James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Among the suitors who presented themselves at her door, however, she allowed only one to make a serious bid for her hand. He was a young man she had known since the age of seven named Harlow Morrell Davis.

  He might have sprung from the imagination of Charles Dickens. Harlow Davis was an only child and every inch a stolid, staid New Englander, a brilliant legal scholar with little sense of humor and less tolerance for emotionalism. His pale, thin face, topped by a bulbous forehead, was framed by protruding ears, small round wire-rimmed glasses, and the starched high collar and tie he had worn every day since grade school. His face seemed frozen in a perpetual scowl, even when photographed with his family on holiday outings.

  Little is known about his childhood except that he was born in Augusta, Maine, on March 9, 1885, the son of Edward E. Davis, a men’s clothier and a deacon of the local Baptist church, and the former Eliza Jane Morrell. The family lived a comfortable life between a sprawling Victorian mansion in Augusta and a seaside cottage at Old Orchard Beach. Harlow’s maternal grandfather, the Reverend A. H. Morrell, had been a founder of Storer College in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, one of the South’s first Negro colleges after the Civil War.

  Harlow Davis’s own scholastic achievements were of a high order. He was chosen valedictorian of his high school class, and at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, he served as president of his class four times, captained the debating team, and headed up the athletic association. A Bates classmate of Harlow’s recalled, “His legal papers were flawless, and he was an indefatigable worker who could concentrate longer upon a problem in patent law than anyone I ever knew. His memory was prodigious, retaining endless figures and facts.”

  Davis decided not to attend Oxford University in England when he learned that the school didn’t allow students to smoke; instead, he moved to Boston and enrolled at Harvard Law School. It was during his last year at Bates College that he had begun his courtship of Ruth Favor, whom he had first met in 1892 during a summer vacation in Ocean Park with his family when she was seven and he eight. They spent time together every summer thereafter.

  Ruthie was flattered by such ardent romantic attentions from a longtime friend, which aroused interest in her if not passion. Harlow’s mother, Eliza, had warned her early on that her son was “brilliant but disagreeable” and that if she ever were to marry him he would “destroy your life.” Despite these severe admonitions, Eugenia Favor decided that the match would be a good one for Ruthie because Harlow seemed to have such a solid future. He had inherited his father’s business and both family houses after his father’s death in 1903 and his mother’s in 1906, and he fairly shone with the promise of a brilliant law career. Unsure, Ruthie vacillated. But Eugenia praised the pairing to her daughter, Harlow wrote Ruthie effusive love poems, and she finally acquiesced. The date was set. The bride was twenty-one, the groom twenty-two.

  The couple were wed on July 1, 1907, in the Favor home on Chester Street, Ruthie a vision in a simple, button-necked white gown with a heavy, decorous veil, attended by her sister Mildred as maid of honor. According to Ruthie, the marriage began on a number of sour notes that reminded her immediately of her mother-in-law’s dire warnings. After the ceremony, as the bride and groom left for their honeymoon, a group of friends and relatives threw handfuls of rice at them. Harlow turned angrily and yelled, “Goddamn you, I’ll get you for this!”

  On July 4, as the new Mr. and Mrs. Davis honeymooned on Squirrel Island in Maine, their hotel was forced to shut off the water supply for several hours. The couple had just had sex, and there was no water for Ruthie to use as a contraceptive douche. Harlow soared into a rage, harangued the hotel staff, and lashed out at his bride. When Ruthie missed her period a month later, Harlow found himself suffused with dread and fear. He felt financially and emotionally incapable of fatherhood. He had no job; he had let the family business founder. He would be entering law school in a matter of weeks, and he knew it would take all his concentration to do as well as everyone expected him to do. He and Ruthie were living in her mother’s house, surrounded by her family, and they already enjoyed little of the privacy he coveted so much. The last thing he wanted at this juncture in his life was a child. According to Ruthie, she burst into tears when he suggested that she give the baby up for adoption.

