Starring Madame Modjeska: on tour in Poland and America 9780253356642, 9780253005199

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Starring Madame MODJESKA

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she sensed in Fritz Devrient’s Hamlet a characterization of such dignity and

naturalness that it informed her later understanding of the Bard.” By the time Helena was nineteen, Zimajer was encouraging her to train as a Ger-

man actress, and she found the prospect tantalizing enough to study Germanlanguage plays with the help of a fine actor from the German troupe, Blum

xtman. rer perception of artasavalue transcending national antagonisms inforced by Aartistic : istinature, “full“full ofofpri was reinforced by Axtman’s pride, recklessness, and abnegation’; although he fainted from hunger, the German refused any payment for his teaching. as become commonplace for Modjeska’s biographers to trace her artistry to the city of Krakow and to read her as its product.*' In paying tribute

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THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 29 to the city, they take their cue from Modjeska herself, who could never resist touting the glories of Poland to non-Polish audiences. Yet in Memories and Impressions she consistently superimposes the image ofa late nineteenthcentury Krakow, a lovely city of refurbished monuments, on the dirty, ravaged Krakow of her youth.** As she declares the formative influence of her hometown, she rewrites it to be beautiful: This is really Cracow—my cradle, my nurse, my mentor and master. Here I was born and bred. Here trees and stars taught me to think. From the green meadows with their wild flowers I took lessons of harmony in color, the nightingales with their longing songs made me dream of love and beauty. The famous “Zygmunt” bell of the cathedral, with its deep and rich sound, reminded me of the glorious past of Poland; the organs in the churches spoke of God and His Angels; stained windows, statues, and altars suggested art—its importance, its dignity.*

Modjeska carefully recreates her first Krakow as a paradise in which she exists as its gifted interpreter, equipped to reimagine its historic sights and events. Subsequent scenes of her childhood city bask in this paradisiacal glow, featuring only splendid historic buildings and enlivened by quaint religious and seasonal pageantry. Modjeska portrays such citywide celebrations as the

Corpus Christi procession, when villagers decked out in their best transformed the city square into a living museum of folk costumes, or the St. John’s Eve “wianki” ceremony, during which unmarried girls cast wreaths of flowers on the Vistula River to foretell their future.** The actress refines the visual

and atmospheric worth of her rundown hometown much as she refined the intellectual worth of her mentor-seducer Zimajer. Perhaps an ugly Krakow was as inadmissable a fact as extramarital sex. In this case Modjeska demonstrates how she developed herself into an artist by divining the city’s allure and transforming its art into her own. Krakow, she asserts, furnished her a series of training sets and visual cues. Her memoirs detail how the look and mood of Krakdéw’s landmarks led her instinctually to pose, to feel, and to act. She was well aware of the instrument at her disposal. At home, Helena had taken stock of herself by examining her poses in silhouette: “I had great difhculty managing my arms, and I did not like the appearance of my rather short-fingered hands; they did not look a bit like those I saw in pictures and statues.”** In the Dominican church located a block from her home, she delighted in mimicking the shape of its Gothic structure, what she supposed was meant to be “two hands joined for prayer, with the finger-tips meeting and relaxed above the wrists, as in some

30 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA of the pictures of praying Madonnas.’** On warm summer days she would steal into the cool church for more make-believe: “How often I would lie down, with my face to the ground, in imitation of our peasant women, with arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, kissing the floor, and praying fervently to God for a miracle, for a glimpse of an angel or of some saint.”*’ Modjeska also extols the long-term theatrical value of her childhood haunts, remembering, for example, how she prepared for Juliet’s scene in the Capulets’

tomb by recalling images of the sinister Franciscan church visible from her window, with its reputedly haunted vaults and “two huge century-old owls” that walked the moonlit grounds.** In striking poses and sensing sets, the young Helena demonstrated the prerequisite painterly sensibility with which nineteenth-century actors were to create their characters.” Modjeska’s evocation of her childhood Krakow also links her growth as an actress with her indoctrination as a patriotic Polish woman. She recounts her family’s ordeal during the 1848 Austrian bombardment of the rebellious city, a quick course in maturation as their home was shelled and strafed, the dead lay just outside their windows, and her mother sternly ordered her brother Jozef, amember of the Polish National Guard, back into the fray (after angrily agreeing to give shelter to the actress on his arm). Helena learned similar lessons in resisting the occupier from well-bred young ladies. She recalls a Miss Apollonia, “our young neighbor from the third floor,” who “recited patriotic verses or sang sentimental love-songs,” and taught the young Helena “that all Russians, and Austrians in particular, were scoundrels and cowards who deserved to be hanged one after another until none of them were left on earth.”*’ When Helena attended Mrs. Radwanska's pension, she looked on, fascinated, as her teacher Miss Salomea communicated in code with a political prisoner in a “provisory jail” opposite their apartment. Helena promised never to betray Miss Salomea’s important secret, and consequently wrote “I hate the Austrians” several times in her grammar workbook.” According to contemporary observers, the stalwart patriotism of Jozefa Bendowa and Misses Apollonia and Salomea was not exceptional. Austrian political repression in the 1850s made poignant martyrs of such Krakovians as Prince Adam Potocki, a popular member of one of Krakow’s first families, and Anna Rozycka, the daughter of a well-known local doctor. Potocki spent a year in jail before being pardoned by the Austrian emperor and released, but Rozycka, sentenced for possession of “forbidden books and national poetry, died in Austria's Theresienstadt prison four years after her arrest and de-

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 31 spite the protests of her doctors. Her fellow prisoners there admired “her constancy and unbending nature.”®’ Many upper- and middle-class Krakovians subsequently supported the January 1863 uprising against the authorities in the Russian partition. Both well-bred ladies and popular actresses contributed to the cause as best they could. Maria Kietlinska was not bold enough to join women attending forbidden meetings and visiting political prisoners incarcerated in Krakow’s Wawel Castle, but she donated linen for the rebels. The Krakow actress Maria Safir’s much more daring feat involved disguising

an imprisoned insurgent in her dress and taking his place in his cell. Elsewhere in the Austrian partition, the actress Aniela Aszpergerowa, an accomplished performer who mentored Helena on the Lwow stage, was sentenced to prison for her ties with the uprising, though she was quickly released.® As local history indicates and her memoirs attest, Helena was raised on such examples of fiery Polish patriotism and saw that women could be outspoken and, to a certain extent, active in their national zeal.°° The political traumas of her childhood Krakow acquainted her well with real acts of heroism and sacrifice. Like other Poles of her inter-uprising generation, Helena embraced the somber patriotic ideal of the soldier-rebel and a program of conspiracy and revolt in aspiration, if not in fact.” More self-styled was her connection of this brand of patriotism with her profession. In Memories and Impressions she represents acting as the best, if still inadequate, surrogate for running off to fight: “Alas! it was not my destiny to die for my country, as was my cherished dream, but instead of becoming a heroine, I had to be satished with acting heroines, exchanging the armor for tinsel, and the weapon

for words.’ Throughout the nineteenth century, Polish actors were admired for their signal public service to an occupied nation by preserving onstage the Polish language, Polish subjects, Polish costumes, even Polish mazurkas. But perhaps no period so theatricalized Polish politics as the early 1860s, when Modrzejewska was launching her career. Beginning with demonstrations to mourn Warsaw victims of Russian oppression in 1861, Krakovians repeatedly mounted public protests “in an atmosphere of excitement and exaltation,” taking solemnly to the streets dressed in czamaras (traditional Polish coats), konfederatki (four-cornered caps), and the black of national mourning. Any woman venturing out in a bright dress was harassed and shamed. These blackgarbed citizens gathered in churches for special masses, walked in religiouspatriotic processions, and sang Polish hymns and national songs.” Modjeska

32 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA recalls how “black crowds knelt down in the Rynek before the picture of the Virgin; and the National Hymn, in accents of desperate complaint, was rising slowly up to heaven.’” In this period, Helena experienced firsthand how theater both informed and bolstered national politics. While she was engaged at the Lwow Theater in the early months of the 1863 uprising, her company deliberately performed “a Polish melodrama, with national costumes and songs” to a house packed with young insurgents. The actors used the device of improvised couplets to convey their support to the soldiers and, as Modjeska writes, “there was such a bond of sympathy between the audience and the stage that were it not for the footlights, they would have all joined in one embrace.”” Yet in this turbulent period of unrest and rebellion, the ardently patriotic Helena remained onstage, content with her “tinsel” and “words.” A patriotism of soldierly discipline and dramatic display, reliant on strong men and women, clearly steeled her commitment to acting, but never waylaid her career. A YOUNG STAR ON THE ROAD

In late 1859, Helena informed her brother Szymon that she was to become a German actress and identified “Mr. Gustaw” as the author of this plan.” Her diary fragments dating from the same period embellished on her fears and fantasies about playing great roles “on the German stage, among strangers, envisioning herself as “Louise, wringing her hands and shedding tears, Ophelia with her vacant stare, Marguerite in the arms of Faust.’ Zimajer’s reasoning likely stemmed from professional calculation, not nationalist bias (he was a Polonized German), for on the German stage, as Helena parroted, “Mr. Gustaw says I'll have better prospects.” By 1861, however, this much-contemplated venture had to be postponed due to Helena’s pregnancy. ‘The first years of her performing career overlapped

with her first years of motherhood, as she gave birth in daunting succession to Rudolf on 27 January 1861 and Maria on 10 April 1862. Like so many other actresses, Helena had to navigate the “momentous obstacles” of pregnancy,

childbirth, and child care along with the arduous physical and mental demands of touring.” That she dared to do so from the outset of her career reflected her ambition and probable desperation. By 1860, her younger sister, Jézia, had joined a provincial troupe and was already touring under the stage name Kossowska.’”°

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 33 For the most part, Helena managed both young children and new career remarkably well, aided by a Benda family used to accommodating irregular relations and their offspring. When Helena, Gustaw, and the newborn Rudolf embarked for the tiny town of Bochnia, where they found refuge with Jézefa’s relatives, Jozefa and Helenass niece Stasia accompanied them.” Helena also mentioned a hired nanny when she wrote Jézefa from Lwow in 1862. Although Helena’s daughter lived only a few years, her death was probably caused by an accident, not family neglect.”’ The actress's letters indicate that she was a loving, proud, and quite controlling mother who boasted about her surviving child’s accomplishments and assiduously, if somewhat imperiously, arranged his affairs. Helena walked firmly in J6zefa’s matriarchal footsteps. The aspiring young actress also was determined that motherhood not deter her from pursuing her dreams, even if their initial settings proved more rustic than she had anticipated. During these early touring years, Modrzejewska first demonstrated her legendary iron will and workaholic habits. The birth of her daughter served as a remarkable case in point. The director of her troupe

at that time, Konstanty Lobojko, remembered that Madame Modrzejewska “began to give birth before the last act [of the drama Polish Homes|, yet managed to finish the performance. Afterwards we took her home, supporting her on either side, and an hour later little Maria came into the world.’ In ten days, the new mother resumed her place on the stage, for by this time she had become “a favorite of our provincial public” and the dependable star attraction of her troupe.” Like most Polish actors in the nineteenth century, Helena Modrzejewska was born on the road. Provincial touring constituted either a preparatory stage or a lifelong career for virtually every Polish player, despite its physical hardships, great financial uncertainty, and bureaucratic hassles, especially when troupes toured across partitions.*° Only a small minority landed engagements in one of Poland’s permanent theaters—the Krakow Theatre, the Lwow Theatre, and the best-paying, government-subsidized Warsaw Imperial Theatres. For most troupes, touring was an arduous business entailing travel from town to town on cart or by foot, substandard food and lodging, and improvised stages in taverns or barns where towns had no appropriate hall.*! Directly dependent on each night's proceeds, touring troupes usually tailored their repertoire to the presumed tastes of the locals, which meant relying on light comedy or more sensational entertainments.*” Touring players could not always be certain of the locals’ welcome. While they might be ac-

34 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA cepted as artists and respected as valiant bearers of Polish culture, they might just as readily be disdained as poor tramps and loose women.* From her summer 1861 debut in Bochnia to her engagement with the Krakow Theatre in fall 1865, Modrzejewska's progress described not a steady ascent, but the small leaps forward and occasional setbacks typical for even a talented actor on provincial tour. During these four years, she toured Galician towns of varying sizes and box office prospects; performed for a short time under contract in the great theater in Lwow; made an unsuccessful debut in Vienna; and played in and around Czerniowce, the provincial capital of Bukowina, a small city of 30,000 populated by Poles, Germans, Moldavians, Jews, Armenians, and Rusyns.* To be fair to her manager-husband, Zimajer strived to advance his protégée’s career according to the tried-and-true patterns of the day. An engagement with a permanent theater enabled Polish actors to move up the professional ladder or to bargain for better positions elsewhere. When Zimajer arranged for Modrzejewska'ss debut in Vienna, trying

at last to deliver on his promise of German stardom, he was following the tantalizing lead of successful crossover players. The great Bogumit Dawison (1818-1872), whose American tour preceded Modrzejewska’s San Francisco debut by a little over a decade, brilliantly exemplified a Polish actor’s possibilities on the German-language stage, as his performances won accolades in Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, and Munich.* Yet the touring life, especially for a novice, could be exhilarating, especially when it signified a more intense version of the sort of work that Modrzejewska coveted at home. Launching a career in tiny Bochnia might have seemed an exercise in futility. Instead, she carefully remembers the experience as the backstory of putting on a hit show. Modjeska describes how she

and Mr. Modjeski chance upon their Krakéw acquaintance, the photographer, dance instructor, and sometime actor Konstanty Lobojko, as they are strolling around town, and the three soon dream up a troupe which they eventually formalize as “The Nowy Sacz Company of National Artists.” Modfjeska represents the troupe's founding as serendipitous, prompted by

their desire to hold a benefit for the widows and children of local workers who had perished in a mining accident. Her account of how avidly they hunt for repertoire, rent a hall, paint scenery, and post bills betrays their long-term plans. The company’s tiny cast was something of a Benda family production, including Helena, Lobojko, Lobojko’s dance pupil Mr. Baumann, Helena’s sister JOzia (stage name Kossowska), and her niece Stasia as prompter, with

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 35 Helena debuting as Modrzejewska, and Zimajer, by default and in solidarity, as Modrzejewski. Their benefit, featuring the light one-act comedy White Camellia and the two-act “play with songs” titled Prima Donna, or the Foster Sister, immediately extended into a series of performances with changing repertoire played to consistently good houses. In short order, Modjeska reports receiving authoritative confirmation of her talent, when Jan Checinski, a Warsaw actor visiting the area and her future director on the Warsaw stage, complimented her after one performance and expressed the hope that he would see her soon in his city. Hollywood could not have scripted a more upbeat amateur-to-professional success story than the debut Modjeska retells in Memories and Impressions.*°

Once their Bochnia performances had made them a going concern, Lobojko’s troupe began touring in earnest. With Zimajer as their “de facto... business head,” they traveled in a wagon resembling an American prairie schooner to perform, among other places, in the mountain town of Nowy Sacz,

from which they took their name; the larger town of Rzeszow, where they drew good audiences for three months; Sambor, where Maria (SinnmayerModrzejewska) was born; Brzezany, where Jézia married fellow troupe actor Walery Tomaszewicz; and Brody, where, in Lobojko’s terse account, a fire destroyed one hundred twenty homes, performances had to be cancelled for ten days, the actors received only half pay, and “Madame Modrzejewska left for Lwéw with her husband and son.”*’ Over this first touring year, their company swelled to thirty-six players, recruited at last a proficient artistic director and leading man in Lucjan Ortynski, and won favorable reviews in the prominent Lwow newspaper the Literary Daily (Dziennik literacki).

Modrzejewska’s initial experience on the road was quite successful, all things considered, and it spotlighted her from the outset as her troupe's beautiful, talented star. Despite its hardships and limited circulation, provincial touring could launch good actors on a fast track to better roles and star status, in contrast to permanent theaters where a novice confronted an entrenched company and fiercer competition.** As early as November 1861, the Literary Daily’s correspondent remarked the improvement of Lobojko’s troupe under Ortynski’s direction and singled out Modrzejewska as an actress of “undeniable talent, with the potential of becoming an ornament on our greatest stage if she keeps up the good work.”® The reviewer for the Literary Daily repeatedly

praised the experienced Ortynski and the novice Modrzejewska. A 2 May 1862 review offered this characteristic assessment, heralding her as “ornament”

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once again: “Young, pretty, talented, filled with a love of art and possessed of a singing, resonant, sweet voice, she deserves a brilliant future. ... With conscientious work and zealous exercise, Modrzejewska may become a valuable ornament not only in her current company, but in any other troupe.””°

The Literary Daily review sounded what would become a recurring refrain in Modrzejewska's clippings—an automatic registering of her beauty and charm. In an era when poor lighting and small stages led audiences and critics to value large, clear features and expressive faces, Modrzejewska presented an almost ideal physical specimen.”! Early photographs of the actress posed in stage roles capture her strikingly well-proportioned face and body— her large lovely eyes, strong profile, graceful and vivid expression, and statuesque figure. As theater historian Dariusz Kosinski observes, conceptions of beauty in the nineteenth-century Polish theater prescribed a blend of the

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 37 real with the ideal, and Modrzejewska incarnated this blend with the givens of face and figure and her growing mastery of “rounded,” often balletic gestures and gait.” Her innate charm, provided she used it in an artistic and not coquettishly personal manner, was also a highly desirable attribute.”* Modrzejewska’s “resonant, sweet” voice proved too limited initially to be ideal, but for much of her career she worked to improve its strength, range, and durability.°* The sum impact of Modrzejewska’s magnificent parts almost invariably wowed audiences and critics, beginning with her first year on tour and for decades to come. This gorgeous, charming, inherently talented young actress thrilled to the road. When Modjeska recalls how simply she needed to live and how intensively she had to work during her first year on tour, her memoir account is suffused with happiness. As Dobrochna Ratajczak observes, Modjeska depicts her travels from Bochnia to Nowy Sacz, the initial leg of her tour, as entry into a provincial arcadia peopled with merry, singing peasants and laid out with “luxuriant orchards, golden fields, ... diminutive white huts,’ and the Carpathian Mountains in the distance.”* In her memoirs and letters, Modjeska regularly professes her delight in nature, unveiling, to be sure, her Romantic artist’s soul, but also demonstrating the sensibility of an educated tourist. On the road to Nowy Sacz, she was at once a poor wandering player and, in retrospect before her readers, a traveler relishing natural wonders and the colorful folk.®°

Modrzejewska took up her workload with equal fervor. No passage in Memories and Impressions better conveys her joy in her profession: Work was a delight to me. Even now when I think of my enthusiasm of those days, Iam thrilled with the recollection. We lived in rooms which were barely furnished. We had to sit on boxes and all sorts of improvised seats. I had but two dresses, one black and the other white, with two tunics, which I used to transform by addition of black and pink ruches; our meals were frugal, but I could see from the porch fields of wild flowers, trees, and mountains; above all, I had my parts, walking up and down on the veranda, I studied them, to the accompaniment of the birds’ songs, and I felt as proud and wealthy as the richest woman. To live in the imaginary world of my heroines, to speak their poetic language, to render different sentiments, to work out a character, were the most cherished delights of my existence.”’

Apart from the idyllic natural setting of her workplace, most important in this passage is Modjeska’s emphasis on intensive self-training—her pure dedication to studying and memorizing parts and working out a character. Just as she implies her innate actor's response to Krakow’s suggestive settings, so her memories of early touring, before she could be influenced by the great actors

38 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA and impresarios of the Polish theater, highlight a self-development that anticipates some of the major practices other actors would need to be taught. In Memories and Impressions the young Modrzejewska has learned to be “deadletter perfect” in committing her parts to memory; to perform a wide array of roles, despite the fact that she “was the star from the beginning’; and to rehearse roles in costume so as to play them naturally onstage.’* She seems to intuit a widely prescribed technique for developing a character “from the whole to its parts” (od ogolu do szczegotu): “When I could not see the vision in my mind from head to foot, even to the garment and the gestures, when | could not hear my own voice ringing in the accents of my vision, I rejected the part, for I knew I could not play it to my satisfaction.”” Nevertheless, as her critics underscored, Modrzejewska needed more rigorous, formal training to fulfill her potential as “ornament” ona greater stage. Her explorations of first the Lwow Theatre and then Vienna's theaters, facilitated by Zimajer, took reasonable steps toward this goal, although neither experience advanced her very far. The Lwow Theatre offered her an impressive physical venue. Its imposing new building, lavishly funded by Count Stanislaw Skarbek and opened in 1842, was shaped like an amphitheater and boasted seating for 1,460 patrons, the latest in stage sets and machinery, and a magnificent Demuth chandelier from Vienna.’ The reviews of Modrzejewska’s three audition plays indicated that Count Skarbek’s theater could provide her with the necessary training as well. One well-wishing reviewer attributed her uneven performances to a lack of “deeper character study” and, by extension, the limitations of her “first school” of playing in the provinces. Recommending her engagement, he argued that her innate talent could be properly developed by “intelligent direction” and the “excellent role model” of Lwow’s veteran actress, Madame Aniela Aszpergerowa.'” For her part, Modrzejewska was feeling feisty at the outset of her Lwow engagement. In her aforementioned 9 November 1862 letter to her mother, in which she praised Zimajer’s negotiation of her contract (she was hired as a wodewilistka, vaudeville player), she declared that she was ready to compete with the younger Lwo6w actresses who envied her good reviews and wished her ill. Even from the lofty distance of her memoirs, she chose to denounce the dirty tricks played on her by these three identified “antagonistic goddesses,” Teofila Nowakowska, Paulina Targowska, and Jézefa Radzynska Hubertowa

(the Mrs. R. H. who had pronounced Helena talentless in Krakéw).! Another letter sent in late 1862 to her half-brother Adolf read like a battle plan,

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 39 taking broader aim at the Lwéw company and revealing just how cocky and calculating the provincial star Modrzejewska had become: “As you know, I’m under contract in Lwow, and Madame Aszpergerowa is truly a great role model. I'm trying to learn all I can from her performances, and it seems to me that I can reach her pinnacle of fame with little trouble. A little more work, and I'll make it. Right now I’m mainly cast in vaudeville parts. Misses Targowska and Nowakowska won‘ let me near real dramas, but I'll prevail.” As it turned out, Modrzejewska lacked both the position and protection to displace her entrenched young rivals in Lwoéw. She opted not to serve out her contract, for her pay was too low, the work and expense too much (like most actresses, she had to make her own costumes), and the roles left her after the evil trio had taken their pick were the too small parts of “pages, gypsies, servant-girls, peasant women, mysterious countesses in French melodramas.”!* The “intelligent direction” recommended for her progress never materialized. Modfjeska hinted that the Lwéw Theatre's “fatherly managers” were pledged to obey the “goddesses.”'® Yet Modrzejewska did discover two useful role models among Lwow’s actresses. Although she sized up the “excellent” Aszpergerowa as a benchmark, she also appreciated the older actress’s encouragement and coaching on parts, lines, and costumes. She learned the value of collaboration even as she competed. Five years later, when she had achieved Aszpergerowas pinnacle of fame, Modrzejewska helped arrange for the Lwow actress's guest appearances in the Krakéw Theatre.’ In Lwow, Modrzejewska also made the passing acquaintance of the young actress Maria Lagowska (stage name Marie Vergne Fontelive), whom she had been hired in part to replace.’ The friendly Fontelive was already bound for Vienna’s Carlstheater, literally enacting Helena’s master plan and enduring negative press coverage for her defection.’ When Modrzejewska caught up with Fontelive in Vienna three years later, the now Viennese actress was blazing another life trail, about to marry a handsome prince and leave the stage.'”’ These Lwow acquaintances incarnated several standard versions of a Polish actress's successful future—an enduring stage career in Poland, triumph on a foreign stage, or social ascent into a noble mar-

riage and retirement.’ During this period of Zimajer-Modrzejewski’s management, the couple also tested Modrzejewska’s viability on the German-language stage by taking a vacation in Vienna in 1865 and sampling its cultural sights. Once again, Modrzejewska, albeit with Zimajer’s assistance, had anticipated a professional

40 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA practice subsequently recommended to other actors, going abroad to study the great performers of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London. After her informal audition with an unnamed Viennese theater manager, she was advised to study

German one more year; the Modrzejewskis could not afford the delay. But their vacation, her first visit to a European capital, exposed her to grander art and consequently grander possibilities. A tour of the great paintings in Viennas Luxembourg Galleries amplified Modrzejewska’s ambition and resolve: “I felt small and humble in the presence of the masterpieces of all ages and all nations, and yet, underneath this humility, I felt a glow of superhuman strength, and a hope that one day I might achieve fame,—in a different and smaller way, of course—for our art was scarcely considered an art at all, but I formed then a strong determination never to rest until I had climbed to the very top of my profession.”!"!

Between Modrzejewska’s temporary defeat in Lwow and her horizonexpanding trip to Vienna, she and Zimajer returned to provincial touring, even as the January 1863 uprising caught fire around them. By April, they had played their way to Czerniowce, a small city in the southeastern corner of Galicia, where they more or less remained for the next two years." To some extent this move must have seemed a setback to the young actress, a regression to touring’s financial uncertainties and fluid companies. With its mixed ethnic population, Czerniowce could not sustain a year-round Polish theater, and anyone mounting a theatrical enterprise there had to include German-language productions to stay afloat. When the Modrzejewskis arrived, their former co-star Lucjan Ortynski headed up the local Polish troupe, but opted to direct the German troupe by year’s end. Once Zimajer had obtained the concession to establish a troupe by mid-1864, his company was expressly Polish-German. Even so, the Polish actors had to resort to local touring outside of the city to survive. Modrzejewska's next logical step would have been to perform in German, as Zimajer had planned in Krakow, but she did not do so here or anywhere else. She may have hesitated on patriotic grounds. In her memoirs, she fashions a little melodrama around the German-language debut that Zimajer has prepared for her in Czerniowce. Her apprehension of betraying her country provoked convulsive sobs and a convenient fainting spell, which resulted in the performance’s cancellation. She may have balked for more complicated personal reasons. At this point in her memoirs she refers to “Mr. Modjeski” more distantly as the man “she dared not disappoint.”!!°

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 41 Yet these uncertain two years, when Modrzejewska was sensing the limits of Zimajer'ss managerial abilities, also renewed her confidence in her star quality, provided her diverse opportunities for professional growth, and reunited her with the still supportive network of her family. In the variously made-up Polish troupes in Czerniowce, Modrzejewska once more reigned as the star, as her reviews in the German-language newspaper Bukowina attest.''* The ambitious repertoire that Ortynski assayed and the troupe continued to perform after his departure allowed her to try out serious and even tragic leading roles for which she was eager, if not professionally prepared.'* As she notes in Memories and Impressions, in Czerniowce she spent an hour or two each day exercising her voice to achieve the deeper shading of a tragedienne.''® Modrzejewska played such parts as the beautiful wife Amelia who loved another in Polish Romantic writer Juliusz Slowacki’s historical drama Mazepa; the eponymous Barbara Radziwilléwna in Alojzy Felinski’s play about a tragic Polish princess poisoned by her mother-in-law before she, a commoner, could be crowned queen; and two incarnations of the rebellious Scottish queen Mary Stuart, a sympathetic portrait by Schiller and a far more critical characterization by Stowacki. In Czerniowce, Modrzejewska also found a professional equal, a kind of male double, in the actor Wincenty Rapacki. The two had met while Modrzejewska was on tour in Sambor earlier in 1863, but they began serious work together only in the Bukovina capital. Born in 1840, Rapacki was Modrzejewska’s peer and likewise a driven, highly disciplined self-starter, although he had benefited from more training in both secondary school and Warsaw's School of Drama. Like Modrzejewska, Rapacki had performed in provincial troupes and had attempted an engagement on the Lwow stage.'”” Equally invested in meticulous role preparation and challenging repertoire, Modrzejewska and Rapacki were paired together and critically acclaimed in such works as Slowacki’s Mazepa and Schiller's Maria Stuart, with Modrzejewska playing the sensitive young heroine or tragic queen vis-a-vis Rapacki's older male leads and strong character roles.'!* Yet even at this early stage in their careers, Rapacki explored professional opportunities rarely accessible to an actress, assuming the direction of the Czerniowce troupe for a very brief stint in 1863 and adapting Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables for their stage.'” Over these two years, Modrzejewska’s troupe also came to include all of the actors in her family—Feliks; his wife, Weronika; his adopted daughter, Henryka; Jozia and her husband, Walery Tomaszewicz; J6zef; and even Szymon,

4.2 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA “just returned from the Vienna conservatory” and made the director of their theater orchestra.”° Modrzejewska’s relations with her clan had grown more complicated, but no less sanguine. She was clearly established as the star of the family, the phenomenon on stage, the family’s best-looking and best natural actor. At the same time, she was still learning and benefiting from her older brothers’ experience and entrepreneurial savvy. In Memories and Impressions, she details how inventive and aggressive her brother Jézef was in improvising stage sets and costumes on the tours outside of Czerniowce. A June 1865 review in the Literary Daily also made a startling disclosure about her brothers’ grand plans. After roundly praising the Bendas’ troupe for its professionalism, fine orchestra, and commendable repertoire (inclusive of Schiller’s Robbers and Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General), the reviewer announced that the brothers’ “main goal and ambition is to direct the Krakow stage.”!”! The Benda brothers did not realize this ambition, but they succeeded in delivering their star sister to Krakow by fall 1865, where she, Feliks, and Weronika were recruited for the new Krakow Theatre company being formed. How Modrzejewska decided to leave Zimajer in Czerniowce remains a subject of much speculation or blatantly inaccurate report. Her decision broke apart her personal and professional world. It meant dismantling her fictitiously respectable little family and abandoning her carefully constructed starmanager partnership with Zimajer. Yet the Czerniowce theatrical enterprise was clearly floundering, and Modrzejewska now seemed ambivalent about Zimajer’s German-language vision of her brilliant career. More terribly, their little daughter, Maria, had died in the spring of 1865, and Modrzejewska’'s grief may have led to a further alienation of affections and a strong need fora change of scene. Her memoirs cloak the crisis in vague terms of injury and illness: “Blow after blow struck my heart and bruised it to the core. Family considerations do not allow me to give the details of all I suffered at that time; but after fearful struggles with inexorable Fate, I found myself free, but ill and at the point of death. My mother and my brother Felix brought me and my little son Rudolphe to Cracow, and I never saw Mr. Modjeski again.”'’” At least in the life story she designed for posterity, Modjeska did not kill off her lover or reduce him to a professional mistake. Nor did she admit the harm and embarrassment he inflicted thereafter by holding their son hostage and exciting gossip with his new wife and theatrical discovery. On paper, Modjeska nearly achieved the clean slate that she could never guarantee in life.

