Part 17

The high-minded judgment which has enabled Mrs. Fiske to select plays which never have a false appeal, her freedom from that self-importance which distorts the meaning of plays for the sake of giving prominence to the “star,” are indications of her qualities as a woman. She has broad sympathies, enthusiasms for affairs outside the theatre, and cherishes no inflated notion as to her importance other than as a woman of the theatre. In her travels, or visiting other theatres, it is her habit to be heavily veiled and altogether lacking in the “theatrical.”[176] She is much more nervous when addressing, _in sua persona_, a small meeting in the interests of some humane movement than when facing a theatre full of people. On the other hand she has an unusually keen sense of humor, and some of her best bits of acting are said to be in impromptu efforts called forth by some circumstance arising within the “family” of her company.[177] One of her engaging traits is her complete freedom from the spirit of rivalry and criticism that sometimes characterizes actors. By those close to her she is said never to speak ill of any one. Indeed her acquaintance among other “stars” is limited; while in the world outside the theatre her friends are many and often distinguished. It may not be uninteresting that Mrs. Fiske, unlike many of her profession, likes “playing one-night stands”; that she does not weary of the endless travel of theatrical life;[178] that she is continually studying to perfect her impersonations or to prepare for future work; and that she has a playful dread of being referred to as “intellectual.” That word, as applied to Mrs. Fiske, has become hackneyed.

The warmest admirers of Mrs. Fiske will admit her limitations. They will, indeed, be grateful for them; for her physical and mental equipment, while they withheld from her certain ranges of drama, simply forbade the adoption by her of the tissue of unrealities which constitutes conventional acting. Without either losing for a moment the sense of conditions imposed by the theatre, or gaining her effects by means of commonplaceness set baldly on the stage, she has evolved an extraordinary realism made up of truth to nature combined with a sense of theatric art so nicely adjusted that even in its most telling moments it is the art that conceals art. It is, in the last analysis, a method that is the visible expression of a rich nature. And by the unalterable fixity of her high aims, the dignity and strength of what she has tried to do, she has earned the gratitude of all those who look forward to an influential, high-minded American stage.

In the spring of 1914 Mrs. Fiske revived _Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh_, and in it proved herself at the height of her powers as an adroit _comédienne_. At the beginning of the season of 1914–15 she acted, in several Middle Western cities, in a new play by John Luther Long and Frank Stayton. _Lady Betty Martingale_ was an ambitious production that took her into an unfamiliar field, and that promised to rival _Becky Sharp_ as a feast of acting and spectacle. It was a “costume comedy,” with the London of the eighteenth century as its setting. The play was unfortunately lacking in substance and dramatic interest, and was withdrawn after a brief career.

JULIA MARLOWE

None of Julia Marlowe’s forebears was identified with the theatre, and she was turned toward the stage almost by accident. When once her fate was determined, her abilities and ambitions were nurtured with the care and privacy given a prize-winning rose, and she was offered then to the public almost full blown. She was none of the wild flowers of the stage--the Ellen Terrys and Minnie Madderns--that grow into a recognized position so gradually that they seem to have been there always. In her sudden leap into public notice Julia Marlowe was something of a parallel to Mary Anderson. Miss Anderson never played anything but “star” parts; nor did Miss Marlowe when once she had called for recognition as a grown-up actress. In her early ’teens, however, years before her début, she had had more than a glimpse of the stage.

[Illustration: JULIA MARLOWE]

Her real name was Sarah Frances Frost. She was born in the little town of Caldbeck, in Cumberlandshire, England, and was brought to America when she was about five. Her family settled in Kansas, but soon removed to Ohio, living first in Portsmouth, and then, when Fanny (as she was then called) was about nine, in Cincinnati. There her father, who appears to have been some sort of skilled mechanic, died while she was still a child. Her mother was married again to one Hess, the proprietor of a small hotel, frequented by stage people; but this circumstance seems not to have been a determining factor in the young girl’s career. Fanny, with her sister Annie, was sent to the public school.[179] One day,[180] when Fanny was thirteen, she came running home to her mother, much excited. She had, she said, a chance “to be an actress and make some money.” Colonel Robert E. J. Miles, a successful manager of the early eighties, was organizing one of the numberless juvenile companies that played Gilbert and Sullivan’s _Pinafore_ throughout the country. “He wanted Fanny,” said her mother, “because she was pretty, to play one of the small parts. Well, I did not think much of the stage, and was strongly opposed to having Fanny undertake anything of the kind, but she persisted, and finally so annoyed me that I partially gave my consent. That was the beginning of it.”

