James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Although she professed to have been completely absorbed in her baby, Bette had remained acutely in touch with what was happening in Hollywood, and she didn’t like what she saw. The best women’s roles were going to actresses years younger than she: Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s, Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, Loretta Young in The Farmer’s Daughter, and Susan Hayward in Smash-Up—The Story of a Woman. Actresses her own age were copping Oscar nominations in the few roles she might have played: Greer Garson in The Valley of Decision, Rosalind Russell in Mourning Becomes Electra.

  Worst of all, her old nemesis, Joan Crawford, had won the 1945 Best Actress Oscar for her first Warner Brothers film, Mildred Pierce (in a role Bette had turned down); she also got a nomination two years later for Possessed, while Bette was ignored for both The Corn Is Green and Deception.

  It is fair to say that by August 1947, Bette was deeply worried that her career had flagged, and she was eager for a major film with a meaty, rangy role. She lobbied Jack Warner hard to let her do two stories: Ethan Frome and a biography of Mary Todd Lincoln. The former, a novel by Edith Wharton that had been a critical success in a Broadway incarnation, concerned a nineteenth-century New England farmer who is driven into the arms of a gende young hired girl by his cold, unpleasant wife. After the pair run off together, they are maimed in a sledding accident, and the wife dedicates her life to caring for both of them.

  Bette wanted to play Mattie, the hired girl, opposite either Gregory Peck or Gary Cooper as Ethan Frome. Even though she was too old for the part, Jack Warner might have been willing to let her try it even a year earlier. But Bette had aged noticeably after the birth of B.D.; she now seemed closer to fifty than forty. Although Warner told her Ethan Frome was out because it was too downbeat a story and he “hated costume stuff,” his real reason for nixing the project was Bette’s appearance.

  Mary Lincoln, the emotionally unstable wife of the sixteenth president of the United States, was a far more appropriate role for Bette. Initially a source of strength for her husband, Mrs. Lincoln became undone by charges that she was a Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War, the deaths of several of her children at early ages, and the assassination of her husband as he sat next to her in Ford’s Theatre. Finally, her eldest son committed her to a mental institution in Illinois.

  Bette sent a barrage of letters and telegrams to Warner begging him to let her play Mary Lincoln. In one she wrote that she found Mrs. Lincoln to be a combination of Scarlett O’Hara and a Back Street woman and added, “To me this is the story of so many women—not just a figure out of history—it is a story of any woman who believes in her husband and pushes him ahead.” She felt the theme was “apt to be box office,” and noted Katharine Hepburn’s success in State of the Union, a very different kind of film. “Anyway,” she concluded, “stubborn Davis is asking you to think more about it—I am so truly sure someone in the theater will do it soon—the Theater Guild has always been interested—or could I do it as a play?”

  Bette got no further with Warner on Mrs. Lincoln than she had with Ethan Frome, and this time the mogul’s reluctance had little to do with Bette. Again, three years earlier, he might have okayed the project, but by 1947 the economic fortunes of his studio—and all the others—were on a distinctly downward slide.

  The motion picture box-office boom of the first half of the 1940s—especially for “women’s pictures” and innocent-minded musicals—had been fueled primarily by the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters left behind by the millions of fighting men who had led the United States and Great Britain to victory in World War II. Once the war ended, complex factors combined to both lower movie attendance and change audience tastes. With their husbands home, and in many cases in need of physical or emotional nursing, many women no longer had the luxury of free time to take in two or three movies a week. Others were soon busy as well with new babies.

  The men who had fought the deadliest war in world history had little taste for frivolous, naive entertainment or soap operas that revolved around issues that paled in comparison to what they had witnessed. They were more interested in stark melodramas that dealt honestly with the dark side of human nature they had come to know, or patriotic war films that filled them with pride.

