Fasten your seat belts, it`s going to be a bumpy tribute.
Bette Davis-that turbulent Yankee, that force of nature who most certainly would have been burned as a witch in an earlier time, that stormy queen of Hollywood and other netherworlds-has turned 80. She celebrated her 70th birthday by hanging a black wreath outside her door and needlepointing a pillow that read, ”Old age ain`t no place for sissies.” Let us not forget how the diva with those penetrating popeyes and that vitriol taught us that youth ain`t no place for sissies either.
Make sure you snarl her name like she does-BETtee DaVISSS. Bite those consonants. Hiss those sibilants. For almost 60 years on screen, from her debut in ”Bad Sister” (1931) to her role as Lillian Gish`s bad sister in
”The Whales of August” (1987, to be released on video this week), Davis has made her career by snarling emotional truths that most actresses were too afraid to whisper.
No matter that she donned hoopskirts as the antebellum temptress in
”Jezebel” (1938), farthingales to incarnate Empress Carlota in ”Juarez”
(1939) and a lace ruff to play ”The Virgin Queen” (1955). Davis is a phenomenon specific to the 20th Century: the emancipated woman. Here was a new kind of gal, the opposite of those submissive, ready-to-surrender simps. She demanded or she deceived, but Davis got what she wanted. She conquered almost 100 movies chin first, shoulders proud-like the prow of a galleon scudding through choppy waters.
Legend has it that Bette (nee Ruth Elizabeth) Davis was born in Lowell, Mass., on April 5, 1908, in the middle of an electric storm-”Between a bolt of lightning and a flash of thunder,” she recalls her mother saying. This may account for the supercharged atmosphere that has surrounded Davis ever since, especially when she performs.
From the first, she had a flair for the theatrical. When she was 4, Davis snipped off her kid sister Barbara`s pretty curls. At the age of 8, Davis rejected dolls, preferring to romp naked in the snow. At 10, Davis made her stage debut as Santa in her class Christmas pageant, which afforded her a first show-stopping exit. Brushing against a candlelit tree, her costume accidentally caught fire; though the flames were hastily extinguished, Davis pretended she was blinded and recalled, ”A shudder of delight went through me. I was in complete command of the moment; I have never known so much power.”
On stage that night, she found her outlet. She has been electric ever since.
Though Broadway legend Eva Le Galliene rejected the 20-year-old ingenue as ”too frivolous” to be an actress and director George Cukor booted Davis from his summer stock company in Rochester, N.Y., she was undeterred. By the following year, 1929, she was the toast of Broadway, in a comedy called
”Broken Dishes.”
With talkies, Hollywood needed the melodic elocution of stage actors. And in 1930, mogul Samuel Goldwyn tested Davis, who at the time had a mellow, woodwind voice. Her timbre was just what the sound technician ordered.
But one look at the exophthalmic actress and the producer wailed, in a famous Goldwynism, ”Whom did this to me?” Studio head Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures hired Davis in 1931 but moaned when he screened her debut in ”Bad Sister”: ”Can you picture some poor guy going through hell and high water in a movie and ending up with her at the fade-out?”
Laemmle was right-but for the wrong reason. The problem was the role, not the actress. Davis had an unmistakable edge, but when she had to conceal it in those ”cotton dress” parts, she was dull. She made five more indifferently received movies and was literally packing for Broadway when veteran actor George Arliss called and asked if she would be his leading lady in ”The Man Who Played God” (1932).
It was a ”gabardine suit” part, harder-edged than her previous roles. She feigns love for Arliss though she is really enamored of a younger man. Her performance earned Davis a contract with Warner Bros., a mixed blessing for both star and studio.
From the first at Warners, Davis lobbied for better parts. In ”Cabin in the Cotton” (1932), she finally got to play the spitfire, Madge, a Southern tease who has the greatest flirt non sequitur in movie history. When Madge`s boyfriend proposes a smooch, she just glows at him seductively and demurs,
”Ah`d love t`kiss ya, dahlin`, but I jes` washed mah hayah.” This is a star-making moment. What`s so startling about the scene is that a smattering of sadism brought out Davis` ripe sensuality.
