Olga Petrova’s Page (1922) 🇺🇸

Jeanette: I hope that my telegram, thanking you for your beautiful letter of good wishes for my recovery, reached you with due speed.

Upon my soul, it really takes some untoward happening such as my accident to show one that so many gentle thoughts exist. I was very much intrigued by one sentence in your note, with that genius for contradiction, that seems to be your most characteristic attribute you say, “Do tell me all your sensations when you saw that the accident was going to happen, although, when I come to think of it, you must have been unconscious, poor darling.”

As a matter of fact I was never so clearly conscious in my life. As the street car ripped a huge gash in the side of my beautiful new landaulet, and I saw, through the crescent of my arm — I had put up an elbow to protect my face from the splintering of the glass — its big shiny surface, it occurred to me that I had never before properly appreciated the relative size of a mere human in comparison with a metropolitan tram.

The next thought that came to me was that something had snapped in my back and that I was not occupying my seat with the same dignity of poise that is usually mine, even under the most trying circumstances. However, summoning what was left of my sang froid to my aid, I managed to walk across the street and into the building in which Dr. Stewart has his office. Whereupon my third thought was that if I were going to shuffle off this mortal coil I couldn’t have chosen a more convenient spot in which to perform the operation.

Doctor (John D.) had left for Great Neck — he did not know of my surprise visit to drive him home — but Dr. Post, who has an office on the floor above, came down immediately with his nurse and had a beautiful bandage over my entire diaphragm before the crowd had even dissolved from Fifty-ninth Street.

By the way, Jeanette chérie, have you ever stopped to consider what a number of people there are in the world that always have time to spare from their personal affairs to devote to impersonal matters, that at the best, have but a morbid interest?

However, to resume — Dr. Erdmann (you remember did all that wonderful work on Caruso; and by the way I shall never cease grieving that Caruso left for Italy when he did), came in, in about twenty minutes.

For the second time this year, Dr. Erdmann left his dinner untouched on my account. He confirmed Dr. Post’s diagnosis of fracture of the seventh and eighth ribs, an inch from the spine. What a little space, and yet how important is an inch, particularly in a matter of spines!

I was sitting quite peacefully in a chair by the open window, deep in argument on the labor situation, when Doctor (whenever you see Doctor spelled in it’s entirety, it means Dr. Stewart) rushed in. He was looking more perturbed than I have seen him in many moons. I insisted on finishing my views on the present economic typhoon before walking the intervening block to the Plaza. Dr. Post and Doctor were both possessed with the idea that I should take a bumpy ambulance to the Post Graduate Hospital. Dr. Erdmann with a wisdom, not often found in man, didn’t attempt to combat my already expressed intention, and merely remarked that the ribs and bruises were mine, and that if I decided that the Plaza was the place to take them to, there was no more to be said.

Arrived in a hastily prepared suite I sat up till eleven o’clock arguing, or rather listening to an argument on the results of radium on superficial cancer. I dined excellently well, on a fine codfish steak fried in butter. Have you ever tried codfish steak fried in butter?

People that I had thought had for ever erased my image from their memory; people that had cherished some real or imaginary grudge against me, either sent messages of sincerity and love, or came to express that love in person. For two days, no queen ever held more royal court than I held then.

As I put down my pencil for a second, the tears dim my eyes. I, that am scarcely sensible to personal suffering, am very sensitive to gentleness of spirit. And as I sit here, at Franklyn, Pennsylvania, looking across to the hills that border the Allegheny; hills that pierce the low-hanging mist, I smell again the perfume of that flowery room and I live again the memory of hands clasped deep in understanding. I think that the odor of those memories will be ever sweet in my nostrils, long after those nostrils have been stopped with dust.

On the Friday (the accident as you know, happened on Thursday) after my dear Dr. Erdmann had left — he came at nine o’clock before going to his office — Alan Dale called. He sat with me for more than an hour. We talked of everything under the sun, grim, serious, and gay. Everything, even the most sardonic of subjects held a humorous quirk. Alan Dale had broken some ribs (front ribs) some time before and we had a wonderful time comparing symptoms.

Miss Jacobs came in as Alan Dale left, and after her my poet. You met Adolphe Roberts at the house; you remember? But there — if I start to tell you of all the people that came I shall never get to the bull fight at all.

