Sweet Betty
by Eugene Fischer
Her final film, a documentary on the rise and fall of the Butcher Brothers studio, was the only time she ever played herself. She sat framed by the tufted padding of a tall dining chair, cigarette holder hovering near small, blood-dark lips. Instead of the trademark curls, her hair rolled down her shoulders in gray waves, and though her voice still bubbled with the neotenous zeal that had made her famous, the words it carried were unhurried candor.
“I never stopped being me,” she said. “That’s what folks have trouble with. Whatever you saw on the screen, or read in the papers, I was always me. But I’ve had people get all smug, tell me to my face they know that Betty’s just an invention.” She drew in breath, released a stream of smoke. “This is a town of liars and fakers, but I was never fake. Things change. People invent themselves. You can’t pick and choose what counts in someone else’s life.”
The documentarian, out of frame, asked her questions, mostly prepared in advance. Betty met them with scowls, dismissive waves, exasperated sighs. She’d gone before a camera one last time to set the record straight, talk about the things she wanted, questions be damned. Her words flowed out through the interview like water around cobblestones.
It started in New Orleans, 1928, as a double act. Bimbo’s double act. It was Bimbo and Nancy back then — she wasn’t Betty yet. Two dogs, mutts both (though Bimbo always claimed of Nancy that he saw mostly poodle in her). Strays with little but the fur on their backs and each other’s constant company, scratching out a life from the waste and excess of the city around them. They snuck food when they could from society ladies’ morning grocery deliveries, slept the humid day away in shady alleys, knocked over trash bins in the evenings if they had to.
Night, though, was for the stage.
The city was still picking itself up and wringing itself out from the ‘27 flood, and the vaudeville theaters were packed with people yearning for the normalcy and diversion of their antediluvian lives. Few acts were more diverting than Bimbo and Nancy.
Bimbo might have been just a mongrel in the street, but under a spotlight he sparkled. He could do it all on the boards. He would juggle and joke, strum and croon, dance himself inside out and back around again. Nancy he brought along as his backup act and “good-luck girl.” On stage she was a one-trick puppy, but what a trick it was. That voice. That baby voice which sang such naughty things, it drove the men wild. As Bimbo’s star rose, the crowds swelled. The pair got word to stop working blue, so Bimbo dropped his raunchier gags from the act and Nancy replaced the dirty lyrics in her repertoire with harmless nonsense: foo-foo-loom-a, teezy-weezy, boop-oop-a-doop. The message came across just the same. It was a killer formula: Bimbo weakened their sides with laughter, Nancy took aim at their hearts.
It was early ’29 when the cameramen came calling. They’d always lurked at the back, filming the top acts for a one-time fee, then splicing them into interstitial reels to run between features in movie houses around the country. And every house was becoming a movie house; even the vaudeville theaters had all been wired for sound. When they approached Bimbo and Nancy, he thought they should give it a try. A lump sum for pratfalls he could do in his sleep and two minutes of Nancy’s tamest? The money would be on top of their usual take for the night, so win-win.
But next month there they were, in the new reels. There they were, flickering on a screen in Bimbo and Nancy’s own theater, the audience gasping for air like always, only the two of them didn’t get a dime.
After that, more offers, but Bimbo told them to scram. “They’re vultures, Nancy,” he said to her. “Ain’t no way we should be making ‘em laugh without earning a piece.”
Still, the idea gnawed at them both. One humid afternoon, curled up together under a deck, Nancy asked, “How many do you think have seen the film now, Bim? More than ever heard me sing with my own voice?”
“It’s gotta be,” Bimbo said. “Cities all over, screens in every city. Gotta be the most popular thing we ever done.”
“It was just two minutes, though,” Nancy said. “We’ve got so much more. So much better.”
“Those reels are gonna eat us. They’ll pay to help ‘em do it, but they’re gonna eat us either way.”
Footfalls above sent motes of rotten wood drifting through the light that angled orange between the deck slats. Nancy burrowed her nose under Bimbo’s neck to hide her face. Soon the sun would sink and the footlights would glow. It should be the best part of the day, but now it felt so fragile, like the stage might crumble to splinters beneath them.
“They can be everywhere at once and we’re stuck here,” said Nancy. “We’re too small.”
“Yeah,” said Bimbo. “If we wanna make it, we gotta be part of something big.”
“I came into my own in Hollywood. Once I got some clout, I made good use of it.” Betty wore a small diamond ring strung on a thin silver chain around her neck, a chain she twisted between idle fingertips as she addressed the camera. “But I never would have gotten there without Bimbo. I was the practical one, he was the dreamer.”
These words made it into the documentary, where they run over a montage of Bimbo in his prime. Huge, soulful eyes. Ears tapered back. Scenes of him playing scared or angry or a hero to the rescue, always with an ineluctable slyness. A coiled spring of wickedness and whimsy in an ill-fitting sweater.
“It was Bimbo who said that if our stuff was good enough for the reels, it oughta be good enough for the studios too. We started sneaking into the cinema all the time, watched everything. By then Walt Disney was already on top, all his aw-shucks mouse comedies and symphony pieces. The Butcher brothers were upstarts. They filmed the jazz crowd, were onto a good thing with their sing-along format. Their stuff was all kind of scrappy, a little more… what’s the word? Surreal. I think that’s why Bimbo and me liked them. They were taking risks, just like us.
“We saved up as much as we could. Even did a few more interstitials for the cash and to keep our faces out there. Then we left New Orleans and hopped freight all the way to the coast. This was 1930, you understand, right after the Crash. The railroad bulls were too busy to bother with a couple mutts like us. Getting out West was a breeze. Everything seemed to come so easy for a while.”
Like Nancy and Bimbo, the Butcher brothers were a duo. Max Butcher was the genius, the inventor, the one whose tinkering and obsessions gave them an industry foothold. He invented Follow The Bouncing Ball, and believed himself cheated of historical credit for that first marriage of motion and sound when his small employer folded just before Walt Disney’s studio released its damnably famous whistling steamboat film. It was a slight that would motivate him the rest of his life. He founded a new studio with his younger brother Dave, and came up with the filming techniques that allowed their nonhuman talent to share scenes with the likes of Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong. “The Competition,” as he always called them, wouldn’t be able to match it until the fifties.
Dave Butcher was the one who kept his feet on the ground so Max could float wherever his capricious mind took him. Dave directed the films, scouted the talent, focused his older brother’s brilliance and jealousy. He was gregarious, bisexual, and comfortably married to a wife who tolerated his dalliances so long as they were discreet and exclusively with men. He covered rent on a Culver City apartment for his longtime friend and occasional lover, Koko. The two had met during Dave’s youth, when the Butcher family lived on Coney Island. Koko, then working as a clown, became an early creative and sexual mentor for Dave, who, having found success in his older brother’s shadow, repaid those formative kindnesses by casting Koko in his films. Koko’s screen presence was mediocre; no amount of exposure would ever turn him into a star, but Dave’s loyalty was absolute.
It was Koko who gave Nancy and Bimbo their chance with the studio. When he wasn’t filming he took side gigs, and was friends with the regulars at the Meralta theater. It was there he first caught one of Bimbo’s shows, and rushed backstage to meet the performer his journeyman eyes recognized as a master talent. Bimbo, in turn, recognized Koko from the screen, and enthusiastically returned the attentions of such a valuable industry contact. Their shared interests made for a fast and easy friendship, and in just a few weeks Koko agreed to invite Dave Butcher himself to see Bimbo and Nancy perform — an unofficial audition.
The two dogs, living in the loading dock behind the theater, worked on their routine every day leading up to the fateful night. During the long, dull hours of their cross-country trip, they’d imagined the occasion of their big break, planned out what numbers would best showcase their talents. But now that the opportunity was real, all those decisions seemed stale, insufficient. The pair bolstered their confidence by working the whole thing out again from scratch. They spent four days rearranging routines, pruning bits from the act, putting them back again. In the end their set was nearly unchanged from what they’d planned on the rails, but infused with the comfort of fresh resolve.
The night of the show, Bimbo and Nancy watched from the wings as Koko led Dave Butcher to a seat near the front. The director wore a tan, three-piece suit with a tie cut to match the lining of his jacket. He drank from a cocktail glass that never touched the table. When not sipping nor speaking, he would hold it aloft and bite the rim, delicately clink the thin edge between his front teeth. A jewel glinted on his little finger.
“That’s our future, sitting at Koko’s elbow,” Bimbo said.
“He looks tired,” said Nancy. The man had deep bags under his eyes, and a thinning fringe of dark hair that he slicked back his forehead with a sweaty palm. “Do you think he’ll like it?”
“Course he’ll like it. But even if he don’t, that’s not what matters. He’s just gotta recognize what we can do. He casts Koko all the time, and Koko admits I’m better than he is. And there ain’t nobody else who sounds like you.”
The house lights dimmed and it was time to take the stage. There were no cameras filming in the Meralta that night, but some who were there — including Betty herself — maintained that Bimbo never put on a better show. He took one pratfall, then another, and then dodged the ground on a third and swam through the air out over the heads of the audience. He danced so fast he jumped out of his shoes, then tapped a duet side-by-side with them before hopping right back in. He peeled his shadow from the ground and stretched it across the stage to traverse like a tightrope. When Nancy came out and sang, Bimbo fawned and swooned, heart beating out of his chest and back in again like a yo-yo. That night, in Culver City, Bimbo and Nancy brought down the house.
The rapturous applause didn’t matter, though. Only one opinion was important. When the show was over, they waited backstage for the verdict, and the wait was long. Not until everyone on the bill had performed and the curtain closed did Koko come to find them, with a tipsy Dave Butcher in tow.
“You sly dog, you’ve been holding out on me,” Koko said. “I knew you were good, but that bit juggling cups of water? That was no fudge, was it? You really did it!”
Dave leaned against the door jamb and looked Bimbo over. “You’re a hustler, aren’t you? You go out and take it.”
Bimbo drew Nancy up next to him. “We put the work in, Mr. Butcher,” he said.
“What you showed me tonight, there’s more where that came from?”
“Come to our shows, by the time you see a stale bit it’ll have turned fresh again.”
Dave chuckled, then said to Nancy, “Koko told me all about him. You were a surprise. Nancy, was it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, Nancy,” He rolled her name around his mouth, didn’t seem to care for the taste. His words smelled of moonshine. “That boopy-doop number? That song’s a flop for most anyone else, but you made it work.”
Koko said, “The way she sings lets you in on the joke. She brings you inside, where it’s okay to take it seriously.”
Dave nodded. “That’s it, I think. Yeah. Neat trick.” He drummed his fingers on the doorframe, then turned and started out of the room. “Take me home, Koko,” he said over his shoulder. “And bring those two by the studio Monday. We’ll find a place for them.”
Her first film role was in Dizzy Dishes (1930), and Bimbo was the star. He plays a harried waiter at a cabaret, who is also inexplicably the chef. It opens with him tap dancing through the aisles, taking orders and rebuffing scoundrels. He then goes to the kitchen for several minutes of culinary slapstick. But the standout moment is when he finally returns to the dining area with a long-awaited roast duck. At that same moment, Nancy — who went uncredited in the film — appears and begins to sing:
Lovin’
I have to have lovin’
But when I have lovin’
I’ve got to have boop-oop-a-doopy-doop (boop-oop-a-doop)
Bimbo, seduced by the song, abandons his work to join her on stage, and dances with the roast duck as Nancy croons:
I’m so blue
Waiting for you to take me
I can’t go on like this
So gimme a kiss and make me
Boop-oop-a-doop
Finally, the most impatient customer, having already eaten his plate, silverware, and table, rushes the stage and chases Bimbo back to the kitchen. Feigning penitence, Bimbo pretends to cook the brutish man’s order, but instead constructs a locomotive from chopped meat and then steals the man’s trousers before riding through a wall and off into the sunset.
It was a successful debut picture for them both, and by far the best-paid work they’d ever had. The studio gave Bimbo an ongoing contract. Nancy remained picture-to-picture, though arranged to have her pay doled out weekly, to spare herself the stress of finding a hiding spot safe enough for a lump sum. The regular income gave her a peace of mind that she’d never before known.
Her first credited film role was their second time appearing on screen together. After Dizzy Dishes, Dave had Bimbo star as an ill-mannered naval crewman in Barnacle Bill the Sailor, a film he’d conceived based on a call-and-response drinking song. Dave thought the name Nancy was too plain for a film actress, and so she was billed in the title card as “Nancy Lee.” But though she now had a credit, her role was much diminished. She got to do little more than sit and ineffectually tug down the hem of her dress while Bimbo carried the show. He sang every number, sharing duets with a cat and a sofa but not with her. Bimbo melted into the floor, popped out of walls, tumbled with scoundrels, and groped Nancy on cue. He nailed every take. Dave was thrilled.
Bimbo did six more movies for the studio in 1930, but only the last one featured them both. Max Butcher had noticed that the first two films had been the most remunerative, and so, as an experiment, requested that Dave find another role for Nancy. Thus, at the end of the year, she got to make Mysterious Mose. Dave decided that even the name Nancy Lee was unworkably pedestrian, so she again went uncredited, but finally she and Bimbo shared equal screen time. Nancy plays a terrified young homeowner beset by apparitions, who must frequently chase down her clothing after it leaps from her body in fright. She sings the title song, and Bimbo, playing the titular Mysterious Mose, doesn’t even appear until halfway through, when he shows up to do some magic tricks, possess the household appliances, steal Nancy’s heart, and explode into clockwork shrapnel.
Mysterious Mose reattained the popularity of their first two efforts, and to Max Butcher the result was clear. Bimbo might’ve been a superlative performer, but Nancy drew in eyeballs. The studio signed her up. They were a duo once more.
The documentarian stopped filming so they could put a new cigarette in Betty’s holder for editing continuity. Once it was lit, she resumed her tale.
“I got my name a little after that. We’d done a film, Bimbo and me, and in the final cut there was a big title card: Bimbo and Betty in Bimbo’s Express! Dave told me, ‘That’s you now, doll. We all love Betty, so don’t you forget.’ I was Betty after that to everyone at the studio. Which back then was basically everyone we knew.” She chuckled, and ashed her smoke. “Even Bimbo got into it. Betty was a headliner, right? Nancy was nobody, but say Betty needed something and watch folks scurry. It felt good to be someone who mattered.”
The documentarian used that comment as a segue to ask about the surgery.
Betty, who had been losing herself to pleasant reminiscence, felt her mood sour. “I’m getting to that,” she said. “You may know what happened, but you can’t understand it jumping all over. Just listen.
“In 1931 we made a ton of films together. Bimbo was still top dog for a while. They were all titled Bimbo-this and Bimbo-that. Each one bigger than the last. Then they started dressing me up different. They got real focused on finding ways to hide my ears, tying them back with a handkerchief or tucking them up into a hat. And not long after that, Bimbo and Betty turned into Betty and Bimbo.”
The documentarian asked a question.
“I didn’t think so at the time. Looking back, I know it did a little. But if it had stopped there, at just the order of our names, he would’ve laughed it off. We were still getting equal time. And I’d always known he was more talented. When I got top billing, that didn’t make me think any less of him. It just made me think a little better of myself.”
Another question.
“Do you want me to tell this or not? What I knew was, my star was rising. Bimbo had gotten to do a bunch of solo projects, and there was talk about letting me do a movie on my own. But the rest of it I never even dreamed of.”
Dizzy Red Riding Hood (1931) was the first time Betty was unquestionably the star of the show. Bimbo’s role was only to provide background comic relief as Betty played up her folktale innocence, and his credit was just a small “with Bimbo” at the bottom of the title card. He did his job as well as ever, but it would be easy to forget he was even in the picture.
After the final shoot, Dave asked Betty to come find him when she was done changing out of her costume, so they could go meet with his brother Max, the studio president. This was an astonishing request. Neither Bimbo nor Betty had yet met the elusive Max Butcher, who had begun to seem like more of a supernatural force than a studio head. Dave was an agreeable director, downright accommodating if his mood was high. But whenever he announced, “Max thinks we should try it this way,” or, “Max says we should focus on that,” then there could be no argument.
Now this powerful spirit was going to manifest, albeit for Betty alone; Bimbo was not extended an invitation.
They left the backlot in Dave’s Cadillac and drove around the sound stages to the executive office building, a place Betty had seen but never been.
“Can’t you tell me what this is about?” asked Betty.
“We’ll let Max explain,” Dave said.
He led her through a facade of Corinthian columns and inside, upstairs, to the northwest corner suite of rooms that were exclusively for his brother’s personal projects. Max Butcher’s office was ringed by drafting boards and work tables strewn with partially-disassembled film equipment. The man himself was taller than Dave, with thick hair, thicker glasses, and a full mustache. They had the same taste in suits, but Max slouched inside his, and peppered the room and its contents with a darting gaze.
“It’s us, Max,” Dave called out as they entered.
“Oh, yes. Dave, so too Betty,” said Max. He draped a cloth over a mound of camera innards and turned to face the visitors. “Come, sit, please.”
Dave moved a chair into the middle of the room for Betty, then dragged a work stool over and perched next to his brother. When all were seated, Max leaned far forward, elbows on knees, and tented his fingers. “Certain realities have come to light,” Max began. “Audiences are exhibiting an outsized response to your roles. We’ve asked you here to discuss how we might capitalize on that.”
“What do you mean?” asked Betty.
“He’s saying you’ve got it, doll,” said Dave. “That Elinor Glyn thing. Even playing second fiddle, people can see it. You put butts in the seats. You’ve got what it takes to be a bona-fide bombshell.”
“What your success reveals is an unexploited gap in the market,” said Max. “It might be an opportunity to finally get ahead of the Competition. He’s our match in variety pictures, but if we maximize the opportunity you present, we’ll be able to put out a product he can’t duplicate.”
On the drive over, Betty had tried and failed to imagine what transgression could have prompted Max Butcher’s desire to see her, what chastisements might be due. She’d braced herself to endure a catalogue of personal failure. To hear this instead was dizzying.
The room fell quiet. The brothers had paused, were looking to her for a response. “That sounds great to me,” said Betty. “So, does this mean I’ll get to make some movies solo?”
“That would certainly be our eventual expectation, yes,” said Max. “But there is an obstacle to overcome before the next steps are possible.”
“There’s only so much I can do with costumes and makeup,” Dave said. “I’ve been trying my best — and it’s been working, you’re more popular than ever. But I can’t tuck your ears into a red hood on every picture.”
“Indeed. For all of Dave’s talents, and your own inimitable qualities, the fact remains that the majority of our audience is human, and you are not. So potent is your winsome nature, Betty, that people are responding despite themselves. But the species difference does create a natural limit to your appeal.”
“What he means is, you just can’t be an It Girl without being, well, a girl. Our kind of girl.”
“We are recommending surgery,” said Max.
The brothers fell silent again.
Something buoyant that Betty had felt growing inside her ruptured, capsized, and sank away beneath sobering waves of comprehension. She met the eyes of the two men and felt pinned in place. She said, “You want me to be human?”
“It would be an extensive procedure,” Max said.
Dave counted on his fingers, “Dock the ears and tail. Snout tuck. Breast reduction on all but the top two. Need to make those bigger, actually. Fill in the gams—”
“The studio would, of course, finance the procedure, and support you through any necessary period of recovery,” said Max. “We’re proposing a significant investment in your future.”
The future they wanted to invest in seemed as separate from Betty as tomorrow’s weather.
“What about Bimbo?” she asked. “Would he need surgery too?”
Dave leaned back and looked to Max, who removed his glasses and began to polish them with his necktie. Max said, “Bimbo is well suited to his present role. Quite well suited. There is, you know, a grand mythological tradition of trickster dogs. One could consider a vaudevillian like Bimbo to be the modern incarnation of that pedigree. His antics have an archetypical charge, which resonates with audiences. It would be a mistake to mute that resonance.”
“Bimbo’s fine, he’s perfect,” said Dave. “What we’re talking about is a change for you. Up till now you’ve been his love interest on the screen. We’re talking about making you the love interest for the whole world.”
It was all too much, too fast. Betty’s heart beat in her ears. “I… I’d have to talk it through with Bimbo first,” she said. “I’ve never…. Surgery?”
Dave got down from his stool and knelt in front of Betty’s chair. He pulled the ring from his little finger and folded it into her grasp. “Doll,” he said, looking up into her eyes, “even the bones of the Earth take some cutting to make a diamond.”
Betty’s tale was interrupted. Another question.
She looked down at her chest, touched the ring hanging from the silver chain around her neck. She squeezed the jewel between finger and thumb as her cheeks flushed with anger. She said, “What answer do you want?”
The documentarian didn’t understand.
“I’m a professional,” said Betty. “Tell me what you want to hear and I’ll say it. You want a yes? I’ll say that was the most important moment of my life, and I still keep Dave’s ring close to my heart. Want a no? I’ll say I threw Dave’s ring away in 1936 and wish I’d never taken it. Just decide what it is you’re after.”
The documentarian, flustered, assured Betty that they weren’t after anything. There was no agenda behind the project, no particular story they aimed to tell.
Betty scoffed. “Of course there is. It’s a piece on the studio, right? Interviews with everyone who’s still around, archivals for the rest? Say a ninety minute cut. I get eight minutes, maybe nine if I’m saucy. You’ll chop up what I say however fits your story best. So if you’re too impatient to hear my life the way I tell it, why waste everyone’s time? Tell me what you want, I’ll give you the takes you need.”
The documentarian conceded that, of course, the finished film would not, could not, capture the full complexity of a life. No film could. The act of editing was indeed inseparable from that of imposing narrative. But still, they argued, that need not mean the project had an agenda. The story told could be a discovered story, something designed to communicate, as well as possible, a discovered truth. The answer Betty should give regarding the diamond ring she wore as a pendant was, simply, whichever answer was true.
Betty sighed, touched the ring again, let her hand drop. “They’re both true,” she said. “More than one thing can be true.”
Bimbo was not in favor of the Butcher brothers’ proposal.
When Betty returned to their shared home, a ground-floor apartment in the same building as Koko, she recounted the whole story of her meeting with the Butchers and offered Dave’s diamond ring for Bimbo’s perusal. He didn’t take it. Instead, he let his bubbling anger boil over and ricocheted around the room, crashing through a dense jungle of invective, hunting the words that fit his rage. He sprang on the telephone and called the studio, demanded to speak to Dave, was denied, demanded more stridently. He didn’t hang up until he had harangued an assurance from Dave’s secretary that Mr. Butcher was aware of his distress and would meet with him tomorrow. Still unsatisfied, Bimbo launched into a recitation of all the things he would have said to Dave, had the guy the guts to pick up his phone.
Through all this, Betty sat on the sofa and tried to relax, overwhelmed by the day’s surprises and familiar from long experience with times when it was best to let Bimbo burn himself out. She turned the ring over and over, studied it in the light. She tried to envision what the glinting gem and polished silver had looked like when they were first unearthed. Just lumps of rock, probably. Unremarkable to anyone except those expert few who were sensitive to their hum of invisible potential. Betty put her head down and closed her eyes.
What did she want?
She imagined her desires as solid shapes. Some of them fit together snug, others were jaggedly incompatible; the whole was a puzzle with excess pieces, impossible to complete without discarding something.
She let the boundaries of her vision expand, watched the full structure of her own desire as it either meshed with or else caromed off the architecture other people’s preferences. Everyone else’s expectations swarmed her own tiny geometry of need, all against the background haze of an even more distant and inconceivable longing: the love of the whole world that Dave had promised could be hers.
Bimbo was still ranting, but his tirade was interrupted by a knock. Koko. Bimbo accosted him in the doorway. “Did you know about this?”
“Not until just now. The studio called, asked if I would check in on you. They’re concerned.”
“Dave called, you mean. And I bet he’s concerned, all right. We’re his great big hit. You know it, Koko. You know how goddamn good we are. Anyone would make a bundle with us. We’d be a hit anywhere.”
Koko said quietly, almost apologetically, “You do have a contract with the studio.”
“Ain’t a word in there about sitting pretty while they chop up Betty! A new name’s one thing, but this? This takes some kind of nerve!” said Bimbo, his voice building to consume the volume Koko had left unused.
“You wound him back up, Koko,” said Betty from the couch. “He was finally starting to flag.”
Bimbo rounded on her, his face a pileup of outrage and confusion. “You’re okay with this?”
“Bim, I’m just waiting for you to blow off enough steam that we can talk without getting scalded.”
“What is there even to talk about?”
“Everything. They said if I do this it could change everything for us.”
“Starting by changing your whole damn body.”
“That’s right,” said Betty. “It’s my body. And I want to talk about it, so sit.”
Bimbo arrested his frantic orbit and joined her on the couch. Koko allowed himself in and sat opposite the couple.
“Fine, let’s talk,” said Bimbo. “Let’s you tell me what could possibly be worth this. Letting them turn you into a whole different person.”
“Not a different person,” said Betty. “Same person, different shape.”
“If you’ll be the same, then why bother?”
“Because the shape matters. You know it matters. Are you going to talk with me for real or not?”
“I don’t see the point, is all. Life’s better than it’s ever been, why would you wanna change things up now?”
Not looking at anyone in particular, Koko said, “There would be some advantages. For you both. When the studio got you this apartment, it had to go in my name. I was happy to sign, but if Betty was a woman she could take over the lease. Might be nice to have control over something like that. Nicer than living in a loading dock, I’d think.”
Betty nodded. Bimbo eyed him like a home invader. “That some kinda threat, Koko? They send you here to tell us that if we don’t play ball we’re out on the street?”
“No, of course not,” said Koko. “Bimbo, I’m a friend. And I’m no one’s message boy. I’m just saying, there would be some upsides.”
“He’s talking about security,” said Betty.
