Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 23

I know an ancient mariner who sits in the sun at Honolulu and remembers the days when, as an orphaned kid, he escaped from the old Cape Cod spinsters in charge of him and ran away to sea. Most of all he likes to tell about the first time he got a berth as mate on a ship sailing round the world. Her captain was the weatherbeaten Thomas Dermot of Rockland, Maine, who, in his turn, had been a Liverpool wharf-rat when the sea scooped him up and adopted him. Now Dermot’s motherless little daughter Jessica was flowering just then into such loveliness that the skipper felt a deep uneasiness about leaving her behind in Rockland. So, whether he thought of her as an innocent to be guarded or as a pearl he might sell some day for a good price, he took her to sea with him. When she stood on the bridge beside him, with the salt wind whipping her dark hair, she must have been as fair a sight as ever greeted mortal eyes.

I wish I might have seen her in those days. When I did see her a dozen years later (the skipper could not keep her at sea forever), her beauty was breath-taking enough in all conscience, but by then there was no surprise in it, for it was famous the world around. At the time she was on the stage, to which great beauty has ever gravitated as to a show window. She was playing with Nat Goodwin in a sentimental romance fabricated around the slim, proud figure of Nathan Hale. Before he went forth to be hanged at dawn, there was a heart-wrenching scene of farewell which drenched the house in tears and left the younger set in the gallery quite inconsolable. Indeed, I quit the theater so bemused that to this day I cannot pass the bronze Nathan Hale in City Hall Park in New York without thinking how sweet at her side might have been the one life he had to give for his country.

Well, that was many a year ago and Jessica Dermot has long since left the stage. Today, she has white hair and a great fortune, and she lives in a villa she has built for herself on the shore at Cannes, where, when she goes out to drive, she can see the depressing and faintly repulsive statue of her old friend Edward VII, erected by the grateful citizens of this French resort which his favor made fashionable. It is a fearsome sight, but at that it may sometimes remind her mischievously of the venturesome days when he was astroll one afternoon in the park at Marienbad and passed this young American woman in a dove-colored gown with puffed sleeves who, not without design, sat seemingly engrossed in a becoming book of poetry, her ruffled parasol tilted to shade the page. As Royalty went by, she chanced to look up from beneath the wide brim of her hat, and, for the space that a breath is held, their eyes met. Then she looked down at her book again and went on reading until, in ten minutes or so, an equerry came bowing and scraping with an invitation to dine that evening. But in her villa now her windows look out on the sea she used to sail when she was a kid from Rockland, long ago. That villa, by the way, was swept by flames in the spring of 1933. If its fate had rested with the local fire department, her home would now be ashes, but the damage was restricted, thanks to the valiant help volunteered by the English battleships at anchor in the harbor. It was so like her to employ the British Navy as her personal fire-extinguisher.

When she herself indulges in such retrospects, hers are, I suppose, the mixed emotions which must be the portion of any woman who knows that already, in her own lifetime, she is a myth. Irrevocably the skipper’s daughter, under her assumed name of Maxine Elliott, has entered into American legend. It is the substance of that legend that her great catch was none of the men she married but the late Pierpont Morgan. The legend has it that, fascinated and ensnared by her loveliness, he showered on her the gifts which leave her still, after the hurricane of the depression, a fabulously rich woman, and that, as a magnate’s kiss for Cinderella, he built and gave her the marble-front theater in Times Square which has borne her name now for more than five-and-twenty years. That the first financier and the first beauty of an era should be thus linked in people’s minds has almost the force of a folk wish. That Mr. Morgan built the Maxine Elliott Theater as a slight token of his regard has been an article in the simple creed of New York ever since I can remember. If I repeat it here, it is for the purpose and the satisfaction of saying something new about it.

What I wish to contribute to the legend is the fact that it is not true. I do not mean merely that it is not quite true. It is not true in any degree. Dollar by dollar, Miss Elliott paid for her share of that theater out of her own shrewdly multiplied savings, and, mind you, it was not merely that she did not know Mr. Morgan well enough to expect or accept such gifts from him. She did not know him at all. It was not merely that they did not exchange favors. They did not even exchange words. The force of gossip is such that it has woven a probably indestructible fabric of faintly scandalous romance about two people who, as it happens, were not even acquaintances.

