The Beginnings of Stage Careers.

By MATTHEW WHITE, Jr.

A Series of Papers That Will Be Continued from Month to Month and Will Include All Players of Note.

BLANCHE BATES BALKED.

As a School Marm She Got Behind Footlights to Dodge Promotion from Kindergarten to Primary Grade.

I knew that Blanche Bates came of a theatrical family, and that, therefore, she had an open sesame to the stage, but I did not know just when she made her first appearance, and to learn this for The Scrap Book I sought her out in the brief interval of rest she has, without a costume change, between the first and second acts of "The Girl of the Golden West."

"How did I make my start?" she repeated in answer to my question. "Well, I rather think it was because I balked at the idea of being known as a 'school marm.' I'll tell you about it. Although both my father and mother were on the stage, I didn't care for the life in the least. In fact, in my small young mind, I set up to being a very grand lady.

"'An actress? No, indeed,' I told myself. 'Something much better than that for me.' I was interested in young children and became a kindergarten teacher in San Francisco, where my mother was playing with L.R. Stockwell. But it was my very success with the youngsters that brought about the close of my career as a teacher. If I could do so well in the kindergarten, the committee argued, I was worth promoting, so one day they came to me with the announcement that I had been advanced to the charge of a grade in the primary department.

To Teach or Not to Teach.

"I suppose I should have felt duly honored, but I didn't. I sat down and began to look ahead, through the vista of years to come. A teacher, a schoolmistress! That somehow didn't agree with the ideas of the grand lady my fancy had conjured up. And, at that psychological moment mother came home with a proposition from Mr. Stockwell.

"It seemed that they were to give him a benefit, and he suggested to her, by way of novelty in the bill, that I should appear in a one-act play. Coming as it did just as I was wavering in my mind about my prospects in the teaching business, the idea caught me, and I said: 'Yes, I'd like to do it.'

"The play was 'The Picture,' by Brander Matthews, and I was the only woman in it, with the gamut of all the passions to run in the portrayal of the part. But I was too young and inexperienced to be frightened at the notion. I went on, and got through, and with the smell of the footlights possessing me I became thoroughly set upon a New York appearance."

After her experience with the Stockwell forces, Miss Bates secured an opening with the Frawley stock as utility woman at twenty dollars a week, which led to the realization of her hopes in the way of a chance on Broadway. And this came in the shape of an engagement with no less famous a company than Augustin Daly's. She made her début in February, 1899, but lasted only two nights.

Too Good for Daly's.

"The resignation of Blanche Bates from Augustin Daly's theatrical company will give a good many persons the chance to say 'I told you so,' the dramatic critic of the New York Sun observed at the time. "A short career for Miss Bates on that stage was predicted on the opening night of 'The Great Ruby; or, The Kiss of Blood.'

"She was called before the curtain four times after her best scene, and the applause was enthusiastic and genuine. That would have been enough to base the belief on. But there was a second and bigger reason, said the prophets, why her stay would be brief.

"The curtain later fell in silence on what should have been an impressive climax for Ada Rehan, and was lifted a single time after the ushers had incited a mild demonstration of personal regard for that favorite.

"It has never been customary to have at Daly's any other actress of dramatic strength than Miss Rehan. The rôles secondary in serious importance have been played by charming but weak young women. As soon as rivalry began, as in the case of Maxine Elliott, it was removed.

"In the sensational melodrama from Drury Lane, with the singularly felicitous title or sub-title of 'The Kiss of Blood,' is a Russian adventuress, who has an honest love affair, though she is a thief, and who is the only female character to figure in the heroics of the play. Miss Bates was assigned to it.

"She had come from California, and was unknown here. She proved to be handsome, fiery, forceful, and very talented. She was a revelation to the first audience, and it was disposed to go wild over her.

"Maybe it would have been better for Miss Rehan if the part had been given to her. Perhaps she had disliked to enact a wicked woman. Anyway, she had chosen instead to appear as a vain, frivolous, but clean and cheerful, wife of a London tradesman.

"This had been written as an eccentric character, and at the Drury Lane it had been played with irresistible drollery by Mrs. John Wood. But Miss Rehan had no mind to look grotesque, and as to low comedy, it is clear out of her line.

"In a serio-comic scene of somnambulism, where Mrs. Wood had been a fright in curl papers and a funny nightgown, Miss Rehan sacrificed nothing to the comic requirements. She was as dignified and stately as any Lady Macbeth. For those reasons the sleep-walking episode, which had been very valuable in London, counted for nothing here, and at its end the actress had good reason to know that it had failed with the audience.

"It was then that experts foretold the withdrawal of the California actress. She appeared at Daly's only one more night. She had not found Daly's Theater comfortable."