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 43 MODRZEJEWSKA IN KRAKOW

As her critics had observed and Modrzejewska herself knew, her acting skills still needed honing when she returned to Krakow after four years on the road.'”° But her relationship to her hometown had changed fundamentally. Modrzejewska was no longer the young Helena who practiced make-believe in Krakow’s settings with a future audience in mind. She returned to Krakow an experienced actress who was engaged immediately by the city’s best theater. During her three extraordinarily successful years there, she was ever a performer on public display in a small city—a professional on the boards and a local celebrity increasingly admired in society. All Krakéw now served as her formal stage. Modrzejewska’s reentry in 1865 was fortuitous because Krakéw was then on the verge of a municipal renaissance. In the latter half of the 1860s, the

once-free city regained a precious national prominence in consequence of the Austrian empire's new weakness. After Austria lost the Prusso-Austrian War in 1866, the empire yielded to Hungarian demands and was reconstituted as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. At roughly the same time, the empire negotiated support from the Polish conservative aristocratic faction in its Council of Nations by ceding Galicia local national autonomy.'”* Austrian concessions included reinstating Polish as the official language of the administration, courts, and schools; granting the city of Krakow self-government; re-Polonizing Krakow’s prestigious, historic Jagiellonian University; and es-

tablishing Krakéw’s Academy of Arts and Letters.’ The empire's new tolerance of the circulation, study, and preservation of Polish subjects enabled Krakow’s florescence as the most prominent center of Polish intellectual life after the 1863 uprising. In sharp contrast, Russian-ruled Warsaw suffered terrible political and economic repressions, and its press and theaters had to cope with often eviscerating censorship. Krakow’s institutional and cultural rejuvenation coincided with the spread of Positivism, a philosophy which abetted its populace's increasing professionalization and advocated organic foundation work to rebuild the nation’s culture and economy in lieu of planning yet another armed revolt. Once the city regained administrative autonomy, its newly elected mayor, Jézef Dietl, a middle-class doctor of a Polonized German family and a former rector of Jagiellonian University, actively promoted cooperation among the city’s classes

44 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA and borrowed the aristocrats’ grand gestures toward achieving that goal, hosting citywide balls and holiday feasts for the poor.'*° Before Dietl took office, an intelligentsia was emerging from the growing numbers of educated professionals in the city—doctors, bankers, industrialists, scholars—who collaborated with civic-minded aristocrats on various social and cultural ventures.

The reformation of the Krakéw Theatre modeled one such enterprise, a product of sanguine class collaboration as well as a kind of pet project of the aristocracy. In summer 1865, a consortium of aristocrats, bankers, and intellectuals—among them, Adam Potocki, Adam Skorupka, and Stanislaw Kozmian—commenced the theater's reorganization, raising the impressive sum of 15,000 Austrian florins for the task and convincing aristocratic landed gentry and affluent middle-class patrons to demonstrate their patriotism and good taste by buying subscriptions for the 1865-1866 season.’”’ The new enterprise was headed by Count Adam Skorupka, a theater lover whose reputation as a “Parisian in Krakow’ reflected his extensive familiarity with France and French culture.'** Some historians judge Skorupka to have been a good front man for the Krakow Theatre, well-positioned to badger his aristocratic peers for support and quick to launch renovations of the theater building’s lighting and heating systems, buy much-needed costumes and decorations in Vienna, and hire staff, including an artistic director.’ Others dismiss Skorupka as an inexperienced manager and ladies’ man, pointing instead to the long-term influence of Stanislaw Kozmian, an intellectual and aristocrat with a thoroughgoing knowledge of European drama and the Parisian and Viennese stages. Kozmian assumed artistic direction of the theater in January 1866 and soon after partnered with Skorupka as general director. Before Kozmian was free to serve, however, Skorupka imported a first artistic director from Warsaw, the retired actor, director, playwright, and teacher Jan Seweryn Jasinski. Whatever Skorupka’s flaws as director, the forty-odd-member cast he assembled was by all accounts extraordinary. It included Modrzejewska; Feliks Benda and his wife; Wincenty Rapacki and his wife, the actress Jézefina (?) Baumann; and the reigning young star of the Krakow stage, Antonina Hoffmann, a highly talented performer who was Kozmian’s lifelong mistress and whose surname discreetly shifted from maiden to married variant (Hoffman6wna to Hoffmannowa or Hoffmann) in theater reviews over the years. That this cast was assembled all at once gave Modrzejewska a key advantage: She faced Hoffmann alone as a rival for female leading roles. While her male romantic partner in these roles was most often the accomplished Warsaw ac-

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 45 tor Wladystaw Swieszewski (1827-1876) in her first Krakéw season, she later played regularly opposite her brother Feliks. Just as Modjeska remembered her first impressions of her hometown to be more interactive than absorptive, so the influence of the Krakéw Theatre on the young actress, in her assessment, proved far less formative than collaborative. Modrzejewska's three years in the newly organized theater coincided

with the gradual emergence of what theater critics and historians dubbed the “Krakow School” of acting.'*° Kozmian is usually credited as the Krakow School’s creator, for he not only reigned as artistic director and then formal general director of the theater from 1871 to 1885, but also wrote extensively in the Krakow press about the Krakéw Theatre and the theater. Kozmian served as one of the editors and chief contributors to Time (Czas), Krakéw’s conservative and most respected daily. He also co-founded and co-edited Polish Review (Przeglqd Polski), a serious journal on Polish culture and history, and Theatre Bill (Afisz Teatralny), a compendium of theater news intended “to link the theater with its public.”'*' In general, Kozmian functioned as a dominant influence in 1860s Krakow, for he was one of the leaders of the Stariczyks, the city’s strong conservative political faction. As it evolved over the decades of Kozmian’s supervision, the Krakow School was perceived as distinctive and innovative in its emphasis on script preparation, character analysis, good diction, strong ensemble work, intensive rehearsing and performance schedules, and an acting style based on truth, simplicity, naturalness, and moderation. In his “Address to Actors” before the opening of the 1871-1872 season, Kozmian prescribed a repertoire that encompassed, in the following order of importance, classic Polish drama, good contemporary Polish plays, the masterpieces of world drama with Shakespeare at the fore, and the best contemporary works available, which he primarily identified as witty, well-made French plays.’ Kozmian's influence on the Krakow Theatre's repertoire was already evident in 1866, his first year as artistic director. The Krakéw School’s other features were less clearly authored and less quickly defined, although Kozmian came to approve these in his reviews over the years and to cultivate them in later generations of actors. The improvement in actors’ diction and the focus on careful ensemble work, for example, had already begun under Jan Jasinski’s direction in fall 1865.'*° Nor was it always clear if the Krakow School developed through its directors or its actors. As Got remarks in his biography of Antonina Hoffmann, Kozmian’s mistress and colleague, the actress “was the

46 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA living example of the principles articulated by the School’s creator.”'%* Theater

historian Zbigniew Jablonski likewise identifies Hoffmann's measured performances, stripped of pathos, declamation, and conventional gestures and mimicry, as truly representative of the Krakdéw School. It would be difficult to ascertain which came first: Hoffmann’s thoughtful acting or Kozmian’s thoughtful design. Modrzejewska’s molding by the Krakdéw School is also debatable, even though she entered Kozmian and Hoffmans force field as a mere provincial star. Certainly her rehearsal and performance schedule intensified: combined rehearsals and shows on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays; morning and afternoon rehearsals on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and performances on Sundays.'* To satisfy a stable, small-city audience with ever-new fare, the directors mounted frequent premieres—a wearying six per month in spring 1866—and slated six rehearsals to prepare for each one.'** Noting that “there was but little time for amusement” during her Krakdéw years, Modjeska also admits the stress of overwork, recalling “the most dreadful experience’ of temporary memory loss before one rehearsal because she “studied so much during the season of 1866-67."1°” Yet with minimal retraining, Modrzejewska impressed the Krakow audi-

ence from the moment of her debut. Commenting on her performances in Waclaw Szymanowski’s weak historical drama Salomon and the same White

Camellia that she had played in distant Bochnia, the reviewer in Time enthused: Modrzejowska [sic] presented herself from the start as the kind of artist rarely encountered even in the great capitals, an artist who, with work and excellent direction, could be first-rate. Nature has been very generous to her, giving her all that an artist truly needs—that is, aside from a beautiful exterior, figure, and voice, that most important gift of artistic perceptiveness, a perceptiveness that instinctively senses what a role requires. Mme. Modrzejowska [sic] also possesses a delicacy in grasping her role and the sort of charm that even the most assiduous efforts cannot achieve, for this kind of charm is innate.'**

In Salomon Modrzejewska played the good Jewish daughter Sara (characterized by the Time reviewer as a “womanly ideal”) who falls in love with both a Polish nobleman and his Christian faith, for which she is killed by her father. Rebutting an overheard remark that Modrzejewska'’s characterization seemed not at all Jewish, the reviewer for Time defended her decision to play Sara with queenly serenity and resignation to her fate. Drawing on her gener-

THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 4-7 ous natural gifts, Modrzejewska apparently endowed a markedly ethnic role with standardized Polish beauty and nobility. Her graceful suffering became the play’s main event. Her performance in the salon comedy White Camellia proved all the more impressive because this “serious and ideal Sara” reincarnated herself as the elegant Countess Hortensia “with such truth and charm.” Here the reviewer combined kudos with an intriguing observation on the actress’s real social status, declaring that no one would know that Modrzejewska’s salon character was being played by “a middle-class girl from Krakow who had never frequented salons and knew no such role models from touring provincial stages.” His comment intimated both the class-jumping power of performance as well as Modrzejewska's innate nobility, assessments that recurred with the actress's growing stardom. This rave review did specify, however, that the inherently gifted Modrzejewska still required “excellent direction” from the Krakow Theatre's presumably superior management. As theater historian Jan Michalik observes, the little concrete information that exists about rehearsals conducted in the Krakdéw Theatre pertains chiefly to later years in Kozmian’s directorship. By these accounts, an established Kozmian had his actors read scripts carefully, analyze their characters’ psychology, and attend all rehearsals for a premiere.'*” But it is telling that Modjeska, one of the few actor-memoirists to describe a Krakow Theatre rehearsal, opts not only to highlight the direction of Kozmian’s predecessor Jasinski, but also pronounces Jasinski, not Kozmian, “my master’ and “the animating spirit of the whole institution, as well as a perfect and accomplished instructor.”'*° Jasinski had been her director for just three months. When he was discreetly relieved of his position in January 1866, the implied reasons included his import of mediocre repertoire from the Warsaw stage as well as assigning the new player Modrzejewska leading roles normally given Hoffmann, who was away from the stage until late in 1865.'" Several decades later Kozmian disclosed that “Jasinski supported [Modrzejewska] to Hoffmann’s detriment, and it was no surprise that [Hoffmann] consequently felt aggrieved.”'” Modfjeska’s version of this story insists that the sixty-year-old Jasinski kindly took her under his wing, corrected the singsong declamation of verse drama that marked her as a provincial player, praised her diligence despite her easy triumphs as a “so-called ‘star,” and encouraged her to tackle the “emotional and tragic parts’ that she felt belonged to Hoffmann.” As told in Memories and Impressions, Modrzejewska initially refused these challenging roles so as

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THE MAKING OF A POLISH ACTRESS 63 opportunities. Despite her enormous workload and grinding schedule, she never lost sight of her individual agenda and cultivated her supporters and mentors to help her realize it. In retrospect, she would identify Jan Jasinski and her brother Feliks as her chief Krakow influences instead of paying the expected homage to Kozmian. She implied that her intensive, innovative train-

ing was mainly her own idea. After three years of hard labor, Modrzejewska sought a professional sinecure that would give her greater control over her time and career, and a high society that she could enter as an established artist and a respectable lady. By autumn 1868, the young Helena who had prostrated herself on the floor of the Dominican Church emerged from the Church of St. Anne as the wife of an aristocrat and a local star deemed worthy of Warsaw's consideration. Up to this point, Helena’s extraordinary selftransformation roughly paralleled that of her hometown. But Modrzejewska needed the big-city stage of Warsaw to unfurl her national greatness.

DPS

Warsaw's State of the Stars

Helena Modrzejewska’s conquest of Warsaw by theatrical debut in 1868 was a major event in Polish culture, the commencement of what theater historians demarcate as the “epoch of the stars.”' In her memoirs, Modjeska reconstructs

her debut as its own drama, primed by antagonism and intrigue, tightly focused on a single performance, and concluding, of course, with her unadulterated triumph. But her conquest of Warsaw sooner resembled a political campaign. Modrzejewska strategized this next move with an eye to consummate, rather than contingent, theatrical glory. Guided by a close adviser, she plotted her campaign with ambition, agility, and media savvy, and delivered masterly performances over the course of several months under intense public scrutiny. She stepped literally into the national spotlight. During the long period of partitioned Poland (1795-1918) the Warsaw Imperial Theatres constituted an obsessively watched showcase of the nation. Conquering the Warsaw stage won Modrzejewska indelible stardom in Polish history as well as the heady, lucrative worship of theater-crazy Varsovians. In Memories and Impressions, Modjeska cannily presents Warsaw's complex of theaters as a kind of fortress to be taken, inserting a photo of their imposing edifice and detailing their square footage (“equal to a large square block in New York”), their enormous staff of “seven to eight hundred people,” and their position as the city’s main venue for the performing arts, including “an

opera company, a comic opera, a ballet, a drama and a comedy company.” This fortress, she implies, was impregnable, organized bureaucratically under

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czarist administration and operated according to “the rule of seniority’: “Its artistic force was recruited mostly from its dramatic schools, and if any outsider was admitted to the ranks, it was usually to the lowest ones.” Its company of consummate insiders stood ready to repel any would-be invaders from the provinces. If the Warsaw Imperial Theatres seemed a fortress from Modrzejewska’s professional standpoint, they also represented an institution of immense and complicated political symbolism, alternately defended or shunned, and yet always maintained by the powers that were. In contrast to the major theaters in Krakéw and Lwéw, the Warsaw theaters had been founded as a state enterprise during the reign of Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-1795), the last Polish monarch, whose rule disintegrated in the partitions.* The state institution he sponsored survived even when the state fell, and Poland’s loss of sovereignty only supercharged its political valence, the more so because this theater of Poland’s former capital was located in the Russian partition. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the theater served as a symbolic

66 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA site of national opposition, bolstering the national cause with patriotic repertoire in a free Duchy of Warsaw under Napoleon’s protection (1807-1815) and throughout the November 1830 uprising. In the grim years leading up to the 1863 revolt, nationalists used the great theater complex to stage their protests and vent their outrage against the occupiers. When the Russian czar and the Prussian regent were to meet in Warsaw in October 1860, pranksters sabotaged their night on the town, doctoring theater bills to announce the upcoming play “Two Villains” and setting off a stink bomb of sulfuric acid and asafetida in the czar’s theater box. Although the management frantically aired the building and replaced the damaged furniture and curtains, the attendees endured the performance with hankies pressed to nose.° As deadly antagonisms flared between Russians and Poles, the theater became the backdrop for more violent events. In March 1861, a rock-throwing mob demonstrated under the apartment windows of General Abramowicz, the detested president of the theaters, and an assassination attempt was made on Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich Romanov, the czar’s brother and governor-general of the Kingdom of Poland, as he was exiting the theater in July 1862. The Russian authorities, in turn, closed the complex of the Great Theatre and Variety Theatre for long periods in 1861 and 1862 and billeted their

troops in the building's grand ballrooms.’ During this bout of Polish unrest, the Russians chose to occupy the fortress at the outset, preventing its cooption as national symbol and battle site. The Warsaw Imperial Theatres thus figured as a deeply politicized symbol for patriotic Poles during the period of national mourning in the wake of the civilians killed in late February 1861 and the uprising itself. Once the Russian authorities reopened the theaters to signal Warsaw's “normalization,” Polish Varsovians boycotted all performances and humiliated any compatriots weak enough to cross the ticket line.* Such stars of the Warsaw stage as Jan Krélikowski and Alojzy Z6tkowski, Modrzejewska’s future colleagues, were forced to play to audiences composed “almost exclusively of Russian officers and bureaucrats and those spheres close

to them.” That the Warsaw theaters could be periodically boycotted, but always cherished by Poles, underscored the riveting conditions of their existence. As the pseudonymous Baroness XYZ observed in “her” excellent editorials on Warsaw life and society, published as Letters to a Friend in the 1880s, Varsovians were obsessed with their theater because it had survived the partitions as a national institution and yet was ever at the mercy of the occupying empire.'° The

WARSAW’S STATE OF THE STARS 67 theater's existence seemed that much more precarious after 1863, when Polish as a spoken public language was allowed only onstage and in church and forbidden in Warsaw's schools, courts, and bureaucracy, including the theater's own."' The theater persisted as the one live forum where, within certain limits, Polish history, literature, character types, costume, and music could be on public display. Nonetheless, Varsovians were always on the alert for signs of Russian sabotage. They duly noted that the czarist authorities had deliberately named the newly completed complex “Great” rather than “National” in 1833 and had categorized both the Great Theatre and Variety Theatre as “imperial” in 1852. As a state-controlled and supported enterprise, these theaters resembled their Russian imperial counterparts in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where actors were classified as civil servants and the theaters operated as a state bureaucracy.'* The joined Warsaw Imperial Theatres fell under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The president appointed to oversee their vast bureaucracy consulted weekly with the city’s governor-general about contracts, salaries, staff, and repertoire.’ Yet the same imperial administration which closely monitored its operation and censored and taxed its productions also ensured the Warsaw Imperial Theatres’ material stability. The Russians in Warsaw valued this institution not only as a pacifying tool, but also as their local art and entertainment."* The grand edifice designed by Antonio Corazzi and boasting 1,100 seats and a large modern stage was completed under Russian occupation in 1833; a fine west wing added in 1836 housed the smaller 322-seat Variety Theatre.'* The Warsaw Imperial Theatres received an annual subsidy from the czarist administration, albeit a much smaller sum than was allotted the opera and ballet favored by the Russians. ‘The actors, all employees of the empire, were guaranteed decent salaries, feus (set payments per performance), and, from 1838, the

extraordinary benefit of a pension.’ No other theater in Poland could provide its players such excellent terms and security of employment. Here was a captured fortress which paradoxically offered its residents material comfort as well as national glory. By the time of Modrzejewska’s 1868 debut, the czarist theatrical administration seemed on the brink of important new improvements. After the sudden death of theater president General Jozef Hauke in April 1868, the new appointee was, according to Baroness XYZ, the exceptional “honest Russian” Sergei Mukhanov (1833-1897), a liberal monarchist who knew and loved art, eschewed blatantly political appointments, and respected his new Polish em-

68 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA ployees.” The first Russian to occupy this important post, Mukhanov allayed fears about any Russifying agenda through his early show of sensitivity and dedication.'* He pleasantly surprised Varsovians as a benevolent, conscientious manager, a provider ona grand scale. To assure the artists under his control of his good intent, Mukhanov took Polish-language lessons, hired Polish staff, and hosted holiday receptions for his employees at which he addressed the assembled in Polish and observed their Catholic customs.” Mukhanov invested boldly in the theater’s material and human resources. His administration refurbished the complex in Theatre Square, built the Summer Theatre in the Saxon Gardens, and renovated the Theatre on the Isle in Lazienki Park, restoring a nationally cherished structure erected during Poniatowski's reign.*® The “honest Russian” was best known, however, for his

Midas touch with talent, particularly during the first half of his tenure as theater president. He successfully concluded the negotiations begun under Hauke for Modrzejewska’s debut, oversaw her subsequent generous contracts, and cultivated her asa star talent and a valuable colleague. He recruited other important stars as well—Modrzejewska’s ambitious co-star Rapacki (a sec-

ond defector from Krakéw) in 1869, the accomplished naif Romana Popiet6wna (nicknamed Popietka) in 1870, and the male dramatic and romantic lead Boleslaw Leszczynski in 1873.*' To the best of his ability and the extent of his resources, Mukhanov pampered his cluster of Warsaw stars with excellent salaries and solicitous treatment. Mukhanov’s ambitions for and achievements in the Warsaw Imperial Theatres represented a joint venture, the good works of an able administrator in consultation with his remarkable artist wife. Maria Kalergis-Mukhanova (1822-1874), eleven years Mukhanov’s senior and a salon lioness before their marriage in 1863, was a virtuoso amateur pianist, a passionate patron of the arts, and a highly skilled, well-connected strategist. The daughter of Friedrich Karol Nesselrode, a German general in czarist service mismatched with Tekla Nalecz-Gorska, a beautiful Polish socialite, Kalergis-Mukhanova was raised in the St. Petersburg—based family of her uncle Karol Robert Nesselrode, the czar’s minister of foreign affairs, and received “a Russian education with the cosmopolitan coloring typical of aristocratic St. Petersburg families.”” Maria escaped from an unhappy first marriage to the rich Jan Kalergis and lived thereafter as an independent and wealthy woman, traveling throughout Europe and settling longest in Paris. Feted as the “White Mermaid,” she was

WARSAW’S STATE OF THE STARS 69 admired for her blonde beauty, witty intelligence, musical talent, and salon savoir faire.

