Bette Davis’s career as a cinema star began with her studio representative’s failure to identify her on her maiden arrival at the Los Angeles railway station thirteen years ago because she didn’t look to him like an actress. If today the estimated sixty million movie habitués did not know her by sight, they too might think she doesn’t look like an actress. Miss Davis’s success has been constructed on her tendency not to be recognized. She arrived in Hollywood with nothing positive but her intelligence, and that was against her. Negatively, Hollywood said that her smile was crooked, her cranium the wrong shape, her mouth too small, her eyes too large, her neck too long, and her erotic appeal devoid of any dimensions whatever. Furthermore, her figure was mandolin rather than guitar. Universal Studios, which had the misfortune to hold her first contract and not renew it, thought her a tense young woman who would never get anywhere. Their Carl Laemmle, Jr., dismissed her as “a cotton-dress girl,”satin sweethearts then being, sociologically speaking, box-office. Samuel Goldwyn, the first producer ever to order a screen test of her, reportedly moaned, when he looked at the film, “Whom did that to me?” She did something to him again some years later when he had to pay her a fortune to star in his “The Little Foxes.” In 1930, the only person who thought that she ought to be in Hollywood was her theatrical agent, and he was in New York and of two minds. When he had signed a contract with her back East, he said she was the biggest gamble he’d ever exported. Today she has the prestige of the boss woman star of Hollywood, a quarter of a million dollars a year (gross), and a long memory.
Miss Davis was born on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts, in a gray clapboard house built on Chester Street by her grandfather Favor, who was descended from fighting Huguenots and was himself a belligerent abolitionist. She says that the only relation between her blood and her career is battle. In her Hollywood history she has fought her way from the bottom to the top and more than once part way back again. She is a militant, lively New England character with portable principles, which she has enjoyed scrapping for on Western studio soil. She has an alert, educated mind, a tempestuous vocabulary, and far-sighted judgments. She is the cerebral type, though never calm; she may be wrong about something, but she will have thought the whole thing out splendidly. A stagehand, seeing her for the first time on the set during the recent filming of “Watch on the Rhine,” said she looked to him like a Down East schoolma’am who had turned into a hell of a fine actress. She is disciplined but unpredictable, is mettlesome, is creative, and hates monotony. She is truthful, and as candid as glass. She is an individualist, and Hollywood, which once coarsely summed up this quality as a headache, now with much refinement calls her forthright. Anyone who tries to drive her gets into trouble, though she can usually be led. Her energy puts her under the necessity of feeling strongly about everything and saying how she feels. Playing a hussy’s role, she is the type, Hollywood says, who would argue a man into a seduction but not tempt him. Her almost regal power in Hollywood still startles her, and she makes no use of it. It probably doesn’t make any sense to her. Merely playing the role of Queen Elizabeth a few seasons ago so inflamed her democratic Massachusetts mind that she swore (rather like the Queen) at having to sit, even in Warner Brothers’ studio, on a damned throne.
Miss Davis was a fledgling Broadway actress when she went to California with the irrelevant superstition that rain brought her luck. For the next three years, in the customary sunshine, she took a cruel beating. She had been brought out to be made a star in Universal’s “Strictly Dishonorable,” but after she arrived she was judged not to have sufficient sex appeal. In an attempt to find out what she did have enough of, and at the same time to introduce her to Hollywood dramatic standards, Universal requested that what it called her gams be photographed, that her name be changed to Bettina Dawes, which it considered a natural, and that she be test-kissed before the camera by fifteen leading men in one afternoon. After all that the studio heads cast her as the good sister in Booth Tarkington’s “The Flirt,” filmed as “Bad Sister.” She thought that she was as much of a flop as everyone else said she was. Immediately afterward, as the result of her performance in a film which somebody manufactured in eight days flat and called “Hell’s House,” the management decided she had no appeal of any sort and for the rest of her first year lent her to other studios, which put wigs and false eyelashes on her and occasionally let her fall on her face for laughs. In her second year there came at last a day when it rained and when, already enjoying an oblique sort of good luck, Miss Davis was packing her bags to return to New York as a Hollywood failure. Unexpectedly, George Arliss, at that time one of the few old-fashioned local literates from the legitimate stage, telephoned to ask her to be his leading lady in “The Man Who Played God.” The engagement with Arliss changed things, insofar as it gave her some momentary standing and made the disappointments of the rest of her second year even harder to bear. Her third year was running into her fourth when, despite six months of devious resistance by Warner Brothers, for whom she was working, and finally because no other actress would touch the job, she was allowed to play the great role of Mildred, the waitress, in the R.K.O. production of Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage.” It was a cotton-dress part, but it enabled her to establish herself as a new kind of star.
