You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet

Interviews with Stars from Hollywood’s Golden Era

James Bawden, Ron Miller

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780813174211
• eBook ISBN: 9780813174235
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Journalists James Bawden and Ron Miller spent their careers interviewing the greatest stars of Hollywood's golden age. They visited Lee Marvin at home and politely admired his fishing trophies, chatted with Janet Leigh while a young Jamie Lee Curtis played, and even made Elizabeth Taylor laugh out loud.

In You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet, Bawden and Miller return with a new collection of rare interviews with iconic film stars including Henry Fonda, Esther Williams, Buster Keaton, Maureen O'Sullivan, Walter Pidgeon, and many more. The book is filled with humorous anecdotes and incredible behind-the-scenes stories. For instance, Bette Davis reflects that she and Katharine Hepburn were both considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara but neither was "gorgeous enough" for the part; Janet Leigh analyzes the famous shower scene in Psycho (1960), which was shot in seven days and gave the actress nightmares for years; and Jimmy Stewart describes Alfred Hitchcock as a "strange, roly-poly man, interested only in blondes and murder." Popular horror film stars from Lon Chaney Jr. to Boris Karloff and Vincent Price are also featured in a special "movie monsters" section.

With first-person accounts of Hollywood life from some of the most distinguished luminaries in the history of American cinema, this entertaining book will delight classic movie fans.

III

The Leading Ladies

Bette Davis

Interview by James Bawden

Who was the greatest female star of Hollywood’s golden age? If you said Bette Davis, it would be hard to argue with you. Davis rose through the ranks of early sound-era actors and was a major headliner after five years of compelling movie performances. By the end of the 1930s she was a two-time Best Actress Oscar winner and the top female attraction at a major studio, Warner Bros.

Davis was not only a great actress but a charismatic personality with a trademark style on-screen that would make her perhaps the most imitated actress of her time, especially by female impersonators, who doted on her flashy gestures and blunt manner of speaking.

If she was a towering presence on-screen, she was no less impressive off-screen, frequently battling with her nemesis, Warner Bros. studio chief Jack Warner, for the right to blaze her own path in movies, often over his fierce objections and multiple suspensions for refusing the roles assigned to her. Once the golden age was over and film historians began to appraise it, there seemed little doubt that Bette Davis had advanced the cause of show business women in an industry that hadn’t paid much attention to them before.

Though Davis won her Oscars for 1935’s Dangerous and 1938’s Jezebel, she lifted many more films into the realm of classic cinema with her mesmerizing displays of acting skill, among them Of Human Bondage (1934), Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1941), The Little Foxes (1941), Now, Voyager (1942), and most especially All about Eve (1950), which contained probably her best-ever work on-screen.

Born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts, she had a sometimes chaotic life, filled with unhappiness off-screen. She had four unsuccessful marriages, some severe financial setbacks and, in the twilight of her career, battled breast cancer and a series of debilitating strokes that almost shut her career down permanently. Yet Davis managed to rise again on numerous occasions—becoming in later years a sort of priestess of scenery-chewing horror roles in films like the box office bonanza What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) opposite her old rival Joan Crawford.

Bette Davis as Margo Channing in 1950’s All about Eve. Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox.

Though she worked primarily in TV movies apart from some dreadful feature films in the last days of her career, Davis had already become a much-acclaimed Hollywood icon and knew, before she died, that her place in cinema history was intact and deliriously rich in magnificent work.

Setting the Scene

I first interviewed Bette Davis in 1976 in her suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in L.A. as she promoted her TV movie The Disappearance of Aimee (1976), in which she played opposite Faye Dunaway. In 1979, I met separately with her and costar Gena Rowlands at New York City’s Plaza Hotel as each promoted the 1979 TV movie Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter.

In 1982 I spent some time on the set of Little Gloria: Happy at Last (1982), which costarred Davis as Alice Vanderbilt. I was the one who showed her a copy of the script where her name is misspelled as “Betty”—she cackled with laughter and then shrugged.

Later, together with my colleague George Tashman, I sat with her at the cocktail reception on the Aaron Spelling lot as she was introduced to TV critics as one of the stars of the new series Hotel (1983–1988).

