James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  “Good evening, Miss Davis,” he greeted her in a strong, masculine voice, extending his hand. As Bette took it she noticed how blue his eyes were, how straight and white his teeth. “I’m Arthur Farnsworth, and I must say it’s both an honor and a pleasure to have you with us.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Farnsworth,” Bette replied, a little more formally than she meant to.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your meal,” Farnsworth apologized, picking up on her coolness. “I’ll be playing the piano in the music room after dinner. I do hope you’ll join us.”

  Bette said she would and returned to her meal, lifting her eyes furtively to watch Farnsworth walk away. He had stirred her emotions pleasurably, and she found herself impatient to be finished with dinner. When she was, she and a few other women gathered in the music room, and she requested her favorite song, “Stardust.” When Farnsworth switched from piano to violin, he played it again for her. Then the group gathered in the lodge’s station wagon and drove to Franconia Notch, where they sat under a bright autumn moon and harmonized together, eventually letting Farnsworth’s pleasing baritone carry on alone.

  The next day, Bette made discreet inquiries about Farnsworth to Robert Peckett, the owner of the inn. She discovered that he was the son of a well-regarded Rutland, Vermont, dentist and his wife Lucile, and that his family came from rock-solid Vermont stock. Bette liked that.

  Something of a Renaissance man, Farnsworth had been a pioneering aviator as well as a musician. As a student pilot in 1931, he had won praise and made headlines when he successfully landed his plane in the waters of Boston harbor after he ran out of gas. He had toured the country in a musical act with his sister Barbara and brother Dan, and had worked at Peckett’s in various capacities since 1934. For the previous two years his job as “host” had primarily meant entertaining the single ladies registered at the hotel, and E. J. Tangerman, a local resident, recalled that Farnsworth’s duties earned him a reputation as a gigolo. If Bette became aware of this she didn’t let it stand in the way of her new romance.

  Farnsworth and his wife, Betty Jane Aydelotte, were divorcing after a four-year marriage, but the decree wouldn’t be final for another fourteen months. He and Bette began their affair almost immediately, and it did wonders for her state of mind. Much to her delight, Farnsworth was no fumbling Ham Nelson or impotent Howard Hughes in bed. Best of all, he wasn’t the least bit intimidated by her star stature. Farnsworth seemed to all the world like a man’s man, a tower of strength—just the kind of man Bette felt she needed “to control me.”

  Bette had planned to stay at Peckett’s for a few weeks at most, but she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving, and she extended her sojourn to nearly two months. The man she nicknamed “Farney” proved a healing tonic for her, and the couple made no secret of their attraction to each other. They swam, hiked, boated, played tennis together day after day. At night, they were discreet about their rendezvous. Each would retire to a separate bedroom, then one or the other would stealthily switch rooms. But their affection for each other was so obvious that soon everyone within a fifty-mile radius of Sugar Hill knew that Arthur Farnsworth, local, and Bette Davis, movie star, were (as they say in Hollywood) “an item.”

  The news got back to George Brent, and he wasn’t happy. He and Bette had never broken up; their romance had simply wound down. The director Irving Rapper, a friend of Brent’s, recalled that he had gone up to Brent’s house one afternoon and found him standing by the fireplace, sadly holding a single rose. When Rapper asked what was wrong, Brent replied that Bette had made an appointment to accept his marriage proposal but had instead sent a note to tell him she had changed her mind because “it wouldn’t work out.” After that, the romance foundered; according to Bette, the bulk of the communication between the couple went through their secretaries, who “were so busy courting each other for us that it was inevitable they would take over our romance.”

  Now that Bette seemed to be involved in an important new relationship, Brent was worried that he would lose her forever, and he wanted to know where he stood. He telephoned her several times from Hollywood, but she was maddeningly noncommittal. Finally he boarded a plane, flew into Boston, and called Bette from his hotel in Copley Square: he wanted to come to Sugar Hill and see her.

  “No,” she told him, “you just sit tight. I’ll come down to Boston and see you.” No one but Brent and Bette knew what transpired between them in his hotel room, but once Bette left Boston, her romance with George Brent was over—and she knew she’d done the right thing when all she could think of during the drive back was Farney.

