Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (17 page)

Marshall was happy to leave the strife of
The Little Foxes'
set behind. He checked in shortly thereafter at M-G-M, where he played opposite Joan Crawford in
When Ladies Meet.
The difference in assignments, between working on a picture with Bette, and then Joan, "was like going on a lovely holiday," said Marshall.

"A Note to the Girls:
Joan Crawford has her supply of
Spring hats complete—and
they're all crownless."

—PAGEANT
MAGAZINE, 1942

Joan was in New York, at a party at Kitty and Moss Hart's, when she met Fredric March. The actor was leaving for Los Angeles the following morning, to appear in
Susan and God
at M-G-M. "How I envied him," said Crawford, who had seen the play on Broadway with Gertrude Lawrence. She longed to play the role of the giddy New York socialite who attempts to introduce God to her upper-crust friends. But, alas, Norma Shearer was set to play the part, until at the last minute she said no. Norma had just turned forty and wasn't keen on playing the mother of a thirteen-year-old girl. Crawford, aided by George Cukor, got the part, and critics called this "my most important and best-executed role," she said. One reviewer, Calvin McPherson of the New York
Telegram and Sun,
did say he found her performance virtually faultless but "just a bit too heavenly." Joan bubbled too much, he felt, and she had formidable competition from her Adrian wardrobe. "She wakes up for a dramatic scene before breakfast and looks like a dress rehearsal of Bette Davis in
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,"
said McPherson. "In her most penitent scene, her gown is covered with little curlycues of fashion you can't keep your eyes off. It just isn't right for the little gal who is working so hard to give us ART."

A Woman's Face
followed, with Joan appearing for half of the picture with the right side of her face hideously scarred. Set against a scenario of murder, blackmail, and plastic surgery, she gave a first-class performance, due largely to the directorial skill of George Cukor. Using the same technique as William Wyler, who through intimidation and numerous takes exhausted the kinetic Bette, Cukor subdued the usually ebullient Crawford. In a pivotal courtroom scene, before the cameras turned he made her recite the multiplication tables two by two until her voice faded to a monotone.
"Now,
Anna," he ordered, "tell me the story of your life."

"A Woman's Face
was a very successful picture for Metro and Joan," said Cukor. "She was very happy, because it put her in the class of actresses like Ingrid Bergman and Bette Davis. But unlike Ingrid, who loved to work but wasn't obsessed with 'career,' Joan was never happy being idle. She would finish a picture one day and the next day she was looking for a new script. She was never still for long. It was always 'my next picture, my next role.' Bette Davis was exactly the same. They only lived for their next role. All that mattered to both was to be up there, on the silver screen, bigger and better than anyone else."

"Nonsense," said Bette, taking offense to the "bigger" part of Cukor's statement. The size of a role was not of paramount importance to her. She could be happy in an ensemble, in "being one of the team." If a part was good and the company was first-rate, she'd do the role.

The production of
King's Row
in 1942 was an example. Bette wanted to play Cassandra, the daughter sexually abused by her doctor father (who also amputates the legs of Ronald Reagan). But Jack Warner regarded the idea as impractical. "This was one of Warner's most expensive films," said writer Douglas Churchill, "and he thought it unwise to add Miss Davis' salary to the budget." (Betty Field got the role.)

The Man Who Came to Dinner
was another ensemble cast. After being hit by a rock during a parade ("People either love me or hate me," said Bette), the actress knew it was time to change her onscreen image again. She chose this comedy.

Bette had seen the play in New York, then called Jack Warner, urging him to buy the screen rights for her and John Barrymore. Barrymore would have the lead role of the acidic critic Sheridan Whiteside, and she would play the lesser role of his faithful secretary, Maggie Cutler. "I wanted very much to work with Barrymore," she said. "He did such wonderful things with Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo."

"And Joan Crawford," she was reminded.

"Joan Crawford? When did Barrymore ever work with Joan?" Bette asked.

"In 1932. In
Grand Hotel."

"Oh!
You are
so
right," said Bette. "I always forget that Joan was in that picture
too."

Barrymore tested for
The Man Who Came to Dinner,
but at that stage of his career his concentration had been eroded by alcohol, which necessitated his reading his lines from cue cards placed by the side of the camera. Jack Warner, already saddled with Errol Flynn ("too drunk at 4:00
P.M.
for his close-ups"), refused to hire Barrymore and signed Cary Grant for the part. When told she would now be working with the debonair Grant, Bette hissed, "I'd rather work with Jack Barrymore drunk than play opposite Mister Cary Grant."

