Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  There was another reason for the move: Ruthie had to quit her job at Pierie MacDonald’s photography studio in Manhattan because she developed osteomyelitis of the jaw, an incapacitatingly painful bone inflammation, and she needed her sister’s help in caring for the children.46 Bette neglects to mention this detail in The Lonely Life. How odd that Davis chose to represent herself as selfish and manipulative instead of legitimately citing her mother’s illness as the rationale for their move back to Massachusetts.

  The soundstage is set. One of the sisters went crazy from time to time. The other became an actress.

  BETTE’S FIRST SCHOOL dance at Newton High School: a disaster. Clad in a corduroy jumper and having given no thought to her hair, shoes, or dancing ability, she was not the ball’s belle. One boy danced with her for mercy’s sake but soon began gesturing frantically to the other boys in an effort to convince one of them to cut in. Nobody did; Bette thought perhaps the boy was spastic. When she figured it out, she rushed home in tears. For the next dance, Ruthie came to the rescue with a new white chiffon dress with turquoise trim and a daringly low neckline. Bette was fourteen at the time. When she put her hair up, she realized—to her horror, she later claimed—that she was pretty.

  The young Bette Davis was a prude and remained so until she got to Hollywood and saw how much fun other people were having and finally decided to join in. She attributed this straitlaced self-denial to her family’s strict Protestant nature, which her parents had inherited from their parents, and back through the generations. When a boy first kissed her, she became convinced that she was pregnant.47 After all, she descended, she claimed, from a Pilgrim, James Davis, who accused a fellow member of his community of witchcraft. (The Favors, on the other hand, were originally Huguenots—French Protestants who, unlike the Puritan Pilgrims, left room for the arts. Still, there was a strong strain of righteousness on the Favor side. Bette’s great-great-grandmother’s tombstone reads “Bearing the White Lily of an Unsullied Life.”)

  In the fall of 1924, Ruthie uprooted the girls once more by putting them in boarding school again. Stability was not a feature of Bette Davis’s upbringing, which led to an unresolvable ambivalence: a powerful longing to settle and an equally strong compulsion to move.

  This time Ruthie chose the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies, which had the dual benefit of being the only fully integrated private school around and also cheap.48 Bette and Bobby both hated the seminary’s overly religious nature, and having gotten used to public school, they resented the amount of time they spent on housekeeping (never a problem at Crestalban). The food, too, was awful. At the end of the first semester Ruthie yanked them once more. They adjourned to Uncle Myron’s for Christmas, and after the holidays, Ruthie packed them off to Cushing Academy in Ashburnham. It was the school Ruthie herself had attended.49

  Cushing Academy was, and remains, a classic New England preparatory school, having none of the eccentricity of Crestalban, none of the racial integration of Northfield, and certainly none of a public school’s working class. One day early on at Cushing, Bette was called in by the headmaster’s wife, who began extolling Ruthie’s self-sacrificial virtues to a perplexed Bette, who at first comprehended the woman’s praise of her mother as a reflection of her own fine nature. “And she is blessed in having a lovely and generous daughter,” the woman continued, only to add an unexpected stinger at the end: “I think it would be splendid if you would help her with your expenses by waiting on table.” Bette was mortified: “My face burned with indignation but, fortunately, I held my tongue, for instantly I realized that mother would not permit me to demean myself by becoming a waitress.” She wrote to Ruthie with the news, fully expecting to receive the kind of self-martyred mothering response to which Bette had grown accustomed. But Ruthie, evidently tired and struggling, was for once willing to share the burden: “That’s very sweet of you,” she wrote. “Go ahead.”

  Bette was, as she later described herself, “humiliated and admittedly belligerent” when she reported to the dining room. She was hardly an experienced server in any sense of the word, and the first few days were hell. It was never easy for Bette Davis to be brought down a peg or two, but after the bruises healed, such experiences came to serve as self-defining life lessons, parables for the less fortunate. In this case, Bette smugly became less of a snob.50

  Bette Davis’s day at Cushing Academy, 1925–26: Rising bell at 7:00 a.m., breakfast at 7:30. Chapel at 8:30, though attendance may not have been required. English IV at 8:50, Latin IV at 9:45, Math IV at 10:30. After lunch: Ancient History at 1:15, at 2:00 French III, and, on Fridays, Bible II at 2:50.51

  On June 12, 1926, Bette Davis appeared onstage at the Cowell Chapel in the play The Charm School, presented by Cushing’s senior class in conjunction with the Drama Club. Bette played the part of Elise, the president of the senior class at a school much like Cushing. Harmon O. “Ham” Nelson’s Syncopators provided the music.52

  From the Cushing Academy Breeze, June 1926:

  One of the fairest girls we know

  Is Bette Davis—“Ham” says so.