  Jack Warner called. Hal Wallis called. Anatole Litvak called. Bette took none of the calls, and returned none. Then Jack Warner telephoned again to say that he was willing to discuss her contract demands. During that conversation on October 26, Warner agreed that Bette would not be required to do more than three movies a year and could have one twelve-week vacation without pay and one four-week vacation with pay a year. Warner also agreed to raise her salary $500 a week to $4,500, but he refused to allow her to choose her own scripts or do outside radio work, and he wouldn’t guarantee her the services of cinematographer Ernest Haller. Bette accepted the compromise.

  Warner told Wallis he was pleased to have the matter resolved, but the Warner Brothers lawyer R. J. Obringer was skeptical. In a memo to the New York office, he commented that Bette hadn’t lasted a year under her August 1939 contract and added that it was “unpredictable” how long these new concessions would keep her happy.

  She was certainly happy at first. Warner informed her shortly after their peace-making conversation that he wanted her to star opposite Charles Boyer in a lush costume drama, All This and Heaven Too. He sent Bette the script, she liked it, and she promised to return to Hollywood by the end of the year.

  First, however, she wanted to put down roots. A few days after she had arrived at the inn, the Pecketts had shown her a ninety-acre, heavily wooded piece of property “up the road a spell” with a one-hundred-fifty-year-old house and barn surrounded by butternut trees. It was for sale, and Bette fell in love with it on sight. Before she had gone to Peckett’s, she had stayed with a friend who owned hundreds of acres, and she sat with him and his wife on their front porch during a sultry Indian-summer evening. “You know, Bette,” the man said, “I’ve worked hard all my life. We’ve owned this place for fifteen years and yet I never sit down and look out over my land that I don’t get a lump in my throat and say to myself, ‘This is my land.’”

  Now that Bette had the contract she wanted—which would allow her four months off every year, three of them consecutive—she knew that she would be able to enjoy her beloved New England as she hadn’t for nearly a decade. She bought the property, christened it “Butternut,” and the day after the sale was final, walked up to the property alone and remembered what her friend had said a few months earlier. “I looked at my acres,” she recalled. “I felt them under my feet. You have never seen such trees in your life. It was too exciting. I knew what my friend meant. And I knew that I would know it more and more as the years went by. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Davis went home!”

  But not before she had to return to Hollywood and make another movie. She left New England early in December in a three-car caravan led by Farney and Bette in his car, a friend in her station wagon, and several other friends in a third car. Farney remained with her as far as Ohio, then had to return to New Hampshire and his job. Bette switched to her own car, kissed Farney good-bye, and promised she’d be back within a few months.

  “You look wonderful’.” Bette heard again and again when she started to make the rounds back in the film capital. When she began work on All This and Heaven Too at the beginning of February, United Press reporter Frederick Othman devoted an entire dispatch to Bette’s new glow. Under the headline “Bette Davis Looks Fine After Rest,” he wrote that she looked “only vaguely like the tired woman who appeared in Dark Victory,
” and was “a walking example of the theory that maybe an actress deserves an occasional rest. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks were round.… She gained thirty-five pounds and immediately had to lose fifteen of them because she couldn’t zip her skirts on.”

  A weight of 116 pounds, Bette told Othman, was perfect for her, and she didn’t cotton to the vogue for rail-thin actresses. “They can’t be healthy when they’re underweight,” she opined, “and to make it worse they seem to have set the fashion for women all over the country to be too thin. I’m glad to see curves becoming fashionable again and I know that when I retire from pictures, I’m going to be a nice, plump, comfortable-looking middle-aged lady. There’ll be no streamlined figure for me.”

  Still, it was a struggle for Bette to keep weight on in Hollywood. Almost the minute she got back, she faced myriad problems that turned her once again into a jumpy, short-tempered, chain-smoking bundle of nerves, the antithesis of her contented, carefree, placid personality in New Hampshire. Not only were there the preparations for her new films—always guaranteed to cause her stress—but there were also the family problems that never seemed to go away.

