James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Warner’s relentless myopia toward her career didn’t improve Bette’s precarious state of mind. Her fights with Wyler escalated, and their periods apart grew longer. When Ham Nelson was in town, Bette felt herself on tenterhooks, trying to hide her relationship with Wyler, loath to end her marriage, yet aware that she and Ham were drifting inexorably apart. Her New England sense of propriety, flexible though it had become in matters sexual, dreaded the specter of a public divorce. But living with Ham was becoming more and more difficult.

  Nelson’s insecurities about the marriage led him to bouts of anger, self-pity, and frustration. He knew Bette was unhappy, knew that her romantic longings were far afield. Although he imagined dalliances around every corner, he didn’t suspect Wyler. He did worry about Henry Fonda after seeing Jezebel, especially since he knew about Bette’s girlhood infatuation. (He wasn’t the only one who suspected Bette was still smitten with Fonda. Hedda Hopper approached Bette after the premiere and whispered salaciously, “Bette, I know one thing for sure—you had to be in love with Henry Fonda. Oh, the way you looked at him!” Bette laughed and waved away the suggestion so convincingly that Hopper never mentioned her hunch in her column. “I couldn’t tell her,” Bette said, “that all those closeups of me showing love for Hank had been shot after he had finished all of his scenes for the picture and had left the lot. It was Willie—off camera—I was looking at!”)

  Ham’s jealousy boiled up again when Bette began work on The Sisters, a melodrama set in 1906 San Francisco. Bette’s costar was Errol Flynn, one of the handsomest actors of his time and a legendary ladies’ man. Flynn played a charming, feckless newspaper reporter who deserts his pregnant wife (Davis) soon after their elopement. She survives the city’s great earthquake and continues to search for him until they are reunited and he begs her to take him back. She does.

  Flynn used his most seductive wiles to get his leading lady into bed, but Bette was wary of him on a number of levels, and she resisted. His reputation as a heartbreaker preceded him, and rumors were rife in Hollywood that it was not only women who shared Flynn’s sexual favors. Several young men in his thrall were said to have committed suicide after he broke off the relationships.

  Like most people during this unenlightened period, Bette felt a deep discomfort with homosexuality, and Flynn reminded her uneasily of Ross Alexander. She needed to respect a man’s masculinity in order to feel truly attracted to him, and in her mind bisexuality was a major point against a suitor’s manhood. She also needed to respect a man professionally; Flynn’s careless work habits and cavalier attitude toward his craft left her puzzled. Flynn was a huge box-office star, paid twice as much as she, and yet he seemed to walk through his roles, while Bette felt she worked “like ten men” on her films. Two or three times a week, the assistant director would have to scour the local bars to get Flynn back to the set after lunch. This infuriated Bette. She later said that Flynn “was certainly one of the great male beauties of his time, but a terrible actor—not because he didn’t have the basic talent, but because he was lazy, self-indulgent, refused to take his work seriously, and tended to throw away his lines and scenes.”

  Jack Warner didn’t help Bette’s feelings toward Flynn when he told her that their billing would read “Errol Flynn in The Sisters, with Bette Davis.” Aghast that her Oscar and her performance in Jezebel didn’t seem to matter a whit to Warner, Bette lobbied to have the billing changed. After months of haggling it was—to “Errol Flynn and Bette Davis in The Sisters.” Hal Wallis said in 1964 that the initial slight was purposeful; Warner had told him, “That dame needs to be brought up short now and then; she’s an egomaniac and I like to get her sweating at times.”

  Flynn was never able to get Bette into bed, although his finely honed sexual instincts told him that she was ripe for the picking. He was right. Her fragile emotional state made her susceptible to any male attention, and she found herself responding to him during some of their love scenes. Every time Flynn felt her weaken, he would make yet another pass at her. Tempted she was—she later called Flynn “utterly enchanting”—but her pride won out: she wasn’t going to let herself become just one more of Errol Flynn’s sexual trophies.

