Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  On one unspecified day Ernie Haller was ill and Bette refused to shoot without him. Irving Rapper was more generous to Haller than Bernhardt was; Haller was, in Rapper’s words, “a cosmetician’s cameraman, very concerned with making the stars look beautiful.”3 Davis was never the vainest of movie stars, but she certainly wanted to look as beautiful as possible in a film like Deception. Bette went out sick again on July 30 and 31, but so did Claude Rains.

  On August 9, Warner Bros. denied Davis’s request to do a broadcast for Cresta Blanca’s radio show because Cresta Blanca was a winery and therefore might create an unsavory association in the malleable mind of the public. She took sick again on the tenth. All in all, she was out for a total of 17 days. Deception took 122 working days to complete—46 days longer than planned.

  Aside from Claude Rains’s entrance—Hollenius disrupts Christine and Karel’s wedding party, held at Christine’s well-appointed apartment, by dramatically throwing the door open and standing just inside the doorway with his overcoat draped over his shoulders like Dracula’s cape—and a spectacularly funny scene at a restaurant, Deception is much less entertaining than it should be. “A party indeed,” Rains intones after the wedding reception grinds to a halt at his abrupt and menacing appearance. “That object, I presume, is a wedding cake. Champagne. All very fitting. I infer a husband.”

  Christine’s apartment, designed by Anton Grot, is not only beautiful but prescient. It’s a loft located at the top of a Manhattan industrial building. To get to it, one has to take an elevator to the floor below and walk up a dimly lit flight of stairs to the penthouse. It’s the height of future style. Inside are several large rooms, obviously cut from one open area, and one wall near the piano consists entirely of angled panes of glass. According to the historians of 1940s style in Hollywood Howard Mandelbaum and Eric Myers, Grot based his design on Leonard Bernstein’s current apartment.4

  Hollenius invites Christine and Karel to join him for dinner before Karel performs, his intent being to so unnerve Karel that he will play badly and humiliate himself. Rapper introduces the sequence wittily. As the threesome enters the restaurant, we see a dish being prominently and elaborately flambéed—as though Hollenius carries with him the fires of hell in the form of cherries jubilee. Rains is obviously enjoying himself as much as his character does; Hollenius relishes the calculated dithering with which he chooses the entrée, the potage, the proper wines. He picks up a dead partridge with the head and feathers still attached, sniffs it, and pronounces it worthy, only to worry the issue of its preparation to death. Should it be stuffed with what he pronounces “troofles” or served more simply? He selects the troofles. He orders the trout to start. Then changes his mind: woodcock, not partridge! All of this drives Karel to precisely the state of distraction Hollenius desires.

  In the face of all this theatricality, Bette remains understated. As with Mary Astor’s performance in The Great Lie, Rains isn’t stealing any scenes because Davis has yielded them to him. Her Christine is remarkably calm for a woman whose lies spiral out of control, and even when she shows up at Hollenius’s baroque mansion and assassinates him, her tempestuous pianist remains under an eerie sort of self-discipline. It’s as though Bette played out Deception’s drama by way of her personal turmoil—the frequent absences from the set due to her illnesses, the car crash, the injured finger—and by the time the cameras rolled she had no theatricality left to give.

  One of Deception’s most delightful details is the severely square-shouldered white fur cape Davis wears when she plugs Rains with the pistol shot. It’s not padded as much as framed, and it sits on the back of her neck as if suspended by a curtain rod. Her new designer, Bernard Newman, sets it off by pairing it with an all-black dress. Camp at its best, it’s both the height of style and risible, as chic a garment as Davis ever wore and yet as comical in its way as the curtains Carol Burnett wore in her immortal parody of Scarlett O’Hara. (“I saw it in the window and I just couldn’t resist.”)

  “I killed him!” Christine confesses to a startled Karel on her knees, the striking fur cape gone tragically missing for the big confession. “Tonight—all the time since you first asked me about him—I’ve told you nothing but lies. One lie. One small lie at first—to be explained the next day, I thought. And then it was nothing but lies! You see I thought you’d leave me if you knew. I thought you’d give up the concert. I thought you’d have nothing!

  “I was wrong. I see that now.” That’s an understatement.

  “Oh, Christine! You must be the happiest woman in the world!” a bystander cries as Christine and Karel make their exit at the end of the film. Unfortunately, Rapper hammers home the irony by tracking into a close-up of Davis—one that’s ill-matched to the previous shot to boot. When all is said, done, and shot, Deception doesn’t quite work.

