Dark Victory: The Life Of Bette Davis Part 5

The ceremony was held at the Biltmore Hotel on February 23. Bette arrived with an eight-man escort that included Wyler. Having been chastised for the pedestrian dress she wore to accept her Oscar for Dangerous three years before, Bette took more care this time. Mayme Ober Peake was ecstatic: "Bette, wearing her new short, softly-waved haircut for the first time in public, was a stunner in brown net, made with a very full bouffant skirt and tight bodice. Across the front of the bodice was inset a bird of paradise!"49 Jezebel-and Grand Illusion-lost the Best Picture award to Frank Capra's bland You Can't Take It With You. Fay Bainter won for Best Supporting Actress; and finally, at the tail end of the awards, Sir Cedric Hardwicke announced that the Best Actress of 1938 was Bette Davis.

She thanked the Academy but singled out William Wyler and insisted that he stand and take a bow. "I earned the Oscar I received for Jezebel," Davis later wrote. "The thrill of winning my second Oscar was only lessened by the Academy's failure to give the directorial award to w.i.l.l.y. He made my performance. He made the script. Jezebel is a fine picture. It was all Wyler."

Onstage, in front of her peers, Bette's nervous exhaustion vanished. She was confident, radiant, proud. "I was never surer of myself professionally than at this moment."50

CHAPTER.

9.

"A GIRL WHO DIES"

THE SISTERS WENT INTO PRODUCTION ON the morning of Monday June 6, 1938, and continued for almost nine weeks, ending at 3:00 a.m. on Sat.u.r.day August 6.1 Bette was paired for the first time with the magnificent Errol Flynn, a man far more gorgeous than any of the actresses playing the t.i.tle characters.

By the age of twenty-nine, Flynn had lived a life that would have been considered delinquent if it hadn't been so exotic and enviable and Flynn himself had been homely. He was born in Hobart, Tasmania. Sent to Australia's finest prep schools, he was inevitably expelled; sailing to New Guinea at sixteen to take a government job, he embarked instead on a private quest for gold ore. The gold hunter then turned sailor, then tobacco plantation overlord, after which he became the most naturalistic of actors because he never knew quite what he was doing other than compelling audiences to gaze upon him in a kind of dazzled wonder.

By the age of twenty-four, he was in England with the Northampton Repertory Company. At twenty-six, he was a movie star in Hollywood with Captain Blood. By the time The Sisters went into production, he was Warners' baddest bad boy-thrilling audiences by swashbuckling his way through hits like The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Adventures of Robin Hood, all the while pulling off his tights offscreen for a series of many women and even a few men on a frighteningly tight timetable that led to the expression "in like Flynn," the suggestion being that it took him mere moments to get where he wanted.

Flynn wasn't afraid to offend his directors and producers, not to mention Jack Warner himself, with his chronic lateness and unpredictability, nor was he reluctant to pick fights on the set, the most notorious of which was his refusal on the set of Captain Blood to let the makeup department shave Ross Alexander's hairy armpits for Alexander's spread-eagled flogging scene because he, Flynn, took too much s.e.xual pleasure in them offscreen, a point Flynn pursued loudly and in the most colorful language until the director, Michael Curtiz, backed down and left Alexander's armpits alone.

Where Bette was methodical as a worker, Errol was anarchic and devil-may-care. For Davis, filmmaking was work, and work was good, and good was virtue and practicality in equal measure. For Flynn making movies was a sport of no more consequence than a good athletic screw. One might a.s.sume that there was immediate friction between the two stars, but there wasn't. "The most beautiful person we've ever had on the screen" is how Davis described him years later. "He openly said he knew nothing about acting, and I admired his honesty because he was absolutely right."2 Bette's confidant, Warner's makeup chief, Perc Westmore (Perc being p.r.o.nounced as in Percival), was amazed at the rapport between the two stars. According to his nephew, Frank Westmore, "It baffled Perc when Bette Davis, the queen supreme of the Warner Bros. lot, raved about 'Errol's charm and enchanting ways' all during the filming of their first movie together, The Sisters, but Bette later explained that she adored working with Flynn 'because he never really worked. He was just there.' "3 The Sisters is a competent and reasonably involving melodrama punctuated by surprisingly effective if archaic special effects. The story begins in 1904 in Silver Bow, Montana, where three sisters-Louise (Davis), Helen (Anita Louise), and Grace (Jane Bryan)-prepare to marry under the seemingly watchful but effectively impotent eyes of their parents (Beulah Bondi and Henry Travers). Louise meets the dashing writer Frank (Flynn) at a Teddy Roosevelt election-night party; they're married within the week, and off they go to San Francisco, where Frank finds work as a low-level sportswriter while trying to write his cherished novel. But his interests really lie in drink. (The makeup department's effort to make Flynn look like a down-at-his-heels drunk is not a success. His smooth, painted-on five-o'clock shadow fails to soften his chiseled jaw and cheekbones, and what with the delicate, derelict-suggesting darkening under his eyes he ends up looking s.e.xier than ever.) Louise miscarries. Frank takes a slow boat to Singapore, leaving Louise alone just as the 1906 earthquake hits. She winds up in a kindly Oakland wh.o.r.ehouse but returns quickly to her job as a department store owner's a.s.sistant. The boss (Ian Hunter) falls in love with her, but she returns to Montana on a family emergency, and at a Taft inauguration ball Frank shows up, she forgives him, and they reconcile, though the actual ending of the film is a stilted shot of the three overly illuminated sisters standing in a row in the middle of a crowded dance floor gazing blankly off into nowhere as the camera cranes back and up.

Like Leslie Howard before him, Flynn made overtures to Davis, but once again she spurned them. "I confused him utterly," Davis wrote in The Lonely Life. "One day he smiled that c.o.c.ky smile and looked directly at me. 'I'd love to proposition you, Bette, but I'm afraid you'd laugh at me.' I never miss the rare opportunity to agree with a man. 'You're so right, Errol.' He bit his lip, waved his arm through the air and bowed in mock chivalry like Captain Blood. He was extremely graceful in retreat."4 She failed to explain why she turned him down.

There was the inevitable dustup with the director, Anatole Litvak, a personally dashing womanizer but just an average-Joe director. What the critic David Thomson writes of Litvak's late career applies equally to some of his early work: "Litvak solemnly puts his actresses through the motions of ordeal."5 In the earthquake scene in The Sisters, he told Bette to stand in position in her upper-floor apartment set, and, at his command, the set fell to pieces around her as she screamed, flailed her arms, and stayed precisely on target. "If I had been a fraction of an inch off my position, that would have been that," Bette later wrote. "As it was, a splinter from a crystal chandelier flew in my eye." Bobby Davis Pelgram happened to be on the set that day, "knitting serenely in a corner" until the earthquake hit. "Tola Litvak!" Bobby screamed after he called "Cut." "You are a son of a b.i.t.c.h!"6 Oddly, Bette and Bobby decided that Litvak had gotten personal by pulling this stunt; he was out to get her, Bette believed. And in the manner of all paranoiacs, she came up with what was, to her, a plausible reason: the cheap b.a.s.t.a.r.d was saving money by not hiring a stunt double.7 It's curious that throughout her life Davis claimed to be striving for truth and realism but remained, in this instance at least, so resistant to performing physical action in its real, spatial context. Litvak films the collapse of the building mostly in master shot. The camera is far enough away from Bette that we continually see the full extent of the devastation, but it's close enough to register the fact that it's Bette Davis herself who risks being hurt or even killed by a shifting floor or falling bricks. That's what gives the scene its tension and bite, and Litvak was wise not to spoil the effect by shooting a stand-in's faceless form from so far away that it wouldn't matter who she was.

