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In a Desolate Town, Her Dreams a Bit Faded, an Aging Dancer Hangs On

By Charlie LeDuff, the New York Times

January 14, 2004

DEATH VALLEY JUNCTION, Calif -  Madam Marta Becket can be found on certain afternoons drifting about the adobe colonnades wearing a black boa, gold hoop earrings, soft shoes and blue eye shadow.

With her long, slender legs and a small, birdlike voice, Madam Becket is the resident diva of this desert ghost town, the star of the Amargosa Opera House, its paint cracked and peeling, its stage lights built from coffee cans. She is also its owner, manager, choreographer, seamstress, prop master and ticket taker.

She gives 50 performances a season, from October through May, in this theater she created more than three decades ago from the abandoned social hall of the Pacific Borax Company. But how long she can go on is anyone's guess. She is 79, needs a knee replacement, smells faintly of liniment oil and, to conserve her strength, sleeps most of the afternoon before performances. The doctor has recommended that she call it a career.

If Madam Becket stops dancing and singing, though, there will be no income to pay the property taxes, and eventually the opera house, the motel and the rest of this old town that she bought and resurrected from the devil will return to the devil, and to dust. "Impossible!" she says of that prospect, sitting in one of the $15 seats of her penny opera house, near the gas stove. "How tedious the whole business has become."

She sits erectly, haughty in movement. She sweeps her hand across the panorama of what she has created in the shadow of the sun. Her manner brings to mind Norma Desmond.

The creep of age is unfair but unstoppable, Madam Becket says. That is the bad part of life, but without death there would be no urgency. There would be no need to create anything of virtue, no necessity to make use of one's time. There would be no Amargosa Opera House.

It was 36 years ago that as a traveling stage performer, she was stranded in Death Valley with a flat tire. While the man who was then her husband repaired the flat, she investigated the town. It was rotting, abandoned and desolate, but Madam Becket, a New Yorker by birth and training, whose credits include Broadway and Radio City , imagined a future for herself inside the crumbling walls of the social hall.

In the beginning, when no one came, she painted murals of a 16th-century Spanish audience on the opera house walls, to at least have someone to dance for. Now they come from Las Vegas and as far away as Germany , or just the casino seven miles up the highway, across the Nevada state line, to see Ms. Becket perform the pieces that she writes and choreographs.

Men have come around with promises to help preserve the place, she says. But in the end they seemed to her to be shyster developers trying to steal her legacy and her 300 acres of prime tourist land at the crossroads of Death Valley National Park .

"I created the second half of my life here," she says. "I don't want to see it disappear."

Historical societies and state universities expressed interest until they found out that the town had no endowment for its upkeep. An architect who attended the performance on Saturday said the roof was long past its worth.

On some evenings, her partner, Tom Willett, 75, the only other resident of Death Valley Junction, cranks up his calliope, and the eerie sound of a carnival drifts across the desert. A child is said to haunt Room 22 of the motel, and coyotes yip at the low-hanging moon. The place gives off the exciting palpitation of death, and one cannot help admiring Madam Becket and Mr. Willett, and the lives they have made in one of the most inhospitable places on earth.

"Oh, there are things I miss about New York ," she says, growing animated with the memories, her dark eyes flashing near the gas stove. "Window shopping on Fifth Avenue , I always loved that. The carousel in Central Park . Confirmation day on Ninth Avenue with the little girls in their white dresses and gloves. It used to be such a wonderful city."

Her career started at the Hula Hut in the Bronx on New Year's Eve, 1943. She had been told they had an orchestra, so she brought sheet music. It was an orchestra of sorts: a piano, trap drums and an inebriated saxophone player. After the show, she stared into the cracked dressing mirror and said to herself, "Where can I go from here?"

Madam Becket says that a show has never been canceled at her opera house because of illness or lack of interest and that the curtain has always gone up at precisely 8:15 p.m.

In the second half of her life, she has become something of a living treasure, the subject of documentary films, magazine articles and local dinner conversation. She has a message for the New York artist.

"While you have time left, find a place where you can live out your dreams," she says. "Even if it is on top of a mountain or in the middle of a desert."

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