James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Still, she felt deeply ambivalent about becoming Ham’s wife. Yes, she loved him; yes, she thought they had a good chance to be happy together. But she was worried. “I was afraid for Ham, afraid of what Hollywood would do to his career, afraid of putting him in a position of being a star’s husband.” All evening she vacillated from a firm “No” to a conditional “Maybe” (“If you get a job here I’ll think about it”) to a possible “Yes” (“Weelll…”).

  One of the main factors pulling Bette toward “Yes” was her frustration at being a twenty-four-year-old virgin living in the same house with a man she found sexually exciting. “I was hopelessly puritan, helplessly passionate,” she recalled, and the combination was driving her crazy. Still bound by Ruthie’s moralistic values, she was afraid that unless she got married soon, she wouldn’t be able to avoid the temptation to sin. Her ambivalence that night knew no bounds. Whenever she would say “Weelll,” Nelson would start to dress for their wedding trip; then she would have second thoughts and say “No” and he’d undress and go back upstairs to bed. Then he’d come down and ask again.

  Finally, at midnight, Bette agreed to marry him, and Ham wasn’t going to give her time to change her mind. He corralled the entire household—six people and Boojum—into two cars and set off for Yuma, Arizona, in the smallest hours of the morning. By daybreak, they were still a hundred miles short of their destination, the desert temperature was already in the nineties, and Bette had been silent the whole time. “It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘This is horrible. I won’t go on.’”

  Ruthie, who could read Bette’s mind by now and knew exactly how to handle her, spoke up first. “Let’s not go on,” she said. Bette reacted as Ruthie had expected. “The mule in me immediately gave a back-kick of the heels and told Ham to step on the gas.”

  When the wedding party arrived in Yuma, their clothing was soaked through with perspiration. (“It was 107 in the shade!” Bette marveled.) The six of them booked two motel rooms for the four women and a third for the two men, and took turns taking showers, then wrapped themselves in the bedspreads while their clothes dried. Ham went out to buy a new shirt and searched all day to find a wedding ring in the small town. Bette kept muttering, “This is so awful it’s funny.”

  The next morning, August 18, Harmon O. Nelson, Jr., and Ruth Elizabeth Davis were married in the cramped home of a Methodist minister. Boojum loudly slurped herself with her tongue throughout the ceremony, and Ham dropped the ring twice, once losing it between two loose floorboards. Bette couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that this wasn’t the kind of wedding she had imagined she’d have. She was once again drenched in perspiration, which turned patches of her drab tan dress a deep brown. “This is love’s greatest test,” she said to herself. “If Ham doesn’t look at me and scream, ‘Good God, is that what’s going to be Mrs. Harmon Nelson?, ’ then I know that nothing matters to him.”

  The fantasy wedding Bette had always pictured for herself flashed through her mind: she’d be “dewy and divine,” dressed in white satin and orange blossoms. To the lovely strains of Mendelssohn, she would walk up a church aisle bedecked with white ribbons. She was jerked back to reality by the sound of locomotives chugging in a nearby railway yard. Perhaps it was all these lost fantasies that led Bette into a little mischief when the minister asked her if this was her first marriage. “No, sir,” she replied, “it’s my third.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Nelson returned to the Zuma Beach house and shared a bedroom for the first time. In her autobiography, Bette rhapsodized that “This was Ruth Elizabeth’s golden moment. The proper bliss of a wedding night was here. The union under God and everything between a man and an honest-to-goodness maid was hers; and her joy was boundless.… Passion formalized, love ritualized, sex smiled upon by Society.”

  In fact, Bette’s wedding night wasn’t nearly so blissful. As she told her friend, the writer Jerry Asher, Ham’s provincial naiveté extended to matters sexual. He had never been with a woman before, and was used to masturbating. He behaved awkwardly in bed, and remained passive with his bride, not quite sure what he should do.

  Bette was, more than anything else, surprised. Nelson had played in bands for years; surely he must have had his pick of available women. Later she would wonder about the depth of Ham’s interest in the opposite sex, but for now she became the aggressor. No sexual sophisticate herself, she masturbated him to climax, and he never satisfied her that first night. It was, she told friends, months before she had “trained” him to please her, but still he seemed to prefer masturbation or fellatio to coital intercourse.