  Jack Warner, for one, felt that Bette’s resistance was a real battle for her. “She always acts better when she’s in love,” he said, “and though she’d have killed me for saying so, I felt she was in love with Flynn all through the shooting. But she’d be damned if she’d let him or anyone else know.” Ham, of course, sensed it, and his imagination tortured him as he conjured up all kinds of sexual shenanigans between Bette and Flynn. The tensions between them grew; they fought over the telephone when she was working, they fought when she got home. Ham started to spend his nights at friends’ homes or in hotels.

  Bette continued to see Wyler, but their relationship had become “tempestuous to the point of madness,” as she put it. As much as she was drawn to “his strength, his brilliance,” she was also terrified that he would “run my life from sunrise to sunset.… I resisted the loss of my sovereignty to the end.” But she couldn’t walk away from him.

  With two tenuous, bombastic relationships tearing her apart emotionally, Bette longed for a solid, quiet romance. In September she thought she’d found it. Instead she became embroiled in a “catastrophic” love affair that would finally give Ham Nelson cold, hard proof that he was being cuckolded.

  It was at a party in September 1938 that she first saw him, a benefit at the Beverly Hills Hotel for the Tailwaggers, an organization Bette headed up that cared for lost and abandoned dogs. She looked lovely at the gathering, her hair falling softly around her bare shoulders and her low-cut, tight-fitting pink lace dress revealing more than a touch of cleavage. She carried a wicker basket over her arm, filled with raffle tickets, and when the tall, handsome man approached her, she felt first a thrill, then a certain amount of relief when he stared into her eyes, not her bosom. She recognized him immediately as Howard Hughes.

  People and activities and talk and laughter swirled around her as she stood next to Hughes in the ballroom, but it all seemed to fade out as she looked up into the face of the rangy, gawky, shy man who reminded her so pleasurably of the young Ham Nelson. Hughes, thirty-three, was world famous as the filmmaker who had launched Jean Harlow to stardom in 1930 with Hell’s Angels, and as an aviator who had recently won the Congressional Medal of Honor after navigating the world in just over ninety hours. Bette had heard he was a cocky, arrogant sort, but when she met him she was taken aback by his sweetness. There were no fireworks between them, she professed, but rather an instantaneous warmth: “He bought scads of raffle tickets from me and asked for a date. He was so debonair and handsome that I was flattered.” She also found it titillating that Hughes was enmeshed in a very publicized relationship with Katharine Hepburn, a woman Bette had always envied for her striking beauty—and now Hepburn’s beau wanted her. Ham was in New York again, Wyler was out of town, and Bette was lonely.

  The date turned into an affair. Their rendezvous were discreet and held at odd hours when Bette wasn’t working. Hughes was a night owl, and they would sit up until the small hours of the morning in front of the fireplace in Hughes’s rented house just feet from the gently lapping surf of the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, talking quietly while Hughes stroked her hair. To Bette’s surprise, this apparently experienced man of the world was shy and fumbling in bed, much as Ham had been at first, and she was stunned when Hughes, so insecure about his attractiveness that he was often petrified by a first encounter with a woman, struggled with impotence. Hughes saw himself, his associate Mickey Neilan recalled, as “a great gangling buffoon of a guy.”

  Bette was patient with him, never made him feel that she was disappointed or thought less of his manhood because of his problem, and she helped Hughes come around until the potency problems evaporated. Hughes’s gratitude knew no bounds. One warm sultry night, an evening Bette would never forget, Hughes covered his bed with gardenias and made love to her am
id the intoxicatingly rich aroma of the exotic flower.

  With Ham still away, Bette became more brazen. She and Hughes began to meet at the Coldwater Canyon house, making love in the bed she shared with Ham. By now, the affair was a poorly kept secret in Hollywood, but nothing so much as a blind item appeared in the newspapers—because, as Bette put it, “since I had always cooperated with them and treated them fair and square, they stood behind me.… Brother, was I lucky!” Her luck ran out when Ham, visiting with friends in New York, heard the rumors about his wife and the eccentric millionaire. Now, he had had enough. He would return to Hollywood immediately, but he wouldn’t confront Bette. Nor, he resolved, would he punch Hughes in the mouth. Instead, he would get proof that his wife was an adulteress—and he would use it against her in divorce court.

