“One’s drama education is not complete unless one knows the drama of the world. To be thoroughly acquainted with the drama of America and England, which, histrionically speaking, are one country, and not to know anything about thee great dramatic movements in Germany, the essentials of modern French plays and the comedy spirit in Italy, is like completing a common school education and omitting all knowledge whatsoever of geography.” (“To Send Out Own Companies: Frank Egan Considering New Production Venture,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 1911, p. III-12. See also “Egan Returns With New Names,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1911, p. III-2).

“Los Angeles has produced some mighty clever boys, but so far the ambitious girls are far in the lead. Many of them are going out in prominent positions in western organizations. Some of them are going straight to Broadway. “Young women that have been sent out from the Egan School during the past year are playing as far West as Honolulu and as far east as London. And in all instances they are Los Angeles girls.” (“Coming Here For Actors,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1912, p. III-20).

The next year Egan moved his school and expanded his operations with the addition of the Egan’s Little Theatre at 1324 S. Figueroa St. at Pico Blvd. After brief early success as a venue for drama, Egan’s theatre venture fell on hard economic times and was reconfigured to also enable the screening of silent movies. (“In the Theater Foyers,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1914, p. III-4).

By her late teens Anna began pursuing a Hollywood acting career in earnest. She visited the Majestic Studio in 1914-15, liked what she saw and soon became an extra. Her story as one of the more successful “extra girls” who parlayed her talents into progressively better roles was featured along with those of her D. W. Griffith-trained stablemates Mae Marsh, Seena Owens and Bessie Love in the December 1916 issue of Motion Picture Magazine (see below). The article described Anna, “She being of the foreign type, was given a place in with a mob of exotic looking supernumeraries. A few days later she was given a small part; as the days passed, her parts became better.” 

“In the first place, I was engaged while a mere spectator on the side lines one day by Mr. Griffith whom we were observing as he directed some scenes for “The Clansman.” When I told him my name he said, “Tut, tut! Impossible!”

As days passed I was continually cast in feature pictures and became accustomed to the work, I began to notice that my business was always to “vamp” to the total eclipse of my tender-hearted ambitions. I finally decided that this was not as it should be, and asked my director for a sympathetic part in the next production. “Impossible!” he snorted. “Heroines are always blonde. Vampires are dark. You are a vamp!” (“Olga Grey, the Griffith Vampire,” by Miss Anushka Zacsek: the Hungarian Ingenue, Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, July 8, 1916, p. 9).

“Fine Arts Film Company, 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif., is in the market for five-reel features, suitable for any of its stars: Douglas Fairbanks, Mae Marsh, Bobby Herron, Lillian Gish, Norma Talmadge, Wilfred Lucas, Fay Tinchner, Bessie Love, Olga Grey and Constance Talmadge. Often two or three of these players may appear in one picture; most of the feminine stars are ingenues, and stories in which the principal characters are young girls are therefore most desired. Stories must have underlying themes of considerable power.” (“The Literary Market,”The Editor, Oct 7,
1916, p. 338).

Besides her role in “Intolerance” Zacsek appeared in six other films in 1916, including the role of “Lady Agnes” in Macbeth. It was around the time of Zacsek’s appearance in “The Birth of a Nation” that Weston began photographing Ruth St. Denis (see above) and her dancers many of whom coincidentally appeared in the Babylonian dance sequences in Griffith’s “Intolerance” under St. Denis’s direction. Weston likely met St. Denis through the movie studio connections of Margrethe Mather (see below), Charlie Chaplin and costume and set designer George Hopkins (discussed later below) thus this may also be around the time that he met Zacsek. (See Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre by David Mayer, University of Iowa Press, 2009, pp. 179-80 and Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles by Beth Gates Warren, Getty Publications, pp. 79-82 for more details). 

On the marquee, “The Girl at Home” starring Vivian Martin, Jack Pickford and Olga Grey. Palace Theater, 30 Pine Ave., Long Beach, H. A. Anderson, architect, 1916. Photo by G. Haven Bishop, 1917. From the online Huntington Library exhibition “Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the California Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990.”

Zacsek would appear in eleven additional films between 1917 and 1920 (see above for example), with a steady decline in the quantity and quality of roles likely exacerbated by factors such as aging, unwillingness to play the casting couch game and the post-war depression of 1920-21 which hit the industry hard. The ambitious Anna, seeing no future on the screen, began seeking other outlets for her acting talents and became involved in local theatrical troupes, possibly through introductions by her former teacher Frank Egan to groups such as the Drama League and the Los Angeles Civic Repertory Company where she soon became entwined within the circles of Reginald Pole (see below), Weston, and Margrethe Mather.

Reginald Pole, n.d. Photographer unknown. From I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood, edited by Lindsay Smith, Chronicle, 1985, p. 59.

“If the company can continue to choose, mount and cast its plays as well as it did in these performances, its success is assured; not in a long time has anything been done, by amateurs or professionals, in this city which has been so artistically satisfying.” (Bliven, Bruce, “Good Plays by Good Amateurs,” California Outlook, May 22, 1915, pp. 9-10). 

The well-reviewed Barnsdall-Ordynski “Everyman” production starred a late recruit from New York, Gareth Hughes as Everyman, Kirah Markham as Everyman’s mother, Irving Pichel, and Frayne Williams. George Hopkins (see above) received much praise for his stage sets and costumes (see below). (“Ordynski “Everyman” Production at Trinity Promises to Unveil New Vista in Esthetics of the Stage – Brilliant is the Conception of Play,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, p. III-11). The production was undoubtedly followed with great interest by Reginald Pole. (“Othello to Have Production Here,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1920, p. II-9). Weston photographed Hopkins the year before and was also hired by him to photograph his creations modeled by dancers Maud Allan and Violet Romer (see two below) as well as Yvonne Sinnard, Katharane Edson, and Margaret Loomis, then dance students of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. (For much more on Ordynski, Barnsdall and the Schindlers see my “Pauline Gibling Schindler: Vagabond Agent for Modernism” (PGS)). 

After a two-year association with Ruth St. Denis helping her develop her Japanese dance routines, Japanophile McGehee supported himself translating and lecturing on Chinese and Japanese topics and and producing and performing Japanese dance routines before a wide range of organizations and women’s clubs. By 1916 he had become involved with a Japanese theatrical troupe called the Cherry Blossom Players for which he directed drama and dance productions under his friend Norma Gould’s business manager and impresario Lyndon E. Behymer. His contagious enthusiasm for the Cherry Blossom Players likely helped him convince impresario Behymer that being able to advertise set designs by the noted architect and fellow Japanophile Frank Lloyd Wright would help in attracting a wider audience to their Japanese troupe’s performances at the Alexandria Hotel (see below) in January 1917. (For much more on McGehee and Ruth St. Denis see my “Bertha Wardell: Dances in Silence: Kings Road, Olive Hill and Carmel“). (Author’s note: There might be a possibility that the above Times report was inaccurate and the sets were instead designed by his son, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. who by this time was designing stage sets for Paramount Pictures. If that was the case, Lloyd would undoubtedly have shown his father the sets while he was in town.).

“so that I might show you what I am doing and so that we might have an outing together. I am now in shape to entertain rather than be entertained as previously. Have just become a member of the Sierra Madre Club and am slowly establishing myself in the life of this city. Have just written a little one-act sketch called ‘Manikin’ … with an opportunity for good dancing, music, and stage sets. My real work is progressing to a point where worry is finding little chance to play its part. … Pretty good considering that I started here without capital, name, or a very wide experience.” (LW to FLW, n.d. Frank Lloyd Wright Correspondence, Getty Research Institute. Also cited in Hines, p. 15).

