Bette Davis (2 page)

While Eugenia Favor had always expected to send both sons to college (before entering the seminary, Paul had attended Dartmouth, and his brother, Richard, would go to Harvard), she had never considered doing the same for Ruthie or Mildred. As far as Eugenia was concerned, Ruthie, having completed her studies at Lowell High School and Lowell Normal School, must pin her hopes on receiving a suitable marriage proposal.

And so it was that in 1907, on spring break from his senior year at Bates, Harlow Morrell Davis appeared at the maple-shaded Favor home at 22 Chester Street, in the Highlands section of Lowell, to ask Ruthie to marry him. Harlow Davis's proposal was all Eugenia could have wished for her daughter. Already in possession of a considerable inheritance—his father's business, two houses, and other properties—Harlow was scheduled to enter Harvard Law School in September.

Ruthie's always vague aspirations to a career on the stage seemed long since to have evaporated. For the time being, at least, she channeled into her relationship with Harlow the relentless driving force she was said to have inherited from her mother. Eight months after she became Mrs. Harlow Morrell Davis, in a small family ceremony in Lowell, she returned to prepare for the birth of her first child, who had been conceived by accident—family rumor had it—on Ruthie's wedding night. Her husband, in the midst of his first year at Harvard Law School, had temporarily stayed behind in the simple wooden row house they had rented at 11 Westminster Street in the Boston suburb of West Somerville. In his place came Mrs. Hall of Augusta, Maine, the jovial nurse who had cared for Eliza Davis during her pregnancy. "Let nature do her perfect work," she repeatedly counseled the high-strung Ruthie, who was grateful for what she recorded in her diary as Mrs. Hall's calming influence.

On Sunday, April 5, 1908, Harlow was in Lowell for the day, when Ruthie gave birth to their first daughter, Ruth Elizabeth.

"Too bad, too bad," Ruthie's sister, Mildred, was heard to cry out when she saw how small, sickly, and miserable the six-pound, nineteen-inch-long baby looked.

In later years, when Bette Davis—as Ruth Elizabeth would come to be known—was a venerable actress much called upon to reminisce about her youth, she consistently portrayed her scrawny, bespectacled, balding father as a cold and unloving figure, who sounded something like a cross between Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop. Again and again, in nearly identical words and phrases, she recounted Harlow's perpetual lack of feeling for her or her mother. According to Bette, the only creature he ever really seemed to care about was a vicious old dog. While her biographers have tended religiously to copy the details of this grim portrait, there exists—at least where Bette's earliest years are concerned—abundant and unambiguous evidence to the contrary: in the family photographs and copious notations in Bette's baby book, as well as in the richly cluttered Victorian-style scrapbook Ruthie kept in this period.

Eliza Davis's nurse, Mrs. Hall, had brought Ruthie the baby book, entided 4 'Baby's Record by Maud Humphrey," as a gift from Augusta, Maine; while the overflowing thick black scrapbook on whose first page was inscribed the heading ''Ruthie's Book" dated back to Ruthie and Haiiow's wedding day. Between them these volumes document the halcyon days of the Davis marriage. The stereotypical poses and attitudes aside, Ruthie's photographs of Harlow and his baby daughter unmistakably catch him without the mask of indifference most people seemed to see. For a man who reportedly showed his feelings to few people, there is clearly an abundance of emotion on display here.

Sunday night, immediately after Ruthie gave birth, Harlow entrained for Boston, where his end-term exams approached at Harvard Law School, but by Wednesday the nervous, excited young father was back in Lowell, awkwardly posing for die camera with four-day-old Ruth Elizabeth, or Betty, as they had decided to call her, on his lap. On the boyish twenty-three-year-old's face is a look of shy adoration shading into terror. In this their first photograph together, he seems afraid he might break her, as if little Betty were made of glass; not so in the flood of pictures that followed, taken by Ruthie during the three months she and the baby remained in Lowell. With each ensuing visit Harlow's confidence and ease with

his daughter can clearly be seen to grow. One such photograph, dated June 10, 1908, shows baby Betty cradled in her father's arms. Under it Ruthie has scribbled the notation that the child is having a comfy time. In another notation the equally contented mother gives us Harlow's pet name for their newborn: Princess Bettina.

