by Thomas Tryon
“I felt a touch on my arm and there was Denyse. I had no idea how long she’d been standing there, but she’d seen me staring at Fedora, and she was mad, all right. She was even madder because now we’d missed the start of Les Enfants du Paradis. I couldn’t resist looking again when Fedora moved back to the entrance. As she passed me, she didn’t slow her step, but said behind her hand, ‘Your little friend is jealous.’”
At the Reynard Intrépide, a small, cozy, candlelit restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street, it was late for dining. There were few people, and service was prompt. Barry ordered a plain Bibb lettuce salad with the meal, then asked for oil, vinegar, and lemon, and insisted on making the vinaigrette dressing himself. He’d had the recipe from William Marsh, who’d got it from Noël Coward; the trick was a couple of pinches of sugar and dry mustard.
“I mentioned that I interviewed Willie once, during the Bobbitt craze. Do you know him?” Marion had never met him. “Little Willie,” as he was known affectionately, was one of the real gentlemen of Hollywood. He was a fine actor, he had once had a good baritone, he was a graceful dancer. He was debonair, thoughtful, and kind. Everyone in the business loved him. He’d enjoyed all his successes, the earlier ones on the musical-comedy stage, then in pictures. His wit was devastating, his style elegant; he was the last of a great old line, most of whom were dead: Coward, Chevalier, Clifton Webb, Jack Buchanan.
In the thirties Willie Marsh had made a number of pictures with Fedora, and he had spoken fondly of her to Barry. This was in the fifties, after Willie’s star had risen again and he was playing Alfie, the butler, in the Bobbitt series. He and Bee Marsh had had a large party, honoring the child star, Bobby Ransome, who played “Bobbitt.” Barry was invited, along with most of Hollywood; the following day he’d interviewed Willie at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was where Willie had mixed the salad dressing. Bee Marsh was having a portrait done, and she had with her a present Fedora had given Willie when they were making The Player Queen: a hand mirror, reputed to have belonged to Catherine de’ Medici. The goldwork was said to have been Cellini’s, and it was a museum piece, worth thousands of dollars.
“Where did Fedora get it?”
“Lord Beaverbrook gave it to her, I was told. Countess Sobryanski must have been intrigued by it: she later wrote a scenario around it and they copied the mirror for a prop; but the picture was a disaster.”
“You mean The Mirror?”
Barry nodded. “Fedora never should have played Catherine de’ Medici. Too unsympathetic. I remember Willie’s line that day at lunch—I don’t think he originated it, but it was appropriate, since we were speaking of Fedora. Tossing the lettuce, he said, ‘Legend is the salad dressing of history,’ and I guess in her time Fedora has dressed lots of dinner salads.”
“Do you think it was true he fell in love with her?”
“I couldn’t say; the subject didn’t come up. Remember, Bee was there at lunch, too.” Certainly he must have been infatuated with Fedora, however; the papers had been full of stories at the time, including reports that unbeknownst to Bee, Willie had tried to arrive at some arrangement with his old co-star, “… though why he should have waited until she got so temperamental and difficult to want to marry her, I couldn’t say,” Barry continued. “He did point out that in the thirties she’d been gay and charming, and that on the set she was always a total professional, letter perfect in her lines, open to suggestions from her director, compatible with the other actors. She was idiosyncratic about a lot of things, though—wouldn’t ever wear green, wouldn’t touch chocolate, shellfish, or cucumbers, wouldn’t work after five o’clock. She always insisted on sitting at a left corner of a table, unless it was round. Willie said it was one of her Russian superstitions. Bee Marsh argued that it was because she was left-handed and wanted her eating hand free; which was probably more likely, though God knows she was superstitious. Willie said she was totally dispassionate about her work; once a part was done it was done. Viewing her performance later, she often used the third person, which I guess indicated a certain objectivity. ‘She’ did this or that, ‘she’ looked thus and so, or more imperiously, she used the indefinite ‘one.’ ‘One’ didn’t like Chinese food, ‘one’ never dared eat oysters, ‘one’ detested red chiffon.