Naturally, Miss Bates did not long remain without an engagement. She was snapped up by the Lieblers for Miladi in "The Musketeers," and soon caught the eye of Belasco, who featured her in "Under Two Flags." Her real arrival, however, was with "The Darling of the Gods," which brought her seven hundred and fifty dollars a week salary and a percentage of the receipts, not a mean advance from the twenty dollars she had been getting from Frawley less than five years before.

MILLER'S STAR OF DESTINY.

It Led Him from His Native London, Through Canada, and Finally to the Old Lyceum Stock Company.

Henry Miller was born in London, but brought up in Canada. He was only a schoolboy when he chanced to read a magazine article about Henry Irving. This fired him with the ambition to act, but he set about realizing it in a most matter-of-fact and sensible way.

Instead of running off to join some theatrical troupe as a super, he began the study of elocution under the late W.C. Couldock, best remembered perhaps as the worthy miller, father of Hazel Kirke. This was at Miller's home, in Toronto, and here he had four years of grounding in the text of Shakespeare.

He was barely nineteen when the chance came, at a Toronto theater, for him to show what his studying had taught him. He was assigned to the part of the bleeding Sergeant in "Macbeth," and the very fact that the company was merely a scratch affair, not far removed from the barnstorming category, really worked to young Miller's advantage.

He was the first leading man with the old Lyceum stock, in "The Wife," and the second at the Empire. In 1899, he expressed his greatest ambition as being the management of a New York theater. This he has realized the past winter at the Princess, where he organized and produced "Zira" for Miss Anglin.

STORM FOR MISS RUSSELL.

As a Child of Ten She Excited Rose Eytinge's Anger Because She Lacked Experience.

Annie Russell, like Miss Bates, comes of theatrical stock, so the door to the stage was on the latch for her.

Miss Russell's first appearance took place in Montreal when she was ten years old, and was preceded by a heart-breaking episode. Rose Eytinge was playing "Miss Multon" against Clara Morris. Two children are needed in the piece, and when Miss Eytinge ascertained that one of them—Jeanne, assigned to Annie Russell—had never been on before, she was furious.

"Do you want to queer the show when so much depends on it?" she demanded of E.A. McDowell, her manager.

The girl, Annie, chanced to overhear her, and fell to weeping bitterly. Miss Eytinge noticed her, had her heart touched by the spectacle, soothed the child, and allowed her to play the part. Later on she appeared in the chorus of a juvenile "Pinafore" company, and was soon promoted to be Josephine.

Then she made a big jump—to the West Indies, to look out for her small brother Tommy, the "child actor" of the company, later one of the two famous Fauntleroys and now a dramatic critic on a New York paper. While with this troupe she was pressed into service to fill a big variety of parts, giving her a good foundation on which to build her big hit in the sun-bonnet of "Esmeralda."

She followed this with another success, in an altogether different line—the poetical one of "Elaine," and then fell ill. For some years she remained off the boards, close to death's door, and returned to them finally in a weakling play by Sydney Grundy, "The New Woman."

She took the taste of this out of the public's mouth by a triumph both here and in London with "Sue," and then went into the background once more with "Catherine," from the French.

Her real arrival as a popular star was made in the autumn of '99, at the Lyceum, in "Miss Hobbs."

MEDAL SET MANTELL GOING.

He Was Encouraged to Become an Actor by a Prize Which, as a Boy, He Won for Proficiency in Declamation.

Mantell, now in Shakespeare, made his professional start as a sergeant. This was in 1874, in the Rochdale Theater, Lancashire, England, under the stage name of Hudson. The play was "Arrah-na Pogue." He was born in Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, on the 7th of February, 1854, but was brought up in Ireland, where he won a medal at school for his proficiency in declamation. This turned his attention to the amateur stage, where his first appearance was made as De Mauprat in "Richelieu."

He came to America in the same year that he began to act professionally, and he procured an engagement with the Museum stock company in Boston. But he soon returned to England, where he remained for four years, acting in the provinces, and when the States saw him again it was in 1878, when he and Miller were with Modjeska.

His first real lift into popularity arrived when Fanny Davenport engaged him for Loris in "Fedora." In this part he was accounted one of the best-looking men who had trod the American boards, and he established a vogue for himself that paved the way for his stellar career of several years in the one play "Monbars."

GILLETTE DESERTED LAW.

Abetted by Mark Twain, the Future Playwright and Star Took to "The Road," Which He Found a Thorny One.

William Gillette may be said to have reached the stage on the run, for he ran away from home in order to gratify his ambition to become an actor. His family were staid citizens of Hartford, Connecticut, where his father once ran for Governor of the State.

The idea was to make a lawyer of William, but after he got over a taste for mechanics, which led him to construct secretly a steam-engine in his bedroom, he conceived for the stage a craze that refused to be snuffed out by parental opposition.

