Behind the Scenes: Now, Voyager (Rapper, 1942) with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid

Betty Davis is a towering figure in American cinema. And during her peak years at Warner Brothers, people would routinely describe her as the greatest actress in Hollywood. She represents a period of filmmaking, and specifically the woman's picture, that is incredibly important. And in addition to being revered critically, she was tops at the box office. To me, now Voyager is really peak Betty Davis. Her magnificent role in All About Eve may be better remembered, but now Voyager represents the pinnacle of her star persona at Warner Brothers, the pinnacle of her acting. The arc that she traces in this film is quite an accomplishment for an actress. But I seldom remember to sit and think, wow, what amazing acting, because I'm involved in watching Charlotte Vale become the person she was meant to be. She was brought to Universal in the early 1930s, and she had a contract there. And unfortunately, it was the worst possible studio for Betty Davis. Universal was a cheapskate studio. They didn't have a lot of A-list productions. Consequently, they didn't have a lot of meaty roles for actors. So Betty Davis arrived ready and eager, you know, to act her little heart out in her first pictures. And she found that mostly what they were concerned with was her appearance, which nobody really seemed to think was up to snuff. Now Davis, back East when she was acting in theater, had been accustomed to thinking of herself as what she was, which was a pretty young woman. However, when she got to Hollywood, she was competing with Hollywood beautiful, which to this day is not a normal kind of beautiful. Then when she actually was cast, she found herself not in leads. Instead, she would get secondary characters, ingenues. Betty Davis never in her life wanted to be an ingenue. She did her best with these roles, but they weren't suitable for her. So 1932 rolls around, and Betty Davis, she goes to Warner Brothers. She got good notices in The Man Who Played God, and she made a few interesting movies here and there. But even in her first years at Warner Brothers, they didn't quite know what to do with her. So the first time that she really got a part where she could show Hollywood what she could do was a movie called Of Human Bondage. She was loaned out to RKO for this part, very much against the wishes of Jack Warner. Jack Warner looked at the script, which was about this viperous cockney waitress named Mildred and how she ruins the life of a gentle painter. And he said, this is going to ruin your career. People are going to hate this character, and they're going to hate you because of it. And Betty Davis didn't care. She thought this was a real part. She wanted to be an actress. Not only that, Mildred's downfall involves a death scene, and Betty Davis decided to go for what the last stages of tuberculosis would really look like, with straw-like hair, hollowed-out eyes, sunken cheekbones. Nobody had ever seen anything like it in a death scene for an actress that young. And when the movie finally played for critics and audiences, everybody was rocked back on their heels. So Of Human Bondage was the breakout, the big before and after for Betty Davis. After that, in 1935, Betty won an Oscar for a movie called Dangerous. However, even so, she still felt like she was getting stuck in insignificant and trivial parts by the brothers Warner. So at one point, she actually said that she was going to accept work in England, which was a blatant violation of her contract. The Warner brothers sued. It all wound up in court. And the essential upshot was that Betty Davis lost. However, by being willing to go so publicly toe-to-toe with Jack Warner, who was a fearsome guy, and the Warners' legal department, which was really scary, Betty Davis earned a kind of respect from her bosses. They said, actually, that Betty Davis, when she announced she wanted to see Jack Warner, she was the only person that would make him actively nervous to see in his office. Anyway, she came back to Warner Brothers, and the fact is the parts did start improving. What can I do for you? I want to get some candid camera shots for a magazine story we're doing on your new picture, Jezebel. Jezebel in 1938 really marks the beginning of Betty Davis' peak years at Warner Brothers, and indeed for her career. In the 1930s and the 1940s, what Warner Brothers developed a particular skill in turning out year after year was the woman's picture. At its most basic, simple level, a woman's picture is a movie that revolves around a central woman character. And the movies themselves can vary across a number of different genres. They can be comedies, they can be romances. What Warner Brothers developed a particular skill in was the melodrama, often starring Betty Davis, who was definitely queen of the lot. And all of these movies really put their heroines through the wringer. Imprisonment, heartbreak, illegitimate birth, you name it. So Warner Brothers bought the rights to Now, Voyager, and the novel was written by Olive Higgins Prouty. She was also from a very well-to-do New England family. In 1922, she published Stella Dallas. Of course, it went on to be adapted with Barbara Stanwyck. However, Prouty's