Popeye the Magnificent

(See front cover)

One warm California afternoon, summer before last, every major Hollywood cinema producer put on his best double-dealing poker face and disclaimed to his colleagues any interest in Authoress Margaret Mitchell's magnum opus, Gone With the Wind. All knew only too well that any open move to bid for it would send the price kiting. Hence young Producer David O. Selznick was highly pleased with himself when three days later he was able to announce that for mere peanuts ($50,000) he had bought the film rights to the book that was becoming the best-selling best seller in a generation.

Before the news was very old the U. S. public was enjoying the zestful pastime of casting Producer Selznick's picture for him. Before very long Producer Selznick knew the people's choice for Rhett Butler to be cinema's No. 1 buckaroo--bold, woman-handling Actor Clark Gable. But the people's choice for Scarlett O'Hara was far from unanimous. It seemed to call for a blend of gusty Tallulah Bankhead, smoldering Miriam Hopkins, redheaded Erin O'Brien-Moore, flashing Paulette Goddard. For Scarlett, Producer Selznick scanned one after another of the public's suggestions, considered as well young Actresses Margaret Tallichet and Arlene Whalen, Mrs. John Hay Whitney, nee Mary Elizabeth ("Liz") Altemus (his backer's wife). On his problems Producer Selznick has for nearly two years been pondering. And other studios, expecting that the cinema Gone With the Wind would be a first-rate harbinger for a whopping cycle of Southern pictures, waited patiently for Producer Selznick to act.

Suddenly last fall one studio took the offensive. Dust-collecting for nearly a year on the shelves at Warner Brothers had been Owen Davis' play Jezebel, a drama of moss-hung New Orleans, spiced with the vixenry of a high-spirited, imperious Southern belle of 1850.

For the Warner publicity department, the fleeting points of similarity between Jezebel and Gone With the Wind were words to the wise. Before long Hollywood was buzzing with gossip that Warners were out to steal the wind from Producer Selznick's sails. Soon gossips had another theme:

Picked for Jezebel's heroine was an actress largely overlooked in Gone With the Wind's nationwide parlor-casting bees, but one who came close to what the public seemed to want in Scarlett. That actress was Bette Davis--tempestuous, intense, compact & casehardened, with diamond dust in her voice, bug eyes lit with a cold blue glitter, and as wide a dramatic range as any cinemactress in the business.

In the audience sat David Selznick when Jezebel had its Hollywood premiere early this month. As Actress Davis venomously kicked aside convention, twisted the code of Southern chivalry, bit her lips to make them kissable, patted her cheeks with a hairbrush to make them scarlet, the audience glanced toward Producer Selznick to see how he liked these things that smacked of Gone With the Wind. If he let fall any comments, they fell in private.

Hollywood called Jezebel "terrific," predicted it would slow Mr. Selznick's Wind down to a breeze. Some wag suggested that the only one who might play Scarlett O'Hara after Bette Davis' performance was Mr. Paul Muni. Fact was that Bette Davis had gone full sail before the wind.

Jezebel. Last week the U. S. cinemaudience saw a crinolined & frock-coated production that cost $1,250,000, an intensely-played, adroitly-directed story, as like to Gone With the Wind as chicory is to coffee. After some badly-drawled atmosphere-setting about the propriety of mentioning a lady's name in a barroom, audiences knew that the girl to be reckoned with would be high-stepping Julie Marsden (Bette Davis), who had turned down a horse-&-hounds aristocrat named Buck Cantrell (George Brent) for one Preston Dillard (Henry Fonda).

That Pres Dillard is in trade (banking) is bad enough, but that he neglects his lady for business is worse. To chastise Pres, Julie wears red to the Mardi Gras' Olympus Ball, where unmarried girls traditionally wear white. To chastise Julie, Pres dances her feet off while proper and white-frocked New Orleans belles primly withdraw to the sidelines. That night Julie's good night to Pres is a slap fully as resounding as that which Scarlett O'Hara deals to Ashley Wilkes to give Gone With the Wind its real start. When Pres goes, Julie is confident he will come back. A year later he does return, with a Northern bride (Margaret Lindsay). With every vixenish wile she can think of, Julie tries to satisfy her longing and her hate. When a duel born of her scheming results in Buck Cantrell's death, even her motherly aunt (Fay Bainter) calls Julie a Jezebel.

