The lobby walls were lined with grey celotex, on which Mr. Valentine had hung prints of Degas ballet girls.
The inside of the theatre auditorium, all in slate-painted pine, with a peaked ceiling, was frankly a wooden box; and the seats were aged opera chairs, on steps. But from Bordeaux, Roscoe had brought, as traveller-curtain, an impish, gay tapestry with knights and dryads and long-necked greyhounds among intricate blue-and-saffron boughs, and it proclaimed, 'Forget the drab box of the auditorium, forget the drab boxes of your daily lives. Here is the gate to imagination.'
The metropolitan newspapers had for years found it a very sound and inimitably novel joke to refer to the summer stock theatres as 'the strawhats' and 'the barn theatres'. Well, if the Grampion structure was not a barn but a decayed church, it did at least have, backstage, something like a mess of old horse stalls. The dressing-rooms, the toilets, the property room, the costume room, the storage room, they were a honeycomb of thin coops, made of old boards with dark nail holes dotting them, and repaired with bits of old lath. They were in a crazy planless plan, so that you could, even in this tiny theatre, get lost. And Bethel loved those dark passages between rickety walls. They were the alleyways of a crazy city of dreams.
When the curtain had opened, to-night, the spectator (other than Bethel) would have seen a fairly good stock-company performance of The Petrified Forest, distinguished by the facts that Mahala was beautiful, in a stately, benign way; that she was so unsuited to the role of poetic desert rat that the director must have done his casting in the cellar, by touch; and that Doc Keezer, as Gramp, was a really good character actor. The rest was silence.
Bethel went backstage once during the show, for no other reason than to assure herself that she could. All she said was 'Hello' to Iris Pentire--so successfully made up to look thirty-five, as Mrs. Chisholm, that she looked fifty.
During the intermission she stood at attention, but she looked out at the strolling audience and vigilantly listened for comments. When a vacationing New York stockbroker said 'Not too bad', Bethel wanted to bite him. When the taxi driver's wife gurgled, 'It was lovely--I was so scared', then Bethel almost kissed her.
In intermissions they walked blissfully not on a New York side street, of coal chutes and high dusty stoops and Chinese beaneries and thin evasive hotels and Greek bars and clammy persistent packs of autograph hunters, but on the dandelion-starred grass, under the elms, in sea breeze. It was the linden trees of Weimar to Bethel, and Stratford in Maytime.
There were some seven reviews of the play in the New Haven and New London papers. Bethel still has all of them in her scrap album. Her prize among them was written by a red-faced man who, under the name of Black Bart, did sports and harbour news for the New London Era, and who wanted to write plays:
If New York theatrical producers could occasionally persuade themselves to give up going to Hollywood to try to get jobs, or to London to try to meet a duke, in between their spasms of actual producing of plays, and if they could be persuaded to have a little interest in their own future careers, they would take a few days off and look over the summer theatres, at which they scoff but which, as a matter of fact, are about the only source, outside of some dramatic schools, for the Eugene O'Neills and Walter Hustons of to-morrow.
That was brilliantly seen last night at Point Grampion, in The Petrified Forest, the opening gun in the Nutmeg Players' theatrical barrage for this summer. If perhaps some of the actors weren't yet as heavily loaded as the Broadway big guns, a lot of them are going to be. The play had the speed of a clipper, with humour and poetic qualities well emphasized. Andrew Deacon, who last summer pleased all hands by his robust characterization of Ethan Frome, is now winning as an English poet in hard luck, and the new leading lady, Miss Mahala Vale, is exquisite in the role of an Edna Millay in a dog-wagon. Interviewed afterwards in his dressing-room, Mr. Deacon, who hopes to find time even in his eighteen-hours-a-day in the theatre to enter the New London Tennis Tournament this summer, having been one of the best players for Old Eli some six years ago . . .
But Bethel cared less for the end of the report, in which it was stated that--
Young Miss Iris Pentire who, seen in her dressing-room, was exquisite as a skein of corn-coloured silk, is indeed a find, for so clever is she in make-up and impersonation that this lovely child gave all the impression of a stuffed-shirtwaist female in the dubious thirties. She is a wow.
Bethel reflected:
'Maybe Iris is better than I am.
'Maybe she's better than I'll ever be.
'She is not a wow!'
XIII
The apprentices were permitted each to appear in three plays during the season. Not till the fourth play, Stage Door, by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman, which opened on July 18th, did Bethel have her chance.
The sensation of the two weeks after The Petrified Forest was the appearance, like a transitory comet--a rather old and tired-out comet that had gone a long way--of Miss Nile Sanderac as guest star in Candida.
She was the first really distinguished actress that Bethel had ever seen in the flesh--the exquisite flesh, shining, ageless, more than human.
Everybody in the United States--'everybody' indicating that 00.05 per cent of the population that cared a hang about the theatre--knew that Nile Sanderac's real name was Nelly Sanders; that she was half Irish, half Yankee. Her career had been energetic. She had appeared in eleven witty plays about London society, ten plays about Park Avenue society, nine plays about Long Island society, and one play about the wrongs of lap dogs. She had been married four times. She was a friend of Gene Tunney, Grover Whalen, Dwight Fiske, the Duke of Westminster, Heywood Broun, Professor Millikan and Representative Sol Bloom. She was forty years old. At least. Her hair had, at various epochs, been mouse, chestnut, black, gold, grey, platinum, and gold again. She had given away, to various worthless but pleasant males, over $42,000. She owed, to various jewellery shops, dressmakers and hotels, over $48,000. She had a bad temper and a kind heart. Her pure shoulders enabled her to wear low black evening gowns to advantage. She spoke French absolutely, and she had never read one book clear through.
Incidentally, she was a very good actress.
The Nutmeg Players did not see much of Miss Sanderac, outside rehearsals. She didn't stay even in the exclusiveness of the House, with Roscoe and Andy and Mahala and Tudor Blackwall, but at the tapestry-brick mansion of the rich Jeddabys, in Grampion Centre. Always, Miss Sanderac was half shabby, in grey suits or spinsterish dresses of grey crêpe de Chine. She seemed to Bethel to have no personal life whatever: she didn't even scold her silent coloured maid or shriek at Roscoe for shrieking. Just once did Miss Sanderac come alive for Bethel and betray that she had private life in plenty--when Bethel saw a puffy man with puffy eyes and a grey moustache pouring out champagne for Miss Sanderac in her dressing-room, and, afterward, taking her off in a limousine. It all dated 1906, sighed Bethel.
Yet every apprentice on the lot, particularly Bethel, loved Nile Sanderac and hoped to be able to die for her. For she smiled at them, a special smile reserved for actors, not the mock-humble grimace she gave to barbarian outsiders; not a stingy smile, but a large one, that showed all her excellent teeth. The smile said that they were all comrades and fellow mummers, rogues and vagabonds, and that laymen were pretty funny.