Over the course of that summer, both Peg and Olive became increasingly passionate in their belief that the Americans must join the war effort. Somebody had to help out the British and rescue the French! Peg and Olive were in full support of the president as he tried to garner backing from Congress to take action.
Peg—a traitor to her class—had always loved Roosevelt. This had been shocking to me when I’d first heard about it; my father hated Roosevelt and was a vehement isolationist. A real pro-Lindbergh sort of fellow, was old Dad. I assumed that all my relatives hated Roosevelt, too. But this was New York City, I guess, where people thought differently about things.
“I’ve reached my limit with the Nazis!” I remember Peg shouting one morning over breakfast and the newspapers. She slammed her fist on the table in a burst of rage. “That’s enough of them! They must be stopped! What are we waiting for?”
I’d never heard Peg get so upset about anything, which is why it stuck in my memory. Her reaction pierced my self-absorption for a moment and made me take notice: Gee whiz, if Peg was this angry, things really must be getting bad!
That said, I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do about the Nazis, personally.
The truth was, I didn’t have any inkling that this war—this distant, irritating war—might have any real consequences until September of 1940.
That’s when Edna and Arthur Watson moved into the Lily Playhouse.
NINE
I’m going to assume, Angela, that you’ve never heard of Edna Parker Watson.
You’re probably a bit too young to know of her great theatrical career. She was always better known in London than New York, in any case.
As it happens, I had heard of Edna before I met her—but that’s only because she was married to a handsome English screen actor named Arthur Watson, who had recently played the heartthrob in a cheesy British war movie called Gates of Noon. I’d seen their photos in the magazines, so Edna was familiar to me. Now, this was a bit of a crime—to have known Edna only through her husband. She was by far the superior performer of the two, and the superior human being, besides. But that’s just how it goes. His was the prettier face, and in this shallow world a pretty face means everything.
It might have helped if Edna made movies. Maybe then she would’ve achieved greater fame in her day, and maybe she’d even be remembered now—like Bette Davis or Vivien Leigh, who were every bit her peers. But she refused to act for the camera. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity; Hollywood came knocking on her door many times, but somehow she never lost the stamina to keep turning down those big-shot film producers. Edna wouldn’t even do radio plays, believing that the human voice loses something vital and sacred when it is recorded.
No, Edna Parker Watson was purely a stage actress, and the problem with stage actresses is that once they are gone, they are forgotten. If you never saw her perform onstage, then you would not be able to understand her power and appeal.
She was George Bernard Shaw’s favorite actress, though—does that help? He famously said that her portrayal of Saint Joan was the definitive one. He wrote of her: “That luminous face, peeking out from its armor—who would not follow her into battle, if only to stare at her?”
No, even that doesn’t really get her across.
With apologies to Mr. Shaw, I’ll do my best to describe Edna in my own words.
—
I met Edna and Arthur Watson during the third week of September 1940.
Their visit to the Lily Playhouse, as with so many of the guests who came and went from that institution, was not exactly planned. There was a real element of chaos and emergency to it. Even beyond the scale of our normal chaos.
Edna was an old acquaintance of Peg’s. They’d met in France during the Great War and had become fast friends, though they hadn’t seen each other in years. Then, in the late summer of 1940, the Watsons came to New York City so that Edna could rehearse a new play with Alfred Lunt. However, the financing for this production vanished before anyone could memorize a single line, and so the play never came into being. But before the Watsons could sail back home to England, the Germans began the bombing of Britain. Within just a few weeks of the German attacks, the Watsons’ town house in London had been obliterated by a Luftwaffe bomb. Destroyed. Everything gone.
“Splintered to matchsticks, apparently” is how Peg described it.
So now Edna and Arthur Watson were trapped in New York City. They were stuck at the Sherry-Netherland hotel, which is not such a bad place to be a refugee, but they couldn’t afford to go on living there, as neither of them was employed. They were artists trapped in America without jobs, without a home to return to, and without safe transit back to their besieged country.
Peg heard about their plight through the theater grapevine, and—of course—she told the Watsons to come live at the Lily Playhouse. She promised that they could remain there just as long as they needed. She told them she’d even put them into some of her shows, if they needed income and didn’t mind slumming it.
How could the Watsons have refused? Where else were they going to go?
So they moved in—and that’s how the war made its first direct appearance in my life.
—
The Watsons arrived on one of the first crisp afternoons of autumn.
It happened that I was standing outside the theater talking to Peg when their car pulled up. I’d just returned from shopping at Lowtsky’s, and I was carrying a bag of crinolines which I needed to fix some of the “ballet costumes” of our dancers. (We were putting on a show called Dance Away, Jackie!—about a street urchin who is rescued from a life of crime by the love of a beautiful young ballerina. I had been tasked with the job of trying to make the Lily’s muscular hoofers look like a company of premier ballet dancers. I’d done my best with the costumes, but the dancers kept ripping their skirts. Too much boggle-boggle, I suppose. Now it was time for repairs.)
When the Watsons arrived, there was a small flurry of commotion, as they had a great deal of luggage. Two other cars followed their taxi, with the remaining trunks and parcels. I was standing right there on the sidewalk, and I saw Edna Parker Watson exit the taxi as though she were stepping out of a limousine. Petite, trim, narrow-hipped and small-breasted, she was dressed in the single most stylish outfit I’d ever seen on a woman. She was wearing a peacock-blue serge jacket—double-breasted, with two lines of gold buttons marching up the front—with a high collar trimmed in gold braid. She had on tailored dark gray trousers with a bit of flare at the bottom, and glossy black wingtip shoes, which almost looked like men’s shoes—except for the small, elegant, and very feminine heel. She was wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses, and her short, dark hair was set with glossy waves. She had on red lipstick—the perfect shade of red—but no other makeup. A simple black beret sat angled on her head with jaunty ease. She looked like a teeny-tiny military officer in the chicest little army in the world—and from that day forward, my sense of style would never be the same.
Until the moment I first glimpsed Edna, I’d thought that New York City showgirls and their spangled radiance were the pinnacles of glamour. But suddenly everything (and everyone) I’d been admiring all summer looked gaudy and glitzy compared to this petite woman in her sharp little jacket, and her perfectly tailored slacks, and her men’s-shoes-that-were-not-quite-men’s-shoes.