{"id":120095,"date":"2018-01-11T09:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-01-11T14:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120095"},"modified":"2018-01-12T12:12:57","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T17:12:57","slug":"the-calla-lillies-are-in-bloom-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/11\/the-calla-lillies-are-in-bloom-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The Calla Lilies Are in Bloom Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Katharine Hepburn spoke this line for the first time in 1933. She had been cast in a now-forgotten play called\u00a0The Lake<\/em>. Jed Harris, the director, was a sadist, and the twenty-six-year-old actress did not flourish in the role. (Dorothy Parker\u2019s famous barb, that Hepburn \u201cran the gamut of human emotion from A to B,\u201d is said to be about this performance). After previewing several shows to declining ticket sales, tepid reviews and increasingly abusive behavior from Harris, Hepburn was desperate to leave the play. \u201cMy dear,\u201d Harris told her, \u201cthe only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you.\u201d She wrote him a check for her life savings and was released from her contract. In her 1991 autobiography, Hepburn writes of this time in her life, \u201cIt was a slow walk to the gallows.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few years later, Hepburn was cast in\u00a0Stage Door<\/em>, a film about a handful of actresses living in a women\u2019s boardinghouse and competing for roles in a play. This fictional play prominently features the calla-lily line, which the director, Gregory La Cava, lifted from\u00a0The Lake<\/em>. Hepburn\u2019s character recites it several times in rehearsals, always lifelessly, until the movie\u2019s tragic climax, and then she recites it once more,\u00a0with feeling<\/em>. After the success of\u00a0Stage Door<\/em>, the line\u2014first a signifier of her failure, then a signifier of her success\u2014finally became a synecdoche for Hepburn herself, the odd mid-Atlantic intonation, the reedy voice, the hard, glittering propriety. The line\u2019s iambic pentameter makes it pleasant to say, and the accent is fun to mimic. The first version I heard was Pee-wee Herman\u2019s in\u00a0Big Top Pee-wee<\/em>. He says it to a pig.<\/p>\n

Like the calla lily itself, movies have their own strange and perennial nature. The movie goes up again and again, the images and words always exactly the same, but time is at work on everything outside the safe little celluloid rectangle. The sets are struck, filming locations bulldozed, props and clothes destroyed and lost. Every time the film is shown, the stars are all a little older. One year, someone on the screen is no longer in the world. And then several people. And then everyone. Once the actors are all gone, the movie is sealed off. It sits on the other side of a wall. It looks the same as ever, but it\u2019s not the same. You\u2019re alone when you watch it, and you\u2019re watching a room of ghosts.<\/p>\n

Or you\u2019re sitting in a room of ghosts. How many people saw this film, and when, and what was it to them? My grandmother would have been eighteen\u00a0when Stage Door<\/em> came out. Hepburn was tremendously stylish then; a girl my grandmother\u2019s age might fashion herself after Hepburn. My mother likely watched the film in the 1970s. Was there a camp element in it? Hepburn by that time was a formidable grande dame; it might have been funny and uncanny to see a performance from her callow youth.<\/p>\n

When I saw\u00a0Stage Door<\/em>\u00a0last winter, Hepburn had been gone almost fifteen\u00a0years. All her ages\u2014young, middle-aged, quite old\u2014existed on an equal plane; no Hepburn loomed larger than any other.\u00a0I sat on my couch watching the exact gestures, hearing the exact words my grandmother saw and heard eighty\u00a0years before in some now-shuttered movie palace in San Jose. Back then, the stars of\u00a0Stage Door<\/em>\u00a0lived and worked and laughed and suffered. Now the stars of\u00a0Stage Door<\/em>\u00a0are all gone. Jean Rouverol, who played Dizzy, one of the girls in the boardinghouse, died last year.<\/p>\n

The video project below is my attempt to reconcile what is born over and over again with what is born only once, grows old, and dies. Hepburn recites the calla-lily line a little differently each time, but the line remains the same; and each time she recites it she is older, but she is also the same. She is always thirty, always seventy-four, always eighty-four. Maybe my grandmother is, too. Maybe I am, too. I can sit on my couch in 2017, and my grandmother can sit in a movie theater in 1937, and we are sitting together, because we are looking at the very same thing.<\/p>\n

The calla lilies are in bloom again, and again and again. The final line of\u00a0The Lake<\/em>\u00a0was Hepburn\u2019s: \u201cThere are ghosts who are friendly ghosts. I shall be back.\u201d<\/p>\n