Mormons and Popular Culture

The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon

Volume 1Cinema, Television, Theater,Music, and Fashion

J. Michael Hunter, Editor

Traveling journalists of the mid-19th century were often surprised to find a theater in the geographically and culturally isolated Rocky Mountain region. Yet, a theater-the Salt Lake Theater-was the first prominent building to be constructed in Salt Lake City under Mormon leader Brigham Young's direction . "I was greatly astonished," wrote Fitz Hugh Ludlow in the 1864 Atlantic Monthly, "to find in the desert heart of the continent a place of public amusement which for capacity, beauty and comfort had no superior in America, except the opera-houses of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia."' The Salt Lake Theatre seated 1 ,500 on four levels, was lighted by 385 oil lamps, and boasted red velvet-lined boxes with red velvet-cushioned chairs. Journalists were also surprised at Brigham Young's liberal attitude toward theater. Reporting on Young's speech at the dedication of the Salt Lake Theatre in 1862, the New York Times reported, "Brigham then gave his views upon theatrical and similar entertainments, from which it was evident that his notions were not cast in the Puritanic mould. "

In Brigham Young's world, all things had a spiritual element. Amusements, if used to uplift and enlighten, were ordained of God. Recalling his strict puritan upbringing,

Young commented, "I shall not subject my little children to such a course of unnatural training, but they shall go to the dance, study music, read novels, and do anything else that will tend to expand their frames, add fire to their spirits, improve their minds, and make them fee l free and untrammeled in body and mind." For Young, the theater and the church could work hand in hand. "The stage," he said, "can be made to aid the pulpit in impressing upon the minds of a community an enlightened sense of a virtuous life, also a proper horror of the enormity of sin and a just dread of its consequences."

Even before the Mormons migrated to Utah, they had staged pl ays in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the early 1840s. Brigham Young himself played a Peruvian high priest in the play Pizarro. Salt Lake City's first dramatic association was formed in 1850, and the Social Hall was erected in 1852 as a place for amusements of all sorts, including theater. A bust of Shakespeare sat on a pedestal above the stage. The Social Hall has been called the first Little Theatre in America, and Brigham Young is considered by some to be the father of the Little Theatre movement.

The astonished journalists who stumbled upon the Salt Lake Theatre would likely have never imagined that the most popular and highest paid actress of the American stage of the late 19th and early 20th century would emerge from Salt Lake City's frontier drama community. Yet, she, Maude Adams (1872-1953)-called "America's best-loved actress" and "one of the greatest actresses the world has ever known"came from among the Mormons.

Maude Ewing Adams Kiskadden was born on November 11 , 1872, in Salt Lake City. Her Mother, Annie Adams, was the daughter of first generation Mormons who trekked across the plains. Annie's father helped cut and haul trees for timber to build the Sa lt Lake Theatre, and for his labors he received passes to attend plays at the theater when it opened. Annie remembered attending on the theater's opening night in 1862, and thereafter, she "fairly gorged" herself on plays . She later recall ed, "I watched the theatre closely, and I attended every performance to which my parents would let me go. I seemed to fee instinctively that the theatre would be my life." She would go home and "mimic" the actors she had seen. It wasn't long before Annie "created a sensation" with her role in a school play. Her Mormon bi shop told her fa ther that he believed she had " real stage ability." Annie coaxed her father into arranging an audition for her at the Sa lt Lake Theatre. Annie was given a piece to read for the theater's managers. " I put every ounce of express ion and emphasis I knew into that piece," she later wrote. She was cast the following week for the part of Grace Otis in The People's Lawyer. Within seven months of her 1865 debut at the age of seventeen, Annie was playing leading roles, and her name became "a household word" in Salt Lake City. Brigham Young's private carriage called for and delivered Annie from her parent's house to the th ater each day.

Maude's father, James Kiskadden, was not a Mormon but an Irishman who had traveled to Sa lt Lake City to work as a cashier in a bank. He attended the theater often, where he sat in a red velvet box reserved for "Gentile"-non-Morm on-theatergoers.