It was two years and 10 film quickies later that Davis` sadism truly shattered audiences. In ”Of Human Bondage” (1934)-after 22 tries, her first great movie-she played the Cockney harpy Mildred, parasite on and tormentor to clubfooted Philip Carey (Leslie Howard). Her alabaster face smeared with rouge, Mildred is frighteningly erotic.
There had been screen vamps before, but not until Davis` pale Mildred had an American movie actress played the kind of vampire who mercilessly drained the lifeblood of her male victims. Davis broke the unwritten Hollywood code:
Play unsympathetic characters sympathetically. Even today, her sadistic pleasure in humiliating Howard shocks. It was the first time Davis let loose. No, she didn`t win an Oscar for her performance; Claudette Colbert won for a little bus-ride comedy called ”It Happened One Night.” Davis did win the best-actress award the next year for a movie aptly entitled ”Dangerous” (1935)-an indifferent drama in which she played an alcoholic actress down on her luck. Most thought her statuette a belated Oscar for ”Of Human Bondage” and a B-picture called ”Bordertown” (1935), in which she was searing as an unstable woman with a yen for George Raft.
Despite her Oscar, Davis was assigned a lot of trash. The script that broke her spirits was ”Satan Met a Lady” (1936), ”The Maltese Falcon” with clipped wings. That same year, disgusted with the scenarios she was handed, she tried to break her seven-year contract-a kind of indentured servitude-by leaving the United States to make a movie in England.
Warners sued, and the English barrister representing the studio opened his remarks with, ”M`lord, I can`t help but think this is the action of a very naughty young lady.” In her own defense, Davis submitted (and she might well have been describing her most memorable screen characters) that ”As a happy woman, I can work hard and everybody will be happy. As an unhappy one, I make myself and everyone around me unhappy and unhappier.” The court ruled against her, but although Davis lost the battle, she won the war-for better scripts.
Upon her return to Warners, she got one of the very best: ”Marked Woman,” a candid story about clip-joint hostesses strong-armed into working for a racketeer. Davis` Mary Dwight is a feral creature in a spangled dress who growls, ”I know all the angles and I`m smart enough to keep one step ahead of them until I get enough to pack it all in and live on Easy Street the rest of my life.” When she threatens to go to the district attorney (Humphrey Bogart) because the racketeer is killing innocent people, the racketeer`s gunsels carve a double-cross in Mary`s cheek. It is a remarkable performance and a remarkable movie, based on racketeer Lucky Luciano and the district attorney, Thomas Dewey. Because of Davis` brilliant performance, ”Marked Woman” leaves you with the impression that Mary Dwight-and not the D.A.-is the hero.
This begs the question, did Davis always mask heroism under the guise of self-interest? Certainly, she did more frequently than any other actress. But this creates the impression that Davis was always a wise-eyed tough broad. There were exceptions.
Davis played wide-eyed good girls like Gabby Maple in ”The Petrified Forest” (1936)-you know, the waitress who tries to stop the rabid Humphrey Bogart from shooting puppyish Leslie Howard. She was a female ”Mr. Chips,”
the stern but supportive teacher, in Emlyn Williams` ”The Corn Is Green”
(1945). And she would go on to play good spinsters like Alicia Hull, the librarian and First-Amendment defender who tries to stop right-wingers from suppressing leftist literature, in ”Storm Center” (1956).
But those are not the best Bettes. For Davis, acting involves decisive action-which is why, at her best, she is not a passive character. At her best, she is willful. At her best, she goes too far.
At her best, she is ”Jezebel” (1938), the 1850 New Orleans heartbreaker who shows up in scarlet at the Olympus Ball, humiliating her terribly proper fiance (Henry Fonda) and flirtatiously provoking lethal duels between her admirers. Davis picked up her second Oscar for this performance.
As Janet Flanner observed in a New Yorker profile, Davis established a new kind of sex symbol-the kind ”who would argue a man into seduction but not tempt him.” She was hot because she was inflammatory.
In ”Juarez,” she is a real fire-breather as Empress Carlota, hurling epithets at Napoleon III and accusing him of abandoning her and Maximilian in Mexico: ”I should have known a bourgeois Bonaparte would do something like this,” she shrieks, stomping her foot. Yet as the poisonous Regina Giddens in ”The Little Foxes” (1941), Davis is glacial, chilling her entire family-perhaps the most frightening screen monster outside a horror movie.
