James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Bette attempted to explain her behavior on the Mr. Skeffington set in her autobiography. “When I was most unhappy I lashed out rather than whined. I was aggressive but curiously passive. I had to be in charge but I didn’t want to be. I was hated, envied and feared, and I was more vulnerable than anyone would care to believe.”

  It was this vulnerability that finally led to a resolution of the “Bette Davis problem” on the set. Vincent Sherman was so frustrated and angry with his star that when Jack Warner asked him to shoot a Red Cross promotional film with her on Sunday, December 10, he considered faking a back injury so he wouldn’t have to do it. He went ahead, however, and afterward, when everyone had gone home, he sat alone on the edge of the set, in darkness, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and how he was ever going to finish this picture without losing his mind.

  Suddenly he heard the staccato click-clack of high heels on the soundstage floor, and he knew it could only be one person. Oh my God, he thought. She’s still here! He hoped she wouldn’t see him. “I thought, I’m in the dark and I’ve got my back to her and why should she stop and talk to me anyway, we haven’t been talking very openly to each other for the past five weeks.” But as the footsteps got closer they suddenly stopped. Then he heard the booming voice and its unmistakable rhythms. “Why are you still here? Why are you sitting in the dark?” Bette demanded. Just like a schoolmarm, Sherman thought.

  He told her he was “just thinking,” and Bette said, “Would you like a drink? I’ve got a bottle in my dressing room.” Sherman agreed, and as she poured Scotch into paper cups, she told him, “I know you wanted to get off the picture, and I just want to thank you for staying. I know I’ve been a perfect bitch, but I couldn’t help myself.”

  Bette then started to cry, and Sherman recalled that what followed was “one of the greatest scenes Bette Davis ever played. She told me everything that had happened between her and Farnsworth, everything that happened since his death, everything that had been going on in her mind for the past five weeks. She said she hadn’t slept for weeks, she wasn’t eating properly. She said she had wanted to come to me and put her arms around me and tell me how sorry she was, but she couldn’t. There were tears streaming down her face when she finished.”

  Sherman was touched. “I was so smitten with her in spite of everything, and I felt so sorry for what she’d been through. I put my arms around her and told her how sorry I was and asked if she’d like to have dinner with me. She said yes, and we went to dinner. Then I took her home, and I stayed with her until one in the morning. That was the first time we had ever been to bed together.”

  The next morning, Sherman told his wife Hedda what had happened. “Well,” she said, with remarkable understanding, “that’s one way to solve the problem. But just be careful.”

  Sherman was unsure what effect his nascent affair with Bette Davis would have on their movie. He worried that it might make matters worse, but the next day’s shooting eased his mind. “She was just delightful on the set,” he says. “So much so that I was embarrassed. Ernie Haller said, ‘She’s like a different person today, isn’t she?’ I didn’t know what to say, but inside I was laughing like hell. I thought maybe I should have done that earlier.”

  Bette and Sherman continued their affair over the next two months, and he was fascinated by her sexual psychology. Whenever they had been intimate, he says, “she would be wonderful for three or four days, then she’d begin to tighten up. Then we’d meet again for an evening, and she’d be fine for a few more days.”

  As much as Bette clearly needed sexual release, it didn’t seem to Sherman that she genuinely enjoyed the sex act. “There wasn’t a great deal of foreplay, or a great deal of afterplay. I had a feeling that after the deed was done, she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She had sort of a puritanical streak. I don’t think she liked feeling vulnerable or submissive during sex. I think she resented it. And I think that after all was said and done, she deeply distrusted men.

  “Sex was a biological need for her, that’s all. And when it wasn’t there, all the nervous energy you saw in her was because her sex drive had no outlet.”

  Little more than a week after their first night together, Bette asked Sherman to divorce his wife and marry her. “We had a terrible fight,” Sherman recalls, “because of course I said no. She knew from the beginning that there was no way I’d leave my wife and baby. It would come up again and again, usually after we hadn’t been intimate for a while and she was tightening up, and she’d be angry. Then we’d get together and everything would be fine for a few days. I tried to keep away from the subject as much as possible.”

