Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  “Tracy was one of those men she thoroughly respected from start to finish,” Louis Calhern, who had a part in the film, said later. “It was not so much a sexual attraction as the admiration of one strong spirit for her counterpart. And the admiration was fully returned.”

  Tracy thought Davis a great talent, with unlimited potential, and they engaged in mutual-sympathy morale-instilling talks off the set. Neither of them, as of late 1932, was getting the parts their talents warranted, and Tracy traded his stories of Fox miscastings in cheap, badly done films with hers, sympathizing especially when she raved on about being “shunted aside in a nothing role” in Three on a Match—a film she never let the Warners powers that be forget about.

  Michael Curtiz, asked years later why no romance ensued between Tracy and Davis during the making of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, replied, “They were too much alike, did too much identifying with each other. I think Tracy, much as he admired her, was put off by her masculine aggressiveness and feistiness, and as for her—well, he was a rather plain man for all his dynamism and I felt she liked ’em better-looking—like George Brent, for instance.”

  But, as friends, they carried on in first-rate fashion, talking about the great movies they would do together when they were “rich and famous.” Oddly enough, they were never to do another film together, though they did do a radio show—of one of her greatest hits, Dark Victory.

  20,000 Years in Sing Sing was based on the book about prison conditions by Warden Lewis E. Lawes, played by Arthur Byron in the film as Warden Long. It was a hard-hitting, realistic book and it made a hard-hitting, realistic picture. Tracy, cocky at first, is humbled by his tough prison experiences, which include weeks of solitary confinement. Later his adjustment to prison life improves and when he hears that Fay, the Davis character, has been in an automobile crash, he is given a brief parole in order to visit her, with the promise he will return at a stated time under his own recognizance. He gets into a scuffle in Fay’s bedroom with the gangster (the Calhern character) who sent him to prison, and accepts the blame for Fay when she shoots his rival. Later he is sentenced to the electric chair. (Of course, under tougher Production Code rulings instituted a year later, in 1934, Fay would have been obliged to pay for her own crime.)

  Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times liked the Tracy-Davis co-starrer well enough, writing, “In this rapidly-paced film there are some extraordinarily interesting glimpses of prison routine. . . . Spencer Tracy . . . gives a clever and convincing portrayal.” He added, “Bette Davis does well as Fay.”

  Seen in recent years, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing does not hold up too well, its plot devices maudlin and unbelievable by current standards, though the cast, including Warren Hymer, Grant Mitchell, and Louis Calhern, does well, and Curtiz keeps the action moving despite the illogic of some of the situations.

  Louis Calhern, a fine actor with a splendid Broadway reputation who later became an eminent character star in films and played Shakespeare’s King Lear on the stage to acclaim, told me in 1954 that 20,000 Years in Sing Sing was typical of the fast-paced Depression dramas of the early thirties. “None of us was meant to shine in our roles—the material defeated us. We were there to serve the plot situations, there was no opportunity for solid characterization, and action and movement and excitement were everything—and that was where Mike Curtiz and the writers came in.

  “Mike was a fine director for this kind of hurly-burly action stuff, but he was a difficult and temperamental man to work with. I know Bette found him a pain in the neck, and for that matter, so did Tracy. Of course he didn’t dare treat Tracy disrespectfully—at least not beyond a point—or Tracy would have hauled off and hit him. Not that Bette was timid either—she’d scream back at him and snarl and even spit at him if he went too far. I suspect Mike sort of enjoyed egging her on.”

  Davis was next rushed into a picture with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., called Parachute Jumper. It was to be the one and only time they ever acted together (though many years later he would be involved as a producer with one of her cinematic ventures).

  In his recent autobiography, Fairbanks sloughs off both Davis and the picture in few words, all dismissive. Davis thought him conceited because he was “Pickfair royalty,” being the son of the famed swashbuckler Douglas, Sr., and the stepson of Mary Pickford. He was also Joan Crawford’s husband, though their marriage was coming apart in a welter of mutual infidelities—hers with Clark Gable, who was married himself at the time—not that anyone cared.

