My Life and Times

by Jerome Klapka Jerome

  “I haven't the courage,” he answered. “I could not bear seeing my play knocked about and rendered senseless by a horde of syndicated savages. It would break my heart.”

  The Dramatists' Club, at one time, had the dream of starting a dramatists' theatre. That would have been a sound scheme, if only we had had faith. It may yet materialise. The plan was that ten or a dozen leading dramatists, possessing a bank balance, should form themselves into a company, lease a theatre and produce their own plays. Afterwards the doors would be thrown open to all. Cecil Raleigh and myself were appointed to report upon the scheme. I went into the City and found there would be no difficulty in obtaining, if need be, financial assistance. Your City man is a born gambler, and the theatre being a ready-money proposition, particularly appeals to him. We could have had a lease of the Savoy at eighty pounds a week, and I am still of the opinion that we missed a golden opportunity. The danger confronting a new management is that of running short of plays. We should have had a dozen to fall back upon, each one the work of an experienced dramatist. Running a theatre is the easiest business going. I ran the Comedy Theatre for six months with the “Prude's Progress.” If I had had a better play I would have made a fortune. As it was I came out with a profit. All that had to be known I learnt in the first week. Bram Stoker, Henry Irving's manager, put me up to the art of “papering.” It was almost the rule then for plays to hang fire at first. The house had to be “dressed,” as the saying was. Generally, this was done by handing out each morning a bundle of passes to the bill-poster for distribution. The deserving poor came in for, perhaps, more than their share. Evening dress, so far as the stalls and dress circle were concerned, was indispensable; but the term is necessarily elastic in the case of female attire, and often the appearance of the house would be irresistibly suggestive of Mrs. Jarley's wax works. Bram Stoker, in those early years when he was building up the Lyceum, took pains. With a Burke's peerage at his elbow, he would confine his complimentary admissions to Mayfair and Kensington, together with, maybe, the park end of Bayswater. It was rarely that his invitation was declined. The Lyceum floor would blaze with jewels, and the line of waiting carriages extend to Covent Garden. I followed the same plan, and kept The Morning Post busy recording the nobility and gentry that, the previous evening, had honoured the Comedy Theatre with their gracious presence.

  Collaboration, generally speaking, is a mistake. Like on the old tandem bicycle, each man thinks he is doing all the work. The last time I tried it was with Justin McCarthy. But that was a play asking for collaboration. Its subject was re-incarnation. Our hero and heroine meet for the first time in the days of Prometheus, and he shows her how to light a fire. A million years later, they turn up in Athens. He is Socrates and she is a slave. What they've been up to in the meanwhile we do not bother about. In the end, they come back to the Present, where the play first opened. I had submitted the idea to Phyllis Neilson-Terry in New York, and she had been tremendously keen about it. But her plans fell through. That is the heart-breaking side of play-writing: you spend a year's labour and nothing comes of it. Or it is produced only to be jeered at and promptly buried. True, what one loses on the roundabout failures one makes on the swinging successes. But, somehow, the failures seem always to be the ones that we love best.

  My first collaboration was with Addison Bright. We wrote a play for Miss Eastlake. I remember Bright's reading it to Wilson Barrett in his dressing-room at Birmingham after a performance of “Claudian.” Barrett had not changed his costume, and came to us with two long hat-pins sticking out of each of his calves. Miss Eastlake had stuck them into him as she had followed him up the stairs. He never noticed them until he went to cross his legs. Miss Eastlake had a great sorrow in the first act, and the curtain went down on her sobbing her heart out. During rehearsals, she came forward for the second act still weeping. Bright explained to her that six years had elapsed, and that the stage directions were: “Enters talking and laughing.”

  “I know,” she answered, the tears still falling down her cheeks. “I can't help it, it's so absurd of me. I'll never be able to get over it in time.”

  There was some risk of it, especially on the first night. To avoid danger, we made the second act to take place on the anniversary of her trouble; and gave her a “pensive” entrance.

