I got up at five and walked the beach for three hours, getting rid of the headache. By half-past eight it was letting up so I downed a cup of coffee and some toast, had the valet get my car and impart instructions to me, and took off for the library.
Thought at first I was in for trouble. A young girl at the front desk said I couldn’t take out books with a Los Angeles library card. I knew I couldn’t possibly spend the day there reading—I was, already, getting nervous. Then an older and a wiser head prevailed. With proper identification and the key tag from my room, she allowed that I could get a temporary card and borrow books. I almost kissed her cheek.
Twenty minutes later I was out; thank God for file-card systems. Drove back fast, experiencing that same sensation as I got closer to the Coronado; as though this great, white, wooden castle has become my home. Gave my car to the valet and plunged into the hotel’s quiet embrace. Had to sit down on the patio and close my eyes, let it all seep back into my veins. The patio a good place for it; like the heart of the hotel. Sitting there, I was surrounded by its past. Peace filled me and I took a deep breath, opened my eyes and stood, walked to the back elevator, rode it to the fifth floor, and regained my room, carrying the books I’d gotten.
There is a book about her entitled Elise McKenna: An Intimate Biography by Gladys Roberts. I’m going to save it for last because, despite the feeling of anticipation I feel right now, I know that, once I’ve finished the biography, it’ll all be gone and I want to savor this excitement for as long as possible.
Writing this and listening to the Fourth; the easiest one, I think, the least demanding one. I want to concentrate on her.
The first book is by John Drew, called My Years On Stage.
He wrote that his first impression of Elise McKenna was that she was too fragile. Big women in the theater were the vogue in those days, I gather from the photographs I’ve seen. Yet he repeats what I’ve already read, that she never missed a performance.
Her mother appeared in plays with her at first—playing Mme. Bergomat to her daughter’s Susan Blondet in The Masked Ball; Mrs. Ossian to her daughter’s Miriam in Butterflies. It says they went to California with this latter play I guess acting companies toured the West Coast regularly, explaining the tryout here.
Even though I’ve written almost everything down, I still feel as though I’ve rushed through this book too rapidly en route to the biography—like a starving man who cannot derive satisfaction from hors d’ouevres but craves to reach the main course.
I’ll force myself to slow down.
The next book is Well-known Actors and Actresses, published in 1903. The section opens “Elise McKenna sells wood, pigs, and poultry” and goes on to state that she cares more for her farm at Ronkonkoma, Long Island, than for anything else but the stage. If she weren’t an actress, the section continues, she would be a farmer. Every moment she can spare from the theater is spent in retreat at her two-hundred-acre farm, her private railroad car carrying her there whenever she has time. “There she can roam around at will, away from curiosity seekers.”
Always that seclusion.
More on that. “Less is known of her personally than any other prominent person on the stage. To the majority of people, their knowledge of her stops at the footlights. To preserve this privacy, she has placed everything pertaining to publication about her in the hands of her manager. If a writer applies for an interview, she refers him to Mr. Robinson, who straightway says ‘No,’ this partly from regard for her own desire for privacy, partly from a well-defined policy which he adopted as soon as he became her manager about ten years ago.”
Which seems to verify my view of him.
Here’s a contradiction. Research always turns them up, I guess. “She has never missed a performance because of illness and never has failed to appear as billed save on one occasion, in 1896, when the train in which she and her company were traveling from San Diego to Denver was stalled in a blizzard.”
1896 again.
Here is a lovely photograph of her. She’s wearing a black coat and black gloves and what seems to be a black bow tie. Her long hair is pinned up with combs and she’s resting her clasped hands on a column top. She looks exquisite and I’m falling in love with her all over again, experiencing the same sensation I had when I first saw that photograph in the Hall of History. Caught up in research, one begins to lose emotional involvement. Now I see this photograph and the emotion has returned. Insane or not, unrealistic though it be, I’m in love with Elise McKenna.
And I don’t believe it’s going to end.
A last—but telling—quote.
“There was a man who was greatly attracted to Miss McKenna (in 1898) and paid her much attention, escorting her and her mother to the theatre and back every night. When matters had gone along awhile, Mrs. McKenna took an opportunity to say to him, ‘It’s only fair to you that I should tell you you are wasting your time. Elise will never marry. She is too devoted to her art ever to think of such a thing.’”
Why should I disbelieve that? Yet I do. I think, in reaction, of Nat Goodwin’s words.
Is there a solution to the mystery of Elise McKenna?
I shudder again. So soon to the last book. One last mental meal and then starvation.
The prospect frightens me.
