by Ed Sikov
Warner Bros. brought forth two such cavalcades: Thank Your Lucky Stars, which began filming in October 1942 but wasn’t released until the following September; and Hollywood Canteen, made in two batches and released on December 31, 1944. The latter film had gone into production in November 1943, but the Screen Actors Guild put a stop to the filming by demanding that all the stars be paid their full salaries no matter how brief their appearances were. The issue was settled in late April 1944 when the Guild agreed that a week’s salary was a reasonable minimum payment for those actors who worked on a per-picture basis. The problem was, Hollywood Canteen was not originally designed to showcase only Warners’ talent, and other studios refused to loan their stars to Warners under the new conditions. What’s more, the New York Times reported, a total of nine other all-star films had been in the planning stages at other studios, but all were dropped thanks to the new rules. Filming on Hollywood Canteen resumed on June 5, 1944.2 Davis filmed her sequence during the last week of June.3
Hollywood Canteen finds Bette acting more or less unself-consciously as herself at the Canteen, introducing acts and presenting prizes and a cake to the lucky “Slim,” the millionth man to enter the club. According to the actress Joan Leslie, with whom “Slim” wins a date, Davis had trouble being Davis. “I just can’t do this!” Bette cried after repeatedly flubbing lines that had been scripted to make her sound like herself. “If you give me a gun, a cigarette, and a wig, I can play any old bag. But I can’t play myself!” “Everyone laughed,” Leslie continued. “This broke the tension on the set and allowed the scene to proceed smoothly, as this super, sophisticated lady probably knew it would.”4
“A very pleasant pile of shit for wartime audiences” is how Joan Crawford described Hollywood Canteen.5 A group of enlisted men responded with even less praise. The film, they wrote to Warners, was “a slur on the intelligence and acumen of every member of the armed services.”6 Still, Hollywood Canteen was a huge hit and became one of Warners’ top-grossing films of 1945.7
Thank Your Lucky Stars is by far the more entertaining of the two films, if for no other reason than Bette Davis enters it singing.
The movie strings itself along on a plot, but it’s deliberate twaddle involving hard-to-take Eddie Cantor and his equally excruciating look-alike, a Hollywood tour guide who helps two fresh-faced kids (Joan Leslie and Dennis Morgan) break into showbiz. That the comedy is mainly about how wretched Cantor is—how stale his routines are, how bug-eyed and “repulsive” he is physically—is a testament to Cantor’s self-deprecating good nature, though toward the end of the film when he turns up in a psycho ward and gets strapped to a gurney, you might find yourself hoping that the onscreen surgeon will actually go through with the lobotomy he threatens to perform. In any event, Thank Your Lucky Stars features Edward Everett Horton and S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall playing a pair of producers who enlist Warner Bros.’ stars as entertainment for the big war benefit they’re throwing at a Hollywood theater—the kind of marvelous, supernatural stage that quadruples in size when necessary to accommodate vast cinematic musical numbers. John Garfield, Humphrey Bogart, Hattie McDaniel, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino, Dinah Shore, Ann Sheridan, Jack Carson, and Alan Hale all appear as themselves.
Nothing in Bette Davis’s career to this point can prepare you for the sublimely ridiculous moment when she opens her dark lipsticked mouth and—well, okay: sings is not the right word. Davis delivers Frank Loesser and Arthur Schwartz’s witty, forced-rhymed “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.” As she remarked about her singing voice to Dick Cavett many years later, “It has more personality than vocal ability, shall we say.”8
However little she appreciated it on a conscious level, her appearance in Thank Your Lucky Stars marks the first time in her career that Bette Davis knew that to get the job done, to make the sequence work—to be bedrock honest as an actress—she had to turn herself into self-parody:
They’re either too young, or too old,
They’re either too gray or too grassy green,
. . .
The battle is on, but the fortress will hold,
They’re either too young or too old.
The sheer ghastliness of Davis’s singing voice is precisely what sells the song. It’s not that she’s gamely attempting to sing while acknowledging that she can’t. No, she transcends mere singing by parodying her speaking voice at its most mannered and italicized, all the while hovering toward but generally missing the musical notes that, for a lesser talent, would have formed the structure of the song. Davis played it smarter. To give an honest performance of herself playing a musical comedienne, Davis knew she had to turn cartoonish. The absurd jitterbug she does with a GI in the middle of the routine is so fast and frenzied—he hurls her around with utter abandon, lifting her far off her feet and flinging her around like a yo-yo—that it might as well serve as a Looney Tunes sequence.
