by Ed Sikov
With Ex-Lady, Davis got the billing (over her costar Gene Raymond). She got Tony Gaudio’s lavish cinematographic attention. She even got writing punchy enough to stand up to her rapidly clarifying screen persona: the independent woman who triumphs on brain power as much as on how she looks in Orry-Kelly. But her emerging life theme was that what she got was never good enough, and not being good enough, it was to Bette’s mind dreadful, shameful. Each indignity was another dark blossom on a weedy vine of rage.
WHEN DAVIS WORKED with George Arliss again, he found her less compliant, more creatively self-assertive. “My little bird has flown, hasn’t she?” he observed between takes on the set of The Working Man.31 Her artistic growth was scarcely surprising, since she’d made eight pictures since The Man Who Played God. But his turn of phrase was not entirely accurate, since she was still tightly tethered to Warner Bros., whose nest was simultaneously commodious and confining. The studio system gave Davis consistent opportunities to work, but she had no control over any of her pictures, directors, costars, costumes, makeup designs, hairstyles, or publicity obligations.
She has little to do in The Working Man, which centerpieces Arliss as a beneficently cantankerous shoe magnate who takes over his late rival’s company in order to morally improve the rival’s madcap son and daughter (Davis). Bette plays Jenny as spoiled but charming, as comfortable in her entitlement as an heiress on the family yacht. There’s none of the brattiness that would have given her character some bite. Forcing her to fall helplessly in love with an especially priggish Hardie Albright is a final indignity.
Next: a drowning here, a poisoning there, a guy whose face is rendered pulp by a subway train, the vanished wife of a slaughterhouse worker—Bureau of Missing Persons is Warner Bros.’ idea of light entertainment. Davis only turns up after about thirty-five minutes—it’s really Pat O’Brien’s film, though Davis got top billing. A two-fisted mug of a detective (O’Brien) lands in the missing persons department. The transfer is supposed to teach him a lesson, but he needs no education in coming up with clever insults. As “Butch” suggests to his estranged wife, “Why don’t you break out in hives and scratch yourself to death?”
Bette shot her scenes from June 26 to July 10, 1933. Her character, Norma, seeks the police’s help in finding her missing husband, except he’s not her husband but rather the man she’s killed, only she hasn’t killed him—it’s his idiot brother who’s the corpse—and he’s not her husband but someone named Therme. (Therme?) “And then I looked more closely at the body,” Bette cries, “and I realized it wasn’t Mr. Roberts at all, but that of his insane brother dressed in Mr. Roberts’s clothes! And Therme Roberts was gone!” It doesn’t much matter.
Pat O’Brien thought as little of the movie as Davis did, but he liked and respected her as a colleague: “I made a new friend in Bette. She was vital, high-strung, biting, so alive, so able to eat her way into a part.”32 O’Brien is right: there really is something devouring about the way Davis approached her roles, even one as ill-defined as this one. She was not only a hungry performer in the sense of being ambitious and craving fame. Her hunger was more idiosyncratic. She feasted on the process of creative make-believe. The essential lie at the heart of fiction making was, for Bette Davis, gratifying on a gut level.
With such drive becoming part of her emerging screen persona, it’s jarring to see Bette turn up behind a drugstore soda counter in The Big Shakedown, so little does the role of a neighborhood pharmacist’s moralistic wife suit her. Charles Farrell plays the druggist who gets involved in a counterfeit digitalis racket run by shady Ricardo Cortez. According to the great character actor Allen Jenkins, who plays yet another in a series of dumb clucks in the film—Jenkins once described himself as having the face of an oyster—Davis was unhappy during the production because she’d wanted to play the role of the racketeer’s moll. That role featured tough talk, ratting, and going down in a hail of bullets. It went to Glenda Farrell, while Davis was relegated to the sidelines selling aspirin and doing a lot of tsk-tsking. The Big Shakedown is based on a story called “Cut Rate” and has an ending that fits the bill: the gangster falls conveniently into a vat of nitrohydrochloric acid. And Bette’s character, Norma, is such a compliant little wife that she forgives her husband for producing the fake digitalis that causes her to lose her baby during childbirth.
