Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice

6. Now, Contract Player

  now, Contract Player a Prior enGaGemenT wiTh beTTe davis prevented Claude Rains from attending his own mother’s funeral. Eliza Cox Rains died on May 13, 1942, during the production of Now, Voyager, Warners’ latest Bette Davis vehicle. Based on a best-selling novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, Voyager had begun production on April 7, with retakes continuing through June. There is no record of Rains having made any request for bereavement leave or, for that matter, his discussing his mother’s death with anyone. Aside from his contractual commitments, the logistics of making an emergency transatlantic crossing during wartime would have been formidable. Years later he would sadly recall, “She shouldn’t have died, I’m sure.” He put most of the blame on his father. “I don’t know what he’d done with her, or about the doctor or anything. But I know that he didn’t know how to look after her. He didn’t realize the importance of it all.” Rains’s sister reported that Frederick Rains had said of his famous son, “He’s a great success. He’s earning money. He can look after me.” Rains suspected that some of the money he had been sending for his mother’s care may well have been diverted. “I’d pay the nursing home and send the checks to him. If he did any work, I didn’t know about it. Tiny parts in pictures. People knew him. I remember his going to Paris, or France, anyway, and coming back with beautiful clothes. I’m quite sure, from what I heard about him and his general behavior, he was killing himself,” Rains said, alluding to his father’s alcoholism. Now, Voyager was a welcome assignment. Rains had just returned to Burbank after a loan-out to Twentieth Century–Fox for Moontide in a C l a u D e R a i n S  largely superfluous role supporting French heartthrob Jean Gabin in his American film debut. The assignment at Fox did, however, give Rains the chance to begin an enduring friendship with the film’s screenwriter, novelist John O’Hara—despite O’Hara’s having written Rains an enigmatic, walk-through part the actor could do little with. In contrast, Now, Voyager would be specifically developed and expanded to showcase his talents. Warners wanted Rains to play Dr. Jaquith, an eminent psychiatrist. Jaquith effects a swanlike transformation of a mother-ridden ugly duckling named Charlotte Vale (Davis), who ends up romantically exchanging cigarettes with her star-crossed lover, played by Paul Henreid. But the studio once more attempted to cajole contractual concessions from Rains and his agent, on the basis that the role, though pivotal, was relatively small and the shooting schedule would exceed Rains’s five-week guarantee . In his autobiography, Hal Wallis wrote that Rains “turned down the part, insisting it was too sketchy. [Screenwriter] Casey Robinson built up the role and Rains agreed to do it for the then enormous salary of $5,000 a week. I offered him $25,000 for six weeks but his agent Mike Levee was adamant and we went ahead with the required arrangement.” It was hardly a victory for the actor and his agent, since Now, Voyager’s production fell in the third year of Rains’s contract, which stipulated that in that year his salary would be $6,800 per week. Warners obviously intended to continue, outrageously, to renegotiate terms picture by picture. But for the moment, Rains knew he had a terrific part. He left it to Mike Levee eventually to settle the financial score. Unlike Rains, whose role was specially tailored for him, Bette Davis was cast only after Irene Dunne, Norma Shearer, and Ginger Rogers had fallen by the wayside. Davis would earn an Academy Award nomination for her role in this film. Now, Voyager was seen as groundbreaking on the topic of psychiatry, especially in its implications for women. The subject matter was provocative for its time, although it still indulged in some Freudian clichés about domineering mothers, as reflected in this scene between Rains and Davis’s mother, played by the indomitable Gladys Cooper: JAQUITH: She is most seriously ill. MRS. VALE: Charlotte is—? now, Contract Player  JAQUITH: Thanks to you. MRS. VALE: Did you say—? JAQUITH: My dear Mrs. Vale, if you had deliberately and maliciously planned to destroy your daughter’s life, you couldn...