Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  James Agee noted in The Nation, “The odd thing is that the two ladies and Vincent Sherman, directing, make the whole business look fairly intelligent, detailed and plausible.”

  The year 1943 brought Davis a sudden tragedy, followed by a disillusionment.

  For nearly three years the Davis-Farnsworth marriage continued on its steady, long-distance course. But during 1943 Farney had seemed ever more distant and preoccupied. Davis knew his work at Minneapolis Honeywell was top secret, having to do with government aircraft projects. So, back and forth between Butternut and Riverbottom, and occasionally Minneapolis, New York, and Boston, they traveled, trying to keep some of the fire alive in their relationship.

  Then on August 23, 1943, after doing some errands for Davis, Farney fell into convulsions on a Hollywood sidewalk. He lingered in a nearby hospital for two days, with Davis sitting tense and worried in the next room, and then died on August 25. Davis was in shock. Farney’s bossy mother came immediately from New York, and demanded an autopsy, which revealed a severe cranial injury. Police were brought into the investigation when it was discovered that Farney’s briefcase was missing. Foul play was a possibility because of his secret government work. Davis then told an inquest that earlier in the summer Farney had struck his head hard in a fall on the stairs at Butternut. He had not complained unduly, and she had thought little of it at the time. After one funeral service at Forest Lawn, Davis, Mrs. Farnsworth, Ruthie, and a large entourage headed east for Butternut, where Davis wanted Farney buried. Mrs. Farnsworth became hysterical at the grave service, and insisted Farney be laid to rest in the Farnsworth vault in Vermont. Davis, exasperated, put Ruthie in charge of digging him up and shipping him to a third service in Vermont. She went back immediately to Hollywood.

  Jack Warner, for once considerate of her feelings, offered to postpone work on her new picture, Mr. Skeffington, but Davis told him that work—lots of it—was the best therapy, and within a week she was on the set.

  Davis did not sentimentalize Farney for long. His briefcase was found; in it were bottles of liquor. Then she 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. This incident exacerbated the earlier head wound and caused the clot that killed him.

  Disillusioned, Davis realized that Farney was a drunk. And a weakling. And an adulterer. His finances, too, she discovered, were messed up. It appeared that he had been spending their money—her money—on other women, trips, expensive gifts, when she thought he had been slaving away in Minneapolis.

  During 1944 Bette Davis was as fed up with love as any woman could be. She had married two copouts. She thought of times when, during the marriage to Farney, Ham Nelson had come to visit. She had remained friendly toward him in spite of all the trouble he’d caused her. Just before Ham left for the service he had come to say good-bye to her and Farney. The two had gotten along like brothers and should have—she recalled later—because they were in some ways two of a kind. Ham sent her a letter of sympathy from the service when Farney died. She left it unanswered. Yes, she had forgiven Ham; yes, she would always remember their earliest years with fondness, but she wanted to keep him on the back shelf for a while, even as a friend. Like Farney, he had once betrayed her trust; he had been a blackmailer and a whining weakling. Farney had been a two-faced smoothie and an adulterer. Men!

  She spent a lot of time in 1944 working at the Hollywood Canteen. The men were attractive and she still, at thirty-six, had physical needs, romantic needs. Fool! she told herself. Sex, she told her friends, was God’s joke on mankind. So was romance, for that matter. But if sex and romance were not to be taken seriously, they could still be entertaining.

  When gossip began to reach her concerning her erotic encounters with the hunkier servicemen at the canteen, she shrugged. Men were good for one thing only, she bitterly told Bobby. And why should she deny herself? Hal Wallis tried to warn her that she was now Hollywood’s top actress, a figure worthy of respect, with enormous national prestige, and she should cool her activities with the canteen kids. Scornfully she rejoined that all men were shits—hadn’t her two husbands taught her that? And why should there be a double standard; why shouldn’t women enjoy themselves just as men did? At thirty-six her physical needs were approaching their height. Time went fast, she told Wallis and his wife, the motherly and concerned Louise Fazenda, who had developed a genuine fondness for Davis since playing her servant in The Old Maid.

