by James Spada
Later that evening, the two were back in bed together and all was fine. “She loved it, you see. She had to dominate her men, and when they wouldn’t let her, she liked it.”
But Bette soon began to carp again, even less rationally. She continually harangued Sherry about not contributing to the family finances, while at the same time she thwarted at every turn his efforts to strike out on his own. He vividly recalls one morning when he and Bette were reading the newspaper in bed and Bette saw a Harrison Carroll column in which Sherry talked about attending UCLA film school in the hope of directing a nature film for children. “Bette tells me that she will be the last one to stand in my way if I really want to get into the film business,” Carroll quoted Sherry.
Bette threw the newspaper across the floor and stared angrily at Sherry. “How much did you pay Carroll to write this!”
“I didn’t pay him anything. He was just interested in what I was doing, that’s all.”
“Let me tell you something—there’s only room for one star in this family!”
“You’re always hollering at me to make money—I just thought I’d try my hand at making pictures.”
“Well, you can forget it!”
Sherry learned that Bette meant what she had said when he spoke to one of the technicians with whom he had discussed the project. Sheepishly, the man said, “I’ve got to tell you that your wife is against you doing this. She has told every one of us that if we go with you, she’ll see to it that we never work in this town again. And she’s got the power to do it.”
It became clear to Sherry that he couldn’t win with Bette no matter what he tried. When he decided that the way to keep his wife happy was to make her as comfortable and relaxed as possible after a hard day’s work, the plan backfired. “She was the breadwinner,” Sherry said, “and I was the housewife. And I loved doing it. I’d always have dinner ready for her when she got home. I’d take off her shoes and bring her slippers and fix her a drink. I pressed her dresses when her maid wasn’t there. I’d draw her bath and give her massages. I felt it was a privilege to do things for her. All I asked in return was love and affection. I’m a man who needs a lot of that. But when she’d come home from work she’d always say she was too tired. I wouldn’t get as much as a kiss from her. She was too absorbed in her work.”
Her latest absorption was in June Bride, a slight comedy that would add little luster to her fading career. Oddly, Bette agreed to be directed again by Bretaigne Windust, and to have her image altered one more time. For this film, she was given a smart, tailored, “modern” look as Linda Gilman, the high-powered editor of a slick woman’s magazine who disrupts an Indiana family’s life when she decides to feature their daughter’s upcoming wedding in her magazine.
The picture turned out forced and largely unfunny, and Jerome Cowan, who played Linda’s publisher, recalled being “sorry that Bette had elected to do [the film]. But she told me she was desperate at the time and felt a comedy—which was never her strong suit, in my opinion—would represent a ‘change of pace.’… Windust had no talent for light comedy… and the depressing, spiritless atmosphere on the set carried over, regrettably, into the final result on screen.”
Bette, upset enough to find herself mired in a potential turkey, found little comfort in her leading man. Robert Montgomery, a forty-four-year-old MGM player on loan, was an accomplished actor, adept at both drama and comedy. Always insecure (and rightly so) about her comedic talents, Bette feared Montgomery would outclass her, and she had lobbied instead for a Warner contractee as her costar, suggesting Dennis Morgan or Jack Carson. But Windust and producer Henry Blanke convinced her that Montgomery was stronger box office, and she relented. Years later Blanke admitted that there was another reason he favored Montgomery as Bette’s leading man: “Since she had her baby, she looked much older.… Bob was in his mid-forties and we felt he might make her look younger. As it turned out, she made him look younger. I think he knew that when he saw the rushes, and it delighted him.”
It hardly delighted Bette, and neither did Montgomery’s frequent criticisms of her less-than-gossamer comedic touch. “Bette, my dear,” he would tell her loudly, “this is not the court of Queen Elizabeth, and certainly not the castle of Lady Macbeth!” But her deepest resentment of Montgomery stemmed from his ardent support of Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey in his campaign against Harry S. Truman. Every public opinion poll suggested that Dewey would win, and Bette loathed Montgomery’s smug confidence in the election outcome. “Montgomery got Bette’s pressure up more than Miriam Hopkins had ever done,” Jerome Cowan recalls, and when Truman pulled off the political upset of the century three days after June Bride opened, Bette sent Montgomery an exultant, gloating telegram.