I confess myself fascinated by this evidence that a legend can spring up and flourish untended without a particle of truth to sustain it. If you have any doubt about the sturdiness of this one, you have only to ask any man in the street, or glance through the pages of Master Winkler’s Morgan the Magnificent, or attend the play called Dinner at Eight. As Mr. Winkler was obliged to write his biography without access to the Morgan archives and without co-operation from the Morgan family, he had to fall back on clippings and gossip and guesswork to such a degree that inevitably so cherished and firmly rooted a myth as the one about Maxine Elliott found a place in his pages. Morgan, according to Mr. Winkler, permitted her to “tame” him. “Maxine Elliott,” he says, “had a peculiar influence over Morgan.” Very peculiar, indeed!

Then there is no mistaking her identity behind the florid, if somewhat neglected, figure of Carlotta Vance in Dinner at Eight. Into that comedy strolls this erstwhile beauty of the stage, brought back from her villa at Antibes by the depression. She must look into her once fruitful investments, and, in particular, get rid if she can of the theater named after her. It had fallen on evil days. Listen to Carlotta herself:

“May I take you for a stroll down Forty-second Street and a little look at the Carlotta Vance Theater? It’s between the Flea Circus and a Hamburger-and-onion Eatery. It’s had six weeks of booking in the past two years. And what were they! Special matinées of a Greek actress named Maria Koreopolous playing Sophocles’ How Are You? in the original Greek. That filled a long-felt want. Then there was a movie week. A big educational film called The Story of Evolution; or, From Ooze to Hoover in ten reels. It then swung back to the legitimate with a little gem entitled Papa Love Mama. Three days. For the past six months they haven’t taken the lock off the door. It’s now known as the spiders’ rendezvous, but you can’t collect rent from them! ... So my little problem is to find somebody I can sell it to. Though I don’t know what they’d do with it, unless they flood it and use it for a swimming pool. I wonder if I couldn’t sell it back to the Stanfield estate. There’s an idea. You know, when he gave me that theater I thought it was pretty magnificent of the old boy. I wish now I’d taken a sandwich.”

At which revelation on the first night in New York, there was a great rustle in the audience, the sibilant sound of a thousand complacent wiseacres all whispering “Maxine Elliott” in unison. Of course it is quite possible that should you ask George Kaufman and Edna Ferber about it, they would blandly insist they were just two great dreamers who had invented that character without a thought of Maxine Elliott so much as crossing their minds. If they should say that, you have my permission to tell them they are lying in their teeth.

What is peculiarly maddening about the Maxine Elliott legend is that the truth itself is so much more interesting. After all, a pretty lady of the stage who thriftily hoards the gifts of rich men as a provision for her old age is a fairly stereotyped character. But here is one who was herself a genius in finance. She helped many men in her time, and needed the help of none. If, baffled by the loss of such a cherished old toy as the Morgan myth, you at least try to suggest that Miss Elliott owed a great deal to the market tips given her by great men of affairs, those who worked with her in the old days will smile a rueful smile, knowing that, as it happened, great men of affairs were more likely to get their tips from her. She had an infallible instinct in investments. I know of one instance when her lawyer had bought ten thousand shares of a copper-mine stock he thought well of when it was selling at 15. She decided to follow him to the extent of a thousand shares. When he sold out at 44—and glad to get it—he was good enough to warn her that he had done so. But she replied, by wire, that she was selling at 115 or nothing. The stock went to 117. The instance would hardly be worth telling if it were not so characteristic. Multiply that by a hundred and you have her story. “If she had been a man,” the lawyer says in dreamy reverence, “Morgan would have been her secretary, and Jacob Schiff her office boy.”

Of course her going into partnership with Lee Shubert in the building of her theater represented an irritated impulse to get her strong and competent hands into the cheerful muddle of the great American box office. But there was a time when she had a better idea even than that. She dreamed a theater with no Shuberts in it at all. It was her notion that the ten most successful stars of the day might form a circuit, and, by thus dispensing with the middleman, themselves take all the profit. She worked out this scheme in such actuarial detail as would have warmed a banker’s heart. Armed with her prospectus, she went to the first star on her list, John Drew, knowing that he at least had a good-enough head to grasp her argument, and that with him in her pocket the rest would follow. He studied the scheme with care. “Yes, it would work,” he said, “but what will become of Charley Frohman?” And he handed it back to her. She tore it up and went her way, cursing the fate that had thrown her into a profession where everyone else but herself was a muddle-headed softy. If she was to make her fortune she would have to do it alone.

