Bette Davis in England

The Anniversary by Bill MacIlwraith

Devonshire Park Theatre, 1996

When Bette Davis came to England in 1968 to make The Anniversary for Hammer, the days of her greatness were long gone. But in her own mind she was still the star she had always been and, a temperamental and forceful actress, by this stage in her career she was too old a hand at the movie game to change her ways now. It was both her strength and her weakness, but she wasn’t the only one to suffer for it…

She had first visited these shores in 1936 following a feud with Jack Warner. The powerful studio head had refused to release her from her contract, although she had long felt unhappy with the roles she was being forced to play, and when the opportunity came up to travel to England to make two films (in breach of contract) she leapt quixotically at the chance to make her point. She was popular here because of her down-to-earth nature and her un-American, nearly English accent. Tough, confident and self-sufficient, she presented an image that the middle-class women of England were pleased to identify with.

The British courts, on the other hand, remained unimpressed. Defending council for the studio famously opened the case by calling her “a very naughty young lady” for complaining at the size of her golden handcuffs salary of over a thousand dollars a week. In the Depression years this seemed a king’s ransom to the ordinary cinema-going public, and Davis lost a lot of the goodwill she had so painfully accrued. The case proved expensive and, amidst other pressures, her husband of the time, musician Harmon Nelson, eager to make his own living again and not just be Mr Bette Davis, had insisted on returning to Hollywood to take up a bandleading job on the eve of the trial, leaving her to face the ordeal alone. In the end, she lost the case and had to go back to Hollywood to see out the remaining five years on her contract, having had only a partial success in highlighting the exploitative and sexist attitudes of the industry.

But in 1951 she was in England again to shoot a murder mystery, Another Man’s Poison, under the direction of Irving Rapper who had directed her in the lushly romantic Now, Voyager. England was now suffering post-war austerity and the press were hostile, which didn’t help her temper or her proneness to tantrums on set. Although she had insisted on having an Oscar-winning cameraman – Robert Krasker – to photograph the picture, at a screening of the tests she was shocked at her own haggard appearance, the result of too much nicotine and alcohol. But when she demanded what Krasker had won his Oscar for, a voice from the back muttered “For shooting ruins” (he had filmed The Third Man in post-war Vienna), which did nothing to soothe her feelings. In addition, the Yorkshire locations were cold, she didn’t get on with leading man Anthony Steele, and during shooting, to add to her misery, she found she had lost out on that year’s Oscar to Judy Holliday.

Seven years later, with roles becoming fewer and further between, she was back here filming Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat. This was directed by Robert Hamer, who had made Kind Hearts and Coronets, but he was unable to bring the same panache to this occasion. La Davis played the part of Alec Guinness’s morphine-addicted mother, lying down, smoking furiously between scenes, and stubbing out the dog ends in a marble ashtray hidden behind the pillows. These would occasionally catch fire, ruining the next take. All involved were disappointed it wasn’t a pleasanter working experience and that the results were so bad.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? opened in England in 1963 and Bette made a personal appearance in Leicester Square to help the launch. So many people turned up that the square had to be closed by police. Still, despite the personal animosity between the two stars, Davis and the equally imperious Joan Crawford, the film was successful and Bette was nominated for an Oscar. Unfortunately, Joan was not. As it happened, Anne Bancroft won that year for The Miracle Worker but had agreed that Joan could collect the prize on her behalf. So Joan got to pick up the statuette after all.

The following year, 1965, saw Davis back in England for her first Hammer horror film, The Nanny. In this she played a character whose mind has been all but unhinged by a succession of tragedies in her past. Young William Dix played her charge, the only one to see through her outwardly sweet nature to the true disturbed mind beneath, and was lucky to get away with his life. Davis played the part in a self-bought unform having become dissatisfied with the one supplied by the costume department.

The Anniversary three years later was another disturbing black comedy which could have been a lot more effective than it was, were it not for the star’s rapidly declining powers. Scripted like The Nanny by Jimmy Sangster, this time from Bill MacIlwraith’s play, it presented Davis as a widow whose three sons have never quite managed to sever her strangling apron strings. Mrs Taggart was a memorable tyrant sporting a famous eye patch, which became a constant irritation to the actress. Jack Hedley, James Cossins and Christian Roberts were the ineffectual sons, while Shiela Hancock made one of her early screen appearances as Hedley’s wife.

Davis clashed immediately with the director Alvin Rakoff, who tended to treat her with less deference than she was used to as a big star. She wanted Jill Bennett, her co-star from The Nanny, to play the part Sheila Hancock was repeating from the stage production. She had producer Sangster replace Rakoff with Roy Ward Baker whom she had known before and, although he guided her tactfully through shooting, the atmosphere remained tense with frequent arguments. Davis remained unrepentant. Throughout it all she maintained that no picture she had ever made in a good atmosphere had amounted to anything, while those put together in a mood of antagonism always did well. The Anniversary, unfortunately, proved the exception to the rule.

