Like a kid on a spending spree he rents her the most expensive and most talented “toys” for support. Bernard Shaw has called Miss Kit his ideal Candida so when she plays the role, Guthrie gets her two Marchbanks—the first, Burgess Meredith; the second, young Marlon Brando. When she plays Juliet he sends to England for Maurice Evans as Romeo, Edith Evans for the Nurse and Sir Ralph Richardson as Mer-cutio. Filling out the rest of the cast, he procures young Orson Welles for Tybalt and in smaller roles, Tyrone Power and a very thin Kirk Douglas. He also presents his lady as Masha in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, her two others being Judith Anderson and Gertrude Musgrove—Natasha is played by Ruth Gordon. For Behrman’s play No Time for Comedy he gives her as her leading man—Laurence Olivier. Raymond Massey plays opposite her in The Doctor’s Dilemma, and now Guthrie mounts an entirely new treatment of The Barretts of Wimpole Street with Miss Kit literally playing herself as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Brian Aherne playing himself as Robert Browning. The jeune homme terrible continues to spoil his beloved star with such grand and glorious concoctions as Antony and Cleopatra with Godfrey Tearle and Antigone with Cedric Hardwicke. They are not all winners, however. White Cargo, a new play set in the South Seas, a pale imitation of Rain, has the usually dignified Cornell playing the native girl, wearing nothing but a sarong. She is also required to speak the deathless prose with “forked tongue.” There are three acts. The curtain comes down on the second act as she crawls across the stage towards some hard-nosed missionary pleading, “Me Tondelayo, me good girl, me stay!” Robert Benchley, reviewing it for The New York Times, headed his column with:
“Me Tondelayo, me good girl, me stay.”
“Me Bobby, me bad boy, me go.”
Guthrie instructs his office to never let Miss Kit see a bad notice—the reviews are kept from her. She sometimes wants to leave the stage door, like any normal person, wearing slacks and sweaters for simplicity and comfort. He screams at her, “You are a star. When the public sees you, you must look like a star.” He dresses her in Mainbocher, Schiapar-elli, Balenciaga—the world’s leading designers make her clothes. To design her sets, he lures the brilliance of Oenslager, Melzinger, Robert Edmond Jones and Oliver Messel. When they travel they travel like royalty in their own private railway coaches—one for them, one for the company, one to sleep and a separate dining car for all of us. I happen to know ’cause I was there.
“THE KATHARINE CORNELL SPECIAL”
I SAT AWESTRUCK in the observation car as I chugged along across the vast and endlessly flat Midwest, through the Colorado mountains, the Rockies, staring in wonder at the noble snow-capped peaks floating by with such dignity until I finally caught my second glimpse of the distant Pacific. By the tour’s end we were to play all the main houses across the country: the Curran in San Francisco; the Biltmore in Los Angeles; the Shubert, Chicago; the National, Washington; the Colonial in Boston and many more such historic buildings, some sadly no longer standing. The play The Constant Wife was a dated bit of froth by Somerset Maugham, but a suitable vehicle for Miss Kit and her staunch troupe of seasoned players. This included two elderly actresses well into their seventies, both British and very grand—elegant, soft-spoken Margery Maude, and a tiny creature known as Eva Leonard-Boyne, a chirpy little bird in full plumage with an enormous milk-white poitrine and a definite past who sported a monocle on and off the stage. We were positive she even wore it to bed; John Emery, a lovable Yank and very funny to boot, cursed with bad ulcers caused by a marriage to Tallulah Bankhead, who had once in the sanctuary of their bed informed him quite firmly, “I don’t go down anymore dahling; it gives me claustrophobia.” John also admitted that occasionally, when he was attempting to excite her, she would invariably show indifference by singeing the tips of her pubic hairs with a lighted match.
