Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  Heading a gifted list of character players is the admirable Donald Crisp as the understanding and compassionate family doctor who knows how to keep deep, dark secrets. “Ever since Tina turned instinctively to you as a mother,” Crisp intones in his keynote speech to Hopkins, “you have watched Charlotte grow into a bitter and frustrated woman—and no woman like that was ever easy to live with.” In her final film appearance, the lovable and funny-sad Louise Fazenda, in private life Mrs. Hal Wallis, wife of The Old Maid’s producer, is deeply touching as the loyal maid who witnesses the passage of the years and their effect on the mistresses she adores. “It’s going to be a happy day, a very happy day for you,” she whispers to Davis as she stands desolate in her bleak bedroom on the night before Tina’s marriage, following up with a warm pat on the arm. Jerome Cowan is also excellent as the second “man who got away” and in 1964 he told me that The Old Maid was the finest picture he had ever been privileged to appear in. “It was quality from the word go,” he said. “Edmund Goulding was so fine and sensitive, knew exactly what he wanted from all of us. And Bette surpassed herself in that. Playing with her was exquisite creative tension—I caught fire from her—I hope I did justice to her in other films we did, but never so much as in that one.”

  The art direction by the gifted Robert Haas caught the 1861–1881 ambience with an aptitude that was as perceptive as it was scholarly and period-sensitive. Special attention should be called to the montage effects. In the first portion, the years 1861–1866 are tellingly illustrated with battle scenes (supplemented by Steiner’s rousing alarums), a shot of the dead lover’s grave in a military cemetery, followed by renditions of Lincoln’s second inaugural (“With malice toward none, with charity for all”), dissolving into the quiet, fluid musical nuances of Steiner that accompany the sign announcing Charlotte’s home for war orphans. The second montage sequence is even more creative, with the growing Tina’s feet skipping and jumping, then practicing at the piano pedals, then dancing a waltz, then being fitted for young ladies’ silk shoes with bows.

  George Brent, as the lost lover Clem Spender, who dies in the war, has few scenes, all in the film’s first half, but he makes them count. In fact, this stoic, passive actor is more alive than usual here: telling off Delia for jilting him; compassionately tender when Charlotte confesses her long-standing unrequited love for him; gentle and understanding as he promises her at the train station that he will try to come back to her. In real life, during the spring of 1939, Brent was serving as protector, consoler, and tender bed partner for a Davis who was considerably off kilter and often hysterical as a result of the disasters of 1938 with her by-then-ex-husband Ham Nelson, and her by-now-erstwhile lovers Wyler and Litvak. Brent gave her his love, but he could not, would not, give her marriage, feeling he was not cut out for “an imprisoning institution” as he called it, but there is no question that he carried her through a period so emotionally wounding and upsetting that it might have unhinged her otherwise.

  Frank Nugent in The New York Times had lavish praise for Davis’s “poignant and wise” performance in The Old Maid, and James Shelley Hamilton wrote, “She has never touched the popular heart so effectually as she has apparently done here, and that without the slightest abatement of the sincerity and histrionic integrity that is one of [Davis’s] strongest characteristics.”

  Contemporary feminists still find The Old Maid timely, despite its period setting, in its depiction of women’s roles and their fates being so unfairly dependent on men and marriage in that period. It was the sweeping range and surprising depth of Bette Davis’s performance in The Old Maid that decided Jack Warner and Hal Wallis to star her as Queen Elizabeth in the film version of Maxwell Anderson’s Elizabeth the Queen, in which Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt had had a stage hit some years before, with Lunt as the queen’s lover, Lord Essex. Warner, Wallis, and his associate producer, Robert Lord, watched the rushes of The Old Maid carefully, and were deeply impressed with Davis’s ability, at only thirty-one years of age, to suggest the bitterness, rueful wisdom, and mellowness of middle age. Her authoritative performance here, they assured themselves, more than qualified her for the complex character of Elizabeth, who would be in her sixties. In The Old Maid Davis used, courtesy of makeup artist Perc Westmore, a wan, grayish, ashen base for her skin with no lipstick or eye makeup, and it had effectively aged her without leaving her looking grotesque, as overemphasized “wrinkle, line, and bulge” makeup then so popular would have. Elizabeth, of course, being theatrical by nature, with elaborate costuming of an exaggerated design and a profusion of vivid red wigs to cover her balding gray pate, could be given an even more vividly “aged” look, but highly theatricalized and bizarre, again without conventional wrinkling or bulging.

