Part 6 (1/2)

Davis's control in The Letter is only in part a matter of repression. She plays Leslie Crosbie as a bored, stifled housewife forced to expend her libido in the creation of a crocheted white coverlet. Still, her Leslie is also a sociopath, a calculating killer and remorseless liar, ceaselessly putting on acts for those around her because authentic emotions-other than murderous rage, that is-are not part of her psychological makeup. Even as Leslie fires the gun repeatedly at Hammond's dead body in the opening moments of the film, her face is stonelike, her feelings impossible to penetrate, and it's this ambiguity that makes it possible for audiences to question Leslie's motives from the beginning, even while we give her some benefit of the doubt.

There is a marvelous extended moment when Leslie's cold sociopathology, her wish to appear sympathetic while lacking all feeling, and Davis's generosity as an actor come together in overlapping, complementary silhouettes. When Joyce tells Robert that he has paid $10,000 for the letter, Wyler handles much of the scene in a single shot lasting about a minute and a half. Joyce is slightly out of focus on the left, with Robert sitting in the middle of the couch and Leslie slumped in the corner on the right. With the camera remaining static, Leslie performs the role of both the exhausted but exonerated innocent and the cunning killer, all with a minimum of gestures or words. A slight s.h.i.+ft of the eyes, a studied rearrangement of the hands, even an absence of movement altogether-all reveal the inner workings of Leslie's mind as the truth of her duplicity finally dawns on her gullible husband. And the balletlike interaction of Davis and Marshall demonstrates the difference between, on the one hand, two fine screen actors playing off each other toward a mutually satisfying end, and Miriam Hopkinslike upstaging on the other. Bette's subtle gestures compel our attention-and she's literally upstage of Marshall while she's performing them-but not at the expense of her costar, who plays it all with equal understatement. If anything it's Marshall's scene more than Davis's.

This is William Wyler's direction at its un.o.btrusive best as well. He lets the audience see the couple's imminent destruction without breaking them up into cra.s.s individual shots. We see the marriage collapse in a shower of tacit lies and their tense exposure in what is effectively a ninety-second two-shot, with an out-of-focus third wheel on the side serving as catalyst.

Curiously, Wyler himself had second thoughts about The Letter once he saw it in an a.s.sembled cut. The normally resolute director was convinced that he'd created a far too thoroughly unsympathetic Leslie Crosbie, and he was worried that audiences would react badly to his film as a result. The film's production notes reveal that after seeing the film with Hal Wallis, Wyler requested permission to reshoot and reconstruct the whole ending, and Wallis was inclined to let him do it as long as he stuck to a prearranged plan and didn't ”start wandering [and] bringing in four or five alternate things.”9 Wyler asked the screenwriter Howard Koch (who was working with the uncredited Anne Froelick) to rewrite these final scenes to provide a more compa.s.sion-inspiring Leslie.

This time it was Davis who prevailed. Alarmed that he was tinkering with something she knew was working fine as it was, she requested a screening of Wyler's initial cut. If Bette Davis was going to soften the character she'd struggled to make hard-edged, at least she wanted to see what she'd done before it was destroyed.

To what she oddly calls her ”shame,” she burst into tears at the end. After composing herself, she argued that what she called ”the intelligent audience” would understand what she and Wyler were doing, and that if they filmed the rewritten scenes they would risk losing everyone.10 They did reshoot the final bedroom scene between Davis and Marshall on October 16 and 17, as well as a scene involving James Stephenson and Frieda Inescort (who plays Stephenson's wife, Dorothy Joyce), but this was scarcely the wholesale new ending Wyler had proposed.

