Bette Davis

Bette Davis: The Actress Who Sued Her Studio

In 1936 an actress with two years of stardom behind her boarded a ship for England, intending to break the contract that bound her to Warner Bros. She lost. The English courts ruled against her and she came home to serve out her terms. It is the defining episode of Bette Davis's career not because she won — she did not — but because she went, and because the fight rather than the outcome became the point.

Lowell, and a Name from Balzac

She was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on 5 April 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the elder daughter of Harlow Davis, a patent attorney, and his wife Ruth. Her sister Barbara arrived eighteen months later. The parents divorced, and the mother subsequently supported the household as a governess and a photographer — a specific kind of downward mobility that produces a specific kind of ambition in a child.

The stage name came from literature: she took "Bette" from Honoré de Balzac's 1846 novel *La Cousine Bette*, a book about a woman whose grievance organises her entire life. It was, in the event, an apt borrowing.

Broadway and a Bad Start

She trained at the Robert Milton–John Murray Anderson School of the Theatre in New York and took dance classes with Martha Graham, an education that shows in the extreme physical precision of her later screen work — the carriage, the sudden stillness, the way she uses a cigarette as punctuation. She made her Broadway debut in 1929 in Ibsen's *The Lady from the Sea* and appeared the same year in *Broken Dishes*.

Universal signed her as a contract player in 1930. She reached Los Angeles that December and made her film debut in *Bad Sister* (1931). The studio had no idea what to do with a woman who was neither conventionally beautiful nor willing to pretend she was. Warner Bros. picked her up for *The Man Who Played God* (1932), and that turned out to be the right building.

Of Human Bondage

*Of Human Bondage* (1934), opposite Leslie Howard, established her. Playing a waitress who is vulgar, cruel and entirely without redeeming softness, Davis did something almost no leading actress of the period was permitted to do: she made herself repellent on purpose, and the performance was the more powerful for it. The Academy Award for *Dangerous* followed in 1935 and a second, for *Jezebel*, in 1938.

Between the two came the lawsuit. Davis's objection to Warner Bros. was not money but material — the relentless assignment of parts beneath her — and the English proceedings of 1936 went against her. She returned to the studio, and the studio, having won, began giving her better films anyway. Her leverage had been established by the fact of the fight.

The Great Decade

What followed is one of the most concentrated runs of work in American cinema. *Dark Victory* (1939), *The Letter* (1940), *The Little Foxes* (1941), *Now, Voyager* (1942) — pictures constructed around a performer who could hold the centre of a film without charm, playing women who are ill, wicked, repressed or transformed, and always in possession of a will.

During the Second World War she founded the Hollywood Canteen, the club where servicemen were served and entertained by film stars, and she later described it as one of the few things in her life of which she was truly proud. She was also the first woman to serve as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Margo Channing and After

She left Warner Bros. in 1949, at which point most careers of her vintage ended. Instead she made *All About Eve* (1950) and gave the performance that outlives everything else: Margo Channing, the ageing Broadway star who understands exactly what is happening to her and cannot stop it. A dozen years later she took the role of Baby Jane Hudson in *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?* (1962) — grotesque, self-immolating, entirely unvain — and earned her tenth and final Academy Award nomination.

The career ran fifty-five years and more than eighty films, from *Bad Sister* in 1931 to the mid-1980s, closing with *The Whales of August* (1987) opposite Lillian Gish. In 1977 she became the first woman to receive the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award.

The private life was turbulent by any measure: four marriages — to Nelson, from 1932 to 1938; to Arthur Farnsworth from 1941 until his death in 1943; to William Grant Sherry from 1945, with whom she had a daughter, Barbara, known as B.D.; and to the actor Gary Merrill from 1950 to 1960, with whom she adopted two children, Margot and William.

Why Bette Is Called a Genius

Davis's gift was not versatility of persona — she was as recognisable as Bogart — but a willingness that amounted to a technique. She would surrender the audience's affection in order to get at something true, and she did it repeatedly, at commercial cost, at exactly the point in film history when a leading woman's employability depended on being liked. The waitress in *Of Human Bondage*, the murderess in *The Letter*, the ruined child-star in *Baby Jane*: these are performances that refuse the flattering angle. Combined with her Graham-trained physical control and a diction so deliberate it became the most parodied voice in America, the result is a body of screen acting that is closer to stage tragedy than to studio glamour.

The strategic intelligence deserves its own credit. Her 1936 court defeat is now understood as a landmark in the long dismantling of the studio contract system, and her Academy presidency and her wartime organising show a woman who understood institutional power and used it.

The counter-case is not trivial. Davis could be mannered to the point of self-caricature, and the very qualities that make the great performances great — the emphasis, the enunciation, the theatricality — collapse into camp in weaker material, of which there was a great deal. Ten Oscar nominations across fifty-five years also means long stretches of undistinguished work. And "genius" here describes an interpretive art, not an originating one: she did not write, direct or produce the films that made her. What she originated was a permission — the demonstration that a woman on screen could be unlikeable and still command the frame. That permission has been drawn on by every serious screen actress since.

Legacy

Davis died on 6 October 1989 in France, near Paris, of cancer, having been weakened by a stroke some years earlier. She was eighty-one. Her characters, as one summary of her work puts it, were "strong-willed females capable of overcoming tragedy and outwitting domineering men" — a description that fits the actress at least as well as the roles. She spent her working life in an industry that preferred its women decorative, and left behind proof that the alternative sells better and lasts longer.

Achievements

• Emmy Award
• Academy Award for Best Actress — 1939
• Worked as autobiographer, character actor and stage actor