  Bette may be the busiest girl in the senior class, but she is never too busy to help out when she is asked. Her giggle is a delight far more pleasing than the “laughing” record on the “vic.” Bette’s talents are numerous, for she has a lovely voice, is the best actress, and the class beauty—what more could anyone wish? She is undecided about what she is going to do next year, but the school she picks out will be lucky! Miner-vian; Vice-President; President, Comrade Club; Glee Club; Student Council; Breeze staff; Expression Play; “Vanities”; Senior Play.53

  More from the Breeze:

  Harmon O. Nelson, Jr. “Ham.” July 5, 1907. Ham came to us from Northbridge High School, wherever that may be. . . . We know his acting in Seventeen was superb, and we also know a certain girl who likes “Ham” without the eggs.

  Harmon Oscar Nelson’s nickname was clearly the subject of much hilarity around the halls of Cushing. For her senior gift, Bette’s classmates presented her with a sixteen pound, twelve ouncer, the wrapping of which she carefully preserved in one of the scrapbooks now archived at Boston University: “Armour’s Skinned Ham—‘the ham what am.’ ”54

  AS SHE KNEW better than anyone (although those who felt the lash might disagree), Bette Davis held fast to a set of righteous beliefs, a roster of strict and unshakable values that saw her through from childhood to old age. With the unyielding tenacity of her Yankee forebears, she bore what the writer James McCourt called a “desire for rectitude” that was based on a bedrock of puritanism. The parameters of right living began to stretch in the 1930s, but even after her liberalization by Hollywood, Bette Davis lived her life as though her ancestors had placed an heirloom yardstick against her spine and demanded that she stand up straight at all times. Bad posture in others was scarcely tolerated either. And yet, McCourt added, “she was so expansive.” 55 In other words, Davis was an upright bluenose but a flamingly theatrical one, her passions burning as fiercely as her stringent sense of probity.

  Hers was an upbringing of stern but detached pressure, although (or maybe as a consequence) she was possessed with pent-up drives that eventually found expression onstage, onscreen, and in bed. The latter was the last of the three to emerge. She let loose as a performer well before she unleashed herself sexually, and even so she ended her life as she began it—by demanding but inevitably distrusting male control.

  As so often is the case, the cliché that begs most loudly to be disproved turns out to be unavoidably true: her father set the course for Bette’s relationships with men. The problematic star of the defining first scene, Harlow M. Davis was, as Bette’s uncle, Paul Favor, once wrote, a “man who revealed his deepest feelings to few people and who wore a habitual mask of indifference.”56 Although Bette claims to have expressed delight at his departure from her family at the time and certainly did so consistently for decades to come, her father’s abandonment resonated throughout her life
in ways she herself never fully understood, let alone acknowledged. A lifelong sense of loss and a thorough ignorance of sex in her youth combined to forge her uneasy development from a hurt little girl who necessarily if unconsciously blamed herself for her father’s departure to an angry and defiant woman who necessarily blamed everyone else for everything.

  Harlow was a distant, unapproachable man whose rare physical contact with his daughter took such a grudging form that even the single incident of physical punishment wasn’t his idea: “Daddy spanked me only once and at Ruthie’s request,” Bette writes in The Lonely Life. She and Bobby had eaten some unripe grapes, an infraction that Ruthie felt required an unusual degree of discipline. “I gave them castor oil,” Ruthie told the head of the house. “You can give them a spanking.”57 The abuse Bette’s father doled out at other times was emotional, not physical, and it resulted in lifelong bruises that couldn’t possibly heal because they were so rarely acknowledged.

