James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  What are we to make of this? A number of scenarios are possible. Farnsworth could have suffered vertigo from his prior head injuries, leading Bette to think he was drunk and push him away from her in anger, causing his fall. (There were no signs of alcohol on his breath at the hospital.) It is hard to imagine that Bette meant to injure him or left him knowing that he had been injured. She could have pushed him and stalked away so quickly that she never realized he had hit his head. She could have realized he was hurt and remained, without being recognized in her sunglasses, then slipped away unnoticed to avoid a scandal once she was sure Farney was being cared for. Or she might have remained with Farney at all times and Warner Brothers was able to use its formidable power to cover up the facts, coach the witnesses with their stories, and ram through the inquest verdict.

  If Bette had been responsible for her husband’s fall, Warner Brothers could not have allowed a full investigation. As Hector Arce has said, “She had no intention of killing him, and if she was charged, she would [have been] acquitted. But if there was a trial the details of her shaky marriage and her infatuation with Vincent Sherman might have come out. Her reputation and her career might have been seriously affected.” Clearly, Jack Warner had too great a stake in his biggest star to risk a full disclosure.

  This wasn’t the first time Jack Warner had exercised his power in Los Angeles. Meta Carpenter, a script supervisor on a number of Bette’s films in the ’40s, recalls that “Jack Warner and Walter Huston were able to get John Huston out of a very, very difficult situation when he hit a young woman with his car on Sunset Boulevard and she died. She was the bride of a man in the business, and it could have been very serious for Huston. But Warner was able to get him off.”

  It would have been easy enough for Warner to convince Frank Nance, Homer Keyes, and the witnesses to cooperate, and not necessarily with an offer of money. This was the height of World War II, and all that Warner would have had to tell them was that because of Farnsworth’s Honeywell work the national security would be jeopardized unless the inquest jury found the death to be accidental. The government, he might have said, would make sure that justice was done. The most charitable explanation for the shoddiness of Nance’s inquest is that he thought he was acting in the national interest.

  Perhaps the strongest evidence that Warner Brothers participated in a cover-up of Arthur Farnsworth’s death is provided by the studio’s legal files on Bette, which are housed at the University of Southern California and which are available for research perusal. For the first three and a half years of the 1940s, Bette’s file bulges with memos, cables, letters, contracts—so much so that nary a week goes by without some written mention of Bette among the paperwork.

  There is absolutely nothing in the file, however, for the three months between August and November, 1943.

  Still another scenario exists to explain the untimely death of Arthur Farnsworth. The press accounts after his death quoted medical experts on what might have caused the basal skull fracture that Dr. Keyes originally said could not have occurred more than two weeks earlier. The Los Angeles Examiner reported that “a blow with a blunt instrument such as a blackjack or the butt of a gun, medical authorities agreed, would cause a fracture precisely such as was at first believed to have resulted when Farnsworth suddenly fell.”

  Several months after his death, Bette learned that Farney had been having an affair with a married woman, whose husband was blindly jealous. Only a few days before Farney’s death, the man had followed his wife to a Sunset Boulevard motel and caught her in bed with Farnsworth. A furious fight ensued, during which the man hit Farney on the back of the head with a lamp. This would have meant that Arthur Farnsworth had suffered at least four blows to his skull in less than two months; in retrospect, his death may have been inevitable.

  Immediately after the inquest, Bette flew to New Hampshire, where Farney’s body had already been taken for burial at Butternut. There was first a funeral service in Vermont, then another in New Hampshire—Farnsworth’s third. Stories have cropped up over the years of great dissension between Bette and Farnsworth’s mother, Lucile, over details large and small—tales of Bette forced to sit in vigil with her husband’s body all night, of an aunt of Farnsworth’s hysterically pulling at his body in its coffin. According to his sister Lucile de Besche, this is all nonsense. “There was only one disagreement at the wake. Both the minister and I wanted the coffin closed. Bette and my mother wanted it open, so we went along with their wishes.”