Here, he fell in love with the young Annie Adams, and the two were married in 1869. Maude was born three years later. Maude would later explain, "My father was a gentile; my mother had been brought up in Brigham Young's family, and was much loved by her Mormon friends. So it seemed more considerate and not flaunting her independence in marrying a gentile if she were married at my greatgrandmother's house."

After Maude's birth, Annie continued to perform at the theater, keeping Maude backstage during performances. When Maude was about nine months old, Annie had finished her part in a regular bill and was holding Maude backstage ready to leave the theater. Meanwhile a one-act farce cal led "The Lost Child" was playing to the crowd. The play featured a baby months younger than Maude, who had already appeared in one scene of the play, but when called upon to return to the stage in a tavern scene as a sleeping baby on a tray, the baby playing the role wouldn't cooperate.

As the baby "kicked and screamed and shrieked," the actors on stage became frantic as the baby's relatives backstage desperately tried to calm the baby. Annie tried to help, but realizing the situation was beyond repair, she hesitated a moment, and said, "Here, take Maudie." Annie later recalled that they "fairly tore her out of my arms and slapped her on the tray," and the actor playing the waiter rushed her on to stage. The audience, surprised to see how the baby had grown, laughed and applauded.

Apparently realizing that she was the center of attention, Maude sat upright on the tray and waved. She was greeted with a burst of cheers."

In 1874, Annie received an invitation to become a leading member of the stock company at Piper's Opera House in Virginia City, Nevada. The salary was good, and she was offered a six-month contract. Annie, Maude, and a maid lived in a boardinghouse near the theater. James remained in Salt Lake City, having expressed disapproval of Annie's decision to take the job. Maude was frequently taken to the theater where Maude played leading roles until the theater was destroyed by fire in 1875.

Annie had made a name for herself and was quickly offered a job at the Bush Street Theater in San Francisco. James joined his family when he obtained a job there as a bookkeeper. Annie became a successful actress in San Francisco, receiving good reviews. Little Maude stood in the wings, watching and memorizing lines.

In 1877, when Maude was five, Annie convinced James to let Maude try out for a part. Maude was chosen to play Little Schneider in the play Fritz, Our German Cousin, where she was billed as "Le Petit Maude." Annie insisted-and James resignedly agreed-to let Maude use Adams for her stage name since it was more stage-like than Kiskadden. Maude's career was launched, and she would appear in numerous plays with her mother. One critic commented that Maude was a "remarkable child" and that she was "free from parrot-like delivery and stilted gestures of most infant actresses."

Another called her "the reigning child actress of the Pacific Slope." David Belasco, known as the greatest American stage manager of the time, said of Maude, "There was a magnetism about the child. She could act and grasp the meaning of a part long before she was able to read." Speaking of their efforts to make it in the theater world, Annie later said, "What a fierce fight we fought! - ! alone at first; and then with me, Maude."

When Maude was nine years old, Annie decided to send Maude to live with her Mormon grandmother in Salt Lake City so Maude could attend the Collegiate Institute, a Presbyterian prep school. Leaving James behind in San Francisco, Annie and Maude arrived in Utah in April 1882. Annie became involved in a local theatrical production and remained with Maude until August, but then returned to San Francisco where she had a role in a production at the Baldwin Theater.

Maude loved her grandmother, loved playing on her grandmother's farm and with her Mormon cousins. She once wrote, "My childhood had been guarded by the kindly Wasatch Range, and the Rockies were friends from my beginning." Maude later reminisced:

Apart from the life in the theater there are two cities that hold very dear memories. One, in a lovely valley protected by friendly mountains is always "home." The people of the valley have gentle manners, as if their spirits move with dignity. Their forebears suffered great hardness in the search for their haven, but those who survived found peace and plenty in the beautiful valley of Salt Lake. And their children have inherited the gentleness that comes from having endured hardness. The memory of them, the thought of them, and their lovely valley is an anchor in a changing, roving life.

In later years, when reporters and writers were clamoring to fill their newspaper and magazine pages with information about the most popular actress of the generation, Maude and her mother spoke openly about their Utah origins. Maude was known throughout her life for her gentle, courteous manner. When complimented on her kindness, she would way, " It was not kindness; it was Salt Lakeness." Annie returned to Salt Lake City in March 1883, where she appeared at the Walker Theater in Fate and Camille. She was still in Salt Lake City when she received word in late September 1883 that James Kiskadden had died of pneumonia in San Francisco. Annie had James's body shipped to Salt Lake City for a funeral and burial. Maude later called it the saddest time in her life. After the funeral, Annie went back on the road, leaving Maude to attend to her studies. The principal of her school commented that Maude was "an excellent scholar- brilliant in dramatic recitations- with a total ignorance of her power-a simple, beautiful, artless schoolgirl."

Yet, Maude longed for the stage, turning her grandmother's attic into a theater where she and her friends put on melodramas. Maude was often director, stage manager, and leading lady. She had a knack for performing funny imitations. She took guitar and piano lessons as well. In late 1886, when Maude learned that Annie had obtained a leading role at San Francisco's Baldwin Theater and was renting a comfortable apartment, she wrote Annie, declaring, " I want to quit school Mamma. I want to go on stage with you."

With both mother and daughter missing each other, Annie decided to pull Maude out of school and bring her back to California. Maude's teacher begged Annie not to remove her from school, commenting that she could be educated as an instructor in elocution where she could command a salary of $1,800 to $2,000 a year. Maude returned to California where in early 1887 she picked up right where she had left off, receiving positive reviews for her performances. While performing in San Francisco, Maude and Annie met Charl s Frohman, an important New York producer, who told Maude to drop her western " r" and look him up when she came to New York.

In 1888, Maude and Annie went on the road, touring nationally with the successfu l play The Paymaster. During the play's New York run, Charles Frohman attended. Frohman was attracted to Maude's professional performance, and soon after Frohman asked Maude, who was approaching the age of sixteen, to join his acting company. Before her seventeenth birthday, Maude would be playing leads. In 1892, Frohman paired Maude with John Drew Jr., a leading star of the day, in a series of plays, beginning with The Masked Ball and ending with Rosemary in 1896. When The Masked Ball opened in 1892, audiences came to see John Drew, but Maude stole the show. The New York Times wrote, "Maud[e] Adams, not John Drew, has made the success of The Masked Ball at Palmer's, and is the star of the comedy. Manager Charles Frohman, in attempting to exploit one star, has happened upon another of greater magnitude." In 1896, Maude again found great success with Rosemary, the last of the Drew vehicles, which also featured Ethel Barrymore. For five years, Frohman had carefully groomed Maude for major stardom. In 1896, he returned from England, where he had purchased the rights to a play by the popular British author, James Barrie. The play was an adaptation of Barrie's book The Little Minister. Frohman wanted Barrie to rework the play to feature a female star-Maude Adams. The play opened in 1897 and became the vehicle that launched Maude Adams into superstardom. Maude would be associated with Barrie's plays for the next 20 years.

In April 1904, Barrie wrote Maude a letter. " I have written a play for children," he explained, "which I don't suppose would be much use in America. She is rather a dear of a girl with ever so many children long before her hair is up, and the boy is Peter Pan in a new world. I should like you to be the boy and the girl and most of the children and the pirate captain." Maude responded, "I read the play ... and was completely won by the character of Peter and so thoroughly interested and thrilled by his numerous adventures that I fell in love with him at once. In the evening, when I saw Mr. Frohman at the theater, I said: I would like to act 'Peter Pan."' Maude continued, "Each line of it thrilled me, and as I passed from scene to scene an affection for Peter grew and took hold of me, until I was perfectly wrapped in a spell of desire to be Peter Pan himself."

Maude was physically well-suited for the role. In 1904, Everybody's Magazine had commented, "Not within the memory of the present generation of theatre goers has an actress gained so secure, so remarkable a hold upon its affections as Maude Adams that strange impish creature with her spontaneity, her enticing contrariety, her touches of pathos .... Although she is past thirty, Miss Adams still looks like a very young girl."

Peter Pan opened in 1905 with the 33-year-old Maude playing the young boy who never wanted to grow up. Maude had a cottage in the Catskills where she rehearsed and rested. There she had befriended John and Elizabeth Alexander. John was a well-known painter and designer, and Elizabeth brought her husband's designs to fruition. At Maude's suggestion, the Alexanders were employed to design the costumes and scenery for Peter Pan. John Alexander designed Maude's costume, which included the Peter Pan collar. The play eventually became a huge success, and the Peter Pan collar was quickly introduced into women's and children's clothing. It became a popular fashion.

Throughout the early years of the 20th century, Maude Adams was the most popular and highest paid actress in America, with a yearly income of more than one million dollars. She involved herself in every aspect of the theater, including staging, scenery, sound, costumes, and lighting. Never to marry, she seemingly devoted her life to her craft. She started her own theater production company, and for two years she worked at the General Electric (G.E.) Laboratories experimenting with color lamps for movies. Working with G.E. and Eastman Kodak, she invented a high-powered incandescent lamp that later made colored movies poss ible, although she was never given credit for it. Her lawyer advised her to sue, believing she could settle for a half million dollars, but she refused to litigate.

Maude's world was changing in many ways. G.E. and Eastman Kodak wanted to form a motion picture laboratory to be supported by motion pictures produced under Maude's name and directed by her. The venture was expected to make Maude richer than she already was. Yet, she refused to sign. She had enough money and wasn't really interested in motion pictures.24 Maude's personal life was changing too. On May 8, 1915, Maude received word that the Lusitania had been torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. Her trusted mentor and friend, Charl es Frohman, had been on the ship sa iling to London. He was presumed dead. Soon after, John W. Alexander, Maude's costume designer, died. Then Allen Fawcett, Maude's stage manager, died. In December of that same year, Maude received another heartbreaking telegram. Her beloved grandmother, Jul ia Adams, had died. In March 1916, she received a third telegram that her mother was very ill back in Salt Lake City, where she had moved to take care of Julia. Maude rushed to Salt Lake City, where she was able to spend two days by her mother's side before Annie died on March 17. In an article about the passing of Annie, Salt Lake City's Deseret Evening News mentioned that Maude had recently lost her dear friend Mrs. Pitts, "who was her second mother." Foreshadowing what was to come, the paper stated, "such an accumulation of sorrows might well be a crushing blow to the strongest."

In 1918, Alexander Woollcott, a New York Times critic and friend to Maude, wrote her a letter from war-ravaged France:

When, as all of us do sometimes, I get very tired of shells and shell-holes, tired of endless wilderness of crumbled homes, tired of mud, mud, mud, I like to shut my eyes and listen to the music that used to usher Peter in through the high nursery window, to see Nibs dancing the pillow-dance in the firelight, to wait while Miss Thing comes down the silver stairway to that absurdly perky strain. All that dear music has been with me through more than a year of exile. Like Woollcott, Maude looked back fondly on bygone, simpler days as the world around her became seemingly more complex and gloomy. With the shadows of a changing world overtaking her, Maude Adams retired from the stage. Secretly, Maude Adams withdrew from the world into the cloistered retreat of a Catholic order in New York City where she stayed off and on for several years. A May 1950 Cosmopolitan magazine reported that Maude, at age 78, " lives in almost total seclusion in the Catskill Mountains." The article stated, "She has a tiny cottage there, decorated with fans and photographs and playbil s, all trophies of the past. Those few who have visited it say it seems like Never-Never-Land." There Maude Adams died of a heart attack at the age of eight-one in 1953. The New York Times wrote, " In the memory of an aging generation she also lives as Peter Pan." The paper then cynically added, "Of course Peter Pan is dead. He could hardly survive the atomic bomb and the jet plane." America had moved on in the decades after Maude left the stage. New forms of entertainment-motion pictures, radio, and television-had superseded the theater as main forms of popular entertainment. Although David 0. Selznick convinced Maude to do a screen test with Janet Gaynor for the role of Miss Fortune in the film The Young in Heart, nothing came of it because Maude did not pursue it. The 12-minute screen test was later preserved by the George Eastman House.

