Iconic Bette Davis
by Spencer Warren
Issue 107 - May 7, 2008

The centenary of one of the iconic stars and most esteemed actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Bette Davis, is being honored in festivals around the country and at the Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles. Born April 5, 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts, as Ruth Elizabeth Davis, she made her first film in 1931, reached her peak in the later 1930’s and 1940’s, and made her final film in 1989, the year of her death.

Miss Davis’s signature roles were in highly colored melodramas that were the specialty of the studio where she was under contract for twenty years, Warner Brothers. This style will be most familiar to readers from Casablanca (1942). These films actually wear their years better than some of the more solemn, ambitious films made at other studios during this period, such as MGM, the “Tiffany” of Hollywood.

Michael Curtiz, the biggest Warners director, who was behind the camera for Casablanca, didn’t think much of Bette early in her career because, compared to all the other leading ladies, she was a plain Jane, appearing to lack sex appeal. Over his protests the young actress won the part of a Southern belle vixen in 1932’s The Cabin in the Cotton. Flirting with an earnest young man in front of his girl, the bleach blonde Bette wins his attention with the first of the many priceless lines that would help define her career: “Ah’d like to kiss ya, but Ah just washed ma hair.” Here she first demonstrated how she could make up for her lack of beauty with the force and energy of her acting.

Ambitious even by Hollywood actor standards, Bette had to crawl and scratch for good parts. Her big break came when Warners loaned her to RKO to play the Cockney tramp, Mildred Rogers, who lures into the gutter a shy, serious medical student, Philip Carey, suffering from a club foot (Leslie Howard) in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1934). Here she had to become ugly and repulsive, not exactly the formula for stardom in those days. But her overwhelming, raw intensity stunned audiences at the time. In her big scene she tells off the pathetic student, having in a fit of rage turned his apartment into a shambles and burned his valued stock securities after he twice took her back when she ran off with other men (even after the two had been engaged!). She even returned the first time with another man’s baby, whom poor Philip cared for as his own. She screams how much she never really could stand him, despite the show she put on. Reaching fever pitch, drawing her arm across her lips, she hollers that after he would kiss her she was so disgusted, “I’d wipe my mouth, WIPE my mouth.” Further going against the path taken by most other actresses, she dies in the end, by then as emaciated a character as ever appeared on the screen. Bette Davis truly earned success by going against the grain. She also was more of a character actress, unlike most women stars, who relied more on their beauty and personality.

Back at Warner Brothers, Bette won the Oscar as best actress the following year for Dangerous, which was a consolation prize for not winning for Of Human Bondage. But she revolted against the tawdry roles and cheap films to which she was being relegated by studio-head Jack L. Warner. Demonstrating in real life the same iron will she portrayed on screen, still in her twenties, she risked her young career by fleeing to England in order to escape the straight-jacket studio contract that bound most stars to their studios with no choice of roles. (And most earned their money in those days – in the early-mid thirties, for example, Bette was making five or six films a year.) She lost the subsequent lawsuit and returned to Hollywood, but Warner had finally got the message. His studio got away from its “cheapie” style and started to bankroll ambitious movies, like the Errol Flynn The Adventures of Robin Hood and Bette’s Jezebel, both released in 1938.

This was a lavish antebellum Old South drama that cashed in on the national mania ignited by publication of Gone With the Wind in 1936 and by the ongoing search for the ideal actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in the movie, a part Bette lusted after but did not get. Here she is Julie Marsden, an untameable “filly” whose stubborn ways cost her the love of her banker fiance, Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda). Her set piece scene is where she shocks the Louisiana establishment by wearing a pink dress to the lavish local ball; all the other girls of course are dressed in white. Angered, Preston forces her to dance with him, on and on, accompanied by Max Steiner’s famous waltz, until they are the only ones left on the floor, surrounded by the enraged aristocracy. In this way he breaks the stubborn filly. (Note, as I have emphasized in earlier essays and reviews, how in these films the plot is dramatized and visualized with minimal dialogue, in contrast to the reliance on lots of talk in many modern films.) Julie loses Preston – horrors – to a Yankee girl, but proves her mettle in the climax when she risks her life to save his, tending to him in the sick quarter of town amidst a yellow fever epidemic. Bette won her second Oscar in three years.

Bette fought not only for better parts in films with more expensive production values, but also for better directors. William Wyler, with whom she had an adulterous affair and who reportedly was the great love of her life, directed Jezebel, as well as two of her many other hits of this peak period: The Letter (1940), based on another Maugham work, in which as a bored wife in the East Indies she murders her lover, and The Little Foxes (1941), from the Lillian Hellman play. Another top director was Edmund Goulding, who guided her to another Oscar nomination right after Jezebel, for Dark Victory (1939). Here Bette is Judith Traherne, a high-living, shallow society woman (the young Ronald Reagan plays one of her “set”) who lives for nothing but pleasure until she is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. Bette memorably manages the character transformation into a serious, sensitive woman; the final scene, as she is going blind and retires to her bedroom to await the end, is perhaps the most unforgettable of her career.

