MAUDE ADAMS
To say that she is the most valuable piece of theatrical property in the country is a brutally commercial way to speak of an artist; but that is the familiar and true, if one-sided, estimate of Maude Adams. From a small career, notable in its way, as a child actress, through a girlhood that had its struggles and trials, to an early share of success and then to an amazing degree of affectionate popularity, a popularity far exceeding that of greater artists, has been her record. The mere announcement of her name, without respect to the play she is acting, is enough to fill any theatre in the United States. Her popularity is such that it amounts almost to an unreasoning worship. One can safely say that, among the women, at least, of America there is an unorganized Maude Adams cult. And whatever the lack of proportion between this adulation and the intrinsic artistic worth of her achievements, it cannot be said that Miss Adams’ popularity has been unfairly won. She has let her acting—whatever its limitations—and her variously expressed ambitions speak for themselves, without Bernhardtian advertising. The public knows her not at all except as it sees her across the footlights. She is one of the dignified women of the theatre.
MAUDE ADAMS
Her mother, Annie Adams, an actress well known to the passing generation of playgoers, was descended collaterally from the Presidential Adamses of Massachusetts. James Kiskadden, the father of Maude Adams, “a man of handsome masculinity,” at the time of his daughter’s birth had come out of the Middle West to practice in Salt Lake City his business of banking.[196] Annie Adams has been better known as the mother of Maude Adams than as an actress in her own right; nevertheless she has had a long career as a capable actress. When Maude was born in Salt Lake City, on November 11, 1872, her mother was a member of the local stock company.
The public had not long to wait for its first glimpse of Maude Adams. When she was nine months old she was taken one night to the theatre where her mother was playing. According to the custom of the day, the evening’s entertainment ended with a short farce, this time The Lost Child. In this piece a baby is carried on and off the stage several times, to be finally carried in on a platter and set down before its distracted father. The baby used on this occasion was only a month or so old, and, as might have been expected, it began to howl lustily in the midst of its travels about the stage. Just at this moment Mrs. Adams, who was not playing in the second piece, was about to leave the theatre, when the stage manager caught sight of little Maude. Miss Adams’ début took place instantly, for she was placed on the platter and rushed onto the stage in place of the howling child. As the latter was some eight months the younger, the audience was treated to the unusual spectacle of seeing a child take on twenty pounds in a few minutes.
After a while the family moved to San Francisco. From time to time the little Maude appeared on the stage, although for the most part she lived the life of the ordinary child. Her glimpses of the life of the stage were probably more than enough, however, to “bend the twig.” Once her mother was supporting J. K. Emmett in Fritz in Ireland. Mr. Emmet had seen Maude and wished to have her play a child’s rôle in this piece. Her father at first demurred, as Maude was only five. The child was eager to take the part, however, and was finally allowed to do so.
After another interval of dolls and books, she played, when about six, the child in A Celebrated Case. She learned her small part so well that she had ample leisure to memorize most of the rest of the play. One man in the company, it is said, was often in her debt for swift and accurate prompting.
The rest of her childhood was divided between school—the Presbyterian School for Girls in Salt Lake City—and occasional appearances on the stage. Her mother insisted on the schooling, and Maude was bright enough at her studies. But one cannot wonder that the life of the stage had already enthralled the little girl. At any rate she left her books on occasion, to play such parts as Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Paul in The Octoroon, and Oliver Twist.
“Little Maudie Adams” came to be the first choice for children’s parts in the best companies playing along the Pacific coast. One who saw much of her in those days, and who took pains to give her much undoubtedly valuable instruction, was David Belasco. “I was the stage manager of the Baldwin[197] then,” said Mr. Belasco. “James A. Herne and I were playing there together, and in our plays there was usually a child’s part. Annie Adams I had known for some years as one of the best character actresses of the West, but my first remembrance of Maude Adams is of a spindle-legged little girl, unusually thin and tall for her age, with a funny little pigtail and one of the quaintest little faces you ever saw. I don’t think even her mother considered Maudie pretty in those days. But even in her babyhood there was a magnetism about the child,—some traces of that wonderfully sweet and charming personality which was to prove such a tremendous advantage to her in the later years.... She could act and grasp the meaning of a part long before she was able to read. When we were beginning rehearsals of a new play I would take Maudie on my knee and bit by bit would explain to her the meaning of the part she had to play. I can see her now, with her little spindle legs almost touching the floor, her tiny face, none too clean, perhaps, peering up into mine, and those wise eyes of hers drinking in every word. I soon learned to know that it was no use to confine myself to a description of her own work: until I had told the whole story of the play to Maudie, and treated her almost as seriously as if she were our leading ‘star,’ she would pay no attention. She was serious-minded in her own childish way even in those days, and once she realized that you were treating her seriously there was nothing that child would not try to do.”[198]
One of “Little Maudie’s” successes at this time was in Chums, which Mr. Belasco had adapted from an old English play The Mariner’s Compass. Mr. Herne, who played in it at the time, later made and acted in another version, The Hearts of Oak. The character Crystal (for whom Mr. Heme undoubtedly named his daughter) occurs in both versions. “From the time Maude Adams created the rôle,” says Mr. Belasco, “it became one of the most vital parts of the play. Chums, in short, scored an immense success, and ‘Little Maudie’ for time being was the heroine of the town.”