Lloyd’s mention of his “Manikin” sketch possibly places him within the Mather-Weston circle as early as this period as Alfred Kreymborg, whose plays “Manikin and Minikin” was staged at the Hollywood Community Theatre in February of 1918 starring Lloyd’s and Reginald Pole’s lifelong friend Lawrence Tibbett and Carlotta Rydman. On the same bill Tibbett also played the lead role in Earnest Dowson’s “Pierrot of the Minute.” (Warnack, Henry Christeen, “Players Popular,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1918, p. II-3).

Kreymborg first visited Los Angeles in the summer of 1917 to read his poetry at the Friday Morning Club and promote his latest literary journal Others. (Troubadour: An Autobiography by Alfred Kreymborg, New York, 1925). During the trip he also visited Mather’s studio, likely at the suggestion of friend and former Little Review employee and contributor William Saphier. Saphier had a brief fling with, and had his portrait taken by Mather who also exhibited same a few months later. (Anderson, Antony, “Of Art and Artists,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1917. Also see Warren, p. 118. For much more on Kreymborg and Saphier see my “Bertha Wardell: Dances in Silence“).

Gaining ever more confidence with his Los Angeles surroundings and expanding dramatic circle Lloyd proposed to his father that they form a partnership and enjoy the finer things that the burgeoning city had to offer.

“I often wish that you might be able to free yourself from the various loads you seem to enjoy piling upon your back and that we two could enter the field together as father and son. I believe we could make them all sit up and enjoy us, and we’d have a glorious time doing it. Architecture, landscape architecture, the theater, and music with the various luxuries and interesting diversions that attach thereto. And do it in a gloriously fine way too. If I only had your sincere support in the matter, I could rip the very devil out of his hole.” (LW to FLW, Frank Lloyd Wright Correspondence, Getty Research Institute. Also cited in Hines, p. 15).

“… an independent. In spite of it, however, a wife. We have taken an old shack in an acre of acacia and [are] decorating the house on next to nothing. Kira is restless, ambitious and forceful, a good thing for us both. She is, however, prone to, or rather impressed by, the fact that the successful stage careers of today (the majority of them) are made by the ‘successees’ selling their bodies and their souls to the ‘successors.’ Perhaps she will get over it. I hope so.” (LW to FLW, n.d. Hines, p. 15).

“[She] really has no actual conception of what she wants to do with a theatre at all. She has vague illuminated moments, but the flashes that come in are eternally slipping away on close contact she puts in power to execute them….And she wants so much to go on. Yet I scarcely believe I could endure the strain of a second season with her.” (Kirah Markham to FLW, February 7, 1917, FLW Archives, Taliesin West cited in Frank Lloyd Wright: Hollyhock House and Olive Hill by Kathryn Smith, Rizzoli, 1992, pp. 22-3).

“Kirah calls up. Is at 7 Fifth Avenue. Wants me to come over. Go. She is downstairs when I get there. Haven’t seen her in over a year, when we lived together. Cries and hugs me. Tells me of her life in Los Angeles as star of Little Theatre. The attitude of [Richard] Ordynski the director toward her. Played two leading roles. Didn’t like her because she wasn’t his style of beauty. Now is Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. Character of her father-in-law, the architect. His opposition to her because he thought she wanted to return to me. Her father also in opposition-same reason. Wright’s great estate in Wisconsin. His mistress. Housekeeper steals letters and publishes them. He takes his discarded mistress back. Kirah wants me to meet her occasionally when she is with her husband and pretend not to have seen her before. I leave, agreeing to meet her somewhere soon.” (Riggio “Diaries,” pp. 170-1).

“I am provoked with Lloyd for wool-gathering again and leaving me entirely in the dark about everything. I am quite tired of maintaining a service that doesn’t enlighten me when I am unable to enlighten myself regarding my own affairs. I still look toward Los Angeles as a place in which I might turn your services to good account, but I know nothing, absolutely nothing of what is going on there. And therefore the matter is in abeyance at least until I can get on the ground myself and make up my mind on what to do.” (FLW, Tokyo to RMS, Oak Park, February 9, 1920, Getty Research Institute). 

“At present RMS and Lloyd Wright(who is at least six feet tall), two draftsmen and an office boy are all crowded into two small office rooms, which are otherwise already overflowing with huge drafting tables and desks and on TOP of them, various stenographers coming in to bring rush copy of contracts, while burly contractors stand about looking crafty and expensive.” (Cited in Communities of Frank Lloyd Wright: Taliesin and Beyond by Myron A. Marty, Northern Illinois University Press, 2009, p. 71).

“Concerning Lloyd I shall not make any reports….his relation to the office is to[o] vague for me to set upon. I should think he could send you all news himself and save me the suspicion of spreading gossip.” (RMS (Los Angeles) to FLW (Tokyo), March 26, 1921, Getty Research Institute).

“…joined the L.A Athletic Club (see two above) through pressure from Dodd and the Uplifters!! (Same Uplifters). It is an expense that is heavy to bear just now but perhaps a wise one. Time will tell. Have started divorce proceedings. [Reginald] Poel sends his best and was sorry not to have seen you off. Expects to put on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” at the Trinity Auditorium next month. (For much on the Uplifters, a group of prominent L.A. Athletic Club members including Dodd and Frank Garbutt, see “Uplifters on Way to Enter Bohemia,” Los Angeles Times, October 26, 1917, p. II-6 and “Uplifters Will Inspect Work on Clubhouse,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1921, p. II-6). (Author’s note: Garbutt’s father’s land development partner J. B. Lankershim also built the Hotel Lankershim). 

He [Schindler] chafes in the (unintelligible) and has bewailed the fact that you forbade him to get in touch with Miss “B.” I have not been able to give him much assistance, hardly any in fact, between the landscape work which I am pushing rapidly along and the perspectives and sickness.” (LW to FLW (Tokyo) ca. late August 1921. Frank Lloyd Wright Correspondence, Getty Research Institute).

Another reason Lloyd may not have given Schindler much assistance is that throughout the period he was working on Olive Hill he was also moonlighting on projects for the Phoenix Country Club, Dodd’s personal estate, the Kenneth Preuss Estate, and Santa Monica High School during the hectic period Schindler was trying to wrap up construction activities and legal disputes on Barnsdall’s Hollyhock House and Residences A and B. (Gebhard, p. 98).

“Life has been very full for me – perhaps too full for my own good – I not only have done some of the best things yet – but also have had an exquisite affair – what more could one wish – and yet through it all I am haunted by that one unsatisfied desire – perhaps if it is ever accomplished I shall be even more unsatisfied! The pictures I believe to be especially good are the one of Tina de Richey – a lovely Italian girl – Venetian…” (Edward Weston handwritten letter to Johan Hagemeyer, April 14, 1921, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Papers, Getty Research Institute).

Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather, “Max Eastman at Water’s Edge”, 1921. Platinum-palladium print, tipped to a mount, signed by Mather and signed and dated by Weston in pencil on the mount, matted, a Museum of Modern Art label on the reverse, 1921. (From Sotheby’s: Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art : April 25, 2001 : Sale NY7632, p. 140).

“…I had two short glimpses of Margrethe. Margrethe, the unchanging. I have done all I can – nothing further to offer, one way or another. She must work out her own destiny quite alone – no one can help her. A lotus in a mud-pond near an old, deserted temple.

Florence [Deshon] was to leave soon for New York – had given up stage work, and was to return east, planning hopefully to enter Columbia University. Feels that she lacks training for any special work, may take a literary course, and later try to write. She needs self-discipline most of all.” (Ramiel McGehee to Betty Katz, ca. October-November 1921, courtesy of Leslie Squyres, Center for Creative Photography. Also cited in Warren, p. 235).

