THE ART OF MARIE MUELLE
ONE factor in my success was the beautiful wardrobe I was enabled to have through the kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Frank S. Jones. The first clothes I ordered from Marie Muelle in Paris, the summer before I went to Metz, I left entirely to her. She showed me designs and had bolts of wonderful shimmering silks unrolled for my inspection, and brought out boxes of curious embroideries, which she kept for her special friends. The Amneris and Dalila costumes she made me were very French of that period of the Comique; pale pinks and greens and everything in long wigs. I wore them a few seasons, but as I grew more in knowledge I did not feel at all Egyptian in pink crêpe de Chine, nor Syrian in pale green. My brother Cecil and I love the Egyptian part of the Louvre, and have spent hours there together. We found a fascinating bronze princess of the right period, which we proceeded to try and copy for me for Amneris.
We were staying out of town at Giverny, the artist colony made famous by Monet, Macmonnies, Friesieke, the A. B. Frost family and many artist friends. I had a big studio with my brother, and he made huge designs of the wings the princess used for her skirt, pinning them on the wall of the studio, then colouring them in the tones of the mummy cases, allowing for their fading through the ages. These designs we took to Muelle, who was most enthusiastic. We worked hard and long on that costume, getting the headdress just right, and making it practical as well as correct. The jewelry I made myself, from wooden beads painted the right colour and in the rue de Rivoli I found just the right Egyptian charms and figures of blue earthenware to hang on the necklace. My wig maker could not seem to satisfy me, so I finally took a short-haired black wig, and braided into it one hundred strands, made of lustreless wool. The dress seemed to lack something when on, so I twisted ropes of turquoise beads round the wrists and the blue accented the whole.
The Dalila clothes I had been wearing then seemed hopelessly pale, washy and conventional, so we hunted the shops of Berlin and Paris for vivid embroideries and searched museums for Syrian women. They did not seem at all popular, though we found magnificent reliefs of men. Taking these as a basis, we built some barbaric robes of scarlet and purple, added a fuzzy short black wig, and I felt much more "like it." I found a necklace of silver chains with clumps of turquoise matrix, in Darmstadt, and had a headdress made to match it. A comparison of the Amneris and Dalila photos will show how one's sense of costuming develops.
We bought all the books on the subject we could find, and studied them for hours. We cut out reproductions of historic portraits and invested largely in photos in the different art galleries we haunted, and pasted them into scrap books. Caps and headdresses have always interested me intensely. The one I wear in "Meistersinger" I copied from a portrait in Antwerp. The Norwegian one I wear as Mary in "Fliegender Hollaender" I bought in Norway, together with the rest of my costume.
Nothing gives such character to a silhouette as a characteristic head, and having to do endless old women, I could give them all just as endless changes of headgear. A comparison of the photos will also show how one grows into the rôle with years of playing, and how one's eyes "come to," how one develops histrionically—how the silhouette acquires snap and vim and carrying power at a distance, and outlines become crisp and authoritative.
My first Carmen clothes were very Opéra Comique and not at all Spanish gipsy. I studied the Spanish cigarette girls and those of gipsy blood as carefully as possible, and my idea of the rôle changed naturally. I went to Muelle one summer, and told her that I was no longer happy in satin princess dresses. She said that Zuloaga had just designed and superintended the making of Breval's clothes for the Comique's real Spanish revival of Carmen. She could duplicate these for me as she knew just where to send in Spain for the flowered cottons in garish colours, and the shot silk scarfs that Zuloaga had imported for Breval. I was delighted at this and adapted the costumes to my needs, using the last one exactly as Zuloaga had intended, with the huge red comb, made specially in Spain.
When I sang Carmen before Prince Henry of Prussia in Darmstadt, he sent word to me that my skirts were too long, no Spanish woman wore them so long. I knew, however, that they were the right length, and any one can see by studying Zuloaga's paintings that the soubrette length skirt is not worn on the proud, swinging hips of the Spanish girl. I have been told by Spaniards that I am an exact reproduction of a Spanish gipsy as Carmen, which shows my studies were not in vain. People have said that Merimée's and Bizet's Carmen is not Spanish, and perhaps they are right; but in aiming to portray a Spaniard, what model can one take but a real one?
