Warner Bros, page 11
Of course, Tom Powers has to die, but only after the tour de force of Cagney’s staggering cadenza in the pouring rain. Gangsters enjoy magnificent endings—get ready for Bonnie and Clyde. Death is Powers’s last great act, like King Kong on top of the Empire State Building—and those two rogues are equally out of control yet secure in our hearts. I don’t mean to suggest that Jack Warner, Zanuck, Wellman, and Cagney sat down and worked this out. Still, The Public Enemy is an anarchist exultation in which “law and order” is a forlorn concession to what we are supposed to think. Here we are, in 1931, at a time of devastated economy and diminishing hope, with an inspiring celebration of outlawry. Warner Bros is often thanked for its liberal sentiments and social concerns. But that is hogwash if you really inhabit Cagney’s energy in The Public Enemy. We are witnessing, and enjoying, a force of unhindered danger. That people demanded to see it was a sign of how the movies had uncovered our violence and despair.
All of which leads to the most notorious thing in the film. Tom Powers the mobster has a mistress, named Kitty, played by Mae Clarke. There is a breakfast scene: he is tousled, in pajamas; she wears a housecoat. It is plain that they have slept together, without much pleasure. Aggravated by her chatter, Tom picks up a half grapefruit and rams it in her face. Censorship passed this (though Will Hays was unhappy with the film), and there are viewers still who cheer and laugh at it, no matter that Kitty has done nothing to merit the attack. She has not betrayed Tom; she has not stolen from him; she has not even talked back to him. There is no back story beyond her and the grapefruit’s availability and Cagney’s restless need to do something and be somebody—to behave as if in a movie.
Zanuck said he had thought of the grapefruit; he dreamed it up in a script conference. But later on, the abused Mae Clarke supported Wellman’s claim that it had been his idea. The director admitted that he had not much liked the actress’s face, while being reminded of regrets over the third marriage on which he had just embarked. Others said it was folklore from some real gangster’s career. Mae Clarke regretted the incident: “I’m sorry I ever agreed to do the grapefruit bit. I never dreamed it would be shown in the movie.” There is even the chance—you can feel this on screen—that Wellman just told Cagney to do it without letting Ms. Clarke in on “the joke.”13
Here is a movie where men are slaughtered so casually we don’t keep count. But the grapefruit seems to smack our own faces. The scene hurts, and it disparages women as a whole. If the fruit had been used against Jean Harlow, who plays a cool society woman drawn to Tom’s danger, I suspect that shock would have been cut, because beauty and class were being assaulted and they were sacrosanct, whereas Ms. Clarke’s Kitty is seen as a drab and a nag.
There’s one more version that feels more reliable. It comes from John Bright, co-writer on The Public Enemy. The grapefruit was always in the script, he said, but Mae Clarke came to work that day with a bad cold, so she asked Cagney to go easy on her sore nose. The actor agreed, but when Wellman heard about their arrangement, he grabbed the gentlemanly actor. “Fuck her nose,” he said. “If it’s real, this scene will make you one of the biggest stars in the business. You give it to her, really give it to her.”
The actor pondered, and did it full force—you can see Clarke’s pain, and her hurt at the broken pact. As soon as “Cut!” was called, she belted Cagney in the face and called him a “double-crossing Irish no-good.” Then she slapped Bright, too—it’s his story.14
Poor Kitty is a sign of how little patience the Warners gangster films had for women. Jean Harlow looks interesting for a moment with Cagney, but then we recall how seldom he risked love stories on screen. That prospect was the one thing to still his energy—though his shy bemusement can be pleasing in a picture like The Strawberry Blonde, where his Biff Grimes (Cagney names are like jabs in boxing) is suspended between Rita Hayworth and Olivia de Havilland. One day on the set of The Public Enemy Harlow passed by and Cagney noticed her upright breasts. He kidded her about how she kept them that way. “I’m just going to ice ’em,” said Harlow.15 If only the film had more of that sparring.
