Any one old enough to read this is old enough to remember that favourite
heroine of fiction who used to start her day by rising from her couch,
flinging wide her casement, leaning out and breathing deep the perfumed
morning air. You will recall, too, the pure white rose clambering at the
side of the casement, all jewelled with the dew of dawn. This the lady
plucked carolling. Daily she plucked it. A hardy perennial if ever there
was one. Subsequently, pressing it to her lips, she flung it into the
garden below, where stood her lover (likewise an early riser).
Romantic proceeding this, but unhygienic when you consider that her rush
for the closed casement was doubtless due to the fact that her bedroom,
hermetically sealed during the night, must have grown pretty stuffy by
morning. Her complexion was probably bad.
No such idyllic course marked the matin of our heroine. Her day's
beginning differed from the above in practically every detail. Thus:
A--When Harrietta rose from her couch (cream enamel, full-sized bed
with double hair mattress and box springs) she closed her casement with
a bang, having slept in a gale that swept her two-room-and-kitchenette
apartment on the eleventh floor in Fifty-sixth Street.
B--She never leaned out except, perhaps, to flap a dust rag, because
lean as she might, defying the laws of gravity and the house
superintendent, she could have viewed nothing more than roofs and sky
and chimneys where already roofs and sky and chimneys filled the eye
(unless you consider that by screwing around and flattening one ear and
the side of your jaw against the window jamb you could almost get a
glimpse of distant green prominently mentioned in the agent's ad as
"unexcelled view of Park").
C--The morning air wasn't perfumed for purposes of breathing deep, being
New York morning air, richly laden with the smell of warm asphalt,
smoke, gas, and, when the wind was right, the glue factory on the Jersey
shore across the river.
D--She didn't pluck a rose, carolling, because even if, by some magic
Burbankian process, Jack's bean-stalk had been made rose-bearing it
would have been hard put to it to reach this skyscraper home.
E--If she had flung it, it probably would have ended its eleven-story
flight in the hand cart of Messinger's butcher boy, who usually made
his first Fifty-sixth Street delivery at about that time.
F--The white rose would not have been jewelled and sparkling with the
dews of dawn, anyway, as at Harrietta's rising hour (between 10.30 and
11.30 A. M.) the New York City dews, if any, have left for the day.
Spartans who rise regularly at the chaste hour of seven will now regard
Harrietta with disapproval. These should be told that Harrietta never
got to bed before twelve-thirty nor to sleep before two-thirty, which,
on an eight-hour sleep count, should even things up somewhat in their
minds. They must know, too, that in one corner of her white-and-blue
bathroom reposed a pair of wooden dumb-bells, their ankles neatly
crossed. She used them daily. Also she bathed, massaged, exercised, took
facial and electric treatments; worked like a slave; lived like an
athlete in training in order to preserve her hair, skin, teeth, and
figure; almost never ate what she wanted nor as much as she liked.
That earlier lady of the closed casement and the white rose probably
never even heard of a dentifrice or a cold shower.
The result of Harrietta's rigours was that now, at thirty-seven, she
could pass for twenty-seven on Fifth Avenue at five o'clock (flesh-pink,
single-mesh face veil); twenty-five at a small dinner (rose-coloured
shades over the candles), and twenty-two, easily, behind the amber
footlights.
You will have guessed that Harrietta, the Heroine, is none other than
Harrietta Fuller, deftest of comediennes, whom you have seen in one or
all of those slim little plays in which she has made a name but no money
to speak of, being handicapped for the American stage by her
intelligence and her humour sense, and, as she would tell you, by her
very name itself.
"Harrietta Fuller! Don't you see what I mean?" she would say. "In the
first place, it's hard to remember. And it lacks force. Or maybe rhythm.
It doesn't clink. It sort of humps in the middle. A name should flow.
Take a name like Barrymore--or Bernhardt--or Duse--you can't forget
them. Oh, I'm not comparing myself to them. Don't be funny. I just
mean--why, take Harrietta alone. It's deadly. A Thackeray miss, all
black silk mitts and white cotton stockings. Long ago, in the beginning,
I thought of shortening it. But Harriet Fuller sounds like a
school-teacher, doesn't it? And Hattie Fuller makes me think, somehow,
of a burlesque actress. You know. 'Hattie Fuller and Her Bouncing
Belles.'"
At thirty-seven Harrietta Fuller had been fifteen years on the stage.
She had little money, a small stanch following, an exquisite technique,
and her fur coat was beginning to look gnawed around the edges. People
even said maddeningly: "Harrietta Fuller? I saw her when I was a kid,
years ago. Why, she must be le'see--ten--twelve--why, she must be going
on pretty close to forty."
A worshipper would defend her. "You're crazy! I saw her last month when
she was playing in Cincinnati, and she doesn't look a day over
twenty-one. That's a cute play she's in--There and Back. Not much to it,
but she's so kind and natural. Made me think of Jen a little."
That was part of Harrietta's art--making people think of Jen. Watching
her, they would whisper: "Look! Isn't that Jen all over? The way she
sits there and looks up at him while she's sewing."
Harrietta Fuller could take lines that were stilted and shoddy and speak
them in a way to make them sound natural and distinctive and real. She
was a clear blonde, but her speaking voice had in it a contralto note
that usually accompanies brunette colouring.
