Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Later she regretted not ever having had Clive as her chief leading man—in 10th Avenue he was more of a supporting player, and their onscreen confrontations were few. Green recalled her saying that there were very few male performers who could match her own intensity. If some people called her a witch, then Clive qualified as a warlock, and their onscreen chemistry would have been mighty interesting.

  Of course during this period Davis was focused on George Brent, but she discussed both Hunter and Clive with Brent and Al Green. As Al Green recalled it, Brent found both men amusing as suitors, and wholly inappropriate, snickering, “One [Hunter] is a milksop who’d bore you to death and the other is a maniac who might cut your head off some night and plunk it on the icebox!” Instead of shuddering in horror at such direct language, Green said, Davis threw her head back and laughed raucously. “Maybe I’d cut his head off—how do you know?” she rejoindered. That same year Clive did another Frankenstein picture at Universal. In this one, The Bride of Frankenstein, he creates a monster woman (Elsa Lanchester was a hit in the role) as spouse for his original monster, and Brent and Green kidded Davis that if she’d only pleaded with Jack Warner successfully for a loanout on that, she and Clive could have raised old Satan himself!

  The scriptwriter for The Girl From 10th Avenue, Charles Kenyon, tailored the leading role to Davis’s full measure. Soapy and trivial as the picture was, it displayed her as a brazen lower-class dame pulling herself up, via sheer nerve and intense address, to the social level where she could vie on equal terms with her rival and win her upper-class guy. Certainly she is given ample opportunity here to stride purposefully about, flash her eyes kinetically, and give the brazen, feisty speeches that by then had become her trademark. The more passive, albeit civilized, Hunter made a perfect foil for all this.

  The New York Times felt Davis had given a performance “both truthful and amusing” and Variety felt she had gone “high, wide and handsome on the emotions.”

  8

  Grinding out the Warner Sausage

  IN LOOKING BACK at mid-1935 when she was languishing in one of her Warner horrors, Front Page Woman, Davis said:

  “The Warners were quite befuddled by me at this point. No matter what piece of garbage they gave me to do, and no matter how much I scornfully sniffed at it, I did my job—and well. If they wouldn’t help me, I’d help myself. Critics and public were making me more important and still they resisted.

  “My graduating contract seemed to the studio to be compensation enough for my work, but money was not the question. They were all used to actors who were grateful they had been rescued from diners or from under wet stones and as long as the cash rolled in, were happy. As long as their paychecks weren’t shy and their billing was bold, all was right with their world.”

  During this period she felt that she was being treated “as an intractable child.” She recalled meeting Jack Warner at parties where he would patronize her maddeningly, wagging his finger at her like a disapproving parent, using annoying variations on: “Remember, Bette, you have to be at the studio at six o’clock. Get to sleep soon!”

  This always angered her because she was noted on the set for her promptness and did not like to be made to feel like a five-year-old.

  More significant is a reference in her biography to Jack Warner’s freedom from adulterous inclinations. “In all fairness,” she wrote, “he was singular as a movie mogul. No lecherous boss was he! His sins lay elsewhere. He was the father. The power. The glory. And he was in business to make money. I was aware of this; but I was and still am convinced that the public will buy good work if it is presented in the same packaging that glamorizes the trash.”

  Katherine Albert told me that Davis was extremely annoyed at Jack Warner’s virtue—at least where she was concerned. “God, the man must wear an iron chastity belt,” she hissed to Katherine. According to the same source, Davis began making unnecessary visits to Warner’s office to try to seduce him. “I just want to see if he’s human,” she laughed. Once she caught Jack without his pants—he was being fitted for a new suit in his office, having little time to run down to his favorite tailor’s.

  “Jack, your legs are great,” she purred, admiringly.

  “Bette—make your exit—pronto!” he rejoindered. His assistant promptly showed her the door.

  Still stinging over Laemmle’s reference to her having “as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville,” Davis was determined to arouse Warner. Katherine warned her that she was flouting the moral-turpitude clause in her contract, insisted on by the Production Code and Legion of Decency that ruled Hollywood in 1935, but Davis said she didn’t care.

