#somerset maugham
Larry Darrell: The only thing that makes me unhappy is making you unhappy. I don’t think I’ll ever find peace until I make up my mind about things. It’s so difficult to put into words. The minute you try, you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself, who am I to bother my head about this, that or the other. Wouldn’t it be better just to follow the beaten path and let what’s coming to you, come? And then I think, of a guy I knew, a minute before he was full of life and fun, and then… he was dead. I’ve seen many men die; but, this one was different. It was the last day of the war, almost the last moment. He could have saved himself, but, he didn’t. He saved me, and, died. So, he’s gone and I’m here, alive. Why? It’s all so meaningless! You can’t help but ask what life is all about. Whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s just a stupid blunder!
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“From the minute I got news of Jeanne Eagels running about the shops in New York to get a pair of shoes for Miss Sadie Thompson I knew that the stage had something coming to it. She dressed the part from the ground up. No need of telling again the old story of her finding one shoe, the mate having been lost, and then having another made to match, except to give emphasis to the point I am making: Jeanne Eagels used her brains from the minute she read the manuscript of Rain. And then she went to work.
“Just try to dress a part. It is easy enough to speculate about it and to even visualize it, but when you come to putting shoes, dress, stockings, hat, beads together, that’s another matter. The objective Sadie Thompson must be the subjective Sadie Thompson. There’s no separating them. Only an artist could do that. The work must be done from within out. And that’s the way Jeanne Eagels did it.” – Recollections of an anonymous stagehand on Jeanne Eagels’ legendary performance as Sadie Thompson in the original Broadway production of Rain, 1922
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