My Heart's in My Mouth

by EMILY KIMBROUGH

1

LAST spring an organization in New York asked if I would like to go on tour under its management. I had never gone lecturing in my life. Nevertheless, writing on assignment for a good many years has induced me to accept practically any job — and thank the person deeply for having offered it.

So I went to New York and told Mr. Long, the head of the organization, that I should be delighted to go on tour for him. What would he like me to lecture on? That, he said, was entirely up to me. Would I submit to him a list of subjects with provocative titles for them? I had written a book with Cornelia Otis Skinner, and another by myself. Therefore he would like me to speak about anything I pleased. Lecturers evidently are not people who lecture. Their qualification for professional public speaking is that they have done something else. So I signed a contract.

After all, I argued with myself all the way home to Philadelphia, it was just like an editor’s asking you for ideas for articles: you would supply the ideas and if they were approved you would write the articles. This time, instead, you would speak them. It was really just the same thing. But I was not fooled for one moment by any such specious argument. There was all the difference in the world, the pit of my stomach told me, between a reader’s turning past, in a magazine, an article in which she was not interested, and an audience’s walking past, or out of, a lecture which did not appeal to it.

But the irrefutable fact remained that if I did lecture I should be paid; so as soon as I reached home I got to work. By the following morning I had a list of five subjects, really three — three subjects about which I cared enormously and about which I had been wanting to write for some time: “Women Selecting Professional Jobs,” “Women Doing Volunteer Work,” and “The Education for a Profession.”

Then, just as I always make up a big number to put at the top of any blank check which I make out in a shop, in order to give the impression that I write thousands of checks and have an enormous bank balance, I added two extra subjects, to make the number bigger. I thought, too, that they would point up the worth-whileness of the other three. So I put down “An Amateur Goes to Hollywood” and “Confessions of a Scapegoat.”

Once, long ago, when I had a job with Marshall Field and Company in Chicago, I gave a fashion show, with comments, on “Clothes for the Platform.” I worked out a series of precepts which all came back to me now. “Do not,” I had said sternly, wagging a forceful and admonishing forefinger at an audience whose youngest member was certainly twice my age, “wear any ornament which might distract attention from what you are saying — pins which catch the light and glitter, jet which moves and quivers, beads which can become tangled or break if fingered. The attention of an audience can be distracted by the slightest unusual movement or light” (I had learned that from people in the theater).

“Do not,” was another of my warnings, “wear clothes which carry much detail. The audience will spend its time figuring out how the detail was applied and will go away with a lasting memory of it and a knowledge of how to copy it, but without the slightest inkling of what you were saying at the time. And do not,” I told them primly, and blush now to remember how smug I was, wear clothes that are too short. Have your clothes for the platform made a little longer than those you would ordinarily wear on the street, because the height of the platform from the level of the audience makes a foreshortening.”

Then I shocked them. “Use make-up,” I said boldly, “whether you are accustomed to putting it on or not. You will have a stronger light on you than that in which you move about ordinarily, and your face will fade out. This is the time, on the contrary, when your face must be emphasized because your expression gives more point to what you are saying. Emphasize your eyes with eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, and eyelash make-up. Rouge is not so important as lipstick. Highlight your mouth like the spot of red in a Corot picture.” That, I thought, was a touch of culture that would bowl them over.

“And,” I had harried them, “do not, if you wear a hat, select one with a brim; what features it does not entirely conceal, it will throw into an impenetrable shadow. Most important of all,” I had concluded with a grand sweep, “whatever clothes you wear, leave alone. Do not fuss with your shoulder straps, your belt, the chain of your lorgnette, pin, beads, or bracelet. Stand still, look up, and speak out.”

2

THERE were other injunctions, of course. I had been asked to show clothes for forty minutes — but these were the high-lights. And remembering them, I thought they were still good. I bought clothes accordingly: two simple black daytime dresses, all line and very little trimming, — one wool, one crepe and satin, — and two black evening dresses — one black velvet, the other black crepe. The black velvet followed every precept. It was entirely without decoration and had a black net yoke, the velvet beginning with a fold just below the shoulders.

The crepe I was a little dubious about. It too was off the shoulders; but it had a red rose at the waist and another at the shoulder. I worried a little about the possible distraction of those red roses, but decided eventually to attempt to rise above them, rather than sacrifice them. Since I wear, at all times, hats so far atop my head that once in Hollywood I took a shower with one on, I was not troubled by an elimination of brims which might hide my features. Such as they were, my features were accustomed to exposure.