For Warner Bros., pictures like The Big Shakedown were staple entertainments—“programmers,” products to be planned, manufactured, shipped, shown, and forgotten except as numbers on a balance sheet. But for Bette Davis, each programmer was hideously special: one by one, they offered all the full-throttle anxieties of Hollywood moviemaking with none of the high-inducing creative satisfaction. After shooting eighteen pictures in three years, Davis was still clocking in as per her contract, putting in long days under hot lights, taking orders she didn’t respect, watching lesser actresses get meatier roles in better movies.
Davis’s driven imagination extended to her recollections, especially when there was scorn involved. “In Fashions of 1934, I played a fashion model in a long blonde wig and with my mouth painted almost to my ears,” Davis wrote in a Colliers magazine article in the mid-1950s. “Imagine me as a fashion model! It was ridiculous. My leading man, William Powell, thought so, too.”33 She went a little further in The Lonely Life: “I was glamorized beyond recognition. I was made to wear a platinum wig. . . . The bossmen were trying to make me into a Greta Garbo.”34
Actually, Davis plays a dress designer in Fashions of 1934, not a model; it’s her eyes, not her mouth, that Warners’ makeup department decided to elongate; her hair had been platinum for most of the pictures in this early phase of her career; the Fashions wigs aren’t particularly long . . . and nobody at Warner Bros. could possibly have been under the delusion that Bette Davis was to be the new Garbo.
Fashions of 1934 doesn’t suit Davis well; in that she was correct. But that’s because she has next to nothing to do. Her role is a lackluster reprise of the graphic designers she played in So Big and Ex-Lady, except that this time she’s drawing knockoffs of women’s gowns and standing in the background looking glum. William Powell plays a debonair schemer who gets Davis’s character involved in a counterfeit couture business.
Fashions of 1934 comes to delirious if incomprehensible life in a musical number. Wrapped in one of Orry-Kelly’s less successful designs, an oversized wing-framed cape constructed out of black feathers (the effect is that of a hefty hunchbacked vulture), an ersatz grand duchess launches into a tortured solo, “Spin a Little Web of Dreams.” A chorus girl backstage falls asleep after opening a window next to a pile of ostrich feathers. A tiny bit of feather drifts in the air until it is caught onstage—another stage, a much grander stage—by one of twenty or thirty befeathered blonde harpists plucking the rhinestone strings of human harps. Stone-faced women dressed in white ostrich feathers serve as the columns. And with this, the drab functionality of the director, William Dieterle, gives way to the gloriously demented genius of Busby Berkeley. Huge feather fans pump and sway on a series of vast, multi-tiered sets. Overhead shots turn feather-armed women into gigantic, undulating chrysanthemums. Brilliant lights glare off the coifs of identical chorines dressed in ostrich feather bikinis as the camera swings around them, unrestrained by mundane considerations like story logic or character development. A battalion of white-feathered oarswomen row a galley—with feathered oars—across a fabric sea. Then the backstage chorine wakes up, and it’s all over, and unfortunately, Bette Davis is nowhere near any of the fun while it lasts.
Bette’s own black Scottie, Tibby, makes a cameo appearance sitting on a hatbox and being carried into a cab, but beyond getting her dog on-screen, Bette’s performance in Fashions of 1934 is one of her most rote.
JIMMY THE GENT, Davis’s next picture, is a lopsided screwball comedy, with Jimmy Cagney’s character far outweighing Bette’s in both screen time and narrative interest. Jimmy Corrigan (Cagney) is a shady private investigator who spec
ializes in finding the heirs to unclaimed millions. Bette plays his former employee who has moved on to a nominally more respectable firm. It’s a Warner Bros. comedy, which is to say it’s purposefully dark and blunt. The film opens with a grimly comical montage of various millionaires violently dying: a motorboat wrecks, a ship capsizes, a plane crashes, a jockey breaks his neck, all entertainingly illustrated by spinning newspapers heralding the lurid and exciting deaths.