  With her fervid sense of the dramatic, Bette Davis always maintained that she was born on Sunday, April 5, 1908, amid great tumult, between a crack of thunder and a bolt of lightning that almost hit the Favor house and split a nearby tree in two. The day’s weather reports, however, show that Ruthie’s later description of the elements—a “lovely” spring shower—was far closer to the truth. As was customary in the New England of the time, the little girl was delivered by a midwife in her parents’ bedroom. She weighed a healthy enough five and three quarter pounds, but she looked frail and her color was poor. When Ruthie’s sister Mildred peered down at the infant in her bassinet for the first time, she muttered, “Too bad. Too bad.”

  The baby, christened Ruth Elizabeth Davis and nicknamed Betty, further crowded the house on Chester Street, three-storied and spacious though it was. There were Grandmother and Grandfather Favor (as everyone called them after Betty’s birth), their children Paul, Mildred, and Richard, Ruth and Harlow Davis, baby Betty, and her nurse, Mrs. Hall.

  The birth of his child didn’t soften Harlow Davis’s attitude toward fatherhood, but the baby seemed to be trying her best to accommodate his habitual bad temper. She seldom cried, rarely fussed, slept soundly through most nights. “She was quiet and easy to care for the first few years,” Ruthie later said. Then she added, “Perhaps in compensation for the years to come.

  Harlow paid the child little mind. Hunched over his law books, uneasy around infants, he left Betty’s nurturing entirely to Ruthie. As young as she was, the little girl noticed, and as her personality developed, most of her energies were directed toward her father. Her first word, uttered when she was ten months old, was “Poppa”; her first sentence, “Poppa forgot his rompers—he catch cold.” After Betty learned to crawl, Ruthie always knew where to find her whenever she disappeared—in her father’s study, often clambering onto his leather couch.

  The baby’s efforts to win her father’s attention usually failed. Grandpa Favor was an occasional substitute, and Bette’s earliest memory was of her grandfather standing on the second-floor landing of their house, encouraging her as she tentatively crawled up the long flight of stairs to him. When she reached the top step she grabbed his legs for support and felt a surge of “triumph.”

  Harlow remained so indifferent to his daughter that he forbade his wife to discuss the child in his presence outside the home. Whenever they vacationed, their acquaintances thought they were honeymooning. After the couple moved into a house of their own in nearby Winchester, and Ruthie gave birth to a second daughter, Barbara, on October 25, 1909, neither child was allowed downstairs while their father was home.

  Sensitive to Betty’s lack of paternal attention, Ruthie overcompensated for her husband’s rigidity by giving her daughter free rein most of the time. “I am afraid I was more lenient than I should have been in an endeavor to offset his harshness,” she said. By the time Betty was nineteen months old, she had developed a strongly defined personality. After her sister Barbara’s birth, she stayed with her grandmother back in Lowell for nearly a month. When she returned, she looked at her little sister and chirped, “My big doll!”

  A few days later, Barbara’s nurse, Mrs. Worthington, left Betty in the nursery for a few moments while Barbara lay in the crib that had earlier been Betty’s. When she returned, the woman found the infant lying facedown on a small couch across the room. She watched as Betty stood next to her sister, stamped her foot, and yelled, “Stay there, stay there!”

  When she reached the age of three, Betty grew eager to emulate her father. A stickler for organization, Harlow demanded that Ruthie keep a spotless home, and he saw to it that he was able to walk through his pitch-dark bedroom
and locate any item of clothing he wanted from any closet or drawer, from memory. When Ruthie once dressed Betty in a gingham smock that had a small spot and some wrinkles in it, the child screamed and cried until her mother brought out a fresh dress and changed her. “She became all smiles,” Ruthie recalled. Then she added ruefully, “Perhaps I should have curbed her.” Bette later agreed: “I should have gotten a good swat on the behind.”

  She almost never did, even when she cut off all her baby sister’s hair and announced, “Now she won’t be pretty anymore!” The only time she could remember being physically disciplined was after she and Barbara ate some forbidden unripe grapes from the family’s arbor, and her father spanked her. Even as her buttocks burned with pain she smiled with a secret pleasure that she had finally won some attention from Harlow, because otherwise “I never felt I had a father.” After that she repeatedly made childish attempts to rouse something, anything, in him that might let her know he cared a whit about her; once she carried a dead field mouse into the dining room while her parents were entertaining. Her behavior only solidified Harlow’s determination to keep as much distance between him and his daughters as possible. Betty soon learned that her best course was to keep out of his way. Her sister, nicknamed Bobby, never grasped the lesson. “Bobby spent every waking moment trying to please Daddy,” Bette recalled. But Bobby’s efforts were no more successful than Betty’s had been.