Playing Mildred was what made Bette Davis in Hollywood and in the world outside. Her characteristic misfortunes, once private matters that added up to failure, became public matters that led to success. Her critical faculty at low ebb because of the ravages her ego had suffered for three years, Miss Davis never entertained any idea that her Mildred ought to have received the annual feminine best performance award, or Oscar, of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the winning of which is to a Hollywood player what winning the Kentucky Derby is to a horse. However, the idea occurred to a number of argumentative New York and California critics after the Oscar had been given to the indubitably excellent Claudette Colbert for “It Happened One Night,” which was a bigger hit than the Maugham film. So next year Miss Davis received the Oscar, tardy but sincere, which was aimed in retrospect at her Mildred but which was at least nominally for her less remarkable Joyce Heath in “Dangerous.” Then, two years later, the Selznick Studio began such mammoth preparations for “Gone with the Wind” that Warner Brothers hastily whipped up a Civil War opus of their own called “Jezebel” and put Miss Davis in the title role. Though Miss Davis had audibly hoped to be lent to Selznick to play Scarlett, the director of the picture had decided that as a New Englander she lacked the Southern sex appeal which he subsequently found in the British Vivien Leigh. So Miss Davis not only played Jezebel but also won her second Academy award for it, which in a way turned out to be worse than not playing Scarlett, because the next year, when she gave, in “Dark Victory,” what critics still rank her top performance, Miss Leigh almost automatically won the season’s award for her work in “Gone with the Wind.” As Hollywood abbreviates the paradoxes, in “Victory,” which was Davis’s tops, she had to lose the Oscar to Leigh, who got it on “The Wind” because Davis had just got it on “Jezebel” because she hadn’t got it on her next-to-tops “Bondage” because she had to lose it to Colbert in “One Night,” which was why Davis had got her original Oscar on “Dangerous” in the first place. By way of extra irony, the nickname of Oscar for the Academy’s bronze statuette was her own invention. At the time she was married to Harmon Nelson, whose middle name is Oscar.
One of Miss Davis’s favorite possessions is a present from her family, a gold bracelet hung with little golden eggs. It is a token of appreciation for the talented goose who laid them. Her family—which now consists only of her mother, Mrs. Ruth Davis, who intelligently shaped Bette’s life and has been her sagacious seeing eye, and Bette’s younger, brunette sister, Barbara, now Mrs. Robert Pelgram—has always been an integral part of her life. She has been especially close to them ever since her parents were divorced. Her father, the late Harlow Morell Davis, was a patent lawyer. Until the feminine Davis trio settled down together (they are now, of course, separated) in California, they lived in approximately seventy-five houses in fifteen years—in Lowell, Somerville, Newton, Boston, Norwalk, Worcester, Rochester, and so on—at first because Mrs. Davis became a roving photographer in order to support herself and her daughters and later because of Bette’s peripatetic beginnings in stock companies. The girls received the first four years of their education at a country-estate school in the Berkshires and their next four more realistically—when the family moved to a dark flat on the upper West Side of New York—at P.S. 186, where Bette was a zealous Girl Scout and won the All-New York grade-school prize for cookie-baking. Bette started high school in East Orange and finished it at Cushing Academy at Ashburnham, Massachusetts, where, as a sophomore of sixteen, she had a schoolgirl crush on the student she was later to marry, Harmon Nelson, and where she waited on table to help with her school expenses, an experience which she says was even more maturing than falling in love.
