Fasten Your Seat Belts

by Lawrence J. Quirk

  While at Mariarden that summer of 1925, the seventeen-year-old Bette acted and danced in an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was directed by Frank Conroy, a seasoned Broadway and classical actor and later a prominent character actor in talking films. It was here that Conroy first noticed her, and later he was even more impressed by her in another production in which Roshanara cast her, The Moth. She danced the title role with such distinctive grace and style that Conroy told her mother, “That girl must continue as an actress. There is something so glowingly individual and distinctive about her that you can’t take your eyes away from her. She belongs on the stage, and nowhere else.”

  Davis graduated in the class of 1926 from Cushing Academy, her future unclear despite Conroy’s encouraging words. She worked as a secretary and at other odd jobs, feeling that she had been enough of a burden to her mother. Some months later, as a treat, Ruthie took her on a theater outing to Boston. There she saw Henrik Ibsen’s touching and powerful The Wild Duck, with Blanche Yurka, a noted stage actress with wild eyes and a flashing, driving style, and Peg Entwistle, a sensitive young actress of great promise who in the 1930s despaired over her lack of success in talkies and jumped to her death from one of the mammoth letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign. Seeing the plays, she was to recall, firmed her resolve to become an actress. She could be happy in no other way of life, she told her mother. There were strong, stormy, elemental feelings inside of her that she had to purge, she said, and acting was the only way to do it.

  Convinced now that Bette’s future lay in acting, and that all other efforts must be subordinated to that end, Ruthie took Davis (Bobby was in school) to New York in the fall of 1927 when Bette was nineteen. The distinguished Eva Le Gallienne, one of the country’s most accomplished and celebrated actresses, had founded a group she called the Civic Repertory Theatre, which offered reasonably priced tickets and well-directed, well-acted versions of the classics, all on a shoestring budget. Miss Le Gallienne, philanthropic and dedicated to encouraging young talent, was also a thorough technician and a stern perfectionist who insisted on high standards, even for newcomers. She was not impressed with the young Bette Davis. Asked to read a part beyond her ability at the time, that of an old woman, Bette flubbed and fumbled her way through it with disastrous results. She reminisced years later that if she felt someone did not like her or was down on her from the word go, she froze up. When Miss Le Gallienne pointed out flaws in her trial interpretation, Davis irritated the Great Lady by replying that she was a beginner, not a finished technician, and that she had come to Le Gallienne to learn, not to demonstrate.

  Mistaking Davis’s humility for conceit, Le Gallienne coolly told the aspirant that she would hear from her by letter. A week or so later the frosty judgment came. It was along the lines that Bette Davis did not reflect a sufficiently serious or professional approach to her would-be profession to warrant taking her on.

  Asked about this many years later, Eva Le Gallienne shrugged and replied, “So many youngsters came down to Fourteenth Street in those days, hoping and seeking. I simply don’t remember her.”

  Crushed by the rejection, Davis mooned around the house in Newton, Massachusetts, where she and Ruthie and Bobby were then living. Around this time, Bobby elected to go to college in the Midwest. She sensed she was forgotten and that all the chips, as usual, were on Bette. Davis said years later, “I don’t blame her for beating a retreat to someplace far away where, for a while anyway, she could feel like her own person.”

  Then Ruthie had another idea. Again she and Bette took the train to New York, but this time they headed for the Robert Milton–John Murray Anderson School of the Theatre. Just before leaving Boston, they had been disheartened by a letter from Harlow Morrell Davis, who disdained the idea of Bette as an actress. “She doesn’t have what it takes for it. She ought to be practical, try for work as a secretary.”

  Ignoring the paternal vote of nonconfidence, Ruthie marched into the school and told the director, “My girl wants to be an actress. She’s very talented. Frank Conroy thinks her potential is unlimited. I haven’t got the money to pay your tuition but will you please accept her either on a scholarship or on a deferred-payment arrangement?” Moved by the aggressive yet somehow plaintive and touching request, the director accepted Bette.

