Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  “I want a very simple but becoming dinner frock for my wife to wear tomorow night,” he said. He could not remember whom he had heard use the word “frock” but it sounded well. “And I should also appreciate your advice regarding the accessories. We’re dining with Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Higgins, the producer, tomorrow night.”

  “Oh,” the floor lady said, and her face cleared, “Mr. Arthur Higgins. Did he send you?”

  “He might have, but he didn’t,” he said. “I’m Thomas Harrow, the playwright.”

  He could not have thought of a better thing to say. The word cast a glow of the arts and made Rhoda sweet and simple like his high-school sweetheart.

  “Oh,” the floor lady said. “Oh yes, Mr. Harrow.”

  They were snobs at heart in those places when dealing with the arts.

  “Something simple,” he said, “but at the same time becoming.”

  “Yes,” the floor lady said. “I think I know what you mean, but I wish the young lady had a slightly different hair style.”

  “She can get a different one,” he said, “this afternoon, can’t you, dear?”

  “Yes, dear,” Rhoda said.

  “The best way to make up our minds,” the saleslady said, “is to have a few simple things modeled, and the hair style of our first girl is something of the style I mean, if you’d care to watch her, Mr. Harrow.”

  She walked down the length of the room and disappeared behind a velvet curtain while he and Rhoda sat in painful silence.

  “The bitch,” Rhoda whispered. “I don’t think she thinks we’re married.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he answered.

  “It matters to me what she thinks,” she whispered. “My mother brought me up to be a good girl. I’m going to take my glove off so she can see my ring.”

  “By God,” he said, “I think perhaps you’d better, darling.”

  He thought of that place again long afterward when he saw My Fair Lady. The scene at Ascot brought it back, and the music fitted with that distant mood. He could remember his sense of creative triumph, more poignant and perfect than anything later, and rightly so, since never in his life again would he deal so closely with that species of human value. It was he who had brought Rhoda there; it was he who had selected the evening gown.

  “While we’re here,” he said, “we’d better make arrangements for a day and afternoon dress, but only the evening one must be ready tomorrow, and I’ll be glad to leave you a check on the Fifth Avenue Bank.”

  It sounded well. He was glad that his uncle had opened an account for him there while he was at school.

  “It really isn’t necessary, Mr. Harrow,” the floor lady said. “Mrs. Harrow does look fetching, doesn’t she?”

  Of course it was necessary. Dresses or frocks were cheaper then, but what with accessories, Tom must have been committed for nearly eight hundred dollars before they were on the street.

  “I don’t know how you can act like a millionaire,” Rhoda said. “You shouldn’t have done it, darling.”

  “Of course I should,” he said. “I said I wanted to see you looking swell, didn’t I, baby?”

  “But Tom,” she said, and he knew she was torn both ways, “we’re beginning to spend all the money in your account, and we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “Don’t you see it doesn’t matter?” he said. “You’ve got the dresses, haven’t you?”

  There you were again. It was something she could never see—the value of a moment. She could never tell the things that existed on which only a sense of being alive could place a value. She could accept the theory, but never the fact that there was sometimes safety in the throwing-away of safety.

  When Cliff Wisehall, who had provisionally promised to do the directing of Hero’s Return, found himself unable, because of pressure, to attend the first four casting sessions, Arthur Higgins became annoyed, although no one knew better than he that annoyance was valueless in dealing with theatrical impresarios. It was apparent that as Cliff Wisehall’s reputation grew greater his flamboyancy increased in a direct ratio. When Arthur Higgins remonstrated, Cliff explained that he was trying to get the feel of the play, and until he could get the feel, it was futile for him to pick actors. He was trying and trying to get the feel sitting up all night, pacing the streets all day, to get the feel, and frankly, it eluded him. He wondered whether Tommy—he had begun calling Tom “Tommy-my-lad” after their first meeting—actually had grasped the inner meaning of the play himself. He also wondered whether Arthur Higgins understood the inner meaning of the play. If either the maestro or Tommy-my-lad did understand just let them tell him.

  It began to dawn on Tom Harrow—after a conference that ended, like others he sat in later, in a barrage of finely balanced rhetoric—that Cliff Wisehall had not got around to reading the play; and finally the same truth dawned on Arthur Higgins, who said late one afternoon that he would direct the play himself.

  Arthur Higgins both presented and directed Hero’s Return, and Tom Harrow learned more of the feel of the theatre in those days with Arthur than he ever needed to learn again. Arthur had learned, by patient experiment, to reconcile the unreality of a stage set with the actualities of living as understood by an audience. He always insisted that his actors must know where they should be every second they were on stage and know what they were doing, and why. There were plenty of actors and actresses who dreaded the Higgins direction, but those who adjusted admired him. Later Tom knew others who were able to achieve more memorable effects, but no one with the Higgins thoroughness or logic. It was his first experience of seeing a play, a figment of his own imagination, start from the beginning and move into tangible shape, and ever afterwards he had never tired of this intricate process.

