Day five of our Christmas visitation to Hollywood Past has us wondering...doesn't being a big star mean that those inane movie still sessions might be a thing of distant memory from those dim, dark ingénue days? Well, this certainly might be one of the thoughts popping into Bette Davis' mind. That, and "Which one of these packages holds a carton of cigarettes?" Or possibly "When can I have another smoke?" Yes, that's our Bette, swaddled and almost unidentifiable for a day as a musher leading a team of co-stars through the divinely desolate wilderness of another character-driven weepie or a ride down the slalom ride of fame for yet another decade.
It would have been fun to hear the conversation that might have flowed between über-photographer and designer Cecil Beaton and the star at this photo session for Vogue magazine. Perhaps Beaton was thinking of Davis when he admonished one and all to "Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."
Heaven knows that Bette was never anyone's slave to the usual or the expected, (though, from her remarks in later life, she might have been an unexpected slave to George Brent, of all people...if he'd given her half a chance). In any case, this bizarre photo seems so uncharacteristic for La Davis, it almost makes one wonder if she might have drawn a page from arch-rival, Joan Crawford, who never seemed to tire of those long sessions worshipping the camera, (not to mention that reassuring reflection in the lens). Of course, in Bette's case, dressing up and hiding behind a parka amid a colorful pile of packages was more her style. Davis loved to swath herself in deep dyed dowdiness in many roles (see her in her wan moments in Of Human Bondage, her turn as the brooding queen alone with her mirror in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, her neurotic duckling with the unibrow before her epiphany in Now, Voyager, and her kabuki-like makeup in Mr. Skeffington for ample evidence of this character building quirk). In addition to this, there were some seriously ill-considered frocks in her not very private life, (which can readily be seen in most of her appearances at the Academy Awards in the late '30s-late '40s. What? No stylists back then?).
At the end of the day, I suspect that this photographic attempt to be au courant sometime back in the day might have been one more attempt by this fine, if bigger than life actress, to gain our attention. As she once explained, she felt "doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless." With characteristic determination to avoid becoming "a character actress", which she believed was "a phrase which means you've had it," maybe this looked like a shrewd move in Bette's world view.
This need for attention and ever greater accomplishment may have been a bit tough on the less driven folk around her, but her work ethic and honesty has yielded a number of movies that continue to resonate with many of us to do this day, especially in films that mirror her belief that "Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life."
Well, maybe not quite as big as that fur-trimmed hood on the parka, perhaps?
Please click here for previous entries in The Christmas Album series on this blog.
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