For this interview, I have merged the highlights of our conversations.

The Interview

BAWDEN: Do you remember what you said when the New York Times recently asked you to define your job as one of the biggest-ever movie stars?

DAVIS: I said I act and then I give interviews and then I act again.

BAWDEN: Did you ever want to be a director?

DAVIS (shocked): Women directors were not permitted when I started out, except for Dorothy Arzner, who dressed like a man. To be a great director like William Wyler, one must be a master psychologist. He could get actors to do things they simply did not want to do. A director must know how to motivate other people and that’s a talent I lack. I can exasperate others, but not motivate them.

BAWDEN: What motivates you?

DAVIS: Poverty. I came from poverty and I’m always fearful of returning to that state. I can only give my all to every part. I could never telephone in a performance. I have to feel the character and be completely true to her.

BAWDEN: What is your biggest regret?

DAVIS: That I didn’t save more of the money I made. Hell, Bob Hope and Fred MacMurray seem to own half the San Fernando Valley. They bought that land in the Depression for $10 an acre. Now it’s all shopping plazas and hotels. I had a mother and sister to support in separate residences and later children and ex-husbands. It got so bad in the fifties I had to do those half-hour TV playlets to keep going. CBS’s Playhouse 90 offered me big bucks to do live TV but it scared me, so I kept turning them down.

BAWDEN: Do you keep up with old friends?

DAVIS: Not as I should. I was touring in 1972 in my one-woman show of clips and questions. We sold out in San Diego and I was back in my dressing room. A strange white-haired man got in and I just looked at him. Then he giggled. I knew that giggle. It was George Brent, my frequent costar. For decades he’d been growing avocados in a farm outside the city. I was sad to see him so aged but glad he landed on his feet after movies gave up on him.

BAWDEN: Any others?

DAVIS: Later, I was touring with the show in Australia and, after the clip from Dark Victory, I explained how the talented screenwriter, Casey Robinson, had turned a flop play into my favorite movie by inserting the character of Anne [played by Geraldine Fitzgerald] to voice all the sorrow—leaving my character to proceed without all that pity. And I said I didn’t know what had happened to Casey. Suddenly an old man jumps up in the auditorium and shouts, “Bette, it’s me!” and he runs up on the stage and we embraced. Casey had left L.A. for a new life down under years before. Well, it was a magical moment.

BAWDEN: When I interviewed [director] Curtis Bernhardt he said how much you and Joan Crawford resembled each other.

DAVIS: I read that quote and was shocked at first. Then I read further and he noted we both came from very poor families. And we hardly knew our fathers. Despite what you may have read, we never feuded on the set of Baby Jane. There simply was no time. It was shot in just over three weeks. I give full marks to Joan for loving the art of being a movie star. She never stepped out without looking her best. She worked eighteen hours a day at maintaining that stardom and I think later on when she was ignored a lot she was shocked by Hollywood’s shabbiness. I always wanted to be an actress and play each character differently. Joan always wanted to be Joan. So I don’t think deep down we resembled each other at all.

BAWDEN: But on Oscar night she exacted revenge of a sort.

DAVIS: Joan collected the IOUs of all the nominated female stars who could not make it that year. I was standing in the wings and Anne Bancroft’s name was announced and Joan swept triumphantly past me. For Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte [1964] I think she was genuinely ill with a virus and had to quit. Why ever would she be scared of li’l ole me?

BAWDEN: Don’t you have quite a history with Katharine Hepburn?

DAVIS: I’ve only met her in passing. You mean I stole her Oscar for Alice Adams [1935] when my performance in Dangerous got the nod? Well, she did give the better performance. We both were up for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but at different times and I don’t think either of us was gorgeous enough. We both dated Howard Hughes. Did you know I was going to star in The African Queen opposite John Mills for a British company? Then finances fell through, John Huston bought the property and recast with Hepburn and [Humphrey] Bogart.

BAWDEN: You had huge fights with Jack Warner, but today you seem nostalgic for the passing of the studio system.

