Bette Davis (33 page)

While it is impossible to know for certain, perhaps Bette's familiar tirades and overall bellicosity had become necessary self-soothing devices; or perhaps she had spent so many years at war with everyone that now that authority was finally hers* she discovered she had not the slightest idea of how to use it in a constructive, positive, disciplined manner. Bette appeared scarcely to comprehend that with control came responsibility. As producer she would have to accept responsibility for the success or failure of the product, and this she seemed disinclined to do. Years later, contrary to all extant evidence, Davis would blame the failure of her independent production company on the studio's unwillingness to "let" her do any real producing—but when had Bette Davis ever waited for Jack Warner, or anyone else, for that matter, to "let" her do what she wanted? Much closer to the truth is that, reluctant as Warner may have been to place the reins of power and control in her hands, the moment he did, whether she was conscious of it or not, Bette proved even more resistant to taking them.

How, exacdy, did she use her freedom? The question is important

for what it tells us of the scope of Davis's imagination and artistic aspiration. With five B.D. Inc. films to reaffirm her credentials as a dramatic actress before she turned forty-one, Davis need not have feared the loss of youth that loomed in Jack Warner's thoughts. Had Bette chosen a serious drama for her first independent production, she might have charted a whole new, no doubt more satisfying, direction for her acting career. But Davis made no bones about having been attracted to the mediocre Stolen Life for the gimcrack plot device of contrasting twin sisters, which allowed her to indulge her artistically self-annihilating preoccupation with the superficies of character. There was hardly any need to probe the psychological depths in Catherine l\irney's screenplay, because to all intents and purposes, there were none. The bloodless writing required only that Bette invent contrasting visual styles for the identical twins, Kate and Patricia. After Pat—the bad, high-living sister—marries Bill Emerson, the man they both love, the dreamy, goodhearted Kate briefly takes up with a thuglike bohemian artist named Kar-nock. But when the bad sister dies in a boating accident, with only her twin as witness, Kate returns to shore pretending to be Pat, in order to take her place as Bill's wife. As in Now, Voyager, where the new Charlotte is plagued by the occasional attitude or mannerism belonging to her spinster past, in Davis's A Stolen Life, Kate reinvented as Pat is intermittently betrayed by the phantom gestures of a former self. In short, rather than use her prodigious gifts as an actress to explore and express the complexities of character, Davis chose, in this her first independent production, to waste herself on insubstantial, if mildly diverting, cinematic sleight of hand.

In the midst of shooting A Stolen Life, Bette poured out her feelings of boredom and restlessness in a May 1945 letter to Robin Brown. The focus of her dissatisfaction seemed to be the absence of Corporal Riley, who, she noted, had been in combat since March and had already been awarded a Bronze Star for gallantry in action. On May 7, V-E Day, the Germans had signed an unconditional surrender at Rheims. But even with the war in Europe over, Bette sighed, her beau was likely to be sent to Asia. To Bette's great despair, Riley had gone overseas without having actually proposed marriage. Although she had been expecting the wealthy real estate man to produce a diamond ring at the last minute, he asked only that she wait for him to return—whatever that might mean. Before long, although she had indeed indicated to Riley that she would be there for him when he came back, Bette was complaining that she was weary of living her life in a mailbox.

In this restive mood, Bette went off to Laguna Beach, where, to

the consternation of her mother and sister, a month after V-J Day she took up with a muscle-bound sailor on weekend leave from San Diego. William Grant Sherry, seven years her junior, was an artist of sorts (with a fondness for painting clowns and other scenes of circus life), whose bohemian attitude and blunt manner seemed to remind Bette of Karnock, the quarrelsome ruffian-painter in A Stolen Life. Bette appeared to enjoy shocking people with the scarcely appropriate new beau, whom she impulsively decided to marry only a month after she picked him up at a party. The romance with the hot-tempered bodybuilder distracted her from the disappointment of A Stolen Life.

