Bette Davis Black and White 9780226813721

Citation preview

b e t t e d av i s b l a c k a n d w h i t e

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

b e t t e d av i s b l a c k a n d w h i t e

julia a. stern

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81369-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81386-­8 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81372-­1 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226813721.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stern, Julia A., author. Title: Bette Davis black and white / Julia A. Stern. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021017850 | ISBN 9780226813691 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226813868 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226813721 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Davis, Bette, 1908–1989. | Davis, Bette, 1908–1989— Friends and associates. | Motion picture actors and actresses—United States. | African American motion picture actors and actresses—United States. | African Americans in the motion picture industry—United States. | African Americans in motion pictures. | Race in motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN2287.D32 S65 2021 | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017850 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Michael, with love abounding, encore

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

J a m e s B a l d w i n , I Am Not Your Negro

Contents

Historical Note x C h a p t e r 1 Introduction Black and White  1 C h a p t e r 2 Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens  17 C h a p t e r 3 The Poetics of Color in Jezebel 45 C h a p t e r 4 Melodramas of Blood in In This Our Life 79 C h a p t e r 5 The Whiteness of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 123 C h a p t e r 6 Bette Davis Black and White  157 Acknowledgments 179 Notes 189 Index 249

Historical Note

I completed the manuscript for this book on May 12, 2020. Thirteen days later, George Floyd, an African American resident of Minneapolis, stopped by officers for allegedly using a counterfeit twenty-­dollar bill in a convenience store, was murdered by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin and three junior colleagues. Floyd had been made to lie on his stomach on the ground, handcuffed, while Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd’s neck and crushed the life out of him for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. The officer was photographed by onlookers with his hands in his pockets while suffocating Floyd, as if casually taking in the view. This gratuitous killing, caught on cell phone by Darnella Frazier, a seventeen-­ year-­old African American girl, exploded, virally, across the country and the world, triggering a series of Black Lives Matter protests in all fifty states, some of  which endured for over 120 days. Floyd’s tragic slaying was the spark that ignited the greatest civil rights protest movement since the heyday of  Dr. Martin Luther King  Jr., a global response that overwhelmed the airwaves and renewed anti-­racist consciousness and activity in ways unimagined during the early presidency of Donald Trump. This book was imagined, researched, written, and revised in the ten-­year period preceding Floyd’s murder and the protests to which it gave birth. It is, however, the product of nearly fifty years of viewing and thinking about Bette Davis and racial representation and, more recently, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement coalescing after George Zimmerman’s murder of young teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. References to BLM appear throughout my study, composed prior to the events of May 25, 2020. xi

Chapter One

Introduction Black and White

P

ersonifying vitality, emotional power, intelligence, and indepen­ dence, Bette Davis was a Hollywood actress like no other. In the 1930s and 1940s, she lived and worked as a feminist, a fact she disavowed and nevertheless embodied decades before the movement’s Second Wave. For nearly fifty years, I have been a votary of the Fourth Warner Brother, as Davis was called in 1941, in honor of her place atop the box office and her tireless war work.1 Yet across that half century, save in the African American press,2 critics, fans, and more recently film scholars have over­ looked one of Davis’s most formidable contributions: her on-­and off-­ screen embrace of cross-­racial understanding and, in one instance, racist provocation. Bette Davis’s work inspires conversations Americans have not wanted to have about racial fantasy and the dream of reconciliation since well before the birth of talking pictures. I began research for this project after writing a book about the place of slavery and racial thinking in Mary Boykin Chesnut’s revised Civil War narratives. Wife of the heir to South Carolina’s third-­largest plantation holding enslaved persons, Chesnut never fully disavowed the racial fan­ tasies of  her class. Yet she knew from childhood that slavery was wrong; wrestled across her chronicle with the ethical bankruptcy of the institu­ tion; and shared a dairy business for fifteen years with Molly, her former enslaved cook, during and after the Civil War. Chesnut’s complex racial attitudes did not yield themselves to the abolitionist reading for which I had hoped. In the face of that experience, I have tried to be skeptical about concluding that Davis’s collaborative screen performances and pri­ vate work on behalf of individual African Americans would necessarily lead to the revelation that Bette Davis was a civil rights pioneer.3 Years of viewing her pictures and working in film archives have led me to consider that Davis’s racial feeling, while almost always egalitar­ ian, was not univocally anti-­racist. She was celebrated in the Black press during the 1940s and 1950s for her efforts on behalf of justice for African Americans. In later years, she also made racially insensitive gaffes: Maidie Norman, her Black costar in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, reported that “when we had our first meeting seated around the table with [direc­ tor] Robert Aldrich, Bette Davis had a fit. She said, ‘it’s not good for my image to have killed a colored person,’ but Aldrich said he was sorry—­ ‘that I had a contract.’”4 2

Introduction Black and White

Davis’s 1962 language was anachronistic: African Americans already considered “colored” a derogatory term; “Negro” had become standard usage; and “Black” would take prominence as civil rights began to yield to Black Nationalism in the late 1960s. The actress seemed more concerned about protecting her reputation than disturbed over playing a murderous racist. In a far more consequential blunder, Davis dressed in Blackface masquerade in 1978, published a photograph of the episode in her third memoir, and displayed the image on the Tonight Show one year before her death in 1989. In my concluding chapter, I explore this incident with Davis’s final Black costar, Ernest Harden Jr., who played her foster son in White Mama (dir. Jackie Cooper, 1980). Rather than allowing me to defend the proposition that Davis was progressive on issues of civil rights, or to refute that idea, my research has taken me in a broader direction. What can we learn about mid-­century American racial attitudes by exploring Davis’s oeuvre? Were her pictures representative of 1930s and 1940s racial feeling in the United States? The movie industry remained plagued by Birth of a Nation caricature. But studios were also shifting into another phase as President Roosevelt at­ tempted to mobilize African Americans to serve in the Second World War. How did Davis’s partnerships with Hollywood’s most distinguished Black actors influence the crafting of characters whose engagement with ethnic others helped distinguish her body of work for its diversity and its depth?5 In films made between the mid-­1930s and the mid-­1960s, Davis starred in a series of roles in which she teamed with African American perform­ ers. Such Black actors were featured as enslaved persons, talented-­tenth aspirants, and working-­class domestics. Many of these movies were re­ broadcast on television while I was an early adolescent, ignorant of  Black history save vague notions about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad and unaware of racist American theatrical traditions like Black­ face minstrelsy. The Little Foxes, Jezebel, In This Our Life, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the central works I explore in Bette Davis Black and White, left me distressed and filled with questions. Why did Jezebel’s enslaved people speak in an extreme form of dialect or, to my early teenaged ears, sound so strange? And why did these on-­ screen bondspersons carry on in the sometimes-­frenzied way that they 3

chapter one

did? In In This Our Life, aspiring Black law student Parry spoke one way in the picture’s first three-­quarters and used a different idiom altogether in his devastating final monologue. To invoke my early adolescent formula­ tion, why in the jailhouse scene did Parry suddenly seem to echo enslaved people from Jezebel? What did it mean that the Black housekeeper in Baby Jane dressed more elegantly than the Hudson sisters and sounded like Blanche as well?6 And why did Jane accuse Elvira of untrustworthi­ ness, ranting to her sister about African Americans that “their people are all liars”? These films were telling me something about race in America that I could not believe. Dr. Martin Luther King  Jr. had been murdered when I was nine. The Black Panthers appeared frequently in the Chicago news­ papers my parents read. In 1971, the Reverend Jesse Jackson founded Operation PUSH on the South Side. I knew about both movements from conversations at dinner and photographs in the Chicago Sun-­Times. When I was thirteen, a wealthy white southern woman named Lucy Montgomery, the mother-­in-­law of a beloved neighbor, began working with the Black Panther Party in Chicago, becoming a significant donor.7 In 1972, for reasons that were never explained to me, I was taken to a fund­raiser for the Panthers at her Lincoln Park town house. Film critic Roger Ebert was in attendance: I was so busy gawking at him that I never met Mrs. Montgomery’s guests of  honor, the three striking Afri­ can American men in leather jackets and berets. Reflecting on this close encounter with radical chic nearly fifty years after the fact leaves me agog at the absurdity of including a Jewish girl from the North Shore in such heady political company. It also makes me groan with frustration over the opportunity missed. Instead of  learning something firsthand about the state of  race relations in 1970s Chicago, I viewed the three Panthers as movie stars to idolize. The evening was my introduction to celebrity charisma eclipsing social consciousness. Little could I have understood that this was a foretaste of America’s movement away from politics based on ideas and into its own version of red-­carpet culture. Recalling Hattie McDaniel’s portrait of  Mammy in Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939), which I had first seen in 1974 at a thirty-­fifth-­ anniversary showing, only amplified my confusion and concern: there 4

Introduction Black and White

seemed to be a gigantic gap between the African American leaders I had glimpsed on television and in Lincoln Park and the buffoons—­another word I didn’t know then—­in the old movies I loved. Through the work of Bette Davis, with whom McDaniel would play in two pictures, giving a devastating performance in In This Our Life, I slowly began to understand American racial injustice as something that extended beyond the pur­ view of the official civil rights movement. The concept I didn’t have for the scope of this problem was “cultural.” Davis’s films eventually became my case studies for thinking about the history of racial representation during Hollywood’s Golden Age, 1929–­1962. And the actress’s indigna­ tion over inequality and unfairness, on screen and off, eventually began to speak to the intellectual work I had begun to do as a scholar of American literature and culture. The questions that engaged me about racial fantasy and cross-­racial exchange were alive and well in Davis’s filmography. As I have indicated, my passion for Bette Davis had long predated my early academic work. Sentimental, melodramatic, and gothic novels pro­ duced largely by American women in the 1790s were my object of study as a young literary scholar in the 1990s.8 The philosophical backstory for that first project had been Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1757), a volume that remains central to my thinking. As my son became a teenager in the 2000s, a particular phrase ambled into our house along with his friends Harvey, Alante, and Jaren. These young men, all African American and two of  whom he had known since ages four and seven, would murmur “I feel you” when they recognized each other’s duress. The Urban Dictionary defined the phrase as “I understand where you’re coming from,” which squandered all of the poetry of the three-­word phrase. Philosopher Smith, whom these young men would have considered beyond “old school,” had made the word “sympathy” the centerpiece of  his paradigm-­ shifting treatise. In the eighteenth century, fellow feeling involved imagina­ tive migration into the experience of another. The first modern theorist of this particular form of compassion de­ scribed sympathy as the ability to be aware of another’s sorrow as if men­ tally inhabiting his or her way of being. Smithian sympathy entailed the collapse of distance and difference and required the emotional identifica­ tion of observer and observed. One was absorbed and moved, if only for a short time, by the pain of the other. This mental migration could also 5

chapter one

describe the twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century experience of viewing a film. What I came to understand, many years after falling in love with classical Hollywood cinema and, particularly, the work of Bette Davis, was that in their appeal to the viewer, the movies themselves were prac­ ticing Smithian sympathy.9 My early wincing over the racialized dialect in the Davis films that I explore in this study was not random, nor did it arise, as I’ve said, from any knowledge of the nineteenth-­century tradition of the American minstrel theater. It was based, instead, on my own experience with an African American family in Chicago. On a sticky summer day in 1963, when I was four, my mother took me to the home of Mary Dodson, our Black house cleaner (then called cleaning lady), who had invited us to meet her four young children over lunch. We drove from our townhouse in Rogers Park, then a middle-­class Jewish community, to the Henry Horner Homes on Chicago’s South Side, a newish public housing project in an African American neighborhood.10 The Dodsons’ apartment was on an upper floor, which featured a communal balcony that laced the outside of the building; looking out on the vast city below, I experienced my first terror of  high places. The vertigo I felt that afternoon began as a physical sensation, but it became translated into a dawning apprehen­ sion of inequality that has stayed with me for the duration.11 Mary opened the door, and I met her sons and daughter, including James Dodson, age five, whose warmth was enveloping. For several hours, we played house; I was his wife and his children’s mother; James was my husband and the father of our three toddlers. We engaged in the game with passionate intensity, and when my mother gathered me to go home, I sobbed, begging her to let me stay. It never occurred to me that I would not see James Dodson again,12 or that had we been actual grownups, our marriage across the color line would have been illegal.13 The Dodson family were the only Black people I knew, and it had been love at first sight. I was too young to comprehend that we lived over twenty miles away, in what grownups would call different worlds. The visit is one of my earliest memories, a joy that became a sorrow. In the early 1970s, finding myself at painful odds with my own par­ ents, and anesthetized by the seemingly arbitrary intellectual and so­ cial rigors of my massive, Ivy-­oriented high school, I discovered Bette 6

Introduction Black and White

Davis’s repertoire on television. A steady diet of Davis films, from Of Human Bondage through What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and be­ yond, awakened me to my own imaginative passions, pushing into a quiet corner the rage and sadness with which I struggled. As a member of the actress’s rerun audience, I could celebrate on the screen the very outsized emotion that was interdicted at home and school. Here was an uncon­ ventionally beautiful woman possessed of huge ferocity. I somehow knew about her intensity, even before beginning to read about her life, and intuited that she herself, not just the characters she played, had suffered censure for emotional amplitude. Her pictures tempered my melancholy, the lyrical eighteenth-­century term for mood disorder, my constant companion. Watching Bette Davis feeling the pain of her characters and performing sympathy—­even in its monstrous absence—­was a revelation. Who else in classical Hollywood had her prescient eyes, swaggering hips, clipped Boston accent, or radi­ ant wit? Davis made being a powerful woman compelling. She reached an enormous prewar, wartime, and postwar audience that included all of my parents’ generation, born between 1925 and 1945, including the great James Baldwin. The Francophile expatriate author would go on to write about Davis in several key passages of The Devil Finds Work, published in 1976. Uncannily and unbeknownst to my teen self, his book appeared during the first phase of my Bette Davis fever. I believe that Baldwin’s essays on his own experience as a Black film spectator remain among the finest meditations on race and classical Hollywood cinema ever written.14 I came to Baldwin many years after wondering about the significance of racial representation in Davis’s oeuvre. In my fourth chapter, I discuss Baldwin’s personal iden­ tification with Davis, his fascination with the bulging eyes that seemed to mirror his own as he watched her on the big screen. Baldwin immediately appreciated the importance of In This Our Life and described the actress’s performance there as shattering the screen. Baldwin thus provided a crucial touchstone on my quest to under­ stand Bette Davis and racial belonging. But it was not until my first trip to the Warner Brothers Archives at the University of  Southern California in 2010 that I would learn that Davis had mentored Black actors. She had been invited by Hattie McDaniel to join her all-­Black company, which 7

chapter one

entertained African American troops posted in California en route to the Pacific during W W II. Davis was a member of several Black labor organizations and participated in some of their festive activities on the Fourth of  July.15 In 1944, the actress was honored with the Motion Picture Unity Award, traditionally presented to African American performers.16 Reporting on the actress’s achievement, the Chicago Defender noted that Bette Davis was “the white actress having done most to harmonize and create goodwill between the races in Hollywood. Her democratic atti­ tude in relation to colored persons, her work in the Hollywood Canteen and her liberal treatment of Negro artists assigned to her starring ve­ hicles are especially cited.”17 Rex Ingram, a prominent Black actor who had played Adam in Green Pastures (dir. Mark Connelly and William Keighley, 1936) and Jim in Huckleberry Finn (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1939), was given this accolade along with Davis.18 Two years earlier, the pair had made history at the Hollywood Canteen on opening night. Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Katharine Hepburn, and numerous other classical-­era movie stars worked to raise money for the war effort at the Hollywood Canteen, co-­founded by John Garfield and Bette Davis. Davis served as its president through the Nazi and Japanese surrenders, joining her passion for the cause with the ferocious work ethic for which she was celebrated. When Rex Ingram was turned away from the Canteen’s open­ ing night gala at Ciro’s Club, Davis lambasted the staff and walked in on Ingram’s arm, spending the evening drinking champagne with the actor at a table for two. And it was Davis alone who determined that the Canteen dance floor should not be segregated.19 “The Blacks got the same bullets as the whites did, and should have the same treatment,” she famously replied to her critics in the motion picture industry.20 Davis seems to have had a special relationship with African Americans in Los Angeles, on and off screen. Several of her films between 1938 and 1962 explored the subject of sympathy across the color line. In each of these pictures, Davis’s character enjoyed a connection to an African American’s struggle for good or participated in a Black figure’s destruc­ tion. Occasionally she played villainesses who, by default, exposed horri­ ble racism. In the most affirming of  these pictures, she partnered with her character’s enslaved people, expressing empathy for their lives and also 8

Introduction Black and White

turning to them for aid in facing exile during a yellow fever epidemic.21 She also willfully interfered with and then betrayed a promising young Black law student’s future. In addition, she murderously shut down her African American housekeeper’s threatening insights about freedom and bondage. Civil rights organizations noted the remarkable power of her most talented protégé, Black actor Ernest Anderson, whose performance in In This Our Life remains a landmark of African American cinematic ex­ pression. While scholars have overlooked the centrality of racial themes in Davis’s oeuvre, it was this dynamic that ignited my fascination with her films as a young teen. In what follows, I explore Davis’s affinities with African American ac­ tors. With the exception of the exquisite Theresa Harris, neither Davis nor the female Black professionals with whom she worked ever embodied the physical type—­featuring upturned noses, long legs, and modest busts—­ that Hollywood sought as its American ideal in the 1930s and early 1940s. Pioneering star studies scholar Charles Affron notes that “the genesis of the Davis story is a comment about her physical impertinence. . . . star­ dom does not completely account for the photogenic quality of a woman whose attractiveness comes more from an effort of will than from na­ ture.”22 Davis’s sui generis looks rattled classical-­era directors, producers, and studio bosses. Reading early biographies of the star while a teen, I didn’t understand why industry moguls had not appreciated her huge eyes, heart-­shaped face, and luminous skin. Badly burned in a child­ hood accident playing Santa in a pageant when her beard caught fire on a Christmas-­tree candle, her face had lost its protective, opaque layer.23 Davis did not quite answer the conventional aesthetic requirements of the classical Hollywood era. Accordingly, Warner Brothers bleached her hair to echo Garbo and made her a fashion plate in her early pictures. But as Davis came into her own around 1934–­1935, a few years into her first substantial Warner Brothers contract, her organic radiance came to dominate the screen. In Bette Davis Black and White, I examine Davis’s unique mode of physical expressiveness, communicated by her extraor­ dinary eyes, and her affinity for collaborating with actors whose distance from norms of American cinematic convention mirrored or refracted her own. I show how Davis, unjustly typed as an ugly duckling, opened up Hollywood cinema in extraordinary ways. 9

chapter one

As I have indicated, Davis’s films provided a world elsewhere that salvaged my early teen years from having been a total loss. But in ad­ dition, the insights evoked by her pictures afforded me my first young adult experience of meaningful absorption; they ignited a new mode of intellectual pleasure so enduring that it would transform me into the Americanist I eventually became. What did these films have to say about being a woman, African or Asian American, Latinx, or Jewish in the 1940s? The corpus of Davis’s work playing on the Midnight Movie ushered me into a world that celebrated the kind of female intensity and nonconformity for which I was notorious in the eyes of my parents. I was experiencing the early 1970s as a ricochet between fictive Bette Davis film locales such as 1940s Singapore (The Letter) and antebellum New Orleans ( Jezebel) and nineteenth-­century Mexico ( Juarez) and 1940s Boston (Now, Voyager). On the screen, Davis’s larger-­than-­life person­ alities were draped in maximum glamour. Many American actors of the period spoke with oddly English-­sounding accents. I did not know, of course, about British stage elocution or the New England regional tones of Boston (Bette Davis) or Connecticut (Katharine Hepburn). At the very same moment in the 1970s, Davis and Hepburn’s pictures, along with those of Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Mae West, and others, were inspiring the work of the nation’s first generation of feminist film theorists. I would not learn about this scholarly coterie until graduate school in the late 1980s, when I decided to teach myself Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory through its feminist film applications. Such was my strategy for swallowing a large and otherwise gag-­inducing intel­ lectual pill. While I was still a teen, Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, E. Ann Kaplan, Judith Mayne, Christine Gledhill, and company were be­ ginning their academic careers, pioneering an entire subfield from the very women’s pictures that I loved most.24 After my first round of reading these early feminist books, I would learn that women’s melodrama, and particularly Davis’s work, also ac­ tually spoke to great contemporary philosophers as well as pioneering feminist theorists working on American literature, my scholarly spe­ cialty. That is, between the late 1980s and the mid-­2000s, both Harvard’s Stanley Cavell and the University of Chicago’s Lauren Berlant wrote 10

Introduction Black and White

brilliantly about Bette Davis as Charlotte Vale in the film adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1941 novel Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942). Both devoted book chapters to what Cavell called “the melodrama of the unknown woman” and what Berlant termed queer love’s celebra­ tion of normative clichés.25 Melodrama is the genre that makes virtue visible. According to literary scholar Peter Brooks, melodrama shines a spotlight on those whom a culture has not seen, recognized, or acknowledged. Melodrama takes up the plight of the poor, the disabled, the unprotected, the other.26 Davis’s heroine Charlotte Vale ultimately rejects the impulse to fit her idiosyn­ cratic square peg into Brahmin Boston’s round hole: she relinquishes the prospect of companionate marriage in order to nurture the daughter of her one great love who is not free to reciprocate. The trajectory of that on-­screen sacrifice echoes Bette Davis’s per­ sonal experience in Hollywood, her battles with studio head Jack Warner and many of the directors who didn’t share her artistic vision. Davis was elected as the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1941. She had ambitious plans for the organization, but resigned abruptly when it became clear that her male peers expected the role to be purely ceremonial. The actress composed the language on her monumental pink granite headstone at Forest Lawn Cemetery to reflect these struggles. It states: “She did it the hard way.”27 Davis achieved maximum expressiveness in melodramatic pictures; it was in this “mode of excess” (Brooks) that she created her greatest charac­ ters, each known for a separate attribute: Mildred Rogers’s parasitism, Joyce Heath’s self-­destructiveness, Julie Marsden’s ferocity, Judith Traherne’s recklessness, Maggie Van Allen’s dutifulness, Stanley Timberlake’s nar­ cissism, Charlotte Vale’s self-­sacrifice, Margo Channing’s vulnerability, and Jane Hudson’s madness. Starting with Of Human Bondage, through Dangerous, Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Great Lie, In This Our Life, Now, Voyager, All About Eve, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and beyond, the actress combined a dancer’s outward lyricism with the ability to com­ municate inner states of feeling through the eloquence of her eyes.28 Davis made virtue and depravity legible as few others in talking pictures could do. In a recent, evocative essay in the collection Affect and Literature, American Studies scholar Amber Jamilla Musser explores the connection 11

chapter one

between melodrama and camp in Davis’s oeuvre. She also takes up the cinematic afterlife created by Davis’s beloved female impersonators.29 Melodrama requires proximity, Musser argues, while camp is predicated on distance.30 I would add that melodrama kindles inner worlds of feel­ ing into spectacular expression. Camp, in contrast, is a performance that remains external, a matter of style. Camp cannot quite consummate iden­ tification across the divide of otherness. In “Notes on Camp,” which reintroduced American intellectuals to what had been seen as a lowbrow sensibility, Susan Sontag wrote that “style is everything.“ The “great stylists of temperament and manner­ ism were Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, and Tallulah Bankhead,”31 she remarked. Cultural Studies scholar Andrew Ross went further, claiming that Davis’s acting style is “always about the performance.” He observed that she could “separate voice and body, image and discourse, and play off one against the other.”32 Davis was able to project competing ideas simultaneously: performing in a realist mode while also communicating her awareness that she was playing a part. This on-­screen double consciousness began as early as Mr. Skeffington. Davis’s beauty-­cum-­aging-­diphtheria-­survivor Fanny becomes a camp figure to her own erstwhile suitors inside the diegesis. This hammy group of prominent bores have courted her for decades, not even dissuaded by Fanny’s marriage to Job Skeffington. The suitors only withdraw from the protagonist when she begins whitening herself with powder and veiling her face to obscure diphtheria’s ravages. Reconciling in the finale with now ex-­husband Job, who has been blinded by the Nazis in a concentra­ tion camp, Fanny frees herself from her fate as once-­objectified beauty. But she also stops serving as a camp figure. Feminist camp theorist Pamela Robertson notes that “for an object to become camp, it must be seen as anachronistic and out of place.”33 Fanny’s salvation comes in no longer being seen at all. In 1982, Chicago’s gay Sidetrack bar rose to fame by looping highlight clips from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford films on the screens mounted across the space. As a member of the Facebook group “Bette Davis Babylon,” I have relished the commentary of queer Davis fans describ­ ing viewing that goes back decades and sharing images of the actress, many of them obscure or previously unpublished. These posts are my 12

Introduction Black and White

anecdotal evidence for the notion that it wasn’t the Stonewall Uprising that enabled Davis’s LGBTQ viewership; queer spectators had reveled in women’s pictures and the actress’s work since the early 1930s. One of my favorite “Bette Davis Babylon” group members is John Sherry, the son of Davis’s third husband, Grant Sherry, and younger half brother to Davis’s daughter, B.D. John reports having enjoyed a friend­ ship with Davis from his birth to her death, sharing posts about his youth­ ful visits with the actress, who could not abide his father but nevertheless doted on Sherry’s son. John was the child of Grant Sherry’s subsequent marriage to B.D.’s former nanny. Though John Sherry’s attachment to Bette Davis is familial and unique in the context of what we might call the more ubiquitous camp bonds featured on the Facebook site, this imagined community is utterly ecumenical in its celebration of Davis. Members are Black, white, Latinx, Asian, male, female, transgender, el­ derly, middle-­aged, and millennial. The site’s diverse demographics sug­ gest that Davis’s twenty-­first-­century appeal extends across distinctions of race, gender, and sexuality. Through Turner Classic Movies (TCM), DVDs, and online streaming, Davis’s magic continues to enchant a broad swath of viewers.34 Long before Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College became an academic major, years after my graduation, I had begun to cobble together an ersatz introduction to Bette Davis’s work. My classroom was the basement of my upper-­middle-­class parents’ home on the slightly less fashionable side of affluent Winnetka, Illinois, seventeen miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan. My family were secular Jews seemingly swimming in a sea of blond-­haired, blue-­eyed, robustly athletic, and gleamingly attractive Protestants, who floated on very old money or relatively new wealth abetted by Merrill Lynch, the Chicago Board of Trade, and other financial entities. My friends’ parents were lawyers and a college professor, though none of these distinctions would have regis­ tered to me when, in 1968, we moved onto the blissfully child-­abundant Walden Road. (Yes, dear reader, I am speaking literally; this Americanist grew up not in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts, but on Walden Road in Winnetka, Illinois.) The democratic spell under which I happily labored was broken in eighth grade, when the most imaginative girl in my class, still a friend, 13

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invited me to visit her home. Her lovely and hilarious mother appar­ ently was a card-­carrying member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a mysterious national women’s association of which I had never heard. She praised my “Tudor” profile and “Protestant” nose. How she could identify either behind my cat’s-­eye glasses and bushy pigtails was an impressive feat. I understood that these so-­called observations held a complex message, though it remained a toss-­up to guess which of the words—­Protestant or Tudor—­made less sense to me. Young  Jewish girls were not common in early 1970s Winnetka, and she was trying to include me, though the experience left me feeling more alien than embraced. By 1970, feminism was in the air. Our block in Winnetka included an array of different women, from the gin-­and-­tonic-­soaked stay-­at-­home mom to the south to the mother to our north who ran away from her corporate husband and four children with a man from the EST retreat she had attended in California. At some point, I noticed that we began to receive Ms. Magazine, though my mother also had purchased a subscrip­ tion to Playboy for my father’s thirty-­ninth birthday. My brother and I were agog over its photographs, which resembled no one we knew, naked or clothed. Both my parents claimed they were reading the magazine for the articles, a fact that struck us as hilarious at the time. I was unaware of Norman Mailer and his cadre in the New Journalism. My family’s Jewishness was untethered from my father’s relatively ob­ servant upbringing and my mother’s ultra-­assimilated experience; the congregation to which her parents had belonged was so secular that she never learned any of the basic prayers and songs that have returned to even the most progressive of liturgies. In fact, her version of the tradi­ tion was informed almost exclusively by the Holocaust and what might be called the first-­wave scholarship linking the destruction of six million European Jews with the formation of the State of Israel. University of Chicago historian Peter Novak has argued that in the 1960s and 1970s, American Jewish intellectuals launched a backlash against the notion that Europe’s Jews had failed to mount a full-­scale resistance to the Nazis.35 Initial support for Israel galvanized around this idea, the dream that in the desert was growing a new warrior culture unified by the refrain of “never again.” Film footage of the liberation of concentration camps became available widely. American Jews were steeping themselves in the 14

Introduction Black and White

details of the Nazi genocide that had been hidden from everyday view in the 1940s, the very period when Bette Davis was in her artistic heyday. This was decades before progressive Jews came to understand that “the Palestinian Issue” looked a lot like “the Jewish Problem” in 1930s Europe. Few in the 1970s seemed to recognize the relevance of the Hegelian Lord and Bondsman dialectic, the idea that the positions of enslaver and en­ slaved were structurally reversible. I was particularly fascinated by two of Davis’s early 1940s films that take up Nazi antisemitism: Watch on the Rhine (based on Lillian Hellman’s play, dir. Herman Shumlin, 1943) and Mr. Skeffington (dir. Vin­ cent Sherman, 1944). Skeffington featured Davis’s Jewish costar Claude Rains playing the title character, who was identified inside the film as a “Hebrew.”36 One picture juxtaposes German resistance members with Nazi sympathizers in the United States (Watch). The other evokes the Third Reich’s roundup, torture, and murder of German Jews, both native and émigré (Skeffington). Both Shumlin and Sherman were secular Jews working in a period when that identification was discouraged. But they managed to create an oblique and disturbing picture of  Hitler’s machina­ tions for American audiences by 1944. Film scholar Thomas Doherty’s powerful 2013 study Hollywood and Hitler: 1933–­1939 opened up an important and occasionally contentious new conversation about the politics of Hollywood in the early classical period.37 Doherty notes that even Warner Brothers, the most aggressively anti-­Nazi studio in the industry, preferred working allegorically in its anti-­fascist, anti-­Hitler pictures of the late thirties. This would change after Roosevelt declared war in December 1941. Doherty convincingly argues that Juarez (dir. William Dieterle, 1939) plays out on a nineteenth-­ century Mexican stage the drama of twentieth-­century German impe­ rial conquest informed by racist hatred. The film stars Paul Muni. Born Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, a Jewish émigré from Galicia, Muni plays Benito Juarez, the indigenous Mexican lawyer-­statesman who raises armed rebellion against Mexico’s French Hapsburg puppet. The Irish-­born Brian Aherne is the Austrian heir, Maximilian, and Bette Davis portrays Carlota, his queen who would go mad.38 Doherty contends that this drama communicates an anti-­totalitarian, anti-­racist message far more effectively than any of  Warners’ films set in 15

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the late 1930s and early 1940s. Most striking is his observation of a pointed omission in most classical Hollywood pictures of the era: neither the noun Jew nor the adjective Jewish was uttered on screen, with rare excep­ tions. The studio frequently deployed Jewish leading man Paul Muni as what one might call a racial Rorschach. Muni clearly is an other, but of what stripe? With Warners’ top makeup man Perc Westmore’s artistry, he could become Chinese, Mexican, Middle Eastern, and beyond. Muni also starred as the Mexican-­born, naturalized American lawyer-­cum-­ racketeer Johnny Ramirez in Bordertown (dir. Archie Mayo, 1935). Not only was Warner Brothers not mentioning Jews. It was casting them as minorities of a different color.39

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Chapter Two

Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens

I

t is well known that first-­and second-­generation American Jews founded classical Hollywood, owned most of the major studios, and served as heads of production.1 Jews also worked on the creative side, often as screenwriters. Dramatist Lillian Hellman entered Bette Davis’s life in 1940, when Warner Brothers loaned the actress to Selznick International to star in the cinematic version of  Hellman’s 1939 stage production, The Little Foxes (dir. William Wyler, 1941). The writer crafted the treatment and collaborated on the screenplay. An only child of Jewish merchants in New Orleans,2 Hellman was inspired by her own family in creating some of protagonist Regina Giddens’s backstory.3 Accordingly, theater and dance scholar Susan Manning reads Regina’s Friday evening soiree for a prospective Northern business partner as a Shabbat dinner transmogrified in the service of profit.4 I originally mistook the portrait of Regina’s acquisitive sibling Ben, a cold-­blooded, avaricious bachelor, for Hellman’s ambivalence over her Jewish family’s relationship with money. Such antisemitic fantasies go back to the Middle Ages and remain in play across the world. But Hellman biographer Deborah Martinsen argues that what the writer loathed about her uncles was not their rejection of  Jewish values for the worship of commerce. Instead, the animus was political. As an avowed leftist, she hated her uncles’ involvement in the corruption and brutality of the United Fruit Company, in which they had a significant interest.5 The Hubbard family’s hint of  Jewish heritage offers an ethnic variation on the white and Black theme of a film written by one Jew, Lillian Hellman, assisted by another, ex-­husband Arthur Korber, and directed by a third, William Wyler. Bette Davis made an additional contribution to the picture’s racial polarities: against Wyler’s expressed wishes, she insisted on wearing Kabuki-­like makeup, the whiteness of which dominated Regina Giddens’s appearance. Wyler apparently hated this ashen mask and fought Davis about it for the entire shoot. This cosmetic transformation made Regina the whitest character in The Little Foxes; her pallor was so excessive that it inched toward the necrotic. The late film scholar James Harvey discusses Davis’s fight with Wyler over her facial whiteness: He had objected even before they began filming to her makeup (she had brought Perc Westmore with her from Warners): a clown-­white 18

Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens

Figure 1  Bette Davis as Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, 1941, screen grab, 00:32:32

powdered look, nowhere so outré as her Queen Elizabeth face but still fairly startling (she said she wanted to look older: Lillian Hellman’s Regina was forty-­one, while Davis was thirty-­three) . . . Take that makeup job that he so objected to, her Kabuki mask face with its chalk-­white skin and rosebud mouth, above all its hooded eyes (thanks partly to the weight of her false eyelashes). It’s less a real sort of beauty than a triumphant flaunting artifice.

It is also a display of  the power of  whiteness as a social marker.6 Davis believed that a startling, colorless face would enable her to convey Regina’s aloofness. She explained that, like Laurence Olivier, she created characters from the outside in. But beyond producing a chilling emotional ef­ fect, Regina’s white mask also communicated the racialized nature of  her privilege. The Hubbards’ fin de siècle success derived from a Jim Crow form of the exploitation that had been practiced on African American laborers since the first days of slavery.7 An ascendant class of wealthy whites, neither genteel nor pedigreed, had begun to rebuild the South after the failure of Reconstruction. Hellman’s on-­screen Hubbards numbered among them. The playwright’s imagination of the film’s Jim Crow–­era African American community 19

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actually echoed Jezebel’s antebellum social order: seemingly little had changed for Blacks on screen (and off) thirty-­five years since freedom. In the earlier picture, house “servants” did not associate with those bonds­ people toiling in the fields. In The Little Foxes, the poor Black children who came begging at Regina Giddens’s kitchen door would never have engaged directly with the mistress. Housekeeper Addie, played by the African American Jessie Grayson, in only her second on-­screen role (she had been a successful contralto soloist in a former life), was not just authoritative but regal.8 Addie knew the score and felt the pain of  those of  her own people who had been left behind. Bette Davis’s Regina, her daughter, Teresa Wright’s Alexandra, Patricia Collinge’s self-­medicating sister-­in-­law Birdie, and Herbert Marshall’s invalid husband Horace, home from convalescence for heart trouble, convene in the Giddens’ garden. Addie joins the group, comfortably knitting while the family chats. Her presence in this scene of white leisure would have been unimaginable in Jezebel. Something subtle has shifted in the thirty-­five years since on-­screen emancipation. One could argue that Addie, as the normative character of the film, functions like a Greek chorus, weighing in on the action. But she is also a Black woman communing with her employers, sitting only slightly outside their circle. Is this fictive kinship or something more? The Little Foxes’ meditations on race come when the worlds of house servants and enslaved field-­workers or impoverished Blacks collide.9 In this regard, the picture echoes Jezebel’s racial tableaux, when a flood of ragged enslaved laborers roil from the quarters to join the mistress’s feverish singing on the great house portico. In The Little Foxes, the clamor of poor Black urchins begging the dignified housekeeper for food inaugurates the picture’s most important ethical conversation. Wyler gives us rare behind-­the-­scenes glimpses of African American life in both films. Describing such seemingly peripheral moments as “fugitive performances, which nestle in the nooks and crannies of the [Black cast] musical,” film scholar Arthur Knight offers evocative language for understanding Wyler’s brief glimpses of African American culture. I extend his formulation to the fleeting all-­Black tableaux that Wyler includes in Jezebel and The Little Foxes.10 In chapter 3, I explore such fugitive performances in Jezebel. 20

Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens

In The Little Foxes, as the Shabbat dinner-­manqué concludes, the picture cuts to the Giddens’ kitchen, where Addie is presiding over the ser­ vants’ meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and gravy. Belle, the Black cook, is outraged and dismissive when a group of raggedy African American children stomp across the back porch, soliciting food left over from the party held for “high-­toned company.” David Hewitt, the politically progressive local newspaper editor and Alexandra’s love interest, has tipped them off to the prospect of bounty in the Giddens’ kitchen. As the children pound fiercely on the screen door, Addie appeals to Christianity and Jesus’s injunction to “feed the hungry.” Cal, the Black butler, responds that no such quotation exists in any book of the Bible, to which Addie then snaps, “Then it should!” None of the young African American actors playing members of the hungry crew is credited on screen, in IMDB, or in records for the film in the Warner Brothers Archives. Nevertheless, I recognized the splendid Dolores Hurlic, who two years earlier had had an unforgettable if uncredited speaking part in Jezebel and whom I discuss in chapter 3. In Foxes, she plays the spokesperson for the clamoring children. Most remarkable is Hurlic’s transformation from Jezebel’s adorable “Errata,” all pigtails and missing baby teeth, to the slightly older child in The Little Foxes with teased-­out hair in ragged garments. The young actress communicates an almost menacing quality: showing her big teeth, she insists that Mr. David Hewitt has authorized their mission; and she implies that neither she nor her friends will decamp unless they receive their biscuits and gravy. Her performance suggests that the African American underclass is percolating into a potential eruption; they will not be appeased without material redress. Then, in mere seconds, the scene turns into a clash between the elegant, respectable Addie and the harried, overworked Belle, who disapproves of  the tattered children, wanting to give them nothing. Continuing to mutter her hard-­ hearted thoughts, Belle loads a plate with fried chicken for the bedraggled band, complaining all the while. One could argue that the disheveled children come away with a culinary upgrade: fried chicken is certainly more substantial than biscuits and gravy. But had cook Belle, who ranks below Addie on the Black economic chain of being, had her druthers, she would have given the poor 21

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Figure 2 In The Little Foxes, 1941, uncredited Dolores Hurlic leads a cadre of Black children demanding leftover food from the Giddens dinner with “high-­toned company,” screen grab, 00:16:43

children nothing.  Jessie Grayson’s Addie’s generosity is in part a function of her distance from Dolores Hurlic and company. In The Little Foxes, class conflict in the African American community unfolds on the lower rungs of the social ladder. The economic fissures dramatized within the Black communities of Jezebel and The Little Foxes can be seen to function as interludes of  local color or entertainment in the eyes of prewar white audiences. But I understand both films as offering serious commentary on racial inequality.11 The fictional Halcyon plantation in Jezebel is run by elite Blacks in the great house and, presumably, as is the case on Tara in Gone with the Wind, Black drivers dominate wretched African American field laborers. In the Jim Crow South of The Little Foxes, emancipation has left an entire cadre of African Americans in the dust. Both films reveal that white fantasies about happy enslaved people and contented freedmen and -­women are just that—­the illusions of elites determined to maintain their power. The establishing shot of The Little Foxes offers a microcosm of my thinking about class strife in the film’s African American community. 22

Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens

A Black laborer drives a wagon carrying sacks of cotton stamped with Hubbard and Sons, while his coworker sleeps on the bags. This is meant to be a humorous touch, suggesting the “shiftlessness” of Black laborers. The film then cuts to the company’s warehouse, where a large platform brims with cotton sacks, and African American employees transfer these bags into the building. Meanwhile, hiding underneath the platform, a Black child of about seven years old holds a giant sack, grabbing any piece of loose cotton that floats down his way. He also plucks tufts that have lodged in the platform through cracks in the planking. The foreman screams for him to “get, get, get! I told you one time, two times . . .” In response to the man’s yelling, the child scampers out across the right side of the screen. Only two frames later, undaunted, he reappears, dashing back in the opposite direction to snatch his bag and several additional tufts before scurrying out of the shot. This scene has much to say about the white fantasy that African Americans are human parasites. Sociologist of slavery Orlando Patterson coined this term to explain enslavers and white factory magnates’ view that they were being exploited and bankrupted by the basic needs of their

Figure 3  The Little Foxes, 1941, frame one of cotton stealing, screen grab, 00:02:39

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Figure 4  The Little Foxes, 1941, frame two of cotton stealing, screen grab, 00:02:40

Black workers.12 In fact, it was the masters and bosses who were the real parasites, expropriating the toil and health of African American labor from slavery through Jim Crow. Like the child beggars at Regina’s back door, the young trickster’s opening scene shenanigans reveal a complex dynamic between management and labor, Black and white. The screenwriters would seem to be saying that poor Blacks are sabotaging the ability of respectable African American workers to succeed at their jobs by siphoning off the profits of white owners. But what this reading forgets is that the Black child in the scene is actually reappropriating commodities from descendants of the white owners who have robbed his ancestors and his community of their labor for 250-­plus years. Another Hegelian Lord and Bondsman reversal is at work. Earlier in the film, Regina’s alcoholic sister-­in-­law Birdie has explained to Alexandra that her father ran a small store after losing his plantation, Lyonette, following the Civil War. Birdie remembers her family having been kind to their slaves, but then explains that her father came to make a living by cheating Negro sharecroppers on basic necessities. Alexandra’s aunt is the Cassandra-­manqué of  the picture, acknowledging her family’s immoralities but, by virtue of her drinking, remains unheard. 24

Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens

The Rise of the Little Brown Wren At only eighteen years old, Bette Davis’s beak-­to-­be overshadows most of her not yet fully developed face. With what would resolve into a Roman nose, Ruth Elizabeth “Bette” Davis actually did not sport a Tudor profile. She was, however, a New England Protestant whose Harvard Law School–­educated, abandoning father came from Boston. On their respective curriculum vitae, Davis’s and my father shared the HLS credential. But according to 1970s standards, alas, Davis might not have glittered in

Figure 5  Sixteen-­year-­old Bette Davis working as a lifeguard in Maine, c. 1924, photograph by Ruthie Favor

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Winnetka, Illinois. Film studio executives in the early 1930s nicknamed her “the little brown wren.” They noted, as well, that she had less sex appeal than Slim Summerville, a bulbous-­nosed male comedic actor, sixteen years her senior, who costarred with Shirley Temple in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (dir. Allan Dwan, 1938). Something in that brown wren attribution nagged at me for years: particularly upsetting was the reference to Davis being figured as drab and dowdy, neither brightly chromatic nor black of hue. Perhaps this made me identify even more powerfully with a woman I immediately knew was stunning despite being typed as an ugly duckling. That the brown aspect of this Hollywood epithet could have pejorative racial connotations would only occur to me decades later. Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale had intrigued me for years. That a person could be misrecognized as unattractive because it might take longer to grow into his or her beauty than it did for his or her peers was the moral of the story as I had understood it. But Bette Davis’s situation did not involve a sluggish growth trajectory; in the reams of still images that her mother Ruthie, a professional photographer, had taken of the teenaged Bette, Davis shines with pre-­R aphaelite beauty. What early 1930s Hollywood failed to understand, but what I intuited from the beginning, was that Davis hailed from another species than the ducks in the pond. And if a swan is judged by ducks—­conventional Hollywood casting directors and moguls—­appropriate admiration can be long in coming. Despite suffering such little brown wren devaluation, and after a disastrous nine months at Universal Studios,13 Warners’ matinee idol George Arliss, who had been her instructor at a dramatic school in New York, remembered his former student. The actor recommended Davis for his ingénue love interest in The Man Who Played God (dir. John Adolfi, 1932), which was the early making of her. Soon after, she signed an initial contract with Warner Brothers, which became her home studio for almost eighteen years where, as I mentioned earlier, she was dolled up like a blond-­haired Garbo in glamorous clothes for the first part of the 1930s. Davis hated being slotted as the MGM Divine One’s less expensive, non-­celestial Warner Brothers facsimile, as she was in Fashions of 1934 (dir. William Dieterle, 1934). But most of all, she wanted parts. The actress cajoled Jack Warner, the studio boss, to loan her out to RKO for Of Human Bondage (dir. John Cromwell, 1934), the film that 26

Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens

more than any other transformed her career from that of supporting player to leading lady. But, faced with more terrible roles on her return from RKO, she refused to play them. In response, Warner suspended her, and the studio then sued her for violation of her contract. The story of the litigation is well known. For my purposes here, it is important only to understand that while Davis lost the lawsuit,14 she won elevation onto the throne as Queen of Warners, displacing glorious clotheshorse Kay Francis. From 1937 to sometime in the mid-­1940s, when Warners put Joan Crawford under contract, a development that helped propel Davis to part ways with the studio in 1948, she reigned supreme as Warners’ marquee star and moneymaker.15 As a semi-­exotic in a conventional system, Davis was my idol. But it is also the case that her films showcased her gifts in the company of what I’d like to call her exceptional American costars: African, Asian, Latinx, and Jewish American actors at the top of their game. Sometimes she was a fiery plantation mistress who came to identify with enslaved Black characters ( Jezebel); other times she expressed racist venom to her Asian peons and a “Eurasian” (biracial) romantic nemesis played by actress Gale Sondergaard, a descendent of Danish immigrants, wearing yellow-­ face makeup and heavy black eyeliner in The Letter (dir. William Wyler, 1940). I became fascinated with the African American performers in her company, particularly the magnificent Hattie McDaniel, the first Black winner of an Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress for Mammy in Gone with the Wind), and Ernest Anderson, who played Parry in In This Our Life. An aspiring lawyer, this African American character faces off from a jail cell against Davis’s monstrous Stanley, who has framed him for her own hit-­and-­run homicide. Parry’s impassioned speech against structural racism, penned by Anderson himself, which I discuss in chapter 4, constitutes the high-­water mark of on-­screen anti-­racist assertion for the entire decade. During my contraband years in the lower regions of our four-­bedroom Winnetka colonial, I soaked up Bette Davis in as many of her films as I could find in a world limited to five channels. This was a half decade before the mass cultural availability of the videocassette recorder, much less cable television or streaming video on demand. My viewing was dictated by the tastes of the programmers on the late show at Chicago’s 27

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PBS station, WTTW, Channel 11; WGN, Channel 9, well before its super-­ station days; and VHF station Channel 32, all of whose listings were recorded in the Chicago Sun-­Times Television Guide, a supplement to the Sunday paper, which became my concordance to Bette Davis. My parents knew I was avoiding engagement with friends, all of  whom, unlike me, were coupled up. Instead, I sought a deeper connection with the Little Brown Wren. Her portraits of sympathy (Now, Voyager) and its absence (The Little Foxes, In This Our Life) balmed my soul. These are the gems I remember: a Cockney waitress en route to becoming a tubercular (read syphilitic) prostitute, with a face so harrowing as to blur the line between life and death; a vain Southern belle converted to self-­sacrifice, willing to give up her life to the man she’s loved and squandered, exiled for yellow fever; a dumpy, mother-­tormented spinster transformed by the love of an unavailable man into a radiant philanthropist and surrogate mother to his rejected child; a reckless, brain-­tumor-­stricken heiress changed by her experience of illness into a devoted doctor’s wife; a conventional-­seeming, lace-­knitting British Malaysian planter’s wife, exposed as an adulterous murderess; a stalwart young bride nurturing the pregnant ex-­wife of  her missing W WII flier husband, in order to pass off the baby as her own; a narcissistic, husband-­stealing sister unmasked as a racist hit-­and-­run killer after she has framed an innocent and intellectually gifted Black man for her crime; an alcohol-­maddened has-­been child star attempting a comeback at her paralyzed former screen goddess sister’s expense. These are the avatars of  Bette Davis I encountered on the late show in the early 1970s. Such Black and white figures, projected from the television screen, spoke to me as the adults in my life did not. Decades into my adoration of Davis, my parents remained baffled that the movie star of their own childhoods should be the leading light of my teenage life and beyond. My father was especially perplexed. He remembered being dragged by his mother, a fan of women’s weepies, to seemingly endless double features starring Bette Davis and her ilk (his term). The ordeal lasted until 1939, when at age nine he was deigned old enough to go to the movies with friends to see Beau Geste (dir. William Wellman, 1939) and The Sea Hawk (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1940). How, he wondered, could a child of the early 1970s be possessed by Bette Davis fever? Even I couldn’t explain. Then, a few years ago, a clue appeared 28

Little Foxes and Little Brown Wrens

Figure 6  My mother, Janet Claire Boshes, age seven, 1942, colored pencil on paper, author’s collection

in the form of a long-­lost colored-­pencil portrait of my mother at age seven. Dated 1942, it was created in the same year as the debut of  In This Our Life. Drawn by a surgeon friend of my neurologist grandfather, the image was encased in a dilapidated alligator-­skin frame, which amplified the allure and simultaneously caused frissons of  horror. The portrait had been tucked in among my late grandfather’s miscellaneous papers and discovered on the death of his widow. The face of  my then-­child mother looked like a miniature Bette Davis.16 Her up-­pinned braids echo the hairstyle of the young Charlotte Vale before her psychic collapse and glamorous resurrection in the flashback intervals of  Now, Voyager. Was Bette Davis my other mother? And did my compulsive viewing of  her films mark some sort of primal search for that fantasy parent? Another compulsive Davis viewer was Trinidadian leftist 29

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Figure 7  Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis), confronted by her mother (Gladys Cooper) in Now, Voyager, 1942, screen grab, 00:05:07

intellectual C.L.R.  James.  James scholar Aldon Lynn Nielsen reports that James wrote in 1943 to his soon-­to-­be wife Constance Webb: During the last two years, illness and other difficulties have caused me to spend a certain amount of time at the pictures. I rather despised them—­Hollywood I mean. I don’t anymore. The rubbish I look at would astonish you. I can sit through almost anything. When it is very bad I see why it is bad. I have, on the other hand, seen Now Voyager [sic] 6 times and will see it if necessary 6 times more. . . . And I am learning plenty, I assure you (SD 73).

I understand James’s Now, Voyager love as involving his identification with Charlotte Vale as an exile, mariner, and castaway. Her revolutionary transformation happens aboard a ship.17 I reveled in the opportunity to watch recurring broadcasts of Davis’s greatest pictures. Now, Voyager was shown often enough that I became 30

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able to memorize every line spoken by Davis’s Charlotte and her monstrous mother, Mrs. Vale: “I’m only surprised that you, of all of the family, should bring such a feather to the family cap!” the British actress spews at Davis’s character on learning that her daughter has become engaged. Gladys Cooper’s genius for lobbing deflating if not shattering statements was unfamiliar in its tone to my adolescent viewing self. The belittling content, alas, was not. Compared to many of her glamorous on-­screen counterparts of the period, Davis possessed a star image far more complex than that of Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and others, who played leading ladies or reformed villains. Davis portrayed loveable heroines (in The Petrified Forest, That Certain Woman, The Girl from 10th Avenue, Now, Voyager, All This and Heaven Too, Watch on the Rhine, Old Acquaintance, The Great Lie, A Stolen Life, Dead Ringer), narcissistic monsters (in Of Human Bondage, Bordertown, Jezebel, The Letter, Mr. Skeffington, In This Our Life, A Stolen Life, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Dead Ringer), and flawed yet compelling figures in between (in Marked Woman, Jezebel, The Old Maid, Juarez, Dangerous, Deception, All About Eve). She left room for ambivalence among those identifying with her in the dark. Most striking to me was the way in which African, Asian, and Mexican American characters kept showing up in Davis’s films. They largely performed what I later learned were racialized formulae derived from the vaudeville era, which had evolved into Sambo-­and Stepin Fetchit–­style repertoires. Asian Americans showcased abject servility and dragon-­lady venom. Latinos erupted in hotheaded outbursts. I knew nothing as a young teen about the early history of racialized performance in America, as I have mentioned. Nevertheless, I already understood that these shticks had nothing to do with actual African and Asian and Mexican Americans. But I puzzled over what the value of these denigrating distortions could be. Despite my family’s support of the civil rights movement (I knew that my uncle had marched on Washington in 1963), my white privilege had shielded me from systemic racism’s ubiquitous poison. Worrying about why Bette Davis’s Black costars in Jezebel performed such strange routines ignited my eventual understanding that dehumanizing racial attitudes were a norm not only in Hollywood but in the world that it reflected. 31

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Even at thirteen I never found humor in such choreographed bumbling and emotionality or such robotic lack of feeling or knee-­jerk reactive violence. Nor did I understand why other film viewers would find such shenanigans funny. The racial fantasies of white Hollywood may have informed many of these roles; but the Black actors who embodied the parts of Gros Bat, Ti Bat (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and Matthew “Stymie” Beard in Jezebel), and Minerva (Hattie McDaniel in In This Our Life) managed to communicate, mid-­performance, acute awareness that such depictions of foolishness were absurd. These scenes embodied an artistic form of Du Boisean double consciousness: the studio dictated this idiocy, but the performers refused to play it straight. As African American actor, screenwriter, and critic Clarence Muse noted of his friend Hattie McDaniel’s genius, she had a “special ability to play characters born of white imaginations with a particular originality.”18 Put plainly, McDaniel and these other screen artists were winking to the savvy viewer, telegraphing that they were having the last laugh at the expense of white racist phantasmagoria, projections having nothing to do with actual African, Asian, and Mexican Americans. Many of the ethnic performers in Davis’s films actually broke through the formulae they were required to enact in order to communicate a utopian or a critical message about cross-­racial understanding in America. In her brilliant, prizewinning book Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood, film scholar Miriam Petty has explored the issue of  McDaniel’s performances as bondswomen and maids, including her Academy Award–­winning work as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. As she and McDaniel biographer Jill Watts each have discussed, contemporary Black activists, particularly NAACP executive secretary Walter White, beginning in the 1940s, bitterly criticized the actress for not pushing back against racist Hollywood and refusing to play these parts. McDaniel always argued that she tried to give complexity to typecast roles and that her activism on the part of the African American community in Hollywood transcended the limitations of her on-­screen performances. Petty’s work has convinced me that there is no wholesale, sweeping argument that can refute the fact that McDaniel’s roles had unintended and harmful effects in stoking racist fantasy in Hollywood. I still maintain, however, that McDaniel’s performance in In This Our Life 32

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allowed her to play against the caricatures she was charged with embodying. And the actress’s work in Alice Adams (dir. George Cukor, 1933), as the surly Black maid who takes no guff from social climber Katharine Hepburn’s on-­screen family, demands reexamination as a return to the comedienne and blueswoman McDaniel that Watts described taking the vaudeville stage in Denver at the dawn of her career.19 Well before ever having heard of cinema studies or African and Asian American or Latinx history, I sensed that actors like Hattie McDaniel were also somehow consciously self-­mocking and excessive and—­in other pictures—­politically ambitious. Part of my aim is to build on those early intuitions by returning to films that dramatize problems of sympathy across the color line. Historians of classical Hollywood cinema, several of them African American, level charges against the depiction of older African American male figures as buffoons and ne’er-­do-­wells and of  women as mammies. Equally condemned is the self-­interested man—­ the trickster—­in a world where the only concern should be conforming to white people’s dictates. The attractive, canny young woman of color is branded as the jezebel or the jade, a seductress or a promiscuous female. Black characters remain archetypal instead of textured and idiosyncratic. In this way, Hollywood limits its representation of African Americans to what are, for whites, comfortable, unthreatening conventions. Certain Black supporting characters in Davis’s oeuvre and many Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s would seem to fulfill similar white cultural fantasies. Film scholar Patricia White notes: One of the most pernicious strategies of Hollywood’s containment of difference is the near-­exclusive restriction of people of color and recognizably ethnic “types” precisely to supporting—­and often ser­vant—­roles and the orchestration of audience identification to the white characters who are more highlighted. Manthia Diawara hypothesizes that a Black spectator is split between identifications directed by narrative and a recognition or a reading that rejects negative stereotypes and distorted histories.20

But as an adolescent viewer, I had no venue for discussing, much less attempting to understand, that the Black performances on the screen 33

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had a troubled, complicated history that scholars were only beginning to explore. This sort of archetypal analysis largely speaks to the surface level of performance.21 What remains little discussed is that the Black, Asian, and Latinx supporting players in Davis’s pictures also used their comedy to articulate and deconstruct American fantasies about color. Not all spectators experienced these performances as transparent windows onto some sort of universal truth about racial difference. As African film theorist Manthia Diawara wrote in his pioneering 1988 essay “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” I posit the interchangeability of the terms “Black spectator” and “resisting spectator” as a heuristic device to imply that just as some Blacks identify with Hollywood’s images of Blacks, some white spectators, too, resist the racial representations of dominant cinema.22

The films I explore employed a series of Black actors of the 1930s and 1940s whom we now would identify as an artistic dream team. Jezebel alone features nearly all of them save Hattie McDaniel. Her brother Sam McDaniel, a prominent Black character actor in classical Hollywood, played a quietly disruptive enslaved coachman in the film. McDaniel herself took key supporting roles in two early 1940s Davis pictures, The Great Lie (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1941) and In This Our Life. In the former, she played the mammified Violet, who had raised Davis’s Maggie since birth on the family’s Maryland estate. Sam McDaniel portrayed Jefferson, Violet’s brother, in a role that also evoked the minstrel past. But in In This Our Life, housekeeper McDaniel is majestic and astute, and a devoted mother to Parry. Her dignified and layered portrait reveals the great actress at her most subtly powerful. The Jezebel cohort included Theresa Harris, a gifted songstress and actor. In the pre-­Code blockbuster Baby Face (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1933), she rose from on-­screen maid to live-­in sidekick to Barbara Stanwyck’s protagonist. As “Uncle Peter,” Aunt Pittypat’s famously henpecked enslaved consort-­manqué in Gone with the Wind, and “Rochester,” Eddie Anderson (Gros Bat) would gain national fame as Jack Benny’s valet–­ alter ego on the eponymous television program of the 1950s. 34

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Matthew “Stymie” Beard (Ti Bat) was one of America’s biggest child stars, playing the young, slick trickster, an archetype reaching back to West African oral traditions. Beard replaced “Farina” and was superseded by “Buckwheat” in the ubiquitous Our Gang short-­film series from 1930 to 1935. Working under the threat of growth spurts, changing voices, acne, and other ravages of  budding puberty, child stars like Beard enjoyed only a brief time in the sun. Ernest Anderson incarnated the young Black law apprentice whose performance in In This Our Life, as I discuss in chapter 4, won accolades from civil rights groups and  James Baldwin. And Maidie Norman, actress and founder of the scholarly field of African American theater history at UCLA, performed the role of Elvira, Black housekeeper and fictive kin to Joan Crawford in Baby Jane.23 During production on Jezebel (1938), Davis was collaborating with director William Wyler in love and in work. By the early forties, she had clout enough to suggest costars and supporting players for her films. Surviving archival materials from the making of the undervalued In This Our Life reveal that Davis single-­handedly promoted the audition of the man who became the most important African American actor in this or almost any other film of the 1940s. The picture offers the most overtly political critique of any in which Davis starred. It reflects the progressive attitudes of  Virginia native Ellen Glasgow, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize–­ winning novel on which it was based, as well as the feelings of  both Bette Davis herself and director John Huston. But most of all, it is Anderson’s picture, which he has single-­handedly transformed into a “Race film,” a fact that Warner Brothers and the regional censors could not abide. In Black Film as Genre, published at the beginning of his magisterial career as a historian of African American cinema, Thomas Cripps defines “Race films” as motion pictures “made for exclusively Black audiences between 1916 and 1956.” Cripps opens his 1978 study with an account of what he calls “Black film”: “those motion pictures made for theater distribution that have a Black producer, director, and writer, or Black performers; that speak to Black audiences or, incidentally, to white audiences possessed of preternatural curiosity, attentiveness, or sensibility toward racial matters.”24 35

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The “Race film” may have had its origins in pictures made by African American companies beginning in the 1910s. With “progressive white-­ produced all Black-­cast Hollywood film titles like Hallelujah, the term appears to have carried over from the ‘Race film’ pioneers.”25 The earliest “Race films” were directed and produced by Black artists William “Bill” Foster, Oscar Micheaux, and brothers George and Noble Johnson, the latter of whom had worked as an actor in early Hollywood. The Johnsons established the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which had white financing and always used a white cameraman. Micheaux’s work was also supported by white investors after his first bankruptcy. In the 1930s, Black actors Ralph Cooper and George Randol and white producer brothers Harry and Leo Popkin started Million Dollar Productions, for whom Jezebel’s Theresa Harris worked.26 Moviegoers in the Black community were In This Our Life’s biggest fans. And this was the case despite the fact that Parry’s (Ernest Anderson’s) devastating speech, in which he confronts Davis’s Stanley from his jail cell and unfolds a disconsolate soliloquy about the uselessness of seeking justice as a falsely accused “colored man,” did not play in every theater. The studio cut the virtuoso scene from the prints shown in Harlem and below the Mason-­Dixon line (Maryland), claiming that Southern distributers feared it would incite race riots.27 More likely, Warners was ambivalent about standing behind the Black character’s crushing denunciation of the American legal system, exposing the ways racial bias flagrantly riddles and poisons any promise that justice will be blind. The studio’s capitulation to such censorship for racially mixed or all-­Black audiences in the South, particularly, speaks volumes about Warner Brothers’ commitment to the bottom line before all else. In this, of course, they were not alone: as Ben Urwand has argued, the classical Hollywood studio system collaborated in numerous ways with flagrantly racist attitudes, at home and in Europe.28 Put another way, the Southern box office problem was offered as a pretext for Warner Brothers’ own anti-­Black bias. In Bette Davis Black and White, I trace the unique blend of racializing caricature and critique in several of Bette Davis’s greatest films from the period 1938–­1962. With the exception of Samuel Goldwyn Productions’ The Little Foxes, all of the pictures were made at or for Warner Brothers 36

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Studio; they cluster largely between the late 1930s and early 1940s, the heyday of classical Hollywood cinema. While my scope in this project focuses on the Black-­white and Black-­Black binaries, other rich subjects include the modern-­day story of the rise and fall of a self-­made Mexi­ can American lawyer-­cum-­gangster; the double biography of Mexico’s nineteenth-­century populist liberator and the imported Hapsburg emperor sent to quell the revolution the former has fomented; and a 1940s-­ era tale of adultery, racism, and murder set in colonial British Malaysia.29 Jewishness overtly enters Davis’s film world with millionaire financier Job Skeffington in the eponymous Mr. Skeffington. Claude Rains’s on-­screen daughter with Bette Davis’s Fanny looks uncannily like Anne Frank. The film appeared half a decade before the world knew her name or recognized her soulful beauty from her father Otto Frank’s surviving photographs. This material sheds an interesting, intra-­studio backlight on the anti-­Nazi drama Watch on the Rhine, of which I’ve spoken. Jack Warner apparently was more transparently anti-­Hitler than any of his other Jewish mogul competitors at MGM, RKO, Columbia, and Selznick International, according to film scholar Ben Urwand’s 2013 The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler.30 Thomas P. Doherty disputes some of  Urwand’s broad claims about the studios’ complicity with Hitler. Urwand notes that between 1916, during the silent era, and about 1932, the studios made 250 pictures featuring Jewish characters and stories.31 This trend came to an abrupt halt with Hitler’s ascension to the chancellorship of Germany in 1933. Most scholars agree, however, that the Jewish studio heads who created Hollywood in the 1910s and shepherded the film industry into sound and through the Golden Age downplayed their own ethnicities. They were reluctant to dramatize scenes of  Jewish life on the big screen after the early 1930s. A belated case in point is Warners’ Jewish star John Garfield’s portrayal of violinist Paul Boray in Humoresque (1946). The character seems to have grown up on the Lower East Side, in an émigré tenement culture, yet his name is French-­sounding, and his on-­screen mother has no accent. As I said, I do not aim to undertake a sweeping analysis of all racial and ethnic representations in every Warner Brothers’ film of the late thirties and early forties. Instead, I ponder why Bette Davis shone so brightly in films involving African American slavery, fictive kinship in Jezebel, and 37

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the struggle for civil and human rights in In This Our Life and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? How did Davis’s performances alongside a company of the nation’s finest African American and ethnic actors inform the social and cultural significance of her oeuvre? Consider frequent Davis costar Claude Rains playing the Jewish Job Skeffington in Mr. Skeffington and Dr. Jaquith in Now, Voyager and the ethnically unspecified cosmopolitan Alexander Hollenius in Deception (dir. Irving Rapper, 1946). In this picture from 1946, Rains’s ominous maestro, who seeks to control Davis’s Christine Radcliffe professionally and romantically, projects the menacing aura informing Nazi characterizations in Warner Brothers pictures from 1942 on.32 Though outside the scope of my project, several of these racially themed films rely on ethnically Asian or Asian American actors only as supporting characters, or employ Latinx performers only in non-­leading roles. In a move I have never understood, Hollywood’s top Chinese American actress, Anna May Wong, was rejected by casting directors on The Letter. She had auditioned for the role of the “Eurasian wife” of English playboy planter Geoff Hammond, the man Davis kills in the picture’s opening moments. The part was given instead, as I have mentioned, to Minnesota native Gale Sondergaard. It would seem that the studio would do anything to avoid hiring an Asian American actress to play this part. Davis was not a political performer in the mode, say, of Vanessa Redgrave, who worked on behalf of Palestinian human rights, or Jane Fonda, the movie industry’s most visible opponent of the Vietnam War. She was, however, a passionate Roosevelt Democrat. Her biographers say she was thrilled over meeting the president and First Lady and was delighted to stump for Roosevelt’s re-­election. Davis also apparently had no patience for Canadian actress Lucile Watson, who had played Davis’s maternal figures in The Great Lie and Watch on the Rhine. Watson’s staunch isolationist Republican views particularly sickened Davis during this time of international convulsion.33 But more significant was her tireless support of the home front war effort: Warners’ leading man John Garfield, inspired by the New York theater community’s Stage Door Canteen, came up with the idea for its Hollywood counterpart, and invited Bette Davis to join him in making his vision a reality. As the Canteen’s president, Davis exhaustively 38

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fundraised and hosted service personnel who visited the star-­packed nightclub oasis in Los Angeles. She also insisted, against considerable pressure, that the Canteen not be racially segregated, making it one of the first integrated nightclubs in 1940s America, as I have mentioned.34 Meaningful integration, with whites and Blacks dancing and dining together, never quite jelled, according to ethnomusicologist and American studies scholar Sherrie Tucker in her book on the cultural dynamics that shaped the Canteen.35 Nevertheless, Davis considered this war work her greatest achievement. I take this up in more detail in chapter 4. As I discuss there and mentioned earlier, with her friend and Warner Brothers colleague Hattie McDaniel, who was chair of  the Negro Division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, Bette Davis entertained Black troops with artists such as Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, and other African American performers. Joining  Jewish singer Dinah Shore, Davis apparently was one of only two white movie stars to volunteer her talents in the effort to raise Black military morale.36 I include several remarkable photos documenting these encounters in chapter 4. Rumor has it that she also gave a series of master classes for African American performers in segregated Hollywood, though the curators of the Warner Brothers Archives have found no evidence to confirm this.37 There is no question, however, that she mentored Black actor Ernest Harden Jr. in preparation for their collaboration in the TV movie White Mama, as I have mentioned and discuss in my final chapter. Harden waxes lyrical about Davis’s warmth, openness, availability, and generosity in getting him ready to collaborate on the small screen. Even a possibly apocryphal story about Davis coaching groups of Black artists, whether true or not, is evocative. The narrative was based on something at work between the actress and the Black theatrical community. And it makes sense when understood in the context of years’ worth of documentation in the Black press of  Davis’s activism and participation in African American causes. The report is also in keeping with my knowledge that Davis mentored Black actor Ernest Anderson, the backstory of which I discuss in chapter 4. Exactly twenty years later, Anderson was cast, again possibly in response to a suggestion by Bette Davis, in a small but memorable part in the last scenes of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? There, he plays a beachfront snack-­shack worker. The days of 39

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Figure 8  Hattie McDaniel leads a corps of Hollywood Black artists to entertain African American troops during WWII, 1942 (Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University)

elevated roles for Black actors would seem to have passed years before, unless one happened to be Sidney Poitier. Nevertheless, during a short scene, Anderson’s character comments to his white customers about a radio report regarding a missing Black woman. In response to the news flash, he audibly questions the motivations of the Los Angeles police. Suddenly, a group of LA patrolmen materializes, interrogating Anderson’s clerk about the “colored” woman for whom they are searching, Elvira, housekeeper of the has-­been Hudson sisters. Anderson’s character’s meditation on the police department’s interests in the safety of Black residents could have been lifted from his character Parry’s damning take on the racism of the American justice system in In This Our Life, filmed exactly twenty years earlier. I discuss this further in chapter 5. Anderson’s two assertions about racial injustice remain relevant today, nearly eighty and sixty years later. Any acting lessons Bette Davis might have given Ernest Anderson, Ernest Harden Jr., and other Black screen 40

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artists certainly had a karmic quality, for brilliant performances clearly circulated back, forth, and all around on the Warner Brothers soundstage. When Hattie McDaniel as Minerva, or “Stymie” Beard as Ti Bat, or Ernest Anderson as Parry, or Maidie Norman as Elvira tangled on screen with Davis characters  Julie Marsden, Stanley Timberlake, or Baby Jane Hudson, everyone’s game was raised. I don’t think it’s too much to suggest that the greatest winners here were Bette Davis and her viewers, Black and white.

A Note on Method Trained as a literary scholar interested in psychoanalytic theory and, later, critical race studies, and immersed for over forty-­five years in classical Hollywood cinema, I inadvertently began this project in my twenties during graduate school. There I reveled in feminist film theory of the late twentieth century, which turned the pictures I had loved forever into startling revelations. Christine Gledhill’s collection on melodrama was particularly inspiring. More recent reading in star studies from Richard Dyer through Martin Shingler’s work as our preeminent Davis scholar and Miriam Petty’s transformative book on Black motion-­ picture performers of the 1930s became invaluable for my thinking about this project. Research on the history of race on film, pioneered by the late Thomas Cripps, Donald Bogle, the late James Snead, Ed Guerrero, Arthur Knight, and Ryan Friedman has been essential to my Bette Davis education. Beloved friends and film scholars Nick Davis and Miriam Petty urged me to explore ethnographic and sociological research on spectatorship: the groundbreaking work of Jacqueline Stacey on women viewers and Jacqueline Stewart on African American audiences in Chicago during the silent era has refined my thinking about racial identification.38 The recent research of cinema scholar Kwynn Perry has enriched my thinking about racialized reception. In her pioneering study of  Black film shorts from the early sound era, Perry elaborates a theory of audience immersion in African American screen performance. She juxtaposes this with a different mode of spectatorship focused on viewing on-­screen Black musicians, dancers, and actors at a distance, as entertainment to 41

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consume rather than figures with whom to commune. Put in the language of Adam Smith, immersion involves the viewer’s imaginative migration into the mise-­en-­scène. In the second paradigm, the audience member remains a spectator rather than a participant, and there is no such imaginative transport. Perry’s arguments inform my readings in the chapters that follow.39 Her formula illuminates Jezebel in particularly fascinating ways, though we still disagree about the scene in which Davis’s Julie joins her enslaved people in frenzied singing: I see this as a moment of immersion, while Perry believes Davis’s heroine is curating the music of her enslaved persons rather than dissolving into it. Our different responses may be racially inflected, since Perry is African American and I am white. But I identify this scene as the turning point in heroine Julie Marsden’s slow embrace of Blackness, and not her “staining” from shame, as others have suggested. Perry’s theory also helps explain certain failures of sympathy for viewers of In This Our Life and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I turn to the issue of racialized immersion in the brief all-­Black jail interlude in chapter 4; and I discuss Ernest Anderson’s fleeting appearance as an ice cream vendor who raises questions about the Los Angeles Police Department’s regard for Black citizens at the end of chapter 5. I recognize the performance of double consciousness in these pictures as a cinematic language for protest. Perry, on the other hand, sees it as a social force that reduces the African American subject to the object of spectacle. Physical excess, as I understand it, offers Black actors the opportunity to undercut the racist phantasmagoria they are performing. Finally, a number of different viewers appear in my book: my thirteen-­ year-­old self, whose cross-­racial experience was limited but alive enough to suspect that the shtick in Jezebel did not represent any truth about slavery or African Americans; and the adult who for thirty years has taught Black and white US literature of the nineteenth century and the major novels of Faulkner, material that makes slavery, freedom, and the social construction of race central themes. Other viewers include critics and scholars, many of them African American, and most importantly, actual Black audience members from the 1930s and 1940s who wrote to Warner Brothers to celebrate or protest what they saw on the screen. Research on African American spectatorship remains of vital importance to under42

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standing how Black images in white pictures signify. Bette Davis’s oeuvre offers an unexpected case study from which we can continue this work.

About the Endnotes Given my commitment to tell the story of Bette Davis and racial fellow feeling as lucidly as possible, I have created, through abundant discursive endnotes, a world auxiliary to that narrative. Davis scholar Martin Shingler, one of my press readers, suggested that the notes almost constitute a second project and that I should promote them into the body of my text. Concerned about interrupting the flow of my exposition, I have largely followed Professor Shingler’s alternative advice, which was to flag the centrality of my notes here. It remains my hope that readers will not overlook the notes or, at least, will browse them after finishing the book. This ancillary conversation will allow full access to the rich texture of  Bette Davis’s links to African American history, feminism, and scholarship on theater and performance.

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Chapter Three

The Poetics of Color in Jezebel

E

arly in The Devil Finds Work, his memoir of moviegoing as a young Black man, James Baldwin speculates that Henry Fonda, Bette Davis’s costar in Jezebel, may have African American “blood.” At fifteen, the future writer and a friend discuss this prospect: the only actor of the era with whom I identified was Henry Fonda. I was not alone. A Black friend of mine, after seeing Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath, swore that Fonda had colored blood. You could tell, he said, by the way Fonda walked down the road at the end of the film: white men don’t walk like that! And he imitated Fonda’s stubborn, patient, wide-­legged hike away from the camera.1

Being “colored” may not be legible, in Henry Fonda’s case, but Blackness will out, since “white men don’t walk like that.” In a later passage, Baldwin describes his teenaged impression that Bette Davis is not Cau­casian; again, it is the way she moves that leads him to this conclusion. Experiencing the star’s on-­screen facial tones as a kind of ashy tint, he explains: “I gave Davis’s skin the dead-­white greenish cast of something crawling from under a rock, but I was held, just the same, by the tense intelligence of the forehead, the disaster of the lips: and when she moved, she moved just like a nigger.”2 The actress’s countenance is reptilian, and her gait, soon to become famous for its driving, hip-­first energies, clinches the connection in Baldwin’s mind between Davis and people of color.3 Jane Gaines’s reading of Baldwin’s remarks about Davis’s skin tone, in her chapter “Green Like Me,” illuminates Baldwin’s central and occasionally opaque meditation. Gaines writes: Jimmy Baldwin has no designs on whiteness. The boy constructs Bette Davis as “ugly like me,” but does not make himself into a white movie star. Instead, he meets Davis in the category of “strange,” which he says he knows because people “treated me so strangely.”

Gaines takes up the complexity of Baldwin’s multiple identifications—­ racial, homosexual, and Hollywood inspired: 46

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Rather than seeing it as retrograde, we need to see the ingenious eclecticism of Black queer identity formation as able to find itself through whiteness, to go deeply into whiteness and take out the best parts. Black disidentification with white stars is an attraction to the glamour in danger as well as the danger in glamour, and it knows just how close to get to the flame. James Baldwin is and isn’t Bette Davis.4

Baldwin’s Devil contains a treasury of insights into his personal viewing experience; the book also offers a template for what scholars of spectatorship later would call cross-­racial identifications. Examining audiences’ relationships with figures on the screen, such theorists ask how race inflects the way viewers make emotional connections with stars. This chapter, on Bette Davis’s heroine’s mobile identifications in Jezebel (dir. William Wyler, 1938), explores Davis’s cross-­racial sympathies with Black actors in the picture and, particularly, her character’s fictional attachments inside the frame.5 Central to my analysis is the way Davis’s Julie migrates across the color line and joins her enslaved people in moments of play and musical celebration.6 This “Blackening” remains a basic, felt affinity; it is not merely the effect of the social humiliation and rejection she brings upon herself. Indeed, by the end of the picture, the heroine’s decision to embrace abjection and exile becomes existential, a condition akin to Black unfreedom in 1853 New Orleans. Wyler’s film began its life as a 1933 Broadway stage play written by Owen Davis Sr., which ran for thirty-­two performances and starred Davis’s early nemesis, Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins had been the leading lady of George Cukor’s Rochester theater company when Davis was an ingénue there; the older woman, a diva, according to several accounts, hated the attention paid to the young starlet. Hopkins’s Broadway Jezebel contract stipulated that she was to play Julie Marsden, the heroine, in a film version of the drama. Launched in Rochester, the actress’s animus persisted across the 1930s and early 1940s. Davis reported that Hopkins appeared on the set of The Old Maid, their first Hollywood collaboration, “wearing a complete replica of one of my Jezebel costumes. It was obvious she wanted me to blow my stack at this. I completely ignored the whole thing. Ensuing events proved she wanted even more to be in my shoes than in my dress.”7 47

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Wyler and Warner Brothers vetoed casting Hopkins, leaving the actress enraged at the usurper Davis.8 Adding insult to injury, Davis soon after had an affair with Hopkins’s former husband, director Anatole Litvak, during the making of All This and Heaven Too (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1940). Such betrayal was the icing on the cake from hell for Hopkins. The pair would go on to make two important films together, The Old Maid (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1939) and Old Acquaintance (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1943), in which Hopkins and Davis turned their mutual animus into creative triumph. That both plots featured sexual competition between the two characters allowed the actresses to draw on their own fraught history, years before Method Acting came to dominate Hollywood dramatic technique.9 As Jezebel moved from theatrical drama to motion picture, much of Owen Davis Sr.’s characterization of race and sexuality was sanitized by the Warner Brothers writing team of Clements Ripley, Abem Finkel, and John Huston.10 The trio’s subsequent screenplay clearly has the Production Code in mind, avoiding any racializing of the heroine. Yet the earlier playscript imagines Julie as racially marked—­as not fully white.11 And playwright Owen Davis Sr. provided the heroine’s ex-­fiancé Preston Dillard a sexual history with multiracial “yallow” or “qua­ droon” paramours. Julie alludes to this, accusing Pres of treating her like a mixed-­race (degraded) women; he replies that his desire for Julie has not been quenched by either these illicit relationships or his marriage to Amy, a Yankee. Sexual expression takes on racial inflections in the play, as when the married Preston passionately kisses his former fiancée and they talk of running away together. Soon after, it becomes apparent that Pres is delirious, stricken by yellow fever, and the rekindled flame sputters out.12 In the film, Henry Fonda’s Preston has no lurid past with “yallow” women and is stupefied and then repulsed by Julie’s kiss. He bears no lingering love for the heroine at all. Ripley, Finkel, and Huston have bleached the play’s sexual melodrama, and the Broadway stage association of  Julie with “Blackness” is reduced to a figurative dimension of the mise-­en-­scène—­ her powerful relationships with the enslaved characters in her world. The screenplay certainly contains no evidence that Jezebel’s three writers instructed the players to enact cross-­racial harmony. That happens only in the stage version, between the mistress and Mammy Winnie, 48

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who has raised the orphaned Julie since birth. No mammy figure makes it onto the Jezebel screen, a remarkable detail in the era of Gone with the Wind and Hattie McDaniel, who actually was under contract at Warner Brothers. Instead, Jezebel’s film writers maintain a conventionally racist scenario, of a piece with its historical moment; they give viewers a 1930s phantasmagoria of jovial enslaved Black people and genteel white owners in 1853 New Orleans. The shooting script includes two scenes straight out of early Black vaudeville, emphasizing antic nonsense if not buffoonery, which I explore in what follows.13 Yet something that unfolds between Bette Davis and Eddie Anderson, Stymie Beard, Theresa Harris, and Lew Payton—­the intimacy of their collaboration—­pushes beyond the screenplay’s 1930s, anti-­Black Hollywood conventions. Consider Hal Wallis’s interoffice memo to Henry Blanke, who ran production at Warners in the late 1930s. Wallis writes: “The only thing that bothers me on ‘JEZEBEL’ is that the little nigger boy [Stymie Beard] will be a full-­grown man by the time Wyler finishes the picture.” This artifact left me speechless when I discovered it in the Warner Brothers Archives. I was agog over both its blithe racism and the obliviousness of  Wallis in drafting such a hateful piece of intraoffice executive “comedy.” Apropos of its ostensible critique of  Wyler’s methods, there were universal complaints about the director’s protracted pace, particularly from Wallis and Jack Warner, head of production and the studio boss who dealt directly with Bette Davis across her eighteen-­year career. At one point, Wallis and Warner considered replacing Wyler with a new director, to Davis’s horror. In her first autobiography, The Lonely Life, she writes: Warners, in a fret, decided to take Willie off the picture, since the budget was going out the window. But this man wasn’t going to be fired if I, personally, had to burn the place down. I wasn’t going to lose this genius for anybody or anything. I walked up that beaten path to the sanctum sanctorum and announced that I wouldn’t finish the film if Mr. Wyler were not allowed to continue. I offered to work late each day on the picture. Warner agreed.14

Wallis’s flagrant disrespect for and denigration of Stymie Beard, among the most experienced and professional of Jezebel’s players, as 49

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well as Warners’ best-­known Black male star in 1938, is stunning, even as an ostensible joke. As a cast member of Hal Roach’s Our Gang short films, Beard was universally recognizable and beloved among American moviegoers for his quick-­witted trickster shenanigans on screen from the mid-­1930s on. As I have said, the Black actors starring in this film represented an African American professional all-­star team; and given the studio’s reputation for doing socially realist and urban-­themed crime pictures (Confessions of a Nazi Spy [dir. Anatole Litvak, 1939]; They Made Me a Criminal [dir. Busby Berkeley, 1939]), Warners had call to employ more Black actors in Los Angeles than other studios. Whether the company’s production executives recognized the value of their African American talent is another story. Jack Warner was smart enough to put Hattie McDaniel under contract just before Gone with the Wind (for which she was loaned to David O. Selznick Productions), but underused her. Given the paucity of non-­maid roles for a large, middle-­aged, dark-­skinned Black actress, he loaned her out for much of  her career. But Wallis’s ease in using racial epithets to talk about one of his most publicly popular performers remains astonishing, even for its historical moment, and illustrates the perniciousness of Hollywood racism in the classical era.15 Yet across the picture, Davis’s heiress struggles against white aristocratic Southern norms. Her defiance is attributed to a ferocious spirit rather than to radical (read abolitionist) politics. Julie’s resistance to authority would seem to be a personal matter, the whim of an immature, overprivileged belle. As early as her entrance into the picture in the fourth scene, she is in sartorial dissent from patriarchal codes: women don’t sport riding habits at parties. Soon after, Julie defies the tradition that ball-­going virgins must wear white, to the horror and repugnance of her entire community. She has made herself a pariah on the basis of  her chromatic choices and what they telegraph about her purity and racial identifications. What starts in the film as individual rebellion, however, ends on a more political note, with Julie’s conscious embrace of social death, materialized as yellow fever. Medical historians describe how the illness actually blackens sufferers’ faces, though Wyler dramatizes only sweating and lassitude. Social death is the ontological position Orlando Patterson identifies with slavery itself. Julie has come to occupy a self-­conception that links her once and for all with her enslaved Black people.16 The 50

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heroine’s final position resembles not the enslaved house workers with whom she’s frolicked, but the field hands who briefly emerge in their tattered garb to entertain Julie’s visitors and then disappear. The fleeting entrance and equally swift departure of the film’s most wretched enslaved people and Julie’s ultimate connection with such abject figures is central to my reading of the film and my thesis in this book. And in the whitewashed visual discourse of slavery in Jezebel, when these enslaved field-­workers show up for the musical interlude, their abjection is not made visceral. We gain closest access to wretchedness when the young male slaves join Gros Bat and Ti Bat in the “carriage is coming” hysteria sequence, discussed below. It is in sartorial form that chief costume designer Orry-­Kelly and the Warner Brothers wardrobe department convey Julie’s conflict with her elite white culture.17 Almost every gown she wears proves incendiary, if not actually unseemly, in the context of Southern aristocratic society and its conventions and codes. Julie enters the film in a sporty black riding costume, never appropriate outside the equestrian arena; she moves to an interdicted red ball gown; this is followed by the reclaimed virginal white dress that, one year earlier, she fatefully had refused to wear; and in her last scenes, she dons a sophisticated, harlequined black and white frock. Dark and light, this sparkling, crystal-­beaded confection would seem to combine the luminous qualities of the red Olympus ball gown with the virginal white lace ensemble she chose to wear too late. This final, duo-­chromatic dress glitters in Julie’s plantation dining room, though none of her visitors register its sartorial untimeliness. That is, the dress looks nothing like any of the nineteenth-­century-­inspired frocks worn by anyone else in the movie, or gowns that could be found in a historical costume collection such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York or a historical society such as the Chicago History Museum. Instead, it is impossible, a fantastic riff on American Victorian-­era formal wear, but fabricated with an eye to the cinematic spotlight of the 1930s; save for the hoop skirt that supports it, the lush and modern quality of its crystal-­beaded textures resembles the gold lamé chiffon and tulle confections worn by Ginger Rogers in her partnership with Fred Astaire. This sartorial nod to a moment almost 100 years in the future signals that Davis’s Julie is, herself, out of time; her transgression of race and 51

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gender codes has rendered her unfit to remain in her own historical milieu. Scenes later, her crystalline harlequined dress has become stained and tattered from nursing Pres and riding the fever wagon toward exile and probable death. Black and soiled white, it bears allegiance to Julie’s transgressions and her final hopes for redemption. Four scenes vividly represent Julie’s ever-­mistaken sartorial impulses. These tableaux telegraph her social and moral degeneration before the picture’s final minutes. But from the film’s backstory, outlined below, we learn that Julie’s emotional life is as unconventional as are her fashion choices. She enjoys greater attachments to her enslaved house workers than she does to her aunt and guardian, both elite whites. The heroine’s bond with Aunt Belle (Fay Bainter, who won an Oscar for her performance) is loving but contentious, particularly when Julie insists on doing things her own way: disobeying the injunction against riding a wild horse and ultimately breaking her collarbone; getting engaged to social peer Preston Dillard and then whimsically ending the betrothal. Julie’s guardian, General Bogardus, a member of the military political elite, seems even more disturbed by Julie’s moods than is Aunt Belle. Wyler depicts their connection as cordial, not close. Jezebel’s white aristocracy lives by its lofty mores and traditions of honor, about which Julie is decidedly ambivalent. In contrast, the film imagines Davis’s heroine as a young woman who spends a great deal of time in play or conversation with her enslaved people, particularly grooms Gros Bat and Ti (petite) Bat and maid Zette. These two enslaved men, possibly father and son, have unconventional names. Literally translated from the French, they are Big or Great Thing and Little or Small Thing. Were the writers playing on the antebellum legal philosophy stipulating that enslaved persons were not human beings but chattel, mere objects? It is not an accident that in Jezebel, the viewer first meets Julie in the midst of a festival of verbal and physical frolic across the color line. Already late for her own engagement party because she has been riding an unbroken colt, the mistress stops in her front courtyard to skylark with Gros Bat (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) and Ti Bat (Matthew “Stymie” Beard).18 At this moment, Davis’s character identifies with both the enslaved youth struggling to rein in the wild colt, and the young horse itself, which won’t take direction. “But he 52

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Figure 9  Ti Bat (Matthew “Stymie” Beard) in Jezebel, 1938, screen grab, 00:07:44

bites!” shouts Ti Bat, eyes popping with terror. “Then you’ll just have to bite him back!” responds Davis’s laughing Julie, even more bulge-­eyed than her young Black groom. James Baldwin writes that as a child of ten, he loved Bette Davis first and foremost because she was “ugly like me.” “Pop-­eyes popping” . . . Bette Davis (as previously mentioned) “moved just like a nigger” and “remained the toast of Harlem.”19 Julie’s conversation with Ti Bat over the wild colt is, of course, a minstrel scene, with Davis’s heroine as the young man’s interlocutor, participating in the Black performance Zora Neale Hurston would call “cuttin’ the monkey for the white folks.” In Jezebel, however, this mistress joyfully inserts herself into the world of enslaved theatricality: rejecting the position of white spectator, she assumes the creative role of “African American” respondent.20 Though some critics believe that Davis overplays the physical dimensions of her characters, in this scene, the actress employs restrained arm movements to commune with her small groom. Stymie Beard’s Ti Bat, dragged by a horse that outweighs him by many hundred pounds, hops 53

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Figure 10  Julie (Bette Davis) addressing Ti Bat (Matthew “Stymie” Beard) in Jezebel, 1938, screen grab, 00:07:44

backward in a sort of parodic tap dance while trying to follow his mistress’s directions. Modeling calmness, his mistress telegraphs instructions for how to manage the refractory horse. This emphasis on Julie’s physical prowess (and its lack) continues through William Wyler’s choreography of the heroine’s exit from the scene: in one lavish swooshing motion, using a small riding crop, Davis was instructed to hitch up the folds of her voluminous skirt and twirl into the house. The actress recounted that it took her exactly fifty takes to master the seemingly effortless maneuver. Wyler may well have received his infamous nickname “Fifty-­Take Willie” on the Jezebel set. Still, as a result of the director’s perfectionism, Davis’s gesture became one of two signature memes for this film, in addition to her dance of shame in the red dress through the receding crowd of waltzing women in white. Julie has accused Ti Bat of bugging his eyes, remarking on facial characteristics that she actually shares with her young enslaved groom. This irony would seem to be part of the fun. But those trademark Bette Davis 54

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eyes mirroring her young African American counterpart also highlight an important moment in the narrative: these two individuals share a profound expressive link. The tableau suggests that in some ways, Julie is self-­blackened—­knowingly connected to her enslaved people—­from the beginning of the film. Certainly, the riding habit she wears in this scene perfectly echoes the classic black garments Ti and Gros Bat wear as coachman, groom, and house servant: all three could be peers attending an equestrian event; conversely, they could be enslaved waiters and maids serving at a hunt breakfast. Despite the fact that her butler is named Uncle Cato (most likely “elevated” to “Uncle” in his early adulthood by Julie’s guardian or Aunt Belle), Davis’s heroine does not actively employ the fantasy of “fictive kinship.” Coined by Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death, fictive kinship is the mechanism by which white masters extend the illusion of paternal relations to their enslaved people, renaming them Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe, to propagate the fantasy that on a plantation, Blacks and whites are one big happy family. Instead, I believe Julie is identifying with her enslaved community: she is not appropriating Blackness as a sign of having been humbled by social condemnation for wearing a risqué red dress to a ball honoring virginal belles. It is here, I think, that Bette Davis’s avid partnership with the Black actors in this film transforms what in the screenplay reads like racist stereotyping (Ti Bat and the colt) into something more genuinely playful and emotionally significant. Later, the heroine does attempt to revisit her snowy, discarded Olympus ball gown in the hope of rekindling the passion of her ex-­fiancé, Preston Dillard. But her belated immersion into whiteness proves too little too late. Instead of drawing Preston’s attention, the dress serves as a magnet to induce the enslaved children to Julie’s side during their crazed musical interlude for the benefit of the “washed-­out lil’ Yankee,” his wife. Sartorial whiteness would seem to have a minimal shelf life: worn one year after its intended use, it no longer awakens elite Southern male desire. The scenes with the belatedly deployed white dress soon provoke Black frenzy and plantocratic alienation. In contrast, Bette Davis’s remarkable duet with Stymie Beard and the eye-­bulging horse is a comic aside with deeper import. All three characters—­Julie, Ti Bat, and the 55

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horse—­share huge, protruding eyeballs, something the writers surely recognized. But there is a way in which Davis’s warm, teasing equestrian pep talk for Beard transcends the ostensibly throwaway, slapstick nature of the exchange. Her response comes in the wake of the horse’s clop-­ clopping backward movement; Ti Bat stands next to the animal’s head, holding tightly to the reins until he is yanked away from his mistress. Despite the young groom’s obvious attempt to control the horse, the creature is too strong, and Beard’s Ti Bat is dragged in the wrong direction, out to the gates of Julie’s mansion. The horse’s rhythmic hoof movements, which catch Julie’s ear, cause her to turn around and gaze at the struggling groom. The unlikely partnering of horse and child rings a ludicrous change on the classic tap-­dancing routines 1930s African American artists performed in Hollywood cinema: think Bill Robinson in pictures with Shirley Temple.21 But Ti Bat is no “Bojangles.” He must dance backwards to avoid being hauled away by a towering, balking animal. Davis, Beard, and the horse may be initially linked by bulging eyes, but their connection is fully embodied in this scene of amusement between mistress and enslaved child. Scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. have written about narratives composed by formerly enslaved men and women—­particularly Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl—­featuring specific type scenes, such as the auction of enslaved persons. Often, horses and cows are for sale at the same time as bondsmen, -­women, and -­children. The tableau allows both narrators to demonstrate how enslaved Blacks are chattel along with beasts: witness this as a literal phenomenon in the auction scenes. In the case of  Jezebel, any such species confusion is egalitarian and pertains to plantation mistress, enslaved child, and horse. Additional moments in the screenplay’s stage directions require Jezebel’s African American actors to perform absurdity—­such as responding to the mention of ghosts during dinner service, for example—­a bit of  phantasmagoric business that comes straight from the minstrel repertoire. But these performers interpret many of the film’s other moments of scripted Black obsequiousness in their own way. As I have just argued, in the bugged-­ eyeball scene between Davis, Beard, and the colt, the actors do their own cross-­cultural migration, however ludicrous it may seem. Without being 56

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able to interview Eddie Anderson and Stymie Beard, both long dead, I cannot say for sure that their performances were intentionally subversive. But as a young and wide-­eyed Bette Davis fan, watching these scenes on the Midnight Movie in the early 1970s, I felt baffled by what was unfolding. The idea of 1930s-­era racist comedy did not translate intact to a young teen whose consciousness remained unmarked by Stepin Fetchit-­ism. My African American childhood friend James Dodson’s gentle grace had not made it to the big screen, which may have been why I found Stymie Beard’s performance particularly upsetting. I could not see, in that first viewing, the complexity of the humor at work or parse out how much racist phantasmagoria and Black creative pushback actually informed these tableaux.22 That would require a deeper Bette Davis education. Without completely rejecting the screenwriters’ call to animate racist conventions, Black actors in Jezebel nevertheless adopted an exaggerated minstrelsy—­which they so embellished that it seemed to communicate its own form of resistance. Their stylized performative excess featured gratuitous absurdity; through such routines, the actors seemed to strain the conventions of the cinematic race romance enough to raise questions about African American consciousness, agency, and creativity both on and off the screen. Several of Jezebel’s scenes featured enslaved characters moving outside the period’s “Stepin Fetchit” and “Mammy” conventions, which the film often eschewed. Arthur Knight discusses African American Blackface masquerade in the chapter on “Aping Hollywood” in Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Invoking Black literary scholar Houston Baker Jr., he describes the “African American inhabitation of the minstrel mask.” Knight argues that for Baker, “however, this masking constitutes a sort of ‘double negative.’ ” Knight notes that “the Black artist is here not behind the mask, but beside it.”23 Film and television scholar Racquel Gates also takes up so-­called “negative” Black images as catalysts for deepening discussions about racial fantasy on the Hollywood screen. What the idea of negativity offers, then, is a mode of analysis for seeing the work that these texts are doing in the first place. For, rather than cut off the analysis at the first sign of a stereotype or politically 57

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regressive construct, negativity seeks to move the discussion past this first level of scrutiny and on to the questions of what meanings these texts hold relative to the culture that produces both them and their positive complements.24

In Gone with the Wind, even Hattie McDaniel’s extraordinarily nuanced performance as Mammy was widely criticized by Black activists and the NAACP’s Walter White, as I note in my introduction.25 The film’s other enslaved figures operate in only two registers: as so-­called “devoted darkies” like butler Pork (Oscar Polk, who played the Archangel Gabriel in The Green Pastures [dir. Marc Connelly and William Keighley, 1936] and the Deacon in Cabin in the Sky [dir. Vincente Minnelli and Busby Berkeley, 1943]); and as buffoons, like maid Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) or butler Uncle Peter (Eddie Anderson, Jezebel’s Gros Bat, and later, Jack Benny’s Rochester). McQueen (The Women [dir. George Cukor, 1939] and Mildred Pierce [dir. Michael Curitz, 1945]) played the young enslaved woman who unravels into the most infamous-­ever racialized hysteria on film, “I don’t know nothing about birthing babies!” We get no Prissy-­like performances of braggadocio or abjection in Jezebel. The scenes featuring enslaved characters offer a small but rich range of alternative Black acting styles for the late 1930s. Consider Albert (Sam McDaniel), the coachman who “belongs” to Aunt Belle’s friend Mrs. Kendrick (Spring Byington). In an early moment, this ridiculous woman, whose entire dramatic existence seems dedicated to recirculating enslaving culture’s most banal clichés, rattles off instructions to her carriage driver. Her orders are ludicrous: “Keep in the shade, Albert! I won’t have the horses standing in the sun, you hear me? [Enslaved people, however, must do so!] Stay in your seat!” She says this despite the fact that it is feverishly hot, as if to communicate: “You must suffer out of my sight as well as in it.” “Keep your hat and gloves on! and your coat buttoned!” Responding automatically with an obsequious retort, the coachman replies to his dull-­witted mistress with a series of “yowz-­ems” and hat-­ doffings that mirror the mechanical nature of her mindless injunctions. But in an unexpected, gratuitous gesture, he yowz-­ems and hat-­doffs one 58

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additional time, after Mrs. Kendrick has reached the threshold of Julie’s town house, provoking the woman’s incredulous reaction. Bondsman and mistress are engaged in a Hegelian duet, in which Albert returns her predictably idiotic salvos with a pitch-­perfect performance of senseless servility. Sam McDaniel, the actor playing the coachman, knows, however, that the game they play is a fiction; and on his side, it runs on the dark inertia of self-­consciousness rather than on abject submission. This extra mechanical hat-­doffing actually appears in Jezebel’s script; but the brilliant McDaniel, Hattie’s older brother and former vaudeville partner who plays the uncredited Albert, seems to be indicating that he possesses a self-­knowledge rarely expressed in films portraying enslaved people in the antebellum South. If Albert is an automaton, Mrs. Kendrick and human bondage have made him one. Conversely, one could argue that the matron is more robotic than her chattel. Throughout the picture, Spring Byington’s Mrs. Kendrick echoes verbatim the exact phraseology of her aristocratic white interlocutors; she initiates not one original conversational gambit across the entire picture. Thus, the coachman’s performance of equally mechanistic gestures shines a bright light on the banality of his mistress’s callous obliviousness. To be sure, Jezebel’s critique of racism is uneven: the film contrasts moments of African American agency and white identification with instances of what seem a throwback to Blackface minstrelsy itself. A later scene involves the Black unleashing of comic absurdity, featuring a display of frenzied emotion and humorous digression that advances the narrative in gratuitously racialist style. In early conversations with me about such moments, Ryan Friedman, scholar of African American film performance, speculated that these freestanding inner tableaux constituted vestiges of the racialized Jim Crow performances that preceded the theatrical showings of silent pictures in the early 1910s.26 Consider the overwrought “Carriage is coming! Carriage is coming! Carriage is coming! CARRIAGE IS COMING!” sequence. In it, Julie’s enslaved maid Zette calls down to Gros and Ti Bat, waiting at the plantation gates. Until this moment, Theresa Harris’s Zette has focused her attentions on her mistress’s wardrobe; before the Olympus Ball, she is particularly eager to learn whether the startling red gown might be 59

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hers when Miss Julie has finished with it. The young maid is an excellent reader of elite New Orleans society and its codes: she knows that the white dress Julie originally planned to wear will never wind up in her custody—­confirming the conventions of a white supremacist culture that a “red” gown suits “Black” skin while a “white” dress never could. Zette’s involvement in the “carriage is coming” shenanigans is out of character—­she is a sophisticated enslaved house worker whose self-­ conception is modeled on that of her slave mistress’s high status and exquisite attire.27 The maid’s question about whether any carriages have arrived seems to incite colleagues Gros Bat and Ti Bat into a flurry, infecting each other with hysteria as they await their mistress’s visitors. This bizarre montage of enslaved people of all stations relaying information and the lack thereof, in an explosive roundelay of near nonsense staged like a relay race complete with verbal baton, cannot be rationalized by the plot. The frenzy expressed is unwarranted, far beyond any attempted realist portrait of the plantocracy in the antebellum period.28 As I noted in my introduction, my early memories of this film concern being gobsmacked by the Black actors’ almost manic behavior. Ignorant of minstrel tradition, I could not remotely work out what was happening on the screen: why in the world were the actors playing enslaved men and women responding with frenzy in anticipation of rich white strangers? Anderson and Beard seem to have taken the screenwriters’ obsequious patter and shattered it into a ludicrous dialogue that begs for interpretation. Again, why would two enslaved house workers and their abject young plantation counterparts express delirious excitement over the prospect of out-­of-­town guests flocking to their slave mistress’s plantation? Would not the advent of numbers of extra white people necessitate additional expropriated labor on the parts of  Julie’s enslaved men, women, and children, surely not a happy prospect? Or are the Black characters here exclusively functioning as conduits for their mistress’s feelings, pace Richard Dyer’s arguments in “White,” or Chris Castiglia’s work on race and interior states?29 In his essay “White,” which preceded the book of the same title published one year later, Dyer offers a fascinating reading of mistress Julie’s employing enslaved Black bodies as channels for expressing undesirable emotion in Jezebel: 60

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Jezebel is distantly related, through the sympathies of its stars, director, and production studio, to progressive ideas on race, as Pines says “within the plantation-­movie tradition . . . undoubtedly the most liberal-­inclined.” These ideas have to do with the belief or suspicion that Black people have in some sense, more life than whites.

Dyer goes on to note that enslaved maid Zette becomes Julie’s expressive outlet: “She no longer expresses her feeling—­she ‘lives’ through Zette. . . . It is Black people who bodily express her desire.”30 This passage in Jezebel raised my girlhood hackles. How could two characters who had frolicked with Bette Davis in that early moment as peers now be carrying on to ridiculous effect in front of the entire Black community? The “carriage is coming” scene clearly enacts the fantasies of the white master class; but what does it mean for the fictional enslaved characters and the Black performers who animate them? Is there any narrative motivation for Gros and Ti Bat’s frantic anticipation of the carriages, other than as a transitional montage festooned in minstrel show humor between two major scenes? It is my sense that the screenwriters meant it as a comic bridge. But I read the scene against that grain, as Anderson and Beard’s response to and parody of cultural fantasies about sycophantic, devoted chattels. It is an African American retort to the master class’s notions of its bondspeople’s dedication, which lives on in the white screenwriters’ consciousness seventy-­five years after emancipation and which is expressed as extreme farce by the Black actors playing these enslaved persons. While Jezebel’s scribes may have sought comic relief in this interstitial piece of  local “color,” the enslaved characters actually spend the majority of the film comporting themselves in a dignified fashion. Thus, the final scene involving Gros Bat and the enslaved house workers, set around the kitchen table at the plantation, affords a striking contrast to the excessiveness of the “carriage is coming” sequence. Julie has learned that Preston has contracted yellow fever and worsened in New Orleans. She insists on traveling across the fever line to the city, a felony punishable by being shot on sight, in order to nurse and try to save him. Davis’s character elects to become a fugitive, fleeing from her own white privilege into a Blackness of fever and death, her only chance, ironically, for a resurrected life.31 61

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Figure 11  Julie (Bette Davis) convinces Gros Bat (Eddie Anderson) to steal her to New Orleans in Jezebel, 1938, screen grab, 01:29:28

Julie turns not to her guardian, the retired general with connections across the state, but to Gros Bat, who in this scene has become almost unrecognizable without his livery. Instead, he wears the checkered shirt and tan pants of a field hand. This uncanny garb amplifies sociologists’ insight that identity is a role enabled, among other things, by costume. The bound Black men and women surrounding Gros Bat are all astir until Julie insists that everyone return to his or her supper. Cameraman Ernie Haller focuses on the groaning table, panning across the plates of cornbread, glasses of fresh milk, and platters of gleaming meats and lush greens. In the late Depression era’s vision of antebellum America, these fictive unfree Blacks are eating more heartily than most of their white compatriots off screen. The scene would seem the stuff of a nineteenth-­ century apologist’s fantasy about slavery’s so-­called “benefits.” On a deeper level, and off screen, of course, these African Americans are eating more lavishly than their struggling white and Black countrymen in the audience because, of course, they are working MOVIE STARS rather than members of the nation’s unemployed. 62

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How often did an antebellum slave mistress rise from her own dinner party to confer with her “people” in the kitchen, the domain of Black labor?32 My 1970s viewing self had no expectations about such protocol, the boundaries that should obtain between master and bondsperson, so this detail passed me by without a beat. Yet Julie does not ring for Gros Bat, the correct way of hailing a house servant. Instead, she excuses herself from the table, still immersed in the elite code of good manners into which she was born, despite suffering the opprobrium of her guests. All of them hold her to blame her for Buck Cantrell’s death by dueling. Julie swishes into the kitchen garbed in the glittering harlequin-­ patterned black and white crystal-­bedecked evening frock. With this bicolored confection, Orry-­Kelly, who designed for Davis across her entire eighteen-­year Warner Brothers career, deconstructs the sartorial opposition between virginal white dresses and scandalous red gowns for the picture’s final scenes. Unlike the infamous crimson dress, this shimmering garment has never been discussed by film scholars. Its skirt is predominately white, framed by delicate black panels. The bodice is largely black, cut in a V-­shape with a white crystal-­beaded blouse-­like insert and white, puffed, sparkle-­bedecked sleeves. The gown expresses the heroine’s ambivalence: should she brazenly strike out for freedom from white convention? Or should she conform to Southern patriarchal dictates? The harlequin design points to masquerade traditions of the eighteenth century, the world turned upside down in which elites wore elaborate costumes and enjoyed a free zone of decadence and play. This dress will be battered and torn as Julie travels as a fugitive and immerses herself in a sick room, marking the final transition into the heroine’s most abject, Black identifications. That process begins as Julie discusses with her enslaved coachman the logistics of making her way down to New Orleans despite the governor’s interdiction of travel. Gros Bat has just completed the journey, becoming her model for what is possible.33 Julie wonders how he evaded the authorities, which causes the coachman to meditate on his ontological condition. He has turned his chameleon-­like gifts into a scheme for survival, allowing him to move back and forth across the fever line because, as he says, “dark as I is, I kind of ooze into de night.” Gros Bat is an elite enslaved person: a coachman ranked near the top of the institution’s 63

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chain of being. But he is also a trickster, playing the role of the bound agricultural drudge in order to circumvent the authorities. Julie too must adopt theatrical stratagems: she dons a dark cloak to join Gros Bat in disguise, self-­consciously “Blackened” for their flight. The mistress’s shadowy mantle and identification with her enslaved groom blew right by my thirteen-­year-­old viewing self. I was only interested in what had come before, Julie’s red dress, the lustrous texture of which cast a shine that, in my limited experience with classical Hollywood costuming, seemed almost otherworldly.34 It is to the interdicted red dress, and to the symbolism it bears, that I now turn. Jezebel is remembered best for this gown and for the way Bette Davis animated its impulsive, autocratic young wearer.35 Her Julie defied both color and class and suffered cataclysmic consequences for doing so. In the history of cinematography, Ernie Haller’s famous tableau of Davis and Henry Fonda being spurned by every couple on the ballroom floor has become iconic.36 It is as if Julie’s scandalous red gown itself repels the sea of white organza and formal dress. The shunning of Davis’s Julie rehearses in miniature the dynamics of contagion, ostracization, and expulsion that will mark yellow fever victims like Pres in the final scenes of the film. Jezebel’s color palette suggests that the second skin of costume encodes important cultural fantasies about the fungibility of whiteness and wellness in the decade leading up to the Civil War. Bette Davis, herself a rebellious young actress who two years earlier had challenged studio patriarchy, had affinity for a character whose indomitability was the source of her charisma as well as of her self-­ destructiveness. Davis had been contracted under a system many in the industry likened to peonage or indentured servitude. Thus, her own wrangling with Warners, escape to England, loss of Warner Brothers’ lawsuit against her for breach of contract, and return to an unexpectedly transformed career (studio boss Jack Warner suddenly began showering her with attractive scripts) bear a suggestive relation to the themes of slavery and flight in Jezebel’s antebellum New Orleans. Through Wyler’s and favorite Davis cameraman Haller’s obsession with fashion as a second skin, Jezebel’s protagonist undergoes a psychological shift away from the privilege of whiteness toward the burden 64

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Figure 12  Julie (Bette Davis) as pariah in Jezebel, 1938, screen grab, 00:34:54

of Blackness. Actual epidermal metamorphosis is not dramatized in Jezebel’s fever scenes, though the sickest historical yellow fever sufferers spewed black vomit and underwent a darkening of their faces.37 Wyler steered clear of such potentially inflammatory images, what we might call sickness Blackface. Instead, it was through an elaborate sartorial grammar that Jezebel engaged complexities of social and racial status in antebellum New Orleans. As I have noted, Davis’s heroine sports a number of spectacular costumes: riding habits, elaborate peignoirs, jaunty striped satin afternoon wear, red and white Olympus ball dresses, simple plaid and floral day gowns, and the sparkling harlequin ensemble of the final scenes. These dresses signify embodied ethnic and class affiliations. Accordingly, the heroine’s early insistence on wearing the décolletaged crimson gown—­her refusal to don pale lace and tulle according to society’s mandate—­reads as her assault not only on the cult of true womanhood but against whiteness per se. Wyler and Haller compose this sequence so that it appears for a 65

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moment as if Julie, shot above the bustline in her strapless gown, is dancing naked. Anonymous feminist film blogger the Flick Chick notes, “Davis, who is wearing a low-­cut dress which leaves her shoulders bare, is framed in such a way that it appears as if she’s wearing nothing at all.”38 In 1938, in the early flourishing years of the Production Code, this trick of the camera works to suggest, on the figurative level, that the heroine has become fatefully overexposed, that her reputation has been stripped away. But something possibly even more cataclysmic seems to be unfolding than the idea that Julie has been reduced to nakedness or that her toxicity to the elite community has reached contamination levels. It is as if Fonda’s Preston has walked into the ballroom escorting a Black woman or one of the “yallow gals” with whom he had been involved in the Owen Davis Sr. stage play. The Olympus Ball dance floor suddenly segregates itself. On the perimeter are numerous white people in snowy gowns and white tie and tails. In the center of the ballroom are Preston Dillard, associated with Northern ideas in the film even before he travels to New York City, and Julie Marsden, who no longer is white.39 Documents pertaining to Jezebel from the Warner Brothers Archives reveal that the dress scandalous enough to part the dance floor at the Olympus Ball was not scarlet-­hued at all. In fact, on the black-­and-­white film stock of the late 1930s, red apparently registered as a murky grayish tone. Glamorous studio stills of the shimmering, strapless-­gowned Davis have become synonymous with her star image writ large. Less well known is that the hue of the dress she donned on screen was in fact bronze. Along with gold and yellow, bronze was a term used to describe light-­skinned African American or biracial figures in nineteenth-­century and Harlem Renaissance–­era literary works.40 In her red bronze Olympus gown, Julie has taken on Blackness. The scene in which Davis’s red dress invades the white ballroom marks the nadir of the heroine’s social power: fiancé Preston responds to her agonizing discomfort with brutal insistence that they continue waltzing while the entire community bears disapproving witness. Had I at thirteen been asked to give an example of sadomasochism, I think Davis and Fonda’s twirl around the deserted dance floor would have perfectly filled the bill and remained true to my ever-­G-­rated sensibility. The planto­cracy’s repulsion generates the heroine’s debilitating shame, 66

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as the white-­clad figures on the floor back away from the couple. It is as if Julie and Pres have been stricken with a horrible contagious disease, prefiguring the way in which yellow fever will destroy the community. The epidemic will make pariahs of native New Orleanians, high and low, white and Black, young and old, and most significantly, Preston Dillard himself. Unbeknownst to his family and friends, in the ensuing year after the red dress fiasco, Julie’s one-­time fiancé has married a Northerner. Soon afterward he presents her at Julie’s plantation house, where their immediate social circle has retreated to escape the yellow fever scourge decimating New Orleans. Only after spending long hours with her guests in her belatedly white Olympus ball gown does the heroine take full reception that Pres is lost to her, a point driven home when he rejects an after-­dinner kiss she initiates in the garden. Her forwardness, in fact, is a furtive sexual reprise of the drama of the red dress, and once again he is outraged. In a less than fully lucid scheme of revenge, Julie determines to put on a show for Pres’s bride, Amy, “that washed-­out lil’ Yankee.” Her insult fixes on the young woman’s pallor, her excessive whiteness. Davis’s character concocts a musical performance with her bondspeople in the attempt to push back against Amy’s early and inane remark that the customs of the South seem “so strange and wonderful, so wonderful and strange.” Just before launching what will be a powerful cross-­racial after-­dinner musical frenzy, Julie takes part in a conversation between Errata and Erronens. They are two young enslaved children about six and eight (Errata is missing her front teeth), sent as emissaries from the quarters, tasked with learning when Miss Julie wants her enslaved people to perform for the guests. Dressed far better than their plantation “pickaninny” counterparts, the pair were played by African American child actors and real-­life siblings Dolores and Philip Hurlic. Like “Stymie” Beard, Philip was another widely known Black child star of the 1930s. He appeared in a number of films, as Verman Diggs in Penrod and Sam (dir. William McGann, 1937), as an uncredited character in Tom Sawyer (dir. John Cromwell, 1930), and as a cast member in the Our Gang shorts (created and produced by Hal Roach, 1922–­1944). In Our Gang, Philip Hurlic apparently shared the screen with “Buckwheat,” Billie Thomas; Thomas hailed from the same neighborhood and came to replace “Stymie” Beard, 67

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Ti Bat, as he aged out of the series. Dolores, less famous than Philip, nevertheless managed to upstage him in this scene, perhaps encouraged in female spunk by the examples of both Miss Julie and the powerhouse who played her. Dolores Hurlic figures as a breakout mini-­star in two of William Wyler’s Bette Davis pictures: Jezebel and The Little Foxes, which I discuss in chapter 2. Hurlic’s tiny but powerful cameos can be understood according to Arthur Knight’s theory of “Black star dances.” This is the conceit that when African American performers become luminous figures in Hollywood, they move to the center of their cultural orbit, radiate, and then rejoin the encircling Black community so that a new “star” can move to the center. Knight writes “what concerned critics” was the regular Hollywood Black supernumeraries of the 1930s and 1940s.  .  .  . Hollywood Black supernumeraries [Louise Beavers, Stepin Fetchit] were stable enough onscreen figures that they verged on being minor Hollywood stars—­certainly regular, recognizable, credit-­line worthy character actors. The Hollywood Blacks were not moving. They were neither true “motion picture stars” nor, more importantly, circulating Black stars who kept in touch with their Black audience through live performance and touring. They had not quite crossed over—­passed into white culture—­and they  would not come back and this made Black viewers feel vulnerable.41

