Bette Davis (12 page)

For an obscure young actress like Bette Davis, just arrived from New York, these and other tales of extravagant demands and bold rebellion against the studios must have seemed very remote. Shortly after Bette made her first appearance at Universal City—the 230-acre "film factory" that Carl Laemmle had built among the mustard fields of the San Fernando Valley in 1915—she discovered that (despite all she and Ruthie had been led to believe in New York, or believed they had been led to believe) the role of Isabelle Parry in Strictly Dishonorable had been assigned to another young stage actress from the East, Sidney Fox. A "Janet Gaynor type," as the studio quickly identified her, Fox had appeared in the comedies It Never Rains and Lost Sheep during the period when Bette was working on Broadway. Both young women were among the countless players Hollywood had begun to import from Broadway in the three years since 1927, when Al Jolson—in Warners' The Jazz Singer— inaugurated the era of the "all-talking" picture by crying out, "C'mon, Ma—listen to this!"

Unlike Sidney Fox, however, Bette was greeted with disappointment and bewilderment when, clutching the wire-haired fox terrier named Boogum that Ruthie had encouraged her to bring along as a prop, she posed for a calamitous series of portraits on her first day at Universal. Studio personnel whispered among themselves, presumably about what David Werner could possibly have had in mind when he signed "Bette from Boston" to a three-month contract.

But the most damning comment seems to have been silent. Ever eager to acquaint himself with newly arrived starlets, studio boss

"Junior" Laemmle (Carl's twenty-two-year-old son, who had received Universal City as a gift on his twenty-first birthday) was said to have opened his office door, peered out at Bette and Boogum for a moment or two, then quickly closed it.

That night, there was so much screaming and shrieking in Bette and Ruthie's room at the Hollywood Plaza Hotel that, fearful of being asked to leave, Mrs. Davis called the front desk to complain about the noise in hopes that the management would think someone else had caused the commotion.

After years of sitting for her mother's camera portraits, Bette knew only too well how badly the photography session had gone. Looking at some of these photographs today, one sees that, much as Bette had feared, she appears uncharacteristically stiff and frumpy in them. Although, at Ruthie's suggestion, Bette had arrived at Universal City draped in a pair of silver fox scarves, she was promptly ordered to remove them before stepping in front of the cameras, dressed in a dowdy black coat and pumps that made her legs and hips appear heavy: astoundingly so, when one considers that Bette weighed scarcely 106 pounds at the time.

And where are the immense, eloquent eyes that so easily dominate page after page of Ruthie's albums of camera portraits? Here only the lids are visible, as Bette mysteriously persists in glancing downward at Boogum, whom she cradles in her arms as if it were the little gray-and-white dog who had just been put under contract to a Hollywood studio.

Bette angrily accused her mother of having given her bad advice about how to dress and conduct herself at the all-important photography session. Confronted with this barrage of vitriolic abuse, Ruthie maintained her equanimity. She blamed Bette's violent outburst on what she characterized as her daughter's panic-stricken state of mind: precisely the "thoughts of fear" that—in Ruthie's view—must have played havoc with Bette's photography session that day, working from within to transform her into the bland and oddly lifeless figure whom the camera seemed unfortunately to have recorded.

Ruthie's antidote to all this was to bolster her daughter's spirits by carrying on as if Bette's first day at Universal City had been an unequivocal triumph, instead of the disaster Bette more realistically deemed it. To Bette's unutterable horror, Ruthie wasted no time signing a lease on a storybook cottage at 4435 Alta Loma Terrace in the Hollywood Hills. No sooner had Ruthie announced that she was a pictorialist photographer visiting from New York than the real estate agent—Mrs. Carr—escorted her to the rustic hideaway

Hollywood cameraman Gordon Pollock had built as a kind of 1 'photographer's paradise,'' all rough wooden beams and open fireplaces. A quaint rooftop weather vane featured two fighting, screeching cats.

Mrs. Davis declared that in the aftermath of Bette's dismal first day at the studio, Alta Loma Terrace would help to restore their dreams.

Still, Bette was plunged into yet another shrieking fit when Ruthie urged her to request an advance from Universal, in order that they might rent the Pollock house. Her mother was putting too much pressure on her: how could she possibly ask Universal for an advance when they so obviously "hated" her? That night, as Bette wept and shook herself to sleep, Ruthie lay awake beside her, trying to think of a way to get the money.

