by James Spada
The minute she was finished with The Little Foxes, Bette went back East to rejoin Farney in New Hampshire. (His job with Minneapolis Honeywell didn’t require him to relocate to Minnesota; his base remained in the Northeast and he commuted several times a month.) As before, the sojourn to Sugar Hill rejuvenated Bette physically and mentally. She had the rugged, down-to-earth Farney as her reality anchor; she looked forward to the fall foliage and the freshly shucked clams and the crisp fall air to renew her and remind her of her roots. And she had Butternut.
While Bette was in Hollywood, Farney and a team of construction workers had followed her and Ruthie’s sketches and rebuilt the main house. “The only thing we could salvage from the original building was the fireplace,” Bette recalled. The new house was built around it, so that it rose from the middle of the living room, two sides open. The small, barnlike structure—with its white pine walls, its comfortable overstuffed chairs and antiques that Bette and Ruthie had gathered from throughout New England—felt more like home to Bette than any other place she had ever lived.
More than ever now, Bette possessed two distinct personalities. In Hollywood, she was Bette Davis, movie star. In New Hampshire, she was Ruth Elizabeth, New England girl. She and Farney puttered around Butternut in plaid flannel shirts and work pants, cleaned house (“Too small for a maid,” Bette explained), burned leaves, planted bulbs for next spring’s tulips, drove their six-wheel truck to market for freshly picked produce. What social life they enjoyed centered around skiing, ski dances, “sugaring-off parties,” and sitting around the kitchen table making small talk with their neighbors.
One reporter who observed Bette at Butternut described her as “divinely happy.” She was probably incapable of ever achieving such a blissful state, but the love she and Farney felt for each other, she said, was “a low but steady light.” Amid some rocks on the Butternut property, she installed a plaque in tribute to her husband: “In Memoriam to Arthur Farnsworth, ‘The Keeper of Stray Ladies,’ Presented by a Grateful One.” Later she admitted that what she liked best about the marriage was that it was “classically European” and allowed her a good deal of freedom. “He didn’t have an ounce of jealousy. He never questioned me about anything I did. He let me run my own life.”
Which meant, of course, that he allowed her full rein to pursue her career, and unlike Ham, made little issue of the financial disparity between them. He’s got a good, important job, Bette told herself, and he’s secure enough that he can enjoy the life my money brings us without feeling his masculinity is being threatened. She liked that. She liked him. She felt content. And in New Hampshire, surrounded by families with small children, she yearned to have a child at last.
Bobby was able to care for her baby Ruth now, and Bette missed her. Georgie Farwell, a neighbor, recalled how Bette reacted to Georgie’s son the first time the Farnsworths visited her home. “My baby was on the living room floor, playing on a quilt. Bette made a beeline for him, and got right down on the floor and started playing with him and you could tell that she was captivated.” Farnsworth wanted a baby too, but Bette’s career was still more important to her than motherhood. She continued to feel—irrationally at this point—that a pregnancy would be disastrous to her career, and she had at least two more abortions during her marriage to Farney. There could be no better indication of Bette’s priorities. Even as she tried to create a normal life for herself at Butternut, nothing could be allowed to impede her career.
After nearly two months in New England, Bette was back in Hollywood to shoot the three movies she was contractually required to make every year. The first of these was a quick shoot, The Man Who Came to Dinner, a light comedy and box-office success with Monty Woolley in which Bette accepted a secondary role as a secretary and won plaudits for her restrained playing.
By October 9, she was already in costume fittings for the second film, In This Our Life, when she got word that Farney had taken seriously ill with pneumonia in Minneapolis. The news turned her frantic. She refused to wait for a commercial flight, which would require several delaying stopovers, and instead called an aviator friend of Farney’s, who told her he had only a single-engine plane. “We’d have to stop every hundred miles. And the weather’s bad.”
