Bette Davis (21 page)

been' 'flattered'' when, disregarding her status as a married woman, Hughes made no particular secret of asking to see her again after the Tailwagger's Ball.

Soon after meeting him, Bette dragged the slightly bewildered tycoon to meet her mother, who enthusiastically declared Hughes a far more appropriate match than Ham Nelson had been. It must have seemed a lifetime ago to Ruthie that she was the last and only adult in her family not to know that Harlow had taken a mistress. Instead of being compassionate to Ham because of her own experience, she appears to have taken perverse pleasure in her daughter's extramarital affairs and, especially, the betrayed husband's obliviousness.

Where Bette had prevented Ham from discovering the liaison with Wyler, now she conducted her affair with Howard Hughes practically in front of her still adoring husband. Yet something in Ham compelled him to ignore all that was happening, even when, as detailed in his December 6 divorce complaint, friends and business associates had begun to ask "embarrassing" questions about the "stability" of his marriage. Finally, however, when it was reported on the radio that Bette Davis was about to marry an as yet unspecified "millionaire," even Ham could no longer deny his wife's unfaithfulness.

In an effort to patch things up with Bette, Ham had arranged to go on vacation with her to New York at the end of August. Perhaps it would help to remove her from the pressures of Hollywood and from Ruthie and Bobby. But when he told her his big plans, he recalled, Bette responded with the announcement that "she preferred to be with her sister or her mother.'' According to the divorce papers, soon afterward Bette "departed with her sister," without so much as a word to Ham about how long they might be gone or where he might reach them.

Before she and Bobby slipped off to Glenbrook, Nevada, while the disgruntled Ham went to New York alone, Bette had finally signed a new contract with Warners, on August 17, which added to the exhilaration she already felt on account of Hughes's attentions. Although Bette seemed scarcely to have realized it at the time, or to have cared, in the end the new contract offered little besides more money. Studio records show that as late as July 7, Bette's camp had been pressing for a three-picture yearly limit, story approval, and the right to do one outside project a year in the final two years of the new contract. By August, however, to the evident stupefaction of Roy Obringer and other Warner Bros, ex-

ecutives, Bette, anxious to get a fresh contract signed, was suddenly content to accept a weekly salary of $3,500 (effective as soon as she started Dark Victory) and a release from her remaining $5,000 debt for Warners' 1936 British court costs.

All that remained, apparently, for Bette to start a new chapter in her life was to banish Ham from Coldwater Canyon once and for all. As the divorce records indicate, when she and Bobby returned from Nevada, she asked Ham "to leave her alone with her work and her family"—and, she assumed, with Howard Hughes. Bette had persistently blocked Hughes's dissolute reputation from her thoughts. She told herself that however many actresses he had been with before, she was "special." This made it all the more painful when, having driven her husband to move in with a colleague from Rockwell-O'Keefe, Bette did not hear from Hughes that September. To her mortification, Hughes evidently had lost interest in her less than a month after they met.

Already frantic over Hughes's desertion, Bette grew further agitated when she heard that Willy Wyler was back in town. The director had spent the summer in Europe, where he had gone to persuade Laurence Olivier to accept the role of Heathcliff in Wuth-ering Heights, after which he had taken off for a month of water-skiing in the south of France. In Los Angeles that September, Wyler met and quickly fell in love with the young actress Margaret Talli-chet, a dark-haired beauty from Dallas. After her humiliating affair with Hughes, this was the last news Davis needed to hear.

"I am sure that Miss Davis is much happier than she has been since she returned from England," Roy Obringer crowed to Warners' New York legal office, in anticipation of her starting work on Dark Victory, her first picture under the new contract. "While it is true in this business that you do not know at what moment these temperamental people will fly off the handle, I have every reason to believe that we will go along on rather peaceful terms with Miss Davis for some time."

"That's Bette sitting over there," director Edmund Goulding told Geraldine Fitzgerald, on Thursday, October 6, 1938, Bette's first day on the set of Dark Victory.

When the young Irish actress, who had appeared at the Dublin Gate Theatre and in Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, looked up, Bette seemed so unnaturally still and silent, it was almost as if she had "turned to stone."

"She's very unhappy," Goulding continued. "Her husband has

just served her with divorce papers. Why don't you go and tell her an Irish joke?"

