James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  The first time Bette brought Sherry to Butternut he fell in love with it. “It was a wonderful, beautiful, dreamland place,” he recalls. “Just right for me because it was down-to-earth—a great big old barn that had been made over, with thick posts to hold up the upstairs loft. It was really New England, with boxes of nails and horseshoes lying around, things Bette’s mother had picked up at auctions. Upstairs she had a delightful four-poster bed.”

  At Butternut, Bette was usually happy and mellow, just as she had been the day Sherry met her, and he came to covet the time they spent there. “She was just herself’ in New England, Sherry says, “the person I loved.” Bette’s cousin Elizabeth Carmichael recalled that Bette seemed very much in love with her husband. “She used to try to bolster him by raving about his painting, and complimenting him all the time.”

  Things were different back in Hollywood; Sherry didn’t like the Toluca Lake house. “I was uncomfortable there, because nothing is yours in a rental. And I didn’t like Los Angeles. I felt like a fish out of water.” To keep Sherry happy, Bette purchased a woodsy home on Diamond Street in Laguna, near Ruthie and the water, with a wall of north light for Sherry’s painting. But when she was making a film, Bette stayed in Los Angeles during the week, and if Sherry wanted to see her he had to stay there too. He did at first, but soon he began to spend more and more time in Laguna—because when Bette was making a picture, she wasn’t the same woman with whom he had fallen in love.

  This first struck him five months after the wedding, when Bette began Deception on the Warner lot at the end of April 1946. As she admitted in her autobiography, she “never either saw or heard anyone” while she was working. Work came first in her life, and everything else—even her husband—was “a necessary refreshment, a comma, a dash in my life sentence of work.”

  The filming of Deception was a trial for Bette for a number of reasons, few of which had anything to do with her home life. Her marriage was barely beyond the honeymoon stage, and Sherry indeed provided her with “refreshment” from her perennial creative struggles with Jack Warner. But those struggles were worse than ever, all of them stemming from Bette’s self-doubts and her increasing sense of betrayal at the hands of the studio. “She was nervous about everything to do with films,” Sherry recalls. “She argued with everybody on the set all the time. She was a very insecure person.”

  Her nervousness wasn’t assuaged by the script she was filming. Deception, as one critic described it, was “like grand opera—only the people are thinner.” Bette wasn’t thrilled by the melodramatic turns Warner was adding to the story, based on a successful stage play about the reunion of a concert pianist (Davis) and her cellist lover (Paul Henreid) following World War II. The woman attempts to conceal the fact that she has been kept in high style for a number of years by a composer (Claude Rains). Following a series of complications, Davis shoots Rains to prevent him from revealing all, then she confesses her act to Henreid after he has triumphantly presented Rains’s latest opus. They agree she must go to the police, and as they leave the concert hall, an onlooker calls to Davis, “You must be the happiest woman in the world tonight!”

  After barely a week of filming, Bette was about as unhappy off screen as her character was on screen. She was upset by the addition of the Rains character to what had been a two-person play, especially since Rains was quite handily stealing the movie out from under her and Henreid with an over-the-top performance. While she had rewritten Mr. Skeffington to her heart’s content, now she was infuriated by the constant rewrites of others—so much so that after one last-minute alteration she stormed into her dressing room and slammed the door on her finger, resulting in huge swelling and an ugly, blackened fingernail.

  Matters went from bad to worse. Bette’s nervous condition weakened her resistance, and she caught colds and other infections repeatedly, including an outbreak of boils on her face. On Saturday evening, May 14, she was driving down to Laguna Beach for her Sunday off when another car made her veer off the road and smash into a tree. Her head shattered the windshield, and she was in a daze when someone arrived and offered to take her to the hospital. She wanted to be taken home, she insisted, and when she got there she went to bed despite the protests of Sherry that she should see a doctor.

  The next day her physician, Dr. Wilson, told her he was worried she might have a hairline fracture of the skull, and that she should remain in bed, as still as possible, for several days. She felt dizzy and ill, and at one point blood began to trickle down her chin from her jaw, which she had also injured. Dr. Wilson told the studio that Bette was in “a very hazy condition” and could not report to work for some time.

  Within a week she had mustered up the strength to return to the set, but she suffered from dizzy spells and went back to Laguna. On May 25 she phoned the studio to say she had the flu, a strep throat, and a fever of 101. She finally returned to the studio on June 13, with the picture now weeks behind schedule, and asked Jack Warner to push back her morning call from 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. Warner, once again eager to keep his biggest star happy at all costs, reluctantly agreed to try out the arrangement.

  On June 22, just before noon, the Warner executive Steve Trilling came to the Deception set on Stage Seven and knocked on Bette’s dressing room door. Inside, he told her that the picture was alarmingly behind schedule and over budget and she would have to return to a 9 A.M. call. Furious, Bette shot back that Jack Warner had agreed to the change in her starting time and if she had to come in earlier she was likely to get sick again and further delay things. “If Jack Warner wants me to change the arrangement agreed to,” she told Trilling, “why doesn’t he have the courage to tell me himself?”

  Trilling tried to placate Bette, but his efforts only heightened her anger. Unconcerned now that others might hear her, she began to shout. “They keep adding dialogue! I have to stay up at night learning lines for the next day! And they’re long, difficult lines! You, Steve Trilling, have a lot of nerve coming on the set during a shooting day! And when you know that we’re working and I’m trying to concentrate and I’m about to go into a scene five pages long with difficult, complicated lines!” Then she started to cry, and Trilling left.

  When Bette got home that evening, she took to her bed and remained there for three days. She soon received a telegram from Jack Warner: “Dear Bette: I am at a loss for words to express myself after having learned of the turmoil that existed last Saturday afternoon with respect to the production of your picture. You must not lose sight of the fact that you are in a profession that calls for certain fulfillment of moral obligations to say nothing of legal ones. You are taking the wrong attitude towards our company and me personally on this whole matter in that you would create conditions that are not fair to our studios. We are not responsible for the working hours under which the industry is making its pictures. We have done everything in our power for you, but now you ask us to change the working hours which I find we cannot do after having honestly tried, which was our distinct understanding when I discussed this with you in my office several weeks ago. Am sure you realize our rapport was radical departure from our normal studio operations and if we continue it will create a complete change in our production methods and prove very costly to us. I implore you as a friend and business associate to use your good reasoning. Am sure in the long run you will realize that what you are doing now is not the proper thing and am asking nothing unreasonable from you.”

  Bette didn’t respond to the telegram, but on June 29, back at work, she halted filming and asked the crew to gather around. She complained that the studio seemed “indifferent” to her health problems and added, “I am appalled that the crew has been called in to work every day I’ve been off sick when Trilling knew you would be wasted because I couldn’t come in. It shows terrible lack of consideration for you. I hate being put in a position like this—when Trilling and Warner make it seem my fault the crew is called in every day, when they know it’s impossible for me to come to work.” />
  The crew was unmoved by Bette’s speech—by now her latenesses and absences had made them resent her as much as the Skeffington crew had, and nothing she said could convince them that she wasn’t simply being her usual bitchy, temperamental self. Jack Warner was livid, and came very close to dismissing her from the picture. But every movie featuring Bette Davis had made money for his studio, so Warner bit his lip, held his tongue, and turned his back.

  The troubled production of Deception came to a close in August 1946, and when the film was released two months later, it disproved Bette’s theory that a discordant set guarantees a successful picture. The costliest of Bette’s films to date, the movie lost over half a million dollars—the first time a Davis film had flopped after forty-nine straight successes.

  Box-office failure was a new experience for Bette, and she didn’t like it a bit. Sherry and her friends soothed her anxieties with assurances that her next film would be yet another blockbuster. But just as disturbing to her was the way she looked in the picture. Bette was approaching forty, the witching hour for most actresses of the period, and it was clear on screen that the battles and the problems and the illnesses had all taken their toll on her. For the first time, she looked every bit her age on screen. Upset, she cornered the film’s cinematographer, Ernie Haller, and demanded, “Why can’t you make me look like I did in Jezebel?”

  Haller looked at her, the picture of contriteness. “Well, Bette,” he explained, “I was eight years younger then!”

  EIGHTEEN

  “E

  verything was wonderful between me and Bette,” recalls William Grant Sherry, “until the child was born.” The nine months his wife was pregnant, Sherry thought, were the happiest period of the marriage. “She was lovely at that time. She had that expression on her face that all new mothers have, in love and having a child. She had the angelic look and I had a photograph of her that was so loving. This was the Bette that I adored. The world just couldn’t have been more beautiful.”

  Bette wanted to have her baby in New England, and she and Sherry moved to Butternut in the fall of 1946 after Jack Warner gave her an indefinite period off, with pay. Six months before the baby’s expected arrival, Bette proudly displayed a brown leather photograph album with gold lettering across the front: “Our Baby—Bette and Sherry.” (Almost without exception, Bette called her husband by his last name.)

  While Bette puttered around the house, Sherry would jump into his jeep every morning and drive up into the mountains to ski. “Then I’d come back down in the afternoon and we’d go for walks in the snow.” Once a week they drove to New Haven to see Bette’s doctor, and as the New England winter hardened she began to worry that the snow might make it difficult for her to get to the hospital in an emergency. Reluctantly, she and Sherry returned early in March to Laguna Beach, where Bette was told that her baby was in the breech position and would have to be delivered by cesarean section. She decided to have the surgery on May 1—because she hoped for a daughter, and felt that May Day would be “a fun birthday for a girl.”

  Sherry was convinced the child would be a boy, and Bette recalled that when her seven-pound daughter was born at 7:15 A.M. on May 1, she said to him, “Poor Sherry—you married an old woman and I gave you a daughter—not a son.” Nonetheless Sherry was delighted to be a father, and he suggested that the child be named Barbara, after Bette’s sister. “Bobby was a very pathetic person,” he recalls. “Inside a lovely person, but dominated by Bette, who treated her terribly. She was nothing. She depended on Bette for her income and Bette used her as a servant. Bobby put up with it because she knew she was a little bit off mentally and she depended on Bette.”

  The infant was christened Barbara Davis Sherry, but her father took to calling the little girl BeDe because of her initials, and later he painted a portrait of her with the nickname appearing on a book she was holding while he painted her. Bette turned it into B.D., and that became the girl’s name for the rest of her life—which effectively obliterated the tribute to Bobby.

  Bette’s age prompted whispers that she had feigned her pregnancy and had adopted B.D. (“Hollywood is a suspicious town,” Bette said.) To check out the rumors, the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper arrived, uninvited and unannounced, at the Sherry house. “She burst through two gates and into the secluded guest cottage where I was resting,” Bette recalled.

  “May I come in?” Hopper asked.

  “It looks like you’re already in,” Bette murmured sweetly. According to Bette, Hopper “scrutinized the child’s features and the condition of my anatomy, and the next day it was officially recorded for Hollywood posterity that I had indeed given birth.”

  Just then Bette’s husband came in, wearing only bathing trunks. Hopper was gaga. “I’d met ‘Sherry’ before,” she wrote, “but in a suit you couldn’t possibly guess what a handsome Greek god he is. Now he’s run up fresh from the sea with the water still glistening on his mahogany tanned skin.” When Hopper exclaimed, “Ah, the bronze giant,” Sherry laughed and said, “I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Hopper spent the better part of an hour with Bette as she lay on a yellow chaise longue after feeding the baby. “I’ve wanted Barbara for so many years I can’t tell you,” Bette reflected. “I used to think it was awful I hadn’t had her when I was twenty-one. But now I realize how perfect it is to have her at my age. When I was a youngster, I was struggling so hard to get somewhere. Now I’ve got the time to enjoy her.”

  Prior to B.D.’s birth, Bette had hired sixty-three-year-old Bessie Downs, the mother of her business manager, Vernon Wood, as the baby’s nurse. Eighteen months later, Bette and Bessie were trading charges in court when Mrs. Downs brought suit against the Sherrys for breach of contract when she was dismissed three days after Bette’s return home from the hospital. In her deposition, Bette explained that she had let Bessie go because she wasn’t following doctor’s orders on feeding the baby. “The instructions were from the hospital and the doctor,” she testified. “They were that she was to be fed every three hours, a very important thing to a young baby.… I asked that the baby be brought down to me to be fed and… on the second day the baby did not appear to me until every four hours. She was an hour late again, and I asked Mrs. Downs had she contacted Dr. Carroll to get permission to change the feedings and she said, ‘No, I hadn’t,’ and she said she would now if I wanted her to. I said it was a little late. I told her, ‘You just can’t switch babies back and forth, one day give them three hours and one day four hours. It’s very upsetting to them.’”

  Downs’s attorney, taking the deposition, interjected. “I will have to take your word for it—”

  “It is!” Bette exploded. “I found out! I had had a cesarean and it wasn’t very good for me at the time to discuss many things, but I myself was so enraged by this I brought it up with Mrs. Downs. I was being treated like an invalid!… She would not let me have anything to do with the baby. She explained to me that it would take four days for the nipples to be right, and in these four days she did not want me to feed the baby… the baby for twenty-four hours was not brought near me at her insistence.… Because it was a great emergency Dr. Carroll found another nurse. At the time Mr. Sherry asked Mrs. Downs to leave, she was an old friend of the family and as it had worked out so badly, for what reason we did not know, he mentioned that it was clashes of temperament. That was his way of telling her to go without insulting her.”

  In her testimony, Downs countered that Dr. Carroll had given her verbal permission to reduce B.D.’s feeding schedule. “It’s not the time of the feeding,” she said, “but the ounces.”

  The Friday afternoon she was let go, Bessie testified, Dr. Carroll came to see her at Bette’s behest. “He seemed quite upset and he said, ‘What’s this all about? I can’t come around here three times a day to settle family quarrels.’ I said, ‘Well, I am sure as far as I am concerned, everything is all right.’ And then he said, ‘While Bette was in the hospital she was fine and since she has bee
n home she has deteriorated. I don’t know whether it is you or her mother or her sister. But I feel that your personality clashes with Bette.’”

  The jury agreed that Downs had indeed been dismissed for that reason, and not because of incompetence or failure to obey doctor’s orders. They awarded her damages of $1,500 and court costs of $243.90. Bette appealed, and the damages were reduced to $680. She didn’t pay Bessie Downs until November 23, 1949.

  “The first months of a child are spectacularly exciting,” Bette wrote in her memoirs, and she added that although she never considered giving up her career, suddenly it wasn’t all that important—“my life seemed full without it.” Sherry was delighted by his wife’s new domesticity; he worshiped her and the baby and secretly hoped that she would remain content to be just Mrs. William Grant Sherry. But it was not to be. Although Bette claimed that she reveled in motherhood and was reluctant to return to Warners, Sherry tells a different story.

  Within a few months of B.D.’s birth, he says, Bette shocked him by announcing, “I’m sick of being a cow. I’ve got to get back to work.” She telephoned Jack Warner and asked him to prepare a new picture for her. “From that day on she changed completely,” Sherry recalled. “She became manager of everything. It was almost like, ‘I don’t need you anymore.’” Sherry feels today that “she got from me what she wanted—a child. And then, I was of no more use to her.” Friends told him that they suspected Bette married him because of his good looks and robust health in order to “have a strong baby.” Sherry isn’t sure they were wrong.

  He couldn’t persuade Bette not to return to the studio, and it soon became clear that it wasn’t just because she felt like a “cow” that she wanted to get back to work. She was afraid for her career. She had had at least three movies in release every year through 1943. In 1944 she’d had two, and in 1945 just one. The poor box-office showing of Deception gnawed at her; she was well aware of the old Hollywood axiom, “You’re only as big as your last picture.” Even if she returned to work immediately, by the time her new film would be in release, she would have been off the screen for nearly two years, with Deception festering in the public mind. She needed to do something quickly.