Jack Warner and Hal Wallis told her not to take the risk, and more frenzied than ever, she spoke to Howard Hughes for the first time since the Ham Nelson debacle. He warned her that the weather was “thick,” but when she insisted he agreed to put a TWA plane at her disposal. After a sleepless night and a conversation with Farney during which he sounded alarmingly weak, Bette left the following morning on a harrowing, wind-buffeted, fog-enshrouded flight that seemed to take forever (the weather forced an unscheduled stop in Des Moines) and left her a sheet-white, trembling mass of nerves.
In Des Moines, a studio representative called her with the news that Farney had rallied, his temperature was normal, and that she should return to Los Angeles. Instinctively, she knew this was a ruse. When she arrived in Minneapolis, she found her husband in intensive care, and to her horror he was too ill to recognize her. Her emotions wavered between terror at losing Farney and fury at Jack Warner for lying to her.
Farney’s physician, Jay Davis, found Bette so overwrought when she arrived that he was almost as concerned about her as he was about her husband. He insisted there was nothing she could do at the hospital and ordered her to get a hotel room and rest. She did, but the next morning she demanded the room next to Farney’s. It was against hospital policy, Dr. Davis told her. She moved into the room that afternoon.
While she sat by Farney’s side, holding his hand and praying for his recovery, Bette was handed a telegram. Hal Wallis expressed his sorrow about Farney but asked when she would be back at the studio. Furious, Bette had Dr. Davis wire back that she was in no condition to return, that the traveling had exhausted her, and she was near collapse over Farney’s condition.
When Farney rallied toward the end of the week, he insisted that Bette return to L.A. and promised her that he would come out to the Coast to recuperate. She agreed, but Dr. Davis wired Hal Wallis that he had ordered her to travel by train in order to get some rest. Just before she left, another cable came from Jack Warner: he insisted she report to the studio directly from L.A.’s Union Station to finish her costume fittings for In This Our Life.
It could only have been Bette’s frazzled state over her husband’s health that led her to play the film’s classic bad girl, Stanley Timberlake, in such a fevered manner that one critic wrote, “Such optimistic souls as believed that Bette Davis’s success with a relatively normal role in The Man Who Came to Dinner presaged a permanent filmic discharge from the neurological lists are doomed to disappointment. The actress converts In This Our Life into an excuse to have a complete relapse [and] bug her eyes, twitch her hands and maneuver her lower extremities as though in performance of some esoteric Charleston.”
John Huston, directing only his second film, made a conscious decision not to rein in Bette’s raw emotionalism. In his autobiography he wrote that she “fascinated” him: “There is something elemental about Bette—a demon within her that threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears. The studio was afraid of her; afraid of her demon. They confused it with overacting. Over their objections, I let the demon go; some critics thought Bette’s performance was one of her finest.”
The plot of In This Our Life was absurdly melodramatic: the spoiled, willful, bored Stanley runs off with her sister Roy’s husband, causes his suicide, then returns home and tries to win back the husband she deserted, who is now in love with Roy. When she fails, she becomes infuriated and in her anger accidentally kills a baby with her car. She flees the scene and blames the family cook’s son, a “colored boy,” who is jailed. She is found out and runs to her lecherous old Uncle William for help. When he tells her he has only six months to live, she screams hysterically, “You don’t care a thing about me!” and flees. She is killed in an automobile acc
ident as she tries to elude a pursuing patrol car.
Few actresses, least of all Bette, could have remained restrained in their performance of such bathos, and the ad campaign cried, “Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad!” The critics may have sniffed, but the fans loved it: the film became her biggest hit to that date, netting $1.7 million in profits.
At the end of filming, the studio gave Bette notice that she was to begin her annual three-month layoff immediately. Since she had promised the publicity department that she would pose for photographs and give some interviews about the film, she arrived at the studio a few days later and was in makeup when Bernie Williams, a publicity man, charged into the room and insisted that she leave the lot immediately. When she asked why, Williams replied, “You’re on layoff! If you stay we’ll have to pay you a day’s salary!”
