Geegee, as he loved to call himself, was full of frolic. He could make light of anything. He made light of the awful play in which he appeared, which was written for the mistress of a millionaire. The author was given five thousand pounds to write a play and put it on the stage. The only condition was that the millionaire’s mistress should be on the stage the whole time, and have nothing to say.
He was once the cause of my seeing the finest piece of acting off the stage which I ever saw. One of our greatest living actors is always chaffed about his penchant for duchesses. Grossmith and I were having supper together by ourselves at his party at the Grafton Galleries. Presently we saw the great actor standing beside us, and Grossmith, without bothering about his being within earshot, said, “We’ll ask —— to sit down and have some supper with us; when he’s been there about two minutes, he’ll look at his watch, and say that he must leave us because he promised to be at the duchess’s in a quarter of an hour.”
The great man sat down and attacked a mayonnaise vigorously. Presently he looked at his watch, and made an elaborate and rather snobbish apology to Grossmith for having to leave, but he had promised the Duchess of ——d, etc., and all the time he was making it, trod on my foot till I nearly yelled. Then he got up and left us, pausing to speak to some one a few yards off to have the satisfaction of hearing Grossmith’s “There, didn’t I tell you!”
Fred Terry, the “manliest actor on the stage,” and his beautiful wife, Julia Neilson, used to come and see us sometimes. I met them first at Hayden Coffin’s, where she was filling the room and the garden with her glorious singing one summer dawn. When she rose from the piano, she made several vain efforts to get Terry away; he was telling Coffin, myself, and one or two others, some of his experiences. When she came back the third time, he said, “My wife always has a devil of a trouble to make me put on my dress-clothes, but when I have once got them on, I never want to go home.”
That night, a rather shy little man, very alert and intelligent-looking, had given us a recitation of his own which was so breathlessly witty, that the audience could not seize all the points. Coffin introduced him as “a very clever friend of mine, Mr. Huntley Wright,” and his name meant nothing to the audience. A year later they would have stood on the mantelpiece to get a better view of the king of musical comedians. Both he and his sister Haidée, that brilliant character-actress, used to come to Addison Mansions in those days. That the Coffins should do so was natural, because I had known Charles Hayden Coffin since he was a boy at school and I was a man at Oxford. He and his sisters and I and my sisters used to skate together at Lillie Bridge. His father was the leading American dentist of London, and Coffin himself was a dentist, or, at all events, in training for it, for several years. But he had such a glorious voice that it was inevitable that he should find his way to the musical stage, and have the longest reign on record as a jeune premier. He thrilled London with his “Queen of My Heart To-night.” He has deserved his success twice over—both on account of his singing, and for the way in which he has helped others; no one has done more for the beginners in his own profession, and for helping unknown composers of ability to get a hearing. There are many people quite famous now whom I heard before they were known to fame at all, at his charming cottage, that rus in urbe on Campden Hill, which has the same initials as himself—C. H. C., Campden Hill Cottage, Charles Hayden Coffin.
With Julia Neilson I should have mentioned her handsome cousin, Lily Hanbury, who was, till her premature death, one of the beauties of the London stage. She came often to us.
It is natural, in connection with her, to think of Constance Collier, now Mrs. Julian L’Estrange, who filled her place, and has gone so much farther, for she has not only personal attraction, but real power. She was, as all the world knows, leading lady at His Majesty’s before she went to America, but all the world does not know that she is the most accomplished tango-dancer on the stage.
There is no more attractive figure on the stage than Ben Webster. Young as he is, he found time to be a barrister before he began his long succession of leading parts, and though he is one of the least stagey actors on the stage, he was born in its purple. He is a grandson of Ben Webster I., who had a claim to fame besides his acting which has long since been forgotten, for he was the founder of the great Queen newspaper, which he sold to Sergeant Cox—strange godfathers for the Queen, the Lady’s Newspaper. Sergeant Cox was the uncle, not the father, of Horace Cox, who was at the head of the Field, the Queen, and the Law Times for most of the last half century. Webster married an actress, May Whitty, so well known, not only for her acting, but for her activity in woman movements. They were very often at Addison Mansions, and among the strongest supporters of our Argonauts Club.
Lena Ashwell we have known better than any other great actress, because we came to know her family long before she went on the stage, through her sister, Mrs. Keefer, wife of the engineer who built the famous bridge over Niagara. In those days she was studying at the Royal Academy of Music, and she is an F.R.A.M. She has a singularly beautiful voice for singing as well as speaking. Conscious of the burning dramatic temperament which won her her fame in the impersonation of the heroine in Mrs. Dane’s Defence, she has always cast her eyes on the stage. When she was only fourteen she spoiled a chicken she was cooking by forgetting to remove the insides because she was so enthralled with reading King John. In intensity she is unsurpassed by any actress on the stage. She is really as good in tender parts as in grim parts, but she is less known in them, though every one should remember how delightful she was in The Darling of the Gods.
Lena Ashwell enjoys the almost unique distinction of having been born on a British man-of-war, the fine old ship which did duty under Nelson, and was the Wellesley training-ship till she was accidentally burnt a few months ago. Her father was a captain in the Navy.