James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Bette later said she was “glad” that her parents divorced. “I hated the way he treated my mother,” she said. “I hated him, really.” For years afterward, she insisted that her father’s absence from her life had none but the positive effect of allowing her to become an actress, something Harlow opposed even from afar and surely would have forbidden had he remained head of the family. But she admitted much later that after that farewell meal at the Copley Plaza, she couldn’t hear the strains of a string orchestra without crying. Forty years later, working on her memoirs, she denied to her ghostwriter that Harlow’s absence meant much to her. After he probed and prodded, Bette finally had to admit that she was kidding herself. “Father’s departure was and is to be reckoned with,” she said. “[It’s] something I’ll never get over.”

  Unquestionably, her parents’ parting affected Bette more than anything else in her childhood. It strengthened her independence, fueled her rebellion, and left her with both a deep-seated need for men and an equally strong distrust of them. Harlow’s legacy to Bette was her sometimes punishing combination of driving ambition and crippling insecurity. All he had to do, on the rare occasions over the years when they saw each other or corresponded, was to mock one of her ideas, and the notion would stiffen into stony resolve.

  When she wrote to him that she was thinking of changing the spelling of her name to Bette after Honoré de Balzac’s novel La Cousine Bette, he called it a “silly” idea. She made the change at school the next day. When he suggested that she become a secretary instead of an actress, her theatrical ambitions crystallized in her mind. “He certainly inspired me no end to prove he was wrong. He made me prove a lot.” What she left unsaid was that his lack of faith in her also left her with deep doubts about her own abilities.

  Bette’s most lasting impressions of her father were filtered through the perceptions of Ruthie, who carried bitterness toward Harlow Davis for the rest of her life. Years after the divorce, Ruthie told friends that Harlow had left her to marry Minnie Stewart, a woman she described as his “mistress.” She probably hoped this piece of information would win her sympathy as a woman wronged, but it wasn’t true. Harlow didn’t marry Minnie Stewart until September 21, 1926, more than eight years after his divorce.

  Again and again throughout her life, Ruthie painted a picture of Harlow as an unremittingly cold, heartless man, indeed a “monster,” with no redeeming characteristics. But Virginia Conroy, Bette’s later dramatic school roommate and longtime friend, thinks Harlow Davis deserves a more evenhanded assessment. According to Virginia, “Bette had been meticulously brainwashed about her father. He had ‘deserted’ the family. The word suggests a feckless, irresponsible man, a ne’er-do-well who took it on the lam. Nothing could be further from the truth—which was that Ruthie deliberately schemed to drive him away and pose as the injured party.”

  Virginia had heard so many terrible things about “Harlow the Heinous” that she decided to “collect evidence” from other family friends about his life with Ruthie and the children. “First I established in my mind what he did not do. He did not drink, gamble, womanize, resort to physical abuse. One of his crimes was to request that he and Ruthie dine separately, with the children being fed first. In view of Bette’s penchant for screaming—she told me her father used to put his hands over his ears to block out the noise—it does not seem unreasonable for a man at the end of a hard day to want to dine in peace.”

  Of the story that Harlow suggested Ruthie give Bette up for adoption, Conroy feels “the idea is so fantastic that it hardly bears repeating. The social implications of such an act would be unimaginable in a small community where the Davis and Favor families were well known. It was incredible to me that Bette would take this statement seriously. The only explanation for it that I can imagine is that during one of Bette’s screaming spells, Harlow might have said, ‘For God’s sake shut her up or give her away!’ And Ruthie put the remark down in her little black book for future use.”

  A friend of Harlow’s once asked him why his marriage failed. His reply was terse and enigmatic: “If a man gets a cup of coffee thrown in his face every morning, he can’t keep his self-respect.” A thought crossed Conroy’s mind when the remark was repeated to her: If this is what happened at the breakfast table, what went on in the bedroom?

