Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Jeanne Eagels
Another great of the American stage of the 1920’s was Jeanne Eagels. Here are references from two of my
father’s books: Matinee Tomorrow (1949), and Forty-Five Minutes Past Eight
(1939).
Jeanne Eagels (1890 – 1929), a former Ziegfeld Follies girl from
Kansas City,
appeared in several Broadway productions before her exceptional appearance as
Sadie Thompson in the 1922 hit play “Rain,” based on a W. Somerset Maugham
story. The intensity of her
performance as a fallen woman trying to start a new life on a South Pacific
island wowed audiences in New
York and on tour for nearly four years. Eagels also appeared in films, starting
in 1915, acting with Hollywood legends such as
John Gilbert and Leslie Howard. Her
final movie, “The Letter” (1929), an early talkie, earned her an Academy Award
nomination for Best Actress, but she died before knowing that Mary Pickford had
won the Oscar.
Jeanne Eagels – Matinee
Tomorrow
The first-night performance of Rain was ragged. An after-performance conference became
fairly hysterical, with only Harris holding himself in control. Eugene Walter
was summoned to do some hasty rewriting, and during the next few days everybody,
including the stagehands, had suggestions for changes. Walter wanted to put in a seduction
scene, showing the Reverend Mr. Davidson and Sadie together after he had charged
into her room, but he was finally overruled. Notwithstanding all the uproar and
ruction, there was actually little revision made during the Philadelphia
engagement. Most of Walter’s time
was spent in blasting Colton, whom he called a half-wit, and to whom
he applied short, obscene words steadily for twenty-four hours. But Colton wasn’t around to hear the vituperation
of the author of The Easiest
Way. The weary and discouraged
Colton had stayed alone in his hotel room for
most of the Philadelphia engagement.
Rain came into the Maxine Elliott Theater on a November evening in 1922, and
the opening brought forth an emotional demonstration never exceeded in the
theater of this country and century.
First-nighters stood and screamed when the curtain fell upon Sadie’s
denunciation of Davidson at the close of the second act; they were as wild as
spectators at a football game.
I occupied a seat in the rear of the balcony on that opening night and
experienced one of the most genuinely stirring moments in all my theater-going
years in the final scene of the third act when Sadie’s long-silent phonograph
broke into the haunting strains of “Wabash Blues,” her gesture of complete
disgust with all mankind. She had
learned only too bitterly that the Reverend Mr. Davidson, the foe of all evil,
who had finally convinced her that she must return to San Francisco and repent
her sins, was an idol with feet of clay.
Jeanne Eagels had her great night and she was acclaimed, and so was the
play, the next day by the enthusiastic critics—Hammond, Broun, Mantle,
Woollcott. Miss Eagels achieved a
stardom that had been honestly earned and she went on to play the role of Sadie
for 174 weeks.
During the long run of the play in New
York no one had greater appreciation for the sheer artistry of
Eagels than Kathryn Kennedy, her understudy, who fled to New Mexico in the
mid-twenties in a last-chance effort to save herself from dying of
tuberculosis. She lived. She decided that the Southwest was to be
her home for the rest of her days and started a theater of her own, the
Albuquerque Little Theater. And
during the year of 1948 Miss Kennedy wrote me thus of the original Sadie
Thompson:
‘I sincerely doubt if Jeanne Eagels
really knew, in spite of her pretensions, that she was a great actress. She was. ... Many times backstage I’d be
sitting alongside of Rapley Holmes (Joe Horn, the storekeeper of Pago Pago)
waiting for my entrance cue and suddenly Jeanne would start to build a scene,
and Rap and I would look up from our books at once. Some damn thing—some power,
something—would take hold of your heart, your senses, as you listened to her,
and you’d thrill to the sound of her. ... Jeanne was scared and unsure of
herself before Rain opened. At one of the dress rehearsals she was
told John Barrymore was out front with some friends. She stood it for awhile and then she
became rattled and couldn’t remember her lines, and she walked off the stage and
said she wouldn’t continue until Barrymore left. They got rid of him, and she went on.
... Jeanne’s surprise at her big hit was actually childlike, but that didn’t
last long. She began to yell for
top billing and a hundred other things.
One night about a month after the opening, when she was really the hit of
the town, her mother came backstage and said she couldn’t get a seat. Jeanne told the stage manager to get her
the seat. “I’m the star of this
thing, by God!” she yelled, and then she looked quickly at several of us as if
she expected us to deny it. Eagels
had a fiery temper, and she was a long time fighting loudly for everything that
she got, but beneath it all she was a lovable person. We’d all get mad as hell at her, but we
had great affection for her.
Jeanne Eagels – Forty-Five Minutes Past
Eight
... I’d now known Jeanne Eagels since “Rain” and
had been frequently to her country houses.
We met one afternoon at Le
Mirliton, that charming and delightful little restaurant in Fifty-eighth Street
which George Kuhnert had been running for all these years. I told her about my new place
upstairs. She wanted to see it
immediately. It was exactly what
she wanted, she decided. A midtown
walk-up, just a tiny place where she could stay when she didn’t feel like
driving to Westchester. I introduced her to Mrs. Packard, the
landlady. Two days later Jeanne
Eagels moved into her two-room walk-up above the fruit shop. She wanted to read and sleep and
rest. But to her modest quarters
she brought cook, maid and chauffeur and I believe there were times when even a
butler put in an appearance. Before
the coming of the erstwhile Sadie Thompson, life above the fruit shop had never
been particularly serene but now, once she had moved in, there was forever
bustle on the stairway. Friends
began dropping in. The two-room
hideaway became something of a salon.
There came an afternoon when the crush was so great that she left her
callers to their gaieties and fled to her Westchester house for peace, only to
find that it, too, was over-run with guests. A great actress, Jeanne Eagels, I
thought. And how singular it was
(and what a loss for the theater!) that she and Emily Stevens and Holbrook Blinn
should all die within a short time of each other. Miss Stevens and Blinn died in
1928. The following year saw the
passing of Jeanne Eagels. Her death
came with shocking suddenness. She
had called at the Park
Avenue Hospital in the late afternoon of October
3, 1929, and was waiting a consultation with her personal physician when a
convulsion seized her. Death was
attributed by the city toxicologist to an overdose of chloral hydrate. The body, in a silver and bronze coffin,
was sent for burial to her native Kansas City,
which she left in her teens to make her fame in New York.
Jeanne Eagels had moved from Fifty-eighth Street but I continued seeing
her frequently. I was not at The Sun office when news of her death
was received. But when I reached my
typewriter the next morning there was a typed memo rolled into the machine. It read: “Please call Jeanne Eagels, 3:10 p.m.”
######
Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Eugene O’Neill
The page boy of the Hotel Savoy, all of four feet, bright face and brighter buttons, was at my river-suite door. He extended his tray. “Letter for you, sir. . . . Thank you very much, sir.”
I’d been expecting this letter. It was in ink and in writing that was fascinatingly minute:
Le Plessis
Saint-Antoine du Rocher
(Indre-et-Loire)
March 29th, 1930.
