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Margaret in Hollywood
By Darcy O'Brien OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1991 Darcy O'Brien
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5862-2
CHAPTER 1
Back in the days when Shakespeare still meant something to a lot of people, I wanted to be a great dramatic actress. Before I knew it, I was in Hollywood—but that is to get ahead of the story, mine and that of others whose lives touched me years ago.
I can't know for certain what made Mother put me on the stage. I can think of two possibilities, one more plausible than the other. Either I was-so adorable that she felt compelled to share me with thousands of other people, or from the beginning I was an insurance policy, indemnity against a failure she sensed was coming. Not that I minded in the least. In no time at all, I knew that if I couldn't perform, I was lost.
I made my stage debut at the age of five, at the Garden Theater at Thirteenth and McGee Streets in Kansas City in 1913, when Harry Valentine, the comedian, lifted me out of an oversized bassinet to end his act. My tiny body was gauze-draped and fairy-winged, a sentimental filip to ten minutes of jokes about marriage. What was I supposed to represent? Hope? Dreams? An unplanned pregnancy? Whatever, Little Meg, as I was quickly billed, was a hit. Murmurs and applause rained on me; I opened up to the audience like a sunflower. Everyone seemed delighted except my father.
"I do not approve," I can still hear him saying to my mother after the Garden emptied that night. We were the last people in the greenroom. I was curled up in a chair with my eyes closed; they thought I was dozing.
"A dubious idea," Father said. "I do not want Margaret on the stage. She is too young."
"Didn't you see the reaction?" Mother asked. "There were grown men with tears streaming down their eyes."
"Precisely," Father said. "'Caviare to the general,'" and I heard him slap his gloves into his palm.
"What generals? I saw enthusiasm, that's what I saw. You mind your business, and I'll mind my daughter."
Father strode from the room. I could imagine one of his magisterial turns, like those of Louis Calhern in later days. He said no more. I do not recall his uttering another word against my being onstage for several years after that. In marriage, he played the straight man.
And so I grew up with funnymen and dancing girls, songbirds, plate-twirlers, animal acts, as my companions. Rehearsals took up my afternoons and Saturday mornings, but they were more exciting than anything going on at school. My classmates may have been envious; I drifted from them. To me, theirs was a world without color and light; they were stuck with being themselves, or what a schoolteacher required, learning life's boundaries. At a later time I would envy them, but for me to be alive was to be in costume, the more fanciful the better; and I grew accustomed to thinking of everyone as putting on an act.
My father was E. P. Spencer. He had built and nominally owned the Garden Theater, bigger than any other in the city, with seats for nearly three thousand people. In actuality he must have held only a small percentage, his backers the rest. But in Kansas City he was known as quite the impresario, a Barnum with a difference: he believed that people craved beauty more than buncombe—an aesthete born every minute. The Garden was pure E.P., a lavish novelty inspired by Babylon and a trip to California, a journey I was too young to remember but which must have included plenty of vegetation and the idea, foreign to the Midwest and perhaps to human nature, that to be out-of-doors, or at least to have the illusion that you were out-of doors, was uplifting. Here, people accustomed to ice in the winter and chiggers in the summer could luxuriate, or so my father's thinking went, in a perpetual Mediterranean spring.
The theater had trees growing in its lobby, reflecting pools within and without, a women's lounge with potted plants, flowers, a festooned grand piano, a waterfall tumbling through a millwheel, a stream flowing into a lily pond "where goldfish and downy ducklings disport themselves," as program notes advised. (Female patrons must have spent a great deal of time in the lounge in those days!)
The main interior was finished in brick and stucco, broken by rooflines and gables and chimney pots. Overhead the arched ceiling was painted blue to represent the heavens, and when the houselights dimmed, one could see tiny electric stars twinkling among the clouds. Vines clung to columns and beams; clusters of wisteria and crimson rambler swayed in the air currents driven by a steam-powered ventilating plant in the basement. In place of proscenium boxes Italianate facades framed the stage, with windows arched and columned and softly lit from within, reminiscent of Cyrano and Romeo. What ideas my father had! Thousands of Kansans and Missourians in those days were flocking to California. Why not bring their dreams to them? he must have thought. He divined the dreariness of their lives, that they could travel in their minds without uprooting themselves, and that theater should be out of this world.
The Garden was all the rage in Kansas City, if only for a while, like everything. People traveled in from Ottawa and Emporia, from as far away as Springfield and Tulsa to see it: farm families and small-town merchants, the newly oil-rich anxious for a kind of culture, folks eager to break the monotony of winter with a smile and a tear.
