by Ed Sikov
“It was one of the worst films made in the history of the world,” said Bette.36
In This Our Life—which is indeed rent apart by Davis’s willfully foul performance—is saddled with a title that seems at first notice to mean something but, upon reflection, does not. Based on Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, it’s the story of two Virginia sisters, each of whom has, for no discernible reason, a man’s name: Stanley and Roy. (Manly names for women were all the rage in 1941: Hedy Lamarr was a Johnny and a Marvin that year, and the eponymous heroines of Frank Borzage’s Seven Sweethearts were called Victor, Albert, Reggie, Peter, Billie, George, and most outrageous of all, Cornelius.) Stanley (Davis) is the wild one, Roy (Olivia de Havilland) the good girl. The potboiler story has Stanley running off with Roy’s husband (Dennis Morgan), who descends rapidly into shame and despair and ends up killing himself. Stanley returns home after a brief period of convalescent hysteria and brazenly comes on to the earnest lawyer she’d jilted (George Brent), but he’s now romancing Roy, however tepidly, so in a fit of pique Stanley gets drunk at a roadhouse, speeds away in her flashy car, runs over and kills a little girl, stops and looks back momentarily before speeding away again, and blames Parry (Ernest Anderson), the black chauffeur, after the police identify her car. (Parry is studying law while working both as the family’s driver and George Brent’s legal assistant.) The truth outs, Stanley engages in a terrifically overwrought scene with her corpulent, all-too-loving uncle (Charles Coburn), and drives her car over a cliff. “Yeah, she’s dead,” an inappropriately bored cop sighs at the end.
Sure, the film is on the silly side despite its liberal racial politics and daring suggestion of the uncle’s incestuous desire for Stanley; he actually tells her he’s got something in his pocket, and she goes rooting around looking for it. And yet under Huston’s sharp-eyed direction (and with Howard Koch’s smart screenplay and Ernie Haller’s moody, shadowy cinematography), the film rises above its material, as does Davis, who repeatedly voiced her contempt for the thing but left it curiously unexplained other than to say that the novel was better. What James Baldwin admired about Davis in In This Our Life still retains its bite. By “a ruthlessly accurate . . . portrait of a Southern girl,” Baldwin means a superficially charming, mercilessly selfish tramp who drives her husband to suicide, ends her mourning by dancing a rhumba, and lays the blame for a crime she knows she committed on an innocent black man, all with a sickening degree of viperish southern narcissism. There is nothing in Davis’s performance to convey the slightest sympathy for this spoiled white woman, and Baldwin clearly approved. If Davis became “the toast of Harlem,” it was precisely because Stanley Timberlake is one of her most uncompromisingly nasty creations, the epitome of evil white privilege, and, as such, she is enormously entertaining. Listen to her deliver this diatribe to her character’s overly indulgent uncle when the scoundrel announces, stunned, that he has been given only six months to live:
“All right, so you’re going to die!” Stanley rises in a fury of frustrated greed, the unbridled rage of an egomaniac denied her rightful attention. “But you’re an old man! You’ve lived your life! I haven’t lived mine—mine’s hardly begun! Think of me, Uncle! Think of what’ll happen to me if you don’t get me out of this. You’re not even listening! You don’t care what happens to me any more than the others! You’d let me go to prison! All you’re thinking about is your own miserable life! Well you can die for all I care! Die!” Scenes like this make life worth living.
“Bette fascinated me,” Huston wrote in his autobiography. “There is something elemental about Bette—a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears. The studio was afraid of her—afraid of her demon. They confused it with overacting. Over their objections, I let the demon go.”37
Davis was not the only passionate player involved in the production. “Huston was and is a most attractive man,” Jack Warner recalled, “and during the filming of this Davis–de Havilland epic anyone could see that it was cold outside but Valentine’s Day on the set. When I saw the first rushes I said to myself: ‘Oh-oh, Bette has the lines, but Livvy is getting the best camera shots.’ ” Huston and de Havilland weren’t just having a torrid affair. They were openly living together at the time, and de Havilland herself was showing signs of anxiety, not only about her relationship with the volatile Huston but about constantly finding herself in front of the cameras, having just finished two other films back-to-back before starting In This Our Life without a break. Davis had top billing, but de Havilland was getting the bulk of Huston’s lavish photographic attention, and Warner warned him that he’d better “get back on track.”
