“It is a plain fact,” the actor William Gillette observed in 1914, “that personality is the most important thing in really great acting.” The New York Times theater critic Adolph Klauber made a similar point, with greater ambivalence: “The person, not the artist, is worshipped in our playhouses,” he observed in 1905. A fine actor infused his role with life, real life, even as he supercharged it. The new style of acting had something to do with the advent of realism in other fields, like literature, and something to do with the new prominence of psychology. And it drew on and in turn fed a larger transition that the historian Warren Susman, among others, has outlined: the movement from a culture of character in the nineteenth century to a culture of personality in the twentieth. It’s a generalization, but the personal challenges for twentieth-century Americans had less to do with making themselves worthy in God’s eyes than with making themselves appealing and alluring in the eyes of their fellow human beings—even those whom they didn’t know and who didn’t know them. The word personality, which had made occasional appearances in the late nineteenth century, became common in the first decade of the twentieth. To distinguish oneself in a crowd, on the stage of the modern city, and in the eye of a camera was the new goal. It meant, as the contemporary self-help books posed the challenging task, highlighting one’s individuality without verging into eccentricity, being distinctive but still a recognizable type. It meant taking advantage of new counsel and new industries to refine one’s self-presentation. For men, there were self-improvement books and courses that showed how to cultivate commanding personalities bolstered by forceful speaking voices and physiques. For women, there was the booming new mass market in beauty aids—face creams, lipsticks, rejuvenating hair products. (A 1922 magazine ad for Woodbury’s soap made the point neatly: “Strangers’ eyes keen and critical—can you meet them proudly, confidently—without fear?”)
“From the beginning,” Susman writes, “the adjectives most frequently associated with personality suggest a very different concept from that of character: fascinating, stunning, attractive, magnetic, glowing, masterful, creative, dominant, forceful. These words would seldom if ever be used to modify the word character.” Actors were cultural pioneers in this regard—living to be looked at—just as they were in more unconventional living arrangements—divorce, female independence. (Actresses at the turn of the century worked for longer spans of their lives than did women in any other field.)
Lyle knew as he sat rereading Miss Taylor’s essay night after night that he was a long way from the London stage or the New York stage or even the Cincinnati stage. His ambit was tent theater performed in little windblown towns on the plains, and his hope was that eventually, if Ray Ketchum ever let him act again, he might someday move up to a regular resident stock company, maybe in Sioux Falls or Oklahoma City. When after a few months Ray relented and Lyle did get back onstage, and when newspaper reviews started describing him in certain terms, terms that suggested sex appeal and personality as much as if not more than “histrionic ability,” he knew he was getting somewhere. He was, the papers said, a young man “whose good looks are not wasted on the feminine portion of the audience.” He was a “handsome,” “pleasant” fellow in possession of a “virile and buoyant personality.” He seemed “youthful,” “impulsive,” and “innocent” with a “silly” sense of humor and, at the same time, an “alert,” “collegiate” air.
The world that Lyle inhabited in his twenties and the country’s is a lost world—the world of traveling theater troupes and local repertory companies that, before the definitive arrival of mass entertainment, could still command people’s desires and imaginations. Soon it would be overwhelmed, first by radio and movies, then by television. But from the 1880s till the late 1920s, touring companies were what brought America its most reliable entertainment, what sparked, season after season and however creaky the machinations onstage, its sense of make-believe. Riverboats on the Mississippi and elsewhere had offered the first touring venues for American theater in the early 1800s, but with the rise of the railroad, companies could make it to small towns all over the country. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, notes Don Wilmeth, a historian of theater, “nearly every village and hamlet began to construct a local ‘opera house’ to accommodate traveling entertainments, creating a vast theatrical network known as ‘the road.’” In 1900, there were 350 companies touring continuously—many of them in tents, or “under canvas,” as the slogan went, during the summer, and in the opera houses when the weather turned cold—and millions of people saw them. “While it lasted . . .” Wilmeth writes, “tent rep was energetic, vital, immensely entertaining, and successful and truly belonged to the people. Indeed, the combined yearly attendance at tent shows during its heyday exceeded that of the New York stage, despite the frequently makeshift, shabby quality of the performances.”