In terms of Bette Davis caricatures, Warners’ animation department had already beaten her to the punch. The enormity and depth of Davis’s well-like eyes had attracted the attention of Friz Freleng and his Merrie Melodies crew as early as 1936 with The CooCoo Nut Grove, which catches a brief glimpse of Davis seated at her own table at the eponymous nightclub. (Freleng took it easier on Davis than he did with Katharine “Miss Heartburn” Hepburn, whom he depicts as a whinnying horse complete with elongated equine teeth and hooves.) The following year, in She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter, Freleng drew a vast-eyed Bette overplaying a scene from The Petrified Florist with an effeminate Leslie Howard before an audience of rude and boorish animals until an obnoxious duck-child commandeers the projector and sends The Petrified Florist unspooling into chaos. Freleng brought Bette into his 1940 Malibu Beach Party as well, along with Jimmy Cagney, George Raft, Ginger Rogers, Greta Garbo, and Spencer Tracy.
In Fred “Tex” Avery’s animated 1941 Hollywood Steps Out, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Jimmy Stewart, and the inevitably mocked Leopold Stokowski all appear at Ciro’s, but Davis’s reserved table is notably empty. They’re waiting for her, but she doesn’t show up; as the film critic and animation expert Hank Sartin notes, Avery is slyly riffing on Bette’s frequent absences from the studio owing to suspensions.9 In Chuck Jones’s 1942 Fox Pop, released under the Looney Tunes label, Bette shows up briefly in the window of the chic Hollywood restaurant Chiro’s wearing a fashionable silver fox fur.
Davis’s last appearance as a Warner Bros. caricature came in 1946 with Hollywood Daffy, in which Daffy jumps off a bus at Hollywood and Vine and jubilantly cries, “Hollywood! The thit-y of the thin-ema at latht!” He immediately heads to “Warmer Brothers Studios” and attempts, with increasingly violent results, to crash the front gate. Animated Bette, of course, has no such difficulties. “Good morning, Miss Davis!” says the security guard (in one of Mel Blanc’s most nasal voices). “So you think I’m mean to you,” the cartoon Bette snaps, clutching a script as she marches through the gate. “You think I’m cruel. Mad. Selfish. Domineering! (To the guard:) Good morning. Well. You’re right. I’m all that. And heaven, too.” (Bette’s voice was most likely not provided by Mel Blanc, but rather by Bea Benaderet, Warners’ go-to gal for female cartoon voices in the 1940s.)10
But the funniest Davis-related moment in any Warner Bros. cartoon occurs without Davis herself being onscreen. In Bob Clampett’s 1946 Bugs Bunny–starring The Big Snooze, in the middle of a speech in which a theatrically desperate Bugs begs a fed-up Elmer Fudd not to leave him, he looks straight at the audience and confides, “Bette Davis is going to hate me for this.”11 The joke is doubly comical. Not only is Bugs playing an overwrought Bette Davis scene—the drag-loving Bugs is almost as much of a gay icon as Bette—but Elmer is threatening not only to leave Bugs but to leave Warner Bros. Disgusted with his deal, especially the fact that he’s constantly playing the same role, Elmer has ripped up his contract and thrown it on the ground. Fudd had an excellent role model in Bette Davis.
HAVING RENOVAT
ED BUTTERNUT to their satisfaction, Bette and Farney turned their decorating attentions to Riverbottom. They hired the designer Mac Mulcahy to redo almost everything; Mulcahy finished his work in the spring of 1943. The breakfast room was done over in Early American style with a corner cupboard and dark wood table and chairs. The sitting room was made even more informal than it had been before, with new built-in bookshelves and overstuffed chairs, although the large full-color map of the world hanging on one wall was a bit schoolmarmish.
