by James Spada
She did. Although the classrooms were part of a huge stone building with a two-hundred-fifty-foot bell tower at its center, Cushing’s several acres of country setting reminded Bette of Crestalban. She enjoyed the curriculum, much more liberal than Northfield’s, and she gravitated toward the school’s revered dramatics coach, Lois Cann; she had begun to have a vague inkling now that she might want to act in school plays.
It was during her two years at Cushing that the diverse facets of Bette Davis’s personality coalesced into the irresistible force they would remain for the rest of her life. She entered the school in the middle of her junior year and not only became a top-grade student but won such popularity that she was voted president of her sorority.
Her fellow students remember her with a tinge of wonder. “She was a very forceful, assertive person,” Bob Hendricks, a year behind her, recalls. “Alert, aggressive, pop-eyed. We were all somewhat in awe of Bette. She was poised, assured—and ambitious. In both the best and worst senses of the word.”
With her new social status came jealousy from her fellow students. Although Hendricks remembered that “there was nothing high-hat about her at all,” Bette would recall that some at the school found her “stuck up.” She denied it. “I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure.”
Still, one of Bette’s own recollections suggests that she had lost little of the snobbery that had made her hate the small apartments and boardinghouses that Ruthie’s financial woes had forced her to live in. Ruthie had notified Cushing’s headmaster, Dr. Cowell, that she would have difficulty meeting the next semester’s tuition, and Cowell called Bette into his office. Nervous and unsure about why she had been summoned, Bette trembled as she knocked on Cowell’s massive oak door. When she sat down in front of the white-haired man’s desk, she was pleased, if a little puzzled, by his initial comment. “You have a wonderful and brave mother, Bette,” he said in his cultured and even voice. “You are truly fortunate in having someone to make great sacrifices to give you an education.” But as Cowell continued, Bette felt as if she had been slapped in the face.
The headmaster suggested that Bette help Ruthie meet her tuition by waiting on tables in the girls’ dining room. “I was afraid that I might cry,” Bette recalled. “How could anyone suggest such a thing to me? I was much too fine a person to demean myself by carrying trays in and out of a kitchen.” Although she was “burning with indignation,” she told Cowell “hypocritically” that she thought it was a wonderful idea and she would write to her mother and ask her permission. “I was absolutely positive Mother would refuse. She would never let her daughter be a waitress!”
She “pulled out all the stops” in the letter, Bette recalled. “I made the whole thing appear not only disagreeable but revolting. For the next few days I was highly pleased with myself.” Came her mother’s reply and “my world seemed to fall apart.” Ruthie wrote that Cowell’s notion was “very sweet” and that Bette should “go right ahead.” For three days, she remained in her room and sulked. She was convinced that the minute her friends saw her waiting on them they would never speak to her again. “I wanted to leave the school. I made desperate plans for running away.” She lay in her bed the night before her first day as a waitress and thought, I wish I were dead.
The next morning she picked up a tray laden with bowls of oatmeal from the kitchen counter, took a deep breath, pushed through the swinging doors into the dining room, and began to place the bowls in front of her fellow students. To her astonishment, there were no whispers, no titters, no finger-pointing. In fact, she noticed that her classmates were friendlier than usual. One girl who Bette knew didn’t like her much said “Good morning” to her for the first time since her arrival at the school. Soon, to her delight and amazement, her humbling dining room duties had won her more friends than ever.
Bette waited on tables three meals a day for the rest of her two years at Cushing—“My snobbishness was a thing of the past.” One of her classmates, Eleanor Coffin, did feel a little uncomfortable having a friend serve her. “I used to feel so guilty that Bette was waiting on tables and I would sit there. I didn’t like that. But we knew she didn’t have too much and her mother was struggling along as a photographer to make ends meet. Bette was helping her mother out, and we admired her for that.”
