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31 5 C H a P t e r 3 Art and Opera My first and last gambol with the Bulls and Bears having proved a wretched failure, I began to look about for another occupation. The theatre was unfortunately impossible. Until my skinny legs showed less tendency to wobble and my voice could be trusted to remain on one pitch for the duration of a complete breath, I could not aspire to any better part than the front legs of a giraffe in a circus. In the meantime there was the matter of my further education. Neither Mabelle nor I entertained any serious thought of high school, for it was clear to both of us that any future I might have did not depend upon algebra and economics. Encouraged by Mabelle in the belief that to be a success in the theatre one should know something of the sister arts, I hied myself to the Art Students’ League in West Fifty-seventh Street. Barely in my teens, but already six feet tall, I enrolled there as a student. I spent my first week in the Antique Class. I defiled sheet after sheet of beautiful soft, white paper with sketches of the Hermes, the Venus de Milo, and unrelated scraps of less illustrious anatomies, all of which was presented to me in disgustingly grimy plaster of Paris. Not unnaturally, this palled on me. Gladys Taliaferro, not to be outdone in artistic aspiration , had in the meantime joined the New York School of Art—commonly known as “The Chase School”—and urged me to enter the Illustration Class in which she was working. I had a sneaking impression that she wanted to keep a closer eye on me. Delighted at the compliment, I bade farewell to Venus and the League and presently found myself seated beside Gladys, sketching a model who was clothed in everything thought best of in the Fashionable Young Thing of the period—complete with high button boots, ruffled parasol, and towering pompadour crowned with a baker’s dozen hair-puffs. a r t a n d o P e r a 32 “Isn’t she lovely?” Gladys breathed enthusiastically in my ear. “Not that I can notice,” I replied. I found no fault with the model’s costume, but her face failed to win me. The more I tried to draw it, indeed , the more intense became my dislike. Why, I reflected, should I be the instrument of perpetuating that for posterity?” Striving with the best of faith to enable Art to improve on Nature, I lent my portrait features modeled after the style popularized by Charles Dana Gibson. Gladys was more than a little apprehensive of this flagrant departure from rule, but I scoffed at her anxiety in what I felt was the best man-of-the-world manner. I had not the slightest doubt but that on criticism day my instructor, Kenneth Hayes Miller, would recognize that I had created a masterpiece and would trumpet my genius to the world. With highest hope I watched his approach. Finally he positioned himself before my drawing, squinted from behind his pince-nez, and drew a heavy crayoned cross through my masterpiece. “Paint what you see,” he said into his beard, and passed on amid the sycophantic titters of the other students. The experience convinced me immediately that the Illustration Class did not suit my talents. I had recently read Trilby, and what I longed for in the realm of Art was something closer to the vie de Boheme so piquantly depicted by the Messrs. DuMaurier and Puccini. In quest of this I investigated other corridors of the school and was ultimately rewarded by coming upon a door labeled “Men’s Life Class.” I opened it and found my quivering nose greeted by a cacophony of odors in which cheap tobacco , turpentine, dust, and human sweat commingled. Through clouds of smoke I made out twenty or more men sitting or standing at easels around the model’s throne, zealously committing to canvas the mottled and Rubenesque bulges of a nude female. Here, I decided at once, was the place for me. Inquiry of the monitor revealed that as a student at the school I was entitled to enter the Life Class if I fancied to do so. “Of course,” he added, “on your first day you’ll have to set ’em up for the boys.” “Of course,” I agreed, without the faintest idea what this obligation meant. It...

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