Dear Ward Morehouse:
Sure thing! I’ll be glad to see you. Arrange to come down and stay over night with us. There’s a good train from Paris to Tours around two or two-thirty p.m. that gets in Tours around six. Wire me a couple of days ahead so I’ll be certain to be here and say what day you’re coming and I’ll meet you at Tours station. This place is ten kilometers out in the country. You can get back to Paris comfortably by the next evening if you’re in a hurry and still have a night and morning here. I warn you I’ve got nothing much to offer in the way of news since I don’t want to declare myself much in advance as to the nature of the work I’m now doing. [It was “Mourning Becomes Electra.”] I’m certain you’ll like it here. I can promise you a grand lungful of Touraine country air and a spell of peaceful repose—and you can give me the New York news!
All kindest regards,
Eugene O’Neill.
Eugene O’Neill, now in California, was then forty-one. He and Mrs. O’Neill (Carlotta Monterey) had presumably happy years in the Touraine. They kept house, thirty-five rooms of house, at Chateau Plessis, removed by a hundred miles and more from the whir of Paris. Their nearest neighbor, a French peasant, wasn’t really near. There, in the great gray chateau, isolated and austere, near the river Loire and encircled by a beautiful wood, he found the tranquility which, seemingly, he had sought and had never found in America.
I took the Golden Arrow out of London, my first Channel crossing other than by plane, and was in Tours the next afternoon. That evening, at Chateau Plessis, we sat before an open fire in the large, high-ceilinged living room. Eugene O’Neill talked freely until well past midnight of himself and his writings. His speech was always thorough; it was never hurried.
“If I had any idea,” he said, “that I’d have to repeat myself, that I had to stand still, I’d quit writing plays. I’d call it a day. I write primarily for myself, because it is a pleasure, and it would cease to be that if I started repeating. I could have gone on forever with plays like ‘Anna Christie,’ or with the expressionism of ‘The Hairy Ape,’ but I’m interested in trying to do better things.
“Now, this new play of mine is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried. God knows, it’s the most ambitious. I’ve done the first draft. I’ll do a second, then lay that aside and start on something else. Later I’ll come back to it, and perhaps I may have something. I don’t want to talk of its content. That hurt me with ‘Dynamo.’ I just want to finish it, call a stenographer from Paris, and then mail it to the Guild. I’ve been at work on it for a year. Carlotta seems to think it’s all right.” (“Wonderful,” was the word Mrs. O’Neill used to me.)
The dramatist-son of a grand old actor sipped his Coca-Cola and sat gazing at the burning wood chunks.
“You see,” he said, “I’ve found out something. I’ve found out that I ought to take more time. Looking back, to ‘Dynamo,’ I did eighteen long plays in eleven years. That’s too much. If I could go back I’d destroy some of these plays, say, four of them—‘Gold,’ ‘The First Man,’ ‘The Fountain,’ and ‘Welded.’ I’ve written, I think, forty plays—twenty long and twenty short. In my notebook I have ideas for thirty plays, perhaps thirty-two. That’s work for a lifetime.”
“Would you,” I asked, “destroy ‘Dynamo’?”
“No, but I’d rewrite it. ‘Dynamo’ had in it the makings of a fine play, but I did it too fast. And it was silly of me to mention a trilogy. And I wasn’t surprised that they jumped me about it—that was but natural after ‘Strange Interlude.’ “
He paused. “The play of mine,” he said, “for which I have the greatest affection is ‘The Great God Brown.’ Next, ‘The Hairy Ape’ and then ‘Strange Interlude.’ My favorite short play is ‘Moon of the Caribbees.’ I think the best writing I’ve done for the theater was in ‘Lazarus Laughed.’
“I’ve been remarkably lucky, I think, in the matter of actors. Certainly the performance of Walter Huston in ‘Desire Under the Elms’ was tremendous. Exactly what I had in mind. And there were splendid performances by Paul Robeson in ‘The Emperor Jones’ and by Lynn Fontanne in ‘Strange Interlude.’ “
We rode the next day in his Bugatti racer and got it up to 106 kilometers an hour. We swam in his concrete pool and wandered over his forty acres, with his Gordon setter and Dalmations coming along. Never one for chatter, Eugene O’Neill, but on this beautiful morning in the Touraine he talked rather constantly.
“I love it here,” he said simply. “But I’ve never had any idea of living here permanently. No nonsense about renouncing America. There’s such a thing as being sensibly patriotic. But living away from America has been a good way to get to know America—to see things you couldn’t see before.”
And so I found Eugene O’Neill when he lived in France. They told me good-bye as the chauffeur whirled through the driveway in Mrs. O’Neill’s magnificent French car. He had on a heavy sweater and she was trim in smart Parisian sport clothes. He extended his hand and grinned. “Tell them we’re coming back,” he said. “We’re coming to live in New York or Georgia or California or somewhere.”
I was in the big car. The engine roared. The car shot forward and I was off for the Tours train, which was to take me back to the boulevards and the bewilderments of Paris.
######
Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Moss Hart
Moss Hart (1904 – 1961) grew up in a New York neighborhood of pushcarts and poverty, and liked to live lavishly after his many stage triumphs, which included six plays co-written with George S. Kaufman (“You Can’t Take It With You” won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), several of his own, and musical collaborations with George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. His Broadway hits stretched from “Once in a Lifetime,” a 1930 farce written with Kaufman, to directing Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot” (1960).
Moss Hart, a man of twenty-odd plays, was talking sharply and amiably of matters theatrical. “The day that ‘Once in a Lifetime’ opened I had 95 cents in my pockets and in the world,” he said. “The dress rehearsal ran until 5:30 a.m. Sam Harris, who always called me Kid, walked from the Music Box to the Broadway corner with me. He realized I was broke and he put a $100 bill into my hand. I must have felt pretty sure about ‘Once in a Lifetime.’ Instead of taking the subway and going home to Brooklyn I went into the Astor Hotel and got a suite.”
And at 11:30 a.m. the time for another rehearsal, it was a glossy young playwright who reported at the Music Box. His clothes had been pressed; he had sent a bellman out for a new shirt and tie. He had had the services of a barber, a manicurist and a masseur and half of that $100 bill, probably more than half, was gone. But he felt good.
Such was Moss Hart’s start as a dramatist. The theater had been in his heart and in his head since early boyhood. He had worked as a theatrical office boy. He had read old copies of such exciting journals as the Dramatic Mirror and the Green Book from cover to cover. He had made his way through the vastly entertaining pages of the old Theater Magazine in the bound volumes from 1901 until it expired around 1929. And he never missed an issue of Variety, which has outstayed them all, which began in 1905 and which is still flourishing.
