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Ambushing the First Actress
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Her long lashes danced and she said:
“It was when a beautiful blond leading lady took me to her bust, I mean breast, and called me her darling child. . . . Beautiful blond leading ladies always were doing that to me when I was a little girl. At that time I was invariably employed to reconcile parted parents by saying, ‘Mama, kiss papa.’ ”
“You had no sense then of the stage’s relationship to life?” I tried helpfully to put in.
“Nor of life’s relationship to the stage,” she turned it. “It was the life outside that seemed the artificial thing. I used to look out and down on life and think the performance enormously counterfeit. My world was peopled by stage hands, carpenters, grips, property men . . . and they were very real and very kind people. And, of course, the most wonderful hour was when my mother gave me soda water and cakes after the play. . . . But . .
“Yes?”
“I was just thinking . . .”
“What?”
“How I lied about that exquisite, flowerlike mother of mine.”
“She was very lovely, very delicate . . . she was mostly soul,” Mrs. Fiske went on, peacefully, her boot silent, her lids unwinking, “and I ruled her with a rod
of iron It gave me great pleasure to tell strange
ladies in the hotels, who took an interest in a precocious little scoundrel, that my mother beat and starved me. But I sometimes spoiled the drama of this by going too far and saying that she also made me work, made me make my own clothes, which were rather pretty and the sewing of which would have been considerable of a feat for a child of five or six. . . . But when I