Free Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming

could think of for the moment was the appalling impression her mother would make on the Nelsons.
    When Bette hesitantly presented her mother to the Nelsons at the Glee Club recital, they were charmed by Mrs. Davis, whose single-minded devotion to Bette they much admired. Ham apparently had told them about the deluxe engraved calling cards Ruthie had had printed for Bette's final year at Cushing and the array of party dresses she had made by hand for various senior dances and social occasions. Ruthie announced to Mr. and Mrs. Nelson that after paying off both daughters' tuition, she had even had a bit of money to spare from the photographic fees she had collected that afternoon. Hearing this, Bette went to work on her mother for one last necessity for the senior dance on Monday: a white satin evening coat like the one she had borrowed from a classmate earlier that spring to attend a campus party with Ham. For the rest of the evening, nothing could divert Bette from the subject. When no promise was forthcoming from Ruthie, her daughter suddenly announced plans for them to drive to the town of Fitchburg the next day for lunch.
    A glance at the Cushing schedule for Saturday indicated a full

    day of activity for Bette: chapel in the morning, a baseball game that afternoon, and later that evening the senior play, in which Bette was set to appear. Still, the next morning Ruthie did as her daughter insisted. They drove to Fitchburg, where Bette dragged her immediately into a clothing store. As Ruthie might have expected it would be, a white satin coat was on prominent display. Mrs. Davis protested that the tiny sum left over from the portrait fees was hardly enough to pay for such an extravagance. Her daughter, whose self-centeredness she had nurtured and encouraged through the years, angrily refused to leave the shop until Ruthie, worn out and embarrassed, relented.
    Bette received her Cushing diploma Monday afternoon, and that evening at eight she was wearing the white satin coat when Ham picked her up for the senior dance. At the dance, precisely as Bette had envisioned, she and her beau were widely regarded as the class of 1926's premier couple-—or so Bette noted afterward when she pasted a satin swatch from the coat into her memory book as emblem of the evening's triumph.
    After graduation, in open defiance of Harlow's wishes, Ruthie and Bette repaired to a one-room fisherman's shack at Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, Maine, to plan Bette's next moves in pursuit of a theatrical career. Back in Boston, the exasperated Harlow secredy drew up a new will, which left his entire estate to his second wife, Minnie, adding: "This I do to the absolute exclusion of my children, Ruth Elizabeth Davis and Barbara Harriet Davis."
    Even as she was being excluded from her father's will, presumably on Bette's account, Bobby had been shut out of the cedar shack in Ogunquit. Ruthie declared it far too small for the three of them. Determined that Bette must have a restful summer at the shore before embarking on her stage career, Ruthie sent Bobby to work cleaning and fetching in a friend's lakefront house, where as many as fourteen guests were known to spend the weekend. The lonely child cried for days at a time when her employers scolded her for clumsiness. Finally, Bobby broke down under the strain and was shipped to Ogunquit. Bobby can only have been startled to discover that her mother had invited Bette's new best friend—whom Ruthie had taken to calling "my Southern daughter"—to live with them.
    Although eighteen-year-old Robin Brown (then known as Marie Simpson) had turned down Ruthie's offer to move in, she was a frequent visitor to the fisherman's shack at Perkins Cove, where she and Bette (to whom she bore a marked physical resemblance) shared their dreams of a stage career. The absolute certainty with which Robin spoke about becoming an actress transformed Bette's

    hitherto vague fantasies into something almost palpable, almost real.