by Ed Sikov
“I was now in a position to refuse to work with Mr. Wyler,” Davis wrote in The Lonely Life. “I asked for an appointment to talk to him. Revenge, they say, is sweet. It has never been thus for me. Mr. Wyler, not remembering me or the incident, was, to put it mildly, taken aback when I told him my grim little tale of woe. He actually turned green. He was genuinely apologetic, saying he had come a long way since those days. I could not help but believe he was sincere.”7 Filming began on October 25, 1937.8
Jezebel begins with a simple but breathtaking display of grandness and scope, as Wyler lengthily tracks his camera down a New Orleans boulevard, past shops, street carts, carriages, passersby, buildings, and still more street stalls and carriages, until it comes to rest facing the imposing facade of a large and busy hotel. Graceful and subtle, the shot demonstrates what the great theorist of film realism André Bazin so admired about Wyler’s style: the image’s continuity reveals the luxurious entirety of a city block, lending weight and authenticity to what audiences would otherwise perceive, however unconsciously, as cut-apart wooden backlot construction in Burbank.
Wyler was equally painstaking with Davis’s entrance as Julie Marsden, though it’s not nearly as grand a sequence. The scene occurs at Julie’s plantation, where—much to the delighted shock of her guests—she is late to her own party. (“Her own party! In her own house!”) Wyler cuts from the interior, with all the guests atwitter, to the street outside. A dark, skittish horse rides up at a gallop. The rider, a woman clad in a tight-waisted, big-cuffed habit and feathered hat to match the spirited horse, brings it to a halt outside the gate, forces it—against its will—to turn and enter, and rides into the courtyard. Handing the horse off to a child slave, she heads to the door only to turn back at the sound of the horse struggling against the boy’s nervous handling. She advises the boy not to be scared. “Yes’m, Miss Julie, but he bites!” “Then you just plain bite him back,” she declares—apparently an act she wouldn’t hesitate to commit herself. Julie scoops her hem up from the back with her riding crop, turns toward the camera in an arrogantly premature curtain call, and sweeps into the mansion.
Bette looks supremely confident catching the hem with her crop, but in fact the scooping bit nearly did her in. Over and over Wyler made her repeat it, and she had no idea why. She’d practiced it beforehand, after all, and she thought she had it down. Concerned, Bette begged Wyler to tell her precisely how to do it, what he wanted, would he just explain it to her, please? But the autocratic Wyler refused specificity. “I’ll know it when I see it” was his terse response. Only when Wyler did eventually see it on take 48 did he move on to the next shot. Trying hard to understand what had occurred, Davis demanded to see the rushes. According to her, when she saw the approved take she realized that Wyler was right; the one he used was the most naturally self-possessed, the least studied. “He wanted a complete establishment of character with one gesture,” she later explained. He got what he wanted.
Wyler was an expressive director, but only onscreen. The man himself gave little coaching to his actors, and Bette, who thought she required his approval, grew alarmed. Having dismissed most of her earlier directors as workmen at best, hacks at worst, she rarely needed their endorsement; she didn’t respect them enough to care what they thought of her. But with Wyler, she was thrown. Here was a director—a creative picture maker who was carefully, technically piecing Jezebel together, shot by shot, in a manner Davis had never seen before. And he gave her nothing.
Being Bette, she said something. “After about a week, I went up to him and said, ‘I may be very peculiar, Mr. Wyler, but I just have to know if what I’m doing pleases you in any way. I just have to know, after every scene if possible.’ So the entire next day, he went, ‘Marvelous! Marvelous!’ And I couldn’t stand it. I said, ‘Please—go back to your old ways.’ ”9
Wyler recognized some of Davis’s mannerisms for what they were: itchily nervous and beyond her control, expressions not of a character’s psychology but of her own anxiety. So he compelled her to stand still when Julie had no reason to move. His order was reminiscent of Laura Hope Crews’s, but he was male, so Bette took it better. “Do you want me to put a chain around your neck?” he barked one day during filming. “Stop moving your head!”10 Wyler also coaxed her out of playing too many scenes at full throttle. Regarding many of her earlier films as deficient—shallow scripts, artless directors—Davis often tried make up for their lack by pumping her characters harder, substituting adrenaline and tics for the substance she knew was missing from the material. Wyler, in contrast, radiated confidence in both himself and the film he was making, and he encouraged Bette to play Julie with more moderation. “She comes in during the morning eager to do it right, maybe to overdo it,” Wyler wrote in a memo to Hal Wallis and the associate producer Henry Blanke, “and I tell her to take it easy. I tell her a scene is important, but not every scene, so she learns not to act everything at the same pressure, as though her life depends on it.”11
William Wyler successfully dominated Bette Davis, so naturally she fell in love with him. Ham was conveniently in New York.
“Her love affair was the talk of the studio,” Wallis later declared.12 It was clear to everyone around Warner Bros. that Jezebel’s star and director were acting out their passion. One night the editor Warren Low and the assistant director Rudy Fehr were waiting in the projection room for Davis and Wyler to arrive and see the day’s rushes. The two were late. Low grew impatient and was about to leave when the director and his star finally showed up—with “lipstick smeared all over their mouths,” Fehr recalled. “They looked ridiculous. They should have looked in the mirror before they came in. This happened practically every night after that. They obviously were doing some heavy petting in somebody’s dressing room before they came to review the rushes.”13
“Our romance was doubly difficult because we could not be seen in public,” Davis once said, the Warners lot evidently not counting as a public space.14 When they weren’t at the studio working, they were essentially housebound and spent many evenings together at Wyler’s place, where his assistant, Sam, made home-cooked dinners for them.
The love affair didn’t lead Wyler to ease up on Davis at work. “That handsome, homely dynamo, Wyler, could make your life a hell,” she wrote in The Lonely Life. “I met my match.”15 She quoted him admiringly (in retrospect) as saying, “I want actors who can act. I can only direct actors—I can’t teach them how to act.”16 Wyler trusted that Davis and her costar, Henry Fonda, could act, and his faith left him free to pursue an indescribable, undirectable quality in every shot, no matter how many takes it took. His efforts put a strain on both Davis and Fonda.
In fact, Wyler demanded even more retakes of Fonda’s shots than he did of Davis’s. The production began to drag; costs were rising, as were rumors. A concerned Hal Wallis asked Henry Blanke, “Do you think Wyler is mad at Fonda or something because of their past? It seems that he is not content to okay anything with Fonda until it has been done ten or eleven takes. After all, they have been divorced from the same girl [Margaret Sullavan], and bygones should be bygones.” Some people even proposed, wrongly, that Bette was enjoying affairs with both men and that Wyler was demanding Fonda’s retakes out of jealousy.17
Wallis, accustomed to Warners’ relatively compliant and workmanlike directors—men who, unlike Wyler, didn’t have much of a vision—grew increasingly exasperated as Wyler kept shooting more and more footage. Wallis was himself a master craftsman, but this was ridiculous; Wyler was wasting celluloid. He complained about Wyler’s multiple takes of Donald Crisp leaving the house and Davis coming down the stairs: “The first one was excellent, yet he took it sixteen times. What the hell is the matter with him anyhow—is he absolutely daffy? . . . Wyler likes to see these big numbers on the slate. Maybe we could arrange to have them start with the number six on each take, then it wouldn’t take so long to get up to nine or ten.”18 Bette, on the other hand, appreciated the care Wyler was put
ting into Jezebel, as much as her own retakes unnerved her. Compared to all the Special Agents she’d made, let alone the Hell’s Houses, Jezebel was bliss—artistically, at least.
