by Ed Sikov
Davis’s control in The Letter is only in part a matter of repression. She plays Leslie Crosbie as a bored, stifled housewife forced to expend her libido in the creation of a crocheted white coverlet. Still, her Leslie is also a sociopath, a calculating killer and remorseless liar, ceaselessly putting on acts for those around her because authentic emotions—other than murderous rage, that is—are not part of her psychological makeup. Even as Leslie fires the gun repeatedly at Hammond’s dead body in the opening moments of the film, her face is stonelike, her feelings impossible to penetrate, and it’s this ambiguity that makes it possible for audiences to question Leslie’s motives from the beginning, even while we give her some benefit of the doubt.
There is a marvelous extended moment when Leslie’s cold sociopathology, her wish to appear sympathetic while lacking all feeling, and Davis’s generosity as an actor come together in overlapping, complementary silhouettes. When Joyce tells Robert that he has paid $10,000 for the letter, Wyler handles much of the scene in a single shot lasting about a minute and a half. Joyce is slightly out of focus on the left, with Robert sitting in the middle of the couch and Leslie slumped in the corner on the right. With the camera remaining static, Leslie performs the role of both the exhausted but exonerated innocent and the cunning killer, all with a minimum of gestures or words. A slight shift of the eyes, a studied rearrangement of the hands, even an absence of movement altogether—all reveal the inner workings of Leslie’s mind as the truth of her duplicity finally dawns on her gullible husband. And the balletlike interaction of Davis and Marshall demonstrates the difference between, on the one hand, two fine screen actors playing off each other toward a mutually satisfying end, and Miriam Hopkins–like upstaging on the other. Bette’s subtle gestures compel our attention—and she’s literally upstage of Marshall while she’s performing them—but not at the expense of her costar, who plays it all with equal understatement. If anything it’s Marshall’s scene more than Davis’s.
This is William Wyler’s direction at its unobtrusive best as well. He lets the audience see the couple’s imminent destruction without breaking them up into crass individual shots. We see the marriage collapse in a shower of tacit lies and their tense exposure in what is effectively a ninety-second two-shot, with an out-of-focus third wheel on the side serving as catalyst.
Curiously, Wyler himself had second thoughts about The Letter once he saw it in an assembled cut. The normally resolute director was convinced that he’d created a far too thoroughly unsympathetic Leslie Crosbie, and he was worried that audiences would react badly to his film as a result. The film’s production notes reveal that after seeing the film with Hal Wallis, Wyler requested permission to reshoot and reconstruct the whole ending, and Wallis was inclined to let him do it as long as he stuck to a prearranged plan and didn’t “start wandering [and] bringing in four or five alternate things.”9 Wyler asked the screenwriter Howard Koch (who was working with the uncredited Anne Froelick) to rewrite these final scenes to provide a more compassion-inspiring Leslie.
This time it was Davis who prevailed. Alarmed that he was tinkering with something she knew was working fine as it was, she requested a screening of Wyler’s initial cut. If Bette Davis was going to soften the character she’d struggled to make hard-edged, at least she wanted to see what she’d done before it was destroyed.
To what she oddly calls her “shame,” she burst into tears at the end. After composing herself, she argued that what she called “the intelligent audience” would understand what she and Wyler were doing, and that if they filmed the rewritten scenes they would risk losing everyone.10 They did reshoot the final bedroom scene between Davis and Marshall on October 16 and 17, as well as a scene involving James Stephenson and Frieda Inescort (who plays Stephenson’s wife, Dorothy Joyce), but this was scarcely the wholesale new ending Wyler had proposed.
When the annual Oscar nominations were announced, Davis found herself nominated for a third year in a row. After winning in 1938 for Jezebel, she was nominated in 1939 for Dark Victory but lost, of course, to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind. The critic Janet Flanner describes the logic: “As Hollywood abbreviates the paradoxes, in Victory, which was Davis’s tops, she had to lose the Oscar to Leigh, who got it on The Wind because Davis had just got it on Jezebel because she hadn’t got it on her next-to-tops Bondage because she had to lost it to Colbert in One Night, which was why Davis had got her original Oscar on Dangerous in the first place.”11
Warners didn’t do much campaigning for Davis this time. Its own gigantic-budget All This and Heaven, Too was up against The Letter in the Best Picture category, though Bette did get a nod as “Best Dressed Gal of the Week” for her “clever, self-designed slacks suit with a new kind of military aspect.”12 At the ceremony, which was held at the Biltmore Hotel on February 27, 1941, the emcee Bob Hope noticed Bette in the audience and quipped, “Bette drops in on these affairs every year for a cup of coffee and another Oscar.” But she didn’t walk away with one that year. Ginger Rogers snared it for Kitty Foyle.