“Helen does not want to go to Helen Poles, because of the possible crowd but I finally persuade her to go. …  At 5:30 we ride over to the Poles. Beautiful house, built by Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr., who is there. He is the man who married Kirah after I left her and from whom she secured a divorce. A fine fellow. Looks like Ed. A charming artistic point of view. We are shown the house. Dinner. The lights. Mrs. Poles little boy. Jack [John Cowper Powys] and his queer friends [Paul Jordan-Smith, Margrethe Mather, Edward Weston, Florence Deshon, the Schindlers, et al?]. We talk until ten, then motor home. I like Wright so much and wish I might see him again. (Dreiser Diaries, p. 385). (Author’s note: It was during Powys’ month-long April 1922 Los Angeles lecture tour that Tina Modotti prevailed upon him to pen the introduction to her Book of Robo, a compilation of her recently deceased husband’s writings.)

“I am very lucky to have found this room in this very small hotel just where I wanted to be. It was only after a very long hunt that I found it. Mr Lloyd Wright who is Helen Pole’s chief friend helped me to find it, motoring me round all this district in her ramshackle little car – an excellent young man, but speak of him not to Reginald! But alas! Helen Pole is still not convalescent from her bad attack of pleurisy and she is going down to her ‘adobe’ cottage at Palm Springs next week, so that I shall be alone – again – except for this admirable young architect who is known to Dreiser and also to our sister Marian. His father, the great architect Mr. Wright, is hiring Helen’s house or rather her mother’s house here, so they have to clear out now. But the appearance of his formidable father will set up the fortunes of Lloyd, I hope; for he is a nice youth and an honest.

Reginald’s little son [Rupert, seen earlier above] has become a fast friend of mine and always calls me ‘John Powys ‘. We are the greatest Rabelaisian cronies. God! he is a little rogue. But he’ll be gone too with his mother.” (Excerpt from letter from John Cowper Powys to Llewellyn Powys, January 10, 1923 from Letters of John Cowper Powys to His Brother Llewellyn, Vol. 1, edited and selected by Malcolm Elwin, Village Press, London, 1975, p. 313). (Author’s note: Lloyd Wright may have met Marian Powys when he visited New York in 1922 where he also met Beatrice Wood at a performance of Pole’s at the Provincetown Theater. See I Shock Myself, pp. 63-4).

Rendering for the Oasis Hotel, 125, S. Palm Canyon Dr., Palm Springs, Lloyd Wright, architect and landscape architect, 1923. From Weintraub, p. 239.

In  June 1923, Pole, then separated from Helen and living with Beatrice Wood in New York, broke the news to her, “You know, I think I should take a trip west and see my wife and son. … I really should go see her. Of course, my best friend, Lloyd Wright, lives nearby and if she wants advice she has him. But I would feel better if I went and saw her.” Beatrice hoped that Reginald, the love of her life, was going back to arrange for a divorce so that they could marry and received the joyful news two weeks later that Helen had fallen in love with Lloyd (see below) and that they were indeed divorcing. (I Shock Myself, pp. 63-4).

Despite marrying his ex-wife Helen in 1926, Wright was able to remain friends with Pole due to their mutual love of his son Rupert and the theater. Thus it was likely through Pole’s connections with the Pilgrimage Playhouse and Hollywood Bowl patrons Gerson, Clarke and Wetherill that Wright was entrusted with the design of the stage sets for  the September 1926 production of “Julius Caesar” at the Hollywood Bowl. (Gebhard, p. 26). A busy summer indeed for Pole as he had just finished his six-week run as Jesus Christ at the nearby Pilgrimage Playhouse, he was also named to direct Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” probably on the grandest scale it had ever been staged. Of Wright’s elaborate sets for the the massive extravaganza (see below) the Times reported, 

“The entire stage and surrounding terrain of the Bowl will be used in the construction of the massive sets. The hills in the background will be blended with the stage settings to complete a series of remarkable backgrounds for the action of the drama…

The great set prepared for the event breaks up into several units including the Roman Forum, Caesar’s house, the orchard or garden of Brutus, the walls of Rome, the Senate house, a street in Rome, the tent of Brutus, the battlefield of Phillippi, etc.

It is so constructed that the action once started may be continuous without delays attendant upon the shifting of scenery. The great battle scene, employing 1000 men, which takes place in the canyon and on the hills in the rear of the Bowl stage, may seen by striking two units of the set, which is done while action is taking place on the terraces in front of the stage.” (“Bowl to Stage Tragedy on Magnificent Scale,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1926, p. II-1.).

The success of the “Julius Caesar” spectacle led to Wright’s commission to design the Bowl’s short-lived orchestra shells for both the 1927 and 1928 seasons (see above and below). The above 1927 shell was built of left over lumber from the stage sets he designed for the June production of “Robin Hood.”  (“Bowl Show in Final Rehearsal,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1927, p. 19).

Tiring of family life Pole separated from Helen in 1921 and throughout the rest of the 1920s split his time between Los Angeles during the summer pageants at the Pilgrimage Play Theater and  Hollywood Bowl and New York during the winter theater season while also lecturing on art, literature and philosophy at Harvard and Yale. As mentioned earlier, Pole met Beatrice Wood in New York in late 1921 while directing her in Helen Freeman’s adaptation of Horace Fish’s novel “Great Way.” Before meeting Pole, Wood had been close friends with art collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg and their artist circle of friends which included Marcel Duchamp with whom she had a romantic relationship in the late 1910s. The Arensbergs moved to Hollywood in 1921 around the time Pole first left Helen and moved to New York. It was through Pole that Wood also met his close friends Lawrence Tibbett when he first moved to New York at Pole’s urging and Lloyd Wright when he came to visit his friends.

It was during this period that Pole staged his and John Cowper Powys adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” which was first staged in April 1922 at the Republic Theatre and the Little Theatre under Pole’s direction and with Pole and Estelle Winwood in the lead roles and Beatrice Wood in a supporting role. (“The Idiot Acted at Benefit,” New York Times, April 8, 1922). According to Wood the play was a great success and caught the attention of David Belasco and many others. (I Shock Myself, p. 62). The following month Pole performed with his and Powys’ mutual friends Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg in their American premiere production of Swedish playwright August Strindberg‘s “Creditors” at the Greenwich Village Theatre. (“Strindberg in Greenwich Village,” American-Scandinavian Review, July 1922, p. 436. For more on Pole and Powys see my “The Schindlers and the Westons and the Walt Whitman School“).

Later that year Browne and Van Volkenburg (see above) made a stop in Los Angeles for a lecture-reading of “Medea” for the Friday Morning Club at the 1,300-seat Morosco Theater (see below). (Nye, Myra, “‘Medea’ Worthy Offering,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1922, p. III-38). While in town they almost certainly reconnected with Paul Jordan-Smith and his wife Sarah (Edward Weston’s cousin), a longtime member and future President of the Friday Morning Club, Reginald Pole and Frayne Williams and possibly the Schindlers as well. (For more on these interrelationships see my “SWWWS“). Browne and Van Volkenburg were on their way to San Francisco where they hoped, with the help of Charles Erskine Scott Wood and Sara Bard Field, to open another Little Theatre similar to the one they had so much success with in Chicago. (For much more on this see my “SWKC“). Browne made a brief foray back to Southern California in the summer of 1923 with an appearance at cast dinner for the American premiere production of Strindberg’s “Lucky Pehr.” (“To Found Athens of America,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1923, p. III-29).

Pole and Wood (see below) soon struck up a relationship and together discovered the works of Dr. Annie Besant and Charles Leadbetter while browsing in the Philosopher’s Bookshop which began a lifelong fascination with Theosophy. (I Shock Myself, p. 60).

In the summer of 1923 Pole invited Wood to come out to Los Angeles and join him for his Pilgrimage Play season, a pattern they would repeat the following summers until Wood, attracted by the presence of Krishnamurti in nearby Ojai, permanently move to Los Angeles in 1926. Wood soon introduced Pole to the Arensbergs who had been living in Aline Barnsdall’s Residence A on Olive Hill which Schindler and Lloyd Wright had just recently completed (see above). (“Diaries of Beatrice Wood” in Beatrice Wood: Career Woman – Drawings, Paintings, Vessels, and Objects by Elsa Longhauser and Lisa Melandri, Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2011, p. 93).