When the annual Oscar nominations were announced, Davis found herself nominated for a third year in a row. After winning in 1938 for Jezebel, she was nominated in 1939 for Dark Victory but lost, of course, to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind. The critic Janet Flanner describes the logic: ”As Hollywood abbreviates the paradoxes, in Victory, which was Davis's tops, she had to lose the Oscar to Leigh, who got it on The Wind because Davis had just got it on Jezebel because she hadn't got it on her next-to-tops Bondage because she had to lost it to Colbert in One Night, which was why Davis had got her original Oscar on Dangerous in the first place.”11 Warners didn't do much campaigning for Davis this time. Its own gigantic-budget All This and Heaven, Too was up against The Letter in the Best Picture category, though Bette did get a nod as ”Best Dressed Gal of the Week” for her ”clever, self-designed slacks suit with a new kind of military aspect.”12 At the ceremony, which was held at the Biltmore Hotel on February 27, 1941, the emcee Bob Hope noticed Bette in the audience and quipped, ”Bette drops in on these affairs every year for a cup of coffee and another Oscar.” But she didn't walk away with one that year. Ginger Rogers snared it for Kitty Foyle.

TONY GAUDIO HAD faced an unexpected problem during the filming of The Letter in the summer of 1940. Like any fine cinematographer, he had a sharp eye for shapes and shadows. So it wasn't surprising that he noticed that Bette was pregnant.

Gaudio ”kept looking at me sideways,” Davis later told her confidant, Whitney Stine. ”Obviously, I couldn't have the baby, and I was upset as h.e.l.l. I had already had two abortions. I was only 32 and thought to myself that, if I married again and wanted to have a baby, my insides might be in such a mess that I couldn't. I cried and cried, but I knew what I had to do. (Where was that d.a.m.n pill when I needed it?) I went to the doctor on a Sat.u.r.day and showed up for scenes on Monday wearing a formfitting white eyelet evening dress for a scene. And that d.a.m.n Tony said, 'Jesus, Bette, it looks like you've lost five pounds over the weekend!' ”13 Davis never revealed the ident.i.ty of the father, but that may be because she didn't know herself.

Bette reserved her most consistent affections for her dogs, who could be trusted to provide her a constant flow of all the simple love in dogdom. In the late 1930s she acquired a Pekingese she named Popeye after a fan magazine applied the cartoon moniker to Bette.14 (Actually Bette told the writer Gladys Hall that she herself thought her eyes resembled those of a bullfrog.)15 There was also Sir Cedric Wogs, a white Sealyham terrier sometimes called ”Ceedie,” sometimes ”Wogs.”16 Her favorite remained Tibby, the female black Scottish terrier. No wonder. A guide to dog breeds describes the Scottie: ”This breed has unusual variable behavior and moods-it can get moody and snappish as an adult. It is inclined to be stubborn and needs firm, gentle handling from an early age or it will dominate the household.”17 Bette once had a director's chair made for Tibby, complete with the pooch's name emblazoned on the back. A poodle, too, arrived sometime along the way. Ham's Doberman moved out along with Ham.

