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CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

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John Barrymore and Daughter

J v,

CONFESSIONS
OF AN ACTOR

JOHN BARRYMORE

ILLUSTRATED \

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

By The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Printed in the United States of America

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Cleveland's, on Wabash Avenue, Chicago,
had been converted into a theater overnight.
Before McKee Rankin and a man named Cleve-
land leased it for a season of repertoire, with
Nance O’Neil as the star, the building had been
a cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg. Need-
less to say, the structure was wholly unsuited
for the new part it was to play, and the acoustics
must have been reasonably peculiar. So far as
I, a humble beginner, was concerned, neither the
acoustics nor anything else mattered, for my
performances on this battlefield were of Simon-
pure badness.

When I played in Sudermann’s Magda, I
was given, as young Max, the brother of the

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

heroine, a uniform which had been made for an
actor of generous proportions. It was one of
those supposedly form-fitting German frock-
coat affairs with two rows of brass buttons down
the front. It could not be taken in, and there-
fore the obvious thing was to build the wearer up
for the uniform. Practically everything in the
wardrobe that was not in actual use in the pro-
duction was stuffed into that jacket, and still, as
in the schoolboy’s interior, there was ever room
for more.

When I went on in the first act I had some-
thing of a chest, but when I took my normal
position, which is like the letter S, the filling
began to shift, and before many minutes I had
as fine a stomach as any of the old-time New
York policemen. I waited up all night in a
warm saloon for the morning newspapers.
There was only one notice. Amy Leslie said:
“The part of Max was essayed by a young actor
who calls himself Mr. John Barrymore. He

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

walked about the stage as if he had been all
dressed up and forgotten.”

There is no more devastating tragedy than to
be awfully bad at a job, to know that you are
awfully bad and still not be able to do anything
about it. McKee Rankin, who produced these
plays, was a good stage manager, but he had too
much to contend with and there never was any
money in the theater. He had always to worry
about bills. He could not waste time upon a
fledgling actor, who wasn’t any good anyway.
The ordinary youngster who goes into the the-
ater is stage-struck, and he has his ambition and
illusion to carry him along and brace him up. I
didn’t even have the desire to succeed as a prop ;
I didn’t want to be an actor. I was there merely
because it was supposed that any member of a
theater family ought to have something in him
that would carry him through a crisis on the
stage ; at least he might be expected to possess a
certain adaptability to the medium.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

During these tragic and unhappy days I was
living at a hotel that I was ashamed to mention
when I chanced upon anyone who knew other
members of the family. Early in my Chicago
stay, at a sedate luncheon given by some friends
of my sister, I had been asked where I was liv-
ing. Quite casually I mentioned the name of
my hotel. There was one of those awkward
pauses that not even the politely noisy handling
of knives and forks could quite cover. The hotel
had been recommended to me by a philandering
acquaintance who had had difficulties with other
Chicago hostelries. After that I gave no address
except Cleveland’s Theater.

These same friends of Ethel were anxious
to see me act and often threatened to gratify
their curiosity. Knowing, as none knew better,
just how bad I was, I kept putting them off and
inventing reasons for the deferring of this treat.
“Just wait,” I would say, “till next week when
we do Elizabeth. You must see me then. I shall

Albert Davis Collection

Ethel Barrymore as Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

be good in that, for I’ll have a real part. I’ll be
no less a personage than Sir Francis Bacon.”

But we never did the old play Elizabeth, in
which Ristori made a very great hit many years
before. A Denver creditor of McKee Rankin
with little feeling for the drama, attached the
scenery and properties because he had not been
paid some trifling bill, and there never was
money enough in the Chicago box office to send
on to redeem this production. Ethel’s friends
tired of waiting, and one night, when I looked
through a peep-hole in the curtain just before
the play began, I saw them sitting like a jury in
two center rows. I rushed back to my dressing
room and applied more make-up, so that I might
not be recognized. I had already worked for
hours and I fancied that I looked like a charac-
ter actor. I had used a little of everything in
that make-up, but I was no more a character
actor than a child would have been with a beard
glued to its chin.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

The bill for the evening was that good old
stand-by of so many impecunious managers,
Leah, the Forsaken. When I entered I was not
recognized. My care as to make-up and my
shingled blond wig baffled the people who knew
me, but not for long. Then came my one line.
As leader of the mob I had to say: “Throw her
in the river.” A howl went up from the front
rows.

