by James Spada
Public relations man that he was, Taplinger knew that this rationale would both flatter Bette and let her down easily. Executives at Warners were contractually forbidden to “date” the studio’s stars; Bob could deny anything more than a friendship with Bette as long as matters didn’t progress too far. But there was another reason that Taplinger didn’t want to marry Bette. According to Bertha Kelley, his longtime assistant, “Bob was a confirmed bachelor. As much as he loved Bette, he was just too devoted to his family. His mother, his father—all came first. He just liked to keep single.”
According to Bob’s sister, “It’s a foregone conclusion that they were intimate,” but she doesn’t think Bette’s pregnancy was Bob’s doing. “He was a little bit too careful for that to have happened, especially because of that Warner Brothers policy.… I don’t even know how their romance managed to take off, because he was very cautious about that.”
We will never know whose baby Bette was carrying in 1940, but she offered what may be an oblique clue to Whitney Stine. After telling him of the pregnancy and abortion, she fell sadly quiet. Then she said softly, “I should have married Willie.”
Instead, she married Arthur Farnsworth. He began to press her to marry him when his divorce was final early in December, but Bette vacillated. For her, there were pros and cons to consider. On the one hand, she found Farney very attractive; he was forceful and manly in some ways, gentle and pliable in others. He seemed to respect her career, and was willing for their marriage to be bicoastal (he would live in New Hampshire a good deal of the time); that appealed to the freedom-loving side of Bette. On the other hand, as she put it in her memoirs, “I was not violently in love with Farney. I loved his loving me, and our mutual love of the New England way of life was the tie that finally bound.”
If it wasn’t exactly grand passion, it was enough for a somewhat older, wiser Bette Davis who still felt twinges of New England guilt about her voluptuous love life. “Ruthie had raised Bobby and me in such a straitlaced way,” she recalled, “that we had to get her okay to go to the bathroom. And we were lectured that a girl never, ever lost her virginity before marriage.” Bette hadn’t, but she had more than made up for lost time before and after her divorce from Ham Nelson. Now it was time, she felt, to make an honest woman of herself.
Despite Ruthie’s strain of lingering Victorianism, she wasn’t thrilled by the idea of Bette marrying again. Even with their continual bickering, Ruthie had felt closer to Bette after the divorce from Ham than she had in years, and she feared that her daughter’s remarriage would drive a wedge between them again. “She had me back again and I’m afraid didn’t want to let me go,” Bette said. But the materfamilias didn’t put up much of a fight. Farney was handsome, charming, and exceptionally well mannered, and he came from a good family. “I really think Ruthie found it hard not to like him,” Bette conjectured.
The wedding took place on the eve of the new year 1941 in Rimrock, Arizona, at the ranch of Bette’s friend, the former actress Jane Bryan, now Mrs. Justin Dart. Bette wore a white dress dotted with lilies of the valley; Bobby, fresh out of the hospital, tentative and wan, was the matron of honor. Bette had chosen the holiday for her wedding so that newspapers would have no more than skeleton staffs, and the gambit worked—many reporters had no inkling of the marriage until January 2, when several of them were greeted by a telegram from Bette that tersely announced the nuptials.
“Bette’s Marriage Jolts Experts,” one headline read, but most of Bette’s friends, especially in New England, had long been aware of the possibility. As another dispatch pointed out, “In Boston, in Littleton, in Franconia, friends of Farnsworth and of Miss Davis talked the kind of talk that will remain forever mystifying to Hollywood folk in general and to Warner Brothers in particular. For what none of the press departments of the film colony, none of the columnists, none of the top-flight executives knew about the impending nuptials was all ‘old stuff to Bette’s and Arthur’s friends here in New England. From a distance of some 3,000 miles, any of the friends of the pair could have tipped Hollywood off… none did.”
Several people who knew Bette, however, had tried to tip Farnsworth off to the fact that it might be a mistake for him to marry Bette. One of these was her cousin, Elizabeth Carmichael. When Farnsworth showed Carmichael the wedding ring he had purchased, she said to him, “Are you sure you want to do this? It isn’t going to be easy, you know.”