“But it was only after her comeback, during Santa Cristi, that she became difficult.”
Marion remembered the stories well. After her comeback she’d indulged in temperament and fits of hysteria, holding up production for days, having people fired, refusing to play scenes as written, all the dismaying and surprising traumas of that part of her life.
“What did you like most about her, that day in the Louvre?”
Barry thought a moment before replying. “It seems to me that the real stars, the truly marvelous people in the world, hold two essentials in common. They’re basically simple, and something of the child remains in them. I liked that about Fedora.”
“And did she still have it the last time you saw her?”
“Oh, yes. But in quite another way.”
“But—what was she really like?”
“Dunno.”
“But you knew her.”
“Not at all. Nobody ever knew her, I don’t think, unless it was Mrs. Balfour. It was a waste, really. It took years to create the public figure, the mythical image—the legend. The ‘salad dressing.’ She allowed it; that was probably her mistake. She was only the counterpart, the shadow. And it was the shadow that fled the press, fled people, fled the world. She really had few friends other than Balfour, the Sobryanskis, Willie Marsh, and Viola Ueberroth. Her mirror was her only intimate, and she wanted its reflection to be the single most important statement she cared to make.”
Both Willie and Bee Marsh had indicated to Barry that Fedora was extraordinarily vain about her looks. Her fear of losing them, a not uncommon characteristic in women, became in her a deep-seated paranoia. The Ueberroths, Derougemont (if Moe Roseman was ever to be believed), more particularly her own make-up man and hairdresser, all had attested at various times to this preoccupation with her looks. It was her greatest flaw.
“Did you ever meet Vando?”
“He was in Europe while I was living there, but I never met him. I saw him, though.”
“What did he look like? I’ve never even seen a picture of him.”
“To my knowledge he never let any be taken. Nobody ever saw him much, but he was always there in the background, at least as far as Fedora was concerned.”
“Was he sinister?”
“Actually he was a very ordinary-looking man. Short, portly, rather bland. They say he used to have a little mustache, although when I saw him he’d shaved it off. But sinister, not at all.”
Hardly more was known of Emmanuel Vando now than at the time, and few facts had come to light since his death. Fedora had always been inclined to surround herself with “types”—colorful, amusing, even bizarre (Derougemont easily fitted this category). But to outward appearances Vando seemed nothing more than what he claimed to be, a doctor of gerontology. He was a Portuguese, born in the Algarve, and claiming degrees at the University of Lisbon and the Neurasthenic College in São Paulo. He had a wife he had never divorced but didn’t live with, and children whose fates remained obscure. There was little doubt that he was to a large degree a charlatan, yet there was never any doubt in the public mind that it was he who was responsible for Fedora’s continuing youth.
It was, if indirectly, Vando who had initiated the German mogul Improstein’s discovery of Maria Fedorowich at the Peterhof Company in St. Petersburg. She was already under consultation to the Portuguese, who was at Moscow’s Bagratian Clinic, and in order to catch himself this big rich fish, Improstein, he baited his hook with a prime example of his theories, an older actress in the company. Improstein was less impressed with her than he was with Maria, whom he subsequently brought to Berlin. As for Vando’s work at the clinic, it was not until the early thirties that he made anyth
ing known concerning his discoveries about the preservation of human tissue and the intricate processes he had devised for the retardation of age effects.
“What were those stories about the Nazi business?” Marion asked.
“That came out at the Nuremberg trials. Testimony given by one of the defendants, a man named Fritsche, tied Vando into having treated several high-ranking Nazis during the war. The Portuguese government evidently had already gotten wind of things, which is why they revoked Vando’s passport before the war. In any case, his reputation was destroyed, he had to close his clinic, and the only patient he continued seeing was Fedora. He died a ruined man.”
“I remember reading an interview Rudi Kramm gave back in the sixties. He said he’d never photographed a face like that; he called Vando a genius.”
“Do you think Kramm was as good a cameraman as King?”
“I don’t know; I suppose so. Kramm was the first one to shoot her in color, wasn’t he? She’d never made a color picture before Santa Cristi.”
“That was her first.”
“Which did she prefer?”