I wras through, and in a few minutes I had
the make-up off which had taken nearly five
hours to put on. I dashed to the nearest West-
ern Union office. Now it is generally known
that in telegrams one may not transmit what are
often the choicest hits of one’s vocabulary, and
the message which I had written out to my sis-
ter— “For Christ’s sake send me fifty dollars” —
was politely hut none the less rejected. I was
desperate. I knew that nothing but a most ur-
gent message would be heeded. I could think of
nothing strong enough that wras good telegraph-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

ese. I explained to the trusting but somewhat
doubting clerk that the message was not pro-
fanity at all, that I was an actor, that the
manager of our company was a man called
George W. Christ, and that it was on his behalf
I wished the message sent. If it were not, the
company would be stranded in Chicago. The
message went — it also went with Ethel. I got
the fifty dollars, and I left the theater and
Chicago.

Another one of my beginnings in the theater
was just after I had returned from two years at
school in England. Ethel had made her great
success in Clyde Fitch’s play, Captain Jinks,
and was playing a return engagement in Phil-
adelphia. F rancis Byrne, a member of her
company, had left the cast unexpectedly, as his
mother had died. There was no understudy and
all the family thought that I ought to help Ethel
out, though what I did to the performance that
night was scarcely a help. I went to the theater

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

as nonchalantly as if it were to a dinner that I
had been summoned. I didn’t know my lines,
I didn’t know where to stand or where to go. I
seemed to have no sense of inherited responsibil-
ity. In the middle of my one good scene in the
first act I forgot my lines and said to the nat-
urally terrified and perspiring actor, who was
on the stage with me, “Well, I’ve blown up!
Where do we go from here?”

Ethel was scarcely able to speak one of her
lines during the first act. When she would start
one of her speeches, the player to whom it was
addressed, seeing that she was helpless from
laughter, would say, “Oh, don’t you mean so and
so?” And then he would give her speech. In
this way the first act was finished. At the end
of the second act there was usually a succession
of curtain calls in which the star led the various
members of the company out to the footlights.
Instead I managed to be on the stage when the
curtain went up and took a call all by myself. I

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

thought that Ethel would pass out in the wings.
Charles Frohman, who happened to be in the
audience, told me that with a better memory he
thought that I might make a comedian some
day.

Of these early performances I have no play-
bills and no scrapbooks. To my mind, at least,
this is just one more evidence of my attitude
toward the theater. I mean to be frank in these
confessions, and I might as well state early in
them that I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted
to be a painter. I left the stage to study at art
schools, and I only went back to the theater be-
cause there is hope — at least money — for the bad
actor. The indifferent painter usually starves.

Ordinarily when a man writes of his work
and his career, he is at the farther edge looking
back. He weighs the disadvantages and the
compensations, and almost invariably concludes
that whatever his youthful ideas may have been,
he really got into the right dimension of work,

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

while to the youthful aspirant he would probably
give Booth’s counsel about going on the stage:
“Don't do it.’’ Still for himself his choice was
inevitably right. I who write at what we may
call the halfway point, am not quite so sure.
But, on the other hand, if there is any value in
these memories and confessions of mine, it may
be because they are being set down on paper
while I still have expectancy. So many mem-
oirs, especially of the theater, are hut faded
memories and it is necessary not only to recall
the incidents, hut to set forth the reasons for re-
calling them as well.

I have written that I mean to he frank. I
don’t mind recording that I look upon myself as
something of a second-story man. As a youth I
was a good deal of a grafter. I appropriated
other men’s clothes and wore them — notably
those of my uncle, John Drew, whose figure is
still excellent! Once in England I overturned a
punt and, having rescued my host’s wife from

Couricsy of Apeda

Mrs. Maurice Barrymore with her three children, Ethel, Lionel and Jack

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

the raging waters of the Thames and walked her
ashore, I continued to live in that house all sum-
mer as a reward for my heroism, and borrowed
my host’s clothes because I had ruined mine in
that foot of water of that hospitable stream.

As a boy I was, I think, a little more fruitful
in untruth than my contemporaries. Also, I
went in for theft. I stole my grandmother’s jew-
els and hid them. While the detectives were in
the house, I imagine I must have looked rather
too casual for when my grandmother, Mrs.
Drew, saw me, her one desire was to get rid of
the detectives and talk to me with a well-worn
slipper. Before this I had pilfered money from
the other members of the family, in such small
amounts that suspicion was not aroused. I care-
fully hoarded it till I had enough to buy a rosary
for a symmetrical lady in Philadelphia, many
years my senior, with whom I fancied myself in
love. What strange inroads religion makes into
the minds of the young!

)

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Now, it is one thing to be frank and relate
incidents which reflect no credit upon the teller,
but for complete frankness, I feel I must set
forth that I have a certain handicap that plays a
most considerable part in my association with
the theater. I am by nature and by the grace of
God a very indolent person. Acting is a pro-
fession that requires infinite and intensive labor
and patience, particularly in the creation of a
character and the projection of a play. Because
of my virtue of laziness, I have had to work
doubly hard whenever I have accomplished any-
thing at all in the theater. I have had to fight
my own tendency to loaf as well as go through
the very serious business of putting a play on.
It isn't that I do not like rehearsal.