Bessie Robbins, the high-spirited leading lady of a company both Lyle and his parents toured with, once complained to a friend about a crying baby in the audience at one of her performances. The friend’s answer was like a little love song to these makeshift shows. “Bess Robbins,” the friend chided her, “the mothers of those babies have saved egg money for months to get to see you tonight. Some of them came forty miles by horse and buggy because you are the brightest spot in a very dreary existence. Any time your audience boasts a baby, it means the mother is a devoted fan—and you be grateful.” Bess never forgot her friend’s gentle chastisement: it reminded her, she said, “not to seek applause but to give happiness.”
Giving happiness in this way could be an arduous business, though. True, traveling actors of the 1910s and 1920s didn’t have it as hard as their predecessors in the nineteenth century. Traveling players in the early nineteenth century had been men and women of Bunyanesque stamina: they almost had to be, just to cover as much ground as they did in the years before the railroad. They trekked ahead on foot to post their one-sheet advertisements on rocks and trees; performed in barns, mills, stables, attics, and hotel lobbies, for audiences perched on rough-hewn benches and logs, before footlights that might consist of tallow candles stuck into potatoes or beer kegs that had been nailed to the floor. The actor John Langrishe and his troupe once had to abandon their wagons after the roads became impassable, and hike six miles, toting wardrobe and scenery, into the town of Bear Gulch, in the Montana Territory, where they performed in a butcher shop for the next two weeks. The actor Solomon Smith recalled an occasion when, while floating down a river in Maine, he spotted a white handkerchief flying from a pole stuck in the riverbank—the usual signal indicating a town was there to receive him and his players. But this time when they disembarked, they stared around in surprise, for there was no town anywhere to be seen. “Oh, you are looking for the houses!” the man who’d clambered down to meet them exclaimed. “Bless ye, they are not built yet.” Indomitable spirits that they were, Smith and his fellow actors performed that night anyway.
The great nineteenth-century actor Joseph Jefferson’s autobiography is full of stories about his pioneer-like adventures on the road. “We traveled from Galena to Dubuque on the frozen river in sleighs,” he writes at one point, describing a tour with his actor parents in the 1830s; “smoother work than the roughly rutted roads of the prairie, but it was a perilous journey, for a warm spell had set in and made the ice sloppy and unsafe. We would sometimes hear it crack and see it bend under our horses’ feet: now a long drawn breath of relief as we passed some dangerous spot, then a convulsive gasping of our nearest companion as the ice groaned and shook beneath us. Well, the passengers arrived safe, but horror to relate! The sleigh containing the baggage, private and public, with the scenery and properties, green curtain and drop, broke through the ice and tumbled into the Mississippi.”
Troupers of the nineteenth century dodged outbreaks of cholera, diphtheria, and yellow fever—Jefferson’s father succumbed to the latter on the road. They coped with their own and other actors�
�� addictions to alcohol, laudanum, morphine, and opium, and with the degeneration of syphilis, which imposed a particularly cruel fate for an actor: memory loss that audiences sometimes laughed and hissed about. At other moments, life for a player was dreamlike, fantastical. Having discovered that hoisting one of the richly painted backdrops as a sail would increase his boat’s speed on the Ohio River, the young Jefferson delighted in his power to lure “wonder-stricken” farmers and their children down to the riverbank. “For a bit of sport, the captain and I would vary the picture, and as a boat teamed past we would show them first the wood scene, and then suddenly swing the sail around, exhibiting the gorgeous palace. Adding to this sport, our leading man and the low comedian would sometimes get a couple of old-fashioned broadswords and fight a melodramatic combat on the deck. There is no doubt that at times our barge was taken for a floating lunatic asylum.”
