GUS HILL
Champion Club Swinger
MAURICE BARRYMORE
(Photograph by Sarony. From the Messmore Kendall Collection)
It was a long time ago and my memory is vague as to the merits of our performances, but I do recall one passing comment. Toward the end of the third week the head usher came to me with the news that “all the ushers have quit, and I don’t know what we’ll do about showing people to their seats, if there are any people to show to their seats.” I asked him the reason for this sudden desertion on the part of our ushers and he informed me curtly that “they couldn’t stand the —— —— shows!”
I don’t remember that I greatly mourned the passing of America’s first art group in the theater and I loafed along pleasantly enough during my years in Cambridge, winning some glory on the running track and trying to make up for my lack of age and weight, both of which at that time told heavily against me on the football field. By some odd freak I took few of the courses in English and wrote nothing at all, my only advance in any of the fine arts being a training as a draw-poker player, an accomplishment I have never ceased to be grateful for to the great university where I secured so solid and lasting a technique.
I was tremendously influenced at this time by Phillips Brooks, who still stands in my memory as the greatest American I have ever known, and I grew so fond of Professor N. S. Shaler, a grand figure both as a man and a scientist, that I took every one of his courses in paleontology without ever gaining the most remote idea of what they were all about.
Quite without ambition and with no definite objective at all I drifted along until, in the summer of 1903, I found myself working for a coal mining company in which my father was interested, in the Cumberland Mountains. I was even a worse mining engineer than I had ever hoped to be and was extravagantly overpaid by my salary of forty dollars a month. I am sure that I, at the time, never considered myself worth any more, but I found it difficult to save out of that forty a month a sum of money large enough to gratify the first great ambition of my life. It came to me suddenly, the very day I went to work in the coal business and consisted of a deep determination to get out of it with the least possible delay.
Aside from the fact that the glamorous title of a mining engineer turned out to be just another name for a guy who dug holes in the ground, I simply detested the dirty little southern town in which I found myself. Also, as I happened to start my work on the very day the Debs strike started, I added fear for my life to my other reason for a prompt withdrawal. There I had to remain, however, all during the riots and shootings and murders of the great strike, and the town I lived in was sometimes held by the strikers, and sometimes by the Kentucky State Troops. On occasion both sides were forced to withdraw for a time, as this part of the mountains had long been reserved as a battleground by the Hatfield and McCoy factions, whose feud, arising out of the fact that some young lady of the generation before had looked funny in a hoop skirt, had resulted in the death, with their boots on, of many more worthy citizens than the entire population of the town in my day. Being even then of a strictly impersonal nature, I didn’t in the least care whether the McCoys killed the Hatfields or the strikers killed the state troops. It didn’t seem to be my party. All I wanted was a ticket to New York.
I knew that I could expect no help from my father. He had, for the moment, lost all of his money. It was his habit to make and lose considerable fortunes with the rapidity and nonchalance of a Wilkins Micawber, and this was one of the times when, like Micawber, he was waiting for something to turn up. My father was, I am sure, the sweetest and gentlest and one of the ablest men I have ever known—and I am equally sure he was the worst business man. I don’t know how many months it took me to save the railroad fare to New York, but I know that I arrived there in due time with exactly twelve dollars in my pocket and a firm determination to conquer the theater, either as a writer or as an actor.