  For Warner Brothers, the general downturn in box-office receipts (and the even poorer showing of the studio’s recent women’s pictures) was compounded by two other factors: the coming government decision that it was a violation of antitrust laws for the studios to own their own movie theaters (which was final in 1948), and the threat of television, which sent a shiver down the spine of every studio employee.

  Jack Warner was no longer certain what kind of movie would attract audiences. Creatively his output foundered, and the years 1946 through 1949 were among the poorest in overall movie quality in the studio’s history. Financially, Warner pulled in the reins, lowered budgets, and nixed any project that was likely to cost too much. This was his main reason for rejecting Mrs. Lincoln: its costumes, its Civil War battles, the kind of director he would need to keep it all together, would have meant the kind of budget Warner was no longer willing to approve.

  Instead, he convinced Bette (who was now making over $6,000 a week, a budget buster unto herself) to appear in a relatively modest picture based on a little-known novel with a neophyte leading man and an untried director. Years later, Bette said of the film, “I should have stopped that picture in the middle and said, ‘Boys, it’s just not working,’ and gone to Jack Warner and asked him to shelve it.”

  Ethel Vance’s novel Winter Meeting hadn’t exactly set bestseller lists on fire, but it had been a succès d’estime, and Bette liked its story of Susan Grieve, a virginal spinster, and her unlikely love affair with a handsome young navy war hero who intends to enter the ministry. What appealed to her most was Vance’s explorations of the differences between the Protestant Grieve, a minister’s daughter, and the Catholic sailor, and the awkwardness and confusion Susan feels at her first sexual experience as she nears forty.

  Bette felt the project might be as prestigious as Ethan Frome or Mrs. Lincoln, and she was impressed when Bretaigne Windust, a well-regarded Broadway director, signed on to helm the project, his first film. William Grant Sherry recalled a visit Windust made to the Sherrys in Laguna Beach. “He was such a gentleman, and the more I listened to him, I realized what good taste he had. He explained to me that he knew there was something about Bette that hadn’t been brought out, by any director.” What Windust wanted to highlight in Bette was a new “softness” and “femininity.” Unfortunately, this new concept amounted to little more than lighter makeup and a pulled-back hairdo topped with Mamie Eisenhower bangs that served mostly to make Bette look spinsterish.

  Bette suspected that Windust’s attempts to “soften her image” had been prompted by Jack Warner and were meant to make her look younger. She realized she was right her first day on the set. “Ernie Haller had set up enormous banks of lights behind huge silk screens just outside of camera range,” she recalled. “As a young actress I had seen these same screens on the sets of Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis, when they were nearing forty, and I knew what they meant. I went back to my dressing room and cried my eyes out.”

  As filming progressed, Bette became just as unhappy with her leading man. Jim Davis, a handsome six-foot-three-inch thirty-three-year-old with a handful of minor films to his credit, was handed a starring role opposite Bette Davis primarily because his $500-a-week salary fit well into the Winter Meeting budget. He tested for the role; Bette liked what she saw and approved him—over the objections of her husband. “Davis was a nice-looking guy, and big,” Sherry recalled, “but he was a little awkward. I said to Bette, ‘I think you can do better,’ but she said, ‘Oh, I think he’ll be all right.’ I didn’t know too much about this, so I backed off.”

  Sherry’s instincts proved correct—Jim Davis was indeed stiff and awkward in Winter Meeting, and there was little chemistry between him and Bett
e. She blamed the “over-analytical approach” of Windust for the fact that Davis “never again during filming showed any signs of the character he portrayed in the tests that made me want him for the part. No help I tried to give him could offset the effect of the detailed direction of Windust. He was lost and openly admitted it.”

  The script of Winter Meeting was unusually talky, and Windust, from a Broadway background, saw no problem in that. Bette knew it could be fatal for the picture, and tried to overcompensate. According to William Grant Sherry, “Bette decided to show everyone that Windust wasn’t the director he was ballyhooed to be. She began to do things in the film that I could see from his expressions weren’t to his liking at all. She started hamming it up. It embarrassed me for her. He would take her aside and say, ‘I want to explain something.’ And she’d snap back, ‘Well! I think I know what I should do, and when I should do it.’ And you could see that he was afraid to buck her.”

