"Because I want to. And because you didn't. It'll be as if you had been
an actor instead of a minister--only it'll be me."
A bewildering enough statement to any one but the one who made it and
the one to whom it was made. She was trying to say that here was the law
of compensation working. But she didn't know this. She had never heard
of the law of compensation.
Her gentle mother fought her decision with all the savagery of the
gentle.
"You'll have to run away, Harry," her father said, sadly. And at
twenty-two Harrietta ran. Her objective was New York. Her father did not
burden her with advice. He credited her with the intelligence she
possessed, but he did overlook her emotionalism, which was where he made
his mistake. Just before she left he said: "Now listen, Harry. You're a
good-looking girl, and young. You'll keep your looks for a long time.
You're not the kind of blonde who'll get wishy-washy or fat. You've got
quite a good deal of brunette in you. It crops out in your voice. It'll
help preserve your looks. Don't marry the first man who asks you or the
first man who says he'll die if you don't. You've got lots of time."
That kind of advice is a good thing for the young. Two weeks later
Harrietta married a man she had met on the train between Evanston and
New York. His name was Lawrence Fuller, and Harrietta had gone to school
with him in Evanston. She had lost track of him later. She remembered,
vaguely, people had said he had gone to New York and was pretty wild.
Young as she was and inexperienced, there still was something about his
face that warned her. It was pathological, but she knew nothing of
pathology. He talked of her and looked at her and spoke, masterfully and
yet shyly, of being with her in New York. Harrietta loved the way his
hair sprang away from his brow and temples in a clean line. She shoved
the thought of his chin out of her mind. His hands touched her a good
deal--her shoulder, her knee, her wrist--but so lightly that she
couldn't resent it even if she had wanted to. When they did this, queer
little stinging flashes darted through her veins. He said he would die
if she did not marry him.
They had two frightful years together and eight years apart before he
died, horribly, in the sanatorium whose enormous fees she paid weekly.
They had regularly swallowed her earnings at a gulp.
Naturally a life like this develops the comedy sense. You can't play
tragedy while you're living it. Harrietta served her probation in stock,
road companies, one-night stands before she achieved Broadway. In five
years her deft comedy method had become distinctive; in ten it was
unique. Yet success--as the stage measures it in size of following and
dollars of salary--had never been hers.
Harrietta knew she wasn't a success. She saw actresses younger, older,
less adroit, lacking her charm, minus her beauty, featured, starred,
heralded. Perhaps she gave her audiences credit for more intelligence
than they possessed, and they, unconsciously, resented this. Perhaps if
she had read the Elsie Series at eleven, instead of Dickens, she might
have been willing to play in that million-dollar success called Gossip.
It was offered her. The lead was one of those saccharine parts, vulgar,
false, and slyly carnal. She didn't in the least object to it on the
ground of immorality, but the bad writing bothered her. There was, for
example, a line in which she was supposed to beat her breast and say:
"He's my mate! He's my man! And I'm his woman!! I love him, I tell you
I--_love him!_"
"People don't talk like that," she told the author, in a quiet aside,
during rehearsal. "Especially women. They couldn't. They use quite
commonplace idiom when they're excited."
"Thanks," said the author, elaborately polite. "That's the big scene in
the play. It'll be a knockout."
When Harrietta tried to speak these lines in rehearsal she began to
giggle and ended in throwing up the ridiculous part. They gave it to
that little Frankie Langdon, and the playwright's prophecy came true.
The breast-beating scene was a knockout. It ran for two years in New
York alone. Langdon's sables, chinchillas, ermines, and jewels were
always sticking out from the pages of _Vanity Fair_ and _Vogue_. When
she took curtain calls, Langdon stood with her legs far apart, boyishly,
and tossed her head and looked up from beneath her lowered lids and
acted surprised and sort of gasped like a fish and bit her lip and
mumbled to herself as if overcome. The audience said wasn't she a shy,
young, bewildered darling!
A hard little rip if ever there was one--Langdon--and as shy as a
man-eating crocodile.
This sort of sham made Harrietta sick. She, whose very art was that of
pretending, hated pretense, affectation, "coy stuff." This was, perhaps,
unfortunate. Your Fatigued Financier prefers the comedy form in which a
spade is not only called a spade but a slab of iron for digging up dirt.
Harrietta never even pretended to have a cough on an opening night so
that the critics, should the play prove a failure, might say: "Harrietta
Fuller, though handicapped by a severe cold, still gave her usual
brilliant and finished performance in a part not quite worthy of her
talents." No. The plaintive smothered cough, the quick turn aside, the
heaving shoulder, the wispy handkerchief were clumsy tools beneath her
notice.