Mark Twain, a neighbor in Hartford, was on the boy's side. His "Gilded Age" was being dramatized, and the author lent his influence to get young Gillette a place in the cast as foreman of the jury in the company of which John T. Raymond was the head. In this rôle he was entrusted with the onerous task of saying these four words in response to the question of the judge: "We have. Not guilty."

Gillette was barely nineteen at the time, and after the run of "The Gilded Age" was over he found himself in New Orleans without another engagement or the chance of obtaining one. Finally he secured an opening on these magnificent terms—agreeing to play without salary and to furnish his own costumes.

The post was that of leading utility man for a New Orleans stock company, and when, after serving for a while under these humiliating conditions for the sake of the experience it would bring, Gillette mildly suggested that he be paid a small honorarium, he was told there was one alternative that was always open to him—he could leave, which he did.

Thereupon ensued a rough and tumble period of existence for the young actor, who did not arrive at pleasant pastures again until he took to writing plays himself. And yet his first production to reach the footlights was by no means an overwhelming success. This was "The Professor," produced at the Madison Square Theater, with himself in the leading part, when that house was managed by an Episcopal clergyman and his brother.

Success Follows Failure.

It is such a superhuman task to secure a manager's attention for a play that the new playwright is prone to feel that the Rubicon has been passed once the manuscript has been accepted. But in reality this is only a halting-place on the roadside where he may tarry to obtain his second wind. And young Gillette needed all the recuperative powers possible, for when "The Professor" was brought to public attention the critics hurled at it their keenest shafts.

The actor-playwright managed to survive, although his play didn't, and, failing to be discouraged, he went ahead with his work on "Esmeralda." This was a story written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, in which the Mallorys of the theater had become interested, and the dramatization of which, in association with the author, they had entrusted to Gillette. This proved to be a big hit, with Annie Russell in the name-part, and ran to over three hundred performances.

Another adaptation success quickly followed—that of "The Private Secretary," in which Gillette also played. Meantime he was at work on another original piece, "Held by the Enemy," a war drama which almost beat "Shenandoah" on its own ground in the race for popularity.

Inspired by the success he had achieved, Gillette was not content to go ahead on the same lines. He ached to branch out, to astonish folks, to do something big, and with his record behind him he had little difficulty in persuading Charles Frohman to go halves in the production of "Ninety Days."

This was a melodrama of the most lurid type, but the Third Avenue edge of it was supposed to be taken off by the elaborate fashion in which it was staged and the care with which the mechanical effects were looked after. It failed completely, running a bare month, and carrying down all Gillette's savings in its collapse. The disappointment shattered his health, and he retired to a cabin in South Carolina, where, after a time, he set to work on some more adaptations—"Too Much Johnson," "All the Comforts of Home," and "Mr. Wilkinson's Widows."

These were all produced successfully, which could not be said of what eventually turned out to be his most famous work; for "Secret Service," called originally "The Secret Service," was looked upon coldly when it was launched in Philadelphia, with Maurice Barrymore in the lead.

Gillette gave the piece a thorough overhauling, and it was put on in the new form, and with the author as the hero, at the Garrick, New York, in 1896, and made the hit that was really the beginning of Gillette's career of fame as actor-playwright.

BELLEW WAS A SAILOR.

He Studied for the Ministry and Ran Away to Sea Before He Got Into the Spot-light.

Kyrle Bellew, soon to follow "Raffles" with "The Right of Way," is the son of an actor who bore the reputation of being the handsomest man in England. He married the daughter of a commodore, and left the stage to enter the church, becoming Bishop of Calcutta. Harold Kyrle (by which name Bellew was then known), being the eldest son, was destined to follow in his father's footsteps, and studied for holy orders at Oxford.

But he soon found that he had made a mistake. His flesh constantly warred against the confining life of the scholar, and at nineteen he ran away to sea, in the old-fashioned way of the story-books.

After five years on salt water he found himself back in England, no further advanced in this world's goods than when he cut stick from Oxford. He wandered about London, not daring to go home, and without money in his pockets. It was at this crisis that he chanced to read an advertisement calling for a light comedian to join a company for the provinces, the salary to be two pounds (ten dollars) a week.

The blood that had come from his actor-father stirred in his veins, and he went at once to apply for the post. His good looks and pleasing address outweighed his lack of experience, and he was transported with joy at being engaged.

While playing in Dublin as George de Lesparre in Boucicault's "Led Astray" his work and appearance so impressed a critic that he wrote to Boucicault, in London, about him. The dramatist at once sent for the unknown actor, and gave him a position in the company at the Haymarket, where in three years' time he rose to be leading man. From there he went to the Lyceum, under Henry Irving, where he first used the name "Kyrle Bellew."