Part 19

So well did Miss Adams acquit herself in these first two years with Mr. Frohman that in 1892, when John Drew left the company of Augustin Daly after eighteen years’ service, and became a “star,” he insisted on having her as his leading woman. Mr. Frohman, his new manager, had had in mind someone of more established reputation, of more thoroughly tried gifts. But Mr. Drew had his way, and Miss Adams her first real opportunity. She was surprisingly successful. The play was _The Masked Ball_.[202] Her part was a brilliant, high-comedy rôle, demanding at once spirit and subtlety. It was admitted that she did not look the part, that there was something awkward and boyish about her Suzanne Blondet. Yet her intelligence, her fine voice, her charm, and her sincerity in emotional passages won her much warm praise. It was her difficult task in one passage of this play to act a woman who is feigning intoxication. To make this tipsy scene anything but disagreeable was a severe test for a comparatively unknown woman, who at best had much to do to win her audience. Win it she did, however, for she was called a dozen times before the curtain. _The Masked Ball_ had a successful career of a year and a half, and Maude Adams, at its close, had pretty well established herself. At less than twenty she was a “leading woman,” the youngest of the day.

Miss Adams remained as John Drew’s principal supporting actress for five seasons--from the fall of 1892 to the spring of 1897.[203]

The success of _The Masked Ball_ was not repeated at once, not until four years later, indeed, when _Rosemary_ gave both Mr. Drew and Miss Adams excellent opportunities. In the meantime she had had occasional small triumphs, and only one approach to downright failure--in _The Squire of Dames_. In this play she had the part of a flippant, heartless young society woman, and, truth to tell, she didn’t do much with it. In the _Bauble Shop_, however, she had had an opportunity for her simplicity and pathos, while in _That Imprudent Young Couple_ she rose superior to the play, and prompted this criticism: “That Miss Adams was able to interest her audience at all last night was due entirely to the charm of her own personality. Her work is still exceptional in its daintiness and its simplicity.... She has found the short cut from laughter into tears. It is good to see that the remarkable success that has come to this young actress has not turned her head.”

As for _Rosemary_, the last play of the John Drew-Maude Adams period, it is to be said that it is one of the most charming of the many plays of its gifted and long-laboring author, Louis N. Parker. It is a pleasantly old-fashioned, idyllic comedy of the England of Victoria’s accession, and seems to have disclosed equally Miss Adams’s gifts of comedy and of pathos;--a play well suited to her middle period.

At this time James M. Barrie was in America. He was planning the dramatization of his novel _The Little Minister_. He saw Miss Adams as Dorothy and marked her at once as the woman to play his Lady Babbie. Mr. Frohman already had half-formed plans for promoting her, and the opportunity to play _The Little Minister_ came just at the right moment. Mr. Drew was deprived of his popular leading woman, and on September 13, 1897, at the Lafayette Square Opera House in Washington (and two weeks later at the Empire in New York) Maude Adams was launched upon her career as a “star.” The success of play and player was immediate and great, for on this occasion began that combination of dramatist and actress--Barrie and Maude Adams--that has proved so singularly appealing,--not only in this play, but in _Quality Street_, in _Peter Pan_, _What Every Woman Knows_, and in _The Legend of Leonora_.[204]

For three whole seasons Maude Adams played Lady Babbie, the first season in New York and then, until the spring of 1900, up and down the whole country. It earned for her several fortunes. The play is, as Mr. Winter[205] has said, a “neat but inadequate paraphrase” of the novel, and the character of Babbie has not the substance and power of the Babbie of the book. Relieved of the necessity for an emotional power that is probably beyond her, Miss Adams was left free to delight her audience with the waywardness and sweetness of the new Babbie of the play. Miss Adams gave the character a peculiar other-worldly charm that seemed then to have made its way to the stage for the first time, and that lingers in the minds of many playgoers as the best remembered achievement of her career. It is probably true that she had even before had parts calling for more varied and difficult work, but the popular success of _The Little Minister_ was one of the extraordinary incidents in American theatrical annals.[206]