  THERE WAS ONE other reason for Davis’s spate of illnesses and absences and temper tantrums during the production of Deception: she was pregnant.

  “The rumor on the set was that I was really the father of Bette’s baby,” Paul Henreid claimed, and “Bette, for reasons of her own and probably to spite her husband, encouraged the rumor. She would tell our friends, ‘I have such a crush on Paul, but he just won’t give me the right time. I don’t know how I can get an affair going with him.’ It started as a joke at first, and I took it as one, but eventually the humor, if any, began to wear thin, and it started to annoy Lisl and me, particularly since I never believed she really wanted an affair. It was simply a ploy to annoy her husband.”

  Bette and Henreid had been friends since Now, Voyager, and it was only natural that they’d spend time together in Bette’s dressing room trailer. “Whenever we were there together and she saw her husband coming on the lot, she’d lock her door and, if he knocked, she would shout out, ‘Paul and I are busy! Leave us alone!’ The implication was that being ‘busy’ was more than just rehearsing lines. I began to think the ‘joke’ had gone far enough, because Bette’s husband was not only a very jealous man, but also a very strong one.” One day the trailer began to shake violently. Henreid assumed it was an earthquake, but Bette knew better: “Earthquake my ass! It’s that stupid bastard of a husband of mine.”

  She then proceeded to invite Sherry in to join them, saying, “It’s all over anyway. We’ve had our little affair and now we’re having coffee. You might as well be civilized and join us.” Sherry declined the invitation and stomped off. Perplexed, Henreid asked Bette why she’d said that. “She smiled at me with that absolute charm of hers and said, ‘But we might as well have an affair, Paulie—everyone thinks we are.’ ” “Thanks to you,” Henreid replied. “Let’s get back to work.”

  “And that,” Henreid concluded, “was that.”5

  Sherry was a violent husband who, after all, had not only hurled a steamer trunk at her but threw her out of the car on their honeymoon.6That Bette goaded him scarcely excuses his actions, but it does partially explain them. It was a marriage of mutual abuse.

  In October, Bette officially informed Warner Bros. that for personal reasons—obviously her pregnancy—she would not be able to work for an indefinite period beginning in the middle of December. Warners agreed that she would be kept on salary for the duration.

  The Sherrys—accompanied by Bobby and her daughter, Fay—set off by train from the San Bernardino station for Butternut to await the birth of the baby. They arrived on November 1. In one of the few kind passages regarding Sherry in The Lonely Life, Davis recalled that although she looked forward to the baby’s arrival, she didn’t feel as though she was doing anything special. Sherry consoled her by pointing out that “creating a baby is the only creating for most women. You have been creating for years.”7

  The family was at Butternut on December 15 when Sheilah Graham let fly a major scoop on her radio broadcast: “Bette Davis—no matter what they say at the studio—is leaving Warners when her present contract expires in another eighteen months. And Bette is wasting no time because she is already
contacting writers and directors and cameramen for her new independent movie company.” Whether Davis was in fact developing any independent film projects at this time is doubtful. In any event, in a letter to Warner Bros.’ lawyers, Roy Obringer called Graham an “air parasite.”8

  After spending an especially rough winter at Butternut, the Sherrys returned to Laguna Beach in March to await the baby’s birth; they were concerned about being too far from an available doctor. They moved from the house on Sleepy Hollow Lane to a new one overlooking the beach at Wood’s Cove—“a dream,” as Bette described it, “filled with antiques, wood-paneled walls, and all my beloved books.” The Wood’s Cove house was not what one would call a beach house. It sat on a bluff high over the ocean and in fact appeared to climb up the cliff. It featured a large entrance hall with old English prints on the walls. To the right was a small library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a fireplace, a desk, and a club chair; the library served as Bette’s study. Down the hall was an expansive living room, where Sherry did his painting. The living room walls were covered with his landscapes and still lifes. The kitchen and dining room were upstairs along with a porch. The bedroom was on the top floor.9 “Keeping house does keep a woman busy,” Bette remarked, “and time flew.”10

  Two snapshots in Davis’s scrapbooks taken the night before she gave birth: one shows a massively pregnant Bette looking out over the ocean, the other of her leaning backward for balance and looking very, very happy.11

  Time reported the blessed event: “Born. To Bette Davis, 39, high-strung cinemactress, and painter (ex-boxer) William Grant Sherry, 32, her third husband: her first child, a girl, on May Day, which Bette Davis chose for her Cesarean section; in Santa Ana, Calif. Name: Barbara Davis Sherry. Weight: 7 lbs.”12

  They called the baby B.D. They pronounced it “beady.”