Mrs. Adams had seen to it that Maude received more of the ordinary schooling than sometimes falls to the lot of a child actress. When she was thirteen, however, her schooling was called complete. The girl had had her taste of success and during her term at school had dreamed of returning to the stage. She told her mother: “It’s no use my studying any more, mother.... I want to go on the stage again, so that I may be with you.” But when the attempt was made it proved to be not the easiest thing in the world. As a child actress of less than ten, she had found parts awaiting her. As a young girl in her middle teens, parts were much harder to find. She traveled about with her mother, getting an occasional small part, such as one of the old women in Harbor Lights, or the Princess in Monte Christo. In the meantime, she studied hard, absorbing her mother’s instructions and learning many rôles.
When Miss Adams was just under sixteen she and her mother crossed the country—in the caste of the melodrama, The Paymaster,—to try their fortunes in the Middle West and finally in New York. Although it is on record that she won “a great deal of praise for her simplicity and beauty,” one can see, in the account of her nightly “plunge into a tank of real water,”[199] a far cry to her later distinction as the interpreter of the subtleties of Barrie.
According to thrice-repeated tales, which her mother has recently taken occasion to deny, it was only after a discouraging period of waiting and of fruitless visits to managers, that Miss Adams got her first opportunity, when The Paymaster had run its course. A more tangible tradition is to the effect that while awaiting something better Miss Adams worked for a while as a ballet girl.[200] According to Mrs. Adams, Maude had not long been in New York when Daniel Frohman offered her a position in the company supporting E. H. Sothern. Virginia Harned took up the cause of the young actress, and introduced her to Mr. Sothern. “I must have been a strangely unattractive and unclassified creature at the time,” says Miss Adams, “too young for mature parts and too old for child impersonations. Miss Harned, who had played child parts with me, had succeeded in interesting Mr. Sothern in me and one great day I was invited to dine with them in a public restaurant. I am sure that I disgusted Mr. Sothern with my unconquerable bashfulness and awkwardness. Painfully diffident, I scarcely uttered a word during the whole of that dinner. Nonetheless I was soon afterward engaged to play in the Sothern company.”[201]
The engagement with Sothern was brief, however, like all that had gone before. Not until she was given the part of Dot Bradbury in Hoyt’s farce A Midnight Bell (in March 1889) did circumstances combine to give her a good part, a long engagement, and some public notice. Until now she was quite unknown to the public at large. But she played this part through the spring and all during the following season. Discerning playgoers, and a critic here and there, began to speak of her as one of the promising youngsters of the stage, and what was more important, she attracted the attention of Charles Frohman, who in the fall of 1890 was organizing a stock company for the Twenty-third Street Theatre. Mr. Frohman gave Miss Adams a place in this company, and from that day until his death—twenty-four years—she remained under his management.
Her first part with Mr. Frohman was a small one—Evangeline Bender in All the Comforts of Home. She gave it some distinction, however, and in her next part, in Men and Women, she was watched with interest. That Mr. Frohman’s choice of this new actress was unfortunate, was the opinion of many. She was small, thin, pale—quite the opposite of the accepted type of stage beauty; but she acted well enough, apparently, for soon she was playing Nell, the crippled girl in The Lost Paradise. The part called for one passage of heightened emotion,—“a fierce little bit of melodrama” that served to attract new notice to Miss Adams. “In an audience of seasoned first-nighters and blasé fashionables there were moist eyes and a surreptitious blowing of noses when Maude Adams gave rein to that tender pathos which is all her own,” says one witness. “This wan, hopeless figure peering wistfully from its shabby raincoat out upon a life she could neither know nor understand was a triumph of natural emotion simulated with superb restraint.” Mr. Frohman showed his new company not only to New York, but sent it on long tours throughout the country.
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.