Dissatisfied with Clements Ripley and Abem Finkel’s screenplay, Wyler brought John Huston on to do some rewriting. The production was under a specific time constraint, too: Henry Fonda signed his Jezebel contract with the provision that he would be finished filming by December 17 so he could travel to New York to be with his wife for the birth of their first child. What with Wyler’s seemingly endless shooting, that deadline was fast approaching, and the picture had fallen nearly a month behind schedule. As Wallis unpleasantly remarked, “The little nigger boy will be a full-grown man by the time Wyler finishes the picture.”19
Jezebel’s centerpiece is the fifteen-minute Olympus Ball scene, an elaborate and largely dialogue-free spectacle during which Julie’s engagement to Preston Dillard (Fonda) crumbles in the face of the couple’s conflicting but mutual obstinacy. The ball, to which all New Orleans society women are expected to wear virginal white, slams to a halt when Julie arrives in flaming red. As written, the scene took up but a few lines of description. This verbal brevity led an assistant director to schedule it for half a day’s work. But as Davis later remembered it, “Willy took five days!”20 They began on November 9 and finished on the fifteenth.21
The gowns for Jezebel are credited to Orry-Kelly, but he didn’t design the key dress. “Milo Anderson told me that he did the red dress in Jezebel,” said the costume expert David Chierichetti. “Orry-Kelly was an Australian citizen, and while his immigration was being processed he had to go back to Australia and stay there for a while. So Anderson finished Jezebel, including that famous dress. I said to Anderson, ‘Didn’t it bother you that Kelly was given credit for your work?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s quite a compliment, isn’t it? They kept renewing my contract, and that’s all I cared about.’ ”22
Wyler begins the Olympus Ball sequence with a reverse crane shot that begins on the reigning king and queen of the ball and travels over the heads of the orchestra and the dancers on the dance floor and ends on an immense crystal chandelier, with a balcony packed with people watching the spectacle in the background. Its precision reflects the gracious regimentation of the partygoers, who are all dressed according to the rigidly refined standards of New Orleans society. A subsequent shot taken from just above the floor reveals swirling hoop skirts, all in white, and the martial steps and black trousers of the men. It’s into this arch, uniformed gentility that Julie makes her brazen entrance with Preston.
Davis plays it birdlike—part peacock, part vulture. Wyler’s camera tracks with them as they make their way through the ballroom, Pres glaring, Julie gliding with an air of haughty triumph tinged with increasing surprise and chagrin as she senses the magnitude of her miscalculation. She asks to leave. “We haven’t danced yet,” the priggish Pres responds.
Wyler cranes above them as they waltz, the crowd slowly making space around them. Julie, who loses her composure and self-possession entirely while being yanked around the dance floor, suddenly looks homely and small in high angle. “Pres,” she begs. “Let me go. Take me out’a heah!”—complete with a touch of whimpering in Davis’s line delivery. Pres stays silent.
On the surface, the tensions of the Olympus Ball seem absurd and arcane. Julie’s dress is truly strumpetlike, but the other women’s pristine, lacy gowns look more like babies’ christening outfits than something an adult would wear. By my standards, Julie’s rebellion is worthy of praise, not condemnation. But the underlying psychology of the scene is still bracing, particularly in light of Bette’s own combustible nature. Julie, after all, has chosen the outrageous red dress in malicious anger—specifically to spite Pres for not having left a business meeting in order to accompany her to a fitting. In this way Julie plays out Bette’s own ambivalence toward male authority. Like Davis herself in both her marriage and her work, Julie insists that a man offer his opinion, and when he contradicts her, she acts out against her own self-interest—in Julie’s case by impulsively choosing precisely what Pres would have rejected, just to prove a point, however damning it may be to her. Julie is as sure of her belief in the scarlet gown as Bette was of her decision to leave Warner Bros. for Ludovico Toeplitz.
The pressure of making Jezebel for a domineering man she loved took its toll on Davis. She became depressed and frightened. Somatic symptoms appeared early on. She was sick on November 2 and 3. She had a charley horse on one of the days scheduled for the Olympus Ball. After shooting exteriors on the back lot in the rain, she developed bronchitis and a bad cold. While attempting to film the shot in which Julie, seated at her bedroom vanity, employs the old southern trick of tapping her cheeks with a hairbrush to make them blush, Bette was so overly energetic with the bristles that her slaps caused bruises and she had to take several days off while her face healed.