Shortly after daybreak, Bette was still in bed when her mother crept off to the Roosevelt Hotel, where the former governor of Maine, Carl Milliken, an old friend of Harlow's family in the state capital of Augusta, was known to play tennis regularly at 7:00 a.m.

"What in the world is the matter, Ruth?" he asked, more than a litde disconcerted to find Harlow Morrell Davis's ex-wife waiting for him there.

Although he readily gave her the four hundred dollars she asked for, Governor Milliken counseled Ruthie to secure a somewhat more modest accommodation than a house in the Hollywood Hills, so that she might teach her daughter the virtues of Yankee frugality; to which Ruthie replied, "No—Bette must be prosperous in appearance from the beginning, because someday she'll be someone here!"

For her part, Bette was scarcely so optimistic: especially when she received official notification that Junior Laemmle had awarded the role of Isabelle Parry to Sidney Fox—who, according to Bette, was generally known to be sleeping with the studio boss.

To make matters worse, although she barely understood it at the time, even as Bette had arrived at Universal City, the studio had been undergoing major changes that would drastically diminish the quality and range of film roles available to her there. In New York, David Werner had dazzled Ruthie with talk of such cosdy "prestige" projects as Erich Maria Remarque's^!// Quiet on the Western Front, with which Junior Laemmle had been successfully upgrading feature production at Universal (hitherto known for the mass production of profitable but less substantial fare). The Great Depression put an end to Junior's dreams, however, compelling him

to reduce costs by reviving the old "factory" mentality of his father's day.

In the days following Christmas of 1930, Bette was all anticipation when Universal assigned her to appear in a new film version of her beloved Booth Tarkington's 1913 novel, The Flirt. The deli-ciously wanton and impudent part of Cora Madison seemed to make up for everything—until Bette learned that in fact the principal role of "the flirt" had gone to her bete noire, Sidney Fox, while she would be playing Cora's meek and mousy sister Laura, of whom Tarkington wrote: "Laura was in nothing her sister's competitor. She was a neutral-tinted figure, taken-for-granted, obscured, and so near being nobody at all. . ."In short, Laura was rather like the unprecedentedly bland persona Bette had somehow established for herself at Universal. She believed this first unwanted assignment could only reinforce the abundant damage that had already been done to her there. That is precisely what occurred when director Hobart Henley's Bad Sister (as Bette's first film was now called) opened in March 1931. Cast in a colorless and unrewarding role, Bette made scant impact on screen, where—almost all agreed—she appeared unsatisfactorily "lugubrious" (New York Times) and "camera-conscious" (Boston Post) beside the more vivid Sidney Fox. Harshest of all, perhaps, was Bette's own verdict on her less-than-auspicious Hollywood debut. When she glimpsed herself on screen for the first time at a preview in San Bernardino, California, a tearful Bette, with her mother, quietly slipped out of the theater less than halfway through the film.

Vastly more painful than her failure to hit her stride as an actress was the jolt of Universale regarding her as odd-looking, sexless, and even somewhat ugly. Laemmle had been heard to lament that the newcomer possessed "as much sex appeal as Slim Summer-ville" (the exceedingly homely actor who had portrayed Tjaden in All Quiet on the Western Front): a source of great mortification to Bette. The ceaseless rejection she experienced at Universal was all the more perplexing to her because it was so entirely unlike anything she had encountered in New York.

Just as Bette was preparing to abandon Los Angeles (quite sensibly, she thought), Bobby's sudden spate of medical bills compelled her to remain. Rather than head east to pick up her stage career, Bette had little choice but to linger at Universal. Her stock there had fallen so low that, despairing of using her in anything himself, Laemmle regularly loaned her out to other studios for such trifles as Way Back Home, The Menace, and Hell House.

At home on Alta Loma Terrace, Ruthie complained that her hands were full. One daughter was endlessly listiess and dejected, and die other seemed in perpetual rage over the terrible films she was forced to make. When Bette came home from a day's work, Ruthie would urge her to take a drink to calm her agitated nerves: the start of Bette's lifelong problem with alcohol. Ellen Batchelder—who became Bette's closest friend and confidante during the early days in Hollywood when Ellen accepted a teaching position in nearby Pasadena—could see that no matter how angry or upset Bette was about her film career, she dared not show her turbulent emotions at the studio. Hardly would Bette get in the door at Alta Loma Terrace when she would feel the urgent need to "let off all that steam," hence the abusive screaming fits to which she regularly subjected her mother and sister.

