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Helena Modjeska and Adren

Residence in California

by Ellen K. Lee

Arden, the century-old Modjeska House in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, is California State Historic Landmark #205. In February, 1991, the house was designated a United States National Historic Landmark. When restoration projects have been completed, the house will be open to the public under the administration of the Orange County Department of Harbors, Beaches, and Parks.

Long before anyone had ever heard of Hollywood or the movies, radio or television, Helena Modjeska (Modrzejewska) was the first great actress to make Southern California her home. It is a far cry from today's Orange County Performing Arts Center to the time, a century ago, when Modjeska first "brought culture" to the newly created County of Orange. In the summer of 1890, tickets at 25 cents and up went on sale at local drug stores for the grand opening of French's Opera House in Santa Ana, a farming town of 3500 people. The performance was a benefit for the Sisters of St. Catherine's School in Anaheim. Modjeska trained members of her amateur local cast and loaned them costumes from her own theatrical collections. Men, women, and children arrived in horse-drawn wagons and buggies from neighboring towns and farms to experience the magic world of the gaslit theatre where Modjeska thrilled them with the spell of her great acting in scenes from Macbeth and Mary Stuart.

Helena Modjeska was a hard-working, idealistic artist who did not fit the usual stereotype of the stage star or prima donna. She showed plenty of temperament when her roles demanded it, but in private life she was a generous and gracious woman who left histrionics to her nervous and excitable husband, Karol Bozenta Chlapowski. Known in American as Count Charles Bozenta, although he held no title in Poland, Karol Chlapowski was Modjeska's devoted husband for more than forty years, until her death in 1909. Drama critic William Winter described him as "one of the kindest, most intellectual, and most drolly eccentric men it has been my fortune to know." He traveled everywhere with Modjeska as her personal manager, on long exhausting nine-month theater tours by private railroad car.

Although she did not learn English until she was thirty-six years old, Helena Modjeska is still regarded by stage historians as America's most distinguished Shakespearean actress of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Despite the handicap of her Polish accent, she played thirty-five English roles, twelve of them Shakespearean, during a career in this country that lasted (with a few interruptions for illness and appearances abroad) from 1877 until 1907, a period of thirty years. Among those with whom she appeared were Edwin Booth, the greatest English-speaking actor of his day; Maurice and Georgie Barrymore, the parents of Lionel, Ethel and John; Otis Skinner and his future wife, Maud Durbin; and James 0'Neill, the father of playwright Eugene 0'Neill. Altogether, in Poland and America, she played 256 roles during her lifetime. The New York Impresario Daniel Frohman wrote in 1935:

Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, and Helena Modjeska were the three greatest actresses of my time. Since their day, no other actresses of their resplendent talent have appeared ... Of the three great foreign stars, Madame Modjeska enjoyed the advantage of acting in our language ... [she] exists in my memory as one of the most charming and considerate women l have ever known. She was a rare and splendid character. Like Bernhardt, Helena Modjeska had amazing versatility. Her charming humor gave her a fine sense of proportion, touching with spirited grace her performances in such roles as Rosalind and Viola ... My management of this fine actress in 1885 stands out as one of the most delightful experiences of my career. Madame Modjeska had remarkable sympathy and tolerance ... she had none of the moody arrogance which is commonly attributed to famous actresses. Never did she show anything but a complete consideration for other members of our company though she had plenty of provocation on our road tour to fly into justified rage.

Once when we were playing in the West, she finished the second act with a superb emotional scene. Tensely the players held their dramatic poses as the curtain began to fall. But its unaccomodating folds dropped only half way, then stuck. Madame Modjeska walked up to the poor chap who was in charge of the curtain. The company gathered nearby, expecting her to discharge him for his stupidity, or at least give him "Hail Columbia." But all she did was to point her finger at him and say 'Naughty, naughty!" as one would to a child. During her youth in Poland, Modjeska had encountered bitter privation and suffering. Before fame came to her, she passed through many disheartening vagaries of fate. l think it was this experience that gave her that lofty understanding and tolerance.

