Bette Davis (16 page)

In hopes of establishing evidence for a possible court case, Ob-ringer asked to have Bette's ultimatum in writing—her current contract made any such refusal to work illegitimate in the eyes of the law—but Levee declined, insisting that all communications be oral. Martin Gang would be in touch in a day or so to hear Jack Warner's response.

In the meantime, Bette visited her friend Robin in New Yoik. Then she enjoyed a triumphal side trip to Newton, Massachusetts, where she was the guest of honor at a luncheon at the Brae Burn Country Club, where she had attended bridge parties and dances some thirteen years before.

And there was a bittersweet reunion with Harlow. Bette's father had gone into semiretirement after a heart attack suffered in the months following Bette's appearance in Of Human Bondage. Harlow had invited Bette to his home in suburban Belmont, but that would mean an encounter with Minnie. Bette insisted he dine with her in Boston at the Copley Plaza Hotel, where eighteen years before, Harlow had taken Ruthie and their young daughters for a last meal together as a family.

Back in New York, Bette continued her public blasts against Warner Bros. On the West Coast, Martin (Jang restated her demands to the studio, asking that Jack Warner and he come to an accord prior to the actress's imminent return.

In later years, Davis's reputation for doing battle with Warner Bros, would obscure the fact that in 1936, salary was the principal issue. Equating power with money, Bette wanted a salary commensurate with die status her Academy Award conferred. Where Bette earned $1,600 a week in 1936, four years before, Warners had paid stars Kay Francis and James Cagney $3,000 weekly, Ruth Chatterton $8,000. That same year, Edward G. Robinson earned $40,000 for each film he made; while Paul Muni's 1933 contract brought him $50,000 per project.

All the play she was suddenly getting in the national press for her flippant remarks about Hollywood seemed to have convinced Bette that forcing Warner Bros, to discard her seven-year contract was going to be a "pushover"—or so she told Mike Levee on April 7. She instructed him to inform Jack Warner that she had changed her mind. She declined even to do retakes for The Golden Arrow before her demands were met.

Warner, fearful of showing the slightest indication of weakness, on April 14 ordered a letter drafted to Gang. In it, he warned that the studio expected Gang's client to live up to the terms of her contract; there would be no new discussions or negotiations. War-

ner's legal staff advised him to withhold the letter until after Bette had somehow been wheedled into coming to Burbank to do the Golden Arrow retakes. When she reported for them on April 18, even as Davis was filming with George Brent, the studio was notifying her attorney of Warner's intransigence.

"I think it important that, just as soon as possible, we put a call in for her to report for work on a picture," Hal Wallis told Warner that same day, anxious to test Bette's threat to refuse all film roles until the contract dispute was settled. But neither of the scripts Wallis had in mind for her— Mountain Justice or God's Country and the Woman—was quite ready, so Warner ordered Bette placed on a six-week layoff without pay, effective April 20. Meanwhile Wallis would attempt to win Levee over to the studio's side and alienate him from Gang, whom Warner blamed for Bette's latest mutiny.

By May 21, a week before Bette was due back for wardrobe fittings for her role as a female logger in director William Keighley's God's Country and the Woman (to be shot on location in Longview, Washington), Levee had persuaded the actress to dismiss her attorney. According to studio files, the agent informed Warners of Bette's willingness to come back to work and ' 'try to secure a new contract in an amiable manner" by showing a new spirit of "cooperation with the company."

Within days of returning to the Warners' payroll (but not to work), Bette wired Jack Warner and requested a June 6 meeting. There she argued on her own behalf for all the same concessions Gang had demanded.

According to Obringer's notes (the always deeply suspicious Warner had arrived for the showdown with his general counsel at his side), Davis opened the meeting by announcing that "she had reached the point where she felt she was entitled to more money." As Warner watched her grimly and silently from behind his desk, the actress went on to specify that she would expect a set yearly salary for a predetermined number of pictures; whether the studio would pay her by the week or the film was for Warner to decide, so long as her yearly total was the same.

