MY ACTOR FRIENDS
SINCE I came back to London a score of years ago, I have known at least
a hundred actors and actresses, but they did not all visit us at Addison
Mansions—some, whom I knew quite well, never could summon up the energy
to go as far west as West Kensington. Actors like to live right in the
centre of things, or right out in country air. There is quite a colony
of them at Maidenhead; Maxine Elliot lives near Watford, in the Manor
House which belonged to my uncle Joseph, and Edward Terry had a house at
Barnes, which is now sublimed into Ranelagh Parade.
Among our chief actor friends were the Grossmiths. Weedon Grossmith,
with his pretty wife, came constantly. That diffident manner of his
hides brilliant abilities. We are apt to forget that besides being one
of the finest comedians of the day, he was once a regular exhibitor at
the Royal Academy (which furnished him with the subject for a farce).
What has made Weedon so “immense” is his absence of _mauvais honte_. He
has dared to play the humiliating parts, of which he is the finest
living exponent, with perfect sincerity. He has often said to me, “Why
don’t you write me a play, Douglas? If you make me a bally enough little
fool, I’ll take it; if you make me a big enough coward, I’ll take it; if
you make me a bad enough cad, I’ll take it. It is my art to put this
kind of character into the pillory.” And so it is; there is no one who
can excel him in depicting the ignoble, foreign as it is to his own
character.
His brother George, with his wife and daughters and his son
Lawrence—George the younger had already flitted from the paternal nest,
and was earning forty pounds a week—were also constant visitors.
Lawrence was always the mirror of smartness. I think he was very bored
with that sort of party, but he adorned it.
Geegee, as he loved to call himself, was full of frolic. He could make
light of anything. He made light of the awful play in which he appeared,
which was written for the mistress of a millionaire. The author was
given five thousand pounds to write a play and put it on the stage. The
only condition was that the millionaire’s mistress should be on the
stage the whole time, and have nothing to say.
He was once the cause of my seeing the finest piece of acting off the
stage which I ever saw. One of our greatest living actors is always
chaffed about his _penchant_ for duchesses. Grossmith and I were having
supper together by ourselves at his party at the Grafton Galleries.
Presently we saw the great actor standing beside us, and Grossmith,
without bothering about his being within earshot, said, “We’ll ask —— to
sit down and have some supper with us; when he’s been there about two
minutes, he’ll look at his watch, and say that he must leave us because
he promised to be at the duchess’s in a quarter of an hour.”
The great man sat down and attacked a mayonnaise vigorously. Presently
he looked at his watch, and made an elaborate and rather snobbish
apology to Grossmith for having to leave, but he had promised the
Duchess of ——d, etc., and all the time he was making it, trod on my foot
till I nearly yelled. Then he got up and left us, pausing to speak to
some one a few yards off to have the satisfaction of hearing Grossmith’s
“There, didn’t I tell you!”
Fred Terry, the “manliest actor on the stage,” and his beautiful wife,
Julia Neilson, used to come and see us sometimes. I met them first at
Hayden Coffin’s, where she was filling the room and the garden with her
glorious singing one summer dawn. When she rose from the piano, she made
several vain efforts to get Terry away; he was telling Coffin, myself,
and one or two others, some of his experiences. When she came back the
third time, he said, “My wife always has a devil of a trouble to make me
put on my dress-clothes, but when I have once got them on, I never want
to go home.”
That night, a rather shy little man, very alert and intelligent-looking,
had given us a recitation of his own which was so breathlessly witty,
that the audience could not seize all the points. Coffin introduced him
as “a very clever friend of mine, Mr. Huntley Wright,” and his name
meant nothing to the audience. A year later they would have stood on the
mantelpiece to get a better view of the king of musical comedians. Both
he and his sister Haidée, that brilliant character-actress, used to come
to Addison Mansions in those days. That the Coffins should do so was
natural, because I had known Charles Hayden Coffin since he was a boy at
school and I was a man at Oxford. He and his sisters and I and my
sisters used to skate together at Lillie Bridge. His father was the
leading American dentist of London, and Coffin himself was a dentist,
or, at all events, in training for it, for several years. But he had
such a glorious voice that it was inevitable that he should find his way
to the musical stage, and have the longest reign on record as a _jeune
premier_. He thrilled London with his “Queen of My Heart To-night.” He
has deserved his success twice over—both on account of his singing, and
for the way in which he has helped others; no one has done more for the
beginners in his own profession, and for helping unknown composers of
ability to get a hearing. There are many people quite famous now whom I
heard before they were known to fame at all, at his charming cottage,
that _rus in urbe_ on Campden Hill, which has the same initials as
himself—C. H. C., Campden Hill Cottage, Charles Hayden Coffin.
