Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America

Starring Madame Modjeska ii Sta r r i ng M a da m e Modj e sk a Starring Madame Modjeska On Tour in Poland and ...

Author: Beth Holmgren

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Starring Madame

Modjeska

ii

Sta r r i ng M a da m e Modj e sk a

Starring Madame

Modjeska On Tour in Poland and America

( Beth Holmgren

Indiana Universit y Pr ess Bloomington & Indianapolis

Publication of this book is made possible in part with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency that supports research, education, and public programming in the humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-Â�3797 USA iupress.indiana.edu Telephone ordersâ•… 800-Â�8 42-Â�6796 Fax ordersâ•… 812-Â�855-Â�7931 © 2012 by Beth Holmgren All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of AmeriÂ�can University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. > The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the AmeriÂ�can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-Â�1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holmgren, Beth, [date] â•… Starring Madame Modjeska : on tour in Poland and America / Beth Holmgren. â•…â•…p.â•‡ cm. â•… Includes bibliographical references and index. â•… ISBN 978-0-253-35664-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Modjeska, Helena, 1840–1909. 2. Actors—Poland—Biography. 3. Actors—United States—Biography. 4. Shakespearean actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title. â•… PN2859.P66M6255â•‡2012 â•…792.02′8092—dc23 â•…[B] 2011022597 1 2 3 4 5â•‡ 17 16 15 14 13 12

For my stars, Jess and Mark

Contents

Acknowledgmentsâ•… ix Timeline of Modjeska’s Life and Careerâ•… xiii

1 Debutâ•…1 2 The Making of a Polish Actressâ•… 18 3 Warsaw’s State of the Starsâ•… 64 4 A Colonial Party and the California Dreamâ•… 116 5 On the AmeriÂ�can Roadâ•… 149 6 The Roles of Madame Modjeskaâ•… 207 7 The Polish Modjeskaâ•… 253 8 Farewell Tourâ•… 298 Epilogue: Finding Modjeska Todayâ•… 309 Notesâ•… 329 Bibliographyâ•… 385 Indexâ•… 399

Ack now l ed gm en t s

As I grew more involved with Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s life and work, I regretted the fact that I could not interview her or spend an hour or two in her presence. But researching and writing this book introduced me to so many other MoÂ� djeÂ�ska enthusiasts and experts that I feel I have been reveling in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s circle for years. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska has made my life rich in friendships as well as the knowledge of her fascinating life in context. I am grateful to Anna Frajlich-Â�Zając and the Kościuszko Foundation for sponsoring my first forays into this book’s topic. I thank Bożena Shallcross and David Ransel for recommending me to Indiana University’s Institute for Advanced Studies; that fellowship equipped me with the time, resources, and impetus to begin serious research. I thank the UNC-Â�Duke Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies for a travel grant to Poland in summer 2004, where I took up the Modrzejewska trail. The very generous leave time I received from Duke University’s Dean of Arts and Sciences literally enabled me to review years of research work and draft the manuscript; the research funds that the university awarded me paid for further work in Poland and subsidized purchase of book illustrations. Other colleagues and the venues they offered have helped me to test out my main hypotheses along the way: Bill Johnston and Indiana University’s Polish Studies Center; Halina Stephan, Irene Masing-Â�Delić, Yana HashaÂ�mova and the Midwest Slavic Conference sponsored by The Ohio State University Center for Slavic and East European Studies; Donna Buchanan and the University of Illinois’s Russian and East European Studies Center; Margarita NafÂ�pakÂ�titis and the University of Virginia’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Carey Baughman and Marshall Duell and the Old Courthouse Museum in Orange County, California; Linda Plochocki, Krystyna Stamper, and Yvonne Boehm of the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Foundation; and Agata Grenda and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. I thank them and the audiences at these talks for their generosity and constructive feedback. I am indebted

x Ack now l e dgm en ts

to George Gutsche, who graciously furnished me with hard-Â�to-Â�get materials. I also thank Basia and Leonard Myszyński of OC Influential Productions, who invited me to participate in their documentary on the great actress and whose award-Â�winning film MoÂ�djeÂ�ska—Woman Triumphant is a beautifully made, eye-Â�opening testament to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s person and achievements. I had the good fortune to work with expert curators, librarians, and scholars on both sides of the ocean. I thank the librarians at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts for their help; Georgianna Ziegler and Â�Nadia Sophie Seiler at the Folger Shakespeare Library for their bibliographic advice; Raymond Wemmlinger for his special assistance at the Hampden Booth Library housed in New York’s Players Club; Anna Chen for her enthusiastic retrieval of materials from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Â�Austin; and Kristin Kulash for her expertise and advance collection of materials at the Harvard University Libraries. I owe an ongoing debt of gratitude to Erik Zitser, Duke University’s fantastic Slavic bibliographer, and to the hardworking Interlibrary Loan staffs at both University of North Carolina–Â� Chapel Hill and Duke University. In Southern California, Bill Landis and other staff members in the University of California-Â�Irvine’s Special Collections and Archives helped me enormously in sorting through their rich cache of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska materials; my thanks to Steve MacLeod and Andrew Jones at UCI for further help in sorting out illustrations and permissions. Sue Hodson was a generous, gracious Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the Huntington Library. Jennifer Ring, the Bowers Museum registrar, has been a wonderful resource and colleague from the moment I inquired about visiting the museum’s substantive MoÂ�djeÂ�ska collection. Her expertise and efficiency and the commitment of Peter C. Keller, the museum’s director, helped to realize the first Polish-Â�AmeriÂ�can Modrzejewska/Â� MoÂ�djeÂ�ska exhibit in 2009. Ellen K. Lee, the greatest MoÂ�djeÂ�ska advocate in California, was kind enough to give me a privately guided tour of Arden in 2001; her death in 2005 impoverished MoÂ�djeÂ�ska enthusiasts everywhere. I was lucky to keep learning about Arden and its visitors from Diane Wollenberg, the Orange County Parks ranger who knows and has served this historic site so well. In Poland, Halina Waszkiel, Maria StanisÂ�zewÂ�ska, Krzysztof Frey, and Â�Monika Chudzikowska were of great assistance in acquainting me with the MoÂ�drzeÂ� jewÂ�ska holdings of the Warsaw Theatre Museum; Maria StanisÂ�zewÂ�ska and Monika Bielecka later streamlined the complicated business of obtainÂ�ing illustrations from the museum’s collection. I thank the staff of the BiblioÂ�

Ack now l e dgm en ts xi

teka Narodowa for their help in locating MoÂ�djeÂ�ska-Â�related materials. Emil Orzechowski, rector of the Communications Division of Jagiellonian University, has kept the Modrzejewska flame alive for decades with his important scholarship and has been a most generous consultant and colleague. MałÂ� gorzata Palka, the curator of the Kraków Theatre Museum, and Anna Litak, the curator of the Old Theatre Museum, have become special friends, sharing their resources and expertise and indulging me with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska shop talk. I treasure my photograph of Anna Litak standing on the stage of the Old Theatre and my memories of the day Malgorzata Palka and I retraced MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s last journey from the Church of the Holy Ghost to the actress’s grave in Rakowicki Cemetery. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my beloved, talented “research assistants,” Maria Kłopocka, Tomasz Kłopocki, and Ladik Laska, who provided me with vital support on and off the Polish Modrzejewska trail. Many friends and colleagues have contributed to the drafting and revisions of this book. My thanks to Lynn Mally and Joy Kasson for critical readings of early chapters; Roman Koropeckyj for advice about the long haul; and Maja Trochimczyk for sharing with me her fascinating work on Modrzejewska and Paderewski. I received invaluable moral support over the years from Â�Madeline Levine, Galya Diment, Helena Goscilo, Bożena and Dave Shallcross, Josephine Woll, Jane Peppler, Mary Ann Downs, Barbara and Bob WenÂ� dell, Linda Barnett, Christine Worobec, Chris Ruane, Adele Lindemeyr, Louise McReynolds, Don Raleigh, Irene Masing-Â�Delić, Yana Hashamova, Jehanne Gheith, and Edna Andrews. Catherine Schuler and Kim Marra made the time and effort to give me excellent feedback on particular sections of the book. I am profoundly grateful to Madeline Levine and Louise McReynolds for their painstaking reading of the entire manuscript and their constructive comments. My fabulous editor, Janet Rabinowitch, has seen this project through from prospectus to final draft. This book simply would not be without her vision, investment, and sage advice. Thanks also go to Angela Burton and Peter Froehlich of the Indiana University Press staff and Dawn McIlvain Stahl, my astute copy editor. As I immersed myself in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska over the last decade, I have been cheered on and reassured by my incredibly loving, vocal family: my parents, Virginia and Kenneth Holmgren; my husband, Mark Sidell; my sister, Janet HolmÂ� gren; my daughter, Jessye Holmgren-Â�Sidell; and my nieces, Elizabeth Jobst and Ellen McKay. My family’s vehement partisanship means the world to me. Jess and Mark have lived with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as long as I have, accompanying me

xii Ack now l e dgm en ts

to Arden, absorbing hours of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska lore over dinner or via Skype, advising me about visuals, ceding the dining room and sometimes the kitchen to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska detritus, and remaining my ardent champions. I offer this book in tribute to them as their actor-Â�manic fan. Greater stars has no woman.

T i m e l i n e o f M o Â�d j e Â�s k a ’ s L i f e a n d C a r e e r

12 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1840

Helena Jadwiga Mizel born to Józefa Bendowa and unknown father in Kraków, Poland. Her half-Â�brothers are Józef, Szymon, and Feliks Benda and, if Michał Opid is her father, Adolf Opid. Her full (?) sister is Józefa. 26 April 1848 Austrian bombardment of Kraków. July 1850 Great Kraków fire, in which the Benda family’s properties are seriously damaged. 27 January 1861 Helena gives birth to Rudolf, her son by Gustaw Zimajer. July 1861 The newly named Modrzejewska debuts on the provincial stage in Bochnia. Soon after, her new troupe begins to tour towns in the Austrian partition of Poland. 10 April 1862 Helena gives birth to Maria, her daughter by Zimajer. Maria dies in spring 1865. NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1862– Modrzejewska engaged by the Lwów Theatre. Spring 1863 January 1863– Polish uprising against the Russian authorities. DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1864 March 1863– Modrzejewska engaged by the Czerniowce Theatre. August 1865 August 1865 Modrzejewska leaves Zimajer, taking Rudolf with her. Fall 1865– Modrzejewska engaged by the Kraków Theatre. Spring 1869 1866 Zimajer abducts Rudolf. Modrzejewska recovers her son four years later. 12 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1868 Modrzejewska marries Karol Bożenta Chłapowski. OcÂ�toÂ�ber– Modrzejewska debuts successfully at the Warsaw DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868 Imperial Theatres. Fall 1869– Modrzejewska reigns as prima donna of Warsaw June 1876 Imperial Theatres.

xiv

13 July 1876 20 August 1877

T i m e li n e of MoÂ�dje Â�sk a’s Li fe a n d Ca r e er

Modrzejewska’s “colonial party” departs for America. The renamed Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska debuts successfully in San Francisco at the California Theatre. 22 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s first East Coast tour begins in New York. OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1879– MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s return to Poland and first guest tour. March 1880 22 January 1880 Funeral of Ignacy Neufeld, schoolboy who committed suicide after giving MoÂ�djeÂ�ska a wreath in Polish national colors. 1 May 1880 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s London debut at the Court Theatre. January– MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s secÂ�ond guest tour in Poland. March 1882 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1882 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska returns from England to the AmeriÂ�can stage. OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1884– MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s third guest tour in Poland. February 1885 Spring 1885 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska guest tours in England and Ireland. 28 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1885 Ralph Modjeski and Felicja Bendówna marry in New York. Summer 1888 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski purchase the Pleasants’ ranch in Southern California and begin transforming it into their AmeriÂ�can home. They name the ranch Arden. Fall 1889– MoÂ�djeÂ�ska tours with Edwin Booth. Spring 1890 Fall 1890– MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s fourth guest tour in Poland. Spring 1891 19 May 1893 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska gives nationalist speech at Chicago Columbian Exhibition. OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1894– MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s fifth guest tour in Poland. The Russian Summer 1895 authorities forbid her appearances in Warsaw in retaliation for her May 1893 speech in Chicago. January 1896– MoÂ�djeÂ�ska suffers a stroke and must undergo a long NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1897 convalescence at Arden. July 1901 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska visits Poland and plays some benefit performances. January– MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s last guest tour of Poland, during which she April 1903 stars in Wyspiański’s Protesilaus and Laodamia.

2 May 1905 23 August 1906

8 April 1909 17 July 1909

T i m e li n e of MoÂ�dj e Â�sk a’s Li fe a n d Ca r e er

MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s benefit held at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Arden is sold and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski move to Tustin. They subsequently move to Bay Island in 1908 (present-Â�day Newport, California). MoÂ�djeÂ�ska dies in Newport, California. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska interred in Kraków’s Rakowicki Cemetery.

xv

Starring Madame

Modjeska

1

(

Debut

H el ena MoÂ�dj e Â�sk a at t h e Ca li for n i a On 20 August 1877, in San Francisco’s California Theatre, an obscure foreign actress performed the title role of Adrienne Lecouvreur, a drama by the popular French playwrights Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé. For San FranÂ�cisco’s many avid theatergoers, the venue, supporting company, and play promÂ�ised a fine evening’s entertainment. After the 1859 Silver Rush “rebuilt” the city in style, the California Theatre, like the nearby Palace Hotel, stood as a sumptuous example of San Francisco’s prosperity and keen pursuit of pubÂ�lic recreation.1 As recalled by historian Constance Rourke, the California “seemed designed both for the cultivation of the actors and the pleasures of the audience,” boasting an expansive lobby, comfortable dressing rooms with good soundproofing, and a stage curtain “covered with Spanish scenes and vignettes of early mining days.”2 A contemporary visitor, Guillermo Prieto, admired its superb stage framed by “a vast arch resting on heavy pillars” and equipped with scenery “run in both sides with great speed on rails along the floor.”3 The California’s “powerful and expert stock company” was formed unÂ�der the talented leadership of actor-Â�managers John McCullough and Lawrence Barrett and furnished knowledgeable, if not always appropriately subordinate, support for visiting stars. 4 The play performed that August night was a familiar star vehicle about the turbulent private life of a famous actress. Like Alexandre Dumas fils’ Lady of the Camellias, its more renowned contemporary, Adrienne Lecouvreur comÂ�

2


The California Theatre, located on Bush Street between Kearny and Dupont. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

pellingly pled the case of “the fallen woman” in love, retelling the tragedy of the real-Â�life Adrienne, an eighteenth-Â�century French actress who dared to adore an aristocratic general and consequently was poisoned by her rival. 5 Scribe and Legouvé’s development of Adrienne’s character builds audience anticipation with her second-Â�act entrance and unabashedly milks their tears with her eloquent fifth-Â�act death scene. The success of Adrienne depended on its star’s subtle emotional expression, physical control, and poignant appeal—Â� her capacity to play a skilled actress in extremis. Popularized by the French tragedienne Rachel Felix (1821–1858) during her 1855 AmeriÂ�can tour, Adrienne easily accommodated a foreign actress in its lead role and proved a successful choice for such players as the Italian Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906), the Czech Fanny Janauschek (1830–1904), and the French Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). 6 The sparse information circulated about this night’s foreign star did little to pique audience interest. The debuting actress came not from France, but Poland, to most AmeriÂ�cans a poÂ�l itiÂ�cally eclipsed and culturally undistinguished part of Europe. Since 1795, Poland had been erased from the European map,

De bu t 3

its territories forcibly partitioned by and absorbed into the neighboring Russian, Prussian, and Austrian empires. This Polish player thus emerged from nowhere, unattached to any tour, unrepresented by any agent, and little remarked by the press. A modest puff piece in the 5 August 1877 San Francisco Daily Morning Call vouched for her talent and French connections: “Between Miss Mayhew and Miss Rose Eytinge at the California will come a lady— an aristocratic lady—who signs herself thus: ‘Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Countess Bożenta.’ . . . The European stage has rang [sic] with her praises, and Poland, the country of her nativity, regards her with pride. The Countess is Rachelesque in her style; and Dumas, wishing to recruit the artistic ranks at the French capital has given, time and again, strong invitations to this fair PoÂ� lander to take a place on the Parisian stage.” 7 An item planted in the Call a day before her debut tepidly predicts that “the Countess [will be] a moderate sensation in the present theatrical stagnation.”8 For a likely combination of reasons—a pubÂ�l ic uninspired by minimal publicity about a “moderately sensational” unknown and otherwise distracted by labor unrest—the audience assembled for the debut of “Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Countess Bożenta” was not large, and her ability to melt “the frigid temperaÂ� tures of this hypercritical people,” in the words of the Daily Alta California, seemed improbable.9 Yet the reviews printed in the next day’s papers announced the birth of a star “which threatens to eclipse our English constellation.”10 The real drama in the California Theatre that night was played out between the unknown actress and her unsuspecting audience. Both the Call and the San Francisco Daily Evening Post declared MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “a revelation” equal to the famed tragedienne Ristori and superior to San Franciscans’ current favorite Shakespearean actress, Adelaide Neilson (1848–1880).11 The “Polish artiste” playing the French Adrienne won over her audience act by act, throb by throb: She appears first in the secÂ�ond act, and has some passages with her devoted teacher “Mons. Michonnet” of a half tender and half playful character, which showed a graceful and intelligent artist, but gave little indication of the tragic power displayed in the fourth and fifth acts . . . The situation in the fourth act, in which the duel of words occurs between the two rivals, is one of the best in French drama, and the fifth affords an opportunity for acting which can hardly be composed. Poisoned, Â�dying, her lover, whom she believed false, returns to her, and then ensues the struggle against the influence of the poison, the supreme efforts which recalled memory and consciousness, and the final death throb with which life actually seemed to go out of the face of the actress.12

4


Loving, lamenting, and dying, this Polish Adrienne wrested “bravas” from her hypercritical AmeriÂ�can patrons, attracted larger audiences each night, and made of every appearance “a fresh triumph.”13 Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska performed her masterful Adrienne eight times before packed houses and, in an audacious move for an actress who had studied English-Â�language parts a mere eight months, added to her new AmeriÂ�can repertoire the Shakespearean roles of Juliet and Ophelia. In the latter, she reconciled herself to playing the mad scene alone and in Polish. As audiences throughÂ�out the United States would soon discover, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska thrived on tests of nerve. Describing her San Francisco triumph to Warsaw friend Maria Faleńska, she reported that “I’ve debuted here at last, and I was naturally a success, as usual. It appears that a strong will can conquer all. The papers are enraptured, the ladies love me. In a word, it’s all going well.”14 The post-Â�debut telegram she sent her husband allegedly contained a single word: “Victory.”15 On 21 August 1877, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska signed a contract for an East Coast tour under the representation of Harry Sargent, the first of several agents to make a pitch to the new star ensconced at the Palace Hotel. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s surprisingly successful San Francisco debut launched her on an awe-Â�inspiring star trajectory over several decades. As her string of conquests led from San Francisco to New York, audiences and critics at once embraced the Polish actress as a consummate artist and ultimately paid her homage as a one-Â�woman AmeriÂ�can theatrical institution. During her long career, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska eclipsed her AmeriÂ�can contemporaries as a high-Â�culture actress speÂ�cialÂ� izing in Shakespeare, rivaled international touring greats Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry in box office draw and adulatory reviews, and played with such famed actors as Edwin Booth and Maurice Barrymore, the paterÂ�familias of legendary stage and screen stars Lionel, Ethel, and John. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s anglicized Polish surname became the stuff of legend. In HollyÂ�wood’s most famous film about stage actresses, the Oscar-Â�w inning All About Eve (1950), critic Addison deWitt (George Sanders) sets the scene by invoking real AmeriÂ�can stars who once graced New York’s fictitious “Sarah Siddons Society”: “These hallowed walls, indeed, many of these faces, have looked upon MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Ada Rehan, and Minnie Fiske.”16 While MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s San Francisco debut marked a momentous professional rebirth, it also unveiled her return from a tantalizingly curious obscurity. As retold in press interviews, biographies, fictional accounts, and her 1910 Memo ries and Impressions, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s riches-Â�to-Â�rags-Â�to-Â�r iches story began when

Modjeska as Adrienne Lecouvreur in the 1870s. From Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska, 1910

6


she quit Poland in July 1876 at the peak of her stardom as Helena Modrzejewska. Various professional and personal grievances prompted her departure, and she envisioned the year’s leave of absence she had arranged with the Warsaw Imperial Theatres as a hiatus rather than a defection. Modrzejewska discreetly joined her husband Karol Chłapowski, her son Rudolf by an earlier extramarital liaison, and a tiny group of Polish artists and associates in a peculiarly AmeriÂ�can experiment—a utopian community in Southern California. Weary of a contentious Warsaw and lured by advertisements touting Southern California’s gentle climate and arable land, this idealistic little party set out for the German agricultural colony at Anaheim, where they imagined they could consult with experienced farmer settlers in a language they knew and could create their own late nineteenth-Â�century version of Brook Farm. Their crazy dream failed within a month and exhausted Chłapowski’s $15,000 investment. Nonetheless, the time the couple spent exploring the wilderness east of Anaheim forged their lifelong attachment to Orange County’s stunning inland canyons. This period when the actress was lost to Poland and not yet known to America suggests her disappearance down a western rabbit hole as she exchanged the pampered world of a national icon for the rugged life of an immigrant farmer. The prospect of imagining an exotic, iron-Â�w illed prima donna coping in a rustic, pre-Â�Disneyland Anaheim has enticed writers of all stripes. Susan Sontag, the most famous of those intrigued, could recall the very moment of her enchantment, when a historical account of the actress’s farming adventure compelled her to start writing the novel In America (2000): “For me, that is a great story with which I could tell many stories. I could tell a story about the discovery of America, about what it’s like to be a foreigner and how you discover yourself and the new place through that very interesting status.”17 This great story proved to be more complicated, however, since Modrzejewska and her husband were also pursuing a parallel, much less utopian dream. As the actress admits in a March 1877 letter to Stefania Leowa, the wife of the editor of the Polish Gazette (Gazeta Polska), performing on the AmeriÂ�can stage “had been my secret plan from the beginning of our venture.”18 To enact that plan she required time to memorize English-Â�language scripts and a less demanding performance venue far from New York’s definitive proving ground. Her party first encountered America in New York, where ModrzeÂ�jewska surveyed the major theaters as a clandestine competitor, absorbing as much in-

De bu t 7

formation about New York players, tastes, and repertoire as her very limited English allowed. According to one of Chłapowski’s letters home, his wife had rejected an initial invitation to play in Polish during their New York stay.19 Whereas Bernhardt’s French-Â�language spectacles attracted a large, generally educated AmeriÂ�can public, Modrzejewska realized that Polish-Â�language performances would have consigned her to ethnic theater productions in “parish halls, saloons, fraternal lodges, and modest professional stages.”20 As she first passed through San Francisco on her way to sleepy Anaheim, Modrzejewska sized up the city’s theatrical possibilities. After their leisurely journey by ship from New York to San Francisco, she and her husband separated from their party to linger in town for roughly a month in fall 1876. Their letters described a young, vital San Francisco which was “one hundred times prettier than New York,” with wide, wood-Â�paved streets and cosmopolitan, multilingual inhabitants.21 The San Francisco that they observed in the late 1870s was known as a good theater town, a West Coast mecca for “actors, opera singers, musicians of all orders, vaudeville and circus performers, bands and bandmasters.”22 According to historian Oscar Lewis, troupes of performÂ� ers typically would “play a few weeks at one of the local houses, then tour the interior, making one-Â�night stands at Sacramento, Stockton, and the foothill mining towns, and, after a secÂ�ond engagement in San Francisco, either return East or continue on to the Hawaiian Islands or Australia.”23 Since its beginnings in the Gold Rush, San Francisco theater welcomed and sustained a broad spectrum of talent and repertoire, including serious actors and notorious celebrities, Shakespeare productions and low comedies and burlesques.24 Three members of the famous Booth family—Junius Brutus, senior and junior, and Edwin, who would be hailed as America’s greatÂ�est Shakespearean actor—performed in the city and on the mining camp circuit. Modrzejewska, Edwin’s future partner, saw his Shylock and Mark Antony in San Francisco and pronounced him “the one good actor in all America.”25 The rough-Â�and-Â�tumble conditions of the Gold Rush and the scarcity of women in the mining camps also yielded exceptional opportunities for actresses and actress-Â�managers. San Francisco audiences enjoyed the extravaganzas mounted by Sarah Kirby-Â�Stark and her husband James Stark, the ambitious opera productions of Catherine Sinclair at the Metropolitan Theatre, and the impressive roster of Shakespeare plays that Laura Keene circulated at the AmeriÂ�can Theatre.26

8


San Francisco attracted such sensations as Lola Montez, “the Countess of Landsfeldt, the Limerick Countess, the Spanish dancer, born Eliza Gilbert in Ireland,” who arrived in the spring of 1853 trailing tales of her love affairs (including her seduction of Ludwig I of Bavaria), commanded astronomical ticket prices for the performance of her torso-Â�exposing “spider dance,” and settled for a brief time in Grass Valley with two bear cubs and a third husband, local newspaper editor Patrick Purdy Hull.27 During the Civil War, the equally scandalous but artistically more ambitious actress Adah Isaacs Menken riveted the public’s attention with gossip about her romances and the dangerous stunt she performed in Mazeppa, or, The Wild Horse of Tartary, when, scantily clad and lashed to the back of a horse, she was borne up a forty-Â�foot ramp offstage. Menken also consorted with the local bohemians gathered around the Golden Era, a literary paper to which she contributed several poems. 28 On this vivid and motley background, Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s foreign provenance, ambition to play Shakespeare, and faux royal title neither outraged nor particularly impressed. As her luck did have it, she debuted in a cosmopolitan city of theater lovers who relished the eccentric, the exotic, the variable, and the sensational. Now that the free and easy liberties of Gold Rush society had passed, her carefully groomed person—that of “a lady, an aristocratic lady”—well suited a lavishly rebuilt San Francisco firmly connected by transcontinental railroad with a civilized East and intent on its own cultural refinement. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s decorous debut launched a far more ambitious career than the provocations of a Montez or a Menken, a mode of working and living more culturally pervasive than Bernhardt’s spectacular assertion of self. From the outset of her AmeriÂ�can career, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska sought to win her pubÂ�lic not as an ethnic artist or a visiting foreign star, but as an AmeriÂ�canized success. She did not affect a colorful ethnicity to enhance her celebrity cachet, as did Montez, although both she and her biographers shrewdly romanticized the “land of her nativity.” Following California Theatre manager John McCulÂ� lough’s advice, she simplified “Modrzejewska” into “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska” so as to become a famous name her new AmeriÂ�can patrons could pronounce. In an era when popular and serious AmeriÂ�can entertainment relied on the performance of formulaic ethnicity—from Buffalo Bill’s “genuine” exhibits of representative ethnics in his “Wild West Show” to “unflattering depictions of the Irish” in professional theater—the Polish MoÂ�djeÂ�ska arrogated for herself the status and highbrow repertoire of English actors, the only non-Â�native group “easily

De bu t 9

accepted by AmeriÂ�can audiences” and, in many cases, conceded superior cultural prestige.29 Benjamin McArthur characterizes the late nineteenth-Â� century AmeriÂ�can theater as “a procession of actors and actresses who were models of Anglo-Â�Saxon gentility and femininity.”30 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska self-Â�assuredly entered their ranks, performing fifteen Shakespearean roles in English over the course of her thirty-Â�year career in the United States (performing only eleven in Polish) and lecturing the AmeriÂ�can pubÂ�lic about the detriments of the star system and the need for a national theater. 31 To realize her lifelong quest to socially elevate the theater wherever she Â�happened to play, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also had to qualify as a respectable, cultivated lady. She won acceptance into the class circles of late nineteenth-Â�century PoÂ� land and the United States which dictated and implemented a high-Â�culture agenda. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska successfully projected peer status with local AmeriÂ�can elites— writers, editors, critics, artists, and actors as well as patrons of the arts. Peer status did not require that she be upper class, although MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s happy marriage to a bona fide aristocrat boosted her reputation immeasurably. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many members of the AmeriÂ�can elite had become devotees and supporters of legitimate theater. Just as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska sought their social approval and influence, so they sought the sort of high-Â� minded, virtuous professional she appeared to be. By 1879, the critic Charles de Kay, one of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s friends, recommended at length this good woman thespian to the AmeriÂ�can public, singling her out among her implicitly less-Â� respectable peers: in her hands roles which exhibit depraved women are elevated and purified by her management of them. Goodness, rather than wickedness, is the suggestion flowing from Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s theory and practice. Her tendency is upward, and the influence she carries with her before the footlights is highly moral as well as aesthetic. In this she is the superior of Sarah Bernhardt, the actress of the present with whom she is most likely to be compared. 32

T w ice t h e Sta r In America, Modrzejewska’s professional anonymity and short stint as an idealistic settler immediately secured the high reputation she had worked so hard to achieve in Poland. AmeriÂ�cans neither knew nor suspected anything about her scandalous youth. Born in Kraków, the former capital of Poland, Helena was the illegitimate child of a local burgher’s widow. When the al-

10


ready married Gustaw Zimajer came to board with Helena’s family, he soon discerned the beautiful girl’s theatrical potential, wooed her with visions of a stage career, and seduced her. Masquerading as the married ModrzejewÂ� skis, their invented surname, Helena and Gustaw toured the provinces and had two children, only one of whom survived. When Helena at last left Zimajer, taking little Rudolf with her, the father retaliated by kidnapping their son while Helena was performing on the Kraków stage. Zimajer allowed her to buy back their child only four years later. By the time she had conquered Poland’s greatest stage in Warsaw in 1868, Modrzejewska largely had reinvented herself through her great talent, learned upper-Â�class behavior, and marriage to Chłapowski. Nevertheless, out of envy or jealousy, Poles could and did choose to remember her sordid past. A spurned admirer dared to publish a risqué novel based on her affair with Zimajer during her early years in Warsaw. Even when Modrzejewska was touring Poland in her 60s, she received anonymous poison-Â�pen letters damning her for her sins. In contrast, her AmeriÂ�can pubÂ�l ic fully accepted what she presented herself to be—Chłapowski’s faithful wife, Rudolf ’s doting mother, and the great artist Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. Her devotion to the California “colony” and, later, Southern California as her wilderness home added the virtue of committed citizenship to her unblemished good womanhood. At the same time, AmeriÂ�can stardom threatened Modrzejewska with a different, no less potent Polish shaming. Her quest for a world-Â�class stage elsewhere, which implied the backwater status of her native theater, could be conÂ�strued by Poles as national betrayal. An occupied Poland demanded the allegiance and investment of its great artistic talents since poÂ�litiÂ�cal restrictions prevented any other form of pubÂ�lic celebrity. Theater critics and the pubÂ� lic regularly excoriated Polish actors who sought the greener pastures of imperial venues. Modrzejewska considered herself an ardent patriot and never played engagements on the German, Austrian, or Russian stages, in the languages and the capitals of Poland’s enemies. But by the summer of 1876, her patriotic feeling was frayed by professional restlessness and anger at back-Â� stabbing colleagues and complacent audiences. In the same letter which divulges her “secret plan,” Modrzejewska argued that AmeriÂ�can success would rejuvenate a static stardom at home: [M]y staying away for some time will not hurt my standing with the critics and the pubÂ�lic of Warsaw. I was beginning to bore them. Had I remained, they soon would have called me old and passée, but when I return, and return with new success,

De bu t 11 they will receive me with open arms! Everybody will find me younger and more attractive, because I shall bring with me fame from abroad to exalt my position. Somebody once said: “Une duchesse a toujours dix-Â�huit ans pour un bourgeois.”33 I left Poland as the leading lady of the Warsaw Theatre. I will return as an acknowledged star of foreign stages. 34

From the moment she stepped on the stage of the California Theatre, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska understood that she henceforth would play always before two audiences—Â� the audience at hand and the audience abroad. 35 Her stardom in two nations meant her permanent double exposure, a condition which she herself assiduously advertised so that absence never resulted in oblivion. Her binational stardom demanded her proficiency in two languages and cultures so that she could shine before both publics and effectively explain one to the other, persuading AmeriÂ�cans of her homeland’s cultural prowess and educating Poles about the fine people and accomplished artists she managed to find in the land of big business. It required as well her consistent self-Â�representation as a model citizen of both countries—as an AmeriÂ�can star devoted to AmeriÂ�can audiences across the country and a Polish star who reliably demonstrated the genius and loyalty her Polish pubÂ�lic expected her to retain. Above all, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska required a convincing defense of her AmeriÂ�can career, proof to her compatriots that her motives were altruistic and patriotic, not materialistic and self-Â�interested. She therefore was fortunate to have an eloquent champion in place at her San Francisco debut, a reviewer who might sweet-Â� talk her abandoned Polish audience into applauding her endeavor. Â�Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Quo Vadis and a trilogy of novels about seventeenth-Â�century Polish imperial history, was embarking on his career in the 1870s and served as advance scout for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “colonial party,” writing sketches of America for the Polish Gazette and hovering as close as he dared to his actress idol. Sienkiewicz’s letters, published in the 10– 11 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1877 issues of Warsaw’s Daily Courier, provide a much-Â�embellished account of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s San Francisco performances. Summoned to attend her opening night, Sienkiewicz joined the local Polish émigrés at the California Theatre to fret over the larger impact of MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s success: “This was no longer just about the fate of one artist, but our fate all together, a question of defeat or victory. Anyone who knows the AmeriÂ� can people will understand how it was. In short, this performance was about winning new fame or shamefully losing face.”36 Sienkiewicz cleverly portrayed MoÂ�djeÂ�ska—her statuesque figure, “womanly charm,” and “the tears and silver

12


vibrating together” in her voice—as Poland on trial and Poland triumphant, a national incarnation whose human warmth and incomparable artistry moved this “naturally cold audience” into uncharacteristic ecstasies. 37 Describing her performance and its aftermath, Sienkiewicz excelled as a Barnum-Â�esque press agent for his star property abroad. He witnessed the standÂ�ing ovation that could be heard in the streets outside, the overflowing houses at MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s subsequent performances, and an AmeriÂ�can press that outstripped Warsaw newspapers in its paeans to her superiority over such famous predecessors as Ristori and Rachel and such contemporary rivals as Neilson. He quoted verbatim the superlative praise uttered by John McCullough and Rose Eytinge, “one of the most famous actresses of the AmeriÂ�can stage,” who graciously postponed her succeeding engagement because, as she confessed, she “can not play after such a genious [sic].”38 Sienkiewicz proudly, if fancifully, reported that a new “vogue for all things Polish has cropped up in San Francisco,” to the extent that “all are incredibly thrilled” by MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s plan to play Ophelia’s mad scene in Polish. 39 Most importantly, Sienkiewicz foresaw in this debut an effective, durable defense of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s patriotism. He rendered “our artist” supranational: “withÂ� out ceasing to be Polish, she has become an artist of the world, like [the Polish painters] Siemiradzki and Matejko.”40 Sienkiewicz claimed that MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s Polish-Â�language Ophelia at the California, which he implied to be a patriotic gesture rather than an adjustment for inadequate English, “will answer immediately all those who faulted our artist for seeking success across the Ocean.”41 Arguing that “our melodious, pure language,” as declaimed by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, seemed “the music of angels” in contrast to the “harsh sounds” of Shakespeare’s English, he remarked its powerful effect on the AmeriÂ�cans as well as the Polish immigrants in the audience: “The performance of Ophelia was the more moving because all the Poles and Polish Jews in San Francisco had come to see it. These people had not heard their native tongue spoken in pubÂ�lic for a long, long time, and so it was not strange that they listened with indescribable emotion.”42 Sienkiewicz thus intuited the new ways Modrzejewska-Â�become-Â�MoÂ�djeÂ�ska would serve her homeland. The actress could not claim the iconic martyrdom of poÂ�litiÂ�cal exile, as had great Polish poets and statesmen who found refuge in Paris after the NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1830 uprising against Poland’s Russian occupiers. These members of the so-Â�called Great Emigration established themselves as

De bu t 13

The California Theatre Company in 1878. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

a primary generator of Polish culture and agitated in vain for Poland’s poÂ�l itiÂ� cal liberation. In contrast, the artist Modrzejewska had come to America voluntarily, and the Poles she met there were not rebel leaders to be worshiped, but isolated immigrants longing for the temporary repatriation she could effect with her performances. She appeared to the Polish community as emissary rather than fellow exile. Operating in a world more attuned to market influence than revolutionary Romanticism, Modrzejewska and her immigrant compatriots shared the belief that their non-Â�sovereign homeland could impress the world best by exporting its arts and artists. No matter what role MoÂ�djeÂ�ska played, the beauty, grace, and costuming of her person and the technical and interpretive brilliance of her performance redounded to Poland’s credit. She was to represent and distinguish Polish national genius before a vast, uninformed AmeriÂ�can pubÂ�lic. In raising the immigrants’ agonizing question of her “defeat or victory” at her AmeriÂ�can debut, Sienkiewicz made clear that this star did not

14


abandon her native stage for greater fame and fortune, but instead sought to promote her homeland to the world at considerable cost to herself. Over the course of her AmeriÂ�can career, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska elaborated on the overseas patriotism Sienkiewicz first sketched for his dubious Warsaw readership. She refashioned the traditional poÂ�litiÂ�cal role of the rebellious Polish artist in exile into the artist’s voluntary service as Polish cultural ambassador. 43 The cultural ambassador left her homeland in order to demonstrate a captive Poland’s cultural greatness to the world, bore poÂ�litiÂ�cal witness for the occupied nation, and ministered culturally and materially to the Poles scattered in the diaspora. Unlike the exiled artist, the cultural ambassador could return on occasion to minister to the nation itself. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska consistently performed and publicized this role in America and subsequently cultivated a younger cadre of performer-Â�ambassadors to follow her lead. These patriotic protégés included Jan, Edward, and Józefina de Reszke, a family of world-Â�renowned opera stars and, above all, Ignacy Paderewski, the virtuoso pianist who eventually became prime minister of a newly independent Poland. 44 What distinguished MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s ambassadorship was her bilingual, cross-Â� class reach, which encompassed her easy social intercourse with America’s cultural and poÂ�l itiÂ�cal leaders, her upper-Â�class ministry to the vast majority of Polish peasant immigrants, and her incarnation of Polish genius for a wide spectrum of AmeriÂ�can theatergoers. In conversation, correspondence, interviews, speeches, and memoirs, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska gracefully campaigned for Polish culture’s “European reputation.” On Tou r w it h M a da m e MoÂ�dj e Â�sk a On 20 August 1877, in San Francisco’s California Theatre, the Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska, the greatest star of Poland’s premier stage, triumphed as Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, a statuesque beauty whose voice of “tears and silver,” graceful movements, womanly charm, and meticulous performance enraptured a modest audience of unprepared San Franciscans. In the course of her first extended engagement at the California, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska performed no spider dance and rode no horse dramatically offstage. She assayed instead a trio of very ambitious roles, playing the actress Adrienne Lecouvreur and the two tragic Shakespearean heroines Juliet and Ophelia, and earned critical reviews that ranged from awed to agreeable. Modrzejewska had come to San Fran-

De bu t 15

cisco a secÂ�ond time as a failed new settler on the verge of bankruptcy, and she quit the city for her first tour as a promising AmeriÂ�can star. The critics commended her on her English-Â�language efforts after a mere eight months of study; her Polish-Â�language performance of Ophelia’s mad scene allegedly captivated compatriots and AmeriÂ�cans alike. Thereafter began a career of almost constant touring, primarily in the United States, but also trial seasons in England, Scotland, and Ireland, a short stint in Prague, and always rapturous guest tours on the main stages of partitioned Poland, where her critics and pubÂ�lic begged her to remain. Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska returned permanently to her homeland only as a relic, when her body was interred, with great pomp and circumstance, in Kraków’s Rakowicki Cemetery. This book opens with the San Francisco debut of Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to introduce a little-Â�remembered actress to a new AmeriÂ�can audience, to surprise readers over a century later with her stunning abilities and extraordinary staying power. An unfilmed, unrecorded stage star of the late nineteenth century, lacking the sensational publicity of a Bernhardt or the notoriety of a John Â�Wilkes Booth, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska is unknown to most of us, and the conditions and demands of her achievement are perhaps unimaginable. Beginning at the mature age of thirty-Â�seven, she spent the next thirty years of her AmeriÂ�can career largely between theater and train car, with occasional transatlantic crossings, performing primarily in an acquired language which she arduously improved as she played, at the same time preserving in her memory Polish versions of much of her repertoire. Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s bilingual performances, biÂ� national success, and the most challenging part of her career all began with her San Francisco debut. Her AmeriÂ�can debut also underscores the imperative to connect Polish and AmeriÂ�can studies of the actress. Polish scholars in the twentieth-Â�and twenty-Â�fi rst centuries have produced the best analyses of the Polish Modrzejewska to date and have compiled and edited excellent primary resources for tracking the entirety of her career. Their coverage of the AmeriÂ�can MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, however, has been less assiduous and more ambivalent. Certainly Poles have had less access to the vast, scattered corpus of English-Â�language materials on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in the United States. Emil Orzechowski, one of the few Polish Modrzejewska scholars who have done extensive research in America, offers this important observation about the state of the field: “Modrzejewska is not MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. And the latter has yet to be portrayed in a book accessible to the

16


Polish reader. Such a book cannot be written, however, until its author has researched a great many sources and has acquired a solid grasp of AmeriÂ�can realia beyond the theatrical conditions of her day.”45 Other Polish scholars, perhaps sharing the attitudes of Modrzejewska’s Polish contemporaries, imply that the actress’s AmeriÂ�can career was less auspicious than her achievements on big-Â�city Polish stages. They assume the inferiority of AmeriÂ�can theater to its late nineteenth-Â�century Polish counterpart, despite the fact that this institution underwent major reforms in production values and player-Â�patron relations during MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s career. They suspect that the AmeriÂ�can star system held the financially encumbered MoÂ�djeÂ�ska hostage with its fabulous earnings, rendering her one more example of a Polish genius wasting talents owed her fatherland in a well-Â�paying West. The few serious AmeriÂ�can studies of the star dwell primarily on her AmeriÂ� can career and tend to be descriptive and admiring rather than analytical in their treatment. That most of these writers can be categorized as amateur or student historians explains their approach and attests to their dedication. They may write about MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as an assigned thesis topic, a figure in local history, or simply a promising book subject. Yet the experience transforms them into her posthumous fans and they accept her as the gracious, respectable, ladylike Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska she projected as her constant AmeriÂ�can persona. These AmeriÂ�can authors may know a fair amount about her Polish biography, but most relevant and exciting for their work are the facts and stories of her gamble on AmeriÂ�can stardom, her exceptional immigrant experience, and her consequent life as AmeriÂ�can celebrity and citizen. Starring Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska presents the first English-Â�language interpretation of the star’s life from her birth in Kraków to her posthumous legacy in both Poland and the United States. It analyzes this extraordinary performer’s incremental creation of herself as a female performing artist, professional role model, “womanly” powerbroker, and cultural arbiter. It examines the development of the Polish Modrzejewska and the AmeriÂ�can MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in successive contexts, demonstrating that the relationship between the two unfolded as continuum rather than rupture, as nuanced expansion rather than compartmentalization. The creation of the AmeriÂ�can MoÂ�djeÂ�ska entailed her deft adaptation to new working and living conditions in the United States, but these adjustments were formative, not provisionally performed, and were grounded in her daily life. Modrzejewska/MoÂ�djeÂ�ska not only triumphed as a binational star, but also effectively established herself as a beloved citizen of

De bu t 17

two countries—as a civic-Â�minded “aristocrat” spreading financial and artistic largesse throughÂ�out partitioned Poland, and a Southern California settler who won hearts and fostered high culture as a generous local celebrity. The storyline of Modrzejewska/MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s biography packs its own dramatic turns and gratifying climaxes, and the sequence of this book’s chapters generally preserves its upward arc and bifurcation after her San Francisco debut. Our tour begins in Kraków, Modrzejewska’s once-Â�beautiful, dilapidated, and class-Â�stratified hometown, where she dreamed of and prepared for a theatrical future and only flourished in a reformed Kraków theater after a meandering provincial apprenticeship. It rockets up to partitioned Poland’s bustling, almost cosmopolitan capital of Warsaw and the Great Theatre, which Modrzejewska came to rule amid jealous courtiers. It crosses an ocean, an isthmus, and a coast to San Francisco and Southern California for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s debut and delineates her lifelong love affair with California. In lieu of crisscrossing America ad nauseam with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s companies, the next two chapters survey how she managed the exigencies of the AmeriÂ�can road and closely examine the ambitious stage and pubÂ�l ic roles MoÂ�djeÂ�ska cultivated over these decades. Here the spotlight shifts to the parallel track of her guest star stints and pubÂ�lic service in Poland. We accompany the star on her farewell tour as her body is borne from Los Angeles to New York to Kraków and her legacy is memorialized in three grand funerals. The epilogue contemplates the remarkably numerous traces of what was an ephemeral, if long-Â�played, art. For all of us who will never know MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in the flesh, this final guide directs readers to the sites and texts where they might sense her lasting imprint.

2

(

The Making of a Polish Actress

The Poland of Modrzejewska’s youth was poÂ�litiÂ�cally turbulent and socially stultifying, possessed of an inspiring past and mired in a present of poverty and oppression. The Polish empire had flourished for centuries under the Jagiellonian dynasty (1385–1569) and as the RepubÂ�l ic of Poland-Â�Lithuania (1569– 1795), boasting prosperous cities, a powerful army, major achievements in the arts and sciences, and a Statute of General Toleration guaranteeing safe haven for Jews, Muslims, and Protestants as well as Catholics. By the eighteenth century, however, the Republic’s wars against the Russians, Swedes, and Prussians had emptied the state’s coffers, and its landed aristocrats further weakened the state’s infrastructure by diverting their fortunes into their own estates. In 1795, the armies of Prussia, Russia, and Austria finally wiped the RepubÂ�lic off the European map, dividing its lands into three occupied partitions. The Russian partition claimed the capital Warsaw, while the Austrian partition, also known as Galicia, included the city of Lwów (now Lviv in Ukraine) and Poland’s historic capital of Kraków. Despite their separate zones of occupation, Poles preserved “the mind of a large nation in a stateless body” and acted out in consequence.1 They mounted several uprisings against their scorned oppressors in the nineteenth century. Modrzejewska was born in the inter-Â�uprising period—between the NoÂ�vemÂ� ber 1830 uprising and the January 1863 revolt, both of which began in the Russian partition, drew participants from elsewhere in occupied Poland, and ended in bitter defeat, as rebels were executed, exiled to Siberia, or conscripted into

T h e M a k i ng of a Polish Act r e ss

19

The Wawel Castle overlooking the Vistula River. From Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska, 1910

the Russian army to serve in the empire’s most dangerous outposts. Although her hometown of Kraków remained a free city until 1846, when a local uprising angered the authorities, the young Helena endured the city’s greatest poÂ� litiÂ�cal and natural trials—Austrian bombardment, the imposition of martial law, several cholera epidemics, and the great 1850 fire which destroyed “one hundred sixty-Â�five houses, four churches, and three conÂ�vents.”2 As she would insist in later accounts, she early on imbibed a fervent patriotism and survived adversity with staunch resolution and a great deal of hard work. The Kraków of her first decades also confronted her with more problematic challenges which she more or less overcame by temperament and talent. Established as the imperial capital from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries, Kraków grew into a museum city, accruing impressive monuments of different architectural styles, from the Gothic St. Mary’s Church, situated on the main city square, to the Renaissance castle looming above the city on Wawel Hill. As the Austrians installed their defensive walls and garrisons, these monuments were left to decay, and city streets and buildings became defaced by dirt and trash. 3 Through most of the 1840s and 1850s, Kraków was a sorry mess of crumbling grandeur, modest dwellings, and Austrian fortifi-

20


cations, poorly lit and strewn with garbage, and its once great Cloth Hall on the market square barnacled with little shops and stalls and verging on collapse. 4 Nevertheless, as the actress later avowed, she saw only the beauty beneath this disfigurement and daydreamed about the city’s glorious history as she wandered its dirty streets. By mid-Â�century, Kraków likewise had deteriorated into a stuffy little provincial city, dominated socially by an exclusive set of aristocratic families, observant of a strict class hierarchy, and bound by puritanical rules of reÂ�spectÂ� able behavior, punctiliously observed by middle-Â�class young women. MoÂ� drzejewska would not be equipped to scale this hierarchy until the late 1860s, when Kraków society itself grew more progressive and she could reign on a reformed city stage expressly supported by aristocrats. In the preceding decades she would have contended with strong local prejudices against actresses as women of little education and low morals who regularly enjoyed the material support of their “protectors.”5 Modrzejewska’s Polish biographers emphasize how her unclear parentage and poverty must have shamed her in her youth. Describing Kraków as the sort of place where “everyone knew everything about everyone,” Tymon Terlecki guesses that the young Helena was mortified by rumors of her illegitiÂ� macy and later gravitated to her seducer Zimajer as a kind of surrogate father. 6 Jerzy Got is definite about how the decline in her family’s fortunes scarred their psyche: “Memories of the superiority and respect they recently enjoyed exaggerated their current situation and led them to indifference, despair, and helpless revolt.” 7 In fact, there is scant documentation as to how the young Helena felt. 8 But it should be borne in mind that her early experiences were also filtered through the stories, reactions, and examples of her unusual family. T h e Fa m i ly Ben da When the great Kraków theater director Stanisław Koźmian paid tribute to Helena’s favorite sibling, the actor Feliks Benda, soon after his premature death in 1875, he praised Feliks’s father Szymon Benda as a solid citizen, “an affluent burgher (mieszczanin) who had acquired something of an estate and, as is usually the case with us, subsequently lost a good part of it serving the city and the RepubÂ�lic.”9 In her memoirs, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska claims that Szymon was ennobled for his efforts.10 Whatever his actual class, Szymon Benda left his much


21

younger wife Józefa a reduced, if adequate, estate of two houses to support her and their three surviving sons, Józef, Szymon, and Feliks. Józefa lived for several years after her husband’s death as a respectable burgher’s widow and an able manager, providing her family with the proper advantages. One of her sons—the talented Feliks—attended the prestigious Kraków gymnasium of St. Anne’s, and her husband’s surviving namesake, Szymon, studied music in Vienna.11 Her family only fell on hard times when the great fire of 1850 swept through the city center and destroyed her properties—both her income and home.12 Thereafter they subsisted on the earnings of the little coffeehouse Józefa had had the foresight to establish before the fire, a business she herself managed.13 Józefa Bendowa was less vigilant in abiding by the moral code of Kraków’s middle class. After Szymon’s death and before wedding her secÂ�ond husband, Michał Opid, she gave birth to Helena, who was listed by her mother’s maiden name of Mizel (Misel) on legal documents and christened Bendówna (the maiden form of the Benda surname) when she was already six years old. Józefa Bendowa was Opid’s wife when she bore her next child in 1842, Helena’s younger sister Józefa or Józia. Opid, who died in 1845 at the age of 39, was the gentle man whom Helena knew and publicized as her legitimate father. Yet rumors circulated that Kraków aristocrat Prince Władysław Sanguszko had sired her, and over the years these were reinforced by the strong resemblance between the lovely actress and Sanguszko’s legitimate daughter, another beauty named Helena.14 While Kraków society regarded her as a bastard of uncertain paternity, Helena was loved, accepted, and recruited for duty in a family where illegitiÂ� macy seemed to bear no stigma. Helena’s half-Â�brother Feliks married a woman whose illegitimate daughter he adopted. Her half-Â�brother Józef not only had a child with his wife before they married, but also abandoned the two just before his wife died. Curiously enough, one of Modrzejewska’s later admirers, the memoirist Maria Kietlińska, described her mother’s shocked discovery of Józef ’s sick wife lying on a torn straw pallet in a dirty room, while her three-Â� year-Â�old daughter played beside her.15 After the poor woman’s death, her child, Stanisława (Stasia) Benda, became the special charge of her thirteen-Â�year-Â�old Aunt Helena. Like other actress-Â�authors of her day, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska omits any reference to sexually immoral behavior in her memoirs.16 The tales of her past that she and her intimates leaked to eager celebrity biographers were similarly cen-

22


sored.17 Yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also mentions no professional or social restrictions on women’s proper behavior, beginning with her mother’s portrait. A working woman and strong head of household, Józefa paid no heed to the domestic focus and narrow social circulation expected of middle-Â�class ladies. Instead she presented an immensely useful role model to her aspiring daughter. MoÂ� djeÂ�ska accepted that she “could not claim the exclusive attention” of a mother busy overseeing household and business, and she proudly states that Józefa had “established a perfect order in her affairs” before the debacle of the 1850 fire. In a quick sketch, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska refers to Józefa’s once remarkable beauty and characterizes her as “a person of great energy, great activity, very quick and outspoken, very generous, but rash in judgment, and often regretting her hasty words and actions.”18 Józefa appears intermittently in the first part of Memories and Impressions as a de facto paterfamilias and a surprisingly modÂ� ern professional mentor. Her stern mother discourages Helena’s early passion for the stage, forbidding her the theater after a first visit leaves the girl “blind, mute and deaf ” to the world, and forbidding her at-Â�home theatricals after she and her half-Â�brother Adolf perform an “absurd” melodrama of their own concoction.19 Józefa did believe in “self-Â�support for women,” but she urged Helena to train as a teacher, the sort of pragmatic advice that Helena herself would mete out in her later years. 20 Once her daughter had succeeded on stage, however, Józefa immediately backed her enterprise, sometimes joining her on tour to care for her grandchildren. Helena’s correspondence indicated that she leaned on Józefa as confidante, caregiver, and all-Â�purpose factotum, the first in a series as she traveled the world. She also gauged her capacity for work on her mother’s stalwart example. In a letter written to relatives four years before her own death in 1909, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska tried to calculate how much longer she would be able to cover her extended family’s enormous expenses given the fact that “I am so much like my mother.”21 Józefa clearly modeled a life of industry and efficiency for Helena, but Helena’s calculations were in vain. The hardworking mother outlived her harder-Â�working daughter by fifteen years. Józefa’s relative absence in Helena’s girlhood benefited her as well. Before the family’s reversal of fortune, the young Helena grew up “free [and] unrestrained,” easily eluding her simple great-Â�aunt Teresa, the adult designated to care for her and Józia, and straying from home to indulge her dreamy imagination.22 That freedom to wander meant that Helena did not know the cloistered girlhood enforced on Kraków’s other middle-Â�class daughters. Maria


23

EsÂ�treicherówna attests that a well-Â�brought-Â�up girl “was not allowed to go anywhere without at least a servant in attendance.” A solitary walk to morning mass might have excited gossip. Serious reading or intellectual discussion also was forbidden, for well-Â�bred young ladies were never to pose as “bluestockings.”23 Helena early sampled the “improper” joys of unchaperoned life. She also absorbed the extra duties of coping with a large, impoverished household, filling in for absent servants. In the first known letter of her correspondence, she itemized for her brother Szymon the tasks and pursuits of her too busy nineteen-Â�year-Â�old life. Helena sewed and ironed because “only old Kazimierzowa comes twice a day to wash the dishes,” tended her now bedridden Aunt Teresa, supervised her niece Stasia who obeyed her because she “speaks to her as an adult,” and read avidly until three in the morning.24 Her independence, workload, and intellectual appetite exceeded what a good Kraków girl of her class was to do and to want, but for the most part her busy mother did not disapprove. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska credits her father, Michał Opid, “a student of philology and a teacher in one of the high schools in Cracow,” as the source of her sensitivity and artistry, the storyteller who introduced his children to the Iliad and the musician whose tender music moved his little daughter to unseemly wails. 25 This sentimental paternal portrait figures as the first in her memoirs’ extensive gallery of artistic and intellectual mentors. Intent on cultural imprimatur, the actress-Â�memoirist recollected the right teachers and guides to compensate for the formal schooling and social breeding she lacked. 26 Unlike her older brothers, Helena had to be satisfied with a Kraków girl’s dilettantish education in a Mrs. Radwańska’s pension, several years with her sister “as day scholars at St. John’s convent,” and whatever additional lessons her mother could afford in French, dance, and music.27 It is not surprising, then, that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska takes pains to depict her “husband” Gustaw Zimajer as the educator her “father” did not live to become. The twenty-Â�five-Â�year-Â�old Zimajer had left his much older wife and settled with the Bendas in 1850, when Helena was ten. Her Memories and Impressions excise any reference to his checkered past—his extant marriage, love of card playing, lack of steady work, and probable jail time for a swindling scheme. Rather, she highlights his sober image as the family’s German teacher and the family practice he established of reading aloud in the evenings. 28 Reading sessions with “Mr. Modjeski” (so named in her memoirs to minimize AmeriÂ�can readers’ confusion or suspicions) schooled Helena in classic and contemporary Eu-

24


ropean literature, from Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller, to Scott, Dickens, and George Sand.29 Mr. Modjeski also squired Helena, with her mother’s permission, to good German-Â�language plays performed in the Kraków Theatre, to Schiller’s Intrigue and Love and a German-Â�language version of Hamlet starring a promising young Fritz Devrient in the title role. 30 Even Mr. MoÂ�djeÂ�ski’s completely fabricated marriage proposal links him with high culture, for it takes place during one of their reading sessions and prompts her to admire him as a suitor equal to the romantic figures in her books: “I answered ‘Yes’ without hesitation, because he had already become as dear to me as my own brothers, and besides, my imagination had adorned him with the attributes of all the possible and impossible heroes I read about in poetry and prose.” 31 Most of the actress’s biographers cast Zimajer as a villain or a mistake, a depiction the star herself initiated once she departed Poland and allowed journalists to exaggerate the age difference and antipathy between them. Some accounts declared him old enough to be her grandfather; others prematurely reported his death rather than admit their separation. 32 Polish theater scholars are intrigued by Zimajer as her shady first impresario, a philanderer and a sponger who nonetheless singled her out when she might otherwise have been lost in caring for her large, needy family. They note his interesting track record as a midwife of talent, pointing to his secÂ�ond discovery of the singer Adolfina Wodecka after Modrzejewska had left him. The death of Zimajer’s first wife freed him to marry the much younger Wodecka and groom her as the singing star Zimajerowa. Zimajer’s greatest flaw, in these scholars’ estimation, was not his seduction or economic exploitation of Helena, but his inadequate management of her career. He made the wrong decisions for a genius who would soon make all the right ones. Terlecki insists that, after her problematic beginning with Zimajer, Modrzejewska “took her fate into her own hands. Forever after she will shape that fate in sharp contrast to what had gone before—with her moral instinct, will, imagination, and aesthetic sense. She will erase the traces of this period until the very end, until the moment of writing her autobiography-Â�romance, her biographical poem about herself.”33 At that “moment of writing her autobiography-Â�romance” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska carefully polishes Zimajer’s image as she inserts him in Memories and Impressions. She neither acknowledges his impropriety nor tarnishes his character. Rather than portray her relationship with him in the black-Â�and-Â�white terms laid out by Terlecki, as the period of her fall or uncharacteristic passivity, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska claims Zimajer’s key role in her professional formation and her maintenance


25

of a new star persona. To a considerable extent, his influence and design were consonant with the large patterns that defined and supported her career. She rewrites him quite shrewdly: Zimajer is cast much more effectively as teacher than villain in her story. The education MoÂ�djeÂ�ska details receiving from Zimajer proved critical to her high-Â�culture ambition. The higher courses for women, the rough equivalent of university instruction, were not instituted in Kraków until 1870. 34 In an era when for most actors voracious reading had to substitute for a higher education and good actors were expected to familiarize themselves somehow with the classics of dramatic literature, Helena’s extensive reading sessions with Zimajer helped to guarantee her intellectuality and to elevate her passion for the theater through her sequential cult of the classics. 35 Beginning with her beloved pantheon of Polish Romantic poets, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska remembers progressing to Schiller, whose little statuette she literally worshiped, and conclusively to Shakespeare, who “became my master then and there, and remained so through my theatrical career.”36 With Zimajer’s critical guidance, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska thus laid the foundation of her lifelong, career-Â�enhancing literary education. Helena’s professional debut under Zimajer’s management also entailed her first successful act of reinvention, as she and her lover assumed new pubÂ�lic identities. For the duration of their relationship, Helena and Gustaw appeared before the pubÂ�lic outside of Kraków and in theater reviews as the presumably married Modrzejewskis. Contrary to rumors about Gustaw selling Helena’s favors to wealthy patrons, the couple preserved the semblance of a respectable, legitimate family until Helena abandoned him. In a letter to her mother during their early days of touring, when she might have dropped the facade, Helena referred to Zimajer as her husband, listed her two children’s surname as the double-Â�barreled “Sinnmayer-Â�Modrzejewski,” and boasted how well she and Gustaw together managed her career: “all this [her rivalry with other actresses] doesn’t rattle me because Gustaw wrangles with everyone, and I am ever polite and politic.”37 It is worth noting that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska would proÂ� ject a similar division of labor between the serene lady artist and her scrappy spouse-Â�manager when her husband Chłapowski managed her AmeriÂ�can tours. As her brother’s friend and the household’s live-Â�in teacher, Zimajer also qualified as a member of the theater-Â�crazy family which fundamentally influenced MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s career and professional identity. For her to claim that Zimajer was “as dear to me as my own brothers” was high praise indeed, as well as

26


strategic placement. Like many other actresses, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was drawn to the theater through her family members in the business, a connection that lessened somewhat the social stigma of working alongside strange men and displaying oneself before the pubÂ�lic. Of the great theater families which emerged in Kraków and throughÂ�out partitioned Poland, the extended Benda clan became one of the largest and most renowned. One theater historian estimates that Feliks Benda was related to as many as seventeen actors by blood or marriage. 38 When Helena was still a child steeped in daydreams and given to wandering, she caught the theater bug from her lively older brothers: Józef, who hared off on various provincial tours; Szymon, who trained as a musician and conducted theater orchestras; and, above all, Feliks, who began his career as a super in the Kraków Theatre in 1852 and worked his way up to leading man and highlighted character roles. 39 Zimajer’s talents in management and production lay behind the scenes, although he filled in onstage as needed and fit easily into the Bendas’ crew. He encouraged the dreams and cultivated the talents of the beautiful sister for whom the career-Â�distracted Józef, Szymon, and Feliks could spare little time. Her brothers seemed to accept Zimajer’s dalliance with Helena as a matter of course and then supported their professional marriage as a going concern. In general, the energies of the Benda children revolved feverishly around matters theatrical. They mounted the sort of amateur at-Â�home productions that were gaining popularity throughÂ�out Kraków, theatricals and tableaux vivants showcased first among the city’s aristocratic families and then emulated by the middle class. 40 Helena experienced her older brothers’ at-Â�home plays as a spectator, “since girls were not admitted to this histrionic circle,” but after Józef, Szymon, and Feliks had ventured out into the world, she and her younger siblings staged their very own melodrama, with Helena starring as an “aristocratic Grecian lady” anxiously awaiting the return of her patriot lover. 41 Once Feliks had established himself in the Kraków Theatre across town, Helena came into regular contact with theater professionals, and her aspirations grew more specific. She made the acquaintance of her future rival, the young actress Antonina Hoffmann; obsessively sketched the beautiful costumes of Feliks’s leading lady, a Mrs. R. H.; and auditioned (unsuccessfully) before this leading lady with her brother’s encouragement. 42 In the years to come, the brothers and sisters Benda, under different real and stage names, would perform together in different configurations, and Modrzejewska would


27

come to rely on the shielding support and good working relations of a strong family team. Their irregular family circle, inclusive of Zimajer and tacitly endorsed by the pragmatic Józefa, seemed perfectly suited to the stage. T h e T h e at r e of K r a ków Beyond Helena’s family circle lay the formative contexts of her hometown— its cultural institutions, historic sights, pubÂ�lic spectacles, and poÂ�litiÂ�cal trials. With Zimajer as mentor and Feliks established in its troupe, the young Helena attended the Kraków Theatre located on Szczepański Square and endured performances in its deteriorating, dark, barely heated building. Although gas lighting had been laid on in Kraków in 1857, and locals gathered in late DeÂ�cemÂ� ber to view the glorious illumination of the market square, the Kraków Theatre could not yet afford its installation. 43 When the theater’s furnaces broke down, they were not repaired, and the players had to perform bundled in their coats; the local newspaper Time (Czas) observed that “even the prima donnas had to sing in their sheepskins.”44 The actor Józef Śliwicki cited similar problems with the heating almost thirty years later, remembering how he slid on an ice-Â�covered floorboard when he ran onstage for his cue. 45 The shabby Kraków Theatre was also a theater divided in Helena’s youth. As part of their Germanization program, the Austrian authorities subsidized the operation of a German-Â�language theater on its premises from 1853 to 1860, limiting the Polish company’s performances to twice a week and every other Sunday. 46 The German theater’s various directors tried out a wide range of productions in hopes of attracting audiences in this small, largely Polish-Â� speaking city, including star-Â�studded operas, such sensational acts as the SpanÂ� ish dancer Pepita de Oliva, and selected Shakespeare plays (Othello, Merchant of Venice) featuring the famous African AmeriÂ�can performer Ira Aldridge. 47 But despite its special privileges and dizzying repertoire, this rather benign Germanizing enterprise faded away, for Krakovians, led by their local aristocrats, preferred Polish-Â�language productions. Helena was such an avid young theatergoer that she disregarded these discomforts and tensions. Her love of art overcame cold, darkness, and national antipathy. Regardless of the bill, she professed enchantment with the performance and a consequent obsession with replaying or rereading the script on her own. Notwithstanding her patriotism, she “thought better of the Germans” after seeing Schiller on stage. 48 Without yet knowing Shakespeare,

28


Old Kraków Theatre viewed from Szczepański Square. Courtesy of the Kraków City History Museum

she sensed in Fritz Devrient’s Hamlet a characterization of such dignity and naturalness that it informed her later understanding of the Bard. 49 By the time Helena was nineteen, Zimajer was encouraging her to train as a German actress, and she found the prospect tantalizing enough to study German-Â� language plays with the help of a fine actor from the German troupe, Blum Axtman. Her perception of art as a value transcending national antagonisms was reinforced by Axtman’s artistic nature, “full of pride, recklessness, and abnegation”; although he fainted from hunger, the German refused any payment for his teaching. 50 It has become commonplace for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s biographers to trace her artistry to the city of Kraków and to read her as its product. 51 In paying tribute


29

to the city, they take their cue from MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself, who could never resist touting the glories of Poland to non-Â�Polish audiences. Yet in Memories and Impressions she consistently superimposes the image of a late nineteenth-Â� century Kraków, a lovely city of refurbished monuments, on the dirty, ravaged Kraków of her youth. 52 As she declares the formative influence of her hometown, she rewrites it to be beautiful: This is really Cracow—my cradle, my nurse, my mentor and master. Here I was born and bred. Here trees and stars taught me to think. From the green meadows with their wild flowers I took lessons of harmony in color, the nightingales with their longing songs made me dream of love and beauty. The famous “Zygmunt” bell of the cathedral, with its deep and rich sound, reminded me of the glorious past of Poland; the organs in the churches spoke of God and His Angels; stained windows, statues, and altars suggested art—its importance, its dignity. 53

MoÂ�djeÂ�ska carefully recreates her first Kraków as a paradise in which she exists as its gifted interpreter, equipped to reimagine its historic sights and events. Subsequent scenes of her childhood city bask in this paradisiacal glow, featuring only splendid historic buildings and enlivened by quaint religious and seasonal pageantry. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska portrays such citywide celebrations as the Corpus Christi procession, when villagers decked out in their best transformed the city square into a living museum of folk costumes, or the St. John’s Eve “wianki” ceremony, during which unmarried girls cast wreaths of flowers on the Vistula River to foretell their future. 54 The actress refines the visual and atmospheric worth of her rundown hometown much as she refined the intellectual worth of her mentor-Â�seducer Zimajer. Perhaps an ugly Kraków was as inadmissable a fact as extramarital sex. In this case MoÂ�djeÂ�ska demonstrates how she developed herself into an artist by divining the city’s allure and transforming its art into her own. Kraków, she asserts, furnished her a series of training sets and visual cues. Her memoirs detail how the look and mood of Kraków’s landmarks led her instinctually to pose, to feel, and to act. She was well aware of the instrument at her disposal. At home, Helena had taken stock of herself by examining her poses in silhouette: “I had great difficulty managing my arms, and I did not like the appearance of my rather short-Â�fingered hands; they did not look a bit like those I saw in pictures and statues.”55 In the Dominican church located a block from her home, she delighted in mimicking the shape of its Gothic structure, what she supposed was meant to be “two hands joined for prayer, with the finger-Â�tips meeting and relaxed above the wrists, as in some

30


of the pictures of praying Madonnas.”56 On warm summer days she would steal into the cool church for more make-Â�believe: “How often I would lie down, with my face to the ground, in imitation of our peasant women, with arms outstretched in the shape of a cross, kissing the floor, and praying fervently to God for a miracle, for a glimpse of an angel or of some saint.”57 MoÂ� djeÂ�ska also extols the long-Â�term theatrical value of her childhood haunts, remembering, for example, how she prepared for Juliet’s scene in the Capulets’ tomb by recalling images of the sinister Franciscan church visible from her window, with its reputedly haunted vaults and “two huge century-Â�old owls” that walked the moonlit grounds. 58 In striking poses and sensing sets, the young Helena demonstrated the prerequisite painterly sensibility with which nineteenth-Â�century actors were to create their characters. 59 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s evocation of her childhood Kraków also links her growth as an actress with her indoctrination as a patriotic Polish woman. She recounts her family’s ordeal during the 1848 Austrian bombardment of the rebellious city, a quick course in maturation as their home was shelled and strafed, the dead lay just outside their windows, and her mother sternly ordered her brother Józef, a member of the Polish National Guard, back into the fray (after angrily agreeing to give shelter to the actress on his arm). 60 Helena learned similar lessons in resisting the occupier from well-Â�bred young ladies. She recalls a Miss Apollonia, “our young neighbor from the third floor,” who “recited patriotic verses or sang sentimental love-Â�songs,” and taught the young Helena “that all Russians, and Austrians in particular, were scoundrels and cowards who deserved to be hanged one after another until none of them were left on earth.”61 When Helena attended Mrs. Radwańska’s pension, she looked on, fascinated, as her teacher Miss Salomea communicated in code with a poÂ�l itiÂ� cal prisoner in a “provisory jail” opposite their apartment. Helena promised never to betray Miss Salomea’s important secret, and consequently wrote “I hate the Austrians” several times in her grammar workbook. 62 According to contemporary observers, the stalwart patriotism of Józefa Bendowa and Misses Apollonia and Salomea was not exceptional. Austrian poÂ�litiÂ�cal repression in the 1850s made poignant martyrs of such Krakovians as Prince Adam Potocki, a popular member of one of Kraków’s first families, and Anna Rożycka, the daughter of a well-Â�k nown local doctor. Potocki spent a year in jail before being pardoned by the Austrian emperor and released, but Rożycka, sentenced for possession of “forbidden books and national poetry,” died in Austria’s Theresienstadt prison four years after her arrest and de-


31

spite the protests of her doctors. Her fellow prisoners there admired “her constancy and unbending nature.”63 Many upper-Â�and middle-Â�class KrakoÂ�vians subsequently supported the January 1863 uprising against the authorities in the Russian partition. Both well-Â�bred ladies and popular actresses contributed to the cause as best they could. Maria Kietlińska was not bold enough to join women attending forbidden meetings and visiting poÂ�litiÂ�cal prisoners incarcerated in Kraków’s Wawel Castle, but she donated linen for the rebels. The Kraków actress Maria Safir’s much more daring feat involved disguising an imprisoned insurgent in her dress and taking his place in his cell. 64 Elsewhere in the Austrian partition, the actress Aniela Aszpergerowa, an accomplished performer who mentored Helena on the Lwów stage, was sentenced to prison for her ties with the uprising, though she was quickly released. 65 As local history indicates and her memoirs attest, Helena was raised on such examples of fiery Polish patriotism and saw that women could be outÂ� spoken and, to a certain extent, active in their national zeal. 66 The poÂ�l itiÂ�cal traumas of her childhood Kraków acquainted her well with real acts of heroÂ� ism and sacrifice. Like other Poles of her inter-Â�uprising generation, Helena embraced the somber patriotic ideal of the soldier-Â�rebel and a program of conspiracy and revolt in aspiration, if not in fact. 67 More self-Â�styled was her connection of this brand of patriotism with her profession. In Memories and Impressions she represents acting as the best, if still inadequate, surrogate for running off to fight: “Alas! it was not my destiny to die for my country, as was my cherished dream, but instead of becoming a heroine, I had to be satisfied with acting heroines, exchanging the armor for tinsel, and the weapon for words.”68 Throughout the nineteenth century, Polish actors were admired for their signal pubÂ�lic service to an occupied nation by preserving onstage the Polish language, Polish subjects, Polish costumes, even Polish mazurkas. But perhaps no period so theatricalized Polish politics as the early 1860s, when Modrzejewska was launching her career. Beginning with demonstrations to mourn Warsaw victims of Russian oppression in 1861, Krakovians repeatedly mounted pubÂ�lic protests “in an atmosphere of excitement and exaltation,” taking solemnly to the streets dressed in czamaras (traditional Polish coats), konfederatki (four-Â�cornered caps), and the black of national mourning. Any woman venturing out in a bright dress was harassed and shamed. These black-Â� garbed citizens gathered in churches for special masses, walked in religious-Â� patriotic processions, and sang Polish hymns and national songs. 69 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska

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recalls how “black crowds knelt down in the Rynek before the picture of the Virgin; and the National Hymn, in accents of desperate complaint, was rising slowly up to heaven.” 70 In this period, Helena experienced firsthand how theater both informed and bolstered national politics. While she was engaged at the Lwów Theater in the early months of the 1863 uprising, her company deliberately performed “a Polish melodrama, with national costumes and songs” to a house packed with young insurgents. The actors used the device of improvised couplets to convey their support to the soldiers and, as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska writes, “there was such a bond of sympathy between the audience and the stage that were it not for the footlights, they would have all joined in one embrace.” 71 Yet in this turbulent period of unrest and rebellion, the ardently patriotic Helena remained onstage, content with her “tinsel” and “words.” A patriotism of soldierly discipline and dramatic display, reliant on strong men and women, clearly steeled her commitment to acting, but never waylaid her career. A You ng Sta r on t h e Roa d In late 1859, Helena informed her brother Szymon that she was to become a German actress and identified “Mr. Gustaw” as the author of this plan.72 Her diary fragments dating from the same period embellished on her fears and fantasies about playing great roles “on the German stage, among strangers,” envisioning herself as “Louise, wringing her hands and shedding tears, Â�Ophelia with her vacant stare, Marguerite in the arms of Faust.” 73 Zimajer’s reasoning likely stemmed from professional calculation, not nationalist bias (he was a Polonized German), for on the German stage, as Helena parroted, “Mr. Gustaw says I’ll have better prospects.” By 1861, however, this much-Â�contemplated venture had to be postponed due to Helena’s pregnancy. The first years of her performing career overÂ�lapped with her first years of motherhood, as she gave birth in daunting succession to Rudolf on 27 January 1861 and Maria on 10 April 1862. Like so many other actresses, Helena had to navigate the “momentous obstacles” of pregnancy, childbirth, and child care along with the arduous physical and mental demands of touring.74 That she dared to do so from the outset of her career reflected her ambition and probable desperation. By 1860, her younger sister, Józia, had joined a provincial troupe and was already touring under the stage name Kossowska.75


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For the most part, Helena managed both young children and new career remarkably well, aided by a Benda family used to accommodating irregular relations and their offspring. When Helena, Gustaw, and the newborn Rudolf embarked for the tiny town of Bochnia, where they found refuge with Józefa’s relatives, Józefa and Helena’s niece Stasia accompanied them.76 Helena also mentioned a hired nanny when she wrote Józefa from Lwów in 1862. Although Helena’s daughter lived only a few years, her death was probably caused by an accident, not family neglect.77 The actress’s letters indicate that she was a loving, proud, and quite controlling mother who boasted about her surviving child’s accomplishments and assiduously, if somewhat imperiously, arranged his affairs. Helena walked firmly in Józefa’s matriarchal footsteps. The aspiring young actress also was determined that motherhood not deter her from pursuing her dreams, even if their initial settings proved more rustic than she had anticipated. During these early touring years, ModrzejewÂ�ska first demonstrated her legendary iron will and workaholic habits. The birth of her daughter served as a remarkable case in point. The director of her troupe at that time, Konstanty Łobojko, remembered that Madame ModrzejewÂ�ska “began to give birth before the last act [of the drama Polish Homes], yet managed to finish the performance. Afterwards we took her home, supporting her on either side, and an hour later little Maria came into the world.”78 In ten days, the new mother resumed her place on the stage, for by this time she had become “a favorite of our provincial public” and the dependable star attraction of her troupe.79 Like most Polish actors in the nineteenth century, Helena Modrzejewska was born on the road. Provincial touring constituted either a preparatory stage or a lifelong career for virtually every Polish player, despite its physical hardships, great financial uncertainty, and bureaucratic hassles, especially when troupes toured across partitions. 80 Only a small minority landed engagements in one of Poland’s permanent theaters—the Kraków Theatre, the Lwów Theatre, and the best-Â�paying, government-Â�subsidized Warsaw Imperial Theatres. For most troupes, touring was an arduous business entailing travel from town to town on cart or by foot, substandard food and lodging, and improvised stages in taverns or barns where towns had no appropriate hall. 81 Directly dependent on each night’s proceeds, touring troupes usually tailored their repertoire to the presumed tastes of the locals, which meant relying on light comedy or more sensational entertainments. 82 Touring playÂ�ers could not always be certain of the locals’ welcome. While they might be ac-

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cepted as artists and respected as valiant bearers of Polish culture, they might just as readily be disdained as poor tramps and loose women. 83 From her summer 1861 debut in Bochnia to her engagement with the KraÂ� ków Theatre in fall 1865, Modrzejewska’s progress described not a steady ascent, but the small leaps forward and occasional setbacks typical for even a talented actor on provincial tour. During these four years, she toured Galician towns of varying sizes and box office prospects; performed for a short time under contract in the great theater in Lwów; made an unsuccessful debut in Vienna; and played in and around Czerniowce, the provincial capital of Bukowina, a small city of 30,000 populated by Poles, Germans, Moldavians, Jews, Armenians, and Rusyns. 84 To be fair to her manager-Â�husband, Zimajer strived to advance his protégée’s career according to the tried-Â�and-Â�true patterns of the day. An engagement with a permanent theater enabled Polish actors to move up the professional ladder or to bargain for better positions elsewhere. When Zimajer arranged for Modrzejewska’s debut in Vienna, trying at last to deliver on his promise of German stardom, he was following the tantalizing lead of successful crossover players. The great Bogumił Dawison (1818–1872), whose AmeriÂ�can tour preceded Modrzejewska’s San Francisco debut by a little over a decade, brilliantly exemplified a Polish actor’s possibilities on the German-Â�language stage, as his performances won accolades in Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, and Munich. 85 Yet the touring life, especially for a novice, could be exhilarating, especially when it signified a more intense version of the sort of work that Modrzejewska coveted at home. Launching a career in tiny Bochnia might have seemed an exercise in futility. Instead, she carefully remembers the experience as the backstory of putting on a hit show. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska describes how she and Mr. Modjeski chance upon their Kraków acquaintance, the photographer, dance instructor, and sometime actor Konstanty Łobojko, as they are strolling around town, and the three soon dream up a troupe which they eventually formalize as “The Nowy Sącz Company of National Artists.” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska represents the troupe’s founding as serendipitous, prompted by their desire to hold a benefit for the widows and children of local workers who had perished in a mining accident. Her account of how avidly they hunt for repertoire, rent a hall, paint scenery, and post bills betrays their long-Â�term plans. The company’s tiny cast was something of a Benda family production, including Helena, Łobojko, Łobojko’s dance pupil Mr. Baumann, Â�Helena’s sister Józia (stage name Kossowska), and her niece Stasia as prompter, with


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Helena debuting as Modrzejewska, and Zimajer, by default and in soliÂ�darity, as Modrzejewski. Their benefit, featuring the light one-Â�act comedy White Â�Camellia and the two-Â�act “play with songs” titled Prima Donna, or the Foster Sister, immediately extended into a series of performances with changing repertoire played to consistently good houses. In short order, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska reports receiving authoritative confirmation of her talent, when Jan Chęcinski, a WarÂ� saw actor visiting the area and her future director on the Warsaw stage, complimented her after one performance and expressed the hope that he would see her soon in his city. Hollywood could not have scripted a more upÂ�beat amateur-Â�to-Â�professional success story than the debut MoÂ�djeÂ�ska retells in Mem ories and Impressions. 86 Once their Bochnia performances had made them a going concern, ŁoÂ� boÂ�jko’s troupe began touring in earnest. With Zimajer as their “de facto . . . business head,” they traveled in a wagon resembling an AmeriÂ�can prairie schooner to perform, among other places, in the mountain town of Nowy Sącz, from which they took their name; the larger town of Rzeszów, where they drew good audiences for three months; Sambor, where Maria (Sinnmayer-Â� Modrzejewska) was born; Brzezany, where Józia married fellow troupe actor Walery Tomaszewicz; and Brody, where, in Łobojko’s terse account, a fire destroyed one hundred twenty homes, performances had to be cancelled for ten days, the actors received only half pay, and “Madame Modrzejewska left for Lwów with her husband and son.”87 Over this first touring year, their company swelled to thirty-Â�six players, recruited at last a proficient artistic director and leading man in Lucjan Ortyński, and won favorable reviews in the prominent Lwów newspaper the Literary Daily (Dziennik literacki). Modrzejewska’s initial experience on the road was quite successful, all things considered, and it spotlighted her from the outset as her troupe’s beautiful, talented star. Despite its hardships and limited circulation, provincial touring could launch good actors on a fast track to better roles and star status, in contrast to permanent theaters where a novice confronted an entrenched company and fiercer competition. 88 As early as NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1861, the Literary Daily’s correspondent remarked the improvement of Łobojko’s troupe under Ortyński’s direction and singled out Modrzejewska as an actress of “undeniable talent, with the potential of becoming an ornament on our greatest stage if she keeps up the good work.”89 The reviewer for the Literary Daily repeatedly praised the experienced Ortyński and the novice Modrzejewska. A 2 May 1862 review offered this characteristic assessment, heralding her as “ornament”

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Gustaw Zimajer and Helena Modrzejewska around 1863. Photo by W. Beldowicz. Courtesy of the Warsaw Theatre Museum

once again: “Young, pretty, talented, filled with a love of art and possessed of a singing, resonant, sweet voice, she deserves a brilliant future. . . . With conscientious work and zealous exercise, Modrzejewska may become a valuable ornament not only in her current company, but in any other troupe.”90 The Literary Daily review sounded what would become a recurring refrain in Modrzejewska’s clippings—an automatic registering of her beauty and charm. In an era when poor lighting and small stages led audiences and critics to value large, clear features and expressive faces, Modrzejewska presented an almost ideal physical specimen.91 Early photographs of the actress posed in stage roles capture her strikingly well-Â�proportioned face and body— her large lovely eyes, strong profile, graceful and vivid expression, and statuesque figure. As theater historian Dariusz Kosiński observes, conceptions of beauty in the nineteenth-Â�century Polish theater prescribed a blend of the


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real with the ideal, and Modrzejewska incarnated this blend with the givens of face and figure and her growing mastery of “rounded,” often balletic gestures and gait.92 Her innate charm, provided she used it in an artistic and not coquettishly personal manner, was also a highly desirable attribute.93 Modrzejewska’s “resonant, sweet” voice proved too limited initially to be ideal, but for much of her career she worked to improve its strength, range, and durability.94 The sum impact of Modrzejewska’s magnificent parts almost invariably wowed audiences and critics, beginning with her first year on tour and for decades to come. This gorgeous, charming, inherently talented young actress thrilled to the road. When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recalls how simply she needed to live and how intensively she had to work during her first year on tour, her memoir account is suffused with happiness. As Dobrochna Ratajczak observes, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska depicts her travels from Bochnia to Nowy Sącz, the initial leg of her tour, as entry into a provincial arcadia peopled with merry, singing peasants and laid out with “luxuriant orchards, golden fields, . . . diminutive white huts,” and the Carpathian Mountains in the distance.95 In her memoirs and letters, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska regularly professes her delight in nature, unveiling, to be sure, her Romantic artist’s soul, but also demonstrating the sensibility of an educated tourist. On the road to Nowy Sącz, she was at once a poor wandering player and, in retrospect before her readers, a traveler relishing natural wonders and the colorful folk.96 Modrzejewska took up her workload with equal fervor. No passage in Memo ries and Impressions better conveys her joy in her profession: Work was a delight to me. Even now when I think of my enthusiasm of those days, I am thrilled with the recollection. We lived in rooms which were barely furnished. We had to sit on boxes and all sorts of improvised seats. I had but two dresses, one black and the other white, with two tunics, which I used to transform by addition of black and pink ruches; our meals were frugal, but I could see from the porch fields of wild flowers, trees, and mountains; above all, I had my parts, walking up and down on the veranda, I studied them, to the accompaniment of the birds’ songs, and I felt as proud and wealthy as the richest woman. To live in the imaginary world of my heroines, to speak their poetic language, to render different sentiments, to work out a character, were the most cherished delights of my existence.97

Apart from the idyllic natural setting of her workplace, most important in this passage is MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s emphasis on intensive self-Â�training—her pure dedication to studying and memorizing parts and working out a character. Just as she implies her innate actor’s response to Krakow’s suggestive settings, so her memories of early touring, before she could be influenced by the great actors

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and impresarios of the Polish theater, highlight a self-Â�development that anticipates some of the major practices other actors would need to be taught. In Memories and Impressions the young Modrzejewska has learned to be “dead-Â� letter perfect” in committing her parts to memory; to perform a wide array of roles, despite the fact that she “was the star from the beginning”; and to rehearse roles in costume so as to play them naturally onstage.98 She seems to intuit a widely prescribed technique for developing a character “from the whole to its parts” (od ogołu do szczegołu): “When I could not see the vision in my mind from head to foot, even to the garment and the gestures, when I could not hear my own voice ringing in the accents of my vision, I rejected the part, for I knew I could not play it to my satisfaction.”99 Nevertheless, as her critics underscored, Modrzejewska needed more rigorous, formal training to fulfill her potential as “ornament” on a greater stage. Her explorations of first the Lwów Theatre and then Vienna’s theaters, facilitated by Zimajer, took reasonable steps toward this goal, although neither experience advanced her very far. The Lwów Theatre offered her an impressive physical venue. Its imposing new building, lavishly funded by Count Stanisław Skarbek and opened in 1842, was shaped like an amphitheater and boasted seating for 1,460 patrons, the latest in stage sets and machinery, and a magnificent Demuth chandelier from Vienna.100 The reviews of Modrzejewska’s three audition plays indicated that Count Skarbek’s theater could provide her with the necessary training as well. One well-Â�wishing reviewer attributed her uneven performances to a lack of “deeper character study” and, by extension, the limitations of her “first school” of playing in the provinces. Recommending her engagement, he argued that her innate talent could be properly developed by “intelligent direction” and the “excellent role model” of Lwów’s veteran actress, Madame Aniela Aszpergerowa.101 For her part, Modrzejewska was feeling feisty at the outset of her Lwów engagement. In her aforementioned 9 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1862 letter to her mother, in which she praised Zimajer’s negotiation of her contract (she was hired as a wodewilistka, vaudeville player), she declared that she was ready to compete with the younger Lwów actresses who envied her good reviews and wished her ill. Even from the lofty distance of her memoirs, she chose to denounce the dirty tricks played on her by these three identified “antagonistic goddesses,” Teofila Nowakowska, Paulina Targowska, and Józefa Radzyńska Hubertowa (the Mrs. R. H. who had pronounced Helena talentless in Kraków).102 Another letter sent in late 1862 to her half-Â�brother Adolf read like a battle plan,


39

taking broader aim at the Lwów company and revealing just how cocky and calculating the provincial star Modrzejewska had become: “As you know, I’m under contract in Lwów, and Madame Aszpergerowa is truly a great role model. I’m trying to learn all I can from her performances, and it seems to me that I can reach her pinnacle of fame with little trouble. A little more work, and I’ll make it. Right now I’m mainly cast in vaudeville parts. Misses Targowska and Nowakowska won’t let me near real dramas, but I’ll prevail.”103 As it turned out, Modrzejewska lacked both the position and protection to displace her entrenched young rivals in Lwów. She opted not to serve out her contract, for her pay was too low, the work and expense too much (like most actresses, she had to make her own costumes), and the roles left her afÂ�t er the evil trio had taken their pick were the too small parts of “pages, gypsies, servant-Â�girls, peasant women, mysterious countesses in French melodramas.”104 The “intelligent direction” recommended for her progress never materialized. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska hinted that the Lwów Theatre’s “fatherly managers” were pledged to obey the “goddesses.”105 Yet Modrzejewska did discover two useful role models among Lwów’s actresses. Although she sized up the “excellent” Aszpergerowa as a benchmark, she also appreciated the older actress’s encouragement and coaching on parts, lines, and costumes. She learned the value of collaboration even as she competed. Five years later, when she had achieved Aszpergerowa’s pinnacle of fame, Modrzejewska helped arrange for the Lwów actress’s guest appearances in the Kraków Theatre.106 In Lwów, Modrzejewska also made the passing acquaintance of the young actress Maria Łagowska (stage name Marie Vergne Fontelive), whom she had been hired in part to replace.107 The friendly FonteÂ� live was already bound for Vienna’s Carlstheater, literally enacting Helena’s master plan and enduring negative press coverage for her defection.108 When Modrzejewska caught up with Fontelive in Vienna three years later, the now Viennese actress was blazing another life trail, about to marry a handsome prince and leave the stage.109 These Lwów acquaintances incarnated several standard versions of a Polish actress’s successful future—an enduring stage career in Poland, triumph on a foreign stage, or social ascent into a noble marriage and retirement.110 During this period of Zimajer-Â�Modrzejewski’s management, the couple also tested Modrzejewska’s viability on the German-Â�language stage by taking a vacation in Vienna in 1865 and sampling its cultural sights. Once again, Modrzejewska, albeit with Zimajer’s assistance, had anticipated a professional

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practice subsequently recommended to other actors, going abroad to study the great performers of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London. After her informal audition with an unnamed Viennese theater manager, she was advised to study German one more year; the Modrzejewskis could not afford the delay. But their vacation, her first visit to a European capital, exposed her to grander art and consequently grander possibilities. A tour of the great paintings in Vienna’s Luxembourg Galleries amplified Modrzejewska’s ambition and resolve: “I felt small and humble in the presence of the masterpieces of all ages and all nations, and yet, underneath this humility, I felt a glow of superhuman strength, and a hope that one day I might achieve fame,—in a different and smaller way, of course—for our art was scarcely considered an art at all, but I formed then a strong determination never to rest until I had climbed to the very top of my profession.”111 Between Modrzejewska’s temporary defeat in Lwów and her horizon-Â� expanding trip to Vienna, she and Zimajer returned to provincial touring, even as the January 1863 uprising caught fire around them. By April, they had played their way to Czerniowce, a small city in the southeastern corner of Galicia, where they more or less remained for the next two years.112 To some extent this move must have seemed a setback to the young actress, a regression to touring’s financial uncertainties and fluid companies. With its mixed ethnic population, Czerniowce could not sustain a year-Â�round Polish theater, and anyone mounting a theatrical enterprise there had to include German-Â�language productions to stay afloat. When the Modrzejewskis arrived, their former co-Â�star Lucjan Ortyński headed up the local Polish troupe, but opted to direct the German troupe by year’s end. Once Zimajer had obtained the concession to establish a troupe by mid-Â�1864, his company was expressly Polish-Â�German. Even so, the Polish actors had to resort to local touring outside of the city to survive. Modrzejewska’s next logical step would have been to perform in German, as Zimajer had planned in Kraków, but she did not do so here or anywhere else. She may have hesitated on patriotic grounds. In her memoirs, she fashions a little melodrama around the German-Â�language debut that Zimajer has prepared for her in Czerniowce. Her apprehension of betraying her country provoked convulsive sobs and a convenient fainting spell, which resulted in the performance’s cancellation. She may have balked for more complicated personal reasons. At this point in her memoirs she refers to “Mr. Modjeski” more distantly as the man “she dared not disappoint.”113


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Yet these uncertain two years, when Modrzejewska was sensing the limits of Zimajer’s managerial abilities, also renewed her confidence in her star quality, provided her diverse opportunities for professional growth, and reunited her with the still supportive network of her family. In the variously made-Â�up Polish troupes in Czerniowce, Modrzejewska once more reigned as the star, as her reviews in the German-Â�language newspaper Bukowina attest.114 The ambitious repertoire that Ortyński assayed and the troupe continued to perform after his departure allowed her to try out serious and even tragic leading roles for which she was eager, if not professionally prepared.115 As she notes in Memories and Impressions, in Czerniowce she spent an hour or two each day exercising her voice to achieve the deeper shading of a tragedienne.116 Modrzejewska played such parts as the beautiful wife Amelia who loved another in Polish Romantic writer Juliusz Słowacki’s historical drama Mazepa; the eponymous Barbara Radziwiłłówna in Alojzy Feliński’s play about a tragic Polish princess poisoned by her mother-Â�in-Â�law before she, a commoner, could be crowned queen; and two incarnations of the rebellious Scottish queen Mary Stuart, a sympathetic portrait by Schiller and a far more critical characterization by Słowacki. In Czerniowce, Modrzejewska also found a professional equal, a kind of male double, in the actor Wincenty Rapacki. The two had met while Modrzejewska was on tour in Sambor earlier in 1863, but they began serious work together only in the Bukovina capital. Born in 1840, Rapacki was Modrzejewska’s peer and likewise a driven, highly disciplined self-Â�starter, although he had benefited from more training in both secondary school and Warsaw’s School of Drama. Like Modrzejewska, Rapacki had performed in provincial troupes and had attempted an engagement on the Lwów stage.117 Equally invested in meticulous role preparation and challenging repertoire, Modrzejewska and Rapacki were paired together and critically acclaimed in such works as Słowacki’s Mazepa and Schiller’s Maria Stuart, with Modrzejewska playing the sensitive young heroine or tragic queen vis-Â�à-Â�v is Rapacki’s older male leads and strong character roles.118 Yet even at this early stage in their careers, Rapacki explored professional opportunities rarely accessible to an actress, assuming the direction of the Czerniowce troupe for a very brief stint in 1863 and adapting Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables for their stage.119 Over these two years, Modrzejewska’s troupe also came to include all of the actors in her family—Feliks; his wife, Weronika; his adopted daughter, Â�Henryka; Józia and her husband, Walery Tomaszewicz; Józef; and even Szymon,

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“just returned from the Vienna conservatory” and made the director of their theater orchestra.120 Modrzejewska’s relations with her clan had grown more complicated, but no less sanguine. She was clearly established as the star of the family, the phenomenon on stage, the family’s best-Â�looking and best natuÂ� ral actor. At the same time, she was still learning and benefiting from her older brothers’ experience and entrepreneurial savvy. In Memories and Impres sions, she details how inventive and aggressive her brother Józef was in improvising stage sets and costumes on the tours outside of Czerniowce. A June 1865 review in the Literary Daily also made a startling disclosure about her brothers’ grand plans. After roundly praising the Bendas’ troupe for its professionalism, fine orchestra, and commendable repertoire (inclusive of Schiller’s Â�Robbers and Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General), the reviewer announced that the brothers’ “main goal and ambition is to direct the Kraków stage.”121 The Benda brothers did not realize this ambition, but they succeeded in delivering their star sister to Kraków by fall 1865, where she, Feliks, and WeÂ� ronika were recruited for the new Kraków Theatre company being formed. How Modrzejewska decided to leave Zimajer in Czerniowce remains a subject of much speculation or blatantly inaccurate report. Her decision broke apart her personal and professional world. It meant dismantling her fictitiously respectable little family and abandoning her carefully constructed starmanager partnership with Zimajer. Yet the Czerniowce theatrical enterprise was clearly floundering, and Modrzejewska now seemed ambivalent about Zimajer’s German-Â�language vision of her brilliant career. More terribly, their little daughÂ�ter, Maria, had died in the spring of 1865, and Modrzejewska’s grief may have led to a further alienation of affections and a strong need for a change of scene. Her memoirs cloak the crisis in vague terms of injury and illness: “Blow after blow struck my heart and bruised it to the core. Family considerations do not allow me to give the details of all I suffered at that time; but after fearful struggles with inexorable Fate, I found myself free, but ill and at the point of death. My mother and my brother Felix brought me and my little son Rudolphe to Cracow, and I never saw Mr. Modjeski again.”122 At least in the life story she designed for posterity, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did not kill off her lover or reduce him to a professional mistake. Nor did she admit the harm and embarrassment he inflicted thereafter by holding their son hostage and exciting gossip with his new wife and theatrical discovery. On paper, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska nearly achieved the clean slate that she could never guarantee in life.


