Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (3 page)
Bette and Boys
She was brought up, she said, as "a chaste and modest New England maiden."
Chaste perhaps, but as a teenager she was seldom timid in her curiosity or her relationship with boys. In her memoirs she told of one summer at Cape Cod when she and a girlfriend would stroll down lovers' lane, shining their flashlights on the lovers parked in cars. On one of her first dates when a boy she liked tried to kiss her, she slapped him hard across the face.
Working as an usher in a theater at the Cape, Bette developed her first real crush, on aspiring actor Henry Fonda. She chased him all over the seaside resort when he was in the rumble seat with another girl. "He never looked at me, never," said Bette sadly. (Joan Crawford would also pursue Fonda, gifting the actor with a sequin-studded jockstrap on the set of
Daisy Kenyon
in 1947. She invited him to model the gift for her, privately. "I was carrying her up the stairs for a scene we were filming," said the actor. "When she whispered the invitation, I nearly dropped her.")
Fonda's recall of the young Bette was somewhat different. He claimed they met in New York, when she was a teenager. They were introduced by a Princeton friend, who after an evening on the town dared the actor to kiss her. "Well, I sort of leaned over and gave her a peck on the lips, not a real kiss," he said. While returning to Boston by train, Bette wrote Hank a letter. In it she said, "I've told Mother about our lovely experience together—in the moonlight. She will announce our engagement when we get home."
"Holy shit," said Fonda. "One kiss and I'm engaged. That's how naive I was, and that's what a devil Bette Davis was at seventeen."
Billie and Bette—Two Dancers
At seventeen, Billie Cassin learned that men could be used to improve her lot in life. That summer her mother moved into a more spacious apartment. The street outside their house was filled with automobiles, and their front porch was lined with gentlemen callers for mother and daughter. Billie only dated the town's wealthiest boys, using them as stepping-stones, to escort her to the Kansas City Country Club, and to the Jack O'Lantern nightclub, where she won her first dancing trophy. Like Bette Davis, Joan found the thrill of the attention and applause pleasing, and addictive. She decided dancing would be her life, and her way out of Kansas. "I had no brains," she said. "I failed in school and college. My options for survival were few." After befriending two girls, a song-and-dance act called the Cook Sisters, Billie auditioned for a nightclub tour. She was hired, and that afternoon stole the sisters' theatrical wardrobe and left Kansas. "She robbed us blind," said Nellie Cook, who never heard from Billie again but seemed to understand. "She had such determination and drive, and she was so frightened of failure. She did what she felt she had to do."
Bette Davis at sixteen also aspired to be a famous dancer, but not in dingy nightclubs or cheap road shows. She wanted to excel in the classical field, by following the exalted steps of Isadora Duncan. During her summer vacation from Cushing Academy, she studied with an ersatz Anglo-Indian teacher named Roshanara, in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Rehearsing eight hours a day, she made her stage debut as a dancing fairy in
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
"My part was small," she said, "but I put such grace and dramatic instinct into my movements that I drew considerable attention. My mother was told I belonged on the stage."
In Boston, after seeing Blanche Yurka in
The Wild Duck,
Bette abandoned her dancing aspirations believing she was destined to become an actress, "hopefully a great one." In school that fall she managed to wangle parts for herself in all of the student plays. Mastering the craft of concentration and recall, Bette also practiced a physical technique that would eventually become her trademark. In confrontations, on and off the stage, she learned how to dilate her eyes for dramatic effect. "I think the child fancies herself a hypnotist," one critic observed.
In a series of fast-shots, Joan Crawford liked to establish how she jumped from dancing in smokers and stag parties to a featured spot in a big Broadway show. 'A little talent, a lot of drive, and some good luck" paved the way, she stated. It was also said that holding hands and sitting in the laps of the right men helped enormously. There was a booking agent in Chicago, a nightclub owner in Detroit, traveling producer J. J. Shubert, and a handsome saxophone player named James Welton. He played in the orchestra of the Winter Garden theater, where Billie, now known as Lucille LeSueur, danced in
Innocent Eyes.
She needed musical charts, for songs she was learning. The two dated, fell in love, and were allegedly married in the summer of 1924. She moved into his studio, stayed five weeks, then left. No public mention was ever made of this marriage, then or later, when, as Joan Crawford, she had her past carefully processed to fit her promising future.