Watching the film in 1972, I noticed these adorable children, thinking they were twins, despite their difference in height. Given the intimacy and grace with which they played a duo, they seemed almost like ballroom dancers who have performed together exclusively. But I could not have explained, remotely, what their gibberish-­sounding names meant, much less fathomed that the writers were having a joke at the expense of innocent child actors. It was only after teaching the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin decades later that I began to decipher the nature of the jest. That such small people should bear absurd Latin names struck me as another bizarre racializing flourish on the part of the screenwriters; it was even more eccentric and perverse than masters naming enslaved babies for famous Romans—­hence Uncle Cato. 68

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Figure 13  Julie (Bette Davis) discusses the meaning of time with Erronens (Philip Hurlic) and Errata (Dolores Hurlic) in Jezebel, 1938, screen grab, 00:33:34

“Errata” conjures Franklin’s conceit that his life is a book filled with printers’ errors. The male “Erronens” understands his mistress’s figurative language: “You can sing anytime” means that one can choose his or her time to make music; this is an assertion of human agency that transforms the amorphous anytime into a real moment. The equally sweet but less sophisticated “Errata” (see Piaget) thinks only in concrete terms: “anytime ain’t no time a-­t-­all.” It is unlikely that the writers pondered the notion of enslaved persons’ time, the fact that most African American chattels had no control whatsoever over the temporalities of their own lives.42 Thus Errata’s suspicion that anytime means no time points to the basic reality about the “peculiar institution”: most enslaved men and women never experienced the largesse of “anytime” because they belonged to white folks, the only persons whose time has any value. “No time at all” better described the un-­freedom in which they understood that they lived.43 “Errata” are defined as a printer’s outtakes, while “Erronens” is a ho­mophone for incorrect or mistaken. This vaudeville-­worthy shtick, 69

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Figure 14  Julie (Bette Davis) and her enslaved people sing “Raise a Ruckus Tonight,” a spiritual linking rebellion and salvation, for the benefit of Pres’s wife Amy (Margaret Lindsay, foreground right). Erronens (Philip Hurlic) and Errata (Dolores Hurlic) stand to the immediate left of  Julie in Jezebel, 1938, screen grab, 01:14:51

performed by two African American child actors dressed as quasi-­ privileged enslaved people, seems to be some sort of joke about the screenwriting process itself. Huston and company have woven their self-­ referential humor into the picture’s narrative. Perhaps the two Black children personify or allegorize Julie Marsden’s blunders: during the most important social event of the New Orleans season, she erroneously wears the red dress, utterly misjudging how far genteel white proprieties can be pushed. Donning the crimson gown constitutes the major errata of an already limit-­testing life, a possibly irredeemable transgression. Even when socially ruinous, shattered expectations can create opportunities for improvisation as well. Such unexpected inventiveness is the central mode of agency for both the enslaved people and their mistress in this film. Thus, Julie gathers the Black community around her, in her reclaimed white Olympus ball gown, to sing “Raise a Ruckus Tonight,” an African American spiritual about finding the way to heaven. 70

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No half-­hearted affair, the mistress’s musical performance involves every enslaved child on the plantation, a number of whom she ushers near to her lap.44 In its melodramatic power, intensely felt and loud, this interval becomes a nearly operatic scene for the “lil’ Yankee’s” benefit. As a first-­time viewer, in the early 1970s, I missed the boat on the salience of the musical interlude. Knowing nothing about the African American sorrow songs, I remember thinking it was interesting that so many enslaved children wanted to be touching their mistress and her Cinderella-­like white dress. According to Meaghan Fritz, the following item may have been used as advertising for the film: D r e s s e s H av e S h o rt L i v e s i n J e z e b e l The lives of beautiful gowns worn by screen stars before the camera averages one week of fairly continuous wear, according to Orry-­ Kelly, Warner Bros. designer and style creator. No matter what the gowns cost, they are useless after a week’s hard wear and must be discarded. Those that are worn only a day or so are sent to the wardrobe department and are worn later by extras in other pictures. If the shooting schedule calls for an actress to wear a dress more than a week, Kelly has a duplicate made. For Jezebel, one of his latest designing jobs, he had duplicates made of every one of Bette Davis’ 16 costumes. One dress that Miss Davis wears, a white organdie on which hundreds of little nose veils [tiny handkerchiefs] were sewn, lasted less than a week, despite all precautions. Two women gave the dress constant care. One cleaned it each night in solvent and the other pressed it and mended it in the morning, replacing the veils that had been torn off the day before. Because Miss Davis wore the gown for three successive weeks, three duplicates were used before the sequence was finished.45

As for the film’s music, it was utterly lost on me. Little did I understand that the notion of “raising a ruckus” pertained as much to Davis’s character as to the Black liberation theology it celebrated, and of which 71

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I was equally ignorant. Nor did I appreciate how Julie was employing the enslaved children as body armor, girding herself for emotional battle. The heroine’s repurposed white Olympus ball gown registered as a glimmering visual field overrun by the figures of Black children; they nestled in, offering vocal harmony for their mistress’s dominant refrain. Looking like a lush, lace-­layered wedding cake (she embodies what she never gets to taste), Julie has become a momentary venue for African American play and pleasure. Additionally, her body is flanked by a phalanx of Black bondspeople, from young adults to the elderly, joyfully participating in what might have been called “a frolic” by white writers of the antebellum period. In such moments, a slave master or mistress orchestrates the musical performance of the entire bound Black community, singing along with his or her “people.” Here, Julie solicits contiguity with Blackness itself.46 Cinema scholar Kwynn Perry has formulated important theoretical language for thinking about the role of African American actors working in primarily white films, using the Black short film as her object of study. She argues that Davis’s Julie is “curating” the singing of Black enslaved persons in the “Raise a Ruckus” scene; therefore, she experiences no “immersion” in an African American cultural experience because the on-­ screen enslaved people are making music not for themselves, but for a white audience. When Cab Calloway and Fredi Washington perform a mini interlude of music and dancing in Hi-­De-­Ho (dir. Fred Waller, 1934), however, the short film includes a studio audience made up of people of color that create an authentic, immersive experience of Black play and pleasure; white folks literally are irrelevant. Perry’s theory is rich and suggestive; but I believe Davis’s character has already crossed the color line by this moment of the film and, if she is curating, she is also participating and being moved by the experience, not as a spectator but as an engaged fellow traveler.47 What musical director Max Steiner and his staff on Jezebel have withheld from the movie audience—­what they have edited out—­are the complete lyrics of the spiritual. Steiner’s version includes only the chorus. The uncensored, comprehensive version of “Raise a Ruckus,” in fact, asserts a far from peaceful agenda for the salvation of enslaved people. 72

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Figure 15  Julie (Bette Davis) conducting the enslaved children, featuring Erronens (Philip Hurlic) and Errata (Dolores Hurlic), immediate right, in Jezebel, 1938, screen grab, 01:15:59

Instead, the song counsels that the specific ruckus to be raised involves enslaved persons killing those enslavers whose false promises “did not set [them] free”: My old master promised me, Raise a ruckus tonight, That when he died he’d set me free, Raise a ruckus tonight, He lived so long his head got bald, Raise a ruckus tonight, He got out the notion of dyin’ at all, Raise a ruckus tonight. (CHORUS:) Come along, little children, come along, 73

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Come while the moon is shining bright. Get on board, little children, get on board, We’re gonna raise a ruckus tonight. My old mistress promised me, Raise a ruckus tonight, Sarah, I’m gonna set you free, Raise a ruckus tonight, She lived till her head got slick and bald, Raise a ruckus tonight, And the Lord wouldn’t kill her with a big green maul,48 Raise a ruckus tonight. (CHORUS) Yes, they both done promised me, Raise a ruckus tonight, But their promise didn’t set me free, Raise a ruckus tonight, A dose of pizin helped them along, Raise a ruckus tonight, May the Devil preach their funeral song, Raise a ruckus tonight. (CHORUS)49

Davis and her Black musical interlocutors, of course, do not sing the revolutionary verses that speak of administering “pizin” to help the lying master “along,” much less “May the Devil preach their funeral song.” But her character is engaged in a performance featuring a spiritual that, in its traditional version, proposes the assassination of members of the white master class. Steiner and company have excised these sentiments from the singing scene, but the spiritual, which was well known, may have evoked its darkest implications in an African American audience. We have no information on the nameless Black singers who performed in this sequence, other than that they were members of the Hall 74

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Johnson Choir, which I discuss below. But I wonder whether some of them might have known this song from their own musical experience in Los Angeles’s Black churches. The repressed but potentially available context of the complete, unedited spiritual carries a gothic power for the film. Mistress Julie has joined her voice with and for her enslaved people, despite the latent implications of a song that is calling for the death of her white plantocratic class. The insurrectionary subtext of the episode points to Julie’s cross-­racial identifications. Ed Guerrero, a Marxist scholar of African American representations in Golden Age Hollywood cinema, offers a powerful reading of the class politics at work in this tableau: What is striking about the scene is its uncontainable, subversive excesses, which erupt when the slaves rush gleefully across the lawn to gather, dancing, on the steps of the portico. At this moment, a sort of visual break or gap occurs in the film’s ideological continuity, and there is a hint of the vast collective of  Black slavery. In such numbers and dressed in such a manner, they only can be field hands and their families, not the uniformed house servants who occupy the middle ground of the film. For a brief moment, we catch sight of what is usually cinematically repressed—­the dimensions of the slave labor system and captive population required to produce the vast wealth of “Halcyon” [ Julie’s plantation]. But this moment of dialectical insight is brief, and the field hands are quickly reabsorbed into the fantasy of the narrative as the camera moves to a close-­up of  Davis conducting the singing.50

Guerrero’s bottom-­up reading of the class dynamics of this racialized scene is brilliant. Julie owns a great plantation, yet the commodities it produces are never mentioned: is she growing sugar? cotton? indigo? These were the principal crops produced through the expropriated labor of enslaved people on Louisiana’s largest plantations, drudgery that Jezebel’s audience never witnesses. The bondspeople on screen for the entirety of the film are house workers, exclusively. Only in the “baptism” scene do scores of field laborers, heretofore utterly invisible, come pouring out of the quarters. This anomaly—­the explosion of previously unseen characters flooding the screen—­lifts the veil off Jezebel’s numerous 75

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mystifications, which service the film’s dominant romantic racialism. That these agricultural toilers suddenly appear for the singing scene, roiling out of their cabins dressed in the only raggedy clothes we have seen in the film, save those of their “pickaninny” children in the “carriage is coming” scene, is a profound ideological slip, as Guerrero notes. His reading, however, works in only one direction. What if we were to imagine that, as much as Julie’s bondspeople are gravitating toward her, she is, in fact, drawn to them as well? This could be fictive kinship on parade. Saidiya Hartman argues that such tableaux can be read in several ways, as falsely conscious obedience or resistant parody.51 Yet I see Julie’s manic frenzy, accompanied by her wild physical embrace of numerous enslaved children, as something more complicated than paternalism per se. Few if any accounts of slave mistresses reveal such women publicly offering their bondspeople the intimate contact that Julie does here; in the scene’s crazed physicality, a deeper connection seems to be at work. In her own words, the heroine is “baptized” by her enslaved people through their musical celebration of individual resurrection. But the suppressed injunction to “pizin” the slave master and missus—­erased by Max Steiner and his musical team—­still haunts Julie’s baptismal epiphany, linking her with her enslaved people at the expense of her own white privilege. The Black bondspeople have flocked to their mistress, magnetized by her white lace form, in a movement that reverses the Olympus ballroom dynamics of red repelling white. Here, white attracts and becomes Black, as Julie migrates into the cultural identity of an enslaved woman. Newly initiated into the spirit of the bound Black community, the heroine begs Amy to let her travel back to the city now locked down by yellow fever: she will be a fugitive in flight from those policing the fever line. Julie must nurse the afflicted Pres back to life, as only she has knowledge of the Creole and patois of the enslaved vital for communicating with the Black subalterns on Lazarette Island, once a leper colony and now conscripted for fever victims. Is Julie going to inevitable death in an act of penitent self-­immolation for crimes against her race and her class? Can she save Preston and bring him back to Amy? The final scene of the film reprises Ernie Haller’s opening tracking shot of  New Orleans before the yellow fever epidemic. These 76

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establishing frames showed market stalls abounding: people of various colors and classes, including Native Americans, selling Mardi Gras paraphernalia, particularly the masks of Carnival. We see the beaked bird that was ubiquitous in images of eighteenth-­century masquerades, as well as mummers, monkeys, and other magical animals. Slowly following the progress of the marketplace, the camera moves as if it were strolling down the street. White working-­class women collaborate with Black teenaged girls—­whether enslaved or free is unclear. Their ambiguous status creates an opening for the viewer: this seems to be an economic melting pot marked by collaboration rather than racial enmity. Biracial women operate stalls. A Black teamster drives a wagon, keeping pace with the camera. Commerce is flowing: the scene is rich with visual detail of commodities created for pleasure and celebration. The panoramic nature of Wyler’s scene makes it hard to determine the status of the Black characters. The concluding scene follows the choreography of the first, but Haller is now tracking death wagons, corpses, the afflicted, and their caregivers. The parallel shots tell us that New Orleans has transmogrified from the Southern capital of exuberant celebration and commercial vitality to a city of affliction and hideous death. Davis’s Julie rides on such a vehicle; nuns sit at her side, tending the dying. Still wrapped in the black runaway’s cloak, Davis’s Julie wipes Fonda’s Preston’s face with cold compresses. Max Steiner’s closing music weaves the “pray for the dead” sequence of Chopin’s Marche Funebre, or Funeral March, the third movement of his Piano Sonata, op. 35, no. 2, into its major melodic strain.52 A shirtless Maroon with waist-­length hair drives their vehicle, en route to Lazarette Island flanked by similar carts, almost none of which carry living white people. Here, to be Caucasian is to be dying, or dead, in an inversion of Patterson’s theory. The late African American film scholar James Snead characterizes the unmade world that Julie enters as one of social death and Blackness: Miss Julie in the rest of the film is a completely changed person: she leaves the refuge of Halcyon’s white world and merges with the tumult of disease and sickness in New Orleans—­signified by various images of Blacks in the ambulance brigades . . . She in effect becomes more Black the less selfish she becomes . . . no longer distanced by social 77

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class from the Black servants who surround her. . . . She has been equalized with the Black sanitary workers, the leveling effects of disease making a mockery of all arbitrary color codes.53

Ripley, Finkel, and Huston name their protagonists’ destination—­an island off the coast of New Orleans, designated as its leper colony and repurposed for the yellow fever epidemic—­Lazarette. Does this choice offer clues that Preston might recover from the disease and be brought back to Julie’s or Amy’s life? The film leaves open that possibility, though Pres’s odds are very low. The biblical Lazarus had already been dead and entombed for four days when Jesus’s followers begged him to resurrect the man. In the stage play version of  Jezebel’s narrative, earlier citizens of New Orleans designated the island as a Black facility. In the playscript, Julie’s ex-­guardian the General describes it as “impossible for a woman. It’s just a Lazare House—­a little island in the river where they take niggers when they get leprosy and people with the plague. Plenty have gone, but none of them come back.” He adds, “There are some old priests there, and a doctor or two, and some colored nuns—­freed niggers who have joined the church.” These Black women have somehow escaped the bonds of slavery to devote themselves to God and service. Julie would seem to be emulating them.54 That is, she is identifying with freed former enslaved women sacrificing their lives to others. As I have noted, several scenes earlier the heroine had incited crack shot Buck Cantrell (George Brent) to challenge Pres’s younger brother Ted (Richard Cromwell) to a duel over Julie’s virtue; against all expectations, callow Ted has killed expert Buck. Julie’s guilt and grief over the needless death she so cavalierly engineered have moved far beyond the propriety of red versus white ball gowns. By choosing Blackness, Jezebel’s heroine takes the high ground for the first time. Begging to follow the afflicted Pres to a fever-­ridden world’s end may look like Julie’s mad self-­ sacrifice. In fact, contagion, infection, and probable death—­Blackness—­ have become the heroine’s sole chance for redemption.55

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Chapter Four

Melodramas of  Blood in In This Our Life

W

 hite, middle-­class Bette Davis fans were horrified by 1941 test screenings of In This Our Life. They hated the star’s vulgar makeup and tawdry dresses, unaware that she had orchestrated both with meticulous care. That Davis played a sociopathic murderess did not help endear these audiences to their idol. Yet the film version of Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning novel became renowned among another set of viewers, most famously the eighteen-­year-­old James Baldwin. As I alluded to in my introduction, in The Devil Finds Work (1972), the writer described his experience of watching In This Our Life in two different theaters: on Forty-­Second Street and Broadway in New York City, perforce from a segregated balcony; and in Harlem, where audiences saw a version of the film with its proto–­Civil Rights aria cut by censors of the Production Code. Speaking of the unedited version, Baldwin celebrated the fact that in the guise of a sibling melodrama, director John Huston had created a Race film. Still, mainstream 1940s critics underplayed, when they did not omit, discussion of the picture’s anti-­racist plot, my focus in this chapter.1

Fabric Skins Bette Davis was revolted by her own self-­styled garishness as Stanley Timberlake, a vicious narcissist with self-­cut bangs and gaudy makeup. I still cannot view the film without flinching over the brassy synthetic dresses in which her character flounced across the screen. In comparison with the exquisite gowns and witty suits of late 1930s Hollywood, the clothes of the 1940s felt loud and drab. My favorite 1930s screen image was Katharine Hepburn as a spirited aviatrix in a moth costume, the epitome of silver-­lamé elegance, in Christopher Strong (dir. Dorothy Arzner, 1933). Type “Katharine Hepburn moth costume” into a search engine and up pop nine still photographs of the actress, dressed as a shimmering silver insect ready for flight in her exquisite, body-­skimming ensemble. Unfortunately, 1940s fashion disappointed me from the get-­go when I fell in love with old movies.2 Despite their lack of silver lamé, Davis’s Dark Victory (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1939) costumes were almost as glorious as the sparkling moth’s: the short fur jacket and matching hat she wore while finding 80

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Figure 16  Judith Traherne’s (Bette Davis’s) beadwork ensemble from Dark Victory, 1939, held in the Museum of American History in Washington, DC (photograph by Meaghan Fritz, author’s collection)

Judith’s “Prognosis Negative” medical chart became iconic of  Bette Davis herself. And the glittering appliquéd sweater, floor-­length skirt, and beanie-­wig Judith donned for a welcome home celebration after brain surgery were installed in the Smithsonian in 2013, where they look even more spectacular in their red, green, and amethyst materiality than they did in black and white. Not since MGM’s transformative lighting of Garbo had exquisitely photographed textures been so vital to a film’s visual sheen. Neurosurgeon George Brent’s diagnostic tests required Davis’s Judith to distinguish between “silk” in one (good) hand and “sandpaper,” the same fabric moved to the other (symptomatic) one. The moment was a microcosm for what I think of as the film’s discourse on inner and outer skins and the importance of the right “fit.”3 Davis’s heroine suffered tactile deficits from her glioblastoma.4 Her fur and sequined garments, however, made my 81

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Figure 17  Judith Traherne’s (Bette Davis’s) fur accessories bedeck the “Prognosis Negative” confrontation scene with Dr. Steele (George Brent) and Ann (Geraldine Fitzgerald) in Dark Victory, screen grab, 01:00:07

young viewing self want to reach through the jacket and hat’s illuminated penumbra and touch them on the screen. Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland’s clothing in In This Our Life, produced only three years later, seemed to emerge from an altogether different historical era. These garments spoke another, cruder, language: slick and slutty or drab and dowdy. There was a coarseness to the fashions not seen before, exemplified in the big exposed stitching on both Davis’s jackets and blouses, suggesting that a swift pull could unravel an entire outfit. Perhaps the theme of fabrication made visible had something to do with the advent of  W WII, an emphasis on the nation’s furious industry as it faced the crisis. The United States had stitched together a war effort out of the Great Depression. The notion of cheap, fast manufacturing and easy disassembly also suggested the unraveling of a pathological family, whose divided members represented the conflict between the old and new South. 82

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The lacing on Stanley’s blouse invites a visual tug at the ribbon, as if to unravel her falsehood about the hit-­and-­run she perpetrated. And its dirndl-­like quality suggests carefree youthfulness—­no one dressed like a child could actually kill one. But it also might allude to a German-­styled costume, at the very moment when the Nazis had at last become the nation’s public enemy, a less than ideal look for a young woman always in trouble. Stanley’s sister Roy’s ensemble raised none of these associations: with its more conservative neckline and longer skirt, the good sibling wears white in contrast to the bad sibling’s black. Could a picture’s unflattering costumes be enough to sour a great actress on her own work? I have wondered over the source of Bette Davis’s ongoing loathing of this film: her negativity seems to have extended beyond self-­consciousness over an expressly cultivated, tawdry mise-­en-­ scène that had backfired with her fans. Perhaps Davis’s performance as a heinous racist proved so formidable that the actress herself turned against

Figure 18  Stanley Timberlake (Bette Davis) and Roy Kingsmill (Olivia de Havilland) as sisters dressed in early 1940s fashion in In This Our Life, 1942, screen grab, 01:10:03

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her own creation? Not even Of Human Bondage’s loathsome Mildred or The Little Foxes’ venomous Regina or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’s homicidal Jane embodied such pathology. Davis played all three roles with subtle compassion, humanizing the shameless Cockney waitress, revealing the injuries of the scheming matriarch and the alcoholic former child star, massaging monstrosity into pathos. In In This Our Life, Davis’s character violated family ties, propelled her purloined husband to self-­ destruction, killed a child, maimed the dead girl’s mother, and framed the Black son of the family’s beloved housekeeper for the homicide she had committed. Stanley Timberlake was turning out to be the actress’s toughest sell.

D av i s C o n f r o n t s R a c e The film was in production on the eve of the nation’s entry into the Second World War. African Americans were advocating for full citizenship in the face of imminent, universal military conscription. At this very moment, Davis would co-­found and become president of the Hollywood Canteen. Early in her term, she dictated that the nightclub would not be segregated, as I have noted, a controversial move that proved more democratic in theory than in practice. Musicologist and American Studies scholar Sherrie Tucker discusses the complex racial forces at play in the ostensibly desegregated nightclub. Black stars like Lena Horne and Fredi Washington danced with African American servicemen; Caucasian actresses paired with white soldiers. Occasionally, a white “hostess” might dance with a Black enlisted man (no officers were allowed). But when that happened, the band would play “The Star-­Spangled Banner,” which would put an end to the dancing and separate the mixed couples producing such social anxiety.5 Despite this fraught dynamic, Davis’s commitments to racial equality were real. She brought in In This Our Life costar Corporal Ernest Anderson to officially receive the eponymous canine mascot of the Canteen and provide a racially ecumenical example. Davis also invited Black soldiers to the Talk of the Town premiere benefit for the Hollywood Canteen and to the after party that broke the color line 84

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Figure 19  Corporal Ernest Anderson reports for duty at the Hollywood Canteen, with costar Bette Davis, comedian Eddie Cantor (Santa Claus), and “Canteen,” the bulldog mascot of the nightclub, 1942 (Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University)

at Ciros [which I discuss later in the chapter]. “Bette Davis Invites Boys to Premiere,” the California Eagle announced two days before the event. “Seventy-­five Negro army boys will be special guests of Bette Davis and the Hollywood Victory Committee.”6

Every week, the Pittsburgh Courier or Chicago Defender featured a story on Davis’s activism on behalf of the African American community; these articles would make ongoing front-­page news in the Black press from 1941 into the 1950s, though her activities went unnoted in national papers. Playing on screen a virulent bigot as convincingly as she did while simultaneously working to promote racial equality in the world may have been a contradiction that she could not metabolize. Perhaps she had turned against the film as a result. But memories of her character’s malignant self-­absorption, her cinematic scapegoating of a promising Black law student for a crime she 85

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had committed, were not what caught my initial attention as a young viewer. Sex, I am sad to admit, took up more mental space than racial inequality at that moment. Instead of injustice, I first registered, instead, something viscerally repellant: the on-­screen relationship between the incestuous Uncle William (Charles Coburn) and his hyper-­sexualized niece Stanley (Bette Davis). Seared into my memory was the image of my favorite movie star on her knees, supplicating Coburn’s vast lap. Only just departing latency, I nevertheless managed to decipher the suggestive pantomime that had circumvented the censors at the Hays Office. Perhaps the Japanese bombing of  Pearl Harbor at the moment the picture came under review had thrown off the enforcers of the Production Code. Davis’s Of Human Bondage had portrayed men and women at their most sadistic and depraved. In This Our Life actually conjured biblical taboos and gestured toward their unfolding on screen. The film featured another culturally prohibited story, which on my first viewing seemed disconnected from its Southern family melodrama. It was the plight of intellectually ambitious African American Parry Clay, played by Ernest Anderson, whom Bette Davis had discovered and mentored, as I discuss in what follows. With utterly no remorse, the star’s protagonist Stanley had implicated Parry for her own car accident: speeding under the influence, she had run down a woman, killed her daughter, and fled the scene. From a jail cell at the film’s climax, Anderson delivered one of the most stunning denunciations of institutional racism ever to appear on the screen. His world unmade as a consequence of Stanley’s racist scapegoating, Anderson’s character lamented, “It ain’t no use for a colored boy to tell the truth in this world; ain’t no ‘on be gonn ta believe him. It ain’t no use.” Parry’s statement, uttered in despair in a 1942 motion picture, could have figured in the first rallying cries of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. In concert with the film’s anti-­racist plot, In This Our Life’s incest storyline shone light on a foundational American problem. Both concerned fictions of blood that shaped what Linda Williams has termed “the American race melodrama.”7 Incest involves the sexual merging of the bodies of family members. Its rhythms are endogamous, an inward turning that Freud considered one of two primal taboos, along with 86

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patricide. Miscegenation has no such anthropological status: as a legal term coined in the mid-­nineteenth century, it criminalized the sexual relations of persons of different races. If incest entails the over-­closeness of immediate kin, miscegenation involves the carnal conjunction of persons the skin colors of whom are thought to be excessively distinct. The miscegenation statute, overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967, had presumed that phenotypical differences were legible. It took the belated reexamination of early twentieth-­century anthropology to reject the notion that “race” was a decipherable phenomenon and to reveal that the concept was constructed by culture. When a woman steals her sister’s husband, Stanley’s initial gambit in the film, is that not a sexual transgression against kin? Novelist Ellen Glasgow and screenwriter Howard Koch crafted a character for whom familial and social boundaries had no meaning.8 Bette Davis’s fans could not have imagined that their idol might have actual emotional appreciation for the incestuous Stanley. In fact, the actress’s real-­life love affairs with various filmmakers enacted a fascinating professional version of this infringement of appropriate distance, of intra-­soundstage indiscretion. William Wyler, her three-­time director and an Alsatian Jewish émigré, constituted both an incestuous and miscegenated paramour in the context of 1930s cultural understanding. At the time, Davis was married to first husband Ham Nelson. Her adulterous relationship with Wyler embodied the transgression of professional and cultural boundaries: Hollywood workplace sexual relations, though not uncommon, were looked upon askance. And the coupling of a New England Protestant and a European Jewish immigrant would have shocked Davis’s proper Boston-­ born-­and-­bred father and her prim relations in Lowell, Massachusetts. Yet across her three autobiographies and countless interviews, the actress described Wyler as the love of her life. While first working with, performing for, and adoring Wyler in 1938, Davis reluctantly terminated a pregnancy about which she never told the director. Even more remarkable, she inadvertently passed up his marriage proposal at the end of their relationship. The affair had started during the filming of Jezebel (1938) and concluded a year before work commenced on The Letter (1940). Davis’s wounded feelings took on an expressive life 87

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of their own in her last film with Wyler. In The Little Foxes (1941), some of Davis-­character Regina Giddens’s eerie coldness might be attributed to the actress’s bitterness over Wyler’s rebound marriage to another woman in 1938. Davis had learned about the director’s impromptu wedding while listening to the radio on the very day that she at last had read his offer: a week earlier, having become furious with Wyler, Davis had left unopened and continued to ignore a letter from him proposing marriage. Davis, of course, was not the only film star to fall for her director: during the making of In This Our Life, Olivia de Havilland became passionately, endogamously, involved with John Huston, a relationship that lasted through the war. Davis’s awareness of  her colleagues’ professional over-­closeness caused her to worry about which female costar would receive the most sympathetic lighting and flattering camera angles. In expressing this professional rivalry, it seems to have escaped Davis that she had elected to play the villainess: she deliberately had chosen sleazy costumes and had insisted on makeup and hair that were unflattering at best, as mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. It was her inspiration to craft the cheap and edgy look that audience test groups reported hating. But it was the subject of incest, broadly construed, that informed both the thematic level of the film and its actual mode of production. In This Our Life is obsessed with themes of “blood,” figured as familial resemblance and as racial belonging. According to Parry’s mother Minerva (Hattie McDaniel), Roy (Olivia de Havilland) takes after the paternal Timberlake side of the family, while Stanley favors the maternal Fitzroys. In the picture’s third scene, Huston focuses on Roy, who is altering her sister’s heirloom wedding dress under the brooding painting of her paternal grandmother Timberlake, its original wearer. Zooming in on the portrait’s sorrowful loveliness, the camera then pans down to the doe-­eyed de Havilland, literalizing the family connection through this visual link. How Stanley, in turn, resembles the maternal Fitzroys seems more temperamental than physical: both Davis’s immoral sexpot and Charles Coburn’s vulture capitalist share ravenous appetites and narcissistic personalities. Ellen Glasgow, who, as I noted, had won a Pulitzer Prize for the novel on which the film is based, amplified this intra-­familial conflict to 88

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allegorize the dying of the old South (the Timberlakes) devoured in the maw of the new (the Fitzroys). The film features a late scene in which Roy and Davis’s ex-­fiancé Craig depart for the opera, a performance mode requiring the audience’s stillness, its capacity for absorption. Meanwhile, the picture has bombarded viewers with dialogue about the dangers of Stanley’s obsessive motion, Uncle William’s rants about Stanley’s unnecessary speeding, and the expensive traffic fines he is tired of paying for his reckless niece. The spectator also has witnessed the frantic gyrations to swing music Stanley has performed in Baltimore,9 prior to her stolen husband’s suicide, and after her despondent return to Richmond, during what is supposed to be her mourning period. Revealing no trace of grief for the man she has destroyed, Stanley is dancing, solo, a glass of scotch as her partner, when Craig and Roy enter the room. To borrow Walter Benjamin’s terms, in her resemblance to the cherished family portrait and modes of performance like opera, Roy would seem to live within the regime of the aura. She represents authenticity, permanence, endurance. In contrast, Stanley embodies mechanical reproduction, associated with the speeding car, portable Victrola, and jukebox she operates just before taking the wheel in a drunken frenzy.10 The film links her with contemporary inauthenticity, rootlessness, disposability. In its incest plot, In This Our Life offers a critique of failed modernity; Stanley’s relationship to her shark of an uncle stands for regression, devolution, a failure to move forward. In This Our Life’s race themes pull in a more progressive direction. This paradox gives the film its agitated, somewhat manic qualities, particularly when Davis is on the screen. As I have noted, the actress had insisted on personally crafting an unattractive look in order to amplify the inner life of the most heinous character she had ever played. She conceived of the promiscuous, alcoholic, psychopathic Stanley as a garishly over-­made-­up, short-­skirt-­wearing seductress. Davis applied lipstick in a slashing motion, coloring well beyond the outline of  her mouth. She also sported loud, tacky-­looking dresses made from the new rayon fabric that had been synthesized in advance of wartime rationing of cotton, linen, and silk. This was not the first time that the actress had taken her own makeup in hand: she also did so for Marked Woman (dir. Lloyd Bacon and 89

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Michael Curtiz, 1937), her arresting proto-­film-­noir film, immediately post-­lawsuit. The bandages and bruises she so convincingly concocted for her character caused the guard she encountered at the studio gate to fear that she had been beaten badly. He accordingly called Jack Warner to alert him that Miss Davis had been in a horrible accident. In The Little Foxes, and even more so twenty years later in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, as I consider in chapter 5, Davis commissioned a white facial mask that was nearly Kabuki-­like. Perc Westmore, her makeup artist for eighteen years, crafted this bespoke visage. In This Our Life required less ghastly effects, but as I mentioned, studio focus groups in Pasadena and Los Angeles responded in droves that they hated Davis’s appearance in the picture: the stiff, curled bangs; the lacquered flipped hair; the harsh brows and vulgar makeup; and the tasteless frocks. In part because of these negative responses, Davis, who had enjoyed stellar relationships with her fans for almost a decade, refused ever again to view this film. Knowing what I have learned about her 1940s work on behalf of Black actors and soldiers, as well as of her anti-­bias policies at the Canteen, I have begun to wonder: was what Davis eventually came to hate about this picture less a matter of unflattering hairstyles and more about having played an opportunistic monster who destroyed a talented Black man?

I n c e s t; o r , “ W h y, U n c l e W i l l i a m , You’re the Limit!” Stanley Timberlake was the most transgressive role of Bette Davis’s career,11 and she played it with full-­blown zeal. Early in the picture, Houston features Stanley and Uncle William entangled in a lurid duet: during a family gathering celebrating her upcoming marriage, Stanley grabs for Uncle William’s gift of a large check that he threatens to “keep in his pocket.” This escapade follows immediately after William’s castigation of her short skirts and reckless driving, both of which he has financed. Pawing across the corpulent man’s white linen jacket, and failing to retrieve the desired prize, a breathless Davis exclaims in a faux Southern accent just audible, “Why, Uncle William, you’re the limit!” Though this performance is nearly indecent, the censors completely overlooked it. 90

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The Production Code’s obsession with the film’s racial content, which I discuss in what follows, apparently eclipsed the overt unseemliness afoot in the incest plot. Uncle William would go on to echo Stanley’s exact phrase, “You are the limit,” midway into the picture, during the pair’s most outrageous scene. But as early as the check-­grabbing episode, Stanley’s witticism about limits linked her heedless driving—­the literal smashing of boundaries—­to the untoward connection with her uncle. The phrase telegraphed exactly what was at work: a dynamic teetering at the very edge of propriety in which intimations of sex were actually exchanged for money. This early tableau of Uncle William’s unseemly pursuit of his niece, and Stanley’s manipulation of his desire, establishes what would become the recurring visual motifs of  Huston’s incest plot. At the midpoint of the picture, a petulant Stanley comes to appeal to her uncle: she cannot bear to remain in Richmond; only he can expedite her escape. She walks in just as a doctor departs, which prompts the young woman’s audacious provocation, an appeal to his manhood: “The idea of your being sick! When your time comes, Uncle William, you’ll die violently; like as not, someone’s husband will shoot you.” The two howl with laughter. “Maybe you’re trying to get rid of me! One of my heirs, you know? Blessed if I put it past you,” he replies. “And kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Not on your life!” Stanley insists. After William informs her that he cut her out of his will after she ran off with Roy’s husband Peter, Stanley confronts her uncle in a tone that suggests that she has contemplated blackmail to accelerate his distribution of golden eggs: “It’s my money as much as it is yours! I know you cheated Father out of his half of the business,” Stanley baldly announces. Then, with a long pause, she concludes, “. . . I call that . . . smart!” As Stanley unleashes this monologue, which moves from snappy banter to not-­quite-­veiled menace, Davis remains in perpetual motion. The actress’s bodily repertoire is inspired by her early training with Martha Graham during drama school in New York City. The performance is unique to Bette Davis’s oeuvre and to the women’s picture tradition more broadly, yet it has received little critical attention. Stanley flops onto William’s library sofa to supplicate the old man. First, she nuzzles her head onto his shoulder. Then, her upper body bends towards 91

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Figure 20  Uncle William (Charles Coburn) and Stanley (Bette Davis) pantomime the incest plot, In This Our Life, 1942, screen grab, 01:00:46

him, legs folded under tucked knees.12 Stanley’s posture stirs William to lean in more closely, his head skimming her upper arm. Davis’s character reclines further backward in response. Martha Graham’s signature contractions—­in which the dancer’s entire upper torso is made to arch, curl, and transform itself into exquisitely unlikely shapes—­inform Davis’s choreography of her character’s manipulations of  William.13 The tableau reaches the crescendo of its push-­me-­pull-­you dynamic when William lunges toward Stanley and she contracts so that her body inclines backward on a diagonal. Their encounter simulates not only pursuit and response, but the thrust and parry of sexual intercourse itself. Taken alone, Glasgow and Huston’s incest plot would seem to add gothic prurience to a story about two branches of a Southern family tracing very different social trajectories: the genteel old South has become bankrupt, seen both in Mr. Timberlake’s loss of his business and also in the corruption of daughter Stanley. And the grasping new South, while 92

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achieving economic ascendency, is also marked by its own degeneracy, in the grotesque form of Uncle William. But the Race plot gives the picture its gravitas. The character played by the most talented Black youth seen on the screen across the 1940s would be trampled by the old South’s depravity. Noble Roy and progressive Craig alone can move a more racially enlightened Southern remnant into the future.

R a c e ; o r , “A C o l o r e d B o y H a s N o Ch ance in This Worl d” It was Parry’s “J’accuse” against racism from a jail cell that caused the problems when In This Our Life came up before conservative Catholic Joseph Breen’s censorship organ in Hollywood. Racist taboos trumped sexual prohibition at this transitional moment. The nation’s attitude toward entry into W WII teetered between ambivalent deferral in No­ vember 1941, when the film was shot, and vehement bellicosity in December 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By the time of In This Our Life’s distribution in early 1942, the United States was at war. Houston’s first images offer a metaphor for the segregated Southern home front of early 1940s America: its yawning racial divide. The camera focuses on a building site in which Asa Timberlake’s former workers, Black and white, are taking apart the material remnants of their departing boss’s achievement. Asa’s brother-­in-­law William’s greed and corruption have destroyed a two-­decades-­long business partnership. The Timberlakes once numbered among the elite of Richmond, while the Fitzroys embodied new money’s vulgarity. Decades later, the social hierarchy has been turned upside down. The director depicts this reversal in the establishing shot of the film: the camera pans across a loading dock, where Black laborers bustle. As the viewer’s perspective moves upward, he or she sees an entirely white cohort of workers, lounging rather than engaging in physical labor. The camera comes to rest on the Timberlake crest being removed for scrap from the building’s cornice. A final frame focuses on a new placard indicating that William Fitzroy has taken over the operation. Cultural critic Bobby Rivers zeros in on this tableau: “We see a loading dock on an 93

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elevated platform. The dock divides the screen in half. White men work on top. Black men on the bottom.”14 The film was only Huston’s second motion picture, after cowriting the screenplay for Jezebel and then directing The Maltese Falcon (dir. John Huston, 1941). Between the incest and race melodrama, it seemed a perfect prospect for a director with radical leanings. In This Our Life featured two families: one white and shown on screen for the majority of the picture; and one Black and visible in only six short scenes. The Black mother and son worked for the white family, as their relatives had done. Unspoken but implied was that this relationship extended back through slavery. In the novel and several early drafts of the screenplay, the Clays were described as “mulatto.” The implication was that miscegenation had taken place in their past. But in having cast the very dark-­skinned Hattie McDaniel as Minerva Clay, the studio took the story in a different direction. Oscar-­winning McDaniel, the greatest Black actress of the era, was under contract first to David O. Selznick and then to Warner Brothers, making her the logical choice for Minerva. Her brilliance and availability overrode the fact that Ellen Glasgow originally had described the character as what we now call multiracial. McDaniel’s on-­screen son Parry, played by the light-­skinned Ernest Anderson, did not share his “mother’s” facial tones; this discrepancy, whether registered or overlooked by viewers, nevertheless implied a phantasmagoric backstory of racial mixing that the film did not elaborate. That mother and son never appear on screen at the same time gave vi­ sual form to the reality that they occupied two separate cultural mentalités that could not be integrated in the narrative. Minerva’s dialect-­inflected diction, physical gestures, and expressive deference all suggested that McDaniel’s character was a modern cousin to the role of Mammy that she played in Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939). McDaniel’s Minerva shared with Mammy a forthright bluntness in speaking to members of her employer’s/master’s family; and she was respectful but not self-­effacing, as many other classical Hollywood African American servants, often played by Louise Beavers, for example, had been. About her own on-­screen son, whom she believed was overly ambitious and would be crushed by racism, Minerva was anxiously pessimistic, despite 94

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evidence of Parry’s intellectual gifts and professional drive. Deriving from this old-­school representational tradition of Black docility and measured expectations, the character of Minerva, despite being animated by the on-­screen energy of the remarkable McDaniel, was not a progressive spirit like her son, who shared many traits with the new Negro archetype of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s. McDaniel’s character did possess a gravitas and a poignancy that most of her previous and future comic roles precluded. In the wake of her Academy Award–­w inning performance in Gone with the Wind, additional parts of stature became hard to find: this is why David O. Selznick, who had immediately signed McDaniel to a long-­term contract, resorted to sharing that agreement with Warner Brothers in order to guarantee that the actress would continue to work throughout the dry spell for Black artists that marked the early 1940s. Though her scenes in the picture were few, In This Our Life offered a new role for the great McDaniel, as a socially astute, dignified, and eloquent mother trying to protect her son against the ongoing disappointment of institutional racism. Her Minerva (Roman goddess of  wisdom) understood the house divided in which she worked and the split between the Timberlake and Fitzroy clans. She was grateful for “Miss Roy’s” support of Parry’s ambition but also feared his encountering the bigotry of “Uncle William Fitzroy’s” harsh new economic reality.15 Miscegenation may have existed in the Clay family past, but it was not an actual problem in the imaginative world that novelist Glasgow and screenwriter Koch (who would go on to co-­win an Oscar for Casablanca, dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942) had created. Unrighteous mixing unfolds off screen in In This Our Life. Instead of creating a forbidden (but widely practiced, coercive) sexual bond between Blacks and whites in the picture, the two writers cast the taboo as a dangerous professional blending of the races. The young, Black Parry had sought to enter the upper echelons of whiteness by becoming a lawyer. The normative character Roy served as his patron, convincing radical attorney and eventual fiancé Craig to take Parry on as his apprentice. Accordingly, viewers, Black and white, would come to sympathize with Parry’s aspirations, a remarkable set of cross-­racial identifications for a prewar Hollywood film, to which I will return. Where else on the 1940s screen had there existed an ambitious, 95

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working-­class Black character striving to achieve heretofore white professional status, a mirror for Ernest Anderson’s own aspirations? Anderson’s salary, of course, was a fraction of what his white colleagues earned: he was paid the same rate per week as an extra playing a taxi driver who appeared on screen for one minute, $150. Anderson’s total earnings on the picture added up to $1,000. Bette Davis, by contrast, was paid $5,000 a week, for a total of $52,500. The luminous Hattie McDaniel, who performed in only two scenes, earned $650 a week, despite her being the only other Academy Award winner in the cast besides Bette Davis.16 Parry’s story marked an extraordinary moment for American movies with African American characters. In This Our Life was published, adapted for Hollywood, and reached the screen between 1941 and early 1942, at one of the nation’s most tumultuous times of transition: the United States had not yet entered the Second World War, though that prospect loomed large. At the same time, the NAACP’s executive secretary (the organization’s top official), Walter White, was attempting to rid Hollywood films of the mammy and docile enslaved roles just discussed, which had been ubiquitous since Birth of a Nation’s Blackfaced cast yielded to “authentic Negro” actors on the screen.17 The success of  White’s efforts, ironically, would put actors like McDaniel, Eddie Anderson, Lew Payton, and other first-­generation Black motion picture performers discussed in chapter 3 forever out of business in Hollywood. Almost all of them, particularly McDaniel, made the great migration to radio and television. In both media, the actress’s sharp, sassy maternal persona lived on.18 On the cusp of the war, perhaps the most uncelebrated African American talent of the classical Hollywood era emerged into view: Ernest Anderson. Bette Davis made his opportunity possible. The actress had her own table in the Warner Brothers dining room, where she struck up what I imagine, given the reality of segregation, was an unusual friendship with her regular waiter, Ernest Anderson. Impressed by both his intelligence and his eloquence, Davis would learn that he had spent at least two years in Northwestern University’s distinguished theater program in its School of Speech and Drama.19 Davis would write about Anderson’s virtuosic acting in her second autobiography, Mother, Goddam: 96

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There was a first in this film. The Negro boy played by Ernest Anderson was written and performed as an educated person. This caused a great deal of joy among Negroes. They were tired of the Stepin Fetchit version of their people.20

As I will discuss shortly, the educated writing and performing in this instance both originated with Ernest Anderson himself. In announcing that this accomplishment “caused a great deal of joy among Negroes,” Bette Davis made an identification not only with Ernest Anderson, actor, but with African America, a vital audience. Stepin Fetchit’s (the Black actor Lincoln Perry’s) abject shenanigans apparently proved as painful to the great actress as they did to many of the nation’s Blacks.21 Davis’s unfortunate phrasing would have been decidedly less joy inspiring to the African American spectators she described. Her use of “boy” strikes my ears as racially coded, particularly at the late date of her book’s publication in 1974, thirty years after the picture was released. Anderson, in his mid-­to-­late twenties in 1942, played a man of twenty to twenty-­two. A best-­case scenario would have the then-­seventy-­year-­old Davis referring to the character Parry’s youthfulness. But, as I discuss in my final chapter, the star was not above reproach when it came to trafficking in painful cultural fantasies; and this was despite her progressive work on behalf of those African American actors she had mentored and the Black servicemen she had entertained in Hattie McDaniel’s company during the war. There are almost no photographs of Anderson beyond screen shots from his films, and the archival record of his acting career is miniscule. Still, the few surviving documents marking his college days are evocative: the entry for his name in a school directory indicates his anticipated year of graduation. His address off campus tells us that he, like other Black students, lived under segregation. And his billing in the only surviving program for a play in which he performed reveals the level of rigor (a drama by Eugene O’Neill) his college training afforded. The young actor was slated to graduate in Northwestern’s class of 1936, which placed him in Hollywood in the mid-­1930s, as Davis’s star was rising. Like all Black students on the then-­segregated Northwestern campus, Anderson lived a mile away from the university in the Emerson Street YMCA, the hub of Evanston’s African American community between 97

Figure 21  Hattie McDaniel signs autographs for Black troops at Lockett Field, California, 1942 (Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University)

Figure 22  The Black troops of the Fourth Cavalry Division receive autographs from Bette Davis at her performance with Hattie McDaniel at Lockett Field, California, 1942 (Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University)

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Figure 23  This rare image of Hattie McDaniel’s entire USO company assembled at Lockett Field in California, 1942, includes McDaniel, Bette Davis, Ethel Waters to the right of Davis, Ben Carter to the left of McDaniel, and below McDaniel, Clarence Muse with Mantan Moreland to his right (Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University; see Tucker, Dance Floor Democracy, 95, for the original reproduction of this image)

the 1920s and 1969.22 The end of exclusionary racial practices rendered obsolete the facility that had served as a “Negro” mecca. In the 1930s, the YMCA housed a community center, a swimming pool, a basketball court, a café, and even a barbershop. Despite the fact that Evanston had a significant Black population, African Americans were not welcome in white hairdressers’ establishments. Accordingly, the Y’s barbershop became the hub of  “Negro” community life, as was common in many urban areas during segregation and beyond.23 Living at the center of Black culture in this college town, Anderson likely had more contact with local African Americans than with the white university community. Of Anderson’s undergraduate theatrical experience, we know only that he was cast in a 1933 summer school production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, playing the “Witch Doctor.”24 The original production had premiered at the Provincetown Playhouse in Manhattan in 1920. 99

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O’Neill had stipulated that the title role of Brutus Jones be performed by Black actor Charles Gilpin, exclusively. Gilpin became the first African American to star on Broadway, where the drama soon moved after its wildly successful opening in Greenwich Village. O’Neill and Gilpin struggled mightily during the play’s initial run: Gilpin apparently drank his way through the production, which drove O’Neill to distraction. Drama scholar Shannon Steen notes the cultural irony of O’Neill as an Irish American being discommoded by the alcoholism of his African American star. From the work of Noel Ignatiev on, scholars of whiteness have linked the mid-­nineteenth-­century immigrant Irish with African Americans in the North. Both sought opportunities as free laborers, and the two groups were pitted against each other in the cultural imaginary. Ignatiev has immortalized a series of period newspaper cartoons envisioning Celts and Africans rendered as apes, subhuman.25 That the playwright himself was a habitual alcoholic until the age of thirty-­seven, when he gave up drinking and, soon after, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, underscored O’Neill’s simultaneous identification with and revulsion over Gilpin. The character of Brutus Jones certainly was a projection of O’Neill’s association with (as Irish) and disavowal of (as white) abject, outcast Americans like those of African descent. By 1924, with the revival of the play and its subsequent world tour, O’Neill would replace Charles Gilpin with Paul Robeson, arguably the greatest stage actor of the twentieth century. And it would famously be Robeson who embodied Brutus Jones in the film version of the play.26 Robeson had objected to the slave-­era dialect. Writes African American theater critic Hilton Als: As we can see (and hear) in Dudley Murphy’s 1933 film version of  The Emperor Jones,  Robeson stands somewhere to the left of O’Neill’s white idea of Black speech, not to mention Black male life. In a number of scenes, the actor with the legendary basso profundo voice, large chest, and liquid eyes struggles with O’Neill’s fantastical, overwrought language as though it were an ill-­fitting mask. Robeson always stood outside the role, if only because his natural dignity would not allow him to fully submit to the des, dems, and dats that 100

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pepper Jones’s speech. Nevertheless, when he began to work his way into Jones, thereby finding what the writer Murray Kempton called the character’s “bitter satisfactions in the mud,” Robeson owned the part. By approaching Jones as an authority figure, Robeson was free to examine what ultimately appealed to him about O’Neill’s troubled and troubling creation: his self-­conferred heroism.

Als reflected on Paul Robeson’s attitude toward O’Neill’s phantasmagoric dialect in a later essay on Robeson’s 1933 film performance. Describing the actor’s first encounter with the play’s language, Als writes: The Harlem Amateur Players’ star performer did not like what he heard. “You may know this kind of person, and Mr. O’Neill may know this kind of person, but I don’t,” Robeson said. (There were other “race men” who were less conflicted about O’Neill’s take on race and power. In a piece written for the 1923–­24 season of the Provincetown Playhouse, W.E.B. Du Bois said that O’Neill was “bursting through” Black stereotypes onstage and giving us “Negro blood.”) In the end, however, Robeson, convinced of the play’s worth, accepted the assignment. Robeson projected his own double-­ consciousness in animating Brutus Jones on film. While “refusing to fully submit to the des, dems, and dats that pepper Jones’ speech,” he simultaneously allowed himself to wear the “ill-­fitting mask.”27

This paradox recalls Andrew Ross’s insight that Bette Davis could separate body and voice, actually pitting them against each other in certain performances. In 1933, Robert Dunmore, an African American graduate of the School of Speech and Drama, class of 1930, was invited back to Northwestern to star in the summer school production of The Emperor Jones.28 The occasion was Alumni Day, in which Northwestern graduates working in the theater across the country would gather to celebrate their achievements. Without data on the size of the Black undergraduate population at Northwestern, much less in the School of Speech and Drama, I can only speculate that in the mid-­1930s, that cohort was tiny. Dunmore, 101

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who had seen success as a director in Harlem, seemed a fitting choice to play Brutus Jones.29 Had John F. Baird, who directed the performance, cast a Black undergraduate rather than a distinguished recent African American alumnus as Brutus Jones, perhaps Ernest Anderson would have enjoyed the biggest role of his life. Instead, the supporting part he played involved no dialogue, but entailed an extended dance of supplication to a malevolent Crocodile God to whom the Witch Doctor sought to sacrifice Jones. Scholars have pointed to the primitivism in The Emperor Jones—­ particularly alluding to the Witch Doctor—­to level a charge of racism against O’Neill, for which a compelling case can be made. Critics arguing that O’Neill was not bigoted make claims for his modernist sensibility, conjuring Picasso’s and Gertrude Stein’s incorporation of African masks into their work.30 Here, primitivism is woven into modernism as a high aesthetic form rather than understood as another name for color prejudice. One also could argue that Jones’s phantasmatic backward journey through the African past from colonialism to the auction block to the ritual sacrifice to the Crocodile God rendered the Witch Doctor an agent of atavistic barbarism rather than an artifact of modernist cultural production. But the travelogue through African American/Afro-­Caribbean history is itself remarkably prescient for a work written in 1920. And O’Neill intended a Black actor to play his eponymous protagonist, itself a radical departure from white, Western theatrical practice.31 At the level of dramatic craft, Anderson’s ability to create and perform complex dance combinations in this largely movement-­based role would have spoken to Bette Davis. I can only imagine the two of them conversing about Anderson’s stage experience in college and beyond. Her own acting technique involved a commitment to total physicality, inspired by her training with Martha Graham in New York City, as I have mentioned. Davis wrote at length about Graham as a teacher and an inspiration in her first memoir, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography: Our instructress for dancing was Martha Graham. Her job was to teach us how to use our bodies properly. To act is to dance! I worshiped her. She was all tension—­lightning! Her burning dedication gave her spare body the power of ten men. 102

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I had already learned that the body via the dance could send a message. Now I was taught a syntax with which to articulate the subtleties fully. She would with a single thrust of her weight convey anguish. Then in an anchored lift that made her ten feet tall, she became all joy. One after the other. Hatred, ecstasy, age, compassion! There was no end, once the body was disciplined. What at first seemed grotesque to the eye, developed into a beautiful release for both dancer and beholder. To me, Martha Graham is one of America’s few authentic geniuses. I was lucky enough to study with her. A mutual friend recently repeated this great woman’s happy observation that amongst dramatic actors, I have always expressed an emotion with full body—­as a dancer does. If this be so, I would like to remind her that it was she who made it possible. Every time I climbed a flight of stairs in films—­and I spent half my life on them—­it was Graham step by step.32

Anderson’s own commitment to a movement-­based performance is itself a revelation. Consider his work with ledger and pencil in the interior design office scene in In This Our Life. He makes every twiddle, tap, and erasure signify something about his character’s focus and ambition. The actor’s physical eloquence extends to the melodious quality of Anderson’s voice: that musicality plays a part in what I have been calling Parry’s prison aria decrying American racism. One journalist noted that Miss Davis “chose Anderson for his beautiful diction,” by which I understand not his mastery of standard English but the harmonious quality of his speech.33 Anderson’s use of movement and his sonorous voice speak to the actor’s artistic sensibility, which we also see in an unexpected document from the Warner Brothers Archives: the signature he affixed to his studio contract. Anderson’s autograph offers a rare window into a brilliant African American actor almost erased by Hollywood racism. His handwriting resembles calligraphy more than it does the script of a college-­educated twenty-­something in early 1940s America. This writing would be appropriate on the title page of a textbook on penmanship. More than the representation of a name, this signature serves as a declarative statement: I am professionally trained. I am an artist who creates beauty in the space of the conventional. Contrast Anderson’s elegant, 103

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Figure 24  Ernest Anderson and executive producer Hal Wallis both signed the young actor’s Warner Brothers contract for In This Our Life, 1942 (Warner Brothers Archives)

angular hand with the large, open loops of Hal Wallis, Warner Brothers’ top producer. White privilege translates as casual, undistinguished, while Black aspiration is exemplary in its reach for the sublime. In 1941, knowing that Ernest Anderson sought employment at Warner Brothers on a soundstage rather than in the dining room as a “service worker,” Davis insisted that he audition for the role of Ellen Glasgow’s Parry, which he won. Anderson appeared in only four of the film’s scenes, as I have noted. But his performance in the jail, into which his character was thrown as a result of being framed by Bette Davis’s Stanley for her vehicular homicide, unfolded as if Anderson were acting on an entirely other plane from George Brent and Bette Davis. This is not to suggest that Davis in any way failed to convey Stanley’s heinous scheme to sacrifice Parry’s life for her own sake. James Baldwin asserted that she shattered the screen with her performance, an insight 104

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which I have noted and to which I will return. I would argue that Parry’s moral conviction, grounded in words that actor Anderson had penned himself, created an emotional vacuum in its wake, a force that sucked the air out of the remainder of the film. Craig vowed that he would clear Parry of the manslaughter charge to which Stanley finally confessed. But we never saw Anderson’s character again. He remained, as James Snead, the late, great scholar of  Black performances on film, would call, a “structured absence.”34 Parry’s social death at the hand of Richmond’s racist judicial system had rendered him permanently invisible to the film’s narrative. The apocalyptic oration Anderson’s character gave had not been what the ostensibly left-­leaning screenwriter Howard Koch originally had in mind. When Anderson received his copy of the script, he was horrified by Koch’s jailhouse lines, the stage directions for which, according to an early draft of the screenplay, make “Parry revert to type [of his race].”35 The actor found the prospect of playing a servile, dehumanized Black youth repellant, and he immediately went to director Huston, apparently arguing that the character in Glasgow’s novel never would have spoken or behaved like the racist caricature sketched on his “blue pages” (script drafts). Persuaded by Anderson, Huston gave him carte blanche to rework his part of the scene. This was how an African American screen neophyte became an auteur, speaking the truth to power of an educated young Black man facing a white supremacist judicial system. During testing, the jailhouse material proved so threatening that the censors at the Hays Office instructed the studio to expurgate it from all prints dispatched to theaters in Harlem and the South. Lifting his language from a female standards official in the Atlanta office, censor-­ in-­chief  Joseph Breen claimed that the scene might incite race riots and accordingly had to be cut. James Baldwin’s response to such mutilation of the film offers one of the few extant Black reviewers’ accounts of both versions of the picture. As I have mentioned, the then-­eighteen-­year-­ old future writer seems to have viewed both the cut and the unexpurgated picture: once, minus Anderson’s character’s soliloquy, in a Harlem theater; and once, with the jailhouse scene’s inclusion, at a movie palace on Forty-­Second Street and Broadway. From the “Colored Only” balcony (or so I infer; Times Square movie houses were segregated), young Baldwin recounted that he had viewed the material “unsuitable” 105

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for audiences in Harlem. This put him in a relatively unique spectatorial position for an African American moviegoer in 1942, as the studio had sent an expurgated print uptown. A surviving letter from the Warner Brothers Archives detailed the Southern censor’s thinking about In This Our Life’s potentially explosive content, providing the racist rationale for the mutilated picture Baldwin saw during his viewing in Harlem. Mrs. Alonzo Richardson, secretary for the City of Atlanta’s Board of Review, wrote: I have had to cut WARNERS—­IN THIS OUR LIFE—­in ten places. First the sentence spoken by the colored boy’s mother—­“Colored boys dont [sic] have a chance anyhow!” The jail scene where it is the word of a white woman against a negro boy would be dynamite in a southern theatre. The scene is as deftly handled as it could be, but with Warner’s experience, in another such scene, and which lawsuit I am told was saved by the minutes of preview in my office, I’m [sic] surprised that this was made. I learn that trouble has come from many southern cities; of course, this was to be expected. The scene in the jail which I cut as I said, was the word of the white woman against that of the negro boy. I cut the scene to where the white girl goes into the jail, begs the boy to tell the truth (?) promising him protection. I cut the boy’s reply altogether, had him walk back into his cell, and the girl and her lawyer leave. With the lawyer looking intently into the face of the thoroughly frightened girl, reading guilt on its every line, all that was said, and which as I say would have been dynamite, was really implied.

