James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Ruthie knew her girls were “horrified” by the place, but there was nothing she could do; Harlow’s $200 a month covered fewer and fewer expenses these days, and the tuition at the White School wasn’t cheap. Bobby slept in the same bed as Ruthie, with Bette on a cot next to them. After the fresh air and hillsides of Crestalban, this claustrophobic apartment was a very hard adjustment indeed.

  P.S. 186 was even harder for Bette to take. The school looked to her like a “big, brown fortress. Forbidding, impersonal.” At Crestalban there were thirteen students on two hundred acres; here there were fifty pupils to a class, three thousand students in all. When she was first herded into a general assembly hall with all of them, she sat there “terrified,” sure that she would be trampled, beaten up, or killed. There had been so much fresh air and nature at Crestalban; what Bette most remembered about P.S. 186 was “the smell of steam heat mingled with chalk and children.” To make matters worse, Bette had been put back half a year to the second half of the seventh grade, because the school principal didn’t consider private school education on a par with the New York City curriculum.

  But just as she had come to love country life, Bette soon found herself enchanted by the charms of 1921 New York. Children named Esperanzo and Seymour and Nuncio, at first frighteningly alien to her, proved “warm and friendly,” and they became her pals. In summer they roller-skated down the hill between Broadway and Riverside Drive, bought colorful shaved-ice cones from an Italian man under an umbrella pushcart, played hopscotch on the asphalt, opened fire hydrants to keep cool during heat waves. In winter, snow transformed the hill into an icy speedway for sledding, and the glittery beauty of the Christmas window displays in the fancy Fifth Avenue shops that Ruthie took her to see left Bette’s huge eyes wide with wonder. After two seasons in New York, Bette recalled, “we were having a glorious time.”

  Even their tawdry apartment, it turned out, could offer entertainment. At night, Ruthie would turn out the lights and raise the window shades, and the three of them, as though in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, would watch their neighbors as they went through their often quirky routines of daily life across the courtyard. “We rocked with laughter,” Bette recalled. “Ruthie had made our dreary place into the first box at the Palace.”

  That spring in New York, Bette saw her first movie, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Rudolph Valentino, and the lights and shadows she saw up on that huge silvery screen left her “tremendously impressed.” She loved Little Lord Fauntleroy with Mary Pickford, and when she saw Black Beauty a while later, she came home and cried herself to sleep on her cot next to Ruthie and Bobby. It was in a movie theater that Bette Davis felt her first nameless stirrings of desire for something more exciting than the future that seemed to be in store for her.

  Bette joined the Girl Scouts in New York and became so dedicated to the organization’s credo and goals that “I would have tripped an old lady in order to pick her up.” She won dozens of merit badges and became a patrol leader, gaining the reputation of a tough-as-nails drill sergeant. She didn’t care whether she was popular; she had a mission—to march her patrol before Mrs. Herbert Hoover, the wife of the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, in a competition at Madison Square Garden. When she won the contest, she was in her glory. “I had to be the best. Nothing less ever satisfied me.”

  The summer of 1922, Ruthie used money she had painstakingly saved over the previous nine months and sent Bette and Bobby to Camp Mudjekeewis in Maine, where they swam, made jewelry, rode horses, and canoed down the fast-moving river that linked Upper Kezar Lake to Lower Kezar. The expense of that “glorious summer” left Ruthie no longer able to afford her classes at the White School, nor even the modest apartment in Manhattan. But she felt she now had enough knowledge to set up her photography business, and when a piano teacher of Bobby’s at Mudjekeewis suggested they move to East Orange, New Jersey, so that Bobby could continue her lessons, Ruthie packed the musketeers up once again.

  This time Ruthie could afford only boardinghouse rooms for herself and the girls, and the situation proved unbearable for Bette. She despised their tiny attic space, hated the shabby decor, dreaded having to share her meals with strangers at the long dining room table. She grew miserably unhappy, and frustrated that the nebulous dreams she had started to nurse of someday being “somebody important” seemed more and more remote by the day. “My imagination took me around the world,” she recalled, “and I was stuck in a boardinghouse in East Orange, New Jersey.”