But before she could name specific sums, Warner cut in, reiterating his refusal to consider a new contract. He brushed aside Bette's desire to make a single "outside" picture each year, with the well-worn declaration "that he was continuously looking for good stories for her." He followed that by a throwing up of the hands and a last-ditch offer to raise her weekly salary from $1,600 to $2,000,

in acknowledgment of the prestige her Academy Award had brought the studio, but only if Bette would agree to tack an additional two years onto her existing contract, whose other provisions were to remain as before.

All smiles and smug conviviality, Warner ushered her out of the office, with Bette promising to "think it over and advise him" of her decision as soon as possible.

When ten days passed without a word, on June 16 Obringer called Bette. She would say only that "she didn't know a lot about business and would rather have Mr. Warner talk to her attorney"— Martin Gang having been replaced by Hollywood lawyer Dudley Furse, who called in due course to set up a new meeting with Warner, on the afternoon of June 18.

That morning, as if to set the tone for the two-thirty conclave, Bette wired Warner, angrily denying all that her agent had said about her willingness to start God's Country and the Woman. One can only imagine the effect of such a telegram on the insecure Warner, who, above all else, dreaded being taken advantage of or made to appear foolish.

When Dudley Furse and Bette's business manager, Vernon Wood, appeared at Obringer's office at the appointed hour, they were met by the studio's general counsel and attorney, Ralph Lewis, of the firm Freston and Files, who regretted that Warner had been detained in Projection Room 5. Obringer wanted to start without him, but Wood pointed out that he and Furse were under strict orders from Bette to present her demands "personally" to Jack Warner. Thus the four men spent some twenty minutes making small talk until finally, at 2:50 p.m., Warner blustered in, complaining of the "excessive heat" and clearly expecting that the discussion was already well under way.

Instead Bette's business manager began by declaring that he and Furse recognized the validity of her existing contract. They were here not to object to the December 27, 1934, document on legal grounds but to request Warner to consider negotiating new terms out of fairness to an actress who had, after all, just won the Academy Award.

Through all this Warner sat poker-faced; but when Wood accused him of "nonchalance" in dealing with Bette's demands, the studio boss launched into a harangue on the ungratefulness of stars whose "walkout tactics'' punished the very studios that had created them. According to Warner, the studios put young unknowns (as Bette had been in 1931) under long-term contract in hopes of "grooming them into well-known screen personalities," at which time the stu-

dio's investment might finally pay off. But if performers like Bette Davis (and James Cagney before her, in his successful 1936 court case against Warners) continued to challenge their contracts whenever the studios declined their "outrageous demands" . . .

Dudley Furse interrupted Warner's litany of complaint by concurring that Bette's 1934 contract was "perfectiy legal and binding" and "was too carefully drawn to afford Miss Davis any opportunity to attack its validity."

But when Furse asked Warner at least to consider Bette's demands, the studio boss snapped that he had already made his final offer: the $2,000 weekly salary (escalating to $3,500 after six years) he had proposed to the actress on June 6. Warner curtly refused even to listen to such other demands as a five-year contract and a four-picture yearly limit.

The next morning, June 19, Bette was scheduled to report for wardrobe fittings at ten, but on the basis of her lawyer's bootless meeting with Warner she failed to show up—knowing full well that the studio would almost certainly suspend her.

Before he ordered the suspension letter sent out, however, Warner invited her and Vernon Wood to his office. There, flanked by Hal Wallis and Obringer, Warner urged Bette to be "a regular trouper'' and start work on the new picture. Not before the studio met her salary demands, she replied: $100,000 a year to start, escalating to $220,000 after four years. Plus she continued to stipulate that Warner Bros, allow her to do a single outside film every year; and declared her willingness to "take her chances and go out of pictures" if Warner failed to come up with the new contract.

"Miss Davis was very arbitrary and obstinate about the entire situation," Obringer noted afterward in his report.

When Warner budged only to offer a token additional $500 weekly in the seventh year of her new contract, Bette decided that enough was enough and strode out of the room. Her business manager stayed behind to assure Wallis that he would do all he could to persuade her to agree to Warner's latest offer.

It was now Friday evening. Wood promised Wallis that he would call him at home, on Sunday at the latest, with the good news. But when the business manager finally called on June 21, it was to report Bette's continued refusal to accept Warner's terms and come back to work.

By this time, Warner Bros, had formally notified Bette that as of June 19, 1936, they had suspended her without pay. Each day she remained away from the studio would be one more day owed at the end of her contract.

