Article from Deseret News Centennial Utah

Thousands of would-be actors and actresses wait a lifetime for the ``break'' that will put them center stage. For Maude Adams, it came when she was 9 months old.

Her nurse had brought her to the celebrated Salt Lake Theater to wait for her mother, Annie Kiskadden, to finish a play. A second play on the bill, ``The Lost Child,'' called for an infant to be brought in on a tray. ``After the babe's first exit, it got to crying so terribly that it could not reappear,'' Maude's mother later wrote. ``I recall how Mr. Maiben was dancing jigs all over the stage, saying `What shall we do? What is to be done?' In the terrible anxiety, I grabbed Maude from the cradle, put her on the tray and she was taken on.''

The audience, so the story goes, was delighted that the baby had grown several months older in the few minutes between appearances and responded warmly when Maude sat up on the tray and smiled.

It was an auspicious beginning to the stage career of one of Utah's most notable theater luminaries. For decades, the name of Maude Adams was associated with the greatest theater offered in the United States. From comedy to Shakespearean drama, her name on a theater bill was enough to bring playgoers out in droves.

Adams (her stage name) was born Maude Kiskadden Nov. 11, 1872, in the family home at about 800 South and 700 East. (The family farm evolved into Liberty Park.) One of her ancestors, John Howland, was among the 41 signers of the Mayflower Compact. Another, her grandfather Barnabus Adams, joined the LDS Church and came to Salt Lake Valley in 1847 with the first company led by Brigham Young. Her mother was born in Little Cottonwood Canyon in 1848 and showed an early penchant for acting, taking child roles in plays presented in the old Social Hall. Later, she was the leading lady of the Deseret Dramatic Co.

For years, mother and daughter traveled together, always in search of acting opportunities.

Maude's entire childhood became a rehearsal for the career that was to come. She played child roles in many plays and once, when the role she wanted went to another child, she was paid $7.50 to sing ``Pretty as a Picture'' and ``That Yaller Girl That Winked at Me'' between acts.

Her single-minded focus on acting robbed her of a normal childhood. In a magazine article she later wrote, she referred to her childhood self as ``The One I Knew Least.'' When she should have been playing and studying, she developed instead a taste for dickering about salaries and parts and a distaste for school - especially geography, which was ``the ghastly thing in life.''

The Adamses traveled extensively chasing roles - San Francisco, New York, Boston. At 12, Maude was apprenticed to a theatrical company touring California. At 15, she had her first try as a leading lady, and pronounced it ``a complete failure.''

Bit parts and associations with leading actors and directors chipped off the rough edges over time. Her first favorable reviews noted her role in ``Lord Chumley'' in Boston. She earned the nickname ``Midget,'' later expanded to ``Mrs. Midget,'' even though she never married.

A biographer later suggested that one of her most valued mentors, director Charles Frohman, may have been Maude's one true love. His death aboard the ill-fated Lusitania, torpedoed on May 7, 1915 at the outset of World War I, was a blow. The death of her grandmother later that year and her mother in March 1916 added to a heavy emotional burden that temporarily dampened her career.

Nevertheless, Adams was among those actors who dutifully traveled from city to city entertaining U.S. servicemen. Travel time was spent knitting socks for the fighting men.

``Peter Pan,'' one of the most enduring and beloved of children's plays, was written for Adams by Scottish playwright James Barrie.

The character of the boy who refused (and continues to refuse) to grow up ``came to my mind through you,'' Barrie wrote. But he never saw her in her famous enactment of his play. They were lifelong friends and frequent correspondents until his death. She appeared in several of his works during her long stage career.

Hundreds of children, after watching Peter Pan fly away to new adventure in Never-Never Land, wrote letters. One lad invited her to lunch and told her to be sure to bring Tinkerbell. ``You can fly here easily and not pay car fare,'' the child assured her. She learned never to leave the theater when children might be waiting lest they learn she was a woman, dashing their visions of Peter Pan.

A reviewer praised her as a ``delicately beautiful creature, (who) summoned such cheek and boyishness for the part of Peter Pan.'' From the first performance in the Empire Theater in New York through almost three continuous years, Adams brought Pan to life 223 times. The play was briefly revived twice, in 1912 and in 1924 when the lissome Adams was 42.

When she played the role in Salt Lake City in 1904, children from local orphanages were invited to a matinee. The director of St. Ann's Orphanage later said that ``The only trouble is that it has kept the entire corps of nurses busy trying to prevent the children from flying out the windows.''

Adams returned to Utah as often as her career allowed. In a first-person magazine article in the mid-1920s, she wrote that ``At Grand-mother's house, there were vastly entertaining things: cows and sheep and horses and dogs. And trees to climb with cherries at the top. And oh, the sweet-smelling hay in the barn and the swing tied to one of the rafters. There were fields to roam, whole fields of wild flowers - freedom.''

As her career began to wind down, Adams became a world traveler. She once wrote of the Swiss Alps: ``They are inspiring but not friendly like the mountains that protect the lovely Valley of Salt Lake. My childhood had been guarded by the kindly Wasatch Range, and the Rockies were friends from my beginning.''

Adams dabbled a bit in production. She wanted to film Rudyard Kipling's ``Kim,'' and spent considerable time in Europe working on a script, but the project never came to fruition.

In 1937, she was invited to join the staff of Stephens, a girls' junior college in Columbia, Mo. She taught drama at the school until 1950 and died three years later in Tannersville, N.Y.

Boston researcher Phyllis Robbins, a close friend of Adams for more than 50 years, donated books, photos and papers related to the actress' career to the University of Utah. She also wrote a biography, ``Maude Adams: An Intimate Portrait,'' which preserves the rich details of the Utahn's life.

Published 30 January, 996 Deseret News

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