Mrs. Richardson never substantiates the claim that In This Our Life had caused trouble in many Southern cities. She casts her assertion in the subjunctive case, postulating that the “problem” is hypothetical rather than material, unfolding her claim on the basis of hearsay and prejudice rather than social fact. Atlanta is just now undergoing, as is the case in many of the southern cities, much unpleasantness with the negroes. . . . The feeling against the Motion Picture Industry, for constantly promoting the negro is 106

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certain. I hear it everywhere I go. At every meeting and with the increased impertinence of the negroes in spite of things done for their own good, it is not a good time to exploit them in the south.

Richardson’s use of the term “exploit” here makes almost no sense. How would Black audiences viewing Parry denounce institutional racism after his life had been destroyed by a vicious white woman prove injurious? Would this revelation actually constitute news to African Americans? Mrs. Richardson’s imagined “negro” audience would have to have been buried under centuries of false consciousness to find Parry’s claims anything more than a statement of fact. Individual Black spectators, writing to the studio to praise the film, would utterly belie Mrs. Richardson’s claims.36 She concludes: In spite of much misplaced philanthropy, it is still our problem—­we KNOW how to handle it—­we love the negro as others can never love him—­appreciate his ability, as none others CAN, and put up with his frailties as none others do or would, and after all, the basic fact is that he knows and appreciates this. The false leadership, under false promises of a few whites (misguided, to be kind), this leadership of their own face and by shrewd unscrupulous many times half-­whites, makes for every effort for understanding and utmost effort for not only harmony BUT freedom from race riots, which will come at any minute under more than slight provocation. Therefore, I will have to continue to cut as I deem best, and for the safety and harmony of both.37 (my emphasis)

Mrs. Richardson’s complaint unfolds according to the logic of white supremacy at its most banal: Black protest over unjust treatment functions as lighted match thrown on the pyre of white privilege. There is nothing remarkable in her response. Somewhat surprising is her acknowledgment that Parry’s on-­screen claims have been “as deftly handled as [they] could be.” This admission suggests that Ernest Anderson’s performance has broken through the defenses of such “lovers of negroes” as Mrs. Richardson claims to be. It is deluded white radicals and “half-­ whites” (the “one-­drop rule” comes to mind here) who continue to 107

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shatter the racial harmony of the South. According to Mrs. Richardson, who clearly believes she speaks for “the community,” Black Atlanteans have been grateful for the noblesse oblige of whites like herself. If Hollywood and Atlanta rested satisfied that such censorship would safeguard public security, the Black press was not lying down over the mutilation of In This Our Life. On August 22, 1942, with a byline from Palm Beach, Florida, the Chicago Defender published the headline “Film That Mirrors the Solid South Is Cut to Its ‘Liking.’ ” The notice referred to the fact that the picture was set in Richmond, Virginia, no bastion of cross-­racial sympathy in 1942. That Southern distributers, who enjoyed the patronage of Black audiences seated in their segregated balconies, censored Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning novel-­cum-­film to reflect their own, anti-­Negro values was an irony that African American newspapers would not ignore. “RACE ACTOR’S SCENES IN MOVIE ‘CUT’/ANDERSON’S ROLE IN BIG FILM DELETED,” wrote the Pittsburgh Courier, a popular African American weekly. The byline for the article was dated New York City, July 9, 1942. Attended by the advance hullaballoo of an outstanding characterization by a colored actor, Warner Brothers film In This Our Life came to Harlem last week minus the scenes featuring the major histrionics and young Ernest Anderson. As presented on Broadway about a month ago . . . this picture was hailed as giving one of the first honest, true to life and sympathetic portrayals of the Negro. The conservative New York Times, in its review of the picture, went so far as to say that the story clearly faced the race issue as never before in the movies. . . . When the picture arrived in Harlem, Anderson was seen for brief and insignificant moments. The dramatic height of the show, in which Anderson plays a significant part, is deleted. . . . In the meantime, Harlem is burning up because they have not had the opportunity to see one of the truly great “breaks” they have had in the motion picture industry.38

Having been deprived of the intact picture in African American neighborhoods in New York and the South, the Black press kept In This Our 108

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Figure 25  Parry (Ernest Anderson) at his ledger in In This Our Life, 1942, screen grab, 00:27:02

Life’s civil rights themes alive in a series of print protests. What the Courier and its peers did not know was that In This Our Life’s Ernest Anderson himself had written his character’s lamentation for the scene Harlem was not allowed to see.39 Anderson had inserted civil rights politics into his performance over a decade in advance of the movement’s national emergence. Pioneering film scholar Thomas Cripps, whose two-­volume study of African Americans in cinema is the foundational resource in the field, conducted one of the only known interviews with Anderson. The actor told him that he “remembered [In This Our Life] as the movie that Black soldiers on a segregated post stopped with their shouts and applause in order to rerun the jail scene,” thereby undoing the damage perpetrated in Harlem and the South.40 Two uncut earlier scenes underscored Glasgow and Huston’s racial uplift theme. Parry has graduated (figuratively speaking) from caring for Stanley’s car to serving as a bookkeeper in Roy’s interior design business. This elevation happens during the time in which Stanley resides in 109

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Figure 26  Parry citing Blackstone’s Commentaries in In This Our Life, 1942, screen grab, 00:27:24

Baltimore, having stolen Roy’s husband and married him but before she drives him to suicide. Roy asks Perry what he plans to do with the extra money he is earning. “Pay rent, I reckon,” he notes. “It sure is nice to have money coming in steady.” Roy wonders if there might be something he could buy for himself. “Well,” he replies, “there is a book in the secondhand store.” “What book?” Roy questions. Parry then strikes a pose conjuring the universal gesture of philosophical meditation, Western sculpture’s “man thinking,” and in an exquisite, musical voice, he intones: “Blackstone’s Commentaries: The Foundation of Modern Law and Modern Jurisprudence.” Parry’s reference, as it happens, embellished the actual title of Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England; Book 1 The Rights of Persons; Book 2 the Rights of Things; Book 3 Of Private Wrongs; Book 4 Of Public Wrongs. This treatise, the ur-­text of Anglo-­American legal education, figures almost magically in Parry’s dream of self-­fashioning: color prejudice impedes a 110

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Black man in America from rising up the corporate ladder. But if he obtains a professional education, becomes a lawyer, no one can take that away.41 As Parry articulates Blackstone’s (ersatz) title, Anderson projects an inner radiance, a look of beatification, that is unprecedented in the history of Black cinematic performance. The rule of law would seem to be this young man’s ideal, a secular religion. But the American race melodrama about to unfold will show him otherwise. Parry reaches the near-­zenith of  his ambition when he is promoted to clerk in Craig’s public interest law firm, where Roy’s now-­fiancé works on behalf of the very little people that Uncle William Fitzroy despises. Dressed in an elegant three-­piece suit and tie, he manages the outer office, where “Mr. Craig” gives him “plenty of time to study” while working for the leftist lawyer. By 1941, while In This Our Life was in production, the New Deal’s successes, and John Huston’s leftist point of view, were palpably apparent. The film regards Uncle William, a predatory industrialist, as the resident bad guy. Despite the fact that he would seem to incarnate the fantasy of the “perfect negro,” even Anderson’s Parry is not immune to the white supremacist system that Craig has vowed to fight.42 The lawyer drags Stanley to see Parry, resulting in the sort of confrontation that African American literary scholar Kimberly Benston has theorized as a “facing scene,” based on Hegel’s account of  the Lord and Bondsman. In Benston’s configuration, the Lord, invested with total power, and the Bondsman, lacking agency, square off, unequal. At any time, according to Hegel, the Lord could risk his or her superiority if the Bondsman challenged its validity. That is, if the Bondsman refused to recognize the Lord’s mastery and rose up, the relationship could be reversed. And if the Bondsman recognized the value of his or her own labor, he or she could upend the dynamic in which that toil had been stolen by the Lord.43 Director John Huston’s and cinematographer Ernie Haller’s camera recorded this struggle in a space rarely seen in classical Hollywood movies: a segregated “Negro” jail in Richmond, Virginia. The film’s point of view emanates from behind the head of an inmate wearing a dress shirt and vest who moves bottle caps across a homemade checkerboard. Its black squares have been crudely scratched from a white card. Two men 111

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are playing furiously while four additional prisoners hover over the game, attending the action, coaching and criticizing. This is the only all-­Black cast interlude in the picture. Sam McDaniel played an uncredited “Black man in jail,” one of several African American actors to be listed in records on the film. The others were: Freddie Jackson, Billy Mitchell, Ernest Morrison, Napoleon Simpson, and Buck Woods. None of their characters had names, as if all African Americans held in jail cells were interchangeable and anonymous. Still, the actors themselves managed to articulate their characters’ individualities through their physical movements and facial expressions in the brief checkers-­playing scene.44 Racism saturated five successive drafts of the In This Our Life screenplay’s account of this moment: each version stated that one of the Black extras should look “gorilla-­like.”45 Given Anderson’s eventual anti-­racist soliloquy in the following scene, the irony of the casting note was telling. But the screenwriter’s racial phantasmagoria was belied by the players, who moved long, elegant fingers across the board in syncopation. Consider two readings of the tableau: all Black men, de facto, are criminals. And all Black men, as a group, are not monolithic: several prisoners wear elegant suits, some sport worker’s coveralls, and a few are clad in tattered garb. Across class lines, they represent a wide swath of the African American experience.46 Screenwriter Howard Koch actually afforded his fictional prisoners some ingenuity: they had concocted a checkerboard out of the barest materials. Neither black nor red, the pieces on the board were identical gray because realism dictated that only one kind of capped bottle would be available in jail. Symbolically, for Black men in the American criminal justice system, the side on which they were playing did not matter. Losing would seem to be the anticipated outcome of every game before it even began. Kwynn Perry’s notion of immersion versus spectacle is particularly illuminating here. The scene was framed so that the viewer’s gaze was aligned with whiteness, that is, Craig and Stanley’s point of  view, looking in on the incarcerated Black men playing checkers. According to Perry, this constituted spectacle, not immersion. But with the next scene, in which Stanley confronts Parry, one could argue that Stanley has been 112

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Figure 27  A segregated Richmond jail cell in In This Our Life, 1942, screen grab, 01:20:50

pulled into the prison mise-­en-­scène and is enmeshed in a facing scene with Parry in which, while she possesses the power of whiteness, she lacks the authority of the truth. This checkers game took place in the foreground of one of the unsung cross-­racial encounters filmed in the 1940s. Cinematographer Ernie Haller employed deep-­focus camera work, in which Black actors occupy the foreground, while white performers, still visible, are subordinated on a more distant picture plane. The checkers-­playing prisoners have their backs turned or stand aslant from their intradiegetic white audience, which cannot register in their lines of sight. Theirs is an all-­Black world. Davis’s Stanley and George Brent’s Craig gaze at the African American inmates from a position that mirrors that of  the audience. From this vantage point, the two white characters are themselves barred out of the central action, their gazes unreturned and unreturnable. Stanley’s cock-­headed, quizzical look of judgment walls her off from the scene of Black immersion which, though fleeting, is unforgettably powerful. 113

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Setting the scene for Parry and Stanley’s Hegelian reckoning, Craig insists that his young colleague “just tell the truth.” The visibly traumatized Parry rouses himself to recount the evening of the accident: he had been eating supper at home when the police arrived and took him away. Challenging Stanley’s mendacious account of the instructions she had given him over the telephone, before the accident, he countered, “But Miss Stanley, you know that ain’t so! You told me I needn’t bother to come and get the car tonight.” The young man’s haunting rehearsal of Davis’s lofty diction, and his plaintive assertion that she knew the truth, fail to evoke her recognition. Instead, Stanley persists in badgering Parry to confess to the accident, assuring him that her “Uncle has influence and money; he will get your sentence reduced; and we’ll all give you a fresh start.” Craig translates: “You see, Parry, this way it’s your word against hers.” Significantly, Parry answers in his first-­ever use of dialect, featuring “ain’t” and “gonna”: “my telling the truth ain’t gonna help me. Ain’t nothing gonna help me.”47 The dream of law school lies in fragments. “It ain’t no use,” he repeats. “It ain’t no use in this world. . . . You can’t help me. Ain’t no one can help me. My telling the truth can’t help me. Ain’t nothing gonna help me.” Anderson delivers his lines with exquisite musicality. Earlier, as I noted, when Parry had expressed joy over the prospect of owning Blackstone’s Commentaries, he had recited the book’s full title while looking upward as if divinely inspired. Now in jail, his voice almost inaudible, Anderson’s Parry glances up from his abject stare, looks Davis’s character straight in the eye and, with heightened energy, intones, “It ain’t no use in this world.” For a frame or two, it isn’t clear who is the prisoner and who is free. Haller has shot the confrontation so that Parry and Stanley’s hands each rest between the jail bars, all but touching. As Stanley tries to convince Parry to accept her catastrophic proposition, she expands her luminous eyes to their widest aperture for maximum manipulative effect. But the camera sees only her right eye: the left is obscured almost completely by prison bars. These images violate the cinematic conventions by which Bette Davis’s films had been shot since the mid-­1930s: emphasis on bulging blue eyes working their magic; or telegraphing the actress’s own double consciousness, her awareness that 114

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Figure 28  Parry (Ernest Anderson) and Stanley (Bette Davis) face off behind bars in In This Our Life, 1942, screen grab, 01:22:33

the character she plays is herself performing inside the fictive world. In no other film has Davis been rendered cyclopoid. Martin Shingler’s analysis of the camera’s production of “Bette Davis eyes” beautifully captures the star’s technique and that of the cinematic apparatus: The most notable aspect of Davis’s face was her eyes: large, liquid, and constantly moving. Her pupils rove restlessly from side to side and up and down in grand sweeping arches whilst her eyelashes have a very pronounced and emphatic motion. Close-­ups of Davis’s eyes are used frequently, shot slightly from above, enabling the viewer to peer into them as she looks upward, her lids wide open and the lights strongly reflected, making them glossy.48

Shingler has identified the physics of recognition that cinematographer Ernie Haller and Davis create between herself and the spectator, 115

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Figure 29  Stanley (Bette Davis) presents a monocular view with Parry (Ernest Anderson) in In This Our Life, screen grab, 01:22:18

a meeting of gazes that makes sympathetic identification possible—­or impossible, in the case of Stanley. No one in classical Hollywood could use physical movement to the expressive effect of  Bette Davis. She was the only Golden Age actress to have a pop song named for her eyes. Ernest Anderson, however, came close to sharing Davis’s plasticity: he possessed a significant facial range, from despair to ebullience. But if  Davis’s genius emanated from her eyes, Anderson’s was located in his voice. The Cleveland Call and Post reported that for a short time, Ernest Anderson had had a radio program on the Mutual Network called “Tapestry in Bronze,” in which he read poetry with a musical accompaniment. The program’s title would seem to refer to his racial identification as a light-­skinned African American.49 As I have noted, Parry’s jailhouse lament was Anderson’s own. His soliloquy, featuring African American vernacular language and phrasing, was as much a sorrow song (see Frederick Douglass, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and W. E. B. Du Bois) as it was a narrative. His cadences and 116

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refrains—­da dum da dum da dum; da dum da dum da dum—­offered a lament in prose that linked it with the tragic music of African American protest recorded by Douglass in 1845 and reaching back to the eighteenth century. James Baldwin wrote that in In This Our Life, Bette Davis had incarnated an evil so degenerate that she had shattered the screen.50 But without Ernest Anderson, her fellow auteurist collaborator, such a devastating achievement would not have been possible. So it was as a Race film that African American audiences in New York and Washington, DC, responded to Warner Brothers with a small flood of letters preserved in the studio archives at the University of Southern California. They came from a range of Black viewers. The first was addressed to Bette Davis personally, from an educator who had seen the film while visiting an unnamed Southern city  where, apparently, an uncut version was available to mixed audiences: This picture, to me, sounded an entirely new note in motion pictures so far as the Negro people of America are concerned, and it will undoubtedly do an inestimable service in emotionalizing the position of the American Negro as an oppressed minority. The message is given with finesse and delicacy and escapes the impression of direct propaganda. I am sure that you are personally responsible for the experiment and for the strength of the message, and I want to thank you, Warner Brothers, and the script writers and others who made the picture possible. (my emphasis)51

This educator, Mr. W. A. Robinson, called for the “emotionalizing” of Americans—­what nineteenth-­century abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe described as making readers “feel rightly.” He believed in the power of films like In This Our Life to function as had the sentimental novel: reaching out from the screen to shake the audience into fellow feeling for the oppressed “Negro.” It was through art, he insisted, and not political propaganda, that this idea had to be spread. What Mr. Robinson could not have known, of course, was that it was not the white scriptwriters but the Black actor himself who had crafted 117

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this compelling message. Thus, Mr. Robinson concluded that In This Our Life’s social significance was the result of Davis’s willingness to make an experiment attributing dignity and eloquence to a Black character. He did not mention her African American costar, or the fact that the existential duet of the film’s penultimate scenes came from a remarkable collaboration of the actress and the former “service worker” she had discovered. Bette Davis was a genius, and so was Ernest Anderson. Together, they “shattered the screen” (Baldwin). The executive editor of the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier noted that in this picture, a very grievous side of the life of almost every colored American is exposed in the role of Parry Clay . . . The writer wished to commend the company for its liberality and courage, recognizing . . . that the . . . public least want to see or hear the truth if it hurts. In This Our Life is a contribution to better Americanism. It is a nudge on the way to that better America and better world.52

In one of the film’s last moments, in the Timberlake living room, In This Our Life amputates Parry Clay’s promising narrative trajectory in the wake of Stanley and Parry’s facing scene in jail. Craig’s relentless interrogation of  Stanley provokes her confession: it was she who ran down the mother and killed her little girl. Implied in Craig’s insistence on taking Stanley to the jail was the idea that he would see to Parry’s exoneration, though that outcome is never dramatized. Our last vision of Anderson’s character reveals a man whose soul has been crushed. His very speech has devolved from poetic eloquence to faltering ethnic dialect. Parry’s “reversion to type,” in fact, marked Anderson’s skill with phantasmagorical Black vernacular, his performance of racialized language. Using a form of Black dialect for the first time in the picture, the character had spoken truth to power and thus been made to disappear.53 Ernest Anderson was universally praised for his performance, from the New York Times to the Black press. Bette Davis was recognized as well, named Best Actress of 1944, as I noted in chapter 1, by the Negro Unity Association along with Black movie star Rex Ingram, who had played 118

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God in The Green Pastures as well as Ronald Coleman’s valet in the leftist legal drama The Talk of the Town (dir. George Stevens, 1942). As I also note in chapter 1, two years earlier, on opening night of the Hollywood Canteen in November 1942, Ingram was refused entrance to the Ciros nightclub, which was hosting the Canteen’s premiere. Outraged by what, in effect, was the racism of  her own staff, Bette Davis took Ingram’s arm, and the couple made a grand entrance, after which they spent the evening at their own table, drinking champagne.54 Meanwhile, Anderson had enlisted in the US Army’s Fourth Cavalry, a historic all-­Black corps. Its distinguished service dated back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt, who had led the unit during the Spanish-­American War as the Tenth Cavalry, or Buffalo Soldiers, which was renamed in W WII. As I have mentioned, Davis had invited Anderson to represent Black servicemen by being photographed with her at the Canteen in its early days. This would become the highpoint of Anderson’s celebrity. Returning to Warner Brothers postwar, Anderson found on-­screen work as a cinematic waiter, a Pullman porter, a janitor and, in one of his last speaking parts, the ice cream vendor in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? No documentation exists to confirm that Bette Davis had a hand in his landing this part. But it is hard to believe that their friendship had not endured or that she would not continue to champion his acting career. Like Anderson in In This Our Life, Maidie Norman, who became the first African American theater professor at UCLA, and who played Elvira in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, also objected to what she felt was a racist script, as I discuss in chapter 5. Norman refused to speak the dialect she had been given by Henry Farrell, creator of the novel and co-­author of the screenplay with Lukas Heller. When she complained, director Robert Aldrich gave Norman the green light to rewrite her dialogue. In that context, it would not have been at all surprising if Anderson once again had insisted on crafting his own lines as well. This time, his character blasted the Los Angeles police for neglecting the security of Black residents. His speech recalled Parry Clay’s message in 1942. In a final irony, the Warner Brothers publicity department put out a post–­In This Our Life memo concerning the imagined fate of  its would­be breakaway Black star, conflating life and art in the most painful terms: 119

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Figure 30  Ernest Anderson and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962, screen grab, 02:11:03

Ernest Anderson, Warner Bros. service boy, who has a dramatic role in the picture In This Our Life, played his part so earnestly that he believed his own lines and is now going to start night school to create a career for himself. In the picture starring Bette Davis . . . Ernest has a scene in which he states his belief that the only way a negro boy can ever become a success is to learn a profession, because colored folks cannot work up from the bottom in business houses the way white people can. What is he going to do? Complete his education and get a teacher’s degree so that he can help raise the educational level of his race. (my emphasis)55

Ed Scofield, the Warners publicity agent who composed this document, appears to have known nothing about Ernest Anderson. A North­ western University alumnus would be unlikely to attend night school for teacher training. As for Anderson supposedly wanting to “create a career for himself,” Scofield seems to have erased the fact that the young man was in the midst of an accolade-­winning run as a film actor. That Warners publicity concocted a narrative actually controverting Parry’s lines about professional ambition and bestowing on Anderson a modest, conventional ending was in keeping with the film’s erasure of Parry’s story. So it 120

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was that for four scenes, Ernest Anderson lit up the screen before being relegated to service “boy,” both on film and off. Nevertheless, rejecting the role of the “perfect Negro” to speak truth to power, character Parry, his creator Ernest Anderson, and Bette Davis, as his racist antagonist Stanley, indelibly marked American cinema.

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Chapter Five

The Whiteness of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

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camp horror classic, an allegory of aging actresses, and a history  of American entertainment, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1962) is a film about female power. Adapting his novel for the cinema, Henry Farrell imagined two sisters in decline, an ex-­vaudeville child star and a former movie queen from Hollywood’s Golden Age. His screenplay (with Lukas Heller) offered a potentially blockbusting vehicle for two actual Hollywood has-­beens, fifty-­four-­ year-­old Bette Davis and fifty-­eight-­year-­old Joan Crawford. Backstage photographs documented that both lived on cigarettes, and Crawford reportedly spiked the Pepsi she continuously drank on set.1 Smoked and pickled, the two actresses looked older than their fifty-­something years. Making herself up to horrifying effect, Davis registered on the screen as someone closer to eighty. Accordingly, the film offered a brutal parable of the short shelf life and ultimate disposability of women’s celebrity. It also provided a powerful critique of the American family as toxic incubator of female ambition. In what became the marquee photo advertisement for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, cinematographer Ernie Haller framed the two aging actresses behind a barred and filigreed upstairs window: this shot came to serve as a miniature for the entire picture. Blanche Hudson ( Joan Crawford), paralyzed, stares plaintively from her wheelchair at sibling Jane Hudson (Bette Davis). Jane, back turned indifferently to her sister’s suffering, gazes out the window with a sour expression. Jane dominates the frame, with Blanche positioned below her shoulder. Despite their unequal stature, both are confined by the wrought-­iron bars dominating the image. Suggesting a double incarceration, Haller’s gothic shot foreshadows the film’s final revelation: for decades, Jane has been as psychologically imprisoned by Blanche as Blanche has been physically confined by Jane. This chapter explores how the sisters’ agon extends beyond one family’s calamity: Baby Jane raises questions about the reality of equality and freedom for all Americans in the early 1960s. These readings have influenced my teaching of Baby Jane for many years. But in addition, I turn to the historical significance of the film’s present tense, which Aldrich calls “Yesterday.” The year 1962 marked an early moment in the decade in which postwar, Eisenhower-­era conservatism 124

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Figure 31  Marquee shot of Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) and sister Blanche Hudson ( Joan Crawford) in an early scene from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962, screen grab, 00:51:49

began to be overshadowed by the go-­go frenzy of American youth culture. Radical shifts in fashion and sexual norms, short skirts, long hair, and the dissemination of the birth control pill would become harbingers of more seismic social change. Baby Jane offers a prescient glimpse of this ascendant world through its teenaged next-­door neighbor. Barbara Merrill, known as B.D., Bette Davis’s first and only biological child, plays the part with delicious snark.2 The picture returns to youth culture again in the final scene, in which Crawford’s paralyzed Blanche lies dying on the beach against a background of transistor radio music and swarming teens. In her androgynous silk jumpsuit and floppy tie, the disabled ex-­film star looks like she has been washed up from the shores of another era or the costume department of a dystopian picture. Both she and her sister, in a white lace frock echoing her child stardom, are utterly out of time: Blanche is expiring and Jane, floridly psychotic, is headed for an institution, where her future will be frozen in the amber of 1917. Baby Jane’s last scene provides an intimation of the transformative 1960s to come, with liberation movements, protest marches, and assassinations destined to unfold just beyond the film’s temporal frame. Aldrich, of course, could not have imagined the murders of President Kennedy in 1963 or Malcolm X in 1965 or the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968, or the passage of the Civil 125

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Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965. But the picture conveys the sense that social change is brewing; and through Elvira, the sisters’ housekeeper, played by Black actress-­activist Maidie Norman, the film moves toward the cusp of contemporaneity. The political afterimage I identify in Elvira’s storyline becomes an important horizon for reconsidering the sororal battle at the heart of the film. Blanche seeks liberty, over and against Jane’s confinement and torture of her. Jane wants to destroy Blanche so she can be free of the guilt she bears for the car accident that disabled her sister. The potential reversibility of their positions as oppressor and victim, a classic Hegelian struggle, is key to the film’s denouement. But it is not just poisonous sorority that lies at the heart of the sisters’ story. The picture highlights the unconventional bond between Blanche and Elvira. Their communion resembles few of the interracial relationships depicted in many late 1950s and early 1960s Hollywood films.3 Conversations unfold as the exchanges of equals. Perhaps Blanche’s dignity in disability and Elvira’s nobility in the face of racism forge fellow feeling based on shared self-­reliance in a precarious world. However their attachment begins, Blanche declares that she and Elvira are sisters: theirs is the only loving relationship we witness as viewers. Jane’s first victim, accordingly, is Elvira. She kills the housekeeper, the film’s only substantive African American character, in a tableau evoking lynching, which I will discuss below. Jane’s violence erupts as primal retribution: after claiming to Blanche that all of Elvira’s “people [African Americans] are liars,” she becomes convinced that her sister has replaced her with a Black surrogate. In having chosen Elvira as her intentional sister, Blanche has erased Jane from the privilege of whiteness, an unbearable fate in the Manichean universe of Baby Jane. Always dressed to the nines when she enters the Hudson mansion, the elegant Elvira would seem to negate the white-­faced, disheveled Jane. This unspoken, racialized conflict offers a larger context for the ex-­child star’s crimes. Bette Davis’s character is linked to a poetics of whiteness that I have been tracing across the actress’s career. Davis donned a lighter version of her Baby Jane Kabuki makeup in William Wyler’s The Little Foxes (1941), as I discussed in chapter 2. She insisted that her villainess, Regina Giddens, appear ultra-­white on screen. Director William Wyler 126

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hated this look and fought about it with Davis throughout production, but the actress would not relent. Such a choice might have seemed inexplicable in the early 1940s, but contemporary critical race theory helps us decode the politics of whiteness at work in Davis’s performances of evil or imperious characters. The actress emphasized her social superiority in visual form in this story of Southern white nouveau-­riche social climbing against a landscape peopled by Black servants and Black laborers toiling during post–­Civil War Jim Crow. But this white face also appears in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1939) and in the late, self-­consciously performative passages of Mr. Skeffington (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1944). In the former, Davis embodies royal power through the instrument of her face: whitest skin, flashing eyes, partially shaved red head, and elaborate early modern British-­style wig. In the latter, Davis’s character Fanny would seem to incarnate psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s influential essay “Womanliness as Masquerade.” Riviere argues that women construct and perform their femininity, supplemented with clothes, coiffures, and cosmetics: there is no such thing as natural womanliness without female curation.4 As I discussed in chapter 1, Davis’s narcissistic Fanny begins to use white foundation to mask the ravages of diphtheria. Her increasing whiteness emphasizes the film’s discourse of female beauty as performance, enabled by cosmetic enhancement. Mrs. Skeffington is at her most ghoulish in scenes with her abandoned, half-­Jewish daughter Fanny Jr. and her youthful beau. In the karmic denouement of this subplot, the rejected daughter has become engaged to the man who walked away from her narcissistic mother. Excessive whiteness would seem an attempt to hold at bay the grief Fanny Skeffington feels over her ruined beauty and failed romantic prospects. Such identifications of whiteness with sought-­after social power—­ and also grief—­take their most obvious form in the grotesque powdered mask Davis concocts and wears throughout Baby Jane. Jane’s extreme whiteness strikes a particular contrast in the scenes featuring the torturing of Blanche and the murder of Elvira. Against this context, we might understand the picture as a white supremacist enslavement narrative for the dawn of the civil rights era set against the history of American entertainment. 127

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Va u d e v i l l e , C l a s s i c a l H o l l y w o o d, and Television The racial poetics that I trace in what follows unfold across a substantial swath of American theatrical history beginning in the pre-­W WI era and extending to the early 1960s. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? offers viewers a palimpsest of twentieth-­century American performance modes. The picture most richly rewards the spectator immersed in Davis’s and Crawford’s oeuvres. When I was thirteen, I had already seen Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Old Maid, The Letter, The Great Lie, Now, Voyager, The Old Acquaintance, Mr. Skeffington, All About Eve, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, but my Crawford repertoire was not as robust. I knew only The Women (dir. George Cukor, 1939), where Crawford played the conniving perfume counter salesperson who preys on other women’s husbands; and the psychological thriller Possessed, where the actress portrays an amnesia patient in flight from the murder of her rich husband’s first wife (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). Crawford had earlier costarred with Clark Gable in a cross-­class love story of the same name (dir. Clarence Brown, 1931); and in Mildred Pierce (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1945), her Oscar-­winning turn as a divorcée who creates a restaurant empire only to face near destruction at the hands of the parasitic daughter who has seduced her second husband.5 As a teenaged viewer, I did not appreciate that Aldrich was citing actual old movies in Baby Jane, sending up early performances by both stars. Montana Moon (dir. Malcolm St. Clair, 1930), a little-­known early Crawford romance set in the American West, was the director’s first inner text for the Blanche Hudson film festival. Running on a local TV station, the retrospective sends Jane into a frenzy of sadistic revenge. We get snippets of Davis’s “terrible” earlier films in the second section of the picture, “1935,” Ex Lady (dir. Robert Florey, 1933) and Parachute Jumper (dir. Alfred Green, 1933). The first was a pre-­Code social realist comedy with Davis as a female libertine; the second was an aviation adventure in which she played a secretary called Alabama (complete with unconvincing Southern accent) and platinum-­blond hair. Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934) is the only film quoted in Baby Jane that 128

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does justice to Joan Crawford’s gift for playing working girls on the rise (see also Grand Hotel, dir. Edmund Goulding, 1932). The scenes from Davis’s early pictures evoke nothing but contempt from the studio bosses who review Jane’s 1930s work and dismiss it. Her failure to translate child stardom into the adult glamour and charisma for which her sister has become famous has propelled her into alcoholism, bitter envy and, ultimately, madness. The clips from Jane’s old movies are part of Aldrich’s larger project to explore American entertainment culture from vaudeville to television. My decades-­long interest in Baby Jane’s gothic family dynamics prevented me from appreciating Aldrich’s rich take on US history and culture, which may have been unlikely to register with viewers seeing the film at a drive-­in in 1962. Watching the picture numerous times since becoming a scholar of American literature in the 1980s, I now have trouble seeing anything but the tropes of classic enslavement narratives and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of falling houses and sibling horror. I also recognize Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s discourse of angelic girlhood and slavery’s poison and William Faulkner’s decaying, incestuous families. The Compsons (The Sound and The Fury, 1929) and the Sutpens (Absalom, Absalom!, 1936, published the same year as Gone with the Wind) are both stained by their legacy of holding Blacks in bondage and their continued embrace of racial animus. As a director working in the 1950s and early 1960s, Robert Aldrich surely would have known Poe, at the very least through the Roger Corman films that proliferated in this period, produced by American International Pictures, starting with The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and The Premature Burial (1962). And if he hadn’t read Uncle Tom’s Cabin or discovered its child abolitionist visionary, Evangeline St. Clare (little Eva), he certainly would have seen the recent Warner Brothers’ thriller The Bad Seed (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1956) and its protagonist Rhoda, with her iconic look: white party dress, lush golden curls, and patent-­leather Mary Janes, the first two images of which originated with Stowe’s angelic character in her 1852 bestseller. All of these enabling sources—­works by Poe, Stowe, and Faulkner—­ cohere around the vision of a nation haunted by the African bondage that marred its founding. It is my contention that this historical insight 129

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also informs What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Consider a slender but powerful thread in the film’s complex tapestry of enslavement and freedom that actually points in a progressive direction: two years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and three years prior to the ratification of the Voting Rights Act, the picture tells a story about human captivity, the limits of sisterhood, and an emancipatory rather than an oppressive form of fictive kinship. In this chapter, I attribute authorial agency to director Aldrich rather than to author Henry Farrell, who wrote the original novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991) on which Aldrich based the film. Farrell’s ur-­text has no racialized plotline: his original housekeeper is a middle-­aged white woman. Aldrich transformed the story by choosing actress Maidie Norman to play his normative character as an African American with an active civic sensibility; this casting decision, I would argue, elevates the Hegelian implications of Farrell’s novel into a full-­blown American racial morality tale. The argument of what follows, accordingly, focuses on Maidie Norman’s improvisation within Aldrich’s version of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?6 In Baby Jane, the most politically imaginative character is not the affluent, white, disabled former movie queen but her Black housekeeper, who is “going downtown to see a man about jury duty.” That ostensible throwaway line did not originate with novelist/screenwriter Henry Farrell and collaborator Lukas Heller. Instead, Maidie Norman, who would become the era’s leading (and possibly only) professor of African American theater studies at UCLA as well as a working actress, was horrified by the dialogue she had been handed. Norman opined in an interview for the San Jose Mercury that the language evoked the tones of “slavery times.”7 She approached Aldrich about her discomfort over performing a demeaning part, whereupon the director invited her to rewrite her lines. In this moment, an actress playing a small part (only four scenes in total) redirected the film’s thematics, its discourse of un-­freedom. Norman affixed those motifs to the specific issue of civil rights and the need for what historians in the early 1960s began to call the Second Reconstruction. Her insertion of an African American referent into Farrell and Aldrich’s 130

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more abstract meditation on liberty offers a glimpse into the world beyond Hollywood celebrity that Blanche also briefly imagines, and the film soon after shuts down. This moment of political assertion, involving a color-­blind juridical domain, fleetingly telegraphs a potentially new way of being for 1960s America: one in which the movement of African Americans into the civic arena constitutes a mode of dramatic performance unanticipated by Hollywood, save in remarkable moments such as Elvira’s declaration. Before turning to the film’s stealth civil rights epiphany, however, it is crucial to understand the historical, meta-­theatrical backstory on which it is built. As a chronicle of disparate American popular performance modes, the film sequentially depicts preteen Baby Jane’s (Davis’s) vaudeville act on the eve of  World War I; twenty-­something Blanche’s classical Hollywood star turn in the 1930s; and the rebroadcast of her most famous films on television’s Million-­Dollar Movie in the early 1960s. Aldrich’s citation of clips from Bette Davis’s and Joan Crawford’s performances for Warner Brothers and MGM adds a delicious historical texture to the story. And, as mentioned earlier, the casting of Davis’s own daughter as the hostile teenaged next-­door neighbor deriding “that fat sister” (Davis as the crazy, dissipated Jane, who apparently took it upon herself to stuff her costume housedress with golf  balls) marks another allusive stroke of genius. That B.D. was being paid to slander the character played by her own mother, whom we know from Merrill Hyman’s notorious memoir My Mother’s Keeper first filled her with ambivalence and, ultimately, with rage, is remarkable enough. That in her later tell-­all she would characterize Davis in caustic ways echoing her youthful, on-­screen sardonic derision remains another way in which Baby Jane’s entangling of art and life continues to resonate.8

W h i t e -­F a c e d C l o w n and Little White Girl It is easy to forget the first image of Baby Jane. As an adult viewer, I did not correctly recall the film’s opening; instead, I interpolated a memory of the tableau of the car accident that snaps Blanche’s spine, the picture’s third scene. Its first moments, in fact, begin on a less cataclysmic if 131

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Figure 32  Baby Jane performing in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962, screen grab, 00:02:38

still unhappy note: the encounter between a distressed young girl and a sorrowful-­looking white-­faced jack-­in-­the-­box clown at a toy store near the theater where Baby Jane Hudson is performing. The year is 1917. As if the figure in the mechanical box were animate, its toy visage begins to shed a tear. An off-­screen voice urges the child standing before the box to respond to the toy’s crying face; but she starts to scream, wailing until the shot dissolves to black and then comes into focus on the theatrical marquee announcing the arrival of “Baby Jane Hudson from Duluth.”9 What is the relation of this strange scene to the palimpsest of historical epochs flashed across the first few minutes of Baby Jane’s opening frames? These are establishing shots for the picture’s brief tour through two significant periods, 1917 and 1935, before it comes to rest on “Yesterday,” 1962. Why does director Aldrich inaugurate his gothic story of the decay of classical Hollywood with an encounter some forty-­five years prior to the film’s present tense? Given that one of the figures in the duo by definition cannot see, hear, or speak, this toy store–­facing scene would seem gratuitous and bizarre, unless we consider the exchange between uncanny mechanism and angelic-­looking child as a miniature for the movie’s larger thematics: the relation of Jane and Blanche Hudson to the modes of mechanical reproduction that have made them stars but, ultimately, have passed them by for newer technologies, more up-­to-­date 132

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modes of performance, and younger, more glamorous leading ladies.10 In addition, the little girl’s failure of empathy would not seem to bode well for Baby Jane Hudson’s potential capacity for fellow feeling, being moved by another’s pain. The film foregrounds this crisis of sympathy as a problem with complex ramifications across the narrative, affecting the fate of characters such as Blanche and Elvira and the picture’s larger emphasis on liberty and un-­freedom. The little girl frightened by the jack-­in-­the-­box in Baby Jane’s opening frame clearly stands in some relation to the child performer across the street: both sport curled blond hair, white lace frocks, and patent-­leather party shoes. This displaced mirroring moment suggests that no good will come to the pale child on stage who herself performs like a windup toy, at the beck and call of her father and his cues. The fictional backstory of the Hudson daddy-­daughter stage repertoire involves the premise that the “death” of said father has produced an outpouring of grief in his little girl, shaping the sentimental appeal of the lyrics she sings as she sends “a letter to Daddy, whose address is Heaven above.”11 In returning again and again to the picture in the decades during which I have taught nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century American literature, I have come to see that in her lacey white dress and lush blond curls, Baby Jane is a living allusion to Evangeline St. Clare. Nicknamed “little Eva,” this character was nineteenth-­century sentimental literature’s greatest fictional heroine and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s most enduring creation. It is little Eva who preaches anti-­slavery on her deathbed and who becomes the most celebrated figure in the popular culture of Victorian America. Living on past her fame at the center of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she takes up a renewed life in theatrical Tom shows, pantomimes, and minstrel acts across decades.12 Moving into the twentieth century, as an industrializing America grew increasingly isolationist, audiences looked back with yearning to the Golden Age of nineteenth-­century sentimentalism. Thus, it could be that, on the verge of the United States’ entry into World War I, a 1917 vaudeville audience greeted a little blond girl in a white dress making tearful appeals about loss with cheers of sympathy rather than the snorts of laughter with which I imagine its 1962 audience might have responded. Absent from even these viewers’ semi-­conscious understanding of Baby 133

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Jane’s sentimental tableau, however, would have been the history of racial idealism, limited of course by Stowe’s own prejudices that originally had been attached to her vision of Eva as evangelist of anti-­slavery and prophet of Black uplift. Equally unfathomable to Baby Jane’s vaudeville fans would have been the musical antecedents of Mr. Hudson’s banjo repertoire on stage: the oeuvre of wildly popular mid-­nineteenth-­century composer Stephen Foster, who took his inspiration from Blackface performances that allegedly imitated the music and dancing of enslaved plantation toilers.13 Baby Jane’s mid-­twentieth-­century audience would have been unaware of the nineteenth-­century political contexts of the abolitionist novel that bestowed on popular culture her golden curls and white garb. Nor in 1962 would they have recognized the pro-­slavery plantation romance tradition that motivated Mr. Hudson’s music. Viewers of Baby Jane would have been ignorant of the absurdity of an Eva clone and a Stephen Foster figure harmoniously sharing the same stage. But, whether canny or unwitting, Aldrich’s representation of these politically antithetical traditions sets up the powerful thematic of slavery and freedom that marks the remainder of the film. This dynamic is underscored in Baby Jane’s second epoch, 1935, which introduces the subjects of human parasitism and ideological reversal,14 central features of slavery, as organizing the relations of the Hudson sisters as they compete for top billing on the Hollywood soundstage. Eighteen years after Baby Jane’s vaudeville heyday, she has suffered a change of fortune vis-­à-­vis her dark-­haired sister Blanche, now a famous movie star. In an empty screening room, a director and a studio executive view a series of grotesquely acted “takes” from a Jane Hudson film in production, concluding that she is unwatchable. In the following scene, shot outdoors on the lot, they walk and talk about the studio’s unholy bargain with Jane’s sister Blanche, who has eclipsed Jane’s vaudeville star in becoming a movie idol. As a condition of Blanche remaining under contract, she has insisted that with every picture she makes, Jane also must be cast in a film. The men pass a huge old-­fashioned pearl-­white limousine, and one opines to the other: “Who do they make monsters like that for anymore?” His interlocutor replies, “For Blanche Hudson!” 134

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Blanche Hudson’s oddly anachronistic material possessions belong to the roaring twenties, the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Scribner’s, 1925). I discovered the novel in 1975, along with my high school Honors English classmates; even my teen-­hating teacher couldn’t destroy the lyricism and the luminosity of Fitzgerald’s prose. Like the car that Fitzgerald imagined for Gatsby, reflecting “a thousand suns” in its infinite regress of mirrors, Blanche’s outsized automobile embodied the vast American optimism that had characterized the early 1920s. By 1935, this buoyancy had been deflated by the ongoing economic unraveling of the Great Depression, and the material artifacts that had marked the former boom, like Blanche’s limousine, came to bear an aura of grotesque superannuation. The movie star’s nostalgic attraction to luxurious commodities from the period of her early stardom had not been limited to mammoth automobiles. She had purchased an architectural white elephant to match, “the old Valentino place,” which would take a “year to fix up,” apparently an eternity even in a period when enduring unemployment would have made laborers plentiful and eager to work. While Baby Jane doesn’t explore the fact that Blanche’s success has been a 1930s-­era phenomenon, her taste in cars and homes seems out of synch with the forward-­looking consumer desires of her generation, whose celebrities seek streamlined automobiles and Bauhaus-­style dwellings. Blanche is a throwback, identifying with the silent era, Rudolph Valentino, and his Orientalizing roles and Italianate mansion. Remaining in step with the changing zeitgeist has become a problem for both Blanche and Jane Hudson. This innocuous-­seeming 1935 studio interlude ends in a cataclysm for the Hudson sisters: the executive alludes to Blanche’s invitation to another of her lavish parties at the Grove, which he cannot decline. Aldrich then cuts to the interior of a car and focuses on the jeweled slipper and elegant hem of its unidentified driver’s evening gown; the following close-­up shows her foot slamming the gas pedal, accelerating the car into a huge wrought-­iron gate. The camera provides viewers with an apt fetish for the victims of the crash, focusing on a mangled Baby Jane Hudson doll on the driveway, one of the nearly life-­size souvenirs from the 1917 vaudeville act that Mr. Hudson had hawked from the stage. With a gaping hole where its shattered forehead once had been, the battered 135

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plaything looks as if it has undergone extensive surgery on a make-­believe frontal lobe, leaving two blue eyes but no viable imaginary brain. The ruined doll portends its original’s cognitive debility, mental illness, even florid insanity, setting Aldrich’s scene for the final epoch of the picture. Haunting organ music and the title and credits then roll, leading to the film’s major setting, “Yesterday.”

The Hudson Family Gothic With antic energy, and a sensory focus on popular cultural details, Al­ drich opens on 1962: harsh go-­go music blasts from transistor radios; dog food commercials punctuate movie marathons on daytime television; and a blazing sun shines on the traffic for which Southern California has become known. We meet the women of the Bates family, the Hudson sisters’ next-­door neighbors. That Henry Farrell and Lukas Heller should award this mother-­daughter duo the surname of the most famous 1960s cinematic murderer, Norman Bates, perpetrator of the matricide in Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), constitutes a witty generic homage to the reigning master of film horror. But for this Bates family, familial psychopathology dwells not in their own home but in the adjacent residence. In fact, this family Bates would seem to represent the new normal, post-­Psycho. An open question remains about just how normative the new normal actually is. In fact, Mrs. Bates’s ubiquitous presence in the driveway and her inversely proportional failure to intuit, much less to intervene in, the horrors that will unfold only yards away suggests something ominous indeed about the state of neighborliness in the contemporary era. The Bates women share a starstruck attitude toward Blanche Hudson, whose romantic films provided the score to Mrs. Bates’s youthful courtship. Mother and daughter believe they “know” the former movie queen through the intimacies of television. This starkly contrasts with their complete lack of interest in Blanche’s ghastly looking, caustic sister. They remain fixated on the televisual Blanche of yore and manage to disavow her flesh-­and-­blood sibling whose path constantly crosses theirs. The pair do not recognize Jane as a human being and a neighbor, much less a former vaudeville sensation or even a second-­rate Hollywood has-­been. 136

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For the Bates women, Jane Hudson is nothing more than the conduit through which to achieve contact with an actual Golden Age movie queen. As this account of fellow feeling in Baby Jane suggests, the relations between members of its local community are disordered indeed, reflecting no trace of mutual awareness or empathy. I remember yelling at the screen during my first viewing of the film, wanting to shake Mrs. Bates by her fashionable shoulders and tell her to do something to rescue Blanche. But her job in the film, apparently, was to bestow gladiolas and remain oblivious: her inner world, evidently, was completely opaque. Recent viewings suggested that it is by reading the film’s physical landscapes and the homes in which these characters dwell that their interior states become more comprehensible. The Bates residence is open and modern; embodying the California scene of the early 1960s, it projects an architect’s vision of human transparency both inside and out. The house is flanked by picture windows, as if the women were living inside a giant television set, though significantly, no one next door is watching their performance of American domesticity. The Hudson sisters are fated to remain the objects of such voyeurism, never its subjects. In the old Valentino place, the siblings live in a shrine to inaccessibility, in stark contrast to the Bates home. Designed in an Italian Gothic style, the house is marked by the small, grilled windows of an archaic fortress, recessed entrances, and vast rooms, closed off and unseen. The Hudson estate radiates the message “Do not disturb,” only lacking fierce guard dogs to punctuate the picture. Just as entry to their home is barred, there is little that is transparent with or between the Hudson sisters, down to their physical selves. The viewer’s ability to perceive Jane’s appearance is literally obscured: we never see her face in an unadorned state. Instead, the camera focuses on the sedimented layers of white pancake makeup with which she has masked it and the French Revolutionary–­era beauty spots with which she has punctuated her handiwork. It was Davis’s ingenious idea to add new layers of makeup to her face every day of filming without washing off the old, as if Jane’s countenance itself were ossified by archeological layers of “time.” The haunting effect is of Davis as a male drag queen impersonating a faded child star. It is as if she were emulating an aristocratic 137

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character from The Scarlet Pimpernel, a film released in early 1935, just after its leading man Leslie Howard costarred with Bette Davis in her break-­ through film, Of Human Bondage (dir. John Cromwell, 1934). Howard was almost as well known for his Pimpernel as he would become for his Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939). In the first film, by day, Howard’s Sir Percy Blakney comports himself as an inebriated, foppish English nobleman; at night, as the Pimpernel, he rescues from Robespierre’s guillotine his French aristocratic counterparts, enabling their escape to England and the counterrevolution. Davis’s Jane also is a drunken, superannuated aristocrat, deposed ro­yalty of the stage. Having endured shifts of taste and the shame of evaporated celebrity, she, like the fictional Pimpernel, is also engaged in the fight of her life, not only the struggle for survival but a fantasy of reemergence into the spotlight. Most of all, she cannot let Blanche, who controls every dimension of their existence, put her in what she calls a “home.” Since the accident that paralyzed her sister, the Hudson house, divided from the time of Baby Jane’s heyday, has inched toward fracture. Undaunted by the limitations of her wheelchair, Blanche has continued to run the show, managing Jane like a wayward child who has overspent her allowance and is prone to tantrums. But with the unanticipated reemergence on television of movie star Blanche, as a thirteen-­inch, two-­dimensional revenant, possessed of the power to inspire new depths of jealousy and animus in her sister, Baby Jane’s present-­day plot careens into motion. Early moments of the film heighten the contrast between disabled 1962 Blanche and her luminous 1935 avatar. But equally significant is the distinction between present-­day Jane, known for her ghastly visage, which she has created with deliberate “artfulness,” and the comparatively innocent look of her 1917 self, in which only her curls are designed.15 Contemporary Jane’s creepy, excessive facial whiteness piles on the visual horror, amplifying Davis’s brilliant physical performance. But more recent viewing suggests the heavy powder she sports also speaks to the film’s racial politics, constituting a reverse form of Blackface minstrelsy. Stowe had endowed little Eva with the white privilege inherent in angelic purity. Baby Jane Hudson, an Eva clone divested of any saintlike impulses, shores up her fading advantages as former vaudeville star and 138

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sister to a Hollywood movie queen with supplemental traces of her earlier cultural power, now translated literally into ultra-­whiteness. Gorgeous through the epoch of the accident, Jane by 1962 easily could be mistaken for a slattern of the lower classes. She wears shapeless housedresses more typically donned by janitresses from central casting than by retired Hollywood actresses. When Jane moves into the public sphere, placing ads, ordering costumes, planning to meet a potential musical accompanist, she dons outdated ensembles from the late 1940s. And in the film’s final half hour, she is dressed in lacey white baby-­doll frocks, adult-­size copies of the 1917 Baby Jane Hudson dress, complete with white tights and shiny black Mary Janes. Through the narrow range of costumes worn by Davis and Crawford’s Hudson sisters in the film’s present tense, Aldrich addresses the sisters’ utter untimeliness: either their clothes replicate the past, like the Baby Jane ensemble; or they speak to an ostensibly happier moment, as might the 1940s era suits Jane wears on her errands; or their ensembles reject periodization altogether: as I have noted, the disabled Blanche’s unbecoming silk jumpsuits could be uniforms from a dystopian society. Second only to Garbo in personifying glamour at MGM, Joan Crawford had been known for her elegant sequins, satins, and sables on screen. Yet her Blanche of 1962 is dressed in black, save for a floral negligee she dons in her first scene and never wears again. From this moment on, she is clad in the aforementioned unattractive dark jumpsuit, accessorized by a vaguely Western-­themed floppy silk bow tie—­think Crawford in Johnny Guitar (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1954)—­in her incarnation as a wheelchair-­ bound paraplegic. Displaying no sex appeal, no femininity, and no style, Blanche lives as a former woman. Her melodious voice offers the only remaining vestige of her screen persona of yore. Confined to the household’s second floor, Blanche’s connection to the outer world is tethered by the flimsiest of umbilicals, the telephone cord and the call button. Stripped of vivacity and sparkle, reduced to a wardrobe so unflattering as to evoke the penitential, she is featured almost exclusively in her bedroom. The space is retrofitted with the accoutrements of a rehabilitation hospital, save for a once-­lavish dressing table adorned by faded photos testifying to her former fame and fortune. But unlike Jane, Blanche is no Miss Havisham (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861): far from 139

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living in the past, she watches and enjoys her classic films on television, affirming, “Still, that was a pretty good picture!” Conversing about household business with her sister, and prattling to her parakeet, Blanche also plays film critic. Twenty-­five years after the fact, she offers a negative verdict on the technique of the director who helped mold her younger self in the pictures that happen to be showing on television: “I told him to hold that shot longer!” During the opening moments of the film’s third epoch, we see the Bates women watching Blanche on television as well. The three viewers are separated by a narrow hedge abutting the two driveways and thirty years of passed time. Yet the disabled Blanche lives in the present. She shares a complex and equivocal intimacy with Jane; an unambivalent affection for the parakeet; and a relatively healthy relationship to her former self—­the young, beautiful, and ambulatory icon preserved through the magic of videotape and the oil portrait of herself in the 1940s that hangs over her bed. But her most powerful attachment is to her African American cleaning woman, Elvira. It is through the two women’s heart-­to-­heart exchanges that Aldrich identifies Blanche with Blackness. The housekeeper appears in only four scenes in the film, but she lies at its moral center. As mentioned earlier, Blanche wishes aloud that Elvira rather than Jane could be her sister; and the two discuss their dream of living together like siblings once Jane is “looked after properly,” Crawford’s character’s euphemism for institutionalizing Davis’s Jane. As Blanche’s Black “twin,” Elvira perfectly looks the part. Far from dressing in the uniform of a char, the attractive housekeeper wears stylish two-­piece suits with high heels and classic late 1950s shirtwaists accessorized with pearl earrings to work in the Hudsons’ home. In the picture’s 1962 “present,” Elvira’s chicness, in fact, is equaled only by that of the tony Mrs. Bates. If the housekeeper’s fashionableness signifies her engagement with modernity, her employer Jane’s dishevelment conversely registers a level of detachment from reality. Two such polar ways of living in the world cannot coexist with ease. Very early in the film, sporting a face resembling a white mask, Jane confronts the elegant Elvira on the mansion staircase in a facing scene worthy of Faulkner. This obviously does not bode well for the Black woman in the dyad, if Absalom, Absalom! is to be our guide: 140

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Figure 33  Elvira (Maidie Norman) and Jane’s (Bette Davis’s) staircase confrontation, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962, screen grab, 00:23:47

Figure 34  Elvira (Maidie Norman) warns Blanche ( Joan Crawford) about Jane in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962, screen grab, 00:24:43

Faulkner’s Clytie, “free but incapable of freedom,” gets shoved aside or knocked down in every encounter. Jane’s track record for nurture is hardly propitious if we consider her own self-­culture, untidy and slouchy, to cite Mrs. Bates’s daughter’s phrasing. Carrying her sister’s birdcage, Jane immediately triggers the housekeeper’s suspicion that something malicious must be afoot. In contrast, Elvira appears polished and refined in her stylish tan linen suit with white piping and black patent-­leather high heels; visually, at the level of 141

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Figure 35  Sisters’ facing scene: Blanche ( Joan Crawford) and Jane (Bette Davis) 2-­shot, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962, screen grab, 00:23:12

costuming and choreography, Aldrich would seem to have reversed the servant-­mistress relationship. Blanche and Elvira’s intimate relationship embodies an idealized form of sorority, ringing a change on the “fictive kinship” that marked enslaver-­ enslaved relations in the American South prior to emancipation. As I have discussed, Orlando Patterson coined the term to describe such faux filial connections as “Uncle Tom” and “Uncle Cato.” Such titles posit a relationship that has been produced by slavery’s natal alienation, the ripping apart of parents and children, and the paternalistic dynamics that reinsert African Americans into those white families who enslave Blacks as “fictive kin.”16 Blanche and Jane, sisters by birth, are bound by enmity and shared suffering rather than by love. In their facing scene, Crawford’s Blanche peers anxiously at Davis’s Jane, while Jane, confronted by her sibling’s accusations, cannot quite look Blanche in the eye. Biological kinship, Aldrich would suggest, does not necessitate actual communion. With these details in place, we can begin to read Baby Jane’s narrative of sadistic sisterhood in terms that extend beyond the horror genre into something specifically literary and American: Aldrich has concocted not just a captivity tale with gothic dimensions, as many have noted. Baby Jane is an enslavement narrative, featuring a white woman as the natally alienated, socially dead, and physically paralyzed victim, whose mobility literally is restricted, who is 142