TONY GAUDIO HAD faced an unexpected problem during the filming of The Letter in the summer of 1940. Like any fine cinematographer, he had a sharp eye for shapes and shadows. So it wasn’t surprising that he noticed that Bette was pregnant.
Gaudio “kept looking at me sideways,” Davis later told her confidant, Whitney Stine. “Obviously, I couldn’t have the baby, and I was upset as hell. I had already had two abortions. I was only 32 and thought to myself that, if I married again and wanted to have a baby, my insides might be in such a mess that I couldn’t. I cried and cried, but I knew what I had to do. (Where was that damn pill when I needed it?) I went to the doctor on a Saturday and showed up for scenes on Monday wearing a formfitting white eyelet evening dress for a scene. And that damn Tony said, ‘Jesus, Bette, it looks like you’ve lost five pounds over the weekend!’ ”13
Davis never revealed the identity of the father, but that may be because she didn’t know herself.
Bette reserved her most consistent affections for her dogs, who could be trusted to provide her a constant flow of all the simple love in dogdom. In the late 1930s she acquired a Pekingese she named Popeye after a fan magazine applied the cartoon moniker to Bette.14 (Actually Bette told the writer Gladys Hall that she herself thought her eyes resembled those of a bullfrog.)15 There was also Sir Cedric Wogs, a white Sealyham terrier sometimes called “Ceedie,” sometimes “Wogs.”16 Her favorite remained Tibby, the female black Scottish terrier. No wonder. A guide to dog breeds describes the Scottie: “This breed has unusual variable behavior and moods—it can get moody and snappish as an adult. It is inclined to be stubborn and needs firm, gentle handling from an early age or it will dominate the household.”17 Bette once had a director’s chair made for Tibby, complete with the pooch’s name emblazoned on the back. A poodle, too, arrived sometime along the way. Ham’s Doberman moved out along with Ham.
In “Divorce Is Making Her Miserable,” Gladys Hall reported that Bette left the Coldwater Canyon house after splitting up with Nelson and moved into a furnished rental in Beverly Hills with her friend Ruthie Garland. An unsourced clipping in one of Davis’s scrapbooks identifies Garland as “an old friend from Boston”; check the credits for The Sisters and you’ll find that Bette got her an acting job: the small role of Laura Watkins. (It’s Garland’s only screen credit.) Every Wednesday they had dinner at the counter at Steven’s, a diner near the Warners lot that was operated by another Bostonian, Steven Draper.18
What Gladys Hall failed to report was that the other Ruthie, Bette’s mother, had moved in with Bette first. But their relationship was fraught with tension, and Mother quickly moved out again in a huff. There were two different postdivorce rentals: one on North Rockingham and one on Beverly Grove.19 And the January 1939 Screen Guide claimed that Bette had moved in with Bobby and her husband.20
Wherever she was living, the Yankee-est girl who ever came down the pike had let loose. Bette finally launched the affair s
he’d always wanted with George Brent—whose second marriage had ended, as it had begun, in 1937—but it didn’t last very long. “Our secretaries were so busy courting each other for us that it was inevitable that they would take over our romance,” Davis wrote.21
She also had a brief fling with Anatole Litvak, of all people; after the shouting matches came lust. The ever-overheated Lawrence Quirk has Miriam Hopkins, “still riddled with lesbian hankerings for Davis,” telephoning Bette in a fury and threatening to name her as correspondent in Hopkins’s divorce proceedings against Litvak.22 The only indication in Davis’s personal scrapbooks that Litvak was anything more than just one of her many directors occurs in a graffito added to a clipping about Bette attending the Warner Club Sixth Annual Dinner Dance at the Biltmore Hotel on February 17, 1940. Her escort was Litvak, after whose name Bette has appended a handwritten “!”23
In the late summer of 1939, a more long-lasting relationship began. In late July, after finishing The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (and before starting All This and Heaven, Too), Bette headed for Mountainville, New York, to spend two weeks with her friend Peggy Ogden. On August 14, the two women left by car for New England. The Boston Globe caught up with her on the Cape, in Dennis. “Mostly I am eating lobsters and clams,” Bette declared. Davis also said that she was blissfully free of Warners’ publicity department, going so far as to claim that her contract contained a clause that forbade any studio publicists to come within one hundred yards of her when she wasn’t shooting a film.24
“After two weeks of roaming, seeing old friends whom I no longer had anything in common with, nor they me, I went to an inn in Franco-nia, New Hampshire,” Bette later wrote. “It was called Peckett’s.”25
Franconia was, and remains, a small Yankee village about two-thirds of the way up New Hampshire toward Quebec. It’s about ten miles from the Connecticut River, which divides New Hampshire from its neighbor, Vermont. About three miles in the other direction is the northwestern edge of White Mountain National Forest. Robert Frost once had a farmhouse there. The closest town of any size is Littleton, the population of which was then 5,000.
