Dance to the Piper

by AGNES DE MILLE

1

THIS is the story of an American dancer, a spoiled egocentric wealthy girl, who learned with difficulty to become a worker, to set and meet standards, to brace a Victorian sensibility to contemporary roughhousing, and who, with happy good fortune, participated by the side of great colleagues in a renaissance of the most ancient and magical of all the arts.

When I started my training, there were no native ballet companies except the disreputable troupe at the Metropolitan Opera House. The only touring companies most of us had ever seen were Anna Pavlova’s Russian Ballet, the Denishawn group, or very rarely Isadora Duncan. There were good ballet schools in only four cities and no dance critics whatever on the daily papers. Throughout our country an almost universal indifference to the art prevailed, reinforced and perpetuated by social taboo.

I was born into a middle-class family which was by their standards successful. My parents were well educated and fastidious. It was unusual for a daughter of such a household to choose dancing as a career. I was brought up, my mother hoped, a lady; and ladies, my father knew, did not dance. Consequently a good deal of discussion took place by articulate people under heated circumstances.

My father, William C. de Mille, was a New York playwright who had several brilliant successes with Belasco before he was thirty-five. My mother was the daughter of Henry George, the political economist, and had been born in San Francisco just after the writing of Progress and Poverty. She was an ardent Single-Taxer and a fearless crusader from her birth.

My sister Margaret and I passed our first years in the exact routine of New York children — head colds, walks in the park, curtailment of racing and screaming in the apartment. Father continued to write hit after hit, collaborating with Belasco — The Warrens of Virginia, which gave a fourteen-yearold, Mary Pickford, her first role; Classmates, whose ingénue was Mary Boland; and The Woman, in which Mary Nash made her first success.

Since Father was a playwright, I determined to be an actress. It was only after seeing the matinee performance of Adeline Genée, dainty, doll-like, and impeccable, that I altered my choice of vocation. I declared on coming home that henceforth I would be a ballet dancer, and that Mother might arrange about lessons for the next day. There were, however, no lessons. But I danced, and I was encouraged by Mother to improvise nightly while she accompanied me on the Orchestrelle, these exercises becoming as much a part of the evening’s program as brushing teeth.

Father took no notice. Father was busy with the real theater. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he had a flop, After Five, a comedy dealing with suicide. I remember seeing him in bed the morning after this opening, the bed and floor strewn with newspapers while he hunted for a bit of mercy in edition after edition.

“What’s happened, Father?” I asked excitedly.

“Go away, dearie,” said my mother, sweeping me in front of her muslins and adding with that smooth voice of studied unconcern which instantly signaled to me that the family was on the verge of ruin: ”Your father is preoccupied.” Father raised an ashen face over the top of the Times.

“Perhaps,” she continued as the door shut on me, “Hollywood would be a good change. Tell Cecil ‘yes.’ You needn’t stay long. You can have a complete rest. I don’t think it will damage your New York reputation — besides, it will be so good for the children’s colds.”

2

FATHER’S brother, Uncle Cecil, had gone to California the year before, in 1913, an adventure considered by the rest of the family as the purest folly. But Cecil had little to lose. He had had uneven success in acting and playwrighting, and his ventures with business had failed as well. On departure for the West he asked Father for $5000. But Father had staked him too often fruitlessly and this time was being cautious. It has since become clear that Father’s decision was not a profitable one, that $5000 would have entitled him to one-eighth interest in Paramount Pictures, Inc. The company was founded around a lunch table in New York. Jesse Lasky, an ex-cornet player who had made a small name in vaudeville with his band of beautiful redheaded girls, gave his name — The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Co.; Sam Goldfish, a glove merchant and Lasky’s brother-in-law, was business manager. He later changed his name to Goldwyn.

Cecil, who established himself immediately as Director General of the Lasky company, begged Father to join him. They were settled very nicely, he wrote, in what had been a stable on Vine Street. Business was expanding rapidly; the work was pioneering and picturesque; Father was literate and would, therefore, Cecil pointed out, find unique opportunities. So Father agreed to go.

He wrote back every single day from Hollywood and sent photographs: Cecil and himself in director’s costume, riding breeches, and puttees to protect their legs on location work. Cecil in his early thirties, balding already, stocky, with the dynamism of a young bull, his head lowered to gaze straight into the camera, his beautiful teeth flashing; Father, the older brother, thoughtful, intelligent, practiced, waiting slightly to the rear. There were photographs of rattlesnakes crawling over the dressing-room steps, of Hollywood and cowboys, of actresses in tangles of hair, their black-rimmed eyes squinting in the white sun.

Mother decided to close up the New York flat and follow him out with my sister and me. We planned to stay for six months and then we would come back so that Father, well rested, could write another successful play.

Mother started to pack: I looked ahead. I would, I hoped, go to school with an Indian boy. I would have a horse and ride with the cowboys. I would, please God, be allowed to act in the movies.

Hollywood was different from what I thought, anticlimactic after the momentous trip West. Where were the deserts cut and gullied by pale blue rivers? The red and orange Indian mountains we had left behind in Arizona? The ancient villages glimpsed fleetingly as the tracks clicked behind too fast? From a Pullman window I had seen two Navajos, scarlet and purple, riding quietly down a path to the shadowed arroyo, just as though it had been three hundred years ago, just as though a train were not going by in front of them with little girls eating their lunch of lettuce and Thousand Island dressing en route to join their handsome young father in Hollywood.

The trip was a belated homecoming for Mother. For Father, Margaret, and me it was a voyage into pure adventure. We stayed the first few nights with Uncle Cecil but Mother quickly found us a dear little ugly house of our own, snuggling at the foot of a hill and boasting a banana tree and a rose garden.

Hollywood was merely a country town, like many in the East, with palms instead of maples and chestnuts. There were absolutely no Indians, but there was a hermit with sackcloth, bare feet, and staff. Kids said he lived in a cave in the hills. And there were some cowboys. They kept largely to themselves out on the Lasky ranch, coming in only occasionally to the studio to play caballeros or knights or Civil War cavalry or themselves. Occasionally they would show up in a group of six or eight in Uncle Ce’s back yard and take us for a good thumping gallop around the block astride their saddlebows. They smelled of sweat and leather and they laughed with great male laughs which we found pleasantly terrifying. We used to come upon groups of them riding down the back streets where the asphalt was soft under their horses’ feet.

The main thoroughfare, Hollywood Boulevard, was a shambling, drowsy street of box stores and shingled houses under the dusty crackling palms and pepper trees. The stores had been thrown together in a week, but the houses were substantial, built by citizens of the Middle West who had come to the Coast to die at ease in the sun. A trolley clanged down the eight miles from Laurel Canyon to the heart of Los Angeles, and this was the only public conveyance. On it every morning rode the entire working staff of the studio carrying their lunch boxes. Only the Director General, my uncle, and the producer, Jesse Lasky, rode to work in cars. Actors, directors, and writers went by trolley. And when the family had Uncle Cecil’s car or when he came home to dinner with Pop, they walked. I used to see them crossing the vacant lot in the red sunset, their put teed legs scratching through the dried yellow grass. They carried briefcases and talked with heads lowered.

“Anne,” called Father, “I’ve brought Cecil home.”

“Cecil?” said Mother in a fluster. His effect on the womenfolk was always that of a cock in a barnyard, and Mother, like all his female relatives, looked upon every chance to serve him as an indulgence on his part.

“William,” she said, “you might have warned me.” And she rushed to make the table look prettier.

They sat long after dinner and talked of the studio. I was asleep by then, but I woke to hear their voices. They talked with fervor. They were in love with their new work. In the first year, Pop stayed away from the studio only seventeen days, including Sundays.

3

THE studio was a converted stable on Vine Street, the building itself of a dingy, dark green wood. At the little wooden railing which fenced petitioners from the Promised Land sat a brash kid with his feet on the rail. He was usually called Mervyn Le Roy, and insisted on greeting persons by their first names instead of addressing the daughters of studio executives properly as “Miss de Mille.” In the wooden wall were wickets labeled CASTING DIRECTOR and CASHIER. People lined up in front of them at appropriate times, but the daughters of executives swept through, snubbing Mervyn Le Roy.

Crossing the hall, one came right out into the open air again. There, in a great rectangle of wooden shacks, carpenter shops, dressing rooms, and such, were broad, low wooden platforms, the stages, open to the weather and protected from the skies only by long awnings of white muslin called diffusers that pulled back and forth on guide wires. To a certain extent the sunlight could be regulated by the manipulation of these canvases. The rain could not be. When it poured, the scenery got sopping and stood dripping and drenched under tarpaulins. The worn boards of the stage collected pools, and shooting was suspended. The first glasscovered stage was not erected until we had been there a year, and was the exhibition piece of the company. All the shops went up in a fine blaze one Tuesday afternoon and were prudently rebuilt of cement. There being no walls of any kind around the sets, any studio member who wanted to could stop and watch and invite family and friends to join. Mary Pickford was the first actress to insist on privacy, and was regarded as antisocial as well as temperamental and self-indulgent for doing so, but she was too expensive ($10,000 per week) to be gainsaid.

Direction was largely improvisation, and acting consisted mainly in following, without showing irritation or fluster, signals shouted through a megaphone. To supply the rhythm which set dialogue or timed pantomime might have furnished and which everyone instinctively felt was needed, a couple of musicians stood by. They played anything they liked, appropriate or not, and they played without cease, through hammering, sawing, dragging, calling, banging, whispering, and sobbing. In moments of intense passion, the violinist generally moved in close to the scene of operations like a good anesthetis, carefully feeding the efforts of the earnest young woman who was attempting to pull emotional significance out of thin air. She was given no build-up, no springboard of audience excitement, no pattern even — just told to pump out raw emotion under a blazing sky while she watched the yelling director or the chicken hawks overhead circling down from the hills and back.

The stories were generally settled in a day or two of conference. A list of sets and props was handed to the carpenters, a list of costumes to the dressmakers. The location man was told to hunt up a good place in the San Fernando Valley for a massacre. The cameraman loaded his box, and they were ready to begin. It was my father who, coming from the tradition of a literate theater, suggested that it might be useful to write out in detail beforehand what they planned doing. He wrote complete little synopses for Cecil. Then he asked a writer friend, Margaret Turnbull, to come West to help him. The two of them wrote synopses sitting at desks in a small wooden house with screen doors on the lot. Pop got the studio painter to make him a sign which he hung on the doorknob, SCENARIO DEPARTMENT. And this was the first time these words appeared in Hollywood.