Kalergis-Mukhanova played a key behind-the-scenes role in the Warsaw theaters’ new development, beginning with her husband’s initial advancement. Although she was highly ambivalent about residing in Poland, for her a cultural backwater whose politics she once had championed but later despised, Kalergis-Mukhanova engineered her husband’s appointment through her state connections. As she confessed in a letter to her daughter Maria, she was relieved to see “Serge in active service ... in a position outside of politics which allows him to do good works and to demonstrate his organizational talent.”’? Once her husband was in place, Kalergis-Mukhanova helped him secure new talent, beginning with the hire of a prerequisite prima donna. Like Count Przezdziecki, she quickly discerned the Warsaw company’s need for a charismatic leading lady. “We have excellent actors,” she wrote Maria in May 1868, “but the women are very poor.’”* She personally seconded her husband in inviting Modrzejewska to Warsaw, an unusually gracious gesture from an aristocrat which impressed the socially striving actress.”** When Kalergis-

Mukhanova’s convalescence at various spas prevented her from attending Modrzejewska's debut performances in fall 1868, she requested her return to give several more performances in spring 1869, and sweetened that command with a dinner invitation to the actress and her husband.”° The Mukhanovs’ exceptional support of Modrzejewska conveyed their great desire for her talent and their growing regard for her person. It also reflected the Warsaw theaters’ abiding reverence for the player over the director or the playwright. After the passing of Wojciech Bogustawski (1757-1829), the first great Polish impresario who combined the talents of actor, director, and mana-

ger, the theaters’ reputation mainly rested on their performing stars, such players as dramatic leading lady Leontyna Halpertowa (1803-1895), dramatic leading man Jan Krélikowski (1820-1895), and comic lead Alojzy Zétkowski (1814~1889).?” For decades before the heralded epoch of the stars, a kind of star system already functioned in Warsaw, with repertoire tailored to the best and most popular actors’ specialties and ambitions.”* The Warsaw Imperial Theatres’ artistic director, appointed by the president, did not dictate repertoire, as Kozmian and Skorupka had done in Krakow. Instead, he negotiated repertoire with his entrenched, thin-skinned artists, showcased his best talent, assembled supporting casts, indulged in a backstage intrigue or two, and

70 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA ran general interference. Nineteenth-century Polish players worked and lived in the state of the stars. When Modrzejewska sought a Warsaw engagement and found herself courted by a sophisticated star-hungry administration, she settled in this state with its attendant privileges of national glory, keen public support, a stable and lucrative position, and a more self-directed career. Her conquest of the fortress won her the status of resident royalty. THE BATTLE FOR WARSAW

Modrzejewska nevertheless hesitated before committing to a Warsaw debut. She understood very well the negative consequences of this player-centered theater, realizing that her future colleagues would be wedded to the status quo and ruthlessly defensive of their turf. To conquer and dominate meant that she would have to displace and demote. Few, if any, of the entrenched Warsaw company would welcome her. More likely, these established actors would be dismissive, resentful, and obstructive toward any outside contender. Although Modrzejewska long toyed with the possibility of playing on the Warsaw stage, it was Przezdziecki who mounted and then helped sustain her campaign.” The shrewd count set off waves of advance publicity to win the interest of the theater administration and the Warsaw public. Approaching the theaters’ top bureaucrat, he relied on Modrzejewska’s beauty and adeptness at posing to pitch her debut. The talented Krakow photographer Walery Rzewuski had assembled five photo albums in 1867-1868, each depicting a local star (Hoffmann, Modrzejewska, Benda, Bolestaw Ladnowski, Rapacki) in his or her various roles.*° When Przezdziecki showed Modrzejewska's album to General Hauke in February 1868, the theater president was instantly sold on her good looks, especially in Ophelia’s winsome disarray, and was eager to negotiate her guest performances.” Przezdziecki alerted Modrzejewska to the power of the Warsaw press in smoothing her acceptance. Her battle for Warsaw required that she navigate the fierce crosscurrents of Warsaw's big-city papers after her easy ride on the praise of Krakéw’s Time.” Even before the Warsaw journalists turned their attention to her, Przezdziecki prompted press interest by publishing in the esteemed French monthly L’Artiste an anonymous tribute which included a review of her performances, a sonnet in her honor composed by a mysterious “Lord Pilgrim,” and a heliograph of the beautiful actress in the flesh. French

WARSAW S STATE OF THE STARS 71 coverage would prompt Warsaw's interest in the actress, but Przezdziecki additionally saw to local advertisement. In a 24 February 1868 letter to Modrzejewska, he urged her to have a look at the last two issues of the Warsaw Courier which spotlighted the Krakow Theatre and “its first-rate star.”** In due course, news of her Krakow prowess had spread to other papers. As her debut date neared, more photographs were deployed, this time in the press, to woo the public to her performances. The same stunning Ophelia portrait that had won over Hauke appeared in Sheaves (Klosy) in late September 1868, a visual ad reinforced by verbal praise of her “shapely form, charming beauty, and eyes alight with fire and emotion.”*’ As Szczublewski observes, Modrzejewska’s “Warsaw campaign’ constituted a new public relations phenomenon: “Never before had an artist prepared such a comprehensive battle for success. | Coverage in] the dailies and weeklies, a series of lithographs with her posed in her best roles... lots of photos displayed in shopwindows, an oil painting of her Ophelia exhibited in the Academy of Fine Art. The actress appeared on the field of battle long before the battle commenced.”*° Behind the scenes, Modrzejewska was engaged in tough negotiations, which she handled with vacillating confidence and apprehension. Her first response to Prezdziecki’s Warsaw proposal was to point out the difficulties in obtaining a leave from the Krakow Theatre and the uncertainty of performing good repertoire in Warsaw.*’ When the count pressed her with sample repertoire lists and possible performance dates, she expressed her gratitude, but made clear her reservations: “As for the number of performances—I'd agree to six at the most because I don’t want to perform in old plays and the Warsaw actors surely won't want to learn new pieces for me. I’ve learned a bit from people who know the Warsaw theater about the problems facing debuting artists.”** By May 1868, Jan Checinski, her old acquaintance from her touring days

and the theaters’ newly appointed director of drama and comedy, had entered into these negotiations and assured her of his support and clout. Under Mukhanov’ss benevolent administration, he informed her, he would at last “be good for something” in determining “the fate of the drama.”*’ Thereafter began an oddly triangulated tug-of-war over Modrzejewska’s remuneration and repertoire, with Przezdziecki pushing for higher fees and ambitious plays, Checinski deploring Przezdziecki’s unrealistic demands and urging Modrzejewska to reason, and Modrzejewska leaning on the count and playing coy with the director. Her “unrealistic” adviser won her an impressive 150 rubles

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9O STARRING MADAME MODJESKA Frou-Frou, and consumers reportedly quipped that at last they “could lick Modrzejewska.”'” The public’s cult of Modrzejewska, from their ticket-line vigil to their candy consumption, gave her enormous power at the box office. Szczublewski maintains that Modrzejewska earned more for the Warsaw theaters than did the long-established, fabulously paid Zétkowski.'* In the epoch of the stars, patrons attended the theater not for a specific play, but for a specific performer. As Got observes, they went “to see Modrzejewska, or Z6tkowski, or Derynzanka’” (a tragedienne who flourished in the late 1870s to early 1880s).'“* Once Modrzejewska had won the public's eager following, she mainly had to decide where she would lead them. After her meandering apprenticeship with Zimajer and her hard labor under Skorupka and Kozmian’s direction, she had attained more power to set her own agenda, to ascertain what sort of artist she wanted to be and what sort of art she wanted to create. Muchas she had sought to be received socially as Madame Chiapowska, so Modrzejewska aspired to be acknowledged as a serious artist, and she discovered the same master for her finishing in Kalergis-Mukhanova. This consummate musician was fast friends with Franz Liszt, a onetime student of Frederic

Chopin, and a key patron of the man she considered the musical genius of her era, Richard Wagner. Consigned to Warsaw as her home after Mukhanov had been named president of its theaters, she strived never to lose contact with the musicians she had admired elsewhere, encouraging their guest stops in Poland as they toured between Berlin and St. Petersburg, and traveling often, despite serious health problems, to mingle with her beloved geniuses in the West. Until her death in May 1874, Kalergis-Mukhanova served as a remarkable professional role model, protector, and mentor for Modrzejewska. The actress had benefited from the support of other aristocratic women and had studied the career moves of adventurous actresses in Vienna and Paris, but she had yet to encounter a society lady who incarnated both master strategist and artist. Kalergis-Mukhanova’s class and age (she was almost twenty years Modrzejewska’s senior) prevented her social descent into a profession. Yet she performed willingly in public for charitable causes, compared favorably with talented professional pianists, and invested much time and energy in developing professional musicianship in Warsaw, fundraising for the new Conservatory of Music and promoting Aleksander Zarzycki as the conserva-

WARSAW S STATE OF THE STARS O1 tory's first director.'** Kalergis-Mukhanova performed as an artist and functioned as an advocate, but took neither formal credit nor pay. In somewhat the same way, she served the Warsaw theater, drawing on her broad knowledge of the arts and artists as she saw to the theater’s improvement. Kalergis-Mukhanova was not simply an aristocratic do-gooder, but an artist-aristocrat of catholic tastes who did professional good works. In this regard, she resembled Przezdziecki, although her sex and expertise in the performing arts made her a more apt role model for Modrzejewska. She proved to be Modrzejewska's surest, most perspicacious intercessor with the Russian censor in winning approval of serious, “politically suspect” repertoire for the Warsaw stage. When the censor balked at a proposed production of Hamlet, protesting its “suggestive” murder of a king, Kalergis-Mukhanova worked her connections and personal magic: “She invited the gentleman [the censor] to her house, and in a few words persuaded him that the murder was a family affair only, and therefore perfectly harmless.”'*° According to Memories and Impressions, Kalergis-Mukhanova used different methods to gain permission to perform Slowacki’s Mazepa, a play the censor decried for its audacious inclusion of a Polish king. The savvy negotiater “had a talk with Monsieur Censor, conceded his demotion of the play's king to prince, and obtained for his lady friend a small part in the Warsaw ballet.”

Apart from facilitating important new repertoire with her diplomacy, Kalergis-Mukhanova taught Modrzejewska, her best protégée, how cultivated, well-rounded, and seriously ambitious a performing artist could be. The Baroness XYZ best evoked the sort of “master classes” that KalergisMukhanova conducted for her chosen few: “If there ever was a true artistic salon in Warsaw, then it was at [Kalergis-Mukhanova’s]. She admitted only a few people, a select group of artists and writers, and her dinners and evenings were among the city’s finest and most vibrant. There they read new works and studied music extensively. And there Modrzejewska, Romana Popielka, and Krolikowski sorted out their conceptions of their roles, and the hostess herself acquainted her guests with the latest musical compositions and treated them to the Chopin pieces that she knew and played so well.”'*8 While contemporary critics were debating whether an actor could be respected as a creative artist or hailed as a genius, Kalergis-Mukhanovass gatherings conveyed the highest compliment, implying a parity between superb actors and superb musicians.'” In contrast to other professional artists in Po-

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WARSAW S STATE OF THE STARS 93 land, actors were least likely to be educated and specially trained, yet KalergisMukhanova purposefully set about refining her “select group.”'*° The ama-

teur pianist activated for them a connection, often stated in theater reviews, between great musicians and great actors as virtuosos. Kalergis-Mukhanova had come of age during the heyday of those composer-performers who had thrilled Europe with their charisma, brilliance, and showpieces, and she knew well the greatest piano virtuoso of all time, Franz Liszt.'*' The equivalence between the careers of a musician and an actor could only be approximate, for an actor had no recourse to the musician's universal language and would be much

more limited in designing a solo career. Nonetheless, Kalergis-Mukhanova expressly encouraged Modrzejewska to pursue a career as a touring virtuoso, advising her “to study in German three Shakespearian parts—Juliet, Ophelia, and Desdemona—in order to perform them at the greatest dramatic festival in Weimar, where she would introduce [her] to the German stage and also to the greatest German of the time, Wagner.”'” Modrzejewska did not follow Kalergis-Mukhanova to Weimar, but her joint efforts to refine her own talent and to uplift the Warsaw theater’s repertoire reflected the master lessons she had absorbed from her female mentor. Her sessions with Kalergis-Mukhanova had broadened her artistic horizons and heightened her professional goals. At the Mukhanovs’ she rubbed elbows with such European musical greats as Anton Rubinstein and Hans von Biilow and was advised to dream on a world scale about her career prospects. Unlike Liszt or Wagner, Modrzejewska would never compose her own scores, yet she aimed to be at once a great artist and an ambitious impresario, giving the finest performances and importing world-class plays to her Warsaw audience. The actress soon discovered the enormous conflict between virtuosic am-

bition and working for the collective good in the Warsaw theater. While Modrzejewska was well matched to the foreign artists she met in the Mukhanovs’ home, she found very few kindred spirits among her colleagues on the job. The state of the stars was, in a sense, ungovernable, its residents reluctant to comply with direction or to undertake new collective endeavors. Too many individual agendas and intrigues worked at cross-purposes. For the first time since her embattled year in the Lwow Theatre, Modrzejewska confronted an

entrenched group of actors, some of whose resentment only deepened the longer she reigned. She could no longer rely on her family circle, as she had in Krakow, nor would she be able to reconstitute it in Warsaw.

94 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA A closet impresario among virtuosos and lesser talents, Modrzejewska first had to cope with the uneven ensemble of the Warsaw company. The gallery of players that she sketches in her memoirs is carefully censored, constrained by collegial courtesy and her claim to her American readers that the Warsaw theater “belonged to the first rank in Europe.”'*? Here she pays brief tribute to her initial female rivals—the tragedienne Salomea Palinska, who “died shortly after my entering the Warsaw Theatre” (in 1873, five years after Modrzejewska’s 1868 debut); the “beautiful and talented” Aleksandra Rakiewiczowa, whose career foundered on “the too rapid increase of her progeny’; and the ingenue Wiktoryna Bakalowiczowa, who was not “strictly beautiful,” but “the finest product of the Warsaw dramatic school.”!’* Her bolder portraits of Kr6likowski and Zdtkowski, the two major stars of her company in 1869, barely

hint at trouble in paradise. On the one hand, she portrays “our great tragedian” Jan Krolikowski as her frequent co-star, an intellectual, versatile player possessed of an “outwardly quiet, but highly strung nature” and equally adept at playing either Hamlet or Iago.'** On the other hand, her sketch of Alojzy Zotkowski, “our great comedian,” celebrates his handsome figure, arresting stage presence, and instinctual genius for comic characterizations, but also remarks his lack of education and simpleminded craving for applause. Modjeska blandly notes that she had little opportunity to perform with Zétkowski, “for his best parts were in plays in which there was no suitable place for me.” She forbears mentioning how “our great comedian” sometimes egregiously mishandled roles assigned him in her best plays.'*° Apparently Warsaw's two most popular stars performed largely apart from each other.’*’

The uncensored cast picture, at least during Modrzejewska’s first years in Warsaw, was far less salutary. In December 1869, Chlapowski divulged to Boleslaw Ladnowski, one of Modrzejewska’s former leading men, that “there is no collegiality among the actors [here]. Every actor considers himself an official and worries only about his own good, not at all about the success of the play or the good of the theater.”’** Chtapowski dismissed the artistic director Checinski as a crazy intriguer and pointed out the company's woeful lack of male romantic leads. Neither director nor actors strived to achieve an

ensemble: “Individual roles are often very well-played, but that’s the end of it. The casting often makes no sense, decided either at the director’s whim or according to an actor's seniority. It’s terribly stupid.”!’’ The remedy for these assorted problems, he argued, would involve the appointment of a new di-

WARSAW S STATE OF THE STARS 95 rector, the import of reliably excellent players, and the selection of a proper repertoire. Modrzejewska likely shared these sharp opinions and definitely agreed with her husband about engaging either Ladnowski or Feliks Benda to outfit the company with a strong male “lover.”!°° Neither candidate succeeded during the actress's Warsaw tenure. Modrzejewska would not be partnered with an adequate romantic lead until 1873, when the Warsaw Imperial Theatres engaged Bolestaw Leszczynski (1837-1918), a powerful actor whose manly good looks complemented her “womanly charm” and whose great talent, according to his co-star, was not equaled by his “capacity to work.”'*! Other hires incrementally improved the company. Soon after Modrzejewska’s debut, Rapacki duplicated her triumph on the Warsaw stage and abandoned Krakow for the capital. She at last gained a protégée and a sanguine female partner when Mukhanov hired Romana Popieléwna, a young Lwow actress whom Modrzejewska pronounced “the best ingenue I ever saw on any stage.”'® A fine ensemble had coalesced in the Warsaw Imperial Theatres only by 1873, under Modrzejewska’s abiding dominance. By 1874, both her rivals Palinska and Bakatowiczowa had died, and she had effected a reconciliation with the surviving Rakiewiczowa by supporting her for specific roles.'® Yet the intrigues and interpersonal tensions never faded away, as evidenced in Chiapowski and Modrzejewska’s advice to actors about to debut or contemplating the prospect. Chlapowski, for example, counseled the persistent Ladnowski to be polite to Krdélikowski, “a good man” who at times may be jealous of others’ success, but does not scheme, and to be wary of Rapacki, who “never refrains from scheming.” In late 1874, Modrzejewska warned her young confidant Gustaw Fiszer, a Lwow actor whom she had met in Zakopane, that he should postpone his Warsaw debut on account of Mukhanov's absence (the president’s underling Michal Bojanowski “knows nothing about the stage”) and her current quarrel with Checiriski over casting the second female lead in her new star vehicle Sphinx.'® In her hopes for a good ensemble, Modrzejewska was most discouraged by Feliks’s rejection. Feliks Benda was invited to guest star/debut in the autumns of 1871 and 1872 and was not engaged despite relatively good reviews. The reasons for his failure may have stemmed from flaws in his performance, particularly his faulty diction, or the rivalry of the company’s inadequate male leads, but his rebuffalso signaled behind-the-scenes resistance to any increase

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young talented artists starved in the meantime, looking so shabby that even when they pooled their resources for a cup of coffee, the waiters at Lourse, a renowned Warsaw pastry shop, refused to serve them.’”” Reviewing these hard times, Witkiewicz concluded that there were only three options open to artists in 1870s Poland: “remain at home and perish bit by bit, attend dinners and ‘evenings’ and allow oneself to be ‘sponsored,’ or go abroad.” Poland, he bitterly observed, was quite ready to “export her artists.”*° Modrzejewska shared neither the artists’ unpopularity nor their terrible poverty. Yet Witkiewicz’s critique of Warsaw as a “no-man’s land” for serious

art and artists mirrored her own increasing discontent and recommended these disgruntled young men to her as co-seekers of truth and beauty. If Modrzejewska could no longer abide the state of the stars, then she would start laying the groundwork for a state of her own in which high-minded artists such as Chelmonski, Chmielowski, Witkiewicz and their like would be the first settlers. To establish this state, she would need to exercise the last of Witkiewicz’s options: go abroad.

110 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA In effect, Modrzejewska was adapting yet another lesson she had learned from Kalergis-Mukhanova, abandoning a Polish backwater to dedicate herself to greater art made elsewhere. She mainly differed from her mentor in her high evaluation of Polish art and artists. Modrzejewska and her young comrades faulted their working context, not themselves. ‘The sun and her planets were utterly convinced of their own gifts. As the young painters already had discovered in Munich, they cherished and reproduced visions of Poland even when they worked abroad. What wounded them were the philistine attitudes of their compatriots. Modrzejewska and her quartet sought no imported genius to lead them, but a loyal and generous local following. Asa performing artist, Modrzejewska also needed to become proficient in another language if she were to make better art abroad. She had proven herself to be a master of expression, movement, gesture, and costume, but she could not rely on mimetic talents to succeed outside of Poland. She faced once more the conundrum that had dogged her career from its beginning— the challenge of performing well in another language on a non-Polish national stage, in a venue with greater artistic possibilities and international visibility. While she plotted her Warsaw debut, she had toyed with the possibility of a debut on the Paris stage. At Kalergis-Mukhanova’s urging, Modrzejewska had taken up the study of German again in winter 1871 as she convalesced from typhus, preparing for a possible debut in Weimar.” As she recalls in Memories and Impressions, other acquaintances recommended that she learn Russian or Italian, in the latter instance so that she might perform with the great touring actor Tommaso Salvini in, of all places, America.” By 1874, Modrzejewska was contemplating yet another language option, prompted by the example of a guest star on the Warsaw stage and her acquaintance with a family of former emigrants to the United States. Modrzejewska performed in Hamlet and Othello with Maurice Neville, an actor billed as an American who played in English to the casts Polish. Neville’s actual surname was Grossman and he represented an intriguing hybrid phenomenon to the Warsaw public—a Hungarian-born, German-educated veteran of the American and English stages.”** Several reviews remarked that Neville, a non-native English speaker, gained currency in America through his acquaintance with the great poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”** Here was an inspiring example for Modrzejewska, a performing artist whose capacity in English and instinct for cultivating local greats allowed him to cross borders with impu-

WARSAW S STATE OF THE STARS 111 nity. She remembers that Neville encouraged her to study English, and subsequent correspondence attests that she kept in touch with him for future advice .**

Modrzejewska chanced on another American settler in the person of her ardent fan and young friend, Anna Wolska, who attended the actress's yearly guest performances in Lwéw.?** Wolska’s father, Kalikst Wolski (1816-1883), had fled to France after the November 1830 uprising and then quit France for America after participating in the revolution of 1848. In America, he helped found the socialist utopian colony “La Reunion” not far from Dallas, Texas, a farming community planned by hundreds of non-farming socialists which

predictably failed. His daughter Anna, born during the family’s voyage to America, was educated in the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans after her mother’s death. Father and daughter returned to Poland in either 1860 or 1861, and Wolski’s tales of his emigrant experience, titled To America and in America, were first serialized in Sheaves in the mid-1860s and published as a book in 1876. Both the Wolskis would serve Modrzejewska as key informants on America and, once she had settled there, Europe-based guardians of her son and nieces.**’ Modrzejewska visited Wolska in spring 1874 soon after she had performed

with Neville, and she recruited Wolska, along with her brother Feliks, her new protégé Gustaw Fiszer, and others, for a self-styled phalanstery, a semiserious artistic society that she maintained in Zakopane over the summer.”* Delighted with her makeshift new community, Modrzejewska began pondering America as a possible next venue a half-year before Karol was caricatured in the Variety Theatre and her young artist admirers were enlivening her salon. She was learning English from Wolska—an October 1874 letter to

her teacher showed off what she had retained—and the two together contemplated the prospect of founding a real artists’ phalanstery in the United States.**? As early as summer 1874, Modrzejewska was thinking in quite concrete terms of a state of her own.

The exotic frontier of America also beckoned to Modrzejewska from the pages of the Warsaw press. Kalikst Wolski's tales in the 1860s were followed in the 1870s by articles on American politics and society and illustrations of cowboys, Indians, and buffalo hunts in America’s Wild West. By 1875, the journalist Julian Horain, resettled in California, was sending first his Letters from America and then his Letters from California to the Polish Gazette. Ho-

112 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA rain would prove an important contact for Modrzejewska and her traveling party once they reached California. Press interest in America and Modrzejewska’s tentative travel plans dovetailed ideally when her old friend Edward Leo, the editor of the Polish Gazette, decided to hire her new friend Sienkiewicz as the paper's roving correspondent in United States.”*° Over the course of 1875, Modrzejewska, Chiapowski, Dolcio, Modrzejewska’s quartet of fellow artists, the Wolskis, Chtapowski’s relative Lucian Paprocki (a caricaturist), and Chtapowski’s 1863 comrade-in-arms Julian Sypniew-

ski (an agronomist) batted about the idea of emigrating to America. In her memoirs, Modjeska reenacts one such conversation on a “winter evening in 1875” during which the assembled talk of the upcoming Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, peruse maps, and swap tall tales about the flora, fauna, and ready fortune of California—about cactus fruit, coffee growing wild, rattlesnakes, grizzly bears, pumas, and the gold one can dig out “almost every-

where.” She admits the wild idealistic dreams they entertained (“all sorts of things except what really was in store”) and treats her readers to her own derivative vision of utopia: “Oh, but to cook under the sapphire-blue sky in the land of freedom! What joy!” I thought. “To bleach linen at the brook like the maidens of Homer's ‘Iliad’! After the day of toil, to play the guitar and sing by moonlight, to recite poems, or to listen to the mocking-bird!” ... Yes, the prospect of a simple life, so mocked at to-day, had for us the charm of a revivifying novelty. It seemed like being born again.*”

The composition, destination, and purpose of their party were much discussed and subject to constant change. The group expanded for a time to include Modrzejewska’s mother and brother Szymon as well as the writer Ignacy Maciejowski, their old friend from Krakdéw, who corresponded at length with Chtapowski about the trip from his current residence in London. ‘The site for the group’s resettlement shifted from Texas, Wolski’s old stomping grounds, to a more alluring and better advertised California. The group’s agenda was constantly adjusted to accommodate individual drives and desires. Whereas Modrzejewska harbored dreams of an English-language stage career and an

artists’ phalanstery, the fourteen-year-old Dolcio longed to view America's great engineering feats, and Chlapowski “conceived the idea of forming a colony in California on the model of Brook Farm.”*** America presented Chia-

powski with a golden opportunity for remaking what had become a subsidiary life; its frontier excited his political dreaming. He had money of his own

WARSAW S STATE OF THE STARS 113 to invest in a small California utopia—an inheritance after the death of his youngest brother Alojzy in 1875—and he applied himself to its planning, consulting with the others about everything from viticulture to silkworm farming.*** At last Chlapowski could play the grand benefactor, and, if the colony supported them as he hoped, he might succeed as his family’s long-term provider.**

The colony's fate would play out in California, but Modrzejewska’s hopes for a phalanstery were dashed already in Poland. None of her painters could commit to the trip. Chelmonski’s fortuitous sale of a few pictures financed his relocation in Paris, where his mentor Godebski helped him build his career.”*° Neither Chmielowski nor Witkiewicz had the money to travel and would not accept Chiapowski’s temporary largesse. Of her constant quartet, only Sienkiewicz could afford the voyage, courtesy of the Polish Gazette, and she was to be denied the pleasure of his company until she and Chlapowski landed

in Anaheim. Both the journalist and the agronomist Sypniewski were dispatched to America in February 1876, seven months before the main party, to scout their way. The other members of the group, apart from Chtapowski and Dolcio, were more liabilities than inspiring fellow travelers: Mrs. Sypniewska

and her two children (the second child was born just before the trip), Paprocki, and a sixteen-year-old peasant nursemaid. Writing to Sienkiewicz in mid-June, Modrzejewska conveyed her frustration as they waited for Mrs. Sypniewska’s overdue baby and shared with him the deflating news that their onetime partner Chelmonski had sold two paintings for 18,000 francs and was “becoming civilized” in Paris.”*”

The preempting of one dream, however, did not affect Modrzejewska's other plan to internationalize her career. In Memories and Impressions she is careful to downplay that ambition, lest she seem selfish and unpatriotic. When Warsaw friends encouraged her to consider an American debut, she confessed the renewed “wild hope of playing Shakespeare in his own language,” only to renounce it in deference to “our friends’ plans.”’** Yet a May 1876 letter from Maciejowski reflected that “the splendid project” of her performance on the American stage was very much under discussion. ‘The ever-enthusiastic Maciejowski approved “their intentions for [Maurice] Neville”— ostensibly their utilization of his contacts—and urged them to generate the sort of “humbug” (he uses the English word) that will pitch Modrzejewska successfully to the Yankees. He offered Chtapowski a sample puff piece about his illustrious wife

114 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA which could be sent without delay to the New York Herald, suggesting that they use aristocratic titles to impress royalty-admiring Americans. He also implied that Modrzejewska, like Neville, should look up Mr. Longfellow.*” As ludicrous as Maciejowski’s recommendations might have seemed to the party in spring 1876, they contained just the sort of advice Modrzejewska's American agents would regularly dispense over the coming decades. Maciejowski's reply underscored how keen Modrzejewska and Chlapowski were to explore her career options as an integral part of their adventure. A culturally wide-open America would serve Modrzejewska as well, if not better, than it did her “colonist” husband. America would not provide a glamorous natural backdrop for her phalanstery, yet it would free her as an artist from the repellent limitations and constant public scrutiny of the state of the stars. Success on the remote American stage, Modrzejewska shrewdly reasoned, could lead to success in what were for her more artistically meaningful places—the London stage, certainly, where Shakespeare was best played, or back home, where international fame could render her close to omnipotent in the theater and society. Modrzejewska likely anticipated this leverage as she bade her public farewell to Warsaw in June 1876. To Mukhanov’s dismay, she negotiated a yearlong leave from the Warsaw theaters and then proceeded to give final performances in Warsaw and Lwow, the better to make her audiences appreciate her loss. Modrzejewska’s Warsaw performance, held June 21 in the city’s Summer

Theatre, packaged a composite of her greatest hits: the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, Ophelia’s mad scene from Hamlet, Maidens’ Vows in its entirety, and the final act of Adrianna. She seemed to be taking professional inventory for the journey ahead. A review in the Warsaw Courier reported her audience’s overwhelming response, with innumerable curtain calls, and thus

described the weeping Modrzejewska’s exit through an adoring crowd: “A great many of the audience members formed a double line stretching as far as the gate to the Garden and waited for Madame Modrzejewska to emerge. As soon as she appeared, she was greeted with shouts, heartfelt wishes, and cries of adoration. ‘Come back to us!’ they cried. ‘Come back as soon as possible, for without you we'll be sad and lonely!’”*°° A little over three weeks later, on 13 July 1876, after four guest performances

in Lwoéw and farewell trips to Krakéw and Karol’s family in Poznan, Modrzejewska's nine-person party stood aboard the German steamship Donau in the port of Bremen and waved good-bye to three of Karol’s brothers. Her

WARSAW S STATE OF THE STARS 115 recollection of the moment is purposefully upbeat: “After taking most affectionate leave of those three dear, brave young men with whom we had long chats about our future prospects,—and after having written numerous letters to our families and friends,—on a bright summer morning, full of good hopes and cheerful spirit, we sailed into the great Unknown.”**! Thus departed the provincial “upstart” from Krakéw who had conquered the fortress of the Warsaw Imperial Theatres and reigned as the greatest and best-publicized star in the state of the stars. Like so many immigrants to the United States, Modrzejewska left her homeland to make a new life in the New World, although hers was a provisional venture. Having exhausted the opportunities of the Warsaw stage, she sought to build an international career featuring repertoire of her own choice. Like her young artist-comrades, she longed for a freer, more supportive working context. Having endured the scrutiny and abuse of a Warsaw star's public life, she was desperate for a place “inaccessible to human curiosity” where her family members could pursue their dreams and she could play the lady unafraid of public slander. Indeed, she seemed initially content to suspend her career for the sake of that oasis. Insofar as she could imagine, Modrzejewska hoped to be professionally independent and socially inviolate in America, at least for the time it took to prepare for her next move.

DIPS

A Colonial Party and the California Dream

FROM TOURIST TO SETTLER Modrzejewska traveled without her phalanstery in July 1876, but she greatly relished her leisure time, distance from the Polish stage, and the sea’s hypnotizing Romantic landscape. Her transatlantic diary is happily self-indulgent: Is there no regret for my country left in me? Or is it that the ocean, with its immortal beauty, has filled my soul to the very brim, leaving no room for anything else? I do not care to analyze the present state of my mind; I only know it is made of happiness and peace. My soul, lulled by that strange nurse, is dreaming. What are these dreams? Ah, there are no words in human language to express them. The thoughts are as unseizable as birds in their flight, like clouds which scarcely take shape ere they change into mist and melt away. This is bliss! A sharp and fragrant air strokes my brow: I take it in with full lungs—TI nearly faint away under its caressing breath,

drawing from it strength and health.'