With Julia Neilson I should have mentioned her handsome cousin, Lily
Hanbury, who was, till her premature death, one of the beauties of the
London stage. She came often to us.
It is natural, in connection with her, to think of Constance Collier,
now Mrs. Julian L’Estrange, who filled her place, and has gone so much
farther, for she has not only personal attraction, but real power. She
was, as all the world knows, leading lady at His Majesty’s before she
went to America, but all the world does not know that she is the most
accomplished tango-dancer on the stage.
There is no more attractive figure on the stage than Ben Webster. Young
as he is, he found time to be a barrister before he began his long
succession of leading parts, and though he is one of the least stagey
actors on the stage, he was born in its purple. He is a grandson of Ben
Webster I., who had a claim to fame besides his acting which has long
since been forgotten, for he was the founder of the great _Queen_
newspaper, which he sold to Sergeant Cox—strange godfathers for the
_Queen, the Lady’s Newspaper_. Sergeant Cox was the uncle, not the
father, of Horace Cox, who was at the head of the _Field_, the _Queen_,
and the _Law Times_ for most of the last half century. Webster married
an actress, May Whitty, so well known, not only for her acting, but for
her activity in woman movements. They were very often at Addison
Mansions, and among the strongest supporters of our Argonauts Club.
Lena Ashwell we have known better than any other great actress, because
we came to know her family long before she went on the stage, through
her sister, Mrs. Keefer, wife of the engineer who built the famous
bridge over Niagara. In those days she was studying at the Royal Academy
of Music, and she is an F.R.A.M. She has a singularly beautiful voice
for singing as well as speaking. Conscious of the burning dramatic
temperament which won her her fame in the impersonation of the heroine
in _Mrs. Dane’s Defence_, she has always cast her eyes on the stage.
When she was only fourteen she spoiled a chicken she was cooking by
forgetting to remove the insides because she was so enthralled with
reading _King John_. In intensity she is unsurpassed by any actress on
the stage. She is really as good in tender parts as in grim parts, but
she is less known in them, though every one should remember how
delightful she was in _The Darling of the Gods_.
Lena Ashwell enjoys the almost unique distinction of having been born on
a British man-of-war, the fine old ship which did duty under Nelson, and
was the Wellesley training-ship till she was accidentally burnt a few
months ago. Her father was a captain in the Navy.
Having been brought up in Canada on the St. Lawrence, she is a wonderful
canoeist. Her grace on the water used to be the theme of the frequenters
of Cookham Reach.
Her brother, Roger Pocock, has written the best novels of the Canadian
North-West. They are descendants of the famous traveller, and had a
great-great-uncle, Nicholas Pocock, the sea-painter who painted Nelson’s
Battle of the Nile and Lord Howe’s Glorious First of June. Another
ancestor wrote farces in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Lena Ashwell owns the Kingsway Theatre, and has produced some notable
successes there, in which she showed her determination to give brilliant
beginners—whether actors or dramatists—a chance. But since 1908, when
she married Dr. Simson of Grosvenor Street, she has chiefly given
herself up to feminist and benevolent movements—the chief of which was
the founding of the Three Arts’ Club for young actresses, musicians, and
painters to make their home as well as their club. The Three Arts’ Club
has an excellent magazine of its own, and confers the various advantages
of an Institute on its members. She is also a prominent worker for the
Suffrage Movement.
One of the earliest of our actor friends, and one of our most frequent
visitors, was James Welch, who first came with his brother-in-law, Le
Gallienne. He had given up chartered-accounting for the stage for five
or six years before we knew him. But a good many years more had to pass
before he came into his own as the genius of farce, though he played
with real power and success in several of Ibsen’s plays, and Bernard
Shaw’s first play, _Widowers’ Houses_. It was in _Mr. Hopkinson_, in
1905, after he had been on the stage for eighteen years, that he became
an idol of the public, and was enabled to go into management.
Ever since then he has been enormously successful, and in spite of it,
has remained the same simple, impulsive, unspoiled person as ever. He
used often, as I have told in another chapter, to go to the Authors’
Club with me.
One night not long since, when I was chatting with him in his
dressing-room at the theatre, and was asking him when he could have
another game of golf, he said, “I don’t know, I’m sure. I have contracts
with cinema-film photographers for seven thousand pounds, and I don’t
see how the devil I am going to get them all in.”
I felt quite oppressed with the unfairness of things, for I had known
this same man when he was just as brilliant an actor, eating his head
off with chagrin at not being able to get an engagement (of which I am
sure he was badly in need pecuniarily), and now here were photographers
and film-makers tumbling over each other in their anxiety to take him in
his inimitable fooling in _When Knights were Bold_, or his misery and
stupefaction in his great condemned cell-scene from the Coliseum.
Welch is quite a decent golfer—down to 8, I think, though the time was
when I had to give him 8. He is also a remarkably good spinner of golf
stories. I tell him that whenever he is hard up for a curtain-raiser, he
could easily hold a house for half-an-hour with his golf-stories.
One of his favourites is about his caddie at Aberdeen, to whom he gave
two seats to see him in _When Knights were Bold_. Next day on the links,
he asked the man how he liked it.
“My wife laughed,” said the cautious Scot.
“And what did you think of it?”
“Oh, I? Now tell me, mon, do you make a guid thing of it?”
“I do pretty well.”
“Ye do?” said the caddie. “Then my advice to ye is, to drop golf—ye’ll
never make a living at that.”
Mrs. Welch is a daughter of Lottie Venne, one of the best women
comedians we ever had on the English stage—a frequent visitor to us at
one time, as was that fine actress, Fanny Brough (Mrs. Boleyn), an
eminent member of an eminent family, whom we first met at an Idler tea.
At the Idler, too, we met the Beringers, of whom we saw a good deal at
that time—Mrs. Oscar Beringer, the playwright, and her daughters Esme
and Vera, who were both on the stage. Vera, the younger, has followed in
her mother’s footsteps, and written plays—one with Morley Roberts. Esme,
who is very popular both as a woman and an actress, has played in a
large number of parts with an unvarying success.
We knew Beatrice (Robbie) Ferrar much better than either of her sisters,
though all three came to our at-homes, just as they were all three on
the stage. Though she had been on the stage six years when we met her,
she still looked a mere child. She was for years one of the best
_ingénue_ actresses (for which her pretty, small features, bright
colouring and demure expression, gave her natural advantages) on the
stage. She was one of the most familiar figures at the Idler functions.
Rowena Jerome, who has scored several successes in her father’s plays,
was only a little child, playing horses, remarkably clever and
precocious, in the days when we were going to the Idler teas and
Jerome’s house in the Alpha Road, St. John’s Wood.
Among other actors and actresses we met at the Idler teas or at Jerome’s
were Ian (Forbes) Robertson and his wife, and their daughter, Beatrice
Forbes-Robertson, Nina Boucicault, the Henry Arthur Jones’s, Kate and
Mary Rorke, Olga Nethersole, George Hawtrey, Lindo and Phyllis
Broughton. I saw Phyllis Broughton the other day, looking absolutely the
same as the very first time she ever came to our flat, twenty years ago,
the gentlest-faced actress I ever met.
Forbes-Robertson’s brother, Ian Robertson (who never used the name of
Forbes himself, though his pretty daughter Beatrice resumed it when she
went on the stage), came to us less frequently than his wife and
daughter, who were habituées.
Mrs. Robertson was a daughter of an old friend of mine, that remarkable
man Joe Knight, who always seemed to me as if he ought to have been
Henty’s brother. As dramatic critic of three leading newspapers, the
_Athenæum_, the _Globe_, and I forget the other, he had almost as much
power to make and unmake as Clement Scott had. He used his influence
most generously. At the same time he was a scholar of omniscience; he
performed the Herculean task of editing _Notes and Queries_ for the
proprietors of the _Athenæum_; and he had a daughter so good-looking and
charming that I always thought of her as Romola when I thought of her
with him. I have no doubt that before she married Ian Robertson she had
made herself as useful to the scholar as Romola.
Their daughter, Beatrice, has made a distinguished name for herself on
the American stage.