Miss Cornell, the last of the great actress-managers—and my sponsor
Then there was Gertrude Musgrove, a delectable lady of considerable style, an expert at light comedy with a ribald sense of humour for whom I was developing a rather large crush. She became my constant companion and partner in crime. My heart was gladdened too at the sight of young Anna Cameron, my pal from Canada, playing the ingenue and who, like myself, was understudying the major roles. Dear Anna had discovered the Method and would on occasion take it to the extreme. She was convinced her character came to life in the dressing room. Her role in The Constant Wife was a good one, but brief, and at each performance, before her entrance, she would talk quite loudly to some invisible creature offstage before opening the door. Cynical old Eddie Bayliss, Guthrie’s principal stage manager, thinking she had gone quite mad, asked her if anything was wrong, and, if not, who the hell was she talking to? Blithe as ever, Anna replied, “Oh, I was just telling my chauffeur downstairs to wait for me as I won’t be long.” Making up our dangerous quartet was a dear, daft lost soul of an Englishman named Peter who played the butler and had a disastrous problem with hootch. Being his understudy, I lived in a permanent state of terror as I knew at any moment I would have to go on.
The train was much like a travelling boardinghouse reeking of intrigue and at “lights out” Gertrude, Anna, Peter and I would snoop up and down the sleeping car trying to ferret out who was in whose upper berth! The four of us squatted down outside Eva Leonard-Boyne’s curtained compartment muffling our mirth as the old lady, whose prolonged snoring was invariably interrupted by some late-night fantasy or autumnal wet dream, cooed and gargled her way to what seemed a wistful aging climax.
Gertie (seated) in The Three Sisters with Cornell and Anderson
Way into the night we sat, Guthrie occasionally joining us, telling endless stories—one of them Gertrude’s romantic tale of how she first met her husband, the late great set designer and painter Vincent Korda of the celebrated Hungarian film family (the subject of her son Michael Korda’s delightful book Charmed Lives). It appeared she was a mere teenager of about fifteen attending a private girls’ school somewhere in the mountains of Switzerland. Every morning the students, wearing their regulation school uniforms, took a recess and went outside to play. One such morning Gertrude, standing a little apart from the others, noticed a tall man of middle age, dark and swarthy, walking up the hill towards her carrying an easel over one shoulder. The bell rang for the girls to return to their classes, but Gertrude lingered behind. Sometime later, privately, Gertrude finished the story for me: “There was something about that man that riveted me where I stood—something hypnotic in the confident way he approached me. He walked up to me, put down his easel, gently, slowly, unbuttoned my pinafore and gazed for the longest time at my breasts. He then gave me the tenderest, warmest smile, refastened my blouse and, taking me by the hand, said quite simply, ‘You’re coming with me.’ I went with him—I knew I had to. He led me away—out of my world into his—a world of love, passion and art. But wherever we went he always made sure to enroll me in some school or other in order to finish my studies. When his celebrated contemporaries came to supper he would banish me upstairs. ‘You vood be so bored, dahling; zey are all too old for you’—but I didn’t mind. I would sneak out onto the staircase balcony and peer down at them through the banisters. One night when Winston Churchill, an old friend of Vincent’s, arrived to dine I curled up for hours on the landing in my nightie, hugging my knees, my eyes popping out of my head trying to hang on to every word.” How ironic, I thought, as I listened to Gertrude—there she is “the Constant Nymph” appearing in a piece called The Constant Wife.
Now, there are some who insist that this is not true. That she met Korda many years later on the set of Charles Laughton’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, which Korda had designed. Well, I admit Gertie was prone to embellish on a grand scale and she could have been putting me on. But this was the story that she told me and I want so much to believe it that I’m sticking to it. Besides, Gertie could have made me believe anything really, because, you see, I was hopelessly infatuated.
Guthrie could never turn Miss Kit into a
great actress. No matter how skillful his presentation of her—she remained always the same—fine, noble, sympathetic, in everything she portrayed. But by bringing those qualities of hers to the surface he had, intentionally or not, turned her into a great star and a great “boss.” She ruled her little kingdom like a queen and as she worshipped goodness to obsession, so she believed everyone in it to be good. When one of her lambs decided to stray from the path of righteousness, she simply refused to believe it; and if some outsider dared criticize her “brood” she turned a deaf ear and a cold shoulder.