  Humiliated at home, Fairbanks in early 1933 tended to be indifferent, cynical, and supercilious about Hollywood and Hollywood people. Later that year he would fall in love (by his own later admission in his book) with Katharine Hepburn when they did Morning Glory. For his pains he got no response from the lady. His infatuation with Hepburn is notable in a number of scenes in which he listens to her troubles with a manner so sympathetically concerned that even at the time it aroused speculations about his feelings for her. Within a year he would be off to England, where he would stay for some years, becoming, as Davis later sniffed, “more British than the British.”

  While many years later they would become friends—of a sort—Fairbanks and Davis found their chemistry lacking in simpatico in 1933, and their scenes together demonstrate their mutual indifference all too clearly. “Those love scenes between them were the stiffest kind I ever had to deal with,” director Alfred E. Green later recalled. “I always laughed because the picture was based on an original story called Some Call It Love. All I can say is that the way those two played it, no one would ever have mistaken it for love!”

  In her circa-1933 discontented and frustrated style, Davis was unhappy with everything about Parachute Jumper. She didn’t feel that photographer Jim Van Trees lit her properly or highlighted her best angles; she felt Green neglected her for the male actors, she found the talented Leo Carrillo irritating and claimed he tried to pinch her; she and Claire Dodd, a supporting player of the cut-rate femme fatale kind, rubbed each other the wrong way—especially when she noted that Claire got better clothes to wear and better photography. “The damned cameraman must have had a crush on her—at my expense!” she later snorted.

  Frank McHugh, saddled with the ridiculous name of “Toodles” as Fairbanks’s sidekick, later recalled that the atmosphere on the set was tense and unhappy, and everyone was anxious to get it over with, especially Green, who had to keep them all out of one another’s hair.

  “Bette was going through a tense and miserable period, and I understood why,” McHugh later said. “She was being knocked around in one ‘man’s picture’ after another, and wasn’t getting the right opportunities to shine. And it frustrated her and made her ornery.” She and McHugh reminisced on the set about their stock days.

  Fairbanks had an irritating habit of letting Davis’s tensions and snappishness roll off his back. Often, as Green recalled, he treated her as if she weren’t even there. “He regarded her as the standard ‘love interest’ necessary to the plot line for, in his view, some idiotic reason, and she was someone to be tolerated and disregarded whenever possible.”

  The picture is a piece of nonsense about pilots drafted to fly narcotics into the United States, with Fairbanks, originally a marine flier, exposing the villainies of drug lord Carrillo and eventually turning him over to the authorities. Davis plays “Alabama,” a southern girl “gone wild in New York,” and she worked overtime to attain the correct accent. She was rewarded by Weekly Variety’s observation. “A Southern accent that gets across.” The doubtful Times critic ambivalently stated “[Miss Davis] . . . speaks with a most decided Southern drawl” but failed to indicate his approval or disapproval.

  To her delight, Davis found herself cast again with the great George Arliss, her old mentor and career catalyst, in a picture called The Working Man. Arliss noted at once that her self-assurance and self-possession had increased tremendously in the short year since The Man Who Played God. “My little bird has escaped her cage
and found her wings,” he told her after their first scenes together.

  Later she discovered that Arliss had expressly requested Warner and Zanuck to cast her in his film. Always sensitive to her troubles and concerns, he had continued to take a fatherly interest and wanted to check for himself her progress in cinema technique. He took photographer Sol Polito aside and asked him to favor Davis in as many shots as possible, and even took it upon himself to discuss her costumes with Orry-Kelly who, talented man that he was, sometimes tended to overdo, overshadowing his actresses with his creativity. Arliss also worked with director John Adolfi to highlight Davis’s best qualities, and she is sleek and authoritative and feisty in the final product.