It was an odd thing that I should not have met (Sir J.) Forbes-Robertson
at Jerome’s, considering how much they have done since to make each
other’s fortunes in the _Third Floor Back_, for which Jerome, as he
always does when I am in England, sent me stalls on one of the opening
nights. But, as a matter of fact, I met Forbes-Robertson at Palermo in
the Venetian palace which Joshua Whitaker, the head of the great Marsala
wine-firm, built for himself, adjoining the old Ingham house in the Via
Bara. Forbes-Robertson was staying there, and I am in and out of the
Whitakers most days when I am in Palermo. He was convalescing from a
severe illness, and we went about, the little which he could manage,
together in Sicily, and afterwards for a whole week together in Venice.
He was, I remember, very tickled with one trip which he took in Sicily
when he got stronger. A nephew who lives in England, but has very large
possessions in Sicily, came out to stay with the Whitakers. They wished
him to visit his various properties in the interior when he was there.
But the thing did not interest him; he was a subaltern in the Guards,
taken up with much more important thoughts. But he was an ardent admirer
of Forbes-Robertson on the stage, and he was willing to go wherever his
uncle desired if Forbes-Robertson would go with him.
Forbes-Robertson was eager to oblige his hosts, and captivated with the
manner of the expedition, for, as they were going into brigandy parts of
the island, and the person of a great landowner is the favourite prey of
the brigand, they had to have an escort, and sit with loaded revolvers
on their knees.
Everything passed off happily, and Forbes-Robertson came back with the
knowledge that an orchard in which pistachio trees bear freely is as
good as a gold-mine.
In Venice he was quite well again, and spent all day in letting us show
him the _artist’s bits_ of Venice, for there was a time when, like
another of our leading actors, he expected to make his living as a
painter, not as an actor. He was educated at the Royal Academy till he
was twenty-one, after leaving the Charterhouse, where he was four years
the senior of Baden-Powell.
He was especially delighted with the gondola expeditions we made to the
back canals of Venice. One day it would be along by the lagoon, where
the timber-rafts lie floating, and collect weeds and local colour, past
the ruining abbey of the Misericordia and Tintoretto’s Church, S. Maria
del Orto, to Tintoretto’s house, now woefully humiliated by being a
“tenement,” but unrepaired and unaltered since that prince of painters
lived and worked in it. It may easily be found, since it is near the
Camel sign of a mediæval Moorish merchant. Another day it would be
across the Giudecca, where the big Adriatic fishing-boats, with figures
of saints and monsters on their scarlet and orange sails lie anchored,
generally with their sails flapping against their masts, as if they knew
that they were there for ornament to the landscape. Across the Giudecca
there was the famous Redentore Church, with its three far-famed Madonnas
by the pupils of Bellini, and there was more than one house with that
rarity for Venice—a garden.
Over the other side of the Giudecca we all went into the great old
garden of some Marchese. Venice has gardens there, but the Venetians are
so unused to gardens that they abandon them to dull evergreens, when,
having nothing to overshadow them, they might be as full of gay flowers
as a sarcophagus in Raphael’s pictures of the Resurrection. The only
person I know who does make use of his garden chances is Dr. Robertson,
the Presbyterian Minister, who wrote that wonderful book, _The Bible of
St. Mark’s_.
I think Forbes-Robertson enjoyed the visit to Tintoretto’s house best of
all. The well-head in the court was untouched except by the soft fingers
of three centuries; the studio, with its open timber roof and huge
fireplace, had nothing about it to distract the eye from memories, for
it was a bare tenement of the poor. And it was such a very little way
from S. Maria del Orto, a name made classic to the British public by the
robbery of one of the most precious Madonnas of John Bellini—Santa Maria
del Orto, which contains a frescoed choir by Tintoretto, and his
“Presentation in the Temple,” and his tomb. When we were looking at the
immortal Venetian pictures in the Accademia and the Doge’s Palace, or
studying the faded marbles which jewel the interior of St. Mark, he was
so overcome with reverence that it seemed almost a pain to him. He had
not, I think, been in Venice before. At all events, he did not know it
as I did—I could take him to any point of interest in the city by a few
minutes’ walk, and perhaps crossing the Grand Canal by a traghetto. I
have written half a book about Venice, and some of my best writing is
about it. I do not know why I never finished it.
Henry Arthur Jones’s family I have known since they were children. Mrs.
Jones used to come to our parties before the eldest of her children was
out of the schoolroom, and we spent one summer in the same house at
Ostend, so we have watched the elder girls coming to the front on the
stage with interest. Of the great dramatist himself I have spoken
elsewhere. If he had chosen, he could have been equally famous as a
writer of books. He has a profound mind, and a popular method of
statement.