“She never said. I don’t imagine Kramm ever topped ‘The Queen’s King,’ though.”
Since Ophelie, Fedora had had only one cameraman, Walter King, hence the sobriquet “The Queen’s King.” People said he couldn’t have managed it without Vando, but Walter King was an artist, and he discovered new things in Fedora’s face that as she grew to increasing maturity only intrigued her viewers more.
But what, Marion wanted to know, was his secret? How had he done it?
“Ever see Corinne Griffith in Black Oxen? No, too young, and they don’t show that on the Late Show. It’s from a Gertrude Atherton novel. Fedora’s story isn’t dissimilar—a woman’s physical youth is restored by gland treatments, and so on. But if Vando was a charlatan, as they say, would she have continued going to him for all those years?”
“She was always sneaking in and out of his clinic, wasn’t she?”
“She spent her life sneaking in and out,” Barry said, pouring more wine. It was true; Fedora’s had been the great disappearing act of the century. It seemed her natural habit, like the fox’s of going to earth, and while at first the newspapers and radio played it up importantly, the more often it happened, the less likely they were to make anything of it. There’d be a small paragraph buried among inconsequential items, mentioning that Fedora had not been seen since last May, the studio had no clue as to her whereabouts; then would come the follow-up item: she had surfaced in some unlikely outpost, once in Samoa, once aboard the Ranee of Sarawak’s yacht, once in the Yucatán jungle while visiting the Mayan ruins.
In the mid-twenties she had completed a number of pictures in a row: Without Remorse, Judith and Holofernes, Impératrice, and in the autumn of 1925 she was loaned to Paramount to begin the spectacle Queen Zenobia. She returned to AyanBee early in 1926 to do A Woman’s Past, which was to be followed later that year by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. She was fatigued, and as she often did to rest between pictures, she left Hollywood for Europe. It was known that also on board her ship was Jan, or John, Sobryanski, who was from then on to figure so importantly in her life. Heir to a large lumber fortune, only scion of a venerable Polish name, John Sobryanski was cultured and sophisticated, and though some years her junior, obviously smitten with the famous star. By the time the ship docked at Le Havre, the entire passenger list was speculating on the romance. Subsequently they were seen together in Paris, watching the races at Longchamps, then in London, at Ascot, where they were formally invited to meet their majesties in the royal enclosure; Queen Mary was a close friend of John’s mother, the countess Sobryanski.
Subsequently they toured, à deux, on the Continent, in a well-photographed maroon Hispano-Suiza, journeying eventually to Kraków, to the ancestral estate, where Fedora met Countess Sobryanski. Later they went to Berlin, where Vando’s clinic was then located. Improstein had introduced the doctor to many wealthy and influential Germans and his work was still enjoying considerable patronage. Following Berlin, the couple went to Switzerland and pictures of them boating on one of the lakes in pastoral calm made the papers, worldwide. Count Sobryanski was later to buy a small château in Montreux, at the end of Lake Geneva, prior to the loss of the Kraków estate in the war, but it was perhaps merely coincidental that a short time later Vando opened another clinic at Basel, only several hours away.
The idyll was eventually interrupted when Fedora was required to return to Hollywood for wardrobe fittings and tests for Madame Bovary. She had wanted to play Emma for a long time. Unfortunately, production difficulties were encountered, then script problems, and the film was twice delayed. Louella Parsons described her as chafing under the enforced wait, and quoted her as having let it be known that she would rather be back in Europe for the winter season. Then, just before she was to begin the film, she collapsed. The cause given by Parsons: Vando’s regimen. The picture was finally abandoned altogether, but instead of returning abroad, Fedora sequestered herself in her Beverly Hills house.
Next, a broker disclosed that the property was up for sale. People came to inspect the vacated premises, but it added little to the legend of their goddess to discover that the house was unpretentious, that she lived modestly and used toilet paper like anyone else.