  “What has happened to Bette?” the Hollywood insiders began to ask. Louella and Hedda and others in the press contingent took to covering for her. They could see she was lonely, restless, unhappy; had they known the real causes of her unhappiness, her determination to use sex to compensate for her emotional disillusionments and deprivations, they might have sympathized even more deeply. But Davis, gentlewoman that she was, at least when it came to public relations, continued to cover up for Farney. In all the interviews she gave in 1944 and 1945, she mourned him; in all her public statements he was treated respectfully, as a husband she had loved and lost and missed. She didn’t want to hurt Farney’s relatives, either, even if she couldn’t stand his siblings, even if his mother was an overbearing monster. So publicly she paid her respects, and inwardly she seethed with anger and frustration.

  Considering that Davis began the long and complex Mr. Skeffington within a month of her husband’s death, the energy and dedication she put into it seem all the more remarkable. She always found that work was for her the best possible tonic and palliative for personal troubles, and it is perhaps providential that she had been making wardrobe tests for the picture with shooting scheduled imminently just at the time of Farney’s death. Jack Warner told her that she could postpone shooting on Mr. Skeffington as long as she wanted—even months (it took a major crisis like a death in the family to spur him to flexibility of this sort)—but she pleased him and earned his reluctant respect by plunging in almost immediately. Davis’s perfectionism and temperamental demands and her quarrels with director Vincent Sherman and the screenwriters Philip and Julius Epstein caused the picture to go way over budget and shooting schedule; it ran from September 1943 into March 1944, consuming a full six months from conception to completion. Again the finished product ran impossibly long, and had to be cut to 145 minutes—even that was phenomenally long for a major 1944 production, especially with wartime costs escalating and the restrictions on material and energy.

  Davis was intrigued by the role of Fanny Trellis, the spoiled heiress of 1914 New York because, as written by the novelist “Elizabeth” and the Epsteins, she was supposed to be phenomenally beautiful. Since Davis had never considered herself good-looking (nor, as she knew, had many others) it tickled her that she would be playing a great beauty and femme fatale, a sort of man-trap par excellence who gets her comeuppance after age and illness overtake her, and learns the hard way, that, in the film’s most famous and oft-quoted phrase, “a woman is beautiful only when she is loved.”

  The sterling actor Claude Rains had his best opportunity in a Davis picture to date (a better one would come later). Here he is not merely one of the supporting players, but Davis’s leading man. As in the case of Charles Boyer and a very few others, Davis was deeply gratified to be playing opposite a talent she considered at least equal, if not superior, to her own, and she and Rains, who had become great personal friends, worked felicitously together as always.

  Fanny Trellis, Davis’s character, has married wealthy financier Job Skeffington (Rains) in order to save her beloved brother, Trippy (Richard Waring) from jail; it seems he has been tampering with the company’s finances, accepting commission fees he has not really earned. Fanny has many suitors; a consummate narcissist and flirt, she is forever dressing up and primping and analyzing her beauty in mirrors. Skeffington knows she has married him for his money (her own estate is depleted) and to save Trippy. When Trippy dies in the war, Fanny is devastated, and she and the unloved Job drift apart into w
hat today would be called an open relationship. Fanny soon divorces him to be absolutely free to romance as many younger men as possible, and Job, who has given his unloving wife a large settlement, goes to Europe with their daughter, whom Fanny doesn’t want because she is a constant reminder that her youth is passing away.

  Fanny then chases much younger men and whiles away her time in idle luxury until an attack of diphtheria destroys her beauty while she is in her early forties. Deserted by all but her faithful cousin, Walter Abel, and her servant, Dorothy Peterson, she becomes a recluse until Abel tells her that Job, broke and a victim of Nazi persecution, is back. She agrees to help him out financially but will not see him. Abel urges her to, and she goes down the great flight of stairs to find Job in the drawing room, frail, white-haired—and blind. Realizing at last the depth of her selfishness and aware that to the blind Job she will always be as beautiful as ever, she takes him upstairs with the words to one and all, “Mr. Skeffington has come home” and recalls yet again his words to her of long ago, “A woman is beautiful only if she is loved.”

