Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming Read Free Book Online Page A

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