  Harlow Davis wouldn’t allow his daughters to dine with their parents except on Saturday evenings and holidays. Even then, Harlow had no patience with childish meanderings or lapses of etiquette. “I can remember sitting at their table during a holiday celebration,” Bette’s cousin Elizabeth Carmichael said, “and we children weren’t allowed to speak. He was a cross man, and he wasn’t nice to children.” Ruthie recalled that after nearly every meal the family shared, the sisters left the table in tears.

  As Betty’s personality began to express itself more and more forcibly, Harlow actually grew to dislike her. Her penchant for screeching appalled him, and even he was annoyed by the extremes to which she would now take her fastidiousness. One afternoon he took Betty and Bobby to the circus, and Betty sat thrilled by the clowns and elephants and acrobats until she noticed that the carpeted runway for the animals had a crooked seam down the middle. It drove her to distraction; it ruined her day. She brooded while all those around her hooted at the three-ring antics. “Daddy simply decided I was an ungrateful brat,” Bette said. “He only knew that he had sacrificed an afternoon for nothing.” Even her laughter grated on Harlow. “He once promised me a dollar if, after a year, I learned to laugh like a lady. I never collected.”

  Photographs of the Davis family taken around this time show Ruthie flanked by her daughters, playing with them on the beach or on the lawn of their home. In almost all of the pictures Harlow appears off to one side, sitting or standing alone, not interacting with his children at all.

  One Bette Davis biographer has described Harlow Davis as a “monster,” but as Bette herself put it, “It is so difficult to label people.” She recalled his frequent gifts to Ruthie, and his generosity when he paid for his brother-in-law Richard’s tuition at Harvard Law School after Grandfather Favor died and Eugenia found herself in “reduced circumstances.” Bette’s fondest memories of her father centered around Christmas time, “Daddy’s favorite holiday.” On Christmas Eve, he would cheerfully decorate the family tree, stringing twinkly lights and carefully hanging colorful glass balls. Then he would dress up in a red costume, wear a white cotton beard, clang a bell, and shout “Ho! Ho! Ho!” as his children tumbled excitedly down the stairs to find the living room filled with so many gifts they “spilled into the hallway.”

  But Christmas was the only time Betty got anything that even approached love or attention from her father. “He was barely conscious of us,” she said, and Harlow’s demanding work made the situation all the worse. He had graduated from Harvard Law School in 1910 with a specialty in patent law and was hired as an in-house attorney for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation of Boston. He worked long hours of overtime, rose quickly through the ranks, and took charge of United’s patent department within a few years. He spent his entire working life with the firm.

  Harlow Davis made a good salary; the family soon moved to a large, two-story house, and they vacationed every summer in Maine. His daughters were well dressed, the family car was a Cadillac. Financially, he proved to be the ideal provider Eugenia Favor had wanted for her daughter. Emotionally, he left Ruthie and her children impoverished.

  Her childhood memories, except for the cold vacuum left by her father, were happy ones for Bette Davis. Her mother provided sunlight, she said, to balance her father’s “dark cloud.” Ruthie encouraged her daughter’s boundless fascination with the world around her, answered her questions without condescension, never attempted to quash her enthusiasms. If her father wanted her to remember how “unimportant” she was, her mother taught her that she was the center of the universe.

  Almost from the beginning, Ruthie behaved as much like a friend to Betty as a mother, and it was all a part of Ruthie’s rebellion against her own rigid upbringing. “Even though the family thought my ideas about children’s individuality a little eccentric,” she said, “I still had my own ideas and kept to them. I do believe obedience is not as important as good companionship and I never insisted on a schedule of discipline merely for discipline’s sake.”

