Autobiography
Page 28
Salzburg
18 August
Such a cold! Suppose I dribble and cough on the pillar tonight? The last performance was a disgrace. I despise Reinhardt for displaying such a cobble and let him know it. Result: we are in all day for rehearsal and outside it’s “wie am ersten Tag.” We have dressed Iris up as the Nun and she is to be tried out by Reinhardt to see if talent lurks. She is shaking, poor child, and must shake for four more hours.
Later. It’s impossible. I’m halfway through the performance, and this is the first moment free from fussing to keep the different groups of friends mellow. There’s Gladys, Oggie and Ronnie, there’s Letty, Mildred and Betty, there’s Iris, Ethel and Kaetchen, Berners and me, and a frightful Gest group.
The picture in the Tatler of you asleep, entitled “M.P. in Dreamland,” is shaming, though I like to see you sleeping, not spooning. I like to think of you in a motorless town (Venice) where you can’t be run over.
Iris has said the Lord’s Prayer to Reinhardt, who was delighted and has telegraphed to Gest that she can certainly play the part. So now she’ll go with me to America and that makes the whole and entire difference. Kaetchen will take us. “My Mummy” arrives today. She’ll be furious at my having a cold.
At the festival I met for the first time Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a name already meaning much in the world and one that was to mean much more to me and my family. He thought me good as the Madonna, and was enthusiastic about writing a new pantomime. He told me the story of his libretto for Strauss’s new opera, Die Ägyptische Helena, with Scheherazade’s art, and begged me to cherish his two sons if one day they were sent with Kaetchen to seek their fortunes in America.
Kaetchen took us across the Atlantic on the Olympic. The new Spielmann was in the Second Class, and I had plans of rehearsing Iris in the Nun’s part on board. There was no piano that we might use, and if there had been Iris was invincible in resolve not to co-operate. The whole thing (including the salary) embarrassed her. Long-suffering Kaetchen had a cruel time between her obstinacy and my self-pity.
On the Olympic
We work K. cruel hard, making him brush our hair, fetch and carry, tuck us up. In return he gets only scoldings. We give him “treats.” They always take him in and turn out to be what most he hates, like lunch on deck or hide-and-seek on A and B deck. Only one laugh today, when K. said to the waiter: “Let me have a halibut.”
Kaetchen took us to the Hotel Sinton, Cincinnati, and introduced us to servidors, incinerators and coffee-shops and there left us, the reluctant Nun and her anxious task-mistress. Iris had a ringing success and enjoyed her laudatory notices. The stage manager said that she was like a Holbein statue, whatever that was. She lost her embarrassment and (always) her weekly salary. She wore a grey red-lined regimental coat with brass buttons, and the cheques or dollar-bills floated out of its wide pocket as she fumbled for cents to give to beggars. We were warm and comfortable and shown a good time by everyone. It was our first stage-stop, and homesickness was not yet the spectre that for me it was to become.
Kaetchen came to and fro from New York for “treats.” He was unhappy by temperament and would pace up and down the room like Felix the Cat, sulky and silent. “What’s wrong, Kaetchen?” “Nothing I mean—I mean nothing.” Jealousy walked with him, but he had nothing yet to be jealous of. He was suspicious of the space and air that he had to leave, and of the innocent breathers whom he left behind. Perhaps the relentless teasing was warping his nature. I do not think so—he needed it and became an addict.
Kaetchen’s treat today was being read aloud to. Iris and I read chapters alternately of two books to confuse him. Hers is Hunger by Knut Hamsun, mine the new H. G. Wells. For three hours he endured it. In return he brought us hampers, chocolates and new books, scandal and good financial news.
Clever and godfatherly Otto Kahn was coping with my savings to some jingling tune. “The Boss has made you a thousand dollars” seemed to be often told me—an unwearying repetition.
The Miracle train chugged its way to many of the big cities carrying the five-hundred-strong cast (two to a bed), and local students made up the crowd-scenes. They loved the revelry and the thirty dollars a week. Iris and I kept clear of it. So cumbersome is a mobile cathedral that to build and unbuild it left us generally with ten days or a fortnight between cities, during which we returned to the rigours of New York.