Since his debut with “Once in a Lifetime,” written in collaboration with George S. Kaufman, Hart has gone along contributing steadily and brilliantly to the American stage. He and Kaufman supplied an interesting and frequently fascinating play in “Merrily We Roll Along,” a comedy drama that ran backward. Hart and Irving Berlin put together a revue that was remarkably fresh and alive in the one entitled “As Thousands Cheer.” He and Kaufman achieved superb comedies in “You Can’t Take It With You,” their story of the mad, happy, daffy, lovable, unmethodical but somehow sense-making family called the Sycamores, and in the engaging and explosive “Man Who Came to Dinner,” which was based on the tantrums and impromptu rages of Alexander Woollcott. Hart, in calling upon Kaufman in Bucks County, Pa., told him of a terrifying weekend during which he had had Woollcott as a house guest, with A.W. spending most of his time bullying and harassing and torturing other guests and servants.
“Wouldn’t it have been terrible,” Hart remarked, “if Aleck had broken his leg – and had to stay.” They looked at each other. Lightning had struck. They had their play. Eight months later “The Man Who Came to Dinner” was completed.
Moss Hart’s solo efforts have included “Lady in the Dark,” which turned out to be an exciting vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence; “Winged Victory,” an Air Forces propaganda piece, into which he packed a lot of tumultuous theater; “Christopher Blake,” which contained some of his best writing but which was wrecked by its sheer repetitiousness, and “Light Up the Sky,” an engaging comedy of theater folk.
Have a talk with Moss Hart and you get a lot of chatter that is both entertaining and informative, to wit: “George Kaufman and I had written two plays together before I ever called him George; it was always Mr. Kaufman. He didn’t call me Moss or Mr. Hart. He would just say er...er...er...or something like that. I used to smoke cigars and he wouldn’t come near me. So I started smoking pipes. George threw me into that.
“George and I will probably write together again. I certainly hope so. Everything I know, whatever I know, I learned from the best teacher in the world – Kaufman. He happens to be the most complicated, as well as the most interesting human being I’ve ever known and he also has the greatest sense of honor of anyone I’ve ever met.
“We were having some trouble with ‘Once in a Lifetime’ and Sam Harris came to the rescue. Sam was a real gent, to use a Lindy’s kind of expression. He was very smart in a strange sort of way. We just couldn’t get a last act with ‘Once in a Lifetime’ and Sam hit it when he said that we needed a quiet scene, that we didn’t have one in the play. That led to the writing of the scene on the train.”
Moss Hart then revealed that “Once in a Lifetime” had gone to Jed Harris before Sam Harris ever saw it.
“Yes, Jed read it first,” he said. “Jed sent for me. He kept me waiting six hours. When he finally called for me to come in he was standing shaving at the bathroom mirror, stark naked. Jed is a man with a real, deep, deep talent. Thank God I didn’t do ‘Once in A Lifetime” with him. I’ve never done any play with him. I wouldn’t want to spend six months in a sanitarium. But I respect him. Jed used to be a very colorful figure. He has become kind of macabre.”
Hart put a match to his pipe and went on quietly:
“The theater is so ridiculously unsound. Everybody’s saying that and I don’t think it hurts at all for it to be said again and again. Our basic trouble is mainly that the theater is not now a part of our cultural or national life. Why, I’d like to have a play of mine open in six or seven towns simultaneously and I have the feeling that there could now be a great renaissance, and if this came about the theater could lick Hollywood. Eventually all the guilds and the crafts will have to get together and everybody concerned will have to take the gamble. Everything has gone up and up and up. It cost only $16,000 to open with ‘You Can’t Take It With You,’ but ‘Light Up the Sky’ cost $80,000. ‘Lady in the Dark’ opened on Broadway for $119,000 but today that would be around $300,000.
“One of the great mistakes some of us make is railing against the critics. It’s the fault of the managers that the critics are so powerful, and all because of our vanity. Give us good notices and we take out those big ads quoting everybody. To start, or to stop, with the critics is complete nonsense. Of course, it’s that artillery barrage the day after a play opens that really hurts. It’s that concentrated fire. The theater is a floating crap game; you get just one roll of the dice. You’re told, on the day after you open, whether you can stay open or not. Perhaps it would help some if the notices could be staggered over the space of a week, but you wouldn’t get your line at the box office that way. And I guess that couldn’t be done. People who follow the play reviews want the verdict quick. A new play happens to be news.
“It’s been my discovery that an audience has a kind of idiot genius; an audience will detect falsity in a play, and reject it, without ever knowing why. I despise anybody who thinks that the theater is easy and I hate the idea of backers who come into the theater just to have fun. ... I’m going to be writing plays, I hope, for the rest of my life. There’s one thing you do learn about playwrighting. Each play is a separate problem, a separate job.
######
Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Robert E. Sherwood
Robert E. Sherwood (1896 – 1955) was wounded serving with the Canadian Black Watch in the First World War, and his anti-war topics during the Twenties and Thirties, and then his anti-Nazi dedication in the Forties, were the defining themes of his life. He wrote thirteen plays (including “The Petrified Forest,” “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” and “There Shall Be No Night”), several screenplays, speeches for Franklin Roosevelt and a Bancroft Award-winning biography on Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, an important F.D.R. aide.
Robert E. Sherwood, six feet, six and a half and sixty years old, is a Harvard man who discovered that there was a good living to be found in writing for the theater—much more of a living than in editing magazines, such as the old Life. So, with the production of “The Road to Rome,” he became a dramatist. Save for time out for book writing (“Roosevelt and Hopkins”) for speech-writing for the late F.D.R. and for a whirl at television, he has stuck to his trade pretty steadily since the late Twenties.
Sherwood is a man of high principles and one of many who regard Franklin D. Roosevelt as a great American. He has a passionate admiration for the British and lived part-time in England for some years. He has always been impressed by Britain’s timelessness and steadfastness, by its courage and great spirituality. He will never lose his love for the giant city of London, for the serenity of the surrounding countryside, for the charm of the roadside inns and the geniality and humanity of the pubs.
The plays of Robert E. Sherwood have revealed expert craftsmanship, a mastery of incisive dialogue, a feeling for characterization. His outstanding contributions to the drama have included that touching and nostalgic comedy, “Reunion in Vienna;” that bitter and reflective play on the imbecility of war, “Idiot’s Delight;” the serious and extraordinarily effective protest against war that bore the title of “There Shall Be No Night;” the play of irony and comment on our civilization that was called “The Petrified Forest,” and the eloquent drama of Abraham Lincoln’s before-Washington years, “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.”
And there is also the fact that Sherwood was one of the founders of the Playwrights’ Company, a vital producing organization for New York and the American theater since it was formed in the fall of 1937.
*** ***
Take up the story of the Playwrights’ Company in Sherwood’s own words: “We’d been talking it over for some years. Then there came a night that brought on a particularly tempestuous meeting of the council of the Dramatists Guild. It was all about movie money in the theater. After that meeting Max Anderson and Elmer Rice and I went around to a place called the Whaler Bar for a drink and we knew that the time had come for us to get started. That was our beginning. We knew that Sidney Howard would join with us and we thought of a lot of others. We thought of Sam Berhman. We had to keep in mind the question of reasonableness. Well, we got Sid and we got Sam—and we went ahead.
“We wanted to start with $100,000, which seemed a lot in 1937. The five of us put up $50,000, which was $10,000 to a man. We raised $50,000 on the outside. We started our organization with the idea that it would become so permanent it would outlive not only the usefulness but the actual lives of the original founders. ... We were very fortunate to get off to a good start with ‘Abe Lincoln in Illinois,’ which was a success. We’ve had big winners in such plays as ‘Tea and Sympathy’ and ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ We’ve also been extraordinarily lucky to have such men in our employ as Vic Samrock and Bill Fields. Each of them is a positive rock. The idea has worked so far. We’re hoping that it will keep on working.
*** ***
Bob Sherwood is unhurried in speech—unhurried and articulate and very thoughtful. He is never one to say ‘Now don’t quote this.’ He places dependence in the good judgment of those with whom he’s talking. He lit a cigarette, sank into a corner of a divan, crossed his long legs and went along quietly:
“We thought in the beginning that we might fail because our plays were lousy, but not because we didn’t have any plays. We knew that some of us would always be writing and we’ve kept at it pretty well. I think that Max Anderson, far and away, has held the position of being America’s most distinguished playwright after Eugene O’Neill. What a marvelous model of patience Max is. You could never imagine anybody more reasonable. Such qualities came out during the production of ‘The Bad Seed,’ which also turned out to be a fine success for the Playwrights’ Company. Elmer Rice has done some wonderful things for the theater, and so has Sam Berhman. Everybody knows what a loss the death of Sidney Howard has meant to the stage and to all of us. ... I think Elmer did a magnificent job in his staging of ‘Abe Lincoln in Illinois,’ and if there’s ever been a better performance on any stage than the one Raymond Massey gave in the title part I just haven’t seen it.
“I loved Arthur Hopkins, who put on ‘The Petrified Forest’ for me—a fine, sensitive and honest man, Arthur was. ... I had great success with ‘Reunion in Vienna’ and thanks to those lovely performances of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. How lucky can a playwright be when he gets such people to play for him? They were equally wonderful in ‘There Shall Be No Night’ and ‘Idiot’s Delight.’ Alfred’s going into his dance in the second act of ‘Idiot’s Delight’ provided one of the most delightful interludes I’ve ever come upon.
“Hollywood? Sure, I liked the dough I got for working out there but my job’s the theater. The idea behind this organization was to keep us all out of Hollywood. I’m now in the theater—heart and soul and body and mind. It’s something that’s to be forever with me. And that’s the way I’ve always wanted it.”
######
Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Alfred Lunt
Alfred Lunt (1892 – 1977), of Wisconsin, and Lynn Fontanne (1887 – 1983), of Great Britian, married in 1922 and became the outstanding American theater couple for nearly four decades, known especially for their urbane comedic talents. They appeared together in more than 24 plays, including roles written by George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Nöel Coward, S. N. Behrman and Robert Sherwood. Although they acted in film, television and on the radio, Lunt and Fontanne are remembered for their compelling stage performances. The pair retired in 1960; a Broadway theater is named in their honor.
Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne represent the most successful man-and-wife acting team in the history of the American theater. Lunt has been, certainly for me, the most fascinating actor on our native stage for the past thirty years. His technique in itself is irresistible—great strides about a living room, sudden changes in inflection and intonation, unsettling, hypnotic stares. Miss Fontanne, incredibly lovely to look upon from a down-front seat, retains her style and sparkle. Her laughter is as contagious as it always was; the zest which has always characterized her performances is undiminished.
Lunt and Fontanne have been delighting audiences of Broadway, London’s Shaftesbury Avenue and the American midlands ever since they first appeared together in “The Guardsman.” They had a romp in such plays as “Reunion in Vienna” and “Idiot’s Delight.” They supplied vibrant drama in “There Shall Be No Night” and “Elizabeth the Queen.” They brought all of their vast skill and insouciance, their artful and unmethodical and seemingly impromptu style of playing to such negligible comedies as “O Mistress Mine” and Noel Coward’s “Quadrille,” which had its finest moments when Alfred was making his speech about the sights and sensations of the American continent, a lyrical description of a great land as seen from the swaying caboose of a freight train.
Their success in the theater has been enormous, but they fret and worry over each play as if it were their very first. They have earned vast sums of money from their acting, but they’ll tell you that they have none at all. They look fit and fine, but they’ll tell you that they don’t feel well and Alfred will ask you, in his jerky offhand fashion, if they look too tired, if they should retire.
Then, when you assure him that he and Lynn will be playing until they’re in their eighties, he says: “Time really doesn’t mean anything to us. We just go on and on. We do hope that people don’t get tired of us. We’ve now been acting together, God knows, longer than most people have been alive.”
The Lunts will also be inclined to tell you, if you talk with them for more than five minutes, that they’re a pair of more or less homeless gypsies and notwithstanding the fact that they own a beautiful Swedish manor house in Genesee Depot, Wis. and a charming 16-feet-in-width house in New York’s Gracie Square. They will also insist that they’re weary of travel but at any minute they’re likely to be off for Noel Coward’s retreat in Jamaica, for London or for Spain, or for another cross-America tour. They’ve never regretted turning down “Life With Father,” saying seven years of it would have killed them, and they still talk now and then of trying “Macbeth” and of playing a repertory season in New York. I doubt if they’ll ever get around to either. But I shall be expecting to see them in new plays and in revivals of old ones for the next twenty years. These people, this Wisconsin born actor and this British-born actress, they’re theater. Our stage has been enriched immeasurably by their presence for three decades.
*** ***
I’ve had exciting sessions with Lunt and Fontanne in New York and London, in San Francisco and Chicago, in Lisbon and Atlanta and in Genesee Depot. It’s when they’re occupying their house of five chimneys in the tiny Wisconsin village, on Route 83, about forty-five minutes out of Milwaukee, it’s when they’re down on the farm, as they call it, that they actually talk most about the theater, from which they’re making a temporary escape.
Alfred, engaged in making his renowned Swedish hamburgers in the spacious and fabulously well-equipped kitchen at Genesee, will suddenly blurt out: “What a fine actor George Arliss was. Oh, I’ve met some wonderful, wonderful people in the theater. There was Olga Nethersole. One of my earliest memories in the theater was Miss Nethersole being carried up a flight of stairs in Clyde Fitch’s play, “Sapho,” around 1901.
And then Lynn breaks in (they’re always breaking in on each other but they never miss a word the other says): “Alfred, dear, you couldn’t, you just couldn’t have been going to the theater in 1901.”
“My dear,” says Alfred, his voice assuming the proportions of a pleasant roar, “I was very, very young, but I was going to the theater. ... Oh, I was with Margaret Anglin when I was starting. A very fine woman and a very fine actress.”
Alfred exhibited a long cigar, prized and preserved since Winston Churchill gave it to him during the time they were playing “Love in Idleness” in London for a wartime engagement.
“We love going to London,” spoke up Lynn. “We were there during the buzz bombs and I slept beautiful through all of the racket, but when it ceased I just couldn’t sleep at all.”