The fury rose in Bette like volcanic lava. She was so angry she didn’t remember getting to Jack Warner’s office. She tore past his startled secretary and barreled into the inner sanctum, where she found Warner staring out the window. “How dare you!” she hissed as Warner spun around. “How dare you treat me like a chorus girl! How dare you order me off the lot! You should have known I had made dates to do publicity work for the film. You should have known I would keep those dates—pay or no pay! Now I am getting off the lot and it is just possible I may never come back!”
She stalked out and refused all communication from the studio for weeks. She had never been angrier with Jack Warner—this time, he had made her feel cheap. Finally, a desperate Warner pleaded with Bette’s business manager, Vernon Wood, “What does this woman want?” Revenge, Wood thought to himself. Instead he replied, “She wants a new contract.”
“A new contract?” Warner parroted as his throat tightened.
“Yes. She wants her salary increased, and she wants to do no more than two pictures a year, of any kind.”
What was J.L. to do? Bette Davis was his biggest star, his most prestigious actress, and his strongest box-office draw. Each of the thirty-eight films she had made for the studio had made money, for a grand total of $21.4 million in profits. Warner relented. He raised her salary to $5,500 per week and agreed that she wouldn’t have to make more than two movies a year.
They always hang themselves, Bette thought when Wood told her that Warner had capitulated to her every demand. They’re penny wise and pound foolish, these moguls.
When the Japanese staged a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, the struggle against Nazism and fascism that had begun in Europe in 1939, once remote for most Americans, hit home with a shock. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war against Japan the next day, after which Germany and Italy, honoring their pact with Japan, declared war on the United States.
Bette immediately wrote to Roosevelt, one of her idols, to offer whatever help she could provide. The President took her up on her offer. Rather than vacation in New Hampshire, as she had planned, she joined the government’s “Stars Over America” program and traveled across the country to sell war bonds, raise money, and rally the populace. Her first stop, in Iowa, was so successful that the government asked her to make a special trip to Missouri, where she sold more bonds in one day than anyone else had in two months. Tirelessly, she crisscrossed the country visiting private homes, aircraft factories, square dances, state fairs, schools, and Rotary clubs.
Still, she created controversy. If she didn’t sell enough bonds by signing autographs, selling memorabilia, and being gracious, Bette would harangue an audience until they were cowed into shelling out their money. “Do what you can do—to the level you can do!” she’d rasp, her voice about to go, “or you’re not my idea of an American!”
When press reports that likened Bette to a drill sergeant filtered back to Jack Warner, he was worried. He counseled her to show a little more tact. “They want you warm, gracious, kindly,” he told her. “Don’t get strident. Don’t disenchant them.”
“I know what I’m doing, J.L.,” Bette snapped. “You and your brother in New York just sit around and count the money I make for you. I’m the one who has to deal with the public. The only way to get them to contribute, to develop enthusiasm, is to let ’em have it straight, no holds barred!”
She was right, of course, and it’s astonishing that even by now Jack Warner seemed not to understand Bette’s appeal to the public. Moviegoers might occasionally accept her onscreen as “warm, gracious, and kindly,” but it was characters like Mildred Rogers, Julie Marsden, Regina Giddons and Leslie Crosbie in The Letter—real bitches, Bette called them—that her public responded to most strongly. When Bette sold two million dollars’ worth of bonds in two days (and a picture of herself in Jezebel for $250,000), criticism of her sales pitches ceased.
Bette returned to Hollywood in April, irritated that all that greeted her was an empty house. Farney had indeed come to Riverbottom to recover, but he had returned to New Hampshire before long, and Bette had seen him only sporadically for the preceding six months. As much as she could appreciate marital freedom, she hated it when she needed Farney and he wasn’t there. Her spirits improved when she convinced Hal Wallis and Jack Warner to cast her in Now, Voyager rather than borrow Irene Dunne from Columbia for the part. “I’m under contract here,” she pleaded, incredulity in her voice. “Why can’t I play Charlotte Vale? As a New Englander, I understand her better than anyone else ever could.” For once, she got her way with very little argument.