“I know,” Farnsworth replied, “but I want to do it.”
“Are you sure?” Carmichael pressed him. She wasn’t talking about Hollywood and the exotic lifestyle he was about to enter, she says, but rather “I was thinking about Bette. Because she wasn’t easy—especially when she was working.” But Farnsworth assured Carmichael that he was going into this marriage with his eyes open.
Mr. and Mrs. Farnsworth had scant time for a honeymoon. Married on a Tuesday, Bette had to be back at the studio the following Monday to begin work on a slight comedy with Jimmy Cagney, The Bride Came C.O.D., which proved unworthy of both their talents. Bette had worked on The Great Lie, a soapy melodrama with George Brent, up until a few days before the wedding, but she was too happy to be angry about Warner’s sweatshop schedule. She and Farney drove around the desert Southwest, awed by the sprawling mesas, enormous rock formations, and exotic plant life. They stayed each night in Spanish adobes or rambling ranch-house inns.
By Sunday, Bette was back at Riverbottom and her husband was on a train to New Hampshire. The Farnsworth marriage—in its modern, unconventional way—had begun.
THIRTEEN
B
ette marched into the imposing, high-ceilinged meeting room of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in her patented no-nonsense way, wearing a tailored black suit and carrying a portfolio of papers. She sat down at the head of a sprawling oak table and faced a dozen starchy, middle-aged men. “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said as she opened her portfolio, her speech just a tad more clipped than usual. “Shall we begin?”
Nothing could have been more symbolic of Bette’s lofty new status in Hollywood than her election in January 1941 as the first woman president of the motion picture academy. Not her four nominations and two awards in the prior five years, not her selection as “The Queen of Hollywood,” not her sobriquet as “the fourth Warner Brother,” not even the fact that her last three films—All This and Heaven Too; The Letter; and The Great Lie—had each brought in over $1.2 million in profits to her studio. To be chosen as the academy president, in Bette’s mind, was the highest honor she had yet received—and a responsibility she was determined to live up to.
“My dear Miss Davis,” one of the elderly chaps interrupted as Bette shuffled through her papers. “There’s plenty of time for the business at hand. First, we of the board all want to welcome you as our newly elected president!”
The men applauded and Bette stood to accept their welcome. But she sat down again quickly, eager to get down to work. She knew from the academy by-laws that her position gave her a good deal of power, and she came to this first meeting intending to use it. Once the minutes of the previous gathering were read, and the board’s greeting was entered into the record, Bette laid out her agenda.
“Gentlemen,” she began, “there are a number of important issues I think we should address. First, as you know, there has been some talk in the community that holding our usual banquet at the Biltmore might seem frivolous in the light of the terrible struggle that our British and European friends are engaged in against the Nazis. Some have suggested we cancel it. I think a better solution would be to hold the award ceremony in a theatre, charge a minimum of $25 a seat, and donate the proceeds to British War Relief.”
The board members sat in stunned silence. “Charge to attend the Academy Awards?” one finally stammered. “But—but—that would be so undignified.”
Bette forged ahead. “Another matter of great importance is the issue of extras. Many of these individuals don’t even speak English, and fe
w are capable of judging technical excellence in motion pictures. I move that we no longer allow them to cast votes in the Oscar competition.” Again no one said a word until Walter Wanger, Bette’s predecessor as president, balefully asked, “Miss Davis, you have won two of our awards. What do you have against the Academy?”
As the meeting progressed along similar lines, as each new suggestion triggered shock and disapproval, Bette began to feel that she had been chosen only to be a glamorous figurehead and had no real power to effect change. Two days later, she resigned the position, despite a warning from the 20th Century-Fox production chief Darryl Zanuck (who had sponsored her for the presidency) that if she quit the job “you’ll never work in Hollywood again.”