  The truth about Harlow Davis clearly lies somewhere between Ruthie’s colorings and Virginia Conroy’s. Apparently, Harlow felt equally wronged by Ruthie. So much so that after his second marriage he took out his anger on both his daughters by expressly excluding them from his will.

  One thing is certain: In his absence, Harlow was as important a force in Bette’s future success as her mother, who hovered over her and pushed, pushed, pushed her toward stardom. “The very thought that he valued her genius (as yet unproved) so little as to want her to become a secretary made her mind boggle,” Virginia Conroy recalls. “But secretarial experience has often proved a bulwark against the casting couch in many a talented girl’s struggle, and that’s what Harlow Davis was concerned about.

  “Yet the memory of her father’s secretarial plans for her served as a goad through all her theatrical setbacks. It spurred her in a negative way as much as her mother’s positive praise. Bette would rant and rave and weep at fate, and through her tears she would gasp aloud to the invisible Harlow Davis, ‘I’ll show you!’”

  TWO

  R

  uthie Davis and her daughters, once part of a securely upper-middle-class nuclear family, were now cast adrift. Divorce was rare in this era; the girls were so ashamed that Bette never mentioned her father, and Bobby told friends he had a job outside the country. “The children of divorced parents feel a little strange, a little different,” Bette said. “I never once told anyone that my parents were divorced. I remember thinking, ‘There is something funny about us.’”

  Just as bad as the psychological impact was the financial. With a little scrimping, the $200 a month from Harlow would have been enough to rent a small apartment and send the girls to public school. But by now Ruthie was determined that her daughters should have the very finest education, and that could come only from private schools, which were expensive. Ruthie vowed to give her girls the best no matter what, and for the next fourteen years she struggled to keep “the three musketeers” (as they came to think of themselves) a step ahead of the bill collector. Ruthie later estimated that between 1918 and 1932 they lived in eighty different residences, many of them boardinghouses. Sometimes they made their moves in the middle of the night to avoid paying the rent.

  Most other women of her era would have set about at once to find a new husband. Ruthie did not, partly because of her experience with Harlow and partly because as a mature woman of thirty-three she found she liked her independence and wanted to follow her own dreams. She was much ahead of her time in that respect, and when she set out to find a job she was hit by the fact that this was not an easy task for an untrained woman of her social position and financial needs in 1918. Most working women of this era who did not teach, nurse, or become secretaries were either impoverished factory workers or servants in wealthy homes. When she first went looking for work she wore her shoes “down to holes” before finding a well-paid position as a governess in New York for three small boys who had become “animals” after the death of their wealthy father—a tough job, Ruthie recalled, but one that allowed her to send her daughters to one of the finest boarding schools in Massachusetts.

  There was the crux of it—Ruthie’s determination to give Bette and Bobby the same lifestyle and education they could have had with a successful patent attorney for a father. Sadly, Ruthie realized that this would require that she be separated from the girls—her job was in New York, the school she had chosen—Crestalban—was in the Berkshire Hills. Bette and Bobby, barely used to the absence of their father, now were faced with their mother’s removal from their daily lives as well. But Ruthie saw Crestalban as “one big happy family” and a place where the lives of he
r girls could be “molded into a fine pattern.” It was, she felt, the perfect situation for children whose parents could not keep “a normal home.”

  She first inspected the school on a snowy afternoon. Crestalban’s director, Marjorie Whiting, ran the school with her brother and two sisters, and she met Ruthie’s train in a small sleigh. They rode a mile or so with blankets wrapped around their knees, the sleigh’s silver bells tinkling gaily, and when they arrived Ruthie was met with a Currier & Ives tableau: a white farmhouse at the crest of a low hill, surrounded by several huge red barns and a brown-shingled building. That, Miss Whiting pointed out, was the schoolhouse.