Now the time had arrived for Miss Kit to be tested in the extreme, for the “butler” decided to go on one hell of a long binge. Poor Peter was in bad shape that week. He had hit the sauce with a vengeance, run out of booze money and had started in on the methylated spirits (a bottle of witch hazel wasn’t safe to leave around). So it wasn’t exactly a picnic the night I arrived at the theatre a little after the “half hour” to be told by the stage manager that I had to go on because the butler was bombed and had passed out in his dressing room.
“Does Miss Kit know?” I stuttered, beginning to shake like an aspen leaf.
“Not yet, she doesn’t” was the ominous reply.
“Give me a minute,” I said as I rushed to get Anna and Gertie. The three of us barrelled into his room, bolted the door, slapped him around, poured gallons of coffee down his throat and threw him into his butler’s weeds. He seemed to be recovering slightly and I prayed like hell, for the last thing I ever wanted to do was go on in that fatal part. At least he was able to stand, though somewhat shakily, and we pushed him toward the stage. Apart from walking smack into a couple of stage flats, he was doing pretty well.
Now the butler’s role was complicated to a degree. He was required to make countless entrances merely to announce various people and then retire, but all with split-second timing for each announcement was meant to cut across specific discussions of a most private and intimate nature. The curtain went up. Peter, though he slurred a good deal, seemed to be doing not too badly and Miss Kit, who never left the stage, noticed nothing out of the norm. But Peter, still basically sloshed, suddenly got a second wind and began to get bubblingly overzealous.
With an aggressive insistence he would appear onstage whenever he felt the urge and stand there weaving about dangerously, announcing with stentorian defiance a host of arriving visitors, not all of whom belonged in the play. He was so enjoying himself, in fact, that he would interrupt crucial scenes by announcing guests who had already been onstage for some time. As a capper, Peter finally decided he had had enough of his butler role so upon his very latest entrance he pulled up a chair, sat down in the center of the stage, joined the family and nodded sheepishly at everyone in the room and in the audience, a silly, grinning, vacuous expression frozen all over his exceedingly purple face. The act one curtain came down with a louder, more final thud than usual. I replaced Peter in the second and third, Anna pushing me on when my cue came. I was frightened out of my wits, but I made it. By the time the last curtain fell, I had become a hero—a minor hero, perhaps—but a hero nonetheless.
Miss Kit, la chatelaine at Martha’s Vineyard with friends
BEING A NOVIERO of fair standing at the McClintic-Cornell Club meant positive, nay, guaranteed reemployment and almost certain promotion. Brashly confident that this would occur and banking on it utterly, I ran back to Mother Earth (Jane Broder) for some interim financial replenishment. She had already anticipated me, calling her old friend Eva Le Gallienne who responded by promptly giving me my Broadway debut. God bless Miss Le G! I was twenty-four.
Miss Le Gallienne or “Le G” as she was affectionately nicknamed, was not just one of the theatre world’s supreme figures, she was a woman of exceptional intellect and individuality who could draw with ease from her rich ancestral link with the literary past. Her father, Richard Le Gallienne, was the celebrated English poet and friend of Oscar Wilde and therefore exceedingly close to the center of that buzzing elitist society of Victorian letters. Her mother was Danish, a language that Eva understood—she also spoke perfect French and a little Russian. So it was not surprising that Le G was more than capable of tossing off new, fresh working adaptations of the plays of Chekhov and Ibsen, which she not only translated but also adapted from the original Russian and Norwegian. An actress of high intelligence and power, she was able to further ensure their success through her unforgettable interpretations of Mrs. Alving, Hedda Gabbler, Masha and Madame Ranevskaya.
Miss Eva Le Gallienne, or “LeG,” as we all affectionately called her
Le G sported a withered arm and hand and one eye that tipped slightly askew, some of which she had received when long ago, risking her own life, she carried to safety the near-asphyxiated young actress Josephine Barrington from the top of a burning building. It was this same courage and determination that made her such a force as an advocate and champion of women’s rights and fervent supporter of the plea that lesbianism be treated with compassion and understanding—not brutally suppressed and outlawed. At a time when every conceivable obstacle barred the way to such a cause, she quietly fought to dignify her beloved sex not with the objectionable militance we are sometimes confronted by, but with a grace, wit and humility that were astonishing in their effectiveness.