On the telephone with Obringer, Mike Levee announced that he was "through with her"—as a client she was "more grief than his commission was worth." According to Obringefs notes, the exasperated agent even offered to give the studio his file of correspondence with Bette (later he declined to do so, on the advice of his lawyer, who reminded Levee that his other clients might balk at his seeming to take the studio's side in the Davis affair). Levee believed that in appearing to accept his advice, then abruptly, inexplicably changing her mind, the mercurial actress was almost certainly "relying on the advice of others."

"Give me a blank check, because I don't know how much I'm going to spend today," Ruthie told Bette, in the presence of Ellen Batchelder, who explains that Ruthie expected to be paid back for all her years of struggle and sacrifice on Bette's behalf.

Ruthie and a newly sedate Bobby had moved back to Los Angeles. On their arrival they had promptly summoned reporters to declare Bobby's career plans: ' *I want to be an actress, just like my sister," Bobby announced on December 12. 1934.

Instead, eight months later, Ruthie married off her twenty-five-year-old daughter to a slender, rather languidly handsome young man. five years Bobby's junior: "Little" Bobby Pelgram. as Bette and Robin had called him in Ogunquit. where they had known his older brother Charlie. .Although Ruthie was delighted by the match, Bette could hardly conceal her jealousy over Bobbys having landed the wealthy sportsman and aviation enthusiast. In his beautifully tailored white flannels and na\y blazer. Bobby Pelgram reminded many of Bette s friends of a dashing, romantic figure in a Fitzgerald novel.

Because she wanted the same wedding anniversary as her older sister, Bobby eloped with her fiance to Tijuana. Mexico, on August 18, 1935, accompanied by Bette and Ham—who was soon to suffer by comparison with his moneyed brother-in-law.

"When Bene started to become very successful. Ham decided that he didn't want people to regard him as 'Mr. Bette Davis.' says Robin Brown of the period when Bette's husband insisted they abandon "the Garbo house" (as Bette called it) for considerably more modest quarters at 5346 Franklin Avenue in Hollywood (with a tiny rear cottage for Ruthie). And when Bette visited him in San Francisco, where he was earning one hundred dollars a week as a musician at the Villa Mateo in nearby Daly City. Ham was emphatic that she stay with him in cottage number 10 in the Mission

Auto Court—a neat bit of publicity, perhaps; but a grave offense, as far as Betters mother was concerned.

Where Ham quietly supported Bette's struggles with the studio, it was Ruthie first and foremost who prodded her to disregard the advice of her agent and keep fighting when Jack Warner offered so much less than she had demanded; and Ruthie who urged Bette to accept the strange proposal that reached them from London now. The mysterious and controversial forty-five-year-old Italian producer Ludovico Toeplitz—upon whom the King of Italy had conferred the title "de Grand Ry"—inquired whether Bette might be free to make a film for his Toeplitz Productions Ltd. in England. Toeplitz's previous productions included The Dictator, starring Clive Brook and Madeleine Carroll, and The Beloved Vagabond, with Maurice Chevalier.

Excited at the prospect of an opportunity to travel abroad, and even more by the fifty-thousand-dollar fee Toeplitz offered, Bette and Ruthie remained blissfully unaware of persistent rumors in the international film community that connected Toeplitz (a close associate of Gabriele D'Annunzio) with Fascist Italy. Having declared film "the most powerful weapon," Benito Mussolini was widely thought to have dispatched Toeplitz to London as a sort of "unofficial film ambassador" who would one day return to Rome to work in Cinecitta, the new complex of sixteen studios facing the Centro Sperimentale on the Via Tliscolana (known as "the artistic laboratory of Mussolini's time"). Giving rise to these rumors were Toeplitz's apparent economic ties to the Banca Comerciale Italiana, despite Fascist prohibitions on exporting capital from Italy. Nor did Toeplitz seem to have been required, as had other Italian nationals abroad, to transfer his principal funds to Fascist Italy.

According to an August 27 letter from Toeplitz to Davis, Bette's representatives responded to his preliminary inquiries with assurances that Warner Bros, had committed "numerous breaches" of their contract with the actress, thereby freeing her to accept the starring role in Toeplitz's production of I'll Take the Low Road.