Written By: Daniel D'Addario
“There are not many actresses who will come right out with the truth,” wrote LIFE’s Los Angeles correspondent Alice Crocker in notes accompanying a 1947 photoshoot, “when that means admitting a birthdate of April 5, 1908.” Bette Davis, frank and relatively unaffected throughout her career, was one of the few. Her freewheelingness and seeming lack of concern for her image shows through in this photoshoot, taken months after the birth of her daughter and three years before the first of her comebacks, as (ironically enough) a vain actress in the film All About Eve.
Davis in 1947 was not yet the hardened warrior of FX’s 2017 miniseries Feud (in which Susan Sarandon portrays the early-1960s Davis as a star fueled by nicotine and resentments, aware both of the status she’s earned and how little it’s respected). These photos show someone fully in control of herself, but far more at ease than the Davis who made What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? such a lurid hit. The setups are startlingly intimate: Davis seems not at all to be playing to the camera even when obviously posing with her husband, William Grant Sherry. She’s lost in reverie, or selling us on the idea that she is.
The notes make clear just how difficult living in the public eye could be, even in a far less media-saturated age than our own. “There are not many people (much less actresses) with figures to worry about who at 39 would be willing to go thru [sic] the effort of having a baby,” wrote Crocker. “However, the common rumor is that she has wanted a baby for some time and husband number three was acquired for that specific purpose.” (She notes, without apparent irony, that this has “a malicious note which can probably be discredited.”) Davis seems unconcerned with such speculation, even as she is opening her life to magazine cameras. Sitting on the wheel of a plane, she smokes in a pantsuit and loafers and looks away from us, as though something enticing were happening just out of frame.
These pictures depict her at a time when age, she freely admitted, was catching up with her, limiting the roles she could agree on with her studio, Warner Brothers. But she was at the beginning of something, too, having only just become a mother and putting the pieces together for an unlikely second act, one that capitalized on her skill at framing herself inthe right light. The year after these photos were taken, Davis’s June Bride would stanch some of the wounds her career had sustained after successive flops; then, in 1950, All About Eve relaunched her as a grande dame of the screen.
The Eve role used what was best of Davis’ star persona but refracted it through the cinematic style of the time, putting hauteur and intellect in an Edith Head gown. Later on, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a “vanity-free” performance whose ghoulishness only emphasized the still-radiant beauty of the off-screen Davis, and got her plenty of accolades for her bravery.
Davis would divorce Sherry—who in these photos seems unmoved by the camera’s gaze even as he shows off his well-developed physique—in 1950, the year of Baby Jane’s release, and marry Gary Merrill, her All About Eve costar. The spuriousness Crocker put forward in her notes was fair (if sharply worded). But Sherry barely registers in the photos—it’s all, always, about Bette, who manages to make you feel as though you’re intruding on private moments even with all the stage-management of a photoshoot around her. It’s another brilliant performance.
Bette Davis in California, 1947.
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Bette Davis with her dog in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis and her third husband, artist William Grant Sherry.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry at the beach in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry boating in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry boating in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis and her third husband William Grant Sherry boating in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis, her husband William Grant Sherry, and their boxer, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, at the beach in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis worked at her desk at home in California, 1947.
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Bette Davis and William Grant Sherry played billiards at home in California, 1947
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis and her third husband, William Grant Sherry, at home in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis at home in California, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis in front of a plane with her third husband, William Grant Sherry, who was studying to become a pilot under the G.I. Bill.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Bette Davis, 1947.
Loomis Dean The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
