by Susan Sontag
I have ruined my health in the struggle for wealth!
Said the banker in piteous tones—
“Oh!” And jumped down.
At the sight of Maryna, everyone shrank into guilty, childish solemnity.
“Please! Let me not interrupt.”
“We were only joking about, Madame, and reciting doggerel to each other,” said Cornelia Scudder, the young actress to whom Maryna had given the roles of Celia in As You Like It, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, and Louise, the virtuous sister in Frou-Frou.
“Then—I insist—you will continue.” Maryna liked Cornelia. She looked from face to face. “No one wants to perform for me? No one wants to make me laugh?” She smiled at their discomfiture. “Very well.” She nodded gravely. “Then I must perform for you. Something you’ll find of special interest, I think, even though it’s in Polish.”
Maryna began in a whisper. Her dappled voice turned husky, then liquid. Her delivery was full of hesitations at first, revealing a mind heavy with feeling, amorous feeling, bitter feeling, unsure of what it wished to express. Then, gaining momentum, she passed to a high, mocking cadence. Rhapsodic, purling phrases were routed by harsh, slicing sounds, and a light, crazy laugh and then sobs and moans. Gazing out vacantly, she dropped into a hoarse tone, broken with grief, and finished with a pulsing vocal surge, telling of renewed hope and determination.
Clutched by Maryna’s spell, the actors stared at her mutely. Miss Collingridge, sitting opposite Maryna, scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it across the table. Maryna frowned. Finally, someone dared speak. “Tremendous,” gasped Horace Petrie, their new Posthumus in Cymbeline, Angelo in Measure for Measure, and Banquo in Macbeth.
“Sshhh,” said Mabel Hawley, typecast for maids (Juliet’s Nurse and Nanine in Camille and Joyce in East Lynne) but, to cork her near-overflowing discontent, also awarded the role of Adrienne’s Princesse de Bouillon.
“Whatever it was, Madame, I was harpooned by it,” said Harry Kellogg, the company’s ringleted, portly Prince de Bouillon in Adrienne, Henri de Sartorys in Frou-Frou, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, and Duke Senior in As You Like It. He was from a whaling family in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
“Was it a poem, Madame?” said Mabel. “A monologue from an old Polish tragedy?”
Maryna smiled, and lit a cigarette.
“What was it, Madame? What was it?” exclaimed Charles Whiffen, her Iachimo in Cymbeline and Claudio in Measure for Measure and Orsino in Twelfth Night and Archibald Carlyle, the wronged husband in East Lynne.
“I merely—” she began, while idly unfolding Miss Collingridge’s note. It read: “You recited the Polish alphabet. Twice.” Maryna burst into laughter.
“Tell us! What was it, Madame?”
“You tell them, Mildred, what I was reciting.”
“A prayer,” declared the young woman defiantly. She was blushing.
“Exactly,” said Maryna. “An actor’s prayer. In my sad devout country, there is a prayer for everything.”
Miss Collingridge smiled.
“Mildred, you’ve not been studying Polish behind my back, have you?” Maryna said the next morning on the train heading toward a night’s Frou-Frou in Leadville. Dressed in a lacy tea gown, she was reclining on a chaise longue, waving her cigarette with a lazy gesture; Miss Collingridge shook her head. “Then, if I did not know you so well, I would say you were quite diabolical.”
“Madame Marina, that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“And how was it, my alphabet?”
“In English, we say ‘And how was my alphabet?’”
“Noted,” Maryna said. “And the alphabet?”
“Grandiose,” sighed Miss Collingridge.
Maryna could never understand why in America there was so much suspicion of the arts, even among educated people, and so much antipathy toward the theatre. A woman to whom Maryna was introduced in the lobby of the Plankinton Hotel in Milwaukee boasted that she had never set foot inside a theatre. “When I see a theatre entrance, I cross to the other side of the street.” Yet there was no end of young women in every American city who thought (or whose mothers thought) they were born for the stage.
One or two might become actresses. None whom she saw—and Maryna wanted to be magnanimous—would ever be a star.