I might mention, however, in passing that we started to cast the “White Peacock” that day and rehearsed the next. In conclusion I might repeat how really glad I am that the whole affair took place, not only on account of the new and tender relationships it established, but also because it strengthened a philosophy in me that needs strengthening.

I never was very materialistic, as you know. I have never given much consideration to “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” but I have an even less regard for them now than before. I have found a greater peace than I ever thought possible. As I look again to the hills I realize how little our individual happenings matter in the collective evolution of things.

All this detail of the accident because you ask for it, and because Mr. Quirk [James R. Quirk] suggested it. By the way in his last letter he remarked that this note to you should contain an account of the opening of the ‘‘White Peacock,” but how on earth can I do that with only a few hundred words left. That will have to go until next month.

And now for a very brief description of a corrida.

In turning the pages of my memory book I find that the most impressive of the bullfights that I witnessed was the corrida in honor of the fête of Corpus Christi, at Sevilla.

As my mind travels back, I remember that the eve of the feast is especially worthy of description.

The festival this year happened on the twenty sixth of May, but for days before the people of Sevilla had been making ready.

The whole square in the center of the city was hung with garlands, some of living flowers, many of artificial ones. Thousands of colored electric bulbs shed their light indiscriminately on garden roses and on roses fashioned of violent pink paper. Enormous altars, bearing life-sized figures of the Madonna and of favorite saints, stood cheek by jowl with ice cream wagons and fruit carts.

At seven o’clock, the tall candles on the high altars were lighted. Towards sundown a slight breeze sprang up and played hide and seek among the tall tapers. Now one succumbed to its whimsies only to be resurrected by its stronger next door neighbor, as the wind veered from its course.

Dancing, games, fortune-telling — by real gypsies from Granda — wore the hours away till midnight, when the crowds, that had gutted the square as well as the narrow streets of old Sevilla, began to dissolve gradually and the far off music of some sleepless lover merged with the all-night clanging of the church bells.

Doctor and I had been invited by some of the personnel of the city to witness the “boxing” of the bulls for the corrida on the morrow. We left the square at five

minutes after twelve for the “field,” where the toros await preparation for their first and last journey to the ring.

This exhibition, I was given to understand, is reserved for friends of the espadas, the bull breeders, and for guests of the city, and is not available to the general public.

In our party, there were ten persons, all Spanish except Doctor and me. Doctor had a wonderful time talking English with a very polite Sevillian, who did not understand a word but who “filled in” with pigeon French.

We set out in victorias belonging to the various members of the party. The particular one assigned to me was drawn by two of the most beautiful Andalusian mares I have ever seen.

We followed the banks of the Guadalquivir for about a mile before turning into the gardens of Marie Louise. The moon shone down a silvery blue from a far away sky, on to the shadowy shapes of vessels that lay at anchor.

As we turned into the park we stopped for a minute to listen to the nightingales. Nightingales, Jeanette chérie, not just one nightingale, but a whole chorus of throbbing melting throats!

We stopped again at the Pavilion of Marie Louise. It stands in the center of an artificial lake, cradled in a grove of orange trees. Two peacocks were roosting on the roof. Their plumage was iridescent in the moonlight. The scent of the orange flowers was overpowering —

In thirty minutes we arrived at the field. At the entrance we were met by several. Guardia di Sevilla, in their funny, shiny hats. They, very politely escorted us to our places on a high platform (one of two), raised above an enclosure about a hundred feet square. From these platforms one looks down into a narrow passageway, through which the bulls are driven, one by one, into their boxes. Adjoining it is the rest of the enclosure, bordered by a high wooden fence and an equally high wooden gate.

In comparing the wild enthusiasm of the actual corrida, the festival of boxing the bulls is almost a solemn procedure.

Voices are hushed among those that exchange remarks on the chances of the following day, or on the respective merits of the toros. But for the most part, only the chirping of the crickets, or the occasional whirr of a nocturnally inclined cicada, makes itself heard. The glow of cigarettes shine feebly in the rays of the moon.

Suddenly there is a movement in the crowd; a restlessness, rather than concerted action. Far away the dull tinkle of the bells of the steers supplies the reason for this phenomenon. Then, a still duller sound of thumping hoofs, and one strains one’s eyes, but the moonlight fails yet to show their owners.

Long breathless seconds — and then, dark moving shapes far out on the edge of the campus. Out from their native plains come the magnificent beasts, lured by the stupid steers to the very gate of their damnation — or their glory.

As they come nearer, one hears the heavy breathing of their powerful lungs and smells the odor indissolubly connected with cattle. The shapes of mounted herdsmen are now plainly visible, as they stand, with long, steel-pointed lances, to welcome them inside the enclosure.

There is a sound of a heavy door falling into place. The first bull has preceded his erstwhile friend, the steer, into captivity. He looks around wonderingly for his companion. The inexorable door divides him from his former comrade, for ever and a day.

He stands for a moment, both feet together. Then individually they paw the ground. The smell of bruised grass is very sweet to the humans, but to the bull there is something wrong. He lifts his enormous neck with a bellow of rage that cleaves the soft night. He turns. He runs. He runs the only way he can run — right into the narrow passage. Another door descends. Even the enclosure is cut off.

He bellows again. The odor of the beast is very strong now. He is right beneath one’s very nostrils. His pelt gleams with sweat. Froth bubbles at his mouth.

He kicks desperately at the wooden walls of the partition. He tries his luck with his powerful horns; sometimes he may break a tip — that is all. Suddenly he sees a door open invitingly. He rushes through and into his wagon lit.

He lows with fresh energy. He kicks with renewed vigor. One feels that he will certainly smash so frail a thing as wood, as though it were paper, before he will resign himself, with ignorant complacency, to his journey to the bull ring. In the midst of the noise a shout goes up. He is forgotten in the excitement of the second bull.

And so eight are boxed before one makes ready for home again, in the peace of the moonlight, to the accompaniment of singing nightingales, that flit through the branches of the orange trees in the garden of Marie Louise.

Heavens! Still no description of the corrida proper!

Until next month, Jeanette, chérie!

—

Olga Petrova, who is now scoring a personal triumph in a play she has written and directed

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“Picking on the Pictures”

A new motion picture menace is discovered by the Dearborn Independent which now finds that America is being destructively misrepresented in foreign lands by the American made motion picture. It seems that “a woman in Java gave up a projected trip to the United States because the movies taught her that ‘bandits, holdups, murders and risks’ of all sorts make up our daily fare of life,” according to the Literary Digest’s quotation of the journal famous as the property of an authority on ten motor cars. It is also revealed that American film makers have been given to making special spicy scenes for the export versions of some of their dramas, that they have sent to primitive foreign lands films condemned here by censors, all of which is said to make native races look down on the white man in general and the American in particular.

It is fitting also in this same connection to call attention to a number of other shouting menaces:

American made sausage for export to Mediterranean countries is heavily spiced, often with garlic. That’s bad for the oriental temperament.

American made gasoline stoves for South American trade are often painted a brilliant carmine.

American newspapers print murder stories on page one.

This is a regrettable phase of all business. Things are made to sell. The influences of the motion picture are not wholly good. Nothing in human expression is absolutely pure. The American Indian got Christianity and rum in the ‘same shipload. The same British enterprise which took Anglo-Saxon culture to the Far East abetted opium in China. Good is often interbound with evil. It is the way of life.

But the world survives, even progresses, despite all this.

Henry Ford’s Independent is merely engaging in that fascinating pastime now so popular, entitled “Picking on the Pictures.” with the same brand of intelligence its owner uses in everything he undertakes outside his flivver factory.

There are a good many phases of the picture industry that could be improved. Perhaps they will be in time, the ultimate consumers of pictures permitting this to be done.

Every advertisement in Photoplay Magazine is guaranteed.

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Will Hays has quit the Cabinet for the films.

He has accepted the offer of, as quoted, $150,000 a year to head a new organization of motion picture producers and distributors.

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, March 1922

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Stage and film favorite, short story writer, playwright. Brilliant Madame Petrova, who journeyed to Spain to collect material for her own play in which she appears on the stage this year, is going to write a page for Photoplay each month

Photo by: Campbell Studio

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, January 1922