No Mahler now. I want to concentrate entirely on this book, her biography.
A frontispiece photograph of her, taken in 1909. It looks like a picture taken at a seance; that of a young woman looking at the camera from another world. She seems, at first glance, to be smiling. Then you see that it could, also, be a look of pain.
Again, Nat Goodwin’s observation comes to mind.
“Never,” writes the author in the first lines of her book, “was there an actress whose personality was more elusive than Elise McKenna’s.”
Agreed.
Here’s the first description of her in any detail: “A graceful figure with gold-brown hair, deep-set eyes of greyish green and delicate high cheekbones.”
A quotation from her first, notable review in 1890. “Elise McKenna is as pretty a soubrette as one can see in an afternoon promenade—a sweet and tender blossom on the dramatic tree.”
Don’t skip so much! Dictate every pertinent fact. This is the last book, Collier!
Oh, God, the people in the next room have gone still again.
Reviews of plays she did. I’ll read them later.
An interesting—no, fascinating item.
In 1924, she burned her notes, her diaries, her correspondence; everything she’d written. Had a deep pit dug on her Ronkonkoma farm, threw everything inside it, poured kerosene across the pile, and set it all ablaze.
All that remained was a fragment of page the fire wind had blown away. A handyman found it and kept it, later giving it to Gladys Roberts, who transcribes it here.
(M)y love, where are you now?
(F)rom what place did you come to [me]?
(T)o what place go?
Was it a poem she liked? A poem she’d written? If the former, why did she like it? If the latter, why did she write it? Either way, it seems to brand as a lie her mother’s remark to that man.
The mystery keeps getting deeper. Each layer removed reveals another layer underneath.
Where is the core?
A review of her Juliet in 1893.
“Miss McKenna ought to be neither surprised nor hurt to ascertain by this experience that nature never intended her to act the tragic heroines of Shakespeare.”
How that must have hurt her. How I wish I could have socked that damned reviewer in the nose.
An interesting quote regarding her trip to Egypt with Gladys Roberts in 1904. Standing, at twilight, on the desert, near the pyramids, she said, “There seems nothing here but time.”
She must have felt as I do in this hotel.
Mention is made of the composers she liked. Grieg, Debussy, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven—
My God.
Her favorite composer w
as Mahler.
I’m listening to Mahler’s Ninth now: performed by Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic.
I agree with Alban Berg. He is quoted on the record jacket as saying (when he read the manuscript) that it was “the most heavenly thing Mahler ever wrote.” And Walter wrote, “The symphony is inspired by an intense spiritual agitation; the sense of departure.” Of this first movement, he wrote, it “floats in an atmosphere of transfiguration.”
How close to her I feel.
But back to the book.
An unexpected bonus section—pages of photographs.
I’ve been looking at a particular one for fifteen minutes now. It conveys, to me, more of her than any photograph I’ve seen. It was taken in January of 1897. She’s sitting in a great, dark chair, wearing a high-necked white blouse with a ruffled front and a jacket with a twill effect. Her hair is held up by combs or pins, her hands are folded on her lap. She is looking straight at the camera.
Her expression is a haunted one.
My God, those eyes! They’re lost. Those lips. Will they ever rise in a smile again? I never have seen such sadness in a face, such desolation.
In a photograph taken two months after she was here at this hotel.
I can’t take my eyes from her face. The face of a woman who has endured some dreadful trial. All the spirit has been drained from her. She’s empty.
If only I could be with her and hold her hand, tell her not to feel such sorrow.
My heart is pounding.
As I was staring at her face, someone tried to open the door of my room and, suddenly, I had the wild idea that it was her.
I’m going mad.
Moving on, nerves approximately in sheaths again.
More photographs of her. In plays she did: Twelfth Night, Joan of Arc, The Legend of Leonora. Accepting an honorary master of arts degree at Union College. In Hollywood in 1908.
“Sometimes I think the only real satisfaction in life is failure in your endeavor to do your best.”
Not the words of a happy woman.
Her generosity. Box-office receipts of her plays sent to San Francisco after the earthquake; to Dayton, Ohio, after the flood in 1913. Her free matinees to servicemen during World War I; her performances and hostess work in army camps and hospitals.
Another contradiction.
“The only circumstance under which she failed to make a performance occurred following an engagement of The Little Minister at the Hotel del Coronado in California.”
She was not, however, caught in a blizzard. Her company may have been but she was not with them. She stayed behind at the hotel. Not even her mother or manager remained with her.
Now that’s peculiar; unlike anything she’d ever done before. From what the author indicates (however discreetly), her action was an unexpected shock to everyone. “But more on that later,” writes Gladys Roberts. What does that mean? Yet another mystery?
