1 FROM COAL-FED ALLEGHENY TO SANTA BARBARA’S OCEAN
IN 1971, MARTHA GRAHAM SPOKE deprecatingly and with winning frankness to an interviewer. Among the three daughters of Dr. George Graham, she had not, she said, been the pretty one: “Mary was blond and gorgeous. Geordie had curly auburn hair and big beautiful eyes. And then there was little old slit-eyed me.”
But it was, of course, Martha, the eldest of the three, whose cheekbones photographers came to adore and who—as a dance artist adventuring into new, somber, and challenging territory—was often caricatured in her skeletal glory by newspaper cartoonists.
In any case, it was never conventional beauty that made people look twice at Graham. Even when she was a rather plain little girl by the standards of the day, she had a sense of herself and could summon an imperious manner when she thought a situation called for it. Disliking the experience of being on a train, four- or five-year-old Martha informed the conductor, “I’m Dr. Graham’s daughter, and I want out of here!”
She was proud of the fact that her dainty little mother, Jane Beers (usually “Jenny” or “Jeanie”), could trace her lineage back to Myles Standish, the well-born military officer who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, hired to help organize that first British colony on American soil. Miss Beers, the eldest of three sisters, would have been about twenty-two years old in 1893 when she eloped with George Graham, fourteen years older than she and a covert ladies’ man. The family was strictly Presbyterian. The daughters—Martha (b. 1894), Mary (b. 1896), and Georgia (b. 1900)—attended Sunday school (Martha even taught there at one point). On the Sabbath, the only toys they were allowed to play with were brown-and-white blocks with biblical scenes on them (which the often-rebellious eldest daughter detested and declined to touch).
In the many interviews Graham gave over the decades, she polished the memories that remained the most pungent to her and that could be said to have influenced her work. She divided her childhood from her birth until she came of age into two distinct parts, the first spent in her father’s hometown of Allegheny, Pennsylvania (swallowed up by Pittsburgh in 1907), and the second in Santa Barbara, California, where the Graham family moved when she was fourteen. It was not just her metamorphosis from little girl to adolescent that she stressed, but the differences between life in the two cities and the birthmarks that both left on her art. Many of the dances that later made her famous drew on the dualities of restraint and freedom, decorum and wildness that molded her bisected early years.
The city of Allegheny was cradled by the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers as they join to flow into the Ohio. From Pittsburgh’s steel mills across the river, effluvia more noxious than river water also bathed the town. Even when deprecating the pollution, writers marveled at the vision of power harnessed and transformed. In his 1907 book, The Romance of Steel: The Story of a Thousand Millionaires, Herbert W. Casson could not resist painting a heroic image of Pittsburgh’s mills.
The city has always its pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night. A yellow haze hangs over the region, as though reflecting the gold-making that is going on below. Floating rivers of dense black smoke flow from hundreds of chimneys and flood the streets between the skyscrapers. At night the scene is one of lurid grandeur—a continuous fire festival.
When Martha and her sisters left their Fremont Street home, silk veils covered their hats and faces, and they wore gloves winter and summer. They were allowed to play in the open air when they visited their mother’s sister Anna and her family in the more rural town of Mars. The Grahams sometimes went to Atlantic City at Easter, too, and photos show them in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where one of Dr. Graham’s five brothers lived and where Martha’s father, “in his sweet way,” said she years later, would take the waters “to get boiled out of him his naughtiness” (probably not a thought that occurred to her at the time). The brothers, she said approvingly, were all “hellers.”
In later life, Graham couldn’t remember having any friends her age when she was a small child, unless you counted her “slew of cousins” (Jenny’s two sisters, Mary and Anna, had ten offspring between them—all girls). Nor did she ever mention where she received her primary education (“We didn’t go to school too early,” she said to an interviewer). Their young mother invented playtimes that Martha remembered as “enchanting” and may have been educational as well.
Elements of theatricality infused the sisters’ recreation. They loved dressing up in their mother’s silk petticoats, which took its toll on the petticoats, so Mrs. Graham stitched little skirts with trains for her girls (they insisted on trains), and they swept grandly about, impersonating grown-up ladies. Their parents returned from a trip to California with three pairs of what Graham called “little Fu-Manchu shoes” to add to their disguises.
At some point, a cardboard theater, telling the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, made its way into the house, and Martha—fascinated early on by the interplay between darkness and light—left the room where her siblings, mother, cousins, and aunts were playing and returned to the toy theater. Something, she realized, wasn’t quite right: How could Little Red Riding Hood find her way to grandmother’s house unless there was a light in the window to guide her? Martha struck a match and put it in place, with predictable results. By the time the adults had smelled smoke and come running, the prudent child had already thrown a rug over the burning toy.