  Sexual problems were not the only ones the couple faced. Ham soon got a job as an orchestra leader at the Colony Club, a popular night spot on the Sunset Strip, and returned home each night only a few hours before Bette left for work. By the time she got home after a day at the studio, Ham was getting ready to leave again. They barely saw each other except on Sundays.

  Still, Bette gave her all to make her marriage to Ham Nelson work. When he took a gig at the Villa Mateo in Daly City, a suburb of San Francisco, late in 1933, she drove north every weekend to see him, accompanied by a new friend, Liz Fisher, and turned Ham’s tacky lodgings, cottage number 10 in the Mission Auto Court, into as close an approximation of a home as possible. She and Liz “cooked up a storm” and decorated an evergreen for Christmas with gay cutouts from the Sunday comics. There wasn’t a place in the world, Bette recalled, that she couldn’t “make seem like home. Ruthie had given me this ability… money is not the biggest ingredient. Imagination and being adaptable help the most.”

  It took a few visits before others staying at the Mission Auto Court recognized Bette. “How does it feel to be the husband of a famous movie star?” Ham was asked. “She’s just Bette to me,” he replied. People “made fun” of her, Bette said at the time, when they found out that she “cooked, swept, cleaned, and kept house for my husband just as women do all over the world. I needed that experience, and because of the demands of my work, I had never been able to have it in Hollywood. I wanted it, not only for my own good but also to prove to Ham that I could be a real wife in every sense of the word, not just a part-time wife whose job is pretty important to her, too.”

  This “admission” of Bette’s was more disingenuous than it was candid. While she did assume, happily, the role of “the little woman” when she wasn’t working, when she was on a set her career took precedence over her marriage. Emoting for the camera, exhausted at the end of a day’s shooting, Bette longed for the “wife” she had talked about earlier, and Ham seemed more than happy to accommodate her. When she suggested that he do some housework, he agreed, but Bette found herself less pleased by Ham’s contributions than dismayed that he hadn’t refused to do “woman’s work” as a “real man” would have.

  Publicly, they played out the charade of a happily modern “percentage” marriage; Ham’s $100 a week, they claimed, would pay for 10 percent of what Bette’s $1,000 a week (by 1934) could buy. Bette bought furs, gowns, a black Packard “to keep up her business position,” and Ham bought suits off the rack and a Ford roadster that cost him $19.50. So far, Bette said, the arrangement had “worked beautifully and enabled each to keep our self-respect and the respect of the other.”

  The reality was less comfortable, and Ham Nelson would learn that he couldn’t win with Bette one way or the other. When he refused to allow her to pay for a more extravagant lifestyle than his $100-per-week income could keep up with (as her “real man” would have), she flew into a fury. They had moved into a white, ivy-covered English Tudor house on Horn Avenue in Hollywood; Ruthie and Bobby lived in a guest house in the back. When Bette wanted to move to a larger, more fashionable home, Nelson said firmly, “We can’t move, not yet.”

  “We can afford to move,” Bette insisted. “I’ve got the money.”

  “We can’t buy a house with your money,” Nelson shot back. “What difference does it make, Ham?” she shouted. But Nelson had already turn
ed and walked away.

  Early in 1933, Bette discovered she was pregnant. Initially ecstatic, she was stopped cold by her husband’s reaction to the news. “You’re much too busy to have a baby,” he told her. “It would be stupid to jeopardize your career.” Then he added something that to Bette was the real point: “You don’t think I’m going to have you pay the hospital bills for the baby, do you?”

  It was their baby and their money, Bette replied. But Ham had grown more and more adamant about living largely on his income. Ruthie sided with Ham and told Bette that to have a baby now could derail her career. Bette saw the point, but the only way out of her pregnancy was to undergo an operation, and the thought of it made her feel “wretched.” Still, she said, “I did as I was told.”

  Unlike other young women of this era, Bette didn’t have to undergo the ordeal of a back-alley operation performed by a quack. A studio doctor performed the procedure, quickly and safely, in a medical setting. After a silent drive home with Ham, Bette took to her bed and cried for hours, shaking with misery and guilt.

  Even so, she would undergo another abortion while married to Ham Nelson.