If there was no loitering, a feature full-length (five-reel) film could be shot in two weeks; with one week for preparation and one week for editing and cutting, a picture could be finished for the first running in about four weeks. The runnings or first showings occurred on Wednesday and Saturday nights. Every employee had the privilege of attending with his family. Everyone told the director what he thought of the work and offered his suggestions for improvement. Everyone was proud at the prospect of success, everyone saddened by a failure. New inventions were the boast of all — the first large close-up, for instance, or the daring sequence of a man leaving one house and arriving at another, omitting the intervening explanatory scene of his walking down the street.

The men who made the early films did not despise their work or hate their bosses. They had not come to accept frustration as their almost inevitable lot. Each picture was a challenge. They worked as individualists. They worked on their own as artists. And although very few of them were artists, they all had the pleasure and pride of believing they might be and worked accordingly. Some of their exuberance found its way into the productions, and many of these films have the zest and sincerity of true primitives.

In those early days the citizens of Hollywood were openly contemptuous of the infant industry. Every now and then the comfortable maggot domesticity of Hollywood Boulevard was interrupted by a moving-picture unit which arbitrarily roped off a section of sidewalk and made use of whatever portion of the town suited their story needs while the citizenry gaped in good-natured disdain or raw curiosity. A carload of Keystone cops would debouch in the leading thoroughfare, beat their victims on the head with cotton clubs, and effect a departure before the authentic constabulary of the town were aware of what happened. The townsfolk were amused but not surprised, since nothing the “movies” did surprised them. Picturesque, irresponsible people of precarious ways and bizarre tastes, they were considered no social threat as long as they were kept in their place.

Behind this street of make-believe and inflamed ambition, behind this tiny empire-building, the hills rose suddenly, untamed, pre-Spanish, coarse with desert weed and wild tearing sagebrush, riven with flood, blind with dust storm, formed and burnt in an endless sun, and hard and promising that the future was as unknown and terrible as the past, that there was enough strength and brutal promise in the land to stir the earth underfoot until the windows rattled and the people knelt in their little stucco churches and conversed urgently with God. And over all stretched the bare sky, the original sky, the peeled and exposed sky, blind and endless.

Very few were aware of what the hills meant in their lives. If they thought at all of such matters it was to stop suddenly on a December morning and remark that the hills had turned green with a veiling of grass and flowers, that there was a smell of wild lilac in the air, and from beyond the orchard country, when the wind turned, a hint of snow. The rains had come! The blackened slopes were now meadows of blowing, moving blossom. The children grew unmanageable and took to the highlands, returning after long forays, scratched and bitten, with armfuls of dying lupine and brodiae or an entire yucca, twelve feet tall, which they presented to their perplexed mothers.

Once, years later when I was grown and far away, someone placed a sprig of sagebrush under my nose. I burst into tears. The hills, the breathing hills! Veiled with purple in the hazy canyons, powdered with gold where the mustard and the eschscholtzia tangled in the strong grass, the crests glowing and moving with promise beyond and beyond and beyond to where old San Jacinto stood in a final cold wall against the desert! My grandfather knew the hills when California was in truth a promised land, and rode their slopes with shining heart. My grandmother turned her head to them as she stood a schoolgirl in the cloisters of the Los Angeles Mission. I had seen the wheels of the Spanish oxcarts rotting in the grass. I had walked through the old molding adobe halls and stared into the blind reduced bell towers, so small and quiet beneath the terrible blue sky. I had smelled the box hedges around the graves. It seemed to me as I stood on the top of the hills that I heard the bells again, the pious Spanish bells, forged in another country and carried here with so much pride and care, now stolen or broken but forever stilled, the bronze bells that had brought my grandmother to her knees and roused the Indians in the San Fernando fields with apprehension. It seemed to me as I stood on the hills that my whole life lay before me. The descending grassy slopes filled me with a passion to run, to roll in delirium, to wreck my body on the earth. Space means this to a dancer — or to a child! The descent through the air, the finding of earth-footage, the embracing and struggle with the fundamental ground. These are to a dancer what strong scents are to an animal.

It is no accident that California produced our greatest dancers, Duncan and Graham, and fostered the work of St. Denis, Doris Humphrey, Maracci, and Collins. The Eastern states sit in their folded scenery tamed and remembering, but in California the earth and sky clash, and space is dynamic. When people speak of Hollywood I am not minded of the goings-on in the hot studios, nor the pleasant social life of cheap oranges and easy swims, but of the untouched country behind the town, pagan, pantheistic, where mountain cats still prowl, the little deer start and tremble at human approach, coyotes scream, and the beneficent rain comes down in the eucalyptus groves.

4

I HAD counted on a week or two to get acclimated, to look around, but Mother with her fatiguing energy found and settled on a school within two days of arrival and we once more had to take up our good mornings with that sort of thing. The Hollywood School for Girls was held out of doors in a garden. We sat under the trees, moving from spot to spot for classes as it seemed pleasant to do so. When it rained we studied in long shacks. Very nice young ladies attended, mingled quite democratically with the moving picture daughters. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Joel McCrea were our two male pupils. Doug, Jr., was a fat youngster in a sailor suit. He stood on his head too often and hung by his heels from the lower branches of trees. His father’s reputation weighed heavily on him.

Several of us had famous fathers and none of us was unaware of the responsibility. Among the young ladies were the two daughters of Louis B. Mayer, Edith and Irene. They were dark-eyed friendly girls distinguished by mistaken enthusiasm for their father’s achievements. Our loyalties remained throughout the school years violent and competitive. Noblesse oblige alone kept me from telling them outright what my family thought about their family’s films.