"I couldn't," said Fitzgerald. "I don't know her. I've never met her."

*'Please. She's so upset. We don't know if she's even going to be able to work. Please try."

To oblige Goulding, Fitzgerald hesitantly approached the actress, whose secretary and best friend she was set to play in Dark Victory.

4 'Who are you?" said Bette.

"My name is Geraldine Fitzgerald, and I'm going to play Ann."

"Oh."

"Eddie Goulding told me to come over and tell you an Irish joke."

"What?"

"Well, Eddie says that he thinks you're a bit unhappy today and that you'd like to hear an Irish joke. I'm not at all sure he's right."

"All right," Bette said, after a long, ominous silence. "Go ahead. If you have an Irish joke, tell it."

"Well," Fitzgerald began slowly, "this is a joke my grandmother told to warn me that men are unreliable. A farmer's wife was chatting away to her crony, and this is what she said: 'You can't rely on men at all! You can't, you can't. You can't depend on them at all! Just the other day when my husband came in from the field, I put his stew down in front of him—and he pushed it away! So I took the bowl and I brought it out to the half-door, and I took out the mouse that was in the stew and I threw it out into the backyard. And then I brought back the bowl to my husband and put it down on the table in front of him—and he pushed it away again! You see, that's men all over. He wouldn't have it with the mouse in it, and he wouldn't have it with the mouse out of it!' "

At which Bette emitted a great shriek of laughter: signal to Goulding that she was ready to begin.

On Broadway, in November of 1934, Dark Victory had been widely regarded as little more than a "made-to-order vehicle" for Tallulah Bankhead. Her appearance as the doomed "Long Island playgirl and horsewoman" Judith Traherne was what the New York World-Telegram's Robert Garland called the sole "reason for its being"; while Percy Hammond, in the New York Herald Tribune, recommended it as "an admirable utensil for its star's shiny technique' '— replete with a good deal of "eloquent shivering" when Tallulah's "spoiled darling of Bridgehampton" learns she is going to die. IWo months later, in January, calling Dark Victory "the best

modern woman's vehicle, potentially, I've read since A Bill of Divorcement, '' David Selznick wrote to urge Greta Garbo to consider portraying Judith Traherne on-screen (with a script by Philip Barry and direction by George Cukor) before she undertook a planned film version of Anna Karenina. Nothing came of Selznick's proposal, and exactly a year later, at Warners, Hal Wallis's executive assistant, Walter MacEwen, endeavored to acquire the rights from Selznick—this time as a Kay Francis vehicle, to be scripted by Casey Robinson. Since then, however, in the aftermath of Jezebel, Bette had displaced Francis as—-in Roy Obringer's words—"our top rank female artist."

On September 26, 1938, less than two weeks before she reported for work on Dark Victory, when Bette learned that Kay Francis would be leaving Warners direcdy, she instructed attorney Oscar Cummins to press for the rival actress's "dressing room"—actually, a two-story cottage—as unequivocal symbol of her ascension.

Goulding and others in the Dark Victory company quickly recognized that Bette was decidedly apprehensive as she began to work on her next major film. She was thrilled with Casey Robinson's screenplay about the terminally ill Judith Traherne and the handsome Dr. Steele, whose love transforms her before she dies, but the more she studied it, the more she wondered whether she would be able to do justice to the role. Robinson shaped his screenplay by giving it an exceptionally strong transformational arc as Judith passes from being a shallow, spoiled society girl, terrified of what the future may bring, to a woman of admirable strength, fortitude, and emotional depth.

It struck Bette that in its simplicity of line, this was a very different sort of transformation from the one she had so brilliantly enacted in Jezebel. As the Jezebel screenplay clearly suggests, in the film's final moments there is a strong element of duplicity in Julie Marsden's purported regeneration as she convinces Amy to allow her to accompany the dying Pres to the leper island. When Amy asks Julie to confirm that it is his wife whom Pres loves, the screenplay indicates that in the guise of being noble, Julie responds with a convenient he, uttering the words of reassurance Amy ' 'wants to believe." In the film, Davis adds immeasurably to the moment by refusing to make it too clear that she is lying. When Julie concedes to Amy, "We both know—Pres loves his wife," Bette leaves us uncertain whether or not she is telling the truth as she sees it. The actress discovered no such intriguing duplicity or ambiguity in Judith Traherne's metamorphosis in Dark Victory. Casey Robin-

son's considerably less subtle screenplay required her to show the beats by which Judith is transformed into the fine, courageous figure whom Bette intermittently despaired of being able to portray convincingly onscreen because, quite simply, she feared the ennobled Judith was so entirely unlike herself.