My Orfeo clothes I have never changed. The crêpe de chine for them was imported by Mounet-Sully for one of his characters, and Muelle gave me the piece that was left over. Its beautiful creamy colour and thick softness cannot be improved upon, to my mind.
Marie Muelle is now the first operatic costumer of the world. This reputation she has built unaided through her own unfailing energy. Through her rooms pass the most fabulous-priced opera singers, the greatest actors, the stage beauties, famous managers, producers, and designers, the ladies of the great world seeking costumes for wonderful private fêtes—and gentlemen seeking the ladies—all the varied crowd of many nationalities to whom the old childish pastime of "dressing up" is a business or a pleasure. The present establishment in the rue de la Victoire is quite impressive. The hall is usually half-filled with the trunks of "Muelle artists" engaged in America, who bring their things into New York in bond to avoid paying the ruinous customs charges, and are therefore forced to go through the weary round of dispatching the same old stage wardrobe out of the country and bringing it back again every season. Even when the clothes are quite reduced to shreds and patches the rags have to be elaborately packed, identified by lynx-eyed officials, and sent at least outside the three-mile limit of the American Continent to be thrown away!
The first big white reception room of the Maison contains a long table usually littered with samples, some chairs, and a large mirror lit like that of a star's dressing room. There is a mantelpiece covered with photographs of singers of all grades of celebrity, each dedicated with a message of admiring affection to Marie Muelle. Around the wall are various armoires, one containing a library of works on costume, another a glittering collection of stage jewelry, a third many portfolios of water-colour designs for every sort and kind of theatrical garment for every rôle.
Oh! those designs! A young soprano has won an engagement in Monte Carlo and wants a stage wardrobe for her repertoire. Out comes the "Modern French" portfolio with a bewildering series of blonde and sinuous Thaises, Moyen-Age Mélisandes, a scintillating Ariane in contrast to a demure little work-a-day Louise; and the lady spends a delightful afternoon in selecting her favourites.
Then Muelle sends for an armful of samples—
"Crêpe de chine, of course, for the Thais. Yes, in flesh pink with plenty of embroidery. Here is an échantillon"—and she pins it to the drawing.
The singer picks out a scrap of heavy, lustrous crêpe—
"No, not that quality. That is something special, and there is no more to be had for love or money."
Colours and fabrics are decided upon, all tested for becomingness under the bunched electric lights, which mimic the strong light of the stage. Each design has an assortment of tags of material pinned where many others have been pinned before. Muelle is an expert in colours for the stage. She doesn't talk learnedly of synthetic dyes, processes, or German competition, but she can give you a bright blue that is warranted to stay blue, no matter what vagaries of lighting a stage manager may indulge in.
Her pale colours never turn insipid, nor her dark ones muddy. She keeps a special dyeing establishment busy with her orders alone, and twenty-four hours seems time enough to obtain any shade known to the palette.
The textiles once chosen, Camille is called to "take measures" and arrange for the fittings.
"And now, one question," says Mademoiselle, "Is your stage level, or does it slope towards the back? Very well, that is all."
When the singer arrives for her first trying-on, the fitting room is filled with lengths of material, and Mademoiselle herself stands in the midst, brandishing a huge pair of shears. She throws a length of silk over one of your shoulders, puts in two pins, and bunching the material in her left hand, gives a slash with the scissors in her right, with a recklessness that makes you shudder. A pull here, a fold there, two more pins—and the stuff hangs as almost no one else can make it hang, accentuating a good figure and disguising a poor one.
Occasionally in filling a regular order she will stumble upon an unusual effect. One day they were making Moyen-Age sleeves for the dress of a well-known singer whom Mlle. Muelle has gowned for years, but who has never been included in the list of her special favourites. The sleeve was of slashed silvery grey, lined with cerise, the lining showing on the edges. She picked up a bit of cloth of silver and pulled it through the slashes. The effect charmed her.
"Tenez!" she said, "That is too good for her. We'll keep that for La Belle Geraldine."
