James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Bette stared ahead wide-eyed as they drove up to the Playhouse, part of a colorful arts colony comprising a remodeled church as the theater, a paint shop where the scenery was made, a moving-picture house, and a restaurant. She bounded into the theater as if to say, “Well, you lucky people, here I am,” and announced herself to Raymond Moore, the owner of the Playhouse. Moore seemed perplexed. “Who did you say hired you?”

  Bette repeated the partially clad man’s name. “Why, he has no authority to engage players!” Moore sputtered. “Our company is already full. The season has begun. I’m terribly sorry, but there is no place for you here.” Bette thought of the lease Ruthie had signed, of the anticipation and excitement she’d felt, and wanted to cry. She looked so shocked and crestfallen that Moore took pity on her and asked if she would be willing to usher for the season. Of course, he added, she would be paid. “Yes!” Bette fairly shouted.

  Despite what she saw as “the tragedy of my fall,” Bette ushered with gusto, all the while learning every line the company’s ingenue spoke. She reminded Mr. Moore at every opportunity that should he ever need an actress—“even a deaf-dumb maid to remove the tea things in the second act”—she was available. Ruthie had no premonitions of broken legs this time, but Bette kept a watchful eye on the ingenue’s health.

  The young lady remained intact, and as Bette guided people to their seats one evening she saw Henry Fonda take the stage. She nearly gasped—she still thought he was “the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.” After the show, she said hello to him but mentioned nothing about her unheeded letter of a year before. Neither did he. She invited him to the cottage for dinner with her and Ruthie, and he accepted. They served steamed clams, a New England delicacy reserved for special occasions. Fonda, a Nebraskan, loathed them. Once again nothing came of Bette’s crush, and she was philosophical about it: “He just never took to me.”

  Although the company ingenue continued in good health, she was not suited for the role of Dinah in the company’s last play, Mr. Pim Passes By. In July, Bette had taken a brief break from her ushering chores to reprise her Cushing senior play role of Elise Benedotti in The Charm School with the Cape Playhouse Junior Players in East Dennis, so Moore knew she could act. When Laura Hope Crews, who was to star in and direct Mr. Pim, asked Moore to find another actress to play Dinah, an English girl, he suggested Bette. Crews told her that if she could learn to sing the English ballad “I Passed by Your Window” by the following morning, the part would be hers.

  Bette had never heard it, but she assured Miss Crews she’d be ready. No one else in the company knew the song either. While Bette stayed behind to usher that evening, Ruthie motored to every music store in Dennis and Hyannis, on the other side of Cape Cod, but none had the sheet music. Frantic, she began to knock on doors where pianos were visible through the front windows. Again no luck. Then she stopped at a local church and asked the organist; he not only had the music but offered the use of his piano so that Bette could practice the piece. Ruthie called Bette, who borrowed a car after the night’s performance ended, drove to Hyannis, and stayed up until three in the morning learning the song by heart: “There is no stopping a girl when she really decides to be an actress.”

  On the first day of rehearsals, Laura Hope Crews, who was renowned for her elegant hand gestures, watched Bette gesticulate nervously on almost every line. A few scenes into the play, she told everyone to stop and turned to Bette. “No good ingenue ever moves her hands,” she told her. Bette was mortified. She had not been trying to imitate or upstage Crews; she had used her hands to communicate all her life. She resisted the temptation to remind Crews that she wasn’t playing a cripple, and that her hand gestures had helped her characterize Sylvia Fair. Instead, she made such a strong attempt to resist her natural mannerisms when she resumed the scene that “I looked like a Rembrandt figure.”

  She slipped during an emotional moment in the last act of the rehearsal and let her arm move up “about twelve inches.” Immediately she felt a sharp slap from behind her that pushed her hand down to its prior limp position. She turned to see Miss Crews, who went on with her line readings as though nothing had happened. “My face burned and I must have counted to ninety-five before I regained control of myself,” Bette recalled. “It was just as well that I did. I was an unknown; she was famous. Any display would have meant my ruin.”