Agent Nils T. Granlund also knew Crawford during this period. In his book,
Blondes, Brunettes and Bullets,
he described Lucille LeSueur as "a gorgeous girl, with huge blue eyes, perfect features and ripe, voluptuous lips." Granlund booked girls into Manhattan clubs and speakeasies. He recalled the day Lucille came to see him. Pleading poverty, and the illness of her mother back in Kansas, she said she needed extra work. She was a dancer, she told him, but she could also sing. She had charts for five songs, made up by a musician friend. Granlund sent her to audition for club owner Harry Richman. She was hired on the spot, to perform at midnight for fifty dollars a week. Returning to Granlund's office, Lucille burst into tears. "She had no money—sob—to buy an evening gown—sob—to wear in Mr. Richman's show—sob." The agent gave her fourteen dollars and sent her to a dress store on Forty-second Street. She came back with the dress and was trying it on in a corner of the office when the door opened and Marcus Loew, the owner of Loew's movie theaters and the recently formed M-G-M pictures, walked in. "Turn your back!" the embarrassed but angry showgirl told the magnate. "He was quite taken by her modesty and beauty," said Granlund, who asked Loew to make a screen test of Lucille. She tested three times but was deemed unsuitable for movies. Shortly thereafter, writer Helen Lawrenson claimed that the showgirl, eager for more money, displayed her cinematic talents elsewhere—in a series of soft-core porn movies. One of these was entitled
The Plumber,
which featured comedian Harry Green. (According to Lawrenson, when Joan married Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., she bought up every print of her "blue movies," with the exception of one copy, which was owned by The Quiet Birdmen of America, a private club whose members included Charles Lindbergh and one of Bette Davis' husbands.)
In October 1924 Nils Granlund introduced Crawford to a visiting M-G-M executive, Harry Rapf. Granlund claimed he introduced Lucille to Rapf backstage at the Winter Garden. She recalled the meeting took place at Harry Richman's club. Producer-director Joe Mankiewicz said he thought the meeting was held in the bedroom of Rapf's hotel suite. "She had that extra something," said Rapf. "Good looks and a very perky personality."
"Harry Rapf had a nose so big it kept his private parts dry in the shower," said Lucille LeSueur. On December 24, 1924, she received a telegram offering her a five-year contract with M-G-M. She boarded the Sunset Limited on New Year's Day, bound for California. "I was only seventeen, and still wet behind the ears," she said. "She was over twenty-one, and already jaded," said her future rival, Bette Davis.
Bette Davis never had to whore or struggle during her early days of acting. Unlike Joan Crawford, Bette had a formidable ally and financial supporter—her mother, Ruth Favor Davis.
A talented but impeded actress in her youth, Mrs. Davis was said to be devouringly ambitious for Bette, whom she described as the more talented and driven of her two daughters. "Mother had the guts and dreams for her children," said Bette. "She fueled my drive." A single parent, Ruthie worked as a nurse, a housemother, a portrait photographer and retoucher to support and educate her daughters. "She was a strong, beautiful woman," said a source who knew her well. "She could charm the shoes off you one day, then cut you dead the next. Just like Bette."
When Bette graduated from Cushing Academy and professed her fervent desire to be an actress, Ruthie picked up the family and moved to New York City. She arranged for Bette to audition for the renowned Eva Le Gallienne. Bette, nervous, giggled her way through the audition and was denied admission to Le Gallienne's academy. Undaunted, Ruthie brought Bette to the John Murray Anderson Dramatic School. "My daughter wants to be an actress," she told the school's executive director, "and you've got to make her one. But I haven't a nickel. I'll have to pay you on the installment plan." The director said he tried to discourage the "innocent young thing," but the mother was too persuasive.
With fellow students Lucille Ball, Joan Blondell, Katharine Hepburn, and Paul Muni, Bette studied diction under George Arliss and movement and dance with Martha Graham. She learned how to center her emotions onstage. 'Anguish, joy, hatred, rage, compassion could be conveyed through body language," said Bette, while working on her own inimitable brand of personal magnetism, style, and star quality, "all to be defended to my death."