But yellow fever sweeps out of the bayous and the people of New Orleans, among them Pres Dillard, begin to drop. When it comes time to remove Pres to the leper and fever colony on Lazarette Island, whence few return, Julie, strong in apparent regeneration, goes to nurse him, while his trustful Northern bride stays behind to pray for their return.

As drama, Jezebel is slender stuff. One red dance frock in a ballroom full of white ones could not ordinarily be much of a shock to a cinemaudience. But by force of personal intensity and able acting Actress Davis gives her emotional crises a convincing importance. In fact she establishes her character so convincingly that few cinemaudiences will be persuaded that Julie's sacrificial fade-out is not just another foxy trick to get her man, dead or alive.

Vamp & Vixen. Ten years ago Bette Davis went to lofty Eva Le Gallienne, looking for a place in her Manhattan Civic Repertory company. Actress Le Gallienne dismissed her saying, "I can see your attitude toward the theatre is not sincere. . . . You are a frivolous little girl." Three years later, after a year with Universal Pictures, she was dismissed again, for lack of sex appeal. "I can't imagine any guy giving her a tumble," pronounced Carl ("Junior") Laemmle, 23-year-old Hollywood producer-genius.

Last week, had they cared to, Actress Eva Le Gallienne, after a lacklustre season of her own, and Junior Laemmle, out of a job at 30, might have seen Actress Bette Davis, with plenty of sincerity and more than a dash of sex appeal, demonstrate that she is well worth the $3,500-odd a week Warner Brothers now pay her 40 weeks of the year.

Spunk, a capacity, if not a liking, for hard & thankless jobs, a willingness to play roles that would send most Hollywood beauties protesting to their agents, have given Bette Davis her present eminence. "I'm no Pollyanna," she says truthfully, "I like to play gutty girls and attractive wenches." There was a time, however, when she wanted to play Alice in Wonderland. "I'd be wonderful," said she, "with my popeyes and long neck."

In her often-told life story, biographers have enjoyed tracing her flair for the theatrical back to the Lowell, Mass, child who at four snipped off her younger sister Barbara's pretty curls; who at eight hated dolls, romped naked in snowdrifts; who at ten, terribly burned in a Christmas tree blaze, played blind for the exquisite drama of the moment.

Her name, Bette (pronounced Betty), was a custom-made diminutive of Elizabeth. Her full name is Ruth Elizabeth, after her mother, Ruth Elizabeth Favor Davis. When Bette was eight her parents were divorced.* Thereafter Bette & Barbara lived with Mrs. Davis, known affectionately as Ruthie.

In 1927, a year after she was graduated from Gushing Academy, Ashburnham, Mass., Bette, then 19, went to Manhattan, had her discomfiting brush with Le Gallienne, later enrolled in John Murray Anderson's dramatic school. When a chance came to play in George Cukor's stock production of Broadway in Rochester, Ruthie sent her off with a blessing and the admonition to learn both her own part and that of the leading lady, because "the lead is going to break her leg."

When on the opening night the lead, Rose Lerner, tumbled down the spiral staircase backstage and sprained an ankle, Bette was less surprised at the accident than horrified at her mother's long-range powers. Later she joined the Provincetown Players, hit Broadway's fringe in The Earth Between, had an engagement (complicated by belated measles) with Blanche Yurka's troupe in The Wild Duck, a summer at the Cape Playhouse, and Broadway successes in Broken Dishes with Donald Meek, The Solid South with Richard Bennett. Two screen tests resulted, and in December 1930, Bette, Ruthie and their terrier dog went to Hollywood.