Although Bette's mother expressed violent opposition to Sherry, Ruthie was preoccupied: she was making plans to marry Robert Woodbury Palmer, the Belmont, Massachusetts, businessman whom she had been "chasing" for some years now. On November 21, 1945, three days before the sixty-year-old Mrs. Davis was scheduled to be married to Palmer in a ceremony at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs, Ruthie, in the course of filling out an Orange County marriage license, heard herself utter the name of her mother, Harriet Eugenia, whose sweetest hope had once been to see her dreamy, artistic, ardent elder daughter contentedly married; and whose blackest hour must have been Ruthie's irreversible metamorphosis into that most wretched and reviled of old New England females: a grass widow, or divorcee. Which makes it all the more striking when, perusing the 1945 marriage license, one notes that although on the document's left-hand side the prospective bridegroom lists his current marital status as "Divorced," Ruthie on the right declares herself "Widowed": a tiny, harmless, forgivable falsehood certainly, but a poignant one nonetheless, suggesting as it does a woman's unrelenting secret sense of shame at having long ago been abandoned for another. And what of Ruthie's years of violent effort: her menial jobs; her study and work—and, ultimately, failure—as an art photographer; her successful nurturing— however often selfish, mean-spirited, and cruel—of her elder daughter's talent and career? Besides "Occupation: Trade, Profession, or Particular Kind of Work," Ruthie wrote "Housewife."

Six days after Ruthie became Mrs. Palmer, her thirty-seven-year-old movie star daughter startled America by marrying the recently discharged sailor whom she had known for barely five weeks, in a much-publicized ceremony in the chapel of the Riverside Mission Inn. Although Bette's uncle, the Reverend Paul Favor, had been set to perform the ceremony at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Laguna Beach, at the last minute the Episcopal bishop ordered him not to

do so, Bette being a divorcee. Thereupon Dr. Francis C. Ellis, who had officiated at Ruthie's wedding in Palm Springs the week before, was recruited.

Like a fidgety character in one of her movies, marching down the aisle on the arm of her new stepfather, Robert Woodbury Palmer, Bette tried to soothe herself by repeatedly tugging at a lace handkerchief borrowed for good luck from her matron of honor, Bobby. She continued to clutch and pull and tear at it all through the ceremony, so that by the time Dr. Ellis had finished, the handkerchief was nearly in shreds.

In turn, the hulking bridegroom—who posed as Hercules at the Laguna Festival of Arts—never once looked at Bette during the ceremony, preferring to keep his gaze fixed rigidly on Dr. Ellis until it was time to kiss the bride, which, according to newspaper reports, he did with "considerable fervor."

"Who'll give me a cigarette and a glass of champagne?" Bette exclaimed afterward, adding: "That was the longest scene I ever played; the aisle seemed three blocks long!"

Bette alternated between deep drags on her cigarette and gulps of champagne all through the family picture-taking session that followed. Ruthie managed little more than a pained polite smile when her new son-in-law reached out with one mighty hand to show her where to focus her camera, meanwhile tightly clutching Bette's waist with the other.

After their wedding night at Smoke Tree Ranch, Bette and Sherry (as she called him) drove to Mexico City. Bette was scheduled to attend the Mexican premiere of The Corn Is Green. It was a calamitous journey, blighted by two flat tires, Bette's usual vitriolic tirades, and, apparently, her first glimpse of Sherry's "uncontrollable temper," as he responded to her cruel taunts by angrily throwing her out of the car and, later, hurling a trunk at her in their desert hotel room.

marriage to Bette. Sherry quickly proved a shrewder adversary. Banishing Ruthie left him with only Bette to contend with.

Within eight months of marrying Sherry, Bette discovered that she was pregnant. When she was married to Ham Nelson, Bette had had an abortion because her pregnancy would get in the way of filming Of Human Bondage. This time, on the contrary, expecting Sherry's baby seems to have provided her with a way out of launching her second independent B.D. production: a prospect she had faced with considerable dread, as she had yet to comprehend why A Stolen Life had so badly misfired. Davis was in the midst of filming Irving Rapper's Deception—the second Warners production under her new contract—when she astonished Jack Warner with the news of her impending motherhood. Instead of announcing the B.D. production that was to have followed the Rapper film, Bette declared her intention to begin a maternity leave on December 15, 1946. Although she insisted she was merely postponing her next independent production, Bette quietly dissolved B.D. Inc. several months later, an indication that she had no intention of repeating the unhappy experience of producing her own films.

After the initial shock, Bette's decision to take a maternity leave was greeted with a general sigh of relief at Warner Bros. Sherry's presence in her life had hardly had the tranquilizing effect that Jack Warner and others had anticipated. If anything, production records suggest that her conduct during the filming of Deception had been even more arbitrary and destructive than usual. All too clearly there was no rational principle at issue, only an ugly display of power for its own sake, when she repeatedly insisted on altering the shooting schedule according to whim.

On the first day of shooting, April 25, Davis failed to appear on the set until one in the afternoon, giving the excuse that she had "attended a party the previous night and did not get home until 2:30 a.m. " Thenceforth there was no telling at precisely what time the capricious actress would decide to show up for work. When the studio tried to accommodate her by agreeing to start filming an hour later each morning, she appeared for work at the earlier time— and protested angrily at being required to wait. Attempts to reason with her were met with bewildering fits of agitation: "Miss Davis got very excited and nervous, taking off her gloves and starting to cry," reported Al Alleborn of executive assistant Steve Trilling's ill-fated effort to come to some kind of terms with Bette. On several occasions she is recorded to have gathered the crew around her to denounce Warner Bros, for a variety of imagined offenses, but her

vituperations served only to alienate the others, who, anxious simply to get on with their work, resented the star's waywardness.

"I am at a loss for words to express myself after having learned of the turmoil that existed last Saturday afternoon and today with respect to the production of your picture,'' Jack Warner wired Bette on June 24, 1946. "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." Hence the particular copiousness with which the studio recorded each fresh instance of Davis's unreasonable behavior on Deception, in anticipation of a possible lawsuit against her. When Bette declared her intention to take a few months off, Warner put up no fuss about advancing the $224,000 she and Sherry needed to cover their living expenses during the thirty-two weeks of her hiatus. Among themselves, studio executives expressed the hope that Davis would return from her maternity leave in a somewhat more rational and constructive mood.

"Our host and hostess greeted us in slacks and matching plaid sports coats bearing the distinctive monogram which Sherry himself designed and which marks many of their personal effects," wrote a Sunday-supplement reporter who visited die pregnant thirty-eight-year-old actress in Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1946. "All hands promptly moved down to Butternut for a real New England breakfast of oatmeal mush, sausage, maple syrup and delicious pancakes made by Sherry's mother. You have only to meet Mrs. Sherry to know where her son gets his quiet dignity. And she commands the unstinted respect of her daughter-in-law. Mrs. Sherry, senior, together with Skippy, who is Sherry's younger brother, are spending the winter in the Butternut house with Bobby and her fair-haired little daughter Fay. So it will be a lively community sharing the fortunes of Sugar Hill this winter, of all sizes and sexes and ages."

Everyone, it seemed, except Ruthie, whose last glimpse of Bette had been at the San Bernardino railway station. The forlorn mother had photographed her elder daughter and son-in-law as they boarded an eastbound train. The couple was to spend Christmas at Butternut and remain there to await the birth of their child at the Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Before Sherry entered their lives, Ruthie had supervised the dismantling of a century-old barn and its faithful reconstruction at Sugar Hill, where it would serve as Bette's permanent residence, with Ruthie installed in the charming old farmhouse. It was Ruthie who monitored the painstaking renovations and decorations; Ruthie

who planted the fragrant beds of roses; and Ruthie who documented the step-by-step rebirth of Butternut in myriad photographs. But now, suddenly, Sherry's mother, a San Diego elevator operator, had usurped her place there—while Ruthie languished on the West Coast with her husband. The degree of Ruthie's agitation that winter may be measured by her January 1947 announcement that she and Palmer were separating after a mere fourteen months of marriage. In February, Bette and Bobby returned to California to comfort her.

Of all the photographs that Ruthie took of her elder daughter through the years, none can be more intriguing than those from April 30, 1947, the night before Bette planned to give birth by caesarean at Santa Ana Community Hospital. She had chosen the date expressly so that the baby's birthday would be May Day. Bette posed for the pictures on the waterfront terrace of the Sherrys' new house at 1991 Ocean Way in Laguna Beach. Their shoreline view—she had written Robin, that March, in a self-described state of enchantment-reminded her of their long-ago summers in Ogunquit. Ruthie's April 30 photographs show a voluptuous, luxuriantly pregnant woman in profile. This is hardly the image one associates with the vaguely masculine figure of Bette Davis—whose aura of sexual ambiguity was so deeply ingrained in the popular imagination that, the day after Bette brought her baby home from the hospital, rumor was rampant in Hollywood that the virago had never really been pregnant at all; that Bette Davis had secretly adopted seven-pound Barbara Davis Sherry.