personal life was difficult, and she had had one daughter die in infancy already in about 1919. And then after the publication of Stella Dallas, another daughter, Olivia, who was less than one year old, died of encephalitis. And Prouty naturally was absolutely devastated. So the pressure of trying to be a writer while having children and guilt and extreme grief over the loss of Olivia all sort of culminated in Prouty herself having a nervous breakdown in about 1925. So she herself went to a sanitarium, not unlike Cascade in the movie, run by a Dr. Austin Fox Riggs. And Dr. Riggs, in retrospect, seems to have been a pretty forward-thinking man in a lot of ways. He sat down with Prouty and untangled what was really destroying her, which was the tension, in many ways, between her private life and her yearnings to be creative. And what he told her was, he said, you need to have a space that is yours alone to write. So what she wound up doing was getting an office where she could write. And this council and this stay at the sanitarium did a great deal to repair Prouty's life. And she continued to turn out more novels, four of them about the Vale family of Boston, Massachusetts. And this one, Now Voyager, coming out in 1941. So Warner Brothers bought the rights. At that time, Betty Davis was coming off of a movie called In This Our Life, directed by John Huston. She heard that they were discussing Now Voyager, a novel that she knew. And they weren't really talking about her for the main role. First, they were talking about Irene Dunn. Then they were talking about Ginger Rogers. And then they were also talking about Norma Shearer, who was sort of flirting with retirement at this point. Betty Davis eventually went to Hal Wallace, and she said, look here, what are you doing? You have a part of a New England spinster, a woman from a good Massachusetts family. I am from New England. I am from Massachusetts. I know this milieu like the back of my hand. And furthermore, I'm the best actress on the lot. Why are you showing this script to Ginger Rogers? And they were eventually persuaded to let Betty have it. I'm not entirely sure why people were not interested in her for the part. I think it may have been that they had a hard time imagining her playing this kind of downtrodden, mousy character, although in the end she played it, I think, better than any of the other actresses discussed for it ever would or could have. There was also some question as to whether they thought she could play the flip side of it, beautiful, glamorous Charlotte Vale. And I guess Betty Davis didn't take that very well either. However, I personally think that now Voyager is Betty Davis at her most beautiful. Betty Davis was generally very highly regarded in Hollywood, and they all thought of her as extremely professional. However, it was also widely known that if you did something that she did not like or did not want to do, she would murder you. So all of this sort of preceding the selection of a director for now, Voyager undoubtedly also meant that they may have wanted fresh meat in the form of Irving Rapper. He was a former dialogue director, and Rapper was agreed upon by Betty Davis perhaps in part because she thought she might be better able to control a novice. And in fact, that was at least partly true. Rapper did not offer a lot of resistance to Davis and her demands during this production. It's all very much, I think, as Betty Davis wanted it to be. Betty Davis had suggested Paul Onreid. He was an Austrian, and he grew up and spent much of his life in Vienna. And then he went on stage with the great Max Reinhardt, among others, and he wound up eventually getting an offer from Hollywood. He started playing a few parts here and there, like a Nazi spy in Night Train to Munich. And he made a movie called Joan of Paris opposite the French star Michel Morgan. Betty Davis saw this movie, liked him in it, so did the studio, and they decided that Onreid was a good prospect for the part of Jerry Duras. Betty Davis, when she was preparing for a role, her main thing was to sort of think about the physicality of the character at different points during the narrative. As a movie star, she was also very aware that that was a big part of her job, how she was going to come across visually. Even at this much later date in time, eight years after Of Human Bondage, it was still extremely unusual for a glamorous star to want to appear anything other than glamorous in public. So Betty Davis, God bless her, was not like that. And with the help of Perce Westmore, the makeup artist, she was very keen on looking the right way throughout the script. In fact, there's some suggestion that she actually wanted to go a little further with the makeup and how Wallace dialed it back. He said, no, you know, we have the orthopedic Oxfords, we have the thick stockings and the beetling brows, and we have the glasses that, in a phrase of critic Lawrence J. Quirk that I love, he said the glasses made her look like a psyched-out squirrel. We have all this. We don't need anything more. The very words of psychiatry, Dr. Jackworth, doesn't it fill you with shame? My daughter, a member of our family. There's nothing shameful about my work or frightening or anything else. It's very simple, really, what I try