Bette Davis: |
Funny business, a
woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder, so you can move faster. You
forget you’ll need them again when you go back to being a woman. That’s one
career all females have in common – whether we like it or not – being a woman.
Sooner or later we’ve all got to work at it, no matter what other careers we’ve
had or wanted. And, in the last analysis, nothing is any good unless you can
look up just before dinner or turn around in bed – and there he is. Without
that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a
book full of clippings – but you’re not a woman. Slow curtain. The end.
– Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) (1)
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1. Davis commented: ‘The public, the critics, even my friends thought they could recognise me in these lines’. |
A
young painter, Kate Bosworth, is spending the summer in Martha’s Vineyard.
There, she meets Bill Emerson, the lighthouse keeper’s assistant. Kate and Bill
fall in love. One day, her twin sister, Patricia, arrives unexpectedly. During
a misunderstanding that she strives to maintain, Bill mistakes Patricia for her
sister and begins courting her, until Kate arrives and reveals the fraud. While
Kate is gentle and considerate, Patricia is seductive and devious. Patricia
seduces Bill, Kate steps aside, and they marry. The day of the ceremony, during
the bouquet toss, Kate happens to be in the first row. Patricia tosses it in
her direction but, rather than catch it, Kate moves away coldly, letting the
bouquet of white flowers land at her feet. This short, expertly restrained
scene from A Stolen Life (Curtis
Bernhardt, 1946) contains a summary of Bette Davis’ destiny in film, at once robbed
and robber, old maid and ambitious woman – it suffices to refer to the French
titles of her films (eg., La Voleuse for A Stolen Life).
If
women’s films continued to be made well after Hollywood’s Golden Age, (2) the
label ‘woman’s picture’ disappeared with classicism and its genres – to which
it belonged, just like crime films, musical comedies and westerns. We find it
difficult, however, to consider the woman’s picture an entirely separate genre.
Its existence seems to be justified only by the female audiences it was
supposedly bringing into theaters and its far too close relationship shared
with what we may call life. The woman’s picture would therefore be a Hollywood
mirror held up to its audience, stripped of the artificiality that confers
genres with their sense of being autonomous worlds, their capacity to refer
back to themselves alone, to their own skies. Stanley Cavell’s work testifies
very well to this exemplary, moral dimension we readily attribute to woman’s
films. He mixes what he calls the melodrama of the unknown woman or the comedy
of remarriage with a philosophy of moral perfectionism inherited from Emerson
and Thoreau. His greater moral than formal interest in the genre, and his preference
for relying more on lines of dialogue than shots, is perhaps due to the woman’s
film being a talky genre (crime films and westerns being devoted to silence),
where the primacy of the script over mise en scène is
regularly affirmed.
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2.
Some examples: Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970), Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974),
Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends (1971), Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1974), John Cassavetes’ A Woman
Under the Influence (1974), Robert Altman’s Three Women (1977), Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978) …
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Here’s
an idea: the woman’s picture is a Hollywood genre with its own codes and
conventions, but one which functions in opposition to the other genres. It must
move away from genre in order to reach it. The purity of the writing in westerns
and crime films makes them function on a subtractive logic: the more that is
removed, the more the essence of the genre seems to be reached. A true woman’s
film is instead always deviated, disfigured and sick, always at odds with the
idea of a fulfilled destiny. A good woman’s film is a failed quest, a duel
where the nice sheriff gets himself killed, a series of detours delaying the
final goal: the fulfillment of a destiny.
Just
like the duel and sense of honour in westerns, or the
crime to be solved and the femme fatale in the film noir, the idea of destiny is one of the script conventions of
the woman’s picture, the main stakes whose fictional depths only serve to manifest
a truth of mise en scène, script, performance and
emotion. It remains to be seen why destiny is only feminine. Perhaps in
Hollywood a woman becomes and a man is. What would a man’s destiny be?
