by James Spada
When the summer ended, Fritz returned to Yale and the Davis family went back to Newton. There, the melancholia Bette had suffered five years earlier in New Jersey returned. For the next two years, she made no progress whatsoever toward her dream of a stage career, and felt herself totally adrift and alienated. She helped Ruthie around the house, typed manuscripts for a local author to earn extra money for the family, and pined over Fritz. Her loneliness was worsened by the fact that most of her old Newton High friends had gone on to college or careers, and few of them were left in town.
Ruthie’s photography business had sagged, and she was badly pinched for money again. Unsure that she could meet the next month’s rent, she suggested to Bette, now eighteen, that she pose for an acquaintance, an elderly sculptor who lived on Beacon Hill in Boston. The woman, Ruthie explained hesitantly, was willing to pay very well for a model for a life-sized embodiment of Spring in the form of a young… lovely… naked girl.
Bette stared at her mother, her eyes larger than ever, and gulped. “It will be okay, darling,” Ruthie soothed. “She’s a lovely woman, very high in Boston society. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s for the sake of art.”
Two days later, the artist’s long black limousine pulled up in front of their house, a uniformed driver at the wheel, and whisked Bette to Boston. As she sat in the back seat, she looked eagerly out the window to see whether any of the neighbors had noticed her. To her intense disappointment, no one had.
Horror rippled through her when she walked into the studio and saw the sculptor’s handsome young male assistant. Ignoring the look on Bette’s face, the woman told her that the dressing room was at the top of the stairs. “Please remove your clothes,” she said matter-of-factly, “and we’ll begin.” Bette’s face burned with embarrassment as she scurried up the stairs. Fifteen minutes later, she still hadn’t mustered the courage to come down. “Miss Davis,” the woman called up the stairs, “we’re ready for you.”
“I was absolutely panicked,” Bette recalled. “I was so modest.” But, finally, she descended the steps. “I tell you, I was mortified. It took me years to get over it, as a matter of fact.” She stuck to the commitment she’d made, however, and felt better when she realized the young man was “impersonal about the whole thing.” Within a few days, she felt less self-conscious, more comfortable with her body—attributes that would serve her well as a budding actress.
When the sculpture was completed, Bette adored it. “It was lovely, beautiful. I had the perfect figure for it.” Still, she reflected years later that the entire episode “does present a picture of a sad little girl, earning money for the family.”
At this point in her life, Bette was sad—and confused. She couldn’t fathom what the future held for her. Ruthie didn’t have the money to send her to the kind of acting school she now felt ready for, one in New York that would prepare her for a career on Broadway. She knew she didn’t want to be a housewife and spend the rest of her life in Newton. When Ham came home from Amherst that Christmas and visited her, she forgot Fritz and fell back in love with the doe-eyed musician she had met at Cushing: “A beau—on hand—is worth two in the bush.” She sat with him, staring at the Davis Christmas tree, and dreamed of the future—dreams she felt were “hopeless” at this point in her life.
When Ham returned to school, Bette thought she would “lose my mind with ennui.” Sensitive as always to her daughter’s moods, Ruthie surprised her with a trip to Boston to see a production of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, starring Blanche Yurka, with Peg Entwhistle as the Norwegian Ekdal family’s sensitive, ill-fated fourteen-year-old daughter Hedvig. It was Bette’s first exposure to legitimate theater, and it affected her more deeply than anything since her summer at Mariarden.
She had watched the first act of the play with interest, but when the second-act curtain went up and revealed for the first time Hedvig and the Ekdal home, she gasped. Peg Entwhistle looked just like her! And scattered around the living room was all manner of photographic equipment; Hedvig’s father earned a meager living as a photographer and retoucher. She felt more and more empathy for Hedvig as more and more similarities to her own family came to light: Hedvig’s father thinks of his wife as intellectually inferior to him, and when he learns that Hedvig is not his daughter he deserts the family. When he leaves, Hedvig flies into a frenzy of pain and bewilderment. As Peg Entwhistle wept and pleaded hysterically for her father not to go, Bette held her breath for fear that she would jump up and cry out, too.
