MRS. LESLIE CARTER
About the time of “The Ugly Duckling”
that, had he embarked her with a good play, he would have brought her to public acceptance much earlier than he did. In Mrs. Carter’s performance of Kate Graydon there were moments in which she escaped the thraldom of solicitude and self-consciousness and clearly indicated possession of the faculty of vigorous dramatic expression. This was the original cast of “The Ugly Duckling”:
| Douglas Oakley | Arthur Dacre. |
| Count Malatesta | Edward J. Henley. |
| Professor Graydon | William H. Thompson. |
| Viscount Huntington | Ian [Forbes-] Robertson. |
| Mr. Ernest Granly | R. F. Cotton. |
| Jack Farragut | Raymond Holmes. |
| Chevalier Raff | Mervin Dallas. |
| Randolph | Thomas Oberle. |
| Mrs. Graydon | Ida Vernon. |
| Hester Graydon | Helen Bancroft. |
| Kate Graydon | Mrs. Leslie Carter. |
| Mrs. Granly | Helen Russell. |
| Helen | Ida Macdonald. |
| Agnes | Fannie Batchelder. |
“If it had not been for the interest of Isaac Rich, of Boston,” Belasco told me, “whose friendship and good will I had gained through my work on Gillette’s dramatization of ’She,’ and who was kind enough to help me when it seemed as though most of the rest of the world was against me, I don’t believe we could have got a tour booked anywhere. However, we did manage to get a route—and lost a fair-sized fortune playing it! Mrs. Carter was made a target all along the line.”
MORE FAILURE, AND A LAWSUIT.
During this tour, though Mrs. Carter revealed fine talent and won some commendation, the business was uniformly bad until she appeared in Chicago; there, for the first time, the receipts exceeded the expenses, and it began to seem as though the tide had turned toward prosperity. But the venture had already cost more than $40,000, and Fairbank, becoming dissatisfied, suddenly withdrew his support. “On the strength of Mr. Fairbank’s promise,” Belasco declared, “I had given mine, to many creditors, and now, when they pressed for payment (as they did very quickly when it became known Fairbank had withdrawn), I was unable to keep it. I had no recourse but to bring suit against him to make good his promise and, most unwillingly, I prepared to do so.” Mrs. Carter’s first tour under Belasco’s direction and the life of “The Ugly Duckling” were both peremptorily brought to an end by Fairbank, acting through one of his attorneys, R. W. Morrison, in Kansas City, on March 14, 1891; the theatrical company which had been acting in association with Mrs. Carter was disbanded, and the perplexed manager and his dejected pupil returned to New York, where arrangements were presently made by Belasco to institute a lawsuit against Fairbank. Writing on this subject he has said:
“The Fairbank lawyers came to New York to see what compromise I would accept. I said: ’Here are all the bills. If you pay them, the incident will be closed.’ But they refused. Mr. Fairbank had hoped the tour would be a financial success, the lawyers said, and he would never have entered into such a speculation if he had known how much it involved. ’Certainly,’ I answered, ’he did not expect a theatrical venture of this nature to cost nothing! I am sure of Mrs. Carter’s ultimate success,’ I declared, ’and I am willing to bind myself by a promise to pay everything back’; but the lawyers refused. So I put my affairs in the hands of my friend, Judge Dittenhoefer, and the suit began. The trial lasted for three weeks.”
Belasco’s suit against Fairbank,—which was to recover $65,000, as reimbursement of losses incurred in presenting “The Ugly Duckling,” payment for professional services as Mrs. Carter’s dramatic instructor (for which services Fairbank had agreed to pay), and other items,—remained in abeyance for several years. It was, however, finally brought to trial on June 3, 1896, before Justice Leonard Giegerich and a jury, in Part V. of the Supreme Court of New York. Belasco’s action was met by denial and a counter suit for $53,000 by Fairbank. The issues were acrimoniously contested at every point, but on June 23 the jury returned a compromise verdict (as one juryman described it) in favor of Belasco, awarding him $16,000 and 5 per cent. interest,—$20,000 in all. During that trial certain newspapers, manifesting singular partisan bias, went to scandalous extremes of exaggeration and ridicule in their reports of the testimony in effort to disparage Belasco and make him appear contemptible. One fiction then originated has persisted,—the fiction, namely, that Belasco instructed Mrs. Carter by “pounding and bumping” her and dragging her about a room by the hair. That tale was based on an allusion to rehearsal of the shocking Murder Scene in the revolting play of “Oliver Twist.”
Mrs. Carter’s acknowledgment of her debt to Belasco and her appreciation of his assistance and his forbearance toward her are significantly denoted in a letter written by her, June 3, 1890, to Charles L. Allen, one of Fairbank’s principal Chicago lawyers, from which the following words are quoted: