The star Bette Davis refused to work with: “the most beautiful man that ever lived”
When you think about Bette Davis and the stars she didn’t get along with, the first person to spring to mind would undoubtedly be Joan Crawford. The two were grande dames of the silver screen for decades, and their careers mirrored each other. They started working in Hollywood around the same time, though Crawford started during the silent era and Davis started just after. They enjoyed more than one career peak, reaching leading lady status in the 1930s before being shunted aside for younger women. In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, both women had comebacks, and they never retreated from the screen.
Their rivalry is still legendary, even if it has grown out of proportion over the decades. Davis was insecure about Crawford’s beauty, while Crawford was insecure about Davis’s acting talent and the respect she commanded in the industry. When push came to shove, however, the stars agreed to work with each other in 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Given that Davis was willing to share the screen with her biggest rival, it is surprising that there was someone with whom she flatly refused to work. Ultimately, she recognised that Crawford had the goods when it came to acting, which was more than could be said of one star with whom she was supposed to appear in one of the biggest cinematic events of the century.
Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind was a sensation when it was released in 1936, and the subsequent search for the perfect actor to portray its Civil War-era heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, was as highly publicised as an unexpected celebrity marriage. Nearly every famous female actor in Hollywood was considered, but Bette Davis was at the top of the list. She had already shown her aptitude for playing manipulative Southern belles in Jezebel, so she was the obvious choice.
When Davis heard that swashbuckling Australian Errol Flynn was expected to play Rhett Butler, however, she baulked. Flynn had risen to fame playing dashing pirates and wild heroes in movies like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood, but as far as Davis was concerned, he wasn’t much of an actor.
During a 1971 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, Davis said, “Errol was the most beautiful man that ever lived and the most charming. But he sure couldn’t have played Rhett Butler.”
She wasn’t alone in this sentiment. Producer David O Selznick didn’t think Flynn was the right choice either. But they were in a bind. Both Davis and Flynn were under contract with Warner Bros., and the studio refused to loan her out to Selznick unless Flynn got to star opposite her. She refused, and that was the end of that.
It would have been a blow to any actor’s ego to learn that not only was his acting too poor to earn him the role of Rhett Butler, but it was so bad that it prevented one of Hollywood’s greatest stars from winning the part of Scarlett. Still, Davis didn’t think he’d had any hard feelings about it.
“Errol was the most honest person about his talents,” she said. “You know, he made no bones about saying, ‘I’m not an actor at all.’ But he just was one… he was one of the personality people you’re talking about. He was marvellous.”
Although many aspects of Gone with the Wind have aged horribly (racism being the most prominent), there is no faulting the choice of leading actors. Vivian Leigh was the perfect Scarlett, and Clark Gable was such a perfect Rhett that it’s as if he stepped right off the page and onto the screen.