  RUTHIE DIDN’T COME calling as often as she once did. Sherry forbade her to do what she’d long been accustomed to doing, namely marching in unannounced. “He convinced me that I was now sufficiently grown up to run my own life,” Davis wrote. “I stopped confiding in Mother at thirty-six.” Ruthie responded by escalating from “distrust” of Sherry to “loathing.”13

  Ruthie also found that she couldn’t adjust to marriage after so many years of being single, so she divorced Robert Palmer.14

  Bobby had by that point divorced Robert Pelgram; the couple separated in the spring of 1944. She’d given birth to a daughter, Ruth Favor Pelgram—always called Fay—in October 1939 and immediately plunged into a postpartum depression so severe that she had to be hospitalized. Bette cared for the baby at Riverbottom until Bobby recovered. “The baby is with me until Bobby is stronger; she’s been so ill since the baby’s birth,” Davis told Modern Screen’s Gladys Hall at the time.15

  In February 1946, Photoplay, covering Bette’s wedding with Sherry, also gushed that Bobby “was rumored to be marrying again, this time a young doctor, also from Laguna Beach.”16 The identity of the seaside physician remains a mystery, but in June of the following year Bobby married a man by the name of David Berry. “The Davis girls were now, absurdly, Mrs. Sherry and Mrs. Berry. There was rhyme if not reason to both of our marriages,” Bette later remarked.17

  David Berry was, according to Fay Pelgram, “a nice man, but he had a problem with alcohol.” Bette’s wedding gift to the couple was either cruelly witty or simply cruel: a dozen cases of liquor. By the end of 1948, after one too many binges on her husband’s part, Bobby threw Berry out of the house and obtained a restraining order against him, and her marriage was effectively over. The divorce was granted on March 4, 1949. Soon thereafter, Bobby suffered another nervous breakdown and spent the next two years in a sanitarium.18

  AFTER B.D.’S BIRTH, Davis returned to the screen in Winter Meeting. The film’s director, the fantastically named Bretaigne Windust, came from Broadway, where his most recent production had been the musical Finian’s Rainbow; before that he’d staged the comedy State of the Union. Earlier credits include the comedies Arsenic and Old Lace and Life with Father. Winter Meeting was his first motion picture. It was a melodrama.

  According to Davis, Windust “had the idea that he would introduce a brand-new Bette Davis to the screen. He would have been smarter to leave the old one alone.” She never liked the movie, which she called “a badly drawn triangle . . . a dreary film and hardly a triumphant return.”19 And there’s nothing especially new about Bette; her performance is thoughtful and muted, rather like her interpretation of Kate Bosworth in A Stolen Life.

  The story is simple: “Slick” Novak, a brooding war hero visiting New York City, is set up with a bit of flashy fluff (Janis Paige) but falls instead for Susan (Davis), a troubled poet with massive inherited wealth and a taste for tailored suits. Burt Lancaster turned down the role of Slick after telling Warners’ head of production, Steve Trilling, what was wrong with the screenplay scene by scene.20 Thirteen actors tested for Slick, including Richard Widmark, whom Davis rejected. They settled on strapping James Davis, fresh from a series of small and often uncredited roles in westerns and action pictures. His screen test was apparently excellent, and Bette insisted that he be cast, but as she later acknowledged, his performance in the film itself was lackluster. James Davis went on to appear in over 140 films and television shows, but in Winter Meeting he makes little impression. One almost wishes they’d cast George Brent.

  Winter Meeting took forever to film. Shooting began on September 15, 1947, but the production didn’t wrap until February 1948. Jack Warner made noises about seeking financial “relief” for all the time lost because of Davis’s illnesses.21

  With its combination of Windust’s enervating direction, a set of underdrawn characters (with one flaming exception), and the lack of chemistry between the two Davises, Winter Meeting is dull. Still, a ludicrous shock comes when Slick looks down at Susan, who is kneeling by a tasteful fire, and intones, “This is going to be tough on you, Susan, but all my life I’ve wanted and planned on being a priest!” (Thunderous Max Steiner chord.) “A priest?!” Susan cries. The revelation puts a crimp in the romance.

