Hollywood Studio Magazine (1977)

Rate DOVES RECIPIENT OF THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FIFTH ANNUAL AWARD FOR LIFE ACHIEVEMENT IN MOTION PICTURES AND TELEVISION Excerpts from AFI Souvenir Book. Born Lowell, Massachusetts, April 5, 1908. Attended John Murray Anderson's acting school. Off Broadway debut in The Earth Between with the Provincetown Players, 1928. Toured in The Wild Duck and The Lady From the Sea with Blanche Yurka. Broadway debut in 1929 with Donald Meek in Martin Flavin's Broken Dishes, followed by Solid South with Richard Bennett, in1930. After losing the lead in Universal's Strictly Dishonorable to Sidney Fox, Davis was scheduled for the title role in Bad Sister. But, in a last-minute switch, she was given the lesser role of the good sister, while Fox was handed the lead in a movie that has been almost completely forgotten. Carl Laemmle, owner of Universal, looked atthe Davis footage and remarked, ‘Can you picture some poor guy going through hell and high water in a picture and ending up with her at the fade-out?” Meanwhiie, the Laemmles thought so little of Davis that they rushed her through routine assignments in Seed and the first Waterloo Bridge, and were happy to lend her out for Way Back Home, The Menace, andHell’s House. Her option dropped, her bags packed for an ignominious return to New York, the phone rang. It was George Arliss. Went to Hollywood late that year under contract to Universal, after testing unsuccessfully for Sam Goldwyn, who stared at the test and said, “Who did this to me?” Bette Davis and Conrad Nagel in Bad Sister, 1931 Bette Davis and George Arliss in The Man Who Played God, 1932 Disconsolate, Davis picked up the phone to hear, “Miss Davis, this is George Arliss,” to which she kiddingly replied, “Of course, Mr. Arliss, jolly decent of you,” thinking it was Pat O’Brien or some other humorist. But it was George Arliss, and he.gave her the romantic lead opposite himself inthe second film version of the Jules Eckert Goodman play, The Silent Voice, whichhe had done in 1922 as asilent. Arliss played a concert pianist who loses 6 HOLLYWOOD STUDIO Magazine his hearing and then lives vicariously by distributing gifts to people in the park below, whose problems he has lip-read. Davis was the girl who falls in love with him. She has credited Arliss with being her ‘‘first professional father. |owe him the career that finally emerged.” That was her first movie made under contract to Warner Bros., a pact that would endure for eighteen years through muchsturm und drang, angst, layoffs, and a lawsuit. Bette Davis and Theodore Newton in The Working Man, 1933 Again with Arliss, but billed second instead of fifth. Ithad been a busy year for Davis with increasingly important roles opposite Warners’ top stars—Barbara Stanwyck inSo Big, Ruth Chatterton in The Rich Are Always With Us, Richard Barthelmess in Cabin in the Cotton (who can forget her premature Tennessee Williams Southern vamp who drawled, ‘“Ah’d kiss you, but ah jest washed mah hair’), Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., inParachute Jumper, Spencer Tracy in20,000 Years in Sing Sing. That year she also married Harmon O. Nelson, the first of her four husbands. In The Working Man, Davis played a postgraduate flapper who is taught the error of her ways by the all-seeing, all-knowing, allwise Arliss. The New York Times called it “cheery andharmless,’’ two adjectives which, after 1934, would rarely be used to describe anything in which Davis played a part. But first, there were more dues to be paid in Ex-Lady and Bureau of Missing Persons, and then someone got the idea to turn Davis into the Garbo-Dietrich-Harlow-Lombard of Warners. ... Bette Davis and William Powell in Fashions of 1934, 1934 Fashions of 1934 was the result. A William Powell, just priorto The Thin Man, anda Davis with blond wig, false eyelashes, and almost as much makeup as Boris Karloff wore as Frankenstein’s monster. They sat around indolently and watched an endless series of Orry-Kelly fashion shows. “There was nothing left of Bette Davis in this film,” she reports indignantly. ‘| had hit the bottom ofthe barrel. Never again did | allow anyone to go against my type, with makeup, hair, etc... .” Things would get worse before they got better—The Big Shakedown with Charles Farrell and Ricardo Cortez, Jimmy the Gent with James Cagney, and the mildly interesting Fog Over Frisco, which cast Davis as a thrill-seeking society girl who acts asa fence for gangsters.