  If Bette was the Queen of Hollywood, Ruthie was the Queen Mother, and she expected, as always, to be able to project the appropriate image. Despite the fact that Bette had been on suspension for months and wasn’t receiving a paycheck, Ruthie’s spending on gowns, furs, and jewels was so profligate that Bette was shocked to find when she returned that the Davis coffers were nearly depleted. Bobby and her husband (with Ruthie’s encouragement) had also spent too much, mostly on preparations for the new baby, using the store charge accounts Bette had established in both her name and theirs. (It was around this time that Bobby nicknamed Bette “The Golden Goose.”)

  When Bette confronted Ruthie for the umpteenth time about her spendthrift ways, waving her bank statement in her face and railing against her, Ruthie came up with one of her usual blithe responses: “But Bette, you’re going back to work soon—there’ll be more money than we know what to do with!” Exasperated, Bette canceled all the store accounts.

  And soon there was the baby to add to Bette’s nervous condition. Bobby had given birth to her daughter, Ruth, at Hollywood Hospital on October 1, and soon the chemical imbalances caused by childbirth and the rigors of new motherhood had sent her reeling into postpartum depression. Her behavior deteriorated so badly—to the point of screaming fits and paranoia—that Ruthie called an ambulance and Bobby was hospitalized once again. When Bette returned to Hollywood she took baby Ruth into her home and told the press that she would keep her “until Bobby is stronger. She’s been so ill since the baby’s birth.”

  Bette felt guilty about having been away when her sister’s latest breakdown occurred—“I felt I had let her down.” Typically, she attempted to make up for it by plunging headlong into surrogate motherhood. She remodeled one of her bedrooms into a nursery, complete with every known piece of baby furniture, colorful wallpaper, and shelf after shelf of toys, and lavished the child with attention and love. She even pretended, in her actressy way, that the little girl was hers. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a baby in my house and I love it,” she told a reporter. “Yes, she does look like me—even I can see it.”

  But Bette was driven to distraction by the infant’s constant demands and nightly crying fits, and she hired a full-time nurse to care for her. Still, the minute the child would begin to cry Bette would sit bolt upright in bed, and with her new film requiring a 6 A.M. wake-up, she was soon exhausted again—a condition that caused some controversy the night of the Academy Awards banquet on February 29.

  Bette had been nominated for Best Actress for Dark Victory, along with Irene Dunne for Love Affair, Greta Garbo for Ninotchka, Greer Carson for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and Vivien Leigh for Gone With the Wind. Bette had been considered a shoo-in to win until Gone With the Wind was released on December 20. Bette was so certain Leigh would be the victor—and so tired during the pre-award dinner at the Ambassador Hotel—that she told Ruthie she wanted to leave before the award presentations began.

  “Are you mad?” Ruthie gasped. “Everyone will think you’re a bad loser. You’ll stay right where you are!”

  She did—until two in the morning, when, as expected, Gone With the Wind took the vast majority of the Oscars, including Best Actress. Bette joined in the applause for Vivien Leigh—she has always maintained that Leigh deserved the award—then turned to Ruthie and announced, “We’re going home now.”

  Although she slept for only three hours that night, Bette soon learned that her “sacrifice” for the sake of appearances went for naught when catty comments began to circulate around Hollywood the next day: “Did you see Davis leave in a huff when she lost? She walked out in a rage!”

  “There is nothing anyone can do,” Bette sighed, “to avoid the preconceived and desired reactions of Hollywood.”

  Bette had felt so much pleasure at the purchase of Butternut that in February—armed with her new weekly salary of $4,500—she bought a home very much like it in Glendale, quite close to the studio, for $60,000. (She put $22,000 down and had a monthly mortgage payment of $1,000.) She christened the rustic, thatch-roofed cottage “Riverbottom,” and she and Ruthie furnished it with overstuffed chairs and sofas covered in plaids and ginghams, knickknacks from local thrift stores, and hurricane lamps that gave the place the homey New England look that Bette loved so much. It was the closest thing she had had to a “real home” in California, and she vowed to put down roots at Riverbottom.