“Huston has a huge heart of lead beneath that fine gray head of his, and in a few hand-picked words he told me to go you know where,” Warner noted.
Warner’s solution was ingenious if abstruse. He escorted Bette, Huston, de Havilland, and the producer David Lewis into a studio screening room and showed them some rushes, after which he told them,
“Tell you what—you all go ahead and finish the picture as is. We’ll get our money out of it because these kids will draw, but I won’t go to the preview.”
“You won’t go to the preview?” Bette snapped.
“No,” I said.
And Bette caught my little pop fly to the infield, and suddenly she used all the four-letter words, and some that were new to me, on Lewis. She came close to tearing out every seat in Projection Room No. 5, and she would have given everyone a punch in the nose if I hadn’t interfered.38
Living on the emotional edge had become as natural to Bette Davis as her means of coping with it: shouting and swearing. But there was an added reason for panic as the production got under way. Farney, in Minnesota doing some consulting work for Minneapolis Honeywell on the basis of his aviation expertise, had developed a bad case of lobar pneumonia, his second in less than a year. He was rushed to Abbott Hospital, where, on Monday, October 20, his fever spiked to 106.
Bette was called at the studio, and she quickly left for Minneapolis. With the help of Howard Hughes, who provided an airplane on short notice, she flew via Kansas City and Des Moines before reaching Rochester, Minnesota; she drove the rest of the way. She found Farney in critical condition but beginning to respond to the sulfa drugs his doctors were administering. She and Farney’s mother, Lucille—a sturdy, stocky Yankee gal with spectacles—checked into the Curtis Hotel.39
“Farney not out of danger yet—doctor thinks by end of week will definitely know,” Davis cabled Warners. “Am so sorry about Farney and of course understand,” Hal Wallis replied. At first, she planned to take the Super Chief back to Los Angeles, but then she decided to fly, which she hated to do, so much so that Farney’s doctor forbade her to get back on a plane. As Dr. J. C. Davis of Minneapolis explained in a wire to the studio, her trip to Minnesota had “exhausted her due to her inability to relax in the plane with the result that it has required four days for her to recuperate.” She arrived on the Super Chief on the thirtieth and proceeded straight to the studio in Burbank.40
Because of Farney’s illness, In This Our Life was behind schedule even before Huston started shooting it, and by mid-December, Jack Warner was irate. Referring to the footage Huston was cranking out every day, Warner told the director on the seventeenth, “[I think you] can just exactly double what you are taking.”41 That was the day Bette caused a further delay by falling ill. “She is confined to bed with the flu,” Dr. Paul Moore told the studio.42 For reasons that remain unclear, Raoul Walsh took over for Huston in early January, and Bette adamantly refused to play at least one scene according to Walsh’s direction. The production wrapped on January 8, 1942, thirteen days behind schedule.
Testiness reigned. Wallis reprimanded Davis for causing so many delays on her last three pictures—the breakdown, the dog bite, Farney’s pneumonia, the flu—and Bette was indignant. “I am sorry your plans were delayed,” she crisply observed in a handwritten r
esponse, “but I didn’t ask the dog to bite me, nor did I have much fun during the process.” Wallis forwarded the letter to Warners’ legal counsel with the comment, “Just put it in your files with the accumulation of other nasty notes.”
