Bette Davis: The Dramatic Story of Her 4 Husbands

Bette Davis married four times. Three unions ended in divorce, one in a death that left questions the coroner never fully answered. The first husband was a bandleader from Massachusetts who watched her career consume their marriage over seven years. The second collapsed on a Hollywood street in 1943 with a weeks-old skull fracture no one could explain. The third put her in the hospital after a fight that made headlines, then spent decades writing letters she never opened. The fourth was an actor who drank himself through a decade of rage before she finally walked out in 1960. Each divorce carved through her fortune. Harmon Nelson received $70,000 in 1938, worth over $1.5 million today. Arthur Farnsworth's family threatened to sue over his death and settled privately for a sum her lawyers called ruinous. William Sherry's 1950 divorce cost her $200,000 plus ongoing child support. Gary Merrill's settlement in 1960 included $100,000 cash and the Cape Elizabeth house. By the time she died in 1989, the four divorces had consumed $900,000 in inflation-adjusted losses, and adoption costs for a daughter with severe intellectual disability had drained another $2 million. The marriages collapsed under identical weight. Warner Brothers owned her schedule completely, eighteen-hour shoots six days a week, and every husband eventually demanded she choose. She refused every time. In a 1987 interview two months before a stroke silenced her, she said she'd never met a man strong enough to love her without needing to diminish her. Letters discovered in her estate told a different story. In 1963 she wrote that she'd driven Sherry away with her temper. In 1972 she confessed Gary had been right to leave. The most painful judgment came from her own daughter, who published a memoir in 1985 portraying Bette as violent and manipulative. Bette never spoke to her again.