Bette Davis by Barbara Leaming Page B

After that, the troupe would go on to Philadelphia and Washington and then Boston, where Bette expresses the wish that she will see her father again.

Although Bette certainly mentioned the Ibsen plays during Harlow's visit to her dressing room on March 23, until this point he had expressed no special interest or alarm with regard to The Wild Duck. Now suddenly, on April 8—the very day that Bette had informed him she will be opening in the play—from his office in Boston, Harlow writes a letter whose barely suppressed frenzy about whether or not she has been cast as Hedvig suggests that in the interim he has read and been profoundly disturbed by the play that first caused his daughter to want to become an actress. All too obviously, he, like Bette, has instantly grasped the story's personal implications.
    IWice in the course of five sentences, he begs her to tell him if she is indeed to play Hedvig. The repetition suggests Harlow's desperate need to find out whether his worst fear can be true: a need he struggles to conceal by transparently pretending to be interested in her other roles as well. Having written that he is especially anxious to know if she is to play Hedvig, on second thought he scratches out "if," replaces it with "whether," then adds "or Gina" to the end of the sentence. Ineluctably drawn to Hedvig's name when he goes over the sentence yet again, Harlow marks an "X" above it. The mark directs Bette to a scribbled footnote to the effect that, while he assumes that she has been cast as Hedvig, the part seems too wonderful for a newcomer (almost as if he is hoping against hope that somehow this may not be her role). Harlow is so anxious to get Bette's answer right away that, as he informs her, he has attached a stamped self-addressed envelope—something he has certainly never done before. Bette needn't even find a separate piece

    of paper for her reply; Harlow has written his questions at the bottom of the page, with plenty of room left for her answers. Needless to say, his first query is about Bette's part in The Wild Duck; next he inquires about her roles in The Lady from the Sea and Hedda Gabler. That the first play is all that he really has in mind is suggested by his erratically, unconsciously altering his numbering system after referring to it. Thus, after a general heading asking her to identify her roles in the plays that follow, he writes ' '(a) Wild Duck,'' then suddenly ' '(2) Lady from the Sea (3) Hedda Gabler.'' And that Bette knows perfectly well what is principal in Harlow's thoughts is suggested by her boldly underscoring the name "Hedvig" when she writes it beside her father's entry for The Wild Duck— something she does not do for her roles in the other plays. Next, in a note to her father at the bottom of the page, Bette does something that she almost never did with anyone about any part she played; she enters into a heartfelt discussion of the rede of Hedvig, why it appeals to her and what satisfaction she gets from playing it. After praying that she will come to Boston so that Harlow may see her do Hedvig onstage, Bette focuses on the immense pleasure she derives from making everyone in the audience weep at her performance of the hysterical scene when Hjalmar walks out on her. Freely taunting Harlow with emotions that have long been pent up within her, Bette goes on to say that she doesn't blame people for weeping over poor, abandoned Hedvig, whose cruel mistreatment has caused her to suffer so.
    "Even I was not prepared for the torrent of emotional intensity which racked that frail body as she lay face downward on the sofa, crying her heart out,'' Blanche Yurka would say of Bette's opening-night performance in The Wild Duck, on April 8, 1929.
    In Bette's Modern Library edition of the play, one discovers that she has underscored the stage direction indicating the loudness of her screams when she pleads with Hjalmar not to leave. She has scratched out the line "I think this will kill