by Ed Sikov
In her fine autobiography, The Lonely Life, Davis characterizes Ruthie as the artistic one, her father as the intellectual. Ruthie was flight, passion, theatrics, decorating. Harlow was all focus and analysis, as clear and precise as a magnifying glass. He had a stinging temper, too, in a way that Ruthie did not. When Harlow took a good-natured faceful of rice moments after his wedding, he wheeled around to the well-wishers and roared, “Goddamn you! I’ll get you for this!”4
He could not forgive his wife for her sex, either. Harlow Morrell Davis married Ruth Favor on July 1, 1907.5 Three days later, the newlyweds were lodging at Squirrel Island, Maine, where a water shortage kept Ruthie from douching after a bit of honeymoon intercourse. Harlow flew off the handle at this female breach of a gentleman’s trust and, according to Ruthie, brought the whole hotel into his intimate uproar.6Betty Davis was born nine months and one day later in Lowell, Massachusetts.
In her unpublished memoirs, Ruthie recalls the “lovely April shower” that “heralded” Betty’s birth on April 5, 1908.7 Davis, in The Lonely Life, turns it into a Homeric squall: “The gods were going mad and the earth was holding its head in a panic. . . . I happened between a clap of thunder and a streak of lightning. It almost hit the house and destroyed a tree out front. As a child I fancied that the Finger of God was directing the attention of the world at me. Further and divine proof—from the stump of that tree—that one should never point.”8
Appalled at the baby she bore, at least at first, Ruthie said, “Is that what I’ve got? Take it away! It’s horrible!”9 She changed her mind later, though she maintained a vigilant criticism lest Ruth Elizabeth ever commit the sin of resting on her laurels. No matter what Ruth Elizabeth’s achievements and fame, her mother taught her that she could always do better.
Harlow was not cut out for fatherhood, a fact that should have been clear from the start. He was cut out for dissecting infants, not nurturing them. Nevertheless, as Ruthie described it, “Bette’s sister Barbara came along eighteen months later to keep Bette from being spoiled.”10 If that was indeed the rationale for bearing a second child, it didn’t work.
With Barbara, called Bobby, it was all about Betty from the start. Bobby was in her crib when Betty, according to Ruthie, waited until Bobby’s nurse was out of the room. She then removed Bobby from the crib Betty considered her own, trundled her across the room, and deposited the usurper on the couch in an act of reclamation and revenge.11
Betty was driven in a way Bobby never was, an innate trait that her parents reinforced with firm Yankee expectations. Their soil was rocky, their winters were harsh; for generations they had been brutalized into enduring. Betty’s grandfather once bullied her into climbing a flight of stairs. Betty faced him from the bottom. She was barely able to walk. “Come on, climb!” he commanded from the top. “You can do it. One step at a time.” According to Davis, she made it, bruised but triumphant.12 It was the first of many painful successes.
There were strict rules in the Davis household, as there generally were in the New England families from which the Davises and Favors descended. Harlow Davis was a man who believed that children ought not to dine at table until they could conduct a worthy conversation, so Ruth Elizabeth and Barbara were exiled to the kitchen or nursery. Father’s rule didn’t apply on Sundays, but he often banished them in tears anyway after they committed some infant infraction or other.13
Of the sisters, Ruthie remembered, “they were always close. Bette once cut off Barbara’s hair, but on the whole they lived amicably together.”14 “Now she isn’t going to be pretty,” Ruthie heard Betty declare moments after the shearing. “She isn’t going to be pretty any more.”15
Throughout her life, everybody liked Bobby. Most felt sorry for her.