ONE OF THE most lurid sections of Charles Higham's Bette: The Life of Bette Davis concerns her brief affair with Howard Hughes, the peculiar and fantastically wealthy aeronautics designer, flier, filmmaker, and, at the time of Bette's affair, on-again off-again lover of Katharine Hepburn. Hughes, Higham a.s.serts as we return to our demeaningly squatting position at the bedroom door's keyhole, "suffered from recurrent ejaculatory impotence," and Bette, "who was not beautiful and thus was not threatening, told her friends she managed to help him overcome his impotence. She was sweet and kind and good to Hughes-she set his mind free of anxiety."8 Higham goes on to tell what seems to be an over-the-top story involving a jealous and maddened Ham Nelson returning from New York, wiring their bedroom on Coldwater Canyon Drive for sound-"with the aid of a well-known private detective"-and sitting alone in a sound truck up the road listening to his wife and Hughes making what was, for Hughes at least, psychotherapeutic love. As Higham reports, Ham "suddenly could endure no more. He raced down to the back door, let himself in with a key, and burst into the bedroom. Hughes tried to punch Ham in the face. He flubbed it." The enraged Ham then threatened to blackmail both Bette and Hughes-Bette by revealing her adultery to the press, Hughes by hawking the aural evidence of Hughes's s.e.xual dysfunction to the highest bidder. Bette, Higham writes, "became hysterical as Ham ran out."

The story turns even more thrilling when Higham a.s.serts that Hughes "hired a professional gangster to kill Ham but then learned that Ham had advised the police that if he were murdered, Hughes would be responsible for the killing" and called the goon off. Hughes is said to have paid Ham $70,000 to destroy the recording, Bette is said to have repaid Hughes by taking out a loan, and Hughes-by all accounts, the multimillionaire actually took her money-was kind enough to send her a flower every year on the anniversary of the blackmail loot's repayment.9 Lawrence Quirk, in Fasten Your Seat Belts: The Pa.s.sionate Life of Bette Davis, and James Spada, in More Than a Woman: An Intimate Biography of Bette Davis, supply more details of the affair: Bette met Hughes while she was selling raffle tickets at a benefit for the Tailwaggers, an organization that cared for lost or abandoned dogs, at the Beverly Hills Hotel in September 1938. Bette had headed the Tailwaggers since June. ("All my life I've been animal crazy, especially over dogs," Bette said around this time. "But only when I became president of the Tailwaggers did I become acutely aware of the problems of dogdom.")10 They began their affair at Hughes's Malibu beach house, where Hughes once romantically "covered his bed with gardenias and made love to her amid the intoxicatingly rich aroma of the exotic flower."11 Spada provides the exact date of the stealth recording-September 22, 1938-but claims that instead of Higham's "well-known private detective," Ham enlisted the aid of his turncoat brother-in-law, Robert Pel-gram. In this version there is no sound truck with its c.u.mbersome (and consequently suspect) trail of wires leading out of the house, across the lawn, up the street, and into a parked vehicle. Instead, according to Spada-who got his information from Bobby and Robert Pelgram's daughter, Fay-the crafty brothers-in-law drilled holes in the floorboards and ran wires from the bedroom to the bas.e.m.e.nt, where they installed the recording device, all during the day while Bette was distracted at the studio. Spada also provides the detail that the flower Hughes sent every year was a red rose.

Although it seems so out of character for Ham Nelson to have become a frenzied blackmailer, Vik Greenfield, Bette's personal a.s.sistant in the late 1960s to mid-1970s, swears that the incident really took place as Quirk and Spada described it. "It's true," Greenfield stated. How did he know? "Because Bette told me," he placidly answered.12 The Hollywood press knew only about the tension in the marriage, not the affair with Hughes or the blackmailing. A clipping dated August 30, 1938, almost a month before the crisis, already finds Bette and Bobby (amusingly called Mrs. Pilgrim) at a Glenbrook, Nevada, divorce resort. Another quotes Bette in "righteous wrath" saying, "I am in Nevada for a vacation-not a divorce!" Another reports, erroneously I imagine, that Ham had actually joined her at Glenbrook. Still another touchingly reveals that Ham called his wife "Spuds."

By September 17, the rumors hadn't abated. The columnist Harrison Carroll quoted Ham as saying, "We'll just have to wait for developments." On September 20, Bette said, "There is no use denying that we are having difficulties." If Spada's date is correct, the difficulties worsened considerably on the twenty-second, and on September 27, Carroll reported that the couple had separated, with Ham moving out of the Coldwater Canyon house and into the home of "L. Linsk, a fellow a.s.sociate in the Rockwell-O'Keefe Agency." Bette was still calling it "a marriage vacation."

Mayme Ober Peake weighed in. She quoted Bette: "I found one thing in England I hope to keep forever-peace of mind. A good licking is good for the soul."13 Ham filed divorce papers on November 22, alleging among other things that Bette was p.r.o.ne to give more attention to her books than to her husband. From the Complaint for Divorce, dated November 22, 1938, Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr., plaintiff, versus Ruth Elizabeth Nelson, defendant: "Defendant has insisted on occupying herself with reading to a totally unnecessary degree, and upon solicitation by plaintiff to exhibit some evidence of conjugal friendliness and affection, defendant would become enraged and indulged in a blatant array of epithets and derision."14 When the matter came before Judge Thurmand Clarke on December 6, the proceedings contained the following snippet of dialogue: JUDGE CLARKE: Did she do a great deal of reading?

HAM: Yes. To an unnecessary degree.

Judge Clarke granted the divorce.

Bette received an unsigned letter from an irate woman. Because of Bette's divorce, the former fan wrote, her husband and sons refused to see any more of her movies ever again. "They all hate you and I think you belong in h.e.l.l and I hope you go there," she explained.15 Bette saved this letter for the rest of her life.

