Bette Davis (34 page)

According to her contract, Deception having been completed prior to the maternity leave, it was Bette's turn to produce and appear in a film of her own choosing when she returned to the studio on July 28, 1947. Instead, that September, she announced her decision to dissolve B.D. Inc. Jack Warner was only too happy to hear her say she would leave the producing to the studio, which promptly assigned her to a pair of lackluster films, Winter Meeting and June Bride, to be directed by Bretaigne Windust. (Bette's loud public protests that Warner Bros, would not allow her to portray Mary Todd Lincoln, or appear in a film based on Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, seem extremely odd, coming as they did soon after she had chosen to give up the right to select and produce her own projects.) As it happened, Winter Meeting would be the first of Davis's films to lose money. This suggests that her decline in popularity was perhaps closer at hand than Warner or his executives had anticipated. There had already been disturbing indications that

something was wrong. In the years 1938 through 1942, Davis had been nominated again for Academy Awards five years in a row. She was nominated again in 1944 for Mr. Skeffington. But since then she had failed to be nominated for The Corn Is Green, A Stolen Life, or Deception.

And with the end of the war came a significant image problem for Bette, whose strong, combative, independent female characters had provided such excellent role models for American women. Now that the men had come home, a rebellious, threatening female figure like Bette Davis was the very last thing they wanted to see when they went to the movies with their wives and girlfriends. As far as a great many men were concerned, it was high time for the old male-dominated order to be restored; whatever freedom and power the women had exercised and enjoyed in their absence must be instantly relinquished. Now that women had seen what they were capable of accomplishing out in the world, it was going to be difficult for some of them to return to the old domestic routines as if the self-discovery of the war years had never taken place. On account of all she had come to represent to American women during the war, Bette Davis was a poignant, even painful reminder of the efficacy they had been required to give up with the coming of peace: hence the subliminal threat the actress seemed to pose to many returning GI's, who bristled at the image of female strength and independence she embodied.

Bette had shifted her tactics with Jack Warner, whose frantic, fearful private notes from the period indicate his distaste for the new sort of warfare he was being forced to fight: not with Davis herself, as in the past, but with Jules Stein's MCA agents. On January 5, 1949, hoping as always to check Bette's unbridled behavior with directors, Warner had called agent Lew Wasserman to propose the exceptionally tough Raoul Walsh to direct her next, in Storm Center. The furious studio boss recorded that when he uttered Walsh's name, "Wasserman started to chuckle and ridiculed my suggestion." The agent's glib mockery was enough to make the insecure Warner foam at the mouth.

How he longed for one of Bette's familiar fits of temper—so much easier to cope with than the agent's derisive laughter. Warner insisted on seeing Bette in person, to talk about Storm Center without her agent present.

When Wasserman caught Warner off guard with the suggestion that they tear up Davis's studio contract and start anew, Warner— by his own account—blundered by offering to sell it to her for $250,000. This was precisely what MCA seemed to have been

waiting to hear. The agency stood to earn more money with Bette free to work for the highest bidder. Afterward, Warner logged his exasperation when MCA admitted to having informed Bette of his ill-considered offer to sell her contract but not his plea that she come in alone to talk to him about working with Walsh.

"It is not our desire to sell Miss Davis her contract at any time and never, irrespective of what money we could get, has it been my desire to do so," wrote Warner when word reached him that, bitterly perceiving the studio to have insulted and rejected her, Bette was about to accept his "offer" and walk out.

What neither Warner Bros, nor MCA seems to have counted on was Bette's deeply etched fear of change, which at length prompted her to signal her desire to return to the fold. On January 17, 1949, she and Jack Warner came to terms on a new one-picture-a-year, four-year contract (at a fee of $200,000 per picture, minus the $224,000 the studio had advanced during her maternity leave). Bette retained the right to do a single outside film each year, but she had no story or script approval over her projects at Warners. Much as the actress appears to have regarded the right to do the yearly outside picture as a great victory, it hardly seems the triumph Bette made it out to be when one recalls that in 1947, at her own instigation, she had dissolved her independent production company. Other than the potential of bringing in more money, the outside film scarcely accorded Davis the power she had already voluntarily relinquished.