There often were long periods of idleness when her soul sickened and her
purse grew lean. Long hot summers in New York when awnings, window boxes
geranium filled, drinks iced and acidulous, and Ken's motor car for
cooling drives to the beaches failed to soothe the terror in her. Thirty
... thirty-two ... thirty-four ... thirty-six....
She refused to say it. She refused to think of it. She put the number
out of her mind and slammed the door on it--on that hideous number
beginning with f. At such times she was given to contemplation of her
own photographs--and was reassured. Her intelligence told her that
retouching varnish, pumice stone, hard pencil, and etching knife had all
gone into the photographer's version of this clear-eyed, fresh-lipped
blooming creature gazing back at her so limpidly. But, then, who didn't
need a lot of retouching? Even the youngest of them.
All this. Yet she loved it. The very routine of it appealed to her
orderly nature: a routine that, were it widely known, would shatter all
those ideas about the large, loose life of the actress. Harrietta Fuller
liked to know that at such and such an hour she would be in her dressing
room; at such and such an hour on the stage; precisely at another hour
she would again be in her dressing room preparing to go home. Then the
stage would be darkened. They would be putting the scenery away. She
would be crossing the bare stage on her way home. Then she would be
home, undressing, getting ready for bed, reading. She liked a cup of
clear broth at night, or a drink of hot cocoa. It soothed and rested
her. Besides, one is hungry after two and a half hours of
high-tensioned, nerve-exhausting work. She was in bed usually by
twelve-thirty.
"But you can't fall asleep like a dewy babe in my kind of job," she used
to explain. "People wonder why actresses lie in bed until noon, or
nearly. They have to, to get as much sleep as a stenographer or a clerk
or a book-keeper. At midnight I'm all keyed up and over-stimulated, and
as wide awake as an all-night taxi driver. It takes two solid hours of
reading to send me bye-bye."
The world did not interest itself in that phase of Harrietta's life.
Neither did it find fascination in her domestic side. Harrietta did a
good deal of tidying and dusting and redding up in her own two-room
apartment, so high and bright and spotless. She liked to cook, too, and
was expert at it. Not for her those fake pictures of actresses and opera
stars in chiffon tea gowns and satin slippers and diamond chains cooking
"their favourite dish of spaghetti and creamed mushrooms," and staring
out at you bright-eyed and palpably unable to tell the difference
between salt and paprika. Harrietta liked the ticking of a clock in a
quiet room; oven smells; concocting new egg dishes; washing out lacy
things in warm soapsuds. A throw-back, probably, to her grandmother
Scoville.
The worst feature of a person like Harrietta is, as you already have
discovered with some impatience, that one goes on and on, talking about
her. And the listener at last breaks out with: "This is all very
interesting, but I feel as if I know her now. What then?"
Then the thing to do is to go serenely on telling, for example, how the
young thing in Harrietta Fuller's company invariably came up to her at
the first rehearsal and said tremulously: "Miss Fuller, I--you won't
mind--I just want to tell you how proud I am to be one of your company.
Playing with you. You've been my ideal ever since I was a little g--"
then, warned by a certain icy mask slipping slowly over the brightness
of Harrietta's features--"ever so long, but I never even hoped----"
These young things always learned an amazing lot from watching the deft,
sure strokes of Harrietta's craftsmanship. She was kind to them, too.
Encouraged them. Never hogged a scene that belonged to them. Never cut
their lines. Never patronized them. They usually played ingénue parts,
and their big line was that uttered on coming into a room looking for
Harrietta. It was: "Ah, _there_ you are!"
How can you really know Harrietta unless you realize the deference with
which she was treated in her own little sphere? If the world at large
did not acclaim her, there was no lack of appreciation on the part of
her fellow workers. They knew artistry when they saw it. Though she had
never attained stardom, she still had the distinction that usually comes
only to a star back stage. Unless she actually was playing in support of
a first-magnitude star, her dressing room was marked "A." Other members
of the company did not drop into her dressing room except by invitation.
That room was neat to the point of primness. A square of white coarse
sheeting was spread on the floor, under the chair before her dressing
table, to gather up dust and powder. It was regularly shaken or changed.
There were always flowers--often a single fine rose in a slender vase.
On her dressing table, in a corner, you were likely to find three or
four volumes--perhaps The Amenities of Book-Collecting; something or
other of Max Beerbohm's; a book of verse (not Amy Lowell's).
These were not props designed to impress the dramatic critic who might
drop in for one of those personal little theatrical calls to be used in
next Sunday's "Chats in the Wings." They were there because Harrietta
liked them and read them between acts. She had a pretty wit of her own.
The critics liked to talk with her. Even George Jean Hathem, whose
favourite pastime was to mangle the American stage with his pen and hold
its bleeding, gaping fragments up for the edification of Budapest,
Petrograd, Vienna, London, Berlin, Paris, and Stevens Point, Wis., said
that five minutes of Harrietta Fuller's conversation was worth a
lifetime of New York stage dialogue. For that matter I think that Mr.
Beerbohm himself would not have found a talk with her altogether dull or
profitless.
The leading man generally made love to her in an expert, unaggressive
way. A good many men had tried to make love to her at one time or
another. They didn't get on very well. Harrietta never went to late
suppers. Some of them complained: "When you try to make love to her she
laughs at you!" She wasn't really laughing at them. She was laughing at
what she knew about life. Occasionally men now married, and living dully
content in the prim suburban smugness of Pelham or New Rochelle, boasted
of past friendship with her, wagging their heads doggishly. "Little
Fuller! I used to know her well."
They lied.
Not that she didn't count among her friends many men. She dined with
them and they with her. They were writers and critics, lawyers and
doctors, engineers and painters. Actors almost never. They sent her
books and flowers; valued her opinion, delighted in her conversation,
wished she wouldn't sometimes look at them so quizzically. And if they
didn't always comprehend her wit, they never failed to appreciate the
contour of her face, where the thoughtful brow was contradicted by the
lovely little nose, and both were drowned in the twin wells of the
wide-apart, misleadingly limpid eyes that lay ensnaringly between.
"Your eyes!" these gentlemen sometimes stammered, "the lashes are
reflected in them like ferns edging a pool."
"Yes. The mascara's good for them. You'd think all that black sticky
stuff I have put on, would hurt them, but it really makes them grow, I
believe. Sometimes I even use a burnt match, and yet it----"
"Damn your burnt matches! I'm talking about your lashes."
"So am I." She would open her eyes wide in surprise, and the lashes
could almost be said to wave at him tantalizingly, like fairy fans. (He
probably wished he could have thought of that.)
Ken never talked to her about her lashes. Ken thought she was the most
beauteous, witty, intelligent woman in the world, but he had never told
her so, and she found herself wishing he would. Ken was forty-one and
Knew About Etchings. He knew about a lot of other things, too.
Difficult, complex things like Harrietta Fuller, for example. He had to
do with some intricate machine or other that was vital to printing, and
he was perfecting something connected with it or connecting something
needed for its perfection that would revolutionize the thing the machine
now did (whatever it was). Harrietta refused to call him an inventor.
She said it sounded so impecunious. They had known each other for six
years. When she didn't feel like talking he didn't say: "What's the
matter?" He never told her that women had no business monkeying with
stocks or asked her what they called that stuff her dress was made of,
or telephoned before noon. Twice a year he asked her to marry him,
presenting excellent reasons. His name was Carrigan. You'd like him.
"When I marry," Harrietta would announce, "which will be never, it will
be the only son of a rich iron king from Duluth, Minnesota. And I'll go
there to live in an eighteen-room mansion and pluck roses for the
breakfast room."
"There are few roses in Duluth," said Ken, "to speak of. And no
breakfast rooms. You breakfast in the dining room, and in the winter you
wear flannel underwear and galoshes."
"California, then. And he can be the son of a fruit king. I'm not
narrow."
Harrietta was thirty-seven and a half when there came upon her a great
fear. It had been a wretchedly bad season. Two failures. The rent on her
two-room apartment in Fifty-sixth Street jumped from one hundred and
twenty-five, which she could afford, to two hundred a month, which she
couldn't. Mary--Irish Mary--her personal maid, left her in January.
Personal maids are one of the superstitions of the theatrical
profession, and an actress of standing is supposed to go hungry rather
than maidless.
"Why don't you fire Irish Mary?" Ken had asked Harrietta during a period
of stringency.
"I can't afford to."
Ken understood, but you may not. Harrietta would have made it clear.
"Any actress who earns more than a hundred a week is supposed to have a
maid in her dressing room. No one knows why, but it's true. I remember
in The Small-Town Girl I wore the same gingham dress throughout three
acts, but I was paying Mary twenty a week just the same. If I hadn't
some one in the company would have told some one in another company that
Harrietta Fuller was broke. It would have seeped through the director to
the manager, and next time they offered me a part they'd cut my salary.
It's absurd, but there it is. A vicious circle."
Irish Mary's reason for leaving Harrietta was a good one. It would have
to be, for she was of that almost extinct species, the devoted retainer.
Irish Mary wasn't the kind of maid one usually encounters back stage. No
dapper, slim, black-and-white pert miss, with a wisp of apron and a
knowledgeous eye. An ample, big-hipped, broad-bosomed woman with an
apron like a drop curtain and a needle knack that kept Harrietta mended,
be-ribboned, beruffled, and exquisite from her garters to her coat
hangers. She had been around the theatre for twenty-five years, and her
thick, deft fingers had served a long line of illustrious
ladies--Corinne Foster, Gertrude Bennett, Lucille Varney. She knew all
the shades of grease paint from Flesh to Sallow Old Age, and if you
gained an ounce she warned you.
