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!