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Fortunately for herself, if not for Clarence as a whole, the first player of Tess was not kept from full enjoyment of the game by a mere character sheet....

"The first Tess was a young lady named Ruby Ebarb. She was actually pretty well known socially, and knew Myrtis Toole, who was cast as the unfortunate Carrie Nation."

It was a collision from several directions resulting in conflagration. It helps first to understand how casting worked. There were certain people whom Henrietta liked, and of course she was principally involved in casting, with Horatio, because the registration cards came to her home address and nobody else saw them unless she chose to pull one out and read them. And of course she had it in her mind to give the "good" roles to her friends and secondary roles to everyone else. Her stated belief here was that her friends represented the "highest caliber of amateur dramaticians."

The problem with this, however, was her interpretation of "good roles" which started of course with the presumption that anything written by herself was good, followed in rough order by King (who said his writing was good), Bucher (whose writing King said was good), Marsden, and Walker whom she despised.

To some extent this resulted in a "briar patch" phenomenon, a la brer rabbit. The women who Henrietta disliked - which included anyone who she thought was loose - particularly the divorced Grace Dodd (she had not yet begun her own extensive collection of husbands), and the sensual Lena Collins, both artists, and artists' models - that is to say anyone she felt threatened by - were pawned off on other GMs. Except for the role of Carrie Nation, which she kept as her especial torment, to be visited in the first case on the unfortunately Myrtis Toole, who was neither "loose" nor a rival, but had in fact insulted Henrietta at her own "Salon."

Thus some of the persons Henrietta liked least got very good roles, while her favorites languished in a series of roles with no real goal other than marriage. The arrangement was bound to cause her problems, and in her later games she seldom was able to fix it, leading to an eventual circle of female friends made up of marriage-fascinated women.

Even the loyal Fred Wooley writes "Henrietta wrote some of the best drawing room comedies, and attracted a certain caliber of male player. She lost a lot of the male audience, those who wanted action and lots of shooting. But she draw another segment, and never understood why. They cared little one way or the other for her games, but where Henrietta struck there would be women - plenty of them - with romantic hooks and little to do. To the way of thinking of a certain type of lothario, this was a goldmine, and to this Henrietta ever turned a blind eye. Her games were a circus of flirting, and it is arguable that the women playing her game felt safe under the mother hen's watchful eye. Even talk would not go very far with Henrietta on watch.
- Metagame Vol. LI No. 8, August 1956, "The Collected Works of Henrietta Wallace 1903-1950, (promotional review)"

However the first Tess was to throw Henrietta - and the other GMs - for a long loop.

It isn't clear why Ruby Ebarb was cast as Tess. She was friends with Myrtis Toole, but apparently hadn't come out either way in Myrtis spat with Henrietta, and one can assume that Henrietta was courting her support.

"What nobody knew at that point is that Ruby Ebarb had at best a tenuous grasp on reality. She arrived on Friday night, and after picking up her packet, proceeded to affect an appalling sounding cockney accent and tell numerous players that she was a four hundred year old cockney vampire who was also the lover of a prominent Ragtime Musician. She was dressed in a very 'fast' manner after a saloon girl of the day. She also wrote poetry in the style of Coleridge and Byron and had of course been their intimate.

She played the character as a sort of demure harridan.

Now the problem was that there were enough other odd characters in Clarence that nobody knew for sure whether this was true or not, though it seemed unlikely even at the depths of desperation and bad taste that the GMs had served up a four hundred year old Cockney vampire with a penchant for modern clothes and music, as well as a strong background among the Gothic literati. One guesses Byron might have grown a bit tired of her Cockney accent.

She was in short a game unto herself. Regrettably, the GMs were disorganized and quite busy and she came to nobody's notice Friday night.

The game were evenly divided between the appalled and hurt. Some were merely hurt because she had a much more exciting role than they, and began to go singly and in numbers to the GMs to complain, and some were appalled that they had created such a ridiculous thing, and so would have nothing to do with her. Nevertheless she had her friends - for in LARP no matter how stupid or badly presented a player is, if they appear to oppose the GMs they will never lack for at least a few allies - had a good morning of running roughshod over the rest of the game.

The matter was complicated because either she or a confederate (as in partner, not as in one of that faction) had gone to Walker at some point and gotten him to scrawl out a couple of badly phrased abilities that lent her some legitimacy. It is likely that Walker would have cheerfully signed his own death warrant at that time, as long as he could keep the pen going straight.

Eventually the GMs held a conference, or rather exchanged messages through Miss Cooke, since in fact they were mostly not speaking to one another. I believe that Bucher and King were speaking taciturnly, Henrietta was speaking to nobody but Marsden (she had nothing to say to Bucher, and was having a tantrum at King about some last minute changes she had insisted get made, though she'd nowhere made them) and Marsden was speaking to Walker and Henrietta but not both at the same time as they would not get within ten paces of each other, but not to King and Bucher, who had advised he should be cut from the staff (largely it is reckoned because King could see that Marsden's characters were getting along better than his), and Walker had been so indiscreet as to say so.

The upshot was that King and Henrietta both wished to publicly confront and defrock her for "cheating" while Walker could care less. Marsden ultimately made the point that she was at that point carrying several plots, if badly, and had better be left alone, for if she went away a substantial little portion of the game might collapse. Henrietta charged Marsden to 'control' her, and he passed the task to Walker.

Walker was never good at handling confrontational players - though less hysterical than Henrietta, he was not in fact a confrontationalist, and preferred to retreat and cast slingstones from a distance. Faced with the fait accompli of handling the mess he had created, he borrowed some Chloral Hydrate from Dr. Moore, and put it into her drink. Then as they say 'she played no more that night,' and was decidedly quieter in the morning.