  The film’s producer, Henry Blanke, called a meeting with Bette and Windust that Sherry also attended. “The rushes are terrible,” Blanke told them bluntly.

  “You get a decent director and then we’ll have something,” Bette snapped.

  “Bette was a very insecure person,” Sherry recalled, “and that was why she’d try to take the upper hand with everybody and put everybody down. Had I been married to Bette longer than I was at that time, I might have gone over and talked to Bretaigne and said, ‘Hey look, start smacking her around, and get what you want.’ Because that’s what the big directors did with her. They’d just say, ‘Bette, we’ll do it all day until you do what I want.’ And then she’d finally have to do it their way. She liked that.”

  Janis Paige, the second female lead in the film, was a twenty-five-year-old newcomer “very much in awe” of Bette. “She was the star,” Paige recalls. “She was the epitome and number one. But she seemed confused on this picture. She was battling Warner Brothers for better roles, she thought Jim Davis wasn’t strong enough for her. Windust wanted to ‘change’ her, and I think she had an actor’s paranoia about being changed. We actors fight very hard and work very hard for whatever image we have, in order to be different. I think she was scared.

  “You could hear the fights on the set. She was extremely outspoken and that doesn’t always sit well with people. I think she always felt alone—Bette Davis against the world. For the most part that was true. She fought so hard for women’s rights. She was a remarkable human being when you think about it, so far ahead of her time, in every possible way.”

  Among Bette’s many frustrations with Winter Meeting were the censorship restrictions on the script. The very elements that had most intrigued her about the novel had to be jettisoned for the film, and that drove her to fury. “We were not allowed to be honest about the differences of opinion between a non-Catholic and a Catholic” for fear of offending either religious group, she said. And neither would the censors “allow Jim and me to be shown in the bedroom, let alone in bed.… With no Hays [censorship] office [the film could have shown] how difficult it was for Susan to have sex for the first time—with a man who really wanted to be a priest! Think of all those meaningful conversations in the dark over cigarettes after making love!”

  All of Bette’s worst fears about Winter Meeting proved correct when it was released two days after her fortieth birthday on April 7, 1948. The box office was disastrous (it lost nearly $1 million), the reviews scathing. Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times, “Of all the miserable dilemmas in which Miss Davis has been involved in her many years of movie suffering, this one is probably the worst. For it offers Miss Davis no salvation. As a neurotic spinster who falls in love with a young Navy hero whose passion, ultimately revealed, is to become a Catholic priest, it leaves her no recourse save to send her young man on his way. And that she does with such slow anguish as to make it seem interminable.”

  There was anguish for the Davis women on the marital front as well. In January 1947, Ruthie had separated from Robert Palmer, their longtime friendship undone by daily proximity and the disinclination of both of them to change well-established habits to suit the other. Still another factor, if William Grant Sherry is correct, was Ruthie’s propensity to run her husband “ragged.”

  Two years after her divorce from Robert Pelgram, Bobby, now thirty-eight, seemed to have found happiness again when she married David Roscoe Berry, a well-built man of imprecise occupation in his early thirties. The wedding took place on June 9, 1947, in Las Vegas, and Bette told her sister, “Now we’re Mrs. Sherry and Mrs. Berry!” Although Bette knew that Berry had struggled with alcoholism, she sent the newlyweds a dozen cases of liquor as a wedding present.

  Bobby’s daughter Ruth, eight years old, liked Berry. “He was a nice man,” she recalls, “but he had a problem with alcohol.” William Grant Sherry thought that the marriage was a big mistake. “I don’t know who got the idea that they should get married. Bobby was a mess, he was a mess, oh gosh. He turned out to be a drunk and the worst thing that Bobby could have.”