At that moment she was no longer just a member of the audience. She felt she had become Hedvig. “I was watching myself,” she recalled. “There wasn’t an emotion I didn’t anticipate and share.… It seemed as though everything in my life fell into place.… There had been a glimmer here and there; but this time was the vision.… I knew now that more than anything—despite anything—I was going to become an actress.”
Ruthie turned to Bette at the end of the play and saw that she was sitting stock-still, dry-eyed, her face “a graven image. It went beyond tears with her.”
“Mother,” Bette said, “if I can live to play Hedvig I shall die happy. And someday I will play her!”
Back in Newton, that day seemed a million years away. Still without a regular job, Ruthie had swallowed her pride and pleaded with Harlow yet again to help her finance Bette’s acting ambitions. “Let her become a secretary!” he bellowed in reply. “She’ll earn money quicker. Bette could never be a successful actress. Or better yet, find her a husband!” Bette wasn’t surprised when Ruthie came home empty-handed. “This was my second reason for succeeding,” Bette said. “To prove Daddy wrong. He truly challenged me.”
In September 1927, Ruthie read about a new repertory company on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, run by the acclaimed young actress Eva Le Gallienne. When she saw that the students earned their tuition by appearing in the company’s plays, she swept Bette into the Model T and drove off for New York. At the audition the next day, Ruthie remained in the waiting room while Bette was interviewed by Le Gallienne’s assistant in her outer office. She was taken aback by the woman’s questions, among them whether she knew why actors should study the movements of animals. “That’s what I’ve come here to find out!” she blurted. She had never received that kind of training, and the whole exercise “made me feel stupid and I wasn’t used to that. I have never functioned well when anyone is doubting my ability to do something.”
The assistant looked at Bette reprovingly and handed her a play from which she was to read for Miss Le Gallienne. When she realized that her part was an elderly Dutch woman, Bette was dumbfounded. Why should a girl of eighteen portray a woman of seventy? she thought. She took a deep breath and entered the sanctum sanctorum of Le Gallienne’s office. The woman asked “cold and impersonal” questions about Bette’s background, her ambitions, whether she could sustain herself while attending school. The last question rankled her; she replied curtly that “I would not become a public charge, inasmuch as I would live with my mother in New York.”
Le Gallienne sat in silence and looked at Bette expectantly. She dug in her heels and read as well as she could, but knew instinctively she was doing a poor job. Still, Le Gallienne’s look of disinterest while she read angered her, and she stopped. “What I said is beyond recall, but Miss Le Gallienne interpreted it, and rightly, as an outburst of defiance. Fixing me with a frigid eye, she said, ‘I can see that your attitude toward the theater is not sincere enough to warrant taking you as a pupil. You are a frivolous little girl.’”
Hot with anger, Bette stalked out of the school while Ruthie padded along behind her, pleading, “What happened, what happened?’’ The anger she felt, Bette said, “was a lifesaver. Humiliation and defeat were outweighed by my indignation. All I had asked for was an opportunity to try, and I felt this had been denied me. I was mad.” But by the time she and Ruthie were on the highway headed back to New Rochelle, New York (where they were staying with Ruthie’s brother Paul), B
ette was in tears. She had lost an extraordinary opportunity, and she knew it.
As Ruthie lay in bed and listened to Bette’s bitter sobs most of the night, she resolved that her daughter would try again. The next day, she drove Bette back into Manhattan to the Robert Milton/John Murray Anderson School of the Theatre. Not long into their preliminary interview with John Anderson’s brother, Hugh, Ruthie asked about the tuition. She reacted with shock when the man replied, “$500 a term.”
Ruthie’s head began to fill, as usual, with alternatives, possible solutions, deals. But Bette stood up, said firmly, “Mother, let’s go, we can’t do it,” and that was that. As ambitious as Bette was, she easily accepted rejection at this point in her life. She allowed herself to be deterred much more readily than Ruthie did, as though each rejection and each obstacle were a personal affront. “Funny thing,” Ruthie wrote after Bette became a star, “this very famous woman has always had this negative approach.” Perhaps somewhere in her subconscious Bette believed that Harlow was right, that she “could never be a successful actress.” As much as his lack of faith could egg her on, it could also hold her back.
At home again in Newton, Bette received an official rejection from Le Gallienne, who wrote that she lacked the seriousness to become an actress. “If I ever could have become a mental case,” Bette said, “it was at this time.” She sagged into a depression, terrified that she would never become the “something” she had dreamed about since childhood, that she would be doomed, like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, to a deathly life in the provinces. Miserably the fear gripped her that her father might be right about her lack of potential, and her mood further soured, leaving her by turns irritable and melancholy. One day she would argue and snap at Ruthie, the next day she would do her household chores like an automaton, silent and pale, overwhelmed by hopelessness.
Ruthie’s heart broke for her daughter, but the only thing she could do for her now was find work and make the money Bette needed to attend the Milton/Anderson School. She heard about a photo retouching job in Norwalk, Connecticut, and she and Bette moved yet again. (Bobby was now a senior at Newton High and wanted to complete her term there. She remained behind with her Aunt Mildred and Uncle Myron.) They took another dreary room in a boardinghouse, and Ruthie began long hours of delicate retouching. For the first time in her life, Bette looked for work herself, and when she couldn’t find any her depression deepened. She slept most of the day. “Lying there I would think—There’s no reason for my getting up. If I can stay in bed long enough the day will be shorter… and maybe I can forget that Ruthie’s eyes are red-rimmed from strain and that she must sit cramped in a chair all day long.”
But as though to worsen her suffering, as though to punish herself, Bette was drawn every day to a coffee shop across the street from Ruthie’s studio. She would sit on a stool at the lunch counter, silently drinking one cup of black coffee after another, and watch her mother work in front of a picture window, hunched over the drafting table, squinting at negatives. “I don’t know why that photographer’s window drew me like a horrible magnet,” Bette said. “I don’t know why I wanted to inflict pain on myself. I only knew that I couldn’t keep myself away from it—that I must watch Ruthie even though it was unbelievable agony to do so.”
Even the weather mirrored Bette’s melancholy, and most of the time she watched her mother through wind-blown sheets of rain or sleet. “Sometimes I would rush away from that lunch counter, dash down the street, walking until I had passed the last house and was on the state highway, hoping that perhaps I would stop seeing Ruthie, stop remembering within my heart that for me there was nothing to do but wait. But always that tableau of Ruthie was just ahead of me, no matter how many miles I walked, no matter how wet and cold and dreary I was, how completely exhausted I became. And so I would go back to the lunch counter.
“As I sat there I thought to myself—I’m going mad. This can’t go on. Isn’t there ever going to be an end to this?”
FOUR
R
uthie shook Bette awake. “Come on, get up. Put on your navy dress. I think it’s your best. And that blue hat. We’re going to New York. You’re going on the stage.” Ruthie had been aware that Bette watched her work day after day, and it broke her heart. She couldn’t stand her daughter’s suffering any longer. “Hurry!” she ordered. “We haven’t much time.” Bette had no idea what was going on, but she obeyed without a word. “I wondered if some miracle had happened, but I feared to break the enchantment by asking questions.” It was Wednesday, October 29, 1927.
The Model T had broken down, so they took the train from Norwalk to Grand Central Terminal, and during the ride Ruthie wouldn’t answer Bette’s incessant queries about what was going on. It wasn’t until their taxi pulled up in front of the Milton/Anderson School that Bette realized what Ruthie was doing. “But Mother,” she protested, recalling their previous visit and the $500 tuition, “how can we—?” She had barely finished the sentence before they were inside Anderson’s office. “Mother was quite wild-eyed,” she recalled. “Mr. Anderson never knew what hit him.” While Bette sat mute beside her, Ruthie began. “My daughter is going to be an actress,” she stated flatly. “I haven’t any money to pay her tuition in full. But you are going to take her as a student, and you will get your money eventually.” Ruthie caught her breath and looked at Mr. Anderson.
“Has she any talent?” he asked.
