Bette Davis (5 page)

At Newton High, Bette Davis had swiftly established herself as one of the most popular and high-spirited girls in the freshman class; but Helen Elwell, who sat next to her in several classes, sensed Bette's gnawing embarrassment about her mother's circumstances. Much as Bette struggled to conceal her feelings, she was privately in torment that even the least affluent of her new friends lived in big houses with all the luxuries that she and Bobby would have enjoyed had Ruthie and Harlow remained married. When Bette visited the other girls' homes, she often secretly made notes that emphasized what she imagined to be the great costliness of the furniture and decor: so different from the ramshackle castoff items with which Ruthie had furnished their studio.' 'Normally she would

have been in our situation, but because her parents were divorced she was not," says Sister Koops of the charmed life Bette almost certainly would have led as the daughter of a prominent Boston patent attorney. "That might have been part of her drive: 'Well, I'll show them!' "

Resentment over her loss of worldly position caused Bette regularly to recoil from meeting with Harlow; but time and again, Ruthie insisted that the child go in to Boston to see him anyway. According to Bette's mother, maintaining regular contact with her father was "the only decent thing to do."

This was a very rare instance of Ruthie's insisting on anything with Bette, whom she indulged in most things. Ruthie's unabashedly vicarious preoccupation with Bette's social life at Newton High encouraged the daughter to view even the most trivial details as life-and-death matters. Ruthie stoically accepted and thus tacitly encouraged Bette's screaming fits when all did not go exactly according to plan. While most of Bette's schoolmates had family seamstresses at home, she had to rely on her mother to make her clothes in the spare minutes when Ruthie wasn't working as a portrait photographer. On one occasion, when Bette came home from school in anticipation of finding the dramatic marabou-fringed dress she was to wear to a party that evening, she was enraged to discover Ruthie still frantically sewing away. Before a word was exchanged between them, Bette burst into tears. "I want to wear it tonight!" she shrieked. "I have to have it tonight!" Ruthie clearly saw nothing odd in this irrational outburst. "I'll have it ready by tonight, don't worry," she said, with barely a pause to look up at Bette's tirade.

Bobby had enjoyed her fleeting moment of triumph in New Jersey, but in Newton she quickly reverted to a status that Sister Koops called "the little stepchild." Following the initial shock of discovering an entire wall covered with photographs of Bette, visitors to the Davis apartment invariably noted to themselves the astonishing absence of even a single picture of Bobby. Dismissed by most of Bette's friends as "a plain Jane," Bobby scarcely did better the following summer when the Davis sisters returned to Camp Mud-jekewis. The retiring thirteen-year-old had looked forward to recapturing past glory at the piano. This time, however, Bobby's tentmates ganged up on her, making merciless fun of the poor flustered child for striving to be teacher's pet. A recently diagnosed heart murmur, which precluded her participation in most group activities, compounded her agonies. Bobby was condemned to spend most of her time alone. Far too agitated to fall asleep at night

and plagued with a nervous cough throughout much of the summer, she often lay awake in her cot for hours on end, using a flashlight to read under the covers.

By contrast with the ineffably miserable Bobby, Bette spent her summer in ceaseless activity. Nonetheless, she found the time to read at least one novel at camp, Booth Tarkington's calf-love chronicle, Seventeen, The novel's evocation of''the painful age'' seemed to speak to Bette as no book had done before: ". . . these years know their own tragedies. It is the time of life when one finds it unendurable not to seem perfect in all outward matters; in worldly position, in the equipments of wealth, in family, and in grace, elegance, and dignity of all appearances in public."

Like a great many other young Americans before her, Bette was touched by the plight of the novel's hopelessly lovesick protagonist, Billy Baxter, whose agonies of self-consciousness are all the more painful because they occur at an age when "such things are not embarrassing; they are catastrophical."

By the time she returned to Newton, Bette had quite consciously reinvented herself in the image of another of Tarkington's characters: the coy object of Billy Baxter's delirious affections, the incorrigible flirt Lola Pratt. In the past, Bette had incarnated a variety of characters in Ruthie's fantasy photographs; but that fall of 1923, playing the school heartbreaker was her first full-blown dramatic role. Although she showed no interest in joining the Newton drama club, Bette indulged her taste for theatrics in her excruciatingly passionate, if basically innocent, relationships with boys.

