Folly Beach
Authors: Dorothea Benton Frank
Folly Beach
Dorothea Benton Frank
In memory of Dorothy Kuhns Heyward
DUSK
From
Carolina Chansons
They tell me she is beautiful, my City,
That she is colorful and quaint, alone
Among the cities. But I, I who have known
Her tenderness, her courage, and her pity,
Have felt her forces mould me, mind and bone,
Life after life, up from her first beginning.
How can I think of her in wood and stone!
To others she has given of her beauty,
Her gardens, and her dim, old, faded ways,
Her laughter, and her happy, drifting hours,
Glad, spendthrift April, squandering her flowers,
The sharp, still wonder of her Autumn days;
Her chimes that shimmer from St. Michael’s steeple
Across the deep maturity of June,
Like sunlight slanting over open water
Under a high, blue, listless afternoon.
But when the dusk is deep upon the harbor,
She finds
me
where her rivers meet and speak,
And while the constellations ride the silence
High overhead, her cheek is on
my
cheek.
I know her in the thrill behind the dark
When sleep brims all her silent thoroughfares.
She is the glamor in the quiet park
That kindles simple things like grass and trees.
Wistful and wanton as her sea-born airs,
Bringer of dim, rich, age-old memories.
Out on the gloom-deep water, when the nights
Are choked with fog, and perilous, and blind,
She is the faith that tends the calling lights.
Hers is the stifled voice of harbor bells
Muffled and broken by the mist and wind.
Hers are the eyes through which I look on life
And find it brave and splendid. And the stir
Of hidden music shaping all my songs,
And these my songs, my all, belong to her.
D
U
B
OSE
H
EYWARD
Contents
One
• Act I / Scene 1
Two
• Cate / At the Cemetery
Three
• Act I / Scene 2
Four
• Cate / Needs a Plan
Five
• Act I / Scene 3
Six
• Cate / Packing
Seven
• Act I / Scene 4
Eight
• Cate / Road Trip
Nine
• Act I / Scene 5
Ten
• Cate / The Porgy House
Eleven
• Act II / Scene 1
Twelve
• Cate / The Piano
Thirteen
• Act II / Scene 2
Fourteen
• Cate / About Dorothy
Fifteen
• Act II / Scene 3
Sixteen
• Cate / Grandma
Seventeen
• Act II / Scene 4
Eighteen
• Cate / The Moon
Nineteen
• Act II / Scene 5
Twenty
• Cate / The Piano
Twenty-one
• Act III / Scene 1
Twenty-two
• Cate / The Hospital
Twenty-three
• Act III / Scene 2
Twenty-four
• Cate / The Sisters
Twenty-five
• Act III / Scene 3
Twenty-six
• Cate / Aunt Daisy
Twenty-seven
• Act III / Scene 4
Twenty-eight
• Cate / In Control
Twenty-nine
• Act III / Scene 5
Thirty
• Cate / The Playwright
Epilogue
• September 2010
Folly Beach
A One-Woman Show with Images
By Cathryn Mahon Cooper
Setting:
St. Philip’s Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina. Dorothy Kuhns Heyward rises from her grave and dusts herself off. She kisses her fingertips and touches the tombstone of DuBose Heyward, which is next to hers. She walks to center stage near the footlights and speaks.
Director’s Note:
Images to run on back wall scrim: photo of Folly Beach, the beach itself including the Morris Island Lighthouse, photo of Murray Boulevard with an enormous full moon, map of Ohio and Dorothy in evening dress, and DuBose in smoking jacket. Dorothy has a serious side but she’s also very funny.
Act I
Scene 1
Dorothy:
I married an actual renaissance man. Yes, I really did! The story I have to tell you is about the deep and abiding love we shared.
Not
the carnal details,
please,
but some of its
other
aspects such as the sacrifices we were willing to make and the lengths to which we would go for each other. DuBose Heyward was the real and only true love of my life.
It was the summer of 1921 and when we met for the first time, we were both guests at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Mrs. MacDowell was a wonderful woman who had a very large estate but a very small family. But she
loved
the arts! So every summer she invited certain writers and artists of every genre and we packed our gear and took ourselves there to work. The minute I laid eyes on DuBose Heyward I knew he was going to be mine. We sized each other up and, without so much as a nod, we knew our feelings were mutual. When the summer had ended, he returned to Charleston and I returned to New York. We wrote to each other each week and sometimes more often and saw each other when we could. Finally, after our third summer together at MacDowell we were married on September 23, 1923, at the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City.
DuBose returned to Charleston without me because my play
Nancy Ann
was about to open in New York.
That
set the Lowcountry jungle drums thumping like mad!
Where was his wife? And who was she anyway? From Ohio? She writes plays? A lady in the theater?
Well, I had to do the work I was being paid to do! But I knew enough about Charleston to know I’d better watch my step, so early on I adopted the
zippered lip
posture and took my lead from DuBose. It was his reputation we had to protect and he was so much smarter about those things than I was.
Oh! There is so much I want you to know. This was a crazy time in the world. The economy was going down and hemlines were going up. Women were bobbing their hair, throwing away their corsets, and kicking up their heels, doing the Charleston, especially in Charleston! And in the arts? In Charleston? Well, DuBose and his friends decided that big nasty misunderstanding with the Yankees was behind them and they had to look to the future. I mean, please! Charleston was spared a visit from Sherman but sentiments still ran so strong sixty years after the war ended? Honey, the way people whined and carried on, you’d think old Sherman barged into every lady’s house on the Peninsula, broke all her china, stole her daughters, and punched her husband in the nose! Just ridiculous. I mean, people moaned and moaned about how much better things were before . . . wait, do you know the story about Oscar Wilde? No? Well then, listen to this. Oscar Wilde came to Charleston sometime around 1885, the exact year is a little fuzzy to me, but anyway, there’s Oscar standing on the High Battery with a Charleston gentleman admiring the full moon. Oscar says,
My word, would you look at that extraordinary moon!
The Charleston gentleman says,
Ah, you should have seen it before the war!
So now you see, Charleston was reluctant to embrace the future if it meant deemphasizing the past one tiny iota. DuBose and his cohorts wanted to hold on to all the glories of the past but have their work reflect their observances of their present day
and
their hopes for the future.
God, I loved that man. We’re not talking about moonlight and magnolias here. This is about the magic of a spectacular marriage and how it fueled our creative life and shaped our worldview.
There have been so many stories about DuBose and me and all of them are wrong. Not diabolically wrong, but just skewed at an off angle, enough to make our lives seem like something other than what they were. In public we were both extremely quiet, especially DuBose. In private we laughed about everything and argued loudly over every issue of the day. Well, maybe I was the one who provided the volume. The point is, very few people
really
knew us.
Maybe my words will be kind of a memoir of the Charleston Renaissance. I don’t know. But someone has to paint the mood of the time and set the record straight. I guess that will have to be me, the spitfire from Ohio who was never afraid of the truth. Or passion. Not that DuBose was afraid of passion or of the truth. He was never a coward. It’s just that his heart pumped the holy blood of old Charleston. Let me tell you this, old Charlestonians would just as soon be caught in their birthday suit walking down Murray Boulevard as reveal their hearts to outsiders. But in Canton, Ohio, we ladies were perhaps more inclined to gently speak our minds.
DuBose and I may not ever have earned a lot of money at one time, but ah well, such is a writer’s lot in life. After he published
Porgy
with Doubleday in 1925, we had a few more cookies in our cookie jar and were able to acquire a little house in the wilds on Folly. We adored the island and every peculiarity about it. Yes, we did. In fact, the happiest days of my life all happened on Folly Beach. We were young then, our heads spinning with creativity, and we thought we had plenty, because we were rich in so many other ways. Who needed a telephone anyway?
And we had daily rituals that brought order and all the dignity of a Park Avenue parlor to our lives. For example, to celebrate civility, my darling DuBose and I enjoyed our own private happy hour every afternoon around dusk. Right before the sun turned deep red and began its slow descent into the horizon, we dressed for dinner. We both loved Hollywood glamour and sometimes referred to Folly Island as Follywood for the fun of it. And why not have a little glamour in our lives? No, I didn’t put on a long satin frock and call for Jeeves to make highballs. Oh, no. Our life was substantially more modest! I simply reapplied my makeup and cologne, put on a fresh dress, and brushed my hair. DuBose slipped on his velvet smoking jacket and carefully slicked his hair back, so that in the rose-hued early evening he resembled a very dapper Fred Astaire, but younger and with more hair. And he always smelled like something delicious.
Fade to Darkness