Wood quickly adapted to the Los Angeles scene and took up right where she had left off with the Arensbergs, Lawrence Tibbett and his wife Grace and befriending Lloyd and Helen [Taggart] Wright. Despite growing further apart by the end of 1926, Wood and Pole began attending lectures by Annie Besant and visiting the Theosophist community in Ojai. (I Shock Myself, p. 82). During 1926-7 Wood may have also crossed paths with another ardent Theosophist, Pauline Schindler, whose first stop after packing up her son and leaving husband Rudolph and Kings Road in August 1927 was also the fledgling Theosophist community in Ojai. (For much more on this see my Pauline Gibling Schindler: Vagabond Agent for Modernism).

Wood’s involvement with Theosophy deepened throughout 1927 and by 1928 Wood and Pole had become frequent contributors to The Star: An International Magazine, the official organ of the Order of the Star in the East. For the initial Ojai Star Camp in the spring of 1928 Pole and Wood produced the play “The Light of Asia” starring Pole, his by then wife Frances and Wood (see below). (“Krishnamurti Defines Star,” Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1928, p. II-6 and Crane, Helen R., “The Light of Asia,” The Star, August 1928, p. 38).

“Mr. Poel conveys the impression of rampant asceticism with a vivid clearness in his portrayal of Rosmer. His personality blends very ideally with the role. Anna Zacsek’s repressed acting and her finely controlled emotional outburst at the end of the second act made for a really brilliant portrayal of Rebecca West.” (“Rosmersholm” Is Given At The Little Theatre,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1920, p. III-4).

“Without pausing to wrinkle even one moment over the question, Frank Egan made up his mind the very minute the curtain rang down, on “Romersholm,” on opening night, at the Little Theatre, that Anna Zacsek would do well in a series of Ibsen matinees in New York, and therefore, being a man of decision, he means at once to make arrangements to that end. So New York may look out for a highbrow invasion.

Miss Zacsek is the same brilliant young actress whom we used to know in pictures as Olga Gray. She always had a great desire to play Ibsen, even in the old days, in Triangle mellers [melodramas].

Ever since her first appearance in Ibsen plays a year or so ago, at the Little Theatre, she has shown unusual brilliancy and aptitude for such roles.” (Kingley, Grace, “Olga Gray As Was,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1920, p. III-4).

“Hedda is not typically her metier as was the lady of intriguing purposes in “Rosmersholm,” although there was a steady gaining of performance in her portrayal. She showed a tendency at the opening to strain for emotional effect, not exactly suitable to the woman who, with all her determination to reach out to rule, was constantly held in check by her conventional bonds. … With the play’s progress Miss Zacsek made this part of her interpretation ever more convincing. Still, she did not differentiate quite sufficiently in the part from her previous Ibsen roles.” (Schallert, Edwin, “Hedda Gabler” Presented at Little Theatre,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1921, p. III-4).

“In “Monna Vanna“ Maurice Maeterlinck gives a
wonderful picture of the new woman – not the new woman as portrayed in the
newspapers, but the new woman as a reborn, regenerated spirit; the woman who
has emancipated herself from her narrow outlook upon life, and detached herself
from the confines of the home; the woman, short, who has become race-conscious
and therefore understands that she is a unit in the great ocean of life, and
that she must take her place as an independent factor in order to rebuild and
remold life. In proportion as she learns to become race-conscious, does she
become a factor in the reconstruction of society, valuable to herself, to her
children, and to the race.” (The Social Significance of the Modern Drama by Emma Goldman, Badger, Boston, 1914, pp. 130-131).

Times drama critic Grace Kingsley lauded Frank Egan for bringing the play for the first time to Los Angeles and entrusting the renowned Hedwiga Reicher to direct. She described Zacsek as,

“…the dark-eyed volatile, fascinating young siren, who used to be Olga Grey in pictures, but who flashed suddenly meteor-like across our vision a few months ago at the Little Theatre, when she created a sensation in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” and later as the heroine of “Hedda Gabler.” She has sort of a slender, Burne-Jones brunette beauty, has Miss Zacsek, that is oddly striking anywhere, and which is especially attractive on the stage. Having seen her you’ll not forget her. Her personality is vivid, but odd. Alive every minute, her brilliant black eyes miss nothing.”

Presciently describing the character traits that would bode well for her later career as an attorney, Kingsley continued,

“Miss Zacsek takes an active interest in everything, both in and out of her profession, believing all is fish in the way of equipment that comes to the actress’s net. … It wasn’t mere idle curiosity that prompted her, nor mere idle observation, for previously she had spent much time reading along medical and psychopathic lines believing that such knowledge is endlessly helpful insight into life. Up in San Francisco she went once and dwelt in Chinatown with a missionary woman friend for a fortnight, and another time she aided a detective in unraveling a crime mystery. While in New York a few years ago, she lived in Greenwich Village, absorbing atmosphere. But back of this young player’s seemingly meteoric success are several years of hard, grueling work and heart-breaking professional experiences. She had studied music and art, and fitted herself as a concert pianist, when curiosity led her one day, about six years ago, over to the Griffith studio, where D. W. Griffith was putting on “The Birth of a Nation.”

Kingsley briefly summed up Zacsek’s early movie career and continued with,

“…but she got the New York fever, went back there, met Nazimova, who kindly advised her, took her to dinner, lunch and the theater, and was a great and real source of inspiration to the little unknown western girl. But all of her hopes for the theatrical engagement she had longed for fell through, and when a picture engagement also failed, she became so disheartened that she came home and took a position as governess.”

Zacsek always maintained hope of returning to the stage and her chance came when Egan engaged Pole to stage some Ibsen plays at his Little Theatre and when he introduced her to him,

“…[Pole] at once believed in her, and it was in her first stage venture, Ibsen’s “When We Dead Awaken,” that she showed what her talent really was made of. Then she did “Rosmersholm” and “Hedda Gabler,” but it appears that “Monna Vanna” her brilliancy will find even more congenial atmosphere. Such great faith has Frank Egan in Miss Zacsek that he means to send that young woman to New York in a series of Ibsen matinees.” (Kingsley, Grace, Art Play Is In Rehearsal; Modernistic Production of “Monna Vanna”; Olga Grey Zacsek In Title Role,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1921, p. III-13).

“…to bring Olga Gray Zacsek, who is now in Detroit working on a series of musical productions in conjunction with the New York Symphony Orchestra. Among other productions in which he will feature Miss Zacsek, Mr. Egan mentions “Thy Name Is Woman,” played last year at the Mason with Mary Nash, and “The Riddle Woman” by Charlotte E. Wells.” (“Art Theaters Active Here,” Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1921, p. III-13).

“Working with pliable material sensitive to color and rhythm, Olga Grey Zacsek, director, produced some interesting results with “Africanus.” There was nothing stiff nor ungraceful about the work of these Negro actors and actresses and the lilt of their musical voices was pleasing to the ear. The play is rich in Negro humor, some of it of a delicious order, and the audience was kept laughing most of the time. … In stage settings Miss Zacsek has struck a note entirely new to Los Angeles, following the lead of Arthur Hopkins and Robert Edmond Jones, disciples of Gordon Craig. Tracy and Oliver were the artists.” (“The Looking Glass,” The Crisis, April 1922, p. 275).