The presence of Mrs. Hall, who unbeknownst to Ruthie had postponed her wedding to assist them, gave the young couple much-needed time to be alone together. The kindly nurse took Princess Bettina for her first glimpse of the outside world, a spin around the block in her new wicker pram; while Harlow escorted Ruthie on her own first trip outdoors since giving birth, a romantic ninety-minute tour of the Highlands by horse-drawn carriage. Ruthie took special pleasure in the fact that even now that she and Haiiow were parents, people often mistook them for honeymooners.

That July of 1908, Ruthie photographed Harlow and Betty as they happily posed one last time at Grandmother Favor's house, where die baby had recently learned to smile. Harlow had completed his first year at law school with customary aplomb, already admired by classmates for his extreme powers of concentration and prodigious memory; and now he had finally come to collect his wife and daughter for the train trip to West Somerville. In three months the baby seemed barely to have grown, weighing a scant two pounds more than when she was bora. Upon their arrival at Westminster Street, Ruthie noted with horror that the next-door neighbors had a new baby a day younger than puny Betty but already almost twice her weight.

Their daughter's perceived fragility seems to have endeared her to them all the more. Harlow especially was keen that she never be let out of sight. He doted on her as once he had doted on his sickly mother, Eliza. Ruthie recorded Betty's favorite place in the house as the sofa in Harlow's den. There the baby lay calmly for hours while Harlow pored over lawbooks. Of an August afternoon, when Harlow was not absorbed by his studies, he might sit with her on the front porch overlooking Westminster Street, where image-hungry Ruthie photographed Betty pressing her elfin face against his cheek, as the child loved to do.

And Harlow, in turn, loved above all else to play with the baby in bed in the morning while Ruthie dressed. For anyone who looks through Ruthie's old scrapbook, it is impossible to discover even the faintest tincture of the indifference usually ascribed to Haiiow in what appears to be a candid shot Ruthie took that September; the photograph shows the young father tenderly reaching across the bed to his adoring five-month-old daughter.

By Thanksgiving, the Davis establishment was ready to host its first family holiday. Almost all the Favors—Eugenia and her ailing husband, William, Ruthie's younger brother, Dick, and her sister, Mildred, as well as two cousins and a family friend—gathered around Harlow Davis's bountiful table, where Betty was scheduled to eat in her high chair for the first time. As the baby banged the table with her rattle throughout the meal, it must have seemed to Eugenia Favor that she had succeeded brilliantly in directing the destiny of her elder daughter, Ruthie.

Already Ruthie's daughter seemed to display that indomitable will Eugenia fancied herself to possess. Although relatively slow to speak, Betty was quick to communicate her needs and wishes. The baby had learned from Harlow to shake her head to indicate displeasure (an oft-repeated gesture, most frequently accompanied by a robust little laugh) and in time loudly to cry out ''No-no!" After a period of crawling on her stomach to get where she wanted to go, Betty learned to pull herself up by various articles of furniture. Then, when she could stand alone, she propelled herself by leaning on the go-cart her father had made for her. Able to walk at last, she regularly dashed across the front lawn to meet Harlow when he came home at night.

On Christmas Eve in the middle of Harlow's second year at Harvard Law School, the Davises visited the Favors in Lowell, where, as was to become his custom, Harlow dressed as Santa Claus to deliver Betty's first bagful of presents. Upon their return to West Somerville, Ruthie became pregnant again, this time by design. Whatever grave trepidation Harlow had initially felt about the prospect of parenthood his firstborn had almost instantly dispelled. Now, indulgent father that he had become, he and Ruthie theorized that a little sister or brother would do much to keep Betty from being spoiled.

As the birth of their second child approached, the Davises enjoyed a brief holiday in the cottage at Old Orchard Beach. Ruthie— now eight months pregnant—occupied herself photographing her husband and baby at play on the Grand Strand. Afterward, Betty was deposited in Lowell to spend a month with the Favors. At the time of her first pregnancy, when she and Harlow had been married less than a year, Ruthie had felt most comfortable giving birth in her mother's house on Chester Street. This time it seemed to Ruthie (as it did to Harlow) that her place was with her husband in West Somerville, where a maid called Margaret and a new nurse, Mrs. Worthington, would tend to her needs. Harlow was two months

into his final year at law school when, on October 25,1909, Barbara Harriet Davis was born.