I enjoyed every minute of the long rehears-
als in London, but then I usually have liked the
rehearsals of any play. There is creation in the
rehearsal period. Ever since I was a boy and
wanted to be a painter I have had the urge to be

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

a creative artist. In sj)ite of the handicap of my
laziness, that still holds. But when a production
gets set and one must go to the theater six nights
and two afternoons a week to repeat the same
part, there is danger that after a certain time,
even with the best intentions in the world, and
with the most loyal and encouraging support of
an audience, one may become stale. About this
time one is reminded, as in the “big” love scene
of the second act while breathing, with impas-
sioned fervor, down the leading lady’s neck, that
fishing is perhaps a much better business. To
play one part eight times a week is too much for
any actor. If he is to have variety and freshness
for his audiences, then he should have different
material to work with. The only part that I
have ever played that is always fresh to me is
Flamlet. It is such a stark, blazing, glorious
part, and he has such deathless things to say!
And yet I know that I cannot play Hamlet
eight times a week many weeks in succession.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

People I meet so often ask me why I stop a
play in what seems to them the middle of the run
and while there is still a demand for seats at the
hox offiee. It is not easy to explain, but it is
because I lack something that is a very valuable
quality for an actor to possess. Not even the
promise of great returns — and the business men
of the theater tell me they would he good — can
force me to cart myself, Hamlet and a lot of
scenery around and play wherever they will let
me.

The actor who is willing to repeat a part
gains the greater facility by the repetition.
And, besides, there are other advantages. He
does not require so many vehicles, and he has the
opportunity to build up a loyal following that
may prove serviceable to him when, in the lean
years that come to every actor, his personality is
no longer a novelty. I am no trouper. To have
that quality that makes for a good trouper is, as
I say, of great value, but there are many valu-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

able qualities that bring no particular pleasure
to the possessor. Ambergris brings a great price
by the ounce. It comes from the stomach of the
diseased whale, but who would wish from choice
to be the whale who makes this contribution?
Not I. Perhaps I am selfish as well as lazy. I
like that word “perhaps.” It is easier to play a
noble character on the stage and leave the no-
bility with the clothes and the make-up in the
dressing room than to be a nice person off the
stage.

The actor of to-day has an opportunity to
get variety of work through acting in the
films. In the beginning a great many persons
of the theater and out of it looked upon the
movies as an inferior art. It isn’t. Pictures
often go wrong just as stage plays do and are
devoid of art. I was, myself, connected with
what was probably the worst picture ever made.
Not only did I play a part in this, but I had a
great deal to do with the making of it. Come to

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

think of it, it is quite a distinction that in all this
great industry of the screen which has turned
out so many bad pictures, I was largely respon-
sible for about the worst picture I ever saw.

Not only may the actor gain variety of ex-
pression and work through appearing in the pic-
tures, but he can earn enough money so that he
may retire before he is too old. A man never
knows when he is too old to play Romeo. The
spirit is always willing, even if the flesh is all too
visibly present. In the old days in the theater
an aged Romeo was not infrequent. lie may
have looked perhaps like a corseted bloodhound,
hut he carried his lifted face proudly. lie fan-
cied that he could still play the part, and he did.

Though I came of an acting family and I
have the heritage of an actor, I do not feel I am
disloyal when I set forth my reasons for not
caring too much for the theater as a medium in
which to work. I don't believe when I was a
boy I thought overmuch about what I should do

Mrs. John Drew as Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan's Rivals

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

when I grew up. In my grandmother’s house
there was often a discussion going on about act-
ing, but it never seemed to mean any tiling to me
or that I was part of it.

Of those days in Philadelphia I have few
memories. There are a number of stories,
wheezes we call them in the family, which are
concerned with me, but I shall not tell them.
They have been used by others of the family in
their reminiscent articles and books and they
have been told again and again by reminiscent
writers outside the family. Particularly I shall
not tell that story of my grandmother, Mrs.
John Drew, Senior, and myself. The story I
mean is the one in which I came home late for a
meal and wanted to give a good excuse. I burst
into the house and said: “Mummum, did you
ever see a house that was painted all black?”
Grandmother looked up, looked at me severely
and said : “No, nor did you.” I shall not tell that
story.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

At the age of nine, when I was at Notre
Dame Convent in Philadelphia, I got into a
fight with a schoolmate, and I threw a hard-
boiled egg at him. I hit him right in the ear. It
lodged there quite some time. As a punishment
I was forced by the good Sister Vincent to look
at a large hook. It was Dante’s Inferno, illus-
trated by Dore. From this I trace much of my
later history. It opened up wide fields for me,
things I had never dreamed of. It made such a
lasting impression upon me that when I followed
my own bent some years later and took up draw-
ing, I tried to draw like Dore. And this inci-
dent, I think, accounts for much that is macabre
in my character.