She had got back at him during filming, too. After a hayride scene, she complained loudly to Windust, Blanke, her agent Lew Wasserman, and her husband (who happened to be visiting the set that day) that Montgomery had been copping feels under the hay. “He’s trying to make everybody think he’s still young by feeling my leg,” Bette reasoned torturously.
“When I heard that,” William Grant Sherry says, “I could feel the heat come into my face. I got up and went to his trailer and told him, ‘Robert, if you do that scene again, just keep your hands off my wife’s legs.’ He said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure you do.’ And I left. They closed the set down because he got so furious he wouldn’t work. Bette loved it. She and Lew Wasserman were laughing. She said, ‘That’s the kind of husband I have.’”
The comedienne Mary Wickes played one of Bette’s assistants in the film, and her recollection of the hayride incident suggests that what Bette thought was lust may have been nothing more than scratching. According to Wickes, “The hay had just come in and it was full of fleas. It got so bad they had to replace it with fresh hay.”
June Bride got mixed reviews when it opened on October 29, 1948. Some critics felt it was “one of the merriest entertainments of the movie season” and “pure, unadulterated fun,” while others were less easily amused. As for Bette, The New Yorker critic carped, “she conducts herself throughout the film with the grim competent air of a prison warden.”
The film did respectable business, pulling in half a million dollars in profit, but that wasn’t enough to offset Bette’s prior two failures and justify her salary, which now had reached nearly $9,000 a week. Despite that, Jack Warner gave Bette a new, four-picture contract in January 1949 that paid her $10,285 weekly. She was now the highest-paid woman in the United States.
Amazingly, while Jack Warner seemed willing to throw money at Bette, he still would not grant her script approval. The abysmal quality of the next film he insisted she do, in fact, suggests that even as he signed Bette’s new contract, Warner harbored doubts about whether Davis, draining his coffers by nearly half a million dollars a year, remained an asset to his studio.
“Jack, please don’t make me do this picture!” Bette pleaded. “Give it to Virginia Mayo. She’ll be much better in it!” She sat in Warner’s office, wearing sunglasses as she always did when talking to her boss “so that he couldn’t look into my eyes,” and tried to get out of doing Beyond the Forest. She hated Lenore Coffee’s script of a Stuart Engstrand novel about Rosa Moline, a small-town Wisconsin housewife who tries anything—including self-induced abortion and murder—to escape from her boring husband and go to Chicago to marry an industrialist with whom she has had an affair. (The ad copy for the finished film called Rosa “a twelve-o’clock girl in a nine-o’clock town.”)
“I’m too old for the part, Jack,” Bette argued. “I’ll look ridiculous!”
“Now, Bette,” Warner cajoled. “This is a part you could really sink your teeth into, like Mildred. You’re always telling me you want gutsy roles. Well, Rosa Moline is just as strong and snakelike as Mildred. She’s a man hater, she’s scheming and climbing and ambitious in the same cheap, sluttish way Mildred is. Your fans will eat t
his up!”
When Warner went on to tell her that the respected King Vidor would direct, and that her beloved Max Steiner, who had won three Oscars, including one for Now, Voyager, would write the score, Bette began to feel that the project might just work. “I thought Rosa Moline would be a challenge. I hadn’t played a bitch in years.… The book was great, and it could have made a marvelous movie.”
But too many of the creative decisions of all concerned conspired to turn the film into a wretched mess. The first of these was the casting of the attractive forty-four-year-old Joseph Cotten as Rosa’s husband, who in the book is far less physically appealing. According to Bette, “The husband was supposed to be a man like Eugene Pallette [who played Bette’s husband in Bordertown]—a fat, horrible man. So when they told me that Joseph Cotten would be my husband, this adorable man, I said, ‘What in the world would she leave him for?’”
