Bethel Merriday

XXI

Their first rehearsal, when they read through their parts aloud, was at the historic Gotham Theatre, but it was not on the stage, which still shone from the presences of Mrs. Fiske and Maude Adams and John Drew and Nat Goodwin. The bones of a recent brief theatrical misfortune were being carted away from the stage; in the lounge, the management was trying to make old red-plush chairs into new red-plush chairs; and the lobby was being painted. And so the auspicious first rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet was held in the Ladies' Room.

It was quite a nice Ladies' Room, with a dressing-table, a wide mirror edged with designs in frosted glass, six refined pink washbowls and a dozen gilt chairs, which were taken by the older troupers. Mrs. Boyle pre-empted two of them, one for her fur, while the others sat on the floor.

As Mercutio's page and as understudy to Juliet, Bethel had nothing to read, in among the organ notes of Romeo and Lord Capulet and the Prince; but as Prologue, she had a whole sonnet, at the beginning of the first act, and she sang it out in the fresh voice of an eager young girl who loved 'the traffic of our stage with the pair of star-crossed lovers'.

She thought that Adrian Satori, directing, nodded a blessing. But afterwards it seemed to her that everyone else had read so much more richly: Andy the soul of youthful love, Zed Wintergeist so boldly gay a Mercutio, Harry Purvis a swift blade as Tybalt, Hugh Challis sputtering pomp as Capulet, and Mrs. Boyle not forty-four but an eternal twenty.

(Bethel was quarrelling with Shakespeare and the Nurse for their lie that Juliet was fourteen. Why, she herself, was twenty-two, and it looked as though that enterprising young sprout Juliet had been around at least as much as she.)

When the reading was done, Mr. Wyndham Nooks encompassed Bethel like a fog blowing from a distillery and boomed, 'It's a shame to think of a lovely child like you having to open the play with the prologue. It will be beyond your powers. You'll blow, sure as hell! Of course I have almost more than I can carry already, with three bits, but I'll inform our good friend Deacon that for the good of the show, I can take on Prologue too.'

'You'll get those lines over my dead body!' snarled the young actress who once had been our gentle little Bethel.

The rehearsals wandered from the Ladies' Room up to the stage of the Gotham, then to a hall where Romeo, supposed to be gazing down the long tessellated ballroom at the distant beloved, was actually looking into Satori's yawns, three feet away. But they settled down for two weeks on the stage of that competent new theatre, the Prince Regent, not occupied just now by a play. Bethel felt happily that she had lived here all her days.

No first night, with chandeliers and Jerome Kern overture and furs and white shirt fronts and sparkling applause, could be more enchanting than the undressed stage, illuminated only by a work-light on a standard, with shadowy hints of the tall brick back wall, the bars of steam pipes, dusty stacks of old flats leaning against the wall, the electric switchboard and, mysterious above all, the upward-reaching darknesses of the fly loft. Against this quiet obscurity the actors, in shirt sleeves or old sweaters or too jaunty tweeds, moved back and forth, stammering their lines, repeating them, stopping to read not-quite-learned lines from the typed parts which they held up to their faces with one hand while the other hand made vague wild blind motions of wielding a club--or a girl.

Satori lounged over a kitchen table, making minute delicate notes on his script, and Nathan Eldred, the stage manager, in another chair discreetly drawn two feet farther back, prompted from his own script . . . No audience, but darkness and strangeness, and in the midst of it, the work-light, and the moving actors beginning, gesture by gesture and word by beautiful word, to evoke the passion in Verona.

That was the stage for Bethel Merriday.

Only a few times did Satori run through with her the prologue to the first act--the second-act prologue was cut out; and as Mercutio's page, she was on but a few minutes. Her real task, as understudy for Juliet, was to sit down in the auditorium, unmoving, like a solemn little owl, concentrated on everything that Mrs. Boyle did--every pronunciation of a musical line, every slightest movement of intense eyes, tender lips, eagerly graceful arms.

If she wanted to be up there with the others on the stage, she comforted herself with the assurance that soon she would be. In her next show she would have an understudy of her own--yes, and she'd treat her in a lot friendlier way than she was treated by Mrs. Boyle, whose most ardent attention was to look at her as though she had got in here by mistake and mutter 'Oh!'

Bethel understood better now the improbable stories of understudies who prayed that their principals would fall through a trap door.