But the idea of a prize dame for a rising hoodlum was strictly theoretical in the thirties—as late as the Al Pacino Scarface (1983), Tony scrambles to woo the sexy but cold Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), then promptly loses interest in her. In Little Caesar, as has been noted, Rico is hostile to women from the start. There are even interpretations that his character is gay. That’s a stretch for 1931, but it’s a sign of how thoroughly the studio neglected female characters. This is enough to prepare you for the great battles fought by Bette Davis (who was another kind of emotional intimidator, and who rarely took prisoners).
When Jack Warner talked about that grapefruit sequence, he managed to make it seem like a marketing strategy:
This brutal bit of business achieved a kind of grisly immortality, aroused endless resentment among militant feminists [Jack wrote this in 1965] and made “Czar” Will Hays stew in the office where he was being paid a huge salary to protect the movies from that sort of attack. I have no doubt that innumerable young lovers, discovering that their sweeties got a masochistic delight watching this rough stuff, adopted the grapefruit technique to get what they wanted. It may have been hard on Hollywood in particular and stubborn girls in general, but it sure was great for the grapefruit business.16
Facetiousness allied to cynicism: it’s the cocky attitude ready to trump Einstein on relativity. Just two years later, in the very funny Hard to Handle, Cagney plays a con artist who promotes marathon dance contests . . . and a craze for grapefruit! Warner Bros knew just what they were doing—and they wanted us to know, too. It’s a sign of the cheerful battle Warners (and every other studio) fought with censorship or high-minded theories of responsibility over gangster violence. There’s a brazen amorality that runs riot in Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. The sense of abandon is a little like the earliest rock and roll. In the same Hard to Handle (directed by Mervyn LeRoy), Cagney says the public is a cow that needs to be milked. That was us! And audiences were laughing at the jab.
Will Hays was indignant over gangster films. Howard Hughes made his Scarface (on a much bigger budget) just as Little Caesar and The Public Enemy (cost $150,000, ice included) were being made. Hays opposed Scarface and delayed its release until 1932. More than that, he imposed a subtitle on the project, “Shame of the Nation,” and required a scene where civic leaders and newspaper people discuss gangsterism and lecture us on what a terrible thing it is. (Director Howard Hawks kept this scene so flat he hoped audiences would guess it was an add-on to all the elegant scenes of slaughter.)
The public suffered such reservations, and interpreted them as humbug from a business that would do anything it could to sell tickets. The humble upstart who seizes power was a very winning fantasy—it matched the ascent of people like the Warners, who had gained social heights without education, class privilege, or old family money, and without abandoning the aura of eastern European Jewry. And all of this was happening at a moment when so many Americans were without the money to survive. So bromides rang out, and quite soon, with the coming of the Production Code, gangster films lost their rough edge. Cagney started to play hoodlums and rascals for laughs—and in time he became a hard-bitten, punchy gangster (Flicker Hayes) with Blondell as his ex-hooker sweetheart (He Was Her Man); a daredevil self-destructive (The Crowd Roars, Ceiling Zero); or on the side of the law itself, as “Brick” Davis in G Men. That gentrification of the gangster spirit would find its most unexpected hero in Humphrey Bogart, who in the thirties was just one of the small-part dirty rats Cagney had to dispose of.
Some of the wishful bromides came from honest hearts and citizens in Hollywood who donated to charity and did good works, no matter that their profits came from so many kinds of exploitation. At the time of The Public Enemy, the solemn Harry Warner—who reproved his stars if they sexually harassed secretaries—said, “Gangster pictures are not responsible for the wildness of youth, nor are there too many gangster pictures. . . . Gangster pictures properly presented should have a good effect. They are intended to point out the lesson that crime does not pay. With proper home training, they should assist in keeping kids from turning into delinquents.”17
You can see Jack’s grin and the swagger that urged, “You tell ’em, Harry! Give ’em hell.”
Bette Davis in The Letter—hated nearly every minute at Warners and made it fit for dangerous women
12
Bette v. Everyone
IT OFFENDED HIS BROTHER Harry, but Jack Warner had a clear-cut attitude toward females: there were those you married, and those you played around with. Don’t let them get confused. This worked, if you were in America, careless of old family attitudes, and if you were rich enough to pay the bills. To be “somebody” was a license to be out of control in the fresh fields of violence and sex.
