by James Spada
Her third show, Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, featured a guest actor, the handsome leading man Dodd Meehan, and Bette fell for him. Meehan took advantage of her moon-eyed adoration and had her cue him for all his lines during rehearsals, which left her with little time to learn her own part. At the morning dress rehearsal, she “blew up” in her lines so often that Raymond Moore told her, “If you don’t learn your part we will have to cancel the opening tomorrow night.”
Ruthie had been at the rehearsal, and when she and Bette got home she spent the next fifteen straight hours coaching her; they didn’t finish until four in the morning. The next night, Bette was letter perfect, but Ruthie still fantasized about running Dodd Meehan over with her car.
By now, Bette had a theatrical agent, Jane Broder, and when she returned from Cape Cod, Broder had an offer for her: to play Donald Meek’s daughter in a new domestic comedy by Martin Flavin, Broken Dishes. At first Flavin and the show’s director, Marion Gering, found Bette’s acting merely serviceable, and considered firing her. But after eight days of rehearsals she warmed to the role, and “they changed their minds about that.” She was to be paid a salary of seventy-five dollars a week—nearly a fortune to her and Ruthie.
Broken Dishes opened at the Ritz Theatre on November 5, 1929; Bette and the play won mostly positive reviews. One critic called her “delightful in her girlishness, her little feminine tricks, her tenderness and sympathetic feelings for her father, her diffident happiness with her lover.” Another called her “something of an artiste… pretty and believable as Elaine.”
Bette glowed with amazement and joy as she read the words. Finally, she had originated a role in a major Broadway show, she had been reviewed favorably by the top critics, and the play looked as if it was going to be a hit. She could scarcely believe it; now she was in the company of Gertrude Lawrence, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, George M. Cohan, Helen Morgan—all of whom were also on Broadway that season of 1929. She daren’t let herself dream that someday she might be among their peers.
Broken Dishes played 178 performances in New York, and had a successful road tour later in the year. After the first three months, Bette’s salary was doubled to $150 a week, the equivalent of $1,800 in 2013 dollars, and she and Ruthie went on an ecstatic shopping spree. The stock market had crashed several months earlier, and many investors (including Donald Meek) had lost large amounts of money. But the Great Depression hadn’t yet taken its stranglehold on the country, Bette was in a hit, and the Davis women felt blithely wealthy.
About a month into the New York run, Bette had received an “imperious” summons from the Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted to test her for a movie role opposite the popular British romantic actor Ronald Colman. Although the prospect intrigued her, she couldn’t summon up much enthusiasm about going to Hollywood. She loved Broadway and disliked cameras—“I had been Mother’s model so often I had a phobia about them.” But Ruthie, who was well aware of the fame, money, and power available to an actress in the burgeoning film industry, insisted that she do it.
The test, made at the Paramount studios in Astoria, was “ghastly,” Bette recalled. She shook with nerves and fainted briefly just as the cameras began to roll. She was given no direction, was poorly lit, badly dressed and made up, and had a crooked tooth that stood out on film “like a locomotive.” After Goldwyn saw the film he thundered, “Who wasted my time with that one?!” Bette agreed with the assessment, and put thoughts of Hollywood out of her head. But she did go directly to a dentist to have her tooth straightened.
In the summer of 1930, Bette returned to Cape Cod for her third season with the Playhouse. One Sunday evening in August, she, Ruthie, and Bobby sat in the Hyannis Port cinema, riveted on Joan Crawford in Our Blushing Brides. As the film ended and the lights went up, Bette let out “a blood-curdling yell”: four rows in front of her she saw the back of a curly-headed young man who couldn’t have been anyone but Ham Nelson. She ran up to him and he picked her up in his arms and twirled her. They hadn’t seen each other for four years, “and yet we were both acutely aware of the existence of the other. Ham had always been important to me.”
