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V
“UNCLE VANYA” TAKES THE ROAD

“Uncle Vanya” reopened September 22, at the Booth Theatre, with the original company, except for the part of Sonia, which was played by Zita Johann. That Miss Johann is a successful actress has been sufficiently demonstrated. Yet one could hardly fail to resent any change in the perfect “Vanya” cast. It did something to the illusion. The scenes between Helena and Sonia were still lovely, only Sonia wasn’t quite Sonia any more, but just someone playing her part, pretending. Lillian was all that she had been—my knowing her had not made her any less the illusion, Chekhov’s Helena. It was a warm night, but the audience was good—and appreciative.

When I saw her next day, she reproached me for not letting her know I was there. A week later, I went again, and this time sent in a card, specifying my seat. During the next intermission, a boy brought a little note.

“I am playing for you,” she wrote. “I hope you will think I am not doing it too badly.” And her kind heart prompted her to add: “God bless you!”

Then after two weeks, they were off for Boston, where they arrived at perhaps the worst moment in Boston theatrical history. A great military reunion was there—the streets were a bedlam—all day and far into the night. Not many could get to the theatre, the Wilbur, and those who could, were unable to hear the actors for the tumult outside. What an atmosphere for Chekhov. Lillian wrote me:

It was such a nervous night. The theatre seemed like a barn to speak in, and the noises from the sky and the streets made us all wonder if the audience would tell what we were trying to do.

There are 500,000 strangers in Boston, all of them shouting, blowing whistles, shooting, or making some sound to convince the world that they are “happy.”

It is almost impossible to walk on the streets and today no motors are allowed within the city limits. Concentration is difficult. Just now, they are shooting beneath my window. Yesterday “Sonia” came over to rehearse our scenes. We found it impossible. Americans are at their very worst in such a mood, it seems to me.

These are the notices that Georgina cut from the papers. If they are bad it is not surprising, as we were far from our best, last night.

She did not read notices of herself, during an engagement; they made her self-conscious, she said.

The Boston notices were by no means “bad.” They spoke of the hard conditions under which the play was produced, the paid-for empty seats, the perfect cast selected for Chekhov’s picture of human futility. “A delicately beautiful dramatic tapestry,” the Globe called it, “its colors subdued and blended, as only master craftsmen can blend.... The company is superb, and the acting well-nigh perfect.” And the Transcript, with a full-length three-column picture of her, paid a just tribute to the play and its production. Lillian’s part it spoke of as “elusive, wraith-like, symbol of the unattainable. At the end, like a spirit of a passing dream, she drifts away, to leave them to their old problems and their solitude.”

But for a week, the attendance was very bad. Then the visiting military was gone, and the house filled. It would have been filled for a month longer, if they could have stayed. But Chicago was waiting.

Lillian was always reading some book on the road. This time she was re-reading “Wuthering Heights.”

What a beautiful piece of work is Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” It sweeps across the page like the winds on the moor that she knew so well. From fury to tenderness, with such understanding; how many lives had she lived before, to know so much!

She firmly believed in mental and spiritual growth through reincarnation. She was convinced that she had lived before—that now and again, she caught glimpses of a former life. Personally, I was by no means sure that mere human beings had known a previous existence, but I was certain that Lillian had. Not a previous existence, but the same existence, of which the present gave hardly more than a glimpse.

Chicago welcomed her with open arms: she had always been a favorite there. She wrote:

“They keep me moving as fast as a machine-gun in this kind, friendly Chicago. But I shall be so happy when I am by the East River, once more, talking in the little den.”

As for the papers, they could not say enough good things of “Uncle Vanya,” of Lillian, of the entire company. The Post gave a column of appreciation. It had a large picture of Lillian, and in part, said of her:

If an embodiment were needed of our Siberian spirit from the steppes, stalking from East to West, we’d say cast Miss Gish for the part—only, make the spirit glide across the stage, as does Miss Gish at her first entrance.... “Uncle Vanya,” as presented, may not be Chekhov, but it is superbly Lillian Gish—and this reviewer, for one, prefers Lillian Gish to Chekhov.

The News spoke of her initial entrance, “Not only as a perfect entrance for an actress to make out of the half-dream world of filmdom into the world of flesh and blood, but the whole of Chekhov’s drama in a fifteen-second gesture.”