  She and Annie Hughes both “came out” the same evening at the Criterion in a play, I think, of McCarthy's. They both had a wonderful success. The last time I saw poor Miss Eastlake, she was running a cheap boarding-house in Gower Street. As the result of an illness, she had lost all her beauty and had grown tremendously stout. She was still playing the heroine. She was finer than I had ever seen her: patient and cheerful. She made a jest of the whole thing. It was in a play that I wrote for Annie Hughes that the telephone first appeared on the English stage. People talked about it, and the critics said it was false realism. I wish now I hadn't done it. But maybe somebody else would have thought of it, if I hadn't.

  I wrote three plays for Marie Tempest, two of which she never played in, and the third she wished she hadn't. It was her own fault. She wanted a serious play, and I gave her a serious play. She loved it when I read it to her. “Esther Castways” was the name of it. She was magnificent in it, and on the first night received an ovation. But, of course, the swells wouldn't have it. She had made a groove for herself; and her public were determined she should keep it. We ought to have known that, all of us. I didn't get on with her at rehearsals. I wore a red suit. I rather fancied it myself; but somehow it maddened her; and I was obstinate and wouldn't change it, though she offered to buy it off me that she might burn it. My daughter made a successful first appearance in the play. Marie took a liking to her. She liked young girls, and was always very nice to women. It was men she hadn't any use for, so far as I could gather. A pity she ever got into that groove. She was a great actress pinned down to frocks and frivolity. Lillah McCarthy gave me an insight into female psychology when she told me that the first thing she did with a new part was to dress it. She could not imagine how the woman would think and feel till she had visualized the clothes that she would wear. Then she began to understand the woman, working from the clothes inwards. I can understand: because The Stranger in “The Third Floor Back” came to me like that. I followed a stooping figure, passing down a foggy street, pausing every now and then to glance up at a door. I did not see his face. It was his clothes that worried me. There was nothing out of the way about them. I could not make out why it was they seemed remarkable. I lost him at a corner, where the fog hung thick, and found myself wondering what he would have looked like if he had turned round and I had seen his face. I could not get him out of my mind, wandering about the winter streets; and gradually he grew out of those curious clothes of his.

  “Miss Hobbs” (or “The Kissing of Kate,” to give the play its original title), produced by Chas. Frohman in America with Annie Russell as Kate and wonderful old Mrs. Gilbert as Auntie, was my first real money-making success: if a gentleman may mention such detail. She has been a good child to me, God bless her. The Princess Paulowa presented her in Russia and is now showing her round Italy. She was a great success in Germany. I was living in Dresden at the time; and the Kaiser sent me his congratulations, through an official of the Saxon Court, who brought it to me in a big envelope: so he couldn't have been all bad. How the coming of the Great War was kept from us common people may be instanced by the production of my play, “The Great Gamble,” at the Haymarket, six weeks before the guns went off. The scene was laid in Germany. One of our chief characters was a dear old German Professor. German students, in white caps, sang German folk songs and drank Lager beer. We had incidental music, specially written, in the German style. The hero had been educated in Germany and the heroine's mother's co-respondent was an Austrian. For a solid month, we rehearsed that play without a suspicion that the Chancelleries of Europe were one and all making their secret preparations to render it a failure. Talk of organized opposition! It was a cons
piracy.

  “Fanny and the Servant Problem” I wrote for Marie Tempest. She was otherwise engaged when it was ready; and Frohman not wanting to wait, we gave the part to Fannie Ward. I think myself she made a quite delightful “Fanny,” and Charles Cartwright's Butler was a joy. Alma Murray played the Lady's Maid. I had not seen her for nearly twenty years. She had been one of the first to put Ibsen on the London stage. But for that, she might have had her own theatre and been a leading light. But in those days the feeling against Ibsen was almost savage, and no player prominently connected with his plays was ever forgiven. For some reason or another, “Fanny” failed in London. So Fannie Ward took it to America, and there it was a big success, under the name of “Lady Bantock.” The Americans love a title. Afterwards it was converted into a musical comedy and ran for four seasons. With Hamlet, I object to actors speaking more than is set down for them. But a gag by the American actor cast for the music-hall manager was quaint, I confess. He finds the Bible that her Uncle and Butler has placed open on Fanny's desk. He turns over the pages, and seems surprised. “What have you got there?” asks his companion. “I don't know,” he answers. “It's all about the Sheenies.”

