The Stage And Stage Degenerates

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Title:     The Stage And Stage Degenerates
Author: William Cowper Brann [More Titles by Brann]

BY ROBERT LEE WYCHE.

Here and there in the big and little towns of America cranks are busily working for the elevation of the stage. Every 2 x 4 newspaper man who thinks he has a mission, every preacher who desires to make a sensation in the pulpit, every maiden novelist whose feminine mind battens in pruriency, every old maid who has missed her opportunity to be manhandled and wishes to reform a race she has done nothing to increase, every two-for-a-quarter evangelist between Bangor and Los Angeles is talking a lung out for the public on the subject of making the stage higher and better. When Col. Hercules, not of Herculaneum, viewed the Augean stables he may have thought that he had a considerable job on hand, but he tackled it with a man's strength and brain. By the help of his good right arm and a river or two he got rid of some thousands of tons of filth which went to enrich the levels lower down. Col. Hercules died in time to save his reputation. If required to cleanse the modern stage, he would pull his beaver over his brows and sneak out of town. Col. Hercules was a man who knew when he was over-weighted. He entered the ring only with such opponents as he stood a chance to best.

Once upon a time I boarded in a little German hotel in this city. Near it was the great Madison Square Garden. In consequence, the little hotel, which was very German--that is to say, clean and cheap,--was patronized by many actors and actresses. They had little rooms upstairs, got their morning coffee in the little restaurant and after the evening's performance sat in the little apartment off the bar, where the floor was sanded and drank beer until the small hours. These men were representatives of their profession so far as America is concerned. There were no stars among them and none of the lowest stratum. They were of the middle class of the people of the footlights. Nearly all of them were married and a few of them had children. They had the small ambitions and the small amusements of their class.

At that time I worked upon one of New York's yellow journals. I reached the hotel each morning between 12 and 1 o'clock, and always found the theatrical symposium in full blast. I was with these people for three months for an hour or two each night and think that I formed a fair idea of what the American stage is like. In those months I heard just two general subjects discussed--grease-paint and copulation. That was all of it. No science, no literature, no art in its higher sense, no news of the day, no politics, no sports, no history, no travel, not anything that goes to make up the intellectual life of the ordinary man. From first to last it was the business of acting, the demerits of some actor not present, the merits of those present, the pursuit of woman and the unholy pleasures of indiscriminate sexual lust. The dominating passion of these people was a petty jealousy. I never heard from them a good word for a successful brother artist. I never heard them breathe one generous hope that other men or women would grow happy and prosperous. I never heard them speak a kindly sentence for one of their ranks who had fallen upon evil days. They were selfish, they were brutally abusive, they were ridiculously conceited, they were all geniuses held down by a conspiracy of managers, they were card and dice sharpers, they were willing at any time to act the part of procurer or procuress for a consideration of drinks and suppers. I was rejoiced at the opportunity to study a type that was new to me, and when I got enough of it I moved out.

I have met these people and their kind many times since then. I have seen them in Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco. They are everywhere the same. They do not differ in any degree. On the road they are slightly more restrained, for fear of corporal punishment or jail, but the impulse of gluttony and lechery is always there. Any keeper of a second or third-class hotel in a town that is on one of the big circuits is apt to grow eloquent upon the subject of theatrical folk if given the chance. They are noted for a brazen effrontery in demanding everything that is in sight and the laxity with which they regard a debt incurred. I have no doubt that the first man to let his valise down from the second-story window of a hotel, slide down the rope himself and thus square his bill was the leading comedian of that sterling bit of humor, "Hot Times in the Tenderloin." Meantime his soubrette, who was another man's wife, was waiting for him outside, and they went away together.

I do not know that the baleful fire of unchaste amour runs more fiercely in the veins of stage people. I only know that they give it more of a free field. You sometimes hear some bar-room comedian and booze recitationist, who draws a hamfatter's salary in a continuous vaudeville, declare to half drunken listeners that there are good women on the stage. So there are--some. But they are so rare that when they are found they shine like the jewel in the Ethiop's ear. It would be within the bounds of truth to say that for every virtuous woman behind the foot-lights there are ten prostitutes. Even those who try to keep their feet from the mire and succeed are given no credit for chastity by their fellow professionals. One night, in my never to be forgotten German hotel, I was assured in a thing in loud-patterned trousers and a snow-white overcoat with deep black collar and cuffs, that he knew Emma Abbott, then dead, was unfaithful to her husband, Eugene Wetherell, also dead. This was spoken of "honest little Emma." A purer woman never lived. I knew that he was lying and told him so, but he was ready with a tale of time, place and circumstance and brazened it out. In like manner I have been told tales of Mary Anderson and Modjeska and Viola Allen--all of them lies. They were the tributes which my gentle friends, male and female, paid to success in their beautiful but risky profession.

It is not to be wondered that women who go on the stage lose their virtue. The wonder is that some of them preserve it, in spite of the life they lead and the company they are forced to keep. The very talents they possess render them susceptible to adulation and applause. They keep late hours. They are thrown constantly with conscienceless males. They breathe an atmosphere of excitement. If they display unusual capabilities, they are intoxicated nightly with the deep, rich, moving roar of high acclaim. Their nerves need bracing and they take to late suppers and champagne with absinthe in the mornings. From the woman who drinks to the woman who falls is not a far cry. I once asked Lizzie Annandale, the contralto, to tell me why so many stage girls surrendered their most precious possession within a year after their first night behind the scenes. She was a frank old party, willing to talk to a friend:

"Aw," she said, "that's easy. Women are only human. The girls are cut off from association with decent people. They have to live with stage folks. Society is barred to them. Stage men marry only when they can't help it. The girl must have somebody to look after her, some man to see that her trunks are checked, that she gets a decent seat in a crowded train, that she doesn't get the worst of it all around. A man expects pay of some kind and she hasn't anything to give except herself. That is what he wants. Take our own company, for instance. We are carrying twenty chorus girls. We are bound for the southern circuit. After we play New Orleans we play Texas. After we leave Texas we make a jump straight across the continent to 'Frisco. The girls don't get wages enough to enable them to take berths in the sleepers. They will be forced to herd day and night in the other coaches with the men. You will see the chorus people, male and female, asleep two and two on the seats. The exhausted woman's head rests on the shoulder of her companion, the man's arm around her to hold her steady. What do you suppose happens when a thing like that is kept up for awhile? Aw! W'at t'ell."

Despite the constant efforts of the classes mentioned in the opening paragraph of this story, the American stage is not being elevated to any extent. It is steadily sinking lower. Year after year its plays grow worse, its players more reckless and debased. This, it has been said, is the fault of the public and, to a great extent, this is so. The managers are in the business for money. They give the people that which the people will pay to see. Nobody cares anything for tragedy any longer. Stage classics have become stage stalenesses. Shakespeare is out of date. "The Gaiety Girls," "In Gay New York," "The Merry World," Hoyt's buffooneries, "Problem Plays," social eraticisms have become the rage. Translations from the French, with all of the French immorality reduced to English grossness, pack the theaters. In New York a manager named Doris put on a pantomime which represented the scene in a bridal chamber. The police closed it up after half the bald-headed men and nearly all the boys in town had seen it. That pantomime, I understand, is now drawing crowded houses in Chicago, having been introduced to the citizens of the western metropolis by Sam Jack of "Adamless Eden" game. Continuous performances are proving mines of gold for their conductors and in the continuous performance the vulgar song and ribald jest meet with readiest applause. Your wife or your daughter, who goes down town for her morning shopping, gets lunch with a glass of absinthe, drops into the continuous show for an hour and comes home with memories in her little head of a song which should be interdicted by law, or of a dialogue that ought to land the speakers in jail, or of Hope Booth, posing in imitation nudity as Venus Aphrodite, or some beefy actor, also an imitation nude, as Ajax defying the lightning, or Antinous, facing the audience full front without a stitch of clothing on him. This is pleasant for the wife and daughter, but how about you? You do not look anything like Ajax and your daughter's brothers bear no resemblance to Antinous.

Thousands of men and women are actors and actresses, but they do not differ in type. They are to be recognized anywhere in any crowd. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are invested in the business, and it is the business of the owners to make them pay. The public wants filth and it gets it. The plays given to patrons have only the purpose to make money. They are not written to educate, to uplift, to ennoble. The men who make them look only to the collection of their royalties. The best play of the year is Gillette's "Secret Service." It is trifling. It does not teach anything. It inculcates no moral. It does not deviate in any way from the well known "war play." In these days there is always some snipe of a federal lieutenant, who gets shot in the heel, or under his coat tail, or somewhere behind, and is quartered on the family of a southern planter, and the daughter falls in love with him, and her brother is in the Confederate army, and there is a whole lot of trouble and everything comes out all right in the end. Gillette's hero is a Federal spy instead of a lieutenant, but that is about the only difference. I imagine that he must have been many times to see Bronson Howard's "Shenandoah," whose favorite novelist in turn, I think, must have been E. P. Roe, of "Barriers Burned Away." The next success, it is supposed, will be something in the line of Mr. Howard's "Aristocracy." This play, its author assures us, was written to demonstrate the danger that lies in an American girl marrying an European nobleman. Instead, it administers a solar plexus blow to American womanhood. The heroine marries a German prince, merely because he is a Prince, discarding her honest and true lover in a scoundrelly fashion, while her beautiful stepmother comes within an ace of surrendering her person to her son- in-law, and is prevented only by the inopportune arrival of her idiotic husband. It is all very "elevating," and a good thing to take your wife and daughter to see.

We arrive at this formula: The American stage is debasing; American stage people are dead beats and women of scarlet. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. The business is Jew-ridden. They do not act, but they handle the dollars. Everybody knows that your Jew drummer and your Jew theatrical manager are incapable of anything sexually wrong. The big syndicate which has its home in this city and is endeavoring to control the theatrical business of more than half the country is composed of Jews. One of them is an undersized Silenus named Erlanger, who used to be a pensioner upon the personal and mental abilities of the ill-fated Louise Balfe and repaid her for her bread and favors by brutally assaulting her in Arkansas.

Yes, Brother Iconoclast, the 2 x 4 newspaper men and the sensational preachers and the prurient prudes who write novels and the unfructified old maids and the narrow-beamed self-elected evangelists are talking, but they do not elevate the American stage to any great extent. It bids fair to remain the same excellent school of preparation for the penitentiary and the bagnio. New York, November 20, 1897.

[The end]
William Cowper Brann's essay: Stage And Stage Degenerates

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