My father wanted to give them nothing but Shakespeare and other elevated drama, but vaudeville and light comedies and sketches filled the seats. I heard him say over and over that once universal education raised the sensibilities of the audience Americans would settle for nothing less than the classics. Until then, merely entering the Garden would give people ideas of a genteel, earthly paradise and move their minds to higher things. I have no idea how he formed these notions, perhaps from reading Andrew Carnegie or John Dewey. In his optimism he was thoroughly American, his strengths lying elsewhere than in prophecy.
Father also operated E. P. Spencer, Inc., "Producers, Creators and Managers of Theatrical and General Amusement Enterprises," as his advertisement in Variety announced. "Vaudeville Acts, Sketches, Tabloids and Plays Written, Built, Staged, Produced." "Spencer's Fraternity Boys and Girls: A Spectacular Scenic Comedy with 25 Singing and Dancing Collegians," "September Morn with Violet Greenwood," and "Kid Days: A Musical Comedy of Childhood" were among the offerings. If you had an empty theater anywhere in the Midwest, E. P. Spencer could provide a show. A new finish for your acts? Some new music, a new song, a number, a gag, or an entire monologue? E. P. Spencer could furnish it.
Or almost. Father must not have had more than twenty-five or thirty people working for him. Everyone had to be able to perform many roles and to sing and dance on demand; in those days actors were able to work, instead of spending most of their lives waiting for the telephone to ring. Compared to the Shuberts or Balaban & Katz, E. P. Spencer was small potatoes, but locally he had a grand reputation. When he entered a room with his fine clothes and dark full beard, everyone deferred to him. If he acted more important than he was, in show business who can ask for anything more? As for me, I adored him. When I think of him now, I see myself running again and again into his arms. To me he played the father's role well.
So it was a natural, perhaps an inevitable, move for me from the usual child's playacting to the real thing. What other children did to amuse themselves and relatives on a porch, I enacted at the Garden. My mother, Alice, arranged for tap-dancing and singing lessons; by the age of six or seven I could pick out a few tunes on the piano. If at music and dancing I was competent but no genius, my appeal on the stage then came from the novelty of a small creature's behaving like an adult, similar to the quirky pleasure people derive from seeing a nun ice-skate or hearing a bird talk. One of the other acts at the Garden consisted entirely in displaying a pair of poodles in various costumes—tiny raincoats, pajamas, dinner jackets, baseball uniforms, sailor suits. At the time I wondered whether the poodles realized how funny they were, or resented being laughed at, or felt as I did, swelled by laughter and applause. They were given bits of meat when they performed properly, and spanked or yanked with slip-collars when they did not. In my case all that was necessary was for my mother to tell me that hard work was the key to success and that lazy people ended up in the gutter. The applause took care of the rest of my motivation. I must have been born a ham; I was very much a trained dog.
Alice and her mother, Nell, stitched all my costumes—milkmaid, goose girl, street urchin, Little Miss Muffet; as I matured I became a miniature Minnehaha and Evangeline. By the time I was seven, I looked ten, and my appearance as a water nymph, addressed by a kneeling tenor who extolled my clean, pale limbs and tumbling auburn tresses, was a minor sensation.
When I gaze now at a photograph of myself in this role, I see a girl undeniably pretty, slim and graceful, perhaps beautiful in a Pre-Raphaelite way; and over the bridge of many years there comes to me a fainter version of the rush, the thrill, I felt at the effect I was having on men. Of course I did not understand then precisely what this effect was; that knowledge would come later, and soon enough. But one understood it instinctively, as all girls do whether they are dull or bright. It did not take a Viennese doctor to discover it, only to publicize something that before his time had required no advertisement. Standing center stage with my live hair shining, the tenor praising me, the presence of the audience palpable, I felt my skin glow and my head lighten with—something, a pressure, an energy that quickened my breath. I did not wonder what this power was—I permitted it and heightened it by moving my body slightly or touching the tip of my tongue to the back of my lips.
The young man singing to me on one knee was not supposed to touch me—I was a dream figure—but sometimes he did, brushing my hand or my arm or my thigh—surreptitiously, behind, out of the audience's sight. I can't recall his name, but I enjoyed what he did, more thrilling because the audience couldn't see it. He must have become a wonderful lover—unless he ended up chasing after little girls! I never said a word to him about the game we played, nor he to me; but each time we performed, I hoped he would touch me, and in me there was a fluttering of anticipation.