"We acted in a few school plays together," said Joan Blondell. "Once we played nuns in a restoration comedy. Bette always seemed so sure of herself on stage. She was very outspoken and serious about everything. I don't recall her ever having fun or being relaxed outside of class. Of course her mother, Ruthie, was always there, in the background, reminding Bette they had no time to waste."
"As far as Mother and I were concerned," said Bette, "the world would not be a safe place to live until I conquered it."
2
"The fact that Joan became a star
before Bette mattered a great
deal. Bette always liked to be
first, but Joan's name was
established long before hers. That
was pet peeve number one."
—ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS
O
n January 3, 1925, Lucille LeSueur arrived in Los Angeles and registered at the Hotel Washington on Van Buren Place, four blocks from M-G-M. ''A jumble of makeshift buildings and hastily constructed stage sets," the studio was situated on Washington Avenue, opposite a general store and a gasoline station. When Lucille checked in that afternoon, she was asked to make a second, more elaborate screen test, to gauge her dramatic abilities. "Four basic emotions were called for—anger, puzzlement, wistfulness, and allurement." She was told not to be afraid of the camera: "It's only got one eye and it can't talk back." On signing her contract, for seventy-five dollars a week, she was informed she would have to provide her own underwear and stockings for roles, and if after six months she didn't seem suitable for pictures she would be sent back to Kansas.
The following morning, at eight o'clock, Lucille stood in line at Central Casting, waiting to be chosen for that day's schedule of pictures. She never made the slate. "The flashiest and friendliest girls got picked," she said. "Girls who were shy got overlooked." Adapting to the system, Lucille appeared for three days as an extra in a ballroom scene in
The Merry Widow;
in another picture, the back of her head was used as a substitute for Norma Shearer. Described by one writer as "just one of a truckload of good-looking, ambitious showgirls," Lucille soon displayed that extra dimension compulsory for starlets who wish to rise above the competition. "I had the ability to scheme, to finagle, to plan ahead," said Crawford. She requested a meeting with Harry Rapf, the man who had brought her to California. Rapf, who had forgotten about the brunette chorine he met in New York, was married. He suspected trouble when he was told that the new contract girl insisted on meeting with him privately But Lucille was too smart for common games. She told Rapf she was grateful to him for bringing her to such a fine studio as M-G-M, but felt guilty about the generous salary they were giving her "for such little work." The executive was impressed with her conscience, her ambition, and her feeling for "family," a spirit the soon-to-be-mammoth studio was eager to foster. He picked up the phone and called Pete Smith, who was in charge of M-G-M's new publicity department. Rapf suggested that Smith consider using the new girl for promotion work. Soon photographs of Lucille, jumping hurdles and throwing footballs at USC, appeared in the newspapers. She flashed her sprightly charms at moviegoers in a trailer for forthcoming releases, and at the company's first sales convention in Los Angeles she appeared in a bathing suit with a sash across her breasts identifying her as "Miss M-G-M." In April the readers of
Movie World
magazine were asked to choose a screen name "which best expressed the girl's energetic, ambitious, and typically American personality." The winning name, submitted by "a crippled lady who lived in Rochester, New York," was Joan Crawford.
Even with a new name and the patronage of Harry Rapf, stardom did not come overnight for Joan Crawford. "It took three long years of working and watching and picking up new tricks," she said. She haunted the sets and became acquainted with the camera operators and directors. She snuck into the publicity offices to steal photographs, then spent hours studying the stars' looks, experimenting with her own through gab fests with the boys and girls in makeup. She also kept hustling for work. "If I heard a director or producer had a part that might be right for me, I'd camp on his front doorstep until I got it. I also had a girl watching the back door too."
Over a sixteen-month period, Joan Crawford appeared in thirteen pictures at M-G-M. She also acquired the reputation of being a quid-pro-quo girl. Years later, when asked if she ever had to sacrifice her virtue for roles via the proverbial casting couch, Crawford replied, "Well, it sure as hell beat the hard cold floor."