It was a strain, sitting paralysed and ignored from ten to one and from two till six, particularly when the hour of six meant, to Mr. Satori, in scorn of Equity rules, seven-thirty or nine-thirty or eleven. Yet she rejoiced in this long, precise, four-week rehearsal as against the panic sketchiness of five-day rehearsals in summer stock.

And she was very cross with Iris Pentire--it didn't take much to make her cross with Iris--for sneaking away from her observation post as understudy to both the Nurse and Lady Capulet for a smoke in the lobby, or backstage to whisper glisteningly to Zed Wintergeist.

Zed was mutinous and critical from the first. Bethel was a little surprised when, after the five-day probation period before contracts were made permanent, Andy and Satori still kept him in the cast.

He wanted to make the articulation of the lines as prosaic and contemporary as the costumes; he wanted, he said, to exchange the gilt decorations of a fairy tale for the beauty of human emotions. Andy read Romeo, he said, like an elocutionist at Chautauqua.

In one of the hysterical blow-ups at rehearsal which are a proof that the play is progressing healthily, Zed denounced Andy and Andy denounced Satori, and in compromise Zed was allowed to deliver his lines as though a laughing, aching human being were talking, while Andy went on winging the empyrean. . . . Even young Bethel could see that the contrast was shocking, but Satori was dictator, as apparently a director must be.

After rehearsal hours, Andrew Deacon was the producer, with all the privilege of coaxing his friends to put money into the venture, and the imperial right to decide whether they should presently be playing three nights in Bonanza City, or one night each in Coyote Crossing, Cathay and Carlsbad. But during rehearsals, Satori told Andy and Zed--and Mrs. Boyle and Bethel--indiscriminately that they were stinking, and Andy took it more gratefully than anybody else in the company.

If there were skirmishes and barricades, there were no feuds or cliques in the company--yet. Everybody said that they were going to have a 'hit'. These modern clothes were making the play not an antique but a love story almost as good as one out of Hollywood. The married men of the cast, Hugh Challis, Geoffrey Hoy, Antonio Murphy, Wyndham Nooks, Nathan Eldred, the stage manager, and Tertius Tully, the company manager, muttered to one another that, after the last lean year, they would now be able to 'send home enough for the little woman and the dear little ones to go out and get soused every Saturday night, like gentlemen'.

Zed's nobly expanding grouch extended to Mr. Schnable's scenery as much as to the speech.

Like Bethel, he did not see why a contemporary Romeo should be played in a mock Lombard palace. With Douglas Fry, the small industrious assistant stage manager, Zed sketched a permanent set suggesting modern Italy; a huddle of yellow plaster walls with red-tiled roofs and a medieval tower, the terrace of Lord Capulet's modern villa, strung with coloured electric bulbs for dancing, with the door of Laurence's cell below the terrace, and behind all, the skeleton of a wireless tower.

They brought in their sketches--two enthusiastic young men who loved the stage so much they were willing to be damned for their impudence--and Mr. Schnable, the designer, a middle-aged man who didn't love anything in particular, promptly damned them. Andy said mildly, Yes, well, it certainly was an interesting sketch, but afraid he'd spent all the money on scenery he could afford to. . . .

Zed returned this benignity with a glare.

That newly fledged trouper, Bethel, was surprised that Mahala took direction almost as humbly as Andy. She began to respect Mahala as purely as she disliked her.

Mahala seemed mobilized now to capture Andy complete. The border-incident came from Joan Hinterwald, and it was Bethel who answered the call when Joan rang up.

Bethel summoned Andy to the telephone, and she couldn't help overhearing him--well, she didn't help it. He sputtered, 'No, honestly, Joan, it's impossible. I can't leave. We're rehearsing . . . What? . . . Serious? Of course it's serious! What do you think I'm doing? Playing at playing? . . . All right; be sore then.'

Bethel saw him stalk back on the stage and ten minutes later sit down with Mahala. He must have murmured to her something of his troubles, for Mahala patted his arm sympathetically. Bethel sighed.

After that day Mahala was cockier than ever. She tore through the Lady Capulet role like a racing driver, and she had the cheek to say to Mrs. Boyle (twenty-six being lofty to forty-four), 'I wonder if any of the audiences will get the humour of my playing your mother?'

'Perhaps it isn't humorous, my dear,' purred Mrs. Boyle.

The two pages, Bethel and Iris, were not to wear tights and ruffles, but dreary military-school-cadet uniforms. Bethel was simultaneously glad that she would not have to be so immodest as to show her pretty legs in public, and sorry that she was not going to be more attractive. As to the conduct of their two minutes parts, Iris and she fell out.