“We got money now, don’t we?” said Bimbo. “Our films are hits, ain’t they? Talking about security when everyone here’s a goddamn movie star.”
Koko shook his head. “I’m no star. You two, maybe. Me? I’m just a no-account clown who got lucky. You think I used to live in a place this nice either? But I listened to Dave, and here I am, doing better than I ever had a right to. Now, Dave says he can turn Betty into a world-class heartbreaker? I hear that, I think fame, money, clout like none of us has ever seen. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that?”
“There ain’t no reason Betty can’t be world-class the way she is,” said Bimbo. “Think about it, who’s the biggest star in comedy? A mouse. A mouse in overalls is splitting more sides than anyone since Buster Keaton.”
“You’re the comedian though,” said Betty. “I’m a singer. Folks want different things from me than from you.”
“Whatever they want, you’re giving it to ‘em already. Gone from nobody to the top of the bill, but now you gotta get all cut up to be a big shot? What kinda sense does that make?”
“Dave and Max think I could be bigger. Bigger than anyone else, maybe.”
“How big do you gotta be?” asked Bimbo. “We made it. You and me. We worked our way up from the gutter, and now we got everything we ever dreamed.”
Koko said, “For now. But things do change. I know you’ve had things change on you before, and lord knows I have too. There’s no stopping it. You can only prepare for it, by grabbing as much as you can while you can.”
Bimbo shivered, panted anxiously. He said, “This ain’t just taking, though. This is giving something up, too.” He locked eyes with Betty. “It’s always been you and me. Through it all, nothing’s changed that.”
“It’d still be you and me,” said Betty.
“Would it? ’Cause if you go through with this, changing what you are, then what does that make us?”
“The same thing as ever.”
“No. No, you wanted to talk for real? Two dogs living together, that’s one thing. But a woman with a dog, what is that? Say you turn into the biggest human woman movie star ever lived, then what does that make me? Your pet?”
“Bim, come on.” Betty moved over close to him. “You know me. You know what you mean to me.”
“That’s why I don’t understand. How could you wanna do this to us?”
“It would be for us. To put a floor under our feet.” Bimbo’s terrified face flooded her with sympathy, made her feel soft at the edges. But at her center a new ambition was setting. “What if the studio goes under? What if they knock this place down? The way things are now, none of it’s ever really ours. I want to play for keeps, Bim. I want us to play for keeps together.”
Bimbo looked at her with low ears and sunken eyes.
“I think I should go,” said Koko, and stood to leave. On his way out the door, he paused and added, “It’s a big decision, and a big opportunity. The kind that doesn’t come around twice. Whatever you do, Betty, just be sure you’re choosing what’s best for you. Whatever that means.”
But Betty wasn’t sure that she ever could be sure. Being sure would mean knowing how it would all turn out, or at least convincing herself that she knew. She didn’t think it was possible to be both honest and sure about something like this. She couldn’t know what was best, she could only make her best guess.
When Koko was gone, Bimbo said to her, “What you’re talking about, playing for keeps… I don’t know if that’s a game I can play.”
Betty said, “We’ll figure it out. That’s what we’ve always done.”
She licked his face and rested her head on him, on their couch, in their apartment, so far from where they had started. Somewhere on the twisting geometry, Betty knew, was a place where her needs and Bimbo’s fit together like two parts of a broken whole. She knew its shape. She could reach out and feel it. It existed. And if it existed, it should go right on existing. The only trick, she thought, would be keeping it in view.
Betty plucked the remains of her cigarette from its holder and stubbed it into the ashtray. “We’re done for now,” she said.
The documentarian suggested a short break. Fifteen minutes for some water and fresh air.
Betty stood. “Pack your things,” she said. “Come back tomorrow if you want. I’m done for today.”
With a helpless nod from the documentarian, the crew began to strike the set. They stowed the mics and floods, unmounted the camera. When all had been packed away, Betty showed her desultory visitors to the door.
After seeing them out, Betty went to the redwood sideboard that held her dry bar. She fished a pearl onion from a narrow pickling jar and set it swimming in a tumbler with three fingers of gin. She took the drink to her bedroom, where she removed and hung up the dress she’d worn, that she’d need again tomorrow. The rest of her clothes she let fall to the broadloom carpet.
She examined herself in the tall mirror that stood beside her vanity. Her eyes cascaded down the myriad scars and lines and folds sketched across her galvanically depilated skin. Her body was like a map, drafted from the plan she had chosen for it, diligently updated over the years with novelties it had discovered on its own.
There were so many versions of her. Stray. Singer. Starlet. Sex symbol. Has-been. Where-is-she-now? She had been each of those people, yes, but none of them was her. The real her was all of them at once, layered atop each other like an overexposed photo. An amalgam solid and opaque at the center, blurred at the edges into fleshy ambiguity. Life, as she had known it, was a continual renegotiation of where she ended and everything else began.
She belted her drink, crunched the onion, and went to refill her glass. With a little luck, and a little more booze, she’d meet the morning with no memory of whichever version of her it was that her subconscious would cast as the star of tonight’s dreams.
The documentarian spent that evening in a hotel bar, balancing priorities, trying to salvage the project. They were working on a shoestring budget from Telefilm Associates of America, who had recently acquired the rights to the Butcher Brothers archive and hoped a retrospective film would increase the value of their new property. The plan had been to devote a single day to Betty’s interview, but she’d ended the shoot prematurely, and before getting to the topics people actually cared about.
Betty’s story was too central to do without. The only option would be to tack an extra day on the schedule. They would just have to make sure that day two proceeded as efficiently as possible. No interruptions this time, no unnecessary delays. Absolutely nothing that might antagonize the subject.
The documentarian and crew regrouped over an early breakfast, roughed out a new plan, agreed on certain pitfalls to be avoided. The subject didn’t like questions? Fine. Throw the prepared questions away. Let her ramble as much as she likes, so long as there’s a camera rolling. They arrived back at Betty’s door focused, organized, ready for action.
Betty met them haggard and housecoated. Her eyes were ringed by dark circles, and her hair reached out in wispy entreaties, like a creature from the bottom of the sea. She let them in, told them to get ready without her, that she’d freshen up and join them in a little while. Then she disappeared into the depths of the house.
The subject was obviously, brutally hungover.
There was nothing for it. They set up the lights and framed things as best they could. When the time was right, they’d just have to adjust on the fly. The woman was a wreck, so continuity was already out the window. They killed time shooting some b-roll of Betty’s home, and consoled themselves that today’s audio might still be good, at least. They could use it for voice overs with clips from the Butcher Brothers archive. The answer, as ever, was to shoot as much as possible while they could, and worry about fitting things together later, in the editing room.
After fifty minutes, Betty reemerged. She looked pristine. Hair tamed, face glamorous, she had composed herself into perfect camera readiness. A beleaguered gait betrayed the superficiality of her transformation, but once Betty was seated the scene was indistinguishable from the day before. The documentarian was delighted, the crew astonished. Just a sound check and a lit cigarette, and they were ready to roll.
“So,” said Betty, after the clapper hit the slate, “I understand that you’re curious about my surgeries.”
By the 1930s there was in Hollywood a small but well-established fraternity of secretive surgeons, beauty-makers who straightened noses, shrank ears, smoothed the curves that cameras would so cruelly exaggerate. They never named their patients, and were well compensated by stars and studios for their silence. For those most crucial or delicate procedures, Dr. Jakob Ginsburg was the first name on everyone’s list. People said he was a wizard with a scalpel and pipette of acid, a man who could turn anyone into anything. Even more impressive: in nearly six years of specialty practice, Dr. Ginsburg had never yet been sued by a dissatisfied patient. That made him unique among his confederates, and cemented his reputation as a man capable of working miracles.
During the presurgical consultation, Dr. Ginsburg spread on his desk glossy pictures of Betty, shot from all angles. He uncapped a fat, black marker and sketched outlines, cross-hatched excesses, pointed arrows at regions to be augmented, relocated, or removed. Max and Dave leaned over the table with him, offering suggestions and articulating priorities. Betty sat quietly, watching the men point, listening to the felt tip squeak out the contours of her future. The details were of interest, but she had nothing to add. Her own conditions she had already negotiated.
She’d told Max and Dave that she’d do it, but required certain assurances. First, Bimbo’s place at the studio had to be safe. If they had been planning to kick him to the curb then she wanted no part of it. The brothers assured Betty that as long as she worked for them, Bimbo would have a job too.
Second, she wanted a house. A nice one with no lien, deeded over to her the very minute she was a human woman. A place in Beverly Hills that no one could take away, regardless of how her bombshell burst. This, too, the brothers were willing to grant.
