Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections

by Clara Morris

I understood how many illusions were produced, and one of the proofs that I was meant to be an actress was to be found in my enjoyment of the mechanism of stage effects. I was always on hand when a storm had to be worked, and would grind away with a will at the crank that, turning a wheel against a tight band of silk, made the sound of a tremendously shrieking wind, which filled me with pride and personal satisfaction. And no one sitting in front of the house looking at a white-robed woman ascending to heaven, apparently floating upward through the blue clouds, enjoyed the spectacle more than I enjoyed looking at the ascent from the rear, where I could see the tiny iron support for her feet, the rod at her back with the belt holding her securely about the waist (just as though she were standing on a large hoe, with the handle at her back), and the men hoisting her through the air, with a painted, sometimes moving, sky behind her.

This reminds me that Mrs. Bradshaw had several times to go to heaven (dramatically speaking), and as her figure and weight made the hoe support useless in her case, she always went to heaven on the entire paint-frame or gallery, as it is called—a long platform the whole width of the stage that is raised and lowered at will by windlass, and on which the artists stand while painting scenery. This enormous affair would be cleaned and hung about with nice blue clouds, and then Mrs. Bradshaw, draped in long, white robes, with hands meekly crossed upon her ample breast and eyes piously uplifted, would rise heavenward, slowly, as so heavy an angel should. But, alas! there was one drawback to this otherwise perfect ascension. Never, so long as the theatre stood, could that windlass be made to work silently. The paint-gallery always moved up or down to a succession of screaks unoilable, untamable, blood-curdling, that were intensified by Mrs. Bradshaw's weight, so that she ascended to the blue tarlatan empyrean accompanied by such chugs and long-drawn yowlings as suggested a trip to the infernal regions. Mrs. Bradshaw's face remained calm and unmoved, but now and then an agonized moan escaped her, lest even the orchestra's effort to cover up the paint-frame's protesting cries should prove useless. Poor woman, when she had been lowered again to terra firma and stepped off, the whole paint-frame would give a kind of joyous upward spring. She noticed it, and one evening looked back, and said: "Oh, you're not a bit more glad than I am, you screaking wretch!"

I had learned to make up my face properly, to dress my hair in various ways, and was beginning to know something about correct costuming; but as the season was drawing to its close my heart quaked and I was sick with fear, for I was facing, for the first time, that terror, that affliction of the actor's life, the summer vacation.

People little dream what a period of misery that is to many stage folk. Seeing them well dressed, laughing and talking lightly with the acquaintances they meet on the street, one little suspects that the gnawing pain of hunger may be busy with their stomachs—that a woman's fainting "because of the extreme heat, you know," was really caused by want of food. That the fresh handkerchiefs are of their own washing. That the garments are guarded with almost inconceivable care, and are only worn on the street, some older articles answering in their lodgings—and that it is not vanity, but business, for a manager is not attracted by a seedy or a shabby-looking applicant for an engagement.

Oh, the weary, weary miles the poor souls walk! with not a penny in their pockets. They are compelled to say, "Roll on, sweet chariot!" to even the street-car as it appears before their longing eyes.

Some people, mostly men, under these circumstances will stand and look at the viands spread out temptingly in the restaurant windows; others, myself among the number, will avoid such places as one would avoid a pestilence.

We were back in Cleveland for the last of the season, and I used to count, over and over again, my tiny savings and set them in little piles. The wash, the board, and, dear heaven! there were six long, long weeks of vacation, and I had only one little pile of board money to set against the whole six. I had six little piles of wash money, and one other little pile, the raison d'être of which I may explain by and by, if I am not too much ashamed of the early folly.

Now I was staying at that acme of inconvenience and discomfort, a cheap boarding-house, where, by the way, social lines were drawn with sharp distinction, the upper class coldly recognizing the middle class, but ignoring the very existence of the lower class, refugees from ignoble fortune.

Mrs. Bradshaw, by right of dignity and regular payments for the best room in the house, was the star-boarder, and it was undoubtedly her friendship which raised me socially from that third and lowest class to which my small payments would have relegated me.

Standing in my tiny, closet-like room, by lifting myself to my toes, I could touch the ceiling. There was not space for a bureau, but the yellow wash-stand stood quite firmly, with the assistance of a brick, which made up for the absence of part of its off hind leg. There was a kitchen-chair that may have been of pine, but my aching back proclaimed it lignum-vitæ. A mere sliver of a bed stretched itself sullenly in the corner, where its slats, showing their outlines through the meagre bed-clothing, suggested the ribs of an attenuated cab-horse. From that bed early rising became a pleasure instead of a mere duty. Above the wash-stand, in a narrow, once veneered but now merely glue-covered frame, hung a small looking-glass, that, size considered, could, I believe, do more damage to the human countenance than could any other mirror in the world. It had a sort of dimple in its middle, which had the effect of scattering one's features into the four corners of the glass, loosely—a nose and eyebrow here, a mouth yonder, and one's "altogether" nowhere.