The section goes on: “The play, which had been undergoing trial performances on the West Coast, proceeded no further, and for some time it appeared as though it might be cancelled altogether.”
Ten months later, it opened in New York.
In the intervening period, notes the author, no one saw
Elise McKenna. She remained secluded on her farm, spending her days walking on her property.
Why?
Her favorite wine was an unchilled red Bordeaux. I’ll get some. Then I’ll be able to listen to her favorite composer as I drink her favorite wine—here in the very location where she was.
Another aspect to the mystery.
“Before The Little Minister opened in New York, her acting had been highly pleasing but from that day on, her performances took on a luminescence and a depth which no one has yet been able to explain.”
I’d better go back to those reviews.
Comments on her acting up to 1896:
“Delightfully delicate. Charming restraint. Simple sincerity. Personal charm. Gracious modesty. Felicity in utterance. Clever and intelligent. Consistently promising.”
And afterward:
The Little Minister: “There is a new vitality, a new warmth, a vivid emotional life in Miss McKenna’s acting.”
L’Aiglon: “Surpasses that of Sarah Bernhardt as the stars surpass the moon.”
Quality Street: “Played with infinite grace and a pathos for which there was no gainsay.”
Peter Pan: “Her acting is an expression of the life force in the simplest, most beautiful way.”
‘Op o’ Me Thumb: “The Actress portrays every pang of despair, of utter wretchedness and of absolute desolation that the unloved, unlovable woman feels tearing at her heart. The acme of genuine pathos.”
Romeo and Juliet: “How different from her first performance of this role. Finely emotional and intensely appealing on its tragic side. Total poignancy. Sense of emotional loss conveyed with brilliant conviction and authority. The most sympathetic, the most human, and the most convincing Juliet we have ever seen.”
What Every Woman Knows: “Her best work was noticed in the scenes of suppressed agony of spirit and the philosophic tone of her gentle martyrdom.”
The Legend of Leonora: “Exquisitely appealing acting by Miss McKenna, who has never played with finer touches or richer glimpses of real womanliness and tenderness.”
A Kiss for Cinderella: “Miss McKenna is so dauntless and gently pathetic that she almost breaks your heart.” (From no less than Alexander Woollcott himself.)
Joan of Arc: “The triumph of her career. A completely formed and finished jewel of characterization.”
When exactly did this change take place?
I can’t help but believe that it was during her stay at this hotel.
What happened, though?
I could use the aid of Sherlock Holmes, Dupin, and Ellery Queen right now.
I’m looking at the photograph again.
What put that expression of despairing acceptance on her face?
Maybe there’s an answer in this chapter. I’m near the end of the book now. The sun is going down again. So are my hopes. When I’m finished with the book, what’s going to happen to me?
“The stage is her life, her close friends always said. Lovemaking is not for her. Yet once, to me, in an unguarded moment, a moment never again repeated, she hinted that there had been someone. As she spoke of it, I saw, within her eyes, a tragic light I’d never seen before. She gave no details beyond referring to it, with a sad smile, as ‘My Coronado scandal.’”
It did happen here then!
The final chapter; on her death. I feel a crushing weight inside me.
Quote: “She died of a heart attack in October 1953 after—”
“—after attending a party at Stephens College, in Columbia, Missouri, where she had taught dramatics for a number of years.”
She and I were in the same location once before then.
But at the same time.
Why do I feel so strange?
Her dying words are quoted. No one, says the author, ever understood their significance.
“And love, most sweet.”
What does that remind me of?
A Christian Science hymn. Except the words are: “And life, most sweet, as heart to heart, speaks kindly when we meet and part.”
Oh, dear God.
I think I was at that party.
I think I saw her.
I’m having trouble breathing. There’s a pulsing at my temples, at my wrists. My head feels numb.
Did it really happen?
Yes; I was there. I know it. It was after a play at Stephens. My date and I were at a party for the cast.
And I recall her saying … I can’t recall her face or her name, yet I recall her words … .
“You have an admirer, Richard.”
I looked across the room and … there was an old woman sitting on a sofa with some girls.
Looking at me.
Oh, dear Lord, it couldn’t have been.
Why was that woman looking at me then?
As if she knew me.
Why?
Was that the night Elise McKenna died?
Was that old woman really her?
I’m looking at the photograph again.
Elise. Oh, God; Elise.
Did I put that look on your face?
It’s dark in my room.
I haven’t budged for hours.
I just lie here staring at the ceiling. They’ll cart me away in a basket soon.