In ”Divorce Is Making Her Miserable,” Gladys Hall reported that Bette left the Coldwater Canyon house after splitting up with Nelson and moved into a furnished rental in Beverly Hills with her friend Ruthie Garland. An unsourced clipping in one of Davis's sc.r.a.pbooks identifies Garland as ”an old friend from Boston”; check the credits for The Sisters and you'll find that Bette got her an acting job: the small role of Laura Watkins. (It's Garland's only screen credit.) Every Wednesday they had dinner at the counter at Steven's, a diner near the Warners lot that was operated by another Bostonian, Steven Draper.18 What Gladys Hall failed to report was that the other Ruthie, Bette's mother, had moved in with Bette first. But their relations.h.i.+p was fraught with tension, and Mother quickly moved out again in a huff. There were two different postdivorce rentals: one on North Rockingham and one on Beverly Grove.19 And the January 1939 Screen Guide claimed that Bette had moved in with Bobby and her husband.20 Wherever she was living, the Yankee-est girl who ever came down the pike had let loose. Bette finally launched the affair she'd always wanted with George Brent-whose second marriage had ended, as it had begun, in 1937-but it didn't last very long. ”Our secretaries were so busy courting each other for us that it was inevitable that they would take over our romance,” Davis wrote.21 She also had a brief fling with Anatole Litvak, of all people; after the shouting matches came l.u.s.t. The ever-overheated Lawrence Quirk has Miriam Hopkins, ”still riddled with lesbian hankerings for Davis,” telephoning Bette in a fury and threatening to name her as correspondent in Hopkins's divorce proceedings against Litvak.22 The only indication in Davis's personal sc.r.a.pbooks that Litvak was anything more than just one of her many directors occurs in a graffito added to a clipping about Bette attending the Warner Club Sixth Annual Dinner Dance at the Biltmore Hotel on February 17, 1940. Her escort was Litvak, after whose name Bette has appended a handwritten ”!”23 In the late summer of 1939, a more long-lasting relations.h.i.+p began. In late July, after finis.h.i.+ng The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Ess.e.x (and before starting All This and Heaven, Too), Bette headed for Mountainville, New York, to spend two weeks with her friend Peggy Ogden. On August 14, the two women left by car for New England. The Boston Globe caught up with her on the Cape, in Dennis. ”Mostly I am eating lobsters and clams,” Bette declared. Davis also said that she was blissfully free of Warners' publicity department, going so far as to claim that her contract contained a clause that forbade any studio publicists to come within one hundred yards of her when she wasn't shooting a film.24 ”After two weeks of roaming, seeing old friends whom I no longer had anything in common with, nor they me, I went to an inn in Franco-nia, New Hamps.h.i.+re,” Bette later wrote. ”It was called Peckett's.”25 Franconia was, and remains, a small Yankee village about two-thirds of the way up New Hamps.h.i.+re toward Quebec. It's about ten miles from the Connecticut River, which divides New Hamps.h.i.+re from its neighbor, Vermont. About three miles in the other direction is the northwestern edge of White Mountain National Forest. Robert Frost once had a farmhouse there. The closest town of any size is Littleton, the population of which was then 5,000.

The a.s.sistant manager at Peckett's Inn was a thirty-three-year-old divorce named Arthur Farnsworth. Handsome, cultured, manly but refined, Farnsworth was more than just the a.s.sistant hotelier; he was an experienced pilot and aeronautic engineer-rather like Howard Hughes, only not crazy. He was also an accomplished violinist. Descending from praiseworthy Yankee stock and bringing along equally fine manners, Farney was a most acceptable beau for Bette during her time in Franconia.

The more stable relations.h.i.+p Bette began while in Franconia was with the land itself. She bought what she called ”one hundred and fifty acres of rocky, rolling land” on Sugar Hill. (She later revised the figure upward to two hundred acres.)26 ”It was here that I came out of my blue funk-here that I felt happy for the first time in years. New Hamps.h.i.+re and Farney were a tonic for me. I kept extending this rare vacation, hating to leave.”27 The property had a name, which Bette kept: b.u.t.ternut.

In March 1940, the Hollywood press was all abuzz. Arthur Farnsworth and his sister were currently Bette's houseguests, and the sweet promise of nuptials filled the gossip columns. But one famous scribe wasn't so sure: ”It wouldn't surprise me if she does marry, but I doubt it will be to Farnsworth,” Louella Parsons noted.28 Louella may have been on to something. In late April, after finis.h.i.+ng work on All This and Heaven, Too, Bette set sail on the Monterey for a tenday vacation in Hawaii. Initially, the press reported that she was accompanied only by her friend Robin Byron.

