Read Online Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show by Frank Delaney - Free Book Online Page B

boy, the dark-eyed boy with the long eyelashes. Esmeralda holds a hand to her little breast in fear. She looks this way and that, hoping for help.
    “Is there nobody near? Is there nobody to help me?”
    Now Esmeralda’s eyelashes flutter—but there’s no help at hand.
    Finally, she takes a deep breath and the screen says, “I must do it alone.”
    Esmeralda steps out into the roadway and holds up a hand. Now the screen says, “Mr. Horse—stop. At once!”
    The horse comes tearing on. Esmeralda holds up a hand again. The screen says, “Stop, I say, Mr. Horse. This instant!”
    And the horse sees Esmeralda. He shakes his huge head like a mad beast. But he skids to a halt, and Esmeralda walks over to him. She pats his nose. The screen tells us what she says: “Nice Mr. Horse. Good Mr. Horse. Now have some grass.”
    The grateful father and the adoring boy climb down. They walk over to Esmeralda.
    “You saved our lives!” shouts the black screen in its white curly words. “How can we ever thank you enough?”
    Through my tears I reflected that I could have told Esmeralda a thing or two about bolting horses.
    Here’s the background. In August 1910, a gentleman named Sidney Olcott crossed the Atlantic by steamer and arrived in Cork. His employers had spun a globe of the world in front of him and asked where he’d next like to work. He chose Ireland, the land of his mother’s birth.
    Sidney Olcott was a film director, one of the first, and one of the most famous of his day. Since infancy, and having listened to his Irish mother’s tales and reminiscences, he had revered Ireland, and the notion thereof. It’s a not uncommon malady.
    The Kalem Company—“K” for George Kleine, “L” for Samuel Long, and “M” for Frank Marion—was founded in 1907, and generated myriad films in the United States. When he landed, Mr. Olcott took long reconnaissance tours all over his mother’s motherland and settled—unsurprisingly—in beautiful Killarney.
    His first film there,
A Lad from Old Ireland
, packed theaters back inthe United States, a box-office sensation, because every Irish immigrant, and all people of Irish descent, wanted and needed wonderful images of home.
    In 1911, riding the magic carpet of his success, Mr. Olcott came back and set up a permanent company in the village of Beaufort near Killarney. He invited leading male and female actors from all over the world to work with him there, in films such as
Conway, the Kerry Dancer; The Colleen Bawn; Rory O’More;
and dozens more. All told, the Kalem Company made more than a hundred films in Ireland back then, many in and around Killarney.
    Sarah Kelly had known Mr. Olcott slightly since New York days; he knew her work thoroughly; he sent out a call for her, and she answered.
    They sailed excellently, despite some choppy seas. Venetia remembered it well, and described it to me one afternoon twenty-one years later. She said that she couldn’t be torn away from the rail, where she wanted to stare at the ocean all day. They didn’t get seasick, and the ship also delighted Mrs. Haas. Always a bonus—the lifting of that frown.
    For Sarah, the voyage became a social whirl. Her fame had begun to cross the Atlantic with her; man after man pursued her.
    “My dear Ben, I dined at a different table every night,” she said to me.
    Of Mr. Anderson not a word was mentioned. Sarah hadn’t told him of her decision. On the day of sailing she simply failed to turn up at the Waldorf. He went there every afternoon for two weeks and waited for her. Eventually, when no reply came to his letters, he found a way to inquire discreetly, and that was the first Mr. Anderson knew of Sarah Kelly’s departure. She had turned her back on him—and his money. But she knew, she told me, that he’d follow her one day.
    Beaufort lies some miles from the town of Killarney. Once settled in the Great Southern Hotel, Sarah hired a sidecar with a driver, called a “jarvey.” They told her in