Bette Davis (31 page)

Following Old Acquaintance, Bette arranged to meet Sherman— who had a wife and small child—in Acapulco; but first there came the immense disappointment of the 1943 Academy Awards ceremony, at which Bette had expected to win for her Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager. Instead the Best Actress award went to Greer Garson for Wyler's Mrs. Miniver. This was the film Willy had been about to make when he gave the damning interview about Bette, even going so far as to say how happy he was to be working with Garson, instead of Davis, who, for all her talent, seemed hell-bent on destroying her career.

Hence Bette's particularly foul humor when, shortly thereafter, Sherman failed to meet her as arranged in Acapulco.

That Jack Warner can hardly have understood the source of her upset is suggested by his having offered to send Farney to Acapulco, clearly in hopes of soothing her to the point where she might agree to attend the Mexican Red Cross reception.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for you to be the great lady all Mexico knows you are," wired Warner on March 15, confident at last that this was precisely the sort of thing Bette Davis wanted to hear.

"I was standing just inside the entrance of my store, and suddenly I heard a terrifying yell,'' said Dave Freedman, who owned a cigar shop at 6249 Hollywood Boulevard, near the office of Bette's attorney, Dudley Furse. "It made my blood curdle. The yell came from a man walking just inside my view, and as I heard him yell, I saw him suddenly fall straight backward and land on his head. He made no attempt at all to break the fall with his arms or hands, so that's why I think something happened to him before he hit the ground. Blood rushed from his ears and nostrils."

And according to advertising man Gilbert Wright, who was standing outside when Farney mysteriously collapsed shortly after leaving Furse's office at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, August 23, 1943: "I had seen him walk past the store entrance. When he was almost past, he let out a throaty cry, and the next moment he came down on the back of his head, just as if he were doing a blackflip and hadn't quite made it. I ran to him, and it was all I could do to hold him, because he was in convulsions. The blood was flowing from his nose and ears."

It had seemed to Dudley Furse that Farney was "in good spirits" as, a short while before, he signed tax papers pertaining to Bette's new independent production company, B.D. Inc., which—according to a June 1943 agreement—was set to produce some of her pictures at Warners after she had completed her next film there, Mr. Skeffing-ton.

"Mrs. Farnsworth, we believe your husband has had an epileptic fit," said a caller from Hollywood Receiving Hospital, where an ambulance had delivered the unconscious Farney (who was recorded to have had no alcohol on his breath).

"There are a great many things my husband may have had," Bette replied, "but I assure you that an epileptic fit is not one of them!"

Within minutes, Bette summoned her personal physician, Dr. Paul Moore, to arrange for Farney's immediate transfer to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where X-rays disclosed a fractured skull. By this time, Farney's condition had changed from "unconscious" to "semi-conscious."

"We have been unable to ascertain what caused the skull frac-

ture," Dr. Moore told reporters at the hospital. "Mr. Farnsworth has not been able to talk coherently."

Meanwhile Bette and Ruthie had arrived at Hollywood Presbyterian, where Farney failed to recognize them; doctors urged the frantic wife to go home and rest. Contrary to what observers may have thought at the time, it seems unlikely that Bette's acute agitation arose out of any great love for her husband. Robin Brown points out that by the time of Farney's accident, the couple's romance was clearly over.

As late as October of 1941, Bette had rushed to her husband's bedside at Abbot Hospital in Minneapolis when he was stricken with a nearly fatal case of lumbar pneumonia; but after that, the couple's two-and-a-half-year marriage had deteriorated steadily, with episodes of drinking, infidelity, and domestic violence.

The press carried stories about the glorious Arabian horse Farney had given Bette (without mentioning that it had been paid for with her money); and there was much publicity about the airplane Bette had purchased for her beloved Farney, who, while his wife was busy working at the studio, happily filled the hours with a group of amateur aviators called The Quiet Birdmen. Jack Warner's correspondence with Bette in this period suggests that he—like others in Hollywood—mistakenly regarded the affable, impeccably mannered Arthur Farnsworth as a stabilizing influence on Bette. After all, he expertly squired her to a variety of studio social functions, where, as Robin Brown recalls, Farney was particularly fond of all the attention he received as Bette Davis's escort.

