Bette Davis, OF HUMAN BONDAGE – Part I: Biggest Oscar Snubs #1
"The air was thick with rumors," Bette Davis later recalled in her memoirs. "It seemed inevitable that I would receive the coveted award. The press, the public and the members of the Academy who did the voting were sure I would win! Surer than I!"
According to Mason Wiley and Damien Bona's Inside Oscar, when Bette Davis announced she would be present at the awards ceremony on Feb. 27, 1935, official Best Actress nominees Claudette Colbert, Grace Moore, and Norma Shearer decided they wouldn't.
They needn't have worried. Possibly because many votes had already been sent in by the time of Howard Eastabrook's announcement [see previous post], or perhaps because of other vote-tallying issues — whether intentional or unintentional — regarding the write-in ballots, Claudette Colbert turned out to be year's Best Actress. Davis later claimed that the powers-that-be at Warners had specifically asked their employees not to vote for her. But Warner Bros. conspiracy or no, there were no write-in winners that year.
When the Academy announced the order of votes — that was normal procedure in those days — it was revealed that Colbert was followed by official nominees Shearer and Moore. Years later, however, Academy records revealed that the announcement had been false. Bette Davis had come in third. "Not since that decision in 1934 was so cavalier a verdict allowed to take place," Davis wrote in her autobiography.
Possibly because of the Bette Davis Oscar Outrage — Davis affirms it was so in her book, but I haven't found confirmation for it — in 1935 Price Waterhouse & Co. was contracted to tally the Oscar ballots, something they've been doing ever since. (Previously, the Academy's staff and judges had done the vote tabulation.)
The Academy would allow write-in votes the following year as well, and that's how non-nominee Hal Mohr won the Best Cinematography Award for A Midsummer's Night Dream. Bette Davis, an official nominee that year, took home the Best Actress Oscar for the minor melodrama Dangerous — a consolation prize if there ever was one. More deservedly, she would win a second Oscar three years later for Jezebel. Eight more nominations would follow in the next quarter century.
"I was heartbroken not to win my first Academy Award for Of Human Bondage," Davis wrote in Mother Goddam. "Not that I honestly have approved of my performance as Mildred, as I have upon only very few occasions approved of other performances. But due to the reviews and the acclaim given me by friends in my profession I just took it for granted I would win. One must never take anything for granted — especially Academy Awards. I made the same mistake three more times. Shame on me — never will again."
Chief sources: Inside Oscar by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona; 70 years of the Oscar: the official history of the Academy Awards by Robert Osborne; Mother Goddam by Whitney Stine and Bette Davis; The Lonely Life: An Autobiography by Bette Davis.