HOW WOULD YOU feel if you were told you had only six months to live? This was the reporter Gladys Hall's question to Bette Davis at the time of Dark Victory's release. "I would resent it horribly," Bette replied before shifting from decorous indignation to out-of-control rage: "I'd hate to! I'd scream, 'Why should this happen to me?' I'd go crazy, wild, mad! I'd try hard to deaden my agony with insane sedatives. I'd try to forget by any means I could lay my frantic hands to-drinking, love affairs, noisy nightmares, anything to dull the edges of the essential nightmare."16 No doubt the increasingly histrionic Davis would have reacted precisely as she said she would at the time. Her divorce from Ham had made her especially vulnerable to the emotional shakes she barely restrained even at the best of times. But, as almost always, the actress in her won out. In Dark Victory, she plays her character's impending death much more delicately. Judith Traherne is a marvelous blend of n.o.bility and the jitters, and Bette related to her intensely. Many years later, with the critical distance afforded by age and experience, she called Judith Traherne "my favorite-and the public's favorite-part I have ever played."17 The original play, by George Emerson Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, starred the gravel-throated Tallulah Bankhead and ran for only fifty-one performances late in 1934. Although the critics loved Bankhead, the play got emphatically mixed reviews. Brooks Atkinson, for instance, called it "a curious stew of mixed vegetables."18 Still, the melodrama was appealing enough to Gloria Swanson, who pitched it to Columbia's Harry Cohn as a vehicle for herself. Cohn wasn't as impressed as Swanson was and took a pa.s.s.19 At around the same time, David O. Selznick bought the rights with an eye toward casting Greta Garbo and Fredric March; the two stars were about to make Anna Karenina, a project Selznick considered too similar to Garbo's other costume dramas. When Garbo turned him down, he offered the role to Merle Oberon, but Dark Victory stayed dormant.20 Davis learned of the property early in 1938, and in characteristic fashion, she made a nuisance of herself over it with the front office. She cajoled to no avail until, finally, one Warners producer expressed interest: David Lewis, an a.s.sociate producer of The Sisters and the boyfriend of the director James Whale. Together, they approached Edmund Goulding, who had made Grand Hotel. His old-fashioned treatment of Jezebel to the contrary notwithstanding, Goulding knew the value of a good melodrama. The threesome of Davis, Goulding, and Lewis convinced Jack Warner to buy the rights from Selznick for $50,000, though Warner himself couldn't understand why anybody would "want to see a picture about a girl who dies."21 It's telling that Bette Davis received the most sympathetic responses from Lewis and Goulding, a gay man and a bis.e.xual, rather than Jack Warner or Hal Wallis. If there is such a thing as a gay sensibility, however imprecise and indefinable it may be, Dark Victory embodies it, at least in part. The writer Jeff Weinstein once offered a definition that stands the test of time: when asked whether there was such a thing as a gay sensibility and whether it had any influence on mainstream culture, Weinstein answered that, no, there is no such thing as a gay sensibility, and yes, it has had an enormous influence on popular culture. Dark Victory is a cla.s.sic case in point.

Judith Traherne is already gay in the archaic sense of the word: she's flippant, merry, a bit boozy. She's a good-time gal with unlimited wealth and a fabulous wardrobe, and any gay man worth his salt-any gay man d'un certain ge, that is-would happily imagine himself in her pumps. But Dark Victory's unabashedly amplified, high-stakes melodrama, especially as acted out by Bette Davis, elevates it into the pantheon of gay iconography-the impa.s.sioned and exceedingly imitable realm of the drama queen. It's not just that the queen of both fact and fiction reigns melodramatically, though in this case, of course, she's awarded a brain tumor and a splendid, heartrending death. More essentially, it's the pent-up energy of concealment and its imminent breakdown that provide the gay regent with much of her authority. The question of who knows what about one lies at the heart of gay men's experience-gay men of the twentieth century, at least. The queer theorist Eve Sedgwick calls it "the epistemology of the closet."

In this light, it's little wonder that Bette Davis became a gay icon. As the playwright, actor, and actress Charles Busch notes, "She's wonderful at playing someone with a secret-like the scenes in Dark Victory where she knows she's dying, and she's being a horrible b.i.t.c.h to everybody."22 Cabin in the Cotton's seductive and bizarre "I'd love to kiss ya but I just washed my hair" may have been her first camp-worthy bit of dialogue, but Davis's delivery of Judith Traherne's grandest line is precisely that of the flamboyant gay queen of the dramatic arts. Having discovered the truth about her own mortal illness, Judith lets her doctor and best friend in on the secret they have kept from her by s.n.a.t.c.hing the menu out of the waiter's hands and, her nostrils flaring, declaring, "I think I'll have a large order of prognosis negative!" From these glorious moments of subterfuge and its destruction, concealment and revelation, twentieth-century gay men forged their own culture.

That Edmund Goulding asked Ronald Reagan to play gay in Dark Victory adds a minor grace note to the proceedings-minor in both senses of the word. Not only is Reagan's faintly as.e.xual character, Judith's sodden friend, not terribly important to the film's nature, but the performance is soured by Reagan's lack of talent. The future president wasn't enough of an actor to play someone fundamentally unlike himself. As Reagan too euphemistically put it, "The director wanted it to be kind of a-well, as he described it once, a fellow that could sit down in the room while the gals were changing clothes and they wouldn't mind. And I didn't really see it that way." Didn't, couldn't, no matter. Goulding's biographer, Matthew Kennedy, goes so far as to call Reagan's objection a kind of h.o.m.os.e.xual panic. "He comes off as a greenhorn actor giving a poor imitation of drunkenness," Kennedy adds. "His character is watery and forgettable, and Reagan's refusal to take chances makes him appear insecure both as an actor and as a man."23 Reagan is unimpeachably straight in the worst possible way-stilted even when drunk. The drama queen, on the other hand, knows exactly when to pour it on and when to play it subtly. She saves herself for her best, most attention-grabbing moments. At other times, it's all about restraint. In the scene when Judith wanders through Dr. Steele's emptying office, discovers her own medical file on his desk, and sees the "prognosis negative" conclusion in letters from other consulting doctors, Davis abandons almost all activity and simply lets the camera register her face-slightly tense and sober but nothing more. She permits the celluloid to do the work rather than taking over the job herself. Even when she confronts Steele's nurse about the meaning of prognosis and negative, thereby confirming her own impending death, she underplays it. The buoyant Judith-partying with her aristocratic friends and parrying with Humphrey Bogart's strangely Irish horse trainer, Michael-is Davis being mannered; the serious, private Judith is much more the result of Bette's knowing when to leave well enough alone.

DARK VICTORY BEGAN shooting on October 10, 1938, under the hawklike eyes of Hal Wallis. Two weeks later, the producer was irate. The film was falling behind schedule. He complained bitterly to Goulding about what he considered to be the abominably long time it took to film two shots. One of them, representing only nine seconds of screen time, took Goulding and his cinematographer an hour and a half to shoot. "You can tell Ernie Haller for me that any other cameraman on the lot could have made the shot in half the time or less," Wallis fumed.24 There was also a fresh chill in the air between Goulding and Davis, Bette considering her director to be artistically irresolute. According to the New York Times, Goulding also kept Bette in the dark, as it were, about the nature of Judith's illness, the theory being that she would appear more believably happy during the first part of the film. Bette is said to have been annoyed, and justifiably so; a director of Goulding's experience might have given an Oscar-winning actress more credit for being able to act.25 Then again, the detail itself is suspect. Bette presumably had read the play before pitching it again and again to Warner Bros. In any event, Judith is acutely if secretively aware that there's something awfully wrong with her from the beginning. She enters the film in failed denial.