Wallis was similarly displeased by the comment cards he read in February after an early preview, and he responded by blasting Perc Westmore for radically changing Davis’s makeup without clearing it with him first. Mayme Ober Peake announced as early as November that Bette had “hit the peroxide trail” again for In This Our Life, and to Wallis’s dismay she also appeared to have acquired a new set of lips—as though he hadn’t been seeing the rushes all along.43 (Mayme wasn’t entirely accurate; Davis’s hair is much darker and more natural looking than it had been early in her career.) As Wallis told Westmore, there were “far too many [cards] commenting on Bette Davis’s makeup and in most uncomplimentary terms. They thought she looked badly, and they didn’t like the hairdress nor the new style of Cupid’s bow lips on her.”44
Always the voice of the braying middlebrow, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times took a swipe at Davis when the film opened in May 1942: “She is forever squirming and pacing and grabbing the back of her neck. It is likewise very hard to see her as the sort of sultry dame that good men can’t resist. In short, her evil is so theatrical and so completely inexplicable that her eventual demise in an auto accident is the happiest moment in the film. That, indeed, is what probably provoked the audience to cheer.” The twitchiness that so annoyed Crowther is a physical expression of her character’s base and supremely uncontrollable carnality, the salty funk that emanates from a woman who can’t stop moving, and in point of fact there are men who appreciate that musk. One imagines de Havilland’s Roy chairing some committee of the Junior League; Davis’s Stanley gets her kicks in more provocative ways and in sleazier surroundings. What “good men” see in her is also what they smell: the unquenchable energy that enables her to keep going for hours. John Huston and James Baldwin were more perceptive critics. They saw, even though Bette herself did not, that In This Our Life gives full voice to Davis’s obdurate honesty. Should she really have played this racist bitch as having a softer, more lovable side?
TWO ITEMS FROM the wire services in November 1941:
HOLLYWOOD, Nov. 7 (U.P.)—Bette Davis, twice winner of the Movie Academy award [sic], today became the first actress-president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Miss Davis was elected by the board of governors to succeed Walter Wanger, producer, the academy announced today. Another actress, Rosalind Russell, was elected third vice president.
CALDWELL, Idaho, Nov. 15 (A.P.)—Calamity Jane, with wings aflutter, raced down a dusty asphalt track today to fleeting fame and the Thanksgiving dinner table of Bette Davis, the actress. For Calamity, shooed by Ellen Gregory, proved herself the “runningest” bird in Caldwell’s annual Turkey Derby. Miss Gregory, a bookkeeper, competed against heavy-footed businessmen. The winning bird had been promised to Miss Davis.
There is no record of how Calamity Jane tasted or whether she was even roasted and served at Riverbottom, where Bette and Farney were sharing space with a total of seven Scotties: Tibby, of course; the rather recent arrival Peckett’s; and Peckett’s’s new litter of five. (The puppies were eventually given away.)45 There is, however, some documentation of Bette’s brief but stormy tenure as president of the Academy. Her mistake was in believing that she had the authority to make a few changes.
Davis went into it as a smart, capable, dynamic leader—the Girl Scout troop commander grown into a movie star. She was an avid reader if not an intellectual; she knew her way around the film business in Hollywood as well as the larger popular culture from which her films sprang. And she was accustomed not only to being taken seriously but to having her way as often as possible. She was an inspired choice to lead the Academy—on paper.
It took less than a month before a group described by one reporter as the Academy’s “old-timers” began demanding that Wanger take over again. It wasn’t exactly that they didn’t like Bette. It was that “no woman, especially no actress, is in a position to successfully direct Academy affairs.” By the first week of January, she was out.46
“I have reached the conclusion that probably I am a very disagreeable person,” Davis wrote in “Uncertain Glory,” her first memoir (published in the Ladies Home Journal), and it is clear that she rubbed the Academy’s old guard the wrong way for reasons that went beyond her sex, though it’s equally obvious that had Walter Wanger or any other Hollywood male acted in the same commanding manner, he wouldn’t have been forced out after only sixty days.47
From her perspective, Bette just made a few practical suggestions, that’s all. “I was the first to suggest that they abolish votes by extras, which they all thought was the wildest thing they’d ever heard,” she later said. “Well, three quarters of the Hollywood extras at that time couldn’t even speak English. . . . If you were up for an Oscar and you bought them ice cream every Saturday afternoon, you’d get it.”48
And another thing: because of the impending war, Davis felt that holding the annual Oscar ceremonies—which then included cocktails and dinner—at the Biltmore Hotel would “seem frivolous in the midst of national austerity.”49 Instead, Davis proposed, the Academy should hold the event in a grand theater, invite the public and charge admission, and donate the proceeds to the British War Relief Fund. By the time Bette got around to suggesting that Rosalind Russell take over from Mervyn LeRoy as chair of the committee that ran the event, the die was cast. Walter Wanger went so far as to ask her what she had against the Academy, as though Davis’s sensible suggestions were a deliberate attempt to tear the organization apart.
