Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Nugent added, “Admittedly it is a great role—rangy, full-bodied, designed for a virtuosa, almost sure to invite the faint damning of ‘tour de force.’ But that must not detract from the elequence, the tenderness, the heart-breaking sincerity with which she has played it. We do not belittle an actress to remark upon her great opportunity; what matters is that she made the most of it.”

  Dark Victory was to bring Davis yet another Academy Award nomination. She lost, however, the Best Actress of 1939 accolade to the actress who had won the role she so desperately wanted, Vivien Leigh for Scarlett O’Hara.

  Dark Victory was also the one and only time she ever appeared with Ronald Reagan. He is strictly a supporting actor in this; a weak, alcoholic, aimless but amiable young playboy who listens to her troubles with a light, wryly expressed sympathy, and who even indicates a possible romantic interest, which in the script is given short shrift. Then twenty-eight years old, Ronald Reagan was at the height of his youthful all-American boy romantic appeal. Two years an also-ran Warner player after a period as a Midwestern sports announcer, he had a fine voice, looked great in swimming trunks, and was much sought after by various ladies, most of them actresses.

  His role as written by Casey Robinson was merely that of a thoughtless, aimless, mildly likable young playboy pal of Judith Traherne’s, but Edmund Goulding, with his eye ever out for the manly charms of attractive studs, took a shine to Reagan, then developed a crush on him which clean-cut, solidly heterosexual Reagan uneasily sensed. Things got tense when Goulding began coaching Reagan in his role, insisting that he put effete, gay nuances into his playing. Reagan resisted, and Goulding, bitchy and feeling subtly rejected, proceeded to give him a hard time. Reagan later recalled that Goulding made him feel inadequate and shallow and ungifted. Certainly the feyness that Goulding wanted Reagan to convey in his character was wrong for Reagan the man and Reagan the actor. His instincts told him that the role should be interpreted as just another spoiled-brat bubblehead on the way to alcoholism, with too much money and leisure for his own good. In the end, his will prevailed over Goulding’s—for which Goulding never forgave him.

  George Brent was to continue his protective, forbearing attitude toward Davis for a full year; he became her shoulder to cry on and to lean on, and she was always grateful to him for it. Being only human, Brent found himself often impatient with his lover’s high-strung, over-emphatic, and superelectric approach to matters great and small—and eventually even he tired of the emotional wear and tear. As Davis had herself admitted, she wanted desperately to marry Brent, but he didn’t think marriage would work for them—a wise attitude, in retrospect. In the period after the Chatterton divorce, Brent—except for two very short excursions to the altar with Ann Sheridan and Constance Worth—was on a sabbatical from marriage, doubted it suited his temperament. This devastated Davis, and compounded her feelings of rejection.

  Geraldine Fitzgerald has spoken well of Bette Davis right down to the present. In 1971 she told Rex Reed: “I’ve remained friends with Bette to this day. Not long ago, we both had to travel to Hollywood for something, so we decided to catch a train and catch up. In every town, crowds would gather around her, and she was like a queen, pretending not to notice all the excitement. She’d keep talking, asking about every man on the old Warners lot, and I’d say, ‘Well, I never had an affair with him,’ and she’d roar, ‘Well, you’re the only one who didn’t, Fitzie!’”

  In 1976 Geraldine was telling Doug McClelland: “We used to sit around the [Dark Victory] set and say, ‘I don’t think it’s going to work.’ A great deal was improvised, and Eddie Goulding rewrote much of it. In fact, he invented my whole character—she was not in the original stage play—as a kind of Greek chorus for the dying heroine so she wouldn’t have to be complaining a lot.”

  Recalling to Doug the famous scene when she and Davis are gardening and Davis feels blindness coming on and realizes her death is imminent, Geraldine said Goulding asked her, “What would you do in real life under those circumstances?” She replied that she had always been frightened of death and that in all likelihood she’d probably run away. “He told me to do just that; I did, and it’s in the movie.” (Geraldine’s memory of this was somewhat inaccurate, for Davis’s character insists that she leave in order to spare her the drama of a heartrending parting.)