The restless Browne continued his vagabond ways and moved his center of operations to Los Angeles after his and Kuster’s successful 1924 season in Carmel. Around this time Browne had a stopover in Halcyon to spend some time with the pregnant Janson where he also read Jeffers’ recently published Tamar which prompted a letter of praise to the poet and his reply, “…That you should read “Tamar” through such a divine hazard, in the oasis by Santa Maria [Halcyon], is more luck than any writer deserves…“ (Letter from Jeffers to Browne, February 11, 1925, from The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1897-1962 edited by Anne N. Ridgeway, Johns Hopkins Press, 1968, p. 33).

Upon settling in Los Angeles Browne produced the occasional play (see above) and for the next two years taught at USC. Hearing that he was in the city, former students came back one by one to work with him. (Browne, p. 286). Appalled by Browne’s squalid surroundings at USC, frequent Edward Weston portrait subject as early as 1916, Ruth St. Denis allowed him free use of her building and office while she was gone on a world tour. (Browne, p. 287). (For much more on Ruth St. Denis see my Bertha Wardell: Dances in Silence.)

As one of the movers and shakers of the planning effort, Pauline organized an event at Kings Road to help promote the cause. She arranged for Browne to lecture on Hermann Keyserling, likely on the occasion of the recent publication of his The Travel Diary of a Philosopher. (Author’s note: Edward Weston often referenced Keyserling’s diary in his Daybooks). Possibly accompanied by Ellen Janson to the soiree, Browne recollected, “And Pauline Schindler, brilliant, warm-hearted, bitter-tongued, who was trying to create a salon amid Hollywood’s cultural slagheap, invited me to her home to lecture on Keyserling.” (Browne, p. 287). Pauline excitedly wrote her mother of the salon, “[the party]…is going to be huge. We have never had more than a hundred guests before … But this will be overflowing.” (PGS letter to her mother, [n.d.] circa October, 1925. Cited in Sweeney, p. 96). 

“A great banquet was planned in my honour; every theatrical celebrity whom I knew in America and Europe was invited to attend as a guest of honour; an astonishingly large number sent messages of goodwill; some even accepted. The realtor danced round Ruth St. Denis’ office: “With these names behind us the theatre is as good as built.” It was all so splendiferous that I telegraphed Nellie Van to come to the banquet; she sat beside me; the speeches made us feel that we had not lived in vain. Finally our evening came to its end. As I was leaving, the chairwoman of the Publicity Committee unostentatiously handed me an envelope. ”A cheque on account,” I thought, “how charming:” and thanked her warmly. When I got home I opened the envelope. It contained the bill for printing, postage, stationery, telephone, telegrams, table decorations and dinner for the guests of honour. Grinning wrily, Nellie Van returned to Seattle. My students and I gave performances anywhere – schoolrooms, tents, barns - where a ten-dollar note could be earned toward paying that bill: dollar by dollar we paid it to the last cent. Then I spat savagely and straight into the streets of Los Angeles and, worn out by the interminable conflicts within myself, the interminable struggle to establish a theatre which mattered, the interminable inability to pay for it, said goodbye to my theatric dreams.” (Browne, p. 288).

“Is your “Idiot” scenery to be for stage or movie? I read the book last summer, and found much in it to criticize, much to praise, and much food for thought. I could tell you exactly how to do the setting. When I read a book I am continuously painting new mental pictures.” (Sophie Gibling to RMS, n.d., ca. January 1928. UC Santa Barbara Art Museum, Architecture and Design Collections, Schindler Collection).

“Reginald Pole gives a remarkable performance as Myshkin, the frail Russian prince. Pole has a marvelously sensitive face, on which expressions are mirrored with perfect fidelity. There are times in “The Idiot” when he appears almost in an eerie fashion as the true Redeemer. His voice, as in the Pilgrimage Play with which he has been identified, is of youthful, sympathetic timbre.”

Busby thought Zacsek to be “a picturesque, interesting Natasya and the possessor of a splendid voice.” (Busby, Marquis, “”Idiot” is Intensely Powerful,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1928, I-11). Former lover Weston had a similarly favorable review as he wrote of Zacsek,

Harriet Freeman, 1925. Photographer unknown. From Chusid, p. 138. University of Southern California Freeman House Archive © 2011.

As they did with Zacsek and numerous other women, Weston and Schindler also shared a romantic interest in Harriet Freeman (see above). Like Aline Barnsdall and John Storer, the Freeman’s would commission Schindler to design additions, renovations and furniture over the years for their Frank Lloyd Wright-designed homes in Hollywood (see below for example).  The last of four concrete block houses Wright designed during his brief 1923-4 stint in Los Angeles, the Freeman House was also a major stop on the salon-party circuit for the Schindler-Weston circles (see announcement for Schindler lecture two below for example).  (For much more on the Freeman House and the Schindler-Weston circles see my “Foundations of Los Angeles Modernism“).

After “The Idiot” wrapped, Pole retreated to his beloved Palm Springs where he devoted himself to completing his “life work,” a musical drama entitled “The Elfrith Idyll” which was conceived during his Cambridge days in collaboration with best friend Rupert Brooke. As an antidote for his months of concentration, Pole announced that he would present a series of matinee performances starting with Arnold Bennett‘s “The Great Adventure” and that future matinees would probably include some Ibsen dramas featuring Zacsek as the heroine. (“Reginald Pole Writes Music Drama; To Do Play Series,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1928, p. C-13).

“The presentation which featured Olga Zacsek, was effective to the tiniest detail. The cast was an excellent one, and the costumes and the settings harmonized in a highly effective manner, the whole blending into a colorful tableaux. … As mentioned before, Olga Zacsek, in the role of the heroine, Monna Vanna, completely captured last night’s audience, not only with her histrionic ability, but with her charm and exceedingly lovely appearance. Boris Karloff gave a splendid characterization in the difficult role of Guido Collona, and William Stack shared honors with his interpretation of the Florentine general, Prinzivalle.” (Olga Zacsek Acts Lead in Guild Drama,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1928, p. I-11).

“Honors go to Olga Zacsek for a poignantly lovely interpretation of the awkward inarticulate chamber maid. She has scenes of passionate fright and choking misery that are beautiful bits of emotionalism. … Settings by R. M. Schindler are strikingly contraposed arches and angles against black curtains. A most interesting effect of remoteness was achieved in the murder scene by placing the furnishings of a room on a small high platform. The fact that the bottoms of the tables and trays were visible gave the feeling of the fourth floor back with a clever simplicity of means.” (Miller, Llewellyn, “Olga Zacsek in Egan Play,” Los Angeles Record, May 24, 1928).

  ”Portia Once Screen Star: Trial Unmasks Olga Grey”, Los Angeles Times, Jun 10, 1935, pg.I-1, 8.

Zacsek Residence, 114 Ellen St., Playa del Rey, 1938. From R. M. Schindler by Judith Sheine, Gustavo Gili, 1998, p. 151.

Flush with money for the first time in her life, Zacsek commissioned Schindler to design a new house on the sand dunes of Playa del Rey in 1936. The striking home with commanding views of Santa Monica Bay (see above and below) was completed not long after the Schindler’s divorce proceedings began in earnest in late 1937. In a December 21, 1937 letter to her client Schindler Zacsek wrote, “I suggest that you have assembled your income and expenditures. Not that I desire to look into your private life, but, it is truly necessary if we are to muzzle Pauline.” There is also 1938 correspondence in the Schindler Archive at UCSB from Pauline’s attorney, Morris E. Cohn, regarding child support. Cohn, like Pauline, was an amateur composer, thus they were also probably longtime friends from happier times at Kings Road. (I am indebted to author Susan Morgan for the above UCSB Zacsek-RMS and Cohn-PGS correspndence from UCSB).

