She had sensed a cooling of Hale's ardor for her in recent months, but she had attributed this to, simply, the passage of time; after all, they had been together for four years, and the honeymoon couldn't be expected to last forever. She was soon to discover, however, that there was far more to it than that.

Hale began to spend more and more time away from home, to take unexplained trips to distant places without her. Bette refused to believe that he was being unfaithful to her, but the nagging thought persisted until finally she did some quiet investigating on her own and learned that Hale had been seen in Hollywood, Palm Springs and Acapulco with a beauteous young red haired movie actress – that he was having an open, wildly clandestine affair with her.

Bette had been crushed at first, refusing to accept the truth, knowing that she had to. Then the bitter irony of it all struck her, for this was the same situation she had placed David in those five years past; now she was the one being cheated on. And as David had done with her, she confronted Hale when next he came home – and he laughed in her face contemptuously, a stranger whom she had never thought existed in the body of the man she loved. He told her he was getting a divorce to marry the red haired starlet, that he was taking everything to give to the other woman and that, if Bette tried to countersue or to make any trouble at all, he would see to it that she was dragged through the messiest, cheapest, loudest kind of court battle on record. And if that wasn't enough, there was always other ways of taking care of her.

There was nothing for Bette to do. The change in Hale from a happy carefree lover to a cold, sneering stranger frightened her, and she had no doubt that he meant every word he said. She had tried appealing to some of her friends only to discover that she had no real friends at all – that all the acquaintances she had made while living with and married to Hale were his friends, his kind of people. Once they knew how things stood in the Bixby household, they were on Hale's side, not Bette's, and she was suddenly completely alone with no one to turn to, nowhere to go.