FAY TEMPLETON
Born almost literally in the theatre, and cradled as a baby in a
champagne wardrobe basket, a full-fledged "professional" at the tender
age of three years, it would have been marvellous, indeed, if Fay
Templeton had become anything else except an actress. When I heard these
tales of Fay Templeton's life in the nursery period of her
existence,--stories of how she had often slept in the dressing-room
while her mother, Alice Vane, died nightly in the leading role of some
old-time tragedy, of the nights and the days of travel, of all the
nerve-racking hardships that made up the weary, weary life of the actor
"on the road,"--I was strongly reminded of the early life of Minnie
Maddern Fiske. Both were children of the theatre; and forthwith we who
are not children of the theatre exclaim, how pathetic that is! So they
seem to me, I must confess, these children without homes and without
companions of their own age, knowing nothing of the pleasure of
quarrelling and making up again, children whom one never thinks of as
young, and yet who cannot really be old, brought up as they are in the
indescribable and contradictory atmosphere that is characteristic of the
stage, an atmosphere of hypocrisy and simple-mindedness, of contemptible
smallness of spirit and self-sacrificing generosity, of petty
spitefulness and frank good fellowship, of foolish jealousies and
whole-souled democracy. With all their artificiality, superficiality,
and self-sufficiency, I think that there is, on the whole, more
frankness, sincerity, and honest selfishness among stage folks than
among any other class of society. In certain respects, actors are in
their relations with one another far less the actor than are many
persons who are not supposed to act at all.
[Illustration: FAY TEMPLETON
Singing the "Coon" Song, "My Tiger Lily."]
A strange thing must life seem to the child of the theatre, when he gets
old enough to think about it. He looks upon the world topsy-turvy, as it
were. The serious things of his life are the frivolities of the
work-a-day world, and the viewpoint of these work-a-days must be a
constant source of perplexity to him. He must wonder, for instance, why
they go to the theatre at all, why they are so foolish as to spend
money, which is such a rare and precious thing, to behold the
commonplace and dreary business of play-acting. How he, the pitied one
of the world of homes and domesticated firesides, in his turn must pity
those easily beguiled individuals who practise theatre-going! How he
must smile ironically at their sophisticated innocence and be even
shocked at their unaccountable ignorance! Thus it happens that he pities
us because we have illusions about things that he knows are the crudest
delusions, and we pity him because he lives a life so far apart from
ours that we can see nothing in it but hardship and unhappiness. We of
the homes waste our tears on him who feels no need of a home, who,
contented with his lot and glorying in his freedom, scorns publicly the
narrow monotony of a seven A.M. to six P.M. with an hour off for
luncheon at noon existence. Which is right? Both--and neither.
But to return to Fay Templeton and Mrs. Fiske. Miss Templeton made her
first appearance on the stage when she was three years old, dressed as a
Cupid and singing fairy songs. Mrs. Fiske began even younger, and she,
too, was a singer. Arrayed in a Scotch costume of her mother's making,
she piped in a shrill treble between the tragedy and the farce a ballad
about "Jamie Coming over the Meadow." After this infantile experiment,
however, Mrs. Fiske forsook the lyric stage practically for good and
all, although she did at one time play Ralph Rackstraw in Hooley's
Juvenile Pinafore Company. Miss Templeton, on the other hand, clung
faithfully to opera and the allied forms of theatrical entertainment,
particularly that branch known as burlesque, in which she was and still
is an adept without a compare. The nearest that she ever came to being
identified with what player-folk delight to call the "legitimate" was
when at the age of seven years she played Puck in Augustin Daly's
production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Grand
Opera House in New York. This was considered a remarkable impersonation,
especially for a child of seven, and it received the special
commendation of Mr. Daly himself. Miss Templeton's success at so
youthful an age was, to be sure, most unusual, but it was by no means
inexplicable, if one only knew that she had had, even at that time, four
years' experience on the stage, and that she had starred, principally
throughout the West and South, at the head of a company managed by her
father, John Templeton.
The generalization that infant stage prodigies never amount to anything
has fully as great a percentage of truth in its favor as any other
generalization, but there are occasional exceptions. Mrs. Fiske, already
referred to, was one; Della Fox was another; and Fay Templeton was a
third, and possibly the most remarkable case of all. Mrs. Fiske at least
had the advantage of the intellectual training of the classic drama, and
Della Fox, after her precocious success as a child, was kept faithfully
at school for a number of years by stern parental authority; but Fay
Templeton during her childhood was continually associated--with the
possible exception of Puck--with the lightest and frothiest in the
theatrical business. More than that she was at the head of the company,
the star, the praised and petted. Whoever saved her from herself and
the disastrous results of childish self-conceit is entitled to the
greatest credit.
After her hit in New York in "A Midsummer's Night's Dream," Miss
Templeton travelled to San Francisco with her father and James A. Herne.
There she became a prima donna in miniature, and charmed the
Californians, especially by her imitations of the prominent grand opera
and comic opera artists of the day. Her San Francisco experience was
followed by her appearance at Niblo's Garden, New York, as Parepa Rosa,
Aimee, and Lucca. The next half-a-dozen years were spent principally in
the South, where she starred in a repertory of which her Puck in "A
Midsummer's Night's Dream" was the chief feature.