“If the Carmel residents could but realize the treat in store for them their would be many a trip this week out to the Mission Tea House where Johan Hagemeyer, pictorial photographer, is conducting an exhibit. There seem s to be no doubt that Mr. Hagemeyer stands at the head of this comparatively new school on this coast. His pictures are not photographs. They are interpretations. He uses the camera as a painter would use his brush. The mechanical or scientific instrument is lost sight of, it becomes merely the medium for expressing the artist’s vision. … Mr. Hagemeyer has been called an ultra-modernist. It is because he emphasizes the individual touch, the idea or intent that must be in every created thing, the essence of the producer, his or her individuality, imagination, etc.” (“Hagemeyer Exhibit of Art Photography Is Notable Collection,” Carmel Pine Cone, November 4, 1922, p. 8).

Their scandalous relationship, complicated by the existence of yet another Reverend Paul Smith in the pulpit of the First Methodist Church in San Francisco, whose views on feminism were diametrically opposed to Jordan Smith’s, confused the press as the scandalous love quadrangle played out in the headlines of the San Francisco and Los Angeles newspapers. The mess prompted Jordan-Smith to hyphenate his name in a futile attempt at obfuscating the transgression of his affair with the unyet divorced Sarah. Thus Jordan-Smith’s ardently hoped for academic career was nipped in the bud as the Berkeley English Department faculty voted not to renew his fellowship. (Starr, p. 316 and Warren, p. 115). 

Jordan-Smith also enrolled in graduate classes at the University of Chicago and befriended the likes of Clarence Darrow, Maurice Browne, Floyd Dell, John Cowper Powys, Emma Goldman, Parker H. Sercombe, Margaret Anderson and bookseller George Millard and found his passion for book-collecting and a life of letters. Jordan-Smith was exposed to the beginnings of the Chicago Literary Renaissance and Chicago-style anarchism and labor unrest which he did not always share sympathies with. Like Rudolph Schindler after his 1914 arrival, Jordan-Smith also found great solace within the walls of the Art Institute of Chicago (see below), but took exception to the traveling Armory Show exhibition in 1913 which was the beginning of his break with the left wingers in art. (The Road I Came, p. 220). 

Like Pauline Schindler, plumbing heiress Kate Crane Gartz, was formerly a volunteer at Jane Addams‘ Hull-House, a settlement house on Halstead St. in Chicago for which she and her family, especially her industrialist father Richard T. Crane, provided much financial support. The Crane family was prominent in Chicago educational circles with Richard being president of the Board of Education and his son Charles providing much financial support for the University of Chicago and educational reformer John Dewey. Kate’s brother Charles R. Crane, later an ambassador to China under Woodrow Wilson, donated his mansion on Michigan Ave. for use as the Chicago School for Civics and Philanthropy where Pauline Schindler enrolled for graduate classes in social work during the fall and winter terms in 1915-16 while living and teaching English and music at Hull-House. (Sophie Pauline Gibling Transcript, Student Files, Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy Records, Box 6, Folder 4, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library). A later patron of the Walt Whitman School, Gartz was also a lifelong member of the Friday Morning Club and one of the founders of the the Pasadena Playhouse, Pasadena Civic League, and the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Clara Packard was impressed enough by Jordan-Smith’s speaking ability that shortly after the U.S. entered the war, she, along with ex-California Senator John Downey Works, and possibly Gartz, asked him to organize and lead the Southern California Chapter of the People’s Council and offered him offices in the Douglas Building (see below) at Third and Spring Streets in downtown Los Angeles. (The Road I Came, p. 316 and Warren, p. 116).

The Book of Robo, Being a Collection of Verses and Prose Writings by Robaix de L’Abrie Richey edited by Tina Modotti with introduction by John Cowper Powys, 1923. From the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

In 1919, Around the time Weston was taking the above bathing pool photos in Claremont and the Schindlers were getting married and moving to Taliesin, William Thurston Brown (see below) was on a national lecture tour promoting the Modern School Association of North America, the official successor of the Francisco Ferrer Association, formed in the U.S. upon the 1909 martyrdom of anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona, Spain. The Ferrer Modern Schools were an integral part of the anarchist, socialist, and labor movements in the U.S., intended to educate the working-classes from a secular, class-conscious perspective. They provided an alternative, progressive learning environment for children, and some also had night-time adult-education programs. 

The Masses, June 1914. (From Wikipedia).

Cover of the first issue of The Liberator, March 1918. Art by Hugo Gellert.

The above issue of The Modern School featured articles by Will Durant, an early principal of the Ferrer Modern School in New York, soon-to-be head of the Walt Whitman School in Los Angeles and 1916-17 editor of the magazine, William Thurston Brown, on “The Work of a Libertarian School” and a book review by Carl Zigrosser who edited the magazine after Brown and before becoming the first director of the Weyhe Gallery in 1919. One of Zigrosser’s 1917 pamphlet covers featured a Rockwell Kent woodblock print which soon became the logo for the Modern School Association of North America.(See below). It was under Zigrosser’s tenure that the magazine became one of the most interesting little reviews in the country featuring work by the likes of Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Witter Bynner, Rockwell Kent, Man Ray, Max Weber, Raoul Dufy, Konrad Bercovici, Padraic Colum and others. (Avrich, p. 172).

The Walt Whitman School (see above) was created in 1919 by a group of progressive families who were dissatisfied with what they considered the the stultifying teaching methods of the public school system within the context of the Red Scare era of post-war social ferment and government oppression. The school’s founders were mostly anarchists who sought to abolish all forms of educational and political authority. “The first proletarian school in the West,” as the Walt Whitman School deemed itself, was located at 517 South Boyle Avenue in the immigrant community of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. The school catered mostly to Russian Jewish and Mexican children of radical, blue-collar parents, including the grandson of Ricardo Flores Magon, then serving time in prison, as was Eugene Debs, both arrested under the 1917 Espionage Act and swept up in the Palmer Raids. Kate Crane Gartz corresponded regularly with Debs and Magon during their incarceration. (See below for example and The Parlor Provocateur or From Salon to Soap-Box: The letters of Kate Crane Gartz, Mary Craig Sinclair, Pasadena 1923, p. 33-5).

Assisting William Thurston Brown were his wife Elsie Pratt and a number of well-known Los Angeles anarchists, including Thomas H. Bell, Joseph Spivak, and Jules Scarceriaux, a Belgian anarchist who taught pottery at Stelton in 1917. (Avrich, p. 273). The “educational advisor” was Paul Jordan-Smith, later literary critic of the Los Angeles Times, who was one of the speakers at the school’s formal dedication ceremony on February 29, 1920. (See program above). Jordan-Smith’s early involvement with the school possibly came about through a direct request from Brown or through Brown’s solicitation for financial support for the school from Jordan-Smith’s radical philanthropic circle including, in addition to his wife, her cousin Fanny Weston Bixby Spender, Clara A. Packard, Kate Crane Gartz, Mary E. Garbutt, Dr. and Mrs. Percival Gerson, Bertha Fiske and others. (See below for example).

By now close family friends with Sarah Bixby and Paul Jordan-Smith, Edward and Flora Weston most likely learned of the formation of the Walt Whitman School through Paul. They could also have learned of the school directly from the headmaster Brown who was also in the Mather-Hagemeyer-Weston circle, at least by the summer of 1920, evidenced by Hagemeyer’s July 3, 1920 diary entry, “Party at studio at night with William Thurston Brown, Elsie Pratt, (his wife) & Lula.” (Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, Hagemeyer Collection).

The promise of an unstructured environment offered by the Whitman School appealed to the Westons so they enrolled their unruly sons Chandler and Brett who encountered troubles in the much stricter classroom environments at their previous schools. Edward likely bartered the boys’ tuition for photography work for the school. Edward’s negative attitude towards formal education created in all four of his sons, and especially Brett, a hatred of being in school which also contributed to disciplinary problems between the boys and mother Flora and added discord in the Weston’s failing marriage. Of this situation Brett recalled,

Pauline Schindler was arrested alongside Kate Crane Gartz’s sister, Mrs. Frances Crane Lillie, for her participation in the 1915 Chicago Garment Workers’ Strike (see above) while working at Jane Addam’s Hull-House. (“Rich Woman Now Socialist,” New York Times, December 8, 1915, p. 10). She and her by then indoctrinated husband Rudolph, brought their penchant for radicalism from Chicago and plunged headlong into the Los Angeles anarchist scene shortly after their 1920 arrival from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin.