Helena Modjeska was born in Krakow, Poland, on October 12, 1840, a daughter of Michael Opid and the widowed Jozefa Benda. Today the location of her birthplace is marked by a plaque on a building not far from the old medieval city's main square. Helena Opid grew up in a family of six artistically talented children. One half-brother became a musician, another an architect. Helena, her sister, and two of her half-brothers became actors. When she was nineteen, Helena began a relationship with Gustav Sinnmayer, who became her first theatrical manager and the father of her two children, Rudolph (Ralph), and Marylka. When she made her theatrical debut in the Polish town of Bochnia in the summer of 1861, Helena took the stage name of Modrzejewska. Sinnmayer was known as Modrzejewski for a time; he and Helena never married although in later years she referred to him as her first husband. After a four-year apprenticeship in the provinces, during which her daughter died, and an increasingly unhappy relationship with Sinnmayer-Modrzejewski, Helena fled from him and returned to Krakow with her four-year old son. Here, for the next four years, she received superb training as a leading member of the resident company of the Stary Teatr, or Old Theatre, which still stands and is now named in her honor.

In 1866, when the Krakow company played a summer season in Poznan, Helena met the well-educated Karol Bozenta Chlapowski, whom she married two years later, shortly before her twenty-eighth birthday. The newly married couple moved to Warsaw where for the next seven years Helena reigned as the leading actress of the Russian-controlled Imperial Theatre, or Teatr Wielki, which stands today as rebuilt after its virtual destruction by Nazi bombing during World War II. Modjeska and her husband had many devoted and loyal Warsaw friends. Audiences adored her. But she was subjected to malicious attacks in the press, stage jealousies and conflicts, and Russian censorship and surveillance. Encouraged by those who admired her Polish Shakespearean roles, she longed to leave Warsaw and seek laurels in the wide world.

In about the year 1875 the Chlapowskis and their friends began to read pamphlets circulated in Europe by railroad companies anxious to attract settlers to the fertile farmlands of southern California. The German wine-producing village of Anaheim was described as a paradise. Helena read with interest of European actresses who had triumphed in England and America. Some had played at the California Theatre in San Francisco, then one of the finest playhouses in the country. Could she not do the same? Might she next conquer other American cities, and then even London? Chlapowski was eager to help her achieve her ambition. Coming from a family of gentry landowners and agriculturists, he began to dream of life as a large landowner in Southern California where vast unpopulated tracts were said to be cheap, and even free. With a few young artists and intellectuals, including his friend Jules Sypniewski and journalist Henryk Sienkiewicz, future Nobel laureate and author of the Trilogy, he planned to establish a Polish utopian colony.

Sienkiewicz and Sypniewski sailed to New York and crossed the country by rail early in 1876 to see the theatres of San Francisco and to investigate the prospects for a Polish colony at Anaheim. Sienkiewicz remained in California while Sypniewski returned to Poland to tell of the wonders he had seen.

Karol and Helena left Europe in July of that year with 15-year-old Ralph Modjeski, Karol's artist cousin Lucian Paprocki, and the Sypniewski family including a wife, two infant children, and a nursemaid. The "colonists" saw the theatres of New York and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia before sailing down the Atlantic coast to Panama, where they crossed the isthmus by rail. They reached San Francisco by coastal steamer in the autumn of 1878. The Sypniewskis sailed back down the coast to Anaheim, where Sienkiewicz had rented a farm. Remaining in San Francisco for three weeks, the Chlapowskis were received cordially by some of the city's Polish emigres who thought a title might increase Helena's chances of obtaining a theatrical engagement. KarI and Helena became the "Count and Countess Bozenta." They met John McCullough, manager of the California Theatre, who advised Helena to learn English before attempting an appearance. She arranged to return to San Francisco after first helping to settle the colonists in Anaheim. Late in October the new Count and Countess Bozenta reached Anaheim, a farming community of about a thousand people. Their new life began on the 20-acre rented farm with a two-bedroom frame collage, a barn, a vineyard, fruit trees, and a vegetable garden.

