This 'n That by Bette Davis

Author:Bette Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

My most awesome experience during the eighties was the result of an interview in Playboy magazine. For what reason I cannot imagine, I mentioned that as a teenager I had posed in the nude for a statue of Spring, by a sculptress in Boston, and as far as I knew it was still in a park somewhere in the city. The rest of what I said to the interviewer was that the sculptress was an elderly woman with a male assistant. She had a little dressing room at the top of a flight of stairs and told me to go up and remove my clothes, please. After fifteen minutes or more, I was still up there when she called out, “Miss Davis, we’re ready.” I was absolutely panicked…but I took off my clothes and there I was. I walked very slowly down the stairs. My face was beet red, I’m sure, with embarrassment.

To my astonishment, this started a city-wide search in Boston that lasted for months. Playboy carried a follow-up story in its next editions. Newspapers around the country gave it front-page-type attention, and the Boston Herald American ran a headline that asked: “Can You Find Bette Davis’ Nude Statue?” On an inside page appeared photographs of three nude or seminude statues in Boston city parks. The caption asked: “Is one of these Bette?”

Finally the statue was found. It was privately owned by a man who lived on an estate in Belmont, Massachusetts. Sculpted in bronze by Anne Coleman Ladd, it was part of a fountain showing four figures dancing around a circle. It is quite lovely. I had the perfect figure for it. And the innocence—I was sixteen and just out of high school.

I posed for the statue to help earn money to add to my mother’s funds. My puritan New England upbringing made the experience a difficult one. Mine was another era, almost another world.

In the same Playboy interview, I aroused another furor with a statement of mine, the subject being white wine. I said to the reporter, “I am bored with people who drink bottles of white wine at the cocktail hour and claim they do not drink. They often are far ‘tipsier’ than any of us who drink scotch and water or vodka and tonic.” The result of this remark was a barrage of resentful letters from white-wine drinkers. At parties people would apologize to me for drinking white wine. I have never learned when to shut my mouth. I obviously should have this time.

The laugh is now on me. After my stroke, I was told by my doctors they would prefer that I drink wine spritzers, which have much less alcoholic content than my scotch and water. Seemed to me this was an irony of fate.

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