  It has also been written that Mrs. Farnsworth insisted that her son’s body be moved to Vermont shortly after Bette had had rocks blasted away and trees leveled on her property in order to bury him at Butternut, and that this caused great conflict between the two women. This too, Mrs. de Besche said, is not entirely true. The removal did occur, but not until two years later, after Bette had remarried and Mrs. Farnsworth felt it would be less hurtful to her. Bette seems to have been equally solicitous of Mrs. Farnsworth’s feelings. “For a long time after Arthur’s death,” Mrs. de Besche adds, “Bette was extremely thoughtful of my mother and her grief over losing Arthur.” Mrs. Barbara Briggs, Farnsworth’s other sister, has said that “Bette and my mother were both very strong ladies, but they had no fight over my brother’s death.”

  Whatever the secrets of her second husband’s death, Bette took them to her grave. “There were certain topics Mother would not go into,” her daughter B.D. wrote. “That was one of them.”

  Two months later, a small urchinlike boy walked up to the Warner studio gate, incongruously carrying a briefcase. When he said he wanted to see Bette Davis, the guard started to shoo him away. Then the boy said it was a matter of life and death, and the guard remembered something about Bette’s husband and a missing briefcase. When he telephoned the set and spoke in hushed tones to Bette, she asked that the young man be brought back to her dressing room.

  Sitting on a small sofa across from Bette, the boy nervously confessed that he had snatched the briefcase amid the confusion after Farney fell. Guiltily, he handed it to her. Stunned, Bette took the case and laid it on her lap, fumbled in her purse for a few dollars, handed the money to the boy, and asked him to leave. He scurried away. As a wave of fresh sadness washed over her, Bette snapped the lock and opened the case. In it were half a dozen bottles of alcohol, both empty and full. She looked down at them for a few moments, then she burst into tears.

  SIXTEEN

  V

  incent Sherman yelled, “Roll ’em!” and looked to Bette to begin a scene from Mr. Skeffington. She sat in a chair on the right side of the set—the opulent Skeffington living room—and picked up the telephone. Everyone waited for her first line, but she said nothing. After a few minutes, Sherman spoke up.

  “We’re ready to begin, Bette,” he said softly.

  “I can’t do it,” she replied, putting down the phone.

  Sherman called, “Cut!” and walked over to his star. “What’s wrong, Bette?”

  “I don’t think I should be sitting on this side of the room. It doesn’t feel right.”

  Sherman wasn’t sure what to say to her. “But Bette, if we do it anywhere else, I’ll have to knock a wall out to accommodate the camera. We’re already behind schedule. Please, couldn’t you give it a try?”

  She was unsympathetic. “I can’t play the scene here, Vince,” she insisted.

  By this time, Sherman was ready to throttle Bette Davis. “I wanted to kill her at times,” he says. “She challenged me on everything. She was a complete bitch.” At first, Sherman didn’t understand what was going on. “When we did Old Acquaintance, she welcomed all of my suggestions, we worked together beautifully. Now she was rejecting everything I said, and I realized that it was a personal thing. She was striking back at me for what she saw as my rejection of her. It got so bad, crew members were coming up to me and asking, ‘What’s going on?’ Her costar Claude Rains told me, ‘I’ve never seen her like this.’”

  Sherman felt himself
on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “I couldn’t sleep at night, my hair was falling out. Finally my wife said to me, ‘What the hell is going on? You’re not eating, you toss and turn every night.…’ I broke down and told her everything that had transpired between me and Bette. She said, ‘Oh my God. You’ve got a problem. It’s not going to get better, it’s going to get worse. If I were you I’d get the hell off the picture.’”

  Mr. Skeffington had started out amid high optimism. Bette and Sherman both loved the script that the twin brothers Philip and Julius Epstein had fashioned from the bestselling novel by the pseudonymous “Elizabeth.” The story concerned Fanny Trellis, a beautiful, vain, and flighty young woman in 1914 New York who marries a much older millionaire, Job Skeffington, in order to save her brother from prosecution for embezzling from Skeffington’s firm. When the brother is killed in the war, Fanny divorces Skeffington and allows him to take their daughter to Europe because the child’s growth reminds her of her fading youth.