Dateline: Honolulu, April 29: ”Hundreds of people” greeted Bette Davis as the s.h.i.+p pulled into the dock. ”Take off those dark gla.s.ses, Bette!” reporters shouted. ”And Bette did and shouted back, 'h.e.l.lo, everybody!' Wearing a white linen sailor dress with navy blue trim and a pert little sailor hat, Bette repaid her fans for waiting long on the hot crowded dock. She stood out on her lanai suite so everybody could see her, talked across to the crowds, jingled her gobs and gobs of charm bracelets, and smiled for pictures.” ”She wants to take hula lessons,” one reporter announced. Still another tracked Bette down a few days later and found her in ”a bright red and white Tahitian print holoku she had purchased that afternoon.” Davis had taken ”a trip around the island, with a stop at Janet Gaynor's beach home for a swim, and of course a luau,” at which Bette sampled poi with lomi lomi salmon. She'd also purchased a carved ivory pikake necklace for Ruthie.29 The journalists quickly discovered a much juicier detail: Bette was traveling with another friend besides Robin Byron. ”Just the publicity director, not a boyfriend,” Bette announced when asked who the short, good-looking, dark-haired man was-the one who was hanging around Bette's lanai. Thirty-one-year-old Robert Taplinger was indeed Warners' head of publicity. But with Farney having gone back East, and with Bette in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she was free to explore her coworker's other talents.

One member of the fourth estate was less than impressed with Bette's latest choice. ”From outward appearance, you might think he was just a shoe clerk or something.”

Dorothy Kilgallen, May 6: Warners is ”tearing its hair over Bette Davis's sudden and serious romance with Robert Taplinger, the press agent, but she just giggles, and what can they do?”

Jimmie Fidler, May 8: ”Arthur Farnsworth, Boston hotel Midas, is burning wires to Bette Davis in Hawaii, checking her 'romance' with a studio press agent.”

Reporters swarmed when Davis and Taplinger-and Robin Byron-arrived back in Los Angeles on May 13. Bette flatly denied that the couple was planning to be married.30 Hedda Hopper noted that she was still going out on the town with Taplinger on June 1. Toward the end of the month, Sidney Skolsky broke the news that a single gardenia was arriving for her on the set of The Letter every day; there was no card, no note, but everybody knew it was from Taplinger.

After The Letter wrapped, Bette headed east for a three-month vacation. She arrived at Boston's South Station at noon on July 27 and was promptly greeted by what the Boston Traveler described as a crowd of 1,000 ”unruly autograph seekers and hero-wors.h.i.+ppers, mostly young girls.” With a ten-man police escort, she was swept along by the crowd to a waiting car and ”whisked to the Ritz Carlton” for a press conference, at which she announced that her next film would be Calamity Jane. Davis was apparently of two minds about Calamity Jane. She wrote in Mother G.o.ddam that she ”would have adored to play this character. Always one of my dreams, one that didn't come through.”31 At the time, however, she told Modern Screen, ”There's been some talk of Calamity Jane, which I politely trust I shall not do.”32*

Bette had taken the train east with Robin Byron. Bob Taplinger had arranged for a special dinner on board with champagne, an empty chair for Bob, and a note: ”Don't wait for me.” Davis didn't. The affair was over.

THE GREAT LIE isn't great as much as it's outlandish: The das.h.i.+ng multimillionaire flier Peter Van Allen drunkenly marries the tempestuous concert pianist Sandra Kovak, but Sandra is a little vague about legalities; her divorce papers haven't actually been filed yet, so they aren't really married after all. Pete, sober for a change, goes on to marry his old sweetheart, the plain but wealthy Maggie, only to disappear over the jungles of Brazil, never having been told that during his weekend of inebriated illegal marriage he has impregnated Sandra, who is convinced by Maggie to bear the child, little Pete, who is raised by Maggie as her own son until Pete the father turns up alive, and Sandra threatens to reveal the truth to win both Petes back, and Maggie actually tells the truth and wins both Petes back, and Sandra loses the ball game. Surprisingly, Bette plays Maggie rather than Sandra.

* Jerry Wald's script for Calamity Jane, although written with Ann Sheridan in mind, was handed instead to Bette, but the film didn't get made until 1953, by which point it had become a Doris Day musical.33 Another of Bette's abortive projects around this time was the crime drama Danger Signal, which she emphatically didn't want to do; it was eventually made by Robert Florey in 1945.

