James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  The crush became so great that when Bette arrived she feared she wouldn’t be able to get in to give her welcoming speech in time. A security guard escorted her to the back of the building, where she clambered through a bathroom window. After Bette and John Garfield offered their opening remarks, Abbott and Costello did their comedy routine, “Who’s on First?” Then Kay Kyser, Rudy Vallee, and Duke Ellington started to swing, and hundreds of fresh-faced, wide-eyed young men danced with movie goddesses like Rita Hayworth, Carole Landis, Joan Crawford, Betty Grable, and Marlene Dietrich. None of these men had ever seen so much beauty, glamour, and excitement in one place. It was enough to make them forget for a while that they were headed out to war.

  Bette helped found the Hollywood Canteen because making films made her feel guilty. The United States was locked in a potentially apocalyptic struggle with Germany across the Atlantic and Japan across the Pacific. Hundreds of thousands of American boys were being shipped off, many to their deaths, leaving behind widows and orphans and heartsick parents. In the midst of all this, lines of dialogue, or the line of a dress, seemed absurdly unimportant.

  Even before America entered the war, Bette had said, “With France, beautiful, brave France, collapsing, England with its back to the wall, and Hitler’s hordes trampling down democracy everywhere in Europe, making faces at motion-picture cameras seemed utterly inconsequential. My feeling about my work was, ‘What does it matter?’”

  Although she had already done a good deal for the war effort during her last layoff from Warners, and had joined Lena Horne and Ethel Waters in Hattie McDaniel’s touring troupe to entertain all-black army divisions (she was the only white member), Bette couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that she wasn’t doing enough, and that spending her time making movies was frivolous. Hal Wallis reminded her that films—particularly her special brand of “women’s pictures”—were a diversion and a comfort to lonely wives and grieving widows, and of course that was true. But somehow it didn’t seem enough.

  It was John Garfield who gave Bette the chance to make what she considered a major wartime contribution. The handsome twenty-nine-year-old cinema anti-hero had been classified 4-F, and like many men in that position, he felt frustrated and impotent at not being able to fight in a war that the vast majority of Americans believed to be morally right and necessary for the survival of the free world.

  Garfield decided that the best contribution he could make would be to establish a servicemen’s club in Hollywood, where embarking and returning soldiers could dance and mingle with movie stars—and not have to pay a cent for it. When he brought the idea to Bette during the late spring of 1942, she shouted “Yes!” the minute she heard it, and she plunged into the preparations with her indomitable energy. Between shots of Now, Voyager, she helped Garfield with the mountain of details that needed to be worked out—at this point they didn’t even have a building to house the club.

  They found a run-down former livery-stable-turned-nightclub called The Old Barn on Cahuenga Boulevard. Bette persuaded fourteen guilds and unions to donate the labor and materials to renovate the building. The carpenters’ union pounded nails; the electricians’ union replaced the wiring; the musicians’ union supplied an orchestra. Studio artists and cartoonists decorated the walls, Cary Grant donated a piano, Jack Warner shipped in linoleum.

  Bette also enlisted the help of Jules Stein, her agent and the powerful head of MCA, who was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Canteen. Stein invested and managed the money so well that there was always a surplus of funds despite a weekly bill of $3,000 for food alone.

  The Hollywood Canteen was an enormous and instantaneous success. There was music, dancing, fun, and good food, usually served by people these men never thought they would have a chance to meet, and their excitement was palpable night after night. Bette rarely danced with the men, but she scrubbed floors, served meals, and signed autographs, often after a long day’s shooting. Whenever there was a shortage of celebrities, Bette could be counted on to show up. “Couldn’t have a night when there was nobody,” she said. And to the surprise of many, Bette usually won the lion’s share of the attention, even when women of sexier reputations and more conventional beauty were present.