Fay Templeton was fifteen years old when she became a recognized light
opera star of national reputation. She was the original in this country
and the best-known Bettina in "The Mascotte," and she also appeared in
"Girofle-Girofla." For two years she played Gabriel, which was created
by Eliza Weatherby, one of the most beautiful of the Lydia Thompson
burlesquers, in "Evangeline," and she was also in the revival of "The
Corsair."
At the Fourteenth Street Theatre, New York, in August, 1890, after a
period of absence from the stage, Miss Templeton brought out the
burlesque called "Hendrick Hudson; or, The Discovery of Columbus," by
Robert Frazer and William Gill. This told an imaginary story of the
meeting, at the El Dorado Spring in Florida, of Columbus lost on his
third expedition to America, and Hudson. It was not an unfruitful theme
for burlesque treatment, but the work itself was poorly put together,
disconnected, and prone to drag. Neither was Miss Templeton herself all
that could be desired. She was apparently in a state of transition. She
had lost the roguish girlishness that made her Gabriel so charming, and
she had not yet learned to give free rein to the rich individuality and
the unctuous humor that are so characteristic of her work at the present
time. No dramatic critic would say to-day, as was said at that time, of
the production of "Hendrik Hudson," that "it must be written, in
reluctant sorrow, that Miss Templeton was not sufficient in talent nor
in charm to lead a burlesque company to great success." Miss Templeton
was not seen again, after the short and inglorious career of "Hendrik
Hudson," until she brought out "Mme. Favart" during the season of
1893-94.
The piece that re-established her in public favor, however, was
"Excelsior, Jr.;" New York, in particular, finding her impersonation of
the up-to-date young man about town very much to its liking. After she
joined the Weber and Fields organization in New York and unexpectedly
shone forth as a marvellously entrancing interpreter of "coon" songs,
she clinched her hold on the public with which she is now an established
favorite.
During the season of 1899-1900 Fay Templeton was identified with those
two gorgeous productions, "The Man in the Moon" and "Broadway to Tokio,"
besides taking a flyer into vaudeville, where she first brought out her
wonderful imitation of Fougere, the French chanteuse. In shows like "The
Man in the Moon" and "Broadway to Tokio" one is expected to have nothing
with him except the two senses of sight and hearing. It is the
spectator's part to take what comes--and it is supposed to come
constantly and rapidly--simply for the sake of the moment's fun that
there may be in it. His cue is to laugh at the stage jokes of the
hard-worked comedians, and to be dazzled into a semi-hypnotic state by
the dancing women posturing amid marvellous effects of light and color.
They are eminently entertainments to be felt and not thought about. One
is constantly receiving new impressions, and just as constantly
forgetting all about them. The result is that after the shows are all
over, one is surprised to find that from the mass of material he has
retained no one impression distinctly. He remembers only flashes here
and there.
One figure, however, was revealed by each and every one of these memory
flashes,--that of Fay Templeton, whose wonderful versatility as an
entertainer, and whose pure virtuosity as an artist, both of them given
free rein in these spectacles, raised her head and shoulders above her
associates in the two casts.
In "The Man in the Moon" there was nothing else that evidenced half the
art shown in her singing of the ditty "I Want a Filipino Man." It was,
it is true, a fearfully suggestive study of elemental human passion, a
song of hot blood and crude, unblushing animalism. But it was
wonderfully well done, and the swing of its rhythmic sensuality was not
to be resisted.
Two things that Fay Templeton did in "Broadway to Tokio" I recall with
especial vividness. One was her treatment of the cake-walk, commonly a
prosaic, athletic exhibition of increasing boredom. She evolved from the
conventional prancing of the gay soubrette a dance whose appeal to the
imagination was intense, a dance into which might be read many meanings.
Her cake-walk was the embodiment of languorous grace and the acme of
sensuous charm. It breathed an atmosphere of tropical indolence. It
suggested the lazy enjoyment of the cool of the evening after a long day
of hot, fierce summer sunshine, the time when one dreams idly of fleshly
delights. It was a dance teeming with passion, passion quiescent, which
a breath would fan into a blaze.
Miss Templeton's second remarkable achievement was her imitation of
Fougere, or, better still, her impersonation of Fougere. It is
difficult to describe intelligently just the effect of Miss Templeton's
art in this specialty. It was not a photographic copy of the external
Fougere; it was rather a reproduction of the Fougere personality.
Indeed, she pictured only with indifferent fidelity the Fougere
mannerisms, but she placed before one, with almost uncanny accuracy, the
Fougere individuality and the Fougere stage appeal.
It was, in fact, acting as distinguished from mimicking. Fay Templeton
literally represented Fougere as she might a dramatist's imaginary
personage. Temperamentally, Miss Templeton does not in the remotest way
suggest Fougere. The French woman, indeed, is just what Fay Templeton is
not. She is thin, she is nervous with a champagne sparkle, and she is
perpetually and restlessly vivacious in her artificial French way. Fay
Templeton is not thin, and her personality is far away from
nervousness. Where Fougere would worry herself half to death, Fay
Templeton would insist on solid comfort and plenty of time to think,
even a chance to sleep, over the vexing problem. One pictures Fay
Templeton as passing her leisure moments in the luxurious embrace of a
thickly wadded couch piled high with the softest of pillows. Nor is hers
the champagne temperament,--rather that of rich and mellow old Madeira,
a wine of substance, of delicate aroma and of fruity flavor, which does
not immediately bubble itself into a state of insipidness.