Something a little more fixed, a little less novelistic (The Novel of Mildred Pierce, The
Novel of Marguerite Gautier, as the French titles tell us), engaging his identity
more than his existence. What most resemble masculine woman’s pictures are
movies such as The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) and The Man with the
Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955), where men who have fallen into drugs or
alcohol attempt to rediscover what they were: a musician, a writer. An identity
is lost and found, but is always waiting for us. A destiny can be stolen. It is
a story waiting to be inhabited, like a train we take or a date we make, and
which other women can take in your place. A woman can steal your date, your
man, your child, or your destiny – and it will only be theft in your own eyes.
The
woman’s film navigates around this crushing injunction that consists in having
to be a woman and having a destiny. The markers of a woman’s destiny circulate
freely, demonstrating an extreme plasticity: child, husband, work and parental
bonds have never been as mistreated and twisted as in the most beautiful
examples of woman’s pictures. Children may be exchanged for money, belong to
another woman than their mother, a mother may hate her
child. Every configuration is possible since it is, precisely, about manipulating
concepts inherent to a genre – a mother becomes, then, far beyond all realism,
a simple becoming-mother. A major woman’s film is one that reduces these
realistic themes (having a man, having a child, having a job) to the state of a pure, fictional and malleable unit that is stirred
into an endless number of possible equations – to the point of delirium.
There
is the destiny of the front page girl: frenetic montage of a series of front
pages announcing society gossip – engagements, marriages and rumoured romances of all kinds. Warner, the studio with
which Davis was under contract for 17 years, was associated with this
realistic, urban style where the events of a life are spread across a documentary
background. Then there is the considered austerity of the novel in which
destiny – less flashy, more profound – seems to take control of itself in
anonymity. The risk for a woman is in confusing the frenzy of successive front
pages with the turning of the pages of a novel, in confusing life with an imitation
of life.
We
must know to run at the same speed as our destiny, or else it will be lost.
Davis is someone who – through gluttony or renunciation – always loses sight of
it. The ambitious woman is early, the
old maid is late – Davis systematically plays both. Late: A Stolen Life, Dangerous (Alfred E. Green, 1935), The Old Maid (Edmund Goulding, 1939), Old Acquaintance (Vincent Sherman, 1943), All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
1950), Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper,
1942), That Certain Woman (Edmund Goulding, 1943), The
Corn is Green (Irving Rapper, 1945), A
Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra, 1961). Early: Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938), The
Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941), The
Letter (William Wyler, 1940), In This
Our Life (John Huston, 1941), Mr Skeffington (Vincent Sherman, 1944), Beyond The
Forest (King Vidor, 1949), Payment on
Demand (Curtis Bernhardt, 1951), What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), The Scientific Cardplayer (Luigi Comencini, 1972). The list goes on. Transposed into another
genre, an old maid is like an alcoholic sheriff facing his need for courage or
a major reporter having to solve a crime with one leg in a cast. We never think
better than when sick. Wounded, tired characters are always reflective in
regards to what we demand from them, they draw out the underlying false facts
hidden in a situation. If a good woman’s picture is already in great health
when it is sick (whereas a sick crime film or western is the beginning of the
end), Davis, a sick woman, coincides with her genre.
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This
destiny is, first, inscribed on a face that is uglier and more interesting than
any other. She says so herself in her memoir, This ‘n That: ‘And there is no question that the glamour actresses made
Hollywood the famous place it is today. The glamorous actresses at the time
were Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr and, of course,
Marilyn Monroe. The nonglamorous types, in which
group I included myself, were Hepburn, Tracy, Cagney, Fonda, Bogart.
The nonglamorous types were all from theater and had
been brought to Hollywood at the beginning of talking pictures. At present,
Hollywood may lament the lack of stars as glamorous as those I have just
listed’. (3) The skeletal and cerebral beauty of Katharine Hepburn reminds one
of the bulging and mischievous beauty of Bette Davis.