The attitude of my family toward all competition strikes me today as remarkably haughty. When Cecil made Carmen with Geraldine Farrar, and Fox quickly rushed out a rival version entitled Carmen as It Should Be with Theda Bara, it was automatically taken for granted by all de Milles that this second interpretation would be spurious. Naturally, all inner family councils were championed by me on playground and pavement. “Have you seen The Birth of a Nation?” asked Luigina Carpenter in rebuttal. I had not seen it for moral reasons. Nothing Mr. Griffith ever directed was considered by Mother suitable for a growing girl. But ignorance never stopped my tongue. “That’s nothing,” I said, “wait until you see my uncle’s picture The Arab — three hundred horsemen galloping across the burning Arabian sands and massacring a whole town full of people.”

“That’s nothing,” retorted the maddening Luigina. “In The Klansman there’s the Ku Klux Klan and fiery crosses and thousands, simply thousands of Negroes and Southern gentlemen lynching one another.”

“My mother says that’s not nice,” l answered, slamming the front gate.

The one person in the school I made no attempt to bully or dominate was a beautiful, dark-haired child named Mary Hunter. She alone remained uncowed, though friendly, and played with me when and as it suited her and when her mother permitted, which was not too often. Mary was reminded quite peremptorily that we were movies. Nevertheless, we declared ourselves inseparable for life. Oddly enough, we have been.

Her aunt was Mary Austin, the writer. Mrs. Austin occasionally visited Mary’s home and told us remarkable stories and worked out our fortunes in cards. She kept a strong protective watch over her niece and advised her about her studies, admonishing her as to behavior in long, strongly expressed letters about how to conduct herself in a manner becoming the famous Mrs. Austin’s niece. Although not her niece, I was also given strongly expressed advice then and later.

The class I enjoyed most was pantomime. We had dancing too, but Mother refused to let me take this, as possibly confusing to my native gifts. But I watched the other little girls learning Ruth St. Denis’s and Isadora’s dances thirdhand.

5

OUR second summer, Uncle Cecil brought Farrar to Hollywood to play Carmen and I had my first model to aspire to. The world-famous Geraldine was the first great international star to try the Western experiment. Grand Opera meant far more in those days than it does now or possibly ever will again. It represented the ultimate in theatrical grandeur, honor, permanence, and splendor, and Farrar was among its most dazzling, names. She had trod the oldest and most glorious stages. She had graced courts. An emperor had been at her feet. The studio hummed with anticipation! It was in a sense like the excitement that preceded Mary Anderson’s first visit to a mining town. The first star dressing room to grace Hollywood was erected, lined with chintz and furnished with comfortable wicker chairs and couches. A Steinway piano was procured for the set. She came West with her mother, her father, her French maid, her business manager, her hairdresser, and two lady companions, all at the expense of the studio. That was quite proper. If she had come in any lesser manner we would have been disappointed.

She visited the studio first on a Sunday morning and we were all on hand, the executives and their families, either to welcome or to stare. I was enthralled — jet-black hair with blue lights in it (her hair was naturally chestnut; she dyed it — not blond according to the habits of the time, but black), a glowing skin, deep Irish blue eyes, a figure rather dumpy but superbly held, a lovely provocative voice, and the most dazzling smile we had ever seen. She gave each person she spoke to her entire momentary attention. She brought out all that was witty, sparkling, and vital in them, even in us, gap-toothed children, even for the part of a minute when we limply took her hand and bobbed a curtsey. We had never seen such unutterably lovely clothes. She wore a blond straw hat with pink roses, pendant diamond earrings, a cool linen dress, and white silk stockings with long pointed black patent-leather shoes and cut-steel buckles. (“They may be fashionable,” said Mother, “but I don’t think they’re in good taste. Black stockings should go with black shoes.”) Margaret and I vowed to love her all our lives. She became our crush, and the grownups, quick to turn to their own advantage any emotion that would serve them, even the most sacred, prevailed on us to go to bed on time because she did (ten-thirty always when she was not singing), and urged us to answer our letters because she replied to hers within twenty-four hours in her own hand. The electricians, the carpenters, the cowboys all adored her. Everyone at the studio, from executive to assistant prop-boy, spoke of her as “Our Gerry.”

During that summer she came to dinner at our house. I was not permitted, of course, to eat with her, but very nearly ran a temperature at the prospect of having her under our roof.

After dinner there was music. Farrar never sang during the summer, but she played the piano with great power and everyone else sang. She played brilliantly, improvising as she went, talking and laughing. Before she played she stripped her fingers of her black pearl rings as large as robin’s eggs, and her great diamond and pearl bracelets, and threw them on the piano top. Then she sat down and played like man. The sound of the music and the laughter woke my sister and me and we crept in our nightgowns to the stairs and sat there with faces pressed against the balustrade, shivering at the glory below.

6

As the daughter of Henry George, Mother had early settled for herself the causes of war, of economic depression, of unequal distribution of wealth, and so on, and she naturally found it a matter of no great effort to reach definite conclusions on hats, dresses, interior decoration, manners, painting, music, plays, cooking, the rearing of children, and sex.

We were brought up in a manner lively but stern. Father wanted us healthy, nontheatrical, and lettered. He didn’t seem to care about much else. Mother, on the other hand, had comprehensive ideas about everything.

