Part 15

If I may be allowed to call myself as a witness I can depose that I have seen not a few performances of the well chosen company at Wallack’s Theater forty-odd years ago which were far less effective than they might have been because one or two prominent characters had to be assigned to performers who were good actors in their own lines but who were hopelessly unsuited to the parts forced upon them because they alone were available. In the ‘Shaughraun’ of Dion Boucicault, for instance, by the side of Boucicault himself and Harry Beckett, Ada Dyas and H. J. Montague, John Gilbert and Madam Ponisi, who were all admirably adapted to the characters Boucicault had composed for them, there were also Joseph Polk and Ione Burke, who were entirely unsuited to the parts they were forced to play. And there were two equally unfortunate miscastings in ‘Diplomacy.’ If this was the case not infrequently at Wallack’s with its long prestige, how much more frequent and more flagrant must have been the misfits in the performances in theaters of inferior grade?

Professor Phelps tells us that all would go well if there could be established a stock-company in every city and even in every large town; but Professor Phelps—fortunately for him—was not born long enough ago to have seen the artistic inadequacy which is inevitable in the stock-company, inadequacy in the acting, in the stage-management and in the mounting. The productions of the managers of traveling companies have set a standard to which no resident stock-company can hope to attain. And the cost of an ambitious attempt to satisfy the expectations of the playgoing public would be prohibitive to any intending manager of a stock-company. He would not dare to undertake the task unless he was supported by an endowment, by a subsidy, or by a large body of subscribers, who being sharers in the enterprize might be more tolerant of relatively unimportant deficiencies in acting and in mounting.

There is no doubt that a repertory theater is highly desirable. It might be of inestimable service both to the author and to the actor. The actor is very unfortunate if, in the malleable years of his youth, he finds himself appearing in the same part for two or three hundred nights; and the author is unfortunate when his play has had its two or three hundred nights and then drops out of sight forevermore. A repertory theater would provide varied experience for the performers and afford them opportunity to acquire versatility; and it could do a great service to the reputation of the playwrights by reviving and keeping on hand, so to speak, the plays which deserve to be seen again and again.

But under present conditions a repertory theater is economically impossible. The rent of a building and the salaries of actors are now prohibitive. A repertory theater in New York, even if it did not aspire to be a rival of the Théâtre Français, must be described as a luxury,—and like all luxuries it would be expensive. It can come into existence, and it can have a chance to continue to exist, only when a group of lovers of the arts of the drama shall combine to provide the theater itself and to make the path easy for its manager.

(1920)

XIV

MEMORIES OF ACTORS

XIV

MEMORIES OF ACTORS

I

A playgoer from my youth up, a playgoer in Paris and London as well as in New York, I have had the good fortune to be on terms of friendly intimacy with not a few of the leading actors of the past half-century, French and British and American. I have elsewhere set down my memories of Edwin Booth and Henry Irving, Joseph Jefferson and Constant Coquelin, four of the foremost figures in the theater at the end of the nineteenth century. There are a dozen or a score of other players with whom I foregathered at one time or another, less prominent in their profession but not for that reason any less attractive in their several ways and not less companionable.

Most of the actors with whom I have had relation were good company; they had seen many men and many places; and their journeyings had worn off any abrading angularities their personalities may have possessed. They had mixed with all sorts and conditions of men; and they thereby gained the shrewd knowledge of human nature which they needed in their art. They had acquired polish even if they did not always possess culture. They were no more likely to be bookish in their tastes, or even to be widely read, than are the practitioners of the other professions, painters and musicians, most of whom are probably too alertly interested in the immediate present to be tempted into dusty exploration of the past. They were often apt in anecdote and quick of wit, with a wide command over words, the result of their acquisition of the sharp and swift dialog of the stage. In no other calling have I found men swifter to make a joke or to take one, even if it happened to be pointed against themselves.

It is sometimes asserted that actors as a class are inclined to be unduly aware of their own excellence in the quality they profess and even unduly inclined to communicate to others their own opinion of their own achievements. My experience, such as it is, does not support this assertion. I have found the men of the stage at least as modest as the men of the studio and the men of the study. Over-swollen vanity is not the exclusive property of any one profession, and I doubt if it is more frequent in actors than in authors or artists. Where I comb out my memories the two most exuberant examples of ingrowing and outflowering self-appreciation that I ever had occasion to observe were both of them physicians, who were also authors and who were wholly unable to resist the ever present temptation to dilate upon their own triumphs and to confide to all listeners the frequent compliments they had gluttonously accepted.