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starved, abused, and brutally tortured in a scene that resonates of lynching, and who finally is left to die of wounds and dehydration. While the film is set nearly 100 years after the emancipation of America’s enslaved population, some cross-­racial conventions from the Jim Crow era, which historians understand as extending to 1960, seem to remain: Elvira calls the sisters Miss Blanche and Miss Jane; she has no private mode of transportation and travels by bus; she cleans not only the Hudsons’ home but also the abject detritus of Jane’s drinking binges, protecting Blanche from her sister’s alcoholism. And she ultimately proves her “devotion” to employer Blanche by sacrificing her life to save Crawford’s character from the homicidal Jane. Yet there also are progressive edges to the portrait of Elvira. Her smart wardrobe and interest in the obligations of citizenship—­going to “see a man about jury duty”—­mark her as engaged and socially conscious. Elvira’s comment has several valences: she would seem to be wanting to play a role in the civic arena adjudicating guilt and innocence, a privilege not uniformly extended toward African Americans until after 1965 and, in some places, not until the mid-­1980s and beyond. In fact, the statutes surrounding the composition of juries gave discretion to the states. Jury selection was left to the legal professionals involved in individual cases. District attorneys and defense lawyers were free to throw out a certain number of potential jurors for “cause.” One such “justifiable exclusion” turned out to be the failure to be white. It was only through civil rights legislation pursued into the 1980s that statutes finally outlawed such discriminatory practices in voir dire proceedings.17 Another reading of Elvira’s statement proves even more profound: perhaps she is talking to “a man” about the powers of citizenship that jury duty entails. This is, after all, the moment when the civil rights movement began to penetrate the consciousness of almost all Americans.18 But whether or not Elvira possesses a heightened awareness regarding African Americans’ rights in the national arena—­and her comment about jury duty is a clue that she does—­having to witness Jane’s violent slide into insanity has made the problem local. Elvira will not desist: she is committed to rescuing Blanche Hudson from her sister’s captivity. A moral drama plays out before her and she is the only person willing to take a stand, an assumption of sisterly virtue that will cost her life. 143

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As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, Maidie Norman, the actress who played Elvira, commented during an interview conducted before her death in 1998 that she actually rewrote most of her lines to keep Elvira from sounding like someone from “slavery times.” Norman was one of the most fascinating Black performers of the era: she was born in Georgia, to a Black suffragette mother, the first woman to vote in Lima, Ohio, and an African American law enforcement officer father. Norman graduated from HBCU Bennett College with a degree in theater arts; she took an MA in theater and drama at Columbia University and taught both subjects briefly at Stanford and at UCLA for over a decade. Hers were among the very first courses on African American theater given at an American university. UCLA even created a Maidie Norman prize for the best undergraduate essay on Black theater, which is still awarded every year. And so it was that Robert Aldrich chose not just any Black actress to play this part. Instead, the director transformed the character from novelist Henry Farrell’s ethnically unmarked cleaning woman to Maidie Norman’s African American maid. Casting the highly educated and accomplished Norman in the role, Aldrich also agreed to her request to cut the Blackface-­like dialect to which she had objected.19 That Farrell and Heller initially wrote the part in this demeaning way raises another set of questions that are beyond the scope of my chapter. Importantly, however, the two were receptive to Norman’s re-­education program concerning Elvira’s level of culture and political ambition. Thus, Norman’s character evolved from a lower-­class white house cleaner to Joan Crawford’s eloquent, beautifully dressed Black sibling-­manqué. Such a figure was far from congruent with stereotypical Hollywood portraits of Black women in domestic service such as those played by Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, and Theresa Harris during Bette Davis’s heyday, 1934–­1948.20 Elvira seems to be the only figure in the Hudson ménage with an analytical mind. She is the crack detective, while the two sisters remain caught in worlds of illusion: Blanche cannot let herself metabolize the reality that Jane’s aggression could be homicidal; and Mrs. Bates is oblivious to Jane’s ongoing assaults against Blanche. The housekeeper finds a manila envelope of defaced fan mail for Blanche that Jane has intercepted and attempted to destroy. These diverted letters could have come from the plot of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748): Jane has become the 144

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film’s Robert Lovelace, protean suitor and rapist. While Jane has not committed sexual assault, like Lovelace she drugs Blanche whenever guests are expected; and she has gone to great lengths to deprive her of access to a life-­affirming world, confining her sister to the cell of her bedroom and cutting off access to the telephone. In a cinematic twist on Lovelace’s penchant for forging letters, Aldrich gives us Jane’s gift for mimicry. Off screen, the sound editor has recorded Crawford’s Blanche apparently speaking on the telephone to both the local liquor store and the family doctor. Imitating Crawford’s original prerecorded speech, Davis’s character mouths her sibling’s words, adding bodily gestures that mirror Crawford’s physical motions, lilting voice, and characteristic intonations. Jane has become Blanche’s mannequin and puppeteer. Davis’s masterful syncopation with Harold McGhan’s sound technology returns viewers to the very theatricality at the heart of Jane’s vaudeville roots. On the concert hall stage, 1917, what flowed from Baby Jane’s mouth was not music of her own invention. Instead, she enacted her father’s script, less artistic genius than mannequin for Mr. Hudson’s ersatz Stephen Foster musicality and financial ambition. In the same scene in which Blanche learns from Elvira that Jane has attempted to destroy her relationship with her fans, we see another trope from the eighteenth-­century novel tradition unfold. This one pertains to slavery. The association came to me during research for my first book, on the early American novel. Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) is one of the two works that most influenced American sentimental fiction of the late eighteenth and mid-­nineteenth centuries.21 The novel is known for a moment in which, visiting France, protagonist Yorick observes a starling in a cage calling, “I can’t get out! I can’t get out!” Yorick soon after will visit the Bastille, where he will witness the complete abjection of a prisoner sentenced to permanent servitude. His encounter with the starling begins to awaken in Yorick a sense of empathy for all captives: for, though he had offered the poor bird his aid, he had been unable to bend the cage’s iron wires and liberate the creature, whose hopes he had raised and dashed. Soon after, gazing upon a human inmate in the French jail, the protagonist again is reminded of the starling’s fate, gloomily concluding that “disguise thyself as thou wilt, thou art still slavery!”22 145

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Aldrich rings a dark change on such Sterne-­ian dejection. Blanche has kept a parakeet in an ornate, pagoda-­like structure, deriving visible plea­ sure from the bird’s music and companionship. Overhearing Blanche’s doting exchange with her pet, Jane remarks, “I’ll clean the cage.” My thirteen-­year-­old viewing self was beginning to learn about cinematic conventions: Jane’s seemingly solicitous gesture could not bode well for the prospect of Blanche’s retaining her feathered friend. In the next scene between the sisters, Jane informs Blanche that the bird has escaped while she was tidying his enclosure. “It flew out the window,” Davis barks in the clipped staccato Boston accent for which she still was famous, twenty years past her leading-­lady prime. In a three-­shot of  Jane, Blanche, and Elvira, the housekeeper expresses outrage over Jane’s refusal to look directly at Blanche. The camera work documents that the sisters’ lines of sight are incongruent, as Elvira attempts to mediate this standoff. Such an averted reckoning, after Jane’s sadistic neglect of her sister’s bird, becomes a powerful metaphor for their failure of sympathy. When asked what they most vividly remember about this film, view­­ ers  do not cite the car accident scene or the penultimate vision of Blanche’s demise on the beach. Instead, they almost universally invoke the sequence in which Jane brings Blanche’s lunch tray and, as Blanche removes the meal’s elegant silver dome, she discovers that her missing bird has been served as the entrée. The dead pet rests artfully atop a bed of lettuce surrounded by perfectly sliced tomatoes. Perhaps this is a humorous reference to the chicken salad lunch on so many American women’s menus in the late 1950s and early 1960s; but to Jane’s thinking, apparently, parakeet salad constitutes a fitting substitution. Aldrich closes the scene with Blanche shrieking in horror, as Jane shuffles down the hall, cackling maniacally. In the following scenes involving food, Crawford’s wild eyes reveal her character’s apprehension of whatever ghastliness might next appear on the menu of Jane’s sadism. Blanche is so spooked that she cannot bear to lift the silver dome on the subsequent meals that her sister delivers. Plates of food have begun to bear messages: parakeet salad declares that Blanche’s attachments are trivial and absurd and that Jane’s contempt for her sister is boundless. The following morning, Jane unveils the dinner 146

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that her sister has been too petrified to approach the night before, tucking into a pork chop with Rabelaisian gusto as she straightens the room and makes small talk. In a parody of 1950s parenting manuals, Jane offers a line that has become a cult classic: “But you didn’t eat your din din! If you don’t finish your din din, you have to wait til lunch!” This is the sadistic response to her despondent, bewildered, and frantic sister when Blanche whimpers for something to eat. Soon after this, Jane tells Blanche that she’s noticed rats in the cellar. Then, in a turn that comes as no surprise to the audience schooled on the parakeet salad, though it certainly astonishes Blanche, Jane serves her distraught sister a dead rat on another bed of lettuce, surrounded by more perfectly sliced tomatoes. This psychic assault drives Blanche to her most frantic moment in the picture. Aldrich composes aerial shots of the tormented Crawford character madly turning circles in her wheelchair; her mechanical supplement has morphed into an engine of masochistic torture. The substitution of waste for food violates Western culture’s foundation in norms of hospitality. It conjures moments like the memorable scene between Odysseus and the Cyclops, a host who, rather than feed his guests, prefers to devour them instead. Viewers of Baby Jane may fail to remember details of its plot, but few forget the parakeet salad, which, even more than the composed rat, telegraphs the route to sororicide ahead.23 In fact, the parakeet had been Blanche’s animal twin of sorts. Both fluttery, possessed of musical voices, bird and woman were fated to see their aspirations limited by their respective cages, miniature wrought-­ iron pagoda and wheelchair and metal bars, respectively. Jane’s culinary torture of Blanche, however, does not merely amplify the elements of horror that give the film its signature flavor: it actually brings us back to the conventions of the enslavement narrative. In several essays published in the mid-­1990s, I explored the ways enslaving masters and mistresses transform the accoutrements of domesticity into objects of abuse; several important nineteenth-­century Black women writers represent such scenes in their novels and autobiographies detailing bondage-­like conditions of servitude or escape from slavery.24 In Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, the sadistic mistress of biracial (“tragic mulatta”) protagonist Frado brutally stuffs her mouth with blocks of wood 147

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and tea towels, not only injuring the child but also impeding expression and nourishment. Harriet  Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl features “disobedient” bound Blacks being punished as if they were food to be consumed. Jacobs tells of an enslaved man condemned for stealing meat being burned to death by the dripping fat from a piece of roasting pork that is cooking overhead as he hangs, like an animal that has been butchered. She also relates the horrific account of her master “Dr. Flint’s” enslaved cook being forced, as punishment for her alleged role in a hateful dog’s demise, to ingest the corn mush she had fed the cur, which has become transformed into the vomit he spewed in the process of expiring. Worked, consumed, used up, enslaved bodies in these narratives themselves devolve from “meat” to “waste.” Like these tormented enslaved men and women, Blanche too is starved, though Jane’s actual withholding of sustenance is intermittent rather than comprehensive. We cannot forget the belatedly offered pork chops, on the menu between parakeet salad and composed rat, nor can we overlook Jane’s dramatic enjoyment of a pork chop meant for her wheelchair-­bound sister. But Blanche has become so traumatized over the mere thought of raising the dome, itself a theatrical mode of pre­ sentation with meal as star and silver globe as curtain, that she comes to reject Jane’s cooking altogether. We almost never see Blanche in the act of eating, save during her desperate foray into Jane’s dressing table, which she plunders for anything edible, finding and nearly inhaling a handful of ancient, cast-­off chocolate remnants that Jane has picked over and discarded. This candy does Blanche no nutritive good, but her eager ingestion of these sweets speaks to her affinity for the dark and the abject.25

The Blackening of Blanche The scene where Blanche devours Jane’s pawed-­over candy marks the only time in which the disabled movie queen successfully acts as an independent agent: soon after, having hurled herself downstairs in order to reach the only working telephone in the house (her sister has disconnected the upstairs handset), she is found by Jane. Caught in flagrante on the telephone, Blanche has just implored their physician to declare 148

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Figure 36  Elvira (Maidie Norman) witnesses Blanche’s ( Joan Crawford’s) lynching, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 1962, screen grab, 01:38:50

her sister incompetent. Outraged over her sibling’s betrayal, Jane calls the doctor back, and in her best “Blanche”/Joan Crawford imitation, Davis’s character explains that the sisters will no longer be needing his services, as she, “Blanche,” has chosen another physician for their care, apparently in the last several seconds. As I briefly alluded to earlier, Crawford complained for years about Davis’s sadistic zeal in doing stunts herself: replacing the phone in its cradle, Davis’s Jane pummels and kicks Crawford’s cowering Blanche into unconsciousness. She then brutally drags her disabled sister up the stairs, like a sack of potatoes. Crawford would get revenge in another scene by stiffening her slender frame to simulate great weight so that Davis actually injured her back while pulling Crawford along the floor. This episode of unthinkable sister-­on-­sister violence culminates in Jane’s trussing Blanche’s hands up to a rehabilitation triangle that has been placed over her bed for therapy. Gagged and bound, dressed in black, Blanche is en route to her own lynching. That it is Elvira alone, Blanche’s “Black sister,” who has any intimation of trouble afoot in the Hudson home makes perfect narrative sense. For some time, Elvira has been suspicious that Jane has been sedating Blanche with sleeping pills or plying her with noxious medication. Unbeknownst to the housekeeper, Blanche has lost access to the telephone, which renders her socially dead: with the oblivious Mrs. Bates failing to see much 149

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of anything when she delivers floral offerings for the “invalid” Blanche, Elvira constitutes her only remaining connection to the outside world. Appearing at the Hudson mansion on her day off, Elvira expresses such intense concern for Blanche that she enrages Jane, who summarily fires her, demanding that she return her key, though Elvira claims not to have it. The housekeeper pretends to board a city bus while Jane departs in the other direction in her car, but once the vehicle pulls away from its stop, Elvira rushes back to the mansion to rescue Blanche from what she suspects is Jane’s malice. Elvira’s opportunity for heroism, however, is narrow indeed. Not only has Blanche been drugged and locked into her bedroom; tools will be required to liberate the invalid. What unfolds next could have come directly from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: the staging on a staircase of a Hegelian facing scene between a Black woman, Clytie-­Elvira, and her white counterpart, Rosa-­Jane. In both narratives, two unmarried middle-­ aged females physically struggle to gain or prohibit access to a family member who has been cossetted upstairs to die, Henry Sutpen-­Blanche Hudson. In the case of Baby Jane, the lunatic Davis character, dressed like little Eva, fictional daughter of a fictional slave master who failed to free his own bound Blacks, hammers to death her African American ex-­employee. But the assault does not succeed until after Elvira has attempted to unbind the captive Blanche from the therapeutic triangle on which Jane has cinched her as a murderous Klansman might tie up his African American victim. I read Blanche and Elvira’s identification with one another as made complete in this scene: the white woman enacts the iconography of lynching while her Black “sister” is actually murdered off screen. That Aldrich does not represent Jane killing Elvira is a fascinating directorial decision, perhaps having to do with 1962’s more genteel representational mores, or because the horror he does display is ghastly enough. But the effect of his choice is that Elvira never fully disappears from our consciousness. A reaction shot of Blanche aghast, accompanied by thunking sounds that leave no doubt about what has happened, registers the murder; and the audience, identified with Elvira as the film’s normative character, is left to share Blanche’s response. After re-­trussing Blanche’s hands on the triangle and re-­stuffing the gag in her mouth, 150

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Jane dumps Elvira’s corpse into Blanche’s wheelchair and covers it with a dark blanket. Aldrich has created a stunning chiasmus: the expiring Caucasian Blanche, strung up like an enslaved or a Jim Crow–­era Black victim mid-­punishment, is bound for death, while the dead African American Elvira assumes Blanche’s place in the wheelchair, secreted at the top of the house, as if she were alive. With this identification, it would seem that Blanche’s fate is sealed: she has taken on the burden of Elvira’s Blackness and, accordingly, she too must be sacrificed. But just before the sisters’ agon reaches its conclusion, a fascinating twist unfolds: Jane’s newly hired accompanist, the queer giant Edwin Flagg, who in his greed for food and money embodies the human parasitism associated with enslavers, stumbles upon the captive Blanche. While drunk, he ascends the stairs of the mansion, in flagrant disregard of Jane’s plaintive insistence that he remain below. Contorting a Baby Jane doll into an obscene position in his lap, Flagg seats himself in Blanche’s wheelchair with a dark blanket draped over his head, the very one that Jane had used to shroud Elvira.26 For one horrifying moment, it appears to both Jane and the viewer that the murdered Black woman has come back to life. Jane screams bloody murder, wailing like a stricken child, at the moment that Edwin spies the trussed-­up Blanche; and, terrified beyond expression, shrieking, “She’s dying! She’s dying!,” he flees the house. Privy to attempted sororicide, the man is unwilling to intervene. Flagg occupies a role that was common among so-­called “right-­thinking” people of both the South and the North before 1861, many of whom expressed disapproval of slavery as an institution but did nothing to stop it while bound African Americans in their communities continued to be tortured, murdered, and dehumanized. Baby Jane ends with a remarkable demystification of what Hegelian scholars of African American slavery call “ideological reversal,” in which the master blames his or her bondspersons for his or her own abjection, first inverting and then veiling moral responsibility for transforming people into things. In the film’s final sequence, the dying Blanche, at the beach and laid out on the sand, covered with the same dark blanket that had served as Elvira’s shroud, insists on “telling Jane the truth about the accident.” In labored tones, she reveals that it was not Jane who had driven the car that disabled her that night in 1935; in fact, Blanche had insisted on 151

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taking the wheel herself, because Jane was stupefied with drink. Blanche had been enraged and profoundly hurt over Jane’s cruel imitation of her voice at the party they had attended. Indeed, as I noted earlier, Jane’s mimicry of Blanche has been one of the picture’s recurrent themes: Davis has lip-­synched Crawford’s (actual prerecorded) tones on screen, while off screen Jane has entertained party guests with her cruel impressions of Blanche. As Blanche recounts her sister’s ruinous mockery, the viewer presumes that Davis’s Jane has retained her vaudeville talent for vocal impersonation.27 Such viciousness apparently proves the last straw for Blanche, who has been turning the other cheek toward her sister since childhood. In the denouement of her beachside confession, Blanche admits that, driving up to the entrance of their estate on the night of the accident, she had asked Jane to open the gate for the car, but as Jane was doing so, Blanche hit the gas and plowed into the wrought iron. Somehow, according to Blanche’s memory of the evening, Jane had managed to hurtle her body out of the way, while Blanche’s spine snapped when the car’s metal hit the bars. So traumatized was Jane by what she had witnessed (and then repressed for twenty-­seven years) that she disappeared for three days on a drunken bender with a strange man. With Jane nowhere to be found, Blanche was able to blame the catastrophe on her alcoholic sister, thus binding Jane with devastating guilt for something she had not done. So it was that Jane Hudson, mobile and independent, if also alcoholic and en route to madness, became chained for life to her sister Blanche, linked by a misplaced but overwhelming sense of culpability and sorrow. Meanwhile Blanche, paralyzed, dependent, socially dead, and at the mercy of Jane, actually held the power of knowing that first, her abjection was the consequence of her own sororicidal impulses; and second, she had turned Jane into a monster. As Blanche remarks during her revelation: “You weren’t always ugly. I made you ugly.” In this final turn of the screw, the fictive enslaver, Jane, learns that the symbolic bondswoman, Blanche, bears the burden for her own captivity. It is Blanche, not Jane, who has evaded responsibility for what has become her own undoing at the hands of the sister she has so thoroughly dehumanized. In this regard, Aldrich has only been following Hegel, whose famous argument 152

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turns on the notion of the potential reversibility of the relation between Lord and Bondsman. Pace Hegel, in fact, the roles of protagonist and antagonist in Aldrich’s enslavement narrative are interchangeable: for as much as Jane is the victimizer and Blanche is her suffering subaltern, Blanche also is the old South’s aristocratic plantation mistress fallen on hard times, paralyzed before the future and compelled to repeat the past. Oppressed by the guilt that she has caused Blanche’s helplessness, Jane accepts the injunction to servitude as might a poor white peon with no way out of such mind-­numbing labor and class stagnation. Following the abolition of slavery and the Great Migration—­read the end of constricting multi-­ year contracts and the demise of the studio system, in the Hollywood iteration of this parable—­who is left to tend to the great house? Beyond a few Black sharecropping women, such labor defaults to those once non-­ enslavers, landless, impoverished whites left behind by Reconstruction, its failure, and the rise of Redemption governments seeking to restore the former white elites to power. In this alternative interpretation of the film, abject whites like Jane continue to loathe the owners of the great houses as much as they had before the war; but most profoundly, in fantasies born of ressentiment, they despise the African Americans who, only a generation or two out of bondage, have elevated their fortunes as such lower-­class whites have not. Witness Elvira, dressed and coiffed like a professional woman and committed to doing her civic duty by serving on a jury; she perfectly embodies figurative peon Jane’s nightmare scenario of racial uplift as zero-­ sum game, where for every ambitious African American who ascends the ladder of class, a bitter poor white plunges further down. According to this reading of the film, Bette Davis’s whiteface masquerade (possibly enabled by the flour bag on the kitchen table in the early scenes of the film) would mark an attempt to solidify her social status above the African American housekeeper. She believes Elvira has kicked her down the chain of being. As ultra-­white, there can be no mistaking her station. Jane inaugurates her assault against Blanche through her murder of the ancillary Elvira. As her torture of Blanche becomes sororicidal, it is clear that Jane sees her sister and Elvira as a matched 153

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pair. Such violence could be understood as an uprising from below, the explosion of what had been a poor white populist murmuring against the ruling class that has bubbled up into a one-­woman revolution. In a stunning piece of American social allegory, in which family members personify class interests, Jane’s animus is directed not only at her own sister but also against the Black woman it would seem that Blanche has anointed to replace her.28 In this alternative account of Aldrich’s film, the paralyzed “slave mistress” has created her own “enslaved” person. But, like many oppressed subalterns, Jane’s tolerance for relentless labor and perceived dehumanization has its limits. In the face of Blanche’s seemingly endless demands, as if to signal her rejection of such subservience, Jane lightens her visage. Her whiteface would seem an attempt both to reestablish parity with Blanche29 and to take a stand against Elvira, the Black housekeeper whom she believes has displaced her as Blanche’s sister under the skin. In the paranoid, racialized economy that Jane imagines, every act of Black agency must be countered with a momentous white response. Thus, in her final Hegelian struggle to maintain supremacy, she hammers Elvira to death in a crucifixion scene of white over Black. With either reading in place, Baby Jane’s power remains in its brilliant anatomy of a family, its exploration of how two sisters’ mutual envy has become self-­devouring. The film turns on the idea that domestic mythologies, often distorted and untrue, nevertheless can exact fatal tolls. The picture links the Hudson siblings to older American stories about fallen houses, incestuous dynamics, and tales of fratricide; consider Baby Jane’s spooky parallels to Absalom, Absalom! In Faulkner’s most searching exploration of the American house divided, patriarch Thomas Sutpen orders younger son Henry to murder his firstborn brother, Charles Bon. Cursed by “Black” “blood,” according to his father’s (unverified) calculations, Bon can never fulfill—­indeed, can only destroy—­Thomas Sutpen’s infamous “design” for a dynasty so rich, powerful, and all-­white that it never could be dismantled. Aldrich, it would seem, has built a national allegory on the frame of a horror film. Almost fifty years after the creation of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, its messages about the human capacity for exploitation and the social construction of monstrosity remain hauntingly pertinent. 154

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Yet, with all of that said, we must remember another dimension of the picture that often is overlooked: Baby Jane’s fleeting but powerful vision of African American civil rights avant la lettre. Accordingly, perhaps the most enduring, and in fact, the most salient question the film raises, just might be “What ever happened to Elvira?”

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Bette Davis Black and White

B

ette Davis’s association with civil rights and Black lives did not end with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I close my study with several brief glimpses of what we might call the racial afterlife of Bette Davis. Two episodes come from the late 1970s to late 1980s: a photograph of the actress in Blackface masquerade; a racially themed made-­for-­television movie, in which she performed opposite a twenty-­something Black actor; and an African American fashion designer in Paris who made the nearly eighty-­year-­old Bette Davis his muse. I also take up the legacy Davis left to two African American women playwrights: the experimental dramatist Adrienne Kennedy, who conjured the actress and her Now, Voyager costars into characters in two dream plays; and the MacArthur Grant–­ winning playwright Lynn Nottage. Inspired by Davis’s performance as a headstrong Southern heiress in Jezebel, Nottage reimagined the film’s characters in her drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark: plantation mistress “Marie” in the fictional film The Belle of New Orleans, played by Gloria Mitchell (an homage to Bette Davis’s Julie Marsden in Jezebel); and her enslaved maid “Tilly,” performed by Vera Stark (inspired by Theresa Harris’s Zette in the film). In her satirical reinvention of William Wyler’s acclaimed picture, the subject of chapter 3, Nottage focuses more on “maid” Vera Stark than she does on “mistress” Gloria Mitchell. Kennedy and Nottage have seized the actress’s baton and passed it to a new generation of African American artists. In their hands, Bette Davis’s iconic gifts live on in a multicultural future beyond her imaginings.1

Bl ackface Bette In the photo gallery of This ’n That, Davis’s final autobiography (1987), the actress included a picture of herself in Blackface masquerade.2 Written during her long recovery from a mastectomy, followed days afterward by a stroke, the memoir described the context for the photograph. It was taken by a guest in April 1978 at the actress’s seventieth-­birthday party. Davis had mounted a black funeral wreath on her front door, worn all-­ black garments and a “Negro wig,” and darkened her face with ebony makeup. In the memoir paragraph devoted to this tableau, making no mention of the painful performance history of American Blackface minstrelsy, Davis claimed that she had been in mourning for herself. 158

Bette Davis Black and White

Figure 37  Bette Davis pictured in Blackface in her final autobiography, written with Michael Herskowitz, This ’n That (New York: Berkeley, 1987), n.p.

Ten years later, one year before she died, Bette Davis appeared on the Tonight Show where, before millions of American viewers, she shared this Blackface image. Johnny Carson introduced the photograph by ex­ pressing his perplexity: he didn’t understand the picture and asked the ac­ tress if she could explain it. Reprising verbatim from her memoir, Davis described having thrown a seventieth-­birthday funeral; the picture documented that she had been grieving for herself. This response offered no explanation for how the actress understood Blackface as a venue for expressing bereavement. Given what I thought I had understood about Davis’s anti-­racist commitments, the photograph astonished me. What of her support and mentoring of African American actors? Her desegregating of the Hollywood Canteen? Her collaboration with Hattie McDaniel during the war? Her membership in Black labor unions in the postwar era, all detailed in the 159

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African American press? What had I misunderstood? As Zora Neale Hurston wrote of her heroine’s marital disillusionment in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “something fell off the shelf inside of her . . . It was her image of Jody, tumbled down and shattered.”3 So, my idol had crashed from the imaginary pedestal I had built for her at age thirteen. And I was julienned by the shards. Bette Davis in Blackface: could my longtime heroine have been racist at heart, despite her endeavors to the contrary? Could everything I had discovered over years spent in the archives and viewing the oeuvre have been a lie? I needed to understand the contradictions that might have led to Davis’s performance that night in 1978, some ambivalence or disordered thinking that I had missed. If this episode remained inexplicable, would that mean that Bette Davis was a racist and a hypocrite? The Blackface image haunted me and troubled my project. What could Davis possibly have been thinking? How might we understand the shade of coloring she’d chosen to apply? Her facial tones seemed to depart from the conventional browns of classical Hollywood corking up—­Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (dir. Alan Crosland, 1927), Fred Astaire in Swing Time (dir. George Stevens, 1936), Judy Garland in Everybody Sing (dir. Edwin Marin, 1938), and Bing Crosby in Holiday Inn (dir. Mark Sandrich, 1942)— ­and moved into the range of a pure Black.4 Did that signify that her Black­ face was saying something unique? That she was out-­blackening Holly­ wood burnt-­cork performances decades after their heyday? What did it mean for Bette Davis to pretend she was an African Amer­ ican woman? Was this scornful? Demeaning? A serious vision of racial identification or some sort of dark joke? A white exercise in racism as one-­ woman show? Or a sympathetic and tone-­deaf gesture? It was problematic enough that Davis had blacked up; but she had been photographed and then exhibited the picture in a memoir. And, adding insult to injury, she had displayed the image on the nation’s most popular late-­night television talk show. The exhibition history of her Blackface performance suggested that ten years after the incident, Davis still believed that there was nothing wrong, disparaging, or hateful about what she had done. Johnny Carson and his producers apparently did not think so either. Film scholar friends Nick Davis and Miriam Petty were far less surprised by the Blackface photo than I had been. They had sought to trouble 160

Bette Davis Black and White

my idealization of Davis; the photo gave them evidence to suggest that her affiliations were more complicated than I had imagined. So I returned to the painful legacy of American minstrelsy into which Bette Davis had inserted herself at the late date of 1978. Could Davis’s stunt be a botched at­ tempt at identification with African American abjection in a moment of despondency? And how might that potential expressive “eloquence”—­in her own mind—­provide some sort of consolation to her as she mourned what she believed was the death of her career?

White Mama Ernest Harden Jr., the then-­twenty-­eight-­year-­old Black actor who had costarred with Bette Davis in the 1980 made-­for-­TV movie White Mama, had his own recent thoughts about these questions.5 I was introduced to Harden by Kathryn Sermak, the actress’s longtime assistant, companion, and Davis memoirist, decades after reading about his collaboration with the actress.6 We had been invited as Davis scholars and former costars to compose tributes marking her unique contribution to cinema on the

Figure 38  Bette Davis (White Mama) and Ernest Harden Jr. (as B.T.) in White Mama, CBS Wednesday Night Movie, 1980 (Ernest Harden, private collection)

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thirtieth anniversary of her death. The world’s academic expert on Davis, Professor Martin Shingler, curated these remembrances on his website, which were shared with the Bette Davis estate and its followers. Around this time, after a long search, I at last had obtained a DVD copy of White Mama and viewed the film, which was first broadcast forty years ago. The picture was shot in 1980, just two years after the Blackfaced actress “celebrated” her seventieth birthday. In a phone interview, I asked Mr. Harden if he knew about the photograph and, if so, how he thought and felt about it. He told me that he had seen the picture and, choosing his words with great care, said that he believed Miss Davis had blundered in wearing Blackface and sharing the image on television.7 Mr. Harden went on to explain that Miss Davis had a “great love for my people,” and that perhaps the Blackface masquerade was a mistaken attempt to express that affection, connection, and solidarity. He sensed that she had not thought through what she had done; the performance in Blackface had been an unfortunate gaffe.8 But he believed that Miss Davis’s relationships with African Americans, particularly with the Black actors with whom she worked, should be what really counted. As a teacher, costar, and friend, he avowed, she had transformed his life. Harden shared several remarkable stories about Davis as mentor and colleague: before they began shooting White Mama, she had invited him to her apartment in the Colonial House in Hollywood, a building where Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, and William Powell, among many other Golden Age stars, had lived.9 The actress wanted to get to know him and to begin talking about their characters. Mr. Harden told me that Davis had originally wanted Dorian Harewood, his best friend and Davis’s one-­ time costar in the ill-­fated and short-­lived Miss Moffat, to reprise their pairing in White Mama. But Harewood was deemed too mature-­looking to play a sixteen-­year-­old, so he recommended Harden. Miss Moffat was a musical rewriting of the Welsh coal-­mining bildungsroman The Corn Is Green. Davis had starred in the film (dir. Irving Rapper, 1945). The 1974 stage version was set in the Black sharecropping South. The show lasted less than two weeks in its Philadelphia previews. Bette Davis, then in her mid-­sixties, had trouble memorizing her lines, and she really could not sing. The musical was a disaster, and flopped, putting an all-­Black cast, including the star Nell Carter, out of work for 162

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almost two years. Davis scholar Martin Shingler speculates that, given the fact that the actress knew she was no singer, it must have been the repurposed material, with a potentially anti-­racist theme, that had attracted her to the musical.10 At the time White Mama began production, Harden was in his twenties, playing an abandoned sixteen-­year-­old troubled teen from the ghetto. Davis was seventy-­two, and portrayed a down-­on-­her-­luck white widow whose neighborhood on the edge of Skid Row in Los Angeles had fallen into decrepitude. Harden’s character’s foster-­parent-­to-­be would receive checks from Children and Family Services. Becoming his guardian would allow Davis’s “White Mama” to remain in her apartment without turning to welfare, of which she had a horror. This socially charged plot could easily have devolved into a sentimental morass.11 Instead, the movie was steeped in a tough, realist aesthetic, more reminiscent of 1970s theatrical films directed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola than productions of the Hallmark Channel-­ to-­be. What Harden and Davis conveyed was the relationship of two strangers, Black and white, who came to an understanding that almost completely avoided racial phantasmagoria. Davis’s foster parent, whom we infer had never known “Negros,” nevertheless seemed to bring no rac­ ist baggage to the dynamic. That her character lacked prejudice surprised me. I couldn’t help wondering if Davis’s own liberal sensibility—­prior to the Blackface birthday episode—­had informed both the screenwriter’s thinking and her performance. Certainly, White Mama’s premise appealed to the actress, who later told Carson that she thought the best pictures were being made for television rather than for “theatrical release,” her sarcastic invocation of language used by the late twentieth-­ century movie business. In light of our twenty-­first-­century television renaissance, Davis’s 1988 take on the medium’s potential promise sounds positively prophetic today. Harden’s character entered the film having already internalized white racist ideology from a hard life on the streets, but he began to shed these conceptions in the company of the woman he came to call White Mama. It was B.T. who used the N-­word as he ventriloquized what he fancied were his foster mother’s racist beliefs in order to throw them back in her face. Played as a stoic survivor, Davis’s character remained unfazed by 163

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B.T.’s hateful tirade. Soon after, in the second half of the film, the young man determined to rescue White Mama after she suffered eviction and subsequent homelessness. The picture concluded with B.T. joining the army and directing his recruiting officer to deposit his pay with Davis’s character. Thus, the nurtured became the nurturer, a fantasy of racial reconciliation with a twist. It was the African American character who had turned into the caregiver for White Mama, the foster parent who initially had taken him in because she had needed the money. Harden told me that Davis was eager for him to flourish; they hit it off immediately and were determined to translate their chemistry to the small screen. The two ran lines, rehearsed, and even commuted together to the set on Los Angeles’s Skid Row in a studio car. One evening, as Davis, Harden, and former child star Jackie Cooper, the picture’s director, were being driven home, the two Hollywood veterans decided they needed to talk candidly with their young colleague. Davis explained that she had received a slew of hate mail, before the film had even been finished and months in advance of when it would be shown on television. The letters raged that once lifelong fans would have nothing more to do with their former idol Bette Davis, given that she was consorting with “n*gg*rs” (Harden’s transcription in his tribute). The actress reported in This ’n That that someone had thrown a bottle at her during shooting. Whether this was a racist attack or the act of an alcohol-­fueled or homeless Angelino, it added to the atmosphere of terror she described operating on location in Skid Row in White Mama.12 Growing up in a rough area of Detroit should have prepared him for this barrage of vitriol, Harden explained, but it had not. He had believed that, after the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., racism in America had ended. Harden was more shaken by the hate mail than was Davis, he continued. She felt that it was important to toughen him up to the potential racist backlash that might be his experience in the industry. In response to the anti-­Black threats, White Mama’s producers sent two armed police officers to escort Bette Davis door to door and to keep her safe on the set. Distinctly unhappy with this situation, the actress insisted she would disregard the security detail if it did not protect Ernest Harden as well. So it was that Bette Davis and her Black costar spent the remainder of the shoot together, in close company. 164

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The hate mail created the opportunity for Harden and Davis to talk about American racism. They discussed his experiences in college and with casting directors. He noted that the roles for dark-­skinned Black men were almost nonexistent. She shared her feelings about facing attacks by racist former fans at this late point in her career. And she revealed a deep understanding of American racial history, describing her work co-­founding and desegregating the Hollywood Canteen and participating in the Double V campaign during the war: Victory abroad against Nazism and fascism; Victory at home for civil rights. Harden explained that growing up in a tough all-­Black Detroit neighborhood, he had actually learned about racism from the news on television, rather than firsthand in the streets. Segregation had closed down his access to what was nearly ubiquitous anti-­Black prejudice because he had lived inside its limiting horizons. It was while attending Michigan State University, at which only 15 percent of students were African American, that Harden had directly experienced bigotry and prejudice. Before age eighteen, such forces had felt more abstract than palpable. This was the ongoing, behind-­the-­scenes conversation that animated the two actors, Harden recounted. Yet their film, which takes up extreme poverty and racial inequality as its central themes, never devolved into agitprop. Given my snobbish preferences for Davis’s classical Hollywood performances, my expectations for this made-­for-­T V movie were low. I dreaded a cheesy sentimental take on poor surrogate families, Black and white. Harden had guest-­starred on the hit sitcom The Jeffersons for two seasons; he had played George’s employee Marcus Henderson with subtlety and wit prior to being cast with Davis in White Mama. Far from being a work of schmaltz, the picture was actually harrowing to watch. Given its heightened realism and its painful content, at moments it felt unbearable, even forty years after it was made. In White Mama, Bette Davis and her Black male costar gave believable performances, pushing back against the conventions of the TV movie and particularly its typically sunny conclusions. The plot line was resolved with B.T.’s enlistment at sixteen, but he had to leave White Mama in order to provide her with a steady income, a rending sacrifice for both. Thus, Davis and Harden offered a powerful meditation on the persistence of American racism and poverty. The film was aired during Ronald Reagan’s 165

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presidential campaign and revealed an ongoing homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, which remains the worst in the country. White Mama proved timely in 1980 and remains timeless as well.

Pat r i c k K e l l y ’s S a r t o r i a l E m b r a c e Three years before Bette Davis died, Kathryn Sermak, the actress’s former assistant, companion, and memoirist, introduced the seventy-­seven-­ year-­old to Black fashion designer Patrick Kelly. The Mississippi-­born

Figure 39  “Patrick & Bette,” drawing by Justin Teodoro (courtesy of the artist)

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Figure 40  “Patrick and Miss D,” late 1980s (photograph by Kathryn Sermak, private collection)

artist was the first American and African American admitted to the Chambre syndicale du pret-­a-­porter after having taken Paris by storm with his joyfully whimsical dresses:13 curve-­hugging black and red jersey sheaths festooned with candy-­colored hearts fabricated from buttons;14 knit gowns splashed with oversized red lips; and accessories adorned with images drawn from what African American cultural scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called “racist memorabilia,” which the designer collected.15 Kelly’s company’s logo, the golliwog, had shouldered a racist legacy for over a century. Children’s book writer Kate Frances Upton had created the fictional creature in a series of stories for children: the character was a dark-­skinned, wild-­haired, goggle-­eyed gnome.16 Other Kelly references were less sinister, if still provocative, such as his impudent hats resembling giant wedges of watermelon, long associated in racist phantasmagoria with African Americans.17 Kelly’s redeployment of or signifyin’ on demeaning iconography made his designs controversial; golliwogs were unequivocally racist 167

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images.18 Yet the designer meant his send-­up of the freakish Black gnome and his zeal for watermelon millenary to accentuate racist fantasy in order to assail it. Departing from high fashion convention in the 1980s, Kelly cultivated a circle of African American, African, and Anglo African models who walked in his shows: Pat Cleveland, Iman, and Grace Jones became fixtures of the Kelly runway. Black fashion editor Robin Givhan addressed the paradox of Kelly’s art in a retrospective essay published in the Washington Post: One could argue that as an expatriate in Paris, Kelly profited from enduring and damaging stereotypes while Blacks at home suffered them . . . But Kelly’s legacy bears few indications of self-­doubt, anger or hatred—­self or otherwise. Instead it is relentlessly, ruthlessly joyful . . . By embodying stereotypes, Kelly sought to deflate them.19

Kathryn Sermak began working as Patrick Kelly’s press attaché in Paris after leaving Bette Davis’s employ. Before departing, she had been instrumental in the actress’s two-­year-­long recovery from her mastectomy and debilitating stroke. With strength renewed as a result of Sermak’s care, Davis was planning a December 1986 trip to receive an award when her protégée insisted that the actress stop in Paris for a visit. Sermak took her mentor to a Christmas Eve dinner party that Kelly, a renowned Southern cook, was throwing. Neither the young designer nor his family and friends realized that Bette Davis would be joining them, as Sermak had only identified her houseguest as Miss D., an elderly relative from California.20 The actress and the designer hit it off immediately. Kelly had been a lifelong Bette Davis fan—­no great surprise for a Black, gay, Southern artist raised by his grandmother and his mother. After insisting to the flagging Davis that she stay for his homemade peach cobbler, the designer pulled out a bag of trademark red plastic lips, which he attached around the tiny waist of the actress’s black knit dress. He transformed her classically elegant ensemble into a sassy, joyful confection. Davis was enchanted. The next day, Kelly sent the actress a size-­four black dress and matching hat that Davis adored. Anticipating appearances on Late Night with David 168

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Letterman, Kelly and Davis collaborated on ensembles for each occasion: the first, worn on May 26, 1987, was a black knit sheath with a huge heart crafted from tiny Smartie-­like buttons, finished with a black Jughead crown encircled by giant colored buttons to match. The second, created for her appearance on April 20, 1989, featured a red jersey dress flanked by three large, sequined question marks and a matching red boater, bespoke for the occasion of the television host’s questions and answers. In that final, 1989 interview, after greeting Letterman, Davis stood up from her chair, modeled the question-­marked ensemble, and announced that she and Patrick Kelly had devised the dress so she could turn the interrogation back on Letterman. In her ebullience, Davis knocked over his water glass, drenching Letterman’s trousers. Thus ensued an impromptu, hilarious exchange marked by his mortification and her instinct to turn fiasco into comedy. Davis dominated the screen. In her earlier, 1987 appearance, Letterman had asked Davis to tell him about her dress. She had replied: “It was made by Patrick Kelly, a wonderful Black designer in Paris. The heart is made from buttons—­simply marvelous. Mr. Kelly is in New York right now, hoping to find some American backers for his company!” She then opened an envelope and handed Letterman a three-­inch Black plastic baby doll, one of Kelly’s totemic tchotchkes, and encouraged the host to pin the figure on his suit. Letterman, clearly flummoxed, did as she directed. In the weeks preceding this broadcast, Linda Wachner, president of fashion giant Warnaco, had been engaged in multi-­million-­dollar negotiations with Patrick Kelly, but seemed to be cooling on a potential alliance. Tuning in to Letterman that night, Wachner witnessed Bette Davis’s full-­throated endorsement of the designer and immediately decided to sign off on their deal.21 Sermak wrote that Bette Davis became Patrick Kelly’s muse. She wore his dresses for the remainder of her life. Classical Hollywood film scholar Martin Shingler notes that the image Kelly created for the actress bolstered her confidence, given her emaciated frame and partially frozen face [post-­stroke]. It must have taken a lot for Davis to commit to these very striking outfits, with their bold colours and vivid designs, but she certainly did and created some stunning late-­life portraits wearing his [clothes]. It was a form of armoury.22 169

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Adorning herself in such high-­concept fashions, as Shingler astutely notes, shielded Davis from the pain of her diminishment. Kelly’s designs offered a brilliant final mise-­en-­scène for a woman whose life’s work had involved creating indelible images. Such glorious costuming redirected the spotlight away from the ravages of her physical decline; instead, Kelly’s clothes refocused attention on the actress’s sparkling wit and energized her spirit.23 When Davis died in the American Hos­ pital in Paris after collapsing at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, it was the devoted Kathryn Sermak who accompanied her mentor’s body back to California. For Davis’s burial, her protégée selected a black Patrick Kelly gown with a mock turtleneck and Davis’s own black mink hat. Sermak also chose a simple jersey version of Davis’s final ensemble to wear on their valedictory plane flight together. Patrick Kelly, who tragically was to die of AIDS less than twelve weeks later, would wrap both Bette Davis and Kathryn Sermak in a final embrace of love.

A Movie Sta r H a s to Sta r in Black and White As I have noted, Bette Davis spent the last decade-­plus of her life, 1978–­ 1989, involved in two racially charged episodes: performing and publicizing the Blackface incident; and making White Mama, which resulted in hate mail, a thrown bottle, and the lifelong friendship of a talented young African American actor. These moments both spoke to but did not engage with each other. Davis’s inexplicably racist gaffe telegraphed insensitivity across the Tonight Show’s national audience. We will never know how many of Carson’s viewers took offense at—­or didn’t register—­ Davis’s Blackface exhibition. Only one year later, she gave a television performance of great compassion that revealed the actress in a powerfully ant-­racist light. In her final three years, Davis wore clothes made by a brilliant and provocative Mississippi-­born Black designer who challenged the Parisian fashion elite with racially provocative images on his clothes. Patrick Kelly’s creations dared wearers and observers alike to think about America’s original sin of slavery and the Jim Crow regime 170

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that had replaced it and that still persists. The paradox Davis offered for analysists of race in America cannot be fully resolved. But, to attempt to draw some conclusions about Bette Davis’s legacy on racial issues, I close these meditations by touching briefly on two female African American playwrights whom she clearly inspired: Adrienne Kennedy and Lynn Nottage. Kennedy, a Black experimental dramatist, featured Bette Davis in her dream plays, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976) and The Film Club (1992), and in her memoir, The People Who Led Me to Write My Plays (1987). In Movie Star, she cast Bette Davis heroine Charlotte Vale as her leading character. Kennedy imported Now, Voyager’s mise-­en-­scène of the cruise ship on which Davis and her character’s lover Paul Henreid traveled into the first scene of her play. The Film Club opens with the following: “Often, when I’m despondent, I watch Bette Davis’s movies.”24 But it was the memoir that most sharply focused the rich imaginative ties between Kennedy and her favorite Hollywood actress. With an iconic still photograph of Bette Davis from the last scene of Now, Voyager, and a movie poster featuring the ocean liner on which Charlotte Vale had embarked in her quest for freedom, The People Who Led Me to Write My Plays, Kennedy’s autobiography, is a work of Davis love. Built from highly curated images and texts, the memoir unfolds in snapshot-­like fragments, accruing its power through repetition. Recurring touchstones are the playwright’s growing up as a member of the African American middle class in Cleveland in the 1930s and 1940s, her obsession with reading, and her zeal for motion pictures. Throughout the memoir, Kennedy describes the town of Montezuma in rural Georgia where her grandparents and extended family lived; every summer, without adult supervision, she traveled there with her homesick little brother on a dirty Jim Crow railroad car. Few African American writers of the 1960s and 1970s could claim to both have grown up in a middle-­class, integrated Black and immigrant neighborhood in the Midwest and also to have lived in a rural, segregated “Negro” town in the South.25 Kennedy’s range of early experiences in two very distinct African American communities fueled her creativity away from traditional dramatic forms and into her own kind of magical realism. 171

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Like James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and other Black intellectuals born in the mid-­1920s and early 1930s, young Adrienne Kennedy fell in love with the movies. Beginning at age eight, the future dramatist discovered Bette Davis in Juarez (dir. William Dieterle, 1939) as the Hapsburg empress. The Mexican Revolution had toppled her colonial figurehead husband, Maximilian. Davis’s Carlota, already beside herself with grief over her childlessness, descends into madness.26 Two years later, Kennedy saw the actress in The Little Foxes (dir. William Wyler, 1941), playing the monstrously selfish, spouse-­killing murderess Regina Giddens. One year after that, the playwright-­to-­be celebrated Davis in the role of mother-­ tormented, sympathetic Charlotte Vale, transformed from ugly duckling to swan in Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942). Bette Davis’s roles gave the young Kennedy a rich space for fantasy.27 The playwright’s childhood was punctuated by a haunted reality as well. Kennedy reported that when she was a schoolgirl, her mother had suffered the torment of disturbing dreams; before breakfast, Mrs. Hawkins would greet her children with darkened, sagging eyes and a frantic demeanor. Educated at Atlanta University, but remanded to the role of wife and parent, Kennedy’s mother had a powerful and unfulfilled imagination. Mrs. Hawkins nurtured it by sharing her disquieting dreams in story form each morning. Kennedy notes that her preference for dramatic visionary tableaux was inspired by her mother’s fantastic accounts. Her plays themselves unfold like hallucinations, nonlinear, dissociated, imagistic. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, Kennedy imagined Bette Davis as an African American woman whose social worker father admired pioneering Black historian John Hope Franklin, sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and president of Morehouse College Benjamin Mays. The protagonist’s father threatens suicide by jumping off a settlement house, the building of which had been his career-­defining project; he lands on a scaffold, barely surviving. Why was Bette Davis Kennedy’s touchstone? Kennedy features two photos of Ingrid Bergman in her autobiography, and Joan Crawford makes a brief appearance there as well. But Kennedy wanted to be more than simply inspired by or identified with the heroines of Gaslight (dir. George Cukor, 1944) or Mildred Pierce 172

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(dir. Michael Curtiz, 1945). She actually sought to be Bette Davis: not to be like her, but to actually become her. Kennedy loved the actress because she embodied the theme of transformation; Now, Voyager was particularly important for the playwright because it is a paean to female metamorphosis,28 a universal motif despite the film’s upper-­class Boston milieu.29 She celebrated the star for the powerful agency she displayed on film, in roles sympathetic, repugnant, and magnificent. Thus, the playwright lifted Bette Davis from her status as screen icon and molded the dramatic character she called “Bette Davis” into a force in her own, experimental, Black dramatic universe. Theater scholar Elin Diamond put it eloquently: “Kennedy doesn’t make common cause with Bette Davis; rather she purloins a cinematic image for her fantasy life as a way of telling us about her life.”30 Kennedy’s movie star wasn’t a parody, like a Davis impersonator’s take on the actress’s line from The Cabin in the Cotton, “I’d love to kiss you, but ahh just waaashed my haaay-­ah” (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1932). She was a vessel for the playwright’s imagination to fill with fantasies of how a powerful woman could move decisively through the world.

“I’d R ather Pl ay a Maid for $70 0 Than Be One for $7” —­H a t t i e M c D a n i e l Kennedy used Bette Davis as a dramatic vessel into which she could pour her artistic fascinations. Informed by a historical sweep beginning with ancient Egypt and extending through the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kennedy’s dream plays had a trans-­historical quality. Lynn Nottage, Kennedy’s younger counterpart, returned to Davis’s Oscar-­winning performance in Jezebel, particularly white mistress Julie’s relationship to enslaved maid Zette, to pursue a more contemporary set of questions. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) offers a satirical take on 1930s melodramas of moonlight and magnolias. But the play’s central critique involves the rigid color politics that dominated casting practices in Hollywood’s Golden Age. 173

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Vera Stark, set in pre-­Code Los Angeles, features four African American actresses: Gloria Mitchell, a fragile “white” belle; Anna Mae Simpkins, a fair-­skinned racial Rorschach, who has claimed she is “Brazilian”; the eponymous protagonist Vera, who calls to mind the radiant, underemployed Theresa Harris,31 the majority of whose on-­screen roles remained uncredited; and Vera’s roommate Lottie McBride, whose humor and size evoke Hattie McDaniel. Vera and Lottie are relegated by their dark complexions to playing enslaved persons and servants. Nottage’s target is the chromatic spectrum for Black actresses in Hollywood. Through Gloria, Anna Mae, Vera, and Lottie, the playwright shows that on screen or off, “Race” in Hollywood is always a performative affair.32 The variety of film roles offered to African American actresses of the 1930s and early 1940s could be counted on one hand: enslaved people in historical pictures; and maids or servants in films set during Prohibition and the Great Depression. Black movie star Louise Beavers was said to be put on a liquid weight-­gaining diet in preparation for playing Delilah, the mammified muse of pancake making in Imitation of Life (dir. John Stahl, 1934).33 Nottage’s Lottie claims to be “trying to eat my way into some work” (Vera Stark, 2.2.24). But in act 1, Lottie reveals to Vera that not long ago, she was svelte and sparkling, performing as an understudy who took the stage four times in the real-­life 1928 blockbuster all-­Black-­ cast Broadway musical Blackbirds (prod. Lew Leslie). This groundbreaking production became the most popular all-­Black-­ cast review in theater history. Its stars included Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the sultry Nina Mae McKinney, soon to dazzle in Hallelujah (dir. King Vidor, 1929), which starred African Americans exclusively. The production was so successful that it traveled to Paris before the cast undertook a nationwide tour. By making the underemployed Lottie a veteran of Blackbirds, Nottage dramatizes the dire state of affairs for accomplished African American women artists in Hollywood. Meanwhile, actresses like Lottie must stuff their way into mammy parts or, like Vera, seek the even rarer roles of attractive young servant women “jades,” like the abovementioned sexpot Nina Mae McKinney. Even these precious “glamour” parts for young female Black performers, however, had largely evaporated after the early period of sound, post-­1929.34 174

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Nottage’s vivacious, gorgeous Vera Stark, twenty-­eight years old, repeatedly laments that she is too dark to play an octoroon posing as a plantation mistress like Gloria; for her entire career, on and off screen, Mitchell has successfully passed for white. In the drama’s second scene, Vera’s roommate, the fair-­skinned Anna Mae, reveals that she has been masquerading as a Latina actress, “Anna Maria Fernandez.” Such dissimulation, she is convinced, will be a passport to the big screen. When we meet Vera again, in act 2, set in the 1970s, the now-­sixty-­year-­old heroine has become a sometime Las Vegas performer who has starred in numerous movies as servants and maids. Vera’s long cinematic career, however, has involved no further breakthroughs after she was cast as “Tilly,” the famous “slave with lines,” in the (faux film within the play) The Belle of New Orleans. Meanwhile, she confirms that Gloria Mitchell is in fact her cousin and that Gloria performed with Vera in Black vaudeville when they were children. Gloria’s epidermal good fortune has meant that she has enjoyed a great range of roles, while Vera has been forever typecast, relegated to tiny parts and uncredited roles. Very early in the play, Anna Mae in the persona of “Anna Maria” pleads with Vera to borrow an elegant coat. She later appears at Gloria’s Hollywood party, flaunting the wrap’s fabulousness, only to discover Vera and Lottie serving as Gloria’s maids. “Anna Maria,” almost as fair as Gloria, has imagined herself as a native of Brazil (though whether the character understands that she’s speaking with a Portuguese accent is unclear). She must pass in order to entice her new boyfriend, director Maximillian van Oster, into casting her in The Belle of New Orleans. By donning Vera’s elegant wrap, “Anna Maria” has adopted a second skin through which she can mask the legibility of her African American identity. Nottage does not detail the garment’s color. But the stylish coat is borrowed from a Black woman dark enough that she could never pass for white. Accordingly, the elegant wrap materializes the phantasmagoria surrounding white Hollywood and its illusions about the African American experience. Vera’s migrating garment offers a rich miniature for the entire dilemma of passing in the play. Anna Mae/Anna Maria re­ quires a luxurious outer skin to cement her performance as the Brazilian Bombshell. Her roommate’s coat provides the necessary supplement to 175

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the fictive Latina’s identity. Yet, because of Vera’s dark skin tone, the elegant coat alone cannot transform her into a “white” lady on the screen. At Gloria’s party, van Oster shares with Vera, Lottie, and Anna Maria his visions for the type of “Black actors” he seeks to cast for The Belle of New Orleans: hyper-­embodied, primitive, visibly suffering, “real Negros . . . of the earth . . . Negroes who have felt the burden of hard unmerciful labor” (1.4.26). Vera and Lottie respond to the director’s racist soliloquy by transforming themselves into exact facsimiles of his phantasmagoria—­wailing, moaning, and singing spirituals. Vera is cast as Tilly, the “slave with lines,” and Lottie is hired as another enslaved person in a supporting role. In my chapters on Jezebel and In This Our Life, I addressed those critics of Hattie McDaniel who argued that her performances, while extraordinary, did not push back at status-­quo white supremacy, either in Hollywood or on a national level. Such scholars might also claim that Jezebel’s Black costars donned minstrel masks at the behest of white screenwriters. It is my sense that in collaborating with Bette Davis, who reveled in their artistry, actors such as Stymie Beard, Eddie Anderson, and Theresa Harris worked in an atmosphere of comparative creative freedom that allowed them to redefine their menial roles from within.35 Theater scholar Harvey Young quotes critic Chris Jones on Nottage’s vision: if all African American actors have been offered roles of “slaves with lines, then, well, the only real options have been to either take the role and sell your dignity, or take the role and try to quietly subvert the stereotypical mindset of the studio.”36 This sentiment echoes Black Golden Age Hollywood actor, producer, and agent Clarence Muse’s comment, mentioned earlier, identifying “his friend [Hattie McDaniel’s] uniqueness as her special ability to play characters born of white imaginations with a particular originality.”37 It also recalls Hilton Als’s insights about Paul Robeson’s assumption of Brutus Jones’s vernacular speech. In the world of Vera Stark, all Black actresses are playing parts inflected by the racial fantasy of classical Hollywood. Gloria has made an entire career performing elite whiteness; in order to be cast as Marie’s enslaved maid Tilly, Vera has had to enact Maximillian van Oster’s gin-­fed fantasies of anguished “Negroes” who embrace relations to the earth. Without their fluency in racial role-­playing, Nottage’s Gloria and Anna Mae would 176

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have been relegated to menial parts, and Vera and Lotte would have remained employed as maids rather than having played them on the screen. Vera Stark reveals one more unexpected insight. Nottage’s “white” diva Gloria Mitchell hails from a shrouded African American background and grows up performing in Black vaudeville. For the course of her adult career, Gloria Mitchell passes for white. The Belle of New Orleans, her triumph, is meant as a parody of William Wyler’s Jezebel, the film in which Davis arguably gave her finest performance. By the transitive property, then, Lynn Nottage has imagined a world in which Bette Davis not only could have been, but actually was, Black.

