A Romantic Stage Life, a Distorted Legacy

In her native Poland, she’s regarded as the country’s greatest actress of all time. In America, she is considered the leading American Shakespearean actress of her era, the late 1800s.

And she is remembered for trying, along with her noble husband, to establish a “Utopian colony” in the then-thriving farming community of Anaheim, a short-lived agricultural adventure that has long been romanticized in California history.

Her name was Helena Modrzejewska, known in this country as Helena Modjeska.

Never head of her? Most Americans haven’t.

But she is being edged back into the limelight by “In America,” Susan Sontag’s new bestseller, published last month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sontag says her book was “inspired by” the story of Modjeska’s 1876 emigration with husband Count Karol Bozenta Chlapowski and journalist Henryk Sienkiewicz, who would later win the Nobel Prize for “Quo Vadis.” Sontag also says, “Most of the characters in the novel are invented, and those who are not depart in radical ways from their real-life counterparts.”

Radical indeed, and the keepers of the Modjeska flame in Orange County take exception to the artistic license Sontag has taken with Modjeska’s life.

“I’ve had a couple of weeks to get over my shock and anger,” says Ellen Lee, one of the directors of the Helena Modjeska Foundation, which supports preservation of the actress’ country home, nestled in the foothills behind the defunct El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. “The character Sontag has created is as different from the real Modjeska as day and night. Her character is intended to show off the sleaziness of American show business and what commercialism does to art. She’s using a lot of Modjeska’s life, but Modjeska herself never caved into this.”

The novel is “an attempt to cash in on Modjeska’s name with a novel that is simply not worthy of Modjeska,” Lee said.

(The book is ranked No. 3 today on the Los Angeles Times’ bestsellers list, the fourth week it has appeared there.)

Linda Plochocki, a fellow foundation director and docent at the house, praises Sontag’s book as a work of fiction but adds: “People have to understand that it doesn’t depict Modjeska as we’ve come to know her.”

So who was the actress with the wavy brown hair and slightly aquiline nose, the Victorian lady who could be powerful and passionate on stage yet unprepossessing, soft-spoken and gentle off it?

In her 30 years on the American stage, Modjeska mastered 12 Shakespearean parts and took on other classic and contemporary roles, including the lead in America’s first professional production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” in 1883. Her acting style was regarded as subtle, natural and realistic, Lee said. And her leading men included the biggest names of the day: Maurice Barrymore, Otis Skinner and Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth, who said of her: “She is a genius; I learn something new from her every day.”

In Poland, Modjeska is revered not only as the country’s greatest actress, but as a great patriot. The old city theater in Krakow where Modjeska performed is named in her honor, as are streets and schools. The school in Zakopane that Modjeska established for peasant girls is still in existence, and schoolchildren know her name. A decade ago, Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film director who received an honorary Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards, even directed a seven-part miniseries about Modjeska’s life in Poland. (It is not available in translation or with subtitles in the United States.)

Throughout Orange County are scattered reminders of Madame Modjeska, as she was known to friends, colleagues and her admiring public.

The north peak of Saddleback Mountain in southern Orange County, its largest natural landmark, as well as a section of Santiago Canyon below are named in her honor. There also is a statue depicting her in her famous role as Mary, queen of Scots, at Pearson Park in Anaheim, which also has a street bearing her first name, Helena.

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And there’s Arden, her home, lovingly preserved in Modjeska Canyon. The county bought the house and remaining 14 acres of the original 1,340-acre ranch in 1986 and has been offering limited tours since 1994. The five-gabled, white-frame house, designed by the renowned architect Stanford White, is one of only two National Historic Landmarks in Orange County. Richard Nixon’s birthplace in Yorba Linda is the other.

No trace, however, remains of Modjeska’s time in Anaheim.

Farming there had been the dream of Modjeska’s husband, who was known as Count Bozenta. But what later was called a Utopian colony never numbered more than 10 people, Lee says, and everyone went their separate ways after only 10 weeks.

Modjeska, she notes, had come to America for one reason--to act. And after 10 weeks in Anaheim, she spent eight months studying English in San Francisco before making her American stage debut on Aug. 20, 1877. Modjeska’s theatrical company toured America by train over the next three decades, playing everywhere from New York City theaters to so-called “opera houses” and town halls in silver boomtowns such as Leadville, Colo.

Modjeska acted in English, albeit with a Polish accent, unlike her foreign-born contemporaries who toured America. Italy’s Eleanora Duse acted only in Italian; France’s Sarah Bernhardt, in French.

“She’s definitely one of the leading lights of the American acting scene in the late 1800s,” UC Irvine drama professor Robert Cohen said. “And she’s remarkable in that she moved to America. It’s hard to become a great actor in a second language. So it was like a star turn.

“That’s not a way to create great ensemble theater, but this is a period where Americans liked star-oriented theater. So they came to see a star.”

A star she was, proclaimed in playbills by only a single name, Modjeska.

Modjeska was an outspoken critic of the American theatrical system, decrying the working conditions and lack of training for young actors.

“She’d say, ‘In my country, the theater is a fine art. Here it’s an amusement,’ ” Lee said. “She cared greatly about the American theater, and when they wouldn’t accept new playwrights, such as Ibsen and [George Bernard] Shaw, she defended them and said, ‘We have to move with the times.’ ”

One thing Sontag’s novel doesn’t touch on at all, says Lee, is the house at Arden.

In the summer of 1883--seven years after they first arrived in Anaheim--Modjeska and her husband returned to Southern California on vacation. They camped for three weeks on a homestead in Santiago Canyon owned by their friends, the J.E. Pleasants family. The couple returned to the remote canyon for two more summers, and in 1888, they bought the ranch, which was 11 miles and a three-hour trip by horse and buggy from the tiny El Toro train station.

Except for summers when they returned to Poland, Modjeska and her husband vacationed at their country home for several months every year. The ranch provided a refuge for Modjeska, who, as actor-manager of her company, did everything from selecting and training her casts to helping with costumes.

“It was very hard, demanding work,” Lee said. “Arden, I think, gave her peace and quiet and solitude.”

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Although 300 homes now stand in the two-mile section of Santiago Canyon named for Modjeska, only Modjeska’s family and staff lived there during her lifetime.

By 1906, Modjeska was in her mid-60s, and her career, which had financed life on the unprofitable ranch, was winding down. They reluctantly sold Arden, and after completing a winter tour in 1907, Modjeska retired from the stage and turned her attention to writing her memoirs, first in Tustin and then on tiny Bay Island in Newport Bay, which was then the muddy estuary of the Santa Ana River.

Modjeska was not well, but when she was asked to participate in a benefit show in Los Angeles arranged by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst for earthquake victims in Sicily, she agreed to perform the sleepwalking scene from “Macbeth.”

“The articles about it were rather shocking in a way,” Lee said, because critics wrote “ ‘the voice of Lady Macbeth was also the voice of a dying Modjeska.’ It was obvious she did not have long to live.”

She died a few weeks later, at 68, on April 8, 1909.

The Pacific Electric railway sent a private car to carry Modjeska’s coffin to Los Angeles for her funeral at St. Vibiana’s, the historic cathedral downtown.

“Her funeral was the first really big celebrity funeral that Los Angeles had ever had,” Lee said. Shops were closed, schools let out and thousands thronged the downtown streets.

“It was,” she says, “a farewell to a queen.”