THREE
B
ette sat in English class and stared out the window, the sounds of a classmate’s recitation of “Beowulf” droning in her ears. Suddenly she perked up: passing outside the window was a tall, gangly, likable-looking young man she found very attractive. Later, after class, she saw him again, and asked around to discover that he was Harmon O. Nelson, Jr., a senior and a musician whom everyone called “Ham.” Bette later described him as “lean, dark curly-haired, with a funny nose and beautiful brown eyes.” She was smitten. “I think I liked him at first,” she said, “because he had such cold, curious eyes, promising warmth. Then I liked him because he was such an indifferent louse. He didn’t pay the slightest attention to me. I went home and told Ruthie about him. I said, ‘I’m going to get him if it’s the last thing I do!”’
At the next school dance, Bette had her usual fill of male attention, but Ham Nelson, playing the piano to help pay his tuition, never approached her during any of his breaks, and Bette went home frustrated.
They got to know each other when Ham invited her to join a musicale he was putting on at the school. She as yet had no burning desire to perform; she had enrolled in Lois Cann’s Expression class, but she had never had any problem expressing herself and the exercises brought her no creative epiphany. But she immediately said “Yes!” to Ham’s request, because she knew it would bring them closer together. For weeks Ham coached her with her song, and during the show he provided the accompaniment for her rendition of “Gee, I’m Mighty Blue for You,” one of the hit songs of the day. “I had a lot of fun,” Bette recalled, “skipping octaves on him and doing all kinds of little tricks.”
Ham sang “Paddlin’ Madeline Home,” and Bette noticed that he had a beautiful voice and was “a gifted musician.” Bette mustered up the courage to ask him why he had ignored her for so long. Shyly Nelson replied that he had liked her the moment he first saw her, months earlier, but he was certain that if he had let his interest be known, she would have rebuffed him. She let out one of her raucous laughs, and from that moment on she and Ham Nelson were “an item.” When Ham began trumpet lessons, he interrupted her studies every night by playing taps for her from his dormitory room, directly across a courtyard from hers—“A definite agony for all concerned,” Bette recalled. She scarcely minded. “I was wading in those velvety brown eyes. I was truly in love. So was he.”
But he had competition. Art Walsh, a fellow senior who didn’t much like Ham Nelson anyway, decided that he should be Bette Davis’s beau. As Bob Hendricks recalls it, “Art and Ham had a big fight on the gymnasium floor, to see who would win the hand of the fair damsel.” Bette was taking dance classes directly above the gym while this was going on, and word got to her in a flash. While she waved her arms and kicked her legs and smiled prettily, she could hear “these awful sloshing noises and tremendous thumps and bangs.” Ham seems to have gotten the worst of it: “Art just about killed me,” he admitted.
Ham may have lost the battle, but he won Bette. Soon everyone took it for granted that they were “the class couple.” At his senior prom in June 1925, they danced every dance together; no one dared cut in. The night before, she had played Lola Pratt in the senior class play, Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen, but the acting bug hadn’t yet bitten her as deeply as the love variety: she did the show only because Ham played Uncle Georgikins. At a party on the last day of school, it was less a comment on her acting than her love life when Bette, blushing deeply, was presented with a large baked ham.
That summer, Ruthie took Bette and Bobby to Peterboro, New Hampshire, a small artistic community whose local photographer had recently
passed away. Mariarden, a noted theater school, was nearby, and Ruthie was sure they’d need a photographer to record their recitals. She found a small, two-hundred-year-old clapboard building with space for a photography studio and darkroom below and living quarters above. She hung a shingle from the small portico above the front door announcing “The Silhouette Shop,” took out an ad in the local paper, and drummed up business among the residents of the picturesque town. Peterboro, Bette recalled, offered Ruthie “a feast of cultural and creative opportunity.”
It did Bette as well, for it was in Peterboro that she experienced the first thrill of real stage accomplishment and felt her nascent notion that she might want to be an actress blossom into the implacable ambition that would propel her through the rest of her life. And all because she liked dancing and thought it would be fun to study it with Mariarden’s exotic instructress, the British danseuse and designer Jane Cradduck, who had been raised in India and went by the nom d’artiste of Roshanara.