Later, when I was in Seton Hall School, in
New Jersey, I was punished for some infraction
of rules by one of my instructors, Father Mar-
shall. I wrote an indignant letter to my grand-
mother, which ended with the sentence: “He
struck me a blow which felled me to the ground.”

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

My grandmother was horrified and sent my fa-
ther instantly to find out if it was really true
that I was being grossly ill-treated. Father was
bored by the errand, but still he did not refuse a
command from my grandmother. When he
arrived at Seton Hall, however, he met Father
Marshall first and got into a discussion with him
about the Carlyle Harris case. Carlyle Harris
was a student at The College of Physicians and
Surgeons. He poisoned his young wife who was
still a schoolgirl. He was arrested, tried and
convicted of murder and was executed. The
ease was a great sensation at the time. With a
talker like father it was soon time for his return
train and he went away without seeing me. He
merely left word with Father Marshall: “Tell
the hoy to look out and behave himself.” My
disappointment was very hitter, for I had let it
he known that my father, who had been amateur
heavyweight champion of England, was coming
down, to heat up the entire school. I had prom-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

ised that there would he great ructions. It was
an awful anticlimax.

I was alone with my grandmother the sum-
mer that she died. I can see her now as she sat
there in her rocking-chair on the porch of an
obscure hotel at Larchmont, New York. She
had innumerable paper-hacked books, and there
was always one in her hands, but she seldom
read. She sat gazing out across the Sound, hut
she was really gazing at old half-forgotten
things, tilings that had once seemed important
and which were now becoming confused in her
mind.

Sometimes she would talk to me. She would
break into the middle of a topic as though we
had left it but a minute before. Mostly, she
spoke of other times and other manners in the
world of the theater. She was fond of me,
fonder, I think I may say, than of any of her
other grandchildren. At night when she went to
bed I helped her to her room. I waited to he

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

there to do this, though I wanted to go about
nights and stay out until any hour. The day she
died she reached over and patted me on the arm.
To my mind, my grandmother typified every-
thing that an actress should be.

What was the understanding, what was the
rapport between this tired old woman of the
theater and her wastrel grandson ? Tired?
Why shouldn't she have been? When she was
eight years old she played five characters in a
protean sketch called Twelve Precisely. There
is a charming lithograph of her published in
1828 in these five characters. At eleven this
same prodigy — she was Louisa Lane then —
played Shakespere’s King John. That was but
the prelude to a busy, crowded life in which she
was not only an actress, hut for years manager
of the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia.
Small wonder then that when she ceased to act
she was tired.

After an absence of fourteen years, I went

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

back to the house in North Twelfth Street, in
Philadelphia. It had seemed such a wonderful
place to me, and the rooms had been so big; but
now it was all drab and dreary. I do not know
of what substance those conventional white
Philadelphia steps are made, but they were be-
ing washed by a slatternly woman, and they did
not seem to get much cleaner in the process.
Those three steps that Ethel, Lionel and I had
jumped up and down on in our countless trips
in and out of that house. John Drew had
crossed them to see his mother. Grandmother,
with her stately dignity, had left from them to
go to the theater. Jefferson, in his calls upon
her, had walked there. It was perhaps on the
second step that my mother stood one Sunday
morning when she met my father as he was re-
turning from an all-night party.

“Where are you going, Georgie?” he asked.

“I'm going to church. You can go to hell.”

I went into the house and looked at the old

Miss Lane (the author’s grandmother) at the age of eight as the five
characters in Twelve Precisely from an old lithograph

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

rooms where I had played, and of which I had
such deathless memories. They were cramped
and fusty. I saw the place on the top floor which
was a cache for the things I stole. I was really
glad to leave and that I had a nicer place to go
to — a theater where there was room to move
about. In spite of the alien person washing the
front steps, I did get back something of the per-
sonality of that wonderful old actress. Some-
how I sensed the aura of Mrs. John Drew, even
in that mean, shabby house. I felt something of
her personality and austerity which she ever
carried into the theater, where she was known as
“the Duchess.”

Of my mother I remember very little. I was
very young when she died in California. When
the news came to grandmother she was in New
Jersey resting between seasons. She sent for
me and told me of mother’s death. She wanted
to be alone with me then. Though my own
knowledge of Georgie Drew Barrymore is

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

slight, I am certain that she was a divine, gay,
lovely person. Much has been written by actors
and playwrights and literary people of Maurice
Barrymore, my father — he was a great wit and
his conversation kept people up willingly all
night — but little has been said about my mother.
A few years ago my wife, who was summing up
her ideas of the Drew-Barrymore family, said:
“What about your mother? She is the one who
interests me most.” The people who knew both
my mother and my father remember mother
best. Clever as my father was, he never pulled
one of his famous lines upon her. lie simply
could not get away with it.

