By Mary Carter
EAGLE TIMES CORRESPONDENT
WINDSOR, VTJune 2, 2023–Her revenge on the 1939 film ‘Gone With the Wind’ remains famous. When Bette Davis was offered the role of Scarlett O’Hara, it went with the proviso that matinée idol Errol Flynn play Rhett. Flynn, a true looker, was no actor. Davis turned the iconic part down. Still, Bette wanted to one-up the frenzy ‘Gone With the Wind’ was creating with a southern belle role all her own. Thus, the 1938 hit ‘Jezebel’ was born, securing Davis her second academy award.
Davis was born in Lowell Massachusetts to an enterprising mom and a deadbeat dad who abandoned the family when she was still a child. Bette, her younger sister Bobby and mom Ruth moved about. Ruth, having sharpened her photography skills, opened a studio at 5 Vine Street in Peterborough, NH. It was here, in 1925, that Bette got her start at the Mariarden Theater. Davis revealed in her autobiography, ‘The Lonely Life,’ that during that Peterborough summer, she and sister Bobby would spy on the dancers housed across the street. They were nudists, and never pulled down the shades.
Fast forward to 1939. Davis had completed nearly fifty motion pictures and needed a break. Roaming about New England, Davis ended up at Pecketts on Sugar Hill. This graceful NH inn, still in operation today, was home to America’s first skiing school. It was here that she met husband number two. Assistant Manager Arthur Farnsworth was a thirty-three-year-old divorcée. The son of a successful Windsor, VT dentist, Farnsworth was a sportsman, a violinist, an aeronautical engineer and charming. Davis, likely channeling a typical movie scenario, wandered off a 5.5 mile hiking trail, knowing fully well that Farnsworth would come looking for her. He did. Davis would return to Hollywood to complete the movie ‘The Letter.’ However, when the film wrapped, Davis scurried back to Sugar Hill and Arthur. They married on New Year’s Eve, 1940.
Purchasing a fixer-upper adjacent to Pecketts, Davis called upon Warner Bros carpenters to transform the property into a proper New England estate which Bette named Butternut. “A home like this gives you something to think about. Life becomes dangerously dull if one thinks only of his or her work,” Davis told a local reporter. Davis informed her studio that she would retreat to Sugar Hill three months out of the year.
Davis’s next film, ‘The Great Lie,’ was given a gala premiere on Bette’s thirty-third birthday in Littleton, NH. Warner Bros made sure the town was decked out in style. Life Magazine covered the event. A parade was planned and street signs were changed to the names of Bette’s best movies. The birthday girl was surprised with a hundred pound birthday cake. The townwide party raged into the wee hours.
Not two years later, Bette and Arthur’s union ended with his tragic collapse outside the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. Bette Davis would sell her treasured Butternut. To that trail to Bridal Veil Falls, Bette would leave a plaque that read: ‘In memoriam to Arthur Farnsworth, the Keeper of Stray Ladies, Pecketts 1939, Presented by a Grateful One.’
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