My pleasure must have floated out to the audience in invisible waves. I could see four or five rows beyond the footlights, far enough to observe that it was the men who rose for a standing ovation, their wives or companions struggling up later if at all. "The apogee of femininity with the dew still on her," the Kansas City Times wrote of me, a nice piece of Edwardian lip-smacking. "Margaret Spencer exuded the pinkish breath of girlhood. If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, there was many a shining, grateful eye in the Garden last night." In another time and place I would have been called an eyeful.
I know that my father was aware of this—what is the word? salacious?—element in my appeal. The idea of his child-daughter slobbered over by potbellied ticket-holders, who were, after all, paying him to look at me, must have seemed like pandering. But if he wanted me to quit the stage, live like an ordinary child, he said nothing about it. To have done so would have been to acknowledge more than he cared to, perhaps, and it would have meant a full-scale confrontation with my mother, which he did not have the stomach for, not then.
Instead he did his best to elevate my sensibilities, rattling off high-flown quotations at me—"Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" was a favorite—and giving me books and poems to read, in general treating me as if I were a creature of a higher order. This flattered and pleased me and made me think of him as sent from some better, nobler world, the one where the idea of the Garden came from; I was his disciple. "'Full beautiful, a faery's child,'" he would say to me at the breakfast table when Mother was out of hearing. Patiently, calling me his pixie, his imp, his elf, he coached me in Puck's "What fools these mortals be" speech so that I could recite it onstage. I did so one night after an act that included pie-throwing. Alone on an empty stage, I spoke Puck's lines in my small, round voice, lingering over foools as Father had taught me and gaining applause somewhere in the range of polite. He must have believed that what he was trying to make of me had triumphed over others' ideas, including Mother's. Maybe he knew something—it is a question that has recurred to me ever since. "Wonderful! Marvelous!" he said afterward, gathering me in his arms and hugging me and twirling me around as if I had achieved stardom or, more to his taste, angelhood. "Your father loves you! The world loves you, and you're not of this world! My Margaret!"
I buried my face in his beard.
Late in 1916 the Garden went bankrupt, and Father with it. It was too large and too expensive to maintain, moving pictures had already begun to siphon off the vaudeville audience, people were becoming preoccupied with our possible entry into the war in Europe—there were any number of reasons. I have the sense that my dear, lovely father, my dreaming, noble, optimistic, foolish father, had been operating at a loss for some time but could not think what to do until it was too late and he went under. I also believe that he could not bear firing the actors and others who depended on him, and so he paid them until he was hopelessly in debt. That at any rate is what my mother accused him of, and I have no reason to doubt her judgment in this. She was a practical woman, like her mother before her; but of them further on.
E.P. was then in his early forties, and vigorous except for frequent colds and a persistent cough. Outwardly he took a positive view of his failure, cheering us up with quotations—"A minute's success pays the failure of years," and so on. Determined to make a virtue of necessity, to turn bad luck into good, he made frequent references to Dame Fortune's wheel.
One afternoon, a few days after the bank announced foreclosure on our house, with other creditors threatening and my mother saying that if she did not get some grocery money we would have to start roasting mice, my father announced that a fabulous opportunity had come his way and that by God he was going to seize it. From his agitation, thrusting his fists up like a victorious prizefighter, bobbing up and down on his heels and toes, one might have thought he had just inherited a munitions factory.
"Start packing! We're off to Eldorado!"
As this was the name of a small town in central Kansas, my mother must have thought she had misunderstood him.
"Chicago?" she asked.
"Much farther than that," he addressed me, sawing the air.
"A storybook land in the realms of gold! Vast cattle ranches where dark men serenade the moon. Exotic cities alive with enterprise. Houses full of flowers. Men and women dining on strange fruits. Caballeros strumming guitars. A place where dynasties have been created overnight. A place the Spaniards settled many, many years ago. We'll live by the sea and breathe the salty air!"
My eyes must have been wide, but I didn't know enough geography to venture a guess.
"So we're going to California," my mother said brightly. "How nice. I think that is a fine idea. The Pinneys went out last year and haven't come back. He's in real estate and doing very well, I hear."
"Guess again," my father said.
"The Holy Land!" I shouted. I had been studying colored maps and hearing about milk and honey in Sunday school. "Are we going there? I want to live in Galilee!"
I took hold of Father's lapel and kissed the rose he always wore there. I must have looked like an engraving called filial devotion.
"Argentina!" he said. "We're going to live in Buenos Aires!"
It sounded fantastical. I had never heard of it. I cheered and jumped up and down.
Mother rattled dishes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Margaret in Hollywood by Darcy O'Brien. Copyright © 1991 Darcy O'Brien. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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