Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  Dateline Atlanta, September 27 (AP): “Bette Davis, screen actress, was quoted by the Atlanta Constitution today as denying published reports that she came South to marry Cpl. Lewis A. Riley, who is stationed at Fort Benning. ‘I am not going to marry anyone,’ the newspaper quoted her in a story from Phenix City, Alabama, which is near the Army post.”14

  Davis’s presence on the outskirts of Fort Benning was hardly a secret to the locals. According to Photoplay’s Pauline Swanson, autograph seekers

  camped at Bette’s gate once the address of her vacation home was printed in the papers. Even the padlock and the owner’s four dogs roaming the premises failed to daunt their enthusiasm. One enterprising fan made friends with one of the dogs—a collie—and sent a note to Bette attached to its collar. Bette has a sense of humor, and such enterprise deserves recognition, so she sent the dog back to the gate bearing the coveted autograph.

  Otis Taft, a Columbus grocer, bragged that Bette had ordered supplies from his store. By nightfall everyone in town knew that Miss Davis had ordered “twenty-five dollars worth of groceries for one day! Fancy groceries, too!”15

  Bobby Pelgram joined Bette in Georgia for a time. According to Pauline Swanson, Bobby “tried valiantly to discourage the reporters and photographers who descended on the house, but Bette at last had to make an appearance and posed for photographs wearing a red and white plaid shirt and navy blue knee-length shorts. . . . Bette took to life in Phenix City like a native. She carried wood from the back yard for the fireplace and the wood-burning cook stove. She learned to make biscuits on the old iron stove without burning them and mastered a wood-smoked steak. She bought hip boots and overalls and joined her farmer neighbors in fishing expeditions and coon and possum hunts.”16 What with the overalls and the possums and Riley’s muscles, it was all terribly rustic.

  On November 6, the evening before the election, Davis was back in Hollywood, where she took part in a pro-Roosevelt radio broadcast produced by Norman Corwin, along with Tallulah Bankhead, Judy Garland, Paulette Goddard, Humphrey Bogart, and Olivia de Havilland. The broadcast is said to have pushed a million votes to Roosevelt, who went on to win handily with over 53 percent of the popular vote and 81.5 percent of the electoral vote.17

  Davis quickly returned to Georgia and Corporal Riley. At the end of November, she received an invitation to join the president for Thanksgiving dinner at his Warm Springs estate, about thirty-five miles north of Fort Benning. Many of the guests were wheelchair-bound. Some were navy men with war wounds, but most suffered from polio or infantile paralysis. Much to the annoyance of White House staffers as well as the head of the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, Basil O’Connor—but to the retrospective surprise of no one—Bette managed to seat herself next to the president for most of the evening and couldn’t be pried away.18 As Roosevelt’s personal aide, William D. Hassett, put it in his diary entry for November 28, 1944, “A movie actress managed to ingratiate herself past the administrator of the Foundation and sat beside the President to the amazement of all. She was accompanied from Columbus by a hunky escort whom she introduced as Corporal Reilly [sic], to the disgust of the authentic Michael [F. Reilly, head of the Secret Service], who declared with heat that he [Lewis Riley] did not belong to the Montana-Irish Reillys. Doc O’Connor furious. We suppressed all the pictures.”19

  Davis never names Riley in any of her memoirs, but she does include this comment: There was, she writes, “a man I thought I might marry. He had been in Europe for the duration and was being transferred from the European theater to Japan. . . . Before he left he asked me to wait for him. I said if that was what he really wanted, he should put a diamond on my finger. Which he did not, and as I knew I would, I grew tired of living my life in a mailbox . . . and did the ‘Dear John’ thing. A friend of my ex-beau was with him when he received the letter and told me he was very upset. I was pleased.”20

  IN NOVEMBER OF 1945, Ruthie finally remarried. The sixty-year-old divorcée chose Robert Woodbury Palmer, a fifty-three-year-old businessman from Belmont, Massachusetts. A Boston newspaper clipping in the Davis archives offers several eyebrow-raising details: Palmer “was divorced 10 days ago in Reno from Mrs. Helen Bush Palmer” and “is reported to have met Mrs. Davis only a few weeks ago.” The clipping goes on to report that the former “Mr. and Mrs. Palmer resided for several years in Belmont. They were married 32 years. They have two children.” And then the final kick: “News of the engagement announcement came as a complete surprise to the Palmer friends here, many of whom did not know he had divorced Mrs. Palmer.”

