The Haunted House of Lunt

A Stern Investigation of Some Ghosts from Ancient Greece and Waukesha, Wisconsin

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

ONCE upon a time, when Greece was young, long, long before the day of that nameless dramatist who wrote the poem we call the Book of Job, a sightly man with a fine voice, of which no one relished the resonance more than himself, stood upon a rock and spoke a piece. It was an heroic piece and a sad one, brewed from his memories of the things his grandmother had told him and now poured afresh out of his own swelling heart. To his surprise and pleasure his neighbours were not only willing to listen to him, but seemed to enjoy doing so, a circumstance which mysteriously but definitely added to his own enjoyment of the occasion. He was, of course, the first tragedian.

Mingled in the listening throng was one who watched the speaker with an aching and envious attention, a little chap who said to himself that if he had as fine a figure and as beautiful a voice he, too, would mount a rock and hold all the rest of the village enthralled. But he was a less striking and a less splendid fellow, and his voice was cracked and undependable. They would only laugh at him. That would be terrible. And yet—well, suppose they did? Suppose, in defiant anticipation, he even tried to make them laugh? It would not be so much fun, but he would prefer it to the intolerable and suffocating silence to which he was now subjected. He would rather be laughed at than not get up on that rock at all. So he ventured timidly forth, expecting—even inviting—the laughter of his neighbors, with something of a flagellant's relish. The crowd rocked with merriment at him. He was, of course, the first comedian.

THEN in the crowd there was still another, whom these two strangely fascinated, but whose own deep dread of similarly exhibiting himself kept him forever rooted to the ground. And too bad, too, he thought to himself, because he had so much the better mind, and could think up so much more to say than either of them. He might, of course, take them aside and make a few suggestions, patiently, perhaps contemptuously, telling them what he, if he had their merely physical gifts, would say to the eager, biddable crowd below. So, little by little, he did just that, spinning long thrilling tales for these docile mouth-pieces of his who, whenever their own invention flagged, were grateful enough for such help hut who, in the way of such folk the world around and ever since, would, when once they had mounted the rock again, forget that they had not imagined it all themselves. And he, listening from a little distance, knew they had forgotten, and was made, somehow, melancholy thereby, lie, of course, was the first playwright.

With these three at work, that rock on an Aegean island a few thousand years ago became the world's first theatre. Or so, at least, I think it all came about, though I cannot testify out of my own experience, as it all happened before my time. But it was so described to me one day in London by a sage who is much older and much wiser than myself. and who really knows everything. The sage's name was Bernard Shaw.

At intervals since that spare beginning, the rock, as an institution, has undergone sundry elaborations. None of these elaborations was of great moment and none was of indisputable value, as we can all see for ourselves when, from time to time, a Ruth Draper comes out of the fathomless mists and goes back to first principles.

As one who joined the aforesaid crowd early in life, and has stood ever since in its milling midst, patient as any groundling in the old Globe Theatre on the Thames, I occasionally see one or another player who seems to me to be a lineal descendant of that first comedian, bidding for the laughter of us all, yet not quite enjoying it—haunted, I think, by the ghost of an ancient dread. Such a player is Alfred Lunt.

ISUSPECT that some such spectre hovers near him whenever he plays in a comedy, and the sound of laughter coming out of the dusk of a crowded auditorium—even when it is a laughter he himself has tried to beget— stirs in his subconscious memory the uneasiness of a forgotten panic. That, at least, is my own private explanation for the fact that a trace of awkwardness impairs all his performances in comedy, and keeps him from being quite so good an actor in such pieces as this season's Caprice, or The Second Man, or even Arms and the Man, as he is in plays of pity and terror like The Brothers Karamazov, or Croat Song, or Juarez and Maximilian, or Outward Bound, or Robert E. Lee. Why?

Now, mind you, I think that the inquiry is worth the trouble of making it only because I vastly admire Mr. Lunt as an actor, and, were I the author of a Second Man or a Caprice (which Heaven forefend), I would jump for joy at the prospect of getting so fine a player to play it for me. Indeed, such is our poverty in the art of acting, that this Wisconsin product who, with Lynn Fontanne, now heads the Acting Company of the Theatre Guild, is, I suppose, the leading actor in the English speaking theatre. Certainly I know that if I were sentenced to spend the next five years in a town with only one theatre in it, hut would be allowed to name the personnel of that theatre's stock company, the first player I would choose for its roster would be Alfred Lunt. And furthermore I think that if you were to take a poll of all the producers, critics and playwrights now in New York, a vast majority of them would, perhaps to their own surprise, make the same first choice. But I would rather see him as Macbeth than as Charles Surface, and that for some reason which needs more explanation than the traditional one which would be offered by the man in the street. The man in the street thinks that comedians and tragedians are of different species, in which notion the man in the street is, oddly enough, in error. Indeed, as a rule, Macbeth can only be played by someone who would also be, or have been, a good Charles Surface, and only because he was also a delightful comedian was John Barrymore able to become the best Hamlet of his day.