Life in the famous "Polish Utopian colony at Anaheim" was humorously and plaintively described by Modjeska in her autobiography, Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska. Polish artists and intellectuals were unprepared for frontier farm life. Sypniewiski's homesick and disconsolate wife remained in bed while Helena cooked meals on the wood-burning stove and washed clothes in a tin washtub. "Everything seemed to be a sad failure," Modjeska wrote. "We had several cows, but there was no one to milk them, and we had to buy milk, butter, and cream from the neighbors." Modjeska's oft-quoted statement about the colony's cows, written almost thirty years later, is at variance with the enthusiastic letters written at the time by her husband. In a letter to his brother Joseph on November 15,1876, about three weeks after his arrival in Anaheim, Chlapowski reported: "In the beginning we bought milk, butter, and bread - today we milk the cows, make butter, and bake our own bread. Soon we will have our own vegetables ..." Before long "Count Bozenta" became an investor in California real estate, buying a 47-acre Anaheim ranch planted with seedling orange trees.

Modjeska tells of meeting the Santiago Canyon pioneers, J.E. Pleasants and his wife Maria Refugio, who invited the colonists to visit their mountain homestead. Of this first horse and buggy visit to the site that would later become her "Forest of Arden," Modjeska recalled:

... one day we made a new excursion to the Santiago Canyon in the Santa Ana Mountains, where our new friends, the Pleasants, lived. On our way we stopped at a charming spot, called the "Picnic Grounds" (now lrvine Park). With its magnificent old live oaks overhung with wild grapevines, its green meadows and clear, limpid brook, the place was so beautiful that it excited our greatest admiration. Towards the evening we reached the upper part of the canyon, in the heart of the mountains, and the sun was quite low when we arrived at the home of the Pleasants. The couple was away on some errand, but the spot they selected for their residence was so enchanting that we were fully rewarded for our long trip.

On an acre or so of level ground stood a tiny shanty, the dwelling house; a few steps farther was an arbor covered with dead branches, vines, and climbing roses. Inside of the arbor a rustic sofa, table and chairs, an outdoor dining room and living room in one. Next, a kitchen consisting of an iron stove under the shelter of widely-spread oak branches, with pantry shelves built in the cavity of the same tree. Some rose-bushes, a few flowers, a small palm, and an olive tree were the only improvements on nature. This primitive miniature household was the center of a crescent formed by the sloping mesa, thickly covered with bushes of wild lilac, wild honey-suckle, etc., and oaks. In front the grounds were closed by a swift creek, and a precipitous mountain, called the "Flores Peak." All around, like a living dark green frame, oaks and oaks, some of stupendous dimensions. In the distance, mossy rocks and mountains. The whole picture looked more like fantastic stage scenery than the real thing.

Soon after the first of the year 1877, Modjeska left for San Francisco to learn several of her former Polish roles in English and to make a serious attempt at a debut on the stage of the California Theatre. And, as Helena noted, "the most alarming feature of this bucolic fancy was the rapid disappearance of cash and the absence of even a shadow of income." Sienkiewicz departed next, going first to Los Angeles and later to the San Francisco Bay area. Chlapowski, Paprocki, and young Ralph Modjeski began a rustic beekeepers' existence on a Santiago Canyon "claim," where they had built a small wooden shanty near the Pleasants house. Sypniewski and his family remained in Anaheim as managers of the orange ranch.

In March the three Santiago Canyon "squatters" joined Helena in San Francisco. Now drought and a financial depression had come to California. Trees and crops withered. Sheep and cattle were dying. Chlapowski wanted to sell his ranch, but land values had plummeted. Helena had begun to learn English, but the California Theatre gave her no encouragement. Hard work and many frustrations lay ahead. Feeling responsible for the homesick Sypniewskis, Chlapowski returned to Southern California where for the next year he and Paprocki would make their home at the Pleasant ranch, with occasional visits to Anaheim. Ralph remained in San Francisco with his mother, in a small apartment on 0'Farrell Street. An eighteen-year old Polish-Jewish girl, Jo Tuholsky, became Modjeska's good friend and English teacher.