"Believe me, there was no one sleeping together in those days!" says Miggie Fitts, who became Bette's best friend when Ruthie rented a new apartment on the top floor of a two-family house on Lewis Terrace, near the Fitts residence on Pembroke Street. "If you had a kiss, it was something. Different world!" Arm in arm, Bette and Miggie and perhaps one or two other girls would stroll the two miles home from school, almost always with a group of boys trailing behind. Ruthie declared her apartment boy-ridden, on account of all the lovesick young men who regularly swarmed there in pursuit of Bette. In Newton, where an individual was identified by who her family was, Harlow's mortifying absence had often caused Bette to agonize over her place in the world. That fall, her newfound role as class coquette seemed to accord her a satisfying status and identity she had previously lacked.

"All my memories are contained within," Bette would declare of the thick Victorian scrapbook she kept in this period. Up to this time, it had always fallen upon Ruthie to preserve and construct

family history in scrapbooks, diaries, and photographs, but suddenly, as reflected in Bette's private memory book, the fifteen-year-old perceived herself as embarking on a life distinct and apart from that of her mother and sister. Still, the fancies recorded here might be those of almost any girl her age enchanted by what Van Wyck Brooks has called "the glamour of youth": a lock of Miggie's brown hair, a scrap of gray chiffon from one of the gowns Ruthie sewed for Bette that year, a prized invitation to the (hitherto ofF-limits) home of Sister Koops in West Newton, and a Harvest Carnival dance card overflowing, as always, with boys' names.

To judge by his ubiquitous presence in Bette's memory book, her principal young man in this period was George J.''Gige'' Dunham, whom Ruthie had designated house favorite at Lewis Terrace. Son of the president and general manager of the Standard Steel Motor Car Company in Boston, the shy, well-mannered Gige Dunham charmed and delighted Bette with the adoring poems and love notes he regularly asked the other girls to pass on to her. "The boy poet"—as he fancied himself—had seen Bette for the first time the year before, at a lifesaving lecture at Newton High. Telling himself that "there never was such a girl," he could scarcely work up the courage to speak to Bette. Instead he promptly composed but dared not deliver a garland of whimsical verses for her, in which he proclaimed Bette his "special friend." Finally, that summer, he wrote to Bette at Camp Mudjekewis. It was Gige's good fortune that having just read Billy Baxter's love poetry in Seventeen, Bette was thrilled to have her own boy poet to suffer over her.

For all the gratifying attention she received from Gige and the other boys, Bette's memory book records the nagging fear that before the fall term was up, one absolutely crucial bit of affirmation would have eluded her: an invitation to join the select Sophomore Club, whose membership of fewer than thirty was limited to what she described as Newton's best families. According to Ellen Batch-elder, the school administration struggled unsuccessfully to abolish the Sophomore Club on the grounds that everyone was not welcome to join. The club's exclusivity was precisely its attraction to Bette, who worried endlessly that her "family situation" would keep her from being accepted. Not even Bette's election as vice-president of her Newton class that term seems to have meant as much to her as the tiny pink envelope that she and fifteen of her friends (including Ellen, Sister, and Faith) finally received late in October, welcoming them to what was widely regarded as the Newton "smart set."

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32 Barbara Learning

"This is the house where Bette lives," the boy poet declamied that spring of 1924. "These aie the care that come to the house where Bette lives. These are the boys that come in the cars that come to the house where Bette lives." It was no secret that poor Gige Dunham was in despair over the older, fester boys—seniors headed for Harvard, Yale, and other New England colleges^-with whom Bette had begun to keep company. Despite his father's position at the Standard Steel Motor Car Company, Gige was still without an automobile of his own. He could hardly compete with boys capable of driving off with Bette in the closed cars that were so radically altering die nature of the American date. That year, at least 43 percent of all cars manufactured in the United States were closed (by contrast with 10 percent in 1919): providing young couples with the sort of unsupervised mobile "room" that prompted one juvenile court judge of die era to proclaim the automobile a "house of prostitution on wheels."

"Bette dated more, certainly more than I was allowed to date," says Sister Koops. "But that is no reflection on Bette, because I wasn't allowed to go down to the corner."