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Modr zej e wsk a i n K r a ków As her critics had observed and Modrzejewska herself knew, her acting skills still needed honing when she returned to Kraków after four years on the road.123 But her relationship to her hometown had changed fundamentally. MoÂ�drzeÂ�jewÂ� ska was no longer the young Helena who practiced make-Â�believe in Kraków’s settings with a future audience in mind. She returned to Kraków an experienced actress who was engaged immediately by the city’s best theater. During her three extraordinarily successful years there, she was ever a performer on pubÂ�lic display in a small city—a professional on the boards and a local celebrity increasingly admired in society. All Kraków now served as her formal stage. Modrzejewska’s reentry in 1865 was fortuitous because Kraków was then on the verge of a municipal renaissance. In the latter half of the 1860s, the once-Â�free city regained a precious national prominence in consequence of the Austrian empire’s new weakness. After Austria lost the Prusso-Â�Austrian War in 1866, the empire yielded to Hungarian demands and was reconstituted as the Austro-Â�Hungarian monarchy. At roughly the same time, the empire negotiated support from the Polish conservative aristocratic faction in its Council of Nations by ceding Galicia local national autonomy.124 Austrian concessions included reinstating Polish as the official language of the administration, courts, and schools; granting the city of Kraków self-Â�government; re-Â�Polonizing Kraków’s prestigious, historic Jagiellonian University; and establishing Kraków’s Academy of Arts and Letters.125 The empire’s new tolerance of the circulation, study, and preservation of Polish subjects enabled Kraków’s florescence as the most prominent center of Polish intellectual life after the 1863 uprising. In sharp contrast, Russian-Â�r uled Warsaw suffered terrible poÂ�litiÂ�cal and economic repressions, and its press and theaters had to cope with often eviscerating censorship. Kraków’s institutional and cultural rejuvenation coincided with the spread of Positivism, a philosophy which abetted its populace’s increasing professionalization and advocated organic foundation work to rebuild the nation’s culture and economy in lieu of planning yet another armed revolt. Once the city regained administrative autonomy, its newly elected mayor, Józef Dietl, a middle-Â�class doctor of a Polonized German family and a former rector of Â�Jagiellonian University, actively promoted cooperation among the city’s classes

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and borrowed the aristocrats’ grand gestures toward achieving that goal, hosting citywide balls and holiday feasts for the poor.126 Before Dietl took office, an intelligentsia was emerging from the growing numbers of educated professionals in the city—doctors, bankers, industrialists, scholars—who collaborated with civic-Â�minded aristocrats on various social and cultural ventures. The reformation of the Kraków Theatre modeled one such enterprise, a product of sanguine class collaboration as well as a kind of pet project of the aristocracy. In summer 1865, a consortium of aristocrats, bankers, and intellectuals—among them, Adam Potocki, Adam Skorupka, and Stanisław Koźmian—commenced the theater’s reorganization, raising the impressive sum of 15,000 Austrian florins for the task and convincing aristocratic landed gentry and affluent middle-Â�class patrons to demonstrate their patriotism and good taste by buying subscriptions for the 1865–1866 season.127 The new enterprise was headed by Count Adam Skorupka, a theater lover whose reputation as a “Parisian in Kraków” reflected his extensive familiarity with France and French culture.128 Some historians judge Skorupka to have been a good front man for the Kraków Theatre, well-Â�positioned to badger his aristocratic peers for support and quick to launch renovations of the theater building’s lightÂ�ing and heating systems, buy much-Â�needed costumes and decorations in Vienna, and hire staff, including an artistic director.129 Others dismiss Skorupka as an inexperienced manager and ladies’ man, pointing instead to the long-Â�term influence of Stanisław Koźmian, an intellectual and aristocrat with a thoroughgoing knowledge of European drama and the Parisian and Viennese stages. Koźmian assumed artistic direction of the theater in January 1866 and soon after partnered with Skorupka as general director. Before Koźmian was free to serve, however, Skorupka imported a first artistic director from WarÂ�saw, the retired actor, director, playwright, and teacher Jan Seweryn Jasiński. Whatever Skorupka’s flaws as director, the forty-Â�odd-Â�member cast he assembled was by all accounts extraordinary. It included Modrzejewska; Â�Feliks Benda and his wife; Wincenty Rapacki and his wife, the actress Józefina (?) Baumann; and the reigning young star of the Kraków stage, Antonina Hoffmann, a highly talented performer who was Koźmian’s lifelong mistress and whose surname discreetly shifted from maiden to married variant (HoffmanÂ� ówna to Hoffmannowa or Hoffmann) in theater reviews over the years. That this cast was assembled all at once gave Modrzejewska a key advantage: She faced Hoffmann alone as a rival for female leading roles. While her male romantic partner in these roles was most often the accomplished WarÂ�saw ac-


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tor Władysław Swieszewski (1827–1876) in her first Kraków season, she later played regularly opposite her brother Feliks. Just as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska remembered her first impressions of her hometown to be more interactive than absorptive, so the influence of the Kraków Theatre on the young actress, in her assessment, proved far less formative than collaborative. Modrzejewska’s three years in the newly organized theater coincided with the gradual emergence of what theater critics and historians dubbed the “Kraków School” of acting.130 Koźmian is usually credited as the Kraków School’s creator, for he not only reigned as artistic director and then formal general director of the theater from 1871 to 1885, but also wrote extensively in the Kraków press about the Kraków Theatre and the theater. Koźmian served as one of the editors and chief contributors to Time (Czas), Kraków’s conservative and most respected daily. He also co-Â�founded and co-Â�edited Polish Review (Przegląd Polski), a serious journal on Polish culture and history, and Â�Theatre Bill (Afisz Teatralny), a compendium of theater news intended “to link the theater with its pubÂ�l ic.”131 In general, Koźmian functioned as a dominant influence in 1860s Kraków, for he was one of the leaders of the Stańczyks, the city’s strong conservative poÂ�litiÂ�cal faction. As it evolved over the decades of Koźmian’s supervision, the Kraków School was perceived as distinctive and innovative in its emphasis on script preparation, character analysis, good diction, strong ensemble work, intensive rehearsing and performance schedules, and an acting style based on truth, simplicity, naturalness, and moderation. In his “Address to Actors” before the opening of the 1871–1872 season, Koźmian prescribed a repertoire that enÂ�comÂ� passed, in the following order of importance, classic Polish drama, good contemporary Polish plays, the masterpieces of world drama with Shakespeare at the fore, and the best contemporary works available, which he primarily identified as witty, well-Â�made French plays.132 Koźmian’s influence on the Kraków Theatre’s repertoire was already evident in 1866, his first year as artistic director. The Kraków School’s other features were less clearly authored and less quickly defined, although Koźmian came to approve these in his reviews over the years and to cultivate them in later generations of actors. The improvement in actors’ diction and the focus on careful ensemble work, for example, had already begun under Jan JasińÂ� ski’s direction in fall 1865.133 Nor was it always clear if the Kraków School developed through its directors or its actors. As Got remarks in his biography of Antonina Hoffmann, Koźmian’s mistress and colleague, the actress “was the

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living example of the principles articulated by the School’s creator.”134 Theater historian Zbigniew Jabłoński likewise identifies Hoffmann’s measured performances, stripped of pathos, declamation, and conventional gestures and mimicry, as truly representative of the Kraków School. It would be difficult to ascertain which came first: Hoffmann’s thoughtful acting or Koźmian’s thoughtful design. Modrzejewska’s molding by the Kraków School is also debatable, even though she entered Koźmian and Hoffman’s force field as a mere provincial star. Certainly her rehearsal and performance schedule intensified: combined rehearsals and shows on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays; mornÂ�ing and afternoon rehearsals on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and performances on Sundays.135 To satisfy a stable, small-Â�city audience with ever-Â�new fare, the directors mounted frequent premieres—a wearying six per month in spring 1866—and slated six rehearsals to prepare for each one.136 Noting that “there was but little time for amusement” during her Kraków years, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska also admits the stress of overwork, recalling “the most dreadful experience” of temporary memory loss before one rehearsal because she “studied so much during the season of 1866–67.”137 Yet with minimal retraining, Modrzejewska impressed the Kraków audience from the moment of her debut. Commenting on her performances in Wacław Szymanowski’s weak historical drama Salomon and the same White Camellia that she had played in distant Bochnia, the reviewer in Time enthused: Modrzejowska [sic] presented herself from the start as the kind of artist rarely encountered even in the great capitals, an artist who, with work and excellent direction, could be first-Â�rate. Nature has been very generous to her, giving her all that an artist truly needs—that is, aside from a beautiful exterior, figure, and voice, that most important gift of artistic perceptiveness, a perceptiveness that instinctively senses what a role requires. Mme. Modrzejowska [sic] also possesses a delicacy in grasping her role and the sort of charm that even the most assiduous efforts cannot achieve, for this kind of charm is innate.138

In Salomon Modrzejewska played the good Jewish daughter Sara (characterized by the Time reviewer as a “womanly ideal”) who falls in love with both a Polish nobleman and his Christian faith, for which she is killed by her father. Rebutting an overheard remark that Modrzejewska’s characterization seemed not at all Jewish, the reviewer for Time defended her decision to play Sara with queenly serenity and resignation to her fate. Drawing on her gener-


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ous natuÂ�ral gifts, Modrzejewska apparently endowed a markedly ethnic role with standardized Polish beauty and nobility. Her graceful suffering became the play’s main event. Her performance in the salon comedy White Camellia proved all the more impressive because this “serious and ideal Sara” reincarnated herself as the elegant Countess Hortensia “with such truth and charm.” Here the reviewer combined kudos with an intriguing observation on the actress’s real social status, declaring that no one would know that Modrzejewska’s salon character was being played by “a middle-Â�class girl from Kraków who had never frequented salons and knew no such role models from touring provincial stages.” His comment intimated both the class-Â�jumping power of performance as well as Modrzejewska’s innate nobility, assessments that recurred with the actress’s growing stardom. This rave review did specify, however, that the inherently gifted Modrzejewska still required “excellent direction” from the Kraków Theatre’s presumably superior management. As theater historian Jan Michalik observes, the little concrete information that exists about rehearsals conducted in the Kraków Theatre pertains chiefly to later years in Koźmian’s directorship. By these accounts, an established Koźmian had his actors read scripts carefully, analyze their characters’ psychology, and attend all rehearsals for a premiere.139 But it is telling that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, one of the few actor-Â�memoirists to describe a Kraków Theatre rehearsal, opts not only to highlight the direction of KoźÂ� mian’s predecessor Jasiński, but also pronounces Jasiński, not Koźmian, “my master” and “the animating spirit of the whole institution, as well as a perfect and accomplished instructor.”140 Jasiński had been her director for just three months. When he was discreetly relieved of his position in January 1866, the implied reasons included his import of mediocre repertoire from the WarÂ�saw stage as well as assigning the new player Modrzejewska leading roles norÂ�mally given Hoffmann, who was away from the stage until late in 1865.141 Several decades later Koźmian disclosed that “Jasiński supported [ModrzejewÂ�ska] to Hoffmann’s detriment, and it was no surprise that [Hoffmann] consequently felt aggrieved.”142 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s version of this story insists that the sixty-Â�year-Â�old Jasiński kindly took her under his wing, corrected the singsong declamation of verse drama that marked her as a provincial player, praised her diligence despite her easy triumphs as a “so-Â�called ‘star,’â†œ” and encouraged her to tackle the “emotional and tragic parts” that she felt belonged to Hoffmann.143 As told in Memories and Impressions, Modrzejewska initially refused these challenging roles so as

Actress Antonina Hoffmann (1842–1897). Photo by Walery Rzewuski. Courtesy of the Kraków City History Museum


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not to offend Hoffmann, but when the latter replied that Modrzejewska was being “very wise” because she “could not possibly play dramatic heroines,” their competition began with a bang. A provoked Modrzejewska returned to Jasiński and was handed a pile of sixty roles to prepare, including tragic leads.144 Indebted to Jasiński for this pivotal support, Modrzejewska stayed in touch with him long after he was deposed, asking him for advice less often than the clearly doting actor wished and enlisting his aid for her WarÂ�saw debut.145 Modrzejewska was Jasiński’s most famous “grateful pupil,” though other actÂ�ors, including Rapacki, benefited from Jasiński’s fine coaching.146 Her gratitude also implied criticism of his successor. By naming Jasiński her master and “theatrical father,” Modrzejewska preemptively denied Koźmian credit for her professional progress during her Kraków years.147 Koźmian does appear from time to time in her memoirs, but as an incidental character, remarked only in passing as the standard-Â�bearing “head of the Cracow theatre.”148 Modrzejewska ascribes other credit for her Kraków training to her brother Feliks and, not surprisingly, herself. Feliks, an actor who spent the bulk of his career in Kraków and was claimed by Koźmian as the archpupil of the Kraków School, figures in her memoirs as her mentor-Â�partner, a more experienced, always loving, sexually innocuous co-Â�star.149 When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recalls how very well she and Feliks worked together, she presents her training as the result of extraordinary family talent and drive rather than a director’s outside influence: We used to rehearse at all hours, without regard for the proper time or place: at the supper-Â�table after the performance, behind the scenes during the rehearsals, and mostly during our walks in the fields or under the chestnut trees of the Grand Alley. At the dinner table we were often rebuked by my mother or my brother’s beautiful wife for these eternal rehearsals. Felix would ask between the courses:— “Helena, how does that scene begin?” and then we started. Sometimes we would discuss the meaning of the words, and in case we did not agree, we fell into such a heated argument that we had to be called to order. At other times we would find such natuÂ�ral expression for our lines that mother would take it for simple conversation, and then there was my brother’s triumphant exclamation:— “You see, Helena, that was well done. Mother thinks we are having a chat.”150

The young Helena who read Kraków for acting cues thus continued her self-Â�styled training with her brother as fellow pioneer. She depicts how she herself maintained the relentless work ethic and anticipated the scholarly study and artistic collaboration identified as Kraków School practices. Her

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role preparation in Kraków embellished on the pacing and memorizing she did as a novice in Nowy Sącz. In her memoirs, the young Kraków actress arose at five each morning and went out “into the open air” with her parts, reciting aloud as she walked up and down Chestnut Alley or Kraków’s Botanical Gardens.151 She recalls taking “a quantity of historical notes” about a part in preparation and researching her own costume for a historical drama in the Jagiellonian University Library, where the great bibliographer and her lifelong friend Karol Estreicher interceded on her behalf to request advice from the celebrated historical painter Jan Matejko.152 These solo forays would become standard practice for Kraków actors by the late 1870s. Then “every premiere” resulted from a ready collaboration between actors, artists, and scholars, as actor Roman Żełązowski fondly remembered: “Painters designed costumes, set up studios for set design, painted the decorations needed for a specific play. Others browsed the Jagiellonian University Library to find us textbooks and commentaries for our roles and plays.”153 The self-Â�guided Modrzejewska also dared pubÂ�lic criticism of the new management.154 When the company was touring the resort town of Krynica in summer 1866, they went on strike against Koźmian, and Modrzejewska joined the protest. In Memories and Impressions she cannot recall the strike’s root cause, but cites the “bad melodramas” they were being forced to play as grounds enough for grievance.155 The scenario she describes contrasts a detached, displeased Koźmian to a spirited bunch of players living together “as one family.” More serious and portentous was Modrzejewska’s lone rebellion against the rushed pace of the Kraków Theatre’s performances.156 In May 1866, the normally indefatigable actress had to be replaced as a lead in Schiller’s Intrigue and Love after the programs had been printed. Time deplored the switch in high-Â�handed terms, guessing that it was not the fault of the theater’s directors and warning that this incident conveyed a disrespect of the pubÂ�lic that could spell a theater’s ruin.157 Modrzejewska’s answering salvo in Time constituted her print debut as a consummate theater professional. Her 4 May 1866 letter to the editor explained that her packed rehearsal and performance schedule allowed her a single day to prepare her part: “In truth I’m often given that little time to learn a role, but this is usually in a comedy where an artist may sooner rely on her own inspiration to fill in a forgotten line, and not in a tragedy by such a poet as Schiller!” Her request for a two-Â�day postponement was denied. Modrzejewska put her case before the readers with utter confidence: “Would it not be disrespecting the pubÂ�lic to perform without having


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learned one’s role and studied one’s work? The performance was not postponed. Does this constitute disrespect on my part? Let the pubÂ�lic judge.”158 According to her actions and recollections, Modrzejewska retained a certain degree of independence in dealing with her directors and plotting her own professional course. She represented herself as a pioneering, hardworking contributor to, rather than pupil of, the new Kraków Theatre company. Her attitude toward Koźmian, the Kraków School’s supposed creator, was always professional, sometimes testy, and never quite subordinate. She seconded his love of the great dramatists, especially Shakespeare, whose works ennobled the theater they both sought to improve, and she respected his enormous industry and reforming zeal. But she would never pose herself listening raptly to his legendary analyses, as did younger actors under his direction.159 In Kraków, Modrzejewska was already set on becoming a theater phenomenon in her own right. Yet Modrzejewska did learn a great deal on the job in Kraków under the favorable conditions that Koźmian was gradually shaping and in concert with other talented players on the Kraków stage. She typically shared the critics’ praise and the audience’s ovations with Rapacki and Hoffmann; Feliks’s performances were applauded less regularly. By her own account, she and her brother achieved “originality and exactness” in their performances of one-Â� act French comedies.160 Modrzejewska and Rapacki continued to impress reviewers in their quite distinctive and equally well-Â�executed roles, with Modrzejewska lauded for her graceful, natural, emotionally nuanced romantic heroines and Rapacki commended for his versatility, adeptness with makeup and costume, and commanding portrayals of patriarchs, villains, and colorful rogues. In a rare story of their work together backstage, Rapacki remembered how they collaborated with the author Mikołaj Bołóź-Â�A ntoniewicz to breathe life into his “unscenic” ponderous verse drama Anna Oswięcimówna. Modrzejewska and Rapacki constructed their respective roles (the eponymous Anna and her “proud, coarse, vengeful admirer” Laszcz) through private consultation with the playwright, who “explained to us what he could not articulate in his verses.”161 Modrzejewska’s performance also improved through her keen rivalry with Hoffmann, whom she praises in retrospect as “highly gifted and much more experienced.”162 As Koźmian shrewdly observed, the rivalry of these two strong talents, fueled by their contrasting looks, temperaments, and predilection for certain character types, generated competing claques of male supporters and

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a stupendous boon for the theater.163 Comparing Hoffmann’s irregular features, expressive face, and lively manner with Modrzejewska’s classic beauty and dreamy temperament, Koźmian deemed Hoffmann suited to play dramatic, decisive characters and Modrzejewska perfectly cast as a lyrical heroÂ� ine. The passionate Hoffmann figured as yang to the poetic Modrzejewska’s yin. Whereas Hoffmann reportedly stormed her audience by “frontal attack,” Modrzejewska gradually captivated them with a “faux passivity.”164 The rivals played exceedingly well together. Koźmian praised their excellence in such contemporary French plays as Alexander Dumas fils’ The Ideas of Madame Aubray as well as their legendary duet in the great Polish playwright Aleksander Fredro’s comedy of romantic errors, Maidens’ Vows, with Hoffmann “typecast” as the sharp, insouciant Klara and Modrzejewska as the sweet, impressionable Aniela.165 Whatever their physical and temperamental differences, it seemed that Modrzejewska had absorbed certain key lessons from the more experienced Hoffmann. Koźmian implied and Got asserts that Modrzejewska rid herself of the “exaggeration and affectation” that she relied on in the provinces by observing Hoffmann at work.166 In effect, Hoffmann may have given Modrzejewska her most overt “instruction” in the Kraków School. Due to Koźmian’s oversight, the repertoire that Modrzejewska played in Kraków was consistently more ambitious than what her troupes could sell in the provinces. But what most distinguished her progress over these years was her better, if not full, development of serious dramatic roles. Got provides the most astute summation of what Modrzejewska attempted and achieved in this period.167 He traces how she perfected her roles as the “first lover,” which required her projection of naïveté, dreaminess, and arch flirtation. At the same time, she began concentrated work on the great dramatic and tragic roles that Hoffmann had predicted she could not play. When Modrzejewska had tried such parts as Amelia in Mazepa and Barbara Radziwiłłówna on tour, her performances had been marred by the admixture of high pathos that the Kraków School expressly discouraged. In Kraków, Modrzejewska managed these roles with greater moderation and “true” emotion, at least in their romantic moments, although her reviews indicated that she still struggled to portray such complicated characters in their entirety, to convey thoughts and emotions that shot beyond the bounds of a “female sensitivity” she reliably portrayed.

Modrzejewska as Aniela in Aleksander Fredro’s Maidens’ Vows, 21 November 1865. Photo by Jan Mieczkowski. Courtesy of the Kraków City History Museum

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This episodic and incomplete grasp of her character’s psychology also occurred in the first Shakespearean performances Modrzejewska attempted— Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and even Ophelia and Juliet, two roles she eventually would make her signature masterpieces. Yet with increasing experience Modrzejewska sometimes succeeded as a dramatic heroine, as in her 12 January 1867 incarnation of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, when she truly rendered the gamut of the queen’s emotions “from shame, indignity, and humility to anger and an explosion of the strongest passion.” One of her reviewers recognized her “complete” achievement that night: “The duration of this role and its emotional struggles did not tire the actress, and whenever her role departed from its normal track, she would soar like an eagle.”168 On the Kraków stage, Modrzejewska was learning to master the sorts of roles that would enhance her performance on the social stage of the city. In the secÂ�ond half of the nineteenth century, French melodramas and comedies exerted a powerful influence throughÂ�out Europe, and these plays usually featured the locus and characters of aristocratic society. The best French actors were said to reproduce their native aristocrats’ real gestures, behavior, and conversations in the salon—a feat captured in the Polish term salonowość— and Polish actors were admonished to emulate either their French counterparts or local aristocrats.169 As Kosiński remarks: “the idealized salon was a role model for the stage. . . . Incarnating that model, the theater not only affirmed, but also popularized its worth, and served in turn as a role model for those who would never set foot in a salon.”170 Achieving salonowość was therefore most desirable for the Polish and particularly the Kraków actor. Koźmian looked to the Kraków aristocracy to model and encourage the right behavior for his actors assaying salon roles.171 He castigated his class peers for not filling the loggias and stalls that French and Austrian aristocrats occupied in their theaters, and thus not serving as examples for the performers : I often hear this unfortunately apt complaint about our actors and actresses— “But no one behaves that way in a salon!” You are right, dear madame! But aren’t you partly at fault? If you were a regular patron of the theater, your smile, your satisfaction, your applause or your turning aside to whisper a criticism to your neighbor would be ample instruction, for your presence would create that magnetic human bond between actress and lady, and help a Polish actress, who is not at all a great


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lady, to become one on stage, just as a French actress does, although she is even less a lady offstage.172

Modrzejewska early evinced an aptitude for incarnating great ladies in the showcase salon roles of contemporary French dramas.173 Playing the part of Genowefa in Victorien Sardou’s Our Good Countryfolk, Modrzejewska was said to rival the French actress Delaporte, whose performance of this role in Paris had elicited Foucher’s famous aphorism: “Si le mot de perfection n’exisÂ� tait pas, il faudrait l’inventer pour elle.”174 During Modrzejewska’s years in the Kraków Theatre, the aristocrats had not yet drifted away from their subscription seats, and both the stage and the stalls afforded Modrzejewska an intensive, effective “finishing school.” While Modrzejewska was winning acclaim as a lady onstage, she also sought to remain that lady when she left the theater. Ever since she had debuted as Madame Modrzejewska, she had assumed the somewhat less vulnerable pubÂ�lic persona of a professional actress wed to her agent-Â�manager. Having abandoned this liaison and its failed script, she cultivated a new role determined in large part by her work-Â�driven life. Kazimierz Chłędowski, one of her disappointed suitors who settled for friendship, portrayed her as a cloistered miss, an actress who seemed positively nunlike in pursuing her vocation. A kind of revirginalized Modrzejewska lived with her mother and brothers on Floriańska Street. A visitor first entered the large room of her mother, a very nice older lady, and was announced by their shrilly barking little dog. The artist lived in a second, narrow room with a window facing onto the courtyard. A couch covered in oilcloth, a bed with a white spread, several chairs, a little desk picked up from the Jewish furniture shops on Szpitalna Street, and an even smaller dressing table with an attached mirror—these were the sole furnishings of her modest apartment. On the table lay several play scripts and a large book in French containing the biographies of the greatest actresses.175

Modrzejewska projected an image of admirably chaste ambition, retreatÂ� ing behind mother and dog to the equivalent of a convent cell with its few scattered objects of devotion. Chłędowski wrote in awe of her love of art and incessant self-Â�improvement: “The young artist worked hard on herself, beginning to study French, reading a great deal, and, despite her modest means, dressing herself in excellent taste.”176 Her beloved son, Dolcio, evidence of her immoral past, had been absorbed into the capacious Benda family. When Zimajer kidnapped the five-Â�year-Â�old in May 1866, Modrzejewska’s suddenly

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cancelled performance was the only pubÂ�lic sign of her distress. Behind the scenes, a frantic mother strived to ransom him from his father until Zimajer relented, for the right price, in 1869. Ironically, her son’s long absence reinforced the impression of her chaste dedication.177 In Kraków, surrounded by family and with stable employment, Modrzejewska first operated as a professional woman without an intervening manager. As her talent and stardom became more apparent, she found herself in the position of broker and benefactor. Her co-Â�star Rapacki fondly recalled that Modrzejewska “enchanted people with her intelligence as well as her charm. Throngs of society’s elite surrounded her. A host of counts and non-Â� counts took up the pen.”178 Modrzejewska’s letters reflected how she both inspired and commissioned new dramas. Jan Aleksander Fredro, the son of Poland’s greatest living playwright, dedicated a piece to her in NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1867.179 In her never-Â�ending quest for good roles, Modrzejewska apparently encouraged Władysław Umiastowski to “refine” Dumas fils’ Lady of the Camellias for Polish production, for a play about a courtesan was still deemed too provocative for Polish audiences.180 The most influential of Modrzejewska’s “counts and non-Â�counts,” however, was Count Aleksander Przeździecki. A historian, writer, collector, and man of considerable cultural influence, Przeździecki was a frequent, well-Â�known visitor to Kraków.181 As the Count explained in a 16 February 1867 letter to the actress, he dedicated to her his Polish adaptation of the play After the Ball (Le lendemain d’un bal) “in commemoration of the pleasant moments spent in Kraków” in fall 1866.182 When Modrzejewska thanked him, wondering if she “deserves so much of [his] kindness,” she may have been acknowledging his social prowess or testing the purity of his motives.183 By the following year, Przeździecki had become her mighty champion, helping her negotiate her guest performances in the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres.184 Modrzejewska was drawn, to a limited extent, into Kraków society, where she was in the curious position of being a professional actress in a highly theatricalized real world. The tone-Â�setting Kraków aristocrats were ever on pubÂ� lic display in their sumptuous amusements—their great balls, sleigh ride parties, masques, and, of course, amateur theatricals. The Potocki family balls, held in Pod Baranami, their in-Â�town palace, provided seasonal spectator sport and were emulated on a lesser scale by middle-Â�class and professional associations. As Estreicherówna recalls, at Pod Baranami “the palace halls were covered in carpets, mirrors and flowers bedecked the stairs, a doorman with a


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hÂ� alberd stood at the gate, and a police guard on the street patrolled the crowds swarming to catch a glimpse of arriving guests.”185 The aristocrats’ amateur theatricals, often performed in French, which many of the players knew better than Polish, were reviewed in the Kraków press.186 When Helena Sanguszko, the princess rumored to be Modrzejewska’s half-Â�sister, appeared in an amateur tableau vivant, she impressed the reviewer in Time with her great beauty, and her tableau received the equivalent of three curtain calls.187 Professional actors participated in these amateur extravaganzas, but mainly as instructors and advisers. We know that Modrzejewska’s sister-Â�in-Â�law, Â�Weronika Bendowa, gave dancing lessons for ball-Â�goers in her home and, according to Chłędowski, Modrzejewska would then emerge from her metaphorical cell to even out the male-Â�female dancing pairs. In so doing, the actress risked some censure; Chłędowski noted that male dance students outnumbered the females because “Kraków families didn’t want to send their daughters to the home of an actress.”188 Yet Koźmian pointed out that over the course of Â�Feliks Benda’s career “no amateur theater in [Kraków] high society managed without [him], for he usually organized and directed [these performances].”189 Feliks became a favorite of the Potockis and other first families.190 The Kraków aristocrats’ amateur pastimes were therefore deftly dramatic, produced with specialist input, and pursued with the awareness that the general pubÂ�lic was watching, envying, imitating, and reporting on them. The aristocrats were, in effect, the most admired performers in the city, but their talent stemmed from “inborn superiority” rather than acquired professional skill. Any successful impersonation of their pubÂ�lic behavior therefore had to be natural and realistic within the desired aesthetic parameters of the day, unmarred by vulgarity, exaggeration, or preciousness. Modrzejewska strived to play refined, charismatic ladies without discernible dramatic effect offstage as well as on. She was an actress facing the ultimate challenge, projecting herself as a woman whose virtuosity was her nature, not the hard work of a déclassé professional. Modrzejewska easily succeeded in the theater, where she was judged as a fictitious character. Offstage, she encountered greater difficulty because she could not wholly erase her real-Â�life profession, class, and past in the minds of her beholders. Kietlińska’s diary records mixed reviews of Modrzejewska in society. The Kraków native declared herself to be “like most women . . . a most avid fan of this brilliant and entrancing artist,” but she knew only the onstage Modrzejewska. She first met her “ideal” in person at a ball. “I’ll never forget how I

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felt when she gave me her hand and her beautiful kindly eyes gazed at me,” the elderly diarist remembers. “I remained under the spell of her indescribable charm the rest of my life.”191 But Kietlińska had come under the real Modrzejewska’s spell because she had to replace a huffy Miss Zieleniewska who refused “to dance with an actress in the same circle.” Modrzejewska clearly could not bewitch those who made no exception to the class rules. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s memoirs strategically depict her winning the highest stamp of approval from Kraków’s most distinguished family, the Potockis. The actress recalls that she behaved with intuitive correctness when she chanced on the married Count Adam Potocki in the park, “a very handsome, tall, and distinguished-Â�looking man” whom she neither recognized nor permitted any familiarity.192 Her reserve was appreciated by the count’s wife and mother. In consequence, Modrzejewska was invited to pay a visit to his mother, Countess Arturowa Potocka, Kraków’s most socially committed philanthropist and a key supporter of the theater. During this audience, Modrzejewska studied the natives in the drawing room: “those aristocratic ladies were utterly simple, without a grain of snobbishness in their manner. Their grace was like the grace of children, unconscious of their beautiful movements which, however, were marked with reserve acquired through early training.”193 When Potocka spoke with Modrzejewska in private, however, she declared that the actress needed no template to play these ladies right. The comments the actress recollects authorize her exceptional ability to pass for an aristocrat: [Potocka] added, laughing, “You are as clever as a snake. You played the other evening the countess in ‘The White Camelia’ as if you were born among us. Where did you meet countesses?” I answered that she was the only great lady I had ever laid eyes on. “You see,” said she, “that was intuition. Other actresses, when they represent women of nobility, or princesses and queens, walk with a straight, rigid spine, as if they had swallowed a stick. They sometimes in modÂ�ern comedies resort to a lorgnette, looking snobbishly on people and examining them from head to foot, with a silly, superficial smile. Thank Heaven, you have none of that insipid nonsense. You are simple, and that is right.”

By summer 1866, Modrzejewska was contemplating a bolder class advance by choosing the right husband. Her marriage to Karol Chłapowski, a Poznań aristocrat and a veteran of the 1863 uprising, would gain her admission to a number of high society circles in WarÂ�saw. Their courtship during her Kraków years was more complex than the usual tales of the actressocracy, in which beautiful women of the stage married handsome noblemen for love, money,


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and release from their profession. In Chłapowski, Modrzejewska discovered an aristocrat who not only appreciated her ability to act as if she “were born among us,” but also admired her as a great artist in a most absorbing profession. Even as she was playing for approval and acceptance, Modrzejewska happily found Chłapowski to be an aristocrat whom she could marry on her own terms. From the start of their relationship, Chłapowski was integrated into Modrzejewska’s theatrical family, as Zimajer and other Benda partners had been, although Chłapowski’s involvement entailed social risk and valor. A member of a prominent aristocratic family in Poznań, in the Prussian partition of Poland, Chłapowski was the son of a baron and the grandnephew of General Dezydery Chłapowski, who had served the Polish cause under Napoleon and had fought in the NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1830 uprising against the Russians. Raised in France and Belgium and enrolled for a time in the University of Louvain, Karol Chłapowski was one of those Polish aristocrats whose French surÂ�passed and accented his Polish.194 At first, he appeared to be more the comical character actor than the romantic lead, “a nearsighted man with the inevitable pince-Â�nez on a black cord, an absentminded fellow constantly losing things or putting them in the wrong place, a chatterbox and occasional politician.”195 Yet by the time Chłapowski laid eyes on Modrzejewska during the Kraków Theatre’s summer 1866 tour of Poznań and Krynica, he was piecing together a life blown apart by his ordeals in battle and prison. The dilettantish, directionless Chłapowski was a casualty of the 1863 uprising. He had abandoned a world of privilege to fight alongside the rebels, and when he was wounded and sent home, the Prussian authorities had clapped him into Berlin’s Moabit Prison for twenty months. By summer 1866, Chłapowski had returned to Poznań, where he “was dabbling in theatre and journalism” and going to plays with his equally theater-Â� addicted cousin, Tadeusz.196 While charming comedies and pretty actresses offered welcome diversion to other young war-Â�weary veterans, the twenty-Â� five-Â�year-Â�old Chłapowski was developing into an astute man of the theater and fraternized with actors in good part to talk shop. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska remembers first seeing him from the stage, breaking her own concentration during a performance to study “his mobile face, a slightly sarcastic smile, and the absorbed interest with which he caught the slightest shadings in the actor’s words and actions.” When she read his “severe dissection” of her wandering attention in the next morning’s paper, she “liked him for his sincerity all the more for

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[she] knew he was right.”197 She introduces readers to her suitor Chłapowski not as a stage door Johnny, but as a fellow professional who knows his business. Here the star pointedly cedes the limelight to her critic. Over the next few months, Chłapowski pursued Modrzejewska openly and threw himself into her professional circle and plans. After her company’s stint in Poznań, he followed them to Krynica, where he “assimilated himself at once with our improvised family and took part in our meetings and excursions.” According to an odd gossip-Â�column-Â�cum-Â�theater-Â�review in Time, Chłapowski’s almost simultaneous arrival with the Kraków company (he is referred to as “a certain gentleman from Poznań”) piqued the locals’ curiosity: “This young man strolls about as cool as you please and surely does not know that he has become the mystery of Krynica—bah! today’s big man about town.”198 The aristocrat and the actress seemed bound for each other. While Modrzejewska was eagerly training to act naturally as a lady, Chłapowski was presuming to pass as boon companion of the troupe. Already in Poznań, Chłapowski began investing in Modrzejewska’s future career elsewhere, reading to her the poetry of de Musset, Chateaubriand, and Lamartine and taking “a great deal of pains [sic] to correct [her] bad French.”199 To some extent, he was reprising Zimajer’s role with his French lessons, although Modrzejewska offered him reciprocal instruction in Polish language and literature. A year younger than his beloved, Chłapowski approached her as peer rather than protégée. By fall 1866, when Modrzejewska was granted a six-Â�week vacation, Chłapowski joined her and her brother Feliks on a trip to Paris, where he orchestrated their instructive visits to the Théâtre Français, the Gymnase, the Odeon, the Théâtre du Vaudeville, and the Palais Royal. Whatever his romantic designs on the beautiful actress, this young aristocrat never questioned the primacy of her career. It is not altogether clear what role Chłapowski played in that career after their Parisian trip and before their wedding—whether he advised her, for example, to agree to the guest appearances she made in Lwów in May 1867 or what opinions he shared about her role choices and interpretations. The Kraków Theatre company toured Poznań again in the summers of 1867 and 1868 and Modrzejewska thereafter vacationed with Chłapowski in either KryÂ� nica or Zakopane, a hamlet in the Tatra mountains which would soon rival Krynica as a tourist destination. Chłapowski cropped up in her correspondence in June 1868, when he played secretary for an ailing Modrzejewska as she continued to negotiate her WarÂ�saw debut with Przeździecki.200 Three


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months later, on 12 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1868, the actress and her suitor-Â�secretary were married in St. Anne’s Church in Kraków, on the verge of Modrzejewska’s next move upward. Modrzejewska’s acceptance by the Chłapowski family would require careful cultivation and never be complete, since Karol’s eldest brother Maciej did not recognize their union.201 Nonetheless, their classic mésalliance worked to their immense mutual satisfaction. The young veteran Chłapowski fell in love with a woman whose profession represented another great passion in his life. Although he would pursue other, often costly, projects during their marriage, Modrzejewska’s artistic genius steadied him with a much-Â�needed direction and purpose. Modrzejewska discovered in Chłapowski the right man for the rest of her life and work. Unlike the unmarried Hoffman and the retired Maria Łagowska, Modrzejewska had become involved with an aristocrat who made her his wife and revolved around her career. Her escape from Zimajer and her wildly successful years in Kraków clarified for her what she desired and would tolerate in a partner. She knew well the limits of an irregular liaison, however it might be represented to the pubÂ�lic. Although she worked tirelessly to play the great lady onstage and in society, her primary passion, like Chłapowski’s, was for the theater, and she had no wish to marry away from it. Nor did she want or need another husband-Â�manager, at least for the foreseeable future. Chłapowski offered Modrzejewska everything but a fortune—Â�legitimate marriage, ebullient companionship, professional expertise, and an aristocratic partnership into which she and her fellow actors were welcomed as peers. Shortly after their wedding, Modrzejewska and Chłapowski departed for WarÂ�saw, where her spectacular debut spelled the end of the Kraków stage of her career. This intensive period had been extremely important in polishing and furthering her talent, if not forming her basic approach. Her three years with the revitalized Kraków Theatre of Skorupka and Koźmian had honed her diction, mimicry, gestures, and part preparation and had expanded her range of roles. Modrzejewska benefited from the theater’s better management, its greater local prestige and patronage, Koźmian’s ambitious choice of repertoire, the directors’ and actors’ commitment to more thoughtful role analysis and extensive rehearsing, and performing with other fine actors in her Â�company. Yet the Kraków-Â�born Modrzejewska who so quickly attained stardom in the new Kraków Theatre was the first player to abandon it for WarÂ�saw’s larger

Modrzejewska and her husband, Karol Chłapowski, in 1869. Courtesy of the Kraków City History Museum


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opportunities. Despite her enormous workload and grinding schedule, she never lost sight of her individual agenda and cultivated her supporters and mentors to help her realize it. In retrospect, she would identify Jan Jasiński and her brother Feliks as her chief Kraków influences instead of paying the expected homage to Koźmian. She implied that her intensive, innovative training was mainly her own idea. After three years of hard labor, Modrzejewska sought a professional sinecure that would give her greater control over her time and career, and a high society that she could enter as an established artist and a respectable lady. By autumn 1868, the young Helena who had prostrated herself on the floor of the Dominican Church emerged from the Church of St. Anne as the wife of an aristocrat and a local star deemed worthy of WarÂ�saw’s consideration. Up to this point, Helena’s extraordinary self-Â� transformation roughly paralleled that of her hometown. But Modrzejewska needed the big-Â�city stage of WarÂ�saw to unfurl her national greatness.

3

(

WarÂ�saw’s State of the Stars

Helena Modrzejewska’s conquest of WarÂ�saw by theatrical debut in 1868 was a major event in Polish culture, the commencement of what theater historians demarcate as the “epoch of the stars.”1 In her memoirs, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska reconstructs her debut as its own drama, primed by antagonism and intrigue, tightly focused on a single performance, and concluding, of course, with her unadulterated triumph. But her conquest of WarÂ�saw sooner resembled a poÂ�litiÂ�cal campaign. Modrzejewska strategized this next move with an eye to consummate, rather than contingent, theatrical glory. Guided by a close adviser, she plotted her campaign with ambition, agility, and media savvy, and delivered masterly performances over the course of several months under intense pubÂ� lic scrutiny. She stepped literally into the national spotlight. During the long period of partitioned Poland (1795–1918) the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres constituted an obsessively watched showcase of the nation. Conquering the WarÂ� saw stage won Modrzejewska indelible stardom in Polish history as well as the heady, lucrative worship of theater-Â�crazy Varsovians. In Memories and Impressions, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska cannily presents WarÂ�saw’s complex of theaters as a kind of fortress to be taken, inserting a photo of their imposing edifice and detailing their square footage (“equal to a large square block in New York”), their enormous staff of “seven to eight hundred people,” and their position as the city’s main venue for the performing arts, including “an opera company, a comic opera, a ballet, a drama and a comedy company.”2 This fortress, she implies, was impregnable, organized bureaucratically under

R ecto 65

The Great Theatre in Warsaw. From Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska, 1910

czarist administration and operated according to “the rule of seniority”: “Its artistic force was recruited mostly from its dramatic schools, and if any outsider was admitted to the ranks, it was usually to the lowest ones.”3 Its company of consummate insiders stood ready to repel any would-Â�be invaders from the provinces. If the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres seemed a fortress from Modrzejewska’s professional standpoint, they also represented an institution of immense and complicated poÂ�litiÂ�cal symbolism, alternately defended or shunned, and yet always maintained by the powers that were. In contrast to the major theaters in Kraków and Lwów, the WarÂ�saw theaters had been founded as a state enterprise during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski (1764–1795), the last Polish monarch, whose rule disintegrated in the partitions. 4 The state institution he sponsored survived even when the state fell, and Poland’s loss of sovereignty only supercharged its poÂ�litiÂ�cal valence, the more so because this theater of Poland’s former capital was located in the Russian partition. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the theater served as a symbolic

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site of national opposition, bolstering the national cause with patriotic repertoire in a free Duchy of WarÂ�saw under Napoleon’s protection (1807–1815) and throughÂ�out the NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1830 uprising. 5 In the grim years leading up to the 1863 revolt, nationalists used the great theater complex to stage their protests and vent their outrage against the occupiers. When the Russian czar and the Prussian regent were to meet in WarÂ�saw in OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1860, pranksters sabotaged their night on the town, doctoring theater bills to announce the upcoming play “Two Villains” and setting off a stink bomb of sulfuric acid and asafetida in the czar’s theater box. Although the management frantically aired the building and replaced the damaged furniture and curtains, the attendees endured the performance with hankies pressed to nose. 6 As deadly antagonisms flared between Russians and Poles, the theater became the backdrop for more violent events. In March 1861, a rock-Â�throwing mob demonstrated under the apartment windows of General AbramoÂ�wicz, the detested president of the theaters, and an assassination attempt was made on Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich Romanov, the czar’s brother and governor-Â�general of the Kingdom of Poland, as he was exiting the theater in July 1862. The Russian authorities, in turn, closed the complex of the Great Theatre and Variety Theatre for long periods in 1861 and 1862 and billeted their troops in the building’s grand ballrooms.7 During this bout of Polish unrest, the Russians chose to occupy the fortress at the outset, preventing its co-Â� option as national symbol and battle site. The WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres thus figured as a deeply politicized symbol for patriotic Poles during the period of national mourning in the wake of the civilians killed in late February 1861 and the uprising itself. Once the Russian authorities reopened the theaters to signal WarÂ�saw’s “normalization,” Polish Varsovians boycotted all performances and humiliated any compatriots weak enough to cross the ticket line. 8 Such stars of the WarÂ�saw stage as Jan Królikowski and Â�A lojzy Żółkowski, Modrzejewska’s future colleagues, were forced to play to audiences composed “almost exclusively of Russian officers and bureaucrats and those spheres close to them.”9 That the WarÂ�saw theaters could be periodically boycotted, but always cherished by Poles, underscored the riveting conditions of their existence. As the pseudonymous Baroness XYZ observed in “her” excellent editorials on WarÂ� saw life and society, published as Letters to a Friend in the 1880s, Varsovians were obsessed with their theater because it had survived the partitions as a national institution and yet was ever at the mercy of the occupying empire.10 The

Wa r Â�saw ’s Stat e of t h e Sta r s

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theater’s existence seemed that much more precarious after 1863, when Polish as a spoken pubÂ�l ic language was allowed only onstage and in church and forbidden in WarÂ�saw’s schools, courts, and bureaucracy, including the theater’s own.11 The theater persisted as the one live forum where, within certain limits, Polish history, literature, character types, costume, and music could be on pubÂ�lic display. Nonetheless, Varsovians were always on the alert for signs of Russian sabotage. They duly noted that the czarist authorities had deliberately named the newly completed complex “Great” rather than “National” in 1833 and had categorized both the Great Theatre and Variety Theatre as “imperial” in 1852. As a state-Â�controlled and supported enterprise, these theaters resembled their Russian imperial counterparts in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where actors were classified as civil servants and the theaters operated as a state bureaucracy.12 The joined WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres fell under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The president appointed to oversee their vast bureaucracy consulted weekly with the city’s governor-Â�general about contracts, salaries, staff, and repertoire.13 Yet the same imperial administration which closely monitored its operation and censored and taxed its productions also ensured the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres’ material stability. The Russians in WarÂ�saw valued this institution not only as a pacifying tool, but also as their local art and entertainment.14 The grand edifice designed by Antonio Corazzi and boasting 1,100 seats and a large modÂ�ern stage was completed under Russian occupation in 1833; a fine west wing added in 1836 housed the smaller 322-Â�seat Variety Theatre.15 The WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres received an annual subsidy from the czarist administration, albeit a much smaller sum than was allotted the opera and ballet favored by the Russians. The actors, all employees of the empire, were guaranteed decent salaries, feus (set payments per performance), and, from 1838, the extraordinary benefit of a pension.16 No other theater in Poland could provide its players such excellent terms and security of employment. Here was a captured fortress which paradoxically offered its residents material comfort as well as national glory. By the time of Modrzejewska’s 1868 debut, the czarist theatrical administration seemed on the brink of important new improvements. After the sudden death of theater president General Józef Hauke in April 1868, the new appointee was, according to Baroness XYZ, the exceptional “honest Russian” Sergei Mukhanov (1833–1897), a liberal monarchist who knew and loved art, eschewed blatantly poÂ�l itiÂ�cal appointments, and respected his new Polish em-

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ployees.17 The first Russian to occupy this important post, Mukhanov allayed fears about any Russifying agenda through his early show of sensitivity and dedication.18 He pleasantly surprised Varsovians as a benevolent, conscientious manager, a provider on a grand scale. To assure the artists under his control of his good intent, Mukhanov took Polish-Â�language lessons, hired Polish staff, and hosted holiday receptions for his employees at which he addressed the assembled in Polish and observed their Catholic customs.19 Mukhanov invested boldly in the theater’s material and human resources. His administration refurbished the complex in Theatre Square, built the Summer Theatre in the Saxon Gardens, and renovated the Theatre on the Isle in Łazienki Park, restoring a nationally cherished structure erected during PoÂ� niaÂ�towski’s reign.20 The “honest Russian” was best known, however, for his Midas touch with talent, particularly during the first half of his tenure as theater president. He successfully concluded the negotiations begun unÂ�der Hauke for Modrzejewska’s debut, oversaw her subsequent generous conÂ�tracts, and cultivated her as a star talent and a valuable colleague. He recruited other important stars as well—Modrzejewska’s ambitious co-Â�star Rapacki (a secÂ� ond defector from Kraków) in 1869, the accomplished naïf Romana PoÂ�pieÂ� łówna (nicknamed Popiełka) in 1870, and the male dramatic and romantic lead BołeÂ�sław Leszczynski in 1873.21 To the best of his ability and the extent of his resources, Mukhanov pampered his cluster of WarÂ�saw stars with excellent salaries and solicitous treatment. Mukhanov’s ambitions for and achievements in the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres represented a joint venture, the good works of an able administrator in consultation with his remarkable artist wife. Maria Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova (1822–1874), eleven years Mukhanov’s senior and a salon lioness before their marriage in 1863, was a virtuoso amateur pianist, a passionate patron of the arts, and a highly skilled, well-Â�connected strategist. The daughter of Â�Friedrich Karol Nesselrode, a German general in czarist service mismatched with Tekla Nałęcz-Â�Gorska, a beautiful Polish socialite, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova was raised in the St. Petersburg–based family of her uncle Karol Robert Nesselrode, the czar’s minister of foreign affairs, and received “a Russian education with the cosmopolitan coloring typical of aristocratic St. Petersburg families.” 22 Maria escaped from an unhappy first marriage to the rich Jan Kalergis and lived thereafter as an independent and wealthy woman, traveling throughÂ�out Europe and settling longest in Paris. Feted as the “White Mermaid,” she was


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admired for her blonde beauty, witty intelligence, musical talent, and salon savoir faire. Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova played a key behind-Â�the-Â�scenes role in the WarÂ�saw theaters’ new development, beginning with her husband’s initial advancement. Although she was highly ambivalent about residing in Poland, for her a cultural backwater whose politics she once had championed but later despised, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova engineered her husband’s appointment through her state connections. As she confessed in a letter to her daughter Maria, she was relieved to see “Serge in active service . . . in a position outside of politics which allows him to do good works and to demonstrate his orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ� tional talent.”23 Once her husband was in place, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova helped him secure new talent, beginning with the hire of a prerequisite prima donna. Like Count Przeździecki, she quickly discerned the WarÂ�saw company’s need for a charismatic leading lady. “We have excellent actors,” she wrote Maria in May 1868, “but the women are very poor.”24 She personally seconded her husband in inviting Modrzejewska to WarÂ�saw, an unusually gracious gesture from an aristocrat which impressed the socially striving actress.25 When Kalergis-Â� Mukhanova’s convalescence at various spas prevented her from attending Â�Modrzejewska’s debut performances in fall 1868, she requested her return to give several more performances in spring 1869, and sweetened that command with a dinner invitation to the actress and her husband.26 The Mukhanovs’ exceptional support of Modrzejewska conveyed their great desire for her talent and their growing regard for her person. It also reflected the WarÂ�saw theaters’ abiding reverence for the player over the director or the playwright. After the passing of Wojciech Bogusławski (1757–1829), the first great Polish impresario who combined the talents of actor, director, and manaÂ� ger, the theaters’ reputation mainly rested on their performing stars, such players as dramatic leading lady Leontyna Halpertowa (1803–1895), dramatic leading man Jan Królikowski (1820–1895), and comic lead Alojzy Żółkowski (1814–1889).27 For decades before the heralded epoch of the stars, a kind of star system already functioned in WarÂ�saw, with repertoire tailored to the best and most popular actors’ specialties and ambitions. 28 The WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres’ artistic director, appointed by the president, did not dictate repertoire, as Koźmian and Skorupka had done in Kraków. Instead, he negotiated repertoire with his entrenched, thin-Â�skinned artists, showcased his best talent, assembled supporting casts, indulged in a backstage intrigue or two, and

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ran general interference. Nineteenth-Â�century Polish players worked and lived in the state of the stars. When Modrzejewska sought a WarÂ�saw engagement and found herself courted by a sophisticated star-Â�hungry administration, she settled in this state with its attendant privileges of national glory, keen pubÂ�l ic support, a stable and lucrative position, and a more self-Â�directed career. Her conquest of the fortress won her the status of resident royalty. T h e Batt l e for Wa r Â�saw Modrzejewska nevertheless hesitated before committing to a WarÂ�saw debut. She understood very well the negative consequences of this player-Â�centered theater, realizing that her future colleagues would be wedded to the status quo and ruthlessly defensive of their turf. To conquer and dominate meant that she would have to displace and demote. Few, if any, of the entrenched WarÂ�saw company would welcome her. More likely, these established actors would be dismissive, resentful, and obstructive toward any outside contender. Although Modrzejewska long toyed with the possibility of playing on the WarÂ�saw stage, it was Przeździecki who mounted and then helped sustain her campaign.29 The shrewd count set off waves of advance publicity to win the interest of the theater administration and the WarÂ�saw pubÂ�lic. Approaching the theaters’ top bureaucrat, he relied on Modrzejewska’s beauty and adeptness at posing to pitch her debut. The talented Kraków photographer Walery Rzewuski had assembled five photo albums in 1867–1868, each depicting a local star (Hoffmann, Modrzejewska, Benda, Bolesław Ładnowski, Rapacki) in his or her various roles. 30 When Przeździecki showed Modrzejewska’s album to General Hauke in February 1868, the theater president was instantly sold on her good looks, especially in Ophelia’s winsome disarray, and was eager to negotiate her guest performances. 31 Przeździecki alerted Modrzejewska to the power of the WarÂ�saw press in smoothing her acceptance. Her battle for WarÂ�saw required that she navigate the fierce crosscurrents of WarÂ�saw’s big-Â�city papers after her easy ride on the praise of Kraków’s Time.32 Even before the WarÂ�saw journalists turned their attention to her, Przeździecki prompted press interest by publishing in the esteemed French monthly L’Artiste an anonymous tribute which included a review of her performances, a sonnet in her honor composed by a mysterious “Lord Pilgrim,” and a heliograph of the beautiful actress in the flesh. 33 French


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coverage would prompt WarÂ�saw’s interest in the actress, but Przeździecki additionally saw to local advertisement. In a 24 February 1868 letter to Modrzejewska, he urged her to have a look at the last two issues of the WarÂ�saw Cou rier which spotlighted the Kraków Theatre and “its first-Â�rate star.”34 In due course, news of her Kraków prowess had spread to other papers. As her debut date neared, more photographs were deployed, this time in the press, to woo the pubÂ�lic to her performances. The same stunning Ophelia portrait that had won over Hauke appeared in Sheaves (Kłosy) in late SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1868, a visual ad reinforced by verbal praise of her “shapely form, charming beauty, and eyes alight with fire and emotion.”35 As Szczublewski observes, Modrzejewska’s “WarÂ�saw campaign” constituted a new pubÂ�lic relations phenomenon: “Never before had an artist prepared such a comprehensive battle for success. [Coverage in] the dailies and weeklies, a series of lithographs with her posed in her best roles . . . lots of photos displayed in shopwindows, an oil painting of her Ophelia exhibited in the Academy of Fine Art. The actress appeared on the field of battle long before the battle commenced.” 36 Behind the scenes, Modrzejewska was engaged in tough negotiations, which she handled with vacillating confidence and apprehension. Her first response to Preździecki’s WarÂ�saw proposal was to point out the difficulties in obtaining a leave from the Kraków Theatre and the uncertainty of performing good repertoire in WarÂ�saw. 37 When the count pressed her with sample repertoire lists and possible performance dates, she expressed her gratitude, but made clear her reservations: “As for the number of performances—I’d agree to six at the most because I don’t want to perform in old plays and the WarÂ�saw actors surely won’t want to learn new pieces for me. I’ve learned a bit from people who know the WarÂ�saw theater about the problems facing debuting artists.”38 By May 1868, Jan Chęciński, her old acquaintance from her touring days and the theaters’ newly appointed director of drama and comedy, had entered into these negotiations and assured her of his support and clout. Under MukÂ�hanov’s benevolent administration, he informed her, he would at last “be good for something” in determining “the fate of the drama.”39 Thereafter began an oddly triangulated tug-Â�of-Â�war over Modrzejewska’s remuneration and repertoire, with Przeździecki pushing for higher fees and ambitious plays, Chęciński deploring Przeździecki’s unrealistic demands and urging Modrzejewska to reason, and Modrzejewska leaning on the count and playing coy with the director. Her “unrealistic” adviser won her an impressive 150 rubles

Modrzejewska as Ophelia. From Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska, 1910


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per debut performance plus a benefit, a performance of her choice for which she received all proceeds. Chęciński had advised her to ask for no more than 100 rubles lest she antagonize his superiors. 40 While their negotiations over payment pointed up Modrzejewska’s greater influence with the management, their debate over repertoire ultimately flagged before the resistance of the company. As the three struggled to settle on a final list of plays in summer 1868, Chęciński warned Modrzejewska about Przeździecki’s utopian playlist in the light of WarÂ�saw’s rather mediocre repertoire and then lectured her about WarÂ�saw’s “superior” production standards, which required lengthier rehearsal periods than the fast-Â�paced production schedules of Kraków and Lwów permitted. Even as he protested her suspicions about her future colleagues, he advised her not to demand that they work “too hard” for her debut. 41 Modrzejewska complained to Przeździecki as late as 22 July 1868: “my contract with the director of the WarÂ�saw Theatres is not yet guaranteed, the actors are being difficult about my repertoire, and it’s likely that I will have to endure a great deal of unpleasantness.”42 Despite Przeździecki’s persistent brokering and the friendly advance coverage she received in certain WarÂ�saw papers, Modrzejewska’s fears were well-Â� founded. Even if the WarÂ�saw actors did not make their antagonism toward the newcomer public, it was aired by proxy in a two-Â�part editorial published in the August 1868 issues of the WarÂ�saw Gazette. This piece was written by the paper’s editor Józef Kenig, an astute theater critic who was also the husband of Salomea Palińska, one of the theater’s regnant leading ladies. 43 Without naming names, Kenig ridiculed the presumption of “provincial” actors who would attempt to succeed on the WarÂ�saw stage. He wondered if the guest performances of such aspirants would teach the same lesson to Varsovians as did the Spartans’ pubÂ�lic display of “drunken Helots,” repelling good citizens with unseemly examples. He recalled the cases of other WarÂ�saw theater wanna-bes who miscalculated their strength, and he condescended to Kraków theater critics by characterizing them as either blind men who worship the “one-Â�eyed” or provincials guilty of unfounded, if well-Â�intentioned, boosterism. Kenig’s nasty preemptive strike demonstrated just how treacherous the crosscurrents of the WarÂ�saw press could be. Kenig’s advance defamation and the WarÂ�saw actors’ covert sabotage only fired Modrzejewska’s resolve to compete and subsequently furnished her with useful plot elements in reconstructing her debut for posterity. The version that she elaborates in her memoirs simply pits the heroine and her supporters

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against her antagonists. In Memories and Impressions her back-Â�stabbing colleagues saddle her with the challenging Adrianna Lecouvreur as a first performance after glimpsing her talent in rehearsal. Their pretext is the “sudden illness” of a key performer for the play Modrzejewska had chosen to be her first debut piece. Trapped by intrigue, Modrzejewska emerges as a resilient protagonist, learning from Jasiński that she must underplay in future rehearsals and discovering that Palińska’s attempt to eclipse her (Kenig’s wife presented her own Adrianna two weeks before Modrzejewska’s debut) would only underscore her superior interpretation. The memoirist then gives her readers a blow-Â� by-Â�blow account of her first-Â�night performance on 4 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868, highlighting her backstage anxiety, the critical support of her one good fairy (the actor Jan Rychter), and the overwhelming applause of her “almost reverent” Polish audience. Her tale concludes with the prerequisite flourishes of curtain, ovations, and contract. 44 The larger story of Modrzejewska’s debut performances is less melodramatic, but, if anything, more impressive, as the actress triumphed again and again as conqueror rather than rebounding as underdog. Modrzejewska’s adÂ�vance press paid off handsomely with her patrons, if not her professional peers. The Great Theatre’s 1,100 seats were filled for Adrianna, and her first entrance greeted with prolonged applause. 45 As subsequent performances confirmed, Modrzejewska became a huge box office draw, a godsend to an institution close to bankruptcy when Mukhanov had assumed its helm. 46 Her debut constituted a mini-Â�season from early OcÂ�toÂ�ber to late NoÂ�vemÂ�ber, entailing eighteen performances, one benefit, one performance for charity, and poetic declamations in several pubÂ�l ic concerts. 47 Adrianna Lecouvreur was truly a winning premiere, but almost all of her performances reaffirmed her abilities and fanned her quite astonishing popularity. Modrzejewska’s debut repertoire of eleven plays encompassed more or less contemporary French dramas and comedies (plays by Scribe and LeÂ� gouvé, Sardou, Dumas père, and Dumas fils), Schiller’s Mary Stuart, and two tried-Â�and-Â�true Polish comedies, Józef Korzeniowski’s Miss-Â�Madame (Panna-Â� mężatka) and Fredro’s Maidens’ Vows (Śluby panieńskie). 48 The preponderance of French plays reflected the dominant trend in both WarÂ�saw and Kraków theaters. 49 In lieu of playing Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet for her benefit, possibilities that had tempted her and Przeździecki, Modrzejewska settled for Sardou’s Our Nearest and Dearest. She would be able to lobby effectively for


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a Shakespeare production only after she had become a standing member of the cast. 50 According to her reviews, Modrzejewska stunned WarÂ�saw audiences in her first Adrianna as a beauty, an artist, and a woman. It was no accident that the Illustrated Weekly printed a full-Â�page, full-Â�length portrait of her in this role a few months after her premiere. Her face and figure could launch a thousand issues. 51 The WarÂ�saw Courier, her “loyal” newspaper, echoed the praise of her first review in Kraków’s Time, itemizing “generous Nature’s endowments” of a ringing voice, noble figure, lovely face, and expressive eyes. 52 The Illustrated Weekly admired her likeness to a Greek statue in the first Adrianna, and offered this somewhat more detailed portrait to accompany its full-Â�length photograph of Modrzejewska-Â�Adrianna in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber: “She is of middling height, although one might consider her a tall woman, with regular and expressive features. Her eyes and smile are capable of all manner of shading and play a key role [in her performance]. And she possesses that great harmony of form that Greek art deemed most alluring in a woman.”53 As the reviewer in the WarÂ�saw Courier added, this beautiful actress was also a meticulous artist who had invested “deep thought” into her Adrianna and knew how to manipulate her gifts to best effect. Other reviews singled out the intelligence and deftness of Modrzejewska’s characterization. The Pol ish Gazette marveled at the range of emotions her Adrianna convincingly incarnated—Â�“the deep feeling, naïve simplicity, tenderness, and feeling of blissful happiness.”54 The Illustrated Weekly declared that every visual and gestural detail of her characterization seemed perfectly natural and unaffected, from her facial expression to “the folds of her dress.”55 Even her naysayer Kenig, who did not concede her triumph in print until late OcÂ�toÂ�ber, admired her relentless perfectionism and “ability to make use of her assets.”56 To be sure, Kenig’s belated review also marked the actress’s limitations in range and effect. He early sniffed out her difficulties in playing “strong” tragic parts and scenes. Modrzejewska, he generalized, “has more charm than strength, more skill than the ardor one can only summon if one has the prerequisite strength, more naïve earnestness than deep feeling in her emotional expression. . . . Her charm is sometimes a strived-Â�for effect, created with poses and movements which are contrived, but nonetheless well-Â�conceived and in harmony with her chosen character.”57 The charm, skill, and physical grace that Kenig damned with faint praise were lauded by other critics as the hall-

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marks of her characters’ convincing “womanliness.” As the reviewer in the Polish Gazette practically sighed after witnessing Modrzejewska’s tender moments in Adrianna, “it is likely that no man would not desire to be so loved and no woman would suppose she could love more.”58 A review in Sheaves by the talented critic F. H. Lewestam resisted naming a winner in the implied contest between Palińska’s and Modrzejewska’s dueling Adriannas, but posed a fascinating comparison between Modrzejewska’s interpretation and those of two great predecessors, the Polish Leontyna Halpertowa and the Italian Â�Adelaida Ristori. Halpertowa played the actress Adrianna as an artist and Ristori projected her as a kind of female warrior, but Modrzejewska rendered her “a loving, artistic and heroic woman” (Lewestam’s emphasis), a conception which successfully motivated contradictions in the role which Halpertowa and Ristori had had to downplay. Furthermore, the “womanly vices” of cruelty and vengefulness that Modrzejewska’s Adrianna embodied never detracted from her appeal. Indeed, Lewestam commended Modrzejewska on her beautiful dying. RiÂ� stori and Palińska, who he claimed imitated the Italian on this point, enacted a violent, disfiguring, naturalistic death which only repelled the viewer. In contrast, Modrzejewska’s “ethereal figure faded away before our very eyes. If this constitutes the highest reality, for a real woman can doubt and love and forgive and suffer in no other way, then it is a reality of the loftiest poetry.” According to Lewestam, Modrzejewska’s lovely womanly Adrianna appropriately died a lovely woman’s death, thereby “exciting our pity and comÂ� passion.”59 After her first victory in Adrianna Lecouvreur, almost all of ModrzejewÂ�ska’s successful debut performances were remarked for their projection of a charming womanliness, although this quality was said to vary in affect and purity. The critics were predictably thrilled by her Aniela in Fredro’s Maidens’ Vows, a performance Kenig pronounced one of her best creations and Lewestam described as a riveting demonstration of quietly burgeoning love and sweet attentiveness, for Modrzejewska’s Aniela knew how to listen onstage. 60 The reviewer in the Polish Gazette praised her Aniela as “an idyll transformed into a maiden,” first noting what would become a repeating pattern in Modrzejewska’s WarÂ�saw career: that she somehow transformed the quiet good girl into the star of the show. 61 Other characterizations, such as her Zuzanna in Sardou’s A Sheet of Paper and her Cecylia in Korzeniowski’s Miss-Â�Madame, evinced a more polished,


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quick-Â�witted, enterprising “womanliness.” The Polish Gazette posited the interesting similarity of her Zuzanna, a mature independent heroine, to the breezy, smart, capable “AmeriÂ�can women our sketch artists depict.”62 More frequently, however, Modrzejewska’s heroines flirted with the improper, verging on or landing among the fallen in French imports focused on contemporary manners or social drama. As Kenig bemoaned in one of his editorialized plot explications, the very popular Dumas fils writes “in defense of woman” and represents sympathetically women’s sexual misadventures, yet “no one has so degraded women in drama.”63 Similarly “degrading” works such as DuÂ� mas père’s Miss de Belle Isle and Sardou’s Our Nearest and Dearest cast MoÂ� drzeÂ�jewÂ�ska as, respectively, a young woman about to be compromised by unÂ�scrupulous high-Â�society types and a young wife contemplating an extramarital affair. For the most part, Modrzejewska’s compromised heroines triumphed over their stigmatization. The Illustrated Weekly felt she incarnated the victimized Miss de Belle Isle with delicate shading and a beautiful truth unsullied by natuÂ�ralistic details, although Kenig found her to be monotonously plaintive. 64 Puzzling in print about her choice of this play for her benefit, Lewestam nonetheless concluded that Madame Modrzejewska played its almost unfaithful wife with “such charming coquetry” that no one could tell if she actually had succumbed to adulterous love. 65 In Dumas fils’ The Ideas of Madame d’Aubray, Modrzejewska braved the part of Janina, a formerly kept woman and unwed mother, who redeems herself through true love for an honorable man and the approval of his high-Â�minded mother, the title’s Madame D’Aubray. A review in the Polish Gazette argued that the actress rendered even this fallen woman coherent and appealing through her complex, inexorably uplifted emotional portrait and her projection of a mother’s love along with romantic love for the right suitor. 66 Modrzejewska’s “womanly” interpretation of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, the one tragic role in her debut roster, drew mixed reviews. Whereas Lewestam applauded what he judged to be her successful blending of “pure womanly charm” with “womanly dignity,” Kenig criticized her Mary for lacking “the passion, power, and exultation” that he felt Schiller’s portrait requires. Even Lewestam admitted that Modrzejewska’s voice did not bear up for the duration of the play. 67 Overall, the debuting Modrzejewska did not convince the WarÂ�saw critics of her abilities as a tragedienne. As the generally well-Â�disposed Wacław Szymanowski concluded in a DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868 issue of the Illustrated

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Weekly: “Madame Modrzejewska’s real area of expertise (we repeat that we are making this judgment based on our impressions thus far) is as first lover in high-Â�class salon comedies.”68 Such reservations barely mattered. In short order Modrzejewska was engaged as “first actress of drama and comedy” in the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres for the 1869–1870 season. Mukhanov wooed her with an annual salary of 2,070 rubles for eight months’ work, a guaranteed seven performances a month for which she would be paid 30 rubles apiece, and the opportunity to select or approve five new roles per season. 69 Her stupendously high salary eclipsed those of the theaters’ established female stars—Wiktoryna Bakałowiczowa, for example, earned 1,500 rubles for eleven months’ work and received 10 Â�rubles per performance—but fell far short of the 3,750 rubles earned by WarÂ�saw’s popular comic male star, Alojzy Żółkowski.70 As the above sample of her reviews suggests, Modrzejewska also won enormous critical acclaim, even from the man who had attacked her for her provincial presumption. By late OcÂ�toÂ�ber, Kenig had done a careful about-Â�face, acknowledging Modrzejewska’s hard work and specialized abilities and proposing, with apologies to Kraków, that “she remain with us.” His marriage to Palińska notwithstanding, Kenig was hardheaded about the victorious Modrzejewska’s box office worth to his city’s beloved theater: “It could be that Madame Modrzejewska will demand a very great deal more than is now paid our players of either sex, with the exception of Żółkowski and the prima ballerinas. But she has a perfect right to do so given her success to date.” 71 Among her fellow stars, especially her female rivals, Modrzejewska’s conquest rankled. Her competitors and ill-Â�wishers would never be able to outplay her, but they would take revenge by countering her support for other newcomers and joining obliquely in attacks on her character and her family. Touchy egos and self-Â�interested intrigue continued to wreak the usual havoc in the state of the stars. In DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868, however, Modrzejewska departed WarÂ�saw with a kind of truce in place. Before she left, she and Chłapowski paid an obligatory visit to Żółkowski, signaling a “pact of nonaggression” between rising and established stars and implying that they amicably shared first place in the theater.72 Perhaps most importantly, Modrzejewska had won over a huge percentage of WarÂ�saw’s theatergoing public, and this conquest founded an important power base for her future ambitious projects. In its 1 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868 issue, the WarÂ�saw Courier presented a fascinating snapshot of Modrzejewska’s tempo-


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rary parting with her WarÂ�saw fans, reporting on the wild applause and curtain calls interrupting every act of Adrianna and the farewell banquet where her eminent supporters, including her old campaign manager Przeździecki, swapped photographs and hoisted toasts.73 In Memories and Impressions MoÂ� djeÂ�ska narrates a more dramatized farewell scene as they boarded their train: “All our friends and a great many strangers came to the station. Students appeared in a large body. We were actually smothered with flowers which friends and the pubÂ�lic threw into our compartment. We departed amidst cheers, good wishes, waving of handkerchiefs and exclamations: ‘God be with you!’ and ‘Come back to us!’ and ‘Long live art!’ and many other cheers which escape my memory.” 74 Thus the new queen of the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres, the triumphant interloper from the provinces, took leave of her adoring subjects. M a da m e Ch ł a powsk a Departing WarÂ�saw, Modrzejewska was not bound for Kraków, but for WroÂ� cław and her husband’s family homes in the Prussian partition to the west. She had yet to win his family’s acceptance, although she and Chłapowski had been wed three months. Preparing for this more delicate debut, the actress improvised her own repentant woman script. Modrzejewska’s initial letters to Karol’s sister Anna, sent during her debut season in WarÂ�saw, were little masterpieces of confession and supplication, soliloquies worthy of the most earnest redeemed Magdalene. In the first, she humbly thanked Anna for permission to be in touch and pledged her conversion: “My life’s goal is to follow the path of a true Christian and an honest wife.” 75 When Â�Modrzejewska learned of Anna’s warm acceptance, she enacted a graceful melodramatic scene on paper: “I long to kneel and thank everyone who has decided not to dwell on what was, and to thank you for forgetting the past and extending to me your angelic hand.” 76 It is not clear if the invitation to the family estate was long in coming or if Modrzejewska did not press the point until after she had run her theatrical gauntlet. In any event, she arrived at Kopaszewo in mid-Â� DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868 in the flush of professional victory.77 Modrzejewska’s fullest depiction of this family debut appears in her memoirs and is stocked with scenes demonstrating family approval and highlighting its aristocratic majesty.78 Anna and her husband Kazimerz Chłapowski (he was her cousin) welcomed the WarÂ�saw arrivals cordially, “in an atmosphere of tenderness, peace and refinement not easily equalled.” The actress recalls

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that she received the most overt blessing on her career from the other female professional in the family, Karol’s aged maternal grandmother, Madame Morawska, who was a well-Â�k nown writer.79 Describing their visit to Â�K arol’s paternal uncle, the famous General Dezydery Chłapowski who had served under Napoleon, Modrzejewska not only recounts his military and civic exploits, but also recreates her dramatic vision of the embattled Polish nation as she ponders the old soldier and his brother-Â�in-Â�law Count GutaÂ�kowski praying in the family chapel. 80 For all intents and purposes, ModrzeÂ�jewska’s debut before the Chłapowskis was a success, although not as unqualified as her memoirs intimate. Not only did Karol’s eldest brother, Maciej, never recognize their marriage, but the family also gently interfered with her career for a brief time, suggesting that she avoid playing roles of dubious morality—a request she first tried to honor, but then pragmatically put aside. 81 Madame Chłapowska thus returned to Kraków launched as a WarÂ�saw star and accepted for the most part as a member of a landed aristocratic family. The Kraków pubÂ�lic gave her a conquering heroine’s welcome when she reprised Adrianna in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber. 82 In early 1869, she performed in several other ambitious productions, including King Lear and Goethe’s Faust, until Skorupka abruptly dismissed her after she took leave to give the command performances Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova had requested in WarÂ�saw. As Skorupka announced in the Poznań Daily (Dziennik Poznański), her absence in spring 1869 together with her WarÂ�saw contract for the following season forced him to this momentous step. 83 Never a docile employee of the Kraków Theatre, Modrzejewska took Skorupka’s dismissal in stride, as she informed Przeździecki: “My unmarried state (so I call it) doesn’t distress me at all. I’m reading, studying history, working, and preparing my WarÂ�saw roles.”84 Freed of the Kraków Theatre’s grinding schedule, Modrzejewska was also trying out the new part of aristocratic wife and hostess. These months in KraÂ� ków before her first WarÂ�saw season constituted one of the very few periods in her long marriage when she could play helpmate to her husband. In KraÂ�ków, Chłapowski had been named editor-Â�in-Â�chief of the new liberal newspaper the Nation (Kraj), Time’s first serious competitor. Designed as a forum for KraÂ� ków’s young Turks who opposed the city’s strong conservative faction, the Nation espoused a platform of Galician autonomy, the creation of a Galician constitution, and religious tolerance. Although the Nation was in publication a mere five years, it attracted a highly talented group of sponsors and writers and was reputed to be one of the best papers in Poland. 85


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Karol’s co-Â�workers, along with other local luminaries, gathered at the ChłaÂ� powskis’ KraÂ�ków apartment on Szewska Street. 86 The actress and her aristocratic husband entertained a cross section of KraÂ�ków’s movers and shakers, inÂ�cludÂ�ing radical politicians, poets, playwrights, the critic Ignacy MaÂ�cieÂ�jowÂ� ski (pseudonym “Sewer”), and such old acquaintances as Estreicher, ChłęÂ� dowÂ�ski, Skorupka (for a time), and Koźmian. 87 One might say that ModrzeÂ� jewÂ�ska’s 1869 salon comprised the crowning postscript to her KraÂ�ków period, one measure of which was the invitation that she and her husband received to the Potockis’ Pod Baranami. 88 In KraÂ�ków, she launched an offstage role that she would refine, with expert help, in WarÂ�saw, facilitating gatherings where she played high society hostess, mentor-Â�patron, and fellow artist-Â�intellectual. When she and Chłapowski made the grand move to WarÂ�saw in August 1869, Modrzejewska had to trim her social and domestic activities, although she would never again let work preempt her private life. Leaving the home where her family had shielded her, the affluent new star naturally included certain family members in her new domestic entourage. The married Madame Chłapowska now succeeded her mother as matriarch, serving as bountiful aunt to her siblings’ children. 89 Józef ’s daughter Stasia, the niece Helena first mothered when she herself was a child, relocated with them to WarÂ�saw in 1869; Modrzejewska would see Stasia married off in 1873.90 A few years later, she wrote Szymon that because she and Karol were “waiting in vain for an heir,” she was consoling herself by taking in her sister Józia’s seven-Â�year-Â�old daughter and namesake, a “little hippopotamus” with “a poor little brain” who nonetheless showed aptitude for music and drawing.91 Most importantly, Modrzejewska recovered Dolcio in 1869, paying off ZimaÂ� jer for sole custody of her beloved son and exclusive rights to her invented surname.92 With characteristic magnanimity, Chłapowski helped realize this reunion of mother and child. The couple together embraced the eight-Â�year-Â� old boy as family, however much his presence excited WarÂ�saw gossip. The happy, but madly busy Modrzejewska relied on her mother for her son’s day-Â� to-Â�day care, either in her own WarÂ�saw apartment or back in Józefa’s home in KraÂ�ków, where Dolcio could attend a Polish-Â�language school. Modrzejewska’s letters evidenced little worry about his progress or the traumatic afterÂ� effects of his abduction and ransom.93 She professed only pride and delight in the achievements of her multitalented son, who played chess and loved music and, according to his grandmother, “was as wise as a rabbi.”94 Modrzejewska boasted to her family of Dolcio’s good nature, mathematical ability, and pro-

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digious talent as a pianist. But she did fret a little that he had “so many virtues”: “I wish sometimes he’d be a little bad, so that I could correct him while he’s still a boy. I shudder to think that something might crop up in him when it’s too late.”95 To her regret, Modrzejewska did not have to juggle work and socializing with childbearing during her WarÂ�saw years. But her earnings also supported— to the couple’s mutual dismay—her aristocratic husband. The move to WarÂ� saw had displaced Chłapowski professionally. He could not continue working as an editor or a critic in a city glutted with journalists, and his plan to launch a literary journal titled Figaro did not come to fruition.96 His difficulty in finding employment and likely dissatisfaction with the office positions he held became an abiding source of anxiety in their marriage. While Chłapowski always championed Modrzejewska’s career, he, unlike Zimajer, had no wish to be her dependant. It seems that Chłapowski landed two desk jobs, first in the Discount Bank in 1871 and then in the Society for Fire Prevention in 1873.97 Modrzejewska admitted her relief when she mentioned this last position in a letter to their friend, the composer Józef Nikorowicz: “He’s been working very hard for several months now and doesn’t seem at all bored with his duties. You can imagine how happy this makes me.”98 Ultimately, however, pubÂ� lic ridicule of Chłapowski’s financial dependence would help them decide to quit the fishbowl of WarÂ�saw. Yet life in this fishbowl, at least initially, was exciting, rich with opportunities for socializing, entertaining, and enjoying oneself if one’s salary was as splendid as Modrzejewska’s. By the late 1860s, WarÂ�saw had emerged from the grim trauma of 1863 resembling a Reconstruction-Â�era Atlanta, a boomtown distracting itself after its painful conquest with big business and rampant deÂ�velopment. Compared with tradition-Â�bound KraÂ�ków, WarÂ�saw had grown into an industrial, financial, and transportation hub, with a population of over 160,000 (three times that of KraÂ�ków), factories built within its city limits, and three transcontinental railroad lines crisscrossing its territory.99 Like other boomtowns, WarÂ�saw evinced great contrasts in wealth, encompassing “old” and “new” rich as well as the very poor, boasting impressive palaces, well-Â� stocked shops, and such grand new buildings as the St. Lazarus Hospital and the Hotel Europejski, yet plagued by an inadequate sewer system, generally poor sanitation, and periodic outbreaks of typhus and other infectious diseases.100


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In social and physical terms, WarÂ�saw in the late 1860s was less hierarchical and conservative and more attuned to change, commerce, and entertainment than was KraÂ�ków. WarÂ�saw’s class stratification was highly unstable and increasingly irrelevant, jumbled by the 1863 uprising and rapid capitalization. Rich and poor lived side by side in many WarÂ�saw districts, and even in the same apartment buildings.101 In KraÂ�ków, the aristocracy still set the city’s tone and reigned as its first citizens. WarÂ�saw’s aristocracy, perceived to be ever less in touch with sociopoÂ�litiÂ�cal reality, was losing poÂ�litiÂ�cal influence to a financially independent intelligentsia of white-Â�collar professionals.102 After 1863, WarÂ�saw society largely abandoned the salon culture which had dominated its inter-Â�uprising scene.103 As the Baroness XYZ observed from her retrospective vantage point in the 1880s: “Today there is no exclusively aristocratic salon in WarÂ�saw, for the aristocracy does not set our social tone, but mingles more and more with financiers.”104 Salons gave way to gatherings diversified in class and determined by shared professions, relations, and interests. In her overview of these gatherings, Janina Kulczycka-Â�Saloni cites such examples as the “Saturdays” hosted by Polish Gazette editor Edward Leo and his wife Stefania, and the “Tuesdays” at home with Maria Ilnicka, the editor of the women’s newspaper Ivy (Bluszcz), who welcomed former rebels and exiles as well as critics and writers into her circle.105 Other “at homes” included industrialists and merchants, the influential new rich of the city.106 According to the redoubtable baroness, the prerequisites for admission into WarÂ�saw society no longer involved the class credentials still mandatory in KraÂ�ków and Lwów: “a person of society can be any of these—a count, prince, baron, and squire, or an engineer, lawyer, journalist, doctor, artist, landed gentleman— one is eligible, that is, if one has worth as an individual, sociability, and a good reputation.”107 “Good society” in post-Â�1863 WarÂ�saw tended to be inclusive, eclectic, and made up of constantly overlapping sets. The more guests one welcomed, the more gatherings one attended, the better the results for all concerned.108 WarÂ�saw’s cross-Â�class mobility, professional bias, and increasing disregard for caste and ceremony worked very much to Madame Chłapowska’s Â�social advantage.109 WarÂ�saw engaged her in a social whirl which KraÂ�ków could never muster. Modrzejewska’s new city “liked to play and knew how to play.” Its peak play seasons were the weeks of winter carnival between Christmas and Lent and the summer carnival in June when the city hosted a wool fair and

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horse races on the Mokotów track.110 During winter carnival, when ModrzeÂ� jewÂ�ska was most reliably in town, there was a constant round of “balls, shows, concerts, jour fixe and five o’clocks.”111 As WarÂ�saw’s brightest new attraction, Modrzejewska was invited to ball after ball, where she danced so much that she seemed to be compensating for her hardworking youth. Maria Faleńska, the writer who would soon befriend the actress, worried a bit about her Â�stamina in her first WarÂ�saw season: “Madame Modrzejewska is invited and admired everywhere and is relishing the pleasures of society life. Sometimes one fears for the artist, watching this indefatigable woman exchange her theater costume for a ball gown and dance until dawn.”112 In Memories and Impressions, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska offers a more wholesome picture of her dancing days, explaining to her readers that “to move lightly on the waxed floor to the rhythm of a Strauss waltz, a Levandovski mazurka, intoxicated me as much as would poetry, mountain air, or a beautiful landscape.”113 She remembers attending three parties in succession with her husband and nieces after her performance in Romeo and Juliet. In the morning, after mass, she soldiered on to rehearsal, while her family members tumbled into bed.114 Modrzejewska relished a partying WarÂ�saw, and she was eager to take her place as a WarÂ�saw hostess. In this big diverse city, she benefited from precedents set by other ambitious colleagues and experienced friends. The national symbolism and citywide worship of the theater already granted her a loftier Â�social status than she could have achieved in KraÂ�ków or Lwów. Some of her predecessors and older contemporaries in the theater, stars such as Halpertowa, Królikowski, and Rychter, had gained entry to WarÂ�saw’s inter-Â�uprising salons, where they declaimed and performed in amateur theatricals.115 Modrzejewska followed confidently in their footsteps and furthered her network of social acquaintances through such well-Â�placed supporters as her husband, Count Przeździecki, and the Mukhanovs. She placed her beauty, celebrity, and skill in declamation at the disposal of WarÂ�saw’s charities, performing at benefit concerts and attracting customers to charity bazaars. Faleńska enthused to Stefania Estreicher about “Madame Chłapowska’s success in raising money at a bazaar” and her kind patronage of a fellow artist, the poor consumptive singer Miss Mezzenzefi: “I cannot tell you how much the ChłaÂ� powskis put themselves out for Miss Mezzenzefi’s concert. In general, they are more willing and able than almost anyone else I know.”116 Key to Madame Chłapowska’s social advancement were her friendships with a set of respectable, socially adept ladies who functioned as role mod-


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els, confidantes, and connections. Aside from Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova, whose influence was most complex, Modrzejewska identified three important intimates: Stefania Leowa (wife of editor Edward Leo), Emilia Sierzputowska, and Maria Faleńska.117 In her memoirs, she does not distinguish Leowa from her witty, generous husband, but counts both as her “very best friends.” SierzÂ� putowska was an intimate of Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova, resembling her friend in class (aristocratic), heritage (a Polish mother wed to a czarist general), and interest (passionate devotion to the arts, and particularly the music of Wagner). Modrzejewska dubbed the impulsive, warm-Â�hearted Mademoiselle Emilia “my inspiration” and wrote her lively, frank, and sometimes irreverent letters. Faleńska figured in contrast as Modrzejewska’s “conscience.” She was a professional writer and translator, a well-Â�networked intellectual, a somewhat inflexible Polish nationalist, a “faithful and devoted wife” to the misanthropic poet Felicjan Faleński, and a doer of good deeds. Although Faleńska’s refusal to flatter “had sometimes the effect of a bucket of cold water poured on [one’s] head,” she proved an invaluable intellectual and social guide: “[Madame Faleńska] advised me as to whom I might receive and whom I should avoid and in this she never was guided by prejudice, but by real friendship.”118 Madame Chłapowska’s best example of a high society lady, one equipped with the prerequisite charm, wit, and cosmopolitanism, was Maria Kalergis-Â� Mukhanova. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska memorializes her as an unfaded beauty: “Tall, blonde, with exquisite figure and true, sensitive features, Madame Mouchanoff at fifty was still very attractive. Her grand, yet perfectly simple manner served as a model to many a young woman . . .”119 In the inter-Â�uprising years, Kalergis-Â� Mukhanova had kept a salon in Paris and, intermittently, in WarÂ�saw. Although she disliked the latter location, she found she “could do an immeasurable amount of good there,” as she explained to her daughter, and she cultivated all the local talent she could discover.120 The dinners, teas, and evenings which she hosted and to which she regularly invited Modrzejewska implied a sanctioned connection between society and the best theater people. Indeed, when she wrote her daughter about the dinner she held for the Chłapowskis, she praised Modrzejewska as a proto-Â�aristocrat: “She is an ideal, lovely and young, and resembles [Countess] Adamowa [Potocka].”121 Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova cultivated and befriended Modrzejewska and even relied on the actress as her surrogate for certain social obligations.122 Schooled by example, advice, and extensive circulation, Madame ChłaÂ� powÂ�ska launched her Tuesday “at homes” in fall 1870 at the outset of her secÂ�

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ond season.123 As she remembered them, these receptions “of a literary and artistic character” brought together artists, writers, scientists, and, more generally, “people of high social standing.”124 The cumulative guest list she approximates in her memoirs (she and Chłapowski hosted Tuesdays on and off over the next six years) reads like a WarÂ�saw who’s who: Count Przeździecki, the Leos, the Faleńskis, the famous WarÂ�saw caricaturist Franciszek KostrzewÂ� ski, WarÂ�saw Courier editor Wacław Szymanowski, the playwright Edward LuÂ� bowski, the drama critic Władysław Bogusławski, the Positivist philosopher and writer Aleksander Świętochowski, the composer Stanisław Moniuszko, the director of the Conservatory of Music Aleksander Zarzycki, the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, and four young painters—Józef Chełmonski, Adam Chmielowski, Aleksander Gierymski, and Stanisław Witkiewicz.125 Her receptions also included occasional financiers and prominent doctors.126 In this way, the Chłapowskis slipped easily into the mainstream of WarÂ�saw society, embellishing on the sort of lively, heterogeneous “at homes” modeled by the gatherings of Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova and others. During the summer off-Â�seasons, Madame Chłapowska also vacationed like an affluent, au courant Varsovienne, returning to the southern Polish mountains which had exhilarated her on her first provincial tour. When she performed in theatricals in Krynica in the summers of 1870 and 1871, she did so purely for fun. The beautiful mountain landscape now served as a rustic resort in which she could play with other talented people. Her colleagues fondly recalled how the Krynica productions drew together vacationing stars, joining Modrzejewska with the extraordinary singers of the de Reszke family as well as actors from the KraÂ�ków stage.127 Madame Chłapowska cherished the mountains and their resort towns of Krynica and Zakopane as the sort of well-Â�heeled tourist and civic-Â�minded Pole she could not have afforded to be nine years before. In 1870, she traveled to Zakopane for a “cure” involving cold baths, gymnastics, and running barefoot through the chill morning dew.128 A year later, after Dr. Tytus ChałuÂ� biński had nursed her through a serious bout of typhus, she saw the Tatra mountains through the good doctor’s eyes as a region and an indigenous people in urgent need of preservation and support. During his lifetime, Poles recognized Chałubiński (1820–1889) as an enlightened sort of national explorer, a professional man who sought not to exploit, but to cultivate the wild territories he helped to rediscover. Stanisław Witkiewicz, another champion of the Tatras, insisted that “every single good work in Zakopane or the Tatras was


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undertaken or completed by [Chałubiński].” The doctor discovered the curative powers of the mountain climate, and also “founded schools, built roads, created banks and associations, and facilitated everything that could civilize, socialize, and cheer the mountain people and everything that could inculcate a love for the Tatras [among Poles] and give them access to this recently wild and unknown world.”129 Through his protean efforts, Chałubiński generated a domestic tourism industry and engaged his compatriots in the gratifying national cause of conserving a beautiful Polish landscape and cultivating the picturesque górale (highlanders).130 Madame Chłapowska’s mountain vacations thus confirmed her successful transformation into a well-Â�to-Â�do Varsovienne and gave her her first lessons in an intellectual’s proper appreciation of the wilderness, a sensibility that would stand her in good stead once she began touring America’s “Wild West.” Although she, like most Krakovians, needed no outsider’s introduction to the Polish mountains as a vacation mecca, Chałubiński’s formula of health-Â�oriented tourism plus philanthropy and nation building informed her patronage. After she had relocated in America, Modrzejewska returned to invest in Zakopane, its colorful residents, and native crafts, building her first summer home there and founding, with Chałubiński’s help, a women’s school of lace making.131 Witkiewicz would fete Modrzejewska, after Chałubiński, as one of those who “rendered this remote wilderness a center of civilization and charity.”132 Madame Chłapowska had learned quickly how to serve as a new sort of first citizen. Sta r Pow er , Sta r Li a bi lit y When Modrzejewska returned to WarÂ�saw for her first regular season in fall 1869, she came to rule as a WarÂ�saw star. Now under contract with the WarÂ� saw Imperial Theatres, she was assured of the administration’s backing, the city’s keen attention, and her own greater influence over what and how often she played. As her own pre-Â�debut publicity campaign demonstrated, Modrzejewska was ready from the outset to assume a new wide-Â�scale celebrity. Over the next seven years, she would use the star power she generated to enlarge the scope of her career. More than any other actor of her day, Modrzejewska fueled the twin phenomena of gwiazdorstwo (the star’s self-Â�promotion) and aktoromania (the public’s actor worship) that characterized the epoch of the stars.133 During this

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epoch the extant national bond between WarÂ�saw actors and their audience grew more intimate, intense, and consumer-Â�oriented, hyped by a fast-Â�growing media and eagerly underwritten by theatergoers. With its expanding capacity for photographic reproduction, the mass-Â�circulation press packaged the actor as artist and celebrity, treating its readers to assorted “portraits” as well as reviews, biographies, and more intimate personal interest notes about a star’s health, family, and career plans.134 Older actors disdained promotional photographs as tasteless advertisement, but ambitious young stars such as Modrzejewska and Rapacki used photos as essential tools of their trade.135 The WarÂ�saw pubÂ�lic responded fervently and demonstratively to their new idol. Their actor-Â�manic ritual began at the box office, where patrons lined up at dawn to be sure of their tickets for a Modrzejewska performance.136 A young Henryk Sienkiewicz, writing for the Polish Gazette, generally characterized the 1870s theater box office line as a “Darwinian struggle” in which “the weaponry are elbows,” “the goal is a ticket,” and the displayed photograph of the star hovers just above the madding crowd of fans.137 The caricaturist KostrzewÂ�ski depicted different incarnations of this scene from WarÂ� saw life, sketching one set of Modrzejewska fans in a scuffle before the box office window and mocking another as a motley religious procession which bore the living icon of the actress at its head.138 All these portraits of WarÂ�saw theater fans accent the combined reverence and passion in their mania.139 Modrzejewska’s fans found more material ways to worship and consume her. They showered the actress with the inevitable bouquets, wreaths, banners, and expensive jewelry, offering these gifts not as pre-Â�payment for her favors, as patrons had done with actresses in the past, but as royal tribute to a national artist and beloved star. Modrzejewska’s pubÂ�l ic adored her extravaÂ� gantly and fanatically. Faleńska reports that when Modrzejewska returned to the stage in early 1871 after a long convalescence from typhus, the enormous ovation greeting her first entrance almost moved her to tears, and “the flowers strewn about the stage mounded up over the course of the evening.”140 Varsovians also consumed Modrzejewska and other stars by commodifying them, borrowing their names and images as brands for candy, cigarettes, and special dishes.141 The link between candy making and star consumption was well established in WarÂ�saw, where Semadeni Theatre’s confectioner’s shop was patronized by stars and stargazers alike. Boxes of Modrzejewska candy sported her likeness in the title role of Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac’s

Franciszek Kostrzewski’s cartoon depicting a box office brawl over tickets to a Modrzejewska performance. Courtesy of the State Archive in Kraków

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Frou-Â�Frou, and consumers reportedly quipped that at last they “could lick Modrzejewska.”142 The public’s cult of Modrzejewska, from their ticket-Â�line vigil to their candy consumption, gave her enormous power at the box office. Szczublewski maintains that Modrzejewska earned more for the WarÂ�saw theaters than did the long-Â�established, fabulously paid Żółkowski.143 In the epoch of the stars, patrons attended the theater not for a specific play, but for a specific performer. As Got observes, they went “to see Modrzejewska, or Żółkowski, or DerynÂ� żanka” (a tragedienne who flourished in the late 1870s to early 1880s).144 Once Modrzejewska had won the public’s eager following, she mainly had to decide where she would lead them. After her meandering apprenticeship with Zimajer and her hard labor under Skorupka and Koźmian’s direction, she had attained more power to set her own agenda, to ascertain what sort of artist she wanted to be and what sort of art she wanted to create. Much as she had sought to be received socially as Madame Chłapowska, so Modrzejewska aspired to be acknowledged as a serious artist, and she discovered the same master for her finishing in Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova. This consummate musician was fast friends with Franz Liszt, a onetime student of Frederic Chopin, and a key patron of the man she considered the musical genius of her era, Richard Wagner. Consigned to WarÂ�saw as her home after Mukhanov had been named president of its theaters, she strived never to lose contact with the musicians she had admired elsewhere, encouraging their guest stops in Poland as they toured between Berlin and St. Petersburg, and traveling often, despite serious health problems, to mingle with her beloved geniuses in the West. Until her death in May 1874, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova served as a remarkable professional role model, protector, and mentor for Modrzejewska. The actress had benefited from the support of other aristocratic women and had studied the career moves of adventurous actresses in Vienna and Paris, but she had yet to encounter a society lady who incarnated both master strategist and artist. Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s class and age (she was almost twenty years Modrzejewska’s senior) prevented her social descent into a profession. Yet she performed willingly in pubÂ�lic for charitable causes, compared favorably with talented professional pianists, and invested much time and energy in developing professional musicianship in WarÂ�saw, fundraising for the new Conservatory of Music and promoting Aleksander Zarzycki as the conserva-


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tory’s first director.145 Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova performed as an artist and functioned as an advocate, but took neither formal credit nor pay. In somewhat the same way, she served the WarÂ�saw theater, drawing on her broad knowledge of the arts and artists as she saw to the theater’s improvement. Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova was not simply an aristocratic do-Â�gooder, but an artist-Â�aristocrat of catholic tastes who did professional good works. In this regard, she resembled Przeździecki, although her sex and expertise in the performing arts made her a more apt role model for Modrzejewska. She proved to be Modrzejewska’s surest, most perspicacious intercessor with the Russian censor in winning approval of serious, “poÂ�l itiÂ�cally suspect” repertoire for the WarÂ�saw stage. When the censor balked at a proposed production of Hamlet, protesting its “suggestive” murder of a king, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova worked her connections and personal magic: “She invited the gentleman [the censor] to her house, and in a few words persuaded him that the murder was a family affair only, and therefore perfectly harmless.”146 According to Memories and Impressions, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova used different methods to gain permission to perform Słowacki’s Mazepa, a play the censor decried for its audacious inclusion of a Polish king. The savvy negotiater “had a talk with Monsieur Censor,” conceded his demotion of the play’s king to prince, and obtained for his lady friend a small part in the WarÂ�saw ballet.147 Apart from facilitating important new repertoire with her diplomacy, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova taught Modrzejewska, her best protégée, how cultivated, well-Â�rounded, and seriously ambitious a performing artist could be. The Baroness XYZ best evoked the sort of “master classes” that Kalergis-Â� Mukhanova conducted for her chosen few: “If there ever was a true artistic salon in WarÂ�saw, then it was at [Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s]. She admitted only a few people, a select group of artists and writers, and her dinners and evenings were among the city’s finest and most vibrant. There they read new works and studied music extensively. And there Modrzejewska, Romana Popiełka, and Królikowski sorted out their conceptions of their roles, and the hostess herself acquainted her guests with the latest musical compositions and treated them to the Chopin pieces that she knew and played so well.”148 While contemporary critics were debating whether an actor could be respected as a creative artist or hailed as a genius, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s gatherings conveyed the highest compliment, implying a parity between superb actors and superb musicians.149 In contrast to other professional artists in Po-

Maria Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova (1822–1874). From Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska, 1910


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land, actors were least likely to be educated and specially trained, yet Kalergis-Â� Mukhanova purposefully set about refining her “select group.”150 The amateur pianist activated for them a connection, often stated in theater reviews, between great musicians and great actors as virtuosos. Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova had come of age during the heyday of those composer-Â�performers who had thrilled Europe with their charisma, brilliance, and showpieces, and she knew well the greatest piano virtuoso of all time, Franz Liszt.151 The equivalence between the careers of a musician and an actor could only be approximate, for an actor had no recourse to the musician’s universal language and would be much more limited in designing a solo career. Nonetheless, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova expressly encouraged Modrzejewska to pursue a career as a touring virtuoso, advising her “to study in German three Shakespearian parts—Juliet, Ophelia, and Desdemona—in order to perform them at the greatest dramatic festival in Weimar, where she would introduce [her] to the German stage and also to the greatest German of the time, Wagner.”152 Modrzejewska did not follow Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova to Weimar, but her joint efforts to refine her own talent and to uplift the WarÂ�saw theater’s repertoire reflected the master lessons she had absorbed from her female mentor. Her sessions with Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova had broadened her artistic horizons and heightened her professional goals. At the Mukhanovs’ she rubbed elbows with such European musical greats as Anton Rubinstein and Hans von Bülow and was advised to dream on a world scale about her career prospects. Unlike Liszt or Wagner, Modrzejewska would never compose her own scores, yet she aimed to be at once a great artist and an ambitious impresario, givÂ�ing the finest performances and importing world-Â�class plays to her WarÂ� saw Â�audience. The actress soon discovered the enormous conflict between virtuosic ambition and working for the collective good in the WarÂ�saw theater. While Modrzejewska was well matched to the foreign artists she met in the Mukhanovs’ home, she found very few kindred spirits among her colleagues on the job. The state of the stars was, in a sense, ungovernable, its residents reluctant to comply with direction or to undertake new collective endeavors. Too many individual agendas and intrigues worked at cross-Â�purposes. For the first time since her embattled year in the Lwów Theatre, Modrzejewska confronted an entrenched group of actors, some of whose resentment only deepened the longer she reigned. She could no longer rely on her family circle, as she had in KraÂ�ków, nor would she be able to reconstitute it in WarÂ�saw.

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A closet impresario among virtuosos and lesser talents, Modrzejewska first had to cope with the uneven ensemble of the WarÂ�saw company. The gallery of players that she sketches in her memoirs is carefully censored, constrained by collegial courtesy and her claim to her AmeriÂ�can readers that the WarÂ�saw Â�theater “belonged to the first rank in Europe.”153 Here she pays brief tribute to her initial female rivals—the tragedienne Salomea Palińska, who “died shortly afÂ�ter my entering the WarÂ�saw Theatre” (in 1873, five years after Modrzejewska’s 1868 debut); the “beautiful and talented” Aleksandra Rakiewiczowa, whose career foundered on “the too rapid increase of her progeny”; and the ingenue Wiktoryna Bakałowiczowa, who was not “strictly beautiful,” but “the finest product of the WarÂ�saw dramatic school.”154 Her bolder portraits of Królikowski and Żółkowski, the two major stars of her company in 1869, barely hint at trouble in paradise. On the one hand, she portrays “our great tragedian” Jan Królikowski as her frequent co-Â�star, an intellectual, versatile player possessed of an “outwardly quiet, but highly strung nature” and equally adept at playing either Hamlet or Iago.155 On the other hand, her sketch of Alojzy Żółkowski, “our great comedian,” celebrates his handsome figure, arresting stage presence, and instinctual genius for comic characterizations, but also remarks his lack of education and simpleminded craving for applause. MoÂ�djeÂ� ska blandly notes that she had little opportunity to perform with Żółkowski, “for his best parts were in plays in which there was no suitable place for me.” She forbears mentioning how “our great comedian” sometimes egregiously mishandled roles assigned him in her best plays.156 Apparently WarÂ�saw’s two most popular stars performed largely apart from each other.157 The uncensored cast picture, at least during Modrzejewska’s first years in WarÂ�saw, was far less salutary. In DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1869, Chłapowski divulged to Bolesław Ładnowski, one of Modrzejewska’s former leading men, that “there is no collegiality among the actors [here]. Every actor considers himself an official and worries only about his own good, not at all about the success of the play or the good of the theater.”158 Chłapowski dismissed the artistic director Chęciński as a crazy intriguer and pointed out the company’s woeful lack of male romantic leads. Neither director nor actors strived to achieve an ensemble: “Individual roles are often very well-Â�played, but that’s the end of it. The casting often makes no sense, decided either at the director’s whim or according to an actor’s seniority. It’s terribly stupid.”159 The remedy for these assorted problems, he argued, would involve the appointment of a new di-


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rector, the import of reliably excellent players, and the selection of a proper repertoire. Modrzejewska likely shared these sharp opinions and definitely agreed with her husband about engaging either Ładnowski or Feliks Benda to outfit the company with a strong male “lover.”160 Neither candidate succeeded during the actress’s WarÂ�saw tenure. Modrzejewska would not be partnered with an adequate romantic lead until 1873, when the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres engaged Bolesław Leszczynski (1837–1918), a powerful actor whose manly good looks complemented her “womanly charm” and whose great talent, according to his co-Â�star, was not equaled by his “capacity to work.”161 Other hires incrementally improved the company. Soon after Modrzejewska’s debut, Rapacki duplicated her triumph on the WarÂ�saw stage and abandoned KraÂ�ków for the capital. She at last gained a protégée and a sanguine female partner when Mukhanov hired Romana Popiełówna, a young Lwów actress whom Modrzejewska pronounced “the best ingenue I ever saw on any stage.”162 A fine ensemble had coalesced in the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres only by 1873, under Modrzejewska’s abiding dominance. By 1874, both her rivals PaÂ� lińska and Bakałowiczowa had died, and she had effected a reconciliation with the surviving Rakiewiczowa by supporting her for specific roles.163 Yet the intrigues and interpersonal tensions never faded away, as evidenced in Chłapowski and Modrzejewska’s advice to actors about to debut or contemplating the prospect. Chłapowski, for example, counseled the persistent ŁadÂ� nowski to be polite to Królikowski, “a good man” who at times may be jealous of others’ success, but does not scheme, and to be wary of Rapacki, who “never refrains from scheming.”164 In late 1874, Modrzejewska warned her young confidant Gustaw Fiszer, a Lwów actor whom she had met in Zakopane, that he should postpone his WarÂ�saw debut on account of Mukhanov’s absence (the president’s underling Michał Bojanowski “knows nothing about the stage”) and her current quarrel with Chęciński over casting the secÂ�ond female lead in her new star vehicle Sphinx.165 In her hopes for a good ensemble, Modrzejewska was most discouraged by Feliks’s rejection. Feliks Benda was invited to guest star/debut in the autumns of 1871 and 1872 and was not engaged despite relatively good reviews. The reasons for his failure may have stemmed from flaws in his performance, particularly his faulty diction, or the rivalry of the company’s inadequate male leads, but his rebuff also signaled behind-Â�the-Â�scenes resistance to any increase

Modrzejewska and her half-Â�brother, actor Feliks Benda (1833– 1875), taken when she was convalescing from typhus. From Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska, 1910


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in Modrzejewska’s influence. After Feliks’s secÂ�ond set of debut performances in 1872, the satirical rag Spikes (Kolce) printed an imaginary theater bill with a cast made up of Modrzejewska and a horde of Bendas.166 Faleńska pinpointed the irony of the star’s powerlessness backstage in NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1871, when the machinations against Feliks began: “Madame Modrzejewska is much loved by the public, but in the theatre she can do nothing.”167 Whereas some faction among her colleagues nipped her supposed dynastic ambitions in the bud, Modrzejewska famously succeeded in wielding influence over the WarÂ�saw theater’s repertoire. She cobbled together this control through her benefit performances, her allegiance with Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova vis-Â�à-Â�v is the censor, her established box office appeal, and her virtuosity. Her benefit plays included such ambitious works as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1870) and Hamlet (1871), Słowacki’s Maria Stuart (1872), and Schiller’s Don Carlos (1874) and Intrigue and Love (1875).168 It was for just such “poetic dramas” that Modrzejewska required Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s diplomatic assistance. The censors readily approved the contemporary French repertoire that WarÂ�saw theater critics so often deemed sexually immoral, but they were absurdly suspicious of any possible poÂ�litiÂ�cal resonance in the themes and language of poetic classics. The censor so balked at the dramas of Słowacki that only the playwright’s initials “J. S.” could appear on the playbills.169 With Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s occasional intervention, Modrzejewska labored assiduÂ� ously for these plays’ approval, arranged for new translations of the Shakespeare tragedies, and often had to make do with texts butchered “in such a way that it was quite impossible to get any sense out of them.”170 Aware of her backstage struggles with the censors and recalcitrant colleagues, the press applauded her efforts and identified her exceptional achievement and altruism. Lewestam recognized her generosity in designating Ham let her benefit in 1871, for her Ophelia was far from being a primary role. Her choice indicated “her high regard for art in general and for the worthiness of her profession in particular.”171 Kenig paid her the most fulsome compliment when she sponsored the performance of Intrigue and Love in 1875: “We must do justice to this great artist, who not only disregards herself in choosing plays for her benefits, but also tries to enrich and uplift our repertoire by selecting works of lofty significance. Słowacki, Shakespeare, and Schiller have reached or returned to our stage mainly through her offices.”172 In addition, Modrzejewska could take credit for introducing plays by Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and George Sand to the WarÂ�saw stage.173

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Modrzejewska often persuaded her pubÂ�lic to pay for the privilege of such enrichment. She excelled at marketing Shakespeare to Varsovians. (To her chagrin, Slowacki’s plays proved a much harder sell, despite the patriotic overtones of their authorship.174) Reviewing her benefit performance of Romeo and Juliet in January 1870, Szymanowski credited her star reputation as well as her stunning Juliet with attracting a pubÂ�l ic “not yet prepared” for the Bard.175 The reviewer for the Polish Gazette likewise acknowledged her key contribution and reported how her audience “attempted to repay the artist” with ovations, bouquets, and commemorative trinkets.”176 The ticket sales for ModrzejewÂ� ska’s 1871 benefit performance of Hamlet exceeded those of lucrative ballets and operas, according to Szczublewski.177 When the actress mounted Much Ado About Nothing for her 1876 benefit, the Illustrated Weekly doubted that there were still tickets to be had two days before the show, guessing that “a Shakespeare play, the performance of a favorite actress, and the chance to pay tribute to her talent and work attract everyone.”178 Even as Modrzejewska was serving as occasional impresario, transcending self-Â�interest in her quest for better plays, she was polishing her skills and developing her own starring parts. To the alternating delight and consternation of the critics, she was sometimes a great ensemble player committed to the general cause of high art and sometimes a virtuoso content with a showcase role in an inferior vehicle. She coped in various ways with the hard fact that the classic plays she loved seldom featured strong female leads. In this regard, Shakespeare’s Juliet proved an exception which Modrzejewska instantly appropriated and polished as a signature role. The critics adored her Juliet for her “idealization of earthly love,” the grace of her soft and rounded gestures, and her well-Â�delineated range of emotions, including “naive girlishness, radiant dreaminess, deep and calm feeling, various forms of despair, [and] heroism.”179 Modrzejewska’s successes in other dramatic masterpieces such as Hamlet, Othello, Schiller’s Don Carlos, and Słowacki’s Mazepa amounted to secondary roles which her powerful performance transformed into leads. Her Ophelia perhaps best illustrated this feat. Lewestam declared that Modrzejewska’s Ophelia stole the show in Hamlet, eclipsing even Królikowski in the title role. The actress successfully fleshed out Ophelia’s sketchy traits by poignantly motivating her madness, delineating how her sweet, submissive love for family and suitor could not withstand the incomprehensible blows of rejection and murder.180 Kenig observed that Ophelia’s character (one of charm rather than


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strength) well suited Modrzejewska’s temperament and skills, but he nonetheless found the actress’s interpretation reflected a profound understanding of Shakespeare and “rewarded us for much that was not right in Hamlet.”181 Kenig was not alone in feeling so rewarded. Many patrons exited the theater after Ophelia drowned, uninterested in Hamlet’s further torments once the main event had quit the stage.182 The star played other lovely, loving, victimized secondary characters to outsized notice. According to Szymanowski, Modrzejewska’s 1873 Â�Desdemona was not overshadowed by Leszczynski’s rough, passionate Othello, but instead “moved into the foreground and drew all the theatregoers’ sympathy.” Her Desdemona impressed the critic with her purity; she avoided any expression of sensuality and demonstratively loved in Othello the great warrior hero, not the strapping man.183 Even in minor roles, Modrzejewska riveted viewers. Although Schiller’s Don Carlos (her 1874 benefit) did not win praise as a production, Modrzejewska’s two scenes in the modest part of Princess Eboli “became the culminating point of the entire play.”184 Like her great contemporary Sarah Bernhardt, Modrzejewska found the juiciest starring roles in contemporary French dramas that verged on melodrama, teased audiences with sexual improprieties, and trained their spotÂ� light on female character. Dumas fils’ The Lady of the Camellias was still forbidden the WarÂ�saw stage, but the censors tolerated other plays that imitated its tale of the fallen woman somehow redeemed. As her great success in Â�Adrianna already indicated, Modrzejewska excelled at “harmonizing” the emotional extremes these parts entailed and assured her audience of her character’s underlying goodness. Critics sometimes doubted the possibility of such goodness, yet they recognized its enormous appeal. Lewestam criticized Modrzejewska for interpreting Marion Delorme, the eponymous fallen heroine of Victor Hugo’s play, as a dove instead of a tigress, but Szymanowski registered the effect of her glimpsed purity on the audience: “The most eloquent evidence of this were the tears spilling down the faces of the female patrons, those ladies whom women like Marion most injure, disrupting their quiet homes and shattering their family happiness. This was the artist’s greatest triumph.”185 While the critics griped about the immorality of such plays, the implausibility of their romantic intrigues, and their clumsy extremes in characterization, they quite regularly praised Modrzejewska for her compelling performance. Her intelligent interpretation compensated for the inadequate script. Several reviewers made this case for Modrzejewska’s Frou-Â�Frou, the title char-

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acter of Halévy and Meilhac’s play. The plot of Frou-Â�Frou hinges on the improbable transformation of an empty-Â�headed lady of fashion, a woman who marries and then abandons her family on a whim, into a Magdalene whose death absolves and ennobles her. As Kenig sarcastically concluded, the secÂ� ond half of Frou-Â�Frou does not so much reprise The Lady of the Camellias as recycle that play’s tear-Â�jerking effects. Yet whatever the play’s disjuncture in plot, tonality, and genre, Kenig admitted that Modrzejewska carried off her ridiculous part: “[She] has, as usual, a great deal of charm, freedom, and a sure stage sense, all of which this role demands.”186 Lewestam agreed, although he considered her penitent scenes much more persuasive.187 The Polish Gazette reviewer insisted, in turn, that every pose of Modrzejewska’s Frou-Â�Frou deserved to be photographed.188 Kenig’s general comments on this performance bear quoting here, for he singled out the value of a virtuoso performance independent of the drama: “Theatre pieces have their own fata. A well-Â�liked actor, a well-Â�chosen day, a pleasing face, a masterful performance will not only save, but also sustain a play that one could not bear to read. One work of art saves another. A good actor can save a lousy author.” Modrzejewska’s performing art “saved” such fallen women dramas as Feuillet’s Sphinx and Hugo’s Angelo Malpieri. In Sphinx, first performed in 1874, Modrzejewska played a flirtatious married woman who plans to seduce her puritanical brother-Â�in-Â�law and poison his wife, but in the end repents and poisons herself. In Angelo Malpieri, performed in 1876, her part was that of the courtesan Tisbé, who refrains from killing the other woman once she realizes that her rival had saved her mother’s life. When Tisbé later rescues that rival with “false poison,” her former lover kills her in confusion. Somehow Modrzejewska’s lead performance floated these melodramas, enabling her “to elevate the whole and win the audience’s sympathy” in Sphinx and “to nuance [her role] with psychological intuition and graceful movement” in Malpieri.189 Modrzejewska’s virtuosity seemed positively transformative, rendering minor parts major and improbable parts convincing. At least one WarÂ�saw critic, however, felt that Modrzejewska’s success in such roles was due more to self-Â�packaging than performing genius. Summarizing her WarÂ�saw achievements in 1879, Wladysław Bogusławski (grandson of the great theatrical pioneer Wojciech Bogusławski) asserted that Modrzejewska best played “high-Â�class coquettes” and today’s “uneasy, passionate, nervous” heroine.190 He insinuated that the actress performed such roles as

Modrzejewska as Gilberta in Frou-Â�Frou at Warsaw’s Great Theatre, 18 February 1871. Courtesy of the Kraków City History Museum

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Adrianna essentially as herself, infusing them with her personal charm and relying on her much-Â�vaunted set of natural assets: “Modrzejewska need only appear in the full radiance of her beauty, to pitch her diction on a lyrical note, and to bedazzle her viewers here and there with her mastery of stage technique, and she has captured all hearts, which beat the faster without knowing if they beat for the heroine or the actress herself.”191 Bogusławski’s sharp critique reflected in part his complicated personal relations with the actress; by 1879, he was mightily irritated by her “virtuoso” stardom and departure for America. He also professed his disapproval of her successful vehicles—that is, the new “drama of [women’s] emancipation” in which an actress risked being identified with her daring roles: “As the heroine in dramas by Feuillet, Sardou, and Dumas, she gives everyone the right to touch her sore spot and ask: how much does the pain the author inflicted on his heroine pain the actress herself ?”192 Nevertheless, Bogusławski’s critique negatively measured how powerful the female star Modrzejewska had become and how her stardom battened on showcase roles in the plays of Dumas fils, Feuillet, and a bevy of other Frenchmen. That Bogusławski read her performances as “real” implied the larger extent of her performing genius. In KraÂ�ków, the young Modrzejewska had impressed the critics with her capacity to pass as high-Â�born on the stage. In WarÂ�saw, her high-Â�class roles were rendered so naturally and effectively that this severe critic belittled them as mere extensions of who she was. In a sense, Modrzejewska had achieved the innate theatricality of a KraÂ�ków aristocrat. Her virtuosity had become her “nature.” This impression of naturalness was heightened by Modrzejewska’s consummate attention to costume and toilette as well as pose and gesture. As Rapacki would recall with some exaggeration: “No actress since has better understood how to convey character through costume. Modrzejewska’s clothing was an entire epoch: I would add parenthetically that she never relied on a costumer, but sewed her costumes herself.”193 In lavishing the same care on her “fashionable, costly, and elegant” private wardrobe, she invited further generalizations about her “innate” upper-Â�class taste and style.194 Though Modrzejewska attained unprecedented stardom in WarÂ�saw, she still struggled with some of the weaknesses apparent in her KraÂ�ków performance—Â� specifically, her voice’s strength and depth and her uncertain control in strong tragic parts.195 A Polish Gazette review faulted her 1869 performance of Donna Diana, the fiery daughter of a Spanish baron, as too much like the soft Â�Aniela in Maidens’ Vows or the capricious young lady in Miss-Â�Madame.196 Kenig (of


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course!) complained of her inappropriately teary and melancholy rendition of Schiller’s Mary Stuart in May 1872.197 Yet Modrzejewska did succeed in broadening her range of leading characters, triumphing as a lady Machiavelli in Feuillet’s Dalila in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1871 and as the malicious Lady Tartuffe in Émile Girardin’s play by the same name in NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1872.198 Just before she departed WarÂ�saw, she forecast her future success in Shakespeare’s mature comedies with her performance in Much Ado About Nothing, stretching her repertoire of sprightly misses and salon adepts to play Beatrice as a refined lady wit.199 Overall, Modrzejewska achieved tremendous professional success in her WarÂ�saw years. She cultivated and capitalized on her great popularity, accedÂ� ing to “star packaging” and mass-Â�media publicity, and receiving the ardent devotion and material tribute of her actor-Â�manic fans. Modrzejewska worked WarÂ�saw’s star system as it had never been worked before, applying her star privileges, popularity, and performing skill to the improvement of her theater’s repertoire and demonstrating her artistic genius in starring roles and minor parts, masterpieces and melodramas. Since the days of Wojciech BoÂ� guÂ�sławski, no actor and certainly no actress had displayed such ambition and wielded such power. A State of H er Ow n Modrzejewska’s glorious reign nevertheless ended with her defection, much to her public’s surprise and dismay. When she explains this decision in Memo ries and Impressions, she opts for a black-Â�and-Â�white narrative of persecution at home and opportunity and adventure abroad. Such a plot best justified her departure to her countrymen and flattered her AmeriÂ�can readers with another story about their coveted Promised Land. But her reasons for leaving were also supercharged with artistic and social ambition. Modrzejewska had conquered WarÂ�saw in 1868, but she could not command universal obedience. Nor was she empowered to change fundamentally the system in which she worked. Over the course of her seven years on the WarÂ�saw stage, she learned that she—and, for that matter, any other star—could never rule the state of the stars. Baroness XYZ coolly assessed her as a lucky gambler who left “the star system as rickety as ever” after her “good luck passed.”200 ModrzejewÂ�ska’s dreams of a great art, a world-Â�class career, and a dedicated community of artists simply could not be realized in her homeland.

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By the mid-Â�1870s, the upward trajectory of her career had leveled off and Modrzejewska was wearying of intrigue and antagonism. She was playing in a strong, well-Â�rounded company after 1873, but producing new repertoire was growing more, rather than less, difficult. Modrzejewska’s inside support had eroded. Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s death from cancer in May 1874 deprived the actress of her key mentor and intercessor, dulled Mukhanov’s interest in the WarÂ�saw stage, and altogether endangered what the star had pursued as their joint agenda: “the elevation of the artistic and ethical standard of our Â�theatre.”201 A cluster of other deaths upset and undermined her. When Feliks succumbed to tuberculosis in April 1875, his death meant the loss of her beloved brother-Â�mentor and underscored again her powerlessness to advance him as she raced up the professional ladder. The premature deaths of Palińska in OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1873 and Bakałowiczowa in NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1874 bespoke the constant peril of disease in the capital (Modrzejewska herself was too ill to attend PaÂ� lińska’s funeral) and exposed her to always lurking comparisons and criticism. Palińska was pointedly remembered as a true tragedienne, in implicit contrast to Modrzejewska, and Bogusławski would champion the dead BaÂ� kaÂ�łowiczowa’s modesty and “unmannered artistry” over Modrzejewska’s celebrity and virtuosity. 202 Even the sudden death of the “intriguer” Chęciński in late 1874 was disruptive, for his immediate successors reaffirmed the impossibility of governÂ� ing the unruly WarÂ�saw company. Rapacki’s appointment as artistic director lasted until April 1876, at which point Władysław Bogusławski filled the post for a mere eight months. Modrzejewska could observe the problems these two peers faced in their attempts to impose higher standards and a uniform will on her fellow actors. Rapacki struggled to implement the good production values and attention to ensemble that he had known in KraÂ�ków. During his short tenure, the press commended him for his direction of ensemble scenes and his provision of appropriate costumes and sets.203 After Rapacki’s resignation, the equally ambitious Bogusławski soon encountered resistance as a newcomer and an opinionated director.204 Modrzejewska was not offered the directorship at this time, nor did she evince interest in it. Perhaps she was so thoroughly disgusted with offstage intrigue that directing did not appeal. As she declared to Gustaw Fiszer in January 1875: “I’ll always love art, but backstage sickens me.”205 Or perhaps Modrzejewska’s conditioning by Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova disinclined her to wield


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power formally and thereby risk her carefully wrought image as a lady. She had expressed similar reservations in the past. Almost a year before he became director, Rapacki had surprised her by writing and producing his own play, a drama about the medieval Polish artist Wit Stwosz, the creator of the magnificent altar in KraÂ�ków’s St. Mary’s Church.206 Modrzejewska’s reflections on Rapacki’s late-Â�blooming talent revealed both frustrated ambition and surprisingly conventional notions of a woman’s place. Although her “conscience” Maria Faleńska was a professional writer, Modrzejewska affected distaste for female “scribblers” in a letter to her young friend Anna Wolska: A strange feeling came over me after I read [Rapacki’s play]. I blamed myself that I have written nothing thus far, that all that I have thought of has drifted off like smoke, formless, and left no trace. But I cheer myself in thinking that nothing is more unbearable than a woman who writes and then I am at peace, although I am not entirely pleased with myself. You see how my ambitions afflict me from time to time!207

Throughout her WarÂ�saw career Modrzejewska confronted the inevitable underside of star worship, suffering the envy and slander that her enormous celebrity provoked. The two most concentrated attacks happened at different points in her WarÂ�saw career, one during her secÂ�ond season and the other in January 1875. The first took aim at her relationship with Zimajer and provincial touring years by “unearthing” this past in scandalous fiction. InÂ�stallÂ�ments of The Actress, a novel by playwright, critic, and spurned suitor Edward LuÂ� bowski, began to appear in Weekly Novellas and Romances (Tygodnik Powieści i Romansów) in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1870. In a letter to Estreicher, Felicjan Faleński disparaged the journal’s readers as “wardrobe assistants, lackeys [and the like]” and characterized Lubowski’s work as “an oddly dirty novel which allegedly lampoons Modrzejewska,” including “a rape scene . . . that is so explicit as to leave nothing to the imagination.”208 There is no record of Modrzejewska’s response to this mean-Â�spirited fiction, but her pubÂ�lic mainly seemed preoccupied with her recovery from typhus and speedy return to the stage. The secÂ�ond attack, however, devastated Modrzejewska because it was launched from the stage to ridicule her husband and home life. As SzczublewÂ� ski rightly remarks, this affair loomed large in her biography as the reputed “blow that ultimately decided [her] exile from WarÂ�saw.”209 On 4 January 1875, the WarÂ�saw company, then under Rapacki’s direction, performed The Bat, a new play by the aforementioned Lubowski, in the Variety Theatre. This satirical comedy on contemporary morals featured a cast of “bats”—“idlers, idiÂ�

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ots, braggarts, charlatans, malcontents, and madcaps”—who seek, but fail to dishonor a truly honorable man.210 Most of the reviews welcomed the play as a good addition to the WarÂ�saw Theatres’ relatively spare Polish repertoire and praised individual performances, including Władysław Szymanowski’s portrayal of the lazy, freeloading Mr. Żmijski (“Mr. Serpentine” or “Mr. Snakey”). Some critics regretted the fact that Szymanowski’s character unabashedly caricatured Chłapowski, a ploy made nastier by Żmijski’s line: “I live off the capital of my dearest wife.” Gossip circulated that Szymanowski, the brother of the recently deceased Bakałowiczowa, was avenging his sister’s eclipse by Modrzejewska. Szymanowski’s interpretation was malicious, but not at all exceptional. This sort of caricature enlivened plenty of performances in nineteenth-Â�century Polish theater. Feliks Benda had mimicked none other than Lubowski, the author of both The Actress and The Bat, when he played a braggart on the KraÂ�ków stage in 1869.211 Despite the mild protests in the press and the loud whistling of Modrzejewska’s supporters in the house, Szymanowski persisted in this impersonation over the long run of the play, which was performed twenty-Â�t wo times before Modrzejewska left Poland and for a decade thereafter.212 The actress was powerless to protect her husband’s pubÂ�l ic face and to rebut the nasty implications about her marriage. Nor did any of her high-Â�placed supporters, such as Mukhanov or Rapacki, intervene to stop the slander. In a diary note (pointedly quoted in the memoirs) she vents her anguish and outrage at length: Who knows . . . whether any woman should seek happiness outside of her home, which seems to be the proper place for her. There she reigns. Her life is inaccessible to human curiosity. . . . But a woman who has dared to raise her head above the others, who has extended her eager hand for laurels, who has not hesitated to expose and throw to the crowds all that her soul possessed of love, despair, and passion,— that woman has given the right to the curious multitude to interfere in her private affairs, to rummage in the most secret recesses of her life, to count her very heart’s Â�pulsations. . . . When [commentaries] touch those who are dear to us, when cruelty and malice combine to tear with their claws our dear ones, then, oh, then, an invincible horror fills our soul towards that pillory called the “Stage,” and a great doubt rises in our mind. . . . 213

Modrzejewska responded to The Bat and her ever more static career by entrenching herself in her version of an “inaccessible” home, in the Tuesdays that she and Chłapowski now hosted in their seven-Â�room apartment on Graniczna Street.214 She was retreating, much as the WarÂ�saw-Â�averse Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova had done, into a carefully self-Â�selected society. At home, the couple enter-


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tained standing favorites (the Leos, the Faleńskis, Sierzputowska, such theater colleagues as Popiełówna, Rapacki, and Leszczyński) and began cultivating a younger set of artists—the journalist Henryk Sienkiewicz and the painters Józef Chełmoński, Adam Chmielowski, Aleksander Gierymski, and Stanisław Witkiewicz. Witkiewicz biographer Zdzisław Piasecki identifies the actress’s “at homes” as one of just three havens for struggling young artists in WarÂ�saw; the others were located in the apartment of sculptor and critic Cyprian Godebski and the cheap seventh-Â�floor studio that Chmielowski and Witkiewicz could barely afford in the Hotel Europejski. 215 Entering her life at a difficult time, these young men revitalized Modrzejewska with a sense of new conquest and a joint desire for artistic and personal fulfillment. They were six to eleven years younger than she, and all soon fell under her spell. Sienkiewicz scholar Julian Krzyżanowski approximates their intense relations with heavenly metaphors: “They met in a planetary orbit around the sun of Countess Chłapowska.”216 According to Krzyżanowski and Szczublewski, almost all the love letters that Modrzejewska received from Sienkiewicz and the others in this group were destroyed either by its “sun” or her husband, yet some evidence of their reverent passion for her has survived. 217 Aleksander Gierymski, who had left WarÂ�saw for Rome by autumn 1875, bitterly wrote a friend about his “first love” for this “queen”—“her movements, tears, and beautiful words”—and railed against her stupidly jealous husband, who missed the innocence of his attachment.218 Witkiewicz channeled his love into verse and paintings and expressed his abiding reverence for “Madame Helena” in letters to his mother and eventually his wife. 219 In general, her artists discovered in Modrzejewska, the stunning actress and master of poses, a most inspiring subject, one who met their aesthetic standards by blending the real with the ideal in her person and art.220 Witkiewicz’s 1876 painting titled “The World and Art” features Modrzejewska’s face, recognizable by her large melancholy eyes, on the figure of a peasant boy playing a fiddle out in the fields. 221 Chmielowski commenced a monumental portrait of the actress which he intended for the entrance to the National Museum, although he ultimately destroyed his work.222 The Helena who had practiced her poses in silhouette as a girl was likely gratified to become these painters’ darling in her mid-Â�30s. Sienkiewicz’s feelings for Modrzejewska were more physically passionate and persistent than those of his brother artists, and even though he once plied her with love letters and served her admirably in America, he kept silent about

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his feelings thereafter. His 1888 novella The Third One (Ta trzecia), however, offers intriguing glimpses into the relations between actress and artists in 1870s WarÂ�saw. Its first-Â�person protagonist, the painter Władysław Magórski, suggests a composite of Chełmoński, Gierymski, and Sienkiewicz himself.223 The novella depicts the young artists’ merry, shabby bohemia and traces Magórski’s romantic misadventures until he discovers the title’s “third one.” The woman Magórski truly loves is Ewa Adami, an actress whose talent, artistry, and sacrifice “on the altar of the theater’s juggernaut” render her an exception among other actresses, women Magórski dismisses as coarsened “by playing love, faithfulness, and nobility every night.”224 Magórski perceives Adami as a comrade and a fellow artist, yet after their marriage she takes an “indefinite leave” from the stage and seems to devote herself to family life. For whatever reason—the demands of the plot or the author’s abiding discomfort with the actress’s morally suspect profession—Sienkiewicz fictionally molded the lady “sun” he orbited into a subordinate wife. Apart from basking in these young men’s intimate expression of actor mania, Modrzejewska likely recovered with them some of the playfulness of her family circle and certainly shared with them a yearning for greater artistic achievement. These young artists were likewise dismayed by the limitations of the Polish scene, and they had suffered far more than she for their nation and their art. Two of “the most extraordinary trio ever seen” were victims of the 1863 uprising.225 Chmielowski (1845–1916) lost his parents and his leg during the fighting, and the younger Witkiewicz (1851–1915) had endured deportation with his rebellious family and the death of his father in Siberian exile. All three, including Chełmoński, had studied, painted, and gone hungry in Munich, lured there by a prosperous art market, the relatively low cost of living, and an Academy of Art that did not require school credentials for their admission.226 Witkiewicz was forced by poverty to return to his mother’s home in WarÂ�saw, but he, Chełmoński, and Chmielowski were also drawn back to Poland “by a longing for their loved ones, their native landscape, and people other than those who lived in that alien Bavarian city.”227 Yet once the three had repatriated and were working together in their seventh-Â�floor studio in the Europejski, they had to contend with a fossilized Polish Academy still prescribing thematic art and superficially cultured consumers who preferred cheap sentimental pictures to their paintings.228 Dedicated to serious studies of nature and the Polish folk that did not sell, these


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Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) in 1876. From Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska, 1910

young talented artists starved in the meantime, looking so shabby that even when they pooled their resources for a cup of coffee, the waiters at Lourse, a renowned WarÂ�saw pastry shop, refused to serve them.229 Reviewing these hard times, Witkiewicz concluded that there were only three options open to artists in 1870s Poland: “remain at home and perish bit by bit, attend dinners and ‘evenings’ and allow oneself to be ‘sponsored,’ or go abroad.” Poland, he bitterly observed, was quite ready to “export her artists.”230 Modrzejewska shared neither the artists’ unpopularity nor their terrible poverty. Yet Witkiewicz’s critique of WarÂ�saw as a “no-Â�man’s land” for serious art and artists mirrored her own increasing discontent and recommended these disgruntled young men to her as co-Â�seekers of truth and beauty. If Modrzejewska could no longer abide the state of the stars, then she would start laying the groundwork for a state of her own in which high-Â�minded artists such as Chełmoński, Chmielowski, Witkiewicz and their like would be the first settlers. To establish this state, she would need to exercise the last of Witkiewicz’s options: go abroad.

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In effect, Modrzejewska was adapting yet another lesson she had learned from Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova, abandoning a Polish backwater to dedicate herself to greater art made elsewhere. She mainly differed from her mentor in her high evaluation of Polish art and artists. Modrzejewska and her young comrades faulted their working context, not themselves. The sun and her planets were utterly convinced of their own gifts. As the young painters already had discovered in Munich, they cherished and reproduced visions of Poland even when they worked abroad. What wounded them were the philistine attitudes of their compatriots. Modrzejewska and her quartet sought no imported genius to lead them, but a loyal and generous local following. As a performing artist, Modrzejewska also needed to become proficient in another language if she were to make better art abroad. She had proven herself to be a master of expression, movement, gesture, and costume, but she could not rely on mimetic talents to succeed outside of Poland. She faced once more the conundrum that had dogged her career from its beginning— the challenge of performing well in another language on a non-Â�Polish national stage, in a venue with greater artistic possibilities and international visibility. While she plotted her WarÂ�saw debut, she had toyed with the possibility of a debut on the Paris stage. At Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s urging, Modrzejewska had taken up the study of German again in winter 1871 as she convalesced from typhus, preparing for a possible debut in Weimar.231 As she recalls in Memo ries and Impressions, other acquaintances recommended that she learn Russian or Italian, in the latter instance so that she might perform with the great touring actor Tommaso Salvini in, of all places, America.232 By 1874, Modrzejewska was contemplating yet another language option, prompted by the example of a guest star on the WarÂ�saw stage and her acquaintance with a family of former emigrants to the United States. Modrzejewska performed in Hamlet and Othello with Maurice Neville, an actor billed as an AmeriÂ�can who played in English to the cast’s Polish. Neville’s actual surname was Grossman and he represented an intriguing hybrid phenomenon to the WarÂ�saw public—a Hungarian-Â�born, German-Â�educated veteran of the AmeriÂ� can and English stages. 233 Several reviews remarked that Neville, a non-Â�native English speaker, gained currency in America through his acquaintance with the great poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.234 Here was an inspiring example for Modrzejewska, a performing artist whose capacity in English and instinct for cultivating local greats allowed him to cross borders with impu-


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nity. She remembers that Neville encouraged her to study English, and subsequent correspondence attests that she kept in touch with him for future Â�advice .235 Modrzejewska chanced on another AmeriÂ�can settler in the person of her ardent fan and young friend, Anna Wolska, who attended the actress’s yearly guest performances in Lwów.236 Wolska’s father, Kalikst Wolski (1816–1885), had fled to France after the NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1830 uprising and then quit France for America after participating in the revolution of 1848. In America, he helped found the socialist utopian colony “La Reunion” not far from Dallas, Texas, a farming community planned by hundreds of non-Â�farming socialists which predictably failed. His daughter Anna, born during the family’s voyage to America, was educated in the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans after her mothÂ�er’s death. Father and daughter returned to Poland in either 1860 or 1861, and Wolski’s tales of his emigrant experience, titled To America and in America, were first serialized in Sheaves in the mid-Â�1860s and published as a book in 1876. Both the Wolskis would serve Modrzejewska as key informants on America and, once she had settled there, Europe-Â�based guardians of her son and nieces.237 Modrzejewska visited Wolska in spring 1874 soon after she had performed with Neville, and she recruited Wolska, along with her brother Feliks, her new protégé Gustaw Fiszer, and others, for a self-Â�styled phalanstery, a semi-Â� serious artistic society that she maintained in Zakopane over the summer.238 Delighted with her makeshift new community, Modrzejewska began ponÂ� derÂ�ing America as a possible next venue a half-Â�year before Karol was caricatured in the Variety Theatre and her young artist admirers were enlivening her salon. She was learning English from Wolska—an OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1874 letter to her teacher showed off what she had retained—and the two together contemplated the prospect of founding a real artists’ phalanstery in the United States.239 As early as summer 1874, Modrzejewska was thinking in quite concrete terms of a state of her own. The exotic frontier of America also beckoned to Modrzejewska from the pages of the WarÂ�saw press. Kalikst Wolski’s tales in the 1860s were followed in the 1870s by articles on AmeriÂ�can politics and society and illustrations of cowboys, Indians, and buffalo hunts in America’s Wild West. By 1875, the journalist Julian Horain, resettled in California, was sending first his Letters from America and then his Letters from California to the Polish Gazette. Ho-

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rain would prove an important contact for Modrzejewska and her traveling party once they reached California. Press interest in America and Modrzejewska’s tentative travel plans dovetailed ideally when her old friend Edward Leo, the editor of the Polish Gazette, decided to hire her new friend Sienkiewicz as the paper’s roving correspondent in United States. 240 Over the course of 1875, Modrzejewska, Chłapowski, Dolcio, Modrzejewska’s quartet of fellow artists, the Wolskis, Chłapowski’s relative Lucian Paprocki (a caricaturist), and Chłapowski’s 1863 comrade-Â�in-Â�arms Julian SypniewÂ� ski (an agronomist) batted about the idea of emigrating to America. In her memoirs, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska reenacts one such conversation on a “winter evening in 1875” during which the assembled talk of the upcoming Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, peruse maps, and swap tall tales about the flora, fauna, and ready fortune of California—about cactus fruit, coffee growing wild, rattleÂ�snakes, grizzly bears, pumas, and the gold one can dig out “almost everywhere.”241 She admits the wild idealistic dreams they entertained (“all sorts of things except what really was in store”) and treats her readers to her own derivative vision of utopia: “Oh, but to cook under the sapphire-Â�blue sky in the land of freedom! What joy!” I thought. “To bleach linen at the brook like the maidens of Homer’s ‘Iliad’! After the day of toil, to play the guitar and sing by moonlight, to recite poems, or to listen to the mocking-Â�bird!” . . . Yes, the prospect of a simple life, so mocked at to-Â�day, had for us the charm of a revivifying novelty. It seemed like being born again. 242

The composition, destination, and purpose of their party were much discussed and subject to constant change. The group expanded for a time to include Modrzejewska’s mother and brother Szymon as well as the writer Ignacy Â� Maciejowski, their old friend from KraÂ�ków, who corresponded at length with Chłapowski about the trip from his current residence in London. The site for the group’s resettlement shifted from Texas, Wolski’s old stomping grounds, to a more alluring and better advertised California. The group’s agenda was constantly adjusted to accommodate individual drives and desires. Whereas Modrzejewska harbored dreams of an English-Â�language stage career and an artists’ phalanstery, the fourteen-Â�year-Â�old Dolcio longed to view America’s great engineering feats, and Chłapowski “conceived the idea of forming a colony in California on the model of Brook Farm.”243 America presented ChłaÂ� powski with a golden opportunity for remaking what had become a subsidiÂ� ary life; its frontier excited his poÂ�litiÂ�cal dreaming. He had money of his own


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to invest in a small California utopia—an inheritance after the death of his youngest brother Alojzy in 1875—and he applied himself to its planning, consulting with the others about everything from viticulture to silkworm farming.244 At last Chłapowski could play the grand benefactor, and, if the colony supported them as he hoped, he might succeed as his family’s long-Â�term provider.245 The colony’s fate would play out in California, but Modrzejewska’s hopes for a phalanstery were dashed already in Poland. None of her painters could commit to the trip. Chełmoński’s fortuitous sale of a few pictures financed his relocation in Paris, where his mentor Godebski helped him build his career. 246 Neither Chmielowski nor Witkiewicz had the money to travel and would not accept Chłapowski’s temporary largesse. Of her constant quartet, only Sienkiewicz could afford the voyage, courtesy of the Polish Gazette, and she was to be denied the pleasure of his company until she and Chłapowski landed in Anaheim. Both the journalist and the agronomist Sypniewski were dispatched to America in February 1876, seven months before the main party, to scout their way. The other members of the group, apart from Chłapowski and Dolcio, were more liabilities than inspiring fellow travelers: Mrs. Sypniewska and her two children (the secÂ�ond child was born just before the trip), Paprocki, and a sixteen-Â�year-Â�old peasant nursemaid. Writing to Sienkiewicz in mid-Â�June, Modrzejewska conveyed her frustration as they waited for Mrs. SypÂ�niewska’s overdue baby and shared with him the deflating news that their onetime partner Chełmoński had sold two paintings for 18,000 francs and was “becoming civilized” in Paris.247 The preempting of one dream, however, did not affect Modrzejewska’s other plan to internationalize her career. In Memories and Impressions she is careful to downplay that ambition, lest she seem selfish and unpatriotic. When WarÂ�saw friends encouraged her to consider an AmeriÂ�can debut, she confessed the renewed “wild hope of playing Shakespeare in his own language,” only to renounce it in deference to “our friends’ plans.”248 Yet a May 1876 letter from Maciejowski reflected that “the splendid project” of her performance on the AmeriÂ�can stage was very much under discussion. The ever-Â�enthusiastic Maciejowski approved “their intentions for [Maurice] Neville”—ostensibly their utilization of his contacts—and urged them to generate the sort of “humbug” (he uses the English word) that will pitch Modrzejewska successfully to the Yankees. He offered Chłapowski a sample puff piece about his illustrious wife

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which could be sent without delay to the New York Herald, suggesting that they use aristocratic titles to impress royalty-Â�admiring AmeriÂ�cans. He also implied that Modrzejewska, like Neville, should look up Mr. Longfellow. 249 As ludicrous as Maciejowski’s recommendations might have seemed to the party in spring 1876, they contained just the sort of advice Modrzejewska’s AmeriÂ�can agents would regularly dispense over the coming decades. Maciejowski’s reply underscored how keen Modrzejewska and Chłapowski were to explore her career options as an integral part of their adventure. A culturally wide-Â�open America would serve Modrzejewska as well, if not better, than it did her “colonist” husband. America would not provide a glamorous natuÂ�ral backdrop for her phalanstery, yet it would free her as an artist from the repellent limitations and constant pubÂ�lic scrutiny of the state of the stars. Success on the remote AmeriÂ�can stage, Modrzejewska shrewdly reasoned, could lead to success in what were for her more artistically meaningful places—the London stage, certainly, where Shakespeare was best played, or back home, where international fame could render her close to omnipotent in the theater and society. Modrzejewska likely anticipated this leverage as she bade her pubÂ�lic farewell to WarÂ�saw in June 1876. To Mukhanov’s dismay, she negotiated a year-Â� long leave from the WarÂ�saw theaters and then proceeded to give final performances in WarÂ�saw and Lwów, the better to make her audiences appreciate her loss. Modrzejewska’s WarÂ�saw performance, held June 21 in the city’s Summer Theatre, packaged a composite of her greatest hits: the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, Ophelia’s mad scene from Hamlet, Maidens’ Vows in its entirety, and the final act of Adrianna. She seemed to be taking professional inventory for the journey ahead. A review in the WarÂ�saw Courier reported her audience’s overwhelming response, with innumerable curtain calls, and thus described the weeping Modrzejewska’s exit through an adoring crowd: “A great many of the audience members formed a double line stretching as far as the gate to the Garden and waited for Madame Modrzejewska to emerge. As soon as she appeared, she was greeted with shouts, heartfelt wishes, and cries of adoration. ‘Come back to us!’ they cried. ‘Come back as soon as possible, for without you we’ll be sad and lonely!’â†œ”250 A little over three weeks later, on 13 July 1876, after four guest performances in Lwów and farewell trips to KraÂ�ków and Karol’s family in Poznań, Modrzejewska’s nine-Â�person party stood aboard the German steamship Donau in the port of Bremen and waved good-Â�bye to three of Karol’s brothers. Her


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recollection of the moment is purposefully upbeat: “After taking most affectionate leave of those three dear, brave young men with whom we had long chats about our future prospects,—and after having written numerous letters to our families and friends,—on a bright summer morning, full of good hopes and cheerful spirit, we sailed into the great Unknown.”251 Thus departed the provincial “upstart” from KraÂ�ków who had conquered the fortress of the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theatres and reigned as the greatest and best-Â�publicized star in the state of the stars. Like so many immigrants to the United States, Modrzejewska left her homeland to make a new life in the New World, although hers was a provisional venture. Having exhausted the opportunities of the WarÂ�saw stage, she sought to build an international career featuring repertoire of her own choice. Like her young artist-Â�comrades, she longed for a freer, more supportive working context. Having endured the scrutiny and abuse of a WarÂ�saw star’s pubÂ�l ic life, she was desperate for a place “inaccessible to human curiosity” where her family members could pursue their dreams and she could play the lady unafraid of pubÂ�lic slander. Indeed, she seemed initially content to suspend her career for the sake of that oasis. Insofar as she could imagine, Modrzejewska hoped to be professionally independent and socially inviolate in America, at least for the time it took to prepare for her next move.

4

(

A Colonial Party and the California Dream From Tou r ist to Sett l er Modrzejewska traveled without her phalanstery in July 1876, but she greatly relished her leisure time, distance from the Polish stage, and the sea’s hypnotizing Romantic landscape. Her transatlantic diary is happily self-Â�indulgent: Is there no regret for my country left in me? Or is it that the ocean, with its immortal beauty, has filled my soul to the very brim, leaving no room for anything else? I do not care to analyze the present state of my mind; I only know it is made of happiness and peace. My soul, lulled by that strange nurse, is dreaming. What are these dreams? Ah, there are no words in human language to express them. The thoughts are as unseizable as birds in their flight, like clouds which scarcely take shape ere they change into mist and melt away. This is bliss! A sharp and fragrant air strokes my brow: I take it in with full lungs—I nearly faint away under its caressing breath, drawing from it strength and health.1

Modrzejewska’s passage to America did not transform her into the poet or playwright she sometimes desired to be, but it made of her an inveterate letter writer to ever more distant family and friends. The actress had to transfer her performance to paper and to play the right roles before various correspondents. Her 13 August 1876 letter to Witkiewicz, written from New York after they had toured the city and visited Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, obliged the painter and critic with local snapshots and acerbic judgments. “New York,” she declared, “is a monstrous, untidy bazaar. The buildings are large, but without style. Brick or chocolate houses (the latter called

A Col on i a l Pa rt y a n d t h e Ca li for n i a Dr e a m

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here brownstone), with green window-Â�shades, look simply awful. The whole city is as ugly as can be. But what makes the streets look still more unattracÂ� tive are the soles of men’s boots in the windows. Imagine that men have here the singular custom of sitting in rocking-Â�chairs and putting their feet up on the window sills.”2 With the same audience awareness, Modrzejewska conjured up lush pictures of jungle flora for the old Romantic poet Kornel Ujejski as her party traveled across Panama, evoking for him a “living bower of lianas” fit for a water nymph, a “wreath of blue butterflies circling the shore,” and a black woman resembling a bronze Greek sculpture in her beauty and dignity. 3 The master plan of Modrzejewska’s debut on the AmeriÂ�can stage never strayed far from her dreaming mind, as her correspondence and insistent patronage of New York theaters clearly indicated. In the same letter in which she complained to Witkiewicz about ugly New York, she acknowledged that “when I get mastery over the new language, I may come here; for, however unattractive New York seems to me, it is the metropolis of America, and it will give me pleasure to conquer it.”4 Yet she and her husband and son were enjoying their vacation immensely and making their way west with much pleasure and little hurry. In lieu of racing to California on the newly completed cross-Â� country railroad, they opted for a slower, cheaper steamer down to Panama, a two-Â�hour trip across the Isthmus, and then a three-Â�week passage on The Constitution, “a very old side-Â�wheeler,” up the coast to San Francisco. 5 An accident on their first ship, The Colon out of New York, delayed them another week when the bursting of the ship’s main steam pipe meant they had to be towed back to their starting point, an inconvenience tempered by “a champagne dinner every day while we remained in dock.”6 They traveled on unfazed. Modrzejewska’s 8 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1876 letter to her mother dwelled contentedly on their daily routine of eating, napping, chatting, strolling the deck, and sky watching. Until her “colonial party,” as she dubbed them, reached their presumably final destination in Anaheim, where Chłapowski and Sypniewski could commence being California farmers, the actress easily slipped into the lifestyle and point of view of an affluent, educated tourist, a refined lady whose touring was strictly a private affair. Modrzejewska’s projected class and manners thoroughly distinguished her from the typical Polish immigrant to the United States in the 1870s. Her memoirs delicately distance her from familiar immigrant types among the miserable third-Â�class passengers on the Donau. Modrzejewska professes disgust

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for the heartless sport of her first-Â�class peers as they toss coins and oranges to the “pitiful crowd” below, even as she admires the music and dancing performed by “the aristocracy of the steerage.” 7 In either case, she depicts herself literally looking down on those who may be her poor compatriots, the peasants whom Sienkiewicz profiled in his travelogue, Portrait of America, as immigrants “come for bread” (za chlebem). 8 By the late 1870s, Sienkiewicz could generalize that most of the Polish immigrants in the United States “left [their home] country not to realize poÂ�litiÂ�cal ideals, but to feed themselves.” After attending a mass at a Polish church in New York, Chłapowski likewise estimated that four-Â�fifths of the Polish immigrants there were peasants, who were shepherded, unfortunately, by “too few good Polish priests.”9 These immigrants’ airless, cramped westward passage below deck contrasted grimly with Modrzejewska’s weeks of eating, relaxing, and dreaming in first-Â�class accommodations. Modrzejewska and Chłapowski, unlike their poor countrymen, could afford to tour America’s big cities before settling down to work. Edwin Booth’s performances were reason enough for the couple to stop over in San Francisco while the rest of the party, including Dolcio, were packed off to their new home in Anaheim.10 In contrast to New York’s “monstrous bazaar,” with its ugly brownstones, “millions of omnibuses,” and “mania for signboards,” San Francisco delighted the couple with its freshness, liveliness, and comfortable wooden structures and sidewalks.11 They discovered there a diverse popuÂ�lace, where “you could hear every European language spoken on the street.”12 Perhaps most importantly, the small, active Polonia which embraced them in San Francisco was well distinguished by class, profession, and poÂ�l itiÂ� cal adventure, as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska carefully recalls in her memoirs. Captain Rudolf Korwin Piotrowski was a veteran of the 1830 uprising; Captain Kazimierz Bielawski, a respected engineer in the city, had quit Austrian Poland after “the terrible massacre of landowners in 1846”; Captain Lessen “had fought under Kossuth, in the Hungarian revolution in 1848”; and Dr. Pawlicki, once a surgeon in the Russian navy, “had left the service during the [anti-Â�Russian] insurrection of 1863.”13 The journalist Julian Horain, a relative newcomer, had similarly welcomed Sienkiewicz and Sypniewski earlier in the year. As the actress intimated in a letter home, this little group lobbied hard for her return to the stage, while she demurred, thinking “only of rest.”14 But she was already availing herself of the services of General Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski, who had earned his title serving the Union in the AmeriÂ�can Civil War, for this


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prominent immigrant “took a more lively interest than any other of my Polish friends in my future dramatic career in this country—at least he was better acquainted with theatrical people and things, and together with his friend, [California] Governor Salomon, was later very active in my behalf.”15 At this point in her travels, Modrzejewska was to trade sightseeing for farmÂ�ing, assuming some of her immigrant compatriots’ hardships as she supÂ� ported her husband’s hopeful experiment. Booth’s fine performances as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar tempted her to act otherwise.16 In these early days, Krzyżanowski engineered her introduction to John McCullough, then the actor-Â�manager of the California Theatre where Booth was performing, and a proposal that she play Â�Ophelia in Polish to Booth’s Hamlet “was discussed seriously” until Booth declined, pleadÂ�ing fatigue.17 The Polish star was but temporarily deflected from an AmeriÂ�can debut in autumn 1876 by insufficient English, family loyalty, and her delusional dream of “rest.” She entered her AmeriÂ�can immigrant life as more charmed opportunist than committed pioneer. By the end of OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, Modrzejewska and Chłapowski had set off for Anaheim, California’s “first successful co-Â�operative colony” established by industrious German immigrants in 1857.18 In scouting possible sites for their settlement in spring 1876, Sypniewski chose Anaheim, according to MoÂ� djeÂ�ska, “because of the German families he had met there. . . . He thought it would be easier to commence our ranch life among people with whom we might be able to talk.”19 Sypniewski had happened on a model agricultural community that improved on “the primitive economy of [California’s] bonanza ranches” with its well-Â�tended vineyards and orchards and orderly bourgeois lifestyle.20 Anaheim historian Mildred Yorba MacArthur reconstructs a prim model of this “Mother Colony,” describing the Germans’ neat little homes “surrounded by flowers and vegetable gardens” and the menfolk who ended their workday exercising in a gymnasium and participating in a Singing Society.21 Anaheim could boast a combined general store and post office, a hotel that served “as the focal point of all early social activity,” and a woman physician, Dr. Alice Boyd Higgins, who had accompanied her husband, Dr. W. H. Higgins, to his new practice in 1869.22 As promising as the community might have seemed to experienced farmers, it initially disenchanted Modrzejewska, fresh from an exhilarating San Francisco. She was relieved to be reunited with their party, which included Dolcio and her “sunburned, strong, and healthy” admirer Sienkiewicz, who

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San Francisco looking east from Russian Hill to Telegraph Hill and Yerba Buena Island, 1870s. San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library


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had managed to complete two more stories for his cycle Charcoal Sketches while he awaited his idol. But she was appalled by the small house and farm that Sypniewski and Sienkiewicz had rented for their experiment: “The commonplaceness of it all was painfully discouraging, and the front yard, with its cypresses, shaggy grass and flowers scattered at random, looked like a poorly kept small graveyard. The only redeeming point was the view of the mountains of the Sierra Madre to the north, and of the Santa Ana Range to the east.”23 In pleasant, prosaic Anaheim, the colonial party was reduced to close quarters, with the Sypniewski family installed in the largest bedroom, Modrzejewska and Chłapowski occupying the other bedroom, Dolcio assigned the parlor sofa and Anusia a nook in the kitchen, and Sienkiewicz and Â�Paprocki camped out in the tack room of the barn. The actress had experienced the crowded conditions of poverty in childhood, and Anaheim, despite its lovely climate and exotic vegetation, seemed a regression to that hard past rather than entry into the exotic pastoral idyll she had dreamed of in WarÂ�saw. After settling into their “commonplace” rental, the party took up the work of farming and housekeeping, recalling again some of the duties of her KraÂ� ków youth, although this time Modrzejewska stepped automatically into her mother’s shoes as mistress of the household. Most accounts of the colony emphasize in retrospect that its members were ill-Â�suited for manual labor and its failure a foregone conclusion. Charles de Kay characterized the group benignly as “children off for a grand holiday, not German immigrants.”24 Jeannette Gilder, De Kay’s sister-Â�in-Â�law, theater critic, and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska fan, repeated one of the actress’s more exaggerated “interview” versions of their venture in an 1886 sketch: They bought land, built a house, purchased cattle, hens and chickens and other necessities, and then swung hammocks under the trees, laid in a stock of cigarettes and waited for the crops to grow and for the cattle to multiply. As long as the money held out they lived a delightful life. Unfortunately, there is a limit to money, and before too long it was all gone and the little colony had to turn to work. This was too prosaic entirely for some of its members, and they continued to swing in the hammocks and smoke cigarettes while the others worked and waited upon them.25

In this interview, Gilder carefully singled out MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Chłapowski, and Dolcio as those who “worked and waited upon” the loafers lolling in their hamÂ� mocks. By the century’s end, after MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had become celebrity fodder for the press, a local California journalist spun out the story of the colony as a ridiculous tall tale, claiming it numbered thirty-Â�three members and citing lo-

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cal “reports” of the high-Â�spirited, inexperienced colonists “practicing WagÂ� ner” while their livestock died untended.26 For a very few weeks the colonists struggled to achieve a modest blend of Chłapowski’s and Modrzejewska’s communitarian visions, doing their share of physical work by day and cultivating the arts in the evening. The actress recalls that her “housekeeping days” commenced “at seven next morning” after their arrival, when she, “attired in one of my pretty aprons . . . brought from Europe,” made breakfast to order in the kitchen, preparing “tea, coffee, milk, chocolate, and wine-Â�soup.”27 Chłapowski confided in his brother Józef that Helena “had the most work” cooking and cleaning, “since [the maid] Â�A nusia was still of very little use, and Mrs Sypniewska offered little consolation or help.”28 He waxed more enthusiastic about his male colleagues, praising Sypniewski as the most active, the fifteen-Â�year-Â�old Dolcio as the most practical, and Sienkiewicz as the party’s reliable hunter. In contrast to later tales of their indolence, Chłapowski claimed that they amazed the locals with their industry, taking on the field work and laundry their neighbors hired Mexicans, Indians, and Chinese to do. In the evenings before they went early to bed, he asserted that they would “play music and read aloud.”29 His wife recalls these artistic evenings with more realistic detail: “My boy went to the piano to play one of Chopin’s waltzes,—he wanted to see if his fingers did not get stiff from the hoe,—and after supper Sienkiewicz, in spite of fatigue, read us one of his Charcoal Sketches.”30 Modrzejewska also traces the rapid disintegration of this routine for all the colonists excepting herself, Dolcio, and her husband, who was most invested, literally and psychologically, in this new life: “There was no system among our idealists; they worked or not, they discussed a great deal, they sometimes even quarrelled and then made up and hugged each other; in one word, they lived under a nervous tension which could not last long.”31 Chłapowski requested books from his brother Józef about beekeeping and chicken farming, but he had already written his brother Franciszek that Helena would be returning to San Francisco in a few weeks to study for her debut. 32 In her memoirs, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska narrates this decision more dramatically and definitively, announcing the resumption of her career as imperative for the colony’s welfare: “My husband had already spent $15,000, yet he was ready to sacrifice the last penny of his small remaining capital to keep up the colony. I could not allow that, and disclosed my plan of going to San Francisco in order to study English, and try to get on the stage.”33


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Despite the financial failure of their “bucolic fancy,” Modrzejewska and Chłapowski’s first sojourn in Anaheim forever enchanted them with SouthÂ� ern California, albeit in somewhat different ways, and shaped how they settled and were perceived as AmeriÂ�cans. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s offstage life in America unfolded, flourished, and at times suffered under the spell of the couple’s California dream. Their early experiences in and around Anaheim awakened their appreciation for California’s gorgeous nature and healthful climate. As Modrzejewska studied English and lobbied for an audition in San Francisco during the spring and summer of 1877, Chłapowski remained in the south, tethered to his investment (at this point a 47.7-acre ranch) and those dependent on him financially. When Sienkiewicz decamped for points north of San Francisco after Modrzejewska had departed (the star and her journalist champion would be reunited at her August 1877 debut), Chłapowski, Paprocki, and, for a time, Dolcio left the farm to Sypniewski’s management and roughed it in the mountainous wilderness to the east, where Chłapowski fell more deeply in love with the possibilities of living there. In spring 1878, the Anaheim ranch was resold to its original owners and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s star earnings paid for the Sypniewski family’s return passage to Poland. Anusia was hired as nanny to Dr. Pawlicki’s children in San Francisco, and Paprocki remained behind in America as well, eventually succumbing to insanity and dying in an asylum. 34 A N e w Ca li for n i a Dr e a m The failed Anaheim experiment functioned as an important rite of passage for Modrzejewska and Chłapowski, not only testing their limited capacity for “farming toil and household drudgery,” but also reinforcing their identity as educated tourists and aesthetes. As Modrzejewska confessed to Â�Stefania Â�Leowa, her stint as farmer’s wife “might have become insufferable had I not been able to breathe this glorious air of California, or look at the blue mountains and send them my greetings every morning and evening.”35 Like increasing numbers of affluent travelers and intellectuals in their day, they came to value California as captivating scenery and a recuperative environment. Historian Earl Pomeroy defines the westbound tourist in the late nineteenth century as a conservator rather than a homesteader, as someone “who looked backward on the Wild West as something to be enjoyed before it disappeared rather than forward on it as something he must embrace and conquer in order to survive or to serve the national destiny.”36 Much as AmeriÂ�cans were drawn

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west by accounts such as Charles Nordhoff’s 1874 California for Health, Plea sure, and Residence: A Book for Traveller and Settlers, so this Polish party was attracted by the salutary travel sketches of Julian Horain and, more exclusively, Sienkiewicz’s glowing accounts of California as a gentle paradise. 37 California historian Kevin Starr argues that this sort of literary tourism fomented actual tourism by the early 1870s as writers such as Nordhoff, Horace Greeley, and Bayard Taylor celebrated the state just as it was, encouraging visitors to relate “in a new manner to California, in enjoyment, not exploitation or the throes of finding a living.”38 Sienkiewicz, who had preceded the group by five months to write his east-Â� west journey for the Polish Gazette, became a literary and an actual California tourist simultaneously. His own preconceptions of America had been formed by his favorite authors, James Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte, and he was eager to meet their fictions in the flesh. 39 According to his sketches, Sienkiewicz, like Modrzejewska, was repelled by an ugly, commerce-Â�driven New York and further disappointed by the money-Â�g rubbing, uncouth Yankees and ignoble Indians he encountered in his travels. Though he condemned the white settlers’ extermination of the Native AmeriÂ�cans, he had to admit that “the Sioux warriors did not correspond entirely to the mental picture of Indians which I had acquired from my reading of Cooper, Bellamare, and others. Upon closer inspection, they appeared shabby, extremely dirty, and Â�slovenly.”40 Sienkiewicz only happened on fiction-Â�worthy specimens of AmeriÂ�can heroes among the high-Â�country squatters in California who chose to live against the stunning backdrop of the state’s inland wilderness. Abandoning a tamed Anaheim before his party arrived, Sienkiewicz trekked into the Santa Ana Mountains, where he made the close acquaintance of Jack Harrison, a robust, honorable, tough-Â�spirited, yet nature-Â�loving squatter, who served him as guide and caretaker and figured in his sketches as the epitome of healthy AmeriÂ�can masculinity. 41 With his Portrait of America, Sienkiewicz anticipated such AmeriÂ�can conservators of a character-Â�building Wild West as Theodore Roosevelt, novelist Owen Wister, and the editor-Â�activist Charles Fletcher LumÂ�mis, who all championed the West’s rugged virtues. 42 Just as the Polish tourist prescribed WestÂ�ern manliness as an antidote to European neurosis and anemia, so Roosevelt would promote “the strenuous life” he lived on his WestÂ�ern ranch as “the antithesis of overcivilized decadence.”43 Sienkiewicz’s inland trek led him to the stunning homestead of John E. Pleasants and his Mexican-Â�Indian wife, Donna Maria Refugio, a couple who


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exercised considerable local influence through their wealth and Donna Refugio’s reputation as a wise counselor with many family connections. Intrigued by the fact that the Pleasants lived in the open air, with just a roof for shelter, the Polish writer admired the magnificent setting for their wall-Â�less home: First seen by moonlight, the landscape as a whole seemed to me very Romantic, as did most of the squatter homesteads set up in the canyons. A pair of upper and lower valleys and an encircling ridge resembling an amphitheater created the impression of a giant Roman circus or a kind of staircase. At the stairs’ foot a stream murmured along a stony corridor leading the way to the Pleasants’ dwelling. . . . Moonlight drenched that entire amphitheater of hills and the arena of the valley. . . . One could imagine that the games had just ended: Caesar had departed, the crowds had scattered into the city streets, and in the arena’s bloody sand lay the eternally sleeping bodies of the gladiators. . . . Sometimes a gorgeous set design can create such an illusion, and at moments it seemed to me that I saw before me the most beautiful stage setting I had ever seen. 44

Modrzejewska fully shared Sienkiewicz’s Romantic sensibility and love of the wild, and subsequently sampled his favorite views. Their party sought respite from farm life by exploring the surrounding countryside, viewing the blue Pacific from the otherwise desolate outpost of Anaheim Landing, where the actress threw herself on the sand and sobbed from homesickness, and reÂ� tracÂ�ing Sienkiewicz’s journey “to the Santiago Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains, where our new friends, the Pleasants, lived.”45 The Pleasants had extended them an invitation to visit in person, and while Modrzejewska found the Anglo-Â�Mexican couple curious and sympathetic, she muses in her memoirs that “we had not the faintest idea then how closely this visit was connected with our final settlement in California.”46 The beauty of the new landscapes she beheld—the charming “Picnic Grounds” with “limpid brook,” “green meadÂ�ows,” and “old live oaks overhung with wild grapevines”—Â�Â�revived in her the pleasure of being a tourist and a dreamer once more. 47 In her memoirs, the actress details the Pleasants’ open-Â�a ir household, with its “rustic sofa, table, and chairs” forming a combined “outdoor dining and living room” inside an arbor, and “a kitchen conÂ�sistÂ�ing of an iron stove under the shelter of widely-Â�spread oak branches with pantry shelves built in the cavity of the same tree.” Like Sienkiewicz, she was swept away by the theatricality of the landscape. Here California utterly gratified her, the unhappy farmer’s wife and “resting” actress, with a gorgeous natural set. But unlike the wandering writer, she invokes Shakespearean drama rather than ancient Rome to do it justice, and discloses how she and Chłapowski return to make

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this “fantastic stage scenery” their own: “A few years later we bought this place, and I called it ‘Arden,’ because, like the ‘Forest of Arden’ in As You Like It, everything that Shakespeare speaks of was on the spot,—oak trees, running brooks, palms, snakes, and even lions,—of course California lions,— really pumas. 48 The Pleasants’ natural amphitheater became the couple’s AmeriÂ�can home ten years later, once the actress had earned enough to purchase it and she, her husband, and now-Â�grown son had decided on the United States, for diverse reasons, as their primary place of settlement. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski’s abiding reputation as first settlers of Orange County was cemented by this purchase. But their attachment to and identification with Southern California really began with their colorful failure as California farmer-Â�homesteaders and their first forays as Southern California tourists. Modrzejewska and ChłaÂ� powski had come to America to homestead first and to storm the AmeriÂ�can stage second, yet they very soon discovered that these ambitions worked for them only and always in reverse. Owning a large, lovely ranch for their off-Â� seasons meant that they had to project a stable affluence which in fact waxed and waned with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s earnings. The actress had to work hard to belong to “a population of educated, financially secure AmeriÂ�cans who came and stayed precisely because they liked the climate and the scenery.”49 Th e Sett l er on t h e Ca lifor n i a Stage Fortunately, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could strive for both affluence and respectability in a state that the Gold Rush had opened up to adventurers, foreigners, and entertainers. Prospecting for gold in the 1850s and then silver in the late 1860s brought all types to California, primarily through the gateway of San Francisco. As Starr observes: “Because the situation was so undefined, the AmeriÂ� can presence itself so recent, foreigners became more co-Â�colonists than alien immigrants. With no industrial economy, developed as in the East and in AmeriÂ�can hands, California made available a middle ground where foreigners and AmeriÂ�cans interacted to their mutual transformations.”50 The overÂ�whelmÂ� ing German presence in Anaheim stood as a case in point. This orderly settlement absorbed contingents of Mexicans, Native AmeriÂ�cans, Irish, French, Chinese, African AmeriÂ�cans, Polish Jews, and an occasional Russian, as ChłaÂ� powski informed his sister back in Poznań. 51 The inland wilderness, where Sienkiewicz had discovered the ideal AmeriÂ�can man, was also home to quest-


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ing foreigners. Writing his wife from his temporary retreat near the Pleasants’ homestead, Chłapowski amused her with a sketch of another odd neighbor, “a burly Russian with an immense shaggy beard . . . who calls himself Williams.” This foreign hermit had built his log cabin with his own hands and displayed for them the skins of a mountain lion and the many wildcats he had killed. 52 Up in San Francisco, Modrzejewska reunited with a “distinguished” Polonia, itself representative of California’s ethnic heterogeneity, and experienced a refined, “intrinsically international” city intent on enjoying itself. LongÂ�time resident and memoirist Amelia Ransome Neville (1837–1927) celebrated San Francisco as “The Fantastic City” and pronounced her contemporaries “a pleasure-Â�loving people” possessed of “Old World sophistication” and international color: “Mexicans with scarlet sashes [and] striped serapes” and “Orientals in blue blouses.”53 Neville’s was a post–Gold Rush society, yet the effect of that human juggernaut had left her city’s residents with abiding habits of restless pubÂ�lic life and conspicuous consumption of food, drink, and assorted entertainments. 54 Clarence E. Edwards traced the richness of the restaurant scene to a peculiarly San Franciscan worldliness: “It is but a step across a street from America into Japan, then another step to China. Cross another street and you are in Mexico, close neighbor to France. Around the corner lies Italy, and from Italy you pass to Lombardy, and on to Greece. So it goes until one feels that he has been around the world in an afternoon.”55 San Francisco’s different ethnic groups did not always coexist peacefully, particularly in 1877, the year of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s debut. Over that summer, the Irish populist demagogue Dennis Kearney organized a Workingman’s Trade and Labor Union, delivering incendiary speeches against the capitalists and the Chinese to those poor laborers and unemployed who loitered in the sand lots near city hall. When the “sandlotters” attacked individual Chinese and set fire to some of their businesses in late July, a vigilance committee of over 6,000 people swiftly formed to disperse the rioters. 56 But even as ethnic and class tensions sometimes erupted into violence, the city’s nouveau riche and middle class were steadily rebuilding the city on a grand scale and patronizing its many entertainments. Neville remarked on this disparity: “When I look back across the pageant of the years there is an especial brightness and touch of the bizarre about that sequence of the late sixties, the seventies and eighties. In it was the reign of the bonanza kings who built their palaces on Nob Hill, where Jim Flood’s thirty-Â�thousand dollar brass fence glittered in the sun. . . . An incredible period it was with its lavish expenditures and sudden

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luxury veneered over many crude ways of living.”57 Elsewhere she chronicled the “brief and brilliant” reign of William Ralston, who co-Â�founded with D. O. Mills the Bank of California, kept an estate south of the city “like a prince of the Renaissance,” and helped build the luxurious Palace Hotel (1875), the Grand Opera House (1876), and the magnificent, state-Â�of-Â�the-Â�art California Theatre (1869) before his bank collapsed and he perished the same day in a swimming accident off North Beach in 1875. 58 The same disparity between “crude ways” and “lavish expenditures” applied to the city’s entertainments. The adventurous Mexican poÂ�litiÂ�cal exile Guillermo Prieto, who declared Californians “the greatest enthusiasts for pubÂ� lic diversions,” traversed the entertainment spectrum, noting with interest the fancy whorehouses on Dupont Street where the prostitutes had their own display windows and named doors; the underground musical bars and dance halls visible through windows built into the sidewalk; and San Francisco’s very impressive theater scene dominated by the California. 59 By 1876 two more major theaters had opened in the city—Baldwin’s Academy of Music and Wade’s Opera House, built to seat 2,500 and later enlarged. 60 San Francisco had become a lucrative embarkation or ending point for star tours, especially after the completion of the railroad, with a local audience avid for the major players of their day. Neville named a succession of stars who came west to perform: “the whimsical Rip Van Winkle of Joseph Jefferson; Clara Morris, lachrymose and appealing with a white camellia in her flowing hair; Matilda Heron, a more beautiful Camille who in her last days nearly starved to death; and lovely Adelaide Neilson.”61 Another longtime resident, Harriet Lane Levy, remembered how her Jewish immigrant father found in the theater “the richness of the living denied him at home”: “Long before the blur of strange sounds broke into meaning for him, he was climbing to the gallery nightly, absorbing the new tongue in rolling phrases saturated with feeling. The stage became book, club, and society to him. Over a lifetime if a famous actor came to the city, Father disappeared each night after dinner as to a rendezvous.”62 Encouraged by San Franciscans’ “impetuous love of theater and cuisine,” a number of the city’s ambitious artists had organized by the 1870s to be taken more seriously at home and at large. 63 Theater historian Edmond M. Gagey credits John McCullough and Lawrence Barrett with raising actors’ local status through their administrative skills and social circulation. He remarks on the formation of athletic and social clubs for and by players, “among them


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the California Boating Club and the Benevolent Protective Order of Seals.”64 Actors also benefited from the establishment of the Bohemian Club in April 1872, which, according to founding member Edward Bosqui, “was organized for the association of gentlemen connected professionally with literature, art, music, and the drama, and also those who by reason of their love or appreciation of art might be deemed eligible.”65 Renowned for its “evenings of conversation and conviviality . . . called High Jinks” and its “midsummer jinks” of entertainment-Â�filled camping on the Russian River, the Bohemian Club not only proved to distinguished travelers that “all the elements of culture and refinement” flourished in San Francisco “at the confines of civilization,” but also that visiting artists, including actors, were welcomed into their midst. 66 Actresses as well as actors were sometimes admitted to the club. Modrzejewska was invited to one of its “ladies’ receptions” in spring 1877, months before she proved her talent on the San Francisco stage. In a 27 April letter to Faleńska she praised the club as “one good thing” in a city she admitted she liked less than she did during her first visit, for she now felt repelled by the locals’ obsession with “what one is worth” and a “financial aristocracy . . . composed of the crudest and least enlightened types.” Modrzejewska had a wonderful time at the club, with its magnificent suite of rooms, portrait gallery, library, reading room, and fine restaurant, though she grew a bit bored with the “great many more speeches and readings than music and song during this soiree.”67 The Bohemian Club pledged the Polish actress their enthusiastic support and patronage for her future endeavors. 68 In later years, once she was an established star, the club hosted dinners for her “and Count Bożenta,” as Neville recalled, as well as a breakfast for Sarah Bernhardt. 69 Well-Â�met by San Francisco’s culture and society, Modrzejewska nonetheless approached its stage at first as an immigrant settler, albeit one from the upper class. Her desire to perform in English, with as little accent as she could manage, already distinguished her from most foreign touring stars. With her characteristic all-Â�or-Â�nothing attitude, Modrzejewska vowed to her mother a little over a month before her debut: “I want in every respect to be irreproachable insofar as this is possible, and that’s why I’m hesitating until I’ve mastered English. I don’t want the pubÂ�l ic to see me as a foreigner, but as an actress from some English province.” 70 She had difficulty finding an apt successor to her tutor Anna Wolska. She hired and then fired a teacher whose English had a strong German accent, ignored the advice of Captain Piotrowski, who visited frequently and, according to her husband, “spoke six or seven languages—

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all of them badly,” and finally discovered an unlikely instructor in a young woman named Jo Tucholsky who happened to be her neighbor.71 Tucholsky, a Polish Jewish immigrant who had come to America when she was four years old, became the actress’s lifelong friend and a teacher who worked for love rather than pay.72 In Jo Tucholsky, Modrzejewska had acquired an extraordinary combination of instructor, companion, and champion who drilled her new Â�pupil from morning until night, even when they attended the theater: “All the time she compelled me to speak English by not answering my German or French questions until I translated them into English.” 73 Tucholsky essentially joined the family after Chłapowski and Dolcio had spent six weeks with Modrzejewska in the city. Dolcio, who had AmeriÂ�canized his first name to Ralph, stayed on and became Tucholsky’s second, quicker student. The devoted young teacher patiently “corrected every wrong pronunciation and accentuation” as the actress began the enormous task of reciting and memorizing entire plays in English.74 Tucholsky also read with Modrzejewska at her audition. During these tense, poverty-Â�dogged months in early 1877, Modrzejewska admitted that she “had to pawn her jewelry and lace” and sometimes “went to bed hungry.” 75 She reverted to the tireless labor of her early years in the profession, preparing herself all over again for the stage with the help of family and friends, although now those friends included influential local fans and an immensely talented reporter waiting in the wings. The one family member conspicuously absent at her debut was Chłapowski, who stayed put in SouthÂ� ern California because of a “bad fall.” 76 Viewed in retrospect, their accidental separation illustrated just what was at stake for the couple then and over the long term: Modrzejewska’s success on the boards was imperative for the ransom of their California dream. Her return to the theater from the position of private citizen first hindered her audition and then enhanced her publicity. When she presented herself to Barton Hill, the California’s stage manager in McCullough’s absence, Modrzejewska soon realized that he had rejected her automatically as a non-Â� professional, self-Â�deluded “Madame la Comtesse”: “From what he said further, in the form of good advice to give up my ‘fancy,’ I understood that he had doubts as to my being an actress at all, and supposing he had before him only an amateur stagestruck society woman, he tried to get out of this difficult situation as smoothly as possible.” 77 Her successful audition before Hill constituted her hardest test in America, which she passed in her sheer fury


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“to crush the Philistine”: “Poor, dear Mr. Hill, who was only doing his duty as a cautious manager, did not suspect these antagonistic feelings, which put me on my mettle from the start and made me deliver my very first speeches with so much intensity and realism that I myself was startled at my new intonations. I was sure of victory from the very beginning of the rehearsal.” 78 As she played the scene, Modrzejewska spied Hill waving his white handkerchief in helpless surrender. Post-Â�debut, the actress made light of Hill’s misperception in one of her first interviews in the San Francisco Daily Morning Call: “â†œ‘They thought,’ said the lady in conversation the other day, speaking in her uncertain English, and laughing low all the while, ‘they thought I was debutante; I who have studied my art in Europe; but they do not think so now.’” 79 Now her stint as a California settler made good copy, qualifying her, in contrast to AmeriÂ�can professional peers and foreign touring stars, as a bona fide lady, another would-Â�be California colonist. Her two-Â�week debut from 20 August to 31 August 1877 as “Helena MoÂ�djeÂ� ska, Countess Bożenta” and her return engagement in late NoÂ�vemÂ�ber, after a tour including Virginia City and several California towns, consolidated her position as a new star. By 26 August 1877, the Daily Alta California was already predicting MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s nationwide success: “A New York reputation may make a play, but a San Francisco reputation will make an actor in America.”80 The press reiterated her ranking as a great artiste of world-Â�class caliber and local drawing power, equating her with famous rivals ranging from Rachel Felix to Sarah Bernhardt, Adelaide Neilson to Clara Morris. 81 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was heralded as a consummate artist from a little-Â�known part of the world, an actress who “treads the stage as one born to it” and excels “in the expression of the finer emotions of the soul.”82 Like her WarÂ�saw critics, the San Francisco press deemed her strongest as the sympathetic, sensitive heroine in what they called “society drama,” as the victimized actress in Adrienne Lecouvreur and Marguerite Gauthier in The Lady of the Camellias, simply titled Camille on the AmeriÂ�can stage. 83 The reviews of her Juliet, performed in English during both engagements, lauded her grace and inventive stage business, but lamented her imperfect English in a Shakespeare play, where fluency and diction were of paramount importance. The San Francisco critics also echoed Kenig’s judgments of almost a decade before, pointing out, in the gentle formulation of the Daily Alta, that “tragedy is too heavy for the artiste.”84 Comparing MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s “aesthetic” Juliet to Neilson’s “sensuous” one, even the usually admiring Evening Post found the former to be lacking Neilson’s grand “physical force.”85

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Diverging in their assessments of her Juliet, the critics were unanimous in their praise for what the Evening Post commended as her “true womanhood”: “What we may all congratulate ourselves upon is that as artiste and woman she is wholly worthy.”86 While the San Francisco Daily Chronicle reviewer negatively credited her extraordinary reception to “womanly grace and sympathy” rather than talent, the Call predicted her continued success “in the plays of the translated French school,” given “her grace of movement, her striking physical expression of the passions and emotions, a womanly sensibility, if you will, that stage wear has not impaired.”87 The critics also agreed that MoÂ� djeÂ�ska, unlike her AmeriÂ�can competitors, achieved a “spirituelle Camille,” a new role tailor-Â�made for an actress specializing in fallen women redeemed: “She succeeds as far as will ever be possible in reconciling the many inconsistencies and unnatural qualities of the character; while, at the same time, she makes us almost forget the totally false sentiment and unquestionably bad moral purpose of the play.”88 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska made an even stronger impression on her audience in the wealthy isolated mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where the Call reported that “the people . . . indulged in a sort of mild craze about the Countess when she played Camille.”89 One such female fan enthused to Sienkiewicz as he was pasÂ�sÂ� ing through, following MoÂ�djeÂ�ska eastward: “We [in Virginia City] see all the greatest actresses. We’ve seen Janauschek, Clara Morris, Mrs. Bowers, and Miss Eytinge, but we’ve never seen anyone like MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and we never will again. She is so talented, so sweet, so ladylike. Such a thing has never happened on our stage.”90 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s first performances at the California Theatre likewise proved her success in exporting the high-Â�toned offstage persona that she had refined in WarÂ�saw. Out of ignorance or prejudice, San Francisco critics read her as European rather than Polish, valuing her as a lofty “exponent of the dramatic art of the European stage.”91 Though the Call advised her “to sink the title of ‘Countess’” since “the world of art is republican,” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s performances convinced the critic at the Evening Post that she was an aristocrat, an actress at ease and at home in high society. Her ability to “be” the aristocrat, first remarked in KraÂ�ków, then “naturalized” in WarÂ�saw, was simply an incontrovertible fact to AmeriÂ�cans who accepted her at face value: “The position which MoÂ�djeÂ�ska has held in Europe has introduced her to the highest circles of society, and enabled her to move on the stage not with the regulation theatrical stride, but with the artistic grace of a lady in her drawingroom.”92


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In her own assessment, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had conquered California temporarily. Writing to her mother several days after her first performance, she admitted: “My career here is not yet stabilized, for after two weeks of debut performances I need to prepare new roles more thoroughly. Only then can we declare victory.”93 Her short inland tour of “small towns of California and Nevada” arranged by Irish comedian James Ward did not “obtain handsome results,” although her secÂ�ond two weeks in San Francisco at the California were both lucrative and professionally useful, establishing her as a formidable Camille, a role long prohibited her in Poland. Nevertheless, California could only launch her on a necessarily itinerant AmeriÂ�can career, one both she and her husband envisioned as limited and prefatory to an engagement in England and a triumphant return to their native land. As soon as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska signed with Sargent on the morning of 21 August 1877, her attention strayed eastward. By the end of DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877, the Call was informing its readers of all the stops on her first East Coast tour: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Louisville.94 Her triumphs elsewhere did not mean that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska dismissed her California beginnings. She was quick to rebut a New York Tri bune interview appearing in the California press that “quoted” her negative comments on San Francisco audiences.95 In later years, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska praised California and particularly its press, which “generously encouraged my first efforts in a foreign language and thus opened for me the entrance to the English-Â�speaking stage.”96 Li v i ng t h e Ca li for n i a Dr e a m MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski invested the next five years testing the international limits of her career, establishing her star power throughÂ�out the United States, assaying and never quite achieving the conquest of the English stage in the early 1880s, and returning several times to Poland for guest performances and family visits. By 1882, however, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had come to terms with the fact that hers was to be a binational rather than international career, and that her fortune and most of her artistic dreams could only be realized in the United States. In the meantime, her son, Ralph, who had enrolled in 1878 in Paris’s famed National School of Bridges and Roads (L’École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées), viewed America, with its burgeoning opportunities for civil engineers, as his future professional home. Chłapowski, always more of

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a democrat than his middle-Â�class spouse, still cherished dreams of making a life in a socially fluid United States. It came as no surprise that on 4 July 1883, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s husband and son elected to become AmeriÂ�can citizens just before the trio embarked on a summer vacation out West. Chłapowski’s newly acquired citizenship automatically naturalized his wife as an AmeriÂ�can.97 At this point, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, too, was contemplating how she might settle in America as befit her star status. For an AmeriÂ�can actor of this era, home ownership signaled both earning power and a publicity-Â�worthy normalcy, a life off the road and among family. The at-Â�home actor represented a solid or leading citizen, if the property in question emulated an estate. As early as 1870, the actress and writer Olive Logan (1839–1909) cited the fine homes of tragedian Edwin Booth (1833–1893) and comedian Joseph Jefferson (1828– 1905) to argue the morality of the AmeriÂ�can theater before a still dubious pubÂ�lic. Logan singled out Jefferson’s “charming villa at Hoboken” as brick-Â� and-Â�mortar proof of the actor’s strong domestic ties and traditional values: “His house is a delightful combination of the old with the new, being an old-Â� time Jersey brown-Â�stone mansion, metamorphosed by a well-Â�known architect, under whose hands the house, outbuildings and grounds assumed most picturesque forms and faces.”98 By the 1880s, Jefferson and Booth had purchased summer homes as well— Jefferson his Crow’s Nest on Buzzards’ Bay and Booth an estate he christened Boothden near Newport.99 At such summer retreats a select group of AmeriÂ� can players consorted with major cultural and poÂ�litiÂ�cal figures as “fishing and duck-Â�hunting pals.”100 When Booth sold his in-Â�town and summer homes to buy the property for the Players Club in New York in 1888, he further advanced the actor into good society, combining his living quarters with a social club which aimed to elevate the actor’s social status and to inspire in all players a reverence for their vocation.101 In its membership and ambition, the Players outstripped the Lambs Club, the “first important New York theatrical club founded in 1875,” achieving “an atmosphere that was partly dignified gentlemen’s club and partly theatrical museum” in a four-Â�story residence remodeled by architect Stanford White and equipped with library, dining room, lounges, and a billiard room all “decorated with theatrical portraits and memorabilia.”102 By the turn of the century, the actor’s residence had become such a commonplace that publishers treated readers to lavish illustrated albums featuring star homes, photographing their grounds, interiors, and the respectable residents within.103


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In the summer of 1883, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska informed her New York friends that she and her husband and son were playing Western tourists once more, daydreaming and property hunting: “We have travelled a great deal and are more in love with this country than we ever were before. After having climed [sic] the Pike’s Peak in Colorado and visiting the Cave of the Winds (with its beautiful stalactites) and the Garden of the Gods, we started for New Mexico.”104 The family wended their way back to Canyon San Jago, the site of the Pleasants’ homestead in SouthÂ�ern California, and spent ten glorious days with Judge Richard Egan, the reputed “monarch” of San Juan Capistrano. Egan had enchanted MoÂ�djeÂ�ska with presumed relics of a Spanish California past and tales of a “beautiful and quaint old town which was still untouched by the feverous breath of civilization . . . where everybody lived and no one worked very hard—where fruit and songs were the nourishment of the young and old—where all things were calm and happy—where the sky never changes and the young people are always in love, often changing their mind, but never their sentiment.”105 Although Egan was reportedly “so afraid crowds will come and ruin the poetry of the old mission,” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s long-Â�cherished pastoral dream, authorized by a local source, might now be satisfied by buying real estate she could afford. A few weeks after her visit, Edward Bosqui encountered an ecstatic Judge who sang MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s praises and informed him “that she was so delighted with the country and climate that she intended purchasing land in the immediate vicinity and would make it her permanent home.”106 MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s longing for an “untouched” California of picturesque history and natuÂ�ral plenty anticipated the “mood of nostalgia and romance” propagated by Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona. This fiction, intended as a protest against European settlers’ mistreatment of Mission Indians, actually sentimentalized the mission “stage set” in lieu of criticizing its designers, evoking a mythical “SouthÂ�ern California suffused with the golden memory of pastoral days.”107 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska never did settle in Capistrano, though several years later she reported to an AmeriÂ�can friend that there was to be a new town built near it named MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, which she hoped would flourish since “it would be rather unpleasant for me to hear the people call ‘MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’ a deadbeat or something worse.”108 Nevertheless, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 1883 return visit to Santiago Canyon revived old attachments and decided the star and her husband to buy an undivided one-Â�half interest in the Pleasants’ 160-Â�acre ranch.109 Five years later, after she had married off Ralph and helped establish him in his AmeriÂ�can

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career, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski committed themselves to buy the entire ranch as well as an adjoining homestead for a grand total of $18,000.110 Once again they tried on the role of California rancher, yet this time they treated their purchase as a deserved, supportable indulgence rather than an essential livelihood. They were ready now to pursue the tourist variant of the California dream. “At the core of this dream,” Kevin Starr asserts, “was the hope for a special relationship to nature,” a reverential, protective appreciation of California’s natural assets and the health-Â�restoring properties of its climate.111 These attitudes particularly took hold in SouthÂ�ern California, where the weather was warm and sunny for most of the year. Even as she worried over expenses during their first off-Â�season on the ranch, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could not help but sing its praises to her Polish relatives: “Our property here is very pretty. . . . In the morning I usually tour the entire garden and check on the progress of my shrubs and flowers. We’ll have a mass of them this year—and they’re so beautiful. A few days ago I planted a tree by myself that we’ll call a Mickiewicz tree, and later on we’ll plant a Chopin lane and build a Słowacki grotto.”112 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska shared the “garden consciousness” that pervaded SouthÂ�ern California’s regional identity, as well-Â�to-Â�do residents transformed an initially spare landscape into beautiful hybrid gardens, blending English and Mediterranean plantings with native palms and eucalyptus. The actress’s “hideaway Arden” modeled an early version of many other such enchanting developments.113 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska intentionally integrated Polish elements into her “scenery,” but claimed, like a good nature-Â�revering Californian of her day, that “all our improvements had for their main object not to spoil what nature had provided, and we left all the old oaks around the house, and the pretty wild shrubs on the terrace.”114 Relating her 1896 visit (inclusive of photographs) with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in her “mountain home,” Marie H. McCoy described her extensive property as “a magnificent natural park.” Live oaks and broad lawns spread out before the house, and mountains raised a “wild and rugged” backdrop behind it, where “Nature is left in undisturbed sublimity.”115 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski came to rely on the balms of Arden’s beauty and restorative climate, especially when the actress’s health suffered from “the tyranny of Art,” her euphemism for the grueling conditions of touring.116 McCoy could interview the actress at home in 1896 because a stroke suffered on tour forced MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s retreat to Arden. Recovering from partial paralysis of her left side, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska lay “pinned” to her chaise longue, wrote letters filled with family news to her Polish relatives and friends, and soaked up sun, peace, and


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fresh air.117 During her convalescence, she wrote Wolska about the loveliness of their ranch, even in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber, when “roses are miraculously in bloom, and the fragrance of the violets fills the garden.”118 Retaining a competent staff to tend the roses and violets was a recurring problem. On occasion, the couple, off on tour, had to impose on their in-Â�town friends, particularly the Langenbergers, a prominent family of first German settlers in Anaheim, to spruce up the place for family or guests arriving before they themselves could come home.119 In 1893, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recruited an excellent gardener, Theodore Payne (1872–1963), a fresh arrival to America from England who was trained in the nursery and seed business. Payne would become a renowned preserver of California flora, developing botanical gardens in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Pasadena (associated with the California Institute of Technology), and elsewhere in SouthÂ�ern California.120 In Life on the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Ranch in the Gay Nineties, Payne offered a brief history of the two and a half years he spent in the employ of Madame MoÂ�djeÂ� ska and the man he was requested to call Mr. Bożenta. Payne’s account reflected how the couple’s presence or absence affected both Arden’s social life and its gardens. When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was on the road, Payne “concentrated on the most staple varieties [of vegetables] for the ranch help,” but when “the folks were home” and constantly entertaining local friends and occasional celebrity visitors, he “tried to have as large a variety of vegetables as possible.” When Madame was in residence, he saw to the roses of which she “was passionately fond” so that they might pass muster with serious gardeners who came to visit. Her friend Mrs. Langenberger, he noted, “was quite a gardener and had many rare plants at her place in Anaheim. . . . Her daughter, Mrs. Bullard, was also interested in horticulture and distinguished herself by being the first person to hybridize the Watsonia, having over fifty named varieties to her credit.” Another observant visitor, Florence Yoch, would become “a famous landscape architect . . . responsible for the laying out of many beautiful gardens in SouthÂ�ern California.”121 Although Payne does not include her in his list, Jeanne C. Carr was a similarly talented friend of the nature-Â�loving actress. Wife of Ezra Carr, a professor at the University of California appointed superintendent of instruction for the state in 1875, Jeanne not only served as deputy superintendent, but also earned renown for her horticultural prowess and association with John Muir, the great preservationist.122 Carr created out of her family’s forty-Â�two-Â�acre Pasadena spread “the fabulous, world-Â�famous Carmelita Gardens, planting and caring for two hundred and more varieties of trees and plants from all over the world.”123

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Payne’s account of year-Â�round life on the ranch also exposed its dangers, rough conditions, and languor—the hidden disadvantages of “ranching” in the SouthÂ�ern California wilds instead of spending summers in secÂ�ond homes on the New England coast. Payne’s stint as a gardener began very soon after Arden’s brief wave of violent crime, when ranch hand Francisco Torres murdered foreman William McKelvey over the issue of a road poll tax withheld from his wages. Torres was subsequently dragged from the Santa Ana jail and lynched by an angry mob on 20 August 1892.124 Lesser dangers included the occasional mountain lion, ubiquitous rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and centipedes, as well as the terrible summer heat and dearth of water. Payne had joined a relatively peaceable, multinational, but rough-Â�mannered ranch crew—several Germans, a Frenchman, an AmeriÂ�can, and a few Mexicans (including a jolly cook named Jesus Soto)—and he encountered other local eccentrics as he tramped the territory.125 But eventually isolation and boredom convinced him to quit: “In the summertime when the folks were home, it was a nice place to be, but in the winter it was very dull. . . . In January of 1896 I left the ranch.”126 At Arden, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski aimed to realize a number of their cherished imported dreams. They had attempted and abandoned a similar project in Poland, building the villa Modrzejów in the Tatra Mountains where they hosted family members, friends, and fellow artists. Arden, like Modrzejów, was to serve in large part as a gracious home for family and guests and a site for vacationing and amateur artistic entertainment. If it did not evolve into a phalanstery, Arden furnished MoÂ�djeÂ�ska a place where she could indulge in her twin desires of communing with nature and, much less frequently, arts-Â� centered socializing. While the grounds were left alternately to nature and the ranch crew, the couple planned their house as a small-Â�scale showplace, in keeping with the fashion of their upper-Â�class AmeriÂ�can associates. Emulating their New York friends, the Richard Watson Gilders, whose summer home in Marion, Massachusetts, had been remodeled by Stanford White, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski hired the great architect to work similar magic on the cabin they had bought with their property.127 Although he did not personally supervise its redesign (one surviving 1888 letter from the architect to Chłapowski only mentions blueprints and window glass), the house bears features characteristic of his other work—“the shingled trim of the central gable, the arched Palladian window, the two small, round windows, . . . and the shingled well house.”128 Despite its modest proportions, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski’s elegant home,

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Modjeska and Chłapowski’s renovated house at Arden. Courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California

beautifully situated and “filled inside with European treasure,” awed the scattered locals.129 Several decades before mansions were constructed for Hollywood’s screen stars farther north, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had established a peculiar sort of star home far from any California town, its location dictated by remembered beauty and her husband’s unabating desire to ranch. To reach Arden, visitors traveled by train to the El Toro station and then spent four hours crossing mountainous terrain in a horse-Â�drawn cart. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska understood the value of advertising her exotic residence, agreeing to newspaper interviews and photographs on location. Recognizing that her fans would want souvenirs of this important component of her legend—MoÂ�djeÂ�ska at home in her California paradise— she consented to the production of photo postcards featuring her on Arden’s grounds by the vine-Â�covered old well, seated on the edge of one of its reflecting fountains, or standing with flowers in her arms. Her Memories and Impressions includes exterior and interior shots of her home. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was zealous about the quality of such “private” views, as she warned journalist Helen Jones: “People are apt to pick up for print the worst looking pictures if

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they are only easy for print, but I should not like to have published anything as unflattering as those photos are. I see you have copyrighted them without waiting for my approval—but I hope you will retire them from printing or else you will make me regret that I allowed you to take any of the pictures on my grounds.”130 More urgent than advertising, however, was keeping open house for desired guests. Mrs. James S. Rice, a singer befriended by the couple, recorded a detailed first impression of her Arden visit: We have had the pleasure of spending two days with [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] in her beautiful mountain home. The house is called an India bungalow, the music and sitting room all in one. It is like a little chapel with a large triple window at one end. The walls are all sealed with redwood stained dark, and on them are hung fine paintings— battle scenes of the Insurrection of their fair Poland—very thrilling and fine, two of them quite large. Then there is the beautiful life-Â�sized painting of herself, books, music, photographs, crayons, etchings in great profusion, until your poor head is in a whirl looking at so much and hearing Count Bożenta describe them. He is a very rapid talker and of course one has to listen attentively to understand him. They have a Concert Grand Chickering piano and a fine Mason and Hamline organ. Both play well and so between looking at pictures and one or the other playing the accompaniment for me, I was more tired when reaching home than I like to acknowledge. Oh! Another feature of the room was an immense stone fireplace—over the mantel is an enormous buffalo’s head mounted.131

Rice’s inventory of their “little chapel’s” paintings, instruments, books, and music suggested less a showplace than an ark provisioned for the Â�couple’s emotional and cultural survival in the wilderness. In the room they had combined into gallery, conservatory, and library, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski hung paintings that opened like windows onto Poland and a buffalo head given them by Judge Egan which identified them as self-Â�aware preservers of the old West.132 Rice’s exhaustion by the end of her visit attested to how eagerly her hosts had awaited a talented playmate, as they vied with each other to accompany her. Much less often, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska entertained celebrity friends such as the Paderewskis, once her protégé had established himself as an international touring virtuoso, and the family of William Winter, the foremost New York theater critic of her heyday.133 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also hosted members of her touring company, favorites such as Otis Skinner and Maud Durbin, who eventually married. Payne recalled how the very sweet Miss Durbin “used to come out in the morning and walk along the paths [of the garden] as she practiced reciting

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Arden’s library during Modjeska’s residence. Note the buffalo head mounted above its fireplace. Courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California

some of her parts.”134 Both Payne and Otis Skinner, quoting his wife’s early diary, related complementary stories of the grand Mexican barbeque MoÂ� djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski hosted in 1894 to celebrate the joint birthday of their gardener and Jasiek Zając or Johnny Hare, a Polish highlander boy they had sponsored as a ranch hand. Durbin characterizes the event as a grand mixer of guests and locals from miles around.135 Payne likewise remembered the mass of nearly eighty attendees and relished the symbolism of Madame MoÂ� djeÂ�ska dancing with her ranch hand, Jose Serrano: “What a picturesque scene. I thought to myself, ‘What a wonderful country. Nowhere else could this happen. Hospitality and freedom. No social lines or barriers and everyone happy and contented.’”136 The 1894 barbeque at Arden vividly illustrated how MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and ChłaÂ� powski represented at once celebrities and hospitable first citizens in a still sparsely settled SouthÂ�ern California. As local historian Ellen Lee aptly ob-

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serves, “No celebrities in Orange County’s first two decades were more mentioned in the local press than were Count Bożenta and Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. When Bożenta’s dog was bitten by a snake, when MoÂ�djeÂ�ska bought a new hammock, when they visited friends in Tustin, when they stayed at the Laguna Beach Hotel—it was always news.”137 Arden’s wild beauty and remoteness coupled with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s consistent, consummate performance of the gracious lady attracted local attention and awe. One self-Â�confessed “trespasser in Arden,” Everett Carroll Maxwell, remembered that the ranch seemed to him as a boy “a dream world peopled with a fairy princess, and ruled by a real queen.”138 Maxwell described a fete given in her honor at the Orange County park where MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, “seated in a gilded chair canopied with wild flowers and ferns,” reviewed the sporting competitions and bestowed prizes on the victors: “They crowned her queen with a wreath of mountain laurel, which I happen to know she treasured for many a day.”139 This local reverence stemmed as much from MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski’s generosity as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s stardom and regal manner. The couple readily arranged or attended county picnics and barbeques, donated lavishly to local charities, and swapped visits with their friends in Anaheim, Tustin, and Santa Ana.140 The at-Â�home MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also offered herself as a professional mentor to local aspiring actors. In the off-Â�season, when most stars rested after many hard weeks of daytime travel and nightly performances, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska opted instead to encourage, teach, and advise. Her efforts effectively erased the line between stage and the society where she lived, improving that society rather than elevating herself. Amateur theatricals gained popularity and respectaÂ� bility among middle-Â�class SouthÂ�ern Californians, but these differed fundamentally from the aristocrats’ noteworthy “play” in Poland. AmeriÂ�cans valued professional expertise, even that of the long-Â�stigmatized stage, and by the last decade of the nineteenth century, they stood in awe of its serious stars. Whereas her brother Feliks had been the good fellow favored by Polish aristocrat-Â�amateurs for his stage knowledge, the star MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was heeded by SouthÂ�ern California’s amateur players as the ultimate authority, a lady addressed and obeyed as “Madame” without irony.141 Occasionally, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s benefit performances inspired a young volunteer to dream desperately about a stage career, as was the case with Ernest Crozier Phillips. Performing in The Winter’s Tale in 1905, a benefit presented by the amateur Cumnock Dramatic Club, Phillips reported enthusiastically: “the presence of Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska has had the effect of stimulating each in-


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dividual to greater exertion. The great actress has a kindly word and an encouraging smile for every member of her cast. Her suggestions have been invaluable.”142 Phillips evidently showed promise as an amateur player, for when he and his mother visited Arden in the summer of 1905, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska suggested “the possibility of [his] joining her company at some future time.” Six months later, her telegram summoned him to San Francisco: “Get ready Ross Macbeth. Don John in Much Ado. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska.” Despite his parents’ lingering doubts about the propriety of the stage, Phillips jumped at the opportunity and “was engaged for the remainder of the season.”143 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski thus earned their reputation as Orange County’s first settlers through their celebrity, sociability, philanthropy, and efforts to cultivate local talent. Both wife and husband dutifully joined local clubs, although MoÂ�djeÂ�ska sometimes balked at the incessant demands for lectures and meetings: “The women here have a positive mania for founding clubs, and it is unbearable.”144 But just as they enjoyed their occasional impromptu parties and concerts at Arden, so the pair gravitated to other free-Â�form entertainments, such as Anna Held’s Green Dragon, an eccentric encampment overlooking the Pacific in La Jolla. Created out of whimsically constructed and connected cottages, rooms, and tents, and usually filled with music-Â�making guests, the Green Dragon “became an institution in SouthÂ�ern California, and no sight seer, no pleasure-Â�seeker, no musical, literary, or national celebrity failed to include it among ‘the places to see.’”145 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Chłapowski, and Held became friends after Held’s chance visit to Arden. Thereafter MoÂ� djeÂ�ska, accompanied by her husband or her friend Jo Tucholsky, sometimes took refuge from the inland summer heat at Held’s coastal colony. Much as Held seemed a soul mate to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, so the Green Dragon’s artistic orientation, informal atmosphere, and stunning setting—all plotted by another California pioneer from Europe—playfully echoed the Poles’ inland dreamscape. Pay i ng for t h e Ca li for n i a Dr e a m Along with glowing references to flowers, sunshine, and splendid mountain backdrops, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letters intermittently reported on Arden’s operations, or, more often, malfunctions, as a ranch. Soon after they had purchased the land, the star sensed just how much money it would consume and how slowly and uncertainly it might profit them. She also recognized the ranch’s over-

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whelming value to her husband, as she openly confided to her relatives: “Our farm is still a very expensive toy, despite the economies we’re trying to put in place—but I’ll not say a word, for this is Uncle Karol’s only passion. He is as bound to this piece of land as a mother is to her firstborn son.”146 This “expensive toy,” more than any other occupation, might compensate Chłapowski for his financial dependence on his wife. Buying Arden resurrected Chłapowski’s original dream of becoming a California farmer, and he now had the prerequisite funds to pursue different schemes of living off the land, projects he had to implement in the off-Â�season or by proxy. In NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1888, a lonely MoÂ�djeÂ�ska wrote her good friend Jeanne Carr that “Charlie” was off in San Juan with his olive tree cuttings, while she, left at Arden, “burn[ed] large logs in the library chimney and read the life of Christine of Sweden in Revue de deux mondes.”147 In June 1890, she informed Carr that her visit to Arden would have to be made by hired carriage, since “our horses will be busy with barley until Saturday.”148 An impassioned “Charlie” worked every possible angle to make the ranch produce. Payne recalled a diversified Arden when he arrived in 1893, a ranch “devoted mostly to cattle raising,” with “some grain land, about thirty acres of olives, a small acreage of oranges and grapes together with an apiary of about 120 hives of bees.”149 Chłapowski cultivated good relationships with the ranch workers, putting into practice the “mental attitude” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had admired in him in the early days of their courtship. Then Chłapowski’s “unfailing generosity” and ability to talk with poor peasants and workmen “not as a superior to an inferior, but as man to man” struck her “as being unusual in the son of a nobleÂ�man and a prominent landowner.”150 Chłapowski might have adopted the “baronial style” of other SouthÂ�ern California ranchers, recreating plantations with poorly paid Chinese or Mexican employees in lieu of slaves.151 But to MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s occasional irritation, Chłapowski strived to be on a democratic footing with the working man in America, particularly those in his employ. When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had to share her dinner table with a visiting carpenter, the equality all these “free citizens” presumed infuriated her, “for they lie, drink, and cheat whenever they can get away with it.” The mistress of Arden did not “believe at all in the Yankees’ simplicity, and very little in their honesty.”152 It seems harsh to dismiss Chłapowski as an inept rancher, given his necessarily long absences from Arden and the natural difficulties posed by the ranch’s location. Yet even his wife’s indulgent descriptions intimated that he


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was both well-Â�intentioned and absentminded, exuberant and inefficient. One young Arden guest, the Florence Yoch whom Payne praised as “a famous landscape architect,” confirmed these contradictions, recalling “Mr. BoÂ�żenta’s proud achievement of a leaky garden pond” and his sorry attempts at flower cultivation: “I remember once being at the ‘Ranch,’ as they loved to call it, when Mr. Bożenta came rushing out with a scrawny little Lily of the Valley in a pot to give to ‘Helshu,’ one of his pet names for her. She received it as though it were the most fabulous floral offering. He had been struggling all winter doing all the wrong things to it in their little badly built glass house.”153 He sometimes “did all the wrong things” to the ranch as well. The large investment he made in olive trees and olive oil production evaporated “not only because of Karol’s lack of understanding of the first principles of olive culture but as a result of blight, which struck all the olive groves in SouthÂ� ern California” by 1900.154 In her 1899 portrait of Chłapowski as “a brilliant, nervous, dynamic man of immense ability,” Amy Leslie, a prominent celebrity reporter, noted this failure as evidence of his breezy optimism: “He is an olive grower, and counts upon a crop worth at least $50,000 from his groves near Los Angeles sometime—not this time.”155 A less bemused Paderewski lamented Chłapowski’s disastrous venture into goat breeding when, “without knowing anything about them,” he purchased an “enormous” number of goats who promptly died or were stolen.156 Presuming that the couple’s life at Arden had all been Chłapowski’s doing, the famous musician dryly observed: “He had such queer ideas sometimes.” Apart from Chłapowski’s “queer ideas,” drought and excessive heat plagued most inland SouthÂ�ern California farmers, and Arden suffered predictable setbacks. In July 1894, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska bid May Langenberger to postpone her visit to the ranch because “the water has stopped again.” She spelled out the dire consequences of this stoppage in a longer letter to May’s mother Clementine, depicting Arden as more hell than paradise: “We had a trouble with sluices and did not know if we could get any water at all for some days. . . . We have no ice as you know—and the weather is painfully hot. . . . Our cows refuse to give milk and our chickens to lay eggs. We had to keep the cows in the corral and feed them, but they were a little neglected the week we were not here and they are not yet in good shape.”157 Arden’s water woes recurred in the summer of 1896 when Chłapowski had new pipes installed through the ranch’s challenging terrain.158 The only long-Â� term solution to this problem involved damming canyon water to create a

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reservoir. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska finally assented to this very expensive project, which was not completed until the summer of 1900.159 Even with a seemingly reliable water supply, the ranch so beloved for its beauty and so essential for Chłapowski’s sense of personal fulfillment never outgrew its status as expensive toy. The sluice gates of their precious dam “were tampered with” in summer 1901 and released all the stored water into the canyon. A year later, the reservoir’s flumes malfunctioned.160 In the depressing fall of 1896, while MoÂ� djeÂ�ska was undergoing physical therapy in San Francisco after her stroke, she was already warning her husband that “the cost of maintaining the ranch will devour us.”161 In the end, owning Arden prevented, rather than facilitated, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s retirement, as Paderewski vigorously argued when he and his wife paid his former benefactor a visit in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1904. He was appalled by their situation: “It was a very painful impression to see these dear people (already aged) and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself looking rather sick, living in that forlorn place for the surroundings of their charming little house were certainly conducive to deep melancholy.”162 When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska first retired from the road in 1904, their livelihood shifted from box office to ranch with disastrous results. By summer 1905, Arden had produced three tons of honey, a crop of popping corn that would fetch a high price, some olive oil at last produced by their olive trees, and plenty of barley and alfalfa for their livestock, yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska divulged to her relatives that they could not meet their expenses: “The ranch has promise, but while one waits for that promise to be fulfilled, one has to live.”163 Her letter also referred to potential buyers. These once-Â�wealthy first settlers of Orange County could no longer afford to live their interconnected versions of the California dream. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, now in her late 60s, would have to embark on two more “farewell” tours to free them from debt. On 23 August 1906, they sold Arden and two days later removed the contents of their ark.164 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was perhaps the first California star whose reduced circumstances late in life forced the sale of her star home. Nonetheless, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski never abandoned SouthÂ�ern California as their home place. Moving into town among friends once MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had finished her final tour, they first rented the Rancho Los Alisos in Tustin, “a many-Â�sided one-Â�story dwelling encircling a central patio” and “surrounded by a 23-Â�acre walnut and citrus grove.” Rancho Los Alisos brought them close to such Tustin friends as the James Rices and such Santa Ana friends as the Joseph Yochs (Florence’s parents) and Dr. James Boyd and his sister Rosa.165

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Modjeska’s Little Arden, her last home on Bay Island. Courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California

MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s correspondence, including her invitations to Anna Held, emphasized this temporary home’s size and comfort and their undiminished socializing. In her words, Rancho Los Alisos located the actress in more suitable society, with a bank president living nearby instead of the “ex–horse thief ” and “family of Mexican workers” she identified as their closest neighbors on the ranch.166 For what they thought was the long term, the couple followed the example of some of their Tustin friends and built a Bay Island cottage on Balboa Bay, where, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska predicted, a nice garden would revive her husband’s spirits with work in the fresh air. This early twentieth-Â�century “exclusive” community boasted water and mountain views as well as access to the Pacific Electric Railroad, the couple’s lifeline to friends and doctor.167 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could wax eloquent once more about California’s beauty when she wrote her grand-

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daughter Maria in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1908: “It is so nice and warm here that we can sit on the balcony without wearing heavy clothes. The air is refreshing and at the same time mild, and the views everywhere are so beautiful.”168 Their Bay Island investment, dubbed “Little Arden,” was MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s last home. San Francisco turned out to be an ideal gateway for Modrzejewska’s conquest of America, the right sort of theater town to launch an unusual newcomer on the AmeriÂ�can road. That she would settle in 1880s SouthÂ�ern California long before it became an entertainment mecca posed a much greater puzzle. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s off-Â�season home in the wilds of Orange County was a continent away from the AmeriÂ�can theater hub of New York and the posh retreats of her intellectual friends and professional peers, difficult for even local friends to reach, and outrageously expensive to maintain. But as long as they could afford it, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski chose to be at home in America as Californians—as co-Â�colonists, nature lovers, and amateur ranchers. As her visits to Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains first demonstrated, the actress thrilled to the sometime role of preservationist, the “civilized” person’s mode of enjoying and protecting a gorgeous, not quite tamed wilderness. Yet, in contrast to Zakopane, where residence entailed ministering to the poor highlanders, Orange County, California, allowed the couple to join an appreciative, accepting community of other settlers, where Chłapowski could fraternize with the locals and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could play their revered queen for the rest of her life.

5

(

On the AmeriÂ�can Road

After her California debut, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s hybrid identity as earnest settler and classy import rendered her an unusual sort of touring star. In fact, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska began her AmeriÂ�can career as a recently arrived foreigner who could barely manage a simple conversation in English. She might easily have been dismissed as a single-Â�season sensation or relegated to the ethnic margins of AmeriÂ�can culture. Yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska resisted performing anywhere but on America’s English-Â�language stage, unlike her closest immigrant counterpart, the German-Â�speaking Czech actress Fanny Janauschek. Janauschek first made her name in German-Â�language theater in the United States and only shifted to English-Â�language performance late in her career, on the strong advice of her new manager Augustin Daly.1 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska would not duplicate Janauschek’s slow progress into the mainstream. The America she entered in the late 1870s disdained the increasing numbers of Polish immigrants as distinctly lower class, as one of the new ethnicities expressly needing Anglo-Â�Saxon cultivation. Polish-Â�language theater in America was a modest and very localized affair in the late nineteenth century, a ghettoized circuit. In talent, charisma, and star status elsewhere, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska resembled such great continental touring rivals as her contemporary, Bernhardt, and her successor, Eleonora Duse. If she had not been Polish, she might have succeeded as a visiting star whose foreign tongue could be tolerated in bilingual productions. Like the opera, nineteenth-Â�century AmeriÂ�can theater readily featured some foreign language and multilingual performances. Bernhardt and Duse played respectively in French and Italian on tour. The great actor Tommaso

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Salvini overwhelmed audiences with his tragic power in Italian, co-Â�starring with Edwin Booth in bilingual productions. 2 Two decades earlier Booth had tried a bilingual Othello with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s compatriot, Bogumił Dawison, although the latter, it should be noted, played his part in German. 3 Yet even if Polish had been an acceptably civilized performing language for a critical mass of America’s theatergoers, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had set herself the imposing goal of playing Shakespeare in English. To this end she worked tirelessly to improve her English-Â�language enunciation and debated with critics over her right as a “non-Â�Anglo-Â�Saxon” to perform Shakespeare, a genius she insisted belonged to all humankind. In her memoirs, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska argued most forcefully for her sacred right to the world’s “greatest poet” and “greatest analyst of human souls”: “The attitude of those who claim that only English people, or their descendants, have the right to touch the laurels of Shakespeare, reminds me, speaking with all reverence, of the narrowness of certain disciples of Christ (see Acts of the Apostles), who claimed that salvation was restricted to Jews, and did not benefit the converted Gentiles.”4 Thus, unlike the famous European stars who toured the world as monolingual, but international, celebrities, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska assiduously developed herself as a bilingual, binational artist, adapting to and cultivating two national theaters. While she retained her status in Poland with intermittent tours, she aimed for the equivalence of native stardom first in America and then in England, asserting her right to try out new repertoire on these stages and, above all, to perform in Shakespeare’s plays. In England her ambitious plan did not succeed, but in America the critics, public, and theater historians embraced her as a natuÂ�ralized star. 5 In his historical typology of AmeriÂ�can acting, Garff B. Wilson identifies the foreign-Â�born MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as a key practitioner of what he names the classical school of AmeriÂ�can acting style, the female counterpart to Booth himself. 6 More particularly, Charles Shattuck categorizes MoÂ�djeÂ� ska as a “classic” along with Booth, Lawrence Barrett, and Johnston Forbes-Â� Robertson in her passionate devotion to Shakespeare’s “play and to no other objective.”7 The Polish Modrzejewska’s establishment as the esteemed AmeriÂ�can star MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was a rare feat, given the great preference of late nineteenth-Â�century AmeriÂ�can critics and audiences for British talent. With superior elocution and accents impressive to AmeriÂ�can ears, British actors were avidly patronized, whatever their capacity and stage of career. 8 Established AmeriÂ�can stars, such

On t h e A m er iÂ�ca n Roa d

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as Edwin Booth, planned English tours to prove their performing mettle in competition or collaboration with English actors.9 When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, regarded as a different sort of foreigner, began to mount Shakespearean productions in America, she automatically invited negative comparisons with such successful British imports as Adelaide Neilson and, later in her career, the touring Ellen Terry (1847–1928).10 The Polish actress’s age and diction handicapped her in competing with English Juliets and Ophelias. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s non-Â�native, non-Â�British provenance linked her with other immigrants who successfully reinvented themselves on the AmeriÂ�can stage. MoÂ� djeÂ�ska transcended her unprepossessing ethnic past just as did many actors (Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough, James O’Neill, Ada Rehan) born poor in Ireland.11 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska flourished professionally by hiding early scandals, while making no secret of her non-Â�A nglo-Â�Saxon roots and ardent Catholicism. Her image was also elevated, of course, by her husband’s aristocratic lineage and the incorrect title of Countess Bożenta that her shrewd managers insisted on advertising until she at last decided to forbid them. The growing influx of her poor countrymen might have tarnished her by ethnic association, but MoÂ�djeÂ�ska convinced critics and the pubÂ�lic of her vaguely European nobility throughÂ�out her AmeriÂ�can career. The “European” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also competed with native-Â�born AmeriÂ�can actresses whose great local popularity depended on the extreme, overt display of passion—the practitioners of the school of emotionalism. Such players as Matilda Heron (1830–1877), who first popularized Dumas fils’ Marguerite Gauthier as Camille and, especially, Clara Morris (1849–1925), renowned as the “Queen of Spasms” or the “Queen of the Streaming Eye,” vaunted inspiration over technique and captivated audiences with pure emotionalism rather than striving for a balance between sensual and intellectual play.12 These players eclipsed MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in tragic force, always her Achilles heel. As their careers would demonstrate over the long run, however, they did not possess her technical finish and reflective intelligence in creating character. One contemporary reviewer offered this comparison of Morris and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, likening the AmeriÂ�can’s impact to a storm that breaks and passes, while the Pole’s art proved “cumulative rather than dynamic—admirably proportioned, perfectly finished, and never irregular or disruptive.”13 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s emotional competitors had to confine their repertoire to melodramatic roles, which she reliably incarnated with greater delicacy and psychological consistency. The AmeriÂ�

Actress Clara Morris (1849–1917). Photo by Sarony. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations


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cans’ lack of training or technique left them ill-Â�equipped to play Shakespeare or any other classic drama.14 Regardless of her different competitors, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska initially perceived and treated her AmeriÂ�can career as provisional. Her success in the United States, as she explained to Polish friends in the spring before her 1877 debut, was designed to test her capacity for conquest overseas and to make her appeal irresistible to her resentful or complacent compatriots.15 While she vacationed in Poland the summer after her first remarkable AmeriÂ�can tour, she promised her friends just one more foray abroad and a triumphant return—this time to England and then back to WarÂ�saw “for good.”16 Such declarations sounded a recurring mantra in her letters to Poland. The farewell tours she repeatedly Â�announced in America should not be dismissed as publicity gimmicks beÂ�cause, in many instances, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska genuinely hoped the next year on the AmeriÂ�can road would be her last. Even in summer 1887, with a series of successful Shakespearean productions to her credit and her first grandchild born an AmeriÂ�can citizen, the actress indulges in her familiar lament: “I must return again to our country to restore myself, for I’m beginning to go numb. Karol says that it’s better and calmer for us here rather than back at home, and he’s right—but I’m living like someone who has lost a lung and struggles to breathe.”17 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did return to Poland periodically for family visits, vacations, guest tours, and an aborted attempt at nesting. Awed audiences as well as initially dubious critics always welcomed her home. Poland came to represent for her a cultural and spiritual refuge, a laboratory where she was free to try out exciting new plays that she hesitated to risk before AmeriÂ�can audiences who were long resistant to new social drama. Absence did make her artistic soul grow fonder, or so she claimed in her letters. Yet, over the three decades following her San Francisco debut in 1877, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s AmeriÂ�can career proved to be far more absorbing and influential than an exchange of high art for great fortune. The AmeriÂ�can stage first provided her a launching pad and a fabulous windfall, and then lured her back as a national venue where she exercised the greatest control over her companies and productions, and as a national culture which she improved most tangibly with her high-Â�quality performances and crusading professionalism. Exhausted by the vastness of the AmeriÂ�can road, “breathing with one lung” as she toured, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska nonetheless relished her self-Â�imposed mission of socially uplifting and artistically advancing the AmeriÂ�can stage.

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Scou t i ng t h e A m er iÂ�ca n Roa d MoÂ�djeÂ�ska quickly became familiar with the exigencies of North AmeriÂ�can touring during her first two provisional years, traveling from New York to St. Louis and from Toronto to New Orleans. She started on the road when the traveling combination system was becoming the rule, a system which fatigued, appalled, and also benefited her.18 Facilitated by America’s extensive railroad routes and encouraged by the better business they generated, traveling combinations initially involved a star, accompanied sometimes by a few other selected players, who toured to perform with different local stock companies. This star nucleus soon evolved into entire traveling companies, all booked in New York, the center of the AmeriÂ�can theater business. The spread of this system gradually decimated local stock companies and demoted local theaters to specialized real estate.19 A very few stock companies in major cities survived for a time; such was the lucky fate of the players at Moses Kimball’s famed Boston Museum.20 Yet late nineteenth-Â�century AmeriÂ�can theater increasingly relied on the box office draw of the star and centralized management in hiring casts and booking theaters. The AmeriÂ�can road recalled the conditions of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s early provincial touring in Poland in its sheer physical demands on the players. Actors in the United States did not have to travel by cart, but as theater historian Thomas Postlewait observes, “the Railway Guide was the great equalizer” for all performers. Even nationally renowned stars had to endure constant travel, with attendant “train stops, delays, breakdowns, missed connections, boarding houses, cheap hotels, filthy rooms, poor restaurants, inadequately equipped theatres, incompetent musicians, bad weather, poor management, drunken companions, exhaustion, illness, social prejudice, and uncertain pay.”21 Remarking that “only the sturdiest could endure repeated seasons of touring,” Benjamin McArthur identifies MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as one of those exceptional survivors “in her longevity,” since “most actresses had ended their careers by their middle or late thirties.”22 Chłapowski laid out the grueling course of his wife’s very first East Coast tour for his sister Anna: “She played five weeks in New York, is now in Philadelphia, will travel to Washington tomorrow and from there to Baltimore, then on to Boston for an entire month—then once again on a southwest circuit to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and Â�Chicago. . . . She plays every day except Sunday and often plays twice on Saturdays and


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Wednesdays.”23 Touring actors had to rehearse as well as perform on the road. During extended stays in one city their days were packed with further obligations, what MoÂ�djeÂ�ska wearily summarized in a letter home as “tedium, worries, visits, letters, posing for photographs and playbills, audiences with critics, etc., etc.”24 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also discovered that AmeriÂ�can touring meant ceding some control to a general manager and a stage manager. As actress-Â�memoirist Olive Logan explained these jobs to the lay public, the general manager dealt with the front of the house—bookings, ticket sales, hotels, transportation, and pubÂ� licity. The stage manager, most often an actor, generally prepared for the production, arranging for sets, props, and lighting, training the stagehands, and in many cases absorbing the tasks of casting, stage direction, and actor preparation.25 Yet whatever the stage manager’s duties, the stars exerted considerable influence on the company’s atmosphere and repertoire. Like the late nineteenth-Â�century Polish theater, the AmeriÂ�can stage in this period centered on the player, although it paid more anxious attention to the financial bottom line.26 In these decades before the pubÂ�l ic acceptance and popularization of such great playwrights as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw, AmeriÂ�can audiences, like Polish audiences, went to the theater first and foremost to see their favorite stars. In later interviews and publications, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska regularly inveighed against the pernicious consequences of the star system, criticizing its destruction of the stock companies which had furnished AmeriÂ�can actors their most reliable training, deploring its generation of overnight stars—particularly society lady actresses—on account of their beauty or momentary celebrity, and pointing out the consequent loss of good ensemble play and high-Â�quality productions. She equally decried the crude, formulaic ways that AmeriÂ�can general managers packaged their stars, remembering how Sargent bought her “a fat little pug dog” as furry proof of her stardom and advertised the bogus theft of her jewels, because “every great star always loses hers at least once a year.”27 Yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska initially complied with these gimmicks, despite the indignation she expressed in retrospect. Nor did she eschew a star’s extravagant lifestyle wherever she lived and played, although she resisted the flamboyance and rule-Â�defying exhibitionism that Bernhardt used to enlarge her fame.28 Eliding the actress with the aristocrat in her persona, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska took the high road in pubÂ�lic and did whatever she pleased in private. During her first visit to New Orleans, a city which charmed her with its exotic pleasures, she spent

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time between engagements dispensing enlightenment to her Polish fans and buying outrageous gifts for her family.29 One lengthy letter, addressed to the editors of the KraÂ�ków newspaper Time, educates her compatriots about how to read AmeriÂ�can humbug—more precisely, a phony interview with her from the AmeriÂ�can Sunday Times which WarÂ�saw’s Century (Wiek) had translated and published. Identifying the Sunday Times as a paper read by Irish laundresses and their like, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska explains that while she never met the author of her interview, she has given her agents carte blanche to promote her with false stories about pug dogs, stolen jewels, etc., for America, after all, is the land of advertisement. 30 Sent the day before, two shorter notes to her nieces (Feliks’s daughter Felicja and her sister’s daughter Józia) boast that she has bought them two little alligators in New Orleans which will outfit each with a pair of beautiful shoes and necklaces of alligator teeth. 31 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska happened to oblige her agent with her keen attention to her wardrobe—an approved interest of aristocratic ladies and a form of advertisement over which she exercised total control. Like other stars of her era, she chose costumes to suit her role, flatter her figure, and show off the latest fashion. 32 The AmeriÂ�can press relished MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s close-Â�fitting, richly accessorized gowns, which helped sell her tasteful redemptions of love-Â�struck courtesans and straying wives. An 18 January 1878 article in the New York Tri bune detailed the design, fabric, ornamentation, and cost of her five dresses in Camille, including a simple $200 robe bought at the local department store of Lord and Taylor and a ball dress from Worth’s in Paris, “a princesse of pearl-Â� colored satin.”33 A self-Â�proclaimed “racy interview” with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in the 4 May 1878 issue of the Chicago Tribune baldly transformed her into a product model, with information parenthetically inserted about the commercial establishments where one could buy whatever the actress had worn: A thoroughly French taste in dress is shown by the Countess de Bożenta (her toilets probably approaching more nearly to the standard of perfection as set by the great Chicago costumer, Ghormley, than any other celebrity who has visited Chicago) both in her stage costumes and home toilets, judging by the one she wore on this occasion. It was a trailing Princesse, of soft, clinging cashmere (such as may be seen in the spacious establishment of Charles Gossage and Company, the ladies’ favorite resort), wine-Â�colored, trimmed with broad bands of bizarre embroidery in faded tints, with a quantity of creamy lace about the throat and wrists, and a set of unique dead gold jewelry (which if purchased in Chicago must have come from Giles, Brothers and Company, who always have the latest novelties as well as the largest stock to select from). 34


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MoÂ�djeÂ�ska wielded her star’s influence to ensure her comfort on the road, a demand that Sargent and subsequent managers shrewdly exploited as marvelous publicity. In lieu of enduring one shabby hotel after another during her one-Â�night performances in small towns, she convinced Sargent to provide her with a private railroad sleeping car for herself and the leading members of her company. In Memories and Impressions, she claims to be the first AmeriÂ� can star with a private car at her disposal, a practice that became widespread by the early 1880s. 35 She does not mention that Sargent quickly alerted the press to her special home on the rails—an item far more newsworthy than a pug dog—and actually invited the pubÂ�lic to view it during their longer stopovers. As early as 6 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1878 the Cleveland Plain Dealer waxed enthusiastic about the $9,000 palace car that Sargent had appointed “with rich and beautiful woodwork,” “etched plate glass windows,” blue and gold curtains, and Persian rugs. 36 The newly emergent AmeriÂ�can star encountered greater difficulties, however, with regulating production values and repertoire choice. She was initially dependent on Sargent’s judgments about what and how to play. Remembering the preparations for her New York debut, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska felt herself temporarily fortunate to be in the experienced hands of actor-Â�playwright Dion Boucicault, whose unusually comprehensive efforts as stage manager included correcting her script’s translation, adjusting scenic effects, selecting the cast, and even advising the other players on line delivery and stage business, the sort of direction MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had expected her support to figure out for themselves. Boucicault explained to her that AmeriÂ�can combination companies usually took instruction from their stars, for under the star system the company was to “behave so as to bring out in relief all the points of the star.” Just as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was about to argue her preference for good ensemble playing, she recalled how chaotic her San Francisco company had been: “When I compared the strict order of our rehearsals at the Fifth Avenue Theatre [in New York] with the laxity of those in the California Theatre, I acknowledged Mr. Boucicault’s superior judgment, and held my peace.”37 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s English was too poor to instruct her support in her first AmeriÂ� can season. Yet even with her deficient language skills in the late 1870s, she agitated to improve and expand her repertoire. She had added Camille to Â�Adrienne as another sure melodramatic vehicle for conquest. 38 Camille, the consummate fallen woman melodrama, was tailor-Â�made for an actress who excelled in such Dumas-Â�derivative plays as Frou-Â�Frou and Odette. Camille was

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also entrenched in the AmeriÂ�can theater by the time MoÂ�djeÂ�ska attempted it, a star maker for actresses of the school of emotionalism and a sensational draw for AmeriÂ�can audiences. Matilda Heron had begun playing the part in the 1850s after she had viewed its performance in Paris, and she made a sensational, painfully realistic Camille her lifelong project, such that the heroine’s name was inscribed on her tombstone. 39 Clara Morris, always effective as “the soiled dove,” likewise offered a gripping rendition of the repentant courtesan. 40 Wilson maintains that few could match Morris’s “portrayal of the inner struggles which manifest themselves in the quivering lip, the heaving breast, and especially the streaming eye.”41 In this era, melodrama remained a powerful magnet on the AmeriÂ�can stage, with its messages of moral peril and needed reform, displayed and then disciplined female sexuality, and the inevitable restoration of the patriarchal family. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s investment in an English-Â�language performance of Camille garnered her rich and repeated returns. 42 Her addition of Frou-Â�Frou, a drama she knew from her WarÂ�saw seasons, also paid off, the more so because her foreign accent and gorgeous costumes fulfilled here, as well as in Camille and Adrienne, AmeriÂ�cans’ conveniently vague expectations of how an elegant Parisian sounded and dressed. 43 Unfortunately, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s early success in fallen-Â�woman melodramas meant that Sargent urged her to learn similar, yet inferior, plays which she either abhorred or performed badly. In fall 1878 she debuted in Masks and Faces, another actress drama by Thomas Taylor and Charles Reade which featured Peg Woffington, the successful Irish performer who sometimes co-Â�starred with David Garrick and demonstrated her goodness despite her suspect profession (her true face beneath her theatrical mask). Even with the help of the accomplished young comedienne, Lotta Crabtree, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “could neither catch [the part’s] Irish brogue nor dance the jig in the last scene,” and she was grateful to discard the play in the following season. 44 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska suffered longer with Sargent’s choice of the crowd-Â�pleasing East Lynne, a hoary old melodrama she nicknamed Beast Lynne. Like Frou-Â�Frou and Odette, East Lynne requires the protagonist’s demotion and then miraculous transformation from errant lady into humiliated, repentant wife and mother. Written by Mrs. Henry Wood and a moneymaking tearjerker ever since its AmeriÂ�can debut in 1862, East Lynne begins with the marital misadventures of the haughty Lady Isabel Vane, who subsequently disguises herself as a mousy governess to gain access to the children she had abandoned. 45 While MoÂ�djeÂ�ska loathed the play for its cheap sentiment and lower-Â�class appeal, reviewers in Chicago and


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New Orleans applauded her performance in it, not distinguishing her more delicate work in Camille and Adrienne. The Daily Picayune batched her melodramatic performances together, blandly concluding that “the tearful order of emotional drama is her forte, since she is so strong in pathos.”46 Even performing melodramas, however, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was intent on convincÂ� ing her audiences that she was a serious artist and an estimable lady. Such double ambitions were attainable, given the changing sociocultural valence of the AmeriÂ�can theater and its players. By the secÂ�ond half of the nineteenth century, the theater was being refined into a venue for wholesome and sometimes uplifting amusements. In quest of larger audiences and therefore avid for the patronage of respectable women and middle-Â�class families, theater owners purged their buildings of bars and the notorious third tier, where patrons made assignations with prostitutes. 47 Theaters were deliberately called museums to imply their educational function, and to encourage family attendance; the pit where rowdy male theatergoers had once gathered to cheer on their favorites or shout down undesirables was refurbished as the parquet and opened to women; and the gallery was shrewdly renamed “the family circle.”48 Architecture and decor evidenced greater refinement, perhaps most ambitiously at Booth’s Theatre, opened in 1869 in New York, where “the playhouse presented an elaborate French and Italian Renaissance facade with white marble statues of Shakespeare, Comedy, and Tragedy to passersby on Twenty-Â�Th ird Street.”49 In general, the AmeriÂ�can theater revamped itself to cater to the nation’s growing middle class, in which women figured as emblems of respectability and engines of consumption. Managers intentionally cultivated playgoing as a consumer habit, positioning theaters near shopping districts, offering special matinees for afternoon shoppers, and recognizing the value of actresses’ stage costumes as trendsetters for women’s fashion. 50 Theatergoing, as a respectable form of mass entertainment, also fundamentally changed the relationship between patrons and players. As women and children swelled the numbers of theatergoers and audiences were being educated about proper theater behavior, the spotlight shifted literally from the seats to the stage, with the house lights dimming as the show began. 51 Patrons no longer challenged or interrupted the players, but were passive, attentive, appreciative, and respectful, and willing from time to time to attend the sorts of dramas that “improved” them.52 Theater critics such as William Winter, the most influential reviewer of the late nineteenth century, played a crucial role in enlightening audiences about the particular values or deficien-

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cies of a given play or its performers. 53 These critics took seriously their function as the gatekeepers of a new genteel tradition in AmeriÂ�can culture which upheld social refinement, an aesthetic sensibility, and higher learning. 54 Actors, in turn, were expected to incarnate genteel ideals. Theater historian Bruce McConachie identifies Edwin Booth as the “poster actor” for late nineteenth-Â�century America’s refined bourgeois taste. A player pronounced legendary by Winter himself, Booth was admired for both his classic repertoire (primarily Shakespearean drama) and an acting style demonstrating Â�intellectuality, sensitivity, and idealized natuÂ�ralÂ�ism. 55 Actresses’ prescribed gentility was gauged by their “womanliness,” a quality which in large part echoed the “true womanhood” of gentleness and motherly feeling esteemed earlier in the century and now embellished with the bourgeois niceties of delicacy, grace, and refinement.56 Both players and middle-Â�class patrons, from different sides of the footlights, were moving toward the same social models of cultured behavior and artistic ideals, one by exhibition and the other by emuÂ�lation. Given the career she had made and the self-Â�image she had invented in Poland, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska advanced on the AmeriÂ�can stage when it was most primed to accept and appreciate her. While she was apprehensive about winning the critics and audiences of the major East Coast cities—particularly the theater hub of New York and Boston as the nation’s intellectual capital—she set about this conquest with well-Â�tested methods. She would be sure to render her popular melodramatic roles acceptably genteel, prove her ability to play Shakespeare’s most attractive and maidenly heroines insofar as her English permitted, and cultivate support and influence through her contacts with AmeriÂ�can artists, critics, and highly placed patrons. Although she had to conquer and connect with audiences city by city, the mass-Â�circulation press quickly spread the news of her achievements and celebrity, and the iterations of her tours only reinforced her growing network of high-Â�level support. Her New York debut represented the first eye of the needle, a debut she feared most and played badly, as she admits to Faleńska, but which was exceedingly well received. 57 She performed Adrienne Lecouvreur from 22 DeÂ� cemÂ�ber 1877 until 14 January 1878, trying out the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet on January 7th and 17th, and devoting the last two weeks of her engagement to Camille. Reviewing her Adrienne, the less popular and controversial of her melodramatic parts, the New York critics praised her extensively, but were not unanimous in declaring her great. All retold her unusual


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coming to America story by way of explaining this immigrant’s unusual refinement. As Edward A. Dithmar for the New York Times assured his readers: “Throughout the piece Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska acted with infinite delicacy, sentiment, and skill. We can scarcely recall what may be termed a more soulful effort, and in none within the memory of the present generation has the supreme art of the actor—the art of interesting, of captivating, and of moving by the best, and therefore least perceptible, means—had a more graceful demonstration.”58 Most influential for her career and future connections, however, was her eloquent endorsement by Winter, a New York Tribune theater critic, “aligned . . . with the genteel school of Richard Henry Stoddard, Bayard Taylor, and Edmund Clarence Stedman.”59 Booth’s lifelong friend and sincere idolater, this critic immediately pronounced Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “a great actress” who “deserves—Â�at once, and by this single performance of Adrienne—to take her place in the highest esteem of the intellectual pubÂ�lic.”60 While he critiqued the adaptation of the play she used and the problems posed by her foreign accent, he spelled out, with an abundance of elevating attributes, how perfectly MoÂ�djeÂ� ska had idealized her actress heroine. Her Adrienne “was the image of a woman who typifies the most exquisite natural refinement, a consummate elegance of manners, and the highest sanctity and magnanimity of passionate love. It was far more than the faithful copy—ample and finished—of a dramatic ideal; it was a revelation of that royal wealth of soul and that noble height of mind which make the possible sublimity of human nature.” Here at last was an actress, albeit untested in high tragedy, who might match Booth in her capacity to exalt, ennoble, and “reveal the higher reality” through art. 61 Winter observed that “even her garments . . . seemed a part of the outgrowth and fragrance of the character.” Implying her welcome contrast to the “emotional acting” of Clara Morris and others, Winter declared that the pubÂ�lic “may now once more enjoy—what, since the days of Seebach, has been absent—that rarest of all unions upon the stage, emotional power aroused through the imagination and not the senses, and shaped and swayed by intellectual character.” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Camille proved a far more popular offering with both critics and audiences, although Winter, who deemed the play immoral and repugnant, could only approve MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s performance as a most beautiful fabrication. Years after his first sight of her in the part, he reprinted this critique in his 1913 essay collection, The Wallet of Time: “If anything could reconcile judgment to the drama of ‘Camille,’—which nothing can do,—it would be

Theater critic William Winter (1836–1917). Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations


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the embodiment of its heroine, incorrectly and unjustifiably, as she was embodied by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. She was more like a spirit than a woman; she was the ideal of native purity, lost through passion, but struggling toward the light.”62 Other critics writing of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Camille in her first season echoed Winter’s admiration of the lead actress in spite of the play, although they stopped short of declaring her portrait to be false. Washington correspondent to the Times Grace Greenwood objected to the drama “not on moral grounds alone, but for its excessive morbidness and for a peculiar soreheartedness it leaves on the mind.” Yet she found MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to be “all . . . , and more, or better” than the admirable original Marguerite Gauthier whom Greenwood saw played in Paris by Mme. Doche: “[MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] excels Doche in grace, in tenderness, in the dainty archness of her comedy, and in that exquisite delicacy which, in the utmost abandon of gayety or passion, stops short of license and coarseness.”63 A little over a month later, the Cleveland Plain Dealer heralded MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s Camille as the “spirituelle” creation first acclaimed by the San Francisco critics. 64 During her first month on the New York stage, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska succeeded in captivating theatergoers with her artful, redemptive versions of fallen women and gradually insinuated herself into important sociocultural networks. By mid-Â� February 1878 she and her manager Sargent were writing Winter himself of her continuing success onstage and off, especially in Washington, D.C. MoÂ� djeÂ�ska indicated that she would be thrilled to see the critic again during her stopover in Toronto, and coyly asked Winter if “it is allowed to ‘Camille’ to send hearty good wishes to one who has been kind to her.”65 By OcÂ�toÂ�ber, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska was able to make plainer how much her cultural mission resembled Winter’s: “I feel very often discouraged in the hard task I have undertaken to act on a foreign stage, in a foreign language, in pieces that are not of my own choice . . . but such words and such appreciation as yours inspire me with a new courage and give me confidence in myself.”66 As these missives and subsequent correspondence show, Winter and his wife, the actress-Â�cum-Â�writer Elizabeth Campbell Winter, became lifelong friends of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her husband, as they did with a number of other major actors of their day. 67 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska benefited from this friendship professionally and personally, be it from Winter’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King John for her production, or the family and shop talk she exchanged with Lizzie Winter. 68 Winter’s favor did not guarantee MoÂ�djeÂ�ska glowing reviews, as he later made clear in his highly qualified judgments of her Shakespearean performances.

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But his friendship conveyed a key endorsement, a blended approval of her art and person, because “he maintained that the actor’s personality significantly influenced the personality of the character he impersonated.”69 This powerful critic’s praise implied MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s double acceptance as accomplished artist and good woman, identifying her as precisely the right sort of player to grace an improved, respectable AmeriÂ�can stage. In New York, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also happened on a more extensive source of professional support and social connections in the circle of Richard Watson Gilder. Gilder had moved from the editorial staff of Scribner’s Magazine to become editor-Â�in-Â�chief of The Century, a monthly magazine of immense national influence that published such renowned AmeriÂ�can authors as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry James. The talented Gilder clan, extended by marriage, included Richard’s sister Jeannette Gilder and brother-Â�in-Â�law Charles de Kay, both of whom worked as journalists and critics and served MoÂ�djeÂ� ska in print as eloquent fans. Jeannette would found her own journal on the theater scene titled The Critic. Her masculine dress and forthright manner broadcast her feminism and implied her lesbianism; she always showed a keen professional interest in the work of other talented women.70 Richard’s wife Helena de Kay Gilder, whom MoÂ�djeÂ�ska named Madonna after observing her serene interactions with her four children, was a painter who helped found the “Society of AmeriÂ�can Artists,” a group whose defiance of the AmeriÂ�can Academy of Fine Arts likely reminded the actress of the painter-Â�soulmates she had left behind in WarÂ�saw.71 As Rosamund Gilder remarks in editing her father’s letters, her father had “a gift for friendships,” and both parents offered their home, a refurbished stable at 103 East 15th Street, as “a congenial meeting ground” for artists and influential people of all sorts and social levels—poets, painters, actors, millionaires, and penniless philosophers.72 Their open door “Fridays” constituted one of the first bridges between respectable New York society and the theater. Here one visitor remembered meeting the actors Joseph Jefferson, Benoît-Â� Constant Coquelin, and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, as well as Twain and Mr. and Mrs. Â�Grover Cleveland.73 Journalist Maurice Francis Egan surmised that the Gilders’ “position was so assured that they never had to consider the social eligibility of anybody.” Egan declared these evenings “the most delightful gatherings I have ever known,” where Mrs. Gilder cultivated “something of the simplicity of the German life” with her knitting and lack of affectation, and “everybody stayed until the last moment.”74

Publisher and poet Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909). Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

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In Memories and Impressions MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recalls a scene backstage when this extraordinary family reached out to her during a performance of Camille. She and Jeannette “fell into each other’s arms,” laughing after the high emotions of the third act, and Richard and his “beautiful madonna-Â�l ike wife” shook her hand by way of introduction.75 With the Gilders MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski recovered the sort of informal, playful, art-Â�centered environment that they themselves had sponsored in WarÂ�saw—a combined salon and family circle where one could mingle with the cultural elite (including fellow actors) and at the same time let down one’s hair. Rosamund cites one such rollicking session from her father’s journal, when MoÂ�djeÂ�ska cavorted with her new AmeriÂ� can friends and put on an impromptu performance: Helena [Gilder] put her necklace around Madame [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska]’s forehead with her silver bracelets hanging at the sides, and Madame fell on the floor in the attitude of Cleopatra. That was so fine that Helena and she ran out into the other room to dress her up in full character. While they were gone the rest of us turned the room into a theatre—with bouquets at every seat. . . . Then, not knowing ‘Cleopatra,’ [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] recited something else, in Polish—we afterwards learned that it was Hagar addressing the Almighty—a Polish poem. Then she recited a passage from Corneille—‘Les Deux Horaces.’ Then a speech of ‘Camille.’ . . . Such recitations and readings we had never heard—we, who cannot bear recitations and readings as a rule. It was great acting—the play of expression in the face was subtle and most exquisitely beautiful, and the tragic part made the tears start.76

By DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1878, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska felt comfortable enough with Helena Gilder to complain to her about the dreariness of the road and confess (in French) that “mon mari est très homesick a 103 E. 15th Str., N.Y.” 77 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska appreciated and utilized the professional services that this well-Â� connected family in publishing could render her. Jeannette Gilder’s reviews in the New York Herald already touted MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s talents, and, in Shattuck’s estimation, were ever sympathetic, “discriminating,” and often “vividly detailed.” 78 The actress was especially grateful for the important biographical profile that Charles de Kay had printed in the March 1879 Scribner’s. As she wrote Helena Gilder very soon after, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska clearly understood the quality and reach of the Gilder family’s endorsements: “Forgive me to speak a la Sargent about business—but I wanted to tell you that I am very much indebted to Mr. Richard and Mr. C. De Kay for all that they have done for me—not only from the artistic but also pecuniary stand point. You both and yours were the first to discover my true value—and this appreciation opened the eyes to many persons who never dreamed before to look upon me as a being who not only knows how to dress but also can think and conceive a character.” 79

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Helena de Kay Gilder’s art studio in New York City. Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

Throughout their lives MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski were able to expand their entrée into AmeriÂ�can and English high society through their friendship with the Gilders. 80 Touring introduced MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski to other sociocultural oases and networks resembling the Gilders’ “Studio.” In Boston, the “AmeriÂ�can AthÂ�ens” where MoÂ�djeÂ�ska anguished about her reception, she was pleasantly surprised to be received by one of the nation’s iconic cultural figures, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She easily retraced Maurice Neville’s social success. In a relieved letter to her mother she described the “spiritual feast” that she and her son enjoyed in the poet’s famous Cambridge home, an important event she repeats in her memoirs because it linked her with a national poet, for her the most exalted artist. 81 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could not know how liberally Longfellow spread such feasts for new visitors, but she was fortunate indeed to attract an AmeriÂ�can celebrity with “an especially appreciative eye for handsome younger women” and a progressive supporter of female writers and perÂ�formers. 82 In his enthusiasm for this lovely star, Longfellow persuaded some lo-

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cal critics to write generous reviews of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s first Romeo and Juliet in Boston. He subsequently provided her key contacts for cultivating her English career. 83 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska cherished Longfellow’s friendship and what she perceived to be its high-Â�culture imprimatur long after his death in 1882. She discovered other, more lasting connections and moral support in Boston through her acquaintance with James T. Fields and his wife Annie. The Fields, like the Gilders, were a power in AmeriÂ�can publishing. James ran the publishing business of Ticknor and Fields and edited the Atlantic Monthly; Annie worked with him as more professional partner than conventional wife. 84 The two regularly opened up the impressive library of their Boston home as a gathering place for visiting artists, including actors and actresses, for James Fields was a devotee of the theater. 85 At 148 Charles Street an aspiring artist could be seen and converse with an influential artistic and intellectual community on a private stage “celebrated for its taste, its copiously furnished bookshelves, its well-Â�chosen array of paintings, sculptures, and objets, and, most of all, its hosts.”86 After her first Boston performance in Romeo and Juliet, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her husband were invited to a Fields’ reception, where they were joined by Longfellow, treated to readings of Emerson’s and Keats’s poetry and a performance of Chopin, and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself commemorated in her pensive response to her countryman’s music by visiting poet Celia Thaxter. Here she circulated among other visiting luminaries such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Edwin Booth “with his young, energetic-Â�looking little wife.” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s well-Â�received performance and warm reception at the Fields’ famous home delivered just the sort of doubled artistic and social approval that she desired, a tasteful symbolic embrace of her persona by a world-Â�class city: “My engagement in Boston was an uninterrupted chain of intellectual pleasure and artistic enjoyment,” she fondly recalls in Memories and Impressions. “It would be difficult to find more congenial and inspiring circles in the whole world than those of Boston in 1879.”87 The Boston intelligentsia continued to lend MoÂ�djeÂ�ska support in implicitly feminist form. Annie Fields fostered a supportive network of female writers, according to her biographer Judith A. Rosman: Although many of these writers never met, and even those who lived relatively close to each other seldom had the time or the means to visit each other, they supported each other with letters full of encouragement. They exchanged photographs, manuscripts, and published books. They congratulated each other on marriages and chil-


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dren and consoled each other on the deaths of family members. They understood, as most of the male writers did not, the difficulties that women faced when they tried to achieve distinction in the arts. In addition to writers, the support network included women painters, sculptors, stained-Â�g lass artists, educators, reformers, actresses, and others. 88

MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was admitted into this far-Â�flung network, which flourished all the more after James Fields’s death, when Annie invited the younger writer Sarah Orne Jewett, her bosom friend, to be her housemate.89 The actress readily joined this virtual community, being always on the move, culturally ambitious, professionally secure, and eager to consume new artistic work of all sorts. Through Fields and Jewett, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska became acquainted with the promÂ� ising young author, Willa Cather, who would create a lovely portrait of the actress as a mature woman in the novel, My Mortal Enemy.90 Over the years, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska treated Fields and Ornett as trusted fellow artists and valued critics, cherishing their astute opinions of her performances and reciproÂ�catÂ�ing with favorable comments on Jewett’s prose and Fields’s critical acumen. MoÂ� djeÂ�ska especially courted such talented AmeriÂ�can women as the iconic civilizers of Gilded Age America. Through Annie Fields’s network, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska became identified with a circle which shaped and largely controlled high culture in the AmeriÂ�can Athens, and was thus assured patronage of her own classic offerings on the Boston stage.91 In general, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska enjoyed and encouraged her worship by AmeriÂ�can women of all ages. “Women adore me, cover me with flowers, and compose verses in my honor,” she happily reported to her mother from Boston.92 In Chicago, girls tore up the napkin she had used at a reception and danced with its pieces pinned to their bosoms as makeshift “Orders of Helena.”93 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was delighted to offer extra matinee performances for her avid female fans.94 Given her keen awareness of the effects of her figure and costumes, the star surely gauged her influence as a fashion plate as well as her physical appeal to all her patrons. Yet onstage and offstage MoÂ�djeÂ�ska resisted any overt display of sexual desire or availability. She accepted such impassioned tribute from women as the customary response to her charisma, just as she treated the “Boston marriage” of Fields and Jewett as a perfectly platonic friendship. Prominent politicians likewise fell under the actress’s spell as she played across the country. Her initial tour in Washington won her audiences with such famous and infamous men as General William Tecumseh Sherman, former Massachusetts Governor and Senator George Sewall Boutwell, and Senators Eugene Hale and Roscoe Conkling, before whom, in her limited English,

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she attempted to plead the Polish cause.95 She recounts later in Memories and Impressions how she negotiated the coincident visits of President Chester A. Arthur and General Benjamin Butler, candidate for the governorship of Massachusetts, during another Boston performance of Romeo and Juliet, as she was commandeered to hand flowers to each politician and then obliged to accept an unexpectedly gorgeous bouquet in return from Butler.96 Two months later, an impressed Arthur “brought his son, Chester, Jr., and a gaggle of pubÂ� lic figures which included (naturally) General Sherman” to see MoÂ�djeÂ�ska perform Rosalind in As You Like It to a packed house at the National Theatre.97 One of her most ardent fans, who had idolized her from girlhood, was Â�Grover Cleveland’s lovely, fashionable secÂ�ond wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland.98 In the South, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was welcomed and captivated by gracious SouthÂ� ern gentry, invited to stay at the home of Mrs. Sherwood Bonner in Memphis and on General Jackson’s horse-Â�breeding farm near Nashville.99 White SouthÂ� ern landowners, she informed Faleńska, reminded her of Polish country gentry in their careering between poverty and sudden reckless extravagance.100 Two newspaper men met on tour became her special friends and faithful promoters. Colonel Henry Watterson, the owner of the Louisville Courier-Â�Journal, was well connected with actors and politicians in Kentucky and New York, where he patronized the Players Club.101 Eugene Field, a journalist for the St. Louis and then Chicago papers, admired MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as a truly good woman on the stage, in contrast to Bernhardt and the many other actresses he disdained as immoral.102 He teased his friend by mugging at her from the audience during climactic scenes in Camille, to her great delight. Field immortalized MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in two very different poems. In the comical “Modjesky as Cameel” he depicts her as an actress who stirs one of her rough-Â�hewn patrons, “Three-Â�Fingered Hoover,” to punish her “Armo” by throwing him “through the landscape in the rear.” Fields attributed his later “Wanderer,” a much more serious poem, to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s own pen.103 The journalist had provided his friend with two poetic testaments to her womanliness and sensitivity, albeit in contrasting modes—one a vernacular WestÂ�ern tall tale portraying her as a pure damsel in distress and the other “her own” poignant, high-Â�flown ruminations about the foreigner’s nomadic life and pledge to “sing, O my home! of thee.”104 Over her first two years on the AmeriÂ�can road, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska delivered spiritually redemptive performances in melodramas (Adrienne, Camille, Frou-Â�Frou, and even “Beast” Lynne) and made friends with the Winters, the Gilders, the Fields, Longfellow, gentlemen of the press, influential politicians, and sun-


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dry pillars of the community as she toured big and small AmeriÂ�can cities. But by the time she left the United States in May 1879 she had not achieved bona fide success as a Shakespearean actress. In the late 1870s the Polish actress possessed neither the English nor the managerial control to near this goal. Charles de Kay’s March 1879 article in Scribner’s pled her case by proxy: “Owing to comparative obscurity, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska is compelled to play in a number of dramas in which she does not fully believe.” Praising her Juliet, the one Shakespearean role she was able to include in these early tours, he argued her foreigner’s right to the Bard: “That Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska should play Shakespeare will not seem so bold when it is remembered that the Polish stage, like that of Germany, is supplied with admirable translations of his dramas. Poland and Germany appreciate Shakespeare far better than America and England, if we measure appreciation by the number of his plays acted during the current year.”105 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Juliet in America met with moderate critical success, reviewers variously assessing how she coped with the obstacles of her foreign accent and age (playing a young teenager while being in her late 30s). Remarking on her 12 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1878 performance, Dithmar of the New York Times was sympathetic to her plight, admitting that: “it is doubtful, indeed, if Juliet is a possibility in the theater; for she is at the same time the representative of blooming youth and of the highest tragic feeling.” But his final judgment, reflective of the gender biases of his day, claimed that this experienced matron approximated maidenliness with hysteria: “Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s earnestness and mental strength demand our respect, but her Juliet cannot win our admiration. Her performance last evening was throughÂ�out nervous and hysterical; her simplicity was womanly, not girlish; her passion sounded no great depths. To those unable to separate charming personality from genuine achievement, she was still a fascinating woman, but her art—which is that of the woman of the world—failed to attain its end.”106 Other, more positive reviews, such as one appearing on 8 February 1879 in the Daily Picayune, mentioned her accent as an inevitability to be forgiven: “As Juliet, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s foreign accent is more noticeable than in any other character she plays. In ‘Camille’ and ‘Frou-Â�Frou’ it is charming. In the serious lines of Juliet it is not pleasing, yet is almost forgotten when her admirable acting is considered.”107 Primed by her admirer Longfellow, however, the Boston Evening Transcript insisted that she had transcended age and flawed English in her marvelous performance on 22 April 1879:

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Sta r r i ng M a da m e Modj e sk a Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska of course labored under the drawback common to all actresses with maturity of power sufficient for the role, the difficulty of simulating Â�extreme youth in girlhood, beside the special burden in her case of a foreign accent and outlandish inflection. Had she spoken in her native tongue, leaving the audience to Â�follow her in a libretto, the beauty of her personation would no doubt have appeared even greater, tho the achievement would really have been inferior. As it was, however, no actress in our experience has begun to embody the fervid, frank, impetuous, gushing, lovely girlishness of Juliet, “too innocent for coquetry, too fond for idle scorning,” as did MoÂ�djeÂ�ska.108

MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Boston reception in spring 1879, both critical and social, constituted her greatest achievement as an English-Â�speaking Shakespearean to date, although she closed her run here with performances of Camille and East Lynne. Despite this momentary triumph, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska still puzzled over how she might refine the motley nature of the AmeriÂ�can stage given her own handicaps and the ways stars were managed on the AmeriÂ�can road. As the actress observed in a 30 March 1879 letter home: “America is not a country where true artists can enjoy wild success. It is true that in almost every city there is a circle of educated people, but they don’t fill the houses, and a different class of pubÂ�lic attends either foot races or operettas such as [Gilbert and Sullivan’s] Pinafore.”109 Her competition that March included a Captain Boynton who had invented a boat-Â�l ike device he could practically live in while floating downriver, an “act” that Sargent also happened to represent. She and the captain necessarily shared the spotlight in publicity stunts. When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska returned to America in 1882, she would have to grapple with the problem that so plagued her famous predecessors and contemporaries on the AmeriÂ�can stage: how to sell high art to the AmeriÂ�can mass pubÂ�lic. And she would need to convince that pubÂ�l ic to patronize a foreign-Â�accented actress daring to perform Shakespeare. T h e English Detou r By spring 1879, with two seasons in America to her credit, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska resolutely set her sights on England. As the planning of their AmeriÂ�can trip indicated, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski had identified her star status on the English stage as their consummate goal. In terms of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s career, if not Chłapowski’s desires, America figured as the actress’s back door to English success, a place


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where she might try out her skills on a less demanding English-Â�language stage. In so prioritizing, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska actually shared the views of most of her AmeriÂ� can professional colleagues. AmeriÂ�can actors, especially those seeking to try their abilities as Shakespeareans, booked English tours to prove themselves vis-Â�à-Â�vis their English peers. The actress Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876), a major tragedienne in the generation preceding MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s, achieved AmeriÂ� can stardom by way of successful seasons in London, where she became overnight “â†œ‘the greatest creature, in the greatest city in the civilized world.’”110 LonÂ�don success made Cushman’s fortune and produced for her the social conÂ�nections that she never would have cultivated in the United States.111 Theater historian Gail Marshall attributes Cushman’s glowing English reception to the ways in which she, an actress powerful in dramatic force and physique, “challenged both stage conventions and conventions of femininity” on the English stage, earning special accolades for her performance as Romeo, whom she played to her sister’s Juliet.112 Almost forty years later, Edwin Booth assayed several seasons in London in the early 1880s, at first achieving disappointingly moderate success, as he complained to his old friend Winter: “What have I gained by acting here? I haven’t knocked the dust out of the Old Drury’s cushions (I think you prophesied that I could) nor scattered the old owls from their roosts—‘or words to them effex.’ It seems to me a loss of time and labor. I shall leave no impression—Â� there seem to be few minds here worth impressing. The actor’s art is judged by his costumes and the scenery. If they are not esthetic (God save the mark!), he makes no stir. . . . I did expect, however, more interest for the Shakespearian drama than is manifested. Chas. Kean, Fechter, and [Henry] Irving have feasted the Londoners so richly they cannot relish undecorated dishes.”113 By May 1881, Booth joined forces with his closest English counterpart, the star-Â� impresario Henry Irving, and impressed the English pubÂ�l ic as Irving’s equal, if not occasional better, in two productions of Othello in which the Englishman and the AmeriÂ�can swapped the parts of Othello and Iago.114 Other foreign stars of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s day—most notably, Sarah Bernhardt and Adelaide Ristori—treated London as another stop on their international tours and simply relied on their performances’ overwhelming visual and mimetic effects to win the pubÂ�lic. Through her choice of performing language and exclusively AmeriÂ�can overseas tours, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska sooner resembled her AmeriÂ�can peers in her progress toward English stage success. Her seasons in

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England overlapped with those of Booth’s; in June 1881, after his co-Â�triumph with Irving in Othello, she invited the two co-Â�stars to recite at her benefit.115 Her professional reasons for attempting the conquest of the London stage echoed Cushman’s and Booth’s. She sought success in a European cultural capital and authoritative acknowledgement of her prowess in Shakespearean drama. Although she was befriended, as Booth was, by many great English contemporaries such as Irving and his constant leading lady, Ellen Terry, she, too, suffered some of Booth’s initial disillusionment with the public’s lackÂ� luster response. She shared her frustration with Sierzputowska in late 1881: “The English, both men and women, are machines, or at least that’s how they wish to appear to foreigners. They’ve shown how much they love me, but they lack the imagination or that drop of warmth than can melt the heart . . .”116 But MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s non-Â�native English and long-Â�term goals set her apart from both touring Europeans and cachet-Â�hungry AmeriÂ�cans. She wanted in England what she had already secured in America, a more world-Â�renowned stage that she might pair with the Polish stage for the decades remaining in her career. London superseded all AmeriÂ�can cities as a world cultural capital and lay closer to continental Europe—not only to the Polish theater, colleagues, family, and friends, but also to Paris, where her son would be training as an engineer for the next four years and, not so coincidentally, where the exacting actress ordered her stage costumes from the renowned dressmaker Madame Duluc.117 The upwardly mobile MoÂ�djeÂ�ska perceived London as the ultimate proving ground for her English-Â�language career, where she hoped to ensconce herself as a successful performer of those Shakespearean parts which best suited her histrionic gifts. Her campaign for English-Â�stage success consequently used some of her twice-Â�tried strategies in Poland and the United States, this time without the same degree of managerial interference. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had almost paid off the enormous fine of five thousand rubles for breaking her contract with MukhaÂ� nov, and she had shed Sargent and his generic star handling, disappointed in his failure to arrange a London engagement. Nor did MoÂ�djeÂ�ska need to undergo the “nationalizing” experience of resettlement. In a highly class-Â�conscious England, a stint of pseudo-Â�farming would only have demeaned her in the eyes of the upper-Â�class patrons she wanted to court. Instead, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her husband immediately set about cultivating professional and high-Â�society connections through Chłapowski’s relatives and contacts made through their


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well-Â�placed AmeriÂ�can friends. By 1879 Chłapowski had been dispatched to do solo reconnaissance in England, looking up his London-Â�based aunt and her English husband, the Bodenhams. Meanwhile, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, recognizing that her London season could not possibly begin until spring 1880, negotiated contracts with assorted Polish theaters, capitalizing on her new-Â�won reputation as a star overseas. She compensated somewhat for her long absence by participating in the Józef KraszewÂ�ski Jubilee in KraÂ�ków, a national event celebrating fifty years of work by this distinguished exiled Polish novelist. Here MoÂ�djeÂ�ska performed her famous Â�Adrianna in OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1879 and led the opening Polonaise with KraÂ�ków’s mayor Michal Zyblikiewicz at the inaugural ball.118 “Between visits and balls” the actress worked out with Mukhanov an ambitious WarÂ�saw engagement, encompassing several old Polish favorites, two Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra), and a series of her tried-Â�and-Â�true melodramas with the added Lady of the Camellias, for which she received special permission to perform.119 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska triumphed in her return to the KraÂ�ków, Lwów, Poznań, and WarÂ� saw stages, but this reconquest unfortunately involved her in Poland’s larger poÂ�litiÂ�cal theater of national martyrdom, when a seventeen-Â�year-Â�old schoolÂ� boy, Ignacy Neufeld, killed himself in consequence of being her fan.120 NeuÂ� feld, along with a group of student comrades, had been expelled from school by the WarÂ�saw czarist authorities for presenting the actress with a wreath made up in red and white Polish national colors. As the organizer of this tribute, Neufeld had hoped that his suicide would reinstate his friends, but his death instead precipitated a huge pubÂ�l ic funeral demonstration in which MoÂ� djeÂ�ska took part, riding with Sierzputowska in a closed carriage and laying a similarly red and white wreath on the boy’s grave.121 Neither artistic triumph nor patriotic pathos prevented MoÂ�djeÂ�ska from proceeding to England in March 1880. There she undertook another course of intensive adaptation. She once again had to study English, this time, as she reported to her mother, under the tutelage of “a certain gentleman with a monumental nose and strong white teeth (regular monkey’s teeth)” who corrected her accent for two hours each morning.122 To her dismay, her monkey-Â� toothed teacher declared that hers was a Russian and not a Yankee accent. His unabashed ignorance of Poland as a country existing apart from Russia struck her as typically English. Whereas MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s foreignness had trans-

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lated into a generally European cosmopolitanism in the United States, indifferent Englishmen simply lumped Poles together with their despised enemy and condescended to both.123 At the same time, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski assiduously prepared for her favorable artistic reception through highly selective circulation. The important people on the English stage formed a far more concentrated and interconnected group than those in America or Poland. In this great imperial capital MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could not afford the anonymity that she had to overcome in California if she were to succeed as an artist. Too many established stars and touring performers regularly arriving from the Continent could nip her nascent celebrity in the bud. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letters and memoirs accordingly advertise how she hobnobbed with the famous and talented several months before she stepped upon the stage. At her first reception hosted by Hamilton Aidé, an artist and “dilettante in letters,” the actress willingly submitted to scrutiny “from head to toe” by ladies with lorgnettes, until her moving recitation of her favorite poem in Polish, Ujejski’s “Hagar in the Wilderness” (Hagar w puszczy), forced them to drop their weapons and wipe their eyes.124 RecapituÂ� lating this event for Sierzputowska, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska noted that someone sketched her as she recited and “so this little literary and artistic world has recognized me already.”125 Aidé’s reception led to the couple’s visit with Britain’s reigning poet, Alfred Tennyson, a distinction she related to several correspondents and commemorates in Memories and Impressions. She itemized for Witkiewicz the other poetic folks in attendance during this visit (Robert Browning, the granddaughter of Lord Byron) as well as the painters they had met elsewhere in society and at their studios (John Millais, Alphonse de Neuville).126 Her memoirs profile other impressive artists, both local and visiting, whom she encountered during her London seasons: Laurence Alma-Â�Tadema, Edward Burne-Â� Jones, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.127 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska clearly wanted to project herself as an accepted member of an artistic elite, passing easily from an AmeriÂ�can into a British intelligentsia. Yet a March 1880 letter to Helena Gilder reflected her insecurity in either set. Teasing her AmeriÂ�can friend that she will not steal away “her” British poet (Ehrman Syme Nadal), she also confessed her jealousy over Gilder’s response to Bernhardt, then touring in the United States: “[Bernhardt] has so many friends, so let me keep you for Â�myself.”128


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As an actress, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska relied in England, as she had in America, on beautifully performed melodrama to first secure her audience. She had arranged for her beginning engagement with actor-Â�manager Wilson Barrett at the Court Theatre, a small venue that always featured very good actors and “attracted the best public,” as she assured Faleńska.129 Barrett himself had advised her that “it would be better not to touch Shakespeare until I made myself known in some easier literature.”130 Opting for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s surest hit, The Lady of the Camellias, the manager and his star avoided its censorship on British soil by persuading its English translator, James Mortimer, to camouflage it rather superficially with the substitute flower title of Heartsease and the new, shrewdly chosen name of Constance for its heroine. As MoÂ�djeÂ�ska admitted, Mortimer and Barrett also “changed some objectionable features of the heroine’s profession.”131 As was to be expected, the Polish actress triumphed decisively in her 1 May 1880 English debut. Due in good part to her high-Â�profile socializing beforehand, her debut audience included the Prince and Princess of Wales (the prince, accompanied by a Count Jaraczewski, complimented her backstage) and a host of London’s greatest actors—among them, Mrs. Kendal, Mrs. Bancroft, Johnston Forbes-Â�Robertson, and Charles Coghlan.132 The critics unanimously praised her work, and over the play’s extended run she attracted other famous admirers such as Henry Irving, her great rival Bernhardt, and Kalergis-Â� Mukhanova’s old friend Hans von Bülow, who complained only about the orchestra conductor who “murder[ed] Chopin between the acts.”133 Yet despite her unquestioned success in her first role and her somewhat more restricted success in society, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was far more apprehensive about what she dared to do and what the conditions of her work would be over the long term in England. America had not been so culturally imposing or tradition-Â�bound. Even as her letters to Poland boasted of her contacts, they disclosed unprecedented feelings of intimidation and alienation: “I’ve never yet felt so far from my own country and my own people as I feel here.” The statue of Nelson at Trafalgar Square taunted her as a nobody, she wrote, even as advertisements for her performance, her surname printed in letters three-Â� feet-Â�high, struck her as unconscionably audacious.134 Her proclamation of victory after her debut was uncharacteristically subdued. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letter to Witkiewicz in early May 1880 sounded apathetic rather than triumphant: “Today I can write without laments, for I have conquered. Do I feel happier now?

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I cannot tell. Life is strange, after all.”135 While she informed him of invitations to play with a Polish troupe in Russia and very tempting talk of performing Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, and other Shakespeare plays in London, she also admitted that she might have to perform Heartsease until the end of July, the sort of reiteration of a single role that the actress had always abhorred. As MoÂ�djeÂ�ska soon learned, performing in London and occasionally touring in Ireland and Scotland required less physical wear and tear than did the AmeriÂ�can road, but this experience troubled her with an even keener sense of a divided, perhaps misdirected, career. Feeling homesick, she dutifully supplied Estreicher and others clippings of her “triumphs for Poland” abroad.136 She confided in Estreicher that Russian soldiers have invaded her dreams for somehow her poor brain has confused conquering British theatergoers with the fight to reclaim Polish sovereignty: “I remind myself that this is a dream and I have to go to rehearsal and that I’m not seizing castles with spear in hand, but trying to capture hearts colder than stone with my tortured tongue and the groans of my soul. . . .”137 So recently in the thick of Polish culture and politics, hailed as a national genius and the cause of another instance of senseless national martyrdom, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska surely felt pain and guilt at separating from her homeland. During her seasons in England, Poland’s relatively close proximity alternately strengthened and shook her professional resolve. On the one hand, she vowed to Sierzputowska that for the time being she wanted to play roles other than that of a Polish Joan of Arc.138 On the other hand, the once critical Bogusławski was begging her to return for the good of the cause, when the national stage most needed her revitalizing power.139 After her debut, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska felt that she was regressing rather than progressing in a theater where lofty experimentation had once seemed possible. With Barrett’s year-Â�long contract in hand for 1881, she had to depend, for the most part, on the now uninspiring vehicles that had sold her so well in America. Relearning a superior literary version of Adrienne Lecouvreur for the English stage was “mechanical work . . . very painful and hard.”140 She complained to Helena Gilder that her subsequent success as Adrienne in spring 1881 did not make her happy: “I feel all the more how little good I achieve performing in a foreign language. The more I play [in English], the more I sense the imperfection of my performance.”141 With terrific effort, the Polish actress did break away from her standard popular repertoire in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, memorizing an English version of the play arranged by Lewis Wingfield from the combined translations of


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Joseph Mellish and actress Fanny Kemble. In a letter to her mother, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska attributed Mary Stuart’s “unexpected success” to the many Catholics who turned out to witness Mary’s unhappy fate and suggested that the critical discord over her performance reflected something of a revived religious war: “the Protestants want to sink me, but most of the critics are with me, as is the pubÂ�lic.”142 A New York Times overview of the London press found that most reviewers applauded her performance and were pleasantly surprised by the “natuÂ�ral force,” “ardor, vehemence, and passionate fierceness” in her Mary, attributes missing in her previous roles.143 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could report the undeniable success of playing “very nearly one hundred performances” of the play.144 But the Polish star’s other experiments—a new play, Juana, by William Gorman Wills, and her lone Shakespearean offering of Romeo and Juliet— probed definitively what her limits would be on the English stage. Juana, a costume drama starring a Spanish girl “consumed by jealousy verging on madness” and ending with her insanity and death, “was produced with great care and in the best style, the scenery and costumes elaborate and handsome.” Yet the critics in this case did succeed in sinking Juana, regardless of their religious convictions, as “too gloomy” a play.145 When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska embarked on Romeo and Juliet thereafter, she sensed the great risk involved. Marshalling her courage, she informed Stefania Leowa in February 1881 that “I see the clouds gathering over my head and sniff battle in the air” as she girds herself “for the next campaign.”146 At least she had had the practice of performing Juliet on another English-Â�language stage, and her manager Barrett at last agreed that it was time to try the part.147 The actress’s recollection of playing Juliet on the English stage in Memo ries and Impressions focuses defensively on the contradictory coaching about diction that she received during rehearsals, conveying her primary worries over accent. Her brisk summation of her reviews, by named critics, bravely claims success, citing the “many notices, some good, some adverse, as might have been expected by a foreigner ‘tackling Shakespeare,’” and noting the estimable reviewers who “spoke of my improved English.” She could report that her cast included a most “admirable” Romeo in Johnson Forbes-Â�Robertson, an “excellent Friar” in Charles Ryder, and “a successful Mercutio” in Wilson Barrett.148 Nonetheless, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s final note about her first English Romeo and Juliet elliptically signals her defeat, informing the reader that Irving and Terry offered their own version of the play at the Lyceum Theatre soon after her de-

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but. The incipient comparison to Terry doomed her. Curiously enough, Oscar Wilde, one of the famous friends MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had made during her London seasons, declared Romeo and Juliet to be her Waterloo. Quoted in the New York Times during his January 1882 visit to the United States, Wilde implied the transgression of a non-Â�Englishwoman playing Shakespeare before English audiences: “Why, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska delighted London until she made her appearance as Juliet. Then she seemed to lose her hold upon audiences, and they were never satisfied with her after that performance, no matter what she undertook.”149 Wilde overstated her drop in popularity, for English audiences readily patronized the Polish actress as a vaguely foreign, beautifully costumed heroine in salon melodramas. But he correctly perceived that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had sinned against national taste in presuming to play a romantic Shakespearean heroine, daring a role reserved for such consummately English leads as Terry. In an article reviewing the nineteenth-Â�century English reception of foreign actresses, Gail Marshall marks MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as the outsider particularly stymied by her choice of Shakespearean role and “un-Â�English” incarnation of it. If MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had excelled as a tragedienne and had attempted the mature, harsher part of Lady Macbeth, as did Cushman and Ristori, she might have succeeded despite her accent. Instead she insisted on a role of “extraordinary cultural and theatrical status,” one which, during the Victorian period, enabled a “display of female sexual attractions . . . to coexist with a persistent sense of the character’s exemplary young femininity.” British reviewers, much like her critics in both America and Poland, had identified and praised MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s intelligent “self-Â�conscious artistry” in other roles, qualities antithetical to the “â†œ‘natuÂ� ralÂ�ness’ and ‘charm’ so beloved of English actresses, and particularly of Ellen Terry, at that time.”150 In the eyes of the Victorian English pubÂ�lic MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could never excel as a Juliet on account of her ethnicity and technique. It is intriguing, however, that the expatriate AmeriÂ�can writer, Henry James, applauded MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s London performances of Mary Stuart, at least, over Terry’s rendition of Portia in Merchant of Venice.151 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska continued to perform in London and on short provincial tours until SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1882, spending the off-Â�seasons and holidays in Poland as well as such glorious natural playgrounds as Brittany (summer 1881) and Cornwall (summer 1882). During these years, she maintained close ties with her son studying in Paris and the two nieces in her charge (Feliks’s and Józia’s daughters), whom she had settled in a convent school in Walmer, in the County of Kent. Her social success had burgeoned, ranging from formal re-

Actress Ellen Terry (1847–1928). Photo by H. L. Mendelsohn. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Modjeska as Juliet at London’s Court Theatre, 26 March 1881. Photo by Elliott and Fry. Courtesy of the Kraków City History Museum


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ceptions in more than thirty aristocratic homes to casual visits to artists’ studios, where the new neo-Â�Romantic movement of the pre-Â�Raphaelites perfectly matched her performing aesthetic and clearly influenced her stage costumes.152 She made fast friendships with a number of English artists, particularly the Forbes-Â�Robertson brothers (both Johnston and Ian), although she enjoyed herself most when visiting Polish opera stars (the de Reszke brothers, Marcelina Sembrich-Â�Kochańska, and Władysław Mierzwiński) attended her “Sundays” at home, giving improvised concerts and playing games.153 In professional terms, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska would never reach the parity in Shakespearean play that Booth had achieved for a time with Irving, but she delivered an impressive number of well-Â�patronized performances under Barrett’s management, and the participants in her June 1881 benefit (Irving, Terry, the Kendals, even Bernhardt) reflected the theater community’s esteem for her work.154 Her nearness to Poland also facilitated an intensive tour of thirty-Â�eight performances in WarÂ�saw in spring 1882, during which she not only dueled successfully with Bernhardt over the hearts of her Polish pubÂ�lic (Bernhardt had completed a Polish tour weeks before), but also tried out some new pieces, including a stunning premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (retitled Nora).155 Circulation among aristocrats and artists, proximity to family and her national stage, a thoroughly respectable professional record—all these factors would seem great inducements to remain, to divide her career between England and Poland or to make Poland her base and limit herself to occasional English tours. Yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s cumulative lesson about England as a place to live and work was one of limitation, as she experienced this imperial culture’s solipsism, subtle exclusion, behavioral restraint, and professional typecasting. In the diary she kept while on provincial tour in autumn 1881, the actress complained about the frustrating opacity of the English: “It is very difficult to make acquaintances here, and foreigners often have erroneous opinions about people. England is like a sea. If you know how to dive, and are allowed to do so, you will find pearls, but if not, you must float on the surface, and never see the riches hidden at the bottom of the depths.”156 Writing Witkiewicz from Glasgow toward the end of the tour, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska even dismissed her love for the poor, oppressed Irish: “But it’s all the same—England, Ireland or Scotland, it’s all alien territory. These people have nothing in common with us. When I tell them at times of our misfortunes or our heroes, they open their mugs to say ‘oh, oh,’ but they believe nothing, or rather, they don’t want to believe me.”157

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MoÂ�djeÂ�ska learned that her advancement on the English stage basically enÂ� tailed a more thorough pigeonholing of her “type,” a decision based on market considerations and national parochialism. By spring 1882, she was playing under the Bancrofts’ excellent management at the grander, more venerable Haymarket Theatre. Yet her repertoire for the next three months consisted of a single play, Sardou’s Odette translated and adapted for the English stage by Clement Scott, who had carefully kept her character’s name that of the foreign-Â�sounding title: “All the persons of the play were turned into English people, with the exception of Odette and the wicked companion of her downfall in the fourth act.”158 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could complain of neither “the pretty theater” nor its courteous and considerate managers, yet the play’s inordinate success doomed her to its long run and an enervating state which, in her words, “caused the phonographic plates of my brain to be rubbed off in places, and I began to forget words of my lines.”159 For the restless MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, performing a second-Â�rate melodrama three months straight amounted to a kind of purgatory. Her 22 June 1882 letter to playwright Pierre Berton indicated that she was desperately seeking new material as a means of escape.160 To the end of this London experiment, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska remained a prisoner of how her English audiences wanted to see her, as she lamented to Faleńska: “The pubÂ�l ic is crazy about the play, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the heir to the Danish throne and other such figures applaud and weep, the pubÂ�lic even more. The ladies like my dresses and new faux diamonds—what more is needed? The set is marvelous—even an organ is played in the last act instead of a piano (for this is a novelty) and so it’s as if I’m in heaven—yet I’d prefer something else.”161 By the close of her contract with the Bancrofts, which she “declined politely” to extend, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had made up her mind to conclude her long-Â�term English career, and already had signed with AmeriÂ�can manager John Stetson for the 1882–1883 season on the other side of the Atlantic. She burned no bridges in taking her leave and never made explicit her reasons for preferÂ�r ing America to England as her professional secÂ�ond home. Nor could she have predicted at this point the impressive achievements and ambitious flops that she and her traveling companies would produce in the United States over the next two decades. True to the mantra that she repeated to Polish friends and herself, she pronounced the upcoming AmeriÂ�can season a farewell tour.162 Yet she likely knew that she had exhausted what English society and the English stage were willing to offer her, whereas America promised more money,


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fewer prohibitive traditions, and, depending on her box office appeal, greater control over the whole show. As MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could report to her mother soon after their arrival in the United States: “Tomorrow we begin rehearsals and I think all will go well, for I’ve been welcomed back warmly, even fervently. . . . If only we could make a pile of money. God will take care of the rest. I’m not greedy, but it’s nice to be successful.”163 M a nagi ng t h e A m er iÂ�ca n Roa d When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska returned to the United States, she had the advantage of knowing the social and cultural territory. Longfellow had died while she was abroad, to her great sorrow, but she still had in place a supportive, influential social infrastructure that spread across her touring circuits. She returned enhanced with the cachet that several successful seasons in England bestowed on AmeriÂ�can performers, glory overseas that gave ample grist to America’s media mill. With a likely nudge from her new, high-Â�powered manager, John Stetson, the New York Times covered her arrival from London as if she were returning royalty. Stetson and his associates set out to meet her steamship, The Arizona, in a tug sporting “an enormous white flag with a deep red border bearing the name ‘Modjeska’ in the centre in blue . . .” After Madame MoÂ�djeÂ� ska, accompanied by “Count Bożenta” and two maids, had been settled at the Clarendon Hotel (long her preferred New York accommodation) and telegrams had been dispatched “announcing the safe arrival of the party . . . to London, WarÂ�saw, and Cracow,” the actress “was called upon by Oscar Wilde and Mora, the artist.”164 Before previewing her AmeriÂ�can tour and repertoire, the reporter carefully reminded readers that: “during the past season [Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] has been playing to crowded houses at the Haymarket Theatre, London.” A condensed review of what MoÂ�djeÂ�ska assayed and achieved over these provisionally planned decades highlights her extraordinary stamina, ambition, and artistic evolution. To summarize her general progress: From OcÂ� toÂ�ber 1882 to March 1907 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was booked on twenty-Â�four tours of the United States, with occasional forays along her circuits to Canadian cities in both east and west. Most of her tours extended from OcÂ�toÂ�ber to May or June, although she sometimes played short, geographically concentrated engagements to fill in lacunae due to other travel plans or health reasons. Apart from rare indispositions and accidents, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was prevented from tour-

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ing for only one long hiatus of roughly a year and a half (from January 1896 to NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1897) due to the effects of a stroke. Even then, being restless without work, short of cash, and convinced that she had exercised herself back to working order, she attempted a short West Coast tour in San Francisco in late January and early February 1897, and promptly suffered a relapse. Depending on her managers and current box office appeal, which waned markedly only in her last few years onstage, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s tours were booked along pre-Â�existing circuits. The most lucrative of these encompassed the principal cities of the East Coast (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore); the South (e.g., Louisville, Memphis, New Orleans); and what was considered the West (Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis). West Coast circuits focused primarily on San Francisco, with increasing stops downstate in Los Angeles. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s tours also bore her along seemingly more remote, well-Â�paying routes— through Portland, Seattle, and Spokane to Butte, Montana, and Duluth, and along the copper-Â�rich upper Michigan peninsula. In her last years, the physically failing actress was relegated to what most performers dreaded—one-Â�night stands in the small cities and towns of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. Within this twenty-Â�five-Â�year period, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska interspersed five trips to Europe. In 1884–1885 she toured England, Ireland, and Poland; her 1890–1891 season constituted a “triumphal tour” of Poland as well as several wonderful weeks performing in Prague; and in her 1894–1895 season she performed in Lwów, KraÂ�ków, and Poznań and was stunned to discover that the Russian authorities forbade her the WarÂ�saw stage for a speech critical of Russia which she had given at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.165 In summer 1901, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her husband mainly rested in Poland, although the actress gave a few benefit performances. But during her 1902–1903 season, what was to be her final trip to Poland, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska toured in Lwów and Poznań and thoroughly engaged with the flourishing “Young Poland” movement in KraÂ�ków, thereby demonstrating her capacity for artistic and professional growth even as an actress in her early 60s. In 1882, Stetson proved to be a shrewder, more obliging manager than Sargent in 1877, and the returning Polish actress was much better prepared to exploit the pliant, star-Â�centered nature of America’s traveling combination companies. Over the next two decades, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska experimented with different types of managers, including the provident, but culturally ignorant Stetson (1882–1883) and the consummately courteous, generous Daniel Frohman


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(1885–1886). For a number of seasons she preferred working with her husband as her formal business manager or “impresario,” with an administrative manager for assistance. Only in the last two years of her touring (1905–1907) did a weary MoÂ�djeÂ�ska sign with managers who served the Theatrical Syndicate, a monopoly created in 1896 by three major partnerships who gained “exclusive booking control of all the important theatres of the country” and the circuits serving those theaters, thereby barring independent companies from the best-Â�patronized venues.166 Like a number of other major stars who rebelled at the syndicate’s stranglehold, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski had long resisted any alliance with it, sometimes to their financial detriment.167 But at this point in her career, the sixty-Â�seven-Â�year-Â�old star mainly longed for what she hoped would be quality control on tour with little effort on her own part, as she acknowledged to her friend Mrs. Rice: “It is a very good engagement and with good people, for I heard that the managers are all that can be the best among them. It is under the Syndicate—of course, but they usually mount the plays hansomely [sic] and are sure to give me a fine leading man.”168 Whichever management she chose, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska expected that she would serve in many regards as de facto artistic director, choosing repertoire, training her company, and seeing to different aspects of the productions. Throughout the 1880s, her most impressive decade on the AmeriÂ�can stage, she seemed to relish this control and artistic authority. Stetson, for example, approved all repertoire she proposed, which meant taking a gamble on two new Shakespeare productions, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. His star quickly realized that the artistic success of this tour was truly her business: “During the rehearsals I noticed that my stage manager was doing some guesswork, and that it would be necessary for me to take the direction of plays in my hands. Every scene had to be rehearsed and conducted by me, even the grouping of people, the lights and scenery. I also had to teach some young girls and boys how to deliver their lines and what to do with their too many hands and feet.”169 Stetson amply fulfilled his general manager obligations by assembling a strong company that featured the handsome, talented, charismatic leading man Maurice Barrymore (1847–1905).170 He also “assisted at the scenery rehearsals,” giving immediate approval for changes as necessary, but his star and not his stage manager advised him best on appropriate scenery and props.171 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska honored her next AmeriÂ�can manager, the great impresario Daniel Frohman (brother to Charles Frohman, a co-Â�founder of the syndicate), as “the kindest and most considerate” of all her AmeriÂ�can impresarios, and Frohman

Actor Maurice Barrymore (1849–1905). Photo by Benjamin Falk. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations


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returned the compliment in his 1935 Autobiography, asserting that “my management of this fine actress in 1885 stands out as one of the most delightful experiences in my career” and praising MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, along with Bernhardt and Duse, as “the three greatest actresses of my time.”172 Frohman handled MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s 1885–1886 tour with lavish care, hosting her and her husband at his Connecticut home as soon as they had returned from Europe and furnishing her with “a private railroad car and carriages” plus a guaranteed salary of $1,750 a week.173 Frohman purchased and for a time housed the two very large Siberian bloodhounds who were to serve as the star’s exotic protectors in a new play titled Prince Zillah. When one of the hounds died on the road by leaping, still chained, from the baggage car, Frohman “madly scour[ed] the country for a replacement.”174 Because he so admired his star’s interpretation of Adrienne Lecouvreur, he scheduled its performance often, despite MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s advice to the contrary, and once literally underwrote this personal preference by being the lone member of the audience. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, in turn, repaid Frohman’s care with consistently excellent acting and ample profits, despite a little-Â�changed repertoire.175 During her 1883–1884 season, between Stetson and Frohman, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska reported how much power she wielded without them. In an 8 June 1884 interview with the New York Times, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska spoke in terms she knew her AmeriÂ�can audience would appreciate—as “a woman of business”: “â†œ‘You see, I have been my own manager this year, and I have had the most prosperous time I have ever enjoyed in America,’” adding unabashedly that she “â†œ‘cleared about $70,000.’” While she admitted that she keenly disliked the “perpetual motion” of being on the road, she prudently thanked and complimented her pubÂ�lic throughÂ�out big-Â�and small-Â�town America: “â†œ‘The amount of intelligence shown by those audiences and their keen appreciation of even subtle points excited my admiration. I played in all these small cities with as much pleasure as I should have appeared in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston.’”176 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s mettle as “a woman of business” was publicly tested five years later when she and her husband were negotiating the 1889–1890 season with Booth himself, the AmeriÂ�can actor she most admired. Booth had experience playing with foreign actors before. Lawrence Barrett, after several seasons of successfully husbanding Booth’s waning “fire,” masterminded Booth’s star alliance with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. Speaking from the soapbox of the New York Times, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska declared that their union “is the realization of a dream I have long cherished” ever since first glimpsing Booth on the San Francisco stage in 1876,

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and she implied its beneficial precedent for improving the AmeriÂ�can theater: “Mr. Booth and myself are not going to satisfy the demands of the AmeriÂ�can stage to be raised to a higher plane, but the fact that we have come together has germinated, so to speak, and it promises to bear good fruit.”177 Fond dreaming aside, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski bargained hard for favorable material terms. As short news items in the Times reported over the winter of 1888–1889, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, a major star and a proven moneymaker, would not stoop to the lesser status of Booth’s leading lady, but insisted on equal billing as his co-Â�star. Citing the New York theater gossip she had heard from her daughter-Â�in-Â�law Felicja, the actress wrote Chłapowski her suspicions that Barrett, still managing his friend, was manipulating pubÂ�lic opinion against her in the press.178 Yet by late February 1889, both parties had agreed to the costar billing and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska embarked on the tour in the fall as Booth’s named equal, although to a great extent she had to work within Booth’s own limits. The vast majority of their tour repertoire happened to be Booth’s signature pieces (Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Richelieu), in which MoÂ�djeÂ� ska often had to resign herself to lesser and too young female parts. With the exception of her tour with Booth, however, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska exercised tremendous control over her productions in America, from costume and set design to the selection and development of repertoire. The actress knew well the importance of impressive costuming as both audience-Â�riveting fashion and artistic support. In the 1889 New York Times interview cited above, she remarked as she packed the wrapper in which her Adrienne decorously expires: “I positively don’t believe I could die without it. The costume does a great deal for the woman in my opinion.” In French melodramas such as Frou-Â� Frou and Odette, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska regularly bedazzled female theatergoers with her wardrobe. A note in the 22 May 1883 San Francisco Evening Bulletin typically observed that “the ladies, especially, were delighted with the exhibition of beautiful dresses which MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and other ladies of the company displayed.” Appreciating how MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “invests [the] impossible character [of Odette] with so many feminine traits” and “delicate and admirable tones and hues” in a January 1886 performance, the reviewer for the New York Tribune also wryly observed that “the luxury of woe has not lost its attractive power. Odette’s costumes were marvels of beauty and good taste.”179 When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska mounted new plays, particularly historical costume dramas, she researched costumes and sets with the same zeal she first displayed as a young actress in the university library at KraÂ�ków. For The Chouans, an


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adaptation of Balzac’s novel Le dernier Chouan about the wild Bretons’ defiance of the young French repubÂ�l ic in the early 1800s, a major new production planned for her 1886–1887 season, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had costumes made to order in London, Paris, and Brittany itself, where she and her family entourage had vacationed. She also arranged for three railroad carloads of scenery to be built in Boston and shipped to New York for the premiere.180 While this extravaganza only had a limited run due to its four-Â�hour length, unwieldy dramatic construction, and the expenses of transporting its set, it earned critical acclaim for its look and some of its cast’s performances, foremost among these MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s. In an 11 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1886 review for the New York Tribune, Winter credited “the excellence of the acting and the carefulness of the presentation” with keeping “a crowded house . . . in breathless attention”: “The scenery was elaborate and the costumes as correct and picturesque as could be imagined.”181 The reviewer for the St. Louis Globe-Â�Democrat positively relished the spectacle MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had engineered in The Chouans—its “picturesque blood-Â� and-Â�thunder effects,” “fires flashing from muskets and sabers clashing,” as well as its charming costumes: “The Chouans furnishes pleasure from a variety of sources, and despite its goriness and mere theatric gaudiness, satisfied people who at other times demand pure dramatic merit in a performance given by an artiste of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s reputation.”182 While the melodramatic “goriness and gaudiness” of The Chouans marked a daring departure for “an artiste of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s reputation,” her involvement as designer of two new Shakespeare productions advertised her principled return to subdued, tasteful conventions. Most ambitious were her preparations for Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, in which she highlighted her part as the wronged Queen Katherine by cutting the fifth act featuring Anne Bullen’s coronation and Princess Elizabeth’s christening, and thus concluded the play with the climax of Katherine’s moving death. In other particulars, she aimed for period authenticity without indulging in “blood-Â�and-Â�thunder effects.” MoÂ� djeÂ�ska first mounted Henry VIII in her 1892–1893 season, under the management of Frank L. Perley and J. J. Buckley, who provided her with Otis SkinÂ�ner, her second-Â�best leading man after Barrymore, and a good company inÂ�cludÂ� ing “John Lane, Beaumont Smith, Ben Rogers, Wadsworth Harris, and the one [player whom] MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself had enlisted, Peyton Carter.”183 By the early 1890s, the actress was well established as a Shakespearean player in the United States and clearly felt confident enough to compete with no less a Shakespearean interpreter than the English Henry Irving, who, as Booth re-

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marked, served up the Bard as a “decorated dish” with elaborate scenery, copious props, and fine costumes. She touted her production of Henry VIII over Irving’s version scheduled later that season, treading a fine line between authenticity and entertainment: “I wish it to be distinctly understood,” remarked Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska with emphasis, “that I do not propose to put forward a ‘production of the play,’ as Mr. Irving does. Such a proceeding is altogether foreign to the creed of artistic procedure which I have made it a rule to adhere to and follow. We will have new scenery, of course, and new costumes, and the staging of the play will be carefully studied and carried out in a manner which I trust will win the unqualified approval of the pubÂ�lic. But there will be no attempt at spectacular effects, although we shall employ above 100 people in the various scenes and shall make a decided impression with the ballroom scene in the course of which a gavotte of the time of Henry VIII will be danced, and songs and music of the period of the piece will be sung and played.”

A DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1892 review in the Milwaukee Sentinel revealed more about MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s extensive period research: “Last summer [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] visited the Chicago Public Library, and from its rich collection of costume plates she made designs for her revival of Henry VIII. Not only entire costumes, but even the minutest details of the Tudor era she selected. Thus she was virtually not only the leading actress, but the stage manager, costumer, and property mistress of the performance, given last evening.” The result, as the Sen tinel reiterated in two separate reviews (the secÂ�ond appearing on 6 January 1893), was a “scenic treatment . . . satisfactory to a quiet taste,” with excellent costumes and scenery that “are illustrative and tasteful and do not err by being too gorgeous.”184 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s emphasis on costume as a key ingredient in production held true for many other companies showcasing female stars. But she was unique in her expertise and savvy innovations, according to Polish scholar Bianka Kurylczyk. Whereas Bernhardt and Terry were dressed by others for Shakespearean roles, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska designed the costumes for herself and her cast. Though she diligently studied historical models, she also improved on her costumes’ consumer appeal by ornamenting them with contemporary fashion accents. Thus, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 1882 Rosalind costume included a bustle, and the Renaissance garb she designed for her 1895 Viola sported the puffy leg o’ mutton sleeves popular in the 1890s.185 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s later efforts at scenic design mainly won her productions praise for their visual effects and her own riveting, usually sympathetic portrait.


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Her long-Â�cherished goal to play the Egyptian queen in the original English-Â� language version of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra only came to pass in her 1898–1899 season, when she was nearing sixty and had persuaded her Â�manager John Fisher, the owner of a San Diego theater, to risk its premiere.186 By this time, however, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could delegate certain artistic duties to transplanted family members. Her niece Emilia Benda (Szymon’s daughter) recalled that while her aunt was preoccupied with impersonating Cleopatra, studying the queen’s image from an old coin and characteristically learning her part by memorizing lines along with gestures “of classical precision,” Emilia’s brother, the talented artist Władysław Benda, had been recruited to sketch both costumes and stage designs and to paint sets in Fisher’s San Diego establishment.187 A 22 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1898 review in the San Francisco Daily Chronicle attested to the combined success of the star and her nephew: “Her costumes tell the whole secret of the woman’s character. She is a superb picture all through, not either in barbaric splendor or in gorgeous queenliness, but in daintiest hints of the most beautiful textures. . . .”188 An older MoÂ�djeÂ� ska studiously avoided projecting the sensuality of the Polish Cleopatra she had performed eighteen years earlier. She opted for an oddly ethereal incarnation of the monarch, “almost as if she had got the role rewritten by Sir James Barrie.”189 A critical review in the Denver Post sensed “a sort of Sunday school flavor” in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s scrupulously unbarbaric portrayal of Cleopatra, but nevertheless approved the production’s “spectacular effects.”190 Notwithstanding the short run of Antony and Cleopatra, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska devoted herself to developing yet another beautiful queen’s tragedy the following summer, again with Fisher’s blessing and investment. The play Marie Antoinette, a new offering by Clinton Stuart, prompted the actress, as was her favorite habit, “to study the period of Louis XVI intensively, in order to design the costumes for her new play and advise John Fisher as to scenery and properties.”191 Fisher hired Thomas Moses of New York’s AmeriÂ�can Theatre to create sets, scenery, and props, which were once more built to order in the manager’s San Diego establishment.192 A puff piece appearing in the 24 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1899 San Francisco Call, adorned with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s photo in her Antoinette costume, advertised her contribution as an incentive to patrons: “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, it is whispered, has materially assisted her manager, John C. Fisher, in designing the scenery for the production, for she is an artist of no mean ability.”193 Once again the critics singled out the play’s look and the star’s dignity and pathos for praise, while deploring the play itself for its wordiness and static exposi-

Modjeska as Marie Antoinette. Courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California


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tion.194 Yet such a series could facilitate the lovely live pictures that MoÂ�djeÂ� ska excelled in composing, as Dithmar implied in the New York Times: “The play is very prettily set, however, and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, who is wonderfully lithe and graceful for her years, is a splendid figure in her rich gowns.”195 Less specific evidence exists for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s contributions as a director in her companies, though she presumably directed as needed, given her concern for good ensemble work and sometimes evident impatience with inept stage managers. Maud Durbin, the star’s protégée in the early 1890s, could remember MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s rare anger at one stage manager, a Mr. Rose, when the flustered man played the First Witch in Macbeth and forgot to remove his gold-Â� rimmed spectacles as he rushed onto the stormy heath.196 Powerful theater professionals and producers recognized MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s directing ability. In 1892, Koźmian urged her to found an acting school or commit her talents to the artistic direction of the KraÂ�ków Theatre.197 The actress hinted at a similar offer from AmeriÂ�can gentlemen interested in establishing “an endowed theatre” in New York, Boston, or Chicago in 1895, although nothing came of the discussion.198 Writing in February 1900 to Sarah Orne Jewett, the actress referred to her current work as director: “Next week I shall present to the New York pubÂ� lic Miss Celia Loftus in the part of Viola in Twelfth Night—and am directing the rehearsals. I hope that young woman will be one day a good Shakespearean actress.”199 As late as NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1905, on one of her last tours under Jules Murry’s management, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska complained that she was serving as director as well as stage manager once more, although with considerably less energy: “I have to be at every rehearsal and even trouble myself about the scenery and the right kind of setting for the stage. This keeps me very busy and tires me also.”200 Despite her abilities, drive, and temperament as a leader, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska never formally assumed a managerial or directorial position, whatever credit she sometimes claimed for herself in correspondence or the press. She never ran her own theater, as did Booth or—a closer counterpart—Mrs. John Drew, Georgie Drew Barrymore’s mother, who managed Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre for thirty years, “training actors and mounting popular productions in a well-Â�regulated theatre, which ran at a profit.”201 Nor did this female star submit to the control of the new male producer-Â�d irectors emerging in the late nineteenth century, engaging in one of the “strange duets” that scholar Kim Marra incisively analyzes. The spirited Ada Rehan (1860–1916) succumbed to the autocratic, abusive Augustin Daly (1838–1899) as one of the stars in his

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company and lived as his long-Â�suffering mistress for twenty years. 202 MoÂ�djeÂ� ska had settled the problem of being controlled by her manager-Â�lover early in her career, with family backing and her own increasing managerial competence. In effort if not in title, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska resembled the actress-Â�managers who were particularly visible on the AmeriÂ�can stage, women such as Catherine Sinclair (1817–1891) and Laura Keene (1826–1873) whose “control extended to every aspect of production, inÂ�cludÂ�ing play selection, role assignment, and choice of costumes, scenery, and music.” Jane Kathleen Curry remarks the “hidden” power available to the AmeriÂ�can actress through just such offices: “Although throughÂ�out the [nineteenth] century it remained unusual for any woman to be in a position to hire, train, supervise, and discipline men, these things were done by woman managers.”203 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s grand ambitions, intellectuality, painstaking technique, and workaholic habits rendered her an intriguing bridge figure in the history of the AmeriÂ�can theater and, especially, the professional and pubÂ�l ic evolution of the AmeriÂ�can actress. Her AmeriÂ�can career was founded on her prowess as the most refined queen of melodramas in which women figured as sinner/sacrifice; elevated by her artful, intelligent interpretations of Shakespeare’s wise, virtuous maidens and wronged queens; and extended by her repertoire development, company training, and pubÂ�lic lectures to the next generation of “new women” theatrical entrepreneurs such as Julia Marlowe (1866–1950) and, especially, Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865– 1932).204 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska plotted a middle course in her management by which she retained her position as charismatic lead for as long as her audiences patronized her and exerted her control and influence over her company as a ladylike star. An acknowledged theater professional in America, she could never feign Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s disinterested aristocratic promotion of the arts, but she strived for a variant on the informal, uncredited mode of influence that her mentor had exercised and thereby preserved her image as the unruffled, cosmopolitan, charmingly authoritative “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska.” As much as she railed against the star system, she readily exploited and enjoyed the power that accrued to her as the star in a player-Â�centered theatre. Long blessed with a youthful beauty and keenly aware of her strengths as a romantic rather than tragic heroine, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska dared to play Juliet when she was a grandmother in her mid-Â�40s; to incarnate Camille, Adrienne, and Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Viola into her late 50s; and to seek out queenly rather than less attrac-


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tive character parts for her last years on the stage. To a very great degree, she persisted as the virtuoso soloist she had become decades before in WarÂ�saw, the unfailing star whose performances received the critics’ highest praise and were often championed as the sole redeeming feature of new plays that failed. For artistic, financial, and personal reasons, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska never opted to yield the limelight for primary power offstage. As she could admit to her old friend Faleńska, she struggled hard with the aging process and the prospect of losing her looks. Approaching the Rubicon of fifty, she hoped that her patrons would appreciate “the charm of maturity and artistic power” in her older self, but she confessed that the first moments of her passage from “the lovely Miss Helena to serious matron” were “unpleasant.”205 Ensconced as a star and comfortably occupying a decorous middle ground, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska mentored company members as a matter of course. She claims in Memories and Impressions that she and Chłapowski did their best to make her colleagues comfortable on the road: “While my husband had the manageÂ� ment of my tours, which we had for several years, we had the whole company located in the private car.”206 Because she periodically interrupted her AmeriÂ� can touring for trips to Europe or, in one case, due to illness, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska tried to find places for her actors in the companies of other stars she respected. She explained to Booth on behalf of a Miss Gray “whom I have heard recite,” and who also happened to be Colonel Watterson’s protégée, that “it is really very hard to get any scenic education until a person begins under a good management.”207 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also monitored her companies for improper behavior. For example, her 1883 memo to administrative manager Fred Stinson complained of an actress whose rowdy behavior kept the company up until 5 am and resulted in her being removed from the private car. Anticipating more such shenanigans onstage, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska contemplated how to replace the offending player. 208 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska offered unvarnished moral support as well as social guidance. In a series of letters to Grace Fisher, a young actress whom the star’s 1896 stroke left out of work, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska assured her protégée that she would retain a place in her troupe, could keep the costumes she had borrowed, and need not anguish over her lack of “business capacity”: “Is it necessary for an artist to have any business capacity!! Who put these dreadful thoughts into your mind? Of course you have no business capacity, so much the better. Who cares?”209 MoÂ� djeÂ�ska even took Fisher into her confidence about her own financial straits: “I should not like others to know of it—I mean to suspect even that I am not

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rolling in gold. AmeriÂ�cans have contempt for the poor and adore the rich. I prefer to be adored.”210 Whether the members of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s companies received a good scenic education usually depended on their temperament, stage of career, and attachment to their star. The gorgeous, headstrong Barrymore allegedly was not always line-perfect in his parts, but confident of his worth and ambitious to prove himself as a playwright and an actor beyond the leading man roles he played vis-Â�à-Â�vis MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and other female stars. Mary Shaw, another favorite of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s, had been a veteran of Augustin Daly’s tightly controlled company, and preferred the theatrical home she found during her five seasons with the Polish actress. In an 1897 interview with the New York Dramatic Mir ror, Shaw declared these seasons “one of the most enjoyable periods of my theatrical life. [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s] company was one of the finest and best balanced I have ever seen, and we were all congenial to each other.”211 Theater historian Albert Auster identifies MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as more than a professional role model for Shaw: “In MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s company, along with being exposed to the craft of a great actress, Shaw also had a chance to observe at first hand a woman of great charm and intelligence, for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had before emigrating conducted literary salons in her native Poland with writers like Henry Sienkiewicz (Quo Vadis).”212 Other company members shared Shaw’s high opinion of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. Julia Marlowe, an ambitious young actress intent on producing Shakespeare’s plays and other high-Â�quality drama despite her limited stage experience, first hired MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s company as her support in 1888, when the Polish actress had decided on a long retreat at Arden. Marlowe recalled that the company “was a fine one, conÂ�sistÂ�ing of people who had played with Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska for years,” but whom she had to wean from “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s method” and “the business which she favored in her various plays.”213 Marlowe consequently faced “a stormy season.” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s devoted cast believed their former star “to be incomparable in all her roles” and resented their new star as an upstart whose changes disparaged “Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s judgment, reputation, knowledge, [and] virtuosity.”214 The successful middle course of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s management also depended, as did her position and function at home in Southern California, on her relationship with her nearly ubiquitous, intensely engaged spouse. Whether Chłapowski formally served as her manager, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska thrived emotionally in his company and relied on their coupledom to set the right tone on the


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road. The letters she sent him during the 1885–1886 Frohman season highlighted just how much she needed his support, when one might expect that she felt most cosseted by her manager. Chłapowski was then off in Poland, acting as chairman of a Polish Benevolent Committee which helped relocate Polish migrant workers driven from Germany by Bismarck’s policies. 215 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letters to him were filled with longing, worry about his safety, shop talk, and some secÂ�ond-guessing about Frohman’s decisions. Writing from Boston in March 1886, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska noted the critics’ acclaim for her Odette along with the less than packed houses. She wondered if they had too much competition, or if E. H. Vanderfelt, the leading man Frohman hired since BarryÂ� more was unavailable, was “not as attractive to women,” or if her manager simply did not know his business.216 Subsequent letters complained about their poor audiences in Providence and those “small cities” where she did not draw well.217 By the time she had reached Pittsburgh in mid-Â�April, after weeks of “caring little” about her performance, the lonely star had come to this conclusion about Karol’s absence: “We never ought to be parted for such a long time, at least if you don’t leave me with the children [presumably her son and daughter-Â�in-Â�law]. Living here I only see alien faces and gaze all day long at the withered and yellowed face of Miss Cobb [her assistant], or hear the stupid things my actor colleagues tell me. My best moments come during walks and on rainy days when I knit or paint.”218 Whereas the garrulous, argumentative, absentminded, chain-Â�smoking ChłaÂ� powski might have seemed a strange traveling companion for the gracious, highly competent Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, the two evolved into sanguine and completely interdependent professional partners in America. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska described just how well they worked together in a DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1892 letter to her sister-Â�in-Â� law Anna: “Anyone who hasn’t been in America and hasn’t paid close attention to how business is done here, how everything must be arranged swiftly, without wasting a moment in reaching one’s goal, has no idea of all that Karol must devote himself to or of the work I undertake to achieve the right artistic results.” Since Anna was just such a person, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska gave her a full account of their daily routine: We rise at 8:30 and I lie abed until 9—Karolek drinks coffee and reads the papers which contain all my reviews. At 10 a young man comes to clip these. Karolek has to talk with him, as well as give him some letters to answer, which Karol himself sometimes dictates. Then our agents arrive and he goes over bills and travel routes with them, they settle any doubts over the cost of railway tickets, transportation, or the

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Sta r r i ng M a da m e Modj e sk a worth of certain theatres, departure times, extra performances, etc., etc. This usually takes up the rest of the morning. During this time I go to rehearsal or study at home—I often sew those costumes or accessories that I won’t entrust to anyone else. Naścia [her maid] is already at the theater busy unpacking or packing my dresses and mannequins, for although I usually have a wardrobe assistant as well, we barely manage, since there is so much laundering and sewing to be done for those young ladies who appear only for a moment on the stage as ladies in waiting or villagers. The ladies in waiting are usually very dirty and untidy and strip off their dresses in haste, like a secÂ�ond skin, and tear them up dreadfully. After a short lunch Karolek sits down to his local correspondence (people here like to write, and write an enormous amount), I either receive visitors or pay visits— although most often I close myself off in my room and work. At five we have tea— I sometimes nap—and at 6:30 I go to the theater. So it goes, day after day. We don’t even have time to read except just before bed. 219

The couple’s odd complementarity bemused their celebrity interviewers. A long profile in a DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1887 issue of the Daily Picayune welcomed the vivacity and candor of their conversations: “Bright, fiery, cultured and talky, it is easy to see that [Chłapowski] is a kind of pleasant, perpetual Fourth of July celebration in the life of his distinguished wife and that in one sense he keeps her alive with his drollery, good cheer, and sunshiney temperament. . . . An interview with Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska with Count Bożenta left out, would be like eating soup that had not been salted.”220 A decade later, Amy Leslie offered a more revealing review of this marital “show,” juxtaposing the histrionic, garrulous “Bożenta” with his quietly dignified spouse, yet enjoying their perpetually harmonious duet: “Between them there are always affectionate bombardments of chaff, bright exchanges of banter and sudden rises into lofty discussions upon Platonian themes quite beyond the depth of anybody less than a Buddhist ascetic and savant. They are as mysteriously companionable and breezy as they can be.”221 The “salted soup” of the couple’s conversation, their breezy companionÂ� ability, and their like generosity set a consistent tone for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s companies regardless of her external management. Insofar as their punishing performance schedule allowed, the actress wife and her voluble husband played considerate, somewhat eccentric hosts on the road, echoing more formally their behavior back at Arden. They accentuated the obvious difference in their temperaments so that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska might preserve her collected demeanor while Chłapowski, also called Mr. Bożenta or Charlie (by his wife), indulged in


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Karol Chłapowski in the 1890s. Courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California

choleric outbursts usually directed at targets outside the troupe. Traveling with them in the early 1890s, Otis Skinner remembered how smoothly they handled a relentlessly intimate life on tour: [Life] was spent very largely in a private car, and not only did we meet constantly in the theatre for performances and rehearsal, but in the small hotel on wheels, lived, ate, and slept as well as the thunder of passing trains and the banging of switch engines in railroad yards o’ nights would permit—Madame, her husband, the business manager, Buckley, and myself, as well as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s indispensable Polish maid, Naścia. With marvelous poise, Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska played the hostess. It was no small matter to adjust one’s moods and irritabilities, that come with morning coffee after a sleepless night, to the close intimacy necessarily ours for an unusual number of meals per diem (the most vital business on that car was the business of eating), but MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s temper seemed serene. “I don’t always feel pleasant,” she said, when I asked if she was never ruffled. “I used to lose my temper very often, so did Mr. Bozenta, but it was not wise for both of us to be excited at once, so we agreed that but one of us should lose his temper on any occasion while the others keep calm.” “And does it always work?” I asked. “Perfectly,” she laughed, “you see, Charlie is excited all the time.” 222

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Together, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski afforded their players a stable, benign base, a kind of high-Â�toned theatrical family in which the star played the “pleasant” lady rather than prima donna and her husband weighed in as a knowledgeable, highly opinionated theatrophile. While MoÂ�djeÂ�ska surely served as the company’s chief artistic authority, husband and wife worked together to nurture talent and easily crossed the line from professional rectitude to compassionate friendship. According to Amy Leslie, Chłapowski made it a point to argue with the equally irascible Barrymore on almost any topic and these “daily wrangles” finally led to the actor’s resignation. 223 But Barrymore’s daughter Ethel recalls in her autobiography how MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, “the most charming and entrancing woman I was ever to meet,” offered the entire Barrymore family use of her private car for rest and play, and ultimately persuaded Georgie Drew Barrymore to convert herself and her children to Catholicism: “So suddenly Lionel and I were surprised to be baptized again. Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her husband, Count Bożenta, were Lionel’s godparents; and Miss Veronica Murray, who presided over a very elegant boarding-Â� house in New York, and one Perugini, the only Catholic Mamma could find at the moment, were mine.”224 A few years later, after Georgie had died of tuberculosis in Santa Barbara and the thirteen-Â�year-Â�old Ethel had to accompany her mother’s body back to her father and grandmother in Philadelphia, the Chłapowskis came to her aid: “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska met me in Los Angeles— she and her husband—and they helped me. Poor Madame couldn’t stop crying, though she tried so hard to, and I felt I had to comfort her.” 225 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski also helped launch the career of Maud Durbin (1873–1936), furthered the fortunes of Otis Skinner (1858–1942), and facilitated these two actors’ marriage. Cornelia Otis Skinner’s account of her mothÂ� er’s “scenic education” tells of a young woman bewitched by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Camille in a Denver performance. Miraculously admitted for an audience with the star, Maud was a bit scandalized that “the great lady” was smoking a cigarette “caught in a small, gold clamp attached to a chain on her forefinger.” Yet once she had been issued a contract with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s company, the novice was assured of Madame’s careful mentoring. 226 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself assuaged the anxiety and indignation of Durbin’s parents with a diplomatic letter about promising parts and modest costumes: “My dear Miss Durbin! I am afraid my stage manager’s letter has discouraged you and therefore, I write to you to urge you not to give up the opportunity of making your career . . . maybe the only sure one you have. You may get an engagement in some other Â�companies . . .


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but, I assure you, it will not be the same.” Assigning her, among other parts, the speaking of the Prologue and Epilogue in Henry VIII, the star promised Durbin that her herald’s dress “may be long to the knees.”227 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska proved to be a rigorous mentor, reading parts with Durbin, disciplining her when the inexperienced girl used the star’s own prompt book or copied another actress’s costume, and demonstrating to her the standard MoÂ�djeÂ�ska part preparation, modeled on Hamlet’s famous advice, of suiting action to word and word to action.228 The Chłapowskis gradually integrated her into their traveling family. The young Durbin began her career in New York chaperoned by her mother, but when her parent was called home to care for a sick child, Chłapowski noted that the girl’s eyes were red from weeping and soon afterwards MoÂ�djeÂ�ska summoned Durbin to help sew costumes, busy work that “was merely her motherly way of keeping me from sobbing my heart out.”229 A very junior member of their company, Durbin nonetheless was included at times in their private car dinners and invited to spend a memorable summer with them at Arden, where MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “relaxed in the role of efficient hostess, wife, mother, and grandmother” and Durbin attended the famous 1894 birthday barbeque.230 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska put the finishing touch to Durbin’s and Skinner’s careers by convincing the actor to hire the young woman for his new company, a professional relationship that blossomed into marriage. While MoÂ�djeÂ�ska saw promise in Durbin, Chłapowski was keenly aware of Skinner’s potential, as he informed his Polish family in fall 1893: “Skinner is surely the most talented AmeriÂ�can actor today and has a magnificent future ahead of him. He is educated and pleasant company for us.”231 Skinner, in turn, recalled the couple’s support and generosity when their paths diverged, they to Europe and he to star on his own: “The season closed and Madame bade me goodby, to return for a year to her native Poland, wishing me success in my following season, which was to see me as a star in my own right. . . . She and her husband had shown great interest in my venture, even offering financial backing.”232 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski’s sanguine partnership could not ensure a constant domestic idyll on the road, given their company’s “perpetual motion,” sometimes appalling theatrical venues, the large egos and private vices to be found in any group of actors, and Chłapowski’s occasionally errant fireworks. Stinson, for example, served off and on as the company’s administrative manager and abruptly resigned his post in SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1883 because he was “said to have had trouble with the Count Bożenta.”233 Barrymore’s two-Â�year break

Actor Otis Skinner (1858–1942). Photo by Sarony. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations


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with the company likely had little do with Chłapowski’s argumentativeness, since both he and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska went their separate ways on English tours in fall 1884. But the ambitious actor was upset that his star had not devoted more of her touring schedule in the 1883–1884 season to a play he had written as her vehicle, Nadjezda, a melodrama about the 1863 Polish uprising. Although it drew mixed notices and exhausted MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in a dual mother-Â�daughter role, Barrymore was proud of his creation and demanded its more frequent performance, to which MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did not consent. In spring 1884, the Barrymore-Â� MoÂ�djeÂ�ska fallout over Nadjezda ended curiously, with Georgie Drew Barrymore filing a legal complaint over the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska company’s “unauthorized” production of the play and the company’s subsequent agreement to cease its performance.234 Regardless of this legal squabble, Barrymore and family rejoined MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s company in the 1886–1887 season. Much more shocking was the company’s permanent loss of actor Frank Clements, an English import who had played MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s leading man in her first AmeriÂ�can tours, then resumed work in her company in secondary roles, displaced by the likes of Barrymore and E. H. Vanderfelt. The company knew of Clements’s binge drinking and worried when he went missing during their spring 1886 tour, but they could not have anticipated his horrible, inconclusively accidental death. Somehow Clements, “who had been drinking heavily,” fell under a train in Newark and was decapitated on 8 May 1886.235 Though they obviously could not control Clements’s addiction, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski left money with his widow and later helped the family by hiring his son Robert for youthful parts in the winter of 1887.236 Clements’s career, rather than his alcoholism, pointed to another perennial problem for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s changing company casts: their recurring need for a passable “leading man” willing to play secÂ�ond fiddle to a female star, especially as that star grew older. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s beauty long served her well, and it is interesting to note that Clements, four years her junior, was removed from romantic leads quite quickly, either supplanted by more charismatic talent or recast because of his own maturing looks. In later years, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was paired with Joseph Haworth (1855–1903), fifteen years her junior; Otis Skinner, who was eighteen years younger; and even the future silent film star William S. Hart, who played Armand to her Camille and Macbeth to her Lady Macbeth during her 1895–1896 season when he was just turning thirty. Both Skinner and Hart gallantly dismissed this age discrepancy in their memoirs, Hart declaring that “it was a great honor to have been associated with this great actress,” and Skinner opining that “old she was not; not even in years or appearance,

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and in her art she was at her very heyday.”237 Yet the actress and her husband regularly coped with the special problems facing an older female star who was unreliable in tragedies and unwilling to sidestep into unattractive character parts, unlike the aging Charlotte Cushman. 238 By the end of her touring years, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had not saved enough for a comfortable retirement, mainly because of the scope of Chłapowski’s off-Â�season ambitions and the burgeoning needs of her relations. Yet over her decades on the AmeriÂ�can road, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska enjoyed a broader professional and personal latitude than she ever would have attained in Poland or, most certainly, England. She exercised great control over her expert interpretations of her starring roles, the visual impact of her performances, the scenic education of the actors under her authority, and the choreography and stage business of her troupe as a whole. She functioned in effect as an artistic manager and an occasional director without forfeiting her continental aristocratic persona at large. As she traveled the AmeriÂ�can road, Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska remained ensconced among her adopted nation’s cultural elite. A great artist in a large and socially fluid country, she interacted with a wide variety of native-Â�born actors and visiting players, as well as artists and professionals outside of her specialization in literature, journalism, the fine arts, and politics. She played a season onstage with Edwin Booth, enjoyed lifelong friendships with such powerful Â�intermediaries as the critic William Winter and the publisher Richard Gilder, cultivated and benefited from associations with other female artists such as Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, and was welcomed as a social equal into the homes of national and local first citizens. Perhaps most important, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska developed a vital working relationship with her husband on the road, putting to good use his knowledge of and passion for the theater, and depending on him as her co-Â�producer and chief professional confidante. In the United States, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski were partnered together in a way that would have demeaned him in a class-Â�stratified Polish context, reducing the aristocrat to business manager. Their relationÂ� ship in America guaranteed her artistic control, psychological stability, and reÂ�lief from general managerial obligations, while the AmeriÂ�can road, rather than California real estate, cast Chłapowski in his most successful professional role as unsilent partner and protector of his star. “Mr. Bożenta” indulged in his democratic ways on tour with zest and fireworks, enabling Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s contrasting reign as the calmly transcendent star, his serene “aristocratic” spouse.

