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.
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.”
Of these plays of the interregnum it is curiously true that those least entitled to serious consideration as drama, Barbara Frietchie and When Knighthood Was in Flower, were the most successful in advancing Miss Marlowe to the heights of popularity. Colinette—which was adapted from a French play—and The Countess Valeska—from the German—were both justified as skillfully written romantic dramas, of much strength and charm, if not of permanent value. Barbara Frietchie and When Knighthood Was in Flower, however, were highly artificial, thin, pseudo-historical dramas, one dealing with the heroine of Whittier’s poem—the play was by the prolific Clyde Fitch—and the other a fictional episode in the life of Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Miss Marlowe’s sincerest admirers deeply regretted the time and energy she spent, year after year, on these and like plays; but they often asserted that her acting transformed and beautified the material with which she worked. As Colinette, according to Mr. Winter, she “gave a performance of singular flexibility and of exceptionally artistic grace, such as not only pleases while passing but leaves in the memory an ideal of noble and lovable womanhood,”—strong and partial words, but indicative of the glamour Miss Marlowe has thrown over inferior plays. “Her utterance of Barbara’s appeal to her father for her wounded lover’s life,” says Mr. Winter of her acting in Mr. Fitch’s play, “was spoken with exquisite beauty, and her expression of the frenzy of grief, on finding him dead, reached as great a height as is possible to spoken pathos.”
As for When Knighthood Was in Flower, an English critic later said: “There is a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool’s fabric of the melodrama, which set her far above our steady practitioners in the same act of sinking. And, above all, a sense of parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She was a live thing; defiantly and gayly conscious of every absurdity with which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.”
All this playing in popular pieces of the day involved a certain amount of additional training for the work that was to come,—the third and last period of Marlowe’s work,—the ten years during which she and Edward Sothern were “joint stars.” She brought to her new work a variously experienced, thoroughly disciplined art.
It sent something like a thrill through that large part of the public interested in the theatre, when it was announced, in the summer of 1904, that Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern were to act together in Shakespeare. It was felt that the actress was again coming into her own.[192]
Some of her parts with Mr. Sothern were but revivifications of heroines of her early career: Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, Rosalind; others she attempted for the first time during one or another of these years from 1904 to 1914: Ophelia, Katherine the Shrew, Lady Macbeth, and, at the inauguration of the ill-fated New Theatre in New York, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra.
The American public, whatever its expectations in 1904, has since come to take a rather complacent view of its privilege in seeing Miss Marlowe and Mr. Sothern act Shakespeare together. They have been financially extremely successful. Several other attempts during this period to popularize Shakespeare in America (and some of them were “produced” and acted in a manner to make them fit rivals) have struggled through brief and only moderately well supported existences; while Sothern and Marlowe have gone on for the best part of ten years, drawing crowded houses. Yet many an old time playgoer, who has followed Julia Marlowe’s career since its beginnings, will tell you that nothing she has done since has quite equaled, in the combined appeal of its fresh youth, its varied beauty, and its unforced poetic moods, the acting of the Julia Marlowe of early days.
The summer of 1906 Miss Marlowe spent—as she has many others—in Europe. One of the places she visited was the birthplace of Jeanne d’Arc, for she was contemplating the production of Percy MacKaye’s play concerning the Maid. When she returned to America, she and Mr. Sothern dissolved their association with the Frohman side of the theatrical house, and went over to the Shuberts. There followed the production of a group of plays new to her experience, John the Baptist, by Sudermann, in which she played Salome, The Sunken Bell, by Hauptmann, a piece retained from Mr. Sothern’s earlier repertoire, and Jeanne d’Arc.
It was with the last two plays, and with Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, As You Like It, When Knighthood Was in Flower, and Twelfth Night, that Miss Marlowe ventured for the first time to appear in London, in the spring of 1907. The success of the Sothern and Marlowe engagement at the Waldorf Theatre hung at first in the balance, for the first play presented was The Sunken Bell, which failed to appeal to London. As for Miss Marlowe as Rautendelein, she was dismissed by Mr. Walkley in The Times as showing the grace and elfishness and charm of the character; “but she was not,” he continued, “exactly a frisky fairy.”
The tide turned with Miss Marlowe’s Viola, and, somewhat to the surprise of his followers at home, with Mr. Sothern’s Hamlet, which was hailed as a distinguished achievement.
One English writer, Arthur Symons, quite lost his head in admiration of the American visitors. “We have not in our whole island,” he wrote, “two actors capable of giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an interpretation of Shakespeare, or indeed of rendering any form of poetic drama on the stage.” Beerbohm Tree gave them a supper at His Majesty’s; Mr. Asquith was there, a prince or two, and, more to the point, a representative group of England’s stage workers. “There is danger,” said The Evening Standard when she played Viola, “of our all becoming Marlowe worshipers if she goes on like this.”[193]
Though the London critics appraised Mr. Sothern’s Hamlet higher than American reviewers ever did, and though the newspaper comment on each play was favorable, except on The Sunken Bell and When Knighthood Was in Flower, the London public did not attend in great numbers.
Still, the English tour may be said to mark the apex of the career of both artists. When they returned home each was for a time again an independent “star.” When the ambitiously planned New Theatre, in New York, opened its doors for what was fondly hoped would be the dawn of a new era in the American theatre, Miss Marlowe and Mr. Sothern were the leading members of a cast assembled to perform Antony and Cleopatra. The production pleased neither public nor critics, and it cannot be said that Miss Marlowe will be remembered chiefly for her Cleopatra. Since then “Sothern and Marlowe” have again carried Shakespeare up and down the country.
Why is it that the public, loyal as it has been to them, has taken their untiring campaign in fostering the Shakespeare tradition so much as a matter of course? Perhaps it is because nearly everyone speaking English now takes Shakespeare himself as a matter of course, to be accepted, like starlight and the blessings of a free government, with unenthusiastic complacence, and because Miss Marlowe herself is so utterly Shakespearean. For everything she has done has had a Shakespearean tinge. “She was so infinitely more charming [as Mary Tudor] than the play justified her in being,” someone once wrote. “She looked exactly as she would have looked had the play been Shakespeare’s.”
“Those of us who saw her as the Queen Fiametta remember well how incongruously like Hermione she looked and was. When Miss Marlowe played Colombe in Colombe’s Birthday she seemed to forget that she wasn’t playing Rosalind. And even in Mr. Esmond’s distinctly modern drama, Fools of Nature, Miss Marlowe to more than one spectator suggested the England of Shakespeare’s day oftener than the England of to-day.”[194] As for Shakespeare’s plays themselves: Her Viola, both of the early days and of the later period, was so lovely an embodiment of the poet’s ideal that he himself would have been satisfied with it; her Juliet, her Beatrice, her Rosalind, all in more or less degree, were filled with the peculiarly Shakespearean spirit, the radiant sweetness and vitality of his women.
There is abroad among the theatregoers of America a peculiar, almost personal affection for Miss Marlowe, which is not inconsistent with the complacent feeling of which we have spoken. There is about Marlowe none of the overpowering sense of riding the whirlwind that has accompanied Bernhardt in her royal progresses about the planet; she has none of the picturesque ebullience of a Terry, nor even the specialized appeal of Maude Adams. She has been a happy “combination of the poetically ideal and the humanly real” that wins, for a beautiful and skillful actress, a position in the popular heart, even if it does not take her, because of more or less extraneous characteristics, into the front rank of “personages.”
Miss Marlowe, in her quoted utterances, has occasionally thrown light on her attitude toward her own work and toward her profession:
“I wish they wouldn’t confound me so much with the parts I play and imagine I must be playing my own emotions because I give the part I am playing an air of reality.”
“It isn’t the rewards that one works for;[195] we work because we have to, because we can’t stop. Except for a shallow or vain nature there is nothing in the rewards of this profession commensurate with its pains; but in the very labor of it there’s joy, if you’re born to know it, that nothing else can approximate for you.”
Those who have known Miss Marlowe in her own person say that the simplicity and the good taste observable in her work as an actress find a counterpart in her life off the stage. The home she maintained for years at Highmount in the Catskills was a quiet retreat where she enjoyed the outdoors, her books, and the society of a group of friends, most of whom were not personages known to the theatergoing public. Her liking for books, which is said to be keen, induced her not only to carry about on her travels hundreds of volumes, but at one time to take up seriously the study of the mysteries of bookbinding. One summer she spent in Germany, taking lessons in that craft, and in her library are a number of volumes, illuminated and bound by her own hands. She sings a little, plays the piano well, and has a well-grounded musical knowledge. Unlike many another successful actress—Mary Anderson, for instance—she retained her early strong love for her profession.
“The rarest quality of Miss Marlowe’s art,” says Elizabeth McCracken, one of Miss Marlowe’s closest friends, with what is probably true insight, “is its lovely youthfulness. Her mirth is utterly young; at its gayest, it is tinged by a certain wistful gravity. Her woe is young, too; at its saddest, no drop of bitterness stains it. Children instinctively accept her as a kindred spirit, someone not so different from themselves as most grown-ups.”
Add to this engaging youthfulness—another name, perhaps, for her sense of poetry—her dark and buoyant beauty, her rich voice that lent its own music to Shakespeare’s, and you have Julia Marlowe, not a genius, certainly, but one of America’s gracious women, who has brought beauty in many forms to the American stage in a period when, but for her, it had been sadly lacking.