Her last name was Lesom, but nobody remembered it until she brought
forward a daughter of fifteen with the request that she be given a job;
anything--walk-on, extra, chorus. Lyddy, she called her. The girl seldom
spoke. She was extremely stupid, but a marvellous mimic, and pretty
beyond belief; fragile, and yet with something common about her even in
her fragility. Her wrists had a certain flat angularity that bespoke a
peasant ancestry, but she had a singular freshness and youthful bloom.
The line of her side face from the eye socket to the chin was a
delicious thing that curved with the grace of a wing. The high cheekbone
sloped down so that the outline was heart-shaped. There were little
indentations at the corners of her mouth. She had eyes singularly clear,
like a child's, and a voice so nasal, so strident, so dreadful that when
she parted her pretty lips and spoke, the sound shocked you like a
peacock's raucous screech.
Harrietta had managed to get a bit for her here, a bit for her there,
until by the time she was eighteen she was giving a fairly creditable
performance in practically speechless parts. It was dangerous to trust
her even with an "Ah, there you are!" line. The audience, startled, was
so likely to laugh.
At about this point she vanished, bound for Hollywood and the movies.
"She's the little fool, just," said Irish Mary. "What'll she be wantin'
with the movies, then, an' her mother connected with the theayter for
years an' all, and her you might say brought up in it?"
But she hadn't been out there a year before the world knew her as Lydia
Lissome. Starting as an extra girl earning twenty-five a week or less,
she had managed, somehow, to get the part of Betty in the screen version
of The Magician, probably because she struck the director as being the
type; or perhaps her gift of mimicry had something to do with it, and
the youth glow that was in her face. At any rate, when the picture was
finished and released, no one was more surprised than Lyddy at the
result. They offered her three thousand a week on a three-year contract.
She wired her mother, but Irish Mary wired back: "I don't believe a word
of it hold out for five am coming." She left for the Coast.
Incidentally, she got the five for Lyddy. Lyddy signed her name to the
contract--Lydia Lissome--in a hand that would have done discredit to an
eleven-year-old.
Harrietta told Ken about it, not without some bitterness: "Which only
proves one can't be too careful about picking one's parents. If my
father had been a hod carrier instead of a minister of the Gospel and a
darling old dreamer, I'd be earning five thousand a week, too."
They were dining together in Harrietta's little sitting room so high up
and quiet and bright with its cream enamel and its log fire. Almost one
entire wall of that room was window, facing south, and framing such an
Arabian Nights panorama as only a New York eleventh-story window, facing
south, can offer.
Ken lifted his right eyebrow, which was a way he had when being
quizzical. "What would you do with five thousand a week, just
supposing?"
"I'd do all the vulgar things that other people do who have five
thousand a week."
"You wouldn't enjoy them. You don't care for small dogs or paradise
aigrettes or Italian villas in Connecticut or diamond-studded cigarette
holders or plush limousines or butlers." He glanced comprehensively
about the little room--at the baby grand whose top was pleasantly
littered with photographs and bonbon dishes and flower vases; at the
smart little fire snapping in the grate; at the cheerful reds and blues
and ochres and sombre blues and purples and greens of the books in the
open bookshelves; at the squat clock on the mantelshelf; at the gorgeous
splashes of black and gold glimpsed through the many-paned window.
"You've got everything you really want right here"--his gesture seemed,
somehow, to include himself--"if you only knew it."
"You talk," snapped Harrietta, "as the Rev. H. John Scoville used to."
She had never said a thing like that before. "I'm sick of what they
call being true to my art. I'm tired of having last year's suit relined,
even if it is smart enough to be good this year. I'm sick of having the
critics call me an intelligent comedienne who is unfortunate in her
choice of plays. Some day"--a little flash of fright was there--"I'll
pick up the _Times_ and see myself referred to as 'that sterling
actress.' Then I'll know I'm through."
"You!"
"Tell me I'm young, Ken. Tell me I'm young and beautiful and
bewitching."
"You're young and beautiful and bewitching."
"Ugh! And yet they say the Irish have the golden tongues."
Two months later Harrietta had an offer to go into pictures. It wasn't
her first, but it undeniably was the best. The sum offered per week was
what she might usually expect to get per month in a successful stage
play. To accept the offer meant the Coast. She found herself having a
test picture taken and trying to believe the director who said it was
good; found herself expatiating on the brightness, quietness, and
general desirability of the eleventh-floor apartment in Fifty-sixth
Street to an acquaintance who was seeking a six months' city haven for
the summer.
