Chapter 6 #2
The girls were a former lady’s maid, who would manage Rita’s face paint and hair, and a silver-haired matron, who was in charge of a long metal rack crammed with costumes in rainbows of colors.
It was the costumer’s job to pair the tall Welsh hat with the correct knitted shawl, the zingara’s tambourine with the proper hair ribbons, the geisha’s kimono with the yellow silk chrysanthemum to be tucked in the sash at her waist.
“How many dances are we photographing?” Rita asked, surveying the bulging rack with trepidation.
“As many was we need to. We’re booked for the day, miss. That many.”
IN THE END, it wasn’t so many dances after all, barely a sampling of nations, but it still devoured hours and hours, eight hours straight with a quick break at noon for coffee and stale ham sandwiches.
She became a Welsh girl for the camera, a French girl, a Spanish girl.
A gypsy, a zingara, a British sailor. An American cowgirl.
She lifted her tambourine or her fan and sometimes kicked up a foot, holding whatever pose she had to for as long as she had to, muscles aching as the photographer adjusted the lighting and muttered instructions to his girls, who sometimes darted forward for some small adjustment—the drape of an apron, the position of a hair comb—before the shutter clicked and the flash powder burned.
For the cowgirl, Rita showed them her pistol, and even though no one could quite believe that Americans danced with their guns in hand, everyone agreed it would look perfect in the shot.
The geisha costume, however, defeated her.
It wrapped around her so snugly Rita could hardly bend at the waist, much less do anything with her feet.
In the end, she knelt on the floor before a lacquered screen, sat back on her heels with her arms slightly open and smiled tenderly at the camera, as if it were a long-absent lover who had finally returned home.
“Good God,” muttered the photographer, peering at her from behind the lens. “Yes. That look. Do that one again.”
And she did. It was easy.
THE LAYOUT IN The Sketch was published in July, accompanied by a peppy little article about Miss Jolivet, how fresh and exciting she was, and how she was sweeping London by storm, which was a wild exaggeration.
Yet, by then, she had been cast in William Poel’s austere version of Much Ado About Nothing.
She was Hero, the young, innocent heroine battered by fortune and her fiancé’s fickle faith.
So, months after she’d stood on the stage of the Catharine and boldly lied about playing the same part, her lie had lifted up on the wings of faith and transformed into truth.
That was how Inez had put it, in her soft and earnest way: wings of faith, transformed into truth. Rita preferred to think about how Ansel Lurie was likely squirming with rage, wherever he was.
Lurie was now far behind her, along with his embarrassing farce.
Mr. William Poel was all that Ansel Lurie had hoped to be but could never be, and William Poel had grand ideas about how to stage the Bard.
(Some said odd ideas, modern ideas, as if the notion of change offended their very souls.) Poel eschewed overly fussy sets and ornate, glittery costumes.
He demanded an open stage, minimal props, and outstanding acting.
On Rita’s first day of rehearsal, at the smoldering crack of dawn at St. George’s Hall, he shook her hand and told her that even though she was young and new, she must not fall behind.
The company would move like a locomotive through the acts, he said, pushing all detritus out of the way like dying sparks along the rails.
He had not been in jest. That morning, Rita took her chair at a long wooden table for the cast’s first read-through.
When Mr. Poel, at the head of the table, kept banging his fist against the tabletop, rhythmic as a train, urging, faster, better, everyone did as he said.
She learned on the jump to speak as quickly and eloquently as she could, with as much emotion as she dared without descending into parody. Thank God, it seemed to work.
Hero was the role of a lifetime, at least for a girl her age. She wasn’t going to waste it.
The truth was, though, that maybe she wasn’t as clever as she hoped.
Maybe she wasn’t the discovery of a generation for the stage.
The celebrated Mr. Poel seemed to take a special interest in her, yes, but perhaps it was because of Charles.
Or perhaps it was because she was so raw and eager, so ready to be what he wanted.
Mr. Poel gave her very pointed direction, his attention so focused on the details that he would comment on the placement of her hand on her hip in the wedding scene (higher; her fingers should pinch at her waist as if in pain).
The half smile on her lips when being wooed (too coy; be more sincere).
The degree of anguish in her brow when she realized her betrothed’s betrayal (just right).
Rita soaked it up like a sponge. She wasn’t in love with him—she didn’t even know if he had a wife, or wanted one—but she was seduced by his vision.
By the purity of his dream. It felt exactly aligned with her own.
She wanted to make herself the best vessel for the art that anyone could be.
Much Ado ran for months.
Then one early September afternoon, Rita’s world shifted.
Only a little, only enough to allow a startling, lucid glimpse of what her future might hold.
It was a small moment in an ordinary day, so small that in a remarkable life, it might easily go unremarked.
But it was the first of a thousand small moments just like it that would follow ever afterward.
More than a thousand, perhaps even ten thousand.
So she did remember it—the first time she was recognized in public.
She and Inez had gone shopping for hats and ended up taking luncheon in an intimate, elegant café in Covent Garden.
They ate sole and roasted potatoes under a series of colorful murals by Alphonse Mucha, and when the waitress approached at the end of the meal with a copy of The Sketch, asking quietly for an autograph, Rita borrowed a pen of aquamarine ink from the gentleman at the table next to hers, signing her name beneath the pictures of the improvised dances with an elaborate, sculpted flourish.
My Best Wishes. Rita Jolivet.
When she was finished, both she and Inez paused a moment to admire it, that jeweled blue scrawl across the page, how the “a” at the end of her first name formed a tail that crisscrossed under her last name, three long loops.
“Draw a heart, there,” Inez said, pointing at the bottom of the loops.
“A heart? No. That’s so sappy—”
“A heart, just there. Do it. It makes it special.”
So Rita bent closer and drew a careful heart where her sister had told her to, and honestly it wasn’t half-bad. Certainly the waitress seemed happy enough. She thanked them with pink cheeks and carried the magazine away with the pages still open, so the ink would dry without smearing.
Rita returned the pen to its owner at the next table with a curtsy. He was older, with white hair and jowls like a bulldog, but he smiled at her easily enough as he tucked the fountain pen back into his jacket pocket.
“So you’re famous, then, young lady?”
“No, not really,” Rita demurred.
“She is,” Inez countered. “But not as famous as she will be. Perhaps you should have her autograph too, sir.”
“Perhaps I should,” the man agreed, and that was how Rita came to borrow his pen a second time, and how the fashionable art nouveau café lost a single linen napkin that day, one stained with a few bold lines of bright blue ink.