The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  Or remember.

  “Flo,” she asks, “are you all—”

  “She killed herself,” Flo says finally, not flinching from their stare.

  “Yes,” Richard says. “That’s what it says here. In 1938.”

  Flo narrows her eyes, then smiles coyly. “But why are we talking about her? I thought you were here to interview me.”

  “I am,” Richard says. He tries to smile but he’s uncomfortable. “I have to ask you, Flo. By whatever logic—by whatever means—are you The Biograph Girl?”

  She meets his gaze and smiles—almost in relief, Jean thinks, as if he’s asked her the one question she can answer directly.

  “No, Mr. Sheehan,” she says. “I’m not The Biograph Girl.”

  The rest of the interview goes as it had before: Flo speaking about life in the past, how things have changed, how much she has seen, how she learned to drive a car, what it was like to live through two world wars, how she felt watching a man walk on the moon—all wonderful and fascinating insights and experiences.

  But precious little about herself.

  Richard respected the line she so firmly drew in the sand. But when they said good-bye, there was still something in all of their eyes as they shook Flo’s hand and thanked her.

  “Mr. Sheehan,” Jean asks now, as they walk out of the day room.

  “Yes?” he says.

  “There isn’t something I should know, is there? I don’t want anything upsetting Flo. I mean, the woman who killed herself—might she have been a relation of Flo’s?”

  He shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine.” He withdraws the photocopies from his jacket and hands them to her. “Here. I’ve got the originals at home. See for yourself. An amazing coincidence.”

  “Is that all it is?”

  He smiles. “What else could it be?”

  But Jean knows he doesn’t believe it. Not for an instant.

  She looks over at Flo, now busying herself picking up coffee cups from the tables in the day room. Who is she really? Jean thinks. She’s never really known, and she suspects no one else at St. Mary’s over the years has known either. Who is this wise old woman she’s come to rely on, to trust, to love? Who is Florence Bridgewood?

  August 1904

  Names, names, names. You get confused by all the names. I don’t wonder. I’ve lived a long life. There are a lot of names.

  Linda? Yes, that’s one of the names I’ve mentioned. But I can’t really tell you about Linda until I’ve told you first about San Francisco. It’s still the most beautiful place on earth, you know, with the possible exception of the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea. But back before the earthquake—oh, then San Francisco was an enchanted village on a hill. I don’t imagine there are many who remember it from that time—how could there be? Sad. How very sad. It was like a fairy tale kingdom—it really was. A charming village out of a storybook—that’s the only way I can describe it.

  And if you know anything about me yet, you know I don’t go in for sugarcoated reveries or drippy nostalgic hyperbole. Get out the barf bucket again when I hear that kind of stuff! So I really mean it when I say that San Francisco before the great earthquake was magical. The little colorful houses, the cobblestone streets, the astounding tableau of hill and sky and sea—

  “I never want to leave,” I told Ducks the day we arrived, turning in place to see the panorama around me.

  “Some folks never do,” he said.

  You have to see it in your mind. Really see it. Only then can I tell you about Linda.

  It’s a summer day. Linda and I are on the crest of a hill overlooking the Mission district. The sky is defiantly blue and the sun is directly overhead and warm. It’s one of those quintessential San Francisco summers, with none of the mugginess of New York. Whenever I think of that day—or any of those days I spent with Linda in the Golden City—I think of brightness and warmth and hillsides of wildflowers.

  Now it’s true I’m not one to go on much about sunshine and daffodils. I admit that, when I first saw Linda, I thought she was just a silly little filly. All lace and fluff. And maybe she was. But that day, I’m telling you—I’ve never known a day so warm or bright or filled with fragrance.

  So there.

  I can see her still, weaving daisies through her hair.

  “Tell me, Flo,” she said. “Suppose they let you play Juliet. Suppose you could be the leading actress of any company in the country—but the audience was forbidden to ever applaud. Would you still want to be an actress then?”

  “It’s too silly a scenario for me to even consider,” I replied.