"La Belle Geraldine," as Miss Farrar is known in Paris, is one of Muelle's most constant patrons. Ever since her Berlin days she has been costumed by the Maison Muelle, and she stands very high in the list of Mademoiselle's favourites.
The outer room may contain the photographs of celebrities great and small, but in the inner room there are just two—a portrait of Miss Farrar as Elizabeth and one of myself as Carmen.
Opening off the main reception and fitting rooms are others lined with armoires and stacks of boxes running to the ceiling. Then come the rooms for cutting and sewing, and the embroidery rooms. Muelle uses quantities of solid embroidery and appliqué work, where other costumers are content with stenciling and gilding. She has the secret of a metal thread that does not tarnish. Her idea is that the use of first-class materials, good silks and satins, real velvets is a necessity in these days of electric lighting, which is as revealing as sunlight; that the substitution of imitation fabrics went out with the use of gas in the theatre, and that the superior wearing qualities alone of the best materials justify the greater expense.
The capacity of her armoires and the size of the accumulated collections they contain were tested some years ago by the special production of Strauss's "Salome" at the Châtelet Theatre in Paris, when Muelle was called upon, at ridiculously short notice, to furnish all costumes for a cast of 150 people. There was a royal ransacking of cupboards and jewel cabinets, but everything was ready on time for the dress rehearsal.
A greater feather in her cap was the order to costume the new productions of the Russian Ballet, from designs by no less a personage than the great Leon Bakst himself. Then ensued a dyeing of silks and a printing of chiffons, a stringing of beads and knotting of fringes which set the whole establishment humming like a beehive.
For all their thousand problems, the costumes were finished and delivered at the appointed time.
Since that triumph there has been hardly an important costume event in all Paris in which Muelle has not had a share, if not entire charge. She costumed Astruc's first season in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. She has been responsible for the costuming of many productions of the Russian Ballet, and for great spectacles like Debussy's "St. Sebastien" and "La Pisanelle" of D'Annunzio. Society knows her as well as the stage, for she has been the presiding genius at many an exquisite fête, Greek, Roman, or Persian, held in lovely gardens behind the prosaic exteriors of exclusive Parisian homes.
But all this has not turned her head, nor changed her toward her old friends. She still loves a good gossip. Many a note have we had from her—"I am delighted that Mademoiselle is returning to Paris, and hope that she will come to see me. I have quantities of stories to tell her, and we shall die of laughing."
But though she enjoys a choice tidbit, she will tolerate no malicious tale-bearing. She refused an order, tactfully and firmly, from one singer because the lady tried to tell tales out of school against one of Muelle's chosen favourites. Her revenge in this case was typical. She knows that advancing age is the enemy par excellence of popularity for stage people, so she makes a point of always referring to the delinquent as "La Mère So-and-So!"
The list of her kindnesses to artists is unending. One case that I know of personally is typical. A girl with an unusually beautiful voice had arranged a début, leading to a first engagement, and she ordered her wardrobe from Muelle. She failed to be engaged after her début, however, and one disappointment after another came to her, so that it seemed impossible for her to make a start at all. But Muelle had faith in her, and kept the beautiful clothes, unpaid for, hanging in her presses for several years. At last the girl made a great hit in Russia, and is now a well-known singer, and, needless to say, a faithful adherent of the Maison Muelle. This is only one instance of the kind, and, of course, there are many, many more in which Mademoiselle's kindness does not find a monetary reward.
Often have I heard her suggesting economy to those whose salaries are not in the "fabulous" class. She will show a girl how to costume two rôles, with the same dresses, by combinations and changes so cleverly thought out that the keenest public won't detect them. Elizabeth and Elsa may wear the same mantle, right side out in one rôle and wrong side out in the other. An extra tabard of brocade or embroidery will allow an Ophelia to wear the gowns of Marguerite—all tricks of the trade, and well understood in the Maison Muelle.
Brilliantly clever, immensely capable, good-natured, and big-hearted, a splendid organizer and the faithfulest of friends, Marie Muelle has earned by the hardest of hard work, and now justly enjoys her title of "First Theatrical Costumer," not only of Paris, but of the world.