Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Vincent Sherman provided the most credible account of the cause of Arthur Farnsworth’s death. According to Sherman, Davis had urged him to accompany her on the trip to Mexico after Old Acquaintance wrapped back in February. Although he was flattered—and interested—Sherman nevertheless hesitated to accept the invitation. The day before Bette was to leave, Farney showed up at Sherman’s office at Warner Bros. and told him that he knew about Bette’s infatuation. The couple had had a drunken fight about it the night before. Sherman quotes Farney as saying, “She’s very emotional and not aware of how bad it could be for both of you if you meet her in Mexico. . . . So I’m begging you—don’t go! Please don’t go to Mexico.” Sherman described Farney as “a gentle soul” who understood his wife’s overly emotional nature very well.

  Bette phoned Sherman twice from Mexico—once from Mexico City and once from Cuernavaca—to see if he was coming to join her, but Sherman begged off, citing work commitments. It’s not that he didn’t find Bette attractive. In fact, he was fascinated by her and quite susceptible to her charms. But even if he hadn’t been married, which he was, he knew that an affair with the mercurial Bette Davis would have been unavoidably messy. And so he demurred, hoping that by the time they began work on Mr. Skeffington in the fall, Bette’s ardor would have cooled.

  It hadn’t. One Sunday afternoon in late 1943 or early 1944, after filming some scenes for Skeffington, the soundstage having emptied, Davis invited Sherman to her dressing room for a scotch. “I’ve been a perfect bitch,” she told him. “I feel guilty about what I am doing to you and what I did to Farney.” Bette then told him that on the morning she’d left for Mexico, she and Farney had had a few more drinks and another fight, after which Farney had followed her to the train station. They’d continued arguing on the train, and Farney told Bette that Sherman had agreed not to meet her in Mexico. The train began to move. “I begged him to get off, but he went on, saying he’d had a long conversation with you. . . . I screamed at him to get off before it was too late, and I pushed him toward the platform. Finally, he took the last few steps down and jumped, but by this time the train was moving rapidly. I ran down to the bottom step, held onto the bar at the side to look back and see if he was all right. He had fallen and was holding his head.”

  Davis and Sherman began their affair that night.23

  “Farney and I had a good life together,” Davis wrote in The Lonely Life. “Classically European in tradition, I believed it would have gone on forever. We made few demands on one another, and still he was always there. So was I. He filled the house with his sweetness and consideration of me. Now I was alone again. I will always miss him.”24 It’s an amiable if overly discreet literary send-off to a man whose worst fault may have been a tendency to drink too much, but it leaves many issues unresolved. Since everyone who had a meaningful relationship with the couple is now dead, these questions will remain unanswered, though it is safe to assume that if Davis indeed shoved Farney hard enough on the train steps and helped cause the fatal injury, however inadvertently, the guilt she felt must have been powerful and long-lasting.

  The only further aspect of the case that deserves reporting is that during the inquest, when Bette was asked if anything had happened recently to cause Farney’s head injury, Bette lied and said no.

  “A TEMPERAMENTAL STAR for whom sex was an artistic necessity” is how Vincent Sherman described Davis. “She was very sexy,” Sherman said, “but sex for her was an act of physiological need. It was a pile up of energy, and she had so damn much of it. She was pent up. And that was relaxing for her.”25 But Davis was “pent up” even during sex; she couldn’t fully let herself go. She was a sexual athlete, but an inhibited one. “Because of her repressive nature and her attitude toward sex, I think she rarely allowed herself to indulge her sexuality fully,” Sherman explained. “As a result she was plagued by a misdirected energy that often turned into nervousness, emotional outbursts, and at times cruelty. I say this because she limited her warmth and affection before the deed, and afterward seemed only to want to forget that it had ever occurred. It was as though from hunger she had stolen food but felt guilty about it.”26