Seemingly she cared little about accumulation for its own sake. Secretly she decided upon a specific sum as her objective. She was on tour in the Middle West when the word came from her bankers that the sum had been reached. That night the notice went up on the bulletin board. She paid her company to the end of the season, dismissed them, and walked out of the stage door an independent woman. If some years later she came back to it for a season or two, it was because the war and a houseful of nieces brought needs for more money, which she had not foreseen.

The truth about Jessica Dermot, if I may make a clause out of my own title, is less something I myself might presume to tell than something I would like to read. It is a biography I hope someone better qualified will write while I am still around to read it. I suppose it will have to deal, to some extent, with Maxine Elliott as an actress. She never was one, really. It was the habit of her friends to say that her beauty handicapped her, but that was nonsense. Indeed, her beauty was all that let her into the theater at all. Certain quite homely little women among her contemporaries had, as a compensation, the capacity to make Maxine Elliott on the stage seem a woman of no importance. She was not so much a bad actress as a non-actress. She had everything that beauty, wit, great intelligence, ambition, industry, and a will of iron could contribute to the making of an actress. It was not enough. The strange, incommunicable gift was not hers.

Then the book will have to deal with her marital adventures. She attempted two husbands before deciding that marriage was no career for which she was equipped. The first, whom, to judge from her paragraph in Who’s Who in the Theater, she seems to have forgotten, was a man named McDermott. According to Rockland tradition, he was a man much older than herself whom she married because her family needed his money. Later—as who did not in those days—she married Nat Goodwin. Afterwards in his memoirs he classified his brides. The first was an angel, the second a dear little thing, and the third, Maxine, a Roman senator. Roman general would, I think, have been more apt. That selfsame paragraph in Who’s Who makes up for its first oversight by marrying her off to Tony Wilding, the British tennis player who was killed in the war and to whom, as a matter of fact, she was never married at all. Just before the war the cables hummed with prophecies that she would marry him. Her old friend, Melville E. Stone, as head of the Associated Press, sent her a wire of confidential inquiry in the matter. She wired back: “I have honorable intentions towards no man.” But, for that matter, there was a time when half the hearts of England were left hopefully on her doorstep, including one noble coronet that she would have none of. It was her difficulty that she would be the appanage of no man, and yet could not like a man who would be an appanage of hers. I happen to have known the husbands of some women of great achievement. Most of them were the lowest form of animal life. Whether great women have a taste for such, like a predilection for Roquefort, or inevitably make poor things of the men they marry, I do not know. I merely appreciate the validity of Miss Elliott’s predicament.

I hope that the chapter on Hartsbourne Manor will be written by someone who savored its brilliant hospitality. It was her English country home during and before the war. Edward and his ministers and all the glittering people of that time were guests under its roof. In the first startled autumn of 1914 the youngsters interspersed the bridge games with target practice. When she sold the place at last, she paid a farewell visit to its haunted gardens, and stayed looking long at the beech tree pockmarked with bullets fired by those young friends of hers who never came back from France. There is a legend at Hartsbourne that once the King was minded to visit her unattended for the week-end. She wrote him she knew that no one who had been so good a friend would thus destroy her. Majesty replied crossly that not even his own subjects were suffered to advise him in such matters. She began packing her trunks, and some of them, marked for America, were already in the van when a breathless equerry arrived with a list of guests the reconsiderate King would bring with him.

Two stories which I myself can vouch for will belong in that biography. The first concerns an English actress who, stricken with a once-fatal malady, was sent abroad to die. At some hospital in Switzerland they guessed she had three months to live. Just then a car arrived with a great lady who wanted to know if there were any hope. Well, there was talk of a new specific recently discovered in America. It was as yet a little-tried remedy and this patient, the doctors said, was so worried about her dependents back in England that any experiment seemed hopeless. The visitor took out a check book. The new treatment was ordered forthwith, the hospital expenses for the next six months were paid in advance and all the worries in England were shouldered on the spot. This gesture saved the day. That actress is still playing triumphantly, owing, as many of her sisters do, much to Maxine Elliott.

Then I would have you know that when her career as a hostess at Hartsbourne was at its zenith, she used to say a good-by to her guests on Sunday night, whether or not they were lingering till Monday. Then she herself would withdraw into a plain little two-room wing which was inviolably hers. There for five days of the week she satisfied her Rockland soul by practicing the art of dressmaking. Her nieces and friends, firmly she adorned them every one. It was a bit of the Maine coast transplanted to the heart of Hertfordshire. It was Jessica Dermot having her way behind the lovely mask called Maxine Elliott.