Davis was never particularly fond of Jimmy the Gent—neither she nor most critics ever appreciated her genuine if offbeat talent for comedy—but the movie has found its share of fans. The critic Otis Ferguson wrote, “If this wasn’t the fastest little whirlwind of true life on the raw fringe, then I missed the other one.”35 And the critic and screenwriter Andrew Bergman (Blazing Saddles) called it “simply a great American comedy” and “the funniest film of Cagney’s career.” Jimmy the Gent may not be Bringing Up Baby or The Awful Truth, but it has its moments, one of which Cagney himself engineered in irritated response to his own casting. As Bergman noted, Cagney’s head resembles that of Sluggo:36
Cagney: “When I heard I was going to play another one of those guys, I said to myself, ‘They want another of those mugs, I’ll really give them a mug.’ So I had my head shaved right down to the skull except for a little top knot in front, and I had the makeup man put bottle scars all over the back of my head. The opening shot was of my back to the camera, with all those scars in sharp focus. . . . Hal Wallis, who was running that part of the studio at the time, took my haircut as a personal affront. ‘What is that son-of-a-bitch trying to do to me now?’ he said. To him, for God’s sake.”37
Both Cagney and Davis tend to speak quickly even in the most laconic of movie circumstances. In Jimmy the Gent, they spit their lines like bullets. “They got a stiff down there that sounds swell,” says Cagney. Says Bette, “You can go down deeper, stay under longer, and come up dirtier than any man I’ve ever known!” Smartly, she delivers this screwball line not in outrage but as cold fact.
Cagney recalled Davis as being unhappy during the filming of Jimmy the Gent: “Her unhappiness seeped through to the rest of us, and she was a little hard to get along with.”38 Cagney’s biographer, Doug Warren, went further, describing her personal reaction to her costar as one of “contempt.”39
A convoluted murder mystery, Fog Over Frisco introduces Davis in a racy nightclub where criminals aren’t unfamiliar. The men at the bar hear several loud bangs and instinctively duck. The director, William Dieterle, cuts to a bunch of balloons, behind which Bette’s face emerges in close-up as she pops them one by one with a pin. She’s a good-time girl, this Arlene Bradford—socialite, fashion plate, and trafficker in stolen bonds. Her staid financier father (Arthur Byron) is appalled simply by her nightlife: “You promised to turn over a new leaf after your last scandalous escapade,” he chastises over the breakfast table the next morning, faux-elegantly pronouncing the last word to rhyme with act of God. But the leaf never turns. All too soon—the whole movie runs all of sixty-eight minutes—Arlene turns up as a corpse in her own rumble seat, and by the end, her responsible stepsister, the extraordinarily named Valkyr (Margaret Lindsay), fresh from a kidnapping, has to explain the whole tangle in voice-over. The suspicious, snooping butler is really a cop; both a fiancé and a yacht each have two names; there’s something about a secret code. . . .
Fog Over Frisco was fun for Davis, who had kind things to say about it in retrospect. For one thing, its production was supervised by Henry Blanke, whom she admired. He was, she later wrote, “a producer of infinite taste, an understanding man, whatever our problems. He was a great contributor to the Warner product during the great Hal Wallis years at Warner Bros. He was an enormous contributor to my personal career. The part in Fog Over Frisco was one I adored. It also was a very good script, directed superbly by Dieterle.”40 The film was shot with characteristic Warner Bros. efficiency from January 22 to February 10, 1934.
Two days before shooting began, Bette Davis underwent her first abortion. Ham told the studio that she was suffering from sunstroke and the flu and needed a few days’ rest.41
WHILE SHOOTING 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, in the late summer of 1932, the screenwriter Wilson Mizner handed Bette a W. Somerset Maugham novel called Of Human Bondage and suggested she read it with an eye toward playing the disreputable antiheroine.42 Mizner was himself a colorful character. His voice was thin, his dentures were loose, and his hands were battered into stumps, a condition he attributed to “hitting whores up in Alaska.”43 He evidently appreciated Maugham’s Mildred Rogers from several perspectives.
A few months later, when the director John Cromwell screened Cabin in the Cotton—he was thinking of casting Richard Barthelmess in something—he saw Davis if not for the first time then at least from a fresh perspective.
