by James Spada
Bette fumed, but she’d be damned if she would give Hopkins the satisfaction of a blowup. Instead she constantly took Sherman aside to advise him on how best to “handle” Miriam, something Sherman made the mistake of complaining about to Miriam. “There’s going to be a showdown,” he told Hopkins. “Either she directs the picture or I do. I’m not going on in this way.”
Sensing success, her Southern belle side rushing to the fore, Miriam cooed, “She’s bin runnin’ roughshod over me from th’ beginnin’ Vince. Ah’m an innocent in this matter. I never did any harm ta her. Ah don’ know what she’s talkin’ ’bout.” When Bette heard about this exchange, she felt she had been betrayed by Sherman, whom she always suspected would side with Miriam because of their mutual Southern backgrounds. She began to harangue Hopkins about her performance, but whenever she did Miriam would take a hearing aid out of her purse, put it in her ear, and pretend it wasn’t working. Bette would stalk off to her dressing room, red-faced with fury, and soon a game of one-upmanship began: when Bette muttered that Miriam had just played a scene as though she were dead, Hopkins showed up the next day dressed entirely in black; every time Miriam came in with a revised script page on pink paper, Bette would quickly present Sherman with a blue page of her own changes.
For the last third of the movie, after the two characters have aged nineteen years, Bette added gray to her hair and some subtle aging makeup. Hopkins did nothing. “That bitch,” Bette seethed to Sherman. “I’m going to be looking old and she’s going to be looking younger than she looked at the beginning!”
The friction took its toll on both women. Each was out sick ten times in January; they alternated sick days during one week so that no scenes of them together could be filmed. When a columnist printed these statistics and repeated the stories of the two stars’ mutual antipathy, the anticipation of many in Hollywood for the film’s upcoming set piece mushroomed: the moment when Bette’s character, sick to death of Miriam’s selfishness and treachery, shakes her senseless and leaves her collapsed on a sofa. When Life magazine asked Jack Warner to allow one of their photographers on the set for the scene, he refused. “I don’t think it’s good for the picture, two dames hating each other,” he explained to Sherman. “What they feel about each other isn’t good publicity. I’d rather not have it.”
On the morning the scene was to be shot, Bette noticed far more observers on the set than usual. “The rafters above the stage were full of excited spectators,” she recalled. “It was rather like a prizefight ring below.” Bette told Sherman that for the sake of realism, she intended to shake Miriam just as hard as she could. But, she warned him, “She’s gonna try to fuck up this scene, Vince.” When Miriam arrived on the set she told Sherman, “Vincent dear, ah know Bette has t’ shake me, but ah slipped badly and have a crick in mah neck, an’ ah just hope she won’t be too violent.”
Sherman mentioned this to Bette. “Goddamn it!” she growled. “I knew she’d come up with something!” When the big moment arrived, hundreds of observers watched Bette grab Miriam by the shoulders and shake her as hard as she could. Sherman was prepared for anything except what happened. As he explained it, “When you shake someone, they try to resist you, and their head moves back and forth as part of the push/resistance struggle. Miriam did just the opposite. She put up no resistance, just let her head relax so it went all over the place, like a broken doll.” (This despite the “crick” in her neck.)
Bette turned in fury to Sherman and screamed, “She just went limp!” and stormed off the set. Sherman took a deep breath and walked over to Hopkins. “Miriam, it looks phony and weird that way, with your head wobbling like that.”
“Ah was only tryin’ to coah-perate,” Miriam sighed. “I didn’t want ta fight her, ah just wanted to let her do it.” When Sherman shot the scene again, Miriam stiffened up enough so that with careful editing he was able to make the confrontation look, as he later resignedly put it, “all right.”
All this professional tension left Bette drained and more emotionally needy than ever. Farney provided her no solace; he still spent more time in Minneapolis or New Hampshire than he did Los Angeles, and when he was on the West Coast he and Bette fought so much about his drinking that they wound up avoiding each other at separate ends of the rambling Riverbottom.
