Broadway by Brooks Atkinson 1970
Maude Adams appeared in two productions that year (1900)first at the Criterion at 44th Street as Lady Babbie in Barrie's The Little Minister, which had made her a star in 1897, and then as Napoleon's little son in Rostand's L'Aiglon at the Knickerbocker Theater at 38th Street.
Charles Frohman, the busiest as well as the most ingratiating producer of his day, believed in the supremacy of the actor, and he had a gallery of fine actors to prove his point-John Drew, Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams...
The most unlikely actress became the most legendary. Offstage, Maude Adams was not beautiful in any of the conventional ways. Offstage, she was without personality or distinction, In 1910, after she had been a star for eighteen years, she had difficulty in establishing her identity in a Fifth Avenue shop. She had just returned from a lucrative national tour and went skipping around town on a shopping spree. A slim, apologetic figure in an old brown traveling coat and a small hat, she looked insignificant. Since she had not brought either cash or a checkbook with her, she asked the manager of a store to have some clothes sent to he home C.O.D. He hesitated when he considered the shy, colorless woman who was asking for service. The name "Maude Adams" meant nothing to him. She did not look to him like a woman who could pay for good merchandise. In another shop the same day she bought a sable hat for $1500, to be paid for by check when it was delivered. She could afford anything that struck her fancy.
The theater was her whole life. She was born in 1872 in a Mormon community, daughter of a woman who was a member of a Salt Lake City stock company. Little Maude Adams Kiskadden was carried on stage in a platter when she was nine months old-the platter being an essential prop in an obscure stock play. When her mother moved to San Francisco to join a stock company, Maude was a a conspicuous success at the age of five in a play called Fritz. A precocious boy actor named David Belasco was in the same cast.
When she came to New York, she had an undistinguished career. She puzzled some of her fellow players by her apparent lack of knowledge about acting and her helplessness. There was a good deal of puzzled apprehension when Charles Frohman made her John Drew's leading lady in The Masked Ball in 1893. She played the part of a gentlewoman who drank too much at a party. When she made her exit after a scene in which she had to balance her gentility against her state of intoxication, the applause made her a potential star. In 1897, Charles Frohman made her a genuine star in Barrie's The Little Minister. She earned $50,000 the first year. Her blue eyes, luminous skin, delicate features, and her enchanting voice gave her a unique and irresistible stage presence. After triumphing in the Barrie play, she played a listless Juliet that was generally regretted, and L'Aiglon, in which her refinement and gentility emasculated a vivid character.
But her success in The Little Minister began a long series of associations with Barrie, a playwright whose literary manners were identical with hers. She was also successful in Rostand's Chantecler-which gave her personal pleasure because the part was not typical of her style. Once Maude Adams became a star, she earned vast sums of money. She had a private house on 41st Street, a farm at Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island, and a house in Onteora Park in the Catskills. When she was playing in New York, a special train stood by in Long Island City on Saturday night to take her to Lake Ronkonkoma and return her on Monday. Her St. St.Bernard dog accompanied her. Her railroad car cost $30,000. It included a small stage on which she rehearsed her company when on tour. To say that she worked like a trouper was a literal statement of fact.
Maude Adams was generous with her associates. She gave handsome presents to members of the stage crew who had been particularly helpful. Out of her own income, she raised the salaries of some of the actors in her companies. Thus, in her private life she exercised some of the happy prerogatives of the fairies in Peter Pan and of the heroines she played. After crowning her career with a beguiling performance in Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella, she retired from the stage in 1918, taught acting and stagecraft in a small Middle Western college, and spent a lot of money and time trying to perfect what she expected would be a revolutionary stage electric light. In 1931 she returned to the stage to play Portia to Otis Skinner's Shylock-a drab performance and production that never got closer to New York than Newark. In 1931, she toured summer theaters as Maria in Twelfth Night-a small part in an undistinguished production. But she could not renounce the stage. Apparently the discipline and the excitement of many years in the theater could not be discarded permanently.
On the stage, Maude Adams had a soft, elusive charm that could not be analyzed or resisted. Acting the part of Maggie in Barrie's What Every Woman Knows,, she spoke three famous lines: "Charm is the bloom upon a woman. If you have it, you don't have to have anything else. If you haven't it, all else won't do you any good." In the latter half of the twentieth century, that may sound too pat and sentimental. But it states a fact; and Maude Adams was the fact it stated.
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