Prunella Hall was pleased to report in her Screen Gossip column not only that Bobby Davis Pelgram's two English setters, Daffy and Don, but Bobby herself were all appearing in the film. According to Prunella, the volatile Daffy refused to let anyone else handle her, so Bobby donned a maid's uniform, went before the cameras, and was so nervous about her performance that she yanked her older sister's zipper in the wrong direction and momentarily choked her.26 (Coincidently, Louella Parsons informed her readers-erroneously, of course-that Warner Bros. had cut a deal with Sigmund Freud to be a consultant on the film.)27 Bobby's scene must have ended up on the cutting-room floor, but the dogs play a key role: they humanize Judith, who responds to them with more consistent affection than she displays toward any of her other friends, including the man she marries.

It was no secret that filming Dark Victory was nerve-wracking for Bette almost to the point of debilitation. She didn't start off well in any sense of the word. The columnist Dorothy Manners reported that after the divorce, Bette tried to recuperate from the stress at "La Quinta, at Palm Springs, at all the other hideaways she sought," but that these escapes didn't really help. When Davis began shooting the film, Manners noted, "she was a sick girl mentally and physically."28 Then, after just a week of filming, and having pleaded for the role for months, she begged Hal Wallis with equal gusto to find someone else. The role was too much for her, she told him; she was ill, upset, hysterical; she couldn't bear it; he simply had to replace her. But Wallis, having seen the dailies, knew that the camera-in its cold, close, mechanical way-was picking up something ineffably honest about Davis's own anguish. "Stay sick," he said.29 She never was one to hide her neurosis successfully, if she was able to hide it at all, and everyone connected with the production was aware that she was especially fragile. "It's up to you guys to keep the lady on an even keel," Wallis told Goulding and her costar, George Brent. "Eddie, you work with her-and George, you play with her-and it'll keep her excited, amused, and on the ball."30 She missed at least three days of filming in late November because of an unspecified illness. And on December 3, the day the company filmed the gardening scene, in which Judith comments that the sky is clouding over but feels the warmth on her hand and realizes that she is going blind and will die within hours, Bette became particularly overwrought. As one production manager reported to another, "Miss Davis was taken hysterical in this scene and they had difficulties in getting it. She cried very heavily and it was very difficult and very trying for everybody to get the scene."31 By this point late in the filming Bette empathized with Judith so overpoweringly that she couldn't help sobbing at her imminent death, knowing all the while that histrionic tears were all wrong for the character. And her intensely frustrating inability to get it right only made her all the more hysterical. Goulding didn't pressure her but instead let her play the scene again and again until finally, dry-eyed, Davis gave the result they both wanted.32 Bette was characteristically hard on herself when describing her performance in this scene to Gladys Hall: "I went into the scene and knew that it was putrid. I wasn't being the character of the girl in Dark Victory, you see. I was just being Bette Davis weeping over my own heartache."33 "WHY, THE TEAR jerker is an art in itself!" Goulding declared to the New York Times around the time of the film's release. "There is a certain psychiatric technique to it. You see, no one will cry about anyone who cries about himself. In Dark Victory, I wrote into the picture a character in the person of Geraldine Fitzgerald who did all the crying for Miss Davis. If Miss Davis had wept, no one would have wept with her, but Miss Fitzgerald was in the position of the audience, weeping behind Miss Davis' back, and that gave Miss Davis a clear course of martyrdom."34 (Judith has a good friend in the play, but Fitzgerald's character is indeed Goulding's creation.) For all his talent and gay sensibility, Goulding's "psychiatric technique" fails him as far as the ending of Dark Victory is concerned. As finely, honestly heartbreaking as the ending is-it's certainly one of the most emotionally commanding last reels in American film-its heart and its art owe infinitely more to Davis than to Goulding, who keeps trumping up sentiment in all the wrong places. Once she realizes the end is imminent, Judith methodically sends Dr. Steele, now her husband, off to Philadelphia. (George Brent's sluggishness actually works to his character's advantage here, since it makes it possible for audiences to believe that this dedicated neurosurgeon remains oblivious to his wife's swiftly oncoming blindness. Casey Robinson had advocated casting Spencer Tracy as Dr. Steele instead of Brent, and one can only wonder how Tracy, much the better actor, would have handled the role.)35 She also dispatches Ann, who goes running tearfully down the street toward an unspecified destination. Alone, as she has planned to be at the end, Judith feels her way into the house and begins to climb the stairs.

Geraldine Fitzgerald, who plays Ann, recalled that the set "had been beautifully lit with a kind of heavenly glow shining on Bette as she slowly climbed the stairs. Suddenly she stopped and turned around and came down the stairs, this time very matter-of-factly (almost clumping down, you could say) and said to Eddie Goulding, 'Is Max Steiner going to underscore this scene?' 'Oh, no,' said Goulding. 'Of course not! We all know how you feel about that!' 'Good,' said Bette, 'because either I'm going up the stairs or Max Steiner is going up the stairs, but we're G.o.dd.a.m.n well not going up together!' " ("I hate to remember," Fitzgerald added, "but I think the scene was underscored and she had the Vienna Boys Choir accompanying her.")36 In fact, Steiner's underscoring is mercifully quiet-at first-as Judith ascends the stairs, gripping the banister for support. She crosses to her bedroom and closes the door behind her. But neither Goulding nor Judith's maid, Martha, takes the hint. Judith wishes above all else to be supremely alone, but Goulding cuts from the heroine sequestering herself in her bedroom to die to a shot of Martha looking stricken on the landing. He even tracks forward on this heretofore undistinguished character, giving her much more emotional weight than she either deserves or requires. If Judith's best friend, Ann, has been the audience's surrogate thus far, Goulding proceeds-most unfairly-to turn her maid into a gawking neighbor craning to get a better look at who's being carted into the ambulance at the house next door.

Goulding still doesn't let up. After Martha stares at the closed bedroom door, not only does she open it and enter, but her first impulse is, ridiculously, to draw the drapes-in the room of a woman who obviously no longer cares and can no longer see.

Goulding then pans with Martha as she crosses right to reveal a final surprise. Flying in the face of everything we know about her until this moment, Judith Traherne suddenly becomes religious: there she is, on her knees at the side of the bed, devoutly praying. It's Hollywood piety at its most intolerably phony. The free-spirited Judith has evinced absolutely no interest in G.o.d throughout the film, but now Goulding forces her to experience death as the foxhole in which atheism vanishes.

And Geraldine Fitzgerald was only partially correct: this is when the angelic choir comes in. That a sense of authenticity survives such hok.u.m is a testament to Bette Davis's measured, sure-footed performance.

Judith pulls herself onto the bed and says, "I don't want to be disturbed," but Martha persists in trying to make herself useful and begins removing what she considers to be extraneous items from the bed: a jacket, a sweater, a blouse. Martha then tucks Judith in with a comforter Judith has not requested and, at long last, makes her exit.

But Goulding's inexplicable fixation on his heroine's extraneous maid is so overpowering that he simply can't resist cutting to yet another shot of her. We see her looking stricken again, this time at the door. Finally, she closes it with herself on the other side. Good riddance, and amen.

With his heroine alone at last, Goulding gets to the heart of the matter in just a few seconds: a brilliant head-and-shoulders shot of Judith lying on her side, in solitude and at peace. A close-up would have been intrusive, the visual equivalent of Martha's pestering. A more distant shot would have lacked depth of feeling. The shot holds for only a few moments before-in an inspired touch-the image goes out of focus and blacks out, a visual trope that precisely expresses Judith's diminishing experience of vision, light, and life.

Cut to the racetrack.

In one of Goulding and Robinson's least inspired ideas, Dark Victory originally had a happy ending. Judith still died, of course; there was no miraculous cure. But her death did not originally serve as the final scene. No, Goulding and Robinson cut away from Judith dying quietly, in dignity and solitude, to a horserace, with Judith's horse charging down the stretch in the lead. Cut to Bogart's Michael in out-of-character tears. Cut to the triumphant Challenger with a wreath of flowers around his neck. Cut to Ann and Steele in Judith's old box at the track, where Ann urges the dispirited Steele to return to his medical mission. "Your work can't stop now!" she insists. "We can't let her courage have stood for nothing!" Making a bad scene even worse, Casey Robinson gave Steele one of the most ineloquent final lines in all cinema: "All right," he says.37 The end.

As David Lewis described it in a November 4 memo to Hal Wallis, Goulding wanted "to take the edge off Judith's death and [let audiences] leave the theatre with the feeling of entertainment and optimism."38 To his profound discredit, Wallis concurred, and they shot the scene. After seeing what appears to have been a fairly polished rough cut, Wallis offered some guidance. For one thing, he counseled, "shorten the long shot holding on Davis at the bed after the maid leaves." In that he was right. But there was more: "See if you can find some close-ups of a dark horse that we can cut into the race where Ann says 'Look, he's winning,' and where the boy talks to the Colonel about the horse-about three cuts of him in the proper spots"-as though Dark Victory was really the tale of a conquering steed. But even Wallis found one shot to be overly jubilant: "Take out the cut of putting the wreath on the horse," he advised.39 The film previewed on March 7, 1939, complete with the Challenger and "all right" ending. Lo: it didn't work. Wallis's a.s.sistant made the point simply, even plaintively to his boss two days later: "I do not know how the picture could end any better than by having the girl die as she did."40 It was that ending, the truncated one, that Warner Bros. released to extraordinary acclaim and tears of melodramatic fulfillment. If only they could have edited out the maid.

THE TRAILER FOR Dark Victory proved to be something of a milestone. Against a close-up of an a.s.sertively unglamorized Bette looking solemnly to the right, the crawl began: "In the career of every great actress, one role lives forever as her finest creation. Warner Bros. now proudly present [sic] the most exciting star on the screen in a story that lights the full fires of her genius. The portrait of a free soul!" Beyond trumpeting the earnestness and depth of Davis talent, which was by then irrefutable, the studio was finally fully exploiting what it had tried so hard to dampen or deny: the "free soul" in question could have just as easily been Bette as Judith Traherne. Warners at last appreciated and was willing to sell a film based on the fact that its fierce and neurotic star was indeed the rebellious and unconventional woman the public well knew her to be offscreen as well as on-.

At the same time, Warner Bros. could only go so far. "Which type of make-up for you?" the Dark Victory pressbook asked. "With medium skin and light blonde hair, Bette Davis is an outstanding example of this type beauty. Below are her make-up suggestions: powder-peach; rouge-blush; mascara-brown; lipstick-blush; eye shadow-purple." And: " 'A clear, lovely skin is the blonde's most precious beauty a.s.set,' states Bette Davis, the exquisite blonde star of Dark Victory, which will open at the Radio City Music Hall on Friday."41 Apparently n.o.body told Warners' publicists that Bette hadn't been blonde, either onscreen or off-, for several years.

Then again, Warners was only following cultural convention in continuing to sell Davis as an offscreen fashion plate. The following year, for example, the New Yorkbased Fashion Academy named Bette one of America's twelve best-dressed women. Bette won, naturally, in the "Screen" category. Mrs. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt won for "Society." And in the "Adventure" category, the winner was the naturalist Osa Johnson, "selected for using scientific knowledge of jungle attire in practical everyday fashion."42

CHAPTER.

10.

FEUDS.

DARK VICTORY WRAPPED ON DECEMBER 5, 1938, and despite Davis's precarious emotional state, the studio gave her only a week off before beginning her scenes for Juarez on the twelfth. Juarez was, for Warners, an Important Picture. The script was two years in the making; 372 sources were consulted. The production designer Anton Grot and his team drew 3,643 sketches and 7,360 blueprints for fifty-four sets including several Mexican villages, the throne room and living quarters of Chapultepec Palace, rooms in a castle on the Adriatic, and rooms in a castle in France.1 A total of fourteen women were said (by Warners' publicists) to have provided the black hair used to concoct Bette's wig at a cost of $2,500.2 Shooting began almost two months before Davis set foot on a soundstage and continued until February 8, 1939.

Mexico elects as its president Benito Juarez (Paul Muni), the brilliant Zapotec who rose from illiterate fieldworker to lawyer, judge, governor of Oaxaca, and radical reform politician, but Louis Napoleon (Claude Rains) installs the glamorous Maximilian von Hapsburg (Brian Aherne) as emperor. Catastrophically liberal for an emperor, poor Max just doesn't get it. He arrives in Mexico with his wife, Carlota (Bette), expecting great popular support, figures out that he's a dupe, but soldiers on. He refuses to suppress Juarez, but Juarez stubbornly insists on a Hapsburg-free democracy and keeps on rebelling. Maximilian considers abdicating, but Carlota, not a great political adviser, convinces him not to on the theory that he can save Mexico from its real enemies in Europe if he remains in charge. Maximilian holds an olive branch out to Juarez in the form of the prime ministership. Juarez refuses. Napoleon then undercuts Maximilian by ordering his troops out of Mexico. Carlota travels to Paris and confronts Napoleon but loses her mind, a shift in temperament Orry-Kelly expresses by way of an all-black gown. Juarez and his forces capture Maximilian, who n.o.bly ends up facing a firing squad for the good of Mexico.

Juarez was directed by William Dieterle, who had directed Fashions of 1934, Fog Over Frisco, and Satan Met a Lady and who nearly took over Jezebel. Dieterle was, as Brian Aherne described him, "a very tall, precise German with dark, burning eyes and strictly formal manners [who] always wore white cotton gloves on the set in case it should be necessary, in getting the exact angle he wanted, to touch the face of a player."3 The director certainly had the getup; he just didn't have much talent.

Aherne didn't have kind things to say about his leading lady: "I even found Bette Davis attractive when I played Maximilian to her Carlota and, brilliant actress though she is, surely n.o.body but a mother could have loved Bette Davis at the height of her career."4 He didn't elaborate. Perhaps he didn't have to.