Margaret and I were not allowed to go to the studio often, and never unchaperoned. We were never permitted to read the newspapers. We were allowed to look at the pictures in the Sunday supplements except during the Arbuckle scandal, and then we weren’t. We knew few actors. Father did not like them extracurricular and only about a dozen were invited to the house. Margaret and I dined alone until high-school age. We went to bed at eight until then and at nine until college.

Mother’s ideas of dress were rigid. My sister and I were dressed exactly alike to prevent jealousy. We wore Liberty smocks or little frocks of Japanese crepe embroidered and cross-stitched by her own hand. With the exception of hats and shoes, she never bought us store clothes. She considered these too ordinary and, I suspect, given her remarkable moral scruples, too easy. She dressed herself with similar independence and with proud disdain for whatever anyone else might choose to wear. She had a penchant for tricornes and wore them in velvet, satin, felt, velours, straw, with cockades and without, with fathers, sometimes with flower — and when I was old enough I wore them. Never at any point in my growing up did they bear relationship to the current vogue. My sister, with greater independence of spirit, began making personal decisions about her own clothes by the time she was ten. It is no accident that she became one of the leading style experts in this country. I never gainsaid Mother about so much as a color or a ruffle. Mother like red satin heels on her slippers because Louis XIV and XV had worn them, and when I was old enough I wore red heels. She liked eighteenth-century evening dresses, but made in useful, comfortable, twentiethcentury materials like chiffon and China silk. She had definite ideas about hair — curls on the forehead, curls down the back, curls on the side. She curled me every morning before school while I read aloud to her, usually in French. She did not understand French, but she thought it was good practice for me. When I started going to parties she piled a crown of curls on the top of my head surmounted with laurel leaves. This arrangement did much to militate against any social success I might have had. Her own hair was very lovely, a bright golden red which she wore coiled at the nape of her neck. My hair was red-gold, too, quite handsome but rather too thick and curly to be manageable. “The Circassian Ugly” my sister called me, and there were many family jokes of similar nature. It was part of our parents’ plan to keep us from imagining that we were in any way attractive girls — lovable, yes, but attractive, never.

Mother was tiny. She wore a size one shoe. And she took great pride in the fact that I had inherited her small foot. I wore a size one and a half point shoe when I was grown which broadened in width as my toes grew misshapen in battle. I nearly ruined my feet trying to maintain her unmatched pedal tradition.

Mother loved to entertain but invited always those people she thought ought to get on together, with small regard as to whether they were likely to or not. She set a beautiful table, regulating the drinks according to her scruples: none at all, for instance, during prohibition, although she heartily disapproved of the law. “Don’t break the law,” she would say to her thirsty and disappointed friends, “change it!”

She had a horror of waste, a tie-over from an impoverished girlhood, and even when my father was earning $4000 a week regularly the year around, she would go about the house turning out the lights to save the light bill. She felt compelled to shop at the end-of-the-month bargain sales even when she could well afford more leisurely times, even when she needed nothing. She saved everything — old letters, old laces and ribbons, papers and strings. She saved time. She shortened her life saving time. She was always late because she was afraid she might have some spare time on her hands, and accordingly arranged a daily schedule that ignored geography and delay. Resting she considered a waste unless it was done strenuously — that is, on a bed, on one’s back, with one’s eyes closed. “Don’t just sit there, dearie,” she would say coming into a room. “Do something!” To this hour I find it impossible to read a book before sundown unless it has some immediate connection with my work.

Her humor was irreverent, capricious, zany, and delightful, but modified and curtailed by her multiplicity of moral compulsions. She was always worrying about something. She felt she was not wringing the worth out of the moment unless she fretted a little. She gave the impression of being a dear, quaint, fussy, old-fashioned busybody until a question of principle was involved or a crisis; then suddenly one found oneself facing up to a personality with all the instability of Gibraltar. She was a rock. She was a fortress. It was as though the shadow of her father stood behind her and quietly laid his hand on her shoulder.

Mother’s veneration for her father bordered on the religious. Her compulsion to carry on his work, to promulgate his theories, she accepted as proof of her love. She chafed and fretted at her inadequacy to do anything conclusive, but she let no small opportunities pass, such as talking to friends at tea parties, giving public lectures, or leaving pamphlets with the grocer, the shoemaker, the studio electrician, the traffic cop. It was her tragedy that she had inherited her father’s energy and passion to do good without his sense of organization or intellect. The great powers within her were never channeled. They ran at cross-purposes, directionless, tearing at her heart, hurrying her, driving her. They would have broken her early but for her constitution, which, though deceptively veiled in fragility, was unusually durable. But they left her no peace. All her life she could never rest.

Nor could she let us rest. Having known one authentic genius, she took for granted that anyone in whom she placed her faith and love must stand head and shoulders above the surrounding multitudes. This was a bit tough on her husband and daughters, bright enough in their way, but none too eager to be judged by standards of absolute supremacy.