The trouble was, it was RKO that would be making Of Human Bondage, not Warner Bros. Davis claimed to have shown up at Jack Warner’s office every day along with Warner’s shoeshine boy: “I spent six months in supplication and drove Mr. Warner to the point of desperation—desperate enough to say ‘Yes’—anything to get rid of me.”44 When Warner at last relented and agreed to the loan, he did so with a certain you’ve-made-your-bed attitude, not comprehending why any of his actresses would ever want to play a dislikable creature like Mildred. As Bette later noted, “If my memory is correct, he said, ‘Go and hang yourself.’ ”45
It’s pure speculation, but one wonders whether Bette Davis would have had the January 1934 abortion had Of Human Bondage not been presenting itself imminently as her first potential masterpiece. “Harmon didn’t even know she was pregnant,” insists Anne Roberts Nelson, Ham’s second wife. “It was Ruthie who talked her into it. If Bette couldn’t work because she was pregnant, the meal ticket was gone.”46 But it wasn’t just Ruthie’s financial support that was at stake, though Mother’s comfort—all her housing, clothing, food, and entertainment expenses, not to mention her mad money, for after she moved with Bette to Hollywood in 1930 she didn’t work another day in her life—did indeed rest squarely and heavily on Bette’s shoulders. At stake was something even more central to Bette’s life than her mother: her art. Mildred Rogers was the first truly important role Bette wanted.
Of Human Bondage began shooting toward the end of February 1934, at RKO’s studios in Hollywood on the corner of Melrose and Gower, and continued through April 9. At first, Leslie Howard and his English friends were snobby toward the little loaner from Warner Bros. “There was lots of whispering in little Druid circles whenever I appeared,” she later noted.47 But Howard’s agent at the time, Mike Levee, took Howard aside in his dressing room and said, “If you’re not very careful, that girl will steal the picture,” to which Howard rather self-servingly responded, “Do you know something, Mike? If I am very careful, she will steal the picture,” thereby giving himself much of the credit for Bette’s eventual triumph.48
Davis’s eagerness for audiences to hold her character in contempt is not the only turning-point aspect of Of Human Bondage. It’s here that Bette really begins to deliver her lines like punches. We’re introduced to Mildred in the restaurant where she works as a waitress. Philip (Howard), who has a club foot and walks with a pronounced limp, is seated at a table with a friend. Philip makes a smart remark when Mildred strides over to his table, and Mildred responds, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Bette’s Cockney accent is layered, impure—a low-class twang unsuccessfully masked by pretension. But beyond the skillful inflection, the moment is historic because Bette Davis (to borrow the novelist Blanche McCrary Boyd’s marvelous phrase) has started to speak in italics, in this case highly imitable iambs.
Throughout the film, Mildred replies to each of Philip’s invitations with, “I don’t mind,” a line Bette reads with increasingly irritating condescension, a vocal recognition of what we’re asked to see as Mildred’s pathetic attempt to rise above her station. It’s an accent noticeable as an actress’s im
pression of Cockney, not a accurate mimic’s impersonation. Bette Davis demands to be recognized as Bette Davis, the stresses her vocal signature writ large.
Vocalization aside, Mildred is also about movement—a display of physical, one could even say carnal, confidence. It’s the swing and strut of a particularly common whore. In the initial flirting conversation with Howard, Bette cocks her head back and forth in opposing diagonals, shifting her shoulders as she does so. “I don’t know whether I will or whether I won’t,” she announces (in response to Philip’s invitation to let him find her a reason to smile). When Philip walks away from the table, Cromwell dwells on his limp not for the audience’s sake but for Mildred’s. There’s a shot of Philip walking past her, a shot of Mildred casting her eyes downward, a shot of Philip’s legs walking away against a bare checked floor, and finally a shot of Mildred’s reaction. “Ha,” she says with a knowing cluck, but Davis undermines Mildred’s superiority by shifting her eyes away to the left, a minute register of her own self-consciousness and a subtle recognition of Mildred’s as well.
Davis herself claimed never to have understood Philip’s fierce attraction to Mildred. She believed in Mildred’s vile nature, of course; one has no doubt that Davis nailed this character so squarely because she saw something of herself there—the manipulative ambition, if nothing else. But for Davis, Philip’s “whimpering adoration in the face of Mildred’s brutal diffidence” was unfathomable. As an actor’s issue, this was “Howard’s problem and not mine,” she later wrote, but it’s telling that Davis refused to acknowledge in herself what Maugham treats as essential to the human condition: self-destructive desire.49 The “bondage” of the title is the helpless submission of drastically unreturned love. Could it possibly be that Davis never felt such an emotion? Or is it that she just refused to own up to it in public?