Juarez is hampered by its most dramatic attempt at scrupulous authenticity: Paul Muni's makeup. In a misguided quest for strict realism, Muni insisted on precisely mimicking the real Juarez. He and the film's producers, Hal Wallis and Henry Blanke, traveled to Mexico in August 1938 on a fact-finding mission. Somebody even managed to dig up a 116-year-old man who had fought under Juarez. But Muni went much further than listening to an old soldier's tales. He demanded that he appear onscreen looking exactly like Juarez. Perc Westmore described the laborious process: "We started by taking photographs of Muni, then painting the likeness of the Indian Juarez over them. We took plaster casts of his face. We had to accentuate his bone structure, make his jaws appear wider, square his forehead, and give him an Indian nose. He had to be darker than anyone else in the picture, so we used a dark reddish-brown makeup, highlighted with yellow." After seeing the makeup tests, Jack Warner remarked, "You mean we're paying Muni all this dough and we can't even recognize him?"5 Warner was right, but he missed the more critical problem: Muni can barely move his mouth under all the glop, let alone register even the broadest facial expressions. The otherwise brilliant actor forced himself to play the entire film from under an inflexible Zapotec mask, and the result is disastrous.

Bette was complimentary about Muni in a backhanded kind of way: "Muni was brilliant. Utterly. Articulate. A real intellectual. But he was his own worst enemy. Why did he hide behind the characters so much? . . . He could have accomplished his purpose without that rubber face."6 Bette's three mad scenes are measured, altering between shifty-eyed paranoia and filtered-lensed catatonia with makeup by Perc Westmore. Agitated, she storms into the chambers of Louis Napoleon (Claude Rains) and demands that he revoke his orders to pull his troops out of Mexico. She's elegantly dressed in a dark velvet gown with white fur collar and cuffs, but it's the gauzy, trailing scarf that falls from her hat that enhances her distracted quality as it flies around her head with every gesture. When she sees that Napoleon is set in his plans and has betrayed Maximilian, she hautily shrieks, "What else might a Hapsburg have expected from a bourgeois Bonaparte!" Her voice cracks: "You charlatan!"

She then faints, wakes up crazy, and accuses Louis Napoleon of trying to poison her; she comes to believe that Napoleon is Satan in a subsequent scene. Finally, in her last scene, Dieterle cuts away from Maximilian about to face the firing squad to an evocative shot of Carlota in her chambers, wandering to the window, throwing it wide, and reaching out, saying and then screaming, "Maxl!"

There was originally to be more of Maximilian and Carlota, but it was Muni's picture all along-the t.i.tle makes that point succinctly-so when Muni demanded more scenes to tip the balance in his favor, Warner Bros. acquiesced, and a number of Davis's and Aherne's scenes ended up on the proverbial cutting-room floor.

THE OLD MAID started shooting on March 15, 1939. It's a complex Edith Wharton plot: On the day Delia Lovell (Miriam Hopkins) is to marry the stiff Jim Ralston (James Stephenson) at the dawn of the Civil War, her old fiance, the reckless Clem Spender (George Brent), returns from a two-year absence. He's crushed by the wedding, so Delia's sister Charlotte (Bette) consoles him-intimately. Clem joins the Union army and dies. Charlotte turns a stable into a home for war orphans, including a little girl named Tina (who grows up to be played by Jane Bryan). Tina is short for Clementina; she's Charlotte's illegitimate daughter, but it's a big secret. Delia invites Charlotte and Tina to live at the Ralston mansion. Fifteen years pa.s.s. Charlotte has become a carping biddy. Tina, who calls Delia "Mummy" and her real mother "Aunt Charlotte," falls in love with someone presentable. Delia adopts her to give her propriety and a fortune; Charlotte threatens to reveal the truth on the eve of the wedding. But at the brink she realizes she can't go through with it, and so, like the great Stella Dallas, she m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tically effaces herself and lets her daughter wed in ignorance.

In The Lonely Life, Bette was delightfully catty about her costar: "Miriam is a perfectly charming woman socially. Working with her is another story. On the first day of shooting, for instance, she arrived on the set wearing a complete replica of one of my Jezebel costumes. It was obvious she wanted me to blow my stack at this. I completely ignored the whole thing. Ensuing events prove she wanted even more to be in my shoes than in my dress." And: "Miriam used and, I must give her credit, knew every trick in the book. I became fascinated watching them appear one by one. . . . Keeping my temper took its toll. I went home every night and screamed at everybody." And: "Once, in a two-shot favoring both of us, her attempts to upstage me almost collapsed the couch we were sitting on. . . . If her back had had a buzz saw that allowed her to retreat beyond it, I wouldn't have been in the least surprised."7 On Monday, April 17, Bette fainted at 3:50 p.m. A doctor was summoned; he found her pulse to be abnormally high and sent her home. Davis stayed out Tuesday and Wednesday as well, at which point Miriam declared that she was sick, too, d.a.m.n it, and departed for home. Friday, April 28 saw a discussion between Hopkins, Goulding, and the unit manager, Al Alleborn. The subject: Hopkins's evolving, rejuvenating makeup. Goulding had noticed that Miriam was coming onto the set looking younger and younger by the day, and he wasn't pleased. Hal Wallis responded by ordering Perc Westmore not to deviate from the makeup design that he and Goulding had originally approved. Hopkins registered her displeasure by showing up on time the next day but immediately claiming illness and leaving for home.8 The film finally wrapped on Sat.u.r.day, May 6, ten days behind schedule.

The tension between Hopkins and Davis was no secret at the time. Indeed, Warners used it for the sake of publicity. As Life reported in August 1939, "The fact that Davis and Hopkins dislike each other intensely not only added to their pleasure in making the picture, but also proved so mutually stimulating that Hal Wallis, Warner Bros. production chief, plans to team them again in Devotion."* Life was astute in appreciating that both actresses used their enmity as a kind of recreation. Davis herself was quoted as saying, "The jealousy was completely one-sided. I have never been jealous of an actor I was working with in my life."9 She went much further about Hopkins later: "Actors went through torture working with her because she was a pig about it."10 THE PRIVATE LIVES of Elizabeth and Ess.e.x is the protracted t.i.tle with which Warner Bros. saddled Davis's next film, an expensive ersatz-historical costume drama filmed in Technicolor. Davis plays Elizabeth I, Errol Flynn her arrogant sometime consort Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Ess.e.x. The production was fraught with tensions, breakdowns, and ill feelings. Flynn-whose name Michael Curtiz tended to p.r.o.nounce as "Earl Flint"-drunkenly crashed his car midway through filming and came away with facial scars. Olivia de Havilland, fresh from the pressure of filming Gone with the Wind, threw a fit on the set one day and caused much memo writing. In one pivotal scene Bette slapped Errol on the face so hard, her fist laden with jewelry, that he never forgave her. The film is at best a curiosity.

Elizabeth and Ess.e.x is based on Maxwell Anderson's 1930 blank-verse play, Elizabeth the Queen, which ran on Broadway for 147 performances and starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Like Fontanne, Bette Davis could have torn into the role of Elizabeth and still have spoken the poetry, but Flynn-whom Bette called "the only fly in the ointment"-was out of his depth.11 "I can't remember lines like that," he complained to Curtiz, so the screenwriters Aeneas MacKenzie and Norman Reilly Raine rewrote them out of verse and into fairly inelegant Hollywood prose. Davis had advocated casting Laurence Olivier to no avail. She later claimed that during her scenes with Flynn she was playing in her mind to Olivier.

* Devotion wasn't made until 1946 and ended up starring Olivia de Havilland and Ida Lupino. Davis and Hopkins were paired together in 1943 in Old Acquaintance.

