Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  She could have used that support, and badly, for Warner and Zanuck did not build on what they had in her. In her next picture, Three on a Match, she appeared perhaps a total of 15 minutes out of the 63-minute running time. Moreover her nemesis, Warren William, was on hand again to annoy and pester her. “I should think you would be flattered by Warren’s attentions,” Ann Dvorak, one of her co-stars, told her. “If you like him so much, he’s yours on a silver platter,” Davis snapped back. Joan Blondell was also in the film about three girls, one a former reform school inmate (Blondell) who turns entertainer; another a wealthy matron (Dvorak) with a little son she adores—and the third, Davis, a drab secretarial-school graduate who works as a stenographer (Davis—a stenographer) and is given no story line (she seems to be on hand only to join the other two in lighting from the same match in a restaurant scene, hence the title). Superstition has it that the third person to use the match will die and that turns out to be Dvorak, who wrecks her marriage, and destroys herself with drink and drugs. Blondell inherits the husband and the son. As for Davis, after serving as a sort of companion to the kid while all the melodrama gets sorted out, she proceeds to disappear without a trace—a thankless role in a thankless film for the erstwhile steamy siren of Cabin in the Cotton. Warren William was less rakish and more respectable than usual as the husband who finds eventual consolation with Blondell, and since his scenes with Davis were almost nonexistent, his advances were infrequent—on set at least.

  Davis was enraged at being shunted into Match after shining so conspicuously in Cotton. She told one and all that it was a perfect example of the pernicious contract system under which a player had to take what was assigned, or face suspension. She was particularly angry because the screenwriter, Lucien Hubbard, had given her no juicy scenes to play and had even deprived her of a romantic interest! Nor was Mervyn LeRoy any help as director, absorbed as he was in making Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak look as exciting as possible.

  Davis recalled years later with biting irony that LeRoy had let her know—tactlessly, she felt—that he believed Joan Blondell was going to become “a great star” and that Ann Dvorak’s future was “unlimited.” “Great for them—but what about me?” was her reaction at the time. “It wasn’t that I didn’t wish the other girls well,” she added, “but I didn’t get a crumb out of that script!” The ultimate irony was that neither Dvorak nor Blondell ever approximated the great stardom Davis was to enjoy. The critics were not slow to pick up on Davis’s Match mistreatment. The critic of Hollywood Filmograph, among others, noted that “Bette Davis is ravishing in appearance, but had very little to do.”

  But she was about to co-star in real life—a major role. Ham Nelson was back—to stay.

  5

  Ham, Sex, and Other Things

  I WAS HOPELESSLY PURITAN! Helplessly passionate!” This was how Bette Davis, in her memoirs, described what she was like during the hot summer of 1932. Still a virgin at twenty-four, still repressed, she had taken on her mother’s sublimational attitudes and threw all her sexual energy into her work, playing out scenes in movies that in sophisticated terms were far ahead of the mother-and-sister-preoccupied life she actually led.

  Then Ham Nelson reappeared. After working in night clubs in the East as a trumpeter, he had come to Hollywood to play in a band connected with the Olympics held in Los Angeles that summer. Soon he landed a job with the Colony Club, where he played trumpet with the jazz band.

  Ham had not changed much from the sixteen-year-old kid she first met at Cushing Academy. Eight years had gone by, he was now twenty-four, but he was still the same shy, insecure, gangling introvert he had always been. He found his release in his music, attacking the trumpet like a man possessed. Ruthie looked on Ham with favor. He would, she decided, make the ideal son-in-law. His family and his New England roots were equal to the Favor and Davis backgrounds. He and Davis liked each other, there was some physical chemistry there, he was gentle and serious, and he had taught Davis a lot about music, not just jazz but classical also.