“Those English people,” murmured Alfred. “So good, so kind, so courageous. ... We always enjoyed our mid-afternoon tea in London and w liked those early curtains. And right after the performance we’d come home to dinner.”
*** ***
We left the kitchen and went into the gay, flower-toned living room, a room with Biblical murals which were painted by Claggett Wilson.
Now Alfred, changing the pace, snapped: “What is the matter with us, really? Here we have this big place and now we go and buy that sweet little house in Gracie Square, the tiniest thing in New York. And what do we do? We go trouping about the country and don’t live in either place.”
“You know,” said Lynn, keeping the conversation on an irrelevant plane, “we do adore Helen Hayes. Alfred says she looks occasionally like Sarah Bernhardt, and if you listen to Alfred he’ll probably tell you that he was seeing Bernhardt’s plays back in the Nineties and that he was taking her to tea.”
“Not Bernhardt, not dear dear Sarah,” put in Alfred. “She always had ‘Camille.’ ... Come on, we’ll go back to the kitchen and try those Swedish hamburgers. If you’re not hungry we’re putting you on the train and sending you back to Chicago.”
######
Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Noël Coward
Noël Coward (1899 – 1973) started young and never stopped: acting, writing, singing, performing, for audiences large and small. He enjoyed friendships with the high- and low-born, was not ashamed to appear late in life in lucrative Las Vegas revues, and loved his chats with the Queen Mother. He was knighted in 1970.
There was a period in World War II during which Noel Coward, the world’s jack-of-all-entertainment, gave his friends cause for alarm. He became dangerously near pomposity. He said goodbye to the theater, proclaiming with a most unbecoming solemnity that he was through with it for the duration. He began dabbling in international politics and was forever being whisked away on missions that were mysteriously official. He took his martinis in Government Houses and took himself seriously while sipping them. HE became something of a self-appointed High Ambassador to Practically Everything, filling a wartime role not unlike that which had belonged in former years to the Prince of Wales.
Fortunately, however—fortunately indeed for bored, restless and entertainment-hungry Allied troops on ever-alerted but inactive fronts—Noel recovered. With a twitch of his impudent and expressive eyebrows and a Cowardesque grimace or two, he got hold of himself, laughed convulsively at himself, begged the drama’s forgiveness for his neglect, and returned forthwith to the only job he knew, the combined job of performing and writing. He visited bases, hospitals and troop concentrations here, there and everywhere giving his one-man show—songs in his fashion, and at whatever piano they had around; stories in his clipped, laconic and amusingly venomous manner, never avoiding impish malice when it could be used to humorous advantage. He gave autographs by the thousands, and always to the accompaniment of his own crisp chatter, his delayed and quivering smile, his cruel-lipped and darting twists of speech.
He gave his concerts, as he called them, throughout the British Isles and the vast Mediterranean area. He appeared in such Near East cities as Teheran and Baghdad, that dusty and over-glamourized metropolis beside the mighty Tigris. He was the theater’s, and his country’s, royal funmaker in Australia and South Africa. He dropped out of the skies to do his highly specialized act for the maimed and the wounded in scores of hospitals, always finding himself greatly moved by the courage and cheerfulness of the shattered young men of modern war, and never failing to become somewhat apologetic by his own noncombatant status. As a government emissary he had been actually stuffy and was probably the first to become aware of it. As a troops entertainer, paying impromptu calls upon fighting men in remote corners of the world, he was in his own métier, and he contributed vitally to the war effort.
Noel Coward, actor, playwright, composer, lyricist, raconteur and world-traveler, has written farces, comedies, dramas, revues and operettas and he has done the words and music for countless songs. His forty to fifty plays have included such whopping hits as “Private Lives,” “Bitter Sweet,” “Design For Living,” “Blithe Spirit” and “The Vortex.” In “Cavalcade” he gave the theater a stirring panorama of British history and in the wartime film, “In Which We Serve,” which won the New York Film Critics’ Award as the best picture of 1942, he was extraordinarily successful in a medium for which he has never had any great interest. He has never been madly keen, as he might express it, to go in for screen acting or writing or producing for any kind of extended period. He is a dramatist who has been booed at first nights—certainly when “Sirocco” had its London premiere and who has been given thundering ovations. There have been few nights in the history of the New York stage when the tumult within a playhouse has equaled that which came at the final curtain of “The Vortex” on its opening at Henry Miller’s in 1925. Since Noel came challengingly to the front as a man of the theater who could do practically anything there have been several epidemics of his plays in both London and New York and at one period in his career he had contracts to supply the clamorous needs of a dozen managements more or less simultaneously.
All of which is difficult to blend with the picture of Noel Coward as a flippant and insecure young man of twenty-one who was a bewildered visitor seeing New York for the first time. Before making that trip to America he had achieved moderate standing as a young actor. He had appeared in such pieces as “Hannele” (in which there was a breathless child actress who called herself Miss Gertie Lawrence), “Charley’s Aunt,” “Peter Pan,” “The Knight of the Burning Pestle” and in his own play, “I’ll Leave It To You.” His New York stay intensified his desire to succeed as a dramatist and when he returned to London he put in countless hours at his playwrighting. He gave the West End stage “The Young Idea”, “London Calling” and “The Vortex” in which he appeared as Nicky Lancaster, the neurotic son of a neurotic mother. When “The Vortex” opened at the Everyman Theater in November of 1924 Noel was on his way. In another year he had four plays running in London simultaneously.
Noel’s earnings in the theater have been enormous. When he was thirty-two, as London’s busiest actor-playwright-composer-director, his intake was in excess of $6,000 weekly. He has by no means overworked himself in recent years but his year-to-year income has been a steady one and there are frequent windfalls, such as the $40,000-a-week whirl that he had at Las Vegas in 1955. He will tell you, and very crisply too, that he has never been disgustingly rich. He takes great pride in this property at Jamaica and he owns a house in Kent, behind Dover. He sold the New York apartment that he had bought from Alexander Woollcott and his London flat in Gerald Road, S. W. 1, is taken on lease. During the London blitz he wryly observed, “the Germans are trying to take it from me, piece by piece.”
Noel’s closest friends include his partners, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and John C. Wilson, who turned from Wall Street to the theater and has never had any regrets. Noel has stayed at many of the world’s best hotels and at a few of its worst. He will undoubtedly catch up with any that he has missed, for there are still a few odd spots on this planet that he has not visited, just as there are some luxury liners, tramp steamers and poky river boats on which he has not sailed. Before the war he was traveling light when he moved around the world with twenty or thirty assorted pieces of luggage but his wartime training was such that he’s now quite content to be off for Cape Town or Melbourne or Calcutta with only a brief case, pajamas and a toothbrush.
The affection that Noel has for close friends never prevents his being quietly enraged with their views on a subject – say, on a new Coward play – are not completely in accord with his own. He was certainly more than mildly vexed with the Lunts for turning down “Blithe Spirit.” His pique, however, was of short duration and it is certain that if there’s one particular spot in all the world that he prefers to all others it is the Wisconsin village of Genesee Depot, to which he frequently goes as a guest at the Swedish manor house of Alfred and Lynn.