  That was when Bette Davis’s real career began. The instructors at the Milton-Anderson school were the best. She took classes from George Arliss, one of the greats of the British and American stage and screen, who came as a guest instructor and inspired his young charges with his interpretive skills. Later he became an important factor in her life. Martha Graham, also an instructor, taught Davis the principles of full bodily expression on stage. Later, Graham, a disciplined, objective artist who did not bestow praise easily, said of her, “She had control, discipline, electricity. I knew she would turn out to be something out of the ordinary.” During her two years there, Bette shone in such roles as Mrs. Fair in The Famous Mrs. Fair, played on Broadway by the then-popular star Margalo Gillmore.

  Armed with her Milton-Anderson background, she alternated over the next two years between summer stock on the Cape and in companies in Rochester, New York, and elsewhere. Frank Conroy, who had kept in close touch with her, introduced her to George Cukor, who in 1928 was running a repertory group in Rochester. Given a small role in Broadway as a gum-chewing, tough chorus girl, she played the lead when the star was indisposed.

  After a promise from Cukor that she would be rehired in the fall as a resident ingenue, Davis went to the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts. At first all she was offered was work as an usher. Undaunted, she accepted and awaited her chance. It came when the famous actress and veteran of numerous Broadway shows, Laura Hope Crews, who was directing and playing the lead in a warhorse called Mr. Pim Passes By, sent out an SOS for a girl who could assume an English accent. Davis overheard the request from the aisle where she was dusting seats and sorting out the evening’s programs and shouted that she could fill the bill. Counting herself lucky that she had practiced accents while at Milton-Anderson, Davis got a commitment for the role—but only on condition that she would sing and play a certain ballad, I Passed by Your Window. Unfamiliar with the song, Davis and Ruthie scoured the music stores of the neighboring towns until they found the sheet music. Thanks to musician boyfriend Ham’s tutelage in piano and singing at Cushing, Davis performed expertly and won her share of applause. Acting with Laura Hope Crews was another matter. While too shrewd and professional not to recognize her nascent talents, Crews was particularly vexed by some of Bette’s mannerisms, especially her tendency to wave her arms around. At one point the Great Lady was so vexed that she slapped Davis full in the face. On another occasion she pushed her. The arms stayed at her sides for the rest of the Cape run.

  Soon Davis was heading off to Rochester again, her mother, as always, in tow, to fulfill her engagement with the Cukor stock company. It was the fall of 1928, and she found herself up against such solid professionals as Frank McHugh, Louis Calhern, Wallace Ford, and Elizabeth Patterson, all of whom later wound up in Hollywood films.

  Also in the company was Miriam Hopkins. Already a seasoned Broadway leading lady at twenty-six, Miriam was autocratic, demanding, temperamental, and a scene-stealer par excellence. Even then she had perfected her standard attention-getting tricks, including fluttering handkerchiefs, picking up books, stroking her throat, anything to distract attention, even from a bit player. Though she had already gone through several husbands, lesbian rumors about her were rife; she fanned them by having in tow a beautiful young girl she called her “protégé,” who disappeared with her into her bungalow right after dinner, each and every night. She befuddled Davis by patting her on the fanny and telling her she had a sexy, swanlike neck. One night she invited Davis to join her and the girl in her bungalow; a horrified Ruthie pulled her away on a pretext. “Stay away from her—she’s trouble!” she told Bette.

  After this, Miriam became short wit
h Bette when they played scenes together. One night Miriam screamed at Cukor, “She’s stepping on my lines! The bitch doesn’t know her place! I’m the star of this show—not that little nobody!” Enraged and humiliated, Davis pulled in her horns through sheer willpower.

  Years later George Cukor denied that he fired Davis peremptorily. He told me, “Her talent was apparent. She did buck at direction, yes. She had her own ideas, and though she only did bits and ingenue roles, she didn’t hesitate to express them. Her mother, as I recall, pushed her like crazy, was always lurking about. But I did not fire her. She insists I did, says I had a low opinion of her then. But I deny it all!” Whatever the nitty-gritty of the situation, she did leave the stock company rather abruptly. Louis Calhern, the accomplished and seasoned character star, had complained in a play called Yellow that Davis looked more like his daughter than his mistress, and she was replaced. Calhern said later that, moreover, she was too standoffish with the resident Lotharios and wouldn’t “put out,” which made her unpopular.

