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.”