Finally, she wanted her on-screen relationship with Bimbo to remain the same. That condition was rejected. Max opined that the whole project was pointless unless they had freedom to customize her screen presence to the demands of the market. Dave recollected what had befallen poor Clara Bow, how Frank Gernow made up stories for the Coast Reporter claiming she enjoyed sexual relations with a Great Dane. Gernow went to jail for his fabrications (not because they were lies, for distributing obscenity through the mail), but Bow’s career was ruined all the same. “We’d be on thin ice shooting movies that showed something like that,” said Dave.
Eventually, Betty and the brothers reached a compromise: she and Bimbo would continue to have opportunities to act together, but the specific roles would be left up to the studio.
An agreement in place, everyone got back to work. Betty and Bimbo shot seven more films on a rushed production schedule, so that the studio would have regular releases to stoke the fire of Betty’s popularity while she recovered from her procedures. Bimbo remained professional throughout the shoots, but their personal life shriveled. The jokes dried up. Talk became tentative. They struggled to meet each other’s eyes during the day, and clung to one another desperately at night.
When the films were in the can, there was nothing left for them to do. Betty posed for the photographs and rode with the Butchers away from the studio in a car with darkened windows. It was time for Dr. Ginsburg to ply his trade.
Even more audacious than Betty’s proposed new body was the schedule for its creation. To minimize her time out of the spotlight, the producers and the doctor settled on an ambitious surgical plan: everything in just two operations.
Half a century later, a journalist would describe the extent of Betty’s augmentation to contemporary surgeons, asking what they would tell a patient seeking the same in so few steps. The respondents unanimously said it would be irresponsible, if it was even possible, which it probably wasn’t.
Dr. Ginsburg said only, “There will be pain.”
Betty nodded.
“I’ll tell you what Hell is,” said Betty. “Hell is everything at once. More bad things at once than your mind can hold. You fill up, overflow, and it still just keeps coming, until you break apart and wash away.”
Betty ashed, contemplated the glowing cherry at the end of her cigarette. She sat for a long, quiet moment, and everyone watching matched her stillness. Smoke climbed undisturbed to the ceiling, the room’s held-breath silence cut only by a soft whine as the implacable camera rolled on.
“I don’t really remember what it felt like after the surgery,” she said finally, “but I remember remembering. Like I came back from Hell and forgot it, but still have the diary I kept on the trip.” She shook her head. “There’s nothing else like it. I can remember what the floor of a boxcar tastes like, the smell of every soundstage my whole career. But when I think about my recovery, it’s like I’m reading the lyrics instead of hearing the music.”
Her convalescences took five months. She spent that time in their new Beverly Hills home, where Bimbo cared for her with uncompromising tenderness. The studio provided round-the-clock nurses, but he stayed at her bedside just the same. He allowed the professionals to examine sutures and measure blood pressure, but any task to which he was equal he undertook himself. Bimbo was determined to see Betty restored to her full vitality. Betty — the scope of her existence reduced to mundane indignities, fitful sleep, and pain — was receptive without limit to his nurturing attention.
There is solace in being needed. The constant outflow of support eroded the sharpest edges from the stone of betrayal in Bimbo’s heart. By the time Betty was ready to resume work, the couple were talking and laughing together again. The laughter was shyer than before, and the talk, by unspoken agreement, restricted to topics proximate and innocuous. But no longer were they lost to one another across a chasm of anxiety and resentment.
The Butchers, meanwhile, had spent the duration of Betty’s recovery planning their transformed star’s debut.
The first new film was Any Rags (1932), a soft launch that did little more than display Betty’s new body and give audiences tacit permission for overtly prurient interest. The film is carried by Bimbo, playing a junk collector who, during a long musical number, sees and instantly falls in love with Betty. Betty has no clearly defined character, and only two substantial scenes. The first features her singing from her apartment window that she has no junk to offer Bimbo down below. It’s fairly chaste, lacking the busy hands and innuendo of their previous films — though Betty’s dress does fall off twice to display her thoroughly human physique.
Betty reappears only at the end, for a choreographed kiss with Bimbo at the climax of another song. It’s the movie’s most overt gesture, and one that seems curiously at odds with the Butchers’ concerns. This skirting of the interspecies romance boundary is balanced by the film’s final image: Bimbo and Betty, now living together in a house built from garbage, go for a walk with a small, leashed puppy dog that is unmistakably Betty’s pet.
A possible explanation for this odd picture comes from a 1973 biography of Max, which posits that Any Rags was shot more to mollify Bimbo than to display Betty. The author claims that the entire film was an afterthought, written at the last minute to give Bimbo a showcase and a happily-ever-after. The Butcher brothers’ attempt to “throw the dog a bone,” in the hope that it would make him more accepting of his next role, which they had already penned.
The next film was the reconstructed Betty’s true premiere, and it was calculated to the finest detail.
Boop-oop-a-doop (1932) begins its project of repositioning Betty in the audience’s imagination before the first scene even starts. Over the title cards runs a new theme, a jingle composed specifically for the relaunch of the film’s star. A male chorus sings:
The cinematic screen
Crowns a brand new queen
Just one look’s all it took with
Sweet Betty
Prettier than words
For a smile you’ll be hers
Just one look’s all it took with
Sweet Betty
Her face
A sight to see
And there’s so much more
All right where it should be
You can ask anyone
She’s as perfect as they come
Just one look’s all it took with
Sweet Betty
The audience gets that look immediately. The opening shot is full body on Betty in a bikini top and short black skirt, hoop earrings dangling where her ears used to hang, eyes wide with concentration as she undulates to Sol Bloom’s snake charmer melody. Her movement is unnatural, almost seems humanly impossible. The inhumanity is explained when the camera pulls back to reveal that, for all the close-up detail, this is merely a picture of Betty, emblazoned on a waving flag above the big top of a circus. (To achieve this effect, Max invented a method for compositing a still shot of Betty into footage of a blank flag on a windy day. It was the basis for two patent applications.)
The film cuts to circus performers parading past an adoring crowd. Bimbo plays a carny clerk, handling odd jobs like inflating the fat woman and grooming the bearded lady. Koko is there as well, a clown who enters on the back of an elephant. At the head of the parade is Betty, standing balanced atop a saddled horse and blowing kisses to the audience.
The action moves inside the big top, where an enormous, mustachioed ringmaster introduces a series of animal acts. Intercut with these are scenes of Bimbo moving through the stands, hawking peanuts. These scenes qualify Bimbo’s part as a speaking role, but notably lack any showcase for his talents. His character does not appear again.
The last animal-only act is a procession of dogs of all different breeds, who run up a ramp and jump through a hoop. The film smash cuts from this presentation of canine diversity to Betty: all woman in an A-line dress, high-heeled boots, and her soon-to-be-iconic single garter belt. She’s in a cage with several lions, cracking a whip overhead to keep three of them at bay. A fourth sneaks up on her from behind, prompting desperate shouts of warning from trembling onlookers. But even the king of beasts is overcome by Betty’s beauty; rather than savage her, the lion demurely returns a dropped handkerchief before escorting her, safely, to the exit.
Betty’s next act is a musical number on a high wire. Scantily clad and wielding a comically small umbrella, she sings an exhortation for an unnamed intimate to seize the moment and “Do Something,” each verse punctuated by a sultry boop-oop-a-doop directly into the camera.
The ringmaster eyes her lasciviously during the performance, twirling his mustache and licking his lips. After the show, he lurks near Betty’s tent until she returns, then creeps in and looms over her. He strokes her bare leg and, when she pushes him away, asks if she enjoys her job.
Betty affirms that she does.
The ringmaster whispers what she’ll have to do to keep it.
Betty socks him in the jaw.
The ringmaster snarls, “You’ve done your last boop-oop-a-doop!” and tries to throttle her, but she slips his grasp. As he chases her around the tent, she sobs and sings:
You can take back all my money
You can throw me for a loop
But please just let me keep my boop-oop-a-doop
You can say my songs are tasteless
You can kick me to the stoop
But please just let me keep my boop-oop-a-doop
Koko, juggling nearby, hears Betty’s cries for help and rushes in to save her. The hulking ringmaster easily tosses him aside, several times, but the clown remains stubbornly persistent. The ringmaster opts to solve the problem permanently by stuffing Koko into a cannon, lighting the fuse, and blowing him to bits. As the ringmaster scans the sky for flying clown fragments and delights in his own cleverness, Koko emerges unscathed from the muzzle. He hefts a mallet and conks out the ringmaster mid-chuckle.
Betty runs to her rescuer’s side, and Koko whispers a question in her ear. Betty proudly sings, Through it all I kept my boop-oop-a-doop! Koko kisses her cheek, they embrace, and gaze into one another’s eyes as the screen fades to black.
