The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 74

by Nanna Popham Britton

74

When I was a child, even before I had reached the age of ten, my flights of imagination in picturing my future self always took one of two directions—toward being an actress or a writer. It was said of my mother that she possessed considerable dramatic ability when she was a girl, and I know my father wrote extremely well. Neither mother nor father realized the glories of these talents developed, except in amateur, local settings. Doubtless, mother's Quaker grandmother, with whom she lived a great deal of the time, would have thrown up her hands in holy horror at the mere mention of a stage career for her granddaughter, Mary Lee Williams. So this love of the drama took with my mother an entirely safe form, and she became known among her friends and the townspeople as a monologuist of more than usual ability.

I am frank to say that the dramatic appeal of my own life-play, which had passed the climactic stage with Elizabeth Ann's entrance into the world, greatly appeased the instinctive hunger for self-expression which I likely inherited from my mother, and indeed I was finding the drama in which I held the center of the stage to be fast developing into a tragedy. A tragedy because it was failing—yea, had failed—to provide the satisfying denouement which I had looked forward to with hopeful heart at the rise of the curtain. This sense of unfinishment had begun to prey upon my mind even before our baby came, but I had banished it rather successfully with the full buoyancy of my nature and had clung to visionary hopes and to Mr. Harding's oft-repeated statement to me that in his "sober judgment" he felt that our relationship was "predestined." And surely, I thought, predestination would naturally slate lovers for the perfect fulfillment of their desire in every direction.

But Life, stark with dire realities, confronted me now, and the romantic illusions upon which I had fed were meeting with pitiful destruction on many sides. Enforced separation from my beloved, submission to an arrangement whereby I forfeited the glory of being known as my own child's mother, and continued ill-health, sufficed to precipitate the unhappy disillusionments I was experiencing. And the process of introspection and introversion constantly indulged, more pronouncedly after a visit to Washington, seemed sometimes to leave me momentarily in a terrifying state of inability to think at all, so intensely did I think.

It was this state of mentality which inclined me again to consider the stage, and I began anew to see in it an outlet for "suppressed emotions." I had in the fall of 1920 succumbed to an advertisement and taken some desultory instructions from a man who had his studio in the Auditorium Building in Chicago, but it had seemed for many reasons an unworthwhile investment and I had given it up. Now I pondered it seriously. To live another's vicissitudinous experiences might, I thought, take my mind from my own mind and prove an emotional boon.

A very dear friend of mine, who knew the whole of my story, listened sympathetically to these arguments and agreed it might help enormously to relieve me both mentally and physically. She took me to see a friend of hers who had long been a leader in the motion picture world, but, after hearing from him and his wife that they would prefer to see their daughter "scrub floors in the Boston Store" (that being considered a low-priced department store in Chicago) than to enter upon a career in the movies, I felt less inclined to view it with approval myself, and this in spite of the fact that the motion picture magnate cordially volunteered to allow me to act in the next film he produced, and offered a camera test to see whether or not I screened well.

Still harboring a hope that this character of activity might benefit me, and feeling disinclined to return to secretarial work, and, moreover, firmly convinced that I ought not to remain at my sister Elizabeth's entirely unemployed except for my preferred occupation of being with and caring for our darling baby, I took my problem in early June, 1922, down to Washington and laid it before Mr. Harding.

I remember how he smiled, the smile of an indulgent parent to a spoiled child perhaps, when he said, "Why, sure! Go on! I think that would be fine!" smiling at my tearful attempt to explain what must to him have seemed like a wild idea. "Then I'll become a movie fan!" he added merrily, having only been twice to the movies in Washington, he told me. He said he was sure I could do as well as any actress he had ever seen(!), and he also said he could understand how the partial outdoor activity might do me good.

However, later on he wrote me, almost upon the heels of my departure from Washington, asking me not to consider going either into the movies or on the stage, saying he had thought it over and was "afraid" of it. No doubt he was thinking of possible publicity and ultimate exposure. At any rate, I gave up the idea altogether and have never been so tempted since. How I could have thought it possible to undergo the hardships to which even the moderately successful screen or stage artist is subjected—the rehearsals, travel, hours, etc.—is incomprehensible to me now, when I remember that I was then making two trips a week to the South Side to Dr. Barbour who was administering iron hypodermics, and who even found it necessary to recommend that I spend about half of my time in bed.