No, the explanation of the great Lunt mystery would lie special and personal. And the clue to the crotchet which makes him less at ease in gay pieces came to me suddenly and innocently in a letter from Mrs. R. M. Fairleigh, of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She is, l am proud to say, a reader of mine, and, as it happens, was a schoolmate of Alfred Lunt in the days when he was called Fritzie and was the life of Carroll College at Waukesha, Wisconsin, where White Rock comes from. Mrs. Fairleigh's casual memories of that chapter in our Mr. Lunt's life are so entertaining that it would be an impertinence of me to transpose them into words of my own. So. without taking the risk of asking her permission, I quote from her letter as follows:

Did you know that Alfred Lunt was a born slapstick comedian, better than any on the stage today? Alfred was—Heaven help us—an infant prodigy. When he was six years old he built a marionette stage, and acted Shakespeare according to Mantell. The Spring before I entered Carroll, he had made his first big hit in The Private Secretary. He used to rehearse his pieces to me. He had been the reader on our college Glee Club tours for two years, and we were all thrilled at the honor when the rival college, Beloit, had to borrow Alfred for the trip through the West which was given to its Glee Club by the Santa Fe. His chief stunts, which always brought down the house, were imitations of Harry Lauder, kilts, dialect and all—I fear, from your report, that he used this dialect in Maximilian—and his imitation of a revivalist minister preaching a sermon from the text: Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard, to get her poor dog a bone.

He was a magnificent comedian, but upon his return from the highly successful tour he promptly announced that he would be a clown no longer. He would devote himself to the uplift of the drama. He would interpret the passions of human life. Human emotions would be laid bare. In short, he would become a tragedian. The comedy mask was laid aside, and tragedy claimed her own.

Fritzie learned Poe's Telltale Heart for his tragic debut. I thought it wonderful. It was a faculty concert of the College of Music and Alfred was to reward us for listening to the piano numbers. The stage was a perfect setting for the sombre story. Half way across the back a dark green curtain was stretched. The black of the concert grand-piano and the black and white of Alfred's first dress-suit were melancholy and effective against the green. He was very tall and very slender then.

He opened his mouth for the first word. The audience snickered. He rolled his eyes and made a tragic gesture. The audience chuckled audibly. He moaned, "Oh, that eye!" and a burst of laughter drowned his next words. It was cataclysmic. Every sentence sent the audience into hysterics. Every time he groaned "It heats, heats, heats," we went of! into paroxysms of laughter. Yet it had not impressed me as funny at all when he had rehearsed it. Poor Alfred! lie was crushed. He stayed home from school a wTeek, refusing to see any of us. Finally Dean Ray forbade anyone mentioning it to Alfred on penalty of expulsion, and with that threat to strengthen his reassurances, went over and brought him hack to school.

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Has he ever told this? I reckon not, for he swore then he would never he funny again as long as he lived, and at college he would never act anything but straight parts, which he wasn't very good in.

After which hitherto considerately suppressed chapter of his biography, and 1 tell it now for the best of reasons, let me add one more story about this player. It concerns the fact that for years his sleep was haunted by nightmares, or rather by a nightmare. Always there came swimming at him out of space, like a monstrous jack-o'lantern, a hideous and malignant face, which swung nearer and nearer until it almost touched his own, when he would awaken with a yell of fear and lie shaking between the sheets until da wn.

Now it so happens that a year ago a passerby presented him with a copy of Edmund Pearson's brilliant book, Studies in Murder. Eventually he turned to the chapter about Mate Bram, First Officer of that unhappy barkentine, the Herbert Fuller, which, on a hot day in July, 18%, set sail from Long Wharf, Boston, bound for Rosario, in the Argentine. She had aboard her a cargo of lumber and eleven persons. Thirteen days later she came creeping into the port of Halifax, towing in her own jollyboat three of the eleven—the Captain, the Captain s wife, and the Second Mate—all slain with an axe, wielded, necessarily, by one of the other eight. It took two juries a long time to decide which of these eight was the murderer, and even then the decision was so hedged with doubt that long after Mate Bram had been sent to Atlanta for life, he was pardoned by President Wilson. The Herbert Fuller lived to he torpedoed by a German submarine off Monte Carlo. The tale of the murders, which made her into the most haunted ship in the legends of the American seacoast, furnished Mary Roberts Rinehart with the plot of her Afterhouse Mystery, and years later prompted Edmund Pearson to add this absorbing chapter to his Studies in Murder.

Well, Mr. Lunt was deep in that chapter when, on turning a page, he found himself looking with amazement at the photograph of Mate Bram. For the face in that photograph was the face of his nightmare. And he knew then, suddenly, that he had been haunted ever since childhood with a picture he had seen in a newspaper at a time when the tale of the Herbert Fuller was being told at every hearthstone in America. He knew then whence his fear had come. That knowledge, athe Freudians could have foretold, scotched his nightmare. It has never come back to him since.

Perhaps, if ever he reads this chronicle, he may guess as suddenly that the panic which upsets him whenever he hears laughter in the auditorium has no profounder origin than that night in Waukesha when he put on his first dress suit and recited The Telltale Heart to an audience that inconsiderately went into fits of uncontrolled hysterics.