Saturday, April 5, 2008

This Day in Film History (Birth of Bette Davis)


April 5, 1908—Those “Bette Davis eyes” first stared out at the world on this date in Lowell, Mass.

Her birth name was actually Ruth Davis, but she took the first name “Bette” in tribute to the French novel Cousin Bette by Balzac. Had her career not fallen into the abyss in her mid-to-late 40s, that role—a vengeful poor relation out to destroy her richer Parisian cousins—might have made a wonderful vehicle as she made the transition from leading lady to character actress. It would have afforded plenty of opportunity to display the intelligence—and seething amusement and anger at what suckers men are—behind those famous eyes.

Shortly before her 10th birthday, her father left the family—the first of a lifelong series of men who would never stay around, including four husbands.

Lack of money didn’t prevent her mother from sending her and her sister to boarding school, however. After that, acting beckoned.

People had her pegged from the start as a star in the making at John Murray Anderson's Dramatic School in Manhattan. Davis, her (initially) less successful classmate Lucille Ball remembered in her autobiography, Love, Lucy, “earned raves for everything she did. A short, dynamic blonde, she projected with great verve.”

Battles With the Studio
After a short Broadway stint, she made her way to Hollywood. Universal Studios couldn’t figure out what to do with her, and for awhile it appeared that Warner Bros. couldn’t either. Even after her star-making role (made on loan to RKO) in Of Human Bondage as a ferociously unsympathetic prostitute and a compensatory Oscar for Dangerous a year later, she was so annoyed with Warner Bros. for the parts they offered her that she left for England. A threatened lawsuit by Jack Warner brought her to heel, but she had made her point, and from then on the quality of the roles improved.

Critic Terrence Rafferty, whose judgment I have come to trust over the years, labeled Davis “the greatest actress of the American cinema” in a
fine career summation in The New York Times last weekend. I’m not sure I would go that far: Katharine Hepburn and Meryl Streep, for instance, have displayed a flair for comedy that Davis rarely if ever showed, and Streep in particular has displayed an extraordinary capacity to make herself over into virtually anybody. But there is little if any doubt of the tremendous impact that Davis at her best could make.

Whenever people think of Davis, several films come immediately to mind: Dark Victory, Now, Voyager, All About Eve, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Jezebel, The Letter, and The Little Foxes. (The last three were made in collaboration with director
William Wyler. According to interviews with Charlotte Chandler done not long before the actress died, Davis aborted the child she conceived with Wyler while making Jezebel. Later, when he proposed marriage, she took too long to think about it and Wyler married someone else. For the rest of her life, she mourned him as the man who got away—though the director, predictably, thought that life with her would have been impossible, given her tempestuousness.)

Three Davis Favorites
All of these films deserve their acclaim, but I would suggest three others not as well known: Mr. Skeffington, The Old Maid, and Old Acquaintance.

Her last Oscar-nominated role while under contract to Warner Bros., Davis’ Fanny Skeffington is a vain beauty who marries her Jewish husband to save her brother from a stock-market scandal. The self-sacrificing decision by loving and long-suffering Job Skeffington (played by Claude Rains) to let her go leads her to embark on a string of empty affairs—and to end up lonely when a bout of diphtheria ruins her looks.

The plot is surely melodramatic and the film bears all the marks of the ‘40s “woman’s movie” (the more mature version of today’s “chick flick” we know today). But Davis negotiates her character’s passage from flirtatiousness to heartbreak well. (Kudos also to cinematographer Ernest Haller, whose black-and-white photography made Davis appear at the height of her allure--though even here, Davis needs to be given her due, since --characteristically--she never allowed anyone else to do her makeup for her.)

The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance became battlegrounds with a star whose tempestuousness may have exceeded Davis’:
Miriam Hopkins. In The Old Maid, an adaptation of the Edith Wharton novella, the actresses’ on-screen rivalry for the affection of the daughter that Davis’s Charlotte bore out of wedlock and Hopkins’ Cousin Delia adopted as her own was played out off-screen. Every bit of that intensity shows onscreen in the faceoffs between Davis and Hopkins. (Not long before her death, Davis paid a tribute of sorts to Hopkins, calling her “a wonderful actress but a bitch,” even – perhaps the ultimate compliment from Davis, given the run-ins she’d have through the rest of her career with other co-stars– “the most thoroughgoing bitch I have ever worked with.”)
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Last summer, I saw the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of John Van Druten’s Old Acquaintance. Though Margaret Colin and Harriet Harris gave their all, the play felt curiously flat—as did, I might add, the more explicit film remake Rich and Famous starring Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen in the Davis-Hopkins roles. But then, it was hard not for these two to measure up to my memory—the 1943 film featured a battle for the ages.

With Davis’ first choice for her frenemy in the film, Norma Shearer, turning down the role, the stage was set for a rematch between Davis and Hopkins. The script, like the play, featured a scene in which Davis’ midlist novelist, level-headed Kit Marlowe, was supposed to slap her longtime friend, Hopkins’ successful trashy novelist Millie Drake, for her jealousy and general all-around idiocy. The day the scene was shot, everybody on scene gathered to watch the most eagerly awaited rematch since Joe Louis and Max Schmeling’s shot but epic encounter at Yankee Stadium five years before.

Davis didn’t disappoint, letting Hopkins have it in a scene that makes the short list of any great Davis moment.

In her speech accepting her Best Actress Oscar for Terms of Endearment, Shirley MacLaine referred to the “turbulent brilliance” of co-star Debra Winger. That ferocious commitment to excellence was also the hallmark of Davis—who, in fact, in
a late-career interview, offered Winger up as one of two young actresses she particularly admired (Sissy Spacek was the other).

The tragedy of Winger’s career—now in abeyance for who knows how long?—is that she made her mark in relatively few films. For all of Davis’ clashes with moguls, directors and co-stars, the genius of the studio system was that it offered her repeated opportunities to practice her craft—and, in the case of Mr. Skeffington, elevate what seems at first glance to be hopelessly humdrum material.

A Little-Known Late-Career Treat
How might Davis’s career have turned out had she been born later? One tantalizing glimpse can be found in this 1963 guest appearance Davis made on Perry Mason, when CBS called on several stars to fill in for Raymond Burr as he recovered from surgery. (Given the lack of decent roles Davis was getting at that point, even after Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, she probably jumped at the chance to play something.)

The show’s formula didn’t allow Davis a lot of room, but watch this clip as her defense attorney listens to her client—eyes flitting around the room, fingers clutching and unclutching her pencil--and you’ll learn all you need to know about her character’s restless intelligence. “The Case of Constant Doyle” is like watching Michelangelo doing a pencil drawing—not an ideal medium, but enough to reveal an outsized talent. It's easy to imagine Davis on Law and Order or its progeny.

For a long time, Hollywood discussed making an American version of Helen Mirren’s detective Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. I think Davis would have performed marvels with the flinty but troubled middle-aged detective superintendent.

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