But Mariarden’s tuition was too high for Ruthie, and Bette enrolled instead with the Outdoor Players of Marie Ware Laughton, who waived tuition in exchange for Ruthie’s photographs of the students’ activities. From Miss Laughton’s staff, Bette said, she learned “nature dances a la Isadora Duncan.” Classes were held on an acre of green lawn with a background of tall pines. On a Monday afternoon about a week into the session, as Ruthie took pictures of Bette and her classmates practicing, a wave of excitement rolled through the students: Roshanara was on her way to visit the class. Ruthie watched in awe as the Great Lady, her long black robe trailing behind her, moved across the grass with such grace she seemed like a swan. Bette was spellbound by the spectacle as well, and barely able to concentrate on her own movements from then on. When the class was over, Roshanara thanked the students and just as grandly took her leave.
The next morning, she sent a note asking to see Bette at four o’clock that afternoon. Ruthie’s face lit up, but Bette assured her that the woman probably just wanted to give her private lessons because she’d been so bad, and they wouldn’t be able to afford them anyway. When they arrived for the meeting, Roshanara told them that Bette had great potential and that she wanted her as a student. “I do not mean to embarrass you, Mrs. Davis,” she said, “but I know you are short of funds; I have heard.” She suggested that Bobby—who had shown a talent for the piano—play at rehearsals three hours a day, in exchange for which Roshanara would pay her five dollars a week and waive Bette’s tuition.
Thrilled by the prospect of studying with Roshanara more than she had been by anything before, Bette worked “harder than I had ever thought possible.” She rehearsed eight hours a day in punishing heat to prepare for her role as a dancing fairy in a public performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ruthie later learned that Bette had had a painful plantar wart on her foot during all this time that had “caused her agony even to step,” and that later took three months of treatment to cure. But Bette had said nothing because she was afraid that if she did, she wouldn’t be allowed to dance—and by now she was completely under the spell of Roshanara, who “made my head reel” with the way she combined movement and emotion. When she, Ruthie, and Bobby saw the woman dance her own “Prayer,” Bette felt more reverence than she ever had in a church.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bette Davis’s first performance before a paying audience, was presented on July 23, 1925, and as she danced in ensemble and heard the crowd’s applause she felt a thrill wash over her. But it was nothing compared to her next performance, as The Moth. For this highly theatrical dance, a solo turn on an outdoor stage, she wore a flowing white silk gown with enormous sleeves extended over long bamboo sticks to simulate wings. Bette’s body fluttered as smoothly as the silk did in the warm evening breeze, as she enacted the birth, flight, and death of the moth on the glass stage, shimmering in silhouette above colored lights that slowly changed from white to blue to amber. The moonlight from above, Ruthie recalled, “seemed to cast its kindly light down upon this graceful child who herself was coming out of her cocoon.”
Bette’s performance caught the audience in its spell, and when she drooped to the floor and the moth died, they burst into a sustained ovation that almost overwhelmed her. Ruthie and Bobby had huddled close together as they watched Bette, astonished by the power and the beauty she had projected on that colorful stage. Afterward, Bette recalled, they looked at her “as if they’d never seen me before.”
Frank Conroy, an instructor and director at Mariarden, walked up to Ruthie moments later. “Mrs. Davis,” he said, “throughout my life I have religiously abstained from advising a mother to put her daughter on the stage. But Bette has something you can’t buy and you can’t imitate. Even if she doesn’t open her mouth, she has that quality that draws an audience to her. I think that someday, if she works hard, she will be a fine actress.” Ruthie and Bette stared at Conroy for a few seconds, then glanced at each other. Both looked as though a light had been turned on behind their eyes.
When Bette returned to Cushing for her senior year in the fall of 1925, her triumphant summer at Mariarden carried over into an “obsession” with the theater. She had so loved the acclaim, the matchless sense of accomplishment she had felt, that she became fiercely determined to experience it again and again. She also knew that if she could achieve some measure of theatrical success, she would be able to help Ruthie avoid the financial struggles she had grappled with for so many years.
