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  BETTE DAVIS

  MORE THAN A WOMAN

  An Intimate Biography

  JAMES SPADA

  Table of Contents

  Begin Reading

  Connecticut ● New York ● Colorado

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE & PREFACE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICES

  OTHER BIOGRAPHIES BY JAMES SPADA

  DEDICATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PART ONE: “A High-Strung Young Filly”

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  PART TWO: “The Little Brown Wren”

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  PART THREE: “The Fourth Warner Brother”

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  PART FOUR: “Ten Black Years”

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  PART FIVE: “Survivor”

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  PART SIX: “The Lonely Lady”

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  COPYRIGHT NOTICES

  JAMES SPADA

  BETTE DAVIS:

  MORE THAN A WOMAN

  An Intimate Biography

  Copyright © 1993, 2013 by James Spada

  Int’l ISBN: 978-1-62071-056-2

  ISBN: 1-62071-056-0

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic means is not cool with us unless written permission has been received from the publisher

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Spada, James.

  More than a woman: an intimate biography of Bette Davis / James Spada. p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  ISBN 0-553-09512-9

  1. Davis, Bette, 1908-1989. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title. PN2287.D32S62 1993

  791.43’028’092—dc20

  [B] 93-7366

  CIP

  For information address:

  Author & Company, LLC

  P.O. Box 291

  Cheshire, CT 06410-9998

  This eBook was designed by iLN™

  and manufactured in the United States of America.

  OTHER BIOGRAPHIES BY

  JAMES SPADA

  Grace Kelly: The Secret Lives of a Princess

  Marilyn Monroe: Her Life in Pictures

  Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept the Secrets

  Barbra Streisand: Her Life

  To learn more about James Spada and

  all of his books please visit:

  http://www.JamesSpadasHollywood.com

  DEDICATION

  For Kathy Robbins—agent, mentor, friend.

  An actor is something less than a man;

  an actress is more than a woman

  —Inscription on Bette Davis’s cigarette case

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  James Spada has written twenty books, including the international bestsellers Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess; Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept the Secrets; Streisand: Her Life; and Monroe: Her Life in Pictures. Born and raised in Staten Island, New York, he now lives in Los Angeles.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I

  am deeply indebted to a number of people for their cheerful and dedicated help during the three years it took to research and write this book. First among these is Christopher Nickens, my friend and assistant, who worked with me as closely as anyone possibly could. Himself the author of a book about Bette Davis, Chris has an encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood in general and Bette in particular that enriched this book immeasurably. He conducted many of the interviews in these pages, did hours of library work, and generally kept things moving toward the inevitable deadline.

  I much admire the incredible knack of Cathy Griffin to find elusive people and then persuade them to open up to her. A private investigator, she traveled to Geneva, New York, Westport, Connecticut, Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, and Charlottesville, Virginia, on my behalf and unearthed a great deal of important information about Bette, Gary Merrill, Margot Merrill, B.D., Jeremy, and Ashley Hyman, and Michael and Chou Chou Merrill.

  Mike Szymanski spent long hours ferreting through the Halls of Records of Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties for vital statistics on Bette, her husbands, and her family. He made herculean efforts to locate witnesses to, and otherwise shed light on, Arthur Farnsworth’s fall on Hollywood Boulevard, poring through the Los Angeles fictitious name filings, county property records, birth, death, and marriage records, business license filings, and tax rolls, as well as the records of the L.A. District Attorney and Coroner’s offices. His perseverance was rewarded when the Coroner’s Office located the Farnsworth inquest transcript, which had long been thought missing.

  I am always grateful to my agent, Kathy Robbins, for her belief in me and her careful stewardship of my career. My editor, Gene Young, inherited this book, but her enthusiasm was always so high one would have thought it had been her brainchild. I deeply appreciate her good cheer and excellent advice. Thanks to Steve Rubin, who enthusiastically signed up this project at Bantam, and the estimable Charles Michener, my original editor.

  Laura van Wormer, who has gone from my editor to my dear friend and now publisher, deserves very special thanks for being the impetus to make my biographies available as eBooks.

  Thanks as well to Elizabeth Mackey, Steve Ross, Isabel Thompson, and Lauren Marino of the Robbins Office for their many professional courtesies; Lauren Field of Bantam for her legal advice; my Dutch publisher, Jan van Willigen of DeKern, Matthew Snyder of CAA, and Edgar Scherick.

  I am grateful to Michael Merrill for kindly referring me to his relatives Sally Favour and Ruth Bailey, and for allowing me to quote from unpublished manuscripts in the Bette Davis Collection at Boston University.

  The following people also graciously allowed me to quote from unpublished manuscripts, letters, or diaries: Dr. Howard Gottlieb of Boston University, Virginia Conroy, Ray Stricklyn, Gladys Young, and Mike Ellis.