Late in life, she christened the little paper theater as her first stage set—her “first attempt to make another world.”
Accounts of her early temper fits also suggest a sense of drama that could be interpreted as presaging a career on the stage. Once, hating the dress she was supposed to wear to school, she tore it off herself. (Her mother told her they’d mend it and she would wear it to school.)
Lizzie Prendergast, the family’s young Irish cook and nursemaid, also stimulated the girls’ imaginations. An engaging storyteller and singer with a good voice, she could entertain them even as she prepared the family dinner. George Graham—before marrying, starting a family, and moving his practice into their large hillside home—had served as a medical doctor in nearby Dixmont, at the Western Pennsylvania Hospital, an institution specializing in mental disorders. He had treated the orphaned Lizzie at some point—apparently for severe dog bites. She credited him with saving her life and, according to family legend, showed up on the Graham doorstep soon after Martha was born, offering her services.
The household seems to have had surprising fissures in the rules of discipline, morality, and ladylike behavior that reflected nineteenth-century Christian values. During Dr. Graham’s childhood, when he and his brothers had lived for a time in Hannibal, Missouri, the only church nearby was Roman Catholic, and the family opted to forgo theological differences and attend services; mistrusted Christianity was apparently better than none. When he and his wife were out of town, they had no objection to Lizzie’s taking the girls with her to the Catholic church in Allegheny, where Martha became fascinated with the vestments, the statues and paintings, the incense, the colors, the music—in short, the theatricalized ritual of the services.
Mrs. Graham disapproved of professional theater (as, no doubt, did her own mother and formidable grandmother, with her black silk gowns and white widow’s caps). Yet George Graham took four-year-old Martha to a Punch-and-Judy show and paid little attention to what she was reading in his considerable library. One afternoon he escorted her to a play, scandalizing his wife. It isn’t recorded what Jenny thought on the occasions when he took his eldest girl to the races and helped her place one-dollar bets. These gambling forays were possibly the source for a remark of Dr. Graham’s that Martha cherished and often quoted: “You’re like a horse that runs best on a muddy track.”
In 1908, a tragedy and a change of residence resulted in a profound alteration in the family’s way of life. Jane Graham bore a son, William, who died before his second birthday, leaving her not only bereft but in delicate health. In light of this and Mary’s worsening asthma, the Graham family (including Lizzie) left Allegheny for Santa Barbara and cleaner air. According to Graham, this wasn’t the first long train trip they made to the West Coast. “Mother said, ‘I can’t live here. I can’t live in this god-forsaken city’ [meaning the Pennsylvania coal town]. So we picked up everything and went to California again and stayed there.” Dr. Graham maintained his practice in Allegheny for several years and took Santa Barbara vacations as often as he could, finally retiring in 1912. His wife’s sister Mary (“Auntie Re”) was widowed in 1910, and over the next few years Mrs. Graham persuaded her husband to bring both her sisters’ families to Santa Barbara.
Graham, like the pioneering American dancers who preceded her, was given to recounting epiphanies. Loïe Fuller, performing in a play when the lighting system accidentally dimmed, filled time by rushing around the stage brandishing an overlong skirt that she happened to be wearing: “It’s a butterfly!” cried the enchanted crowd (and so began Fuller’s transformative solos with fabric and light). Isadora Duncan experienced her revelation in the Parthenon (“I had found my dance, and it was a prayer”). Ruth St. Denis wrote of being steered into the spiritual reaches of Orientalism by a cigarette poster in a Buffalo drugstore window that showed the goddess Isis on her throne. The facts do not fully support these inspirational claps on the head as jump starters for careers, but—polished by memory and repeated many times—the stories provided iconic assists for the women’s attempts to dignify dancing and separate it from popular entertainment.
One of Graham’s early epiphanies was Santa Barbara—the burgeoning city and everything about it. Picnicking on the high, flat tongue of a peninsula known as the Mesa and referred to by Martha as “the old Diblee estate,” she and her siblings cavorted like young horses. “I remember running in absolute ecstasy into the sun with my arms open to the wind … And I’d get so tired I’d fall down and then I’d get up and run some more. But it was the sense of light, the sense of freedom, and the sense of the beginning of NOW, that terrific beginning of one’s impulse.” She was seventy-seven years old when she recollected this feeling—not for the first time. And, although the Grahams attended the Presbyterian church in Santa Barbara, she felt in retrospect that “no child can develop as a real puritan in a semitropical climate. California swung me in the direction of paganism, though years were to pass before I was fully emancipated.”
