The Calla Lily Are in Bloom Again
The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange blossom. I carried them on my wedding ceremony twenty-four hours, and now I place them here in retentivity of something that has died.
Katharine Hepburn spoke this line for the first time in 1933. She had been cast in a now-forgotten play calledThe Lake. Jed Harris, the director, was a sadist, and the twenty-six-year-old actress did not flourish in the role. (Dorothy Parker'south famous barb, that Hepburn "ran the gamut of man emotion from A to B," is said to be near this performance). After previewing several shows to failing ticket sales, tepid reviews and increasingly abusive behavior from Harris, Hepburn was desperate to leave the play. "My honey," Harris told her, "the only interest I have in you is the coin I can make out of you lot." She wrote him a cheque for her life savings and was released from her contract. In her 1991 autobiography, Hepburn writes of this time in her life, "It was a slow walk to the gallows."
A few years later on, Hepburn was cast inPhase Door, a film about a handful of actresses living in a women'south boardinghouse and competing for roles in a play. This fictional play prominently features the calla-lily line, which the managing director, Gregory La Cava, lifted fromThe Lake. Hepburn's character recites information technology several times in rehearsals, always lifelessly, until the picture'south tragic climax, and then she recites it once more,with feeling. Subsequently the success ofPhase Door, the line—first a signifier of her failure, and then a signifier of her success—finally became a synecdoche for Hepburn herself, the odd mid-Atlantic intonation, the reedy voice, the difficult, glittering propriety. The line's iambic pentameter makes information technology pleasant to say, and the accent is fun to mimic. The first version I heard was Pee-wee Herman's inLarge Top Pee-wee. He says it to a pig.
Similar the calla lily itself, movies accept their own strange and perennial nature. The motion-picture show goes upwardly once again and over again, the images and words e'er exactly the same, but time is at work on everything outside the prophylactic little celluloid rectangle. The sets are struck, filming locations bulldozed, props and apparel destroyed and lost. Every time the film is shown, the stars are all a footling older. Ane year, someone on the screen is no longer in the world. And then several people. And and then everyone. One time the actors are all gone, the movie is sealed off. It sits on the other side of a wall. Information technology looks the same as ever, only it's non the same. You lot're alone when you picket it, and y'all're watching a room of ghosts.
Or you're sitting in a room of ghosts. How many people saw this moving-picture show, and when, and what was information technology to them? My grandmother would accept been eighteen when Stage Door came out. Hepburn was tremendously stylish then; a daughter my grandmother's age might fashion herself afterwards Hepburn. My mother likely watched the film in the 1970s. Was there a camp chemical element in it? Hepburn by that time was a formidable grande dame; it might have been funny and uncanny to see a performance from her callow youth.
When I sawPhase Door last winter, Hepburn had been gone almost xv years. All her ages—young, middle-anile, quite former—existed on an equal airplane; no Hepburn loomed larger than any other. I sat on my couch watching the exact gestures, hearing the exact words my grandmother saw and heard eighty years before in some at present-shuttered movie palace in San Jose. Back then, the stars ofStage Door lived and worked and laughed and suffered. Now the stars ofStage Door are all gone. Jean Rouverol, who played Light-headed, one of the girls in the boardinghouse, died concluding year.
The video project below is my attempt to reconcile what is born over and over again with what is born merely once, grows quondam, and dies. Hepburn recites the calla-lily line a piffling differently each time, but the line remains the same; and each time she recites it she is older, but she is also the same. She is always thirty, ever lxx-four, always eighty-four. Maybe my grandmother is, too. Possibly I am, too. I can sit on my burrow in 2017, and my grandmother tin can sit in a movie theater in 1937, and we are sitting together, considering we are looking at the very same thing.
The calla lilies are in blossom over again, and again and again. The final line ofThe Lake was Hepburn's: "In that location are ghosts who are friendly ghosts. I shall be dorsum."
Lindsay Nordell works with video and lives in New York City.
Source: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/01/11/the-calla-lillies-are-in-bloom-again/
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