Dark Victory_The Life of Bette Davis

by Ed Sikov

  “Bobby was thrilled with the opportunity to contribute to the family exchequer and very expertly played for Roshanara’s classes that summer,” Bette writes in The Lonely Life, achieving on paper a balance of admission and denial so precarious that one wonders if she sustained it equally unstably in her mind. As it actually happened, Bobby didn’t play for Roshanara herself at Mariarden but rather for one of Roshanara’s protégées in the dank basement of a church twenty miles away in Keene.7 Bluntly stated, Bobby was now working for Bette, as she would continue to do on and off for the rest of her life.

  There are scrapbook photographs of Roshanara, who was in fact a round-faced Irishwoman named Olive Craddock. In one, she’s bareheaded and wrapped in layers of sarilike silk; in another, she’s got a nunlike Mother Teresa scarf over her head. In still another, she’s clad in a drastically wide-sleeved cloak and a turban.8 Still, Olive Craddock came by her adopted Indian identity honestly; she was born in Calcutta, the daughter of an officer in the British army.9

  Roshanara, who died the following year, gave Bette her first formal lessons in the art of bodily motion, the use of one’s physical being to express fluid, ephemeral emotions that words would be incapable of pinning down. Any mildly proficient performer can utter the line “I don’t mind,” as Davis does in Of Human Bondage, but without the particular stretch of the neck and cock of the head, the line would lack its irritating, brittle authority. Even in her first moment in her first movie, Bad Sister, Davis holds a stack of plates just a bit too high, an essentially choreographic strategy that not only compels her audience’s attention but reveals, clearly but nonverbally, the primness of her character.

  At Mariarden, Davis’s lessons in motion had a more graphic, less narrative end. One of Ruthie’s art photos shows Bette performing as “The Moth”: a swirl of white fabric, angular at the top as the material flies straight out like a plate, but rounds itself and swirls at the bottom, like a fluent wing.

  After the Le Gallienne rejection and Bette’s brief period of despair in Norwalk, Connecticut, Ruthie marched into the Anderson-Murray School and told Hugh Anderson, the director’s brother and the academy’s manager, “My daughter wants to go to your school. I have no money. You’ll have to let me pay her tuition as I can.”10 According to Davis, Anderson “was so stupefied by Ruthie’s guts that before he knew it he had said yes.” They returned to Norwalk, packed their things, and moved to the city the following day.11

  By the time she got to Anderson’s school, Bette Davis possessed some basic dramatic skills and an even more basic natural flair. At eighteen, she was a small, odd beauty. Standing at five feet, two inches, she had a dynamic presence far greater than her physical stature. Ruthie’s high school graduation portrait of Bette shows a smart white fur collar framing an improbably boyish face that’s sharply feminized by two huge, magnetic eyes directed slightly off to the left. Her hair is styled in waves and parted on the right, a single curl jutting provocatively over her cheek. In Davis’s physicality alone, Anderson saw what Le Gallienne (or her secretary) missed, and so Bette Davis began her formal dramatic education sympathetically.

  Claiming he could never remember anybody’s name, Anderson called everyone by the nicknames he bestowed upon them. Staunch New Englander that she was, Bette’s was “the little Southern girl.”12 Perhaps she earned the nickname because of the successfully subtle accent she perfected in imitation of her new best friend, Marie Simpson, the West Virginian she met at Ogunquit, Maine, the previous summer. Simpson, who was working as a waitress at Ogunquit and who later changed her name to Robin, remained an almost lifelong friend.

  After installing Bette in an East Fifty-eighth Street rooming house next to the Anderson-Milton academy, Ruthie took a job as housemother of St. Mary’s School in Burlington, New Jersey, on the other side of Trenton.13 Bobby was removed from Cushing and sent back to Newton High to save the tuition. She lived with her aunt.