Modrzejewska’s passage to America did not transform her into the poet or playwright she sometimes desired to be, but it made of her an inveterate letter writer to ever more distant family and friends. The actress had to transfer her performance to paper and to play the right roles before various correspondents. Her 13 August 1876 letter to Witkiewicz, written from New York after they had toured the city and visited Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, obliged the painter and critic with local snapshots and acerbic judgments. “New York,” she declared, “is a monstrous, untidy bazaar. The buildings are large, but without style. Brick or chocolate houses (the latter called

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 117

here brownstone), with green window-shades, look simply awful. The whole city is as ugly as can be. But what makes the streets look still more unattractive are the soles of men’s boots in the windows. Imagine that men have here the singular custom of sitting in rocking-chairs and putting their feet up on the window sills.”* With the same audience awareness, Modrzejewska conjured up lush pictures of jungle flora for the old Romantic poet Kornel Ujejski as her party traveled across Panama, evoking for him a “living bower of lianas” fit for a water nymph, a “wreath of blue butterflies circling the shore,” and a black woman resembling a bronze Greek sculpture in her beauty and dignity.° The master plan of Modrzejewska'’s debut on the American stage never strayed far from her dreaming mind, as her correspondence and insistent patronage of New York theaters clearly indicated. In the same letter in which she complained to Witkiewicz about ugly New York, she acknowledged that “when I get mastery over the new language, I may come here; for, however unattractive New York seems to me, it is the metropolis of America, and it will give me pleasure to conquer it.”* Yet she and her husband and son were enjoying their vacation immensely and making their way west with much pleasure and little hurry. In lieu of racing to California on the newly completed crosscountry railroad, they opted for a slower, cheaper steamer down to Panama, a two-hour trip across the Isthmus, and then a three-week passage on The Constitution, “a very old side-wheeler,’ up the coast to San Francisco.* An accident on their first ship, The Colon out of New York, delayed them another week when the bursting of the ship’s main steam pipe meant they had to be towed back to their starting point, an inconvenience tempered by “a champagne dinner every day while we remained in dock.”° They traveled on unfazed. Modrzejewska’s 8 September 1876 letter to her mother dwelled contentedly on their daily routine of eating, napping, chatting, strolling the deck, and sky watching. Until her “colonial party,’ as she dubbed them, reached their presumably final destination in Anaheim, where Chlapowski and Sypniewski could commence being California farmers, the actress easily slipped into the lifestyle and point of view of an affluent, educated tourist, a refined lady whose touring was strictly a private affair. Modrzejewska's projected class and manners thoroughly distinguished her from the typical Polish immigrant to the United States in the 1870s. Her memoirs delicately distance her from familiar immigrant types among the miserable third-class passengers on the Donau. Modrzejewska professes disgust

118 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA for the heartless sport of her first-class peers as they toss coins and oranges to the “pitiful crowd” below, even as she admires the music and dancing performed by “the aristocracy of the steerage.”’ In either case, she depicts herself literally looking down on those who may be her poor compatriots, the peasants whom Sienkiewicz profiled in his travelogue, Portrait of America, as immigrants “come for bread” (za chlebem).* By the late 1870s, Sienkiewicz could generalize that most of the Polish immigrants in the United States “left

[their home] country not to realize political ideals, but to feed themselves.” After attending a mass at a Polish church in New York, Chiapowski likewise estimated that four-fifths of the Polish immigrants there were peasants, who were shepherded, unfortunately, by “too few good Polish priests.”? These immigrants airless, cramped westward passage below deck contrasted grimly with Modrzejewska’'s weeks of eating, relaxing, and dreaming in first-class accommodations. Modrzejewska and Chiapowski, unlike their poor countrymen, could afford to tour Americas big cities before settling down to work. Edwin Booth’s performances were reason enough for the couple to stop over in San Francisco while the rest of the party, including Dolcio, were packed off to their new home in Anaheim." In contrast to New York’s “monstrous bazaar,’ with its ugly brownstones, “millions of omnibuses,” and “mania for signboards,” San Francisco delighted the couple with its freshness, liveliness, and comfortable wooden structures and sidewalks.'! They discovered there a diverse populace, where “you could hear every European language spoken on the street.”!* Perhaps most importantly, the small, active Polonia which embraced them in San Francisco was well distinguished by class, profession, and political adventure, as Modjeska carefully recalls in her memoirs. Captain Rudolf Korwin Piotrowski was a veteran of the 1830 uprising; Captain Kazimierz Bielawski, a respected engineer in the city, had quit Austrian Poland after “the terrible massacre of landowners in 1846°; Captain Lessen “had fought under Kossuth, in the Hungarian revolution in 1848”; and Dr. Pawlicki, once a surgeon in the Russian navy, “had left the service during the |anti-Russian] insurrection of 1863.''° The journalist Julian Horain, a relative newcomer, had similarly welcomed Sienkiewicz and Sypniewski earlier in the year. As the actress intimated in a letter home, this little group lobbied hard for her return to the stage, while she demurred, thinking “only of rest.”* But she was already availing herself of the services of General Wiodzimierz Krzyzanowski, who

had earned his title serving the Union in the American Civil War, for this

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 119

prominent immigrant “took a more lively interest than any other of my Polish friends in my future dramatic career in this country—at least he was better acquainted with theatrical people and things, and together with his friend, |California] Governor Salomon, was later very active in my behalf.” At this point in her travels, Modrzejewska was to trade sightseeing for farming, assuming some of her immigrant compatriots’ hardships as she supported her husband’s hopeful experiment. Booth’s fine performances as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar tempted her to act otherwise."° In these early days, Krzyzanowski engineered her introduction to John McCullough, then the actor-manager of the California Theatre where Booth was performing, and a proposal that she play Ophelia in Polish to Booth’s Hamlet “was discussed seriously” until Booth declined, pleading fatigue.’’ The Polish star was but temporarily deflected from an American debut in autumn 1876 by insufficient English, family loyalty, and her delusional dream of “rest.” She entered her American immigrant life as more charmed opportunist than committed pioneer. By the end of October 1876, Modrzejewska and Chlapowski had set off for Anaheim, California's “first successful co-operative colony” established by industrious German immigrants in 1857.'* In scouting possible sites for their settlement in spring 1876, Sypniewski chose Anaheim, according to Mo-

djeska, “because of the German families he had met there. ... He thought it would be easier to commence our ranch life among people with whom we might be able to talk.”!’ Sypniewski had happened on a model agricultural community that improved on “the primitive economy of |California’s|] bonanza ranches” with its well-tended vineyards and orchards and orderly bourgeois lifestyle.”° Anaheim historian Mildred Yorba MacArthur reconstructs a prim model of this “Mother Colony,” describing the Germans’ neat little homes “surrounded by flowers and vegetable gardens” and the menfolk who ended their workday exercising in a gymnasium and participating in a Singing Society.*! Anaheim could boast a combined general store and post office, a hotel that served “as the focal point of all early social activity,” and a woman physician, Dr. Alice Boyd Higgins, who had accompanied her husband, Dr. W. H. Higgins, to his new practice in 1869.” As promising as the community might have seemed to experienced farmers, it initially disenchanted Modrzejewska, fresh from an exhilarating San Francisco. She was relieved to be reunited with their party, which included Dolcio and her “sunburned, strong, and healthy” admirer Sienkiewicz, who

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Fini AA tai Aig NERA IO SEN 8 eta, > a lC( ae oe eS 4 ‘lie PRs Le oe 1h aaa ee VOvEE Pe a? ‘ SS aE er. : =. ———eg i. » ~» ; —— ¢ ~S | Sees , 6 ta ce | Sitios ee i st" "3° Ie |tae &+ || oo NEES * wim i e eon | Oy aM eas "ye Fi, eae -—— 4h ——— 2S & eae eae " —_— ee tet) BA, s Mires ye Eh ee - :. zo! ——y*—_ : < :Bees ; b ee. MMR | > Ree Like increasing numbers of affluent travelers and intellectuals in their day, they came to value California as captivating scenery and a recuperative environment. Historian Earl Pomeroy defines the westbound tourist in the late nineteenth century as a conservator rather than a homesteader, as someone “who looked backward on the Wild West as something to be enjoyed before it disappeared rather than forward on it as something he must embrace and conquer in order to survive or to serve the national destiny. °° Much as Americans were drawn

124 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA west by accounts such as Charles Nordhoff’s 1874 California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence: A Book for Traveller and Settlers, so this Polish party was attracted by the salutary travel sketches of Julian Horain and, more exclusively, Sienkiewicz’s glowing accounts of California as a gentle paradise.*’ California

historian Kevin Starr argues that this sort of literary tourism fomented actual tourism by the early 1870s as writers such as Nordhoff, Horace Greeley, and Bayard Taylor celebrated the state just as it was, encouraging visitors to relate “in a new manner to California, in enjoyment, not exploitation or the throes of finding a living.”** Sienkiewicz, who had preceded the group by five months to write his eastwest journey for the Polish Gazette, became a literary and an actual California

tourist simultaneously. His own preconceptions of America had been formed by his favorite authors, James Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte, and he was eager to meet their fictions in the flesh.*’ According to his sketches, Sienkiewicz, like Modrzejewska, was repelled by an ugly, commerce-driven New York and further disappointed by the money-grubbing, uncouth Yankees and

ignoble Indians he encountered in his travels. Though he condemned the white settlers’ extermination of the Native Americans, he had to admit that “the Sioux warriors did not correspond entirely to the mental picture of Indians which I had acquired from my reading of Cooper, Bellamare, and others. Upon closer inspection, they appeared shabby, extremely dirty, and slovenly.”*°

Sienkiewicz only happened on fiction-worthy specimens of American heroes among the high-country squatters in California who chose to live against the stunning backdrop of the state’s inland wilderness. Abandoning a tamed Anaheim before his party arrived, Sienkiewicz trekked into the Santa Ana Mountains, where he made the close acquaintance of Jack Harrison, a robust, honorable, tough-spirited, yet nature-loving squatter, who served him as guide and caretaker and figured in his sketches as the epitome of healthy American masculinity." With his Portrait of America, Sienkiewicz anticipated such American conservators of a character-building Wild West as Theodore Roosevelt, novelist Owen Wister, and the editor-activist Charles Fletcher Lummis, who all championed the West's rugged virtues.” Just as the Polish tourist prescribed Western manliness as an antidote to European neurosis and anemia, so Roosevelt would promote “the strenuous life” he lived on his Western ranch as “the antithesis of overcivilized decadence.”

Sienkiewicz's inland trek led him to the stunning homestead of John E. Pleasants and his Mexican-Indian wife, Donna Maria Refugio, a couple who

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 125 exercised considerable local influence through their wealth and Donna Refugio's reputation as a wise counselor with many family connections. Intrigued by the fact that the Pleasants lived in the open air, with just a roof for shelter, the Polish writer admired the magnificent setting for their wall-less home: First seen by moonlight, the landscape as a whole seemed to me very Romantic, as did most of the squatter homesteads set up in the canyons. A pair of upper and lower valleys and an encircling ridge resembling an amphitheater created the impression of a giant Roman circus or a kind of staircase. At the stairs’ foot a stream murmured along a stony corridor leading the way to the Pleasants’ dwelling. ... Moonlight drenched that entire amphitheater of hills and the arena of the valley. ... One could imagine that the games had just ended: Caesar had departed, the crowds had scattered into the city streets, and in the arena’s bloody sand lay the eternally sleeping bodies of the gladiators. ... Sometimes a gorgeous set design can create such an illusion, and at moments it seemed to me that I saw before me the most beautiful stage setting I had ever seen.**

Modrzejewska fully shared Sienkiewicz’s Romantic sensibility and love of the wild, and subsequently sampled his favorite views. ‘Their party sought respite from farm life by exploring the surrounding countryside, viewing the blue Pacific from the otherwise desolate outpost of Anaheim Landing, where the actress threw herself on the sand and sobbed from homesickness, and retracing Sienkiewicz’s journey “to the Santiago Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains, where our new friends, the Pleasants, lived.”** The Pleasants had extended

them an invitation to visit in person, and while Modrzejewska found the Anglo-Mexican couple curious and sympathetic, she muses in her memoirs that “we had not the faintest idea then how closely this visit was connected with our final settlement in California.”** The beauty of the new landscapes she beheld—the charming “Picnic Grounds” with “limpid brook,” “green meadows, and “old live oaks overhung with wild grapevines” —revived in her the pleasure of being a tourist and a dreamer once more.” In her memoirs, the actress details the Pleasants’ open-air household, with its “rustic sofa, table, and chairs” forming a combined “outdoor dining and living room” inside an arbor, and “a kitchen consisting of an iron stove under the shelter of widely-spread oak branches with pantry shelves built in the cavity of the same tree.” Like Sienkiewicz, she was swept away by the theatricality of the landscape. Here California utterly gratified her, the unhappy farmers wife and “resting” actress, with a gorgeous natural set. But unlike the wandering writer, she invokes Shakespearean drama rather than ancient Rome to do it justice, and discloses how she and Chtapowski return to make

126 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA this “fantastic stage scenery’ their own: “A few years later we bought this place, and I called it ‘Arden,’ because, like the ‘Forest of Arden’ in As You Like

It, everything that Shakespeare speaks of was on the spot,—oak trees, running brooks, palms, snakes, and even lions,—of course California lions,— really pumas.*®

The Pleasants’ natural amphitheater became the couple's American home ten years later, once the actress had earned enough to purchase it and she, her husband, and now-grown son had decided on the United States, for diverse reasons, as their primary place of settlement. Modjeska and Chlapowski’s abiding reputation as first settlers of Orange County was cemented by this purchase. But their attachment to and identification with Southern California really began with their colorful failure as California farmer-homesteaders and their first forays as Southern California tourists. Modrzejewska and Chiapowski had come to America to homestead first and to storm the American stage second, yet they very soon discovered that these ambitions worked for them only and always in reverse. Owning a large, lovely ranch for their offseasons meant that they had to project a stable affluence which in fact waxed and waned with Modjeska’s earnings. The actress had to work hard to belong to “a population of educated, financially secure Americans who came and stayed precisely because they liked the climate and the scenery.”” THE SETTLER ON THE CALIFORNIA STAGE

Fortunately, Modjeska could strive for both affluence and respectability in a state that the Gold Rush had opened up to adventurers, foreigners, and entertainers. Prospecting for gold in the 1850s and then silver in the late 1860s brought all types to California, primarily through the gateway of San Francisco. As Starr observes: “Because the situation was so undefined, the American presence itself so recent, foreigners became more co-colonists than alien immigrants. With no industrial economy, developed as in the East and in American hands, California made available a middle ground where foreigners and Americans interacted to their mutual transformations.”*° The overwhelming German presence in Anaheim stood as a case in point. This orderly settle-

ment absorbed contingents of Mexicans, Native Americans, Irish, French, Chinese, African Americans, Polish Jews, and an occasional Russian, as Chia-

powski informed his sister back in Poznan.*' The inland wilderness, where Sienkiewicz had discovered the ideal American man, was also home to quest-

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 127 ing foreigners. Writing his wife from his temporary retreat near the Pleasants’ homestead, Chtapowski amused her with a sketch of another odd neighbor, “a burly Russian with an immense shaggy beard... who calls himself Williams.” This foreign hermit had built his log cabin with his own hands and displayed for them the skins of a mountain lion and the many wildcats he had killed.*’ Up in San Francisco, Modrzejewska reunited with a “distinguished” Polonia, itself representative of California’s ethnic heterogeneity, and experienced a refined, “intrinsically international” city intent on enjoying itself. Longtime resident and memoirist Amelia Ransome Neville (1837-1927) celebrated San

Francisco as “The Fantastic City” and pronounced her contemporaries “a pleasure-loving people” possessed of “Old World sophistication” and international color: “Mexicans with scarlet sashes [and] striped serapes” and “Orientals in blue blouses.”*’ Neville’s was a post-Gold Rush society, yet the effect of that human juggernaut had left her city’s residents with abiding habits of restless public life and conspicuous consumption of food, drink, and assorted entertainments.** Clarence E. Edwards traced the richness of the res-

taurant scene to a peculiarly San Franciscan worldliness: “It is but a step across a street from America into Japan, then another step to China. Cross another street and you are in Mexico, close neighbor to France. Around the corner lies Italy, and from Italy you pass to Lombardy, and on to Greece. So it goes until one feels that he has been around the world in an afternoon.”** San Francisco's different ethnic groups did not always coexist peacefully, particularly in 1877, the year of Modjeska’s debut. Over that summer, the Irish populist demagogue Dennis Kearney organized a Workingman’s Trade and Labor Union, delivering incendiary speeches against the capitalists and the Chinese to those poor laborers and unemployed who loitered in the sand lots near city hall. When the “sandlotters” attacked individual Chinese and set fire to some of their businesses in late July, a vigilance committee of over 6,000 people swiftly formed to disperse the rioters.°° But even as ethnic and class tensions sometimes erupted into violence, the city’s nouveau riche and middle class were steadily rebuilding the city on a grand scale and patronizing its many entertainments. Neville remarked on this disparity: “When I look back across the pageant of the years there is an especial brightness and touch of the bizarre about that sequence of the late sixties, the seventies and eighties. In it was the reign of the bonanza kings who built their palaces on Nob Hill, where Jim Flood’s thirty-thousand dollar brass fence glittered in the sun....An incredible period it was with its lavish expenditures and sudden

128 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA luxury veneered over many crude ways of living.”’®’ Elsewhere she chronicled the “brief and brilliant” reign of William Ralston, who co-founded with D. O.

Mills the Bank of California, kept an estate south of the city “like a prince of the Renaissance,” and helped build the luxurious Palace Hotel (1875), the Grand Opera House (1876), and the magnificent, state-of-the-art California Theatre (1869) before his bank collapsed and he perished the same day in a swimming accident off North Beach in 1875.8 The same disparity between “crude ways” and “lavish expenditures” applied to the city’s entertainments. The adventurous Mexican political exile Guillermo Prieto, who declared Californians “the greatest enthusiasts for public diversions,’ traversed the entertainment spectrum, noting with interest the fancy whorehouses on Dupont Street where the prostitutes had their own display windows and named doors; the underground musical bars and dance halls visible through windows built into the sidewalk; and San Francisco's very impressive theater scene dominated by the California.” By 1876 two more major theaters had opened in the city—Baldwin’s Academy of Music and Wade's Opera House, built to seat 2,500 and later enlarged.® San Francisco had become a lucrative embarkation or ending point for star tours, especially after the completion of the railroad, with a local audience avid for the major players of their day. Neville named a succession of stars who came west to perform: “the whimsical Rip Van Winkle of Joseph Jefferson; Clara Morris, lachrymose and appealing with a white camellia in her flowing hair; Matilda Heron, a more beautiful Camille who in her last days nearly starved to death; and lovely Adelaide Neilson.”” Another longtime resident, Harriet Lane Levy, remembered how her Jewish immigrant father found in the theater “the richness of the living denied him at home”: “Long before the blur of strange sounds broke into meaning for him, he was climbing to the gallery nightly, absorbing the new tongue in rolling phrases saturated with feeling. The stage became book, club, and society to him. Over a lifetime if a famous actor came to the city, Father disappeared each night after dinner as to a rendezvous.’®

Encouraged by San Franciscans’ “impetuous love of theater and cuisine,’ a number of the city’s ambitious artists had organized by the 1870s to be taken

more seriously at home and at large. Theater historian Edmond M. Gagey credits John McCullough and Lawrence Barrett with raising actors’ local status through their administrative skills and social circulation. He remarks on the formation of athletic and social clubs for and by players, “among them

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 129 the California Boating Club and the Benevolent Protective Order of Seals.”® Actors also benefited from the establishment of the Bohemian Club in April 1872, which, according to founding member Edward Bosqui, “was organized for the association of gentlemen connected professionally with literature, art, music, and the drama, and also those who by reason of their love or appreciation of art might be deemed eligible.” Renowned for its “evenings of conversation and conviviality ... called High Jinks” and its “midsummer jinks” of entertainment-filled camping on the Russian River, the Bohemian Club not only proved to distinguished travelers that “all the elements of culture and refinement” flourished in San Francisco “at the confines of civilization,” but also that visiting artists, including actors, were welcomed into their midst. Actresses as well as actors were sometimes admitted to the club. Modrze-

jewska was invited to one of its “ladies’ receptions” in spring 1877, months before she proved her talent on the San Francisco stage. In a 27 April letter to Falenska she praised the club as “one good thing” in a city she admitted she liked less than she did during her first visit, for she now felt repelled by the locals’ obsession with “what one is worth” and a “financial aristocracy... composed of the crudest and least enlightened types.” Modrzejewska had a wonderful time at the club, with its magnificent suite of rooms, portrait gallery, library, reading room, and fine restaurant, though she grew a bit bored with the “great many more speeches and readings than music and song during this soiree.”*’ The Bohemian Club pledged the Polish actress their enthusiastic support and patronage for her future endeavors.® In later years, once she was an established star, the club hosted dinners for her “and Count Bozenta,” as Neville recalled, as well as a breakfast for Sarah Bernhardt.’ Well-met by San Francisco’s culture and society, Modrzejewska nonetheless approached its stage at first as an immigrant settler, albeit one from the upper class. Her desire to perform in English, with as little accent as she could manage, already distinguished her from most foreign touring stars. With her characteristic all-or-nothing attitude, Modrzejewska vowed to her mother a little over a month before her debut: “I want in every respect to be irreproachable insofar as this is possible, and that’s why I'm hesitating until I've mastered English. I don’t want the public to see me as a foreigner, but as an actress from some English province.’” She had difficulty finding an apt successor to her tutor Anna Wolska. She hired and then fired a teacher whose English had a strong German accent, ignored the advice of Captain Piotrowski, who visited frequently and, according to her husband, “spoke six or seven languages—

130 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA all of them badly,” and finally discovered an unlikely instructor in a young woman named Jo Tucholsky who happened to be her neighbor.’! Tucholsky, a Polish Jewish immigrant who had come to America when she was four years old, became the actress's lifelong friend and a teacher who worked for love rather than pay.” In Jo Tucholsky, Modrzejewska had acquired an extraordinary combination of instructor, companion, and champion who drilled her new pupil from morning until night, even when they attended the theater: “All the time she compelled me to speak English by not answering my German or French questions until I translated them into English.””’ Tucholsky essentially joined the family after Chlapowski and Dolcio had spent six weeks with Modrzejewska in the city. Dolcio, who had Americanized his first name to Ralph, stayed on and became Tucholsky’s second, quicker student. The devoted young teacher patiently “corrected every wrong pronunciation and accentuation’” as the actress began the enormous task of reciting and memorizing entire plays in English.” Tucholsky also read with Modrzejewska at her audition. During these tense, poverty-dogged months in early 1877, Modrzejewska admitted that she “had to pawn her jewelry and lace” and sometimes “went to bed hungry.”’> She reverted to the tireless labor of her early years in the profession, preparing herself all over again for the stage with the help of family and friends, although now those friends included influential local fans and an immensely talented reporter waiting in the wings. The one family member conspicuously absent at her debut was Chlapowski, who stayed put in Southern California because of a “bad fall.””° Viewed in retrospect, their accidental separation illustrated just what was at stake for the couple then and over the long term: Modrzejewska's success on the boards was imperative for the ransom of their California dream. Her return to the theater from the position of private citizen first hindered her audition and then enhanced her publicity. When she presented herself to Barton Hill, the California’s stage manager in McCullough’s absence, Modrzejewska soon realized that he had rejected her automatically as a nonprofessional, self-deluded “Madame la Comtesse”: “From what he said further, in the form of good advice to give up my ‘fancy, I understood that he had doubts as to my being an actress at all, and supposing he had before him only an amateur stagestruck society woman, he tried to get out of this difhcult situation as smoothly as possible.””’ Her successful audition before Hill constituted her hardest test in America, which she passed in her sheer fury

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 131

“to crush the Philistine”: “Poor, dear Mr. Hill, who was only doing his duty as a cautious manager, did not suspect these antagonistic feelings, which put me on my mettle from the start and made me deliver my very first speeches with so much intensity and realism that I myself was startled at my new intonations. I was sure of victory from the very beginning of the rehearsal.”” As she played the scene, Modrzejewska spied Hill waving his white handkerchiefin helpless surrender. Post-debut, the actress made light of Hill’s misperception in one of her first interviews in the San Francisco Daily Morning Call: “They thought, said the lady in conversation the other day, speaking in her uncertain English, and laughing low all the while, ‘they thought I was debutante; I who have studied my art in Europe; but they do not think so now.””” Now her stint as a California settler made good copy, qualifying her, in contrast to American professional peers and foreign touring stars, as a bona fide lady, another would-be California colonist. Her two-week debut from 20 August to 31 August 1877 as “Helena Modjeska, Countess Bozenta” and her return engagement in late November, after a tour including Virginia City and several California towns, consolidated her position as a new star. By 26 August 1877, the Daily Alta California was already predicting Modjeska’s nationwide success: “A New York reputation may make a play, but a San Francisco reputation will make an actor in America.”*° The

press reiterated her ranking as a great artiste of world-class caliber and local drawing power, equating her with famous rivals ranging from Rachel Felix to Sarah Bernhardt, Adelaide Neilson to Clara Morris.*' Modjeska was heralded as a consummate artist from a little-known part of the world, an actress who “treads the stage as one born to it” and excels “in the expression of the finer emotions of the soul.’®? Like her Warsaw critics, the San Francisco press deemed her strongest as the sympathetic, sensitive heroine in what they called “society drama,” as the victimized actress in Adrienne Lecouvreur and Marguerite Gauthier in The Lady of the Camellias, simply titled Camille on the American stage.** The reviews of her Juliet, performed in English during both engagements, lauded her grace and inventive stage business, but lamented her imperfect English in a Shakespeare play, where fluency and diction were of paramount importance. The San Francisco critics also echoed Kenig’s judgments of almost a decade before, pointing out, in the gentle formulation of the Daily Alta, that “tragedy is too heavy for the artiste.”** Comparing Modjeska’s “aesthetic” Juliet to Neilson’s “sensuous” one, even the usually admiring Evening Post found the former to be lacking Neilson’s grand “physical force.”*

132 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA Diverging in their assessments of her Juliet, the critics were unanimous in their praise for what the Evening Post commended as her “true womanhood”: “What we may all congratulate ourselves upon is that as artiste and woman she is wholly worthy.’** While the San Francisco Daily Chronicle reviewer nega-

tively credited her extraordinary reception to “womanly grace and sympathy” rather than talent, the Call predicted her continued success “in the plays of the translated French school,” given “her grace of movement, her striking physical expression of the passions and emotions, a womanly sensibility, if you will, that stage wear has not impaired.’*’ The critics also agreed that Modjeska, unlike her American competitors, achieved a “spirituelle Camille,” a new role tailor-made for an actress specializing in fallen women redeemed: “She succeeds as far as will ever be possible in reconciling the many inconsistencies and unnatural qualities of the character; while, at the same time, she makes us almost forget the totally false sentiment and unquestionably bad moral purpose of the play.”*® Modjeska made an even stronger impression on her audience in the wealthy

isolated mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where the Call reported that “the people... indulged in a sort of mild craze about the Countess when she played Camille.”* One such female fan enthused to Sienkiewicz as he was passing through, following Modjeska eastward: “We [in Virginia City] see all the

greatest actresses. We've seen Janauschek, Clara Morris, Mrs. Bowers, and Miss Eytinge, but we've never seen anyone like Modjeska and we never will again. She is so talented, so sweet, so ladylike. Such a thing has never happened on our stage.””° Modfjeska’'s first performances at the California Theatre likewise proved her success in exporting the high-toned offstage persona that she had refined

in Warsaw. Out of ignorance or prejudice, San Francisco critics read her as European rather than Polish, valuing her as a lofty “exponent of the dramatic art of the European stage.”*! Though the Call advised her “to sink the title of ‘Countess’ since “the world of art is republican,” Modjeska’s performances convinced the critic at the Evening Post that she was an aristocrat, an actress at ease and at home in high society. Her ability to “be” the aristocrat, first remarked in Krakow, then “naturalized” in Warsaw, was simply an incontrovertible fact to Americans who accepted her at face value: “The position which Modjeska has held in Europe has introduced her to the highest circles of so-

ciety, and enabled her to move on the stage not with the regulation theatrical stride, but with the artistic grace of a lady in her drawingroom.’”

