Read Online Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming - Free Book Online
Authors: Barbara Leaming
Tags: United States, General, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Motion Picture Actors and Actresses, Acting & Auditioning, Biography & Autobiography / General, 1908-, Actors, American, Davis, Bette,, Biography/Autobiography
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self-confidence seemed to evaporate overnight. The boys whose affections she loved to toy with weren't supposed to reject her as Harlow had. It was almost with a sigh of relief that at Thanks-
giving break Bette contracted measles, which would keep her out of school for the rest of the term.
Things were scarcely any better for her in Newton. Bette's girlfriends there were all excitedly planning for college. Sister Koops would soon be going off to Skidmore and Miggie Fitts to Mount Holyoke. College, however, was a possibility that even the self-sacrificing Ruthie could hardly consider for Bette on her erratic earnings as a photographer and the $200 monthly alimony she continued to receive from Harlow. More than ever, as Bette made the rounds of Christmas parties in Newton, including a dance at the Neighborhood Club given by Sister Koops and her older sister Doris, she lamented a fate that had robbed her of all she would have possessed had Ruthie not been so foolish as to lose Harlow to another woman.
It was in this frame of mind that, on January 5, 1926 (six days after Sister Koops's party), Bette accompanied Ruthie to the Blanche Yurka production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck at the Repertory Theatre of Boston: an experience she would later credit with having inspired her to become an actress. In The Lonely Life, Davis recalls the powerful identification she felt with the English actress Peg Entwistle in the role of Hedvig. "I was watching myself," Davis would write. "There wasn't an emotion I didn't anticipate or share with her.'' But beyond saying that she was ' 'thrilled'' by Entwistle's performance, Bette offers no clue to precisely what it was in The Wild Duck that stirred her. More useftil is the theater program she preserved from that momentous day. Even before the curtain went up, if Bette read George Bernard Shaw's "Analysis of the Play," Shaw's references to the Ekdal family—to the mother Gina's "photographic work," the father Hjalmar's feelings of intellectual superiority to his wife and his subsequent abandonment of her and their teenage daughter, Hedvig—can only have struck a strange and disturbing chord. Whether Bette read the Shaw text in her program we cannot know; but knowing what we do of her life to this point, it is possible to imagine the powerful sense of recognition she must have felt when the curtain went up on a set littered with Gina's photographic equipment and camera portraits. In eerie resemblance to Ruthie Davis, Ibsen's Gina Ekdal has studied photography and earns her scant living as a photo retoucher. Like Harlow Davis, Hjalmar Ekdal was once (as another character says) "accepted amongst his fellow students as the great light of the future." Hjalmar's disdain for what he perceives as Gina's dull-wittedness and vulgarity exactly parallels the dynamics between Harlow and Ruthie, whose "inability to share his intellectual life became a
source of irritation' '—as Bette recalls in her memoir, careful to add that she can "understand" her father's impatience with Ruthie's "lesser gifts." Also as in Bette's experience, while the father in Ibsen's 1884 play is presumed to be the superior partner, it is the mother whose labors in the photography studio provide the money on which she and her daughter must live.
More and more as she grew older, Bette would consciously prefer to identify with Harlow. She would openly share his "irritation," even "contempt," for Ruthie, especially in those periods when Bette most intensely blamed her mother for having abdicated the comforts and position life with Harlow would have offered. Feeling, as she did that winter of 1926, the vexing precariousness of her circumstances in contrast to Newton friends like Sister Koops (whose adoring father, a well-to-do widower, provided all that Bette might have had from Harlow), Bette can only have experienced a pang when in The Wild Duck Hjalmar promises his daughter: "Hedvig, I am determined to make your future safe.
giving break Bette contracted measles, which would keep her out of school for the rest of the term.
Things were scarcely any better for her in Newton. Bette's girlfriends there were all excitedly planning for college. Sister Koops would soon be going off to Skidmore and Miggie Fitts to Mount Holyoke. College, however, was a possibility that even the self-sacrificing Ruthie could hardly consider for Bette on her erratic earnings as a photographer and the $200 monthly alimony she continued to receive from Harlow. More than ever, as Bette made the rounds of Christmas parties in Newton, including a dance at the Neighborhood Club given by Sister Koops and her older sister Doris, she lamented a fate that had robbed her of all she would have possessed had Ruthie not been so foolish as to lose Harlow to another woman.
It was in this frame of mind that, on January 5, 1926 (six days after Sister Koops's party), Bette accompanied Ruthie to the Blanche Yurka production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck at the Repertory Theatre of Boston: an experience she would later credit with having inspired her to become an actress. In The Lonely Life, Davis recalls the powerful identification she felt with the English actress Peg Entwistle in the role of Hedvig. "I was watching myself," Davis would write. "There wasn't an emotion I didn't anticipate or share with her.'' But beyond saying that she was ' 'thrilled'' by Entwistle's performance, Bette offers no clue to precisely what it was in The Wild Duck that stirred her. More useftil is the theater program she preserved from that momentous day. Even before the curtain went up, if Bette read George Bernard Shaw's "Analysis of the Play," Shaw's references to the Ekdal family—to the mother Gina's "photographic work," the father Hjalmar's feelings of intellectual superiority to his wife and his subsequent abandonment of her and their teenage daughter, Hedvig—can only have struck a strange and disturbing chord. Whether Bette read the Shaw text in her program we cannot know; but knowing what we do of her life to this point, it is possible to imagine the powerful sense of recognition she must have felt when the curtain went up on a set littered with Gina's photographic equipment and camera portraits. In eerie resemblance to Ruthie Davis, Ibsen's Gina Ekdal has studied photography and earns her scant living as a photo retoucher. Like Harlow Davis, Hjalmar Ekdal was once (as another character says) "accepted amongst his fellow students as the great light of the future." Hjalmar's disdain for what he perceives as Gina's dull-wittedness and vulgarity exactly parallels the dynamics between Harlow and Ruthie, whose "inability to share his intellectual life became a
source of irritation' '—as Bette recalls in her memoir, careful to add that she can "understand" her father's impatience with Ruthie's "lesser gifts." Also as in Bette's experience, while the father in Ibsen's 1884 play is presumed to be the superior partner, it is the mother whose labors in the photography studio provide the money on which she and her daughter must live.
More and more as she grew older, Bette would consciously prefer to identify with Harlow. She would openly share his "irritation," even "contempt," for Ruthie, especially in those periods when Bette most intensely blamed her mother for having abdicated the comforts and position life with Harlow would have offered. Feeling, as she did that winter of 1926, the vexing precariousness of her circumstances in contrast to Newton friends like Sister Koops (whose adoring father, a well-to-do widower, provided all that Bette might have had from Harlow), Bette can only have experienced a pang when in The Wild Duck Hjalmar promises his daughter: "Hedvig, I am determined to make your future safe.
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