But the best, bester and bestest Davis-the revelations of her career-are in a trio of tearjerkers in which her mercurial characters span the thermometer`s entire range. These are ”Dark Victory” (1939), ”The Letter” (1940) and ”Now, Voyager” (1942). In the first, she is a victorious victim; in the second, an unapologetic victimizer, and in the third, a neurotic ugly duckling who becomes a loving swan.
As spoiled rich girl Judith Traherne in ”Dark Victory,” Davis plays a man-eater who has Humphrey Bogart for breakfast, Ronald Reagan for supper and George Brent between meals-for which this headstrong heiress` punishment is a brain tumor. Davis` evolution from selfish brat to unselfish woman is so nervily convincing that she makes you believe in redemption. (Caution: No grown woman has ever watched this movie without major water damage to her makeup.)
In ”The Letter,” Davis plays man-killer Leslie Crosbie, plugging David Newell in the famous opening scene and fairly slaying the souls of Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson over the next 95 minutes. It is a testament to Davis` acting that when she pretends to be a proper English wife knitting in the parlor of her husband`s Malayan rubber plantation, she quietly persuades you of wifely goodness.
Then there`s ”Now, Voyager,” everyone`s favorite romance, about Charlotte Vale, a repressed Back Bay dowdy who undergoes psychoanalysis, plucks her caterpillar eyebrows and becomes a glamorous butterfly. Though this movie is propaganda on behalf of love-as-self-sacrifice, it is so humidly romantic that it seems reasonable when Davis` Vale reasons, ”Don`t let`s ask for the moon, we have the stars!” Paul Henried is Davis` married boyfriend
(who gallantly lights two cigarettes and hands her one) and Claude Rains is her psychoanalyst.
If you watch a lot of Bette Davis movies, you`ll notice three recurring themes: (1) Her characters almost never have parents, as if to imply that no mere mortals possibly could have conceived this tempest, that she must be a self-creation. (2) She`s a neurotic chain-smoker, often lavishing more attention on cigarettes than on lovers. In a way, the cigarette is Davis` most enduring romantic partner-she puffs as though nicotine were her sustenance and kisses the smoke as she exhales. (3) A Davis character rarely enjoys a happy ending, as if to insist that movies are not about soothing, but about seething, emotions. Bette Davis is catharsis in a film can.
Just when you think Davis has outdone herself, along comes ”All About Eve” (1950), in which she gives a ripsnorting, show-stopping performance as a star who treats everyone around her like her supporting cast. Whether she`s raising the eyebrows that are the very definition of arch, embalming herself with martinis or toasting her enemy with a raw scallion, Davis plays the role of Margo Channing to the hilt. It`s a tribute to Davis` sense of humor that she is able both to criticize and caricature her tendency to overplay a scene. It`s a tribute to her dramatic skills that in ”Eve” she can also underplay. Taking herself down a few pegs, Davis` Margo meekly admits, ”Infants behave like I do. They carry on and misbehave. They`d get drunk if they knew how.”
During the `50s, though men her age were sexually viable on screen-Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart played romantic leads opposite ingenue Audrey Hepburn-Davis and other divas were encouraged to retire. Not our Bette. That`s her as Debbie Reynolds` ma in ”The Catered Affair” (1956), as Ann-Margret`s rummy mummy in ”Pocketful of Miracles” (1961) and as Susan Hayward`s matronly mother in ”Where Love Has Gone” (1964).
Refusing to be merely an apple-pie screen mom, Davis spawned a horror cycle-aging superstars as grotesques-with ”What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962), the screen`s greatest sadist tormenting its greatest masochist, Joan Crawford.
Bette Davis celebrated her 80th birthday by beginning work on her 87th theatrical film-as the title character in Larry Cohen`s ”The Wicked Stepmother.”
But enough of this Grand Guignol. Although we love her in ”Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”, ”The Nanny” and ”Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte,”
please, please, won`t someone write Bette Davis a nice, normal part about a nice, normal Gray Panther who shoots her husband?