It’s one of the legends of the theater that Noel can toss off a play in three days—or even two. He took all of three to write his comedy hit, “Private Lives,” while confined to bed with an attack of flu in Singapore. “Hay Fever,” that gay and giddy comedy that ran for a year in London (but it was received with something less than rapture in New York) was a three-day writing job in London. “Fumed Oak,” a minor masterpiece of a worm that turned, the most popular of the short plays that belonged to the “Tonight at 8:30” grouping, was written in forty-eight hours during one of his freighter trips.
Noel Coward, who first greeted a not-too-responsive world at Teddington-on-the-Thames on December 16, 1899, and who began acting at the age of eleven in “The Goldfish,” a children’s play, is a six-footer. He generally weighs around 145. He is very erect, and frequently seems almost military in his bearing. There is definitely an Oriental cast to his pale, lean face, with its small elfin eyes and a friend once remarked that “Noel could pass any day for a Chinese general if he would dress for the part.” He invariably frowns as he smiles. He never gives the appearance of being a dandy, but he wears the best of English clothes. He likes yellow chamois gloves, wears a top hat with authority, and if he were given the choice of a single garment for a thirty-day ordeal on a raft in the open sea, I’m sure that he would ask for an old silk dressing robe—with cigarettes in the pocket.
I’ve known Noel for a quarter of a century and have found him to be a man of poise, reserve, dignity, humor, generosity and devastating charm. And cynical wit, always. Since his precocious child-actor days he has always had a positive passion for work. He has generally been much more excited over what he was going to write tomorrow than in what he completed yesterday. He has always been fascinated by Charles the Second and wants to play him on the stage. He has never been overwhelmed by a desire to play Hamlet and for this his many friends are thankful. “But it would never surprise us,” one of them remarked recently, “to find him turning to the serious plays of Galsworthy or coming forth as Peer Gynt or King Lear.”
And then he added: “You see, Noel Coward is a man who likes having a good time. He likes garden parties. He can even take cocktail parties. He likes swimming and yachting and lying on the beach or on a rock in the sun. But he enjoys himself most when he is acting. He has been acting, off stage as well as on, for just about all of his life.”
######
Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes (1900 – 1993) first appeared on stage in 1905; her
final performance was in a 1971 performance of “Long Day’s Journey into
Night.” She preferred the stage to
films, but made many memorable movies, including “Airport” (1970), for which she
won an Academy Award, and several Disney productions. She is one of the few people to win an
Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.
Helen Hayes is small and slight and is by no means beautiful. Many actresses have had greater vocal
range and power, many have had more on-the-surface glamour. But Miss Hayes has magic, a definite
star quality once she is on the stage.
Such quality has come forth in a great variety of roles throughout a
career that has endured since her childhood.
In 1938 I conducted a symposium, “Ten Great Performances”, for The New York Sun, publishing 150
carefully prepared lists from 150 contributors. Miss Hayes topped the field. Eighty-one of the more or less famous
playgoers who listed ten stage performances that had stayed in their memory
wrote in the name of Helen Hayes.
The great majority of her supporters were of the opinion that her acting
in “Victoria Regina” was deserving of all-time honors. Others recalled her superb work in
“Coquette,” in which she played a Southern girl who took her own life at the
final curtain. There was also
mention of James M. Barrie’s “Dear Brutus” and of “Clarence,” the best play
Booth Tarkington ever wrote.
I was captivated by Miss Hayes’ acting in all those plays and was of the
impression that she also distinguished herself in such lesser pieces as “Ladies
and Gentlemen,” “Harriet” and “Happy Birthday.” And certainly she brought her very
special magic to her characterization as Mrs. Antrobus in the 1955 revival of
Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.”
*** ***
Helen Hayes’ life has been one of a series of stage triumphs and it has
also been one that has been touched by tragedy. It struck when her 19-year-old-daughter,
Mary Hayes MacArthur, died after a brief illness.
She was desolated by Mary’s death, pitifully unprepared to withstand a
shock so overwhelming. She needed
help, and quickly. It came in the
form of wires and letters from all parts of the continent. By such means an entire nation rushed to
her aid in a great emergency. Her
first impulse had been to give up the theater, at once and forever. To quit the stage, radio and everything
else. But ... there were all those
loving hands reaching out.
“I just had to pick myself up and go on,” Miss Hayes told me several
weeks after Mary’s death. “I’ve
always been so glad that I went back to work. You learn one thing when something
terrible happens and that is that every human being had a duty to everybody
else. ... No, ‘duty’ is not the right word. It’s just that everybody owes something
to everybody else. It became
important to me to show my great friends how I could get through such a
crisis.
“Everybody said, ‘Just plunge into work.’ My doctor said it, that blessed Mayor
O’Dwyer said it, everybody said it.
Everybody was there trying to help me and I knew that it was up to me to
try to do something back for them.
Well, I tried. ... I’ll never forget the opening night of ‘Happy
Birthday’ in New
York. I
asked Mary to come down to the theater and sit with me. I knew that her easy calm and humor
would help me. I was in my dressing
room making up and got to shaking and I said, ‘I’m frightened of that dance in
the second act.’ If Mary had then
made a trite remark it would have done no good, but she simply said, ‘Suppose
you fall down—what do you do? You
pick yourself up and go on.’ That’s
what I tried to do after Mary died.”
*** ***
Miss Hayes, speaking quietly and with increasing calmness, fell to
talking of many of the plays of her career.
“I’ve always, always been terrified of first nights,” she said. “I’ve often said to myself, ‘This is the
last, positively the last,’ but then you find yourself going into and going
through another one. We just never
learn, do we? I’ll never forget the
opening of ‘Coquette.’ We hadn’t
been too good out of town and we all felt defeated as we came in. But we opened and a riot greeted
us. I got through the first night
of ‘Happy Birthday’ because of Mary’s simple solution. We had a rather terrible time with
‘Happy Birthday’ in Boston.
Opened cold there because of all the tricks and lights and mechanics and
our play was sunk on the opening night.
We knew that it went badly and they told us so in the papers the next
day. But Rodgers and Hammerstein
were so full of sweetness and courage and confidence. They kept telling me that everything
would be all right, and so it was—by the time we got to New York. Anita Loos, in her writing of ‘Happy
Birthday,’ made technical demands of the kind that you’d think only Hollywood could take care
of, but Dick and Oscar never turned a hair. They just went right ahead and did all
the things that Anita’s script called for.
They’re such wonderful men; we had a love feast all the
way.
“Had another rough time in Boston when we went there with Josh Logan’s
play, ‘The Wisteria Trees.’ On the
opening night all hell broke loose; the play just went wild. There was complete apathy from the
audience. People sat out there like
frozen robins, just sat and stared at us.