  Many other people assisted me in a variety of ways during the writing of this book, and I am indebted to them all:

  In Los Angeles—Roy Moseley, Lucille Carroll, Tom Gilbert, Betty Berzon, J. Randy Tarraborelli, Bart Andrews, Tom Boghossian, Jimmy Bangley, Rick Carl, Mike Hawks, Bill Franklin, Randall Henderson, Randall Riese, Tim Nesbitt, Jim Pinkston, Eve Sullivan, Kathryn Sermak, John Sala, Tom Watson, Donald Spoto, Fred Otash, Bill Doty, James B. Pollack of Ralph Edwards Productions, Irwin Okuns and Sally Laughton of the Disney studios, Karen Swenson, J. B. Annegan, Sabin Gray, Hal Pedersen, David Rada, Marlene Mattaschiam of the Publicist’s Guild, Kari Johnson of Hollywood Heritage, Sandi Gibbons of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, Dace Taube of the University of Southern California, Marcia Ventura of Los Angeles Voter Registration, Bob Dambacher and Scott Kerry of the Los Angeles Coroner’s offi
ce, Mike Battula of the District Attorney investigator’s office.

  In New York and New England—John Cronin of the Boston Herald, Richard Branson, Peter Cosenza, Duncan Chaplin III of Snackerty Enterprises, Robert P. Peckett III, Elmer Fryckman, Franklyn Lenthall of the Theatre Museum in Boothbay, Maine, David Anderson of the Maine State Archives, Madge Ames, Ruth Mitchell of the alumni association of Cushing Academy, Amy T. Logan of Cushing Academy, Dr. Laura N. Shapiro of Newton North High School, Carol Cortese of the Westport, Connecticut, News, George Zeno, Lou Valentino, Allison Solow, Sam V. K. Willson, Megan E. Ferrera and Eleanor R. Clise of the Geneva, New York, Historical Society, William Castiglione of Abbey Industries, E. J. Tangerman, Laura Magnant, Pearl Altman.

  Additional thanks to Milton Green, Wendy Leigh, Ed Hobart, Lee Hanna, Richard Jordan, Maggie Maskell, Johan de Besche, Lisa Zwickey of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, Florence W. Hoffman of Denison University, Dott Burns, Tom Fontana.

  The staffs of a number of libraries were enormously helpful: Dr. Howard Gottlieb and Karen Mix of the Boston University Library; Ned Comstock, Stuart Ng, and Leith Adams of the University of Southern California library; Sam Gill and the staff of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the staff of the Lincoln Center Library; the staff of the Los Angeles Public Library; David J. Sleasman of the Curtis Theatre Collection, University of Pittsburgh Library; Pat Gaudilo of the Geneva Free Library; Dr. Charles Bell of the Harry Ranson Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Mary K. Knill, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas; Maura Porter, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts; Martin I. Elzy, Jimmy Carter Library, Adanta, Georgia; Geir Gunderson, Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Dwight E. Strandberg, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas; Amanda Fish, Richard Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, California; Benedict K. Zobrist, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri; Mark Renovitch, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

  And finally, thanks again to my friends and family, who put up with the craziness every few years: my father, Joe Spada, my brothers, Richard and Robbie, and my dear friends Glen Sookiazian, Dan Conlon, Jeff Leach, John Figg, Mark Meltzer, Michael Koegel, and Kevin Scullin.

  PART ONE

  “A High-Strung Young Filly”

  ONE

  T

  he little girl sat next to her father on the back porch of their clapboard Victorian house as a warm summer breeze stirred the crystal-clear night air. Here and there a strand of her wispy blond hair strayed from under the wide satin ribbon at the back of her head and fell across her forehead, above the huge eyes that grew ever larger with the wonderment she felt at the sight above her.

  The New England sky was aglow with thousands of tiny sparkling stars, more than she had ever seen. “The sky was silver with them,” she recalled. “I was bewitched.”

  As he too gazed above him, her father’s face remained wintry and expressionless, framed by the high starched collar and necktie he wore even while at leisure. The man rarely spoke to his daughter, barely heard the child’s incessant, excited chatter about this discovery or that. But this evening it was he who broke the silence of the girl’s reverie as he turned to see her staring with such awe at the unfathomable enormity above her.

  “Do you see all those stars up there?” he asked her.

  She followed his gaze back up toward the sky and her heart jumped with excitement—her father was going to explain the mysteries of the heavens to her.

  He turned to her again. “There are millions and millions of them. Remember that always and you’ll know how unimportant you are.”

  Bette Davis spent the rest of her life trying to prove her father wrong.

  On both sides of the family, her heritage courses back through long lines of bedrock New Englanders. There was the Pilgrim, James Davis, who sailed from Wales to the New World in the early 1600s and helped found the city of Haverhill, Massachusetts. There was Colonel Jabez Mathews, a Revolutionary War hero, and a line of Hinckleys with resonantly Puritan Christian names like Reliance, Thankful, Experience, Mercy, and Admire.

  James Davis became a selectman of his community, and during the simmering seventeenth-century religious persecutions that flamed into the hysteria of the Salem witch trials, he accused a man named John Godfrey of “familiarity with the Devil.” At the trials, twenty people—mostly women—were executed, some of them hanged in a public square while the good townspeople watched, mouths agape.