The original dining room design had featured all-too-scenic wallpaper—horses on a hunt running through fields—and a long, dark dining table set off by white chairs. Mulcahy installed knotty pine paneling and a matching dining table and chairs and added cheerful pink and white draperies and a huge breakfront displaying china and pewter cups. The living room’s original layout—two long couches facing each other—was transformed into a more casual room by way of easy chairs surrounding a large circular coffee table. The master bedroom, which once featured a high four-poster bead with white cover and canopy, now sported a new, long, low bed with a plaid bedspread and matching drapes, wall-to-wall carpeting, and a recovered chaise.12
Riverbottom was newly homey, but it wasn’t the home of a traditional couple. After completing Old Acquaintance, Bette went off to Mexico with her friend the Countess Dorothy di Frasso while Farney continued to spend time in Minneapolis and elsewhere on the road doing notably unchronicled work for the military. (Di Frasso was the daughter of the millionaire Bertrand Taylor. Known for giving lavish parties, she was a fixture on the Hollywood scene in the 1930s and ’40s. Her title came from her second marriage, to Count Carlos di Frasso.)
Bette, meanwhile, was battling Warners for a new contract. “My trip to Mexico was of long duration,” she wrote. “I was in contractual difficulty with Warner Bros. I had never demanded a salary raise or limitation of films per year, and I felt the time had come. I informed the studio I would not return until my contract met these demands.”13
The contract she won, dated June 7, 1943, covered nine films over five years at $115,000 per film for the first five and $150,000 for the final four. In a separate pact, Warner Bros. and Davis agreed that five of these films would be produced by her new production company, B.D. Inc., with Davis finally achieving some measure of contractually based control over the selection and development of stories and, indeed, all production matters, though the final decisions would remain the studio’s. For the first three B.D. Inc. pictures, Davis would get the first $125,000 of gross receipts, with Warners getting the next $232,000; any remainder would be split as follows: 35 percent to Davis and 65 percent to Warner Bros. For the remaining two B.D. Inc. films, Davis would get the first $150,000.14
There were the usual number of misfires and false alarms. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Bette was set to star in the romance One More Tomorrow opposite Paul Henreid; the film was actually made in 1943 with Ann Sheridan and Dennis Morgan but wasn’t released until 1946.15
She was offered a role in Battle Cry, a propaganda epic to be directed by Howard Hawks, whose biographer Todd McCarthy describes it as an action film dealing “with virtually every front on which the war was being fought, from China and the Soviet Union to North Africa and the French underground. It would have run eighteen reels and cost $4 million.” Writers included Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Ben Hecht, Pearl Buck, Edna Ferber, Maxwell Anderson, George Kaufman, and Moss Hart, with William Faulkner as the orchestrating author of the piece. Jerome Kern was commissioned to write the score. Bette’s segment would have cast her most improbably as “Ma-Ma Mosquito,” described by McCarthy as “a tough old Chinese grandmother recognized by Chiang Kai-Shek for leading resistance against Japanese occupation.”16 Not only did Bette turn down the role, but Battle Cry went into turnaround at practically the last minute and never got made.
She did appear in a seventeen-minute Fox short called Show Business at War, along with everyone from Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Barrymore, John Garfield, and Irving Berlin to Irene Dunne, Marlene Dietrich, W. C. Fields, Alfred Hitchcock, Myrna Loy, Walt Disney, Frank Sinatra, and Orson Welles.17
Davis expressed some interest in an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome with an eye toward appearing opposite Raymond Massey, who had played the title role on Broadway in 1936. Matthew Kennedy reports that Joan Crawford had encouraged Edmund Goulding to approach Bette for Ethan Frome, but Goulding had had enough: “I wouldn’t go near her with a ten-foot electric pole,” he told Crawford.18 And as Louella Parsons announced in March, “along came the war, taking Massey to Canada—and along came Mr. Skeffington for Bette.”
FARNEY DIED ON August 25. He had collapsed while walking down Hollywood Boulevard two days earlier and never regained consciousness.
The death of a movie star, or a movie star’s spouse, usually engenders dark speculations about mysterious circumstances and all-too-tidy cover-ups, and the death of Arthur Farnsworth at the age of thirty-seven is no exception, particularly because Bette brought to the case the suspicious habit of killing her onscreen husbands. Add to her murderous melodramas Farney’s cryptic war work, and the case remains ripe enough to be covered on E! Network’s Mysteries and Scandals series more than a half century after the fact. But Bette was not Leslie Crosbie or Regina Giddens, and Farney was not James Bond. As disappointing as it may be to the morbidly nosy, there is no indication that Farney died from any reason other than a brain hemorrhage resulting from a skull fracture that was caused by a fall. The most sober explanation is that he was drunk and fell off a moving train.
