| Hon. John Rutherford | Herbert Kelcey. |
| Robert Grey | Henry Miller. |
| Matthew Culver | Nelson Wheatcroft. |
| Silas Truman | Charles Walcot. |
| Major Homer | William J. LeMoyne. |
| Jack Dexter | Charles S. Dickson. |
| Helen Truman, Mrs. Rutherford | Georgia Cayvan. |
| Lucile Ferrant | Grace Henderson. |
| Mrs. Bellamy Ives | Mrs. Charles Walcot. |
| Mrs. Amory | Mrs. Thomas Whiffen. |
| Agnes | Vida Croly. |
| Mr. Randolph | W. Clark Bellows. |
| Kitty Ives | Louise Dillon. |
“The Wife” was so beautifully set, so perfectly directed, and so well acted that, though at first the dead weight of the play oppressed its representation, the public press, even at the first, inclined to accord it an importance which it did not deserve. Georgia Cayvan’s impersonation of the wife revealed anew the deep feeling and the graceful art that had won her recognition as a favorite actress. Grace Henderson (she was the wife of David Henderson, critical writer and producer of musical extravaganza), who acted the mischief making, jilted woman, Lucile, played with discretion and sincerity,—but it was difficult for the spectator to believe that a woman with a face so beautiful and a voice so delicious would ever have been jilted by any man not blind and deaf. Henry Miller was loud and extravagant as Grey; Herbert Kelcey was dignified, manly, and fine in feeling and elegant in manner and movement as Rutherford, and LeMoyne was delightfully humorous as Major Homer.
“The Wife” received 239 consecutive performances. Yet the fate of that play hung, for some time, in the balance. “I knew, even before the production,” said Belasco to me, “that it was too long and too loosely jointed, but I felt it could make good; and Mr. Frohman had faith. De Mille was pretty well discouraged after a week or ten days, and he told me he expected he’d have to go back to school-teaching [De Mille had been a school-teacher before he joined the Madison Square Theatre, where, in 1884, Belasco first met him]. Brent Good, proprietor of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, and also Stickney protested, in a directors’ meeting, that the play was a failure and was losing money and ordered it withdrawn.” The next morning Daniel Frohman instructed Belasco to put the play of “Featherbrain,” by James Albery, into rehearsal and prepare it for production as rapidly as possible. “I felt certain,” Belasco has told me, “that ’The Wife’ could be made a great money-getter, and I resolved it should have a fair trial: I held back on the preparations of ’Featherbrain’ all I could,—and, meantime, De Mille and I altered and cut, day after day, on our play. This procedure was justified by the result. Writing on this subject, Belasco declares: “It seemed to us that for every word we cut from ’The Wife’ we gained a person in the orchestra.” What a pity the necessary pruning and adjustment could not have been done before the production! Then the prosperity of a theatre and of many persons would not have been endangered. The sum of more than $50,000, owed to the Tiffany Studios, was paid in full, out of the profits of “The Wife,” and the directors of the corporation, as also Daniel Frohman, were so well satisfied with the ultimate result that Belasco and De Mille were commissioned to write the next new play required, for the following season, which was to be one constructed as a starring vehicle for Edward H. Sothern, who had been “inherited” by the Lyceum management under a contract with Helen Dauvray.
REVISION OF “SHE.”
The first dramatic work done by Belasco, after he had dismissed “The Wife,” was a revision of a drama called “She,” made by William H. Gillette on the basis of Rider Haggard’s novel of that name. This was produced, November 29, 1887, at Niblo’s Garden, New York, by Isaac B. Rich and Al. Hayman.
The signal talent of Haggard is not well displayed in “She,”—in which the tone is sensual and the literary art inferior, and in which, indeed, it can fairly be said that the author has collected materials and outlined a plan for a work of fiction, rather than that he has adequately utilized his materials and plan. There is in it little indication of distinctive intellectual character or of scrutinizing artistic revision, and, although contemporary with both Worcester’s and Webster’s “Unabridged,” the writer frequently informs his readers that words are wanting to describe the objects he has undertaken to portray. “She,” therefore, notwithstanding that it contains attributes of merit, is, as Haggard left it, a verbose and chaotic narrative, presenting the apotheosis of woman as a handsome animal. The story, however, presents melodramatic points tributary to situation and several of those points were utilized for stage presentment and invested with picturesque scenery. The play begins with a shipwreck on the coast of Africa. “Set waves” swung on obvious cordage. A “profile” boat went to pieces on a rock. Lightnings flashed. A quantity of real water was projected into the air. And a band of adventurous seekers after the inscrutable and awful female personality known as She were rescued, to pass through manifold adventures, including encounters with African cannibals and terminating with a quest for the Fire of Life, in which, when found, the mystical Princess was destroyed. Particular recital of the incidents of the stage adaptation is not requisite here: the novel, extraordinarily popular in its day, is still accessible to the curious. The form adopted by Gillette in framing his histrionic synopsis of the book is that of genuine, old-fashioned melodrama,—the form of theatrical spectacle interblended with music that was in fashion a century ago. There is an opening chorus. African savages, auxiliary to the proceedings, chant. The heroine woos her favorite in a melodious adjuration, and bursts into song on her lover’s breast. Music is introduced in the most unlikely places. Even the cannibals utter their stomachs in harmonious howls, preparatory to a feast on the flesh of man. “She,” as adapted by Gillette, was in part reconstructed and improved by Belasco, to whom such curious fabrics of more or less ridiculous spectacle had been familiar in his early days and who readily rectified its technical defects. “It was simply a matter of curtailing and readjusting,” he afterward wrote; “when the scenes and situations were rehearsed again it was found that we had a very good play”: the accuracy of the latter statement, of course, depends on the standard of merit applied in determining what constitutes a “good play.” Belasco did not revise “She” until near the end of the New York engagement, that is, about the middle of December, 1887. The play was transferred from New York to the Hollis Street Theatre, Boston, and there, and elsewhere in the country, it was prosperously presented.