"She'll probably ruin my enamel dressing table with toilet water and
ring my piano top with wet glasses and spatter grease on the kitchenette
wall. But I'll be earning a million," Harrietta announced, recklessly,
"or thereabouts. Why should I care?"
She did care, though, as a naturally neat and thrifty woman cares for
her household goods which have, through years of care of them and
association with them, become her household gods. The clock on the
mantel wasn't a clock, but a plump friend with a white smiling face and
a soothing tongue; the low, ample davenport wasn't a davenport only, but
a soft bosom that pillowed her; that which lay spread shimmering beneath
her window was not New York alone--it was her View. To a woman like
this, letting her apartment furnished is like farming out her child to
strangers.
She had told her lessee about her laundress and her cleaning woman and
how to handle the balky faucet that controlled the shower. She had said
good-bye to Ken entirely surrounded by his books, magazines, fruit, and
flowers. She was occupying a Pullman drawing room paid for by the
free-handed filmers. She was crossing farm lands, plains, desert. She
was wondering if all those pink sweaters and white flannel trousers
outside the Hollywood Hotel were there for the same reason that she was.
She was surveying a rather warm little room shaded by a dense tree whose
name she did not know. She was thinking it felt a lot like her old
trouping days, when her telephone tinkled and a voice announced Mrs.
Lissome. Lissome? Lesam. Irish Mary, of course. Harrietta's maid,
engaged for the trip, had failed her at the last moment. Now her glance
rested on the two massive trunks and the litter of smart, glittering
bags that strewed the room. A relieved look crept into her eyes. A knock
at the door. A resplendent figure was revealed at its opening. The look
in Harrietta's eyes vanished.
Irish Mary looked like the mother of a girl who was earning five
thousand a week. She was marcelled, silk-clad, rustling, gold-meshed,
and, oh, how real in spite of it all as she beamed upon the dazzled
Harrietta.
"Out with ye!" trumpeted this figure, brushing aside Harrietta's
proffered chair. "There'll be no stayin' here for you. You're coming
along with me, then, bag _and_ baggage." She glanced sharply about.
"Where's your maid, dearie?"
"Disappointed me at the last minute. I'll have to get someone----"
"We've plenty. You're coming up to our place."
"But, Mary, I can't. I couldn't. I'm tired. This room----"
"A hole. Wait till you see The Place. Gardens and breakfast rooms and
statues and fountains and them Jap boys runnin' up and down like mice.
We rented it for a year from that Goya Ciro. She's gone back East. How
she ever made good in pictures I don't know, and her face like a
hot-water bag for expression. Lyddy's going to build next year. They're
drawin' up the plans now. The Place'll be nothin' compared to it when
it's finished. Put on your hat. The boys'll see to your stuff here."
"I can't. I couldn't. You're awfully kind, Mary dear----"
Mary dear was at the telephone. "Mrs. Lissome. That's who. Send up that
Jap boy for the bags."
Mrs. Lissome's name and Mrs. Lissome's commands apparently carried
heavily in Hollywood. A uniformed Jap appeared immediately as though
summoned by a genie. The bags seemed to spring to him, so quickly was he
enveloped by their glittering surfaces. He was off with the burdens,
invisible except for his gnomelike face and his sturdy bow legs in their
footman's boots.
"I can't," said Harrietta, feebly, for the last time. It was her
introduction to the topsy-turvy world into which she had come. She felt
herself propelled down the stairs by Irish Mary, who wasn't Irish Mary
any more, but a Force whose orders were obeyed. In the curved drive
outside the Hollywood Hotel the little Jap was stowing the last of the
bags into the great blue car whose length from nose to tail seemed to
span the hotel frontage. At the wheel, rigid, sat a replica of the
footman.
Irish Mary with a Japanese chauffeur. Irish Mary with a Japanese
footman. Irish Mary with a great glittering car that was as commodious
as the average theatre dressing room.
"Get in, dearie. Lyddy's using the big car to-day. They're out on
location. Shootin' the last of Devils and Men."
Harrietta was saying to herself: "Don't be a nasty snob, Harry. This is
a different world. Think of the rotten time Alice would have had in
Wonderland if she hadn't been broad-minded. Take it as it comes."
Irish Mary was talking as they sped along through the hot white
Hollywood sunshine.... "Stay right with us as long as you like, dearie,
but if after you're workin' you want a place of your own, I know of just
the thing you can rent furnished, and a Jap gardener and house man and
cook right on the places besides----"
"But I'm not signed for five thousand a week, like Lydia," put in
Harrietta.
"I know what you're signed for. 'Twas me put 'em up to it, an' who else!
'Easy money,' I says, 'an' why shouldn't she be gettin' some of it?'
Lyddy spoke to Gans about it. What Lyddy says goes. She's a good girl,
Lyddy is, an' would you believe the money an' all hasn't gone to her
brains, though what with workin' like a horse an' me to steady her, an'
shrewder than the lawyers themself, if I do say it, she ain't had much
chance. And here's The Place."
And here was The Place. Sundials, rose gardens, gravel paths, dwarf
trees, giant trees, fountains, swimming pools, tennis courts, goldfish,
statues, verandas, sleeping porches, awnings, bird baths, pergolas.
Inside more Japs. Maids. Rooms furnished like the interior of movie sets
that Harrietta remembered having seen. A bedroom, sitting room, dressing
room, and bath all her own in one wing of the great white palace, only
one of thousands of great white palaces scattered through the hills of
Hollywood. The closet for dresses, silk-lined and scented, could have
swallowed whole her New York bedroom.
"Lay down," said Irish Mary, "an' get easy. Lyddy won't be home till six
if she's early, an' she'll prob'bly be in bed by nine now they're
rushin' the end of the picture, an' she's got to be on the lot made up
by nine or sooner."
"Nine--in the morning!"
"Well, sure! You soon get used to it. They've got to get all the
daylight they can, an' times the fog's low earlier, or they'd likely
start at seven or eight. You look a little beat, dearie. Lay down. I'll
have you unpacked while we're eatin'."
But Harrietta did not lie down. She went to the window. Below a small
army of pigmy gardeners were doing expert things to flower beds and
bushes that already seemed almost shamelessly prolific. Harrietta
thought, suddenly, of her green-painted flower boxes outside the
eleventh-story south window in the New York flat. Outside her window
here a great scarlet hibiscus stuck its tongue out at her. Harrietta
stuck her tongue out at it, childishly, and turned away. She liked a
certain reticence in flowers, as in everything else. She sat down at the
desk, took up a sheet of lavender and gold paper and the great lavender
plumed pen. The note she wrote to Ken was the kind of note that only Ken
would understand, unless you've got into the way of reading it once a
year or so, too:
Ken, dear, I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit hole, and
yet--and yet--it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life.
Two weeks later, when she had begun to get used to her new work, her new
life, the strange hours, people, jargon, she wrote him another cryptic
note:
Alice--"Well, in our country you'd generally get to somewhere
else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as I've been doing."
Red Queen--"Here it takes all the running you can do to keep in the
same place."
In those two weeks things had happened rather breathlessly. Harrietta
had moved from the splendours of The Place to her own rose-embowered
bungalow. Here, had she wanted to do any casement work with a white
rose, like that earlier heroine, she could easily have managed it had
not the early morning been so feverishly occupied in reaching the lot in
time to be made up by nine. She soon learned the jargon. "The lot" meant
the studio in which she was working, and its environs. "We're going to
shoot you this morning," meant that she would be needed in to-day's
scenes. Often she was in bed by eight at night, so tired that she could
not sleep. She wondered what the picture was about. She couldn't make
head or tail of it.
They were filming J. N. Gardner's novel, Romance of Arcady, but they had
renamed it Let's Get a Husband. The heroine in the novel was the young
wife of twenty-seven who had been married five years. This was
Harrietta's part. In the book there had been a young girl, too--a
saccharine miss of seventeen who was the minor love interest. This was
Lydia Lissome's part. Slowly it dawned on Harrietta that things had been
nightmarishly tampered with in the film version, and that the change in
name was the least of the indignities to which the novel had been
subjected.
It took Harrietta some time to realize this because they were not taking
the book scenes in their sequence. They took them according to light,
convenience, location. Indoor scenes were taken in one group, so that
the end of the story might often be the first to be filmed.
For a week Harrietta was dressed, made up, and ready for work at nine
o'clock, and for a week she wasn't used in a single scene. The hours of
waiting made her frantic. The sun was white hot. Her little dressing
room was stifling. She hated her face with its dead-white mask and
blue-lidded eyes. When, finally, her time came she found that after
being dressed and ready from nine until five-thirty daily she was
required, at 4:56 on the sixth day, to cross the set, open a door, stop,
turn, appear to be listening, and recross the set to meet someone
entering from the opposite side. This scene, trivial as it appeared, was
rehearsed seven times before the director was satisfied with it.
The person for whom she had paused, turned, and crossed was Lydia
Lissome. And Lydia Lissome, it soon became evident, had the lead in this
film. In the process of changing from novel to scenario, the Young Wife
had become a rather middle-aged wife, and the Flapper of seventeen had
become the heroine. And Harrietta Fuller, erstwhile actress of youthful
comedy parts for the stage, found herself moving about in black velvet
and pearls and a large plumed fan as a background for the white ruffles
and golden curls and sunny scenes in which Lydia Lissome held the
camera's eye.