But even in my father’s day, the trouper’s life had its hardships, starting with constant travel through raw and lonesome towns scattered like corn feed over the Midwest. His scrapbook records that as he toured with the Chase-Lister company between September 23, 1920, and January 23, 1921, he played a total of twenty-five different towns throughout Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming, working every day but Christmas. The engagements would last anywhere from two days to a week, with a different play performed every night. Often the actors were riding “milk-and-vegetable trains” that made frequent stops, and switching trains in the middle of the night on frigid little open platforms, where the wind came scouring off the plains and nearly stopped your heart. If you arrived in the morning, you might get lucky and find a place open that would sell you a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and if you were young and often hungry like Lyle, you’d stuff your pockets with any of the warm, sugary sinkers that had been left behind by one of your fellow actors before you ran for the train. It meant carrying your own trunks, the trunks made so sturdily by the Taylor company that it eventually stopped making them because they lasted too long—big, wooden steel-cornered wardrobes that inspired some troupers to say they’d been born in one. (My father’s stood in our garage for years, a thing of almost monumental heft and mystery whose burnished wood still shone like butterscotch candy.)
Hotel keepers sometimes banned actors, or hung curtains in the dining room to partition them off from the decent folk eating there. Merchants sometimes complained that the show people drained business from the local stores when they came to town, since while they were there, the locals would be spending all their pin money on playgoing. Chase-Lister once issued a wry rejoinder to such accusations that tells you something about actors: “Every Tuesday morning the management pays out to the people of the company, something over $600.00. If you are at all familiar with the habits of theatrical people, you will know that most of this money is spent in your town before the following Sunday.”
When actors did find accommodations at a hotel or private house, the rooms were often stark or shabby, and in the winter, drafty and cold. My father recorded the names of all the hotels and houses he stayed in, along with their prices, which averaged a dollar a night. “Stopped at Elkhorn Hotel, and it’s punk,” he noted laconically of a place in Ewing, Nebraska. Philip C. Lewis, a former trouper who wrote a history of the theatrical circuit, recalled that players frequently opted for the hotel nearest the station “because it was so vital to make the trains (the usual weariness of the actor involved the risk of oversleeping),” and also out of the hopeful feeling that for a night or two, how bad could it be? “This meant, in aggregate, that they were spending their lives in faded, frequently filthy (‘Don’t look under the bed’) rooms, with temperatures at extremes, where the electric light was small improvement on the candle; places noisy with drunks, singing chambermaids in the halls, doors crashing; beds with sags, lumps or thinly covered springs, broken window shades, broken windows, no closets, no bath—and despite prayers, sometimes bugs that made acquaintance in the middle of the night.” Bessie Robbins remembered one small-town landlord who put the whole company of twenty or so men and women together in one big bedroom. “You know each other, dontcha?” she recalled him saying. “Thought you’d like to be together.”
The troupers would find crazy places to rehearse during the day—the local undertaker’s cooling room for corpses on a hot summer afternoon, or in a patch of yard behind somebody’s shed with an audience of goats and pigs. Backstage, conditions weren’t much better. “The actor who secures a looking glass that is not cracked or a wash stand that is not in eminent danger of toppling over,” wrote one trouper, “is indeed considered fortunate, and as for a carpet on the floor, that is a luxury seldom found.” Lewis observed that in the dank basements of opera houses where the actors dressed, “the lighting was often installed by someone who never thought actors might want to see themselves in a mirror as they make up.” There were good reasons why “trouper” became a synonym for someone who persevered. “There were no understudies,” Bessie Robbins recalled. “You played your part whether you felt like it or not. Of course, when you were sick someone would give you a friendly push from the wings. Once on the stage you forgot about not feeling well.”
