So Very Theatrical

________________________________________________
Title:     So Very Theatrical
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

There is a young woman I thought of taking there for luncheon the other day, but when I called for her it did not seem to me that she had used her lip-stick that morning--and so we went somewhere else.

She is pretty good-looking and was dressed not at all unfashionably. She would have done all right at the Waldorf, or at the Vanderbilt, or Biltmore, or Ritz-Carlton, or Ambassador. Indeed, I don't know but that at some such place as that I should have been rather proud of her.

But, you see, for the place I had in mind her skirt was a little too long--it came almost halfway to her ankles. Her bosom was quite covered. She moves with fair grace, but without striking sinuousness. And I suddenly recollected that she does not smoke much.

No; I saved myself just in time; I should have been chagrined, embarrassed, most decidedly uncomfortable; she would have been conspicuous. I should probably have lost caste with the waiters, too; and not again have been able to get a table after the plush rope had been thrown across the entrance to the dining-room; which, so keen is competition for places there, is shortly before one o'clock.

If you know where this place is, why, of course, all right. But nobody has any business to go shouting all over the housetops exactly where it is. People who aren't just naturally by temperament a part of the picture oughtn't to know how to find it. Though it is a perfectly good bet that bunches of them would like to know.

But that's just the way so many of these havens of the elect get ruined. A lot of curious "visitors" go piling in right along; the scene soon loses all its authenticity; and shortly becomes bogus altogether. Why, I can remember when artists--painters and writers--lived in Greenwich Village. There, in those days.... But all that was years ago.

This much only will I tell you about the location of the most distingué place there is in which to have luncheon. The centre of the inhabited world is, of course, Longacre Square, that widened curving stretch of Broadway looking north several blocks from the narrow stern of the gracefully towering Times Building, rising from its site of a bit of an island surrounded by four surging currents of traffic. A few miles away (from Longacre Square) the provinces begin. But there, the most gleaming spot on this our globe under the canopy of the purple night, is the quintessence, the apex of human life.... I am here speaking, of course, in the spirit of those of that nomad race whose hopes for gold and fame lie through the "stage entrance"--I mean the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre.

To the east just off Longacre Square along the crosstown streets is a medley of offices of divers theatrical and screen journals, chop-houses, and innumerable band-box hotels whose names doubtless only a district messenger boy could recite in any number. The particular one for which we are headed is famous enough to those familiar with fame of this character. Here the "Uncle Jack" of the American stage, Mr. Drew, for some time made his residence. It is always the stopping place in New York of perhaps the finest of our novelists, Joseph Hergesheimer. That mystical Indian gentleman, Mr. Rabindranath Tagore, has found it a not unworthy tent on his western pilgrimages. And so on.

You cannot be long in its rich little lobby without overhearing struck the high note of its distinctive clientele. "Where do you open?" asks someone of someone else. And the answer is not unlikely to be: "At Stamford. When do you close?" In the subdued light bare satin arms and enspiriting lengths of colorful stocking flash from the deep chairs where feminine forms are waiting. A graceful hand opens a telephone booth to expel a smoking cigarette.

Here enters Walter Prichard Eaton, come down from his Berkshire farm for the height of the theatrical season. A tall, leisurely, very New Englandish, smooth-shaven young man, now coming decidedly grey just over the ears. Entering the dining-room we come plump against our old friend Meredith Nicholson lunching with a bevy of friends. A youthful fifty perhaps now, the author of one of the best sellers of any day, "The House of a Thousand Candles." Clean-shaven, with a physiognomy suggesting that of a Roman senator. What has brought him just now from Indiana? Well, he is revolving in his mind the idea of writing a new play, as soon, he adds, as he "can find the right ink." Hasn't been able to get hold of any that just suited him.

But much more important to his mind, apparently, than this play is another mission in which he has become involved. He is going to have himself "mapped," that is, have his horoscope cast. Yes, by one of the ladies of his party, who, it appears, is eminent as a professor of this science, now rapidly coming into a period of great vogue. When he has supplied her with the data concerning his birth she will reveal to him the course of his career through 1922.