Then a San Francisco paper printed a photograph of a Spanish-mission-style domicile, with a banner line offering the tantalizing question: “FEDORA’S NEW HOME?” The building was the Convent of Santa Margarita up in Monterey, and word had leaked that the actress had got herself to a nunnery and was “in retreat” behind its walls, resting after her collapse. She found little rest. Newsmen marshaled in squads, manning posts at the main door and at salient points about the grounds. Photographers attacked the rear walls, where they were confronted by outraged nuns, who demanded they leave the premises. One enterprising reporter attempted an assault over the wall, where his intrusion among the outraged sisters was sufficient for him to verify that yes, Fedora was within. He had glimpsed a woman sitting in the garden and he had not the slightest doubt that it was she whom he sought. Rumor became rife that she intended taking vows.
The siege turned into something of a carnival, with assorted vehicles parked helter skelter at the entrance, radios playing, food being consumed, and litter strewn about.
Fedora remained invisible. Then suddenly all the hoopla proved fruitless, since its object had mysteriously reappeared in Hollywood. No one had seen her leave the convent, but a limousine arrived at the Bel Air Hotel, where the star was now registered; she was driven to the studio, where she lunched with various notables in the commissary, photographs were taken to mark the occasion, and a new movie was announced. Such furor did the actress Fedora occasion and thus were her comings and goings noted by an eager and curious world.
She completed Ophelie, one of her most beloved silent pictures, that year. She received her first Academy nomination for The Red Divan, but lost to Norma Shearer. Her films were released with almost unvarying regularity through the following decade. During this period it seemed she had given up her penchant for travel; she seldom left Hollywood or its environs. She preferred her new house in Pacific Palisades, with its view of the ocean. The property was enclosed by a high stucco wall, over which could be glimpsed only the tops of banana trees, and few visitors were admitted. Her housekeeper-companion was an Englishwoman, Mrs. Balfour, the widow of a Scot who had raised alfalfa in the San Fernando Valley. After his death she moved to Encino, and it was Viola Ueberroth who found her and brought her to Fedora.
Then, in the middle thirties, the Sobryanskis, mother and son, arrived unexpectedly in Hollywood, and their itinerary was diligently recounted by the papers. They visited Shirley Temple in her bungalow at Fox, lunched with L. B. Mayer at Metro, and at AyanBee they came on the set to watch Fedora and Willie Marsh shooting The Player Queen. Everyone knew the reason they were there: Sobryanski was hoping to persuade Fedora to marry him. Despite their wide acqu
aintance with notables, neither Barry nor Marion had ever met the count. What details there were were most accurately reported in the Tole biography (Tole had himself secured several interviews with the count, who was still living in Menton, while the countess spent most of her time on Crete). His mother was the countess Maria Yvonne Lislotte Chernieff Sobryanski. She seldom went to movies and initially had never seen Fedora on the screen. Of the old nobility, she hardly approved of her son’s involvement with an actress—and an “older woman”—no matter how beautiful or famous. The reasons for her change of heart were as obscure as other details of the story, but the fact was that the two women did afterward become exceptionally close friends. Though the three were the object of considerable speculation in the press, no one had ever accurately divined the true relationship. But at the time, lacking the success he sought with Fedora in Hollywood, the forlorn count returned with his mother to Europe.
It was further noteworthy that the link between Fedora and Countess Sobryanski was more closely forged during the war, when Fedora sought refuge at the château in Switzerland, and that she was later a frequent guest at their other residences—the Paris apartment, their horse ranch in the Camargue, and the villa on the island of Crete. Just before the war John had finally married and produced the heir required to ensure the title, and his wife seemed as much in evidence—and as good friends with Fedora—as was his mother. By then the family estates had been wrested from the Nazis by the Russians, but since Countess Sobryanski had been outspoken on the subject of Communism, she was not permitted to return to Poland, and spent her time exiled on Crete. Barry recalled for Marion the Life (September 23, 1946) photographs of Fedora and the countess exploring the labyrinth at Knossos and other excavated sites. Lislotte, always a regal figure, was now white-haired, if trim and spry, a somewhat younger version of Mary, dowager queen of England, whom she had known as plain May Teck, and with whom she shared an affinity for fine needlework, porcelain snuffboxes, and cameos, one of which Mary had bestowed on her friend.