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8 ( Farewell Tour After her feat of mastering three new parts for the Kra­ ków stage in 1903,­ Mo­ dje­ ska’s final years in America marked a period of fitful artistic decline. With the help of influential friends and her husband’s willingness to abandon his ranching schemes, she mainly worked her family out of debt, selling Arden and enduring the hard farewell tours that her 1905 benefit had generated. Her truly final 1906–1907 season on the Ameri­ can road told on her already fragile health. Mo­ dje­ ska admitted falling asleep during a rehearsal “to the great amazement of our director” and reckoned that her pitiable state at last moved manager Jules Murry to arrange for her customary travel by a private car, a dreary conveyance named “The Sunbeam.”1 She knew her waning star had demoted her to an awful circuit; in one letter she listed her return address as “some dump where Murry ‘is peddling’ Shakespeare and me.”2 Aging and ailing, the star could no longer summon the prerequisite physical control and mental acuity to impress audiences from the stage, although she attracted nostalgic, forgiving fans, among them many of her critics. During this last brutal tour, she enjoyed the company of two lively young women—her stagestruck niece Emilia and Emilia’s friend, Gilda Varesi, a future minor star whom Mo­ dje­ ska naturally mentored.3 One last time, family cushioned the bumps of the road. Mo­dje­ska’s tour earnings also shored up her opposition to appearing on the vaudeville stage, a lucrative offer of $18,000 for ten weeks which Chłapowski refused on her behalf. As her husband diplomatically explained to impresario Robert Grau: “Please believe me that [Madame ’s] refusal to appear in ‘Vaudeville’ conveys no disrespect to the artists Farewell Tour 299 and directors associated with it. She simply feels that it would not be suitable to change the direction of her work after such a long career. On the contrary, because everything on the stage interests her, she has observed vaudeville’s artistic development and progress with great pleasure.”4 Mo­ dje­ ska had implied the same respect for vaudeville two decades before, when she remarked on the uniquely Ameri­ can theater of Harrigan and Hart. But she had no intention of stepping down from the legitimate stage at this late date, keeping instead to the course she had declared to Frohman in 1886: “There is no use talking—I am not going to play in the people’s theater. Please, inform me how much it would cost to get me out of it. I will rather pay than do a thing I would regret after.”5 Mo­ dje­ ska could bid farewell to the Ameri­ can stage with her long-­ term reputation more or less intact. Retirement, however, did not mean that she could rest from her work as provider and model citizen. She concentrated on writing her income-­ generating memoirs and spent part of her days sewing clothes for the children whom the Bronson Settlement saved from the streets of Los Angeles.6 “Scribbling four to five hours” a day fatigued her physically and emotionally, yet, as she wrote home, “I have to finish my memoirs and we have to build a house” before they could think of visiting Poland again.7 In August 1908, Chłapowski informed his sister that he was typing and occasionally correcting Helena’s memoirs because they both hoped this publication would finance such extras as those “future trips to Europe” about which they “have been dreaming for two years.”8 In early 1909, Mo­ dje­ ska and her nephew Władysław Benda were corresponding about how his illustrations might be incorporated in the serial publication of Memories and Impressions.9 In short, Mo­dje­ska spent her last year and a half in a lesser whirlwind, writing , sewing, corresponding, socializing, traveling to Chicago to visit Ralph’s family, and organizing one last move to their new, partially finished home on Bay Island. She volunteered for another benefit, playing Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene on 12 January 1909 to raise funds for the victims of the 1908 Armenian earthquake, a performance during which her frailty brought tears to her patrons’ eyes.10 Then, on 16 March 1909, Mo­ dje­ ska suffered a serious attack of what her doctor diagnosed as Bright’s Disease, a debilitating inflammation of the kidneys complicated by her serious heart condition. Her health...

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