  Fanny, rich and idle, pursues much younger men until she contracts diphtheria. The disease ravages her, and her well-preserved beauty vanishes until she looks closer to seventy than fifty. Devastated, she refuses to leave her home. Finally a friend tells her that Job Skeffington has been a victim of Nazi persecution and has returned to America penniless. She offers to help him financially, but refuses to see him because of her appearance. The friend convinces her to change her mind, and she is stunned to find that Job is now old, frail—and blind. She realizes how selfish she has been, and that to Job she will always be beautiful. She accompanies him upstairs after telling the household staff, “Mr. Skeffington is home,” and she recalls what he told her years before: “A woman is beautiful only when she is loved.”

  Sherman had asked Bette to play Fanny Trellis shortly after they completed Old Acquaintance, and although she had turned down the project two years earlier based on a script by John Huston, she liked the refashioned story by the Epsteins, who had written Casablanca (with Howard Koch) and would go on to win an Oscar for it. What intrigued Bette most about Fanny was her description as one of the great beauties of New York society. “I was far from being beautiful,” Bette admitted, but she knew what could be done with makeup, hairdos, and lighting. Her hairdresser, Maggie Donovan, designed a curly Gibson Girl style that “gave me the illusion of beauty”; her makeup man Perc Westmore gave her a soft look and made her eyes seem even bigger; and her cinematographer, Ernest Haller, lit her with diffuse fill light that further softened her features and made her face appear more youthful.

  The rest Bette supplied herself. During her opening scene, in which Fanny descends a staircase to greet a group of young admirers, she kept repeating a mantra to herself: You are the creamiest thing that ever existed, Fanny. You’re Venus and Mrs. Harrison Williams combined. You’re just too beautiful to live.

  Bette needed all the help she could get to look her best in Mr. Skeffington, because emotionally she was a wreck. Still shattered and guilt-ridden by Farney’s death, she was more high-strung than ever, sexually frustrated, furious with Vincent Sherman for rejecting her, and terrified that she was losing control of her life and her career. All of these factors, Sherman believes, contributed to the extraordinary difficulties she created during filming.

  Jack Warner had offered to let Bette take as much time off as she needed after her husband’s death, but she felt that work would be the best palliative, and she reported for costume and makeup tests only three weeks after Farney’s final funeral. Filming began a month later. As soon as she turned up on the set, Sherman realized that she should have taken a longer rest. “Just about every decision she made was wrong, and she wouldn’t budge on any of them. It was a combination of a personal vendetta against me and a fear on her part that she was losing control. She felt helpless about everything else in her life, so she wanted at least to exert control over the picture. But her instincts this time were terrible.”

  Sherman couldn’t persuade Bette not to raise her voice an octave to make Fanny seem more feminine; he thought she sounded ridiculous. He wasn’t able to talk her out of the heavy, grotesque mask she wanted to wear after Fanny is devastated by diphtheria. As Ernie Haller put it, “She began to go to extremes. She wanted to look ravishingly beautiful in the opening scenes, and then ugly as sin in the last shots. She had a ghastly rubber mask designed to make her look older. Instead it made her look like something out of a horror movie, but she insisted on wearing it.”

  When Sherman arrived on the set one morning, he saw Bette in her rubber mask, half bald, wearing a patchy red wig. “My God, Bette!” he exclaimed. “If I shoot you like that you’ll look like a witch!”

  “Don’t you worry, Vince,” she replied. “My audience will take me in this kind of thing. They don’t mind if I do this to myself.”

  “Well, I mind,” Sherman retorted. But once again he lost the battle. At first, the friction between Bette and Sherman seemed little more than honest creative differences. Bette had strong opinions as always, and now she had the power to make them stick. Sherman concedes that Bette thought her characterization of Fanny “was honest and real. I suppose to some extent she was right… perhaps she was more right than I was, although I think I was more right in other places.”

  What angered Sherman far more—as well as the Epsteins, Jack Warner, and everyone in the cast and crew—was Bette’s sometimes unfathomable behavior on the set. During a dinner-party sequence, she insisted on introducing all the guests to each other as the scene opened, a time-consuming process, even after Julius Epstein reasonably pointed out to her that the audience would assume the introductions had been made before the scene started. In another party sequence with dozens of guests, Bette improvised lines of dialogue with everyone. As Epstein recalls it, “She’d go up to someone and say, ‘How is Aunt Tilly?’ Then she’d go up to someone else and say, ‘How are the children?’ It was ridiculous. The first cut of the movie was three hours and twenty minutes long, and that was the main reason why.” Julius and his brother argued with Bette again and again over things like this, but she stood her ground.