“LORD CHUMLEY” AND E. H. SOTHERN.
During the early part of 1888 Belasco did some work as a teacher of acting, bestowing, at the request of Daniel Frohman, special attention on instruction of Mrs. James G. Blaine, Jr. (Mary Nevin), a person of social influence—and therefore potentially valuable to the management of the Lyceum Theatre—whose aspirations for a theatrical career were terminated by serious illness. Toward Spring the necessity of executing the commission to write a new play for the use of Sothern, at the Lyceum, compelled Belasco to lay aside all other labor, and, about March-April, in company with De Mille, he repaired to Echo Lake, and there, after trying and rejecting many dramatic schemes, the co-mates in authorship finally hit upon one to their liking. By about July 1 (1888) they had practically completed a new play, entitled “Lord Chumley,” and they returned to New York in order that Belasco might put it into rehearsal. In doing this he had to confront an unexpected difficulty: Sothern, who had expressed himself as satisfied on reading the scenario of the play, did not like the part of Chumley in the finished work and, as Mr. Frohman informed the disgruntled authors, was averse to undertaking it. Belasco writes of this: “‘But the character’s Sothern,’ I said; ’every look, gesture, and exclamation fits him like a glove!’... Of course, it was the old story all over again; an actor never knows what is best suited to him.” The latter notion is, I think, extravagant: for every instance wherein an actor has made a notable success in playing a part against his judgment and will a dozen could be cited wherein the actor has known his powers and made his distinctive success by following his own judgment in selection of the part to be played. “You are mistaken,” Charles Burke told a friend, who had exclaimed to him, in a burst of admiration, “You don’t know what a good actor you are!”, “I know exactly what a good actor I am, and exactly what I can do on the stage.” Sothern, as his later career has shown, cherished ambition to act parts of a very different character from Chumley, but, fortunately for all concerned, he consented to undertake that part, after Belasco had expounded it to him; the rehearsals were carried on with diligence and, on August 21, 1888, “Lord Chumley” was produced, for the first time anywhere, at the Lyceum Theatre.
The play of “Lord Chumley” is a mosaic of many old dramatic situations, culled from various earlier plays, revamped and intercalated so as to make a sequent story, and it can rightly be designated a comedy, tinged with melodrama and farce. Chumley is a young English lord, a gentleman by nature as well as birth; simple, generous, sincere, intrepid, and acute, but hampered by shyness, an impediment in his speech, and a superficial aspect of inanity. He impoverishes himself in order to serve a friend, Hugh Butterworth, an imprudent young fellow, an officer in the British Army, who is being victimized by a specious French rascal. This malignant person wishes to wed the officer’s sister, Miranda, and by threatening to ruin that young man’s reputation has extorted from her a promise of marriage. The lady is beloved by Chumley, who intervenes and prevents the marriage, incidentally vindicating himself in her opinion: she has at first believed him to be a fool and later a blackguard, but she ends by perceiving his intrinsically fine character and reciprocating his love. In the course of his variegated experience he contrives to make himself misunderstood in attempting to tell his troubles to a sympathetic spinster; he dwells without repining in the squalor of a miserable lodging, to which his generous self-impoverishment has reduced him; he confronts a desperate burglar in the dark and, armed only with a cigarette-holder shaped like a pistol, he fools, cows, and overcomes him; he exhibits astounding physical prowess in conflict with a burly antagonist, and he displays amazing mental acuteness in penetrating and defeating the malevolent purposes of a villain.
Belasco, writing of himself and his co-worker De Mille, says: “For a month we talked over Sothern’s play without a single idea. At this time [1887-’88] pistol cigarette-holders came into fashion. I bought one in the village [near Echo Lake] to amuse the De Mille children, but forgot to take it out of my hip pocket. The next day as De Mille and I were out walking in the snow I leaned against a tree, drew the toy pistol from my pocket, and called out: ’Stand and deliver,’ and in a flash the foolish situation gave us the first idea for what was afterward called ’Chumley.’ We used this serio-comic situation in our Second Act, where Chumley holds a real thief at bay with his cigarette-case.” That, no doubt, is a correct account of the “first idea”; others came from Belasco’s ample store of recollections. Chumley, as a character, is a remote variant of the elder Sothern’s Dundreary, superimposed on H. J. Byron’s Sir Simon Simple, in “Not Such a Fool as He Looks,”—which was written for Charles Mathews. In the development of the plot in which he is implicated and the treatment of the character there is much reminiscence—touches of John Mildmay, in his scene with Captain Hawksley, in “Still Waters Run Deep”; of Harry Jasper, in “A Bachelor of Arts”; of Sir Bashful Constant, Arthur Chilton, Mr. Toots, and, in particular, Eliott Gray, in his scene with Myles McKenna, in “Rosedale.” All the situations indicated have long been used as common property. The merit of the play consists in the effectiveness with which those situations are employed and in the bright, fluent, and generally telling dialogue with which they are interfused. Chumley is an extremely long part. Sothern’s performance was exceptionally good, and it was received by public and press with copious approbation. The success of the play was unequivocal: it held the stage till November 11. On November 13 Pinero’s “Sweet Lavender” succeeded it, but with the production of that excellent drama at the Lyceum Belasco had, practically, nothing to do: “Sweet Lavender” was sent to New York from London and was “put on” in exact accordance with the prompt-copy as prepared by the author when making Edward Terry’s presentment of it.