However selective memories of childhood can be, anyone who has gone from an industrial city in northeastern America to the western shores of the continent can understand how a fourteen-year-old girl in 1908 may have experienced California as a place in tune with her own developing body and sensuality. The sunny days and balmy temperatures in a small city nestled between the tempestuous Pacific to the west and the Santa Ynez Mountains to the east were as heady as the scents of eucalyptus and manzanita on the bluffs and orange blossoms, magnolia, and jasmine in the gardens. Two blocks from the house on Garden Street, where the Grahams eventually settled, huge trees unfamiliar to an easterner graced Alameda Park. Everywhere flowers bloomed and fruits ripened. Crimson bougainvillea vines draped over porches, jacaranda trees sprouted lavender blossoms, and agave plants reared their leafy swords. A girl could step outside and pick guavas and figs for breakfast or lemons to spice the dinner. Uphill stood the eighteenth-century Franciscan mission. A trolley running down State Street led to the harbor and the beach.
The population of Santa Barbara was not quite as variegated as its flora. However, it included the Spaniards and Mexicans who were part of its founding years, Chinese, Japanese, and a dwindling tribe of Chumash Indians. The Chinese workers who did the Grahams’ cooking, housework, and laundry adored pretty, blond Mary. Little Geordie was the favorite of a fat old friar at the mission.
Martha—and soon, Mary—could easily walk from the first Graham residence on De la Vina Street to the Santa Barbara High School, a substantial, somewhat grim stone edifice, out of keeping with any adobe-walled, tile-roofed buildings that acknowledged California’s Spanish history. When the family moved to the Garden Street house, the trips to school would have taken longer, and the walk home was a steep, uphill one, perhaps entailing a trolley ride. Graham’s strength and physical adroitness initially found an outlet in basketball; according to schoolmates, she was a nimble, slippery devil on the court. Anyone considering her high school career would think her the typical bright student. She joined the Quorum, the school’s debating society; organized a school dance; and contributed to the yearbook, Olive and Gold, and edited it during her senior year. She adored her English teacher, Jane Carroll Byrd, and learned to sew expertly.
Santa Barbara wasn’t quite the cultural backwater Graham once claimed it was. (“Nothing ever erupted there but a nice day.”) In 1908, the year the Grahams settled there, the city boasted four theaters that presented plays, including the Potter (part of the gigantic seaside Potter Hotel). The others showed a mix of vaudeville and silent movies. Influxes of wealthy people seeking space, sunshine, and clean air swelled the population, which, in the 1910 census, reached eleven thousand. And in 1912 the Ace American Picture Company (known, because of its trademark symbol, as “The Flying A”) set up a branch in Santa Barbara, the following year building a studio that covered two downtown blocks.
The initial group of twenty (actors, crew, and a cadre of cowboys) arrived on July 6, and by noon the next day, the Flying A had completed its first locally made one-reeler, The Greaser and the Weakling (Mexicans weren’t always treated respectfully in these mini sagas). During Graham’s last year of high school, one- and two-reelers were being filmed not just on outlying ranches and on the studio lot but on city streets. Citizens could hardly avoid bumping into a shoot. Everyday life mingled with celluloid visions of the Old West, with its Indian maidens, Spanish missions, and cowboys both gallant and villainous.
However, the experience that apparently kindled in Graham the desire for a life in the theater was a single live performance. On May 3, 1911, Ruth St. Denis was scheduled to present in Santa Barbara the program of solo dances she had been touring with since December 1910, and Graham saw a poster advertising it downtown. Oddly, it was one of St. Denis’s six shows presented in late April at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles, to which Martha had persuaded her father to take her. They did not travel the ninety-odd miles on the train that linked San Francisco with Los Angeles, but made their way south on the schooner that regularly plied the coast. The outing—as well as the corsage of violets Dr. Graham had bought for his daughter—must have seemed exciting from the start to a girl approaching her seventeenth birthday.
St. Denis had embarked on her career as a soloist only four years prior to this, her second American tour. Her performances often baffled spectators to whom dancing was what they saw on the vaudeville circuit. The images she presented onstage were both alluring and high-minded, sometimes simultaneously. Although, as a girl, St. Denis had paraded her high kicks and splits at Worth’s dime museum in New York and learned stagecraft from performing in plays produced by David Belasco, her ideas about movement were influenced by the Delsarte System of Expression, devised by François Delsarte (1811–1871) and further developed by such American exponents as Genevieve Stebbins. In an era when dancing was viewed as licentious, Delsarte’s system analyzed gestures and positions of the body in terms of the balance among the spiritual, the mental, and the physical.