A scrapbook photo has both girls stripped to nothing but bandanas tied around their very blonde hair, sitting on a blanket on a hot summer’s day.16 Another poses them with Harlow: the girls are wearing large Mother Goose–like bonnets and sitting on his lap. Betty engages the camera, caught in a half smile, seemingly about to remark upon something of importance. Bobby sports a determined pout. Harlow is sour beyond words, staring glumly at the camera with an admonishing expression on his face. Wire-rimmed glasses perch slightly down on his nose. There’s a high, bony, recognizable forehead on a longer, thinner face. Why he feels such a powerful urge to reprimand remains unclear.17
Harlow graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1910. Obsessive-compulsive before the condition had been diagnosed, he found his calling as a meticulous patent attorney with the United Shoe Machinery Company of Boston.18 In The Lonely Life and elsewhere, Davis describes him using words like brilliant, cruel, and sarcastic. She tells a story so frigidly exact in its rendering of her father’s logic that you immediately see and understand her psychological profile as well as his. She was enchanted by a clear summer nighttime sky, as any romantic, unstunted child would be. “Do you see all those stars up there?” the father asked his little girl. “There are millions and millions of them. Remember that always and you’ll know how unimportant you are.”19
Still, the portrait Bette Davis draws of her father is complicated by one most unexpected detail: “Christmas should have exacted a loud ‘bah humbug’ from Harlow M. Davis,” Davis writes, but “it was Daddy’s favorite holiday.” The sour, distant father decorated their Christmas tree every year. Then he played Santa.20 He could be generous with money and special-occasion cheer, if not his affections, of which he had few, though the exception to that rule took the form of his brutal dog, a chow, which terrified Bette with its constant snapping.
Harlow’s menacing presence to the contrary notwithstanding, Davis maintained that her childhood—spent mostly in Winchester, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston about ten miles to the northwest—was essentially happy. (Never dwell on adversity; a Yankee creed. One with true strength of character should barely acknowledge it.) Her thanks went entirely to Ruthie.21 She cited the wedding Ruthie threw for her sister Mildred, complete with Japanese lanterns dangling from the yard’s trees. She recalled sliding with Bobby down the snow-covered hill behind the house, swinging on the swings by the kitchen door, baking pies with her cheery mother in the kitchen.22 But she also remembered running dreamlike through the woods while being chased by a pack of dogs. One of them caught her hair in its teeth until she broke free.23
Was Bette Davis really chased by wild dogs as a child? Or was she having a clear premonition of her career in the movie business?
BARBARA STANWYCK ONCE said of Davis that “she had the kind of creative ruthlessness that made her success inevitable.” It’s a marvelous turn of phrase, suggesting that it was her fierce drive that was creative rather than the other way around.24
Ruth Elizabeth Davis mastered the fine art of emotional manipulation at an early age. It comes naturally to children, but particularly so to nascent performers. “If I could never win my father, I completely conquered Ruthie. I became an absolute despot at the age of two.” She sensed her mother’s weakness and exploited it: “The tantrum got me what I wanted. My demands were frightening and unusual.” Indulgence was Ruthie’s favored response. Still, little Ruth Elizabeth was Harlow’s daughter, too: “My passion for order and perfection were unheard of in a child so young. An untied lace on a shoe, a wrinkle on a dress, drove me into a fury.”25 Harlow escorted the girls to the circus one afternoon. Betty, once she noticed it, could not shake away her itchlike awareness that the long carpet runner on which the animals made their entrances was ruined by a crooked seam. It wasn’t just a crooked seam to Betty but a fatal, ceaselessly distracting flaw that threatened to take the whole world down into chaos with it.26 Even as a child, Davis was an odd combination: part hysteric, part obsessive-compulsive, a blend seen as well in some of her most dedicated fans.
Harlow menaced, Ruthie pandered. Bobby, aiming to please, attempted to win Harlow’s love by conforming to his expectations, an impossible task for a five-year-old, and a strategy that almost certainly
led to her lifelong battle with mental illness. Betty’s goal was to steer clear of him on a practical level, though emotionally she never got over the longing—for love, approval, stability, and male control, which of course she also felt compelled to reject, dismiss, ignore, or mock.27
When Betty was seven, Ruthie packed their things for a trip to Florida. On their way to the train station, they stopped at the Copley Plaza in Boston. A string orchestra played. Harlow was unusually gentle. Ruthie didn’t talk much. Betty was surprised to see her father kiss her mother farewell.