An unusually candid letter that Bette wrote to Teddy Newton, an actor she and Robin had first known in New York, discloses the intense feelings of self-loathing and doubt that tormented her during the filming of Dark Victory. In the course of four handwritten pages, Bette details the paralyzing guilt she feels about her admittedly cruel treatment of Ham. For the first time in her life, a lack of self-respect is making it hard for her to look at herself in the mirror. Her agitation over all she has done to hurt poor, sweet Ham has left her so sick that she is finding it difficult to perform satisfactorily in Dark Victory, a project she insists she adores.

Although Bette had desperately wanted to exile her husband and had seemed to do everything she could to humiliate him and force him from their home, now that he was finally gone she was tortured with regret. Part of this, as always with Bette, was sheer selfishness. For all her contempt for Ham, she had grown accustomed to having him at home as an audience for her tirades, the passive object of her abuse. Although she had deliberately driven him away, there were moments when she seemed strangely to regard his departure and divorce suit as yet another rejection of her.

However naively, she had fully expected Howard Hughes to take her husband's place. The tycoon's sudden, unexpected defection ("a blow to my ego," as she later described it) left her alone to brood over her two short-lived extramarital affairs, both of which had ended in rejection and sexual humiliation for Bette. Despite the high spirits with which she had flung herself into the liaisons with Wyler and Hughes, such behavior went against the grain of everything her background and experience had taught her to believe. Her father's adultery so many years before had unquestionably been the determining factor in Bette's life; his subsequent marriage to his mistress was a painful fact she had always felt it necessary to repress.

Having long perceived herself as a victim of her father's adultery, now she had emulated his behavior in her own extramarital affairs, and she began to find it unbearable to think of herself in these terms. Thus the absurd, oft-repeated story she started to tell in this period about Ham's having blackmailed Howard Hughes with a secret recording he had made of one of the tycoon's trysts with Bette. As Davis's friends knew only too well, such behavior would have been

entirely out of keeping with Ham Nelson's gentle, temperate nature. Besides, so openly had Hughes conducted his brief affair with Bette that it would hardly have been necessary for her husband to resort to anything like secret sleuthing to prove her unfaithfulness. For Bette, however, the spurious story had the distinct benefit of transforming her into the victim of her husband's cruel behavior, rather than the other way around. To judge by Bette's letter to Teddy Newton, in which one discovers no trace of the indignation against Ham she regularly voiced among friends and associates, transferring her own unbearable guilt to her husband was something she very badly needed to do at the moment. And in her mortification over Hughes's having swiftly lost interest in her, the blackmail story possessed the added advantage of seeming to explain why the tycoon had so abruptly disappeared from her life.

Her emotions already in disarray over the loss of Hughes and the end of her marriage to Ham, Bette found herself scarcely able to continue work on Dark Victory when, in the midst of filming, she learned of Willy Wyler's marriage to Margaret Tallichet, to whom the director had proposed ten days after they met. Knowing his friend's desire to keep his wedding plans secret, John Huston had offered the house of his father, Walter Huston, in Running Springs in the San Bernardino Mountains as a good place to get married far from the Hollywood madding crowd. Only closest friends and family members would be present: John Huston and his wife, Lesley, Pfcul and Lupita Kohner, Wyler's lawyer, Mark Cohen, and the director's parents, Melanie and Leopold Wyler, and his brother, Robert. For all the attempts at secrecy, word about the impending marriage began to spread soon after Wyler and his bride-to-be signed a year's lease on a house just below Jack and Ann Warner's in Beverly Hills. That Bette had probably heard about the wedding in advance is suggested by her behavior as recorded in studio production reports when the second week of shooting drew to a close. On Friday, October 21, even as Willy and Talli were headed for the San Bernardino Mountains, Bette had begun to complain of not feeling well. And the next morning, October 22—Willy's wedding day—Bette's chauffeur, Brown, appeared on the set with a note to Goulding, informing the director that she was too ill to come to work.