  Winter Meeting features two notable details: the only screen appearance of William Grant Sherry, who appears dressed in a sailor suit in a crowded subway station (he’s the one carrying a sack over his shoulder in front of Bette as she makes her way up the stairs), and the marvelous performance of John Hoyt as Susan’s bitchy friend, Stacy. Hoyt is a sort of poor queen’s Clifton Webb—slightly pinched and delightfully prissy. “Well, if you don’t mind my saying it, I’m relieved,” Stacy snaps at one point. “He may have been a hero—and the uniform is devastating—but that’s the trouble! The really dreadful letdown comes when you see them dressed in civvies, all set to go to work in a soap factory in Akron.” A little later: “Susan, dear, this is really dreadful—I’m terribly upset!—but what I simply can’t understand is how a man like that got to first base with you! The fellow obviously has nothing inside that handsome head. Of course he probably has other attributes.” Bette shoots him a very funny look before responding.

  Why Bretaigne Windust was selected to direct Bette’s next picture, June Bride, is unclear, given Bette’s distaste for his directorial style. She’d been shocked by Windust’s insistence not only on extensive rehearsals on the sets of Winter Meeting but on a complete dress rehearsal before the cameras began to roll. “Not since the George Arliss days had such involved preproduction rehearsals taken place,” Davis later noted.22

  Davis had mixed feelings about June Bride. “I had fun,” she wrote in The Lonely Life, “as I seldom got a chance at a good comedy.” But earlier in the book she damned her costar for a particularly dastardly method of hogging scenes: “Robert Montgomery and I made one picture together, and it might just as well have been a ballet. An excellent actor who needn’t have bothered embroiled me in a fascinating tangle of mechanics. . . . Mr. Montgomery, resenting, I presume, my role of a woman in charge, purposely added elements to his close-up performance that did not exi
st in the original scene. By reacting to things I never did, he invalidated my close-ups, making them worthless. It was upstaging in its most diabolical form. Needless to say, it was thoroughly unprofessional as well.”23

  But June Bride’s sexual tensions may actually have benefited from Montgomery’s shenanigans. It’s the story of a commanding New York professional woman, an editor at the popular women’s magazine Home Life, and an international ace reporter known for ferreting out the hidden dramas and uncomfortable details of the stories he covers. Their attraction for each other is palpable in a prickly, screwball sort of way. “I never know whether you’re going to kiss me or kick me,” Carey (Montgomery) tells Linda (Davis) in admiring frustration toward the end. Home Life’s gimmick is to make over the middlest of middle-American houses and its occupants. The current task is to create a picture-perfect June wedding in a small Indiana town in the middle of the winter. The magazine has a long lead time. One editor is in charge of renovating the garish, knickknack-ridden rooms. (As Barbara Stanywck says in Ball of Fire, “Who decorated this place? The mug that shot Lincoln?”) Another, the fat mother. The wedding plans fall into chaos when the bride elopes with the callow groom’s older brother, but Carey engineers a real love match between the all-too-cutely named “Boo” (Betty Lynn) and the jilted groom, Bud (Raymond Roe).

  Just before the wedding begins, you can catch a glimpse of Debbie Reynolds making her first screen appearance: she’s sitting next to the fireplace watching as Bette admonishes a little boy who is bridging between the arm of the couch and the fireplace mantel. Reynolds reappears for a second during the ceremony—she’s mostly blocked by the bride—as Windust’s camera tracks in on a tearful Linda standing in the doorway. In her memoir, Reynolds tells of sneaking onto the set one day and climbing up to a catwalk, where she watched Davis and Montgomery film the shot of Linda lying on a fur rug and Carey kissing her neck. Reynolds was mesmerized as they took various takes until, she writes, “one of my elbows accidentally slipped from the railing, throwing me slightly off balance, and one of my shoes made the slightest knocking sound on the metal walk. Davis stopped the kiss. She threw Montgomery off and sat up ramrod straight. ‘What’s that?!’ She looked skyward.” Reynolds beat a silent retreat as Bette shouted, “This is supposed to be a closed set! Who is up there?!” “My heart was pounding. She was furious. I thought she was going to kill me.”24