  The wedding took place in Palm Springs on November 24 at 4:00 p.m. at the Smoke Tree Ranch. Bette, the matron of honor, wore a white Hawaiian print with a lei.21 The couple honeymooned at the legendary Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.22

  Bette Davis to Wed on Coast Tomorrow

  Hollywood, November 28 (UP): Bette Davis, screen star, will be married on Friday at Laguna Beach to William Grant Sherry, 30-year-old artist and former professional prizefighter, whom she met for the first time a month ago, her studio announced today. The ceremony will be performed by the 37-year-old actress’ uncle, the Rev. Paul Gordon Favor, in St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in the presence of a few relatives and friends. . . . Miss Davis will be given in marriage by her stepfather, Robert Woodbury Palmer, it was made known here yesterday. Mr. Palmer wed Miss Davis’ mother last week. Miss Davis’ sister, Barbara Pelgram, will be an attendant.”23

  Bette Davis Wedding Barred by a Church

  Hollywood, November 29 (AP): Forbidden the use of an Episcopal church for the ceremony because she was once divorced, Bette Davis will marry William Grant Sherry tomorrow noon in the Chapel of Mission Inn, a hotel at Riverside. Miss Davis and Mr. Sherry obtained a marriage license at Santa Ana this afternoon. . . . The ceremony will be performed by Rev. Francis C. Ellis, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Riverside.”24

  Bride Flustered at Ceremony in Chapel of Mission Inn

  Los Angeles, November 30; Special to the New York Times: Bette Davis, film actress, and William Grant Sherry, artist and erstwhile pugilist, were married at 3:30 P.M. today in the St. Francis Chapel of the Mission Inn at Riverside. . . . The bride, whose only attendant was her sister, Mrs. Barbara Pelgram of Laguna, appeared somewhat flustered as she was escorted to the altar by her new stepfather, Robert Woodbury Palmer of Palm Springs and Boston. Although she has appeared before motion picture cameras in many wedding scenes, she admitted to a friend at the ceremony that “this is altogether different.”

  Bette met Sherry at Ruthie’s house, Windswept, in Laguna Beach in October, Sherry having recently been discharged from the marines. When Hedda Hopper got a look at him sometime after the wedding, she was delighted with what she saw: “In a suit you couldn’t possibly guess what a handsome Greek god he was. Now he’d run up fresh from the sea with the water still glistening on his mahogany tanned skin. He has an even, confident, ingratiating smile, kindly but masculine as a left hook.”25 Hopper’s final metaphor was sadly prophetic. Sherry used that left hook, and more, on Bette with some regularity. It began on their honeymoon when he hurled a trunk at Bette and threw her out of the car.26

  The manly beauty that entranced both Davis and Hopper is not evident in photographs, which show a tall trim man with a sharp, lengthy nose, a forehead even more prominent than Bette’s, a drastically receding hairline, and a jutting and slightly upturned chin. Sherry resembled Fearless Fosdick, only with Bob Hope’s nose. But by all accounts he was muscular, as was Corporal Riley, to whom Davis sent her Dear John letter after deciding to marry Sherry.

  The press got wind of the movie star’s impending marriage to the ex-marine thanks to Sherry’s mother, an elevator operator at the Pantages Theater Building in San Diego. Mrs. Sherry saw no need for secrecy when her son privately declared his intention to marry Bette after the first of the year, so naturally she told her friends, some of whom called reporters. The wedding was pushed up to late November.

&nbs
p; Ruthie was, as Bette put it, “aghast” that Sherry’s mother was an elevator operator, though Ruthie of all people should have appreciated the practical problems faced by working women. Hitting closer to the mark, Ruthie also thought that Sherry was a dangerous golddigging hustler. Ruthie “was violently against our marriage,” Davis wrote. “It turned out she was right. But for the wrong reasons.”27

