Sharing a cigarette with Bette Davis

A post several weeks ago by Judith Shapiro on her blog, Remembering Matters, about the culture and mystique of cigarette smoking, has caused Nora to recall a highpoint of her young life: when she and Bette Davis shared a cigarette.

It came about like this.

The year—1943, the middle of the war years; the place, Tulsa, Oklahoma; the occasion, a war bond rally in the Coliseum. The guest speaker: the glamorous movie star, Bette Davis, who had just finished making “Now Voyager.”

Nora was a senior in a Tulsa high school. Two girls were chosen from each school to serve as Bette’s “Honor Escort” and sit on the stage with her, and she was one of them. Bette was going around the country promoting the sale of War Bonds. She was in her mid-thirties then, in the prime of her power and beauty. She wore a long, black, V-neck dress and an orchid corsage. Her hair was golden-blonde, her skin flawless, her flashing blue eyes large and lustrous, and her expressive mouth at its most scornful, gracious, amused, mocking, all in turn. She was also smoking.

Bette met privately with the eighteen or so girls of the Honor Escort in a small room before the rally began. They had assembled early in a state of high excitement to await her entry. And they were not disappointed.

Bette swept into the room and gave them that wide, enigmatic smile. Then she sat down at a small table to talk to the teenagers, and they could ask her questions. On the table was an ashtray, and in Bette’s lap was a silver lame evening bag, and in the bag were her cigs and lighter.

She stayed the length of one cigarette. Then she stabbed it into the ashtray, stood up and posed for pictures with some of the girls. They were, of course, overwhelmed by the charisma of her presence. Then she swept out to go and make her speech. The girls followed to sit with her.

But Nora was not so overcome that she didn’t make it first to the table and the ashtray. She grabbed the still-warm cigarette butt, fuchsia-edged, much to the envy of her fellow escorts. She may have hidden it in the lace of her mother’s awful dress she’d had to wear or maybe palmed it throughout the program.

Anyway, it ended up in Nora’s jewel box, carefully wrapped in tissue. Nora would take it out now and then and show it off, reverentially. Eventually, the butt crumbled so badly than when she wasn’t there her stepmother threw it out.

Nora should’ve had that cigarette butt bronzed.