  Noting also, from the rushes of The Old Maid, that Davis could convey the authority and self-contained precision of a woman along in years, Jack and Hal commissioned Aeneas MacKenzie and Norman Reilly Raine to fashion a screenplay in which Davis could cut loose along those lines, and in grand queenly style. It was decided that the film should be photographed in Technicolor (Davis’s first) and Sol Polito and W. Howard Greene worked in close collaboration to assure that Davis aged vividly and compellingly. Perc Westmore later had another inspiration: Since color would highlight every detail garishly, he shaved Davis’s hair back two inches, thus underlining the reality of baldness under the red wigs and hairpieces. He then applied white, pasty makeup and shaved off her eyebrows, replacing them with thin lines that, in Robert Lord’s words, “made her look like a baby in a Halloween mask and costume.”

  Davis spent much time studying portrait reproductions provided by the research department, seeking to approximate Elizabeth’s actual appearance as accurately as possible. Her own appearance meant nothing to her—only historical accuracy. “Make me up horribly, and dress me outlandishly—I don’t care, so long as you get the essence of the original,” she told Perc Westmore and Orry-Kelly. When fussy, bossy director Mike Curtiz demanded that the overblown, full-skirted costumes be cut down to fit set requirements, Davis, knowing they were authentic, accurate reproductions, tricked him by doing tests in the cutdown versions and actual shooting in the originals. Having taken Curtiz’s measure from long and bitter experience, she knew he would be too tied up with other details to even notice. “He had his ego field-day jumping on the costumes,” she told Orry-Kelly cynically. “I doubt he will bother repeating himself.”

  Davis worked herself up and even threatened to walk off the picture because of the title. First it was The Knight and the Lady. This she hated; it cheapened the project, she wrote Warner. Warner then changed it to Elizabeth the Queen (the original stage title), then to Elizabeth and Essex, because Davis had insisted that she be favored in the title, and finally, in deference to box-office considerations, to The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Having won her case with the title, Davis then insisted on top billing. She had put up with “Errol Flynn and Bette Davis” billing the year before in The Sisters, in deference to Flynn’s box-office clout at that time, but by mid-1939 she herself was a formidable ticket lure and she felt she didn’t have to cater to Flynn anymore. Flynn did not like the switch but eventually agreed to “Bette Davis and Errol Flynn” because he knew he was in a prestige project made from a play whose verse language (courtesy of Maxwell Anderson) had been partially incorporated into the film—verse he did not feel qualified to handle with his usual jaunty dispatch.

  Davis had not wanted Flynn as Essex. She had done everything she could to get Laurence Olivier, who, like herself, had won a great stardom submitting to Willie Wyler’s strictures during Wuthering Heights, released just as Essex was getting under way. Olivier, too, had chafed under Wyler’s direction; like her he had quarreled bitterly with the intrepid little man and walked angrily off the set. And again like Davis, he had sat in wonder at the results that Wyler showed him in the projection-room rushes. Eventually he, also like Davis, credited Wyler as the man who had made his international
renown possible. Davis dreamed of Olivier as Essex, the euphonious and musical Maxwell Anderson verse delivered eloquently by a master of the spoken English word. She was to say for years afterward that Olivier as Essex to her Elizabeth would have taken the film to a new level of prestigious literacy and glamour—but it was not to be.

  Jack Warner, to please Davis, tried to land Olivier, but there were contractual and other problems, and moreover Olivier felt his fortunes would thrive better in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock. His instincts proved correct, for Rebecca made Olivier an even bigger star, clinched by his Darcy in Pride and Prejudice at MGM with Greer Garson and his Nelson in That Hamilton Woman opposite his by-then wife, the brilliant and beautiful Vivien Leigh—she who had overshadowed Davis’s Oscar-nominated Dark Victory with her Scarlett in GWTW.

