The Great White Way: A Re-creation of Broadway's Golden Era of Theatrical Entertainment, Allen Churchill, 1962

“Who was the brightest of the stars produced by the Star Factory?

“Of all the scintillating Frohman personalities, the most glittering always remained a luminous slip of a woman who resembled a lively girl, often played a boy, once portrayed a barnyard rooster, and lived a private life so remote that she might indeed have been a heavenly star twinkling far above the earth.

Her name was Maude Adams and beside her ardent following (it included hundreds of thousands of children) the crowds that thronged to see John Drew, Richard Mansfield, and Sarah Bernardt dwindled into unhappy insignificance. While other actresses of the time were popular, Miss Adams improved on this by having passionate admirers. 'Her popularity is such that it amounts almost to unreasoning worship,' said her contemporary Forrest Izard. 'One can safely say that, at least among the women of America, there is a Maude Adams cult. The mere announcement of her name, without respect to the play she is acting, is enough to fill any theater in the land.'

“Miss Adams' earning power equaled her drawing power. Over twenty years (she retired in 1917) this brightest of stars was in a position to earn $20,000 for nearly every week she worked. Often she acted fifty-two weeks a year. It is likely that-in days before taxes-she profited more from her talents than any other performer in the world. Money, though, was the least of her concerns. She lived quietly, splurging only on rare trips to Europe. Merely in a small, spontaneous way might she be called extravagant. From her own pocketbook she often increased the salaries of underpaid bit actors, or of stagehands who pleased her by laboring overtime. Occasionally, as she arrived at the theatre the star would spy a schoolgirl shedding tears outside for lack of enough money for a ticket. Miss Adams would then stop her carriage to buy her one, or would issue orders from backstage that all balcony seats be lowered in price to let such girls in.

“But such human aspects of Miss Adams were little know, for this was a time before personal press-agentry and rapacious newspaper columnists. To the playgoing public she merely represented the perfect Charles Frohman star; the docile girl who permitted the master-producer to pick her roles, dictate her life, and in every way act as a Pygmalion. This was entirely true, and Miss Adams was always unstinting in her praise of Frohman for his guidance.

“In return for tender care, Frohman extracted his own price from her and the ot her stars he employed. The first requirement was a high standard of moral behavior, for C.F. never forgot his experience with Dion Boucicault or changed his mind about never-engage-a-star-smirched-by-scandal. He not only insisted on spotless offstage conduct by his stars. He did not even like them to have active social lives. 'Nothing so kills the healthy growth of an actor,' he pontificated, 'and brings usefulness to an end as soon as the idea that social enjoyment is a means to public success and that industrious labor to improve himself is no longer necessary.”

“Maude Adams-born Maude Adams Kiskadden in 1872-not only fitted perfectly the exalted Frohman standards of obedience, but seemed perfectly to match the era's conception of an actress. ..It was a country ready to fall...under the spell of the mystique of theatre stardom. Maude Adams, never visible in public or available to he press, apparently bereft of an offstage life, seemed the quintessence of it all. She seemed to enjoy the nunlike seclusion Frohman imposed on her. If nothing else, this allowed her to sublimate all emotional life into the acting craft, making her dedication to the theatre complete.

“Still, this is hardly enough to account for her gigantic appeal. What, then, was her magic? 'Maude Adams is a moonbeam,' a critic wrote, and this remains the best description of them all. Of her voice, another said , 'There is a pipe organ in Germany, one note of which will shatter glass-her tones do exactly that to one's heart.' Beyond the age of thirty Maude Adams could play a piquant girl-child or an elfin boy, each with a leavening of Irish mischief. Her will-o'-the-wisp charm was called ethereal, pixie, lambent, and lucent. As Maggic Wylie in Barrie's What Every Woman Knows, Miss Adams herself spoke the line, 'Charm is the bloom upon a woman.' On stage Maude Adams certainly bloomed. Yet it must be added that this fragile moonbeam quality does not always shine through in photographs. Every adjective applied to Maude Adams rang a variation on the word virginal, yet in photos she looks remarkably earthy. This may be because she was so often pictured as a boy. At the same time, her large round eyes have a level, worldly look. Slightly prominent teeth bring to her a look of intriguing, slightly perverse invitation. In all, Maude Adams, moonbeam, much resembles a precocious and not unknowing teen-ager of our day.

The contradictions in Maude Adams ' pictures match others in her character. Under the elfin surface reposed a trained woman of the theatre who viewed herself and the world with great solemnity. 'Genius is the talent for seeing things straight,' she said once, and straight is the way she looked at most matters connected with both career and existence. Reasons for this were no doubt rooted in a hard-working childhood, with only a mother to lavish any amount of affection on her. Through this mother Miss Adams could proudly trace her ancestry directly back to the Mayflower. Aasenath Ann 'Annie' Adams was also the offspring of a first-generation family of Mormons. In her teens, Annie was chosen by a wife of Brigham Young to become one of the Salt Lake City Church acting group. She showed exceptional talent.

Several years later one of her performances was watched by a roving Scotch-Irishman named James Kiskadden, of whom it was said 'He seldom let work stand in the way of his enjoyment of life.' Kiskadden vowed to wed alluring Annie Adams and in time he did. Marriage may have sobered James Kiskadden slightly, but it never made him a good provider. The honeymooners traveled from Utah to San Francisco in 1869 on the first through train ever run to the Coast. They decided to say there. A short time later Annie Adams found it necessary to go to twork as a professional actress. Maude was nine months old when Annie appeared in a play called The Lost Child, in which a baby is carried on stage aboard a platter. Inevitably baby Maude was drafted for this taxing role and so (on an almost-silver platter) her theatre career began.

Annie Adams continued her active career (Kiskadden fades from the scene like vapor), touring with theatrical companies over the rugged frontier territories of California and Nevada. Maude was with her, laying Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, among other roles.

“...she functioned well as a child performer. As Little Maudie, she not only played speaking parts in the lurid melodramas of the day, but piped between-the-acts songs like “Pretty as a Picture” and “That Yaller Girl That Winked At Me.” While still a tot she became keenly aware of the rights and priviliges of talent. “At six I liked to be consulted about the business arrangements with my managers-salary and how long the engagement was to last.'

At ten, Little Maudie was dispatched to Salt Lake City, there to attend the Collegiate Institute. Later her teachers would recall her as an intelligent, adjusted child, but Miss Adams complains of the fact that she was a celebrity to other pupils. By the age of twelve she was back on the Road, leaping by stagecoach from one gold-coast town to another. Once, she and her intrepid mother toured as far east as New York, where the star of the attraction followed tradition by absconding with the profits. In California again, Maude seems to have realized that she was not a born genius whose talents divinely prepared her for the stage. One play in which she appeared had numerous laugh lines, but she was unable to make the audience laugh at hers. Other members of the cast became annoyed. The leading man worked wit her, trying to teach the preternaturally serious girl how to lighten and liven the tones of her voice. Finally, he gave up in despair.

This seems to have persuaded Maude that her strongest weapon as an actres was hard work. Years later she would be hailed for her 'tremendous reading, solitary thinking, and extra-ordinary personal application.' Now, oddly enough, the harder she labored on herself, the more wispy and fragile her personality seemed to become. In 1889 a second road Tour carried her to New York, and following a round of casting offices, she was dispatched to Boston as a replacement in Lord Chumley, starring E.H. Sothern. One Eastern critic privileged to cover an early Maude Adams performance called her 'a sweet and tender blossom on the dramatic tree.”

“...a few men briefly attempted to pay court to Maude Adams. “

Socially she occasionally mixed in groups with such outstanding males of the time as Richard Harding Davis, Finley Peter Dunne, Charles Dana Gibson, and John Fox, author of the best-selling Trail of the Lonesome Pine.

But for all her enormous theatre success, Miss Adams continued unsure of herself. 'I had very little confidence in myself as an actress,' she later said of herself at this time. This lack of assurance may have been behind her increase in passion for isolation. Even Frohman, so carefully guiding her destiny and so much in favor of the isolation, became concerned about the a lack of variety in her existence. He encouraged her to become interested in stage lighting, which was making new strides after the development of electricity. Miss Adams obligingly dug into this esoteric art with all her customary thoroughness. During the later years of her retirement she was rated a lighting expert and was often consulted by other experts.

Peter Pan established a long-run record at the Empire, then went on spectacular tour. (Miss Adams now traveled with a $30,000 railroad car which held a stage for between-cities rehearsals.)

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