With Ham no longer at Cushing to divert her attention, Bette plunged herself into dramatics. Florence Melanson Rogers, who had returned to the school as an instructor soon after her graduation and was only four years older than Bette, recalls that “she was in rehearsal every single afternoon. She always wanted to be in the plays, and she loved it when they would go public and take them to neighboring towns for a night or two.”
Bette discovered that she often felt more natural on the stage than she did away from it. “I loved rehearsing. I learned the lines easily. I never suffered from stage fright. I felt no self-consciousness.” Bob Hendricks recalled that Bette soon became Lois Cann’s “great white hope.” She also represented hope to Ruthie, who knew better than her daughter how much success on the stage could mean to the Davis family. Ruthie had always encouraged Bette in whatever enthusiasm she embraced, but she now became something akin to a stage mother. According to Bob Hendricks, “She was a martinet. She pushed Bette hard. I think she thought, Well, which of my daughters is gonna make it? And then she just pushed the hell out of Bette.”
With Bette more than ever in the forefront, her sister found herself shuffled even further into the background. Although Bobby was intelligent, musically talented, and, some thought, prettier than Bette, her painful shyness and secondary position in the family left her “completely overshadowed by Bette,” Bob Hendricks recalls. “A punishing overshadowment. It was extremely bad.” Florence Rogers remembered helping Bobby with her posture. “She was a dear, sweet, shy, overshadowed little sister. It was pathetic. She was just shoved into the background. She was so mousy that I don’t even know if most people knew Bette had a sister at Cushing.”
Bette’s main goal that year was to play the lead in her own senior play—and of course she did, on June 12, 1926. The piece was The Charm School by Alice Miller and Robert Milton, in which art imitated life: Bette played Elise Benedotti, the student leader at a girls’ boarding school. She did so “vivaciously,” according to her yearbook.
When she was graduated from Cushing, Bette’s classmates voted her the “prettiest,” the “busiest,” and the “best actress” in the class. Her yearbook photo is accompanied by this legend:
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 singing voice, is the best actress, and the clas
s beauty—what more could anyone wish?
To pay for Bette and Bobby’s tuition that semester, Ruthie had photographed the entire graduating class and single-handedly developed the proofs and retouched each finished portrait. She stayed up night after night until the early-morning hours to finish the work, and when it was completed she felt tired unto death.
As Bette proudly walked across the stage to accept her diploma on June 13, she scanned the audience for her father. He wasn’t there. Then she spotted Ruthie, and the sight of her mother that day, more than anything before it, galvanized her determination to succeed. Ruthie weighed about ninety pounds, looked drawn and tired, and had signs of developer poisoning on her face. “A braver, more exhausted mother was not there that day,” Bette recalled. “I wanted to cry.”
The next three months, according to Ruthie, were Bette’s “last carefree summer.” Ruthie rented a small fishing shack in Ogunquit, Maine, for one hundred dollars the season; it had one large room with a fireplace and a small alcove as a bedroom. Because there was so little room, Bobby went to live with Ruthie’s best friends, a husband and wife and their family, where she was expected to “earn her keep” by doing chores. She was made to wash dishes every day for thirteen or fourteen people, and the wife accused her of chipping several dishes through carelessness. Finally, as Ruthie later put it, “she just went to pieces,” and she was brought home by the husband, who told his wife she had been taking advantage of Bobby. She had never complained.
Bette, by contrast, hadn’t a care in the world. She became the only female lifeguard in Ogunquit and acquired a new boyfriend, a handsome Yale man named Fritz Hall who rode a motorcycle and reminded Bette of the dashing aviator Charles Lindbergh. Smitten for the first time since she met Ham Nelson (who was out of sight at Amherst College and soon out of mind), Bette wrote Ham a Dear John letter, returned his fraternity pin, and declared her love for Fritz.