  2

  Struggling to the Surface

  DAVIS’S BRIEF TENURE at Rochester proved to be the darkness before the dawn, however. The brilliant James Light asked her to take a role in The Earth Between by Virgil Geddes, produced at Light’s Provincetown Playhouse in New York’s Greenwich Village. Davis and Ruthie found a small apartment on West Eighth Street that winter of 1929, and happily and excitedly joined the famous community of bohemian artists of all stripes and persuasions, political, sexual, and cultural. There, as one writer put it, “People can call their souls their own, and see who cares!”

  To be sure, the theater on MacDougal Street was small and poorly heated and not very clean. But it was redolent with memories of great actors and great plays, including those of Eugene O’Neill, and young Geddes, fresh from Nebraska, was as excited over his brain-and-spirit-child getting produced there as Davis was to be starring in it. Washington Square was nearby, and over on Sixth Avenue and beyond in Sheridan Square were wonderful little clubs and coffee shops where the current political and art trends were earnestly debated. Davis and Ruthie, sometimes accompanied by Geddes or male cast members, enjoyed the Village atmosphere. Many years later she recalled “that wondrous sense of ecstatic freedom I knew while living there. There was a sense of the unexpected and the magical. I am sorry for any artist of any persuasion who has not, for however long or briefly, sampled the life of Greenwich Village.”

  There has been some debate as to whether Davis completely understood the plot of The Earth Between, or whether her Village-tour companion, the young playwright Geddes, ever cared to enlighten her. Certainly by age twenty-one, in 1929, Davis, who had cultivated a wide-ranging sensibility through voracious reading and constant observation, must have been familiar with the phenomenon of incest, at least in general terms. And incest, however subtly conveyed, was what The Earth Between was all about. Davis must have sensed the play’s underlying currents, for her performance as the fragile, sensitive, delicate-spirited daughter isolated on a Nebraska farm under the pervading influence of her father’s powerful personality won unreserved kudos from a number of critics.

  Many of her friends and neighbors were on hand to root for her that evening of March 5, 1929. Armed with a run-of-the-play contract for thirty-five dollars a week (which sufficed far more handsomely than it would sixty years later), Davis used all her instincts and emotions to bring the hapless girl to life. The two-act play was preceded by a brief Eugene O’Neill piece, Before Breakfast, but this was one night when O’Neill, who had helped make the Provincetown Players famous some years before, took a back seat. The evening was hers. With Grover Burgess as the ominous father and William Challee as her younger romantic vis-à-vis, Davis responded with wild delight to the cheers and bravos of an intelligent and responsive audience.

  She was later to say that nothing in her life could ever equal the deep emotions and the wild elation that night brought her. New York had accepted her without reservation. Her only sadness was that her father remained in Massachusetts; instead of attending the performance he sent a basket of flowers—without a note.

  Bobby, Ruthie, and Uncle Paul Favor, a minister, all waited until the morning papers appeared at the stand at the corner of West Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. They brought them home to Davis, who wept tears of joy as the first reviews were read to her.

  Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times had written: “Miss Davis . . . is an entrancing creature who plays in a soft, unassertive style.” St. John Ervine wrote in The New York World that she had ably suggested the girl’s disturbed mind. And from the New York Daily News: “The performances are good, especially that of Miss Davis, a wraith of a child with true emotional insight.”

  The Earth Between played to full houses and garnered flattering press interviews for Davis, who got yet another lift when Blanche Yurka, the famed actress and producer, asked to see her.

  Miss Yurka was a formidable theatrical presence on the New York scene in 1929. By no means a beautiful or even handsome woman, she nevertheless took complete command on stage by dint of hypnotic, flashing eyes, a dynamic, compelling chemistry, and a fierce theatrical aura that commanded immediate attention. She had produced and starred in many fine classical and modern, as well as repertory, plays, and at that moment was casting for the role of Hedvig in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. She had gone to watch Davis after reading the reviews, and was sure she would be right for the vulnerable, impassioned Hedvig, who reacts to the news that she is an unwanted child, adopted by an indifferent father, by committing suicide.