  Ruthie began pestering Bette about being twenty-four and in danger of becoming a bachelor girl transformed into old maid if she waited any longer to marry. Davis listened half-mockingly, half-receptively. It was true that she found her virginity a burden. She had played all those hot love scenes for four years, on stage and screen, and with a variety of men, yet she had not known a man in the biblical sense, and her curiosity and physical needs were mounting. She continued to joke that all she really knew of a naked male was what she had been reluctantly forced to address when she diapered the boy in that early movie. At home, she and Bobby pored over medical and anatomy books and were well acquainted with the “facts” of male-female intercourse. But what did it feel like—that was the sixty-four-dollar question. And did it feel differently with a man one loved as against a man one was merely attracted to?

  Ham was on hand, subject to daily inspection—with his clothes on, of course—so Davis had plenty of opportunity to think about his potential as husband and lover. She liked his sensitivity and his musicianship and the shy, tentative way he had. She found it remarkable that a man who had knocked around with so many orchestras in so many locations did not project more feisty, extroverted toughness and heartiness. She decided that Ham had become even more handsome with the years. She knew he didn’t think himself so—he had described himself as “a big, gawky loon”—but she found his tallness and still-adolescent awkwardness charming and sweet. He told her he thought his nose was too big and his mouth too thick, but she felt these gave his face character and interest.

  She and Bobby speculated about Ham’s sexual experience. Had he ever had a girl? They read that young males who were not married masturbated frequently—that is, if they weren’t lascivious lady chasers. Was Ham, perhaps, a male virgin? He wasn’t telling—and she wasn’t asking. What had happened to Ham in eight years? Why were young men’s lives such mysteries to women? Why did it have to be that way?

  Finally, egged on by Ruthie, who stated firmly that it was time she functioned as a woman, Davis asked Ham if he was ready to marry. In future years she was never willing to admit that she had done the proposing, but in fact she had, with Ruthie prodding away in the background. Ham accepted immediately.

  Ruthie, as usual, suggested the time and place and terms of the wedding, which took place on August 18, 1932. Still tentative and unsure, aware that Ruthie was rushing things to keep her from changing her mind, she set out with Ham, her mother, and Bobby for Yuma, Arizona. They had decided on Arizona because California insisted on a six-week waiting period. There were to be no romantic airplane flights for Davis—fashionable as they were already becoming in 1932. They set out along the dusty pre-freeway roads in a beat-up Auburn that threatened to conk out at any moment.

  The heat of the desert was murderous. Gas stations were few and far between. The clothes stuck to them as they sweated profusely in the heat. Davis drove while Ham sat, languishing and miserable, beside her, and Ruthie and Bobby perspired and complained in the back. When they finally pulled into Yuma after a miserable journey of many hours, they checked into a second-rate hotel, dried their clothes, and Ham went out to buy a suit and wedding ring—a cheap one, since Yuma’s few stores were hardly a class act, even by 1932 standards.

  The next morning, an Indian mission minister married them. As Ruthie later recalled, Ham misplaced the ring twice; one time it went through a hole in his pocket; another time it fell into a floor crack and he had to grovel to find it. Right after the uninspiring, perfunctory ceremony, they headed straight back to California and Zuma Beach, where Davis was living.

  In her memoirs, Davis has waxed rhapsodic about what happened after she and her bridegroom had perfumed and lotioned themselves to the nines, got rid of Ruthie and Bobby, closed the door of their room, and got into bed to face one another as husband and wife for the first time. In Davis’s words: “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.”

  Growing more specific, if still restrained (for her), Davis gushed on: “I was able to shower an object with the unnamed joy that lay simmering beneath my humorless drive without a trace of guilt, with no fear of disapproval.”

  Many years later, Davis described the night in more realistic terms to Jerry Asher, when she lamented that she had not had any affairs before marriage and expressed her envy of young women in the 1960s who could “try a guy out, see if he fit for size.” If she had been a virgin that night of August 18, 1932, she found that Ham had been a chronic masturbator, was given to premature ejaculation, was shy and awkward and even unsure of what orifices were correct for penetration. She said that as the years went on she wondered about Ham’s sexuality, wondered if he had had relations—however brief and tentative—with other male musicians during his national tours. Bobby told her later that men often indulged in casual relations when thrown together—was that a factor in her bridegroom’s past, she later wondered.

