Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Some of the critics exasperated her by declaring she had been starred over the title prematurely; she wasn’t ready. She felt they missed the point that had she been starred in a worthy vehicle, her stardom would have been eminently justified.

  In the story, Davis and Raymond are advertising agency co-workers—he a writer, she a commercial artist. She is dead set against marriage as (in her view) a stultifying, unromantic institution, and he reluctantly goes along with her until career pressures force them to marry. Money troubles follow, and attempted infidelities—he with Kay Strozzi, she with Monroe Owsley. Eventually they settle for a copout reconciliation in which 1933 middle-class illusions are soothed via an implication that marriage is okay after all.

  Davis told one of her biographers, Whitney Stine, in 1974: “A more unsuitable part in a cheaper type film I don’t think could have been found to launch me into stardom. It was a disaster.”

  The “marvelously corrupt” Owsley was one of the picture’s chief assets as Davis’s would-be seducer. He presented, in his sinister, sickly, rat-faced persona, an almost refreshing contrast to superwholesome yet sexy, all-American blond Gene Raymond. Owsley, who died prematurely in 1937, was a strange, tormented man offscreen, having much in common with another oddball, Colin Clive, who played with Davis in a later film. All manner of sinister stories went the rounds about Owsley, from reports of homosexual seductions which he conducted with utmost intensity, to scandals involving drug use, alcoholism, and gambling. Whatever the misfortunes of his private life, Owsley was one of those rare actors who managed to present his entire self, dark as it was, onscreen with theatrical flair and panache. Davis, while she admitted that “this rat-faced rodent gives me the shivers,” was the first to concede that whatever he projected, it was consummately effective on camera. The circumstances of Owsley’s death remain mysterious, and there were reports that the studio hushed up the more sensational elements surrounding it.

  Typical of fan reaction to Owsley was one letter published in a fan magazine: “He’s a slimy toad, a no-good rat up to trouble—and you feel he’s like that off-camera, too!” It was significant that Owsley did not sue the magazine for libel—he probably agreed with every word of it!

  The New York Times review is worth quoting at length:

  “Bette Davis, a young actress who has shown intelligence in the roles assigned to her in films, has had the misfortune to be cast in the principal role of Ex-Lady. What that somewhat sinister event meant to her employers was that Miss Davis, having shown herself to be possessed of the proper talent and pictorial allure, now became a star in her own right. What it meant to her embarrassed admirers at the Strand on Thursday night was that Miss Davis had to spend an uncomfortable amount of her time en déshabillé in boudoir scenes, engaged in repartee and in behavior which were sometimes timidly suggestive, then depressingly naive, and mostly downright foolish.”

  Gene Raymond told me many years later, “I felt the film was ahead of its time and that Bette looked just wonderful in it. Certainly she had a good photographer [Tony Gaudio] for that. I had a lot of fun with the fellow actors on the set—Frank McHugh, Claire Dodd, and Bette were great to play with—though Bette was so serious and intense she made us all feel like amateurs by comparison. I did resent some silly copy in the press implying we were stuck on each other—especially as she was married—I needed an angry husband breathing down my neck like I needed a head cold, but we tried to laugh it off as just flak designed to sell a movie.”

  Frank McHugh recalled, “I know Bette was unhappy with the film—she told both Pat O’Brien and me she was—but it wasn’t all that bad, and there was some snappy dialogue in it, though maybe I’m looking at it from my angle since I had a lot of it to speak!”

  Robert Florey and Davis did not get on well—possibly because neither had much faith in the material. Florey later told Adela Rogers St. Johns: “If they decided they wanted her to be a full-fledged Warner star, they could have showcased her in something better than that.” Davis couldn’t have agreed more.

  The only thing Davis honestly enjoyed about her next Warner quickie was her reunion with Pat O’Brien, who with his wife had become one of her warm friends and supporters. They continued to have laughs on the set, as in their earlier film, and on weekends Davis and—when he was in town—Ham went to the O’Briens for dinner.

