Curtain Time: The Story of the American Theater
by Lloyd Morris; Random House, 1953
Frohman's outstanding achievement as a star-maker was the career of Miss Maude Adams, who for twenty years inspired an idolatry remarkable in the annals of the stage. In 1896, when his novel, The Little Minister, was an American best-seller, James M. Barrie made his first visit to the United States. He had earlier written a play, The Professor's Love Story, which the British star, E. S. Willard, had successfully presented in New York. On the basis of this prior success American producers, Frohman among them, were urging Barrie to dramatize The Little Minister, a venture which he declined to undertake. One day while in New York, Barrie called at Frohman's office. The producer was out, and his secretary suggested that Barrie go downstairs to the Empire Theater, where John Drew and Miss Adams were appearing in Rosemary, a sentimental comedy. Barrie attended the performance, and was sufficiently captivated by Miss Adams's acting to promise Frohman that he would try to dramatize The Little Minister. Thereafter, he never wrote another novel. Instead, at Frohman's insistence, he turned out play after play, many of them written expressly for Miss Adams. "He was very dogged," Barrie wrote of Frohman after the producer's death. "I had only one quarrel with him, but it lasted all the sixteen years I knew him. He wanted me to be a playwright and I wanted to be a novelist. All those years I fought him on that. He always won, but not because of his doggedness; only because he was so lovable that one had to do as he wanted. He also threatened, if I stopped, to re-produce the old plays and print my name in large electric letters over the theater."
After meeting a poor reception in Washington during a tryout engagement, Miss Adams brought The Little Minister to the Empire on September 30, 1897. This date was, in a sense, historic. It marked the inception of that amazing relationship between the American public and the star which, beginning as a one sided love affair, developed into a worship without precedent or subsequent parallel. Miss Adams was twenty-five, winsome rather than pretty, slight, frail and girlish. Her lilting speech and muted laughter, the delicacy of her tread, the graceful swiftness of her movement, gave her a quality that soon was described as "otherworldly." Though intensely feminine, she made a curious impression of elusiveness, as if she had an elfin strain. A decade later Barrie was to say of a play that he had written for her, "I could see her dancing through every page of my manuscript." In that play, What Every Woman Knows, he gave her lines which defined her appeal for him, and certainly for the public: "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 Little Minister Miss Adams had a role which blended whimsical humor, sentiment and a veiled implication of pathos. These were the attributes which, in time, came to be associated with her acting and her personality, so inseparably that critical distinction between them was seldom made. Was it Miss Adams' art which imparted life to Barrie's creations? Or was it Barrie who, through his creations, endowed Miss Adams with her characteristic palette and tonality as an artist? The public never knew and scarcely cared. But the extraordinary, perhaps unique, affinity between actress and playwright was obvious. Frohman once said that, "when one of my stars finishes with a play, that play goes permanently on the shelf, no one ever hoping to muster together an audience for it without the original actor or actress in the star part." Only two of the Barrie plays which Miss Adams acted were ever successfully revived after her retirement.
During its initial showing at the Empire, The Little Minister ran for three hundred consecutive performances, to gross receipts of $370,000, a financial record at the time. Before Miss Adams finished with the play, it had three thousand performances throughout the country, earned a half-million dollars for Barrie and more for Frohman. By 1901, when Miss Adams appeared in Quality Street , her second Barrie play, she had become the most potent box office attraction in the American theater. Her name was a magnet that drew crowds, and Frohman, reporting gleefully on her immense success, was able to make such typical observations as, "Miss Adams' receipts last week in Boston were the largest in the history of Boston theaters or anywhere--$23,000."
Yet her most memorable triumph came four years later, on November 6, 1905, when at the Empire she assumed the title role of Barrie's Peter Pan. Barrie had offered the play to Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree for production in London. Tree, after reading it, reported in alarm to Frohman that "our dear friend Barrie has gone mad." The play, he asserted, was a nightmare. There were children who lived in treetops; a character that was only a wandering spot of light; an alligator with an audible clock in its stomach, and a big dog. When Frohman undertook to produce the play in both London and New York, Barrie offered him the script of another, Alice Sit by the Fire, to indemnify him for the probable losses to be incurred by Peter Pan.
The play was one of the greatest successes in the history of the American theater, and with it Miss Adams completed her conquest of the American heart. She was idolized by children as well as their elders, and in the affection that she inspired there was reverence never before yielded to an actress. "Miss Maude Adams in the only stage personage within my experience," Frohman wrote, "who has a distinct public following, loyal and encouraging to her in whatever she does." This was true, yet it was an understatement of the peculiar fact that, for American playgoers, Miss Adams could do no wrong. Her appearance as Juliet--with the handsome matinée idol William Faversham as Romeo, and the ineffably romantic James K. Hackett as Mercutio--was not acclaimed by the dramatic critics. Nor in Edmond Rostand's L'Aiglon did she, in their opinion, rival Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. When, in 1911, Miss Adams assumed the feathers and strut of the barnyard hero of Chantecler, a role which Rostand had written for Constant Coquelin, and which Lucien Guitry had created, it seemed probable that her performance would be less than superlative. Yet a line formed at the box office at four o'clock on the day before tickets went on sale; the sum of $200 was offered in vain for a seat on the opening night; and at the end of the play Miss Adams received twenty-two curtain calls. This was not a tribute to her gallantry in assuming a role for which she was obviously unfitted. It expressed an all but universal conviction of her exalted status. Her most fanatical admirers did not claim for Miss Adams, as an actress, equality with Duse or Bernhardt. But the great public claimed for her a distinction far more impressive. They said that she was incomparable.
Millions of Americans saw Miss Adams on the stage, rejoiced in her performances, cherished a sense of genuinely personal relationship to her. Yet, paradoxically, only a handful of people really knew her. Frohman believed that the illusions of the theater would be shattered if the public saw his stars offstage, or knew too much about them. "He spent a fortune sheltering Maude Adams from all kinds of intrusion," his biographer revealed. "With her especially he exhausted every resource to keep her aloof and secluded. He preferred that she be known through her work and not through her personal self." Possibly this was her own preference also, for, as Frohman's biographer noted, "one of his supreme ambitions in life was to gratify her every wish." Miss Adams was not only invisible, but shrouded in mystery.
"C. F. spoke of her as if she were a princess in an ivory tower," Miss Billie Burke, one of his later stars, recalled. "His fine eyes would light up with worship that was almost religious." Like everyone else in the profession, she heard that Frohman was in love with Miss Adams. There was a persistent rumor that they were secretly married, although Frohman lived, as a bachelor, in a hotel. "I think Charles Frohman loved Maude Adams as a hungry spirit loves music and poetry and as a fine boy loves his heroes and their ideals," Miss Burke wrote more than forty years later. "Miss Adams was to Frohman, I imagine, what she was to everyone else: a sprite."
|
|