  George Currie, one of the faculty at the Anderson school, began his instruction appropriately with a pedagogy of hopelessness. He told his class on the first day of school, as Bette later wrote, “that we were heading for the toughest, least glamorous life imaginable. His picture of the artist’s life was a pointillism whose dots of color were sweat, jealousy, competition, disillusionment, insecurity, and more sweat.”14 “Any artist who doesn’t know that the greatest reward is his own satisfaction in work should choose an easier way of life,” Currie told his impressionable students.15 The theme of dashed dreams formed the backbone of Currie’s syllabus. As Davis described him, “George Currie did little other than lecture his class on the futility of the theater. Day after day he emphasized what a dreadful place it was. By the time the semester ended, fully thirty pupils had dropped out.”16

  Other faculty at Anderson’s school included Michael Mordkin, Robert Bell, John Murray Anderson himself, and a dance instructor, Martha Graham, whose technique, which became famous as “contraction and release,” focused on the back and shoulders, all toward the goal of precise expression and startling, percussive movements.17 “What she said to us,” Bette told James McCourt, “was: ‘Think of acting exactly like a ballet’ . . . by which she meant that acting had to have a continuity of movement in both voice and body—everything smoothly connected.”18

  “To act is to dance,” said Graham to her students. Bette adored her. “She was all tension—lightning! Her burning dedication gave her spare body the power of ten men. If Roshanara was a mystic curve, Miss Graham was a straight line—a divining rod.” Later, after Davis became a movie star, Graham is said (by Davis) to have admired Davis’s ability to express “an emotion with full body, as a dancer does. If this be so, I would like to remind her that it was she who made it possible. Every time I climbed a flight of stairs in films—and I spent half my life on them—it was Graham, step by step.”19

  As for Bette’s voice, the high squeal decried by Crestalban’s Margery Whiting lowered considerably thanks to an elocution class. As Anderson himself declared, “Remember that voice a month ago? Well, listen to it now!”20

  BECAUSE HOLLYWOOD CALLED in late 1930, Davis never got a chance to become the grand dame of the theater she imagined in her youth. And she quickly accustomed herself to the brief but intense bursts of acting—and long stretches of setup time—required by the camera, the cinematographer and electricians, the sound crew, the makeup artists, the director, and everyone else involved in the construction of a film. Between drama school and the Universal and Warner Bros. lots, Bette Davis got only a taste of the physical, live, do-it-all-again-tomorrow reiterations of the theater. Her relative inexperience with the paradoxical exhilaration and tedium of performing on a stage in front of an audience would come back to haunt her.

  As one might expect with Bette Davis, there was drama with the dramas. “It was a dark and stormy night in Macdougal Street,” the critic Robert Garland wrote of March 5, 1929, the evening of Bette Davis’s Off-Broadway debut in The Earth Between. Produced by the Provincetown Playhouse, the play, as Garland felicitously described it, “deals with the jolly old Oedipus complex in two acts and eight scenes.” “Bette Davis did well as Floy,” he noted; “Miss Davis is nice to look at, too.” The critic Burns Mantle of the Daily News called her “a wraith of a child with true emotional insight.” But it was Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times who offered the most astounding assessment—astounding in retrospect, that is: “Miss Bette Davis, who is making her first appearance, is an enchanting creature who plays in a soft, unassertive style.”21

  The Earth Between is about a Nebraska farmer’s incestuous desire for his sixteen-year-old daughter, played by Bette. She was just shy of twenty-one at the time and had to have the theme spelled out for her. “It did seem to me when I read the play that the widowed father’s compensative demands on the child were excessive, but it never occurred to me for one moment just how fully he wanted her to replace her mother. I had never bumped into Oedipus at dear old Cushing—and certainly never in Winchester.
My father didn’t even like me!”22

  Even the most benign form of paternal love may not have been prominent in Harlow Davis’s emotional repertoire, but he was dutiful on the occasion of Bette’s opening night. He sent a bouquet of flowers and a note. Her uncle, Paul Favor, who attended the opening-night performance with Ruthie, noted in a letter that “she had enough flowers for a funeral, including a large basket of roses, jonquils, etc. from Harlow and a telegram from him.” The Reverend Favor went on: “I met some of the so-called leaders of the stage, producers, managers, and so on, and one of them assured me that Betty was considered to have a great future. She seems well but is thin and looks frail.”23

  Bette received her first fan letters thanks to The Earth Between. “One was from an unholy student at Holy Cross,” she wryly commented.24

  The Earth Between was the reason Bette left drama school before completing her full course of study. In fact, she turned down a scholarship at the Anderson-Milton academy to prepare for the play, and she did so with the full blessing of Hugh Anderson, who thought the opportunity to make her professional debut at the Provincetown Playhouse was a risk worth taking. But as it happened, the production of The Earth Between was postponed for a full year after Bette dropped out of school. For Bette, it was a year of struggle, frustration, despair, and terror, with intermittent fits of glory. It was a high-strung twenty-year-old girl’s first exposure to professional theater.