One became the queen of the intellectual screwball comedy; the other the queen of
the sickly melodrama. Ugly ducklings in more conventional genres, the nonglamorous types created and invented films capable of
accommodating them.
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3.
Bette Davis, This ‘n That (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987), p. 138.
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At
20, Davis had a devilish baby face, with small rings around her eyes. An ugly doe,
we might say. In 20,000 Years in Sing-Sing (Michael Curtiz, 1932), her voice is still shrill and
whiny, she gesticulates and overacts constantly. Bette Davis the actress is not
quite there yet. Later, she bases her acting on a form of weary rectitude; in
this early phase, she makes noise as if to prove herself. We can easily imagine
her running between auditions and living with roommates in a kind of remake of
Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door (1937).
Or as a city girl, like those who in film
noir disappear and get themselves killed by slimy guys who promises them
the stars – like in Lloyd Bacon’s dull Marked
Woman (1937).
An
actress possesses her true face around 30. Young, she does not yet have it, and
does not know that she’s preparing to have it. Old, she does everything to get
it back – the ravishing 30s where the face and body are saturated, full of
health and vitality. An old, male actor ages like leather, he has no point of
equilibrium to find since he is assured of the permanency of his face. His luck
is that in ageing, an actor’s face is unveiled: free from all youth, we make
out what suffices to constitute his face. An actress can only lose herself in
losing her radiant 30s. She must then accept the chaotic succession of her
multiple skins. This inescapable alteration, this absence of a facial
substratum, hides the turbulence of
femininity, its capacity to lose everything and the possibility for
disfiguration – mirrors and disfiguration are often strictly feminine themes in
cinema. Extreme case: Elizabeth Taylor always tried to make the red of her
lips, the piercing blue of her eyes and the ebony of her hair permanent, in an
attempt to draw attention away from her flesh which was withering monstrously
around her. An actress must, then, find on her own face points of anchorage and
stability that will maintain the youthfulness of the entire face – often, she
is the last one on whom the illusion works, caught as she is under her own
narcissistic spell. Bette Davis is the actress who most played with the
impossible stability of the face. Instead of maintaining an impossible stability,
she simply dissects it, and does so from a young age.
At
27, in Dangerous, Alfred E. Green’s
film inspired by the life of Jeanne Eagels, she plays
a former glory of the stage who is wallowing in
alcohol, convinced she brings misfortune to everyone who comes near her. She
has a romance with an old admirer, who handles the re-launching of her career,
but she ends up renouncing this love, deciding to care for her first husband, who
is disabled because of her. In 1939, in her early 30s, she acts successively in
Edmund Goulding’s The
Old Maid and Michael Curtiz’s The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.
In Goulding’s film, she gives up her life as a mother
after having an illegitimate child with her sister’s ex-fiancé. In Curtiz’s film, she is an inhuman, ugly, old queen (having a
portion of her head and her eyebrows shaved for the role), who has a
destructive love affair with the Earl of Essex, played by Errol Flynn. The
great, theatrical purity of this work makes it one of the most emblematic
examples of a Davis film: at the heart of a behind-closed-doors love story, the
bodies are present to each other but the love is doomed. At 30, Davis is
playing roles of 50 and 60 year old women worn out by love and the experience
of life. The precision of the dialogue is equaled only by her cold heartedness
– giving Davis a nasty, indifferent quality that constitutes one of her major
registers as an actress.
Bette
Davis has this step-mother side of Walt Disney queens: straight silhouette
standing at the top of a staircase, eyelids lowered like a cat watching and
preparing to attack, her hands alone betraying her plotting. It can be fun to
watch Davis’ hand gestures, signs of nervousness as well as rigidness. Behind
her back, on her neck, arms hanging at her sides or in front of her, she moves
her fingers frenziedly while her body remains stiff. It’s surprising to learn
that the evil queen in Snow White was
modeled on Joan Crawford, when such maleficent rectitude was already fully present
in Davis.