  “People are flouting it all the time—look at the way Darryl Zanuck acts,” Davis declared defiantly, but, eventually she stopped “trying to get into the boss’s pants,” as producer Henry Blanke pointedly put it, because of her growing admiration for Warner’s wife, Ann, who always treated her graciously. Ann Warner was later to become a crucial Davis ally, so her perspicacity in pulling in her seduction horns might have been instinctive. There was also the factor—quite evident—that Jack Warner had absolutely no sexual interest in Bette Davis.

  Writer Jerry Asher, who knew Davis intimately, felt this galled her. “She became quite vain about her alleged ability to get any man she wanted,” Jerry recalled. “First George Brent kept her at arm’s length, now the Grand Panjandrum himself!”

  Jerry also felt that her many quarrels with Jack Warner over the years had their roots not just in her determination to get quality product, but in hurt vanity, which Davis hotly denied.

  As of 1935 Brent had been legally free of Ruth Chatterton for a year and was up for grabs, only he was the one doing the grabbing—at the bodies of quite a few attractive Hollywood women, some actresses, some even married, which made Warner extremely nervous, given those eternal moral-turpitude clauses. As Henry Blanke remembered it, Jack called George into his office one day. “George, why don’t you get married again?” he began.

  “No thanks—like my freedom!” (Brent was noted for his terse responses.)

  “Okay, so why don’t you give Davis a tumble! You know she’s had the hots for you for years!”

  “She’s a married woman, Jack.”

  “Since when has that stopped you? Anyway, I’m putting you two in another picture together. Two in a row, in fact. The public likes to see you together. They sense the sexual tension. It comes off real onscreen.”

  “Maybe from her. Not from me.”

  “You start shooting Monday at seven. Now get out!”

  “Glad to.”

  In the first of the two 1935 pictures co-starring Bette Davis and George Brent, Front Page Woman, Brent is supposed to be in love with Davis, though he feels she is a “bum newspaperwoman. All women are bum in such a job,” is ace reporter Brent’s ongoing observation. He tricks Davis over a murder verdict, which she reports inaccurately due to his machinations, and she is fired. Then she is forced to restore the balance, and the rest of the fast-paced but surprisingly boring and perfunctory doings have her doing just that.

  The fans took notice of Davis’s calf-eyed looks at Brent all through the sequences featuring them together. Davis made the mistake of taking hubby Ham Nelson to a screening of Front Page Woman, and Mike Curtiz remembered them arguing along such lines as:

  “You must be in love with that guy the way you ogle him constantly in front of the camera.”

  “But Ham, I’m paid to be an actress and you have to look interested in your leading man.”

  “Horseshit!”

  Scriptwriters Roy Chanslor, Lillie Hayward, and Laird Doyle, all replete with sound newspaper backgrounds, made the proceedings, based on ex-newspaperman Richard Macauley’s story “Women Are Bum Newspapermen,” look authentic. Adela Rogers St. Johns, one of Hearst’s premiere newshens, was drafted by the Warners publicity department to give out stories and interviews assuring one and all that Bette Davis’s Ellen Garfield went through her paces in the best
tradition of tabloid sob sisters. She even got a phone interview with the great William Randolph Hearst himself, who asseverated that Davis as Garfield was indeed the genuine goods.

  Overlooked by the public at large was the fact that, after a rift with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer over their failure to cast his mistress, Marion Davies, in “stature” roles, Hearst had moved Marion and his Cosmopolitan Productions over to Warners. “I’d hire her any time,” Hearst declared. “She can start on the San Francisco Examiner!” Jack Warner was delighted with the publicity, and Davis began getting invitations to Hearst’s San Simeon estate.

  Davis’s second 1935 picture with George Brent, Special Agent, was no great shakes. Its slipshod direction by William Keighley exasperated her. Photographer Sid Hickox, not one of her favorites, shot her without the care and attention Polito and others had lavished.