  According to Quirk, it was only a few days after Farney died that Bette began showing up again at the Hollywood Canteen and defying one of the central rules laid down by Jules Stein: no fraternization between hostesses and servicemen. As the director Delmer Daves pointed out, “Some of these kids were prize specimens—real catnip for the gals. I’m not saying she disappeared with any of them, but I would not have blamed her if she had. She was in a real intense, uptight mood at times, and some romantic quickies might have filled the bill for her—might have calmed her down.” As for the stars, starlets, and volunteers who served as Canteen hostesses, they, too, were often young beauties, and yet it was Bette Davis who commanded the most attention. Jack Carson once noted, “There were some real lookers at the Canteen—knockouts like Dolores Moran and Julie Bishop and Dorothy Malone. But Bette was the one they clustered around.” Carson asked a hunky marine why: what did Bette possess that was so magnetic for the men? One young soldier had a simple reply: “I hear she screws like a mink.” Carson was indignant at first, taking it as a slur on Bette, especially since Davis had earned a less lurid reputation as one of the Canteen’s hardest workers. But then, Carson realized, there was nothing wrong with Bette’s having a little fun on the side. “Well, ain’t it the truth,” he thought to himself.27

  It was also at the Hollywood Canteen that she met the composer and lyricist Johnny Mercer, with whom she had a brief and unpublicized affair.28

  The Hollywood Canteen didn’t serve just as an easy pickup joint for the widow Farnsworth. She continued to wash dishes, organize the staff, and perform for the service members who flocked there to get their minds off the war. Perc Westmore recalled one evening when he showed off his makeup skills by transforming Mickey Rooney into Clark Gable and Bette into Bela Lugosi as Dracula.29 Another night, with Westmore’s help, Bette became Groucho Marx. Westmore then selected a brawny soldier and turned him into a woman. Groucho and his pretty date then danced to the great amusement of the crowd.30

  Among the many books, records, photos, and ephemera archived at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library is a fascinating record of day-to-day, or rather evening-to-evening life at the Hollywood Canteen. It’s a diary written by one of the volunteer hostesses—a civilian, not a starlet. Here’s Jane Lockwood Ferrero’s entry for February 27, 1943. (Old Acquaintance had just wrapped, and Farney was still alive.)

  The Canteen was jammed again tonight. . . . Bette Davis sang the song she sings in her new Warner Bros. picture called Thank Your Lucky Stars—same idea as Paramount’s Star Spangled Rhythm and Columbia’s Tales of Manhattan. The name of the song was “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old”—very cute, altho it’s very evident that Bette is a much better actress than singer. Her husband Wm. Farnsworth [sic] was there, too. She also greeted and had her picture taken with the lucky fellow who was the 500,000th serviceman to cross the Canteen’s threshold. He was a sailor stationed at Port Hueneme.

  A slightly later entry notes, “She’s no singer—she sounds like a broken-down Dietrich.”

  Davis doesn’t make too many appearances in the diary until late October—she had spent some time at Butternut after Farney’s death as well as having taken her Mexico vacation beforehand—when Ferrero writes, “Bette Davis was back—smiling but careworn. Wore black simple tailored suit and black snood.” And again in late November: “Bette Davis was there signing and working behind the snack bar. Her hair is quite dark for her new picture Mr. Skeffington, I guess.”31

  MR. SKEFFINGTON WAS A difficult picture for all concerned with its making. It had nothing to do with the fact that the star and the director were carrying on behind the scenes. (As Sherman wryly observed, “The only way I could finish the picture was by having an affair with her.”32 When the film wrapped, so did the affair.) The chief r
eason was Bette’s compulsion to wrangle about points that required no argument, and Sherman wasn’t Wyler enough to withstand the pressure. She couldn’t help herself but battle. “In these years I made many enemies,” Davis wrote. “When I was most unhappy I lashed out rather than whined. I was aggressive but curiously passive. I had to be in charge, but I didn’t want to be. I was hated, envied, and feared, and I was more vulnerable than anyone would care to believe. It wasn’t difficult to discover that when people disliked me they really detested me. And they couldn’t do any more about me than they could about death and taxes.”33