And that was all if the show didn’t run out of funds, leaving its actors stranded in unfamiliar towns with barely a dime. “Layed off 1 week, acc’t no bookings,” my father writes from Sterling, Colorado, in mid-December 1920. He had to hold off till early February in Fairbury, Nebraska, just before his nineteenth birthday, to buy the new overcoat he needed for the prairie winter. Naturally, actors were good at putting on a front. “We broke actors sometimes do our span of poverty in the grandest style,” my father told a magazine interviewer in the early 1930s. “Because we must keep up the old front, we have starved to death in high-powered cars with elaborate wardrobes and excellent hotel addresses. It’s fun, of course, to look back on it all, but it’s the devil to go through.”
As he got older, it was mostly the lark of it all that he remembered. The touring companies Lyle acted with in the 1920s—Chase-Lister, Clint and Bessie Robbins, the John Winninger Players—were like big, rumbustious families headed by husband-and-wife teams whom he looked to as surrogate parents, parents more fun-loving than most people’s in those days. The troupes were communities unto themselves—self-contained, close-knit, yet capable of conferring certain freedoms that the rest of society did not enjoy. Older women continued to work onstage as long as they wanted to, or as the joke went, as long as the corset industry held out, and they continued to act, in many cases, opposite young and handsome men like Lyle. (One such actress, Flora DeVoss, performed ingenue roles for so long that after a while she felt compelled to issue a sort of explanation, however misleading: “Perhaps you knew Miss DeVoss, perhaps you knew her mother, perhaps you knew her grandmother.”) Because husbands and wives often worked as acting teams and ran the companies together, their relationships could be uncommonly egalitarian. As Lyle’s stepmother, Anna, said of her partnership with Ed Henderson, “There’s no ‘lord and master’ in our household. Each one has a say and that makes for real harmony.” Women worked well along into their pregnancies—deft costuming could hide a lot—and couples raised children on the road. Bessie Robbins, who herself had been born to theatrical parents—she was their middle child, “the ham in the sandwich,” as she put it—recalled rehearsing with her baby “on my hip for a year. Directors put up with anything in those days.”
Fellow actors played pranks on one another, teased and needled and annoyed one another, broke one another’s hearts, loved and comforted one another. My father, as he went from juvenile to leading man in tent-rep and then stock companies, was forever falling in and out of love. There was a pretty musician who played in the orchestra, several actresses, and a seventeen-year-old Omaha flapper named Mary Bell, who was written up in the paper for having “appeared on the streets with a portrait of Clarence Darrow painted on her right knee and another one of Bill Bryan on her left.” Mary’s insouciant Sco
pes-trial reference didn’t last long, alas. Her “plans for tripping the light fantastic with her new knees at a fashionable dance last night went a glimmering when her father saw the gleaming countenance of Clarence and Bill on Mary’s shapely patellas,” and demanded she scrub them off.
Far from their families—families who might have shunned them anyway—troupers were free to make up their own traditions. At Christmas, they’d gather in the lobby of their hotel to sing carols, then repair to a private dining room, if there was one, to eat Christmas dinner together. On their birthdays, they’d write and recite poems for one another. One year, a fellow actor presented Lyle with this charming tribute, in honor of his affection for loud ties:
Some may long for the soothing touch
of lavender, cream, and mauve.
But the ties you wear must possess the glare
of a red-hot kitchen stove.
The books you read and the life you lead
are sensible, sane, and mild.
You like calm hats and you don’t wear spats,
but you wear your neckties wild.
So I give you a wild tie, brother,
one with a lot of sins,
a tie that will blaze in a hectic haze
down where the vest begins.
They maintained a store of backstage dos and don’ts, some of which persist to this day, for actors, like baseball players, are often superstitious. Never play or sing “Home, Sweet Home” in the theater; that meant your show would close soon. Never use a Bible onstage—it was bad luck—substitute a dictionary instead. Never say “Macbeth” in the theater; that, too, brought bad luck, for the story had come down over the centuries that the play had real black magic incantations in it. Never say the last line of an act during rehearsals; say “tag” instead.
The Entertainer Page 10