That summer Mrs. Davis, who was in debt, optimistically took her cameras and daughters to Peterborough, New Hampshire, which, full of actors and theatre movement, had just lost its local photographer. There Bette, aesthetically excited by the recitals of Roshanara, the Anglo-Indian dancer, who was then holding classes in the village, was invited to become a free pupil and to train to be a professional dancer. Roshanara’s sudden death and a chance conversation which Mrs. Davis had with the actor Frank Conroy, who said that for once in his life he was advising a mother to put her daughter on the stage, altered everything. Bette had been inside a theatre only twice, the first time to see “The Easiest Way,” the second time to see Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck.” She thought the gloomy Hedvig would be a wonderful part to play. Mrs. Davis, who has always doubled as mentor and prophetess in the home, predicted that her daughter was as good as signed up for the role.
There followed three years which Miss Davis puts under the heading of “There is no stopping a girl when she really decides to be an actress.” The first attempt to stop her was made by Eva Le Gallienne, who let her read the part of a seventy-year-old Dutch character and quickly shooed her off as a “frivolous little girl.” Mrs. Davis then told John Murray Anderson that she wasn’t sure how soon she could pay for it but that her daughter ought to be studying in his dramatic school. This Bette did for the next two years. Her best friend there was Rosebud (afterward Joan) Blondell. Miss Davis got her first job in George Cukor’s winter stock company in Rochester, where she opened in 1928 with one line in “Broadway.” The prophetic Mrs. Davis, however, had told Bette she had better learn the fatter role of a character named Pearl, since the actress assigned to it was fated to sprain her ankle. She did, and Bette became Pearl. The next summer Bette thought she was engaged, along with Peggy Wood, Basil Rathbone, and Romney Brent, for the Cape Playhouse at Dennis, Massachusetts, but upon her arrival she discovered that there had been a misunderstanding. She could, though, stay on and usher if she wished. Miss Davis ushered and, without being asked, learned all the ingénue rôles. She got her chance, closing week, to play Dinah in “Mr. Pim Passes By.” She made her New York début early in 1929 at the Provincetown Theatre, playing the role of Floy, the farmer’s daughter, in James Light’s production of a rural drama called “The Earth Between.” Next morning Brooks Atkinson remarked in the Times that a certain newcomer, Miss Bette Davis, “is an entrancing creature.” That season her mother’s earlier prediction came true. In Blanche Yurka’s road company of “The Wild Duck,” Miss Davis played the role of Hedvig, after nearly missing the part because of an attack of measles which Mrs. Davis had failed to previse. When the Broadway season of 1929 opened, Miss Davis was part of it, as the ingénue in a farce called “Broken Dishes,” at the Ritz Theatre. The play ran for a hundred and seventy-eight performances. Miss Davis was getting $300 a week by the end of the run and considered that she had arrived. When Goldwyn wired from California to order his Paramount studio at Astoria to make a test of Miss Davis and it turned out to be dreadful, she was not surprised. As a New York actress, she didn’t think much of anything Hollywood did; neither, in all probability, did Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, and Franchot Tone, who were then contented fixtures on Broadway. In 1929, on Broadway, it was Hollywood which had not yet arrived.