Davis had just turned thirty-one when she began filming Elizabeth and Ess.e.x. Having been aged to about fifty for the later scenes of The Old Maid, she was now prepared to let Perc Westmore transform her not only into a sixty-year-old but a most recognizable sixty-year-old with a forehead even higher and bonier than Bette's own. The press reported at the time that Westmore "was horrified" at Davis's insistence on being completely bald in one scene-she was evidently talked out of it-but he later took some of the credit for Davis's radical transformation, though he was quick to praise Bette's gumption: "Here was a gal-I don't care what the part-who would go along with the make-up I decided on. When she played Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth and Ess.e.x I shaved her head halfway back!"12 With less than a week of rest after wrapping The Old Maid, Bette was back at the studio on May 11 to start shooting Elizabeth and Ess.e.x. According to her lawyer at the time, Oscar c.u.mmins, Hal Wallis promised her not only a long rest period after she finished but also "a modern picture" as her next project. Wallis contentiously responded that he'd promised nothing, it was just a discussion, there was no formal agreement about anything.13 (In fact, Davis took a long, restorative, life-changing trip East after finishing the film.) Some of the difficulties surrounding Elizabeth and Ess.e.x might have been diminished, or at least played out at a lower volume, had Davis been given more than five days off between pictures. An imbroglio about the film's t.i.tle was already raging at the end of April. Warner Bros. wanted to change Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen to The Knight and the Lady to give Errol Flynn more prominence, but that presented a contractual problem: if the film was considered to be a "man's picture," Flynn got top billing over Davis. Bette took an extreme position on the matter: syntactically, she argued, the t.i.tle The Knight and the Lady indeed made it a man's picture, so she really couldn't appear in it at all. "The present t.i.tle is obviously one to give the man first billing. I feel so justified in this from every standpoint that you force me to refuse to make this picture unless the billing is mine," she wrote to Jack Warner. Warner offered to give Davis top billing but still wanted to keep The Knight and the Lady. Davis refused: "I could not accept first billing with the present t.i.tle as it is a man's t.i.tle. Therefore the t.i.tle will have to be changed." Warner telephoned Davis at her table at the studio commissary on May 6, the day she finished The Old Maid, and informed her that she would get top billing, that The Knight and the Lady would definitely not be used, and that the picture might end up being called Elizabeth and Ess.e.x. This was not the end of the discussion.

Davis was also fighting with Hal Wallis about a dress: "I forgot to drop you a line before I left about the costume you turned down for Elizabeth. I insist on wearing it."

Robert Lord, the film's a.s.sociate producer, was concerned enough about Bette's emotional state that he suggested that the studio take out an insurance policy on her health. Miss Davis, Lord wrote, "is in a rather serious condition of nerves. At best she is frail and is going into a very tough picture when she is a long way from her best." Jack Warner vetoed the idea.14 Bette didn't show up for filming on Monday, June 19; she phoned in complaining of a sore throat. Her physician-now a Dr. Culley-told her that it was laryngitis and that she'd be out until Thursday at the earliest. The production shut down completely. As a production manager noted, "We can do absolutely nothing on this picture until Miss Davis returns." On Wednesday, Dr. Culley informed the studio that Miss Davis was still ill and, by the way, she'd read about Flynn's having wrecked his car off Sunset Boulevard and not being able to appear before the cameras for a week or maybe two because of facial abrasions. The studio informed the doctor "that most of it was publicity and that we expected Flynn by Sat.u.r.day or Monday at the latest," at which point Dr. Culley acknowledged that "it would be possible for Miss Davis to be in by Sat.u.r.day or Monday." This innocuous statement led to a testy conversation between Oscar c.u.mmins and Warners' counsel Roy Obringer, with c.u.mmins forced to a.s.sure Obringer that Flynn's injury had nothing to do with Bette's absence, that Culley's remarks were "uncalled for," and that although Bette felt truly terrible about being unable to work, the studio surely must appreciate that it wasn't mere laryngitis but ruptured blood vessels in her throat that kept her from being able to perform.15 With both Davis and Flynn indisposed, each in his or her own special way, the production didn't get back into gear until the twenty-seventh. The t.i.tle issue reared up again on the thirtieth. Warners, evidently fixated on certain crucial words, was now proposing The Lady and the Knight. And Bette was having none of it, dramatically: "I find myself so upset mentally and ill physically by the prospect of this t.i.tle," she wired Jack Warner, "that unless this matter is settled in writing I cannot without serious impairment to my health finish the picture."

There were only a few more days to go as far as wrapping the troubled production was concerned, and Flynn's lack of professional training wasn't helping. It hadn't helped all along. The production reports are peppered with such notations as "If Flynn knows his lines today we should finish" and "[Mr. Flynn had] considerable difficulty with his lines" and "Mr. Curtiz can make fast time until he gets with Errol Flynn, and then we slow down to a walk."

Flynn's difficulties had begun with the impossible verse of the script and worsened when Bette slapped him with a fistful of rings. In the finished film, the slap occurs very quickly; Curtiz immediately cuts in to a closer shot of Flynn, and it appears in the take he used that Davis's hand is free of jewelry. In any case, Flynn chronicled the initial slap in his marvelously t.i.tled memoir, My Wicked, Wicked Ways: "Joe Louis himself couldn't give a right hook better than Bette hooked me with. My jaw went out. I felt a click behind my ear and I saw all these comets, shooting stars, all in one flash. . . . I felt as if I were deaf." Flynn claimed that he approached Bette privately in her dressing room, but that she cut him off before he had a chance to complain: "Oh, I know perfectly well what you are going to say. If you can't take a little slap, that is just too bad! If I have to pull punches, I can't do this. That's the kind of actress I am-and I stress actress! Would you mind shutting the door?" According to Flynn, he went back to his dressing room and threw up.16 In the scene between Elizabeth and Ess.e.x in the Privy Chamber before Elizabeth orders his head chopped off, Elizabeth having had enough of Ess.e.x in much the same way Davis had of Flynn and Jack Warner had of Davis, Flynn found it impossible to speak his already simplified dialogue. "We lost considerable time because of Mr. Flynn's continual blowing up in his lines," the production manager noted with despair. "We made 20 takes, all on account of Flynn. Mr. Curtiz dismissed him at 5 pm as it was absolutely impossible to accomplish any more than he had already done."17 The gossip columnist Harrison Carroll was quick to report that Flynn, rising after delivering the line "Am I not as worthy to be king as you to be queen?" had caught his cape under his heel and landed on his a.s.s.18 Olivia de Havilland, who plays Lady Penelope Gray, was creating her own havoc as well. She'd shown up on the set on May 24 but immediately announced that she couldn't film anything because she was too caught up with shooting retakes for Gone with the Wind and she certainly couldn't play two characters simultaneously. Shouting ensued. Jack Warner himself finally convinced her to shoot at least some of her scenes on schedule. "I had another display of temperament late Sat.u.r.day afternoon from Miss de Havilland," the exasperated production manager wrote on June 10, "to wit-at 5:15 pm when we started to rehea.r.s.e a scene between her and Miss Fabares [Nanette Fabray playing the girlish Margaret Radcliffe under the original spelling of her name], she informed Mr. Curtiz that she positively was going to stop at 6:00 pm, but Mr. Curtiz told her that unless she stayed and finished the sequence he positively would cut it out of the picture. Miss de Havilland expressed herself before the company, and Mr. Curtiz came right back with the result that she made a display of hysterics before the company and it became necessary for me to dismiss the company at 6:15 without shooting the sequence." The production manager dryly added that "inasmuch as this sequence was inserted at Miss de Havilland's request, I believe we should not shoot it and uphold Mr. Curtiz in the matter."