Authority, idiosyncrasy, velvetiness—these are what make a star. And an unforgettable voice. You could do everything with the voice, once you knew which notes should be punched out, which left in shadow. Your breath control now gives you whatever you need: seamless phrasing, a bright range of colors, subtle timbral changes, the jolt of a cry or a crystalline whisper or an unexpected pause. Your voice rises, effortless, unhurried, and pure—enchanting the whole theatre into reverent silence. Who did not feel improved, then and there, by Isabella’s noble plea?
But man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep—
You could make every member of the audience feel pensive, profound, if only for a moment. Or, with Here’s the smell of the blood … still and just a flutter of fingers at the end of a shapely arm clamped demurely to your side while looking down at the paralyzed guilty hand (no need to sniff it or lick it or hold it to the tip of your taper’s flame) and groaning, sighing, resonating like a bell with All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this … little hand. Oh, oh, oh!—you could, you did, convulse every heart in the theatre.
* * *
SOMETIMES MARYNA rehearsed an actor in a new part from midnight to five in the morning, was up and at her first appointment at nine, and went on to have a full day and perform in the evening. She never looked tired. When asked, as she often was, about her beauty secrets, she at first replied, “A happy life … my husband and child, my friends, my life in theatre, a reasonable amount of sleep, and good soap and water.” In America it was common for a star to claim to be, under the wrappings of privilege, no different from everyone else, which everyone else, while only faintly imagining these privileges, knew was untrue. Maryna’s women admirers were happier when she began “endorsing” something they could buy: Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s Beauty Creams and Angel Star Hair Lotion.
She wished she could find a cream or lotion she liked, especially since she had reluctantly begun using the new grease-based makeup. Standardized like so much of modern life, the new makeup elements came ready-made in the form of round sticks, each numbered and labeled. It was quicker to apply than dry makeup, and safer, if one believed the rumor that certain chemicals used in preparing some of the powders, such as bismuth and red and white lead, were actually poisonous. (If only it were possible to use both dry and wet makeup—as the steamships plying the Atlantic, smoke streaming from their great funnels, also sported, in case of engine failure, a full complement of sails!) And Maryna had to resign herself to harsh, unflattering lighting, too. Odorless, safe (is safety that important?), brighter (oh, so much brighter)—what was thrilling on the street was a devastation in the theatre. Thick soft gaslight, with all the lovely specks and motes in it, conferred the necessary illusion on many a scene which electricity now revealed in all its naked trashiness. She’d heard that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry had refused to replace gas with electricity in the Lyceum—ever. But in America no one could refuse the often unlovely imperatives of progress. Gaslight was obsolete, and that was the end of it. The American partiality for the new decreed: whatever is, can be improved. Or ought to be replaced. Maryna soon forgot whether she had signed a letter, dated May 7, 1882, which appeared in many magazines under the heading “Madame Zalenska’s Tribute to an American Invention,” just for the fee she was paid, or whether for a time she had actually used this amusing new product.
My dear Sir: Last October while in Top
eka, Kan., I purchased several boxes of your Felt Tablets (Ideal Tooth Polisher) for the teeth and have been using them ever since. I cheerfully add my testimony to others as to their value, and believe this invention will eventually almost entirely supersede the brush made of bristles. I am only afraid that at some time I may run out of Tablets in a place where none are procurable.
Yours sincerely,
Marina Zalenska
It became harder—does this always happen to great actors?—to remember the difference between what she said and what she thought. After she hailed her friend, Mr. Longfellow, as America’s greatest poet—she had broken off her tour to recite “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and say a few words of tribute at his funeral—Bogdan ventured to rebuke her. “You can’t really think Longfellow is as good a poet as Walt Whitman?” he exclaimed. “I … I don’t know,” Maryna said. “Do you think I’m becoming stupid, Bogdan? It’s quite possible. Or just very conventional? I shouldn’t like that at all.”