Harlow did not accompany them onto the train. When they arrived in Florida, Ruthie announced that when they returned North they would no longer be living with Daddy. Bobby cried. Betty was relieved and announced, “Now we can go on a picnic and have a baby.”28
It’s not that this Yankee child had no idea about the facts of life that’s striking; one assumes she had no such knowledge. No, it’s her guileless lack of innocence—that and the joyous sense of a harsh world opening up to its fullest creative potential. Life without Father had become a luscious rose blooming unexpectedly from a bush full of thorns.
After returning from Florida, Ruthie and the girls left Winchester for Newton, another Boston suburb, this one to the west of the city, where the previously impractical mother learned that Harlow’s support payments would not be enough to live on. She had to go to work. Grandmother Favor not only made the choice of boarding school for the girls after seeing an ad in the Atlantic Monthly but went ahead and enrolled them without telling Ruthie: Crestalban, a farm school in the Berkshires that operated without the benefit of electricity. (The word Yankee does not begin to describe the spartan ethos of this school. Crestalban girls took naked snow baths every winter morning and stayed outside most of the day.29 In the New England mind, this was thought to build character.) Ruthie moved to New York City and became a governess for three Upper East Side boys.30
In one of the scrapbooks, two photos of little girls dressed as winged wood sprites in a school play illustrate Crestalban’s rustic theme.31 This might have been Betty Davis’s first theatrical performance.
For each of the three years she spent at Crestalban, Betty played Santa Claus in the Christmas pageant. The third year she caught fire. Lacking any twentieth-century source of power, the Crestalban Christmas tree was lighted, of course, by candles. Betty, dressed in red flannel that was pillowed out by a lot of cotton wadding, disobeyed the order not to get near the tree, and her sleeve, then her beard, snagged the flames. Quick-thinking teachers wrapped her in a blanket and put the fire out, but something else ignited: despite her blistering skin, Betty Davis was seized with the dramatic impulse and, for the sake of the effect, kept her eyes closed when they took the blanket away from her face. “I heard one of the teachers wail, ‘She’s blind! Oh God, she’s blind!’ I didn’t know whether 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 and groped helplessly about with my hands until the full savor of that moment was extracted.”32
Betty Davis’s first starring role came to a hasty end when Margery Whiting, the headmistress, insisted that the burned child simply buck up. At Crestalban, it was the better part of puritanical valor not to spoil everyone else’s Christmas party by moaning in agony.33
Ruthie failed to recognize Betty when she arrived at Grand Central Station for the holiday break, because her face was covered in blisters. An intern at the hospital to which Ruthie sped insisted that the only way to prevent lifelong facial scarring was to keep Betty’s skin greased and bandaged round the clock for several weeks.34 There’s a scrapbook photo showing Betty wearing what appears to be a wimple. This was the dramatic effect that the ever inventive Ruthie created by merging acres of facial bandages with a large white bow.35
In the 1930s, Margery Whiting, asked about her by-then-famous former pupil, was far too much a New Englander to gush. The crusty lady remembered Ruth Elizabeth Davis as having performed in school plays “capably,” but her acting was “not inspired.” Miss Whiting characterized the eleven-year-old Betty as much more self-conscious than the other girls, and, said the headmistress, her high-pitched and squeaky voice did not help matters at all. On the plus side from Miss Whiting’s perspective was the child’s sharp memory and, it might go without saying, young Betty Davis’s extraordinary drive.36
Belief in herself above all others was the central tenet of Davis’s lifelong faith, and her mother was the first votary. But in the fall of 1921, Ruthie decided to do something for herself rather than for her headstrong daughter and her younger sister, the afterthought. She pulled the girls out of Crestalban and used what would have been their tuition money for her own: she enrolled herself in the Clarence White School of Photography in New York City. The girls’ transition was harsh—from the Berkshires to a tacky apartment on Broadway and 144th Street, from a tiny rustic farm school to P.S. 186 with fifty children in every class.37
Ruthie, intent on making something out of nothing, taught the girls how to entertain themselves by spying on neighbors—a sort of Rear Window game, free urban entertainment.38 By December the girls were happily sledding down a hill toward the Hudson, adjusted to life in the city.39 And Ruthie, seeing a future for herself in commercial art, was learning the intricacies of lighting, shading, composition, and chemical developing. The pictures she took before her formal training already demonstrated a natural flair, but with training Ruthie could do more than simply be a visual artist. She could support her family as one.
