The first genuine triumph of her career came to Miss Marlowe when she reached Boston. Her week at the Hollis Street Theatre in December, 1888, was the first completely reassuring experience of her career, for there, for the first time, did she win the genuinely enthusiastic response of public and critics. In Philadelphia, too, and in Baltimore, and Chicago, she found a cordial welcome. Her ambitions were beginning to be realized, Miss Dow’s labors justified, and Mr. Falk’s coffers were once more filled.
A correspondent of the Boston Herald, writing from Brooklyn in 1888, gives his impressions of the rising “star”: “Anything more unlike than this young girl off the stage [he had been ‘an audience of one in assisting at her Thanksgiving repast, which was hurriedly swallowed between matinée and evening performances’] and as the character she represents before the footlights I have seldom seen. It is as though she were two distinct individuals, bearing absolutely no relation in manner, face, figure, temperament or intelligence to each other. Away from the footlights, and divested of the rôle she personates, Miss Marlowe is a frank, girlish young woman, almost awkward in her movements, and shy and retiring to excess in manner and speech. There are times when she seems almost plain and again one is surprised into thinking her absolutely beautiful.... She is not at all assertive; on the contrary, she impresses one as a person who would never force herself into any prominence. This is Miss Marlowe off the stage.
“On the stage? Well, I had a mental shock when I saw her as Parthenia. It was like a transformation scene, and so complete that I almost failed to recognize the actress as the same shy, unformed girl I had been chatting with. Is she a great actress? Decidedly, no. But I would wager a good deal that the day is not far distant when she will be hailed as such.”
Successful as she began now to be in other cities, she did not at once win as much favor in New York. It took her ten years to become as popular in the metropolis as she was in “the provinces.” Taking a general view of Miss Marlowe’s career it would seem that her conquest of New York coincided fairly accurately with her modification of her early ideals as to playing nothing but the “classic” parts, for, lying between the period of which we have been speaking and the later “Sothern and Marlowe” campaign with Shakespeare, there were some years (roughly from 1897 to 1904) when the “classics” were pretty well abandoned.[187]
The first change in the hitherto carefully guarded repertory came in 1894, when she was married to her “leading man,” Robert Taber. With a self-subordination rare enough among newly-fledged “stars” she saw herself taking, at times, inferior and sometimes quite unsuited parts in plays produced primarily for the sake of Mr. Taber. The worst instance was Henry IV, in which Mr. Taber was an admirable Hotspur and Miss Marlowe a Prince Hal who was hopelessly at variance with the ideal of the part.[188] At this time she was known as “Julia Marlowe Taber,” but the change involved some sacrifice, for, by 1894, the name “Julia Marlowe” had a definite value and the public did not respond enthusiastically to the new order of things. It is a theatrical axiom that the public does not like to see man and wife acting together. One manager[189] brought suit because, having contracted for “Julia Marlowe,” he got “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taber.” It has been said that Frederick Stinson, the manager who had labored for years to develop the prestige that attached to Miss Marlowe’s name, aged visibly when his work was so rapidly undone.
The artistic coalition that was thought would be the result of the marriage turned out a comparative failure. Unfortunately a personal element that proved anything but helpful entered the situation. Mr. Taber was a skilled actor of a rather hard style—but the printed criticisms of their productions often brought more praise to Mrs. Taber than to him,—naturally enough, as she was the better artist. His resentment at his comparative artistic failure went to such lengths that he quarreled with his wife, and, after three seasons of married joint-stardom they went their separate ways: Taber to London to act with Irving, and his wife, after a meeting in France, and an ineffectual effort on her part to effect a reconciliation, to America to resume her career as Julia Marlowe.[190]
A survey of the plays the Tabers gave together from 1894 to 1897 does not show that the public was warranted, from any lack of their adherence to the Marlowe standard of play, in withholding its former allegiance. There was, to be sure, the mistake, Henry IV. Mrs. Taber was, moreover, a comparative failure as Mrs. Hardcastle and as Lydia Languish—for her forte was not eighteenth century comedy—and Romola afforded scarcely any opportunities for her, while Mr. Taber’s Tito had a great success. But all of these plays excepting Henry IV were really incidental, and at different times during these three years Mr. and Mrs. Taber were playing a number of the old Julia Marlowe successes: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Much Ado, Ingomar, Pygmalion and Galatea, The Hunchback, and The Lady of Lyons.
It was not until 1897, when the separation had taken place and Miss Marlowe had placed herself under the management of C. B. Dillingham, associated with Charles Frohman, that her period of artistic eclipse, and of great commercial prosperity, began. At the dictation of her new management, she abandoned almost altogether the heroines of poetic drama, and began a seven-year term in the service of the dramatized novel and the quickly forgotten modern ephemeral play. The Countess Valeska, Colinette, Barbara Frietchie, When Knighthood Was in Flower, and The Cavalier make rather a sorry showing when compared with most of the list just given. She was made at last a successful “star” in New York,[191] but, as John Corbin wrote at the close of this period of eclipse, she was “mourned by the ‘road’ [i.e., the country outside New York] as the living tomb of a youth of abundant promise.”
Of these plays of the interregnum it is curiously true that those least entitled to serious consideration as drama, Barbara Frietchie and When Knighthood Was in Flower, were the most successful in advancing Miss Marlowe to the heights of popularity. Colinette—which was adapted from a French play—and The Countess Valeska—from the German—were both justified as skillfully written romantic dramas, of much strength and charm, if not of permanent value. Barbara Frietchie and When Knighthood Was in Flower, however, were highly artificial, thin, pseudo-historical dramas, one dealing with the heroine of Whittier’s poem—the play was by the prolific Clyde Fitch—and the other a fictional episode in the life of Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Miss Marlowe’s sincerest admirers deeply regretted the time and energy she spent, year after year, on these and like plays; but they often asserted that her acting transformed and beautified the material with which she worked. As Colinette, according to Mr. Winter, she “gave a performance of singular flexibility and of exceptionally artistic grace, such as not only pleases while passing but leaves in the memory an ideal of noble and lovable womanhood,”—strong and partial words, but indicative of the glamour Miss Marlowe has thrown over inferior plays. “Her utterance of Barbara’s appeal to her father for her wounded lover’s life,” says Mr. Winter of her acting in Mr. Fitch’s play, “was spoken with exquisite beauty, and her expression of the frenzy of grief, on finding him dead, reached as great a height as is possible to spoken pathos.”
As for When Knighthood Was in Flower, an English critic later said: “There is a certain lilt and go, a touch of nature among the fool’s fabric of the melodrama, which set her far above our steady practitioners in the same act of sinking. And, above all, a sense of parody pierced through words and actions, commenting wittily on the nonsense of romance which so many were so willing to take seriously. She was a live thing; defiantly and gayly conscious of every absurdity with which she indulged the babyish tastes of one more public.”