To vary the task of repeating the same rôle months on end, and (perhaps chiefly) to satisfy her ambitions, Miss Adams essayed, in the Spring of 1899, her first Shakespearean part, Juliet in _Romeo and Juliet_. The result was anything but a complete success, though her thick-and-thin admirers professed themselves pleased. William Faversham was Romeo, and James K. Hackett, Mercutio. Miss Adams as Juliet left much to be desired. She has a gracious, elfish, quite individual charm; she has winning humor and a quiet, directly appealing power of pathos; she is the interpreter _par excellence_ of the delicate, touching whimsies of Barrie; but she has not, or had not then, tragic power. Juliet, it need not be said, demands a large share of such power. Young as Shakespeare represents her to be, she is a creature of glamorous beauty and consuming passion. Such Miss Adams could not make her. She could and did make Juliet pleasantly and touchingly girlish, a graceful, fragile, pathetic figure. But _Romeo and Juliet_ was not an artistic success (though it was a financial one) and Miss Adams speedily dropped the part. “I have not done what I intended to do,” she honestly acknowledged.

But her next part was not, as one might have expected, a return to the medium of her accepted successes. It was even a step further away. Bernhardt, in the spring of 1900, had acted the Duke of Reichstadt in Rostand’s play _L’Aiglon_. Reichstadt was the son of Napoleon the Great and Marie Louise of Austria. The play tells the story of his abortive attempt to regain his father’s throne. Miss Adams, a few months after Bernhardt’s production in Paris, essayed the part in New York, of course in an English version.[207] Like one part she had played before, Juliet, and another she was to play later, Chanticler, Reichstadt was too large and exacting a part for her. Yet by reason of her own physical characteristics she suggested the weakness and effeminacy of the young Duke, and in the lighter scenes she was pleasing and satisfying. In the more serious scenes--and there are two that require great acting in the tempestuous strain: the Mirror Scene, in which Reichstadt is shown by Metternich the hopeless weakness of his character and the desperation of his cause; and the scene on the battlefield of Wagram, where “the eaglet” is crushed by visions of his father’s ruthless career,--in these scenes Miss Adams was interesting and pathetic, but she hardly exhausted the possibilities.[208] The production of _L’Aiglon_ could not, however, fail to add to her artistic reputation and to her immense popularity, if that were possible.

With _Quality Street_, a delightful, simple, sunshiny play by Barrie in which she was the lovable and thoroughly feminine Phœbe Throssell, and in the far less attractive play _The Pretty Sister of José_, in which she was a Spanish girl, “of delicate, winning sensibility,”[209] Miss Adams returned to the sort of acting which in _The Little Minister_ had made her name universally known.

Never, however, before or since, has Miss Adams’ popularity risen to such a pitch as it did upon the production of _Peter Pan_. First produced in 1905, it ran for three seasons, and when Miss Adams revived it recently and took it far and wide about the country it proved as popular as ever. It may be, as Mr. Winter says, “immeasurably inferior, in fancy and satire, to _Alice in Wonderland_.” But then, Mr. Winter found it at times puerile and tedious, and could discern nothing in it but a diversion for children. _That_ it certainly was, but the children’s ages ran from four to fourscore. It was a matter of common observation, even in that supposed center of case-hardened worldliness, New York, that the audiences were largely of grown-ups, and that stock-brokers, “tired business men,” and others who would flee miles from the ordinary “children’s play,” came not once, but thrice, a dozen times, in some cases, to see the triumph of Peter over Captain Hook. The elfin quality, the gracious charm and warm-hearted humor of Miss Adams’ _Peter Pan_ may not have been sufficient to make it, as a feat of acting, her most memorable achievement; but play and player have won their way into the public’s affections more thoroughly than anything else she has done--more even than _The Little Minister_.

