by Brandy Purdy
“I’m all yours tonight, Lizbeth,” Nance whispered sensually into my ear, making me shiver and my whole body quiver; then she asked me to lead the way to my carriage.
“This is the happiest night of my life!” I breathed.
“I aim to make it so, dear Lizbeth,” Nance answered.
And she did! She took a beautiful silver flask with her initials flashing in diamonds from her garter, raised it to her lips, and drained it, then with a carefree laugh and a cry of “Catch!” tossed it out the carriage window, into the white-gloved hands of one of her tuxedoed and top-hatted admirers, laughing delightedly and blowing him a kiss when he called back that he would treasure it all the days of his life and that it would be buried with him, right over his heart when he died. And then she turned and reached for me—me! It was me she wanted! Not any of them!
“ ‘That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold,’ ” she whispered huskily against my quivering, shivering flesh, quoting Lady Macbeth just for me as her hand cupped my breast. “ ‘What hath quench’d them hath given me fire!’ ” And then she kissed me and I tasted the burn of whiskey on her lips.
As Nance would say, “Leave the audience wanting more and then don’t give it to them,” so I let the curtain fall, Dear Reader, upon that blissful night of wonder when I held a star in my arms.
As there is often dust lurking beneath a carpet, all too frequently—and quickly!—tinsel turns to ashes. The audience sees only the splendor, the costumes, smiles, and gaiety; they never smell the sweat in the actor’s armpits or see the ugly bunions and painful, seeping blisters disfiguring the dancer’s feet that look so lovely in their satin slippers as they glide, and prance, and leap across the stage. All too soon, the stardust cleared from my eyes, and Truth pulled my golden goddess down from her pillar but never quite succeeded in completely destroying my fascination with her, only tarnishing it somewhat. She was such a beautiful dream, I held on as long as I could. I simply could not bear to let her go, and vanish, upon my awakening to reality’s jarring slap. And Nance had her own reasons for entwining her arms and clinging tight to me. So we sustained the beautiful, mutually agreeable illusion as long as we could.
She was born plain Gertrude Lamson, a strict Baptist minister’s tall, gangly corn-fed daughter. At sixteen, when she declared her intention of going on the stage, her father, determined to publicly shame this intent to sin out of her and see her settled down and married to a respectable dairy farmer, denounced her from the pulpit before his entire congregation. As they all sank to their knees, praying fervently for her wayward Satan-tempted soul, Gertrude Lamson shed her name and life as she knew it like a snake does its skin and became Nance O’Neil as she walked, tall and proud, down the aisle and out of her father’s church, never deigning to turn an eye left or right or backward, looking only forward, determinedly, to her own future. She was like a pioneer woman setting out to forge a new life for herself out of the wilderness, and all the dangers she might encounter be damned!
She made her way to San Francisco, hitching rides in wagons laden with hay, pigs, or watermelons, and with traveling peddlers in flashy checkered suits who could not wait to get their hands inside her bodice and drawers. As soon as she arrived in this great big city that would have made most little country girls quail and quake with fear, Nance inquired of a newsboy which was the best and biggest paper. Soon she had wiled and beguiled her way into the affections, and the bed, of a famous drama critic. He was only too happy to write her a letter of introduction to talent agent McKee Rankin, a man with a shrewd instinct for discovering and developing new talent.
Here is a young friend of mine who wants to go on the stage, his note read. Kindly discourage her.
But the moment Mr. Rankin laid eyes on Nance he knew he was looking at a diamond in the rough. A star! Relentlessly, like a slave driver cracking the whip, day and night he honed and polished her. Heartless as Simon Legree when, exhausted, she fell down at his feet and cried that she was too tired to go on a moment longer, he simply jerked her back up and put her through her paces again and again until he was satisfied; he would accept nothing short of perfection from her. “Mark my word,” he always said to Nance, even when she lay at his feet and cried and cried, “you’ll thank me for this someday!”