DAVIS: The studio system made me. I’d been at Universal and got bad parts and the studio head, Carl Laemmle, said I had the sex appeal of Slim Summerville. He dumped me and I thought that was it and was packing to return to New York City. Then I got a phone call from George Arliss, the great British character star, who was at Warners. He’d won the Oscar for Disraeli [1929] and his portraits of great men from Voltaire to Richelieu tickled the cinema-going public. He said he thought I had something and asked me to visit him on the lot and discuss a part in his next movie, The Man Who Played God [1932]. To say I was all nerves is an understatement. I went and he was very kind, but I thought he was elderly. His wife, Florence, was there, too. She was going blind from macular degeneration. And I made a test and he insisted Jack Warner sign me for a full year. The movie was a huge success and my little part was noticed. For the first time I was photographed with care and my clothes were made especially for me.

BAWDEN: Were you an instant success?

DAVIS: Hardly. In one of those 1932 movies, Three on a Match, the director, Mervyn LeRoy, told the press that Ann Dvorak would be a huge star, Joan Blondell would have a long career in support, but there was no hope for me. I stopped speaking to him. We never worked again. Years later he said he had something for me and I said he should try and find Miss Dvorak and have her play it.

BAWDEN: But Warners kept you working and began building you up into a star.

DAVIS: Yes! I used that year to understand the art of picture making. I made seven more pictures that year at Warners, including So Big! [1932], which starred Barbara Stanwyck, who was a year older; The Dark Horse [1932], a merry spoof of presidential elections; The Cabin in the Cotton [1932], where Richard Barthelmess was the sole star. He’d been big in silents and now wore a girdle and was thirty-nine and played a rural innocent vamped by little ole me. That movie has my favorite line of dialogue: “I’d love to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair.” What does washing one’s hair have to do with kissing?

Then I made The Rich Are Always with Us (1932). I was twenty-four and the big star was a Broadway icon, Ruth Chatterton, aged thirty-nine. I remember the day they rolled in what was called “baseball lighting”—the same lights used in night baseball games and intended to wash out all her wrinkles. I never thought about them again until sixteen years later when I was about to start the comedy June Bride [1948] and I was aged forty and they wheeled in those same baseball lights and I, too, got teary.

BAWDEN: So you’re saying the studio system nurtured you.

DAVIS: Today the young actresses get none of this. For one thing, so very few movies are made. Most of them get their starts in TV soaps or nighttime series. If they’re in a big prime-time hit, they play the same character for years on end. The salaries are huge and there’s no incentive to quit early. Then they might get some movie roles based on their TV notoriety, but nobody has taught them how to act. And they fade very quickly. TV networks don’t want them back and one of them told me with the decline of TV movies she has nowhere to go except back to afternoon soaps. So yes, I’m very grateful for the studio system for nurturing me.

BAWDEN: But the time came when you left for Britain because you couldn’t take it anymore.

DAVIS: That was five years later. I’d progressed up the star ladder. In 1934, I got Jack Warner to loan me to RKO for the great part of Mildred in Of Human Bondage. Jack was furious I got such great reviews. He said it had made me uppity and he openly campaigned to keep me off the Oscar ballot for Best Actress. But later on a mole at the Academy told me I almost won with the write-in votes permitted at that time. And I won the next year for Dangerous, which was viewed as a consolation award. I certainly believed Katharine Hepburn deserved to win that year for Alice Adams. And some of my Warners films had been big hits, like The Petrified Forest [1936].

Bette Davis with Franchot Tone in Dangerous (1935), her first Academy Award–winning performance. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

But Jack believed in stardom’s seven years rule, meaning a star would invariably be fading in her last years. So he tried packing in as many bad movies as possible and I utterly refused to do one stinker, Garden of the Moon [1937], and left for Britain to make movies. [Margaret Lindsay wound up taking the female lead in that movie.] He sued me and there was a British trial which I lost and I went to see Mr. Arliss, who was back in England, and he said take your medicine and return. And I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: How to Talk to a Movie Star
• I. A Comedy Giant
• II. The Leading Men
• III. The Leading Ladies
• IV. Child Stars and How They Grew
• V. Famous Monsters of Filmland
• VI. Unforgettable Heavies
• VII. Great Character Actors
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index