Bette Davis Read Online Free PDF

schoolhouse that made up Crestalban. Afterward, she explicitly echoed the language of her old chautauqua Delsarte

    manual when she enthusiastically declared Crestalban "a school of expression, not repression." Her comment suggests the extent to which sending her daughters there resuscitated for Ruthie long-buried ideals of women's fitness and fulfillment.
    Following her recovery from the flu, Ruthie boldly changed her own plans as well. Instead of remaining in Winchester, she would go to New York City, where her older brother, Paul, having recendy completed his doctorate at the University of Dublin, was now assistant pastor at St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue. Ruthie knew that, unlike her two well-educated brothers, she was miserably unprepared for the working world. At least she could stay with Paul until she managed to turn up a job, possibly as a domestic.
    But first, as she outfitted the giiis with the sleeping and sitting bags and warm under and outer garments they would need for their new open-air life, it seemed to Ruthie that in the excitement of the moment, neither Betty nor Bobby quite grasped the finality of their departure from Winchester. Nor, \^hen Ruthie returned there alone afier depositing her daughters at Crestalban, did she have a concrete idea of the life that faced her as she put most of their possessions in storage in anticipation of closing the house and driving to New York.
    Putting on plays, usually truncated melodramas, was a favored activity at Crestalban. Ten-year-old Betty, keen as always for attention, enacted her first dramatic roles there—but not to great effect, according to the school's director, Miss Margery Whiting. Miss Whiting later remembered Bette as • 'considerably more self-conscious than most children at that age"; the child had "a high squeaky voice that was definitely unattractive on the stage."
    As it happened, in Betty's three years at Crestalban, her most successful, even legendary, performance seems not to have taken place on stage at all. By Christmas 1920, after two years as a nursemaid in Manhattan, Ruthie had moved to Millbrook, New York, to assume the position of housemother at Miss Bennett's school for girls. Her previous job had given Ruthie litde time off to be with her daughters and no proper place for them to visit her. Betty and Bobby had often spent holidays and even summers at Crestalban, endlessly exploring Lanesboro's marble caverns and underground passageways. This Christmas, however, Ruthie's new employer agreed to allow Betty and Bobby to pass the holiday in Millbrook, so long as Ruthie took responsibility for the handfiil of students at Miss Bennett's who would not be going home during the vacation. The night before the Davis girls were to meet Ruthie in Grand

    Central Terminal in New York, Margery Whiting held her annual Christmas party at Crestalban. At the party, much as Harlow had always loved to do, Betty appeared dressed as Santa Claus to distribute the gifts under the candlelit Christmas tree.
    Disregarding instructions to wait until the teacher returned, Betty excitedly reached into the pile for her own present. Either her sleeve or her collar brushed against a candle, instantly bursting into flames that, when she tried to put them out, quickly engulfed her Santa Claus beard. By then, however, Miss Whiting had thrown Betty to the floor, where she vigorously rolled her in a rug until the fire was extinguished. As Betty emerged from the rug, something told her to keep her eyes closed, as if to prolong the oddly pleasing sensation of being watched and pitied by all. I'll make them think I'm blind! was her first thought (or so she later admitted to Ruthie), as teachers and classmates cried for fear that it was true.
    By her own account, Betty took similar pleasure the next day at Grand Central when Ruthie cried out in despair at the sight of her badly blistered face, flecked as it now was with cinders from the train trip. Horrified to discover