Always in need of professional allies on a picture (“Us against Them”), Bette sought romantic and sexual soothing as well, and she found it with Gig Young, the handsome thirty-year-old newcomer playing the fiancé she loses to her rival’s daughter. Appearing in only his third film, Young was immensely flattered that a star of Bette’s magnitude would find him sexually attractive. In spite of his marriage of less than three years to Sheila Stapler, Gig embarked on an affair with his leading lady that found them sneaking assignations in her dressing room suite or at Riverbottom after a day’s filming. According to Young biographer George Eels, Gig told Sheila his late nights were the result of the strife on the set between Davis and Hopkins. She had read and heard about it, so she had no reason to disbelieve him.
Young, five years Bette’s junior, played a naval officer ten years younger than Bette’s character. When it came time for Hopkins to deliver a put-down of her friend’s romance (“She wants to be a sailor’s bride—of forty-two!”) she spoke it with just enough extra malice that Bette couldn’t miss the dig. The affair with Young was cut short when he was drafted into the Coast Guard; he reported for duty as soon as Old Acquaintance production wrapped in February.
On the last day of filming, Bette and Vincent Sherman worked until two o’clock on a Sunday morning to finish the picture, and Bette asked him for a lift to Ruthie’s house in Laurel Canyon, where she stayed frequently to allay her loneliness. On the way, Bette spotted Simon’s drive-in restaurant on the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Laurel Canyon. “Can we stop for a hamburger?” she asked Sherman. “I’m starving!”
They placed their orders, then Bette turned and looked into Sherman’s eyes. “Well, Mr. Sherman,” she said, “I just want you to know that it’s been fun working with you and despite all the trouble we had with Miriam, you handled her beautifully.” Then she paused and added softly, “I want you to know that I love you.”
“I love you, too, Bette,” Sherman replied cheerily, assuming this was typical Hollywood hyperbole.
“No, Vince,” she whispered, and took his hand. “I mean, I really love you.”
Sherman looked at her and felt chills that he recalled vividly forty years later. “You must remember who Bette Davis was at this time. She was very attractive, a great actress, and a powerful star. I was a new, impressionable director.” Sherman, who was two years older than Bette, admits that he was “enamored” of her during filming: “I admired her, and she appealed to me tremendously, both physically and mentally. But I never made a pass at her. I was happily married, with a wonderful wife and a three-year-old daughter. And Bette was married. I didn’t know what to say to her. Finally I just said, ‘Well, Bette, I can’t tell you how flattered I am.’”
They left the restaurant about 3 A.M., then parked in front of Ruthie’s house and continued to talk. Bette confided in Sherman that her marriage was in name only, and asked him how he felt about her. He admitted he was attracted to her, but he made no moves. “She was too far above me—in standing, in salary, everything.” Sherman feared that “if I made a pass at her, it would have offended her New England sense of values. Also, it had to be her idea.”
Of course, Bette wanted Sherman to “make a pass at her.” She saw in him many of the same qualities that she admired in William Wyler; Sherman even reminded her physically of Wyler. Something might have transpired between the two of them in his car that night—except for Ruthie. “It was about four o’clock in the morning by now,” Sherman recalls, “and Bette’s mother came out on the front porch in her bathrobe and called out, ‘Is that you, Bette Davis?’ Bette replied, ‘Yes, Mother.’ And her mother said, ‘Do you realize what time it is? You come into this house
at once!’” Sherman burst into laughter. “What’s so funny?” Bette asked. “I haven’t heard that kind of talk since I was in high school,” he replied.
“Here was Bette Davis,” Sherman mused, “twice married, twice the winner of the Academy Award, and her mother was talking to her as if she were a sixteen-year-old out past her curfew.” As she got out of the car, Bette turned back to Sherman and said, “Ruthie means well.”
Sherman didn’t follow up on Bette’s amorous revelation to him, so she initiated a dinner date a few weeks later. It was clear that Bette wanted a sexual relationship, and he enjoyed the thought: “I would have loved to have put my arms around her and made love to her.” But again, the pull of his family proved stronger, and he let the opportunity pass. Soon thereafter, Bette joined him for lunch at the studio and mentioned that she was about to take a vacation trip to Mexico—did he think he might be able to join her in Acapulco? He told her he would try, but in fact he had no intention of going. “I tried to hedge a bit by saying that Warners might want me to stay to work on the final cut of Old Acquaintance, but I did tell her that I would try to get away.”
