My dad would illustrate my early stories and I would listen to him ramble about European history and warfare, eagerly asking questions about Kings, Queens and our own family history. I was born and raised out on the fringes of the rainy Pacific Northwest on fishing boats and cold beaches with only a dog and kittens for company, and so my love of reading and creating stories started very early. Bette was haughty and austere, her sentences overwhelmingly go like this: “I’ve ALWAYS hated lemonade,” “I’ve NEVER condone sleeping in,” “I’ve ALWAYS found starlets to be trite,” “I’m SIMPLY BORED by pettiness.” I made all these up but her attitude is all to easy to ape. In her eyes it was always a matter of taste, a matter of art or wanting the picture to be the best it could be: but read a few outside interviews and the famous Davis temper seems childish and ego-driven with a penchant for hatred of being wrong, rather than ‘for the art.’ I certainly became bored with her litany of abuse towards men, but at least it was all very lucidly written and expressed in her classic way. I can’t entirely blame her, I’d HATE to be treated as men treated women in the 50s, and if I were a true artist as Bette strove to be and was trained in the theatre I’d certainly hate being shoehorned into confinement and virtual slavery as the studios of old Hollywood used to do. Bette wrote this book in 1962, very defensive about herself, her personality, her failures as she saw them and most of all how much men contributed to her ire. She had four marriages and several children, won two Oscars and had multiple awards and nominations throughout her lifetime. And that plain and simple is what drove Bette Davis. It’s easy to see how a child in that environment could be driven, always driven to look for proof that she was good enough.

Bette refers to her austere Yankee upbringing many times with a mixture of pride and as a label to explain herself. The dog, a vicious chow who bit everyone, was the only being Bette ever remembered her father showing affection for. “Daddy,” as Bette called him was a cold man trapped by his own walls of intellect and criticism of every living thing. She was throwing formidable tantrums with no discipline when she was a toddler, she held total reign over her mother while courting attention from her highly intelligent, completely aloof father.

This is commendable, but as she lays out the brief setting of her childhood it’s easy to see how her temperament was formed. Bette begins the book by claiming all faults as her own, all mistakes laid at no other door than her own. Her famous feuds and boil-over temper were legendary, yet her close friends also knew a woman who was driven to succeed not just as an actor but as a person, within her own limits.

The lonely life by bette davis