James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  SEVENTEEN

  O

  n the cool Saturday evening of October 20, 1945, Bette and Ruthie attended a cocktail party in Laguna Beach at the oceanfront home of Russell Leidy, a ceramics artist. As soon as Bette finished her new film, A Stolen Life, early in August, she moved into Ruthie’s guest room and spent the next two months resting, walking along the beach, shopping in the local art galleries, swimming, and sunbathing. The extended vacation had left her relaxed and relatively mellow, but she was still lonely and melancholy over the state of her romantic life. It had been two years since Farney’s death, she had not had a serious romance since Lewis Riley, the Canteen was closed, and she was beginning to wonder if she had any appeal left to the opposite sex.

  The party guests noticed that Bette was quieter than usual, more reserved. After a few minutes, she wandered out onto a balcony that overlooked the ocean and stood alone, staring out at the night-blackened water. After a few moments she turned around, and that was when she saw him: a tall, strong-featured, wavy-haired, powerfully built man dressed in sailor whites who couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. When she smiled slightly and nodded to him, William Grant Sherry picked up another drink for her at the bar and joined her on the balcony.

  “Bette and I just seemed to gravitate toward one another,” Sherry recalls. “We talked and talked about all kinds of things, and it irritated everyone else at the party, because she wasn’t sharing herself with them. Finally some of the guests started saying things like, ‘Why don’t you come in here?’ But we never did. We just kept talking away.”

  At thirty, Sherry was seven years younger than Bette, but he liked older women because “they were more mature and I enjoyed being with them better than the young ones.” Bette, he noticed, “was in pretty good condition,” and he found her very attractive. As they stood and chatted, he liked her even more: she seemed so pliable and yielding that he thought of her as a girl who needed his protection.

  Their conversation was largely about him; Bette learned that he was soon to be discharged from the navy, and that he had been hospitalized for many months after an explosion on his ship that burst one of his eardrums. He told her he had been a boxer, that he was an artist who had done surgery renderings for a medical journal and had ambitions to be recognized as a fine artist, and that he was a licensed physiotherapist and worked out with weights regularly.

  When Sherry asked Bette, “What do you do?” she realized to her delight that he did not recognize her. She didn’t clue him in. “I’m an actress,” she replied, and Sherry says he assumed she was a member of the local Laguna Beach theatrical company. “She didn’t tell me she was a movie star, and she certainly didn’t seem like one.” They talked about their mutual New England backgrounds—Sherry was born on Long Island but spent summers with his family in Maine and Vermont—and both grew more smitten by the minute.

  “No one ever paid court with the singularity of purpose that Sherry displayed,” Bette said. After their initial meeting, the couple saw each other day and night. “We spent all our evenings on the beach,” Sherry recalls, “or sitting around the barbecue at her mother’s place, which was a very simple house. I’d stay there until the early morning hours. And all I could think of was that I was falling in love with this girl.”

  Sherry’s obvious adoration, Bette admitted, “excited” her, and he had no doubt that she shared his feelings. “She acted like a person in love,” he says. “She melted with me, and she just seemed so proud to be with me. I was a good-looking person.”

  When Sherry returned to his naval base in San Diego a few days after meeting her, he found that he could think of nothing but her. The following weekend, when he drove back up to Laguna (where he shared a house with a friend), he and Bette were once again inseparable. On the final day of that weekend, Sherry told her that he was “crazy” about her, and that he would be getting out of the service in a week. He said he didn’t have much money, but there was a gallery in New York selling his paintings and, “I’ll work something out.” Would she marry him?

  “I really believe I couldn’t have avoided becoming his wife,” Bette said, and she claimed to have realized later that Sherry had made up his mind to marry her on first sight—“perhaps before.”

  It was the suspicion implicit in that last aside—that Sherry was a gold digger who had known precisely who she was—that led most of Bette’s family to oppose the notion of their marrying. Bette’s cousin Elizabeth Carmichael didn’t believe Sherry really loved Bette—“it was just like getting the gold ring or something.” Sally Favour, married to Bette’s cousin John Favour, said, “I felt that he was an opportunist.” Ruthie and Bobby both vehemently denounced him to Bette; Ruthie didn’t think Sherry was of the proper social station to marry Bette Davis, and she was “aghast” to learn that Sherry’s mother, the widow of a theatrical carpenter, was working as an elevator operator in San Diego. Icily, Bette told Ruthie she admired Mrs. Sherry for supporting herself—something, she reminded her mother, that Ruthie hadn’t done since Bette became a star.

  But Ruthie’s opposition to Sherry only hardened. She and Bobby both engaged private investigators to delve into his background, and the reports, apparently, contained enough of interest that Ruthie badgered Bette to read them. She refused. “Ruthie… so continually criticized him,” Bette recalled, “that she drove me right into his arms.”

  When Bette told Ruthie that she was of a mind to accept Sherry’s proposal, Ruthie asked her plaintively, “Why, Bette, why?”

  “He’s damn good in bed, that’s why!”

  “You don’t have to marry him for that!” Ruthie sputtered.

  Sherry didn’t like Ruthie at all. He thought she was “a very domineering woman who spent a lot of Bette’s money and always wanted more things,” and he suspected that she and Bobby disliked him so much only because they were “afraid I was going to take Bette away. There was no other reason they should dislike me.”

  Bette told Sherry that she wanted to marry him, but she asked if they could put off the wedding until after she returned from a planned trip to Mexico City—“something about a film down there,” as Sherry recalls it. He told Bette, “Let’s get married first and then go down together. What’s the point of going down yourself?”

  She agreed, and in order to placate her mother’s misgivings about Sherry, she asked him to sign a prenuptial agreement assuring that he would make no claims on her property in the event the marriage ended in divorce. He did so. On November 16, Hedda Hopper broke the news that Bette Davis planned to marry William Grant Sherry on the thirtieth of November.

  The date was less than a week after the sixty-year-old Ruthie planned to marry fifty-three-year-old Robert Palmer, a Belmont, Massachusetts, businessman she had known for some time. After nearly thirty years as a divorcée, Bette’s mother had decided that she had had enough of living alone, that she wanted the company of a man who was friendly and accommodating and unthreatening—“a nice little fellow,” as Sherry considered Palmer.

  Palmer, like Ruthie, was divorced, but on the marriage license application, Ruthie described herself instead as “widowed,” an indication of her continuing shame over the divorce from Harlow. When she was asked to list her occupation, she wrote “Housewife.”

  Sherry didn’t think the marriage would be very successful. According to him, “Ruthie just ran that poor man ragged. He should never have married her. The poor guy.”

  William Grant Sherry contends to this day that he had no idea who Bette Davis was until after he married her, but that’s hard to believe. He must have been aware of the Hopper story revealing their wedding plans, and he gave an interview to the Los Angeles Examiner a few days before the marriage. He was also questioned by reporters about the last-minute change in plans necessitated by the refusal of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Laguna to marry the couple because of Bette’s 1938 divorce from Ham Nelson. If Bette was only a local actress, why was there so much press interest in her marriage plan
s?

  In any event, the ceremony was scheduled for Friday afternoon, November 30, at the chapel of the Mission Inn in Riverside. But Ruthie’s constant fussing over Bette just before the ceremony caused an altercation that nearly made Bette change her mind about marrying Sherry, according to him. Bette had been a nervous wreck all morning, and Ruthie told Sherry, “You go off somewhere. You’re making Bette nervous.”

  “You’re the one who’s making her nervous!” Sherry shot back. Ruthie immediately told Bette what Sherry had said to her, and Bette later told him she had been so furious with him “I almost didn’t come down and marry you—that you would talk to my mother that way!”

  Dressed in a blue wool suit and a blue Breton sailor hat trimmed with goose feathers, Bette was escorted down the aisle by her brand-new stepfather, Robert Palmer, who had walked the same path to marry Ruthie one week before. The newly divorced Bobby was the matron of honor and Sherry’s Laguna Beach roommate, Seymour Fox, was best man. Once he and Bette were pronounced man and wife, Sherry kissed Bette “fervently,” according to witnesses. Bette’s only comment: “That was the longest aisle I ever saw!”

  Afterward, sixty guests crowded into a reception at the Inn’s galleria, where Bette cut a three-tiered cake and Ruthie took the wedding pictures. Then the Sherrys departed for Mexico in Bette’s enormous 1944 Buick, laden with trunks and gifts, as hot dry Santa Ana winds kicked up throughout southern California, bringing the kind of burning static air that Raymond Chandler said “curls your hair and makes your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.”

  Indeed, the heat got to Bette and her bridegroom. The arid air and the merciless sun undid both their tempers, and Sherry ordered Bette out of the car at one point halfway through the trip. As they drove along endless vistas of Southwest desert, the roads were so hellish that the tires began to blow out, and no sooner would Sherry replace one than another would go. By the time they got to Guanajuato, three hundred and fifty miles from their Mexico City destination, all four of the Buick’s tires were useless and there were no spares left. Finally they had no choice but to sit by the side of the road in the suffocating heat, share a bottle of Scotch they’d brought along, and await rescue. When it came, just as night began to fall, it was in the form of a fleet of official Mexican government cars carrying soldiers, policemen, politicians, and reporters.

  When the first man out of the first car, a policeman, saw Bette, he called out to the others, “She’s here! She’s here!” All the men greeted her effusively, and Sherry recalls that he turned to his bride and commented, “Boy, they’re making quite a fuss over you!” Bette dismissed it with an airy “Yeah, well…”

  The Sherrys were driven directly to Mexico City—where, Bette finally explained to Sherry, she was scheduled to appear at a gala screening of The Corn Is Green, which the Mexican government had selected to kick off a campaign against illiteracy. After a quick shower and change of clothes at their hotel, they were hustled over to the theater. Sherry says he finally realized at this point that his bride was more than a Laguna Beach actress, but he was still stunned as he and Bette entered the movie theater and thousands of people rose in unison from their seats in acclamation. “Who are you, anyway?” he asked her.

  “I’m Bette Davis,” she replied, acknowledging the cheers.

  “The name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Well, you’ll find out,” Bette murmured as she took one last bow and sat down.

  After the screening, the Sherrys were treated to a round of nightclub entertainment at which they were the guests of honor. Then they were taken back to their rooms, the bridal suite in a lovely hotel in San Juan Hill, outside the city. Isn’t this wonderful? Sherry thought, and when he saw that Bette’s maid Dell Pfeiffer—whom Bette had flown down for the occasion—had placed his pajamas on the bed next to Bette’s nightgown, he was overcome with emotion. “Tears came to my eyes. This was so wonderful to me. I was married, I had a wife, and I had wanted one for so long—but I had never found anyone that I wanted.”

  Bette saw the tears in her husband’s eyes as he gazed at the bed. “Oh, Sherry, you big sap,” she said.

  Sherry soon learned that it was electricity in a relationship that stimulated Bette, not sentimentality. She managed during this working honeymoon to infuriate her groom so badly that he threw a steamer trunk across the hotel room at her. “I never seemed to bring out the best in men,” she admitted with some understatement. According to Sherry, Bette thrived on conflict and strife in their relationship. “She was always doing something to make me lose my temper to the point where I’d throw something at her. And she loved it. She’d always have that certain look of satisfaction on her face that she had made this man lose his temper.”

  When they returned to California, the Sherrys set up housekeeping in Bette’s rented Toluca Lake home, where she had moved after renting out Riverbottom not long after Farney’s death because the memories were too sad. (She sold the property in 1946 for a $5,000 profit.) Back at the studio, Bette asked to have some of her films screened for her new husband, who didn’t think he had ever seen one of her movies—a fact she found vastly amusing and repeated to anyone who would listen. After Sherry had watched a couple of pictures, he recalled that he had seen them but had found Bette less than memorable. “I never liked the person she was on screen,” he says. “I always enjoyed the men in her pictures better, and her I just put out of my mind. I told her that she didn’t come across on screen the way I liked her. She wasn’t the type of person I’d be interested in. But at home, she was.”

  Sherry enjoyed treating his bride like a queen. “I took care of her, you know, did all kinds of things for her, and if I went for a walk, I’d always bring back some little flower or something. It was a lovely romance with her. I really loved her.”

  This first blush of love left Sherry nonplussed by the wiles of Joan Crawford, who had recently come to Warner Brothers from MGM. Ever since their 1935 competition for Franchot Tone, there had been bad blood between Bette and Joan, and one afternoon a few months after his wedding, as Sherry strolled through the Warner lot, Crawford hailed him from across the street. She strode up to him and extended her hand. “Mr. Sherry? I’ve wanted to meet Bette’s new husband. How do you do?”

  Sherry said it was nice to meet her, and then Crawford extended an invitation for dinner. “That would be very nice,” he replied. “I’ll tell Bette.”

  “I don’t want Bette,” Joan responded. “Come alone.”

  Taken aback, Sherry stammered, “Well, Miss Crawford, I-I-I… don’t go anywhere without Bette. Thank you just the same.” When he got to his wife’s dressing room and told her what had happened, Bette laughed. “Oh, she does that with all the men. That’s nothing new. Are you going?”

  “Of course I’m not going!” Sherry exclaimed. Bette let loose with another of her raucous laughs and that was the end of that.

  On May 1, 1946, A Stolen Life was released, and Bette had a special interest in its success at the box office: it was the first of a series of films she was to produce for Warners under the aegis of her new production company, B.D. Inc.

  As she admitted in her memoirs, Bette didn’t produce the film in any real sense. “I simply meddled as usual. If that was producing, I had been a mogul for years.” The formation of the production company was in large measure a concession on Jack Warner’s part to Bette’s ego and her power. There were some minor tax benefits for her as well, but Bette’s main interest in producing her own pictures was that she would finally get to choose the movies she wanted to do.

  Warner braced himself, certain that Bette would choose some esoteric piece sure to flop at the box office. But if she had learned anything in her fourteen years at the studio it was that financial success was everything, and everything good came from it. She chose A Stolen Life for two reasons. First, she was convinced it would be popular with audiences. Second, it would provide her with a showcase for he
r acting versatility: the script called for her to play twins, one good, one evil.

  If some observers expected Bette to have a scene-chewing field day with the parts, they were disappointed. Instead she gave a subdued, effective performance, subtly delineating the character differences between the two women, and touchingly portrayed the heartbreak of the good twin after her sister steals away the man she loves. But the film turned out to be talky, static, and oddly uninvolving. The director, Curtis Bernhardt, who had begun his career in Germany, gave the picture an incongruous high-contrast film noir look; too many scenes were so dark they were difficult to see.

  The reviews of A Stolen Life were generally poor, but audiences flocked to it, and the picture became Bette’s biggest hit, netting a $2.5 million profit at the box office. The overriding reason for its success has to be Bette. She had been off the screen for more than a year, and in A Stolen Life audiences could see her play both the characters she had always been best at: the long-suffering, noble martyr and the willful, selfish barracuda. Whatever the shortcomings of the picture itself, Bette’s fans loved it.

  Bette never did produce another film; she found that worrying about everything was far more debilitating than merely meddling when she felt so moved. She had proven that her instincts could produce a huge financial hit, and she was content to go back to fighting creative battles and leave the accounting to others.