Bette Davis Read Online Free Page B

May 30, 1911, declaring herself miserable and in need of rest, Ruthie Davis checked into a sanitarium.

    coil more and more deeply into herself. Finally, in the 1916-17 school year, seven-year-old Bobby, like her mother before her, seemed to experience a total mental collapse (as it happened, the first of many throughout her life), which forced Ruthie to withdraw her from the second grade.
    Bobby's breakdown coincided exactly with a new source of turmoil in the Davis household: Ruthie's growing suspicions that Harlow had taken a mistress. "He had had a woman all that time, but I was the last to know," Ruthie would confide to a family friend, Ellen Batchelder, long afterward. The woman was Minnie Stewart, a thirty-one-year-old nurse who had been treating Harlow for asthma. The very existence of Harlow's mistress, let alone the fact that he eventually divorced Ruthie expressly to marry her, would long be the most deeply repressed aspect of Davis family history, especially as promulgated by Bette. Finding it far too painful to admit that her father had left them because he was in love with another woman, Bette always preferred to think of Harlow as someone incapable of love.
    As was typical in the place and period, however, other family members would most likely have turned a blind eye to Harlow's extramarital liaison and encouraged Ruthie to ignore it as long as he was discreet and didn't ask for a divorce. Memoirs of the era suggest that even the most upright Yankee lady was capable of viewing an affair such as Harlow's "as unacceptable behavior, but j behavior that had to be accepted." Almost certainly his cousin Myron Davis and Ruthie's sister, Mildred, would have known about Minnie. And given all Harlow had done and continued to do for the Favors, what position could Dick or even Eugenia have taken if, as was probable, they were among those who knew about Harlow's illicit sexual relationship long before Ruthie did?
    For everyone concerned, divorce would have posed the far greater threat, on account of the scandal it would heap upon them all. A divorced woman had no proper place in their New England world, where she might be derided as a "grass widow" (as opposed to a true or "sod widow," whose husband had died). In a small New England town where everyone knew her story, a grass widow faced the almost certain prospect of finding herself subtly ostracized, even by old friends. Since mistresses frequently came from among the ranks of local divorcees, were the Davises to be divorced now, it would be Ruthie, not Harlow, whom other women were likely to shun as a threat to their own marriages.
    The widely held attitude that women were somehow at fault when their husbands left them is reflected in a 1907 essay by Anna A.

    Rogers published in the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly, that most influential literary periodical of the New England Brahmins, of which Eugenia Favor is known to have been a longtime devoted reader. In "Why Marriages Fail," Rogers attributed "a marked increase in the evil of divorce in the United States'' to recent changes in the status and aspirations of women—in particular: "1) Woman's failure to realize that marriage is her work in the world. 2) Her growing individualism. 3) Her lost art of giving, replaced by a highly developed receptive faculty." According to Rogers, any modern wife who failed to accept that it was her responsibility, not her husband's, to make the marriage work had "the germs of divorce in her veins.'' And to all women, such as Ruthie Davis, who longed for some other form of fulfillment than marriage alone provided, the Atlantic Monthly author offered "the plain fact" that besides being a good wife, "no other work really important to the world has ever been done by a woman."
    1 'I can only know how it affected me—it didn't,'' Bette Davis would insist years later when asked about her parents' marital problems. Her fourth-grade report card from the Winchester Public Schools for the 1917-18