Bette left for Acapulco the first week of March, already in a poor frame of mind because on March 4 she had lost the Best Actress Oscar most observers had expected she would win for Now, Voyager. (Greer Garson won the award for Mrs. Miniver.) She registered at the Hotel Los Galmingos, and waited for Sherman’s arrival. “I waited and waited,” Bette recalled. “To my chagrin, he never came. He stood me up.” According to Sherman, he did call to tell Bette that he wasn’t going to join her. What he didn’t tell her was what had happened to make his decision final: Arthur Farnsworth had telephoned him at the studio and said he had something important to discuss with him. Could he come and speak with him?
“Farnsworth was a very nice guy,” Sherman recalled. “He came to my office and told me that he and Bette had had too many drinks the night before she left for Mexico and got into a terrible fight, during which she told him everything: that she was in love with me, that she and I were going to Mexico together, the whole thing. He begged me not to go”
Sherman wasn’t sure what to do, so he told Farnsworth the truth. “Arthur,” he began, “I can tell you that nothing has happened between Bette and myself. Honestly. Yes, there was some talk about Mexico, but I haven’t made any plans to go.” He looked Farnsworth directly in the eye and added, “I promise you, I will not go.”
In Bette’s view, Sherman had rejected her, and she was angry. By the time she received a telegram from Jack Warner asking her to appear at a reception with the president of Mexico to launch his country’s Red Cross, she was in a very foul mood indeed. She snapped back that she was on vacation and that once again Warner expected her to “work for free.” Tentatively, Warner drafted and redrafted his reply. (By now, whenever he faced the Davis dudgeon, J.L. handled her as gingerly as possible.) Despite his long, carefully worded response to her objections, and his argument that Bette’s appearance was important to the United States’s war effort, she did not appear at the function.
Instead, she went to stay at the Acapulco home of Dorothy, Contessa di Frasso, an American-born beauty who had married an Italian count and whom Bette knew only as a wealthy California hostess. What she didn’t know was that the Contessa was under FBI surveillance because of her friendships with the Los Angeles gangster Bugsy Siegel and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The United States government suspected that di Frasso was a paid agent of Mussolini, but the FBI’s close watch of her activities in 1943 revealed nothing, and the surveillance was called off. Bette never did know that she was being watched while staying with the Contessa; had she found out, she would surely have breathed a sigh of relief at Vincent Sherman’s failure to keep their illicit rendezvous.
Crushed by Sherman’s rejection, Bette resolved to make one last attempt to salvage her marriage to Farney. In April, she left Mexico and went directly to Butternut. At first, the reunion went well. Bette was unusually docile and pliable, and she helped Farney around the house, socialized with the neighbors, did everything she thought one should do to be a good wife. It didn’t last long. Issues that should have been laughed off gnawed at Bette; whenever some small problem resurfaced, she would snap, Farney would withdraw, and silence would hang over Butternut like a pall. Before long the Farnsworths were drinking and battling more seriously than ever, and the husband was taking the worst of it.
Bette was always able to get the better of Farney verbally. His sister, Lucile de Besche, recalled that Bette “had the superior intellect of the two,” and Bette later said that all of her husbands “loathed my brightness.” When she was angry, Bette would turn into a harpy, cruelly goading Farnsworth until he couldn’t take it any longer and hit her. Their marriage descended into violence more and more often now.
In June, according to Bette, she and Farnsworth were sitting in the loft when the telephone rang downstairs. He got up to answer it, and as he started down the stairs in his stocking feet, he slipped and plummeted to the bottom, cracking his head on the floor as he landed. Bette ran to him, but he protested that he was all right. Bette has never said whether Farnsworth had been drinking.
For the next few days, Bette noticed that Farney was acting oddly. He appeared woozy and forgetful; sometimes he would move sluggishly or go into a limp as he walked. But he was an uncomplaining sort, and he pooh-poohed the symptoms. Finally, he seemed to return to normal, and in early July he and Bette boarded a train back to California. She was set to begin a new film, Mr. Skeffington, and he had been hired by the Disney Studios to help prepare an instructional film for the Air Force on the use of the new Norden bombsight for bomber planes.
