Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming Page A

contribute money for tuition when she needed it—obviously a major sore point with Bette) how expertly taught she evidently had been at the John Murray Anderson-Robert Milton School. Only for a moment, toward the end of the letter, does a harsher voice seem about to erupt, when, perhaps thinking of the nervous breakdown that once sent Ruthie to a sanitarium, Harlow suddenly warns Bette that if she fails to take care of herself now, she may crack up.

    would only have intensified her psychic identification with Ibsen's Hedvig, who suffers from serious eye trouble. (Had Bette's extreme sympathy with the character gone so far as to make her virtually unable to read in the first place?) For all the personal reverberations Bette discovered in The Wild Duck, there is no evidence in anything Ruthie said or wrote to suggest that she recognized any of her own similarities to Hedvig's mother, Gina Ekdal. By the time Bette and Ruthie were finished with their ten days of rehearsal, however, as far as Bette was concerned Ruthie certainly had taken on important aspects of Gina's nature. On the eve of the all-important rehearsal with Yurka, Ruthie set the alarm clock for 7:00 A.M. That would give them more than two hours before Bette was due uptown. Unfortunately, Mrs. Davis neglected to wind the clock. They worked on Bette's lines long past midnight, and neither mother nor daughter awakened in the perpetually dark apartment until nine-thirty the following morning. What ensued then was the sort of shrieking and vituperation witnesses would often observe between Bette and Ruthie in years to come. While Ruthie searched frantically for a cab at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, Bette seems suddenly to have bitten her mother's shoulder, actually ripping through Ruthie's woolen dress with her teeth.
    When the pair finally arrived at the Bijou Theatre, Cecil Clovelly was decidedly cool to them. "Why not think up a new one?" Clovelly snapped at Ruthie as she struggled to excuse their lateness with the story of the unwound alarm clock. Still weak from her illness and ten days with scarcely anything to eat, Bette let loose a barrage of invective at her mother. She ended with a loud command to get out and leave her alone. Yurka was intrigued and fascinated by this unexpected display of violent emotion—a display rendered all the more notable by its incongruity with Bette's extreme fragility and sickly pallor. While Yurka can hardly have imagined the source of all this pent-up resentment against Ruthie, she was nonetheless immediately aware that it could be put to splendid use onstage. Later, Yurka would remember this strange outburst as she encouraged Bette merely "to let herself go" in the scene in The Wild Duck where Hedvig breaks down because her father has abandoned her: a scene for which Yurka declared Bette would obviously need no rehearsal.
    Ejecting her mother from the theater had been a major turning point for Bette. She had always privately blamed Ruthie for the loss of Harlow, and now she blamed her anew for the near sabotage of her long-awaited chance to speak to him through the character of Hedvig.

    Anyone who doubts the immense personal significance that Bette's role in The Wild Duck held for both her and her father need only consult their uncharacteristically emotional correspondence on the subject that April of 1929, shortly after Bette turned twenty-one. For her birthday on April 5, Harlow had sent her an expensive suitcase to take on the forthcoming theatrical tour. The gift had mingled associations for both of them, since it came from a parent who had cruelly and unnecessarily allowed his daughter to travel about in poverty for much of her life. Having finally signed her contract with Blanche Yurka the day before, Bette would write to Harlow on her birthday to thank him for the luggage and to crow over her opening in The Wild Duck, scheduled for three days thence at the Boulevard Theatre in nearby Jackson Heights.