”Before I started The Great Lie I wasn't very excited about it,” Davis told an interviewer at the time of the film's release in the spring of 1941. ”I had just come back from a vacation in New Hamps.h.i.+re [and] was still wondering what to do when I got some of my fan mail. A lot of it ran in this vein-'Why can't you be nice for a change?' I also remembered [that] someone, while I was in New Hamps.h.i.+re, said, 'Why, you're young!' Everyone apparently had the idea that I was an old woman due to the many older characters I played. . . . I guess I do need happier roles for a change. I don't kill anyone in this picture.”34 It was scarcely news that Davis wasn't thrilled by The Great Lie. Hal Wallis was enraged when he read in Harrison Carroll's syndicated column in mid-November 1940-the film was then in the middle of shooting-that Bette didn't think it was terribly important: ”This is just another motion picture,” she blithely told Carroll. Wallis advised Jack Warner thenceforth to have the publicity department ”keep people away from her.”35 Warners had been developing the property-Polan Banks's bestselling potboiler, January Heights-since early that year. Warners was all over the map in terms of choosing a director. In late January, Hal Wallis was considering two: Curtis Bernhardt and William Dieterle.36 Less than a month later, Jack Warner was adamant: ”Let us have it definitely understood that Vincent Sherman will be put on January Heights as the director.”37 Bette added her two cents sometime later: she wrote to Wallis that yet another choice, Lloyd Bacon, simply wasn't right for the picture. Maybe they could borrow Garson Kanin from RKO, but ”Eddie G. is the one if he would do it.”

Goulding needed convincing. In late September Wallis ordered Henry Blanke to ”keep after Goulding and have him start active preparation.” Goulding started working on it later that week.38 Warners originally a.s.signed the script to the writer Richard Sherman, but Sherman took so long with it that they handed it over to Lenore Coffee in June. And still n.o.body liked it very much. Blanke was afraid that the story was so contrived that any alteration in the already-unstable plot might cause the whole thing to collapse. At one point they even killed little Pete.

George Brent was cast, appropriately enough, as the flier, Peter Van Allen. (The critic Matthew Kennedy describes Brent's character all too well: ”He isn't much more than a hard-drinking sperm donor.”)39 But the part of Sandra was up for grabs. Rosalind Russell met with Goulding over c.o.c.ktails in late September. Warners' casting director, Steve Trilling, scheduled a meeting with Joan Crawford and tried to sell her on the project by telling her the story verbally, pointedly avoiding showing her the script itself.

Tallulah Bankhead was mentioned. So was Vivien Leigh. Barbara Stanwyck turned it down because she didn't want to play an unsympathetic character at that particular time. ”I'm dying to do Sandra!” Constance Bennett wired Hal Wallis in mid-October. Sylvia Sydney and Jane Wyatt were screen-tested, as was Anna Sten.

According to Mary Astor, Bette called her on the phone in December 1940 and asked her to play the role. ”She personally wanted me for the part, she said, and she apologized for asking me if I would mind taking a test. 'A few idiots have to be convinced.' ”40 Astor is slightly off on her chronology. January Heights, aka Far Horizon, aka The Great Lie, began filming on November 1 with the role of Sandra yet to be cast, though Astor's screen tests had taken place the previous week. Astor started shooting on November 15.

