by James Spada
Ginny was fascinated and perplexed by the inconsistencies in Bette’s character. “She could be brash and battling, frightened and lonely, violent and vulnerable.” She seemed a “bundle of nerves and talent” who hovered between bravado and terror: “She carried a bottle of spirits of ammonia and a spoon in her pocketbook—in case she should faint on the subway.”
The one steady trait in Bette at this point was her dedication to her studies. She loved the school and its grand stage, was thrilled by the immersion into drama, speech, and dance that her classes offered her. She learned to soften her broad Boston A’s, and was told by the revered actor George Arliss, a guest lecturer, not to “adopt that exaggerated speech we hear so much of today on the stage. Be clear and simple!” She studied movement, stage technique, the projection of one’s voice. She wasn’t taught how to act—“There are things that cannot be learned”—but rather she acquired the tools an actor must possess: poise, grace, confidence, technique.
As Roshanara had before her, the instructor who most influenced Bette was her exotic, extravagant dance teacher: Martha Graham. “To act is to dance!” Graham would proclaim as Bette sat in her class, riveted. “Martha Graham had just finished her Oriental period,” Ginny recalled, “and usually wore a henna-colored tunic with long full skirt split up one side. Her jet-black hair was pulled back in a knob and she affected the continental makeup popular at the time—white face, red lips, no rouge.”
Graham conducted her classes once a week, and she was a “hard taskmaster,” according to Ginny. “The confrontation one had to go through to be excused from a class of hers was hideous. If we had a cold, she would remind us that ‘Ruth St. Denis dahnced with a temperature of one hundred and four!’” Several students who didn’t dip properly at the ballet barre were abruptly pulled up by their hair, and others—including Ginny and Bette—took more than one whack from Graham on a recalcitrant thigh.
Graham had her students wear bathing suits to make them “uninhibited” about their bodies. Ginny found “hair-raising” Graham’s theory that every citizen should be forced by law to stand naked in a public place once a year and be either punished or rewarded for what they had done to their bodies.
Graham taught her students everything from the ethereal theories of interpretive dancing (“Positive emotions lift your body up toward the heavens”) to the practicalities of how to fall down a staircase without getting hurt. One’s walk, Graham told her students, should be from the hip and not the knee, with head up and shoulders back: “Carry your body proudly!”
One afternoon Ginny and Bette decided to follow Graham as she walked to the subway station after class “to see if she really walked that way all the time.” She did, and Ginny recalled that she “seemed like some kind of immortal goddess thrusting her way through the tired, bedraggled, round-shouldered denizens of the sidewalks of New York.”
Bette soon seized upon Graham’s walk, Conroy recalled, and “exaggerated it into a swivel and made it her own, a characteristic later beloved by her imitators.” Years hence Bette observed that whenever she climbed a flight of stairs in a film (“I spent half my life on them”), she was being Martha Graham every step of the way.
Although Bette could be as serious as a tragic muse in her studies, Ginny saw another side of her. “I believed she was the world’s greatest comedienne. At night she would often trail around in an oversized lavender rayon nightgown of her mother’s, tottering on the rickety heels of mules cut down from old shoes. She would emote, wave her arms about, roll her eyes wildly. One time she recited some lines we used in school: ‘She left the web / She left the loom / She made three paces through the room / She saw the water lilies bloom.’ When she got to the three paces she took three big hops toward me. I laughed so hard I fell out of my cot and the mattress tumbled over on top of me.”
A different kind of hysteria sometimes overtook Bette when Ruthie paid her a visit. “It was a real show,” Ginny recalled, “and I loved drama. There were several big rows.” Ginny had noticed that Ruthie doted on Bette, seemed to sacrifice everything for her. “When I first met Ruthie she had only one pair of stockings that she had to wash out every night and pray she wouldn’t get a run. She gave Bette her fur coat so that she could make an impression at school, even though she only had to go two doors down the block to classes—leaving Ruthie with a cheap cloth coat for the cold trips back and forth from New Jersey.”