She made her debut at the Alcazar Theatre in a bit part as a nun, standing out only because she was the tallest one, but when she took the lead in du Maurier’s Trilby, playing the artist’s model who falls under the spell of Svengali, daringly displaying her bare feet, and the rest of her body wrapped in the scantiest and sheerest draperies the law would allow on the “respectable” stage, a star was born. Everyone fell in love with Nance O’Neil.
From that point there was no stopping Nance. Soon she was touring all over the United States, practically living on a train, saying good night in one city and waking up in another. Then across the sea she went, to play before the crowned heads of Europe, touring like a whirlwind through England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, India, Africa, and Egypt, and being wooed with jewels by princes, dukes, khedives, maharajahs, and sultans. One even pried the priceless blue diamond eye out of a sacred golden idol as a gift for her. The newspapers published pictures of Nance wearing it on her forehead or in her hair when they reported her dusky regal swain was devoured by wild dogs while out hunting as a divine punishment no doubt for the act of sacrilege he had committed out of his profane love for her.
Critics and crowds alike adored her, universally praising the passion, subtlety, naturalism, raw, naked emotion, and earthy sensuality she brought to each part she played. Lillian Russell, Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Mrs. Leslie Carter, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Constance Collier, and Ellen Terry were all compared to her and found wanting. And I daresay if Nance had applied herself to musicals and comedies with the same determination as she did to dramatic roles, she would have left Lotta Crabtree and Eva Tanguay coughing and gasping in her dust too, like crippled invalids in comparison, but tragedy was Nance’s métier, or her meat and potatoes, as she liked to say.
Offstage, she was earthy, not ethereal; flawed; and far from perfect. Her life was complete chaos, motion and mayhem, and she lived it like a whirling dervish with never a dull or still moment. But that was how Nance liked it. She never thought of the future, of hard times and old age, and lived only for the instant. She was a notorious spendthrift; it was as though money burned her like red-hot coals and she must fling it from her as fast as possible. She ran up debts she could never hope to repay and was always trying to keep one step ahead of the process servers and debt collectors. Anyone who would extend her credit or loan her money was her new best friend. In spite of her habit of not paying, jewelers, furriers, couturiers, milliners, glovers, shoemakers, and perfumers continued to court and oblige her; just to have her photograph in popular periodicals and picture postcards wearing their creations meant money in the bank to them. And Nance was always glad to give them a signed photograph of herself wearing their wares to display in their shop windows.
Morally she was equally bankrupt. Nance was deep in the thrall of a lovely green liqueur she called “the green fairy” and simply could not do without it, nor did she want to, and she constantly smoked strange, exotic cigarettes that made her alternately languid and giddy. She was vain and self-centered and had no concept of fidelity. “People are people; we love who we love!” she would declare grandly before tumbling into bed with whoever took her fancy, was readily available when she was in an amorous disposition, could do something for her career, gave her money, or, like a magician, could make her financial and legal woes vanish for the time being. Male or female, it didn’t matter, Nance was far too broad minded for “a little thing like that” to matter. And after her passion was spent, she always proved that the meaning of loyalty was equally elusive to her; once Nance was sated, the need past, the bankroll depleted, or the requisite favor granted, the moment she didn’t need her paramour anymore
, the affair was over. Her lovers learned all too quickly it did no good to cling; it only annoyed her and turned her sweet memories of them to bitter, as Nance was all too ready to warn them.
Whenever anyone tried to take her to task for her heartless heedlessness, Nance would simply shrug her lovely shoulders and quote Shakespeare: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our selves. Though that hardly excused her conduct and only confirmed that she knew exactly what she was doing and didn’t care if she rode roughshod over the whole world’s hearts. She would happily have trampled every heart in Christendom if it suited her, just to get her way. It was all about Nance. She was the only one who mattered.
Cataloging her flaws like this, so clear eyed and dispassionate in my old age and hindsight, I cannot help but wonder how I could have loved her so much, but I cannot deny that I did with a passion that still burns like a fever.