  Geraldine insisted to Doug McClelland that Davis was not difficult to work with—not with her, anyway. She remembered that at the close, when it came time for her to mount the stairs to die quietly and resignedly in her bedroom, she asked Eddie Goulding, to everyone’s amusement, “Well, Eddie am I going to act this or is Max?” “She adored Max Steiner, whose music complemented her performances so excellently, and in this instance she was joking,” she added hastily, continuing, “She always played fair with her fellow actors, never tried to turn your face away from the camera, as so many did. [Was Geraldine thinking of Miriam Hopkins at that point?] She would not have thought such behavior a moral thing to do. And she knew it would be better for the film if everyone was in there pitching.”

  Defending some of the roles Davis accepted circa 1976, Geraldine sharply observed: “Some people today say she takes any role—but I can tell you, although maybe I shouldn’t, that she supports armies of people.”

  As late as 1987 Geraldine was defending her friend to anyone who would listen. “Her life has been a gutsy and heroic one—she’s the most resilient, toughly elastic person I know. And almost eighty at that! Other people are settling back to relax long before that age—but not Bette—nor me, for that matter! Maybe I took a page from her book. She’d inspire anyone!” Between directing scenes in one of her recent plays, Geraldine told me, “Dark Victory will always be imprinted on my memory as one of my most sublime experiences—thanks to her. When you acted with her you were caught up into something bigger than yourself—that was Bette—larger than life—and in the best sense of that now-clichéd phrase. That’s one of the secrets of her long-pervasive, widespread artistic influence!”

  Casey Robinson, who wrote the screenplay for Dark Victory, said in 1979, forty years later: “[The film] is about two things, love and death, and I decided [when writing the film] that these two elements should be kept apart as long as possible; that when there was a scene about love, it wasn’t about death, when there was a scene about death, it wasn’t about love. That is on the surface. So when there was a scene about love, death was underneath it; when there was a scene about death, love was underneath it—all the time, until the very end, when one would reunite them into a sort of requiem.”

  In the second of her blockbuster 1939 pictures, Juarez, Davis was seen to maximum advantage as Carlotta, empress of Mexico and consort of the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian, the Austrian archduke who is inveigled by Napoleon III into accepting the crown by means of a rigged plebiscite in order to further Napoleon’s machinations for collecting Mexican debts to France.

  Paul Muni is Juarez, the intrepid Indian who is the legally elected president of Mexico and who fights the foreign intruder ruthlessly until Maximilian is defeated and executed, Davis’s Carlotta, always emotionally unstable and superintense, goes to Europe to plead with the perfidious Napoleon to help her husband put down Juarez’s resurgent forces, but Napoleon, intimidated by the post–Civil War United States’ determination to invoke the Monroe Doctrine with force if necessary (the period of the film is 1864–1867) and determined to cut his losses in Mexico, coldly refuses her. This gives Davis the occasion for one of her most classic angry scenes, in which she denounces Napoleon before his wife and ministers, later falling into the faint that presages her gradual descent into madness. And this time around, in a harrowing scene later in the film, Davis goes mad with a colorful vengeance far surpassing her mad scene in Bordertown. She is wild-eyed and pitiable indeed as she insists to Metternich (Walter Kingsford) that the “evil” Napoleon is haunting her, and that “they” are out to destroy her. In this and other scenes Davis gives a colorful, compellin
g delineation of a woman never physically or mentally strong to begin with who summons manic energy (which eventually consumes her) in her determination to rescue the life and fortunes of a beloved husband.

  Though Paul Muni and Bette Davis are co-starred (his name took precedence) in this colorful and impressive historical drama, they never meet throughout. His story, and hers and her husband’s, are told contrapuntally, with clever intercutting and parallel action techniques. Some have maintained that it amounts to two separate scripts, but a careful analysis of the film indicates only too clearly that one cannot exist without the other—for both dramas are poignant explorations of character and motivation that feed upon each other, both to highlight contrasts and illuminate the tragic human motivations and drives that impel one, Juarez, to eventual victory, and the other, Maximilian, to defeat and execution.

