She was a generous actress, as well. She made everyone’s performances look better, by her mere presence onstage. She coaxed the best out of everyone. She liked to step back a bit in rehearsal and let the light shine on another actor, beaming at them somewhat as they played their role. The great actresses are not often this kind. But Edna always thought of others. I remember Celia coming to rehearsal one day wearing false eyelashes. Edna took her aside to caution her not to wear them in performances, as they would cast shadows over her eye sockets and make her look “corpselike, darling, which is never what one wants.”
A more jealous star would not have pointed out such a thing. But Edna was never jealous.
Over time, Edna made Mrs. Alabaster into a far more subtle character than what the script suggested. Edna transformed Mrs. Alabaster into a woman of knowing—a woman who knew how ridiculous her life was when she was rich, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be broke, and then knew how ridiculous it was to be running a casino in her drawing room. Yet she was a woman who bravely played the game of life anyhow—and allowed the game of life to somewhat play her. She was ironic, but not cold. The effect was a survivor who had not lost the ability to feel.
And when Edna sang her romantic solo—a simple ballad called “I’m Considering Falling in Love”—she brought the room to a state of silent awe, every single time. It didn’t matter how many times we’d heard her sing it already; we all stopped whatever we were doing to listen. It’s not that Edna had the best singing voice (she could be a tad chancy sometimes on the high notes), but she brought such poignancy to the moment that one couldn’t help but sit up and pay attention.
The song was about an older woman who was deciding to give herself over to romance one more time, against her own better judgment. When Billy wrote the lyrics, he hadn’t intended them to be quite so sad. The original point, I think, had been to create something light and amusing: Look, how cute! Even older people can fall in love! But Edna asked Benjamin to slow down the song and alter it to a darker key, and that changed everything. Now when she got to the last line (“I’m just an amateur / But what are we here for? / I’m considering falling in love”) you could feel that this woman was already in love, and that it was terminal. You could feel her fear at what might happen to her heart, now that she had lost control of herself. But you could also feel her hope.
I don’t think Edna ever sang that song in rehearsal that we didn’t stop and applaud her at the end.
“She’s the real deal, kiddo,” Peg said to me one day from the wings. “Edna is the real blown-in-the-bottle deal. No matter how old you get, don’t ever forget how lucky you were to see a master at work.”
—
A more problematic actor, I’m afraid, was Arthur Watson.
Edna’s husband couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t act—he couldn’t even remember his lines!—and he certainly couldn’t sing. (“To listen to his singing,” Billy diagnosed, “is to have the rare pleasure of envying the deaf.”) His dancing had everything wrong with it that dancing can have and still be called dancing. And he couldn’t move around the stage without looking as though he were about to knock something over. I wondered how he’d ever managed to be a carpenter without accidentally sawing his arm off. To his credit, Arthur did look awfully handsome in his costume of a morning suit, top hat, and tails, but that’s about all I can say in his favor.
When it became evident that Arthur couldn’t manage the role, Billy pared down the character’s lines as much as possible, to make it simpler for the poor man to get through a sentence. (For instance, Billy had changed Arthur’s opening line from “I’m your late husband’s third cousin, Barchester Headley Wentworth, the fifth earl of Addington” to “I’m your cousin from England.”) He also took away Arthur’s solo. He even took away the dance number that Arthur was meant to have with Edna as he was attempting to seduce Mrs. Alabaster.
“Those two dance as though they’ve never been introduced,” Billy said to Peg, before finally giving up on the idea of having them dance at all. “How is it possible that they are married?”
Edna tried to help out her husband, but he didn’t take direction well and got sputteringly offended at any efforts to refine his performance.
“I never understand what you’re talking about, my dear, and I always will!” he snapped at her once, insensibly, when she tried to explain the difference between stage right and stage left for the dozenth time.
The thing that drove us the craziest was that Arthur could not stop himself from whistling along with the music coming from the orchestra pit—even when he was on stage, and in character. Nobody could get him to stop.
One afternoon, Billy finally shouted, “Arthur! Your character can’t hear that music! It’s the theme from the goddamn overture!”
“Of course I can hear it!” Arthur protested. “The bloody musicians are right there!”
This had caused the exasperated Billy to go on a long rant about the difference in theater between diagetic music (which the characters onstage can hear), and non-diagetic music (which only the audience can hear).
“Talk English!” Arthur had demanded.
So Billy tried again: “Imagine, Arthur, that you are watching a western with John Wayne in it. There is John Wayne, riding his horse all alone across a mesa, and suddenly he starts whistling along to the theme music. Do you see how ridiculous that would be?”
“I just don’t see why a man can’t whistle these days without being attacked,” sniffed Arthur.
(Later, I heard him ask one of the dancers, “What the devil is a mesa?”)
—
I used to look at Edna and Arthur Watson and try with all my might to imagine how she coped with him.
The only explanation I could come up with was that Edna genuinely loved beauty—and Arthur was undeniably beautiful. (He looked like Apollo, if Apollo were your neighborhood butcher—but, yes, he was beautiful.) This made a certain amount of sense, because there was nothing in Edna’s life that wasn’t beautiful. I never saw anybody who cared about aesthetics more than that woman did. I never once saw Edna that she wasn’t exquisitely put together, and I saw her at all times of the day and night. (To be the kind of woman who is perfectly kempt even at the breakfast table or in the privacy of her own bedroom requires a certain amount of labor and commitment—but that was Edna for you, always ready to put in the hours.)
Her cosmetics were beautiful. The tiny silk drawstring purse in which she held her loose change was beautiful. The way she read her lines and sang onstage was beautiful. The way she folded her gloves was beautiful. She was both a connoisseur and a radiator of pure beauty, in all its forms.
In fact, I think part of the reason Edna liked to have Celia and me around her so much was that we were beautiful, too. Rather than being competitive with us—as many other older women might have been—she seemed enhanced and invigorated by us. I remember one day the three of us were walking down the street together, with Edna in the middle. She suddenly clasped us each by the arm, smiled up at us, and said, “When I walk around town with the two of you towering young ladies at my side, I feel like a perfect pearl, set between two gleaming rubies.”