At the Lyceum Club at luncheon one day
last winter in London, I sat next to Mrs. W. II.
Kendall. She was kind enough to say some
charming things about my Hamlet, which she
had seen on the first night. She told me, how-
ever, that she was particularly interested to see
me because I was the son of Georgie Drew

Maurice Barrymore, the author’s father
Mrs. Maurice Barrymore (Georgie Drew), the author’s mother

■ ,

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Barrymore, one of the most brilliant women she
had ever known. Mrs. Kendall went on to tell
me that she had made perfect havoc of father’s
witticisms, and he was supposed by everyone to
be much the more witty.

In Nassau, where I was fishing with a genial
old friend a few years ago, I met a charming
lady who was living in the same house in Santa
Barbara when mother died. She told me of
mother’s death and that her last words were:
“Oh, my poor kids, what will ever become of

them?”

One doesn’t have to go back so very far to
remember when New York was still something
of a village. There were fewer hotels and res-
taurants in those days, and though they may
have been less comfortable, they were more
friendly and they possessed more individuality.
They stood for different things, and one patron-
ized the restaurants and dining rooms to get
certain dishes that one knew in advance one
would find; just as one also knew that if he
strolled into the bars that formerly dotted
Broadway, he would encounter certain people
at certain fixed hours.

There were fewer theaters, too, and when
one of them had a first night it was sort of in the
air. It seemed important somehow. Then the

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

theatrical season began definitely with the open-
ing of the Empire Theatre by my Uncle John
Drew’s company about Labor Day and ended
usually about the first of May. Now the the-
atrical season practically never ends, and during
most of the year there are four or five new plays
a night staged in theaters that are as impersonal
as the numbered streets from which they take
their names, or else in theaters too new to have
acquired the traditions that were associated with
such names as Daly’s, Wallack’s, the Empire,
the Madison Square, the old Lyceum, the Man-
hattan and the Fifth Avenue, where Mrs.
Fiske’s company put on the production of
Becky Sharp, in which my father played Raw-
don Crawley. When one walked along what
was then known as the Rialto one met actors.
And there was night life centered about Herald
Square.

Even before the blight of Volsteadism, New
York had evinced an impatience and a desire to

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

change, to move lip town and not to stay long
when it got there. In this process of ever mov-
ing and rebuilding, the old theaters and the old
haunts went and their places were taken, not by
the same number of new structures but by many
more than that. It was as if the gates had sud-
denly been opened to hordes of new people who
demanded that they, too, must he fed and
amused.

It is of a New York that is gone that I write,
a New York that I first knew about the time of
the Dewey Arch in Madison Square. I have a
distinct memory of that arch that I suppose I
may tell now. The statute of limitations must
long since have put this deed of vandalism in
that happy legal paradise where there is immu-
nity from one’s misdemeanors. After a dinner
at Solari’s restaurant, at which we changed the
map of artistic Europe, three newspaper men,
Carl Decker, Frank Butler, Rip Anthony, and
I stole the sword from the hand of the figure of

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Victory which surmounted the Dewey Arch. As
I was the youngest, the most acrobatic and the
least important all around, I played, not wholly
from choice, the stellar part. I was assisted by
boosts and shoves as far as the others could help
me, and then I climbed aloft. I felt a good deal
like Oliver Twist who used to be pushed through
openings that Sykes and the others could not ne-
gotiate. We then paraded up Broadway with
our dubious trophy, and the story of the exploit
was told again and again in every barroom by
the other three, all of whom were more fluent
talkers, though less agile of limb, than I. It is
difficult now to believe the absurdity that this
huge thing of wood and plaster, divorced from
its owner, the figure of Victory, should, when
carried in mock triumph by the four of us, have
proved an open sesame to places that, because of
our poverty, were ordinarily barred to us. I do
not know where we hid the sword when we went
home.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

At this time I was studying art. I had en-
rolled at the Art Students’ League, but there I
learned nothing. I went only once. I thought
that my father, who had paid for the tuition,
might he angry when he heard of this, but he
merely said, “I can't understand how you hap-
pened to go once.” I then went to a school run
by George Bridgman. lie took an especial
interest in me, and helped me out of all propor-
tion to what my demands upon his time should
have been. I saw a good deal of him out of
classes, and then he taught me more of life,
observation and art than there was time to teach
in the school.

I was interested, and I was working quite
hard, and this seemed to impress the other mem-
bers of the family. Ethel was talking about me
one night to a great friend of hers, Cissie Loftus.
“Isn’t it a pity that Jack can’t get started, that
he can’t get some recognition for his work?”
Ethel said.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

“What is his work?” asked Cissie in some
surprise.