Other decisions were no better, including one to deck Bette out in a jet-black wig that one critic described as “Dracula-like.” With heavy lipstick and eyeliner, wearing frumpy print dresses and plaid shirts, she looked little short of ridiculous, and she knew it. She could see too that King Vidor, who had triumphed with The Fountainhead earlier in the year, was doing little to elevate the film from its absurdly melodramatic story line.
As filming progressed through the late spring and summer of 1949, Bette dreaded having to act the scenes where Rosa throws herself down an embankment to induce an abortion, develops peritonitis and raging fever, drags herself out of bed, smears on her makeup, and then crawls toward the train in a desperate last-ditch effort to get to Chicago, then dies with her hand outstretched toward the track.
With each day of filming Bette grew more and more terrified that she was making her worst picture, one that might well drive the final fatal stake through the heart of her cherished career. She feared she would make a fool of herself, and as so often before her insecurities resulted in temperament, tantrums, and absences from the studio. “She had so many excuses for not going to the set,” William Grant Sherry recalled. “Her favorite was laryngitis. One day she sent a note to [the film’s producer] Henry Blanke saying she’d lost her voice totally. A little while later Jack Warner telephoned to ask how she was. She grabbed the phone and started screaming at him.”
Before long, Bette rebelled. During an argument with Vidor and Henry Blanke in her dressing room, she reiterated her reservations about playing Rosa at her age, about the casting of Cotten, about everything. Vidor explained that he thought Rosa was “a fine variation on Mildred” and that a woman of forty-one could be “desperate for new experiences.”
“Don’t give me that crap!” she bellowed. “Warner just thinks this will be less expensive than Frome or Lincoln. He wants something trashy and cheap that he thinks will sell to lowbrows. I didn’t work all these years for better pictures to be relegated, at this stage, to horseshit like this!”
A few weeks before the film was completed in August, Vidor asked Bette to retake a scene in which he felt she hadn’t flung a bottle of medicine at Cotten viciously enough. She refused to do it again, and left the studio. At home that evening, according to William Grant Sherry, “She was furious and fretting and talking about quitting Warners. She asked me what I thought and I told her, ‘It seems to me, Bette, that with your fame and ability, there would be an awful lot of scripts that would come your way from other studios. It’s a gamble—you’d have to give up that salary—but if you’re brave enough and take a chance, it might work.”
Soon thereafter Jack Warner called, and Marion Richards, a twenty-one-year-old woman who had just joined the Sherry household as B.D.’s governess, recalled that “she yelled so loud at Jack Warner that there was practically smoke coming out of the phone. Neither of them would budge an inch on anything.” Finally Bette told Warner, “If you want me to finish the film, let me out of my contract.”
To her shock, Warner agreed without hesitation, and even before she arrived on the set the next morning, he had released her. “It was dirty pool on my part, but I was that desperate,” Bette said, suggesting that she had forced Warner to let her break her contract against his will so that he could avoid losing the $800,000 already spent on Beyond the Forest. But if Bette had come to the end of her rope with Warner, so had he with her. He was tired of her demands, her temperament, her tantrums, her enormous salary. The Warner legal department notified Bette to stop telling the press she had forced the studio to release her, because “it was a mutual decision.”
“I was relieved to see her go,” Jack Warner wrote in his memoirs.
On her last day at Warner Brothers, Bette dubbed a particularly apt line of dialogue—“I can’t stand it here anymore”—and sat around all night on the back lot drinking until dawn with Henry Blanke and three of her favorite crew members. Then, “three sheets to the wind,” she drove through the Warner gate for the last time in tears. She grieved for the loss of the working relationships she had loved, the loss of the “second father” she had respected as much as she hated, and, worst of all, the loss of the secure career that the studio had provided her over the last eighteen years. Sherry had predicted she’d be flooded with great scripts now that she was freelance, and part of her believed it. Another part of her chilled with the fear that her age, her spotty recent box-office record, and her reputation as a troublemaker might cause other studios to shy away from her.