The response was phenomenal. The film smashed studio records for both ticket sales and press coverage. Betty was, as expected, on the front page of all the Hollywood rags, but also got a full article in the LA Times and a mention in the New York Herald-Tribune. (“[A] woman whose virtue, while perhaps tightly held, is maintained at arm’s length.”) Howard Hughes, having only recently parted ways with Jean Harlow, called Max with an offer to buy Betty’s contract. “Do Something” became a surprise radio hit. Sales of elastic roll garters spiked.
For Betty it was the start of her golden age, the two years during which she was the brightest star in Hollywood.
The Butcher brothers maintained a scientific approach for her next releases, iterating on themes, tweaking variables, and gauging responses. Some of these films were increasingly overt variations on Betty’s encounter with the ringmaster. In one, Betty’s besotted employer is not a carny but a white collar manager, and, after some initial resistance, Betty accedes to his amorous designs. In another, she is captured by lustful pirates, and only the combined heroics of Bimbo and Koko save her from ravishment. These films were well-received, but showed diminishing returns. It seemed there was a ceiling on the appeal of such overt sexualization.
Other experiments followed the surprise success of “Do Something” by having Betty cover popular songs (with, of course, a bouncing ball so the audience could sing along). Adding Betty garnered more press attention for the studio’s sing-along films, but only modestly grew their audience.
The real triumphs were the films that expanded on Betty’s turn as a lion tamer: depictions of Betty oblivious to her own charm, even as it warped reality around her. The first of these — another instant hit — simply showed Betty as a newcomer to town, awed and grateful at how helpful everyone is, while behind her back the locals all quarrel for her favor. The brothers would repeat this formula again and again, casting Betty as a naif across an atlas of settings and situations. It never failed. Wondering if there was any limit to the approach, Max eventually penned a film wherein the very planets of the solar system fight over Betty, who does nothing at all but hurtle through the sky in gravitational confusion. People loved it.
Thus was the matter settled. The numbers showed that Betty was best deployed as an unassuming innocent, perpetually astonished by the attention she receives from an adoring world. By the end of 1932 she was playing some version of that character in every film. The box office returns grew and grew.
Away from the screen, Betty became the toast of Hollywood. Photographers crowded her at premieres, and she was a coup for any high-class soirée. She became a fixture of the gossip columns, her name selling cheap papers as easily as her body and voice sold theater tickets. No one could get enough. As the country sank into the deepest depths of the Great Depression, people longed for rags-to-riches stories, and no star rose from humbler beginnings than Betty.
Her star was so bright, it washed out Bimbo’s sparkle completely.
“I need a drink,” said Betty. She stood from her chair and went to the dry bar. As she clinked in the other room, the crew exchanged nervous glances, the vision of the Betty who’d greeted them still fresh in their minds.
Betty returned with a gin and sat heavily in the seat. “Hair of the dog,” she mumbled, and paused to watch light dance in the cut crystal tumbler before knocking half of it back. She held the glass in her lap, both hands around it tight. The camera operator zoomed so the drink was out of frame, Betty’s face swelling in the viewfinder, but seeming farther away than ever.
”Of course I got asked about Bimbo and me,” she said. “And of course I lied. But you have to sell a lie, and keep on selling it. He couldn’t walk a red carpet with me, go to parties with me. We couldn’t be seen in public together at all. It was hard for him.”
Him, flinging himself off her, flaccid and furious.
“Got nothing to work with here.”
“Hard for both of us, but mostly him. It’s easier for me now to see what he went through. He had to listen to me go on Louella Parsons’ show and laugh and say, no, no, we’re just good friends.”
Him, swatting her breast when she turns around.
“The fuck do I even do with those?”
“Had to listen to her chatter about what a special bond you can have with a pet, and me just go along with it. It was humiliating for him. He got… bitter. But I had to be so carful, or we could’ve lost everything.”
What do you want me to say?
This is me. This is my body.
“I knew that Max and Dave wanted Bimbo out of the picture. I knew that any hungry gossip writer would’ve loved to tear us down. It was like the whole world wanted us to be over. But none of that would’ve mattered. Not to me. Not ever.”
Him, growling.
“Not your real fucking body.”
“If what we had stayed good, nothing would’ve made me leave him. He could only do that himself.”
Betty let Bimbo stay in the house in Beverly Hills. She moved to a penthouse on Sunset, where she fumed and cried and spent a week ignoring the Butcher brothers’ calls. She stayed inside, having food brought in but letting the rest of the world and its problems pile up with the newspapers outside her door. The studio must have planted some sympathetic lie about her disappearance in those papers, because well-wishing notes and occasional flower bouquets from other A-listers began to trickle in. She kept the flowers.
During week two, Dave showed up in person to say she could take all the time she needed. When she was ready to work again, they’d only do films she was comfortable with. The studio had her back, he said, one hundred percent. She thanked him, and sent him on his way. Thereafter, regular messages from the brothers reiterating their support — always with an artfully unforced mention of that future time when she would start making movies for them again.
She began emerging in week three: a haircut here, a restaurant meal there. Short excursions to support the slow healing of her wounded heart. And once she started going out in public, it wasn’t long before overtures and invitations followed her home. She still wasn’t interested in the spotlight, and turned down the radio shows that wanted her on. But when Marion Davies invited her to a party in Santa Monica, she accepted. There, away from camera lenses, she enjoyed being around people again, listening to them talk about themselves without pushing her to reciprocate. She declined a proposition from Gary Cooper, but that night did invite a pretty, bashful young man from the catering staff to her bed. The first of many new lovers with whom she would seek consolation.
Sleeping with humans was different, but something she soon learned to enjoy. It helped that the men she took back to her penthouse were worshipful, barely able to believe they were going to bed with a goddess of the silver screen. She chose positions that let her look in her lovers’ faces, and always thought she could see movies playing behind their eyes.
Bimbo, meanwhile, still had his studio contract. Two months after Betty left him, a solo film he’d made in her absence hit theaters. Betty donned a shawl and dark glasses and bought a matinee ticket at a theater across town. There, she saw Bimbo playing his usual brand of wily scallawag, inhabiting center stage with a gusto she’d missed from him for over a year. They’d cast some scrawny, wooden lookalike hound in the girlfriend role; watching Bimbo kiss her made Betty’s blood boil and eyes sweat. But Bimbo… it had been so long since she’d seen him from a theater seat, doing the things he was born to do. He was brilliant, she thought, watching him sing and dance and pilot a robot through a boxing gym. As brilliant as anyone had ever been.
The movie bombed. It was a complete flop, and the Butchers stopped couching their desperation for her return. Their precariousness was made plain: they needed her. Everything they were trying to build, the studio’s whole future, depended on her. There were loans coming due, business moves premised on Betty’s continued stardom. If she didn’t return soon, they’d be ruined. They implored, promised to do whatever she required, anything that would get her back on set.
Watching her ex tank at the box office. Hearing the brothers beg. It kindled in Betty a small flame of satisfaction, which she sheltered from the wind of her own generosity so it could burn tall and bright. She’d let it gutter out, eventually. But for now it was something she needed. Something she wanted. Something to keep her warm.
“When I went back to work, I told them, no rewrites. No writing Bimbo out. I wanted him exactly where he was, playing bit parts in my hits. I wanted to rub his nose in it, that without me he was just a flash in the pan. Prove I’d been right.
“It was petty, but I’m glad I did it. That work we did at the end… we’d always been trying to prove ourselves to the world, but that was the only time we had something to prove to each other. Bimbo had a lot of pride. He kept putting everything he had into his parts, however small. Like he was saying, okay, be the big shot, but if you don’t bring it I’ll steal every show. So I had to put in everything, too.
“I don’t know if anyone else could see it, but it’s all there. Me and Bimbo, trying to out-do each other. It’s why that last year of movies we made together are the best of my whole career.”
In 1933, only Mae West grossed more at the box office than Betty. Between West’s salacious wisecrackers and Betty’s flirtatious ingénues, movies were reaching new heights both lucrative and libidinal. But the women’s success drew criticism, which soon matched in passion that of their admirers.
Since 1922, Hollywood had successfully defended itself from government regulation by persuading the public that they policed themselves. The studios had hired William Hays — former head of the Republican National Committee, practiced at leaning on the levers of power — as a figurehead of self-censorship. For a decade, through Harding and Coolidge and Hoover, the Hays Office kept state censors mollified while leaving the movie industry legally and artistically unfettered.
But now the country was changing. It was supposed to; that was the promise that put a Democrat in the White House for the first time in sixteen years. The banks, chastened and chaperoned by new regulations, were finally open again. So were the bars, newly freed from Prohibition and shaking up spirits. Anything seemed ripe for upheaval in Roosevelt’s America, and William Hays’s influence in Washington was at an all-time low.