  With the help of Mariarden’s Frank Conroy, Bette first found acting work in Rochester, New York, where George Cukor, then in his late twenties, was directing a show called Broadway and needed someone for a tiny role. Ruthie, once again credited by Bette with the possession of clairvoyance, advised her at the train station on April 27, 1928, to take pains to learn the role of Pearl, because she, Ruthie, sensed that something wonderfully dreadful would happen to the actress playing that part. “Monday and Tuesday were uneventful,” Davis later wrote of the first week of Broadway’s run. “By Wednesday we had slipped into the routine of the performance. Then, during the matinee, it happened. Miss Lerner fell during the second act. . . . She played that night on crutches.” Cukor replaced her with Bette.

  Pearl had one great moment: she got to fire two gunshots at her lover, who was then to stagger offstage and die, neatly and safely, in the wings. But Bette, who was particularly jittery one night, her fear of guns compounding her stage fright, kept pulling the trigger so quickly and repeatedly that she practically machine-gunned the poor fellow, who had no actorly choice but to drop dead in the middle of the stage and hold his breath for the rest of the act.25 On a more serious note, Barbara Leaming reports that Cukor was impressed with Bette’s performance and its “many heightening touches, such as the odd dancelike rhythm that made it seem almost as if she were willing her victim to die.”26

  When Broadway’s run ended, Bette returned to New York. She found no acting work there, but she did convince a man who was connected with the Cape Playhouse, a summer stock company in Dennis, Massachusetts, to hire her. She, Ruthie, and Bobby sped to Cape Cod only to be informed that the guy in New York lacked the authority to hire actors and that all the acting slots were full. But, they told her, she could be an usher if she wanted. And so Bette Davis spent most of the summer of 1928 showing patrons to their seats and watching other actors do what she knew she could do at least as well herself.

  The season was nearly over when Laura Hope Crews showed up to appear in A. A. Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By. Crews told Bette—who had made it naggingly clear to everyone all summer long that she would be much happier onstage than handing out programs—that she would be granted a small role in the show if she learned to play the song “I Passed By Your Window.” The only trouble was that nobody but Crews knew the song, and Crews wasn’t singing. Spurred by a pleading and histrionic Bette, Ruthie scoured the Cape and found what may have been the only copy of the obscure melody in the possession of a church organist in Hyannis who agreed to teach it to Bette on his piano. “We stayed there until three in the morning while I learned the music,” Bette recalled.27 Crews (who went on to achieve her greatest fame as Aunt Pittypat Hamilton in Gone with the Wind) found Bette to be fidgety onstage—no surprise there—and commanded her to keep her arms at her sides, still. Immobility was impossible for Bette Davis, especially in the earliest stage of her career. “Came the day of dress rehearsal and its accompanying excitement. The play ran off well and I kept myself in hand until the third act. Then, involuntarily, I moved my arm perhaps twelve inches. A slap brought my arm down to its proper limp position and I turned to see [Crews], impassive and unconcerned, continue with her lines. My face burned, and I must have counted to ninety-five before I regained control of myself. . . . The blow may have been a major tragedy when it was delivered. Time and a degree of success have made it seem awfully unimportant,” though not so immaterial as to escape retelling in several of Davis’s memoirs.28

  Bette returned to Rochester in the fall of 1928, this time with Ruthie and their atrociously named dog, Boogum, the three of them having deposited Bobby at Denison College in Ohio on their roundabout trip from Cape Cod to upstate New York. Cukor and his producing partner, George Kondolf, had formed the Temple Players, named after the Rochester theater in which their plays were to be performed, and they hired Bette to appear in the company’s first production: a vaudeville story called Excess Baggage. In Bette’s words, the play was about “a tightrope walker and his pretty wife, who stood about in spangles.”29 Wallace Ford played the tightrope walker; Miriam Hopkins was the pretty wife.