  Ruthie placed a small notice in the local paper and started to pick up some photography business, trundling her camera and reflectors and tripod over to the neighbors’ houses to take family portraits. It wasn’t much, but it was a start, and Ruthie loved it. Finally, she was able to express her creativity and make money at it too.

  Bette entered East Orange High School as a freshman after she insisted on taking a special examination that made up for the half-year she had been put back at P.S. 186. But her alienation was so great that she made no friends at the school, and she offered no remembrances of her studies there in her autobiography. Her life during this period, she felt, was little more than “a monotone. If I had any distinguishing emotion at all it was that I was waiting for something. I didn’t know at all what… I can’t remember that I ever thought, much less said, that I would become an actress.… I just sort of lived in a static mist… punctuated with occasional rages when something I wanted penetrated the coma.”

  Ruthie later admitted that she had been “petrified” by those rages, and she tried to placate Bette at every turn, but without success. Bette enjoyed her power over her mother but Ruthie’s permissiveness also “irritated” her. It was at this point in her life that Bette’s feelings about her mother turned ambivalent. Bette with her mercurial temperament and willfulness was always first and foremost in Ruthie’s heart and mind, far ahead of the withdrawn, undemanding Bobby. Anything Bette wanted, Ruthie would try to get. Anything Bette disliked, Ruthie would try to change. She did whatever was necessary to keep Bette’s moods on an even keel, keep Bette happy, keep Bette from tearing off into a terrible tantrum.

  The closeness between mother and daughter grew so strong that it sometimes took on an almost unnatural cast. After Bette’s face was burned, Ruthie had begun bathing her daughter every night, carefully sponging her sensitive skin and helping it to heal. Long after Bette recovered, Ruthie continued to give her tub baths; she didn’t stop the practice, in fact, until Bette was well into her teens.

  But for all of Ruthie’s ministrations to Bette, for all her attempts to keep her happy, Bette in her adolescent angst lost respect for Ruthie. She felt disdain at how easily she could manipulate her, embarrassment at how silly she sometimes seemed. When Ruthie would chatter in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere around her sullen daughter, Bette would smirk and call her a “flibbertigibbet.”

  Bette’s behavior in East Orange so alarmed Ruthie that she consulted a doctor, but to little avail. The man simply advised her that Bette was “a high-strung young filly” and that the best thing to do would be to leave her alone because “she needs a free rein.” As Bette recalled it, Ruthie had little choice anyway: “The filly became a bucking bronco.”

  One evening, as they prepared for dinner, Ruthie suggested a game: She and Bette would exchange clothes and assume the other’s personality throughout the meal. Bobby and another girl would wear each other’s jumpers and do the same. After they joined the other boarders at the sprawling dining room table, Bette began to chatter incessantly, ending every other sentence with a giggle. Ruthie sat, uncharacteristically silent, staring sullenly at her plate. Finally Ruthie looked up and started to laugh, recognizing herself in Bette’s impression. But Bette, “as if a bomb had exploded under both of us,” started screaming at her mother. “I’m not like that!” she cried and stood up so violently that her chair toppled over. She barreled out of the room as the laughter of the other boarders rang in her ears.

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p; Later, calmed, Bette realized what her mother had tried to do, but the attempt was futile. “I couldn’t help the way I was acting. I felt like a misfit.” She longed for something more, something that would “penetrate the coma.”

  After two months in East Orange, Ruthie fell ill. She felt feverish, her jaw ached. A dentist told her that she had osteomyelitis of the jawbone, a serious bacterial infection. The doctor cleaned out the infection, closed Ruthie’s jaw with twenty stitches, and sent her home. When she stepped off the trolley car in front of the boardinghouse, she collapsed on the sidewalk. Frightened by the experience, she felt she needed to be near her sister Mildred in Newton. A few days later, Mildred and her husband came to New Jersey to help the musketeers come home.