  The cast first met in a private dining room in the Hotel Astor. They had already assembled when he arrived, sitting on banquet chairs like a class about to attend a college lecture. A new cast, he often thought, resembled a crew signed up for a long voyage in the age of sail, all listening with anxiety for the good word from the captain. Of course many were friends who had signed up together on other voyages, but others were new, silently eying each other with a competitive jealousy peculiar to their profession.

  “Well, here’s the author,” Arthur Higgins said. “He’s late, but we can start now.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Higgins,” Tom said.

  “No one has a right to take time away from other people,” Arthur said. “Remember, after this, everyone on time. And, now the author’s here, we’ll spend the morning reading through the play. I want the people in the opening scene to move to the far end of the room. All right, my dear—you’re the young sister, aren’t you? I’m sorry, I forget your name.” It was one of the ingenues, a girl who was new on the stage.

  “Delia Duneen,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Arthur Higgins said, “I won’t forget again.”

  As a matter of fact no one did, after Hero’s Return opened. She was not billed as a leading lady until later, and she was established after that.

  He had met all the cast before, but he had never seen them together and he had never previously been through the experience of listening to any long work of his own read by a group of strangers. No one could ever tell, playwright, director or actors, what might eventually happen to a play while it was in rehearsal. Everyone was groping in his own sort of darkness, particularly in the first reading. While he listened to these strangers stumble over his lines, he was beginning to perceive the theatre’s utter lack of self-concealment. Everyone was involuntarily subjected to the criticism of everybody else, and it was a sort of criticism that demanded self-reliance or inordinate vanity or the help of others. He always understood afterwards why people in the theatre were always drawn together, apart from the rest of the world, and why so many of them were generous and considerately kind. You knew people better in the theatre than in other environments because you had to. There was not much to know about some, but you always
had to know what there was and you had to remember through the years tastes and capacities.

  Well, in the end, he had known them, nearly all the great ones and the lesser ones, and their faces and voices now formed a procession through his memory. He could see the ending generations of his early days, the Drews, the Marlowes, the Keanes, the Sheldons and the Thomases. He could recall the first time he had met John Barrymore and the last. He had seen youth grow to middle age and disappear, and he had seen the authors come and go. It startled him to realize that so many of them only a few years his senior were gone already—O’Neill, Howard, Barry, and Sherwood. He had seen new ones take their places, the Millers and Williamses. The truth was, if he lived much longer, he would get to be a grand old man of the theatre himself. He had known them all and he could believe he had been backstage ten thousand times, kissing the leading lady and the supporting girls and telling each that she had been glorious, and saying it was the best performance he had ever seen and predicting that the play would run for a thousand years. You had to keep your head to discount the flattery, but there was genuineness beneath the convention. There was the strong wine of friendship, the common bond and community experience. You were a part of the brotherhood and, once you were, you were never wholly like anyone outside the boundaries.

  He could see why Rhoda had never really been at home with those people, although she had always looked at home. She had always been uncertain in the presence of make-believe and she could never sort out as he could the values of illusion and reality.

  “The trouble is,” she said, “I don’t like insecurity.”

  She had never said a truer thing. The theatre was as insecure and fickle as public taste.

  “And you’re insecure yourself,” she had said. “That’s what makes me so nervous, Tom. You’re getting more that way all the time.”

  Frankly he was already beginning to suspect the word, and it happened, when Rhoda had made that particular remark, he was less secure than he had ever been afterwards. She made it the day they were going to try out Hero’s Return in the theatre in the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware. He had not been sleeping well; he had been rewriting several scenes that were more on his mind than Rhoda was. In the theatre, insecurity constantly moved into some new sort of insecurity. If you were once successful, you always had a fear that you would never be so good again, and so, whatever happened, there was always insecurity.

  XVIII

  He Heard about Hal in Wilmington

  It was always possible to argue over the virtues or defects of tryout towns—New Haven, Philadelphia, Wilmington or Washington, or Boston—and the audience reaction to opening plays differed in each of these cities, but no tryout town could be perfect, and Wilmington was convenient because there was the theatre, right inside the hotel. Thus the ordeal of an opening night, the clash of personalities, the trauma of watching a play run through for its first time before a paying audience, and the final post-mortems and rewrite hours, all those things that made a first night hideous, could take place under one roof.

  “I don’t see why, if you’re so nervous,” Rhoda said, “you and I can’t have supper alone, instead of being even more nervous with Arthur and Helen Higgins.”

  “Please stop calling her Higgins,” he said. “She’s Helen Adair—she doesn’t like to be called Mrs. Higgins.”

  “I don’t see why she can’t take it,” Rhoda said, “I have to be called Mrs. Harrow, don’t I?”

  “You didn’t have to be, once,” he said. “Remember the idea was that you decided to take the chance.”

  “I know,” she said, “I had to. You’d never have come back. You’d have forgotten all about me. In fact, you keep forgetting me the way it is.”