  Frank S. Nugent in The New York Times said succinctly but pointedly:

  “The brothers Warner have turned out another of their machine-gun sagas of crime and punishment in Special Agent, crisp, fast-moving and thoroughly entertaining. . . . it has all been done before, but somehow it never seems to lose its visual excitement. . . . The Internal Revenue Bureau is personified handsomely in the reflection of contemporary manners by George Brent. Ricardo Cortez is entirely convincing as the racket lord, and Bette Davis manages to fit in reasonably as the patriotic book-keeper who double-crosses her boss for Uncle Sam and Mr. Brent (in about an 05–95 ratio).”

  The picture does not hold up well when seen today, and Davis’s role hardly seems necessary to the action. The 76 minutes are carelessly edited; Production Code restrictions, running rampant in 1935, forced the reshooting of several scenes which were awkwardly inserted, making for choppy continuity. Screenwriters Laird Doyle and Abem Finkel, working on an idea by Martin Mooney, do not bring the characters into sharp psychological relief, and motivations are not convincingly assigned.

  Being without ego or star ambition, Brent usually walked through his parts and collected his paycheck uncomplainingly. Around the studio, he was known as “Apple of Jack Warner’s Eye” and “Good Old Mr. Dependable.” He said he didn’t like most of his pictures, but he had some especially caustic words for Special Agent, telling Ruth Waterbury of Photoplay that it was “a poor, paltry thing, unbelievable and unconvincing in all its aspects.” Ruth later told me that Warners publicity talked her out of using the quotes for fear of affecting the picture’s chances. “It was one of those rare instances where George spoke his mind for print,” she told me. “He had had early hardship in Ireland, and a decent paycheck went a long way with George. He never thought much of his acting abilities and told me once he was afraid people would find out how lousy he was and fire him—so he seldom made waves.”

  Waterbury also remembered that Davis had the continuing hots for Brent all through 1935 and that she made no secret of it.

  “The chemistry between them onscreen was always exciting,” Waterbury remembered. “And the chemistry offscreen even more so! But for years it was more on Bette’s side than George’s. She finally got her reward—reciprocity—but it took her years! And even then, I always felt she was more emotional about it than he was. Of course, George always kept—at least on the surface—that quizzical, detached attitude toward women that they took to like catnip. Women, whether they admit it or not, don’t like to get too sure of a man—Bette was no exception.”

  During this same period Davis was to weather the unwelcome addresses of a dangerously neurotic young Warner actor who could hold his own with Owsley and Clive—and then some!

  Ross Alexander, Davis’s fellow contract player at Warners, was a tormented, confused young man. He had gone on the stage in 1923 when he was sixteen (he was a year older than Davis) and had been seduced by several older actors and two prominent stage directors, and “between engagements” had been kept by a series of wealthy men. Opportunistic and self-despising, Ross hated his homosexual side, and later went on a wild overcompensation swing by romancing several prominent actresses. He gravitated toward forceful women and after he came to Warners in 1933, he developed a wild crush (which Jerry Asher called an obsession) on Davis. “He was forever maneuvering to get cast in a picture with her,” Jerry remembered. “It was really pathetic, and so self-deceptive when he went on about if he ever held her in his arms and kissed her onscreen he’d kindle a wild response in her. I knew Bette well enough to know that Ross wasn’t her type. He was a handsome enough kid, with a good body and a wry, offhand, cynical charm that made him great in certain roles, but she could always spot a bisexual component in a man and that she needed like a hole in the head at that stage. And he wouldn’t have been masculine enough for her—not that he was effeminate; that he wasn’t, but there was something feminine and feline about the way he put himself across on screen, especially in comedy parts.”

  It seems that Ross Alexander began writing Davis love letters, which he sneaked under her dressing-room door. “She’d read them, laugh at them and throw them in the wastebasket,” Jerry Asher told me. “Ross was a real masochist. He didn’t know when he was getting no—a big loud no—for an answer, and the fact that Bette was married to Ham Nelson didn’t seem to bother him at all.”