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 133

In her own assessment, Modjeska had conquered California temporarily. Writing to her mother several days after her first performance, she admitted: “My career here is not yet stabilized, for after two weeks of debut performances I need to prepare new roles more thoroughly. Only then can we declare victory.’* Her short inland tour of “small towns of California and Nevada” arranged by Irish comedian James Ward did not “obtain handsome results,” although her second two weeks in San Francisco at the California were both lucrative and professionally useful, establishing her as a formidable Camille, a role long prohibited her in Poland. Nevertheless, California could only launch her on a necessarily itinerant American career, one both she and her husband envisioned as limited and prefatory to an engagement in England and a triumphant return to their native land. As soon as Modjeska signed with Sargent on the morning of 21 August 1877, her attention strayed eastward. By the end of December 1877, the Call was informing its readers of all the stops on her first East Coast tour: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Louisville.** Her triumphs elsewhere did not mean that Modjeska dismissed her California beginnings. She was quick to rebut a New York Tribune interview appearing in the California press that “quoted” her negative comments on San Francisco audiences.” In later years, Modjeska praised California and particularly its press, which “generously encouraged my first

efforts in a foreign language and thus opened for me the entrance to the English-speaking stage.””°

LIVING THE CALIFORNIA DREAM

Modjeska and Chiapowski invested the next five years testing the international limits of her career, establishing her star power throughout the United States, assaying and never quite achieving the conquest of the English stage in the early 1880s, and returning several times to Poland for guest performances and family visits. By 1882, however, Modjeska had come to terms with the fact that hers was to be a binational rather than international career, and that her fortune and most of her artistic dreams could only be realized in the United States. In the meantime, her son, Ralph, who had enrolled in 1878 in Paris’s famed National School of Bridges and Roads (L’'Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées), viewed America, with its burgeoning opportunities for civil engineers, as his future professional home. Chlapowski, always more of

134 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA a democrat than his middle-class spouse, still cherished dreams of making a life in a socially fluid United States. It came as no surprise that on 4 July 1883, Modfjeska's husband and son elected to become American citizens just before the trio embarked on a summer vacation out West. Chlapowski's newly acquired citizenship automatically naturalized his wife as an American.”

At this point, Modjeska, too, was contemplating how she might settle in America as befit her star status. For an American actor of this era, home ownership signaled both earning power and a publicity-worthy normalcy, a life off the road and among family. The at-home actor represented a solid or leading citizen, if the property in question emulated an estate. As early as 1870, the actress and writer Olive Logan (1839-1909) cited the fine homes of tragedian Edwin Booth (1833-1893) and comedian Joseph Jefferson (18281905) to argue the morality of the American theater before a still dubious public. Logan singled out Jefferson's “charming villa at Hoboken” as brickand-mortar proof of the actor’s strong domestic ties and traditional values: “His house is a delightful combination of the old with the new, being an oldtime Jersey brown-stone mansion, metamorphosed by a well-known architect, under whose hands the house, outbuildings and grounds assumed most picturesque forms and faces.””* By the 1880s, Jefferson and Booth had purchased summer homes as well— Jefferson his Crow’s Nest on Buzzards’ Bay and Booth an estate he christened Boothden near Newport.” At such summer retreats a select group of American players consorted with major cultural and political figures as “fishing and duck-hunting pals.”°? When Booth sold his in-town and summer homes to buy the property for the Players Club in New York in 1888, he further advanced the actor into good society, combining his living quarters with a social club which aimed to elevate the actor's social status and to inspire in all players a reverence for their vocation.'” In its membership and ambition, the Players outstripped the Lambs Club, the “first important New York theatrical club founded in 1875,” achieving “an atmosphere that was partly dignified gentlemens club and partly theatrical museum” in a four-story residence remodeled by architect Stanford White and equipped with library, dining room, lounges, and a billiard room all “decorated with theatrical portraits and memorabilia.”!°* By the turn of the century, the actor’s residence had become such a commonplace that publishers treated readers to lavish illustrated albums featuring star homes, photographing their grounds, interiors, and the respectable residents within.’”

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 135

In the summer of 1883, Modjeska informed her New York friends that she and her husband and son were playing Western tourists once more, daydreaming and property hunting: “We have travelled a great deal and are more in love with this country than we ever were before. After having climed [sic] the Pike’s Peak in Colorado and visiting the Cave of the Winds (with its beautiful stalactites) and the Garden of the Gods, we started for New Mexico.”!™ The family wended their way back to Canyon San Jago, the site of the Pleas-

ants’ homestead in Southern California, and spent ten glorious days with Judge Richard Egan, the reputed “monarch” of San Juan Capistrano. Egan had enchanted Modjeska with presumed relics of a Spanish California past and tales of a “beautiful and quaint old town which was still untouched by the feverous breath of civilization ... where everybody lived and no one worked

very hard—where fruit and songs were the nourishment of the young and old—where all things were calm and happy—where the sky never changes and the young people are always in love, often changing their mind, but never

their sentiment.” Although Egan was reportedly “so afraid crowds will come and ruin the poetry of the old mission,” Modjeska’s long-cherished pastoral dream, authorized by a local source, might now be satisfied by buying real estate she could afford. A few weeks after her visit, Edward Bosqui encountered an ecstatic Judge who sang Modjeska’s praises and informed him “that she was so delighted with the country and climate that she intended purchasing land in the immediate vicinity and would make it her permanent home.”!°° Modjeska’s longing for an “untouched” California of picturesque history and natural plenty anticipated the “mood of nostalgia and romance” propagated by Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona. This fiction, intended as a protest against European settlers’ mistreatment of Mission Indians, actually sentimentalized the mission “stage set” in lieu of criticizing its designers, evoking a mythical “Southern California suffused with the golden memory of pastoral days.”!°” Modfjeska never did settle in Capistrano, though several years later she reported to an American friend that there was to be a new town built near it named Modjeska, which she hoped would flourish since “it would be rather unpleasant for me to hear the people call ‘Modjeska’ a deadbeat or something worse.’ !°° Nevertheless, Modjeska’s 1883 return visit to Santiago Canyon revived old attachments and decided the star and her husband to buy an undivided one-half interest in the Pleasants’ 160-acre ranch.'” Five years later, after she had married off Ralph and helped establish him in his American

136 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA career, Modjeska and Chlapowski committed themselves to buy the entire ranch as well as an adjoining homestead for a grand total of $18,000." Once again they tried on the role of California rancher, yet this time they treated their purchase as a deserved, supportable indulgence rather than an essential livelihood. They were ready now to pursue the tourist variant of the California dream. “At the core of this dream,” Kevin Starr asserts, “was the hope for a special relationship to nature,” a reverential, protective appreciation of California’s natural assets and the health-restoring properties of its climate.'"’ These attitudes particularly took hold in Southern California, where the weather was warm and sunny for most of the year. Even as she worried over expenses during their first off-season on the ranch, Modjeska could not help but sing its praises to her Polish relatives: “Our property here is very pretty. ... In the morning I usually tour the entire garden and check on the progress of my shrubs and flowers. We'll have a mass of them this year—and theyre so beautiful. A few days ago I planted a tree by myself that we'll call a Mickiewicz tree, and later on we ll plant a Chopin lane and build a Slowacki grotto.”!” Modjeska shared the “garden consciousness’ that pervaded Southern California’s regional identity, as well-to-do residents transformed an initially spare

landscape into beautiful hybrid gardens, blending English and Mediterranean plantings with native palms and eucalyptus. The actress's “hideaway Arden” modeled an early version of many other such enchanting developments.'!’ Modjeska intentionally integrated Polish elements into her “scenery, but claimed, like a good nature-revering Californian of her day, that “all our improvements had for their main object not to spoil what nature had provided, and we left all the old oaks around the house, and the pretty wild shrubs on the terrace.”!* Relating her 1896 visit (inclusive of photographs) with Modjeska in her “mountain home,” Marie H. McCoy described her extensive property as “a magnificent natural park.” Live oaks and broad lawns spread out before the house, and mountains raised a “wild and rugged” backdrop behind it, where “Nature is left in undisturbed sublimity.”! Modjeska and Chiapowski came to rely on the balms of Arden’s beauty and restorative climate, especially when the actress’s health suffered from “the tyranny of Art,’ her euphemism for the grueling conditions of touring.'’’ McCoy could interview the actress at home in 1896 because a stroke suffered on tour forced Modjeska’s retreat to Arden. Recovering from partial paralysis of her left side, Modjeska lay “pinned” to her chaise longue, wrote letters filled with family news to her Polish relatives and friends, and soaked up sun, peace, and

A COLONIAL PARTY AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM 137 fresh air.'"’ During her convalescence, she wrote Wolska about the loveliness of their ranch, even in December, when “roses are miraculously in bloom, and the fragrance of the violets fills the garden.”' Retaining a competent staff to tend the roses and violets was a recurring problem. On occasion, the couple, off on tour, had to impose on their in-town friends, particularly the Langenbergers, a prominent family of first German settlers in Anaheim, to spruce up the place for family or guests arriving before they themselves could come home.'”” In 1893, Modjeska recruited an excellent gardener, Theodore Payne (1872-1963), a fresh arrival to America from England who was trained in the nursery and seed business. Payne would become a renowned preserver of California flora, developing botanical gardens in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Pasadena (associated with the California Institute of Technology), and elsewhere in Southern California.'”° In Life on the Modjeska Ranch in the Gay Nineties, Payne offered a brief history of the two and a half years he spent in the employ of Madame Modjeska and the man he was requested to call Mr. Bozenta. Payne's account reflected how the couple's presence or absence affected both Arden’s social life and its gardens. When Modjeska was on the road, Payne “concentrated on the most staple varieties [of vegetables] for the ranch help,” but when “the folks were home’ and constantly entertaining local friends and occasional celebrity visitors, he “tried to have as large a variety of vegetables as possible.” When Madame was in residence, he saw to the roses of which she “was passionately fond” so that they might pass muster with serious gardeners who came to visit. Her friend Mrs. Langenberger, he noted, “was quite a gardener and had many rare plants at her place in Anaheim. ... Her daughter, Mrs. Bul-

lard, was also interested in horticulture and distinguished herself by being the first person to hybridize the Watsonia, having over fifty named varieties to her credit.” Another observant visitor, Florence Yoch, would become “a famous landscape architect ... responsible for the laying out of many beautiful gardens in Southern California.”’’ Although Payne does not include her in his list, Jeanne C. Carr was a similarly talented friend of the nature-loving actress. Wife of Ezra Carr, a professor at the University of California appointed superintendent of instruction for the state in 1875, Jeanne not only served as deputy superintendent, but also earned renown for her horticultural prowess and association with John Muir, the great preservationist.’”” Carr created out of her family’s forty-two-acre Pasadena spread “the fabulous, world-famous Carmelita Gardens, planting and caring for two hundred and more varieties of trees and plants from all over the world.”!”°

138 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA Payne's account of year-round life on the ranch also exposed its dangers, rough conditions, and languor—the hidden disadvantages of “ranching” in the Southern California wilds instead of spending summers in second homes on the New England coast. Payne's stint as a gardener began very soon after Arden’s brief wave of violent crime, when ranch hand Francisco Torres murdered foreman William McKelvey over the issue of a road poll tax withheld from his wages. Torres was subsequently dragged from the Santa Ana jail and lynched by an angry mob on 20 August 1892.’"* Lesser dangers included the occasional mountain lion, ubiquitous rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and centipedes, as well as the terrible summer heat and dearth of water. Payne had joined a relatively peaceable, multinational, but rough-mannered ranch crew—several Germans, a Frenchman, an American, and a few Mexicans (including a jolly cook named Jesus Soto)—and he encountered other local eccentrics as he tramped the territory.’ But eventually isolation and boredom convinced him to quit: “In the summertime when the folks were home, it was a nice place to be, but in the winter it was very dull... . In January of 1896 I left the ranch.”!”°

At Arden, Modjeska and Chtapowski aimed to realize a number of their cherished imported dreams. They had attempted and abandoned a similar project in Poland, building the villa Modrzejow in the Tatra Mountains where they hosted family members, friends, and fellow artists. Arden, like ModrzejOw, was to serve in large part as a gracious home for family and guests and a site for vacationing and amateur artistic entertainment. If it did not evolve into a phalanstery, Arden furnished Modjeska a place where she could indulge in her twin desires of communing with nature and, much less frequently, artscentered socializing. While the grounds were left alternately to nature and the ranch crew, the couple planned their house as a small-scale showplace, in keeping with the fashion of their upper-class American associates. Emulating their New York friends, the Richard Watson Gilders, whose summer home in Marion, Massachusetts, had been remodeled by Stanford White, Modjeska and Chtapowski hired the great architect to work similar magic on the cabin they had bought with their property.'”’ Although he did not personally supervise its redesign (one surviving 1888 letter from the architect to Chlapowski only mentions blueprints and window glass), the house bears features characteristic of his other work—“the shingled trim of the central gable, the arched Palladian window, the two small, round windows, ... and the shingled well house.”!”® Despite its modest proportions, Modjeska and Chiapowski’s elegant home,

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Modjeska’s correspondence, including her invitations to Anna Held, emphasized this temporary home's size and comfort and their undiminished socializing. In her words, Rancho Los Alisos located the actress in more suitable society, with a bank president living nearby instead of the “ex—horse thief” and “family of Mexican workers” she identified as their closest neighbors on the ranch.'°° For what they thought was the long term, the couple followed the example

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of some of their Tustin friends and built a Bay Island cottage on Balboa Bay, where, Modjeska predicted, a nice garden would revive her husband's spirits with work in the fresh air. This early twentieth-century “exclusive” community boasted water and mountain views as well as access to the Pacific Elec-

tric Railroad, the couple's lifeline to friends and doctor.’ Modjeska could wax eloquent once more about California’s beauty when she wrote her grand-

148 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA daughter Maria in December 1908: “It is so nice and warm here that we can sit on the balcony without wearing heavy clothes. ‘The air is refreshing and at the same time mild, and the views everywhere are so beautiful.”'®* Their Bay Island investment, dubbed “Little Arden,’ was Modjeska’s last home. San Francisco turned out to be an ideal gateway for Modrzejewska's conquest of America, the right sort of theater town to launch an unusual newcomer on the American road. That she would settle in 1880s Southern Cali-

fornia long before it became an entertainment mecca posed a much greater puzzle. Modjeska’s off-season home in the wilds of Orange County was a con-

tinent away from the American theater hub of New York and the posh retreats of her intellectual friends and professional peers, difficult for even local friends to reach, and outrageously expensive to maintain. But as long as they could afford it, Modjeska and Chlapowski chose to be at home in America as Californians—as co-colonists, nature lovers, and amateur ranchers. As her

visits to Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains first demonstrated, the actress thrilled to the sometime role of preservationist, the “civilized” person’s mode of enjoying and protecting a gorgeous, not quite tamed wilderness. Yet, in contrast to Zakopane, where residence entailed ministering to the poor highlanders, Orange County, California, allowed the couple to join an appreciative, accepting community of other settlers, where Chiapowski could fraternize with the locals and Modjeska could play their revered queen for the rest of her life.

DPS

On the American Road

After her California debut, Modjeska’s hybrid identity as earnest settler and classy import rendered her an unusual sort of touring star. In fact, Modjeska began her American career as a recently arrived foreigner who could barely manage a simple conversation in English. She might easily have been dis-

missed as a single-season sensation or relegated to the ethnic margins of American culture. Yet Modjeska resisted performing anywhere but on Amer-

icas English-language stage, unlike her closest immigrant counterpart, the German-speaking Czech actress Fanny Janauschek. Janauschek first made her name in German-language theater in the United States and only shifted to English-language performance late in her career, on the strong advice of her new manager Augustin Daly.' Modjeska would not duplicate Janauschek’s slow progress into the mainstream. The America she entered in the late 1870s

disdained the increasing numbers of Polish immigrants as distinctly lower class, as one of the new ethnicities expressly needing Anglo-Saxon cultivation. Polish-language theater in America was a modest and very localized affair in the late nineteenth century, a ghettoized circuit. In talent, charisma, and star status elsewhere, Modjeska resembled such great continental touring rivals as her contemporary, Bernhardt, and her successor, Eleonora Duse. If she had not been Polish, she might have succeeded as a visiting star whose foreign tongue could be tolerated in bilingual productions. Like the opera, nineteenth-century American theater readily featured some foreign language and multilingual performances. Bernhardt and Duse played respectively in French and Italian on tour. The great actor Tommaso

150 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA Salvini overwhelmed audiences with his tragic power in Italian, co-starring with Edwin Booth in bilingual productions.” Two decades earlier Booth had tried a bilingual Othello with Modjeska’s compatriot, Bogumil Dawison, although the latter, it should be noted, played his part in German.° Yet even if Polish had been an acceptably civilized performing language for a critical mass of America’s theatergoers, Modjeska had set herself the imposing goal of playing Shakespeare in English. To this end she worked tirelessly to improve her English-language enunciation and debated with critics over her right as a “non-Anglo-Saxon” to perform Shakespeare, a genius she insisted belonged to all humankind. In her memoirs, Modjeska argued most forcefully for her sacred right to the world’s “greatest poet” and “greatest analyst of human souls”: “The attitude of those who claim that only English people, or their descendants, have the right to touch the laurels of Shakespeare, reminds me, speaking with all reverence, of the narrowness of certain disciples of Christ (see Acts of the Apostles), who claimed that salvation was restricted to Jews, and did not benefit the converted Gentiles.”* Thus, unlike the famous European stars who toured the world as monolingual, but international, celebrities, Modjeska assiduously developed herself as a bilingual, binational artist, adapting to and cultivating two national theaters. While she retained her status in Poland with intermittent tours, she aimed for the equivalence of native stardom first in America and then in England, asserting her right to try out new repertoire on these stages and, above all, to perform in Shakespeare's plays. In England her ambitious plan did not succeed, but in America the critics, public, and theater historians embraced her as a naturalized star.° In his historical typology of American acting, Garff B. Wilson identifies the foreign-born Modjeska as a key practitioner of what he names the classical school of American acting style, the female counterpart to Booth himself.° More particularly, Charles Shattuck categorizes Modjeska as a “classic” along with Booth, Lawrence Barrett, and Johnston ForbesRobertson in her passionate devotion to Shakespeare's “play and to no other objective.””

The Polish Modrzejewska's establishment as the esteemed American star Modjeska was a rare feat, given the great preference of late nineteenth-century American critics and audiences for British talent. With superior elocution and accents impressive to American ears, British actors were avidly patronized, whatever their capacity and stage of career.® Established American stars, such

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 1§1 as Edwin Booth, planned English tours to prove their performing mettle in competition or collaboration with English actors.” When Modjeska, regarded as a different sort of foreigner, began to mount Shakespearean productions in America, she automatically invited negative comparisons with such successful British imports as Adelaide Neilson and, later in her career, the touring Ellen Terry (1847-1928).!° The Polish actress’s age and diction handicapped her in competing with English Juliets and Ophelias. Modfjeska's non-native, non-British provenance linked her with other immigrants who successfully reinvented themselves on the American stage. Modjeska transcended her unprepossessing ethnic past just as did many actors (Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough, James O’Neill, Ada Rehan) born poor in Ireland."' Modjeska flourished professionally by hiding early scandals, while making no secret of her non-Anglo-Saxon roots and ardent Catholicism. Her image was also elevated, of course, by her husband’s aristocratic lineage and

the incorrect title of Countess Bozenta that her shrewd managers insisted on advertising until she at last decided to forbid them. The growing influx of her poor countrymen might have tarnished her by ethnic association, but Modjeska convinced critics and the public of her vaguely European nobility throughout her American career. The “European” Modjeska also competed with native-born American actresses whose great local popularity depended on the extreme, overt display of passion—the practitioners of the school of emotionalism. Such players as Matilda Heron (1830-1877), who first popularized Dumas fils’ Marguerite Gauthier as Camille and, especially, Clara Morris (1849-1925), renowned as the “Queen of Spasms” or the “Queen of the Streaming Eye,’ vaunted inspiration over technique and captivated audiences with pure emotionalism rather than striving for a balance between sensual and intellectual play.” These players eclipsed Modjeska in tragic force, always her Achilles heel. As their careers would demonstrate over the long run, however, they did not possess her technical finish and reflective intelligence in creating character. One contemporary reviewer offered this comparison of Morris and Modjeska, likening the American's impact to a storm that breaks and passes, while the Pole’s art proved “cumulative rather than dynamic—admirably proportioned, perfectly finished, and never irregular or disruptive.’'’ Modjeska’s emotional competitors had to confine their repertoire to melodramatic roles, which she reliably incarnated with greater delicacy and psychological consistency. The Ameri-

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She recounts later in Memories and Impressions how she negotiated the coincident visits of President Chester A. Arthur and General Benjamin Butler, candidate for the governorship of Massachusetts, during another Boston performance of Romeo and Juliet, as she was commandeered to hand flowers to each politician and then obliged to accept an unexpectedly gorgeous bouquet in return from Butler.”° Two months later, an impressed Arthur “brought his son, Chester, Jr., and a gaggle of public figures which included (naturally) General Sherman” to see Modjeska perform Rosalind in As You Like It to a packed house at the National Theatre.” One of her most ardent fans, who had idolized her from girlhood, was Grover Cleveland’s lovely, fashionable second wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland.” In the South, Modjeska was welcomed and captivated by gracious Southern gentry, invited to stay at the home of Mrs. Sherwood Bonner in Memphis and on General Jackson’s horse-breeding farm near Nashville.” White Southern landowners, she informed Falenska, reminded her of Polish country gentry in their careering between poverty and sudden reckless extravagance.'°’ Two newspaper men met on tour became her special friends and faithful promoters. Colonel Henry Watterson, the owner of the Louisville Courier-Journal, was well connected with actors and politicians in Kentucky and New York, where he patronized the Players Club.'*' Eugene Field, a journalist for the St. Louis and then Chicago papers, admired Modjeska as a truly good woman on the stage, in contrast to Bernhardt and the many other actresses he disdained as immoral.’ He teased his friend by mugging at her from the audience during climactic scenes in Camille, to her great delight. Field immortalized Modjeska in two very different poems. In the comical “Modjesky as Cameel” he depicts her as an actress who stirs one of her rough-hewn patrons, “Three-Fingered Hoover,’ to punish her “Armo” by throwing him “through the landscape in the rear.” Fields attributed his later “Wanderer,” a much more serious poem, to Modjeska’s own pen.'™ The journalist had provided his friend with two

poetic testaments to her womanliness and sensitivity, albeit in contrasting modes—one a vernacular Western tall tale portraying her as a pure damsel in distress and the other “her own” poignant, high-flown ruminations about the foreigner’s nomadic life and pledge to “sing, O my home! of thee.”’” Over her first two years on the American road, Modjeska delivered spiritually redemptive performances in melodramas (Adrienne, Camille, Frou-Frou, and even “Beast” Lynne) and made friends with the Winters, the Gilders, the Fields, Longfellow, gentlemen of the press, influential politicians, and sun-

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 171 dry pillars of the community as she toured big and small American cities. But by the time she left the United States in May 1879 she had not achieved bona fide success as a Shakespearean actress. In the late 1870s the Polish actress

possessed neither the English nor the managerial control to near this goal. Charles de Kay’s March 1879 article in Scribner's pled her case by proxy: “Ow-

ing to comparative obscurity, Modjeska is compelled to play in a number of dramas in which she does not fully believe.” Praising her Juliet, the one Shakespearean role she was able to include in these early tours, he argued her foreigner’s right to the Bard: “That Madame Modjeska should play Shakespeare will not seem so bold when it is remembered that the Polish stage, like that of Germany, is supplied with admirable translations of his dramas. Poland and Germany appreciate Shakespeare far better than America and England, if we measure appreciation by the number of his plays acted during the cur-

rent year. '° Modjeska’s Juliet in America met with moderate critical success, reviewers variously assessing how she coped with the obstacles of her foreign accent and age (playing a young teenager while being in her late 30s). Remarking on her 12 October 1878 performance, Dithmar of the New York Times was sympathetic to her plight, admitting that: “it is doubtful, indeed, if Juliet is a possibility in the theater; for she is at the same time the representative of blooming youth and of the highest tragic feeling.” But his final judgment, reflective of the gender biases of his day, claimed that this experienced matron approximated maidenliness with hysteria: “Mme. Modjeska’s earnestness and mental strength demand our respect, but her Juliet cannot win our admiration. Her performance last evening was throughout nervous and hysterical; her simplicity was womanly, not girlish; her passion sounded no great depths. To those unable to separate charming personality from genuine achievement, she was still a fascinating woman, but her art—which is that of the woman of the world—failed to attain its end.”’° Other, more positive reviews, such as one appearing on 8 February 1879 in the Daily Picayune, mentioned her accent as an inevitability to be forgiven: “As Juliet, Modjeska’s foreign accent is more noticeable than in any other character she plays. In ‘Camille’ and ‘Frou-Frow’ it is charming. In the serious lines of Juliet it is not pleasing, yet is almost forgotten when her admirable acting is considered.”!”’ Primed by her admirer Longfellow, however, the Boston Evening Transcript insisted that she had transcended age and flawed English in her marvelous performance on 22 April 1879:

172 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA Madame Modjeska of course labored under the drawback common to all actresses with maturity of power sufficient for the role, the difficulty of simulating extreme youth in girlhood, beside the special burden in her case of a foreign accent and outlandish inflection. Had she spoken in her native tongue, leaving the audience to follow her in a libretto, the beauty of her personation would no doubt have appeared even greater, tho the achievement would really have been inferior. As it was, however, no actress in our experience has begun to embody the fervid, frank, impetuous, gushing, lovely girlishness of Juliet, “too innocent for coquetry, too fond for idle scorning,” as did Modjeska.'®

Modjeska’s Boston reception in spring 1879, both critical and social, constituted her greatest achievement as an English-speaking Shakespearean to date, although she closed her run here with performances of Camille and East Lynne.

