Madame Modjeska Left Behind Heritage of Joy

Otis Skinner, one of the great American actors of the last century, writes of a visit to Helena Modjeska’s Forest of Arden in our county’s Santiago Canyon:

“Johnny, the Polish boy Mr. Bozenta has trained to become the overseer of the ranch, has had a birthday, and we had a barbecue, Mexican fashion. All the ranch people for miles were invited. We had a wonderful time under the sycamore trees. Hosts of people and so much to eat! The meat strung on poles (a sort of primitive spit) was twirled over a low fire by two Mexicans.

“They liked it--the Mexicans; but I couldn’t eat it, and I burned my throat with the red stuff they ate with a spoon; it was chili made into a puree.”

Skinner is quoting from a diary of his wife, Maud Durbin Skinner, an actress of note, in his autobiography, “Footlights and Spotlights.” As a young girl, Miss Durbin began her stage career in Madame Modjeska’s company and later passed a summer at the Modjeska ranch, in a section of Santiago Canyon we today call Modjeska Canyon.

The great Polish actress, Madame Modjeska, lived on the ranch from 1888 until 1906. Recently, 17 acres of the once 1,300-acre ranch was acquired by Orange County as a historical landmark. The Modjeska home, designed by New York architect Stanford White, still stands and is undergoing restoration.

The actress, who was born in Krakow in 1844, spent her last days on Bay Island in Newport Harbor until her death in l909. Although the ranch had not been a profitable venture, her final years were made financially secure by her close friend Ignace Paderewski, the celebrated Polish pianist. Paderewski arranged in 1905 a farewell testimonial in her honor at the Metropolitan Opera House.

These reminders and others of the cultural influence of Modjeska and her second husband, Count Bozenta, on Orange County were given by Ellen Lee of Laguna Beach. Lee, a historian, was the principal speaker last weekend at Polish Heritage Night in Buena Park. The event was co-sponsored by the Buena Park Historical Society and the Orange County Centennial Committee.

One purpose of this event and others upcoming throughout the county, in cooperation with other county historical societies, is to raise funds to mark our county’s centennial in 1989.

Louise Booth of Villa Park, general chairman of the Centennial Committee, announced to the 200 of us gathered at the Buena Park Recreation Auditorium that the next event will be a Celebration of Quilts, an exhibit of historical quilts from Southern California in a setting with antique furniture, to be held in the First United Methodist Church of Orange on May 29 and 30.

Polish food, including pirogi, or stuffed pancake, prepared by volunteers headed by Irene Fogle, and colorful native dances and songs by groups led by Rick Kobzi and Helen V. Warner introduced to me an aspect of Polish culture that I didn’t know existed in contemporary Orange County.

Polish people, I learned, settled in the colony of Anaheim. Among them in 1876 were Modjeska, Bozenta and the novelist Henry Sienkiewicz, who was to win the Nobel Prize in 1905. In her native Krakow, Modjeska had encouraged and helped both Paderewski and Sienkiewicz to commence their respective careers. As Lee remarked, Modjeska was a generous, warm-hearted woman.

She had to go to San Francisco to act because there were no proper theater facilities in Los Angeles and what was to become Orange County. Modjeska supported and opened in 1890 the Grand Opera House in Santa Ana. Modjeska’s enormously successful American debut was in San Francisco in “Adrienna Lecouvreur” on Dec. 22, 1877. She starred with Edwin Booth in 1889-90, and was thereafter considered one of the greatest actresses on the English-speaking stage.

This was followed by transcontinental tours with Otis Skinner and Maurice Barrymore. And always, between tours, she returned to her beloved home in the Forest of Arden in Santiago Canyon. Old-timers here revered her, Lee said.

It was Modjeska who named the woods surrounding her home here after the forest in Shakespeare’s play, “As You Like It.” The actress had considered her performances in the role of Rosalind in that play her greatest success.

Otis Skinner said that her chief characteristic was “joy.” In her acting, there was joy, he recalled. “It was joy always striking a different note, a joy restrained and admirable in execution; the great joy of artistry.”