6

(

The Roles of Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska

Th e R ight R epertoir e: R e v i v i ng t h e Cl a ssics Because she sought to make her mark above all as an artist rather than as a director or a master teacher, the question of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s lasting professional legacy remains problematic. In spite of her complaints about life on the road, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska seemed primarily disposed to shine onstage. Nothing inspired her more than the prospect of an excellent new part or a starring role in a play that she might redeem through her interpretation and design. In WarÂ�saw, she confessed envy of Rapacki’s achievement as a playwright, but in America, she mainly preoccupied herself with finding promising new plays to produce. Toward the end of her AmeriÂ�can career, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska seemed sanguine about the value of her ephemeral art. When a reporter for the New York Times asked her in 1899 if “the work of the stage” was less satisfying than that of a painter or a sculptor, creators of lasting art, the actress’s response was thoughtfully positive rather than self-Â�deprecating: “â†œ‘No,’ Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska answered, ‘you do not have anything to show, but you know what you have done.’”1 Knowing what she had done and also what she had tried to do on the stage had to constitute MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s legacy, for these efforts fully engaged her impresario’s drive, performing genius, and exceptional artistic openness. For an actress who thrived on challenges and passionately promoted high art, the greatest thrill always lay in developing the right repertoire. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska pursued this goal everywhere she played, outfoxing the Russian censor in WarÂ� saw to perform the greatest drama on regicide, struggling out of the enervat-

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ing circle of her successful melodramas in London, and striving to draw the general AmeriÂ�can pubÂ�lic to see the classic and new social drama she desperately longed to perform. During her many tours in the United States, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska performed thirty-Â� five different plays, a number too small for her taste, since she preferred diverse bills in touring and ever-Â�new parts in her repertoire. As much as she tired of them, she could never afford to abandon her melodramatic hits. MoÂ� djeÂ�ska even added Odette, the triumph and bane of her last London season, to her AmeriÂ�can repertoire in her first season back, in a premiere performance which Winter judged “scarcely inferior” to her Camille “in power of emotion and in beauty of mechanism,” although he felt the character itself could not match Camille’s “goodness”!2 Dithmar’s praise for her masterful incarnation of contemporary agitated heroines echoed Bogusławski’s 1879 verdict, yet with less reproof: “Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska shows her best face in the representation of personalities which belong to the social life of to-Â�day; of personalities, above all, which have in them a perversely feminine element of weakness. The illogical, wayward, morbid temperament of Odette is entirely within her grasp.”3 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska depended on her Camilles and Odettes to fill houses even as she infused them with the psychological depth and complex temperament that vindicated her choice for more discerning viewers. By 1882, she was determined to complement, if not eclipse, her mesmerizing fallen women with the classic fare of Shakespearean plays and Schiller’s Mary Stuart. In the 1882–1883 season, she not only reprised Romeo and Juliet, but also established As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Mary Stuart in her rotating repertoire. As she confided in Faleńska, she even intended to add The Taming of the Shrew and Â�Cymbeline to the season’s daunting list, “but this is still a secret.”4 Her gamble that these dramas could form the backbone of her AmeriÂ�can playlist succeeded with incessant practice and performance. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s grand scheme was enabled by general trends in the late nineteenth-Â� century AmeriÂ�can theater’s repertoire and acting style. In his seminal study of highbrow culture, Lawrence Levine marks its emergence in America by tracing changes in the interpretation, performance, and patronage of Shakespearean drama. 5 The Bard’s plays rivaled the Bible as texts that AmeriÂ�cans knew thoroughly and valued immensely for their vigorous drama, high oratory, and moral lessons. In the first half of the nineteenth century, ShakeÂ�spearÂ� ean drama had been produced in America as popular entertainment, tricked out with entr’acte diversions, music, and pageantry, and performed by such

T h e Rol e s of M a da m e MoÂ�dje Â�sk a

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“vigorous, tempestuous, emotional” actors as Edwin Forrest. 6 Yet tastes and behaviors altered as theaters began to woo middle-Â�class patrons. Surveying the general decline in Shakespearean productions from 1855 to 1870, McConachie marks the shift away from such “muscular tragedies” as Macbeth, King Lear, and Coriolanus to Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and the comedies.7 A new generation of actors also challenged the style of “strenuous realism” that Forrest and Junius Brutus Booth had made so popular. Edwin Booth, Forrest’s namesake and Junius’s son, began this partial revolution, “play[ing] his roles in a less ferocious, more subtle and intellectualized fashion than his father and most of the other leading actors of the first half of the century had.”8 Theater historian Edwin Duerr dates the onset of this revolution as early as 1860, when Booth tested his Hamlet, Richard III, and Richelieu (a play by Bulwer-Â� Lytton) against Forrest’s Richard III, Richelieu, King Lear, Othello, and Mac beth, although Duerr categorizes the younger actor as more refiner than rebel: “With admirable taste he undoubtedly softened and dignified the excesses of standard elocution until as ‘an expounder of the text,’ he was hailed as being eminently modÂ�ern and natural.”9 Wilson, too, ascribes Booth’s innovation to individual talent rather than programmatic change: “Booth’s style of acting was shaped by his natural gifts: a beautiful voice, a graceful though not a powÂ� erful physique, and a penetrating, poetic mind. . . . His art was smooth, even of texture, and marvellously relaxed.”10 Booth’s best acting emerged from a combination of careful study, fine technique, and inspiration; if this last element was missing, his work “could be cold and formal,” but its presence “could enthrall his audience with the beauty and fire of his performance.”11 Booth’s style, repertoire, and lifelong adoration by the pubÂ�lic fundamentally conditioned AmeriÂ�can audiences’ responsiveness to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her Shakespearean ambition. Her acting approach in many ways overlapped with his, involving a similar “careful analysis of parts,” “the symmetry and balance of her conceptions,” “the even texture of her acting,” and even the coldness critics occasionally complained of when “she failed of inspiration.”12 Both Booth (his idol) and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska (one of his favorites) were championed by WinÂ�ter, the chief judge of genteel success on the boards, because their acting achieved what he deemed the desirable “balance between emotion and technique.”13 Booth, moreover, was pivotal in what Levine represents as the sanctification of Shakespeare in America, the transformation of Shakespearean productions from popular entertainment into grandly designed high art to be consumed with awe and, consequently, a greater outlay of cash. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska

Actor Edwin Booth (1833–1893). Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations


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debuted on the AmeriÂ�can stage a mere seven years after Booth’s sixty-Â�four consecutive performances of Hamlet in his own New York theater “stirred the greatest excitement, drew the strongest box office [and] received the highest praise.”14 During the six years of his management (1869–1875), even after he had to declare bankruptcy in 1874, Booth “mounted altogether eight major Shakespeare productions” in his theater, subscribing, curiously enough, to what he later professed to disdain in Irving’s much elaborated sets, “this grand nineteenth-Â�century delusion that one got at the heart of Shakespeare’s mystery by filling the stage with more and more realistic scenery.”15 While Booth eventually rid himself of this delusion as well as his theater, his dedication to the Bard remained evident not only in his repertoire, but also in a more permanent project he undertook with Winter. In 1876, he proposed that the critic co-Â�produce “acting edition[s] of all the plays I perform,” and, over the next two years, actor and critic “published a total of fifteen Prompt Books,” nine of which were Shakespeare plays.16 Thus, while Shakespearean productions dwindled in number even before MoÂ�djeÂ�ska appeared on the AmeriÂ�can stage, their refined revival by Booth and continued identification with him as a beloved national celebrity imbued them with the right class appeal for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s image and purpose. Booth’s performances were regarded as the most accomplished and coveted that the AmeriÂ� can theater had to offer, works of performing art so beautifully mounted and played as to raise them high above the motley of AmeriÂ�can entertainment which had dismayed MoÂ�djeÂ�ska on her first tours. Through his sensitive intellectual style and richly furnished sets and theater, Booth helped define late nineteenth-Â�century AmeriÂ�can culture “as a higher sphere of activity associated with class privilege.” He produced highbrow art for an aspiring elite.17 Or, as McConachie argues, the sensitivity, spirituality, and idealization inherent in Booth’s acting were embraced and patronized as the values of America’s newly ascendant business class.18 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska therefore had good reason to presume that a revived, refined Shakespearean tradition could attract discerning, well-Â�paying audiences, provided those audiences came to admire her in, and identify her with, certain Shakespearean parts. Booth kept a core of his father’s repertoire a going concern, but tailored it to his personal strengths and contemporary context. MoÂ� djeÂ�ska benefited from Booth’s reform and Shakespeare’s consequent currency, yet she faced the higher hurdles of first identifying the right starring roles and then mastering their language and interpretation to her AmeriÂ�can pubÂ�lic’s sat-

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isfaction. She needed to reverse the preference of her St. Louis audience when she played As You Like It and Odette on consecutive nights in winter 1883: “Whatever any may have thought of Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Â�Rosalind, and there are some who profess not to have greatly admired it, her Odette is without question such a character as to rank her among the few great actresses.”19 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s successful creation of a gallery of Shakespearean roles over the next two decades is perhaps more impressive than Booth’s efforts because she, for the most part, cleared these hurdles despite her foreigner’s handicaps. Her first challenge was one familiar to her from her WarÂ�saw days. An ambitious actress in the late nineteenth century simply had fewer classic star parts at her disposal. A critic for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin spelled out this perennial problem: “The range of Shakespearean plays in which a woman can star is limited. There are ‘Juliet’ and ‘Rosalind’ and possibly ‘Beatrice’ and ‘Viola,’ but ‘Desdemona’ is overshadowed by two male characters in the play, and ‘Portia’ has always been subordinate to ‘Shylock.’”20 In WarÂ�saw, Modrzejewska could amplify lesser roles such as Desdemona and Ophelia into strong attractions. But her attempts at an English-Â�speaking Juliet, first in the United States and then in England, were stymied by her age and, at least in London, her marked non-Â�Englishness. By the time she returned to America in 1882, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Shakespearean ambition was at fever pitch. Whatever the abiding flaws in her spoken English, she would wait no longer to try the parts she always had coveted, that handful of Shakespearean heroines which showed off her own best onstage attributes of keen intelligence, poetic feeling, the artful expression of romantic love, physical grace, highly nuanced characterization, and the projection of good womanliness. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s subsequent efforts contributed to and benefited from what ShatÂ�t uck historicizes as the “feminization of Shakespeare,” an offshoot of the onstage “woman-Â�worship” flourishing in England, WestÂ�ern Europe, and the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.21 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s advance from French erotic melodrama to Shakespearean roles exemplified a general progression for leading actresses in her day. In tandem with Booth’s tempering and intellectualizing once “strenuously” played male roles, actresses such as Cushman and Janauschek, who had “masculinized” their incarnations of such tragic parts as Lady Macbeth, were passing from the scene, yielding to lovely new players who acted evil through conventionally feminine wiles. Shattuck elaborates on the consequences of the public’s shifting gender role preferences in both theater business and the media: “The cleverest of


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this new breed of ‘womanly women’ often took command of the profession. Many of them hired and led their own companies, chose and directed their own plays, were featured on posters and in newspaper advertisements and usurped the attention of the critics, who lavished paragraphs upon the lady stars and saved a few sentences at the end to mention the Romeos, Â�Malvolios, Orlandos, and Benedicks who acted ‘in support.’ Audiences flocked to adore these much advertised tender Juliets, sparkling Rosalinds and Beatrices, and gentle Violas.”22 Perhaps the cleverest “womanly woman,” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska already knew her best Shakespearean vehicles would be those comedies with a spirited or ardent heroine at the helm—As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, and the little-Â�played Cymbeline. She occasionally inserted The Merchant of Venice into the roster, for Portia’s alternately romantic and serious scenes were well within her range. She tried a few performances of Two Gentlemen from Verona in her 1885–1886 season, although her part as Julia— “but another Viola . . . in embryon”—was too slight to reap star dividends.23 The rebellious Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, at least before her subduing, simply did not suit MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s performing persona. Shakespeare had given her no young queens, with the exception of Cleopatra, which she undertook very late in her AmeriÂ�can career and disappointingly sanitized. But after her successful English-Â�language debut of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, she could grow old with this effective queenly role and please the critics with the tragic force she reliably brought to Schiller’s unhistorical portrait of Mary as a pious woman wronged. When age forced her to the secondary queenly roles of Katharine in Henry VIII and Constance in King John, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did everything in her star power to render these her productions’ key performances, even if this meant trimming an act to redirect the spotlight. Just as WarÂ�saw audiences had treasured most her Ophelias and Desdemonas, so her AmeriÂ� can audiences waited patiently for her star turns as queen in two lesser Shakespearean plays. Most interesting, however, was MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s reinterpretation of the great tragic part of Lady Macbeth. She had to learn the role for her tour with Booth, but she fully reconstructed the villainess as her own creation once she could outshine Macbeth, the leading man to her star, in her own companies’ performances. Whatever her choice of Shakespearean play, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska still had to do battle with its English, the most difficult and demanding language on the English-Â� speaking stage. Her melodramas had eased her into the AmeriÂ�can theater,

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amply allowing for “exoticism” in look and sound. Amy Leslie even argued that “a strange tongue illumines the text like a margin picture would a book” in the “two companion dramas” of Adrienne Lecouvreur and Camille.24 In contrast, Shakespeare required precise pronunciation, a strong feeling for English poetic meters, and fluency in using archaic words, usages, and syntax. At the outset, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s accented delivery of Shakespeare’s lines detracted from her performance and irritated even sympathetic reviewers. Winter could not help but remark on the impediment of “her foreign accent and cadence” when she first performed Twelfth Night in New York. 25 Dithmar in the New York Times was less circumspect, complaining that “it was frequently impossible to understand her, and some of the loveliest verse put into the sweet mouth of Viola became, as she spoke it, unintelligible.”26 He leveled the same charge at her Rosalind in the 11 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882 performance of As You Like It.27 Yet opinions about the effect of her accent markedly changed as her first Shakespeare-Â�laden tour traveled west. In St. Louis, it was reported that “some found her peculiarities of enunciation painful to the ear,” while others thought “the slight foreign accent rather added to the charm of her delivery.” 28 The Mil waukee Sentinel also judged her accent to be a plus and insisted that “she slurs nothing.”29 The reviewer for the Chicago Tribune fulsomely complimented her on her progress in English: “Since her last appearance in Chicago, Mme. MoÂ� djeÂ�ska has improved greatly in many respects, and in none more so than in her command of the English tongue. That she will ever master it is hardly to be expected, but she has so far succeeded that the foreign flavor, which her speaking will always retain, but adds a pleasant and piquant grace to a very charming enunciation and accent.”30 These divided responses to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s English elocution—marring mispronunciation versus pleasing piquancy—recurred in her notices throughÂ�out her AmeriÂ�can career. It bears noting that none of her critics identified that accent as Polish or Slavic; either they did not recognize it as such or saw no benefit in socially demoting a well-Â�patronized star. While MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s English did improve, her accent never disappeared, and could be exacerbated by new parts, new partners, illness, and aging. Yet in many performances it counted as a minor flaw. By January 1886, when she had mastered the part of Rosalind, the critic for The New York Times accepted her “slight foreign accent” as a likable feature of her “almost faultless piece of comedy acting.”31 The San Fran cisco Daily Chronicle reviewer so enthused about MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s performance as Imogen in Shakespeare’s usually “disagreeable” play Cymbeline in January 1889,


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another part that the actress had polished over several years, that he was ready to pronounce her “the most brilliant Shakespearean actress of the century,” if she “could only be free from the accent which one cannot help noticing.”32 Yet later that year, which saw MoÂ�djeÂ�ska paired with Booth in a series of Shakespeare plays, the always sharp-Â�tongued Nym Crinkle (the pseudonym for critic A. C. Wheeler) deplored the inevitable contrast between the two stars’ elocution: “That which was condoned in Camille was uncomfortable in The Merchant of Venice, and that which passed by without comment in Nadjezda was glaring in Hamlet, and all the more so in that it was placed as, Mr. Barrett would say, ‘in conjunction’ with an actor who has won no small part of his fame by the unexampled clarity and incisiveness of his English speech.”33 Outliving MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Winter ostensibly uttered the last word in their long debate over foreign actors’ ability to excel as Shakespeareans. Issuing his summary judgment in The Wallet of Time, the critic stated that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “cadences of elocution, her mispronunciation of English words, and her foreign accent somewhat marred the beauty of the verse and impaired its meaning.” He further claimed her “racial” inability to understand and play the Bard’s characters correctly: “It is a fact, which all the protests made by foreign actors and their over-Â�zealous advocates cannot obscure, that the greatest actors are those who, illustrating a true ideal of Shakespeare’s great characters, do so with perfect interpretative art; and the actors in whom that union of ideal and execution has been manifested at the best have been and are actors of Shakespeare’s race.”34 With this blanket conclusion based on “fact,” Winter not only contradicted some of his earlier reviews of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s work, but also dismissed general critical opinion of her interpretive ability. 35 What truly persuaded critics and audiences to forgive or even embrace her accent was MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s keenly perceptive, remarkably finished execution of her parts, just what Winter posited as an impossibility for a foreigner. The enormous popularity of her Rosalind in As You Like It, her favorite role and the part AmeriÂ�can audiences came to identify as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s equivalent to Booth’s Hamlet, demonstrates how thoroughly and effectively she made the part her own and, in the eyes of many, her Rosalind the best. The play’s New York premiere, presented at Booth’s Theater with Barrymore as her Orlando, elicited high praise from the critics, although Winter resisted a complete endorsement. His DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882 review applauded MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Rosalind as “replete with the frolic, the joy, the sentiment, and above all, with the mind of Rosalind; added to which sterling merit, its execution is impressed with that

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air of natuÂ�ralÂ�ness which on the stage is the perfection of well-Â�directed art.” Yet her interpretation lacked, in his assessment, “exuberant physical glee” and “bold color and richness”: “A subdued, twilight tone pervades it—lovely to think about, but not effect on the instant.”36 As he would later add, such a twilight tone was “not the tone of Shakespeare’s Rosalind.”37 Dithmar in the New York Times thought otherwise, however, declaring MoÂ� djeÂ�ska to be “in perfect sympathy with the character” and her acting, despite her accent, to be “full of artistic feeling”: “It had the depth and the tenderness of restrained passion, and it had an airiness, an ingenuous braggadocio, a refined charm, which were, it seemed to us and apparently to the audience, fascinating.”38 With her usual close reading, Jeannette Gilder praised MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s brilliance and wit as Ganymede, Rosalind’s masculine impersonation in the forest, and traced the actress’s psychologically astute interpretation of a Â�Rosalind first struggling to mask her sorrow and unjust disgrace (“Her banter seems always ready to end with a sob”) and then fortified and transformed by love: “It irradiates her with a great joy. She will dress as a man, with curtle-Â�a xe and boar-Â�spear. . . . She will go ‘to liberty and not to banishment.’ The scene lasts for a few brief minutes, and in it MoÂ�djeÂ�ska plays on every note of emotions. Her range is wide; her touch unerring.”39 For the most part, other critics across the country, in Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and elsewhere, shared Dithmar’s and Gilder’s enthusiasm for her 1882–1883 Rosalind. The Milwaukee Sentinel approved her interpretation most explicitly, stating that no one who had seen her performance would “doubt for a moment . . . that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska fully comprehends and appreciates all the subtle and delicate points of Rosalind’s character, the beauty and sweetness of her disposition.”40 Some papers did echo Winter’s reservations (e.g., the Louisville Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin), deciding, in the words of the Bulletin, that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Rosalind “is not the character which Shakespeare drew.”41 Yet all delighted in her brilliance and charm, even in the not-Â�so-Â�Shakespearean performance that obtained. Accruing such accolades on its first AmeriÂ�can tour, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Rosalind became definitive for many critics over subsequent seasons. Reviewing her company’s As You Like It in NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1885, the Louisville Courier-Â�Journal proclaimed: “Hers is the most ideal of all the Rosalinds that our stage has known; yet it is given to us as a reality, and we believe in it.”42 That same fall season the Chicago Tribune effectively preempted Winter’s “racial impossibility”

Modjeska as Rosalind in As You Like It at Booth’s Theatre, New York, 15 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. Courtesy of the Warsaw Theatre Museum

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argument, crediting MoÂ�djeÂ�ska with “the intuitive knowledge” and “spiritual kinship of poetic sympathy” to play this part best, and subsequently claimed that “it is, indeed, no little thing to have witnessed what well may be regarded as the only Rosalind.”43 By 1889, even the San Francisco Evening Bulletin had reversed its verdict of six years ago: “There is not much to be said at this day about MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s ‘Rosalind.’ Taken all in all it is the best on the AmeriÂ�can stage.”44 One of the most articulate and ardent members of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s audience was George C. D. Odell, who published his Annals of the New York Stage, a young man’s chronicle of theatergoing, after he became Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University. He attended MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s As You Like It at the Union Square Theatre on 25 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1886: I have the most vivid memory of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Rosalind. . . . This was one of the Â� glories of the AmeriÂ�can theatre. What her Rosalind may have lacked in raillery and youthful buoyancy, it made up in gentle humour, grace, poetry, or even at times pensive charm . . . MoÂ�djeÂ�ska easily transcended all phases of technical efficiency, of which, indeed, she was past mistress, and arrived into a realm of poetic and spiritual heredity that few have reached. And this in spite of her foreign accent which one must admit detracted from utter enjoyment of her Shakespearian imitations. Her Rosalind . . . was bewitching and exquisite as no other Rosalind in my experience has been. 45

Ultimately, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s much-Â�praised and oft-Â�performed interpretation qualified her as an authority on the part, a fact that Winter himself acknowledged in reviewing a January 1892 production of As You Like It. The aging critic had not changed his mind about this Rosalind’s strengths and weaknesses, but he now admitted how very well the non-Â�English MoÂ�djeÂ�ska felt and knew the role: “Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s fondness for the part and her deep sympathy with it are manifest in every act and word. No one understands it better, and no one, probably, could descant on it with more minute knowledge of its attributes and its drift.”46 Indeed, ten days after this review appeared, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska showed just how ably she could “descant on it,” delivering a paper on the role of Rosalind before the Goethe Society of New York, a study she had composed two years before at Arden, her California version of Rosalind’s forest. In it, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska sketched for her listeners how one can deduce Rosalind’s character quite readily from the cues in Shakespeare’s text, without recourse to Thomas Lodge’s novel Rosalynde on which the play was based. The lecturing actress detailed how she read, interpreted, and embodied her role, accenting


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always subtlety and refinement: “In studying the play one can easily see that the part of Rosalind has not been written for what we actors call ‘points,’ for effective entrances and exits, etc. It would be easy to produce a melodramatic effect in the scene with the Duke Frederick at the end of the first act, but it would be a great mistake. Rosalind is never loud. . . . Even in her indignation she is not disrespectful.”47 By explicating several key scenes and arguing how they must be played, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska challenged her critics on their own turf, proving through analysis as well as action that her genteel Rosalind, dwelling in “an idyl and a poem more than a comedy,” is “the only Rosalind,” “the most ideal of all Rosalinds.” With her repeated performances of As You Like It and Twelfth Night after their 1882 premieres, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska gradually trained her AmeriÂ�can audiences to look forward to her next new Shakespearean venture, to anticipate the pleasure of watching a beautiful, accomplished actress make a “classic” play palatable entertainment, and to invest in her growing gallery of roles as the sort of commendable cultural acquisition—a “complete set”—that distinguished both the artist and her enlightened AmeriÂ�can consumers. Her Viola in Twelfth Night, her secÂ�ond most popular Shakespearean role, ran much the same critical gauntlet as did her Rosalind and likewise won over most critical opinion. Its New York premiere, coming on the heels of her first As You Like It, made comparison of her ambitious new parts inevitable, to the secÂ�ond play’s disadvantage. The New York Times review remarked the half-Â�fi lled house and undemonstrative audience for this first Twelfth Night and even questioned MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s wisdom in attempting a part for which she was clearly not “fitted.” Whereas Rosalind, “a woman of brilliant intelligence and humor,” playfully schools her lover in winning his suit while she is disguised as a male youth, a “more simple, direct, ingenuous” Viola grieves for a twin brother preÂ� sumed dead and selflessly loves the Duke she serves as a page. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Viola yielded but “a faint reproduction of the effect made by the performance of her Rosalind.”48 Winter also found MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Viola to be more flawed than her Rosalind, but traced these flaws to her limited experience in the part, which “left her ideal quite indefinite” and the effect of her consequently “irresolute” performance “remote and cold.”49 By NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1883, J. Ranken Towse, a prominent New York theater critic writing for the Century, reported on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s more definite and finished Viola, a part which “promises to become a fit companion to her Rosalind.” When Viola is shipwrecked and bereft of her twin brother at the beginning of

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the play, Towse admired how MoÂ�djeÂ�ska transcended the shabby set at Booth’s Theatre by powerfully pantomiming “the impression of cold and storm, of suffering, fatigue and fear” and thus setting a true course for her character: “The natural timidity of woman was substituted for the high courage of Â�Rosalind, and this phase of character was emphasized throughÂ�out the play, and was made manifest even in the love scenes with Olivia, which were treated most picturesquely, in varying moods of bewilderment, incredulity and raillery, but with the constant suggestion of the pain inflicted for love’s sake by a loving heart itself.”50 Towse assessed MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 1883 Viola as a very promising work in progress, and, by her 1885–1886 and 1886–1887 seasons, other papers declared that promise fulfilled. In its February 1886 review, the Philadelphia Public Ledger remarked the “consummate art” and sustained performance of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “tender, graceful, womanly Viola.”51 Two months later, the Chicago Tribune appreciated her addition of “a hundred artistic touches that give charm to the characterization and place it almost on an equal plane with her unexcelled Rosalind.”52 Most telling, however, is the 7 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1886 review in the New York Times, which recommended MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s production of Twelfth Night as “delicate beauty” so well staged and performed “that the sensitive spectator may thoroughly enjoy” it: “The performance was as nearly perfect in expression, in its gradations of light and shade, and pictorial effect, as we can hope to have performances of Shakespearean comedy nowadays.”53 The young Odell, sitting in the audience that DeÂ�cemÂ�ber night, enthusiastically agreed: “MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s Viola . . . was incomparably the finest I ever saw, in pensive charm, in humour, in grace, in refinement, and in retention of womanly delicacy even in the farcical duel scene.”54 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s patrons could experience another role the critics pronounced worth collecting. In MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Rosalind and Viola, theatergoers enjoyed the added attraction of their shapely star more revealed by male garb. As a rule, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska favored shorter male costumes than her rivals wore. 55 It is much less clear how cross-Â�dressing affected her characteristic projection of womanly charm. Some of her critics noted restraint in her boy play, the lack of “physical vigor” or “a certain robustness” which coded her interpretations of Ganymede and Cesario as never quite unfeminine by the standards of the day. 56 Odell remarked on the “womanly delicacy” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska retained as Cesario, and Towse asserted that her Ganymede played woman to her audience “while presenting to Â�Orlando nothing but the waywardness of a fanciful boy.”57 In these cross-Â�


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dressed parts MoÂ�djeÂ�ska apparently projected the woman as the character’s essential identity and the boy as the woman’s well-Â�played, but obvious performance. With Rosalind and Viola, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska laid the foundation for her Shakespearean gallery, incessantly polishing established roles and tantalizing audiences with the debut of new heroines. Reviewing her company’s “most worthy” production of Much Ado About Nothing in March 1888, the critic for the Philadelphia Public Ledger was moved to pay homage, as Kenig once did, to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s lofty and delightful contribution to his native stage: Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska is to-Â�day the most pleasing and accomplished actress upon the AmeriÂ�can stage. . . . To sit through one of Shakespeare’s comedies in which Â�MoÂ�djeÂ�ska has a part to play is to look, listen and enjoy. She is in all the characters, from the beautifully informing spirit within to the material splendor of her costume without, a picture which delights the eye even as the melodious sweetness of her voice, playing upon the rhythmic text, charms the ear. Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska is one of the few women of the stage who plays with rare acceptance the women of Shakespeare, whose native loveliness and grace do not shame, but honor them, giving them an added charm. 58

Debuting Much Ado About Nothing in fall 1887, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska won predictable accolades as Beatrice, and Dithmar of the New York Times deemed her to be only slightly inferior to Ellen Terry in the role. 59 By 1892, the Times thought her Beatrice more powerful and varied than Terry’s incarnation, although still less brutal than the character Shakespeare had created. Elaborating on the comparison, Dithmar implied MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s superiority as an actress, even of Shakespeare, weighing Terry’s perfect English diction against MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s unerring taste, exquisite art, and thorough comprehension of Shakespeare’s plays. 60 At least in America MoÂ�djeÂ�ska no longer had to fear Terry’s overwhelming national advantage. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s first Portia in English, played with Booth, suffered in contrast to her co-Â�star’s eloquent Shylock. Yet, as Shattuck remarked, her carefully thought-Â�out preparation resulted in several effective innovations—her earnest black garb in the trial scene “instead of the scarlet robes affected by Ellen Terry and other recent Portias,” her gradual modulation from mannish to womÂ�anly tones during the scene, and her introduction of a “woman’s touch.”61 As MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recalled in a 6 January 1893 interview with the Milwaukee Senti nel, she interpreted Portia’s magnificent speech of intercession (“The quality of mercy is not strained . . .”) not as an opportunity “for great elocution,” but

Modjeska as Viola in Twelfth Night at Booth’s Theatre, New York, 11 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. Courtesy of the Warsaw Theatre Museum


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as the expression of “a woman pleading with a man.” She admits that she first horrified Booth by touching him on the shoulder during this scene in keeping with her conception, but the applause for his unfeigned shock convinced him to retain this effective bit of stage business for the rest of their tour. Dithmar approved the innovation as well, and praised her Portia as “an uncommonly thoughtful, picturesque and pleasing performance.”62 Even Winter singled out her Portia as fine and well suited to her temperament, although, true here to his “racial” principles, he declared hers inferior to the “incomparable” Ellen Terry’s. 63 As much as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska professed to look forward to collaborating with America’s greatest Shakespearean actor, their tour featured a weary Booth and forced his middle-Â�aged, much more energetic co-Â�star to play parts decades too young. Nym Crinkle decried the tour as another bad example of the star system at work, with manager Lawrence Barrett banking on “the profitableness of having two eminent names on the same bill.”64 Some reviewers, for example, faulted MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Ophelia as too “passionate” in her behavior or, speaking a little more plainly, “too mature in conception” to do justice to the character’s simplicity and youth. 65 Yet her early NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889 performances thoroughly delighted Dithmar of the Times and, most surprisingly, the same Nym Crinkle who had thought she should act her age. Like her WarÂ�saw pubÂ� lic, who favored her Ophelia over Królikowski’s Hamlet, Crinkle relished the psychological consistency and appeal that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska infused into her “secondary character”: “The charm of [the play] was not in Mr. Booth’s Hamlet so much as in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s unfamiliar Ophelia. Nothing she has done this season came so near to replacing her in the good opinions of her innumerable friends. At all events, nobody ever saw Ophelia so beautifully dressed and nobody ever saw the great pathetic mad scene so pathetically done.”66 The fifty-Â�year-Â�old actress retired Ophelia and Desdemona after the conclusion of this sometimes inspiring, often confining tour. But MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s passion for her Shakespeare project was such that she risked producing the much less popular plays of Measure for Measure and Cymbeline, foreseeing her prowess in their female leads even as she advertised her cultural service in restoring them to the stage. Other companies avoided both because of the “indecencies” in their plots and attendant dialogue. Measure for Measure hinges on the misperception of the heroine’s sacrificial seduction to save an errant brother. In Cymbeline, Princess Imogen’s beloved husband Posthumus waÂ� gers with a lecherous drinking partner that the latter cannot lead his faithÂ�ful

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wife astray. Cymbeline, moreover, was reputed to be “not a good acting play,” confusing its viewers with “too many intrigues” involving a war between ancient Britain and its Roman overlords, an old feud between the British King Cymbeline and his true subject Belarius, who had abducted the king’s sons, and the scheming of Cymbeline’s secÂ�ond wife and doltish stepson. 67 Only Imogen’s fidelity shines like a beacon through the play. In refining these dramas to attract her “sensitive spectators,” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska struck a delicate balance between decency and authenticity. She trimmed the prurient dialogue in the comic scenes of Measure for Measure, while retainÂ�ing “a very large portion of the original text.”68 Her preservation of the original in Cymbeline resulted in “a very long” performance, which might have been shortened, Dithmar opined, if she cut “some of the play’s coarse lines” in Â�Imogen’s trial. 69 In any event, her critics commended her for unÂ�earthÂ�ing highÂ� brow treasure. Reviewing Measure for Measure, a rather pedantic WinÂ�ter urged her admirers “to thank her for providing a revival of one of the less frequently acted plays of Shakespeare, and such a revival as brings the work worthily before the student of the acted drama and gives him a memorable picture of one of the poet’s creations which it is not possible often to enjoy outside the library.” 70 The sexual threats surrounding the heroine in both Measure for Measure and Cymbeline framed some of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s strongest onstage attributes—her projection of charming virtue and resolute romantic love. Critics occasionally complained that her performances of these consummately good women lacked force. The usually reverential Milwaukee Sentinel reviewer found that “in the scenes of passionate energy her Imogen failed to reach that point of excellence which a tragic star should command.” 71 Reviewing the corpus of the star’s work from his 1916 vantage point, Towes proved a fan of her Â�Rosalind, Viola, and Portia, but criticized her Imogen as “a brilliant sketch rather than a completed study” and summarized her Isabella as “not deficient in gracious dignity, personal charm, or tender feeling; but . . . lacking in energy and poignancy.” 72 Yet several years after their premieres (Cymbeline was first performed in 1883 and Measure for Measure in 1887) MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her critics had reached a characteristic modus vivendi, with her more polished command of these parts winning their almost unqualified praise. Reassessing her Imogen in 1888, Dithmar seemed to be delivering a foregone conclusion, observing that the star “expresses perfectly the absorbing love, the faith, and the spotless virtue


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of Cymbeline’s daughter.” 73 The San Francisco Chronicle review of her company’s 1889 Cymbeline was less perfunctory, not only praising MoÂ�djeÂ�ska at length for making “every scene . . . a picture” and fully transforming herself into “a charming, suffering, gentle Imogen” (“a high type of womanhood”), but also commending her on the revival of a Shakespearean heroine “that ordinary actresses are [not] likely to be able to make hackneyed or famous.” 74 This critic stepped back to appreciate MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s larger goal: “To play the Shakespearean heroines and not to play Imogen does not seem to be treating the Bard fairly.” The most powerful champion of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Isabella turned out to be WinÂ� ter himself, who judged her in OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895 to be “especially well qualified by nature to interpret [the part] with correctness and completeness. Isabella is a woman of fineness and force of character and the motive and guiding span of her life are found in its absolute purity.” 75 Though Winter did nitpick at MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s usual weak points of age and accent, he conceded that her performance perfectly incarnated Isabella’s ideal of “nobility, sanctity, ecstatic devotion, and involuntary feminine allurement.” Indeed, Winter later declared Isabella perhaps “the finest of all [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s] many impersonations.” 76 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Â�Isabella won the critic’s approval much as her depiction of Camille had done, through her persuasive show of virtue in a vice-Â�r idden drama: “It revealed in a clear light the lovely sincerity of her spirit and the beauty of her felicitous art and it went far toward redeeming all that is repulsive in the play.”77 Yet, in contrast to Camille, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Isabella was written as unambiguously virtuous; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska needed only to combat Isabella’s licentious context, not transcend her self-Â�indicting past. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s later portraits of Queen Katharine in Henry VIII and Queen Constance in King John likewise afforded her a showcase, on a much smaller scale, for her signature pathos and womanliness, in these instances as wife and mother. Admitting that Constance was “a minor part,” the Denver Post nonetheless highlighted MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s performance of it in 1901 as “a remarkable dramatic picture.” “On the occasion of her final appearance the state of her great grief was pictured in her wonderous [sic] impersonation of pride, passion and hopeless despair.”78 Reviews of her New York premiere in Henry VIII agreed on the skill and beauty of her “impersonation,” what Dithmar identified as “by far the most important feature of the revival.” 79 Still dissatisfied with “her delivery of blank verse,” Winter nevertheless praised her Katharine for its “tenderness, force, austerity of demeanor and the charm of

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a mournful poetic beauty such as fits well with the bleak and desolate scene of the Queen’s forsaken and neglected death.” In Henry VIII, the melancholy tone Winter disliked as dissonant in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Rosalind exactly suited her aging, abandoned queen. The last enduring role in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Shakespearean gallery was that of Lady Macbeth, a part Towes judged to be essentially beyond her grasp: “The formidable essence of it was foreign to her nature and apparently beyond her power of perception.”80 Attending her first New York performances as Lady Macbeth with Booth in 1889, Winter could not but agree, citing the same incompatibility between her character and her role. 81 Yet once again MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s reconceptualization of a well-Â�known part, after suffering negative comparisons with the interpretations of such fiery predecessors as Charlotte Cushman, persuaded many other critics across the country to appreciate a Lady Macbeth tailored to her own talents and the genteel character values she shared with many in her audience. Even as she tinkered with the part vis-Â� à-Â�vis Booth’s Macbeth, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska opted to project her villainess as “feminine” rather than “masculine,” to psychologize and humanize what other actresses played as evil incarnate. Admiring her performance’s consistency and “at times striking and strong” scenes, the critic for the Baltimore Sun seemed open to her different interpretation: “Her conception of the character is that of a woman whose heart and courage are still feminine in spite of the fierce ambition that urges her on, not that of one in whom a womanly form concealed a masculine mind and spirit.”82 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was not alone in rethinking her approach to Lady Macbeth’s character. It was only to be expected that other actresses, excelling in romantic and comic roles during this brief age of Shakespeare’s “feminization,” might adjust Lady Macbeth to reflect their culturally valued “womanliness.” Shattuck points to the coincidence of two “womanly, wifely, loving Lady Macbeths” appearing on the English and AmeriÂ�can stages during the 1888– 1889 season. One was played by Ellen Terry, who, according to her biographer Nina Auerbach, projected her character as the consummate “bourgeois wife” whose main task “is to love men”; the other, rendered more “naturalistically,” in Nym Crinkle’s estimation, was ventured by the notorious Mrs. Lillie Langtry. 83 All three actresses apparently committed their character to evil out of ambition for a beloved husband. Reviews indicate that Terry and Langtry emphasized the seductive allure of their villainesses, a trait MoÂ�djeÂ�ska usually underplayed in her characters’


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behavior, if not in their costumes. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska plotted her performance for the greatest psychological coherence. Her Lady Macbeth was a refined noblewoman who suffered the onslaught of ambition as a kind of illness, an agitating possession, which temporarily empowered her to kill and urge killing, but which soon broke her apart physically and mentally, a process culminating dramatically in the sleep-Â�walking scene shortly before her death offstage. 84 The May 1894 review in the San Francisco Chronicle best detailed the impressive novelty of her “artistic study” of Shakespeare’s greatest villainess: In fact this is the peculiarity of the performance, that one never gets away from the femininity of Lady Macbeth. The cruelty of her nature when she is not stirred by her ambition does not deprive her of grace, refinement and dignity. . . . One cannot compare her with any other exponent of the role. She becomes dominated at once by the burning desire to achieve her ambition as soon as its possibility is suggested. Her greeting of Macbeth when he comes is excited and feverish. . . . Away from all conventionalities of our stage is her playing of the murder scene, the same feverish excitement governing it. . . . M’s sleep-Â�walking scene is one of the greatest things she has done. . . . When she comes on she has the heavy, almost stertorous, breathing of a horrible nightmare; steady, long breathing, that one hears only in sleepers, and, which puts before the audience the somnambulist. Every sound of her voice is low and painful; the sigh which brings out the line of the physician is entirely characteristic; and every detail of the scene may be said to be in perfect keeping. Mme. Â�MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “Lady Macbeth” is a great piece of artistic work. 85

By 1900, even the New York Times yielded, with cursory praise, to the charms of her refined and womanly murderess, acknowledging her Lady Macbeth “a remarkably interesting portrayal notable for its dignity and pathos.”86 It is intriguing to observe the parallels between MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s non-Â�fiendish Lady Macbeth and her other royal rebel and tragic protagonist, Mary Stuart. A standard offering for most of her AmeriÂ�can career, Mary Stuart did not belong in her Shakespearean gallery, but it illustrated her general preference for what Dithmar characterizes “as the noblest and most elevated dramatic subjects.”87 In contrast to those English Protestants who had wanted to sink her London “Mary,” both Towes and Winter retrospectively approved her characterization as one of “symmetrical beauty” informed by “a clearly defined, beautiful ideal.”88 What vexed Winter about MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Mary Stuart was not her performance, but the historically inaccurate portrait of its script, written by Schiller and adapted into English by Lewis Wingfield, whom Winter dismissed as “a feeble writer, but a person skilled in tailoring and upholstery.” Before MoÂ�djeÂ�ska bewitched New York audiences once more with her beau-

Modjeska as Lady Macbeth at the Kraków Theatre, 23 May 1891. Photo by Józef Mien. Courtesy of the Kraków City History Museum


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tiful, dignified Mary, Winter could not resist citing an eyewitness account of the real queen as a fat, round-Â�shouldered, bewigged woman who “would never be accepted on the stage.”89 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did not face the same minefield of tradition and provenance in playing Mary Stuart as she did in risking Shakespearean roles. Nor was her beautifying of Mary as conceptually radical as her feminization of Lady Macbeth. Yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s version of the Queen of Scots, like her rendition of Lady Macbeth, issued a genteel challenge to her more forceful competitors. The Chicago Tribune handily decided this contest in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s favor in May 1884, juxtaposing Janauschek’s Mary with that of her beautiful Polish peer: Teutonic in temperament and in rugged force . . . Janauschek’s Queen was a woman to command, and not to fascinate, men—a woman to conquer, and not to toy with kingdoms. But last night there stepped upon the boards an actress whose perfect repose was such as stamps the highest caste, and whose strange accent might have tinged the speech of her who was once the wife of the French Dauphin. In the pure sense of the word, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was aristocratic—her composure, her humiliation, and her passion breathing that charm of gentle breeding which is the inheritance of a lady rather than a trick of the stage, or even a direct result of art.90

Once more MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s performance of the aristocrat was read as real and savored as beautiful. This reviewer clearly preferred the “whole-Â�souled womanly genius” she created in Mary to Janauschek’s Teutonic commander. When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska premiered this play in New York two years later, in January 1886, Dithmar missed the force and command so evident in the relatively recent Mary Stuarts of Janauschek, Ristori, and Marie Seebach, yet commended “the finished methods, the delicacy and womanly refinement that distinguish all of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s work.” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s queen charmed, attracted, moved well, and always looked good, exerting a subtler power he also appreciated: “We have had before Mary Stuarts who could command, rebuke, and suffer; here was one to compel adoration, to make the homage of Mortimer and Leicester seem perfectly natural, and the faithful devotion of her retainers easily explainable.”91 Other reviewers affirmed that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s successful Mary Stuart was founded on this winning combination of intense, dignified womanliness, which “shines beside the masculinity of Elizabeth” (her contrasting nemesis in SchilÂ� ler’s play), and the moving pictures the actress made on the stage “in near perfection in proportion to color and form as it is allotted to humanity to make it.”92 Winter identified MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s potency as painter/subject here and else-

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where: “The drama [Mary Stuart] served as an excellent medium of expression of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. It is not so much a play as it is a series of pseudo-Â�historical pictures.”93 In the most tragic roles that she attempted, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska compensated audiences expecting dark emotions and moral ambiguity with an eminently watchable work of art, visions of womanly types which psychologized, refined, and made fascinating what they could not completely redeem in their protagonists’ unsavory actions and liaisons. As a Baltimore Sun reviewer conÂ� fessed in March 1887, Mary Stuart “is apt to prove gloomy and tedious” withÂ� out its star, but once MoÂ�djeÂ�ska enters the stage, “it becomes instinct with grace and life, and before the combination of dignity, strength, and sweetness which she presents us, we forget the murder of Darnley, the questionable alliance with Bothwell, and all the criticisms of cold historians and remember only the graces and charms that gave the unhappy queen her fatal fascination.”94 Th e R ight R epertoir e: I n Se a rch of t h e N e w From the late 1890s on, the AmeriÂ�can press tended to fete MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself as a classic and to recommend her performances, almost invariably advertised as her “last,” as master classes for a new generation of actors and audiences. The New York Dramatic Mirror hailed the “potent spell” of her 1898 revival of Macbeth and voiced the hope “that some other artists and managers will follow Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s example and give us great plays, well acted and adequately set.”95 With decades invested in developing and selling a classic repertoire of exalted parts, the Polish actress had succeeded in establishing herself as a one-Â�woman institution in the AmeriÂ�can theater, a female equivalent to Booth in her revivalist ambitions and hits. Yet unlike Booth and her successor in Shakespearean drama, Julia Marlowe, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was never satisfied with mere revivals, no matter how far she had extended her gallery of greats. Towes remarked to her credit: “In these later days our ‘stars’ are content to repeat indefinitely the characters in which they have been conspicuously successful. But MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, inspired by the true artistic temperament, was always seeking to enlarge her repertory and win triumphs in new directions.”96 A February 1892 interview in the Louisville Courier-Â�Journal depicted the actress literally surrounded by play manuscripts in her apartments at the Galt Hotel. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was ever on the lookout for a


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promising new drama, as eager for new material in America as she had been in WarÂ�saw’s state of the stars.97 The actress occasionally dipped into her pre-Â�America repertoire to refurbish “new” vehicles for her English-Â�speaking audiences, performing plays such as Augustin Moreto y Cavana’s Donna Diana, touted as a Spanish verÂ�sion of her Shakespearean Beatrice and used as a staple solo piece during her tour with Booth. She briefly mounted and then dropped another Scribe and LeÂ� gouvé salon drama, The Ladies’ Battle, in the winter and spring of 1900.98 Yet the vast majority of the new plays that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska tested and sometimes commissioned for AmeriÂ�can production either flopped instantly or owed their brief run to striking melodramatic effects. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself invariably won good notices, regardless of the dramatic shambles around her, and was even patted on the back for her persistence. Preparing to torpedo her new play Daniela in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1886, the sombre work of the German playwright Felix Phillipi, Dithmar paused to admire her pluck: “If any woman in the theatrical profession deserves well of the public, that is Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. She is unwearying in her search after a new play that shall combine intrinsic excellence with sufficient opportunity for the exercise of her own polished acting, to which one goes at each performance with that refreshing feeling of absolute safety that the actress will do nothing offensive to aesthetic principles nor to human intelligence.”99 Odd as it may seem, five of the eight new plays that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska produced reversed her painstaking makeover as a great Shakespearean actress, linking her with past melodramatic successes or AmeriÂ�cans’ muddled conception of her “race.” Her 1895 Mistress Betty; or the Career of Betty Singleton, a new play by Clyde Fitch, author of the popular Beau Brummell (1890), capitalized on her enduring success as Adrienne, retelling the tragic life of an eighteenth-Â� century London actress who marries an alcoholic duke and is driven mad by his preference for another woman. Yet, as the New York Dramatic Mirror snidely commented: “If Clyde Fitch imagined that Mistress Betty would take its place in the modÂ�ern repertoire of standard plays as a worthy companion to Adrienne Lecouvreur, he is doomed to disappointment.”100 New York audiences found Mistress Betty to be so confusing and dull that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska opted to end her 1895 “farewell tour” there with the reliable Mary Stuart.101 Prudently avoiding any of the new post–Civil War plays focused on AmeriÂ� can situations and settings, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska went to the other extreme, allowing

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herself to be cast as a Slav, even a Russian spy, in a quartet of dramas hinging on misguided passion and poÂ�litiÂ�cal intrigue.102 Barrymore first tapped her potential as a specifically East European exotic in Nadjezda, his melodrama in which the title character, a Polish woman, sacrifices her honor to a Russian general during the 1863 uprising to save her husband’s life. When her husband’s corpse is returned to her in exchange, Nadjezda first vows that her little daughter Nadine will avenge her father’s death and then commits suicide. The grown Nadine consequently fulfills this pledge by stabbing the scurrilous general as he prepares to seduce her and thereafter poisons herself, reprising her mother’s tragic end. In the taxing double roles of mother and daughter, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska apparently acquitted herself with “womanly and spontaneous” pathos and “keen sympathy,” if not with quite the “tragic fibre” such far-fetched melodrama required.103 Barrymore’s Nadjezda did acknowledge his star’s “tragic” nationality, but plotted it to ludicrous extremes. Daniel Frohman likewise counted on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Slavic heritage to sell the new play Prince Zillah, complete with Siberian bloodhounds, in her 1885– 1886 season. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was cast as Marza, the daughter of a Russian father and a gypsy mother (she played the mother as well). Marza is about to wed the title character when he learns about her past and denounces her. Marza consequently goes mad and is reconciled to her prince just before she dies. A review of Prince Zillah in the Louisville Courier-Â�Journal praised MoÂ�djeÂ�ska for “her highly emotional and dramatic acting,” but elliptically conveyed the star’s own distaste for the play’s hackneyed bombast: “It is a romantic play, but does not comply with the requirements of the romantic drama, and Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska has determined to retire the play for the present.”104 During the 1891–1892 season MoÂ�djeÂ�ska mounted two other new “RusÂ�sian” plays in quick succession, the reason being that the first, E. C. Reynolds’s clumsy Tragic Mask, had to be replaced immediately by a marginally more successful offering, The Countess Roudine, written by Paul Kester with its final act substantially reworked by Minnie Maddern Fiske. Both plays cast MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as a Russian embroiled in contemporary politics. In The Tragic Mask MoÂ�djeÂ�ska played an ineffectual Russian spy, making the best of her “thankless heroine,” yet she was ultimately overwhelmed by the drama’s much more interesting villain and “shockingly ill moulded” plot.105 Encumbered by slightly less preposterous poÂ�litiÂ�cal intrigue in The Countess Roudine, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s character Liana is finally converted by love into what Winter dryly identified as the best possible Russian—a radical revolutionary: “All Russians are brutes, until they


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become Nihilists; but when a Russian becomes a Nihilist he becomes an angel.”106 Yet Winter recognized this play’s short-Â�term worth as a showcase for Fiske’s skillful invention and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s alternation onstage “betwixt fiery expedition and the concentrated passionate calm of inordinate excitement.”107 It is not clear why MoÂ�djeÂ�ska undertook these absurd “Slavic” melodramas, since she needed no new exotic roles to boost her box office after returning to the United States. Nadjezda and Prince Zillah may have been scripts she could not afford to refuse withÂ�out losing a leading man or a manager. Perhaps she was tempted to test approximations of her ethnicity as a first step toward familiarizing her audience with “her Europe’s” historical plight and tragic heroism. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski long harbored the dream of adapting a great Polish play for the AmeriÂ�can stage so as to link her achieved prowess in classic drama with an exhibition of Polish high culture. Early on they had considered and discarded the idea of translating Słowacki’s Mazepa; during their final visit to Poland in 1902–1903 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska contacted several promising young playwrights about commissioning a new drama for export, but withÂ�out success.108 Instead of impressing AmeriÂ�can audiences with a translated Polish classic and a compelling portrait of Polish womanhood, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska only won their fleeting sympathy as a desperate Polish heroine in Barrymore’s implausible Nadjezda. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s misadventures in her quest for classic new drama echoed the experience of many of her contemporaries.109 Yet she would not deny her great appetite for fresh material. Her sustained effort in adapting Balzac’s Le Der nier Chouan for the stage in the late 1880s, as she shepherded the project from novel to play and from French to English, exemplified her passion for and patient cultivation of promising new work. She coveted the bounty her immediate successors were able to harvest, for she knew she was working on the cusp of an era of great playwrights. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska longed to produce and perform in the European masterpieces which gradually made their way to America, even though their different tonality and thematic “impropriety” outraged fellow devotees of genteel culture. Admiring these new dramas, she sometimes allowed her love of art to slip the bonds of contemporary respectability. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska tried out two works by exciting new European playwrights on the AmeriÂ�can stage with opposite results. In her 1883–1884 season, having ensconced Mary Stuart, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline in her repertoire, she risked premiering Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, renamed Thora, at Macauley’s Theatre in Louisville on 7 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1883. She was the first “AmeriÂ�can”

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actress to do so. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska already had played the role, retitled Nora, to great acclaim in WarÂ�saw in March 1882.110 But introducing Ibsen’s play to the Â�A meriÂ�can pubÂ�lic in the early 1880s posed a new sort of gamble for the actress. Instead of crossing “racially” prescribed boundaries to play classic English-Â�language parts, she dared to perform a most potent “immoral” heroine, confronting her pubÂ�lic with an unrepentant woman—a proto-Â�feminist worse than any errant wife. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s decision to play Thora/Nora fundamentally challenged the Camilles, Odettes, and Frou-Â�f rous she so delicately and convincingly redeemed. In contrast to those melodramas, which relished the spectacle of the punÂ�ished adulteress and upheld the patriarchal family in the process, Ibsen’s plays exposed the patriarchy’s injustice and painful consequences, dissecting “the constrictive nature of women’s experience in contemporary society, and the psychological and emotional damage such experience has on them.”111 Ibsen’s dramas asserted and perceptively explored the fact of women’s sexual desire instead of damning it as a vice and exploiting it for salacious display.112 Although Ibsen never identified himself as a feminist, his works were read, welcomed, and performed as feminist by actresses throughÂ�out Europe and, after a frustrating delay, the United States.113 Regardless of their implicit politics, Ibsen’s “dramatically central and emotionally demanding roles for women” proved a boon for actresses long starved for substantive new parts.114 In the words of one critic, the great AmeriÂ�can-Â� turned-Â�English player Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952) “speaks for all turn-Â�of-Â� the-Â�century actresses in claiming that ‘no dramatist has ever meant so much to women of the stage as Henrik Ibsen.’”115 Minnie Maddern Fiske advocated for Ibsen most effectively on the AmeriÂ�can stage, first playing Nora in A Doll’s House for a single benefit performance in 1894.116 Much as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had created a “collector’s set” of Shakespearean heroines, so Fiske mastered a gallery of Ibsen parts ranging from Nora and the eponymous Hedda Gabler (debuted in 1903) to Helene Alving in Ghosts (1927).117 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did not err in sensing the great theatrical potential of A Doll’s House in 1883, but the timing of her debut misjudged her audience’s sophistication. She carefully selected Louisville as its site, where she enjoyed ColoÂ� nel Watterson’s overwhelming patronage in the press and the good Â�facilities of Macauley’s Theatre. She was equipped with a text adapted from the German and Polish by her husband.118 Yet the few reviews of the one-Â�night run obscured the reason for its failure with euphemisms. The Louisville Courier-Â�


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Journal reflected something of the play’s contents in noting MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “nervous intensity and strength” in the secÂ�ond act, but the reviewer mainly inÂ�voked the usual platitudes—of “beauty and varying charm,” “pure womanliness,” and “exquisite art” to praise her work. This prerequisite tribute paid, he enigmatically concluded that “Thora as a play will probably never become very popular with AmeriÂ�can audiences.”119 After MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s death, Chłapowski endorsed Henry Watterson’s hypothesis about Thora’s one-Â�night run: “The [AmeriÂ�can] audience was not yet mature enough for Ibsen.”120 Ten years later, when more AmeriÂ�can theatergoers seemed interested in Ibsen’s challenging dramas and defiant heroines, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska triumphed in another controversial new “classic,” the English translation (this time by ChłaÂ� powÂ�ski with Otis Skinner’s help) of Hermann Sudermann’s Heimat, reÂ�t itled Magda.121 A key participant in the play’s preparation, Skinner recalled how much his star invested in this challenging new role: “Madame had set her heart on this play, and put her last ounce of enthusiasm into her acting. Her Magda was temperamental and buoyant; her broken English much less a handiÂ� cap to her than in her Shakespearean performances.”122 In her 29 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1893 interview with Catharine Cole in the Daily Picayune, conducted about a month after Magda’s debut, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska felt confident enough to claim it as one of her remaining star roles, those “â†œ‘ left for us, who are grandmothers.’” By this point she had renounced Juliet, along with Ophelia and Desdemona, but her repertoire still contained these treasured parts: “â†œ‘Lady Macbeth is yet mine, and Marie Stuart is left me, and, then, in addition to some other women, I have now my great Magda.’”123 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was not alone in coveting the part. By 1899, Amy Leslie could report that Duse and Bernhardt were in hot pursuit.124 In the same year that Leslie’s book was published, Minnie Maddern Fiske also tried out the role.125 Sudermann’s play tempted these major talents with a slightly revamped star vehicle. Magda integrates the charismatic role of a prima donna, in this case a famous singer, into a modÂ�ern “social drama” which bundles together a somewhat confusing cluster of “truths” and pivots on sensational scenes of disclosure and defiance. To a striking extent, Magda borrows the charm and pathos of standard nineteenth-Â�century melodramas such as Adrienne and Camille in its heroine’s construction, while incrementally undermining her socially prescribed punishment. The play progresses from Dumas toward Ibsen, yet rewards the heroine with a vindicating, stagey triumph. As reviews in the New York Times and the New York Dramatic Mirror both remarked, Sudermann re-

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sembled, but did not equal, Ibsen in his dramatic power and radical vision.126 Several critics otherwise argued that Sudermann’s work was “more wholesome” than Ibsen’s. The Boston Evening Transcript approved its lack “of that cheap and morbid pessimism which sees and paints no character that is not somehow distorted and tainted with physical or moral maladies.”127 In short, Magda offered MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Bernhardt, Duse, and others the enticing role of victim turned into a “new woman” victor. The plot of Magda centers on the heroine’s turbulent relationship with and final vanquishing of her martinet father. Twelve years before the play begins, her father threw her out of the house when she refused to marry Dr. Weber, a clergyman he had chosen for her husband; her rebellion left the father half-Â� paralyzed. Forced into the street, Magda falls in love with a prominent man by whom she becomes pregnant, but she manages to support herself and her child with her singing and steadily rises to stardom under an Italianized version of her name. When a festival brings her back as guest artist to her hometown, Magda’s rejected suitor, the kind clergyman who still loves her and has tended to her father in her absence, finally persuades her to stay with her star’s retinue at her father’s, although she demands that her parent not question her about her past. Magda is already growing restless with the business of family reconciliation when the appearance of Privy Councillor von Keller, her former lover and also her father’s friend, forces her past into the open. Von Keller offers to marry her because her celebrity and fortune will aid his poÂ�litiÂ�cal career. Magda’s father insists that if she does not assent to this marriage and the renunciation of her career, he will kill her and himself. Oddly enough, the willful prima donna acquiesces to both paternal demands, but changes her mind when von Keller adds the third condition that she give up their child, the living evidence of their sin. In the final scene, she and her father clash once more and when Magda taunts him with the possibility that her child may not be von Keller’s and bares her breast for his pistol shot, her father suffers a stroke and drops dead. In Magda, the fallen woman destroys and discredits the patriarch by exposing his heartlessness and distorted ideas of her unworthiness. He would cover up her sin at the cost of her freedom, her art, and even her child. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the artist’s inclusion of Magda in her repertoire, where it remained until 1899, was a bold step for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the lady, signaling her approval of a new drama critical of the social status quo. In a March 1893 letter she relished having purchased the rights to the play, in part because it reÂ�lieved


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her from endless performances of “the boring” Queen Katharine and in part because she judged Sudermann to be as profound as Ibsen and the better playwright. At the same time she worried that its contents might offend “young ladies” and provoke “hypocrites” to censure it.128 Early in January 1894, she expressed her enthusiasm about Sudermann’s “great play—entirely modern, still with an undercurrent of a deep moral meaning” to Mrs. Winter: “You must promise me to come to the first performance, I am so anxious to know what you will think of it. It is very rarely that I add a modÂ�ern play to my repertoire, but Magda was too strong a temptation for me.”129 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s choice of correspondent here is intriguing, for while she may have written Lizzie WinÂ� ter in hopes of tempering her husband’s likely objections to the role, she also may have been seeking the understanding of a female friend in the theater. Certainly Mr. Winter, playing patriarch, disapproved of her yielding to Magda’s temptation, the more so because MoÂ�djeÂ�ska heretofore had excelled “in transmit[ting] that which is common or base into that which is rare and fine.” Reviewing her career in The Wallet of Time, he deplored Magda even more than her Shakespearean ventures as her major misstep: “Her association with the lugubrious Ibsen’s paltry play of ‘A Doll’s House’ was slight, and it was soon forgotten. The incident of her artistic life which is remembered with regret by those who most admired the artist and who most revere her memory was her introduction to the AmeriÂ�can stage of Hermann Sudermann’s radically pernicious play of ‘Heimat,’ which, under the name of ‘Magda,’ she made known in this country at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, on January 29, 1894, and which she was pleased to consider and to designate a masterpiece of dramatic literature.”130 The gatekeeper of genteel culture, Winter loathed Ibsen and other new realist playwrights and attacked their “social dramas” as morally tainted and injurious. He specifically condemned Magda for its preaching against an unbelievable parental tyranny and its confusion of “Woman’s Freedom” with harlotry. Faulting its heroine as an incarnation of “bad womanliness,” Winter cataloged her vices: “She is vain, silly, perverse, obstinate, self-Â�willed, unchaste, ugly in temper and absolutely selfish.”131 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, in his estimation, was responsible for importing a female character far more dangerous than Camille. Despite such strong evidence to the contrary, theater historian Ellen DonÂ� kin maintains that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska conceived a deliberately “non-Â�feminist” interpretation of Magda to gain Winter’s approval and ensure her production’s success.132 To prove that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s strategy of currying favor worked, Donkin

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singled out Winter’s qualifying remarks in a 30 January 1894 review about how the actress vastly improved the scripted character, endowing Magda with “profound sensibility of temperament, charm of manner, beauty of spirit, brilliance of mind, gentleness, simplicity, grace, and all that is meant by loveliness.”133 By the time MoÂ�djeÂ�ska brought Magda to New York, she and WinÂ� ter were old friends, but their private relations had never swayed him from publicly criticizing what he considered to be her ill-Â�chosen repertoire or misÂ� conceived performances. The critic always refrained, however, from attacking his friend’s character. Given Winter’s conviction about the immutable link between an actor’s own character and those s/he played, it was crucial that he assert his friend’s refinement of a repugnant role, arguing her misperception of it to reaffirm her essentially virtuous nature. In effect, Winter was enlarging here on his defense of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in Camille, for the part of Magda represented to him a much greater peril. How did MoÂ�djeÂ�ska play Magda? In her memoirs, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska declares that what appealed to her in Sudermann’s play “was not so much the BohemianÂ� ism, the plea for women’s rights, as Magda’s enthusiasm for art, the consciousness of the high mission of the artist.”134 Nonetheless, she had to sort out onÂ�stage the play’s highly mixed ideological messages, as a Chicago Tribune editorial pointed out soon after Magda’s debut in that city. In Sudermann’s script, Magda argues that a self-Â�supporting woman should be free to love “in [her] own way,” yet she also admits the “sin” in such conduct and then declares that “it is only through sin we can grow. To become greater than our sin is worth more than all the purity you [the character of Dr. Weber] preach.” In counterpoint to Magda’s stirring declarations of women’s sexual freedom and the artist’s decadent power stands the sympathetic character of Dr. Weber, her former suitor, who also influences the heroine with his example of compassion and self-Â�sacrifice.135 Then there is the puzzle of the imperious Â�Magda’s sudden willingness to abide by the rules of her hateful home, her quick changes from prima donna to obedient daughter to outraged single mother to “shameless” feminist. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s reviews tracked how Magda allowed her to utilize and then proÂ� gress beyond her signature roles. The Tribune’s 28 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1893 review of her debut identified familiar MoÂ�djeÂ�ska strategies in the play’s first act, where she combined the irresistible “caprices of the prima donna” with glimpsed tenderness as she came to appreciate the kindly Dr. Weber. She lost audience sympathy after the secÂ�ond act through no fault of her own. Because von Keller,


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her former lover, was played as a comical coward, “the audience could not forgive Magda” for sacrificing herself to such a fool.136 But when the Tribune critic revisited Magda once more after a week of performances, he hailed MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s progress from charismatic lady to plain-Â�speaking, realist heroine: “It is the province of this actress to refine Rosalind to the gentler temper of our time; to lift Marie Stuart to the plane of martyrdom; to reduce Camille to the elements that are ‘purely womanly’; but in the present representation she showed that she could interpret a severely natural character, and to portray it with vivid, uncompromising truth.”137 Reviews from the East Coast to the West reflected that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had mastered Magda’s roller-Â�coaster ride of changing moods and attitudes.138 Pronouncing Magda the role in which MoÂ�djeÂ�ska appeared to greatest advantage, the Philadelphia Public Ledger elaborated: “Her grace and beauty of expression are given full play, and in the later scenes she passes quickly and with great dramatic power through the whole gamut of emotions and passions.” The star received the highest, most detailed praise from the Boston Evening Transcript, despite the fact that her chosen vehicle was “of the Ibsen school”: As Magda, artist, Bohemian, deep-Â�hearted, keen-Â�sighted woman, Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska may, in a word, be called magnificent. It is an impersonation of illusion withÂ�out flaw; a characterization in which temperament and art united to vitalize an author’s creation to present sight and to enduring memory. It will stand among the most notable triumphs of Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s career; among the most notable artistic achievements of the century. . . . All the keen, brilliant, sardonic humor in which the character is so rich is given at its utmost worth; and in Magda’s few bursts of supreme passion the actress rose to heights of power that won from the spectators a whirlwind of spontaneous and fervent applause. The impersonation is one that no student of the drama, and no theatre-Â�goer who cares for the thrill of a new and compelling emotion, can afford to miss.139

Quite apart from her accolades in the press, inÂ�cludÂ�ing Winter’s highly qualified “character-Â�saving” praise, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s AmeriÂ�can audiences could not know what her success as Magda meant to her after three decades on both Polish and AmeriÂ�can stages. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself had been a “fallen woman” who had overcome that social stigma through tremendous talent, drive, and a fortuitous marriage, succeeding so well that she risked and triumphed as a fallen woman in fashionable salon dramas while still in Poland, where memories of her past were fresh. Such characters almost always paid for redemption with death. Only in America, some fifteen years later, with many more tastefully dispatched Camilles and Adriennes to her credit, could MoÂ�djeÂ�ska dare to

Modjeska as Magda at the Brooklyn Park Theatre, 29 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1894. Photo by Józef Siebald. Courtesy of the Kraków City History Museum


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play a fallen woman who showcased her success rather than her sin and responded to her punishment with defiance rather than self-Â�destruction. In making Magda a staple role in the 1890s, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska clearly felt confident enough about her social reputation to risk playing a fallen woman who not only paralleled her own path upward from unwed motherhood to stardom, but also, unlike the real-Â�life MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, openly taunted those who would judge her. Sudermann’s script enabled MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to exonerate rather than discipline the fallen woman and to claim the value of her freedom and her child. Most important, in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s stated opinion (since she dared not mention the relevance of Magda’s sin to her own case), was that Sudermann’s play depicted a female sinner prevailing as a great artist, despite the machinations and prejudices of figures from her past. Here was heady confirmation of her own triumphs. While MoÂ�djeÂ�ska knew in advance that Winter could never approve such an outcome, no matter how much she ennobled her sinner’s portrait, she was profoundly touched that Annie Fields, her stalwart source of female solidarity, apparently understood and valued her choice and interpretation of the play. As she writes Fields on 20 February 1894: I have read and re-Â�read every word and cannot express how much I appreciate your judgement upon my art. I am so glad you found the difference between my acting of the past and present time. Sudermann is the writer of the picture—as you said—and I took great pains to suit his style. Being devoted to Shakespeare and the romantic drama for the last ten years, it was somewhat a new experience to personate Magda, and I am happy that the result was successful—happy that it afforded me the opportunity of appearing in a new light before you. Since I came to this country the critics had pronounced so many unconvincing verdicts upon me, praising one too highly or condemning my deficiencies which could not be overcome, that I ceased long ago to try to please them. My sole object is to be true to my art following one teacher only: Nature, and my sole reward to meet from time to time superior minds like yours ready to appreciate my work.140

MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s success with Magda subsequently emboldened her to defend the “new drama” in print, prompting Winter’s inevitable counterattack. Performing Magda had vouchsafed her a glimpse into a drama-Â�rich future, one she could relish briefly and intensely in Poland on her final tour. Once she finally had retired from the stage, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska magnanimously applauded the efforts of younger actresses as they flourished in this era of new drama, benefiting from a “more cosmopolitan New York” and performing Ibsen and other formerly audacious playwrights withÂ�out fear of critical and social censure.

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MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s remarkable scope and service as a bridge figure, spanning the sociocultural distance from Morris to Fiske, Ristori to Duse, Camille to Magda, were affirmed once more in her April 1907 interview with the New York Times, where the aging actress heaped praise on a new talent, Alla Nazimova, a onetime member of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre and a future silent screen star. Expressing Slavic sympathy for a Russian, despite “the Government which separates us,” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska implied a professional kinship as well as an appreciation for Nazimova’s aptitude in modÂ�ern plays: “I consider Mme. Nazimova a most wonderful artist, and I am especially struck by the difference in two such characterizations as her ‘Hedda Gabler’ and ‘Nora.’ I do not consider her as an AmeriÂ�can actress, but as a great foreign actress playing in English. . . . She is one of those wonderful actresses able to keep down their personality and play a character as the author has conceived it.”141 Thus the great star who made high art of melodrama and qualified, in many critics’ eyes, as America’s best Shakespearean actress of her era showed the foresight to identify a worthy kindred successor—another foreign-Â�accented player who would win kudos on the AmeriÂ�can stage for her interpretations of new classics by Ibsen and Chekhov. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the theater legend was not entrenched in her past repertoire, but more than a little envious of a new generation of playwrights and their lucky interpreters. Th e Pu blic Rol e of M a da m e MoÂ�dje Â�sk a After her return to the United States in 1882, with improved English and greater confidence about her knowledge of AmeriÂ�can culture and its mass media, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska adroitly capitalized on the symbiosis between actress and press in late nineteenth-Â�century America identified by theater historian Susan Glenn: “The urban culture of spectacle was in large measure constituted by the sensationalist press and the brazen journalistic practices of the 1880s and 1890s. For newspapers and magazines did more than report on female spectacle in and outside of the theater; they also helped manufacture it.”142 Adept at onÂ�stage tableaux, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska knew just how to comport herself in the pubÂ�lic eye. A typical interview in the Milwaukee Sentinel during her Stetson tour depicted her at table with her husband, the picture of high-Â�class respectability, portrayed as a “beautiful woman, elegant in figure and feature, whose every movement as she walks and talks indicates her aristocratic origin.” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska


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volunteered and manipulated information with ease, announcing that business has been “excellent,” correcting (at her husband’s prompt) the Sentinel’s misquote of what might have been construed as unkind remarks about fellow actress Mary Anderson (1859–1940), declaring her fondness for both California and Milwaukee, and expatiating about regional preferences in repertoire: “Well, here in the West I think Shakespeare takes the best. In the East the French plays are more thought of, such as Camille and Odette. In Chicago and other WestÂ�ern cities, As You Like It and Twelfth Night found more favor, but in St. Louis Odette was the great attraction.”143 Over the twenty-Â�five years of her ensuing career, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska consistently projected herself as a well-Â�bred lady, a serious artist, and an articulate intellectual when reporters “caught” her offstage. That most of these lifestyle interviews were conducted by female reporters only reinforced her chosen self-Â� image, for these women, serving a middle-Â�class readership, avoided scandal and accented culture and charm in their female subjects. An extensive 7 DeÂ� cemÂ�ber 1887 interview with Catharine Cole in the Daily Picayune presented one of the best such portraits.144 From the outset, Cole conflated MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the lady with the serious professional, doubly damning the new phenomenon of actress wanna-bes among society women: “In reality [Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] is a charmingly natural, unaffected and suave woman, a real gentlewoman, whose life has been pure and stainless and whose work and ways have done more to uplift and elevate the stage than can be accomplished by a whole society full of professional beauties padded into Worth gowns and lamely stumbling along on the crutches of gossip and notoriety.”145 Cole’s survey of the actress’s reception room in her sumptuous private car, “Mascotte,” presented its mistress writing letters amidst piles of books ranging from Ben Hur to “the beautiful old monkish legends of the ‘Gesta Romanum.’” Missing were flashy jewels and pug dogs. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was described as an avid reader whose particular favorites included New Orleans writer George Cable as well as Charles Dudley Warner and Bret Harte. The well-Â�read actress, the more imposing because she devoured books in an acquired language, deftly steered their conversation from literature to the performing arts, implying their equal artistic worth. The Polish transplant could lecture for hours about the AmeriÂ�can stage: “There is no AmeriÂ�can school [of acting]. The only really great typical AmeriÂ�can actress is Clara Morris. She is AmeriÂ�can, typically of the school because she is all originality. Booth is next, with a lean-

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ing to the German school. Jefferson is both English and French with the airy delicacy of the French School. . . . And then there are others, say Harrigan and Hart, unique in their way, they are cultivating an Irish-Â�A meriÂ�can school, and there is nothing like it except in America.” Always a diligent student, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had learned to play critical expert a decade after her AmeriÂ�can debut. Her knowledge of the AmeriÂ�can scene was comprehensive, ranging from Booth’s classic offerings to the vaudeville team of Edward Harrigan (1844–1911) and Tony Hart (1855–91), who performed comic skits “centering on various urban ethnic characters and situations” particularly drawn from New York’s Lower East Side.146 Equipped with the credentials of a “European” star, she ventured to classify certain AmeriÂ�can colleagues according to European schools. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s natural affinity for the lecturer’s podium, especially in dictating theater reform or analyzing dramatic character, increased with improved English and more touring experience, as she graduated from interview subject to published critic and courted pundit. Although AmeriÂ�can reporters almost invariably represented MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as a thoroughly respectable, happily married, and at times aristocratic lady, she was quick to protest any deviance from this norm. There were rumors that she made romantic overtures to Barrymore during their tours, despite the presence of both parties’ spouses in close quarters, but this gossip appeared in print only posthumously.147 Oddly enough, the greatest scandal MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had to control emerged when she and Booth, both well into middle age, embarked on their 1889–1890 season. A reporter for the New York Herald, “in drink” and hinting at improper relations between the two stars, provoked Booth to protest off the record that both he and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska were too old for that sort of nonsense. The resulting article, titled “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Grievance: The Great Polish Actress Said to Be Unwilling to Play with Edwin Booth for Personal Reasons,” alleged MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s mercenary attitude toward their tour, Booth’s jealousy over her notices, and the male star’s “ungentlemanly and unchivalrous advances” to his co-Â�star.148 Both artists immediately and simultaneously published statements disavowing these charges in the next day’s issue of the New York Times.149 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the lady did not disdain the AmeriÂ�can press’s capacity for promoting her business, although she wished to dispense with all the cheap attention-Â�grabbing gimmicks that Sargent had imposed on her during her first years on the road. After her season with Stetson, when she and Chłapowski


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had taken charge of her company, the star instructed their administrative manager Fred Stinson to censor any media foolishness: “I despise anything that looks like what you call ‘advertising booms’ or advertising more than is required legitimately to let people know where I am and what I am playing. Please deny when people say that I am a painter, or play the guitar divinely, or love dogs (I have none) and am inconsolable, or swim races, or gallop horses and divers other things which the ubiquitous AmeriÂ�can reporters and paragraphers [sic] are so apt to claim that I do, for I really do not. In fact, when they say that I do anything else for the pubÂ�lic but act, please deny it always.”150

She was perfectly at ease advertising her plays—“where I am and what I am playing”—and sharing with the press any details pertaining to their productions. Over the years MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also agreed to endorse a variety of products such as “Recamier Cream and Balm,” “Waterman’s Ideal Fountain Pen,” and “Felt Tablets (Ideal Tooth Polisher).”151 Yet in at least one instance MoÂ� djeÂ�ska implied her involuntary part in such commercial transactions. Sharing “Some Stories about MoÂ�djeÂ�ska” to promote her local performances in Brooklyn, a 5 February 1899 article in the New York Times recalled her reaction to an advertisement stating that “Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska is never withÂ�out Boanerges’ Chicory extract,” a patent medicine: “A look of deep amusement stole over her face as she lay among the pillows and gazed at her picture in the paper and the emphatic words below. ‘They are right,’ she said finally. ‘Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska is never withÂ�out it. They sent me a bottle once, and to my certain knowledge it was never opened, so I must have it still.’” Above all, as Cole’s 1887 interview thoroughly demonstrated, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska loved to exploit the AmeriÂ�can press as a lectern where she wielded an artistic, professional, tacitly feminist authority unavailable to her in Poland. Auster, McArthur, and Glenn all underscore AmeriÂ�can actresses’ qualifications and opportunities for moving from the theatrical stage to other pubÂ�l ic stages in the late 1800s, inÂ�cludÂ�ing lobbying for women’s suffrage. Glenn’s scholarship specifically traces how actresses from the 1880s to the 1920s “use[d] theatrical spectacle as a vehicle for achieving greater voice in culture and politics.”152 Actresses also enlisted in the pubÂ�lic campaign to render acting respectable women’s work in a generally professionalizing AmeriÂ�can society, forming clubs and leagues and giving speeches and honorary receptions. When she returned from England, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska arrived prepared for an AmeriÂ�can press eager for a celebrity’s quotable opinions, especially those of a popular articulate actress with an identifiably cosmopolitan point of view. By the 1890s, she was further

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gratified by the recognition a sorority of kindred professionals bestowed on her, women who consulted and recruited her as a senior mentor. Thus, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the actress became MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the critic, lecturing and publishing on the theater’s standards, deficiencies, and necessary reform.153 As early as DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882, her essay “Success on the Stage” appeared in the North AmeriÂ�can Review, advising aspiring actors about proper training (their general cultivation of all the arts combined with extensive stage experience) and necessary attributes (natural talent, polished technique, and inspiration). While at this point she offered no definite endorsement of drama schools or private coaches, she already implied a criticism of America’s star system that would become a constant refrain in her pubÂ�lic statements: “The best school of acting seems to be to take the stage itself—where one begins by playing small parts and slowly, step by step, reaches the important ones. . . . It was my bad fortune to be put, soon after my entrance on the stage, in the position of star of a travelling company. I think it is the greatest danger I encountered in my career, and the consequence was that when I entered afterwards a regular stock company—I had not only a great deal to learn, but yet much more to unlearn.”154 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s visibility as a professional pundit grew enormously in the next decade, after the founding of the Twelfth Night Club, the actresses’ counterpart to the Players, and the creation of the Professional Women’s League (1892), open to different types of female artists (“dramatic, musical, and literary”), but primarily serving actresses with assorted benefits such as lectures, self-Â� help classes, and “donated dresses.”155 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was inducted as an honorary member of the Twelfth Night Club on 2 February 1894 and given a reception by the League as “guest of honor” on 14 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895.156 Among the attendees at the latter event were Mary Shaw, one of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s favorite secÂ�ond leads, and her old friend from her early touring days, Lotta Crabtree, who happened to be “one of the League’s Vice Presidents . . . a charter member, [and] an always-Â�honored guest.” In the early 1890s, Minnie Maddern Fiske invited MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to help shape a new “Women’s Page . . . exclusively devoted to the interests of the women of the stage,” which would appear as a regular feature in her husband’s paper, the New York Dramatic Mirror: “It is my earnest wish to secure the opinions and suggestions of several of our most distinguished artistes. May I ask that you will write me a few lines? Your words will be eagerly read by hundreds of


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young girls, and be of great service to me in inspiring interest in beginning the good work.”157 There is no evidence of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s participation in this venture, but she was reviewed often and, especially toward the decade’s end, quoted at length on the paper’s pages. In Memories and Impressions, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska pays tribute, in turn, to Fiske’s contributions to the profession, praising the younger actress’s efforts to create a good ensemble in her companies: “no part, however small, is slighted, and the result is a harmonious whole.”158 Courted by like-Â�minded female peers, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska easily mastered the pubÂ� lic role of the actress’s champion and commentator on AmeriÂ�can theater at roughly the same time as her “great Magda” was touring the country. Her secÂ�ond authored article, titled “Endowed Theatres and the AmeriÂ�can Stage” and published in the NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1892 issue of Forum, was far more critical and prescriptive than the advice she had shared with the pubÂ�lic in 1882. Fifteen frustrating years of performing in the United States dictated the high tone of this essay, in which she protested the unrefined jumble of AmeriÂ�can entertainments, traced the negative trickle-Â�down effects of the star system on actor training and ensemble production, and insisted on the establishment of the endowed theater announced in the title, a subsidized national theater fostering creative experimentation withÂ�out box office pressure.159 By 1892, Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had closed ranks with other great actors to lobby for a highbrow AmeriÂ�can theater. Lawrence Levine identifies her essay as a milepost in AmeriÂ�can society’s larger embrace of high culture, citing its scripturally resonant juxtaposition of the temple with the marketplace: “Art has covered her face and flown away, ashamed of those who cease thus to be priests at her altar and simply become commercial travellers in art, changing the stage to a sample-Â�room where the pubÂ�lic has only a vague idea what the article might have been if it had been shown under the best conditions.”160 Yet her mission was never accomplished. Even in the final chapter of Memo ries and Impressions, her last testament on any subject, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska still exhorts the theatrical establishment to reform and the pubÂ�lic to support its artistic and moral improvement. Here she leaves for posterity a list of her career-Â� long recommendations: to abandon the star system and to restore the stock companies or some facsimile thereof; to endow a national theater fed by an attached drama school that could compete successfully with already established European counterparts; to convince all English speakers of the foreigner’s right and ability to play Shakespeare; and to fight her art’s degeneration

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into commercial product, “a purveyor of coarseness and immorality,” by asserting that “the theatre, if true to its mission and properly conducted, may be one of the most refining and wholesome influences.”161 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s pubÂ�lic critique of the AmeriÂ�can theater usually invoked her European career to enhance her authority. Her remarks in a March 1892 letter are characteristic: “AmeriÂ�can actresses don’t receive real training, although there are women of great talent among them . . . In any event Art came to you [in America] from Europe.”162 But her speechmaking in defense of the actress seemed an altogether AmeriÂ�can phenomenon, the product of long-Â�term conditioning by the AmeriÂ�can press and AmeriÂ�can professional values. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did not march for AmeriÂ�can women’s right to vote, yet she zealously lectured with her sister thespians in America about their art and respectability at fairs, conventions, and club benefits. Organizers sought her out as an established authority. When May Wright Sewall, a member of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair Auxiliary Women’s Congress, was planning a series of lectures by female experts in politics, science, and the arts, she discovered in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska an expert resource. The star not only drew up a list of possible speakers inÂ�cludÂ�ing Morris, Janauschek, Rehan, and Marlowe, but also lobbied for the Congress to invite Duse, “a first-Â�rate artist” and “exceptionally intelligent woman.”163 In America, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska willingly subscribed to women’s professional solidarity and social engagement. She joined her peers at the lectern on 17 May 1893, her “assignment . . . to address the gathering on ‘Woman in the True Drama.’”164 In subsequent years, the lecturing star would return regularly to the podium either before live audiences or through extensive interviews in the press. At the May 1894 Women’s Congress in San Francisco, for example, she aimed to prove the actress’s historic and abiding goodness, referencing the initial bond rather than antagonism between the actress and the church in the tenth century, when a Sister Precita, the “Nun of Dundesheim,” wrote plays that she then produced with her convent sisters in the cast. Admitting that the stage may corrupt, immodestly expose, and lure women away from the home, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska nonetheless preached here what she had tried to practice, arguing that acting “brings us into continual contact with the greatest thoughts in literature, from which it is impossible to do otherwise than to derive good.” She insisted that a theater “properly conducted . . . is an instrument for good secÂ� ond only to the church,” in which women are best positioned to exert a virtuous influence on the pubÂ�lic.165


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By 1898, when she was invited to deliver a keynote address at a February benefit for the Twelfth Night Club, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s speeches elevating the actress were as well polished as her ventures into the risky repertoire of Sudermann, and she dared to advocate women’s performance in dramas which sometimes bypassed “good womanliness” in their quest for great art.166 To be sure, her 1898 address opened by reasserting the actress’s morality and artistic worth, citing as evidence the favorable impressions that Twelfth Night Club members had made on “women devoted to sister arts and literatures” and “women of the outside world.” She invoked her profession’s inspirational goddesses, Thalia and Melpomene, as proof of the actress’s lofty pedigree and threw in a patron Saint Gemisius for good measure. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska then reiterated her standing plea for good repertoire, exhorting an actress-Â�patron sisterhood across the footlights to transform the AmeriÂ�can theater from its frequent use as “a vulgar place of amusement” into a stage for noble art. To some degree, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 1898 speech echoed a previous generation’s Victorian exhortations to be chaste and sober, as she urged women “to protect what is best and to taboo what is unclean or inartistic in the theatrical world.” Her targets were not sex and drink, but commercialized entertainment and, strangely enough, deliberately sanitized drama. Implying a greater sophistication in contemporary performers and patrons, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska cautiously opened the door to a different type of “noble art” in Ibsen, Sudermann, and other writers of the new social drama: I hope my words will not be misunderstood in a narrow, exclusive sense. I believe that the stage, in order to be a factor in civilization and in modÂ�ern life, cannot be treated on the plan of a kindergarten but must touch all the vital interests of life, and cannot even keep entirely aloof from the delicate subjects which, though not pleasant to talk over in polite society, have important social bearing; but there is a measure in everything, all depends on the treatment, and there is a higher instinct of good taste and of nobler ideal which ought to be decisive in this regard.

Just a week later, Fiske’s New York Dramatic Mirror, which had published MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Twelfth Night Club address, reported that other New York papers had attacked the actress “for her simple truth-Â�telling in the interest of art”—more specifically, her implied criticism of the Theatrical Syndicate, which happened to be the Fiskes’ bête noire.167 Yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s speech also riled Winter, the self-Â�appointed watchdog over the AmeriÂ�can theater’s morÂ� als. Winter shared her concerns about the perils of commerce to the stage,

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but he condemned her “warning against a theatrical kindergarten.” Her open door, in his eyes, only led to perdition. His rebuttal of her speech in the Tri bune was so central to his prescriptions for the AmeriÂ�can theater that he concluded his portrait of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in the Wallet of Time with its reprint. InferÂ� ring that “it seems just possible . . . that Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska suspects a preference for ‘kindergarten’ methods as underlying the objection sometimes made to the ‘advanced’ drama, and even to such plays as ‘Camille’ and ‘Magda,’” he stoutly maintained that such objections were not puerile, but imperative alarms against the “pernicious effect” of such repertoire.168 “It remains true,” Winter declared, “that the production of such tainted plays as ‘Camille,’ ‘Magda,’ ‘Mrs. Tanqueray,’ ‘Michael’s Lost Angel,’ and ‘The Tree of Knowledge’ has, within the last few years, while rearing and fostering an audience of cads and vulgarians of both sexes, largely alienated the better classes of the people and driven them from the Theatre.” The close of his rebuttal thundered his conservative stance: Well-Â�bred persons do not attend the Theatre for the purpose of obtaining information as to the matrimonial adventures of pimps and harlots. The Ten Commandments are well known. Actors are not expected to furnish “lessons.” The province of the Stage is Art, and the handmaidens of Art are Beauty and Romance. If that be a “kindergarten” doctrine, then by all means let us have the “kindergarten”! At least it could be visited withÂ�out risk of nausea at the ribaldry of an insensate libertine or the woes of a sentimental drab.

Instead of taking aim at MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself in this diatribe, Winter simply denied her agency: “Much is pardoned to genius and beauty, and the experience of that great actress—who has given pleasure to thousands of persons— is exceptional and is well-Â�calculated to blind her to the truth.” Claiming in effect that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska knew not what she saw or performed, Winter rejected her perspicacity as a critic and believed her interest in the new drama to be misguided. But his rebuttal revealed her to be at a critical juncture, and he wanted to prevent her forward fall. Winter implicitly urged MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to continue projecting a self-Â�limiting “goodness” in all her role-Â�playing—be it refining Camille, explicating Rosalind, or lecturing on the morality of actresses— and warned her against her current “blind,” dangerous pursuit of a “pernicious art” that would render her “goodness” outmoded and valueless. At this late point in her career, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was too old to resolve onstage the tension between her established reputation and her excitement about the


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future—Â�between staple hits and new social dramas, the popular penitent and the “pernicious” provocateur. When she emerged from retirement for her 1905 testimonial and benefit at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, she played it safe, performing excerpts from Macbeth rather than Magda. Yet Â�MoÂ�djeÂ�ska weathered attacks on her publicized opinions much as she had weathered negative reviews of first nights. She cultivated a similar modus vivendi as a critic with her readers, seeking to win audiences over to her new pubÂ�lic role with time and exposure. By the early 1900s, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska flourished in the media limelight that a serious AmeriÂ�can actress enjoyed and could exploit ad infinitum offstage. Apart from a mass-Â�circulation press eager to quote her as a celebrity and, increasingly, a historical legend, she retained close ties with such well-Â�placed publishers as the Gilders. Fifteen years after Bogusławski had begged her to write her memoirs, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska turned to Richard Gilder, an editor who guaranteed quality and mass distribution, to help her produce her most effective critical work, the story of her exceptional career and the most extensive compendium of her professional know-Â�how.169 The resulting Memories and Impressions, intended in part as a moneymaker after her retirement, constituted her largest publication in size, thematic scope, and educational ambition.170 To some extent, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s memoir resembles other actresses’ autobiographies of her era as a final obliging performance before her audience in which she reprises her signature persona and entertains fans with anecdotes about famous co-Â�stars and patrons.171 But MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s text pursues many agendas, divided as it is between two national audiences and their attendant sensibilities and expectations, and encompassing lyrical recollection, historical lecture, and professional editorial. In it, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska carefully constructs her self-Â�portrait as a young artist in an idealized old KraÂ�ków, whitewashes her early sexual scandals to vouch for her genteel development, and edifies her AmeriÂ�can readers about Polish politics, culture, and theater. Here, in contrast to most of her female peers in print, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska never relinquishes agency, but regularly professes her ambition, strength, and resilience. She claims her conquests one by one, incorporating occasional excerpts from her letters and diary jottings to temper the overall impression of relished power with outpourings of “womanly” pathos. These excerpts almost as often achieve an opposite effect, exposing the steel beneath her grace. In this massive book, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska puts the finishing touches on the various roles she performed before the AmeriÂ�can pubÂ�lic onstage and at large—as a better trained

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and vaguely “aristocratic” European import, a successfully naturalized highbrow AmeriÂ�can artist, an indefatigable impresario behind the scenes, and an experienced pundit on all things theatrical. In Memories and Impressions MoÂ� djeÂ�ska bids her AmeriÂ�can audience farewell from behind an immortal lectern, forever relating her exemplary life and improving opinions to a posterity she presumes will listen and learn.

7

(

The Polish MoÂ�djeÂ�ska

Memories and Impressions begins not with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s journey to America, but her 1890 return visit to KraÂ�ków when she was accompanied by “Miss L. B. F.” (Lu Freeman), an exuberant young AmeriÂ�can friend. The actress opens her life story with the sentimental joy of repatriation rather than the thrill of embarking for the New World. As she exits the train in KraÂ�ków and is embraced by her friends, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska feels herself to be completely at home: “Faces not seen for years, faithful eyes and friendly, smiling lips, shaking of hands, words of hearty welcome,—all this fills me with joy, warms me, intoxicates me. The lapse of years spent far away from the country shrinks into nothingness; I am again with my own people as of old, and they are the same, unchanged and true! I am happy!”1 This preface, “written some years ago,” attests to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s profound and abiding attachment to her native land. After decades performing before the AmeriÂ�can public, she reminds her readers first of her Polish roots and always parallel Polish stardom, maintained by cherished returns which shrink the years away “into nothingness.” The presence of the appreciative Miss L. B. F. explicitly obliges MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to serve as local guide and interpreter. She enjoys introducing her AmeriÂ�can friend to her private KraÂ�ków—the Virgin Mary statue in which she confided as a child, the location of the house in which she was born—as well as such magnificent Polish monuments as St. Mary’s Church and the Wawel Castle, once the residence and burial place of Polish kings. Her role as guide expands as her readers accompany the reminiscing star to each of the partitions: the beautiful hills and small towns of Galicia,

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the Chłapowski family’s ancestral lands in the Prussian partition, the bustling metropolis of Russian-Â�occupied WarÂ�saw. One of her chief reasons in undertaking this publication “was the desire to acquaint the world with the great names of her homeland,” as Chłapowski explains to Gilder after her death, entreating him to retain those daunting Polish surnames in the text.2 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska spent most of her post-Â�1876 life and career in the United States, yet she never ceased negotiating multiple identities as a high-Â�profile Pole. She lived in a state of constant self-Â�translation, touting herself as a representative and an “export” of her people to the United States and pacifying her compatriots as a true Pole who brought home gifts from America—a fortune to be distributed and a surprisingly honed talent to be shared. In America, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska also distinguished herself vis-Â�à-Â�vis other Polish immigrants, a negotiation which proved equally arduous. The artist easily played Lady Bountiful to a lower-Â�class Polish diaspora, or Polonia, but she herself had to finesse the financial obligations and pressures to assimilate that burden every AmeriÂ� can immigrant. Once she had secured AmeriÂ�can stardom, remaining Polish demanded tremendous energy and considerable risk. Even a binational star found she could not guarantee the ethnic pride and socioeconomic status of her descendants. T h e Cu lt u r a l A m ba ssa dor The star’s role as cultural ambassador, her clearest mission as a Pole away from Poland, evolved from Sienkiewicz’s neat nationalist packaging of her AmeriÂ� can debut. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska realized that winning extra-Â�national leverage would enable her reconquest of her native stage, provided she lay her overseas laurels at Poland’s feet. The cultural ambassador always masked the careerist in MoÂ�djeÂ� ska. After her early successes on the AmeriÂ�can stage, she phrased her triumphs diplomatically for the folks at home. In a SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1877 letter to Wolska, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska insisted that her first performances pleased her most in persuading the Yankees to empathize with “our country.” She contemplated a world tour with the same patriotic goal: “Ah, if I could spread news of our unhappy Mother the world over, tell people about Her sufferings and shout at the top of my voice: [Poland] has not yet perished! Believe me, Ania, my triumphs gratify me more because I am a Pole, not an artist.”3 Her fulsome rhetoric and interjected “Believe me” suggested preemptive justification, since such a tour was not far from what MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the careerist then envisioned.