Twenty-two years before, Lillian had last “played Chicago,” in a theatre where one’s dressing-room was in a flooded basement, and one had to wear a long skirt and high heels to avoid the Gerry officers. Now, the Gerry officers did not mind any more—the Harris Theatre was beautiful and well-appointed—one’s dressing-room had the fittings required by a modern star. And there were flowers in it, and a little heap of notes and cards—invitations, and requests for interviews. There had been no interviews twenty-two years ago, and if the critics noticed her at all, it had been obscurely and briefly, a line in some half-hidden corner. Now, her picture looked out from every dramatic page, while at the Goodman Theatre, in the foyer, along with those of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble, hung the “Romola” portrait, which Nikolai Fechin had painted, the only portrait of a living actress so honored. Lillian had known that following its exhibition in New York, the portrait had been bought for the Chicago Art Institute, but did not know before that it had been hung in the Goodman Theatre. Now, she was obliged to go and stand beside it and be photographed, with a bevy of girls, and the papers published that, too. And here, in one paragraph, we have a romance as complete as any to be found in the story books.

It was on November 3, that “Uncle Vanya” reached Pittsburgh, a damp and heavy season of gloom.

“Someone dropped my heart into the pit of a coal-mine,” wrote Lillian. “I want so to find it, so I can dust it off before I reach New York.”

To brighten her stay, and to get material for our work, she brought “Aunt Emily” down from Massillon, not very far distant.

Pittsburgh was hardly a “Vanya” city, but the newspapers were kind—to the play and to the company.

Perhaps it was not strange—but only seemed so—that “Uncle Vanya” had its best houses in Newark, which had been substituted for Philadelphia. I am told there are a good many Russians there—it may be that Chekhovians and other cultured ones abound. At all events they did love “Vanya,” there, and said so, and I shall always hold them in affection for the sake of Jed Harris and his perfect company, and especially for the sake of Chekhov, whom a good many people regard lightly, or do not regard at all. The in-growing life of a Russian farm-house, the tragedy of a cherry orchard, are meaningless to them, or only amusing. It was amusing to Chekhov, too, who laughed—a little—that he might not weep—too much.

Lillian was at home again during the Newark engagement, going across the river each evening and matinée afternoon, unpretentiously by bus, with tiresome changes. She might have gone as befitted a great star, but she preferred to go modestly, and, as she thought, more suitably.

And then, presently, “Vanya” was being given in New York again, this time briefly, at the Biltmore. I saw it twice, there, and the charm of it did not wane, but grew upon me exactly as the charm of the play itself, when read quietly on a winter afternoon. It is my conviction that such another company to play “Uncle Vanya” is not likely to be assembled.

The “Vanya” engagement ended at the Biltmore on the evening of November 29, 1930. Following the matinée, Lillian had the company to her apartment, for dinner. She was as pleased as a child with the prospect of having them, and the arrangements. A friend had sent in some very good Italian home-made claret, there was a big turkey, and the tables were arranged in a T, in the living-room at Beekman Terrace.

Owing to the evening performance, the guests could not remain more than an hour, but it was an hour to remember. Kate Mayhew beamed on her younger companions. And when, that night, at the theatre, Griffith came behind the scenes and greeted her with a rousing kiss, she declared, later, to Lillian, that it was the happiest day of her life. “Dinner with you, and kissed by Mr. Griffith! What more could anyone ask?”

Lillian had not seen Griffith for some time. It was a surprise, therefore, when he came behind, at the end of the performance. It was something more than eighteen years since the day she had come to find Gladys Smith at the Biograph studio, and had first seen him, a tall man walking up and down, humming “She’ll never bring them in.”

What a story of endeavor those eighteen years had told. I have given many pages to it, but among the “Vanya” notices I find this unidentified bit which reflects the spirit of it all:

Lillian Gish, who has ever held high the torch of beauty during her entire career as stage and screen star, and with undeviating purpose has been representative of the finest and best traditions of the theater, adds another triumph to her list of admirable achievements. As the ethereal and wistful Helena she is all the author could have hoped for. Something more intangible she gives to the rôle than her delicate loveliness, her undeniable charm and the richness of her experience as a sincere and gifted actress.

VI
RELIVING THE YEARS

It became our custom to work two afternoons a week—Tuesdays and Fridays, and on the hour I found her always ready. Whatever engagement she made, she would keep it; whatever promise, even a partial one. I think she was born with that conscience, and the years of rigid picture appointments had kept it in repair. Griffith had said to her: “You, as the star, must never fail to be there. The others will take their cue from you. You must be on time.” And she always had been on time, and ahead of time. Once, by a lapse of memory on my part, I missed an appointment when we were to see one of the old pictures together. If she had scalded me with censure, I should have felt better—if she had even shown a little irritation, instead of anxiously helping me to find excuses, I could better have borne it. Five minutes later, it had passed from her memory, but it refuses to pass from mine.

