The Beginnings of Stage Careers.[2]

The Beginnings of Stage Careers.^[2]

By MATTHEW WHITE, Jr.

EIGHTH INSTALMENT.

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

An original article written for The Scrap Book.

NEW NAMES BROUGHT LUCK.

Margaret Illington and Grace Elliston First Sought Thespian Fame Under Cognomens Now Almost Forgotten.

Although widely divergent in their personal appearance and methods of acting, Grace Elliston and Margaret Illington, the first two Mice in “The Lion and the Mouse,” have one thing in common—each, after appearing on the stage under one name for some time, changed it for another.

Miss Elliston, it will be remembered, created Shirley Rossmore in the original production of the well-known Klein play last autumn, while Miss Illington went to Chicago later on in the second company, and made a big hit in the part when the piece was tried in London. To take the ladles in this order then—

Along about the middle or early nineties, a New York critic, in noticing the appearance at the Casino of Frank Daniels in “The Wizard of the Nile,” wound up his comments with these two sentences: “There were others that were clever—and one little beauty of a maid whose eyes played havoc with the audience. Her name is Grace Rutter, and she will be a star some day.”

Mansfield Recognized Talent.

This “little beauty of a maid” was only in the chorus, and although she has not yet fulfilled the strict letter of this prophecy, she has come pretty close to it, and is yet young. Born in Bluff City, Tennessee, she became interested in amateur theatricals and in a small way made her first professional appearance at the old Lyceum Theater, Memphis, in “Boccaccio.”

The experience was fascinating, and an offer from a traveling company tempted her beyond her strength, and she went on the road, finally reaching New York as a member of “The Dazzler” company.

At a benefit performance of some sort she recited. Richard Mansfield happened to be present, saw promise in her work, and engaged her as a member of his Garrick Theater stock company, then in its first season at this house, which Mr. Mansfield had just taken over from Edward Harrigan and renamed. But as it happened, it was also his last season there, and Miss Rutter’s only opportunity was to do Dodo in a burlesque of “Trilby” called “Thrilby.”

Hoyt & McKee, who succeeded Mansfield in the control of the Garrick, gave Miss Rutter a small part in Hoyt’s farce, “A Day and a Night,” which, in turn, secured for her an opening with Daniels, and in due course she was added to the musical comedy forces at Daly’s, where she was seen in “The Geisha,” “The Circus Girl,” and other London importations.

Chose Another Ladder to Climb.

But although she might be progressing all this while so far as salary was concerned, the ambitions in Miss Rutter’s heart were not being at all satisfied, and in the spring of 1899 she resolved to begin at the foot of the ladder again and mount up the dramatic rather than the light musical rounds.

After some casting about and a period of hope deferred, the ambitious young woman obtained a chance to appear with Daniel Frohman’s stock company at the old Lyceum. There she made her début in “His Excellency the Governor.” She decided, however, that the old name was against her, associating her as it did with musical work, so she appeared on the house bill as “Grace Elliston.” Perhaps her most notable work at the Lyceum was in the charming, fantastic curtain-raiser, “The Shades of Night.”

She remained with the Lyceum company for another season, and then, at the Criterion, created the leading part in that short-lived dramatization, “The Helmet of Navarre.” When this mistake was laid away on the upper shelf, minus camphor balls, Miss Elliston passed to Bonita in a big Academy of Music revival of “Arizona.” Her Shakespearian aspirations were realized in 1903–’04, when she became Olivia in Viola Allen’s offering of “Twelfth Night.”

Manager Named His Future Wife.

It was in 1900 that patrons of James K. Hackett, in “The Pride of Jennico,” saw that the part of the gipsy girl was played with much fire and dash by a very young actress who was set down on the program as Maude Light. Investigation shows this to be the real name of a stage-struck young woman from Bloomington, Illinois, who, after some very modest attempts in Chicago, had come to Daniel Frohman with her dramatic aspirations. She was placed in a minor rôle with the Hackett company, to be speedily promoted to Michel, the gipsy aforesaid, the second important female part in the play. And it wasn’t long before she was sometimes doing that of the Princess herself, whenever Bertha Galland was out of the cast. Her change of name was made at the request of Mr. Frohman. It seemed that the other women were all using stage noms, so when the matter was laid before her Miss Light expressed her perfect willingness to fall in line.

“But what shall I call myself?” she inquired.

“I’ll make you up a name,” replied Mr. Frohman, and forthwith took her native State, Illinois, and her home town, Bloomington, and out of the two formed “Illington,” prefixing “Margaret” for euphony.