In New York, Ruth Elizabeth Davis became a Girl Scout. Vehemently. As you would expect, she rose rapidly to the rank of patrol leader and commanded her girls like a drill sergeant. There was a contest—a competitive dress parade for Mrs. Herbert Hoover at Madison Square Garden—and Ruth Elizabeth’s patrol necessarily won. When she entered a citywide cooking contest sponsored by the Board of Education, naturally she earned first prize.40 Nothing else would do.
A home economics notebook survives in the archives.
Betty Davis, PS 186.
530 West 144th St.
13 1/2 years old
5' 2.5”
97 pounds. What I should weigh: 107 pounds.
How to keep ourselves and others strong:
1. Keep body clean inside and outside.
2. Eat the right kind of food.
3. Exercise regularly in the open air.
4. Care of teeth, etc.
The notebook also contains recipes for cream soups and chocolate pudding as well as instructions on the proper care of babies.41
Ruthie had a friend in New York, the improbably named Myrtis Genthner. Myrtis Genthner was reading a French novel at one point and casually suggested to Ruth Elizabeth that she change the spelling of her nickname, and with that, Betty turned into Bette. “The fact that M. Balzac’s Lisbeth Fischer was a horror didn’t come to my attention until I read the book some time later,” Miss Davis observed. Bette wrote a letter to her father soon thereafter and employed the new spelling when she signed her name. Harlow mocked the change, of course, and by dismissing it, he hammered it into permanence.42 Of course.
The novelist and critic Brigid Brophy remarked of Bette Davis’s rechristening, “Perhaps the change of name has as much ritualistic significance in the psychology of a star as in that of a dictator—or of a nun taking the veil.”43 Betty is everyday, Bette eccentric. Betty is a homey dessert. Bette is resplendent, all but unique. With the change to Bette, an even more dramatic persona began to emerge.
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER, Ruthie sent the girls to Camp Mudjekeewis in Fryeburg, Maine, close to the New Hampshire border, for the first of three summers. It was considered a wholesome dose of brisk northern air—swimming, hiking, canoeing. The camp, named for Hiawatha’s father, was operated by the Misses Perkins and Pride. The latter, a piano teacher from East Orange, New Jersey, was so impressed by Bobby Davis’s native talent as a pianist
that she convinced Ruthie to move to New Jersey at the end of the summer so that Bobby could continue her lessons. 44 For once excited by her younger daughter’s talent, Ruthie moved them all into an East Orange boardinghouse.
Bette, shocked at finding herself out of the spotlight, made a point of being bored and obnoxious. Bobby was getting the attention she believed was owed solely to her, and she resented it.
Ruthie was, as she herself described it, “petrified” of Bette. Bossy and unmanageable in East Orange, Bette took everything out on her mother. The slightest suggestion—what to wear, how to behave—provoked piercing, theatrical glares. Bette held Ruthie’s nervous giggle in severe condescension, and she let Ruthie know it. Even the doting Ruthie grew exasperated to the point that she suggested a new game one day: she and Bette would exchange clothes and personalities for the evening. Bette was mildly entertained until the accuracy of Ruthie’s performance struck her. She had to admit that the glum sulks and furious scowls were hers. Ruthie was especially shrewd in that she played this game out in front of the other boarders at the communal dining table, which only added to Bette’s shameful self-recognition: Bette learned that the way she presented herself to the world was at least as important as how she actually felt.45
According to Bette, her behavior improved somewhat, but she remained essentially miserable in New Jersey. So Ruthie placated her. Mother terminated Bobby’s piano lessons with Miss Pride, and they moved again—this time to the Boston suburb of Newton, where Ruthie’s sister Mildred lived.