Ham was on the Cape to lead the Amherst College orchestra during their summer gig at the Old Mill Tavern. He and Bette talked into the early morning hours that first night, and resumed their romance with long days at the beach, drives in Ruthie’s Chevy, walks around the Cape. “It was as though we had never been apart,” Bette recalled. “We just talked and talked and talked, and grew to know, even though no words were said, that this was somehow very right, that we belonged together.” But marriage, at the time, was out of the question. Bette had to return to New York, Ham to Amherst, and once again circumstances kept them apart.
A week into the road tour of Broken Dishes later that year, Bette got an offer to star again on Broadway, this time as Alabama (“Bam”) Follonsby in a new comedy by Lawton Campbell, Solid South, starring Richard Bennett, father of the movie stars Constance and Joan. Bette liked the idea of originating another role, but she was reluctant to leave Broken Dishes. She had heard that Mr. Bennett could be difficult, and she would have to be ready to open in ten days. With “misgivings,” she took the night train from Washington to New York and went directly to Bennett’s office for an interview.
“I suppose that you are another of those young ham actresses,” Bennett sniped in greeting. Tired, cranky, and ambivalent, Bette snapped back, “I’ve been on the train all night, Mr. Bennett. Unless you show me more consideration than this, I’ll go home and we’ll forget the matter.”
Bennett smiled, told her, “You’ll do,” and added that she would be paid $125 a week, more than she was getting for the Broken Dishes tour. (Salaries were lower on the road because of the expenses involved in moving a show from town to town, and the lower ticket prices in smaller cities.) Bette thought a few minutes, realized that to create a new character was more important than any of the drawbacks, and accepted Bennett’s offer.
She later recalled Solid South as “a good play,” and it did receive favorable reviews when it opened on October 14, but Bette was rarely singled out for praise. She blamed the fact that the show lasted just three weeks on Bennett’s temperament, unprofessionalism, and heavy drinking even while he worked. The second night, he stepped out of character in the middle of a scene and bellowed, “Stagehand, where’s my cigar?” A few nights later he became irritated when the audience didn’t respond to a comic speech he was delivering. He left Bette and another actress alone in the middle of the stage and walked down to the footlights to berate them: “I suppose I’ll have to tell you a dirty story to get you to laugh.” He then walked off the stage and left his leading ladies to their own devices.
On the Monday of the fourth week of the run, Bette walked into the theater and saw a notice posted on the bulletin board. Solid South had been closed, it said, “by act of God.” The god, Bette thought bitterly, must have been Bacchus.
The show-business gods, however, had smiled on Bette the previous Friday. She had taken another screen test, this one for Carl Laemmle at Universal, for a role in their movie version of Preston Sturges’s hit play Strictly Dishonorable. Once again Bette had felt ambivalent. “I was not fooled for a moment into thinking that the screen was the same thing as the stage,” she recalled, “nor did I suspect that it might someday overthrow the theater. [But] it was new and it was big and it was impressive, and it certainly was worth investigating.”
This time, Bette did her own makeup, wore her own clothes, and had straight teeth. She came off much better than she had in the Goldwyn test, and after a long series of transcontinental phone calls, Universal offered her a contract at the staggering pay of $300 a week, with renewal options with pay raises every three months. Ruthie couldn’t believe it when Bette vacillated. “Don’t you realize what an opportunity this is?” she pleaded. “Movies are seen around the world, by millions more people than ever see plays. And Hollywood could make us rich, B
ette! You haven’t done a thing for them yet and they’re willing to pay you twice as much a week as any Broadway producer ever has. I read that Constance Bennett makes $30,000 a week, what with her acting and her cosmetics business! Imagine that, Bette! You must accept this offer. You must!” Bette sat mutely, overwhelmed by her mother’s tirade. Finally, Ruthie took a deep breath and quietly concluded the lecture. “If you don’t, you’re a perfect fool.”
Bette signed the contract in the office of David Werner, Universal’s New York talent scout. She sat in front of his desk, in awe of the opulence around her; the huge room was resplendent with wood paneling and thick red carpeting and shiny brass furnishings. She had brought Boojum with her, convinced that she would seem more “Hollywood” carrying a dog to a meeting. The contract was the longest document she had ever seen, and just as she put pen to paper to sign it, Boojum jumped off her lap and proceeded to relieve herself on that thick wool carpet.
“I don’t know why I’ve done this,” Werner muttered to her as she handed him the signed pages. “You’re the greatest gamble I’ve ever sent to Hollywood. You don’t look like any actress I’ve ever seen on the screen. And yet, for some reason I can’t analyze, I think that I’m right. I think you’ll go a long way.”
Bette’s theater friends disagreed. Unanimously, they were appalled that she had “sold out” to Hollywood, and they warned her of dire consequences: “If you’re serious about being an actress you’ll never get a chance out there,” they told her. “You can’t lick them.” She was certain they were right after her first meeting in New York with Universal’s publicity department. Several gentlemen sat behind a great oak desk with their feet up, the soles of their shoes toward Bette, and peered at her critically. They asked her for facts about her life they could use in press releases, then announced that of course her name would have to be changed. “We feel that ‘Bette Davis’ lacks glamour,” one of them told her. “It doesn’t have the fan appeal that it should.”
Bette bristled. “It’s done all right on the stage.”
The man was all patience. “You don’t understand,” he replied. “Picture names must excite the fans. They must possess that intangible allure that makes customers think that actresses are different from ordinary people.”
And what name, Bette inquired, did they have in mind?
“Bettina Dawes!” they replied in unison. “It’s a natural!”
Bette almost gagged. “Bettina Dawes!” she cried. “I may not know anything about Hollywood, and Davis may not sound as romantic as Bernhardt, but I like it and I’m going to keep it!”
Several of the men began to object when Bette added, “Besides, I refuse to be called ‘Between the Drawers’ all my life.”
The men laughed, then Bette laughed, and finally one of them said, “Okay, we’ll discuss this again later.” To her immense relief, nothing more was ever said about changing her name.
Bette and Ruthie drove to Madison, where Bobby had transferred to the University of Wisconsin, to pick her up for the start of her Thanksgiving break. (Bobby’s reasons for the switch have been lost to posterity.) After a Thanksgiving sojourn with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Myron in Newton, Bobby took a train back to Madison, and Ruthie and Bette returned to Manhattan to make the arrangements for their journey to Hollywood. Ruthie sold the Chevy, arranged to sublet their apartment, and on the snowy morning of December 8, Davis mere et fille boarded the train to California, Bette with Boojum in her arms. Both women’s emotions were a jumble of anticipation, uncertainty, excitement, and fear. With fifty-seven dollars left to her name after she had made all the arrangements to leave, Ruthie thought of Constance Bennett’s $30,000-a-week income and sighed.
It saddened Bette to think that she might never again see the New England she so loved, and she knew she would miss her friends and family. But she was thrilled by the promises that Universal had made to her: Strictly Dishonorable would be a prestigious picture, and it was sure to make her a star overnight: “Clearly, my future was dazzling.”
As she sat with her mother on the observation deck, Ruthie chattering incessantly about all the adventures that awaited them, Bette fell silent. Her mind wandered back over all the sacrifices that Ruthie had made for her, all the times she had pushed and prodded and browbeat her to gather up that one last ounce of gumption when Bette was sure she had none left.
The train sped along toward Bette’s future, and all she could think about was the tableau that had haunted her three years earlier: Ruthie framed by the window of that photography studio as she retouched negatives, her head bowed, her eyes strained. “I have never paraded sentiment,” Bette said. “I have always thought that my mother sacrificed far too much to be paid with empty lip service. But there is a shrine in my heart to her, and that shrine is the memory of a woman hunched in a window, to make it possible for her daughter to have the chance which only her mother’s mind could conceive.”
PART TWO
“The Little Brown Wren”
SIX
B
ette and Ruthie stood on the dusty platform of the railway station in Pasadena, stranded. They had traveled for more than five days in the coach section of a chilly train that had been stopped by snowdrifts several times. Unable to afford berths, they had slept fitfully in the uncomfortable seats, and when they arrived on the Saturday morning of December 13, they were tired, downcast, and irritable. A publicity man from Universal was supposed to have met them, but no one was there.
