Chapter 1
Bette Davis was twenty-three and too smart for her own good. But there she was lying on a couch at Universal in a fixed camera set-up so that any man the studio could round up came in and made movie love to her. ‘You gorgeous, divine darling,’ they said – they had to say something, so they had lines written for them. ‘I adore you. I worship you. I must possess you.’ There were fifteen of them – ‘The most compulsively dedicated harlot never had a morning like mine,’ she would write – and there you see how smart she was. Not just funny, but able to surmount her own indignity with caustic intelligence. She was a novice being tested for ‘chemistry’, or ‘it’, or ‘sex appeal’. This was after Carl Laemmle, the head of the studio had announced – with her in the next room and the door open – ‘She has as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville!’ Summerville was fortyish, a country hick with a simpleton cowboy face. He was just a little niftier than his horse.
We can talk about what Bette Davis had and didn’t have, and what you might like to have done to her if you were a red-blooded American male. Suffice it to say that with Bette Davis, her looks and her sexiness – her appetite for the movies – were always under question. ‘Well, she was never beautiful,’ you hear people say. But the same Bette Davis, in those years from 1931 to 1945 – the golden age, more or less – was nominated seven times for best actress. In the same period, Garbo got one nomination, Katharine Hepburn four, Marlene Dietrich one, Claudette Colbert three, Barbara Stanwyck three. Davis outpaced the field without ever convincing a studio – or maybe herself – that she had ‘it’. Simple, unequivocal desirability. Yet something possessed her, an energy or a need that could leave every other actress seeming vacant.
The thing she asserted was that there were ‘Bette Davis parts’, a territory where other actresses had best not tread. For there was something fearsome in being Bette Davis, something that seemed close to consuming the woman herself. It’s a part of the nature of acting in those days, and of the terrible insecurity of actresses, that several of the great parts might have been recast – Irene Dunne surely could have played Mrs Miniver, Barbara Stanwyck could have done Mildred Pierce, Katharine Hepburn could have been in My Man Godfrey, Claudette Colbert was actually cast as Margo Channing in All About Eve and I am tempted to share the lady’s own imperious view, that Bette Davis would have been a natural as Scarlett O’Hara – ‘It was insanity that I not be given Scarlett.’ (The essence of Davis, it seems to me, is in the use of the word ‘given’ there, as opposed to some such construction as ‘be cast as’. The ‘gift’ was something the common people should have seen as appropriate to their queen, and it should have required no asking from her!)
In other words, competition – the helpless state of the harlot – was as open as the studio contract system allowed. And Bette Davis had at least a dozen rivals who photographed better than she did, or who had more glamour or lustre, more gender obedience and more of ‘it’ than she could offer. Yet she was the commanding figure of the great era of stardom and star projects. Moreover, most of that time, she was employed and held by a guys’ studio where the bosses would tell her to her face that not a single man was going to pay money to see this or that project. Let’s add that she had another three best actress nominations after 1945 – in All About Eve, The Star and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Come to that, one has to note and marvel how in her heady years she was not actually nominated for Of Human Bondage, The Old Maid or The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.
I doubt there is a better example of willpower thriving in the alleged age of sex appeal. Her own insistence that she was right for a role, or the best actress around, is not always sympathetic. But it is much harder to make a case for her being wrong. She prided herself on exact judgement and insight, on reason and justice – New England virtues – and never quite realized that on the West Coast the country was run rather differently.
Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born on 5 April 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts. This was nine months and four days after the marriage of her parents: Harlow Morrell Davis, of Bates College and Harvard Law School, and Ruth Favor, an amateur actress of some ability. The Favors were of French descent, while the Davises had been in Massachusetts since 1634 – and in Wales before that. It was a Davis who had helped found the city of Haverhill. Harlow Morrell Davis had a great dome of a forehead, rimless spectacles and a most earnest gaze. He would have been shocked if, say, his first child had been delivered less than nine months after the day of his marriage. Nevertheless, he had not intended to have a family so swiftly and the father proved incapable of talking to Ruth or to her younger sister, Barbara, born eighteen months later. Aged five, apparently, Ruth decided to alter her name to Bette – a name she had seen on the spine of a Balzac novel. The father thought the change was pretentious, and that attitude only offended Bette the more. When Bette was seven, the father left the family.
By the time Bette was twenty, she was resolved to be an actress. The mother passed this information on to the father, who was reported as having said, ‘Let her become a secretary! She’ll earn money quicker. Bette could never be a successful actress.’ The young girl took this as a challenge, just as she now perceived her father as a negative force. It was a part of her larger determination to triumph, to do as she wished, and to lead what would amount to her ‘lonely life’. In 1962, Bette Davis published a short memoir called The Lonely Life and it is nearly shrill with her determination to take personal responsibility for everything:
I have always been driven by some distant music – a battle hymn no doubt – for I have been at war from the beginning. I rode into the field with sword gleaming and standard flying. I was going to conquer the world . . .
My father’s cavalier disappearance from our home when I was a small child certainly has significance. Consider my quartette of marriages. But his hypothetical perfection as a father might have bound me to him and spoiled other men for me.
If I were making a documentary film about Bette Davis, I would cut from that observation (preferably in her piping voice – a regal, declaratory voice) into the opening scene from The Letter. It is night in Malaya. Clouds cross the moon. Rubber plantations are busy with their dripping business. Suddenly there is a flurry of action at one house. We hear a shot. A door opens, a man tumbles out, pursued by a small, fierce-faced woman in a long housecoat that flows as she moves. With a revolver she fires five more shots at him, and into him. It is a very arresting passage of movie and a great opening. It will be said quite soon that this woman, Leslie Crosbie, shot the man because he tried to force his attentions on her.
We don’t quite believe that story. We can believe that a man might tell Leslie he loved her and even try to rape her. And she might be hurt and shocked by it. She might shoot him – once. But six shots, one after the other? In such flowing, irresistible motion. We guess that if the gun had held a dozen bullets, the man would have had to soak them all up. No, there is another story – this man has let the woman down, and she is ready,
Continues…
Excerpted from Bette Davis
by David Thomson
Excerpted by permission.
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Faber & Faber
ISBN: 9780865479319