  The picture in question, Bureau of Missing Persons, was replete with what one writer has called the “calling-all-cars, follow-that-cab” situations. It dealt with the missing persons bureau of a metropolitan police department, where O’Brien is assigned because he has proved too handy with his fists as a regular cop. His boss, Lewis Stone, thinks he will cool off by tracing vanished folk in what he calls the department’s “kindergarten.”

  Soon O’Brien is involved with a mysterious woman, played by Davis, who wants him to find her missing husband, Alan Dinehart. She is later implicated in her husband’s death. She disappears, and O’Brien runs a report that she has been found dead and will be buried at public expense. Lo and behold, she shows up at her own funeral with Dinehart, who, it turns out, murdered his insane twin brother. Davis, declared innocent, and O’Brien resume the romantic attraction they had only just commenced.

  As the plot shows, it was standard Warners keep-it-moving, keep-it-exciting stuff, and among its other problems Bureau of Missing Persons couldn’t seem to make up its mind, under a harried Roy Del Ruth’s direction, if it was comedy, drama, melodrama, or a combination of all three.

  For added insurance, Bureau was packed with good character players, including cynical, wisecracking Glenda Farrell as an ex-wife who drops in periodically to ensure O’Brien’s alimony payments to her, and addled-as-usual Hugh Herbert, a bureau employee eternally preoccupied with finding a woman who, it turns out, works right in his office. (Ruth Donnelly, in one of her half annoyed, half wryly amused portrayals, did ample justice to this character.)

  In fact, the character players were the best thing about this so-so film, with a screenplay by Robert Presnell based on a book, Missing Men, by John H. Ayers and Carol Bird. Davis, upon viewing the finished product, was mightily incensed with photographer Barney McGill, who made her look like two different people in mismatched shots. In some she looked almost matronly—at twenty-five yet!—and in others seemed eighteen and just out of high school. Del Ruth gave her little attention, leaving her to her own creative devices. Given the ramshackle screenplay, the character stars stealing the scenes, and the fact that she had half a dozen scenes to play at most, it is small wonder that a more than usually exasperated Davis gave one of the more notably uneven performances of her career.

  O’Brien came off well in the picture since his character followed the linear dramatic pattern—find the murderer. He recalled to me in 1965 the unhappiness from which Davis suffered—with the picture, with her role, with the treatment the Warners were giving her.

  He said: “Ex-Lady, with her name above the title, had been her first official starring film and it flopped, through no fault of her own, and now, in Bureau of Missing Persons, she was back among the cast—not even ‘first among equals’ but, shall we say, ‘equal among equals,’ and it galled her no end. ‘This picture is lousy as hell,’ she said to me more than once while I tried to kid her into a more mellow mood on the set. I remember that she really blew her top when some stupid fan magazine published an item that she and I were ‘that way’ about each other—and we were both married, and moreover, thought of each other only as friends! Oh, it all got to her all right—and I am surprised, in retrospect, that it took her three more years to walk out on the Warners!”

  Oddly enough, Davis might have made the cinematic big leagues as early as 1934 instead of having to wait until 1938 and Jezebel, for to her surprise and excitement, she heard that Emil Ludwig, the author of a much-praised and well-publicized biography of Napoleon, was negotiating with Jack Warner for the film rights. Reportedly he would even write the screenplay with help from one of the W
arner hacks, in order to give it what Warner called “the requisite cinema interest.”

  Robert Florey, the director, was also involved in the negotiations, which consumed the early months of 1934. Ludwig and Florey were determined that none other than Warners’ “Little Giant,” Edward G. Robinson, would essay the Little Corporal, with Bette Davis leading all comers for the role of the empress Josephine, whom Napoleon eventually deserts for a more advantageous alliance with the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise, who gives him his heir.

  George Arliss was also enthusiastic about the project, though there was no part in it for him. He had intimated he would not be averse to the role of Talleyrand, Napoleon’s great minister, but later changed his mind because he felt the part was not of starring stature. During the shooting of The Working Man, Davis had talked with Arliss of her desire to do a prestige costume drama, and the sympathetic and concerned Arliss reportedly planted the idea of Davis as Josephine into the minds of Ludwig, Florey, and Warner, who expressed his doubts about Davis in such a project.