As a result of this conversation I was com-
missioned to do a poster for E. H. Sothern’s
production of Justin McCarthy's Francois
Villon play, If I Were King. Miss Loftus was
the leading woman of the company, and she
had talked to Daniel Frohman, Sothern’s man-
ager, about me. The poster was a good one and
was used for many a year, and in after years
when the play was revived it was used again. I
have no embarrassment in mentioning how good
this drawing was. Bridgman did most of it. I
believe Mr. Frohman paid me five dollars for it.

Once at an exhibition of the Press Artists’
League, a private affair run by a man who split
with the artists if there was anything to split, I
had the thrill of seeing a sticker with the magic
word “Sold” pasted on a drawing of mine. It
wasn’t a cheerful subject: A hangman is walk-
ing along a road, carrying a stick which casts a

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

shadow behind him, and this is so cast that it
suggests a gallows. Above the road, floating
in the air, are the faces of the men and women
that the hangman has executed. When I had
recovered from my shock that anyone should
buy a drawing of mine — not that I didn’t think
it good, of course — I asked the name of the pur-
chaser. Andrew Carnegie had thought The
Hangman worth ten dollars. Of the purchase
price I received five dollars, the maximum
recognition of my talents.

During my days as an art student I saw a
great deal of Rip Anthony and Frank Butler,
two of the men who were associated with me in
the theft of the plaster sword from the Dewey
Arch. The former was familiar for some years
to everyone along Broadway. Anthony was a
tall, spare man with a pointed black beard. As
I look hack, his undeniable talent seems more
wasted than that of almost anyone I have ever
known. It made no money for him while he

An original drawing by ihe author

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lived, and after his death he was remembered
only by the people who had known his genial
and buoyant self. lie worked in wash, and he
could do more to a piece of cardboard in half an
hour than anyone I have ever seen use a brush.
He had two salesmen, who, after the manner of
that time, were described as bulldogs. They
carried his work around telling an extremely
pathetic story to any who would listen, that the
artist was dying of tuberculosis; the irony was
that Anthony did die of tuberculosis. When a
picture was sold, Anthony got a third and each
bulldog a third.

He lived in the old Aulic Hotel, which stood
just opposite the side of the Herald Square
Theater in Thirty-fifth Street. He managed
to keep a room there, even though he seldom had
money enough to eat. Again and again I saw
him pull out a bureau drawer, use it for an
easel and in an incredibly short time have a
drawing done. In exchange for a night’s lodg-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

ing on the floor of his room, I often posed for
him. I was all sorts of persons and figures.
Once I was Custer’s Last Stand, and at another
time a Roman matron at the tomb of her son.

Anthony would go into the bar of the Aulic
Hotel, or any place else along Broadway, with-
out money enough to buy a drink, and would sit
at a table waiting for some chance acquaintance
to come in who might, in exchange for engaging
conversation, purchase a highball. Several times
when I joined him he would ask me in a loud
voice to have dinner with him. We would sit at
a table and bread and butter would be put be-
fore us. Anthony would immediately pocket
the bread and some salt and pepper. We would
seem to be waiting for someone before placing
our order.

If no one turned up decently soon, Anthony
would move on to his next prospecting ground,
lie would not do so, however, till he had left
some such message as: “If Mr. Vanderbilt — or

Photo by JJnderwood (£ Underwood

An early photograph of John Barrymore

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Mr. Astor — comes in here asking for us, tell him
we couldn’t wait any longer and have gone on to
Sherry’s. They will understand.” This ob-
vious and transparent bluff was used again and
again, but no one seemed to mind; no one even
called it. The mornings after the nights that I
would lodge with Anthony, there would be no
breakfast except the pilfered roll of the night
before. Anthony would put some hot water in
a cup, salt and pepper it generously, and then
call me to breakfast. “Get up,” he would com-
mand, “we have bouillon this morning — bouillon,
my boy.”

In Thirty-fourth Street there was a board-
ing house run by a charming person called
Minnie Hay, which was the gathering place for
newspapermen. To-day one may meet an actor
or a newspaperman any place or anywhere, but
in the late nineties and for a while after, this was
not true. The people in the professions used to
be more clannish. There were fewer special

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writers and columnists then, and the news writer
was not known through syndicates all over the
country as he is now, but he was, I think, more
widely known along Broadway and to his fel-
lows than he is to-day. A story didn’t have to be
signed for the people at Minnie Ilay’s to know
who wrote it.

Here one met everyone who wrote or drew
for the papers. It was a friendly place, for in
this clearing house for newspaper men no money
was needed. Minnie was a philanthropist with
no particular convictions in the matter. One
just charged things. Somewhere in the Far
West she had a husband, who sent her enough
money to keep the place going. Saturday night
this place became positively festive. Everyone
did stunts. In those days no one danced except
at a dance. Think of waltzing at a supper party
in that period.