Then Josh took the play all apart, like a jigsaw puzzle. He had a dictaphone and he walked up and
down and after the third week I wanted to smash it to pieces. Whatever and however ‘The Wisteria
Trees’ turned out to be in New York it was far, far better that what we had in
Boston. ... I think it was a Virginia accent I
used in ‘The Wisteria Trees,’ the same that I tried when I did ‘The Glass
Menagerie’ in London.
Clement Atlee told me I reminded him of Lady Astor.
“Years ago, when I first came to New
York from Washington, I had a trace of a Southern
accent, but you can bet I lost it by the time I got to playing ‘Dear
Brutus.’ I don’t think Mr. Gillette
could have taken that Deep-South kind of talk. The first night of ‘Dear Brutus’ still
looms out above them all. What a
rare and great gentleman William Gillette was. ... Funny, but you just never
know about a play on the road. You
never know whether you have a New York play
until you open in New
York. ... It’s been something dreamy to work with the
great people I’ve known in the theater—Dick and Oscar, Gillette and Tarkington
and Alfred Lunt, Anita Loos and Jo Mielziner and Lucinda Ballard, Gilbert Miller
and, of course, Jed Harris. What
great talent that man really has!”
######
Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Maude Adams
Maude Adams (1873 – 1953), the daughter of an actor, left Salt Lake City, performed
in touring companies, and made it to Broadway at age 16. She appeared in 25 Broadway shows in 28
years, starring in many of them, including the original “Peter Pan” in
1904. She toured extensively and
was one of the most popular and enticing actresses of her generation: her demure personality and quiet beauty
were magnetic to theater-goers wherever she appeared.
Maude Adams went on the stage at the age of nine months; she was still on
it at sixty, playing Portia, having returned to the theater after a long
retirement to make a harrowing, across-America tour in “The Merchant of
Venice.” Miss Adams, born in 1872
in Salt Lake
City and in an adobe house typical of those of the
Mormons, the daughter of Annie Adams and James Kiskadden, had a spiritual
quality that made her appeal universal.
She was quite the most beloved player of her time.
There was something about her that was elusive and ineffable, an
indefinable and incommunicable quality that enchanted playgoers and that, upon
occasion, bewildered the critics.
The rippling laugh, the lilting voice, the quaint tossing of her
head—these were attributes that endeared her to audiences. On the practical side, she was the
American star with the greatest box-office power from the time of “The Little
Minister” in 1897 to “What Every Woman Knows,” which came along in 1911. Her name sold seats. It packed
theaters. The evidence was
incontestable. People went to see
her who never entered a playhouse at any other time. A week’s receipts of $20,000 for an
Adams play on tour was a normal gross, and that
was the day and time of the $2-top ticket.
Miss Adams was known to playgoers, young and old, in cities, towns and
villages throughout our land. She
never appeared on the other side of the Atlantic—she often spoke of wanting a
London engagement—but she was an actress who held her place in the hearts of the
theatergoers of the British Isles because of her long and successful association
with the plays of James M. Barrie.
The imaginative Charles Frohman had to coax the shy Scotsman to write for
the theater, but after the success of “The Little Minister” there was no
difficulty in getting him to write for Miss Adams. It was Sir James who gave her her
greatest success, “Peter Pan.” Its
richness has remained undiminished for half a century. Unnumbered thousands of Londoners,
during their visits to our shores, were fascinated by Miss Adams as Lady Babbie
in “The Little Minister” and by her when she was playing Phoebe of the Ringlets
in “Quality Street” and they were completely under her spell when she appeared
as the irresistible Peter Pan and the managing and indispensable Maggie Wylie in
“What Every Woman Knows.”
*** ***
It was my good fortune to have had numerous meetings with Miss
Adams. Once I got to see her she
wasn’t at all remote—she was human and warm, wise and gay and humorful. My first luncheon with her was at the
Colony Club, which always gave her its careful protection. During an unforgettable two hours in
1932 she laughed pleasantly, her eyes sparkled, her hands fluttered and she
frequently clasped them beneath her chin as she spoke of her long tour in “The
Merchant of Venice,” of Charles Frohman and James M. Barrie, and she went on to
tell me of a dress rehearsal of “The Legend of Leonora.” “Mr. Frohman and Sir James and I sat
together and we got to talking about the last act,” she said. “I told them I didn’t like it. Mr. Frohman protested; he said that it
was excellent. Then, all of a
sudden, a little voice on my right piped up; it was that of Sir James. ‘Miss Adams is right,’ he said. ‘It is a rotten last
act.’”
I called on Miss Adams several times at the Colony Club and stopped over
in Columbia, Mo., on U.S. 40, midway between St.
Louis and Kansas City, for luncheon
with her when she was on the faculty of Stephens College. It was later, in New York, when she
summoned me by telegram for a meeting to discuss revisions in the second act of
a play I’d written and which had been submitted to her. She undoubtedly had some good ideas for
the rewriting of that troublesome second act, but I scarcely heard her words; I
spent the afternoon in something of a trance, listening to the music of her
voice, which evoked memories of teen-age playgoing in Georgia. She had come to my town as the great
star of “What Every Woman Knows” and “A Kiss For Cinderella.”
*** ***
Charles Frohman was fully aware of Maude Adams’ potentialities when he
put her into “The Masked Ball” with John Drew. He was quietly exultant when she again
succeeded with Drew in “Rosemary”, and when she brought her girlishness and
complete loveliness to the role of James M. Barrie’s Lady Babbie in “The Little
Minister” the great producer was certain that she could be sure of a devoted
following for all the years that she cared to give to the stage. Miss Adams was in “Rosemary” at
New York’s
Empire when Sir James, on his first visit to this country, saw her
performance. He was enchanted with
her playing, returned to London, and wrote “The Little Minister” for
her. It was with that play that
Frohman presented her as a star.
Miss Adams had her failures.
Juliet, for instance. She
was far from impressive in the exacting role of the Duc de Reichstadt, the
weakling son of Napoleon, in Rostand’s “L’Aiglon,” and she was no more suited to
Chanticler of the comb, spurs and tail feathers than she would have been to Lady
Macbeth, but these slips were not counted, and certainly not remembered, by her
worshipful public. She was
triumphant as Lady Babbie and in “Quality Street.” She charmed playgoers with her playing
as the Spanish heroine in “The Pretty Sister of Jose,” won them completely when
she came forth as Maggie Wylie and it was as Peter Pan that she gave the
greatest performance of her career.
Barrie
had had misgivings about “Peter Pan.”
When he sent the manuscript to America he told Frohman that he did
not have much hope for it as a commercial property. But Frohman did not share the Scotsman’s
doubts. He was elated with the play
and talked of little else for weeks.
He predicted that Miss Adams would be irresistible in her suit of leaves
and that Peter of the treetops and the Never-Never Land would become her most popular
part. And during the long run at
the Empire, as playgoers from six to sixty were swarming into his beautiful
playhouse, he had reason to be pleased with his foresight, but he was a man too
free of pretensions and of self-importance to go in for
self-congratulation. And he was too
busy. He was planning to send his
great star and the Barrie fantasy to every corner
of America.
