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Starring Madame MODJESKA
On Tour in Poland and America
By Beth Holmgren Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2012 Beth Holmgren
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35664-2
CHAPTER 1
Debut
HELENA MODJESKA AT THE CALIFORNIA
On 20 August 1877, in San Francisco's California Theatre, an obscure foreign actress performed the title role of Adrienne Lecouvreur, a drama by the popular French playwrights Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé. For San Francisco's many avid theatergoers, the venue, supporting company, and play promised a fine evening's entertainment. After the 1859 Silver Rush "rebuilt" the city in style, the California Theatre, like the nearby Palace Hotel, stood as a sumptuous example of San Francisco's prosperity and keen pursuit of public recreation. As recalled by historian Constance Rourke, the California "seemed designed both for the cultivation of the actors and the pleasures of the audience," boasting an expansive lobby, comfortable dressing rooms with good soundproofing, and a stage curtain "covered with Spanish scenes and vignettes of early mining days." A contemporary visitor, Guillermo Prieto, admired its superb stage framed by "a vast arch resting on heavy pillars" and equipped with scenery "run in both sides with great speed on rails along the floor." The California's "powerful and expert stock company" was formed under the talented leadership of actor-managers John McCullough and Lawrence Barrett and furnished knowledgeable, if not always appropriately subordinate, support for visiting stars.
The play performed that August night was a familiar star vehicle about the turbulent private life of a famous actress. Like Alexandre Dumas fils' Lady of the Camellias, its more renowned contemporary, Adrienne Lecouvreur compellingly pled the case of "the fallen woman" in love, retelling the tragedy of the real-life Adrienne, an eighteenth-century French actress who dared to adore an aristocratic general and consequently was poisoned by her rival. Scribe and Legouvé's development of Adrienne's character builds audience anticipation with her second-act entrance and unabashedly milks their tears with her eloquent fifth-act death scene. The success of Adrienne depended on its star's subtle emotional expression, physical control, and poignant appeal—her capacity to play a skilled actress in extremis. Popularized by the French tragedienne Rachel Felix (1821–1858) during her 1855 American tour, Adrienne easily accommodated a foreign actress in its lead role and proved a successful choice for such players as the Italian Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906), the Czech Fanny Janauschek (1830–1904), and the French Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923).
The sparse information circulated about this night's foreign star did little to pique audience interest. The debuting actress came not from France, but Poland, to most Americans a politically eclipsed and culturally undistinguished part of Europe. Since 1795, Poland had been erased from the European map, its territories forcibly partitioned by and absorbed into the neighboring Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires. This Polish player thus emerged from nowhere, unattached to any tour, unrepresented by any agent, and little remarked by the press. A modest puff piece in the 5 August 1877 San Francisco Daily Morning Call vouched for her talent and French connections: "Between Miss Mayhew and Miss Rose Eytinge at the California will come a lady—an aristocratic lady—who signs herself thus: 'Helena Modjeska, Countess Bo enta.' ... The European stage has rang [sic] with her praises, and Poland, the country of her nativity, regards her with pride. The Countess is Rachelesque in her style; and Dumas, wishing to recruit the artistic ranks at the French capital has given, time and again, strong invitations to this fair Polander to take a place on the Parisian stage." An item planted in the Call a day before her debut tepidly predicts that "the Countess [will be] a moderate sensation in the present theatrical stagnation."
For a likely combination of reasons—a public uninspired by minimal publicity about a "moderately sensational" unknown and otherwise distracted by labor unrest—the audience assembled for the debut of "Helena Modjeska, Countess Bo enta" was not large, and her ability to melt "the frigid temperatures of this hypercritical people," in the words of the Daily Alta California, seemed improbable. Yet the reviews printed in the next day's papers announced the birth of a star "which threatens to eclipse our English constellation." The real drama in the California Theatre that night was played out between the unknown actress and her unsuspecting audience. Both the Call and the San Francisco Daily Evening Post declared Modjeska "a revelation" equal to the famed tragedienne Ristori and superior to San Franciscans' current favorite Shakespearean actress, Adelaide Neilson (1848-1880). The "Polish artiste" playing the French Adrienne won over her audience act by act, throb by throb:
She appears first in the second act, and has some passages with her devoted teacher "Mons. Michonnet" of a half tender and half playful character, which showed a graceful and intelligent artist, but gave little indication of the tragic power displayed in the fourth and fifth acts ... The situation in the fourth act, in which the duel of words occurs between the two rivals, is one of the best in French drama, and the fifth affords an opportunity for acting which can hardly be composed. Poisoned, dying, her lover, whom she believed false, returns to her, and then ensues the struggle against the influence of the poison, the supreme efforts which recalled memory and consciousness, and the final death throb with which life actually seemed to go out of the face of the actress.