So far as she has been permitted, Miss Davis has molded her film career on her motto, “I love tragedy.” She wisely aimed to be Hollywood’s unique female expert at playing tragic, or at least miserable, heroines. Until Pearl Harbor she was the American favorite of the Japanese moviegoers because, they said, she represented the admirable principle of sad self-sacrifice. An adult-minded New Englander, atavistically suspicious of happy endings, she was so convinced by her early Hollywood parts that a floppy feminine hat was a symbol of celluloid sappiness that she later had written into her contract a clause permitting her to refuse to carry a hat in her hand like a damned basket of rosebuds. Her directors say that for Davis to get going at her best she needs to play an intelligent female who is either wrong or wronged—a cerebral skirt, preferably with a black conscience and somehow entangled with fate—against a background of earthquake, upperclass murder, or historical crisis. Considering the dramas her talent has led her into and which she has played out to the bitter end as characters appropriately named Gabrielle Maple, Judith Traherne, Charlotte Lovell, or Henriette Deluzy-Desportes, Miss Davis has led a comparatively quiet life. In 1932, in Yuma, Arizona, with her mother and sister as witnesses, she married Harmon Nelson, then a dance-band pianist. Nelson soon became the leader of his own night-club orchestra at the Colony Club in Hollywood. The marriage lasted only six years. “He was too honorable to trade upon my position in pictures. The gulf between our earnings discouraged him. That, more than anything else, licked him,” Miss Davis later bluntly wrote in the Ladies’ Home Journal, as if forced to read aloud from some crisp, up-to-date, unhappy feminist script.
Miss Davis is now married to Arthur Farnsworth, a native of Rutland, Vermont, where his father is a doctor. Farnsworth is a handsome, ruddy-faced, laconic New Englander, formerly a professional flier and still a Quiet Birdman. He works for the Minneapolis Honeywell Regulator Company, which now manufactures thermostats and other instruments for aircraft; temporarily, as a representative of the firm, he is working on aviation-training shorts for the Army at the Disney studio. They met in Rutland early in 1939. When Farnsworth suddenly appeared in California, late that year, gossip columnists hinted that Miss Davis was going to elope with him. “Whom should I elope from—my cook?” Miss Davis inquired sharply, and sneaked away with Farnsworth on New Year’s Eve to a friend’s ranch, where the marriage took place.
The Farnsworths live in a sparsely settled section of unfashionable Glendale, in what is probably the only two bedroom, two-acre estate in the film colony. Their one-story, six-room, peak-roofed “Hansel and Gretel” house is surrounded by small, neat grounds, every inch of which is used to accommodate the California essentials—swimming pool, herbaceous borders, garden, garden fireplace for barbecues, and a small paddock and stables containing four horses, including one Palomino, a pastel breed that is now the Hollywood style. Miss Davis swims so well that she was once a member of an otherwise male lifeguard crew at Ogunquit, Maine, and rides horseback daringly, having learned on fractious studio steeds she was warned against but nevertheless tried early in her film career. The Davis place is called Riverbottom because it is in the bottom lands of the Los Angeles River. The house, for which she reportedly paid $50,000, was built so solidly that it lived through the flood of 1938, which swept away nearby dwellings, to become a white elephant on the real estate market, since nobody, until Miss Davis turned up a couple of years later, was willing to trust the district again. She bought the place on the assumption that acts of God are rare, though she could get no local insurance company to agree with her. Riverbottom was finally insured by Lloyd’s.
Her New England sense of thrift having early been shocked by the periodic auctions of the possessions of cinema stars who had flown too high, Miss Davis used to declare that she would own nothing in California which she couldn’t take back East with her in a trunk. Psychologically, she led up to buying her little Western estate by buying a big New Hampshire barn and a few acres of surrounding land. The place is called Butternut Hill and is in the White Mountains. For two years, between pictures, she and her mother have been making it livable by furnishing it with American antiques they have collected. Farnsworth and the Davis ladies get along well in the community; the neighboring town of Littleton, on the Ammonoosuc River, gave Miss Davis a party on her thirty-third birthday, at which she and the governor of the state led the grand march.