  Mother had hired Linda to play the ingenue part in The Winds of Pompeii. I had wanted the role, but Mother had forbidden it, telling me I was still too young.

  “But I’m fourteen!” I protested. Or fifteen, sixteen—somewhere there.

  Oh, I was prepared to hate Linda. She came in off the dusty street carrying a basket of oranges, her blond hair blowing in the breeze. Her hair was even blonder than mine, white almost, nearly invisible from a distance in the bright sun. “Well, if it ain’t Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” I sneered to Ducks.

  “Her name’s Linda Arvidson,” he told me.

  “Bet she doesn’t even smoke cigarettes.”

  I was right. No cigarettes, no beer, no obscenities passed her lips. Her first gesture was to offer me an orange. “Why aren’t you playing the ingenue?” she asked. “You’re certainly pretty enough.”

  “My mother’s the company manager,” I explained, finding myself accepting her gift.

  “I would think that would entitle you to all sorts of perks,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I’m not ready, she says.”

  Linda smiled. “I imagine you’ll only be ready once she’s ready to share the spotlight.”

  It wasn’t the last time Linda would speak the truth so plainly. Mother wasn’t aging well. Her face was deeply lined, and the rough brown skin of too many days in the sun could no longer be lightened or softened by any of the expensive creams she bought. I’d find her sitting alone on the back steps of the theaters we played, just sitting there, staring up at the moon. Sometimes Ducks would be behind her playing his harmonica, and I loved to sit there and fall asleep to the sound. Sometimes I’d forget where we were—in five months we’d played eleven cities, from Albany to Detroit to Chicago to Little Rock. Sometimes none of us spoke, except on stage, for days.

  Oh, Mother. All those years together, and I hardly knew you. During our brief sojourn in Buffalo with my grandmother, I’d come to discern that Mother had once been persona non grata to her family for choosing a life on the stage. But hard as that must have been, it wasn’t enough to account for the grand sadness that seemed to envelop her at all times, the sense of great tragedy that trailed her like a shadow.

  As I reached young womanhood, my mother’s air of melancholy only seemed to deepen with the lines on her careworn face. The impossible grandeur that she tried to impart was less able to conceal her weariness. She now carried a brass-handled cane with a pearl stud at the top. Her moonlit vigils on the back porches of theaters became regular occurrences.

  It was one such night when I found her sitting out back, the crickets chirping rhythmically, her cane in her hands. She called me over to her, breaking her usual silence.

  “Florence,” Mother said. “I’ve gotten a letter from your brother Norman. He asked about you.”

  My brother. He was still living in Buffalo with my grandmother. He’d hated me when Mother and I had come back. I suppose he resented me, thinking I’d stolen Mother away.

  “He wouldn’t care if I were alive or dead,” I said to Mother.

  “That’s not true, Florence.” Her voice was queer. Soft, vague. “You’re his baby sister. He’d take care of you if—”

  “If what, Mother?”

  She tapped her cane impatiently on the steps. “Oh, Florence. I don’t know what is best. These theaters we’re playing—these half-empty h
ouses. What’s the point anymore? All my dreams—it’s too late, Florence, too late.”

  For her, maybe. But not for me.

  “You said I would be famous, Mother. All my life you promised me that! I still believe in the dream! Don’t you?”

  She looked at me with such empty eyes. She didn’t believe it. I could see that. She was tired, old. She had barnstormed through North America for nearly thirty years, and still she was playing on run-down stages to half-filled houses. She no longer believed—in herself or in any of the rest of us.

  We carried Mother’s depression with us like a heavy trunk of extra props. Ducks tried to cheer her up, spicing her rum and playing silly songs on his harmonica. But by the time we reached the end of our tour, we all shared her weariness.

  Then an amazing bolt of luck hit us. Ducks was sitting there on the back steps of an old theater in Chicago, puffing his cigar late one night. He seemed mesmerized by the rings of smoke that billowed one after another up into the air. “Florrie,” he said at last. “Run inside and fetch me that funnel from our prop trunk.”