Early in June, after several months of going to bed hungry and pawning her possessions, Helena finally persuaded the managers of the California Theatre that she was indeed an actress and not just an amateur stage-struck countess. Her highly acclaimed debut in English, in Adrienne Lecouvreur by Scribe and Legouve' was at last made on the stage of the California Theatre on August 20, 1877. The following week she played Ophelia, with one scene in Polish, to John McCullough's Hamlet. It was he who had shortened her name from Modrzejewska to Modjeska. In Anaheim Chlapowski received a telegram containing a single word, "Victory," and hastened to San Francisco to share his wife's triumphs. He and his friends could now breathe easily, but there was not yet enough money to send the colonists home. He returned to Anaheim when Helena and Ralph left for her theatrical engagements on the East Coast. It was only after her brilliant New York triumphs in the Dumas play of Camille, early in 1878 that Chlapowski at last returned the ranch to its original owners and sent the Sypniewskis back to Poland. The Polish colony at Anaheim had lasted for about a year and a half. Chlapowski's orange grove had never produced any fruit, but he had come to love life in Santiago Canyon, "the most beautiful place on earth." Five years would go by before he and Helena would come back to California.

In 1883, after extensive artistic tours in Great Britain, Poland, and America, Helena, Chlapowski, and Ralph (now an engineering student in Paris) returned for a camping vacation in the canyon, where Chlapowski bought a one-half undivided interest in the Pleasants' 160-acre homestead. Other summer visits were made in 1886 and 1887. In 1888, after the death of Maria Refugio Pleasants, Modjeska and her husband bought the Pleasants' remaining interest in the land, house, outbuildings, and water rights. Purchases of about 175 acres of adjoining land brought the size of their initial holdings to 335 acres. Later purchases would create a ranch of 1340 acres along two miles of Santiago Greek.

For help in enlarging the house Chlapowski called upon the rising young architect Stanford White, one of his and Helena's New York friends. Although architectural historians have confirmed White's participation in the design of Arden, no blueprints or drawings have ever been found. There is no evidence that White ever visited the site. Probably working from photographs of the Pleasants house and its wooded settings, White retained the one-story, twin-gabled original dwelling as an east wing containing a kitchen, dining room, pantry, entrance parlor, a small bedroom, and Chlapowski's ranch office. White designed a similar structure as a west wing, with four bedrooms (one later used as a costume room) and a bathroom. These east and west double-gabled wings were joined by a central gabled section containing a large library-living room and music room. With covered verandas at each end, the long white frame house created a stunning effect with its backdrop of liveoaks and low hills. Grounds were laid out with two large concrete fountains, lawns, rose gardens, and palm trees. Wagons and carriages reached the house by a wooden bridge across Santiago Creek. Chlapowski planted his vegetable gardens in a meadow beside the creek, below the rocky outcropping known as Flores Peak. In July 1888 Modjeska and her husband invited a number of Orange County and Los Angeles friends to a housewarming celebration. At first the ranch was called "El Refugio," as it had been during the Pleasants era. Early the next year, however, Modjeska decided to give it a new name.

l called it Arden," she wrote, "because, like the "Forest of Arden" in As You Like It, everything that Shakespeare speaks of was on the spot, " oak trees, running brooks, palms, snakes, and even lions... Our place was removed ten miles from the railroad and twenty-three from the nearest town, Santa Ana.

The snakes so casually mentioned by Modjeska were dangerous rattle-snakes, an ever-present danger to humans and animals. Mountain lions and coyotes prowled the surrounding steep, chaparral-covered terrain. Visitors must have been astonished to come upon the picturesque house in its wild and remote setting. Combining rustic informality with European sophistication, Arden came to represent an ideal of California pastoral living. Admirers of Modjeska like to think of the great Polish actress walking in her Forest of Arden, reciting her roles aloud. Illustrated magazine and newspaper articles appeared. Tinted postcards showed Modjeska at the Well, or Modjeska at the Fountain.