If one wanted to stand in well with the
hostess as well as with the guests, one brought

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some delicacy to the Saturday night revels. A
newspaper friend and I had been at three Satur-
day nights in succession without contributing
anything except our presence. Another week,
and we were still penniless. At a supper party
during that week, Colonel John Jacob Astor had
asked Ethel if she liked grapefruit, and she told
him that she did. Grapefruit was something of
a novelty then and had not as yet become part
of the national breakfast. The next day a whole
crate arrived at her house, which was just around
the corner from the Garrick Theater, in Thirty-
sixth Street.

This was a famous boarding house. Many
people of the theater lived there, and at the time
Maude Adams had an apartment there also.
Ethel told me the incident of the grapefruit, and
my friend and I went to call upon her when we
knew that she was at the theater round the cor-
ner playing Captain Jinks. We borrowed the
entire crate and took it to Minnie Hay’s, where

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

for one Saturday night we were the hit of the
evening. Rip Anthony was a frequent visitor
at Minnie Hay’s, and it was there, I believe,
that I first met Frank Butler.

F rank Butler was, I think, the most extra-
ordinary man that I ever met. He was the son
of a nephew of General Butler, of Civil War
fame and his mother was R ose Etynge, at one
time the leading woman of the Union Square
Theater and a great favorite in New York.
From the stories that were circulated about
Frank Butler while he was alive, and that have
lived in the conversation of a reminiscent turn
of those who had the rare fortune to know this
diverting individual, one might easily conclude
that he was a far greater person than he actually
was. I do not mean to imply that he was not an
extremely able and facile writer, but he was
what is usually described as a character, and in
any age the designation of him would probably
have been the same. Beau Brummel was such a

John Barrymore as Beau Brummel

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

character, as I found out when I played him on
the screen — much more talked about and quoted
than up and doing.

One afternoon, two years ago, during the
run of Hamlet in New York, I went with two
friends on an old-book hunt. This has some of
the same lure for me as fishing, and it also re-
quires patience. We were in an unfrequented
bookshop on the West Side which specialized in
foreign-language books, though there were a few
sections of English books. On a shelf of verse
I saw a slim book with the name “Butler,” on
the back. On the title page I found that it was
written by Frank Butler, and that I had illus-
trated it. Till that day I had never owned a
copy, and I had completely forgotten its exist-
ence. As I read it in the intermissions that
night in my dressing room, many things that I
had not thought of for nearly twenty years sud-
denly became fresh.

I seemed to see Butler — a happy Butler,

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happy because he had his gold tooth. Somehow
Frank Butler had managed to lose a front tooth,
and in its place there was a detachable gold one.
If his smile flashed the gold tooth he was to he
trusted, he was affluent. If the gold tooth was
not in sight it was pawned. It was the barom-
eter of his fortunes. The limit of borrowing
with this security was seventy cents. We often
tried to get more hut never did. It was his last
asset and he never let it go without trying every-
thing else to get money. Other historians of
this same period have, when we have been swap-
ping reminiscences, doubted this story of the
gold tooth, but I vouch for its truth and can
bring witnesses, if they are required.

One night when the gold tooth was not in his
possession, I met Butler in Ilerald Square and
he told me that of the usual seventy cents only
fifteen was left. lie had had' no dinner, and he
had no place to sleep. Both could not he done
on that sum. I, too, had had nothing to eat, and

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

I had no money at all. I told Butler that I had
a place to sleep, in fact, a studio in Fourteenth
Street.

“If you feed me I’ll lodge you.”

He ruminated for a moment. “Done, by
God!”

But he had that day written a story for the
Morning Telegraph and his desire to read his
own article was so great that part of the capital
had to go for a copy of his paper. In those days
the Telegraph was, I believe, the only morning
paper that could he purchased the night before,
and though it was a five-cent, paper if one waited,
ten cents was charged for the privilege of getting
it before going to bed. Obviously our syndicate
could not expend two-thirds of its capital on a
paper, but Butler had to read his story and note
what might have happened to it in the editing.
He approached a newsboy and demanded a
paper for five cents. The boy was at first un-
willing to make such a sale, but he could not hold

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

out long against the importance of the facts that
Butler confessed about himself. Not only did
he tell the hoy that he worked for the paper, but
he all hut admitted that he owned the paper. At
any rate, he got the Telegraph with the expendi-
ture of hut one nickel.

We then conferred as to the best way to
spend the dime that remained. We agreed to
repair to an all-night restaurant just around the
corner from the Herald Building. The strategy
was to be this: Butler, as the owner of the dime,
was to go into the restaurant and order and pay
for butter cakes, which were not only three for
five, but were heavy and filling, and a cup of
coffee. I was to wait outside till he had had
time to eat one and one-half of the cakes and to
drink one-half of the coffee. This I did and
then entered. I looked about me a second and
then found the table where he was sitting. I
whispered something in his ear.