For years Harrietta Fuller's entrance during a rehearsal always had
created a little stir among the company. This one rose to give her a
seat; that one made her a compliment; Sam Klein, the veteran director,
patted her cheek and said: "You're going to like this part, Miss Fuller.
And they're going to eat it up. _You_ see." The author bent over her in
mingled nervousness and deference and admiration. The Young Thing who
was to play the ingénue part said shyly: "Oh, Miss Fuller, may I tell
you how happy I am to be playing with you? You've been my ideal, etc."
And now Harrietta Fuller, in black velvet, was the least important
person on the lot. No one was rude to her. Everyone was most kind, in
fact. Kind! To Harrietta Fuller! She found that her face felt stiff and
expressionless after long hours of waiting, waiting, and an elderly
woman who was playing a minor part showed her how to overcome this by
stretching her face, feature for feature, as a dancer goes through
limbering exercises in the wings. The woman had been a trouper in the
old days of one-night stands. Just before she stepped in front of the
camera you saw her drawing down her face grotesquely, stretching her
mouth to form an oval, dropping her jaw, twisting her lips to the right,
to the left, rolling her eyes round and round. It was a perfect lesson
in facial calisthenics, and Harrietta was thankful for it. Harrietta was
interested in such things--interested in them, and grateful for what
they taught her.
She told herself that she didn't mind the stir that Lydia Lissome made
when she was driven up in the morning in her great blue limousine with
the two Japs sitting so straight and immobile in front, like twin
Nipponese gods. But she did. She told herself she didn't mind when the
director said: "Miss Fuller, if you'll just watch Miss Lissome work. She
has perfect picture tempo." But she did. The director was the
new-fashioned kind, who spoke softly, rehearsed you almost privately,
never bawled through a megaphone. A slim young man in a white shirt and
flannel trousers and a pair of Harvard-looking glasses. Everybody was
young. That was it! Not thirty, or thirty-two, or thirty-four, or
thirty-seven, but young. Terribly, horribly, actually young. That was
it.
Harrietta Fuller was too honest not to face this fact squarely. When she
went to a Thursday-night dance at the Hollywood Hotel she found herself
in a ballroom full of slim, pliant, corsetless young things of
eighteen, nineteen, twenty. The men, with marcelled hair and slim feet
and sunburnt faces, were mere boys. As juveniles on the stage they might
have been earning seventy-five or one hundred or one hundred and fifty
dollars a week. Here they owned estates, motor cars in fleets, power
boats; had secretaries, valets, trainers. Their technique was perfect
and simple. They knew their work. When they kissed a girl, or entered a
room, or gazed after a woman, or killed a man in the presence of a woman
(while working) they took off their hats. Turned slowly, and took off
their hats. They were mannerly, too, outside working hours. They treated
Harrietta with boyish politeness--when they noticed her at all.
"Oh, won't you have this chair, Miss Fuller? I didn't notice you were
standing."
They didn't notice she was standing!
"What are you doing, Miss--ah--Fuller? Yes, you did say Fuller.
Names---- Are you doing a dowager bit?"
"Dowager bit?"
"I see. You're new to the game, aren't you? I saw you working to-day. We
always speak of these black-velvet parts as dowager bits. Just excuse
me. I see a friend of mine----" The friend of mine would be a willow
wand with golden curls, and what Harrietta rather waspishly called a
Gunga Din costume. She referred to that Kipling description in which:
The uniform 'e wore
Was nothin' much before,
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind.
"They're wearing them that way here in Hollywood," she wrote Ken. She
wrote Ken a good many things. But there were, too, a good many things
she did not write him.
At the end of the week she would look at her check--and take small
comfort. "You've got everything you really want right here," Ken had
said, "if you only knew it."
If only she had known it.
Well, she knew it now. Now, frightened, bewildered, resentful.
Thirty-seven. Why, thirty-seven was old in Hollywood. Not middle-aged,
or getting on, or well preserved, but old. Even Lydia Lissome, at
twenty, always made them put one thickness of chiffon over the camera's
lens before she would let them take the close-ups. Harrietta thought of
that camera now as a cruel Cyclops from whose hungry eye nothing
escaped--wrinkles, crow's-feet--nothing.
They had been working two months on the picture. It was almost finished.
Midsummer. Harrietta's little bungalow garden was ablaze with roses,
dahlias, poppies, asters, strange voluptuous flowers whose names she did
not know. The roses, plucked and placed in water, fell apart, petal by
petal, two hours afterward. From her veranda she saw the Sierra Madre
range and the foothills. She thought of her "unexcelled view of Park"
which could be had by flattening one ear and the side of your face
against the window jamb.