Olga Nethersole could not come in the evenings to our at-homes, because
she was generally acting, but she came for long talks in the afternoons.
I found her remarkable, not only as an actress of a singularly emotional
type, but from the interest which she takes in the social problems of
the day, such as criminology and emigration. A year ago, at a party
given by the C. N. Williamsons at the _Savoy_, when we were comparing
notes on the Canadian North-West, from which she had just returned, and
which I knew twenty years ago, I was much struck by her grasp of the
subject.
I cannot remember whether it was at the Idler or at “John Strange
Winter’s” that I first met Martin Harvey, who, like Forbes-Robertson, is
a painter in his leisure moments. He was with Irving in those days,
recognised already as the most capable all-round actor in the company,
and for his wonderful conscientiousness and finish. Harvey had the good
sense to bide his time, and when he did launch on his own account in
_The Only Way_, which Frederick Langbridge, the poet, dramatised in
collaboration from Dickens’s _Tale of Two Cities_, he made an
instantaneous and gigantic success. In the days when he used to come to
us, he was singularly boyish-looking, and delightfully modest about his
powers, though all his friends knew that he was a genius.
It was certainly “John Strange Winter” who introduced us to Mary Ansell,
at that time one of the twin stars of Barrie’s first play, _Walker,
London_.
It may have been Mary Ansell, who was noted for her beauty, who
introduced us to the other star of the play, Irene Vanbrugh, equally
noted for her prettiness and her archness, who continues to this day to
interpret the whimsicalities of Barrie with such delightful
_espièglerie_. She was a Miss Barnes, daughter of a Prebendary of
Exeter—there were four daughters living with their mother in Earl’s
Court Road. Violet, the eldest, and Irene, the youngest, then unmarried,
were on the stage, Angela was a violinist or violoncellist—I never
remember which of these instruments my friends play—and Edith, the fair
one of the family, frowned on the stage, and married somebody of
importance in India. Angela came to us oftenest. A little later Violet
Vanbrugh married Arthur Bourchier, whom I had met long before when he
was at Christchurch, Oxford, and the leading light of the Oxford A.D.C.,
of which Alan MacKinnon, an old friend of mine at Trinity, who
introduced us, was another leading light.
Bourchier, the inimitable, is, I fancy, the only professional
Shakesperian actor who could have the chance of taking the part of one
of his own family in Shakespeare. For Cardinal Bourchier, Archbishop of
Canterbury, is a character in Shakespeare’s _Richard III_. He was also
Henry VI’s Chancellor, as Sir Robert de Bourchier was to Edward III in
1340—the first of the lay-Chancellors of England.
The first time I saw Bourchier act was when he was an undergraduate at
Oxford—the part was Harry Hotspur, and he was superb in it, because
this was a part in which he could use his art and his personality in
equal proportions. Since then I have seen him blend his two great
qualifications of character-acting and potent personality, in many
parts, in Henry VIII pre-eminently, and I have seen him exercise the
two qualifications separately in many parts, now as an old
seventeenth-century Bishop, overflowing with goodness, now as a bluff,
practical joker in boisterous farce with Weedon Grossmith. He is
certainly one of the finest actors on the stage, when you consider him
from the double standpoint of his tremendous personality, and his
power to disguise it in parts entirely foreign to one’s idea of
Bourchier. I cannot help liking him best as himself on the stage,
because to me there is nothing so interesting as personality, and he
has such an inexhaustible flow of wit and high spirits.
If Bourchier had had no success on the professional stage, his name
would have been immortalised in its annals, for it was he who persuaded
Jowett, of Balliol, the then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, to abolish the
statute of the University against Oxford having a theatre, and he
actually enlisted Jowett’s services into raising the money for building
one.
When I first went to Oxford, we had no theatre on account of the famous
statute. Our ancestors regarded actors as “rogues and vagabonds,” and
only a year ago a well-known actor got off serving on a jury on the
grounds that he was legally a rogue. But though the town might not have
a theatre, it might have as many low music-halls as it liked, because
the University did not consider what went on in “the halls” as acting at
all. The real point at issue—would the ladies of a caste like Irving’s
or Tree’s be as likely to tempt the St. Anthonys of Oxford out of their
hermitages in the deserts of learning—was entirely lost sight of.
With Bourchier one naturally thinks of Aubrey Smith, who had to play Sir
Marcus Ordeyne in Bourchier’s theatre—Smith, who was the chief light of
the Cambridge A.D.C., and the crack Cambridge bowler of his time in the
’Varsity matches.