  “I always sensed that Mr. Arliss was one hundred percent in my corner, as he was in that first film, and I shall always be grateful to him,” Davis later said. She added that Arliss had taught her “something wonderful” relating to film acting—something she never forgot, which in essence was: “Films are not shot in situational continuity, so always keep in mind the action in the scene just before and after, at least as they appear in the script progression.” She added, “This was the annoying film technique we all had to weather—it would be so aggravating and disconcerting, this shooting out of sequence—a light comedy scene coming just before a big dramatic moment when I was required to spill my emotional guts out. Mr. Arliss’s tips were life-savers, believe you me!”

  Arliss, an Academy Award winner who was as prescient in directing as he was in his primary pursuit, acting, gently warned her not to give too much of herself in scenes of relative inconsequence. “He was right about that, too,” Davis later recalled. “I went into each and every scene, at least in that period, on all cylinders, sometimes lending them an intensity and an attack beyond the merits of the situation.”

  The Working Man was a trivial effort, unworthy of Arliss, Davis, and the other talents involved. In it Arliss is a retired shoe manufacturer who takes a job incognito in a rival firm because he is bored and wants to help the scions of his dead competitor shape up and fly right before they lose their inheritance via their frivolous lives. Soon he is competing with the stuffed-shirt nephew (Hardie Albright) whom he had left in charge of his own business—and of course the miscreant heirs, Davis and Theodore Newton, see the error of their ways.

  Davis had her problems with handsome young Theodore Newton, who played her brother. Newton refused to accept her protestations that she was a “settled married woman and therefore now beyond the pale” and took to following her around, bringing her coffee on the set, and otherwise waxing, as she put it, “uncomfortably attentive.” She mentioned this to Arliss, who scoffed, “Oh the boy has a crush—and let him work it out by being nice and understanding. He’s not going to harm you.” “I don’t know about that—you haven’t seen the glint in that kid’s eye,” she snapped back. At her request, Adolfi and Albright had some words with the frustrated would-be swain, who proceeded, as best he could, to cool it. “Thank God he plays my brother and there are no love scenes,” she sighed in relief to Albright, who laughed, “He may surprise you with some incest ideas yet!” But, as it turned out, a word to the wise was sufficient, and Newton kept his distance.

  Thanks to all the care and attention Arliss had assured for her, Davis got some nice critical pats on the back. “Good work,” said the Times. “Scores strong,” wrote the Film Daily reviewer.

  In early 1933, Bette and Ham were given a honeymoon for free, but an odd one. They were sent out with the Forty-second Street Special, a round-the-country train trip that covered all major cities, where the premieres of the lavish new musical, Forty-second Street, were held. Warners and General Electric shared the cost of the elaborately fitted and staffed Pullman train, which wound up in Washington for the March 1933 inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  They covered thirty-two cities in thirty-two days. Among those accompanying Bette and Ham, who felt rather lost among all the famous names, were Glenda Farrell, Laura La Plante, Joe E. Brown, Olympics star Eleanor Holm, Tom Mix and his horse—who had a car all his own—Leo Carrillo, and Preston Foster. Also on hand were a dozen gorgeous chorus girls who elicited wolf whistles at all the stops. Fans gawked at them wide-eyed, and some hooted at all the glitter—it was, after all, in the depths of the Depression, and the new president Roosevelt would shortly close the banks. In Boston they made do with the money substitute—scrip. In Washington Davis and Ham met members of the Roosevelt family—she was a firm, devoted admirer of the new president—and then it was New York and yet another caravan, with much smiling and waving to many ragged, forlorn people. Davis recalled that it was then she realized Hollywood made even secondary players national names—those trashy films she had weathered were not to be written off as total losses after all.

  She remembered that during all the excitement and the bumpy train rides, sex was the last thing on her and Ham’s minds. Then, once back in Los Angeles, with domestic habits reestablished, Ham’s sexual idiosyncrasies served their usual purpose—for him. In retrospect, Davis realized that his masturbatory habits, which she knew he continued in solitude, were being adapted for other purposes, among them the prevention of any possible pregnancy. Coitus interruptus was one of Ham’s specialties, to her annoyance and frustration, along with his failure to “hold his fire” until her orgasm approached or matched his own. He would pull out at the last second and shoot his sperm on her leg—it was sticky, but it worked. At first she thought it was accidental, part and parcel of his still gauche sexuality. Then she realized he was doing it on purpose. She finally talked him out of pulling out, but then he took to wearing condoms. She told him they irritated her vaginal lining, tricked him into doing without them a few times, and got pregnant.