The Warner Bros. archives at the University of Southern California contain an all-too-lengthy discussion between executives of how Bette opened a pimple one weekend and had put some kind of salve on it, but then realized that this was the wrong thing to do, so she consulted a specialist who worried that there might be a hole left in Bette’s cheek, so the physician began applying solutions to wash it out. He “will attempt to remove the core tonight, sterilize it, and apply a salve so that makeup can be applied,” a detail-oriented memo writer noted on November 30.23
Wyler wasn’t shooting Jezebel in sequence, either. Eschewing continuity for the sake of convenience or artistic interest was, and remains, standard filmmaking practice, but Davis wasn’t used to it and it disrupted her sense of Julie’s development. “Davis had hysterics last night because we were shooting so much out of continuity,” a production manager noted on December 21. On December 29, after eleven hours of shooting a number of shots out of sequence, Bette became panic-stricken and broke down in tears.24
Jezebel was so far behind schedule that the company spent New Year’s Day working. That’s when Bette received word that her father had died at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts.
“BIOGRAPHY IS THE medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world,” Janet Malcolm writes in The Silent Woman, her masterful book-length essay on Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the imperfect craft of writing about other people’s lives. “The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. . . . The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.”25
For Bette Davis’s biographers, one of the most evocative and resonant scenes in Davis’s life plays itself out in a luxury suite called The Wild Duck, 1929. It’s just down the hall from the musty and rarely opened Broken Dishes, but it is to Broken Dishes what the queen’s bedchamber is to a crawl space next to the servants’ quarters. In the literary lives of Bette Davis, The Wild Duck is especially well-trodden terrain, its bureau drawers ransacked several times over, its mirrors imprinted by many sets of examining fingertips. The temperature and humidity are kept permanently high, for Ibsen’s play is about a father who cruelly abandons his daughter.
After a performance of The Earth Between in March 1929, the director and actor Cecil Clovelly sent Bette a card requesting her to meet the actress Blanche Yurka the following morning at 11:00 a.m. uptown at the Bijou Theatre, where she was appearing in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. Yurka, who had just directed as well as starred in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck in a successful revival at the Forty-ninth Street Theatre, was preparing to take both shows on the road, and Linda Watkins—who had played Hedvig, the sac
rificial innocent in The Wild Duck, and Boletta, the awkward elder daughter in The Lady from the Sea—was leaving the company. Yurka wanted to cast Davis in both roles.26
To Bette, Yurka “seemed like a giant bird of prey. Her long neck pressed forward and her glowing eyes devoured everything around her.”27 The audition was brief. Bette read a few lines from The Wild Duck but was quickly interrupted by Yurka, who said, “That’s fine, my dear. We’ll have one week of rehearsal after you close in The Earth Between.”28 An Actors’ Equity contract dated April 4, 1929, survives in the Davis archives: Bette was paid seventy-five dollars per week to play the roles of Boletta, Hedvig, and understudy “in the Ibsen Repertoire.”29
Bette may have been a superb Boletta, but no one cares. It’s her Hedvig on which everyone focuses, mainly because Bette herself made such a fuss about it, even—or especially—at the time. The Wild Duck sparked a severe attack of hysteria, a “malady by representation,” as Freud described it: Bette broke into a violent and all-consuming rash the day she was cast. At the time, she and Ruthie assumed it was measles, but in retrospect Davis understood it to be a physical manifestation of an extreme emotional response. She was reacting explicitly to the fear and stress of her casting, and on a deeper level—however little she owned up to them—to the parallels between Hedvig’s family and her own. The red flaming rash that spread over Bette’s body had an even more immediate cause: Harlow, the father who had left her, was to attend The Earth Between that very evening.