DANCED ON CHURCH STEPS.
Front of a Negro Place of Worship Was the Scene of Henry E. Dixey’s Preparation for the Stage.
“The steps of a colored church near where I lived was my practise-ground, and I was on the stage when I was eight.”
Thus spoke Henry E. Dixey, in his dressing-room at the Lyric, between the acts of “The Man on the Box,” in response to my question about his start in his stage career—a career that stands out more remarkably than the majority. After achieving a reputation in a burlesque with which his name became so closely identified that it was often used interchangeably with his own, he went into Daly’s theater and played Malvolio in “Twelfth Night,” in a fashion to cover himself with glory. He has scored high in the Gilbert & Sullivan operas, and is now a successful star in high-class comedy.
Dixey’s real name is Dixon. He was born in Boston on January 6, 1859. His parents had no connection with the theater, and had no idea that Harry’s predilection for dancing was going to lead him there. When very young he helped eke out the family income by becoming a cashboy in a dry-goods store but he wasn’t a shining success at it. The part he liked best was being sent on errands, which gave him an opportunity to collect cronies about him and practise fancy steps on his improvised stage in front of the African meeting-house, as aforesaid.
Failed to Serve Two Masters.
It didn’t take the dry-goods people long to “get on” to the idiosyncrasies of their youthful employee, and in due course he lost his job and was cooling his heels all day long on the sidewalk, most of the time in the vicinity of the stage-door of the Howard Athenæum, then under the management of the late John Stetson.
When Stetson was putting on “Under the Gaslight,” he needed a street urchin, so he decided to give the little Dixon chap a chance to show what he could do. The child introduced a song and dance, made an instantaneous hit, and thus started on his career. His part was called Peanuts, and he was retained at the Howard for small bits with James S. Maffit and his partner, Bartholomew, in their pantomime work.
How he managed to pick up an education, with his head full of the stage, is difficult to determine; but one has only to talk with Mr. Dixey to know him for a man of keen intelligence and common sense. But his parents continued to keep him under their eye in Boston until after “Evangeline” was produced. Here he encountered his old friend, James S. Maffit, again, as the Lone Fisherman. Crane was in the cast, too, doing Le Blanc, the notary. Dixey was the forelegs of the famous Heifer, the hind ones submitting to the direction of Richard Golden. But during the tour of the famous piece Dixey did very many of the other parts in the burlesque.
In the course of the early eighties John Stetson extended his field of operations to New York, and set up a stock company at the Fifth Avenue Theater. Dixey, as one of its leading members, created Christopher Blizzard in “Confusion.”
“Adonis” and Its Successors.
In New York he fell in with William F. Gill. Dixey had some of the ideas for “Adonis.” Gill had more, and put them together in the shape of a burlesque. They tried to get Dixey’s old friend and first manager, Stetson, to bring it out at the Boston Globe. But he got cold feet on the proposition, declaring that it was too expensive to mount. Rice took it in hand, and after he had demonstrated the thing to be a success Stetson wanted an interest in it, in exchange for which he was willing to plank down twenty thousand dollars, but it was then too late.
“Adonis” ran at the Bijou in New York for more than three hundred nights, and was afterward done in London.
“The Seven Ages,” built on the same lines, was a frightful frost, if a thing can be said to be so when done in a temperature of one hundred and three degrees, which Mr. Dixey avers the thermometer registered at the old Standard in the early—and last—nights of the piece.
After “The Seven Ages”—Daly’s for Dixey, and in this connection I want to quote from an interview the actor gave to a writer for the New York Dramatic Mirror some ten years ago.
“Do you know,” he said, “that I really was the first Svengali on the stage? In ‘The Tragedy Rehearsed’ I introduced a little Trilby burlesque, where Miss Rehan was hypnotized into singing ‘Ben Bolt.’ That was the very earliest stage use of Miss O’Ferrall.
“Afterward I went to Augustin Daly and proposed that he should dramatize ‘Trilby,’ have Miss Rehan play the character, and let me do Svengali. It would have revolutionized things at Daly’s. But he pooh-poohed me, and wouldn’t listen to the idea. Instead, he put on ‘A Bundle of Lies,’ where I had a fifteen-line part. The play was a fearful frost.”
Takes Dark View of Future.
Just previous to the death of Stuart Robson, Dixey made a big success as David Garrick in the play “Oliver Goldsmith,” which Augustus Thomas wrote for Robson; then, by way of striking variety, Dixey went to London in a Casino review, “The Whirl of the Town,” which failed to please England.
A few years later, when Charles Frohman imported Barrie’s “Little Mary” to the Empire, puzzling New York by the play written around the stomach, Dixey was the Earl of Carlton.
Dixey, by the by, does not believe in stock companies, and is rather pessimistic as to the future of our stage, in the way of the supply of actors.
“Where are they coming from?” he said to me the other night, in the course of his chat about his own start in the business. “What training do they get under the present system to fit them for any work out of a set groove into which chance and the powers that be happen to drop them? Suppose, for example, you are a young man who has done good work in amateur theatricals, and with a ‘pull’ in the shape of a letter of introduction to a big New York manager. You are also straight and tall and would make a presentable appearance on the stage.
“Well, you have your interview with the big manager of to-day. He looks you over, presses a button, and to the obsequious underling who answers the summons, he says: ‘Put this gentleman in the juvenile part in Number Three company of “Mrs. Prettytoes’ Shoestrings.”’
“You are elated at first at getting a job, but you find later on that ‘Mrs. Prettytoes’ Shoestrings’ has long since exhausted its drawing powers in the big cities, and is billed for six months through the one-night stands of Texas and Arkansas. You play the same part for all that period, and the next season maybe you will receive a rôle exactly on the same lines when, if you are lucky, week stands may replace the single night stops.
Where Are Actors to Come From?
“And so it goes. Because you look the character you are assigned to it, and you never have an opportunity to show what you can do in the way of versatility, and consequently you never grow. Again I repeat, Where are the big actors in the next generation to come from?
“How about the stars of to-day? Were they not nearly all of them shining marks twenty years ago, having been cultivated under the old order of things? The only show a man has nowadays outside of the few cheap stock companies, to play more than one part a season, is when the first play put out fails.
“How different this was around Civil War times, when your star traveled from town to town and the companies in the various theaters were obliged to be up in the various plays he put out? Our cities were so small then that the same people had to be counted on to support a week’s engagement, so the bill had to be changed nightly. Twenty years from now I wonder who will be the stars, how many of them there will be, and—save the mark!—to what artistic merit will they attain?”
In a sense Mr. Dixey is himself a victim of the system he deplores. His season in “The Man on the Box” having been so successful, his manager has secured the dramatic rights to Cyrus Townsend Brady’s novel. “Richard the Brazen,” which will give Dixey a part on very similar lines to the conscienceless Lieutenant Worburton he enacts in the Harold MacGrath story.