Iris intended to be as dainty and flirtatious in grey trousers as in chiffon.

'Of course! You don't want to miss being feminine, not with Zed and Douglas and Lyle and Tom Wherry around!' Bethel was guilty of remarking.

'And you an Equity member less than two weeks,' sighed Iris.

'I don't see what that's got to do with it!' But this preposterous attack confused Bethel, and she ended, without much conviction: 'I'm going to be as sturdy a young scrapper as I can.'

'All right, dearie; don't tell me about it; tell Satori,' mused Iris.

Never had Bethel been so put in the wrong, never had she so inexcusably put herself in the wrong. It didn't comfort her much to have Iris and Zed go off to lunch arm in arm. She was privately deciding that since Andy was apparently lost forever in the warm ardours of Mahala, like a bumblebee enveloped in the vegetable horrors of the Venus flytrap, she would better think seriously about Zed.

Then was horrified to discover that she could take Zed very seriously indeed. She could admire his noisy courage; she could be tickled by his ever-changing monkey face.

But this was treachery! she accused herself, and her spirit sat down again before the kindly shrine of Andy.

Of the constant line changes compelled by the modern setting, none produced a better battle than Romeo's order to Balthasar: 'And hire post-horses; I will hence to-night.' Andy was all for rendering it, 'Fill up the car with gas; I'll leave to-night'. Zed (whom no one had consulted) agreed profanely. Satori insisted that this was a trifle too post-Elizabethan. 'You don't absolutely have to have the apothecary sell Romeo a drum of carbon monoxide to kill himself with, you know. Let's make the speech, "Have the car ready; I will hence to-night." That's good enough--or bad enough.'

It was Bethel who most profited by all the violences done to Shakespeare's words.

Iris had boasted though it might be Bethel who understudied Juliet, she had no lines on the stage except the 'regular little college-girl speech' of the prologue, while Iris, as Paris's page, had four whole lines and a whistle.

But Satori and Andy condensed the end of the play. In the new version, after Juliet's death, in a light that rose to earliest dawn, cloaked figures that might have been ghosts moved slowly on stage, and the curtain came down after a speech combined from the last lines of Capulet, Montague and the Prince:

This speech, Victor Swenson, as Prince Escalus, assumed would be his own, while old Nooks pointed out that it would go very nicely indeed with the role of First Watchman. But Andy and Satori, to universal astonishment and considerably less than universal rejoicing, gave it to Bethel, as newly created Epilogue.

And she was to have a lovely new white silk robe and a gold laurel-crown, a combination of Elizabethan and Contemporary, in which to say both prologue and epilogue, and Iris was stunned and despairing, until Zed remarked that the costume looked like Memorial Day Services at the James A. Garfield High School.

She had to cue Mabel Staghorn, as the Nurse. She had to cue Mahala. Much worse, she had to get Iris to cue her, as Juliet. She had her role comma perfect before Mahala had learned half of hers. But that wasn't enough. Maggie Sample had told her that you don't really know a role until it's so deep in your unconscious that you aren't aware of saying the lines at all. So she chased Iris from auditorium to hidden dressing-rooms to the prop room and cornered her, and thrust the part at her, and demanded, 'Here, I want to be cued. You know I'm all ready to cue you, whenever you say the word.'

'Oh, what's the hurry? We're only understudies. Wait till I get a real role,' sighed Iris.

Satori had a theory that present-day audiences find Shakespeare dull because the productions are paced like a funeral. He yielded to Andy and kept Romeo's high poetic lines in a highfalutin elocution, but he drove the other actors to such speed that they went off into the wings and wept. There must not be a tenth of a second between cue and response; no gazing up to the wings with an archepiscopal reverence. Yet he was precise about every detail of action.

Every cross, every slight lifting of the hand, must be fitted to every other movement like a micrometer gauge, and as to the exact meanings of lines Satori and Andy were always diving into the Variorum Shakespeare and coming up, philologically dripping, with 'Look! Look! In the quartos there's no dash before the "no". This is Ritsen's punctuation.'

'I see they got some nice Irish variorum on the menu today. Try some?' said Doc Keezer to Bethel at lunch. He had taken her to Sardi's, where all the debutantes try to look like actresses, and all the actresses try to look like--actresses. Normally the cast's communal lunch, between spasms of rehearsal, was a waxed-paper container of coffee and a ham sandwich from the drugstore, but occasionally Doc Keezer rebelled, and demanded time for real food.