On a number of the tables are cards marked "Reserved." Around two sides of the room upholstered seats running the length of the wall seat couples in greater intimacy of tête-à-tête side by side before their little tables. Most of the young women present--but could you really call many of them young women?... Their most striking feature, after the dizziness of their beauty, and the ravishing audacity of their clothes, is the bewitching tenderness of their years. More than several of these dainty, artfully rose-cheeked smokers look to be hardly past seventeen. Their foppishly dressed male companions frequently are in effect far from anything like such youth; and in a number of cases are much more likely to remind you of Bacchus than of Apollo.

Two of these misses nearby are discussing with one another their "doorman." "Isn't he," exclaims one, "the very dearest old doorman you have ever seen in all of your whole life!" Yes, it would seem that, peering down the long vista of the past, from out of their experience of hundreds of theatres, neither of these buds of womanhood could recall any doorman so "dear" as their present one.

The dominant group in the room is a gay and populous party about a large round table in the centre. And undoubtedly the dominant figure of this party is, you recognize, Alexander Woollcott, dramatic critic of the New York Times, invariably at this same table at this same hour, a very spirited, a very round plump young man, very dapper to the end of every hair in his trim little black moustache. Next to him who is that? Why, goodness me! if it isn't Edna Ferber, who, though I doubt not she would not want to be counted in the fledgling class of some of our soubrette friends here, indeed does seem to be getting younger all the while.

Joining this party now is an odd and rather humorous looking figure, tall, amusingly stooping and amusingly ample of girth for a character of such apparently early manhood, an intensely black crop of hair and a very blackish streak of moustache, soft collar, unpressed clothes. Sits down, hooping himself over his plate with a suggestion of considerable shyness. Gives you an impression, perhaps by the brightness of his eyes, of Puckish mirth playing within his mind. Heywood Broun.

At the table on our right we perceive a very popular lady known to us, Miss Margaret Widdemer, or, as she now is, Mrs. Robert Haven Schauffler. Her general air breathing the simplicity of a milkmaid amid this scene. Under her mammoth floppy hat reminding you of an early summer rose. She is discussing with a spectacled person who looks as if he might have something to do with book publishing whether her next book should be a light romance on the order of her "Wishing-Ring Man" and "Rose Garden Husband" or she should come into the new movement of serious "Main Street" kind of realism.

And there, on our left, certainly is a publisher, Mr. Liveright of the firm of Boni and Liveright. Young fellow, thirty-five perhaps. Maybe he is talking about some of his striking successes, such as "Potterism" and "From Mayfair to Moscow." With him Ludwig Lewisohn, literary and dramatic critic.

Back of us we detect young Burton Rascoe, former literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, newly arrived in New York as managing editor of McCall's Magazine, and to whom (by the way) the suppressed novel "Jurgen" was dedicated. You wouldn't think anybody would be so frowning as to want to suppress Mr. Rascoe. He looks as if he might be twin brother to any dewy bud here.

Who is that he is with? Theodore Maynard, I declare. Young English poet, critic and novelist. And the other side of him is a gentleman, Oliver Saylor by name, who at the height of the revolution went to Russia to study the Russian drama, and engrossed in æsthetics lived for a time in quarters midway between the contending military forces. Beyond we see a young lady recently come on from Ted Shawn's song and dance studio in Los Angeles.

And yonder you see a young man who is just as dear and sweet as he can be. He served his country during the war by knitting a sweater and a "helmet" for a poet he knew in the army in France. He, this dainty youth, looks pretty much lip-sticked himself. In order not to sin against daintiness this young person has a habit of powdering his nose. A coarse friend of his forbade his doing this, and the next time he met him neatly powdered rebuked him for it. Whereupon the young man replied: "Oh! You wouldn't (would you?) let a little powder come between friends."

And, finally, here most happily we are ourselves.

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: So Very Theatrical

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN