What is the bane of a young actress's life?
Under the protection of pretty seals stamped in various tints of wax, I find one question appearing in many slightly different forms. A large number of writers ask, "What is the greatest difficulty a young actress has to surmount?" In another pile of notes the question appears in this guise, "What is the principal obstacle in the way of the young actress?" While two motherly bodies ask, "What one thing worries an actress the most?" After due thought I have cast them all together, boiled them down, and reduced them to this, "What is the bane of a
young actress's life?" which question I can answer without going into training, with one hand tied behind me, and both eyes bandaged, answer in one word—dress. Ever since that far-away season when Eve, the beautiful, inquiring, let-me-see-for-myself Eve, made fig leaves popular in Eden, and invented the apron to fill a newly felt want, dress has been at once the comfort and the torment of woman.
Acting is a matter of pretence, and she who can best pretend a splendid passion, a tender love, or a murderous hate, is admittedly the finest actress. Time was when stage wardrobe was a pretence, too. An actress was expected to please the eye, she was expected to be historically correct as to the shape and style of her costume; but no one expected her queenly robes to be of silk velvet, her imperial ermine to be anything rarer than rabbit-skin. My own earliest ermine was humbler still, being constructed of the very democratic white canton
flannel turned wrong side out, while the ermine's characteristic little black tails were formed by short bits of round shoe-lacing. The only advantage I can honestly claim for this domestic ermine is its freedom from the moths, who dearly love imported garments of soft fine cloth and rare lining. I have had and have seen others have, in the old days, really gorgeous brocades made by cutting out great bunches of flowers from chintz and applying them to a cheaper background, and then picking out the high lights with embroidery silk, the effect being not only beautiful, but rich. All these make-believes were necessary then, on a $30 or $35 a week salary, for a leading lady drew no more.
[Illustration: Clara Morris as "Jane Eyre"]
But times are changed, stage lighting is better, stronger. The opera glass is almost universally used, deceptions would be more easily discovered; and more, oh, so much more is expected from the actress of to-day. Formerly she was required, first of all, to sink her own individuality in that of the
woman she pretended to be; and next, if it was a dramatized novel she was acting in, she was to make herself look as nearly like the described heroine as possible; otherwise she had simply to make herself as pretty as she knew how in her own way, that was all. But now the actresses of a great city are supposed to set the fashion for the coming season. They almost literally dress in the style of to-morrow: thus the cult of clothes becomes harmful to the actress. Precious time that should be given to the minute study, the final polishing of a difficult character, is used instead in deciding the pitch of a skirt, the width of a collar, or open sleeve-strap, or no sleeve at all.
Some ladies of my acquaintance who had been to the theatre three times, avowedly to study as models the costumes, when questioned as to the play, looked at one another and then answered vaguely: "The performance? Oh, nothing remarkable! It was fair enough; but the dresses! They are