With her friend Margaret Webster, she also had the guts to manage a most ambitiously mounted repertory company smack in the very heart of Manhattan called the Civic Repertory Theatre. Surrounding herself with a talented rostrum of players, she gave many innovative presentations of new and experimental works as well as classic revivals of top quality. Though she mostly became Ibsen’s champion, she assumed such diverse characters as Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Rostand’s Chantecler. Sadly, several years later the theatre, financially insolvent, closed but it had gained for Miss Le Gallienne not just a multitude of adoring fans but also a firm place in the history of the American theatre. She was in many ways responsible for what is now considered Off Broadway. Now, after much too long an absence from the very public she had created, she was at last making her comeback!
The play of her choice, The Starcross Story, which she had engaged me for, was a dated English piece of little merit, not in the least worthy of her and it opened and closed in one night! One solitary night! But what a night! As many as possible of her loyal supporters who could cram themselves into one building were in attendance! I shall never forget her entrance—that modest woman tiptoeing onstage to one of the most memorable receptions I have ever witnessed. Like the disciples of some archangel, they rose in a body to welcome her—cheering, yelling, screaming, throwing hats and programmes into the air! I thought it would never cease—they refused to let her begin—the noise was deafening; no end seemed in sight, so she did the only thing she could to stop them. She acknowledged them. Slipping completely out of character (something Le G would normally frown on), she bowed low to the waist and held that bent suppliant position till I thought her spine would snap—waiting for them to calm down so that the anticli-mactic play that followed could be allowed to proceed on its mediocre course. In our time, that sort of adulation occurs only at the opera or rock concerts, but I’m glad I was standing on that very same stage next to Miss Le G amidst all the frenzy she had stirred, in the days when it could happen in the theatre, and did and should.
But one night?! Please! I was convinced my career, Broadway or otherwise, was at an end! This was it! Jane snapped me out of it, of course, and pushed me forward into a new production the Theatre Guild was presenting. So after all I was to have another chance. I kept searching out Miss Le G, however, regularly attending her master classes. She was, as might be expected, a brilliant teacher—an inspiration. Although I was to see her again only at odd brief moments throughout her long and distinguished life, I shall never forget that brave lady and her relentless, steadfast quest to fight conformity and despite a somewhat cold, academic exterior, how curiously, how strangely alluring
she was, with her beautiful speaking voice, her superior mind, glowing inner spirit, her little crooked smile, her flashing eyes, her floating hair.
At least the new Theatre Guild production of Irish actor-playwright Walter Macken’s Home Is the Hero enjoyed a slightly more respectable run at Broadway’s Booth Theatre (three weeks) and brought me some kudos in the small but meaty role of Manchester Monaghan, a sleazy spiv, replete with winkle-pickers and knuckle-dusters. The play’s director, Worthington Miner, television’s drama chief, was once again my angel of mercy. It also gave me the opportunity of renewing my old friendship with Donald Harron (playing the lead); laugh at his quips, get to borrow his makeup; develop a crush on Peggy Ann Garner (the soubrette), who in turn had a crush on Don but decided to marry Albert Salmi—oh well! What the hell?!
After the closing performance we all hit Patsy and Karl’s with a vengeance and the next day (which I could barely recognize) brought me my invitation to rejoin the McClintic-Cornell establishment. Climbing into my best blazer, shirt, tie and grey flannels, I reported to rehearsals for Christopher Fry’s pastorally poetic The Dark Is Light Enough. The story recounts how an aging countess at great risk to her life harnesses her own horses and rides through the Hungarian winter into enemy lines in order to rescue a young deserter she believes in and bring him to her castle, where she hides him from certain death. The play took as its theme and inspiration those lovely lines of Fabre’s:
In Spite of Myself: A Memoir Page 17