  Bette thought that Crews’s restriction on her made her performance stiff, but she was a crowd pleaser as Dinah—partially, she thought, because the subscription audience knew her as their usher and were rooting for her. In any case, Raymond Moore was impressed enough to invite her back the following summer as the company ingenue.

  Overjoyed, Bette returned with Ruthie to New York, while Bobby, eager to continue the independence that had allowed her to become more her own person while she completed high school at Newton, went back to stay with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Myron while she waited to see whether she had been accepted as a student at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. “She was showing signs of wanting to go far away,” Bette recalled. “I think she had a desire to establish her own identity.”

  Bette and Ruthie took an apartment on Fifty-third Street along with a childhood girlfriend of Bette’s from Maine, also an aspiring actress. The quarters were so cramped Ruthie had to sleep on a suitcase held up by two chairs. The first night, the girls were awakened by a crash and found Ruthie on the floor, inextricably entwined in the bedclothes. “Although we protested, she tried it again and finally learned to keep her balance,” Bette recalled. “She insisted that we get our rest; she said she could sleep days while we were looking for work.”

  Bette had no success “making the rounds,” and September 1928 turned into “the darkest period of my life.” She suffered a solid month of unrelieved rejection—audition after audition, turndown after turndown. “Eating was a problem. I felt sorry for any man who asked me to dinner, for it meant that I could conserve my resources during the day and order everything on the menu at the poor fellow’s expense.”

  Bette felt she couldn’t possibly fall any lower after she entered a Vilma Banky look-alike contest in the hope of winning a fifty-dollar prize. She rented appropriate vamp clothes from a costumer; Ruthie did her hair and makeup. She looked so much like Banky, she and Ruthie both agreed, that “I left for the theater with the fifty dollars as good as in my pocket.”

  There were nearly one hundred girls lined up inside the theater when Bette arrived, and as she looked them over she felt more confident than ever that she would win. Then she and the others saw a girl being escorted to the center of the stage and assumed she was the first contestant. Instead, the girl was announced as the winner. “It was such a palpable fake that I wanted to shout my resentment,” Bette recalled. “There was nothing to be done, but I learned a lesson. Never again did I get on that side of a Hollywood publicity stunt.”

  With Ruthie prodding her as usual, Bette kept knocking on doors, but matters remained bleak until she returned to Rochester in October to join the Cukor/Kondolf stock company for a full season as its ingenue. With this job and her promise of another season on Cape Cod, Bette now had professional acting commitments for the next twelve months. Ecstatic, she and Ruthie piled back into the Chevy and drove to Newton, where they were joined by Bobby, who was equally overjoyed about her acceptance at Denison.

  The three musketeers then drove Bobby to school in Granville, Ohio, before Ruthie and Bette headed for Rochester. There was barely room to breathe in the car, what with clothes and Boojum and Ruthie’s camera equipment and all the things the university required Bobby to have in her dorm room. But all three women were happier than they had been for a long time, each with visions of a better future ahead of her.

  None more so than Bette. After she and Ruthie kissed Bobby goodbye in Granville, they turned around and headed back East for Rochester and Bette’s first full season as an employee of a theater company. Bette sat next to Ruthie, with Boojum in her lap, and chirped h
appily about this subject and that. For the first time in her life, she truly felt like an actress.

  FIVE

  I

  t was nearly midnight when Ruthie and Bette arrived at their new apartment building in Rochester. Bette clambered up the steps, laden down with luggage, exhausted from the long drive, dripping wet from the rain. When she opened the door to the apartment and flipped on the light, she let out a shriek: the walls were papered with bold red-and-white stripes that seemed to vibrate as she looked at them. More jittery than ever about starting a full season with Cukor, Bette turned to Ruthie as she came up behind her and proclaimed, “I cannot stay here. These stripes will make me mad!”

  Ruthie thought of the three-month lease she had signed and the month’s rent she had paid in advance and murmured soothingly, “If you put out the lights, darling, you won’t see them.” But Bette would not be placated. “I’ll see them in my sleep,” she screamed. “Throughout eternity!”

