Helen Hayes—born
120 years ago today in Washington, DC—was trying in the above quote to convey
her unique burden as “The First Lady of American Theater.” But she may as well
have been talking about the psychic (and often physical) demands of any star
carrying a play.
Many stars stagger under this yoke. But Hayes was made
of tougher stuff. She got her instinct for acting from her mother, Essie, an
actress with a third-rate troupe (“the Liberty Belles”) who hoped her daughter
could have the stage career she couldn’t, and her unpretentious manner from her
father, a salesman for a wholesale meat company.
Until her mid-20s, Helen was under the control of
producer George Tyler, who did not allow her to socialize with other actors.
Her decision to join Actors Equity, rather than the producer-friendly union
that Tyler favored, the Fidelity League, marked the moment of her real
independence.
Not long after this, the sheltered actress met, at one
of the parties she began to attend, Charles MacArthur, the
playwright-screenwriter who co-wrote The Front Page and Twentieth
Century. He presented her with a bag of peanuts, telling her, “I wish they
were emeralds.”
It was the least likely of matches—the son of a
Protestant minister, he had grown up to be a prankster, a tall, charming
womanizer, and friend of the Algonquin Round Table wits (including Dorothy
Parker, with whom he had an affair leading to an abortion); she, a devout
Catholic, convent-educated, awkward when not on stage, and descended from a
Famine emigrant. Despite all of their differences, they were devoted to each other,
marrying in 1928.
They represented theatrical royalty, an image
reinforced in her maturity, with her roles in Victoria Regina, playing
the British monarch from teen to ailing old woman, and The White House,
appearing as several First Ladies.
Still, she was frank in later life about the
difficulties in her marriage, including the loss of their 17-year-old daughter,
Mary, to polio and Charlie’s alcoholic spiral after that. (The couple adopted
their other child: James MacArthur, “Dano” of TV’s original Hawaii Five-O.)
Helen and Charlie maintained a New York City apartment
and the more palatial “Pretty Penny” (nicknamed, the most common story goes,
because of its hefty price tag), in Nyack, in Rockland County. (Rosie O’Donnell
briefly owned the Italianate-style estate after Hayes’ death.)
Hayes began her 70-year theater career at age six and
made her Broadway debut when she was eight. At age 19, with a fistful of
credits, her name was suggested to Eugene O’Neill for the principal female role
in his autobiographical play The Straw. The playwright, not knowing who
she was, was initially skeptical about her ability or insight into his tragedy—not
realizing that her Irish background and her parents’ troubled marriage gave her
more understanding of his characters than he could ever imagine.
In time, she demonstrated this affinity—and the
playwright revised his opinion of her—after her appearance in a radio version of
The Straw. Had he lived to see it, O’Neill would also have loved Hayes
in the posthumous A Touch of the Poet, as well as her last stage
triumph, the 1971 Kennedy Center production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night,
when she played the thinly fictionalized version of O’Neill’s morphine-addicted
mother. She died at age 92 on St. Patrick’s Day, 1993.
There is another Hayes quote from On Reflection
that I am fond of. Decidedly unsentimental, it not only applies to her but also
to the nature of creative achievement in general:
“This is the day of instant genius. Everybody starts
at the top, and then has the problem of staying there. Lasting accomplishment,
however, is still achieved through a long, slow climb and self-discipline.”
(The picture accompanying this post shows Hayes with
Gary Cooper in the 1932 screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell
to Arms. Despite the restrictions of censors, the two stars are better
matched and more vibrant than the two who took over their roles in the 1957
remake, Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson.)
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