  “Is she up to costume stuff—I think of her as a modern girl,” he growled to Arliss and Florey, who promptly offered arguments to the contrary. But the surprise element in all these plans and alarums was the reluctance of Edward G. Robinson to take on the role of Napoleon. Here was another case of a Warner star who would later shine in major costumers (as would Davis) possibly delaying his “prestige period” unnecessarily for some years.

  Robinson’s reasons for refusing the role of Napoleon remain obscure. Possibly he felt his fans wouldn’t accept him in the role, as Florey later intimated, and preferred to keep playing it safe with gangsters and assorted mountebanks. Davis was deeply disappointed when the negotiations for Napoleon faltered, as she had looked forward to playing with Robinson.

  Napoleon—at least in his Hollywood incarnation (there had been a notable silent film by Abel Gance covering aspects of his life)—had to await Charles Boyer’s excellent portrayal in the 1937 drama at MGM, Conquest, opposite Greta Garbo, as his mistress, Marie Walewska. (In that version, Josephine was nonexistent, as she harked back to an earlier era in the Little Corporal’s life.)

  Arliss sought to console Davis by persuading Warner to lend her to another studio for his 1934 House of Rothschild but Warner refused, giving as his reason that the ingenue role in that was too slight and unsuited to Davis’s personality.

  In retrospect, Davis’s loss of Josephine opposite Robinson’s Napoleon may have been all for the best, as the empress was not that colorful or dynamic a figure, and screenwriters who handled her (to wit, the Merle Oberon impersonation in Marlon Brando’s 1954 Désirée) never succeeded in bringing her fully alive.

  But in 1934, pre–Of Human Bondage, Davis was extremely depressed and disappointed over the loss of the role. And Jack Warner was to be proved wrong in spades within a few years about her unsuitability for costume roles.

  As it turned out, it was not the last time her wise mentor George Arliss attempted to come to her rescue. His admiration for her continued unabated. Meanwhile Warners was determined to keep Davis planted firmly in Depression 1934, though sporting its most expensive fashions and acting with the very 1934-ish William Powell.

  As I noted in my Complete Films of William Powell, the Davis-Powell chemistry distinctly did not work in Fashions of 1934, later known simply as Fashions. Powell is a “fashion pirate,” always trying to swipe Paris designs for cheaper sale in America. He and his assistant, Davis, go to the City of Light to do more pirating, with Frank McHugh along sporting a hidden camera on the head of his cane. Hugh Herbert contributes a goodly share of the laughs as an entrepreneur from California who hopes to promote the use of feathers on Paris gowns. All achieve their objectives with the help of phony duchess Verree Teasdale, an old pal of Powell’s from Hoboken, and crusty, snobby fashion emperor Reginald Owen is brought to heel, with all ending in an elaborate Busby Berkeley–choreographed fashion show, after which Powell and Davis return to America and, presumably, marriage.

  “I had great respect for Mr. Powell as an actor but at the same time was not particularly motivated to co-star with him again. Likable as he was, we just weren’t right for each other before the camera, and I think the onscreen results prove it,” Davis said years later.

  William Dieterle, who directed, later opined that Davis was very much in Powell’s shadow and resented it. Moreover, Perc Westmore and Orry-Kelly saw to it that she was made up and gowned to the extravagant nines, with long, blond Garbo-esque hair, thick pancake makeup, the longest, falsest eyelashes they could create, and slinky, overstylized gowns. “That kind of thing was for Harlow or Crawford—never for me,” Davis said later. “In that picture I was frightfully ill at ease, and even felt embarrassed at times.”

  Davis was also annoyed at having to play onlooker to some protracted funny business between Frank McHugh and Hugh Herbert in the back of a car, and as the scene plays today, she is obviously impatient and annoyed beneath her tight smile and forced attentiveness. “I’ve spent so much of my life being second fiddle—will it ever end?” she asked the producer, Henry Blanke.

  Powell, sensing her reservations concerning him, tended to keep his distance. He was winding up his career at Warners that year, and was soon to go on to MGM and even brighter stardom.

  Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times wrote: “The story is lively, the gowns are interesting and the Busby Berkeley spectacles with Hollywood dancing girls are impressive. Instead of a stereotyped narrative about the enchantress who becomes an overnight queen of the Broadway stage, there is in this film something original.” Another critic called Davis “letter-perfect,” an observation she considered double-edged.

  She told Kathryn Dougherty, editor of Photoplay at the time: “I can’t get out of these awful ruts. They just won’t take me seriously. Look at me in this picture—all done up like a third-rate imitation of the MGM glamour queens. That isn’t me. I’ll never be a clothes horse or romantic symbol.” Dougherty tried to tell her that she might have more potential in those directions than she thought, and that in some shots photographer William Rees had even made her look quite beautiful. Davis’s retort was, “Beautiful never. Striking, sometimes, if I’m lucky!”

  She still hated to look at herself on screen. “Everyone comes off better than I do!” she lamented to Dieterle. “Verree Teasdale has more sophistication and wears clothes better, Powell is center stage in a flattering role, McHugh and Herbert steal all the laughs. I just stand around—like an afterthought!”

  Even the romantic addresses of handsome young Phillip Reed, who plays a songwriter in love with her, proved scant consolation. “He’s cute, but too boyish for me,” was her slough-off for the disappointed young Reed, who offscreen was one of many who got “crushed” on her. Fashions was a film she obviously wanted to forget.

  Davis next found herself cast opposite Charles Farrell, who had won fame in the silent era as the leading man in Seventh Heaven opposite Janet Gaynor, they played a waifish couple languishing in a Paris garret, and the world had taken them to its heart. Farrell went on to do other films with Gaynor, and his career prospered, with her and other co-stars, into the talkie era, but by 1934 Farrell found himself on the downgrade, and for him, The Big Shakedown, about a counterfeit drug racket, was a B picture and a “Big Comedown.” Davis sensed his depression during the film and tried to comfort him as best she could. While there was no romance, he did later recall her kindness and sympathy. “She’s a gentler, sweeter, more understanding person than her publicity and reputation would lead one to suppose,” Charlie Farrell said years later, after he had made a fortune as owner-manager of the Palm Springs Racquet Club. Later he was mayor of Palm Springs and found a second career on TV with My Little Margie and The Charlie Farrell Show. Not a peregrinative man romantically, he was for many years the husband of actress Virginia Valli.

  “Charlie was a really sweet person,” Davis told Katherine Albert years later. “He was certainly no womanizer. In his m
anly, quiet way he had more self-confidence than many men I’ve known, and didn’t think he had to prove anything—and he didn’t.”

  Katherine Albert also recalled Davis’s telling her that “Charlie was a real gentleman in his love scenes—never took advantage of the proximity to get fresh.” She recalled Davis getting annoyed when she rejoindered that maybe that was why the picture emerged so dull and also-ran—Charlie hadn’t put enough moxie into his onscreen lovemaking!

  In The Big Shakedown Charlie is a druggist and Davis his hapless wife. They get involved with a racketeer (Ricardo Cortez at his slimiest) who talks Charlie into a cut-rate prescription-drug racket. When Farrell realizes what is going on, he tries to drop Cortez but is beaten and threatened. For fear Davis will be harmed, Farrell continues to go along with it. Meanwhile wife Davis loses her child after a premature delivery. Cortez eventually meets death at the hands of a business rival, Henry O’Neill, winding up in a vat of acid. One critic commented, “If only the acid had shown up earlier, it might have kept the audience from falling asleep.”

  The reviews were devastating. “Far-fetched, over-acted and unbelievable” was the kindest of the reactions. When the film was shown many years later, I watched it appalled. John Francis Dillon’s direction was sloppy in the extreme; he died soon after the picture’s completion, so possibly his declining health was a factor in this poor showing. Sid Hickox did not give the required photographic attention to Davis, though she looks sweet, she is not given the subtle lighting that highlights her true individuality as it was evolving by early 1934. The screenplay by Niven Busch and Rian James is confused, lacking in cumulative impact, and the editing is jerky and tenuous.