Arden was a working ranch. A short distance down the canyon below the main house stood the barn and carriage house, chicken yard, and accommodations for ranch hands. Chlapowski had an apiary of more than a hundred hives. Through the years honey would be his best source of income from the ranch. In 1892 and 1893 he planted about thirty acres of mission olives at the lower end of the ranch. Much of this old olive grove is still in existence today. Orange County's 1896 tax records show that in that year Charles B. Chlapowski paid personal property taxes on poultry and beehives, three "wagons," thirteen horses, three colts, ten cows, seventeen calves, and twenty-eight steers.

Many photographs of the outside of Modjeska's house may still be seen in library and museum collections, but the few interior photographs known thus far show only the library and music room. Paneled in redwood, with a fifteen-foot-high vaulted ceiling, the library was dominated by the large stone fireplace designed by Stanford White. Light from the "triple-mullioned Palladian window" in the north wall illuminated large oil paintings given to Modjeska by famous Polish artists, including her friends Jozef Chelmonski and Stanislaw Witkiewicz. Below the pictures, around all four sides of the room, glass-fronted bookcases contained manuscripts, scripts of plays, and two thousand books. Chlapowski delighted in showing visitors the collections of pastels and water-colors, etchings, photographs of friends and Polish scenes, statuettes, porcelains, and silver laurel crowns presented to Modjeska by audiences in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Photographs of this room and the adjoining music alcove show oriental carpets and animal skin rugs, handwoven couch covers and tapestries, heavy carved wooden furniture, graceful wicker chairs, and sofa pillows embroidered by Modjeska. At night the room was dimly lighted by kerosene lamps and candelabra. Modjeska and her husband entertained many house guests. Bridge, whist, and poker games were played on the antique oak table, its massive top supported by four carved lions on a pedestal base. The house was often filled with music. Modjeska owned a grand piano, an organ, and a guitar. Musical friends and relatives came with their instruments.

Theodore Payne, a young English horticulturist who served as gardener at Arden from 1893 until 1896, remembered the day of his arrival in the canyon early in the summer of 1893:

Madame Modjeska and her husband, Mr. Bozenta, came out to meet me. They were very nice, democratic kind of folks... Madame Modjeska used to come out and walk around the garden every day. She was passionately fond of roses ... In the afternoon Madame and her friends would generally occupy chairs or hammocks on the lawn under the oak trees and read and chat or do fancy work. Later in the afternoon they would go horse-back riding. Madame rode a bay horse she called Orlando.

This was a fascinating place and such lovable people to be associated with. Besides the natural beauty of the scene the whole air seemed charged with gaiety and romance. It was indeed a new experience for me and sometimes l wondered if it were not just a beautiful dream.

Actress Maud Skinner wrote of life at Arden in 1894:

It was amid the beauty and peace of "Arden" that l came to know more than ever the greatness of the woman and the greatness of the artist. In the theatre there had been the rich glamour of the star exalted above her co-players, to whom homage was due and homage was paid by the company and by the public. In Arden there was no pomp or pageantry, but the pleasures and annoyances of daily life. Often we were a dozen at a table, and when the temperamental cook, Jesus, [Jesus Soto] who possessed none of the patient virtues his name implied, departed, Madame was equal to the emergency and prepared delectable Polish dishes with the ease and manner of one born to the role of chef. She directed the gardeners, she directed her household, she sketched, she read aloud to her small grandson and spent much time writing and illustrating a fairy tale for him. In the evening we had music and cards and often dancing, when Madame and Mr. Bozenta entertained their guests with exhibitions of Polish and Russian dances. Tea was always brought in at ten o'clock. Tourists and picnic parties sometimes invaded the grounds and were usually invited into the living room. Her hospitality was frequently imposed upon, or would have been had Madame not always accepted the intruders politely and given them the welcome she considered due strangers within her gates. Mexican neighbors and nearby ranch owners were her friends.

