Did you know that before she became a famous Hollywood actress, Bette Davis was the state of Maine’s first female lifeguard? In 1926, she completed Red Cross training and joined the Ogunquit Ocean Rescue team.
In her memoirs, Davis recounted that passing the grueling Red Cross test and earning her lifeguard emblem was a major confidence booster and a true turning point in her youth.
During the mid-1920s, Davis’s mother, Ruth, worked as a portrait photographer, and the family frequented the burgeoning art colony of Ogunquit, Maine. To earn money before fully pursuing her dream of acting, the future star took on two local jobs. By day, she worked the watch towers as a lifeguard on Ogunquit’s beautiful, but often treacherous, dynamic Atlantic shoreline. By night, she earned tips as a waitress at a local spot called The Crooked Pine.
Her training as a lifeguard actually came in handy much later in her career. While filming the classic 1942 melodrama Now, Voyager on location at Lake Arrowhead, her young co-star Janis Wilson got into serious trouble in the water. Drawing on her teenage training, Davis jumped in and rescued her from drowning.
Maine remained close to Davis’s heart throughout her entire life. In the 1950s, at the height of her fame, she returned to the state with her husband Gary Merrill, buying a historic estate on the coast of Cape Elizabeth where they raised their children.
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