Bette began filming director King Vidor's Beyond the Forest on May 24, 1949. It would be her first film under the new contract and, as it happened, the last she would make at Warners for a good many years. Through the decades, the story of Bette's abrupt departure from Warner Bros, has been much corroded by legend. But the studio's legal files provide important clues to the events that precipitated the final rift: Bette's having caused "a fuss" on the set when the estimable Vidor criticized the manner in which she had hurled a small bottle of medicine—evidently somewhat less strongly than the director thought appropriate. According to Roy Obringer's notes, this was followed by a frenzied telephone conversation between Davis and Warner, in the course of which the possibility of their "calling it quits" was hastily proposed and just as hastily agreed upon. Afterward, Warner was uncertain whether he or Bette had suggested it first. Although it has often been speculated that Jack Warner had simply wearied of Bette's ceaseless war fever, the real reason for his failure to try to make peace with her while she finished Beyond the Forest is given in a key notation in her legal

file, which indicates that in the view of Warner Bros, executives, the actress had "lost her position as a sure money maker for the studio," as "over a period of recent years some of her pictures have made money and some have not."

Even now that the studio had unceremoniously ended its relationship with Bette Davis by tearing up her contract as soon as she finished filming Beyond the Forest, she and Jack Warner seemed wistfully, ineluctably drawn to take up the cudgels one last time. Bette could scarcely resist taunting him in the press with claims that she had deliberately "acted up" during the Vidor film to provoke the studio to break her contract. Warner, in turn, responded with the angry directive to his legal staff to find grounds for a suit against her—but all to what purpose?

On August 9, 1949, Bette Davis prepared to leave the Warners lot for the last time after eighteen years as a contract player. She was genuinely hurt and surprised that there was no one at the gate to wish her well. Bette appears not to have grasped the extent to which, weary of her by now entirely pointless and often ugly fits of temper, most of her co-workers were happy to see her go.

on the enduring threat of violence, the ominous atmosphere quickly took its toll on their daughter. Like Bette, whose girlhood temper tantrums and obsessive behavior had begun at the age of two in reaction to tension between her parents, two-year-old B.D. seems to have responded to discord at home with misbehavior that-according to the governess—included repeatedly defecating behind the furniture. By October, Bette had begun to harbor serious fears for her own and her daughter's safety. More than once she threatened to end the marriage. To her threats, Sherry replied, "Just try to get rid of me."

"That girl and I were made for each other and I'm not going to let her go," Sherry told reporters after Bette disappeared with B.D. and Bobby on the evening of October 19, 1949, two months after the final break with Warners. ' * When I first heard about the divorce suit, I thought someone was trying to play a joke on me. When I learned it was true, I was just sick. I'm sure she'll come back when this whole thing blows over. It's just a matter of controlling my awfiil temper, but I know we can patch this up if we can just see each other again."

Asked about reports that he had smashed furniture in fits of anger, Sherry responded: "I fly into a temper at the slightest provocation, sometimes without provocation. Bette told me she was afraid of what I might do to her and the baby when I was in one of my rages. She said if she were a housewife it would be different. I don't blame Bette at all for what she did. It's tough for her to work hard in pictures and have this problem at home. I should be able to protect her and not frighten her.''

Unable to communicate directly with his wife, he publicly appealed to her to return: "I think that Bette needs me. Aside from loving her, I felt, when we were married, that I could bring her stability, and I did for a long time before I lost sight of my path. I want to get back on that path. I never believed in that psychoanalysis stuff—I thought it was silly—but if a doctor can solve the cause of my temper and Bette will come back to me and cancel her divorce, I'll do anything."

Having left the house on the pretext of appearing on a radio program, Bette wasted no time filing for divorce to end her four-year marriage. She also requested that Judge Robert Gardner of the Santa Ana Superior Court issue a restraining order to protect her against Sherry. "The defendant has threatened the plaintiff with bodily harm," Bette's attorney declared. "And the plaintiff alleges she is fearful if defendant is not restrained from molesting the plaintiff, the plaintiff may suffer irreparable injury."