'All that Shakespearian research stuff is the bunk,' he said. 'It's by no means proven that the best way to play Shakespeare isn't to do a Marmaduke Montmorency de Booth, with all the dog you can put on, tights and velvet hats and a lot of rapiers, and chew the scenery and yell and give everybody a good time--and you can get all the fittings second-hand then, and pick out the most rheumatic old ham at Billy McMoriarty's saloon for director. However, Beth, this is a theatrical engagement. We might have to go to work if we didn't have it. How about some cheese for dessert? When we get out on the road, you'll learn to take cheese instead of all this ice cream. It keeps your belly filled, and that's the chief purpose of a trouper, and not no purple ecstasies, or big notices by the police reporter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.'

'I'm going to love trouping,' said Bethel.

'You are, eh? Wait till you have to catch a seven-a.m. train in Minnesota in January, with the thermometer eighteen below, and that old north-west wind scooting down the platform and the train an hour and a half late, and then it comes in with ice on it like armour, and the heating apparatus gone on the blink.'

'I'll love it, Doc.'

'Yes, you probably will, child. That'll be the one thing that'll finally tear it--to have you chattering like a canary bird at breakfast, when the rest of us have hang-overs and don't want to be suddenly jarred. You're a nice kid. I couldn't interest you in a goat farm in Vermont, could I? No? Okay, let's go back and see how much more of a beating the Bard will take.'

She was still alone every evening--her companions of the day vanished into nonexistence after rehearsals--but she was not lonely. She curled on the bed in her room, repeating the Juliet part aloud; she washed her hair; she went by herself to a movie, humming such classic epodes as 'Tea for Two', gliding in a warm, lilac-coloured mist that shut out the November drizzle and cement pavements and iron gratings. For the first time in her life she was completely happy.

And once Andy invited her to an evening party at the Picardy, of which she recalled little except Mahala, in a black evening frock with a panel of silver from bosom to hem, being maddeningly gracious and proprietorial, and insisting on pouring out drinks for large strong men like Harry Purvis and Tony Murphy and Victor Swenson.

And once Andy took her to dinner at the Twenty-One Club, at which he appeared at least twice a week for the purpose of explaining to a circle of professional wits that he never went to Twenty-One because there were too many professional wits there.

'Here's the picture you and I have to get, as apprentice actors, both of us. It's an allegory that Dorothy Gish told me,' said Andy. 'There was an old vaudeville couple; they'd been on the stage, mostly in the four-a-day, for thirty years, and they'd never made over sixty dollars a week between them. They'd done the same act--patter with a little Indian-club juggling, and then go into their dance--for fifteen years.

'Well, vaudeville is out, for the time being. They're living in a furnished housekeeping room, and Pop has been working in a clothes-pressing shop, evenings, to keep going. But they've had three days in a movie house in Altoona, and they land back in New York twenty-five dollars to the good. To-night they'll have chicken, and Pop will be able to buy a new pair of pants for three-fifty, and that will keep the old coat going another year.

'It's evening and it's raining, and they carry their own suitcases from the ferryhouse, but they're cheerful until a Rolls-Royce limousine comes flying by, near the kerb, and splashes mud all over them. In the limousine is a handsome, husky young couple--furs and top hat, staring straight ahead, ignoring everybody.

'Pop pulls out his old handkerchief, and wipes the mud off his wife's skirt, and he points after the expensive couple in the car and crows, "But they can't act!" There's our gospel, Beth.'

And once, rather rudely, Zed invited her to dinner at an Italian restaurant in the East Forties, so far over that it was practically in Italy, and filled her with fetuccini, and lectured her as eloquently as Andy.

'This last week, the rehearsals will get pretty hysterical. Satori will work us all night. Nobody will know his lines. Everybody will blow up. But that kind of strain you get over,' said Zed. 'The thing you've got to have the character to stand--good, old-fashioned, Scotch-Yankee-Montana word, "character"; I like it--is after the show closes, and you go plumb loco, because month after month you can't get a job--you're in swell shape, all ready to go, and they won't let you up on any stage.'

'I know. I've had just a month and half of it.'

'You've got to be prepared for a year and a half of it--ten years. Sitting by a telephone all day, waiting for a manager to call you.'

'Do you?'

'No, but then I've got a special method. I insult people, and so they notice me. That takes too much pains and energy for most people. And then, too, it gets around that I'm a really good actor, and they need me.'

