Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (7 page)

In that fashion, alongside her single parenting of Venetia, assisted and encouraged by Mrs. Haas, the lovers embarked upon celibacy. All of this Sarah Kelly told me herself, her grave face breaking into one of her planned and perfect smiles.

The contact between King Kelly and his daughter in those first years of the new century also casts light on what followed between him, his daughter, and his granddaughter in the years I knew them.

Talk about volatile! From the outside it looked as though Sarah loved and hated her father equally; she worshipped and despised him, she kissed him on the mouth and she slapped him in the face.

King Kelly adored his new granddaughter, no doubt about that. But, like all his responses, it was a love that considered his feelings, not anybody else’s. For instance, one evening early in 1902 (this information
comes from Mrs. Haas), King Kelly came home at about seven o’clock to the house in Brooklyn.

In his fashion—like a gale with musical accompaniment—he sang at the top of his voice as he swept into the hall. He called out to Sarah and Mrs. Haas that he was going out to dinner with some friends, who would come home with him later for a card game.

“And where’s my little angel?” he shouted. “Where is she?”

“She’s asleep,” said Mrs. Haas. “Do not wake her. It took a while to make her sleep—she is tired and has new teeth.”

“New teeth?” he roared. “Look who’s talking about teeth—old Shark-face herself. I must see these new Kelly teeth. I, who have to wear other people’s teeth, must see this.”

He rampaged across the landing and into the nursery and switched on the bright gaslight. The child awoke, he picked her out of her cot and swung her high, and she began to shriek.

Drab Mrs. Haas, who was then in her mid-twenties, only a few years older than Sarah, ran up the stairs and Sarah came tearing after her. Little Venetia was now yelling in fear, and the big man was trying to soothe her by holding her cheek to his.

“But he hadn’t shaved that morning and his beard hurt her,” said Mrs. Haas—who took Venetia from him and began to calm her. (Venetia, by the way, claimed to remember every moment of this story, even though she was only twenty-four months old at the time.)

As King Kelly, in his brown suit, backed out of the nursery, protesting that he only wanted to see his little granddaughter, his angel, his jewel, Sarah reached the top of the stairs. She had been out walking that day and hadn’t taken off her strong town shoes. When her father turned to greet her, she began to kick him. She landed her shoes on his shins, on his knees, every lower extremity within reach.

He grabbed her and held her at a distance, too far for her boots to connect with him. Then he spun her around, bent her over like a jackknife, and larruped her three, four, five times on the behind. The whacks echoed through the house. He pushed her away from him, made it to his bedroom, and locked himself in, while Sarah—who had almost fallen over when he dropped her—stormed up and down outside, screaming at him and kicking his door. Eventually Mrs. Haas prevailed upon her to calm down so that the child might get some peace.

Later that night, however, all through the card game, in which five of his cronies took part, Sarah sat right beside King Kelly, her thumb in her mouth, her head often leaning on his shoulder. During a break she sat on his knee, while he boasted about her to his pals: “My daughter, the great actress.”

“I’ve never been conventional in my relationships,” she often told me.

If I had known all those details, if I’d had any idea of what volatility they had survived between each other, I’d have understood better the bond between father and daughter, the seeming mismatch that so puzzled me later on.

H
ere I feel that I must balance things a little by telling you how different my own mother’s life was in those days—such a contrast with the afternoon hours of Sarah Kelly in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Mother had been born a lean infant, wiry and long. By the time she was twelve she had acquired after-school and holiday work from a farmer who lived near her parents. When asked by the farmer what she’d like to do, Mother said, “The cows.” All through her teenage years, she fetched them in the morning and evening for milking—a tall, thin young drover, appreciated by all who knew her.

“Handsome more than pretty,” she herself said she was—but memorable even at twelve. And passionate about what she did. “Cows will do anything for you,” she told me once, “if they like you. That’s a good lesson, isn’t it?”

When I discovered—I was about eight years old—this feeling she had for cows, I begged her for her stories. She remembered individual cows, creatures who would allow her and her alone to milk them. “There was a Friesian called Lucy who kicked everybody else. And Flicker, because she always caught you in the face with a flick of her tail.”

