Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming Read Free Book Online

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