On Monday, the twenty-third, Farney left Riverbottom for the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, where he was serving as a technical consultant on aeronautics for some government films Disney was producing. From there he went to Hollywood to do some shopping. Davis wrote in The Lonely Life that “he had been forgetful, disorganized, as he went off to work. He had seemed almost tipsy and I joked about the possibility that he’d spiked his orange juice. We’d laughed about it. Later on, he’d ordered me a leopard stole at Magnin’s.”19 He then paid a visit to their lawyer, Dudley Furse. On his way to his car, he suddenly cried out and hit the pavement in front of a tobacco store on the 6200 block of Hollywood Boulevard, between Vine and Argyle. The store owner called an ambulance, and Farney was taken first to a receiving hospital and then to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where he died two days later.
Bette had gone shopping that day with Margaret Donovan, her longtime hairdresser and the wife of Perc Westmore, and had returned to Riverbottom by the time the phone call came in. She’s said to have called Dr. Moore, who told her to meet him at Hollywood Presbyterian.
Rehashing the case luridly in 1951 for American Weekly, Adela Rogers St. Johns, the overrated grande dame of Hollywood journalists, wrote that “after the coroner’s autopsy report, the Hollywood Homicide Bureau and the District Attorney’s office took over. The autopsy revealed that the skull fracture had not resulted from the fall that day. According to medical authorities, it had taken place some time before and the sidewalk hadn’t caused it, but possibly ‘a blunt instrument such as a blackjack or the butt end of a gun.’ ” Swiftly abandoning the blackjack and gun for lack of evidence, St. Johns moved on to quote Bette: “Then I remembered a fall Farney had at our New Hampshire home late in June. Coming downstairs in his stocking feet to answer the telephone, he slipped on the first landing and slid the full length of the stairs. He landed on his back, struck the back of his head and scraped his back severely. He suffered the usual lameness for some days but not being the complaining kind he said nothing, so I thought no more about it.”
St. Johns, needing to spice up her story in the blackjack’s continuing absence, plunged on: “Still, there were complications about the time element. Dr. Homer R. Keyes, assistant county surgeon, thought it couldn’t have been more than two weeks since the original injury occurred.” Eventually, though, St. Johns was forced to admit that “following confere
nces, investigations, hearings, and further medical reports, Bette’s explanation was finally accepted as the true one.” How accurate St. Johns’s reporting is on any point remains questionable, however, since she went on in the same story to credit William Wyler for directing the great, sardonic tale of Hollywood murder, Sunset Boulevard.20
Lawrence Quirk brings Lucille Farnsworth to the scene: “Farney’s bossy mother came immediately from New York and demanded [the] autopsy.” Then he drops the bombshell. Farney’s briefcase, which supposedly went missing when he collapsed, turned up later, and “in it were bottles of liquor. Then [Bette] learned that he had been hit over the head two weeks before he died by a cuckolded husband who had found Farney in bed with his wife.”21
James Spada goes so far as to place Bette herself at the scene of Farnsworth’s collapse, but his source is Davis’s notorious third husband, William Grant Sherry, who told Spada long after the couple’s acrimonious divorce that he and Bette had been walking along Hollywood Boulevard once when “all of a sudden Bette started shaking and looked frightened. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ She pointed down to the ground and said, ’That’s where I pushed Farney. I thought he was drunk and I pushed him and he fell and hit his head on the curb.” What better way to get back at one’s ex than to have her privately confess to killing her previous husband, especially after she’s safely in her grave and can’t sue? The generally reliable Spada proceeds to theorize: “She could have pushed him and stalked away so quickly that she never realized he had hit his head.” (Davis was so busy stalking away that she never heard what one of Spada’s own witnesses describes as “a terrifying yell.”) Or: “she could have realized he was hurt and remained without being recognized in her sunglasses, then slipped away unnoticed to avoid a scandal once she was sure Farney was being cared for.” (Disguised a few steps short of a Groucho nose and glasses, Bette Davis remained unrecognized in a crowd that gathered just off the corner of Hollywood and Vine.) “Or she might have remained with Farney at all times and Warner Bros. was able to use its formidable power to cover up the facts, coach the witnesses with their stories, and ram through the inquest verdict.” (Jack Warner, aka Satan, was so commanding and manipulative that he bought off the press, the justice system, and every bystander in the heart of Hollywood.) These speculations are all dismissable.22