Meanwhile Sherry sent a letter to Bette through Dudley Furse, pleading with her "to call off the suit so I can go to a psychiatrist in the east whom I can talk to and who really knows about the mind." Bette reportedly wrote back: "Please remember there is no hate in my heart. I only want a solution to this thing."

By October 28, when Judge Gardner granted a temporary restraining order to prevent Davis's husband "from interfering with or molesting the plaintiff in any way," Sherry had voluntarily decamped for a house Bette owned on Toluca Lake, so that she and B.D. could return to Laguna Beach. "It's much better for her to stay there," Sherry announced. "It's a fortress, and all. It's protected by electric gates."

Even now that the court had ordered him to keep his distance, Sherry persisted in pressing for a reconciliation with Bette—who, three weeks to the day after abandoning him, surprised everyone by inviting her moody, mercurial husband to meet with her at Dudley Furse's office on the morning of Wednesday, November 9.

"Miss Davis and her husband have agreed to a trial reconciliation beginning immediately," Furse announced following the meeting. "Miss Davis has agreed to postpone any further action in her divorce in the hope of solving their marriage difficulties."

Even before the story appeared in the press, the Hollywood lunch crowd at Lucy's Restaurant was astonished to see the movie star and the muscleman—whose violent relationship had been abundantly documented in recent weeks—"laughing, talking, and holding hands," as they enjoyed a convivial lunch with Jack Skirball, producer of Bette's first post-Warners film, Payment on Demand, atRKO.

"I just need somebody to talk to me," Bette told twenty-two-year-old Marion Richards when she awakened her in the middle of the night. "Would you come downstairs? I'm in the mood to cook."

"I'm not very hungry," said the governess, only gradually comprehending that Davis's real motive for this curious behavior was a sudden surge of fear of her husband.

"Well, I'm going to cook anyway," Bette continued, with a manic rush of enthusiasm, "and I want to talk to you while I'm cooking, so get dressed and come downstairs!"

Whereupon, as Richards recalls, she dutifully got out of bed and accompanied her employer to the kitchen. Trying to lose herself in the rituals of cooking, Davis frantically prepared an enormous meal for the two of them at two-thirty in the morning.

Although Sherry (having briefly considered checking in at the

Menninger Clinic) had begun psychiatric sessions with Dr. Frederick Hacker, his behavior with Bette continued to alternate between violence and subservience. Marion Richards watched in horror as Bette's husband "started to act like a servant." For all Sherry's efforts to run Bette's house, no sooner would she come home from the studio than she would fly into a rage. ■ ' You prince!'' Bette would cry, jabbing him in the chest with her finger. "You're around this house all day doing nothing, while I'm out there being the breadwinner!" "There were times she was so cruel, it was unreal," says the governess.

As always, her sister Bobby provided another convenient target for Bette's nightly fury. She had divorced "Little" Bobby Pelgram in Las Vegas in 1945. Two years later, she had married David Roscoe Berry in Laguna Beach. When Bette learned that her new brother-in-law was a recovering alcoholic, she sent the couple a dozen cases of liquor for a wedding present. Bobby's second marriage was short-lived; and once again now, she had resumed her lonely role as Bette's shadow.

"Bobby was there for Bette when she was in her good moods, her bad moods, whatever mood she was in. And I must say, I've seen Bette treat her like dirt," says Marion Richards. But for all the abuse Bette regularly heaped on Bobby, it seemed to Richards that the waiflike younger sister continued to love and idolize the elder, whose needs and wishes she never questioned. In the Sherry household, Bobby often found herself thrust into the role of "peacemaker" between Bette and the more recalcitrant members of the domestic staff. Especially on those occasions when Bette hesitated to confront the staff for fear of being disobeyed, Bobby was sent in on her behalf. With one cook in particular, Bette despaired of ever getting her way when, enraged at the actress's meddling in her kitchen, the woman exploded at her, "Who and what do you think you are!?" Richards was astonished to see Bette dash out of the kitchen,' 'with her tail between her legs," and run straight to Bobby. "Bobby!" she ordered imperiously. "I want you to go in there and tell the cook that Mrs. Sherry doesn't want it done this way!"