  Bette’s fondest early memories remained inextricably entwined with the New England seasons and Yankee customs: the first tulips and warm breezes of springtime; picking berries with Bobby in the dense and enveloping woods behind their house; the profuse vegetable garden that provided a groaning board of green and yellow produce for the dinner table; the salty spray that whipped off the ocean during summer clambakes in Maine; the nip of autumn as Ruthie sewed their Halloween costumes; the windows fogged up on a cold Thanksgiving morning while the turkey crackled in the oven and its wonderful aroma filled the house; the frigid winter days when she and Bobby would slide down the nearby hills, snow stinging their faces, using only their behinds as sleds.

  The idyll might have been total but for Harlow, and as the years passed the marriage of Ruthie and Harlow deteriorated. Even at seven, Betty sensed that her father had become as indifferent to Ruthie as he was to her and Bobby. Marriage to the surly Harlow had never been easy for Ruthie, and now it was almost unbearable; his simmering hostility toward the children, his long absences and silences, all took their toll. Ruthie had inherited the high-strung Favor personality, the characteristics Elizabeth Carmichael had called “hyper” in her grandmother. There was as well an emotionally fragile strain in the family, and it led Ruthie to take her husband’s small cruelties very hard. Just three years into the marriage, photos of her show a downcast, weary woman, dark circles under her eyes, a nearly haunted look on her face.

  Nervous and fidgety, Ruthie now burst into tears at the slightest provocation. In 1911, on the edge emotionally, Ruthie checked herself into a sanatorium for a rest. It was a juncture in her life that she never again mentioned, not even to Bette; the shame of it in this unenlightened period was too painful a memory.

  A few months later, Ruthie returned home in a better frame of mind, but over the next several years her marriage continued to crumble. When Betty was eight, she sensed that “a shadow” had fallen over the Davis home. She would sit rigidly on the living room sofa and listen to her parents argue in the kitchen, then watch, afraid to speak, as her father walked stone-faced up the stairs and her mother cried. Soon the arguments were replaced by hushed conferences, and the normally talkative Ruthie would sit in long cold silences at the dinner table, silences that seemed strange and ominous to the eight-year-old. She felt tortured by the realization that “my mother was unhappy, that something was wrong.” While Betty tried to intellectualize the problems in her childlike way, Bobby withdrew into herself and suffered her own bout with mental instability. During the 1916-1917 scho
ol term, Bobby’s condition got so bad that Ruthie was forced to remove her from her second-grade classes.

  Finally, in February 1918, just as the tension threatened to become unbearable, Ruthie told the children that she was taking them on a vacation to St. Petersburg, Florida—without their father. On the evening they were scheduled to board the train south, Harlow took the family to dinner at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. The sounds of a gay string orchestra filled the restaurant, but the meal was a typically strained affair; Ruthie picked at her food and said nothing. Harlow, Bette recalled, acted oddly “attentive and kind” to her and Bobby.

  She retained a vivid memory of the next scene for the rest of her life. At the railway station, Harlow kissed them all good-bye. As the train pulled out of the depot, Betty peered through the window and watched her father standing on the platform, tall and thin, waving sadly back at them. Then he receded into a cloud of smoke as the train chugged off down the track.

  When they returned to Massachusetts in early April, Ruthie told her daughters that their father would no longer live with them. Bobby ran to her room in tears, but Betty just piped up happily, “Well, anyway, now we can go on picnics and have a baby sister!” Ruthie later wondered how Betty knew her father hadn’t wanted any more children. “She must have overheard something and grasped the idea.”

  On April 5—Betty’s tenth birthday—Ruthie filed a “libel for divorce” action against Harlow. She accused him of years of “cruel and abusive treatment” that ended only when they separated on February 24, and asked for a dissolution of the marriage, custody of Betty and Bobby, and alimony. Harlow contested none of it. Perhaps because he was an attorney, the case proceeded with unusual speed: two and a half months later, the divorce was final. No provision was made for Harlow’s visitation rights to his daughters; he hadn’t asked for any. He was ordered to pay Ruthie $200 a month in alimony, and Bette always maintained that because he was a lawyer he had pulled strings to “pay as little as possible.” The amount was certainly not enough for the Davis girls to enjoy anything near the lifestyle they had been used to with Harlow.