As young Martha Graham would have noticed, Ruth St. Denis’s art involved transformation on two levels. She embedded herself in cultures where dance was associated with religion as well as with entertainment. And although she didn’t stint on exotic sets, fake jewels, wigs, and gauzy fabrics, a number of her solos involved an inner transformation; the character she impersonated rose to a higher state of self-knowledge or received a spiritual revelation.
St. Denis hadn’t studied the dance styles of the Asian countries she represented onstage; her light steps, whirlings, and stampings had little to do with, for example, Indian tradition. Instead, at a time when Orientalism was all the rage in theater, literature, art, and design, it was the philosophy and the iconography of various cultures that she plundered for her dances, along with exotica she had observed in Coney Island’s 1904 “Durbar of Delhi exhibit with performers” and in the 1892 extravaganza Egypt Through Centuries at the Eldorado Amusement Park in Weehawken, New Jersey, on the palisades just across the Hudson River from New York City. What Graham and her father saw that day in Los Angeles (and perhaps again in Santa Barbara?) struck the high school girl as startlingly beautiful—and something more. The program consisted of three solos that had figured in St. Denis’s first New York recital in 1906, Radha, The Incense, and The Cobras; two, The Yogi and The Nautch, that she had composed during her successful European appearances between 1908 and 1910; and three excerpts from Egypta, an elaborate dance-drama with a cast of fifty that she had premiered in New York in December 1910. The piano scores for all these were by Western composers. (Radha went through her transformations to pseudo-oriental extracts from the opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes.)
At thirty-two, St. Denis was a charismatic performer (and remained so into old age), and the theatrical savvy she had acquired while performing in Belasco’s productions made her aware of how to balance a program. In The Cobras, for instance, she played a snake charmer, coiling and rippling her remarkably flexible arms while a jeweled ring on each hand formed the serpents’ eyes. In The Incense, those sinuous arms took on the image of the smoke rising from the incense that she, as a devout woman, had scattered from a bowl into each of two braziers—her sari-draped body swaying and settling into soft curves, as if she had become elevated by the fumes into communion with the deity she had come to worship.
She opened her California programs with the “Palace Dance” from Egypta. Red-wigged, bejeweled, and flourishing a tambourine, she re-created herself as an exotic court entertainer. Several hours later, the evening ended with the more complex Radha, an ingenious amalgam of the desires of the flesh and the triumph of the spirit.
Seated on her throne, wearing more jewels than fabric, St. Denis as Radha, the beloved of Krishna, rose to demonstrate to her assembled priests (“Hindu” extras that sometimes included St. Denis’s brother) the dangerous delights absorbed through the five senses. To convey Sight, she caressed a string of pearls; she sipped from a cup of wine for Taste and shook little ankle bells for Hearing. The scent of a garland of roses, draped over her arching body, led to the “Delirium of the Senses,” in which—now wearing a full skirt—she spun herself into ecstatic collapse. Having illustrated the senses so seductively, she then rejected them all and returned to her niche, purified. Radha undoubtedly sent members of that Los Angeles audience home congratulating themselves that they had seen something morally uplifting.
The program certainly inspired Martha Graham. Perhaps for the first time, she beheld a performer presenting herself as a mysterious and glamorous presence, as a magician with fabric and lighting, as a goddess. Interviewed in 1986, when the Martha Graham Dance Company revived The Incense, Graham recalled St. Denis’s uncanny, seemingly boneless arm ripple as “one of the treasures of the world. It went from the spine through the entire body and was in touch with all the vibrations of the universe.”
After seeing St. Denis perform, Graham veered onto a new course—appearing as one of thirty-seven “geishas” in a downtown performance based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and acting in plays at Santa Barbara High. She undertook the female lead in a classroom effort, Dido and Aeneas, and, in her last year, had no time for basketball. After she appeared as one of the heroine’s three aunts in the senior play, Prunella, or Love in a Dutch Garden, a 1904 romantic fantasy by Laurence Housman and Granville Barker, she received what may have been her first review, which she, as editor of Olive and Gold, was doubtless pleased to publish in its pages:
The interpreter of “Privacy,” the aunt who remains in the forlorn garden waiting for Prunella’s return, was a fine bit of acting. Miss Graham’s voice exactly suited the part and she was careful not to overact when she discovers that the man who bought her house is he who lured Prunella away. Sincere and artistic appreciation of proportion marked every moment of Miss Graham’s admirable work.
After graduation, Graham didn’t apply to Vassar as her father hoped she might, instead enrolling in the Cumnock School of Expression in Los Angeles, which turned out to be quite near where Ruth St. Denis and her new husband, Ted Shawn, opened a school in 1915.
Copyright © 2024 by Deborah Jowitt