From the Hackett play Miss Illington passed to the stock company at Daly’s, still under Mr. Frohman’s management, appearing as the Maid in “Frocks and Frills,” a small part which she made stand out vividly, and at the same theater she did Fleur de Lys in “Notre Dame.”

Succeeded Miss Loftus.

E. H. Sothern’s troupe next claimed Miss Illington’s services, and she took Cecilia Loftus’s place as leading woman when that actress fell ill and was obliged to leave the stage for the hospital.

In the autumn of the same year (1903) Miss Illington created the leading part in that distinguished failure, “A Japanese Nightingale,” but during the brief run of the piece she assumed a part attended with more success—that of the wife of her manager, Daniel Frohman. It was announced then that she would leave the stage at the end of the “Nightingale” engagement, but, as so often happens in such cases, the bridegroom proposes and the bride elects to please herself. So the very next spring we found her as Henriette in the all-star cast of “The Two Orphans.” And last season she filled the title rôle in “Mrs. Leffingwell’s Boots.”

For the coming winter Miss Illington is to be entrusted with the most important part that has yet fallen to her—that of the leading lady with John Drew in Pinero’s new play, “His House in Order”—a rôle created in London with great success by Irene Van Brugh, who made such a hit here a few years ago with John Hare in “The Gay Lord Quex.”

WOULDN’T STAY CURED.

Jane Wheatley Celebrated Her Recovery from First Attack of Stage Fever By Falling Victim to a Second.

Although stock company work, with two performances a day and a weekly change of bill, is an awful grind, it is also about the only way nowadays in which the young player can obtain the necessary experience to give him or her that versatility which broadens ability.

Take, for instance, the six weeks last spring when Jane Wheatley filled an engagement in Providence as leading woman of the Albee stock company, at Keith’s. During that period she was Muriel in “The Second in Command,” an English comedy; Lucy in “The Dictator,” an American farce; Katherine in “If I Were King,” a romantic drama; Phyllis in the Goodwin-Elliott play, “When We Were Twenty-One”; Marcelle in “The Gay Parisians,” a lively farce from the French; and Mary of Magdala in the Scriptural play, “The Holy City.”

Of her work in the last-named part, a local critic wrote: “She carried the rôle through from the moment of awakening from the scarlet bondage with a spirit of reverence that was much more than mere acting, and had applause been permitted she would have carried off all honors.”

Spent Allowance for Theater Tickets.

Miss Wheatley is a young woman who went on the stage from pure love of it, starting In 1898 with a very lowly part In “The Christian.” She was with Viola Allen for three seasons, and subsequently she played prominent parts with Sadie Martinot. She followed Grace Filkins as Lady Airish, in the support of Alice Fischer, in “The School for Husbands.” The account she has furnished The Scrap Book of her start in the profession is so very entertainingly written that I am giving it herewith in her own words:

“While studying in Boston some years ago, every penny of my allowance went for theater tickets, and the Hollis Street Theater was my favorite haunt. My chum was an enthusiast on the subject, if ever there was one, and I made a very good second. We had our respective favorites, and mine was Miss Viola Allen. I always had hoped to meet her, and even thought she might advise me or help me to a position on the stage. But how to arrange a meeting?

“My chum (Kate) and I talked it over, and finally decided upon a plan of action.

“Kate had gone to a boarding-school, somewhere in Canada, and had heard much from the teachers about Miss Allen, who had been a former student there. One of the teachers even suggested giving Kate a letter to Miss Allen. These facts were all we had to introduce us, but I remember that I was the timid one and Kate the fearless.

“After the matinée one day we summoned up courage and went to the stage entrance, sent in our cards, and, with beating hearts, waited. Miss Allen was then leading woman with the Empire stock company.

“In a few minutes a maid came out to us, and with cold politeness inquired what we wanted.

Aid from Viola Allen.

“‘We wished to see Miss Allen,’ was our answer.

“I know now what a piece of effrontery it was on our part, for when an actress has played a long part, and has only a short time before she has to play it again, she is ready for only one thing, and that is rest. However, Miss Allen was then, just as she always has been, kind, and invited us to come another day—which we did; and this time we were successful, for she saw us, and I remember how happy it made me.

“I remember the conversation, too; for she spoke of what was uppermost in our minds—our ambitions. So encouraging was the interview with this dear lady that when I finished my studies in Boston I wrote to her, saying that I meant to start my professional career in the autumn, and ‘would she help me?’

“She did. In reply to my letter, she said there were no parts in her play, ‘The Christian,’ except those requiring experience, but that some characters would speak in chorus, and I would be welcome to such a part.