New York
24 October 1925
So it’s to Boston we go tomorrow. Walking yesterday I dropped in at an animal shop and found an ideal monkey, tame and handleable. This morning I felt an imperative desire for it, stimulated by thinking what a “treat” it would be for Kaetchen. Forty dollars was a wicked extravagance. Iris leads me to folly. It’s here and has just made two varied and far-spreading messes. I’ve called it Jacko. He’s an entertaining and decorative goblin and does the classic tricks of grimacing in the glass, smelling bottles, putting the tiny nose in the face-powder, destroying the puff. Wade is furious.
Boston is receiving us as Potentates, Dominions and Powers. The reception committee is headed by the Governor of Massachusetts and leading citizens. The whole cast has been ordered on to the station platform. Kaetchen will be in charge of Jacko and the huge medicine ball (both unpackable).
Boston (Hotel Lenox)
25 October
We’ve fallen on our feet this time—half Beauty’s tour in the Beast’s castle, half Sarah Bernhardt’s triumphant progress. Gest says that the rooms were “built” for us. He means decorated. Drawing-room with grand piano, Spanish Miracle style, bells, candles, missals, lampshades of plainsong. Iron gates lead us into the dining-room, heaped with choice fruits, and in the credence stand one dozen champagne, four Château Yquem 1911, two whisky, two gin, one brandy, one vermouth, six Bordeaux, twelve liqueurs (various), a dozen Bass and cigarettes. The bedroom is vast, hung with citron brocade, beds painted lacquer-red, lace sheets, satin covers, flowers actually growing out of everything. The reporters dealt with, Iris, Gest, Kaetchen and I sat down to tenderest lobsters, steaks, alligator pears and pastries washed down with Château Yquem and served by an old retainer.
Next day. It’s as sensational outside as in. Shop-windows full of life-sized photographs of us. Some sport gothic arches, stained illuminated glass and wax dummies of the Madonna and Nun. The famous Boston Library, a Temple of Art (Sargent, Abbey etc.) has a room dedicated to photographs and relics of The Miracle, photographs of Morris Gest at the age of four, ten and nineteen, and some of Kaetchen, all labelled “From the private collection of Morris Gest.”
Five letters from you today. Iris says “I’m glad he loves you so much. I didn’t know he did.” Don’t ever read my letters to Maurice. I’m apt to write him similar descriptions and I hate to be shown up.
I’ve sent Jacko back. He tried to light matches, unstoppered every bottle he could and threw drinking-glasses about because he found them heavy and inconvenient. The last outrage was when he took up a wide position on the dressing-table among the gold and turquoise, and was sick and sick and sick. A whole bunch of grapes returned in deep purple fluid. As he retched he shook his little head from side to side so as to cover a wider area.
It’s midnight, and over our delicate supper Iris and I discuss the change of conditions and desires in ten years. What would we not have given for a privacy like this, unhaunted by mothers and maidenheads? Here we have time, space, a cellar and fullest freedom, and we discuss it before retiring early.
28 October
Huge success, mad applause, Gest sobbing on the chancel steps, Kahn and Jo Davidson and Ziegler from the Metropolitan and Bertram from New York arrived at six to return at midnight. One old actor fell head-first down the steps and badly hurt a woman in the front row. When I pulled the bell it didn’t ring. Flowers all the way to a party wonderfully staged with real yew-hedges lit by thick church-candles.
Keep me loved in England. I get so fearful of loss. The Leviathan leaves England on the 15th. If I left
on 6th I’d have 2½ to 3 days of you. Write what you think. Are Dover cliffs still white?
P.S. I feel like a mandrake torn out of the earth—English earth.
My mother joined me, radiant to be back. She was the happiest of the cast. She had left her golden drawing-rooms overlooking the Green Park and installed herself in the Arlington Street lodge, a great come-down much to her liking. The house had been denuded by a sale and was in the market waiting for some modern Croesus.