  Even had Sherman not been happily married, he would not have wanted to spend his life with Bette Davis. “I knew after what I went through the first several weeks of Skeffington that life could be hell with her. By that time I had made up my mind that no matter what happened I could never marry a woman like this.”

  The filming finally wrapped on February 17, 1944, two months behind schedule, and Vincent Sherman decided at that point that he had had all he could take of Bette. “I avoided her after that. I refused to return her calls. She tried to make trouble [for me]. But Jack Warner didn’t care, as long as the picture was made.”

  While he was editing the film, Bette accosted Sherman on the sidewalk in front of the Warner studios. “Everyone says the picture is wonderful,” she chirped. “I want you to direct my next one.”

  “Bette, do me a favor,” Sherman replied. “Get yourself another director.” And he walked away from her as fast as he could.

  Several years later, Sherman began a three-year affair with Joan Crawford, and he found the two women surprisingly similar. “Even though they hated each other, they were sisters under the skin. Both had been deserted by their father, which left them with an eternal distrust of men. When a father deserts a family, it leaves a wound in his daughter that’s impossible to overcome. It leaves a scar the rest of her life. And even if a man treats her decently, she’ll always think, Someday he’ll leave me.”

  Mr. Skeffington opened at the Strand Theatre in New York on May 25. As Julius Epstein recalled, “It didn’t do too well critically.” A number of critics thought Bette had once again fallen into self-parody, and the formulaic “woman’s picture” she and Warners had patented came under ridicule by the esteemed critic James Agee in The Nation: “It is another of those pictures in which Bette Davis demonstrates the horrors of egocentricity on a marathonic scale; it takes just short of two and a half hours’ playing time to learn, from her patient husband (Claude Rains), that ‘a woman is beautiful only when she is loved’ and to prove this to an audience which, I fear, will be made up mainly of unloved and not easily lovable women.… Essentially Mr. Skeffington is just a super soap opera, or an endless woman’s-page meditation on What to Do When Beauty Fades. The implied advice is dismaying: hang on to your husband, who alone will stay by you then, and count yourself blessed if, like Mr. Rains in his old age, he is blinded.”

  The Epsteins cut twenty minutes from the film for its national release, and it proved popular with enough viewers other than “not easily lovable women” so that it became one of the studio’s top three box-office hits of the year. Bette received her seventh Oscar nomination in nine years for the film, but lost the award to Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.

  With Mr. Skeffington out of the way and her affair with Sherman at an end, Bette’s diversions were again provided largely by the Canteen. In the spring of 1944 she made a short cameo appearance in Hollywood Canteen, Warner Brothers’ self-congratulatory all-star paean to the club, which brought in $3.3 million in profits, most of it donated to the Canteen. To assuage her loneliness, Bette sometimes showed up at Cahuenga Boulevard five or six nights a week. She still drew many of the same satisfactions from the Canteen as she had from the outset, but now there was an added element. Rejected by Sherman, pining with rose-tinted memories over her marriage to Farney, Bette was a mass of sexual frustrations. The
Canteen, early in 1944, went a long way toward filling that void.

  Her sexual dalliances with the servicemen at the Canteen, in fact, were so frequent and so blatant that some of the most jaded Hollywood insiders were heard to mutter, “What’s happened to Bette Davis?” The actor Jack Carson, a friend, was puzzled less by Bette’s behavior than by the number of handsome, muscular servicemen who seemed always to surround her, often to the exclusion of far more beautiful actresses. He asked one of them what the attraction was. The young man replied, “I hear she screws like a mink.”

  “I thought that an ungentlemanly remark considering how Bette was knocking herself out night after night for those guys,” Carson told author Lawrence J. Quirk, “and I was about to call the loudmouth son of a bitch on it, and then it struck me, Well, ain’t it the truth?”