  She complained that despite her inexperience, she had to be the aggressor sexually, that, thanks to the medical and anatomy manuals she and her sister had examined, she brought Ham to climax, but she couldn’t get him “properly trained” to satisfy her until some months after they were married. She even admitted that Ham’s tall, rangy body, well muscled and well endowed in the crucial spot, had so excited her that she had not hesitated to masturbate and even fellate him—practices considered, and not just by puritans like her mother, perverted in the extreme in 1932. Later she recalled his thorough, abandoned enjoyment of these practices as suspicious, indicative. . . . But she admitted also that once she had encouraged and trained him in more penetrative techniques of the missionary-position kind, he performed creditably.

  But along the lines of you never know anyone till you’re married to him, she refered to Ham in primarily negative terms years later. There was his tendency to whine, his passive willingness to do the dishes and make the beds instead of protesting that was woman’s work, his moodiness and sulking, his inability to act the man’s role. She craved a decisive, forthright, masculine man, one she could lean on, defer to, one who would dominate her, set a direction for their lives. Ham, she said, failed her miserably there. There was the inequity in their earnings, which humiliated him. And the difference in their hours—as Ham went to bed after playing in a band all night, she got up to go to the studio. Because of his silences, his withdrawal, his inability to stand up to Ruthie and Bobby, who had taken their own quarters behind the house she and Ham rented, his tendency to walk away from a fight, his almost feminine languors, Bette slowly began to lose respect for Ham Nelson.

  In the 1932–1935 period, Davis gradually discovered that she was married to three people rather than one. There was Ham, who fluctuated between whining self-pity and sudden aggressiveness. First he would cry, then he would hit her. When he was on tour with his band, she camped out with him in auto courts and cooked for him—that is, if she was not on a picture. Her attempts to play the little wife only annoyed him. His attempts to tidy up and wash dishes made him seem weak and feminine to her. Then he took up boxing to become more assertive. But he overcompensated and became too combative, knocking around other men, such as Ross Alexander, who showed an interest in his wife. He saw himself as a cuckold and imagined rivals around every corner.

  His boxing gloves and macho posturings notwithstanding, Davis sensed weakness in Ham. Slowly she lost respect for him, even came to despise him, but she was unwilling to admit she had failed in what she regarded as a woman’s most important role—marriage. Ham was the symbol of her commitment and as such he must be sustained, he must be borne with.

  Frantically, Davis tried to recapture the first year or so of their marriage, the romantic love they had known fitfully amidst all the sex education and shy, insecure bumblings of her boy-man spouse. Believing firmly in his musical talent, she deplored the fact that his drive didn’t begin to equal hers. He lived from paycheck to paycheck, showed no initiative in getting better band spots. Whatever did come, came, it seemed, by happenstance rather than because of any strong motivation on Ham’s part. One of his few merits by default was that he was to all indications faithful to her. “But then, what other woman would want him?” Ruthie scornfully observed. The marriage limped on through 1933, 1934, 1935, and beyond because there seemed no compelling reason to end it.

  And then there were those other two “wives” to whom Davis was married, Ruthie and Bobby.

  Davis often meditated on her inveterate habit of casting herself as the “husband,” the “man of the house,” to her three. Always she came back to the same conclusion. She had assumed the role that Harlow Morrell Davis had abdicated when she was seven years old. It took no psychoanalyst to figure that out, she reflected bitterly.

  Now that she had the money and the resources, she kept Ruthie in handsome homes, handsome clothes, servants, expensive furbelows. Davis allowed herself one servant, the faithful Dell Pfeiffer, a loyal, long-suffering, kindly black woman who adored Davis and even enjoyed her angry outbursts and frequent attacks of temperament. Dell thought little of the Three Wives. Ham she avoided. Ruthie she was quiet around. And Bobby terrified her.

  Now that Davis had “arrived,” Ruthie took the attitude that as Bette Davis’s mother she was entitled to the best there was. Davis had to do without in order to keep her mother living in luxury. Ruthie walked before Davis at premieres and other public appearances. “You’d think she was the movie star and Bette just the also-ran relative,” Bobby once remarked.