Within a few months, Bette realized that her worst nightmare had come true. “Nothing happened,” Sherry recalled. “There were no good scripts. it was all just terrible stuff. It got pretty bad.”
“Why are you sending me this crap!” Bette bellowed to her agent. His reply cut into her like an ice pick: “Because that’s all I’m getting, Bette.” To a woman for whom work was a lifeline, the news was shattering. She fumed and she fretted, she raged against the fates and the powers that be, she beat up on herself for giving up her contract. And she turned on her husband, the most convenient object of her wrath. According to him, “As time went on, Bette completely became another character. She was no longer the Bette that I was in love with. I began to wonder what was going on. I thought it was something with me.…”
Sherry tried to keep his wife happy, tried to placate her, tried to buck her up. It didn’t work, and her denigration of him grew merciless. Now she not only accused him of living off her, she questioned his manhood. Sherry was able to take less and less of it before he would lose control of his temper. “One night she needled me all through dinner and when we went into the living room to have coffee she got me so mad I threw my coffee cup at her. It hit the fireplace and splashed all over and she went racing out of the room.”
In her memoirs, Bette says that “Sherry’s physical violence was a thing of terror to me.” She admitted that it was natural for a husband to want to be dominant in a marriage but “with me this is impossible.” She accused Sherry of throwing her down a flight of stairs, hurling an ice bucket at her head, and throwing things at her while she held their baby. Sherry denies all of this. “Whatever I did throw at her never hit her. I’d throw it across the room just to scare her.”
Sherry’s frustration mushroomed, and so did his violent outbursts. “I fly into a temper at the slightest provocation,” he admitted at the time, “sometimes without provocation. Bette told me she was afraid of what I might do to her and to the baby when I was in one of my rages.”
In a feeble attempt to calm things down and take Bette’s mind off her professional inertia, Sherry tried three times to paint her portrait. He wasn’t able to do it. “Each time,” he says, “the meanest-looking expression would come out in the painting. It would just come up. I paint what I see. I tried to change it and put a smile on her face, but those eyes… I’d tell her, ‘I can’t do it, Bette, sorry.’ She’d say, ‘Can I see it?’ and I’d say, ‘No, you can’t’ and I’d destroy the painting before she could sneak a look at it.”
Caught in the middle of all this marital tension was Marion
Richards, the twenty-one-year-old girl Bette had hired in August as a governess for B.D. after another “personality conflict,” this one with the woman who had replaced Bessie Downs two years earlier. Marion had a feeling that Bette liked her because she could “take or leave” the job and she didn’t “kowtow” to her. As Marion recalls it, “she was more nervous than I was during the interview.”
The pretty young woman, who had appeared as a model on the covers of several magazines, was struck by the fact that whenever the Sherrys were together, they argued. “She was always on his case, calling him a prince, saying that she was making all the money. Then he’d offer to go to work, and she’d say no because then she’d have to pay more taxes. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.”
Marion also noticed that Bette never seemed to let Bobby, recently released from a mental hospital, forget that she was financially indebted to her, either. “Bobby was like a whipped dog,” Marion recalled. “She looked like she was below the servants, and she didn’t dare say the wrong thing or else she’d be reprimanded. When she got depressed, she would just hang her head down. And it seemed that when she would get into that state of mind, Bette would kind of gloat over it. She loved it in a way. She never showed any empathy, she would only get angry with Bobby. That was the cruel side of Bette. She could be wonderful and darling, but then she would go into this other, almost sadistic person. She liked exercising her power over people. There were days when she thought she had the world around her little finger, and she was going to exercise it to the max.”
Marion’s biggest shock when she started working at the Sherry house was the condition of two-year-old B.D., who seemed deeply maladjusted. “When I first got there, this little girl would hide behind chairs, and sometimes she would defecate back there. She just looked scared. Whatever she did it was her duty to do. Bette hadn’t been much of a mother to that child. She was too wrapped up in her career and herself. I never saw her really close to B.D. She didn’t like having to deal with her.”