Despite this momentary triumph, Modjeska still puzzled over how she might refine the motley nature of the American stage given her own handicaps and the ways stars were managed on the American road. As the actress observed in a 30 March 1879 letter home: “America is not a country where true artists can enjoy wild success. It is true that in almost every city there is a circle of educated people, but they don't fill the houses, and a different class of public attends either foot races or operettas such as [Gilbert and Sullivan’s] Pinafore.” °° Her competition that March included a Captain Boynton who had invented a boat-like device he could practically live in while floating downriver, an “act” that Sargent also happened to represent. She and the captain necessarily shared the spotlight in publicity stunts. When Modjeska returned to America in 1882, she would have to grapple with the problem that

so plagued her famous predecessors and contemporaries on the American stage: how to sell high art to the American mass public. And she would need to convince that public to patronize a foreign-accented actress daring to perform Shakespeare. THE ENGLISH DETOUR By spring 1879, with two seasons in America to her credit, Modjeska resolutely

set her sights on England. As the planning of their American trip indicated, Modjeska and Chiapowski had identified her star status on the English stage as their consummate goal. In terms of Modjeska’s career, if not Chlapowski’s desires, America figured as the actress’s back door to English success, a place

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 173 where she might try out her skills on a less demanding English-language stage. In so prioritizing, Modjeska actually shared the views of most of her American professional colleagues. American actors, especially those seeking to try their abilities as Shakespeareans, booked English tours to prove themselves vis-a-vis their English peers. The actress Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), a major tragedienne in the generation preceding Modjeska’s, achieved American stardom by way of successful seasons in London, where she became over-

night “‘the greatest creature, in the greatest city in the civilized world.” London success made Cushman’s fortune and produced for her the social connections that she never would have cultivated in the United States.'!! The-

ater historian Gail Marshall attributes Cushman’s glowing English reception to the ways in which she, an actress powerful in dramatic force and physique, “challenged both stage conventions and conventions of femininity” on the English stage, earning special accolades for her performance as Romeo, whom she played to her sister’s Juliet." Almost forty years later, Edwin Booth assayed several seasons in London in the early 1880s, at first achieving disappointingly moderate success, as he complained to his old friend Winter: “What have I gained by acting here? I haven't knocked the dust out of the Old Drury’s cushions (I think you prophesied that I could) nor scattered the old owls from their roosts—‘or words to them effex.’ It seems to me a loss of time and labor. I shall leave no impression— there seem to be few minds here worth impressing. The actor's art is judged by his costumes and the scenery. If they are not esthetic (God save the mark!), he makes no stir. ... I did expect, however, more interest for the Shakespearian drama than is manifested. Chas. Kean, Fechter, and [Henry] Irving have feasted the Londoners so richly they cannot relish undecorated dishes.”''? By May 1881, Booth joined forces with his closest English counterpart, the starimpresario Henry Irving, and impressed the English public as Irving’s equal, if not occasional better, in two productions of Othello in which the Englishman and the American swapped the parts of Othello and Iago." Other foreign stars of Modjeska’s day—most notably, Sarah Bernhardt and Adelaide Ristori—treated London as another stop on their international tours and simply relied on their performances’ overwhelming visual and mimetic effects to win the public. Through her choice of performing language and exclusively American overseas tours, Modjeska sooner resembled her American peers in her progress toward English stage success. Her seasons in

174 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA England overlapped with those of Booth’s; in June 1881, after his co-triumph with Irving in Othello, she invited the two co-stars to recite at her benefit.'!

Her professional reasons for attempting the conquest of the London stage echoed Cushman’s and Booth’s. She sought success in a European cultural capital and authoritative acknowledgement of her prowess in Shakespearean drama. Although she was befriended, as Booth was, by many great English contemporaries such as Irving and his constant leading lady, Ellen Terry, she, too, suffered some of Booth’s initial disillusionment with the public’s lackluster response. She shared her frustration with Sierzputowska in late 1881: “The English, both men and women, are machines, or at least that’s how they wish to appear to foreigners. They ve shown how much they love me, but they lack the imagination or that drop of warmth than can melt the heart ...”""° But Modjeska’s non-native English and long-term goals set her apart from

both touring Europeans and cachet-hungry Americans. She wanted in England what she had already secured in America, a more world-renowned stage that she might pair with the Polish stage for the decades remaining in her career. London superseded all American cities as a world cultural capital and lay closer to continental Europe—not only to the Polish theater, colleagues, family, and friends, but also to Paris, where her son would be training as an engineer for the next four years and, not so coincidentally, where the exacting actress ordered her stage costumes from the renowned dressmaker Madame Duluc.'” The upwardly mobile Modjeska perceived London as the ultimate proving ground for her English-language career, where she hoped to ensconce

herself as a successful performer of those Shakespearean parts which best suited her histrionic gifts. Her campaign for English-stage success consequently used some of her twice-tried strategies in Poland and the United States, this time without the same degree of managerial interference. Modjeska had almost paid off the enormous fine of five thousand rubles for breaking her contract with Mukhanov, and she had shed Sargent and his generic star handling, disappointed in his failure to arrange a London engagement. Nor did Modjeska need to undergo the “nationalizing” experience of resettlement. In a highly class-conscious

England, a stint of pseudo-farming would only have demeaned her in the eyes of the upper-class patrons she wanted to court. Instead, Modjeska and her husband immediately set about cultivating professional and high-society connections through Chiapowski’s relatives and contacts made through their

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 17§ well-placed American friends. By 1879 Chtapowski had been dispatched to do solo reconnaissance in England, looking up his London-based aunt and her English husband, the Bodenhams. Meanwhile, Modjeska, recognizing that her London season could not possibly begin until spring 1880, negotiated contracts with assorted Polish theaters, capitalizing on her new-won reputation as a star overseas. She compensated somewhat for her long absence by participating in the Jozef Kraszewski Jubilee in Krakow, a national event celebrating fifty years of work by this distinguished exiled Polish novelist. Here Modjeska performed her famous Adrianna in October 1879 and led the opening Polonaise with Krakéw’s mayor Michal Zyblikiewicz at the inaugural ball.''8 “Between visits and balls” the actress worked out with Mukhanov an ambitious Warsaw engagement, encompassing several old Polish favorites, two Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra), and a series of her tried-and-true melodramas with the added Lady of the Camellias, for which she received special permission to perform.'” Modfjeska triumphed in her return to the Krakéw, Lwow, Poznan, and Warsaw stages, but this reconquest unfortunately involved her in Poland’s larger political theater of national martyrdom, when a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, Ignacy Neufeld, killed himself in consequence of being her fan.’*° Neufeld, along with a group of student comrades, had been expelled from school by the Warsaw czarist authorities for presenting the actress with a wreath made up in red and white Polish national colors. As the organizer of this tribute, Neufeld had hoped that his suicide would reinstate his friends, but his death instead precipitated a huge public funeral demonstration in which Modjeska took part, riding with Sierzputowska in a closed carriage and laying a similarly red and white wreath on the boy’s grave.™! Neither artistic triumph nor patriotic pathos prevented Modjeska from proceeding to England in March 1880. There she undertook another course of intensive adaptation. She once again had to study English, this time, as she reported to her mother, under the tutelage of “a certain gentleman with a monumental nose and strong white teeth (regular monkey’s teeth)” who corrected her accent for two hours each morning.'” To her dismay, her monkeytoothed teacher declared that hers was a Russian and not a Yankee accent.

His unabashed ignorance of Poland as a country existing apart from Russia struck her as typically English. Whereas Modjeska’s foreignness had trans-

176 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA lated into a generally European cosmopolitanism in the United States, indifferent Englishmen simply lumped Poles together with their despised enemy

and condescended to both.’ At the same time, Modjeska and Chlapowski assiduously prepared for her favorable artistic reception through highly selective circulation. The important people on the English stage formed a far more concentrated and inter-

connected group than those in America or Poland. In this great imperial capital Modjeska could not afford the anonymity that she had to overcome in California if she were to succeed as an artist. Too many established stars and touring performers regularly arriving from the Continent could nip her nascent celebrity in the bud. Modjeska’s letters and memoirs accordingly advertise how she hobnobbed with the famous and talented several months before

she stepped upon the stage. At her first reception hosted by Hamilton Aidé, an artist and “dilettante in letters,” the actress willingly submitted to scrutiny “from head to toe” by ladies with lorgnettes, until her moving recitation of her favorite poem in Polish, Ujejski’s “Hagar in the Wilderness” (Hagar w puszczy), forced them to drop their weapons and wipe their eyes.'** Recapitulating this event for Sierzputowska, Modjeska noted that someone sketched her as she recited and “so this little literary and artistic world has recognized me already.”! Aidé’s reception led to the couple’s visit with Britain's reigning poet, Alfred Tennyson, a distinction she related to several correspondents and commemorates in Memories and Impressions. She itemized for Witkiewicz the other poetic folks in attendance during this visit (Robert Browning, the granddaugh-

ter of Lord Byron) as well as the painters they had met elsewhere in society and at their studios (John Millais, Alphonse de Neuville).!** Her memoirs profile other impressive artists, both local and visiting, whom she encountered during her London seasons: Laurence Alma-Tadema, Edward BurneJones, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.” Modjeska clearly wanted to project herself as an accepted member of an artistic elite, passing easily from an American into a British intelligentsia. Yet a March 1880 letter to Helena Gilder reflected her insecurity in either set. Teasing her American friend that she will not steal away “her” British poet (Ehrman Syme Nadal), she also confessed her jealousy over Gilder’s response to Bernhardt, then touring in the United States: “|[Bernhardt] has so many friends, so let me keep you for myself.”!”*

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 177 As an actress, Modjeska relied in England, as she had in America, on beautifully performed melodrama to first secure her audience. She had arranged for her beginning engagement with actor-manager Wilson Barrett at the Court Theatre, a small venue that always featured very good actors and “attracted the best public,” as she assured Falenska.'” Barrett himself had advised her that “it would be better not to touch Shakespeare until I made myself known in some easier literature.”'*° Opting for Modjeska’s surest hit, The Lady of the Camellias, the manager and his star avoided its censorship on British soil by persuading its English translator, James Mortimer, to camouflage it rather superficially with the substitute flower title of Heartsease and the new, shrewdly chosen name of Constance for its heroine. As Modjeska admitted, Mortimer and Barrett also “changed some objectionable features of the heroine's profession.”!*!

As was to be expected, the Polish actress triumphed decisively in her 1 May 1880 English debut. Due in good part to her high-profile socializing beforehand, her debut audience included the Prince and Princess of Wales (the prince,

accompanied by a Count Jaraczewski, complimented her backstage) and a host of London’s greatest actors—among them, Mrs. Kendal, Mrs. Bancroft, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and Charles Coghlan.'” The critics unanimously praised her work, and over the play’s extended run she attracted other famous admirers such as Henry Irving, her great rival Bernhardt, and KalergisMukhanova's old friend Hans von Biilow, who complained only about the orchestra conductor who “murder[ed] Chopin between the acts.” Yet despite her unquestioned success in her first role and her somewhat more restricted success in society, Modjeska was far more apprehensive about what she dared to do and what the conditions of her work would be over the long term in England. America had not been so culturally imposing or tradition-bound. Even as her letters to Poland boasted of her contacts, they disclosed unprecedented feelings of intimidation and alienation: “I’ve never yet felt so far from my own country and my own people as I feel here.” The statue of Nelson at Trafalgar Square taunted her as a nobody, she wrote, even as advertisements for her performance, her surname printed in letters threefeet-high, struck her as unconscionably audacious.'** Her proclamation of vic-

tory after her debut was uncharacteristically subdued. Modjeska’s letter to Witkiewicz in early May 1880 sounded apathetic rather than triumphant: “Today I can write without laments, for I have conquered. Do I feel happier now?

178 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA I cannot tell. Life is strange, after all.”!°* While she informed him of invitations to play with a Polish troupe in Russia and very tempting talk of performing Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, and other Shakespeare plays in London, she also admitted that she might have to perform Heartsease until the end of July, the sort of reiteration of a single role that the actress had always abhorred. As Modjeska soon learned, performing in London and occasionally touring in Ireland and Scotland required less physical wear and tear than did the American road, but this experience troubled her with an even keener sense of a divided, perhaps misdirected, career. Feeling homesick, she dutifully supplied Estreicher and others clippings of her “triumphs for Poland” abroad.'*° She confided in Estreicher that Russian soldiers have invaded her dreams for

somehow her poor brain has confused conquering British theatergoers with the fight to reclaim Polish sovereignty: “I remind myself that this is a dream and I have to go to rehearsal and that I’m not seizing castles with spear in hand, but trying to capture hearts colder than stone with my tortured tongue and the groans of my soul... .”'8’ So recently in the thick of Polish culture and politics, hailed as a national genius and the cause of another instance of senseless national martyrdom, Modjeska surely felt pain and guilt at separating from her homeland. During her seasons in England, Poland’s relatively close proximity alternately strengthened and shook her professional resolve. On the one hand, she vowed to Sierzputowska that for the time being she wanted to play roles other than that of a Polish Joan of Arc.'*§ On the other hand, the once critical Bogustawski was begging her to return for the good of the cause, when the national stage most needed her revitalizing power.'*” After her debut, Modjeska felt that she was regressing rather than progressing in a theater where lofty experimentation had once seemed possible. With Barrett’s year-long contract in hand for 1881, she had to depend, for the most part, on the now uninspiring vehicles that had sold her so well in America. Relearning a superior literary version of Adrienne Lecouvreur for the English stage was “mechanical work... very painful and hard.”!*° She complained to Helena Gilder that her subsequent success as Adrienne in spring 1881 did not make her happy: “I feel all the more how little good I achieve performing in a foreign language. The more I play [in English], the more I sense the imperfection of my performance.”'*! With terrific effort, the Polish actress did break away from her standard popular repertoire in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, memorizing an English version of the play arranged by Lewis Wingfield from the combined translations of

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 179 Joseph Mellish and actress Fanny Kemble. In a letter to her mother, Modjeska attributed Mary Stuart’s “unexpected success” to the many Catholics who

turned out to witness Mary's unhappy fate and suggested that the critical discord over her performance reflected something of a revived religious war: “the Protestants want to sink me, but most of the critics are with me, as is the public.” A New York Times overview of the London press found that most reviewers applauded her performance and were pleasantly surprised by the “natural force,” “ardor, vehemence, and passionate fierceness’ in her Mary, attributes missing in her previous roles.'** Modjeska could report the undeniable success of playing “very nearly one hundred performances’ of the play.'** But the Polish star’s other experiments—a new play, Juana, by William Gorman Wills, and her lone Shakespearean offering of Romeo and Juliet— probed definitively what her limits would be on the English stage. Juana, a costume drama starring a Spanish girl “consumed by jealousy verging on madness’ and ending with her insanity and death, “was produced with great care

and in the best style, the scenery and costumes elaborate and handsome.” Yet the critics in this case did succeed in sinking Juana, regardless of their religious convictions, as “too gloomy” a play.'** When Modjeska embarked on Romeo and Juliet thereafter, she sensed the great risk involved. Marshalling her courage, she informed Stefania Leowa in February 1881 that “I see the clouds gathering over my head and sniff battle in the air” as she girds herself “for the next campaign.”!** At least she had had the practice of performing Juliet on another English-language stage, and her manager Barrett at last agreed that it was time to try the part.'”’ The actress's recollection of playing Juliet on the English stage in Memories and Impressions focuses defensively on the contradictory coaching about diction that she received during rehearsals, conveying her primary worries over accent. Her brisk summation of her reviews, by named critics, bravely claims success, citing the “many notices, some good, some adverse, as might have been expected by a foreigner ‘tackling Shakespeare,” and noting the estimable reviewers who “spoke of my improved English.” She could report that her cast included a most “admirable” Romeo in Johnson Forbes-Robertson, an “excellent Friar” in Charles Ryder, and “a successful Mercutio” in Wilson

Barrett. Nonetheless, Modjeska’s final note about her first English Romeo and Juliet elliptically signals her defeat, informing the reader that Irving and Terry offered their own version of the play at the Lyceum Theatre soon after her de-

180 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA but. The incipient comparison to Terry doomed her. Curiously enough, Oscar Wilde, one of the famous friends Modjeska had made during her London seasons, declared Romeo and Juliet to be her Waterloo. Quoted in the New York Times during his January 1882 visit to the United States, Wilde implied the transgression of anon-Englishwoman playing Shakespeare before English audiences: “Why, Modjeska delighted London until she made her appearance as Juliet. Then she seemed to lose her hold upon audiences, and they were never satisfied with her after that performance, no matter what she undertook.”!*? Wilde overstated her drop in popularity, for English audiences readily patronized the Polish actress as a vaguely foreign, beautifully costumed heroine in salon melodramas. But he correctly perceived that Modjeska had sinned against national taste in presuming to play a romantic Shakespearean heroine, daring a role reserved for such consummately English leads as Terry. In an article reviewing the nineteenth-century English reception of foreign actresses,

Gail Marshall marks Modjeska as the outsider particularly stymied by her choice of Shakespearean role and “un-English” incarnation of it. If Modjeska had excelled as a tragedienne and had attempted the mature, harsher part of Lady Macbeth, as did Cushman and Ristori, she might have succeeded despite her accent. Instead she insisted on a role of “extraordinary cultural and theatrical status,’ one which, during the Victorian period, enabled a “display of female sexual attractions ... to coexist with a persistent sense of the characters exemplary young femininity.” British reviewers, much like her critics in both America and Poland, had identified and praised Modjeska’s intelligent “self-conscious artistry” in other roles, qualities antithetical to the “‘naturalness and ‘charm’ so beloved of English actresses, and particularly of Ellen Terry, at that time.”’*° In the eyes of the Victorian English public Modjeska could never excel as a Juliet on account of her ethnicity and technique. It is intriguing, however, that the expatriate American writer, Henry James, applauded Modjeska’s London performances of Mary Stuart, at least, over Terry s rendition of Portia in Merchant of Venice."*! Modjeska continued to perform in London and on short provincial tours

until September 1882, spending the off-seasons and holidays in Poland as well as such glorious natural playgrounds as Brittany (summer 1881) and Cornwall (summer 1882). During these years, she maintained close ties with her son studying in Paris and the two nieces in her charge (Feliks’s and Jozia’s daughters), whom she had settled in a convent school in Walmer, in the County of Kent. Her social success had burgeoned, ranging from formal re-

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ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 183 ceptions in more than thirty aristocratic homes to casual visits to artists’ studios, where the new neo-Romantic movement of the pre-Raphaelites perfectly matched her performing aesthetic and clearly influenced her stage costumes.'’* She made fast friendships with a number of English artists, particularly the Forbes-Robertson brothers (both Johnston and Ian), although she enjoyed herself most when visiting Polish opera stars (the de Reszke brothers, Marcelina Sembrich-Kochanska, and Wiadystaw Mierzwinski) attended her “Sundays” at home, giving improvised concerts and playing games.'** In professional terms, Modjeska would never reach the parity in Shakespearean play that Booth had achieved for a time with Irving, but she delivered an impressive number of well-patronized performances under Barrett’s management, and the participants in her June 1881 benefit (Irving, Terry, the Kendals, even Bernhardt) reflected the theater community’s esteem for her work.'** Her nearness to Poland also facilitated an intensive tour of thirty-eight performances in Warsaw in spring 1882, during which she not only dueled successfully with Bernhardt over the hearts of her Polish public (Bernhardt had completed a Polish tour weeks before), but also tried out some new pieces, including a stunning premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (retitled Nora).'°°

Circulation among aristocrats and artists, proximity to family and her national stage, a thoroughly respectable professional record—all these factors would seem great inducements to remain, to divide her career between England and Poland or to make Poland her base and limit herself to occasional English tours. Yet Modjeska’s cumulative lesson about England as a place to live and work was one of limitation, as she experienced this imperial culture's solipsism, subtle exclusion, behavioral restraint, and professional typecasting. In the diary she kept while on provincial tour in autumn 1881, the actress complained about the frustrating opacity of the English: “It is very difficult to make acquaintances here, and foreigners often have erroneous opinions about people. England is like a sea. If you know how to dive, and are allowed to do so, you will find pearls, but if not, you must float on the surface, and never see the riches hidden at the bottom of the depths.”'** Writing Witkiewicz from Glasgow toward the end of the tour, Modjeska even dismissed her love for the poor, oppressed Irish: “But it’s all the same—England, Ireland or Scotland, it’s all alien territory. These people have nothing in common with us. When I tell them at times of our misfortunes or our heroes, they open their mugs to say ‘oh, oh,’ but they believe nothing, or rather, they don’t want to believe me.”'’’

184 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA Modjeska learned that her advancement on the English stage basically entailed a more thorough pigeonholing of her “type,” a decision based on market considerations and national parochialism. By spring 1882, she was playing under the Bancrofts’ excellent management at the grander, more venerable Haymarket Theatre. Yet her repertoire for the next three months consisted of a single play, Sardou’s Odette translated and adapted for the English stage by Clement Scott, who had carefully kept her character’s name that of the foreign-sounding title: “All the persons of the play were turned into English people, with the exception of Odette and the wicked companion of her downfall in the fourth act.”!S* Modjeska could complain of neither “the pretty theater” nor its courteous and considerate managers, yet the play's inordinate success doomed her to its long run and an enervating state which, in her words, “caused the phonographic plates of my brain to be rubbed off in places, and I began to forget words of my lines.”'’ For the restless Modjeska, performing a second-rate melodrama three months straight amounted to a kind of purgatory. Her 22 June 1882 letter to playwright Pierre Berton indicated that she was desperately seeking new material as a means of escape.’ To the end of this London experiment, Modjeska remained a prisoner of how her English audiences wanted to see her, as she lamented to Falenska: “The public is crazy about the play, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the heir to the Danish throne and other such figures applaud and weep, the public even more. The ladies like my dresses and new faux diamonds—what more is needed? The set is marvelous—even an organ is played in the last act instead of a piano (for this is a novelty) and so it’s as if I’m in heaven—yet I’d prefer something else.”'°!

By the close of her contract with the Bancrofts, which she “declined politely” to extend, Modjeska had made up her mind to conclude her long-term English career, and already had signed with American manager John Stetson for the 1882-1883 season on the other side of the Atlantic. She burned no bridges in taking her leave and never made explicit her reasons for preferring America to England as her professional second home. Nor could she have predicted at this point the impressive achievements and ambitious flops that she and her traveling companies would produce in the United States over the next two decades. True to the mantra that she repeated to Polish friends and herself, she pronounced the upcoming American season a farewell tour.’ Yet she likely knew that she had exhausted what English society and the English stage were willing to offer her, whereas America promised more money,

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 185 fewer prohibitive traditions, and, depending on her box office appeal, greater control over the whole show. As Modjeska could report to her mother soon after their arrival in the United States: “Tomorrow we begin rehearsals and I think all will go well, for I’ve been welcomed back warmly, even fervently. ... If only we could make a pile of money. God will take care of the rest. I’m not greedy, but it’s nice to be successful.”!*? MANAGING THE AMERICAN ROAD

When Modjeska returned to the United States, she had the advantage of knowing the social and cultural territory. Longfellow had died while she was abroad, to her great sorrow, but she still had in place a supportive, influential social infrastructure that spread across her touring circuits. She returned enhanced with the cachet that several successful seasons in England bestowed on American performers, glory overseas that gave ample grist to America’s media mill. With a likely nudge from her new, high-powered manager, John Stetson, the New York Times covered her arrival from London as if she were returning royalty. Stetson and his associates set out to meet her steamship, The Arizona, in a tug sporting “an enormous white flag with a deep red border bearing the name ‘Modfjeska’ in the centre in blue...” After Madame Modfjeska, accompanied by “Count Bozenta’” and two maids, had been settled at the Clarendon Hotel (long her preferred New York accommodation) and tele-

grams had been dispatched “announcing the safe arrival of the party... to London, Warsaw, and Cracow,” the actress “was called upon by Oscar Wilde and Mora, the artist.’'** Before previewing her American tour and repertoire,

the reporter carefully reminded readers that: “during the past season [Madame Modjeska] has been playing to crowded houses at the Haymarket Theatre, London.” A condensed review of what Modjeska assayed and achieved over these provisionally planned decades highlights her extraordinary stamina, ambi-

tion, and artistic evolution. To summarize her general progress: From October 1882 to March 1907 Modjeska was booked on twenty-four tours of the United States, with occasional forays along her circuits to Canadian cities in both east and west. Most of her tours extended from October to May or June, although she sometimes played short, geographically concentrated engagements to fillin lacunae due to other travel plans or health reasons. Apart from rare indispositions and accidents, Modjeska was prevented from tour-

186 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA ing for only one long hiatus of roughly a year and a half (from January 1896 to November 1897) due to the effects of a stroke. Even then, being restless without work, short of cash, and convinced that she had exercised herself back to working order, she attempted a short West Coast tour in San Francisco in late January and early February 1897, and promptly suffered a relapse. Depending on her managers and current box office appeal, which waned markedly only in her last few years onstage, Modjeska’s tours were booked along pre-existing circuits. The most lucrative of these encompassed the principal cities of the East Coast (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore); the South (e.g., Louisville, Memphis, New Orleans); and what was considered the West (Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis). West Coast circuits focused primarily on San Francisco, with increasing stops downstate in Los Angeles. Modjeska's tours also bore her along seemingly more remote, well-paying routes— through Portland, Seattle, and Spokane to Butte, Montana, and Duluth, and along the copper-rich upper Michigan peninsula. In her last years, the physically failing actress was relegated to what most performers dreaded— one-night stands in the small cities and towns of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. Within this twenty-five-year period, Modjeska interspersed five trips to Europe. In 1884-1885 she toured England, Ireland, and Poland; her 1890-1891 season constituted a “triumphal tour” of Poland as well as several wonderful weeks performing in Prague; and in her 1894-1895 season she performed in Lwow, Krakow, and Poznan and was stunned to discover that the Russian authorities forbade her the Warsaw stage for a speech critical of Russia which she had given at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.’ In summer 1901, Modjeska and her husband mainly rested in Poland, although the actress gave a few benefit performances. But during her 1902-1903 season, what was to be her final trip to Poland, Modjeska toured in Lw6éw and Poznan and thoroughly engaged with the flourishing “Young Poland” movement in Krakow, thereby demonstrating her capacity for artistic and professional growth even as an actress in her early 60s. In 1882, Stetson proved to be a shrewder, more obliging manager than Sargent in 1877, and the returning Polish actress was much better prepared to exploit the pliant, star-centered nature of America’s traveling combination companies. Over the next two decades, Modjeska experimented with different types of managers, including the provident, but culturally ignorant Stetson (1882-1883) and the consummately courteous, generous Daniel Frohman

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 187 (1885-1886). For a number of seasons she preferred working with her husband as her formal business manager or “impresario, with an administrative manager for assistance. Only in the last two years of her touring (1905-1907) did a weary Modjeska sign with managers who served the Theatrical Syndicate, a monopoly created in 1896 by three major partnerships who gained “exclusive booking control of all the important theatres of the country” and the circuits serving those theaters, thereby barring independent companies from the best-patronized venues.’ Like a number of other major stars who rebelled at the syndicate’s stranglehold, Modjeska and Chlapowski had long resisted any

alliance with it, sometimes to their financial detriment.’ But at this point in her career, the sixty-seven-year-old star mainly longed for what she hoped would be quality control on tour with little effort on her own part, as she acknowledged to her friend Mrs. Rice: “It is a very good engagement and with good people, for I heard that the managers are all that can be the best among them. It is under the Syndicate—of course, but they usually mount the plays hansomely [sic] and are sure to give me a fine leading man.”!® Whichever management she chose, Modjeska expected that she would serve in many regards as de facto artistic director, choosing repertoire, training her company, and seeing to different aspects of the productions. Throughout the 1880s, her most impressive decade on the American stage, she seemed to relish this control and artistic authority. Stetson, for example, approved all repertoire she proposed, which meant taking a gamble on two new Shakespeare productions, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. His star quickly realized that the artistic success of this tour was truly her business: “During the rehearsals I noticed that my stage manager was doing some guesswork, and that it would be necessary for me to take the direction of plays in my hands. Every scene had to be rehearsed and conducted by me, even the grouping of people, the lights and scenery. I also had to teach some young girls and boys how to deliver their lines and what to do with their too many hands and feet.”!® Stetson amply fulfilled his general manager obligations by assembling a strong company that featured the handsome, talented, charismatic leading man Maurice Barrymore (1847-1905).'” He also “assisted at the scenery rehearsals,” giving immediate approval for changes as necessary, but his star and not his stage manager advised him best on appropriate scenery and props." Modjeska honored her next American manager, the great impresario Daniel Frohman (brother to Charles Frohman, a co-founder of the syndicate), as “the kindest and most considerate” of all her American impresarios, and Frohman

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ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 189 returned the compliment in his 1935 Autobiography, asserting that “my management of this fine actress in 1885 stands out as one of the most delightful experiences in my career’ and praising Modjeska, along with Bernhardt and Duse, as “the three greatest actresses of my time.”'” Frohman handled Modjeska’s 1885-1886 tour with lavish care, hosting her and her husband at his