T h e Polish MoÂ�d j e Â�s k a

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The actress readily borrowed Sienkiewicz’s comparisons of her overseas performances with exported Polish art. During her first East Coast tour, she chided the poet and journalist Władysław Bełza for considering her a “renegade”: “Isn’t it a good thing that I earn a little fame abroad? I will be performing in London—doesn’t that please you a bit? After all, [the artists] Matejko, Rodakowski, Siemiradzki, and others did not cease being Poland’s children when their paintings were acclaimed abroad.”4 Almost twenty years later, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska resorted to a variant on this strategy, claiming that she had established the Polish brand overseas. Respectfully declining an invitation to return to the Polish stage for good, she declared that “the Poles here are on top,” listing Sienkiewicz “who is being read everywhere,” Paderewski, and the de Reszkes as AmeriÂ�can successes. 5 By the 1890s MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had more than fulfilled her obligation as product and booster of Polish high culture in the United States. Yankee audiences of all classes were moved and impressed by her lofty Polish image, talented “expatriate” company, and moving tales of her homeland. Gilded Age journalists Richard Hinton and Eugene Field as well as poets Celia Thaxter and Richard Gilder invoked her Polishness as an ennobling attribute and a tragic heritage. Soon after her AmeriÂ�can debut, the San Francisco– based Hinton apostrophized her as “Sarmatia’s daughter grand,” and even the teasing Field, author of “Modjesky as Cameel,” pronounced the actress (unfacetiously) “our Pole star,” around whom “we rising sons” will revolve in his 1884 poem, “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Rosalind.”6 Thaxter captured MoÂ�djeÂ�ska listening to Chopin at the Fields’ Boston home, a melancholy Polish performer emÂ�bodyÂ� ing her melancholy compatriot’s music: “[S]he heard her Poland’s most consummate voice//from power to pathos falter, sink and change;//The music of her land, the wondrous high,//Utmost expression of her genius strange,—// incarnate sadness breathed in melody.” 7 Gilder’s elegy, “To Poland: On the Last Return of Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1909,” elaborated most affectedly on the bond between the artist and her land “beloved of freedom and of art”: “Though for all welcoming lands there was not dearth//Of love from her, yet loved she passionately//Only the tragic loveliness; only thee//Loved she supremely! Country of great Sorrow—//Rise from weeping,—who weepest now for her// Who was thy priestess and thy worshiper.”8 Her poet admirers often read her posed face and form as the most noble embodiment of her beleaguered nation, as “incarnate sadness” and “tragic loveliness.” The pubÂ�lic and press also thrilled to her emotional meetings with other touring Polish greats. As one theater historian generalized a few years after

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MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s death: “Poland, a small and unhappy country, has done more than its share in furnishing the world with artists.”9 The appearance of pianist Józef Hofmann, another MoÂ�djeÂ�ska-Â�discovered prodigy, at one of her Cymbeline performances in 1888 moved the audience to applaud: “Hofmann stood up and made three profound bows. When Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was recalled after her strong scene in the secÂ�ond act, he threw her a bouquet, which she kissed. Again the audience applauded heartily.”10 A 26 February 1892 interview with the actress in the Louisville Courier-Â�Journal depicted her as a kind of foremother of other great Polish exports. Describing herself as “a pioneer Pole,” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska declared how gratified she was to “hear praises of my countrymen” in America and how “all my people,” following in her wake, have come to love America as well. In consequence, she shared her recollection of Jean de Â�Reszke’s first pubÂ�lic performance: “He was then such a wee bit of a tot that he was afraid to go on the stage alone, and I went with him and held his hand while he sang.”11 Many years later, one of her supporting players, Howard Kyle, offered a more mournful story of their acquaintance when her company and the de Reszkes were performing not far from each other in New York: “â†œ‘I knew them both when they were boys,’ [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] said, adding with a shade of melancholy: ‘Ah! Our country has no poÂ�l itiÂ�cal life. There’s nothing we can do but take up the arts.’”12 Of all her world-Â�class Polish company, however, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was most allied with Paderewski (1860–1941) through their intertwined performing histoÂ� ries, close friendship, and equal prominence as highbrow artists on the AmeriÂ� can road. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska truly helped launch Paderewski’s career during her 1884– 1885 visit to Poland, instantly divining his musical genius when her old friend Chałubiński presented him to her in Zakopane as “our secÂ�ond Chopin.”13 By hosting a joint concert with Paderewski in KraÂ�ków, the star ensured him a full house and 400 Austrian florins for future travel and study. Paderewski scholar Maja Trochimczyk further credits MoÂ�djeÂ�ska with identifying his iconic attraction: his hypnotizing gaze and angelic face wreathed in golden hair. The experienced actress sensed his likely appeal to her British acquaintances, the pre-Â�Raphaelite artists Edward Burne-Â�Jones and Lawrence Alma-Â�Tadema, who painted his portrait; she also introduced him to the Gilders when he commenced his 1891 AmeriÂ�can tour, guaranteeing him valuable publicity in the Century.14 Twenty years younger than his patron, Paderewski ascended as an international star while MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s AmeriÂ�can popularity plateaued. They over-


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lapped as great Polish artists before the AmeriÂ�can pubÂ�l ic for a little over a decade. Paderewski returned MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s career-Â�boosting favors in spring 1905, when he headed the orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion of a great benefit in her honor to be directed by Daniel Frohman at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. A host of impressive “friends and admirers,” inÂ�cludÂ�ing the Grover Clevelands, Henry James, and Mark Twain, formally proposed this tribute to her “in recognition of your services to the stage, and as an expression of our appreciation of your genius and our regard for your character.”15 Paderewski was to play at her benefit, yet the injuries he sustained in a bad train accident prevented him from performing.16 His absence ceded the stage to an exclusively AmeriÂ�can and English cast of distinguished participating actors—among them, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Louis James, James O’Neill, Ada Rehan, and Mary Shaw— and underscored the fact that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska reigned as the lone Polish genius in the AmeriÂ�can theater, the “export” whose verbal facility connected her most intelligibly with her adopted country. Whereas Paderewski eventually became a genuine artist-Â�statesman, serving as the first prime minister of independent Poland after World War I, MoÂ� djeÂ�ska grabbed headlines as Polish national spokesperson when the two participated in another famous event—the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, the secÂ�ond AmeriÂ�can World’s Fair the actress attended. Paderewski and MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s inclusion in the fair formally enshrined the two Poles in America’s highbrow pantheon. According to historian Alan Trachtenberg, this exposition, dubbed the “White City,” signaled “the victory of elites in business, Â�politics, and culture” and conveyed “the triumph of a distinct community of artists, architects, scholars, and patrons: a community whose social commitment to the reforming power of beauty had grown and deepened during the crisis of the Gilded Age.”17 In Chicago, Paderewski spoke only with his music in his May 2 and 3 performances, although his choice of a Steinway piano caused a furor offstage because he had refused to play on the official brand of instrument endorsed by the Fair Committee.18 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, however, had been invited as a lecturer, not a performer, and asked to edify the AmeriÂ�can pubÂ� lic about the respectability and true art of her profession in the fair’s magnificent Woman’s Building. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s designated role at the Fair reflected just how much she had been AmeriÂ�canized through her English proficiency and equal facility in performing at a pubÂ�lic podium.19 On May 17, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska fulfilled her prearranged duty by lecturing on “Woman in the True Drama.” Two days later she had to perform a surprise engagement

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as cultural ambassador when the delegates from Russian Poland failed to appear for their address on women in contemporary Polish society. Presumably frightened about the possible poÂ�l itiÂ�cal repercussions of their speech at home, these women sent in their stead “a few statistical notes.”20 May Wright Sewall, a suffragist in charge of the Women’s Congress Committee responsible for “speeches on topics of interest to women,” prevailed on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to speak for her people just as she had spoken for her profession.21 In her memoirs, the actress admits that hasty preparation and warm enthusiasm for her subject resulted in a less than careful “choice” of expressions: “I said such words as my heart prompted me at the moment.”22 Szczublewski intimates that her forty-Â� minute speech, which outshone those of the other panelists, amounted to a passionate, semi-Â�rehearsed performance: “She presented the first part from memory, used prepared cards for the secÂ�ond part, and had memorized the third part. The speech targeted [Poland’s] three occupying empires and the ending was anti-Â�tsarist.”23 In letters, conversation, and, more guardedly, interviews, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had spread the news of Poland’s unhappy history in general terms ever since her AmeriÂ�can debut. Poetic tributes, press reports, even Maurice Barrymore’s overÂ� blown melodrama Nadjezda about the January 1863 revolt recycled her incarnation of a tragic Polishness. During her short 1885 tour of Ireland, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska referred onstage to the similar misfortunes of Poland and Ireland and then addressed a highly sympathetic small crowd gathered outside of her hotel. In this instance, the police intervened and delayed her return from the theater so as to discourage a large poÂ�l itiÂ�cal demonstration.24 Yet most of the actress’s pubÂ�lic speeches and articles carefully implied Poland’s poÂ�litiÂ�cal oppression. The 1893 speech at the Chicago Columbian Exposition dared a remarkable, prolonged attack on her nation’s enemies in which Polish women, possessed of “courage, industry, patriotism, and patience,” figure as national heroines throughÂ�out Polish history.25 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska began her speech by ascribing the absence of the original delegates to the powers who “endeavor to obliterate from the annals of humanity the history of Poland; to restrict, if not entirely prohibit the use of our language; to hinder the development of every progress, be it economic, intellectual, or social.”26 Arguing that “any organized movement of women” under such conditions would be punishable as “a poÂ�litiÂ� cal crime” and stating outright that “even postal communication” from Russian Poland is unsafe, the Polish star excused the missing delegates and the


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“scarcity” of what they sent and clearly conveyed that she would serve as her beleaguered nation’s unintimidated voice of truth. Her subsequent portrait of Polish womanhood seemed tailor-Â�made to elicit the sympathies of a late nineteenth-Â�century AmeriÂ�can audience. Selecting the Polish gentry woman as most representative of the nation’s “intellectual vitality,” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska described her as a strong, self-Â�reliant manager, the bulwark of her family and household, distinguished by her “high standard of morÂ� ality” and distance from an effete European aristocracy. 27 The actress subsequently invoked illustrations of Polish women from the seventeenth century, when the nation was defending European civilization “against the Asiatic hordes.” Like Spartan wives and mothers, her seventeenth-Â�century forebears calmly bade farewell to husbands called to battle on their wedding nights, or approved their young sons’ rigorous training to become good soldiers. 28 Although MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s examples did not reproduce the genteel lady of contemporary AmeriÂ�can society, their virtue, courage, patriotism, and industry echoed cherished AmeriÂ�can notions of early European settlers in the wild colonies. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska then shifted scenes from the Polish defense of European Christendom to her nation’s current struggle for independence against “the impious spirit” of the three monarchies who had partitioned and annihilated it. The heroines of this era mutated into “the guardian angel” standing at the door of Polish men’s conscience—the iconic “Polish mother” for whom MoÂ� djeÂ�ska claimed a place beside “the Roman matron and the Spartan mother.”29 Closing her speech with the much-Â�used Romantic trope of Poland as the Christ of nations, the actress exalted the contemporary Polish woman as a deeply nationalist Mother of God: “Poland was crucified, but was there not a mother kneeling beneath the cross of Golgotha waiting patiently and praying for the resurrection? And is there not also today the Polish mother waiting patiently and praying for the resurrection of her country? Will she wait forever? No! If there is justice on earth, she will not wait in vain.”30 In delivering this speech, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska stepped unhesitatingly beyond her customary persona as ambassador into the dangerous role of nationalist firebrand. Her performance as a real-Â�life heroine, even using words in lieu of weapons, won bravas in its local AmeriÂ�can context, expanding on her signature roles as an impassioned “good woman” and gratifying an AmeriÂ�can audience (inÂ�cludÂ�ing new Polish AmeriÂ�cans) who imagined their country to be a bastion against all tyrannies. In the safe haven of the United States, after sev-

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eral triumphant guest tours throughÂ�out partitioned Poland, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska undertook that role of Polish Joan of Arc which she had resisted after the 1880 NeuÂ�feld affair. 31 When her transcribed speech was published by the Women’s Congress Committee in a two-Â�volume set of collected documents, its author proudly sent a copy to her niece and nephew-Â�in-Â�law in Poland. 32 In short order, a Polish translation of the speech circulated through all three partitions “as a conspiratorial text” and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself was inundated with praise and thanks in the AmeriÂ�can press. 33 “Next day,” she remembers, “most of the Chicago papers, in big editorials, alluded to my address in a most flattering way and added their own scathing comments upon the governments which had dismembered Poland, and especially on Russia.”34 Some of her compatriots replaced her title as “ambassador of Polish art” with “ambassador of the three partitions,” while others, such as the Association and Circle of Polish Women in Exile, hailed her as a patriot equal to Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski. 35 That MoÂ�djeÂ�ska chose to voice her homeland’s grievances publicly suggests that she felt herself to be impervious to the kinds of repercussions that the original delegates had feared. In doing so, she behaved more like an AmeriÂ� can than a Polish star. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska knew well the sociopoÂ�litiÂ�cal power of the pubÂ�lic podium in the United States. 36 Nonetheless, she was to suffer as a Polish star two years later, when, on her next return to Poland, she was forbidden performing on the WarÂ�saw stage. This czarist interdiction remained in effect the rest of her life, despite her and her friends’ best efforts to placate the Russian authorities, inÂ�cludÂ�ing promised performances in Saint Petersburg. The courageous act which qualified her for the exalted company of Kościuszko, Pułaski, and Joan of Arc seriously penalized her financially and emotionally. Czarist persecution also rendered her a noble Polish martyr and genuine exile in the eyes of the AmeriÂ�can public, for many did not grasp that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could still travel and perform in the Prussian and Austrian partitions. After the 1895 backlash to her 1893 speech, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska resumed a poÂ�l itiÂ�cally cautious course, boosting Poland’s good character and high culture to AmeriÂ� cans. In her letters to the Gilders, for example, she was anxious to convince them that Leon Czołgosz, the Polish immigrant who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901, was typical of his people only in being duped by Emma Goldman “and the German anarchists whose name is legion.”37 She was eager to apprise her friends of Poland’s exciting cultural reflorescence at the beginning of the twentieth century, of the continuing achievements of


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Paderewski and Sienkiewicz, and of the striking new works of young Polish Â�artists: “Our dear Poland is still in high development of art and literature and it is astonishing how much of the artistic temperament we find here in mountainiers [sic] and peasants, and how easily they take to progress in all directions. We have no Poland, its name is wiped out of the map, but we are a Nation full of life and genius, and that even Germans cannot take from us.”38 By the time she commenced work on Memories and Impressions, however, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had retired definitively from the stage and could retell Poland’s volaÂ� tile history of occupation and revolt with no concern about professional penalties. The first two sections of the book, appearing under the rubrics “Childhood and Youth” and “Poland,” are written with the greatest care and detail, for here, in addition to her own biography, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska aims to educate her readers with a short course on Polish history and culture. Specific chapters catalog KraÂ�ków poÂ�litiÂ�cal leaders, WarÂ�saw intellectuals, Polish actors, musicians, painters, and writers—all of those tongue-Â�twisting Polish names that Chłapowski beseeched Gilder not to excise. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s tell-Â�all text also documents Austrian, Russian, and even Prussian oppression, recalling Chłapowski’s sentence in a Prussian jail after his participation in the 1863 uprising. Although the tone of Memories and Impres sions is less incendiary than that of her Chicago speech, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska brooks no taboos, describing how the Russian censor operated in the WarÂ�saw theater, noting the Russian gendarmes and detectives who spied on members of her WarÂ�saw salon, and, most intriguing of all, exposing the czarist government’s reasoning for banning her from Russian Poland. General Kliegels, the WarÂ� saw chief of police, indicated that she might have criticized the Russians all she liked among friends, but “never in pubÂ�lic.”39 In 1893, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had not guessed that her speeches wielded such international influence; by the 1900s she purposefully fashioned her memoirs into a primer on the Polish national cause. MoÂ�d j e Â�s k a a n d Polon i a In playing cultural ambassador, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska faced two daunting obstacles: AmeriÂ�can ignorance of her occupied homeland and AmeriÂ�can apprehension about the flood of lower-Â�class Polish immigrants into their country. Her San Francisco debut spared her the secÂ�ond challenge at the outset, for the small group of Poles settled there had emigrated before 1864 and prospered due

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to their high degree of education, close ties, and continuing interest in Polish politics. 40 They, like most Polish immigrants to the United States before them, represented Â� poÂ�litiÂ�cal refugees who readily assimilated into AmeriÂ�can 41 society. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s odd little colonial party, however, was atypical of the mass migration of Poles who entered the United States between 1870 and 1914. An estimated 3.6 million peasants, tradesmen, and artisans from every partition came to America “for bread.”42 This new influx of Poles tended to be insular and collective in its settlement, coalescing in large, self-Â�sufficient communities which repelled native-Â�born AmeriÂ�cans as foreign ghettos. 43 These immigrants sought solidarity not only as strangers in a strange land, but also in response to the denigration and exploitation they faced in the AmeriÂ�can Â�workplace, where they were stereotyped as ignorant peasants and deemed suitable only for “heavy industrial labor.”44 Their solidarity was reinforced by the control of the Roman Catholic Church. Polish AmeriÂ�can parishes replaced the communities these immigrants had known at home, and their priests, most of whom were themselves immigrants, functioned as more-Â�than-Â� religious leaders, serving as “collectors, builders, contractors, bankers, judges, teachers, accountants, [and] organizers.”45 Priests assumed much of the power and civic works of Polonia’s developing middle class, funding new buildings, founding banks and religious fraternals, wielding local poÂ�litiÂ�cal influence, and defining what it was to be a good Pole. 46 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s wealth, worldliness, and stardom distanced her from this lower-Â� class, parochial Polonia, recalling the position she describes in her memoirs as a first-Â�class passenger gazing down sympathetically at the beehive of disadvantaged humanity in steerage. Her insistence on highbrow English-Â�language performance and socializing with members of America’s cultural elite fixed this distinction in the pubÂ�lic imagination. AmeriÂ�can colleagues and fans approved her relationship with Polonia as philanthropic. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s leading man Otis Skinner evoked this characteristic scene of “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in the teneÂ� ments”: “I have known her to go on Sunday night to a squalid Polish settlement in Chicago and give all that was best of her art in a dirty, ill-Â�ventilated hall, reeking with odorous humanity, in order that her fellow countrymen might once more hear their native tongue spoken on the stage, and a few homes be cheered by money gained in aid of their needs.”47 The “squalid settlement” in Skinner’s tale reflects common AmeriÂ�can prejudices against the immigrant poor. Yet it is crucial to remember that MoÂ�djeÂ� ska shared fundamental values and immigrant concerns with this allegedly


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Priest and students at St. Stanislaus Kostka Church School in Chicago. Courtesy of the Polish Museum of America, Chicago

“odorous humanity” and she had learned from aristocratic mentors in KraÂ� ków and WarÂ�saw never to shirk her civic duties. She and Chłapowski maintained regular contact with AmeriÂ�can Polonia through its most powerful institution. A devout Catholic all her life, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska went to mass wherever she could manage to do so—on the AmeriÂ�can road, during her London seasons, and in SouthÂ�ern California when she made trips from Arden into town or brought a priest out to the ranch. Ellen Lee observes that “little was written in her lifetime about her deep religious nature, but actors who traveled with her were well aware of it.” Certainly Georgie Drew Barrymore was swayed by her example. 48 Despite MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s cosmopolitan lifestyle and friendships with intellectuals and artists the world over, she did not stray from traditional Catholicism, her conservatism only deepening with the years. 49 The AmeriÂ�can star often joined her poor immigrant compatriots as co-Â� worshiper. At the Polish churches MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski frequented dur-

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ing extended tour dates in major cities (St. Stanislaus Kostka in Chicago, St. Stanislaus in New York), they stood out as exemplary members of the congregation. The couple’s initially unfavorable impression of immigrant priests who “exert the worst possible influence on our peasants” quickly improved. 50 Awed by the prodigious feats of the three Barzyński brothers active in Chicago’s Polonia, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska especially enthused about the achievements of Father Wincenty Barzyński after meeting him in March 1879: “As soon as he had arrived [in Chicago], he set about building a church from nothing but the congregation’s donations, and you would be amazed today to see not only the brick church, but also the school where more than 500 Polish children receive an education, and a very pretty presbytery where the priests live and various church councils and meetings of the Rosary society (or whatever they call it) take place.”51 She sent word about the charismatic Barzyński and a few of the other “dozen educated Poles in America” to the poet Ujejski, adding that this priest dreams with his brother Jan of establishing a great Polish colony in Nebraska. “â†œ‘There,’ he says, ‘we will have high schools, a university, and a theater.’ Naturally I declined his offer to direct that theater, which surely will not be built before I die.”52 Over the years, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski welcomed an increasing numÂ� ber of “good” priests who, in their opinion, ensured the moral fiber of the Polish immigration. Writing her niece from a Scranton, Pennsylvania, tour stop in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1895, the actress mentions the local Polish Sisters of the Nazarene and a Polish priest who had just paid a visit to “Uncle”: “It is common now for us to meet Polish clergy everywhere, and we have gotten to know a great many nice priests. This only shows that more and more Poles are emiÂ� grating, for in the past there were only parishes in a dozen big cities, and now they are almost everywhere.”53 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letters never specifically addressed the ongoing rivalry between the exclusive Polish Roman Catholic Union (PRCU) and the inclusive Polish National Alliance (PNA), which, unlike the PRCU, accepted members “regardless of religion, class, poÂ�litiÂ�cal orientation, language, or ethnicity.”54 Yet in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1900, she complained to her sister-Â�in-Â�law about the “so-Â�called union Poles” and their denigration of the church and its priests, protection of rebel clerics, and creation of new churches.55 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska patronized Polonia’s Catholic churches much as a civic-Â�m inded aristocrat would have supported her village parish. In a context where priests exercised middle-Â�class social and poÂ�litiÂ�cal authority over their congregations, she served as the clergy’s patron and colleague even as she attended services


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to be their model parishioner. By the time she and Chłapowski had moved to their last home in California, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska noted this collaboration as a matter of long-standing fact: “Our Polish priest must perform certain special ceremonies in his church, and since there are a great many Poles in Los Angeles who do not attend mass, he maintains that we must set an example.”56 The actress’s involvement with the Catholic Church also drew on her professional talents as costume designer and performer. She used her unerring sense of style and extraordinary skill as a seamstress to dress dolls to be sold at charity bazaars and to make choir robes, altar cloths, and priest’s vestments. Her contributions linked her with many other Polish immigrant women who sewed for the church. 57 Yet the products of her needlework sometimes smuggled a bit of sumptuous stage dressing into the sanctuary. As MoÂ�djeÂ�ska admitted to her good friend Clementine Langenberger: “Please tell Father Dubbel that I have worked steadily eight hours a day for several days on the cope and even at this our Naścia is working on it. . . . We made it out of one of my Paris gowns—as I could not get anything as strong and handsome as this satin in under 4.50 to 5 dollars a yard and I am not very rich just now.”58 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska connected theater and church overtly through her many benefit performances, for the church aimed to provide approved culture for Polonia. The amateur dramatic circles which arose in every large Polish immigrant community “often had ties with a fraternal or parish”59 and served as “a source of income, helping to pay off parish mortgages.”60 Immigrant women who otherwise were confined to keeping house could participate in their church’s amateur theatricals and musicals. 61 Even before the parish sponsored plays in its halls, nationalist spectacle marched through the church itself, according to ethnic theater historian Arthur Waldo: “[Patriotic and religious military] groups would appear every Sunday at High Mass in full Polish cavalry regalia and put on a show, parading inside or around the church, leading processions of the clergy and the faithful. Their presence in Polish parishes preserved patriotism and influenced the production of Polish plays.”62 Almost every priest accepted MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s theatrical donations withÂ�out demur, whatÂ�ever they might have known about her Polish past. Only Father John Â�Pitass, the prelate of Buffalo, New York, condemned and shunned her as “this prostitute”—Â�although it is not clear if his judgment targeted her past or her profession in general. 63 The striking example of Teofila Samolińska (1848–1913), an educated immigrant, talented performer, and ardent women’s rights activist, likewise conditioned Polonia’s largest community in Chicago to appreciate MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s

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achievements. A refugee of the 1863 uprising, Samolińska arrived in Chicago in 1866, and throughÂ�out the 1870s and 1880s produced and starred in dramas and operettas geared to the taste of an emerging immigrant middle class. 64 She wrote her own plays as well, inÂ�cludÂ�ing The Emancipation of Women (Eman cypacja kobiet). 65 Uncannily paralleling MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in her professional and social ambitions, the attractive, always well-Â�dressed Samolińska played gracious queen among Chicago’s South Side Polonia, sponsoring “dramatic evenings” every Saturday to lure her compatriots away from the temptations of tavÂ�erns and billiard halls. 66 Given Samolińska’s strong desire to improve the standards of Polish-Â�language theater in America, it is no surprise that she and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska became closely acquainted during the star’s visits to Chicago in the early 1890s. 67 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s profession thus proved an asset rather than an impediment in her relations with the Polish Catholic Church in America and, by extension, a Church-Â�dominated Polonia. As her pubÂ�lic lectures in the 1890s attested, with their invocations of Sister Precita and Saint Gemisius, the actress firmly believed in the theater’s innate, religiously sanctioned goodness. She supported the project of a good quality Polish-Â�language theater for all Polonia. When the journalist/playwright Szczęsny Zahajkiewicz (1861–1917) proposed to create a drama school and establish a regular season for the Dramatic Circle of the Polish Patriot Organization patronized by Chicago’s St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska raised funds with two memorable performances in late summer 1892. 68 Before an audience of four thousand on 27 AuÂ� gust 1892 she performed the character role of the comical peasant woman “Madame Rooster” (Pani Kogucina) in Władysław Anczyc’s Peasant Aristo crats (Chłopi arystokraci) and naturally stole the show. For her secÂ�ond benefit on 12 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1892, with six thousand in attendance, she played the title role in Zahajkiewicz’s own play, Jadwiga, Queen of Poland (Jadwiga, Królowa Lechitów). During numerous curtain calls Zahajkiewicz ostentatiously destroyed his manuscript onstage, announcing that no one could ever best MoÂ� djeÂ�ska in the role he had written. 69 The actress continually served as an inspirational figure for theater in Polonia, prompting more amateur dramatic circles to form and request permission to name themselves in her honor.70 The goals specified by the fledgling Trenton Dramatic Circle seeking her blessing were characteristic: “first, the cultivation of our native language, and, second, the earnings we make from our performances will help our church and school, which are still encum-


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St. Stanislaus Kostka Church and School in Chicago. Courtesy of the Polish Museum of America, Chicago

bered with significant debts.” 71 When a committee of Chicago-Â�based Polish immigrants asked MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to lobby for the actual construction of a Polish theater in the city, she obliged with an impassioned letter to the editors of the Chicago Daily (Dziennik Chicagoski). Her endorsement and her son Ralph’s subsequent involvement as engineer in the planning stages of the building came to naught, in part because of the project’s financial infeasibility and in

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part because the church wanted no such powerful secular competition.72 Yet in her letter, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had built a case for the theater’s creation based on the church’s example of national service and inculcating virtue. While the Polish language and culture were under attack in the fatherland and slipping away from new generations of Polish AmeriÂ�cans, she observed, the church and its schools labored most effectively against deracination. A national theater could crown the church’s efforts, immersing all its patrons in their language, literature, visual arts, and history, for such an institution, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska boldly asserted, provides “the fastest means of educating its citizens.” 73 However articulate her support or generous her donations, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s involvement with the Polish-Â�language theater remained that of a benefactor, never a director or a regular player. This theater, like Polonia and the Polish Catholic Church in America, merited her devotion, but could not dominate her life and career. Parishioner and patron, guest star and celebrity advocate, she balanced carefully between the positions of a part-Â�time member and a leading figure in the larger world beyond. The actress’s relationship with Polish Catholic Polonia is perhaps best illustrated by her handling of Ralph’s wedding. Much as his mother had planned, Ralph had fallen in love with his cousin Felicja Bendówna (Feliks’s daughter) during joint family summer vacations spent in Europe. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska procured a papal dispensation that the cousins might marry, and all three returned together from Europe in 1885 to hold the event in New York.74 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could only spare five days from touring to prepare her niece for the big day, but she had decided on its venue and participants well in advance. The ceremony was to take place in St. Stanislaus Church, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s regular place of worship in New York, where she had discovered another “very worthy priest” in charge, Father H. Klimecki Â�(Klimuski).75 The actress’s choice of St. Stanislaus, located in a neighborhood of working-Â� class Polish immigrants, signaled her support of Klimecki and the Polish CathoÂ� lic Church and her selective solidarity with Polonia. Here she orchestrated a meeting between the AmeriÂ�can worlds she herself bridged—Â�generally poor Polish immigrants, their enlightened priest, and her elite AmeriÂ�can friends and colleagues. When such people as the Gilders and Daniel Frohman ventured downtown for Ralph Modjeski’s wedding at St. Stanislaus, they witnessed MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s attempt to stage idealized realism—a shabby working-Â�class Polish congregation on whom she superimposed strikingly costumed, gallant Polish extras. Her AmeriÂ�can theatergoers were provided a translator as


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St. Stanislaus Church on Stanton Street, New York. Courtesy of St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Church, New York

well. The New York Times noted that while “the ritual was said in Polish, . . . Archbishop Corrigan delivered a short address in English to the bride and groom.” 76 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s fellow immigrants, in turn, were treated to a “royal” spectacle and free food. One New York paper dwelled on this vivid discrepancy between AmeriÂ�can equivalents of aristocracy and peasantry: When the whistles in the factories further over by the river were shrieking out the hour for midday rest an odd scene was enacted in the dirty little street in front of the church. A line of fashionable carriages, with polished sides and clanking harness, had wound its way down through the grocery wagons and ash carts and drawn up in front of the church. The inhabitants of the vicinity were all out to witness such an unusual sight. A right royal welcome the wedding party had when they alighted. Down either side of the church steps was a line of men gayly decked out in red baldricks, and each holding on high flaming candles at least two feet in length. They were the society of St. Stanislaus. Behind them were still other lines of soldiers, reaching into and up the center aisle of the church, with drawn swords and bearing a fantastic Polish uniform of red and yellow. These were the Krolowski Polski [sic].77

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After the ceremony, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska reinstated the class divide for the reception, as would any savvy upper-Â�class hostess. The wedding party, along with “friends of the family,” drove off for a wedding breakfast at Delmonico’s, then New York’s sine qua non for fine dining. In the meantime “the happy and proud majority [of attendees] hovered for the rest of the afternoon” in the church basement, “devouring black bread sandwiches and quaffing foaming mugs of beer. Between quaffs they told each other what an elegant affair it was.” 78 One wonders where Father Klimecki breakfasted that day. T h e I m m igr a n t M at r i a rch MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could move in and out of Polonia at will, but she was forever burdened with family obligations as the rich immigrant matriarch. Her extended family on both sides of the Atlantic petitioned her constantly for shelter or support.79 Until she had married off her son and succumbed to California’s enchantment, she was most preoccupied with relatives and de facto relatives such as the Wolskis in Poland, France, and England. 80 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska first planned to establish family homes in Poland, although both structures were only finished in 1884. She designated a modest residence on Krowoderska Street in KraÂ�ków, complete with “dining room, drawing room, library, and surrounding garden,” to house her mother and Kalikst Wolski.81 By 1888, after her mother’s death a year before, she was eager to offload this “half-Â�ruined” property since she had accrued other major expenses, inÂ�cludÂ�ing her California ranch. 82 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s secÂ�ond Polish home, also completed, more or less, by her return visit in 1884, represented the actress’s first off-Â�season wilderness retreat when she still regarded America as a time-Â�limited adventure. Here she would host extended family and notable friends in style, comfort, and harmony with Poland’s greatest natural beauty and most Romantic folk. As MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had informed Faleńska in July 1879, she and Chłapowski would undertake the joint projects of building a home on the slope of Mount Antołówka in the Tatras and founding a lace-Â�making school for góral women, thereby demonstrating both familial and philanthropic commitment to Poland. 83 Yet by the time the couple could take up summer residence in the showplace christened “Modrzejów” after its patron, the building’s long-Â�term utility was in doubt. During their initial five-Â�week stay MoÂ�djeÂ�ska thoroughly indulged herself, gathering together family and numerous friends from all over Poland. She mingled flamboyantly with the górale, giving money to their poor, and even dancing in


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male góral costume at one of their beloved bonfires, which she dared to leap over in góral style. 84 After this last hurrah before her son’s marriage and her own probable grandmotherhood, she rarely visited the beautifully situated, but poorly built, Modrzejów. 85 By the late 1880s, when more of her Polish relatives opted to try their fortunes or find sanctuary in America, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska housed them at Arden, whether or not she was in residence. In lieu of a ready-Â�made Polish community, the ranch functioned as the actress’s self-Â�styled family oasis and refuge. Her nephew Ludwik Opid had to avail himself of his aunt’s hospitality multiple times— when he first moved west to seek his fortune, when the San Jose climate proved too chilly for his ailing wife, and when he left his little daughters in his aunt and uncle’s custody after his wife died. Ludwik eventually remarried and resumed his parental duties, but in the interim MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did all she could to provide her grandnieces a good Polish home at Arden. As she explained to Clementine Langenberger in DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1904: “It was sweet of you to invite us to spend Christmas with you, but we really cannot do so, having the two girls with us, who would be very unhappy withÂ�out their Christmas tree and us not with them. . . . The fish supper is ordered and we shall have all in the old fashioned Polish style.”86 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska performed a more drastic rescue and relocation for her impoverished half-Â�brother Szymon, inviting him, his wife, and three children to leave Vienna for sunny California in 1898. The following summer, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was delighted to host a large gathering of the Benda and Opid clans in Arden’s physically modest complex, as she wrote a local friend: “I love to see them all around me, it is such a comfort after traveling and hard work to breathe in a family circle among those I love.”87 Szymon’s daughter Emilia likewise remembered MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s happiness within this circle and described her edifying orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion of their days: “On Sunday the entire family gathered under the oaks to be led in prayer by Uncle [Karol]. One room was designated a little chapel and from time to time a priest would come from Los Angeles to conduct mass. . . . In the evening the little ones would go to bed and the adults often joined in impromptu concerts.”88 In America, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska enlarged on the matriarchal role she had assumed in WarÂ�saw. Despite Chłapowski’s best efforts on their ranch, his wife continued to provide for all. Chłapowski stepped into the breach as her private secretary and treasurer, keeping “regular accounts of the expenses and receipts of ‘The Helena Company.’”89 As was the case for many other Polish immi-

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grants, the actress’s greater earnings in the United States enabled her to support family back in Poland and those who followed her to America. MoÂ�djeÂ� ska paid for home building and repair, family maintenance, assorted doctor bills, overseas trips in both directions, and individual family members’ education. In concert with “Uncle Karol,” she functioned as the head of the family. It was Aunt Helena and Uncle Karol, for instance, who sent family blessings to their niece Józefa and Leon Kozakiewicz on the occasion of their engagement, along with an initial dowry payment of $300.90 In a February 1894 letter, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska laid out her enormous expenses in order to explain to a niece why she could not help the girl’s mother: Ludwik Opid, as you know, already has three children and little income. Ludwik works and scrimps as best he can, but we have to help them occasionally because sometimes they are in a very bad way. Your Mother [Kunegunda] wrote me about money, but I really cannot take on any more obligations. Uncle Karol, however, has written to Józef Chłapowski [his brother] to raise the stipends for Bolesław and Adam [Maria’s brothers] 20 florins a month this year. It seems to me that your Mother’s family could do something for her, and not let her depend on me for everything. Szymon Benda’s family, as you know, has gone to Vienna and is living in poverty, so I must send them several hundred florins a year. Moreover, Ksawera [Szymon’s wife] was sick, so I had to pay for her hospitalization. In addition, this has been a very bad year and Dolcio has had no work for a year and a half and it costs them four to five thousand dollars annually to maintain their household.91

Given the ever-Â�increasing number of family members dependent on her largesse, it was little wonder that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska constantly reviewed her earning capacity, and repeated farewell tour after farewell tour. Nevertheless, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s vigorous mentoring of younger family members was far from pragmatic. In such matters, her temperament and talent wholly separated her from a “patriarchal, authoritarian, and adult-Â�centered” AmeriÂ� can Polonia, in which children’s education was deliberately limited and their labor exploited.92 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska instead played artistic impresario with the younger generations of her family. If a young person showed true aptitude for the arts, the actress did not hesitate to underwrite his or her training. In this immigrant’s hierarchy of values, the talent to create beauty invariably superseded the ability to make money. Thus, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the immigrant matriarch supported the highly talented cellist Ludwik Opid, paying for his daughters’ convent schooling and teeth straightening, despite the fact that their father, in her words, “looks very elegant and denies himself nothing.”93 After Szymon’s death, she quickly pledged


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support to his two gifted children, sending Jadwiga to Chicago for voice lessons because the girl “would some day be a fine singer” and helping WładyÂ� sław set up a painter’s studio in Los Angeles.94 When her sister Józefa’s boy, Ludomir Tomaszewicz, desperately longed to become a musician, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska first hesitated, yet was worn down by his persistence: “Lunio wants to go to the conservatory in Berlin, at least for a year, so that he can give lessons when he returns. I don’t know if this will come to anything, but I don’t want to refuse him the possibility of an education while I can still manage it, so that I have nothing on my conscience.”95 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska wielded her directorial power more imperiously, however, with her son Ralph and Felicja, the wife she had always intended for him. Her Â�“creation” of their married AmeriÂ�can life reflected her overarching belief in individual ambition and professional success as well as her blind spots about other womÂ�en’s conventional family happiness. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska apparently did not foresee that the approved “womanliness” she parlayed into professional success could easily entrap a woman withÂ�out her social status or career. Her menÂ� toring of her son and future daughter-Â�in-Â�law bordered on tyranny, as Ralph’s biographer Józef Głomb observes: “She had an extraordinarily developed sense of family solidarity. She always helped a great deal, sparing neither time nor money, but she also ruled over everything rather arbitrarily.”96 Their trip together to America had confirmed MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s high opinion of her Dolcio as she watched him work hard on the farm, play the piano beautifully, and master English to the point that he could conduct rehearsals and instruct her company’s actors in their native tongue on her first East Coast tour.97 She compensated for her subsequent long separations from her son with sudden indulgences and interventions. By early 1878, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could announce to Faleńska that she had divined her son’s true calling: “Dolcio is not training to be an artist, but he loves music and gives himself up to it completely when he has nothing else to do. . . . This time in America will be a great help to Dolcio in his career. He has mastered a new language and will not lose his way when he returns—and he wants to return for, as he says, he must see the digging of the Panama Canal. He will be studying to be an engineer.”98 Plans for him were swiftly put into place. By SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1878, after a first return home to see family, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski settled Ralph in Paris with Anna Wolska and her father, where the seventeen-Â�year-Â�old was to start preparing for the entrance examinations to the School of Bridges and Roads. Ralph would next see his mother after her secÂ�ond AmeriÂ�can season

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in June 1879. He was admitted to the school after sitting for his examination a secÂ�ond time in OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1881.99 In the meantime, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska took over the rearing of her nieces Józia and Felicja. Her tender letters to the girls from the AmeriÂ�can road urged them to be good and promised them presents. Once rich Aunt Helena was ensconced in London, she enrolled both thirteen-Â�year-Â�olds in an English convent school in 1881, providing them a valuable European education free of charge and usurpÂ�ing the authority of both girls’ mothers. Through calculated placements of her real and surrogate children, the desired results came about “naturally.” “Everyone says that Dolcio and Felicja are in love and will marry,” she writes her mother in SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1882.100 Felicja was not yet fifteen. Unfortunately, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s further mentoring of Felicja involved no professional training and little firsthand supervision. Back on tour in the United States, she ceded control to the same Wolska who looked after Dolcio and served as go-Â�between with her Parisian dressmaker, Madame Duluc. MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s letters to Wolska throughÂ�out the first half of 1883 are packed with disparate orders, from specific instructions about the cut and fit of her gowns to an urgent request to move her charges from the convent back to KraÂ�ków. The messages MoÂ�djeÂ�ska sent regarding the girls’ upbringing were contradictory and the power she had given Wolska abused. Their aunt suddenly wanted Â�Felicja and Józia to return to Poland, study Polish again, and be reunited with relatives. Yet she ordered Wolska to keep them “under [her] exclusive protection” and vigilance, making sure that they did not yet enter society and risk being led astray.101 The unwed mother who had worked very hard to reconstruct her respectability desperately wanted to keep her future daughter-Â� in-Â�law chaste, cloistered, and, to a great degree, dependent. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had transformed her two nieces into her special pets, part-Â�time surrogates for her lost daughter Marylka. Her sponsorship elevated their status in the family and accustomed them to material extravagance. Entrusted exclusively with their care, Wolska only exacerbated their sense of entitlement. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s relative, Adolf Opid, warned her of the consequences of Wolska’s “bad education” after he had tangled with her and her demanding charges in KraÂ�ków: “As for Wolska’s coming here to continue educating the girls—this is a very bad idea, for she teaches them such wastefulness that Â�Józia told me that they can throw away money just as Aunt and Uncle do. According to Józia, Miss Anna teaches them that you only need to yell until you get what you want.”102


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MoÂ�djeÂ�ska supervised Ralph and Felicja’s lives with alternating tyranny, inÂ�dulgence, and neglect, like a busy queen who generally sees to her son’s proper education, bestows on him her great name, has the right sort of princess raised to be his bride, and presides over the major events of the prince and princess’s domestic life.103 She selected and outfitted their first AmeriÂ�can household in Omaha, where Ralph had landed a promising position as assistant to the great bridge builder, George Shattuck Morrison.104 Her 12 January 1886 letter to the couple conveyed the extraordinary extent of her intervention, from the great piles of bedding and linen she had shipped to them to her filtering of messages from Felicja’s mother and the rest of the family.105 Aunt Helena was still pampering Felicja from afar, but she now abandoned her to an America the girl neither knew nor wanted as her home. The matriarch had sacrificed her beloved niece on the altar of her beloved son’s future AmeriÂ�can success. At first MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s heirs fulfilled their duties. As talented, ambitious, and adaptive as his mother, Ralph advanced quickly in his itinerant profession as a bridge engineer, traveling an estimated 50,000 miles a year and steadily accruing impressive professional accolades over his fifty-Â� year career.106 Felicja gave birth to three healthy children—Felix in August 1887 (named after her father), Maria Stuart Helena in January 1893 (named after Helena’s lost daughter as well as the role Helena played the day of the baby’s birth), and Karol in March 1896 (named after Chłapowski). Yet much as the wedding of Ralph and Felicja illustrated MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s two-Â� tiered relationship with America, so their gradually disintegrating marriage played out tensions in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s complicated binational identity. Neither son nor daughter-Â�in-Â�law bothered to maintain the balancing act between America and Poland that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska painstakingly achieved. Although Ralph readily socialized with his famous Polish friends (Hofmann, Paderewski, and Artur Rubinstein) and traveled to Poland in large part to see his father, he settled both professionally and psychologically in America, where his artistry as an engineer was best practiced and most highly valued.107 He had no need of a Polish stage. Ralph Modjeski was a sanguine AmeriÂ�can immigrant who towered above his compatriots in professional achievement and social standing. As Głomb remarks, Ralph, in contrast to his mother, only left his childhood behind when he came to the United States.108 Felicja, however, felt alien in both Polonian and AmeriÂ�can communities. A very young mother with poor English skills, she initially trailed after her husband as he moved from one provincial AmeriÂ�can town after another to work

Ralph and Felicja Modjeski with their son, Felix, and daughter, Maria Stuart. Courtesy of WarÂ�saw Theatre Museum


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on new projects, and was often left alone with the children for long periods of time. Accustomed to indulgence rather than self-Â�reliance, Felicja longed for what constituted the high life in Polish Galicia, “the brilliance emanating from [the Potockis’] Pod Baranami.”109 On her extended visits with the children back in Poland, she circulated in the artistic and aristocratic milieus to which her aunt’s fame had given her access. It was as if husband and wife had fragmented MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s complex persona, with Ralph incarnating the successÂ� ful AmeriÂ�can careerist and Felicja playing the grand Polish lady with her aunt’s money and contacts. Relations between Ralph and Felicja fell apart when MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could no longer subsidize their needs or personally influence their obedience. Her death and Chłapowski’s consequent return to Poland demonstrated just how much the older couple had served as the family fulcrum between individual desires and respectable solidarity, diaspora and homeland. The matriarch and her husband not only provided shelter and financial support for their immigrant relatives, but also functioned as the family’s emotional bulwark and moral compass. The prayer sessions led by Chłapowski under Arden’s oak trees epitomized their role. Ralph separated from Felicja and filed for divorce after his mother’s death. Once he obtained the divorce in 1931, at the age of seventy, he immediately married Virginia Mary Giblyn, a much younger cabaret artist.110 When Ralph first requested a divorce, Felicja resisted and retaliated by exposing the family’s long-Â�concealed “dishonor,” going pubÂ�lic in 1916 with a letter in which she informed her eldest son about the illegitimacy of his grandmother and father and the role of Zimajer in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s life.111 The split between Ralph and Felicja was exacerbated by their positions at opposite ends of the immigration spectrum—the easily naturalized AmeriÂ� can versus the Galician aristocrat wanna-be. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had foreseen some of the perils of immigration over the longer term, as future family generations would be swept into the AmeriÂ�can mainstream. After attending an 1896 reception for Polonia in San Francisco, she wrote Chłapowski that “the Poles here will stop speaking Polish in the secÂ�ond generation.”112 The matriarch knew that her grandchildren were losing their Polish-Â�language skills as well. In a postscript to the dutiful Marylka, she urged her granddaughter to write back in English “if Polish is difficult for you.”113 She was shocked, however, by how quickly her carefully groomed heirs could stumble socially in America after her decades of model behavior. Felix, her beloved eldest grandson, grieved her terribly when he suddenly married “beneath” him, despite her passion-

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ate pleas (written in English).114 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s objections to the marriage were based not on Polish exclusivity, but concerns about professional success and social status. In marrying, Felix deprived himself of a university education and potentially degraded the Modjeski name. When relatives, friends, and reporters asked the actress why she remained in the United States, especially in her later years, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska demurely insisted that her husband and son would decide where she lived.115 While this gesture of womanly submission seemed uncharacteristic of an imperious matriarch, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did cherish close family ties from her early days on provincial tours to gatherings of the clan at Arden. She was also committed to realizing her family members’ specific potential, especially if that potential involved a profession. Pledging allegiance to both native and adopted lands, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska resembled most Polish immigrants in America, but the satisfaction of individual dreams and ambitions—Ralph’s bridge building, Karol’s ranching, her stardom as an esteemed Shakespearean—determined her ultimate preference for America.116 This orientation distinguished her from even the most sophisticated members of Polonia, who persisted in looking eastward for their greatest inspiration. These immigrants felt that “America’s freedom and opportunity was to lead to polonization rather than to AmeriÂ�canization.”117 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska presents a different balance sheet in Memories and Impressions. In retrospect, she values America not as a means, but as assorted discrete happy ends—the place where “most of my family settled,” inÂ�cludÂ�ing several who excelled in their careers; where “we have met many fine men and women and learned to love them”; and where she and Chłapowski “have become AmeriÂ� canized in many ways.”118 Although MoÂ�djeÂ�ska preempts any criticism of her Polish patriotism by claiming that “we are too old to be of much use in the strenuous struggle of the present times,” family ties and individual ambitions outweighed dedication to the Fatherland in her reckoning.119 T h e Gu e st-Â�Sta r Pat r iot MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s engagement with the Polish stage necessarily changed over the years, from her triumphant returns in 1879 and 1880 and her victorious 1882 duel with Bernhardt to the grand guest tours with which her avid Polish pubÂ� lic had to content themselves in the 1890s and early 1900s. By 1882, the “reneÂ� gade” prima donna recognized that “the epoch of the stars” had passed and standards for preparation and performance had deteriorated sharply in WarÂ�


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saw. The 1895 czarist edict forever denying her the WarÂ�saw stage thus dealt her a profound, but not fatal, professional blow, for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska relished her whirlwind tours in KraÂ�ków, Lwów, and Poznań. The actress’s final 1903 tour, dominated by her KraÂ�ków premieres of new plays, afforded the aging virtuosa a final triumph which WarÂ�saw could not provide. Despite the professional deficiencies and personal attacks she endured in her homeland, Poland came to figure as a supreme holiday for the AmeriÂ�can-Â� based MoÂ�djeÂ�ska.120 Her intermittent visits increasingly idealized her image of her homeland as they temporarily eased her homesickness and struggle. Coming back to Poland meant that the hardworking star could relax a bit with family and friends, immerse herself in familiar customs and settings, and perform in her native tongue. Her early visits offered her both respite offstage and admiring recognition onstage after her strenuous attempts to conquer foreign lands. The calculation MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had divulged to Stefania Leowa in 1877 proved correct: Her return to Poland with overseas laurels after a lengthy absence did boost and prolong her popularity. She had chosen the right sentimental venue for her welcome home when she participated in the exiled writer Józef Kraszewski’s 1879 jubilee in KraÂ�ków. The jubilee commemorated fifty years of Kraszewski’s work as a journalist, author of historical fiction, and general champion in preserving the Polish language and making Polish history accessible to all readers. The week-Â�long festivities, which drew over 11,000 visitors from all three partitions, included the unveiling of the restored Cloth Hall dominating KraÂ�ków’s main square.121 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s reentry thus began as national obeisance, as she joined a select ensemble of stars from the Austrian and Russian partitions in paying tribute to another artist who had gained fame in the diaspora. During the 4 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1879 performance of Kraszewski’s play The Castellan’s Mead (Miód kasztelan ski), with the city’s mayor and most prominent aristocrats in attendance, Time could report that “the greatest event . . . was the first appearance of Madame Helena Modrzejewska on the Polish stage after several years away gathering accolades overseas . . . the applause following her appearance must have reminded her of the ocean’s roar when she crossed it to claim new laurels and recrossed it because of her longing for her homeland.”122 KraÂ�ków’s main newspaper had interpreted her venture just as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had intended it to be read. Though MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s first working month in Poland included a series of reguÂ�lar performances, the celebratory spirit of Kraszewski’s jubilee suffused

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these as well. Once the KraÂ�ków star who had run off to WarÂ�saw, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was now embraced as a very special guest of the city—commemorated, featured, and copiously thanked. Time eagerly reported on Tadeusz Ajdukiewicz’s completion of her portrait, the painting he would donate to the National Museum; the actress’s benefit performance which paired her with her old rival Hoffmann in their legendary duet in Maidens’ Vows; and the various parties and gifts given her before she departed the city on NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 8 for performances in Lwów.123 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s hometown, the new Polish capital for such large pubÂ� lic commemorations, thus established the pattern of treating her guest tours as extraordinary events to be celebrated with ovations, parties, and national manifestations, all of which were duly reported in the press.124 The WarÂ�saw critics and pubÂ�lic begrudged MoÂ�djeÂ�ska automatic ovations until they were brought to their feet by her Polish premiere of The Lady of the Camellias, concealed for censorship purposes under the title Maria Gauthier. Szczublewski attributes the Varsovians’ initial coldness to lingering resentment and capital city hubris. Not only had MoÂ�djeÂ�ska abandoned their theater in 1876, but she also had dallied in the “provinces” of KraÂ�ków and Lwów before favoring them with her presence. Nor would WarÂ�saw give her credit for her conquest of America—“the least artistic pubÂ�lic in the world,” according to Bogusławski.125 “WarÂ�saw’s skepticism” vis-Â�à-Â�vis its wandering diva moved her former defender Sienkiewicz to call the Varsovians’ bluff once more in print: “I would wager . . . that you would give anything if Modrzejewska renounced the role of Christopher Columbus and remained forever on the WarÂ� saw stage as its spiritual leader and most valuable ornament.”126 The WarÂ�saw critics soon conceded their mistake with an unprecedented outpouring of praise. The Illustrated Weekly best explained how this tribute came about: “It is hard for us to believe that the artist has made such enormous progress that the same pubÂ�lic which seemed to cool towards her several years back now rightly recognizes her first-Â�rate qualities with great fervor. Nevertheless, this is what has happened. We learned to value Modrzejewska when we lost her. She is what she was—only now we know what the stage is like withÂ�out her. This is the key to the mystery.”127 By the end of 1879, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska coverage overshadowed even poÂ�litiÂ�cal news in the press. The humorous weekly Holiday Courier (Kurier świąteczny) offered a 100,000-ruble reward for an issue of any WarÂ�saw paper with no mention of the star.128 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s return performances proved her worth to the Poles all over again. The guest tours which Sheaves celebrated as świąteczne dni (truly fes-


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tive days) made critics and patrons acutely aware that her genius could never more be taken for granted.129 Comparing before and after scenarios, the critics paid tribute to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s power as a standard-Â�setter, an ensemble creator. Edward Lubowski, her onetime nemesis and now appreciative reviewer in the Illustrated Weekly, lauded “the movement and life Modrzejewska brings to our stage with her performance, the scale of comparison which her performance sets for us—in a word, the moral advantages which her presence in WarÂ�saw provides. . . . Modrzejewska works and knows how to work, and, above all, prompts, encourages, and engages others with her work.”130 The critic feared out loud that her departure would let the WarÂ�saw theater regress to its former “sleepy dolce far niente” (blissful idleness). The theater critic in Sheaves likewise marveled at how MoÂ�djeÂ�ska enlivened the theater’s atmosphere, direction, repertoire, fellow artists, and public, and additionally filled an important gap in the WarÂ�saw company’s cast for “contemporary comedy and drama.”131 Vacillating between plea and command, he urged her repatriation because “a Polish artist has a hundred times greater duties [to her nation] than to those AmeriÂ�can impresarios.” Even in her own calculations, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska likely did not foresee that she would be hailed and wooed as the savior of the Polish stage. Lubowski insisted that the rejuvenation of the theater absolutely hinged on her participation and assigned her “the lion’s share” of the work involved.132 Presuming that patriotism would force her commitment, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s critics did not seem to grasp the enormity of what they demanded she undertake or the personal ambitions they felt she was now obliged to abandon. Instead, as Lubowski characteristically complained, “we feel a justifiable grudge against this famous artist, for her own stage, not the great European stage, but, we repeat, her own—is no longer enough for her.”133 Contradicting these exhortations to return, however, were the Polish critÂ� ics’ admissions that her experience in America had improved her acting. KoźÂ� mian, of all people, was the first to pose these claims. Reviewing her work in Sardou’s Our Nearest and Dearest, the KraÂ�ków director confessed his relief that the actress had not been AmeriÂ�canized and therefore won over by an exclusively realist school, with presumably vulgar visual effects. He rejoiced that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska somehow had vanquished the greatest enemy of her talent— affectation. “We do not know if her contact with natural beauty or a more strongly pulsing life or a more wide-Â�ranging pubÂ�lic [effected this]. Her protean being found the strength to do the hardest thing of all—overcome her-

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self.”134 Koźmian also posited the link between MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s new success as a tragedienne in Schiller’s Mary Stuart with her real-Â�life ordeal in America. Praising her “force” in the play’s third act, an effect she never generated reliably before her trip, he attributed its source to “the same iron will which enabled Mme. Modrzejewska to embark for America, not knowing English, yet carefully nursing a hidden plan to perform there and so master the language in a year that she could perform in it, enrapture [her audience], and make her fame. Only faith, faith in oneself and one’s calling, as well as the will essential to such faith, can achieve these miracles.”135 Flexing her iron will in America apparently catapulted MoÂ�djeÂ�ska into the ranks of the great tragediennes, for Koźmian declared her equal to the renowned Charlotte Wolter of the Vienna and Berlin theaters. After the star had re-Â�won WarÂ�saw, Lubowski hypothesized that AmeriÂ� can nature, not culture, improved her performance by grounding her in the flesh, the “real.” He recalled how Modrzejewska once represented her characters as exclusively spiritual, as “almost ethereal and so scornful of matter that one could say they trod the earth unwillingly,” whereas her current performances projected “extraordinary strength.”136 When Feliks Koneczny pubÂ� lished a more comprehensive analysis of her acting in the Polish Review (Prze gląd polski), he pointed out another benefit accruing to the actress overseas, noting the fine-Â�tuning obtained through her repeated performances of the same role on WestÂ�ern stages. “The great progress” evident in the Mary Stuart which MoÂ�djeÂ�ska performed in 1879 KraÂ�ków, he claimed, was due to just such concentrated repetition.137 Even Bogusławski, who had reproved Modrzejewska for “playing Modrzejewska” after her departure, ultimately acknowledged that different stages of her AmeriÂ�can career mined “the pure gold of her talent.”138 In his estimation, her first foray to the United States added dramatic force and lower tones to her voice, sharpness to her diction, and a quick decisiveness to her gestures. Her return to America after her London seasons forged in her acting a surety, independence, and “unprecedented balance” between “the heights of poetry” and “the depths of reality.” Immediately after MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s death in 1909, Bogusławski expanded on his claims for America’s good influence, asserting that work in an energized environment attuned to quick changes, resolute deeds, and a decided non-Â�lyricism divested her of the precious salon conventions and concern for fashionable chic that WarÂ�saw society had encouraged to her detriment.139 The AmeriÂ�can road had honed MoÂ�djeÂ�ska into a stronger, more serious player, whose perfor-


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mance had become more succinct and trenchant: “America’s frank realism joined with Europe’s artistic idealism, which only benefited from the alliance.”140 Apparently “the least artistic pubÂ�l ic in the world” had liberated MoÂ� djeÂ�ska from an aestheticism practiced to please and had enabled her to play the truth of her characters as she saw fit, whether upper-Â�class Polish theatergoers liked or approved the result. While the Poles, of course, persisted in naming their star Modrzejewska, it seemed the actress’s later performances on the Polish stage awed them with the more dramatically focused, forceful artistry of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. That MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was sorely missed, avidly embraced or “forgiven” by her Polish public, and pronounced “improved” after her time among the Yankees gave her unprecedented power as both “national artist” and box office draw. Doubled prices for her KraÂ�ków and Lwów performances in no way deterred patrons from packing the theaters.141 The Illustrated Weekly reported fierce battles for tickets at the box office and on the streets of WarÂ�saw; at one point the police had to enter the fray.142 The director of Poznań’s Theater Company, Franciszek Dobrowolski, informed the actress in January 1880 that as soon as her performances were announced, “all the seats were literally snatched up in a half day, despite the fact that the prices for every kind of seat were doubled. The orchestra was also sold out, even the smallest corners.”143 Thus, during her first return tour to partitioned Poland, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska discovered that she had become a box office deity. Her star rose above and beyond any Polish company. Her winter 1882 tour furthered her advance on national and international fronts, for she was competing specifically with BernÂ�hardt, the greatest female star of her epoch. Although the WarÂ�saw pubÂ�lic “was still intoxicated by the narcotic impressions” of the French virtuoso in early JanuÂ� ary, the local papers soon declared MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s victory, while celebrating the actresses’ vivid differences. The WarÂ�saw Gazette preferred the Pole’s “realism ennobled by the breath of poetry” to Bernhardt’s “dazzling photographic realism.”144 In the Illustrated Weekly’s more elaborated, but nonetheless predictÂ� able, comparison, Bronisław Zawadzki defined Bernhardt as an incomparable poet “of dissonance,” whose performance conjures “an atmosphere saturated with electricity” erupting in “nervous and violent explosions of temperament,” an approach which makes it difficult for her “to maintain a specific style, to articulate [a character] along classical lines, and to develop a regular progression of gestures and diction.”145 In contrast, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “always plays her roles, never herself, falsifying neither the poets nor life. . . . Her creation never suc-

Actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations


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cumbs to the caprice of a passing inspiration. The artist is sometimes bared by an extraordinary effect . . . but in this way her performance becomes the perfect poetry of harmony.” At least according to her Polish judges, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska had bested the world’s greatest, trumping spectacle and dissonance with poetry and harmony. After the duel of 1882, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her Polish pubÂ�l ic settled into a unique relationship which formalized the mutual idealization between star and fans. The Polish pubÂ�lic never stopped hoping that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska would return to Poland for good. Yet they became accustomed to experiencing her guest tours as extraordinary visitations which exalted the theater for the duration and then left feelings of depression and dissatisfaction in their wake. Critic Konstanty Gorski summed up the experience by quoting Goethe, who observed that a bad guest star ruins local actors, whereas a good one ruins the audience.146 The press paid MoÂ�djeÂ�ska copious tribute regardless of these aftereffects. As the reviewer in Sheaves commented, “every guest tour of Mme. ModrzejewÂ� ska’s adds something to our repertoire and, if none of these additions survives in the repertoire (The Lady of the Camellias, Antony and Cleopatra, Nora), that is surely because no one is brave enough to act a part she has distinguished and risk a comparison.”147 Other critics attempted to comfort the actors suffering loss of confidence after MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s departure: “Not every [actor] can rise so high, and there are enough places beneath for genuine talent, useful work, service, and recognition.”148 For her part, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska discovered that these intermittent visits not only gave her carte blanche to try out new repertoire, but also extended and enhanced her star career in Poland in the only way possible: by featuring her as a rare, astonishingly well-Â�preserved commodity. She operated outside of the repertory system, as any international guest star would, able to choose her starring roles even if these required the local company’s quick preparation. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had outstripped the power of Polish directors who might have cast her according to her age and the rival talents of younger actresses in their ensemble. In Poland, as in America, she could play Marguerite, Adrianna, and even Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola into the 1890s and expect admiring reviews. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as a visiting national phenomenon also wielded the power to dictate the production of more Shakespeare plays in Poland, inÂ�cludÂ�ing Antony and Cleopatra (a drama she only attempted eighteen years later in America), Much Ado About Nothing, her AmeriÂ�can signature pieces As You Like It and

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Twelfth Night, and, finally, Macbeth. As prima donna of the WarÂ�saw Imperial Theaters, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had long planned to try her skill as Shakespeare’s young queen Cleopatra, but the exorbitant costs of this ornate production had always dissuaded directors from the attempt. That the WarÂ�saw theater was willing to risk such expense in 1880 anticipated MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s great drawing power and served her personal ends, for she vainly hoped to perform the play in LonÂ� don. Unfortunately, this Shakespeare play became the one exception to the great critical and financial success of her subsequent offerings, despite the ten gorgeous, tightly fitted costumes she had had made in Paris “according to all the historical instructions about Egyptian costume.”149 In the WarÂ�saw Gazette, Kenig summed up the production’s problems—the unpopuÂ�larity of the drama itself, the costs and difficulties in staging its grand scenes, the tasteless decisions of the director (a tableau vivante with harp music, a scene of the lovers harshly illuminated by electric light), and an inadequate supporting cast. Yet his review in no way damaged its star’s reputation, for only her performance fully impressed this demanding critic: We saw not only a passionate woman, always vehemently emotional, sensual and impulsive to the point of fury, but also tender and coquettish when need be, at once thoughtless and shrewd. But we also had before us a monarch of the East, who submitted with such pride and constraint when she had to kneel before the victorious Caesar that it was as if one of the great pyramids of her country had to abase itself before a lesser colossus.

Kenig’s admiring portrait of an amoral, tempestuous queen differed markedly from the ethereal Cleopatra MoÂ�djeÂ�ska performed on her 1898–99 AmeriÂ� can tour. Her Shakespearean comedies enthralled the Polish pubÂ�lic from the outset. Her accent could pose no problem in Polish translations, her supporting casts (more often in KraÂ�ków) provided the necessary good ensemble, and her familiarity with the roles resulted in the nuanced tones and quick mood shifts the press was quick to praise. Reviewing her 1884 As You Like It on the KraÂ�ków stage, Wilhelm Creizenach struggled to pinpoint the extraordinary achievement of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Rosalind: “The beauty of her figure, her abundant talent, her well-Â�calculated and thoroughly thought-Â�out acting—Â�everything combined to evoke the most brilliant impression.”150 Lubowski appreciated both the difficulty and success of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s incarnation of Viola in an 1885 performance of Twelfth Night: “It is hard to imagine a role with more infinitely

MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Cleopatra at WarÂ�saw’s Great Theatre, 14 January 1880. Courtesy of the KraÂ�ków City History Museum

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subtle nuances. Our artiste nevertheless portrayed these masterfully. She varied each detail and yet the whole emerged as coherent and harmonious.”151 The guest star MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did not have to worry about packing houses for her classic offerings. Her 1884 premiere of As You Like It in KraÂ�ków not only oversold for her weekend performances, but also attracted “the flower of the city’s intelligentsia” and incidentally included as prop a freshly killed stag from the estate of Count Artur Potocki.152 As the critics, public, and her supporting casts discovered over the years of her Polish guest tours, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s work ethic, meticulous part preparation, and stage knowledge never failed to impress. Lucyna Kotarbińska, who effectively co-Â�managed the KraÂ�ków Theatre with her husband Józef during the star’s last tours there, remembered an indefatigable, exemplary professional: “Modrzejewska was eternally youthful until her last days. She arrived first at rehearsals, never parted from her role for a moment, although she had performed almost all the dramas featured on the guest star playbills hundreds of times. While she was playing long-Â�familiar roles, she was not only eager to learn new ones, but also intrigued by the appearance of every new play or young author.”153 In two DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1894 letters to his wife, Józef Kotarbiński offered a franker picture of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as an aging Rosalind: “She performed well, but she is too old for the role, although she decked herself out sumptuously with costumes and lighting.”154 Kotarbiński’s unretouched judgment revealed the happy paradox of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Polish guest tours. However much she aged, her great abilities, enormous national cachet, and fleeting presence allowed her to play just what she wanted. The last Shakespearean role she tried before Polish audiences, Lady Macbeth, presented a paradox of interpretation rather than age. Kotarbiński felt that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s characterization was too beautiful and noble “for the half-Â� savage spouse of a Scottish soldier,” an opinion he published after her death.155 But MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Lady Macbeth generally won acclaim from Polish as well as AmeriÂ�can critics. In KraÂ�ków, Konstanty Gorski justified the better logic of her interpretation—that is, her depiction of Lady Macbeth not as the mainspring of evil, but as sharing the guilt with her husband, driving him gamely down the path to hell, and, always the woman to her man, breaking down more quickly and obviously.156 The WarÂ�saw critics praised her coherent rendering of the role and her “improvement” on Shakespeare by developing her character’s psychology rather than sensationalizing her monstrosity, as Ristori and others had done before.157 They observed, moreover, that the pubÂ�lic


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liked her interpretation, a double sign of her artistic success and guest star value: “The famous artiste will be leaving us again soon, and we do not know if or when she will shine again on our stage. But it is certain that the crowds thronging to her performances are the most eloquent proof of an instinctive reverence for . . . genuine and great art.”158 Perhaps the greatest artistic benefit MoÂ�djeÂ�ska derived from her Polish tours was her happier experience with great contemporary playwrights. The European sensibility of Polish critics, writers, and audiences enabled, rather than censored, the performance of Ibsen’s plays and the later flourishing of turn-Â�of-Â�t he-Â�century drama. Magda, rendered in Polish as The Family Nest Â�(Gniazdo rodzinne), became an instant hit when MoÂ�djeÂ�ska premiered it during her 1894–1895 tour. Her KraÂ�ków reviewer was knowledgeable enough to compare her performance favorably with that of Mme. Reisenhofer “who first played the role under the watchful eye of its author in Berlin’s Lessing theater.”159 But long before MoÂ�djeÂ�ska took up Sudermann’s play, she had mesmerized the WarÂ�saw pubÂ�lic with her 1882 Nora, the Polish version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Whereas a genteel AmeriÂ�can culture resisted Ibsen’s work as a pernicious attack on family values, the Poles welcomed the playwright’s critique of the Odettes and Frou-Â�Frous in which empty-Â�headed wives and mothers were led astray and killed off for their desertion.160 According to Julian Adolf Święcicki in the Illustrated Weekly, “[Ibsen] wanted to show here [in A Doll’s House] that if a husband is a lover-Â�egotist, his wife a plaything, and the family incapable of thinking seriously, then that family cannot cope with the most minor life crisis and its flightiness will tear it apart.”161 During her final trips to Poland in the early 1900s, when the WarÂ�saw stage was no longer an option, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska happily immersed herself in the “high development of art and literature” which the neo-Â�Romantic movement of “Young Poland” was fostering in her renovated hometown. In the process she discovered a highly gifted set of playwrights working in the Austrian partition—Â�Lucjan Rydel (1870–1918), Stanisław Wyspiański (1869–1907), and Gabriela Zapolska (1857–1921). Seeking a contemporary Polish drama suitable for transÂ�position to the AmeriÂ�can stage, the actress pursued professional relationships with each writer. As Chłapowski explained to their young friend and theater critic, Konstanty Gorski: “in the next season 1901/1902, my wife wishes to conclude her AmeriÂ�can career and would like to appear in a Polish play.”162 Hoping someÂ�how to educate AmeriÂ�can patrons about Poland with a drama featur-

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ing Polish history plus Polish costumes, Chłapowski suggested Sienkiewicz, Zapolska, and Rydel as possible choices for the job, although he warned that “we would not be able to use anything that smacks of decadence, Ibsen, or a la Annuntsio [sic].” He further recommended that the new work blend the gravitas of Mary Stuart and Macbeth with “a little comedy.” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s AmeriÂ�can career neither ended in 1902 nor did she and ChłaÂ� powski manage to commission a Polish play for AmeriÂ�can production at any point. Yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in her 60s was more than willing to test out new Polish dramaturgy on the Polish stage. She was prepared to try Rydel’s Forever (Na zawsze) even though the author could not finish the play in time for her to premiere it in Lwów.163 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did perform in Zapolska’s lyrical patriotic sketch Autumn Evening (Jesiennym wieczorem) on 2 January 1903, having memorized her part—that of a daughter-Â�in-Â�law who supports the delusions of a sick old man—in just a week.164 Kotarbiński credited the actress with fleshing out Zapolska’s character in a piece that “was scenically not very interesting.”165 The author of deftly satirical natuÂ�ralÂ�ist dramas (her most famous play, The Morality of Mrs. Dulski, exposes middle-Â�class hypocrisy about sexual mores), Zapolska had impressed the actress with her genuine talent and subtlety.166 But she seemed an unlikely candidate to blend Polish history, gravitas, and “a little comedy” into a vehicle for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. The intense professional and psychological “sisterhood” Zapolska felt for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was such that she continued to propose historical themes and ask for cast and staging details from Chłapowski until late April 1903.167 Her panoramic play, however, never materialized.168 In Wyspiański MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was thrilled to find a playwright who thoroughly satisfied her Romantic temperament and love of poetry, although she could only advertise and never export his work. KraÂ�ków-Â�born and bred, the son of a sculptor, a student of Matejko’s, and a devotee of Wagner’s operas, WyspiańÂ� ski emerged as a new sort of theatrical genius, combining visual, verbal, and scenic arts in his dramaturgy and accompanying set and costume designs. The themes and historical periods of his plays ranged widely, but his love-Â� hate relationship with the beautiful and “dead” museum city of KraÂ�ków, reinforced by his classical education, often led him to integrate classical motifs, figures, and dramatic devices into his work. The prolific Wyspiański revolutionized Polish theater with his bold synthetic approach and the challenging content and form of his plays.


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MoÂ�djeÂ�ska first became acquainted with Wyspiański’s play The Varsovienne (Warszawianka) in 1901, when she learned the part of Maria, the anxious fiancée of a soldier eventually killed in the NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1830 uprising, for three performances in Lwów (2, 4, 5 July 1901). The play’s premiere raised money for the city’s new monument to Mickiewicz; after the secÂ�ond performance, the playwright himself thanked MoÂ�djeÂ�ska for her superb work with a silver laurel wreath. The star reprised the part in Lwów (DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1902), KraÂ�ków (January 1903), and Poznań (February 1903), proving once more her ability to master a truly contemporary role, the neurotic, changeable Maria. In KoneÂ� czny’s estimation, “roles of this type require the actor to exert less control over himself. He is allowed to infuse more of his own individuality into the part, to bend the role to his disposition . . . often one only needs good intuition to succeed. Mme. Modrzejewska is noted for her intuition above all else, and this allowed her . . . to broaden her repertoire by one more role.”169 Unlike Nora and Magda, though, the role of Maria demonstrated MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s ability to declaim a new kind of Polish poetry and to co-Â�create a more critical, complicated representation of Polish history. In the Varsovienne, aristocratic Polish generals and two young women wait for news of a key battle in the uprising; in lieu of solidarity and belief in the cause, the play accentuates class division, pessimism, and loss. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska did not intend her 1902–1903 sojourn in Poland to be her last, but as it happened, this intensive “working holiday” presented a fitting final display of the discipline and skills that so distinguished her art. Touring the three major stages that were left to her, the actress rolled out standard repertoire (Mary Stuart, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Family Nest), added The Varsovienne and Słowacki’s Fantazy (1844/45) (renamed The New Dejanira), and threw herself into preparing three new roles for a last series of KraÂ�ków performances while she spent March 1903 at the Paderewskis’ villa in Morges, Switzerland. The roles she “crammed”—Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Gioconda, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Wyspiański’s Protesilaus and Laodamia (Protesilas i Laodamia)—would be the final additions to her career-Â�long repertoire, a bravura flourish before a reverential pubÂ�lic.170 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska felt flush with success, as she wrote to Helena Gilder: I have played in Austrian Poland and also in Posen (Poznań) and the people received me most kindly. Never in my youth I have met with such enthusiasm. It was almost amusing because I actually walked on flowers. One night my maid counted

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Sta r r i ng M a da m e Modj e sk a 280 bouquets, small in size, but very pretty, thrown down upon the stage from boxes, orchestra and even an arrangement has been made with the manager of the theater to let loose flowers rain from the ceiling on my head. It was very pretty and made my heart beat with joy at the thought that my people still like me as much as of old.171

In adding Gioconda, the Polish star was co-Â�opting a role written for and made famous by her much younger international rival, Eleonora Duse. MoÂ� djeÂ�ska had hesitated over the choice of an Antigone “wonderfully” retranslated by Professor Kazimierz Morawski, for, as she explained apologetically to Morawski’s sister, the part of Antigone ought to be performed by an actress whose only adornments are “youth and beauty.” The actress even offered to school Stanisława Wysocka in the part so that the younger actress could do justice to the play’s verse.172 Nevertheless, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska eventually decided to couple the old classic Antigone with the newly authored classical role of Â�Laodamia in Wyspiański’s play. By late February 1903, she had informed KoÂ� tarÂ�bińska of the costumes she had specially ordered for these parts in BerÂ� lin.173 Kotarbińska’s memoirs divulged that the star donated her earnings to cover the expensive set decorations Wyspiański deemed essential for the production.174 As it turned out, special costumes and costly decorations were the least of the actress’s worries. Having set herself the monumental goal of mastering three parts in short order, the often ailing sixty-Â�t wo-Â�year-Â�old had to admit that she might have overestimated her physical strength. “I’m afraid that these performances may not take place,” she confessed to Kotarbińska, “for my health has begun to fail. From time to time I suffer from fever, dizziness, and such a bad throat that all this makes learning my parts incredibly difficult. I began with Laodamia and barely memorized up to page 44, it’s such hard going. It’s true that nothing is so difficult as Wyspiański’s language, although it is beautiful and I got to work with great enthusiasm. Antigone is easier, and Gioconda easiest to learn and play. I don’t know, though, if I’ll manage it if my health doesn’t improve.”175 The poetics and structure of Protesilaus and Laodamia also daunted her. A widow’s eloquent lament for her husband, the work qualified as a long poem rather than a drama, according to Koneczny: “From beginning to end it is truly one enormous monologue. The other characters who appear here and there are of secondary importance, like static figures in a landscape. They serve only to accentuate Laodamia’s thoughts, which are spoken in several voices.”176 Or, as Jan Sten elaborated in his review for the journal Critique


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(Â� Krytyka), Laodamia, half awake and half asleep, “experiences an unprecedented spectrum of feelings: despair, depression, loving melancholy, an audacity to take on anything, rapture in the embrace of her lover-Â�shade, disillusionment leading her to suicide.”177 Protesilaus and Laodamia represented a one-Â�woman show, the success of which entirely depended on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s virtuosity. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s fears were partly realized on her opening night (25 April 1903) when, halfway through Wyspiański’s arduous play, her voice gave out and “she completed the performance in a half whisper.”178 Sten’s review was unusually merciless, disregarding the fact that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recovered her voice in her subsequent two performances (26 and 28 April 1903): “If it’s still necessary that Mme. Modrzejewska appear onstage, then in no case should she choose roles which demand greater reserves of strength and voice than she possesses.”179 Other critics treated MoÂ�djeÂ�ska more generously, with Koneczny producÂ�ing the most fulsome appreciation of her efforts. While he faulted Wyspiański’s text as undramatic and the production as too visually oriented (“transforming this long poem into a ballet”), he overlooked MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s flawed first night and concentrated on her body and voice on nights two and three: “She interpreted the text incomparably, animating her entire form with light, flowing motions and accentuating thought after thought with incomparable declamation. It was a masterpiece of pose and diction.”180 Koneczny only lamented that there were no technical means to record her voice. (It bears noting here that the one extant photograph of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska live onstage shows her in Prote silaus and Laodamia.) Her old admirer Witkiewicz, spellbound by her performance, wrote his son of the “miracle” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had wrought, and described a Wyspiański moved to tears, “for he saw his own soul in the most wondrous figure possible.”181 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska thus departed the Polish stage playing perhaps her most physically and verbally demanding role in the work of a modÂ�ern Polish playwright whom she acknowledged “a master.” She had been fortunate enough to witÂ�ness the birth of better dramaturgy and a new kind of theater in her homeland—Â� ironically, the first phase in directing audience attention away from the actors to the plays, productions, and directors. She refused the offers presented her in 1902 and 1903 to assume joint direction of the Lwów and KraÂ�ków theatres, the invitation to “rest on her laurels, enjoy some peace and quiet, and ponder the magnificence of ‘The Modrzejewska Imperial Theatres,’ which would mean the renaissance of the Polish theater.”182 Nor did she respond to KoneÂ�

MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Laodamia in Wyspiański’s Protesilaus and Laodamia at Kraków New City Theatre, 28 April 1903. The only photograph of Â�Modjeska live onstage. Courtesy of the State Archive in KraÂ�ków


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czny’s heartfelt suggestion, included in the issues of the Polish Review he sent her, that she found a drama school so as to pass along her great expertise to future generations of actors and ensure “the crowning glory of her life.”183 Offstage, however, the visiting MoÂ�djeÂ�ska labored tirelessly for Polish theater and society as a wealthy “international” star. While theater critics charged her with neglecting the long-Â�term revival of the Polish stage, city fathers, local aristocrats, and scores of charitable orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tions blessed her civic spirit and generosity whenever she appeared. Each return tour, especially after the five-Â� year hiatus between 1885 and 1890, raised the bar for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s national service, as her decision to repatriate seemed less likely and her managerial acumen increased after years on the AmeriÂ�can road. Her 1890–1891 tour proved to be particularly grueling as she traveled from Poznań to Lwów, KraÂ�ków, WarÂ� saw, and Łódź. In KraÂ�ków, her benefit performances and appearances for such charities as the Jagiellonian University Student Mutual Aid Society, the Sokol Gymnastic Society, and the Reading Room for Polish Catholic Youth multiplied to the point that Time commended her achievements offstage: “Madame Modrzejewska not only favors us with one of her incomparable artistic creations almost every evening, but also finds the time and strength to support charitable or useful institutions with her talent.”184 In fact, her self-Â�imposed service likely caused the actress to faint in the fifth act of The Lady of the Ca mellias toward the end of her KraÂ�ków stay. Needless to say, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska played again the following night.185 Fulfilling her national duties in short bursts of intensive activity while denying Poland her long-Â�term presence as a master teacher or a theater director, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska invested financially in Polish theater building as she did not in America. As early as February 1880, she had pledged the earnings from her six performances in Poznań—a sum of 6,000 marks—to a local widowed actress and the city’s theater.186 In this strictly Germanized city, where Poles were arguably most oppressed by their occupiers, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska enjoyed immense popularity as a great artist, a celebrity relation of local aristocrats, and a national symbol. She boldly defined the theater as a means of Polonization onstage after her final performance in 1890: “By playing in Poznań I aimed to awaken your fellow feeling for the noble and ardent work which you see everyday on this stage, work mainly undertaken to preserve the jewel of our people— the Polish language. It’s well-Â�known under what circumstances this theater arose and what difficulties it encounters in this locale. So here I am, a daughter of this land, your sister come from distant parts. Taking advantage of

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your kindness, I implore you: Support the Polish theatre.”187 Her return visits to Poznań swelled this support quite phenomenally. According to actor-Â� eyewitness Â�Stefan Turski (1875–1946), MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s final Poznań tour in 1903 prompted “great patriotic manifestations . . . the Prussian police were helpless or perhaps ordered to look the other way.” City traffic revolved or halted around the star. “Hundreds of carriages brought patrons to each performance and the trams had to be stopped. Reinforced police posts kept order on the street where tens of thousands who could not get tickets waited for the great artist to appear.”188 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska participated most extensively in erecting a new KraÂ�ków theater. Since the 1870s the city government had been contemplating the construction of a new building to replace the inadequate theater MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had known since her youth. Acknowledging that “this idea had been germinating in the minds of all right-Â�thinking citizens who love our nation’s art,” the actress launched large-Â�scale fundraising for the project by donating the earnings of the last two performances of her 1884 KraÂ�ków season.189 As Time reported, “[her] noble example was nobly imitated. In one of the bouquets tossed on the stage, Madame Modrzejewska found an anonymous letter . . . with an added 500 florins.”190 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s open letter to the paper the following day revealed Count Zygmunt Cieszkowski to be the donor, totaled their joint contribution to be 1,377 renskie, and urged others to contribute “to a goal we are all absolutely convinced is essential.”191 By her 1890 tour, she and Chłapowski made news by asking to look over the theater’s blueprint.192 Savvy about best theater-Â�building practices from their AmeriÂ�can tours, the Chłapowskis urged the architect to add “a combined hall for the actors and rehearsal space” and to make the stage deeper by two meters to facilitate scenery changes.193 Roughly six months later, on 2 June 1891, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, together with Antonina Hoffmann, laid the first brick of the new theater as construction began.194 By her 1894–1895 tour, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could perform in the splendid new City Theatre (it was renamed after SłoÂ� wacki only in 1909) on the Square of the Holy Ghost, a building modeled by architect Jan Zawiejski on other sumptuous turn-Â�of-Â�the-Â�century opera houses and adorned by the frescoes of Viennese artist Anton Tuch and a stage curtain by the famed Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki. The symbolism of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s involvement was important for KraÂ�ków’s history and her relationship to KraÂ�ków. The city could boast that a native daughter become international star co-Â�sponsored a grand theater which marked KraÂ�


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ków as a site of European cultural renaissance. KraÂ�ków had furnished the actress her first “stages” and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska literally repaid the favor. In KraÂ�ków she attempted her most challenging Polish productions and aligned herself with the nation’s most vibrant arts scene. The actress exited Poland as a theater builder and a daring innovator, a mature artist who mastered a spellbinding one-Â�woman show by Poland’s greatest playwright on KraÂ�ków’s exemplary new stage. The MoÂ�djeÂ�ska reminiscing in 1908 therefore could feel an unambivalent love for Poland because her welcome there only grew warmer, more sentimentalized, and ritualized with longer separations and passing years. She matured into a beloved national icon of overseas success who lavished artistic and literal riches on her people whenever she could afford to return. Thousands of her countrymen gratefully reciprocated with showers of flowers and nonstop ovations of the sort she “never met in [her] youth,” cherishing her performances regardless of her age and accommodating her new repertoire despite its maximal ensemble effort and limited stage life. Cocooned in a stable, well-Â�controlled relationship of infrequent contact and mutual idealization, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska easily imagined herself to be happy with her own people, who seemed to her “the same, unchanged, and true.”

8

(

Farewell Tour

After her feat of mastering three new parts for the KraÂ�ków stage in 1903, Â�MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s final years in America marked a period of fitful artistic decline. With the help of influential friends and her husband’s willingness to abandon his ranching schemes, she mainly worked her family out of debt, selling Arden and enduring the hard farewell tours that her 1905 benefit had generated. Her truly final 1906–1907 season on the AmeriÂ�can road told on her already fragile health. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska admitted falling asleep during a rehearsal “to the great amazement of our director” and reckoned that her pitiable state at last moved manager Jules Murry to arrange for her customary travel by a private car, a dreary conveyance named “The Sunbeam.”1 She knew her waning star had demoted her to an awful circuit; in one letter she listed her return address as “some dump where Murry ‘is peddling’ Shakespeare and me.”2 Aging and ailing, the star could no longer summon the prerequisite physical control and mental acuity to impress audiences from the stage, although she attracted nostalgic, forgiving fans, among them many of her critics. During this last brutal tour, she enjoyed the company of two lively young women—her stagestruck niece Emilia and Emilia’s friend, Gilda Varesi, a future minor star whom MoÂ�djeÂ�ska naturally mentored. 3 One last time, family cushioned the bumps of the road. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s tour earnings also shored up her opposition to appearing on the vaudeville stage, a lucrative offer of $18,000 for ten weeks which Chłapowski refused on her behalf. As her husband diplomatically explained to impresario Robert Grau: “Please believe me that [Madame’s] refusal to appear in ‘Vaudeville’ conveys no disrespect to the artists

Fa r e w e l l Tou r

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and directors associated with it. She simply feels that it would not be suitable to change the direction of her work after such a long career. On the contrary, because everything on the stage interests her, she has observed vaudeville’s artistic development and progress with great pleasure.”4 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had implied the same respect for vaudeville two decades before, when she remarked on the uniquely AmeriÂ�can theater of Harrigan and Hart. But she had no intention of stepping down from the legitimate stage at this late date, keeping instead to the course she had declared to Frohman in 1886: “There is no use talking—I am not going to play in the people’s theater. Please, inform me how much it would cost to get me out of it. I will rather pay than do a thing I would regret after.”5 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could bid farewell to the AmeriÂ�can stage with her long-Â�term reputation more or less intact. Retirement, however, did not mean that she could rest from her work as provider and model citizen. She concentrated on writing her income-Â�generating memoirs and spent part of her days sewing clothes for the children whom the Bronson Settlement saved from the streets of Los Angeles. 6 “Scribbling four to five hours” a day fatigued her physically and emotionally, yet, as she wrote home, “I have to finish my memoirs and we have to build a house” before they could think of visiting Poland again.7 In August 1908, Chłapowski informed his sister that he was typing and occasionally correcting Helena’s memoirs because they both hoped this publication would finance such extras as those “future trips to Europe” about which they “have been dreaming for two years.”8 In early 1909, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and her nephew Władysław Benda were corresponding about how his illustrations might be incorporated in the serial publication of Memories and Impressions.9 In short, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska spent her last year and a half in a lesser whirlwind, writing, sewing, corresponding, socializing, traveling to Chicago to visit Ralph’s family, and organizing one last move to their new, partially finished home on Bay Island. She volunteered for another benefit, playing Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene on 12 January 1909 to raise funds for the victims of the 1908 Armenian earthquake, a performance during which her frailty brought tears to her patrons’ eyes.10 Then, on 16 March 1909, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska suffered a serious attack of what her doctor diagnosed as Bright’s Disease, a debilitating inflammation of the kidneys complicated by her serious heart condition. Her health temporarily improved after a week of treatment, but then worsened to the point that a group of consulting doctors, along with her regular physician, J. P. Boyd, informed the family that she was past saving. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska lost

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consciousness on April 2 and remained in a coma until she died the morning of 8 April 1909. Felicja MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recorded in her diary that her mother-Â� in-Â�law “gave up the ghost with a pair of long and short breaths, not opening her eyes, but releasing a tear.”11 The drama of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s dying and the somber pageantry of her commemoration were tracked avidly by the AmeriÂ�can press. By 1909, the newspapers had become expert in manipulating mass suspense and sorrow over a celebrity’s death. Sixteen years earlier, as Edwin Booth lay dying in his Players Club apartment, reporters stationed before the club building in Gramercy Park “waited for Dr. St. Clair Smith to wave a handkerchief from the third-Â� floor window as the signal that all was over” so that they could race to file their stories.12 A typical headline in the 4 April 1909 issue of the Los Angeles Examiner intoned: “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska is Unconscious and Near Death. Noted Tragedienne’s Family at Her Bedside.”13 Sparing the actress a frank report on her physical state, the article focused instead on the dramatic responses of those around her—the near collapse of her husband and the rushing of a priest “by auto to administer extreme unction.” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s commemoration differed from those of other AmeriÂ�can actors in presenting yet another cross-Â�country tour rather than a burial. The Los An geles Evening Express informed her Angeleno mourners that her body could be viewed April 10 and 11 by the pubÂ�lic at the Knights of Columbus Clubhouse at 21st Street and Figueroa, and Los Angeles would be but the first stop in her final journey back to Poland.14 Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, the great AmeriÂ�can stage star, an Orange County pioneer, would not be laid to rest where she had been embraced as a co-Â�colonist, but in the country of her birth. Newspapers nationwide reported on her body’s passage from its first viewing in Los Angeles to its holdover in a Chicago cemetery vault and last AmeriÂ�can stop in New York before it was shipped overseas to KraÂ�ków. The railroad transport of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s casket across America proved to be her definitive farewell to her fans. The stops in Los Angeles and New York included formal funerals which, due to the great numbers of her mourners, were made exclusive and theatrical in different ways. In Los Angeles, a black-Â�bordered funeral card, featuring a lovely photo of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in her Queen Constance role, with unbound hair and a look of mournful appeal, was accompanied by an “admit one” ticket for the mass to be held on 12 April 1909 at St. Vibiana Cathedral.15 At MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s spectacular SouthÂ�ern California funeral, two hundred Knights of Columbus


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and representatives of two local Polish societies joined the family escorting the casket from the clubhouse to a packed church. At least four thousand onlookers gathered along their route. Inside St. Vibiana’s, the procession swelled with a “long line of prelates and altar boys, then the Rt. Rev. Bishop Conaty, followed by the honorary pallbearers.”16 Among these last were such California founder figures as Judge Richard Egan and Charles Fletcher Lummis, then the librarian of the City of Los Angeles.17 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski’s local SouthÂ�ern California friends served as active pallbearers. During the service, cellist Ludwik Opid played Chopin’s funeral march, and a section of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, was performed as the recessional.18 If MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Los Angeles funeral represented an AmeriÂ�can and particularly Californian farewell, the 2 July 1909 requiem high mass in New York’s St. Stanislaus Church constituted a heartfelt tribute to her from a congregation of Polish AmeriÂ�cans, leavened aesthetically by the attendance of Richard Gilder, actor James O’Neill, her former co-Â�star John E. Kellerd, and over a score of other “players, writers, and artists.”19 The casket’s magnificent floral drapery came courtesy of the Players, Twelfth Night, and Lambs clubs. Appropriately enough, “the sunlight pouring in through the colored windows made a bright spotlight on [the casket’s] lilies and almost obscured the light of the many candles.”20 Twenty-Â�four years after Ralph and Felicja’s wedding, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s compatriots and colleagues co-Â�produced in the same space a moving farewell to their fellow immigrant and thespian. Howard Kyle, a MoÂ�djeÂ� ska company veteran attending the mass, recalled that the Polish eulogy was delivered in a “manner . . . so dramatic that I regretted being unable to understand what [the priest] said.”21 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s burial in Poland seemed to signal that she was first and last a Pole, the more so since Chłapowski decided to quit the United States and escort her body “home.” The Polish aristocrat whose fascination with America had prompted him to change his citizenship and prolong his wife’s AmeriÂ� can career showed no desire to linger on alone in SouthÂ�ern California. Acceding to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s wishes to be buried with her mother and two brothers in KraÂ�ków’s Rakowicki Cemetery, he simply planned that he and his wife would travel back to Poland together. 22 Ernest Phillips, his wife’s young protégé, joined others in organizing “Count Bożenta’s” departure: “I tried to help him with his packing, which proved to be a very difficult task for both of us. Their lives had so wonderfully blended that the poor old gentleman seemed entirely lost withÂ�out her. Every few hours he would walk up to me, throw his

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arms around me, and cry like a child.”23 Chłapowski settled with his family in Prussian Poland until his death on 20 March 1914, visiting his wife’s grave as often as his health permitted. In lieu of being interred with the Chłapowski family, he insisted on being buried next to his wife in KraÂ�ków. In death as in life, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski remained a unit unto themselves. The couple’s friends, as well as the AmeriÂ�can media, treated his choice sympathetically. The same eccentric whom Joseph Gilder fondly remembered swimming in Long Island Sound “in a top hat, pince-Â�nez, and with a cigarette in his mouth” had gained dignity as “the grieving husband . . . [who] embraced me with Polish fervor, saying ‘Good-Â�bye, Joe—I shall never see you again’” as he departed New York.24 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski’s “funeral tour” across America demonstrated the massive, abiding impact of their AmeriÂ�can lives. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was mourned as a great actress, and she and her husband together were paid homage as beÂ�loved, established members of the various communities to which they contributed—Â� their Orange County neighbors, cultured AmeriÂ�can friends across the counÂ� try, Polish immigrants whose church and native culture they generously supported, and the actress’s many professional associates and protégés. Writ large in the church services and the press coverage of their journey was the motif of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s goodness. In his eulogy at St. Vibiana’s, Bishop Conaty proved to be an astute student of “Madame’s” own sermons, approving her generous heart, “spotless womanhood,” and sanctification of the theater: “MoÂ�djeÂ� ska loved her art with the intensity of fidelity to a vocation which she felt was of God. She realized that the stage is a teacher, in the providence of God—a teacher of goodness, and that amusement should not be allowed to degenerate into a means of evil.”25 Chłapowski praised Conaty’s “marvelous” words and bore witness to other signs of his wife’s near sainthood—her features which became thirty years younger in death, the huge numbers of people who wept upon viewing her body, and “the poor and unfortunate” who especially mourned her “because she had been good to them.”26 Before MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s body had been shipped to a vault in Chicago’s St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery, the Chicago Tribune ran a feature about the actress’s many kindnesses, extended primarily to beginning thespians.27 In a 20 June 1909 letter to the editor, a Mrs. N. Cox protested the Tribune’s Â�m isreporting of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s enormous fortune, citing the actress’s very modest estate as testament to her benevolence: “She was the most generous of women and gave away to relatives, friends, and a host of private and pubÂ�lic charities far more than she


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retained for herself.”28 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Chicago legacy of goodness prompted further charity on this final tour. As the city’s Polish and theatrical communities gathered to bid good-Â�bye at her bier at Twelfth Street Station on 30 June 1909, a tally was taken of the fund MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had initiated for educating her fellow immigrants, an amount “swelled by a 5 cent contribution from every Pole in Chicago.”29 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s posthumous reputation as a good woman and her splendid Catholic funerals on both coasts reflected the AmeriÂ�can constants of her generosity, respectability, and orthodox piety. The Church’s ready embrace of the departed Madame also marked how high the social status of theatrical folk had risen in America over the decades of her career. As sundry theater histories note, perhaps “the most notorious example of clerical prejudice against actors” took place as late as 1870, seven years before MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s debut, when the beloved old comedian George Holland was denied a funeral in his sister-Â� in-Â�law’s church because of his profession. 30 The esteemed actor Joseph Jefferson had accompanied Holland’s son to make arrangements with the minister and made famous the disapproving cleric’s advice to “try the little church around the corner” for the service he refused to perform. 31 This “little church” at 1 East 29th Street, formally called the Church of the Transfiguration, consequently served many members of the theatrical community for their weddings and funerals, patronized for its open-Â�mindedness. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s funeral in the non-Â�cosmopolitan church of St. Stanislaus exalted her well beyond the respectability which she, Booth, Jefferson, and other AmeriÂ�can stars successfully attained in life. Her Polish AmeriÂ�can fans and beneficiaries anticipated the national demonstration that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska would receive in their shared homeland. Given the Polish actor’s enormous symbolism as Poland’s pubÂ�lic “voice” and “body” during the partitions, popular big-Â�city stars were accorded grand funerals as a matter of course. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself had witnessed the impressive farewells paid Bakałowiczowa in WarÂ�saw and her brother Feliks in KraÂ�ków. Because she had eclipsed all such stars in terms of her extraordinary national service at home and overseas, one contingent of Polish AmeriÂ�cans lobbied that she be honored as the playwright Wyspiański and writer Kraszewski had been, buried in KraÂ�ków’s Skałka Sanctuary crypt where the most distinguished sons and daughters of Poland were laid to rest. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s stated preference for Rakowicki Cemetery over Skałka was respected, but her hometown organized a magnificent all-Â�Poland commemoration for their native daughter. 32 The funeral was held the morning of 17 July

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1909 in the Church of the Holy Cross, and its august attendees included deputies from the Austrian Government Council and the Galician parliament, the mayor and city council of KraÂ�ków, delegates from Poland’s three partitions and the United States, local aristocrats, górale from Zakopane, representatives of Polish theaters, artistic groups, and the Prague theater, as well as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s fellow “greats” Paderewski and Sienkiewicz. 33 Aside from its scale, which encompassed a huge number of city residents in the procession from church to cemetery, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Polish commemoration surpassed her AmeriÂ�can services in its extensive, solemn linkage of theater and church. The Church of the Holy Cross stood next to the City Theatre that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska helped to build, and the two institutions shared the green space of the Square of the Holy Ghost. The theater dwarfed the small Gothic church in size and ornate splendor, but the proximity of the two suggested harmonious coexistence, not antagonism. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s funeral procession grandly enacted the continuum which she had asserted so often in her AmeriÂ�can lectures, as her casket was led out of the church by actors of the KraÂ�ków Theatre and followed by actors from WarÂ�saw, Lwów, and Poznań. At significant stopping points, theater people resumed the eulogizing begun by clergy during the mass. Actor Ludwik Solski, Józef Kotarbiński, and Ludwik Heller (representing the Lwów Theater) delivered speeches before the City Theatre itself. Playwright Lucjan Rydel and Michał Tarasiewicz, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s last male partner on the KraÂ�ków stage, joined Dr. Francis Szymański of Chicago’s Polonia in speaking at MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s grave site. After her Polish funeral, Chłapowski did his best to enshrine his actress wife’s image. In NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1909, he informed Richard Gilder that MoÂ� Â� djeÂ�ska and her kin’s new tombstone would feature a bronze bas-Â�relief of her face sculpted by Stefan Lewandowski. At the same time, Chłapowski had arranged for a marble version of the relief with an accompanying epitaph to be mounted by the altar of the Church of the Holy Cross. 34 He printed out that epitaph for Gilder, assuring him that it “sounded like verse in Polish”: Helena Modrzejewska Karolowa Chłapowska, b. 12 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1840 in KraÂ�ków, d. 8 April 1909 in Newport-Â�California. With her art she raised spirits and strengthened hearts. She spread the fame of Polish art beyond the oceans. She sought her fatherland’s glory in her own. She passed through the world doing good unto others. She longed to rest in her native ground— May she rest in peace. 35


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MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s funeral procession in KraÂ�ków, 17 July 1909. Courtesy of the State Archive in KraÂ�ków

Above these words, Lewandowski’s bas-Â�relief depicts a young Modrzejewska’s face in three-Â�quarter profile. With her hair loosened and gaze intent on an unseen beyond, she is memorialized as an aspiring Polish artist in performance before the fateful date of 1876. By the end of the nineteenth century, Krakovians were busy repatriating their famous dead, recovering their remains from exile and staging reburials full of pomp and patriotic manifestation. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s tombstone, like her Ajdukiewicz portrait displayed in the National Gallery, would endure as one more inspiring monument in a zealously kept national museum city. Her image recalls the questing young actress who had flourished on her hometown’s stage. The epitaph her husband had approved prettily generalizes the star’s decades of absence as a mission for her fatherland. This sort of commemoration of Modrzejewska as the eternal Pole would resound for many years: “Modrzejewska incarnated a living symbol of Poland on AmeriÂ�can soil. She was not a theatrical star in the usual sense of the word, but a living witness of

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Bas-Â�relief sculpted by Stefan Lewandowski on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s tombstone in Rakowicki Cemetery, KraÂ�ków. Author’s photo

her people, a live person who conquered all hearts and served in the name of her oppressed nation.”36 Yet Modrzejewska was no exile. The mission she had pursued “beyond the oceans” had primarily been her own. Once she had debuted as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, she never stopped moving in a direction she presumed to be forward, artistically and professionally, until her body betrayed her formidable will. She toured America again and again to fulfill specific ambitions for herself and her family. There she most expanded her power as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the artist, mastering Shakespearean parts, heading up her own companies, producing new plays, and lecturing publicly for her profession. This new AmeriÂ�can star also excelled as a charismatic AmeriÂ�can citizen, a European queen in the SouthÂ� ern California wilderness. Her AmeriÂ�can fans mourned her as their national


MoÂ�djeÂ�ska seated by reflecting pool at Arden in 1902. Graham Photo Company, San Francisco. Courtesy of the KraÂ�ków City History Museum

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artist, although they had nowhere to pay their respects after her body had been borne away. Perhaps the best AmeriÂ�can counterpoint to the Polish bas-Â� relief of an aspiring young Modrzejewska—the completion of the diptych— is a photo postcard of the mature MoÂ�djeÂ�ska at Arden. Here the gracious California hostess rests momentarily on the edge of the reflecting pool before her home, her eyes trained on her beholder, her expression verging on restlessness, and her star image doubled in the water below.

Ep i l o g u e

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Finding MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Today

For those of us intrigued by the biography of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, a long-Â�dead stage actress, the AmeriÂ�can memorial trail is at best elusive. We have no recordings to thrill us with a living voice, no filmed performances or home movies to scrutinize and replay. AmeriÂ�cans were the intended audience for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Memories and Impressions, and Gilder’s publishing house produced for his dear old friend a lavish edition, complete with state-Â�of-Â�the-Â�art reproductions of her photos. But we possess very few translations of her copious correspondence and no reprint of the many letters she wrote in English, in which her opinions are sharper, her style livelier, and her self-Â�image less carefully composed. Nor can we visit MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s grave on this side of the ocean to commemorate the anniversaries of her death. In contrast, the Poles have become practiced keepers of her flame, successful in large part because they had less territory to cover and more national impetus to invest in her memory. The relatively small area of KraÂ�ków’s Old City, Modrzejewska’s first world, encompasses a much-Â�abridged, somewhat meandering walking tour of her life, provided one knows the landmarks beforehand. A crudely carved plaque marks the site, if not the actual building, of Modrzejewska’s birthplace on Dominican Square.1 KraÂ�ków’s Old Theatre, now named after the actress, still stands on Jagiellońska Street, just the other side of the city’s main square. Here Modrzejewska dueled with Hoffmann and performed opposite her beloved brother Feliks. The Theatre Museum, on the corner of Szpitalna and St. Mark, offers the richest immersion in Modrzejewska artifacts, featuring a permanent exhibit of costumes, photographs, paint-

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ings, photographs, trinkets, and everyday objects such as the star’s ashtray shaped like a lizard, her tiny deck of playing cards, and a device for stretching her gloves.2 The best spot to absorb Modrzejewska’s physical grandeur is in the National Museum atop KraÂ�ków’s Cloth Hall, where her portrait by Ajdukiewicz shares a gallery room with Matejko’s enormous tableaux of Poland’s glorious imperial past. Here the star radiates beauty, majesty, and voluptuousness—a late nineteenth-Â�century mistress of the stage and the salon who complements the strapping Polish warriors of earlier centuries. A reproduction of this portrait also fills the wall of a lounge in KraÂ�ków’s Hotel Pollera, one of the actress’s favorite stopping places, a building located directly opposite the Square of the Holy Ghost. The tour concludes by retracing Modrzejewska’s last journey from the Church of the Holy Cross, in which her plaque and epitaph still hang, past the Słowacki Theatre, where she and Wyspiański co-Â�created new work, to her grave in Rakowicki Cemetery. A particularly ardent fan might then head south to visit the trade school the actress founded in Zakopane, an institution now called the Modrzejewska Complex of Professional Schools in Textiles and Clothing. Up north in WarÂ�saw, visitors can tour the Great Theatre, rebuilt after its destruction along with most of the city during World War II; until the economic transition of the 1990s, its resident Theatre Museum maintained a permanent exhibit of Modrzejewska’s costumes and artifacts as part of a general tribute to WarÂ�saw’s “epoch of the stars.” Coordinating any of these trips with Modrzejewska’s jubilees, marking every fifty years since her birth and death, would afford visitors new glimpses of the prima donna. During the 2009 commemoration of her death, a major exhibit titled “For Love of Art: Helena Modrzejewska” Â�(Z miłości do sztuki: Helena Modrzejewska) and organized by the KraÂ�ków Theatre Museum curator Małgorzata Palka went on display in KraÂ�ków and WarÂ� saw. “For Love of Art” drew on Polish and AmeriÂ�can museum holdings as well as the extensive private collection of Krzysztof Ciepły and experimented with a computer-Â�generated montage of the actress’s photos in sequential poses, a brief “moving picture” accompanied by a narrated passage from Memories and Impressions. 3 Polish scholars have also seen to Modrzejewska’s legacy in print, pubÂ�lishÂ� ing an annotated translation of her memoirs, Szczublewski’s year-Â�by-Â�year chronicle of her life, several biographies, and numerous analyses of her performances. By 1965, the two chief pioneers in Modrzejewska scholarship, Got and

Epi l ogu e: Fi n di ng Modj e sk a Today

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Szczublewski, had collected and edited an excellent two-Â�volume compendium of her and Chłapowski’s correspondence. Of particular note is Orzechowski’s 2000 publication of a third volume of correspondence, inÂ�cludÂ�ing Polish versions of many English-Â�language letters MoÂ�djeÂ�ska wrote to AmeriÂ�can addressees. The very correspondence that might interest us most is only available in Polish translation. Modj e sk i a na i n A m er ica Over the last several decades, Polish scholars have been attempting to fill in the blank spots of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s career and life. In 1990, Orzechowski and Anna Litak, curator of the Modrzejewska Theatre Museum, followed the actress’s trail to America, revisiting the stopping points on her AmeriÂ�can tours and stumbling onto cache after cache of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska memorabilia. Their adventure yielded the exciting discovery that “documents connected with MoÂ� djeÂ�ska can be found in almost every AmeriÂ�can town.”4 Thirty years earlier, Â�MoÂ�djeÂ�ska biographer Marion Moore Coleman implied the same possibility in her “Acknowledgments” when she thanked the staff of “innumerable pubÂ� lic libraries” across the United States for “checking dates and obtaining reviews of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska performances” in their locales. 5 America is awash in Modjeskiana—letters, documents, photographs, paintÂ� ings, sketches, clippings, playbills, programs, costumes, jewelry, testimonial gifts, even the wooden sign which directed visitors to Arden. These items have been dispersed rather than collected. In part, the scattering of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s personal possessions was due to family impulsiveness. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and ChłaÂ� powski had given so much to others that the actress’s last will and testament recorded her worth as a mere $5,000, the sum total of her California real estate holdings, silverware and silver plate kept in a safety deposit box, and a $1,000 promissory note from Ludwik and Caroline Opid (her nephew and his secÂ�ond wife). 6 The newly widowed Chłapowski continued acting on impulse in dispensing with their worldly goods. The “ark” of Arden, the one collection unified by the artist’s tastes and interests, had been disassembled three years before. Thereafter, no one in the surviving family thought to catalog and curate her belongings in a systematic way. Chłapowski was waylaid by grief and then distance, Ralph was consumed by a profession as demanding and itinerant as his mother’s had been, and the one person who might have managed this daunting task, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s granddaughter Marylka, was too young

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at the time of the actress’s death. Decades later, Marylka MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Pattison had succeeded in preserving some of the most beautiful MoÂ�djeÂ�ska treasures in her Tucson studio: “the silver laurel wreath with its berries of gold” which her grandmother had received from Wyspiański, the “amaranthine” stole MoÂ� djeÂ�ska wore at her presentation to the Prince of Wales, and a gorgeous Beatrice costume in “creamy satin.” 7 The nationwide dissemination of Modjeskiana also resulted from her extensive, prolonged touring. Friends and fans kept tangible evidence of her life and career for reasons of sentiment, the thrill of material proximity with celebrity, and, when applicable, calculations about its eventual value. Their appetite only increased after her death. Writing Chłapowski on 18 April 1909, acquaintance Julia Kimball requested photographs of her idol and some “small book which [Madame] had liked and held as she read,” which would be for her a “priceless treasure.”8 Like so many fans, Kimball longed for a permanent image of her star and an item which the star herself had touched.9 MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s embodiment of high culture and desire for intellectual contact likewise guaranteed that she would be remembered and admired by patrons in many of the cities and towns where she had performed. If theatergoers aimed to collect her renditions of Shakespearean heroines, then they kept her programs and clipped her reviews as collection-Â�worthy, as proofs of their patronage and prompts for re-Â�savoring the performance. Her fans created “their own small works of art” out of scrapbooks of clippings.10 In at least one famous instance, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska so impressed her patrons that they gave their daughter her name. In Columbia, South Carolina, Henry and Rachel Monteith, an African AmeriÂ�can brick mason and his schoolteacher wife, christened their firstborn Mary MoÂ�djeÂ�ska (1899–1992) out of admiration for the cultivated star. The couple strongly encouraged and supported the intellectual and professional development of all eight of their children. Mary MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Monteith Simkins herself showed no interest in the stage, but grew to prominence as a civil rights activist in her home state, working with the South Carolina Anti-Â�Tuberculosis Association and the NAACP.11 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s discipline in corresponding with an elite roster of addressees also dispersed her enormous correspondence into different archive collections all over the country. Her letters to Annie Fields, for example, can be found in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, whereas her correspondence with Minnie Maddern Fiske is held in the Harry Ransom Center


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of the University of Texas-Â�Austin Library. Other collections are still being uncovered. Alicja Kędziora recently found some of the actress’s letters to May Wright Sewall, her contact for the talks she delivered at the Chicago World’s Fair, in the Indianapolis–Marion County Public Library.12 The MoÂ�djeÂ�ska trail therefore might wind through any AmeriÂ�can’s Â�backyard— if not in libraries, historical societies, or among family memorabilia, then perhaps in local theater lore or name traces. In their online histories, impressive old performing venues across the country—Pasadena’s Grand Opera House, Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House, Leadville, Colorado’s Tabor Opera House, the historic Calumet Theater on Michigan’s upper peninsula—Â�cite her guest appearances as evidence of their past prowess.13 Obsolete celebrity has its uses in America today. At least two theaters—one in Milwaukee (opened 1911) and the other in Augusta, Georgia (opened 1916)—named themselves “MoÂ� djeÂ�ska,” the first to cash in on her popularity in a Polish immigrant neighborhood and the secÂ�ond to borrow her famous name. Her celebrity also led to her exploitation as a brand name for various AmeriÂ� can products, some of which remain collectibles posted on the Web. Rarely a day passes withÂ�out a Google ad appearing for a MoÂ�djeÂ�ska item. As early as April 1878, Chłapowski remarked the peddling of “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska” bonnets, gloves, and brooches to AmeriÂ�can women with aristocratic aspirations.14 “Tight-Â�fitting” MoÂ�djeÂ�ska jackets “of seal plush” were advertised by mail-Â�order catalog.15 The Larkin Soap Manufacturing Company of Buffalo, New York, introduced an entire line of “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska” products ranging from perfume, toilet water, and tooth powder to china tableware, presumably capitalizing on the actress’s genteel cachet.16 The Noritake Company, which specialized in the import of fine china from Japan, also manufactured a MoÂ�djeÂ�ska china pattern which was discontinued by 1918; each piece was rimmed with gold and featured an inside circle with recurring clusters of delicate flowers. The commodification of the star’s unusual surname registered the extent of her popularity and her market value as an emblem of quality and good womanliness. But there is no evidence that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska received any royalties from her appropriated name.17 Kentucky “MoÂ�djeÂ�skas,” the one brand-Â�name product still being made today, originated in Louisville, Kentucky, where, according to several vendors, confectioner Anton Busath was so entranced by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 1883 performance of Thora that he sought and received permission to use her name for his most recent creation called “the caramel biscuit” or the “caramel marshmallow

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wonder.”18 MoÂ�djeÂ�skas became popular local candies, and the Busath company subsequently passed the recipe on to other Louisville confectioners, inÂ�cludÂ� ing Rudolph Bauer in 1889 and Rudy Muth in the late 1940s. Kentucky has declared MoÂ�djeÂ�skas to be a state specialty, and Bauer’s Candies now distributes them through such national chains as Williams-Â�Sonoma and Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores and Restaurants. For AmeriÂ�can consumers of MoÂ�djeÂ� skas, the brand name is disconnected from its celebrity source, save for the brief history its makers insert into the packaging. While Varsovians once associated savoring their sumptuous-Â�looking star with eating her brand-Â�name sweets, AmeriÂ�cans simply buy MoÂ�djeÂ�skas to sample “a retro candy” or “a taste of Kentucky.” In contrast to selling MoÂ�djeÂ�ska-Â�marked merchandise, donating or institutionally collecting Modjeskiana has become particularly complicated because so many official homes seem equally qualified to house her legacy. Some AmeriÂ�can donors have preferred Polish to AmeriÂ�can institutions, judging the former to be better equipped for cataloging and preserving her possessions. In most cases, items donated to institutions remain in special collections, accessible to researchers under the watchful eye of librarians, but not to the general pubÂ�lic. The Special Collections and Archives of the University of California, Irvine Libraries keep a small library of the star’s books along with her desk. The Museum of the City of New York contains several stage costumes. The serpentine gold bracelet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska wore playing Cleopatra and bequeathed to William Winter sits in a basement display case at the Folger. Only two AmeriÂ�can museums have provided pubÂ�lic access to an array of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska objects roughly approximating the displays in KraÂ�ków and WarÂ�saw. In Chicago, the site of America’s largest Polish community and long home to Ralph and his family, the Polish Museum of America permanently showcases the actress’s sketches, photographs, letters, posters, and programs. They have had to store three donated costumes—always the greatest crowd-Â�pleasers— to prevent their further damage by heat, light, and hanging on a mannequin. The Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum in Santa Ana, California, which first began collecting artifacts related to regional history, amassed and for decades displayed an impressive MoÂ�djeÂ�ska collection of more than three hundred objects, many of the items contributed to the museum by the actress’s local friends. As in KraÂ�ków, so in Santa Ana viewers could feast their eyes on her costumes, hats, shoes, stage jewelry, photographs, programs, telegrams, letters, and testimonial gifts, as well as both a doll costumed by the actress


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and one of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s valuable works of art, a Chełmoński painting depicting a peasant girl sprawled in a field, dreamily listening to a local fiddler.19 That items from the Bowers were featured in the 2009 Polish exhibit “For Love of Art” and Orange County, California’s, own 2009 commemoration, “All the World’s a Stage: MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Arden,” displayed in Santa Ana’s Old Courthouse Museum from August 2008 to January 2009, attests to a relatively new link between AmeriÂ�can and Polish MoÂ�djeÂ�ska trails. It is unlikely that all Modjeskiana will ever be collected, especially in the United States, but greater cooperation between Polish and AmeriÂ�can institutions invested in her legacy will result in a more informed, nuanced reconstruction of her experience. Most promising for anyone interested in exploring the actress’s trail, but not trekking its entirety, is the recently established virtual “Documentation Project on the Life and Work of Helena Modrzejewska” sponsored by KraÂ�ków’s Jagiellonian University. Polish scholars are busy adding photos of AmeriÂ�can artifacts to a Web site gallery accessible to everyone.20 Stor i e s Apart from plaques, portraits, exhibits, and candies, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska has inspired a steady output of English-Â�language semi-Â�fictionalized narratives—dramas, screenplays, and novels. The actress’s astonishing ability to recreate her offstage identity, projecting herself convincingly as a chaste disciple to art in KraÂ�ków, a great “aristocratic” lady in WarÂ�saw, and a civilizing pioneer in SouthÂ� ern California, periodically attracts writers and filmmakers seeking an inÂ� triguÂ�ing, seemingly untapped historical subject. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s adventures and conquests overseas immeasurably enhanced the heroic romance of her character and life. She exploited her own biography, especially her sequence of successful debuts, for professional publicity, embellishing it in interviews and reprinting it as a parallel real-Â�l ife drama, complete with happy ending, in some of her theater programs. Her first biographers, Mabel Collins and James Torr Altemus, whose 1883 publications came out in quick succession when MoÂ�djeÂ�ska resumed her AmeriÂ�can career, borrow some of her own strategies for arousing readers’ admiration and excitement. The AmeriÂ�can Altemus declares her career “remarkable and, in some instances, Â�romantic,” and the British Collins assures her readers from the outset: “To the happy possessors of the artistic temperament, there is abundant romance in what we call the prose of every-Â�day existence.”21 “The prose of every-Â�day exis-

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tence” plays almost no part in either of their remarkably similar texts, which depict MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as a youthful dreamer exposed early to cruel scenes of Poland’s oppression and surviving an implicitly unhappy marriage with a “much older” Sinnmayer before she could be united with Chłapowski, the scion of an old noble family and a valiant Polish patriot. Although both authors pronounce MoÂ�djeÂ�ska a Polish Joan of Arc, the primary drama of their accounts is professional, not poÂ�litiÂ�cal. They focus on the travails and triumphs of her debuts in WarÂ�saw, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and London. While these early biographers of the actress exploited melodrama and romance to market their living subject and topical books, the fiction written on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska after her death leans heavily on published primary sources. A good many of these efforts remain shelved with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s scattered memorabilia in Polish and AmeriÂ�can institutions; the authors likely donated their manuscripts in hopes that the institutions would deem them worth preserving for posterity. Playwrights inspired by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska have had somewhat better luck staging their works. Richard Hellesen’s play, Once in Arden, which ran from 20 April to 24 May 1990 at the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, uses the platform of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 1905 benefit performance to explore the financial cost of artistic integrity and the moral cost of artistic compromise. 22 Although Hellesen informed the play with his own pressing questions about why and how to be an artist in America, the critics indicated that his extensive MoÂ�djeÂ�ska research (primarily Coleman’s Fair Rosalind and scholarship by Ellen Lee) overloaded his work’s dramatic structure and stalled its momentum.23 The articulate MoÂ�djeÂ�ska has tempted playwrights to create one-Â�woman shows, which have the added advantage of inexpensive casting and staging.24 What mature actress (especially an aspiring amateur) would not be thrilled to dress in period costume and dominate the stage with her impersonation of a great thespian? The most enduring of these productions is Polish theater scholar Kazimierz Braun’s Émigré Queen or Królowa Emigrantka, a “soliloquy” which had its Polish premiere in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “own” theater in KraÂ�ków on 5 May 1989, its English-Â�language premiere in Dublin’s Project Arts Center on 1 February 1990, and its North AmeriÂ�can premiere (in Polish) in Toronto’s Teatr Polonia on 21 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1992. 25 As Braun explains in introducing the bilingual publication of Émigré Queen, a chance visit to Arden in 1988 sparked its genesis, for there he suddenly “saw [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] in the parlour as she bid farewell for ever [sic] to her home.”26


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Braun’s play voices MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s reflections on her past as she paces around her packed belongings at the ranch in 1906, sipping vodka and smoking. Her monologue does not simply retell her life in sequence, but moves from chronoÂ� logical memories to associations to general themes, quoting liberally from MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s correspondence. At times the author interjects unfounded judgments into the monologue, as when the star declares: “Zimajer was my first man. Charles was my first husband. Henryk [Sienkiewicz] was my first love.”27 Braun builds drama into her soliloquy through re-Â�imagined dialogues and scenes with “invited guests” such as Paderewski, Sienkiewicz, Jo Tucholsky, John McCullough, Adam Chmielowski, her international rivals, as well as critics and colleagues from the Polish theater. His introductory notes suggest that these guests may be cast, depending on the director’s inclination and resources. Despite its inevitable lacunae and occasionally misguided generalizations, The Émigré Queen best animates MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s people-Â�and-Â�event-Â�laden biography, provided its star’s skill and charisma can sustain it. Published fiction inspired by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s life ranges widely in tone and technique. When Willa Cather, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s much younger admirer, incorporated a fine cameo of the artist into her 1926 novel My Mortal Enemy, both the fictional narrator Nellie and protagonist Myra Henshawe perceive the aging MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as romance incarnate. The young Nellie remembers her utter infatuation with the actress’s looks, gestures, words, and sensibility. At a New Year’s Eve supper hosted by the Henshawes in Manhattan, she judges that “by far the handsomest and most distinguished of that company was a woman no longer young, but beautiful in age, Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. She looked a woman of another race and another period, no less queenly than when I had seen her in Chicago as Marie Stuart, and as Katharine in Henry VIII. I remember how, when Oswald asked her to propose a toast, she put out her long arm, lifted her glass, and looking into the blur of the candlelight with a grave face, said: ‘To my coun-Â�n-Â�try!’”28 This queenly MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, beautiful still and sensible to beauty, orchestrates a hauntingly lovely performance before she exits the novel, bidding her young Polish companion sing the aria “Casta diva” from Bellini’s Norma to accompany a peaceful moonlit beginning to the new year. In complete contrast to Cather’s exquisite portrait, the “romance” that author Antoni Gronowicz dishes out in his 1956 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska—Her Life and Loves is of the grocery store check-Â�out line variety, vulgarizing his subject as sex object and mad lover. Gronowicz claims a scholar’s status when he boasts that his MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “is based on twenty years of research, interviews, and travel