It surprised and gratified you, that tone, as does mellow wine when you
have expected cider. She could walk on to one of those stage library
sets that reek of the storehouse and the property carpenter, seat
herself, take up a book or a piece of handiwork, and instantly the
absurd room became a human, livable place. She had a knack of sitting,
not as an actress ordinarily seats herself in a drawing room--feet
carefully strained to show the high arch, body posed to form a
"line"--but easily, as a woman sits in her own house. If you saw her in
the supper scene of My Mistake, you will remember how she twisted her
feet about the rungs of the straight little chair in which she sat. Her
back was toward the audience throughout the scene, according to stage
directions, yet she managed to convey embarrassment, fright, terror,
determination, decision in the agonized twisting of those expressive
feet.
Authors generally claimed these bits of business as having originated
with them. For that matter, she was a favourite with playwrights, as
well she might be, considering the vitality which she injected into
their hackneyed situations. Every little while some young writer, fired
by an inflection in her voice or a nuance in her comedy, would rush back
stage to tell her that she never had had a part worthy of her, and that
he would now come to her rescue. Sometimes he kept his word, and
Harrietta, six months later, would look up from the manuscript to say:
"This is delightful! It's what I've been looking for for years. The
deftness of the comedy. And that little scene with the gardener!"
But always, after the managers had finished suggesting bits that would
brighten it up, and changes that would put it over with the Western
buyers, Harrietta would regard the mutilated manuscript sorrowingly.
"But I can't play this now, you know. It isn't the same part at all.
It's--forgive me--vulgar."
Then some little red-haired ingénue would get it, and it would run a
solid year on Broadway and two seasons on the road, and in all that time
Harrietta would have played six months, perhaps, in three different
plays, in all of which she would score what is known as a "personal
success." A personal success usually means bad business at the box
office.
Now this is immensely significant. In the advertisements of the play in
which Harrietta Fuller might be appearing you never read:
HARRIETTA FULLER
In
Thus and So
No. It was always:
THUS AND SO
With
Harrietta Fuller
Between those two prepositions lies a whole theatrical world of
difference. The "In" means stardom; the "With" that the play is
considered more important than the cast.
Don't feel sorry for Harrietta Fuller. Thousands of women have envied
her; thousands of men admired, and several have loved her devotedly,
including her father, the Rev. H. John Scoville (deceased). The H.
stands for Harry. She was named for him, of course. When he entered the
church he was advised to drop his first name and use his second as being
more fitting in his position. But the outward change did not affect his
inner self. He remained more Harry than John to the last. It was from
him Harrietta got her acting sense, her humour, her intelligence, and
her bad luck.
When Harry Scoville was eighteen he wanted to go on the stage. At twenty
he entered the ministry. It was the natural outlet for his suppressed
talents. In his day and family and environment young men did not go on
the stage. The Scovilles were Illinois pioneers and lived in Evanston,
and Mrs. Scoville (Harrietta's grandmother, you understand, though
Harrietta had not yet appeared) had a good deal to say as to whether
coleslaw or cucumber pickles should be served at the Presbyterian church
suppers, along with the veal loaf and the scalloped oysters. And when
she decided on coleslaw, coleslaw it was. A firm tread had Mother
Scoville, a light hand with pastry, and a will that was adamant. She it
was who misdirected Harry's gifts toward the pulpit instead of the
stage. He never forgave her for it, though he made a great success of
his calling and she died unsuspecting his rancour. The women of his
congregation shivered deliciously when the Rev. H. John Scoville stood
on his tiptoes at the apex of some fiery period and hurled the force of
his eloquence at them. He, the minister, was unconsciously dramatizing
himself as a minister.
The dramatic method had not then come into use in the pulpit. His method
of delivery was more restrained than that of the old-time revivalist;
less analytical and detached than that of the present-day religious
lecturer.
Presbyterian Evanston wending its way home to Sunday roast and ice cream
would say: "Wasn't Reverend Scoville powerful to-day! My!" They never
guessed how Reverend Scoville had had to restrain himself from
delivering Mark Antony's address to the Romans. He often did it in his
study when his gentle wife thought he was rehearsing next Sunday's
sermon.
As he grew older he overcame these boyish weaknesses, but he never got
over his feeling for the stage. There were certain ill-natured gossips
who claimed to have recognized the fine, upright figure and the mobile
face with hair greying at the temples as having occupied a seat in the
third row of the balcony in the old Grand Opera House during the run of
Erminie. The elders put it down as spite talk and declared that,
personally, they didn't believe a word of it. The Rev. H. John did
rather startle them when he discarded the ministerial black broadcloth
for a natty Oxford suit of almost business cut. He was a pioneer in this
among the clergy. The congregation soon became accustomed to it; in
time, boasted of it as marking their progressiveness.
He had a neat ankle, had the Reverend Scoville, in fine black lisle; a
merry eye; a rather grim look about the mouth, as has a man whose life
is a secret disappointment. His little daughter worshipped him. He
called her Harry. When Harrietta was eleven she was reading Lever and
Dickens and Dumas, while other little girls were absorbed in the Elsie
Series and The Wide, Wide World. Her father used to deliver his sermons
to her in private rehearsal, and her eager mobile face reflected his
every written mood.
"Oh, Rev!" she cried one day (it is to be regretted, but that is what
she always called him). "Oh, Rev, you should have been an actor!"