*** ***
Maude Adams, a woman of intelligence and good judgment, with a sense of
obligation to her public, made herself a great asset to Stephens College. She became more available than she had
been in many years and less mysterious.
She even accepted engagements to speak at women’s club luncheons. She moved freely about the campus and
about the town of Columbia in the years 1937-43, going into town for a vase or a
shoe or a Greek ornament or a piece of cheese cloth.
Never sparing herself, she rehearsed her plays until far into the night;
she worked on the scenery and the costumes for her productions and she once
delayed a curtain for ten minutes while she painted a door. It was the feeling at Stephens that she
did a great deal for the drama department, particularly in improving the
standards of speech, and it was her contention that this could only be done by
dealing with the classics.
Notwithstanding her emergence to some extent during her stay at
Columbia, Mo., Miss Adams was enigmatic and
self-effacing throughout most of her life.
Whenever she sailed for Europe she
sought to hide her identity and she was, upon occasion, listed as Miss
Kiskadden. Her telegrams were
generally signed with the initials “M” or “M. A.” During the last decade of her life, in
her commuting between the Colony Club and her home in Onteora, N.Y., she always
traveled by bus. “It’s wonderful
not to be known or recognized,” she once told me. “I can go where I please and when I
please and no one ever bothers me.
Also, I enjoy riding on a bus.”
It was in 1917, several years following her retirement from the stage,
that Miss Adams presented her 300-acre estate at Lake Ronkonkoma, Long
Island, to the Roman Catholic Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Cenacle
because of her gratitude for the comfort and peace she had found in its convent
in 140th
Street.
It was the same kind of tranquility that she was afforded soon after the
turn of the century when she went abroad and sought refuge at a convent in
Tours. There she spent a summer in pensive
solitude, living as the nuns lived, sleeping in a narrow white iron bed in a
room with a wash basin and one small window, which looked out upon a sweep of
olive trees.
*** ***
In some of the towns of America, during Miss Adams’ final
tour in 1931-32 with “The Merchant of Venice,” the clamor over the return of the
beloved Peter Pan approximated hysteria, but there was a word of dissent here
and there. Some of the dramatic
critics refused to accept her as Portia, and one of the individuals who was
unwilling to be impressed was one Mark Anthony, division passenger agent for the
Missouri Pacific Railroad.
When the outspoken Mr. Anthony was asked why he wasn’t anywhere in sight
when Miss Adams’s car was in the New Orleans station, en route to Baton Rouge,
he said: “Listen. Twenty years ago Miss Adams bawled me
out and I haven’t forgotten. I’ve
found that Nazimova is the only woman in the world who can bawl out a passenger
agent the way that Maude Adams can.
I guess she’s the loveliest star this country ever had, and I saw her as
Peter Pan when I was a kid and loved every minute of it, but I’m staying away
from her. She won’t forget, she
hasn’t forgotten, that little run-in I had with her. Frankly, I’m scared as hell of her. She’s got a temper.”
######
Looking Back on Broadway After Dark
with Ward Morehouse
Laurette Taylor
Laurette Taylor had finesse.
She had magic. In 40-odd
years of acting she appeared in only three or four plays that were actually
worth her time, but at the time of her death, following her great performance in
“The Glass Menagerie,” she had so impressed those playgoers who had the great
privilege of seeing her upon the stage that the vast majority of them, if called
upon to name the finest actress they had ever seen, would have made the
instantaneous decision in a single word, “Taylor!”
Miss Taylor was a weak, willful, undisciplined and brilliant woman of the
theater who dropped to the depths through over-drinking and who went on to
achieve, via her performance in “Outward Bound” and “The Glass Menagerie,” one
of the greatest comebacks in the history of the American theater. I didn't see
Miss Taylor in her early years when she was in the wild, wild, melodramas of
Charles A. Taylor, her first husband, years of which Guthrie McClintic has
written fascinatingly in his autobiography, “Me and Kit.” I didn’t see her in her first plays for
the Broadway stage, such pieces as “The Great John Ganton” and “Alias Jimmy
Valentine” and “The Bird of Paradise” but I finally caught up with her when she
revived the indestructible “Peg O’ My Heart” in the early 1920s, and I got to
know her during her years of adversity, following the death of Hartley Manners,
her second husband, and after she had scored the greatest hit of her life in
“The Glass Menagerie.”
*** ***
Laurette Taylor took great pride in that performance and she spoke of it
with deep humility.
“I’m sort of kicking the clouds around,” she told me in 1945, when she
had reestablished herself as the sensation of Broadway. “In playing Amanda, and when I get on
the stage, I become Southern. The
rest of the time I suppose I’m just American. As for the South, I’ve never been below
Washington except for trips to Florida. I got most of the Southern accent that I
use from our author, Tennessee Williams.
I really don’t know any tricks any more. Acting is really so simple and my advice
to young actresses is to try not to become a bedroom thinker but wait until you
get to the theater to do your acting.
I have never felt that playing Amanda was particularly difficult. It’s a part in which you’re actually
riding on an audience’s shoulders.
There are actually only two parts in the play—the shrew in the old
wrapper and the young girl in the faded blue dress.
“I’d like to go on playing Amanda for as long as they’ll let me and I’d
enjoy returning to Chicago with the play—it was there that we got off to such a
wonderful start—but I don’t think I’d want to try any real touring. I haven’t enough time left in my life
for that. ... I suppose I’m a Southerner—out of Ireland. I have a peculiar ear for dialect and
that might give me an advantage over other actresses. My parents and all my ancestors were
born in Ireland and I suppose that’s what’s
the matter with me. I’m Irish all
the way through.
*** ***
Miss Taylor took a gulp of her martini, her third during our dinner-time
talk but she had them under control, and went on:
“The person who had the greatest influence on my life was Hartley
Manners, to whom I was married for fifteen years. I’d always imagined our growing old
together and when he died it completely threw me. I lost my religion and went in for the
longest wake in history. If such a
man as Hartley could be taken away from me what did anything matter? ... I began
drinking harder and harder, and it was only my success in ‘Outward Bound’ that
finally pulled me out of it. Then
along came this blessed ‘Glass Menagerie’ and I knew I was all right—and that I
would be forever.
“Hartley Manners was a graceful man, a gentle man, a wonderful man. He wrote ‘Peg O’ My Heart’ for me. I still get royalties from ‘Peg’—from
churches and little theater groups and summer stock and all that sort of
thing. My! How old that girl is! She goes right back to 1912 and T. R.
and William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson and the Red Sox beating the New
York Giants in the world series. I
loved ‘Peg’ and still do, but it’s always made me furious that amateurs haven’t
wanted to do Hartley’s better plays, such as ‘The National Anthem’ and ‘The Harp
of Life.’
“Until this part of Amanda came along I was offered all the old ladies in
the world, but I didn’t want a part—I wanted a play. I found it, thank God, in ‘The Glass
Menagerie.’ And before this I had
that great chance in ‘Outward Bound.’
Bill Brady gave me that chance.
He was one of the wonderful people to come into my life. He loved the stage; the theater was
wrapped around his heart.”
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