But by the time of Now, Voyager, husband and wife rarely slept together anymore. Alcohol had rendered Farney impotent one time too many. Temporarily Bette moved in with Bobby on Laurel Canyon Boulevard (the address she quiedy began to list on studio documents) and talked of putting Butternut and Riverbottom up for sale.

Desperate not to lose any of the perks of being a movie star's husband, Farney repeatedly pressed for reconciliation, suggesting that, in the absence of passion, there might be benefits for both of them in a sexless marriage. And so it was that after Vincent Sherman failed to meet her in Acapulco, Bette agreed to go to Butternut for a brief reunion with Farney, who had taken up war work as a ' 'liaison man'' between airplane production plants in the South and the Honeywell Precision Manufacturing Company. No sooner did they arrive in New Hampshire, however, than the old hostilities resumed, with heavy drinking on both sides. The fighting and drinking continued on the train to Los Angeles, where Bette later

admitted to having taunted Farney by declaring herself in love with Vincent Sherman.

"The blood in the fracture was black and coagulated, not merely purple and partially congealed as it would have been if the injury had been received only last Monday," declared Dr. Homer Keyes, the assistant county autopsy surgeon, who signed the autopsy report after Farney died on Wednesday night, August 25, with Bette and Ruthie at his bedside. "The fracture could have been inflicted as long as two weeks ago, and, conceivably, Farnsworth had been walking around ever since with the condition fructifying until it eventually caused his death."

Within hours of the release of the autopsy report, Warner Bros, distributed a statement from Bette that, at first, seemed to address the questions raised by Dr. Keyes's findings. "When I learned of the autopsy report," said die actress, "and was asked if I could remember any recent accident which might account for an earlier brain injury, I recalled a fall that Farney had at Butternut, our New Hampshire home, late in June. He was coming downstairs in his stockinged feet to answer the telephone when he slipped on the first landing and slid the full length of the stairs. He landed on his back and struck the back of his head and quite severely scraped his back. He suffered the usual lameness for several days but not being the complaining kind he said nothing more about it and so I thought no more about it. I realize now that little things that happened since, which I thought nothing of at the time, were a result of that fall, all of which have been confirmed by Dr. Moore. At least to find a reason for a seemingly ridiculous accident is a relief and a comfort tome."

Unfortunately, where Dr. Keyes had speculated about an injury that Farney would have suffered "as long as two weeks ago," it was now two months since the fall at Butternut that Bette described. An investigator from the district attorney's office visited her at Riv-erbottom that Friday, August 27, to review her statement in person.

In Los Angeles, rumor was already rampant that the fatal blow had been sustained the week before when a jealous husband mercilessly pummeled Farnsworth after discovering him in bed with his wife. It was a rumor Bette was particularly anxious to put to rest, lest it tarnish the myth of her perfect marriage to Farney, whose death soon had Bette seeming to believe in the myth herself.

' 'I didn't see the fall—I was upstairs—but I heard him and I came running down," Davis declared at the August 31 inquest. "He was kind of wiggly there for a few minutes and very limp. He was lame

and stiff later—you know how a fall like that would affect one—but he never said anything about it, never complained."

Asked whether her husband had seemed ill recently, Bette replied: "During the past four weeks I have been away on vacation and he has been in die East on business and if anything has come up that troubled him physically during that time, I didn't know about it."

Without waiting for the coroner's jury to rule that Farney's death had been ' 'accidental and the result of a fall" for which ' 'no person was to blame," Bette, dressed all in black, swept out a side door of the courtroom, accompanied by Dudley Furse. Although a spokesman for the actress announced that she had to leave directly to accompany her husband's body on a flight to New England, Farney's August 31 death certificate indicates that the body had been shipped to Rutland, Vermont, three days before.