Smith’s beautiful sister, Mrs. Cosmo Hamilton, who latinised her name
into _Faber_ when she went on the stage—she told me so herself—was only
just coming into her own when she died—cut off in her very flower. There
was no more genuinely liked and esteemed woman on the stage.
Granville Barker, the typical clever, red-headed boy, though he was not
then old enough to have been promoted to dress-clothes, used to come
with an extremely intelligent and charming mother, the mother of a large
family, I always understood, though she looked far too young. They were
brought by Edwin Waud, the artist, as far as I remember, and they were
friends of Gleeson White’s. Granville was a very bright boy when you
spoke to him, but he was never much in evidence; he left his mother, so
that she might enjoy herself, instead of having to keep him amused. He
may have gone to the sandwiches and lemonade in the dining-room—more
probably, he was not allowed to smoke, and went to do that.
I fancy that Acton Bond, who now runs the British Empire Shakespeare
Society, must have been a friend of Gleeson White’s, because he came
into our life so very early. Bond was an institution in Bohemia. He was
a singularly handsome and distinguished-looking actor, who took
Shakespeare and other “costume” parts. He was one of the most courteous
men I ever met, and I knew that I could confer pleasure on anybody by
introducing Bond. This was an important consideration to a host who made
a point of keeping all his guests introduced and amused for all the
evening. Bond knew all the denizens in Bohemia, and had a fund of
conversation about them, in addition to being personally very
interesting; and, as a fair golfer, a good man in a boat, a good dancer,
and so on, was a “find” for a country house. Even when he was acting
most, his heart inclined to the other side of his profession—to training
people for the stage and running the Actors’ Association—a sort of Union
for Actors. He did an immense amount of useful work. He married the
charming Eve Tame comparatively lately. A tall man, with a graceful
figure, he carried himself extremely well, and, with his fine classical
head, perpetuated the tradition of the Kembles.
Ray Rockman was one of our Argonaut friends, and became a very intimate
friend indeed. She stayed with us at Salcombe and elsewhere, besides
being constantly at our house. With her tall, slight, aristocratic
figure, the face of a marquise of Louis XV’s court, and her wonderful
Oriental eyes, she had the presence of the greatest _tragédiennes_ who
have adorned our stage. When you see her in a drawing-room, you think
instinctively of Sarah Bernhardt’s great parts, and rightly, because she
was Sarah’s understudy in them in Paris before she came to England. If
any actor-manager had wanted a leading lady for tragedy, she would have
been one of the most famous actresses on our stage to-day, for she had
the divine fire. But London does not run to tragedies, except for the
glorification of an actor- or actress-manager, so she had to descend to
being the villainess of melodramas generally finishing up with suicide
in the last act. In the _Great Ruby_ she showed her real dramatic power.
But she has never had the chance of becoming the leading lady at one of
our chief theatres like His Majesty’s, where she could have taken London
by storm with her magnificent presence and carriage and the passion she
can put into her acting with her marvellous Oriental eyes and coal-black
hair. These she owes to her being a South Russian. I am not sure whether
she was born in Russia or the United States, where her father is a
doctor in Montana—a friend of the Copper King. If any one were to make a
play out of Sarah Siddons, Ray Rockman would be the ideal actress to
cast for the leading part.
It was Ray who introduced me to the wonderful Annie Russell, the most
temperamental of American actresses. I say American, though she was born
in Liverpool, because practically all her work has been done on the
other side, and it was Ray who introduced me to Sarah Bernhardt.
Unfortunately, Sarah does not like talking English, and I am not equal
to saying anything very interesting in French, though I read it with
facility, and know plenty of “kitchen” French for use at hotels and
railway-stations. Sarah sent me seats to see her in _Hamlet_, which she
pronounced “omelette.” I found it rather wearisome, to be quite honest,
because I hear French so badly, and when I went down to see Ray and her
in her dressing-room at the end of the first act, I gladly accepted her
invitation to spend the rest of the evening in her dressing-room, “if I
could not follow her easily.”