  Ham tried to stay away from Davis’s sets and the studio itself, but one afternoon he went looking for her and found a letter headed, on the envelope, TO MY BELOVED ONE, BETTE. Quick-tempered, jealous Ham tore open the envelope and read the letter. Ross had worded it so that it seemed he and Bette had made love. They never had, of course, but an enraged Ham confronted Davis with it on the set of Satan Met a Lady, a movie she was making with Warren William. He dragged her behind a flat and demanded an explanation. Davis read the letter and snickered. “That queer is having pipe dreams,” she told her husband. “He’s trying to prove his manhood—or something—and he knows I see right through him.” Ham clenched his fists, and Davis said, “I’ve got to get back to the set—deal with him as you like. Just get him off my fucking back!”

  Ham went looking for Ross and found him alone in a men’s room. He slammed him against the wall and hollered, “It’s my wife you’re writing that slush-and-mush to, and she wants no part of it! If you’re any kind of a man, you’ll back off!” Ross tried to defend himself by raising his fists, but Ham, taller and stronger, knocked him to the floor.

  The resulting black eye prevented Ross from beginning the filming of his next picture. He stayed home, brooded, and drank. Ross’s wife, Anne Nagel, a pretty young actress who had fallen deeply in love with him, left him several times when she discovered his half-finished notes to Davis under his desk blotter.

  Ross’s obsession grew worse. Davis, ever more annoyed, began taunting him when their paths crossed, casting aspersions on his manhood. “She’s a merciless bitch!” Ross screamed to Jerry Asher. “No, Ross,” Jerry replied, “she just wants you to get off it! Look, you have had some lovely women in your life, including Anne. You can’t get them all! Bette is a married woman, and you’re just asking for more beatings from Ham!”

  Ross began sinking into fits of profound depression. He went out in his car, picked up a male hobo on the highway, and had sex with him. The man made blackmail threats and Ross appealed to the Warners lawyers, who managed to hush the matter up. In January 1937 he killed himself. Jack Warner hired people to get all unsent love letters to Davis out of his house before police and reporters found them.

  With her last 1935 film, Davis tried to make a sow’s ear into a silk purse, and succeeded—somewhat. “I worked like ten men on Dangerous,” Davis later said.

  One of the most interesting reviews Davis was ever to receive was for Dangerous. It came from Picture Post’s E. Arnot Robertson, who wrote: “I think Bette Davis would probably have been burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago. She gives the curious feeling of being charged with power which can find no ordinary outlet.”

  After the two forgettable, pedestrian duds in which she had languished earlier,
Dangerous—soapy, melodramatic, and silly as its basic plot was—offered Davis enough material to charge with her individual and unique talent. The story showcases one Joyce Heath, a self-destructive actress down on her luck, who has taken to drink and who feels she’s jinxed. She has created such a negative image for herself that no one wants to hire or work with her. The character was modeled on the late Jeanne Eagels, who after her initial 1922 Broadway hit in Rain dissipated her fine talent in drink and drugs and a careless life-style, dying in 1929.

  A wealthy young architect, Dan Bellows, played by Franchot Tone, who was on loan from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, takes an interest in the skidding Joyce, dries her out at his country place under the aegis of a disapproving housekeeper, Alison Skipworth, and gradually restores her sense of self and her ambition. He even finances a comeback play for her, and they fall in love. But Davis has a secret husband, a weakling (John Eldredge) who still loves her and refuses a divorce. Davis proceeds to drive them both into a tree, with the famous lines, “It’s going to be your life or mine! If you’re killed, I’ll be free . . . If I’m killed, it won’t matter any longer. And if we both die, good riddance!” He is injured. She escapes with a scratch.

  Later, realizing that she is poison for Tone, she sends him back to his fiancée by assuming a heartlessness that wins his disgust, then goes to the hospital to care for her injured husband after witnessing, from across the street, Tone’s wedding to socialite Margaret Lindsay, who has been patiently waiting for him to overcome his “dangerous” addiction—Davis. Her comeback, of course, is a smash.

  Many critics, and not a few audiences, laughed at this ridiculously contrived ending, to say nothing of the other soapy situations and sappy dialogue, but everyone took seriously Davis’s vivid rendition of a driven, complex, self-destructive woman.