In America

by Susan Sontag

  The acquisition of a private car and their own baggage wagon, with quarters for their skillful colored crew (cook, two waiters, and porter) and ingeniously sectioned storage space for the costumes and backdrops, made it possible for Warnock to add even more one-night stands.

  No more packing and unpacking! They slept and ate on the train for weeks at a time, when every day or every other day there was a new town, a new theatre.

  Upon arriving, Maryna and Warnock would go directly to the theatre, where Bogdan and the rest of the company would soon join them—Warnock to check on the box-office receipts and confer with scenery hands about any technical problems that could arise with their backdrops should the flies be too low or the wing space less than the requisite half of the proscenium opening, Maryna to take possession of the star’s dressing room and post the itinerary next to the mirror so she would remember the name of the town, the theatre, the manager in charge of the stage. In the afternoon a brief rehearsal might need to be organized if tonight’s play had not been done for a week or more, and time had to be set aside for polite exchanges with a delegation of local drama lovers, a poet with a flowing necktie, a stagestruck young lady and her mama, the editor of the town’s newspaper, and the president of the local chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Then back to her dressing room to put on her makeup and don her costume, get on stage to do her performance, receive the local eminences in the greenroom, cull a few flowers from the many bouquets, and be at the railway station by midnight, where Poland and its baggage car would be hitched to the rear of whatever train was going to the town where they had their next engagement.

  The economics of making an acting life entirely out of touring, without a home theatre where plays were rehearsed and maintained, meant that Maryna would never be able to deploy a large repertory in English. (At the Imperial Theatre she had played fifty-six roles!) Still, with six fully rehearsed plays, Zalenska and Company already offered more than did most of the leading actors in America crossing and recrossing the country. Indeed, some actors chose year after year to tour only their most popular role, becoming ever less ambitious for themselves and more contemptuous of their public. But an actor always, and rightly, mistrusts the public. (If audiences knew that the actors are judging them!) Giddy with fatigue and relief that the night’s exertions are over, the actors peering into their dressing-room mirrors while slathering on cold cream to remove their makeup are also issuing verdicts on tonight’s “house.” Attentive? Stupid? Dead? Nothing to be done with stupidity, but Maryna had her ploys to dominate, correct, wake up a dead house—such as moving closer to the edge of the apron, looking out into the audience, turning up both volume and vibrato—or to silence a coughing one. Coughing tells you the audience wishes it were elsewhere. (In a recital, nobody coughs in the first ten minutes or during the encores.)

  The theatres were not always full. The reasons could be bad weather, poor advertising, greedy theatre managers who had made the tickets too expensive, or organized outrage over plays judged to be offensively foreign or too associated with New York. “Let New York have its bedroom tragedies. Ohio will keep its mind on higher things,” ended a letter to the newspaper in Lima urging a boycott of Zalenska and Company at the Faurot Theatre in Camille. It was signed: An American Mother. The reviewer in Terre Haute evoked Maryna’s “womanly grace” in the role of Marguerite Gautier only to reproach her for “thereby making a career of sin seem tenderly appealing.”

  Maryna having flatly refused to program some additional, propitiatory performances of East Lynne in Ohio and Indiana, Warnock, hoping to distract the public, announced that Madame Zalenska had lost Marguerite Gautier’s “cross and tiara of diamonds worth forty thousand dollars”: although he had instantly cabled the finest jeweler in Paris, and the courier toting an even more costly diamond cross and tiara had already boarded the next steamship at Cherbourg, until the treasure reached Indiana he, Harry H. Warnock, could not answer for his star’s mood. Maryna protested that he had made her look ridiculous. Not at all, explained Warnock, the American public expects a famous actress to be parted from her jewels at least once a year.

  “Only her paste jewels? Or her real jewels as well?”

  “Madame Marina”—he snorted with impatience—“a star is always careless with her valuables.”

  “Who has told you such nonsense, Mr. Warnock?”

  “It was proven twenty years ago by Barnum—”

  “But of course.” Maryna sighed histrionically. “I have heard of this Barnum.”

  “—when he brought over Jenny Lind. The Swedish Nightingale, as P.T. dubbed her, and that was pure genius, lost all her jewels three times during her tour.”