“I remember an illustration made frequently by Dr. Emerson at the Emerson College. He pointed out to us that on the stage we were like parts of a mosaic—alone we were nothing, but as a part of the whole, each one in his place very necessary to the whole. I did not then realize how very small was to be my part of the mosaic—its proportions were exaggerated in my mind, and I had visions of myself in a dainty or artistic costume, entering with two or three other young ladles, and speaking in chorus, something as do the four daughters in ‘The Gay Parisians.’

“I also remember Miss Allen’s apologetic remark about the salary. ‘The money is nothing,’ she said.

“As for that part of it—money—it had never entered my mind. The happiness of having the opportunity was enough; and to think of being paid, actually paid, for simply doing what I loved to do! It was all very beautiful.

Appalled by Reality.

“To skip rehearsals, which, needless to say, were a source of great enjoyment, as it was all so new to me, the opening night in Albany came, and there my troubles began.

“The ‘characters speaking in chorus’ formed a mob, and extra supernumeraries were engaged for the night in Albany. It was a wild enough mob; my pride suffered, and my toes, too, for both were trodden upon. The damp cellar dressing-room with its many occupants, and the harsh, severe directions of the stage manager—it was all so different from what I had expected.

“In the course of the evening I found a lonely corner in the despised cellar and wept long and bitterly. Was this the way to Fame? Could I bridge these humiliations and discomforts? The goal seemed very far off, and I remember repeating to myself:

“‘I’m cured! I’m cured!’

“However, I went on to Washington with the company. There I tried another day of it, but conditions grew worse instead of better. During the afternoon of the second day in Washington I packed my bag, walked to the station, bought a ticket for New York, said nothing to any one of my resolution, but wired my father to meet me, and got on the train, bound for home.

Moth Again Seeks Flame.

“And oh, how glad I was to see my father, and he to see me! And how glad he was that I was ‘cured’ of my desire to be an actress!

“Well, to make a long story short, I remained ‘cured’ only a short time—two weeks, I think it was.

“A nice letter from Miss Allen, saying that she would keep my understudy for me, enticed me to return when the company played in New York. I refused to give up again, although those first tears were not the only ones I had cause to shed during that long season.

“My reward came, however, for before the close of the theater year the girl whose rôle I understudied left the cast, and they gave me her part for the rest of the season. Miss Allen helped me herself to do justice to it—even to rehearsing me after matinée, when she must have been very tired.

“And it was in my beloved Boston, where I had first met her, that I played my first part, and in her company, only the theater was the old Boston Museum, not the Hollis Street.”

DANCED ON CHURCH STEPS.

Front of a Negro Place of Worship Was the Scene of Henry E. Dixey’s Preparation for the Stage.

“The steps of a colored church near where I lived was my practise-ground, and I was on the stage when I was eight.”

Thus spoke Henry E. Dixey, in his dressing-room at the Lyric, between the acts of “The Man on the Box,” in response to my question about his start in his stage career—a career that stands out more remarkably than the majority. After achieving a reputation in a burlesque with which his name became so closely identified that it was often used interchangeably with his own, he went into Daly’s theater and played Malvolio in “Twelfth Night,” in a fashion to cover himself with glory. He has scored high in the Gilbert & Sullivan operas, and is now a successful star in high-class comedy.

Dixey’s real name is Dixon. He was born in Boston on January 6, 1859. His parents had no connection with the theater, and had no idea that Harry’s predilection for dancing was going to lead him there. When very young he helped eke out the family income by becoming a cashboy in a dry-goods store but he wasn’t a shining success at it. The part he liked best was being sent on errands, which gave him an opportunity to collect cronies about him and practise fancy steps on his improvised stage in front of the African meeting-house, as aforesaid.

Failed to Serve Two Masters.

It didn’t take the dry-goods people long to “get on” to the idiosyncrasies of their youthful employee, and in due course he lost his job and was cooling his heels all day long on the sidewalk, most of the time in the vicinity of the stage-door of the Howard Athenæum, then under the management of the late John Stetson.

When Stetson was putting on “Under the Gaslight,” he needed a street urchin, so he decided to give the little Dixon chap a chance to show what he could do. The child introduced a song and dance, made an instantaneous hit, and thus started on his career. His part was called Peanuts, and he was retained at the Howard for small bits with James S. Maffit and his partner, Bartholomew, in their pantomime work.

How he managed to pick up an education, with his head full of the stage, is difficult to determine; but one has only to talk with Mr. Dixey to know him for a man of keen intelligence and common sense. But his parents continued to keep him under their eye in Boston until after “Evangeline” was produced. Here he encountered his old friend, James S. Maffit, again, as the Lone Fisherman. Crane was in the cast, too, doing Le Blanc, the notary. Dixey was the forelegs of the famous Heifer, the hind ones submitting to the direction of Richard Golden. But during the tour of the famous piece Dixey did very many of the other parts in the burlesque.

In the course of the early eighties John Stetson extended his field of operations to New York, and set up a stock company at the Fifth Avenue Theater. Dixey, as one of its leading members, created Christopher Blizzard in “Confusion.”

“Adonis” and Its Successors.

In New York he fell in with William F. Gill. Dixey had some of the ideas for “Adonis.” Gill had more, and put them together in the shape of a burlesque. They tried to get Dixey’s old friend and first manager, Stetson, to bring it out at the Boston Globe. But he got cold feet on the proposition, declaring that it was too expensive to mount. Rice took it in hand, and after he had demonstrated the thing to be a success Stetson wanted an interest in it, in exchange for which he was willing to plank down twenty thousand dollars, but it was then too late.

“Adonis” ran at the Bijou in New York for more than three hundred nights, and was afterward done in London.

“The Seven Ages,” built on the same lines, was a frightful frost, if a thing can be said to be so when done in a temperature of one hundred and three degrees, which Mr. Dixey avers the thermometer registered at the old Standard in the early—and last—nights of the piece.

After “The Seven Ages”—Daly’s for Dixey, and in this connection I want to quote from an interview the actor gave to a writer for the New York Dramatic Mirror some ten years ago.

“Do you know,” he said, “that I really was the first Svengali on the stage? In ‘The Tragedy Rehearsed’ I introduced a little Trilby burlesque, where Miss Rehan was hypnotized into singing ‘Ben Bolt.’ That was the very earliest stage use of Miss O’Ferrall.

“Afterward I went to Augustin Daly and proposed that he should dramatize ‘Trilby,’ have Miss Rehan play the character, and let me do Svengali. It would have revolutionized things at Daly’s. But he pooh-poohed me, and wouldn’t listen to the idea. Instead, he put on ‘A Bundle of Lies,’ where I had a fifteen-line part. The play was a fearful frost.”

Takes Dark View of Future.

Just previous to the death of Stuart Robson, Dixey made a big success as David Garrick in the play “Oliver Goldsmith,” which Augustus Thomas wrote for Robson; then, by way of striking variety, Dixey went to London in a Casino review, “The Whirl of the Town,” which failed to please England.

A few years later, when Charles Frohman imported Barrie’s “Little Mary” to the Empire, puzzling New York by the play written around the stomach, Dixey was the Earl of Carlton.

Dixey, by the by, does not believe in stock companies, and is rather pessimistic as to the future of our stage, in the way of the supply of actors.

“Where are they coming from?” he said to me the other night, in the course of his chat about his own start in the business. “What training do they get under the present system to fit them for any work out of a set groove into which chance and the powers that be happen to drop them? Suppose, for example, you are a young man who has done good work in amateur theatricals, and with a ‘pull’ in the shape of a letter of introduction to a big New York manager. You are also straight and tall and would make a presentable appearance on the stage.

“Well, you have your interview with the big manager of to-day. He looks you over, presses a button, and to the obsequious underling who answers the summons, he says: ‘Put this gentleman in the juvenile part in Number Three company of “Mrs. Prettytoes’ Shoestrings.”’

“You are elated at first at getting a job, but you find later on that ‘Mrs. Prettytoes’ Shoestrings’ has long since exhausted its drawing powers in the big cities, and is billed for six months through the one-night stands of Texas and Arkansas. You play the same part for all that period, and the next season maybe you will receive a rôle exactly on the same lines when, if you are lucky, week stands may replace the single night stops.

Where Are Actors to Come From?

“And so it goes. Because you look the character you are assigned to it, and you never have an opportunity to show what you can do in the way of versatility, and consequently you never grow. Again I repeat, Where are the big actors in the next generation to come from?

“How about the stars of to-day? Were they not nearly all of them shining marks twenty years ago, having been cultivated under the old order of things? The only show a man has nowadays outside of the few cheap stock companies, to play more than one part a season, is when the first play put out fails.

“How different this was around Civil War times, when your star traveled from town to town and the companies in the various theaters were obliged to be up in the various plays he put out? Our cities were so small then that the same people had to be counted on to support a week’s engagement, so the bill had to be changed nightly. Twenty years from now I wonder who will be the stars, how many of them there will be, and—save the mark!—to what artistic merit will they attain?”

In a sense Mr. Dixey is himself a victim of the system he deplores. His season in “The Man on the Box” having been so successful, his manager has secured the dramatic rights to Cyrus Townsend Brady’s novel. “Richard the Brazen,” which will give Dixey a part on very similar lines to the conscienceless Lieutenant Worburton he enacts in the Harold MacGrath story.