Summoned at last to play opposite Edwin Booth, in a benefit performance of Hamlet at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Maryna sang Ophelia’s songs to the music Moniuszko had composed for her when she played Ophelia in Warsaw many years before. “Ah, my father’s ghost!” Booth shouted when Maryna knocked on his door an hour before curtain; she wanted to show him the precious original score. He was sitting in full costume in the dark, drinking; she could barely see his slender, important face. The dressing room smelled of urine. She’d heard it said so often that he was born pensive and sad, that his youth, given over to serving a tyrannical, antic father, had been comfortless, and that he had never recovered from the death of a beloved young wife after three years of marriage, followed, soon after, by the infamous deed of his younger brother, John Wilkes Booth. Maryna had her own reasons for being moody, but none of them could compare with his. She did not presume again on his solitude.
She felt serene. She hoped it wasn’t just being old. Each evening, after she finished her makeup and put on her costume, she would select one scene and work on freshening the reading of some lines: then she was lucid, focused, anxious. In her dressing room between the acts, a scarlet and magenta kimono (gift of the Japanese ambassador in Washington, an admirer) flung over her costume, woolen scarf around her throat to keep her vocal muscles warm, cigarette caught in a small gold clamp attached to a ring that she slipped on her forefinger, Maryna brooded over a lapboard accommodating cards hardly bigger than thumbnails … until the call-boy’s summons wrenched her away from her game.
You don’t cheat when you play solitaire. But neither do you accept every hand you deal yourself; you redeal and redeal until you see a hand (say, with two kings and at least one ace) that gives you a better chance to win. Sometimes she was thinking; or planning something; or remembering, for instance, about Ryszard. Often it was just the silky, insidious desire to play another game. There was news about Ryszard. He had married. Henryk had written her first, and then the others. Jealousy flashed, white-hot. (Yes, she had been vain enough to suppose he would never love anyone else.) Her insides felt scooped out with regret; then she iced with anger. (It didn’t occur to her that he had married without love.) She dealt herself the cards. She lost. If you lose, you have to play again. You think, Just one more game. But even if you win, you still want to play again.
* * *
“I WISH TO SPEAK TO Madame Zalenska and her children,” said the tall gaunt apparition in the doorway of Maryna’s car.
An hour ago they had pulled into the train yard at Lexington, Kentucky, for two nights, and the wonder was how she had got past Melville, their clever porter, who was under orders to admit no one except members of the company. The young women who prowled about the stage door or haunted the pavement outside the hotel (if Maryna was in their city for a week’s run), hoping for a glimpse of their idol, had even been known to venture into the railway station’s darker precincts. But this, Maryna saw, was no aspirant to the stage.
“How may I help you?” said Maryna, rising.
“You are Madame Zalenska and”—her pale blue eyes scanned the long table where Bogdan, Miss Collingridge, Peabody, and a half dozen of the actors had just sat down to supper with Maryna—“these are your children?”
Thirty-five-year-old Maurice Barrymore (a gifted English actor and aspiring playwright who had been Maryna’s Romeo, Orlando, Claudio, Maurice, and Armand Duval for several seasons now) and sixty-year-old Francis McGivern (her Friar Laurence, Angelo, Michonnet, and Armand’s father) burst out laughing.
“Quiet, you youngsters, or you shall be spanked and sent to bed without your supper!” said Maryna. “As we all know that a great actress is ageless, I thank you for the compliment, Mrs.—”
“Mrs. Wenton.”
“—but unfortunately I have only one child, and he is far away, in a boarding school near Boston.”
“I am speaking of your company. These are your children too, the children of your soul, and their salvation depends entirely upon you.”
“What would you guess the population of religious lunatics to be in America?” Bogdan murmured to Miss Collingridge.
“Why are you whispering, sir? You should listen to what I am saying to your mother.”
“I am not an actor, madam, so perhaps my soul is exempt from immediate danger. And I defy anyone to construe my relation to this lady as filial.”
Eben Stopford, their Charles the Wrestler in As You Like It and the Porter in Macbeth, banged the table with the flat of his huge hand.
“I see that I am being made fun of.”