Ginny noticed that Bette would grow fidgety whenever her mother visited, as though she were “unconsciously resentful” of her. “There would be wild screams and slammed doors,” Ginny recalled, “but these dustups always ended in kissing, cooing, and tears. I came to think the tears were therapeutic in nature—the object of the exercise. After they’d make up, Ruthie would go into her little-girl act—she’d duck her head, blink her eyes, purse her mouth, and murmur baby talk.”
Because these confrontations were usually about “practically nothing,” Ginny suspected that Ruthie “deliberately offered herself as a sacrificial lightning rod, a safety ground for the charge of Bette’s built-up voltage. It was as if Bette generated a kind of poison that had to be got rid of and put onto someone else.”
The storm currents of Bette’s personality disturbed Ginny. She was puzzled by the warring elements of her psyche, her obvious loathing of her father, her love/hate relationship with her mother—so much so that she suggested to Bette that she seek some psychiatric counseling. Bette rejected the idea out of hand. “She regarded anything like psychoanalysis as a cop-out,” Ginny said. “She thought of it as people placing the blame on others for their failures.”
Once when Bobby came along with Ruthie to see Bette, Ginny became aware of the younger sister’s distant third-place position among the three musketeers. It was shortly after Valentine’s Day, 1928, and Bobby noticed two greeting cards taped onto the mirror over a dresser—one for Bette, one for Ginny. Both were from Ruthie; Bette’s featured a globe with a ribbon around it that proclaimed, “You are all the world to me.”
Bobby, who was still living with her aunt and uncle in Newton, turned to Ruthie and said in a small voice, “You didn’t send me a valentine.”
“But I couldn’t send one to Bette without sending one to Ginny,” Ruthie explained, “and I only had the money for two valentines.”
Even the sixteen-year-old Ginny was amazed by Ruthie’s tortured reasoning. “Somehow, even then, I knew Bobby would have few valentines in her life. She was like a flower deliberately pinched in the bud, so that all the life force of the maternal plant could go to that perfect bloom—Bette.”
Her studies at Milton/Anderson occupied Bette so thoroughly that her head rarely turned for her attractive male classmates. She was still much interested in boys, however, and she continued to correspond with both Fritz at Yale and Ham at Amherst. One of her few dates during this period came about through a new beau of Bobby’s, Hunter Scott, who introduced her to an aspiring twenty-three-year-old actor during a break in classes. His name was Henry Fonda. Bette found him “very beautiful,” and she was thrilled when Bobby’s beau suggested the four of them go on a double date.
The day before, Hunter had goaded Henry into a contest: every time one of them kissed a girl, he would get a point, and whoever had the most points after a certain amount of time would win some prize or other. Fonda despaired of keeping up. “Hunter had a girl pinned in every state in the country, it seemed. I had been dating a girl for two years and never kissed her.”
The foursome drove into New Jersey to the Princeton University athletic stadium, and while Hunter and Bobby strolled under the moonlight on the empty playing field, Henry and Bette remained in the back seat of Scott’s car in awkward silence. “I had just met this girl and she didn’t really attract me,” Fonda recalled. “I didn’t think she was very pretty.” He knew he’d never win the contest, but “I didn’t want to disgrace myself by not having one point. I knew Hunter would be scoring. Some way or other, I just leaned over and gave her a
peck, so that I was at least even with Hunter.”
That was all Bette needed—she fell head over heels. A few days later, Henry got a letter from her accepting his proposal of marriage. “I’ve told Mother about our lovely experience in the moonlight,” she wrote. “She will announce our engagement when we get home.”
“She scared the shit out of me!” Fonda exclaimed. “I thought, One kiss and I’m engaged! Is that how it happens?” He ignored the letter, and when he didn’t hear anything more about it from Bette, he sighed with relief.
If Henry Fonda didn’t want to marry Bette, Fritz Hall did. He invited her to his senior prom, and Ruthie made her a lovely white net dress and cape in which Ginny thought she “looked as beautiful as an angel.” At the end of the evening, Fritz proposed, and when Bette accepted him, he gave her a ring.
