they had amalgamated with First National Pictures and Vitagraph. After experimenting with sound in the John Barrymore film Don Juan in 1926, they revolutionized the industry in 1927 with the first film that blended songs with lines of dialogue—The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. This put them in the forefront of film production, and they led the way into the Talkie Era. In the early thirties Harry became the president of Warner Brothers, Albert the treasurer, and Jack head of production at the Burbank Studios in Hollywood (Sam had died in 1927).

  Jack was a hearty, bluff man who ran his studio with an iron hand. He kept the schedules tight, the salaries low, and his underlings turned out lean, snappy, unadorned pictures that usually ran only a little over an hour. He had a gift for hiring talent, and Darryl Zanuck (and later Hal Wallis) helped him put Warners solidly on the map in the 1930–1933 period with a series of gangster films and taut social dramas that appealed to a Depression audience. Even the musicals for which Warners came to be noted had a snappy, hard edge, featuring struggling chorus girls and male entertainers pushing for the big break.

  Jack Warner considered his actors children and ruled them like a despotic, disciplined, but fair father. Like the other greats of his time—Mayer, Thalberg, Laemmle, Cohn, Zukor—he built personalities through steady exposure, and the plethora of mediocre films he forced on them was compensated by the fact that he turned many of them into household names. Noted for his raffish, unsubtle humor—there is a story that when he was presented to Madame Chiang Kai-shek he made a crack about having forgotten to bring his laundry—Jack also had a shrewd, instinctive taste and a feel for prestige values when he felt the time for them had arrived. He was to hold the talents of the distinguished George Arliss in high esteem, as he later did those of Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, among others.

  In 1932 the brilliant Darryl Zanuck was his chief production aide, and Zanuck contributed fully to the lurid but well-made gangster melodramas that made Cagney and Robinson stars, as well as to the social consciousness and musical films. All were fast-paced, hard-edged, snappily plotted, and modestly budgeted, but with Zanuck less was more, and the product, unembellished by lavish production values (except in the musicals), was smoothly professional.

  Zanuck, born in Nebraska in 1902, had served in World War I, then drifted into writing after a series of odd jobs. A screenwriter at Warners from age twenty-one, in 1928 he was made studio manager after successfully merchandising Rin-Tin-Tin pictures, and in 1929 was made head of production. Restless, inventive, and oversexed (his specialty was exposing his heavy endowment to various lovelies on the lot), he gave Warners a tremendous charge with his creative dynamism. In 1933, he left to form Twentieth Century and l
ater to preside over Twentieth Century–Fox, but when he and Davis crossed paths in 1932, he was the Big Gun (figuratively and literally) at the Warner lot.

  Murray Kinnell, a talented character actor from Broadway who had appeared with Davis in The Menace, was struck by her potential and mentioned her to his friend George Arliss, who was preparing a picture at Warners called The Man Who Played God.

  At that time (late 1931) George Arliss was the foremost character star in films. In his sixties, a thin man with a skeletal face and piercing eyes, by no means handsome or even distinguished-looking, he was not at all the type one would expect Hollywood, and American movie fans, to take to their hearts. In 1886, when he was eighteen, he first appeared on the English stage. Then he came to the United States on a tour in 1902 and stayed to reign on Broadway for decades, eventually moving into silent films and later talkies, where his distinctive voice and manner won him an Oscar for Disraeli (1929–1930). His reputation continued to grow in classy, literate films like Old English, Alexander Hamilton, and The Green Goddess. At the time Davis encountered him, he was Warners’ most valued and prestigious star.

  Davis was just about to leave Hollywood, had in fact already booked her tickets and was packing with her mother for the return trip to New York, when Arliss phoned and asked to see her. He was immediately impressed with her appearance and manner, and, acting on his own trained intuition as well as Kinnell’s recommendation, hired her for the role of Grace, a young girl who is in love with his character of Montgomery Royale, a famous pianist deafened by a bomb meant for a king who was on hand for one of his Paris concerts.

  Back in America, deeply depressed by the fact that he may never hear again, Royale has taken a philanthropic interest in strangers he observes through his binoculars in Central Park, by reading their lips, he learns their problems, and in a number of cases becomes their anonymous benefactor. When he later observes Davis in the park telling the young man she loves that she feels it her duty to remain with Royale, whom she reveres and adores but is not physically in love with, he releases her from their engagement and takes up with an older woman, Violet Heming, who has waited for him patiently.

  The screenplay, by Julian Josephson and Maude Howell, adapted from a short story by Gouverneur Morris and the play The Silent Voice by Jules Eckert Goodman, was directed by John Adolfi in a somewhat posturing, old-fashioned manner that makes the picture seem dated and falsely sentimental today. While the other actors are competent and Arliss is his usual expert, magnetic self, it is Davis who is the revelation of the picture with her sincere, honest, and vibrant playing.

  At the interview, Arliss asked her how long she had been on the stage. To her answer, three years, he replied, “Just long enough to rub off the rough edges.” He thought her vibrant and personable, but it was not until they got on a Warners sound stage for their first scene together that the full impact of her tremendous potential hit him.

  In a Bette Davis career study I wrote for Films In Review in 1955, I quote the effect she produced on Arliss, as recalled in his second autobiography, My Ten Years in the Studios (1940).

  “I think that only two or three times in my experience have I ever got froman actor at rehearsal something beyond what I realized was in the part. Bette Davis proved to be one of those exceptions. I knew she had a ‘nice little part’ important to me—so I hoped for the best. But when we rehearsed she startled me, the nice little part became a deep and vivid creation, and I felt rather humbled that this young girl [Davis was then twenty-three] had been able to discover and portray something that my imagination had failed to conceive. She startled me because quite unexpectedly I got from her a flash that illuminated mere words and inspired them with passion and emotion. That is the kind of light that cannot be hidden under a bushel, and I am not in the least surprised that Bette Davis is now [1940] the most important star on the screen.”