  And Warnock was right. After he divulged the story about the jewels, the houses for Camille were always full.

  Also to be endured: following seven curtain calls for a fast-paced Camille at the Academy of Music in Fort Wayne, the obese man, yellowing wig askew, pushing his way through the throng of present-bearing admirers in the greenroom (who had already pressed on her a bronze statuette of Hiawatha, the collected speeches of Ulysses S. Grant, and a music box, set on a nearby table and repeatedly wound up to unwind “Carnival in Venice”)—he insisted on Maryna’s accepting the gift of his own, dearest, fat, snuffling, champagne-colored English pug. “It ain’t the jewels, Madame Zee, but I’ll bet she keeps you happy for a while.”

  “I shall call her Ug,” said Maryna, all smiles. She was tired, even peevish, that night.

  “I beg your p?” said the fan.

  Unexpectedly, Maryna, who was only fond of large dogs, and dogs without faulty breathing systems, had to promise Warnock she would not give Ug away. Another of Warnock’s dicta: “All famous actresses have small dogs as pets”—and on this one he was unyielding. But Miss Collingridge, who would have charge of the beast, was allowed to rename her Indiana.

  In Jacksonville, Maryna was presented with a pair of lime-green baby alligators.

  “You don’t have to keep these,” said Warnock. Miss Collingridge had already found a larger cage for them, and was daintily emptying jars of insects and snails and some bleeding morsels of raw beef into their open jaws.

  “Ah, but I will,” said Maryna. “I’ve already bestowed Polish names on them. That one is Kasia. And her mate is Klemens. Miss Collingridge assures me that they are pleasant creatures, whose little white teeth are not yet sharp enough to do much harm.”

  “You are making fun of me, Madame Marina.”

  “How can you imagine such a thing? Have you not heard that Sarah Bernhardt has a pet lion cub, a cheetah, a parrot, and a monkey?”

  “Sarah Bernhardt is a French actress, Madame Marina. You are an American actress.”

  “True, Mr. Warnock. Or should I say, True enough. Nevertheless, were I not condemned to live out my days in a railroad car, I would already have acquired a—”

  “Right,” said Warnock. “Keep the alligators.”

  When Warnock had her sit for a photograph with Kasia and Klemens, announcing to reporters that the alligators had been given to Madame Zalenska in New Orleans, Maryna, no amateur herself when it came to the enhancing falsehood, was curious to know why.

  “Because New Orleans sounds better than Jacksonville.”

  “Better? In what sense better, Mr. Warnock?”

  “More romantic. More foreign.”

  “And that is a good thing in America? Be patient with me. I am just trying to understand.”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”

  “But of course. Then do announce they were foisted on me in New Orleans by a ninety-four-year-old Creole soothsayer to ward off the evil spell she saw hanging over my head. And that, although I laughed at the old crone’s prophecy, after a chunk of lead pipe dropped from the flies missing me by only an inch during the ovation for a Romeo and Juliet in Nashville, I have come to feel safer with these baleful creatures in my boudoir than without them.”

  “Now you’re on board!” said Warn
ock. “I see, dear lady, you have understood … everything.”

  “Mr. Warnock, I have always understood. I have not agreed. That is all.”

  Before her As You Like It at the Schultz Opera House in Zanesville, Ohio, the audience was treated to a lecture by a Professor Steele Craven on “Shakespeare and the Comic Spirit.” At Doheny’s Opera House in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a program of variety acts (a ventriloquist, a unicyclist, dancing dogs) preceded her Juliet on the twenty-foot-wide apron stage. At Chatterton’s Opera House in Springfield, Illinois, first came a minstrel show’s twenty-minute Eliza Escaping Across the Ice, then Frou-Frou. In Owen’s Academy of Music, in Charleston, South Carolina, Adrienne followed “A Medley of Short Pieces by Bellini, Meyerbeer, and Wagner.” At Pillot’s Opera House in Houston, the audience was prepared for East Lynne by a monologue entertainer, Thaddeus—“but I answer to Tadpole”—Murch. From the wings, Maryna heard him going on … and on: “Tadpole because I was very little when I was small. Murch because my daddy was Murch. Doodleball Murch. Now he was called Doodleball because—” Bogdan exploded. Either Warnock made sure that nothing, nothing was ever programmed before Zalenska and Company, or Madame would cancel the rest of the tour.

