Memoirs of an American Prima Donna

by Clara Louise Kellogg

"Didn't I tell you so?" I said to Jeannette Gilder. There was always something very odd to me about Helena Modjeska. I never liked her personally half as much as I did as an actress. But she certainly was a wonderful actress. I once met John McCullough and talked with him about Modjeska, and he told me that she first acted in Polish to his English—Ophelia to his Hamlet—out West somewhere, I think it was in San Francisco. He said that he had been the first to urge her to learn English, and he was most enthusiastic about the wonderful effect she created even at that early time. As I had seen her in Sacramento during, approximately, the same period, I could discuss her with him sympathetically and intelligently.

Although I never personally liked Helena Modjeska, I have liked as well as known many stage folk and have had, first and last, many real friends among them. It was my good fortune to know the elder Salvini in America. He happened to be stopping at the same hotel. He looked like a successful farmer; a very plain man,—very. He told me, among other interesting things, that no matter how small his part happened to be, he always played each succeeding act in a stronger colour, maintaining a steady crescendo, so that the last impression of all was the climax. I remember him in Othello, particularly his delicate and lovely silent acting. When Desdémona came in and told the court how he had won her, Salvini only looked at her and spoke but the one word: "Desdémona!"—but the way he said it "made the tears rise in your heart and gather to your eyes."

Irving and Terry, always among my close friends, I first met in London, at the McHenrys' house in Holland Park. At that time the McHenrys' Sunday night dinners were an institution. Later, when they came to America, I saw a great deal of them; and I remember Ellen Terry saying once, after a luncheon given by me at Delmonico's, "What a splendid woman Jeannette Gilder is! You know—" and she gave me a rueful glance—"I am always wrong about men,—but seldom about women!"

Dear Ellen Terry! She has always been the freshest, the most wholesome, and the most spontaneous personality on the stage: a sweet and candid woman, with a sound, warm heart and a great genius. At Lady Macmillan's a number of people, most of them literary, were discussing that deadly worthy and respectable actress Madge Robertson—Mrs. Kendall. The morals of stage people was the subject, and Mrs. Kendall was cited as an example of propriety. One of the women present spoke up from her corner:

"Well," said she, "all I can say is that if I were giving a party for young girls I would steer very clear of Mrs. Kendall and ask Miss Terry instead. The Kendall lady does nothing but tell objectionable stories that lead to the glorification of her own purity, but you will never in a million years hear an indelicate word from the lips of Ellen Terry!"

The only complaint Henry Irving had to make against New York was that he "had no one to play with." He insisted, and quite justly, too, that New York had no leisure class: that cultivated Bohemia, the playground for people of intellectual tastes and varied interests, did not exist in New York. He used to say that after the theatre, and after supper, he could not find anybody at his club who would discuss with him either modern drama or the old dramatic traditions; or give him any exchange of ideas or intelligent comradeship.

He and I had many delightful talks, and I wish now that I had made notes of the things he told me about stagecraft. He had a great deal to say about stage lighting, a subject he was for ever studying and about which he was always experimenting. It was his idea to do away with shadows upon the stage, and he finally accomplished his effect by lighting the wings very brilliantly. Until his radical reforms in this direction the theatres always used to be full of grotesque masses of light and shade. To-day the art of lighting may be said to have reached perfection.

One of the most interesting things about Henry Irving was the way in which he made use of the smallest trifles that might aid him in getting his effects. He knew perfectly his own limitations, and was always seeking to compensate for them. For example, he was utterly lacking in any musical sense; like Dr. Johnson, he did not even possess an appreciation of sweet sounds, and did not care to go to either concerts or operas. But he knew how important music was in the theatre, and he knew instinctively—with that extraordinary stage-sense of his—what would appeal to an audience, even if it did not appeal to him. So, if he went anywhere and heard a melody or sequence of chords that he thought might fit in somewhere, he had it noted down at once, and collected bits of music in this way wherever he went. Sometime, he felt, the need for that particular musical phrase would arrive in some production he was putting on, and he would be ready with it. That was a wonderful thing about Irving—he was always prepared.

Speaking of Irving and his statement about the lack of a cultivated leisure class in New York, reminds me of the Vanderbilts, who were shining examples of this very lack, for they were immensely wealthy and yet did not half understand, at that time, the possibilities of wealth. William H. Vanderbilt was always my very good friend. His father, Cornelius, the founder of the family, used to say of him that "Bill hadn't sense enough to make money himself—he had to have it left to him!" The old man was wont to add, "Bill's no good anyway!" The Vanderbilts were plain people in those days, but had the kindest hearts. "Bill" took a course in practical railroading, filling the position of conductor on the Hudson River Railroad, from which "job" he had just been promoted when I first knew him. He did turn out to be some "good" in spite of his father's pessimistic predictions.