  The fan mail for Bette that arrived at the Canteen was usually opened by young female volunteers, and Carson recalled that it soon became a running joke to see how many of Bette’s correspondents would rhapsodize about the glorious hours they had spent together.

  These brief encounters, of course, did little to fulfill Bette’s deeper emotional needs—but a big, ruggedly attractive, well-built army corporal about twelve years her junior named Lewis A. Riley soon did. Bette found his looks “smashing,” but what really set him apart from so many of the other handsome, supple youngsters around her was his quick wit and the fact that his family, among the founders of Acapulco as a vacation spot, was worth millions.

  A year after Farney’s death, Bette shed her widow’s weeds and began to date Riley publicly. She dined with him at glitzy Hollywood night spots like Chasen’s and La Rue, and pictures of them together popped up in the gossip columns and fan magazines. When they began to attract a little too much public attention, they slipped up north to the Mira Mar Hotel in Santa Barbara, California, after Perc Westmore darkened Bette’s skin to a deep olive and gave her a black wig. The couple registered as Mr. and Mrs. Riley, then went down to the lounge for a drink before dinner. Bette was sure she had pulled off the masquerade until the woman sitting next to her turned and said, “It’s no good, Miss Davis, you aren’t fooling anyone.” When Bette looked flabbergasted, the woman explained, “It’s your voice’. You can’t change that!”

  Bette went upstairs, took off the makeup, and came back down for dinner undisguised.

  After several blissful months, Bette’s affair with Riley was interrupted when he was transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia, and she began work on a grueling new film.

  With her corporal three thousand miles away, Bette was predictably agitated, temperamental, and exasperating on the set of The Corn Is Green during the summer of 1944. The story, based on Emlyn Williams’s play, concerned Miss Moffat, a sixty-year-old schoolteacher in Wales who works indefatigably with a brilliant but desperately poor miner’s son to prepare him for a scholarship examination at Oxford that, if he passes, will help lift him out of his life of poverty and hopelessness.

  As so often before, Bette battled with her studio bosses over details large and small. Ethel Barrymore, sixty-one, had brought Miss Moffat memorably to life on stage, but the studio felt that the character could have been any age and wanted Bette to play Miss Moffat close to her own age. Bette preferred to wear a gray wig and add padding to her clothes to give herself a middle-aged frumpiness that seemed to her more suitable to the character. The studio balked, but Bette wouldn’t be swayed, and she got her way.

  This early skirmish put Bette on a wartime footing once again as filming began, and the set was torn with strife from the start. Bette’s concern for every detail of her pictures was stronger than ever now because so much rested on her shoulders as the premiere actress in Hollywood. She had seen too many fabulous careers crumble after one or two failures, and she knew that no matter what, a bad Bette Davis picture would be blamed on Bette Davis. The pressure weighed on her heavily.

  Few of the people around her, who should have been her creative partners and support system, took the time to consider all this; most of the people at Warners had grown sorely short of patience with Bette. It now seemed to most of them that she created a battlefield mentality around her either because that was the only way she could work or, less charitably, because she was simply, terribly, and irredeemably a bitch.

  The film’s director, Irving Rapper, who had found himself “angry and exhausted” at the end of most days during filming of Now, Voyager, reached the end of his tether with Bette on The Corn Is Green. He was infuriated by her habit of telling everyone—the grips, the sound men, the lighting men, and, most annoyingly, him—how to do their jobs. Struggling to keep his temper, desperate to avoid a confrontation that might threaten the picture’s completion, Rapper bit his tongue, tolerated humiliation, placated Bette at every juncture. But finally, in the middle of filming, she went too far and Rapper snapped.

  “I am the director of this picture, Bette, not you!” he bellowed at her.

  “Well, you’re doing a damned lousy job of it!” Bette screamed back. “Why do I have to do everybody’s work for them?”

  Rapper’s face grew crimson. “Maybe if you’d concentrate on your part and your lines, you’d keep out of other people’s hair!” He stalked away from her and yelled over his shoulder, “I’ve had it with you, Bette!”

