Fay Templeton has made three separate and distinct starts in her career, and this without counting her baby days one, when, her father being manager of a theater in Saint Joseph, Missouri, she was put in the bill whenever an infant was needed. In due course, however, she was whisked away from the footlights and sent abroad to be educated. On her return, Rice secured for her Gabriel in "Evangeline" and thus launched her—in tights—on the first of her three epochs—that of man's attire.
As Gabriel she became the talk of the town, but when she appeared at the same theater—the Fourteenth Street—some seasons later as Hendrik Hudson, in a burletta of that name, her former admirers declared that she was fat, and declined to worship longer at her shrine. Thus it came about that when Edward E. Rice, her old manager in "Evangeline," engaged her to break the title rôle in "Excelsior, Jr.," with which he opened the theater part of his Olympia in 1895, he stipulated that when the time came for rehearsals she must not weigh over one hundred and fifty pounds.
Whether she succeeded in getting herself down to just this figure is not a matter of veracious record, but it is true that she made a hit with her men's clothes and became an authority in the yellow journals on masculine attire. But the banting process was not to her liking, so that Miss Templeton finally decided to seek the sort of parts where her avoirdupois would cut no figure in the artistic results. In this way she came to join Weber & Fields's, entering upon the second phase of her career as a burlesque actress of the first rank.
Her imitations of Irene Vanbrugh in "The Gay Lord Quex," of Ethel Barrymore in "Captain Jinks," of Annie Russell in "The Girl and the Judge," were all of them wonders in their way, and possibly had she been content to remain at the Twenty-Ninth Street music-hall for more than a season after Lillian Russell's advent, the two partners might never have split. But quit she did, and went up to the New York, where her imitation of Fougère in "Broadway to Tokio" was called by one of the critics a classic.
Incapacity of authors to provide the proper sort of vehicle is responsible for Miss Templeton's passage to her third stage of triumph. This has just been reached in "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," that classless concoction of George M. Cohan which shows her as a sedate housemaid of somber clothes and repressed demeanor. But so subtle is her art that she fills the huge New Amsterdam Theater as only Mansfield has ever succeeded in filling it before. There is no tinsel, no dancing, not a single imitation, but in an entirely new field Fay Templeton has blazed a path by the sheer finesse of her skill in attaining results by the simplest means.
WHEN WE OLD BOYS WERE YOUNG.
LONG AGO.
I once knew all the birds that came
And nestled in our orchard trees;
For every flower I had a name—
My friends were woodchucks, toads, and bees;
I knew where thrived in yonder glen
What plants would soothe a stone-bruised toe—
Oh, I was very learned then—
But that was very long ago.
And, pining for the joys of youth,
I tread the old familiar spot,
Only to learn the solemn truth—
I have forgotten, am forgot.
Yet here's this youngster at my knee
Knows all the things I used to know;
To think I once was as wise as he—
But that was very long ago.