  Bette’s sister agreed with Ruthie. “I was furious when I heard that Bobby had hired a detective to investigate Sherry behind my back,” Bette writes. “It was as if my family were saying that at the grown-up age of thirty-five I could not make up my own mind. Bobby finally told me she had had Sherry investigated and I must not marry him. I refused to read or hear about the report the detective gave her; one can only guess at what it discovered: his temper, his inability to support himself, his desire to marry money. After we were married, a friend said that Sherry had told his Marine buddies in San Diego that his ambition when he left the Marines was to marry a wealthy woman. This information came a little late.”28

  Bette’s anger at her mother and sister was misplaced; Ruthie and Bobby weren’t questioning Bette’s decision-making skills in general but rather the specific—and disastrous—course of action she was taking by marrying a man she barely knew. But everyone made nice at the wedding in Riverside. Bobby attended Bette like the dutiful sister she was. Bette’s stepfather of less than a week was indeed the father substitute who escorted her down the aisle, with Bette wearing a simple checked suit with a netting-trimmed hat. Sherry’s mother was there, as was his eleven-or twelve-year-old brother. Bette’s cousin John Favor and his wife were guests. So were the Westmores: the chubby makeup man Perc and his volatile wife, the hairdresser Maggie Donovan.

  Frank Westmore, Perc’s brother, recalls Perc telling him about being at Bette’s house just before Bette was to marry Sherry. Donovan spied the handwritten guest list and noticed that it said only “Perc Westmore.” With a shriek, Donovan yanked Bette into a nearby closet and locked her in. As Bette pounded on the door demanding to be released, Maggie forced Perc to amend the offending document to read “Mr. and Mrs. . . . ,” and only then did she let Bette out of the closet. “I was afraid of that Maggie,” Bette later admitted.29

  IN 1944, WARNERS bought the film rights to James M. Cain’s 1941 novel Mildred Pierce and offered it to Bette, but she turned it down; she’s said to have disliked the idea of playing the mother of a sixteen-year-old.30 Others considered for the role of the hardworking pie baker and excessively indulgent mother were Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and Rosalind Russell.31 Warners eventually settled on Joan Crawford, who won an Oscar for her performance. Davis was more intrigued by the prospect of filming Anna and the King of Siam, but Warners refused to loan her to RKO, and the role went instead to Irene Dunne opposite Rex Harrison.32

  Michael Curtiz wrote to Mrs. Sherry in care of the Plaza Hotel in Laredo, Texas, in mid-December 1945; the Sherrys were still on their honeymoon. Curtiz had just returned from New York, where he showed Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse the screen test Bette had made for the role of the amiable but iron-willed Vinnie Day, the mother in Lindsay and Crouse’s long-running Broadway comedy Life with Father. Curtiz was “heartbroken” to have to tell her that they’d rejected it—and Bette—calling the performance (in Curtiz’s words) “too powerful, too dominating, too superior and without any naiveté.”33 After testing Rosalind Russell, Rosemary DeCamp, and even Mary Pickford, Curtiz ultimately made the film with Irene Dunne and William Powell.34 Bette was also considered for the lead in Jean Negulesco’s Humoresque, but by the time the film went into production in December of 1945, Joan Crawford had taken that role as well.35

  In 1944, shortly after Mr. Skeffington was edited and screened for Jack Warner, Bette ran into Vincent Sherman and told him that Warner was pleased with the way their film had turned out. “I’m glad he was, but I’m not,” Sherman said. Mr. Skeffington had turned out to be nobody’s picture, he told her—not hers, not his. They had been talking about teaming up again on a remake of A Stolen Life, a 1939 British melodrama starring Elizabeth Bergner as twin sisters and Michael Redgrave as the man who marries the wrong one, but Sherman insisted they’d have to reach some kind of understanding before proceeding. “She said something about ‘Do you want me to be like one of those little girls who’s just starting and you tell them everything to do?’ I said no, no, I’ve never been that kind of director, I don’t have that kind of ego. . . . Well, she got very upset, and I said I wouldn’t work that way, and we just never did anything together after that. I’m sorry about it.”36

  Bette saw an early studio screening of My Reputation, a Barbara Stanwyck melodrama, and she liked the way the German émigré Curtis Bernhardt had directed it. (Although My Reputation wasn’t released until 1946, it finished shooting in January 1944.) She decided he’d be perfect to direct A Stolen Life. “A producer at Warner called me and said that Miss Davis had insisted on having me as director,” Bernhardt later said. “I read the script and thought it was godawful. I went back to the producer and said that it was awful for this, this, and this reason. He said, ‘You know, you’re right.’ I don’t recall now what the original problems with the script were, but when the producer went up to Jack Warner and asked for a new writer, Miss [Catherine] Turney, Warner asked why. He gave the reasons, and Warner asked how long he had been on the script. When he answered, ‘about four months,’ Warner said, ‘You’re fired.’ ”37 (Bernhardt didn’t name either the producer or the original screenwriter in question.)