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I

return to my treasured teachers, so central to everything I have thought and written across my career, with ongoing love and gratitude. During a blizzard in Toronto, where the Modern Language Association was having its annual conference in 1993, beloved mentor Ann Douglas found herself without a hotel room. I insisted that she share mine. One evening, I returned to find her reading a biography of  Jean Harlow. Knowing nothing of the brilliant and tragic comedienne other than that she was classical Hollywood’s sex goddess, I began renting Harlow’s pictures: Red-­Headed Woman (dir. Jack Conway, 1932), Dinner at Eight (dir. George Cukor, 1933), Bombshell (dir. Victor Fleming, 1933), Libeled Lady (dir. Jack Conway, 1936), and Wife vs. Secretary (dir. Clarence Brown, 1936). One viewing of Red-­Headed Woman allowed me to understand that my intellectual beacon for forty years had even more to teach me. Ann read multiple drafts of the introduction and my Baby Jane chapter and provided brilliant advice about the shape of the project. It was she who noted that I was in some way trying to retrace James Baldwin’s footsteps. Jonathan Arac encouraged me to consider film as art. He insisted that, as a nineteenth-­century Americanist, I view Deadwood (created by David Milch) so that we could discuss it. His late partner, the luminous 179

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Carol Kay, loved old movies and confessed that if she had had a television with TCM, she would not have been able to stop watching. The week after my dissertation defense, Robert A. Ferguson, late, lamented, and beloved adviser, joined me in a conversation about gender in Now, Voyager for an essay I never wrote. He supported my work on Davis from the start, doing a reading of my Baby Jane chapter that encouraged my civil rights claims from his law and literature perspective. Tim Peltason has the sad distinction of  being the surviving member of the trio of  beloved Wellesley College professors who taught me the skill of  “critical interpretation,“ close reading and literary analysis, between 1977 and 1981. Tim read the introduction and the Baby Jane chapter with rigor and generosity, and introduced me to the work of his friend, the late James Harvey, cinema scholar par excellence, who devotes a chapter to Bette Davis in his last book. Helen Deutsch continues to be my intellectual soulmate and inspiration. She too watched these pictures as a teen, and her expertise in all things sentimental and gothic in the reading of the manuscript pushed me in the most rigorous directions. She also recommended wonderful theoretical work on affect, particularly the poetics of tears, that enriched my understanding of spectatorship. Wendy Graham has been my evil twin in classical Hollywood viewing, fellow survivor of the Columbia University PhD program, and a co-­acolyte of African American cultural production. A brilliant interlocutor for this project for many years, and a beloved friend, she encouraged me not to jettison the memoir and reassured me that a young  Jewish girl’s take on race in Golden Age cinema was something worth pursuing. At Northwestern, Betsy Erkkila, dissertation committee co-­conspi­rator par excellence, shared the essay she had published, “Greta Garbo: Sailing beyond the Frame,” which showed me how an Americanist could legitimately write about a movie star. She read various drafts of the manuscript and raised searching questions that pushed me to think harder and more deeply about the cultural significance of the literary in Bette Davis’s performances. Susan Manning, my first, beloved, collegial friend and three-­decades-­long supporter, led me to the riches of the Black press and helped me think through the memoir versus analysis dilemma I faced at an important crossroads. She was invaluable in helping me 180

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understand Martha Graham’s significance to Davis’s physical aesthetic. Laurie Shannon, cherished friend and department chair during most of my work on this book, came to my Bette Davis lectures, despite experiencing trauma over animal cruelty in Baby Jane. She offered sage counsel about the architecture of the manuscript and has kept me sane over the last particularly difficult years. Susan Scott Parrish, another wonderful old friend, reentered my life after twenty years when we attended the University of Mississippi Conference “Faulkner and Slavery.” She showered me with her brilliance during a magical daylong visit in the summer of 2019, when the world as we knew it was recognizable. It was she who conceived the interanimating theory of Davis’s relation to 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s US racial feeling, which helped me solidify my larger claims about Davis as an important figure for thinking through mid-­century American culture. Jamie Poslosky’s virtuosity in several undergraduate courses and honors thesis work at Northwestern was matched by her insight: after hearing me imitate Charlotte Vale’s hateful mother in Now, Voyager during office hours, she insisted that I should be teaching this material. Her suggestion transformed my pedagogy over a decade and beyond. Ryan Friedman, now a full professor of African American literature and cinema at the Ohio State University, wrote the first film dissertation I ever directed. The book that emerged from his thesis is an exquisitely observed study of Black performers on screen during the early era of sound, 1929–­1934. Ryan’s brilliant article on James Baldwin’s film criticism has become the standard in the field. I’ve learned crucial things about close reading of film texts and racial phantasmagoria from him. Four beloved friends have opened up a world for thinking about race on film. Film scholar and polymath Nick Davis has been my Bette Davis spirit helper since he arrived at Northwestern. He has shared with me the exquisite handbook he drafted for his undergraduates, defining film terminology and theoretical concepts using The Piano as his examples. Nick read the entire raggedy manuscript in the wake of initial readers’ reports, helping me salvage what was useful and jettison what wasn’t. He has been this project’s north star. Miriam Petty, the world’s leading expert on African American film performers in 1930s Hollywood, entered my life and shared her book at 181

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my moment of deepest doubts about the shape of my project. She and Nick provided me with an ad hoc manuscript review that lasted hours and transformed my sense of what the project could contribute. I cannot encapsulate all that I have learned from her, but among other gifts, by her example, she returned me to my love of close reading, arguing that that’s where the riches of film scholarship lie. Professor Racquel Gates generously shared her article featuring the comic Black man motif in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) by return email request. Kwynn Perry, then a graduate student in cinema and media studies at USC, entered my life as a marvelous research assistant. Her discoveries were detailed and brilliantly annotated. Very shortly after, she became my film studies professor as well, in a series of phone meetings in which she taught me how to look anew at Black characters on the screen. Several years later, she asked me to serve on her doctoral committee, where I learned volumes from her brilliant dissertation on Black musical short films to 1945. Her friendship has enriched my life beyond measure. Meaghan Fritz, then a doctoral student in English at Northwestern, served as my research assistant in the Northwestern University Special Collections and at the Howard Gotlieb Archives at Boston University. An intrepid investigator, Meaghan found things about which I could not have dreamed, particularly pertaining to Davis’s participation in African American voluntary associations. She brought enormous intellectual passion and imagination to every discovery, and my book would not exist without her indispensable contribution. Northwestern University librarian Charla Burlenda Wilson and Galter Medical School librarian Ramune Kubilius provided expert help with my queries about Rex Ingram. Sandra Joy Aguilar, then-­curator of  the Warner Brothers Archives in 2010, was of great assistance during my first trip to and subsequent exchanges with that magical facility. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-­Gillece appeared in my doctoral seminar on nineteenth-­century American life writing early in her coursework. She gave me my first tutorial in film studies, along with doing early research for what became my book project. Now a tenured scholar of cinema at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, she was crucial to the theoretical origins of Bette Davis Black and White. I remain grateful for twenty years of Kevin Bell’s magical conversation about old movies, African Ameri­ can cultural production, and the politics of race. 182

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Nathan Mead’s intellectual and emotional excellence made it possible for me to serve as graduate admissions chair and then director of graduate studies without losing my mind. Life in University Hall would be un­ imaginable without the luminous Kathy Daniels, whose support for me and all of my colleagues for over thirty years has enabled us to do the work we love. Staff colleague Reginald Lee, operations manager at the Tech/ Hogan Docks and Lab Services at Northwestern, generously intervened in the bureaucratic tangles of procurement during the beginning of the COVID-­19 pandemic. Masked and socially distanced, he hand-­delivered the new monitor that enabled me to create the screenshots illustrating my argument, saving me crucial time and assuaging my anxiety. In addition to sending me delectable Bette Davis tidbits and clips for the last decade, in 2012, Jay Grossman invited me to give an American Cultures Colloquium lecture, my public debut of the Bette Davis project. During the Q&A, Bonnie Honig made a crucial intervention in my argument about Baby Jane’s racial politics. She suggested a Hegelian reversal, inspired by Blanche’s confession to Jane as she lays dying at the end of the picture. Her framing of  Jane as a “rebel from below,” rising up to protest elite domination, opened up the film anew. The brilliantly imaginative Melissa Bradshaw, a fellow Bette Davis fiend, came into my life through former doctoral student Sarah Turner Lahey. Over two years of joyful collaboration and the birth of a trea­sured friendship, we created the conference “All About Bette: The Cultural Legacies of Bette Davis,” convened at Northwestern in the fall of 2018. Bringing together the world’s expert scholars on Davis, star acting, and feminist film theory, the conference featured Davis’s companion, assistant, and memoirist Kathryn Sermak. She has been a magical presence in the unfolding of this book, sharing stories, information, and unpublished photographs with abundant generosity. It was Kathryn who introduced me to artist Justin Teodoro, who created the cartoon image of  Bette Davis and expatriate African American designer Patrick Kelly and allowed me to use it in my book. Ernest Harden Jr., who costarred with Davis in White Mama, generously responded to me by return email, spoke to me at length on the phone and over Facebook Messenger, and shared wonderful photos of himself and Bette Davis from their time shooting in downtown Los Angeles. 183

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Martin Shingler knows and has written more about Bette Davis than any scholar in the world. He was kind enough to travel from England to give the “All About Bette” keynote lecture and participated with great joy and energy in every session of the event. His countless essays on Davis over the last thirty years have been crucial to my formation as a scholar of her work. I was overjoyed to learn that Martin served as my first, formerly anonymous, reader for the press. His suggestions for revision were not only astute, but remarkably generative. He asked me to consider adding a section on Black expatriate designer Patrick Kelly to my final chapter, making the case that Davis’s embrace of  Kelly’s whimsical and racially provocative designs allowed the actress to appear on talk shows beautifully girded against the ravages of a stroke. Cynthia Baron, scholar of dramatic performance history, also attended the conference; we shared several wonderful conversations about Davis’s sui generis acting style that helped me better understand why, though she claimed to hate Method Acting, her expressive eyes told a different story. My anonymous second reader detected something flickering in the chaos of a too-­early draft of the manuscript. He or she excavated its prom­ ise and provided an invaluably rich map, full of theoretical and practical suggestions for further reading, which made my revisions possible. I remain profoundly grateful for his or her enabling me to realize Bette Davis Black and White through such searching mentorship. I am grateful to Morton O. Schapiro, Northwestern’s president, who invited me to participate in the Traveling Classroom program, a lecture series for donors in Washington, DC, where I gave an early version of the Baby Jane chapter, and to Weinberg College dean Adrian Randolph for attending that talk. Christopher Looby, friend for decades and another Columbia fellow traveler, invited me to give an early version of the Baby Jane chapter at UCLA’s Americanist Research Colloquium. In this, my first non-­ Northwestern foray with the project, I got wonderfully generative feedback from Joe Dimuro, Helen Deutsch, and my former graduate student Sarah Mesle, co-­creator and co-­editor of Avidly. Eric Lott is another Co­ lumbia graduate program survivor and a friend of thirty-­five years. His Dark Mirror has been evocative to think with, particularly the chapter on Huckleberry Finn, minstrelsy, and cross-­racial exchange. 184

Acknowledgments

Matti Bunzi invited me to present my Baby Jane material at the Chicago Humanities Festival, on the theme of America. The lovely Christopher Freeburg, whom I met when he was a grad student, now a distinguished full professor, hosted me for two wonderful days at the University of Illinois, Urbana-­Champaign. Gordon Hutner’s hospitality on his way out of town added to the warm welcome. At my Baby Jane lecture, dear friends Dale Bauer and Justine Murison asked trenchant questions that led to revision; later, Justine shared brilliant advice, drawn from her mentor Colin Dayan: when the archive throws you a curveball, run toward it. Colin’s advice enabled me to write my final chapter on Davis’s Blackface masquerade. Robert Dale Parker and Jamie Johnson offered evocative insights during the Q&A. Conversations with Cindy Weinstein about little Eva and Baby  Jane enriched chapter 5. It has been a joy to collaborate with her over the last decade. The generosity of Robert Levine has been a gift for almost thirty years. Kathleen Diffley and Jane Schultz introduced me to the MMLA Civil War Caucus, where many pieces of my Jezebel chapter debuted across half a decade; they have been beloved mentors and friends for the last decade. Christopher Hager, Coleman Hutchison, Greg Laski, Chris Hanlon, Jeffrey Insko, John Levi Barnard, Justine Murison, Elizabeth Renker, Eliza Richards, and Elizabeth Young raised wonderful questions about the work and have become treasured colleagues and caucus friends. Elizabeth Young, in addition, has been a brilliant collaborator for our most recent session on the nineteenth-­century racial imaginary in Hollywood for the virtual C19 Conference; I am grateful for the 2018 panel work of Harris Feinsod and Donna Campbell, and Donna again along with Melissa Daniels-­R auterkus and Elizabeth Young in 2020. Christopher Herbert came to my Bette Davis lectures as a stalwart advocate; he was the chair who hired and supported me, and I am grateful for thirty years of mentoring and friendship. Carl Smith, Mary Finn, Wendy Wall, Jules Law, Jay Grossman, Jeffrey Masten, Ivy Wilson, Susannah Gottlieb, Kasey Evans, John Alba Cutler, Harris Feinsod, Kelly Wisecup, Helen Thompson, Viv Soni, Michelle Huang, Janice Radway, and Susie Phillips came to talks; Jim Hodge initiated coffees and conversations about the classical era; Justin Mann shared theoretical insights from Black feminist theory; and Susie Phillips and Sarah Maza co-­taught Bette 185

acknowledgments

Davis films with me in our Kaplan Seminar, “Moral Drama/Melodrama,” the most joyful pedagogical experience I’ve had at Northwestern. Thanks to poet, colleague, and neighbor Natasha Trethewey for several important conversations about the significance of racial consciousness in the writing of memoir. Kara Johnson, Nora Eltahawy, Annalese Duprey-­Henry, Rebecca Fall, Tori Akers, Meaghan Fritz, Carli Leone, Todd Nordgren, Kellen Bolt, Ean High, Katherine Scharfenberg, Anna Zalokostas, Johana Godfrey, Adam Syvertsen, and Philip Ellefson served as delicious interlocutors in three different Bette Davis graduate seminars. Discussions with Sara Černe about Faulkner and racial phantasmagoria inspired new thinking. For four years, Kori Cooper and I talked about how a Black feminist scholar could both love and criticize Gone with the Wind. Her honors thesis realized both possibilities. To my wonderful Kaplan Seminar students, Amina Dreessen, Jessica Bickel-­Barrow, Ciara McCarthy, Kaitlin Hansen, Kayla Hammersmith, Callie Floyd, Sinead Lopez, Megan Olsen, R.J. Singh, Ben Levey, and Brooke Sterneck, it was a joy to watch you discover Bette Davis. To the students in American Women Auteurs from Sarah Orne Jewett to Bette Davis, I thank you for your passionate responses to films you might never have seen, particularly Brianna Bagnoli, Keaton McNamara, Gina Gabrielli, Brock Colyar, Jack Hume, Nick Anderson, and Angelina Brady. The following venues invited me to lecture on Bette Davis, race, and American culture: the Chicago Humanities Festival; the Evanston Public Library; the Northwestern University American Cultures Colloquium; the Northwestern University Parents Showcase Lecture; the Northwestern Alumni Association Traveling Classroom, DC; the UCLA Americanist Re­­ search Colloquium; the University of  Illinois Americanist Colloquium; the “All About Bette: The Cultural Legacies of  Bette Davis” conference; the C19 Biennial Conference 2018 and 2020; and the Civil War Caucus of the Midwest Modern Language Association. For twenty-­five-­plus years, Alan Thomas has been my editor at the University of Chicago Press and my treasured friend. When I told him I wanted to write about Bette Davis, he encouraged me to try working in a new voice, the first person. It took a decade, and reams of cut pages, for me to resolve the relation of memoir to analysis, but it was time well 186

Acknowledgments

dedicated. His exacting editorial attention and ongoing faith in the value of my “passion project” allowed me to craft the unexpected book that finally emerged. James Toftness, assistant editor at the Press, shared his extensive knowledge of film studies book production and eased my anxieties about gathering photographic illustrations. To inform her beautiful copyediting, Marianne Tatom immersed herself in Bette Davis’s films, going well beyond the call of duty. Kate Scharfenberg has transformed indexing into celebration. Randy Petilos shepherded the book’s journey from contract through production. I am grateful for our collaboration over the last twenty-­five years. For two and a half decades, Julia Adeney Thomas has generously shared her genius for friendship and her beautiful mind. Since 1979, Elizabeth Coffey, my beloved Wellesley co-­conspirator, has made it possible for me to navigate the turbulent waters of intellectual life with her emotional balm and wonderful wit. Susan Besson and Rachel Perlman have been treasured friends since the era in which I watched Bette Davis for the first time. They and Steve Grossman came to my lecture at the Chicago Humanities Festival, cheering me on as “civilians.” Rachel and I initiated her daughter Claire Kaufman to Baby Jane when she was in high school. Later, Claire and her wife Chloe Cormier joined the “All About Bette” conference screening of Old Acquaintance. As a viewer who saw something compelling in Davis’s performance, Chloe joined my small but eloquent sample set of African American spectators. Marlene Handler, my mother’s treasured friend of seventy-­five years and a fellow old-­movie fiend, sent me glorious coffee-­table books on Bette Davis and encouraged my scholarship for decades. Teresa Goddu, a brilliant collegial “littermate” since 1997, became a beloved friend over the last decade. Her passionate epistolary exchange before, during, and after collusion, obstruction, impeachment, acquittal, abetting sedition on the US Capitol, and a second impeachment, not to mention a long-­hoped-­for if so far invisible counterintelligence investigation, has provided an emotional lifeline for me in the last four terrible years. Deborah Boxerman, one of my two best readers, has been by my side for nearly three decades. She has refined my appreciation for phantasmagoria and the infinite dimensions of tableaux. This book would have been impossible to write and revise without her support. 187

acknowledgments

The late Charles Stern, Janet Stern, Michael Myers, Nicholas Myers, Richard Stern, Grace Morsberger, Emma Stern, Jake Stern, Patricia Stern Smallacombe, the late James Smallacombe, and Anna Beatrice Stern Smallacombe (as a future viewer), Evan Boshes, and Erica Feldman-­ Boshes endured endless showings of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Now, Voyager, Dark Victory, and so on during Christmas and Passover visits to the Citadel, our name for the parental home in Winnetka. Earlier, Richard and Patty watched with me in our blue-­beshagged basement, loyally supporting my passion. Michael joined in 1981, and Grace in the mid-­1980s, sharing her own great zeal. My father Chuck, decidedly not a Bette Davis fan, remained perpetually baffled by my insistence on reprising Baby Jane. What was the relevance of this horrifying film? he would ask. “It’s about a family,” I would answer. Niece Emma wrote an International Baccalaureate project on Davis’s films and later, as a Northwestern film major, suggested we do an independent study on the material that eventually became my American Women Auteurs, Novels and Films course. She was an early test pilot for all that came after and remains the F1 generation’s best reader. My uncle Dr. Roger Boshes and aunt Meredith Hanrahan-­Boshes have supported me for the duration. Situating my aspirations for the book at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests made the project newly legible to them and evoked a level of excitement that made me appreciate the power of ideas crossing over. Nicholas Myers grew up watching me view Bette Davis. Given the spirited sense of his own aesthetic interests, I was never able to convince him to give her oeuvre a chance. I remain determined, however, to pursue this dream. And his psychological insight, gift for the close reading of cultural texts, great heart, and fierce loyalty strike me as Davis-­esque after all. Michael Myers has followed my magnificent obsession for the last forty years. Though he’s never been one to enjoy re-­viewing, he remains an ideal reader, supporting me and this project with his keen intellect and All About Eve–­worthy wit. He read and marked the entire manuscript before I submitted it to the press for readers’ evaluations. Worrying about the relevance of the memoir, he insisted on rereading the introduction, becoming convinced that my personal history was, in fact, central to my argument, despite his own disinclination for overexposure. His greatness of heart enables the flourishing of my imaginative life. 188

Notes

Chapter One 1. See Martin Shingler, “The Fourth Warner Brother and Her Role in the War,” Journal of American Studies 30, no. 1 (April 1996): 127–­131. 2. The following African American newspapers included Bette Davis stories almost weekly during the 1940s: the California Eagle (Los Angeles), Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and Amsterdam News (New York City). 3. In the Bette Davis Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archives at Boston University, Meaghan Fritz discovered a small document suggesting that one of Davis’s paternal ancestors, the Reverend A. H. Morrell, had served for his entire adult life as a minister to African Americans in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. A yellowed postcard pictures a view of Harpers Ferry, “looking toward the gap from Camp Hill.” On the back, in handwriting that Fritz cannot identify, is the following narrative: The Morrell House where we lived for over a year. Quiet for the Government before the Civil War, for the American Army Officers at a cost of $25,000. After the war was given to Storer College, Harpers Ferry, W. Va. 189

notes to chapter one The mansion is pleasantly located on Camp Hill and takes its name from Rev. A. H. Morrell, your great-­grandfather, who spent his life among the colored race. I marked the Morrell House with a cross—­the next building is the hotel where your Grandparents Davis took their meals. This card is as old as you are and has been among my valued [treasures?] but I want you to have it.

4.

5. 6.

7.

The card may have been written to Davis’s father, Harlow Morrell Davis, from his own father and inherited by Bette after Harlow’s death, which occurred during the filming of Jezebel in 1938. See Box 20, Bette Davis Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University, loose papers. The notion that Maidie Norman, who played a housekeeper “going downtown to see a man about jury duty,” was protected by a contract—­that she was an equal citizen under the law—­is a wonderful irony given the era and her character’s interrupted quest for civil rights in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the subject of chapter 5. Norman vowed never to play the role of an African American woman who lacked dignity. See her interview with Lotte Green, San Jose Mercury, November 8, 1995, section B1. Great thanks to Susan Scott Parrish for our ongoing conversation about the cultural stakes of this project. Bette Davis played Jane with an amplified and simultaneously clipped Boston accent, exaggerating her native vocal patterns to grotesque effect: “I cleaned the caaage! He flew awaaay!” she explained to Blanche about the loss of her parakeet. The University of Chicago holds the Lucy Montgomery Papers in its Black Metropolis Research Consortium. The following is the biographical headnote for Montgomery’s materials: Lucy Montgomery (1911–­1990) was an activist and philanthropist who supported civil rights and anti-­war movements, the arts, and other liberal causes. Montgomery was born in Williamston, North Carolina and graduated from Salem College for Girls in Winston-­Salem, North Carolina in 1930. After graduating, she worked for both the Civil Works Administration and North Carolina Emergency Relief Administration before marrying Thomas Harris in 1934. Montgomery and Harris divorced in 1943, and in 1947 she married Post cereal heir, Kenneth

190

notes to chapter one Montgomery. Lucy and Kenneth lived in Chicago where they established the Henry Horner nursery school, a research school whose goal was to discover methods that could enhance the academic achievement of disadvantaged children. With money from Kenneth’s inheritance, Lucy helped sustain the Student Non-­violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and The Black Panther Party. She served on the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped found Women for Peace, and trained volunteers for the Mississippi Student Project.

It is particularly fascinating that Montgomery created a nursery school in the Henry Horner Homes, where my mother and I would visit the Black Dodson family in 1963. The biographical note does not provide a date for the establishment of the laboratory school, but I wonder whether James Dobson and his siblings, whom I discuss in what follows, had access to this transformative community resource. See https://www.lib.uchicago .edu/bmrc/view.php?eadid=BMRC.DUSABLE.MONTGOMERY. 8. There is a powerful genealogy for women’s films of the late 1930s and early 1940s that extends back to the emotionally charged American novel of the 1790s. In both fiction and cinema, sentiment, sympathy, and fellow feeling link the characters in early republican novels and classical-­era motion pictures to their audiences through particular modes of address and appeals for identification. See Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Jacqueline Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Fe­ male Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994), particularly 126–­175. This eighteenth-­century intellectual trajectory finds its nineteenth-­century avatars in the sentimental fiction written by American women between 1850 and 1868: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1850); Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1852); and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). 9. British feminist film theorist Stacey notes that “despite sharing many of the limitations of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis . . . I shall argue that object relations theory is nevertheless particularly illuminating for the cultural analysis of the spectator/star relation.” See Stacey, Star Gazing, 228. 191

notes to chapter one

10. This sixteen-­building high-­rise and low-­rise housing project was completed between 1957 and 1963. It became overrun by gangs in the mid-­ 1970s. Journalist Alex Kotlowitz based his award-­w inning non-­fiction portrait of public housing in Chicago, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Knopf, 1992), on research done at the Henry Horner Homes. The complex was condemned by the Chicago Housing Authority after the city essentially abandoned its residents in the face of gang takeover of the property. Final demolition ended in 2008. My mother’s and my visit took place a decade before the culture of violence became a way of life in the Henry Horner Homes. See also Susan J. Popkin et al., The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 11. I owe this powerful language to my colleague Lauren Jackson. See Jackson, “Black Vertigo: Attunement, Nausea, Aphasia, and Bodily Noise 1970s to the Present,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2019. My inchoate understanding of the Dodsons’ poverty came to me visually: their apartment had no internal doors to its rooms, only large towels hanging to screen off private from public space. Years later my mother explained that Mary had sold her doors to an itinerant wood broker. I still worried about those towels. I wanted the Dodsons to have doors, not because I had ever considered the importance of privacy, but because it seemed wrong that James and his siblings did not have things that I did. 12. A recent internet search yielded several possible James Dodsons in the correct age range in Chicago. There is no Mary Dodson, who would have been in her eighties, still listed. I have imagined trying to locate my childhood husband of one afternoon. But with eight possible James Dodsons listed and an awkward story of race and class and guilt underlying my query, I have not pursued a reunion. 13. It was only in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, that the Supreme Court ruled that the law against interracial marriages was unconstitutional. 14. Malcolm X also had things to say about the representation of African Americans during the classical Hollywood era: “I remembered one thing that marred this time for me: the movie Gone with the Wind. When it played in Mason, I was the only Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug.” Later on, 192

notes to chapter one

he finds happier examples of race on screen: “It was at this time that I discovered the movies. Sometimes I made as many as five in one day, both downtown and in Harlem. I loved the tough guys, the action, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, and I loved all of that dancing and carrying on in such films as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky.” I have wondered whether Malcolm X’s affection for Casablanca had to do with his appreciation for Sam, Dooley Wilson’s African American piano player and sidekick to Humphrey Bogart. The Bogart-­Wilson duo marked a rare moment in early 1940s Hollywood of an egalitarian friendship on screen. Wilson received a Motion Picture Unity Award for this performance in 1944, along with Bette Davis and Rex Ingram, which I discuss above and in chapter 4. See Malcolm X, with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964; New York: Ballantine, 1999), 33, 102. 15. Bette Davis joined the Los Angeles Branch of the Urban League in 1945. She told a reporter that she believed “everyone should be interested in the problems of the day . . . and . . . today, the difficulties confronting minorities form one of the major problems.” See Atlanta Daily World, Novem­ ber 20, 1945, 1. One thinks of Frederick Douglass’s most famous essay, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of  July?,” delivered at the Corinthian Hall, Rochester, NY, July 5, 1852, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-­Slavery Society, which inspired African American voluntary associations to stage political communal events on Independence Day. See https://teachingamericanhistory .org/library/document/what-­to-­the-­slave-­is-­the-­fourth-­of-­july/. 16. PBA  Auction House and Appraisers advertised the program for the award ceremony as 8 pp. Illustrated with photographs of  Los Angeles sponsors and organizers of the event (including several prominent civil rights lawyers) as well as award recipients Jesse Graves, Lena Horne, Rex Ingram, Dooley Wilson, and white actress Bette Davis (honored for her contribution to inter-­racial harmony). 13x10” original pale green wrappers, printed in black. Signed by Dooley Wilson, best-­remembered as Sam, the piano player in the classic film, Casablanca, on the front cover, and by actors Mantan Moreland (who played detective Charlie Chan in several films), and ‘Nicodemus’ Stewart (Cotton Club Vaudevillian who later starred in the Amos n’ Andy TV series).” 193

notes to chapter one

See https://www.pbagalleries.com/view-­auctions/catalog/id /321/lot/95518/Souvenir-­Program-­First-­A nnual-­Motion-­P icture -­Unity-­Award-­A ssembly-­S taged-­b y-­t he-­Committee-­f or-­Unity-­i n -­Motion-­Pictures- ­Sponsored-­by-­the-­Youth-­Council-­of-­the-­National -­A ssociation-­for-­the-­Advancement-­of-­Colored-­People-­April-­23–­1944 -­at-­Second-­Baptist-­Church-­Auditorium-­Los-­Angeles-­California. 17. See Frederick Gooding Jr., Black Oscars: From Mammy to Minny, What the Academy Awards Tell Us about African Americans (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 266. See also Chicago Defender, April 22, 1944. The first annual Opportunity Pioneer Awards presented by the Delta Sigma Theta service sorority to women who “have helped Negroes gain equal opportunity” “went to actress Bette Davis. She was cited for being ‘the first to encourage the casting of Negroes in other than stereotype movie roles.’ ” See New Pittsburgh Courier, 3.3, April 21, 1962, 9. Feminist film theorist Judith Mayne writes: “Davis is known for her anti-­racist stances, and a Black magazine writer once described her as far more appealing to ‘black audiences than other white female stars, in part because of her under­ dog status in her films: she came from behind and, win or lose, always played the game. Blacks wanted this kind of rebellion and this chance of winning in the 1930s and 1940s; we didn’t have it, but we could root for those who did.’ ” See Curt Davis, “Bette Davis: Getting Under the Skin,” Encore American and Worldwide News, November 6, 1978, 30–­31, quoted in Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), 139, my emphasis. 18. Donald Bogle, pioneering historian of race in classical Hollywood cinema, writes that Ingram had attended medical school at Northwestern University in 1919, earning the first Phi Beta Kappa key ever awarded to an African American. Northwestern University librarian Charla Burlenda Wilson and Galter Medical School librarian Rume Kubilius have discovered an article from the Chicago Defender (August 18, 1945), 14, in which Ingram was interviewed and described his pre-­Hollywood experience, claiming that he studied medicine, was inducted into PBK, and had been awarded varsity letters in four sports at Northwestern: track, basketball, football, and baseball. He also reported that his father had been a fireman on a Mississippi riverboat called the Robert E. Lee and that he was born in Cairo, Illinois. That Cairo is the location that Huck and Jim overshoot 194

notes to chapter one

when attempting to steer their raft north, up the Ohio River to freedom, in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and that the actor played Jim in the 1939 film version of Twain’s novel, make me won­ der about the veracity of Ingram’s biography. These two librarians have been unable to document Ingram’s admission, attendance, or graduation from Northwestern or the record of his name in the rolls of PBK. I am most interested in the idea that if  he fabulated his own history, Ingram’s emphasis was on both academic achievement and athletic prowess. The picture that he paints of himself is as a kind of Renaissance man, in a Twainian tall-­tale mold, or a rougher version of Paul Robeson, who earned top honors for debate and oratory, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was valedictorian of  his class at Rutgers, where he earned fifteen varsity letters in four sports, before receiving a law degree from Columbia. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in Films (New York: Continuum, 2002), 60. Bogle’s seminal work lacks footnotes, but the information he supplies corresponds to the article on Ingram from the Chicago Defender. 19.  In 1980, the actress was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the US Department of Defense’s highest civilian accolade, for her work with the Hollywood Canteen between 1942 and 1945. In 1987, two years before her death, Davis was celebrated by President Ronald Reagan, her former costar in Dark Victory (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1939), at the Tenth Annual Kennedy Center Honors. When asked during one of her last television interviews about the former actor-­turned-­president, she remembered, “We all called him little Ronny Reeeegan,” and implied that she hadn’t thought much of his dramatic talent. But Davis noted that the president was lovely to her and her fellow honorees during and after the Kennedy Center ceremony. See her 1988 conversation with Tonight Show host Johnny Carson at www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfS-­zyst1VA and http:// www.johnnycarson.com. 20. See Bette Davis with Michael Herskowitz, This ’n That (New York: Berkeley Books, 1987), 98. See also Lara Gabrielle Fowler, Backlots.net. Sherrie Tucker writes that “the first news item to champion Bette Davis as a protector of the mixed dancing policy had already appeared in black newspapers as a syndicated story of the Associated Negro Press. A senior hostess, alarmed at what she saw as the impropriety of a black hostess dancing with 195

notes to chapter one

21.

22. 23. 24.

196

white soldiers, telephoned the Warners star. Davis purportedly responded, ‘Let them dance if they want to.’ But the issue of upholding mixed dancing (a controversial matter for the studio heads, who worried about the PR of their stables of stars and starlets) did not circulate in the Los Angeles Times or newsreels or movie magazines.” See Tucker, Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 54, quoting “Bette Davis Upholds Mixed Couples at Movie Canteen,” Chicago Defender, January 9, 1943, 1. I had already completed the manuscript for this book when I learned that Bette Davis film scholar Martin Shingler had published an earlier essay on Julie Marsden’s choreography of the colt-­taming scene in Jezebel. In the article, he also discusses Davis’s ease with her fellow Black actors in performance, remarking that “Davis shows no hesitation when throwing herself into the arms of her manservant, nor does she register any signs of restraint when he takes her in his arms and pulls her closely towards his body. This establishes her liberal attitude, which she maintains throughout the film. Although proud among her white peers, Julie is most at ease with her black slaves.” Shingler’s insights anticipate my argu­ ments by ten years. See Martin Shingler, “Making an Entrance: Bette Da­ vis’s First Appearance in Jezebel (dir. William Wyler, 1938),” in Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory, ed. James Walters and Tom Brown (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 35. Great thanks to Martin Shingler for sharing the PDF version with the author. See Charles Affron, Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 208. See Bette Davis, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography (New York: Lancer Books, 1962), 17–­18. See Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the Early 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); E. Ann Kaplan, Mother­ hood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992); Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993); and Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and Women’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987).

notes to chapter one

25. See Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Un­ known Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). For an excellent introduction to film melodrama, see John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 26. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1978; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, reprint 1995). I link melodrama to sentiment in my own reading of the cultural narratives that underpinned Davis’s women’s pictures. Philip Fisher has written movingly on sentimentalism’s connection to democratic feeling in an essay from 1991: the political content of sentimentality is democratic in that it experiments with extension of full and complete humanity to classes of figures from whom humanity has been socially withheld. The typical objects of sentimental compassion are the prisoner, the madman, the child, the very old, and the animal. Each earns inclusion within the social space by means of the reality of their suffering and our own spontaneous response to that suffering. Sentimentality, by its experimental extension of humanity to prisoners, slaves, or children, exactly reverses the process of slavery itself, which has at its core the withdrawal of human status from a part of society.

I would add that Jim Crow policies and, since the civil rights movement, the New Jim Crow, contemporary anti-­Black racism, exact the same withdrawal from human status. See Philip Fisher, “On Democracy and Sentimentalism,” in Fisher, ed., The New American Studies: Essays from Representations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 90. For a searching history of American race melodrama on film and television, see Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). See also Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). 27. An apt emblem of  Davis’s indomitable will was her insistence on disinterring both her mother Ruth Favor Davis and her sister Barbara “Bobby” 197

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Davis Berry and moving their remains to her mortuary real estate at For­ est Lawn, cemetery to the stars. She did it the hard way, indeed. 28. Dance scholar Mark Franko writes of Bette Davis, “It is not by chance, then, that Davis studied with Graham, and that aspects of the actress’s physical characterization in woman’s film of the 1940s recalled Graham’s stage persona. Many of Davis’ most dramatic moments in films of the 1940s contain extremely economical and incisive movement choices that recall moments of Graham’s performances.” See Franko, Martha Graham in Love and War (New York: Oxford, 2012), 160, my emphasis. See also Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 114–­115, for a brief discussion of Martha Graham’s playful pose for a “candid camera” still photograph with Hollywood’s greatest Black dancer of the 1930s and 1940s, Bill Robinson. This remarkable pairing revealed that white concert dance and Black vernacular dance (Robinson started in minstrel shows, and moved to vaudeville, before finding fame as classical cinema’s premier tap dancer in the early 1930s) were in creative conversation. 29. Davis adored the men who played her on the cabaret stage as much as those drag queens loved Davis. Kathryn Sermak, Davis’s assistant, memoirist, and beloved friend, confirmed this during our conversations at the “All About Bette: The Cultural Legacies of Bette Davis” conference, November 5–­6, 2018, at Northwestern University. See www.bettedavis conference.com. See also Davis’s most comprehensive television interview with Dick Cavett, Dick Cavett Show, season 6, episode 40, Novem­ ber 17, 1971, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NCyEFeieRIS. In the New York Times, Stephen Holden writes of Davis imitator Charles Busch that “his satirical impersonations of old movie stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are much deeper than stock drag caricatures because they are so forgiving. At once admiring and scornful, he understands the sources of their egomania and insecurity.” See Holden, “A Forgiving Spirit, Despite Those Sharp Red Nails,” New York Times, July 11, 2014. Busch, an acclaimed actor and playwright, like Ernest Anderson, also attended Northwestern University. He was born to a Jewish family. Busch’s mother died when the future performer was seven, and he was taken to live with his aunt in Manhattan. The actor and writer remarks on his website that he was never cast in a role during his undergraduate 198

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career, explaining that he was so shy as to have been invisible and began writing plays instead. Of drag, he notes that in the garb of a powerful woman, he could project all his inner strength in an external form. See www.charlesbusch.com. In a recent New York Times piece on the production of his new play Lily Dare, Busch explained the thinking that went into his character: “It was a very Bette Davis style, but [I] was not doing her. I’m intellectually approaching the scene, maybe, as she might have approached it. . . . I just love these movies so much that I don’t want to make fun of them; I just want to be in them.” See Elizabeth Vincentelli, “Call Charles Busch a ‘Drag Queen,’ If We Must Use Labels,” New York Times, January 10, 2020, updated January 14, 2020. Busch’s theory of immersion resonates with what experimental dramatist Adrienne Kennedy says about her identification with Bette Davis, which I discuss in my final chapter. 30. See Amber Jamilla Musser, “Bette Davis Eyes and Minoritarian Survival: Camp, Melodrama, and Spectatorship,” in Affect and Literature, ed. Alex Houen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 284–­297. Thanks to Anna Zalokostas for sharing this article with me. Theoretical thinking about melodrama is undergoing a renaissance in contemporary film studies. British feminist cinema scholar Christine Gledhill inaugurated this reappraisal in 1987 with her groundbreaking edited collection Home Is Where the Heart Is, which focused attention on the affective power of the “women’s picture.” In 2018, Gledhill and race melodrama scholar Linda Williams co-­ edited an essay collection on melodrama across media, featuring articles by Martin Shingler, the world’s academic expert on Davis’s acting; Jane M. Gaines, the eminent film scholar who wrote a seminal chapter on Davis and James Baldwin, which I discuss in chapter 3; Gledhill; Williams; and Matthew S. Buckley, a professor of theater whose reconsideration of melodrama galvanized this new scholarship by claiming that the norms of classical Hollywood and modernist aesthetics mistakenly denigrated melodrama as performative excess. Instead, these revisionist theorists have convincingly argued that melodrama is the mode that actually undergirds all classical Hollywood cinema, and that Peter Brooks’s notion of “excess” is, in fact, classical cinema’s normative aesthetic. See Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is; Gaines, Fire and Desire: 199

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31. 32.

33. 34.

200

Mixed-­R ace Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Buckley, “Melodrama: An Introduction,” Modern Drama 55, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 429–­436; Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, “Introduction,” 1–­14; Buckley, “Melodrama Unbound,” 15–­30; Shingler, “Modernizing Melodrama: The Petrified Forest on American Stage and Screen (1935–­1936),” 135–­150; Linda Williams, “’Tales of  Sound and Fury’ or, the Elephant of Melodrama,” 205–­218; and Jane Gaines, “Even More Tears: The Historical Time Theory of Melodrama,” 325–­340, in Gledhill and Williams, Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). See Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 1964, 10, 4, https://monoskop.org /images/5/59/Sontag_Susan_1964_Notes_on_Camp.pdf. Andrew Ross uses What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? as one of  his popular culture case studies in a chapter entitled “Uses of Camp,” in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989), 160. See also 135, 137–­139. See Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 97. It is very common among my own generation of academics, people in their fifties and early sixties, to have fallen in love as teenagers with classical Hollywood film on television, as I did. My son’s generation, in its mid-­twenties, is almost entirely unfamiliar with the genres of women’s pictures, noirs, Westerns, screwball comedies, and so on. One rationale for their lack of interest is that millennials don’t like watching things in black-­and-­white, a baffling if clinical explanation. For the last ten years, I have offered a series of courses (first-­year colloquia, upper-­level undergraduate and graduate seminars) called “American Women Auteurs: Novels and Films 1900–­1962.” The students read fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Nella Larsen and view a number of Davis pictures from Of Human Bondage to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Several of my gay students report having seen All About Eve (dir. Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950) prior to taking the course, though this was in no way universal among undergraduates. In only one iteration of the class did a student volunteer that she had seen more than one Davis picture; her mother, it turns out, was an English

notes to chapter one

professor and a classical Hollywood buff. Several had only heard of the actress through Kim Carnes’s 1981 ballad “Bette Davis Eyes.” Teaching evaluations across all the versions of this course since 2010 suggests that learning about Davis made these undergraduates eager to see other classical Hollywood pictures. 35. Sunday school, which she taught, involved viewing newsreel footage of the liberation of  Dachau and reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, along with Orwell’s Animal Farm and a documentary about the Milgram experiments at Yale. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram, himself  Jewish, sought to measure people’s willingness to follow authority beyond the pale of inhumane behavior. His research had been influenced by the trial of  Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, which was running simultaneously in Jerusalem. 36. Early screenplay drafts held in the Warner Brothers Archives reveal that the initial treatment for Mr. Skeffington, faithful to the eponymous novel written by Elizabeth von Arnim in 1940, did not include the detail that Job Skeffington was Jewish. (Von Arnim also penned Enchanted April in 1922, which was also filmed in 1935 and 1991.) The cinematic Skeffington was shelved for several years until Warners’ script doctor Lenore Coffee eventually introduced the Jewish thematics. In Coffee’s first iterations, WASP antisemitism pervaded the script, expressed particularly by Fanny’s brother Trippy, who objected to the engagement: “What—­that Jew?” he exclaimed, horrified. “But Fanny, you can’t.” “Can’t I? You’ll see. He’s a very nice man. Terribly kind. Much the kindest of anybody we know and much the—­the nicest, really.” “But think of his nose.” “I do. I’ve thought of it a great deal. And I’ve come to the conclusion that noses aren’t everything.” Coffee toned down this flagrant bigotry in the later versions. She concocted the plot turn that sent Job to Germany for business and had him captured by the Nazis and blinded in a concentration camp. The writers sought to make the story topical. Remarkably, Coffee, then the only female script writer at Warners, according to her autobiography, went uncredited on the picture: twin brothers Philip and Julius Epstein received the only screenwriting acknowledgments. See Alice Hunter, Treatment for Mr. Skeffington, September 18, 1940, Story Department, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. See also 201

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Lenore Coffee, Storyline; Recollections of a Hollywood Screenwriter (New York: Cassell, 1973). Jack Warner was warmly praised for the film’s rigorous stance against the Nazis. MGM screenwriter Harold Emmett Rogers wrote to the stu­ dio head: “I think you deserve the plaudits of the whole industry for presenting to the American public a picture which, in my opinion, will do more to break down the ugly barriers of intolerance and bigotry than all the other pictures touching on this theme which have proceeded it.” And actor, writer, and show business personality Lou Holtz wired a telegram saying: “SAW SKEFFINGTON LAST NITE YOU ARE A GREAT JEW A GREAT AMERICAN AND A GREAT PICTURE PRODUCER.” See the boxes on Mr. Skeffington, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. 37. See Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–­1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 38. Empress Carlota was sister of  King Leopold of  Belgium, who appropriated the Congo as his personal ivory mine and destroyed much of the African population who became his veritable slaves. See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). 39. Muni also played “class Others,” such as the bum in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir. Mervyn Leroy, 1932). Thanks to my anonymous press reader for sharing this insight. Chapter two 1. William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zucker, and Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner established the studio system in Hollywood. See Leonard Maltin, The Founding Fathers of Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own (New York: Crown, 1988). See also David Thomson, Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Thomson’s book is part of the Yale Jewish Lives Series. See also Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and see Cass Warner Sperling and Cork Millner (Louisville: 202

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

University of  Kentucky Press, 1998). Sperling was studio president Harry Warner’s granddaughter. See Deborah Martinson, Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels (New York: Counterpoint, 2005), 17–­33. Regina can be a common name for  Jewish girls, particularly in observant families. I had understood the name’s meaning as “queen of heaven,” referring to the Virgin Mary, which made it a desirable name for Catholic parents of newborn females. Apparently, however, the “queen of angels” has significance in not only Catholic (Latin) but also Jewish (Hebrew) naming traditions. And, in fact, the only women named Regina (and Reggie) whom I have known have been Jewish. Far from the Queen of Heaven, Regina Giddens is arguably Davis’s most cold-­blooded villainess. Biographer Barbara Leaming’s venomous account of  Bette Davis’s life implies that there may be a personal backstory to the actress’s 1941 performance: Laeming suggests that Davis may have had some part in her second husband Arthur Farnsworth’s death following his head injury from a fall. The biographer undercuts her own argument, however, by observing that her notion could have been inspired by the homicidal behavior of Davis’s Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes. The character is a monstrous bitch who impassively watches, not lifting a finger to retrieve her husband’s lifesaving medicine, while he dies in agony after a preventable heart attack. That moment in Foxes was the ultimate betrayal Davis played on screen. Jane’s murder of Elvira in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? comes in a close second place. Ranking third is Stanley’s vehicular homicide of a child and her attributing the killing to Parry in In This Our Life. When Manning teaches the play and the film, she suggests its possible Jewish backstory. I have adopted her reading of this third term in attempting to complicate The Little Foxes’ Black/white racial binary. This multinational corporation was responsible for exploiting native Nicaraguans and Guatemalans, expropriating their labor and natural resources. As an advocate for labor for most of her adult life, Hellman found her uncles’ entanglement with United Fruit unforgivable. See Martinson, Lillian Hellman, 21, 28. See James Harvey, Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014), 140. 203

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7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick outlines two essential features of the gothic as “live burial” and “the unspeakable.” See Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Routledge, 1986). 8. The Chicago Defender praised Jessie Grayson’s performance in The Little Foxes with an article titled “ANOTHER SEPIA PLAYER WINS PRAISE”: “When you see The Little Foxes, the Broadway stage success on your movie screen you’ll rave over the acting of  Jesse Grayson who occupies the role played by Abbie Mitchell.” See Chicago Defender, November 1, 1942. 9. Wyler biographer Jan Herman notes, “Jezebel features a large contingent of happy plantation ‘pickaninnies.’ But if the picture can hardly be said to escape the era’s paternalistic racism toward Blacks, Wyler went out of his way to humanize them.” See Herman, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director William Wyler (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 179. 10. See Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 2. 11. Wyler had an abiding interest in social problems: consider Dead End (dir. William Wyler, 1937), with its study of urban poverty and youth crime; and The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946), with its treatment of the psychic trauma of returning soldiers and the reality of physical disability in its story of  Homer Parrish. Army veteran Harold Russell, who lost two hands in a training exercise explosion stateside, plays Homer, a sailor wounded in the Pacific during his wartime service in the navy. 12. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 13. During her brief stint at Universal, she made six films in nine months; three of them were loan-­outs to other studios. See Whitney Stine with Bette Davis, Mother Goddam (New York: Berkeley, 1974), 13. 14. The British judge who presided over Davis’s case against Warner Brothers was offended by the idea that someone earning thousands of dollars a week could compare her contractual situation to slavery. 15. Like Bette Davis, de Havilland also was a rising Warner Brothers star; she shared top billing with Davis as her long-­suffering sister in In This Our Life in 1942. De Havilland remained one of the few screen partners for whom Davis felt a lifelong affection. She also shared the star’s outrage 204

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over Warner Brothers’ regime of indentured servitude, the legal challenge that Davis famously had lost in 1936. Nearly a decade later, de Havilland initiated her own suit asserting that Warner Brothers’ contracts enforced a peonage system of labor exploitation. The former angel of Gone with the Wind actually won her case in 1944; her lawyers convinced the judge that studio contracts imposed conditions on performers that were reminiscent of  Jim Crow conditions if not those of slavery. The two actresses played a pathological form of  kinship on the screen: not simply the flagrant sibling rivalry of in In This Our Life, but a near-­ homicidal connection in the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? follow-­up, Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1964). These performances, however, apparently had no bearing on their enduring attachment off screen. 16. In this grabbed shot, Davis’s face is the original for which my mother’s portrait at seven is a dead ringer. Dead Ringer (dir. Paul Henreid, 1964) is also the title of  her later film, directed by her former costar from Now, Voyager. 17. See Aldon Lynn Nielsen, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 150, citing C.L.R. James, Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb 1939–­1948 (London: Blackwell, 1996). James writes: “Note how closely Greer Garson approximates Ronald Coleman, though she is in my opinion a better craftsman than he. But Bette surpasses them both in my opinion. This American woman has something that neither of these representatives of the older civilisations [sic] have—­tremendous vitality. She is not so fine a person as [Ingrid Bergman] is—­you can feel it; and [Greta Garbo] achieves some extraordinary effects with the greatest economy of means—­but [Bette Davis] is simply terrific at her best. She sweeps on like a battleship” (93). See also Nadia Ellis, Territories of the Soul: Queer Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 44–­46. Thanks to Helen Deutsch for recommending Ellis’s book. 18. Gilbert Seldes, “Sugar and Spice and Not So Nice,” Esquire, March 1934, 60, 120; and Pittsburgh Courier, September 12, 1942; both in Jill Watts, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (New York: Armisted [HarperCollins], 2005). 205

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19. See Watts, Hattie McDaniel; and Miriam Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 20. See Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” Screen 29, no. 4 (October 1988), 66–­79, 68, quoted in Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Rep­ resentability (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 150. Jacqueline Bobo echoes this observation in her discussion of the gendered and raced reception of Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple: “Black women viewers reclaimed the film beyond its critical reception, as they later would do with Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991).” See Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 52, a foundational study of race, gender, and reception in late twentieth-­ century film. 21. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in Films (New York: Continuum, 2002; Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–­1942 (New York: Galaxy Books, 1972) and Making the Movies Black: the Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); James Snead, White Screens, Black Images, ed. Colin McCabe and Cornel West (New York: Routledge, 1994). 22. See Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship,” 66 (my emphasis). 23. Maidie Norman played Joan Crawford’s secretary Anne in Torch Song (dir. Charles Walters, 1953). Her character was an accomplished professional woman who assisted Crawford’s Jenny with rehearsals, business decisions, and personal care. Ironically, this is the very film where Crawford sang “Two-­Faced Woman” in Blackface masquerade. The white star’s adoption of the historically pejorative mask marks an incoherent and provocative moment in a film that otherwise imagines the dignity of its Black character’s expertise. Racquel Gates’s notion of double negative representation, in which the deleterious image in question functions on multiple cultural levels, including resistance, does not apply in this case. Torch Song’s Blackface iconography cannot be redeemed despite Norman’s progressive portrait of Anne. See Gates, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 206

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24. See Thomas Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 7, 3 (my emphasis). Cripps is describing the kind of color-­ line-­crossing viewer I became after discovering Bette Davis’s films. 25. Thanks to my anonymous press reader for clarifying this history. 26. For a superb extended account of  Micheaux’s pictures and early Race cinema, see Jacqueline Nujami Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). See also Mary Carbine, “ ‘The Finest Outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–­1928,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Culture Studies 8, no. 2 (1990): 8–­41. 27. For another account of the studio’s expurgation of  Parry’s anti-­racist oration, see Pittsburgh Courier, Saturday, July 11, 1942, 21. 28. See Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 29. In addition to its flagrant dragon-­lady phantasmagoria and the conventional opium-­smoking import-­export merchant, The Letter showcases the canny and manipulative Mr. Ong. He is played by first-­generation Chinese American Victor Sen Yung. Yung studied economics and animal husbandry at the University of California, Berkeley, and did graduate work at UCLA before becoming a Hollywood character actor, particularly in the Charlie Chan series (dir. Norman Foster, beginning 1938). In Wyler’s film, Yung plays the junior colleague of Davis’s defense attorney and family friend, Howard Joyce ( James Stephenson, who died the following year at fifty-­one). Ong is a Crown-­trained lawyer and Singapore native, a brilliant and seemingly obsequious “Oriental,” who plays both sides of the racial fence for his own profit. It is he who brokers the eponymous letter documenting Davis’s character’s guilt for murder. Howard Joyce declares that Ong is such a fine lawyer that it will only be a matter of time before his protégé sets up shop in competition. But the screenwriters and director get the final racist word on the young attorney: he drives a diminutive, smoke-­spewing jalopy instead of a large 1940s Western car like his English colonial colleagues. Thus, we see Ong, in some ways the film’s liminal figure in a not-­yet-­postcolonial arena rife with cross-­racial tension, symbolically castrated in the audience’s eyes as he exits the British officers’ club in his ludicrous vehicle. 30. See Urwand, The Collaboration. 207

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31. Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–­1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 32. Claude Rains plays Alexander Sebastian, an actual Nazi, in Notorious (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1946). 33. Grace May Carter, Bette Davis (New York: New Word City, 2018), 201. 34. See “Bette Davis Overrules Objection to Mixed Couples at the Hollywood Canteen,” Cleveland Call and Post, January 23, 1943, 12-­A . 35. See Sherrie Tucker, Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 36. A Warners executive account reveals that Bette Davis took her day off from her Warner Bros.’ [sic] picture, Watch on the Rhine, travelled more than 200 miles to the Mexican border in blazing sunlight, and entertained a regiment of  Negro cavalrymen yesterday—­but military regulations won’t allow her to tell where she went. She joined a USO cavalcade including Ethel Waters, Dinah Shore and Hattie McDaniel. They, along with 50 Negro entertainers, put on a show for what the Army describes as the “famous Negro regiment which stormed San Juan Hill under Teddy Roosevelt and pursued Pancho Villa in Mexico.” Bette closed the show with her recitation of the “Star-­Spangled Banner.”

See Alex Evelove’s report, written [transcribed] by Cameron Shipp, 1944 (undated), in the Watch on the Rhine boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. 37. I heard this story in the checkout line at a gourmet takeout café two blocks away from the Warner Brothers Archives at the University of Southern California. Chatting with the cashier, an African American woman of about my then-­age (fifty), I learned that she was a big Bette Davis fan and had watched the star’s old pictures with her mother, a Davis lover from childhood in the 1940s. She and the women in her church group book club often discussed old movies, and she had heard the story of Davis as mentor to Black actors from one of these women friends. The cashier was named Mrs. Lincoln, and she lived near the USC campus, in South Central LA. I consider this conversation unofficial ethnographic data on Black spectatorship for Bette Davis’s pictures. 208

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38. In Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994), Jacqueline Stacey combines psychoanalysis and social science methodology to draw conclusions about female audiences in Britain during World War II. But she departs from the Freudian, Oedipal models made famous by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–­18. Instead, Stacey turns to Object Relations psychoanalysis in its feminist iteration to understand the relationship between individual women audience members and the stars they love in various modes of identification. Jacqueline Stewart describes early “Black viewing practices as a form of ‘reconstructive spectatorship,’ in which African Americans used the cinema as a literal and symbolic space in which to rebuild their individual and collective identities in a modern, urban environment.” See Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 17. In an op-­ed essay in the New York Times, Anglo African philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah meditates on the issue of racial identification. Remarking on the “looks like me” theory of fellow feeling, Appiah cautions that “nobody means it literally. Among Latinx celebrities, Eva Mendes doesn’t look like Cameron Diaz; Sammy Sosa doesn’t look like . . . Sammy Sosa. What the visual metaphor usually signifies, then, is a kinship of social identity . . . ‘Looking like me’ is as much about aspiration as identification. . . . The truth is that our best stories and songs often gain potency by complicating our received notions of identity; they’re less a mirror than a canvas—­and everyone has a brush.” See Appiah, “What Does It Mean to ‘Look Like Me’?,” Opinion, New York Times, Septem­ ber 21, 2019, 1–­3, my emphasis. 39. Perry’s theories apply both to on-­screen representation and to cross-­racial experience more generally. My early visit to and intense play with the Dodson children in the Henry Horner Homes is an example of immersion into the life of African Americans. My experience at the Lincoln Park town house, in the company of the three Black Panthers with whom I did not mingle, corresponds to the viewing of a performance by a cultural other, from a distance, with no communion or exchange. See Kwynn Perry, “Flickers of Black: Short Films and the Black Quest for Social Citizenship in America Before W W II,” PhD diss., Department of Cin­ ema and Media Studies, University of Southern California, 2019. 209

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Chapter Three 1. See James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, in Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 493–­494. 2. Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 482. 3. The late film scholar  James Harvey puts the question of  Davis’s racial iden­ tifications even more baldly than Baldwin’s en-­greenment of the actress: “She had a surprising sort of face for a supposed great actress at the time, let alone a movie star. Not unattractive but overemphatic (those popping eyes)—­there seemed to be something mongrelish and underbred about it.” See Harvey, Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014), 123, my emphasis. Thanks to Tim Peltason for recommending Harvey’s book. As I will discuss below, the stage version of Jezebel analogizes Julie Marsden to a “yallow gal”—­a reference to the biracial women who work as elite prostitutes in New Orleans. Jezebel playwright Owen Davis Sr. may have in mind figures like Faulkner’s unnamed “Octoroon,” Charles Bon’s morganatic wife in Absalom, Absalom! 4. See Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-­Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 33, 39, my emphasis. See also Cassandra Ellis, “The Black Boy Looks at the Silver Screen,” in Re-­viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 190–­214, 200–­206. 5. Julie’s enslaved mammy considers her charge not white: “Go away from mah baby, white lady,” she yells at Preston’s bride Amy, suggesting that the Northern Mrs. Dillard is the only Caucasian afoot. If we consider the heroine as a racially liminal figure, like the “yallow girls” she and Preston will discuss below, then her following comment is particularly illuminating. Mammy  Winnie asks her about a man who has mysteriously appeared on her property. Mammy Winnie: “Who’s him?” Julie: “Just nobody, a person who doesn’t belong, like a tramp nigger that’s neither slave nor free.” She may be expressing a sense of feeling betwixt and between, not really white and obviously not Black. Certainly the American “one-­drop rule”—­stating that even miniscule fractions of  Black ancestry made a person “colored”—­recast the complex spectrum of racial difference into a Black vs. white taxonomy. This legal finding dominated US law until 1967, 210

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6.

7.

8.