  As the cast and crew stood in shocked silence, Bette remained stockstill and yelled after him, “You go one step farther toward that door, you son of a bitch, and you’re fired!”

  Rapper wheeled around. “Only Jack Warner can fire me, Bette, you know that. But he won’t have to: I quit. I’ve had enough of your tantrums and your sadistic bullying.”

  “Tantrums! Sadistic!” Bette seemed about to explode with fury. “Listen, you no-talent third-rater, you ought to go down on your knobby knees in gratitude that you’re directing a Bette Davis picture!”

  Unable to muster up any more anger, Rapper issued a cold, even reply. “I’m not directing, Bette, you are,” he told her, and left the set.

  Rapper returned, and Bette’s oft-tested theory that the best films are made amid creative conflict proved correct once again when The Corn Is Green was released in March 1945. The film posted a profit of $2.2 million, and critics praised Bette’s performance in it. E. Arnot Robinson in Picture Post wrote, “Only Bette Davis, I think, could have combatted so successfully the obvious intention of the adaptors of the play to make frustrated sex the mainspring of the chief character’s interest in the young miner. This would have pulled down the whole idea of their relationship into something much simpler and more banal—more suitable to the sillier film audiences—than the subtle interpretation she insisted on giving. Drab outwardly, the schoolmistress, in her hands, became someone consumed by inward fire, by the sheer joy of imparting knowledge.”

  A few days after she completed The Corn Is Green in the fall of 1944, Bette took a train East, with Bobby in tow, and rented a house in Phenix City, Alabama, just across from the Georgia border and Fort Benning—so that Corporal Riley would be in close proximity.

  Bobby had separated from Robert Pelgram early that spring, after trying for several years to make a badly disintegrating relationship work. Shortly after Pelgram moved out of the house, she had suffered another nervous breakdown and had spent the better part of the year in a mental hospital. Now she was on the rebound emotionally, awaiting her final decree of divorce (which would come the following March), and Bette thought a change of scenery would be good for her. While Ruthie cared for young Ruth, Riley found no shortage of fellow soldiers interested in dating the pretty, pliable Bobby, and often the four of them would double-date. The Davis girls bubbled with contentment.

  Except for the fact that Bette expected Riley to ask her to marry him during the visit, and so far he hadn’t. Before Bette and Bobby’s three-month stay in Alabama ended, Riley received his orders to report overseas, and Bette was sure he would want to get married before he left. To her intense disappointment, he again failed to pop the question
. He did ask Bette to wait for him until his return. “Maybe he was scared to marry me and then go off and be killed,” Bette mused.

  Riley shipped out and Bette returned to Hollywood, where she spent inordinate amounts of time at the Canteen, meeting men. She and Riley corresponded for months, but then Bette decided she was tired of “living my life in a mailbox.” She sent Riley a Dear John letter and broke off the relationship.

  A soldier who was with Riley when the letter arrived recalled that it devastated the corporal, who went on a three-day bender and didn’t get over Bette for a very long time. Told this years later, Bette exclaimed, “My God! Then Riley really did love me! I wish I had married him.…”

  The Hollywood Canteen remained in operation for three years, until World War II mercifully ended with the Japanese surrender in August 1945. Its $500,000 surplus was applied to a veterans’ relief fund. In its three years of operation, the Canteen had often entertained three thousand men a night, one thousand in each of three shifts. Hundreds of thousands of men passed through, and it was an experience they never forgot.

  Neither did Bette. More than forty years after the Canteen’s doors closed, she spoke about that period with undiluted passion. “Christmas tore your heart out,” she told the reporter Gregory Poe. “The servicemen were all so lonesome and sad. One Christmas Eve Bing Crosby came through the kitchen door with his four little boys. He said, ‘Thought maybe we could help out tonight,’ and he got on that stage with those four little boys. Everything those men were fighting for were those four little boys! He sang carols for an hour and a half. Oh God! There were so many wonderful rewards from the Canteen. So many.”