It was extremely interesting to watch her dressing, and she did not take
any more notice of my presence than if I had been a fly, while she was
actually being got ready for the stage, though she made herself
extremely pleasant during the acts when she was off the stage. She could
divest herself of the personality of Hamlet, and resume it at a moment’s
notice. Ray speaks French as well as English, so everything was quite
simple, with her there to interpret. During the longest interval a
message came down for her that the Prince of Wales (afterwards King
Edward VII) was in the house, and Sarah went off to see him for a long
time; it seemed like half-an-hour. She invited me to go with Ray to
visit her at that wonderful rock island off the Breton coast, but for
some reason or other I did not make the effort. I think I had made
arrangements to go to St. Andrews.
Elizabeth Robins I met at the Idler. One always thought of her as the
actress in those days, and not, as one now thinks of her, as the
novelist. Elizabeth Robins is a tall, spare, Western woman, with a very
eloquent face. She is the greatest Ibsen actress we have had in England.
She had the unusual courage, for the stage, to think that good looks and
elegance in dress were of no consequence, when she was presenting
Ibsen’s characters. Her one desire was to fulfil his conception exactly,
and she did it most convincingly.
A few people, like myself, knew that she was the “C. E. Raimond” who
wrote _George Mandeville’s Husband_ for that series of Heinemann’s, but
we imagined it to be a passing phase with her, instead of the prelude to
a series of great novels on burning questions.
I do not know who brought Gertrude Kingston to us first, but she often
came. She was the accomplished violinist mentioned in Lord Roberts’
dispatch of September 13, 1901, as having rendered special service
during the war in South Africa. Mrs. Silver, for this is her real name,
is an authoress as well as an artist and a collector, as I discovered
when we were going over the old things in Phillimore Lodge together
before the sale.
Alice Skipworth was a lovely woman with a gorgeous voice, whose fortunes
on the stage were made in an extraordinary way. An actor-manager engaged
her without any experience of acting to understudy his wife, who
financed his plays, in an American tour. When they got to Philadelphia,
I think it was, on the second night his wife took ill, and Mrs.
Skipworth duly took her place. Philadelphia went wild over her beauty
and her voice, and the actor-manager found himself in the unpleasant
predicament of having to decide whether he would close his doors, or
persuade his wife to let Mrs. Skipworth go on taking her place. His
wife, who was, I believe, very charming herself, was a sensible woman,
and thought it would be better to coin money by doing nothing than to
bankrupt herself by acting, so the understudy acted and sang throughout
the tour, and came back a leading lady in musical comedy. She was a very
clever woman; she could have written an excellent novel about Bohemian
life; she had the knowledge; and she was both witty and epigrammatic.
I need not explain who Murray Carson is. He was a very great light in
those circles, because he was an actor-manager, and as such had the
distinction of giving Lena Ashwell one of her first chances in
_Gloriana_. In addition to his successes as an actor and a manager, he
was joint author with Louis Napoleon Parker in that delightful play
_Rosemary_, since which he has written many plays. He is quite a
well-known figure at various literary clubs, noted for his remarkable
resemblance to the first Napoleon. The collaboration of these two
Napoleons was, I imagine, a mere coincidence.
My last meeting with Decima Moore I am never likely to forget. She was
very fond of watching polo, and we were sitting together in the pavilion
at a club to which I belong, when a man was thrown from his pony, and
dragged along the ground for several yards on his face, his nose
ploughing a regular furrow till it was broken. I went down to where he
was lying. Every one thought he was killed, because he lay insensible
for so long. When he did come to, he said, “Is my nose broken, doctor?”
The doctor said it was, and then he said, in my hearing, “Then I hope
you will make a better job of it than God did,” which seemed to me the
most extraordinary piece of _sang-froid_ for a man who, the moment
before, had been almost across the threshold of life and death.
Sir Charles Wyndham, whose real name I cannot for the moment remember,
and “Mary Moore,” I have seen chiefly on the Riviera at Cimiez. I make
it the excuse for my forgetfulness that he forgot what he was forgetting
once, when, coming up cordially to shake hands with me, he said, “I
remember your name quite well, but I can’t recall your face.”
Wyndham fought in the war between North and South in the United States,
and he was a member of the company of John Wilkes Booth, the actor, at
the time that the latter assassinated President Lincoln in the theatre;
I have never heard if he was actually on the stage at the time. He was
brought up, I understood, as a doctor.
As an instance of Wyndham’s lapses of memory, I may quote that one day
at Ranelagh he asked me if I was a member of the Club. I said “Yes.”
“Can I telephone from here?” “Oh, yes.”