'Upon my word! What about--'

'How do you know whether you're a good actress yet or not? How does anybody know? Don't be a lady. Don't look for insults.'

'Uh--well--yes--'

'The actor and the portrait painter are the only artists that have to have people out in front. Writers are lucky! A writer can write even if he's fallen out of an aeroplane on the Sahara Desert.'

'Write on what?'

'On the sand!'

'That wouldn't last very permanently, would it?'

'What writing does? Even Homer's only lasted three thousand years, and the human race's been going on for at least two hundred thousand.'

'Zed! Do you think I'll be able to act?'

'My pet!' 'Pet' was Zed's standard word of endearment, as 'darling' and 'kitten' were Andy's and 'child' was Doc Keezer's. He would do wonderful, histrionic things with 'pet'; he could make it insulting, belligerent, comforting or amorous.

'But do you think so?' insisted Bethel.

'I don't know yet. You're certainly not a dumb faker like Iris--'

'Then why do you go around with her so much?'

'Because she does what I tell her to, petty! You're not dumb like her, or phony and pretentious like Mahala, or sweet and pixie and dull like Mabel Staghorn. You belong more with Charlotte Levison--she's a tract-passing evangelical fundamentalist Marxian, but a tricky actress. Or maybe you even belong with the big bad Boyle. Or you will, if you ever learn anything.

'At present you can't even walk across the stage as though you were really going somewhere and not being dangled on a string by the director. But--yes, you have a kind of--a touch of strangeness. God knows where you got it! A B.A. from a female college! But maybe you'll be able to do some conjuring yet, if you can ever learn to keep your hands from getting tangled up with your feet when you're pulling the rabbit out of your silver snood. Bethel!'

'Yes?'

'Pet!'

'Well?'

'This show will flop, of course. It won't last ten weeks on the road.'

'Oh! No! Zed! It will succeed! It's got to! I'll make it! We'll all make it go. It's the world and all to Andy.'

'But unfortunately Andy isn't anything to the world and all. He's a nice guy--and that's a lot of praise from me, because mostly I don't like these kindhearted, open-faced, upstanding young men from Yale and Princeton and Dale Carnegie's classes in oratory. But we haven't got anything. Modern dress? Hell, pants don't make a show--even the lack of 'em doesn't.

'It's the emotion, the philosophy, the Stimmung, and the Stimmung of our production is as old-fashioned as Joe Jefferson.

'Romeo is biology, that's what he is, not moonshine, and Shakespeare knew it, the old devil--having been, like myself, educated under a hedgerow. Romeo is a decent young snob who's raving, fighting crazy about a girl who's the first one he's ever been really in love with. But to Andy and even to Mrs. Boyle our presentation is merely a prankish pageant to be played in the glade, under the auspices of the Siddons Society of Sweet Briar College, and it's all the more prankish to wear herringbone tweed instead of velvet, so long as all the thoughts are in velvet. So what have we got? Just another semi-professional road company of "Abie's Italian Rose". No, pet, I'm sorry; I like to eat, too, within reason; but we've got a flop on our hands.'

Bethel was desolate; she was full of eager, loyal, imbecile plans for converting Andy to something which she didn't in the least understand. She loved Andy for his pathetic plans of an eager child; she hated Zed for his cynicism; she hated Andy for his amateurishness; she loved Zed for his integrity; and in excitement and bewilderment she lapped up spumoni like a cat lapping cream.

'So,' Zed went on, 'if I'm right, you and I will be back here in New York by about the end of February. We'll be just a couple of kids, with no job. Let's get acquainted on this tour. Really acquainted.'

'You seem to be sufficiently really-acquainted with Iris.'

'Yuh. Too well!'

'You're one of the gweat big men that all of the poor weak women follow!'

'Pet! Would you mind stopping talking like a fool--like a suburban wife flirting with the dentist? Let's get back to work.'

She was angry and a little curious; not so much as to what his intentions might be as to whether this bumptious young stroller took enough trouble with women to have any intentions toward them at all.

It was a relief to ask cool, pleasant young Douglas Fry his opinion of their fate.

'Of course the show will succeed!' asserted Douglas. 'Isn't Romeo and Juliet the greatest love story going? Aren't Americans the most sentimental people in the world? And isn't this the first time Romeo has been done so people to-day will identify themselves with it? Why, of course! It'll be a wow!'

'Oh yes, I'm sure it will be a wow,' exulted Bethel.