“Madame Marina, shall I escort the lady to the exit?”
“No, no, Eben. It’s all right.”
Mrs. Wenton smiled in triumph, then approached the table and looked intently into Maryna’s face. “Permit me to have a talk with you. A private talk. I am sent to you on a holy mission by the one dearest to my heart.”
“A private talk. Very well. But I shall invite the gentleman who has told you he is not an actor to join us.”
In the sunken parlor at the end of the car, Bogdan picked a magazine from the reading table, sat on one of the sofas, crossed his legs, and frowned. Maryna seated the intruder opposite herself in the armchair by the bookcase. Melville, whom Maryna decided not to reproach for having failed in his sentry duty, appeared with the coffee. Sternly waving it away, their unwanted guest stared open-mouthed as Maryna inserted something into a short gold tube which she set between her lips, leaned forward when Bogdan rose, striking a match, so he could anoint its tip with a flame, and leaned back, resting her wrist on the lace antimacassar of the arm of the easy chair.
“You have never seen a lady with a cigarette?”
“No!”
“So now you have,” said Maryna. “Do be so kind as to master your astonishment and tell me what you want from me, or let me return to my dinner.”
“I may begin now? You will listen to me?”
“You may begin, Mrs. Fenton.”
“Wenton. I don’t know if I can, with that smoke coming out of your nostrils and mouth.”
“You can,” said Maryna. “Try.”
“Last night my son appeared to me from the upper world. My little son, only three when he drowned in the pond near our house, and he had stars in his eyes. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘go to Madame Zalenska. Tell her that the floor of the stage is but a grating beneath which lie the flames of hell. Warn her, Mother, that if she continues to spread bad examples, there will be no pity for her. One day she will take a step, just one step, and that floor will break beneath her with a crash and she will fall into the fiery abyss, and the other actors with her.’” Mrs. Wenton gazed moist-eyed, imploringly, at Maryna.
“I am sorry to hear about your son. When did the dreadful accident happen?”
“Many years ago. But he is always with me. ‘Mother,’ he said last night, ‘go in the name of the welfare of humanity, and beg Madame Zalenska to save herself and the many other souls she is dragging into corruption.’”
“Maryna, don’t—”
“Corrupting? I corrupting anyone?”
“Yes!” And the intruder launched into a tirade against the plays Maryna was appearing in, singling out Adrienne, a story that glorifies the stage; Camille, the story of a courtesan; and Frou-Frou, the story of a frivolous woman who abandons her husband and little son. “All three”—she concluded—“the hellish conceptions of French authors.”
“It does not appease you that these unhappy women, Adrienne and Marguerite and poor Gilberte, all die at the end of the play? Even if they are as bad as you say, are they not sufficiently punished?”
“But before they are punished, you, Madame Zalenska, with your art, have made them seem very attractive.”
“So I should be punished, too? Is that what you are saying?”
“Maryna, let me—”
“No, Bogdan, I want to hear Mrs. Wenton out. I want to understand her.”
“There is nothing to understand, Madame Zalenska. I come in the name of morality and religion.”
“What religion, if I may ask?”
“I am an evangelist. I am of all religions.”
“Really? In America there are so many kinds of churches and even—I’m told—families in which each member belongs to a different church. And you believe in all of them, Mrs. Wenton? Extraordinary. I belong to just one, the Roman Catholic, and follow its precepts of charity and love.”
“I thank heaven that I do not belong to Rome, but all of us, Roman or not, know the difference between good and evil. God has given you talent. Beautiful talent. Why not use it for good? Why do you present such immoral plays?”
“Surely you don’t consider Shakespeare immoral.”
“Another beautiful talent fatally misused! Not all of it, but yes, Shakespeare is rife with indecency! Lust, calling itself love, is the theme of Romeo and Juliet, and of Midnight’s Summer Dream, which has all those couples sleeping together on the ground, and both As You Like It and Twelfth Night have a woman cavorting about the stage in tights! And there’s witchcraft in the one that shows a wife enticing her husband to murder the king, after the witches prophesy to—”