The
two women did not like each other. A man Crawford stole from Davis was at the
origin of the conflict. In her final, very bad film, Wicked Stepmother (Larry Cohen, 1989), Davis, in fact, plays a
stepmother who makes her stepdaughter’s life hard. In a shot showing a portrait
of her younger self, we can make out Crawford in the photo, as if one went all
the way into the details of a B movie to tease the other. Her woman’s picture
rival, Crawford never wanted to give up her glamour, essentially playing the
Hollywood game that consists in being a housewife or broke waitress without
bearing the traces on oneself. Davis assumes physically the social status, the
love life, and the age of her characters, always adding a last touch to her
ugliness and decrepitude, as others do with their beauty. Stanwyck and Crawford in aprons are always already women in the process of being
satisfied, and who await to be so. Like fairy tale
princesses, even in rags they bear the light of their destiny on their faces.
We can look for exceptions. Olivia de Havilland, her great friend, makes
herself ugly in the very beautiful To
Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1939). In Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Stanwyck approaches disfiguration when she plays a woman
who, wanting to be cute, does not realise that her outfit is ridiculous and that everyone is making fun of her. Here
again, there is an excess of power manifested in her costume, a vital
supplement that feels awkward.
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In
her memoirs, Davis explains the reticence of the studio and Robert Aldrich
concerning her makeup during the production of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?: ‘I decided to do my own makeup
for Baby Jane. What I had in mind, no
professional makeup man would have dared to put on me. One told me he was
afraid that if he did what I wanted he might never work again. […] I felt Jane
never washed her face, just added another layer of makeup each day’. (4) The
problem was pretty much the opposite with Crawford: ‘Where the producers were
uneasy about how outrageous I wanted Jane to look, they had a problem of
another kind with Joan. It was a constant battle to get her to not look
gorgeous. She wanted her hair well dressed, her gowns beautiful and her
fingernails with red nail polish. For the part of an invalid who had been
cooped up in a room for twenty years, she wanted to look attractive. She was
wrong’. (5)
In The Old Maid, Davis first appears young,
her complexion fresh and her face surrounded by curls. Midway through, her face
transforms, weakens, her hair becomes white, and there is no makeup on her
eyes. This exaggerated transformation is not only a matter of ageing: it
corresponds to a thwarted destiny. It is also life that has slowly escaped from
a body, a destiny that has not been attained, and a future that will no longer
happen, that freezes upon contact. While everything was potentially there, everything
has disappeared: the loved man and the cherished child. A woman’s picture is
perhaps the story of a woman looking to place her energy, at the risk of losing
it. Davis becomes the aunt of her illegitimate daughter who she cannot publicly
claim and therefore renounces her love. Little by little, her sister (Miriam
Hopkins) takes her place as mother and Davis, in the role of the bitter aunt, makes
her child hate her. During a painful scene, Hopkins orders the girl to kiss Davis
last when she’s leaving for her wedding night, in order to make her understand
that she has meant much to her in spite of their dispute. Davis is taken in by
this orchestration and thinks she’s found her daughter again.
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4.
Ibid., p. 137.
5.
Ibid., p. 138.
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Several
times and in several films, the affront returns: a character asks if Davis is
really a woman. This must mean, it would seem, someone
who knows how to live and to love. If everything suggests that, in Hollywood,
Davis is not a woman, it is because she is not related to men, as she suggests,
but perhaps related to witches. A woman’s picture with Davis is, first of all,
about a witch lost in a love story: she tests her compatibility with this love
and gets caught by the irony of fate. A witch, a queen and an old maid are all
more or less the same thing for Davis. The three are a mixture of ice and fire;
the three cannot experience love, and seem to have a heart of stone. In Davis’
roles, deep within these women thwarted in their love, there is one last corner
of triumphal solitude that does not evaporate in contact with men. A solitary corner that is like a secret, forged in material that
will never burn, especially not in love. A silent secret that a woman
carries deep within herself and that she feels without naming it – the same
secret that explains the solitude of the sheriff who does good but leaves it
for others. If the couple possesses the secret of romance, the old maid
possesses the secret of her refusal.