At seven pounds, Bobby—as they would call her—weighed a full pound more than her sister had at birth. Still, when Mrs. Worth-ington placed Bobby in her mother's arms for the first time, Ruthie noted that the new baby looked much as Betty had.

"My big doll!'' said Betty when she returned from her month in Lowell. Although Grandmother Eugenia had tried to explain that a new little sister awaited at home, from her first glimpse of her Betty seemed convinced that Bobby was her new toy. As long as everyone pretended that the baby was indeed a gift from her parents, she seemed content. But as her mother observed, Betty always had to be the center of everything and was clearly nettled at the prospect of losing any of the spotlight.

The situation came to a head when Betty saw Mrs. Worthington put Bobby in what had formerly been her crib. Until recently, Betty had slept every night a few feet from Harlow and Ruthie in the master bedroom. Exactly a year earlier, in October 1908, Ruthie had recorded in the baby book how Betty would wait quietly in her crib in the morning, darting glances in her parents' direction to see if they were awake yet. Sometimes Harlow and Ruthie would pretend to be asleep in order to watch Betty anxiously waiting for the moment when Harlow would take her into their bed to play. So it was now that, Mrs. Worthington having left the room where Bobby lay asleep, Betty slipped inside and performed what must have been (for a one-and-a-half-year-old) the Herculean task of lifting the baby out of her crib and placing her facedown on a small sofa across the room.

"There, there," Mrs. Worthington overheard Betty saying triumphantly. "I don't want Dolly here."

The arrival of a new baby was only one of the major changes that disrupted Betty's life. In June of 1910, Harlow graduated from Harvard Law School, and with his graduation Betty's familiar daily routines underwent profound alterations. As a student, Harlow had spent considerable time at home. Betty was very much her daddy's Princess Bettina, and she had grown used to Harlow's familiar daily presence. Nothing made the child happier than to be allowed at her father's side as he studied. Even though much of this was merely silent companionship, Betty had spent more time with her father in her earliest years than most children do. Now he would be going to an office each day, and all at once this life had become a thing of the past.

On graduation day, Betty accompanied her parents to Harvard

Ruthie left Bobby behind in West Somerville with Mrs. Worthing-ton. In Cambridge, Ruthie and Betty watched from the crowd as former President Theodore Roosevelt, in town for the thirtieth reunion of his Harvard class, marched beneath the elms in the academic procession. Moments later, when Harlow marched past his wife and elder daughter, he was clearly excited, as a life he had long been planning unfurled before him. Harlow's reputation for what one law school classmate described as "a mental endowment and a will to work of the first order'' had already attracted the offer of a position on the legal staff of a major Boston firm, the United Shoe Machinery Corporation on South Street. In keeping with Boston ideals of rootedness and stability, Harlow would work there for the next quarter century, rising steadily to be head of the Patent Department. And soon after graduation, a newfound sense of self-importance (but not self-indulgence; Boston frowned on that) would lead the promising young lawyer to move his family from their modest row house on Westminster Street to a considerably larger and nicer place (but no showplace; Boston frowned on that too), with a big open porch overlooking tree-lined College Avenue in Somerville.

Ruthie had eagerly anticipated the family's move to their new house, but her life in Somerville proved a disappointment. Once a constant presence in his wife's photographs, Harlow abruptly dropped out of sight, much as he did from the daily lives of his family. Single-mindedly preoccupied with his new job at United Shoe Machinery, Harlow had little time for Ruthie or the girls. During the early years of her marriage, Ruthie's energies had been absorbed by her relationship with a loving husband and by the births of two children in rapid succession. She had been preoccupied with Harlow's needs as he went through law school. There had been little time for her to think about her own repressed ambitions, her longing for something more than a conventional family and home. Now, with Harlow out of the house every day, working long hours at his new job, and her two pregnancies behind her, with no thought of more children on the horizon, a nagging sense of frustration seemed gradually to overcome her. Scarcely had the family moved to College Avenue when Ruthie began to experience periods of increasingly severe depression and lethargy. Harlow's reaction to his young wife's upset was to exacerbate her feelings of abandonment by pulling further away from her, seeming to cut himself off emotionally as well as physically from the wife who had once seemed a safe harbor and now seemed a burden.