From Seven to Seventy: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee

by Edward Simmons

Chapter XIII: The Players

The mad progress of Big Business can almost be likened to a mighty cyclone which sweeps across the countryside with destruction in its wake, but here and there leaving, quite untouched, a farm, a fruit tree, or a windmill—delightful oases—which serve as the only record of a struggling civilization. Big Business in New York has wiped out the homes of the people and sent them in a frantic rush hither and thither in search of a place to live. Always there is that uprooting, due to the steady march of the threatening skyscraper up the island of Manhattan. As in the case of the cyclone, however, verdant places are left behind in this barren desert of commerce, little green spots which remain an eternal blessing and evidence that there were once normal human beings here who thought and had time to care for beauty. One such place is Gramercy Park.

I started one day to try to guess the origin of the name “Gramercy.” Samuel Ruggles, the son of the maker of the park, told me that when his father had bought the land the squatters called it “Grommercy Crick” (there was then a small stream of water flowing through it) and the only word that sounded near enough to that was “Gramercy.” I asked Carl Arendt, a well-known actor, what Grommercy meant in Dutch. At first he said, “Nothing,” but later stopped me and said:

“You may have been aiming at Kromme Zee, which means Crooked Creek.”

Like Zuyder Zee, I believe this is the origin of Gramercy.

The Park reminds one of certain places in London more than anything else. In fact, I have often seen moving-picture companies taking films down here which were afterward to be represented on the screen as taking place in the British metropolis. The garden is perfect in its miniature representation of the different seasons. There is one lilac bush at the southwest corner that always tells me of the approach of spring. One year it did not blossom and I felt as if I had lost a friend. The same gardener has been caring for the growing things for a number of years, and many a child has been intrusted to his care while the nurse or parent was busy elsewhere. He teaches them to love the flowers, to play on the paths so that the grass may grow, patches up the quarrels and broken heads, and is tsar in his little domain.

The plot of ground, with enough money to keep it going, was presented to the residents who live about the square, and most of the provisos have been kept, except that the donor required that no buildings more than four stories be allowed, and no house of other than brick or stone (barring wood, evidently). One or two taller ones have managed to creep in, but in general everything is almost the same as it was in the ’nineties, when I first landed in New York.

One Sunday in winter the son of the maker of the park was out walking with his dad, when along came a man with a gun, dragging a big animal. It was a wolf, and the man took them to the spot where he had shot it. There was a big patch of blood upon the snow. This is the place where The Players now stands.

Edwin Booth gave the house to the club, with the condition that he be allowed to make it his home as long as he lived. It is well known how the idea started on the yacht of Commodore Benedict and how that nucleus of clever folk grew into the institution we have to-day. It was not to be essentially an actors’ club, but a place where the actor could meet his equals. One must be an artist or a patron of the arts to belong and, of course, this includes writers, architects, sculptors, and painters.

It is a very beautiful club. Stanford White is responsible for the architecture and gave his services gratis, as he did for The Lambs. Men coming from the Old World say that it is the only place in America that reminds them of home. The tonality of the rooms is like that of the very old houses of Europe; time has mellowed the walls as it does a bit of lace or tapestry. One of the ceilings that was a pale robin’s-egg blue in ’91 is now an exquisite velvet khaki. No man could paint it. Whistler would give up in despair the idea of even copying it. Like the quality of the hair and skin of a dear old face, it gives an air of good breeding, calm, and quiet over all.

The halls and stairways of the house are lined with photographs and playbills, with, here and there, a painting. Over the fireplace hangs that admirable portrait of Edwin Booth by Sargent which gives one an entirely new conception of the actor. On one of the walls is a drawing by Tom Nast, whom I knew well and loved dearly. It is a political cartoon which was the original, I am told, of the “Tammany tiger.” Tom is the illustrator who disposed of the Irish-American question forever by drawing a banner flying over the Capitol at Washington, on which were the words, “Erin go unum pluribus bragh.” There are a number of unusually valuable mezzotints and wood engravings scattered about, and the biggest collection known to exist, twenty-six portraits in all, of the painter Naegle. Altogether there are five Sullys, an average Sir Joshua Reynolds, a remarkably good Gilbert Stuart, a beautiful Gainsborough in the earlier manner, while on one wall are two small panels by Benjamin West.

