A serial bride, her husbands were likewise not in Camp Bette. Her first trip down the aisle was with Harmon (Ham) Oscar Nelson, Jr. (as in Oscar’s backside), a prep school sweetheart. She proudly proclaimed he took her virginity on their wedding night—“and it was hell waiting!” He began hitting her and insisted she have an abortion as motherhood would hinder her moneymaking career. Davis turned for solace to multimillionaire Howard Hughes; she revealed the tycoon told her she was the first woman who had brought him to a climax. Rather than be flattered, she assumed that was just his customary postcoital line. She added, “Huge he was not.” Ham found out and threatened Hughes with blackmail; Hughes responded by hiring a hit man. At the end, Hughes paid Ham $70,000, which, as a point of honor, Bette repaid. Another lover was actor Ronald Reagan, of whom she reminisced, “I used to think of him as ‘little Ronnie Reagan’—not because he was short, he wasn’t, he was tall and well-built. The ‘little’ was for his acting talent.” Undaunted, Bette wed Arthur Franworth; he died from a head injury when his colleague found Franworth in bed with his wife and struck him on the back of his head. She described her third marriage as a reign of masculine terror; hubby described it as a failed attempt at castration. William Grant Sherry, a former prize-fighter-turned-Laguna-Beach-artist tossed a trunk at her and threw her out of the car—and that was on their honeymoon. She had three children from her marriages, including Barbara, so christened after her mentally handicapped sister; however, detesting the name, she called her B. D. She also adopted children, Michael and Margot. Margot suffered from brain damage; at age three, Bette placed her in an institution. Divorce arrived when William fell in love with their baby’s nanny. Bette’s final marriage, to actor Gary Merrill, ended after ten miserable years in their home, aptly called “Witch Way.” She said of her unholy matrimonial forays, “All my marriages were charades, and I was equally responsible. But I always fell in love. That was the original sin.” She opined she had confused “muscle with strength.”
In the 1940s, Bette was the highest paid woman in the country, known as “the first lady of the screen” and as “the fourth Warner brother.” At the pinnacle of her profession, the thirty-three-year-old assumed Hollywood’s top job when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences elected her as the fourteenth, and the first female, president of the five hundred-member body. Her tenure was brief: she “resigned in fury” after eight weeks because the board wanted her to “be a figurehead only. Because I was a woman, I had to be controlled.” Fox studio head Daryl F. Zanuck had nominated her, and Tinseltown approved. Columnist Hedda Hopper put down her customary poisoned pen: “If any woman here deserves that job, it’s Bette.” Davis later wrote, “I never imagined that I would hold its most exalted post. As the only woman so honored, I was frankly proud.” The position did not prove a love connection, and Bette commented, “I was not supposed to preside intelligently.” When she tendered her resignation, Zanuck informed her she would never work in Hollywood again, but she did not fade away.
The egomaniac who made everything “all about me” awed in All About Eve (1950), her perfect portrait of an aging actress. Claudette Colbert was originally slated for the role, but in the words of Bette, “she hurt her back, thank God.” In her most frightening role, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Davis, in pancake makeup and a wig of blonde ringlets, played a demented, elderly woman clinging to her glory days as a child star.
In tribute to the first lady of the movies, at age sixty-nine, she became the first woman to receive the Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute. Upon acceptance of the tribute she stated, “I suppose…they decided ‘Let’s give it to a dame.’” Even old archenemy Jack Warner showed up at the gala for “the explosive little broad with the straight left.”
Preferring vinegar and venom to sugar and spice, the dame’s final role echoed the embroidered words on her pillow, “Old Age Ain’t No Place for Sissies.” In her mid-seventies, fate dealt Bette four hammer blows. She underwent a mastectomy, suffered a stroke, broke her hip, and underwent acute alcoholic withdrawal. Nevertheless, in Dylan Thomas fashion, she raged against the dying of the light, even though she had a lot to rage against.
Someone once described Hollywood as the place where “they eat their young.” In Bette’s case, the young bit back. B. D. published My Mother’s Keeper, a diatribe in which she portrayed her own Mommy Dearest as a human wrecking ball. Bette said of the book, “I will remember every hate-filled sentence, branded on my soul, as long as I live.” Mother and daughter never spoke again; B.D. was summarily disinherited.
Upon Bette’s death in Paris at age eighty-one, worldwide tributes poured in, but perhaps the most poignant came from a statement her maid had made years before, “It’s nice and peaceful when Miss Davis isn’t around. But I kind of miss her disturbances.” Her epitaph could well have come from her classic line in All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts: It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
La Légion Étrangère, the French Foreign Legion, one of the world’s most unique military forces, had its origin in 1831 with King Louis Philippe to ensure the successful conquest of Algeria by France as a colonial power. Their soldiers, once referred to as crusaders, mounted campaigns in such far-flung countries as Morocco, Madagascar, and Indochina. Currently, more than one hundred nationalities are represented in the 8,500-man fighting force (women need not apply). But in a surreal former era, the extraordinary Susan Travers became the only female legionnaire.
A World War I poster depicted a little girl asking, “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” If Susan’s sons had asked her the same question, what a tale she could have told. And her stranger-than-fiction life stemmed from a desire to be wicked.
Ms. Travers spent her twilight years at a French nursing home, where the ninety-plus-year-old with the papery-skin appearance was unremarkable. What set her apart was her posh English accent, her penchant for champagne, and two unique pieces of furniture from a vine-entwined desert home where she had lived with the love of her life: a chest of drawers inlaid with mother-of-pearl and an ornate trunk, both from Damascus. A further defining characteristic was she displayed ribbons on her habitual tweed outfits. One defined her as the recipient of the Légion d’Honneur, a French honor established by Napoleon; the others were the Médaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre. But the ribbon that was the pièce de résistance bore the colors red and white, identifying Travers as having served in the French Foreign Legion.
Now a forgotten footnote in French history, Susan Travers was born in London in 1909. Her father, a Royal Navy officer, had married her mother for her money, and their union was not made in heaven. Susan’s best times were spent visiting her grandmother in Devon. She attended a school that she regarded as Jane Eyre did Lowood. During World War I, her father was in charge of marine transport at Marseilles (where her grandfather had once served as the British Consul), and in 1921, he brought his family to Cannes as it was beneficial for his rheumatism. The Riviera was on the cusp of becoming the Mecca of the international jet set, and Susan, with her spirit, beauty, and charm enjoyed their privileged playground. Inspired by her neighbor, Suzanne Lenglen, she also became an accomplished tennis player. Financially afloat with a generous monthly allowance from an aged aunt, Susan nonetheless suffered from her father’s neglect as he preferred his only son. By her late teens, Susan had developed a craving for male companionship. “Most of all,” she later wrote, “I wanted to be wicked.” Her