  Having gulled Ham into potential fatherhood without really thinking the question through, Davis was confronted with some hard questions. Did she really want a baby, at age twenty-five, with her career in high gear? Could she take the time out? Her craving for motherhood was at war with her intense careerism. Ham and Ruthie promptly took advantage of her ambivalence.

  When she confronted Ham with the news that she had conceived, his reaction was dour and glum. She was too busy to have a baby, he said; her career might be derailed. Nor would he be “humiliated” because she would have to pay the hospital bills. If he wasn’t successful enough financially to pay for his own child’s birth, then it was better to postpone. An abortion was a must! Then Ruthie, in the East attending Bobby during one of her recurrent nervous breakdowns, wrote that she agreed with Ham. It was bad for her career, too “cluttery,” too ill-timed.

  Resigned outwardly, torn and miserable inwardly, Davis went with Ham to a scruffy little quack in a dusty little house in a drab little town fifty miles from L.A. Ham waited outside in the car. It took less than an hour. She drove home with him in stoic silence, but later retreated into the bathroom and cried for an hour. In 1933 there was a stigma on abortion even for married people. And with the medical dangers—infection, blood loss—more than a few women died from it. Davis aborted twice, escaping the worst.

  6

  Battling Toward the Big Break

  IN HER AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Davis has some cutting words for her next film, Ex-Lady. She says of it:

  “Darryl Zanuck [egged on by critical and popular support of Davis’s recent efforts] decided that it was time to give me the glamour-star treatment. It was a great mistake. I wasn’t the type to be glamorized in the usual way. In an ecstasy of poor taste and a burst of misspent energy, I was made over and cast as the star of a piece of junk called Ex-Lady which was supposed to be provocative and provoked anyone of sensibility to nausea.

  “As an avant-garde artist, my lover was Gene Raymond, whom I discarded, au fin, for the marvelously corrupt Monroe Owsley. One disgusted critic [from Hollywood Reporter] announced that Warner Brothers could have saved a fortune by photographing the whole picture in one bed. It is a part of my career that my conscious tastefully avoids. I only recall
that from the daily shooting to the billboards, falsely picturing me half-naked, my shame was only exceeded by my fury.” Robert Florey’s pedestrian direction was no help either.

  It seems strange that Davis, who longed for stardom, should have objected to getting her name above a picture’s title. And the plot of Ex-Lady, a rehash of Barbara Stanwyck’s 1931 film Illicit, was not only stimulating and refreshing in those pre-Production Code days, it was decades ahead of its time. Davis played a freewheeling soul who believed in living with her guy without benefit of marriage, which she felt only killed the romance and encouraged all kinds of sterilities and boredoms.

  It is true that the plot details, as rehashed by David Boehm with fresh dialogue and situations, from the Stanwyck picture, were cursory, unbelievable, and too neatly telescoped and tied up. Then there is reason to believe that Davis deeply resented being handed a revamped version of a Barbara Stanwyck star vehicle; since So Big she had disliked Stanwyck.

  Also, column items hinted that she and Gene Raymond, her handsome, sexy co-star (later the longtime husband of Jeanette McDonald and a breezy, blond charmer who was great with the ladies), seemed to enjoy each other’s company unduly and exclusively on the set, and she had not even been married six months.

  But what really set her against the film was the advertising; one of the full-page ads that Warners ran in fan magazines and other national publications displayed her ostensibly naked from the breasts up, heavily made up, and staring outward with brazen provocativeness. Above her face was the legend: WE DON’T DARE TELL YOU HOW DARING IT IS! To the side were the words: “Never before has the screen had the courage to present a story so frank—so outspoken—yet so true! Get set for a surprise sensation!”