During the season of 1880–1881, and the two seasons following, the young actress was known as Fanny Brough--her mother’s family name. She was promoted from the chorus of _Pinafore_ to play Sir Joseph Porter, and she was, besides, Suzanne in _The Chimes of Normandy_ and a page in _The Little Duke_. The significance of this first engagement lies chiefly in the fact that the stage management of the company was in the hands of Ada Dow, a sister-in-law of Colonel Miles. This woman had been a competent though inconspicuous actress, and she was a good stage-director. In one of her charges, moreover--Fanny Brough--she had the discernment to see an actress of exceptional promise. It was to Miss Dow that Fanny Brough, renamed Julia Marlowe, was later to owe her early-won position as an actress of genuine attainments.

Her experience in operetta young Fanny Brough followed by playing six weeks as little Heinrich in one of the several _Rip van Winkle_ companies that sprang into being after Joseph Jefferson’s success in the play. The Rip in this instance was Robert McWade. Then came Colonel Miles’ attempt to make a “star” of Josephine Riley, in the season of 1882–1883. In the company were Miss Dow and Fanny Brough, who now, as Balthazar in _Romeo and Juliet_, had her first Shakespearean part. She also had the formidable duty, for one of her years, of playing Maria in _Twelfth Night_.[181]

During these few years the possibilities for greater things lying in the young actress must have become more and more apparent to Colonel Miles and Miss Dow. Soon after the venture with Miss Riley, Fanny Brough disappeared from the stage and was taken to New York by Miss Dow, and there put through a course of training such as few actresses ever undergo.

Off the stage the young aspirant was a rather awkward, self-conscious girl, of a serious turn of mind, imaginative, and like the youthful Mary Anderson, and many another, an enthusiast in her admiration for Shakespeare. Years afterward Julia Marlowe said that she could remember no real childhood. She had gone to no children’s parties, and had had no girl friends. “The experiences which come to growing children as part of their girl life came to me only as part of my stage experience. The first long dress I wore was not as a girl, but on the stage as Myrene in _Pygmalion and Galatea_.” “At this time,” says one account, “she was a saucer-eyed, yellow skinned girl, of a melancholic temperament, high-strung, eager, restless, and unbearable to herself when unoccupied. Her chief joy was to revel in the woes of tragedy queens.”

Obviously this was raw material. That the same girl a few years later stepped before the public in the large Eastern cities and, if not at once financially successful, almost at once was recognized as a well-graced, promising actress, says much not only for her native ability, but also for the quality and thoroughness of the training that took place in the interim.

Miss Dow[182] took an apartment on Thirty-sixth Street and a house in Bayonne, New Jersey. In these places--and especially at Bayonne--the girl’s studies were prosecuted with the greatest faithfulness for something over three years. There is not the least doubt that Miss Marlowe, during this period of tutelage, worked hard to deserve her later success. Five parts[183] were selected from the “classic” repertoire of the day and were studied assiduously. The pupil learned the cardinal principle of leaving no dramatic effort to chance,--of knowing a part so thoroughly well that it can be rendered with a confidence in all the gestures and tones to be employed. So well indeed was this groundwork laid that it probably had its lasting effect on the actress’s art. It has been the commonplace criticism of Miss Marlowe that she lacks the note of spontaneity, that there is evidence of premeditation in all she does. “One would not urge,” said the _Evening Standard_ when she went to London in 1907, “that the outstanding feature of her art is that it is art concealed.”

“I never needed the spur,” Miss Marlowe has said of her days as Miss Dow’s pupil. “The aim of my instructors should have been, perhaps, to keep me from working too hard. Nobody deluded me with the assurance that I was a genius. Indeed the contrary impression was steadfastly enforced, and I secretly decided that I might make myself a genius if I only worked hard enough.”

Besides the minute study of particular rôles, her tasks included music, dancing, gymnastic exercises, the history and literature of the drama, and, under the teaching of a singing master, much practice in voice development. The utmost care was taken in matters of carriage and “stage deportment.”[184]

Miss Dow’s pupil endured the rigors of this training until the spring of 1887. Now, it was thought, the young actress was ready to bid for the public’s notice. It was the fixed idea of both the pupil and her teacher that she would appear only as a “star” and only in “classic” plays. It was but natural that managers were slow to place so much confidence in an untried actress. Months passed, and no manager could be found to take her at her own valuation. What would have been considered by many a good actress attractive offers she repeatedly declined. Finally it was again Colonel Miles who became her patron, as he had been years before. A company was organized, and the erstwhile Fanny Brough, bearing now her new name, made a brief tour (April and May, 1887) in Connecticut, playing Parthenia, Galatea and Pauline. The opening performance was in New London on April 27. She played _Ingomar_, and the next day’s local paper said that she was a genius and would “yet wear a crown of diamonds.” Pleasing as this praise may have been to Miss Marlowe, the truth is that the brief tour was insignificant, and that not the slightest ripple was caused in the great centers by her début in “the provinces.”

The real beginning of Julia Marlowe’s career came the following October[185] when, still under Colonel Miles’ management, she gave a single matinée performance of _Ingomar_ at the Bijou Theatre in New York. “Every one but me,” says Miss Dow, “had lost confidence in her. Mr. Miles asked me in trembling tones if I realized what it would mean if she were a failure. Julia had been in such a state of fright for a few days before the performance that she lost her voice temporarily. When the curtain rose on her début she talked so low for a time that no one could hear her. Then I said from the wings, ‘Julia, if you don’t speak up, I’ll come out on the stage to you.’ She grew angry at this, and from then on everything went smoothly. At the end of the first act there was a silence for a long enough time for her to get to her dressing room. Then the house burst into a storm of applause and she was called before the curtain again and again.”

The town had paid her compliment of curiosity, the critics were more enthusiastic than could have been hoped, and the managers made her various offers, which she consistently refused; all of which constituted a successful début for an actress new to important parts. She was virtually beginning her career at the top, in America’s theatrical capital,--a course involving courage and a high-minded disregard of the many short cuts to easily won material rewards.

Julia Marlowe’s best publicity agent at this time was Robert G. Ingersoll. The “great agnostic” had been “managed,” in his lecture tours, by Colonel Miles’ partner, and was prevailed upon to see Miss Marlowe act. However great and good a man he was, Colonel Ingersoll was not especially skilled as a dramatic critic. Still, such was his influence that his letters of extravagant praise, widely copied in the press, did more than any other one thing to fix her name in the public mind.[186]

In December of 1887 she followed the October matinée by a week at the Star Theatre in New York, playing Juliet and Viola as well as Parthenia, without doing much either to add to or detract from the earliest impression. And then, after this week, came another term of discouraging delay. There came renewed offers of positions in support of other stars, or in plays not to her liking. But she refused them, and said she would play as a star, in the “classics,” or not at all. Evidently the Miles contingent about this time lost some of its enthusiasm, for it seems that a six weeks’ tour that took her as far as Cincinnati was financed by a new backer, said to be a Sixth Avenue restauranteur named Bristol. Success did not yet alight on the Marlowe banner, however, and Mr. Bristol lost his five thousand dollars.

Financial success, indeed, was slow in coming to Miss Marlowe, a fact which may seem curious to a public that of late years has been accustomed to seeing the mere words “Julia Marlowe” and later “Sothern and Marlowe” sufficient to fill any theatre. The restauranteur--art supported by oysters!--was followed in his part of “backer” by the New York photographer Falk, who with a supreme faith in his star saw twenty-five thousand dollars slip through his fingers before a change of management and the growing reputation of Miss Marlowe turned the tide.

It was in the fall of 1888 that the American public began generally to be aware of the presence on its stage of a new and beautiful actress. Mr. Fred Stinson was now made Miss Marlowe’s manager. He was more adroit than his predecessors, and engaged for her support an excellent company that included Charles Barron, who had been leading man at the Boston Museum, William Owen, an excellent Shakespearean comedian, Robert Taber (who later became Miss Marlowe’s husband), and Mary Shaw. A week was spent in Washington, and then another week in Brooklyn. C. M. S. McLellan, writing in the New York _Press_ of November 25, 1888, refers to her as “Julia Marlowe, a girl who played a number of parts in Brooklyn last week.” “She has a tip-tilted nose,” he goes on, “wide, imploring eyes, a slender shape buoyant with health and youth, a songful voice, and the accidental movements of an innocent.... She is now an artiste, in sweet embryo.... It is the apparent pliancy of Julia Marlowe, both mental and physical, which makes you admire her now. It also makes you wonder what her fate is to be.”

The first genuine triumph of her career came to Miss Marlowe when she reached Boston. Her week at the Hollis Street Theatre in December, 1888, was the first completely reassuring experience of her career, for there, for the first time, did she win the genuinely enthusiastic response of public and critics. In Philadelphia, too, and in Baltimore, and Chicago, she found a cordial welcome. Her ambitions were beginning to be realized, Miss Dow’s labors justified, and Mr. Falk’s coffers were once more filled.

A correspondent of the Boston _Herald_, writing from Brooklyn in 1888, gives his impressions of the rising “star”: “Anything more unlike than this young girl off the stage [he had been ‘an audience of one in assisting at her Thanksgiving repast, which was hurriedly swallowed between matinée and evening performances’] and as the character she represents before the footlights I have seldom seen. It is as though she were two distinct individuals, bearing absolutely no relation in manner, face, figure, temperament or intelligence to each other. Away from the footlights, and divested of the rôle she personates, Miss Marlowe is a frank, girlish young woman, almost awkward in her movements, and shy and retiring to excess in manner and speech. There are times when she seems almost plain and again one is surprised into thinking her absolutely beautiful.... She is not at all assertive; on the contrary, she impresses one as a person who would never force herself into any prominence. This is Miss Marlowe off the stage.

“On the stage? Well, I had a mental shock when I saw her as Parthenia. It was like a transformation scene, and so complete that I almost failed to recognize the actress as the same shy, unformed girl I had been chatting with. Is she a great actress? Decidedly, no. But I would wager a good deal that the day is not far distant when she will be hailed as such.”

Successful as she began now to be in other cities, she did not at once win as much favor in New York. It took her ten years to become as popular in the metropolis as she was in “the provinces.” Taking a general view of Miss Marlowe’s career it would seem that her conquest of New York coincided fairly accurately with her modification of her early ideals as to playing nothing but the “classic” parts, for, lying between the period of which we have been speaking and the later “Sothern and Marlowe” campaign with Shakespeare, there were some years (roughly from 1897 to 1904) when the “classics” were pretty well abandoned.[187]

The first change in the hitherto carefully guarded repertory came in 1894, when she was married to her “leading man,” Robert Taber. With a self-subordination rare enough among newly-fledged “stars” she saw herself taking, at times, inferior and sometimes quite unsuited parts in plays produced primarily for the sake of Mr. Taber. The worst instance was _Henry IV_, in which Mr. Taber was an admirable Hotspur and Miss Marlowe a Prince Hal who was hopelessly at variance with the ideal of the part.[188] At this time she was known as “Julia Marlowe Taber,” but the change involved some sacrifice, for, by 1894, the name “Julia Marlowe” had a definite value and the public did not respond enthusiastically to the new order of things. It is a theatrical axiom that the public does not like to see man and wife acting together. One manager[189] brought suit because, having contracted for “Julia Marlowe,” he got “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taber.” It has been said that Frederick Stinson, the manager who had labored for years to develop the prestige that attached to Miss Marlowe’s name, aged visibly when his work was so rapidly undone.

The artistic coalition that was thought would be the result of the marriage turned out a comparative failure. Unfortunately a personal element that proved anything but helpful entered the situation. Mr. Taber was a skilled actor of a rather hard style--but the printed criticisms of their productions often brought more praise to Mrs. Taber than to him,--naturally enough, as she was the better artist. His resentment at his comparative artistic failure went to such lengths that he quarreled with his wife, and, after three seasons of married joint-stardom they went their separate ways: Taber to London to act with Irving, and his wife, after a meeting in France, and an ineffectual effort on her part to effect a reconciliation, to America to resume her career as Julia Marlowe.[190]

A survey of the plays the Tabers gave together from 1894 to 1897 does not show that the public was warranted, from any lack of their adherence to the Marlowe standard of play, in withholding its former allegiance. There was, to be sure, the mistake, _Henry IV_. Mrs. Taber was, moreover, a comparative failure as Mrs. Hardcastle and as Lydia Languish--for her _forte_ was not eighteenth century comedy--and _Romola_ afforded scarcely any opportunities for her, while Mr. Taber’s Tito had a great success. But all of these plays excepting _Henry IV_ were really incidental, and at different times during these three years Mr. and Mrs. Taber were playing a number of the old Julia Marlowe successes: _Romeo and Juliet_, _Twelfth Night_, _As You Like It_, _Much Ado_, _Ingomar_, _Pygmalion and Galatea_, _The Hunchback_, and _The Lady of Lyons_.

It was not until 1897, when the separation had taken place and Miss Marlowe had placed herself under the management of C. B. Dillingham, associated with Charles Frohman, that her period of artistic eclipse, and of great commercial prosperity, began. At the dictation of her new management, she abandoned almost altogether the heroines of poetic drama, and began a seven-year term in the service of the dramatized novel and the quickly forgotten modern ephemeral play. _The Countess Valeska_, _Colinette_, _Barbara Frietchie_, _When Knighthood Was in Flower_, and _The Cavalier_ make rather a sorry showing when compared with most of the list just given. She was made at last a successful “star” in New York,[191] but, as John Corbin wrote at the close of this period of eclipse, she was “mourned by the ‘road’ [i.e., the country outside New York] as the living tomb of a youth of abundant promise.”