Schindler was sent to Los Angeles by Wright to oversee construction of kindred radical and peace activist Aline Barnsdall‘s Hollyhock House on Olive Hill (see above) while he was engaged with construction of the Imperial Hotel in Japan. Pauline wrote of their early whirlwind of extremist activities in Los Angeles,

“We are so far and so deeply “in” the radical movement these days that we never have an evening at home any more … Committee meetings for the Worker’s Defence [sic] league, for the Walt Whitman School, – conferences large and small, – supping in odd places with folk who tell us news impossible to get except ”from hand to mouth “, – lectures; meetings at which we stop only long enough to make an announcement before going on to the next; visits to the printer to read proofs for the school; trips with the car for a committee of a doctor, a lawyer, and an alienist, to the hospital to visit an I. W. W. who has been a month in jail waiting for trial, and so violently and brutally treated by the authorities that in addition to serious bodily injuries he seems to suffer mentally, and is in the observation ward of the psychopathic, suspected of insanity .. Then on top of it all today … we speed out to Pasadena … to a meeting at the private residence of a wealthy radical [Kate Crane Gartz's "The Cloister" (see below)] … to hear Max Eastman (see below) … Everybody was there, – and we had awfully good talk afterwards … Upton Sinclair introduced me to his wife [Mary] … Eastman was delightful … And a good time was had by all … Really a much better time than I have found possible in Chicago, in general ….” (Pauline Schindler, letter to “People”, n.d. [June 1921]. From Sweeney, p. 91).

Gartz Residence, “The Cloister,” Mariposa St. and Santa Rosa Ave., aka “Christmas Tree Lane,” Altadena, W. Carbys Zimmerman, architect, 1908. Lazear, From M. H., “The Evolution of the Bungalow,” House Beautiful, The Bungalow Number, June 1914, pp. 2-5.

Gartz Residence drawing-room where Max Eastman lectured. From Seventh Book by Kate Crane Gartz, Mary Craig Sinclair, Pasadena, 1932. (See also: Apostol, Jane, “From Salon to Soap-Box: Kate Crane Gartz, Parlor Provacateur,” Southern California Quarterly, p. 376).

While attending college at the State Normal School Bertha was apprenticing with the Norma Gould Dance Company with which she would remain associated as a teacher and performer through the early 1920s. The above 1915 article from a local paper listed Wardell and her future business partner Dorothy Lyndall as performers in a welcome home dance fest presented by Gould for her former dance and business partner Ted Shawn and his new wife, the by then renowned Ruth St. Denis. Coincidentally, this was about the time that Weston began his interest in photographing the dance, likely through Margrethe Mather‘s movie business connections with St. Denis and Shawn being two of his earliest dance subjects. (See Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles by Beth Gates Warren, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011, pp. 78-9). 

“Music and Stage,” L.A. Times, July 13, 1911, p. II-5. See also Jones, Isabel Morse, “St. Denis Returns,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1926, p. III-22 referencing McGehee’s role in helping St. Denis master the Oriental Dance).

 

St. Denis’s strong desire to add Japanese numbers to her stage shows created the perfect outlet for McGehee’s passion, talents and knowledge. Later to become an intimate in the Margrethe Mather, Edward Weston, Betty Katz, and Schindler circles, McGehee, to what in retrospect must have been one of the highlights of his life, was hired as publicist, stage director and choreographer for St. Denis through most of 1911-12 while helping her to develop her elaborate Japanese routines such as Omika which met with such success the rest of her career. (See above). There was even mention of marriage between the gay Clarence and Ruth with the idea seemingly quashed by her family. (See below). (Author’s note: There is an extensive collection of press clippings from this period in the Ramiel McGehee Ruth St. Denis Collection at UC-Irvine).

“Ruth St. Denis Engaged?” unidentified publication, August 30, [1911]. From the Ramiel McGehee Ruth St. Denis Collection, UC-Irvine.

Apparently McGehee and St. Denis made rapid progress on developing new Japanese routines as announcements regarding the impending debut of her new dances were beginning to appear around the country the following January. (See above for example). Her inaugural Japanese performance took place in March or April. McGehee’s coaching and indoctrination of St. Denis in all things Japanese was very thorough indeed evidenced by his positioning her in costume at the below Japanese tea ceremony during their time together.

It is not yet clear how long their relationship held together, but it was long enough for McGehee to share everything he knew about Japan, greatly facilitating the metamorphosis of St. Denis into the ‘Fantasie Japonaise’ whom Weston photographed upon her and Shawn’s return to Los Angeles in 1915 and widely exhibited with such great success soon thereafter. (See below). Ironically, it must have been shortly after the time that St. Denis and McGehee eventually parted ways that Shawn entered into the picture in New York in the spring of 1914. (See earlier discussion).

Ruth St. Denis in the Dance of the Flower Arrangement from Omika, 1913. Photograph by Arnold Genthe. From the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

 

Arnold Genthe was possibly the first photographer to capture St. Denis’s Japanese metamorphosis with photos like the above taken in 1913 which also later appeared in his 1916 Book of the Dance.

 

“With this background I was suddenly thrown into contact with a sophisticated group, – actually they were drawn to me through my photography which had gone steadily ahead, – was my development. They were well-read, worldly wise, clever in conversation, – could garnish with a smattering of French: they were parlor radicals, could sing I. W. W. songs, quote Emma Goldman on freelove: they drank, smoked, had affairs, – I had practically no experience with drinking and smoking, never a mistress before marriage, only adventures with two or three whores. I was dazzled – this was a new world – these people had something I wanted: actually they did open up new channels, started me thinking from many fresh angles, looking toward hitherto unconsidered horizons. But there had to be a personal house-cleaning afterwards, – for, not to expose my real self to these clever new friends, I had to pretend much, to become one of them, parrot their thoughts, ape their mannerisms. Then came the day of reckoning when I saw through my own pretence.” (March 17, 1931, DBII, p. 209).

Wardell graduated with a “general professional degree” in 1916 from the State Normal School. In 1919 the college became the University of California Southern Branch where she began teaching dance in the Physical Education Department the following year, through the largess of her mentor and faculty member Norman Gould. (Author’s note: Later Schindler and Weston social orbit habitues, Annita Delano and Barbara Morgan joined the faculty’s Fine Art Department the school’s inaugural year and 1925 respectively). Bertha’s courses included general physical education for sophomores, Folk Dancing and Aesthetic Dancing. She was joined on the Physical Education faculty for the 1922-23 school year by Pauline Gibling Schindler’s sister, Dorothy Gibling, who resided at Kings Road briefly after its 1922 completion and was a frequent visitor thereafter. (See far right below). Gymnastics teacher Dorothy remained on the staff through the 1923-24 year. (For more on Annita Delano, Barbara and Willard Morgan and Kings Road see my “Foundations of Los Angeles Modernism” (hereinafter LAMod) and “Pauline Gibling Schindler: Vagabond Agent for Modernism” (PGS)).

“Dear Poetry, 

     To all serious students of the dance, the first sentence in your October article, “Poetry would like to celebrate its ninth birthday by inaugurating a closer affiliation with the allied arts of music and the drama - perhaps also the dance,” is encouraging. That “perhaps” is deserved, only those who come in daily contact with the too-popular belief that the door to real achievement may be kicked open by a perfectly pointed toe can realize how far the dance has traveled from its dignified origin. In alliance with that music and poetry to which the dance really gave birth lies her only hope. Music and poetry give the dancer a reason for existence.  