If The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Ess.e.x matched in art what it provided in stress for its director, actors, and producers, these gossipy tales would give way to more profound pleasures. But despite Davis's nervy, complex performance, the film doesn't hold together. Orry-Kelly outdoes himself with a jewel-toned metallic satin gown with a severely cinched waist and great volumes of hooped hemline in the scene in which Davis plays a testy game of chess with de Havilland. Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score is nothing if not majestic. And Anton Grot's set design is charmingly perverse, ranging from an expectedly grand throne room to Elizabeth's bizarre quarters in the Tower, which call to mind a vast and gloomy mausoleum. The world Grot created for Elizabeth is a distorted magic kingdom, the deformity reaching its apogee in the Tower scene when a mysterious, orange-lit staircase suddenly unfolds in the stone floor to provide access to the dungeon in which the queen's lover lies. Given that this love story ends in an execution, Grot's design is especially inspired.

But Flynn, adept at derring-do, is a simple Ess.e.x, a pinup schemer. His one-dimensionality is especially striking compared to Davis's weighty if fidgety Elizabeth. Whether she's imperiously flicking her wrist or waving her arm, displaying flashes of melancholy as well as rage, Davis inhabits the difficult, iron-willed monarch even (or perhaps particularly) when she's expressing the character's profound self-doubts. She leans ungainly against the arm of Elizabeth's throne, making herself look awkward and her character exhausted under the weight of her authority. She gives Elizabeth a slight, elderly shake of the head, the natural tremble of declining health, all the while delivering her lines with supreme confidence and a masterly, elegant vocal inflection that registers as the queen's English without being a Streep-like technical tour de force. It is to Mildred Rogers's c.o.c.kney as silk is to linen.

There is a particularly vivifying moment toward the end of the film in which the wormish courtier Cecil (Henry Daniell) pleads to his politically threatened, romantically torn queen, "If we do nothing, both you and your kingdom are at the mercy of Ess.e.x!" And Davis decides to play it down. With dismissive flutters of her heavily bejeweled hands, and with a tone of superb distraction, she turns away from him and replies, with an acidic calmness, "Little man, little man-leave me alone." It's instants like this that turn a coloring-book Tudor epic into something truly regal, however momentarily. As for Davis's contempt for Flynn's putative inept.i.tude, she ended up changing her mind. He may not have been Laurence Olivier, but he was still Errol Flynn. After seeing the film again late in life, Bette told Olivia de Havilland, "d.a.m.n, he's good! I was wrong about him."19 ON HER FIRST day as a teacher in New York City, prim Henriette Deluzy-Desportes (Davis) becomes slightly unhinged when she learns that her spoiled students know her secret shame: she was once a notorious French jailbird. ("How do you spell Conciergerie?" one especially snotty girl demands.) She cancels the day's French lesson and tells them her sad tale. In flashback, Henriette becomes the governess for the children of the Duc de Praslin (Charles Boyer) and his wife (Barbara O'Neil), a beautifully groomed harridan. Monsieur le Duc hates the crazy d.u.c.h.esse and falls in chaste love with Henriette. The mad d.u.c.h.esse accuses Henriette of having an affair with the Duc, and after a series of screamingly tight close-ups, the Duc kills the d.u.c.h.esse and drinks poison. Thanks to a kindly Methodist minister, Henry Field (Jeffrey Lynn), Henriette finds a teaching job in New York, and this regeneration brings us back to the present, by which point Henriette's schoolgirls are all weeping uncontrollably and begging Henriette's forgiveness. The film ends with the promise of Henriette's marriage to the minister: All This and Heaven, Too.

Budgeted at $1,075,000, the melodrama was written-lengthily-by Casey Robinson and directed just as time-consumingly by Anatole Litvak. The producer David Lewis had wanted Greta Garbo to play Henriette; others at Warners advocated Helen Hayes.20 Litvak considered casting his estranged wife, Miriam Hopkins, as the d.u.c.h.esse, saying, "The d.u.c.h.esse de Praslin is a heartless and venomous b.i.t.c.h. Miriam will be perfect."21 But Barbara O'Neil-who plays Scarlett's mother in Gone with the Wind-was cast instead. As Bette points out, this "didn't help matters. As she was conceived for the film, the Duc's revulsion with her was not convincing. His wife was in actuality a sloven and a horror with none of the exterior beauty that was Miss O'Neil's."22 Shooting began on February 8, 1940. Hal Wallis told Litvak the following day that he'd gotten off to a good enough start but that Davis looked "pasty and tired" in the scene in which Henriette interviews for the governess job, and, by the way, Wallis didn't like the way Davis kept moving her hands in that scene, either. That night, Jack Warner saw Litvak and Olivia de Havilland coming out of the studio cafe together at 2:15 a.m. "I told him it would be very funny if Goulding had to finish his picture," witty Warner told Wallis. Warner thought it would be a good idea to have another director ready to go on the picture because of Litvak's characteristically slow pace.23 Bette and Litvak clashed often. They had wildly different conceptions of Henriette, for one thing. All This and Heaven, Too is based on a novel by Rachel Field, Henriette's great-niece; her great-uncle was the kindly minister. Field, Robinson, and Litvak all believed in Henriette's innocence, but in The Lonely Life Bette claimed that she'd read the Marquis de Sade's book about the case as well as Field's novel and that despite her growing friendship with Field, Bette thought de Sade had it right. Henriette and the Duc "must have been lovers," Davis wrote. "It was impossible for me to believe that they were not." Sandford Dody, who helped Davis write The Lonely Life, reiterated the point in his own memoir: "She informed me that she didn't for one moment believe that they were not lovers. Though in fairness to Bette, who preferred using the Marquis de Sade as a historical source and not the governess' niece, Rachel Field, who was only the author, there was precedent for such a conceit."24 (What neither Davis nor Dody explain, however, is the fact that the Marquis de Sade had been dead for thirty-two years before Henriette met the Duc.) There was another point of tension between Litvak and Davis. Litvak showed up every day with elaborate written plans for shooting. Davis, without a trace of irony, later commented that Litvak's shot designs were, "more times than not, not the way I had envisioned it. He was a very stubborn director."25 Litvak was already p.r.o.ne to raising his voice, but according to the actor Basil Rathbone, Bette Davis "was the only one who could give him as good as he gave. A friend of mine told me you could hear Davis and Litvak screaming at each other all the way to Santa Monica when they got going."26 All This and Heaven, Too was Bette Davis's forty-second motion picture. Not only did she think she knew best how to make movies, but she was unable to keep herself from letting everybody know it, including her director, her producer, and the head of the studio.

Charles Boyer, meanwhile, kept listening to war news on his dressing room radio-France and Great Britain had decl