Blithe Spirit: A Reminiscence of Billie Burke
Brantingham, Philip
Philip Brantingham Blithe Spirit: A Reminiscence of Billie Burke • • As the years pass and the stars wheel, it is all too easy to forget those whose gifts were transitory, and not memorialized...
...And we need the memory of joy and grace now, more than ever, to inspire our future...
...They were at one with the great illusionists, Blackstone the Magician, Kuda Bux, and others of genius, for what the stage deals with is illusion, the illusion of life...
...A lovely young woman with a fragile air, she began to act almost the moment she was born...
...She appeared in Peggy, a sentimental thing, and was successful...
...I am not trying to set up a dichotomy...
...Philip Brantingham Blithe Spirit: A Reminiscence of Billie Burke • • As the years pass and the stars wheel, it is all too easy to forget those whose gifts were transitory, and not memorialized in print, marble, or bronze...
...For me, Billie Burke lives only as a woman of charm, character, and beauty...
...It was May of 1903...
...Thus, I hope that the matter has been brought to light and will attract the proper historian...
...Great careers are occluded by forgetfulness, great talents return to the clay and are forgotten, chiefly because what they did was, in the present-day scientific terminology, "consumable...
...Today, those who think of themselves as stage-actors are clever enough to divide their time between their love and films...
...The others, like Billie Burke, who came to the movies, often were forced into trite roles, and remained thus embalmed...
...It was always composed a little of fakery and a little of exhibitionism...
...Their character is decidedly synthetic, like a plastic toy, but they are a reality and not to be ignored...
...And the newer generations will not know it either...
...I have tried, but left the deeper matters and harder facts alone...
...The older you got, the more a "character" you had to play...
...By the time of Talkies, she was in her forties, and no longer the young belle of the theater...
...Therefore the memory that survives, if at all, of Billie Burke, is mostly inaccurate...
...Billie Burke played her type to perfection, for she was flexible, and her innate gaiety came to good use in this role...
...The public loved her ebullience and beauty, and it was not unnoticed else-where, for she replaced the buxom Anna Held in the heart of Flo Ziegfeld (whom indeed she soon married...
...If we can spend so much time bringing back the Romans, perhaps some little effort can be given to one of the good things that has happened to the human race in recent times...
...And she had, besides her beauty and sweetness, a certain hard and wise, yet willful, nature...
...Her case is that of many others, particularly those actors who cared not for films...
...Their fames soon vanished when they did...
...and the other lives on, mocking the spirit of the former, though gently and not without her own charm...
...The real Billie Burke whom we have forgotten, and should not forget...
...In 1907, she appeared with John Drew in My Wife in New York...
...I am merely trying to establish the fragility of true art in the theater, as opposed to the enduring drossof the film, the high road and the low road, as it were...
...And I wish to bring up Miss Billie Burke...
...Gone is her song, her laughter, her moments of greatness...
...Now and then a semi-serious part came her way, almost by accident...
...I mean such as Edward Everett Horton, Miss Zasu Pitts, Victor Moore, or, more seriously, Walter Huston...
...At such a failure of memory, we ought to call in Clio, muse of History, to rectify the matter...
...Now, when we can see her tittering on the Late Show, or arguing cheerfully with The Man Who Came to Dinner, we have no idea that behind this stock character stands a great performer...
...Typecasting, doom for ambitious actors, meant a certain income, but a noncreative future...
...It is already a fact of life...
...Such has been the fate of many stage-actors...
...But though she became a minor celebrity in films, it was at the cost of her past fame...
...Their profession, especially before the advent of films, was one that lived only with the rise of curtains, and often darkened with the fall of same...
...I have not the historical perspective...
...For there were two: the renowned actress of the British and American stage, and the ephemeral flighty of the films...
...Her gaiety, her talent, her versatility made her much in demand, and she moved in grand circles of theatrical life...
...It is impossible to catch in words Billie Burke's qualities at that moment of her greatness...
...it is international, just as deceit is international...
...Her mature talent and appearance meant new roles...
...Her roles became maternal, and often menacing in a foolish way...
...Their talent, however, was special, rare, gifted, and remarkable...
...Perhaps this bedrock pushed her into films, as yet a fairly despised branch of the performing arts...
...And the transience of those in earlier years who were on the high...
...It led her to an achievement in the classic A Bill of Divorcement (1932), in sound, perhaps the last time she appeared in films as an intelligent woman...
...for there is no larger audience than that for films...
...for above all, she was reliable...
...Her blithe spirit does not even carry over into her brief appearance as Glinda, Good Witch of the West, in The Wizard of Oz...
...At one time, Billie Burke was a great star of the stage and a pearl of the theatrical world...
...Also, films abide (undeservedly, in most cases) where memory fails...
...Even as a mite, she toured Europe with her parents, played in pantomime in England, and had her first legitimate role in The School Girl at the Prince of Wales Theater, London, at the age of 18...
...It was no great step upward to the stock Billie Burke character, a vaporous mother, usually a society woman, kindly, well-intentioned, but a little dotty...
...It is a matter of money and publicity...
...While the theater could easily use such skill as hers, films had more rigid requirements...
...The real Billie Burke is dead...
...0 The Alternative: An American Spectator _lune/ July 1976 13...
...Yet her growing success in films signaled the decline of her theatrical career...
...Her successes built upon each other, and she entered the merry world of musical comedy by singing in The Blue Moon and The Belle of Mayfair in London...
...Such types were beloved of Hollywood producers, for they provided a familiar 12 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 persona that audiences, mass audiences, could identify with, like the feebleminded Negro, or the crazy Russian...
...But her career remained international, just as in her beginning...
...She was frothy enough to play trivial romantic roles, and assured enough to take also tragic roles...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
