Bette Davis (24 page)

At a glance one might easily mistake these photographs for stills from the F. Scott Fitzgerald world of Dark Victory; in most of them, there is even a trim, tweedy young man with slicked-back hair, who bears a distinct resemblance to George Brent—or rather to Dr. Steele, with whom the doomed Judith Traherne falls in love and retreats to a little white farmhouse in the New England countryside.

And like Judith, Bette is regularly accompanied by a faithful best

friend who—like the Geraldine Fitzgerald character in the movie-doubles as her secretary (Bette having drafted Robin in this capacity when the latter complained of not having the money to join her in Franconia).

And then one comes upon the pictures of Butternut, the tumbledown little white farmhouse Bette has suddenly, impulsively purchased on Sugar Hill, summoning Warners' head carpenter to New Hampshire to restore it for her between his assignments constructing film sets.

In short, after a year of work, work, and nothing but, shedding one mask only to put on another, and scarcely a satisfying private life to speak of, Bette's six-week quest has ended with her reaching back into Hollywood's "Sargasso of the imagination," as Nathan-ael West called it, to appropriate a film character's richer, more satisfactory life for her own—including, apparently, the images of imminent death and the perpetual noble struggle against it that haunt Judith's otherwise idyllic New England existence with the man she loves.

The tall, tweedy Dr. Steele look-alike in the photographs was Arthur Austin Farnsworth, or "Farney," as Bette and Robin called the thirty-one-year-old desk clerk and assistant manager at Peckett's Inn. Robin had no sense that there was any grand passion between Bette and Farney. It seemed to Robin that although there was something rather "colorless" about Farney, Bette was drawn to him for his charming, impeccable manners, which instantly put her at ease.

Within seventy-two hours of checking in at Peckett's, Bette was being squired about Franconia by the suave, gregarious assistant manager, who—like Dr. Steele in the movie—seemed suddenly to have been put on earth solely to attend to her needs. Very quickly he abandoned his desk duties to amuse her with an endless round of barn dances, hikes, and romantic country drives in his convertible.

A man of attractive surfaces and diverting patter, an expert horseman and amateur pilot with a carefully concealed drinking problem, Arthur Farnsworth possessed scant ambition for a career of his own. After a brief stint in the office of a Boston oil burner company, in 1933 Farney had repaired to the White Mountains, where hotel work allowed him to play at being a country gentleman, always holding out the hope of receiving a substantial inheritance from his mother's "well-to-do" sister, whom he called "Mother Main." In the interim there had been a brief marriage to Boston socialite and aviatrix Betty Jane Aydelotte, but the couple had sep-

arated; and when he met Bette Davis that August, much to his chagrin he was still waiting for the divorce to become final.

1 'Boy?■' scribbled Jack Warner on the page of doodles he preserved from the October 22, 1939, meeting in Mountainville, New York, where he and Bette finally compromised on a three-picture-a-year limit. Having written this near the name "Mr. Farnsworth" and the notation "With Bette Davis," Warner is clearly trying to determine whether Farney is her new boyfriend and what role he may be quietly playing in the negotiations.

Suspicions had arisen that a new player was involved when, in hopes of luring Bette back to Los Angeles, George Brent had called her in Franconia recently, asking to spend some time with her there. Instead Bette had arranged to meet him in Boston, where she passed a few hours with him at the Copley Plaza Hotel, then rushed back to the White Mountains, leaving Brent with the distinct impression that he had been rebuffed.

Brent's mission having failed, Obringer indicated to the actress's representatives that if she did not report to work immediately, Warner planned to replace her at the studio with Vivien Leigh, who had recently finished her role as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind: a role Bette had coveted, though Jack Warner had refused even to consider loaning her out when David Selznick decided not to distribute the picture through Warner Bros.

Studio records show that Obringer's was no mere idle threat. Warner was indeed about to make a move for Leigh if Davis's recalcitrance persisted beyond October 22.

"The story we want to give out is brief,'' Warner told Hal Wallis, after his successful meeting with Bette and the mysterious Mr. Farnsworth. ' 'You can give out something to the effect that we want to make fewer pictures with Bette Davis as we want to keep making the high quality of pictures we have achieved with her."

After the photographs in Bette's album showing her idyllic existence with Farney in New Hampshire, one is momentarily startled to discover an image of her peacefully feeding a newborn baby at home in Los Angeles that November. Named after Ruthie, the child is Ruth Favor Pelgram (Fay, as everyone called her), to whom Bobby had given birth at Hollywood Hospital on October 1.

