I have always been driven by some distant music—a battle hymn no doubt—for I have been at war from the beginning. I rode into the field with sword gleaming and standard flying. I was going to conquer the world.
When the war was won, I knew the triumph of standing victorious over my own dead body, for there among the vanquished, I found a woman lying at my feet. A gold band and a silver thimble on her left hand. Against my full regalia, she had been defenseless.
With my passion for order, I tidied up the battlefield and buried her with full military honors. I even wrote her epitaph. It is the most honorable I know. HERE LIES RUTH ELIZABETH DAVIS…1908–1961…SHE DID IT THE HARD WAY.
I’ve never looked back before. I’ve never had the time and it has always seemed so dangerous. To look back is to relax one’s vigil.
Any vogue has always bored me. I find no exception in the now stylish trip to the inner world of the psyche where Mama and Papa are the villains of one’s life. I could never afford this kind of vacation into self-pity and the transference of one’s mistakes to another. This is Pass-the-Buck-Land and it is a desert.
As I piece things together and see my life up to now, I refuse to yield to that vogue. Whatever I did, I did. My mistakes are mine. I, alone, am responsible.
If you hate your parents for willing you buck teeth, have them fixed or become a comic—only keep quiet about it.
My father’s cavalier disappearance from our home when I was a small child certainly has significance. Consider my quartette of marriages. But his hypothetical perfection as a father might have bound me to him and spoiled other men for me.
I only know that when Mother told me that Father was gone, I said, “Now we can go on a picnic and have a baby.”
But why waste time hating your father when he had a father who had a father? The die was cast when Daddy left us. My sister Bobby’s world went up in smoke. Mine shifted on its axis. It’s as simple as that.
At thirty I learned what it means to be responsible for the outcome of the show. You must set the tempo, chart the course. You are a star.
If you aim high, the pygmies will jump on your back and tug at your skirts. The people who call you a driving female will come along for the ride. If they weigh you down, you will fight them off. It is then that you are called a bitch.
I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn’t dare to make an enemy should get out of the business. I worked for my career and I’ll protect it as I would my children—every inch of the way. I do not regret the dust I’ve kicked up. I always fought people my own size and more often than not they were bigger.
My father is not the star of my drama—nor my mother, my sister, those brothers Warner or my husbands four. They helped and they hindered, but the spark that was Bette Davis was there from the beginning. It emerged in Lowell, Massachusetts, during a thunderstorm. It is true that the spark was fanned by events into something else—but it could never have been snuffed out.
How strange it is, writing this book and going back. Rushing past a cavalcade of Bettes, each younger, each surer of herself, each purer…simpler…a mist of blond puritanism…smaller…shyer…tinier.
It was true about the thunderstorm. Ruthie said the gods were going mad and the earth was holding its head in a panic. The offstage noises were deafening. Thank God, I didn’t have a line at my entrance.
I happened between a clap of thunder and a streak of lightning. It almost hit the house and destroyed a tree out front. As a child I fancied that the Finger of God was directing the attention of the world to me. Further and divine proof—from the stump of that tree—that one should never point.
My Episcopal Minister Uncle Paul detected a note of blasphemy in this conceit and my Baptist grandfather took to his bed; but I was undisturbed by the unanimous rejection of my fantasy. I always felt special—part of a wonderful secret. I was always going to be somebody. I didn’t know exactly what at first—perhaps the beautiful nurse in the Red Cross posters immaculately extending her hand of mercy to the world—but when my dream became clear, I followed it.
A woman has to fly high and fight to reach the top. She tires and needs a resting place. She should travel light—unburdened—but I’ve always done things the hard way. If I fell in love, I married. Had I been a European, I would have managed things differently. The deflowering of New England was unthinkable to this passionate Pilgrim.
I wanted to be married. I wanted a home. Ruthie, Bobby and I hadn’t had one since I was seven years old. We were on the move for years—gypsies. Small wonder that when I could, I acquired houses as other women acquire jewels.
