Free Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming Page A

Bette's painful sense of alienation from the Newton ghis and the directions their lives had taken drew her all the closer to Robin, who shared her lack of money. Raised in West Virginia by the widowed mother of six children, Robin was a scholarship student at Hood College in Maryland. She and five other Hood giris had taken summer jobs as waitresses in the brown-shingled old Spar-hawk Hotel overlooking the ocean in Ogunquit, where Bette had already made quite a sensation that summer as the only girl to take and pass the lifeguard's test.
    At the end of August, when there was still no concrete plan for launching Bette's career, Ruthie proposed that they move back to Newton. If Bobby went to public school instead of returning to Cushing, perhaps they could save enough money to make the big move to New York die following year. At Thanksgiving, when Robin came to stay with them briefly on Cabot Street, Bette seemed lonely and depressed. Her old Newton friends seemed to have dispersed. When a friend of Ruthie's arranged for Bette to pose for a wealthy Boston sculptress, Bette leapt at the opportunity. The artist promised to send a limousine for her, and Bette hoped that if their neighbors saw her being whisked away by a chauffeur, they would think that Bette Davis had gone on to better things.
    At Ruthie's suggestion, Robin met them in Ogunquit the following summer of 1927. They all shared a rustic cottage, while Robin and Bette worked two or three hours every afternoon at what Robin described as "a cinch job," serving tea and cinnamon toast on the porch of Mrs. Johnson's Tea Room. Shortly before leaving Newton, Ruthie had appealed to Hariow to provide the additional ftmds necessary to send Bette to drama school that fell. As might have been expected, he angrily refused on the grounds that Ruthie would do their daughter a far greater service by encouraging her to marry as soon as a suitable husband could be found. This, of course, Ruthie could not accept. As a woman who strongly perceived her ambitions to have been defeated in marriage, she was hardly about to urge the same fate upon her nineteen-year-old daughter. Ruthie's motives were not entirely selfless, however. In Bette's artistic fulfillment Ruthie clearly sought recompense for her own bitterly unrealized dreams.
    That summer in Ogunquit, even as Ruthie pored over advertisements and brochures for drama schools in hopes of finding one where Bette might obtain a scholarship, her elder daughter was quietly falling in love with a dashing Yale man—precisely the sort of fellow Harlow had in mind. Every afternoon, when Bette fin-

    ished her chores at Mrs. Johnson's sedate establishment on the Marginal Way, Francis Lewis "Fritz" Hall, of Portland, Maine, would roar up on the motorcycle Bette called "the two-wheeled devil" to take her home. It seemed to Bette that in his rakish leather helmet, Fritz bore a remarkable resemblance to Charles Lindbergh. The aviator's solo flight between New York and Paris that May had made him something of an American Galahad, which accounts for the incongruous picture of "Lucky Lindy" that Bette pasted in her scrapbook amid the numerous photographs Ruthie took of Fritz in Ogunquit.
    For much of the summer, it had hardly occurred to Mrs. Davis that Bette's romantic relationship with Fritz was considerably more serious than her prior attachments. Even when Bette and Fritz formed what they playfully called a "summer family" with a German shepherd puppy whom Bette named Eli (after Fritz and his fellow Yale boys, or "Elis"), Ruthie saw no cause for alarm. Then, one afternoon in August, Bette arrived home from Mrs. Johnson's with the news that Fritz had asked her to be his wife.
    Ruthie appeared to be in shock as Bette reported Fritz's insistence that the time had come for her to choose between marriage and a stage career. In Fritz Hall's old-fashioned view, a woman could not possibly have both. By abandoning her theatrical ambitions, Bette would prove