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throughÂ�Â�out Europe and America gathering material on the life of the great Shakespearean actress.” But he structures and narrates his biography as hybrid Gothic novel and Harlequin romance.29 The book opens as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska is dying on Bay Island, where she behaves like the demented silent screen star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, driving people from her yard with huge dogs and playing dress up in her old costumes. As the text flashes back on her KraÂ�ków youth, Gronowicz treats us to an after-Â�the-Â�bath nude scene of an impossibly mature MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in 1850: “Her flesh had the firmness and freshness of youth. Her legs were long and she walked with an assured, graceful motion, her long hair like dark gold in braids that hugged the litheness of her buttocks.”30 In this author’s version of her scandalous past, Helena loses her virginity to the Jewish artist Igo Neufeld (in fact, Ignacy Neufeld was the student who had committed suicide after presenting the star with a wreath in 1880), and Neufeld remains her lifelong love, whereas Zimajer (Sinnmayer) disgusts her as her impotent, obese first husband. Other outrageous fabrications include MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s private duel with Bernhardt when the two actresses play the same scene from The Lady of the Camellias in the nude and her attempted suicide during her last KraÂ�ków tour when guilt for the deaths of Neufeld, her daughter Marylka, and Sinnmayer drives her mad. As tempting as it is to disregard Gronowicz’s MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as comical trash, his book crudely conveys the difficulties facing all writers inspired to create their own work out of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s life. “The historical truth about MoÂ�djeÂ� ska” does not substantiate her recreation as a crazed exhibitionist, but it does include facts scandalous for her era and destructive of the coherently good self-Â�image she projected in the latter half of her life. How can a writer convincingly combine sin and virtue in such a well-Â�played, self-Â�made protagonist withÂ�out lapsing into melodrama or lasciviousness? More daunting, however, is how MoÂ�djeÂ�ska improvised such a long successful career and vivid life. How can a writer not buckle under the exposition of all that she experienced and achieved? Who could even approximate MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s pervasive performing genius in literature? Susan Sontag was either unaware or disdainful of these challenges when she produced the best-Â�known AmeriÂ�can narrative drawn from MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s life, her National Book Award–winning novel In America (2000). Sontag first tried recreating history through self-Â�aware fiction in her 1992 The Volcano Lover. In America represents a bolder experiment, for here she chooses historical


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characters obscure to the vast majority of her readers and simply declares her fictional license on the copyright page. After a précis of the California adventures of Helena Modrzejewska, her husband Count Karol ChłaÂ�powski, her fifteen-Â�year-Â�old son Rudolf, and “the young journalist and fuÂ�ture author of Quo Vadis Henryk Sienkiewicz,” the author claims her independence: “Most of the characters in the novel are invented and those who are not depart in radical ways from their real-Â�life models.//I am, however, indebted to books and articles by and on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Sienkiewicz for material and anecdotes used (and altered). . . .”31 In her March 2000 biographical portrait of Sontag, Joan Acocella explains that her friend’s research focused to the point of happy obsession on accurately reproducing her “invented” characters’ real worlds. Choosing MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s story “left Sontag with a lot of homework to do, on life in the eighteen seventies in Krakow, New York, San Francisco, indeed, Anaheim . . . Sontag threw herself into the work. She read nineteenth-Â�century agricultural manuÂ� als, old Baedekers, crumbling newspapers, anything she could lay her hands on.”32 Sontag delighted in furnishing her novel with just the right period materials, from the specific exhibits at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia to the mirrored elevator installed in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. In collecting these materials, Sontag did not anticipate charges of plagiarÂ� ism from Ellen Lee, one of her few readers thoroughly acquainted with English-Â� language sources on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. Soon after In America was published, Lee’s objections, printed in the Orange County Register, attracted national attention. Lee disliked Sontag’s “artistic liberties”—her treatment of the Anaheim venture as a serious utopian experiment, her frank description of an affair between the fictionalized MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Sienkiewicz—because, in her opinion, such inventions “don’t improve on the story of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska” and only make the job of conscientious biographers that much harder. 33 But Lee’s assertion that Sontag drew extensively on published source materials withÂ�out attribution embroiled the novelist in controversy. By May 2000, Doreen Carvajal had publicized Lee’s list of Sontag’s undocumented sources in the New York Times and observed that “in some passages the language itself is taken almost verbatim from other authors.”34 Sontag’s high-Â�handed defense of her unmarked quotations reflected her intuitive duel with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself. As she told Carvajal: “I distinguish beÂ�t ween writers and sources. Willa Cather is a writer, but the others are sources. . . . I don’t consider MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s memoirs the work of a writer. So what interests

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me is the transformation. She’s the source of my character and you can use a sentence that’s exactly the same because it is from her words. Of course, I’ve used her words to create a completely different character.”35 In blithe contrast to the writers mentioned above, Sontag claims that she refused to take dictation from MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and reduced the actress’s “words” (which include her memoirs and some letters) to the sort of factual tidbits that she gleaned from agricultural manuals and old Baedekers. Sontag’s demotion of an artist’s self-Â� expression to the level of historical realia is specious, but it buoys her self-Â� perception as her novel’s sole author. To varying degrees, Sontag does tinker with the major characters in MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s “colonial party.” She changes names: Helena Modrzejewska/Â�Modjeska becomes Maryna Załężowska/Marina Zaleńska, Karol Chłapowski—Â�Bogdan Dembowski, Henryk Sienkiewicz—Ryszard Kierul, and Rudolf/Ralph—Â� Piotr/Peter. She shaves nine years off Peter’s age to limit his character development and details Ryszard’s erotic fantasies and adventures, inÂ�cludÂ�ing the consummation of his love for Marina after her successful San Francisco debut. Sontag truly reinvents Marina’s husband, transforming (alas!) the voluble, absentminded, good-Â�hearted Chłapowski into “an angular bearded man with fine blond hair, combed to the back, that left uncovered his high, powerfully arched and noble forehead.”36 Bogdan struggles with his homosexual desires in America, yet this tension never prevents his primary service as Â�Marina’s chief support. Apart from Bogdan’s subplot and Marina’s fling, however, Sontag hews very close to the plot of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s biography. What Sontag’s narrator reportedly experiences in the text conveys a complicated collaboration with the actress-Â�author. In the opening Chapter Zero, a first-Â�person narrator, whose self-Â� references to her childhood in Arizona and California, Polish Jewish roots, and Manhattan circulation suggest her kinship with the author, stumbles onto her story by entering its already furnished, populated space—a private dining room in a KraÂ�ków hotel where she gradually deduces identities and action. This narrator cannot resist flaunting Sontag’s extensive research: the convened group’s revealing reference to their country as “the Christ of nations,” the presence of a painter “who lost a leg at eighteen in the Uprising,” and her suspicion that the flirtatious Ryszard “would turn out, when much older, to be not only the marrying, but the thrice-Â�married kind.”37 (Sienkiewicz did indeed have three wives.) Anyone familiar with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s memoirs or Sienkiewicz’s biography may admire Sontag’s research and facility in


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compacting so many facts so deftly. They also know that most of the main characters existed and long ago enacted the plot that the narrator presumes to divine. The narrator is not conjuring up space and cast, but rummaging in history’s attic, having perused dusty books which already told her tale. She implies her conflation of recovery with reimagining in a parenthetical statement: “(What writing feels like is following and leading, both, and at the same time.)”38 Sontag depicts her alter ego hot on the trail of a fiction-Â�fi nding mission. When the narrator subsequently explains that she hopes to discover “a story that would speak to me,” one with which “you feel you can tell many stories,” she echoes Sontag herself in her pursuit of “a great story with which I could tell many stories.”39 Sontag’s version of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska overlaps significantly with Got’s and Terlecki’s images of the star as an iron-Â�w illed, ever-Â�strategizing genius. Yet Sontag’s novel differs from their analyses of her life in dwelling on the actress’s strong attraction to America. 40 The novelist seems committed to fulfilling her title’s promise, her idea of telling a story about immigrant reinvention. While admitting AmeriÂ�cans’ cultural insecurity and the ugliness of their cities (she has characters enough to voice both critique and praise), Sontag effectively makes America a key part of Marina/MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “romance.” The novelist counters Polish scholars’ claims of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s persisting homesickness and dismay over her AmeriÂ�can star-Â�slavery with a sequence of scenes tracking Marina’s physical renewal in the desert, relished conquest of the San Francisco stage, and rapture over America’s grand natural beauty and endless possibilities. As the newly converted AmeriÂ�can enthuses before a circle of Polish family and friends: “You cannot imagine how . . . heroic SouthÂ�ern California is. I hope you will see it one day, Henryk. You breathe differently there. The ocean, the desert, in all their sublime neutrality, suggest quite another idea of how to live. You take deep breaths and you feel you can do anything you set your mind to.”41 Some of Sontag’s AmeriÂ�can reviewers faulted her for producing “a thoroughly conventional imitation of a thoroughly conventional 19th-Â�century novel,” planting overused clichés about AmeriÂ�can potential and greatness in her characters’ thoughts and speech. 42 It is clear, however, that Sontag wants to keep the spotlight trained on Marina’s AmeriÂ�can romance. To do so, she collapses MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s busy decade of the 1880s into forty-Â�odd pages, briefly summarizes her English seasons as further proof of her more promising AmeriÂ�can career, and concludes with the presumed high point of her tour with Edwin Booth,

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Â� although the inebriated, pontificating, lecherous Booth she depicts seems woeÂ�fully under-Â�researched. Sontag’s Marina does not return repeatedly to Poland and never ages into the “monster” she imagines she will become after she has made an unimaginable “twenty national tours.”43 Like MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself, who shrewdly dropped an act in Henry VIII to remain in the limelight, Sontag leaves her fictional MoÂ�djeÂ�ska at the pinnacle of her stardom, as she runs over stage business she herself innovated with the great Booth (Portia’s “touch”). Sontag’s denied, yet utterly detectable, collaboration with MoÂ�djeÂ� ska yields this new romance which redounds to the credit of two creators. R et u r n to A r den AmeriÂ�can Polonia never forgot MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, for she ranked as one of the great Poles who made a substantial impact on AmeriÂ�can society. 44 Just as amateur immigrant dramatic circles requested use of her name in her lifetime to inspire their audiences, so Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Polish AmeriÂ�can clubs established throughÂ�out the United States connect themselves with a true crossover Â�success—Â�a Polish immigrant who championed and financially supported her homeland, yet equaled and possibly eclipsed the greatest native-Â�born AmeriÂ� cans in her profession. Nonetheless, it was not until 5 April 1909 that a plaque finally memorialized the actress’s connection with the Polish Catholic Church—Â� specifically, New York’s St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Church, the site of Ralph and Felicja’s wedding as well as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s last AmeriÂ�can funeral. The Polish Cultural Institute in New York organized this commemoration, galvanized by the efforts of visiting Polish scholar Andrzej Żurowski. Yet, as the Bowers Museum collection shows, citizens of Orange County, California, kept the greatest faith with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and persisted in finding a way to honor her long-Â�term residence there. During her life and soon after her death, they christened various landmarks in her name—the lower peak of the two-Â�humped Saddleback Mountain which rose behind Arden and the part of Santiago Canyon where she had lived. 45 Other SouthÂ�ern California name traces include a MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Street in Anaheim, a MoÂ�djeÂ�ska flag-Â�stop on the railroad, and a MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Mineral Springs. 46 According to Coleman, the naming of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Falls, located much farther north near Lake Tahoe, took place at the outset of the actress’s AmeriÂ�can career when she allegedly visited the spot and her enthusiasm for its beauty convinced a local resort owner to pay her homage. 47


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As MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s old friends aged, the once-Â�r ustic towns they had helped civilize expanded at a dizzying pace, stimulated by increased train service, new industries, and a little stardust drifting south from Hollywood. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had shrewdly embraced a “first settler’s” nostalgia for an old California she knew from books and imagined in nature. After World War I, her admiring contemporaries waxed nostalgic about MoÂ�djeÂ�ska herself as a separate, colorful historical chapter which begged to be told to ignorant newcomers. When the Bowers Museum opened its doors in 1936, her legatees were relieved to donate their treasures to a ready showcase of Orange County history in Santa Ana, the county seat. In Anaheim, where Modrzejewska first stepped down from the train onto SouthÂ�ern California soil, an unrecognizable statue of her in the role of Mary Stuart was erected in Pearson Park and unveiled by her grandson Felix in 1935. 48 Her goddaughter Ethel Barrymore, attending an early planning meeting for the project, had recommended creating a scholarship in lieu of this stone monument, which “would not have been Madame’s desire.”49 But a scholarship could not advertise History. Orange County’s civic and cultural appetite for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska sites only increased when its population exploded after World War II, its northÂ�westÂ�ern cities spreading into a continuous metropolis bound by freeways and carpeted with tract housing. As the local economy and population boomed, so did local government and press efforts to celebrate what distinguished their communities other than their exceptional climate. In a 1958 article, Raymond M. Holt acquaints readers with local “shrines” to the actress which “remind us that Madame Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska lived here.”50 He misdates her arrival as 1867 and erroneously claims that Arden’s famous visitors, all identified as Madame’s “intimate friends,” included “Edwin Booth, Henry Longfellow, Joseph Hoffman [sic], Maurice Barrymore, Sarah Bernhardt, Otis Skinner, and Ignace Paderewski.” Displacing facts with celebrities, Holt presumes to enhance local history and promote local tourism: “To the thousands whose life she touched, the symbolic statue of Anaheim, the secluded lodge of Arden with its protective mountain peak, diminutive Bay Island, and the memorabilia at the Bowers Memorial Museum in Santa Ana are shrines perpetuating the memory of one of the world’s greatest artists.” Interest in local history later fueled a post-Â�boom reaction to commercialism, displacing the pursuit of an anodyne, individualistic “good life” with efforts to create a sense of community and continuity. Whereas oppressed nationalism resurfaced in the extravagant commemorations of famous Poles in

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late nineteenth-Â�century KraÂ�ków, history paved over by monotonous residential and commercial development prompted SouthÂ�ern Californians to document the bulldozed past and to preserve whatever remained. Historical societies, as well as students enrolled in the new universities and colleges built in Orange County since the 1960s, zeroed in on local history topics and restoration projects. In this way, Arden once again became a dreamed-Â�of purchase, a site that would serve, in the words of one disappointed traveler on the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska trail, as “her real museum.”51 Tucked away in an inland canyon, the ranch had suffered relatively little development. The “syndicate of Long Beach men” to whom MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski had sold the ranch in 1906 used the property as a rough-Â�and-Â�ready MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Country Club, where members could hike, fish, boat, ride horseback, and bunk in the house or their own tents. 52 One of the club members, Don H. Porter, bought up all its holdings in 1916 and, with his son-Â�in-Â�law, Charles S. Mann, created the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Ranch Company as a tract to be sold off in small lots, with only modest success. In 1918, an enterprising Austrian, G. A. Schweiger, and his French wife leased the house and surrounding grounds and for four years managed the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Inn and Restaurant. Their brochures, decorated with cameo-Â�shaped photographs of “Madame Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska” and “Count Bożenta Chłapowski,” lured travelers into the “Forest of Arden” with promises of “romantic scenery,” “picturesque drives,” “good roads,” and a “fried chicken dinner.”53 Then Charles Walker, an original country club member, decided with his wife Carrie to purchase the house and 14.5 acres of the ranch in 1923 as a wilderness getaway for their extended family and menagerie of animals. The Walker family owned Arden for the next sixty-Â�three years. Their vigilance saved the house from burning down during the 1926 Hathaway Fire, from flooding when the Santiago Creek jumped its banks in 1969, and from further commercial development. 54 A number of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s posthumous fans took heart from the house’s survival. Lee, who had interviewed Orange County Pioneers, knew that the old-Â� timers and the Orange County Historical Society longed to preserve Arden as a memorial to the actress. She remembered the responses of those who had known MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as children: “The local pioneers simply loved the idea of the madame up reciting poetry in her Forest of Arden. . . . They had a great affection and reverence for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska.”55 As early as 1921, when the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Inn and Restaurant was still serving fried chicken dinners, the historical so-


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MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Inn and Restaurant brochure produced between 1918 and 1923. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries, Rice Family Papers, MS-Â�R045, Box 3, Folder 5

ciety gained permission to honor Chłapowski with a bronze plaque mounted on a boulder just beyond the house. 56 After several decades of enjoying Arden and its grounds as their private family preserve, the Walkers grew sanguine about occasionally admitting clubs, school groups, and accompanying journalists to visit and take notes. 57 As their descendants scattered beyond SouthÂ�ern California and returned to Arden ever less frequently for vacations, the family considered selling the place in the 1980s. Maintaining friendly ties with the Walkers and spreading the word about MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s importance, Lee was pivotal in facilitating negotiations between the family and the county and convincing the county of the property’s historical worth. In 1986, the county board of supervisors approved spending 1.5 million dollars to purchase and restore Arden. Yet another California dream had become a reality, what Or ange County Register reporter Steve Hawk anticipated as “a milestone for lo-

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cal historians, who regard the Polish-Â�born MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as the first real ‘star’ to settle in Orange County.”58 Neighborhood concerns about the county’s restoration of “The Arden MoÂ�djeÂ� ska Historic House and Gardens” reflected the deep commitment of ModjeÂ� ska Canyon residents to its abiding “pastoral calm” a full century after MoÂ� djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski sought refuge there. They feared the “traffic and noise pollution” a museum would bring. 59 Yet once the residents and the county agreed to limit the number and kind of events held on the property and to restrict visiting hours to docent-Â�led tours arranged by reservation only, a close-Â� knit MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon not only embraced Arden, but also came to regard it as a positive antithesis to typical SouthÂ�ern Californian development. In the late twentieth century, residents embraced the shades of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski as worthy forebears. Objecting to the large new houses being built in the canyon, one longtime homeowner mused that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “might be horrified to see how the town she inspired has changed.”60 While the Orange County Park staff managed Arden’s eight-Â�year restoration, they share the site’s continued maintenance with the Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Foundation, a nonprofit orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion established primarily by local postwar Polish immigrants who recruited Lee as founding member and main adviser. The foundation defined its mandate as caring for this exceptional Polish AmeriÂ� can treasure, pledging to “help with pubÂ�lic relations and with the acquisition of furnishings, artifacts, photographs, and interpretive exhibits.”61 Their work ranges from organizing and training docents to lead tours of the house and grounds, to scrubbing the bronze plaque dedicated to Chłapowski. Thus, the site which best celebrates MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as a Californian resulted from joint AmeriÂ�can and new Polish AmeriÂ�can efforts. Krystyna Stamper, a Pole who had fought in the 1944 WarÂ�saw Uprising and immigrated to the United States after the war, typically joined the foundation “because to her Arden was a part of [her and her children’s] history.”62 Arden was officially opened to the pubÂ�lic on 18 May 1994 and recognized as both Historic State Landmark and National Historic Landmark. 63 In Orange County, it shares the latter distinction only with Richard Nixon’s home in San Clemente. This county park has hosted a wide variety of local and international visitors—gardening club and historical society groups, students on school field trips, and delegations from Poland. The Orange County Department of Education has approved the park for third-Â�and fourth-Â�grade curriculum enrichment, inviting teachers and students to tour the historic


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house, learn “more lore of the canyon while hiking along the canyon ridge,” and study “the steps of beekeeping”—one of Chłapowski’s agricultural ventures. 64 With the Polish Consulate in Los Angeles and an active Polonia resident in SouthÂ�ern California, Arden doubles as California and Polish heritage site. Arden also attracts day-Â�tripping SouthÂ�ern Californians escaping the crowded coast. Los Angeles Times columnist John McKinney observes that Orange County residents, living in the state’s second-Â�most populous county, suffer from “Nature Deficit Disorder” and the temporal tunnel vision defining their county as “now and only now.” He prescribes for them the cure of hiking the inland canyons and visiting such historic sites as Arden: “The names on the land—from Flores to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Anaheim—speak of this rich tapestry of cultures. The special places—and the trails exploring them—Â�protected by the County’s parks are priceless assets to the megalopolis.”65 For the time being, this National Historic Landmark remains off the beaten path. The narrow road leading up to the park now passes by other homes, yet MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon preserves the atmosphere of a remote, idyllic place, over an hour’s drive from Santa Ana through sometimes rugged country. Given the much slower trip MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski regularly faced over a century ago, it seems crazily courageous that they chose this far-Â�off outpost for their AmeriÂ�can home. This choice speaks to the actress’s deep love of natuÂ� ral beauty, her devotion to her husband, her capacity for running a rustic household, and her astounding willpower in organizing “local” friendships and family get-Â�togethers over the tremendous distances between the canyon and everywhere else. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska made of her nowhere a somewhere. That she dared to live in a place so far from her much-Â�traveled AmeriÂ�can road and even farther away from Poland suggests that here she sought a genuine hiatus from relentless performing, a concentrated reprise of the renewing adventure she had embarked on in 1876. The Arden to which she retreated has been well restored and, thanks to an active MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Foundation, furnished with excellent facsimiles of the home’s original ornaments such as the buffalo head over the fireplace and the imposing oak table with legs carved into magnificent lions. The house’s main section, made chapel-Â�like by the filtered light from its many front windows, is lovely outside and restful within. Yet Arden was not built on the scale we have come to associate with twentieth-Â�century star homes or the residences of the late nineteenth-Â�century rich. The several bedrooms and bathroom which flank the hall leading from the living room/library resemble an

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Arden’s library, refurbished as national landmark in the twenty-Â�first century. Author’s photo

extended cabin. While their tasteful furnishings signal the affluence of their former occupants, these smallish rooms are more cozy than swank. Arden bears the imprint of how the actress conducted her private life. Here MoÂ�djeÂ� ska resided intimately and unceremoniously with family and selected guests. In the off-Â�seasons, she “rested” by immersing herself in a score of different activities: reading, sewing, letter writing, card playing, music making, entertaining, worshiping, sketching, painting, taking and developing photographs, composing lectures, walking, horseback riding, gardening, picnicking, planning local charitable performances, and preparing new parts. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska used Arden as refuge and workshop, a comfortable home and an all-Â�purpose backstage. She played queen as the occasion demanded, yet mainly recuperated from the road by giving her energies free rein. Words best evoke the vivacious woman suspended in her carefully posed photographs; her correspondence reveals her at her most candid and industrious. It often reads like a breathless monologue. Perhaps the surest way to find MoÂ�djeÂ�ska at Arden is to re-Â�imagine her in the acts she and others detailed—laboriously re-Â�stitching her satin gown into a priest’s cope, pacing around the garden as she sorted out a new role, or immersing herself in “the life of Christine of Â�Sweden” as she sat by the library’s roaring fire.

Notes

1. Debu t 1. Oscar Lewis, San Francisco: Mission to Metropolis (San Diego: Howell-Â�North Books, 1980), 111–112. In AmeriÂ�cans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), Kevin Starr remarks on San Franciscans’ “impetuous love of theater and cuisine” and intense pursuit of pleasure, characteristics reflected in the city’s built landscape: “The construction of family housing lagged far behind that of business offices, hostelries (inÂ�cludÂ�ing the extravagant Palace Hotel, finished in OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1878), theaters, opera houses, restaurants, and saloons” (239–240). 2. Constance Rourke, Troupers of the Gold Coast or the Rise of Lotta Crabtree (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925), 208–209. 3. Guillermo Prieto, San Francisco in the Seventies: The City as Viewed by a Mexican Po litical Exile, translated and edited by Edwin S. Morby (San Francisco: John Henry Nash, 1938), 46. 4. Rourke, 1925, 208, 210–211. As one such visitor would recall, “the theatre was as nearly perfect as it is possible to imagine, equipped with everything in scenery, properties, wardrobe, etc., that the most exacting star could demand.” See Rose Eytinge, The Memories of Rose Eytinge. Being Recollections and Observations of Men, Women, and Events During Half a Century (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1905), 249, 250. 5. In Women in the AmeriÂ�can Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), Faye E. Dudden notes the mid-Â�nineteenth-Â�century popularity of a “special subset” of plays that “offered a kind of special pleading against the sexual reputation traditionally accorded the actress: she is either misunderstood or, despite her missteps, a good woman” (135–136). In Europe, this melodrama was titled Adrianna Lecouvreur; in the United States the heroine’s first name became “Adrienne.” 6. In her “Introduction” to AmeriÂ�can Debut: Source Materials on the First Appearance of the Polish Actress Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska on the AmeriÂ�can Stage, introduced, translated, and annotated by Marion Moore Coleman, in Books and Things, new series 6–7, Winter 1964–Spring 1965 (Cheshire, Conn.: Cherry Hill Books), Coleman observes that Adrienne “was a favorite with visiting European stars who had preceded MoÂ�djeÂ�ska here,” a success for the actresses listed above, if not for the German Marie Seebach. 7. San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 5 August 1877. 8. San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 19 August 1877. 9. The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin remarked how uninspiring it was to hear about yet another foreign actress whose “broad, uncouth, and otherwise eccentric pronunciation was sure to offend” (21 August 1877). Daily Alta California, 21 August 1877. 10. Daily Alta California, 21 August 1877.

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not e s to page s 3– 9

11. San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 21 August 1877; San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 21 August 1877. 12. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 21 August 1877. 13. San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 23 August 1877. 14. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria Faleńska, San Francisco, 29 August 1877, in Korespondencja, Vol. 1, edited by Jerzy Got and Józef Szczublewski (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1965), 29. All translations of Polish sources are mine, unless otherwise noted. 15. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Memories and Impressions of Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska (New York: Macmillan Company, 1910), 335. 16. All About Eve, directed and written by Joseph Mankiewicz (1950). 17. Valerie Takahama, “History Lessons,” The Orange County Register, 6 April 2000. 18. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Stefania Leowa, San Francisco, 15 March 1877, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 371. 19. Chłapowski to Józef Chłapowski, Anaheim, around 15 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 351. 20. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 82. In her gargantuan biography, Fair Rosalind: The AmeriÂ�can Career of Helena Mo djeÂ�ska (Cheshire, Conn.: Cherry Hill Books, 1969), Marion Moore Coleman surmises that Â�MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “wisely had no wish to stamp herself a ‘ghetto actress,’ thus automatically cutting herself off from the mainstream of AmeriÂ�can artistic life and precluding any possibility of a future career on the AmeriÂ�can stage in general” (37). For a thoroughgoing history of Polish theater in the AmeriÂ�can diaspora, see Emil Orzechowski, Teatr Polonijny w Stanach Â�Zjednoczonych (WarÂ�saw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1989). 21. See Karol Chłapowski’s letter to Anna Chłapowska, Anaheim, around 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876 and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 17 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876 letter to relatives in her hometown of KraÂ�ków (which was subsequently published in the Kurier Krakowski [The Cracow Courier]), in Got and Â�Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 338–339. 22. Rourke, 1925, 16. 23. Lewis, 1980, 98. 24. Rourke (1925) asserts that “on this new frontier nothing was repressed, either plays, actors, or the audience” and that this “mixed bill” persisted for decades thereafter” (57, 150). 25. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to the poet Kornel Ujejski, Anaheim, OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 347. 26. For more information on these fascinating actress-Â�managers, see Jane Kathleen Curry, Nineteenth-Â�Century AmeriÂ�can Women Theatre Managers (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 35–36, 48; Claudia D. Johnson, AmeriÂ�can Actress: Perspective on the Nine teenth Century (Chicago: Nelson-Â�Hall, 1984), 65–71; and Rourke, 1925, 77–81, 101–102. 27. Rourke, 1925, 64–76; on Montez’s legendary life, see Bruce Seymour, Lola Montez: A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). 28. Renee M. Sentilles richly details the Menken’s San Francisco experience in Perform ing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of AmeriÂ�can Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 172–182. 29. In Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and AmeriÂ�can Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), Laura Browder argues that the showman Buffalo Bill “positioned himself in opposition to the ironized authenticity offered by [P. T.] Barnum and Barnum’s imitators” and thus “removed the irony from ethnic authenticity” (64, 69). Joy S. Kasson traces the fascinating experience and complex responses of Native AmeriÂ�cans

not e s to page s 9 –18

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playing “authentic” Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular His tory (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 169–191. Matthew Frye Jacobson maintains that the efforts of middle-Â�class Irish AmeriÂ�cans to rid the professional theater of such unflattering depictions would only take effect in the early twentieth century (1995, 84). In Actors and Ameri can Culture, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), Benjamin McArthur observes this easy AmeriÂ�can acceptance of English actors, noting also their majority among non-Â�native-Â�born performers (28). 30. Ibid., 29. 31. I’ve taken these statistics from Józef Szczublewski’s extraordinary chronicle of the actress’s life and career, Żywot Modrzejewskiej (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1975), 669. 32. Charles de Kay, “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, v. 17, March 1879, 671. This profile was produced by the brother of Helena de Kay Gilder, who with her husband Richard Watson Gilder became fast friends with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. According to Coleman, de Kay’s article constituted “the first notice MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had received in a journal of national circulation, and it enhanced her prestige as an artist immeasurably” (1969, 240). 33. “A duchess is always eighteen-Â�years-Â�old to the bourgeoisie.” 34. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Stefania Leowa, San Francisco, 15 March 1877, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 373. 35. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was anxious about the news Poles were receiving of her success, as she appealed to Faleńska: “I’m not worried about the masses, but I want those who love me a little (there still are such, yes?) to know how much truth there is in this Polish news” (New York, 23 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 399). 36. Henryk Sienkiewicz, Listy z podróży do Ameryki, Vol. 4, edited by Julian Krzyżanowski (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978), 352. Translation is mine. 37. Ibid., 353–354. 38. Ibid., 356. This phrase is quoted in the original English. 39. Ibid., 358. 40. Ibid., 357. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 361–362. 43. In “The Polish Colony of California, 1876–1914,” his June 1952 master’s thesis in the University of SouthÂ�ern California History Department, Milton L. Kosberg notes that “it is misleading to think of the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska colony as conÂ�sistÂ�ing of poÂ�litiÂ�cal refugees,” given their wealth and “the rather free intercourse between them and their native land after their abandonment of the Anaheim colony” (25, 71). 44. The de Reszkes were brothers and sister: Jan de Reszke (1850–1925) was a famous tenor, Edward (1853–1917) an equally famous bass, and Josephine (1855–1891) an impressive soprano who left the stage upon marrying in 1885. Ignacy Paderewski was twenty years MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Â�junior (1860–1941). MoÂ�djeÂ�ska helped discover all these touring Polish stars. 45. Emil Orzechowski, “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Countess Bożenta (kilka uwag o amerykańskich pamiątkach po Modrzejewskiej i o niej samej w Ameryce),” Dramat i teatr Â�pozytywystyczny, edited by Dobrochna Ratajczak (Wrocław: Wiedza o kulturze, 1992), 252. 2. Th e M a k ing of a Polish Actr ess 1. Patrice M. Dabrowski, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 7. Dabrowski quotes Miroslav Hroch in characterizing the Poles’ mentality.

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2. Maria Estreicherówna, Życie towarzyskie i obyczajowe w Krakowie w latach 1848–1863 (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1968), 39. 3. Dabrowski, 2004, 29; Irene Homola-Â�Skąpska’s book Józef Dietl i jego KraÂ�ków (KraÂ� ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1993), 190, 192. 4. For concrete details on the state of the city, see Estreicherówna, 1968, 8–13, and Homola-Â�Skąpska, 1993. I’ve paraphrased the descriptions of the main square and the Cloth Hall, which appear on pages 188 and 218 of the latter book; the first passage Homola-Â�Skąpska cites from the newspaper “Kraj” 1869, n. 13. 5. Irena Homola, “Kwiat społeczeństwa . . . (Struktura społeczna i zarys polożenia inteligencji krakowskiej w latach 1860–1914) (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1984), 353, 355, 367. 6. Tymon Terlecki, Pani Helena. Opowieść biograficzna o Modrzejewskiej (London: Veritas, 1962), 13, 14, 21. 7. Got and Szczublewski, v. 1, 1965, 17. 8. Got and Szczublewski complain that the actress’s 1910 Memories and Impressions reÂ� create rather than correctly report her youth, authorizing a suspiciously genteel self-Â�image for all posterity. At the same time they must rely on this self-Â�censored source for information about her girlhood thoughts and activities. See Got and Szczublewski, v. 1, 1965, 6–7; SzczublewÂ�ski, 1975, 9. 9. Stanisław Koźmian, “Feliks Benda. Artysta Dramatyczny i Reżyser Sceny Krakowskiej . . . Życiorys,” in Teatr. Wybór pism., Vol. 1, introduction by Jerzy Got and edited by Zofia Z(h)arnecka (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1959), 268. 10. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 19. 11. On Feliks’s schooling, see Janina Kras, Życie umysłowe w Krakowie w latach 1848–1870 (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977), 88. 12. Józefa Bendowa gave birth to three other sons by Benda and one other daughter by Opid who did not survive infancy. 13. Szczublewski, 1975, 6–7. 14. For these and other details about the actress’s lineage, see ibid., 5–7, 10–11. 15. Maria z Mohrów Kietlińska, Wspomnienia, edited by Irena Homola Skąpska (KraÂ� ków: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1986), 28. Maria’s daughter, Elżbieta, in turn, became Modrzejewska’s ardent fan and kept a diary about her sightings of the star. For information on Elżbieta, see Jan Michalik, “Helena Modrzejewska w oczach teatromanki,” Z miłości do sztuki: Helena Modrzejewska (1840–1909) (KraÂ�ków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2009): 75–107. 16. Even the scandal-Â�courting Sarah Bernhardt resisted identifying her mother and father as a courtesan and her patron in her memoirs. See her My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt, translated by Victoria Tietze Larson (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999), chapters I–VI. 17. According to Memories and Impressions, the novelist Mabel Collins Cook based the actress’s first full-Â�length English-Â�language biography, her 1883 Story of Helena Modjeska (Madame Chłapowska), on tales told by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s close friend Anna Wolska (1910, 442). SzczublewÂ�ski claims that Jameson Torr Altemus, the author of another biography appearing in 1883, culled his information from MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s husband Chłapowski (Szczublewski, 1975, 397). 18. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 15, 18, 19. 19. Ibid., 34–35, 45–46. 20. Ibid., 59. In an interesting parallel, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska advised her niece Emilia Benda against the stage in the strongest terms, pronouncing it too hard a life, although she herself would

not e s to page s 22–2 6

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become an actress if given the choice a secÂ�ond time. Emilia Benda, “Moje cztery spotkania z Heleną Modrzejewską,” Wiadomości 455/456. Article included in collection of Muzeum Teatralne in WarÂ�saw. 21. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józef and Teonia Chłapowska, Arden, Summer 1905, in Got and SzczublewÂ�ski, 1965, v. 1, 344. 22. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 15–16, 31. 23. Estreicherówna, 1968, 35–36. 24. Helena Bendówna to Szymon Benda, KraÂ�ków, Fall 1859, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 37. 25. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 17–18. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska writes that Opid died when she was seven. 26. See Terlecki’s characterization of Zimajer in Pani Helena: “This older gentleman was a little like the father she didn’t have and so longed to have—a father complex would plague her for many years and applied to ever different men” (1962, 21). 27. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 42, 43. In her survey history of the emerging KraÂ�ków intelligentsia, Irena Homola observes that female journalists and actresses typically entered their professions equipped with just a primary education. See “Kwiat społeczeństwa . . .,” 1984, 311, Â�355–356. 28. For the likely dirt on Zimajer, see Szczublewski, 1975, 13–14, 17; also Terlecki, 1962, 18. 29. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska does interject his full name as “Gustave Sinnmayer Modrzejewski” in a footnote: MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 44n. 30. For her memoirs’ representation of “Mr. Modjeski,” see ibid., 44, 52, 58, 65. 31. Ibid., 65. 32. For example, in her biography, The Story of Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska (Madame Chlapowska) (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1883), Mabel Collins Cook refers to Zimajer’s “loss,” whereas Altemus records his death. A 1911 overview of the actress’s life maintains that Zimajer “met his death in a disaster in Bochnia,” misapplying the details of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Bochnia debut (it was a benefit for the families of miners who had died in an accident). See Arthur Inkersley, “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Life in California,” Overland Monthly, 2nd series, v. 57, n. 2, February 1911, Â�177–185. 33. See Szczublewski, 1975, 13–14; Terlecki, 1962, 18, 31, 42, 44. 34. Jan Michalik, Dzieje teatru w Krakowie w latach 1865–1893: Przedsiębiorstwa teatralne (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1997), 20. 35. In Dramaturgia praktyczna: Polska sztuka aktorska XIX wieku w piśmiennictwie teatralnym swej epoki (KraÂ�ków: Towarzystwo naukowe Societas Vistulana, 2005), Dariusz Kosiński notes that extensive reading was tantamount to education for nineteenth-Â�century Polish Â� actors and that a good actor was expected to know the great playwrights (93–95). 36. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 52–53, 58. 37. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, Lwów, 9 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1862, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 43. 38. Zbigniew Wilski, Aktor w społeczeństwie: Szkice o kondycji aktora w Polsce (Wrocław, WarÂ�saw, KraÂ�ków, Gdańsk, Łódź: Zakład Narodowy Im. Ossolińskich Wydawnictwo Akademii Nauk, 1990), 75. 39. For a nuanced overview of Benda’s career, see Koźmian’s biographical sketch, “Feliks Benda,” 1959, 266–343. 40. Estreicherówna, 1968, 108–109. 41. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 35, 45–46. 42. Ibid., 118, 53, 55–57. Terlecki identifies Mrs. R. H. as Józefa Radzyńska Hubertowa, a leading actress of her day, who years later sent the famous Modrzejewska letters of gratitude and supplication (1962, 20).

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not e s to page s 27–31

43. Estreicherówna, 1968, 13. 44. Ibid., 112. The quote from Time is repeated by Estreicherówna, 1968, 112. 45. Józef Śliwicki, “Wspomnienia z teatru krakowskiego” spisane przez Stefana EssmanowÂ� skiego, in Stanisław Dąbrowski and Ryszard Górski, eds., Wspomnienia aktorów, Vols. 1 and 2, 1800–1925 (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1963), 195. 46. For a fine history of this episode in Polish theater history, see Jerzy Got’s monograph, Teatr austriacki w Krakowie w latach 1853–1865 (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1984). 47. Ibid., 75–76, 78, 83, 135. 48. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 52. 49. Got argues that Helena assessed Devrient’s January 1859 performance well, in contrast to the review of a professional critic for The Literary Daily (Teatr austriacki, 1984, 144–145). 50. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 62–63. 51. For the most rhapsodic inventory of KraÂ�ków’s sites and dramatic events and their formative influence on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, see Franciszek Siedlecki’s Helena Modrzejewska (WarÂ�saw: Nakładem Związku Artystów Scen Polskich), 8–16. Terlecki’s Pani Helena also characteristically opens: “At the beginning of this tale and before its beginning was KraÂ�ków” (1962, 5). 52. On KraÂ�ków’s role in late nineteenth-Â�century celebrations of Polish history and culture, see Dabrowski, 2004. 53. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 6–7. 54. Ibid., 47–50. 55. Ibid., 46. 56. Ibid., 30. 57. Ibid., 30–31. 58. Ibid., 29. 59. Kosiński notes how actors were to study paintings and sculpture as models for their characters; once they began to create a character, they were to shade and color their character sketch as one would a painting (2005, 95, 191). 60. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 21–27. 61. Ibid., 20–21. 62. Ibid., 32–33. 63. Estreicherówna, 1968, 43–44. 64. Kietlińska, 1986, 209, 212. 65. Wilski, 1990, 86. 66. See Halina Filipowicz’s analysis of Emilia Plater, a gentry woman who joined the rebellious troups in the 1831 uprising, on the contribution of Plater and her very different “daughters” to this tradition of Polish women’s involvement in the national cause—“The Daughters of Emilia Plater,” in Engendering Slavic Literatures, edited by Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 34–58. 67. Kras notes the emergence of the model of the Romantic soldier-Â�rebel in Poland in the 1850s (1977, 23). Commenting on the self-Â�perception and ideals of this “inter-Â�uprising” generation, the so-Â�called “third generation” of Polish Romantics, Maria Janion identifies their abiding commitment to rebellion and conspiracy and their choice of Tyrtaios as role model, an ancient Greek bard who exhorted the troops into battle with his poetry. See her essays “Druga i trzecia generacja romantyków” and “Wieszcz i słuchacze” collected in Prace wybrane, Vol. 1 (KraÂ�ków: Universitas, 2000), 108–140 and 141–170, respectively. 68. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 17. 69. Estreicherówna, 1968: 46–47; Kras, 1977, 17–18; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 79.


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70. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 79. 71. Ibid., 94. 72. Helena Opid to Szymon Benda, KraÂ�ków, Fall 1859, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 38. 73. Reprinted in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 65. 74. In Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1991), Tracy C. Davis makes this general observation: “For actresses, events such as conception, gestation, the timing of parturition, nursing, and child rearing— so easily accommodated by leisured middle-Â�class women with servants and by husbands who regard their only important realm as the pubÂ�lic sphere—were necessarily momentous obstacles to integrate with a theatrical career” (55). 75. Szczublewski, 1975, 21. 76. Ibid., 21–22; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 69. 77. Szczublewski notes that the date and cause of little Marylka’s death are not known (1975, 46). Terlecki surmises that Marylka was killed by a blow from an unlashed wagon shaft (1962, 42). 78. Konstanty Łobojko, “Z pamiętnika (1861),” in Dąbrowski and Górski, 1963, v. 1, 328. 79. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 81. 80. In Teatry prowincjonalne w Królestwie Polskim (1863–1914) (Płock: Książnica Płocka, 2006), Barbara Konarska-Â�Pabiniak notes that, while a School of Drama was founded in WarÂ� saw in 1811 and available to some students, most Polish actors trained on the job (119, 128). See also Dobrochna Ratajczak, “Wędrowka jako model życia i twórczości aktora w teatrze polskim XIX wieku,” in Dziejów teatru krakowskiego: Materiały z sesji naukowej dwieście lat teatru w Krakowie, 1781–1981, edited by Jan Michalik (KraÂ�ków: Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 1985), 169. 81. Ratajczak 1985, 167–168; Konarska-Â�Pabiniak, 2006, 7, 166; Wilski, 67. 82. Konarska-Â�Pabiniak, 2006, 47–48. 83. Wilski, 1990, 67–68; Konarska-Â�Pabiniak, 2006, 165; Ratajczak, 1985, 181–183. Ratajczak notes how touring actors often resorted to the Romantic metaphors of sailor or pilgrim in describing their careers on the road. 84. Terlecki provides this breakdown of the Czerniowce population (1962, 37). 85. See Dąbrowski and Górski, 1963, v. 1, 461–463. In his diary, Dawison also describes how he left the WarÂ�saw theater, where his prospects were limited, for a career-Â�boosting engagement at the Lwów Theatre. Ibid., 179–301. 86. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 73–85. 87. Ibid., 73–85; Lobojko, 1963, 327–29. 88. Ratajczak, 1985, 187. 89. Dziennik literacki [Literary daily], 26 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1861. 90. Dziennik literacki [Literary daily], 2 May 1862. 91. Kosiński, 2005, 33–34. 92. Ibid., 19–21, 25–27. 93. Ibid., 28. 94. Ibid., 38–39. 95. Ratajczak, 1985, 174–175; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 74. 96. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s delighted account echoes that of Józef Dietl, the doctor and professor who would become KraÂ�ków’s mayor. Just a year before (August 1860), this educated tourist enthused in much the same way about the beauties of this mountainous landscape. Dietl has been called the “father of Polish balneology,” that is, the study of the therapeutic value of

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mineral baths. He was assiduous in developing and promoting mineral spas in Poland, and his efforts led to a steady flow of tourists to such resort towns as Krynica and Szczawnica. See Homola-Â�Skąpska, 1993, 51–62. 97. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 76–77. 98. Ibid., 71, 72, 76. Koźmian wrote disapprovingly of the KraÂ�ków Theatre (before his time) when actors got used to speaking their lines after the prompter (“Feliks Benda,” 1959, 271–272). Kosiński (2005) notes the importance of knowing parts by heart (202) and of mastering parts in costume (299). 99. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 77. For a detailed description of this technique, see Kosiński, 2005, 191–194. 100. Karol Estreicher, Teatra w Polsce, Vol. 1, reprint edited by Marek Rudnicki (WarÂ� saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1953), 475–476. In Krótka historia teatru polskiego (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczny, 1977), Zbigniew Raszewski notes that Skarbek funded the building of the theater and provided the theater a subvention (109). 101. “A.G.,” Dziennik literacki [Literary daily], 3 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1862. 102. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 87–90. 103. Helena Modrzejewska to Adolf Opid, Lwów, NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1862, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 45. Adolf Opid was Michał Opid’s son by a previous wife. 104. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 95. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 88–89. When Aszpergerowa wrote Modrzejewska for details about these guest appearances, it is clear from the older actress’s references to Modrzejewska’s intimates and colleagues that the two had become good friends. Aniela Aszpergerowa to Modrzejewska, Lwów, 21 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1867, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 64–65. 107. Mariola Szydłowska, “Modrzejewska i teatr lwowski (1862–1863),” Pamiętnik Teat ralny, 58, no. 3–4 (231–232), 2009, 102, 103, 109. 108. Ibid. 109. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 86, 104. 110. Szydłowska argues that Modrzejewska might have boosted her career on the Lwów stage had she waited out her rivals, who decamped within a year (2009, 120). 111. Ibid., 105. 112. Called Czernowitz by the Austrians, this city is now Chernivtsi in southwestern Ukraine. 113. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 99. 114. Terlecki, 1962, 37; Szczublewski, 1975, 36–37. 115. Terlecki remarks briefly on Ortyński’s abilities as a director and astute selector of repertoire. Ibid. 116. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 109. 117. Ryszard Górski, Wincenty Rapacki (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1960), 7–12, 26–27. 118. Ibid., 21; Szczublewski, 1975, 36. 119. Górski, 1960, 23–24; Szczublewski, 1975, 36–39. Rapacki also directly participated in the 1863 uprising, serving as the city’s commanding officer for the insurgents’ National Front. 120. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 97; Szczublewski, 1975, 42, 46. 121. Dziennik literacki [Literary daily], 23 June 1865. 122. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 114.


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123. In Got’s estimation, Modrzejewska’s years of desultory touring accustomed her to intensive work, acquainted her with a wide repertoire, and built her professional self-Â�confidence, but were of “relatively little intellectual and artistic value.” See his essay “ProÂ�wincjonalna Modrzejewska,” in Teatr i teatrologia (KraÂ�ków: Universitas, 1994), 86. 124. Kras, 1977, 18–19. 125. Dabrowski, 2004, 19. 126. Homola-Â�Skąpska, 1993, 269–278, 282–284. 127. Estreicher, 1953, v. 2, 588–589. Estreicher’s pithy information is repeated and embelÂ� lished on by a number of historians. For a good example, see Zbigniew Jabłoński, “Teatr krakowski w latach 1865–1893,” in Teatr polski od 1863 roku do schyłku XIX wieku, edited by Â�Tadeusz Sivert (WarÂ�saw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1982), 428–429. 128. Estreicherówna, 1968, 58. 129. Estreicher, 1953, v. 2, 588–589; Jabłoński, 1982, 429–430. 130. For an excellent traditional account of the rejuvenation of the KraÂ�ków Theatre and the establishment of the KraÂ�ków School, see Jerzy Got, “Szkoła Krakowska,” in Sto Lat Â�Starego Teatru w Krakowie. Praca zbiorowa dla uczczenia setnej rocznicy objęcia dyrekcji przez Adama Skorupkę i Stanisława Koźmiana, edited by Henryk Vogler, Jerzy Got, and Halina Sitko (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1965), 13–26. 131. Anna Tytkowska, W kręgu piekna, prawdy i polityki: Krakowska krytyka teatralna w latach 1865–1885 (Katowice: “Sląsk” Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2000), 41. 132. Koźmian, “[Przemówienie do aktorow],” 1959, 45–50. 133. Jan Michalik cites this observation of Jasiński’s contributions from the contemporary press in Dzieje teatru w Krakowie w latach 1865–1893: Instytucja Arystyczna (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), 503. 134. Jerzy Got, Antonina Hoffmann i teatr krakowski jej czasów (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1958), 35. In his recollections of the KraÂ�ków Theatre in the 1880s, when the school was truly ensconced, Józef Śliwicki proposes the curious argument that Koźmian tailored the School’s ideals of moderation, discretion, and restraint to accommodate Hoffmann’s limitations and foreground her strengths—i.e., her “thin voice” and prowess in “conversational” parts (1963, 192). 135. Michalik, 2004, 473. 136. Ibid. Szczublewski, 1975, 56, 57. 137. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 130, 153. 138. Czas [Time], 10 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1865. 139. Michalik, 2004, 475, 513. 140. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 115. 141. Jabłoński, 1982, 430; Estreicher, 1953, v. 2, 602–603; Michalik, 1997, 73–76. 142. Koźmian, “Hoffmann-Â�Modrzejewska,” 1959, 356–357. 143. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 116–117 (emphasis in the original). Kosiński notes that singsong Â�declamation was considered one of the most serious flaws in an actor’s diction and a sign of insufficient training (2005, 251–253). 144. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 118–120. 145. See the following Jan Jasiński letters to Modrzejewska: WarÂ�saw, 11 January 1866; WarÂ� saw, 9 January 1867, and WarÂ�saw, 25 April, 1867, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 48, 52, 58. 146. See Eugeniusz Szwankowski, Teatry Warszawy w latach 1765–1918 (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1979), 89–90; also Górski, 1960, 11.

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147. Szczublewski extrapolates: “Helena would always name him her theatrical ‘father,’ her lone teacher in the profession, and thank him for turning her career around” (1975, 51). 148. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 145. 149. Koźmian, “Feliks Benda,” 1959, 266. 150. Ibid., 128–129. 151. Ibid., 128. 152. Ibid., 152, 123. On how Koźmian urged his actors to prepare for historical dramas by studying their characters and times, see Michalik, 2004, 302–304. Rapacki remembers how Józef Szujski, a playwright and professor of history at Jagiellonian University, helped the KraÂ�ków actors retranslate and better understand Shakespeare as they prepared his plays for production (“Kartka z mojego życia,” in Dąbrowski and Górski, 1963, v. 2, 18–21). Apropos of Modrzejewska’s costume-Â�designing skills: One of the reviews of her performance in Barbara Radziwiłłówna admired the fact that she was costumed to resemble King Zygmunt August’s painted miniature of the doomed princess (Dziennik literacki [Literary daily], 12 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1865). 153. Roman Żełązowski, “Pięćdziesiąt lat teatru polskiego,” in Dąbrowski and Górski, 1963, v. 2, 87. 154. Michalik recognizes that in these first years of the new KraÂ�ków Theatre, “the directors . . . and the actors were two different worlds,” and the directors had to navigate a steep learning curve (1997, 99). 155. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 143. Estreicher maintains that the actors were dissatisfied with their lodgings, although MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recalls charming, if noisy, accommodations. Ibid., 140–141; Â�Estreicher, 1953, v. 2, 606. 156. Estreicher deems this incident a sign of divisions to come (1953, v. 2, 605). 157. Czas [Time], 5 May 1866. 158. Czas [Time], 6 May 1866. 159. For the best depiction of this sort of reverence for Koźmian, see Żełązowski, 1963, 85, 117–119. 160. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 129. 161. I’ve taken the description of Laszcz from the Czas [Time] review of one of the play’s performances (29 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1866). Rapacki, “Kartka z mojego życia,” 1963, 15–16. 162. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 118. 163. Koźmian, “Hoffmann-Â�Modrzejewska,” 1959, 355–362. 164. Terlecki, 1962, 59. 165. Koźmian, “Hoffmann-Â�Modrzejewska,” 1959, 357, 360. 166. Ibid., 357; Got, 1958, 35. 167. Jerzy Got, Helena Modrzejewska na scenie krakowskiej, 1865–1869 (Kra Â�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1956), 14–30. 168. Czas [Time], 15 January 1867. 169. Kosiński, 2005, 165–168. 170. Ibid., 61. 171. See Koźmian’s essay “Nasza publiczność,” 1959, 234–236. 172. Ibid., 236. 173. Got enumerates her successes: “Freedom, charm, and truthfulness distinguished her performances in such roles as Hortensia in White Camellia, Cecylia in Miss-Â�Madame, Floryna in a comedy of the same name, Berta in Magic Hands, Antonina in Mr. Poirier’s Brother-Â�in-Â�Law, Maria in Sabaudka, and many others in this vein” (1956, 15).

not e s to page s 55– 65

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174. Czas [Time], 31 January 1867, n. 26. Translation of quote: “If the word perfection did not exist, it would have to be created for her.” 175. Kazimierz Chlędowski, Pamiętniki Galicji, Vol. 1., 1843–1880, edited and introduced by Antoni Knot (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1957), 137. 176. Ibid., 138. 177. Ibid., 140–142; Szczublewski, 1975, 57. 178. Rapacki, 1963, 26. 179. Jan Aleksander Fredro to Modrzejewska, Lwów, 22 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1867, in Got and Â�SzczublewÂ�ski, 1965, v. 1, 67. 180. Władysław Umiastowski to Modrzejewska, Wilno, 14 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1866, in Got and SzczublewÂ�ski, 1965, v. 1, 51. 181. Kras, 1977, 101. 182. Aleksander Przeździecki to Modrzejewska, WarÂ�saw, 16 February 1867, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 56. The play he translated was performed in KraÂ�ków in January 1868 and featured Modrzejewska and Hoffmann in the lead roles. See Czas [Time], 25 January 1868. 183. Modrzejewska to Przeździecki, KraÂ�ków, around 25 February 1867, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 57. 184. Przeździecki to Modrzejewska, WarÂ�saw, 24 February 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 69–70. 185. Estreicherówna, 1966, 53. For more on the aristocrats and their balls and pastimes, see Estreicherówna, 1966, 56–57, and Kietlińska, 1986, 240–241. 186. Estreicherówna, 1966, 108–109; Konarska-Â�Pabiniak, 2006, 43. 187. Estreicherówna, 1966, 110. 188. Chłędowski, 1957, 139. 189. Koźmian, “Feliks Benda,” 1959, 309. 190. Ibid., 337. 191. Kietlińska, 1986, 246–247. 192. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 127. 193. Ibid., 125. 194. Szczublewski, 1975, 58. Terlecki writes that Chłapowski pronounced his r’s like a Frenchman (1962, 63). 195. Ibid. 196. Ibid. 197. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 133, 135. 198. Czas [Time], 15 August 1866. 199. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 139. 200. Chłapowski and Modrzejewska to Przeździecki, Poznań, 21 June 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 88–90. 201. Terlecki, 1962, 106. 3. Wa r Â�saw ’s State of th e Sta r s 1. See, for example, Szwankowski, 1979, 104; Józef Szczublewski, Wielki i smutny teatr (1868–1880) (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1963), 142; Raszewski, 1977, 154. 2. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 154–155. 3. Ibid., 154, 156. 4. Szwankowski, 1979, 5–13, 29.

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not e s to page s 66 – 69

5. Ibid., 61–62, 78–79; Henryk Eile, Teatr Warszawski w dobie powstań (WarÂ�saw: Księgarnia Wł. Michalak i S-Â�ka dawniej “Książnica-Â�Atlas” S.A., 1937), 196–197. 6. Ibid., 143–145; Alexander Kraushar, WarÂ�sawa historyczna i dzisiejsza: Zarysy kulturalno-Â�obyczajowe (Lwów: Wyk. Zakładu Narodowego imienia Ossolińskich, 1925), Â�225–228. 7. Eile, 1937, 146–148; Szwankowski, 1979, 92–94, 96. 8. Eile, 1937, 148, 152–154, 164–167, 177; Raszewski, 1977, 123, 126; Szwankowski, 1979, 92, 96. 9. Eile, 1937, 190. 10. Antoni Zaleski, Towarszystwo Warszawskie: Listy do przyjaciółki przez Baronowa XYZ, edited by Ryszard Kolodziejczyk (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1971), 411–412. Although this 1971 reprint of the baroness’s letters identifies the journalist Antoni Zaleski as their author, other scholars claim that this important work was written by several hands— inÂ�cludÂ�ing Stanisław Koźmian, Konstanty Gorski, and Julia Gorska. See Janina Kulczycka-Â� Saloni, “Antoni Zaleski i Baronessa XYZ,” in Warszawa pozytywystów, edited by Janina Kulczycka-Â�Saloni and Ewa Ihnatowicz (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1992), 241–247. 11. Ibid. Kulczycka-Â�Saloni identifies Polish theater and literature as the two great preserves of the Polish language under the partitions in Życie literackie w Warszawie w latach 1864–1892 (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1970), 13. Raszewski notes that Russian was used in the theater’s administration, but was limited onstage to “obsequious hymns and cantatas” (1977, 146–147). 12. Laurence Senelick, “Theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Cul ture, edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 266. 13. Zaleski, 1971, 415; Szczublewski, 1975, 145. 14. Szwankowski notes that the Russians enjoyed and maintained the theater throughÂ�out the inter-Â�uprising period (1979, 80–81). 15. Józef Szczublewski, Teatr Wielki w Warszawie, 1833–1993, co-Â�edited by Teresa Kilian (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1993), 6, 7, 11, 12. 16. Raszewski, 1977, 144. In his “Diary,” Bogumił Dawison marks the welcome news about retirement benefits organized by then president General Jozef Rautenstrauch (Dąbrowski and Górski, 1963, v. 1, 213). 17. Zaleski, 1971, 167–169. 18. Szczublewski, 1963, 22. 19. Ibid., 28. Modrzejewska’s friend Maria Faleńska remarked on Mukhanov’s gestures of welcome and hospitality with approval in her 5 April 1869 letter to Karol Estreicher in Â�Korespondencja Karola Estreichera z Marią i Felicjanem Faleńskimi (1867–1903), edited by Â�Jadwiga Rudnicka (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, Wyd. Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1957), 34–35. 20. Szwankowski, 1979, 98; Szczublewski, 1993, 144–145. 21. Zaleski, 1971, 418; Szwankowski, 1979, 98, 102, 103. 22. Stanisław Szenic, Maria Kalergis, 2nd and amplified ed. (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1963), 39–41. 23. Szenic, 1963, 410–411; Szczublewski ,1963, 11–12. Mukhanov was appointed president of the WarÂ�saw theaters and imperial palaces; his combined salary for fulfilling these duties was 6,500 rubles per annum (Szenic, 1963, 410, 411–412). 24. Szenic, 1963, 414; Szczublewski, 1963, 17–18. In a 2 February 1868 letter, Przeździecki wrote that even General Hauke admitted the paucity of good actresses in the WarÂ�saw theater (cited in Szczublewski, 1963, 18).


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25. When Modrzejewska, advised by Przeździecki, sent “a very polite and humble letter” to Mukhanov, she carefully included regards for his wife. See her 21 June 1868 letter to Przeździecki, in which she indicated that she has received a letter from “Mme. Calergis”; her 22 July 1868 letter to the count mentioned the letter she has sent in turn to the Mukhanovs (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 88, 97). 26. Mukhanov to Modrzejewska, WarÂ�saw, 19 March 1869, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 116. 27. Szczublewski, 1963, 6. 28. Raszewski, 1977, 144. In “Gwiazdorstwo i aktoromania w teatrze polskim w XIX wieku,” in Teatr i teatrologia (KraÂ�ków: Universitas, 1994), Jerzy Got argues that the concept of the star in sensu stricto did not come about until 1870 (262). 29. Jasiński notes as much in his 25 April 1867 letter to Modrzejewska (Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 58–59). 30. Jerzy Got, “Fotograficzna dokumentacja teatru w Polsce,” in Teatr i teatrologia (KraÂ� ków: Universitas, 1994), 99–100. Got remarks on the “cinematic fluidity” of Rzewuski’s photos. 31. See Przeździecki’s report on Hauke’s rapture to Modrzejewska, WarÂ�saw, 24 February 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 69–70. 32. In a 19 June 1868 letter from WarÂ�saw, Przeździecki advised Modrzejewska that the WarÂ�saw Courier was already in her camp and that “it will be necessary to make sure the other papers act likewise” (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 88). 33. Szczublewski, 1975, 72. 34. Ibid., 69–71. 35. Kłosy [Sheaves], 12/24 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1868. 36. Szczublewski, 1975, 85. 37. Modrzejewska to Przeździecki, KraÂ�ków, undated from late February/early March 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 71–72. 38. Modrzejewska to Przeździecki, KraÂ�ków, 13 March 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 77. 39. Chęciński to Modrzejewska, WarÂ�saw, 24 May 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 81. 40. For the back and forth of these financial negotiations, see Chęciński’s 7 June 1868 and 5 July 1868 letters and Przeździecki’s missive of 19 June 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 84–88, 94–96. According to Szczublewski, the very high fee Przeździecki first proposed for Modrzejewska’s performances (250 rubles per) had been suggested by Hauke. Apparently, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova also counseled the actress to lower her asking price (Szczublewski, 1963, 18, 21). 41. Chęciński to Modrzejewska, WarÂ�saw, 5 July 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 94–96. 42. Modrzejewska to Preździecki, KraÂ�ków, around 22 July 1868, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 97. 43. This two-Â�part editorial appears in Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 1/13 August 1868 and 2/14 August 1868. The two dates given reflect the difference between Russian retention of the Julian calendar and Polish use of the Gregorian calendar; printed in the Russian partition, WarÂ�saw newspapers necessarily referenced the Julian calendar as well. 44. See MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 160–164. 45. Szczublewski, 1993, 148. 46. Szczublewski, 1963, 54.

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47. Szczublewski, 1975, 84. 48. For a complete list of her debut plays, see ibid. 49. In Warszawa i jej inteligencja po Powstaniu Styczniowym, 1864–1870 (WarÂ�saw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1961), Janina Leskiewiczowa estimates that 60 percent of the WarÂ�saw theater repertoire at this time was French, 28 percent Polish, and 12 percent English and German (128). See also Terlecki, 1962, 90. 50. In his 24 June 1868 letter to the actress, Przeździecki anticipated difficulties with the production of Romeo and Juliet, because her company had still to learn it and Modrzejewska would have to tolerate a mediocre Romeo in actor Michał Tatarkiewicz (Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 91). 51. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 29 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber/11 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868, 292. 52. Kurier warszawski [WarÂ�saw Courier], 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868, 82. 53. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 29 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber/11 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868, 292. 54. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 55. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 10 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 56. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 17/29 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 57. Ibid. 58. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 10 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 59. Kłosy [Sheaves], 12/24 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1868 and 26 SepÂ�temÂ�ber/8 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 60. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 17/29 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868, and Kłosy [Sheaves], 3/15 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 61. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 8 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 62. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 10 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 63. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 18/30 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 64. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 1/13 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1868, and Gazeta Â�warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 1/13 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1868. 65. Kłosy [Sheaves], 21 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber/3 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868, and Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 16 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1868. 66. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 19 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 67. Kłosy [Sheaves], 17/29 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868, and Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 22 Â�NoÂ�vemÂ�ber/4 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868. 68. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 29 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber/11 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868. 69. Szczublewski, 1975, 89. 70. Szczublewski, 1963, 29. 71. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 17/29 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1868. 72. This is Szczublewski’s astute interpretation (1993, 150). 73. Kurier warszawski [WarÂ�saw courier], 1 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1868, quoted in Szczublewski, 1975, 92. 74. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 166–167. 75. Modrzejewska to Anna Chłapowska, WarÂ�saw, Autumn 1868, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 104–105. 76. Modrzejewska to Anna Chłapowska, WarÂ�saw, end of NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1868, in Got and Â�Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 108. 77. Modrzejewska and Chłapowski also were able to visit beforehand with Karol’s relatives in WarÂ�saw, with his maternal aunt Irena (née Morawska) Bodenham and her English husband. 78. See MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 168–172. 79. Terlecki cites another version of this legendary encounter in which the actress,


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clothed in a black mantilla, drops to her knees before Morawska, to which the august lady replies: “Rise, my child. We do these things more simply” (Terlecki, 1962, 79). 80. For more information on Karol’s famous uncle, see Memoirs of a Polish Lancer: The Pamiętniki of Dezydery Chlapowski, translated by Tim Simmons (Emperor’s Press, 2002). 81. See her February 1869 letter to Przeździecki in which she explained that she cannot play her former roles in Ideas of Madame d’Aubray and Our Nearest and Dearest for “very important reasons”—that is, at the request of her husband’s family (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 113–114). 82. Szczublewski, 1975, 93. 83. Ibid., 98, 100. See letter sent by Jan Jasiński to Modrzejewska, WarÂ�saw, 28 April 1869, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 118n2. 84. See Modrzejewska’s 11 May 1869 letter to Przeździecki from KraÂ�ków. Here Modrzejewska indicates that her break with Skorupka was due to another reason. It was rumored that the two had quarrelled over the fact that Skorupka, a notorious ladies’ man, was trying to use professional flattery to lure her young cousin Emilia Baumann into his “harem.” See Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 121–122n5. 85. Kras, 1977, 187. 86. Szczublewski, 1975, 96. 87. Ibid., 96–97; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 174–178. 88. Szczublewski, 1975, 96. 89. As high-Â�wage earners, successful actresses often served as their family’s main support. See, for example, the case of the AmeriÂ�can actress Charlotte Cushman, who invested heavily in “domestic empire building” (Dudden, 1994, 100–101). 90. Szczublewski, 1975, 102, 153–154. 91. Modrzejewska to Szymon Benda, WarÂ�saw, 6 January 1875, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 263. 92. Information about this negotiation appears in Władysław Siemieński’s 25 NoÂ�vemÂ� ber 1869 letter to Chłapowski and Stanisław Służewski’s 28 June 1870 letter to Modrzejewska (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 137–138, 161). Modrzejewska reputedly paid Zimajer 4000 guldens for her son and her name (Szczublewski, 1975, 118–119). 93. In her 10 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1874 letter to Gustaw Fiszer, Modrzejewska did admit that Zimajer and his new family limited her circulation: she could not perform in Lwów where “Madame Sinnmayer” was making her fame (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 258). 94. See Modrzejewska’s March 1869 letter to Józef Nikorowicz, and, again, her 6 January 1875 letter to Szymon Benda (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 214–215, 263–264). 95. See 6 January 1875 letter to Szymon. 96. In his 12 June 1871 and 9 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1871 letters to Karol Estreicher, the poet and writer Felicjan Faleński at first somewhat disparaged the Figaro project, and then lamented the fact that what might have been a good journal was not to be. See Korespondencja Karola Estreichera, 1957, 96, 106. 97. Szczublewski surmises that Chłapowski obtained the first position through his relationship with the financier Kronenberger, a frequent guest at their WarÂ�saw “at-Â�homes”(1975, 136). See 19 March 1872 letter that Chłapowski and Modrzejewska sent to Józef Nikorowicz (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 204). 98. Modrzejewska to Józef Nikorowicz, WarÂ�saw, March 1873, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 214. 99. Leskiewiczowa, 1961, 66.

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100. Ibid., 59–60; Helena Michałowska, Salony artystyczno-Â�literackie w Warszawie, 1832– 1860 (WarÂ�saw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Narodowe, 1974), 32–33, 35. 101. Leskiewiczowa, 1961, 65–66. The Baroness XYZ remarked that WarÂ�saw had no aristocratic district such as the Quartier St.-Â�Germain in Paris (Zaleski, 1971, 232). 102. Ryszarda Czepulis-Â�R astenis, “Klassa umysłowa.” Inteligencja Królestwa Polskiego, 1832–1862 (WarÂ�saw: Książka i Wiedza, 1973), 19, 367–368, 387. 103. Kulczycka-Â�Saloni ,1970, 90–94; on this inter-Â�uprising salon tradition, see MichałowÂ� ska, 1974, 55–68. 104. Zaleski, 1971, 242. 105. Kulczycka-Â�Saloni, 1970, 99–102. 106. Ibid., 102–103. 107. Zaleski, 1971, 231. 108. Ibid. 109. This is not to claim that Modrzejewska was accepted everywhere. Her husband, in fact, stood ready to renounce any former acquaintances who would not welcome his actress wife into their home. See his letter from the secÂ�ond half of NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1868 to Przeździecki (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 107). On a visit to KraÂ�ków in early 1870 Przeździecki reported that false rumors of Modrzejewska’s rejection by WarÂ�saw aristocrats were Â�making the rounds there, but he shared evidence to the contrary with the Countesses Potockie (19 January 1870 letter to Modrzejewska). Modrzejewska’s prompt reply (around 24 January 1870) included a cloying message of gratitude to the elder countess and a fresh photograph for Przeździecki, both of which the count shrewdly conveyed to the Potocki palace (PrzeźÂ� dziecki to Modrzejewska, 15 February 1870). See Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 107, 154–157. 110. Zaleski, 1971, 232–240; Irena Tessaro-Â�Kosimowa, Warszawa i jej mieszkańcy w twórczości Franciszka Kostrzewskiego (WarÂ�saw: Wydawnictwo Arkady, 1968), 16–17. 111. Tessaro-Â�Kosimowa, 1968, 16. 112. Faleńska to the Estreichers, 18 February 1870, in Korespondencja Karol Estreichera, 1957, 54. 113. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 187. 114. Ibid., 186–188. 115. Michałowska, 1974, 114, 157. As a rule, even in post-Â�1863 WarÂ�saw actors rarely reached beyond their own social circles because they lacked the education and social finesse. See Czepulis-Â�Rastenis, 1973, 103–106; Leskiewiczowa, 1961, 131–132. 116. See Faleńska’s 26 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1871 and 16 March 1871 letters to Stefania Estreicherowa, Korespondencja Karola Estreichera, 1957, 112, 88–89. 117. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 228. 118. For MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s cited descriptions of these women, see MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 228–230. 119. Ibid., 182, 184. 120. Szenic, 1963, 161–162, 167–168, 188–189, 268. Her letter to her daughter, quoted here, was sent in the secÂ�ond half of April 1858. 121. 29 March 1869 letter cited in Szenic, 1963, 426. 122. See, for example, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova’s requests to Modrzejewska in a letter dated 1873? to escort Romana Popiełówna in her stead to a reception and to guide a certain count to her home (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 232). 123. Szczublewski, 1975, 124. 124. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 215. 125. Ibid., 213, 224–226.


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126. Szczublewski, 1975, 129, 136. 127. See the memoirs of Edward Webersfeld and Józef Nowakowski included in Dąbrowski and Górski, 1963, v. 1, 352, 408–412. 128. Szczublewski ,1975, 119. 129. Stanisław Witkiewicz, “Tytus Chałubiński,” in Pisma Tatrzanskie, edited by Roman Hennel (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1963), 268–269. 130. For more on the significance of the “discovery” of the southern mountains and their people for Polish nation building, see Patrice Dabrowski, “â†œ‘Discovering’ the Galician BorderÂ� lands: The Case of the Eastern Carpathians,” Slavic Review, v. 64, n. 2, Summer 2005, 340– 342. Witkiewicz comments wryly on the attractiveness of the góral—a handsome heroic figure—to an intelligentsia used to disdaining peasants as unappealing, inferior, and untrustworthy. See “Na przełęczy,” in Pisma Tatrzanskie, 1963, 60. 131. For a photograph of her summer home “near Cracow,” see MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 465. The lace-Â�making school was established with Modrzejewska’s gift of 1200 renskie in June 1882. 132. Witkiewicz, “Na przełęczy,” 1963, 73. 133. For a good definition of these terms, see Jerzy Got’s article, “Gwiazdorstwo i aktoroÂ� mania w teatrze polskim w XIX wieku,” in Teatr i teatrologia 253–269. An anonymous article titled “Aktoromania,” presumed to have been written by Aleksander Świętochowski, Â�appeared in Przegląd Tygodniowy in 1871; it critiqued this phenomenon, arguing that actors, with their lack of training and aversion to hard work, deserved no special regard. See Wilski, 1990, 136–137. 134. See, for example, the tidbits included in Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly]’s standard feature, “The Week in Review” (“Kronika tygodniowa”). 135. Szczublewski, 1975, 149. One example of this collaboration: Both Modrzejewska and Chłapowski consented to market an album of Józef Nikorowicz’s “Dramatic-Â�Musical Sketches” dedicated to the actress and featuring photos of her in the roles that inspired his compositions (Shakespeare’s Juliet, Schiller’s Mary Stuart, Moreto’s Donna Diana, Fredro’s Aniela in Maidens’ Vows). This project was never realized. See Kazimierz Chłędowski’s 26 August 1870 letter to Chłapowski, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 165–167. Anna Litak posits that Modrzejewska valued photography not as an art form, but as effective advertisement and a means of documenting her theatrical work. See “Fotografie Modrzejewskiej,” Pamiętnik Teatralny, 58, n. 3–4 (231–232), 2009, 384, 390. 136. Leskiewiczowa, 1961, 130–131. 137. As quoted in Tessaro-Â�Kosimowa, 1968, 18–19. 138. Ibid. 139. For more on the relationship between artist and patron in late nineteenth-Â�century Poland—particularly on the consumer’s homage to and patronage of the artist—see HolmÂ� gren, Rewriting Capitalism: Literature and the Market in Late Tsarist Russia and the Kingdom of Poland (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 150–177. 140. Faleńska’s addendum to her husband’s 23 February 1871 letter to Estreicher in Kore spondencja Karola Estreichera, 1957, 82. 141. Terlecki, 1962, 85; Szczublewski, 1975, 166. Got notes cigarettes brand-Â�named Modrzejewska and Żółkowski, as well as a torte named after Helena Marcello, a leading actress who succeeded Modrzejewska (1994, 267). 142. Wojciech Herbaczyński, W dawnych cukierniach i kawiarniach warszawskich (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1988), 100–101, 65. Herbaczyński writes that Modrzejewska “was a frequent patron” of the Theater shop (101).

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143. Szczublewski, 1975, 138. 144. Got, 1994, 264. 145. Szenic, 1963, 442, 460. 146. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 184. 147. Ibid., 185. 148. Zaleski, 1971, 423. 149. For a brief overview of this critical debate, see Wilski, 1990, 24–41. Wilski points out that while some critics heralded the actor as an independent creator, Positivists insisted that actors, with their lack of special training, could only be considered imitative instruments (36–37). 150. Czepulis-Â�Rastenis, 1973, 104–106, 108, 111, 184; Leskiewiczowa, 1961, 131–132. 151. On the paradigm of the virtuoso and the specific example of Liszt, see Leon PlanÂ� tinga, Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Â�Century Europe (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), 174, 177, 180–181. My thanks to Donna Buchanan for this valuable reference. 152. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 186. 153. Ibid., 191. 154. Ibid., 198–199. 155. Ibid., 195–197. 156. For example, Żółkowski misinterpreted Polonius as a fine Polish nobleman in the Hamlet production Modrzejewska had worked so hard to present on the WarÂ�saw stage Â�(Szczublewski, 1975, 133–135). 157. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 191–195. 158. Chłapowski to Ładnowski, WarÂ�saw, around 10 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1869, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 142–143. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid. See Modrzejewska’s letter to Ładnowski from the beginning of OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1870, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 173–174. 161. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 201. 162. Ibid, 199. See Szczublewski, 1975, 118. 163. Szczublewski heralds the 1873 line-Â�up as “the ensemble of the century,” 1993, 185. On Modrzejewska’s support of Rakiewiczowa, see Szczublewski, 1975, 171–172. 164. Chłapowski to Ładnowski, 20 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1870, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 169–173. 165. Modrzejewska to Gustaw Fiszer, 18 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1874, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 246–247. 166. Szczublewski, 1975, 150–151. 167. Maria Faleńska’s letter to Karol Estreicher, 9 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1871, in Korespondencja Â�K arola Estreichera, 1957, 107. 168. Modrzejewska also tested what she deemed to be promising contemporary plays for her benefits. In 1872 she tried a contemporary German treatment of the Phedre myth, and in 1873 she chose for her benefit Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme, yet another play about a Parisian courtesan, albeit by a major French poet. 169. Zaleski, 1871, 341. On the censor’s hostility to the plays of Shakespeare and Słowacki, see Maria Olga Bieńka, “Warszawie siedmiolecie Modrzejewskiej (1869–1876),” Pamiętnik Teatralny, 58, n. 3–4 (231–232), 2009, 128–129.


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170. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 189–190. Bieńka, 2009, 130. For more information on the serendipity of the Russian censors, see Zaleski, 1971, 340–341. 171. Kłosy [Sheaves], 18/30 March 1871. 172. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 7/19 April 1875. 173. Bieńka, 2009, 151. 174. Szczublewski, 1975, 145–146. 175. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 10/22 January 1870. 176. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 2/14 January 1870. 177. Szczublewski, 1975, 132. 178. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 17/29 April 1876. 179. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 10/22 January 1870; Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 2/14 January 1870. It’s interesting to compare these critics’ accolades with Faleńska’s impression. She appreciated Modrzejewska’s beauty and charm as Juliet, but judged her to be too old for the part. See her 18 February 1870 letter to the Estreichers in Ko respondencja Karola Estreichera, 1957, 54–55. 180. Kłosy [Sheaves], 18/30 March 1871. 181. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 15/27 April 1871. 182. Got, “Gwiazdorstwo,” 1994, 264. 183. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 10/22 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1873. 184. Szymanowski complained that the translation of Don Carlos used for this performance departed fundamentally from the original. See his review in Tygodnik illustrowany Â�[Illustrated weekly], 2/14 March 1874. The praise for Modrzejewska’s Eboli appeared in Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 18 February/2 March 1874. 185. See Kłosy [Sheaves], 1/13 February 1873; Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 3/15 February 1873. 186. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 25 February/9 March 1871. 187. Kłosy, 11/23 March 1871. 188. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 13/25 February 1871. 189. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 5/17 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1874; Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 7/19 January 1876. 190. Władysław Bogusławski, Siły i środki naszej sceny (WarÂ�saw: Wydawnictwo Â�a rtystyczne i filmowe, 1961), 214, 216. 191. Ibid., 227. 192. Ibid., 199. 193. Rapacki, 1925, 148–149. 194. Lidia Kuchtówna, “O kostiumach Modrzejewskiej,” Pamiętnik Teatralny, 58, n. 3–4 (231–232), 2009, 224. 195. Kosiński, 2005, 138, 234, 239. 196. Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 16/28 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1869. 197. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 3/15 May 1872. 198. For reviews see, respectively, Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 22 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber/4 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1871 and 23 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber/5 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1871; and Gazeta polska [Polish gazette], 17/29 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1872. 199. For reviews of her Beatrice, see Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 28 April/10 May 1876 and Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 24 April/6 May 1876. 200. Zaleski, 1971, 418–419.

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201. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 239. 202. As it turns out, Bogusławski was the author of both these criticisms—implicit and explicit. See Szczublewski, 1975, 161, and Siły i środki, 1961, 202–209. 203. Górski, 1960, 53–55. 204. Bogusławski, 1961, 22. 205. 26 January 1875, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 267. 206. Rapacki would write seventeen plays between 1874 and 1892 (Górski, 1960, 56–57). 207. Modrzejewska to Wolska, 28 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1874, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 255– 257. She wrote a secÂ�ond letter the same day to Gustaw Fiszer in which she urged him to follow in Rapacki’s footsteps—to undertake the sort of creative work for which she hadn’t the talent and which she, as a woman, didn’t want to attempt. See her 28 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1874 letter (253–255). 208. Faleński to Estreicher, 10 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1870, in Korespondencja Karola Estreichera, 1957, 73, 75. 209. Szczublewski, 1975, 177. 210. Henryk Struve so characterized the cast in Kłosy [Sheaves], 2/14 January 1875. 211. Estreicher reported this to Faleński in his 15 March 1869 letter, Korespondencja Â�K arola Estreichera, 1957, 30–31. 212. Szczublewski, 1975, 176–177. 213. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 245. 214. Józef Szczublewski, Sienkiewicz: Żywot pisarza (WarÂ�saw: Wydawnictwo W. A. B., 2006), 30. 215. Zdzisław Piasecki, Stanisław Witkiewicz: Młodość i wczesny dorobek artysty (WarÂ�saw, Wrocław: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1983), 130. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska recalls the ordeal of climbing those seven flights to visit her artists in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 217–218. 216. Julian Krzyżanowski, Pokłosie Sienkiewiczowskie: Szkice literackie (WarÂ�saw: PańÂ�stwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1973), 446–447. 217. Ibid., 26, 88, 393, 561, 713; Szczublewski, 1975, 183. 218. Gierymski’s 12 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1875 letter to Prosper Dziekoński in Maksymilian and Aleksander Gierymscy, Listy i notatki, edited by Juliusz Starzyński and Halina Stępień (Wrocław, WarÂ�saw, KraÂ�ków, Gdansk: Zakład narodowy imienia Ossolinskich wydawnictwo PAN, 1973), 192–193. 219. Piasecki, 1983, 161–169, 173–175. 220. Arguing against a false division between realist and idealist artists in one of his essays of art criticism, Witkiewicz cites Modrzejewska as a living blend of these two approaches. See “â†œ‘Największy’ obraz Matejki” in Sztuka i krytyka u nas, edited by Jan Zygmunt Jakubowski (WarÂ�saw: Książka i wiedza, 1949), 101–102. 221. Ibid., 178; also Zdzisław Piasecki, Stanisław Witkiewicz w kręgu ludzi i spraw sobie bliskich. Szkice nie tylko biograficzne (Opole: Kwant Zacher, 1999), 47. 222. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 218–219. 223. For a detailed interpretation of this novella, see Krzyżanowski, 1973, 464–467. 224. Quoted from Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ta trzecia in Nowele, Vol. 3 (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1976), 189–236. All translations are mine. 225. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 215. 226. Piasecki, 1983, 91–92. 227. Piasecki, 1999, 41. 228. Piasecki, 1983, 128; Witkiewicz, “â†œ‘Największy’ obraz Matejki,” 1949, 45–46.


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229. So Witkiewicz reports in “Józef Chełmoński,” Sztuka i krytyka u nas, 1949, 174–175. 230. Witkiewicz, “â†œ‘Największy’ obraz Matejki,” 1949, 48–49. 231. Modrzejewska’s German teacher Ida Brendel writes the actress in German and refers to their ongoing lessons, 5 March 1871, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 181. 232. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 186. 233. Ibid., 236–237. 234. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly] and Kurier warszawski [WarÂ�saw courier], 7 February 1874, cited in Szczublewski, 1975, 164. 235. See Neville’s letter to her on 22 January 1875 thanking her for her note and asking for her help in arranging another set of guest appearances (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 265–266). 236. Szczublewski, 1975, 165. 237. For information on the Wolskis, see MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 464–465, and Arthur Prudden Coleman and Marion Moore Coleman, Wanderers Twain: MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Sienkiewicz: A View from California (Cheshire, Conn.: Cherry Hill Books, 1964), 42–43, 48. 238. Szczublewski, 1975, 167. 239. Modrzejewska to Wolska, 28 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1874, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 255–257. 240. Szczublewski, 2006, 38–39. 241. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 242–244. In my article “Fiction and the Acting Life: The Memoir of Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” in Real Stories, Imagined Realities: Fictionality and Non-Â�fictionality in Literary Constructs and Historical Contexts, edited by Markku Lehtimaki, Simo Leisti, and Marja Rytkonen (Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2007), I observe how Susan Sontag extrapolates from these ensemble scenes in the memoirs for her novel, In America (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000). 242. Ibid., 250–251. 243. Ibid., 249. 244. Ibid. Szczublewski, 1975, 177. 245. See Terlecki, 1962, 114. 246. For more on Chełmoński’s illustrious career, see Witkiewicz, “Józef Chełmoński,” Sztuka i krytyka, 1949, 168–77. Witkiewicz notes that Chełmoński’s talents were almost immediately appreciated in Munich and Paris, in contrast to his WarÂ�saw reception. 247. Modrzejewska to Sienkiewicz, about 15 June 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 309–311. 248. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 250. 249. See Maciejowski’s letter of 17 May 1876 to Chłapowski, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 300–307. 250. Quoted from Szczublewski, 1975, 198. 251. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 256. 4. A Coloni a l Pa rt y a nd th e Ca lifor ni a Dr e a m 1. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 261. 2. Ibid., 266. The original Polish 13 August 1876 letter to Witkiewicz is in Got and Â�Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 314. 3. A fragment written on the Pacific Ocean sent to Ujejski around 24 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 327. Modrzejewska’s extended letter to her mother about the same trip is much less self-Â�consciously literary, packed instead with her lively, sometimes bemused impressions of the Panamanian jungle and its inhabitants. See the letters dated

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8 SepÂ�temÂ�ber and 24 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1876, written first on the Caribbean Sea and then on the Pacific Ocean, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 321–325. 4. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 268. 5. Writing his sister Anna Chłapowska around 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, Chłapowski explains that they decided on sea travel for the pleasures of the voyage and to avoid a large outlay of cash (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 333). 6. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 274. 7. Ibid., 262–263. 8. See Sienkiewicz’s “Osady polskie w Stanach Zjednoczonych Północnej Ameryki” in Listy z podróży do Ameryki, edited by Julian Krzyżanowski (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978), 385–406, edited and translated into English by Charles Morley as “Polish Communities in America” in Portrait of America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 267–291. 9. See the letter Chłapowski wrote to his sister around 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, in Got and SzczublewÂ�ski, 1965, v. 1, 334. In Ethnic AmeriÂ�cans: A History of Immigration, 4th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers note that “[t]he Slavic groups—which included Russians, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Slovaks, Slovenes, Poles, Croatians, Serbs, and Bulgarians—together accounted for about 4 million new arrivals in the United States” and the Poles, “counted separately after 1899,” numbered “well over a million” before the first world war (49, 50–51). 10. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 283. 11. See Modrzejewska’s letter to Faleńska from San Francisco, 17 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 344, as well as her letter to her relatives in KraÂ�ków written the same day (339–340); also Chłapowski’s 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876 letter to his sister (338). 12. Ibid., 338. 13. Ibid., 296–303, 305, 307, 312–313. Korwin Piotrowski also served Sienkiewicz as the prototype for one of his most famous fictional characters, Zagłoba. 14. Modrzejewska’s letter to her relatives, 17 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 341. This letter was printed in the KraÂ�ków Courier that year. 15. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 314. 16. Cf. Modrzejewska’s letter to Ujejski, San Francisco, OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 347. 17. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 285. 18. Erwin G. Gudde, German Pioneers in Early California (Hoboken, NJ: Concord Society Historical Bulletin, n. 6, 1927, republished by R & E Research Associates, San Francisco, 1970), 26. 19. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 283. 20. As Starr observes, “at Anaheim and Pasadena colonists made a vigorous effort to preserve the values of bourgeois life through churches, schools, libraries, and associations for music and debate” (1973, 200). 21. Mildred Yorba MacArthur, Anaheim “The Mother Colony,” compiled and written in honor of the original colonists (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1959), 41. 22. Ibid., 29, 30, 43. 23. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 285–287. 24. de Kay, 1879, 665–671. 25. Jeannette Gilder, “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” in The Life and Art of Edwin Booth and His

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Contemporaries, edited by Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton (Boston: L. C. Page and Company Publishers, 1886), 202–203. 26. Henry G. Tinsdale, San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 27 February 1898. Some of Tinsdale’s misinformation was recycled elsewhere; see William Alfred Hinds’s AmeriÂ�can Commu nities and Co-Â�operative Colonies, 2nd ed. (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1908). 27. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 288. 28. Chłapowski to Józef Chłapowski, Anaheim, around 15 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 353. In a subsequent letter to his sister Anna (18 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1876), Chłapowski described Anusia as “very willing, but terribly slow and perfectly stupid” (358). 29. Ibid., 353, 354. 30. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 289. 31. Ibid., 289–290. 32. See Chłapowski’s letter to Józef Chłapowski, Anaheim, around 15 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1876, and his letter to Franciszek, Anaheim, 4 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 349, 352. 33. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 305. 34. In her 1989 manuscript, “Historical Background of the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska House, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon, Orange County, California,” written for the County of Orange and Thirtieth Street Architects, Newport Beach, Ellen K. Lee notes that the group first farmed a 20-Â�acre vineyard in Anaheim and soon bought a “47.7-Â�acre ranch planted with young orange trees” (5). Chłapowski wrote his sister Anna about the fate of the individual colonists from Chicago in April 1878 and New York on 11 June 1878 (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 420, 424–425). On Paprocki’s sad end, see MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 452. 35. English variant published in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 319; Polish original, dated 15 March 1877, is in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 371. 36. Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in WestÂ�ern America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 89. 37. For a sample of Sienkiewicz’s descriptions of California, see his Portrait of America, 1959, 86. 38. Starr, 1973, 175. 39. Sienkiewicz, 1959, xiv. 40. Ibid., 60. 41. Ibid., 165–167. 42. See Gail Bederman’s “Theodore Roosevelt: Manhood, Nation, and Civilization,” in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880– 1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170–215; also Kim Townsend’s analysis of Roosevelt’s transformation by the West in Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 43. Sienkiewicz, 1959, 166; Bederman, 1995, 192. Identifying Lummis as “a Massachusetts Yankee and a Harvard man,” Kevin Starr contends that “his identification with the frontier . . . should be seen in the context of similar turn-Â�of-Â�the-Â�century alignments on the part of two other Harvard men, Owen Wister and Theodore Roosevelt, for whom the vanishing West served as the corrective symbol for personal and social values under assault” (1973, 397). For further discussion of Sienkiewicz’s discovery of a restorative AmeriÂ�can masculinity, see HolmÂ�gren, “Virility and Gentility: How Sienkiewicz and Modrzejewska Redeemed America,” Polish Review, v. 46, n. 3, 2001, 283–295.

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44. Sienkiewicz, 1959, 185, with my revisions to the translation based on Sienkiewicz, 1978, 233–234. 45. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 293. 46. Ibid., 292. 47. Sienkiewicz (1978, 226) also describes the charms of the “Picnic Grounds” in his travel sketches, noting that this spot was used by residents of Anaheim, Orange, and Santa Ana for a great gathering once a year. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska (1910, 293) interjects that this spot is “at present Orange County Park.” 48. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 294. 49. Starr, 1973, 175. 50. Ibid., 66. 51. Chłapowski to Anna Chłapowska, Anaheim, 18 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1876, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 357. 52. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 311. 53. Amelia Ransome Neville, The Fantastic City: Memories of the Social and Romantic Life of Old San Francisco, edited and revised by Virginia Brastow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Riverside Press, 1932), 21, 46–47. 54. Starr, 1973, 239. 55. Clarence E. Edwords, In Bohemian San Francisco. Its Restaurants and Their Most Fa mous Recipes. The Elegant Art of Dining (San Francisco: Paul Elder & Company, 1914), 4. 56. For an eyewitness account of these developments, see Edward Bosqui, Memoirs of Edward Bosqui, foreword by Harold C. Holmes and introduction by Henry R. Wagner (Oakland, CA: Holmes Book Company, 1952), 132–134. See also Lewis, 1980, 135–143; and Starr, 1973, 132. 57. Neville, 1932, 178. 58. Ibid., 198–204. 59. Prieto, 1938, 44, 29, 24, 45–47. 60. Edmond M. Gagey, The San Francisco Stage. A History, based on the Annals compiled by the Research Department of the San Francisco Federal Theatre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 130–131. 61. Neville, 1932, 211. 62. Harriet Lane Levy, 920 O’Farrell Street, illustrated by Mallette Dean (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1947), 98. 63. Starr, 1973, 240. 64. Gagey, 1950, 99–100. 65. Bosqui, 1952, 126. 66. Starr, 1973, 246; Bosqui, 1952, 130–131. 67. Modrzejewska to Faleńska, San Francisco, 27 April 1877, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 381–382. 68. Addyse Lane, “The Acting Career of Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in California, 1877–1909,” Master’s thesis, Stanford University, 1952, 56. 69. Neville, 1932, 58. 70. Modrzejewska to Józefa Bendowa, San Francisco, 4 July 1877, in Korespondencja Heleny Modrzejewskiej i Karola Chłapowskiego, edited by Emil Orzechowski (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2000), 34. 71. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 309. Chłapowski so judges Piotrowski’s speech in a letter to his sister Anna, San Francisco, around 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 339.


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72. It is interesting to speculate that Modrzejewska, who had moved from the BielawÂ� skis to her own place on O’Farrell Street when her husband and Dolcio came to visit, may have been living fairly close to Harriet Lane Levy, whose memoirs, titled 920 O’Farrell Street, Â�remark that “between the Jews on the north side of the street and the Gentiles on the south a pleasant dissociation existed which no one wished to change. . . . The seclusion of the Gentiles across the street was not distorted into intentional distinction or racial prejudice” (1947, 16). 73. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 316. 74. Ibid., 317. 75. Letter to Faleńska, San Francisco, 29 August 1877, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 303. In the postscript to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 28 February 1878 letter to Jasiński from Boston, the actress mentioned that Piotrowski lent her money for costumes (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 412). 76. Ibid., 334. 77. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 327. 78. Ibid., 332. 79. San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 26 August 1877. 80. Daily Alta California, 26 August 1877. 81. See, for example, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 21 August 1877 and 31 August 1877, and Daily Alta California, 26 August 1877. 82. Daily Alta California, 26 August 1877 and 2 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1877. 83. San Francisco Daily Evening Post, 1 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1877. 84. Daily Alta California, 30 August 1877. 85. San Francisco Daily Evening Post, 30 August 1877. 86. Ibid., 22 August 1877. 87. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 2 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1877; San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 2 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877. 88. The San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 27 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1877, coins her Camille as “spirÂ� ituelle.” The other quote comes from the Daily Alta California, 2 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877. 89. San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 25 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1877. 90. Sienkiewicz, 1978, 333 (emphasis in original). 91. San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 2 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1877. 92. San Francisco Daily Evening Post, 25 August 1877. 93. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 335; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, San Francisco, 25 August 1877, in Orzechowski, 2000, 35. 94. San Francisco Daily Morning Call, 23 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877. 95. Ibid. 96. Coleman, 1969, 550. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was delivering a speech at an 8 July 1890 conference of California editors in Santa Barbara. 97. Ibid., 305. 98. Olive Logan, Behind the Scenes: A Book About Show Business in All Its Branches (Philadelphia: Parmelee & Company, 1870), 458. 99. The Letters of Richard Watson Gilder, edited by his daughter Rosamond Gilder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, Riverside Press, 1916), 141; Between Actor and Critic: Selected Letters of Edwin Booth and William Winter, edited and with an introduction and commentary by Daniel J. Watermeier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 250. 100. These pals included Cleveland, Gilder, Jefferson, and another well-Â�known comic ac-

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tor, William Hart Crane. See Thomas Bogar, AmeriÂ�can Presidents Attend the Theatre: The Playgoing Experiences of Each Chief Executive (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2006), 165. 101. Ibid., 79. See also Watermeier, 1971, 286–289, 296. 102. Daniel J. Watermeier, “Actors and Acting,” in The Cambridge History of AmeriÂ�can Theatre, Vol. 2, 1870–1945, edited by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 451. 103. McArthur, 1984, 71. See, for example, Gustav Kobbe, Famous Actors and Actresses and Their Homes (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1903). 104. Letter from MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, Tallac, California, around 30 July 1883 held in Box 1, Folder I of the Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, 1881–1989. Collection number MS-Â�R37. University of California, Irvine Library Special Collections and Archives 92623–9557. 105. Ibid. 106. Bosqui, 1952, 134. For a largely fictional account of her visit, with much festive dancing and the mysterious reappearance of Sienkiewicz, see Joe Chisholm, “Capistrano in MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s Time,” Westways, v. 28, n. 2, February 1936, 12–13. 107. Starr, 1973, 396–397. 108. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, Omaha, 27 July 1887. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â� R037. Box 1: folder 1. 109. Ellen K. Lee, “Historical Background of the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska House, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon, Orange County, California.” Typescript (1989). Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 9.. 110. Ibid. 111. Starr, 1973, 417. 112. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa and Leon Kozakiewicz, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Ranch, 30 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1888, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 102–103. 113. Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: SouthÂ�ern California Through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 184–189. 114. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 541. 115. Marie H. McCoy, “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Mountain Home,” Land of Sunshine, January 1897, v. 1, 69–70. 116. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska spoke of “Art” being “such a tyrant” in a letter to Annie Fields, El Toro, Los Angeles County, 5 April 1889, F13406 from the James T. Fields Collection. Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 117. See her 9 May 1897 letter to her sister-Â�in-Â�law, Anna, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 226. 118. Ibid., 228; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Wolska, Los Angeles, 2 March 1897, 220; and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Teonia and Józef Chłapowski, Arden, 29 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1896, 212. 119. See, for example, Chłapowski’s extensive letter of instructions to Clementine Langenberger (Louisville, February 26, 1892—cited from the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California) in which he asked her to hire a gardener, cook, and chambermaid, freshen up the wallpaper and mattings for the rooms, and put in provisions for Ralph and his family! 120. For more information on Payne and his work, see the Web site for the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants—www.theodorepayne.org.


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121. Theodore Payne, Life on the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Ranch in the Gay Nineties (Los Angeles: Kruckeberg Press, 1962), 65, 39, 41. 122. See Kindred and Related Spirits: The Letters of John Muir and Jeanne C. Carr, edited Bonnie J. Gisel (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001). 123. Coleman, 1969, 482. 124. For a detailed account of this crime and its aftermath, see Lee, “Helena Modjeska and the Francisco Torres Affair, Summer 1892,” Southern California Quarterly, v. 51, n. 1, March 1969, 35–56. On 5 August 1892, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska wrote about how the murder affected her to Clementine Langenberger; fortunately, she and Chłapowski had been in Anaheim when it was committed: “Thank you so much for your comforting letter! I have been worrying about the murder—but time is a great doctor and I feel quiet now, but instead of mental ill I have a physical one and since two days I suffer from fever and indigestion.” Letter contained in the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California. 125. Payne, 1962, 35, 52, 68. 126. Ibid., 98. 127. Gilder, 1916, 140. 128. See White’s letter from New York, 14 April 1888, in Orzechowski, 2000, 111. Ellen K. Lee notes these White “touches” in her 1989 publication for the Orange County Historical Society, “The MoÂ�djeÂ�ska-Â�Walker House: 1888–1988,” 122. 129. Lee, “Historical Background of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska House,” 1989, 7. 130. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helen (Lukens) Jones (Gaut), 27 June 1902. Letter held in Ralph Arnold Collection, Box 11B. Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 131. Cited from an occasional pamphlet titled, “A Visit to the Walker Residence, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon, April 20, 1970.” Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 11. 132. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 540–541, 543; Coleman, 1969, 547–548; Lee, “Historical Background of the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska House,” 1989, 17. 133. See, for example, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 22 January 1890 letter, sent to Clementine Langenberger from Boston, asking her friend to send one of her older children as a guide to Mrs. Winter at Arden: “I want her to have a good opinion of our dear California.” Bowers Museum, MoÂ�djeÂ� ska Collection, Santa Ana, California. Both families bought their own vacation properties in California—the Paderewskis in Paso Robles and the Winters in Mentone. 134. Payne, 1962, 90. 135. Otis Skinner, Footlights and Spotlights: Recollections of My Life on the Stage (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Â�Merrill Company, 1924), 220. 136. Payne, 1962, 92. In her memoir, The Family Circle, Cornelia Otis Skinner tells somewhat taller tales about her parents’ illustrious friend, claiming that Sienkiewicz, the opera singing de Reszkes, and Joseph Conrad (!) all regularly visited MoÂ�djeÂ�ska on her ranch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948), 34. 137. Lee, “Historical Background of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska House,” 1989, 45. 138. Everett Carroll Maxwell, “A Trespasser in Arden,” Los Angeles Times, 24 SepÂ�temÂ� ber 1911; reprinted in pamphlet, “A Visit to the Walker Residence, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon, April 24, 1970.” 139. Ibid. 140. See MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s typically informal invitation to May (Mabel) Langenberger, the daughter of her friend Clementine, to join her family for a picnic at the County’s lovely

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not e s to page s 1 42–1 46

Picnic Grounds: “We shall bring a luncheon with us, which, I hope, will be sufficient, but some of you may bring a bottle of whiskey because we are short of that article.” Letter of 23 May 1896 in the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California. 141. Howard Kyle, once a player in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s company, remarked that the title “Madame” as applied to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “implied in the tone of its utterance a compromise between love of the woman and respect for the artist” (“On Tour with Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” The Met ropolitan Magazine, January 1910, 445). 142. Ernest Crozier Phillips’s scrapbook, “A week spent with Count Bożenta on Balboa Island,” Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. Ellen Lee Material. FB-Â�110: Folder 5. 143. Ibid. 144. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Konstanty M. Gorski, Arden, 8 February 1904, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 333. 145. Havrah Hubbard, The Joyous Child (“Das froeliche Kind”). A Personality Sketch of Anna Held Heinrich (Lugano, Switzerland: 1939), HM27790. Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 146. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa and Leon Kozakiewicz, Arden, 5 April 1889, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 105. 147. 26 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1888, El Toro, from the Belle R. Kendall Collection 1945 HM44790. Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 148. 18 June 1890, Arden, James T. Fields Collection, CA 142, Box 5. Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 149. Payne, 1962, 36. 150. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 146. 151. Starr, 1973, 135. Starr quotes the observation of Professor E. S. Carr (Jeanne Carr’s husband) that “516 Californians owned 8,685,439 acres, an area nearly twice the size of Massachusetts. Another 12 million or so acres were tied up in grants to railroads. California had been carved into a series of feudal domains.” 152. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa and Leon Kozakiewicz, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Ranch, 30 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1888, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 103–104. 153. Florence Yoch’s 2 February 1967 letter, solicited by Ellen Lee, is included in Lee’s “Historical Background of the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska House,” 1989. 154. Coleman, 1969, 769. 155. Amy Leslie, Some Players. Personal Sketches (Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1899), 7. 156. Ignace Jan Paderewski and Mary Lawton, The Paderewski Memoirs (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 361–362. 157. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 12 July 1894 letter to May Langenberger and her undated 1894 letter to Clementine (presumably around the same date) are both in the Bowers Museum MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Santa Ana, California. 158. See MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 12 July 1896 letter to Clementine Langenberger in the Bowers Museum MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Santa Ana, California. 159. Coleman, 1969, 734–745. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska mentions how happy her husband is with the full reservoir in a 13 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1900 letter to Anna Chłapowska, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 253. 160. Coleman, 1969, 789, 804. 161. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Chłapowski, San Francisco, 30 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1896, in Orzechowski, 2000, 202.

not e s to page s 1 46 –15 4

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162. Paderewski, 1938, 361. 163. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józef i Teonia Chłapowski, Arden, Summer 1905, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 344. This frank letter also conveyed the sad news that their devoted maid Naścia Skowrońska would be leaving them after several months withÂ�out pay. 164. Coleman, 1969, 850. 165. Ibid. 166. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Ludwika Chłapowska, Tustin, 2 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1907, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 370–371. 167. Coleman, 1969, 868. 168. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Bay Island, Calif., 28 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1908, in Got and Â�Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 370–371. 5. On th e A m er iÂ�ca n Roa d 1. Garff B. Wilson, A History of AmeriÂ�can Acting (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 57–58. 2. Watermeier, 1971, 272. 3. Ibid., 109n56. 4. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 531. 5. McArthur, 1984, 170; Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the AmeriÂ�can Theater, 1890–1920 (New York, Praeger, 1984), 4. 6. Wilson, 1966, 42, 57–61. 7. Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the AmeriÂ�can Stage: From Booth and Barrett to Sothern and Marlowe, Vol. 2 (Washington: Associated University Presses, 1987), 21. 8. Dudden, 1994, 30; Logan, 1870, 380; McArthur, 1984, 48; Watermeier, 1999, 465. 9. Watermeier, 1971, 168–188; see also Edwin Duerr, The Length and Depth of Acting, with a foreword by A. M. Nagler (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962), 363. 10. On Neilson’s achievements as a Shakespearean actress, see especially William Winter’s Other Days (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1908), 283, 286, 287, and his Wallet of Time (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1913), 559–561. For Terry’s evaluation by a contemporary AmeriÂ�can critic, see Matthews and Hutton, 1886, 249–256. 11. Thomas Postlewait, “The Hieroglyphic Stage: AmeriÂ�can Theatre and Society, Post– Civil War to 1945,” in The Cambridge History of AmeriÂ�can Theatre, 1999, 137. 12. Wilson, 1966, 110–111, 122–127. 13. Chicago Tribune, 11 May 1884. 14. Wilson, 1966, 112. 15. Cf. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Stefania Leowa, San Francisco, 15 March 1877, and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Faleńska, 23 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 370–373, 398–400. 16. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Faleńska, Zakopane, 14 July 1879, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 459–460. 17. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Wolska, Omaha, 14 August 1887, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 90. 18. McArthur (1984, x) states that the combination system was set in place between 1880 and 1910. Postlewait (1999, 152) notes that there were typically 250 to 300 shows on the road in this period. 19. The best description of this shift appears in Alfred L. Bernheim’s The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the AmeriÂ�can Theatre, 1750–1932 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1932), 20–39. 20. For a description of the museum—its genesis, players, and history—see the memoir

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of one of its stock players, Kate Ryan’s Old Boston Museum Days (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1915), with numerous illustrations and photographs. 21. Postlewait, 1999, 150. McArthur (1984, 64–65) points out other human hazards of the road—alcoholism plus other forms of addiction and sexually transmitted diseases. 22. McArthur, 1984, 30. 23. Chłapowski to Anna Chłapowska, Anaheim, 1 or 8 February 1878, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 404. 24. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józia Tomaszewiczowa, Pittsburgh, 21 March 1878, in Orzechowski, 2000, 42. 25. Logan, 1870, 122–123. 26. Auster, 1984, 4; Wilson, 1966, 108. 27. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 364–365. 28. See her negative reaction to Bernhardt’s publicity making in her 30 March 1879 letter to an unidentified addressee, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 446. Susan A. Glenn, in Fe male Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), argues that the Barnum-Â�esque Bernhardt “ushered in a new cultural phenomenon: the egotistical female artist who not only promotes her plays, but actively constructs exhibits, and advertises her own curious and flamboyant personality” (29). See also Patricia Marks’s Sarah Bernhardt’s First AmeriÂ�can Theatrical Tour, 1880–1881 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2003): “Her histrionic pubÂ�lic acts were part of her temperament, but they were also symptomatic of her desire to succeed on her own” (12). 29. For her favorable impression of New Orleans, see MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 383–384, and her 12 FebÂ�ruÂ�ary 1879 letter to Faleńska, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 436. 30. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to the Editors of Czas [Time], 7 February 1879, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 433–435. 31. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Felicja Bendówna, 6 February 1879, and to Józia Tomaszewiczówna, 6 FebÂ�ruÂ�ary 1879, in Orzechowski, 2000, 47. 32. Bianka Kurylczyk, “Kostiumy Modrzejewskiej w świetle mody epoki,” Pamiętnik Teatralny, v. 58, n. 3–4 (231–232), 2009, 247, 250. 33. In When Broadway was the Runway: Fashion and AmeriÂ�can Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), Marlis Schweitzer observes: “A performer’s status as a fashionable woman similarly depended on her ability to continually appear and reappear in the latest styles, to make and remake herself as a commodity, all while remaining recognizable” (121). 34. Chicago Tribune, 4 May 1878. 35. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 376–377. 36. Daily Picayune, 6 February 1879; Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1878. 37. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 351. 38. Ibid., 339. 39. Wilson, 1966, 122–124. 40. Ibid., 125–127; Matthews and Hutton, 1886, 217–222; Winter, 1913, 564–567. 41. Wilson, 1966, 125. 42. Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: AmeriÂ�can Theatre and Society, 1820– 1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 119, 200, 214, 241. 43. See, for example, Chicago Daily News, 24 April 1878. 44. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 374, 379. 45. Coleman, 1969, 212–213.


