“Thanks for your kind sympathy, dear William Winter,” Belasco wrote to me, in July, 1911. “I have thought of you so often in my grief. I should be glad to come over to your island to see you, but I am not able.... I am trying to be resigned; and, though the pain is great, I must be. Nothing can ever be the same again, and it is all very, very hard. Yet I must go on, and I shall. There is nothing but our work....” He had, within less than two months of each other, lost his father and his dearly loved daughter Augusta,—Mrs. William Elliott. His father was stricken on April 6th, and he died on the 11th, at his home, No. 1704 Sutter Street, San Francisco. Belasco, however, was at that time in almost distracted attendance on his daughter, at Asheville, North Carolina, and could not leave her when he received news of his father’s illness; nor was he able to attend his funeral. Humphrey Abraham Belasco was buried beside his wife in Hills of Eternity Cemetery, San Mateo, California, April 12th.
The death of Belasco’s daughter,—“my little guardian,” as he has called her in talk with me,—was a bereavement more than usually bitter. She was a creature of extraordinary goodness and beauty, of exquisite sensibility, gentle and lovely in nature, childlike in disposition, the pitiful friend of all sorrowing and suffering persons, the special comrade and comfort of her father, and her death came within less than five months after her marriage—to the actor William Elliott. When Belasco was informed of his child’s attachment to Elliott (whom she had met when he was a member of the company supporting Miss Starr in “The Rose of the Rancho”) he, at first, opposed their marriage,—“Not,” as he has told me, “that I had any personal objection to ‘Billy,’—who is a dear fellow
“Oft in the still night
Ere Slumber’s chain has bound me
Fond Memory brings the light
Of Other Days around me.”
From an original made for, and loaned by,
Mrs. David Belasco.
and whom I always liked,—but because I had hoped she would choose a husband out of the theatrical profession, one who could live all his life with her,—which the inevitable travelling of theatrical life makes practically impossible. But when I saw that my little girl was pining for him, that a great love had come to her and that she could never be happy without him, I brushed all my own hopes and wishes away and urged their immediate marriage. I thought to keep her always near her mother and me, so as a wedding gift I had an apartment fitted up for them in the Marie Antoinette, where we live, and we were all going to be together and happy: but it was not to be.”
William Elliott and Augusta Belasco were wedded, at the home of her parents, January 27, 1911: as they were about to start on their honeymoon, the bride, while bidding good-bye to her father, was stricken with sudden illness and collapsed. At first it was believed that her illness was merely a transient disorder, which would soon yield to treatment. For a few weeks her condition fluctuated, but seemed, on the whole, to improve: then, at the end of March, she began rapidly to decline, and Belasco was informed that she was afflicted with an acute form of tuberculosis, which must soon cause her death. That was an issue which her father could not and would not accept without a bitter struggle. “I had seen so many desperate cases of consumption saved, for years,” he said, “that I could not believe my little girl, who had always seemed so strong and well, who was so young and lovely, on the threshold of her new life, with everything to live for, must die. I gathered her up, overnight, and fled with her to Asheville.” There Belasco leased Witchwood, a fine residence,—the home of the late Colonel Charles W. Woolsey,—and installed his daughter in it. Her fatal malady could not, however, be stayed, though every expedient was tried that love could prompt or wealth employ, and she grew rapidly worse. On May 1, in a forlorn hope that the climate of Colorado might prove beneficial, Belasco chartered a special train and removed her to Broadmoor, a beautiful place in the environs of Colorado Springs,—where, on the afternoon of June 5, after great suffering borne with patience and fortitude, she died. Her body was taken to New York; funeral services were held there, at the Temple Ahawath Chesed, on June 9, and late on that day she was laid in her grave in Ahawath Chesed Cemetery, at Linden Hills, Long Island.
“My little Augusta,” writes Belasco in a note made for me, “was the gentlest creature I have ever known and the kindest. No one but myself will ever know how many poor girls and young men have had places made for them in my companies because she came and asked it, with her dear little arms about my neck. And she had good judgment, too; I never have regretted employing any of the people she interceded for. She was just a child to the very end. She had caught some of my foolish little superstitions, and when she died she was surrounded with pretty little painted butterflies that she had pinned about her to help her to get well—‘and I know they will,’ she told the doctor, ‘because my father believes in them and says so!’ Each of my girls was my ‘favorite’ child, but the younger was my special companion, who always took care of me. Though she might have been up till all hours the night before, she never missed getting up to see that I had my breakfast properly, and I never got home too late for her to come pattering to my room to see me safely tucked into bed. I think that, in her heart, the poor child must have had some premonition that she was going to die soon, because she was so fascinated by my play of ‘Peter Grimm.’ I had no thought, when I was writing it, that she was to be taken away from me; but I had long wanted to write something that might show death in a beautiful way; something that would touch on immortality as a vivid reality, just a flash beyond this life, and so help to inspire hope. I used to talk to my little girl about it, and she was the first to read my play when it was finished. I gave it to her one evening and waited for her verdict far into the night, and her approval meant much to me. She attended all the rehearsals, and one night she told me that after seeing ‘Peter Grimm’ no one should be afraid to die. It was the last play she ever saw,—and it is my comfort to believe that its message entered her soul.”