  Bobby came to realize this herself when Berry began to drink heavily again and failed to keep a job for more than a few months. Eighteen months after the wedding, Bobby sued for divorce in Orange County superior court on the grounds that Berry had “failed to provide the necessities of life” for her due to his “idleness, profligacy and dissipation.” In the court documents, Bobby told a harrowing tale of domestic discord.

  She charged that Berry was “habitually intoxicated” during most of their marriage and that when he was drunk he would “inflict on her severe bodily injury” and cause her great anxiety about the “safety and well-being of herself and her minor daughter and other members of her family.”

  On November 28, 1948, Bobby threw her husband out of their Laguna Beach house, and on December 3 she filed her divorce petition. The next day, Berry returned to the house at four in the morning, drunk, and demanded to be let in. When Bobby refused, he broke a window and clambered through it, threatening to “really raise hell around here.” Bobby grabbed little Ruth out of her bed and ran toward the front door, but Berry blocked her passage. Finally she was able to get out of the house and fled to the local police station, where she was told that because there was no restraining order against Berry, the police could do nothing.

  On December 5, a judge issued the restraining order, which forbade Berry even to speak to Bobby. He denied all of his wife’s allegations and told the court that he shouldn’t have to pay Bobby’s legal expenses because she “has sufficient funds and ample income, as well as separate property to pay her own legal fees.” The court decided that all of Bobby’s charges against Berry were true, and ordered him to pay her legal expenses. The restraining order was made permanent, and the divorce was granted on March 4, 1949. Berry was denied even California’s customary community property division.

  This latest personal failure sent Bobby reeling once again into a mental hospital, where she remained for nearly two years. When she was released, she seemed more disconnected from reality than ever. Within a few years she developed a great passion for a Laguna Beach man to whom she signed over her home (much to Bette’s fury, since she had bought the house for her). They lived together for nearly three years, Bobby’s friend Betsy Paul recalls, then he “threw her over and went to Paris to marry another woman. Bobby changed. She just fell apart.”

  Bobby suffered yet another breakdown, yet another hospitalization. She never married again, and during the next decade she was more dependent, emotionally and financially, on her sister than ever before.

  As though to sadly complete the Davis women’s catalogue of domestic failure, Bette’s marriage to William Grant Sherry was coming irreparably apart throughout 1948.

  NINETEEN

  B

  ette and Sherry sat across from each other at their sprawling Spanish-style dining room table, fully set with the finest china, crystal goblets filled with wine, and sparklingly polished silverware. While candles flickered around th
e floral centerpiece and in the wall sconces overhead, the cook brought out their salads and placed one, then the other, on the table as the Sherrys sat in stony silence. As soon as the woman had returned to the kitchen, Bette renewed the scathing attack she had launched against her husband during predinner cocktails.

  “You’re nothing”, she hissed at him as she unfolded her napkin. “You don’t make a living. I make a living. I have to worry about everything!”

  “Bette,” Sherry replied, trying to stay calm, “you know that I take as much as I can off your hands, as much as you’ll let me do. I can make a living anytime.” But Bette would have none of it. Between deep gulps of her white wine and mouthfuls of her salad, she lobbed zinger after zinger at Sherry. “You don’t make any money! I have to make all the money.”

  Sherry clenched his teeth. “I can make money anytime. I’ve always made money in my life. But your lawyers tell me not to sell a painting because our income tax is so terrific. Give it away, they tell me, but don’t sell it. If you want me to make money, I’ll go out and make money.”

  “You live like a prince!”

  “What do you want me to do? Live out in the garage, go begging? I don’t know what you want. Do you want me to get a job?”

  “No!” Bette exploded.

  Finally Sherry could take this irrational harping no longer. He shot up from his chair, lifted his end of the heavy oak table, and turned it over on top of Bette. “She was under the table,” he recalls, “with dishes, lettuce, crystal on top of her. I walked out of the room, and I don’t know how she got out from under that mess.”