So Cary Grant was bounced from
The Man Who Came to Dinner
to
Arsenic and Old Lace,
and the role of Sheridan Whiteside went to Monty Woolley, whom Bette found "bearable." She didn't like the dog in the ensemble cast either. Rehearsing one scene, the Scottie bit her on the nose. "It was a minor bite," said director William Keighly, "but enough for Bette to call a halt to the entire production." Paranoid about being disfigured, and wearing a large hat and veil to cover her bandaged nose, Bette boarded a train for the East Coast. She spent the entire journey confined to her drawing room; then, recuperating in New Hampshire, she sent daily cables to Jack Warner on "the de-swelling of her world-famous proboscis." When production resumed, she said her heart was no longer in the film. "I stayed out of her way," said her costar Ann Sheridan. "I never argued or said 'boo' to her. She was the queen, and I did not fancy having my head handed to me on a platter."

"She was very kind to me, very
loyal, very insistent that
I
be
paid a good salary, with all
benefits.
I
remember nothing but
good things about Bette Davis."

—SALLY SAGE, BETTE'S
LONG-TIME STAND-IN

Working with women was never a problem with Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, as long as the women were behind the camera or in subordinate roles.

With their equals onscreen there
could
be friction. Crawford, as told, had some stressful working moments with Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer. Davis also encountered some initial agitation working with Olivia de Havilland.

A "fresh young beauty, with a voice that was music to the ears," Olivia's star was rising when she was cast as Bette's lady-in-waiting in
Elizabeth and Essex.
The assignment came while Olivia was already hard at work at M-G-M, playing Melanie Wilkes in
Gone with the Wind.
Ordered to show up at Warner's for rehearsals on
Elizabeth and Essex,
Olivia told the director she would not work until
Gone with the Wind
was completed. The director, Michael Curtiz, "flew" at de Havilland, who lost her usual calm and proceeded to yell right back. Bette Davis, watching this, said she came "perilously close to smacking Olivia's face."

The two became friends on their second film together,
In This Our Life.
They played sisters. Bette was the bitch again. She played Stanley, a Southern vixen, who steals her sister Olivia's husband, marries him, drives him to suicide, then, on the way back from his funeral, kills a little boy with her car, blaming the accident on her cook's son, a poor but well-spoken black boy. "That was a first for black people," said Bette. "The negro boy was written and performed as an educated person. This caused a great deal of joy among negroes. They were tired of the Stepin Fetchit vision of their people."

Olivia played Roy, the older, good sister ("I wanted
that
role," said Davis), and she and Bette commenced their long but "peculiar" friendship. Davis became protective of Olivia when she found out the actress was in love with their director, John Huston. She knew Huston from the days when he worked on the script for
Jezebel.
She also remembered that he was a witness, when the great love of her life, William Wyler, married another. As an artist, she said Huston was brilliant, but a bit of "a macho phony." He in turn found Bette fascinating. "There is something frenetic about Bette, a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears."

Bette commiserated with Olivia when her affair with Huston proved to be unhappy. (He was married.) After work, soaking in a hot tub at de Havilland's house as the young actress poured out her troubles, Bette insisted on "reading favorite passages from the Holy Bible to Olivia."

When filming on
In This Our Life
was almost completed, Jack Warner told Bette Davis she was a fool: she was letting friendship ruin her performance. She had the best lines in the picture, but Huston was giving Olivia the best camera angles. "I led her to the projection room," said Warner. "I let her see how Huston's manly pulse, beating for Olivia, had ruined her big scenes."

"When Bette caught on," said Axel Madsen, "she came close to tearing out every seat in the projection room, and the next day Huston reshot many scenes he had taken from her."

Bette later made her peace with Olivia, said Madsen, "but after that she wouldn't have Huston around driving a truck."

"The studio was afraid of Bette; afraid of her demon," said Huston. "They confused it with over-acting."

And Then There Was Miriam

"Miriam Hopkins was a wonderful actress," said Bette, "but a bitch. The most thoroughgoing bitch I've ever worked with."

A Southern belle replete with charm, sex appeal, and vanity, Miriam Hopkins was neither a newcomer nor a supporting player when she first worked with Bette Davis. Back in 1928 Hopkins was the star of Cukor's repertory company while Bette was a struggling, soon-to-be-fired ingenue. Miriam was also a star in films before Bette. In 1933 she appeared in
Design for Living,
the cult classic directed by Ernst Lubitsch; then came
Becky Sharp,
the first Technicolor feature, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. William Wyler also worked with Hopkins, using her in four of his films, including
These Three.
He often claimed that two magic words—"Miriam Hopkins"—could send Bette Davis into a cycle of rage and recrimination.

Miriam was "nuts ... certifiably insane," director George Cukor believed. "Like most actresses, she was in love with the sound of her own voice. Her ego was so gargantuan it frequently turned and fed on itself. She was
very
self-destructive."

