My Actor-Husband: A true story of American stage life

by Anonymous

Will was in front the night I made my début. After the performance we went to a restaurant, there to talk it over. Congratulating me on my "getting away with it" and telling me how "peachy" I looked, he laughingly predicted a line of Johnnies at the stage door, flowers, and the usual perquisites of the chorus girl.... "If you weren't wise to the game, I'd give you a few pointers," he said, ... "but" ... and here he reached across the table and patted me on the hands.... "I reckon you're equal to any situation, old pard.... Just sit tight until I again land on my feet and then you can cut it out, if you like."

I did not find myself subjected to any fierce onslaughts on the part of the Johnnies or viveurs about town. Once or twice I received a note accompanied with flowers. The former I destroyed; the latter I promptly presented to the least pretty of my five dressing-room mates. She wore them on the stage and made eyes at the donor, who occupied an upper box, much to my amusement and to his confusion. I discouraged intimacies of all kinds, with one exception. But of this more hereafter. The stage director never attempted to chuck me under the chin or call me "baby," as he did other members of the cast. I had had my little run-in with him at rehearsal when he essayed to yell at me after the manner of his kind. I stopped short, the orchestra petered out in discord and, walking to the apron of the stage, I modulated my voice, so that it reached him quietly but effectively, where he stood in the back of the theatre. "Mr. M——," I had said, "if you have any further suggestion to offer, you will please do so in a less offensive manner. My hearing is good and I believe I have the average amount of intelligence." There was an ominous silence and the martinet started down the aisle. Behind me I heard a buzz of approbation from the girls who had suffered at his hands. Just why the bully changed his mind I never knew. At any rate the rehearsal was continued. Later the manager chaffed me about the incident. The manager was an undeveloped little person—as if some hereditary blight had nipped him in the bud—distinctly Semitic in all his traits. Will had known him from the time he had abandoned haberdashery for theatrical management; indeed, I believe he had been a member of the manager's first venture into the field.

One feature which stands out most prominently in retrospect was my adaptability to my surroundings. Conditions which once had shocked me no longer left an impression. Obviously the finer edge of my nature had worn blunt. Things appeared to me in a kind of impersonal light. My present path had been chosen from necessity; a part of the scheme of things, yet a thing apart. The commonplace round of concerns and duties went on, but life, real life, for the time being lay fallow. Occasionally, when I caught myself dropping into the slang and jargon I had absorbed from my fellow workers, I mused a bit and pulled myself up with a sharp curb. But, as I have said, I was no longer disturbed or impressed with conditions which once had sent the blood to my cheeks.

The easy familiarity between the sexes which I had thought sufficiently deplorable in the "legitimate" branch of the theatrical profession was in the comic opera world flagrantly increased. I have heard a distinction made between immorality and unmorality, but I fail to observe any slight deviation from the general result. Vulgar stories, steeped in smut, went the rounds. Each new one was welcomed and passed down the line. If one betrayed her disapproval by ignoring the raconteur, she was laughed down and thereafter referred to as "very up-stage." In the dressing-rooms modesty of person was an unknown quantity. Not infrequently I found "extra" gentlemen performing lady's maid service for one of the girls. On one occasion when I slipped on the iron stairway leading to the stage, badly wrenching my ankle, a sturdy stage-hand picked me up, carried me to my dressing-room, and, before I realized what he was about, had pulled off my shoe and was in way of removing my stocking when I protested. "O, well, if you're that fussy—" he said as he went out....

One of the most pernicious influences to be contended against by the girl who tries to go straight is the never-ceasing topic of "men" and "money." The man behind the bankroll is the basis, in one form or another, of all the chorus-girl conversations. To be picked out by a man of means to marry, or, failing this, to be set up in a "swell" apartment and "put it all over" the girls of her acquaintance, is the hope which springs eternal in the chorus-girl breast. Even in hard times, when the champagne appetite needs must be quenched with beer, she dreams of diamonds. Standing in the wings, waiting for the cue, one hears an exchange of banter such as this: "Heard you was at the Abbaye last night.... Where'd you pick him up?... Say, don't you believe anything he tells you! Henny knows all about him and he says that for a tight-wad he's got Russell Sage skinned to death!" Or ... "I was at Morrisheimer's to-day; they're havin' a sale of models. I gotta three-piece velvet suit for thirty-five dollars, marked down from seventy." ... "Say! He must be good to you. Why don't you introduce me to some of your gentlemen friends?"

I once asked a chorus girl of considerable notoriety how she had come to enter the profession. "O," she replied, "my folks was the poor but respectable kind. There was a big family of us, and I, bein' the oldest, had to help out. I didn't get much schoolin' and, after tryin' half a dozen things like bein' a chamber maid, waitin' in a restaurant and that kind of business, I tumbled to the fact that I wusn't bad lookin'. That's all I had; my face and my shape, and the stage was the best place to show 'em."

My dressing-room mates were typical show-girls; manièré, self-conscious and always on parade. It was painfully evident they felt themselves above the chorus, though some of them were pleased to forget the fact that they were but recently graduated from that class.

One of these girls afterward married an English baronet. I have since wondered what disposition was made of the baronet's mother-in-law. I made her acquaintance in the dressing-room one evening, whither she had come to mend her daughter's wardrobe. She was a splendid specimen of the complaisant stage-mamma. Clad in rusty black, her portly figure bulging from ill-fitting stays, one might mistake her for the type of scrub-woman one sees about the large office buildings of early mornings, but never, never would one suspect her of being the mother of this near-Vere-de-Vere. Voluble to a point of madness, she would acquaint you with the family history, the cause and intimate details of her husband's untimely taking off and the great hopes she entertained for her daughter's "getting on." Sometimes she brought with her the youngest of her offspring, a little girl of six who had already made her début as a child-actress. Like all children of the stage, she was precocious and most unchild-like. In the enactment of laws which are aimed to protect the child-labourer, an attempt is being made to bring about an exemption of their application to the stage-child. That the child-actor receives better pay, that he or she works less hours and under more sanitary surroundings than do children in other trades and professions, cannot be gainsaid. But is the economic welfare of the child the prime and only consideration? Is the physical protection the one and uppermost consummation to be desired? What of the spiritual, the moral side of the stage-child? If environment bear the strong influence on human life we are led to believe, then should the stage-child be removed from its infectious surroundings. The old saw to the effect of pitch and defilement is here most applicable.

I have referred elsewhere to the exception I made in my discouragement of intimacies. On that morning at rehearsal when I had resented the stage-director's mode of criticism, among others who had approved my act was a girl whose face had at once attracted me. She was pretty and of less common type than the chorus averages. There was something individual about her. Her appearance was neat and I had observed that her clothes were neither so new nor so extreme as were those of her colleagues. Also I was impressed with a quiet refinement of manner and her usage of good English. As we became better acquainted she sometimes waited for me after the performance and we walked together to the underground station, where our lines diverged. Later I had asked her to dine with me on a Sunday when Will was away on a week-end motor trip. She appeared to enjoy the home atmosphere and visited with me in the kitchen while I was preparing dinner. Feeling that with our reduced income we could not afford it, I had dispensed with a servant. And as Will rarely, if ever, dined at home, my housekeeping duties were not onerous.

"This is what I have always longed for—a little home all my own," Leila had remarked, smiling wistfully.... It was after dinner and we had settled ourselves for a chat.