For make-up I went to my long-tried friend Cornelia Skinner. By this time I was carried away by my own advice, and assured Cornelia that I really thought you could not use too much makeup. “Yes,” she said, “you can,” and vetoed artificial eyelashes. She agreed about everything else, however, from eye shadow to a brush in lieu of a lipstick — in order to make the line of the mouth smoother and more precisely where I wanted it; though, she said, it took practice to get it there. I bought the accoutrements and I practiced. That completed my equipment. I was now ready, I felt, for the platform. I lacked only provocations.

And presently these came. They were printed contracts, heavy with legal phraseology, acknowledging the personal element only by blank spaces into which were typed the name of the particular organization desiring me, the date of the occasion, and the title selected from the list which I had provided. And the only titles selected were (a) “Confessions of a Scapegoat” and (b) “An Amateur Goes to Hollywood.” If anyone was interested in my earnestly considered opinions, he was not represented in these contracts.

He was, however, — that pronoun is sheer fantasy on my part, for it was always a she who figured, — interested in details which surprised me. I would not, she requested, speak less or more than an hour. I would not read my speech or, if I could help it, use notes. I would be prepared to use — if necessary — a microphone, or be able to speak without one.

My social life was tabulated too. I would, so some contracts read, lunch with the ladies of the committee. According to others, I would have a tea after the lecture, a reception if it was at night, or a dinner before the lecture. I might have instead, according to the contract, supper in my room at the hotel on a tray. “Of course,” I said with pretty humor to Mr. Long, “I don’t suppose they mean literally supper on a tray in my room in the hotel. I could go down to the dining room.”

“You could not,” he told me firmly. “If they say they want you in your room, they want you in your room. You see,” — he looked a little apologetic, or perhaps I only imagined it, — “some of these organizations feel that if the lecturer is seen before the lecture, it spoils the surprise. People might even turn in their tickets,” That seemed to me a drastic reaction to one look.

After that I did not even inquire as to a possible leeway in the choice of clothes. The typewritten memoranda read, “Afternoon clothes,” “Street or day clothes,” “Formal,” and there I was ready for them. Formal would be, for me, the black velvet, or all-out with the red roses. Day clothes were the very simple but molded creations in wool and in satin and crepe.

But afternoon clothes troubled me. I had not thought of these as something apart. In my normal life, I would wear in the afternoon approximately the same thing that I would wear for “street or day”; but, for this division in time, I scurried out and bought an “afternoon” dress. It had a pink bow, but I overrode the principle of no decoration, with the hope that it might make the dress look farther along toward evening.

My preparations were made, my designations were in my hand, and I started out.

The fact that I forgot to take along my contract to the first engagement is, I think, irrelevant. I was, it is true, rendered ignorant of the name of the place where the lecture was to be held, the name of the organization holding it, and the name of the hostess running the affair. This lapse forced me to canvass timidly the hotel lobby, which I did remember was the place designated for my meeting with the committee for the luncheon, and inquire of each female citizen established there if she was looking for a lecturer. I was fifteen minutes early, the committee ten minutes late. By the time we had established contact I had compiled enough answers to make up a Gallup poll — all of it negative.

But this was not what caused my sensations when the moment came and I was standing on the platform about to lecture. I had had an excellent lunch in the meantime. I was in suitable day clothes without ornament. My hat was without a brim. My make-up was just right, except that insufficient practice with mascara reduced my vision to that of an old English sheep dog. The trouble came from my hands and my heart. My hands were eerily cold and disagreeably moist, and I found swallowing troublesome, because my heart seemed to be in my mouth.

At that moment I, who would rather be given a chance to talk than play any game, — and I cannot, further, play any games, — should have preferred to be on a galloping horse with a polo mallet in my hand than standing there and having to talk. But the high romantic ideal which has sustained me through so many crises came once more to my aid. “You’re being paid to do this job,” the still, small voice informed me. “Go ahead and do it.”

3

AND so I began to speak, haltingly, and then, I think, with greater sureness, until I forgot about having to swallow, and was interested in my audience instead. I wanted those people to be interested. I desperately wanted them to be amused. The only excuse in the world that I had for being there at all was to divert them for a little while from the gravity and tenseness that surround all the rest of our waking hours.

There was a ripple of laughter. Never again let anyone tell me about peaks on which he has stood, Alpine or Darien. I was on them all. By the time the lecture was three-quarters through, I was so far above myself that I decided to try something else — something I wanted particularly to tell, because it had made a very deep impression on me. It was not funny, but I would try it.

I wanted, I said, — if I could, — to recapture for them the opening day of the shooting of the picture, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. I had not, I explained, known what scene was to be taken first, because, as I was sure they all realized, the scenes were not done in sequence. All those that took place on a particular set were shot, followed by those that took place in another background.