  Davis impressed Arliss not only with her talent, but also with her dedication and professionalism. She was no silly ingenue marking time, primping for the cameras in the hope of exciting the romantic sensibilities of her male audience and the envy of the females. She was already, at twenty-three, a maturely dedicated artist who was determined to give her best at all times. She saw herself surrounded by seasoned performers like Violet Heming, Louise Closser Hale, and Ivan Simpson. She realized that cameraman James Van Trees and director Adolfi were working for a “class” effect in all departments, and in this class setting she was determined to be a class act herself.

  Davis always regarded The Man Who Played God as a significant turning point in her career. She said, “It is probable The Man Who Played God was my most important picture. I did others that I liked better, and which were more significant, but there was something about appearing as Mr. Arliss’s leading lady that gave me standing.”

  There were two things about Arliss she did not know at the time. One was that he had ordered completely private screenings of every picture she had done since coming to Hollywood. He winced at the neglect she had suffered, at the lack of attention, the way the bushels of mediocrity had hidden her exceptional light. The other was that he had formed an immediate attraction to her personally, one he would never reveal to her. Though sixty-four years old when he met Davis, Arliss fell in love with her. He was an unabashed ladies’ man whose romantic adventures had long been tolerated by his patient and understanding wife of many years, Florence, who appeared in several of his films, usually as his spouse and supportive sidekick. Right up to the gates of old age, Arliss’s attention continued to wander, but it was Florence who held his eternal devotion and loyalty. When her eyesight failed in 1937, he retired permanently from the screen to give her his undivided attention. Their son, Leslie Arliss, later became a talented and accomplished director.

  When Arliss plays the scene in which he lip-reads Davis’s frustration over her thwarted love for handsome young Donald Cook and her determination to stand by a man, himself, who is forty years her senior, he plays it with utter conviction. For as events proved, he proceeded to make the same personal sacrifice offscreen.

  Arliss and Davis enjoyed long conversations on the set between takes, and he often served her his favorite tea and scones. Davis recalled that he made her feel like a true lady, like a talented person worthy of the respect of her colleagues. The atmosphere on the set of The Man Who Played God was so different from the casual, knockabout, helterskelter set atmosphere at Universal that she found herself caught up in the sheer wonder of it.

  It was Arliss who suggested she lighten her hair to a more vivid shade of blond to help her appearance match the vividness of her personality. It proved wise advice. After wardrobe had provided her with a set of dresses and gowns that were carefully fitted, and that, for the first time, gave her a truly glamorous aspect onscreen, she consulted with Perc Westmore, Warners’ makeup genius, who saw to it that her hair was carefully bleached, that a chic, slickly conceived new hairdo was designed for her, and that her makeup played up her assets and de-emphasized her liabilities.

  As Davis put it years later: “According to the standards of the world I came from [Broadway], I was a blonde—technically, an ash blonde. According to the Hollywood standards of the 1930s, when bright, bleached hair reigned supreme, my hair was nondescript. [Perc] was wise enough to know [as Arliss did] my photographic appearance would be heightened by the blonder hair. He was right. In The Man Who Played God—for the first time—I really looked like myself. It was for me a new lease on life. As a matter of fact, I was compared to Constance Bennett. I was very flattered. I had always liked so much the way she looked on the screen.”

  Over the year that followed, she was to find the alleged resemblance to Connie Bennett a mixed blessing. It all added up to good publicity, however, as she readily understood.

  Skillfully applied makeup and careful lighting by Jimmy Van Trees (with angles often suggested to him by Arliss himself, who understood them as well as anyone) completed the effect the New Bette Davis produced
in The Man Who Played God.

  Weekly Variety was among those publications picking up on the New Bette, with its reviewer rhapsodizing: “A splendid production. . . . Bette Davis, the ingenue, is a vision of wide-eyed blonde beauty.”

  George Arliss was to reappear in Bette Davis’s life on several more crucial occasions. She always revered him, and when he died in 1946, at seventy-eight, she said: “I owe Mr. Arliss more than I could ever have repaid. In a crucial, important way, he was like a father to me, the first major fosterer of my creative life. His death, moreover, is not just my loss—it is the world’s.”

  After seeing rushes of her performance in The Man Who Played God, reportedly at the insistence of George Arliss himself, Jack Warner signed Davis to a five-year contract, with one-year options. Wasting no time, he rushed her into two new pictures at once, and she was kept busy going from one set to the other. Both roles were supporting performances in films highlighting major stars, but she had good material to work with and managed to shine onscreen despite limited footage.

  So Big, the Edna Ferber novel, had been made before, in 1925, with Colleen Moore. Now Barbara Stanwyck, whose contract Warners shared with Columbia under a new arrangement, was starring in the role of Selina Peake, one of those intrepid women that Ferber enjoyed glorifying. A schoolteacher in the farming country of the West, Selina has the respect of all who know her and has placed her hopes in her son, Hardie Albright, whom she would like to see become a great architect. He has other ideas, however, including womanizing and stockbrokering, but later Selina has the satisfaction of knowing that she has inspired her friend’s son, George Brent, to become an acclaimed sculptor. Davis plays Dallas O’Mara, a young artist in love with Albright. When she comes to know Selina, she understands and appreciates this simple woman’s essential greatness of spirit, and Selina is left with the hope that Dallas will influence her son to nobler pursuits.