It is interesting to see how many of the people who give this special quality arrive out of burlesque. Harry Kelly is another. I recall him first with Lizzie the Fish Hound in Watch Your Step and last in a quite useless musical comedy, The Springtime of Youth (textually that was the title—and in 1922!) For two acts he was wholly wasted. In the third he was magnificent. He was playing the obdurate father: “No son of mine shall ever marry a daughter of the Baxters” was his line. He was informed that she was, in fact, an adopted daughter and that her uncle had left her the bulk of his fortune. For precisely a minute and a half Kelly played with the word “bulk”—one saw it registered in his brain, saw an idea germinating, felt it working forward to the jaw before the cavernous voice gave it utterance—and again one felt the inner struggle not to say it a third time, one felt the conflict of pride and avarice. It was remarkably delicate and fine—so is all of Kelly’s work when he has a chance. His spare figure, long hands, and unbelievable voice always create a character—and it isn’t always the same character.
Bobby Clarke’s scene with the lion comes at once to mind (it is another burlesque act), and Bert Williams—in many scenes—always soft spoken, always understanding his case. There were five minutes of Blanche Ring and Charles Winninger, once, at the Winter Garden; to my surprise, there were more than that for Eugene and Willie Howard at the same house, but they were gained in spite of the Winter Garden technique which underestimates even the lowest intelligence. Willie is rather like Fanny Brice at moments; when he cuts loose one has an agreeable sense of uncertainty. Joe Jackson,[16] actually a great clown, although one doesn’t recognize this in the highly developed medium he chooses, has exactly the opposite effect—he doesn’t cut loose at all; he develops. Everything he does is careful and nothing exaggerated, so you think at first that, although he will be funny, he will not quite reach that top notch on which an artist teeters perilously while you wonder whether he will fall over or keep his balance. Yet Jackson gets there. As the tramp cyclist his acrobatics are good, his make-up enchanting; but his expressed attitude of mind is his most precious quality. It becomes almost too much to watch him worrying with a motor horn which has become detached from the handlebars and which he cannot replace. He tries it everywhere; at the end he is miserably trying to hang it up on the air, and when it fails to catch there he is actually wretched. His movements are full of grace—like those of the grotesque, Alberto, among the Fratellini—and the ecstasy he gives comes by a surexcess of laughter. Another moment of great delicacy, without laughter, however, is that in which Fortunello and Cirrilino swing about on the broomstick. They are a lovely pair, and the little one seated on the palm of the other’s hand is a beautiful picture.
Bert Savoy
Either few women are brought out of burlesque, or women haven’t the exceptional quality I care for. In any case they have seldom given me the excess of emotion by what they have done. Their beauty is quite another matter on which I fail to commit myself. Ada Lewis, in her broad and grand way, has the stuff, and Florence Moore. And once in each performance you can be sure that Gilda Grey will utter a sound or tremble herself into a bacchanalian revel. For the most part her singing is undistinguished, and I do not care for the anxious way in which she regards her members, as if she fancied they would fall off by dint of shimmying. Yet I have never gone to a show of hers without hearing some echo of the nymphs pursued, or seeing a movement of abandon and grace. The dark shuddering voice is sub-human, the movement divinely animal.
Different in every way, but exquisite in every way, was Gaby Deslys. It is good form now to belittle her; she was so vulgar; she came so much on the crest of a revolution, she was such a bidder for our great precious commodity—news space. Ah, well! we have given publicity to less worthy causes. For she was perfect of her type, and in her hard, calculating, sublimely decent way she made us like the type. It was gently vicious—the whole manner. It was overdone—the pearls and the peacock feathers. But behind was a lovely person—lovely to look at and enchanting to all the senses. No, she couldn’t act—how pitiable her loyal efforts; she sang badly; she wasn’t one of the world’s great dancers. But she had something irreducible, not to be hindered or infringed upon—her definite self. She was, to begin with, outcast of our moral system, and she made us accept her because she was an independent human being. She had a sound and accurate sense of her personal life, of her rights as an individual. Nothing could stand against her—and it is said that when she was at grips, at the end, with something more powerful than popular taste, she still held her own, and died rather than suffer the spoiling of her beauty. If that were true one could hardly wish even her beauty back again.