In the closing years of her life, Bette Davis made only one further film in England, a pilot for a TV series which never happened. In Madam Sin (1971), she co-starred with Robert Wagner, whose glamour and toughness she liked, and she played a kind of female Fu Manchu character inhabiting a huge mansion in Scotland on the Isle of Mull. The interiors were filmed at Pinewood where a bee stung her in an artery on her arm and, being allergic, she was lucky to survive.

In the mid-seventies Bette Davis did a tour of one-woman shows, which consisted mainly in her talking to the audience. She filled the Palladium’s 3000 seats three nights running, and could easily have had a much longer run if the management had shared her confidence. Gays in particular loved her acid put-downs of impertinent questions, though only once did she avoid giving a direct answer: someone offered to bet he could name the mystery lover she had alluded to in her autobiography as the only man able to match her in toughness, professional reputation and ego. The actress declined the bet, aware that the questioner just could be right in believing it had indeed been Ben-Hur director William Wyler.

Bette Davis died of cancer in the American Hospital at Neuilly, Paris, on 6 October 1989, with just a hired companion at her side. She was eighty-one.

PS

Bette Davis seems to have been of the old school, unbothered by the need to make herself artificially pleasant to help sell her movies or get on in the industry. A more empathetic imagination than mine might suggest that her spikiness in her later years may have been because she recognised her powers were waning and she sublimated her panic in querulousness. I believe this is the premise of her major hit All About Eve, but that was a movie. Playing the big star off screen as well as on is simply a monumental bore for everyone else, and, it seems to me, the first refuge of the narcissist.

The cult of celebrity being what it is, there is no shortage of background info on the great and the good, which in many cases seems to leave little doubt that a lot of them may not be half as great or a quarter as good as they would like us to think they were. Some, it would appear, think far too much of themselves altogether. And why? Mainly for no other reason than they had the luck to be born with good genes and a shapely body at a time and in a part of the world where if they played their cards right, such good fortune could be lavishly rewarded in return for, let’s face it, relatively little effort on their part. Stars aren’t necessarily great actors, they became that rich and famous mainly because we happen to like watching them be that character they play so well.

As we look back now at the stars from the golden age of Hollywood, it’s impossible to tell merely from those shimmering images on the screen how the performers and crew interacted on a daily basis. You’d like to think they rubbed along pretty well in a kind of democratic slog in pursuit of a common end goal, but of course, there are sadly countless stories about shitty behaviour on the part of people who were earning thousands of times more than the people whose working lives they could make miserable with a single tantrum. There was that one a few years ago, for instance, about some big star cutting a strip off an assistant cameraman or something who had the temerity to move in his eyeline while he was acting – you know, doing his job. If such things were just a case of bad manners that would be one thing – there are moments of tension in all jobs and tempers will fray occasionally – but when the abuse is all one way and the victim is unable to respond because they are only too aware that their presence is of so much less value to the project than that of the star doing all the shouting, that’s when it turns from unpleasant abuse to downright bullying, and there is no context where that should ever be forgivable. It’s also just bloody showing off.

Meanwhile, others in the spotlight often loathed each other so much that they refused to share a set, so their scenes took twice as long to film, and ended up costing twice as much… with no financial penalty to the pampered troublemakers who were making all the trouble, natch. One British star decided to flex his muscles by refusing to shoot a close-up without his full costume. As he was to be filmed sitting in a theatre box, he was only seen from the waist up, but his shoes weren’t available so he point-blank refused to play the scene “improperly dressed”. How many days did another world-famous beauty spend in her dressing room complaining she wasn’t ready to film, while outside a hundred other studio professionals, who had far more to do and might have been trying to do it on an even bigger hangover than she had, impotently kicked their heels? And we all know of the famous American actor who, after a certain point, decided he wouldn’t bother learning his lines anymore, he’d just read them off bits of script stuck to the furniture, the props, and his fellow actors. I don’t call that very Method, do you? I mean, you can hardly continue to hail someone as the world’s greatest cinema actor when they’re reading their lines off Robert Duvall’s crotch, can you? Any more than you can call someone the greatest footballer in the world when he scored his most famous goal with his hand. That’s not great, that’s just cheating.

I can’t remember who it was now, but one prominent thesp, a bit more down-to-earth than most, derided the Method style of acting, saying it was funny how actors playing a nasty character will often stay in that character all the time in order to deliver a more convincing performance – ie, giving them licence to be a shit throughout shooting with no consequences – but whenever they are asked to play a nice character, they are rarely significantly nicer than normal off set. Does this mean that all actors are really nasty at heart and are simply looking for an excuse to act up with impunity? Or does it merely suggest the famous Method is not all it’s cracked up to be, and is actually more about pandering to monstrous egos than helping enable proper acting, which is really only pretending after all?

We all have to pretend in real life. We have to pretend we’re interested in that cantankerous client or that impatient boss, we have to simulate enthusiasm for that child telling us the same story for the umpteenth time, we have to bury our disappointment every time someone we love does something we disapprove of. The difference is, we’re not getting paid squillions of pounds for the privilege. Some people would do well to remember that, and maybe act with a bit more humility going forward. And ham might fly.