When in exile in California, which is about nine months in the year, the Farnsworths, who like no fuss, live quietly. They subscribe to Alexander cocktails before their outdoor fireplace and to practical jokes, such as folding spoons and other surprises, but they serve excellent food and wine. Riverbottom’s furnishings are in good taste, are mixed in period, and are apparently moved a lot. Miss Davis is the moving man’s dream girl, because she is always taking things out of or putting them into storage, on the assumption that she’s going somewhere else to live. Last summer, when a New York acquaintance was invited for the first time to dine in what would have been a half empty house, Miss Davis told the mystified moving men that the guest was an intellectual who loved furniture and to hurry and bring back the absentee pieces from storage, no matter how late. The moving men turned up with their last load at 10 p.m., along with the after-dinner coffee.
Miss Davis is also the book publisher’s delight. She reads just about everything as soon as it’s printed, especially novels, since, as she points out, story-telling is her trade. She once took a whirl at Proust but quickly gave him up. She never reads on the set, though many stars do, if they read. Since, when she is working, she has to get up at half past five in Glendale in order to be in the Warners’ makeup building in Burbank by seven, and since she usually does not come home till seven in the evening, she has to do most of her reading in bed. Among her professional friends are Kay Francis, Olivia de Havilland, and Geraldine Fitzgerald, all three of whom are intelligent women. The Farnsworths also see a lot of Farnsworth’s flying friends from the nearby airfields, old friends from back East, and Miss Davis’s mother, sister, and brother-in-law. On the Warner lot Miss Davis’s chum is Miss Margaret Donovan, who is head of the coiffure section of the makeup department and fixes her hair. The two girls are constantly bequeathing to each other new pieces of favorite costume jewelry in their wills. Miss Donovan was Miss Davis’s witness at her marriage to Farnsworth. A behind-the-scenes influence is Mrs. Bridget Price, a tall, intaglio-faced English lady, an old friend of Mrs. Davis who now is officially in charge of handling the star’s fan mail. There is more, however, to the connection than that; Mrs. Price is their general adviser and catalyst.
Becoming a big star often addles a human being, usually in one of three ways; the victim becomes a superior, lonely ego and stays home, or becomes a public character and goes out constantly, or becomes glamorous, no matter where he or she happens to be. Miss Davis was glamorous, years ago, for about a month. This period ended when, backed up by a smart town car containing a white poodle and liveried chauffeur, and attired in moody black velvet slacks and jacket, she met her mother, who had been on a trip East, at the Los Angeles railway station. Mrs. Davis was unable to believe her own eyes and flatly said so. The glamour was dropped later that day.
For years, before she was successful, Miss Davis sneaked off to neighborhood movies to see herself and suffer. Of her first big Hollywood première, given to her film “All This and Heaven, Too,” she has said that all the ham in her was thrilled at seeing the waiting crowds and her name in lights and that there was, far more than she had imagined, excitement in sniffing the gala air and listening to the whispers and applause. She had waited a long time for it and had supposed it would never come.
Last summer Miss Davis founded the Hollywood Canteen, with, for once, the arguing not being done by her. Her idea that it should be, though independent, affiliated with the New York Stage Door Canteen, which she took as a model, outraged the motion-picture chauvinists and the Hollywood trade papers, quick to resent any compliment to Broadway. After a lot of talk and work the canteen opened in an abandoned night club on Cahuenga Boulevard. There, just as in New York, the stars wash dishes and wait on table, and patronage flourishes. The day before the opening, when Miss Davis was sweeping the floor, a soldier, attracted by a certain amount of commotion, dropped in. “Say, you look like you were Bette Davis,” he observed. She said yes, she was. “Well, lady, your pictures certainly stink, but you look like sweetness and light now,” he said.
