Everyone knows the difficulty of things that are exquisite and well done—so to have facility in such things gives rise to the greatest wonder.
—BALDESAR CASTIGLIONE, The Book of the Courtier
WALK INTO our own national temple of classical culture, and you’ll see that the balancing act of grace—skill without apparent effort—is built into the depiction of grace displayed on its walls. I’m standing under the portraits of the Three Graces that hang in the Library of Congress, just under the ceiling in the art-filled Great Hall.
The first time I noticed these renditions of prim young ladies in chignons and long gowns staring down at me from above, I felt strongly that they were out of place. Painted by the American artist Frank Weston Benson in the 1890s, when Benson was known for his portraits of genteel northeasterners, they give off a slightly uptight vibe.
Unlike their ancient counterparts, they are not naked, smiling, or touching. They aren’t even together. Each is sealed up in her own frame. Chastely attired in white, these long, lean priestesses of purity look down on me with the chilly appraisal of New England debutantes.
As if they didn’t look high-minded enough, Benson added a Puritan touch: alongside her sisters Music, with a lyre, and Beauty, with a hand mirror, the third of the Graces brandishes a shepherd’s crook, symbolizing a good, solid work ethic—Husbandry, as the library’s guidebook tells me, a word with overtones of thrift and self-discipline. No hedonistic layabout, she.
I think about this. While the more prudish and censuring aspects of Puritanism chafe against my view of grace as easygoing and broad-minded, a strong work ethic makes perfect sense as one of its pillars. In fact, hard work explains a lot about Cary Grant.
I’ve come to the Library of Congress to puzzle out how Grant came by his gracefulness, and what I’ve begun to realize is that however much some of it may have been innate—good physical coordination, reflexes—much of it was deeply worked on. I leave the echoing Great Hall and make my way through a labyrinth of corridors to the hushed, cathedral-like Main Reading Room, with its marble dome ringed with angels, alluding to celestial realms.
I’ve got something more down-to-earth in mind, and soon one of the librarians delivers it: a well-thumbed, slightly crumbling copy of How to Enter Vaudeville: A Complete Illustrated Course of Instruction. It was published in 1913 by Frederic La Delle, a thirty-year veteran of the stage, whose illusionist act, he informs us, was “a culmination of years of experience comprising originality—cleverness—versatility—showmanship.” Comprising dignity, too, I gather, as the through-and-through decency of his profession is what he is most interested in conveying here. His book is an encyclopedia of vaudeville acts (sharpshooters, barrel jumpers), but it is also a conduct book about how to be in that world. How to comport yourself onstage and off, in rehearsals, on the road, throughout your career. How to live with yourself and others in a fast-paced, competitive, always-on-the-go arena where material rewards are fleeting, but joy is—or can be—abundant.
La Delle’s manual for vaudevillians is a guidebook for life.
I have no idea if Grant consulted such a book, but it’s fair to say that within its pages lies the philosophy of the craft he stumbled into in his early teens, at a time when progress through the entertainment business wasn’t about one’s needs as an artist. Success came through disciplined, unceasing work.
“Special talent is not required for acting any more than it is for any other profession,” La Delle announces on the first page, opposite a drawing of himself in a high collar, cravat, and three-piece suit. What is required: practice, and the drive to “do something better” than the competition. Also, sweat. Any reward—and La Delle charmingly frames that as a kind of joyful, transformative grace—will come only with time and toil: “In the theatrical profession, whatever you contribute to human happiness as well as your own, will be paid for liberally.”1
What this master illusionist reveals is that there is no magic to his business. Being alert to the moment, paying attention to others, performing with ease and naturalness: these tricks of the trade are also fundamental principles of grace. Vaudevillians learned them—lived them—through rehearsal, revisions, and then reacting on the fly. Figuring out how to make an act work when it was dying (hello, grace under pressure) took a kind of creative energy that came from being fully present. No wandering thoughts. A moment-to-moment slalom skiers’ Zen of responsiveness.
As the How to Enter Vaudeville manual puts it: learn to make every move in a perfectly natural manner.
Live theater works different muscles in actors, and survival in that world is one reason that performers such as Grant, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, and other greats from Hollywood’s Golden Age still seem so alive today, so warmly three-dimensional.
Watch Rogers gaze at Astaire in Top Hat as he woos her with Irving Berlin’s gently bouncy song “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?” How Rogers’s eyes consume him, how her face brightens by degrees! Rogers is one of the most graceful creatures of any category. She danced with an emotional responsiveness you rarely see in any dancer, film or otherwise. This is what made her the perfect foil for Astaire, the cool perfectionist. Rogers deepened the drama as she danced, with the way she reacted to him with her body and her eyes. That responsiveness is also there in the scenes where she is simply listening. But she not only learned how to dance, sing, and act on the vaudeville circuit, she developed an enduring levelheadedness and work ethic that carried her through seventy-three films and were justly prized in a Hollywood of fragile egos and high-maintenance insecurities. That’s grace, too, because it makes things easier for everybody else.
There was no time to be a diva when, at the end of an engagement, vaudeville players had to cram into railcars as the caravan of nomads sped onward to the next gig, next audience, next screwy set of variables and random calamities.
Unlike Hollywood today or Broadway or pop stardom, the vaudeville existence concentrated and distilled all the challenges and stickiness of life. Vaudeville acts were physical; a pretty face wasn’t as important as what you did with your body. The players had to be able to move, and in concert with others; they developed rhythm and timing, action and reaction, and the ability to tune in to the entire theater while staying tuned to each other. They had to think on their feet, go onstage no matter what, fill in at a moment’s notice, improvise in a pinch, put up with schedule changes, travel from town to town doing their laundry in hotel sinks and checking their egos at the door.
Toward the back of La Delle’s book is a chapter titled “How to Make a Success in Vaudeville.” Its placement at the end implies that success comes well after one’s act is learned, and only when the social graces are mastered. His words could apply today, to Amtrak’s Quiet Car, to the subway, to the office:
There is nothing so disgusting as to see some performers enter a railroad station or car and at once try to attract attention, loudly commence to talk show business and tell how they killed them in Schenectady, etc., seeking by this means to call the attention of the other occupants of the car, that they are actors. . . . Let your conduct at all times and in all places be that of ladies and gentlemen. This same suggestion holds good while you are around the theatre, as managers know everything that goes on back of the curtain, even if they never come back there, and I know of a good many acts of just fair ability to get by nicely owing to their gentlemanly and ladylike conduct.
GRANT ALWAYS HAD HIS ANTENNAE OUT, one on his costar, one on us. That sensitivity for others, for making them feel understood, supported, and cared for, can be traced right back to his acrobat’s attentiveness and reflexes. To his vaudevillian toil.