Free Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming Page B

that she loved him all the more. In response to all this, Ruthie suddenly declared that Bette would have to think over Fritz's proposal at drama school. Mrs. Davis had located a scholarship at long last. She and Bette would be leaving immediately for New York. Bobby was hastily sent to live in Newton with Ruthie's sister.

    dicate that Bette never even got to see the actress. It was Le Gallienne's secretary who promptly dismissed Bette after a brief, unpleasant exchange. When the secretary routinely asked Bette what she had read and how she had prepared to become an actress, Bette shrugged her shoulder and snapped that that was precisely what she was here to do: prepare. Bette's sharp tongue and presumptuous manner seemed perfectly normal to Ruthie; even in later years, the doting mother never really understood why Le Gallienne's secretary so swiftly sent them back to suburban New Rochelle, New York, where they had moved in temporarily with Ruthie's brother, the Reverend Paul Favor, on Westminster Court.
    Ruthie had one other name on the list she had prepared in Ogun-quit: the John Murray Anderson-Robert Milton School of Theatre and Dance, on East Fifty-eighth Street off Park Avenue. The school's dean was Arthur Hornblow, the distinguished editor and principal drama critic of Theatre magazine. The next day, Ruthie and Bette applied there, only to discover that in order to be eligible for a scholarship in the spring, Bette would have to enroll that fell at the standard five-hundred-dollar tuition. The sum was well beyond Ruthie's means. And as the Reverend Favor pointed out that night in New Rochelle, there was no guarantee that Bette would be awarded a scholarship for her second term.
    Unwilling to return in defeat to Newton (where her sister, Mildred, had already been paid five dollars for Bobby's expenses that month), Ruthie secured temporary work as a photo retoucher in Norwalk, Connecticut, through a classified advertisement in the New York Times. Soon Bette was devoting hours each day to fren-ziedly scrubbing every inch of the tiny furnished room they had rented. The lonely, disappointed girl was repeatedly observed muttering aloud to herself on the streets of Norwalk as she carried on angry conversations with those whom she imagined to have thwarted her in New York.
    Bette's sole consolation that September and eariy October was the proximity of her fiance, Fritz Hall, in New Haven. Fritz visited as often as he could and struggled endlessly to persuade Bette to give up what he called her "crazy idea" of becoming an actress. According to Robin Brown, Fritz was not alone in his objections to Bette's career. His wealthy family was adamant that Fritz's bride must abandon all thoughts of the stage.
    This time Ruthie did not make the same mistake she had made in Ogunquit, where she seriously misjudged the threat Fritz posed to her long-range plans for her daughter. In mid-October, when Bette gave every sign of preparing to accept Fritz's marriage pro-

    posal with all its conditions, Ruthie quietly slipped into New York to work out a deal with the John Murray Anderson-Robert Milton School. Classes had already been under way for three weeks. The contract Ruthie negotiated at the last minute shows that she persuaded the school to cut its tuition to $340, which she agreed to pay in three installments. On October 24, 1927, Bette excitedly moved into the school dormitory on East Fifty-eighth Street, while Ruthie repaired to Burlington, New Jersey, where she had secured low-paying but steady employment as a housemother at St. Mary's School. It hardly mattered to Ruthie that this was precisely the sort of unsatisfying work she had done years earlier, before training in photography at the Clarence White School. Bette's career was all that counted now.
    "Remember that voice a month ago? Well, listen to it now!" the school's director, stage designer and impresario John Murray Anderson, said of Bette late in November of 1927. He had