Connecticut home as soon as they had returned from Europe and furnishing her with “a private railroad car and carriages” plus a guaranteed salary of $1,750 a week.!”> Frohman purchased and for a time housed the two very large

Siberian bloodhounds who were to serve as the star’s exotic protectors in a new play titled Prince Zillah. When one of the hounds died on the road by leaping, still chained, from the baggage car, Frohman “madly scour[ed] the country for a replacement.”'” Because he so admired his star's interpretation of Adrienne Lecouvreur, he scheduled its performance often, despite Modjeska’s advice to the contrary, and once literally underwrote this personal preference by being the lone member of the audience. Modjeska, in turn, repaid Frohmanss care with consistently excellent acting and ample profits, despite a little-changed repertoire.'” During her 1883-1884 season, between Stetson and Frohman, Modjeska reported how much power she wielded without them. In an 8 June 1884 interview with the New York Times, Modjeska spoke in terms she knew her American audience would appreciate—as “a woman of business”: ““You see, I have been my own manager this year, and I have had the most prosperous time I have ever enjoyed in America,’ adding unabashedly that she “cleared about $70,000.” While she admitted that she keenly disliked the “perpetual motion’ of being on the road, she prudently thanked and complimented her public throughout big- and small-town America: ““The amount of intelligence shown by those audiences and their keen appreciation of even subtle points excited my admiration. I played in all these small cities with as much pleasure as I should have appeared in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston.’””'” Modjeska’s mettle as “a woman of business” was publicly tested five years later when she and her husband were negotiating the 1889-1890 season with Booth himself, the American actor she most admired. Booth had experience playing with foreign actors before. Lawrence Barrett, after several seasons of successfully husbanding Booth’s waning “fire,” masterminded Booth’s star alliance with Modjeska. Speaking from the soapbox of the New York Times, Modjeska declared that their union “is the realization of a dream I have long cherished” ever since first glimpsing Booth on the San Francisco stage in 1876,

190 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA and she implied its beneficial precedent for improving the American theater: “Mr. Booth and myself are not going to satisfy the demands of the American stage to be raised to a higher plane, but the fact that we have come together has germinated, so to speak, and it promises to bear good fruit.”!”” Fond dreaming aside, Modjeska and Chlapowski bargained hard for favorable material terms. As short news items in the Times reported over the winter of 1888-1889, Modjeska, a major star and a proven moneymaker, would not stoop to the lesser status of Booth’s leading lady, but insisted on equal billing as his co-star. Citing the New York theater gossip she had heard from her daughter-in-law Felicja, the actress wrote Chlapowskiher suspicions that Barrett, still managing his friend, was manipulating public opinion against her in the press.'”’ Yet by late February 1889, both parties had agreed to the costar billing and Modjeska embarked on the tour in the fall as Booth’s named equal, although to a great extent she had to work within Booth’s own limits. The vast majority of their tour repertoire happened to be Booth’s signature pieces (Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Richelieu), in which Modje-

ska often had to resign herself to lesser and too young female parts. With the exception of her tour with Booth, however, Modjeska exercised tremendous control over her productions in America, from costume and set design to the selection and development of repertoire. The actress knew well the importance of impressive costuming as both audience-riveting fashion and artistic support. In the 1889 New York Times interview cited above, she remarked as she packed the wrapper in which her Adrienne decorously expires: “I positively don't believe I could die without it. The costume does a great deal for the woman in my opinion.” In French melodramas such as FrouFrou and Odette, Modjeska regularly bedazzled female theatergoers with her wardrobe. A note in the 22 May 1883 San Francisco Evening Bulletin typically observed that “the ladies, especially, were delighted with the exhibition of beautiful dresses which Modjeska and other ladies of the company displayed.” Appreciating how Modjeska “invests [the] impossible character [of Odette] with so many feminine traits” and “delicate and admirable tones and hues” in a January 1886 performance, the reviewer for the New York Tribune also wryly observed that “the luxury of woe has not lost its attractive power. Odette’s costumes were marvels of beauty and good taste.”!” When Modjeska mounted new plays, particularly historical costume dramas, she researched costumes and sets with the same zeal she first displayed as a young actress in the university library at Krakow. For The Chouans, an

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 191 adaptation of Balzac’s novel Le dernier Chouan about the wild Bretons’ defiance of the young French republic in the early 1800s, a major new production planned for her 1886-1887 season, Modjeska had costumes made to order in London, Paris, and Brittany itself, where she and her family entourage had vacationed. She also arranged for three railroad carloads of scenery to be built in Boston and shipped to New York for the premiere.'*° While this extravaganza only had a limited run due to its four-hour length, unwieldy dramatic

construction, and the expenses of transporting its set, it earned critical acclaim for its look and some of its cast’s performances, foremost among these Modjeska’s. In an 11 November 1886 review for the New York Tribune, Winter credited “the excellence of the acting and the carefulness of the presentation”

with keeping “a crowded house... in breathless attention”: “The scenery was elaborate and the costumes as correct and picturesque as could be imagined.”!*! The reviewer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat positively relished the spectacle Modjeska had engineered in The Chouans—its “picturesque bloodand-thunder effects,” “fires flashing from muskets and sabers clashing,’ as well as its charming costumes: “The Chouans furnishes pleasure from a variety of sources, and despite its goriness and mere theatric gaudiness, satisfied people who at other times demand pure dramatic merit in a performance given by an artiste of Modjeska’s reputation.”'* While the melodramatic “goriness and gaudiness” of The Chouans marked a daring departure for “an artiste of Modjeska's reputation,” her involvement as designer of two new Shakespeare productions advertised her principled return to subdued, tasteful conventions. Most ambitious were her preparations for Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in which she highlighted her part as the wronged Queen Katherine by cutting the fifth act featuring Anne Bullen’s coronation and Princess Elizabeth's christening, and thus concluded the play with the climax of Katherine’s moving death. In other particulars, she aimed for period authenticity without indulging in “blood-and-thunder effects.” Modjeska first mounted Henry VIII in her 1892-1893 season, under the management of Frank L. Perley and J. J. Buckley, who provided her with Otis Skinner, her second-best leading man after Barrymore, and a good company including “John Lane, Beaumont Smith, Ben Rogers, Wadsworth Harris, and the one [player whom] Modjeska herself had enlisted, Peyton Carter.”'** By the early 1890s, the actress was well established as a Shakespearean player in the United States and clearly felt confident enough to compete with no less a Shakespearean interpreter than the English Henry Irving, who, as Booth re-

192 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA marked, served up the Bard as a “decorated dish” with elaborate scenery, copious props, and fine costumes. She touted her production of Henry VIII over Irving's version scheduled later that season, treading a fine line between au-

thenticity and entertainment: “I wish it to be distinctly understood,” remarked Mme. Modjeska with emphasis, “that I do not propose to put forward a ‘production of the play, as Mr. Irving does. Such a proceeding is altogether foreign to the creed of artistic procedure which I have made it a rule to adhere to and follow. We will have new scenery, of course, and new costumes, and the staging of the play will be carefully studied and carried out in a manner which I trust will win the unqualified approval of the public. But there will be no attempt at spectacular effects, although we shall employ above 100 people in the various scenes and shall make a decided impression with the ballroom scene in the course of which a gavotte of the time of Henry VIII will be danced, and songs and music of the period of the piece will be sung and played.”

A December 1892 review in the Milwaukee Sentinel revealed more about Modjeska’s extensive period research: “Last summer |Modjeska] visited the Chicago Public Library, and from its rich collection of costume plates she made designs for her revival of Henry VIII. Not only entire costumes, but even the minutest details of the Tudor era she selected. Thus she was virtually not only the leading actress, but the stage manager, costumer, and property mistress of the performance, given last evening.” ‘The result, as the Sentinel reiterated in two separate reviews (the second appearing on 6 January 1893), was a “scenic treatment ... satisfactory to a quiet taste,” with excellent costumes and scenery that “are illustrative and tasteful and do not err by being too gorgeous. '** Modjeska’s emphasis on costume as a key ingredient in production held true for many other companies showcasing female stars. But she was unique in her expertise and savvy innovations, according to Polish scholar Bianka Kurylczyk. Whereas Bernhardt and Terry were dressed by others for Shakespearean roles, Modjeska designed the costumes for herself and her cast. Though she diligently studied historical models, she also improved on her costumes consumer appeal by ornamenting them with contemporary fashion accents. Thus, Modjeska’s 1882 Rosalind costume included a bustle, and the Renaissance garb she designed for her 1895 Viola sported the puffy leg o mutton sleeves popular in the 1890s.'* Modjeska’s later efforts at scenic design mainly won her productions praise for their visual effects and her own riveting, usually sympathetic portrait.

ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 193 Her long-cherished goal to play the Egyptian queen in the original Englishlanguage version of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra only came to pass in her 1898-1899 season, when she was nearing sixty and had persuaded her manager John Fisher, the owner of a San Diego theater, to risk its premiere.'*° By this time, however, Modjeska could delegate certain artistic duties to trans-

planted family members. Her niece Emilia Benda (Szymon’s daughter) recalled that while her aunt was preoccupied with impersonating Cleopatra, studying the queen’s image from an old coin and characteristically learning her part by memorizing lines along with gestures “of classical precision,” Emilia’s brother, the talented artist Wladystaw Benda, had been recruited to sketch both costumes and stage designs and to paint sets in Fisher's San Diego establishment.'*’ A 22 September 1898 review in the San Francisco Daily

Chronicle attested to the combined success of the star and her nephew: “Her costumes tell the whole secret of the woman's character. She is a superb picture all through, not either in barbaric splendor or in gorgeous queenliness, but in daintiest hints of the most beautiful textures... .”'*’ An older Modjeska studiously avoided projecting the sensuality of the Polish Cleopatra she had performed eighteen years earlier. She opted for an oddly ethereal incarnation of the monarch, “almost as if she had got the role rewritten by Sir James Barrie.”'®? A critical review in the Denver Post sensed “a sort of Sunday school flavor” in Modjeska’s scrupulously unbarbaric portrayal of Cleopatra, but nevertheless approved the production's “spectacular effects.”!”° Notwithstanding the short run of Antony and Cleopatra, Modjeska devoted herself to developing yet another beautiful queen’s tragedy the following summer, again with Fisher's blessing and investment. The play Marie Antoinette, a new offering by Clinton Stuart, prompted the actress, as was her favorite habit, “to study the period of Louis XVI intensively, in order to design the costumes for her new play and advise John Fisher as to scenery and properties.”!°! Fisher hired Thomas Moses of New York’s American Theatre to create sets, scenery, and props, which were once more built to order in the managers San Diego establishment.'” A puff piece appearing in the 24 September 1899 San Francisco Call, adorned with Modjeska’s photo in her Antoinette costume, advertised her contribution as an incentive to patrons: “Modjeska, it is whispered, has materially assisted her manager, John C. Fisher, in designing the scenery for the production, for she is an artist of no mean ability.”’”? Once again the critics singled out the play’s look and the star's dignity and pathos for praise, while deploring the play itself for its wordiness and static exposi-

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ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 20§ with the company likely had little do with Chlapowski’s argumentativeness, since both he and Modjeska went their separate ways on English tours in fall 1884. But the ambitious actor was upset that his star had not devoted more of her touring schedule in the 1883-1884 season to a play he had written as her vehicle, Nadjezda, a melodrama about the 1863 Polish uprising. Although it drew mixed notices and exhausted Modjeska in a dual mother-daughter role, Barrymore was proud of his creation and demanded its more frequent performance, to which Modjeska did not consent. In spring 1884, the BarrymoreModjeska fallout over Nadjezda ended curiously, with Georgie Drew Barrymore filing a legal complaint over the Modjeska company’s “unauthorized” production of the play and the company’s subsequent agreement to cease its performance.*** Regardless of this legal squabble, Barrymore and family rejoined Modjeska’s company in the 1886-1887 season. Much more shocking was the company’s permanent loss of actor Frank Clements, an English import who had played Modjeska's leading man in her first American tours, then resumed work in her company in secondary roles, displaced by the likes of Barrymore and E. H. Vanderfelt. The company knew of Clements’s binge drinking and worried when he went missing during their spring 1886 tour, but they could not have anticipated his horrible, inconclusively accidental death. Somehow Clements, “who had been drinking heavily,” fell under a train in Newark and was decapitated on 8 May 1886.’*> Though they obviously could not control Clements’s addiction, Modjeska and Chiapowski

left money with his widow and later helped the family by hiring his son Robert for youthful parts in the winter of 1887.**° Clements’s career, rather than his alcoholism, pointed to another perennial problem for Modjeska’s changing company casts: their recurring need for a passable “leading man” willing to play second fiddle to a female star, especially as that star grew older. Modjeska’s beauty long served her well, and it is interesting to note that Clements, four years her junior, was removed from romantic leads quite quickly, either supplanted by more charismatic talent or recast because of his own maturing looks. In later years, Modjeska was paired with Joseph Haworth (1855-1903), fifteen years her junior; Otis Skinner, who was eighteen years younger; and even the future silent film star William S. Hart,

who played Armand to her Camille and Macbeth to her Lady Macbeth during her 1895-1896 season when he was just turning thirty. Both Skinner and Hart gallantly dismissed this age discrepancy in their memoirs, Hart declaring that “it was a great honor to have been associated with this great actress,” and Skinner opining that “old she was not; not even in years or appearance,

206 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA and in her art she was at her very heyday.”*’ Yet the actress and her husband regularly coped with the special problems facing an older female star who was unreliable in tragedies and unwilling to sidestep into unattractive character parts, unlike the aging Charlotte Cushman.”** By the end of her touring years, Modjeska had not saved enough for a comfortable retirement, mainly because of the scope of Chtapowski’s off-season ambitions and the burgeoning needs of her relations. Yet over her decades on the American road, Modjeska enjoyed a broader professional and personal latitude than she ever would have attained in Poland or, most certainly, England. She exercised great control over her expert interpretations of her starring roles, the visual impact of her performances, the scenic education of the actors under her authority, and the choreography and stage business of her troupe as a whole. She functioned in effect as an artistic manager and an oc-

casional director without forfeiting her continental aristocratic persona at large. As she traveled the American road, Madame Modjeska remained ensconced among her adopted nation’s cultural elite. A great artist in a large and socially fluid country, she interacted with a wide variety of native-born actors and visiting players, as well as artists and professionals outside of her specialization in literature, journalism, the fine arts, and politics. She played a season onstage with Edwin Booth, enjoyed lifelong friendships with such powerful intermediaries as the critic William Winter and the publisher Richard Gilder, cultivated and benefited from associations with other female artists such as Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, and was welcomed as a social equal into the homes of national and local first citizens.

Perhaps most important, Modjeska developed a vital working relationship with her husband on the road, putting to good use his knowledge of and passion for the theater, and depending on him as her co-producer and chief professional confidante. In the United States, Modjeska and Chlapowski were partnered together in a way that would have demeaned him in a class-stratified Polish context, reducing the aristocrat to business manager. Their relationship in America guaranteed her artistic control, psychological stability, and relief from general managerial obligations, while the American road, rather than California real estate, cast Chlapowski in his most successful professional role as unsilent partner and protector of his star. “Mr. Bozenta” indulged in his democratic ways on tour with zest and fireworks, enabling Madame Modjeska's contrasting reign as the calmly transcendent star, his serene “aristocratic” spouse.

DPS

The Roles of Madame Modjeska

THE RIGHT REPERTOIRE: REVIVING THE CLASSICS

Because she sought to make her mark above all as an artist rather than as a director or a master teacher, the question of Modjeska’s lasting professional legacy remains problematic. In spite of her complaints about life on the road, Modjeska seemed primarily disposed to shine onstage. Nothing inspired her more than the prospect of an excellent new part or a starring role in a play that she might redeem through her interpretation and design. In Warsaw, she confessed envy of Rapacki’s achievement as a playwright, but in America, she mainly preoccupied herself with finding promising new plays to produce. To-

ward the end of her American career, Modjeska seemed sanguine about the value of her ephemeral art. When a reporter for the New York Times asked her in 1899 if “the work of the stage” was less satisfying than that of a painter ora sculptor, creators of lasting art, the actress's response was thoughtfully positive rather than self-deprecating: “‘No, Madame Modjeska answered, ‘you do

not have anything to show, but you know what you have done.” Knowing what she had done and also what she had tried to do on the stage had to constitute Modjeska’s legacy, for these efforts fully engaged her impresario’ss drive, performing genius, and exceptional artistic openness. For an actress who thrived on challenges and passionately promoted high art, the greatest thrill always lay in developing the right repertoire. Modjeska pursued this goal everywhere she played, outfoxing the Russian censor in Warsaw to perform the greatest drama on regicide, struggling out of the enervat-

208 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA ing circle of her successful melodramas in London, and striving to draw the general American public to see the classic and new social drama she desperately longed to perform. During her many tours in the United States, Modjeska performed thirtyfive different plays, a number too small for her taste, since she preferred diverse bills in touring and ever-new parts in her repertoire. As much as she tired of them, she could never afford to abandon her melodramatic hits. Modjeska even added Odette, the triumph and bane of her last London season, to her American repertoire in her first season back, in a premiere performance which Winter judged “scarcely inferior” to her Camille “in power of emotion and in beauty of mechanism,’ although he felt the character itself could not match Camille’s “goodness” !” Dithmar’s praise for her masterful incarnation of contemporary agitated heroines echoed Bogustawski's 1879 verdict, yet with less reproof: “Mme. Modjeska shows her best face in the representation of personalities which belong to the social life of to-day; of personalities, above all, which have in them a perversely feminine element of weakness. ‘The illogical, wayward, morbid temperament of Odette is entirely within her grasp.”° Modjeska depended on her Camilles and Odettes to fill houses even as she infused them with the psychological depth and complex temperament that vindicated her choice for more discerning viewers. By 1882, she was determined to complement, if not eclipse, her mesmerizing fallen women with the classic fare of Shakespearean plays and Schiller’s Mary Stuart. In the 1882-1883 season, she not only reprised Romeo and Juliet, but also established As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Mary Stuart in her rotating repertoire. As she confided in Falenska, she even intended to add The Taming of the Shrew and Cymbeline to the season's daunting list, “but this is still a secret.”* Her gamble that these dramas could form the backbone of her American playlist succeeded with in-

cessant practice and performance. Modjeska's grand scheme was enabled by general trends in the late nineteenth-

century American theater's repertoire and acting style. In his seminal study of highbrow culture, Lawrence Levine marks its emergence in America by tracing changes in the interpretation, performance, and patronage of Shakespearean drama.” The Bard's plays rivaled the Bible as texts that Americans knew thoroughly and valued immensely for their vigorous drama, high oratory, and moral lessons. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Shakespearean drama had been produced in America as popular entertainment, tricked out with entr‘acte diversions, music, and pageantry, and performed by such

THE ROLES OF MADAME MODJESKA 209 “vigorous, tempestuous, emotional” actors as Edwin Forrest.® Yet tastes and behaviors altered as theaters began to woo middle-class patrons. Surveying the general decline in Shakespearean productions from 1855 to 1870, McConachie marks the shift away from such “muscular tragedies” as Macbeth, King Lear, and Coriolanus to Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and the comedies.’ A new generation of actors also challenged the style of “strenuous realism”

that Forrest and Junius Brutus Booth had made so popular. Edwin Booth, Forrest’s namesake and Junius’s son, began this partial revolution, “play|ing| his roles in aless ferocious, more subtle and intellectualized fashion than his father and most of the other leading actors of the first half of the century had.”* The-

ater historian Edwin Duerr dates the onset of this revolution as early as 1860, when Booth tested his Hamlet, Richard III, and Richelieu (a play by BulwerLytton) against Forrest’s Richard III, Richelieu, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, although Duerr categorizes the younger actor as more refiner than rebel: “With admirable taste he undoubtedly softened and dignified the excesses of standard elocution until as ‘an expounder of the text,’ he was hailed as being eminently modern and natural.”® Wilson, too, ascribes Booth’s innovation to individual talent rather than programmatic change: “Booth’s style of acting was shaped by his natural gifts: a beautiful voice, a graceful though not a powerful physique, and a penetrating, poetic mind.... His art was smooth, even of texture, and marvellously relaxed.” Booth’s best acting emerged from a combination of careful study, fine technique, and inspiration; if this last element was missing, his work “could be cold and formal,” but its presence “could enthrall his audience with the beauty and fire of his performance.’" Booth’s style, repertoire, and lifelong adoration by the public fundamentally conditioned American audiences’ responsiveness to Modjeska and her Shakespearean ambition. Her acting approach in many ways overlapped with his, involving a similar “careful analysis of parts,” “the symmetry and balance of her conceptions,’ “the even texture of her acting,” and even the coldness critics occasionally complained of when “she failed of inspiration.”’* Both Booth (his idol) and Modjeska (one of his favorites) were championed by Winter, the chief judge of genteel success on the boards, because their acting achieved

what he deemed the desirable “balance between emotion and technique.’ Booth, moreover, was pivotal in what Levine represents as the sanctification of Shakespeare in America, the transformation of Shakespearean productions from popular entertainment into grandly designed high art to be consumed with awe and, consequently, a greater outlay of cash. Modjeska

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THE ROLES OF MADAME MODJESKA 211 debuted on the American stage a mere seven years after Booth’s sixty-four consecutive performances of Hamlet in his own New York theater “stirred the greatest excitement, drew the strongest box office [and] received the highest praise.”'* During the six years of his management (1869-1875), even after he had to declare bankruptcy in 1874, Booth “mounted altogether eight major Shakespeare productions” in his theater, subscribing, curiously enough, to what he later professed to disdain in Irving’s much elaborated sets, “this grand nineteenth-century delusion that one got at the heart of Shakespeare's mystery by filling the stage with more and more realistic scenery.”!* While Booth eventually rid himself of this delusion as well as his theater, his dedication to the Bard remained evident not only in his repertoire, but also in a more permanent project he undertook with Winter. In 1876, he proposed that the critic co-produce “acting edition|s] of all the plays I perform,” and, over the next two years, actor and critic “published a total of fifteen Prompt Books,” nine of which were Shakespeare plays.’° Thus, while Shakespearean productions dwindled in number even before Modjeska appeared on the American stage, their refined revival by Booth and continued identification with him as a beloved national celebrity imbued them with the right class appeal for Modjeska’s image and purpose. Booth’s performances were regarded as the most accomplished and coveted that the American theater had to offer, works of performing art so beautifully mounted and played as to raise them high above the motley of American entertainment which had dismayed Modjeska on her first tours. Through his sensitive intellectual style and richly furnished sets and theater, Booth helped define late nineteenth-century American culture “as a higher sphere of activity associated with class privilege.” He produced highbrow art for an aspiring elite.” Or, as McConachie argues, the sensitivity, spirituality, and idealization inherent in Booth’s acting were embraced and patronized as the values of America’s newly ascendant business class."*

Modjeska therefore had good reason to presume that a revived, refined Shakespearean tradition could attract discerning, well-paying audiences, provided those audiences came to admire her in, and identify her with, certain Shakespearean parts. Booth kept a core of his father’s repertoire a going concern, but tailored it to his personal strengths and contemporary context. Modjeska benefited from Booth’s reform and Shakespeare’s consequent currency, yet she faced the higher hurdles of first identifying the right starring roles and then mastering their language and interpretation to her American public’s sat-

212 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA isfaction. She needed to reverse the preference of her St. Louis audience when she played As You Like It and Odette on consecutive nights in winter 1883: “Whatever any may have thought of Madame Modjeska as Rosalind, and there are some who profess not to have greatly admired it, her Odette is without question such a character as to rank her among the few great actresses.” Modjeska’s successful creation of a gallery of Shakespearean roles over the next two decades is perhaps more impressive than Booth’s efforts because she, for the most part, cleared these hurdles despite her foreigner’s handicaps. Her first challenge was one familiar to her from her Warsaw days. An ambitious

actress in the late nineteenth century simply had fewer classic star parts at her disposal. A critic for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin spelled out this perennial problem: “The range of Shakespearean plays in which a woman can star is limited. There are ‘Juliet’ and ‘Rosalind’ and possibly ‘Beatrice’ and ‘Viola, but ‘Desdemona is overshadowed by two male characters in the play, and ‘Portia has always been subordinate to ‘Shylock.””° In Warsaw, Modrzejewska could amplify lesser roles such as Desdemona and Ophelia into strong attractions. But her attempts at an English-speaking Juliet, first in the United States and then in England, were stymied by her age and, at least in London,

her marked non-Englishness. By the time she returned to America in 1882, Modjeska’s Shakespearean ambition was at fever pitch. Whatever the abiding flaws in her spoken English, she would wait no longer to try the parts she always had coveted, that handful of Shakespearean heroines which showed off her own best onstage attributes of keen intelligence, poetic feeling, the artful expression of romantic love, physical grace, highly nuanced characterization, and the projection of good womanliness. Modjeska’s subsequent efforts contributed to and benefited from what Shattuck historicizes as the “feminization of Shakespeare,’ an offshoot of the onstage “woman-worship” flourishing in England, Western Europe, and the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.” Modjeska’s advance from French erotic melodrama to Shakespearean roles exemplified a general progression for leading actresses in her day. In tandem with Booth’s tempering and intellectualizing once “strenuously” played male roles, actresses such as Cushman and Janauschek, who had “masculinized” their incarnations

of such tragic parts as Lady Macbeth, were passing from the scene, yielding to lovely new players who acted evil through conventionally feminine wiles. Shattuck elaborates on the consequences of the public's shifting gender role preferences in both theater business and the media: “The cleverest of

THE ROLES OF MADAME MODJESKA 213 this new breed of ‘womanly women’ often took command of the profession. Many of them hired and led their own companies, chose and directed their own plays, were featured on posters and in newspaper advertisements and usurped the attention of the critics, who lavished paragraphs upon the lady stars and saved a few sentences at the end to mention the Romeos, Malvolios, Orlandos, and Benedicks who acted ‘in support.’ Audiences flocked to adore these much advertised tender Juliets, sparkling Rosalinds and Beatrices, and

gentle Violas.” Perhaps the cleverest “womanly woman,” Modjeska already knew her best Shakespearean vehicles would be those comedies with a spirited or ardent heroine at the helm—As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, and the little-played Cymbeline. She occasionally inserted The Merchant of Venice into the roster, for Portia’s alternately romantic and serious scenes were well within her range. She tried a few performances of Two Gentlemen from Verona in her 1885-1886 season, although her part as Julia— “but another Viola... in embryon”—was too slight to reap star dividends.”* The rebellious Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, at least before her subduing, simply did not suit Modjeska’s performing persona. Shakespeare had given her no young queens, with the exception of Cleopatra, which she undertook very late in her American career and disappointingly sanitized. But after her successful English-language debut of Schiller's Mary Stuart, she could grow old with this effective queenly role and please the critics with the tragic force she reliably brought to Schiller’s unhistorical portrait of Mary as a pious woman wronged. When age forced her to the secondary queenly roles of Katharine in Henry VIII and Constance in King John, Modjeska did everything in her star power to render these her productions’ key performances, even if this meant trimming an act to redirect the spotlight. Just as Warsaw audiences had treasured most her Ophelias and Desdemonas, so her American audiences waited patiently for her star turns as queen in two lesser Shakespearean plays. Most interesting, however, was Modjeska’s reinterpretation of the great tragic part of Lady Macbeth. She had to learn the role for her tour with Booth, but she fully reconstructed the villainess as her own creation once she could outshine Macbeth, the leading man to her star, in her own compa-

nies performances. Whatever her choice of Shakespearean play, Modjeska still had to do battle with its English, the most dificult and demanding language on the English-

speaking stage. Her melodramas had eased her into the American theater,

214 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA amply allowing for “exoticism” in look and sound. Amy Leslie even argued that “a strange tongue illumines the text like a margin picture would a book” in the “two companion dramas” of Adrienne Lecouvreur and Camille.”* In contrast, Shakespeare required precise pronunciation, a strong feeling for English

poetic meters, and fluency in using archaic words, usages, and syntax. At the outset, Modjeska’s accented delivery of Shakespeare's lines detracted from her performance and irritated even sympathetic reviewers. Winter could not help but remark on the impediment of “her foreign accent and cadence” when she first performed Twelfth Night in New York.’’ Dithmar in the New York Times was less circumspect, complaining that “it was frequently impossible to understand her, and some of the loveliest verse put into the sweet mouth of Viola became, as she spoke it, unintelligible.””° He leveled the same charge at her Rosalind in the 11 December 1882 performance of As You Like It.’ Yet opinions about the effect of her accent markedly changed as her first Shakespeare-laden tour traveled west. In St. Louis, it was reported that “some found her peculiarities of enunciation painful to the ear,’ while others thought “the slight foreign accent rather added to the charm of her delivery.”’’* The Milwaukee Sentinel also judged her accent to be a plus and insisted that “she slurs nothing.””® The reviewer for the Chicago Tribune fulsomely complimented her on her progress in English: “Since her last appearance in Chicago, Mme. Mo-

djeska has improved greatly in many respects, and in none more so than in her command of the English tongue. That she will ever master it is hardly to be expected, but she has so far succeeded that the foreign flavor, which her speaking will always retain, but adds a pleasant and piquant grace to a very charming enunciation and accent.”°° These divided responses to Modjeska’s English elocution—marring mispronunciation versus pleasing piquancy—recurred in her notices throughout her American career. It bears noting that none of her critics identified that accent as Polish or Slavic; either they did not recognize it as such or saw no benefit in socially demoting a well-patronized star. While Modjeska’s English did improve, her accent never disappeared, and could be exacerbated by new parts, new partners, illness, and aging. Yet in many performances it counted as aminor flaw. By January 1886, when she had mastered the part of Rosalind, the critic for The New York Times accepted her “slight foreign accent” as a likable feature of her “almost faultless piece of comedy acting.”*! The San Francisco Daily Chronicle reviewer so enthused about Modjeska’s performance as Imogen in Shakespeare's usually “disagreeable” play Cymbeline in January 1889,