Loving, lamenting, and dying, this Polish Adrienne wrested "bravas" from her hypercritical American patrons, attracted larger audiences each night, and made of every appearance "a fresh triumph." Helena Modjeska performed her masterful Adrienne eight times before packed houses and, in an audacious move for an actress who had studied English-language parts a mere eight months, added to her new American repertoire the Shakespearean roles of Juliet and Ophelia. In the latter, she reconciled herself to playing the mad scene alone and in Polish. As audiences throughout the United States would soon discover, Modjeska thrived on tests of nerve. Describing her San Francisco triumph to Warsaw friend Maria Fale ska, she reported that "I've debuted here at last, and I was naturally a success, as usual. It appears that a strong will can conquer all. The papers are enraptured, the ladies love me. In a word, it's all going well." The postdebut telegram she sent her husband allegedly contained a single word: "Victory." On 21 August 1877, Modjeska signed a contract for an East Coast tour under the representation of Harry Sargent, the first of several agents to make a pitch to the new star ensconced at the Palace Hotel.
Modjeska's surprisingly successful San Francisco debut launched her on an awe-inspiring star trajectory over several decades. As her string of conquests led from San Francisco to New York, audiences and critics at once embraced the Polish actress as a consummate artist and ultimately paid her homage as a onewoman American theatrical institution. During her long career, Modjeska eclipsed her American contemporaries as a high-culture actress specializing in Shakespeare, rivaled international touring greats Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry in box office draw and adulatory reviews, and played with such famed actors as Edwin Booth and Maurice Barrymore, the paterfamilias of legendary stage and screen stars Lionel, Ethel, and John. Modjeska's anglicized Polish surname became the stuff of legend. In Hollywood's most famous film about stage actresses, the Oscar-winning All About Eve (1950), critic Addison deWitt (George Sanders) sets the scene by invoking real American stars who once graced New York's fictitious "Sarah Siddons Society": "These hallowed walls, indeed, many of these faces, have looked upon Modjeska, Ada Rehan, and Minnie Fiske."
While Modjeska's San Francisco debut marked a momentous professional rebirth, it also unveiled her return from a tantalizingly curious obscurity. As retold in press interviews, biographies, fictional accounts, and her 1910 Memories and Impressions, Modjeska's riches-to-rags-to-riches story began when she quit Poland in July 1876 at the peak of her stardom as Helena Modrzejewska. Various professional and personal grievances prompted her departure, and she envisioned the year's leave of absence she had arranged with the Warsaw Imperial Theatres as a hiatus rather than a defection. Modrzejewska discreetly joined her husband Karol Chlapowski, her son Rudolf by an earlier extramarital liaison, and a tiny group of Polish artists and associates in a peculiarly American experiment—a utopian community in Southern California. Weary of a contentious Warsaw and lured by advertisements touting Southern California's gentle climate and arable land, this idealistic little party set out for the German agricultural colony at Anaheim, where they imagined they could consult with experienced farmer settlers in a language they knew and could create their own late nineteenth-century version of Brook Farm.
Their crazy dream failed within a month and exhausted Chlapowski's $15,000 investment. Nonetheless, the time the couple spent exploring the wilderness east of Anaheim forged their lifelong attachment to Orange County's stunning inland canyons. This period when the actress was lost to Poland and not yet known to America suggests her disappearance down a western rabbit hole as she exchanged the pampered world of a national icon for the rugged life of an immigrant farmer. The prospect of imagining an exotic, iron-willed prima donna coping in a rustic, pre-Disneyland Anaheim has enticed writers of all stripes. Susan Sontag, the most famous of those intrigued, could recall the very moment of her enchantment, when a historical account of the actress's farming adventure compelled her to start writing the novel In America (2000): "For me, that is a great story with which I could tell many stories. I could tell a story about the discovery of America, about what it's like to be a foreigner and how you discover yourself and the new place through that very interesting status."
This great story proved to be more complicated, however, since Modrzejewska and her husband were also pursuing a parallel, much less utopian dream. As the actress admits in a March 1877 letter to Stefania Leowa, the wife of the editor of the Polish Gazette (Gazeta Polska), performing on the American stage "had been my secret plan from the beginning of our venture." To enact that plan she required time to memorize English-language scripts and a less demanding performance venue far from New York's definitive proving ground. Her party first encountered America in New York, where Modrzejewska surveyed the major theaters as a clandestine competitor, absorbing as much information about New York players, tastes, and repertoire as her very limited English allowed. According to one of Chlapowski's letters home, his wife had rejected an initial invitation to play in Polish during their New York stay. Whereas Bernhardt's French-language spectacles attracted a large, generally educated American public, Modrzejewska realized that Polish-language performances would have consigned her to ethnic theater productions in "parish halls, saloons, fraternal lodges, and modest professional stages."
