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You shall live in comfort all your life." Almost certainly, however, the section of the play that would have spoken most directly to Bette was what Blanche Yurka (who portrayed Gina) described as "the big emotional scene where Hedvig weeps hysterically over her father's leaving her," as performed by the seventeen-year-old Peg Entwistie. "My heart almost stopped," Davis would write. "She looked just like me." If, by her own account, Bette anticipated and shared the character's every onstage emotion, it was because in Hedvig's screams as she clings to the departing Hjalmar—"Father! Father! No, no! Don't turn away from me. No, no—he will never come back anymore. Mother, you must get him home again! Why won't Father have anything to do with me anymore?"—Bette heard the cries of anguish she had felt, but for fear of seeming weak dared never express, over Harlow's repudiation.
    Since the moment in 1918 when Ruthie declared that Harlow had left them for good, Bette had struggled to conceal her tempestuous feelings about her father behind the mask of indifference she had copied from him. Peg Entwistle's Hedvig suggested a new possibility, a new mask: speaking those very emotions at long last without the danger of having them attributed to oneself. And so it was that when the curtain fell on Act Five of The Wild Duck, Bette turned to Ruthie and solemnly announced, "Mother, if I can live to play Hedvig, I shall die happy!"
    The doodles in Bette's class notes at Cushing Academy during the spring term of 1926 suggest that the prospect of pursuing a theat-

    ileal career after graduation was suddenly much in her thoughts. In the upper-right-hand corner of a piece of lined notebook paper Bette has sketched a theater marquee:
    ZIEGFELD THEATRE
    STARRING
    BETTE DAVIS
    In the lower-left-hand corner one discovers Bette's childish rendering of a chauffeur-driven limousine, with a stick-figure version of herself in the back seat, captioned:
    A CERTAIN NEW BROADWAY STAR AND HER NEW ROLLS
    Other significant fancies surface here as well, such as the Skid-more banner that Bette idly sketches, with reference to the college Sister Koops will be attending. In contrast to the theater marquee, the college banner represents what might have been in Bette's life: the road she probably would have taken had her parents remained married. If, of all the Newton girls, it is Sister Koops (certainly never her closest friend there) about whom Bette has chosen to daydream, it may be because, like Bette, she came from a single-parent home—except that to Bette's way of thinking, Sister had the correct parent, the father. Harlow was scarcely aware of his daughter's day-to-day life, but Sister's father showered her with attention that included the careful monitoring of her every activity, especially where boys were concerned. Which may be why, although one might not notice it at first, when Bette prints Sister Koops's given name near the Skidmore banner, she does it this way: "virgin/ ia?"
    That term Bette landed the starring role of Lola Pratt in a student production based on her favorite novel, Tarkington's Seventeen. If there was any part the aspiring actress was particularly well suited to play, this was it. In the course of work on the production, Bette surprised classmates by embarking on a romance with Harmon Oscar Nelson, Jr., or "Ham," as everyone called this shy, lank-limbed, Ichabod Crane sort of fellow. Ham had been cast as one of Lola's suitors. Unaccustomed to being pursued by girls, Ham was hardly the glamorous figure at Cushing that Blake had been, but therein lay his appeal to Bette, who continued to feel upset and embarrassed by Blake's defection. She feared being rejected all over again should she take up with one of the fester, more popular

    boys. Intent on having a steady boyfriend during her senior year, no matter who he might be, she invented the unlikely, unthreaten-ing Ham Nelson in the role. Ham's childish notes to Bette from this