  Mr. Skeffington began as a novel by the Australian-born, English-educated Elizabeth von Arnim. It was published in 1940, and Warner Bros. quickly bought the film rights with an eye toward turning it into a vehicle for Davis. But Bette, who was preparing to start shooting The Letter at the time, expressed her displeasure at the property in a handwritten note to Jack Warner: “I have also heard rumors that Skeffington with Mr. Goulding was my next. This, I would be forced, for my own future career, to refuse. It is physically impossible for me to play this woman of fifty.”34 She was then thirty-two and certainly enough of an actress to handle the challenge. She’d played Elizabeth I at sixty, after all.

  Mr. Skeffington is the story of Fanny Trellis, a vain young beauty whose family is on the skids, whose brother commits securities fraud, and who marries the wealthy but all-too-Hebrew Job Skeffington mostly as a financial transaction, only to put him through hell. He takes it, to a point, at which time he leaves for Europe, gets caught up in the Nazis’ roundup of Jews, is sent to a concentration camp, goes blind, and returns to Fanny’s guilt-filled, last-minute-salvation ministrations.

  Warners approached Katharine Cornell, who turned it down. “Tallulah Bankhead finally agreed to confirm the deal J.L. offered—$50,000 to do Mr. Skeffington,” Steve Trilling wrote excitedly to Hal Wallis. “Definite rejections on Skeffington from both Dunne and Colbert,” Hal Wallis telegrammed Jack Warner; “Under circumstances do you want me close deal for Bankhead as I promised?”35 By mid-April 1941, Wallis called a halt to it. “The Bankhead thing is off indefinitely,” he wrote to Trilling. “I have taken the picture out of production until we can get the script into proper shape, and we don’t want to make any commitment now.”36

  David Lewis was talking to Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell about preparing a script, but they apparently weren’t interested. Wallis sent some material to Herman Shumlin to try to convince him to direct the picture, but Shumlin turned it down; he didn’t like the story. Warners commissioned a script from John Huston, and Huston obliged. But nothing much happened until early 1943, by which point Bette understood that she could—should—take the risk of appearing as old as Fanny Skeffington needed to look by the end of the film, and Mr. Skeffington was slated for a fall shoot under the direction of Vincent Sherman.

  Davis began by rejecting Huston’s script, perhaps because she’d so detested In This Our Life, and another draft had to be written. Warners hired Julius and Philip Epstein, whose deal elevated them to the role of producers as well as screenwriters. It was a promotion they came to regret.

  Jack Warner wanted to cast the elegant if bland John Loder to play Job Skeffington, Fanny’s appropriately if obviously named husband. Davis, Sherman, and the Epstein brothers advocated Claude Rains precisely because, as Sherman put it, “he was not supposed to be a romantic character.”37 (To say the least. Fanny marries him out of maliciousness and greed, though the film itself downplays her viciousness in a misguided effort to make Fanny less atrocious.) Rains was cast.

  Warner then suggested one small change. He called Sherman and the Epsteins into his office one day and asked, evidently seriously, “Is it necessary that Skeffington be Jewish?”38

  Warner, of course, was Jewish, as were most of the moguls with the exception of the goyish Darryl Zanuck. As such, the brothers Warner were on the alert for any undue attention being called to that fact. “They were very sensitive about any character in any film who was Jewish,” Bette later wrote. “We had many requests from the front office during the filming of Mr. Skeffington to add lines that would make Job appear a saint. Claude and I fought the good fight. We were never forced to say these lines.”39 Still, the film plays Job’s Judaism extremely subtly, just as it does the anti-Semitism of Fanny’s felonious brother, Trippy (Richard Waring). At one point, Trippy haughtily calls Job “a cheap, common little . . .” but Fanny cuts him off before he can supply the obvious missing word.

  Job Skeffington’s Judaism was the least of the problems with the production. Warners considered filming Mr. Skeffington in Technicolor. Bette put up a fuss about the color palette, and the studio decided to film in black and white.40 But by and large, Davis’s outbursts were as irrational as they were constant. “We did not get along too well on Skeffington,” Vincent Sherman later reflected. “I thought she went overboard. . . . It was a very difficult time in her life.”41

  Davis challenged him as she had challenged him on Old Acquaintance, but with a new, more biting edge and with much less reason. Simply reading the unit production manager Frank Mattison’s daily reports is enough to require a stiff scotch with a chaser of Pepto Bismol. Even when Davis was home ill, her shadow loomed large and menacing. “Yesterday afternoon [Monday, October 18] there was quite a hullabaloo on the set when the producers [the Epsteins] came to the stage with Mr. Warner and Mr. Trilling. The producers protested against Mr. Sherman changing the dialogue and cutting out the guests that appeared in the first part of the picture. However, after discussion pro and con, we got some extra people in a hurry and the guests are in the set as per the script. Mr. Sherman feels that Miss Bette Davis would not like this and we may have a blow up on account of it this morning.”

  The following week: “Sherman goes on at his slow pace. . . . I can readily see why Bette Davis wants him to direct her—for the same reason Ida Lupino likes Sherman. He lets them do as they please, and in fact they are really the director when you come right down to it.”

  Two days later, Bette caused a fuss when she intervened in Sherman’s attempt to film a close-up of Richard Waring. “How can you do it when we haven’t played the master scene?” Bette demanded. She was referring to one of the most conventional—and dull—ways of composing a scene on celluloid: the director plunks the camera down at the greatest possible distance from the action and runs the scene in its entirety so that later, in the cutting room, the editor will have something to fall back on if the director is so inept that shots taken from closer distances don’t match with one another. Some directors never play the master scene. But Bette thought she knew how everyone should do everything and didn’t hesitate to say so.

  October 30: “Today Bette Davis was opposed, and still is, to our shooting the interior of the café with Rains and the child until they have shot more script preceding this. It seems as though they sit down and rewrite and rehearse each scene before it is shot, and I suppose she wants to have her finger in even the scenes in which she does not appear.”

  November 4: “There was absolutely no progress made on this set yesterday afternoon except to establish a new entrance for Bette Davis into this scene. The producers were familiar with the sequence and were on the set but they seemed just about as able to do something as nobody. I surely would not want to have my own money in any picture being made the way this picture is being made for Warner Bros. There isn’t a damn thing that can be done about it as long as Bette Davis is the director.”

  By November 9, the production was ten days behind schedule: “I am wondering if it would be possible to speed up the next Bette Davis picture by making it a Bette Davis production, where she would understand that all these delays and slowly progressing through a script at one page or less a day would cost her a little bit of money. . . . If you don’t like the suggestion just forget I made it, but it sure is tough on a unit manager to sit by with a show that goes like this where she is the whole band—the music and all the instrum
ents, including the bazooka.”

  By the end of the week, Mattison reported a new glitch: “We are in somewhat of a dilemma concerning the matter of our producers refusing to have anything to do with the picture. Miss Davis is not only the director, but she is now the producer also. Nevertheless, we will keep on going.”

  By the beginning of December, Claude Rains was getting cranky. He objected to the nasal, hoarse voice of the child actor Sylvia Arslan; “It seems Mr. Rains is getting to be an old woman,” Mattison remarked.42

  Bette was felled by a very serious eye problem on December 9. “I prefer to believe that on the set during Skeffington my eyewash was filled with aceteyne by mistake,” she coldly noted in The Lonely Life. “Aceteyne is a corrosive liquid that dissolves adhesives. It almost dissolved my eyes. I screamed in agony.” Perc Westmore rushed to her aid and washed her eyes out with castor oil.43 She couldn’t film that day, which Sherman spent rewriting more of the Epsteins’ now thoroughly disfigured screenplay.