  A plot and treatment that verged dangerously on outright, indeed outrageous soap opera is saved in this instance by fine, restrained direction from Vincent Sherman, the literate and intelligent screenplay by the Epsteins that ably depicts various periods from 1914 to 1944, and excellent performances from Davis, Rains, and the rest of the cast.

  Davis played this legendary beauty gone to seed with a vicious relish, as if she were getting back, once and for all, at all the actresses whose beauty she had envied. She had often expressed her impatience with lovely ladies who soared to stardom simply because they were photogenic. And she had always resented the cracks about not being beautiful, but rather “striking,” an adjective that, she remarked, covered a lot of territory, some of it in the wrong neighborhoods. So here was her chance to get back, and she made the most of it.

  Her greatest admirer and sternest critic, James Agee at The Nation, said it all concerning her effort. Leading off with the observation that Mr. Skeffington was yet another of those films that “demonstrated the horrors of egocentricity on a mammoth scale,” he added that Davis had proved her point “to an audience which, I fear, will be made up mainly of unloved and not easily lovable women. Essentially,” Agee wrote with his usual understated, acid wit, “Mr. Skeffington is just a super soap opera, or an endless woman’s-page meditation on What-To-Do-When-Beauty-Fades.” The implied advice, he concluded, “was dismaying: hang on to your husband, who alone will stay by you then, and count yourself blessed if, like Mr. Rains in his old age, he is blinded.”

  It is true that for all its endless footage, lavish appurtenances, top production values, and powerhouse performances from Davis, Rains, and company, Mr. Skeffington exudes soap opera throughout. But there are touches of humor. When Davis’s grown daughter (Marjorie Riordan) comes home from abroad, Davis is forced to introduce her to her latest swain (Johnny Mitchell), who is half her age. The kid puts his foot in it neatly by chirping pleasantly to the daughter, “Well I’ll have to call you young Fanny and you—” His stuttering confusion as he leaves the sentence unfinished is hilarious, and the look Davis gives him would stop not just a few clocks but London’s Big Ben itself.

  Jerome Cowan is solid and true as one of her suitors from the great days who disillusions her by proposing marriage, then reneges when she tests him by telling him that she is old—an unforgivable sin!—and also broke. In an earlier scene, when she wafts down the great staircase, the very essence of a 1914 young society beauty, she accepts the adulation of her young admirers with the noblesse-oblige éclat of a princess to the purple born. And her grief and desolation are graphically illustrated late in the picture as she wanders the mansion frantically, aware at last that “the enemy time in us all” has overtaken her.

  Mr. Skeffington won fan approval nationwide in 1944, and did well with many of the critics. But behind the facade, it turned out to be a picture fraught with endless quarreling, as well as the protracted shooting schedule that Jack Warner and his minions at first tolerated out of consideration for Davis’s recent widowhood. “Keep her busy and engaged, heavily engaged,” had been Jack’s advice to Sherman and the Epsteins—not that they needed to exert much initiative on a Davis determined to lose herself in her work.

  Davis worked hard to create a convincing character. She raised her voice a full octave; at first disconcerting, it was soon apparent that it fit the vain Fanny perfectly. She got hairdresser Margaret Donovan to design beautiful period hairdos for her, and Ernie Haller and Perc Westmore photographed and made her up to the nines. For the ravaged, postdiphtheria, aged Fanny, Westmore came up with rubber pieces which Davis found a trial, as they shut off her pores and clung painfully to her delicate skin.

  In other areas, Davis went out of line, forcing rewrites, and then cutting out other dialogue that in her view was unsuitable. The Epsteins were also producers of the film, and Davis began telling them what to do and what not to do. When she gratuitously inserted dialogue without consulting them and told them that she could both write and produce better than they could, they walked off the picture and threatened suit. Davis’s attitude was “good riddance!” With the help of fill-in supervisor Steve Trilling, Davis and Sherman blundered through to the finish—months over schedule. Then the first of a series of incidents occurred which indicated that someone didn’t like Bette Davis. An eyewash she used regularly turned out to be toxic, and only Perc Westmore’s quick action saved her sight in one eye. The liquid was found to have been tampered with. This put the set of Mr. Skeffington into a state of ultimate siege, with Battle-ax Bette self-appointed head of her own special security police. Everyone concerned was relieved when Mr. Skeffington wrapped up.