In real life, as it is called, Miss Davis acts exactly as you would think from seeing her on the screen. Face to face, she is vital, arresting, restless, and informal. She gestures a great deal, as in “The Little Foxes,” and has a nervous tic of tossing her head, as in “The Old Maid.” She also has a woodwind laugh. Her conversation is pertinent, stimulating, and personal; it is animated by sudden ideas, reactions, and asides, almost as if she were talking to herself (which, as a matter of fact, she says she does), and these serve for her as temporary conclusions. Her vocabulary is a mixture of slang and polysyllables. It used to be rather like a Restoration comedy until some cameramen made a film of one of her heated studio arguments. As she watched the picture, she remarked, “My damns seem monotonous,” and started breaking the habit. She still smokes a lot, that always having been her second vice. In the flesh she looks smaller than she does on the screen; she is five feet three and a half, and she tries not to let her weight fall below her normal hundred and ten. As Queen Elizabeth, she weighed ninety pounds and the regal robes weighed seventy-five. She likes buttermilk between meals and is loyal at any time to New England clam chowder. Like many women who work, she detests cooking, and she says that a husband who won’t fry an egg for his wife when she comes home tired doesn’t love her.
Miss Davis wishes that she had been born beautiful. Her magnificent plantation of ash-blonde hair is the only thing about her appearance that satisfies her. When she went into films, her first director made her bleach it, which outraged her. Letting it resume its own lambent lightness was one of her early victories. When a cinema critic admiringly referred to her as Pop-Eye the Magnificent, she shrieked, alternately, with indignation and laughter. “Oh, that same old face!” she recently shouted at herself and to an open-mouthed interviewer in her dressing room. “Imagine having to look at it fifty times a day on a job like this!” It is her notably large eyes, disliked at first by both Hollywood and herself, which finally accelerated her ascent in pictures. When Hollywood at last got around to making analyses, it discovered that eighty percent of screen acting is concentrated in the eyes. In “Dark Victory” Miss Davis made it one hundred percent. Since her role was that of a woman threatened with insanity, her director wanted her to indicate her disorder by crazed motions of the hands. She decided to use only her eyes. Old cameramen say she has the most beautiful shoulder line in the business since Elsie Ferguson. Even the quantity of her erotic appeal, which so worried the studios at the beginning, has been recomputed. When, twelve years ago, a producer said she had no more sex appeal than Slim Summerville, she said he went too far. Now producers go even farther; they say she is solid, ice-cold, Puritan sex, of the type against which the Sunday blue laws had to be passed.
Directors claim that as an interesting instrument to work with there’s no one within ten miles of her once the preliminary discussion of what is to be done has died down. As a matter of integrity, she won’t even cross to the coffee table, centre-left, unless she has a conviction about it. Her disagreements with directors usually arise from the fact that she is still more theatre-minded than movie-minded. She instinctively favors stage realism over camera aesthetics and the customer-catering of the movies. In “Watch on the Rhine,” playing the repatriated American wife of an impoverished anti-Nazi refugee, she went to bat for cotton stockings on her legs instead of silk, which photograph better. Her first row with Warner Brothers came, with customary promptness, when she was doing her first major part for them in “Bordertown,” in which she was supposed to be roused out of bed in the middle of the night and insisted on realistically smearing her face with cold cream. This debate was lengthy and costly; it lasted, and held up production, for an entire day. Directors say that they never know what sort of interpretation they’ll get from her, though they can bank on its being different from the different thing they expected and on its being absolutely sound. They mostly agree that her psychological diagnosis of a role can stabilize a whole picture; that she never throws a good line away; that her talent and technique never dry up, which in movie-making means that the final take, which may be the fiftieth repetition, done at sundown, is as fresh and careful as the first, just after breakfast; and that once she has read and digested a script, the manuscript could be lost and she could still act her role just as the author had intended. She loves to work, and she has endless energy for it. When the director asks people to take their places on a scene, nobody, not even child actors, can beat her onto the set. Because of what she regards as her invaluable grounding in stock, she is a remarkably quick study and is always letter perfect. Many of her arguments in the studio are with producers and directors in defense of carpenters, props, or electricians. She enjoys a good fight that doesn’t even concern her, more or less as her ancestors enjoyed a good hellfire sermon.
Her long-drawn-out, bitter, running quarrel with Warner Brothers, for the past ten years her producers, has left the company and herself helplessly united by the very furies, and profits, they have shared. As Warners were the first powerful unit to see talking pictures coming and to make ready, so they were the first to see something heterodox and useful in Miss Davis. A new style in stars can mean new millions. Warners took on Davis as a leading lady at the end of 1932. By the end of 1933 they were so sick of the bargain that they didn’t even want to go to the legal bother of getting rid of her temporarily by lending her to R.K.O. for “Of Human Bondage.” As Warners reportedly figured it, if she laid an egg in “Bondage,” she would be even more of a dead loss to them, but if she ten-struck, she’d be harder than ever to manage, what with Warners being already groggy from exhaustion. Miss Davis says now that Warners must have thought she carried on like an ungrateful young Duse; she says she certainly thought of herself then as “a girl who was fascinated by the cultural and dramatic possibilities of the screen,” with the ability, given a chance, to help make the screen adult. Warners have never said what they thought either of them thought. The Davis-Warner quarrel was basically over the difference between her conviction (a result of her stage training) that the play’s the thing, and that what she called “contrived parts” were really so much tripe, and the Warners’ supposition that they could (as they did) give her leading-lady roles in such peculiar concoctions as “The Fashions of 1934” and “Jimmy the Gent.” When she refused pictures and parts she didn’t like, as was her contractual right, they suspended her without salary, as was their right.
In 1936, while under both contract and suspension, she sailed for England, where she rebelliously agreed to make a picture for Toeplitz Productions for $60,000 and was, as she expected when the London morning newspapers carried the story, promptly sued from California before nightfall. The mordant-tongued Sir Patrick Hastings opened for the distant Warner Brothers by remarking, “I think this is the action of a very naughty young lady,” with which the white-wigged judge must have concurred, Judging by the verdict. Being under suspension, Miss Davis lost $68,000 in Warners salary. Besides, she lost twenty-five pounds in flesh, and fifty-six hundred pounds in English monies were assessed against her as costs. She returned to California thin and broke. Warner Brothers opened their arms and Miss Davis fell into them, and they made her a present of half of the costs, granted her full-fledged stardom, and prepared to give her good pictures at last. Both had won, both had lost, both had spent a lot of money, and both were so enervated by each other that they didn’t have the strength left to do anything but stay together. A recent news clipping says that Warners are now dickering for the movie rights to Miss Davis’s autobiography, with the idea that she would play herself on the screen. More than any other producers, they would know how to deal with the story of her agitated career. They helped make it up.
To date, Miss Davis has done fifty-two pictures. Her contract, like most Hollywood star contracts, is for forty working weeks a year. She is paid $5,500 a week and makes four pictures annually. Her radio work probably brings in another $50,000, which takes her up to the quarter-million mark. No one knows what picture stars will do if the $25,000 salary ceiling holds good. They might make one picture a year for that sum or produce for themselves. Miss Davis would like, these being sober times, to make Edith Wharton’s “Ethan Frome,” as what Miss Davis terms “a New England memorial.” She has also always wanted to return to Broadway for a serious fling.
If you ask the Hollywood trade who is the best actress in the business right now, the unanimous, indeed the only fashionable, answer is Davis. The trade adds, sotto voce, that her box-office is enormous because men fans are convinced that she is feminine, though she is really only maternal, and because she fascinates most women fans and those she doesn’t fascinate she frightens. On a recent War Bond selling tour in the Ozarks and other rural districts, Miss Davis made the perturbing discovery that she scared lots of simple Americans of both sexes. This in turn alarmed her. Some metropolitan theatre critics claim that she seems complex in her roles because she herself is an unresolved character. On the other hand, émigrés from Europe feel that she should be the dominant member of a great national stock company, like France’s Comédie Française, rather than be allowed to beat out her talent and wings in the movies. Her own idea of an ideal program would be, as she puts it, “to play one good play a winter on Broadway and then photograph it that summer in Hollywood.” She will probably always think of the stage when she thinks of a good play, and to her the cinema will undoubtedly remain something done with improved lantern slides. “A movie,” she once said, “is not even a dress rehearsal.” ♦