  And then there was Bobby. Consumed by sibling rivalry, Bobby announced, circa 1932, that she too wanted to be an actress, but because she lacked the discipline to train and the talent to act, doors were closed to her despite Davis’s admittedly half-hearted efforts to pull strings. Bobby then embarked on a series of marriages, all of which turned out badly. She suffered from a severe self-image problem. In childhood her attitude had been: Bette is the favored one. Now, it was: I want what Bette has; I want to be Bette.

  It was at the point when Bobby realized that not only would she never be Bette, she would never come within a mile of her in any respect, that Bobby began to sink into emotional troubles that in time became frightening, all-out mental illnesses. She moaned that the only positive thing she had brought to the world was her only child, Faye, a sad girl who lived in the shadow of her unstable mother and a series of short-term stepfathers. Bobby began moving in and out of a series of expensive private sanitariums that drained Davis’s resources considerably. Bobby had joined Ruthie as parasite supreme. It was a role she was to play over the next forty-odd years. Bette and Ruthie alternated in taking care of Faye when Bobby was “indisposed.”

  Sometimes during those years, when Bobby was feeling better, and especially after new drugs kept her relatively in balance, she came to work as housekeeper for Davis. Angry at the drain her sister and her mother represented, Davis often used Bobby as a butt for her ever more fierce frustrations and rages. At other times Davis would shower love and apologies on this sad sibling, who found being the sister of Bette Davis an unbearable psychological burden.

  Davis found her visits in earlier years to Bobby’s mental homes an intolerable strain. Often she would find her in an open ward, sitting alone and forlorn. Doctors would recommend state hospitals, telling her in confidence that they gave better care than the private sanitariums for which Davis was paying inordinate, gouging fees. Bobby’s husband Robert Pelgram, Faye’s father, had fled to the divorce court. It was all more than this modest, retiring man could take.

  Davis never forgot one visit to “the Bobby Bughouse,” as she called it. She was sitting quietly, encouraging Bobby to eat a cupcake from the box of goodies she had brought, when up sashayed three female inmates straight out of The Snake Pit. Shocked and excited by the
sight of Bette Davis Herself in their midst, they proceeded, half-flatteringly, half-derisively, to give manic imitations of Davis to her face, swishing around with swiveling hips and holding imaginary cigarettes at odd angles, and popping their eyes outlandishly. “They were silent performances,” Davis said later. “At least they didn’t yowl, ‘Petah—the lettah!’”

  Such were Davis’s three wives.

  Meanwhile, the “husband” continued to work at her movies with manic concentration.

  Darryl Zanuck felt that Davis could do ample justice to the role of Fay in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing opposite Spencer Tracy. Tracy was borrowed from Fox for the role of Tom Connors, a cocky mobster who is sentenced to Sing Sing on a felony conviction and imagines his powerful underworld friends will spring him via a fast parole. As his girlfriend, Davis was portraying a girl who seemed hard and enterprising on the surface, yet had her own areas of vulnerability.

  Davis was enthusiastic about the role, which she sensed had more dimension than most, and she threw herself into the part of Fay. True, she had martinet Michael Curtiz jumping on her again, but since he now sensed her ability after her reviews in Cabin in the Cotton, he tended to give her more respect—and less attention, since he was directing one of those hard, tough, brutal “men’s dramas,” which he mightily enjoyed and with which he excelled.

  Largely left to her own devices, Davis fulfilled Zanuck’s hopes for her by making her characterization real and vivid—her accomplishment being all the more striking since she found herself awash in a sea of melodramatic “men’s stuff.” Davis had always been in awe of Spencer Tracy, who, incidentally, shared her birthday, April 5, though he was eight years her senior—at the time, thirty-two to her twenty-four. She had seen him on the stage and in his early films, and it had long been her ambition to work with him. Quiet and unassuming in his underplaying acting style, Tracy could pack tremendous conviction via his “art that concealed art,” and Davis stole every opportunity to watch him work when she was not acting with him.