In her memoirs, Bette points out that her positions were soon vindicated when Jean Hersholt, elected to replace her, denied extras the right to vote, and again when the awards ceremony was switched, in 1943, to theaters rather than banquet halls. Her implication was that her gender and her position as a movie star had caused the board to ignore her suggestions.
It was just as likely that Bette’s brash way of offering her ideas did them in. Blunt, impatient, never a politician, Bette was no more capable of gently lobbying people to her way of thinking in a boardroom than she was on a soundstage. When she made up her mind that a change was necessary, she wanted it made, and fast. Through patience, Jean Hersholt managed to succeed when Bette saw no recourse but to quit.
It might have taught her a lesson, but it didn’t. She still looked upon the Warner lot as a war zone. “I spent my days in battle,” she said, never imagining that her own fighting style always made the skirmishes worse. Never was the atmosphere more belligerent than on her next picture, The Little Foxes. “We fought bitterly,” Bette said of the experience. Her opponent? William Wyler.
When Sam Goldwyn, one of Hollywood’s premiere independent producers and widely famous for his malapropisms, was told by an aide that The Little Foxes, the Lillian Heilman play he wanted to option for the screen, was “very caustic,” he replied, “I don’t give a damn how much it costs. Buy it!” The 1939 Broadway success had starred Tallulah Bankhead, who triumphed as the steely, rapacious, down-at-the-heels daughter of the South, Regina Giddens, who connives with her brothers to build a cotton gin that will exploit cheap labor. When her banker husband refuses to put up her share of the money for the scheme, she withholds his heart medicine and does nothing as he struggles and dies. Their daughter, appalled when she learns all, renounces Regina and leaves her a lonely, miserable wretch, a victim of her own greed.
When Goldwyn asked Wyler, who was under contract to him, to direct The Little Foxes, Wyler told the mogul that the only woman in Hollywood who could do Regina Giddens justice was Bette Davis. Goldwyn blanched. He knew that Jack Warner was unlikely to lend out the services of his top box-office attraction; he hadn’t done so since Of Human Bondage. The request, as Goldwyn expected, was turned down. But he was able to change J.L.’s mind by refusing to lend him Gary Cooper for Sergeant York unless he got Bette—and by agreeing to reduce a $425,000 gambling debt Warner owed him to $250,000. Goldwyn agreed to pay Warner $150,000 for Bette’s services, while Bette continued to receive her $5,000 weekly salary during the twelve-week production. Bette wasn’t happy about Warner’s $90,000 profit on the deal, but she was eager to play Regina and remained quiet.
Once all the peripheral issues were settled, the real trouble began. Bette hadn’t wanted to see Tallulah Bankhead’s performance because she was afraid that it would influence her too much. Wyler insisted that she go to the National Theatre, where Bankhead had brought the show back to New York after a road tour. The depth of misunderstanding between Bette and Wyler over her interpretation of Regina can be gauged by their remarks over the years. Bette insisted that Bankhead had played Regina as written—brittle, cold, unrelenting in her manipulation and greed—and that there was no other way to play the role. Wyler has said that he sent Bette to see Bankhead because the actress had given the role more shading than Heilman had written into it. “[Regina] was a woman who was greedy and high-handed,” he felt, “but a woman of great poise, great charm, great wit. And that’s the way Tallulah had played it on the stage. But Bette [wanted to play] it all as a villain because she had been playing bitches—this is what made her at Warner Brothers. She thought when I tried to correct her that I was trying to make her imitate Tallulah Bankhead, which I was not.”
It was clear on the first day of filming in May 1941 that problems loomed. When Bette appeared wearing calcimine on her face—to make her appear older and to give her the pale, white-powdered look many Southern women affected during the play’s early 1900s time frame—Wyler scowled at her. “What’s that for?”
“It’s to make me look older,” she replied.
“What you look like is a clown,” Wyler snapped. “Take it off!” She didn’t, but she did have Perc Westmore tone it down a little.