  Resignedly, Davis settled for Flynn when Jack Warner insisted that he had the period flair and swashbuckling aplomb necessary for the daring and adventurous Earl of Essex—and moreover he would supplement her own box-office clout. Though still being comforted intimately by the forbearing and patient George Brent, who had been with her in two of her four 1939 films, Davis admitted that she still responded to Flynn’s dashing good looks and romantic aura. But she was determined to repress these feelings this time around. She succeeded only partially. Her romantic attraction to Flynn is more than apparent in their love scenes, and while there were many stories of the humorous incivilities and ingenious teasing Errol inflicted on Davis during the shooting, his response to her poorly suppressed admiration is apparent in the picture’s more intimate love scenes. In fact his eyes widen with respect and an almost humble appreciation of her feelings in several sequences, and he plays back her impassioned words with understanding and sensitivity.

  As current viewings of the now fifty-year-old Elizabeth and Essex make apparent, Errol Flynn was actually a much better actor than was realized at the time. Davis always admitted he had a fine latent talent that he should have disciplined and refined had he not been obsessed with women, wine, and various forms of devilish diversion.

  Davis continued to find Michael Curtiz grating, annoying, and exasperating. Feisty and peppery as ever, replete with vulgarisms and abuse, Curtiz nevertheless had to respect the formidable figure Davis had become by 1939, so there was more uneasy truce than open combat in their on-set collaboration. Still, he would occasionally get out of line and lapse into shouting at her, but this time around, the Queen of the Warner Lot sent him into slinking, albeit sullen, retreats with acidly delivered, staccato-sharp variations on, “Shut up, Mike! Shut up and let’s get on with it!” In short, on the set of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Bully Curtiz had met his match at last.

  Early in the shooting, Davis asked Warner why he had assigned Mike Curtiz to such an elaborate historical drama—certainly Anderson free verse was not a Curtiz forte—and he had replied, with irrefutable logic, that Curtiz was the studio expert in guiding rousing historical pageants and romances along quickly and surely. “He may not be up to the drama and the artistic stuff, Bette,” Jack Warner told her, “but he will keep the pageantry and the historical spectacle moving at a fast clip.” Then, in an affectionate barb, Jack told her, “Anyway, you can direct yourself—and you probably will. And Errol and everyone else along with you!”

  The plot, such as it is, surrounded by the high-powered acting and historical sweep, has Essex the beloved of the queen, but headstrong and rebellious. He has enemies at court who want to undermine his influence and his hold over the queen. Eventually he is caught in what appears to be treason, and is sent to the Tower. Elizabeth, in a last-minute attempt to save her beloved, promises him his freedom if he will only be satisfied to live as a loyal and therefore passive subject under her rule, but he insists, with an honesty that costs him his head, that he is himself a leader born to rule, and that as long as he lives she would wear her crown uneasily. Since, in the final analysis, Elizabeth prizes the glory and prosperity of England and her crown above all other things, she brokenheartedly sends her beloved to his doom, sitting alone on her throne in the Tower as he descends to his death via trapdoor to the floor below.

  Erich Wolfgang Korngold had been assigned to the Elizabeth project, and his inspired musical motifs contribute greatly to the film’s overall flavor. Korngold subtly worked in medieval-sounding motifs and Renaissance-flavored melodies for a wonderful blend of superbly apropos mood music. Certainly the skillful Curtiz keeps the film moving at a fast clip, despite the Anderson verse passages and the love scenes and sequences involving Elizabeth with her entourage.

  Olivia De Havilland, fresh from shooting her triumphant performance as Melanie in Gone With the Wind, had returned to Warners hoping for some starring parts, but instead found herself relegated to what was essentially a supporting role in Essex as a lady of the court enamored of Flynn. She plays something of a saucy minx, and with a sophistication and sexiness one does not usually ascribe to De Havilland. As usual Flynn pressed his suit, and as usual she informed him that his addresses were tiresome and unwanted. Olivia was a fortress that Flynn, to his lasting sorrow and frustration, was never successfully to storm. Though Davis always remained on excellent terms with De Havilland, whom she greatly respected and admired, she couldn’t help being irritated with Flynn’s continued pursuit of Olivia, and on occasion she outdid the real Elizabeth with some regal snappishness and dyspeptic cantankerousness on the set. These outbursts were only intensified when Flynn would suddenly pinch Davis’s lavishly accoutred behind or even imitate the heavy walk she assumed to approximate how Elizabeth had moved. Davis threw a heavy candelabra at Flynn one day when he said that as Elizabeth she walked “like she had defecated in her panties,” adding, “Shall I help you to the special porcelain throne awaiting you in your dressing room, Your Majesty?”

