Bette Davis Read Online Free Page A

composition as she had never thought to do before. Among the earliest of such images—perhaps the first of the many fantasy photographs Ruthie was to take of Betty in the years that followed— is one commemorating the child's third birthday, in April 1911. At a glance, the picture, which shows Betty posed on top of a table, seems like any other taken before it. Then one notices the way Ruthie has painstakingly bunched and arranged the curtains behind the child, pinning them every which way in an effort, however inept or unsuccessful, to manipulate light and shadow, to infuse her image with the lyrical atmosphere associated with the pictorialist photography of the day.
    Ruthie had first encountered American art photography the previous summer in Maine, where she heard the Ohio-born pictorialist Clarence White lecture on photographic aesthetics. Along with such

    American camera artists as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, and Eva Watson-Schtitze, White was a founder of the movement Stieglitz dubbed the Photo-Secession, dedicated to the critical and public acceptance of photography as a fine art. To Ruthie, White's lecture on the American pictorialists came as a revelation. The artistic poses and moods often discovered in their photographs connected them in spirit to the era's Delsarte-inspired interpretive dance, as practiced most notably by the likes of Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis. This connection suggests why, with her long-repressed background in Delsarte and all it had once symbolized to her, Ruthie would have been so strongly drawn to art photography as a mode of expression.
    Increasingly on edge and distraught, Ruthie sought a direct experience of the art that she hoped would sustain and fulfill her. Shortly after Betty's third birthday, Ruthie and a companion, Alice Canning, made a pilgrimage to New York City. Grandmother Eugenia took charge of Betty and Bobby at home. The previous summer in Maine, Clarence White had mentioned"291," the vanguard New York gallery where Alfred Stieglitz had mounted boldly original exhibitions of pictorialist photography. When Ruthie and Alice Canning arrived at "291," instead of finding a photography exhibition, they discovered Pablo Picasso's first one-man show in America. The New York critics had been mainly hostile to the exhibit. The Globe's Arthur Hoeber, for instance, mocked the eighty-three drawings, watercolors, charcoals, and etchings on display as suggesting "the most violent wards of an asylum for maniacs, the craziest emanations of a disordered mind, the gibberings of a lunatic." But Ruthie seems to have been exhilarated, if pleasantly bewildered, by it all.
    No sooner was Ruthie back in Somerville, however, than her crippling feelings of dejection and dissatisfaction resumed. On May 16, Betty had her tonsils removed. Ruthie's nervous debility kept her from escorting her daughter to Children's Hospital in Boston. Instead Harlow had to do the unthinkable: take the afternoon off from work. His attentions would have been a treat for the little girl, with whom he rarely spent much time anymore. When Betty awakened after the operation, at about five-thirty, Harlow lifted her into his arms, as he so often had when she was a baby, bundled her up, and took her home by cab. There Ruthie fretted over her during the five hours it took for the lingering effects of the ether to wear off and the resdess night that followed. The next day, Ruthie judged the weather warm enough to allow Betty to play outdoors. When the child caught cold, Ruthie held herself culpable.

    All the while, however, it was Ruthie's own health that seemed to have needed careful watching. Her wedding pictures of just four years before show a bright-faced, robust young woman whose years of Delsarte physical training have left her attractively poised and firm of flesh. Photographs from this later, troubled period reveal a depressed, stoop-shouldered figure with a haunted glint in her eye. On