There was nothing of this sort in Booth or Irving, in Jefferson or Coquelin; they were far above it; they were free from self-assertion and even from self-consciousness,—altho of course they could not but be aware of their own outstanding position. In fact, I cannot recall any successful actor of my acquaintance who was abnormally self-centered, or who took himself too seriously. Sometimes, it is true, I have found an actor who had not yet established his position and who now and again seized a chance to let me know that he had played this or that important part not unsuccessfully. But this was not boastful self-praise, even if it might so seem to the uninformed listener; it was only a supplying of information not otherwise available. A writer or a painter has no need to call attention to his book or his picture, because these survive to speak for themselves, even if there are only a few who have them in mind. But the work of the actor has no permanence; it perishes as it comes into being; it instantly ceases to be, except as a memory; and it is as a memory that the actor feels himself called upon to revive it. The difference is that whereas the book of the author, the picture of the artist may be only overlooked, the performance of the actor might be actually unknown to us if he himself did not tell us about it.

II

The first actor whom I came to know was one of the most companionable, the genial John Brougham. In 1869, as a boy I had been present at the opening and at the closing nights of his brief management of the little playhouse in Twenty-fourth Street, behind the Fifth Avenue hotel—a playhouse which not long after became the Fifth Avenue Theater of Augustin Daly and which was rebuilt as the Madison Square Theater by Steele Mackaye. At Brougham’s I had seen his ever-delightful burlesque, ‘Pocahontas,’ in which he himself was the rollicking King Powhatan; and I saw also a later burlesque of his, ‘Much Ado about a Merchant of Venice,’ in which he was an amusing but rather Hibernian Shylock. So it was that when I was elected to the Lotos Club, in the spring of 1871 (while I was still an undergraduate at Columbia College) I seized the earliest opportunity to make Brougham’s acquaintance.

He was not a great actor, that I knew already, altho he was a competent performer; but he had a charming personality, and when he chanced to be cast for a character with which his personality coincided, he was entirely satisfactory. Of course he appeared to best advantage in Irish parts, The O’Grady in Boucicault’s ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and Off-lan-aghan in Lester Wallack’s ‘Veteran,’ and above all Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s ‘Rivals.’ I doubt if Sir Lucius has been more sympathetically impersonated by any performer of the second half of the nineteenth century than it was by Brougham. I have seen the character undertaken by W. J. Florence and by Nat Goodwin, actors of a far more opulent equipment than Brougham, yet neither of them succeeded so well in bringing out the gentlemanly simplicity of this lovable character. Goodwin was too completely an American of the nineteenth century to be able to assume the part of an Irish gentleman of the eighteenth century; and Florence, excellent as he was in Irish characters of another kind, bestowed on Sir Lucius a rather finicky affectation, quite out of keeping with the part.

In those distant days the dramatist was sadly underpaid. Brougham told me once that his price for writing a play for a star was three thousand dollars, payable on delivery of the manuscript, a sum smaller than a month’s royalty on a successful play of to-day. And yet more than one of the vehicles Brougham put together for this modest price, ran like the One Hoss Shay. The stage-version of the ‘Old Curiosity Shop,’ in which Lotta doubled Little Nell and the Marchioness, must have been performed several hundred times; and only less successful were other of the made-to-order pieces he composed for Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams and for Mr. and Mrs. Florence. These last were congenial labor, since they dealt with Irish themes, more or less in imitation of Boucicault’s more solidly built ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘Colleen Bawn.’

Where Boucicault was dominating, not to say domineering, Brougham was yielding and unambitious. Their early disagreement over the authorship of ‘London Assurance’ did not prevent their professional association in later years. When ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ was revived in 1873 at Booth’s Theater, Brougham played The O’Grady, supporting Boucicault as Shaun the Post and Mrs. Boucicault as Arrah. And when Boucicault in 1879 was strangely ill-advised to undertake ‘Louis XI,’ in his own adaptation of the play which Casimir Delavigne had made out of ‘Quentin Durward,’ Brougham was Coitier; and I can testify that on this occasion the honors were divided, or at least the laughs, for I never listened to any dialog more ludicrous than that between a French king with a pronounced Irish accent and a French physician with an equally persistent brogue. These, as Beau Brummel’s valet explained, “these are our failures.”

Brougham had his full share of Irish wit, more spontaneous than Boucicault’s and less likely to be borrowed. He had also the more English delight in punning. In ‘Pocahontas,’ after the opening song Powhatan thanks his attendant braves:

Well roared, my jolly Tuscadoras! Most loyal corps, your king encores your chorus.

And in the same burlesque when John Smith is tied down and about to be put to death, Pocahontas rushes in, crying, “For my husband I scream!” Whereupon the endangered hero raises his head and inquires “Lemon or vanilla?”

These be but airy trifles floating like bubbles atop the dark wave of forgetfulness, which has engulfed many things far more precious. An airy trifle also is Brougham’s remark when Pat Hearn (a once notorious gambler) drove past the Ocean House at Newport one summer afternoon with a very pretty woman by his side. “Isn’t that Pat Hearn and his wife?” somebody asked; and Brougham replied at once, “That’s Hearn, I know; but I can’t say whether or not she is his’n.”

III

It was also at the Lotos that I got to know John T. Raymond. This was probably in the fall of 1874, when he was appearing as Colonel Sellers in Mark Twain’s ‘Gilded Age.’ The actor and the author quarreled after a while, quarreled bitterly and never made up their quarrel. No doubt, Mark knew his own creature better than any one else and certainly better than the rather shallow Raymond. But Raymond gave us at least all the external characteristics of the inspired visionary with his inexpugnable optimism, always about to acquire wealth beyond the dreams of avarice and yet for the moment reduced to a frugal dinner of turnips and water, with only a candle to light up his modest store. I have an impression that the cause of the breach with Mark was Raymond’s unwillingness to forego two or three easy effects which were always rewarded with thoughtless laughter but which were not really in keeping with the character. Raymond was unduly inclined to skylark even on the stage; I have seen him, in the last act of the ‘Gilded Age,’ match silver dollars with a friend he had recognized in the audience. Of course, he chose a moment for the flip of his coin when the attention of the spectators was bestowed upon some other performer, and only a few of them detected his inexcusable pantomime. These lapses from the standard of propriety may not have been frequent, but they occurred far too often; and they could not but be offensive to the author of the play in which the actor was appearing.

When Raymond indulged in tricks of this sort he displayed a lack of respect alike for his audience and for his art. The art had to suffer in silence; but the audience might at any time be moved to protest. I recall that when Raymond was playing Ichabod Crane in 1879 he sent me a box, to which my wife invited three or four of her young friends. In the last act Ichabod comes out into the garden to ask Katrina into the house, where there was merrymaking. To the startled astonishment of our party, Raymond said “Come on in, Katrina! There’s lots of fun! Brander Matthews has brought a whole boxful of pretty girls!”—a speech which nobody in the house—except the boxful—seemed to hear or at least to apprehend, probably because it had no relation to the story being acted on the stage.

None the less was Raymond an accomplished comedian, brisk, lively, laughter-compelling and authoritative. Like many another comic actor, he longed to play pathetic parts; and unlike most of those who have this ambition, he did possess the power of drawing tears. I had first seen him as Asa Trenchard in Paris during the Exposition of 1867, when Sothern had ventured across the Channel to disclose Lord Dundreary to the unresponsive French; and I have never forgotten the simple and manly pathos of the scene in which Asa burns the will leaving him the fortune which would otherwise go to the girl he is in love with. Audiences are always ready to appreciate a brief pathetic episode when the comic character unexpectedly turns his serious side to the spectators. But they are resentful when the funny man whom they have gone to laugh with, and even to laugh at, is presented in a play wherein he is persistently pathetic and not even intermittently humorous. Raymond lost money for himself and for his managers when he impersonated a dreary sobseeker in a dull domestic drama, ‘My Son,’ derived from a tearful Teutonic tale of woe.

In collaboration with H. C. Bunner I put together a rather boisterous farce called ‘Touch and Go,’ which Raymond liked enough to contract to produce but not enough for him ever to set about its production. In its place he had brought out in succession two plays in which the fun was less acrobatic—‘In Paradise’ and ‘For Congress.’ After these pieces had run their course, G. H. Jessop (who was a part author of ‘In Paradise’) came to me with an idea for a comic drama for Raymond and asked me to join him in working it out. It was to be called ‘A Gold Mine’; and having in mind Raymond’s Asa Trenchard in the ‘American Cousin,’ I suggested that we lay the scene in London, so as to repeat the contrast of an American with the British. We also decided to develop our plot so that at the end of the second of our three acts Raymond should have a chance to be pathetic if only for a brief moment.

When our play was read to Raymond he was delighted with it; the character suited him and he rejoiced that he was to have an opportunity to show that he could be serious when the situation required it. During his annual tour he tried out our comedy in one of the smaller Western cities on a Friday night. He sent us a glowing report of the reception of our play and of his own triumph at the end of the second act. And in less than a fortnight thereafter we read in the morning paper that he had had a sudden seizure which had carried him off within twenty-four hours.

IV

Fortunately for the authors, thus unexpectedly bereft of the actor for whom the piece had been composed and to whose personality it had been adjusted, Helen Tracy, who had played the heroine in the single performance which Raymond had given, wrote at once to Nat Goodwin, advising him to secure our play, as it had made a hit and as the star-part would just suit him. Goodwin asked us to let him read the piece; he liked it and we soon came to terms with him, both Jessop and I believing that he was an actor of promise, altho up to that time he had never undertaken a part demanding any subtlety of treatment or any veracity of characterization.

When he was a very young man, Goodwin had made his first appearance in a variety-show, giving imitations of the actors then prominent. It is a curious fact that even the most adroit mimics are rarely able to become accomplished actors, competent to sustain a character consistently throughout a play. Goodwin was one of the few exceptions to this rule. He soon gave up mimicry for burlesque, succeeding that fine comedian William H. Crane, in the chief comic part of the perennially popular ‘Evangeline’ and playing it in careful imitation of his predecessor. As Joseph Jefferson—who had often appeared in burlesque early in his career, notably in a parody of ‘Mazeppa’—once said to me, “burlesque is a very good school for a young comedian, as it tends to give him breadth of effect and certainty of execution.”

From burlesque Goodwin progressed to farce; and when he came to us for ‘A Gold Mine,’ he was playing the part of a drunken undertaker in ‘Turned Up,’ a robustious piece of British manufacture. As the attraction of this whirlwind farcicality was not exhausted, Goodwin arranged with us to postpone our play for a year; and he utilized the delay to prepare the public to accept him in a comedy of a more refined type. He added to his bill the ingenious and whimsical piece called ‘Lend Me Five Shillings’ which Jefferson was still acting occasionally. As he said to me, “I’d sooner finish third to Jefferson than run a dead heat with Dixey!”—Dixey having just made a great hit in ‘Adonis.’

Goodwin also appealed to us to modify the entrance of Silas K. Woolcott, the American who had gone to England to sell a gold mine. “That entrance is all right in itself,” he explained; “and it was all right for Raymond, because he had played parts of that kind before. But I haven’t; and it’s too quiet for me, since they’ll be disappointed if I don’t make them laugh with my first half-dozen speeches.” So we brought Woolcott in through the conservatory, instead of through the front door, and we contrived a very brief episode of equivoke in which Goodwin mistook the butler for a certain Sir Thomas Butler whom Woolcott had been invited to meet.

‘A Gold Mine’ was a more or less artificial comedy with a complicated plot and with dialog as brilliant as the combined wits of the two collaborators could compass. For the part of the fascinating widow with whom Woolcott was to pair off at the end of the play Goodwin engaged Kate Forsythe; and the rest of the cast was at least adequate if not entirely satisfactory. McCarty of the Boston Theater produced the play most judiciously, making a valuable suggestion for heightening the effect of the pathetic speech at the end of the second act. When we asked Goodwin if he was certain that he could play this serious bit and carry the audience with him, the actor answered modestly, “Yes—at least I think so. You see, I’m going to do it in imitation of Charley Thorne.”

This was shrewd, as Charles R. Thorne, Jr., was an actor of straightforward force with a rich and well-modulated voice. It is profitable always for the novice in any calling to take pattern by its experts. As the painter studies in the studio of another craftsman and as the writer “plays the sedulous ape to many masters,” so the actor can find his profit in imitating and emulating the performances of an earlier generation, not making himself a slave to any one of them but gaining variety and flexibility by capturing and combining the methods of half-a-dozen. John Drew, for example, played one of his earliest parts at Daly’s as he imagined it would have been played by Charles Wyndham; and Wyndham had modelled himself more or less on Lester Wallack as Wallack had earlier sought to achieve the airy lightness of Charles James Matthews. I make this assertion without misgiving as my information came directly from these four comedians; and I may add that Coquelin, the most varied and versatile actor of the end of the nineteenth century, once told me that while he was a pupil of Regnier, he learnt almost as much by incessant observation of Samson, an older artist with a method wholly different from Regnier’s.

It was by his performance in ‘A Gold Mine’ that Goodwin first established his position as an actor of indisputable promise; and in the remaining thirty years of his life he gained in power and in authority. ‘In Mizzoura’ was written for him by Augustus Thomas, on purpose to display the more serious quality the actor had exhibited in ‘A Gold Mine’; and it was this more serious quality, strengthened by exercise, which enabled him to rise to the noble dignity of the final episode in Clyde Fitch’s ‘Nathan Hale,’ a tragic character which Goodwin portrayed with beautiful fidelity. He became one of the foremost figures on our stage; he even adventured himself in two Shaksperian parts, Shylock and Bottom, in neither of which was he considered to have been entirely successful; and yet despite his prosperity in the theater he never attained to the commanding position his native endowment would have entitled him to, if only it had been sagely administered.