Following Bette's meeting with Jack Warner, she, Farney, Robin, and several other friends were driving cross-country when Ruthie tracked them down with the news that the birth of Bobby's baby had plunged the young mother into a new fit of uncontrollable

mania, the first to blight her marriage to Little Bobby Pelgram, who was then working as a publicist at Universal Studios. It seemed likely that Bobby would have to be hospitalized again, and Ruthie asked Bette to cut her trip short and come home immediately. When Bette returned with Farney and Robin, she found Bobby a changed person, no longer the stylish, more confident figure she had been since marrying the wealthy sportsman. Bette had seen this behavior before: the haunted glances and erratic gestures, the screaming fits and paranoid ravings that had caused Bobby to be repeatedly institutionalized in the past. Ruthie summoned an ambulance to the Pelgrams' Laurel Canyon home. The shrieking, cursing Bobby was carried out of the house as Bette made a great show of promising to watch over Bobby's husband and baby, who were to stay with her during Bobby's hospitalization.

Farney lingered in Los Angeles through Christmas, after which he returned to Franconia, where Bette promised to join him in March. By that time she would be finished with All This and Heaven Too, the interim film Warners had scheduled until her next major project was ready: an adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Letter, to be directed by William Wyler. In Farney's absence, Bette embarked on a brief affair with her director on All This and Heaven Too, Anatole Litvak, a close friend of Wyler's. In March, when Bette called New Hampshire to say she wouldn't be coming to Butternut after all, Farney appeared in Los Angeles to look out for his interests, Davis's on-the-set romance with Litvak having been widely hinted at in the press. Once again, however, as with Wyler, Bette failed to understand that that was all it was: a director's liaison with his leading lady, to last only so long as they were working together.

When filming was completed, on April 22, Litvak agreed to meet Bette in Hawaii for a quiet holiday together before she started work on The Letter. Three days later, Ruthie and Bobby (newly released from the hospital) saw Bette and Robin off on the boat to Honolulu. Also on board was Bob Taplinger, of Warner's West Coast publicity department, whose amorous attentions were a welcome comfort to Bette's badly wounded pride when, without a word of explanation or regret, Litvak simply failed to appear.

gest Wyler's lack of certainty about whether Bette would want to work with him again after he had directed Merle Oberon in Withering Heights and—more troubling, no doubt—married Margaret Tallichet.

Wyler had not been the first director to propose The Letter for Bette Davis at Warner Bros. Studio records show that Edmund Goulding had "plugged" it to Hal Wallis and others on numerous occasions. But in the spring of 1938, when Jack Warner submitted the text of Maugham's play to the Production Code Administration, head censor Joseph I. Breen replied that there could be no question of his approving "the story of a wife, who murders her lover, but who, by lying, deceit, perjury, and the purchase of an incriminating letter, defeats justice, and gets off 'scott free.' " Besides the murder, particularly distressing to Breen's office were what he characterized as' 'all the sordid details of the illicit sex relationship between the married woman and her lover," as well as "very numerous references to the second mistress of the murdered man, who is characterized as a China woman."

Like other stories in Maugham's 1926 collection The Casaurina Tree, "The Letter" is said to have been based on an actual occurrence in the English colony in Malaya, where it had been Maugham's custom to gather material for his fiction. The source in this case appears to have been Singapore press reports concerning the sensational trial of Mrs. Ethel Mabel Proudlock for the April 23, 1911, murder of William Crozier Steward, whom she accused of having attempted to rape her while her husband, headmaster of a school in Kuala Lumpur, had been dining out with a member of his staff. Whereas the English colony as a whole seemed to believe Mrs. Proudlock's contention that, surprised by Steward's unexpected visit and appalled by his sexual advances, she had shot him six times in self-defense, the prosecution maintained that the headmaster's wife was, in fact, one of Steward's two mistresses: the other being a local Chinese woman.

According to the prosecutor, there had been no attempted rape at all, just simple jealousy of Steward's involvement with the Chinese woman: hence the crime of passion, for which Mrs. Proudlock was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. Although the murderess was subsequently pardoned, she is recorded to have died not long afterward in an English insane asylum.

To this source material Maugham added the melodramatic plot device of the incriminating letter, which the murderess sent her lover, urging him to visit while her husband is away; and which her lawyer must retrieve from the Chinese woman afterward, lest she

turn it over to the prosecution. For his short story and the 1927 stage dramatization based on it, Maugham also significantly altered the outcome of the trial, allowing the murderess to go "scott free" (as Hollywood's Production Code Administration noted with particular horror): her sole punishment suggested in the pungent line with which Leslie Crosbie famously closes the play: "With all my heart I still love the man I killed.''