As she first passed through San Francisco on her way to sleepy Anaheim, Modrzejewska sized up the city's theatrical possibilities. After their leisurely journey by ship from New York to San Francisco, she and her husband separated from their party to linger in town for roughly a month in fall 1876. Their letters described a young, vital San Francisco which was "one hundred times prettier than New York," with wide, wood-paved streets and cosmopolitan, multilingual inhabitants. The San Francisco that they observed in the late 1870s was known as a good theater town, a West Coast mecca for "actors, opera singers, musicians of all orders, vaudeville and circus performers, bands and bandmasters." According to historian Oscar Lewis, troupes of performers typically would "play a few weeks at one of the local houses, then tour the interior, making one-night stands at Sacramento, Stockton, and the foothill mining towns, and, after a second engagement in San Francisco, either return East or continue on to the Hawaiian Islands or Australia."
Since its beginnings in the Gold Rush, San Francisco theater welcomed and sustained a broad spectrum of talent and repertoire, including serious actors and notorious celebrities, Shakespeare productions and low comedies and burlesques. Three members of the famous Booth family—Junius Brutus, senior and junior, and Edwin, who would be hailed as America's greatest Shakespearean actor—performed in the city and on the mining camp circuit. Modrzejewska, Edwin's future partner, saw his Shylock and Mark Antony in San Francisco and pronounced him "the one good actor in all America." The rough-and-tumble conditions of the Gold Rush and the scarcity of women in the mining camps also yielded exceptional opportunities for actresses and actress-managers. San Francisco audiences enjoyed the extravaganzas mounted by Sarah Kirby-Stark and her husband James Stark, the ambitious opera productions of Catherine Sinclair at the Metropolitan Theatre, and the impressive roster of Shakespeare plays that Laura Keene circulated at the American Theatre.
San Francisco attracted such sensations as Lola Montez, "the Countess of Landsfeldt, the Limerick Countess, the Spanish dancer, born Eliza Gilbert in Ireland," who arrived in the spring of 1853 trailing tales of her love affairs (including her seduction of Ludwig I of Bavaria), commanded astronomical ticket prices for the performance of her torso-exposing "spider dance," and settled for a brief time in Grass Valley with two bear cubs and a third husband, local newspaper editor Patrick Purdy Hull. During the Civil War, the equally scandalous but artistically more ambitious actress Adah Isaacs Menken riveted the public's attention with gossip about her romances and the dangerous stunt she performed in Mazeppa, or, The Wild Horse of Tartary, when, scantily clad and lashed to the back of a horse, she was borne up a forty-foot ramp offstage. Menken also consorted with the local bohemians gathered around the Golden Era, a literary paper to which she contributed several poems.
On this vivid and motley background, Helena Modjeska's foreign provenance, ambition to play Shakespeare, and faux royal title neither outraged nor particularly impressed. As her luck did have it, she debuted in a cosmopolitan city of theater lovers who relished the eccentric, the exotic, the variable, and the sensational. Now that the free and easy liberties of Gold Rush society had passed, her carefully groomed person—that of "a lady, an aristocratic lady"—well suited a lavishly rebuilt San Francisco firmly connected by transcontinental railroad with a civilized East and intent on its own cultural refinement. Modjeska's decorous debut launched a far more ambitious career than the provocations of a Montez or a Menken, a mode of working and living more culturally pervasive than Bernhardt's spectacular assertion of self.
From the outset of her American career, Modjeska sought to win her public not as an ethnic artist or a visiting foreign star, but as an Americanized success. She did not affect a colorful ethnicity to enhance her celebrity cachet, as did Montez, although both she and her biographers shrewdly romanticized the "land of her nativity." Following California Theatre manager John McCullough's advice, she simplified "Modrzejewska" into "Modjeska" so as to become a famous name her new American patrons could pronounce. In an era when popular and serious American entertainment relied on the performance of formulaic ethnicity—from Buffalo Bill's "genuine" exhibits of representative ethnics in his "Wild West Show" to "unflattering depictions of the Irish" in professional theater—the Polish Modjeska arrogated for herself the status and highbrow repertoire of English actors, the only non-native group "easily accepted by American audiences" and, in many cases, conceded superior cultural prestige. Benjamin McArthur characterizes the late nineteenth-century American theater as "a procession of actors and actresses who were models of Anglo-Saxon gentility and femininity." Modjeska self-assuredly entered their ranks, performing fifteen Shakespearean roles in English over the course of her thirty-year career in the United States (performing only eleven in Polish) and lecturing the American public about the detriments of the star system and the need for a national theater.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Starring Madame MODJESKA by Beth Holmgren. Copyright © 2012 Beth Holmgren. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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