to do. People walk along the road. They come to a fork in the road. They're confused. They don't know which way to take. I just put up a signpost. Not that way. This way. I actually like the way mental health and psychiatry is presented in Now, Voyager. For one thing, it's exceedingly common, perhaps even to this day, to, in Hollywood movies, have the psychiatrist become romantically involved with the patient. You see that in Carefree. You see it in Spellbound. That's not the case here. You see Dr. Jackworth being exceedingly professional with Betty Davis at all times. The scene where Dr. Jackworth goes to visit Charlotte in her secret attic room and gradually tries to draw her out, really just about what she's like as a human being, is so well done with Betty Davis's mere hostility and his gentle probing questions playing beautifully off of one another. Cigarettes and medicated sherry and books my mother won't allow me to read. Whole secret life hidden up here behind a locked door. Please. It was only the box that reminded me. How very perceiving you are, Doctor. How very right you are. So, at this point, you may be feeling quite protective of Charlotte, and yet you see through Rains' playing that Dr. Jackworth not only has her best interests at heart, but is also going to know exactly how to reach her. Claude Rains was, by this time, an established star, and when they offered him the part of Dr. Jackworth, he turned it down because he didn't feel it was big enough, frankly. So they beefed it up, I think much to the betterment of the movie. Now Voyager, by the standards of the 1940s, is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel it's based on. There are some key differences. One big difference is that screenwriter Casey Robinson basically added that whole frumpy Charlotte first half hour. It's not in the book. The book more or less opens with Charlotte on shipboard. In the book, too, she's on her way to Europe, not Rio de Janeiro. Of course, in 1942, nobody in their right mind would be taking a pleasure cruise to Europe, so that change seemed natural. Some other changes that they made were perhaps more significant. Wait a minute. Why did you run off with me like that? In the novel, Jerry Durrance himself has had a history of mental health problems and his own breakdown, and this is part of their bond on shipboard. The screenwriters felt that it was not going to be as sympathetic to have Jerry be mentally fragile himself, and I think they wanted to make the character somewhat stronger. So they decided to just eliminate the breakdown. One of the changes that was made had to do with the production code and its enforcer, the Breen office. The Breen office made it very clear, for example, that when Charlotte and Jerry spend the night in the hut in Rio, there was an argument and quite a lot of back and forth about whether or not they were going to be under one blanket or two blankets. This was all sort of a proxy for the fact that while in the novel it's quite clear that Charlotte loses her virginity to Jerry that night, in the movie there's no such explicit scene. However, if you are adept at reading the movies of the 1940s, there are clues left all over the place that, in fact, they did make love that night. First of all, you have the farewell at the Rio airport, and you look at the way their body language has changed. You look at the way Betty Davis and Pauline Reed are gazing into each other's eyes, and then there's the famous moment with the cigarette, which is in itself lovely, yes, but look at the way Charlotte fastens her mouth around that cigarette. You know exactly what she's thinking, and you know it because Betty Davis wants you to know it. You see that the real key thing is not her being beautiful and beloved and popular on the ocean voyage, nor even falling in love, but the real key moment for her is when she goes back to Boston, and as Charlotte puts it, I went into the lion's den, and the lions didn't hurt me. Didn't you understand I wished someone to sleep on the same floor with me? We can get one of the maids, Mother, or perhaps we can get the nurse back. We? So long as I pay the bills, I'm running this house. Please remember you're a guest, Charlotte. Well, if I am one, then please treat me like one, Mother. Your guest prefers to sleep in this room. Mrs. Henry Wendell Vale is played by Gladys Cooper, who was a great star of British stage and screen, who, like a lot of other British performers, was in Hollywood at the moment as World War II was raging. One of her first roles when she came to Hollywood was as Maxim de Winter's sister in Rebecca, a very different part from this one. She's actually one of the few warm and nice characters in Rebecca. That is certainly not the case in Now, Voyager. She is the gorgon mother to end them all. I've kept her close by me always. When she was young, foolish, I made decisions for her. Always the right decisions. One would think a child would wish to repay a mother's love and kindness. It's interesting that in her day, Gladys Cooper was acclaimed as one of the great beauties of the world. And in fact, when she's playing Mrs. Vale here, she was only about 53. They've made her up to look older than her chronological age. And they've also put her in these dresses that seem