Years after Maude's death while traveling with his family, writer Richard Matheson became entranced by a portrait of Maude Adams in Piper's Opera House in Nevada. " It was such a great photograph," Matheson stated, "that creatively I fell in love with her. And I thought, well, what if, uh, some guy did the same thing and could go back in time to see her." When Matheson researched the life of Maude, he was struck by her disappearance from the stage into a life of reclusiveness. He created a fictional reason for her withdrawal from the world in his 1975 science fiction novel Bid Time Return. The novel has the main character, Elise McKenna, playing the same roles, in the same plays as the real life Maude Adams. The novel even gives Elise the same birthday and place-Salt Lake City-as Maude Adams. Richard Collier, the book's main character, goes back in time to 1896 to see Elise perform in The Little Minister. The book was adapted to film in 1980 as Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve as Richard and Jane Seymour as Elise.

Although Maude Adams spoke fondly of her Utah beginnings and her Mormon relatives, she was ambiguous about her religious beliefs. While referring to her father as a "gentile"-the Mormon term for non-Mormons-she never referred to herself in that way, indicating that she considered herself a cultural Mormon. In her long career, she performed plays numerous times in Salt Lake City, and was warmly received as one of the community's own. In 1911 , she celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday by entertaining the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in New York City as her guests at a matinee of Chantecler. However, there is no known record of her baptism as a member ofThe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although her mother was certainly a member. Vida Sutton, a writer who had been helping Maude write her autobiography, reported to the New York Times upon Maude's death that Maude, "who was born of Mormon parentage, was a Christian of no denomination."

The Presbyterians had tried to convert her when she attended school in Salt Lake City as a youth, but Maude resisted, remarking that the school's efforts to convert her disturbed her. When Maude was recovering from an illness in a Catholic convent in France in 1901 , she became close friends with the nuns there, and they attempted to convert her to Catholicism. She courteously rejected their entreaties. Critics often commented on Maude's " spirituality" when describing her. Yet, religion was never overtly discussed in interviews or articles about her. "My private life is my own," Maude once empathically declared.

Mormonism, however, profoundly affected Maude Adams's life. Where many Protestant churches rejected acting and the theater as an evil to be shunned, Brigham Young and the Mormons adapted the theater to teach proper morals through melodrama.

In Salt Lake City in the 19th century, all things were spiritual, including the theater. Brigham Young preached, "Upon the stage of a theater can be represented in character evil and its consequences, good and its happy results and rewards; the weakness and the follies of man, the magnanimity of virtue and the greatness of truth." Brigham Young encouraged local bishops to keep their eyes open for talented young people. Young people like Annie Adams were encouraged to act; it was respectable.

Actors were fulfilling a spiritual purpose is uplifting their fellow Saints through their depictions of good and evil and its consequences on stage. Theater mirrored life. The very unique Mormon culture that existed on the American frontier in the 19th century was an incubator for the creative tal ents of Annie and Maude Adams. It's perhaps fitting that Salt Lake City's Pioneer Memorial Museum honored Maude by receiving her cradle for their archives, as the Mormon community and its support of theater had served symbolically as Maude's cradle. The coming together of Mormonism, Annie Adams, and Maude Adams resulted in the development of one of the most important performers of American stage history. The story of American popular culture would be missing something quite special without Maude Adams.