She remembered settling them in their winter stalls, squeezing her
slim body between their adjacent flanks. She remembered inspecting each cow for any ailment or injury once a week in case the vet had to be called. “When I was a child,” she said, “I never got comfort. I was so bony. In the winter or when the east wind came in at the end of March, I felt the cold in every bone. The only place I ever felt really warm was with the cows.”

She slept with cows about to calve—and she grieved if she lost either mother or calf. “A cow’s grief is a real thing,” she said to me once. “I’m not saying they cry salt tears—but you do weep if the calf comes out dead, and the mother can’t lick it into life, and she lowers her head and looks away.”

Her love of cows endured all her life. She talked to them, she represented their interests. Drovers famously carry sticks, long ash batons to steer and drive cattle. One lunchtime, I saw Mother rush out into the yard, where a drover, who had bought two heifers from us, was hammering on their backs to get them up on his cart. She grabbed the ashplant out of the man’s hand and broke it across her knee.

“’twould serve you right,” she snapped at him, “if they turned around and pucked you.”

That day, though a little scared in case the drover, a rough fellow, might retaliate, I thought Mother was wonderful. Do I still think it? I do—and now much more so, despite everything, and I don’t think it simply because of her love of cows. In time, she came to look a bit like them; as she aged, and once all her troubles were behind her, she too developed wrinkled and placid features.

No wonder I wanted to spoil her, make her life easy and easier. She had so many qualities that I liked—the quick movements, the fiddling with her hair, the laugh that, once it started, went right out of control.

A
ll who know the Kelly family seem in agreement that Venetia’s early years passed more or less sensibly, without agitation or unease. In the spring of 1901, and peacefully for mother and child, King Kelly had begun to travel a great deal in the United States. He was, he said, buying land, “investing in the New World.” Thus, he impinged scarcely at all on the life of his daughter and granddaughter in New York. When he did, and when he overdid it, Mrs. Haas repelled his invasions.

The following year, 1902, brought a different pattern. King Kelly was in his forties, and by all accounts—and from the brown photographs—a sight to behold, with his elaborate waistcoat, distinctive hat, and silver-topped walking cane, not to mention the laugh that could crack a hillside. He’d been strutting about in New York, boasting about his daughter “the great actress,” trying to make himself a gentleman among the posh clubs, and trying to avoid the Irish-Americans who might, he said, drag him down. As if he could find a lower place than his own morals.

At first he couldn’t stay away from the Irish. They were too exciting and raunchy, and they were making money. So he played with them and he politicked with them. But then, mid-1902, he disappeared into the
West. In the now calmer house Sarah was able to devote herself completely, she said, to the care and attention of the infant.

A letter came in due course, in which King Kelly explained his absence, by saying that he had been elected mayor of Manhattan, Montana, “because of my unexpected and dramatic success at distributing land here in a fair and peaceable fashion.” He was, said his daughter, “a savage when it came to acquiring land.” Sarah had a way of resting her right elbow in her left hand as she spoke; for her, all the world truly was a stage.

By the time Sarah told me about Montana I’d come to know King Kelly too well to take anything at face value. In case it should prove useful, give me some clues, I decided at one stage to investigate this missing eighteen months of his life. I wrote a letter, “To the Editor, Local Newspaper, Manhattan, Montana,” asking about the name “Kelly” and the 1902 land rush, and—“by great good fortune,” as King Kelly himself might have said—back came a reply.

I
n King Kelly’s absence, Sarah returned to the theater. Despite her great status as an actress and a beauty, she found herself limited in what was available—because she refused to tour plays, a normal practice in those days. She overcame this by straightforward talent, and landed a number of good parts.

The New York stage at that time had great energy. Big names and bold works made headlines every day. As did Sarah, in
Nathan Hale
, as the mischievous and tender Alice Adams, and what she herself termed a “famous” performance as Roxanne in the new play
Cyrano de Bergerac
.

Her career, insofar as she told me, and insofar as I’ve been able to trace it, seems to have been shrewdly managed. She received the respect of her peers and her public without the “star” label and its problems—because although she worked in prestigious houses, she didn’t let herself get strangled by the big owners. Even though chagrin pierced her when the occasional impresario ignored her and brought on actress after actress, she held out against being owned by managements—and it seems not to have damaged her career.

Nor did she become the plaything of a Diamond Jim Brady or any of
the other Irish flashmen who strutted across the skyline of New York like rakish giants.