Every six months Crawford's contract option was picked up, which meant more money for the struggling starlet. She rented her own home, furnished on the installment plan and decorated by Joan herself. ''It was a nightmare of fringe, lace, tassels, and pink taffeta draperies," she recalled. Once she was settled, her family came to visit, permanently. Her brother, Hal, after seeing her picture in a magazine, arrived on her doorstep from Kansas one day. "Hi, sis," said Hal. "If they can put you in pictures, I'm a cinch." Her mother soon followed, and Joan was obligated to provide room and board for both, and to pay the bills they ran up in the local department stores. She was also heavily in debt herself, with expenses for clothes, a beat-up car, and for fees to an abortionist who allegedly performed two operations on her, one of which landed her in the hospital, resulting in the loss of five weeks' pay.
In the spring of 1927, Crawford met Frank Orsatti. Described as an "ltalianate
Padre-Padrone,"
who dealt in real estate and bootleg liquor, Orsatti was a close friend of Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M production. The rumor was that Orsatti supplied Mayer with liquor and women, invited him to parties in the penthouse of his Los Angeles hotel, and helped the studio boss deal with certain problems. When warned by an associate that Orsatti was "bad news," Mayer told Myron Fox, "Look, I've got certain things that have to be done, things that I can't ask people like you to do." Orsatti, it was said, was quite smitten with M-G-M feature player Joan Crawford. He bought her an expensive car, then arranged with Mayer to advance her fifteen thousand dollars so she could buy her first home, at 513 Roxbury Drive in Brentwood Park, situated between Beverly Hills and the Pacific Ocean, and
away
from her mother and brother. It was here that Joan planned the next step of her budding career. With her energy, beauty, and talent, and with Orsatti's backing, she set out to launch herself as the Jazz Baby, America's symbol of Flaming Youth.
The Jazz Age had already swept across America, but it was Crawford who would "catch it by its tail, jump on its back, then ride it on to greater glory." "I was in the right place at the right time," she said of her emergence as Queen of the Charleston and Black Bottom in Hollywood. True, there were other flappers before her, such as Colleen Moore and Clara Bow, and prettier competitors on the dance floor, such as Carole Lombard, but it was Crawford who drew most of the attention and the prizes. "My skirts were a trifle shorter, my heels a little higher, my hair a tad brighter, my dancing faster," she said. "Joan had great body tension," said Carole Lombard. "She was better than I but she seemed to be working at it, and for me it was all play." Crawford was the symbol of an era, said E Scott Fitzgerald—"the best example of the flapper, the girl you see at smart night dubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living."
With the loving cups and cash, Joan also acquired a new set of beaux. She "never dated a boy who couldn't dance," and once more good looks and money were on her list of qualifications. One ardent suitor was Mike Cudahy, the heir to a meat-packing fortune. When Cudahy announced his engagement to Joan, his mother told the press that her son was being used to provide publicity for the star. Furthermore, she was ready to go to court to prevent the marriage license from being issued because her son, at age seventeen, was still a minor, "and he promised me he would remain in school." "Horsefeathers!" said Joan, claiming that Cudahy was handsome and divine, but just a little boy. When another Crawford partner, after dancing with her all night, caught pneumonia driving home in the cold night air with the top down, then died, Joan, with proper respect, wore a black dress and veil to tea dances at the Cocoanut Grove and the Montmartre for a full week.
During this time her studio, M-G-M, took full advantage of the publicity being generated by the starlet in her private life. Commensurate with her popular image, they assigned her roles as a taxi dancer, a circus performer, a kidnapped heiress, and a gangster's moll in
Four Walls.
She was cast in the latter film as the second lead to the studio's number-one leading man, John Gilbert. When the picture opened in New York, the critic of the New York
Evening World
had this to say: "It isn't often that a supporting player manages to steal a picture right from under the nose of John Gilbert.... But that is what happens in
Four Walls
.... For Miss Crawford simply walks off with it."
Full-fledged stardom would come with her next film,
Our Dancing Daughters.
The accounts of how Crawford got the role differed in the telling. The director, Harry Beaumont, claimed he saw Crawford dancing in a nightclub and told Louis B. Mayer that she would be perfect for the role of Dangerous Diana in his Jazz Age movie. "That's not true," said Joan. "Mr. Beaumont never saw me dance anywhere. I had heard of the picture and I went to the story department late one night and stole the script. Then I went to the producer, Hunt Stromberg, and persuaded him to give me the part."