  Ruthie loved what she saw and heard of Crestalban. Indeed more like a family than an institution, it had just thirteen students, all girls, and all expected to tend to the farm’s pigs, cows, horses and chickens, and the upkeep of the house. The students learned to care for their own clothes and bedding, to sew, and to cook. In short, to rely on themselves.

  The buildings had no electricity, no central heating or plumbing; the food was prepared on a wood-burning stove. The students spent sixteen hours of their day outdoors, including their lessons. Overnight they slept on a porch that sometimes left them covered with a thin blanket of snow in the morning. The outdoorsy aspects of Crestalban appealed to Ruthie because her daughters “had never been robust children.” Bette in particular was pale and skinny at eleven; her brilliantly blue eyes, huge and protruding and heavily lidded, only added to her waiflike aura.

  Ruthie brought the girls to Crestalban after a shopping spree to buy them sleeping bags, woollen “sitting bags” for lessons on the porches, warm underwear and leggings and mittens, woollen bloomers, middie blouses, and sweaters. When they arrived, each put on a brave face for the others; neither Bette nor Bobby shed a tear. Ruthie felt it wise to remain only a few hours, to hasten the girls’ adjustment to their new environment. “Then, too, I was pretty sad, and didn’t want them to know how I felt. So they waved good-bye—a little wistfully. I can see their faces as if it were yesterday.”

  The first night, Bette and the painfully shy, wraithlike Bobby shared a sleeping bag in the corner of the porch, trembling with fear and cold and clinging to each other “like orphans in a storm.” But within days they had fallen in love with their new home, joyously taking naked snowbaths in the mornings, milking cows, and birthing livestock. Soon their constitutions improved markedly.

  Their education was top-notch. Nothing but French was spoken during lunch, and every evening the students gathered around the great roaring fireplace in the main room to sew and listen to Miss Whiting read to them from the classics. It was at Crestalban that Bette, who had inherited her father’s keen, analytical mind, developed a passion for books. Most playtimes she could be found sitting alone under a spreading tree, engrossed in some novel or other, oblivious of all the other children romping nearby. Whenever she did join the horseplay, she made sure she became either the leader of the activity or the center of attention. It was a pattern that would continue for the rest of her life.

  Even in a moment of near tragedy when she was eleven, Bette’s main concern was to capture as much attention and sympathy as she could. It was an early morning a few days before her second Christmas at Crestalban, and as she had the previous year, she was playing Santa Claus in preparation for the exchange of gifts among the students and faculty. Her suit was red wool, with white cotton batting at the cuffs and collar, and a cotton beard. Playing Santa reminded Bette of Harlow, and she imitated his rousing “Ho! Ho! Ho!” that had filled their home with rare happiness once a year.

  The school’s tree—huge, freshly cut, aromatic, and gaily decorated with cranberry garlands the children had strung together—stood in the center of the great room, aglow with dozens of burning wax candles. Bette had been warned to stay away from it until one of the adults could gather the presents from underneath for her to hand out. But alone in her Santa suit, poking around to see which boxes were for her, Bette’s curiosity got the best of her, and she reached down to grab one shiny gift with her name on it. In a flash her cuff caught on fire. She shook her arm to put out the flames, but that only fanned them as they spread to her beard.

  Bette heard her own screams, then panicky voices as she felt herself pushed down on the floor and rolled up in a rug. Bobby, who couldn’t bear to look, turned away. Once the flames were snuffed out, everyone stared in horror as Bette lay still on the floor, the sides and top of her face red and bubbly, her eyebrows singed, her eyes seemingly seared shut. She heard one of the teachers cry, “She is blind! Oh God, she is blind!”

  She remained frozen and lapped it up. “I didn’t know if I was blind or not. But I do remember feeling, with thrills and chills of morbid pleasure, that this was my moment, my big dramatic moment. And I deliberately kept my eyes tight closed, groped helplessly around with my hands, until the full savor of that moment was extracted.”

  Miss Whiting couldn’t reach a doctor, and the school nurse decided that applications of cold cream to Bette’s face would be enough treatment until the following day, when she, Bobby, and some of the other children were to return to their parents in New York in the company of several teachers. After an eight-hour journey, Bette and Bobby rushed off the train to greet Ruthie. She recognized only Bobby; by now Bette’s face was a mass of blisters that had become encrusted with cinders from the train. Ruthie let out a yelp and one of the teachers ran forward to explain what had happened and that Miss Whiting suggested she take Bette to a doctor. Ruthie recalled saying “unprintable” things. “Like a mother lioness with a sick cub, I literally snarled as I hurried [Bette and Bobby] away in a taxi.”

  The cabbie rushed them a few blocks to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where only one doctor, a Japanese intern, was on Christmas Eve duty. For more than an hour, the man carefully peeled off the blisters that covered Bette’s forehead and the sides of her face, and gingerly removed the cinders with a pair of tweezers. When he was through, little of the outer layer of Bette’s skin remained. He wrapped her head with bandages, leaving just the bottom half of her eyes, her nose, and her mouth visible, and told Ruthie that in order to prevent lifelong scarring, the burns would have to be swabbed with boric acid and moistened with grease every two hours around the clock for two weeks. “If you can do this,” the doctor said, “the burns will not heal and form scar tissue. They will just slough off and new skin will form.” Then he added, “Unless you hire a nurse, I don’t think you can do it.”

  Ruthie did it. For fourteen days she changed the dressings around the clock; at night she rose to the jangle of her alarm clock every two hours to daub Bette’s burns and try to ease the pain that made it impossible for her to sleep more than a few minutes at a time. She tied Bette’s hands down every night to keep her from scratching, and Bobby held them during the day as Ruthie read stories to distract her. It took years for Bette’s skin to return to normal, and even then the burns left her with a thin, almost translucent epidermis that left her vulnerable to severe sunburns.

  By now Ruthie was employed as a housemother at Miss Bennett’s, a girls’ finishing school in Millbrook, New York, where she was provided room and board as part of her compensation, and where she took Bette to recover. Ruthie had agreed to give up her own Christmas vacation to look after the students who couldn’t go home for the holidays, provided that her own daughters could stay with her. This was necessary because Ruthie didn’t have the money to send them anywhere else.

  After Bette and Bobby completed their third year at Crestalban in 1920, Ruthie lost her job at Miss Bennett’s and could no longer afford to pay their tuition. Her unemployment forced her to make a decision that she had agonized over for some time: She screwed up her courage and enrolled in the Clarence White School of Photography on West 128th Street in Manhattan. Ruthie had become intrigued by the possibilities of the camera after her divorce, and she had taken many family photos and experimental portraits, usually with Bette as her model. All of her creative year
nings seemed to be satisfied by photography, and she hoped that formal training might allow her to set up a studio. Then she would have a career, be her own boss, not have to worry about finding or losing jobs. And she was sure she could make enough money to keep Bette and Bobby well dressed, well housed, and well educated.

  In the meantime, however, they would have to endure some hardship. Ruthie sat the girls down and explained that they would be living with her in Manhattan, and they would have to go to a public school. She hoped that they would understand the need for sacrifice now in order that they might have a brighter future. She told them she had rented a nice apartment, and although the girls were heartbroken not to be returning to Crestalban, they thought this new adventure might be fun. Best of all they would be reunited with Ruthie full time. “For the first time since Winchester,” Bette recalled, “the three musketeers were together again.”

  But the reality of the change traumatized the sisters. When they entered the cramped one-bedroom walk-up at 144th Street and Broadway, the only apartment Ruthie could afford, they found it “so dismal and so foreign to everything we had known” that they retreated to the bedroom moments later and burst into tears. “Do you really believe that she thinks this is a nice place?” Bobby asked. “I’m afraid she does,” Bette replied. “But we must be brave and not hurt her feelings.”