  Ham and his brother-in-law, Bobby’s husband Robert Pelgram, worked feverishly in the basement of the Coldwater Canyon house on the afternoon of September 22 while Bette was at the studio. Ham drilled a hole in the bedroom floorboards, then Pelgram carefully ran the recording wire up a basement wall, along the ceiling, and through the hole. Ham pulled the wire up into the bedroom, attached a small microphone to it, and nailed the microphone to the baseboard under the bed. Then he tested it, while Pelgram listened below. It recorded Ham’s voice perfectly. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  That night, Ham lay sleepless in a motel room, his imagination conjuring up images of what was occurring in his bedroom, images that ripped at his heart. When he and Pelgram returned to the house late the next morning, the sounds on the small disc confirmed his worst fears. Ham’s face contorted in agony as he listened to his wife, his childhood sweetheart, making love to another man. Pelgram tried to soothe Ham’s tears of pain, calm his fits of rage against Bette, against Hughes, against the Fates. Finally they left the dank basement, taking the recorder and the disc with them, and Ham returned to his motel room.

  Around midnight, Ham went back to the house, barged into the bedroom, and caught Bette and Hughes in the act. Hughes jumped up and threw a punch at him, which missed, and a fierce struggle ensued that left Bette screaming in her bed. Finally, with both men exhausted but unhurt, Ham started to back out of the room. “You’ll regret this, you bitch!” he hissed at Bette. “I’ve got tapes of the two of you, and don’t think I won’t release them! Then your lousy career will be over! You’ll be finished! Finished!” On the verge of tears again, he bolted out of the room.

  Hysterical by now, Bette threw Hughes out of the house and frantically called Bobby, who was over in a flash. The sisters searched the house in a frenzy looking for the eavesdropping equipment. Ham is bluffing, Bette kept telling herself. Surely he’s bluffing.

  Bobby later told Ruth Bailey, her daughter with Robert Pelgram, what happened next. “My mother found all this wire down in the basement,” Ruth recalls, “and then she and Bette started following the wires and they wound up in the bedroom.” When she saw that Ham had indeed taped her, Bette was beside herself. A disclosure like this could ruin her career, destroy everything she had worked so hard for. Frantic, she knew she must talk to Ham. He wouldn’t do that to her—he couldn’t.… If only she could talk this over with him, everything would be okay. But then she realized that she had no idea where he was, and her stomach sank. She fell on her bed and sobbed so fiercely she could barely breathe.

  Hughes heard from Ham Nelson the next morning. He would destroy the disc, Ham said, in exchange for $70,000 in cash. As Ruth Bailey puts it, Ham and her father “figured they could use the money. There was a purpose in doing what they did—to get some money out of her.” Hughes paid the blackmail, and Ham broke the disc apart in front of him. Then Ham moved out of the Coldwater Canyon house and in with a fellow agent from the Hollywood branch of Rockwell-O’Keefe. Bette was shattered. “It broke my heart. Ham was my first love.”

  Ruthie wasn’t nearly as upset. She urged Bette to marry Howard Hughes immediately. Bette’s secretary, Bridget Price, wrote Ginny Conroy to say how shocked she was when she heard about Ruthie’s hopes for a Hughes-Davis wedding. It was a terrible idea, Bridget had told Ruthie, because “no one can live with Howard Hughes.”

  “That’s all right,” Ruthie replied. “She can always get a divorce.”

  Bridget’s mouth dropped open. “Do you mean to say that you’d encourage your daughter into a marriage that you knew couldn’t work? Think of all that emotional wear and tear. Think of all that bad publicity.”

  “Think of all that money,” Ruthie sighed.

  Bette’s wiser head prevailed. She felt so conflicted about the loss of Ham that she couldn’t concentrate on another man, and she broke off the relationship with Hughes. She borrowed $70,000 from the studio against her future earnings, to pay him back the money he had given Ham. Bette kept a soft spot in her heart for Hughes, and he remained fond of her. For years afterward he sent Bette a single red rose on the anniversary of the repayment.

  When reporters got wind of the fact that Ham no longer lived with Bette, they started asking questions. Bette denied everything, but Ham was more equivocal. “I can’t say anything about a separation, except that there is none contemplated at this time and we’ll just have to wait a while for developments. Bette will probably have a statement to make about the situation.” She did. On October 1, she sent a terse telegram to key members of the Hollywood press corps: “Ham and I definitely have decided to take a vacation from each other.”

