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Updated: June 11, 2025
Just before she stepped in front of the camera you saw her drawing down her face grotesquely, stretching her mouth to form an oval, dropping her jaw, twisting her lips to the right, to the left, rolling her eyes round and round. It was a perfect lesson in facial calisthenics, and Harrietta was thankful for it.
He was off with the burdens, invisible except for his gnomelike face and his sturdy bow legs in their footman's boots. "I can't," said Harrietta, feebly, for the last time. It was her introduction to the topsy-turvy world into which she had come. She felt herself propelled down the stairs by Irish Mary, who wasn't Irish Mary any more, but a Force whose orders were obeyed.
She was trying to say that here was the law of compensation working. But she didn't know this. She had never heard of the law of compensation. Her gentle mother fought her decision with all the savagery of the gentle. "You'll have to run away, Harry," her father said, sadly. And at twenty-two Harrietta ran. Her objective was New York. Her father did not burden her with advice.
Harrietta was interested in such things interested in them, and grateful for what they taught her. She told herself that she didn't mind the stir that Lydia Lissome made when she was driven up in the morning in her great blue limousine with the two Japs sitting so straight and immobile in front, like twin Nipponese gods. But she did.
They had two frightful years together and eight years apart before he died, horribly, in the sanatorium whose enormous fees she paid weekly. They had regularly swallowed her earnings at a gulp. Naturally a life like this develops the comedy sense. You can't play tragedy while you're living it. Harrietta served her probation in stock, road companies, one-night stands before she achieved Broadway.
"You've got everything you really want right here" his gesture seemed, somehow, to include himself "if you only knew it." "You talk," snapped Harrietta, "as the Rev. H. John Scoville used to." She had never said a thing like that before. "I'm sick of what they call being true to my art. I'm tired of having last year's suit relined, even if it is smart enough to be good this year.
Never hogged a scene that belonged to them. Never cut their lines. Never patronized them. They usually played ingénue parts, and their big line was that uttered on coming into a room looking for Harrietta. It was: "Ah, there you are!" How can you really know Harrietta unless you realize the deference with which she was treated in her own little sphere?
The critics liked to talk with her. Even George Jean Hathem, whose favourite pastime was to mangle the American stage with his pen and hold its bleeding, gaping fragments up for the edification of Budapest, Petrograd, Vienna, London, Berlin, Paris, and Stevens Point, Wis., said that five minutes of Harrietta Fuller's conversation was worth a lifetime of New York stage dialogue.
In those two weeks things had happened rather breathlessly. Harrietta had moved from the splendours of The Place to her own rose-embowered bungalow. Here, had she wanted to do any casement work with a white rose, like that earlier heroine, she could easily have managed it had not the early morning been so feverishly occupied in reaching the lot in time to be made up by nine.
"But I'm not signed for five thousand a week, like Lydia," put in Harrietta. "I know what you're signed for. 'Twas me put 'em up to it, an' who else! 'Easy money, I says, 'an' why shouldn't she be gettin' some of it? Lyddy spoke to Gans about it. What Lyddy says goes.
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