  The Sturm und Drang of Bette Davis’s personality, the elements that warred within her, may well have stemmed from the fact that another one of her ancestors, on her mother’s side, was one of those women killed. Clearly, she was the product of diverse family traits—the rock-solid industry and stoicism of Reliance and Experience and Thankful on her father’s side, and the emotional, artistic bent of her mother’s ancestors, the French Huguenot LeFievres, who numbered among themselves inventors, musicians, and actors, including an early vaudeville star named Eddie LeFavour. Fièvre means “fever” in French, and sangfroid seems not to have been one of their strong points. As Bette put it, they were “perhaps more than titularly feverish.”

  The LeFièvres anglicized their name to Favour over the years, then Americanized it to Favor. Bette’s uncle, the Reverend Paul Favor, ascribes some of the fabled Bette Davis drive as well to the Keyeses, the progenitors of Bette’s grandmother Eugenia Thompson. “This elemental driving force of the Keyeses through the generations,” Favor wrote in a family memoir, “was a double power, the power of vision to see what they wanted to accomplish, and the power to release an uncommon degree of energy which recognized no obstacle strong enough to deter them from achieving their ends.”

  Eugenia Thompson married William A. Favor, a civil engineer, in 1878, and had four children. Paul, their first child, recalls his mother being “as persistent as a flowing river and as irresistible.” Her granddaughter, Elizabeth Carmichael, recalls Eugenia as “a little bitty thing with a strong will. I guess you could say that she was a little hyper.” Her first daughter, Ruth, born on September 16, 1885, inherited all her mother’s “elemental force” and then some—and handed it down to her own daughter, Bette Davis.

  Eugenia Favor’s mission, in her son Paul’s words, was to teach him, Ruth, and their younger siblings Mildred and Richard “lessons of order, industry, obedience and enterprise.” She dominated her household in the big, maple-shaded yellow clapboard house at 22 Chester Street in Lowell like a whirlwind, assuming the role of father as much as mother. Her husband rarely related to his children, preferring to spend most of his spare time at a private club; Paul Favor writes nothing of him in his family history. Eugenia, her cheekbones high, her manner imperious, and her carriage ramrod straight, ran her home with an iron hand. She gave her children piano lessons at precisely the same time each day, and for exactly one hour; if the children were late for a meal, she removed their plates from the table; she set aside time each evening to read aloud to the children from Emerson, Tennyson, Longfellow, Wordsworth, and the Bible. On Sundays she brought them to services at the First Baptist Church of Lowell in their best starched clothes. Church attendance was mandatory, even as they became young adults.

  While Paul Favor admitted that such strict homes can be difficult for children to live in, he grew up to believe that “they are certainly the most satisfactory to look back upon.” His decision to pursue a life in the ministry suggests a personality well suited to such regimentation, whereas his sister Ruth wasn’t nearly as influenced by their upbringing. Along with her drive, Ruth Favor’s predominant traits proved to be independence, rebellion—and complexity.

  Although Ruth was a pretty girl, she hated being one. She insisted on being called “Fred,” wore her brother’s shirts and trousers, and roughhoused with the neighborhood boys on Lowell’s rolling, grassy hills. At the same time she enjoyed putting on little skits in the attic of her house with other girls, and took elocution and dance l
essons from Miss Sadie Porter during her family’s summer vacations in Ocean Park, Maine.

  In the summer of 1897, before Ruth’s twelfth birthday, she took part in a local talent recital at The Temple, Ocean Park’s assembly hall. She read a dramatic portion of Lew Wallace’s The Prince of India in which the hero, Tamerlane, dies. Although the reader was just a young girl, Paul Favor professed that “through her the great audience was transported to distant Persia… and brought face to face with one of history’s most thrilling moments.” The applause, Paul recalled, was deafening, and forty years later members of the audience still talked about the power of the performance.

  Although Sadie Porter influenced a number of her students toward theatrical careers, utilizing the free expressionist theories of the French dramatic coach François Delsarte, neither she nor the Delsarte school had any such profound effect on Ruth Favor. As she grew into a bright, industrious, and efficient teenager, Ruth’s creative energies focused instead on writing: she wrote dozens of short stories and achieved the literary editorship of the Lowell High School monthly magazine through sheer determination.

  Ruth rebelled against academic regimentation and proved a mediocre student, but she had inherited her mother’s drive, and was “in her element,” Paul Favor tells us, when she became the senior commanding officer of the Girls’ Battalion at the school, where she could amply exercise her “dominating” nature.

  At nineteen, graduated from high school, Ruth Favor was expected, as were all girls her age, to marry and begin a family. It didn’t matter that she possessed talent and drive and qualities of leadership; women around the turn of the century weren’t allowed any ambition higher than landing a husband. It didn’t take long for Ruth to find one, for she had flowered into a lovely young woman, “a painting by Mr. Sargent,” as Bette put it, “gay, graceful and full of the joy of life.” A tomboy no longer, she now called herself Ruthie, fluttered with femininity, giggled freely, projected a Gibson Girl delicacy with her upswept hairdos. She grew excited about marriage, the only real future allowed her, and played shy and demure with the many young men who were attracted by her coquettishness and intrigued by her one blue and one gray eye.