  By now, the fan magazines had taken notice of Bette: She was featured in fashion layouts arranged by the studio; she did more than her share of silly publicity poses with huge Valentine hearts and oversized beach balls; and she appeared on her first cover in 1933. As her career began to burgeon, more and more articles about her private life and her marriage appeared with each new film. She earned a reputation for candor; just about every interviewer pointed out that the “outspoken” Bette Davis rarely shied away from subjects about which most actresses remained mute. She owned up to the fact that she had been “fired” from Universal; and admitted to the reporter Laura Benham that her “arrangement” with Ham Nelson wasn’t as successful as she had earlier claimed it was: “In Hollywood there are so many households in which the wife earns either the entire income or the greater portion of it. Mine is one of those households. And therein exists the problem.”

  Benham commented, “I was surprised by her frankness. All too many times have I broken bread with beautiful young ladies of the screen who were bearing the economic responsibility of their families. This was the first time one of them had admitted it.” The title of the Benham article could not have pleased Ham Nelson: “Marriage Costs Bette Plenty.”

  Bette’s openness about some subjects gave her leeway to be less than honest about others. Her questioners were so sure she was being straightforward with them that they tended to believe everything she said. In fact Bette was less than truthful about a number of elements in her life.

  She sometimes led reporters to believe that her parents were still married, and she invariably painted Ruthie as a tower of virtue who sacrificed everything for her daughter’s career. While there were elements of truth in that, Bette never revealed her growing resentment against her mother because of Ruthie’s dominating personality, her continual meddling in Bette’s affairs, and especially her lavish spending. At one point Bette wrote a note listing all the things that most vexed her; foremost was “Ruthie’s growing extravagance.” Bette often did without something she wanted in order to buy Ruthie a new fur, put her behind the wheel of a shiny new car, or send her on vacation. But what irked her even more was Ruthie’s apparent belief that she deserved the kudos for Bette’s career as much as Bette did. Ruthie always walked ahead of Bette at premieres, prompting Bobby to observe, “You’d think she was the movie star and Bette just the also-ran relative.”

  Bette’s profound ambivalence toward Ruthie tore at her heart. On the one hand, she felt that her mother had sacrificed so much for so long that she deserved creature comforts and a share of the spotlight. And yet she grew more and more upset with Ruthie’s profligacy, and increasingly hurt by her suspicion that her mother’s sacrifices had been made more with an eye toward her own future happiness than Bette’s. These mixed feelings left her very uncomfortable, racked with anger one minute, awash with guilt the next.

  The situation with Bobby didn’t help. In December 1934, Los Angeles newspapers ran the story that Bette Davis’s sister was a “new Warner Brothers actress” who wanted to follow in Bette’s footsteps. Without Bette’s knowledge, Ruthie had taken Bobby to Warner Brothers for a screen test, and the Warner executives were interested. When the press items appeared, Bette told reporters that “I mean to help Barbara as much as possible.” Instead, she stepped in and killed the prospect cold. The reason, Ruthie told Ginny Conroy, was that “Hollywood isn’t big enough for two Davis girls.”

  That was only part of it. Bette was less concerned about any competition Bobby might be to her than she was about keeping her sister’s increasingly delicate emotional state out of the limelight. Bobby, even more high-strung than Bette, had lived in her sister’s shadow for so many years, and that shadow was now so long and so dark, that the young woman had teetered over the edge into mental illness a year earlier.

  Always timid, quiet, and nervous, Bobby’s behavior had grown increasingly bizarre. Now her withdrawals verged on the catatonic, but often they were bracketed by violent outbursts of laughter or screaming. Several times, she hit Ruthie and had to be restrained from doing herself physical harm. Finally, there was no choice but to hospitalize her. Ruthie took her to a sanatorium in New York, where she remained for over a year. She didn’t utter a word the entire time.

  Bobby’s mental problems deeply disturbed Bette, and for reasons much more complex than worry about her sister’s welfare. Bobby’s symptoms of untrammeled energy followed by crippling depressions hit much too close to home for Bette; she often exhibited the same pattern. Ginny Conroy said of Bette: “Certainly there were times when she seemed as though she were manic/depressive.” In her most private moments Bette wondered, Could I go nuts like Bobby?