The story—that of a wild, self-centered young socialite—was custom-cut for Joan Crawford. Featured in the opening shot were the lissome Crawford legs dancing to a silent tune as she steps into her undies in front of a three-way mirror. Segueing to the bar of a country club, we see Joan arrive. She takes a sip from every young man's glass, then, hearing the band warm up, clicks her fingers, shakes her head, and breaks into a wild Charleston on the dance floor. Encumbered by her skirt, she whips it off and finishes the dance in her slip. "The scene says as much about egotism and sex in the 1920's as John Travolta's disco turn did in the 1970's," said writer Ethan Mordden.
When
Our Dancing Daughters
opened in December 1927, Crawford's name was billed under the title. After the rave reviews came in, accompanied by the healthy box-office receipts, her name was lifted above the title. The day of the billing change, she was asked to sign a more generous contract with M-G-M. That night, in lieu of attending a formal dinner at the home of Irving and Norma Thalberg, the new star celebrated alone. "I rode around town with a small box camera," she said, "taking pictures of 'Joan Crawford,' blazing on the theater marquees."
Bette—A Serious Actress
During the time when Joan was firmly placing her black satin dancing shoes on the first rung of stardom in Hollywood, Bette Davis was in the East, still gathering the essentials for the foundation of a serious dramatic career.
Upon graduation from Anderson Dramatic School, she worked for a season at the Cape Playhouse in Massachusetts, then went to Rochester, New York, to work with the George Cukor Repertory Company. Midway through the season she was fired for being aloof with her fellow workers. "I didn't know ingenues were supposed to party as well as work," she said. "She refused dates with the young men," said actor Louis Calhern, who found Bette "uppity and unpopular." "She wasn't supposed to sleep around, but she wasn't supposed to be Saint Teresa of Avila either," said Calhern. Equipped with the Aries trait of never forgetting a grievance, Bette would censure Cukor for years to come. "He had his little circle of admirers," she said, "sycophants, if you will. Miriam [Hopkins] was one, Joan [Crawford] came later. They would surround him and adore him. I have always despised that sort of fawning behavior. I was too strong and too talented for Mr. Cukor to mold, and therefore I was released from the company." Cukor, who described Bette as "a very interesting actress at the outset, almost maniacal," had his version of the events. "She was a stubborn young lady. She liked to disrupt rehearsals by giving her interpretation of the author's thoughts—not only for her character, but for the other roles also. It was useless to argue with her, because during the actual performance she would do what she thought was best, frequently giving a different style of performance from the other actors."
Being fired in Rochester turned out to be provident for Bette. In New York she moved twice as fast to become professionally established. She joined an off-Broadway group on MacDougal Street, the Provincetown Players, and made her debut in
The Earth Between,
the story of a girl incestuously in love with her father. The following day Brooks Atkinson of the New York
Times
deemed her" an enchanting creature," and one month later she was asked to audition for Blanche Yurka. Judging Bette to be "a maddening handful," and her mother "a pain in the neck ... a weak, silly creature," Miss Yurka nonetheless hired the ingenue to tour with her in
The Wild Duck.
As Hedvig, Bette conquered the critics in Philadelphia and Washington, and in her native Boston her real father visited her backstage. Ignoring her performance, he told her, "You would make a very fine secretary."
When the tour with Blanche Yurka ended, Bette played a rebellious daughter in
Broken Dishes
on Broadway. During rehearsals the director found her "impossible ... neurotic ... and emotionally backward." On opening night the critics said she was "mesmerizing," "incandescent," and "made of lightning." A week later she was asked by a talent scout to make a screen test for Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn. When the test was screened for Goldwyn, he stood up in the theater and screamed, "Who did this to me?" The producer would be added to her list of old scores to settle, but in the meantime Bette assessed her liabilities. "I was not prepared for motion pictures," she said. "My movements were much too broad. I also had a crooked tooth, of which I was aware, but I had no idea it would stand out like a locomotive."
Bette makes Broadway debut in "Broken Dishes" November, 1929.
Undaunted, she had the tooth fixed and prepared for her next test. "I had no doubt in my mind that I would be given a second chance," she said. "I wasn't a fool. Mother and I knew that talking pictures would soon be very popular. The movie producers would
need
actresses who could talk. Certainly I could do that very well."