Thanks to Davis's intervention, Astor's Sandra Kovak is by far the juicier role. As Goulding described her, ”She is brandy, men, and a piano”-the last on which she persistently pounds the thunderous chords of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat Minor as a way of burning up her overabundant energy. She's flamboyant, catty, and gorgeously gowned. Brent's Pete tells Bette's Maggie in contrast, ”You smell of hay and horses and suns.h.i.+ne,” a signal to stop breathing if there ever was one.41 As Astor wrote in her memoirs, Davis ”was sullen and standoffish” at first. She watched nervously as Davis ”smoked furiously and swung her foot in the angry rhythm of a cat's tail.”42 After a few days of shooting, Davis just couldn't take it anymore. ”Hey, Astor!” she announced. ”Let's go talk a minute.” They adjourned to Bette's dressing room. ”She flopped on the couch and said, 'This picture is going to stink! It's too incredible for words. . . . I've talked to the writers and to Eddie, and everybody's satisfied but me, so it's up to us to rewrite this piece of junk to make it more interesting. All I do is mewl to George about ”that woman you married when you were drunk” and ”please come back to me” and all that c.r.a.p. And that's just soap opera.' ”43 Davis's idea was frankly self-effacing. It meant building up the fiery, elegantly nasty Sandra character at the expense of her own. ”Bette and I [became] as simpatico as a pair of dancers as we worked out the story,” Astor wrote.44 When Astor won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, Bette sent her a cable: ”We did it. Congratulations, baby.” ”People have said that I stole the picture from Bette Davis, but that is sheer nonsense. She handed it to me on a silver platter.”45 Which is why, no doubt, Astor thanked two people in particular in her Oscar acceptance speech: Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky.46 The t.i.tle continued to be a matter of contention. Bette hated the last one the studio settled on. ”I beg you not to call it The Great Lie,” Bette told Jack Warner, because ”the lie is not a great one” and ”it gives away the whole story before anyone sees the picture.” Goulding suggested one she thought she'd pa.s.s along to Jack: Aren't Women Fools? Warners stuck with The Great Lie.47 The Great Lie is great fun to the extent that Mary Astor is a great b.i.t.c.h. Orry-Kelly went out of his way to make Bette look dowdy-at one point he sticks her in a bizarre bonnet that makes her look like a cross between Little Bo Peep and Elvira Gulch-but he gives Astor the full treatment, with innumerable chic hats and furs and slinky black gowns. Her high international style only adds to her bite; the emotional stakes are always raised just that much higher when the vicious b.i.t.c.h looks fabulous.

Amusingly, when Maggie and Sandra adjourn to Arizona for Sandra's pregnancy-it looks a lot like the set for The Petrified Forest-they become a bickering married couple squabbling over ham and pickles, cigarettes and sleeping pills. Maggie even takes to wearing pants. As Sandra delivers her baby, the trousered Maggie paces back and forth on the porch like any other anxious father-to-be.

It's a fine moment onscreen as far as lesbian subtexts go, but the drama queen takes center stage in Sandra's mad scene, which comes complete with a howling desert windstorm, a well-barked ”You make me sick!” directed at Maggie (the killjoy certainly deserves it), a marvelously histrionic attempt to set the house on fire by hurling a kerosene lamp against the wall, and an excellent full-volume shriek. Unfortunately, down-to-earth Maggie methodically slaps Sandra twice in the face, and it's all over.

IN 1940, FLUSH with home owners.h.i.+p in New Hamps.h.i.+re and a raise to $4,500 a week, Bette bought a house in Glendale. As an article in Look noted, Davis had lived in at least twenty-five different places over the course of the last decade alone. Evidently it was time to alight. The house she chose, located at 1705 Rancho Avenue, was a Tudor located on the banks (what banks there were) of the Los Angeles River, where a flood two years earlier had ”washed the neighbors away.”48 She reportedly paid $50,000 for it and dubbed it Riverbottom.49 Riverbottom wasn't a large house. Janet Flanner pointed out in the New Yorker that it was ”probably the only two-bedroom, two-acre estate in the film colony.”50 It was homey, not grand-Flanner called it a ”peak-roofed Hansel and Gretel” house-and featured exposed beams holding up a high ceiling on the first floor; a brick patio; and a cozy breakfast room with a white dinette set. Davis's sc.r.a.pbooks are rife with pictures of the house, one of which Bette charmingly labeled ”my first home in California.” One photo shows a brick sidewalk with a floral border; another a circular brick raised planter in the backyard. The house sported not only a swimming pool but a stable, so naturally Bette bought a horse to go along with it. She labeled one sc.r.a.pbook picture ”Laddie, my Arabian horse, Ruthie, and me, riding ring at Riverbottom”; Bette and her mother are seen being pulled around the driveway in a carriage.51 But her domestic preoccupation remained b.u.t.ternut and its complete renovation. Ruthie had been supervising things for several weeks by the time Bette arrived in August 1940 to see what had gone on in her absence. She traveled with Robin Byron and stayed at the nearby estate of the novelist Ernest Poole.