  Another boon conferred by the snug duality of marriage: since Bogdan had taken up the indignation and dismay she was feeling, Maryna was free to lay claim to another, more indulgent response. Now it was her turn to say, “But what do you expect, dearest? This is America. They need to be sure they’re being entertained. But the rude mechanicals enjoy what I offer them, too.”

  In Ming’s Opera House in Helena, Montana, a Mrs. Aubertine Woodward De Kay played in Maryna’s honor Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 7, No. 1 and the A-flat major Polonaise before the curtain was allowed to go up on Zalenska and Company’s Camille, and afterward offered a banquet for the whole company at the De Kay mansion. It was so naïve, so well-intended. My European fastidiousness is crumbling, Maryna thought. I am happy to please.

  Her repertory now included three more of the Shakespeare roles she had done in Poland: Viola in Twelfth Night and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (she loved these tales of mismatched or dueling couples where everything comes right in the end!), and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, in which Peter could play the tiny role of Hermione’s ill-fated son, Mamillius. Though she knew Peter should be in boarding school, she could not bear to part with him yet. And she’d had to let Bogdan go.

  “I envy you. I wouldn’t know how to lead two lives,” Maryna said, without looking at Bogdan’s eyes. “I’ve paid too much just to lead this one.”

  “I won’t go,” he said.

  “No, I want you to go. I’ll hardly lack for employment while you’re gone.”

  She felt heroic. It surprised her that some people thought her melancholiac. “You seemed a little sad when I came in,” ventured the motherly reporter from the Memphis Daily Avalanche.

  “What Polish face is without a touch of sadness?” Maryna replied. “But I am only a sad person when I am without my husband. We are together all the time, but lately he was obliged to go to California for a few months on business, and I miss him all the time.”

  * * *

  THE DATE of the telegram was 23 February 1879:

  VON ROEBLING AGREES TO OBSERVING FLIGHT STOP AM NOT SEEKING PERMISSION TO GO UP

  What was Bogdan doing? She hoped he would not alarm her, she’d not asked him to reassure her.

  The next telegram came eight days later:

  TIME ALOFT TEN MINUTES STOP INCOMPARABLE SPECTACLE

  Spectacle from the ground? Spectacle from the air? But how could she believe anything Bogdan said? She would have worried even more if there had not been six one-night stands in Missouri and five in Kentucky. Her repertory now stood at nine plays—five of them by Shakespeare—which she had played at thirty-four theatres in the last two months alone. She decided to add Cymbeline as they reached Nebraska on the swing back across the Midwest. Cymbeline, she discovered, was one of the Bard’s most popular plays in America. Audiences loved the stream of reconciliations at the end that washes over both the malign, would-be seducer of the virtuous Imogen and her choleric, easily duped husband.

  Husbands are always right. A guilty wife must die. If really unfaithful, then really die. If suspected wrongfully of being unfaithful, then pretend to die—and wait, as long as it takes, for the foolishly enraged man to see reason and forgive her.

  Of course it wasn’t true anymore. These were modern times. A husband is not always right. But a woman is still expected to declare her poignant dependence on her husband.

  Bogdan! Husband! Lie with me. Hold me. Warm me. I miss riding into sleep with you.

  Another telegram, dated 17 March 1879:

  MARYNA MARYNA MARYNA STOP EVERYTHING IS WHOLE STOP THERE IS WATER EVERYWHERE

  Then silence. Had he gone mad? Would he disappear forever?

  But of course I can live without him. As long as I keep on touring. These tours keep me in balance. Movement and excitement and the awareness of obligation drive away the bad thoughts, silence the foolish inclinations.

  Husband! Friend! Do what you have to do. But don’t torment me. I am not that strong. Yet.

  * * *

  “EACH CRAFT is constructed according to a different principle,” Bogdan reported when he returned. “This one was called Aero Heart. Aero Corazón. Sometimes just Corazón.”

  “Was? Then it crashed.”

  “Maryna, you haven’t understood. It did go up. Almost straight up, the distinctive feature of this aero being that it has no wings. Straight up, without any outward skimming, to a hundred feet or so. There it hovered for ten astonishing, sublime minutes!”