Renewed tension hung over the trip West. The couple rarely spoke to each other as they sat in their compartment and stared out the window at the passing scenery. When either did say something, it usually signaled the start of an argument. One morning, as the train passed through Nevada, Bette and Farney got into a verbal clash that grew so intense that Farnsworth rushed toward Bette as if to strike a blow. She bobbed out of his way, knocking him off balance, and he fell to the floor. Once again, he struck his head, but he seemed to be okay. That night, the last of the trip, the two slept in separate cars.
FIFTEEN
M
onday, August 23, 1943, was a typically hot, dry summer day in Southern California, the sky cloudless, the sun beating stark and bright on the sidewalks of Hollywood. At about 3:30 in the afternoon, according to witnesses, Arthur Farnsworth walked past the Regent Tobacco Shop at 6249 Hollywood Boulevard, carrying a briefcase. The store’s owner, Dave Friedman, later said he was standing just inside the door of his shop, and had heard a “terrifying yell that made my blood curdle. It came from a man walking just inside my view, and as I heard him yell, I saw him suddenly fall straight backward and land on his head. He made no attempt to break the fall with his arms or hands, so that’s why I think something happened to him before he hit the ground. Blood rushed from his ears and nostrils.”
Another witness, advertising man Gilbert Wright, said he had seen Farnsworth walk past the store entrance. “When he was almost past, he let out a throaty cry, and the next moment he came down on the back of his head, just as if he were doing a backflip and hadn’t quite made it. I ran to him but it was all I could do to hold him because he was in convulsions. The blood was flowing from his nose and ears.” Friedman’s sales clerk, Rosalie Fox, called an ambulance and the unconscious Farnsworth was taken to Hollywood Receiving Hospital, where his physician, Dr. Paul Moore, arrived at 4:30 and found him semiconscious and unable to speak. The hospital telephoned Bette at Riverbottom to tell her that her husband seemed to have had an epileptic fit. Her reported response was odd: “There are a great many things my husband may have had, but I assure you an epileptic fit is not one of them!”
Bette asked Dr. Moore to transfer Farney to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where X-rays revealed a fractured skull. Deeply distressed, Bette ar
rived there about 5:30, accompanied by Ruthie, and when Farney did not recognize them she seemed about to pass out. Dr. Moore helped her into a chair, and she remained at the hospital, sleeping in Farney’s room along with his mother, Lucile, who had flown in from New Hampshire, for the next two days. He wavered in and out of consciousness, sometimes seeming to recognize her and his mother, and other times not. On Wednesday evening he took a turn for the worse, and at 7:05 P.M. he died. Bette seemed to take the news stoically, but when Ruthie took her back to Riverbottom she collapsed and was put under sedation.
Arthur Farnsworth’s death certificate listed the cause of death as a “basal skull fracture right temporal and occipital.” It seemed clear that the injury was the result of his fall, and the matter was about to be closed when Lucile Farnsworth demanded an autopsy on her son. She argued that his war work at Honeywell, and his top-secret consultations with the Disney Studios on the Norden bombsight, made it possible that his death involved foul play. When she learned that Farnsworth’s briefcase was missing, her resolve hardened, and the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office scheduled an autopsy for the next day.
On Thursday afternoon, Dr. Homer Keyes, the assistant coroner’s surgeon who performed the autopsy, issued a surprising finding: Farnsworth’s skull fracture was more likely the cause of his fall than the result of it. “The blood in the fracture was black and coagulated, not merely purple and partially congealed as it would have been if the injury had been received only last Monday,” Dr. Keyes told reporters. “The fracture could have been inflicted as long as two weeks ago, and, conceivably, Farnsworth had been walking around ever since with the condition fructifying until it eventually caused his death.”
The press strongly played up Keyes’s finding; headlines called the death “mysterious” and the Los Angeles Examiner suggested that Farnsworth’s “connection with the Honeywell concern, which manufactures precision instruments for aircraft, would furnish a powerful motive for an attack by agents who wanted to acquire valuable secret data.”
