One of “Little Maudie’s” successes at this time was in Chums, which Mr. Belasco had adapted from an old English play The Mariner’s Compass. Mr. Herne, who played in it at the time, later made and acted in another version, The Hearts of Oak. The character Crystal (for whom Mr. Heme undoubtedly named his daughter) occurs in both versions. “From the time Maude Adams created the rôle,” says Mr. Belasco, “it became one of the most vital parts of the play. Chums, in short, scored an immense success, and ‘Little Maudie’ for time being was the heroine of the town.”
Mrs. Adams had seen to it that Maude received more of the ordinary schooling than sometimes falls to the lot of a child actress. When she was thirteen, however, her schooling was called complete. The girl had had her taste of success and during her term at school had dreamed of returning to the stage. She told her mother: “It’s no use my studying any more, mother.... I want to go on the stage again, so that I may be with you.” But when the attempt was made it proved to be not the easiest thing in the world. As a child actress of less than ten, she had found parts awaiting her. As a young girl in her middle teens, parts were much harder to find. She traveled about with her mother, getting an occasional small part, such as one of the old women in Harbor Lights, or the Princess in Monte Christo. In the meantime, she studied hard, absorbing her mother’s instructions and learning many rôles.
When Miss Adams was just under sixteen she and her mother crossed the country—in the caste of the melodrama, The Paymaster,—to try their fortunes in the Middle West and finally in New York. Although it is on record that she won “a great deal of praise for her simplicity and beauty,” one can see, in the account of her nightly “plunge into a tank of real water,”[199] a far cry to her later distinction as the interpreter of the subtleties of Barrie.
According to thrice-repeated tales, which her mother has recently taken occasion to deny, it was only after a discouraging period of waiting and of fruitless visits to managers, that Miss Adams got her first opportunity, when The Paymaster had run its course. A more tangible tradition is to the effect that while awaiting something better Miss Adams worked for a while as a ballet girl.[200] According to Mrs. Adams, Maude had not long been in New York when Daniel Frohman offered her a position in the company supporting E. H. Sothern. Virginia Harned took up the cause of the young actress, and introduced her to Mr. Sothern. “I must have been a strangely unattractive and unclassified creature at the time,” says Miss Adams, “too young for mature parts and too old for child impersonations. Miss Harned, who had played child parts with me, had succeeded in interesting Mr. Sothern in me and one great day I was invited to dine with them in a public restaurant. I am sure that I disgusted Mr. Sothern with my unconquerable bashfulness and awkwardness. Painfully diffident, I scarcely uttered a word during the whole of that dinner. Nonetheless I was soon afterward engaged to play in the Sothern company.”[201]
The engagement with Sothern was brief, however, like all that had gone before. Not until she was given the part of Dot Bradbury in Hoyt’s farce A Midnight Bell (in March 1889) did circumstances combine to give her a good part, a long engagement, and some public notice. Until now she was quite unknown to the public at large. But she played this part through the spring and all during the following season. Discerning playgoers, and a critic here and there, began to speak of her as one of the promising youngsters of the stage, and what was more important, she attracted the attention of Charles Frohman, who in the fall of 1890 was organizing a stock company for the Twenty-third Street Theatre. Mr. Frohman gave Miss Adams a place in this company, and from that day until his death—twenty-four years—she remained under his management.
Her first part with Mr. Frohman was a small one—Evangeline Bender in All the Comforts of Home. She gave it some distinction, however, and in her next part, in Men and Women, she was watched with interest. That Mr. Frohman’s choice of this new actress was unfortunate, was the opinion of many. She was small, thin, pale—quite the opposite of the accepted type of stage beauty; but she acted well enough, apparently, for soon she was playing Nell, the crippled girl in The Lost Paradise. The part called for one passage of heightened emotion,—“a fierce little bit of melodrama” that served to attract new notice to Miss Adams. “In an audience of seasoned first-nighters and blasé fashionables there were moist eyes and a surreptitious blowing of noses when Maude Adams gave rein to that tender pathos which is all her own,” says one witness. “This wan, hopeless figure peering wistfully from its shabby raincoat out upon a life she could neither know nor understand was a triumph of natural emotion simulated with superb restraint.” Mr. Frohman showed his new company not only to New York, but sent it on long tours throughout the country.
So well did Miss Adams acquit herself in these first two years with Mr. Frohman that in 1892, when John Drew left the company of Augustin Daly after eighteen years’ service, and became a “star,” he insisted on having her as his leading woman. Mr. Frohman, his new manager, had had in mind someone of more established reputation, of more thoroughly tried gifts. But Mr. Drew had his way, and Miss Adams her first real opportunity. She was surprisingly successful. The play was The Masked Ball.[202] Her part was a brilliant, high-comedy rôle, demanding at once spirit and subtlety. It was admitted that she did not look the part, that there was something awkward and boyish about her Suzanne Blondet. Yet her intelligence, her fine voice, her charm, and her sincerity in emotional passages won her much warm praise. It was her difficult task in one passage of this play to act a woman who is feigning intoxication. To make this tipsy scene anything but disagreeable was a severe test for a comparatively unknown woman, who at best had much to do to win her audience. Win it she did, however, for she was called a dozen times before the curtain. The Masked Ball had a successful career of a year and a half, and Maude Adams, at its close, had pretty well established herself. At less than twenty she was a “leading woman,” the youngest of the day.
Miss Adams remained as John Drew’s principal supporting actress for five seasons—from the fall of 1892 to the spring of 1897.[203]
The success of The Masked Ball was not repeated at once, not until four years later, indeed, when Rosemary gave both Mr. Drew and Miss Adams excellent opportunities. In the meantime she had had occasional small triumphs, and only one approach to downright failure—in The Squire of Dames. In this play she had the part of a flippant, heartless young society woman, and, truth to tell, she didn’t do much with it. In the Bauble Shop, however, she had had an opportunity for her simplicity and pathos, while in That Imprudent Young Couple she rose superior to the play, and prompted this criticism: “That Miss Adams was able to interest her audience at all last night was due entirely to the charm of her own personality. Her work is still exceptional in its daintiness and its simplicity.... She has found the short cut from laughter into tears. It is good to see that the remarkable success that has come to this young actress has not turned her head.”
As for Rosemary, the last play of the John Drew-Maude Adams period, it is to be said that it is one of the most charming of the many plays of its gifted and long-laboring author, Louis N. Parker. It is a pleasantly old-fashioned, idyllic comedy of the England of Victoria’s accession, and seems to have disclosed equally Miss Adams’s gifts of comedy and of pathos;—a play well suited to her middle period.