As her star rose, Nance also acquired a menagerie, including a baby alligator; an African honking gander; a pink pig she had saved from slaughter because its color exquisitely matched the chiffon gown she was wearing the day she passed it squealing in its pen “as though the poor thing was pleading with the executioner for its life!”; two Great Danes; a matching pair of Russian wolfhounds; a dozen assorted pug dogs, each named after the state in which she had acquired it, and several Pekingese and Pomeranians; a quartet of constantly squawking and talking parrots, including a particularly salty-tongued gray called “Jolly Jack” after the sailor who had been Nance’s lover for a night and given him to her at their dawn parting; an exotic toucan with a vibrant striped beak; a pink cockatoo, as well as a white one with a golden crest; five Angora cats; a tiger cub from a smitten maharajah; an ever-increasing family of floppy-eared rabbits; a raccoon; an orange baboon; a chimpanzee; a pair of capuchin monkeys that mated incessantly and an equally amorous set of marmosets; a performing seal that liked to “sing” in the bathtub; an armadillo from an ardent admirer down in Texas who had also named one of his oil wells after Nance; a tortoise whose shell had been encrusted with precious gems by a love-struck millionaire; a snake Nance delighted to wear in lieu of a feather boa; and a large, lazy green lizard that looked rather like a dinosaur and delighted in eating strawberries by the score; all of them sporting diamond collars and gold tags with her initials set in diamonds. A buck-toothed Japanese in silken robes, whom I was never quite sure was male or female, took care of them all.
Nance also added a husband who doubled as her press agent to her entourage, even though his dalliances with stage-smitten young girls got him into no end of trouble. A former carnival barker and medicine show man whose English accent was as false as the noble pedigree he proclaimed to all who would listen, Alfred Hickham had a hungry wolf’s eye for nubile beauty, the naïve possessors of which he lured into his den to play Little Red Riding Hood. He promised that through the private acting lessons he was offering them, for only a nominal fee, in the privacy of his hotel room because their talent deserved special, personal attention they could not get in a classroom full of dull and mediocre pupils, and under his superior and experienced tutelage, he could transform them into “a glittering star to rival my own wife’s dazzling luminosity.” It was both sad and surprising how many gullible girls believed him.
Nance always paid off the authorities and angry parents to keep Alfred out of jail or from being tarred and feathered and run out of town by a lynch mob, shrugging her shoulders and saying good-naturedly that Alfie would have done the same for her. And everyone knew she had her own peccadilloes—she liked girls as much as he did. It was not at all an uncommon event for her to usurp one of his prettiest and most promising pupils to serve as her understudy, personal maid, or traveling companion, until boredom set in, of course; then Nance threw the poor girl back to Alfie if he would have her.
By the time I met Nance, the novelty of marriage to a faux English aristocrat had faded and she didn’t care what Alfred did or who he did it with, only that a husband was a useful thing to have around at times, like a baby alligator in a diamond collar, and he was overall an amusing fellow and, even more important, an excellent press agent, and a capable but bland, lackluster leading man who knew his place onstage and kept to it and never presumed upon her spotlight.
Unfortunately, Alfred was as fiscally irresponsible as Nance; neither of them was capable of managing the company’s, or their private, finances, and money flowed through their fingers like water. Several times the costumes and props of her company had been attached in lawsuits. Once she even showed up in court wearing the very fur coat she was being sued over nonpayment for. But Nance didn’t care; she was wild, irresponsible, and thoughtless, the freest of the free spirits. She took the Bard’s immortal line all the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players quite literally. She lived by it and was always on. There was never a moment of quiet with Nance unless she was unconscious. And yet, despite her flamboyance and her reputation for releasing raw, unbridled emotions upon the stage that breathed new life back into all the old but perennially popular roles, in real life there was a curious almost soulless quality about her, as though she were merely an empty vessel for others to fill, a medium that the spirits spoke through. You never really knew if it was the real Nance O’Neil speaking or if someone else, a playwright or press agent, had written the lines.
I think a reporter from The Boston Herald described her best. The morning after our first night together, while I still lay cocooned in Nance’s champagne-colored satin sheets, tensely enduring the orange baboon’s insistence on searching my head for fleas, Nance donned a demure dress of flowing white chiffon, loosely did up her hair, sent for the Angora kittens, kissed me “adieu for now,” and went out into the sitting room to assume her carefully calculated pose for the man The Boston Herald was sending to write a feature.
At once pensive and playful, maternal and virginal, she arranged herself upon the floor, playing with the kittens, with the sunbeams pouring in through the windows, catching her just right, and shining a spotlight, like a halo, onto her golden hair. When the reporter walked in and saw her thus, he was completely enchanted.
In her sun-flooded apartments, he wrote, her masses of glorious golden hair were caught loosely up on the top of her shapely head, and held in place by a huge Spanish comb. Nance O’Neil is not always tragic, nor even serious minded. She impresses one from the start as a girl, a very young girl. She is as unaffected by her great success as a child. It may be truthfully said that she is even more interesting personally than she is as an actress—and that is saying a great deal. She is subject to melancholy and decidedly moody in temperament. There is a constant intermingling of sunshine and shadow in her nature. And it is this that makes her so entirely fascinating.
When she came back to me, she laughed about it as she nestled on the bed beside me, snuggling deep into my arms.
“Don’t ever believe anything an actress ever says, darling; we never open our mouths to speak or even to kiss except to further our careers. All the kisses and pretty speeches are to that end and no other. The stage is the only lover we can ever be true to.”
I laughed with her at what I thought was a clever quip, a featherlight flippancy of her profession. I should have seen the warning in those words. I should have heeded it. In all the time I knew her, it was the most honest thing she ever said.
She was a rare charmer and very skillful at manipulating her image, as well as other people. But none of that mattered at the time, though in hindsight it should have. But I was head over heels in love and willing to overlook any and all of Nance’s foibles and flaws; she was only human after all. I chose to be blind and believe our souls had been wandering in the wilderness all these years, crying out for each other, until, at long last, fate brought us together and that she would never discard me as coldly and cavalierly as she did all her other conquests. I was different; I was her soul mate.
Before the next leg of her tour, we detoured, for a much needed respite. I took
Nance to Maplecroft. It was Heaven having her there with me despite Emma’s sour-faced frowns and private protests that Nance was using me and making a fool of me and I was too blind to see it. Emma’s small Fall River mind equated all actresses, even a star like Nance O’Neil, the greatest tragedienne of the modern stage, with common whores. She considered Nance’s presence in our household not only a scandal we could never hope to live down but also a personal insult against all decent, God-fearing women. Father, Emma said, would turn in his grave, like a chicken roasting on a spit, if he knew we were hosting a troupe of actors in our house. We quarreled every time Emma could get me alone. She said I was dazzled by the footlights and glamour and bewitched by the world of make-believe and happy endings. She was right, she summed everything up so precisely, if not at all nicely, but I didn’t care. I was in love.
“If I am dreaming let me dream some more!” I said dismissively, and blocked my ears to the outraged torrent spewing from my sister’s mouth.
I remember the first morning when Nance floated downstairs straight into my arms, just like a dream, in a flowing gown of soft pink mousseline with wisps of her flaxen hair, caught up in a loose topknot, caressing her cameo-perfect porcelain-pale face, idly swinging a straw bonnet, trimmed with silk flowers, by its broad pink satin streamers. She looked like she belonged at Maplecroft. I have a picture of her in that dress, holding that bonnet behind her back, staring coyly out at the camera, at once angelic and fey. It stands in a silver frame beside my bed and, even now, I lay flowers, as an offering, a tribute, before it each and every day. Sometimes I even light a candle. The heart wants what it wants; I still love her. But I was just a new sensation, a novelty, the latest in a long line of diversions, to Nance. I am too wise a fool to pretend it was ever anything more no matter how much I like to imagine otherwise. Like Mr. Carroll’s muse Alice, Nance took me to Wonderland: Still she haunts me, phantomwise, . . . moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.