When we got to the telephone, he began turning up the name of his man of
business, who had a name, which I will not mention, as ordinary as
Skinner; there might have been a couple of score of the name in the
telephone book. He read down the list. “I can’t remember his initials,”
he said. I looked at him as if to say, “Don’t you often see him?” He
caught my eye. His actor’s intuition told him my thoughts. “I know what
you’re thinking,” he said. “Yes, I do ’phone to him every day, but I
can’t for the life of me tell which of all this lot he is.”
Irving once told me at lunch a story which he probably told many others.
He was touring in the United States, and staying either at St. Louis or
Cincinnati. One morning at breakfast a large rat ran across the room. As
he had been up till past five that morning, being entertained by the
local Savage Club—I forget its name—he was feeling rather cheap, and
gave a little start. “You needn’t mind him, Mis’ Irving,” said the negro
waiter; “he’s a real one.”
The Trees I have known for a long time. It is an undiluted pleasure to
meet Tree out at lunch—like all actors, he affects lunches more than
dinners. There are few men so witty. When most of the great actors and
actresses were exhausting their powers of polished vituperation on the
unhappy Clement Scott for his generalisations upon the morals of the
stage, Tree’s reply as to what he thought of the matter was, that
nothing Clement Scott had said made him think any less of him, and Lady
Tree’s rejoinder to the late W. T. Stead is historical.
Cyril Maude always gives me his smile when we meet at a certain polo
club, and often “passes the time of day” to me very pleasantly. But I
know that he is another of the people who remember your name, when they
meet you, but cannot recall your face. Still, I forgive him for the sake
of that Major in _The Second in Command_. His charming wife, Winifred
Emery, whose triumph I saw the night she won her place in the first rank
as Marguerite in Irving’s _Faust_—she was the understudy—always
remembers my face as well as my name. There never was an actress on our
stage who showed more spirit, unless it is Lena Ashwell turning on a
bully, for Lena turns to bay like the lion “on that famed Picard field.”
The Maudes’ daughter is now rapidly coming to the front. I saw her as
one of Portia’s ladies in the _Merchant of Venice_ looking
(intentionally, I suppose) for all the world like the exquisite
Tornabuoni heiress in the choir frescoes of Santa Maria Novella at
Florence, and could hardly believe that it was the same merry, everyday
girl that I meet at the Adrian Ross’s.
[Illustration:
SIR HERBERT BEERBOHM-TREE
_From the drawing by Yoshio Markino_
]
Edward Terry I first met at the Savage, where he was one of the most
influential members, and afterwards at Barnes, where he had a dear old
house near the church, which has been improved away to make room for a
sweet-shop and a garage and an auctioneer’s lair. Though he was so
capable in the chair, and such an excellent comedian, I don’t remember
his ever saying anything worth remembering when we walked or “bussed”
down Castelnau together.
Penley I never met in private life; I only met him at the Savage, where
he never would do a turn, and where his dignity—not assumed—when he was
in the chair was as funny as _Charley’s Aunt_, and proceedings were
conducted in the voice of the curate in _The Private Secretary_.
I first met Mrs.—and Mr.—Patrick Campbell at a party at Oswald
Crawfurd’s in the very early ’nineties. She had been enjoying triumphs
in the provinces for some years, but London was for the first time being
thrilled by that marvellously seductive voice, that languorous grace,
and that panther-like personality, which is sleek till it springs. Of
all actresses, Mrs. Campbell is most closely connected with Kensington,
for she was born in the Forest House, Kensington Gardens, and lives no
farther off than Kensington Square, where she occupies one of the old
houses on the west side.
_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ at one end of her career in London, and
_Bella-Donna_ at the other, established the fact that for parts in which
the infidelity of a wife brings in passion and intrigue of tragic
proportions, she has few equals on the stage of any country. It is the
Italian side of her nature coming out—her mother was a Miss Romanini.
Indeed, one can picture her at her very finest in an Italian mediæval
play—such as the scene where his beautiful mother mourns over the body
of the terrible young Griffonetto Baglioni.
Like Lena Ashwell and Julia Neilson, Mrs. Campbell (Mrs. George
Cornwallis West) might have expected to make her name by music.
She supplies one more illustration of the siren voice of Africa, which
never ceases to call to those who have once listened to it. For Patrick
Campbell made his work in Africa, and died there in the Boer War, and
now their daughter Stella, who had made her mark on the stage with her
_Princess Clementina_ in Mason’s play, has married and gone to live at
Nairobi.
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