Harry thought Jack’s policy lacked tact or taste; it was letting the family down. But Jack had another theory: that a guy in the audience often had his girl with him—a wife or a date—and he was solid about that tie. But that didn’t stop him dreaming about all the other pretty women Busby Berkeley had up on screen for one of his haremlike routines. The essential arrangement of all movies—our dark and their light—was to legitimize or condone fantasy. This could seem pretty, but it was a formula for sexism, a motif that would one day help undermine the American movie.
Joan Blondell was a case in point. I have made the claim already that she is the soul of one of the finest moments in Warners history, singing “Remember My Forgotten Man” in Gold Diggers of 1933, where the song is entrusted to her. She could sing, she could dance, she could handle a joke, be sexy, obedient, a pal. She did whatever was required, and didn’t ask the system for more. She had come to Warners with Cagney: they played together seven times, and their mutual fondness is plain. He said he’d have married her, if he wasn’t tied up already—not every star was so restrained. Jimmy the agitator was always goading Joan to fight for a better contract—and she was paid a fraction of what Cagney earned. But she resisted the advice; she really was as easygoing as she seemed on screen. She was the one girl who liked Jack Warner, and she did her bit, even during long shooting days when she was pregnant. She appreciated being at Warners; she had a feeling for a worthwhile show being put on for the crowd:
I related to shopgirls and chorus girls, just ordinary gals who were hoping. I would get endless fan mail from girls saying “That is exactly what I would have done, if I’d been in your shoes, you did exactly the right thing.” So I figured that was my popularity, relating to the girls. They just wanted more of the same thing. All you got were new clothes and new sets, but the stories were pretty much alike and I was the same type. But those early days of talkies were incredible, what with the soundproof camera booth and everything, I think that’s why they signed Cagney and me so fast, ’cause we just went through it like we were on a stage and they weren’t used to that. We were showing something different, something fast and to the point.1
The only bad fan mail Blondell received was when word got out that she had married Dick Powell in life—the actual shopgirls of America took it for granted that Dick must be married to his screen sweetie, Ruby Keeler. That was Joan’s second marriage. The first was to cameraman George Barnes (1933–36), who shot Footlight Parade and He Was Her Man, among many others. At Warners, she married within the studio family. Her passion, she said, would be number 3, Mike Todd (1947–50)—that was before he married Elizabeth Taylor (who hadn’t been born yet when Joan was signed by Warners).
Blondell was at Warners all through the thirties, and she had star rating, but no really prominent parts. Take Stage Struck, a Busby Berkeley film from 1936, made during her marriage to Dick Powell (1936–44). Blondell plays Peggy Revere, the lead in a new Broadway show that George Randall (Powell) is producing. She is also the show’s financial backer. But Powell is really soft on a younger, superior dancer (played by Jeanne Madden); Peggy is dropped and the kid gets her break. Madden had caught Jack Warner’s eye—she made just three films and ended up running a boarding house in Pennsylvania. Jack’s eye had neither memory nor conscience, but Blondell went on, year after year.
She rose as high as a chorus girl could go, playing what she called “whore-ladies,” who somehow knew much more about life than Joan. But Warners also had an instinct for lady-ladies, witness their promotion of Kay Francis. Francis is not well known today, and a lot of her work has dated badly. But her career needs to be understood as it worked in the 1930s, and it runs counter to the orthodoxy that Warners had no interest in women. Francis was from Oklahoma and a hard-luck showbiz family, but she always carried herself as ladylike. She had dark hair, soulful if not mournful eyes, and a rather pursed mouth that was maybe anxious over her genteel lisp. You only have to see her in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (at Paramount) to recognize her wit and her mischief. She might have gone in other directions.