  Besieged by phone calls begging for more information, Bette told the columnist Mayme Ober Peak that “we have a problem to work out, and we feel we can do it better away from each other. Then, after a little vacation, we’ll see how we feel. This isn’t something we can decide in a minute or two. It’s too important to both of us.” The vacation, she stressed, was meant to save the marriage.

  She said no more. Even after Walter Winchell announced on his radio broadcast that Bette planned to “marry a millionaire,” she remained closemouthed. “I will not talk,” she told Peak. “Even if I should go into court, I shall not tell under any circumstances what has happened between Ham and me. It is our own personal affair.”

  Ham felt the same way. When he filed for divorce on November 22—an extremely rare case of the husband as plaintiff—he didn’t mention Howard Hughes’s name, but he did make it as clear as possible in legalese that his problems with Bette were largely sexual. She had treated him, he charged, in a “cruel and inhuman manner” by becoming “so engrossed in her profession that she has neglected and failed to perform her duties as a wife and has been inattentive, casual and distant to plaintiff, to the point of rudeness and embarrassment.”

  She also “insisted on occupying herself with reading to a totally unnecessary degree, and upon solicitation by plaintiff to exhibit some evidence of conjugal friendliness and affection, defendant would become enraged and indulge in a blatant array of epithets and derision, wholly unjustified, and would upset the entire household and unnerve and humiliate plaintiff.”

  Ham also complained that Bette ignored his friends when they visited, refused to eat meals with him, and preferred to vacation with her mother and sister rather than travel with him. All of this, the lawsuit concluded, had “caused and does now cause plaintiff great and grievous mental suffering and humiliation.”

  Bette didn’t answer the petition, and the divorce was rushed through with the help of Warner Brothers’s influence. Nelson didn’t demand alimony from Bette, despite the fact that she had just signed a new contract for $3,000 a week; rather, he entered into a property settlement with Bette that split the couple’s money down the middle. After a brief court appearance by Ham on December 6, in which he alleged that Bette had told him that her career was more important to her than her marriage, the divorce was granted. Nelson left town almost immediately and went to New York, where he took a job with the advertising firm of Young and Rubicam.

  For most of the second half of the 1930s, Bette Davis had engaged in a sexual lifestyle that would certainl
y have horrified her straitlaced New England forebears and deeply shocked her fans, who thought of her as a bedrock of Christian values. Abortions, adultery, sexual blackmail—none of it would have passed the all-powerful Hays film censorship office if it had been part of a Davis script.

  She was not without shame, and she told a friend late in 1938 that she had been wrong about much in her life, and could no longer look herself in the eye. She must regain that ability, she said—“It’s doing awful things to me.” She had tried to bury her troubles in the work of filming Dark Victory shortly after the separation from Ham, but she told the same friend that while she “adored” the script, she felt badly that she didn’t “feel up to” making the movie. She had been so convinced that she couldn’t do the film justice in the state she was in that she had gone to see Hal Wallis and offered to give up the part of Judith Traherne, a flighty heiress stricken with an inoperable brain tumor. But Bette had always been able to translate her personal troubles into acting brilliance, and when Wallis looked at the first week’s rushes, he told her, “Stay upset.”

  At home, there was nothing to take her mind off the disintegration of her marriage. She told a reporter at the time, “That whole episode of my life just makes my heart ache and you can see why I can’t talk about it.… When I split up with Ham, one of the worst things I had to contend with was living with things we had acquired together. Everything in the house reminded me of Ham. I was all set to forget about him, and up would bob an old chair, and I could see him sitting in it. My God, it was ghastly!”

  Bette moved from the Coldwater Canyon house shortly after the divorce to another large home at 301 North Rockingham Road; a few months later, she moved again, this time to Beverly Grove. The nomadic existence she had spent with Ruthie for so many years left Bette with a restless spirit; after she had succeeded in Hollywood and could afford to live just about anywhere she wanted to, she continued to move frequently, sometimes twice a year.