THE ROLES OF MADAME MODJESKA 21§ another part that the actress had polished over several years, that he was ready to pronounce her “the most brilliant Shakespearean actress of the century,” if she “could only be free from the accent which one cannot help noticing.”** Yet later that year, which saw Modjeska paired with Booth in a series of Shake-

speare plays, the always sharp-tongued Nym Crinkle (the pseudonym for critic A. C. Wheeler) deplored the inevitable contrast between the two stars’ elocution: “That which was condoned in Camille was uncomfortable in The Merchant of Venice, and that which passed by without comment in Nadjezda was glaring in Hamlet, and all the more so in that it was placed as, Mr. Barrett would say, ‘in conjunction’ with an actor who has won no small part of his fame by the unexampled clarity and incisiveness of his English speech.”* Outliving Modjeska, Winter ostensibly uttered the last word in their long debate over foreign actors’ ability to excel as Shakespeareans. Issuing his summary judgment in The Wallet of Time, the critic stated that Modjeska’s “cadences of elocution, her mispronunciation of English words, and her foreign accent somewhat marred the beauty of the verse and impaired its meaning.” He further claimed her “racial” inability to understand and play the Bard's characters correctly: “It is a fact, which all the protests made by foreign actors and their over-zealous advocates cannot obscure, that the greatest actors are those who, illustrating a true ideal of Shakespeare’s great characters, do so with perfect interpretative art; and the actors in whom that union of ideal

and execution has been manifested at the best have been and are actors of Shakespeare's race.”** With this blanket conclusion based on “fact,” Winter not only contradicted some of his earlier reviews of Modjeska’s work, but also dismissed general critical opinion of her interpretive ability.** What truly persuaded critics and audiences to forgive or even embrace her accent was Mo-

djeska’s keenly perceptive, remarkably finished execution of her parts, just what Winter posited as an impossibility for a foreigner. The enormous popularity of her Rosalind in As You Like It, her favorite role and the part American audiences came to identify as Modjeska’s equivalent to Booth’s Hamlet, demonstrates how thoroughly and effectively she made the part her own and, in the eyes of many, her Rosalind the best. The play's New York premiere, presented at Booth’s Theater with Barrymore as her Orlando, elicited high praise from the critics, although Winter resisted a complete endorsement. His December 1882 review applauded Modjeska’s Rosalind as “re-

plete with the frolic, the joy, the sentiment, and above all, with the mind of Rosalind; added to which sterling merit, its execution is impressed with that

216 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA air of naturalness which on the stage is the perfection of well-directed art.” Yet her interpretation lacked, in his assessment, “exuberant physical glee” and “bold color and richness”: “A subdued, twilight tone pervades it—lovely to think about, but not effect on the instant.”*° As he would later add, such a twilight tone was “not the tone of Shakespeare's Rosalind.”*’ Dithmar in the New York Times thought otherwise, however, declaring Modjeska to be “in perfect sympathy with the character” and her acting, despite

her accent, to be “full of artistic feeling”: “It had the depth and the tenderness of restrained passion, and it had an airiness, an ingenuous braggadocio, a refined charm, which were, it seemed to us and apparently to the audience, fascinating.’** With her usual close reading, Jeannette Gilder praised Modjeska’s brilliance and wit as Ganymede, Rosalind’s masculine impersonation in the forest, and traced the actress's psychologically astute interpretation of a Rosalind first struggling to mask her sorrow and unjust disgrace (“Her banter seems always ready to end witha sob”) and then fortified and transformed by love: “It irradiates her with a great joy. She will dress as a man, with curtle-axe and boar-spear. ... She will go ‘to liberty and not to banishment.’ The scene lasts for a few brief minutes, and in it Modjeska plays on every note of emo-

tions. Her range is wide; her touch unerring.’» For the most part, other critics across the country, in Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and elsewhere, shared Dithmar’s and Gilder’s enthusiasm for her 1882-1883 Rosalind. The Milwaukee Sentinel approved her interpretation most explicitly, stating that no one who had seen her performance would “doubt for a moment... that Modjeska fully comprehends and appreciates all the subtle and delicate points of Rosalind’s character, the beauty and sweetness of her disposition.”*° Some papers did echo Winter’s reservations (e.g., the Louisville Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin), deciding, in the words of the Bulletin, that Modjeska’s Ro-

salind “is not the character which Shakespeare drew.” Yet all delighted in her brilliance and charm, even in the not-so-Shakespearean performance that obtained. Accruing such accolades on its first American tour, Modjeska’s Rosalind became definitive for many critics over subsequent seasons. Reviewing her company’s As You Like It in November 1885, the Louisville Courier-Journal

proclaimed: “Hers is the most ideal of all the Rosalinds that our stage has known; yet it is given to us asa reality, and we believe in it.”” That same fall season the Chicago Tribune effectively preempted Winter’s “racial impossibility”

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bered with significant debts.”’! When a committee of Chicago-based Polish immigrants asked Modjeska to lobby for the actual construction of a Polish theater in the city, she obliged with an impassioned letter to the editors of the Chicago Daily (Dziennik Chicagoski). Her endorsement and her son Ralph’s subsequent involvement as engineer in the planning stages of the building came to naught, in part because of the project's financial infeasibility and in

268 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA part because the church wanted no such powerful secular competition.” Yet in her letter, Modjeska had built a case for the theater's creation based on the church's example of national service and inculcating virtue. While the Polish language and culture were under attack in the fatherland and slipping away from new generations of Polish Americans, she observed, the church and its schools labored most effectively against deracination. A national theater could crown the church's efforts, immersing all its patrons in their language, literature, visual arts, and history, for such an institution, Modjeska boldly asserted, provides “the fastest means of educating its citizens.”” However articulate her support or generous her donations, Modjeska’s involvement with the Polish-language theater remained that of a benefactor, never a director or a regular player. This theater, like Polonia and the Polish Catholic Church in America, merited her devotion, but could not dominate her life and career. Parishioner and patron, guest star and celebrity advocate, she balanced carefully between the positions of a part-time member and a leading figure in the larger world beyond. The actress's relationship with Polish Catholic Polonia is perhaps best illustrated by her handling of Ralph’s wedding. Much as his mother had planned, Ralph had fallen in love with his cousin Felicja Bendéwna (Feliks’s daughter) during joint family summer vacations spent in Europe. Modjeska procured a papal dispensation that the cousins might marry, and all three returned together from Europe in 1885 to hold the event in New York.” Modjeska could only spare five days from touring to prepare her niece for the big day, but she had decided on its venue and participants well in advance. The ceremony was to take place in St. Stanislaus Church, Modjeska’s regular place of worship in New York, where she had discovered another “very worthy priest” in charge, Father H. Klimecki (Klimuski).”®

The actress's choice of St. Stanislaus, located in a neighborhood of workingclass Polish immigrants, signaled her support of Klimecki and the Polish Catholic Church and her selective solidarity with Polonia. Here she orchestrated a

meeting between the American worlds she herself bridged—generally poor Polish immigrants, their enlightened priest, and her elite American friends and colleagues. When such people as the Gilders and Daniel Frohman ventured downtown for Ralph Modjeski’s wedding at St. Stanislaus, they witnessed Modjeska's attempt to stage idealized realism—a shabby working-class

Polish congregation on whom she superimposed strikingly costumed, gallant Polish extras. Her American theatergoers were provided a translator as

THE POLISH MODJESKA 269

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well. The New York Times noted that while “the ritual was said in Polish, ... Archbishop Corrigan delivered a short address in English to the bride and groom. ” Modjeska's fellow immigrants, in turn, were treated to a “royal” spectacle and free food. One New York paper dwelled on this vivid discrepancy between American equivalents of aristocracy and peasantry: When the whistles in the factories further over by the river were shrieking out the hour for midday rest an odd scene was enacted in the dirty little street in front of the church. A line of fashionable carriages, with polished sides and clanking harness, had wound its way down through the grocery wagons and ash carts and drawn up in front of the church. The inhabitants of the vicinity were all out to witness such an unusual sight. A right royal welcome the wedding party had when they alighted. Down either side of the church steps was a line of men gayly decked out in red baldricks, and each holding on high flaming candles at least two feet in length. They were the society of St. Stanislaus. Behind them were still other lines of soldiers, reaching into and up the center aisle of the church, with drawn swords and bearing a fantastic Polish uniform of red and yellow. These were the Krolowski Polski [sic].’’

270 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA After the ceremony, Modjeska reinstated the class divide for the reception, as would any savvy upper-class hostess. The wedding party, along with “friends of the family,” drove off for a wedding breakfast at Delmonico’s, then

New York’s sine qua non for fine dining. In the meantime “the happy and proud majority [of attendees] hovered for the rest of the afternoon” in the church basement, “devouring black bread sandwiches and quafhng foaming mugs of beer. Between quaffs they told each other what an elegant affair it was. ’’ One wonders where Father Klimecki breakfasted that day. THE IMMIGRANT MATRIARCH

Modjeska could move in and out of Polonia at will, but she was forever burdened with family obligations as the rich immigrant matriarch. Her extended family on both sides of the Atlantic petitioned her constantly for shelter or support.” Until she had married off her son and succumbed to California's enchantment, she was most preoccupied with relatives and de facto relatives such as the Wolskis in Poland, France, and England.*° Modjeska first planned to establish family homes in Poland, although both structures were only finished in 1884. She designated a modest residence on Krowoderska Street in Krakow, complete with “dining room, drawing room, library, and surrounding garden, to house her mother and Kalikst Wolski.*' By 1888, after her mothers death a year before, she was eager to offload this “half-ruined” property since she had accrued other major expenses, including her California ranch.* Modjeska’s second Polish home, also completed, more or less, by her return visit in 1884, represented the actress's first off-season wilderness retreat when she still regarded America as a time-limited adventure. Here she would host extended family and notable friends in style, comfort, and harmony with Poland’s greatest natural beauty and most Romantic folk. As Modjeska had informed Falenska in July 1879, she and Chlapowski would undertake the joint projects of building a home on the slope of Mount Antoléwka in the Tatras and founding a lace-making school for gral women, thereby demonstrating both familial and philanthropic commitment to Poland.® Yet by the time the couple could take up summer residence in the showplace christened “Modrzejow’ after its patron, the building’s long-term utility was in doubt. During their initial five-week stay Modjeska thoroughly indulged herself, gathering together family and numerous friends from all over Poland. She mingled flamboyantly with the gérale, giving money to their poor, and even dancing in

THE POLISH MODJESKA 271 male géral costume at one of their beloved bonfires, which she dared to leap over in goral style.** After this last hurrah before her son’s marriage and her own probable grandmotherhood, she rarely visited the beautifully situated, but poorly built, Modrzejow.® By the late 1880s, when more of her Polish relatives opted to try their fortunes or find sanctuary in America, Modjeska housed them at Arden, whether or not she was in residence. In lieu of a ready-made Polish community, the ranch functioned as the actress's self-styled family oasis and refuge. Her nephew

Ludwik Opid had to avail himself of his aunt’s hospitality multiple times—

when he first moved west to seek his fortune, when the San Jose climate proved too chilly for his ailing wife, and when he left his little daughters in his aunt and uncle’s custody after his wife died. Ludwik eventually remarried and resumed his parental duties, but in the interim Modjeska did all she could to provide her grandnieces a good Polish home at Arden. As she explained to Clementine Langenberger in December 1904: “It was sweet of you to invite us to spend Christmas with you, but we really cannot do so, having the two girls with us, who would be very unhappy without their Christmas tree and us not with them... . The fish supper is ordered and we shall have all in the old fashioned Polish style.”* Modjeska performed a more drastic rescue and relocation for her impoverished half-brother Szymon, inviting him, his wife, and three children to leave Vienna for sunny California in 1898. The following summer, Modjeska was delighted to host a large gathering of the Benda and Opid clans in Arden’s physically modest complex, as she wrote a local friend: “I love to see them all around me, it is such a comfort after traveling and hard work to breathe in a family circle among those I love.”*’ Szymon’s daughter Emilia likewise remembered Modjeska’s happiness within this circle and described her edifying organization of their days: “On Sunday the entire family gathered under the oaks to be led in prayer by Uncle [Karol]. One room was designated a little chapel and from time to time a priest would come from Los Angeles to con-

duct mass. ...In the evening the little ones would go to bed and the adults often joined in impromptu concerts.”** In America, Modjeska enlarged on the matriarchal role she had assumed in Warsaw. Despite Chlapowski's best efforts on their ranch, his wife continued to provide for all. Chtapowski stepped into the breach as her private secre-

tary and treasurer, keeping “regular accounts of the expenses and receipts of “The Helena Company.’”®’ As was the case for many other Polish immi-

272 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA grants, the actress's greater earnings in the United States enabled her to support family back in Poland and those who followed her to America. Modjeska paid for home building and repair, family maintenance, assorted doctor bills, overseas trips in both directions, and individual family members’ education. In concert with “Uncle Karol,” she functioned as the head of the family. It was Aunt Helena and Uncle Karol, for instance, who sent family blessings to their niece Jézefa and Leon Kozakiewicz on the occasion of their engagement, along with an initial dowry payment of $300.” In a February 1894 letter, Modjeska laid out her enormous expenses in order to explain to a niece why she could not help the girl’s mother: Ludwik Opid, as you know, already has three children and little income. Ludwik works and scrimps as best he can, but we have to help them occasionally because sometimes they are in a very bad way. Your Mother [Kunegunda] wrote me about money, but I really cannot take on any more obligations. Uncle Karol, however, has written to Jozef Chlapowski [his brother] to raise the stipends for Bolestaw and Adam [Maria’s brothers] 20 florins a month this year. It seems to me that your Mother’s family could do something for her, and not let her depend on me for everything. Szymon Benda’s family, as you know, has gone to Vienna and is living in poverty, so I must send them several hundred florins a year. Moreover, Ksawera [Szymon’s wife] was sick, so [had to pay for her hospitalization. In addition, this has been a very bad year and Dolcio has had no work for a year and a half and it costs them four to five thousand dollars annually to maintain their household.”!

Given the ever-increasing number of family members dependent on her largesse, it was little wonder that Modjeska constantly reviewed her earning capacity, and repeated farewell tour after farewell tour. Nevertheless, Modjeska's vigorous mentoring of younger family members was far from pragmatic. In such matters, her temperament and talent wholly separated her from a “patriarchal, authoritarian, and adult-centered” American Polonia, in which children’s education was deliberately limited and their labor exploited.”” Modjeska instead played artistic impresario with the younger generations of her family. If a young person showed true aptitude for the arts, the actress did not hesitate to underwrite his or her training. In this immigrant’s hierarchy of values, the talent to create beauty invariably superseded the ability to make money. Thus, Modjeska the immigrant matriarch supported the highly talented cellist Ludwik Opid, paying for his daughters’ convent schooling and teeth straightening, despite the fact that their father, in her words, “looks very elegant and denies himself nothing.”* After Szymon’s death, she quickly pledged

THE POLISH MODJESKA 273 support to his two gifted children, sending Jadwiga to Chicago for voice lessons because the girl “would some day be a fine singer” and helping Wiadyslaw set up a painter's studio in Los Angeles.** When her sister J6zefa's boy, Ludomir Tomaszewicz, desperately longed to become a musician, Modjeska first hesitated, yet was worn down by his persistence: “Lunio wants to go to the conservatory in Berlin, at least for a year, so that he can give lessons when he returns. I don't know if this will come to anything, but I don’t want to refuse him the possibility of an education while I can still manage it, so that I have nothing on my conscience.” Modfjeska wielded her directorial power more imperiously, however, with her son Ralph and Felicja, the wife she had always intended for him. Her “creation” of their married American life reflected her overarching belief in individual ambition and professional success as well as her blind spots about other women’s conventional family happiness. Modjeska apparently did not foresee that the approved “womanliness” she parlayed into professional success could easily entrap a woman without her social status or career. Her mentoring of her son and future daughter-in-law bordered on tyranny, as Ralph’s biographer Jézef Gtomb observes: “She had an extraordinarily developed sense of family solidarity. She always helped a great deal, sparing neither time nor money, but she also ruled over everything rather arbitrarily.” Their trip together to America had confirmed Modjeska’s high opinion of her Dolcio as she watched him work hard on the farm, play the piano beautifully, and master English to the point that he could conduct rehearsals and instruct her company’s actors in their native tongue on her first East Coast tour.”” She compensated for her subsequent long separations from her son with sudden indulgences and interventions. By early 1878, Modjeska could announce to Faleriska that she had divined her son’s true calling: “Dolcio is not training to be an artist, but he loves music and gives himself up to it com-

pletely when he has nothing else to do... . This time in America will be a great help to Dolcio in his career. He has mastered a new language and will not lose his way when he returns—and he wants to return for, as he says, he must see the digging of the Panama Canal. He will be studying to be an engineer. ’* Plans for him were swiftly put into place. By September 1878, after a first return home to see family, Modjeska and Chtapowski settled Ralph in Paris with Anna Wolska and her father, where the seventeen-year-old was to start preparing for the entrance examinations to the School of Bridges and Roads. Ralph would next see his mother after her second American season

274- STARRING MADAME MODJESKA in June 1879. He was admitted to the school after sitting for his examination a second time in October 1881.””

In the meantime, Modjeska took over the rearing of her nieces Jézia and Felicja. Her tender letters to the girls from the American road urged them to be good and promised them presents. Once rich Aunt Helena was ensconced in London, she enrolled both thirteen-year-olds in an English convent school in 1881, providing them a valuable European education free of charge and usurping the authority of both girls’ mothers. Through calculated placements of her real and surrogate children, the desired results came about “naturally.” “Everyone says that Dolcio and Felicja are in love and will marry,’ she writes her mother in September 1882.'°° Felicja was not yet fifteen. Unfortunately, Modjeska’s further mentoring of Felicja involved no professional training and little firsthand supervision. Back on tour in the United States, she ceded control to the same Wolska who looked after Dolcio and served as go-between with her Parisian dressmaker, Madame Duluc. Modjeska’s letters to Wolska throughout the first half of 1883 are packed with disparate orders, from specific instructions about the cut and fit of her gowns to an urgent request to move her charges from the convent back to Krakow. The messages Modjeska sent regarding the girls’ upbringing were contradictory and the power she had given Wolska abused. ‘Their aunt suddenly wanted Felicja and Jézia to return to Poland, study Polish again, and be reunited with

relatives. Yet she ordered Wolska to keep them “under [her] exclusive protection” and vigilance, making sure that they did not yet enter society and risk being led astray.’” The unwed mother who had worked very hard to reconstruct her respectability desperately wanted to keep her future daughterin-law chaste, cloistered, and, to a great degree, dependent. Modjeska had transformed her two nieces into her special pets, part-time surrogates for her lost daughter Marylka. Her sponsorship elevated their status in the family and accustomed them to material extravagance. Entrusted exclusively with their care, Wolska only exacerbated their sense of entitlement. Modjeska’s relative, Adolf Opid, warned her of the consequences of Wolska's “bad education” after he had tangled with her and her demanding charges in Krakéw: “As for Wolska’s coming here to continue educating the girls—this is a very bad idea, for she teaches them such wastefulness that Jozia told me that they can throw away money just as Aunt and Uncle do. According to Jézia, Miss Anna teaches them that you only need to yell until you get what you want.”!°?

THE POLISH MODJESKA 275 Modjeska supervised Ralph and Felicja’s lives with alternating tyranny, indulgence, and neglect, like a busy queen who generally sees to her son’s proper education, bestows on him her great name, has the right sort of princess raised to be his bride, and presides over the major events of the prince and princess's domestic life.'°° She selected and outfitted their first American household in Omaha, where Ralph had landed a promising position as assistant to the great bridge builder, George Shattuck Morrison.’ Her 12 January 1886 letter to the couple conveyed the extraordinary extent of her intervention, from the great piles of bedding and linen she had shipped to them to her filtering of messages from Felicja’s mother and the rest of the family.'® Aunt Helena was still pampering Felicja from afar, but she now abandoned her to an America the girl neither knew nor wanted as her home. The matriarch had sacrificed her beloved niece on the altar of her beloved son's future American success. At first Modjeska’s heirs fulfilled their duties. As talented, ambitious, and adaptive as his mother, Ralph advanced quickly in his itinerant profession as a bridge engineer, traveling an estimated 50,000 miles a year and steadily accruing impressive professional accolades over his fiftyyear career.'”° Felicja gave birth to three healthy children—Felix in August 1887 (named after her father), Maria Stuart Helena in January 1893 (named after Helena's lost daughter as well as the role Helena played the day of the baby’s birth), and Karol in March 1896 (named after Chtapowski). Yet much as the wedding of Ralph and Felicja illustrated Modjeska’s twotiered relationship with America, so their gradually disintegrating marriage played out tensions in Modjeska’s complicated binational identity. Neither son nor daughter-in-law bothered to maintain the balancing act between America

and Poland that Modjeska painstakingly achieved. Although Ralph readily socialized with his famous Polish friends (Hofmann, Paderewski, and Artur Rubinstein) and traveled to Poland in large part to see his father, he settled both professionally and psychologically in America, where his artistry as an engineer was best practiced and most highly valued.'’” He had no need of a Polish stage. Ralph Modjeski was a sanguine American immigrant who towered above his compatriots in professional achievement and social standing. As Glomb remarks, Ralph, in contrast to his mother, only left his childhood behind when he came to the United States.!°° Felicja, however, felt alien in both Polonian and American communities. A very young mother with poor English skills, she initially trailed after her husband as he moved from one provincial American town after another to work

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THE POLISH MODJESKA 285 cumbs to the caprice of a passing inspiration. The artist is sometimes bared by an extraordinary effect ... but in this way her performance becomes the perfect poetry of harmony.” At least according to her Polish judges, Modjeska had bested the world’s greatest, trumping spectacle and dissonance with poetry and harmony. After the duel of 1882, Modjeska and her Polish public settled into a unique relationship which formalized the mutual idealization between star and fans.

The Polish public never stopped hoping that Modjeska would return to Poland for good. Yet they became accustomed to experiencing her guest tours as extraordinary visitations which exalted the theater for the duration and then left feelings of depression and dissatisfaction in their wake. Critic Konstanty Gorski summed up the experience by quoting Goethe, who observed that a bad guest star ruins local actors, whereas a good one ruins the audience.'*® The press paid Modjeska copious tribute regardless of these aftereffects. As the reviewer in Sheaves commented, “every guest tour of Mme. Modrzejewska's adds something to our repertoire and, if none of these additions survives in the repertoire (The Lady of the Camellias, Antony and Cleopatra, Nora), that

is surely because no one is brave enough to act a part she has distinguished and risk a comparison.’ Other critics attempted to comfort the actors suffering loss of confidence after Modjeska’s departure: “Not every [actor] can rise so high, and there are enough places beneath for genuine talent, useful work, service, and recognition.” '*8

For her part, Modjeska discovered that these intermittent visits not only gave her carte blanche to try out new repertoire, but also extended and enhanced her star career in Poland in the only way possible: by featuring her as a rare, astonishingly well-preserved commodity. She operated outside of the repertory system, as any international guest star would, able to choose her starring roles even if these required the local company’s quick preparation. Modfjeska had outstripped the power of Polish directors who might have cast her according to her age and the rival talents of younger actresses in their ensemble. In Poland, as in America, she could play Marguerite, Adrianna, and even Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola into the 1890s and expect admiring reviews.

Modjeska as a visiting national phenomenon also wielded the power to dictate the production of more Shakespeare plays in Poland, including Antony and Cleopatra (a drama she only attempted eighteen years later in America), Much Ado About Nothing, her American signature pieces As You Like It and

286 STARRING MADAME MODJESKA Twelfth Night, and, finally, Macbeth. As prima donna of the Warsaw Imperial Theaters, Modjeska had long planned to try her skill as Shakespeare's young

queen Cleopatra, but the exorbitant costs of this ornate production had always dissuaded directors from the attempt. That the Warsaw theater was willing to risk such expense in 1880 anticipated Modjeska’s great drawing power and served her personal ends, for she vainly hoped to perform the play in London. Unfortunately, this Shakespeare play became the one exception to the great critical and financial success of her subsequent offerings, despite the ten gorgeous, tightly fitted costumes she had had made in Paris “according to all the historical instructions about Egyptian costume.”'*”? In the Warsaw Gazette, Kenig summed up the production's problems—the unpopularity of the dramaitself, the costs and difficulties in staging its grand scenes, the tasteless decisions of the director (a tableau vivante with harp music, a scene of the lovers harshly illuminated by electric light), and an inadequate supporting cast. Yet his review in no way damaged its star’s reputation, for only her performance fully impressed this demanding critic: We saw not only a passionate woman, always vehemently emotional, sensual and impulsive to the point of fury, but also tender and coquettish when need be, at once thoughtless and shrewd. But we also had before us a monarch of the East, who submitted with such pride and constraint when she had to kneel before the victorious Caesar that it was as if one of the great pyramids of her country had to abase itself before a lesser colossus.

Kenig’s admiring portrait of an amoral, tempestuous queen differed markedly from the ethereal Cleopatra Modjeska performed on her 1898-99 American tour. Her Shakespearean comedies enthralled the Polish public from the outset. Her accent could pose no problem in Polish translations, her supporting casts (more often in Krakéw) provided the necessary good ensemble, and her familiarity with the roles resulted in the nuanced tones and quick mood shifts the press was quick to praise. Reviewing her 1884 As You Like It on the

Krakow stage, Wilhelm Creizenach struggled to pinpoint the extraordinary achievement of Modjeska's Rosalind: “The beauty of her figure, her abundant talent, her well-calculated and thoroughly thought-out acting—everything combined to evoke the most brilliant impression.”!*° Lubowski appreciated both the difficulty and success of Modjeska’s incarnation of Viola in an 1885 performance of Twelfth Night: “It is hard to imagine a role with more infinitely

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