I had heard that the opening day of shooting, however, was a little like a first, night in the theater. The executives came over to wish everybody good luck, flowers were sent to the players, and there was a general air of tension and excitement. I anticipated this as I stumbled along through the enormous, dark warehouse which Hollywood, in a unique moment of understatement, calls simply a stage. Finally I made out a circle of lights at the far end, and when I came at last into its radius, I found the executives and the flowers there.

But I found also that the scene was to take place in the cabin of the ship in which the two girls were sailing for Europe. And I found that it was a cabin which duplicated the very one in which Cornelia and I had set out. Perfect in every detail, down to the water bottles tilted in the little wooden containers, the narrow white upper and lower bunks. Obviously we were traveling in the most modest circumstances.

In the center of the room Diana Lynn, who plays the part of Emily, was waiting for the word to begin the picture. She was dressed in a costume which to the last stitch was the replica of one I myself had worn. Just as I stepped within hearing, the director said, “Ready, camera. Roll ‘em.” And Emily spoke the first words of the picture as it was shot. They were the words which I myself, standing in that very cabin, dressed in that very suit, had said to Cornelia twenty years ago: “Oh, Cornelia, I can’t believe it’s true that Emily Kimbrough is going to Europe.”

For one blinding, electric moment I was the young girl standing there. Nothing that had happened to me since that time was real at all. Europe lay ahead with all the excitement, beauty, and adventure that being young could bring to it. It was all to come — and I was on its threshold.

That had been a shaking moment, and I tried to capture its quality for this audience, telling of it falteringly and stumblingly, as one does when speaking of things which lie very close. Suddenly I was aware that something an actor had once told me about was happening to me. A response was coming up from the audience, so vivid and actual that it was as if someone had put a hand on my arm and said, “I know how you felt. I had a trip of that sort when I was young; and if I should see it recaptured I think it would be almost too sharp to bear.” As I went on with my story, I looked about to find, if I could, from what particular person this emanation could have come.

I found her sitting on the end of the second row, watching me with an intentness which made me know at once that she was really moved, that she was living again in her own mind some such voyage. As I found her I saw, by the reflection against the footlights, the shimmer of tears in her eyes. Then she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall, overcome by her emotion. And her head pressed the button which set off the fire and burglar alarms.

There was no instruction in my contract, for all its explicitness, to cover this tattoo. So I stood there while the braying, jarring clamor swelled. It must, I thought, stop at some time and I would be ready, when it did, to go on as if nothing had happened. This, I had understood, was the law of troupers and I would prove myself one. It did stop and I started; but it turned out to be an intermittent alarm, one which died down only long enough for me to hurl two or three words into the quivering silence before it caught up with me and passed with a yell. I suppose it stopped eventually. I only know that when the firemen, the police force, and the insurance representatives came pouring into the back of the hall, I left the stage with a curious bow, which aimed at a gesture of farewell to the audience and a welcome to the civic authorities.

I have never since then been so confident in a lecture, or so nervous before one. I acquired the conviction, in those few but thundering moments, that nothing so appalling could possibly happen to me on the platform again. (I tremble, as I write this, and pause to knock on wood.) I did feel that other things might, and probably would, happen, but nothing on so wide a scale — and that is a very calming thought. And that is the way it has been — so far. Other things have happened, but not of such grandeur. They have been of a more personal nature, resulting principally from that lecture wardrobe which I had assembled through such splendid precepts.

4

THE first of those lesser occasions was at an afternoon lecture when I wore the black wool street dress, which was so devoid of distracting ornaments that even the buttons were down the back. One of these buttons capriciously and without precedent twined itself into my hair, which I wear in a somewhat Victorian knot low on my neck. I could have borne the discomfort more placidly had my head been in a normal position, but in some fashion the button had gathered to itself individual, and evidently very young, tendrils when I put back my head to see the clock on the balcony. To lower it again severed these tendrils excruciatingly. Therefore, lest I break into a yell of sudden pain, I was forced to finish out the lecture with my head held so high that I could encounter my audience’s eyes only by looking cautiously down my nose with unexpected and idiotic archness.

It never occurred to me to give a trial lecture in my bedroom wearing the black velvet evening dress. I had tried it on, but I dare say I stood still in the fitting room. I do not, as a matter of fact, whirl about on the lecture platform; but I did reach forward, the first night I wore it publicly, for a glass of water on the lectern. I could not, however, pick up the glass — because I was not able to lift my arms. The velvet band which ran around the base of the net yoke below the shoulders was as inflexible as the iron bands of Mr. Longfellow’s blacksmith. I could put my hand on the glass, but I could not lift it. And that fascinated the audience. Everything I had once said about the distraction which clothes can cause was being proved — with humiliation.