  The day that Bette insisted on reading her lines on one side of the set instead of the other, Sherman had had it. “I looked through the finder and saw that I couldn’t shoot the scene the way she wanted it unless the carpenters completely re-did the set. But Bette wouldn’t budge. So I told them to do it, threw the finder down and said, ‘Goddamn her!’ She was standing in the wings and snarled, ‘I heard you, you son of a bitch! Don’t you ever do that to me!’ I just kept walking to the men’s room.”

  Later that day Sherman was in Jack Warner’s office, asking to be let off the picture. Warner pleaded with him to stay. “Vince, you know she’s high-strung. Her husband’s just died, for crissakes, and she’s very emotional. Finish the goddamn picture.”

  Warner persuaded Sherman to tough it out, but the Epsteins were next in line at the exit door. A series of notes that the film’s unit manager, Frank Mattison, sent to Jack Warner vividly outline the producer’s complaints. “It sure is tough,” Mattison wrote in one memo, “to sit by with a show that goes like this where she is the whole band—the music and all the instruments, including the bazooka. I suppose she wants to have her finger even in scenes in which she does not appear.” In another memo he warned about Bette’s script revisions: “I am sure that when the Epsteins see [them] they will be spinning on their heads like tops.”

  The brothers gritted their teeth at most of Bette’s rewrites, but her constant attempts to keep herself chattering away nearly drove them crazy. In one scene where Fanny goes to her husband’s office, the script has the scene open with Bette in front of Job’s desk. Bette insisted that her husband’s secretary should announce her and waited for the woman playing the secretary to call out her name before she walked across the full width of the set to his desk. Julius Epstein told Bette that the secretary would know her well and would simply wave her into the office.

  “But she’s a new
secretary!” Bette explained.

  Epstein looked at her in disbelief. He had written the script, and the secretary (as much as he’d given consideration to her employment history) was not new. “How do you know that, Bette?” was all the man could muster in reply.

  Finally, when Bette refused to do a retake the Epstein brothers wanted from her, they walked off the set and into Jack Warner’s office. He sided with them. “She’ll do the retake,” Warner announced, and headed out for the inevitable confrontation. “When he got to the set,” Julius Epstein recalls, “he took one look at Bette, who was shooting daggers from her eyes, and put his arms around her. She didn’t do the retake, and my brother and I took the next flight to New York.”

  By this time the cast and crew of Mr. Skeffington had had their fill of Bette Davis. She had always been popular with her crews, who saw her as a good ol’ gal, not that far removed from being one of them. But her behavior on this picture shocked and angered them, and they no longer cared that she was a recent widow or an artist fighting for her vision: they had come to think of her as nothing more than a bitch.

  On Saturday, December 2, something remarkable occurred. Bette went to her dressing room and splashed some eyewash in her eye from a vial, as she had done every day for weeks, to alleviate irritation caused by her makeup. This time, when the liquid hit her eye a piercing pain shot through her head and she screamed in agony. Perc Westmore, standing outside her dressing room, bolted to her side just as she hit the floor, writhing in agony. He splashed castor oil in her eye, picked up the eyewash, and rushed Bette to the infirmary.

  There, as Bette lay on the cold steel of an examining table, the doctors continued to flush out her eye while the eyewash was quickly analyzed. The results were a shock. The vial had been laced with acetone, a corrosive substance used as a solvent in paint and varnish, and Bette was in danger of permanent blindness in the affected eye. It was hours before she could see clearly again, and she was under treatment from eye specialists for a week before it was certain that the damage to her corneal tissue was not irreversible. Bette later said that she preferred to believe that the solvent had been put in her eyewash by mistake, but Julius Epstein points out that if he and his brother had still been on the set “we would have been the suspects… as it was they could have rounded up any number of likely perpetrators.”