In spite of success and interesting expeditions to Salem and houses belonging to Mr Sleeper and John Hayes Hammond, in spite of making a new, dear and lasting friend, Charlie Codman, my nostalgia was gnawing at me. We had midnight matinées, making often eleven performances a week, and tiredness probably accounted for my sad listlessness. Christmas we spent at St Louis. The city was interred in thick-ribbed ice, but The Miracle won and the house filled to brimming. There were radio talks, over which we always broke down. Alone we should have been all right, but when we were together and asked serious questions about “our art” we suffered fearful fou rire. I can find only one joke in my letters from St Louis:
The last straw was when an apparently intelligent critic came to interview me. He asked me what English authors I knew. I said “George Moore” and added (not wishing to swank) “At least I can’t really say I know him.” This he wrote up as my position forbidding association with writers “Of course I could not know him—you understand.”
On 20 January 1926 I sent Duff the only poem I ever wrote:
“It’s not a good pome” but mine own and drawn from the well of truth:
I want to go home.
I’m feeling alone.
Groan, groan, hollow groan,
I want to go home.
I want to go home.
No one comforts my moan,
No hope on the ’phone.
I want to go home.
She wants to go home,
She hates foreign loam,
She hates even Rome,
She wants to go home.
She wants to go home,
All theatre-thrills flown.
As the Nun she gets blown.
The Madonna’s lost tone—
She does want to go home.
She wants to go home.
It’s not a good pome,
But she’s only a gnome,
A poor deformed gnome,
And she wants to go home.
She wants to go home.
She’s lying alone,
Her body’s like stone.
O! Duffy, atone!
Turn her salt tears to foam.
O dear Mr Gnome!
I do want to go home.
I thought Chicago beautiful. The white steam from the railway-engines (now sunk underground) and from the central heating wreathed in lovely clouds and garlands among the skyscrapers. Sky and lake were crystalline and blue, but we were not very happy there, although successful theatrically. The press was mischievous, and Elinor Patterson, daughter of Joe Patterson of the Chicago Tribune, had been engaged to play the Nun. This made Iris rage. I had no choice but to play the Madonna nine or ten times weekly.
Chicago
2 February 1926
Gest’s first-night speech beat all previous shames. He collapsed onto the Madonna’s altar in a state of bogus exhaustion while the applause lasted, and then staggering to his feet, tears gushing, thanked the stage-hands by Christian names, thanked me (tactlessly) for staying in America six months, thanked Mother for coming to the U.S., thanked the box-office man’s little wife for sitting up with him o’ nights, thanked Mrs Patterson (the playing Nun’s mother) and the Duchess for giving us birth.
In our apartment house we found Noel Coward and his mother. He was acting in The Vortex and (our hours synchronising) we cooked each other’s meals in our kitchenettes, buying our provisions at “Piggly-wiggly.” We read his new play Semi-Monde and even went to a riding academy with him. Iris was bold and ambitious and to the manner trained. Noel and I were definitely no good with horses. Noel said that the brute they gave him would look round and say with savagery: “Bet you can’t!” Out of duty I went to the slaughter-houses with Sally Carpenter, a figure of Chicago, and could not eat meat for a month.
We were invited to the house of a famous architect, whose car picked us up from the theatre at midnight and drove into a candle-lit room that had busts of ladies in marble hats and veils, where he received us, dressed as Rodolfo in La Bohème. At the piano a negro was banging away. He had his eight fingers (not his thumbs) bound tightly with adhesive plaster, so that long playing would not split them. We drank cocktails in a claustrophobic nautical cabin. The sea, painted on a drop-cloth and dotted with mermaids, rose and fell outside the portholes. Dinner was in Palm Beach (so high and wide a conservatory that we could not see the glass for the bananas). A swimming-pool, lit from below, called for nudes or anyway wilder guests than Iris and me. At coffee-time a man offered us tickets for a hanging next morning: we refused them. Afterwards we toured the house, feeling ashamed of our weary, frumpish reactions. In an Egyptian Room overhanging the lake was a Bed of Ware for ten. We sat gingerly on its edge and watched with nausea a table, laden with ruby caviare, rise from the floor. The Turkish bath had a transparent floor with a secret room beneath, and the Love Nest was a large room carpeted entirely with a black satin mattress. Shoes were left at the door, and we tiptoed in all-but-darkness to the illuminated tank, inset into the middle of the mattress, where albino goldfish were gasping their last. There was a Chinese bed standing on the mattress. We could think of nothing better to say, over and over again, than “How amusing” with less and less conviction. The evening, which we had utterly failed to animate, ended at last. Haunted for days by our lack-lustre, we proposed ourselves again and took Noel Coward for effervescence. A new Apache Room had been decorated especially for the evening, but even Noel’s spirit was extinguished.