As to the books, there is a veritable treasure house—all the knowledge of the stage that one could possibly desire, with many valuable autographed copies and rare editions. The most unusual possession of the club in the way of printed stuff is the second, third, and fourth folios of Shakespeare’s plays. The library room, arranged for ease and comfort, runs the whole length of the house. In the center are soft chairs and couches, with lights close to one’s elbow. There is an air of rest and quiet which has often been found more conducive to sleep than weighty reading by certain of us who are in the habit of staying up till the “wee sma’ hours.” One memento that has always cheered me in my moments of financial stress—for misery loves company—is a letter, written by Oliver Goldsmith to Doctor Johnson, trying to borrow three pounds, which he promises will be repaid as soon as The Traveller shall be published. The letter is probably worth twelve hundred dollars to-day!

Gifts flow into such a place, some appropriate and some ridiculous. The costumes of Edwin Booth, for instance, are of great interest to all, but the back tooth of a comedian—a molar—which the wife of one actor presented to us after his death, is not a very great treasure. But there it is in a glass case by day, and locked up in a steel safe at night along with the paste jewels of the stage.

My earlier friends are the most vivid to me—those who are now gone. Descriptions of them are futile and have been done too many times by others far better equipped in a literary way than myself. I remember them only as they came into the club—some peculiarity of looks, some small joke, some story around the long table at luncheon where we were brought together for a fleeting instant, each to depart the next moment and go his own way. The stories, the wit, and the necessity of competing with the best brains of America in The Players was an education to me.

There were the Aldriches—Louis and Thomas Bailey—no relation, except Louis was named after the writer. As a boy he was very poor, did not know where he came from, only that he was called “Louis.” Having the job of running errands around a theater out west, he was accosted by the stage carpenter one day, who was a great admirer of the writing of Thomas Bailey.

“Your name from now on is Aldrich,” he said, “Louis Aldrich. Don’t forget it or you will catch the devil from me.”

Louis Aldrich it was, and when he had made his way in the world and was successful enough to go in the same society with Thomas Bailey, he had reached the goal that the carpenter had unwittingly marked for him. The poet always rather resented his existence, however.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote delightful verse and was a charming man, but little things sometimes irritated him greatly. I remember him coming into the club evidently as cross as two sticks. The publishers had had the “cheek” to refuse a poem of his. I asked why. “Oh, I suppose they found it too meter-icious.” And this was long before the days of free verse.

Louis Aldrich made a fortune from the play “My Pardner,” taken from the Bret Harte story called Tennessee’s Pardner.

When Louis Aldrich was chairman of the house committee of The Players, I saw him one noon standing at the door of the dining room, talking to Walter, the head waiter. Presently, in a loud voice, he said:

“Walter, what is the lunch to-day?”

“Pork chops and sausages, sir.”

“An insult to the house committee.”

Then later at the table:

“Walter, bring me some of that damn Christian food.”

Henry E. Dixey and Louis were in a war play together, and I heard the latter pray Harry (who had the part of a New York policeman) to spare him when he gave a long speech about the flag. I was one of the first-night audience, and at that most pathetic climax about Old Glory, etc., the policeman suddenly fell dead.

Many actors have a ready wit. Jack Wendall became quite famous for his excellent portrayal of the dog in Rostand’s “Chanticleer.” One of these silly, satisfied business men was a guest at The Players and, meeting Jack, insisted upon his giving an example of his bark right then and there. After much persuasion and, in order to silence the man, he did so. Whereupon the man proceeded to bark much louder and much better than Jack. The actor was worsted at his own game and by such a fatuous creature, but he turned and said, with the most cunning inference:

“It is fine, but you see, sir, I had to learn.”

Speaking of Rostand, I am proud of a translation of mine of two lines of “Cyrano.” Mark Smith had challenged my statement that it could be done in English verse and gave as a test:

“Qu’est-ce qu’un baiser? C’est le point rose sur l’I du mot aimer.”

I gave him:

“What is a kiss? The rosy dot upon the ‘I’ of bliss.”

Mark was an actor and the son of an actor. I saw him first with Mrs. Leslie Carter. It is told of him that just before his birth his parents were in Paris. His father, being very patriotic, went to the American embassy, got some earth from the cellar, and, filling four saucers with it, placed them under the legs of the bed where his wife lay. With Old Glory over the bed, Mark was ushered into the world as near an American citizen as his father could make him.

One of the most interesting stage families of my time was the group of Hollands. E. S., whom we called “Ned,” was perhaps the best known throughout the country and was a finished actor of the so-called old school. It was the father of these boys who made that immortal remark which named a house of worship and made it famous. Holland, with others, approached the pastor of a large Fifth Avenue church to get him to read the burial service for a dead actor. The minister refused, saying that actors could not be buried from his church. Seeing their despair, he repented a trifle and suggested that they try the little church just around the corner. The elder Holland raised his hat and said:

“God bless the Little Church Around the Corner.”

Joe Holland is the only member of the family alive to-day, and he retired from the stage a few years ago. He became very deaf and finally paralyzed, but he has in no way let it ruin his life. With grit and persistence to a degree that should be an example to everyone, here is this man, no longer young, learning to read and, although totally deaf, to speak a beautiful French, sailing a boat better than most professionals and becoming the commodore of the yacht club of the seaport town where he lives in the summer, leading a full life where most people would have given up the ghost long ago.

Joe used to ask one or another of us to go out for a drive with him in the evening. I often wondered what pleasure it could give him and once wrote on his paper (which he always carried), “Why do you do this?” A most pathetic look came into his face.

“I know you are all just being good to me and you can’t keep it up long, but somehow, if I can get you to drive in the moonlight where you wouldn’t want to talk, anyway, we are just as much companions in those moments as if I were not deaf.”

Such delicacy of feeling could not help but come out in his actions, and something Joe did once impressed me very much. Frank Worthing, the actor, was going to England, and, although it was not mentioned, he was going to die. Joe bought half a dozen calendars and sent a sheet to everyone of Frank’s friends, asking that they write a note, a poem, or music, and, if they were artists, make a sketch. These he collected, had beautifully bound and put in the stateroom of the steamer so that “every day when Frank wakes up, he will receive a good morning from a friend.” There is something very fine about a man who thinks that way.

The Players sets aside one day a year for the ladies on Shakespeare’s birthday, when the feminine friends of the members are allowed to invade the house between the hours of two and six in the afternoon. Here the stage-struck young girl may come in hopes of meeting her favorite matinee hero, but I am afraid she is often disappointed, as the young actor is generally timid and stays away that day. It is left to the older gallants to offer a substitute and, if it did not seem like boasting of my own generation, I should say that a John Drew, a Francis Wilson, or that dean of the American stage, an F. F. Mackay is still just as capable of holding his own with the modern flapper as he ever was. Every American or visiting actress of importance has been entertained at these receptions, while special days have been given, on rare occasions, to a few. There was one for Clara Louise Kellogg, one for Mrs. Forbes-Robertson, and one for the divine Sarah.

Sarah is easily the one person alive to-day who knows how to give a personal thrill to everyone with whom she comes into contact. I remember seeing her a year or two ago, driving in New York in an open carriage. I did not recognize her at first, but some subtle influence compelled me to raise my hat and bow in homage to—I know not what. I got in return a thrilling smile. When Madame Bernhardt was guest of honor at The Players, she chose the landing of the stairway upon which to hold her court of honor, thereby stopping all progress up or down. It required all the tact of Mr. Booth to get her satellites away from her and finally move her to a more remote spot. How fine to be a queen and calmly acknowledge it to the world!

Once I was standing with Stanhope Forbes, the Royal Academician, and his brother at the Victoria Station. The brother was then the head of the continental affairs of the Chatham and Dover Railway. All of a sudden an official rushed up and asked what he should do about the next train for Dover, saying that there was a lady who was stopping everything by insisting that she must have her dog with her.

“Well, she can’t,” said Forbes.

“But she insists, sir, and she is making an awful row.

“That’s no matter. Who is she?”

“She says her name is something like Sarah Bernhard,” said the man.

“Good God!” said Forbes, wilting. “Give her the train.”

In my student days there were two “gags” on Sarah. One was, “Yesterday an open carriage drove up to the Théâtre Français out of which got Sarah Bernhardt.” The other was a caricature of Sarah and Sarcey, the critic; she taking fattening, and he anti-obesity, pills. While he is interviewing her one of his pills falls out of the box and is eaten by Sarah’s pet tiger, which is crouched beside her on the floor. The tiger immediately becomes a rug. Sarah screams and gives it one of her pills; it becomes a tiger again.

Duse is a direct contrast, at least to an outside observer, to Sarah. I was walking in Union Square, approaching the place where Tiffany used to be, when out of the door came a somewhat elegant, but modest-appearing figure in black, moving swiftly toward a private carriage at the curb. Something about her seemed familiar and I recognized Duse. Then I saw, to my astonishment, that she was lame. She did not impress me at all on the street, but on the stage she is the finest woman actor I have ever seen. Just realize the physical handicap—you never see it behind the footlights.

What a marvelous quality she gets out of that death-bed scene in “Camille”—her simple nightgown, her expression while waiting for the nurse to leave the room that she might reach under the bolster and get a letter from “him,” the tragedy of her face as her fingers do not find it, and the breaking of the sky after the storm. Her hand had touched it! My respect rose for the great simplicity of this Italian actress.

Duse’s Armand throws everything at her when he begins to think she cares for material things alone. I was telling this in The Players, when an actor, since knighted by the British government, said when he was acting Armand, he threw the bag of gold at her. Imagine a “bag” of gold. In my first days in Paris I saw the effects of the woman Dumas used for the heroine of “Camille” sold at auction.

Duse seemed to me a failure in “Magda.” It had a northern humor that required a Modjeska to sense. The second meeting with the former lover, the country baron, which has always been such a tragedy to most actresses, produced in Modjeska nothing but amusement and a sense of irony. She had the most beautiful hands and arms I ever saw. I once sent her a sonnet about them, and, although it was ten years later before I met her, she remembered it, saying that I was the only man who had discovered the secret of her appeal to her public. Even when she was old and played “La Bataille des Dames,” her arms spoke to the audience and expressed what she wished.

I have met few actresses and have been behind the scenes in the theater only once or twice in my lifetime. Aside from paying my respects to that superb raconteur, Madame Yvette Guilbert, painting a portrait of the fascinating Nazimova, meeting Ellen Terry at tea, and being kissed by the beautiful Maxine Elliott for saying she was a better actor than her husband, I have come into personal contact with only one other—an American.

One rainy March day, while walking down Thirty-sixth Street when The Lambs was in that delightful house that Stanford White built, a closed carriage stopped between me and a Dutch stoop and a young woman got out. She looked up in the air, annoyed, and was going to scuttle up the steps, when I stepped forward to put my umbrella over her. I would have done the same for a washerwoman. She took my arm like a thoroughbred, and I saw her to her door. I had hardly gotten back to the walk when a boy from The Lambs, opposite, came up, saying, “Some gentlemen in the club wish to see you, sir.” I crossed over and went upstairs to confront a line of men drawn up in martial order. There were twenty of them at least, who saluted, chanting:

“We wish to congratulate you on your skill as a professional masher. You are the first man who has succeeded in picking up Maude Adams.”

This was my first and only meeting with her, but she must represent a type that I think beautiful, for one of the figures in a decoration that I made entirely out of my head resembles her so much that I have been asked many times if she did not pose for it. Miss Adams is one of the women who have helped to bring the stage to that position among the arts which men like Booth hoped it would reach.

Besides women, who always come first—who is it who says, “A man and his wife are one, and she’s the one?”—The Players have entertained many notable men, both local and foreign. I met Theodore Roosevelt there for the first time. Not long after, I was in a Broadway car, when I saw him hanging on to a strap. The talk turned to war. I had been back from Europe only a short time and argued that America was not like England, a cuttlefish with a vulnerable body needing long arms to get its food and protect itself against its enemies; but rather like China, an oyster covered by hard shell. The large navy necessary to the first was superfluous to the second. I was met with a hurricane of abuse, to the amusement of the whole car. I did not know that Roosevelt had just been made Secretary of the Navy at Washington.

He told this story to us at the club. Two young Englishmen once turned up at his office and he sent them out to visit at his home in Oyster Bay. After some Saturday night festivities, when the women had all retired from the table, one of the young men started to give his impressions of America. He had been here two weeks.

“Mr. Roosevelt,” he said, “do you not feel that one arriving in a foreign country is often shocked by things that the people living there have gotten used to? Now we have been horrified by the American habit of lynching. Cowardly, you’ll admit; subversive of all law and barbarous?”

“Oh yes,” said T. R., “that’s only natural. Now, for instance, I am always shocked, when I land in England, at your habit of knocking down your womenfolk and kicking them in the stomach. Subversive of all law, cowardly you’ll admit—”

“Of course, that happens only among the lower classes,” replied the young man, laughing mightily.

Roosevelt then showed all his teeth in a grin and said, “Well, I don’t think you boys will be asked to meet any lynchers at dinner.”

Literature and the stage meet in The Players, but the stage generally gets the better of it. Brander Matthews was talking to me once about a play by him and Bronson Howard that was to open shortly. I asked him about its possibilities. “Oh,” he said, “if it goes it will be called another of Bronson’s successes, but if not it will be just another failure of mine.”

Tarkington was one of the successful writer-playwrights even in those days. He is one of the few who have borne out their early promise, a man if there ever was one, with a joy of life that is abounding and a tremendous interest in his fellow beings, however humble. This natural curiosity about life and living seems to me a necessity for anyone who is to do big work in the world. He was modest about his writing. I went with him to the first night of Richard Mansfield in “Monsieur Beaucaire.” We were in tweeds and sat up in the “nigger heaven.” On the stairs I said, “I suppose you dramatized this?”

“Oh no,” he answered, “Mansfield found a coat of mine he liked the looks of and I cut it over to fit him.”

Tark. thinks so artistically and so cleverly. Here is a quotation from a letter written to me in 1914. He tells about Arnold Bennett criticizing the writing of a well-known author as being “too adult,” then goes on to say:

“Adults make everybody uncomfortable; they want to. Most of the surprises saved for the startling tags of stories by Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry are merely little bursts of naturalness—some boyish thing. We recognize the truth of them at sight—and are surprised for the reason that a boy or an artist always catches us off our guard.”

There was a galaxy of playwrights, among them Bronson Howard and Clyde Fitch, now gone as is that dear, kindly, clever man, William Dean Howells—one ever to be missed. I dined somewhere beside a charming girl, and the conversation drifted to the usual topic—marriage. I noticed across the table, just opposite me, the head of Mr. Howells twisting to right and left and trying to follow our talk, so I said rather maliciously:

“One of our cleverest writers has said, ‘Man, even after eighteen hundred years of Christianity, is only imperfectly monogamous.’”

Applause from across the table. “Oh, that is fine, Simmons! Do you remember who said it?”

“Why, I found it in a book I have just been reading, called Indian Summer.”

He suddenly drew back behind the flowers. “Oh, really!”

A few days afterward a short figure crowded up to me in the elevator of a large building with an: “Oh, Simmons, I looked that up. I did say it.”

Kipling was not a member of The Players, on account of his book about the United States. He was not well known when he first came here, and no one was prophet enough to guess that he was to become the greatest name in English of his time. Many of the older men would not “stand for” his criticism of America. I heard old Edward Bell burst forth to Edwin Booth:

“If that cussed young Englishman ever comes into this club, I’ll boot him out of it.”

“Yes,” said Booth, and immediately left for his own room, as he always did if anything seriously disturbed him.

In spite of these prejudices, Kipling was a visitor and became a friend to many of the members. I met him very casually, but admired him greatly, thinking his comments upon us a little harsh, but quite fair in many ways. His classification of England, France, and America to Brander Matthews is interesting. England he claimed, would die for liberty, but had a poor idea of equality; France would die for equality, but was hazy about fraternity; the United States was hazy about both liberty and equality, but went in heart and soul for fraternity; and that was why they would pay five cents to stand up in a street car when others sit down for the same price.

Zogbaum, the artist, once took Kipling over to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to meet Commander Evans, known as “Fighting Bob.” He told me that they at once squatted down together and began to “swap” stories, nor did they do anything else until it was time for Kipling to go. He was silent on the ferryboat coming home, and upon landing in New York asked for the nearest bookseller, where he bought a copy of his own Seven Seas. Borrowing a pencil from Zogbaum, he sat in the shop and wrote for some time, then handing the book to the clerk, he asked him to mail it to Evans at the Navy Yard. That is the way we got the poem, “Zogbaum looks after his pencil and I look after my style.”

Edwin Booth was the spirit and controlling force of The Players when I joined. It was his home and he lent an atmosphere of good breeding and repose that has endured to the present day. I was made a member in ’91 and had the honor of seeing quite a bit of him before his death. His memory for names was already going, and almost every day after breakfast, when he and I would be sitting together in the reading room with the morning papers, he would suddenly look over his newspaper at me in a quizzical manner and say:

“Pardon me, sir, but you remind me forcibly of a family of dear friends of mine the—the—the—actor-painter people—the—”

“The Forbes-Robertsons?” I would suggest.

“Yes, the Forbes-Robertsons. Have you ever been mistaken for them?”

“Oh yes, several times in London,” I would reply. And, the ice so broken, we would talk of all sorts of matters.

One of the most amusing stories told me by Mr. Booth was about a skull, which, by the way, is one of the relics of The Players to-day. A woman in St. Louis wrote to Booth’s father and told him she was the widow of a friend of his who was hanged for murder. She asked permission to send the skull to the actor, suggesting that he use it in “Hamlet”—“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio!” Booth’s father respectfully but disgustedly declined. But the woman was not to be so easily put off. Young Edwin Booth happened to be in St. Louis years later, when he received a letter from the same woman, offering to the son the present the father had refused. The property skull happened to be in pretty bad condition at that time, and as he had no sentiment about it, he replied that he should like to own it. Then Booth said:

“I was in bed one morning when a little nigger boy called to see me. He had a covered basket on his arm. I was curious to see what it contained, so asked him to open it up. Placing the basket on the table, he removed the top and a napkin which was underneath. Before I knew it, basket, cover, napkin flew up in the air, and the most frightened nigger you ever saw was flying down the passageway, while on the floor lay a skull.”

Skied at the top of the staircase and as much out of sight as possible is a horrible portrait, larger than life size, of a well-known actress which was once presented to The Players by some of her relatives. Booth told me that on one Ladies’ Day he suddenly saw these same relatives coming up the stairs.

“I was between them and the portrait,” he said, “and I succeeded in keeping them from seeing it. Never in my life have I attempted to hold an audience as I tried to hold them. I am certain that they saw nothing but Edwin Booth until I had turned them around and backed them down the stairway again.”

In connecting me with the Forbes-Robertson family Mr. Booth’s thoughts would often wander to painting and he once told me how Sargent did the portrait which hangs in the club. As I remember, he sat for it in several places until one day Sargent asked him to have a look at it and say what he thought. Booth was loath to give an opinion, saying it was not to be his, anyway, and he was not the one to be suited. But Sargent pressed him until he said, “No, to be frank, I do not think it is a characteristic expression of mine.”

“Are you very tired?” asked the painter.

“No.”

“Then again, if you will.”

“That time,” said Booth, “I did get tired. He must have kept me standing an hour. What did he do? Why, he began by scraping out the entire head, then rubbed in some blackish stuff and painted that,” pointing to the portrait.

Sargent must have done that wonderful head premier coup in less than an hour!

When I look at the mouth in this picture, I am reminded of what physiognomists say, that it is the indication of our true character more than any other part of the face. Compare the young and old photographs of Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Booth, and you will see that it is within the power of anyone (no matter how plain at birth) to have at least one beautiful feature before he dies. One may not change the setting of the eyeball—because it is dependent upon bone, which cannot be altered. The setting of the eye is what gives the beauty. Those of Christine Nilsson, the singer, appeared on the stage as dark, luminous patches of velvet, for the socket cast a deep shadow; but when I met her personally, they were pale blue and ineffectual. It is the same with the nose.

But the mouth has no bones. It is merely flesh under the control of many muscles. Surgeons tell me that if one opens the cheek of a man who has lived an intellectual life, it is surprising how many muscles one finds. On the other hand, the cheek of an ignorant laborer does not contain much more than a muscle for chewing, for opening and shutting the mouth, and for grinning and frowning. The muscles that give irony, humor, and sadness are not there.

One of the prominent men in America, who has a beautiful mouth, has told me that when he was a boy his family objected so to it as an unsightly thing and that for many years he had the habit of covering it with his hand whenever he expressed himself, for fear of comment. The change has been within the man himself and the mouth has echoed it.

One may train a plain mouth to express the beauty of the human mind which controls it. Mr. Emerson had a hole in his face as a boy, not a mouth. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the plainest man that ever lived, had a sweet, tender, one might say almost beautiful mouth, before he died. At any actors’ gathering, one can see a dozen mouths like Booth’s at twenty-five, but you will hunt a long time before finding the mouth Booth died with.

The delicacy shown in a study of Edwin Booth’s face was borne out in his life. He did the most dignified thing in the world, to apologize for an act of his family against the American nation, by retiring for a period from public life after the assassination of Lincoln.

He was a man who felt keenly, both mentally and physically. He hated to be touched by anyone and loathed to be buttonholed. I remember a well-known writer of fiction, who had the extraordinary capacity for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, eagerly presenting Mr. Booth with a playbill of the performance of the night at Ford’s Theater. He simply arose and went to bed, as he always did on such occasions. Something of the same kind happened quite by accident when Booth was visiting at Nutley, the home of Laurence Hutton, secretary of The Players and an old friend of the actor’s. Booth had retired for the night, when Hutton remembered with horror that at the foot of the bed and in full view upon the wall was one of those same playbills. He knew that if Booth saw it he would pack his bag and silently depart. What to do he did not know. Finally, waiting until he hoped Booth was asleep, he stole upstairs, crept into the room, and carried off the bill.

This sensitiveness about his family was not due entirely to the unfortunate occurrence of Lincoln’s assassination, for it was shown in various ways. One evening a man, who had become a member of The Players by presenting the club with a second folio of Shakespeare, brought a friend in as a guest and presented him to Mr. Booth.

“Why, Mr. Booth,” were the friend’s first words, “I saw your father play. I was in the theater in St. Louis when, as Hamlet, he drove Laertes off the stage and out into the alleyway.”

I saw Booth’s eyes grow dark and ominous, and, rising, he said:

“Sir, I do not doubt that you think you saw that, but of course you did not. That incident never took place. It has been told to me as having happened in four or five different cities in this Union. Good night, sir.” And he was off to bed.

Booth was a superman and showed it in many ways, but there is just one incident which he told me, himself, that proves him one in my eyes. When I see another man’s mind working, I compare it with my own, and when I see that mind doing things that my own could never do, I realize there are grades of mentality that I do not understand and cannot reach; so I bow down and worship. I do not remember how the subject of religion ever arose between us, but he said that the Booths had always been superstitious folk and that he himself had at one time been almost a convinced spiritualist. Having made up his mind on the subject, he was talking to his friend Kellar, the magician. Kellar explained to him how all the wonderful miracles were worked at the seances and then performed before Booth’s very eyes, tricks more wonderful than any he had seen done in the spiritualistic meetings. All of these Kellar explained also.

“Then,” said Mr. Booth, “Kellar performed some miracles that surpassed all of those that had gone before. I asked him how he did them. ‘Mr. Booth,’ he said, ‘I could show you with ease, but these are professional secrets and my own personal property, the explanations of which I must divulge to none!’ On reflection, I decided that my former belief in such matters was harmful to my mind and I gave it up.”

I can understand, if I had the will power, giving up any physical habit which I might feel was doing my body harm, but to have a mental disease, realize it, and cure it, is to me almost inconceivable.

Booth was seemingly of a serene nature, but he was introspective, and underneath that outward calm must have been a deep passion and sense of his own being. He told me that he never stepped upon the stage for a first night that his knees did not knock together horribly, but once before the footlights, he forgot himself entirely. His sense of humor was deep, and although he was always the quiet one of the group, he was probably the most appreciative of a funny story or a witty remark. Even when he lay in bed with his last illness his thoughts were upon these things, for he was much disturbed because he could not remember the point of a clever story he had heard.

For quite a while he had been failing. His legs had been giving out, so that he used the little trunk elevator to go up to his room; then he slowly grew feebler and feebler. I don’t doubt he suffered, but he never let us know it, and his death was merely a gentle going away. I remember the doctor coming downstairs and saying that he had just closed the eyes of a man more than seventy years old. Mr. Booth had crowded into fifty-nine years of life the experiences of an old man.

The Players is changed to-day. Of course, all old things must give way to new; but there is a certain fine sentiment that remains. Perhaps the young man does not appreciate the ideas upon which the club was founded and the traditions which have kept it together, but something of the old spirit is bound to be communicated to him on Pipe Nights or Founders’ Night, or on those occasions when old Joe Holland is brought up in his big armchair. Then all gather around, a fire blazes in the great fireplace, Mr. Booth’s eyes gaze down serenely from the wall above, and each one vies with his neighbor in handing a drink or a smoke to Joe, or telling him the latest story. Then will come in some wit or jester of the gang, and jokes will be told that are as old as the hills, but ever new. There is always a visitor or recent member to be delighted at the old gag when Harry Dixey goes up to Joe and says:

“Lend me five dollars, Joe.”

“Go around to my good ear, Harry.”

With great ceremony, Harry will walk around.

“Lend me ten dollars, Joe.”

“Go back to my five-dollar ear, Harry.”