Bette Davis still reigns in a small New Hampshire town.
By: Bob Brown
New Hampshire’s White Mountains are famous for pristine forests, gorgeous mountain vistas, spectacular waterfalls and moose. You can hike, bike, swim, fish or just enjoy nature. But on what promised to be a rainy day, we thought about catching a movie. We were staying at a motel in Twin Mountain, a collection of motels, cottages, eateries, a convenience store, and a post office, all in the northern reaches of the White Mountain National Forest. Too small for a cinema, it is something of a movie desert.
About 12 miles away, the charming little town of Littleton, N.H., is 153 miles north of Boston, and 3,016 miles east of Los Angeles. It has a working gristmill, a covered bridge, a marvelously restored Main Street, a candy store with "the world’s longest candy counter," and a modest two-screen cinema, the Jax Jr., which shows features generally two weeks after their wide release.
Yet Littleton boasts an historical film premiere. It occurred at the Premiere Theatre, a predecessor of the Jax, first built in 1920 by John B. "Jack" Eames, the so-called dean of New England Motion Picture Exhibitors. When the theater burned down in 1924, Eames rebuilt it and the entire block, creating an even larger 800-seat theater.
There, on April 5, 1941, the most extraordinary movie event in Littleton history occurred when The Great Lie, starring George Brent, Mary Astor and two-time Academy Award winner Bette Davis, premiered. Davis herself arrived on a train that afternoon, coincidentally her 33rd birthday. Ten thousand enthusiastic fans swarmed the downtown to greet her. The lucky ones attended a birthday dinner dance that evening in her honor, and may even have had a turn on the floor with her.
Why Littleton, which had no role in the filming? The key was a local resident, Arthur Farnsworth, who had been an assistant manager at Peckett’s-on-Sugar-Hill, a noted ski resort nearby. The history of Davis and Farnsworth is spelled out in Sugar Hill itself, a little village on a bluff just 10-and-a-half miles down winding country roads southeast of Littleton. The Sugar Hill Historical Museum, built and run by volunteers since 1976, devotes rooms to the early history of the 1780s, up to the heyday of the 19th-century when railcars brought in tourists by the carload to enjoy mountain air and the unparalleled views.
On the day we visited, an entire room was also devoted to Bette Davis, including dozens of photographs of the premiere, the party, and news clippings of how Davis had met Farnsworth, a Rutland native, while vacationing in the area. According to contemporary accounts, she was struck by his attentions, and he by her looks. She was, it seemed, fed up with Hollywood and dreamed of escaping to the New England of her youth (she was born in Lowell, Mass.). Farnsworth and she were romantically linked. She wed him in December 1940 (her second marriage) and had, according to the papers, arranged the premiere in Littleton to be near him.
She bought about 100 acres in Sugar Hill and hired contractors to build a summer place, where she and Farnsworth lived when they were not in Los Angeles. Tragically, Farnsworth died of head injuries two years later under murky circumstances. Local accounts attributed his injuries to a fall downstairs and subsequent falls. Less kind rumors were that Davis and he fought. In any case, to the residents of Sugar Hill, Bette Davis is a hometown girl. A sleigh she owned is exhibited in the carriage room, and a prominent photo of her in the museum is captioned "Deputy Sheriff." In Sugar Hill, Bette Davis still reigns. A video of The Great Lie screens continuously in a little back room of the museum.
The Sugar Hill Historical Museum is located on Main Street, Route 117, Sugar Hill, N.H.; (603) 823-5336. Of note: It was in nearby Franconia, N.H., that Robert Frost penned "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."