Actorviews (1923)

292 A ctorviews my hair and tie it that way with a big ribbon, so all the world see his granddaughter’s hair. “But my mother tie it back when I go to school,” she raced. “She tie it all back but the bang. And the teachers want to tie that back, too. Because they very clean in the French schools and do not want anything get into the pupils’ heads but what they put there. But I say, ‘No, you cannot tie back the bang. Tf you do I tell my mother, who will go to the department of public instruction and complain. The Bordoni family,’ I tell the teachers, ‘they always wear the hair this way, and we call it’ — and I say it to the teachers in French — ‘the hair dressed like the dog.’ “Are you coming to my concert next Friday?” “Wild horses couldn’t keep me from it. But why do you give concerts?” “To hear myself sing in all the languages I know, and in Spanish, which I don’t know. And to make money. I hope to make enough money in concerts not to have to go into vaudeville between plays.” “What’s the matter with vaudeville?” “Nothing. It’s me what’s the matter. I am all right for the downstairs. But the upstairs ” She hesitated, but she positively did not utter the word bonehead. “I am,” she started all over, “too French, too Parisian, too, what you say? subtle for the upstairs of vaudeville. Is that the right word, subtle?” “Yes, and the word was made for you,” I told Bordoni, on whom a solitaire diamond ring bearing a stone so huge it might have had a name as well as an address, was the final note of subtlety. This crown jewel was cut flat on top, like a historied ruby; and it didn’t flash, it burned; it was Bordonilike. “Why,” I asked its wearer, “are French women so much subtler in what they wear than American women?”