A nest was always being improvised. My dressing rooms in the theatre were immediately decorated. Pictures were hung and familiar sentimental objects were strewn about to give an air of continuity. My bungalow at Warners was a mansion. It had everything but a ghost and a six-hundred-year-old lawn.
Even on one-night stands, the pattern remains unchanged. Bits of fabric that “may brighten the place up”…dog-eared volumes I couldn’t possibly have time to read again…choice pieces of china and brass which only crowd the tiny rooms. Favorite cigarette boxes and ashtrays have followed me around the world. I am a nester—and I’ve always found myself out on a limb.
It all started when I was told that I had a gift. The gods are Yankee traders. There are no gifts. Everything has a price, and in bitter moments I have been tempted to cry “Usury!”
It is true that I have lived with nerves exposed. My pulse has raced in endless crisis. My gullibility has begged for treachery. But there is the positive side to the story. I have also marveled at life and exulted in struggle. I have never lost my initial wonder. To be aware that you’re part of the flow—part of the whole miracle—is overwhelming.
Obviously, I have lived in a permanent state of rapture. I was never able to share it with a mate. It exhausted them. I evidently drove them mad; but I was as helpless as they. Once you’ve heard the sound of that distant music, you’re deaf to everything else.
The Yankee in me is still appalled by my repeated attempts at marriage. Knowing that I failed at the impossible doesn’t help. My mistake was the repeated trying.
What can you do when newspapers call your husband “Mr. Davis”? How helpless and yielding can a woman be when her weekly salary exceeds his annual income? What Mrs. could I have been to avoid this?
It is true that I never should have married, but I didn’t want to live without a man. Brought up to respect the conventions, love had to end in marriage. I’m afraid it did.
Morality to me is honesty, integrity, character. Old-fashioned words straight from Emerson, Thoreau, my grandmother. There are new words now that excuse everyone. Give me the good old days of heroes and villains. The people you can bravo or hiss. There was a truth to them that all the slick credulity of today cannot touch. People love their mavericks in the grand manner. The blacks and the whites. How wonderful it would be to know again where we stand and which side we’re on.
The cornerstone of my career in films was the power for action with which all women identified. When I portrayed evil on the screen, the women of the world were purged of suppressed violence and sheer boredom. In Spain, I’ve always been known as La Lupe, the she-wolf. Evidently, I rivaled bullfighting as the national cathartic.
The newspapers of the Middle West voted me the Queen of films. I had the strangest consorts. One year, Mickey Rooney shared my throne. Immensely talented as he is, we were a strange couple. But my morganatic marriages were no less odd. Elizabeth Tudor was right. She ruled alone.
I’m afraid I am a Queen—with all the prerogatives of that station. All except one. With it, heads would have rolled.
It is fortunate for some that the laws of our land stayed my hand. Yes! A Queen I was. Ask any of my husbands. There wasn’t one who didn’t end up calling me one. Or was it Queenie? I’m not quite sure.
I suppose I’m larger than life. That’s my problem. Created in a fury, I’m at home in a tempest.
When I opened on Broadway in The World of Carl Sandburg, Walter Kerr asked when “someone would write Davis a piece of beefsteak she can dig her teeth into.” If no one ever had, I would always have managed to cook up something. At least three men would happily testify that I am difficult to live with. But the Four Horsemen didn’t kill me. I’m too ornery to die.
If I have survived the last ten years, I can survive anything. Mother Goddam—that’s me. I had the book thrown at me. Illness and defeat come hard to someone who has rarely known either. La Lupe only stopped to lick her wounds.
It is the end of a black chapter.
I am living alone for the first time. Alone without the love of a man I always wanted. I knew I would end up this way. I have always said I would end up a lonely old woman on a hill.
I’ve gone solo. Read your programs. Bette Davis in her no-man show!
At this point I wouldn’t change a thing if I could—even the death of that girl who wanted to be the wife. The cards were stacked against her anyway. She was naïve, sentimental, altogether too vulnerable. She was a Patsy.
She made the mistake of fighting like a lady.