Now Bette was rolling out one hit after another – she was nominated for best actress four straight years from 1939 to 1942 and again in 1944. Her most famous film may be Now, Voyager (1942). She is the repressed young Boston spinster, Charlotte Vale, dominated by her tyrannical mother (Gladys Cooper), who is opened to life under the wise, understanding guidance of a psychiatrist, Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains). On a South American cruise she falls in love with Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid, the same year he played Victor Laszlo in Casablanca), only to learn he is the father of a young girl and trapped in a loveless marriage. Charlotte returns home and, as a result of a number of plot twists, she finds herself entrusted with the care of Jerry’s daughter, Tina, like her, a girl with a troubled past with which Charlotte can empathize. Charlotte becomes her de facto mother. Tina knows nothing of the mutual affection between Charlotte and her father, who comes to visit. This leads us to one of the signature romantic climaxes and one of the most famous scenes in Golden Age Hollywood movies. Divorce is out of the question. But the couple don’t have to marry because they find their love in their selfless devotion to Tina. This is their pact for life. Standing on the porch, night having arrived, Jerry says to Charlotte, “Shall we have a cigarette on it?” He lights two cigarettes between his lips and gives one to her. “Will you be happy, Charlotte?” he asks. And as Max Steiner’s renowned Oscar-winning love theme fills the soundtrack and the camera turns skyward, Charlotte responds, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.”

Needless to say, even putting aside the sentimentality, a film like Now, Voyager would not be made today because it centers on an unconsummated love of selfless devotion. The main characters cannot do as they please and gratify their desires. What a reactionary concept in twenty-first century America! This helps to explain why one of the staples of Golden Age Hollywood, the romantic tear-jerker, has become extinct.

By the later 1940’s, Bette’s career at Warners was fading. Her last film under contract there, which she hated but which today is something of a cult classic, was Beyond the Forest. The advertising tagline was: “She’s a midnight girl in a five o’clock town.” Sporting a black wig, Bette is Rosa Moline, the very bored wife of the very noble and boring Dr. Joseph Moline (Joseph Cotten) in a small Wisconsin town. She is given another famous Davis line: Shuffling down the stairs one morning and looking upon their modest, boring, small living room, she cracks as only she can, “What a dump!” The high point of the film is her desperate scene on the dark, rainy Chicago streets; she has run off to the big city chasing after the smooth businessman with whom she had an affair, Ned Latimer (David Brian), only to learn that she meant nothing to him – he repeatedly refuses to see her when she comes, luggage in hand, to his office. Once again, a big emotional scene, this time of the protagonist’s total mental collapse, is dramatized visually, as Bette, with nowhere to go, drags her suitcase through her literal nightmare of despair (while on the soundtrack we hear Max Steiner’s sarcastic arrangement of “Chicago, Chicago.” Bette once said “Max knew more about drama than any of us.”). True, this may not be high drama, but as directed with his usual passionate professionalism and emotional force by King Vidor, it’s a memorable scene and film.

What was Bette to do, now aged 41 and cast off by her studio after several flops? Not for the first time, her career won new life, with the part of a lifetime as the grande dame of Broadway, Margot Channing, in All About Eve (1950). Bette was born for this part and it is the most serious, accomplished acting of her long career. As Margot, at her swank penthouse party, finally begins to recognize how the seemingly sweet ingénue she took in off the streets, Eve (Anne Baxter), is a queen bitch out to steal her career, and her man (Gary Merrill, shortly to become Bette’s real-life fourth husband), she launches the evening with another famous Bette line: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Directed and written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz at Twentieth-Century Fox, this is a straight drama, unlike the melodramas in which Bette specialized at Warners. She seems more relaxed, not feeling the need to give off the sparks that ignited her earlier roles. Bette was ranked behind Katharine Hepburn, as the number two movie actress of all time in an American Film Institute poll ten years ago. But she didn’t have quite the number of prestigious roles enjoyed by many of the others near her on the list (e.g. Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman).

Bette’s last famous role was as the over-the-top, deranged, vindictive former child movie star, Baby Jane Hudson, literally torturing her rival sister, former child star Blanche (Joan Crawford) in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Directed by the sometime over-the-top Robert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Dirty Dozen (1967)), what makes this film special is that in real life the two now aging grande dames of Hollywood were fierce rivals and made no secret of it. Bette considered Joan a poseur who relied only on personality, not acting ability. So her tormenting of her poor, wheelchair-bound sister in their dated mansion has a special ring of truth. When Blanche tells Jane that if she weren’t crippled in her wheelchair, Jane could not be doing to her all these horrible things, Bette taunts Blanche with her last great movie line: “But ya are, Blanche. Ya are!”