Olive Higgins Prouty’s bestseller offered a juicy part for an actress: a repressed, dowdy, mother-dominated Boston spinster who, with the help of a sympathetic psychiatrist, transforms herself into an attractive, stylish woman and finds love with a married man, Jerry Durrance (to be played by Paul Henreid), during a South American cruise. Charlotte knows Jerry cannot divorce his wife, a clinging hypochondriac, and when she returns to Boston she becomes engaged to another man. When she runs into Jerry again, she realizes that she still loves him, and breaks her engagement. Her domineering mother is enraged, and during an argument with Charlotte she dies of a heart attack.
Shattered, Charlotte returns to the sanatorium where she was first helped by psychiatric counseling, and meets a young girl very much like herself before the transformation. The child, it turns out, is Jerry’s daughter; Charlotte helps her to blossom and takes her into her home. Finally Jerry offers to marry Charlotte, but she tells him he must stay with his wife, while she remains a foster mother to his daughter.
The plot, which comes perilously close to bathos, was saved—as are so many of Bette’s films—by a fine script, strong performances, and Bette at the center of it all. Convincing as the dumpy, heavy-browed spinster, touching as the physically altered but still painfully shy traveler, and believable as the self-sacrificing woman in love, Bette as Charlotte Vale delivers one of her half-dozen finest characterizations.
Now, Voyager was Bette’s biggest hit, turning a profit of $2.38 million for Warners, and brought Bette her fifth straight Oscar nomination. It also brought her more mail from moviegoers than any other film. Charlotte’s physical transformation moved many audience members who thought themselves unattractive and gave them hope that they, too, might be able to take control of their lives and find happiness. More importantly, the film’s theme of sacrifice and redemption through selfless love touched a deep chord in the hundreds of thousands of women whose husbands, fathers, boyfriends, brothers, and sons were fighting a war in Europe and Asia.
The film became an enduring classic, and provided one of those indelible movie moments that have remained instantly recognizable: at the film’s end, Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes and hands one to Bette. Then she tells him that their decision to part was the correct one: “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon—we have the stars.”
As she had so often before, Bette made major contributions to the excellence of Now, Voyager. The initial costume and makeup tests of Henreid, a thirty-four-year-old Austrian actor making just his fourth Hollywood p
icture, depicted him with slicked-back hair and a silk smoking jacket, and Bette was appalled. “He looked just like Valentino,” she said. “He was wrong for the part in every way. I thought that was how he wanted to look, but when he told me he hated it too, I insisted on another test. Luckily, it was approved. He would have ruined the picture looking like that.”
In nearly every scene, Bette restored original dialogue from the Prouty novel that had been altered in the script. She fought with the film’s director, Irving Rapper, over matters large and small until, he said, he would go home evenings “angry and exhausted.” Ilka Chase, who played Charlotte’s sister, recalled that Bette was “a fine, hard-working woman, friendly with members of her cast, forthright and courteous to technicians on her picture, and her director’s heaviest cross. She will argue every move in every scene until the poor man is reduced to quivering pulp… she is what atomic energy draws on when it really wants to gather its forces. To make a picture quietly, a procedure so wearing that it leads many others to the doors of a sanitarium, would exhaust Miss Davis about as much as a bout with a six-year-old contender… would tire Joe Louis.”
To Paul Henreid, Bette’s willingness to battle was a godsend. “She was the soul of kindness to me all through the shooting, as she was to all the cast,” he recalled. “I have never understood these stories of how difficult she was to other cast members. On the contrary, she would fight their battles with the director.”
FOURTEEN
H
uge klieg lights sent beacons swirling into the low-hanging clouds in the sky over Hollywood. On Cahuenga Boulevard near Sunset, swing music blared from loudspeakers and filled the night as thousands of servicemen jamming the street cheered every time they caught sight of one of their favorite movie stars pushing through the throng. It was Saturday night, October 3, 1942, and the Hollywood Canteen had opened in a swirl of glamour and excitement to rival the most lavish movie premiere.