BETTE DAVIS Love, Betrayal Revenge

HER FAMILY LIFE, ROMANCES AND FOUR MARRIAGES WERE JUST AS DRAMATIC AS ANY OF HER MOVIES

- LOUISE A. BARILE

On Oct. 12, 1989, Bette Davis was laid to rest during a private ceremony at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles. The two-time Oscar winner, whose career spanned 50 years, was buried beside her mother and sister beneath a epitaph Bette had chosen herself. “She did it the hard way,” it reads.

In her lifetime, Bette received fame, fortune and a record-setting 10 Academy Award nominations, but they came at a very high price. She endured three divorces, sudden widowhood, a shocking betrayal by her own daughter, and the loss of the only man she’d ever truly loved. “If I was a fool in my personal life, I can’t blame acting for that. I chose very foolishly,” Bette reasoned. “None of my husbands was ever man enough to become Mr. Bette Davis.”

Her Hollywood success may not have guaranteed relationship doom, but it presented a big obstacle in her marriages. Her first husband, musician Harmon Nelson, who had been Bette’s boarding school sweetheart, was laughed at in the press for making 10 times less a week than his famous bride. “She married him because he was a sweet guy, but he felt emasculated by her fame and success,” Julia A. Stern, author of Bette Davis Black and White, tells Closer. When they divorced in 1938 after six years of marriage, he complained in their legal papers that all Bette ever wanted to do in bed was read scripts. “That was his humorous way of expressing that she had sort of abandoned him to a non-marriage,” says Stern.

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