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Spunk, a capacity, if not a liking, for hard & thankless jobs, a willingness to play roles that would send most Hollywood beauties protesting to their agents, have given Bette Davis her present eminence. "I'm no Pollyanna," she says truthfully, "I like to play gutty girls and attractive wenches." There was a time, however, when she wanted to play Alice in Wonderland. "I'd be wonderful," said she, "with my popeyes and long neck."
In her often-told life story, biographers have enjoyed tracing her flair for the theatrical back to the Lowell, Mass, child who at four snipped off her younger sister Barbara's pretty curls; who at eight hated dolls, romped naked in snowdrifts; who at ten, terribly burned in a Christmas tree blaze, played blind for the exquisite drama of the moment.
Her name, Bette (pronounced Betty), was a custom-made diminutive of Elizabeth. Her full name is Ruth Elizabeth, after her mother, Ruth Elizabeth Favor Davis. When Bette was eight her parents were divorced.* Thereafter Bette & Barbara lived with Mrs. Davis, known affectionately as Ruthie.
In 1927, a year after she was graduated from Gushing Academy, Ashburnham, Mass., Bette, then 19, went to Manhattan, had her discomfiting brush with Le Gallienne, later enrolled in John Murray Anderson's dramatic school. When a chance came to play in George Cukor's stock production of Broadway in Rochester, Ruthie sent her off with a blessing and the admonition to learn both her own part and that of the leading lady, because "the lead is going to break her leg."
When on the opening night the lead, Rose Lerner, tumbled down the spiral staircase backstage and sprained an ankle, Bette was less surprised at the accident than horrified at her mother's long-range powers. Later she joined the Provincetown Players, hit Broadway's fringe in The Earth Between, had an engagement (complicated by belated measles) with Blanche Yurka's troupe in The Wild Duck, a summer at the Cape Playhouse, and Broadway successes in Broken Dishes with Donald Meek, The Solid South with Richard Bennett. Two screen tests resulted, and in December 1930, Bette, Ruthie and their terrier dog went to Hollywood.
When nobody met them at the train, it was because Universal's emissary had not spotted any passenger who looked like an arriving movie actress. A year later, Bette's contract was not renewed and she was ready to leave town. But George Arliss, about to make The Man Who Played God for Warner Brothers, wanted a dignified young actress with whom it might not seem infra dig for him to fall in love.
On the strength of her performance in The Man Who Played God, Warners signed her to an eleven-year contract. Her hair rinsed to an ash blonde from its natural medium shade, she set out to try to justify for Warners the glamorous canard that she was "a schoolgirl Constance Bennett." It was not until Cabin in the Cotton (TIME, Oct. 10, 1932), with Richard Barthelmess, that she got a chance to develop her stripe of cinemeanness. Two years later RKO borrowed her for the role of hateful, shrewish, supremely selfish Mildred in W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (TIME, July 9, 1934). Said Bette when she saw the film for the first time: "I didn't believe I could act so—so nastily."