In 1939 in New Hampshire, Bette's romance with Farney had allowed her to play Judith Traherne to his Dr. Steele; so it was strangely fitting that Bette's testimony at the 1943 inquest inescapably called to mind Leslie Crosbie's courtroom appearance in The Letter. The story Bette told to account for Farney's death—his having fallen down a flight of stairs—even echoed the scene in The Little Foxes in which Regina Gidden's husband dies on a staircase after they have quarreled. Following the death of her second husband, Bette would coyly hint to friends that somehow she had been responsible. She would hint by turns that she might have pushed him at Butternut or on the train to Los Angeles; or that, like Regina Giddens, she had failed to help him when he fell. But this was merely her pattern of revising the prosaic details of her own life in terms of her movie roles. In 1939, Bette's relationship with Farney had begun as a melodramatic fantasy out of one of her own movies; and in a sense, that was how it ended as well.

We fought all the time with her on the picture. We figured she was a little more 'Bette Davis' than she usually was because of the death of the husband."

Unit manager Frank Mattison's notes suggest that the principal problem was Bette's insistence on ceaselessly rewriting the Epstein brothers' script, adding and subtracting dialogue according to whim: "It sure is tough on a unit manager to sit by with a show that goes like this where she is the whole band—the music and all the instruments, including the bazooka," Mattison recorded. "I suppose she wants to have her finger even in scenes in which she does not appear."

Repeatedly, the unit manager complained of Bette's unabashed efforts to usurp directorial authority: ' 'There isn't a damn thing that can be done as long as Bette Davis is the director," Mattison told studio production manager Tenny Wright.

To make matters worse, it seemed to Mattison that Sherman was not doing all he could to control the headstrong actress.

Unlike Sherman—whom Warner had declined to release from the picture—the Epstein brothers had a clause in their (post-Casablanca) studio contract that gave them the option of going back east in October and November, as they often liked to do. Although, initially, they had waived this right in order to make Mr. Skeffing-ton, before long Davis's ugly behavior on the set caused them to reconsider.

"I am sure that when the Epsteins see it they will be spinning on their heads like tops," Mattison warned Wright when Bette appeared with a long list of script revisions.

At length, when Bette declined to retake a scene as the Epsteins had written it, the writer-producers appealed to Jack Warner.

Julius Epstein says that by now the mere mention of the actress's name caused Warner to use "language that would make a sailor blush.'' Angrily declaring this the moment when he would confront her once and for all and reestablish the production's chain of command, Warner boldly strode off to the set—where the mere sight of her staring daggers at him caused the studio boss to smile weakly and blurt out, "Bette, darling!"

' 'We are in somewhat of a dilemma concerning the matter of our producers refusing to have anything to do with the picture," recorded Mattison, following the Epsteins' abrupt departure. "Miss Davis is not only the director, but she is now the producer, also."

At the end of a day's work, a weary, discouraged Vincent Sherman was sitting alone in the shadows on an empty soundstage. All

he could think about was how to escape the actress who was making his life miserable.

Finally, he remembered an episode of sacroiliac trouble he had experienced several months earlier. "I know what I'll do." Sherman recalls his train of thought. ' 'Tomorrow I '11 help the boys pick up a table or something, and then I'll scream and M to the floor and say my back is out. No doctor will be able to refute that— they'll have to get somebody else!"

Suddenly the click-click of Bette's heels pierced Sherman's reverie. He remained motionless. Perhaps she would go by without noticing him.

"Why are you still here?" she called, coming closer when he failed to answer. "Why are you sitting in the dark?"

"I was just thinking," said the director, hoping that she would turn around and leave him alone.

"You seem like you could use a drink," said Bette, beside him now. "Look, I've got a bottle of Scotch in my dressing room."

"That's one way to solve it," Sherman's wife, Hedda Comoro, told him the next morning. "But be careful."

Davis regarded the affair with Sherman as another token of her increased power; but even her having taken the director as her lover again did not cause her to heed his advice on how to portray the egocentric beauty Fanny Trellis Skeffington. Over the director's objections, Bette insisted on striving for effect with a "speech grotesque" achieved by raising her voice a full octave (purportedly because it made her character seem "more feminine").

That, by this point in her career, Bette may have been a good deal less interested in seriously exploring character than in playing to the gallery is suggested by an exchange she had with Sherman when he protested at another self-conscious bit of grotesquerie: the ludicrous wispy red wig she wore after a bout with diptheria robs Fanny of her long-cherished beauty.