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46. Daily Picayune, 6 February 1879. 47. Dudden, 1994, 79–81; Claudia D. Johnson, AmeriÂ�can Actress: Perspective on the Nine teenth Century (Chicago: Nelson-Â�Hall, 1984), 1990, 4, 12; Logan, 1870, 537. 48. Dudden, 1994, 79–81; Richard Butsch, The Making of AmeriÂ�can Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71–72, 78. 49. McConachie, 1992, 236–237. 50. Butsch, 2000, 67, 68, 74, 77. Mary C. Henderson, in The City and the Theatre: New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square (Clifton, NJ: James T. White & Company, 1973), notes the linkages between theaters, hotels, shops, and restaurants in New York starting in the 1870s (133). 51. McConachie, 1992, 245–246. 52. Ibid.,157–158; Butsch, 2000, 80. 53. Watermeier, 1971, 14–15; McArthur, 1984, 146. 54. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 142, 144. 55. McConachie, 1992, 237, 239, 241; McArthur, 1984, 78–82. 56. McConachie, 1992, 238. On the cult of true womanhood flourishing in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Carroll Smith-Â�Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 199. 57. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Faleńska, New York, 23 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 398–400. 58. New York Times, 23 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877. 59. Watermeier, 1971, 13. 60. New York Tribune, 24 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1877. 61. Wilson (1966) so defines Booth’s technique and poetics of performance (74–76). 62. Winter, “Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” 1913, 371–372. 63. New York Times, 8 February 1878 (emphasis in the original). 64. Cleveland Plain Dealer, 26 March 1878. 65. Autograph letter signed from H. J. Sargent, Baltimore, with autograph postscript signed from Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to William Winter, 14 February 1878, Folger MS Y.c.1471, (16). 66. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to William Winter, New York, 2 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1878. Original letter held in the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 67. Watermeier, 1971, 14, 15. 68. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska requests and then responds to Winter’s adaptation in two letters to Mrs. William Winter, , Folger MS Y.c.1471 (10) (New York, 28 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895) and Folger MS Y.c.1471 (12) (Pittsburgh, 14 January 1896). 69. Watermeier, 1971, 15. 70. Maurice Francis Egan, Recollections of a Happy Life, introduction by Henry van Dyke (New York: George H. Doran Company on Murray Hill, 1924), 117. Egan remembers that, whereas Richard Watson Gilder “resembled a well-Â�bred Italian, distinguished, gentle and with the proper air of reserve when reserve was the proper thing,” his sister Jeannette “was tall and of rather masculine appearance. . . . When Miss Gilder appeared in a very rough and long ulster, topped by a derby hat, and informed me that she was not afraid to go anywhere at night because she sometimes carried a little revolver,” Egan notes, “I had every reason to believe that I was being taken home.” 71. On “The Society of AmeriÂ�can Artists,” see Gilder, 1916, 79. 72. Ibid., 62–66.

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73. Adele Le Bourgeois Chapin, “Their Trackless Way”: A Book of Memories, edited by Christina Chapin (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1932), 75. 74. Egan, 1924, 107. 75. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 356–357. 76. Gilder, 1916, 83–84. 77. “My husband is very homesick for 103 E. 15th Street, New York.” Quoted from 16 DeÂ� cemÂ�ber 1878 letter. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 1. 78. Shattuck, 1987, 318n144. 79. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, Terre Haute House, Terre Haute, Indiana, 3 March 1879. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 1. 80. See MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, Louisville, 22 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1885, Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 1. Chłapowski to Richard Gilder, London, 24 March 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 486–487. 81. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, 3 March 1878, in Orzechowski, 2000, 29; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 360–361. 82. In Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), Charles C. Calhoun similarly notes that “Longfellow found himself increasingly drawn in his last two decades toward playing a pubÂ�lic role that he both welcomed and regretted” (245). Longfellow biographer Christoph Irmscher characterizes his subject as “America’s first ‘pop’ poet,” an artist who “enjoyed the kind of celebrity status that nowadays would win him the devoted attention of the National Enquirer or Star magazine” (Longfellow Redux [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006], 3, 11, 26). Both Calhoun and Irmscher identify Longfellow’s championship of women writers and performers. They note his close friendship with the famed actress Fanny Kemble (Calhoun, 2004, 194; Irmscher, 2006, 25), and Irmscher remarks his admiration for George Sand’s work and the remarkably large number of women writers he included in his edited volume, Poems of Places (174, 209). Kate Ryan, a stock player in the Boston Museum, remembers that “Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, and Thomas Russell Sullivan contributed their books to our library. It was at the Museum that I met Longfellow and also Doctor Holmes” (Ryan, 1915, 178–179). 83. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 380. 84. In her biography, Annie Adams Fields: The Spirit of Charles Street (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), Judith A. Rosman thus describes their relations: “Unlike contemporary couples, the division of labor between home and office was by no means complete. James often solicited Annie’s opinion about books and articles, and he sometimes guided her selection of a menu when an important guest came to dine, especially in the early years of their marriage” (23). 85. Ibid., 13, 23. 86. Susan K. Harris, The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Â�Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 12. 87. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 383. 88. Rosman, 1994, 26. 89. Ibid., 105. 90. Ibid., 154. 91. Harris (2002) remarks how “Annie Fields’s circle included many of the figures behind


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the founding of major Boston cultural institutions, especially the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.” This elite, she argues, was “more interested in art as an aesthetic experience than as an agency for educating the general populace” (144). 92. 3 March 1878 letter to Józefa Bendowa, in Orzechowski, 2000, 40. 93. 6 March 1878 letter to Józefa Bendowa, in Orzechowski, 2000, 43. 94. 28 February 1878 letter to Jan S. Jasiński, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 412. 95. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 363–364. 96. Ibid., 459–460. See also Bogar, 2006, 144. 97. Bogar, 2006, 144. Arthur, however, was unable to obtain a ticket to see MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in Cymbeline while he was on a trip to Chicago in 1883 (Ibid., 146–147). 98. Ibid. 99. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 383–385. 100. See her 12 February 1879 letter sent from Memphis, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 436. 101. Isaac F. Marcosson, “Marse Henry”: A Biography of Henry Watterson, with foreword by Arthur Krock (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1951), 213–214. 102. Lewis O. Saum, Eugene Field and His Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 164, 166, 176–177; Slason Thompson, Eugene Field: A Study in Heredity and Contradic tions, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 242–245. 103. Saum, 2001, 30, 166; Thompson, 1901, 243,153–155. 104. Copies of both these poems appear in Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Countess Bożenta: Ameri can Poets in Honor of Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Émigré Queen, compiled and edited by Emil OrÂ� zechowski and Kazimierz Braun (Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Buffalo Press, 1993), 26–30, 32. 105. de Kay, 1879, 667, 669. 106. New York Times, 13 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1878. 107. Daily Picayune, 8 February 1879. 108. Boston Evening Transcript, 23 April 1879. 109. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to an unknown addressee, Chicago, 30 March 1879, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 443–446. 110. Dudden, 1994, 74, 77. 111. Ibid., 84–85. Dudden notes that Cushman “went armed [to England] with no less than seventy letters” of introduction to those who would ensure her respect. 112. Gail Marshall, “Cultural Formations: The Nineteenth-Â�Century Touring Actress and her International Audiences,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57. 113. Watermeier, 1971, 180. 114. Ibid., 187–188. 115. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Edwin Booth, London, 13 June 1881, in Orzechowski, 2000, 70–71. 116. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Emilia Sierzputowska, London, DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1881, in Orzechowski, 2000, 73. 117. Dolcio failed his first admission exams to the famous Parisian engineering school in 1880, but was soon back on track. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, London, 1880, in OrzeÂ� chowski, 2000, 68. On MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Madame Duluc, see Lidia Kuchtówna, “O kostiumach Modrzejewskiej,” Pamiętnik Teatralny, v. 58, n. 3–4 (231–232), 2009, 225. 118. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 391–394. 119. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Mukhanov, KraÂ�ków, around 15 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1879, and Mukhanov to MoÂ�djeÂ� ska, WarÂ�saw, 6 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1879. Bogusławski sent MoÂ�djeÂ�ska permission to play La Dame aux Camelias in a 24 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1879 letter. All reprinted in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 236, 239, 242.

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120. Szczublewski, 1975, 295, 300. 121. Ibid., 300–303. 122. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 399, 401; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, London, around 8 April 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 495–496. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska identifies her teacher in a 29 March 1880 letter to Helena Gilder as a Mr. Harrison (491). In her 26 March 1880 letter to Wolska, she maintains that she is studying English every day for six to seven hours (489). 123. It bears mentioning, however, that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska was not averse to contemplating from time to time Polish-Â�language performances in St. Petersburg. In her talks with her protégée, Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova likely convinced her of the Russian capital’s cosmopolitanism. 124. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 396. 125. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Sierzputowska, London, 10 March 1880, in Orzechowski, 2000, 60–61. 126. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Witkiewicz, London, 31 March 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 494. 127. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 429–434. 128. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, London, 29 March 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 491–493. 129. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Faleńska, London, 18 April 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 498. 130. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 401. 131. Ibid., 402. 132. Ibid., 404. 133. Ibid., 405–410. 134. Ibid., 398–400. 135. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Witkiewicz, London, around 4 May 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 499–500. 136. Estreicher requested these materials in his 10 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1880 and 2 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1880 letters to the actress, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 517, 519. 137. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Estreicher, Leeds, 6 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 517. 138. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Sierzputowska, London, 18 July 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 408–409. 139. Bogusławski to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, WarÂ�saw, 3 February 1881, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 5–6. 140. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to an unknown addressee, London, around 18 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 522. 141. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, London, March 1881, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 8–9. 142. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, London, 1880, in Orzechowski, 2000, 68. 143. New York Times, 2 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1880. 144. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 414. 145. Ibid., 438–441. 146. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Leowa, London, February 1881, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 8. 147. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 418. 148. Ibid., 420. 149. New York Times, 6 January 1882. 150. Marshall, 2007, 52–73. 151. Beyond their acquaintanceship through the Gilders, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska found in James a theater lover highly appreciative of her skills and delicacy; he would later request her to com-


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ment on and star in one of his own dramas. Photocopies of his letters (the originals are held by Houghton Library, Harvard University) can be found in Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 2. 152. Szczublewski, 1975, 356–357. 153. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 434–437. 154. Szczublewski, 1975, 338–339. 155. Ibid., 346–351. 156. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 443, 445. 157. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Witkiewicz, Glasgow, 20 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1881, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 13. 158. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 451. 159. Ibid., 453. 160. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Pierre Berton, London, 22 June 1882, in Orzechowski, 2000, 74. 161. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Faleńska, 2 May 1882, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 21–22. 162. Szczublewski, 1975, 361. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska promised her mother that she would finish this last tour in America and be home in nine months (MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, 7 SepÂ�temÂ� ber 1882, in Orzechowski, 2000, 75). 163. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, New York, 18 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1882, in Orzechowski, 2000, 75–76. 164. “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Arrival,” New York Times, 19 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1882. 165. Coleman, 1969, 553. 166. Bernheim, 1932, 46–47, 50. For more details on the syndicate’s control over venue, circuit, repertoire, and even theatrical criticism, see Schweitzer, 2009, 20–21. 167. See, for example, Chłapowski’s 21 January 1898 letter to Joseph Buckley, their company’s onetime manager who then got employment with one of the Syndicate partnerships (Klaw and Erlanger); Buckley had apparently signed MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s company for engagements in Syndicate-Â�controlled theaters withÂ�out Chłapowski’s consent (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 236–237). 168. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Mrs. James Rice, Arden, 21 August 1905. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. James S. Rice Family Papers. MS-Â�R45. Box 3: folder 1. 169. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 458. 170. “Maurice Barrymore” was the stage name of Herbert Blythe, which he assumed to spare his father the shame of his chosen profession. 171. Ibid., 461–462. 172. Daniel Frohman, Daniel Frohman. An Autobiography (New York: Claude Kendall and Willoughby Sharp, 1935), 106, 101. 173. Coleman, 1969, 356–357. 174. New York Times, 11 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1885. 175. For example, in reporting on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Chicago engagements in OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1885, the New York Times confirmed that “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska has played to enormous houses thus far upon her tour” (1 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1885). 176. “A Talk with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. Her AmeriÂ�can Season and Future Plans,” in New York Times, 8 June 1884. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s profits were impressive, but her control over her company may not have been as thorough as she wished, contending with big egos such as Barrymore’s. A newspaper item in February 1884 revealed how MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s attempt to instill punctuality in her

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troupe by obliging any latecomer to wear a fool’s cap backfired when the company tinkered with the clocks. The star herself thus became the first offender, and the penalty was immediately dropped (New York Times, 3 February 1884). 177. “A Great Actress’s Ideal. Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Hopes for the Drama. The Desire to Raise the Plane of Her Art Gratified in Her Engagement with Edwin Booth,” New York Times, 25 August 1889. 178. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Chłapowski San Francisco, 23 January 1889, in Orzechowski, 2000, 114. 179. New York Tribune, 28 January 1886. 180. Coleman, 1969, 402–403. 181. New York Tribune, 11 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1886. 182. St. Louis Globe-Â�Democrat, 29 April 1887. 183. Coleman, 1969, 600. 184. Milwaukee Sentinel, 9 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1892 and 6 January 1893. 185. Kurylczyk, 2009, 257. 186. Coleman, 1969, 740. 187. Benda, n.d. 188. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 22 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1898. 189. Shattuck, 1987, 135. 190. Denver Post, 26 April 1899. 191. Coleman, 1969, 752. 192. Ibid., 752–753. 193. Clipping from the San Francisco Daily Call found in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Box 6. Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 194. See, for example, San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 1 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1899. 195. New York Times, 2 March 1900. 196. Otis Skinner, 1924, 218. 197. Szczublewski, 1975, 538. 198. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska reports this in an interview, “Modern and Classic Art. Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Has Something to Say on the Subject,” New York Times, 13 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895. 199. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Sarah Orne Jewett, New York, 28 February 1900. James T. Fields Collection, Box 4, FI3405. Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 200. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Mrs. McCoy, Marquette, Michigan, 20 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1905. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: Folder 3. 201. Curry, 1994, 77, 84, 87–89. 202. For more information on the evolution, image, and productions of the new male regisseur, see Kim Marra, Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the AmeriÂ�can Theatre, 1865– 1914 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006); on the Rehan-Â�Daly duet, see 48–71. 203. Curry, 1994, 129. 204. Wilson, 1966, 224–237. 205. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski to Maria Faleńska, Decatur, Illinois, 26 April 1890, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 112. 206. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 377. 207. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Edwin Booth, London, 18 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1883. Hampden Booth Library, Players Club, New York, New York. 208. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Fred Stinson, before OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1883, in Orzechowski, 2000, 112.


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209. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Grace Fisher, Occidental Hotel, 15 January 1897. Letter held in the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Polish translation in Orzechowski, 2000, 204. 210. Ibid. 211. “Mirror Interviews: Mary Shaw,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 26 June 1897. 212. Auster, 1984, 75. 213. E. H. Sothern, Julia Marlowe’s Story, edited by Fairfax Downey (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1954), 79, 81. 214. Charles Edward Russell, Julia Marlowe: Her Life and Art (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1926), 126. 215. Some of the monies used for this purpose had been raised by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s February 1886 benefit performance in New York. 216. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to her husband, Boston, 3 March 1886, in Orzechowski, 2000, 97–98. 217. See also MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letters to Chłapowski sent from the road on 16 March 1886 and 19 March 1886, in Orzechowski, 2000, 101–102. 218. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Chłapowski, Pittsburgh, 15 April 1886, in Orzechowski, 2000, 103. 219. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Anna Chłapowska, Chicago, 8 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1892, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 161–162. 220. “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska: She Chats with a Picayune Reporter. The Actress in Her Drawing-Â� Room Car. A Few Comments on Art, Literature and the Drama,” Daily Picayune, 7 DeÂ�cemÂ� ber 1887. 221. Leslie, 1899, 7–8. 222. Otis Skinner, 1924, 203–204. 223. Leslie, 1899, 8, 390–391. 224. Ethel Barrymore, Memories: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), 12–13. 225. Ibid., 34. 226. Cornelia Otis Skinner, 1948, 23–26. 227. Quoted from the original English text included in Cornelia Otis Skinner, 1948, 28. This letter was likely sent in April 1893. 228. See Durbin’s diary included in Otis Skinner, 1924, 221. 229. Cornelia Otis Skinner, 1948, 31–32. 230. Ibid., 34–35. 231. Chłapowski to his family, Toronto, Canada, between 12 and 14 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1893, in Orzechowski, 2000, 238. 232. Otis Skinner, 1924, 217. 233. Unidentified clipping from 8 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1883. Held in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, MWEZ & n.c. 474,. 234. See New York Times, 29 March and 3 April 1884. According to Coleman (1969), BarryÂ� more offered the play to Bernhardt when he arrived in London and later was enraged to see her in a new Sardou vehicle, La Tosca, which he “insisted was nothing more than his Nad jezda revamped” (336). 235. “Frank Clements Killed, Run over by a Railroad Train in Newark,” New York Times, 9 May 1886. 236. Coleman, 1969, 390, 412. 237. William S. Hart, My Life East and West, edited by Martin Ridge (Chicago: R. R. DonÂ�nelly and Sons Company, 1994), 122; Otis Skinner, 1924, 199.

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238. Cushman excelled all her stage life in the role of Meg Merrilies, the queen of the gypsies who aids the hero at critical junctures in Guy Mannering, the stage adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s novel. See Dudden, 1994, 86–88. 6. Th e Roles of M a da m e MoÂ�dje Â�sk a 1. “Some Stories of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” New York Times, 5 February 1899. 2. New York Tribune, 7 January 1883. 3. New York Times, 2 January 1883. 4. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria Faleńska, 24 January 1883, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 33. 5. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 15–22, 38. 6. Wilson (1966) describes Forrest as an exemplar of the style of “strenuous realism,” with his powerful voice and magnificent physique (22, 23). 7. McConachie, 1992, 241. 8. Levine, 1988, 48. 9. Duerr, 1962, 363, 364. 10. Wilson, 1966, 75. 11. Ibid., 76–77. 12. Ibid., 61, 62. 13. Watermeier, 1971, 15. 14. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the AmeriÂ�can Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 142. 15. Shattuck (1976) so describes this phenomenon (137, 147). 16. Watermeier, 1971, 65, 70. 17. Trachtenberg, 1982, 8. 18. McConachie, 1992, 241. 19. St. Louis Globe-Â�Democrat, 1 February 1883. 20. San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 29 January 1889. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska made the same observation in a 21 February 1883 letter written to Maria Pietrzkiewicz, in Orzechowski, 2000, 81: “It’s just a pity that the number of women’s roles is so limited in Shakespeare.” 21. Shattuck, 1987, 93. 22. Ibid., 95. 23. The reviewer of Two Gentlemen of Verona in Cleveland Plain Dealer, 8 April 1886, offered this capsule description of Julia. 24. Leslie, 1899, 18. 25. New York Tribune, 9 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. 26. New York Times, 9 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. 27. Ibid., 12 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. 28. St. Louis Globe-Â�Democrat, 31 January 1883. 29. Milwaukee Sentinel, 20 February 1883. 30. Chicago Tribune, 6 February 1883. 31. New York Times, 7 January 1886. 32. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 29 January 1889. 33. “Nym Crinkle’s Feuilleton,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 16 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889. InterestÂ� ingly enough, in his review the week before, Crinkle criticized Booth’s “indolent” elocution: “I still hold to the wretched conceit that nobody can read Shakespeare’s lines like Edwin Booth, when he wants to. I still hold that he doesn’t always want to. I think that in the


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struggle of genius and indolence virtue is not always triumphant” (“Nym Crinkle’s Feuilleton,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 9 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889). 34. Winter, 1913, 391–392. 35. Ibid. 36. New York Tribune, 12 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. 37. Winter, 1913, 387. In his Shakespeare on Stage. Second Series (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1915), Winter pronounced Ada Rehan, one of the stars of Daly’s company, as the best Rosalind, an actress who most exactly discriminated “the three essential dramatic conditions of Rosalind—the woman, the woman playing the boy, and the ‘boy’ playing the woman” (272). 38. New York Times, 12 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. 39. The Critic, An Illustrated Monthly Review of Literature, Art, and Life,16 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. 40. Milwaukee Sentinel, 20 February 1883. 41. San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 15 May 1883. 42. Louisville Courier-Â�Journal, 24 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1883. 43. Chicago Tribune, 14 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1885 and 18 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1885. 44. San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 13 February 1889. 45. George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, Vol. 12, 1882–1885 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936) 235–236. 46. New York Tribune, 12 January 1892. 47. “Rosalind: A Paper Read by Mme. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Before the Goethe Society of the City of New York” on Friday, January 22, 1892. From a copy held in the Bowers Museum MoÂ� djeÂ�ska Collection, Santa Ana, California. 48. New York Times, 19 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. 49. New York Tribune, 19 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882. 50. John Ranken Towse, The Century, NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1883, cited in Matthews and Hutton, 1886, 207. 51. Philadelphia Public Ledger, 5 February 1886. 52. Chicago Tribune, 25 April 1886. 53. New York Times, 7 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1886. 54. Odell, 1936, 23. Odell thought it sad that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska had to bolster her box office after performing Twelfth Night with more performances of Camille. 55. Kurylczyk, 2009, 259. 56. Winter, 1915, 292; John Ranken Towse, Sixty Years of the Theatre (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1916), 205. 57. See footnote 54; also Towse, 1916, 206. 58. The Philadelphia Public Ledger, 21 March 1888. 59. New York Times, 8 February 1888. 60. Ibid., 3 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1892. 61. Shattuck, 1987, 132. 62. New York Times, 29 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1889. 63. Winter, 1913, 388. 64. “Nym Crinkle’s Feuilleton,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 16 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889. 65. See, for example, Baltimore Sun, 4 March 1890, and New York Tribune, 5 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889. 66. New York Dramatic Mirror, 9 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889. For Dithmar’s review, see New York Times, 6 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889. 67. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 29 January 1889.

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68. New York Times, 7 February 1888. 69. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 29 January 1889. 70. New York Tribune, 8 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895. 71. Milwaukee Sentinel, 7 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1883. 72. Towse, “Charlotte Cushman, Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, and Bernhardt,” 1916, 266–269. 73. New York Times, 6 February 1888. 74. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 29 January 1889. 75. New York Tribune, 8 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895. 76. Winter, 1913, 390. 77. Ibid. 78. Denver Post, 26 February 1901. 79. New York Times, 11 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1892. 80. Towse, 1916, 279. 81. New York Tribune, 19 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889. 82. Baltimore Sun, 7 March 1890. 83. Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 254–255; Shattuck, 1987, 95, 119–120. 84. Shattuck (1987) favorably compares the consistency of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s interpretation with the “bold-Â�hearted criminal Ladies Macbeth of tradition who growled and stormed their way through three acts and then almost unaccountably collapsed into remorseful dreams and death in Act V. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska planned her entire performance as a steady progression toward the Sleep-Â�walking Scene” (134). 85. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 6 May 1894. 86. New York Times, 4 March 1900. 87. Ibid., 8 February 1898. 88. Towse, 1916, 277; Winter, 1913, 383. 89. New York Tribune, 12 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1892. 90. Chicago Tribune, 6 May 1884. 91. New York Times, 6 January 1886. 92. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 5 February 1889; Los Angeles Evening Express, 27 FebruÂ�a ry 1889. 93. Winter, 1913, 382. 94. Baltimore Sun, 1 March 1887. 95. New York Dramatic Mirror, 26 February 1898. 96. Towse, 1916, 273. 97. Louisville Courier-Â�Journal, 26 February 1892. 98. In its 23 March 1890 review of Donna Diana, the Chicago Tribune noted that “Mme. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Diana is quite as enjoyable as her Beatrice to which, indeed, it is akin.” 99. New York Times, 14 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1886. 100. New York Dramatic Mirror, 26 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895. 101. New York Tribune, 19 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895. 102. For an overview of AmeriÂ�can playwrighting in this era, see Tice L. Miller’s “Plays and Playwrights: Civil War to 1896,” in The Cambridge History of AmeriÂ�can Theatre, 1999, 233–261. 103. Chicago Tribune, 24 May 1887, and New York Times, 13 February 1884. 104. Louisville Courier-Â�Journal, 29 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1885. 105. Boston Evening Transcript, 3 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1891.


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106. New York Tribune, 14 January 1892. 107. New York Times, 14 January 1892. The New York Dramatic Mirror, owned and edited by Harrison Grey Fiske, Minnie’s husband, predictably praised the play, rebutting other papers’ remarks about its similarity to Sardou’s works, and claiming that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska “had rarely played a part that displayed her artistic accomplishments to better advantage.” See issues 16 January 1892 and 23 January 1892. 108. Coleman, 1969, 745–746. For more on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s search for a new Polish play and her specific relationship with Zapolska, see Holmgren, “Public Women, Parochial Stage: The Actress in Late Nineteenth-Â�Century Poland,” in Poles Apart: Women in Modern Polish Cul ture, edited by Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 2006). 109. See Postlewait (1999): “After the Civil War not a year passed withÂ�out someone lamenting ‘the failure of the AmeriÂ�can playwright’ or calling for the ‘new AmeriÂ�can theatre’ or the ‘future AmeriÂ�can drama.’ Even the playwrights themselves, inÂ�cludÂ�ing Augustin Daly, Edward Harrigan, Dion Boucicault, and Bronson Howard joined the campaign” (123). 110. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska likely retitled Ibsen’s work to prevent audience confusion about its contents. Coleman (1969) remarks that when the actor Richard Mansfield mounted Ibsen’s A Doll’s House under the original title on OcÂ�toÂ�ber 30, 1889, “the play was looked upon as an exotic, in Philadelphia, because of its title, as something exclusively for children” (315). 111. Sally Ledger, “Ibsen, the New Woman, and the Actress,” in The New Woman in Fic tion and in Fact: Fin-Â�de-Â�Siecle Feminisms, edited by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, with a foreword by Lyn Pykett (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 82. 112. Ibid., 84. 113. Gail Finney, “Ibsen and feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, edited by James McFarlane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 89–92. 114. Ledger, 2001, 89. In Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), Gay Gibson Cima points out that “with Ibsen, the female actor for the first time faced the task of portraying a realistic character in a play that depended heavily on retrospective action,” a structure necessitating serious close study of Ibsen’s texts (26–27). 115. Quoted in Finney, 1994, 93. The original quote appears in Elizabeth Robins, Â�Ibsen and the Actress (New York: Haskell House and Publishers, reprinted 1973), 55. As Robins notes, “Ibsen’s deep knowledge of human nature, coupled with this sixth sense of his— the sense of the theatre—was less clouded than in most writers by a desire to dramatise Â�himself. . . . Certainly, as he grew older, as his experience ripened, he was more and more interested in and more aware of the effect of modÂ�ern life on women” (54–55). 116. Auster (1984) claims that Fiske made Nora one of her signature roles from 1894 on (77). 117. Watermeier, 1999, 468. For further discussion of Fiske’s interpretation of Ibsen’s roles, see Cima, 1993, 27–28. 118. Coleman, 1969, 314. 119. Louisville Courier-Â�Journal, 8 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1883. 120. Chłapowski to Forrest Izard, Żegocin, Poland, 7 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1913, in Orzechowski, 2000, 325. 121. Skinner (1924) remembers working “with Mr. Bożenta” on a colloquial English rendering of the Sudermann play, 208. 122. Ibid., 217. 123. Daily Picayune, 29 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1893. 124. Leslie, 1899, 18.

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125. Ellen Donkin, “The Problem of Interpretation: Bernhardt, Duse, Fiske, and MoÂ�djeÂ� ska Perform Magda,” Turn-Â�of-Â�the-Â�Century Women, v. 4, n. 2, Winter 1987, 49. 126. New York Times, 30 January 1894; New York Dramatic Mirror, 5 February 1894. 127. New York Dramatic Mirror, 8 February 1894; Boston Evening Transcript, 13 February 1894. 128. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to an unknown addressee, Denver, March 1893, in Orzechowsk,i 2000, 157. 129. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Elizabeth Winter, Savannah, Georgia, 9 January 1894. Letter held in the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin 130. Winter, 1916, 372–373. 131. Ibid., 373–374, 376. 132. Donkin, 1982, 53, 57. 133. New York Tribune, 30 January 1894, and Winter, 1916, 377. 134. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 544n. 135. Chicago Tribune, 3 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1893. 136. Chicago Tribune, 28 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1893. 137. Chicago Tribune, 3 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1893. 138. Cf. Philadelphia Public Ledger, 16 January 1894; Los Angeles Evening Examiner, 13 April 1894. 139. Boston Evening Transcript, 13 February 1894. 140. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Anne Fields, 20 February 1894, Manchester, New Hampshire. James T. Fields Collection, Box 49, FI3402 (p. 8). Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.. 141. New York Times, 8 April 1907. 142. Glenn, 2000, 34. 143. “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. Arrival of Poland’s Histrionic Artist in the Cream City. She Discourses at Some Length upon Her Favorite Characters. Differing Tastes of AmeriÂ�cans in the East and West. Her Plans for the Future. Opinions of Milwaukee,” in Milwaukee Sentinel, 20 February 1883. 144. Coleman (1969) notes that Cole was the pen name of Mrs. Martha Reinhard Smallwood, a reporter “whom the famous editor of the Picayune, Eliza Jane Poitevant (‘Pearl Rivers’) had by careful cultivation nurtured into a great newspaper woman” (435). 145. Coleman (1969) more specifically reads this statement as “a sidelong reference to Cora Potter, a one-Â�time ‘SouthÂ�ern belle’ who was trying out the amateur stage” (435–436). 146. Watermeier, 1999, 464. 147. See, for example, McArthur, 1984, 67. 148. This article appeared in the 11 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889 issue of the New York Herald. For more information on this episode, see Eleanor Ruggles, Prince of Players: Edwin Booth (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1953), 347–348. 149. See New York Times, 12 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1889. 150. 27 August 1883, unidentified clipping. Held in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, MWEZ + n.c. 474 scrapbook 151. See MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Harriet H. Ayer, New York, 20 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1886, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 82–83. The advertisement for the fountain pen appears in the program advertising one of her final tours under the direction of Jules Murry—1906 or 1907. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. James S. Rice Family Papers. MS-Â�R45. Box 3: folder 7. See, finally, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letter to the manufacturer of these Felt Tablets, New York, 4 February 1888, in Orzechowski, 2000, 110.


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152. Glenn, 2000, 3. 153. In a two-Â�part series of essays for Jeannette Gilder’s journal The Critic, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska writes as a theater scholar, commencing a short history of the early Polish drama that includes a description of religious plays performed in Polish villages. The Critic, July–Â�December 1899; January to June 1900. 154. OcÂ�toÂ�ber 6, 1882 manuscript of Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s article “Success on the Stage,” published in North AmeriÂ�can Review, DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1882, 584–587. Quoted by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 155. Auster, 1984, 70–71. 156. New York Times, 3 February 1894; New York Times, 15 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895; New York Dra matic Mirror, 26 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1895. 157. Minnie Maddern Fiske to Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, New York, 10 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1890. Original held in the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Polish version appears in Orzechowski, 2000, 131–132. 158. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 522. 159. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, “Endowed Theatres and the AmeriÂ�can Stage,” Forum, n. 14, NoÂ� vemÂ�ber 1892. 160. Levine, 1988, 70–71. 161. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 519–559. 162. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Daisy Leslie, Milwaukee, 18 March 1892, in Orzechowski, 2000, 149. 163. Alicia Kędziora, “Nieznane korespondencje Heleny Modrzejewskiej i Karola ChłaÂ� powÂ�skiego,” Pamiętnik teatralny, n. 3–4 (231–232), 2009, 292–295. 164. For more information on women philanthropists and activists’ prominent role in the design of this World’s Fair, see Jeanne Madeline Weimann’s The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981). Coleman, 1969, 623. 165. San Francisco Daily Chronicle, 5 May 1894. 166. New York Dramatic Mirror, 26 February 1898. 167. New York Dramatic Mirror, 5 March 1898. 168. Winter, 1913, 396–397. 169. Bogusławski to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, WarÂ�saw, 12 January 1891, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 131. 170. For a detailed analysis of Memories and Impressions, see Holmgren, 2007. 171. Thomas Postlewait, “Autobiography and Theatre History,” in Interpreting the The atrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989, 252. 7. Th e Polish MoÂ�djeÂ�sk a 1. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 7. 2. Chłapowski to Richard W. Gilder, Żegocin, 11 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1909, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 395. 3. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Anna Wolska, San Francisco, 5 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1877, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 394–395. The line “[Poland] has not yet perished . . .” quoted here begins the Polish national anthem. 4. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Władysław Bełza, Pittsburgh, 21 March 1878, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 415. 5. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Kazimierz Skrzyński, San Francisco, 23 January 1897, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 217–218.

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6. I am quoting these poems from the anthology Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Countess Bożenta (Orzechowski and Braun, 1993, 16, 38). 7. Ibid., 24. 8. Ibid., 44. 9. Forrest Izard, Heroines of the Modern Stage (New York: Sturgis & Walton Company, 1915), 88. 10. For her account of discovering Hofmann as a seven-Â�year-Â�old prodigy, see MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 472–473. The newspaper report about Hofmann and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska appears in an unidentified clipping in the MWEZ + n.c. 474 scrapbook. Held in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 11. Louisville Courier-Â�Journal, 26 February 1892. 12. Howard Kyle, address included in The Polish Institute of Arts and Letters New York Re port, 1932–1936 (New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Letters, 1938), 20. 13. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 466; Terlecki, 1962, 240–241; Szczublewski, 1975, 415. 14. Maja Trochimczyk, “An Archangel at the Piano: Paderewski’s Image and His Female Audience,” Polish AmeriÂ�can Studies, 67, n. 1 (Spring 2010), 2–5, 9–12. 15. Quoted from the original program given Mrs. James Rice by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ� ska Collection. James S. Rice Family Papers. MS-Â�R45. Box 3: folder 7. 16. Paderewski and Lawton, 1938, 362. 17. Trachtenberg, 1982, 209, 217, 231. 18. Paderewski caused a scandal by insisting that he perform on a Steinway at the fair, when the “approved” piano brand for the event was a Kimball. This contretemps in part led to the resignation of the fair’s music director, Theodore Thomas. See Robert Muccigrosso, Celebrating the New World Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 112–114. 19. For more on this topic, see Holmgren, 2006. 20. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 512. See also Weimann, 1981, 543–544. 21. Weimann, 1981, 524. 22. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 513. Terlecki notes a rumor that someone had slipped MoÂ�djeÂ�ska the text at the last minute, thereby putting her authorship into question. But the reports of her memorization of the speech’s parts indicate, at the very least, that the actress had reviewed and endorsed what she presented. 23. Szczublewski, 1975, 554. 24. Ibid., 436–437; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 488–490. 25. Coleman (1969) reprints the entire speech (624–630). 26. Ibid., 624. 27. Ibid., 625–626. 28. Ibid., 628–629. 29. Ibid., 630. 30. Ibid. 31. Terlecki (1962) identifies this role change after her 1893 speech (229). 32. Weimann, 1981, 544; Szczublewski, 1975, 554. In a 13 April 1895 letter to Leon Kozakiewicz, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska asked him to see if these volumes reached them intact, for she suspected that someone has planned to denounce her (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 190). 33. Szczublewski, 1975, 554. 34. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 513. 35. Szczublewski, 1975, 556.

not e s to page s 2 60 –2 64

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36. Glenn, 2000, 134–136. 37. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, Hotel Savoy, New York, 15 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1901. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ� ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 1. 38. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, Morges, Switzerland, 7 March 1903, Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 1. 39. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 517. 40. Florian Stasik, Polish Political Émigrés in the United States of America, 1831–1864, edited with an introduction by James S. Pula (Boulder, Colo.: Columbia University Press, East European Monographs, 2002), 172. 41. In Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-Â�AmeriÂ�can Identity, 1880–1939 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003), Karen Majewski estimates that “over one hundred Polish-Â� AmeriÂ�cans and Poles, inÂ�cludÂ�ing the celebrated generals Tadeusz Kościuszko and Â�Kazimierz Pułaski, fought in the AmeriÂ�can War of Independence.” The “first noticeable wave of immigrants,” she remarks, occurred after 1830 (20). Stasik, 2002, 204. 42. John J. Bukowczyk, A History of the Polish AmeriÂ�cans, with a new introduction by the author (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 15, 10. 43. Helena Znaniecki Lopata, Polish AmeriÂ�cans: Status Competition in an Ethnic Commu nity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Â�Hall, 1976), 3. 44. Bukowczyk, 2008, 23. Bukowczyk lays out the “racial” hierarchy Gilded Age industrialists used in evaluating their ethnically diverse labor force: “white native-Â�born AmeriÂ�cans [were] at the top; Irish, Scots, English, Welsh, and Germans below, but near them; Poles, Magyars, Italians, Slovaks, and Russians next, in various orders; and Black AmeriÂ�cans in the bottom category” (2008, 11–12, 21). 45. See William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s pioneering study, The Polish Peas ant in Europe and America, edited and abridged by Eli Zaretsky (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 248–249. On the provenance and roles of the Polish AmeriÂ�can priest, see William J. Galush, For More Than Bread: Community and Identity in AmeriÂ�can Polonia, 1880– 1940 (Boulder, Colo.: Columbia University Press, East European Monographs, 2006), 12, 17. 46. Bukowczyk, 2008, 41–43; Galush, 2006, 64. 47. Skinner, 1924, 205. 48. Ellen K. Lee, “The Catholic MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” Polish AmeriÂ�can Studies, v. 31, n. 1, Spring 1974, 22. 49. When her friend Anna Wolska had immersed herself in spiritualism, a dismayed MoÂ� djeÂ�ska urged her to return to the one true religion: “But why not give yourself completely over to faith in Christ, which is the most elevated of all the world’s religions?” For the CathoÂ�lic actress, Wolska’s spiritualism promised nothing better than the alternatives offered by “the many occultists, theosophists, and other ‘ists’” then proliferating in America. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Anna Wolska, Arden, 25 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1903, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 328–330. 50. Chłapowski to Anna Chłapowska, San Francisco, around 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1876, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 334. 51. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to an unknown addressee, Chicago, 30 March 1879, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 446–448. 52. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Kornel Ujejski, Boston, 21 April 1879, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 454–455. 53. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Chłapowska, Scranton, Pa., 6 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1895, in Got and SzczublewÂ�ski, 1965, v. 2, 202–203.

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54. Bukowczyk, 2008: 46, 50; Galush, 2006, 27. 55. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Anna Chłapowska, St. Paul, Minn., 13 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1900, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 253–254. 56. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Jane Donahue, Bay Island, Calif., OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1908, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 380–381. 57. Angela and David Pieńkos, “In the Ideals of Women is the Strength of a Nation”: A His tory of the Polish Women’s Alliance in America (Boulder, Colo.: Columbia University Press, East European Monographs, 2003), 13. 58. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Clementine Langenberger, Arden, right after Christmas 1904, letter held in Bowers Museum MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Santa Ana, California. 59. Galush, 2006, 106. 60. Arthur Leonard Waldo, “Polish-Â�AmeriÂ�can Theatre,” Ethnic Theatre in the United States, edited by Maxine Schwartz Seller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 389. 61. Galush, 2006, 107. 62. Waldo, 1983, 389. 63. Coleman, 1969, 664. 64. Arthur Leonard Waldo, Teofila Samolińska, Matka Związku Narodowego Polskiego w Ameryce (Chicago: Nakład prywatny, 1980), 10. 65. Waldo, 1983, 390. 66. Waldo, 1980, 34, 36. 67. Ibid., 36. 68. Waldo, 1983, 392; Orzechowski, 1989, 45–47. 69. Waldo, 1983, 392–393; Karol Wachtl, Polonja w Ameryce: Dzieje i dorobek, with foreword by Father Władysław Zapala (Philadelphia: Nakład autora, 1944), 267. 70. Orzechowski, 1989, 78. 71. Komitet Amatorskiego Towarzystwa Dramatycznego to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Trenton, 14 February 1896, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 205–206. 72. Orzechowski, 1989, 109–116. 73. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to the Editorial Board of Chicago Daily, USA, around 20 January 1901, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 256–257. 74. Józef Głomb, Rudolf Modrzejewski: Człowiek z pogranicza epok (Katowice: Wydawnictwo “Śląsk,” 1981), 38, 40–41. 75. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, New York, 3 January 1883, in Orzechowski, 2000, 79. 76. New York Times, 29 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1885. 77. Taken from 29 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1885 unidentified clipping in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 78. Ibid. 79. In “A Star Between Two Continents: Emigration and Dislocation in the London Career of Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1880–1885,” Polish Review, v. 41, n. 3, 1996, 329–334, Justyna Braun argues that “[a]cting was both MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s profession and the means of her pubÂ�lic existence. It dramatized a perpetual dislocation, a de-Â�centering, which she seemed to carry with her from the beginning of her life in Poland.” 80. It bears mentioning here that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska also pledged her spiritual guardianship to children of close Polish friends, inÂ�cludÂ�ing Chełmoński’s daughter and Witkiewicz’s son, the future artist, philosopher, and playwright Witkacy. See Szczublewski, 1975, 284, and PiaÂ� secki, 1983, 175. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska could not attend a baptismal ceremony for Witkiewicz’s son until 1891, when the boy was six years old.


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81. Terlecki, 1962, 233–234. 82. See MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letter to Józefa and Leon Kozakiewicz, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Ranch, 30 DeÂ�cemÂ� ber 1888, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 100–101. 83. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria Faleńska, Zakopane, 14 July 1879, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 459–461. 84. Szczublewski, 1975, 416. 85. When MoÂ�djeÂ�ska deeded Modrzejów to Ralph as a wedding present, he often met his father there, eventually ceding its management to Zimajer. Ralph likely approved the building’s use for the wedding of his half-Â�sister, Zimajer’s daughter Helena (Głomb, 1981, 91). Modrzejów burned to the ground in 1898, but was rebuilt several years later. Bought by a teachers’ union, it has served as a retreat for teachers before and after World War II (http://z-Â�ne.pl/ s,doc,21781,3,1298,,,.html, accessed March 26, 2011). 86. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Clementine Langenberger, Arden, after Christmas 1904, letter held in the Bowers Museum MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Santa Ana, California. 87. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Mrs. McCoy, Arden, 24 May 1899. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 3. 88. Benda, n.d., 10–11. 89. The “Helena Company” (“firma Heleny”) is Szczublewski’s (1975) formulation (607). 90. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Tomaszewiczówna, Arden?, 26 July 1887, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 84–86. 91. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria Popiełecka, Chicago?, around 10 February 1894, in Got and SzczuÂ�blewski, 1965, v. 2, 169–170. 92. Galush, 2006, 103–104. 93. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria Popiełecka, Arden, 11 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1904, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 336. 94. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria Popiełecka, Arden, 30 April 1900, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 245. 95. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa and Leon Kozakiewicz, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Ranch, 30 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1888, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 102. 96. Głomb, 1981, 37. 97. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, Boston, 25 February 1878, in Orzechowski, 2000, 39. 98. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria Faleńska, Philadelphia, 31 January 1878, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 1, 402. 99. Szczublewski, 1975, 341. 100. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Józefa Bendowa, Newnham Paddox, Lutterworth, 7 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1882, in Orzechowski, 2000, 75. 101. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Anna Wolska, Boston, 29 April 1883, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 39. 102. Adolf Opid to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski, KraÂ�ków 1883?, in Orzechowski, 2000, 88. 103. At one point, the actress states that she supports Ralph financially in part because “his name brings with it certain expenses and responsibilities.” See MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria PoÂ� piełecka, 17 July 1888, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 99. 104. Głomb, 1981, 46–47. 105. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Ralph and Felicja Modrzejewski, New York 12 January 1886, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 76–77. 106. Głomb, 1981, 62.

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107. Ibid., 93–94, 91. 108. Ibid., 20. 109. Ibid., 92. 110. Ibid., 143. 111. Undated newspaper clipping from the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska collection, MWEZ & n.c. 474, in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 112. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Chłapowski, San Francisco, 26 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1896, in Orzechowski, 2000, 202. 113. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Maria MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Bay Island, Calif., 28 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1908, in Got and Â�Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 385. 114. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska rather quickly made peace with Felix’s bride, June Dota, who was, as Chłapowski informed his sister Anna, “apparently a very nice, kind-Â�hearted” girl. But she faulted Felix’s social climbing in-Â�laws, who arranged the wedding withÂ�out her son’s permission and “had the effrontery to send me a wedding invitation.” Chłapowski to Anna ChłaÂ� powska, Bay Island, Calif., 21 August 1908, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 378. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Emilia Bendówna, Tustin, Calif., 1 June 1908, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 376–377. 115. See, for example, her letter to Józefa Kozakiewiczowa, Żegocin, 27 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1902, where she claimed she might almost be happy living among Karol’s relatives if Dolcio and her grandchildren were not so far away (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 295–296). 116. On Polish immigrants’ typically dual allegiance, whatever their class, see Thomas and Znaniecki, 1984, 253; Lopata, 1976, 3; and Bukowczyk, 2008, 17. 117. Majewski, 2003, 125. 118. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 1910, 548. 119. Ibid., 547–548. 120. The playwright Gabriela Zapolska referred to these painful missives in one of her January 1903 letters to the star: “This hurts me so, but it may relieve you to know that I receive the most outrageous anonymous letters whenever I write somewhat sharper reviews” (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 303). Szczublewski (1975) notes that “one of these letters called [MoÂ�djeÂ�ska] “an old hag, and another accused her of stripping her country of the money she takes to America” (627). 121. Dabrowski, 2004, 29–32. For more information on Kraszewski’s life and oeuvre, see Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 256–257. 122. Czas [Time], 5 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1879, 2. 123. Czas [Time] 6 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1879, 2, and 8 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1879, 2. 124. Dabrowski, 2004, 20. 125. Szczublewski, 1975, 295–297. 126. Ibid., 299. 127. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 20 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1879, 208. 128. Barbara Maresz, “â†œ‘Drukowane oklaski?’ Polska prasa o występach gościnnych Modrzejewskiej,” Pamiętnik Teatralny, v. 58, n. 3–4 (231–232), 2009, 152. 129. Kłosy [Sheaves], 13/25 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1879, 408. 130. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 21 February 1880, 122. 131. Kłosy [Sheaves], 13/25 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1879, 408. 132. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 21 February 1880, 122. 133. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 14 February 1880, 100. 134. Czas [Time], 18 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1879, 2. 135. Czas [Time], 23 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1879, 2.

no t e s to page s 2 82–2 89

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136. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 17 January 1880, 46. 137. Dr. Feliks Koneczny, “Teatr krakowski,” Przegląd Polski, February 1903, z. 8, v. 147, n. 440, 379–380. 138. Kurjer Warszawski [Warsaw Courier], 24 January 1885, quoted in Szczublewski, 1975, 426–427. 139. Władysław Bogusławski, “Helena Modrzejewska: Wspomnienie pośmiertne,” in Warszawa Teatralna, edited by Lidia Kuchtówna (WarÂ�saw: Państwowa Akademia Nauk Instytut Sztuki, 1990), 289, 291. 140. Ibid., 292. 141. Szczublewski, 1975, 286, 291–292. 142. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 6 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1879, 362; Szczublewski, 1975, 293. 143. Franciszek Dobrowolski to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Poznań, 26 January 1880, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 483. 144. Gazeta warszawska [WarÂ�saw gazette], 9/21 January 1882, 2. 145. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 28 January 1882, 62. 146. Czas [Time], 21 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1890, 1. 147. Kłosy [Sheaves], 31 January/12 February 1885, 102. 148. St. M. Rz. in Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 14 February 1885, 103. 149. Gazeta Warszawska [Warsaw gazette], 31 January/12 February 1880, 1. 150. Czas [Time], 16 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1884, 2. 151. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 28 February 1885, 133. 152. Czas [Time], 16 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1884, 2. 153. Lucyna Kotarbińska, Wokoło teatru: moje wspomnienia (WarÂ�saw: Nakładem Księgarni F. Hoesicka, 1930), 319. 154. Józef Kotarbiński to Lucyna Kotarbińska, KraÂ�ków, 6 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1894 and 9 DeÂ�cemÂ� ber 1894, in Listy Lucyny i Józefa Kotarbińskich, wybór i opracowanie by Zofia Jasińska (WarÂ� saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978), 52, 54. 155. Józef Kotarbiński, W służbie sztuki i poezji (WarÂ�saw: Nakładem Księgarni F. Hoesicka, 1929), 172–173. In Świat aktorski moich czasów (WarÂ�saw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1973), Adam Grzymala-Â�Siedlecki similarly argues that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska tempered and feminized the role and likely was drawn to the part only by Lady Macbeth’s mad scene (54). 156. Czas [Time], 28 May 1891, 1. 157. “P.” in Gazeta Warszawska [Warsaw gazette], 27 February 1891, 3; Tygodnik illus trowany [Illustrated weekly], 7 March 1891, 154. 158. Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 7 March 1891, 154. 159. Czas [Time], 12 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1894, 2. 160. In this regard, Polish audiences resembled the 1890s London audiences Cima (1993) describes; for both, “the conventions of viewing” and reading gender roles and interactions were determined by the melodramas long dominating their stages. Although feminist theater critics today identify the “negative effect” of Ibsen’s plays “on the representation of women,” Cima argues that “to the actual women who staged Ibsen premieres and to their audiences the scripts offered a real chance for change, for power, however deeply circumscribed from the point of view of the present” (37–38). 161. Julian Adolf Święcicki, “Henryk Ibsen,” Tygodnik illustrowany [Illustrated weekly], 1 April 1882, 207. 162. Chłapowski to Konstanty M. Gorski, Columbus, Ohio, 3 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1900, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 251–253.

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163. Lucjan Rydel to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Tonie, 6 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1902; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Rydel, Lwów, 8 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1902 (Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 291–292, 293). 164. Szczublewski, 1975, 629. 165. Kotarbiński, 1929, 174. 166. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska expressed this opinion in her recently discovered 22 July 1901 letter to Jeannette Gilder from Bad Kissingen, published in Alicja Kędziora’s “Nieznane listy Heleny Modrzejewskiej,” in Z miłości do sztuki: Helena Modrzejewska (1840–1909) (KraÂ�ków: MuÂ� zeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2009), 173. 167. Gabriela Zapolska to Chłapowski, Zakopane, around 25 April 1903, in Got and SzczuÂ�blewski, 1965, v. 2, 320. 168. For more on the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska-Â�Zapolska relationship from Zapolska’s point of view, see Holmgren, 2006, 25–28. 169. Roman Taborski, Dramaty Stanisława Wyspiańskiego na scenie do 1939 roku (WarÂ�saw: Semper, 1994), 11–12. 170. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s 7 March 1903 letter to Helena Gilder from Morges, Switzerland, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 314n4. 171. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Helena Gilder, Morges, Switzerland, 7 March 1903. Copy of English original. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 1. 172. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Konstancja Morawska, Lwów, 25 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1902, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 285–286. 173. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Lucyna Kotarbińska, Poznań, 24 February 1903, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 310. 174. Kotarbińska, 1930, 319. 175. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Lucyna Kotarbińska, Morges, Switzerland, 18 March 1903, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 315–316. 176. Koneczny, Przegląd Polski, z. 11, v. 148, n. 443, May 1903, 355. 177. Jan Sten, “Przegląd teatralny,” Krytyka, z. 5, May 1903, 400. 178. Szczublewski, 1975, 638. 179. Sten, 1903, 400. Taborski (1994) also judges Sten’s review to be unfair because the critic was writing for a monthly, but generalized on the basis of one night’s attendance (58). 180. Koneczny, May 1903, 356. 181. Piasecki, 1983, 176. 182. Quoted from Kazimierz Skrzyński’s letter to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Lwów, 21 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1902, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 294–295. 183. Koneczny, Przegląd Polski, z. 9, v. 148, n. 441, March 1903, 569. 184. Czas [Time], 19 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1890, 2. 185. Czas [Time], 20 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1890, 3. 186. See Franciszek Dobrowolski to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Poznań, 26 January 1880, in Got and Â�Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 483–484. Szczublewski (1975) remarks that MoÂ�djeÂ�ska gave “six times the amount given by any single member of the local aristocracy” (303). 187. Czas [Time], 4 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1890, 3. 188. Dąbrowski and Górski, 1963, v. 2, 254–255. 189. Czas [Time], 24 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1884, 3; also published as MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s letter to the Redakcja (Editorial Board) of Czas [Time], 24 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1884, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 62–64. 190. Czas [Time], 23 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1884, 3.


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191. Ibid. 192. Czas [Time], 18 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1890, 2. 193. Czas [Time], 19 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1890, 2. 194. Szczublewski, 1975, 525. 8. Fa r ew ell Tou r 1. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Emilia Bendówna, Hartford, Conn., 5 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1906, in Got and SzczuÂ�blewski, 1965, v. 2, 354; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Emilia Bendówna, USA, 4 February 1907, in Got and SzczuÂ�blewski, 1965, v. 2, 360. Coleman (1969) identifies the car’s name (857). 2. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Emilia Bendówna, USA, 6 March 1907, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 361. 3. Ibid., 361–362. 4. Chlapowski to Robert Grau, Los Angeles?, 11 OcÂ�toÂ�ber 1906, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 351–352. 5. Autograph letter signed from Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Daniel Frohman, 9 March 1886, Folger MS Y.c. 985. 6. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Ludwika Chłapowska, Tustin, 2 DeÂ�cemÂ�ber 1907, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 370. 7. Ibid., 371. MoÂ�djeÂ�ska to Mrs. McCoy, Bay Island, Calif., 5 June 1908. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 1. 8. Chłapowski to Anna Chłapowska, Bay Island, Calif., 21 August 1908, in Got and SzczuÂ�blewski, 1965, v. 2, 379. 9. Władysław Benda to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, New York, ? February 1909, in Got and SzczublewÂ� ski, 1965, v. 2, 386–388. 10. Coleman, 1969, 871–872. 11. Quoted in Szczublewski, 1975, 682. 12. Ruggles, 1953, 374. 13. Los Angeles Examiner, 4 April 1909. 14. Los Angeles Evening Express, 9 April 1909. 15. Original of this card and ticket held in Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. MS-Â�R037. Box 1: folder 5. 16. “Last Rites over Body of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” Los Angeles California Record, 12 April 1909. 17. Los Angeles Evening Express, 12 April 1909.For more information on Lummis’s place in California history, see Starr, 1973, 397. 18. Terlecki, 1962, 277. 19. New York Times, 3 July 1909. 20. Ibid. 21. Kyle’s short reminiscence appears in The Polish Institute of Arts and Letters New York Report, 1932–1936, 36. 22. See his letter to his sister Anna Chłapowska, Bay Island, Calif., 28 April 1909, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 391–392. 23. Ernest Phillips, “A week spent with Count Bożenta on Balboa Island,” typescript manuscript. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. FB-Â�10: folder 5. 24. Joseph Gilder, “Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Reminiscences,” in Poland, A Publication and a SerÂ�vice, v. 7, n. 3, March 1926, 172–174.

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25. Los Angeles Daily Times, 13 April 1909. 26. Chłapowski to Konstancja Morawska, Bay Island, Calif., 5 May 1909, in Got and SzczuÂ�blewski, 1965, v. 2, 392–393. 27. “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Beloved for Her Kindnesses,” Chicago Tribune, 23 May 1909, B6. 28. Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1909, B6. 29. Chicago Tribune, 30 June 1909, 10. 30. See, for example, Johnson, 1984, 10. 31. Joseph Jefferson, The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson, edited by Alan S. Downer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), 252–253. 32. Dabrowski (2004) quotes a Polish journalist’s designation of KraÂ�ków as the “theater of national celebrations” (51). Terlecki (1962) remarks that, by 1909, KraÂ�ków had “become famous for its parade-Â�like theatrical burials” and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s funeral took place roughly a year after Wyspiański’s (278). 33. Szczublewski, 1977, 683–684; Terlecki, 1962, 278–279. 34. Chłapowski to Richard Gilder, Żegocin, 11 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1909, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 395–396. 35. Chłapowski to Richard Gilder, Żegocin, 22 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1909, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 398. 36. Siedlecki, 1927, 93. Epilogu e 1. This plaque was unveiled during the festivities honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the actress’s death on 26 April 1959. The details are laid out in an invitation from the Presidium of the National Council as well as the directors and ensemble of the Old Theatre named after Helena Modrzejewska. Invitation held in the WarÂ�saw Theatre Museum, WarÂ�saw, Poland. 2. The author thanks Museum Curator Małgorzata Palka for her tour of the collection. At present, the Theatre Museum is undergoing a major renovation. 3. My thanks again to Małgorzata Palka for my personalized tour of this exhibit. In conceiving this photo-Â�montage, Palka realized the sort of visual study that Anna Litak (2009) envisions in her article on the actress’s photographs. Litak maintains that just such “moving pictures” made from photographed sequences will enable us to study the details of MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s performance techniques (399, 402). 4. Orzechowski, 1992, 244. Alicja Kędziora reconfirmed this finding after her 2009 trip to America in “Kolekcje Modrzejewskiej w Ameryce,” 2009, 321. 5. Coleman, 1969, 875. 6. My thanks to Yvonne Beohm, member of the MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Foundation in SouthÂ�ern California, for a photocopy of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s last will and testament. 7. Coleman and Coleman, 1964, i–ii. Kędziora, in “Kolekcje Modrzejewskiej w Ameryce” (2009), maintains that many of the star’s possessions passed into the hands of Ralph’s secÂ� ond wife, the former Virginia Giblyn, and their current whereabouts remain a mystery (327). 8. Julia Kimball to Chłapowski, Boston, 18 April 1909, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 2, 389–390. 9. As Werner Muensterberger argues in Collecting, An Unruly Passion: Psychological Per spectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), collectors may attach mana (the transmigration of spiritual force or efficacy) to the objects they collect (57, 60–61). 10. Kędziora, “Kolekcje Modrzejewskiej w Ameryce,” 2009, 347–348.


381

11. See the African AmeriÂ�can Registry (www.aaregistry.com), the Web site for the MoÂ� djeÂ�ska Monteith Simkins House in Columbia (www.nps.gov), and South Carolina’s Information Highway (www.sciway.net/afam/modjeska-Â�monteith-Â�simkins.html). 12. Kędziora, “Nieznana kolekcja Heleny,” 2009, 284. 13. For more on MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s performances in Colorado’s opera houses in Leadville, Aspen, Colorado Springs, and Greeley, see Stanley L. Cuba, “Poles in the Early Musical and Theatrical Life of Colorado,” Colorado Magazine, v. 54, n. 3, Summer 1977, 240–276. 14. Chłapowski to Anna Chłapowska, Chicago, April 1878, in Got and Szczublewski, 1965, v. 1, 420–422. 15. See the photographed memorabilia at the back of Helena Modrzejewska: Artykuły-Â� Referaty-Â�Wywiady-Â�Varia, selected and edited by Emil Orzechowski (KraÂ�ków: Wydawnictwo Attyka, 2008). 16. See www.buffaloah.com/h/larkin/index.html (accessed March 26, 2011) based on an interview with Daniel I. Larkin, grandson of the company’s founder and author of “John D. Larkin: A Business Producer,” WestÂ�ern New York Wares, 1998. 17. Kędziora, “Kolekcje Modrzejewskiej,” 2009, 346. 18. See Web sites for Bauer’s Candy (www.bauerscandystore.com), Muth’s Candy (www .muthscandy.com), and www.chocolate.com. 19. Leo J. Friis, The Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum and Its Treasures (Santa Ana: Pioneer Press, 1967), 21, 39. Eleanor Young Elliott, “Madame MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Stage Costumes in Museum Here.” Undated clipping. Courtesy of the Bowers Museum MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Santa Ana, California. Catherine Deresiewicz, “Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum,” The Migrant Echo. Culture-Â�Ethnicity-Â�Religion, v. 6, n. 2, May–August 1977, 84–85. 20. Kędziora, “Kolekcje Modrzejewskiej,” 2009, 352. See http://www.helenamodrzejewska .uj.edu.pl/ (accessed March 26, 2011). 21. James Torr Altemus, Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, with illustrations, 1st published 1883 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), 17; and Cook, 1883, 1. 22. Dan Logan, “Hidden Treasure, County Renovation of Historic MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon Home Leads to a Series of Surprising Discoveries,” Los Angeles Times, 31 March 1990; also Valerie Takahama, “The Playwright and His Subject: Hellesen Returns to MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Arden,” Orange County Register, 13 April 1990. 23. Sylvie Drake, “â†œ‘Arden’—A Colorful Subject, A Bland Play,” Los Angeles Times, 23 April 1990; Thomas O’Connor, “Echoes of a Dramatic Quandary,” Orange County Register, 23 April 1990. 24. The most straightforward of these plays is Mattie Redmond Link’s 1978 Helena, a work archived in the Bowers Museum, which relies on Memories and Impressions to retell MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s life story. 25. Orzechowski, 1993, 55. 26. Ibid., 56. 27. Ibid., 64. 28. Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy, with a new introduction by A. S. Byatt (London: Virago, 1982), 57. 29. Antoni Gronowicz, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska—Her Life and Loves (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1956), author’s note. 30. Ibid., 28. 31. Sontag, 2000, copyright page.

382

not e s to page s 319 –32 6

32. Joan Acocella, “The Hunger Artist,” New Yorker, 6 March 2000, 76. 33. Takahama, 2000. 34. Doreen Carvajal, “So Whose Words Are They? Susan Sontag Creates a Stir,” New York Times, 27 May 2000. 35. Ibid. 36. Sontag, 2000, 4. 37. Ibid., 10, 12, 13. 38. Ibid., 17. 39. Takahama, 2000. 40. Holmgren, 2002, 72–75. 41. Sontag, 2000, 322. 42. Michiko Kakutani, “In America: Love as a Distraction That Gets in the Way of Art,” New York Times, 29 February 2000. See also Sarah Kerr, “Diva,” New York Times Book Re view, 12 March 2000, 6–7. 43. Sontag, 2000, 368. 44. See her entry, for example, in Great Men and Women of Poland, edited by Stephen P. Mizwa (New York: Macmillan Company, 1941). Her companions include Kościuszko, Pułaski, and Paderewski. 45. A Hundred Years of Yesterdays. A Centennial of History of the People of Orange County and Their Communities, 2nd ed. (Santa Ana: Orange County Historical Commission, 2004), 255, 261, 263–264. 46. Coleman, 1969, iii–iv. 47. Ibid., 130. 48. Eugene Maier-Â�Krieg sculpted this statue, which features MoÂ�djeÂ�ska on one side and four vineyard workers denoting the city’s agricultural past on the other. 49. Lane, 1952, 117–118. 50. Raymond M. Holt, “Shrines for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska,” Westways, v. 50, n. 2, February 1958, 22–23. 51. Wiktor Kwast, “Wyprawa do MoÂ�djeÂ�skaland,” Tydzień Polski, January 1973, 20–21. 52. Ellen K. Lee, “The MoÂ�djeÂ�ska-Â�Walker House,” 1989, 124–125. 53. Brochure quoted and reproduced courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection. James S. Rice Family Papers. MS-Â�R45. Box 3: folder 5. 54. Lee, “The MoÂ�djeÂ�ska-Â�Walker House,” 1989, 125–126. 55. Steve Hawk, “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Home May Be Opened to Public,” Orange County Register, 16 April 1986. 56. Unnamed clipping titled “Count Bożenta To Be Honored with Tablet,” 31 May 1921. Bowers Museum MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Collection, Santa Ana, California. 57. Bertha Barron, “Famous Folk from Around World Guests in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Home,” The Register, Santa Ana, 4 January 1960. When Marion Walker Boice, the daughter of Charles and Carrie Walker, kindly invited members of the Orange County Historical Society and other local societies to tour Arden, Lee commemorated the event with the publication of a souvenir pamphlet, “A Visit to the Walker Residence, MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon, April 24, 1970.” 58. Hawk, 1986. 59. Frank Messina, “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon Residents Challenge Plans for House,” Los An geles Times, 3 NoÂ�vemÂ�ber 1989. 60. Michael Granberry, “MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Canyon—Its Sylvan Solitude Is So Appealing That Everybody Goes There,” Los Angeles Times, 12 SepÂ�temÂ�ber 1996.

not e s to page s 32 6 –327

383

61. Taken from the foundation Web site, www.helenamodjeska.net (accessed March 26, 2011). 62. Quoted from a reprinted Los Angeles Times article posted at http://anaheimcolony.com/ Newspaper/Post1950/modjeska.htm (accessed March 26, 2011). 63. G. Stankiewicz, “Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Historic House and Gardens Dedicated,” Â�Polish Heritage, Published Quarterly by the AmeriÂ�can Council for Polish Culture, v. 45, n. 3, Winter 1994, 1, 11. 64. On school field trips, see http://ito.ocde.us/Programs/FieldTrips/Helena_MoÂ�djeÂ�ska _House.htm (accessed March 26, 2011). 65. John McKinney, Orange County: A Day Hiker’s Guide (Santa Barbara: The Trailmaster, 2009), 14, 15. McKinney focuses on the trails around Arden on pp. 185–187.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Adrianna (Adrienne) Lecouvreur (Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé), 1–2, 74, 75–76, 80, 99, 114, 130, 159, 161, 175, 178, 189, 214, 235; Modjeska as Adrienne, 5 Aidé, Hamilton, 176 Ajdukiewicz, Tadeusz, 280, 305, 310 aktoromania (public’s actor worship), 87, 103; worship of Modrzejewska in Poland, 87–90, 98–99 Aldridge, Ira, 27 All About Eve, 4 Alma-Â�Tadema, Laurence, 176, 256 Altemus, James Torr, 315–16 amateur theatricals: in America, 142; in Poland, 56–57 America: anticipations of, 111–14; citizenship, 134; first impressions of, 116–17, 118, 124–25; life of “colonial party” in, 121–23 American actors and actresses: genteel role models, 160; homebuilding, 134; memoir writÂ�ing, 21–22; social status, 128–29, 243, 303; symbiosis of actresses with press, 242; touring, 154–55. See also Polish actors and actresses Anaheim, Calif.: history of, 119; initial lodging of “the colonial party,” 121 Anczyc, Władysław: Peasant Aristocrats, 266 Anderson, Mary, 243 Angelo Malpieri (Victor Hugo), 100 Antigone (Sophocles), 291, 292 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 175; Modjeska as Cleopatra, 287; Modjeska’s performance in America, 193; Modjeska’s performance in Poland, 285–86 Arden, 136–42, 138, 141, 200, 218, 270, 271, 324, 325, 328; educational site, 326; operations as ranch, 143, 145–46; sale to Modjeska Ranch

Company, 146, 324; sale to Orange County, Calif., 325; tourist site, 327–28 Arthur, President Chester A., 170 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 170, 187, 208, 212, 213; Modjeska as Rosalind, 217; ModjeÂ�ska’s identification with role in America, 215–19; Modjeska’s performance in Poland, 285– 86, 288 Association and Circle of Polish Women in Exile, 260 Aszpergerowa, Aniela, 31, 38, 39 Axtman, Blum, 28 Bakałowiczowa, Wiktoryna, 78, 94, 95, 104, 106, 303 Bancroft, Mrs., 177 Barrett, Lawrence, 1, 128–29, 150, 151, 189–90, 223 Barrett, Wilson, 177, 178, 179 Barrymore, Ethel, 4, 202, 323 Barrymore, Georgie Drew, 195, 202, 205, 263 Barrymore, John, 4 Barrymore, Lionel, 4 Barrymore, Maurice, 4, 187, 188, 198, 199, 202, 203–205, 215, 244 Barzyński, Father Wincenty, 264 Bauer, Rudolph, 314 The Bat (Edward Lubowski), 105–106 Bełza, Władysław, 255 Benda, Emilia (daughter of Szymon, junior), 193, 271, 298 Benda, Feliks, 20–21, 27, 41–42, 44, 45, 96, 106, 111, 142, 303, 309; death, 104; ModrzejewÂ�ska’s mentor-Â�partner, 49, 63; position among Polish actors, 26; unsuccessful Warsaw debuts, 95–96 Benda, Jadwiga (daughter of Szymon, younger), 273 Benda, Józef, 20–21, 26, 41–42

400 i n de x Benda, Stanisława (Stasia) (daughter of Józef), 21, 33, 44, 81 Benda, Szymon (elder), 20–21 Benda, Szymon (younger), 21, 26, 32, 41–42, 112; relocation of his family to California, 271, 272–73 Benda, Władysław (son of Szymon, younger), 193, 273 Bendowa, Józefa, 27, 42, 81, 112, 117, 133, 175, 185, 270, 274; attributes, 21–23; role model for Â�Modrzejewska, 22, 33 Bendowa, Weronika (Feliks’s wife), 57 Bernhardt, Sarah, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 15, 99, 129, 155, 173, 176, 177, 183, 189, 192, 235, 236, 284; compariÂ� son with Modjeska, 283–85 Berton, Pierre, 184 Bielawski, Captain Kazimierz, 118 Bochnia, Poland, 33, 34–35 Bogusławski, Władysław, 86, 178, 251, 280; criticism of Modrzejewska’s star persona, 100– 102, 104; praise of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 282–83 Bogusławski, Wojciech, 69, 100 Bohemian Club, 129 Bojanowski, Michał, 95 Bołóź-Â�A ntoniewicz, Michał: Anna Oświęcimówna, 51 Bonner, Mrs. Sherwood, 170 Booth, Edwin, 4, 7, 118, 119, 134, 150–51, 168, 173, 174, 183, 191–92, 195, 197, 206, 210, 230, 244, 300, 303; repertoire and style of performance, 209–11; season with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 189–90, 215, 221–223. See also Booth’s Theatre Booth, John Wilkes, 15 Booth, Junius, junior, 7 Booth, Junius, senior, 7, 209 Booth’s Theatre, 159, 209–11 Bosqui, Edward, 129, 135 The Boston Museum, 154 Boucicault, Dion, 157 Boutwell, Senator George Sewall, 169–70 Boyd, Dr. James, 146, 299 Boyd, Rosa, 146 Braun, Kazimierz: Émigré Queen, 316–17 Bronson Settlement, Los Angeles, 299 Buckley, J. J., 191 Bullard, Mabel “May” Langenberger, 137, 145 Burne-Â�Jones, Edward, 176, 256 Busath, Anton, 313–14 Butler, General Benjamin, 170

California: foreigners as co-Â�colonists of, 126–27, 148; impact on Modrzejewska/MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Chłapowski, 123, 125–26, 136–38, 148; impact on Sienkiewicz, 124–25 California Theatre, 1, 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 14, 128, 132 Camille, 131, 151, 157–58, 159, 161–63, 166, 170, 172, 208, 214, 235, 238, 242. See also The Lady of the Camellias Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 257 Carr, Ezra, 137 Carr, Jeanne C., 137, 144 Cather, Willa: My Mortal Enemy, 169, 317 Chałubiński, Doctor Tytus, 86; his work among the Polish highlanders, 86–87, 256 Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum, Santa Ana, Calif., 314–15, 322, 323 Chekhov, Anton, 155, 242 Chęciński, Jan, 35, 71–73, 94, 95, 104 Chełmoński, Józef, 86, 107, 108–109, 113 Chicago Columbian Exposition (1893), 248, 257–60 Chłapowska, Anna, 79, 154–55, 199–200, 299 Chłapowski, Alojzy, 113 Chłapowski, General Dezydery, 59, 80 Chłapowski, Franciszek, 122 Chłapowski, Józef, 122 Chłapowski, Karol, 6, 10, 25, 62, 78, 79, 81, 94– 95, 107, 117, 118, 121, 122, 123, 127, 129, 130, 133– 34, 138, 140, 142, 143, 151, 154–55, 166, 172, 174– 75, 176, 201, 233, 235, 244, 245, 254, 261, 263, 264, 289–90, 296, 298–99; caricatured onstage, 106; commemoration of wife, 304– 305, 311–12, 313, 326, 327; complemenÂ�tarity with MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 200–202, 206; courtship of Â�Modrzejewska, 58–61; financial dependence, 82, 86; managing MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s companies, 187, 190, 197, 198–203; plans for America, 112–13; position within family, 271–72, 277; as rancher, 144–46, 278; return to Poland, 301–302 Chłapowski, Kazimierz, 79 Chłapowski, Maciej, 61, 80 Chłędowski, Kazimierz, 55, 57, 81 Chmielowski, Adam, 86, 107, 108–109, 113 The Chouans (Pierre Berton), 190–91, 233 Church of the Holy Cross, Kraków, 304, 310 Church of the Transfiguration, New York City, 303 Ciepły, Krzysztof, 310 Cieszkowski, Count Zygmunt, 296

i n de x 401 Clements, Frank, 205 Clements, Robert, 205 Cleveland, Frances Folsom, 164, 170, 257 Cleveland, Grover, 164, 257 Cody, Buffalo Bill, 8 Coghlan, Charles, 177 Cole, Catharine, 235, 243, 245 Coleman, Marion Moore, 311 Collins, Mabel, 315–16 Conaty, Rt. Rev. Bishop, 301, 302 Conkling, Senator Roscoe, 169–70 Cooper, James Fenimore, 124 Coquelin, Benoît-Â�Constant, 164 Corazzi, Antonio, 67 The Countess Roudine (Paul Kester and Minnie Maddern Fiske), 232–33 Crabtree, Lotta, 158, 246 Creizenach, Wilhelm, 286 Crinkle, Nym (A. C. Wheeler), 215, 223, 226 Cushman, Charlotte, 173, 174, 180, 226 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 178, 208, 213, 214–15, 256; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s American success in, 223–25 Czerniowce, 34, 40 Czołgosz, Leon, 260 Dalila (Octave Feuillet), 103 Daly, Augustin, 149, 195–96, 198 Daniela (Felix Phillipi), 231 Dawison, Bogumił, 34, 150 de Kay, Charles, 9, 121, 164, 171 de Musset, Alfred, 97 de Oliva, Pepita, 27 de Reszke, Edward, 14, 86, 183, 255 de Reszke, Jan, 14, 86, 183, 255, 256 de Reszke, Józefina, 14, 86, 255 Devrient, Fritz, 24, 27–28 Dietl, Józef, 43–44 Dithmar, Edward A., 161, 171, 195, 208, 214, 216, 221, 223, 224, 225, 227, 229, 231 Dobrowolski, Franciszek, 283 Documentation Project on the Life and Work of Helena Modrzejewska, 315 A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen): MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s production as Thora in America, 233–35; production as Nora in Poland, 289 Don Carlos (Friedrich Schiller), 97, 98, 99 Donna Diana (Augustin Moreto y Cavana), 102, 231 Drew, Mrs. John, 195 Duluc, Madame, 174, 274

Durbin, Maud, 140–41, 195; scenic education by MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 202–203 Duse, Eleonora, 149, 189, 235, 236, 242, 248, 292 East Lynne (Mrs. Henry Wood), 158, 172 Edwards, Clarence E., 127 Egan, Judge Richard, 135, 140, 301 Egan, Maurice Francis, 164 Estreicher, Karol, 50, 81, 105, 178 Estreicher, Stefania, 84 Eytinge, Rose, 3, 12 Faleńska, Maria, 4, 84, 85, 86, 88, 97, 105, 107, 170, 177, 184, 197, 270, 273 Faleński, Felicjan, 85, 86, 105, 107 Felix, Rachel, 2, 12 Field, Eugene: “Modjesky as Cameel” and “Wanderer,” 170, 255 Fields, Annie, 168; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s inclusion in Fields’s network, 168–69, 170, 206; reception of Magda, 241, 312–13 Fields, James T., 168, 170 Fisher, Grace, 197–98 Fisher, John C., 193 Fiske, Minnie Maddern, 196, 232–33, 235, 242, 246– 47, 249, 312–13; gallery of Ibsen parts, 234 Fiszer, Gustaw, 95, 104, 111 Forbes-Â�Robertson, Ian, 183 Forbes-Â�Robertson, Johnston, 150, 177, 179, 183 Forrest, Edwin, 208–209 Fredro, Jan Aleksander, 56 Freeman, Lu, 253 Frohman, Charles, 187 Frohman, Daniel, 186–87, 199, 232, 256, 268, 299; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “most considerate” impresario, 187–89 Frou-Â�Frou (Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac), 88–90, 99–100, 157, 158, 190; Modrzejewska as Gilberte, 101 “garden consciousness” of Southern Californians, 136 Giblyn, Virginia Mary, 277 Gierymski, Aleksander, 86, 107, 108 Gilder, Helena de Kay, 164, 166, 167, 167, 170, 176, 178, 256, 260, 268, 291–92 Gilder, Jeannette, 121, 164, 166, 167, 170, 216, 268, 359n70 Gilder, Joseph, 302

402 i n de x Gilder, Richard Watson, 138, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 206, 251, 254, 255, 256, 260, 261, 268, 301, 304 Gilder, Rosamund, 164, 166 La Gioconda (Gabriele d’Annunzio), 291, 292 Godebski, Cyprian, 113 Gorski, Konstanty, 285, 288, 289–90 Got, Jerzy, 20, 45–46, 52, 90, 310–11, 321 Grau, Robert, 298–99 Greeley, Horace, 124 The Green Dragon, 143 Greenwood, Grace, 163 Gronowicz, Antoni: MoÂ�djeÂ�ska—Her Life and Loves, 317–18 Gutakowski, Count, 80 gwiazdorstwo (star’s self-Â�promotion), 87, 103 Hale, Senator Eugene, 169–70 Halpertowa, Leontyna, 69, 76, 84 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 97, 98, 110, 114, 119; Booth and MoÂ�djeÂ�ska in, 223; censorship in Poland, 91; Modrzejewska as Ophelia, 72 Hare, Johnny (Jasiek Zając), 141 Harrigan, Edward, and Tony Hart, 244, 299 Hart, William S., 205–206 Harte, Bret, 124 Hauke, General Józef, 67, 70, 71 Haworth, Joseph, 205 Held, Anna, 143, 146 Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Foundation, 326, 327 Heller, Józef, 304 Hellesen, Richard: Once in Arden, 316 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 191–92, 213; MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s American success in, 225–26 Heron, Matilda, 151, 158 Higgins, Doctor Alice Boyd, 119 Higgins, Doctor W. H., 119 Hill, Barton, 130–31 Hinton, Richard, 255 Hoffmann, Antonina, 26, 44, 48, 51, 280, 309; embodiment of tenets of Kraków School, 45– 46, 47–49; relationship with Modrzejewska, 51–52, 296 Hofmann, Józef, 256, 275 Holland, George, 303 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 168 Horain, Julian, 118, 124; Letters from America and Letters from California, 111–12 Hotel Europejski, Warsaw, 107, 108 Hotel Pollera, Kraków, 310

Hubertowa, Józefa Radzyńska, 26 Hugo, Victor, 97 Ibsen, Henrik, 155, 289; A Doll’s House, 183, 233– 35, 236, 241, 242, 249 The Ideas of Madame d’Aubray (Alexandre Dumas fils), 77 Ilnicka, Maria, 83 Intrigue and Love (Friedrich Schiller), 97 Irving, Henry, 173, 174, 177, 179–80, 183, 191– 92, 211 Jackson, General, 170 Jackson, Helen Hunt: Ramona, 135 James, Henry, 164, 180, 257 James, Louise, 257 Janauschek, Fanny, 2, 149, 229, 248 January 1863 uprising in Poland, 18, 40, 58, 59, 108 Jasiński, Jan Seweryn, 44, 45, 74; ModrzejewÂ� ska’s “master,” 47, 49, 63 Jefferson, Joseph, 134, 164, 303 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 169, 195, 206 Jones, Helen, 139–40 Juana (William Gorman Willis), 179 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 119 Kalergis-Â�Mukhanova, Maria, 80, 92, 177, 196; Â�biography, 68–69; death, 104; involvement in Mukhanov’s work, 69; professional mentoring of Modrzejewska, 90–93, 97, 104–105, 106, 110; social role model for Modrzejewska, 85, 86 Kearney, Dennis, 127 Kędziora, Alicja, 313 Keene, Laura, 7, 196 Kellerd, John E., 301 Kendal, Mrs., 177, 183 Kenig, Józef, 74, 98–99, 102–103; admission of Modrzejewska’s successful debut, 75–76, 78; complaints about Dumas fils’ degradation of women, 77; initial editorial against Modrzejewska, 73; on Modrzejewska as virtuoso, 100; praise for Modrzejewska as impresario, 97; praise of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 286 Kentucky “MoÂ�djeÂ�skas” (candies), 313–14 Kietlińska, Maria, 21, 31, 57–58; on Kietlińska’s daughter Elżbieta, an avid fan of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 332n15

i n de x 403 Kimball, Julia, 312 King John (Shakespeare), 213; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s American success in, 225–26 Kirby-Â�Stark, Sarah, 7 Klimecki, Father H., 268, 270 Koneczny, Feliks, 282, 291, 292, 293–95 Kościuszko, Tadeusz, 260 Kostrzewski, Franciszek, 86, 88, 89 Kotarbińska, Lucyna, 288, 292 Kotarbiński, Józef, 288, 290, 304 Kozakiewiczowa (née Tomaszewiczówna), Józefa (daughter of Modrzejewska’s sister), 81, 156, 180, 272 Koźmian, Stanisław, 44, 50, 51, 61, 63, 69, 81, 90, 195; aristocrats as models for actors, 54– 55; commentator on and director of Kraków Theatre, 45–46, 49; on Feliks Benda, 20, 57; praise for MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 281–82 Kraków, 19; architectural restoration, 279; inter-Â� uprising history, 19–20; post-Â�1866 florescence, 43–44; training set for young Modrzejewska, 28–30 “Kraków School,” 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 61, 80, 337n130. See also Modrzejewska, Helena, relationship with Kraków School Kraków Theatre, 28, 33, 34, 39, 309; description, 27; new theater, 296–97; post-Â�1865 reformation, 44; repertoire, 27–28; Słowacki Theatre today, 310 Kraków Theatre Museum, 310 Kraszewski, Józef: The Castellan’s Mead, 279, 303; 1879 jubilee in Kraków, 175, 279–80 Królikowski, Jan, 66, 69, 84, 91, 94, 95, 98, 223 Krzyżanowski, General Włodzimierz, 118–19 Kyle, Howard, 256, 301 The Ladies’ Battle (Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé), 231 The Lady of the Camellias (Alexandre Dumas fils), 56, 99, 175; Heartsease in London, 177, 178; Maria Gauthier in Warsaw, 280, 295. See also Camille Lady Tartuffe (Émile Girardin), 103 Lambs Club, 134, 301 Langenberger, Clementine, 137, 145, 265, 271 Langtry, Mrs. Lillie, 226–27 Larkin Soap Manufacturing Company, 313 Lee, Ellen K., 141–42, 319, 324, 325, 326 Leo, Edward, 83, 85, 107, 112

Leowa, Stefania, 6, 83, 85, 107, 123, 179, 279 Leslie, Amy, 145, 200, 202, 214, 235 Lessen, Captain, 118 Leszczyński, Bolesław, 95, 99, 107 Levy, Harriet Lane, 128 Lewandowski, Stefan, 304, 305 Lewestam, F. H., 76, 77, 97, 98, 99 Liszt, Franz, 90, 93 Litak, Anna, 311 “Little Arden,” 147 Logan, Olive, 134, 155 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 110, 114; MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s friendship with, 167–68, 170, 171, 185 Lourse pastry shop, 108 Lubowski, Edward, 86, 281; The Actress, 105; The Bat, 105, 106, 281; praise of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 282, 286 Lummis, Charles Fletcher, 124, 301 Lwów Theatre, 33, 34, 39; description, 38 Ładnowski, Bolesław, 94, 95 Łagowska, Maria (Marie Vergne Fontelive), 39 Łobojko, Konstanty, 33, 34, 35 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 195, 213; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Lady Macbeth, 228; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s mixed reviews in America, 226–27, 230, 251; performance in Poland, 285–86, 288–89 Maciejowski, Ignacy, 81, 112; advice about American advertising, 113–14 Magda (Heimat) (Hermann Sudermann), 235, 236; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Magda, 240; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s American success in, 238–41, 242, 251; performance in Poland, 289 Maidens’ Vows (Aleksander Fredro), 52, 74, 76, 102, 114, 280; Modrzejewska as Aniela, 53 Maria Stuart (Juliusz Słowacki), 97 Marie Antoniette (Clinton Stuart), 193–95; MoÂ� djeÂ�ska in title role, 194 Marion Delorme (Victor Hugo), 99 Marlowe, Julia, 196, 198, 230, 248 Mary Stuart (Friedrich Schiller), 54, 74, 77, 102– 103; English version by Lewis Wingfield, 178– 79, 208, 213; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s American success in, 227–30, 231; success in Poland, 282 Masks and Faces (Thomas Taylor and Charles Reade), 158 Matejko, Jan, 12, 50, 290, 310 Maxwell, Everett Carroll, 142 Mazepa (Juliusz Słowacki), 98, 233 McCoy, Marie H., 136

404 i n de x McCullough, John, 1, 8, 12, 119, 128–29, 130, 151 McKelvey, William, 138 McKinley, William, 260 McKinney, John, 327 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 213; MoÂ�djeÂ� ska’s American success in, 223–25 Menken, Adah Isaacs, 8 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 54, 119, 213; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s American success in, 221–23 Mickiewicz, Adam, 291 Mierzwiński, Władysław, 183 Miss de Belle Isle (Alexandre Dumas père), 77 Miss-Â�Madame (Józef Korzeniowski), 74, 76, 102 Mistress Betty, or the Career of Betty Singleton (Clyde Fitch), 231 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Felicja (née Bendówna), 156, 180, 190, 276, 300; airing of family’s scandals, 277; relationship with mother-Â�in-Â�law, 273–77; wedding, 268–70 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Helena, 1, 2–4, 14–15, 131–33, 160– 63, 257, 300–304; accent, 213–15; aging star, 196–97, 205–206; American touring, 154–55, 185–87, 298–99; American traces and legacy, 4, 207, 302, 311–15, 322–24, 327; Americanization of, 8, 149, 278, 281–83; bas relief on tombstone, 306; Catholicism, 202, 263; commodification, 155–57, 313–14; costume and set designer, 190–95, 268–69; death, 299– 300; director and impresario, 189–90, 195– 98, 207–208, 230–42; fashion plate, 156, 158, 190, 358n33; funerals, 300–304, 305; guest star in Poland, 278–97; immigrant matriarch, 270–78; lecturer and writer for acting profession, 242–52; Memories and Impressions, 247, 251–52, 253–54, 261; mentor to American actors, 142–43, 197–98, 202–203; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska and Â�Modrzejewska, 16–17, 150–51, 281–83, 306– 308; photograph as mistress of Arden, 307; Polish cultural ambassador, 12–14, 153, 254– 61; Polish nationalist firebrand, 258–61; Polish philanthropist, 295–97; relationship with Chłapowski, 143–48, 187, 198–203, 206; relationship with Polonia, 261–70; relationship with young Polish playwrights, 289–93; relationships with son, daughter-Â�in-Â�law, and niece Józia, 273–77; Shakespearean career in America, 9, 150–51, 171–72, 211–27; social ambitions, 9, 132, 134, 135–43, 153, 159, 163–71,

268–70; social networking, 161–71; stories of, 315–22. See also Modrzejewska, Helena MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Inn and Restaurant, 324 MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Ranch Company, 324 Modjeski, Felix, 275, 276; marriage of, 277–78, 323 Modjeski, Karol, 275 Modjeski, Ralph (Rudolf, Dolcio), 6, 10, 32, 42, 112, 113, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 130, 133, 135– 36, 180, 267–68, 276, 299, 311–12; abduction and ransom, 55–56, 81; career, 275, 278; divorce and second marriage, 277; first marriage, 268–70, 273, 275, 277; relationship with mother, 81–82, 273–74, 275, 277, 278 Modrzejewska, Helena, 6–7, 44–45, 129–33; attributes, 36–37; early acting career, 10, 34– 42; education, 23–24, 25, 29–30, 333n35; farmer’s wife, 119–22; fashion plate, 102; friendship with young Warsaw artists, 107–10; illegitimacy, 9, 21; impresario, 94–98; motherhood, 32–33, 81–82; offstage performance as aristocrat, 54–55, 56, 57–58, 81, 84–87; Polish patriotism, 19–20, 31, 32, 334n67; Polish traces, 309–11; reasons for leaving Warsaw stage, 104–14; relationship with Chłapowski, 59–61, 80–81, 106; relationship with Kraków School, 46, 47, 51–52, 61; relationship with Â�Zimajer, 23–27, 34–35, 39–42; star packaging in WarÂ� saw, 64–65, 70–79, 87–90, 345n135; youth, 9–10, 20–23, 332n8. See also MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, Helena Modrzejewska, Maria, 32, 33, 35, 42, 274 Modrzejewska Complex of Professional Schools in Textiles and Clothing, 310 Modrzejów, 138, 270–71, 375n85 Moniuszko, Stanislaw, 86 Monteith, Henry, and Rachel Monteith, 312 Montez, Lola, 8 Morawska, 80 Morawski, Kazimierz, 292 Morris, Clara, 151–53, 152, 158, 242, 248 Morrison, George Shattuck, 275 Mortimer, James, 177 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 54, 98, 103, 213; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s American success in, 221; performance in Poland, 285–86 Muir, John, 137 Mukhanov, Sergei (president of Warsaw Imperial Theatres), 74, 78, 90, 95, 114, 174; achievements, 68; attributes, 67–68

i n de x 405 Murry, Jules, 195, 298 Muth, Rudy, 314 Nadjezda (Maurice Barrymore), 205, 232, 233, 258 The Nation (Kraj), 80 Nazimova, Alla, 242 Neilson, Adelaide, 3, 12, 151 Nesselrode, Karol Robert, 68 Neufeld, Ignacy, 175, 260 Neville, Amelia Ransome, 127–28 Neville, Maurice, 110–11, 113, 114, 167 Nikiforowicz, Józef, 82 Nordhoff, Charles, 124 Noritake Company, 313 November 1830 uprising in Poland, 12–13, 18, 59, 291 Odell, George C. D., 218, 220 Odette (Victorien Sardou), 157, 158, 190, 208, 212; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s extended performance in LonÂ� don, 184 Old Courthouse Museum, Santa Ana, Calif., 315 O’Neill, James, 151, 257, 301 Opid, Adolf, 22, 38–39, 274 Opid, Józefa, 21, 41–42; marriage to Walery Tomaszewicz, 35; stage name Kossowska, 32, 34, 35 Opid, Ludwik, 271, 272–73, 301 Opid, Michał, possible father of Â�Modrzejewska, 21, 23 Orange County, Calif.: Arden as National Historic Landmark, 326; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s importance to, 322–24 Ortyński, Lucjan, 35, 40, 41 Orzechowski, Emil, 15–16, 311 Othello (Shakespeare), 98, 99, 110, 150, 173, 174 Paderewski, Ignacy, 14, 140, 145, 146, 255, 275, 304; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s relationship with, 256–57, 261, 291 Palace Hotel, San Francisco, 1, 4 Palińska, Salomea, 73, 74, 76, 78, 94, 95, 104 Pałka, Małgorzata, 310 Paprocki, Lucian, 112, 113, 121, 123 Pattison, Maria Stuart MoÂ�djeÂ�ska, 147–48, 275, 276, 311–12 Pawlicki, Doctor, 118, 123 Payne, Theodore, 137; account of year-Â�round life at Arden, 137–38, 141, 144, 145

Perley, Frank L., 191 Phillips, Ernest Crozier, 142–43, 301–302 Piotrowski, Captain Rudolf Korwin, 118, 129–30 Pitass, Father John, 265 Players Club, 134, 170, 300, 301 Pleasants, Donna Maria Refugio, 124–26, 127, 135–36 Pleasants, John E., 124–26, 127, 135–36 Pod Baranami (Potocki family palace in KraÂ� ków), 56, 81, 277 Poland: history before the partitions, 18; inter-Â� uprising period, 18–19, 30–32; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s summary of Polish history at 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, 258–59, 261; partitions, 2–3; types of exile, 12–14. See also January 1863 uprising in Poland; November 1830 uprising in Poland Polish actors and actresses: national significance, 10–11, 13–14, 31–32, 66–67; performance abroad, 34, 39; provincial touring, 33–34; social status, 57–58; training practices, 38, 39–40. See also American actors and actresses Polish Cultural Institute, 322 Polish Museum of America, Chicago, 314 Polish National Alliance, 264 Polish Roman Catholic Union, 264 Polonia in America, 11–12, 118, 254, 261–62, 263– 67, 322, 327, 373n44; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as immigrant, 254, 265; Polish-Â�language theater in the United States, 266–68 Poniatowski, Stanisław August, 65 Popiełówna (Popiełka), Romana, 91, 95, 107 Positivism, 43 Potocka, Countess Arturowa, 58 Potocki, Count Adam, 30–31, 44, 58 Potocki, Count Artur, 288 Poznań Theatre, 295–96 Prieto, Guillermo, 128 Prince Zillah, 189, 232, 233 Professional Women’s League, 246 Protesilaus and Laodamia (Stanisław Wyspiański), 291, 292–93; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Laodamia, 294 Przeździecki, Count Alekander, 56, 60, 69, 74, 80, 84, 91; Modrzejewska’s negotiations with Warsaw Imperial Theatres, 70–73 Pułaski, Kazimierz, 260

406 i n de x Rakiewiczowa, Aleksandra, 94, 95 Rakowicki Cemetery, Kraków, 15, 301, 303, 310 Ralston, William, 128 Rancho Los Alisos, 146–47 Rapacki, Wincenty, 44, 51, 56, 88, 95, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 207; biography, 41 Rehan, Ada, 151, 195–96, 248, 257 Rice, James, 146 Rice, Mrs. James S., 140, 146, 187 Ristori, Adelaide, 2, 3, 12, 76, 173, 180, 229, 242, 288 Robins, Elizabeth, 234 Roman Catholic Church in America, 262, 266 Romanov, Grand Duke Konstantin NikoÂ� laevich, 66 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 97, 98, 114, 131– 32, 163, 168, 169, 171, 175, 177; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Juliet, 182; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s performance in England, 179–80, 208 Roosevelt, Theodore, 124 Różycka, Anna, 30–31 Rubinstein, Anton, 93 Rubinstein, Artur, 275 Rychter, Jan, 74, 84 Rydel, Lucjan, 289–90, 304 Ryder, Charles, 179 Rzewuski, Walery, 70 Safir, Maria, 31 St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery, Chicago, 302 St. Stanislaus Church, New York City, 268–70, 269, 301, 303, 322 St. Stanisław Kostka Church, Chicago, 263, 266, 267 St. Vibiana Cathedral, Los Angeles, 300–301, 302 Salomon, Governor, 119 salonowość (aristocrats’ gestures, behavior, conversation in the salon), 54 Salvini, Tommaso, 110, 149–50 Samolińska, Teofila, 265–66 San Francisco, 118–119, 119, 127–29; as theater town, 7–8 Sand, George, 97 Sanguszko, Helena, 21, 57 Sanguszko, Prince Władysław, possible father of Modrzejewska, 21 Sardou, Victorien: Our Nearest and Dearest, 74– 75, 77; A Sheet of Paper, 76–77 Sargent, Harry, 4, 133, 155, 157, 158, 163, 172, 174, 244

Schiller, Friedrich: Modrzejewska’s early worship of, 25, 97 Seebach, Marie, 229 Sembrich-Â�Kochańska, Marcelina, 183 Serrano, Jose, 141 Sewall, May Wright, 248, 258, 313 Shakespeare, William, 97; changing valence and selection of his plays in late nineteenth-Â� century America, 208–209; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s ambition to perform his plays in English, 113, 150; Modrzejewska’s “master,” 25 Shaw, George Bernard, 155 Shaw, Mary, 198, 257 Sherman, General William Tecumseh, 169–70 Siemiradzki, Henryk, 12, 296 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 88, 109, 119–21, 122, 124–25, 255, 261, 280, 289–90, 304; Charcoal Sketches, 121; Portrait of America, 118; relationship with Modrzejewska, 107–108; review of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s American debut, 11–14, 254; trip to America, 112, 113 Sierzputowska, Emilia, 85, 174, 175, 176, 178 Simkins, Mary MoÂ�djeÂ�ska Monteith, 312 Sinclair, Catherine, 7, 196 Skałka Sanctuary, Kraków, 303 Skarbek, Count Stanisław, 38 Skinner, Cornelia Otis, 202 Skinner, Otis, 140–41, 191, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205–206, 235, 262 Skorupka, Count Adam, 44, 61, 69, 80, 81, 90 Słowacki, Juliusz: Mazepa, 41, 91, 97, 98 Solski, Ludwik, 304 Sontag, Susan, 6; In America, 318–22 Soto, Jesus, 138 Sphinx (Octave Feuillet), 95, 100 Stamper, Krystyna, 326 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 161 Sten, Jan, 292–93 Stetson, John, 184, 185, 186–87, 242, 244–45 Stinson, Fred, 197, 203, 244–45 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 161 Strindberg, August, 155 Stwosz, Wit, 105 Sudermann, Hermann, 249, 289 Swieszewski, Stanisław, 45 Sypniewski, Julian, 112, 113, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123; wife and children of, 113 Szczublewski, Józef, 90, 258, 310–11

i n de x 407 Szymanowski, Wacław, 77–78, 86, 98, 99 Szymanowski, Władysław, 106 Szymański, Doctor Francis, 304 Śliwicki, Józef, 27 Święcicki, Adolf, 289 Świętochowski, Aleksander, 86 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 208, 213 Tarasiewicz, Michał, 304 Taylor, Bayard, 124 Tennyson, Alfred, 176 Terlecki, Tymon, 20, 24, 321 Terry, Ellen, 4, 151, 161, 174, 179–80, 181, 183, 192, 221, 223, 226–27 Thaxter, Celia, 168, 255 Theatrical Syndicate, 187, 249 The Third One (Henryk Sienkiewicz), 108 Tomaszewicz, Ludomir (Modrzejewska’s Â�sister’s son), 273 Tomaszewicz, Walery, 41 Torres, Francisco, 138 Towse, J. Ranken, 219–20, 224, 226, 227 The Tragic Mask (E. C. Reynolds), 232 Tuch, Anton, 296 Tucholsky, Jo, 130, 143 Turski, Stefan, 296 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 164, 257 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 187, 208, 213, 214; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska as Viola, 222; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s American success in, 219–20; performance in Poland, 285–86, 288 Twelfth Night Club, 246, 249, 301 Two Gentlemen from Verona (Shakespeare), 213 Ujejski, Kornel, 117, 264; “Hagar in the Wilderness,” 176 Umiastowski, Władysław, 56 Vanderfelt, E. H., 199 Varesi, Gilda, 298 The Varsovienne, 291 virtuosos, relationship between musicians and actors, 92–93 von Bülow, Hans, 93, 177 Wagner, Richard, 90, 93, 290 Walker, Carrie, 324, 325 Walker, Charles, 324, 325

Ward, James, 133 Warsaw, cultural and socioeconomic development, 82–84, 86, 104 Warsaw Imperial Theatres, 33, 56, 65; actors’ benefits, 67; artistic director, 69–70; evolving ensemble, 94–95; political valence, 65–67 Warsaw Theatre Museum, 310 Watterson, Colonel Henry, 170, 197, 234, 235 Whistler, James Abbott, 176 White, Stanford, 134, 138 Whitman, Walt, 164 Wilde, Oscar, 180, 185 Wingfield, Lewis, 227 Winter, Elizabeth Campbell, 163, 170, 236–37 Winter, William, 140, 159–60, 162, 191, 206, 208, 209, 211, 219, 223, 224, 225–26, 227– 30, 232–33, 314; diatribe against new social drama, 249–50; disapproval of MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Magda, 237–38, 239, 241; endorsement of MoÂ� djeÂ�ska as actress, 161–63; endorsement of MoÂ� djeÂ�ska’s character, 170, 173; racial argument against non–Anglo Saxons playing Shakespeare, 215, 216–18 Wister, Owen, 124 Witkiewicz, Stanisław, 86–87, 107–108, 113, 115– 16, 176, 177, 183, 293; commentary on Poland’s treatment of the artist, 108 Wolska, Anna, 105, 111, 112, 128, 137, 254, 270, 273; raising of Modrzejewska’s nieces, 274 Wolski, Kalikst: biography and writings, 111, 112, 270, 273 Wolter, Charlotte, 282 women: American theater reforms to attract Â�female patrons, 159–60; classic star parts for women, 212; “fallen women” dramas, 2, 77, 80, 99–100, 161–63; “feminizing” Lady Macbeth, 226–27; Ibsen’s roles for actresses, 234; Magda as incarnation of “bad womanliness,” 237; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s connection with American female fans, 169; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s later preference for great art over “good womanliness,” 241, 249; MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s “true womanhood” in America, 132; “nervous” emancipated heroine onstage, 100–101, 208; offstage trap of approved “womanliness,” 273; social restrictions on Kraków middle-Â�class women, 22–23; “true womanhood” on American stage, 160; “womanliness” in MoÂ�djeÂ�ska’s Warsaw debut perfor-

408 i n de x mances, 76–77; women as cultural power brokers in Gilded Age America, 169 Wysocka, Stanisława, 292 Wyspiański, Stanisław, 289, 290–93, 297, 303, 310, 312; Protesilaus and Laodamia, 291, 292 Yoch, Florence, 137, 145 Yoch, Joseph, 146 “Young Poland” movement, 186, 261, 289 Zahajkiewicz, Szczęsny: Jadwiga, Queen of Po land, 266 Zakopane, 60, 86–87, 148, 310, 345n130 Zapolska, Gabriela, 289–90; Autumn Evening, 290; The Morality of Mrs. Dulski, 290

Zarzycki, Aleksander, 86, 90–91 Zawadzki, Bronisław, 283–85 Zawiejski, Jan, 296 Zimajer, Gustaw, 9–10, 20, 33, 35, 38, 59, 60, 81, 82, 90, 105, 277; abduction of son, 55–56; checkered past, 23; encouragement of Modrzejewska’s German career, 28, 32, 34, 39– 40; later relationship with son, 275; sanitized representation in Memories and Impressions, 23–25 Zimajerowa (née Wodecka), Adolfina, 24 Zyblikiewicz, Michał, 175 Żełązowski, Roman, 50 Żółkowski, Alojzy, 66, 69, 78, 90, 94 Żurowski, Andrzej, 322

Beth Holmgren is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and Theater Studies at Duke University. She is author of Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time (IUP, 1993), editor (with Helena Goscilo) of Poles Apart: Women in Modern Polish Culture and Russia • Women • Culture (IUP, 1996), and translator and editor (with Helena Goscilo) of The Keys to Happiness by Anastasya Verbitskaya (IUP, 1999).

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