  Harlow was cold, detached, glacial—and yet this asthmatic man of pure reason had been caught having an affair with his nurse. That was why the marriage ended. Her name was Minnie Stewart, and she became the second Mrs. Davis.58 Only late in life did Bette acknowledge Ruthie’s role in Harlow’s abandonment; at that point she was able to recognize her mother’s behavior as her own. As she told James McCourt in the 1980s, “Of course she drove him mad; I see that. I did the same.”59

  Ruthie’s brother Paul took Harlow’s place as a paternal figure. From patent lawyer to pastor, Uncle Paul gave sermons for a living. “In our early years we were very much under the influence of our uncle, Dr. Paul Favor, an Episcopalian minister, and we attended church and Sunday school with the fidelity of Puritans. We were reared in the strict New England manner, with one eye always to God.”60 The other eye, in similar Yankee style, was earnestly focused on high principles of a mortal variety.

  Failure to live up to standards could be cause for panic. She got a kiss on the way home from a drugstore soda counter one summer in Southwest Harbor, Maine, where Ruthie had taken a rental. “Every day I walked to the pharmacy, not necessarily for an ice cream soda.” She was walking for a boy named Francis Young. “Every day, he would come to where I was sitting and ask if I wanted an ice cream soda. I would order one and just look across the counter at his beautiful brown eyes. He walked me home one day and kissed me.”61 This innocent gesture was the occasion of the pregnancy scare: after the kiss, Bette became hysterical and clinically so, her belly actually swelling in response to her guilt-ridden pleasure.62

  Later, there were Newton High School dances and invitations to bridge parties and socials.

  To meet Miss Virginia Day

  Miss Virginia Farnum

  Requests the pleasure of your company

  At a Bridge Party

  On Friday the twenty-eighth of December

  At two-thirty o’clock

  Eleven Gibson Road, Newtonville63

  This was the way things were done; this was the world whose strict rules of etiquette she adopted. The twenties may have roared elsewhere, but not in Newton or Ashburnham, and not for Bette Davis, who continued to employ Miss and Mr. throughout her life, well after the rest of Hollywood was on a first-name basis with stars and directors they’d never met.

  Rectitude aside, there was the conventional boy-crazy phase. Before Ham Nelson, there was “Gige” (George J. Dunham), the son of the president of Standard Steel Motor Car Co. in Boston; and during Gige there was Warren (J. Warren Blake). Before any of these boys there were the senior football players at Newton High whose advances Bette spurned and who retaliated by leaving her, in the seniors’ will, “two dozen handkerchiefs to blow her ‘no’s’ with.” “I cried for hours in humiliation,” Davis later wrote, but her humiliation wasn’t enough to make her say yes to anyone but Ham, and that was only on their wedding night in 1932.64

  At Cushing, Ham gave Bette his pin, which she kept until the summer Ruthie took the girls to Perkins Cove on the Maine coast, where Bette fell for a Yalie named Fritz Hall, at which point she returned the pin to Ham.65 But it wasn’t Fritz with whom Bette went on her first un-chaperoned date that summer. An unnamed youth took her to a dance in Kennebunkport with some of his friends, and they all got roaring drunk, including the driver. Ruthie, said by Bette to have possessed “great psychic powers” but who was actually more of a magnificent worrier whose fears were periodically founded, begged one of Bette’s young friends to rush to Kennebunkport and spirit Bette home to safety. According to Bette, the boy who took her on the date arrived the next morning to report that the driver had indeed crashed the car on the way home. “Bette would most likely have been killed!” the boy is said to have declared.66

  Another young man, an aspiring actor, recalled meeting Bette in 1927. His friend Hunter Scott, whom he described as “a typical F. Scott Fitzgerald character [who] never bothered to get engaged,” picked up the actor outside the Ziegfeld Theater one afternoon in a Packard convertible. In the car were “a Mrs. Davis and her two daughters.” Hunter was courting Bobby Davis at the time and invited them all down to Princeton for the weekend. Scott suggested that he and the actor, Henry Fonda, score their experiences, despite the fifth-wheel presence of their pal Frank “Worms” Grubbs. The following evening, Hunter asked Ruthie for permission to take Bette and Bobby to the Princeton stadium for a moonlight tour. Ruthie, described by Fonda as “a stern New England lady,” acquiesced. Hunter led Bobby off into the darkness, leaving Henry and Bette in the car—and Worms unaccounted for.