The engagement lasted three days. Fritz planned to follow his father into business, and he wanted a helpmate and hostess as his wife, not an actress out on the road most of the time. On prom night, Bette had been blithely noncommittal when Fritz asked her to give up acting. But when he pressed her by phone the next day, she told him she had serious reservations. By Tuesday he was in New York to demand a definitive response.
Ruthie was there too, and Ginny wondered why she was away from her job on a weekday. In retrospect she realized “how agitated Ruthie must have been. Fritz was a definite danger to her grand plans for Bette to become a star.” Ruthie and Ginny left Fritz and Bette alone in the room and “huddled around a corner of the hallway, shivering with cold, straining to pick up what we could of what was going on behind that closed door. At last Fritz emerged and stormed off with an awful slam of the door, as dramatic as in an Ibsen play. Ruth let out a sigh of relief.” When the eavesdroppers went back into the room, they found Bette “a shaking, pink-eyed wreck.” She had given Fritz back his ring. According to Ginny, “Ruthie had done her work well. Bette had avoided her first temptation to bask in romantic domesticity. Now she was well and truly set upon her career.”
Bette acted in a play a week at Milton/Anderson, and soon she, Ginny, and their fellow student Ted Scharf made a two-reeler screen test. The few remaining frame blowups of the footage show the trio in casual dress and attitude, enacting a variety of facial expressions. Bette seems relaxed, but her tight, prim hairdo, simple shirt, and lack of makeup give her a drab appearance that belies the loveliness she possessed in person. Nothing came of the test for any of the participants.
Bette won the lead role of Sylvia Fair in the school’s end-of-term examination play, The Famous Mrs. Fair, to be directed by James Light. The production was to be presented publicly, and if Bette’s performance was judged favorably, she would win a scholarship for the next semester’s tuition. Two days before the show, Bette awakened, to her horror, with laryngitis. She tried every old wives’ remedy and over-the-counter medication she could find until her voice improved serviceably the night of the play. By the third act, she could barely croak out her lines. But since Sylvia Fair at this point in the play has grown dissolute, Bette’s “whiskey baritone” added much to her characterization and made her far more believable playing a much older woman. So did her nervousness, which heightened the fidgety mannerisms she had begun to develop and which lent her a neurotic air that belied her youth.
The audience cheered her performance, and immediately after the show the scholarship winners were announced. “Ruthie’s look of gratitude when my name was read as the winner was worth a lot to me,” Bette recalled.
Bette’s instructors and directors were clearly impressed with her, and her eyes widened when she read a Hugh Anderson press release in the local paper that called her “the perfect modern Venus.” Had Anderson not thus presented Bette to the public at this time, she might have been forever known as Bette Favor. Ruthie had decided that her maiden name would be a more unusual, mellifluous stage name for her daughter than Davis, and both Bette and Ginny agreed. (Unmentioned, but understood, was the underlying break from any remnant of Harlow. One family friend observed acidly, “Ruthie probably figured that this way she could pretend that Bette had been immaculately conceived.”) Robert Milton argued against the change; since Bette had already received public attention as a student of the school under the name Davis, he said, it would be unwise to change her name now. Ruthie dropped the idea.
Not long after Bette’s triumph as Sylvia Fair, James Light asked her to appear in The Earth Between, a play he planned to direct at the Provincetown Playhouse in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. It was Bette’s first offer of paid work, and she was thrilled. But in order to accept, she would have to leave school and forgo the scholarship. Hugh Anderson advised her that the opportunity was too good to pass up, and she accepted Light’s offer.
But problems arose. The play had to be postponed until the following fall, and Bette found herself with neither a scholarship nor a job. She asked her Mariarden instructor Frank Conroy—who was now directing a play on Broadway—if he could recommend her to anyone in need of an ingenue. Conroy put her in touch with George Cukor, who had a stock company along with George Kondolf at the Lyceum Theatre in Rochester, New York. Cukor had not yet cast a small part as a chorus girl in his current production, Broadway, a backstage melodrama that had been a hit in New York. Cukor was unsure when he met Bette in his Manhattan office that anyone as mousy as she seemed to him could carry off the role of a brassy chorine. But rehearsals for the show were already in progress, and he told her, “Okay, we can use you.” She later commented, “I can’t think of a more eloquent speech to be delivered to a girl who wants a job on the stage.”
