Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming Read Free Book Online Page B

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