  “Fanny” has been translated and played in almost every European country, except Portugal.

  “Cook” (I called it “The Celebrity,” and if I had originally called it “Cook” my manager would have wanted to call it “The Celebrity”) proved to me, I am sorry to say, that the power of the critics to make or mar a play is negligible. I have never written anything that has won for me such unstinted praise. I could hardly believe my eyes when I opened the papers the next morning. Generally, if your play does get through, it is the actors who have “saved” it. But in the notices for “Cook,” favourable mention was made even of the author. We all thought we were in for a record run; and I ordered a new dress suit. I ought to have remembered Charles Frohman's advice and waited for the second Monday. But “Cook” also has succeeded abroad, so I comfort myself with the prophet's customary consolation.

  Rehearsals are trying periods. Everybody seems to be wearing their nerves outside their skin. The question whether the actor should take three steps to the right, and pause with his left hand on the back of chair, centre, before proposing to the heroine; or whether he should do it from the hearthrug, with his left elbow on the mantelpiece, may threaten the friendship of a lifetime. The author wants him to do it from the hearthrug—is convinced that from there and there only can he convey to the heroine the depth and sincerity of his passion. The producer is positive that a true gentleman would walk round the top of the table and do it from behind a chair. The actor comes to the rescue. He “feels” he can do it only from the left-hand bottom corner of the table.

  “Oh well, if you feel as strongly about it as all that, my dear boy,” says the producer, “that ends it. It's you who've got to play the part.”

  “Do you know,” says the author, “I think he's right? It does seem to come better from there.”

  The rehearsal proceeds. Five minutes later, the argument whether a father would naturally curse his child before or after she has taken off her hat, provides a new crisis.

  In ancient times, the fashion was for movement. The hero and heroine would be seated, making love, one each side of the piano. At the end of the first minute, the stage manager, as he was then, would call out:

  “Now then, come along, my dears, break it up. Put some life into it. You're not glued to those chairs, you know.”

  The hero and heroine would rise and change seats.

  Nowadays the pendulum has swung too far the other way. I remember a rehearsal where the leading actress suddenly jumped up and began stamping about the stage.

  “Whatever's the matter?” asked the producer.

  “I'll be all right in a minute,” she answered. “I've got pins and needles.”

  My own worst experience was over a musical play I wrote for Arthur Roberts, then with Lowenfeldt at the Prince of Wales'. Lowenfeldt was an Austrian who had made a fortune out of Kop's ale. It was a popular temperance beverage, twenty years ago, until the Revenue authorities discovered it contained more alcohol than the average public-house beer. His grievance against the London critics was that they didn't take cheques. “Why not?” he argued. “A good notice in a respectable paper is worth a hundred pounds to me. I give the critic ten. It pays him, and it pays me.” He thought the time would come.

  Arthur Roberts took me aside.

  “I want you to write me a part with a touch of pathos in it,” he said. “You know what I mean. Plenty of fun, but not all fun. I want them to go home saying, 'Well, I always knew Arthur could make me laugh, but damned if I thought he had got it in him to make me cry.' See what I mean?”

  I retired into the country and worked hard. It seemed to me an interesting story. There were moments in it when, if properly played, a chocky feeling would, I felt sure, manifest itself throughout the audience. But it all came right in the end. I made him a licensed victualler, of the better sort. An uncle died and left him an hotel. Roberts had not attended the reading. At the first rehearsal he took me aside. He said:

  “I've got an idea for this part. I'm a young farmer——” He gave me an imitation of a Somersetshire yokel. It was an excellent performance. “You know,” he continued, “a Simple Simon sort of part. In the second act——”

  “But you can't,” I said. “You're an hotel proprietor at Maidenhead.”