Ruthie came in from New Jersey to help Bette pack, and saw her off with an elaborate letter of instructions in which she addressed her daughter, now twenty, as though she were a child. “Read this first!” she scrawled across the top page of the first of six numbered sections of the letter. She then told her how she should deport herself on the train (“Let the porters take care of the luggage”), how to settle into her room in Rochester, and the fine points of the conduct she expected of Bette during rehearsals. She admonished her to telephone her Uncle Paul, and to use the name “Bette Favor Davis” on business correspondence and checks. Ruthie concluded her manifesto, “God watch over my little girl, as I can’t—but you help him!”
As Ruthie put Bette on the train, she insisted that she be sure to learn the part of Pearl, the lead female role, because “the actress playing it is going to have an accident!”
“Oh, Mother,” Bette laughed, “you and your hunches.” But she had had enough experience with Ruthie’s often uncannily accurate sixth sense over the years that she spent the entire trip studying the other actress’s lines and ignoring the beautiful countryside as it rushed past her compartment window. She wasn’t surprised when Ruthie’s prediction proved dead on the mark. During the third performance, Rose Lerner, the actress cast as Pearl, twisted her ankle in a fall down a staircase. The next day, Cukor asked to see “the dame who has the smallest part.” When Bette appeared, he asked if she could learn the larger part—a brassy, hard-bitten show gal who shoots her lover—by that evening. When Bette replied that she already knew it, Cukor was skeptical. He then asked her if she knew how to fall down a staircase safely. Thanks to Martha Graham, she did. She proved in rehearsals that she indeed had the part committed to memory, and she took the stage as Pearl that evening.
Bette was shocked by the way she looked in the skimpy costume she had to wear, and she decided she needed to chew gum during the performance to help her affect the necessary toughness. Early in the second act, she was supposed to shoot her lover twice, and he was to stagger offstage to die. Bette was so nervous, and had such a fear of guns, that when the moment came she fired at her costar so many times there was no way for him to do anything but drop on the spot. “He was in agony holding his breath for the rest of the act,” Bette recalled.
The play ran, as scheduled, for just one week, but Bette had acquitted herself so well that Cukor and Kondo
lf asked her to join the company as its lead ingenue the following fall. She was ecstatic, but her euphoria evaporated when she got back to Manhattan and began to make the rounds of casting offices in New York’s crushing summer heat. It was her first taste of that ego-battering experience, and she hated it. She felt like a piece of meat, and was so tired of being told she looked too young that she thought she’d scream if she heard it one more time. Again and again she was told to “come back tomorrow,” but she was smart enough to know a brush-off when she heard it. She felt “shattered” by the disregard she was shown “as a human being,” and after a week of this she took to her bed and refused to get up. Ruthie pleaded for days with Bette to get out of bed until finally her persistence paid off—her daughter was back in the fight. Bette loved her mother for it: “I never would have made it without Ruthie.”
Spurred on more by her mother’s determination that she succeed than her own, Bette “badgered” the New York agency representing the Cape Playhouse, a theater company formed the year before in Dennis, Massachusetts, that had already drawn actors of the repute of Basil Rathbone, Peggy Wood (who later starred in I Remember Mama on television), and Laura Hope Crews, best known to today’s audiences as Aunt Pitty-Pat in Gone With the Wind. Finally she got an appointment with a man described to her as the director of the Playhouse—in his hotel room. When she arrived the man was in his underwear, shaving. Fearful and skeptical at first, Bette left in ecstasy after he proved harmless and told her she was hired as the company’s ingenue for the 1928 summer season and should report in a few weeks.
Ruthie was just as thrilled, and she made arrangements to rent a house on Cape Cod. Then she and Bette attended Bobby’s graduation from Newton High, after which all three piled up their new car, a used Chevrolet, with everything from camera equipment to a wire-haired terrier Bette had adopted and named Boojum, and off they went.
