The incomparable Bette Davis—granted merciful release from this ungrateful world thirty-six years ago today (6 October 1989)

Bette Davis in In This Our Life, 1942 WB

Lately I find myself wondering whether the titans of Hollywood—Bette Davis and her contemporaries—would have bothered at all, had they foreseen how fleeting their immortality would prove. Would the great jazz musicians of the mid-twentieth century, or the ballplayers, or the novelists, have poured their souls into their craft if they had known how quickly posterity’s light would fade from them? More to the point, how little the generations to come would cherish their names, or even care to learn them.

In another few decades, even the brightest constellations of the twentieth century—Monroe, Ali, Ruth, The Beatles—will glimmer only faintly, their brilliance dimmed by forgetfulness as the last who remember them pass from the world. Worse still, in an age when artificial intelligence and digital manipulation have placed the machinery of history in the hands of the least scrupulous, what remains may not merely be forgotten but rewritten—or erased altogether.

It falls, then, to those of us who love these figures to keep their memories alive, however humbly. Yet few will trouble themselves, and those who do will never be appreciated. Such is the fate of those who remember in a world that no longer values remembrance, basic decency, and human dignity. —Arthur Newhook, 6 October 2025.

{alternate text for the above image} A black-and-white studio still of Bette Davis captures her seated languidly in an upholstered armchair, exuding both vulnerability and defiance. Dressed in a soft, ruffled blouse and a flowing skirt that reveals one bare leg, she leans back with an expression of distracted contemplation, her luminous eyes lifted slightly upward as if lost in thought or irony. Her hair, styled in loose 1940s waves, frames a face poised between weariness and will. The soft contrast and domestic setting evoke the mood of post-war disillusionment—Davis embodying the archetype of the complex woman: elegant, disenchanted, and indomitable, caught between repose and rebellion.

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