  Bette was enchanted with Hopkins—at first. “Miriam was the prettiest golden-haired blonde I had ever seen,” Davis later wrote. “I will never forget her before a performance—emerging from a shower and simply tossing her curly hair dry. She was the envy of us all.”30 But Davis soon grew resentful of Hopkins, as the other actors also did, for Hopkins had an annoying compulsion to steal scenes by whatever means necessary. An actor would speak, and Hopkins would pointedly move during the middle of the line; an actress would build to an important gesture, and Hopkins would beat her to it—anything to distract the audience’s attention from her fellow performers.

  Hopkins didn’t particularly take to Bette, either. One day during a rehearsal, she stopped in midscene, pointed to Bette, and screeched, “She’s stepping on my lines! The bitch doesn’t know her place! I’m the star of this show—not that little nobody!”31

  Other productions at the Temple Players included Cradle Snatchers (one Rochester newspaper printed a photo of “the little blonde who is seen in this week’s production”); Laff That Off; The Squall; The Man Who Came Back; and Yellow, which had a cast of forty and starred Louis Calhern. Bette played Calhern’s girlfriend—an odd bit of casting on Cukor’s part, since Calhern was six foot four and thirteen years older than Bette. As Calhern put it, “She looks more like my kid than my mistress.” Other trouble was brewing as well. As Bette herself admitted, “I was apt to be a know-it-all. When Mr. Cukor criticized my work, I would always have a reason as to why I did it my way. I alibied.”32 There was still another problem: Bette’s puritanical rectitude. She grew into a famously and frankly foulmouthed woman, a cigarette-dragging, liquor-swilling curser, but even at the age of seventy-four, and speaking to Playboy (of all publications), she couldn’t bring herself to speak of the publicly unspeakable: “I didn’t live up to what was expected in those days of a stock company ingénue, who had other duties—you know what I’m talking about. Socializing. Socializing very seriously, let us say, with people in the company. That was just not my cup of tea.”33

  And so, during a final rehearsal for Yellow, “the stage manager came to me and said, ‘We won’t need you after this show.’ It was so abrupt, so without warning, that I did not have time to be angry. All I could do was ask a simple, ‘Why?’ ‘Cukor says you won’t be needed any more,’ he repeated, and nothing I said brought additional information.”34

  Louis Calhern saw no need to mince words. Be
tte Davis, he said, just wouldn’t “put out.”35

  It obviously wasn’t George Cukor who expected sexual favors from Bette. It was his straight producer, George Kondolf. But long after the actress had become a movie star and the director one of Hollywood’s most successful creative forces, Bette continued to blame Cukor for her dismissal. And Cukor grew increasingly cranky at the mention of it. “She does not let me forget it,” he once complained to the gossipmistress Sheilah Graham. “She keeps telling the story! I find it a great bore.”36

  Bette returned to New York and found a tiny apartment on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village with her friend from Ogunquit, Robin Simpson. “Bette’s mother was around, too, I remember,” Robin’s sister Reggie later recalled. “It must have been a little crowded.”37 The two young women later moved to midtown: an apartment on East Fifty-third Street.

  The comedy Broken Dishes served as Bette’s Broadway debut: harried husband Donald Meek grows a backbone after he gets plastered enough to square off against what one critic described as his “brigadier-general wife,” with Bette playing his sympathetic daughter. After tryouts on Long Island and at Werba’s Brooklyn (a theater at the corner of Flatbush and Fulton), Broken Dishes opened at the Ritz Theatre on West Forty-eighth Street on November 5, 1929. “Miss Davis was easy on the eyes,” wrote the reviewer for the Evening World.38 “Bette Davis, a young actress who would be a better one if she elected to spell her Christian name less self-consciously, is a member of the cast,” another critic opined.

  The Evening Graphic’s “Daily Physical Culture Page” of November 5, 1929, featured a triptych of Bette and Ellen Lowe, one of her cast mates, demonstrating a series of exercises. “Should a man propose to a girl on his knees?” Lowe asks in a bubble in the first frame as Bette suspends herself in a sort of a crab posture with her back and torso flat. “I should think the girl would like it.” Bette, now upright and stretching her left leg out, replies. “But if the man doesn’t?” “Then he can ask her to get off, can’t he?” Ellen bizarrely answers as Bette shifts legs.39 “Physical culture” indeed. It was a glorified skin show. Broadway’s publicity was every bit as crass as Hollywood’s.