Information from the book Maude Adams: A Biography

This book is dated 1971 and is by Ada Patterson. Principle points include:

• 1.The home she was born in was a narrow, two-story adobe house with a lean-to for kitchen and laundry usage in the summer.
• 2. One night a neigbhor brought a set of red and blue alphabet blocks when Maude was eight months old. After one session with the person naming the letters on the blocks Maude Adams learned the letters. By the age of one year old she had taught herself to read.
• 3. They moved to San Francisco when she was four years old.
• 4. Before she was seven years old she showed a tendency towards realism in her performances. One example was a play requiring beer, which was really water, to be brought to the actors, and she insisted that real beer be used.
• 5. She went to a convent in Tours, France where she was taken on as a summer boarder in 1901.
• 6. During her life she also traveled up teh Nile, was in the Lybian Desert, and spent five weeks in Jerusalem.
• 7. While in the Holy lands she obtained sixty books, chiefly in papyrus, including the oldest play manuscript in the world.
• 8. She won an automobile in a competitive vote for the most popular actress in New York.
• 9. There was a golden life-size statue of her sent to the Paris Exposition as one of the most popular American actresses.
• 10. Franklin D. Roosevelt complemented her personally on her acting.
• 11. She could play the piano, harp and cello.
• 12. She would rehearse her own part by herself after the general rehearsal was done.
• 13. "...she avoids people and lives away from the world, preferring and seeking solitude. On the stage, a gossamer, spritelike quality, ephemeral, but radiant as the golden dust on the butterfly's wing..."
• 14. "There is a suggestion of this isolation in the set melancholy of her face which is pensive and t houghtful in repose and haunted as by some secret sorrow even when radiant with her sweetest smile. Hers, too, is a highly nervous temperament, always tuned to the snapping point and her frequent physical collapse arises from this alone.
• 15. Dark green is her favorite tint.
• 16. On her trips abroad she traveled incognito.

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