  Ruthie knew better than to upset her “high-strung filly” on the eve of so important a professional breakthrough. She may have thought wistfully once again that if only she had swatted Bette’s behind on that long ago day when she howled her lungs out about a crease in her dress… But now it was too late: she had helped create a daughter who was willful, self-centered, and used to getting her way. Yes, Ruthie thought, Bette could be a spoiled brat, but it was so clear to her that she was headed for a brilliant stage career that at this point Ruthie’s only concern was to keep her on an even keel emotionally so that she could do her best work on the stage. More than ever, anything Bette wanted, Ruthie would do for her. Anything Bette hated, Ruthie would remove from her life.

  While Bette sat on the edge of the sofa, theatrically covering her eyes with her hands, Ruthie’s mind raced. Within a few minutes she put on a pair of heavy boots, went out into the rainy night, and stealthily left a trail of footprints leading up to the apartment window. She came back, changed into a nightdress, then let out a piercing scream just before she tore over to the landlady’s apartment, babbling that she’d seen a prowler peering in her window and couldn’t possibly remain in so dangerous a place—she had a young daughter with her! They would leave first thing in the morning and have that month’s rent back!

  When the landlady sputtered that Ruthie must have had a nightmare, that such a thing was not possible, Ruthie indignantly told her to go outside and see for herself. When she returned, muttering under her breath, the woman gave Ruthie her money back. While Bette was at the theater the next day, Ruthie found another place. It was in the city’s red-light district, which gave her some pause, but it was even less expensive than the first apartment and closer to the Cukor company’s new home, the Temple Theatre. Besides, Bette liked the wallpaper.

  Calmed, Bette began a week of intense rehearsals, and was delighted to find that she liked most of her fellow actors. They included Frank McHugh, an amiable Irishman, and Wallace Ford, a mug with a gleam in his eye. Bette found them both “loads of fun,” and was fascinated by a mysterious young man named Sam Blythe who eventually was found out as Ethel Barrymore’s son. The publicity helped bring audiences into the theater at prices that started at twenty-five cents and “soared to $1.50 for the choice seats,” Bette recalled. (Bette’s salary was twenty-five dollars a week.)

  Her first play was Excess Baggage, with Wallace Ford and Miriam Hopkins, and the Rochester Times singled Bette out for praise as “a pretty blonde slip of a miss.” She, however, was enchanted by Hopkins, the twenty-six-year-old leading lady. “She was the prettiest golden-haired blonde I had ever seen,” she recalled. “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.”

  Bette’s fondness for Miriam soon stopped cold. With all her beauty and talent, Hopkins was immensely insecure, mean-spirited, paranoid, and given to the most outrageous scene stealing, even from the lowliest extra. Whenever a fellow actor commanded what Miriam deemed an excess of audience attention, she would wave her handkerchief, rearrange flowers, wind a clock, leaf through a book—anything to divert the audience’s eyes back to herself. It was not a propensity likely to endear her to her costars.

  At first Bette was only disconcerted by Miriam’s habit of patting her on the backside and telling her what a beautiful neck she had. Naive as Bette was, she didn’t know about the rumors that Hopkins’s sexual preferences included women as well as men. Although she’d been married twice, Miriam raised eyebrows in the company when she introduced a lovely young girl as her “protegee” and shared a bungalow with her every night. Ruthie’s antennae were more attuned than her daughter’s, and when Bette told her that Hopkins had invited her to join her and her friend one evening in the bungalow, Ruthie told her urgently, “Stay away from her—she’s trouble!” Bette took her mother’s advice.

  Hopkins was angered by this rejection, and she turned viciously on Bette a few days later. In the middle of a rehearsal, she spun away from her and screamed at Cukor, “She’s stepping on my lines! The bitch doesn’t know her place! I’m the star of this show—not that little nobody!” Then Hopkins stalked off, leaving a mortified Bette alone on the stage.

  Bette appeared in half a dozen productions with the Cukor company, and while the repertoire that season didn’t thrill her, she recalled that she “settled down and regarded my work without emotion. Acting was what I wanted to do and I was determined to learn all I could.… Rochester was providing me with solid schooling.”

