She played to the gods, she didn't deny it. At the curtain she would step forward graciously, gesture upward to where the intelligent poor clung like bats to the highest balcony and she would bow and kiss her fingers to them. Not that they were appreciative. They booed and hissed and even threw things from time to time. It was her little joke.
``Its because I'm not very good,'' she said, ``and the plays are not very good. One needs to be reminded.''
``Then why are they there, those ruffians?'' her dresser asked.
``They love me,'' she said, though she knew she lied.
She was rubbing Ponds cream into her face, attempting to remove the last of the orange pancake from skin now netted with lines more close and intricate than any road map. She loved her face. With her low voice and perfect diction it was her treasure, her ticket to engagements round the world.
She tried film in the thirties, made a pair of drawing room comedies filled with clever dialog and stylish furniture, but Noel had been cruel and in truth they were formulaic.
Now in the late forties she had to face the fact that she could no longer remember all her lines. She had to face the fact that angry young men, coarse and callow, were reinventing the West End, and she had no part in it. The glory days of the war were gone when she spoke her arch lines while bombers droned and V1s cut out overhead. When she kissed dying boys with rotten teeth in tent hospitals in the desert.
By 1950 she had disappeared, sunk without a ripple. She was living in a suburb of Wellington, drinking tea in the morning and gin in the afternoon and walking her dog Geoffrey just before dark. When she died her obituary mentioned she had been a London actress, but no-one in New Zealand cared.
Forty years later her two films were restored and re-released by a Mexico City film buff with money to burn. He was in love with her. He found hundreds of photographs. Interviewed people who said they had known her. A documentary of her life was made. People everywhere watched wistfully the world she recreated where good manners and elegance and wit evaded gracefully the daily horrors of the time. She was so beautiful with her smoothly waved hair, her eyebrows plucked to thin high arches, her full mouth dark and glistening.
It took a lot of editing to make the documentary. Arguments, resignations, dismissals and even lawsuits. A major point of contention was something she said in a last Movietone interview.
``I am nothing,'' she had said, ``not even a feather on the wind.''
Those words were not included.