But in 1932, Warners made a deal with agent Myron Selznick to take on her and William Powell as a sophisticated couple. Together, she and Powell made hits out of One Way Passage and Jewel Robbery. In One Way Passage, Joan Ames (Francis) has a terminal illness and Dan Hardesty (Powell) is a convicted murderer. They meet on an ocean liner, the site of a doomed floating romance. As directed by Tay Garnett and scripted by Wilson Mizner and Joseph Jackson, it is as hokey as it is effective. Francis had trademarks: a sad smile and an expensive wardrobe. Female audiences responded with regularity, and even if she was hardly in the Warners tradition, the studio paid her better than any other actress—her salary went as high as $5,000 a week. In Jewel Robbery (which is very close to Trouble in Paradise), Francis is a baroness with jewels and a wandering eye, and Powell is the gentleman thief who romances her. Powell soon moved away to MGM, but Francis became a Warners fixture.
She was as dependent on her clothes (by Orry-Kelly) as she was on scenarios that never doubted her romantic appeal. She was sometimes a professional woman—Mary Stevens, M.D., and The White Angel (in which she played Florence Nightingale). But she could stretch: she was a onetime prostitute trying to go straight in Mandalay; in I Found Stella Parish she is a famous actress with a guilty secret, on another ocean voyage; in Stolen Holiday, she is a fashion model who helps a rascal Claude Rains in his investment schemes; in Confession she is a famous singer who had a secret affair; and in The First Lady she is a woman who tries to seek the presidential nomination for her husband (played by Preston Foster).
This is a selection from more than twenty films she did at Warners. Kay Francis was practical about her status: she made a lot of money doing rather silly “Kay Fwancis” pictures. She wore the clothes and seldom caused trouble until at last she talked of suing the studio for mistreatment. That seems to have soured Jack Warner. She was one of a group of stars written off as box office poison (Katharine Hepburn and Garbo were others), and she was approaching forty. She was dropped at the very point when she was being considered for the dying Judith Traherne in Dark Victory—which was a Francis-type vehicle, until Bette Davis took charge of it. Francis left Warners, and Davis inherited her dressing room. And Davis is more important to this history than Cagney, just as she was a more radical screen presence.
There were times when Bette Davis lamented how fate had led her to Warner Bros, to Jack Warner and Hal Wallis, to a creative climate beset by male chauvinism. If only she had been elsewhere? I think that notion is humbug. Bette was looking for a battle, whether she could know that, or admit it. At any other studio, she would have become a problem, because her angry eyes needed to feel she was embattled and scorned. There are artistic spirits that can be crushed by kindness and understanding.
In which case, Davis was at exactly the right studio, where the battle lines would be drawn up early, and held to despite her success. Jack Warner was always of the opinion that Bette was neither pretty nor sexy—but where would she have been without that doubt? Even Hal Wallis once admitted to her that while he admired what she had done, at a personal level he really didn’t like her pictures.
All that outsider managed was two Oscars, nominations for Best Actress five times in a row in Hollywood’s richest era, and a lot of money made for Warner Bros on a string of films that can still be watched today with pleasure and surprise. And if she wasn’t simply pretty or sexy, maybe that was more radical than the allure of Cagney’s intimations of outrage. Jimmy and Bette were fellow marauders—rapists, nearly, to tender sentimentality—and the irony is that when they were put together on screen ( Jimmy the Gent and The Bride Came C.O.D.), it just didn’t work. Cagney was too polite, or intimidated, and Bette was too admiring or restrained. They both needed to be opposed. They were at the right studio, at home. (But just imagine her as Ma in White Heat, with a moaning Jimmy on her lap.)
The most important men in Bette’s screen life are those she loses, gives up, triumphs over, or kills. Like Judith Traherne, about to go out of focus at the end of Dark Victory, she doesn’t want to be disturbed. Show Bette a happy ending and she could really get nasty.
The very first words of Davis’s rueful memoir, The Lonely Life (1962), put us on alert: “I have always been driven by some distant music—a battle hymn no doubt—for I have been at war from the beginning.”2 She was from Lowell, Massachusetts, born in 1908, the daughter of a lawyer who left the family when she was a child. That put her very close to her mother, who was not just her best adviser but a real friend. She loved movies—Valentino and Mary Pickford—and then she lost her heart to the stage. It was only after sound had arrived that she found herself in Hollywood.