  And a new beau. Shortly after her arrival, she met Charles Ainsley, a young man about her age, and “fell in love” once again. Charlie came to every one of her performances and sent yellow roses to her dressing room each night. He was from a good family, Bette recalled, and “risked his reputation” nightly by dating an actress and being seen at her apartment in “the bad part of town.” But he loved the fact that Bette was an actress; he glowed with pride whenever her picture popped up in the local paper. Within a few weeks, Bette and Charlie were engaged to be married.

  Early in November, as rehearsals for The Squall neared an end, the company manager approached Bette. “We won’t need you after this show,” he said.

  Shocked, Bette could only whisper, “Why?”

  “Cukor says you won’t be needed anymore.” And that was that. For years Bette maintained that she was mystified by the firing, and that all she could imagine was that she had been considered standoffish because she went directly home to Ruthie or out with Charlie immediately after each performance. But in a 1981 Playboy interview, she admitted that there was more to it than that: “I didn’t live up to what was expected in those days of a stock company ingenue, 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.” What she left unsaid was how much she suspected that Miriam Hopkins’s angry hand had helped to stir the vat of ill-feeling against her.

  Louis Calhern, a guest star with the company, was more blunt. Bette was let go, he said, because she wouldn’t “put out.”

  Devastated, Bette went home to Ruthie and fell into her arms. She must be an incompetent actress, she sobbed; she had blown this golden opportunity; she had no future on the stage. Ever plucky, Ruthie suggested that she and Bette go down that minute to the telegraph office and send a wire to Jimmy Light: maybe he was finally ready to put on his Greenwich Village production of The Earth Between.

  Bette said she’d rather go to bed, but Ruthie pushed her out the door and they sent the wire. The next night, as Bette walked offstage after her last performance in Rochester, Ruthie showed her Light’s reply: “If you can come to New York, I think I can do the show.” Ruthie had their packed bags with her, and they went directly from the theater to board the overnight train to New York. The next morning they sat in a small, chilly coffee shop in Grand Central Terminal and had breakfast with Light, who told them that he had raised the money for the show, and coul
d put it on within a few months. Bette signed a run-of-the-play contract with Light for thirty-five dollars a week, and he advised Ruthie to find them an apartment in Greenwich Village near the Provincetown Theatre. She did, on Eighth Street near MacDougal.

  The wait for rehearsals to begin gave Bette time to grow nervous about her Off Broadway debut. The Provincetown was already famous for the quality of its productions, playwrights, and stars—including Helen Hayes, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Katharine Cornell. It had been called the American equivalent of England’s revered Old Vic, and Bette fretted over whether she’d be up to its demands. “One could forgive a shiny new ingenue in a stock company almost anything,” she said, “but this was the real thing. I had to be good. This was New York. Not Broadway, but still New York!”

  The play, too, was first-rate. Written by Virgil Geddes, The Earth Between was an evocative drama of a widowed Nebraskan farmer and his sixteen-year-old daughter, its style redolent of Eugene O’Neill. Bette thought as she read the script that the farmer’s demands on his daughter as a replacement for his wife were a bit excessive, but she read no more into it than that. In fact, the play dealt subtly with the man’s incestuous desire for his daughter, and its final scene strongly suggested her acquiescence.

  According to Bette, the subtext of the play never did dawn on her, and Light never clued her in: he sensed that her lack of insight would add to the innocence he wanted her characterization to exude.

  As opening night of The Earth Between loomed, Bette felt more pressure than she ever had before. There was so much for her to prove—to Ruthie and the rest of her family, to her friends and boyfriends (present and past), to John Murray Anderson, to Eva Le Gallienne, to George Cukor. More than anything else, she wanted to show her father that he had been wrong about her. The hurt she felt at his refusals to help her pay for her studies was still fresh, and his words—“Bette could never be a successful actress”—rang in her ears at the most inopportune times, sapped her self-confidence, made her think of quitting. Then, at Ruthie’s urging, she would take those same words and use them to renew her determination to prove her father wrong.