BETTE DAVIS - The Men She Loved and Lost

THE LEGENDARY ACTRESS ADMITTED SHE WAS ALWAYS A FOOL FOR LOVE

- LOUISE A. BARILE

Two-time Academy Award winner Bette Davis insisted she was the first to call the film industry's highest award an Oscar.

"I named it after the rear end of my husband," she said. "Why? Because that's what it looked like." Over five decades, the legendary actress appeared in more than 100 films and continued to work until shortly before her 1989 death at age 81. "It was my terror that I'd never work again," she said after surviving a stroke and breast cancer in 1983, "for I have always very much loved to work." This commitment along with real talent made her one of Hollywood's most acclaimed stars of the Golden Age. Unfortunately, she was much less successful in her personal life.

Bette married four times and carried on a string of passionate affairs, but never found a love that would last. Still, Bette didn't blame her profession for her disappointments. "A torturous personal life might happen whether or not you become famous," she reasoned. "I can't blame my profession for what happened in my personal life."

PASSION PLAY

New England-born Ruth Elizabeth Davis changed the spelling of her nickname Betty to "Bette" to become more memorable as a young theater actress in New York.

In 1930, she landed in Hollywood with her chaperoning mother and won a contract with Universal Pictures.

Two years later, she was a virgin bride when she wed her first husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson, a bandleader. "She married him because he was a sweet guy from Maine," Julia A. Stern, author of Bette Davis Black and White, tells Closer. Unfortunately, their happiness would not last.

"He felt emasculated by her fame and success," Stern explains. Oscar also accused his wife of reading "to an unnecessary degree" in their 1938 divorce.