  They moved into another boardinghouse, this one even worse than the first, and Bette was so miserable that Ruthie swallowed her pride and approached Harlow for financial help. To her great humiliation, he refused her, and she had no other recourse but to try to regain her strength in the noisy, unpleasant environment of the lodging house. Still, she recovered quickly, and before long she rustled up enough photography business among family and old friends in Newton to afford the rent on the second floor of a two-family house, a living situation closer to what she and the girls had been used to in Massachusetts. Not much later, Ruthie bought a used Model T Ford. Now they were more like a traditional family than they had been for years.

  By Newton standards, however, they were the height of eccentricity. Ruthie turned part of the apartment into a studio and advertised her photography in the local newspaper—“Portraits with a Personality—At Your Home or Mine.” Most days when Bette and Bobby came home from school, they would find their living room overrun with people eager to have their pictures taken and Ruthie bustling around directing the lamps, adjusting the backdrops, posing her subjects. Then she would get behind her “Big Bertha” black box camera standing on its tripod, poke her head under its heavy black fabric, and set off a burst of gunpowder to produce a flash—and an eight-by-ten-inch glass negative she could print and retouch into a lovely portrait or family tableau.

  Bette didn’t mind all this chaos because she was now in a much better humor. Ruthie seemed so much happier “in her element,” and Bette’s “coma” had been penetrated by “something I wanted”: to be accepted by her Newton High School classmates. After a rocky start she did indeed blossom into one of the most popular girls in the school. The transformation occurred between her first and second school dances. She was reluctant to attend the first, held early in the school year, because she had no friends and no beau. Since she’d spent most of her school years at girls’ academies, she recalled, she was “petrified of boys.”

  Ruthie convinced her to go, and dressed her, as usual, in her schoolgirl outfit of corduroy jumper and flat shoes, her long hair combed straight down her back. Bette spent the first hour standing alone along a wall of the school gymnasium, “praying for someone to ask me to dance.” Finally one “sympathetic soul” did, but he soon regretted it—because no one offered to cut in. When Bette glanced into a mirror and saw him gesture frantically to the boys on the sidelines for rescue, she made an excuse and fled. Back home, she sobbed inconsolably to Ruthie that she would always be a wallflower. “Bette,” her mother replied, “I think it’s about time you put your hair up and started to dress like a young lady.”

  She appeared at the second dance looking like a vision in a long white chiffon dress, with a sweeping skirt trimmed in turquoise and a neckline so daring—just below the collarbone—that the visiting Grandmother Favor exclaimed, “Bette, you’re not going to wear that where gentlemen can see you, are you?” That’s exactly what I’m going to do, she thought, and with her hair in a glamorous upsweep and her cheeks pink with excitement, she looked into a mirror and thought to herself for the very first time, You’re pretty.

  The boys at the party agreed. Bette’s dance card filled quickly, and the cutting-in was constant. At the end of the evening, she recalled, she had acquired two boyfriends—John Holt and George Dunham, whom everyone called “Gige.” When Ruthie picked Bette up in the Model T, she drove the boys home as well. Beginning the next day, the rivals walked Bette home the two miles from school every afternoon. From this point on, John Holt recalls, Bette’s personality flowered. “She was bright and intelligent and vivacious and everybody liked her. We sort of prized our association with her because we liked her very much. After we’d walk her home we’d play around in her yard, play with her dog, things like that. One afternoon the dog was chasing Gige around and he ran afoul of some barbed wire on a fence and tore his pants. Bette’s mother spent the afternoon stitching them up, which amused us all no end.”

  Master Dunham won this initial competition for Bette’s affections. “Gige was a fun-loving person,” John Holt says, “full of beans and energy. More so than I was. I was more the serious type—much duller.” When Gige asked Bette if he could be her beau she was “dizzy” with joy—and so drunk with this new power she exerted over boys that John Holt’s mother cautioned him against her: “She thought Bette was always ‘making eyes,’” Holt recalls, “and she didn’t approve of girls making eyes.”