  The actor Jack Carson, who had appeared with Bette in two films prior to the Canteen opening, recalled how surprised he was by the magnetism she seemed to hold for the servicemen. “There were some real lookers there, but Bette was the one they clustered around.… She would jump out of costume and race from Warners down to the canteen and when she showed up she’d look like something the cat dragged in—hair unkempt, makeup still partly smeared over her face, and with any old thing thrown on, and those guys would drop whatever cutie-pie starlet they had on hand and would make a bee-line for her. Within two minutes of showing up, she’d be mobbed by them.”

  Charles Morton was a young navy recruit when he visited the Canteen, and he vividly remembers his awe and excitement at “so many celebrities performing, washing dishes, mopping floors.… I wonder now what stars like Joan Fontaine, Bob Hope, Marlene Dietrich, and Olivia De Havilland thought when instead of asking for their autograph I would ask them, ‘Where is Bette Davis?’”

  She was arguably the most famous actress there, but more than that, the servicemen responded to Bette’s genuine concern and feeling for them. They knew she wanted to be there. Others, it was clear, showed up primarily for the publicity it would bring them. More than once Bette got on the phone and harangued some star or other to show up—“and not just when the newsreels are here!”

  The intermingling of so many people from different parts of the country occasionally caused trouble. “Oh, the black/white problem we had!” Bette recalled. “We had black hostesses, white hostesses. We had millions of southern men—you know how they deal with blacks—and if at any time there was a row, if a black man was dancing with a white girl, or whatever, we would play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and that would stop it.”

  As the war dragged on, more and more wounded and disabled servicemen visited the Canteen, confined to wheelchairs or walking on crutches. Bette put together a thoughtful primer to help the volunteers deal sensitively with these men. “Forget the wounds, remember the man,” she instructed. “Don’t be oversolicitous, nor too controlled to the point of indifference. Learn to use the word ‘prosthetics’ instead of ‘artificial limbs.’ Never say, ‘It could have been worse.’ And when he talks about his war experiences, listen, but don’t ask for more details than he wants to give.”

  Bette’s next two films, released in 1943, kept her solidly in touch with the wartime fervor. Lillian Heilman’s antifascist Broadway success, Watch on the Rhine, gave her a chance to underplay once again as the wife of a leader of the underground anti-Nazi movement in Germany. The film was the first time Bette had been able to “fight the war onscreen,” and she was gratified by its solid box-office profits and positive reviews. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called it “the first Hollywood film to go deeply into the fundamental nature of fascism.… It also reveals with shocking impact the unforgivable carelessness of those who are morally opposed to fascism but who do nothing positive to check it.”

  Thank Your Lucky Stars provided a complete change of pace. A musical pastiche, its thin plot centered around a wartime charity show and featured Bette and a pantheon of other stars in over a dozen musical numbers. Each guest star was paid $50,000, which was then promptly donated to the Canteen.

  The film turned out to be a mixed bag. Talented singers like Dinah Shore, Eddie Cantor, and Dennis Morgan delivered as expected, but most of the rest—Errol Flynn, Jack Carson, Alan Hale, Olivia De Havilland, and Ida Lupino—were conspicuously ill at ease with a song. The best turn by a nonsinger was Bette’s; her number actually turned up on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade after the film’s release. Bemoaning the lack of available men after the draft, she torchily talk-sang that “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.” Bette brought out all her most belove
d (and often criticized) mannerisms in the number—popping eyes, fluttery hands, clipped inflections—and they worked brilliantly in what was meant to be caricature.

  At the end of the song, Bette is approached by a young man who swings her into an athletic jitterbug that left audiences cheering. A dance contest winner, Conrad Weidel, played the young man. He was terrified. “If I hurt you or drop you, Miss D-Davis,” he stammered, “the top guys will pr-probably put me in a cement mixer.”

  “Forget about who I am or who you think I am,” Bette replied. “Just let your instincts come to the fore and do it, boy!” Weidel then handled her so expertly that Bette enthused, “He made me look like the dancer I distinctly was not.”

  Thank Your Lucky Stars pulled in a $1.5 million profit at the box office; added to the donations of its stars’ salaries the film brought in more than $2 million for the Canteen.