to date from about 1892 or so. But I love her performance in this movie. It's very still. It's very coiled. It's very poised at all times. I've already sent for Charlotte. Rapper loves to bring the camera in at key moments on her hands, which are not really fidgety, but they're slightly moving. In the confrontation scene in the bedroom after Charlotte has returned home, rapper puts in frame Gladys Cooper's hand on the bedpost with one finger just lightly tapping. And in that finger is all of her anger and menace. I think that like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis's reputation for being something of an over-the-top actress comes largely from the latter part of her career. However, at her best, Bette Davis is in fact capable of enormous subtlety. And I think now Voyager is something of a showcase for her smaller moments. She's playing a woman who is coming to grips with the truth of her own emotions for the first time. And you see that at several key moments. But when Charlotte does explode in anger, it tends not to go outward with great force, but almost like she's drawing it into herself. She's pulling the anger out of the air and hugging it to herself because she can't take it anymore. Torture me. You like making fun of me, don't you? You think it's fun making fun of me, don't you? One thing that I have noticed about how Bette Davis and the way she moves on screen is that her movement is very deliberate. It's not artificial or sort of imposed by the needs of the scene. It comes from inside. Some of that may have come from her very early training in the Martha Graham dance troupe. And the Martha Graham technique is in part focused on groundwork and on finding your center and your balance. I can see that in Davis's style. Probably the most famous aspect of Now, Voyager is the two-cigarette lighting routine that Paul Henri does with Bette Davis three different times in the movie. What's maybe kind of under-discussed is how sexy a gesture this is. It's mouth-to-mouth. And it enables them to stand very close and breathe at one another. I find Now, Voyager a very sexy film because it's about sublimated and repressed desire. And it isn't always watching people consummate their desires that's the sexiest thing on film. Sometimes watching them try to fight it is even sexier. Now, Voyager was Warner Brothers' fourth highest-grossing picture of 1942, which may not sound that high, but it is when you think of just how many movies Warner Brothers was putting out in an average year in the 1940s. It was dozens a year. It did all right with the critics. It didn't do brilliantly well with them. Women's pictures over the years have always had to battle the notion, particularly from male critics, that it's soap opera, it's silly, it's trivial. It's not like a good manly movie about war. So there is some of that attitude evident in some of the contemporary reviews for Now, Voyager. But overall, Bette Davis got stellar notices, as usual. There were Academy Award nominations for Bette Davis and for Gladys Cooper, but the one Oscar that this film did win was for its score, which was by Max Steiner. One reason why the 1930s and the 1940s were prime years for the women's picture was that Hollywood perceived quite correctly that they were box office. And I think Warner Brothers managed to keep doing so well with it year after year simply by putting their top talent. They didn't treat them like disposable weepies. They said, this is going to be a picture that we're going to spend some money on and some time and some talent. 1942 was a big year for Paul Henry. The next film that he made at Warner Brothers was Casablanca. And, of course, alongside him in that movie was Claude Rains. And, in fact, the shooting schedule for Now, Voyager dragged on so long that it almost affected Rains' and Han Reid's ability to get to the Casablanca set on time. Thank God, in the end, they made it. Bette Davis, Paul Henry, and Claude Rains and Irving Rapper would try to capture lightning in a bottle again in 1946 with a movie called Deception that has a considerably darker and perhaps less romantic storyline. It's a fun movie with some delightfully over-the-top scenes and a spectacular apartment set, but it was not Now, Voyager. After that, she went on to make many more very good movies, but this is sort of Bette on top of Mount Everest as far as I'm concerned. Now, Voyager was, in fact, Bette Davis' highest grossing film of the 1940s and it is to this day one of Bette Davis' most popular movies. And I think it's because it speaks to something that nearly all of us feel at some point. How many of us feel that there is something or someone that has been holding us back, that's been keeping us from becoming our true selves? Now, Voyager is about shaking that off and about emerging as the person that you always knew you were capable of becoming. Why else would so many makeover shows be so popular these days? Now, Voyager is the forerunner of them all. We thought we'd lost you. What a jam. We were looking everywhere for you. We wanted to say goodbye. Don't anybody say goodbye? Not anybody. Just all of them. It is a sad time, isn't it? But I want to tell you one thing. There was no lady on this cruise that was as popular as you were. Oh, thank you. Au revoir.