9.

when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that it was unconstitutional to deny marriages between African Americans and whites. See Owen Davis Sr., Jezebel (New York: 1934), 2.3.41. Film theorist Kwynn Perry calls this dynamic “immersion,” though she and I disagree about whether Davis’s Julie Marsden is “curating” the musical interlude in Jezebel, Perry’s reading, or whether the character has “migrated” into the aesthetic experience of  her African American slaves, my interpretation of the scene, as I have mentioned in the introduction. I take up this issue in what follows. See Perry, “Flickers of Black: Short Films and the Black Quest for Social Citizenship before W W II,” PhD diss., Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California, 2019. Talking about Black musical shorts, Perry asserts that these pictures “do important work to invite cultural outsiders into otherwise removed and ‘folkloric’ Black spaces while simultaneously working to ‘unother’ the people that inhabited them.” Perry, “Flickers of Black,” chapter 1, 31. While it is true that Davis’s character orchestrates the singing scene, I believe she has already crossed over into an identification with her enslaved people, the argument I develop in this chapter. See Bette Davis, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography (New York: Lancer, 1962), 164. See also “Miriam Hopkins—­A Daring Diva,” silverscenesblog .blogspot.com, October 28, 2014; Sheila O’Malley, “TCM Diary: Miriam Hopkins!,” filmcomment.com, October 3, 2016; and “Bette vs. Miriam: Bout of the Divas, Meow,” classicmoviesdigest.blogspot.com, June 20, 2010. Warners producer Hal Wallis received a memo from Walter MacEwen, then head of production, in 1935: “Have now read the full play script of Jezebel and it is not very good. Nevertheless, there is no denying that it could be improved a great deal in transference to the screen and that it would provide a good role for Bette Davis, who could play the spots off the part of a little bitch of an aristocratic Southern girl. She should also look swell in the gowns of the period (1853).” See “Wallis to MacEwen, February 15, 1935, Subject: Jezebel,” in Rudy Behlmer, ed., Inside Warner Bros. (1935–­1951) (New York: Viking, 1985), 40, my emphasis. Davis would insist that she hated Method Acting, explaining that she worked like Laurence Olivier, building a character from the outside in. Olivier famously used false noses, wigs, spectacles, and so on to create 211

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 212

the roles that made him a star. Several details complicate this claim: Davis stated that Marlon Brando was the film performer who most embodied her genius. Brando, of course, was a Method actor trained by Stella Adler, a former student of Stanislavski, and arguably the most gifted artist ever to come from this school of performance in the early 1950s. See Susan Mizruchi, Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (New York: Norton, 2014). Davis’s actual proto-­Method techniques, her ability to materialize internal processes such as thinking, feeling, raging, and loving on her face, in her eyes, and through her movements, allowed her to work from both inside and outside. Perhaps an explanation for what made Davis so formidable an actor was this double-­barreled approach, despite her fulminations against the Method. In her book on the cultural forces that complicate notions that the Method was a purely psychological way of working, Shonni Enelow writes: “What if the intertwinement of the actor’s memories and their performances do not fortify the truth value of emotional authenticity but rather suggest emotion’s inextricability from theatricality?” See Enelow, Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-­Drama (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 18. Abem Finkel had liberal bone fides: he had recently written the Ku Klux Klan exposé Black Legion (dir. Archie Mayo, 1937). See Gabriel Miller, William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Most Celebrated Director (Knoxville: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 142. The playscript for Owen Davis Sr.’s Jezebel (1933) is held at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hollywood, California. In the stage play, Julie asserts, “Out here—­where it is safer to love me—­safe as it is to love a ‘Yallow Girl’ down in New Orleans, (She gestures toward room up L.), not in there where your wife is . . .” See Davis, Jezebel, 2.2.28. In the dramatic playscript, Preston notes that “Great ladies and quadroon girls, my dear brother, have much in common.” See Davis, Jezebel, 2.1.11. Film and African American literary scholar Ryan Friedman notes that many vestiges of Black vaudeville remain as traces of an earlier genre in classical Hollywood cinema. Conversation with the author, July 2016. See Bette Davis, Lonely Life, 156.

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15. See “To Blanke from Wallis, Warner Brothers Inter-­Office Memoran­ dum, January 6, 1938,” Jezebel boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California (my emphasis). 16. American enslavement narratives frequently explore class differences within the bound and white populations. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagin Yellin (1861; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), devotes several chapters to the subject, particularly “The Slaves’ New Year’s Day” and “Fear of Insurrection.” 17. Pioneering scholar of women’s film Jeanine Basinger writes: “Jezebel (1938) carries fashion plotting even further. Its subtitle might be How Soci­ ety Forces Bette Davis to Conform By Making Her Change Her Dress. Jezebel is basically the story of four outfits: a riding habit, a red dress, a white dress, and a plain gray cape. These clothes define Davis in her climactic scenes.” See Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–­1960 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/University Press of  New England, 1993), 132. 18. Antebellum slave mistress and writer Mary Boykin Chesnut uses the term “skylarking” to describe young male bondsmen at play in her revised Civil War journals. See Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 19. See Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 482 and 521–­522. 20. See Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 210. Kwynn Perry’s immersion theory is apropos of Davis’s migration here: “Black bodies and Black culture cross into white spaces and operate therein on their own accord. This specific cultural integration [entails] a flow in which the disenfranchised move into dominant white spaces of their own volition.” This scene is one of the rare moments of immersion, but it is Davis who initiates the movement into Black space. Ti Bat’s performances in several other scenes more closely resemble minstrel-­show-­ like spectacle. I take up these examples in the chapter. See Perry, “Flickers of Black,” chapter 1, 4. 21. See Miriam Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 72–­124. 213

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22. Dalton S. Reymond, the technical adviser on Jezebel who wrote the screenplay for Song of the South (dir. Wilfred Jackson and Harve Foster, 1946), gave an interview to a Louisiana newspaper about Matthew “Stymie” Beard, in an unattributed article entitled “Led By a Negro Child”: These players [the African American cast of  Jezebel] told Mr. Reymond that they regarded themselves as “Northerners” and expressed reluctance to adapt their speech to that of the film’s proper era and location. Little Black [sic] Stymie Beard, [an] 8-­year old actor, who enacted a rather conspicuous subordinate role, however, proved to be Mr. Reymond’s best helper among the actors of  his race. Little Stymie went so far as to give “pep talks” to his elders among the colored actors, and his good humor helped to accomplish the dialogue director’s purpose, after the insistence of Director Wyler and other studio representatives had only partially accomplished the object.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

214

See “Led By a Negro Child,” State-­Times, Baton Rouge, LA, Wednesday Afternoon, March (n.d.), 1938, 8, held in the Bette Davis Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University. This article smacks of racial condescension and Patterson-­ian ideological reversal: the real “children” in the story, after all, would seem to be the adult Black actors who won’t cooperate in speaking Southern (read slavish, degrading) dialect. Only an actual child can reason with these deluded professionals. And yet there is also something subversive and powerful about Matthew “Stymie” Beard possessing the charisma to act as an intermediary between director Wyler and his African American cast, despite the unattributed author’s racist spin on the anecdote. See Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 175, my emphasis. See Racquel Gates, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 19. See Petty, Stealing the Show, 27–­71. Conversation with the author. In an interview with the ANP (Associated Negro Press) in August 1937, prior to the shooting of  Jezebel, Theresa Harris discussed her aspirations as a film actress and her frustrations with racism in Hollywood: “I never

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had the chance to rise about [sic] [above?] the role of maid in Hollywood movies. My color was against me anyway you looked at it. The fact that I was not ‘hot’ stamped me either as uppity or relegated me to the eternal role of stooge or servant. I can sing but so can hundreds of other girls. My ambition is to be an actress. Hollywood had no parts for me.” Harris goes on to praise the efforts of George Randol and Ralph Cooper, who had started the all-­Black film company Million Dollar Productions (backed by white investors). Asked if she believed the new enterprise had a chance of succeeding, she replied, “We have tolerated so many rotten pictures made in Hollywood by whites, I do not see why our own people cannot be tolerant in the pioneering stages of this company.” Harris was currently starring in Million Dollar Productions’ gangster picture Bargain with Bullets: Gangsters on the Loose (dir. Harry L. Fraser, 1937). See Fay M. Jackson, “Dainty Theresa in Gang Film,” The Afro American, August 28, 1937, https://news.google.com/newspapers ?nid=2211&dat=19370828&id=chomAAAAIBAJ&sjid=mP0FAAAAI BAJ&pg=3976,428148. The late, great African American actor Chadwick Boseman described a twenty-­first-­century industry climate not far different from Theresa Harris’s lamentations in the late 1930s when he recounted his experience on an unnamed soap opera at the beginning of  his career. In his 2018 commencement speech at Howard University, he said: Once I saw the role I was playing, I found myself conflicted. The role wasn’t necessarily stereotypical. A young man in his formative years with a violent streak pulled into the allure of gang involvement. That’s somebody’s real story. Never judge the characters you play. That’s what we were always taught. That’s the first rule of acting. Any role played honestly, can be empowering, but I was conflicted because this role seemed to be wrapped up in assumptions about us as black folk. The writing  failed to search for specificity. Plus, there was barely a glimpse of positivity or talent in the character, barely a glimpse of hope. I would have to make something out of nothing. I was conflicted. Howard had instilled in me a certain amount of pride and for my taste this role didn’t live up to those standards. It was just my luck that after filming the first two episodes, execs of the show called me into their offices and told me how happy they were with my performance. They wanted me to be around for a long time. They said if there was 215

notes to chapter three anything that I needed, just let them know. That was my opening. I decided to ask them some simple questions about the background of my character, questions that I felt were pertinent to the plot. Question number one: Where is my father? The exec answered, “Well, he left when you were younger.” Of course. Okay. Okay. Question number two: In this script, it alluded to my mother not being equipped to operate as a good parent, so why exactly did my little brother and I have to go into foster care? Matter-­of-­factly, he said, “Well, of course she is on heroin.” That could be real, I guess, but I didn’t want to assume that’s what it was. If we are around here assuming that the black characters in the show are criminals, on drugs and deadbeat parents, then that would probably be stereotypical, wouldn’t it? That word stereotypical lingered. One of the execs pulled out my resume and began studying it. The other exec was now trying to live up to what they had promised me only a few moments before—­“If there is anything you need, just let us know.” She said, “As you have seen, things move really fast around here, but we are more than happy to connect you with the writers if you have suggestions.” “Yeah,” I said, “that would be great.” I said, “because I’m just trying to do my homework on this. I didn’t know if you guys have decided on all the facts, but maybe there are some things we could come up with, some talent or gift that we can build. Maybe he is really good at math or something. He has to be active. I’m doing my best not to play this character like a victim.” I left the office. I shot the episode I had come in to shoot on that day. Probably the best one I did out of the three because I got what was bothering me off my chest. I was let go from that job on the next day. A phone call from my agent, they decided to go another way. The questions that I asked set the producers on guard and perhaps paved the way for less stereotypical portrayal for the black actor that stepped into the role after me.

Boseman suggests that his conversation with the soap opera executives cost him his job. But offering ideas for enriching his character might not have been in vain. The man who replaced him apparently pushed beyond the Black phantasmagoria Boseman’s bosses had had in mind for his own performance. Only two years after this speech, Chadwick Boseman tragically died of colon cancer on August 28, 2020. See Valerie Strauss, “Chadwick Boseman Praised Student Protesters in 2018 Commencement 216

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Speech at Howard,” Washington Post, August 28, 2020, transcription of Chadwick Boseman, Howard University Commencement Speech, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/08/29/chadwick -­boseman-­praised-­student-­protesters-­2018-­commencement-­speech-­ho ward-­university-­watch-­video/ (my emphasis). The unnamed soap opera on which Boseman first appeared was All My Children, the ABC serial created by the genre-­transforming Agnes Nixon, who brought current events such as the Vietnam War and abortion into her work. All My Children was one of the first soaps to feature Black characters in recurring roles. All My Children also happened to be the very television serial that my siblings and I watched for nearly forty years. The actor who replaced Boseman was Michael B. Jordan, then age sixteen (Boseman had been twenty-­six). Both went on to enjoy illustrious careers, costarring in Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2018) and becoming close friends. See https://www.tvshowsace.com/2020/08/30 /chadwick-­boseman-­michael-­b-­johnsons-­all-­my-­children-­connection/. Great thanks to Patricia Stern Smallacombe for sharing the commencement address and an important conversation about Boseman’s mission to improve cross-­racial understanding in the entertainment industry. In her essay on Mae West’s on-­screen Black maids, Pamela Robertson Wojcik observes that West’s maids “could also be seen as camping it up—­ overplaying their delight in the white star to point to the constructedness and unauthenticity of their supportive role.” Zette’s excitement over the carriages coming, the only time she acts flamboyantly in the picture, makes sense according to Wojcik’s reading. See Wojcik, “Mae West’s Maids: Race, Authenticity, and the Discourse of Camp,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 297. 28. This raises the interesting question of genre in Jezebel: while the film begins as a historical romance of sorts, it turns into a medical and moral melodrama with the death by dueling of Buck Cantrell and the widespread destruction wrought by the yellow fever epidemic. And then, of course, is its oh-­so-­not-­conventional take on slavery, with the mass of the field-­laboring Black population only pictured in a small part of two scenes. 29. See Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Christopher Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional 217

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Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in Antebellum America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 30. See Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1988): 45–­64, 55, 57–­58, quoting Jim Pines, Blacks in Films (London: Studio Vista, 1975), 54. 31. Thanks to Kwynn Perry for her reading of fugitivity here. 32. In a long email exchange with Kwynn Perry on August 11, 2014, we discussed Wyler’s unorthodox handling of enslaved characters in Jezebel. She noted that Wyler afforded these Black characters more presence and agency than did other directors working on films set in the antebellum South. Perry observes that: the servants in the film are always lurking around; they seem to stay too long after they have made their announcements; their routes of service are often a little too integrated for them to be invisible, and technically speaking, their presence often bisects and intrudes upon the frame. These are not invisible servants—­they are very much part of what is going on, and seem to constantly be snooping and gathering information. Of course we know that this is what servants actually do, but there are few films that pay attention to this element without being blatant about snooping being a plot point, characterization, or point of discussion later down the line. For a film about the differences of opinion between the North and South, about slavery, about an impending war which would likely eradicate the slave state, the presence of these information-­gathering slaves is extremely poignant.

Perry also points out that in the early engagement party scene, Ernie Haller’s camera tracks Julie Marsden’s enslaved majordomo’s movement and allows us to meet the characters and be filled in on conversations that he is overhearing. “Uncle Cato works exactly like the omniscient camera—­he knows all, and sees all; he is privy to information not available to others.” Far from being foolish and politically disengaged, Ripley, Finkel, and Huston’s enslaved characters are awake, alert, and invested. Dyer makes a similar observation in “White,” writing: “Compositionally, Jezebel frequently foregrounds Black people—­scenes often open with the camera moving from a Black person (a woman selling flowers in New Orleans, a servant carrying juleps, a boy pulling on a rope to operate a ceiling fan) across or towards white characters; Black people often intrude into the frame while white characters talk.” (54) 218

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33. Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson reported that “Director William Wyler gave his orders. You get in the boat and Eddie rows up the narrows. Then you land and wade through the water. Miss Davis looks at the little boat skeptically. ‘Can you row?’ she asks Anderson. Anderson grins, makes Miss Davis laugh. ‘I played Noah in Green Pastures,’ he says.” See Johnson, “Behind the Makeup,” Los Angeles California Examiner, January 18, 1938. Clipping held in the Bette Davis Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University. 34. Film scholar Nick Davis goes into loving detail about Julie’s transgressive dress in his blog entry on Jezebel: “that red dress, which is maybe the reddest dress I’ve ever seen in a movie, even though Jezebel is shot in black and white. Credit to Haller (the cinematographer) and to costume designer Orry-­Kelly, who found the right frock and got it to gleam just right in the deeper end of the grayscale, but the dismayed insinuations in the screenplay and the worried and flustered faces of the cast play just as much of a role in characterizing that dress, an unforgettable prop, even in monotone.” See www.nicksflickpicks.com, “Best Actress Oscars,” 1938, review of  Jezebel. 35. One of my freshmen seminar students studying American women auteurs from Sarah Orne Jewett through Bette Davis reported that her ninety-­ seven-­year-­old grandmother could not remember the name of her favorite Davis film but vividly recalled the centrality of a red dress in the picture. Thanks to Julianna Rev for sharing this story. 36. Nick Davis, who teaches “Introduction to Cinema and Literature” at North­ western University, features this scene in his unit on cinematography. 37. Historian Jo Ann Carrigan describes the symptoms as they were documented in contemporary New Orleans newspaper and journal coverage. A local minister who survived the epidemic wrote of the “black vomit, with profuse hemorrhages from the mouth, nose, ears, eyes, and even toes; the eyes prominent, glistening yellow, and staring . . . The physiognomy of the yellow fever corpse is usually sad, sullen, and perturbed; the countenance dark, mottled, livid, swollen, stained with blood and black vomit.” Yellow fever sufferers’ vomit was said to resemble black coffee grounds. See John Duffy, ed., Parson Clapp of the Stranger’s Church of New Orleans (Baton Rouge: 1957), 95, in Carrigan, “Yellow Fever in New Orleans, 1853: Abstractions and Realities,” Journal of Southern History, 25, no. 3 (August 1959): 339–­355, 347. 219

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38. See Flick Chick, “A Closer Look at Jezebel (1938) Part I,” December 9, 2008, flickchickcanada.blogspot.com, 1. 39. At the meeting of his board of directors, bank president Preston Dillard notes railroad development in the North. And Dillard and Sons has a branch in New York, from which his future wife hails. 40. Harriet Jacobs is described as “yallow” and “yellow,” as is Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s Passing. See Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and Nella Larsen, Passing (1928; New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 41. See Arthur Knight, “Star Dances: African-­American Constructions of Stardom, 1925–­1960,” in Classic Hollywood Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 386–­414, 404. Knight’s article has been central to the way I have come to conceive Bette Davis’s Black costars. 42. Certain enslaved artisans like Frederick Douglass, who became an expert ship caulker, were allowed to “buy their time” when they  were “hired out.” That is, their masters permitted them to work at a trade, receive wages, hand over the majority of their earnings to their masters, but keep some small proportion of the money for themselves. Many of the enslaved men and women who ultimately purchased their own freedom had been able to hire their time. 43. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs both describe a figurative “fall into racial consciousness,” that moment in which Black children in the antebellum South between the ages of six and eight realize that they have dark skin and are not free. See Douglass, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, ed. Houston Baker (1845, reprinted New York: Penguin, 1986), 47. See also Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 5–­7. 44. The Hall Johnson Choir, the nation’s most prestigious African American choral ensemble, provided the personnel for the singing scene in Jezebel. Hall Johnson founded the company in 1925, beginning with eight singers and expanding to twenty. Born in 1888, Francis Hall Johnson was a composer, arranger, and violinist and violist, the son of an AME minister and the paternal grandson of a formerly enslaved woman, who sang him spirituals throughout his childhood. He received a BA from Allen University and attended the University of Pennsylvania, Juilliard, and 220

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45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

the University of Southern California. Johnson’s creative mission was to preserve the spiritual form. He played violin and viola in the orchestra for Shuffle Along, the first all-­Black musical. And he wrote the music and staged his choir’s performances for the all-­Black stage version of Green Pastures, among his numerous accomplishments preceding his choir’s work on Jezebel and The Great Lie. See https://www.allmusic.com/artist /the-­hall-­johnson-­choir-­mn0000061449. See the Publicity Packet for the Release of Jezebel, in the Bette Davis Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archives, Boston University. The playscript is more forthcoming on cross-­racial communion than is the film: Uncle Billy, a character not named on screen, remarks of  Julie’s activities the day of the Halcyon Plantation house party, “Yes Mass Pres—­an’ mos’ ob de day she was singing wid us down by de quarters.” “Singing?” Preston replies. Uncle Billy: “De old songs same as we all used to sing together. She done say we all was ‘bloeged to sing ’em good, cause ‘yo all an’ we all was agoin’ to sing em heeps ob times, like we uster do befo’e.” Owen Davis Sr, Jezebel, 2.1.12. Apropos of a Black musical short, but with implications for my reading of this scene, Perry notes that “as the white viewer gains access into the Black world via music, the Black subject also gains freedom in the white world as a byproduct of music.” See “Flickers of Black,” chapter 3, 24. A maul is a tool with a heavy head and handle, used for such tasks as ramming, crushing, and driving wedges. Employed in cattle ranching, it is akin to a sledgehammer. See “Raise a Ruckus Tonight,” song lyrics, http://www.protestsonglyr ics.net/Freedom_Songs/Raise-­A-­Ruckus-­Tonight.phtml. I have emphasized the choruses that comprised Steiner’s on-­screen version of the spiritual. Notes from the Jezebel boxes at the Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California, reveal that on November 11, 1937, a Jezebel research staffer named Wilson requested “Negro spirituals, ‘Likes and Dislikes,’ ‘Singing Girl,’ and ‘Raise a Ruckus.’ ” He was told that these materials were “Not in L.A. Pub. Lib.” Nevertheless, “Raise a Ruckus” became the centerpiece of  Julie Marsden’s cross-­racial singing frenzy. See Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image In Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 26, my emphasis. 221

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51. See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 323–­324. 52. See Frederic Chopin, Piano Sonata, op. 35, no. 2, third movement. Claudia Gorbman, pioneering theorist of sound and music in classical Hollywood cinema, writes that Max Steiner, who scored almost all of Bette Davis’s pictures, worked from a nineteenth-­century European Romantic tradition. Gorbman notes: “To a greater extent than other major Hollywood composers, Max Steiner synchronized musical effects closely with events on the screen. As one writer put it, Steiner is legendary for a film-­musical style intent on ‘catching everything.’ His scores, that is, respond to every minute dramatic shift in any given scene, affording blanket emotional coverage for the visual narrative.” See Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 87. 53. See James Snead, White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, ed. Colin McCabe and Cornel West (New York: Routledge, 1994), 80, my emphasis. 54. Davis, Jezebel. 55. The story of Lazarus is told in the New Testament, in the Gospel of  John 11:18, 30, 32, and 38. Chapter four Ben Mankiewicz, Turner Classic Movies’ host since the death of Robert Osborne, chose the film as part of a sequence honoring Olivia de Havilland. In his introduction to the screening, he mentioned Bette Davis, second-­ time-­only director  John Huston, Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize–­winning novel on which the film was based, and even Hattie McDaniel, but never indicated that racial politics inform every dimension of the picture. My TiVo log indicates that I recorded this broadcast of the film in 2015. 2. I thank the press’s anonymous second reader for pointing me to two excellent works on costume history: Michelle Tolini Finamore, Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1997). See also Jane Gaines, “Costume and Narrative: How Dress Tells a Woman’s Story,” in

1.

222

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Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (New York: Routledge, 1990). 3. Dark Victory (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1939), Davis’s favorite film, lies outside the scope of my racial inquiry here. Nevertheless, its discourse of fur coats, pelts, and cancer cells strikes me as a rich object for future study, connecting the film to contemporary discussions of the animal and the human. There is a way in which Davis’s Judith cares far more deeply for her horses and her dogs than she does for Dr. Frederick Steele or her BFF Ann (Geraldine Fitzgerald), whom I have come to believe will take up Judith’s life with the soon-­to-­be-­widowed brain surgeon, just where Davis left off. But what is this discourse of fur coats, animal pelts, and microscopic lives that kill human beings? Attachment in Dark Victory migrates between incommensurate bodies in fascinating ways. Anne Amlin Chen writes brilliantly about skin and costume in the cinematic work of Asian American actress Anna May Wong: “Questions of skin often morph into questions of fabric or other materials. . . . when we are first introduced to Shosho [Wong’s character in Piccadilly, dir. Ewald André Dupont, 1929], the camera zooms in on her and moves slowly down the length of  her well-­covered body to linger lovingly on the close­up of a long run in her sheer black stocking. The camera will return yet again to and fixate on this tear in Shosho’s ‘skin’ when she makes her second appearance . . .” See Chen, “Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern,” Publications of the Modern Language Society 126, no. 4 (October 2011): 1022–­1041, 1030. 4. This is the malignant brain tumor that killed Senator Edward Kennedy, Delaware attorney general  Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden III, and Senator John McCain. Survival rates cluster around twelve to fifteen months to two years. Casey Robinson clearly did some homework in concocting this plot. 5. See Sherrie Tucker, Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). African Americans were not welcome on the main-­floor dining area of the Canteen. In her ethnography, Tucker reveals that Black guests congregated upstairs, in a loft-­like space above the dance floor. Unaccompanied women in military garb were not allowed to mingle on the main floor either, and also dined on the second floor. 223

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6. It remains striking that even the 1940s Black press used the term “boys” to talk about African American soldiers. While young World War II recruits were often described in the national discourse as boys, this particular example evokes a valence of anti-­Black denigration to my twenty-­first-­ century ears, despite its enunciation in an African American newspaper. See Tucker, Dance Floor Democracy, 92. Rex Ingram, the African American actor who played Tilney, Supreme Court–­aspirant Ronald Coleman’s valet in The Talk of the Town (dir. George Stevens, 1942), infuses the role with intellectual integrity. See chapter 1, note 18, for more on the award-­ winning Ingram. 7. Williams, Playing the Race Card. 8. For a discussion of Davis’s liaison with Anatole Litvak, then-­husband of her rival Miriam Hopkins, in 1938, see chapter 3. 9. Scholars of swing identify its origins in African American culture, as a musical and dance form born in Black communities in the 1920s. Eric Lott’s model of “love and theft” pertains, and links Davis’s Stanley with Black expressive forms, though all the swing dancers in the film are white. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 10. See Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (1935; New York: Schocken Books, 2007). In this critique of mechanical reproduction, Huston would seem to be deconstructing his own artistic medium, moving pictures. 11. Mildred ultimately destroys only herself (and her baby, through neglect). Regina Giddens commits spouse-­icide by omission when she refuses to hand husband Horace his medicine in the course of what becomes a fatal heart attack. And while Baby Jane Hudson’s abuse and starvation of  Blanche cause her death, Blanche has destroyed Jane’s sanity earlier in the sisters’ history. Stanley kills a young girl, injures her mother, ruins the life of a talented Black youth, and breaks his mother’s heart. Given the social implications of her assault on Parry’s reputation, in addition to the body count Stanley racks up, I see her as the most heinous of Davis’s characters, if less deliberately homicidal than Regina and more fully rational than Baby Jane. 12. Think of the notorious photograph in which Donald Trump’s presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway sits on the couch in Oval Office, shoes off, legs tucked under thighs, texting, ignoring the meeting of Historically 224

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

Black College and University presidents unfolding behind her. The picture went viral as an emblem of the administration’s lack of respect for or sensitivity toward civil rights concerns. For a critical analysis of Martha Graham’s influence on Bette Davis’s on-­ screen kinesthetics, see dance scholar Mark Franko’s assessment in chapter 1, note 28. See www.bobbyriverstv.blogspot.com, April 26, 2012. See Petty, “Hattie McDaniel: Landmark of an Era,” 27–­71, in Stealing the Show. See Player Salary records, no. 385, and Budget, no. 385, October 20, 1941, for In This Our Life, Director  John Huston, loose papers in In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. See Jill Watts’s biography of Hattie McDaniel, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (New York: Armisted [HarperCollins], 2005); and Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black (New York: Oxford, 1993). McDaniel reverted to the sassy maid role in Beulah, a program that began on the radio and ascended to television. The great actress was having a third act. Tragically, she was diagnosed with breast cancer soon afterward, and died not much later. See Watts, Hattie McDaniel, 271. Anderson’s IMDB biography describes him as a graduate of  Northwestern. But the university’s senior African American Studies librarian, Charla Burlenda Wilson, has found no record of Anderson’s having graduated with his class in 1936. We know that he matriculated in the fall quarter of 1932 and that he performed in the summer school production of The Emperor Jones in 1933. See https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0026695/. Davis and Stine, Mother, Goddam, 162. See Miriam Petty, “Lincoln Perry’s Problematic Stardom: Stepin Fetchit Steals the Shoat,” in Stealing the Show, 172–­216. See Morris Robinson Jr., “Emerson Street Branch YMCA: Segregation in Evanston,” Shorefront Journal, March 28, 2013. Over twenty years ago, Evanston-­born Northwestern University Press graphic designer Morris “Dino” Robinson Jr. single-­handedly imagined, created, and has run the remarkable resource that is the Shorefront Legacy Center, a superb digital archive and museum of African American history in Evanston, Illinois. Greatest thanks to Dino for his aid with this research. 225

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23. Ethnographies have been written about barbershops in urban neighborhoods: for a contemporary example, see David L. Shabazz, “Barbershops as Forums for African American Males,” Journal of Black Studies (Febru­ ary 16, 2016). 24. See Northwestern University Archives, Daily Northwestern, June 9, 1933, program for the student Alumni Days production of The Emperor Jones, n.p. 25. See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2008). 26. See Shannon Steen, “Melancholy Bodies: Racial Subjectivity and Whiteness in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones,” Theater Journal 52, no. 3 (2000): 339–­359. 27. See Hilton Als, “The Empress Jones,” The New Yorker, March 27, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/03/27/the-­empress -­jones. See also Hilton Als, “Master of Disguise: Paul Robeson and The Emperor Jones,” Criterion Collection, ON FILM/ESSAYS, Novem­ber 11, 2009, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1269-­master-­o f -­disguise-­paul-­robeson-­and-­the-­emperor-­jones, my emphasis. See also Mordaunt Hall, “Paul Robeson in the Pictorial Conception of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones,” New York Times, September 20, 1933, https://www.nytimes.com/1933/09/20/archives/paul-­robeson-­in-­the -­pictorial-­conception-­of-­eugene-­oneills-­play-­the.html. 28. Drama scholar Adrienne Macki Braconi discusses Robert Dunmore’s post-­Northwestern career in her study of Harlem community theaters: “In February 1931, Robert Dunmore, a recent African American graduate of  Northwestern University’s drama program, staged a series of three one-­ act plays at the players’ new space at St. Phillip’s Parish House at 211 West 133rd Street. The program included Calderon’s The Little Stone House, Harry Kemp’s The Prodigal Son (1916), and a brand-­new work, Get Thee Behind Me, Satan (which is no longer extant), by HET’s resident scene designer and cartoonist Robert Dorsey. . . . Dunmore directed a revival of Sunday Morning in 1931 and the premier of Climbing Jacob’s Ladder . . . which . . . dramatized two congregations convening at a Southern Baptist church as they gather resources for the legal defense for a young Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Ironically, the defendant is violated by a white mob as church members pray.” See Braconi, Harlem’s Theaters: A 226

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Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 70, 98. 29. The university did enforce a Jewish quota of 6 percent throughout the 1950s. My father, Northwestern class of 1952, began to tell me about this well before I was old enough to understand, although I was indignant in any case; such feelings came automatically. Later, I joked that at his full height, 6 feet 1½ inches, he was the Jewish quota for the class of 1952. Indeed, I shared my sardonic observation with the university’s current president Morton Schapiro, himself  Jewish and shorter than my father. His facial response was worthy of silent cinema. 30. See Steen, “Melancholy Bodies.” 31. Carme Manuel has discussed the Harlem audience’s response to the play during the Harlem Renaissance era: “It is undeniably true that The Emperor Jones had a tremendous impact on the Harlem Renaissance and on the image of the Black man it projected. According to [Richard] Long, this was so because first of all, ‘the Black is clearly the protagonist; the role is virtually a monologue. The performance requires a tour de force of the actor, serving to indicate the high caliber of Black dramatic talent. Brutus Jones is a highly complex character capable of considerable introspection, and this seemed to be an improvement on the Black-­as-­buffoon. Finally, though he sustains a morally appropriate defeat, it is at the hands of other Blacks whom he has attempted to subjugate in a colonialist manner.’ ” Richard Long, “The Outer Reaches: The White Writer and Blacks in the Twenties,” in Victor A. Kramer, ed., The Harlem Renaissance Re-­examined (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 44, quoted in Carme Manuel, “A Ghost in the Expressionist Jungle of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones,” African American Review 39, no. 1/2 (Spring–­Summer 2005): 67–­85, 78. In his autobiography, the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes discussed seeing the play at the 135th Street Lincoln Theater. “The Harlem audience found the character of  Brutus Jones unbelievable and laughed so hard that Black actor Jules Bledsoe ‘Stopped dead in his tracks, advanced to the footlights, and proceeded to lecture his audience on manners in the theater. But the audience wanted none of The Emperor Jones’ ” (Hughes, The Big Sea [New York: Thunder Mouth, 1986], 258–­259). . . . “However, when the film version was shown in Harlem over ten years later, it played to standing-­room audiences, and . . . grossed an unprecedented $10,000 227

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32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

228

in its first week at the Roosevelt Theater.” Langston Hughes, quoted in Eberhard Alsen, “Racism and the Film Version of The Emperor Jones,” CLA Journal 49, no. 4 ( June 2006): 406–­422, 409–­410. See Bette Davis, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography (New York: Lancer, 1963), 45, my emphasis. As I have noted, Davis did some of her finest work in three films with William Wyler: Jezebel, The Letter, and The Little Foxes. The director had a penchant for using domestic interiors to dramatize transformations in characters’ feelings and status: staircases were a favorite Wylerian mise-­en-­scène. I understand Davis’s reference to spending half her working life on flights of steps as her homage to both Martha Graham, who taught her how to maneuver them, up and down, and William Wyler, who showed her how staircases could be traversed to register symbolically. In The Letter’s tropical Malaysian setting, houses were exclusively single story. Nevertheless, Wyler made brilliant use of an elaborate system of multilevel hammocks to emphasize the abject condition of the Malaysian rubber workers who toiled on the plantation of the colonial Crosbies. Ernie Haller’s establishing shots leading up to Leslie Crosbie’s murder of her lover in the first seconds of the picture focus on the oppressive nature of this hammock system. It’s as if the cramped and pestilential interior of a nineteenth-­century ship (a slaving vessel?) had been erected on the Crosbie property, in sight of the well-­appointed colonial bungalow yet worlds apart. Again, William Wyler affords a glimpse of the racialized labor inequities in The Letter’s subaltern culture. See “Bette Davis’ Side-­Line: Warner Star Unofficial Talent Scout,” New York Post, May 2, 1942. See James Snead, White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, ed. Colin McCabe and Cornel West (New York: Routledge, 1994), 6, 8. See draft 3, screenplays for In This Our Life, In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. Phil Carter, the first African American press agent (for MGM), “acknowledged Warner Brothers for overcoming the ‘shameful’ example of The Green Pastures to produce In This Our Life (the film in which Hattie McDaniel plays a domestic worker who ‘lives out,’ rather than in the home of  her employers, and whose aspiring lawyer son, played by Ernest

notes to chapter four

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

Anderson, is framed by the white racist villain played by Bette Davis).” See Carter, “Review Hollywood Offerings since White-­Wilkie Meeting,” Los Angeles Tribune, November 15, 1943, 18, quoted in Tucker, Dance Floor Democracy, 294. Letter from Mrs. Alonzo Richardson, Secretary, City of Atlanta Board of Review, to Joseph Breen, June 6, 1942, In This Our Lives boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. Thanks to Kwynn Perry for discovering this remarkable document. Pittsburgh Courier, July 11, 1942, 21. I haven’t worked out how Koch created a remarkably fantasy-­free character of color in Dooley Wilson’s piano player Sam in Casablanca. Wilson is Humphrey Bogart’s Rick’s peer and BFF. Perhaps the war’s opening for African Americans translated to uplift on the wartime screen? See Brian Edwards’s reading of the movie in his Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Marrakech to the Orient Express (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 29–­77. I infer that Anderson was speaking from personal experience, as he had enlisted in the segregated Black Fourth Cavalry just after the film was released. See Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 371. See also Cripps, Making Movies Black, 31–­34. Parry’s vocational mantra exactly echoed my father’s vision for achieving success as a member of a minority group. He told my siblings and me that we must have a “profession” and become “professionals.” While we all followed his advice, becoming an English professor, an international economist, and a sociologist, he watched the legal profession, his great love, degrade into a circus of marketing and Hobbsean self-­devouring. The beginning of the end, he said, came when lawyers were permitted to advertise in the Yellow Pages. Not far behind were Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and the election of Donald Trump, which to my incredulity (I thought he was being paranoid) my father predicted, only to die six months later. Elizabeth Binggeli uses this term in “Burbanking Bigger and Bette the Bitch,” African American Review 40, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 475–­492. Kimberly Benston, “Facing Tradition: Revisionary Scenes in African American Literature,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 105, no. 1 ( January 1991): 98–­109. 229

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44. For the history of the all-­Black cast genre, see Arthur Knight, Disintegrat­ing the Musical: Black Performance and American Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Ryan Friedman, Hollywood’s African American Films: The Transition to Sound (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). For the IMDB cast list for In This Our Life, see https://www .imdb.com/title/tt0034890/. 45. See all five extant screenplays for In This Our Life, In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California, Scene 21: City Jail, Negro section. In the General Research Record for In This Our Life, on December 9, 1941, a Warners staffer named De Mers responded to a request for “Negro types.” She provided “6 clips” to E.H., Ernie Haller, Davis’s favorite cameraman. I imagine that this research made possible the relatively wide array of African American character types who appear in the jail scene. On November 21, 1941, another Warners staffer named Kelso provided seven clips representing research on “Interior of  Jails.” 46. Great thanks to Kwynn Perry who, in a phone conversation with me in the summer of 2014, made the observation about the double valence of this tableau. Her insight about the racial phantasmagoria that sees all Black males as criminals has become increasingly significant to my thinking about this project. And it jibes with a letter Warner Brothers received from a Black spectator, John S. Holley of  Washington, DC, who loved the film overall. But he noted that In This Our Life was “not entirely without sin, however. It contains two or three features long found objectionable to colored people. Most glaring of cinema sins is the continued inference that the American Negro and the jailhouse are inseparable.” Holley to Warner Brothers, August 9, 1942, In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. 47. Mr. Holley’s final cavil involved the fact that Parry used Black vernacular dialect, that is, Hollywood’s imagination of such speech. Perhaps he overlooked that Parry speaks standard English throughout the film, reverting to phantasmagoric language only at the moment his life has been destroyed to make a point about African American aspirations and the white supremacist crushing of such dreams. 48. Martin Shingler, “Bette Davis: Malevolence in Motion,” in Screen Acting, ed. Alan Lovell and Peter Kramer (New York: Routledge, 1999), 50. 230

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49. See Cleveland Call and Post, “Ernest Anderson Featured in In This Our Life at Globe Theater,” August 1, 1942. See also Ed Scofield, Warners Publicity Release on Ernest Anderson, 1942, In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archive, University of Southern California. 50. Baldwin also wrote in fictional form about Bette Davis incarnating evil. In Go Tell It On the Mountain, his autobiographically based protagonist, John, sees an actress resembling Davis at the movies in a film seemingly based on Of Human Bondage (dir. John Cromwell, 1934) and is never the same again: The woman was most evil. She was blonde and pasty white, and she had lived in London, which was in England, quite some time ago, judging from her clothes, and she coughed. She had a terrible disease, tuberculosis, which he had heard about. Someone in his mother’s family died of it. She had a great many boyfriends, and she smoked cigarettes and drank. When she met the young man, who was a student and who loved her very much, she was very cruel to him. She took his money and went out with other men, and she lied to the student—­who was certainly a fool. He limped about, looking soft and sad, and soon all John’s sympathy was given to this violent and unhappy woman. He understood her when she raged and shook her hips and threw back her head in laughter so furious that it seemed the veins of her neck would burst. She walked the cold, foggy streets, a little woman and not pretty, with a lewd, brutal swagger, saying to the whole world, “you can kiss my ass.” Nothing tamed or broke her, nothing touched her, neither kindness, nor scorn, nor hatred, nor love. . . . John could not have found in his heart, had he dared to search it, any wish for her redemption. He wanted to be like her, only more powerful, more thorough, and more cruel, to make those around him, all who hurt him, suffer as she made the student suffer, and laugh in their faces when they asked for pity for their pain. He would have asked no pity, and his pain was greater than theirs.

See James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952; New York: Dell, 1980), 37–­38. 51. Letter from W. A. Robinson, Director, Secondary School Study, to Miss Bette Davis, Actress, Warner Brothers Studio, Hollywood, California, September 4, 1942, In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. 231

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52. See P. L. Prattis, Executive Editor, Pittsburgh Courier, to Warner Brothers Studio, June 6, 1942, my emphasis. Later that summer, another African American correspondent, Mrs. Edith Peacock McDougal of  Philadelphia, also noted that the film “is outstanding not just as an excellent dramatic story or because of ” John Huston’s “expert and tactful direction; but because for the first time in the history of the cinema, a Negro is depicted as a normal, intelligent, clean-­living, human being. Too long has the movie world shown the Negro a pitiable burden of society. Thousands of us are working, to the best of our abilities, to build and to maintain this civilization.” See Edith Peacock McDougal, 429 S. 20th Street, Philadelphia, PA, to Warner Brothers, August 10, 1942, In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. In September, the legislative representative [possibly a lobbyist] for the first Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, wrote an extraordinary letter to the studio: Our Sorority, composed of 4000 college and university Negro women, offers its heartfelt gratitude and appreciation for the splendid part assigned to Mr. Anderson in In This Our Life. Mr. Anderson’s portrait lacked none of the dignity traditionally lacking in parts played by Negroes in motion pictures. Mr. Anderson is an excellent actor and we are hoping to see more of him in the near future. The type of role played by Mr. Anderson is a step toward the goal of portraying the Negro citizen as a “normal human being.” I am sure that Negroes throughout America feel as we do about this matter. Unfortunately, perhaps, they are reluctant to put down their thoughts in words . . . If you have not received a number of letters concerning this new policy introduced in In This Our Life it is not necessarily representative of indifference of our Negro citizens.

Film scholar Kwynn Perry notes that this letter introduced the notion of a viable “Negro market” into responses to the film. See Thomasina  Johnson, National Non-­Partisan Council of  Public Affairs, Legislative Representative to the Warner Brothers Studio, September 30, 1942, in the In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California. 53. In the novel, Craig effects Parry’s release from jail. Author Glasgow indicates, however, that his spirit and ambition have been extinguished forever. In the film, Parry becomes James Snead’s “structured absence.” 232

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54. I think of Davis as enacting a kind of king of Denmark moment; after the Nazis mandated that all Jews wear a yellow star, legend had it that King Christian X decided to take up the armband himself. Apparently, the king discussed the prospect with a minister, and the Germans rescinded the order in 1940, making the actual wearing of the star unnecessary. See “King Christian X of Denmark,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia .ushmm.org/content/en/article/king-­christian-­x-­of-­denmark. 55. Undated press release from 1942. From Alex Evanove, written by Ed Scofield. See In This Our Life boxes, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California, my emphasis. Chapter five 1. Crawford’s fourth husband, Alfred Steele, was the CEO of the Pepsi-­ Cola company. She apparently had a Pepsi vending machine installed on the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? set. Davis allegedly tried to have it replaced by a Coca-­Cola machine—­or so claims the miniseries Feud (dir. Ryan Murphy, 2017). Murphy’s visually glorious reimagination of the making of Baby Jane depicts the aging actresses drinking like sailors. 2. Former 1940s-­era ingénue Anna Lee played B.D.’s clueless mother, in all her Oleg Cassini-­esque satin pencil-­suited shininess. This casting pit the former widowed sweetheart of How Green Was My Valley (dir. John Ford, 1941) against the former harridan Mildred of Of Human Bondage (dir. John Cromwell, 1934), with said virago’s biological daughter aligned with sentimental favorite Lee. With sixty years of  hindsight, it is hard not to see this as an ironic on-­screen allegory for mother and daughter’s off-­ screen relationship. Davis pioneered a post–­Golden Age Hollywood after­ life in made-­for-­T V movies and guest spots on television shows like Gun­ smoke and a failed but fascinating 1965 pilot for the sitcom The Decorator, culminating in her casting as the matriarch on primetime soap Hotel. Anna Lee played beloved grandmother Lila Quartermaine on General Hospital. Davis’s mastectomy and stroke put an end to the gig on Hotel; Lee played the Quartermaine matriarch for almost twenty-­five years, before being fired in violation of her original contract, which guaranteed lifetime employment on the soap. She was in her nineties. Lee’s experience at ABC 233

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reprised the theme of female celebrity superannuation spotlighted by Baby Jane’s social critique. 3. See The Defiant Ones (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1958) and In the Heat of the Night (dir. Norman Jewison, 1967). See also Imitation of Life (dir. John Stahl, 1934), starring Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers, and its 1959 remake Imitation of Life (dir. Douglas Sirk), which pairs Lana Turner with Juanita Moore. In both versions of Imitation of Life, the white mother and her Black counterpart enjoy close friendship and trade confidences about child-­rearing and romance, but the labor they each contribute to their communal household is hardly that of equals. In the first version, Colbert essentially expropriates Beavers’s pancake recipe, from which she creates a hotcakes empire. Beavers stays home to raise both women’s daughters. In the second film, Turner becomes a renowned stage actress in New York and then in Hollywood, while Moore serves as the nanny and housekeeper of the family. The vision of sorority in both films, in other words, is closer to a one-­way street of white taking and Black giving. 4. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929): 303–­313. 5. It would be decades before I learned about the two stars’ alleged feud or supposed hatred of each other. According to Davis, her loathing of Crawford actually arose as the byproduct of their first and only collaboration, rather than from any animus that had preceded it. Davis would later explain that Crawford’s withdrawing on medical grounds from Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (which had reunited Davis, Crawford, and director Robert Aldrich) after only four days of work on location in Louisiana could be chalked up to the perfectionist germaphobe’s terror of  Davis’s rejecting treatment: refusing Crawford’s gifts; criticizing Crawford’s overly solicitous relations with the crew; and general bullying and pranking. Bette Davis biographer Charles Higham insists that purported omnisexual MGM starlet Joan Crawford had been in love with the Queen of Warner Brothers since the 1930s. This idea apparently had horrified the Boston-­born, self-­styled Puritan Bette Davis. Another theory is that Davis had an unrequited romantic flirtation with the dashing Franchot Tone, Davis’s costar in Dangerous, in 1935. Joan Crawford, just divorced from Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (son of silent-­era film star Douglas Fairbanks), 234

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6. 7. 8.

9.

had apparently set her sights on Tone, whom she soon after married. The most notorious, highly cited anecdote about the Crawford-­Tone courtship claims that Crawford invited Tone to her mansion where, in the solarium, on a fur-­covered lounge, she revealed herself to him while completely naked. A less succulent speculation might be that Crawford simply was haunted by Blanche Hudson’s on-­and off-­screen experience of  being dragged, dropped, and kicked by Davis’s Baby Jane and, getting a brief taste of this treatment on the Hush, Hush set, she changed her mind about subjecting herself to a second collaboration. See Charles Hingham, Bette: The Life of Bette Davis (New York: Dell, 1982), 262–­270. See Donald Bogle, quoted in Latoya Taylor, “Maidie Norman—­Bennett College for Women,” hbcuconnect.com, December 19, 2012. See Loretta Green, “What Ever Happened to Maidie Norman,” San Jose Mercury, November 8, 1995, Local Section, 1B. See B.D. Hyman, My Mother’s Keeper (New York: William Morrow, 1985). Hyman believed her mother was dying when she released her memoir for publication. Unfortunately for B.D., Davis recovered from the mastectomy and stroke that nearly killed her and read the book. Their relationship was destroyed forever. In her essay on the racialized politics of the aesthetic in contemporary film and television, Racquel Gates highlights the terrified face of Get Out’s protagonist Daniel Kaluuya (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017). To many observers, this depiction evokes negative images of African American men expressing intense emotion for comic effect. Gates cites conservative Black film critic Armond White, who condemned this tableau as reminiscent of Black characters portrayed as “wide-­eyed buffoons.” But Gates, whose work on reading such “negative” images as complex, multivalent, and potentially subversive has been generative for my project, sees more in this moment than does White. She argues that the single tear falling down Kaluuya’s face could also inspire “empathy, rather than ridicule, from an audience.” Along these lines, the pale, weeping jack-­in-­the box featured in the opening of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? might be considered as a sympathetic image, a precursor to the whiteface masquerade performed by Bette Davis’s character; and it, too, could suggest that Jane’s so-­called monstrosity might also be worthy of fellow feeling. See Racquel Gates, 235

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“The Last Shall Be First: Aesthetics and Politics in Black Film and Media,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2017): 38–­42, 38, quoting Armond White, “Return of the Get-­W hitey Movie,” National Review, February 24, 2017. 10. The trope of “the toy come to life” has a long literary history beginning with the German Romantics, particularly the tales of Hoffmann and his terrifying story “The Sandman,” about which Freud has written in his famous essay on “The Uncanny,” 1919. See Sigmund Freud, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin, 2003). 11. We may also understand this mirror scene as prefiguring the ultimate splitting of  Jane herself into a mechanistic puppet to her father’s master and the feeling human being who has suffered the buffets of fortune at the hands of Hollywood’s whimsical taste. 12. See The Cambridge Guide to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Cindy Weinstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), for a range of essays exploring the afterlife of Uncle Tom. 13. Eric Lott and other historians of Blackface minstrelsy have argued that this mode of racial masquerade actually originated in the North in the music and dance of free Black dockworkers and teamsters who claimed to have been inspired by watching the performances of enslaved Southern plantation laborers. In fact, these scholars note, such free people actually may have had no exposure to enslaved Black bondspeople and their “inspiration” may constitute something closer to racial phantasmagoria—­ the free Black invention of  bound Blacks’ creative expression. The origins of minstrelsy, in other words, unfold across a chain of transmission that involves at least as much imagination as it does imitation. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 14. In this dynamic, the devouring figure masks her role and claims the status of victim. 15. Aldrich offers several shots of the kitchen in which Davis’s Jane prepares Blanche’s meals; most striking in these chaotic scenes is evidence that Jane has been baking: bags of flour and a sifter stand in the foreground of the worktable; or is Jane creating her facial makeup at home? Davis commissioned her longtime makeup man, Perc Westmore, to concoct a white mask that she could apply every day of shooting without washing 236

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it off. He experimented on the stove in his home kitchen and came up with a recipe that Davis applied for twenty-­eight straight shooting days. This was her own contribution to the horror of the picture, a whiteness she consciously made central to her character. Like her use of  heavy white powder in The Little Foxes, Davis’s Baby Jane whiteface is an exam­ ple of the star working as writer-­auteur. 16. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 17. In Batson v. Kentucky, 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that the defen­ dant could make a prima facie case for purposeful racial discrimination in jury selection by relying on the record, and that a state denied a Black defendant equal protection when it put him on trial before a jury from which members of his race had been purposely excluded. https:// www.uscourts.gov/educational-­resources/educational-­activities/facts -­and-­case-­summary-­batson-­v-­kentucky. 18. Thanks to the late Robert A. Ferguson for this suggestion about the potentially largest implications of Elvira’s statement. 19. As Maidie Norman had guest-­starred on the Amos ‘n’ Andy radio program, among other dispiriting professional experiences, she certainly knew about demeaning, phantasmagoric “Black” dialect. See her interview in Green, “What Ever Happened to Maidie Norman.” 20. As I mentioned in chapter 2, Hattie McDaniel played Violet, the Black servant who raised from childhood Davis’s orphaned heiress in The Great Lie (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1941). The film is set in the present, on the cusp of the Second World War. Violet and Maggie, Bette Davis’s heroine, enjoy a version of the conventional adoring Mammy-­devoted white child dynamic seen in films like Gone with the Wind, a romantic racialist portrait: born from the conventions found in nineteenth-­century novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (1852), African Americans were imagined as nurturing, religious, musical, and devoted to the white people they served. McDaniel acts as a conduit for protesting George Brent’s character’s poor romantic treatment of her “little girl” in early moments of the picture. In one of the film’s most interesting later scenes, the eventual wedding of and reception for Maggie and Peter are not dramatized. Instead, as their friends depart, we see the newly married couple relaxing on the 237

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21.

22. 23.

24. 238

second-­story balcony of their Maryland great house. There, they preside as witnesses to their Black servants, who are celebrating their employers’ union with a twenty-­one-­inch multilayered, white-­frosted wedding cake, presumably baked by Violet, and the singing of traditional African American hymns and spirituals. The scene closes with a teenaged Black male soloist, sitting in the crook of a tree, serenading the couple with a ballad in which the speaker beckons his darling to return to him. As the young singer concludes the verses, he is escorted down from the tree and out of the frame by his parents, a beaming Black couple. I understand this tableau according to Kwynn Perry’s paradigm of white curation of Black musical performance, with Davis and Brent viewing, as if the audience at a concert, a displaced version of their own romantic experience. Maggie’s “Blacks” are most cinematically valuable when they give compelling expression to her own, somehow less accessible, emotional states. Orlando Patterson’s notion of fictive kinship seems particularly applicable here. Members of the Hall Johnson Choir, the nation’s most distinguished and best-­known African American vocal ensemble, who remain uncredited, play members of Maggie’s Black servant community. They perform as the enslaved field-­workers’ choir in Jezebel, as well, also uncredited. See chap­ ter 3, note 44, for an extended discussion of  Hall Johnson and his ensemble. This theme was picked up by American acolytes like William Wells Brown in The Power of Sympathy (1789), the first American novel. See William Wells Brown and Hannah Webster Foster, The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette (1789 and 1797; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), 69. Aldrich puts the spotlight on perverse production and consumption of all sorts, from bad works of purported art like Baby Jane’s vaudeville act; Jane’s 1935 film performances; Blanche’s early, saloon-­dancer movie vehicles; and vulgar dog food commercials on TV. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? also features cheesy artifacts of material culture such as the Baby Jane doll; and the portraits on velvet of women’s heads displayed in the Bateses’ living room. And one cannot overlook the director’s literalization of this trope with the dead parakeet and dead rat lunches. See Julia Stern, “Excavating Genre in Our Nig,” American Literature 67, no. 3 (September 1995): 439–­466; and “Live Burial and Its Discontents:

notes to chapter five

Mourning Becomes Melancholia in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century’s End, ed. Peter Homans (Charlottesville: University of  Virginia Press, 2000), 62–­82. 25. In the film’s other important scene of perverse consumption, the obese Edwin Flagg (Victor Buono, in his debut), whom Jane has hired to be the piano-­playing muse of  her comeback, devours cornflakes from index-­ card-­sized individual boxes sold in packages of twelve. The gigantic Flagg, who looms over his standard-­size kitchen table like an ogre from a fairy tale, does not, like most American cereal consumers, pour milk on his breakfast; instead, he uses half-­and-­half, which on the dairy continuum is close to heavy cream. The year 1962 obviously marked a moment well before the dawning of current fears and confusions about cholesterol, saturated fat, caloric excess, and so on. That his apparently enormous appetite is not sated in any conventional fashion, that is, with a bowl or two of cereal poured from a large carton of cornflakes, but apparently requires a voluminous supply of individual servings (at least ten empty boxes flank his bowl and a quart of cream), affords us an illuminating window onto the habits of this outsized figure. The next moments confirm that he is, in fact a mother-­plagued beast of a man: infantile in his voracious neediness; narcissistically self-­ absorbed; and possessed of bottomless greed for both children’s food and fame and fortune. Indeed, when he comes to the Hudson mansion for tea to be interviewed for the position of Jane’s accompanist, Davis hands him a plate of finger sandwiches. Accepting Jane’s offering and taking the dish, Flagg devours its entire contents, approximately twenty small sandwiches or more. The man is without a clue that genteel convention would have him break bread with his potential employer in a semblance of human communion, featuring reciprocity, a shared plate, and pauses to speak between swallows. Edwin Flagg’s obscene tableside behavior suggests that he, like Jane, just might have been raised by wolves. And, like Blanche’s oversized car, this monster, too, must be fed. 26. We must presume that Jane has moved Elvira’s corpse to the car so that she can dump it far away from their Hollywood home but that Aldrich chooses not to represent this scene. 239

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27. As I have noted, the ventriloquistic chain of transmission here is complicated: Crawford’s voice, pretending to be Davis’s imitating her as Blanche, is then recorded and played, with Davis lip-­synching Crawford’s phrases, all the time doing a wicked imitation of Crawford’s “nicey-­nice” facial expressions. 28. I am grateful to Bonnie Honig for suggesting this alternative reading, which she described as a “democratic/populist revolutionary” interpretation during the question-­and-­answer section of the American Cultures Colloquium at Northwestern University lecture from which I’ve developed this chapter. 29. Accordingly, Bette Davis/Jane’s whiteface would echo the French derivation of  Joan Crawford/Blanche’s name, white. Chapter six 1. The Watermelon Woman (dir. Cheryl Dunye, 1996) is the first film inspired by Black women actresses in early Hollywood. Theresa Harris, who remained known if not celebrated beyond the Golden Age, constitutes the tip of this figurative iceberg. Dunye’s premise, based on her own experience doing research for a college film class, is to resurrect for history the work of this cadre of forgotten female African American movie stars–­ manqué. Her independent film dramatizes this quest and opens up the cultural conversation that eventually leads to Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark nearly a decade later. 2. See Bette Davis with Michael Herskowitz, This ’n That (New York: Berkeley Books, 1987). Photos unpaginated. See the second photo insert, pen­ ultimate image. 3. See Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 112. 4. All these films are shot in black and white, of course. But none of the corked-­up white performers wears makeup as dark as does Bette Davis in the 1978 Blackface photo published in This ’n That, n.p., second photo gallery, penultimate image. 5. See Martin Shingler’s collection of Bette Davis tributes: http://www .martinshingler.co.uk/?p=856. 6. See Kathryn Sermak, Miss D. and Me: Life with the Invincible Bette Davis 240

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

(New York: Hachette, 2017). Davis devotes two paragraphs to White Mama in This ’n That, which includes high praise for Ernest Harden Jr.: “White Mama was an agonizing picture to make: the story of a white woman and the abandoned Black ghetto youth she befriends, played superbly by Ernest Harden, Jr.” (66). I spoke by telephone with Mr. Harden on October 13, 2019. Until we connected through the fortuity of the Bette Davis Tribute, I had only a very small cache of materials relating to his career, culled from miscellaneous boxes in the Warner Brothers Archives at the University of Southern California. These loose papers lacked details of publication, particularly an undated Sunday newspaper magazine story written by Leonard Pitts Jr., possibly for the Miami Herald, where he was a staff writer, in 1980. Mr. Harden suggested that I think about Davis’s faux pas as I might of the misstatements of contemporary presidential candidates on the campaign trail in the 2020 presidential primary race. One regretted stupid remarks made in the heat of the moment, but none of them was disqualifying, he believed. Carole Lombard had been married to William Powell; her second husband was Clark Gable. While I don’t have enough information to determine whether the reshuffling of that triangle had anything to do with the setting of the Colonial House, Hollywood romance and heartbreak seem to have been in its air in the 1930s and early 1940s. See Brian Kellow, “Stage Fright,” Opera News 79, no. 1 (August 2014), www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2014/8/Features /Stage_Fright.html. Thanks to Martin Shingler, press reader’s report, 6. In her seminal and groundbreaking study The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977), literary historian Ann Douglas wrote that “sentimentalism may be described as the political sense obfuscated or gone rancid” (254). Forty years after the publication of Feminization and despite her powerful essays preceding the texts of the Penguin editions of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple, introd. Ann Douglas (New York: Penguin, 1991), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, introd. Ann Douglas (New York: Penguin, 1981), Douglas continues to be criticized for a purportedly anti-­sentimental stance. Nevertheless, a younger cadre of scholars is making the case for her centrality as a public intellectual: see Kevin 241

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12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

242

Pelletier, Claudia Stokes, and Abram Van Engen, “The Last Cleric: Ann Douglas, Intellectual Authority, and the Legacy of  Feminization,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists (Spring 2019): 185–­208. See Davis with Herskowitz, This ’n That, 66. This honor allowed a designer to show at the Louvre with the other artists already admitted to the exclusive association. When asked about the significance of  buttons to his aesthetic, the designer explained that his grandmother, Ethel Rainey, the most stylish woman he knew, began to mend the lost buttons from his shirts by sprinkling and sewing on mismatched, colorful substitutes. Kelly attributes his joy over buttons and bows to Rainey’s early influence. He also credits his grandmother for his early exposure to Vogue magazine, which she brought back from her work cooking in the homes of rich white people in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where the Kellys lived. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Should Blacks Collect Racist Memorabilia?,” originally posted in The Root, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african -­americans-­many-­rivers-­to-­cross/history/should-­blacks-­collect-­racist -­memorabilia/. See David Pilgrim, “The Golliwog Caricature,” Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, November 2000, edited 2012, https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/. Several early Hollywood film shorts featured Black actors devouring watermelon. The best known is Thomas Edison, Watermelon Contest (1896), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0BtFa1MV1Y; see also James H. White, Watermelon Contest (1900), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =0dm8jhzuRfQ. African Americans toiling under slavery who were allowed to have their own kitchen gardens frequently cultivated watermelon. Those enslaved cotton workers struggling to make their daily  weight quotas would sometimes hide watermelons at the bottom of their baskets to amplify the apparent volume of their small crop. Enslavers were often caught out at the end of a harvesting season when their rate of production seemed incongruent with the daily yields that had been recorded. After Emancipation, watermelon was one of the first varieties of produce free men and women typically sold at market. See William R. Black, “How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope,” The Atlantic, December 8, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/national /archive/2014/12/how-­watermelons-­became-­a-­racist-­trope/383529/.

notes to chapter six

For a searching exploration of the ethical questions raised by this pastime, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Should Blacks Collect Racist Memorabilia?” Gates confesses that he amasses African American ephemera himself, describing the particular “treasures” curated in the Sable Images Shop in Los Angeles, which specializes in such artifacts. Gail Deculus-­ Johnson, the shop’s owner, has created a pamphlet that she hands to all of her customers. Gates asked her, “ ‘[Since] some items are disturbing, offensive and hard to believe, [if you collect and display them] are you creating these images yourself?’ Her pamphlet answers: ‘No, definitely not,’ since the store ‘contains astounding mementos reflecting true lives of people of African descent,’ including all that African Americans have suffered through visual media, ‘depictions [that] are a testimony of life in the past,’ including ‘the “good, bad, and ugly.” ’ And in response to whether ‘these politically incorrect depictions’ are, in fact, ‘teaching racism,’ the pamphlet answers that ‘displaying memorabilia as part of a home, no matter how painful it may seem, is ensuring that each one teach one and that history must not repeat itself.’ ” For the groundbreaking work of  Black sociologist David Pilgrim, and the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia he created and curates at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, see Amy Robinson, “A Museum Teaches Tolerance Through Jim Crow,” All Things Considered, April 30, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/04/30/151697195/a-­museum -­teaches-­tolerance-­through-­jim-­crow. 18. In Mr. Skeffington, Fanny’s Jewish financier husband Job gives daughter Fanny a Sambo doll, black-­faced and made of cloth, before departing to fight in World War I. The toy is based on the character from Helen Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), set in India and involving the battle of a Black child against four tigers, whom he defeats. Sambo, like the “pickaninny,” had already “gained currency in America as a Black archetype, particularly, a Black servant who was loyal and contented.” See David Pilgrim, “The Pickaninny Caricature,” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, October 2000, Ferris State University, updated 2012. On one level, the doll is a conventional toy, fashionable among the white upper class of the W W I era: its owner plays the part of a wee imperialist controlling the fate of a young subaltern. On another level, Sambo is an abject figure and, as such, makes a fitting childhood 243

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companion to a little girl whose Jewishness will prove more socially problematic than the WASP status she inherited from her mother. Thanks to Marianne Tatom for bringing Mr. Skeffington’s Sambo doll moment to my attention. 19. See Robin Givhan, “Patrick Kelly’s Radical Cheek,” Washington Post, May 31, 2004; and Kathryn Sermak with Danielle Morton, “Bette Davis and Patrick Kelly Made Perfectly Odd Pal,” The Daily Beast, September 18, 2017. 20. Accounts differ as to whether Kelly and his life and business partner Bjorn Amelan knew in advance that their mystery guest was to be Bette Davis. Sermak believes that the couple was genuinely surprised when Davis walked in the door; other writers imply that the pair had deduced from clues that Sermak’s elderly relative from California was not just any random classical Hollywood actress. 21. Feminist journalist Gloria Steinem had interviewed Patrick Kelly on the Today Show and been so excited by Kelly’s work that she called her friend Linda Wachner to introduce them. The 1987 Warnaco deal transformed Kelly’s business, allowing him to branch out into sportswear, jeans, and more. But when Wachner discovered in the fall of 1989 that Kelly had been hospitalized with AIDS-­related complications, she realized that he would not live to fulfill the terms of the contract and terminated the agreement. Kelly died on January 1, 1990. Steinem would give a beautiful eulogy for Kelly at his memorial service in 1990. See Margo Hornblower, “An Original American in Paris: PATRICK KELLY,” Time, April 3, 1989. 22. Martin Shingler, email communication with the author, July 16, 2020. 23. Sermak describes “zipping Miss D. into her Patrick Kelly” and witnessing a miracle of energy infusing her mentor. See Sermak, “Odd Pals.” 24. See The Film Club, in The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, introd. Werner Sollers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 174. 25. Kennedy would travel to Ghana and Rome with her husband and young son in her early married days. Her second child was born in Italy, which she documents with a photo of the newborn Adam. Joe, her first child, appears in a picture with his parents when he is about three. Kennedy offers an early example of a feminist artist combining creative endeavor—­surre­ al­ist works—­with more traditional cultural expectations—­child-­rearing. 244

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26. Kennedy explains how the duchess of Hapsburg became a recurring figure in her dramas: “Duchess of Hapsburg ( Juarez): In the Paul Muni movie I saw at the Symphony, I was struck by the Duchess of  Hapsburg as played by Bette Davis. In 1957 my husband, son, and I visited the Chapultepec Palace, where the Hapsburgs had lived. I bought many postcards of the palace and the Duchess of  Hapsburg and saved them. One day, the Duchess of Hapsburg would become one of my characters’ most sympathetic alter egos or selves. At the time in Mexico there seemed something amiss about European royalty living among the Aztec culture. European royalty in an alien landscape. Soon my Duchess of Hapsburg would exist in an alien persona, that of the character of the Negro writer.” See Kennedy, The People Who Led Me to Write My Plays (New York: Knopf, 1987), 96–­97. 27. Thomas Beard, a film curator for Lincoln Center and writer for the online film journal The Current, interviewed Adrienne Kennedy by email in preparation for a retrospective of Kennedy’s work at Artists Space. The show was postponed as a result of the COVID 19 pandemic, but Beard published the interview as an installment toward the future event and celebration. Beard wrote that we often think of the best filmmakers as having a signature style that can be traced across their filmographies, offering a through-­line, but actors bring another, rather indisputable kind of continuity from movie to movie: their faces. Even if we suspend our disbelief, on some level their other performances are still there with them, bleeding into the film we’re watching. Like you said, Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo is your childhood friend from Shop Around the Corner.

Beard’s insight echoes my notion that great stars function as auteurs of sorts, with their faces and physical repertoires serving as their “signatures,” to borrow the terminology coined by theorists André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, and Andrew Sarris, who introduced auteurism to American film critical and scholarly audiences. Kennedy’s response to Beard’s ideas sums up her thinking about the power of movie stars as enablers of dreams and identifications for the characters in her plays: “Love what you said about movies bleeding into one another. That is a power, isn’t it? A great power. Bette Davis: a lot of bleeding there . . .” 245

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28. 29.

30.

31.

246

See Thomas Beard, “A Romance with the Screen: Theater Legend Adrienne Kennedy Looks Back,” June 10, 2020, https://www.criterion .com/current/posts/6968-­a-­romance-­w ith-­the-­screen-­theater-­legend -­adrienne-­kennedy-­looks-­back (my emphasis). Great thanks to film scholar Nick Davis, who shared this article with me. This theme extends to the butterflies on Davis’s Charlotte’s borrowed cape, what Henreid’s Jerry calls her “fripperies.” Interestingly, while Olive Higgins Prouty, the author of the novel on which the picture is based, is fascinated by questions of gender and invested in poking at the Boston Brahmins of  her novel, racial issues remain invisible. The closest she comes is in imagining a series of  Irish American doctors—­Dr. Regan—­and servants, Miss Till, the unpictured seamstress, Hilda, and so on. In Dark Victory, Humphrey Bogart plays an Irish immigrant groom and stable manager. Geraldine Fitzgerald, an actual Irish émigré, portrays Judith Treherne’s best friend and companion. The remaining servants are all white, New England stalwarts. One could divide those Davis films in which she plays wealthy women into those including white servants and those featuring African American maids, butlers, grooms, citizens, or enslaved men and women. Dark Victory, The Old Maid, Now, Voyager, and Mr. Skeffington are set in New York, rural Vermont, postbellum Baltimore, and Boston and feature white domestic staff. Jezebel, The Great Lie, The Little Foxes, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? take place in antebellum and Jim Crow New Orleans, southern Maryland, and Los Angeles and feature enslaved Blacks or servants of color. Elin Diamond, “Mimesis in Syncopated Time: Reading Adrienne Kennedy,” in The Adrienne Kennedy Reader, introd. Werner Sollers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 132. In 1933 and 1941, Theresa Harris costarred in two films in which her roles as maid/sidekick in the former, and enslaved woman in the latter, were substantial. One thinks here of  Nottage’s refrain about “slaves [and maids] with lines” as best describing the extensive dramatic work Harris actually achieved in both Baby Face (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1933) and The Flame of New Orleans (dir. René Clair, 1941). In the first picture, Harris plays Chico, Barbara Stanwyck’s Lily’s companion, who toward the end of the drama

notes to chapter six

dons a maid’s uniform, part of the pair’s fiction of Lily’s genteel origins, as her friend sleeps her way up the business ladder. In the second, Harris is an enslaved maid and co-­conspirator Clementine, who labors for Claire, con woman Marlene Dietrich, who is trying to catch a rich husband in antebellum New Orleans. Harris steals the show and, remarkably, she is not made to speak in “Negro dialect,” as she does in Jezebel. Instead, she uses a patently artificial Southern accent, like Claire’s. (Dietrich disguises her native German tones by speaking in a baby whisper with a slight lilt. The result is a completely counterfeit intonation that amplifies that she is in masquerade as a European countess of sorts.) Harris’s enslaved milieu is largely that of  house servants and coachmen, with whom she attends the opera in a segregated box, which is positioned very near her mistress’s seats on a balcony level of the theater. Harris plays an extensive part in the film as the clever arbiter of Claire’s strategy and the diplomatic go-­between on missions to assuage the men competing for her mistress’s hand. But it is as if the picture cannot imagine a role for an inspired enslaved woman in the wake of  her mistress’s elopement with a sailor. Thus, the film renders Clementine invisible after her last scene at the wedding-­manqué. Claire has abandoned fiancé Charles at the altar and turns up on the sailor’s boat, represented only by a bare arm, tossing her wedding gown out a porthole. James Snead’s notion of African Americans as “structured absences” becomes literal at the film’s conclusion. See Snead, White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side, ed. Colin McCabe and Cornel West (New York: Routledge, 1994), 6. 32. Formally, Nottage’s play is more complicated and paratextual than I have indicated in this chapter. Most notably, she has created a twelve-­minute film, purportedly a “restoration” of remaining footage from The Belle of New Orleans, with scenes featuring Vera, Gloria, Lottie, and Anna Mae as Anna Maria, that is screened in act 2, scene 1. Viewers can find the film online on an active website belonging to the fictive Herb Forrester; I suspect he is based on Black film historian Donald Bogle. Two different websites are mentioned in the play text, with Forrester’s aforementioned site and that of Carmen Levy-­Green, another fictitious cinema scholar, whose site provides “background” information on Vera’s career, with filmographies, images, and clips. Nottage extends the reach of  her creations beyond the 247

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33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

248

stage and into cyberspace, a fascinating innovation on the limitations of dramatic art. Harvey Young quotes film scholar Sybil DelGaudio, who writes that Lou­ ise Beavers “went on force-­feed diets to increase her size and marketabil­ ity as an actress, and affected a Southern accent to mask her Los Angeles upbringing. . . . Beavers literally studied and ate her way into the stereotype. Her size became a metaphor for her own social immobility.” See Sybil DelGaudio, “The Mammy in Hollywood Films: I’d Walk a Million Miles—­For One of Her Smiles,” Jump Cut 28 (April 1983): 24, quoted in Young, “Vera Stark at the Crossroads of  History,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage, ed. Jocelynn L. Buckner (New York: Routledge, 2016), 122. See Ryan Jay Friedman, Hollywood’s African American Films: The Transi­ tion to Sound (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). See also Young, “Vera Stark at the Crossroads of History,” 120. Young, “Vera Stark at the Crossroads of History,” 120. Chris Jones, “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark at the Goodman Theatre,” Chi­ cago Tribune, May 6, 2013, quoted in Young, “Vera Stark at the Crossroads of History,” 120. See Jill Watts, Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood (New York: Armisted [HarperCollins], 2005), 66n34, quoting Gilbert Seldes, “Sugar and Spice and Not So Nice,” Esquire, March 1934, 60, 120; Pittsburgh Courier, September 12, 1942.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner), 129, 140–­41, 150 Addie ( Jessie Grayson’s character in The Little Foxes), 20, 22 African American press, 2, 160, 189n2; ANP (Associated Negro Press), 214n27; California Eagle, 85; Chicago Defender, 8, 85; Pittsburgh Courier, 85, 232n52; response to In This Our Life, 108 Aldrich, Robert (director), 2, 119; and US history and culture, 129 Alice Adams (dir. George Cukor), 33 All About Eve (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz), 11, 31, 128 All My Children, 215–­17n27

All This and Heaven Too (dir. Anatole Litvak), 31, 48 Als, Hilton, 100, 176, 226n27 Anderson, Eddie “Rochester,” 32, 34, 47–­49, 52, 57, 58, 96, 176, 219n33. See also Bat, Gros; Jezebel Anderson, Ernest, 9, 41, 225n19; anti-­racism activism of, 27, 35–­36, 39–­41; audition for In This Our Life, 104; as auteur, 105; background, 97–­99; Bette Davis’s praise for, 97; career postwar, 119; critique of the Los Angeles police, 40, 42, 119; and The Emperor Jones at Northwestern University, 99–­102; and the Hollywood Canteen, 84, 85; and In This Our

index

Life, 9, 27, 35, 86, 94, 105–­21; military service, 119, 229n40; and Northwestern University, 97, 99; and Parry’s soliloquy, 4, 27, 93, 105–­21; physicality of, 103–­4, 116; professional aspirations, 96; signature, 104; and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 39–­40, 119 anti-­racism, in In This Our Life, 27, 36, 80, 93–­121 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and racial identification, 209n38 Arliss, George, 26 Astaire, Fred, 51, 160 “aura” (Walter Benjamin), in In This Our Life, 89 auteur function, 245n27; Bette Davis as auteur, 237n15; Ernest Anderson as auteur, 105 Baby Face (dir. Alfred E. Green), 34, 246n31 Bad Seed, The (dir. Mervyn LeRoy), 129 Baker, Houston, Jr., “African American inhabitation of the minstrel mask,” 57 Baldwin, James, 172, 199n30; Bette Davis as “evil” incarnation, 231n50; Bette Davis “moved just like a nigger,” 46; The Devil Finds Work, 7, 46–­47; fantasy of Henry Fonda’s Blackness, 46; Go Tell It on the Mountain, 231n50; identification with Bette Davis, 7, 46; “Pop-­eyes popping,” 53; 250

response to In This Our Life, 7, 35, 80, 104–­6, 117 Bankhead, Tallulah, 12 Bargain with Bullets (dir. Harry L. Fraser), 215n27 Bat, Gros (Eddie Anderson’s character in Jezebel), 32, 51, 52, 55, 58–­ 64; kitchen table scene, 61–­62; as “trickster,” 64 Bat, Ti (Matthew Beard’s character in Jezebel), 32, 41, 51, 59, 68; horse “tap dance” performance, 53–­54, 56, 213n20; identification and connection with Julie, 52, 55–­56; popping eyes, 53–­54, 56 B.D. (Bette Davis’s eldest daughter). See Merrill Hyman, B.D. Beard, Matthew “Stymie,” 32, 35, 41, 52–­57, 176, 214n22; popularity of, 50; Warner’s racist abuse of, 49. See also Bat, Ti; Jezebel Beau Geste (dir. William Wellman), 28 Beavers, Louise, 68, 94, 144, 174, 234n3, 248n33 Belle of New Orleans, The (Lynn Nottage faux film within a play), 158, 175–­79, 247n32 Benjamin, Walter, 89 Bergman, Ingrid, 172 Berlant, Lauren, 10–­11 “Bette Davis Babylon” Facebook group, 12–­13 Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith), 3, 96 Blackface: masquerade and Bette Davis, 3, 158–62, 163, 170;

Index

masquerade and Joan Crawford, 206n23; minstrelsy, 3, 57, 59, 96, 134, 138, 144, 224n9, 236n13; and yellow fever, 65. See also Jezebel; Lott, Eric Black Film as Genre (Thomas Cripps), 35 Black Lives Matter movement, xi, 86, 188 Black Nationalism movement, 3 Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler), 217n27 Black Panthers, 4, 191n7 “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” (Manthia Diawara), 34 Black vaudeville, 49, 175, 177, 212n13. See also vaudeville Blanke, Henry, 49 Bogle, Donald, 41, 194–­95n18, 247n32 Bordertown (dir. Archie Mayo), 16, 31 Boseman, Chadwick, 215–­17n27 Boshes, Janet Claire (author’s mother): color pencil portrait, 29 Brooks, Peter, 11; and “excess” in film aesthetics, 197n26, 199n30 Buono, Victor. See Flagg, Edwin By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (Lynn Nottage), 158, 173–­77, 240n1. See also Mitchell, Gloria Cabin in the Cotton, The (dir. Michael Curtiz), 173 camp (style), 12, 19, 217n27; and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 124

Cantor, Eddie, 85 Carlota of Mexico (Bette Davis’s character in Juarez), 15, 172, 202n38; influence on Adrienne Kennedy, 245n26 Cavell, Stanley, 10–­11 Channing, Margo (Bette Davis’s character in All About Eve): vulnerability of, 11 Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 2, 213n18 Christopher Strong (dir. Dorothy Arzner), 80 Ciro’s Club (nightclub), 8, 85, 119 civil rights: and Bette Davis, 2, 4–­5, 9, 31, 35, 38, 158, 165; as cultural context, 3, 130, 197n26; and In This Our Life, 9, 109; and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 126–­27, 130–­31, 143, 155, 190n4 Civil War, 2, 24, 64, 127, 189n3, 213n18 Clay, Minerva (Hattie McDaniel’s character in In This Our Life), 32, 41, 88, 94–­95 Clay, Parry (Ernest Anderson’s character in In This Our Life), 40, 86, 94, 96, 97, 104, 224n11, 229n41; and cross-­racial identifications, 95; soliloquy of, 4, 27, 36, 40, 86, 93, 103, 105–­21, 207n27, 230n47; as “structured absence,” 105, 232n53 Cleveland, Pat, 168 Coburn, Charles, 86. See also Fitzroy, William Coffee, Lenore, and Mr. Skeffington’s script, 201n36 251

index

Collaboration, The: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Ben Urwand), 37 Collinge, Patricia, 20 Color Purple, The (dir. Steven Spielberg), 206n20 Confessions of a Nazi Spy (dir. Anatole Litvak), 50 Connelly, Mark (director), 8 Cooper, Gladys, 31 Cooper, Jackie (director), 3, 164 Cooper, Ralph, 36 Corn is Green, The (dir. Irving Rapper), 162 Crawford, Joan, 8, 10, 31, 35, 125, 128–­29, 129, 144, 172, 233n1; in Blackface masquerade, 206n23; contract with Warner Brothers, 27; as LGBTQ icon, 12, 198n29; relationship with Bette Davis, 149, 234–­35n5; style of, 139; and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 124, 145–­47, 149, 240n27 Cripps, Thomas, 35, 41, 109, 207n24 critical race theory, 41, 127. See also race; racial phantasmagoria; racist typecasting Crosby, Bing, 160 Cukor, George (director), 33, 47, 58, 128, 172, 179 Curtiz, Michael (director), 28, 90, 95, 127, 128, 173 Dangerous (dir. Alfred E. Green), 11, 31, 234n5 Dark Victory (dir. Edmund Goulding), 11, 128, 195n19, 223n3, 252

246n29; Judith’s costumes in, 80–­82 Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash), 206n20 Davis, Bette, biography: abandoning father of, 25; acknowledgment by Black community, 8, 85, 118; affair with Anatole Litvak, 48; affair with William Wyler, 35, 87; animus for Miriam Hopkins, 47–­48; battles with Jack Warner, 11; becomes Warner Brothers marquee star, 27; birthday funeral, 158–­60; co-­founds Hollywood Canteen, 38, 84; collaboration with Black actors in Jezebel, 49, 196n21; collaboration with Hattie McDaniel to entertain Black soldiers, 7–­8, 39, 97, 159, 208n36; complexity of her star image, 31; and dance, 102–­3, 198n28, 225n13; death of, 170; desegregates Hollywood Canteen, 8, 39, 84, 90, 165; election as first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 11; entertainer of African American troops, 8, 208n36; “Graham step by step,” 102–­3, 228n32; headstone inscription, 11; health problems (stroke, mastectomy), 158, 168; “I’d love to kiss you, but ahh just waaashed my haaay-­ah,” 173; jealousy of Olivia de Havilland’s affair with John Huston, 88;

Index

on Late Night with David Letter­ man, 169; leaves Warner Brothers in 1948, 27; liberal political leanings, 38, 159–­60, 165, 233n54; loan to RKO for Of Human Bondage, 26; loathing of In This Our Life, 83–­84; mentorship of Black actors, 7, 39, 97, 162; patriotic activism of, 38; “racial afterlife” of, 158–­77; relationship with Joan Crawford, 234–­35n5; relationship with Patrick Kelly, 166–­70; on the set of  White Mama, 164; support for William Wyler, 49; support of African American causes, 39; television work, 3, 39, 161–­66, 170, 233n2; on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, 3, 159, 170; Warner Brothers suspension and lawsuit, 27, 204n14 Davis, Bette, characters, 11, 31, 84, 224n11, 246n29. See also indi­ vidual character names Davis, Bette, cultural reception: by Black community, 162, 208n37; diverse audiences, 13; as LGBTQ icon, 12–­13 Davis, Bette, images: in Blackface masquerade, 159; at the Holly­ wood Canteen with Ernest Anderson and Eddie Cantor, 85; with Patrick Kelly, 166, 167; signing autographs for Black troops in 1942, 98; at sixteen, 25; with USO company in 1942, 99; in White Mama, 161

Davis, Bette, physicality and mannerisms of, 12, 26, 46, 91–­92, 102–­3, 116, 198n28, 228n32; and Blackness, 46, 210n3; body, 7, 9, 11, 46; Boston accent, 190n6; complexity on-­screen, 12; emotional range, 7; eyes, 9, 11, 53–­54, 115–­16; as Greta Garbo facsimile, 9, 26; nose, 25; voice, 10; whiteness of, 18–­19 Davis, Bette, racial feeling and representation, 3, 12, 114; and Blackface masquerade, 3, 158–­61, 162, 170; cross-­racial sympathies, 9, 47; ethnic films, 37–­38; racially and ethnically diverse costars, 27, 31, 38; and racial phantasmagoria, 97; racist gaffes, 2–­3, 97, 158–­61, 162, 170; representation of Jewishness in film, 37. See also Jezebel; Marsden, Julie; race; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; White Mama Davis, Harlow Morrell (Bette Davis’s father), 189–­90n3 Davis, Nick, 41, 160, 219n34 Davis, Owen, Sr. (Jezebel stage play), 47–­48 Dead Ringer (dir. Paul Henreid), 31, 205n16 Deception (dir. Irving Rapper), 31, 38 Defiant Ones, The (dir. Stanley Kramer), 234n3 de Havilland, Olivia, 8, 10, 204–­5n15, 222n1; affair with John Huston, 88 253

index

Devil Finds Work, The ( James Baldwin), 7, 46–­47 dialect, racialized, 6; in The Emperor Jones, 100–­101; in In This Our Life, 4, 94, 114, 230n47; in Jezebel, 3–­4; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 119 Diawara, Manthia, 33–­34 Dieterle, William (director), 15, 26, 172 Dietrich, Marlene, 8 Dillard, Amy Bradford (Margaret Lindsay’s character in Jezebel), 48; “washed-­out lil’ Yankee,” 55, 67; whiteness of, 67, 210n5. See also whiteness Dillard, Preston (Henry Fonda’s character in Jezebel), 52, 55, 66–­ 67; screenplay version of, 48 Doane, Mary Ann, 10 Doherty, Thomas, 15, 37 double consciousness, 42, 101; and Bette Davis, 12, 114; and Black resistance to racist stereotypes, 32 Douglass, Frederick, 56, 116–­17, 193n15, 220nn42–­43 Du Bois, W.E.B., 116, 172; on The Emperor Jones, 101. See also double consciousness Dunmore, Robert, 101, 226n28 Dunne, Irene, 10 Dyer, Richard, 41, 60–­61 Ebert, Roger (film critic), 4 Elvira. See Stitt, Elvira Emperor Jones, The (Eugene O’Neill), 227–­28n31; and dialect, 100–­ 101; Northwestern University 254

production with Ernest Anderson, 99–­102; original production, 99–­100; primitivism of, 102; and whiteness, 100 enslavement narrative, 127, 129, 142, 147, 153, 213n16. See also What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Errata (Dolores Hurlic’s character in Jezebel), 21, 67–­70 Erronens (Philip Hurlic’s character in Jezebel), 67–­70 Everybody Sing (dir. Edwin Marin), 160 Ex Lady (dir. Robert Florey), 128 facing scene: in In This Our Life, 111, 113, 118; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 132, 140–­42, 150. See also Lord and Bondsman dynamic Farrell, Henry (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), 119, 124, 130, 136, 144 Fashions of 1934 (dir. William Dieterle), 26 Faulkner, William, 129, 140, 150 feminism, 2, 14; and film theory, 10, 41 fictive kinship: in Jezebel, 20, 37, 76, 238n20; rejection of in Jezebel, 55; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 130, 142. See also slavery Film Club, The (Adrienne Kennedy), 171 Finkel, Abem, 48, 212n10 Fitzroy, William (Charles Coburn’s character in In This Our Life), and incest plot, 86, 90–­94

Index

Flagg, Edwin (Victor Buono’s character in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), 151; appetite of, 151, 239n25 Flame of New Orleans, The (dir. René Clair), 246n31 Fleming, Victor (director), 4, 8 Floyd, George, xi Fonda, Henry, 46. See also Dillard, Preston Fonda, Jane, 38 Fontaine, Joan, 8, 10 Foster, Stephen, 134, 145 Foster, William “Bill,” 36 Francis, Kay, 27 Franklin, John Hope, 172 Friedman, Ryan, 41, 59 Fritz, Meaghan, 71, 189n3 “fugitive performances” (Arthur Knight), in The Little Foxes, 20 Gable, Clark, 128, 162 Gaines, Jane: on Black disidentification with white stars, 47; on James Baldwin, 46 Garfield, John, 8, 37; as Hollywood Canteen co-­founder, 38 Garland, Judy, 160 Gaslight (dir. George Cukor), 172 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 56; and “racist memorabilia,” 167 Gates, Racquel, theory of the “negative,” 57–­58, 206n23, 235–­36n9 Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele), 235n9 Giddens, Regina (Bette Davis’s character in The Little Foxes), 18, 172, 203n3; autobiographical

aspects of, 88; racialized privilege of, 19; whiteness of, 18, 126 Gilpin, Charles, 100 Girl from 10th Avenue, The (dir. Alfred E. Green), 31 Glasgow, Ellen (In This Our Life), 35, 80, 87, 88, 92, 94, 95, 104, 105, 108, 109, 232n53. See also In This Our Life Gledhill, Christine, 10, 41 Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming), 4, 22, 27, 49, 58, 94–­95, 129, 138, 192n14, 205n15, 237n20. See also McDaniel, Hattie; racial phantasmagoria; racist typecasting Go Tell It on the Mountain ( James Baldwin), 231n50 gothic: in In This Our Life, 92; in Jezebel, 75; as “live burial” and “the unspeakable,” 204n7; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 124, 129, 132, 136–­37, 142 Graham, Martha, 91–­92, 102–­3, 198n28, 225n13, 228n32 Grand Hotel (dir. Edmund Goulding), 129 Grayson, Jessie, 20, 22, 204n8. See also Little Foxes, The Great Gatsby, The (F. Scott Fitzgerald), 135 Great Lie, The (dir. Edmund Goulding), 11, 31, 34, 38, 128, 237n20 Green Pastures (dir. Mark Connelly and William Keighley), 8, 58, 119, 219n33, 221n44, 228n36 255

index

Guerrero, Ed, 41, 75–­76 Hallelujah (dir. King Vidor), 36, 174 Haller, Ernie (cinematographer), 62, 64–­65, 76–­77, 111, 113–­15, 124, 218n32, 219n34, 228n32, 230n45. See also In This Our Life; Jezebel Hall Johnson Choir, 74–­75, 220–­ 21n44, 238n20 Harden, Ernest, Jr., 3, 39–­40, 158, 241n8; interview with the author, 162, 241n7; and racism, 165; and White Mama, 161–­66, 241n6 Harewood, Dorian, 162 Harlow, Jean, 10 Harris, Theresa, 9, 34, 36, 49, 144, 158, 174, 176, 214–­15n27, 240n1, 246–­47n31. See also Zette Hayworth, Rita, 8 Heller, Lukas, 119, 124, 130, 136, 144 Hellman, Lillian, 15, 203n5; Jewish background of, 18 Hepburn, Katharine, 8, 10, 31, 33; “moth costume,” 80 Hitler, Adolf, 15, 37 Holiday Inn (dir. Mark Sandrich), 160 Hollywood: aesthetics, 9, 26; and anti-­Nazism, 15; antisemitism of, 18; Black actors and, 3, 68, 95; disposability of female celebrity, 124; Jewish influence in, 15–­16, 18, 37; Production Code, 48, 66, 80, 86, 174; and racial phantasmagoria, 32–­33, 57, 175–­76; as represented in By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, 173–­77; as represented in 256

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 131–­32, 137; studio system, 36, 153, 202n1; systemic racism in, 31, 36, 50, 173, 214–­15n27 Hollywood and Hitler: 1933–­1939 (Thomas Doherty), 15 Hollywood Canteen, 8, 39, 84–­85, 90, 119, 159, 165, 195–­96n20, 223n5 Holocaust, 14, 233n54 Hopkins, Miriam, Bette Davis’s nemesis, 47–­48 Horne, Lena, 39, 84 Howard Gotlieb Archives, 40, 85, 98, 99, 182, 189–­90n3, 214n22, 219n33, 221n45 Huckleberry Finn (dir. Richard Thorpe), 8 Hudson, Baby Jane (Bette Davis’s character in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?): madness of, 11; physicality of, 145; as poor white peon, 153–­54; racism of, 126, 154; vaudeville career, 138, 154; and whiteness, 126, 138, 153 Hudson, Blanche ( Joan Crawford’s character in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), 124; as aristocratic plantation mistress, 153; “Blackening” of, 140, 149–­54; and Blackness, 140; car, 134–­35, 239n25; confession of, 150–­51; lynching, 126, 143, 149, 150–­51; parakeet, 146; relationship to Elvira, 126, 140, 149–­50 Hughes, Langston, on The Emperor Jones, 227–­28n31

Index

human parasitism, 23; in The Little Foxes, 24; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 134, 151 Humoresque (dir. Jean Negulesco), 37 Hurlic, Dolores: in Jezebel, 21, 67–­ 68; in The Little Foxes, 21–­22. See also Errata Hurlic, Philip: in Jezebel, 67, 68. See also Erronens Hurston, Zora Neale, 160; “cuttin’ the monkey for the white folks,” 53 Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (dir. Robert Aldrich), 205n15, 234–­35n5 Huston, John, 3, 35, 48, 70, 224n10; affair with Olivia de Havilland, 88; and In This Our Life, 80, 91, 92, 105, 109, 222n1, 232n52; and Jezebel, 70, 78, 218n32, 224n10; radicalism of, 94 ideological reversal: in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 134, 151. See also Lord and Bondsman dynamic Ignatiev, Noel, 100 Iman, 168 Imitation of Life (dir. Douglas Sirk), 234n3 “immersion,” theories of, 41–­42, 112, 199n29, in Jezebel, 42, 211n6, 238n20 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), 56, 148 Ingram, Rex, 8, 118–­19, 194–­95n18, 224n6

In the Heat of the Night (dir. Norman Jewison), 234n3 In This Our Life (dir. John Huston), 3–­4, 11, 31, 80, 82–­121, 230n45; as allegory for the Old versus New South, 89, 92; anti-­racism of, 27, 36, 80, 93–­121; Black actors’ resis­ tance to racist phantasmagoria, 112–­13; Black response to, 35, 80, 107–­9, 117–­18, 232n52; “blood” theme, 86, 88; censorship of and Southern response to, 36, 106–­7, 207n27, 229n37; costumes and fashion, 80, 82–­84, 90, 222–­23n2; as critique of modernity, 89; cross-­ racial identifications in, 95; and dialect, 114, 230n47; and Hattie McDaniel as Minerva, 5, 32, 94–­ 95; and immersion, 112–­13; incest in, 86, 90–­93; and jailhouse scene, 105–­6, 111–­16; miscegenation in, 87, 94–­95; progressive racial politics of, 89, 111; publicity release on Ernest Anderson, 120; as a “race film,” 35, 117; racism in the script, 112; racist salary discrepancies of, 96; reception, 228–­29n36; Stanley’s physicality in, 90–­93; test screenings of, 80, 90 In This Our Life (Ellen Glasgow), 35 Israel and Palestine, 14–­15 Jackson, Rev. Jesse, 4 Jacobs, Harriet, 56, 148, 220n43; as “yallow” and “yellow,” 220n40 James, C.L.R.: obsession with Now, Voyager, 30, 205n17 257

index

Jazz Singer, The (dir. Alan Crosland), 160 Jeffersons, The, 165 Jezebel (Owen Davis Sr.): representation of sexuality in, 48; theatrical version, 47–­48, 221n46 Jezebel (dir. William Wyler), 10–­11, 31, 32, 34, 47–­78, 128, 158, 176–­77; abjection of the enslaved in, 51; anti-­racist critique, 58–­59; and Biblical resonances, 78, 222n55; “Blackening” and “Blackness” of  Julie, 47–­48, 50, 55, 64, 76–­78, 210–­11n5; “Carriage is coming!” sequence, 59–­60; chattel tableau, 56; dialect in, 2–­3, 52; fictive kinship in, 37, 238n20; and immersion, 42, 211n6; Julie’s costumes, 50–­52, 64–­67, 71–­72, 213n17; Julie’s expressive connection with Ti Bat, 55; Julie’s relationship to the enslaved characters, 52, 55, 75–­77; Julie’s sympathy with enslaved characters, 8, 27, 47, 55, 72; kitchen table scene, 61–­62; minstrelsy in, 53, 56–­ 57, 59, 213n20; Olympus ball sequence, 66–­67; performative resistance to racist stereotyping, 55–­57, 60; Preston’s stage play sexual history, 48; racial phantasmagoria in, 49; racial tableaux in, 20, 59; “Raise a Ruckus” musical interlude, 55, 70–­76, 221n49; reimagination by Lynn Nottage, 173–­77; representation 258

of slavery, 2–­3, 20, 22, 51, 60–­63, 204n9, 217n28, 218n32; romantic racialism in, 76; stage play by Owen Davis Sr., 47–­48; theatrical history of, 47; Ti Bat’s horse “tap-­dance” performance, 53–­54, 56. See also Julie’s wardrobe Jim Crow era, 59, 127, 170, 197n26, 205n15, 243n17, 246n29; and The Little Foxes, 19, 22, 24; and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 143, 151; and the work of Adrienne Kennedy, 171 Johnny Guitar (dir. Nicholas Ray), 139 Johnson, George, 36 Johnson, Noble, 36 Jolson, Al, 160 Jones, Grace, 168 Jordan, Michael B., 217n27 Juarez (dir. William Dieterle), 10, 31, 37, 172; as anti-­totalitarian political allegory, 15 Julie’s wardrobe (in Jezebel), 213n17; black and white “harlequin” dress, 51–­52, 63; red dress, 51, 64–­ 67, 219n34; riding costume, 51; politics of dress color, 60; white Olympus ball gown, 51, 55, 71 Kabuki makeup, 18–­19, 90, 126. See also whiteness Kaplan, E. Ann, 10 Keighley, William (director), 8, 58 Kelly, Patrick, 158, 166–­70, 244nn20–­21; Bette Davis as “muse,” 169; and “racist

Index

memorabilia” design elements, 167, 242n14, 242n16 Kennedy, Adrienne, 158, 244–­45n25, 246n27; Bette Davis’s influence on work, 171–­73, 245n26; and her mother, 172 King, Dr. Martin Luther, Jr., xi, 4, 164 Knight, Arthur, 20, 41, 57; “Black star dances,” 68 Koch, Howard (screenwriter), 87, 95, 105, 112, 229n39 Korber, Arthur, 18 Late Night with David Letterman, 168–­69 Letter, The (dir. William Wyler), 10, 27, 31, 38, 87, 128, 228n32; anti-­Asian racism of, 207n29; yellowface masquerade in, 38 Letterman, David, 169 Lindsay, Margaret. See Dillard, Amy Bradford Little Foxes, The (dir. William Wyler), 3, 84, 126, 172; exploitation of Black sharecroppers in, 24; fried chicken instead of biscuits, 21; Jewish reading of, 18, 203n4; and poor Black children, 20–­24; tableau of Black cotton workers, 23 Litvak, Anatole (director), affair with Bette Davis, 48 Lombard, Carole, 10, 162, 241n9 Lord and Bondsman dynamic (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), 15; in In This Our Life, 111, 114; in Jezebel, 59; in The Little Foxes, 24;

in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 126, 130, 150–­53, 153. See also facing scene; ideological reversal Lott, Eric, “love and theft,” 224n9, 236n13. See also Blackface; minstrelsy Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Eric Lott), 224n9, 236n13. See also Blackface; minstrelsy lynching, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 126, 143, 149, 150–­51 Mailer, Norman, 14 Malcolm X, 125, 172, 192–­93n14 Maltese Falcon, The (dir. John Huston), 94 Manning, Susan, 18 Man Who Played God, The (dir. John Adolfi), 26 Marked Woman (dir. Lloyd Bacon and Michael Curtiz), 31, 89 Marsden, Julie (Bette Davis’s character in Jezebel): “Blackening” and “Blackness” of, 47–­48, 50, 55, 64, 76–­78, 210–­11n5; dress, 50–­ 52, 55, 60, 63, 64–­67, 71, 213n17, 219n34; ferocity of, 11; as a fugitive, 63; relationship to enslaved characters, 51–­52; resistance to white cultural norms, 50–­51; sympathy for enslaved people, 8, 27; in the work of Lynn Nottage, 158, 174–­77; and “yallow gal” phantasmagoria, 48, 66, 210n3, 212n11. See also Julie’s wardrobe Marshall, Herbert, 20 259

index

Martin, Trayvon, xi Martinsen, Deborah, 18 Mayne, Judith, 10, 194n17 Mayo, Archie (director), 16, 212n10 McDaniel, Hattie, 7, 41, 50, 144, 173, 174, 222n1, 225n18, 228n36, 237n20; activism of, 32; as chair of the Negro Division of the Hollywood Victory Committee, 39; collaboration with Bette Davis to entertain Black soldiers, 7–­8, 39, 97, 159, 208n36; genius of, 32; in In This Our Life, 32–­33, 88, 94–­95; as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, 4–­5, 27, 32, 49, 58, 94–­ 95; photograph leading a corps of Hollywood Black artists, 40; photograph signing autographs for Black troops, 98; photograph with USO company in 1942, 99; resistance to racist stereotypes, 32–­34, 58, 176; salary of, 96, 173; studio contracts, 50, 94–­95; in The Great Lie, 34, 237n20 McDaniel, Sam, 34, 112; resistance in Jezebel, 34, 58–­59 McKinney, Nina Mae, 174 McQueen, Butterfly, 58; Malcolm X on, 192n14 “mechanical reproduction” (Walter Benjamin): in In This Our Life, 89; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 132 melodrama, 11, 197n26, 200n30; and camp, 12; and film studies, 199n30; and women, 10 260

Merrill Hyman, B.D. (née Sherry, Bette Davis’s eldest daughter), 13, 235n8; My Mother’s Keeper, 131, 235n8; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 125, 131 Method Acting, 48, 211–­12n9 Methodology, 41 Micheaux, Oscar, 36; and white support of “race films,” 36 Mildred Pierce (dir. Michael Curtiz), 58, 128, 172 Million Dollar Productions, 36 minstrelsy, 6, 34, 134, 176, 236n13; and Blackface masquerade, 3, 96, 134; in Jezebel, 53, 57, 59, 213n20; in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, 138, 144. See also Blackface; Jezebel; Lott, Eric; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? miscegenation, in In This Our Life, 87, 94–­95. See also slavery Mitchell, Gloria (character in By the Way, Meet Vera Stark), 158, 247n32; performance of whiteness, 174–­77 Montana Moon (dir. Malcolm St. Clair), 128 Montgomery, Lucy, 4, 190–­91n7 Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, A (Adrienne Kennedy), 171 Mr. Skeffington (dir. Vincent Sherman), 12, 15, 31, 128; Jewish response to, 202n36; Jewish thematics of, 37, 201n36; Sambo doll, 243–­44n18; and whiteness, 12, 127

Index

Muni, Paul (née Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund), 15–­16; as racial Rorschach, 16, 202n39 Muse, Clarence, 32, 99, 176 Musser, Amber Jamilla, 11 My Mother’s Keeper (B.D. Merrill Hyman), 131, 235n8 Nazism, as represented in Hollywood, 12, 38; antisemitism in Watch on the Rhine, 15; in Mr. Skeffington, 15 Nelson, Ham (Bette Davis’s first husband), 87 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, 30 Norman, Maidie, 2, 35, 41, 130–­31, 144, 190n4, 206n23; objection to racist dialect, 119, 130, 144, 237n19; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 126, 130–­31. See also Stitt, Elvira “Notes on Camp” (Susan Sontag), 12 Nottage, Lynn, 158, 173–­77; and Hollywood racism, 174 Novak, Peter, 14 Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper), 10–­11, 28, 29, 31, 38, 128, 171, 205n16, 246n29; and the work of Adrienne Kennedy, 158, 171–­73 Now, Voyager (Olive Higgins Prouty), 11, 246n29 Of Human Bondage (dir. John Cromwell), 11, 26, 31, 84, 86, 138 Old Acquaintance (dir. Vincent Sherman), 31, 48, 128 Old Maid, The (dir. Edmund Goulding), 31, 47, 128

Olivier, Laurence, 19 O’Neill, Eugene, 97; The Emperor Jones Northwestern University production with Ernest Anderson, 99–­102 Orry-­Kelly (costume designer), 51, 63, 219n34 Our Gang (dir. Robert F. McGowan), 50, 67 Our Nig (Harriet Wilson), 147 Parachute Jumper (dir. Alfred Green), 128 Parry. See Clay, Parry Patterson, Orlando, 23; and “fictive kinship,” 142, 238n20; theories of slavery of, 50, 55. See also Jezebel; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Payton, Lew, 49, 96 Penrod and Sam (dir. William McGann), 67 People Who Led Me to Write My Plays, The (Adrienne Kennedy), 171–­73 Perry, Kwynn, 41, 72, 112, 218n32, 221n47, 230n46; and “immersion” and “curation,” 72, 211n6, 238n20 Petrified Forest, The (dir. Archie Mayo), 31 Petty, Miriam, 32, 41, 160 Poe, Edgar Allan, 129 Poitier, Sidney, 40 Possessed (dir. Clarence Brown), 128 Possessed (dir. Curtis Bernhardt), 128 Powell, William, 162, 241n9 261

index

primitivism, 102. See also Emperor Jones, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The (dir. Michael Curtiz), 127 Prouty, Olive Higgins, 11, 246n29. See also Now, Voyager Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock), 136 psychoanalytic theory, 41, 191n9, 209n38 race: Blackface masquerade and minstrelsy, 3, 53, 57, 59, 96, 134, 138, 144, 158–­61, 170, 224n9, 236n13; and comedy, 34; cross-­ racial encounters and identification, 2, 5, 32, 42, 47–­48, 67, 72, 75, 95, 113, 143, 184, 209nn38–­39, 221n46, 221n49, 234n3; as cultural construct, 87; and film production, 36; passing, 175, 177; racial fantasy, 2, 5, 23, 42; racial inequality, commentary on, 22; racial injustice, 5; racial representation in Bette Davis’s films, xi, 4, 8, 5, 7, 34, 37, 75, 192n14, 209n38; racist memorabilia, 167, 243n17; racist tropes (golliwog, watermelon), 167, 242nn16–­17, 243n18; and reconciliation, 2, 131, 164; romantic racialism, 76, 237n20; and spectatorship, 42, 209n38; and White Mama, 164–­65. See also Blackface; In This Our Life; Jezebel; minstrelsy; racial phantasmagoria; racist typecasting; sympathy; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; White Mama 262

“race film” (Thomas Cripps), 35–­36, 80, 117 racial phantasmagoria, 2, 5, 23, 32, 42, 49, 55, 57, 62, 111–­12, 163, 216, 230n46, 236n13; Black resistance to, 42, 176; and The Letter, 207n29; and the work of Patrick Kelly, 167–­70, 176 racist typecasting, 3, 5, 31, 33, 174, 176, 194n17; the “buffoon,” 5, 33, 49, 58, 227n31, 235n9; the “maid,” 32, 58; the “mammy,” 33, 58, 94, 248n33; “Stepin Fetchit-­ism,” 31, 57, 97; the “trickster,” 24, 50, 64; troubled history of, 33–­34. See also Gone with the Wind Raines, Claude, 15, 37, 38 Randol, George, 36, 215n27 Reagan, Ronald, 165, 195n19 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (dir. Allan Dwan), 26 Redgrave, Vanessa, 38 Richardson, Samuel, 144 Ripley, Clements, 48 Rivers, Bobby, 93 Riviere, Joan, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” 127 Robeson, Paul, 100–­101, 176 Robinson, Bill, 56, 198n28 Rogers, Ginger, 51 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 3, 15, 38 Roosevelt, Theodore, 119, 208n36 Ross, Andrew, 12, 101, 200n32. See also camp Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown), 128

Index

Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 36 Scarlet Pimpernel (dir. Howard Young), 138 Sea Hawk, The (dir. Michael Curtiz), 28 Selznick International, 18, 50, 94–­95 sentimental novel, 5, 117, 144–­45, 191n8, 238n21–­22, 241n11 Sermak, Kathryn (Bette Davis’s former assistant and companion), 161, 166, 168–­70, 198n29 Sherman, Vincent (director), 15, 48, 127, 187 Sherry, Grant (Bette Davis’s third husband), 13 Sherry, John (son of Bette Davis’s third husband, Grant Sherry), 13 Shingler, Martin, 41, 43, 115, 162, 163, 169, 189n1, 196n21 Shore, Dinah, 39 Shumlin, Herman (director), 15 Silverman, Kaja, 10 Skeffington, Fanny Trellis (Bette Davis’s character in Mr. Skeffing­ ton), whiteness of, 12 slavery, 2, 37, 42, 50, 133–­34, 142, 147, 242n17; and allegory of the caged starling, 145; and dialect of “slavery times,” 130, 144; and Hollywood studio system, 153, 204n14, 204–­5n15; and human parasitism, 23–­24, 134; and ideological reversal, 134, 151; representation in film, 3, 62, 75; relationship to Jim Crow era, 20, 59, 197n26; as represented in Jezebel,

51, 60–­64, 69, 78, 204n9, 217n28, 218n32; as represented in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 145, 151; and the work of Patrick Kelly, 170. See also enslavement narrative; fictive kinship; Jezebel; miscegenation; social death Slavery and Social Death (Orlando Patterson), 55 Smith, Adam, 5, 42 Snead, James, 41, 77–­78, theory of “structured absences,” 105, 232n53, 247n31 social death: in In This Our Life, 105; in Jezebel, 50; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 149, 152; and yellow fever, 50. See also Patterson, Orlando; slavery Sondergaard, Gale, 27, 38 Sontag, Susan, 12 sorrow songs: and Parry’s soliloquy in In This Our Life, 116; and “Raise a Ruckus Tonight” in Jezebel, 71 spectatorship, theories of, 41–­42; African American spectatorship, 42 Stacey, Jacqueline, 41, 191n8, 191n9, 209n38 Stage Door Canteen, 38 Stanwyck, Barbara, 10, 12, 34, 246n31 Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (Miriam Petty), 32 Steen, Shannon, 100 Steiner, Max, 222n52; and Jezebel, 72, 74, 76, 77, 221n49 263

index

Stern, Julia, biography, 4, 14; absorption in Bette Davis’s oeuvre, 28; academic career, 5, 41–­42; 200n34; adolescence and youth in Winnetka, 13, 27; and All My Children, 216–­17n27; Black Panther fundraiser, 4; discovery of Bette Davis, 6–­7; Dodson family visit, 6, 57, 191n7, 192nn11–­12, 209n39; enchantment with classic Hollywood women’s pictures, 10; father of, 25, 28, 229n41; on generational responses to classic Hollywood cinema, 200n34; identification with Bette Davis as “little brown wren,” 26; and Jewish culture of the 1960s and 1970s, 14; Jewish identity, 4, 13, 227n29; liberal family of, 31; mother’s resemblance to Bette Davis, 29; Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel, 191n8; response to Bette Davis’s Blackface masquerade, 159; response to Hollywood fashion, 80; suspicion of racialized performance, 57; teenage reaction to racist phantasmagoria, 32, 42, 57; and Wellesley College, 13 Stewart, Jacqueline, 41, 209n38 Stitt, Elvira (Maidie Norman’s character in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?): elegant clothing of, 4, 40, 140–­41; “going downtown to see a man about jury duty,” 130–­32, 143; 264

murder of, 150–­51, 203n3, 239n26; progressivism of, 119, 126–­27, 143; relationship to Blanche, 126, 140–­ 46, 149–­55, 239n26 Stolen Life, A (dir. Curtis Bernhardt), 31 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 117, 129, 133–­ 37, 191n8, 237n20 Summerville, Slim, 26 Swing Time (dir. George Stevens), 160 sympathy, 5–­7, 28, 42, 133; in Bette Davis’s oeuvre sympathy, 8, 27–­ 28; cross-­racial sympathy 6, 8, 33, 108. See also Jezebel; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Talk of the Town, The (dir. George Stevens), 119 Temple, Shirley, 26, 56 That Certain Woman (dir. Edmund Goulding), 31 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), 53, 160 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Adam Smith), 5 They Made Me a Criminal (dir. Busby Berkeley), 50 Thorpe, Richard (director), 8 Timberlake, Stanley (Bette Davis’s character in In This Our Life), 11, 27, 80; and incest, 86–­87; wardrobe of, 80, 82–­84 Tom Sawyer (dir. John Cromwell), 67 Tonight Show, Bette Davis appearance on, 3, 159, 170, 195n19 Torch Song (dir. Charles Walters), 206n23

Index

Traherne, Judith (Bette Davis’s character in Dark Victory), 11, 223n3; costumes of, 81–­82 Trump, Donald, xi, 224n12 Tucker, Sherrie, 39, 84, 195–­96n20 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe), 129, 191n8, 237n20; “little Eva” and Baby Jane, 133, 138–­39, 150 Uncle William. See Fitzroy, William United Fruit Company, 18, 203n5 Universal Studios, 26 Urwand, Ben, 36–­37 Vale, Charlotte (Bette Davis’s character in Now, Voyager), 172; and melodrama, 11; resemblance to author’s mother, 29; self-­sacrifice of, 11 vaudeville, 31, 33, 49, 59, 69, 212n13; and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 124, 129, 131–­34. See also Black vaudeville; minstrelsy Voting Rights Act, 126, 130. See also civil rights Wachner, Linda, 169, 244n21 Wallis, Hal (producer), 49–­50, 211n8 Warner, Jack: anti-­Nazism of, 37; battles with Bette Davis, 11; contract with Hattie McDaniel, 50; loan of Davis to RKO, 26; scripts given to Bette Davis, 64 Warner Brothers Archives, 7, 21, 39, 49, 66, 103–­4, 106, 117, 182, 201nn35–­36, 202n35, 208n36–­37 Warner Brothers Studio: and anti-­Nazism, 15; contract with Bette Davis, 26, 64, 204n14;

employment of Black actors, 50; In This Our Life and capitulation to censorship racism, 36; lawsuit and suspension of Bette Davis, 27, 64; publicity release on Ernest Anderson, 120 Watch on the Rhine (dir. Herman Shumlin), 15, 31, 38; Jewish thematics of, 37 Watermelon Woman, The (dir. Cheryl Dunye), 240n1 Waters, Ethel, 39 Watson, Lucile, 38 Watts, Jill, 32–­33 West, Mae, 10 Westmore, Perc (makeup artist), 16, 90 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (dir. Robert Aldrich), 3, 11, 31, 84 124–­55; 1960s context, 124–­25; American theatrical history of, 128–­31; Baby Jane doll, 135–­36, 151, 238n23; Blanche as aristocratic plantation mistress, 153; Blanche and Blackness, 140, 149–­54; Blanche’s car, 134–­35; Blanche’s confession, 151–­52; crisis of sympathy, 133, 137; and domesticity, 137, 147; Edwin’s appetites, 151, 239n25; Elvira’s progressive role, 126, 130–­31, 143; Elvira’s relationship to the Hudson sisters, 149–­55; as enslavement narrative, 127, 142, 147, 153; and food, 146–­48; and the history of American 265

index

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (cont.) entertainment, 124, 127; Jane as poor white peon, 153; Jane’s childhood appearance, 133; Jane’s racism, 126; Jane’s whiteness, 137–­39, 236–­37n15; and “little Eva,” 133; and material culture, 238n23; nostalgic aesthetic, 135, 139; parakeet salad, 146; as racial morality tale, 130; rat lunch, 147; relationship of the sisters, 152–­53; themes of equality and freedom, 124, 133; ventriloquism in, 145, 149, 152, 240n27; white-­ faced jack-­in-­the-­box clown, 132, 235–­36nn9–­10; whiteface masquerade in, 137–­39, 153–­54, 235n9, 236–­37n15, 240n29. See also Lord and Bondsman dynamic; race; slavery; whiteness What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Henry Farrell), 119, 130 White, Walter (NAACP), 32, 58, 96 whiteface masquerade: in The Little Foxes, 237n15; in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 137–­39, 153–­54, 235n9, 236–­37n15, 240n29. See also whiteness White Mama (dir. Jackie Cooper), 3, 39, 161–­66, 170, 241n7; cross-­ racial understanding in, 163; racist attack on production, 164; themes of racial inequality and poverty, 165 266

whiteness: and Baby Jane Hudson, 126–­27, 137; and the Irish, 100, 246n29; in Mr. Skeffington, 12, 127; of Queen Elizabeth I, 19, 127; of Regina Giddens, 18, 126; social power and politics of, 19, 127, 153. See also whiteface masquerade Williams, Linda, “the American race melodrama,” 86, 199n30 Wilson, Harriet, 147 “Womanliness as Masquerade” ( Joan Riviere), 127 Women, The (dir. George Cukor), 58, 128 Wong, Anna May, 38, 223n3 World War II: and African American service, 3; and the production of In This Our Life, 84, 86 Wright, Teresa, 20 Wyler, William (director), 18; affair with Bette Davis, 35, 87; critique of  Bette Davis’s white make-­up in The Little Foxes, 18, 126–­27; “Fifty-­ Take Willie,” 54; interest in social problems, 204n11; and Jezebel, 48–­ 49, 218n32; and staircases, 228n32 yellow fever: in Jezebel, 50, 65–­67; as social death, 50; symptoms of, 219n37 Zette (Theresa Harris’s character in Jezebel), 52, 158; “Carriage is coming!” sequence, 59–­60; and the work of Lynn Nottage, 173 Zimmerman, George, xi