I, however, considered Pop an authentic genius. He was to me the master artist, the great scholar. I frequently wept when he spoke about his work. It was more than my nerves could stand, this communion in professional purpose which the others in the family could not share. My passion was to please him, never to fail his expectations, to bear his name proudly, and I did all he asked eagerly. He was an excellent photographer; I learned photography. He sang well and half-jokingly suggested that I learn the piano in order to accompany him; my response ran to five hours’ daily practicing in the summer and full-length recitals with my sister. He was a fine athlete and had been a track man at Columbia. He played brilliant tennis and worked out with Maurice McLoughlin and all the Suttons and Bundys on Sunday afternoons. I tried to learn tennis, making the semifinals always in the junior state tournaments. He told me what to read; I read. He told me what not to; a gun would not have persuaded me to open the book. He told me to write. I became editor of the school paper, and he took my best themes proudly back East with him to show Brander Matthews and John Erskine. He told me to stop bullying my little sister; I tried for a day or two at a time.

We talked long about tennis, about books and art — a great deal about books and the importance of fine work. He talked in detail every night at dinner about his work at the studio, inflaming me, exciting me, but never, never holding out any promise of a release for my professional yearnings. I kept hoping. I always believed that next month he would lead me through the gates of the studio and say, “Here is a new professional.”

At this time our neighbor, Fred Stone, invited his little daughter, Dorothy, to dance with him as his partner at a big benefit performance. He taught her the steps and worked with her for hours. They had a great success. I ran with this example of paternal love to Pop. “But you see, my dear,” he said, “I am not a dancer.”

“Oh, Pop,” I begged, “don’t be horrid, don’t tease. You know what I mean.”

“No, my dear, I don’t,” he said, “and besides I want my daughter to have an education.”

Mother believed in self-expression, but she could not go against his will, and he was particularly interested in not having us embrace the theater as a career. I dare say Mother would have liked me to be recognized as a child prodigy in every major artistic field, but without my ever suspecting that I was in any way unusual. Improvised dances were cultural, that was all there was to that. She wanted me above all to be a fine, gentle, sweet-mannered, pure girl and this was what I was being raised as against every inclination in my nature.

7

UNCLE CECIL is one of the most remarkable men I have ever met. He has been a marquee name since 1913 — a span of unbroken and successful effort which for sheer length has been without match in the history of moving pictures. Father, within the confines of our separate family group, may have been considered the intellectual, but Uncle Ce was taken by all, family, friends, and admiring professionals, to be the type of success, the brilliant, decisive epitome of achievement. One did not contradict him because he was absolutely convinced, because his personality was compelling, and because he had been vindicated in his tastes by millions. Consequently, his idea of a star was accepted by almost all of us as axiomatically the recipe for a great performing artist. My desire to comply with this pattern and my subsequent rejection of it as unsuitable for myself have been among the strong shaping forces of my life. But he remained in the background although perhaps not consciously for all of us, as the point of reference, the lodestar. We might say we did not like this or that, or disagree in such and such a way, but the emotional impact of his position and power was enormous. We responded to him with a kind of reflex. There was no place in the family point of view for failure then or later; he had made it out of the question.

As younger men, both brothers, William Churchill and Cecil Blount de Mille, looked much alike, slender, dark, and handsome, Cecil very much the handsomer of the two. Father looked like a Spanish grandee, with melting brown eyes, dark curly hair, and the brow and nose of a thinking, proud man. His face was severe even in repose, and his mouth firm in preoccupation. But the lights blazed behind his eyes and his lids and his lips were crosshatched with lurking smiles. His voice was an actor’s voice, sharp and decisive but always quiet, drawing out soft and sibilant in his more wicked comments.

Pop’s outstanding characteristic was his wit. Language was his delight and tool. He became known as one of the best after-dinner speakers in Hollywood. It is a pity he chose to spend the best years of his life working where no speech was wanted, for his dramatic satire was fine. He was as potent at the breakfast table, and I used to sit shivering in a mixture of admiration and terror as the barbed comments came closer and closer. Dinner with Father meant a real display of intellectual pyrotechnics to me. I sat with shining eyes, giggling and giggling. He never had a better audience, and he had many.

Father didn’t care how he looked on the set. He directed in his old clothes, an old battered tennis hat which he refused to change or throw away. He gave himself entirely to the business on hand and was extremely bad-tempered if he was interrupted, but he never raised his voice to his actors. With them he had endless patience, coaxing, cajoling, analyzing. He was adored by cast and technicians, who usually called him “Billˮ with familiarity and affection. Cecil, on the other hand, was always on show and appeared for work impeccably dressed, usually in well-cut riding breeches and leather boots. His manner was princely and courteous. He always made guests welcome, explained and chatted and showed off in a very satisfactory way. If he lost his temper it was in the grand manner, building up from a simple statement of displeasure, through long developments of sarcasm, to a fulminating climax of operatic splendor which not infrequently terminated with dismissal. He held the belief that he got the best work from people when he had stripped their nerves raw, when they could no longer think, when they acted through an instinct of rage and desperation. If they turned in a fair piece of work and he struck them across the mouth, they’d turn in a better one the next day. He regularly set his entire staff by the ears by demanding publicly their individual opinions on one another’s work while he sat aloof in Olympian calm until matters had reached a broth of discussion. He then stepped in and resolved the trouble by Jovian fiat.

He has often said to me that he thought ladies made poor actresses because, he reasoned, they had learned too much control. He had his own methods of breaking down that control. He generally got what he was after. When, however, he worked with skilled technicians he was quiet and patient. And he was very much more often charming than not, and humorous, and whatever he did he did with colossal zest, and it was never dull working for him. Although I suppose every member of his staff has from time to time resented his tyranny, they have stuck with fierce loyalty and pride, some of them for thirty years. They called him “Chief,ˮ and his theory that he was the greatest director alive they accepted as their party slogan.

