Show Business: Just a Dame from New England

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Hollywood also taught her to be stubborn. When she arrived there in 1930, fresh from a now forgotten Broadway play called Solid South, nobody could quite remember why she was hired. Unusual looking, with pretty but slightly bulging eyes, she was not at all like the sultry beauties of the time, the Jean Harlows and the Dolores Del Rios. "I had a terrible time. Remarks were made about me. Like, 'Who would want her at the end of the picture?' Or, 'She has about as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville'­the character actor. In one movie, Fashions of 1934, they gave me a Garbo wig, a Garbo mouth and huge lashes. I looked like somebody dressed up in mother's clothes. But it was a great break because I learned from the experience. I never let them do that to me again. Ever!"

She is, however, grateful for those early films­such as Bureau of Missing Persons, Parachute Jumper, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing and Housewife­because they gave her her craft. Once she had mastered that, and won an Academy Award for Dangerous (1935), she was constantly banging on the door of Jack Warner, the head of the studio, demanding better roles. Finally, in disgust at his refusal, she bolted and tried to break her contract. "Just before I left, Mr. Warner sent for me. 'Please, don't leave,' he said. 'I've just optioned a great book for you. It's called Gone With the Wind.' 'I bet it's a pip!' I said and walked out of his office." There is an explosion of laughter and she adds: "You make a few little mistakes like that along the way, you know."

She not only lost the role of Scarlett, she also lost her contract battle with Warner Brothers and was forced to return to the studio in 1936. In victory, Warners was surprisingly magnanimous. Pictures of the quality that she had unsuccessfully fought for were suddenly hers: Jezebel (for which she won her second Academy Award), Dark Victory, The Letter, Watch on the Rhine, Mr. Skeffington, The Corn Is Green. When she was 31, she even played an aging Queen Elizabeth in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. But whatever the costume she wore, or whatever the accent she spoke in, she was always Bette Davis. Some actors pour themselves into a character, like plastic filling a mold; in her case the characters poured themselves into her and adjusted to the contours of her unique personality. She could be believable as the dowdy victimized New England spinster in something like Now, Voyager; but audiences knew from the start that Cinderella would get what she wanted in the end. Nobody could imagine one of her characters knuckling under for very long.