Modjeska and her husband spent a number of happy summers at Arden. 1899 brought a family reunion. Visitors included Ralph Modjeski (by now a well-known American bridge builder) with his wife Felicie and their children Felix, Marylka, and Charles; Felicie's mother, Veronica Benda; Modjeska's nephew, cellist Louis Opid who had come to California in 1895 with his wife Stefania and three children, John, Helena, and Lola; and Modjeska's brother, the musician Simon Benda, who had come a year earlier from Poland with his wife Xawera and three grown children, Emilia, Jadwiga, and Wladislaw (who as W.T. Benda was to become an eminent artist and illustrator). A visitor from San Diego remembered Grandmother Helen Modjeska that summer as she sang and rocked her grandchildren to sleep in their hammocks in the grape arbor.

The late 1890s had brought a series of drought years, with acute water shortages for Arden. Chlapowski's olive trees were no more productive than the ill-fated orange trees of the Polish colony twenty years earlier. Ever optimistic and hopeful that some day the trees in the rocky stream bed would become productive and pay for all the ranch had cost, he now decided to build a dam for the conservation of creek runoff. His Harding Canyon Dam, built of stone and concrete, was completed in 1901. Although it was an expensive project in which Chlapowski took great pride and delight, it did little to alleviate Arden's chronic water problems.

Modjeska was sixty-four years old and without a theatrical contract when lgnace Jan Paderewski visited the ranch at Christmas in the year 1904 and urged his old friends to sell their beloved Arden, which he saw as an unprofitable "white elephant." They knew he was right, but found it hard to accept his advice. Sadly they sold Arden in the summer of 1906. After Modjeska's final theatrical tour (arranged with Paderewski's help) ended in the spring of 1907, they lived in a rented house in Tustin for a year. In July 1908, they moved to a cottage they had bought on Bay Island at Newport Beach, where Helena Modjeska died on April 8, 1909. She and her husband, who died in Poland five years later, lie buried in Krakow's Rakowicki Cemetery.

The portion of Santiago Canyon owned by Modjeska and her husband became known as Modjeska Canyon. Soon after her death, the northwest peak of Saddleback Mountain was named Mount Modjeska in her honor. Arden was a country club from 1907 until 1917. Subdivision began, as lots and acreage were sold for what now seems a pittance. Cottages and vacation cabins sprang up in the once-primeval Forest of Arden. For a few years after World War l, during the early automobile era, the main house was an inn and restaurant. In the early 1920s the house and 14.4 acres of adjoining meadow and woodland were purchased by the Charles J. Walker family of Long Beach, who owned the property as a vacation retreat for sixty-three years, until its sale in 1986 to the County of Orange.

As years went by, Modjeska was not forgotten in Southern California. When Bowers Museum opened in Santa Ana in 1932, old timers made generous contributions of cherished Modjeska memorabilia. Among the museum's treasures is a Chelmonski painting of two young Polish peasants. It is said that after the painting had won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition in the 1880s, the artist took it from the wall and presented it to Modjeska. Generations of school children have learned the story of the Polish colony at Anaheim and Modjeska's Forest of Arden. In Poland Helena Modjeska is still regarded as her country's greatest actress of all time. In Southern California she remains an honored pioneer woman. Historian Terry Stephenson, a personal friend, wrote in 1948:

Of all those who loved the Santiago with whole-souled devotion, perhaps none has been more enthusiastic in that devotion than was Madame Helena Modjeska. To many thousands of people, the Santiago is known largely because it was the home of Modjeska, the greatest of tragediennes. To students of the stage, the home of Modjeska in the Santiago is a shrine ...

From: Polish Americans in California, vol. II. National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs & Polish American Historical Association. California 1995.

The sources of additional information

Daniel Frohman, Daniel Frohman Presents, (New York, 1935) pp. 101-7.

Helena Modjeska, Memories and Impressions, (New York: The MacMillian Company, 1910 pp. 15-19.

Ibid., pp. 293-4.

Theodore Payne, Life on the Modjeska Ranch in the Gay Nineties' (Los Angeles, 1962) pp. 34 and 39-40.

Maud Skinner, Modjeska, Theatre arts magazine, Vol. 11, pp. 432-3.

Terry E. Stephenson, Shadows of old Saddleback, (Santa Ana, 1948) p. 38.

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