In another Barrie play, _What Every Woman Knows_--produced after the comparatively short life of _The Jesters_, a romantic mediæval play in which she displayed her familiar ability without working any great advance or change--Miss Adams accomplished what remains as probably the most noteworthy acting, _as acting_, of her career. She entered thoroughly into the part of Maggie Wylie--the Scotch woman who, while regaining, in a novel way, her errant husband, demonstrates again “what every woman knows,”--the dependence of mere man upon woman. The play was a delightful instance of Barrie’s gift for dressing human truths in whimsical fancy; Miss Adams, in the well chosen words of Mr. Winter, combined “goodness, tenderness, magnanimity, pride, motherhood, and pity with some little dash of tartness,--and gave a performance which needed only flexibility and more essential Scotch character to make it as entirely enjoyable as it was artistically consistent.”[210]

When Maude Adams was announced as Mr. Frohman’s choice for Chanticler in Rostand’s barnyard drama of that name, there was much plain-spoken wonder. It was felt by even her most cordial well-wishers that her ambitions and Mr. Frohman’s indulgence of them could not well go further. Facetiously expressing this feeling, _Life_ announced that Mr. Frohman’s next production would be Shakespeare’s tragedy of _King Lear_, with Maude Adams in the title part. Chanticler demands an actor of the somewhat florid style, at least an actor skilled in poetic speech. The “make-up” is as nearly as possible the fac-simile of our old friend the barnyard rooster, comb, tail feathers, spurs and all. It can easily be seen that an elocutionist, in such a part, is a necessity. It was generally said that the single and obvious choice for Chanticler was Otis Skinner, who would indeed have been ideal. Still, Miss Adams, somehow, certainly escaped failure. She is fragile and a woman, not a robust man; but her Chanticler took on, through her intelligence and sincerity, a share of the impressiveness that the part needed, though one felt that Miss Adams could have been spending her ability to better advantage. The apparent perversity that has taken a sweetly feminine, very American woman, of limited powers but sure ability to delight within her proper, modern field, and made her first a heroine of Shakespearean tragedy, then a decadent, disease-stricken youth, then a young mediæval nobleman in masquerade, and later the embodiment, several times life size, of a rooster, has been one of the strange phenomena of the recent American stage. The extenuating circumstances are first that managers are always more or less at a loss for good plays, particularly for a strongly individualized actress; and further that Miss Adams, greatly to her credit, did nothing without casting over it at least the glamour of a fine intelligence and an admirable ambition.

A marvelous exhibition of what Miss Adams and Mr. Frohman, when they put their heads together, could do in the way of contrast to Phœbe Throssell and Maggie Wylie, was the production for a single performance in the great Stadium at Harvard, one night in June, 1909, of Schiller’s _Maid of Orleans_. Miss Adams had played _Twelfth Night_ in Sanders Theatre one evening a year before. The _Maid of Orleans_ was an outgrowth of the earlier performance and was undertaken at the suggestion of the German department of Harvard. That there were one hundred and fifty mounted knights in full armor, one thousand men-at-arms, two hundred citizens, one hundred and fifty women and children, one hundred and twenty musicians, and ninety singers, besides sixty speaking parts, gives some idea of the magnitude of this unique presentation. In the coronation scene more than fifteen hundred persons were on the improvised Stadium stage. The cost of this single evening’s performance, with its specially constructed scenery and long preparation, was tremendous. And Maude Adams planned and carried through the entire proceeding. “This,” said one perhaps over-enthusiastic spectator, “is the biggest thing ever undertaken by any woman, except the one she is representing.” And through it all Miss Adams was playing the Maid, even to leading, on a great white charger, the troops of France in the battle charge. The spectacular effects--the storm scene, the battle scene, the scene of the coronation--were vastly impressive, though the petite figure and delicate art of the principal actress were often lost in the largeness of her surroundings.

Maude Adams and James M. Barrie seem to have been, artistically, born for each other. At any rate, it is in his plays--_The Little Minister_, _Quality Street_, _Peter Pan_, _What Every Woman Knows_,--that she has deservedly won her fame. The latest in the list is _The Legend of Leonora_, in which she has forsaken Chanticler’s feathers and Peter Pan’s breeches once more to don petticoats. It brings Miss Adams back to a doting public in a part that gives rein to her old time ability as a light _comédienne_. That a portion of this public is more or less shocked to see its beloved Maude Adams playing the part of a murderess--even though Leonora and her crime are amiable unrealities--indicates the strongly personal element in the popularity of the actress.[211]

This personal element has been introduced into the Maude Adams worship solely across the footlights. That is to say, the public knows next to nothing of her as a human being except as her personality is poured into and out of her work. Out of a native shyness as well as out of a desire to avoid publicity except as an actress, she carries her self-effacement off the stage to the last degree. She is never met at social gatherings, she has never addressed meetings or written magazine articles; she is seldom seen on the streets or driving in the park, and the occasions on which she has, in many years, gone to any theatre as one of the audience could be numbered on one’s fingers. She dresses with the utmost quietness and with small regard to current styles.

But her shrinking from “the general” is, one need hardly say, without trace of a sour attitude toward the world. She is said to be chary of personal friendships, but those who know her best speak glowingly of her bountiful kindness. She has, of course, made a great deal of money. A considerable share of it has gone, unostentatiously, to the relief of the needy. She is said to have a list of pensioners:--old, destitute players, or acquaintances of her early life.[212]

Miss Adams has always taken a keen interest in the mechanical side of the theatre. More than most actresses she knows the intricacies and the artistry of scenery and lighting, and has much to say of them when she is to appear in a new part. She has, indeed, her own office in the Empire Theatre building and there conducts the many details of organizing a production. In adoring a sweet and fragile woman her admirers are likely to forget that Maude Adams is a thoroughly trained woman of the theatre, of tried executive ability.

The sweetness and simplicity of Maude Adams herself and of her acting comes in part, one is tempted to think, from her very real love of nature. She has a New York home--and a quiet retreat it is--but her real abiding place, when her work permits, is at Sandygarth Farm on Long Island, where she owns what may fairly be called an estate. She has there her stables, her kennels, her fields under cultivation, her woods; and she knows the details of farming only less well than the secrets of stagecraft. She has, too, a bungalow in the Catskills. She is fond of riding and of long walks in the country. Books form an inevitable furnishing in all three houses. She has given herself a good schooling in French, and she is on more than speaking terms with the philosophers and poets. She likes foreign travel, and has made several trips to Europe and the near East. She plays well the piano and the harp and when opportunity offers she goes to symphony concerts. Altogether she is a serious-minded devotee of the essential, the beautiful and the simple. She is of course aware of her own great popularity. But the feeling it inspires in her is said by her friends to be one of humility and wonder. And whatever her rank as an artist, she has sent across the footlights her simplicity, her sense of sweetness and light, to be a beneficent influence. Her picture, cut from a magazine and pinned to the wall of a ranch house in the far West, or of a tenement in the slums of an Eastern city, is a symbol of something good added to American life.

SOME AMERICAN ACTRESSES OF TODAY

“There is no great acting now,” the veteran theatregoer will tell you. “The day of the stars has passed.” He who remembers vividly Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Booth and Madame Janauschek feels that times have changed indeed. And he is quite right. But sometimes he is sure, with Mr. Winter, that they have changed altogether for the worse. And there he is wrong. If it seems true that with the passing from our stage of Madame Modjeska, Miss Rehan and Miss Marlowe the robes of high priestess of our stage, to whom all the people delight to burn incense, grace alone the slender form of Miss Maude Adams, that fact does not necessarily argue a lack of genius in the artists that remain. We are, on the whole fortunately, abolishing the rank of high priestess.

All the women, with one or two exceptions, who are the subjects of the preceding chapters have been out-and-out exponents of the star system. It is an undesirable system, which is not essential to the theatre and which is only a passing phase, though it has lasted a matter of centuries, and though we owe to it many names that make illustrious the annals of the drama. It is undesirable because it subordinates the play, which first and last should be “the thing,” to the interpreter of the play, because it exercises a vicious influence on playwrights who write to clothe personalities rather than their own ideas, and an equally vicious influence on actors who think of plays primarily as opportunities for histrionic exploits. “But,” some one says, “did not Shakespeare himself write plays that are obviously for stars?” Well, he certainly wrote plays upon which starship has battened. Like any other good plays, however, Shakespeare’s plays are even better when the starship, as such, is left out, as any one will testify who has seen them acted without the extraneous element that is symbolized by enormous type on the play-bill.

To think of the theatre first of all in terms of actors and actresses is, however, natural enough. It is a popular way of looking at the theatre, and it would be idle to expect its total disappearance. And it would be ungrateful. Actors and actresses are public servants and benefactors, to whom recognition and praise are due. But recognition is one thing; starship, with all its adulations,--Bernhardtism,--is another. And there are good reasons for thinking that other aspects of the theatre are also becoming popular.

The early years of the twentieth century have been a period of rapid development in the theatre, a development marked by at least two broad phenomena: first, the growing public sense of the drama as an art, of which acting is a component part, not the chief end; and, secondly, the revolution in the technique of stagecraft. To sum up the matter in a word, the stage is struggling, rather blindly, to liberate itself from the conventions that intervene between audience and play. As an incident in that liberation, the star system is on its way, not to destruction, for the actor of genius will always remain a compelling figure, but at least to broad modification. Starless casts and repertory companies have been plentiful enough to indicate the beginnings of a strong, new current.

Again, playwriting and acting, hand in hand, have become more realistic, more subtle, more psychological; there are far fewer opportunities for broad effects than in the old days, there is far less of the intense concentration of playwright and audience on a single character and a single actor or actress. It is probable that even if a Bernhardt or a Duse or a Cushman should spring up in our midst she would find effective physical and psychological barriers to an ascension to starship as those illustrious women have known it.

Very briefly indicated, these are some of the phases of the phenomenon that may easily be mistaken by the cherisher of traditions as the passing of first-rate acting. Though it is different in tone and method, and leads less often to extreme heights of public notice, acting to-day succeeds as well in its adaptation to the newer ideal of the primacy of the play as did the older school in the exaltation of the actor.

It is a rather odd circumstance that while the English stage is rich in its actors and comparatively scantily supplied with excellent actresses, the reverse is true in America, so far as concerns the younger generation. Our civilization seems to breed actresses thickly at home, and to entice them from abroad. When Edward Sothern, Otis Skinner, David Warfield, Henry Miller, Robert Mantell, John Drew, William Gillette and even Mr. Hackett, Mr. Faversham and Mr. Daly shall have retired from the stage, who is to help Ernest Glendinning and the imported Mr. Lou-Tellegen maintain the honors of their sex? But when Mrs. Fiske and Maude Adams shall have followed Julia Marlowe into retirement, there still will be, even if Ethel Barrymore and Margaret Anglin should regrettably have left the stage, a considerable group of still younger actresses, none of whom may ever achieve stardom as it was once practiced, but each of whom fits with admirable ability into the newer order of things.

Better than almost any one else, Miss Barrymore represents the dangers of the star system. The daughter of one of America’s best actors, Maurice Barrymore,[213] and the niece of another, John Drew, she was a marked victim from the beginning. Charles Frohman made her a star in 1900, when she was twenty-one. She had had a scant half dozen years of training in her uncle’s company in America and in Henry Irving’s company in England, and had not played more than a dozen parts in all. She was made a star simply on the strength of a pleasing personality, intelligence, a pretty face, and a working grasp of stage behavior.