We saw a number of the old pictures, that winter, as has appeared in earlier chapters:

Lillian, in “Broken Blossoms,” the picture that had made her the “world’s darling” and is still today recognized as the highest point touched by the pictures, for beauty and artistic perfection. I insisted on seeing this picture twice, for it seemed to me her masterpiece. From the moment she enters the picture, her whole attitude, her face, her hands, her feet, her bowed shoulders and bent back—every part and feature of her, tell her crushed, stunted, trampled life.

Of course, her wistful beauty added to the pathos of it all, but Lillian without beauty—if one can conceive that possibility—would have achieved a triumph. When she crosses the street, stoops to pick up the tin foil which she gathers to sell, looks into the shop window, touches the flower she wants, one’s heart turns fairly sick for the broken child.

She had not wished to play the part, because it was of a child of twelve. “I wanted Griffith to get a girl of that age.”

“But a girl of twelve could never have done it.”

She did not answer, only mentioned that she had been ill at the time.

“Do you consider it your best picture?”

She hesitated.

“If not, what would be your choice?”

Again she hesitated, then:

“‘White Sister,’ perhaps.”

We saw that, too, and “Romola,” and poor little Mimi, and Hester Prynne, made when Lillian had become, beyond all question, “First Lady of the Screen.”

It was toward the end of March that we saw the last of her great silent pictures, “Wind.” The motion picture had arrived at mechanical perfection when it was made. It was one of the several “swan songs” of that ill-fated year. I thought it a remarkable picture—beautiful in its stark un-beauty. It only seemed unfortunate in that it presented the most sordid of human aspects against a background of wind-cursed wastes.

Lillian watched it almost without a word. I think she approved her part in it, and why not? Technically, she was at her best. We drove home rather silently.

“It was the exact opposite of ‘Broken Blossoms,’” I ventured to say.

“You mean …”

“That that was sheer beauty, while this–”

“But this had beauty, too, don’t you think?”

“Great beauty. The illusion of blowing sand … Letty’s cumulative terror of it—those were classic things. But I cannot imagine going through the torture of seeing it again. The ending didn’t save it.”

“No. I wanted it to end with her complete madness … with her rushing out into the wind … vanishing in the storm. They wouldn’t let me.”

“They thought they were giving it a happy ending.”

“I suppose so.”

We saw one more picture after that, “The Enemy,” her last silent film, and our winter was at an end—a winter during which, by a form of “eternal recurrence,” exactly symbolic of Ouspensky’s “duplicate reincarnations of the past” I had watched her relive the years, change from the young girl who had played Elsie Stoneman to the mature and finished actress of “Wind,” of “One Romantic Night,” of Chekhov’s Helena.

And in watching I seemed to guess something of her secret. Chiefly, as I believe, it lies in the fact that she does not do violence to herself by making herself over into the part she presents. She studies the environment, the period, the hundred contributing details of the situation, then lives her part in the play as she might have lived it in reality. She takes on the psychology of it—what she conceives to be such—and in some subtle fashion, fuses it with her own. Always, it is Lillian who is playing, and always you want it to be Lillian, just as all those people she has played—Hester Prynne, Mimi, the White Sister, poor little Lucy Burrows, and Helena—would wish to be Lillian, if they could see her in their parts. And the nearer they could be like her, the better White Sister and Hester Prynne and Helena and the rest, they would make. I am not saying that hers is the best dramatic method—my equipment does not warrant that positive statement—I am only saying that the effect she gives us is not of acting, but of life itself.

Sometimes I feel that I have dwelt overmuch on the subject of Lillian’s beauty; again, I feel that I have said very little. It is such a tremendous thing when considered in its relation to her material being—such a baffling thing. She is not richly proportioned. In height five feet four and one half inches, her weight is one hundred and ten pounds. True, her slender feet are small, her limbs shapely; but her arms are full long, her expressive hands rather large, her shoulders narrow, her bust that of a young girl. It is strange, but these very defects—defects in another—add to the charm that surrounds her like an aureola. Her face—I cannot write about her face—I suppose the classic purist might take it to pieces, discovering a variety of faults. Let him do so. In doing it he will miss Lillian altogether—her beauty and the magic of it. It has often been likened to music, the strains of Debussy, which is well enough, as far as it goes, and I have found it in the heart cry of Mascagni’s “Intermezzo,” in the “Eve of St. Agnes,” in the dying fall of the “Londonderry Air.” To say that it is spiritual only partly tells the story. It is that, but it is something more. It has a haunting eerie quality that has to do with elfland, and lonely moors—the face that seen by the homing lad at evening leaves him forever undone. Scores of men and women, too, have written of it, have felt its strangeness. Some have tried to write of it lightly, but underneath you feel the magic working. They have glimpsed “Diana’s silver horn,” and are forever changed.