  Fonda wrote in his autobiography,

  I sat there thinking, “I’ve got to kiss her. I’ve got to!” She looked up at me with those enormous saucerlike eyes and what the hell. [I] sort of leaned over and gave her a peck on the lips—not a real kiss, but what a relief to me. One point! I felt like Casanova.

  [Later,] I received a letter that my date had written on the train. . . . It said, “I’ve told Mother about our lovely experience together in the moonlight. She will announce the engagement when we get home.” It was signed, “Bette Davis.”

  “Holy shit,” I thought. “One kiss and I’m engaged.” That’s how naïve I was. And that’s what a devil Bette Davis could be at seventeen. For years, whenever I saw Bette Davis I’d give her a wide berth.67

  Bette herself recalled the scene somewhat differently, or maybe she was just exercising Yankee discretion: “Perhaps we discussed, that night, our hopes for the future. Perhaps we necked. I don’t remember.”68 A calling card affixed in one of Davis’s scrapbooks reads simply “Henry Jaynes Fonda.”69

  CHAPTER

  2

  LESSONS

  John Murray Anderson—Robert Milton School of the

  Theatre and Dance

  128-130 East 58th St.

  Plaza 4524

  New York

  Owned and operated by the Park Avenue Theatre

  Corporation

  October 19, 1927

  Enrollment Contract

  I hereby enroll in the Anderson-Milton School of the

  Theatre and Dance as a Dram. (Jr.) Student for a course of

  four months (less 3 weeks) beginning on Oct. 24. 1927 and

  terminating on Jan. 31. 1928.

  Miss Bette Davis, age 19

  c/o Rev. Paul G. Favor 22

  Westminster Court

  New Rochelle, NY

  (Signed) John Murray Anderson1

  JOHN MURRAY ANDERSON WAS COMME ça—a beautifully dressed, finely mannered man of the theater in the style of Clifton Webb. The composer Sheldon Harnick tells a classic story about him: Anderson was once directing a rodeo out West when someone let the wild bulls out of their pen before their proper cue. “No, no, no!” Anderson shrieked. “Get back in the pens! It’s not time yet!” In Anderson’s theatrical imagination, charging bulls and errant chorus girls were essentially the same animal.2

  The Anderson-Milton School was not Bette Davis’s first choice for dramatic education in New York City. She held it
against Eva Le Gallienne until the day she died that Le Gallienne rejected her application to attend the august actress’s Civic Repertory Company, on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, where young actors received free tuition in exchange for taking roles in the company’s productions. According to Davis, she was panicky at her first professional audition—and especially so in her skittish, electric youth, when life was a series of high-voltage moments on which existence itself depended. Le Gallienne asked her to read the part of a sixty-five-year-old Dutch woman. It was a showy, stupid request meant to intimidate rather than teach, and Bette sensibly replied that that was why she wanted to go to drama school—“to learn how to play a part like this.” Le Gallienne reacted with stony silence. Bette performed as well as she could, and Le Gallienne thanked her with forced politeness and promptly dismissed her, calling her “a frivolous little girl.”3 (One of Davis’s other biographers, Barbara Leaming, insists that it was Le Gallienne’s secretary who actually conducted the audition, but no matter.)4

  Davis had been treated much better, and received far more nurturing, during the summer she spent in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where Ruthie had opened a photography studio, the Silhouette Shop. This was between her junior and senior years at Cushing—the summer of 1925. There were two summer dance and theater programs in Peterborough at the time: Mariarden, where the exotic Roshanara taught dance, and the cheaper Out-Door Players, run by Marie Ware Laughton.5 Bette was accepted at Mariarden, but Ruthie couldn’t afford the tuition, so she began her studies at the Out-Door Players, where she learned, as she later put it, “nature dances à la Isadora Duncan.”6 But Roshanara attended one of Bette’s early performances and was so impressed by the girl’s natural gift for movement that she agreed to take her on as a student at Mariarden—provided that Bobby Davis would earn Bette’s tuition by playing the piano for rehearsals.