  Bette’s long work days and her frequent harried evenings at the Canteen left her in a perpetual state of near exhaustion. Friends wondered how she managed to keep at it. “Thank God I was blessed with so much energy!” she replied. But too often now, that energy threatened to desert her. On her days off she’d sleep twelve to fourteen hours; when Farney was in Minneapolis or New Hampshire she’d feel lonely and dissatisfied, and when he was at Riverbottom with her she would be too tired and draggy most of the time to be much of a companion. What even Arthur Farnsworth didn’t know at this time was that Bette kept herself in perpetual motion in part to avoid facing the fact that her marriage was crumbling.

  It wasn’t just because Farney was away so much and Bette was so often tired. As she had with Ham Nelson, Bette had come to resent rather than enjoy Farnsworth’s frequent passivity, and she took to goading her husband to “Be more of a man!” or “Show some life, for crissakes!” Farnsworth’s reactions ranged from withdrawal to secret drinking to hitting Bette. “He got violent at times to take out his frustrations,” she said.

  By this point Bette had realized that Farnsworth was “an alcoholic who was tied to his mother’s apron strings… and what a mother. Christ, what a cold bitch!”

  Bette, who could belt back a drink with the best of them, didn’t realize the extent of Farnsworth’s alcohol problem until she found a cache of empty bottles he had hidden. “I couldn’t understand that,” she told Whitney Stine. “If you drink, then drink! He didn’t have to hide it from me.”

  Furtive drinking, Bette later learned, was a problem in Farnsworth’s family. His brother, too, was found to have hidden a large number of liquor bottles under a bed. Bette sensed that his drinking wasn’t the only secret Farney tried to hide. “As much as I loved my husband, I realized that he had problems he hid from me. Maybe I caused some of them, I don’t know.” She never did find out what most of them were.

  According to her cousin Sally Favour, Bette may have been the only one who didn’t realize the extent of Farnsworth’s drinking from early on. “He was drinking heavily,” Sally avers. “He didn’t drink that much at first, but he got to drinking more and more as they were married. You know, being married to Bette would be very difficult for anybody, and it was for Farney. It’s pretty hard for a guy to live as Mr. Bette Davis, and to live with a human dynamo like she was.”

  The marriage was heading for disaster, Bette knew, and now a new problem arose that she found unbearable: their sex life dissipated as Farney’s drinking rendered him impotent more and more often. Both of them began to dally with others, and when Bette found out about one affair of Farney’s, she exploded to a friend, “He can do it with her for crissakes!” Finally the innuendoes around Hollywood about the Farnsworths’ marital problems cropped up in the gossip columns, but Bette denied them all. “Farney and I are divinely happy,” she lied.

  In November 1942, Bette fell into a troubled cauldron of a different kind when she was cast again in a picture opposite Miriam Hopkins. Her better judgment had told her not to do it, but the script was too good to turn down. Old Acquaintance was the story of two lifelong friends, both writers, one down-to-earth and noble, the other pretentious, bitchy, and suspicious, and their real and imagined rivalries over their careers and men. The script, written by John Van Druten and Lenore Coffee (based on Van Druten’s play), featured much delicious bitchiness; when a reporter makes a gaffe in front of the Hopkins character and says, “I guess I should cut my throat,” Miriam replies, “There’s a knife over there on the table.” It also gave Bette one of her best movie lines: “There comes a time in every woman’s life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.”

  Bette was cast as the sweet character, and Miriam Hopkins typecast as the bitch. Immediately, Hopkins caused trouble. With her picture-to-picture deal with Warner Brothers, she demanded to be paid $10,000 a week, twice as much as Bette, and to be allowed complete autonomy over her own makeup, wardrobe, and hairstyling. The film’s director, Edmund Goulding, began to look for a replacement, and considered Margaret Sullavan, Janet Gaynor, and Constance Bennett, but it was clear that none of these women could play this harridan as well as Miriam. Jack Warner personally pleaded with Hopkins to reconsider and assured her that she wouldn’t be paid any less than Bette. When Warner agreed to her personal grooming and wardrobe requirements, Hopkins signed on at $5,000 per week.