It was in this volatile moment that the Archbishop of Cincinnati, who saw in the cinema a symbol of all that he decried in culture, founded the Legion of Decency to protest films offensive to Christian morality. The Legion introduced an A-B-C rating system for movies, with only A films permissible for viewing by upstanding Catholics. They canvassed state censorship boards to adopt their system, and had congregations around the country pledge boycotts of any movie that didn’t meet their standards.
It was the old threat born anew. If the Legion of Decency’s ratings were adopted by enough states, it would become the de-facto regulator of the film industry. The studio heads met and agreed that this new surge of censorious fervor had to be brought in-house. But doing so this time would mean taking some lumps.
The Hays Office created a new branch, charged with enforcing the content guidelines of the Motion Picture Production Code. The Code had been in place since 1930, but compliance had previously been voluntary; most scripts were never even submitted for review. The rulings of the new Production Code Administration, though, would be binding, and now every movie would require its stamp of approval prior to release. To lead the PCA, William Hays installed Joseph Breen, a man whose sterling reputation as a conservative Catholic, casual antisemite, and enemy of communism made him immune to criticism from the Legion of Decency.
The gambit worked. But for studios that had been printing money on the strength of films containing, as the Code put it, “any inference of sex perversion,” the good times rolled to a halt in the summer of 1934.
No studio was hit harder than Butcher Brothers.
Bimbo was fired. The brothers retained no faith he could carry a film on his own, and any movie with both him and Betty, regardless of content, would get spiked for suggestion of bestiality. The brothers’ deal with Betty was simply impossible to honor under the new regime. They could afford to pay out the rest of Bimbo’s contract, but not to let him anywhere near a film set.
In symbolic repudiation of the former star, Bimbo was replaced by Smudge, a puppy who, though a talented child actor, never spoke on screen, and whose domesticated subservience left no ambiguity about his role in Betty’s life.
But it wasn’t just her costar who had to change. Joseph Breen singled Betty out directly, citing her “suggestive winking and hip-shaking” as a prime example of the sort of immorality he was there to stamp out. Max and Dave, as dependent on her success as ever, scrambled to remake her into something Breen would find acceptable.
First to go were the strapless bustier dresses with hemlines high enough to show a garter. After all the time and money they’d spent to create Betty’s body, and all the anguish she’d endured to achieve it, now it had to be obscured by shawl collars and below-the-knee skirts. Sleeves metastasized across her outfits. Her wardrobe suffered a creeping infestation of aprons.
Her roles, too, transformed. Gone was the adventurous, carefree flapper who had so enthralled audiences, and in her place appeared an earnest career girl or fretful homemaker. These were demure, reactive characters, less likely to drive the action than their more brazen predecessors had been.
As Max and Dave struggled to produce films that would both keep the studio afloat and satisfy the censors, Betty found herself increasingly sidelined in her own movies. They still had her name atop the title cards, but her presence dwindled in favor of showcasing other performers. There was Uncle Clank, an elderly theater veteran who played an inventor of comedic contraptions that were as likely to create problems as solve them. Also featured was Phil Fearless, a tall, barrel-chested babyface with eyelashes even longer and thicker than Betty’s, who was introduced as her new love interest. Sometimes even Smudge ended up with more screen time than she did as the films were cut and recut to meet PCA approval.
It was in 1935 that Betty, fed up with her meager parts, confronted Max. She visited him in the executive building, where his sanctum had shrunk to a single office. The man himself, once so imposing, seemed to have shrunk as well. He looked gaunt, and twitchier than ever.
“Why am I even in these movies?” she asked. “Why put my name on them if you won’t let me do anything?”
Max explained. “The boundaries of our aesthetic landscape have shifted, as might the view from a window of a moving train. Centered in our vision now are simpler, more juvenile enthusiasms. We can still see you, Betty, giant that you are. But now you are like the mountain that shelters the colors and song of the village.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Max took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Dave should be the one to discuss this with you. He’s the director,” he said. “Please, Betty. I will, of course, always make time for you. But I am very busy.”
That night Dave took her to the Frolic Room, and over cocktails said, “I wish things were different, doll. Truly, I do. I can’t even cast Koko anymore.” He bit his glass and sighed, breath rippling across his martini.
“What’s wrong with Koko?” asked Betty.
“He’s not a star. The only stars we’ve got are you and Popsy, and you can’t keep shining forever when Breen won’t let us use you right. Max says that we have to develop new talent to diversify the appeal of our product.” He drained his drink, signaled for another. “If Koko was going to break out, it would’ve happened already. We have to give those roles to people with more potential.”
Betty rolled her eyes. “Of course. I’m sharing the spotlight with Uncle Clank now because he’s got so much potential.”
“Clank’s just an excuse for the machines. Other studios would need to hire engineers, but Max can design all that stuff himself. Max says we have to lean on all our advantages right now. Anything we can still do that they can’t.”
The booze was going to Betty’s head, even as Dave slid another cocktail in front of her. “So it’s all a switcheroo,” she said, taking the drink and looking up at him. “You tell them it’s my movie, but really you want them to fall in love with someone else.”
“They already love you, doll. They love you so much, they keep coming to these lousy movies, just in case there’s another glimpse of what we can’t show anymore.”
Betty was shocked. “You think they’re lousy?” she asked. Not that she disagreed; she, too, found their recent output anodyne. Nearly extinguished was the exciting surrealism, the risk-taking that had first drawn her and Bimbo to the studio. But never before had Dave revealed the slightest dissatisfaction with his work, or any lack of faith in its quality.
“Maybe lousy’s too strong. On the technical side they’re top-notch,” Dave said. “Sharpest we’ve ever done in some ways. Just no soul to them anymore.” He put his glass down and leaned his head into his hand. “If someone else takes off like Popsy, we have a shot. We just need to launch a few more Popsys.”
Popsy was the studio’s only other performer with a dedicated audience. He was a strongman who played a muttering, good-humored sailor, a character who’d persevere through any obstacle to satisfy Olivia, his girlfriend on the screen and wife in real life. He’d made his debut in 1933 as one of Betty’s costars, a would-be lover defeating other suitors for her affection. But he’d refused to kiss her at the climax of their only film together, and thereafter refused to continue acting at all if his romantic partner was played by anyone but his wife. After a screen test to prove that Olivia could hold her own, Butcher Brothers gave him what he wanted. Now it was his movies — along with what remained of Betty’s appeal — that were keeping the studio lights on.
“You’re kidding yourself if you think Phil will ever be another Popsy,” said Betty.
“He’s gorgeous,” said Dave. “Gorgeous goes a long way.”
“He doesn’t have it,” Betty said, feeling unsteady on her barstool. “He’s stiff as that bitch you replaced me with in Bimbo’s last picture.”
“Yeah, well, she was gorgeous too. You want another one?” Betty shook her head. Dave got another for himself. “You know Bimbo and Koko are performing together, now? At the Meralta. Seems like they’re having a grand old time.”
Betty hadn’t heard.
“You should go see them,” Dave said. “Koko’s best on stage. Give him a room to read, and he can make it seem like everything he does is just for you. That’s his greatest talent. Doesn’t work through a camera, though. I never could figure out how to catch it on film.”
Betty sipped her drink, and said, “There’s a lot of love that goes into making movies, when everything’s working. It’s easy to be cynical about Hollywood, but what gets lost is that love. And you’ll forgive an awful lot when you love what you’re doing.”
This elicited a smile from the documentarian, grins from the crew; they knew exactly what she meant. Much had changed about filmmaking in the years since Betty’s career ended, but that, at least, was as true as ever.
“But I stopped loving the work. I think Dave did too, and maybe even Max. I wasn’t proud of the movies we were making, anymore. It felt like we were groveling. Like each new script was another apology that I had ever existed in the first place. Max would say how the studio needed to reinvent itself, but if you ask me, reinvention means moving toward something new, not just running away from what you used to be.”
The documentarian asked a question, then. A gnawing follow-up that could be held back no longer.
Betty raised her hand to her neck and touched the diamond ring. “Oh, right. That. Well, there was one movie I really blew up about. It was called Be Human — see how subtle things had gotten? The title song built to this crescendo where I was supposed to sing, ‘If all of us were human, everything would be grand / So be human if you can.’
“It was too much. I said no way, I wouldn’t do it. They told me, oh, I just didn’t understand, the movie was really all about how we have to be good and kind to everyone, human or not. Be human just means be humane. But I said they were talking out both sides of their mouth, and I was done helping them do it. I told Max he was a hypocritical piece of shit, and Dave that he was just the smear Max left behind.