I was also wearing a pair of combs trimmed with brilliants. I thought that much ornament in the back would not be distracting. It was distracting, however, to have one of them fall to the floor. In all the years I had worn them, that had never happened before. The audience divided itself into titters and cooing noises of sympathy over my effort to pick it up and my inability to put it back in my hair. I should of course have left it on the floor. “Whatever clothes you wear,” I had said, “leave alone. Do not fuss.” But I was so surprised that I stooped spontaneously, and certainly I held the audience spellbound.

Nothing untoward happened the first day I wore the black satin and crepe afternoon dress. This was the model which depended, entirely, upon line and was of platform length. I was depending a good deal upon the dress too, and at the end of the lecture was rather pleased the way we had both come out.

It was then that a woman from the audience came up to shake hands and said: “How different you look off the platform, Miss Kimbrough. I wonder if it could have been the lights? Up there, you know, you looked the way people do in front of those broadening mirrors at amusement parks.”

That is another aspect of lecturing to which I am not yet accustomed—“The Things People Say!”

“We are glad to have you.” A luncheon hostess and president of a club turned and smiled graciously at me, as I sat on her right. “We were so upset over Colonel Rommel’s not being able to come that we should have been glad of anybody, and we are.”

“Tell Miss Skinner,” a woman called out across the crowd at an after-lecture tea, “that if I had gone on the stage, as I had wanted to, I might have been her mother. I often think of it.” She sent a little twittering wave of her hand to me, and left. I find myself thinking about it often too; but I have not, as yet, told Cornelia.

I did tell her and Roland Young, however, when we were talking about “The Things People Say!” of the woman who told me I was a nice person. “I said to myself,” she had asserted, pressing my hand with real affection, “all the time I was listening to you, ‘Now that is not what I call funny, but she seems a nice person, and I am just going to tell her so.'”

That, Cornelia said, was one of the unanswerables, and we matched samples. She remembered a large woman who approached her at the conclusion of a performance. Taking one of Cornelia’s hands, she held it against her very ample bosom and patted it, saying over and over, “My dear, my dear, my dear.” Cornelia challenges me to find a response to that. Furthermore Cornelia insists the gesture itself was not easy to answer. How long should she have left her hand there for patting? Should she perhaps have brought the other one up, of her own volition, to keep it company?

I remembered, too, the inspired introduction which the chairman of the evening gave, years ago, to an early performance by Cornelia. “Due to the exorbitant price of Admiral Byrd,” she had said, “we have with us this evening Miss Cornelia Otis Skinner.”

Roland submitted for our estimate a man who came up to him in a hotel lobby and, placing his hand upon Roland’s shoulder, looked him up and down from head to foot, and ejaculated with obviously the greatest pleasure and friendliness, “Yes sir, yes sir.” Roland is a careful and deliberate man, and he is still deliberating over the courteous reply to that expression of recognition.

That is the kind of imponderable which I face at every lecture, with unallayed trepidation but with anticipation too. I was once standing by the hostess, after my speech, meeting the guests as they came in. One of these, a pleasant-looking woman, spoke to the hostess and shook hands with her conventionally. Then she turned toward me. “This is Miss Kimbrough,” the hostess told her, and the guest shook my hand with equal conventionality. But instead of speaking, she unexpectedly closed her left eye in the most debonair wink, tossed her head, and made an extraordinary clucking noise three times, as if she were urging on a horse. Perhaps I should have winked and clucked back at her, I did not, however, make any response whatever except to continue shaking her hand in a mesmerized fashion. And I do not yet know what I should have done or said.

I am far from complaining about this form of social communication. I have the deepest gratitude to anyone who comes up to speak at all, and a feeling of sympathy which I can scarcely restrain myself from expressing. I have been a member of an audience so much longer than I have addressed one, that my feelings are entirely below the platform.

There are few things more distasteful to me than going to the speaker, or the actor, after his performance. I have not the slightest idea what to say. If I tell him that I liked his performance, the remark sounds to me lukewarm. But if I say I adored it or “loved every minute of it,” I seem to be gushing like a girl — which I am not — and therefore am once more confounded by my own awkwardness.

I have a deep conviction that the performer is scarcely going to alter his work according to whether I liked it or not; that his indifference, in fact, to whatever I may say or happen to think about it is cosmic in proportion. Brooding over these conjuredup reactions I am, by the time I have reached the object of my disagreeable pilgrimage, in such a state of sullen gloom that it must be only too apparent to the performer how desperately I wish I were anywhere but facing him. No wonder then that as a performer my heart, that unstable organ, goes out in sympathy and gratitude when anyone from an audience overcomes his reluctance and marches along to say to me anything at all. Certainly his heart is in the right place.