  Bette admitted that she careered “from crush to crush” now, but her series of boyfriends was important to her mainly because they brought with them invitations to football games, hayrides, dances, marshmallow roasts, sleigh rides—in short, they made Bette a part of the Newton social life that she coveted and came to love.

  As flirtatious as she was, Bette “zealously guarded” her chastity. While Ruthie may have been ahead of her time as a single working mother, when it came to sexual frankness with her daughters, her Puritan ancestry came to the fore in a rush of silence. What little Bette knew about the birds and the bees she had picked up in tittery whispers from classmates. This information was scarce and inaccurate; the first time a boy kissed Bette, she was so certain she’d have a baby that her stomach expanded into a hysterical pregnancy. “My terror,” she recalled, “the possible disgrace to Ruthie, was indescribable.”

  When she had her first period, a similar panic gripped Bette: no one had warned her about menstruation, and she was sure she was dying. Ruthie told her this was part of a girl’s growing up, and the “burden women must bear” to have children. Wistfully, Bette wrote in her autobiography that the younger Bobby was spared this “jump into the unknown.”

  As Bette developed into young womanhood, her mother took on a strange new role in her life: rival. Ruthie was just thirty-six when Bette was fifteen, and still a lovely, vibrant woman. Bette remembered feeling a deep twinge of jealousy when one of her older boyfriends complained that she didn’t have her mother’s maturity.

  Ruthie had several suitors herself at this point, and for the first time since her divorce she allowed herself thoughts of marrying again. But whenever she would introduce a gentleman to Bette and Bobby, and afterward gently inquire whether they might accept him as a stepfather, her daughters invariably, adamantly said no. And that would be that. According to Bette, “She let us wreck her personal life. She never thought of herself, only of us.”

  And still she struggled to pay the bills. Even though the girls hadn’t been in a private school for several years, inflation had been so high during that period that Harlow’s $200 alimony payment, worth the 2013 equivalent of $1,800 four years earlier, was worth half of that in 1922. The income from Ruthie’s photography business wasn’t enough any longer, and the summer after Bette’s first year at Newton High, Ruthie took a two-month job as a live-in cook/housekeeper for a young minister in Provincetown. The position included free room and board and gave Bette and Bobby a fun July and August by the sea. Bette remembered it as “wonderful,” particularly a summer romance with a young man about to enter Harvard.

  To have a “college man” as a beau at fourteen kept Bette in a perpetual state of euphoria. She never admitted to it, but she may have let him believe she was older; it wouldn’t have been hard to do. Bette
had posed for Ruthie just about daily ever since her mother had purchased studio equipment and began to experiment with lighting and focus and how to pose her models. The experience gave Bette the carriage and self-possession of a young adult, and her strong intelligence and quick wit belied her age. Only her naivete might have given her away, although it wasn’t unusual in this era for women much older to be equally unworldly, and Bette’s beau may have left for the ivy-covered campus in Cambridge with no idea just how young his girlfriend had been.

  At the end of the summer, the Davis gypsies returned to Newton, where Bette completed her sophomore year of high school in 1923 without distinguishing incident. By then, inflation had subsided and the cost of living was 20 percent lower than it had been for the previous two years. Necessities cost Ruthie less, and the increased buying power enjoyed by everyone else perked up her photography business to the point that she felt she could afford to send Bette and Bobby back to boarding school.

  She chose the all-girl Northfield Seminary primarily for its reasonable tuition, but both her daughters were miserable there. They felt overworked, and found the instruction too religious and the food “hopeless.” Although they tried to keep their letters to Ruthie upbeat, she sensed their unhappiness and took them out of the school over the Christmas holidays of 1924. In January she enrolled them in an alma mater of her own, Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, a small, well-regarded prep school, considered by many a stepping-stone to Dartmouth College. Cushing was coeducational and had a strong dramatics department, and while its $l,000-a-year tuition for each of her girls put Ruthie on the cusp of poverty once again, she thought that Bette, especially, would love the place.