In spite of Joseph Breen's 1938 pronouncement, Wyler's personal papers show that he was actively pursuing the project in the summer of 1939 when he and Robert Stevenson conducted extensive talks that resulted in Stevenson's August 26 "Suggested Methods of Treatment'' for a second film version of The Letter (the first having been made at Paramount in 1929, with Jeanne Eagels as Leslie Crosbie: a picture that, Breen noted in his letter to Jack Warner, had aroused "nation-wide protest" at the time of its release).

Although by September of 1939 it was being said at Warner Bros, that Wyler was on the verge of convincing Samuel Goldwyn to secure the motion picture rights to The Letter, this was probably just Wyler's devious way of reviving Jack Warner's interest in the Maugham project, much as the director had once manipulated Goldwyn into buying Wuthering Heights by indicating that Warner wanted it. On September 28, Hal Wallis's executive assistant, Walter MacEwen, informed his superior about Goldwyn's purported "interest" in The Letter, the rights to which were being offered to Warner Bros, for $25,000. Another factor besides Bette's presence at Warners (and Jack Warner's perpetual distaste for loaning her out to other studios) made Wyler want to direct The Letter there rather than for Goldwyn, to whom he remained under contract: what he perceived as Goldwyn's nettlesome tendency to take personal credit for Wyler's artistic achievements, as when Goldwyn reportedly declared, "I made Withering [sic] Heights, Wyler only directed it."

By this point in Wyler's career, the credit he received for a picture had come to be far more important to him than the money he was being paid: or so it seemed to Hal Wallis, who, after making the deal with Wyler to film The Letter, recorded the director's preoccupation above all else with being given "the proper billing and publicity." Thus in his April 9, 1940, contract, besides spelling out the credit he required on screen, Wyler wanted it specified that his name would appear in "all paid advertising and publicity . . . in type 33 % % the size used for the title.'' The size of Wyler's ego and the extent to which Goldwyn may have pierced it is suggested by the Warner Bros, general counsel's August 1, 1940, warning to

director of advertising and publicity S. Charles Einfeld that the studio "religiously" give Wyler precisely the credit indicated in his contract, lest the director "raise a lot of hell," as he seemed most likely to do should they disappoint him.

In addition to the potential problems of censorship that both MacEwen and producer Robert Lord had warned would have to be dealt with if Warner Bros, was to bring The Letter to the screen, from the first Hal Wallis appears to have been concerned about the difficulties presented by "photographing a play" that struck him as "very wordy." Wallis feared that if Wyler did not find precisely the right tempo for the material, if the action was somehow allowed to be too slow, the finished film might turn out to be dull.

Some of this, naturally, seems to have been the residue of Wallis's earlier conflicts with Wyler, whose directorial style had seemed so entirely out of place at Warner Bros, when he filmed Jezebel there in 1937-38. Since then, however, the immense triumph of Jezebel on all conceivable levels should have extinguished any doubts that Wallis and others may have had about Wyler's professional competence. But even now, as evidenced by the usual blast of threats, insults, and diatribes, there remained abundant concern at Warner Bros, about what was still widely perceived there as the inefficiency of Wyler's working methods.

Wyler's marks and notations on Robert Stevenson's August 1939 treatment and on the various drafts of The Letter completed by screenwriter Howard Koch at Warner Bros, provide rare glimpses of the director working through his material prior to filming it. (Talli Wyler recalls that whenever he began a new project, her husband's all-embracing concentration was such that it was almost as if he had suddenly gone "under water," where inevitably he remained for the duration.) Already, on the first page of Stevenson's pre-Warner Bros, treatment, Wyler's pencil marks seem to sketch out what he and cameraman Tony Gaudio would do in the opening moments of The Letter. Stevenson devotes some fifteen lines and three short paragraphs to describing what he envisions as the film's initial images, "establishing the Crosbie bungalow and the native huts around it": alongside which copious account, in the right-hand margin Wyler has scratched two thick black lines, one beside the first paragraph, and another beside the third; and then, to link them, he has traced a kind of semicircle, apparently to represent how he would film all of what Stevenson describes in paragraphs one to three—the slumbering dogs, the native houseboys, the fluttering birds, as well as the murder itself—with a long, elegant sweep of the camera.