  With Mr. Skeffington finally in the can, Davis found her next film more of a pleasure than a duty, more play than work. Warners had decided to make a movie about the Hollywood Canteen that Davis and John Garfield had founded in 1942 and where, post-Farney, she had been consoling herself.

  Davis always gave John Garfield much of the credit for the canteen’s success. Garfield, 4-F in the war, felt it was the least he could do for his contemporaries in uniform. Since the Los Angeles area was a prime embarkation point for soldiers, sailors, and marines headed for the Pacific theater, there had been a need for it even prior to 1942 when the draft put a lot of men in uniform. For her part, in her free time Davis met with and enlisted numerous enthusiasts famous, not so famous, and unknown. Everyone got into the spirit and the canteen flourished until the end of the war. It also flourished financially, through the efforts of Jules Stein, president of MCA (Davis’s agents) and his wife, Doris, who made wise investments and set up the framework. So wisely in fact did Jules Stein manage the canteen’s finances that half a million dollars remained in the treasury at V-J Day. With these funds a foundation was started that continued to benefit servicemen.

  Those in the know joked that Davis’s extracurricular activities with the men at the canteen, if properly directed and photographed, would have made the Bette Davis movie to end all Bette Davis movies! Meanwhile Davis gave out dignified interviews to the press, telling all the fan mag mavens and the newspapers that she would always be grateful “for the loyalty of those who outlived the first flush of publicity and novelty and continued to work with us.”

  When Warners got around to making Hollywood Canteen in 1944, they marshalled practically every Warner personality not in the service for the film. Joan Crawford, fresh on the contract list, appeared in a few scenes, none of them with Davis. Other luminaries on hand were big guns like Barbara Stanwyck and smaller fry like Alan Hale.

  The film, a 124-minute affair directed by Delmer Daves from his own screenplay and original story, had a superslim plotline. Robert Hutton and Dane Clark play two soldiers on sick leave who spend three exciting, star-laden nights at the canteen before embarking for the Pacific. Hutton, lionized as the millionth GI to come to the canteen headquarters, gets to date Joan Leslie, on
whom he develops a man-size crush. Dane Clark gets to dance with Joan Crawford but presumably not fall in love with her. (Asked years later to give a contrast between working with Davis and Crawford, Dane shrugged and laughed, “Apples and oranges—doesn’t that take me off the hook?”) Then Davis and Garfield get center stage to talk about the canteen and its aims and purposes, Davis as president, Garfield as vice president.

  Most of the film is taken up with musical numbers such as Roy Rogers singing “Don’t Fence Me In,” Eddie Cantor and Nora Martin warbling “We’re Having a Baby,” Joe E. Brown and Dennis Morgan making a try at “You Can Always Tell a Yank,” and Jane Wyman and Jack Carson performing gamely and expertly a number titled “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” Asked years later if in Hollywood Canteen she had been tempted to do yet another hot jitterbug number as in Thank Your Lucky Stars the year before (only this time with a hot GI, natch!), Davis laughed and said she knew her limitations and was content to stay within them that time around! LeRoy Prinz got much credit in the reviews for the clever musical numbers, fast-paced and elegant, that he created and directed.

  In a 1988 interview for this book, Joan Leslie recalled.

  “Bette Davis was a guest star in two wartime pictures I did, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Hollywood Canteen, but we only worked together in Canteen. Of course I had seen her around the lot, visited her sets, and was proud just to be in the same movie with her. We had one scene together in Hollywood Canteen. She was a founder of the canteen and, I think, the person who talked Jack Warner into giving the film’s proceeds to the canteen and the USO. In the plot, the canteen decides to give the one millionth serviceman to enter there anything he wanted.