  The supporting cast again featured Davis’s dependable old standby Donald Crisp as Sir Francis Bacon, who tries to temper Essex’s self-destructive restlessness. Vincent Price was his usual flamboyant self as Sir Walter Raleigh, and Henry Daniell is in top form as a treacherous courtier, as is Alan Hale as a warring Irish earl. Henry Stephenson as another of the queen’s noble advisors adds characteristic solidity to the proceedings.

  Jack Warner, knowing Davis’s deep disappointment over missing out on Gone With the Wind, had his private little joke co-starring her, twice in one year, with the man she had deemed unfit for Rhett Butler. But he also felt sympathetic to her feelings about GWTW, and this was one of the factors influencing him to give her four blockbuster films during what was to be her greatest year, 1939. He carefully arranged to release The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in December 1939—the very month that Gone With the Wind debuted—feeling that this impressive costumer in color, with its lavish budget, solid historical ambience, and top production values, would somehow allay and soothe her regrets.

  While Davis’s performance is well thought out in most respects, she did have an annoying habit of squirming around both while sitting and standing. Certainly Willie Wyler would have caught her on this one, had he been in charge, because the movement detracts from her otherwise regal performance. It is worth remarking that she did not repeat this blunder when she played Elizabeth again sixteen years later. Frank Nugent in The New York Times felt that Davis’s Elizabeth was “a strong, resolute, glamor-skimping characterization.”

  One day Charles Laughton, who had won his Oscar for the 1933 Private Life of Henry VIII, appeared on the set.

  “Hi, Pop!” Davis shouted, advancing toward him in full costume and with a queenly insouciance.

  “Ah! It’s my favorite daughter!” he replied smartly, falling in quickly with her mood.

  They went to a corner of the set and talked for a long while during a complicated lighting operation. Davis recalled confessing to him that she felt she had bitten off more than she could chew in essaying the role of Elizabeth when she was only thirty-one. She never forgot Laughton’s reply:

  “Never stop daring to hang
yourself, Bette!”

  Davis felt a real kinship with Laughton. Like herself he had been plagued with feelings of physical inferiority; he felt fat, ungainly, blighted—indeed deformed. As he had believed himself not handsome, so she had always felt herself not beautiful. While she was not homosexual, she could identify with his struggles over his essential femininity as she had struggled with the disparate masculine impulses in her own nature that had given her an aggressiveness and tenacity so often disconcerting to her overlords. She had heard of his homosexuality and its humiliations; the grapevine never seemed to let up on the unfortunate Laughton, whose marriage to Elsa Lanchester was largely regarded as one of convenience and friendship, while he pursued his true romantic objectives—handsome young men—with a manic intensity that frightened him as much as them. Hurt deeply by their assorted reactions—they either used him or recoiled from him—Laughton had become a deeply embittered and distrustful man whose wild rages reportedly matched her own when he was thwarted or frustrated or rendered despairing by his unfortunate bents. Davis, circa 1939, did not have the deep and sophisticated understanding of the gay temperament that she was to develop in later years despite the fact that she had been awash in gay and bisexual actors through much of her stage and film career, but Charles was one man with whom she sympathized—and empathized—deeply. While her brand of outsiderism was not his, as she knew, there were many points at which their psyches met. She was always among Laughton’s firmest defenders.

  One time at a party, shortly after their meeting on the Elizabeth and Essex set, she heard a cruel joke about him—one Elsa Lanchester was to elaborate on when she reminisced about Charles after his death. It seems Elsa had come home to find Charles ready with a confession. He had picked up a man in a London park, and had brought him in. They had had sex on the living room sofa. The young man later demanded money and threatened to bring the police in. Elsa, as the story went, took all this in stride but was much more concerned that the sofa where the liaison took place should be sent out to the cleaners!