They stood for what seemed an eternity amid their baggage, shielding their eyes from the hot, harsh California sun as they peered up and down the long, now-deserted platform for a sign of their escort. Bette held Boojum and struggled to keep calm. They felt, Ruthie recalled, like “strangers in a strange land.”
Finally they had no choice but to take a taxi to the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, an expensive twenty-mile journey. Bette hung out the window as the cab drove into Hollywood, amazed and entranced by the warm, dry air two weeks before Christmas and the rows of exotic palm trees. She was sure that she’d see stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Norma Talmadge, and Vilma Banky every other block. To her disappointment, the fabled intersection of Hollywood and Vine seemed little more than a main street corner like any other.
After Ruthie paid the cabbie, she had seven dollars left in her purse. They went to their room and Bette called John Johnston, Universal’s publicity director. Johnston was relieved to hear from her; he had sent one of his men to meet her, but he had returned alone because he hadn’t seen anyone who looked remotely like an actress. “I may not have had a mink coat,” Bette retorted, “but I was carrying a dog. That should have made him think I was an actress.”
The studio sent a representative to the hotel (who made arrangements for the Davises to remain there until they could find a house to rent) and a photographer, who took the first pictures of Bette Davis in Hollywood. She held Boojum and posed next to Ruthie in the hotel lobby, and in the one surviving photo, mother looks more the budding movie star than daughter. While Bette cast her eyes down toward the dog, Ruthie looked directly into the camera and smiled prettily. But neither looked the least bit glamorous in their drab cloth coats and cloche hats.
Bette was told that a studio car would pick her up on Monday morning. On Sunday, as soon as she and Ruthie finished lunch (which they charged to the room and thus the studio), they began their house hunt. They stopped at a “smart” realty office near the hotel and told the broker, Mrs. Carr, that they had a very limited budget but hoped for a small house. Mrs. Carr replied that she thought she had something in their price range, but first she wanted them to see a “simply adorable” house that was far too expensive but that she liked to show to newcomers to Hollywood.
The house was at 4435 Alta Loma Terrace in the Hollywood hills, and the minute Ruthie and Bette saw it they fell in love. It was a two-story California bungalow-style cottage, completely furnished, with a thatched roof, a heavy redwood door, a ladder that led to a little balcony ab
ove the step-down living room, a built-in sofa, rows of bookcases filled with richly bound volumes, and a goldfish bowl built into a window. There was a rooftop sun deck, a patio out back, and—wonder of wonders—a flower garden in full bloom in December. To Ruthie, it was a “Hollywood house such as you dream about when you are far away.”
As Mrs. Carr had suspected they might, Bette and Ruthie wanted to live there. But the rent was $150 a month, and Bette wouldn’t receive her first paycheck from Universal for at least two weeks. Ruthie begged her to ask the studio for an advance, but she refused. Undeterred, Ruthie told Mrs. Carr that they were interested and would let her know their decision by Monday. Bette suspected that her mother had lost her mind, and she was sure of it later when Ruthie told the same thing to a car salesman about a green Ford phaeton because she thought Bette looked “just right” behind the wheel.
“You must have a car in this city, Bette,” Ruthie cajoled. “Everything’s so far away, and you can’t hail a taxi like you can in New York. Besides, you must give the appearance of being a promising young actress. Just ask the studio for the money, Bette. Surely they’ll—”
“No, Mother!” Bette exploded, and Ruthie realized that further pleas would be useless. They returned to their hotel, where Bette cried herself to sleep over their inability to afford that charming house, and Ruthie lay awake wondering how she could make things right. She considered wiring Harlow and asking for the $400 she needed, but decided the expense of the wire would be wasted. The next morning at 6 she awoke with an idea. She skulked out of the Plaza and hurried to the nearby Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where she knew that a long-time family friend, the wealthy former governor of Maine, Carl Milliken, was staying. She inquired about Milliken, and was told he would be down in a few minutes to play his daily game of tennis. When Milliken, tall and dapper in his tennis whites, stepped out of the elevator and saw Ruthie, he was both surprised by her presence and alarmed by the frantic expression on her face. “What in the world is the matter, Ruthie?”
