Madam President: Inside Bette Davis’s Ill-Fated Tenure as Academy Pooh-Bah
For fifty days in winter 1941, the “First Lady of the American Screen” reigned as the inaugural woman to assume the AMPAS presidency.
Hello, mes chers! How are you all doing?
I thought I’d wait a week for my Oscars post-mortem. Let the dust settle! Can you believe no lady directors were nominated? Neither Miss Gerwig nor Miss Cooper? (I don’t know where they dug this Justin E. Triet fellow up from; French filmmaker of Anatomy of a Fall.) A competent crop of contenders, though, with plenty of leeway to navigate the oversights. After all, Cecil B. DeGerwig was cited as a writer and Miss Robbie as a producer. The technical categories brim with movies so obscure, you’re not sure they even exist! Snooty Twitter favourite, May Dethember, is in for Screenplay – and Past Lives, the Korean Brief Glenncounter, in Picture. A pal quipped President Janet Yang – who courted controversy for her endorsement of Michelle Yeoh, last year – probably had Celine Song and Greta Lee on speed dial, waiting to apologise for their “snubs”.
The Academy’s girlbosses outnumber their female Best Director winners by one. Ms. Yang follows Cheryl Boone Isaacs (2013-2017), Fay Kanin (1979-1983) and Bette Davis (1941-1941). Yes. Sandwiched between the wartime presidencies of the distinguished producer Walter Wanger, Bette’s interregnum lasted less than two months around the time of Pearl Harbor…
Little did Ms. Davis realise that she ascended to her post as a publicity stunt. A brainwave of David O. Selznick’s, in fact; seconded by Darryl F. Zanuck. They needed someone who could hype up the organisation in the first flush of its teenage years. It was a completely nominal job. A bit like the intimacy co-ordinator on All of Us Strangers – oh, shut up! What did you think of AoUS? Miss Andrew Scott as Larry Grayson and Master Paul Mescal as his imaginary friend Everard. I can take or leave such “epics”. Let’s face it, media featuring effluent and attractive homosexuals is always given a free ride by critics. See: Back Passages and Fellow Travellers. As in real life, I obey the “Look, but don’t touch” edict when it comes to interacting with members of that race. Wasn’t it nicer when we had the Production Code and uppity poofs had to kill themselves in the end or be otherwise punished for their crimes? I don’t find today’s offerings at all relatable.
Anyway, America hadn’t joined the war at the time I am speaking of now. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, like its 2024 counterpart, was wary of pushing ahead with a business as usual gala in light of worrying events overseas. In those days, that meant a tux-and-tails dinner at the Biltmore Hotel or the Cocoanut Grove – where, up until Gone With the Wind, winners knew their fate in advance! President Davis had to set a date for the 14th Academy Awards, honouring fare like Citizen Kane, How Green Was My Valley and her own The Little Foxes. The news of the February 1942 ceremony got pushed into the inside pages, though, being announced on the somewhat busy news day of December 7th 1941.
The story used to go that Bette, refusing to be a sinecure, suggested an ambitious programme of reform; so distasteful to the bigwigs that her resignation swiftly followed. “I arrived with full knowledge of my rights of office,” Davis recalled “I had studied the by-laws. It became clear to me that this was a surprise. I was not supposed to preside intelligently. Rather like an heiress at her deceased father’s board of directors’ meeting, I felt quite capable of holding a gavel.” A caretaker ruler of fifty days, she went on to find more meaningful war work as co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen. “No woman, especially no actress, is in a position to successfully direct Academy affairs.” Regardless, they incorporated many of her ideas.
Bette’s suggestions included moving the awards to a theatre (where they’ve stayed for eighty years apart from that COVID anomaly in a train station) and giving out ersatz prizes for the duration of the crisis. Proposals that were met with horror at the single meeting she oversaw. “But, Miss Davis, such an evening would rob the Academy of all dignity. To charge people to attend?” “Yes,” the Yankee spitfire responded “$25 per head. We’ll donate the takings to British War Relief!” She also recommended Rosalind Russell oversee the planning committee; slighting longtime organiser Mervyn LeRoy. Delicate egos bruised, the board accused the thirty-three-year old of biting the hand that fed her – “Wanger, the former president, wanted to know what I had against the Academy!”. Like the urban myth that she named the statue after her first husband Harmon O. Nelson’s buttocks, these embellishments grew more elaborate as the decades went on.
The various Bette bios I consulted had her initiating the Costume and Make-Up categories years before they existed in reality – as well as ear-marking the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, honouring a producer’s body of work, for Orson Welles’s debut at twenty-six. (It went to Walt Disney.) She was keen to disenfranchise bit-players: “If you give them ice-cream every Saturday, they vote for you”. In her 1962 memoir, The Lonely Life, Bette carps: “I proposed that motion picture extras be denied the right to vote, since many of them didn’t even speak English, let alone know anything about excellence of performance”. And it was true: denture-wearing Walter Brennan (who famously classified his filmography by “teeth or no teeth” roles) had just won an unprecedented third for a workaday western called, imaginatively, The Westerner; solidifying his place alongside Ingrid Bergman, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis and Frances McDormand. Mind you, supporting players were given plaques then – before being upgraded to Oscars proper, albeit plaster ones, in 1944. (I was pleased to read that when this category was initially flouted in the thirties, it was to be called “Best Performance by a Character Actor or Actress”. I wish it still was – if only to keep Othiefia Stoleman and similar second bananas at bay.)
“All in all, it was obvious that I had been put in as President merely as a figurehead. I sent in my resignation a few days later and Darryl Zanuck informed me that if I resigned, I would never work in Hollywood again. I took a chance and resigned anyway.”
— Bette Davis, The Lonely Life (1962)
To quote Nicole Kidperson’s Best Actress speech: “Why come to the Academy Awards when the world is in such turmoil?”. Bette realised, in a time of bomb shelters and blackouts, that new priorities outweighed concerns for movie accolades. “I resigned the position in order to show them!” Bette puffed “but nobody cared.” Her departure ended a bizarre episode in the Academy’s history, with Walter Wanger re-assuming his duties and Roz Russell ultimately chairing the planning committee. There would be no dancing and a casual dress code – save for military uniforms – and ladies would be expected to donate the money they would’ve otherwise spent on folderols to the Red Cross.
Bette’s abdication was a one-day wonder. True, ice-cream-eating extras did bring How Green Was My Valley to victory over “Little Orson Annie” – to the Academy’s never-ending shame. (They weren’t purged from the voting rolls until the presidency of Jean Hersholt.) But a marvellous scholarly work, The Academy and the Award by Bruce Davis (no relation), a former executive who studied the minutes of her December war council, debunks the many misconceptions that sprung up in biographies and chat shows. Bette’s relationship with AMPAS remained entirely affable. As the dictum of vexed origin goes: one should never let the truth get in the way of a good story…
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