  Then Goulding found himself beleaguered from the other side. When Bette said she would accept no cameraman but Sol Polito, whose work she had loved in Now, Voyager, Goulding fired off a telegram to Hal Wallis: “I am either working for Warner Brothers or Miss Davis and there is a difference. Urge you not to commit to any promise on cameraman until after talk with me. That would put me in a position of Davis, Hopkins, moods, fads, and nonsense.”

  Caught between Bette’s demands and Miriam’s, and besieged by late-night telephone calls from both of them to make sure he wasn’t siding with one against the other, Goulding suffered a heart attack. He recovered with near-miraculous speed once he was removed from the picture.

  Several other directors turned down the assignment. “I might be able to work with Hopkins,” one said, “and I might be able to work with Davis. But together? Never!” Finally, the relative newcomer Vincent Sherman accepted the challenge. Bette had wanted to work with Sherman in 1940 after George Brent recommended him to her, but he didn’t like the script she wanted to do with him (Affectionately Yours, which she never made), and wrote to tell her so. “I never heard from her,” Sherman recalled, “and I didn’t know whether she was angry. But whenever I passed her on the lot from then on she’d ignore me.”

  Bette was skeptical about Sherman as director of Old Acquaintance; he had made only seven B pictures before this. But Hal Wallis assured her that his most recent film, The Hard Way, was excellent, and that Sherman had pulled a first-rate performance out of his star, Ida Lupino. Bette acquiesced, but she was still worried. As the November production date approached and Los Angeles was battered by a series of rainstorms, she developed strep throat and took off for Palm Springs to recover. She didn’t report for work the first week, and Sherman filmed around her. When she finally arrived, she did so in the company of her agent’s partner, Lew Wasserman, with an obvious “show me” attitude toward Sherman.

  Sherman saw her arrive on the set as he directed Miriam in a scene. After he yelled, “Cut!” he walked over to Bette and said, “Hello.” He thought she would say, “Well, at last we’re working together,” but she was more terse than that. “How are things going?” she asked. Sherman replied that things were going very well; why didn’t Bette stay and watch some rushes? “Oh, may I?” Bette purred.

  “That was why she had come to the set in the first place,” Sherman says. “She wanted to see the rushes of what I’d been doing and if she hadn’t liked them you can bet she would have gone to the front office and told them she didn’t want me to continue.” As Bette watched four days’ worth of filming, she was delighted to see that Sherman had beautifully captured Miriam’s worst qualities—her harshness, her coldness, her vicious edge. Sh
e called Sherman that night. “I think it’s delightful,” she told him. “You’re doing a wonderful job with Miriam! When do you want me to come to work?”

  “Tomorrow morning at nine.” Bette said she’d be there. “She came in and we went through the picture,” Sherman recalls. “There was no problem—except the two ladies.”

  As before, the main problem was Miriam. Bette Davis’s status as a movie star had taken a quantum leap since the filming of The Old Maid; she was now the undisputed queen of the American cinema. If Miriam had been insecure about working with Bette early in 1939, she was rendered frantic by it in 1943. Her antics and machinations escalated throughout the filming until they had just about careered out of control.

  Two days into shooting with Bette, Miriam called Sherman and complained that he was giving Bette more close-ups. She didn’t believe his protestations to the contrary, and she continued to badger him with phone calls. After a week of this he sent her a letter: “Miriam, if I had my own mother in this film I wouldn’t favor her over any other actress because I do what I think is best for the film and not what I think is best for any individual.”

  Still unconvinced, Hopkins reverted to the tried and true tactic of scene stealing. She asked Sherman if she could use a cigarette holder in one scene, and then covered Bette’s face with it during an over-the-shoulder shot. More than once she slowly blew cigarette smoke in Bette’s face until her costar’s eyes began to tear; whenever she was supposed to do no more than listen to a Davis monologue, she did every bit of business she could think of to distract attention away from her costar.