  “I’ve got a lot of things on my mind, Rhoda,” he said. “This business is sort of like having a baby. Everyone says so.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Suppose we should start having a baby?”

  “You don’t think you are, do you?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That makes you frightened, doesn’t it?”

  “Not frightened, only startled,” he answered.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m glad you didn’t say that it makes you startled ‘on top of everything else.’ Everything that happens lately is on top of everything else, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” he said, “everything is on to top of everything.”

  “I never knew there could be so much to get on top of,” Rhoda said. “Aren’t you going to wear a dinner coat?”

  “No,” he answered.

  “I don’t see why,” she answered. “Arthur Higgins always does, and you needn’t be cross about it.”

  “I’m not going to wear a dinner coat on top of everything else,” he said.

  “There,” she said, “don’t say it that way. If you wore a dinner coat, you wouldn’t look so much like a genius. You’re getting to look more and more like one all the time.”

  “I wish to God I were one,” he said.

  “Well, hook up my dress,” she said. “You still like it, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “except for the hooks.”

  “I don’t believe anybody could be worse with hooks than you,” she said. “I wish I had a maid.”

  “I wish you had, too,” he said.

  “Don’t be so cross,” she said. “I know you’re worried. Do I look all right?”

  He had never seen her look better. The dress went with her hair and eyes. The only thing that disturbed him was that she had never looked so expensive.

  “What’ll we do if it doesn’t work?” she said.

  “If what doesn’t work?” he asked.

  “You know,” she answered. “The play—and you’re afraid it isn’t going to work, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right, I’m afraid,” he said.

  She moved her bare shoulders impatiently.

  “I wish I understood any of this,” she said. “I don’t see why you and Arthur Higgins don’t know whether the play is going to be good or not, after all the weeks you’ve been going over it and over it—and instead of that you all get more and more uncertain.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I thought it was good when I wrote it, but I don’t know anything about it now. I guess that’s how it is with plays.”

  “But lots of people have seen it,” she said. “Haven’t they told you what they think?”

  “It doesn’t matter what they think,” he said, “because they didn’t pay to see it.”

  Bridge was entirely different when you played for even a small stake, and the same was true with a play. Once an audience had a stake in a play, there was a psychological release that built a new relationship between audience and players. If you wanted to be philosophical, perhaps this condition was like all phases of life; if you wanted to live you had to pay, and if the management gave you a complimentary ticket, you did not live. It was interesting that Rhoda had echoed that thought that night.

  “Yes,” she said, “I guess everyone’s got to pay.”

  Her remark still annoyed him. He never had been able to discover just what Rhoda had paid for. She had always got in with what was still called at the box office an “Annie Oakley.” She had always had a free ride, ever since he had met her on Dock Street, but then perhaps no ride was ever wholly free.

  “Tom,” she asked him, “did you ever happen to know any of the du Ponts?”

  “You ask the damnedest questions,” he said. “No, I don’t know any of them.”

  “There must be lots of them living around here, mustn’t there, to have this big hotel and everything?”

  “Yes,” he said, “there should be lots and lots.”

  “Do you think any of them will be at the play tonight?”

  “Why do you care?” he asked her. “I don’t know.”

  “I’d just like to see what one of them looks like,” she said.

  “God almighty,” he said. “They must look
like other people.”

  “But Tom,” she said, “they aren’t like other people. They aren’t like you and me.”

  “I don’t know whether they are or not,” he said, “and I don’t care. I don’t want to be a du Pont.”

  “I know you don’t,” she said. “That’s what I don’t understand about you, because I’d like to be one.”

  “All right,” he said, “all right—and exactly why should you like to be a du Pont?”

  “Don’t get cross, Tom,” she said. “I’d like to be a du Pont because they don’t have to worry in the way we do. No matter what happens, there they are.”

  Rhoda, more than political arguments, had made him into an approximation of a liberal. Instead of being amused, he was angry, which showed that the strain of the play was telling on him.

  “All right,” he said, “I’d rather worry than be a du Pont.”

  “I don’t see why you say that,” she said. “I hate to worry, and no du Pont has to.”

  “Listen,” he said, “there might be a revolution.”

  “A revolution?” she said. “Don’t be silly. Look at this hotel.”

  “Listen, baby—” he said.

  “Don’t you call me baby,” she told him. “You’ve been picking up all sorts of words since this play has been in rehearsal.”

  It was consoling to believe that he had been justly angry.

  “Listen, baby,” he said, “to have this on top of everything else is more than I can take tonight.”

  “There you go again,” she said, “on top of what?”

  “Listen, baby,” he said, “I have to worry about the play and about you and me, and what are you being but a selfish little bitch?”

  “Would you kindly say that again?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Who were you when I saw you in front of that typing school? Who brought you to the Hotel du Pont, anyway? Who paid for that goddam frock you’re wearing? I repeat the phrase with pleasure, you’re a selfish little bitch.”

  It hit her between wind and water, because once you showed Rhoda the picture, she was able to see it, almost always.