Bette Davis does not appear to have been a happy woman, with her three divorces (a fourth husband died on her). She had three children, one of whom, after writing a nasty “tell all Mommie Dearest” book about her, was cut out of her will. The Warners director Vincent Sherman wrote in his memoir about their affair in the 1940’s and how Bette recognized she had sacrificed her personal life on the altar of her career.

Allow me to close with my two favorite Bette Davis movies, whose plots underline the strong moral substance of the movies that Americans flocked to in this bygone, pre-1960s era. The first is The Old Maid (1939), directed by Edmund Goulding, based on the novel by Edith Wharton and stage adaptation by Zoe Akins. In the Civil War South, Charlotte Lovell (Bette) makes a woman’s grievous mistake with the young man she loves, Clem (frequent co-star George Brent), who earlier had fallen for the wiles of her selfish sister, Delia (Miriam Hopkins). Except Delia, after having come between them, jilted Clem for a wealthy man, and Clem had gone to Charlotte for sympathy. Charlotte later gives birth out of wedlock and Clem is killed at Vicksburg. Her daughter, Tina (Jane Bryan) is raised as a foundling, until the sisters agree that Delia, who is now an aristocratic widow, should adopt Tina. Charlotte becomes the spinster aunt of the household. And oh! How she suffers in this movie. Because Charlotte is always trying to teach Tina moral virtue, as opposed to the spoiling she gets from her “mother” Delia, Tina comes to hate her “aunt.” And Charlotte’s unending, silent suffering is compounded by the knowledge that Delia bears some responsibility for wrecking her life and consigning her to the place of the stern spinster aunt, alienated from her little girl. As the film proceeds, the competitive, mean Delia sticks the knife into Charlotte more and more, often in front of the girl, in order to buy the girl’s affections for herself. And Delia’s knife is even sharper than appears because in real life Bette had had an affair with Miriam Hopkins’s husband, director Anatole Litvak. And, perhaps even worse, Miriam had played Jezebel in the play Warners bought for Bette and which became Bette’s Oscar-winning performance! What is more, Miriam Hopkins was one actress who could match Bette on screen, her selfishness playing off Bette’s silent suffering. (They were teamed again in 1943 as rival author “friends” in Old Acquaintance.)

After ninety minutes of this torrent of emotional blood-letting, everything works out for the best – with, to be sure, the ideal of self-sacrifice preserved. Charlotte had been on the verge of revealing the truth to Tina before deciding to take the secret to her grave. But at least Tina then comes to appreciate Charlotte’s years of devotion, doing only what was best for Tina. In the finale, as Tina boards a carriage with her new husband to head off to what we know will be a good life, she bids good-bye to the now aged woman she still believes to be her ever caring spinster aunt -- and Goulding’s camera moves in on a close-up of the proud Charlotte for the end, leaving this viewer with tears in his eyes. Yes, this is soap opera, but the high professionalism of the film from all concerned, not least Bette’s subtle portrayal of silent suffering, raises it to a higher level.

My other favorite Bette Davis movie is A Stolen Life (1946), directed by the little known but accomplished Curtis Bernhardt. Bette plays twin sisters on Martha’s Vineyard: the bad sister (Patricia Bosworth) whom the men all love because of her alluring, superficial qualities, and the good sister (Kate), a painter, whom the men ignore because her good qualities are seen as unexciting and boring. Both fall for the handsome man in town Bill (Glenn Ford), and of course he marries Patricia, leaving Kate to suffer alone with her painting. Later, Patricia and Kate are together on their sailing boat when they encounter a fierce storm. Kate awakens on the rocks to learn Patricia has drowned and Bill can now be hers. So she decides to assume the identity of her popular sister. However, she comes to see that the marriage had gone on the rocks (like the sailing boat) because one cannot live life based on the superficial qualities; it’s what people have deep down that counts, and Bill had been greatly wounded by Patricia’s bad behavior. Over time, Kate finds that what Bill wants and needs is the other sister, i.e. herself. Indeed, we see him falling in love with Kate as he comes to see her qualities. (The pause in relations between Bill and Patricia, which is continued once Kate assumes her sister’s identity, covered the film with the Hollywood Production Code then in force, which of course would never have permitted the unmarried couple to live as if they were married.)

So in the end Kate dramatically reveals her true self, they become married and live happily ever after. Playing two opposites obviously was right up Bette’s alley, and as always, she made the most of her opportunity.

Bette Davis fought hard for what she accomplished, and there can be no doubt that her legacy will be celebrated at her bi-centenary, after decades more movie-going pleasure for future generations.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline On Line’s media critic.