  Juarez is a rousing, colorful historical drama, beautifully directed by William Dieterle, a sensitive artist with a great feel for sweeping material such as this. It is compellingly scored by the great Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who masterfully blended Mexican and Austrian themes for heartstopping results. Juarez is cinema at its baroque best, with all the finest technical appurtenances that the various artisans of the screen had learned as of 1939. Beautifully acted by the principals, touching in its intimate scenes, deeply moving in its pageantry and intense evocation of conflicting national ideals—monarchist versus republican—it is one of the great masterpieces of the screen and has been unfairly downgraded through the years by people whose political obsessiveness overshadows their esthetic appreciation. Certainly Juarez celebrates the democratic process eloquently, as in the scene where Muni’s Juarez explains to the impulsive but well-meaning young general Diaz (John Garfield) the difference between a monarchy and a republic. Muni throughout, heavily made up to approximate the stolid Indian features of the legendary Juarez, is magnificent, giving his role strength and solidity and iron purpose.

  In their respective autobiographies, both Davis and John Huston have tried to blame Muni for “hogging” the picture, with Davis claiming that he added “fifty pages to the script,” and Huston, who wrote the screenplay along with Aeneas MacKenzie and Wolfgang Reinhardt, insisting that Muni’s ego impelled him to force changes in his favor, even assigning his brother-in-law, the screenwriter Abem Finkel, to carry them out. But the final result seems to belie this. Carlotta and Maximilian in their half and Juarez in his seem to dine quite equitably at the banquet of fine drama, pageantry, and human poignancy that this great picture offers. The final cut is 125 minutes, but thanks to the fine pacing and riveting drama, it seems to fly by in half an hour.

  Brian Aherne as Maximilian gives the finest performance of his career. An excellent actor who had won fame in 1931 as Robert Browning to Katharine Cornell’s Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street when he was only twenty-nine, Aherne, a veteran of the London stage and Broadway, had made an initial splash in films as Marlene Dietrich’s sculptor-lover in the 1933 Song of Songs, and had followed this up with solid leading-man stints opposite such great ladies of drama as Helen Hayes, Joan Crawford, and Merle Oberon. His Maximilian is a most touching piece of acting, sensitive, kind, yet conscious of his monarchical destiny and determined to rule justly in the interests of all his people. He, too, is affecting when it is his turn to explain to Garfield’s Diaz the proper functions of a monarch in a just society as he conceives them.

  All three stars get their innings, and to compare the qualities of Aherne’s, Davis’s, and Muni’s delineations is to differentiate between apples, oranges, and pears. Of the three, Davis’s is perhaps the most vivid characterization. Her Carlotta is intense, passionate, hysterical, poised always on the thin, sharp edge of the instability that leads eventually to catastrophic madness. She subtly suggests her eventual fate in her wild-eyed, intensely articulated pleas to Claude Rains’s Napoleon, and even in her grief-stricken, self-denying speech to her husband in which, barren irrevocably, she offers to go away to give him a chance to find someone else who will give him an heir. Since he loves her intensely, he refuses the offer in a tender, deeply felt love scene. Later they adopt a boy of Mexican blood as their “crown prince,” to ensure the dynasty’s continuance. But all is for naught, with Napoleon’s determined withdrawal from his abortive Mexican adventure leaving Maximilian and his few devoted followers and ragtag “Imperial Army” at the mercy of the ever-advancing forces of native Mexicans under the implacable Juarez.

  If any fault is to be found, it is in the tacked-on ending in a cathedral, in which Muni, looking down at Aherne’s executed body in a coffin, asks forgiveness. It is totally unreal and unmotivated, despite Muni’s and the audience’s recognition that Maximilian is a good man with the most noble of intentions.

  Davis remembered the picture as her introduction to the actor she held forever after in great awe and admiration—Claude Rains. She recalled that imperial study scene in which she excoriates him for his betrayal of his treaty with her husband and shouts, “Murderer! Murderer!” Rains’s Napoleon looked at her with such poisonous hatred as he scornfully refused her that she was sure he was expressing a real-life contempt for her acting efforts. Such, of course, was not the case, as Rains held Davis’s abilities in the highest regard, and they derived great enjoyment from working together in three more pictures.

  Claude Rains came to Hollywood in 1933, after triumphant years on the London stage and on Broadway, especially in characterizations in which he shone courtesy of the Theatre Guild. In that first role, the 1933 Invisible Man, he wasn’t seen through most of the picture, but the bandaged figure was, nonetheless, unarguably Rains, given the matchless voice and the characteristic bravura stance. An intense, unhappy, driven man, the often-married Rains cut a wide swath in the Hollywood of the thirties and forties, giving even character roles of limited footage the force of a star appearance. Davis and Rains became great personal friends through the years. After his death, when asked by a TV talk-show host if Rains were a “happy” man, Davis made an eloquent rejoinder to the effect that no complex artist was ever happy in the ordinary sense of the word, that those who felt and thought deeply could find release only through art—or words to that effect. Certainly in her understanding of the complex gifts of the inimitable, irreplaceable Claude Rains, Davis demonstrated her understanding of the artist’s psyche and esthetic.

  Rains’s Napoleon is the best rendition ever of that upstart nephew of the original Napoleon, who began as a revolutionist, then became president of the French Republic, and finally the head of the Second Empire. Rains makes him proud, vain, crafty, elusive, and cowardly. His scenes are relatively few but Rains makes them vivid.

  There was some criticism, then and since, of John Garfield’s Porfirio Diaz, the chief complaint being that Garfield’s persona was too modern and New York–naturalistic for historical roles, but actually his fine acting and strong personality triumph over any anachronistic flavor. Juarez is full of fine actors: Montague Love, Gale Sondergaard (wonderfully sly and serpentine as the manipulative Empress Eugenie), the sterling and solid Harry Davenport as the emperor’s doctor, and John Miljan, the vital Joseph Calleia, and Irving Pichel as revolutionary types.

  Gilbert Roland is touching and stalwart as a loyal Mexican officer devoted to the emperor. In 1964 Roland spoke to me about Juarez on the set of a movie he was making. “There was a feeling of importance, of excitement to it,” he said. “Even while we were shooting it, William Dieterle guided us all so expertly and with such flow and movement in the scenes that when I saw it complete, with Korngold’s score and all, in a movie house, I got identically the feeling I had in the hurly-burly of acting in it.” Of Davis, Roland said, “She looked so beautiful in that film, in her black wig and period costumes; people keep saying that Bette Davis was never a beauty, but at that time, and especially in that picture, she was as lovely as any woman I ever saw or could name.”

  Though Davis and Brian Aherne act beautifully and convincingly the deep
and profoundly committed conjugal love that Maximilian and Carlotta in actual historical fact felt for one another, they got along in real life like oil and water. Both took cracks at the other in their respective autobiographies. It is obvious that they were not chemically and mentally simpatico. Davis claimed that he was haughty, self-involved, and touchy, and that when she told him he should always wear a beard (she meant it as a compliment, she maintains), he looked down at her with hatred and told her she should always sport a black wig.

  Aherne spoke slightingly and dismissively of Davis in the several interviews I did with him in the 1960s and 1970s. “She was gifted, but she coasted on her natural talent too much,” he said frostily. “It took a strong director who knew what he was about to rein her in and teach her discipline and control. She tended to overdo everything, she tore emotions to shreds. She didn’t seem to appreciate the value of subtle understatement, of indirection.” Since Aherne, as Davis herself always maintained, was certainly not averse to hamming it up grandiloquently when it suited him, his observations did smack of the pot calling the kettle black. Always intimidated and affronted by aggressive ladies, Aherne wound up marrying the shy, reserved (or anyway she was at that time) Joan Fontaine, who, circa 1939, was in real life much like the insecure, frightened girl she portrayed so effectively in her starring breakthrough film, Rebecca. (Later Fontaine evolved into a fiercely independent, combative personality, and her remarks about the masculine supremacy–inclined Aherne were not kind.)

  Davis’s only recorded comment about the ill-starred Aherne-Fontaine marriage was, “I don’t know how she stands his uppity, supercilious ways.”