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| Gaby Deslys (1881-1920) |
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In Press and Literature |
(Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, April 06, 1920)
Wanted to be a Juliet and Died of a Broken Heart
How the Sudden Death of Gaby Deslys Has Revealed Her Consuming Desire to Be Known as a Great Tragedienne Instead of Merely a Music Hall Favorite.
Every girl who ever thought of the stage has wanted to be a Juliet — just as every stage-struck young man has wanted to be a Romeo.
Love! The real thing, set in the most romantic way! Love that dies tragically! There you have it. Something to make them all adore you and cry about you. Well, no stage person, no actor or actress, secure in some other line of expression ever loses the wish to climb to the supreme level. And even the adorable Gaby Deslys was no exception. She was just naturally something else — a sprite, maybe', a flickering fairy of the stage.
But she wanted to be a Juliet. It was the dream of her life. The more they laughed and applauded her as something else, the more she longed to be that ecstatic Shakespearean heroine — to play "opposite" a real honest-to-goodness Romeo, to express in a passionate simplicity of stage art the classic instance of young, innocent first love.
She brooded over the ambition more than any knew, except her intimates. It is these intimates who declare that she really died broken hearted. For she never did get to be a Juliet.
"Life Was Her Greatest-Love"
One day she came to New York with a hundred hats, and heaven knows how many gowns. Yet wearing, them all was not her central thought. Her central thought was that America might make her a Juliet. But it didn't. After all her triumphs she went back to Paris very, very unhappy.
"To me," she said to her friends, "Juliet typifies the perfect exaltation of the noblest of passions! To die for love, what a wonderful privilege!"
But this romantic role was denied her in death, as had been the one she longed to portray in life. For Gaby knew no great consuming love, save her love of life. It was her chief charm. She radiated and bubbled and effervesced with it from finger tips and toe tips, it curled her bowed lips in winsome smiles, it haunted her witching ways and naughty pranks, and gave sinuous grace to her amazing gowns and nodding plumes.
To have seen Gaby, bounding with feline leaps on the stage, or stepping with half-repressed ferocity through the amorous paces of the murderous Apache dance! To remember her voice purling through some lilting French Chanson! To have seen her beautiful hair, tumbling over her rosy little ears, and into her limpid eyes, alight with the inspiration of her audience, and then to say that disappointment at being unable to play a role so different, so opposite, was oven partially responsible for the death of this beautiful, joyous girl, seems ridiculous.
And had there been nothing more in life for her than mere song and dance, such, an idea would appear as foolish as it sounds. Versions as to Gaby's birthplace and early station in life, are as various as they are. numerous. Some accounts even state that she hailed from Hungary with a distinctly Hungarian name. But she always said she came from Marseilles, of good parentage; and she ought to know.
Basking in Royalty's Smiles
How she ever endured her bounding vitality to remain bottled up in a convent until the age of 16, is a mystery, but she eventually ran away, and against her father's wishes, went-upon the variety stage, at the munificent salary of $10 a week. And so began a career that rivalled in the realm of the theatre, of love, and the adulation of the public, the glittering life's history of the beauties who reigned over the imagination of poets and artists and rulers in the golden age of Greece and Rome.
And in those early days of her triumph, there was no hint of the tragedy of the great shadow that was so prematurely to overtake her youth. Nor did she have the least yearning then, to impersonate tragedy on the stage. It was the joy of success that held her in its grip, and intoxicated her. And the joy of her spirit held her long line of suitors enthralled and enmeshed.
And what a romance unfolds itself in the personalities and personnel of those extravagant admirers! Not since the days when Thais and Phryne held sway in Alexandria and Athens, have gifts of such imperial value and beauty been showered upon any stage favorite. Heads crowned with kingly diadems, with the white hair of age, and with youth's romantic fervor, the flippant and serious alike, all fell under the spell of her flashing wit and beauty and radiant good nature.
It is too universally reported to be entirely discounted that the former King Manuel of Portugal lost his head and his crown, and the price of fabulous pearls, to the winsome Gaby. Nor was the more phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon temperament proof against her wiles, that is, the male temperament. For Queen Mary, with the instance of her royal Portuguese relative still very fresh in mind, had a heart-to-heart talk with her royal son, the Prince of Wales, "the morning after" he had been noticed to applaud the fair Gaby in her Music Hall performance with a far from royal reserve.
And the throne immediately thereafter called upon the bishops of the church to deliver a ukase {Imperial decree - Ed.} against "immorality in the Music Halls." British literature then rushed into the breach, with George Bernard Shaw and Sir James Barrie chief spokesmen for the much discussed Gaby, and they seem to have carried off the honors.
This pampered darling of the gods was even shielded from the occasional frowns of the sun. Mirrors and stained glass windows were so skilfully arranged over the wonderful gold bed in the exquisite bedroom of Gaby's London house, that no matter how dismal the rain or fog, there was a constant play of delicate light throwing a curious iridescence about the room, something like the rainbow after a summer storm.
One Wish That Came True
But though gentle and winsome to all, she felt no particular call for any special one of her many admirers. And the more they clamored at her door, the greater became her longing to do something really worth while, to make her name live in the annals of the stage.
"I am tired of being known as 'the beautiful Gaby' who wears pretty gowns. I want to be a real actress in a real play. I want my public to know me as I really am, the Gaby with a soul. I want to play Juliet!"
Then came her opportunity in 'Infatuation,' the motion picture play, that created a furore, and from that moment her every ambition in life was subordinated to her resolve to give the world her version of Juliet, that heroine of matchless love, triumphing in the very absence of its consummation.
One other emotion also consumed and wellnigh obsessed the beautiful Gaby. She had a horror of growing old, and perhaps ugly and even penniless. It was her consuming desire to go out in a flame of glory, at the pinnacle of her youth and beauty and fame, and strangely enough she had her wish.
And now she lies in her last rest, much as lay the Juliet she so passionately loved, clad in a simple white gown of tulle and chiffon, on a bed of white roses, with the medal of the blessed Virgin she never went without, the sole ornament on her breast.
And of her as of the lovely Juliet, it may be said "The air that had drunk in her words and her last long looks, still hung about the corners, as the air where a rose has bloomed holds a little while the memory of its breath."