An overactive imagination could come up with a scenario where Bette Davis kills her second husband, Arthur Farnsworth. After all, pick any Bette Davis movie at random, and she’s probably killing someone. Just the other night, I caught a very random Bette Davis movie: a weird 1964 late-late-film noir called Dead Ringer where Bette Davis kills Bette Davis (she plays two parts: twin sisters). Did she kill her husband, Arthur Farnsworth? That was a persistent urban legend, and here’s why.
Today, you can walk past the Frolic Room on 6249 Hollywood Boulevard and admire its Art Deco facade, without knowing one item of trivia that happened below your feet. The Hollywood Walk of Fame star for Connie Stevens is there. Apparently, too, the L.A. Metro Rail, the subway, runs directly underneath that spot. Every piece of ground has its history.
Here, too, Bette Davis’ husband mysteriously dropped dead one day in 1943. Nothing obviously homicidal happened, no shooting, no stabbing, not even a heart attack. This reportedly otherwise healthy man in his 30s simply dropped dead on the sidewalk and no one ever could determine why.
Bette and Farny
By 1943, Bette Davis was already an established movie and stage actress, playing roles as varied as a “vixen and a tragedienne,” as described by the Los Angeles Times. Unlike so many other movie actors and actresses of the day, she married outside of the industry: Arthur Farnsworth.
Born on December 15, 1908, in Proctor, Vermont, Farnsworth was a high school friend of Davis and working as the assistant manager at a ski lodge Peckett’s On Sugar Hill in the White Mountains of New Hampshire when he met her.
On one of Davis’ vacations to her cottage, Butternut, in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, Davis and Farnsworth rekindled their friendship and turned it into a marriage in 1940. Farnsworth was often reported at that time as being a former commercial airlines pilot affiliated with the aeronautical branch of the Minneapolis-Honeywell Co.
A Stop in Hollywood
At the time, Davis and Farnsworth were living at 1705 Rancho Avenue, Glendale, in a $50,000 house on the banks of the Los Angeles River that Davis called Riverbottom.
Some reports state that, on that day, Farnsworth first went to Burbank, then came back to Hollywood.
Why was Farnsworth here in the first place?
Farnsworth may have caught a show at the Pantages. On Monday, the Pantages was showing Mr. Lucky, with Cary Grant and Laraine Day. He might have caught a late matinee to see that picture.
Regent Liquors may have been his destination, but proprietor Dave Freedman did not mention Farnsworth visiting the store; only that as Farnsworth “passed his store” Farnsworth emitted a muffled scream.
The fall happened on the afternoon of August 23, 1943. After a muffled scream, Farny fell backward and struck his head on the pavement. He fell into a coma and was dead by 6:30 p.m. August 25.
He never regained consciousness. The base of his skull was fractured and he suffered several hemorrhages and a high fever as he lay in the hospital.