  All This and Heaven Too turned out to be Bette’s biggest hit to date, amassing a $1.24 million profit, and she won high critical praise for her controlled and understated performance as a governess accused of murder in nineteenth-century France. The film garnered three Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, but it was Bette’s other 1940 performance, in The Letter, that won her a third consecutive Best Actress nomination. The film reunited her with both William Wyler and Somerset Maugham, who wrote the original story, a lurid melodrama of a Malaysian plantation owner’s wife who kills her lover as the film opens and remains unrepentant throughout her trial, at which she is acquitted when her lawyer suppresses an incriminating letter. Finally she tells her husband, “With all my heart I still love the man I killed!” Then—since no one could get away with murder in the movies of the period—she allows herself to be stabbed to death by her slain lover’s wife.

  With Arthur Farnsworth three thousand miles away, Bette was lonely and sexually frustrated during the filming, and her feeling that she was single and could sow some wild oats resurfaced. Her daily proximity to Wyler stirred up her dormant romantic feelings toward him, and he too felt there was unfinished business between them. They began another affair, but it was short-lived; after a few months Wyler deferred cordially to a young man the restless Bette also had her eye on, an actor in the production ten years her junior named Bruce Lester.

  Bette found Lester winsomely sweet, like the young Ham Nelson, and he stirred her newfound maternal instincts pleasurably. They made no secret of their mutual attraction; they ate lunch together every day and left the studio in a single car each night. “This is the first time in my life that I’ve been free and able to have fun, have dates, have romances,” Bette explained to a reporter. “Now I can play the flirt and be the young-woman-about-town.…”

  Characteristically, Bette quickly tired of Lester’s genial passivity. “She found Bruce attractive and sweet,” her friend Jerry Asher recalled, “but he was a bit tame for her speed.” She got herself out of the entanglement by telling Lester the truth: that Arthur Farnsworth was on his way to Los Angeles. He had read Bette’s “young-woman-about-town” comment and didn’t much like it; he left for Los Angeles by train a few days later.

  Farney stayed with Bette at Riverbottom for two weeks, and the romantic fire between them flared. During a motor trip to Death Valley with some friends, as reporter Sally Jefferson put it in a dispatch, “Arthur’s devotion
to Bette was observed by all. It was plain that he worshipped her.” Farnsworth wasn’t happy that his romance with Bette Davis had hit the newspapers; his divorce still wasn’t final, and he didn’t want to jeopardize it. He and Bette agreed that it would be best for him to return to New Hampshire before any more press stories about them appeared.

  “I was pregnant during The Letter,” Bette confessed years later to her friend Whitney Stine. “Tony Gaudio, the cameraman, kept looking at me sideways. Obviously, I couldn’t have the baby and I was upset as hell. I had already had two abortions. I was only thirty-two and thought to myself that if I married again and wanted to have a baby, my insides might be such a mess that I couldn’t. I cried and cried, but I knew what I had to do. I went to the doctor on a Saturday and showed up for scenes on Monday wearing a form-fitting white eyelet evening dress for a scene, and that damn Tony said, ‘Jesus, Bette, it looks like you’ve lost five pounds over the weekend!’”

  Bette never told Stine who the father was, but the list of candidates is clear. Arthur Farnsworth, William Wyler, and Bruce Lester are all possibilities, but so too is Bob Taplinger, the head of publicity at Warner Brothers, with whom Bette had had a clandestine rendezvous during a Hawaiian vacation just before she began The Letter. In typical Hollywood fashion, when reporters noticed both Bette and Bob disembark from the ocean liner upon their return the two of them said it was merely coincidence and that neither had even been aware of the other’s presence on the ship. It took only a few transpacific inquiries for the newsmen to learn that the couple had danced in close clinches every night at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and that Bob had sent flowers to Bette’s room every day.

  Rumors of the romance popped up in the press when Bob and Bette continued their romantic dancing in a series of New York nightclubs—Arthur Farnsworth’s proximity notwithstanding. According to two people very close to Taplinger, the romance was a serious one. Taplinger’s sister Doris recalled, “Bette told me that she very much wanted to marry Bob, but he told her that marriage wasn’t right for her, that she couldn’t be a wife—her career should be the most important thing to her. She told him she would give up her career for him, but he said no, she would be depriving the world of her talent.”