Darryl Zanuck, who’d sponsored her for the presidency in the first place, told her melodramatically that if she resigned she would “never work in Hollywood again,” but Bette quit anyway, knowing that her career wasn’t even up for discussion, let alone on the line.50
There was some consolation: in December 1941, the Hollywood Women’s Press Club named Bette as Tinseltown’s most cooperative star along with Bob Hope. (The least cooperative? Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.)51 The award was a bit of sweet revenge for Bette, who had seen herself publicly reprimanded by Hedda Hopper earlier that year for the grievous sin of failing to take a call from the women of the Studio Club.52
ON FEBRUARY 1, 1942, Louella Parsons reported that Hal Wallis had bought the film rights to Ben Ames Williams’s novel The Strange Woman for Bette, but the film, a melodrama, didn’t get made until 1946 and ended up starring Hedy Lamarr. Warners considered starring Davis as a would-be murder victim in the noirish Danger Signal, but Faye Emerson ended up in the role when the film was finally made in 1945.53 In July 1942, the Hollywood Reporter fell for somebody’s tale that both Bette and Greta Garbo were interested in playing the lead in Dishonored Lady, but that one didn’t get off the ground until 1947, with Hedy Lamarr once again taking the role in question.54
The Reporter also announced in October the renaming of the Hollywood Theatre to the “Bette Davis,” and in November the same paper declared, as the headline put it, “Bette Davis to Play Self in Film,” the autobiopic said to be based on her Ladies Home Journal piece.55 Neither was true.
It’s unclear whether Bette herself even heard of any of these projects, the trade papers and gossip columns tending to claim things based not on facts but rather on producers’ and agents’ schemes. But there was one film Warners really did want her to do, and she fought it. In early 1941, Warners paid $35,000 for the rights to Stephen Longstreet’s novel The Gay Sisters, a tale of intrigue between two prominent New York families, the Gaylords and the Barclays. The Gaylords were thinly veiled Rockefellers, the Barclays Vanderbilts. Bette Davis was to play the stubborn Fiona Gaylord, with Mary Astor playing her younger sister.
Bette read the novel while resting at Huntington Beach during her tense, emotional absence from The Little Foxes, and as she wrote to Wallis she had “only one
reaction—my character in the book is so much like Regina in Little Foxes.” In addition, she wrote, she did not want to play yet another forty-year-old woman. “There’s so much time for that,” she observed. (Davis was then thirty-three.) Another stumbling block was Mary Astor. Henry Blanke clarified Davis’s objection to Astor’s casting to Hal Wallis: Davis held nothing against Astor personally, but Astor necessarily looked older than Davis on celluloid, so Davis would be required to be aged—again—in order to make it plausible that she was the oldest of the three sisters. Wallis sent Davis Lenore Coffee’s script anyway, but as Bette noted in a letter to Jack Warner, she still didn’t want to do the film and that casting Astor as her younger sister would be “very foolish [and] just not right.”56 Irene Dunne was considered; MGM was asked to loan Norma Shearer; an offer was made to Katharine Hepburn; Barbara Stanwyck ultimately took the role opposite George Brent. Mary Astor, meanwhile, was cast in another picture: The Maltese Falcon.57
Bette proposed to Warner Bros. in the summer of 1941 that she, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and Richard “Dicky” Whorf film Chekhov’s The Seagull. She’d spoken to Whorf, who told her that Lunt and Fontanne were interested in doing a picture of one of their plays; they’d done The Seagull on Broadway in 1938. But the project went nowhere.58