And certainly, as a director of mass movement, this century has not seen his like. I have worked with many, including Reinhardt, Mamoulian, Cukor, and Kazan, and I know. He surpassed in this respect by long odds D. W. Griffith, whom many think invented and developed the technique of screen spectacle. The sense of rhythm, the eye for detail, the dynamic power with which he hypnotized a mob standing for hours in the open sun, kept them from sitting down, scattering, chewing gum, or even growing mechanical in their response at the end of the exhausting rehearsals; his faculty for invention; his endless patience despite weather or wear to stop the whole enormous mechanism, as elaborate as an advancing army in attack, because some fool man on a balcony in the middle distance had thrown off his toga and put on his pince-nez; his courage to re-rehearse the whole scene, hearten his assistants, whip up the actors again to performance pitch and straighten out all technical difficulties before the sun dropped and the shadows changed, knowing that every five minutes the cash register ticked up thousands, wore a source of never ending astonishment to me. The power to dominate the mob came out of his guts, the very core of his nervous life. When I began to direct I recognized what went into these spectacular displays of endurance. He talked to me about it. “If one takes one’s focus off the crowd for the space of even a few sentences to an assistant, if one leaves the set for five minutes, to go to the bathroom for instance, it takes an hour and a half to get the crowd back to where one broke off.” I might have added from the depths of my own experience, “Or if one is doubtful or afraid or uncertain.” But such ideas never occurred to him in his whole career. The strength for this domination came from his undeviating belief in what he was doing and from his enormous pride of position.

He lived like a prince potentate. Periodically, there was the crisis of production, but the household under the control of Aunt Constance remained serene and ordered. She kept all in balance. Three children were adopted; and later, in turn, all the grandchildren were given asylum and care. She liked children and so did Cecil, and this is rare for a man of his enormous egocentric drive. Tides of young people passed through those large flowerfilled rooms, bringing their storms and turmoils and passions. Aunt Constance quieted the clamor and kept the place ready for the master. Frederik, the beautiful Norwegian butler, and Helja, the Finnish maid, helped. They were with her for twenty-live years. Her enchanting hospitality was open to all of us throughout our growing up.

Uncle Cecil seldom came home to dinner before ten or eleven at night. At seven the next morning, the children were crawling over his bed. At seventhirty he was choosing his suit and tie, and by eight-thirty he was on route to the studio — often on foot.

There were always big plans. There were always important people and projects in the offing. He has been the admiration of many great businessmen; he performs with money like a virtuoso.

Success was power; success was comfort and fun for everyone. He had acquired besides his home in Laughlin Park a large ranch, “Paradise,” a yacht, name jewels, a Rubens, a fine library, several show horses for his daughter, a superb cellar, as well as the more usual paraphernalia of a great Hollywood producer — swimming pool, tennis court, cars, gardens, and Lord knows what real-estate holdings and investments that were not apparent to a child’s eye. Laughlin Park was policed by a night watchman, and Uncle Ce went to bed with a loaded gun, as did my father always. These circumstances I grew up with; they were the atmosphere of my childhood the direct antiphonal counterpoint to Mother’s preoccupation with economies and her unallayed guilt about owning anything at all while half the world went hungry.

8

ANNA PAVLOVA! My life stops as I write that name. Across the daily preoccupation of lessons, lunch boxes, tooth brushings, and quarrelings with Margaret flashed this bright, unworldly experience and burned in a single afternoon a path over which I could never retrace my steps. I had witnessed the power of beauty, and in some chamber of my heart I lost forever my irresponsibility. I was as clearly marked as though she had looked me in the face and called my name. For generations my father’s family had loved and served the theater. All my life I had seen actors and actresses and had heard theater jargon at the dinner table and business talk of box-office grosses. I had thrilled at Father’s projects and watched fascinated his picturesque occupations. I took a proprietary pride in the profitable and hasty growth of “The Industry.” But nothing in his world or my uncle’s prepared me for theater as I saw it that Saturday afternoon.

Since that day I have gained some knowledge in my trade and I recognize that her technique was limited; that her arabesques were not as pure or classically correct as Markova’s, that her jumps and batterie were paltry, her turns not to be compared in strength and number with the strenuous durability of Baronova or Toumanova. I know that her scenery was designed by second-rate artists, her music was on a level with restaurant orchestrations, her company definitely inferior to all the standards we insist on today, and her choreography mostly hack. And yet I say she was in her person the quintessence of theatrical excitement.

As her little bird body revealed itself on the scene, either immobile in trembling mystery or tense in the incredible arc which was her lift, her instep stretched ahead in an arch never before seen, the tiny bones of her hands in ceaseless vibration, her face radiant, diamonds glittering under her dark hair, her little waist encased in silk, the great tutu balancing, quickening and flashing over her beating, flashing, quivering legs, every man and woman sat forward, every pulse quickened. She never appeared to rest static, some part of her trembled, vibrated, beat like a heart. Before our dazzled eyes, she flashed with the sudden sweetness of a hummingbird in action too quick for understanding by our gross utilitarian standards, in action sensed rather than seen. The movie cameras of her day could not record her allegro. Her feet and hands photographed as a blur.

Bright little bird bones, delicate bird sinews! She was all fire and steel wire. There was not an ounce of spare flesh on her skeleton, and the life force used her body until she died of the fever of moving, gasping for breath, much too young.

She was small, about five feet. She wore a size one and a half slipper, but her feet and hands were large in proportion to her height. Her hand could cover her whole face. Her trunk was small and stripped of all anatomy but the ciphers of adolescence, her arms and legs relatively long, the neck extraordinarily long and mobile. All her gestures were liquid and possessed of an inner rhythm that flowed to inevitable completion with the finality of architecture or music. Her arms seemed to lift not from the elbow or the arm socket, but from the base of the spine. Her legs seemed to function from the waist, When she bent her head her whole spine moved and the motion was completed the length of the arm through the elongation of her slender hand and the quivering reaching fingers. Without in any way being sensual — being, in fact, almost sexless — she suggested all exhilaration, gaiety, and delight. She jumped, and we broke bonds with reality. We flew. We hung over the earth, spread in the air as we do in dreams, our hands turning in the air as in water — the strong forthright taut plunging leg balanced on the poised arc of the foot, the other leg stretched to the horizon like the wing of a bird. We lay balancing, quivering, turning, and all things were possible, even to us, the ordinary people.

I have seen two dancers as great or greater since, Alicia Markova and Margot Fonteyn, and many other women who have kicked higher, balanced longer, or turned faster. These are poor substitutes for passion. In spite of her flimsy dances, the bald and blatant virtuosity, there was an intoxicated rapture, a focus of energy, Dionysian in its physical intensity, that I have never seen equaled by a performer in any theater of the world. Also she was the first of the truly great in our experience.

I sat with the blood beating in my throat. As I walked into the bright glare of the afternoon, my head ached and I could scarcely swallow. I didn t wish to cry. I certainly couldn’t speak. I sat in a daze in the car, oblivious to the grownups’ ceaseless prattle. At home I climbed the stairs slowly to my bedroom and, shutting myself in, placed both hands on the brass rail at the foot of my bed; then, rising laboriously to the tips of my white buttoned shoes, I stumped the width of the bed and back again. My toes throbbed with pain, my knees shook, my legs quivered with weakness. I repealed the exercise. The blessed, relieving tears stuck at last on my lashes. Only by hurting my feet could I ease the pain in my throat.

It is a source of sadness to me that few of our contemporary ballet dancers ever saw Anna Pavlova. At the time of which I write, her name was synonymous with the art — Pavlova, the Incomparable, was an internationally known slogan. She was as famous as Caruso and her position as unique. No one today approaches her power over the popular imagination. She half-hypnotized audiences, partaking almost of the nature of a divinity.

My life was wholly altered by her — so I wonder, casting about in vain for similar dazzling influences, what first drove Kaye, Alonso, Fonteyn, Toumanova, and Helpmann to the barre.

She danced The Dying Swan. Everyone has danced The Swan. What was it? A series of pas de bourrées around and around the stage with flutterings and undulations of the arms interspersed with broken staggers until the final collapse and folding away. Nothing else. Fokine composed it in half an hour for a charity performance, and it is probably the most famous solo in the history of dancing. When she trembled onto the stage it was a death agony, the voice in the dark, the final anonymous cry against annihilation. And when she lay doubled up and the last shudder passed through feathers and broken bones, drawing as an afterbeat when all was finished the shivering inert hand across her face in a gesture of final decency, everyone sat stricken. Death was upon each of us.

Death came to Anna Pavlova in 1931, when she was fifty. She had not stopped touring for a single season. Her knees had sustained some damage, but she would not rest, and she was in a state of exhaustion when the train that was carrying her to Holland was wrecked. She ran out into the snow in her nightgown and insisted on helping the wounded. When she reached The Hague she had double pneumonia. Her last words were: “Get the Swan dress ready.”

Standing on Ninth Avenue under the El, I saw the headlines on the front page of the New York Times. It did not seem possible. She was in essence the denial of death. My own life was rooted to her in a deep spiritual sense, and had been during the whole of my growing up. It mattered not that I had only spoken to her once and that my work lay in a different direction. She was the vision and the impulse and the goal.

Pavlova’s ashes were laid in the Golder’s Green cemetery near her home, Ivy House, Hampstead Heath. All the glory of the last great Imperial days stood by. Karsavina was there, Lopokova, Massine.

But also in New York, in Los Angeles, in Paris, Berlin, Rome, San Francisco, wherever there was a Russian Orthodox Church, the dancers gathered, those that knew her and many more that didn’t I went in New York and all the dancers of the city were there. My mother came. She said she wished to, that she owed her a debt of many hours of joy. We stood. The Russians held lighted candles; the choir chanted with a high tonal insistency that wore down like rain on rock. The priest passed in and out of his painted, holy screens. A friend leaned to me. “They are singing,” she whispered. “Receive the soul of Anna. Cherish our Anna. Bless and protect Anna.” But I put ray handkerchief to my mouth and heard the drums and the beating of feet and the cries she gave as she leaped. At the conclusion of the service Fokine, as senior friend, colleague, and Russian, received our condolences. He knew very few of us. We walked up silently, strangers, and shook his hand. His wife, Vera Fokina, in black from head to foot with sweeping veils, stood beside him.

We went out into the day. Wherever Pavlova had passed, hearts changed, flames sprang in the grass, and girls ran out to a strange, wild, ancient dedication.

(To be continued)