  In mid-December 1944, while Bette was just outside the gates of Fort Benning with Corporal Riley, Warner sent her a telegram in care of the Williams Lumber Co., Columbus, Georgia. He suggested assigning the producer Mark Hellinger to A Stolen Life. In addition to being the proposed star, Bette was the film’s producer, the deal for A Stolen Life having been inked as the first production under the B.D. Productions label. But as Warner pointed out in his telegram, “Your not being here makes it rather awkward in getting this film prepared.” “Hope you’re having a wonderful time and that everything is really the life of Riley with you,” he cutely added. But Bette was displeased at the Hellinger suggestion, perhaps because she believed she could handle the producer’s function herself when she returned to Hollywood, and so A Stolen Life was left adrift without an executive in charge.38

  After Davis returned from the South, she began looking at wardrobe designs. “I went to a showing of Miss Davis’s costumes,” Bernhardt later recalled.

  The whole staff that she’d assembled was there, and I walked in as the new director. The costume designer was a friend of hers. [Bernhardt appears to be referring to Orry-Kelly, but Davis, in Mother Goddam, insisted that she “did not have Orry-Kelly to help” her on A Stolen Life.39 Precisely who designed the dual wardrobes for the twins remains unclear.] Whenever a new costume would come out, she would rave, “Isn’t that wonderful! It’s glorious!” etc. After the third time of “wonderful, glorious,” I asked her very softly, “Excuse me, Miss Davis. Don’t you think these costumes are a little theatrical?” I thought I was very diplomatic, but my words had the opposite effect. She burst out in a flood of insults. “Theatrical? Theatrical! Let’s stop talking that way, Mr. Bernhardt.” She went on for ten minutes until I finally said, “Thank you, Miss Davis,” and got up and walked out. She asked me where I was going. I said, “You don’t need a director, you need a yes-man.” She said, “That’s not true,” ran after me, grabbed me firmly by the hand, and led me back. That was my first encounter with Miss Davis. After that, her attitude was a little more demure.40

  When confronted by Bernhardt’s anecdote, Davis offered the following objection: “I never believed in yes-men. I despised them.”41 True enough, but not enough. Davis despised those “weak sisters” who refused to stand up to her, but she also raged against those who did. In a way, Bette Davis thought she could walk on water, but her first step turned any lake into a sheet of exceedingly sheer ice tha
t only she could stride upon. Others, their tread either too heavy or too timid, fell through.

  “Later on,” Bernhardt claimed, “Bette was fired as producer, and I produced it. It’s an argument between her and me. She never did produce it, but her name is on it as producer and she claims that she produced it. For tax reasons, she had her own company, B.D. Productions. . . . It was a stupid argument because there is no producer at a major studio. Everything is handled by departments. The expenses are handled by the finance department, the cutting by the editing department, the writing by the story editor who assigns the writers.”42

  Obviously Bernhardt never worked with Hal Wallis, who oversaw virtually every aspect of the films he produced. Wallis never produced departmentally or by committee. But Wallis left Warners for Paramount in the spring of 1944.43 And given that A Stolen Life was the first B.D. production, it’s unlikely that Wallis would have been in charge of it even had he stayed.

  If the argument over who actually produced A Stolen Life is, as Bernhardt put it, “stupid,” it’s not because Bernhardt’s explanation is any sounder than Davis’s. In The Lonely Life, Davis wrote: “I was no more allowed to be a real producer than the man in the moon,” suggesting that she was somehow kept from exercising any authority by some nefarious unnamed force emanating from the Warners front office. And yet she went on to admit that “as star in the dual role, I simply meddled as usual. If that was producing, I had been a mogul for years.”44 But when faced with Bernhardt’s assertion that she didn’t produce A Stolen Life at all, she bristled: “We were coproducers,” she insisted.45 Shooting began on Valentine’s Day 1945.