Iris was my great solace. She was more lively and enterprising than I was, and what sad brooding she shared with me she could string into verses, while I could but mope inertly. Kaetchen came and went, weaving himself ever more faithfully into our lives. The more we loved, the more we teased and baited him.
Iris looked like an eccentric puppet doll, and we had imperceptibly fallen into the way of referring to ourselves as “the Dolls.” So we made two dolls of rag, and my mother painted their faces realistically. Wade dressed them in the same material cut like the clothes we always wore. “Iris” had pink Joan of Arc hair and “I” (as in life) looked from beneath a concealing cloche hat. Some demon possessed us to confide this wanton couple to the guard of the Twentieth Century train, and Kaetchen received a telegram in verse to meet “the Dolls” at dawn on the following day. He was due to go to Palm Beach to stay with his devoted friend Otto Kahn. Hearing of our arrival, he gave up his rarer-than-rubies reservation and was on the morning platform with all smiles prepared. A coloured porter handed him the puppets. Disappointment and humiliation must have been difficult to bear, but he had his amusing revenge. He took the dolls two days later to the millionaire’s playground, and from Oheka Villa they wrote us daily an account of their sunlit days and wilder nights, of their clothes, presents, jewels, their prowess at games and love. It all but destroyed us, deathly tired in the grey cold of Chicago. They had a costly morocco leather box made for their rest and travel, and Kaetchen did not part with them until his death, when they disappeared, no doubt disintegrated with grief. He also travelled with my mask in wax, cast from the mould of Jo Davidson’s bust. That also has vanished. His temperament was so changeable that we could tell at once if our dearest and necessary Kat were black or white of mood. Rex Whistler drew me a picture to order, reversible as a medal. One side showed the purring white sleekness of our pet, with a touch of black warning at his tail’s tip. On the other side was a rampant hell-cat with a hopeful flash of white at the end of his lashing tail. That treasure too has gone. It played its part in forecasting and s
ometimes checking Kaetchen’s temper as he watched us reverse it. I gave him too a reversible dressing-gown, a magpie turncoat.
We were in Chicago many weeks. I had influenza and for the first and only time missed four performances. This lowered me. I wrote to Duff:
To save myself from breakdown I evolved a philosophic comfort on these lines. I enjoy anticipation more than I am able to savour the present. When I am with you and happy in all and every way, my apprehension of the slightest change, even the trivial imperfections of the moment, can wreck my pleasure. When I am exiled and starved of happiness I have the tremendous anticipation of betterment. It works well enough if I can keep the fear of realising the certainty of life being short, and these days the best, from creeping in. But it always does. What is to be done with me? What am I losing to gain this miserable triumph and these few dollars?
I was appalled too by my appearance, and Iris remembers my looking in the cruel looking-glass and murmuring: “That’s over. Now it’s nap on personality.”
Gest urges and urges me to stay with bribery and blackmail. I can’t do it. Do settle. I’m so tired. I want to be treated as a child and not like an executive woman. I want to obey. Photographs of me are like the Fat Woman of Brentford, with the head of Rameses II on top. If I had more guts I’d stay for the extra £2000, but I can’t wash out a holiday with you. There are not enough of them in the summer of life. I feel sad days will never cease. I’m tired, tired … I … I … I … I wonder why I worry to put words between the Is.