From the book Matinee Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Our Theater by Ward Morehouse

Maude Adams went on the stage at the age of nine moths; she was still on it, playing Portia, when she was sixty, having returned to the theater after a long retirement to make a harrowing, across-America tour in The Merchant of Venice. Greatness, as an actress, was never attributed to Miss Adams as it was to Bernhardt-she was never the ‘actress' that Ada Rehan was- but the daughter of Annie Adams and James Kiskadden had something of a spiritual quality that made her appear universal. The rippling laugh, the lilting voice, the odd toss of her head-these were attributes that endeared her to playgoers. On the practical side, she was the theater's star with the greatest box-office power from the time of The Little Minister in 1897 until What Every Woman Knows, eleven years later. Her name sold seats! It packed theaters. The evidence was incontestable. people went to see her who never entered a playhouse at any other time. A week's receipts of twenty thousand dollars for an Adams play in a road stand was a normal gross, and tat was the day and time of the $2-top ticket.

Charles Frohman was fully aware of Maude Adam's potentialities when he put her into The Masked Ball with John Drew. He was quietly excellent when she again succeeded with Drew in Rosemary, and when she brought her girlishness and ineffable loveliness to the role of James M. Barrie's Lady Babbie in The Little Minister, he was certain that she could be sure of a devoted following for all the years that she cared to give to the stage. Miss Adams was in Rosemary at the Empire when Barrie, on his first visit to this country, saw her performance. He was enchanted with her playing and returned to London and wrote the role of Lady Babbie for her. And then Frohman presented her as a star.

Maude Adams had her failures. Juliet, for instance. She was far from impressive in the exacting role of the Duc de Reichstadt, the weakling son of Napoleon, in Rostand's L'Aiglon, and she was no more suited to Chantecler of the comb, spurs, and tail feathers that she would have been to Lady Macbeth, but these defects were not counted, and certainly not remembered, by her worshiping public. She was beloved for her Babbie and for her Phoebe of the Ringlets in Quality Street; for her charming Spanish heroine in The Pretty Sister of Jose; for her delightful playing as the indispensable Maggie Wylie in What Every Woman Knows, and for the most memorable performance of her life, given at the Empire on the evening of November 6, 1905, when she came forth as Barrie's Peter Pan. Barrie had great misgivings about Peter Pan when he sent his manuscript to America; he frankly told his producer that he did not have much hope for it as a commercial property, but Frohman did not share the Scotsman's doubts. He was elated with the play and talked of little else for weeks. He predicted that Miss Adams would be irresistible in her suit of leaves and that Peter of the treetops and the Never-Never Land would become her most popular role. And during the long run at the Empire, as playgoers from six to sixty came swarming into his theater, he had reason to be pleased with his foresight, but he was a man too free of pretensions and selfimportance to go in for self-congratulation. And he was too busy. He was planning to send his star and her Barrie fantasy to every corner of America.

Maude Adams was an actress of good judgment and intelligence and with a sense of obligation to her public. She was always interested in reaching the young people of America. There were the playgoers of the future to be considered, and she insisted upon having a good number of seats selling at 50 cents available at every stand. There came an evening during one of her tours in Peter Pan when the line for the gallery box office in an Eastern city was a block long at 7:40 P.M. The regular admission price to the gallery was 50 cents but the house manager, knowing that he could get more for this performance, gave his orders, "Open up, and charge everybody one dollar." When Miss Adams reached the theater a few minutes later there was a teen-age girl sobbing near the stage door. The girl tearfully confided that she had saved up her fifty cents and had been planning for many weeks to see Peter Pan but that she didn't have a dollar and didn't know where to get it. Miss Adams summoned the house manager to her dressing room, told him what she thought of his actions, and demanded that there be a refund of fifty cents to every person who had paid a dollar to get into the gallery that evening. And if he did not do so there would be no performance. What happened to the young girl who had been crying? She saw the performance in a box seat as the guest of the star.

At the time the Empire first shook with cheers for the daughter of the Kiskaddens in Peter Pan (which was, as John Gassner observed in his Masters of the Drama, * "perhaps the most escapist play ever written"), there was commotion of sorts in New York's Thirties and Forties. The Gilsey House, a sporty theatrical hotel at Broadway and 29th Street, was still a favorite meeting place for people of the amusement world; theater folk also flocked to the Holland House and to Considine's and to Jack's and the Metropole. The Astor, in all its magnificent bulk, had reared itself at Times Square. Playgoers were discovering Sixth Avenue via the mighty Hippodrome. William Faversham, who had learned his trade with the fine Lyceum and Empire stock companies, had a solid success in The Squaw Man at Wallack's. Robert B. Mantell was roaring as King Lear at the Garden. Lillian Russell, still highly paid but on the downgrade artistically, was singing twice daily at Proctor's 125th Street. Viola Allen was engaged with a minor comedy, Fitch Toast of the Town. Margaret Anglin was at the Princess in Zira. The long-legged and frequently funny Richard Carle was in The Mayor of Tokyo at the New York, and another laugh specialist, Eddie Foy, had The Earl and the Girl at the Casino. "Variety," the theatrical weekly, founded by the sagacious Sime Silverman, was preparing to come forth with its first issue. Burns Mantle, from out of Denver, was covering plays for the "Chicago Inter-Ocean." Ashton Stevens was the outspoken critic of the "San Francisco Examiner"; George Jean Nathan, Cornell'04, was about to enter journalism via the "New York Herald." And the brassy, flag-waving George M. Cohan, of the crazy dance and the kangaroo walk, had opened his Forty-five Minutes from Broadway out of town and had a booking for the New Amsterdam. He brought it in as his New Year's gift to Broadway, on the very first evening in 1906. It had been Cohan's intention to make it a show for Fay Templeton, who played the housemaid, Mary Jane Jenkins, but by the time the production reached the 42d Street the reformed vaudeville actor, Victor Moore, in the role of the slangy Kid Burns, had completely taken over.

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