  “Good,” he answered. “All you'll have to do, is to knock out the hotel and call it a farm.”

  I tried reason, but he was just mad to be a farmer. He sketched out the part. It would be novel and amusing, I could see that. I sat up for a night or two, and turned him into a farmer. We struggled through one or two rehearsals; and then he had another inspiration. He wanted to be a detective, disguised as an Italian waiter.

  “Where's the difficulty?” he demanded. “Somebody steals the old girl's jewels. I'm in love with the daughter. The police are no good, I take the job on for her sake.”

  It meant re-writing half an act. I did it. Three days later, he wanted to be a French Marquis, reduced to giving English lessons in Soho.

  “Don't you see, my dear boy?” he explained. “Gives me an opportunity for pathos. I've been making them laugh, now I make them cry. Variety: that's the thing we want.”

  I never saw the play myself. I was told that he got them all in; and the critics spoke highly of his versatility. Adrian Ross (Arthur Ropes) took it off my hands and finished it. He was a wonderful worker. He would write a scene—quite a good scene—while Arthur Roberts walked up and down the room and acted it. The next morning, Arthur had forgotten all about it; and Ropes would write him another.

  I wrote “The Passing of the Third Floor Back” for David Warfield. I worked it out first as a short story. It was John Murray, the publisher, who put the idea into my head of making it into a play; and when I saw Warfield in “The Music Master,” it seemed to me he was just the actor to play it. He would not have had the dignity and compelling force of Forbes-Robertson. He would have made the character win rather through tenderness and appeal. I was on a lecturing tour in America; and I got my agent, Miss Marbury, to put me into touch with Belasco, Warfield's manager. It was in a Pullman car between Washington and New York that I sketched out the idea to him. It got hold of him. We were both doubtful as to how the public would receive it. I thought I could do it without giving offence. Belasco agreed to trust me, and on my return to England I got to work upon it. It was not an easy play to write: one had to feel it rather than think it. I was living in a lonely part of the Chiltern hills with great open spaces all around me, and that helped; and at last it was finished. I had arranged to return to America to produce “Sylvia of the Letters,” a play I had written for Grace George; and I took “The Passing” with me. I read it to Warfield and Belasco late one night at Belasco's theatre in New York. We had the house to ourselves; and afterwards we adjourned to Warfield's club for supper.
It was about three o'clock in the morning, and the only thing we could get was cold beef and pickles. They were both impressed by the play, and we found ourselves talking in whispers. I fancy Belasco got nervous about it, later on. We fixed things up next morning at Miss Marbury's office, and he asked me to see Percy Anderson, the artist, when I got back to England, and get him to make sketches for the characters. It was while he was drawing them, in his studio at Folkestone, that one morning Forbes-Robertson, who had a house there, dropped in upon him. Forbes was greatly interested in the sketches; and Anderson showed him the play.

  Forbes-Robertson wrote me telling me this; and saying that if by any chance arrangements between myself and Belasco fell through, he would like to talk to me. His letter arrived the day after I had had one from Belasco, making it clear that he did not want, if possible, to be bound to his contract; so for answer, I called upon Forbes-Robertson in Bedford Square; and read the play to him and his wife. He also was nervous; but Gertrude Elliott swept all doubts aside and ended the matter.

  We got together as perfect a cast as I think any play has ever had. Ernest Hendrie as the old Bookmaker, Ian Robertson as the Major, Edward Sass as the Jew, Agnes Thomas as Mrs. Sharpe, and Haidee Wright as the Painted Lady were all wonderful; and Gertrude Elliott played the Slavey. I was afraid, at first, that her beauty and her grace would hamper her; but she overcame these drawbacks and, even at rehearsal, invested the little slut with a spirituality that at times transfigured her. My daughter played the part in the country and afterwards in London during the war, and they two were the best Stasias I have seen. Lillah McCarthy was to have played Vivien. Granville Barker was in America, and she consulted Shaw, who read the play and told her to grab the part and hang on to it. She had an engagement she thought she could get out of; but it was not so, and we had to seek elsewhere.