  Miss Yurka wasted no time. When Davis arrived with Ruthie, she told Davis that an audition was unnecessary and offered the role of Hedvig to her. There was one minor trial to be weathered before Hedvig was hers, however. One morning Davis woke up with a bad case of measles. Fortunately The Earth Between had run its course, and Miss Yurka, determined that Davis should play in The Wild Duck, held up rehearsals for several weeks until she recovered.

  Miss Yurka said later that during rehearsals and during the run, Davis had presented problems. “She attacked the role too passionately at first. I wanted her to give it all she had—and that was considerable—but I had to temper and restrain her. I was troubled by her apron-strings ties to her mother, whom I thought a silly, flighty woman who had made her daughter her career and indeed her whole life. She was the archetype of the classic stage mother—only worse. She was always around. She watched every man who came near Bette—even her fellow actors. I think she had the idea that even a man’s look could rape and/or impregnate!”

  But Miss Yurka, who was also acting in the play, responded to Davis’s dedicated intensity by generously handing her whole scenes. “I’ve had my day—let’s see this eager, talented young girl commence to have hers!” she told the press. When the play opened in New York, Davis garnered more fine reviews. “She acts with all her heart and being,” one critic commented. “On view here is a sincerity that is as compelling as it is electric.”

  Miss Yurka took the play on tour. The critics in Philadelphia were equally good. The Philadelphian critic called Davis “strikingly effective . . . [she] thrills us with the poignant grief that comes with the revelation of the child’s great tragedy.” Washington was next, with The Post rhapsodizing, “Bette Davis is a young woman who is going to advance far in her stage endeavors. She was . . . profoundly sympathetic and appealing.” By this time Miss Yurka was bringing Davis out to take curtain calls with her; she treated her like a co-star, to Davis’s everlasting gratitude. Years later, Davis was to say of Yurka: “People thought her formidable, frightening, and cold. I came to know, first-hand, the warm heart, the appreciation for good work, the fervent dedication to the acting art that were at the core of this great woman.”

  The tour of The Wild Duck reached Boston—Boston, where she had nurtured youthful dreams and hopes and had known the depths of despair during times when she feared nothing would ever happen, nothing would ever begin. Again the accolade
s were fervent, with the Boston Post declaring, “Our Miss Davis, practically our native daughter with her birth in Lowell and her former residence in our suburbs, does us proud in one of Ibsen’s finest, most demanding classic roles. Heartbreaking and compelling is she as she expresses her profound grief and lostness.”

  Friends poured in from Lowell, Lynn, Winchester, Newton, and Cushing Academy. Then, at long last, Harlow Morrell Davis appeared in the audience, and later in her dressing room. As usual unable to convey what he was feeling (or possibly not feeling), he remarked on the accomplishments of other cast members, the direction, the play itself, then went on to the weather. Of her performance he said nothing. Later, at home, he penned her a formal, correct note, the highlight of which, after perfunctory congratulations, was an injunction to eat properly, for he thought she looked peaked.

  During the tour Davis had also cut her teeth on another Ibsen play, The Lady From the Sea. Yurka felt this would be good contrast for her, as she played a happy, young, and carefree girl, demonstrating that she could convey youthful lightheartedness and expectancy as well as tragic grief. All in all, the Yurka-Ibsen tour vastly expanded Davis’s capacities and convinced her, once and for all, that she had a future in acting.

  After the tour ended, Davis went back to the Cape Playhouse for more seasoning. Her ushering and bit-playing days firmly behind her, she spent the summer of 1929 honing her talents in a variety of interesting roles. She said of her experiences with summer stock, “It keeps you on your toes; it teaches you timing, discipline, control.”

  The director Marion Gering, who was later to do some compelling early-thirties talkies, saw her in the spring of 1929 in The Lady From the Sea and asked her to try out for the ingenue role in a play by Martin Flavin called Broken Dishes, which was to open on November 5, 1929, at Broadway’s Ritz Theater. In it, she would act with the comical yet poignant actor Donald Meek, a fussy, bald-headed little man whose uniquely androgynous, put-upon, aura would bring him a considerable measure of fame as a character actor in Hollywood later.