  “Tell me more,” she said.

  “Ah, Maryna. I feel very foolish. What am I doing to us? I’m possessed.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re telling me a story.”

  “I don’t tell stories!”

  “Yes, you do.” She laughed softly.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What it looks like.”

  “Like a giant bell, with the cabin completely enclosed and a huge, broad screw propeller sticking up from the roof that, when set in motion, is like a spinning top. I told you it has no wings, didn’t I? Yes, of course I did. The lift-power is supplied by something the inventors call Air Squeezers, a tube through which compressed air is ejected below the craft. Squeezers and propeller send the craft straight up to a predetermined height, after which it stops, then flies horizontally—that part didn’t work this time—in the direction in which it’s pointed. Up to eighty miles an hour, Juan María and José claim.”

  “I thought the inventors were all Germans.”

  “Almost all.”

  “And they survived, unscathed, your Mexican friends, when the aero fell. You’d have told me if they were killed or…”

  “Yes, Corazón is superbly prepared for catastrophe. A balloon three times its size, called a compensator, inflates rapidly to retard too sudden a descent, and elastic legs shoot out beneath the craft to break the fall on alighting.”

  “But you didn’t go up with them?”

  “Maryna, I told you I wouldn’t.”

  “And so you didn’t.”

  “I was on the verge of asking to be taken along. But I was afraid of being unable to master my fear. I knew, they knew, the landing would be subdued, disillusioning, not fatal. Still, there’s no certainty. That’s what an adventure is, isn’t it? It’s got flowers in its hair but it has no face”—“What, Bogdan?”—“Oh, and Dreyfus is interested. And I think I can get von Roebling to meet with him. And then I’ll have accomplished my mission. Maryna, Maryna, please don’t shake your head like that!”

  * * *

  LEAVE AMERICA? Because—most American of reasons—it was “time to move on”? Warnock didn’t understand. “But you’ve just begun in America. You can make a fortune here. Everyone loves you.”

  But how could a man like Warnock understand the lure of Lon
don for a true worshipper of Shakespeare? To be an actress in England, not just in English! In England she would bloom and surge beyond everything achieved on this second, even more successful American tour.

  “No, you won’t,” said Warnock.

  With the baffled, angry Warnock continuing to predict that her London venture would be a failure, Maryna put herself in the hands of Edward Dudley Brownlow, the English impresario. On May 1, 1879, she made her London debut with Camille, although not under that title, because Camille—as La Dame aux camélias was known, nonsensically, in English—lay under a ban from the Lord Chamberlain. Having always revered England as not only the land of Shakespeare but the birthplace of every civic freedom, Maryna was astonished to learn of the existence of a government censor in London. Just like Warsaw. No, not like Warsaw, if English censorship was so puny it could be thwarted by changing a play’s title. And Maryna rather liked Heartsease, the new title, which seemed agreeably, meaninglessly conciliatory, and was disappointed to learn from Brownlow that heartsease was merely the name of another flower. She felt demoted, like the pure-hearted courtesan’s signature flower. Surely this Lord Chamberlain could not oblige “the lady with the camellias” to die in the fifth act on a bed strewn with … pansies!

  She’d chosen Camille over a play of Shakespeare for the same reason she started in America with Adrienne Lecouvreur: her accent would matter less in a French play. The new mask through which she had learned to produce the sounds of English in America, with its jaw a little slack, had, with Miss Collingridge’s help, to be tightened for London. Syllable breaks were reexamined and became crisper, consonants produced from the back of the mouth were moved forward, and the lips made thinner. “Snobs that they are, the English enjoy finding fault with our American accents,” Miss Collingridge observed. “They particularly object to what they describe as the drawling intonation of American actors.” “Drawl!” exclaimed Maryna. “Since when do I drawl?” Maryna could not admit to herself that she found the English intimidating. She had got used to the loose-mouthed American conversational attack—its garrulousness, its insistence on familiarity. In America, no one was interested in the tragic fate of her homeland, but she was made to feel welcome all the same. Here, both journalists with soiled collars and her titled dinner partners assumed she would want to bore them about Poland, while she was hoping to make English conversation. About the theatrical season in London. About Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone. About the weather.