When it was completed, b.u.t.ternut became a rambling, three-sectioned white house with a relaxed living room with a white couch and a red brick fireplace; a large, functional kitchen with wood cabinetry painted white; and an unfortunate early American dining room with overly quaint wallpaper featuring a Huck Finnlike boy repeated ad infinitum all over the room. The living room fireplace chimney was unusual in that it served to heat the kitchen; the flue traveled under and across the kitchen floor before heading to the roof. Bette's bedroom had its own 3,500-pound fireplace suspended by girders from the ceiling and a big couchlike bed in the center of the room. There was a large screened-in porch, too, along with servants' quarters. Bette loved it. Her nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away.52 Davis arrived back in Hollywood in early October. After filming the revised scenes for The Letter, she began making The Great Lie.

She married Farnsworth on New Year's Eve, 1940, at her friend Jane Bryan's ranch in Rimrock, Arizona. (Jane Bryan was now Mrs. Justin Dart.) Farney had been proposing for quite some time, and finally Bette agreed. Whitney Stine describes the scene: ”Three cars left Los Angeles on Monday morning, December 30, occupied by Davis, Ruthie, her hairdresser Margaret Donovan, [Donovan's] boyfriend Perc Westmore, dog Tibby, Lester Luisk [sic], cousin John Favor, and houseguest Ruth Garland. They picked up the marriage license in a driving rain in Prescott, Arizona. The weary travelers finally drove into the ranch on Tuesday afternoon. Sister Bobby and her husband flew in from Los Angeles with Dart in his private plane. The wedding was held that night.” Farney had flown himself in from New England.53 There was no honeymoon. Davis had to start work on her next picture.

As a publicity stunt, The Great Lie's world premiere took place on April 5, 1941-Bette's thirty-third birthday-in Littleton. (”Warner Bros. did this for me at my request. The purpose of the premiere was to raise money for the Littleton Hospital,” Davis later wrote, but the studio got great press no matter what.)54 Warner Bros. installed Davis-themed street signs all over town. For the duration of the gala, the All Saints Episcopal Church, for instance, was located at the corner of Dangerous and Dark Victory. Whitney Stine, always with an eye toward wardrobe, reports that ”Davis, in a white blouse and felt skirt, and Farnsworth, in a plaid s.h.i.+rt, and brown corduroy suit, hosted a c.o.c.ktail party at the Iron Mine Inn in the afternoon.”55 The New York Times rather snidely claimed that ”crowds of celebrities and curious swelled this quiet community five times its normal size of 4500, and everybody stayed up way past the usual bedtime and liked it a lot.”56 The governors of both New Hamps.h.i.+re and Vermont turned up. Life chronicled the event with a four-page spread. (”A birthday ballet is rendered by nervous s.h.i.+rley Walters of Littleton, aged 5,” one caption reads.) The prescreening stage show featured a 200-pound plaster of paris birthday cake, which was perilously suspended by safety cables above certain unnamed dancers-possibly including nervous little s.h.i.+rley Walters-and then lowered to the stage. There was also a 103-pound edible cake baked by a man named Gerald Cork.u.m.57 But ”the birthday gifts she most appreciated were cookies, candy, and preserves bestowed on her by Littleton people,” Life glowed. And the town mortician gave Bette a bag of b.u.t.ternuts.58

CHAPTER.

12.