James Spada - Bette Davis: More Than a Woman

by James Spada

  Harlow Davis, in his bitter absence, helped Bette find a key to her characterization of Floy, the naive farm girl with a close, loving relationship with her father. Bette used her fantasies of what life might have been like had Harlow been a different man, had their family stayed together, had her father loved her. It wouldn’t be the last time that Harlow’s departure from the Davis family circle would inspire Bette to a brilliant performance.

  James Light, as good a showman as he was a director, scheduled the play’s opening for an evening on which he knew no other plays were set to premiere—in order to assure a larger turnout by the New York theater critics than was usual for an Off Broadway show. Bette knew that good reviews for her performance would help her career immeasurably. She also knew that the reverse was just as true. The pressure rendered her nearly catatonic. Whenever Ruthie couldn’t penetrate one of these moods of Bette’s, she’d chirp, “I wonder when Bette’s coming back from Canada?” She asked the question a lot in the days before The Earth Between opened.

  Years later, Bette could recall little of that first performance on March 5, 1929, except that the night was stormy with mixed snow and rain and that after the final scene, in which her character yields to her father in a wheat field, she felt a huge rumble build and vibrate throughout the theater. She thought at first the roof was about to cave in. Then she realized it was applause—ecstatic, sustained applause, the loudest, most fervent she had ever heard on a stage—and most of it directed at her. She couldn’t believe it: she had thought her performance was “awful.”

  She felt as though she floated to her dressing room, which was full of flowers and telegrams, family and friends. There was a wire from Bobby and yellow roses with a note from Charlie Ainsley: “I love you.” She felt more loved that night than she ever had before; her head swirled with visions of stage stardom, and of marriage to Charlie. But there was one big aching void: her father wasn’t there. Amid all the bouquets she was drawn to one small basket of flowers by its scent, which reminded her somehow of her childhood in Winchester. She opened the envelope attached and found an engraved card that read only, “Harlow Morrell Davis.”

  The reviews for the play were mixed, but to a man the critics praised the newcomer. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote, “Miss Bette Davis, who is making her first appearance, is an enchanting creature who plays in a soft, unassertive style.” The Daily News critic called Bette “a wraith of a child with true emotional insight.”

  “That was the greatest night of my life,” Bette recalled. “I have played in finer theaters; I have experienced the thrill of thousands of people jamming the streets for a premiere of a film in which I appeared.” But nothing would ever equal the emotion Bette felt that night.

  Three weeks later, Cecil Clovelly, the road manager for Blanche Yurka, came backstage to Bette’s dressing room after a performance and asked her, “How would you like to go on the road with Miss Yurka in Ibsen?” Bette was struck dumb. She knew that Yurka was still touring in the production of The Wild Duck that had so affected her three years earlier in Boston, and there was only one role Yurka could have wanted her to play: Hedvig. Clovelly confirmed it. Linda Watkins, the actress playing the part, was about to leave, and Clovelly had suggested Bette to replace her. He had been impressed with her in The Earth Between and knew the show was set to close, as scheduled, in a week.

  Bette met with Yurka the next day at the Bijou Theatre, intensely nervous but captivated by the forty-one-year-old stage legend’s extraordinary intensity, her magnetism, her swanlike neck. Bette read just a few lines before Yurka’s rich, mellow voice interrupted her. “That’s fine, my dear,” she said. “We’ll have one week of rehearsal after you close in The Earth Between.” The Yurka company was in repertory with three Ibsen plays, and Bette was to replace Linda Watkins in a small part as a maid in The Lady from the Sea for one week, then settle into The Wild Duck.

  The rest of that day stood out in Bette’s memory for the remainder of her life. She felt aglow, giddy, incredulous that she would get to play Hedvig just as she had told Ruthie she would. Minutes before her evening’s performance as Floy, she began to feel queasy and feverish, and by the time the final curtain fell, she felt dreadful. Weak and nauseated, she slumped into her dressing-room chair after the performance and the room began to whirl. Just then she looked up at the doorway and sat bolt upright: standing there was the imposing figure of her father, wearing a topcoat, homburg hat, and leather gloves. She hadn’t seen him in years, and she was amazed at how little he had changed. Now forty-four, he had grayed a bit, and had a few lines around his eyes and mouth. Otherwise, he looked just as she remembered him.

  He seemed ill at ease. Bette jumped up and asked him to come in. There was no kiss, no hug, no handshake. Harlow stood stiffly and told her that he had enjoyed the play. He then enumerated, point by point, all the positive qualities of each of the actors in the cast—except for Bette. “He never mentioned my performance,” she recalled. “I… was hurt.”

  Tentatively, inarticulately, Harlow suggested that Bette join him for dinner that evening. She told him that she didn’t feel up to it; she thought she was coming down with something. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she croaked, “but I feel wretched—really.”

  “I see,” Harlow replied.

  Bette knew her father didn’t believe her and protested, “I have a chill and I’m soaking wet.…” But by this point she felt too sick to care. She also knew that even had she not been ill, there could never be a reconciliation between her and Harlow. He had hurt her too deeply; there was too much mutual distrust, too much misunderstanding, too much awkwardness between them. They were, simply, too unalike. Looking sad, Harlow said good-bye and left.

  She went home and collapsed into bed; the next morning she awoke covered with spots and a frantic Ruthie sent for a doctor. The diagnosis: one of the worst cases of measles the man had seen, and he ordered her not to get out of bed until she recovered. Ruthie and Bette both panicked. Not only would Bette miss out on the last week of The Earth Between, but there was no way she could attend rehearsals of The Lady from the Sea and The Wild Duck in time to learn her parts. Bette was shattered, sure that her chance to play Hedvig was gone. “The suffering from my malady was not nearly so intense as the pain from my broken heart,” she recalled.

  Yet again, Ruthie saved the day. She assured Cecil Clovelly that if Linda Watkins could remain with the company for just one more week, Bette would know both parts by heart, without rehearsals, in two weeks. Bette told her mother she was being ridiculous; surely Blanche Yurka wouldn’t change everyone’s plans for her. But that’s exactly what happened. Yurka wanted her, and whatever had to be done would be.

  Ruthie didn’t allow Bette’s astonishment to last very long; she started to coach her for the parts that day. Bette remembered the next two weeks of illness as a “nightmare.” She lay in bed, feverish, achy, her eyes so sensitive to the light that Ruthie had to read the scripts to her with a flashlight in the pitch-dark apartment. Wearing a flannel nightshirt, her hair in bedtime braids, Ruthie sat on a chair next to Bette’s bed and read to her late into the night, cueing her responses when she forgot them, tugging the proper emotions out of her when she felt too weak to call them up. Bette threw temper tantrums, grabbed the script out of Ruthie’s hand and flung it across the room, howled that she couldn’t concentrate, her eyes hurt, she wanted to be left alone! But Ruthie never let up.

  By the night before she was due at the Bijou for her one rehearsal for The Lady from the Sea, Bette knew both her parts by instinct. The next morning she and Ruthie awoke at 9:30—exactly the hour Bette was supposed to begin the rehearsal. After all that work, Ruthie had forgotten to set the alarm. Bette became hysterical, screaming with rage as her mother pushed and pulled her into her clothes and got her down to Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. There wasn’t a taxi in sight. Mad with frustration, Bette grabbed Ruthie and bit her on the shoulder, her teeth cutting into her mother’s flesh through a
woollen dress.

  They ran into the theater an hour late, and Ruthie started breathlessly to explain what had happened to an angry Cecil Clovelly. Bette turned on her furiously. “Get out, Mother!” she screamed. “And stay out!” Ruthie, carrying a thermos of milk and a bottle of wine she had brought to give Bette fortitude, did as she was told and sat quietly by the stage door as Bette began her rehearsal.

  It went off without a hitch, and Bette felt confident she would at least know her lines at her first performance—that same day at a 2:30 matinee. But when she was handed her costume, she lost her composure once again. It was soiled and torn, and had not been altered to fit her. “It was unbelievable,” Bette recalled. “I announced my displeasure, which was even more incredible, and crawled off to a lunch that I prayed I could keep down.”

  When she returned, she found that the costume had been washed, ironed, starched, sewn, and laid out in her dressing room along with freshly shined shoes and a crisp white cap—all by Ruthie. With her mother plying her with milk and wine every time she came offstage, Bette got through the performance—even though she hadn’t even seen the play’s set before she took the stage. As a Broadway debut, it was inauspicious (and unreviewed), but Bette felt grateful that she wouldn’t have to play Hedvig under such adverse conditions. By the time the company traveled to Jackson Heights, Queens, for Bette’s first performance in The Wild Duck, she was recovered, in a better frame of mind, and totally ready for the challenge.

  Blanche Yurka, who staged as well as starred in The Wild Duck, had seen Bette in The Earth Between and thought she had the makings of a “great” Hedvig. Although Bette was now twenty-one, she could pass easily for fourteen with her sylphlike body and the big-eyed innocence she exuded. More important, Yurka felt instinctively that Bette would “attack the part, not with technique, but with her nerves and her heart.” Yurka decided not to rehearse Bette fully in the big emotional scene, where Hedvig weeps hysterically as her father leaves her. “It was a risky thing to do with such an inexperienced youngster,” Yurka recalled, “but I followed my hunch and merely told her to let herself go when she came to the spot. But on opening night, even I was not prepared for the torrent of emotional intensity which rocked that frail body as she lay downward on the sofa, crying her heart out.”

  Yurka had no way of knowing, of course, that at this pivotal moment in Ibsen’s play she was not watching Hedvig Ekdal plead with her father not to leave her, but rather Bette Davis crying out to Harlow.

  When The Wild Duck left New York to continue its tour, Ruthie insisted that she accompany Bette. Blanche Yurka was not pleased. She considered Bette’s mother a silly woman whose apron strings were far too tightly tied to her daughter, and “the archetype of the classic stage mother—only worse!” Yurka had found Bette to be “overeager and full of tears and tantrums,” and she realized that Ruthie’s worried hovering merely worsened matters.

  Nevertheless, Yurka allowed Ruthie to travel with the company, and she was generous to Bette professionally as well. She would sometimes hand entire scenes to her; she told the press at the time, “I’ve had my day—let’s see this eager, talented young girl commence to have hers!” Bette recalled that “the critics were exceptionally nice” about her performance, and they were. “She acts with all her heart and being,” a New York reviewer felt. “On view here is a sincerity that is as compelling as it is electric.”

  In Philadelphia, one critic singled Bette out for special praise: “The strikingly effective portrayal in the production is that of Bette Davis.… Miss Davis—wan, sickly, yet cheerful as a child should be—thrills us with the poignant grief that comes with the revelations of the child’s great tragedy.” This time, Bette felt she deserved the praise heaped upon her in city after city. “For the first time I felt that I was really accomplishing something in my career.”

  One of the Washington, D.C., critics, however, sounded a discordant note amid the litany of praise with stinging observations that telegraphed some of the criticisms Bette would later face as a screen actress. “She had about the same amount of the much-maligned sex appeal as a kippered herring,” Mabelle Jennings wrote in the Washington Post. “There were occasions when I knew perfectly well that she had forgotten there was anyone else on stage but herself.… In twelve months’ time she will be doing harder and heavier roles than she is today. But this enlargement of experience will also see the passing of the naturalness of her Hedvig characterization.”

  Her success in The Wild Duck brought Bette her first request for an interview. She and Ruthie were agog with excitement at the prospect, and when the reporter entered her dressing room, Bette sat at her vanity mirror, her legs crossed demurely, her attitude suffused with as much sophistication as she could muster. “I’ve read sufficient interviews given by prominent personages of the stage,” Bette announced to the bemused journalist, “to have a comprehensive idea of the information you desire.”

  For Bette, the “grand triumph” of the Wild Duck tour was her opening in Boston. It was nearly spoiled when she read a letter from Charlie Ainsley just before the performance: he was breaking off their engagement because his parents disapproved of actresses. Bette was furious: why hadn’t Charlie fought harder for their relationship? Why hadn’t he talked to her about it? He never could have really loved her!

  But she forgot it all out on that stage, where her only problems were Hedvig’s. She had found first nights “a nightmare,” and this one more than any because “word had gone out among my schoolmates that a hometown girl was coming back.” Friends came from Winchester, Newton High, Mariarden, and Cushing, and every relative within a three-hundred-mile radius sat in the front rows—including her father. She peered out from behind the curtain, mesmerized, petrified, and thrilled by the enormous theaterful of people eagerly waiting to see her.

  Aware that Bette had “come home,” Blanche Yurka broke one of her strictest rules during the curtain call. None of the supporting cast members ever took bows alone, but as she and Bette acknowledged the cheers in Boston, Yurka slipped away and let Bette bathe in the hosannas all by herself. The audience erupted. People stood on their chairs and cheered for the hometown girl who’d made it. Bette said she felt “wave after wave of love” wash over her until she simply stood there and cried. “The weight that was Charlie lifted like a miracle.… I was alone—onstage and everywhere; and that’s the way it was obviously meant to be.… My heart almost burst. This was the true beginning of the one, great, durable romance of my life.”

  The “waves of love” followed Bette backstage, where her dressing room was jammed with well-wishers. Harlow Davis saw the mob and slipped away; but several months later he caught the show again in New York, where its tour ended at the Shubert Riviera on Ninety-sixth Street. Again he went backstage to see Bette. Again he asked her to join him for supper and again she declined, pleading weariness.

  The similarities between Hedvig and her father and Bette and himself could not have been lost on Harlow. Prompted perhaps by a twinge of guilt, he wrote her a long letter after seeing The Wild Duck for the second time. It was a “big kick” for him to see her in the play, he said, and he was “very proud” of the “fine debut” his daughter had made in New York. After expressing his regret that once again Bette had been unable to dine with him, he admonished her to take good care of herself (“You need lots and lots of cream, milk, eggs, fruit, green vegetables”) and closed by saying, “[I] was glad to see my so accomplished daughter do so very well.”

  This note doesn’t suggest an ogre of the sort Ruthie had painted over the years. Perhaps Harlow Davis had mellowed. Perhaps Ibsen had made him realize the pain he had caused his daughter. Perhaps he was more comfortable complimenting her in writing than in person. But it was all too little, and too late. And Ruthie, still bitter, had little desire to close the chasm between her ex-husband and her daughter. “A loving mother might have tried to mediate,” Ginny Conroy felt, “but Ruthie did no such thing. Rather, she continually bad-m
outhed Harlow, used every possible occasion to drive the wedge further between father and daughter. That way, she could be assured that Bette—the center of her universe—would forever be exclusively hers.”

  Bette returned to the Cape Playhouse in the summer of 1929, after she and Ruthie drove to Ohio to pick up Bobby. During the ride back, Bobby bubbled with excitement about her studies as an English major at Denison and about all the friends she had made in the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. Secretly, Ruthie was pleased that Bobby finally had a life of her own to talk about, and the topic of conversation didn’t always have to be Bette. Still, they were headed to Cape Cod purely for Bette’s sake, and by the time they got there, the discussion rarely strayed away from what the summer held for her.

  Her first assignment—as an older sophisticate in The Constant Wife—made her so nervous on opening night that she passed out on stage. According to Bette, the play’s star, Crystal Herne, “turned playwright” and hastily invented a new ending on the spot to explain what had happened. “The audience never knew the difference.” Next she did The Patsy, her first comedy, and during rehearsals she woke up every night in a cold sweat, terrified that she wouldn’t get a single laugh. When her first line was met with guffaws, she relaxed. “I proved to be a laugh riot.”