  It was a genuine concern; mental illness remained a thread throughout Bette Davis’s life. It is impossible to know whether similar problems afflicted Bette’s ancestors, because in those eras such illness was hidden at all costs within families; even had Ruthie or Bette heard rumors about mental instability in the family, they wouldn’t have spoken of it publicly. But it is perhaps significant that one of Bette’s forebears had been labeled a witch; many of those so accused suffered from mental illnesses that made them behave so strangely that they seemed, in this period before scientific enlightenment, to be “possessed by the devil.”

  Bette tried to put it out of her mind. In her memoirs, she attributes Bobby’s emotional turmoil to the fact that after Bette’s marriage her sister “felt she had lost me and her anxieties took on the proportions of a nervous breakdown.” There was far more to it than that, but Bette was never able to accept the fact that whatever was in the genes, Bobby’s instability was badly exacerbated by the “punishing overshadowment” to which Bette and Ruthie had subjected her since her childhood. When Bobby returned to Los Angeles after her confinement back East, in good spirits and hoping for a film career, only to have her exciting new aspirations shot down by Bette, it was crystal clear that nothing had changed.

  Around this time Bette’s beloved Boojum died, and she was profoundly saddened by the loss. She had never liked being alone, and with Ham working nights and Bobby away, the adorable little terrier had provided warmth and company for her whenever she most needed it. Ruthie quickly found a replacement, a Scottie Bette named Tam-O-Shanta, and within a few years the Davis home had become a dog sanctuary with the addition of a Sealyham, a Doberman, and two poodles. But Bette always kept a special place in her heart for Boojum, who had been with her when all of this started. Her pet’s death and her sister’s illness were melancholy reminders to Bette that she was no longer the New England girl she had been when Boojum first came into her life.

  Bette’s career ups and downs continued, as if on a parallel graph with her personal highs and lows. She was earning $1,000 a week by mid-1934, and at the height of the Great Depression, when the cost of living bottomed out, this salary wa
s equivalent to nearly $15,000 in 2013 dollars. She was touted as Hollywood’s “hottest new star” in Sunday supplements, she dressed in designer gowns and expensive furs, she appeared on the covers of more and more movie magazines, was mobbed by adoring fans at premieres. She made seven films between January 1933 and April 1934; with Ex-Lady, released in May 1933, she was billed over the title for the first time. She was starting to feel like a “star.”

  But the undertow of mediocre films Warners so often gave her threatened to wash this promising career out to sea. Only one of those seven films, The Working Man, which reteamed her with George Arliss, proved creatively satisfying for Bette. Most of the others, while successful at the box office, were either artistic clunkers or failed to utilize Bette’s talents properly. Bureau of Missing Persons, she said, had an “appropriate enough title, I guess.” Fashions of 1934, although a box-office success that many critics considered “clever and lively,” left Bette unhappy because Warners had tried to make her over into a blond Greta Garbo, with a platinum wig styled to resemble Garbo’s coiffure—“to say nothing of the false lashes and huge mouth and the slinky clothes.” She felt, she said, “glamorized beyond recognition.”

  That was where Bette Davis differed from most screen actresses of the early thirties. She had little interest in glamour; she wanted to be praised for her talent, not her legs or her eyes or her hair. And that was why, when she learned that the director John Cromwell wanted to borrow her from Warners to play Mildred in the RKO movie version of W. Somerset Maugham’s bestseller Of Human Bondage, a beacon of light seemed to shine out at her from the edges of her ever-deepening doubt about the direction of her career. Mildred! she thought. What a marvelous part for an actress!

  No other star in Hollywood would touch it. Mildred Rogers in Maugham’s semiautobiographical novel is one of the most unsympathetic characters ever transferred to film. A sullen, slatternly, barely literate Cockney waitress, she coldly manipulates Philip Carey, the shy, sensitive, club-footed artist-turned-medical-student who obsessively loves her. She leaves him twice for other men, one of whom makes her pregnant and both of whom desert her. She returns to Philip each time; he is still so possessed by her that he takes her in. But he rebuffs her physical overtures when he realizes they are rooted not in love or even sexual attraction, but rather pity and a sense of indebtedness. Infuriated by the rejection, Mildred rails viciously against him, destroys his paintings, and burns the bonds he has inherited and needs to continue medical school.