As she looked around at the opulent set that Stephen Goosson had designed for the Giddens home, Bette felt it wasn’t true to the play; rather she felt it should have a “decaying grandeur” to underscore Regina’s need for money. She lost that fight, and the next several as well, and within a few days of the start of filming she was a mass of raw nerves, a stick of dynamite about to explode.
Wyler, by all appearances, was eager to set off the charge. He challenged Bette at every turn, demanding retake after retake to get from her the more finely shaded interpretation he wanted. Bette had loved the chance to refine her performance in Jezebel this way, but now she resisted. More confident of her abilities, more convinced of the validity of her characterization, she bristled now under Wyler’s direction, bucking against his strength like a bronco, determined not to give in to him. With every retake he demanded, with his every plea to soften Regina, Bette’s performance grew only more brittle.
Wyler was shocked by how differently Bette behaved toward him now. No longer was she pliable, open to suggestion. Raucous screaming matches erupted between star and director, rocking the soundstage, her dressing room, his office. Teresa Wright, twenty-two and appearing in her first motion picture, burst into tears one day listening to the vicious, scatological insults Bette and Wyler hurled at each other. Neither would give an inch, and the usually courtly Wyler’s nastiness toward her shocked Bette. One stiflingly hot afternoon—the temperature was over one hundred degrees—Wyler was rehearsing an elaborate dinner scene at which he wanted Bette to convey the height of Southern charm and hospitality. She played it instead with a razor-sharp edge, and at its conclusion Wyler announced loudly, “That’s the lousiest goddamn dinner scene I ever saw. Maybe we’d better get Bankhead!”
Bette lost all her reserves of composure. She burst into tears, pushed herself away from the table, and ran to her dressing room, slamming the door with a resounding crack. Then she walked off the set, for only the second time in her life, and fled to her mother’s house, where she took to her bed, Ruthie in hand-wringing attendance.
Farney was in Minneapolis, where he had taken a job with the Honeywell corporation, and could offer little consolation. While Goldwyn and Wyler considered replacements for Bette (including Bankhead and Miriam Hopkins, who had lobbied for the role before Bette was cast), her doctor informed them that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and could not return to the set for several weeks. The studio sent an examining physician from Lloyd’s of London to see Bette, and he concurred that she needed several weeks of rest.
After Goldwyn decided that in spite of everything, there could be no Little Foxes without Bette, Wyler shot around her for three weeks until she returned on June 7, scarcely better able to cope with the heat and the stress, but determined to get the ordeal over with. Wyler, too, was in a more conciliatory mood. Resigned to the fact that he couldn’t alter Bette’s interpretation, he let her play Regina her way and concentrated instead on turning what had been a talky, static stage play into vivid cinema. With the help of photographer Gregg Toland, he
succeeded. The film’s centerpiece—and one of Bette’s most famous film moments—is the scene in which Regina allows her husband (played by Herbert Marshall) to die by denying him his heart medicine.
They could have shown Regina’s reactions as the sounds of her husband’s struggle up the stairs to get his medicine are heard off screen; they might have cut back and forth between the two actors; they considered shooting both Bette and Marshall in hard focus, a technique Toland had pioneered with great success in Citizen Kane a few months earlier. Instead, he and Wyler decided to keep the camera trained on Bette’s hard, unfeeling face while showing her husband in the background, in soft focus. It created a memorable cinematic image.
When filming wrapped in early July, Bette felt a palpable relief, and a deep sadness. “To be happy to have a film with Wyler as the director finished was indeed a heartbreak for me,” she said. But Bette long maintained that she could tell whether a movie would turn out well by the amount of strife on the set—the more, the better—and The Little Foxes proved her point. Released on August 21, 1941, the film was a box-office success and won high critical acclaim. In February it received nine Oscar nominations, including Bette’s fourth consecutive nod as Best Actress.
Bette had proven that her interpretation was a valid one, but at a high price. She maintained as late as 1974 that one of her few remaining ambitions was to do “one more film with Willie before I end my career.” But Wyler—who went on to win three Oscars as Best Director—never again offered her a role in one of his pictures.