Before long, Gige Dunham's distress about the bold new direction Bette's social life had begun to take came to be shared by Ruthie. Mrs. Davis confided to Miggie Fitts's mother her fears that things might be getting out of hand with her willful daughter. Much to Ruthie's chagrin, it was suddenly a question not of the sort of sweetly innocent flirtation described in Tarkington's Seventeen (and embodied by her daughter's blameless relations with Gige) but of that far more serious phenomenon which F. Scott Fitzgerald had taught America to call "petting." "None of the Victorian mothers—and most of the mothers were Victorian—had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed," Fitzgerald had written in This Side of Paradise (1920). In that book, the Tar-kington "flirt" metamorphosed into a "baby vamp," capable of saying (as Lola Pratt could never have done), "IVe kissed dozens of men. I suppose I'll kiss dozens more." As Ruthie was the first to admit, even if she prohibited her increasingly unbridled daughter from getting into cars with young men, since she was out working so much of the time she could hardly monitor all that went on in the apartment in her absence.

It seemed to Ruthie that with the close of the spring term at Newton High, her agonies over Bette's boy fever were about to come to an end. The anxious mother wasted no time removing Bette from Newton. Ruthie and the girls were to spend the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod, where they would live in the Winthrop Street parish house of H. M. Grant,

a Methodist student pastor. In Provincetown, Ruthie's hopes of removing Bette from temptation were quickly dashed. When Bette wasn't modeling for painters from the local arts colony, she carried on much as before, filling the parsonage with a succession of houseguests from Newton. Among these visitors were several of the older boys, whom Ruthie hesitated to banish lest her daughter cling to them all the more tightiy. When to Ruthie's great relief the gentlemanly Gige Dunham put in an appearance that July, Bette's attentions to a Harvard freshman named Jim Allen caused the boy poet to depart in a jealous pout. Taking great pleasure in the histrionics of it all, Bette made a great show of tearing up the heartsick letter Gige sent her from Newton. Then, on second thought, die carefully gathered the pieces in an envelope to preserve in her scrapbook.

Without friends—let alone boyfriends—of her own, Bette's sister, Bobby, spent much of the summer taking long solitary walks on the dunes. Now and then a kindly Portuguese fisherman took her fishing for the mackerel with whose red gills Provincetown ladies had once been said to trim their hats. After a particularly violent storm, Bobby was out "mooncussing," or beachcombing, when she plucked a shattered toy sailboat from die debris that had washed ashore. In the days that followed, the quiet, lonely child devoted herself to repairing die little boat, adding a new mast and cretonne sail of her own design. As usual, however, on launching day the honors fell to Bette. While Bobby watched from the beach, Bette set the sailboat adrift. It headed out to sea and was lost. Bobby screamed and screamed for her sister to swim after it, but Ruthie declared the tide far too dangerous.

Bette's turn to scream came soon afterward, when, in hopes of isolating her from eager male admirers, Ruthie announced plans to send both girls to a religious boarding school some one hundred miles west of Boston. By contrast with the dramatically posed and costumed female figure shown in the pictorialist camera portraits that cluttered the walls of their various apartments, the photograph Ruthie attached to Bette's application for admission to the North-field Seminary for Young Ladies envisioned her as the quintessence of Pre-Raphaelite feminine innocence: Bette Davis as Lewis Carroll might have photographed her.

Set among the woodland brooks of rural Northfield, Massachusetts, the seminary had been founded in 1879 by the evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody to educate the daughters of impoverished farmers, at a tuition roughly half that at other schools. Author of the popular book Heaven: Where It Is, Its Inhabitants, and How to

Get There, the Reverend Moody had begun to take a special interest in the plight of poor girls everywhere when, on his way to a revival meeting, he paused before a mountain shanty to observe two young daughters of a paralyzed father braiding palmetto straw hats for their scant living.

Bette was mortified at the prospect of being shipped off to a school whose connotations of poverty and neediness were precisely those she had struggled to transcend in the eyes of her Newton friends. How was she to tell Sister Koops or Miggie Fitts that, instead of parties and dances, this year would be devoted to prayer meetings and Bible study; or that, like all the other poor girls at Northfield Seminary, she would be expected to help with housework to defray expenses? Back in Newton, where Ruthie had rented yet another new flat, on Gray Birch Terrace, Bette cruelly accused her mother of wanting to punish and humiliate her for having attracted the sort of masculine attention that Ruthie craved for herself. In fact, Ruthie had been worried, justifiably perhaps, that as a divorcee's daughter, Bette was likely to be far more closely observed and commented upon than other girls in Newton. The anxious mother sincerely believed that it was better to send Bette away than risk the public outcry that seemed almost inevitable had she been allowed to remain and take up with the Newton boys as before.