With blond hair, blue eyes, and perfect features, Hopkins could "flirt as naturally as she could breathe." Her affairs were numerous. "When I can't sleep, I don't count sheep," she said, "I count lovers. And when I reach thirty-eight or thirty-nine I'm fast asleep." Her staccato speech, nervous energy, and infidelity could drive men to distraction. One fevered beau threatened to slit her throat in public. Another, actor John Gilbert, burst into her bedroom one morning and fired a bullet into the bedboard over her head. Instead of screaming or hiding under the covers, Miriam said, "Oh, John!" swept out of bed, and took the smoking gun from his hand. Later, using her best friend, the heavy drinker Dorothy Parker, as a character witness, Miriam applied to an adoption agency for a baby. When the news that the child, a five-day-old boy, was ready, Miriam sent her agent to pick him up. She adored the boy, who at age six was enlightened by mother Miriam about sex. "The worst thing a man can be is a bad lover," she told her son. When asked what she did when a man was a bad lover, the actress replied, "I kick him out of bed."

Miriam loathed Bette Davis, for a few reasons. The first of these was
Jezebel.
She had played the role on Broadway and owned the screen rights. She was promised first crack at the role by Jack Warner, but Bette stepped in, played it, and won the Oscar. Then she suspected Bette was having an affair with her husband, director Anatole Litvak. He came home from the studio one night and told Miriam, "I found a marvelous new script. Bette Davis can do it as a movie; and you can play it on the radio."

When Hopkins was hired to costar with Davis in
The Old Maid,
Bette commented, "She'll be trouble, but she'll be worth it." On the first day of shooting, Miriam showed up wearing an exact duplicate of the dress Bette wore in
Jezebel.
"It was a grand entrance to end all grand entrances," said Bette, "and was calculated to make me blow my cool." As filming went on, Miriam tried everything to sabotage Bette's performance. "If I had a long difficult speech, she'd break in with, 'Oh, I'm so sorry. One of my buttons came unbuttoned.' In one instance this tactic forced me to make 20 takes of a single scene."

The Old Maid
was a big success, and Davis and Hopkins were reunited for
Old Acquaintance—
a story of two girlhood friends who compete as novelists. The picture was to be directed by Edmund Goulding. During a loud and violent argument with Davis, over the cameraman she wanted to choose, Goulding suffered a heart attack, and was replaced by Vincent Sherman. ("Goulding was faking a heart attack," Jack Warner believed.)

The peace between Bette and Miriam lasted approximately twelve minutes, said Sherman. There were tricks, upstagings, petty arguments, and delays, the likes of which he had never seen before. "I was caught in the middle," he said. "I could not show partiality to either actress. It was my job to get the film done on time. Of the two, Miriam was the worst offender, although Bette was not blameless either."

Hopkins began the battle on camera by blowing smoke into Bette's eyes. During Bette's speeches she would pick imaginary lint off her shoulders, look at her watch, or straighten a painting in the background. Bette in turn allegedly cast shadows on Miriam's face when they shared a two-shot, revised lines in the script, and talked loudly to the grips when Miriam was concentrating on her close-ups. A
Time
reporter told of the squabble over dressing rooms. "Davis contended that favoritism was being shown Hopkins since her dressing room was slightly closer to the set than hers. To settle this dispute, the assistant director carefully measured the distance between both dressing rooms and the set, made some minor shifts so they were precisely equidistant, and shooting resumed."

Early in January 1943
Old Acquaintance
was thirty-six days behind schedule because of rewrites and the combined illnesses of the leading ladies. On January 22 Bette reported ill. The following day Miriam took to her bed. The day after that, when Miriam returned, Bette was out; Miriam missed the next day. Both actresses were called before Steve Trilling, Jack Warner's executive assistant. He threatened to turn the matter over to the Screen Actors Guild, barring both from working in films again. With "tears and denials of any differences," the stars vowed to cooperate to get the picture finished amicably.

But Davis fully intended to get in one last chop at Hopkins. "There was a scene in the film where I was supposed to slap her," said Bette. "The whole Warner studio knew this was coming up, and the morning we shot the scene the set was crowded to the rafters."

Miriam, however, would not cooperate. "She wasn't licked yet," said Bette. "The most realistic way for an actress to absorb a blow is to be rigid as possible, but Miriam went limp. As I tried to shake her, she was like an empty sack. But she couldn't escape the moment of retribution forever, and at last I got in a perfectly timed swat. I can only report that it was an extremely pleasant experience. Miriam spent the rest of the morning weeping just beyond camera range, in what I assume was one last attempt to disconcert me."

When
Old Acquaintance
was completed, Miriam Hopkins packed her bags, sold her house in Beverly Hills, and moved to New York. She was through with Hollywood, she said. This last experience with Bette Davis had ended her desire to work in films again. (Five years later she would return, as a character actress in supporting roles.)

Bette Davis was also temporarily disenchanted. She vowed never again to work with women (of equal stature). In her next film, Mr.
Skeffington,
she would be surrounded by men, except one minor female role, that of her daughter, and a girlfriend mentioned frequently throughout the film but never seen on camera. The film was scheduled for production in July 1943. In May, Bette left on an extended vacation. While she was gone, her boss signed another major female star to a long-term contract at Warner's. She would prove to be a more formidable competitor and fighter than Miriam Hopkins.

Her name was Joan Crawford.