“Then I went on a bender. Got myself thrown out of a bar. I ended up at the Meralta, making a fool of myself, booing all the human acts and demanding they put Bimbo on. He wasn’t even on the bill that night, but someone must’ve called him or Koko, because they showed up to take me home. I tried to push Bimbo up on stage, and fought the whole way when they took me out of there. I was so angry. When we got up to my penthouse, I started throwing dresses out the window, and when they stopped me doing that I howled like a banshee. I have no idea how long it took them to get me to calm down and go to bed, but somewhere in there I found Dave’s ring and threw it down the garbage chute.
“All the papers ran pictures the next day. It was the biggest scandal going for a week or two. The sloppiest spectacle I ever made. Everyone had to go out and make excuses for me, do damage control. But it was real, at least. I don’t know how anyone could see that and think I wasn’t for real.
“And when it was all over, I went back and did the movie anyway.”
The momentum from Betty’s meteoric rise ebbed away through the late 1930s. By the end of 1936, Popsy was the larger draw. His audience had grown, but not as much as Betty’s had diminished, which it continued to throughout 1937. She retained a core fanbase that ensured her movies would, if produced frugally, always be at least modest financial successes. But it was a bare fragment of her prior celebrity.
In 1938, the Butcher Brothers studio saw its last gasp of success from a new star, a strongman even more prodigiously talented than Popsy. Kent was a square-jawed farm boy who left home for the excitement of LA, and happened to be the strongest, fastest person anyone had ever met, able to leap over buildings and tie steel beams into knots. To showcase his incredible skills, Max built mechanical monsters for him to battle in extravagant, choreographed spectacles of sound and color. The movies were fantastically expensive to make, but so popular that they always earned back their budgets — though sometimes just barely.
For a time, the Butchers tried reviving Betty’s popularity by affixing her to Kent’s coattails. Max planted tabloid stories that she and the new superstar were an item. Dave made sure they were photographed together at parties and premieres. Kent gave interviews where, at the brothers’ urging, he said that of course it was a dream come true to share a studio with Popsy, but in truth Betty was the performer he most admired.
This attempt to rekindle their dimmed star with sparks of romance from their brightest was unsuccessful. Betty’s box office numbers didn’t budge, and the whole endeavor was soon abandoned. Some have speculated that they lacked the chemistry to capture the public’s imagination as a couple, and it is certainly the case that Kent’s homosexuality was an open secret around Hollywood.
Betty agreed to the brothers’ plan not because she had any hope of being restored to her former glory; she was counting the days until her contract with the studio expired and she would no longer need to perform. No, Betty went along with the ruse to draw attention away from the truth of her private life. After conspicuous nights out on Kent’s muscular arm, she would go home to her penthouse and send down the service elevator. When it returned, there would be Bimbo, and she would take him to bed.
Neither Betty nor Bimbo told anyone of their bestial affair, not even their closest friends. After losing sight of one another for years in the dazzle of fame, they had quietly found each other again, and in secret made a private space that was for them alone. They forgave, and they loved, and though their undeniably fortunate days were rich with enviable diversion, it was only during their nights together that they knew the joy of contentment.
One night in 1939, only a few months before Betty would be free of her contract and need never act again, Bimbo said to her, “I wanna give you something.”
“What is it?”
He left the room a moment, then came back to bed and offered Betty a diamond ring. The diamond ring Dave had given her eight years prior.
“All these years and I’m still knocking over trash cans,” he said.
“You’ve had this the whole time?”
“I couldn’t let it go. Figured you’d want it again, someday. I wanted to be the one to give it to you this time.”
Betty took the ring and scratched fingers through his fur. “Thank you.”
Bimbo yawned and stretched. “I shoulda asked you to marry me back then, shouldn’t I?” he said. “Back when things were good. If I’d asked before I messed everything up, you woulda said yes, right?”
“If you had, then what? How would that have worked?”
“I guess, if you said yes… I guess I woulda got the surgery too.”
Betty licked his nose, pulled him close and kissed him on the head. “You’re a dreamer, Bim,” she said.
“I was done with the studio when my contract ended in ’39. I think Dave and Max already weren’t seeing eye to eye by then, but I was gone before the split. Ask someone else if you want to know about that. When I was out, I was out. I had all the money I needed, and like I said, there was no love in it for me anymore.
“I’d been holding Bimbo’s money too since I became a woman, just for legal reasons. When I retired, I moved it all to a trust for him. The trustees had to be human, but I had a lawyer write it up so they basically had to do whatever Bimbo said. The most they could get in his way was to have him sit on an idea for a week, make sure he really meant it if he wanted to spend too much at once. Bimbo could be impulsive. But he mostly made good decisions.
“The important thing is, it wasn’t my call. I put a floor under his feet, too. One that nobody could take away, not even me. I’m proud of that.
“When I moved back in here, I told him I’d buy him another place if he wanted, and put it in the trust, too. This house, though… it’s practically a part of me. I wouldn’t know how to give it up. He understood that. Just me making the offer, that was enough for him to stay.”
Betty paused, sucked her cigarette, and looked past the camera and the visitors who brought it. Soon they’d leave, and she’d still be here, in her home. This place was the vessel she’d poured her life into, the shape she’d chosen to fill, until she couldn’t imagine fitting anywhere else. But still, things came and went. No fit was ever perfect.
“Bimbo died in 1941,” said Betty, eyes glittering. “He was seventeen. That’s pretty old, for a dog.”
The documentary, The Imagination Machine (1957), was released in two versions: a 62-minute cut that was screened at film festivals, and a 54-minute cut for broadcast on television. Footage from Betty’s interview comprises 3 minutes and 27 seconds of both. The television version contains a further 89 seconds of audio from Betty’s interview, while the festival version uses 137 seconds. Most of the festival version’s longer runtime comes from more extended clips from Butcher Brothers movies.
The film’s director is credited as “M. Davis,” an individual who resists easy identification.
One M. Davis — Michael Davis — is known to have worked for Telefilm Associates of America during the relevant timeframe. His life, as it was then, is relatively well-documented, due to an acrimonious divorce during which he drove his Chevrolet through the wall of his own house. Articles about the incident make it clear that Michael Davis worked for the company as an accountant, not a filmmaker. He is unlikely to have been the documentarian.
Lacking records from the company itself, the best clues to the documentarian’s identity are found in the credits of other movies. There are two potential candidates: Mark Davis and Mary Davis. They both have sporadic credits on industrial films and television productions in the fifties and sixties, including on documentary series like Wide Wide World and See It Now. Both were members of the Radio and Television Directors Guild; Mark is listed as an active member from 1955 to 1958, and Mary from 1957 until 1960, when the organization merged with the Screen Directors Guild to form the Directors Guild of America, of which only Mary Davis is listed as having been a member. Neither of them are credited in Guild documents as the director of The Imagination Machine, but then neither is anyone else. The film doesn’t appear in extant Guild records at all.
It is tempting, then, to examine the creative choices evident in The Imagination Machine, and match it to the style of films known to have been directed by either Mark Davis or Mary Davis. Viewing their works, Mark Davis’s films seem to be more often grounded in personal narrative, while those of Mary Davis are likelier to explore the interaction between people and systems. But The Imagination Machine does neither. It simply extolls as groundbreaking the work of the Butcher brothers and their performers, recapitulating headlines and intrigues, eschewing any deep investigation for hagiography. This is undoubtedly exactly what Telefilm Associates of America wanted, but does mean that the whole of the film is no more revealing than the director’s credit at the end.
The documentarian might have been Mary, or it might have been Mark. Or maybe it was neither; M. Davis could have been someone else entirely, could even have been a pseudonym — an intentionally vague appellation chosen to hide the documentarian’s true identity. Conversely, perhaps it was both of them; M. Davis could have been one person with reason to use more than one name, their briefly overlapping Guild memberships simply an administrative error.
Mary or Mark? Both or neither? Human or not?
There is no way to tell.
All that can be known for certain is that one morning, seven years later, over a light breakfast of buttered toast and half a grapefruit, the documentarian read in a newspaper that Betty had died. Her obituary revealed that, after suffering a stroke which left her physically disabled, she had spent the last years of her life in a nursing home. The documentarian remembered Betty saying that her home was practically a part of her — and remembered also that the comment wasn’t in the documentary.
As they read the short synopsis of Betty’s career and cultural relevance, the documentarian thought about the choices they’d made, what they’d included of Betty’s last time on film and what they’d left out. They wondered if they had done anything to shape how Betty was remembered. Could one draw a line — tenuous, perhaps, but true — that connected their own film to these few, final paragraphs?
Probably not, the documentarian decided after a moment’s reflection. Probably it was vainglorious to even entertain the notion. After all, Betty’s story had been settled in people’s minds for decades before the documentarian ever told their intentionally uncontroversial version of it. And even if they had contradicted the established narrative, how much difference could one little contradiction make? Life was full of them, and it carried on all the same.
“Sweet Betty” © Eugene Fischer, 2026