Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming

ask her to read for the part. A member of Yurka's company, Cecil Clovelly, had seen The Earth Between in the penultimate week of its run. Clovelly remembered Bette as one of Roshanara's Dancing Fairies in the Mariarden production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which he had performed the role of Flute. As chance would have it, Yurka had been doing Ibsen on Broadway and was about to go on tour, when Linda Watkins, the young actress who played Hedvig, announced that she planned to leave the company at the close of its Broadway run. Clovelly proposed Bette to Yurka, who summoned her to the Bijou Theatre on West Forty-fifth Street for an eleven o'clock audition the following morning, Saturday, March 23, 1929.
    "Now you must tell me what is the matter," implored Bette, essaying the role of Hedvig during her audition onstage at the Bijou. "Why won't Father have anything to do with me anymore?"
    "You mustn't ask that until you are a big girl and grown up," replied Clovelly, as Gregers Werle.
    "You are Hedvig!" Blanche Yurka shouted from the orchestra when Bette finished. She rushed onstage to offer Bette a contract to appear in the Actors' Theatre Inc.'s Ibsen program at a weekly salary of $75. Rehearsals were set to begin the following week in anticipation of Bette's taking over from Linda Watkins on April 3.
    By the time Bette returned from the audition to her dressing room downtown at the Provincetown Playhouse, where she was due to go on that night in the role of Floy Jennings, she felt as if she were about to be ill. Her queasiness was badly exacerbated when a stagehand delivered a note. The familiar handwriting would no doubt have loudly and instantly spoken to her even before she read the words. The note was from her father. Without warning, he had come to New York to see her play. He asked, in an awkward,

    strained manner, if he might see her after the show to congratulate her and take her to supper.
    What thoughts may have raced through Bette's mind as, already feverish and covered with a pink rash, she stepped out onstage that Saturday night we cannot know. The Provincetown Playhouse, a former stable, was extremely small, which makes it likely that at some point Bette would at least have caught a glimpse of Harlow in the audience, nervously wondering if his daughter would agree to dine with him. His hesitation, his fear of rejection, was obviously based on all the times when Bette recoiled from visits to a father whom she correctly perceived to have rejected her first.
    Although Harlow and Bette were alone together in her dressing room afterward, we may glean something of the tense, painful, largely unspoken back-and-forth that went on there from the evidence of a letter Harlow wrote to his daughter two days after his return to Boston. Known as a man who disclosed his feelings to few people, Harlow struggles, in his March 25, 1929, letter to say to Bette at least some of what had remained unsaid in die awkward, unsatisfying minutes they spent together. Besides telling her father that she wasn't up to dining with him, she seems scarcely to have talked about anything besides the impending Ibsen tour, while Harlow apparently praised every actor in the company but his own daughter. Monday morning, back at his desk at United Shoe Machinery, Harlow laments having seen her so briefly; her evident rush to get home on account of an illness he seems barely to believe in; his failure to ask her even half the questions he meant to, since, as he points out, he was counting on a long talk over supper. Lest Bette think that her father had merely dropped in at the theater that night because he happened to be in town on business, Harlow assures her that he came to New York solely to see her act. The man who once declared that she should become a secretary and give up all thought of a stage career reverses himself here. Harlow tells her how proud he is of her theatrical debut, how accomplished she seems, and (notwithstanding his failure to