Bette's spirits appeared to revive when she was ordered to report to the Universal wardrobe department to be outfitted for tests for the female lead in director William Wyler's A House Divided. Modeled on Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, A House Divided chronicled the furious competition between a father and son for a single woman: the father's new young wife, who has come to him courtesy of a marriage broker. Set to star Walter Huston in the role of the tyrannical father, Seth Law, the John Clymer-Dale Van Every script was streamlined by Huston's son John, who cut the dialogue "to an absolute minimum" in an effort to diminish the story's more melodramatic elements. The role of the oddly inarticulate young bride, Ruth Evans, bore comparison to that of Floy Jennings in The

Earth Between, Bette's first theatrical success in New York: a good omen.

But Davis also perceived herself to be under enormous, almost unbearable pressure as she arrived at the Universal wardrobe department in anticipation of meeting Wyler for the first time. Bette could have no illusions about her Hollywood career thus far. By any conceivable standard she had failed miserably in films, and with her contract about to come up for renewal, Universal was more than likely to dismiss her. Aside from being the only decent role for which she had been considered since the loss of Strictly Dishonorable, Ruth Evans in A House Divided was probably Bette's last chance to make her mark at Universal. She felt certain that failing to capture Wyler's attention in the day's tests might mean the end of her screen career.

By this time, on the advice of a Universal secretary, who counseled her to make herself appear sexier, Bette had already lightened her hair and altered her makeup to conform with what she interpreted as Hollywood standards of beauty. Intent on making Wyler notice her, she madly searched the wardrobe racks for a provocative costume. Ignoring the various dresses the wardrobe ladies urged upon her, she finally discovered what she had been looking for: a dark plaid cotton dress with a snug bodice and a low-cut square neckline that bared an inch or so of cleavage. For Bette, choosing the "chest dress," as she called it, was an act of utter desperation. For all her years of merciless flirtation with young men, Bette was still a virgin and unaccustomed to offering herself so blatantly; but as she kept telling herself, she simply could not afford to lose the role in A House Divided.

As the studio wardrobe ladies clicked their tongues at the absurdly ill-fitting "chest dress," Bette dashed out of the wardrobe department and over to the soundstage where Willy Wyler was conducting tests. Acutely uncomfortable in the revealing outfit, with all it seemed to signify, Bette was nonetheless confident that by displaying the ample breasts she believed to be her best feature, she was guaranteed to catch the director's eye.

Instead, when her name was announced on the soundstage, Wyler merely cast a disgusted, dismissive glance in Davis's direction and groaned loudly to an assistant, "What do you think of these girls who show their chests and think they can get jobs?" As Bette later described it to Ruthie, at that moment her mouth went dry and she felt all the color drain from her face. Wyler, seeming to look directly through her, ordered the test to begin. Paralyzed with embarrassment and confusion, humiliated to have offered herself like

that, only to be rejected, Bette muttered something about an incompetent wardrobe lady's having forced her to wear the ludicrously snug plaid dress, but Wyler would hear none of it. When the camera went on, he showed little patience as the strangely tongue-tied Bette Davis stumbled ineptly through her test.

Not long afterward, to Bette's chagrin, the role of Ruth Evans went to actress Helen Chandler; and worse, much as she had feared, Bette was dismissed by Universal when Junior Laemmle declined to renew her contract.

In September 1931, Bette and Ruthie had started packing to go back east when a Warner Bros, representative called to offer her a role in the new George Arliss film. Bette initially thought that the offer must be some kind of joke. Murray Kinnell, who had acted with Bette in The Menace (an adaptation of Edgar Wallace's The Feathered Serpent, which she had made on loan-out to Columbia), was set to appear in Warners' The Man Who Played God, starring the immensely popular English actor George Arliss, to whom he recommended Bette for an ingenue role that had yet to be cast. As chance would have it, Arliss had seen and admired Bette's performance as Hedvig in Blanche Yurka's The Wild Duck and he asked Rufus LeMaire to summon her for an interview. The interview would launch Bette Davis on her tumultuous eighteen-year career at Warner Bros.