When nobody met them at the train, it was because Universal's emissary had not spotted any passenger who looked like an arriving movie actress. A year later, Bette's contract was not renewed and she was ready to leave town. But George Arliss, about to make The Man Who Played God for Warner Brothers, wanted a dignified young actress with whom it might not seem infra dig for him to fall in love.

On the strength of her performance in The Man Who Played God, Warners signed her to an eleven-year contract. Her hair rinsed to an ash blonde from its natural medium shade, she set out to try to justify for Warners the glamorous canard that she was "a schoolgirl Constance Bennett." It was not until Cabin in the Cotton (TIME, Oct. 10, 1932), with Richard Barthelmess, that she got a chance to develop her stripe of cinemeanness. Two years later RKO borrowed her for the role of hateful, shrewish, supremely selfish Mildred in W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (TIME, July 9, 1934). Said Bette when she saw the film for the first time: "I didn't believe I could act so--so nastily."

When her performance failed to win the 1934 award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the resulting protest was loud & long. But next year the Academy gave her an "Oscar" for her work in Warners' Dangerous.

For most actresses, Academy awards mean better roles, more salary. However, when the studio cast her for James Oliver Curwood's God's Country & The Woman, Actress Davis indulged in a little spade-calling, flounced off to Europe. The Warner legal department got busy. In London court Bette tried to hypnotize Mr. Justice Branson with her great, round eyes, but His Honor had his eyes on bewigged Warner Barrister Sir Patrick Hastings, who was saying: "This is rather a naughty young lady. What she wants is more money." To prove it, Sir Patrick read from a letter from Bette to Jack L. Warner: ". . . Our main problem is getting together on the money. . . . As a happy person I can work like hell." The court finally decided against her. "A hell of a life . . . a real sock in the teeth," raved Bette, and left to "serve five years in the Warner jail."

Jail of a sort it was. Bette had spent $18,000 fighting for freedom; Warners had spent $25,000 to get her back to work. With a judgment for the studio's court costs hanging over her head, Bette was philosophic: "A good licking is good for the soul," said she. But for good conduct the judgment was eventually waived and her pay boosted from $3,000 to $3,500 weekly. Since her return in December 1936, parts have been better (Marked Woman, Kid Galahad, It's Love I'm After), and only once has her wish been denied. That was when she sought the role of Nana in The Life of Emile Zola. The studio thought the part (eventually played by Erin O'Brien-Moore) "unworthy of a great actress."

Ham & Spuds. Bette Davis always thought she would marry Ham Nelson some day. At Cushing Academy she had him as her beau, and like a big brown faithful pet he somehow stuck close throughout the busy years that followed. In 1932 they were married at Yuma. His full name is Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr. He calls her Spuds, has given up leading orchestras to be a Hollywood agent. Once they lived in a big house in Brentwood, formerly occupied by Bette's favorite actress, Greta Garbo (whom she has never met). Now they rent Actor Robert Armstrong's secluded Coldwater Canyon house, which has a tennis court, swimming pool, wide sunny patio and porches, and plenty of room for the houseful of schnauzers, Sealyhams, Scotties and poodles who make an entrance when Ham rings a bell. Bette reads piles of popular novels, smokes chains of cigarettes, takes few drinks because they affect her quickly. The social life of the Nelsons is mostly bridge with the Robert C. Pelgrams (Sister Barbara), Boston bean suppers cooked by Ruthie, dancing, not in Hollywood's gaudy "strip" of nightclubs but in Los Angeles' public Palomar dance hall, where Benny Goodman sometimes plays.

What Bette Davis dislikes most about Hollywood is its la-de-da parties and glamor girls. She also dislikes toadying to the powers-that-be. In Hollywood it is considered policy to court fat Hearst Gossip-Writer Louella 0. ("Lolly") Parsons. But Bette does no courting.

What she fears more than anything else is the fate of the wornout player. "I shiver each time I see an auction of a star's personal belongings advertised in the papers. I don't want that to happen to me. I don't want to own anything in Hollywood . . . that can't be packed in a trunk."

-Her father, Lawyer Harlow Morrell Davis, died, aged 52; last New Year's Day.

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