“CAMILLE”

VII
A FEW NOTES

In my notebook of this time I find these entries:

March 31, 1931: She has returned from a brief stay at Atlantic City. “I read ‘Arrowsmith,’” she said. “I think it a fine book.

“I remembered something while I was there: something from my childhood: I remembered Papa taking Dorothy and me there, once; I think we stayed there overnight. I know we paddled in the water on the beach. How strange, when my memory is so poor, that this should come back to me, after all these years. I think we went from New York, so it must have been just after Baltimore, when I was about five.”

No date: How tolerant she is! Whatever her belief or habits, she never urges them upon others, or tries to disintegrate theirs. She never smoked a cigarette in her life, but for years she has lived in a drift of tobacco, without objection or criticism. She drinks nothing stronger than mild wine, but provides generously for her guests.

April 5: Artists are always wanting to paint Lillian. Just now she is posing for Sorine, the distinguished Russian painter who did the Pavlowa which hangs in the Luxembourg. Lillian’s portrait is to hang there, he says, and some day in the Louvre. I saw it today, with her. It is vividly, delicately done.

No date: Today she said: “I attended a symphony concert, last night, with some friends. In the box with us was Gabrilowitsch. I thought of what the music meant to him that it did not mean to me. What he heard that missed me entirely. Musicians have an entire world of their own. No other art has that in the same degree. Science has it, I suppose. But music seems different,—of a world still farther removed.”

April 15: How does she find time for all the things she does? She has no secretary, now, yet somehow keeps up conscientiously with her letter answering—of itself a heavy task. Then, home duties, social demands, this posing every day for Sorine; also, for a young German girl, Fräulein von Bismarck; reading plays; this work of ours, which takes no end of time, and thought. I don’t see how she manages it all—but she does.

I suppose things trouble her, but she remains serene. There is about her a detachment from the worries of life that suggests Karma Yoga, and is that, I have no doubt, for she is versed in Eastern Philosophy.

Whether she “suffers fools gladly,” or not, I do not know. I only know that she suffers them—without complaint.

She reads omnivorously, but always, as I think, seeking the best, and apparently reading with care and reflection.

A few days ago I lent her Brand Whitlock’s latest book, “Narcissus,” which tells a Belgian legend of Van Dyck. Today she said: “I read it twice—for the story, first, then for the beauty of it—the style. It has great charm. I want to read it again.” Then she told me a story of Van Dyck and Frans Hals, which somewhere she had read, or heard.

April, 1932. Something has happened, or is in the process of happening. Since the conclusion of “Uncle Vanya” Lillian has given little serious consideration to theatrical matters, putting aside as unsuitable a variety of offered parts. A new prospect now presents itself—one that appeals to her taste and imagination: a group of influential citizens of Denver, Colorado, headed by Mr. Delos Chappell, propose to refurbish and reopen the ancient Opera House of the little “ghost mining town” of Central City, with a week’s presentation of “Camille,” at fancy prices, for the benefit of the University of Denver. Robert Edmond Jones is to stage and direct the production, with Lillian as Casting Director, herself in the title rôle. She is deeply interested—has secured Raymond Hackett for the part of Armand, the rehearsing to begin at once.

From a special to The New York Times

Denver, Col., July 16.—In an impressive ceremony, amid the merry laughter of “pioneer” belles and gay young men, and at a cost of $250,000, the famous Central City Opera House was brought to life tonight after a silence of fifty years.

Men, women and children from the Atlantic Seaboard and the Pacific Coast came to this “phantom” village, once the miners’ capital. Daughters and sons, granddaughters and grandsons of pioneers who once made those same walls vibrate with their applause were there for the gala opening of the revival, in dress such as their ancestors wore at the theatre when it was new. Some of the gowns, handed down through the fifty years, were once heard to rustle down those same aisles. Every person in the audience represented some famous character of the time when Central City was the centre of Colorado’s gold mining industry. “Camille” typified to perfection the taste of the ’80s in the theatre.

Miss Lillian Gish, as Marguerite Gautier, takes the leading rôle, with Raymond Hackett playing opposite her as Armand. It was the first time “Camille” has played in the old opera house in fifty years.