The sun came up, hard and bright and white, day after day. Hard and
white and hot and dry. "Like a woman," Harrietta thought, "who wears a
red satin gown all the time. You'd wish she'd put on gingham just once,
for a change." She told herself that she was parched for a walk up
Riverside Drive in a misty summer rain, the water sloshing in her shoes.
"Happy, my ducky?" Irish Mary would say, beaming upon her.
"Perfectly," from Harrietta.
"It's time, too. Real money you're pullin' down here. And a paradise if
ever there was one."
"I notice, though, that as soon as they've completed a picture they take
the Overland back to New York and make dates with each other for lunch
at the Claridge, like matinée girls."
Irish Mary flapped a negligent palm. "Ah, well, change is what we all
want, now and then." She looked at Harrietta sharply. "You're not
wantin' to go back, are ye?"
"N-no," faltered Harrietta. Then, brazenly, hotly: "Yes, yes!" ending,
miserably, with: "But my contract. Six months."
"You can break it, if you're fool enough, when they've finished this
picture, though why you should want to----" Irish Mary looked as
belligerent as her kindly Celtic face could manage.
But it was not until the last week of the filming of Let's get a Husband
that Harrietta came to her and said passionately: "I do! I do!"
"Do what?" Irish Mary asked, blankly.
"Do want to break my contract. You said I could after this picture."
"Sure you can. They hired you because I put Lyddy up to askin' them to.
I'd thought you'd be pleased for the big money an' all. There's no
pleasin' some."
"It isn't that. You don't understand. To-day----"
"Well, what's happened to-day that's so turrible, then?"
But how could Harrietta tell her? "To-day----" she began again,
faltered, stopped. To-day, you must know, this had happened: It was the
Big Scene of the film. Lydia Lissome, in black lace nightgown and
ermine negligee, her hair in marcel waves, had just been "shot" for it.
"Now then, Miss Fuller," said young Garvey, the director, "you come into
the garden, see? You've noticed Joyce go out through the French window
and you suspect she's gone to meet Talbot. We show just a flash of you
looking out of the drawing-room windows into the garden. Then you just
glance over your shoulder to where your husband is sitting in the
library, reading, and you slip away, see? Then we jump to where you find
them in the garden. Wait a minute"--He consulted the sheaf of
typewritten sheets in his hand--"yeh--here it says: 'Joyce is keeping
her tryst under the great oak in the garden with her lover.' Yeh. Wait a
minute ... 'tryst under tree with'--well, you come quickly forward--down
to about here--and you say: 'Ah, _there_ you are!'"
Harrietta looked at him for a long, long minute. Her lips were parted.
Her breath came quickly. She spoke: "I say--_what?_"
"You say: 'Ah, _there_ you are.'"
"Never!" said Harrietta Fuller, and brought her closed fist down on her
open palm for emphasis. "Never!"
* * * * *
It was August when she again was crossing desert, plains, and farmlands.
It was the tail-end of a dusty, hot, humid August in New York when Ken
stood at the station, waiting. As he came forward, raising one arm, her
own arm shot forward in quick protest, even while her glad eyes held
his.
"Don't take it off!"
"What off?"
"Your hat. Don't take it off. Kiss me--but leave your hat on."
She clutched his arm. She looked up at him. They were in the taxi bound
for Fifty-sixth Street. "She moved? She's out? She's gone? You told her
I'd pay her anything--a bonus----" Then, as he nodded, she leaned back,
relaxed. Something in her face prompted him.
"You're young and beautiful and bewitching," said Ken.
"Keep on saying it," pleaded Harrietta. "Make a chant of it." ...
Sam Klein, the veteran, was the first to greet her when she entered the
theatre at that first September rehearsal. The company was waiting for
her. She wasn't late. She had just pleasantly escaped being unpunctual.
She came in, cool, slim, electric. Then she hesitated. For the fraction
of a second she hesitated. Then Sam Klein greeted her: "Company's
waiting, Miss Fuller, if you're ready." And the leading man came
forward, a flower in his buttonhole, carefully tailored and slightly
yellow as a leading man of forty should be at 10:30 A. M. "How
wonderful you're looking, Harrietta," he said.
Sam Klein took her aside. "You're going to make the hit of your career
in this part, Miss Fuller. Yessir, dear, the hit of your career. You
mark my words."
"Don't you think," stammered Harrietta--"don't you think it will take
someone--someone--younger--to play the part?"
"Younger than what?"
"Than I."
Sam Klein stared. Then he laughed. "Younger than you! Say, listen, do
you want to get the Gerry Society after me?"
And as he turned away a Young Thing with worshipful eyes crept up to
Harrietta's side and said tremulously: "Oh, Miss Fuller, this is my
first chance on Broadway, and may I tell you how happy I am to be
playing with you? You've been my ideal ever since I was a--for a long,
long time."