  I did as he asked. When I returned he placed the funnel—a large old tin thing—over his face, the narrow end pointed up at the sky.

  I laughed. “Ducks, whatever are you doing?”

  He didn’t answer. He just kept puffing away on his cigar. The smoke escaped from the funnel as if from a chimney.

  “Eureka!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got a brilliant idea.”

  The next morning, our hands were slathered in plaster and papier-mâché. We molded the gunk around the metal hoop structure of an old antebellum costume skirt. Mother spied us and asked us just what we thought we were doing.

  “This is what our drama needs, Lotta. How can we tell the story of Pompeii without a volcano?”

  “We are serious actors,” she sniffed. “We need no gimmicks.”

  Ducks chuckled. “I think we need something, pet. Filling half a house means the other half is empty.”

  There was an agent in town. I can’t recall his name, but he was big in those days. One of those high-hatted men in waistcoat and pipe who consorted with people like Ziegfeld and Daly. What made him especially important was that he had connections in San Francisco, the heart of the West Coast theater. East Coast celebrity did not carry much weight in the west. Mother knew this; we never attempted to venture much past the Mississippi. But Ducks, inspired by his cigar, had other ideas.

  I helped him lift the heavy plaster pyramid into a wagon. We filled another wagon with old rags. We each pulled one down the street, causing passersby to stop and stare. But Ducks paid them no mind, so excited was he by his brainstorm. We knew we could never get an appointment to see this Mr. Important Agent, but we found out where he was staying, and set up camp in front of his hotel. After piling the rags underneath our volcano, we set fire to them, prompting a policeman to walk over and threaten us.

  “Just watch, Officer,” Ducks pleaded. “We won’t let them burn for long.”

  By constantly batting out the flames, we caused great clouds of smoke to puff from the hole we’d made in top. “Voila!” Ducks exclaimed. “The volcano of Pompeii!”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said the policeman.

  We drew quite the crowd, all of whom oohed and ahhed over such a marvel. We kept up our routine, lighting the rags, stamping out the flames, causing the rags to smolder and the volcano to puff.

  And just as Ducks figured, soon the agent came out from the hotel, intending to hail a cab.

  “Come see The Winds of Pompeii,” Ducks barked as if to the throng in general but really for the agent’s ears alone. “The season’s most sensational theatrical experience. See a real live volcano erupt upon the stage.”

  I shall never forget seeing the agent stop and turn, glance in our direction. I studied his face carefully, watched all of his movements. He looked at the smoky contraption in our rusty old wagon, then around at the crowd that had gathered. I remember watching him remove first one white glove, then the other, folding them both into his right palm. Then he strode toward us, and I knew our fortunes had changed.

  Thanks to Ducks. Always thanks to Ducks. The agent hired us for a West Coast run after our assiduous assurances that of course our volcano was safe, that there was no threat of fire. That was the ever present worry for theaters in those days, and in truth, we had no idea whether or not we’d burn the house down. We were fortunate; we never burned anything more than an old curtain once in Sacramento, for which he had to pay twelve dollars and forty cents. But that old volcano did us far, far more good than harm.

  It brought me to Linda.

  We were booked into the Grand Opera House on Mission Street. In those days, Mission, near Third, was called South-of-the-Slot—not the best of places for a young lady to walk alone, Mother told me. Pawn shops and saloons, and a scattering of dingy nickelodeons. But in the midst of it all, languishing in lonesome splendor, was the old opera house, and I found it staggeringly beautiful. The extravagantly tiled floors and lavish red curtain still recalled the theater’s glory days when Henry Irving and Ellen Terry themselves had trod the boards. To be sure, there had been bigger companies and more stellar names there, but the Lawrence Dramatic Company brought the first-ever erupting volcano to the opera house, and that was something in itself.

  But the manager still treated us with contempt. Mother tried introducing the company, but all he cared to see was the volcano. “Sir,” Mother said, “I’ll have you know the Lawrence Dramatic Company is an esteemed company throughout—”

  “Listen, old woman. If you didn’t have that fire-breathing contraption, you’d never have been invited out to make the trip.”

  He was a barrel-chested souse with hair growing out of his nose. He got real close to Mother’s face when he talked. She didn’t dignify his rudeness. She simply withdrew her lace handkerchief from her sleeve, wiped her face, and said demurely as she turned away, “Sir, it is impolite to spit when you speak.” We all covered our mouths to hide our laughter.

  I played the part of a child, on stage for no more than ten minutes. Behind the curtain, I passed out helmets to the actors playing soldiers and occasionally would help the prop boy fan the smoldering ashes to create the volcano’s smoke. But mostly I’d watch Linda. She was the kind of actress I wanted to be, poised and beautiful, ethereal even—and when she came out for her curtain call, the audience always got to its feet.

  “We’ve got to make good here,” I told Linda. “If we fail in San Francisco, word of it will make its way through theatrical circles like shit through a sewer.”

  “Oh, Flo,” she said. “How you talk.”

  But I could tell I charmed her. She had never quite met a girl like me. Or me one like her, I suppose. I didn’t have a lot of contact with girls my age, and I felt rather puffed up by her attention. When she asked if I wanted to climb the hill behind the theater to get a better look at the city, I made it into a race. I won, of course; she came up huffing and puffing with her basket of oranges like the little nelly she was.

  “What do you want more than anything, Flo?” she asked me, catching her breath and settling down on the grassy hill.

  “To be a great actress,” I answered, assuming she’d challenge me.

  But she didn’t. She just began picking her flowers. “Look,” she said at last, pointing. “Between those two hills. Can you see it?”

  Yes, I could. The water. The Pacific Ocean. Green against the blue sky. Oh, what a magnificent city it was. Never before had I been able to see so far. Its vast sweep overwhelmed me. Up each hill and around every corner, I was continuously discovering a new vista of sun and sky and ocean and mountain—all there in one staggering view.

  “I’ll talk to your mother,” Linda said, peeling an orange now and handing me a wedge, “if you really think you still want to play the ingenue.”

  “But you must come with us,” I said. “When we go back east, you must come.” I bit into my orange. It was sweet and tart at t
he same time, and I pulled the pulp through my teeth.

  “You know I can’t, Flo. Not yet. My family is here. But I will follow. I promise.”

  “Oh, you must, you must—if you want to be an actress. New York is where you have got to be. Have you read about all the new theaters springing up? All along Broadway, from Thirty-fourth up to Forty-sixth Street. Dozens of them. They say the lights—”

  Linda looked over at me with enormous blue eyes. “Are like the walk into heaven,” she finished.

  How beautiful she looked in the sun. “Why are you an actress?” I asked her suddenly. “You say I don’t really want it. That all I want is the applause. Why are you an actress?”

  She laughed. “Oh, what an enormous question, Flo. I’m not quite sure I know the answer.” She paused. “But I know it’s not the applause.”

  The hillside around us blazed with yellow flowers that day—in my mind they’re daffodils, but it was likely too late in the season for daffodils. Or maybe not. Maybe there were dozens of daffodils reflecting the golden light of the noonday sun. Daffodils and buttercups and sunflowers as dazzling as Linda’s sun-soaked hair, her bright yellow dress, her happy laugh. Sunflowers. Yes, I’m sure there were sunflowers. And calla lilies. Everywhere.

  “There’s nothing quite like it,” she said finally, looking over at me with those pale blue eyes that were nearly translucent, her knees bent and pulled up to her chest, her arms crossed over them and her face resting on her hands. “I only feel truly alive when I’m on the stage.”

  This made me pause. I couldn’t say the same. I had a flash of memory then—of riding a horse in Buffalo, saddling him up and mounting him like a boy, galloping faster and faster through the meadow with the air filling up my lungs until I thought they might burst. I’d felt alive then, gloriously alive. The stage was thrilling, the applause intoxicating—but I had many moments of life beyond the footlights.