Bette Davis at Home in Beverly Hills, California, 1939 ~ Vintage Everyday

Bette Davis moved to Hollywood with her mother, Ruthie, and their atrociously named dog, Boojum, in December 1930. She’d been appearing on Broadway in forgettable plays like Broken Dishes and Solid South, but Hollywood’s still-new ability to synchronize sounds with images required a whole new crop of actors—ones trained to speak. And so, as a gossip columnist reported at the time, “Talkies want Donald Meek of Broken Dishes. Also want Bette Davis.

Hardly anyone remembers her first few films—The Bad Sister (1931), Seed (1931), Hell’s House (1932), Way Back Home (1932)—but in 1932 Davis landed a contract at Warner Bros., and that was the turning point. She stayed at Warners through 52 films, two Oscars, five more nominations, many suspensions, one bitter lawsuit and countless tantrums, until they finally parted company in 1949.

In June 1934 Davis and her husband of nearly two years, the boyish musician Harmon “Ham” Nelson, moved from one lavish rented home to another: from Greta Garbo’s place on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood to a sizable Spanish Colonial Revival house at 906 North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. The house had been built in 1926 for actress Virginia Valli. In 1932 Valli married actor Charles Farrell, a childhood friend of Davis’s from New England with whom she made The Big Shakedown in 1933 (and from whom she had rented a house in Toluca Lake). The luxurious Beverly Hills house was designed by John Byers, one of the most sought-after residential architects of the 1920s and ’30s; he had a way with white stucco, heavy wood ceiling beams and clay-tile floors and roofs. Examples of Byers’s work can still be seen today around Brentwood, Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, but the Valli house was torn down in 1991.

Details of Bette Davis’s life on North Beverly Drive are scarce. She and Nelson didn’t stay all that long; by 1936 the couple had moved again, this time to a much simpler house at 5346 Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. She’d acquired two more dogs along the way, both of whom shared the North Beverly house with Davis and Nelson. There was Sir Cedric Wogs, a white Sealyham terrier sometimes called Ceedie, sometimes Wogs; and Tibby, a Scottish terrier. It was no wonder Bette and Tibby got along so well—they were two of a kind. A dog guide describes the Scottie as a breed with “unusual variable behavior and moods—it can get moody and snappish as an adult.”