In a rush, Ruthie told Anderson about Roshanara and Frank Conroy and how spellbinding Bette had been as The Moth and, after a deep breath, concluded, “You must take her!”
Anderson chuckled and cast a perplexed glance at Bette, who turned her eyes downward in embarrassment. “Years later,” Bette said, “he told me he didn’t know what to think that day. He was too bewildered.” But when Bette read for him, his brother John, and Robert Milton—far better than she had for Le Gallienne—he and Milton were impressed. John was less so. Years later he told associates that he didn’t think Bette had much talent, but the opinions of his partners carried the day, and Bette was accepted as a student. Ruthie arranged to pay the tuition in three monthly installments. Bette later said that Hugh Anderson was amenable to all this less because of her talent than Ruthie’s chutzpah.
Bette was to begin her studies the following Monday. By Saturday, Ruthie had quit her job in Norwalk, piled all their earthly belongings into the repaired Model T, and found a position as a housemother at St. Mary’s School in Burlington, New Jersey, in order to be closer to Bette. On Sunday, Ruthie helped Bette settle into her “dormitory,” a huge boardinghouse next door to the converted mansion that housed the Milton/Anderson school. The building—two brownstones converted into one—offered tepid water, drafty hallways, a chaperon on each floor, and a restaurant in the basement where students ate all three of their daily meals, along with paying members of the public.
When Bette and Ruthie arrived, Bette’s roommate wasn’t there, but the girl seemed unconcerned with housekeeping: the room, a small bedsitter with two cots, was in chaos. Once Ruthie left, Bette found herself alone in a strange new environment, with neither her mother nor her sister for emotional support, and on the threshold of an exciting—and frightening—new chapter in her life.
When Bette’s roommate, Virginia Conroy, returned, she was struck by her first sight of Bette Davis. “She was sitting on the floor in the middle of a small Navajo rug wearing short homemade pajamas, her golden hair cascading down her back. Over and over she kept playing the same song on her hand-wound phonograph, ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,’ about a little lamb lost in the woods.”
Ginny introduced herself and asked Bette what was wrong. Bette quickly rose off the floor and muttered, “Nothing. Nothing at all.” But Ginny recognized the signs of loneliness and homesickness and tried to make light conversation. Bette’s replies were monosyllabic until Ginny mentioned she was from a small town in Massachusetts. Suddenly, they were soulmates in Bette’s mind, and a fast friendship began.
Still, Bette and Ginny should never have gotten along. There was the matter of the housekeeping, very important to Bette, whose childhood obsession with neatness had only grown over the years. Ginny, at sixteen, was three years younger than Bette. And their personalities clashed. “She was a Clara Bow type,” Bette recalled, “a true flapper, who entertained few serious thoughts.… She was the first girl I’d ever known who used lipstick and much too much of it.”
Ginny recalled that whenever she danced the Charleston, sang, and played her ukulele while Bette was trying to study, Bette would “bug out her eyes, switch her tail, stretch her neck like a hostile greylag goose and say in an icy tone, ‘Do you mind?’” Intimidated at first by Bette’s intensity, Ginny would quiet down, but later she told her, “You know, Bette, you could be the bee’s knees if you wouldn’t take life so seriously.’”
One afternoon, Ginny took a cigarette out of her purse, fumbled to light it, and took a puff. Bette was shocked. “Ginny! How can you do that?” she cried.
“Oh, you should try it, Bette,” Ginny replied nonchalantly. “All the smart people do it.” Bette refused and afterward pointedly opened the windows or left the room whenever Ginny lit up.
Despite their differences, Bette soon considered Ginny “delicious” and “a dear,” and they developed a strong, lifelong friendship. Although Bette was better educated, she found that Ginny was “Phi Beta Kappa in most of the subjects worth knowing about.” Ginny was surprised to discover that Bette was “even more naive and innocent than I was. Of course we both knew, as did all damsels of our generation, that if we ever spoke to a stranger or even let him catch our eye, we would be in imminent danger of landing up in the South American white slave market.” Bette felt compelled to warn Ginny further about men: “They will tell you,” she began, and then paused to find the words, “that certain things are… all right. But Ginny, they are not!”