     We had the pleasure of working with Alfred Kreymborg in the summer of 1920 (see discussion below), and not only felt that we, as dancers, had profited, but we gained an insight into, and a feeling for, the rhytnm of modern poetry that nothing but the actual bodily expression of it could have given us. We have been fortunate also in being associated with a musician [Henry Cowell] who has used pieces of Sara Teasdale’s, Vachel Lindsay’s, Bliss Carman’s, and other moderns, as themes for dance-music.      

     Certainly poets, musicians and dancers need not fear to join forces. They have the fundamentals in common with such different, yet harmonious, outward manifestations of those fundamentals, surely the result will not be unworthy of poetry or music, and will surely be of infinite value to the dance in its reinstatement among the arts. We so often fail to say the pleasant things we think. Poetry is a monthly refreshment. It is like a breath from freshly opened flowers, or a drink of mountain water.  

Bertha Wardell 

Los Angeles, Cal.” (For much more on Henry Cowell and his Schindler-Weston connections see my “Schindlers-Westons-Kashevaroff-Cage“).

“…In making a dance form, two things are necessary - a “dance idea,” and the music which expresses that idea. The idea may come from something that I read – poetry, rhythmic prose, – folklore or mythology; but, it does not ‘develop (that is, exist as anything but an intellectual concept) until I find music to which it is possible to think in terms of the “dance idea.” For instance, when I have an ”elfin” idea, I must have “elfin” music, for a Russian dance, Russian music, if the dance form evolved is to be true. …When the dance comes, it appears as a tiny figure dancing to the music to which I am listening. The figure is on the back of my forehead. … Sometimes I have consciously to fill in gaps when the figure is not clear, but I think it keeps on dancing just the same even though I can not see it. The figure, itself, has no sex and has no other outlines than that of a body – even in recreating national and folk dances there is no characteristic dress. The extremities are the most distinct. The face can not be seen at all. (Italics mine). … I use poetry, etc., to keep me in the proper mood until the dance has appeared. The length of time elapsing after I have found both music and the idea until the dance formulates itself depends on the amount of time I have at my disposal to give to listening to the music. If I am interrupted in the process of creation, I am never worried, I always feel as if the dance were being well taken care of even though I am not consciously working with it. There are times though, when I am very tired and can get nothing from the music, reading, or thinking - then I play jazz and let myself go to it – just dance around. …The only thing which seems to be essential to the creativeness in me, is love; it may be love for the dance idea or for the music. I can only express what I mean by love by saying that to me it is a state in which I give up myself utterly, or open myself to what. really is. I must have this feeling of love or the dance idea and music will not appear in dance form. I can stimulate this feeling in myself by reading something beautiful, by being with some person of whom I am very fond, or by looking at flowers. …The dance form complete is only a skeleton. The dance pattern – that is, the direction and arrangement of the movements on the floor, and the penetration of the form with the subtle differences of moving and feeling (italics mine) which give style and character and make the dance true, are left for the dancer. …My own process, that of translating the dance form into theatrical terms, is as follows: First, I dance over the movement rather sketchily, to get the “feel” of it, and, as I do this, I become conscious of how the movement should be executed. …I can only describe my process by saying that, after doing the movement very easily without any thought other than to get the sequence of movements, the proper execution of them – that is, the use of head, torso, arms, and the emphasis and phrasing, follow spontaneously. (Italics mine). …The only Oriental dances that have ever “belonged” were some native Japanese dances I once learned. (From Ramiel McGehee?). …After I have the sequence and the general outline of the dance form with whatever else has come spontaneously, I leave the dance for a day or two. During the time when I am not actually practicing comes the second part of the process. This consists, first of all, in enriching my associations by reading everything that may have to do with the dance – fact or fiction. If the dance is of a suitable type, I try to put the essence of it into writing. I find that the expression of an emotion or the delineation of a character will clarify itself if I can describe it in words which please me. I also use what might be called a form of meditation. …I practice no regular spiritual exercises other than those I have mentioned, but I try to be out-of-doors as much as possible, to read poetry, highly imaginative prose, and books of travel, and never to harbor resentment. Anger, hate, or any of the destructive emotions kill creativeness.” (Bertha Wardell, Playhouse of the Dance, Hollywood, California, excerpted from Everyman’s Genius by Mary Austin, pp. 323-9).

 ”My dear Edward Weston: – Your photographs affected me a great deal. Even to think of them gives me a feeling of reality, of things falling – and fallen – into their proper relations. Someone asked me which studies I had liked. For the life of me I couldn’t remember – the effect seemed to be a sum-total reaction. Except for the studies of bodies! I shall own some of these one day. I must. It is not often that anything says “dancing” to me as these do. The body – so present – so soft and warm to touch – the source of so many beauties and delights – yet so mysterious. Barbara Morgan says you are sometimes in need of a model. If I could help I would be happy to lend myself. Tuesday afternoons I have free. Sometimes, Fridays too. Cordially, Bertha Wardell.” (Edward Weston: His Life by Ben Maddow, Aperture, 2000, p. 151. For Weston’s acknowledgement of this letter see February 26, 1927, DaybooksII, p. 6)

“My dear Edward Weston: - You and your work have been very strongly in my mind since yesterday. You yourself seemed possessed for an instant not only of a physical, but of a psychic fatigue. I wished that you had not worked so long. It disturbed me; I think, especially because of the exceeding delicacy and vitality of your work which is dependent to a certain extent, at least, on the vitality of your body. What you do awakes in me so strong a response that. I must in all joy tell you. Perhaps it will seem out of proportion to you, in whom it has grown gradually, but, on the other hand, perhaps only someone from without can sense what you do in its true proportions. Your photographs are as definite an experience to the spirit as a whiplash to the body. It is as if they said, “Look – here is something you have been waiting for something you have not found in painting or even in sculptures. Something which has been before only in the thought of dancing.” It has so enlivened my own feeling about dancing that something of that may be born yet – and not dead. I beg of you – do not come to the dancing Sunday. This envelope is very empty of a card. Some day, if you will let me -I would like to dance for you. It was very happy and restful posing for you. If there is anything you want to do again however – you must feel free to send me away if you find yourself too weary. There is the danger that this will strike you in the wrong mood, that it may seem sentimental and loquacious when words about your work should in all appropriateness have finesse and reserve. All of which I risk gladly, hoping that the weariness was not unavailing - that the afternoon may have brought forth something which you can enjoy having made. BBW.” (Edward Weston: His Life by Ben Maddow, Aperture, 2000, p. 152-3).

April 8. … I have Easter flowers, – royal red tulips with blue centers from Cristal [sic], and a single rose from B. A new coffee cup from C. too: but now I do not use coffee! Last night Nahui and Matias cooked Mexican style. I took Bertha. Mushrooms fried in olive oil with garlic and chili, – green peppers, cheese and sausage, chocolate and bizcochos, – a meal well prepared but not in my present way of thinking. I have a bellyache this morning, … Matias dances beautifully, with gestures of a torero. I could watch him all evening with more pleasure than the best of stage performers. I know Bertha was fascinated too. He is naturally a dancer, – none of the tricks of a professional, no mechanical perfection.

Bertha Wardell, 1927. Edward Weston photograph. Collection Center for Creative Photography. ©1981 Arizona Board of Regents.

April 13. Tuesdays are now definitely B. day. She enjoys working with me, and I respond to her. Her beauty in movement is an exquisite sight. Dancing should be always in the nude. I made 12 neg’s,- for the first time using the Graflex: arrested motion however, for the exposures were three seconds. But these negatives will be different in feeling, for the ease of manipulation of a Graflex allows more spontaneous results.

Persinger String Quartet, ca. 1928. From the left, Louis Persinger, first violin, Louis Ford, second violin, Nathan Firestone, viola, and Walter Ferner, cello. (From CAMA Santa Barbara).