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Actorviews
barrel. He’d die sooner than go out and face his audience. I can see him, when the curtain is finally down, coming out and shyly praising me in that great hour of his!”
“Arthur Hopkins must have had something to say,
too, considering the night made you his star?”
“Yes; he seemed to take it for granted that I had reached the time, or the part.”
“But didn’t you yourself feel the thrill of this dramatic first night?”
“Not a nerve of feeling — for myself. I needed success — oh, Lord, how I needed it! — but I had been working and hoping for Mr. O’Neill’s play. And when I picked up the papers next morning I did not — as people of our profession so often do — begin at the bottom, looking for my own name. I began at the
top. . . . Perhaps my intense interest in the play helped my performance. My performance was ‘set’ by this time; no sudden starship could change it, no unaccustomed praise.
“Perhaps it’s just as well I wasn’t brought up on praise,” she dryly smiled. “The best I ever got from my mother was: ‘The lady who sat next to me said you were awfully good, Polly, so I guess you are !’ My brother was more extravagant, because more surprised. He said : ‘My God, ma, the kid is good !’ ”
I explained Miss Lord’s unsudden rise to Miss Lord while she filled our cups and invited me to puff my pipe in her airy drawing room at the Congress. “Maybe,” I said, “you weren’t a sufficiently good bad actress in stock.”
“Maybe !” she laughed, and it was the only time * heard her laugh.