The assistant manager at Peckett’s Inn was a thirty-three-year-old divorcé named Arthur Farnsworth. Handsome, cultured, manly but refined, Farnsworth was more than just the assistant hotelier; he was an experienced pilot and aeronautic engineer—rather like Howard Hughes, only not crazy. He was also an accomplished violinist. Descending from praiseworthy Yankee stock and bringing along equally fine manners, Farney was a most acceptable beau for Bette during her time in Franconia.
The more stable relationship Bette began while in Franconia was with the land itself. She bought what she called “one hundred and fifty acres of rocky, rolling land” on Sugar Hill. (She later revised the figure upward to two hundred acres.)26 “It was here that I came out of my blue funk—here that I felt happy for the first time in years. New Hampshire and Farney were a tonic for me. I kept extending this rare vacation, hating to leave.”27 The property had a name, which Bette kept: Butternut.
In March 1940, the Hollywood press was all abuzz. Arthur Farnsworth and his sister were currently Bette’s houseguests, and the sweet promise of nuptials filled the gossip columns. But one famous scribe wasn’t so sure: “It wouldn’t surprise me if she does marry, but I doubt it will be to Farnsworth,” Louella Parsons noted.28
Louella may have been on to something. In late April, after finishing work on All This and Heaven, Too, Bette set sail on the Monterey for a tenday vacation in Hawaii. Initially, the press reported that she was accompanied only by her friend Robin Byron.
Dateline: Honolulu, April 29: “Hundreds of people” greeted Bette Davis as the ship pulled into the dock. “Take off those dark glasses, Bette!” reporters shouted. “And Bette did and shouted back, ‘Hello, everybody!’ Wearing a white linen sailor dress with navy blue trim and a pert little sailor hat, Bette repaid her fans for waiting long on the hot crowded dock. She stood out on her lanai suite so everybody could see her, talked across to the crowds, jingled her gobs and gobs of charm bracelets, and smiled for pictures.” “She wants to take hula lessons,” one reporter announced. Still another tracked Bette down a few days later and found her in “a bright red and white Tahitian print holoku she had purchased that afternoon.” Davis had taken “a trip around the island, with a stop at Janet Gaynor’s beach home for a swim, and of course a luau,” at which Bette sampled poi with lomi lomi salmon. She’d also purchased a carved ivory pikake necklace for Ruthie.29
The journalists quickly discovered a much juicier detail: Bette was traveling with another friend besides Robin Byron. “Just the publicity director, not a boyfriend,” Bette announced when asked who the short, good-looking, dark-haired man was—the one who was hanging around Bette’s lanai. Thirty-one-year-old Robert Taplinger was indeed Warners’ head of publicity. But with Farney having gone back East, and with Bette in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she was free to explore her coworker’s other talents.
One member of the fourth estate was less than impressed with Bette’s latest choice. “From outward appearance, you might think he was just a shoe clerk or something.”
Dorothy Kilgallen, May 6: Warners is “tearing its hair over Bette Davis’s sudden and serious romance with Robert Taplinger, the press agent, but she just giggles, and what can they do?”
Jimmie Fidler, May 8: “Arthur Farnsworth, Boston hotel Midas, is burning wires to Bette Davis in Hawaii, checking her ‘romance’ with a studio press agent.”
Reporters swarmed when Davis and Taplinger—and Robin Byron—arrived back in Los Angeles on May 13. Bette flatly denied that the couple was planning to be married.30
Hedda Hopper noted that she was still going out on the town with Taplinger on June 1. Toward the end of the month, Sidney Skolsky broke the news that a single gardenia was arriving for her on the set of The Letter every day; there was no card, no note, but everybody knew it was from Taplinger.
After The Letter wrapped, Bette headed east for a three-month vacation. She arrived at Boston’s South Station at noon on July 27 and was promptly greeted by what the Boston Traveler described as a crowd of 1,000 “unruly autograph seekers and hero-worshippers, mostly young girls.” With a ten-man police escort, she was swept along by the crowd to a waiting car and “whisked to the Ritz Carlton” for a press conference, at which she announced that her next film would be Calamity Jane. Davis was apparently of two minds about Calamity Jane. She wrote in Mother Goddam that she “would have adored to play this character. Always one of my dreams, one that didn’t come through.”31 At the time, however, she told Modern Screen, “There’s been some talk of Calamity Jane, which I politely trust I shall not do.”32*
Bette had taken the train east with Robin Byron. Bob Taplinger had arranged for a special dinner on board with champagne, an empty chair for Bob, and a note: “Don’t wait for me.” Davis didn’t. The affair was over.
THE GREAT LIE isn’t great as much as it’s outlandish: The dashing multimillionaire flier Peter Van Allen drunkenly marries the tempestuous concert pianist Sandra Kovak, but Sandra is a little vague about legalities; her divorce papers haven’t actually been filed yet, so they aren’t really married after all. Pete, sober for a change, goes on to marry his old sweetheart, the plain but wealthy Maggie, only to disappear over the jungles of Brazil, never having been told that during his weekend of inebriated illegal marriage he has impregnated Sandra, who is convinced by Maggie to bear the child, little Pete, who is raised by Maggie as her own son until Pete the father turns up alive, and Sandra threatens to reveal the truth to win both Petes back, and Maggie actually tells the truth and wins both Petes back, and Sandra loses the ball game. Surprisingly, Bette plays Maggie rather than Sandra.
* Jerry Wald’s script for Calamity Jane, although written with Ann Sheridan in mind, was handed instead to Bette, but the film didn’t get made until 1953, by which point it had become a Doris Day musical.33 Another of Bette’s abortive projects arou
nd this time was the crime drama Danger Signal, which she emphatically didn’t want to do; it was eventually made by Robert Florey in 1945.
“Before I started The Great Lie I wasn’t very excited about it,” Davis told an interviewer at the time of the film’s release in the spring of 1941. “I had just come back from a vacation in New Hampshire [and] was still wondering what to do when I got some of my fan mail. A lot of it ran in this vein—‘Why can’t you be nice for a change?’ I also remembered [that] someone, while I was in New Hampshire, said, ‘Why, you’re young!’ Everyone apparently had the idea that I was an old woman due to the many older characters I played. . . . I guess I do need happier roles for a change. I don’t kill anyone in this picture.”34
It was scarcely news that Davis wasn’t thrilled by The Great Lie. Hal Wallis was enraged when he read in Harrison Carroll’s syndicated column in mid-November 1940—the film was then in the middle of shooting—that Bette didn’t think it was terribly important: “This is just another motion picture,” she blithely told Carroll. Wallis advised Jack Warner thenceforth to have the publicity department “keep people away from her.”35
Warners had been developing the property—Polan Banks’s bestselling potboiler, January Heights—since early that year. Warners was all over the map in terms of choosing a director. In late January, Hal Wallis was considering two: Curtis Bernhardt and William Dieterle.36 Less than a month later, Jack Warner was adamant: “Let us have it definitely understood that Vincent Sherman will be put on January Heights as the director.”37 Bette added her two cents sometime later: she wrote to Wallis that yet another choice, Lloyd Bacon, simply wasn’t right for the picture. Maybe they could borrow Garson Kanin from RKO, but “Eddie G. is the one if he would do it.”