In
Sherman’s Old Acquaintance, she forms
a friend duo with Miriam Hopkins. Jealous of her friend’s writing career,
Hopkins leaves her family life to write romance novels. Each, then, leads a
writing career: one in a popular register, the other in an intellectual
register. Davis refuses the advances of Hopkins’ husband and dates a man who is
younger than her. (6) In just a few scenes, a relationship between a woman older
than her lover by two decades has never been so tenderly and intelligently
depicted – he tells her she is beautiful and that girls his age don’t
interest him; she accepts his love painfully, knowing it is doomed by the age
difference. In the lapse of time she takes to respond to his marriage proposal,
he falls in love with her best friend’s daughter, as if Davis, through her
hesitation, has foreseen the two young people meeting. In opposition to nascent
love, with Davis it is necessary to invent the expression of ‘dying love’ – meaning
the pleasure Davis procures in witnessing this slow death or provoking it. Even
in a love story as conventional as Dark
Victory (Edmund Goulding, 1939), we must count on
an important, extremely Davisian detail: young,
beautiful and in love, we know, nevertheless, that she is doomed to die at the
end of the film.
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6.
In her personal life, Davis was, for a long time, the mistress of Hopkins’
husband, director Anatole Litvak.
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In Old Acquaintance, the two women
writers end up sitting on a sofa drinking champagne, the men of their lives far
behind them, each one thinking of a possible next novel bearing the film’s
title. A solid title, like the two women’s friendship, but equally like the
friendship Davis seems to intend for herself at
moments, that which confers her autonomy of heart and authority of mind. This
familiarity a person can have with herself, entirely contained here in her very
precise way of lighting a cigarette – we might say she pushes others away
to have a bit of space to herself. With regards to the cigarette, Davis writes:
‘Later I discovered that for a performance a cigarette is a marvelous prop –
sometimes for emphasis, sometimes for anger. For so many
things. What emotions you can convey merely by putting one out’. (7)
There is an unforgettable shot in A
Stolen Life where, lying on the bed, the twin sisters experience their last
moment of complicity. The one lights the other’s cigarette: Bette Davis lights
a cigarette for Bette Davis. In this light that is favorable to feminine
secrets – as if the scene were seen through a veil of tulle – a dream of
absolute solitude is realised.
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7. This ‘n That, p. 90.
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At
32, she also makes herself older in one of the genre’s masterpieces, Rapper’s Now, Voyager. The transformation is done
in reverse: this time, the old maid becomes a lady of the world – her face hidden
by the large brim of her hat – and she embarks on a ship to her new life. At
36, she is completely disfigured by illness in Mr Skeffington, a two and a half hour,
long-winded romantic film following the path of a couple played by Davis and
Claude Rains – the actor with whom she preferred working, as she writes in her
memoirs. Mr Skeffington tells the story of a capricious woman who marries out of self-interest and
leads a dissolute existence before ending her life with her husband – blind and
battered – back at her side after escaping from a concentration camp. Illness
takes from her what remained of her youth: very thin hair, pale, wrinkled skin,
bulging eyes. A beautiful woman who is lost to illness and,
moreover, adds layers of makeup over her misfortune. Davis was 36, her
face plastered with makeup, a hair’s breath away from collapsing, but she looks
20, even 30 years older.
All
throughout her career, Davis’ face is composed of successive layers, each one
revealing an age, a state of becoming. She removes or adds them depending on
the film. At 36, again, she turned down the role of Mildred Pierce for which Crawford won an Oscar (in Curtiz’s 1945 film), instead choosing the role of Miss
Moffat in Rapper’s The Corn is Green.
In it, she plays an old teacher fighting to open a school in a small mining
town in Scotland. Warner was against such a young actress playing the role of a
woman over 50; to narrow the gap, Davis wore a gray
wig and put on weight. This very pure movie is characteristic of Davis’ masterpieces:
the script’s big twists and turns allow, paradoxically, for great emotional clarity.
It is often after two hours of a film, during its final seconds, that the
woman’s picture truly becomes a tearjerker.
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Of
Davis, what we most remember are female duos – rarely duos formed with men, as
in All About Eve,
where she experiences a complicit, intellectual love with Bill Simpson (Gary
Merrill), a director younger than her. In real life, she was married to Merrill
for ten years, and this film in which they acted together haunted the
couple. Davis writes: ‘He wanted me to be Margo Channing’. (8) When she ran
into Joseph L. Mankiewicz a few years later, having once
never stopped pestering him to make a sequel, she ended up saying: ‘You can
forget about the sequel, Joe, Gary and I played it and it didn’t work’. (9)
If All About Eve is the culmination of Davis’ career, that is because it is the story of a
decline enveloped in a classic, vigorous form. A film about
an actress saying goodbye to her youth through the intermediary of an annoying,
young rival. Eve Harrington (Ann Baxter), an extremely ambitious
groupie, is just a younger version of Margo Channing, whom she has to shed like
a layer of skin. (10) In the first part of the film, Margo feels threatened by
Eve, who seems to want to steal her life, her career and her friends. But no
one around her understands the reason for her fear, until Eve’s true,
malevolent intentions are proved. It is only the consequence of Margo’s fear of
ageing, the face of a private crisis, a theft that no one sees but her. Most
terrible is Channing’s false triumph over her rival and the final shot of an
admirer who introduces herself into Eve’s room to offer her services to her.
Behind Eve, the groupie contemplates herself in her mirror with multiple
reflections, holding in her hands the award Eve has just been given –
barely at the peak of glory, an actress waits to be replaced, the life cycle
catching up to everyone.
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8.
Ibid., p. 185.
9.
Ibid., p. 186.
10. We could consider Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) as a remake of All About Eve, completing the expression of the idea of the double.
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What
allows All About Eve to remain not entirely lost in the shadow of its actress’ moods is that,
before being the portrait of a woman, it is the portrait of a group of friends braving
everything that is falling apart. But it is also a movie that picked up its actress
at the right moment, when she was leaving Warner and could no longer find worthwhile
roles – the role of Margo Channing was first reserved for Claudette Colbert,
then in bad health. In Davis’ filmography, Mankiewicz’s film seems like a painful trick. For the first
time, she seems to undergo what, until then, she had been preparing to play.
Young, she enjoyed making herself older and uglier, in the manner of a child
for whom it is easy to be everything. Now old, her roles of ageing women touch
her personally, they grasp at her skin. Furthermore, the race against time is
pursued and finds its resolution in the hysteria of two films made with
Aldrich, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? – alongside a Crawford who still plays divas in a
wheelchair – and then Hush … Hush, Sweet
Charlotte (1964), with her accomplice de Havilland, Crawford having turned
down the role. (11) A little earlier, in 1961, in Capra’s film A Pocketful of Miracles, we find Davis
extremely poor and having to make her daughter believe she belongs to New York
high society. In Baby Jane, Davis
plays a ten year old girl trapped in the body and sick mind of a woman over 50.
We find again here the makeup from the production of Mr Skeffington. Davis dances in her living
room, her hair braided, wearing her childhood dress – convinced that her career
as a child star might be re-launched.
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11.
The initial title was supposed to be What
Ever Happened to Charlotte? but Davis, considering
this too awful, refused to act in it unless this was changed.
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from Issue 6: Distances |
© Original French text © Murielle Joudet 2013. English translation © Ted Fendt & LOLA 2015. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |