MISS ADAMS'S INFANT ROLE.
Irritated by the Complaints of a Comedian,
Her Thespian Mother Offered Her as
a Substitute for a Property Baby.
The man who is responsible for Maude Adams's first appearance on the stage is now the prosperous proprietor of a wholesale liquor store in Salt Lake City. A jolly Englishman, his name is Phil Margetts, and at that time he was an actor, the popular comedian of the Salt Lake Theater, the biggest playhouse west of the Rockies, under the favored patronage of Brigham Young.
It was back in 1873, and Annie Adams was leading woman in the stock company maintained there. The daughter of one of the Utah pioneers, she had gone on the stage some eight years previous, and had not allowed her marriage to a business man, one James Kiskadden, to interfere with her career.
Maude was born on November 11, 1872, and as the family lived very close to the theater the child was practically brought up in the very odor of Thespianism.
On one occasion, according to John S. Lindsay in "The Mormons and the Theater," the regular bill of the evening was followed by the usual farce intended to send the people home in good humor. It was called "The Lost Child," and in it Margetts was cast for the father of the strayed or stolen infant. At the eleventh hour the comedian discovered to his disgust that he was expected to carry on the stage and fondle a rag doll instead of the real thing.
"But I thought you were going to provide me with a flesh-and-blood baby," he indignantly demanded of Millard, the property man.
"I tried to, Phil," replied this long-suffering individual, "but, honest, I couldn't get one. Nobody wanted to let her baby out of her arms, even for a minute."
"Ye gods!" exclaimed Margetts. "Not a baby to be had in the Mormon capital!"
Time was pressing, and he appealed to Mr. Caine, the stage manager. The two were still wrangling over the matter when Mrs. Kiskadden almost literally threw nine-months-old Maude into the breach.
It was in San Francisco, some five years later, that the little girl "walked" on for the first time. This was with J.K. Emmet, in the old Bush Street Theater, as Little Schneider in one of his "Fritz" plays. Her mother was a member of the company, but her father did not altogether approve of Maude's histrionic attempts. They were speaking of the matter at the dinner-table one day, and Mr. Kiskadden remarked to his wife:
"I won't have the child making a fool of herself."
Whereupon Maude, whom they had both supposed to be too busy with her knife and fork to be paying any attention to the talk, broke in with:
"I'll not make a fool of myself, papa."
She had her way, and continued to act at intervals in companies where her mother was employed, until she was sent to school, which she left to take up her career again around 1888, when she was in her middle 'teens.
One of her child engagements in San Francisco found her in a play called "Chums," at the Baldwin. This was the work of David Belasco, who had risen at the theater from call-boy to stage manager and dramatist. The piece, which afterward became famous under the name "Hearts of Oak," had in its cast at the time James O'Neill, Lewis Morrison, and James A. Herne. Belasco called the heroine Chrystal (a name used later by Herne for his own daughter, now leading woman with Arnold Daly), and Maude Adams was little Chrystal.
Miss Adams passed from schoolgirl to school mistress in a play, Hoyt's "A Midnight Bell," which was a great success at the Bijou Theater in New York. Here Charles Frohman saw her work, and liked it so much that he engaged her for the ingénue in his first stock company, then lodged at Proctor's Twenty-Third Street Theater.
This was in the autumn of 1890, and Miss Adams's first appearance under the Frohman régime was made in William Gillette's comedy-farce, "All the Comforts of Home," in which she was cast as Evangeline Bender, daughter of a retired produce dealer. Henry Miller led the list of players, which was facetiously headed "Who's In It?"
The same jocose spirit prompted the further elucidations of the details in the evening's entertainment on the house bill in this wise:
WHERE IS IT?
Drawing-room of a private house in London.
WHEN IS IT?
Now.
WHAT TIME IS IT?
Act 1. A morning.
Act 2. A few mornings later.
Act 3. Another morning.
Act 4. The same morning.
(Good morning.)