Butler suddenly pushed back his chair and

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

exclaimed dramatically: “My God, isn’t that
terrible!” He was to convey from his manner
of exit that something had broken loose at his
newspaper, presumably the near-by Herald, and
that he was needed at once. He grabbed his hat,
and, seeming to be choking from the insufficient
food, he fled. I sat down to the unfinished meal,
finished it, and then joined Butler round the
corner.

We walked down to Fourteenth Street, and
there I discovered that I had forgotten my key.
Butler was not pleased with the prospect, but
there was nothing for it but to sit down and wait
until the furnace man arrived to receive the milk-
man. We wrapped pieces of the Morning Tele-
graph around us and sat on the brownstone
stoop. At length we got in and climbed the
weary steps to my hall room, which l had de-
scribed as a studio. It was on the back and the
one window faced north; to that extent it was a
studio. I had never had any money to get any

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

furniture, and there was nothing in the room ex-
cept piles of books belonging to my father.
These were strewn everywhere. Butler stood
in the middle of the room, and with his pompous,
outraged dignity, demanded, “Where do I
sleep?”

I explained that he could have the middle of
the floor or that vast space under the window,
or he could take either side of the room. Then
he knew he had been sold. Other floors might
have been had for the asking, and he had paid in
advance for the use of this one. He made the
best of it and prepared to cover himself with
books, as I did. We burrowed down into them
as though they were snow. It was not a bad
adventure for Butler, as he was able to turn the
story of the night into copy the next day.

In that hare unfurnished room Butler
dreamed that all the authors came to comfort us
and offered us much of cheer and philosophy.
“We were poor ourselves,” they confessed,

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

“until we attained recognition. You little know
in what good company you find yourself and
how much better bedfellows you have than if
you had more money. It’s not at all bad to be
poor when you can have such distinguished com-
pany.” This may seem far-fetched, but the
story brought fifteen dollars. When he was
paid, Butler gave me five dollars for my share
in the evening. He had entirely forgiven me.

I had first heard of Butler from my brother,
Lionel. lie had played with him during a brief
period when Butler, tired of writing, had desired
to become an actor. He joined McKee Ran-
kin’s company, the same company with which I
had played during my brief and unhappy en-
gagement at Cleveland’s converted cyclorama
in Chicago. The company reached Minneapolis,
and just as in the engagement at Cleveland’s,
times were very bad and no one had any money.
Butler, Lionel and a man Lionel describes as
the head of the Minneapolis underworld were

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

sharing a room which they could not pay for;
the underworld seems to have been at a low
point there as well as the theater. In some way,
Butler aroused the wrath of McKee Rankin,
probably by his had acting, and it must have
been had indeed to get a dismissal from a com-
pany when salaries were not being paid.

Now here comes a situation which is, I think,
without parallel. Butler was let out on Satur-
day night, and on Monday lie appeared in the
front of the theater as the critic for the leading
Minneapolis paper. When this was known
behind the scenes consternation, envy and every-
thing else were let loose, together with no little
apprehension. Butler had gone to the editor of
the paper Monday morning, and with his usual
eloquence and persuasiveness had talked himself
into a job. lie admitted to knowing everyone
in the East. One of his modest assertions was
that he was a friend and protege of Charles A.
Dana, the owner of the New York Sun.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Now it happened that the regular dramatic
critic wanted to get up in Canada on his vaca-
tion. It was the end of the season, and the
Rankin company had taken the theater to play
repertoire as long as they could compete with the
parks and the open spaces. It was scarcely
worth while for the critic to delay his vacation,
and Butler got the job. No dismissed actor ever
had a chance like this, and Butler made the most
of it. No one who knew him doubted but that
he would.

The company, never too thoroughly re-
hearsed, had little confidence that Monday
night. The play was an adaptation from the
French, and both McKee Rankin and Nance
O’Neil played titles. The critic lost no time in
his review in pointing out to the good people of
Minneapolis that not only were the two leading
actors unfamiliar with persons of rank, but that
there was nothing Gallic about them or their
performances. His invective against Rankin

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

was as skilful as it was unfair. No ordinary
critic could have put this thing into type in a
way that would have hurt so much.

Then Butler went on to point out that even
with the example of all this bad acting before
him he could not see how any actor could play
as relatively unimportant a part as that of the
servant so atrociously that it seemed almost
important. This was Lionel, with whom he was
sharing a room, for which Butler ultimately
paid, as there were no salaries for the actors
during this engagement. Fortuitously for him,
Butler lasted as critic as long as the Rankin com-
pany stayed in Minneapolis, and he made more
than enough money to get back to New York.

In addition to his work as dramatic critic, he
did signed Sunday articles about Minneapolis
which were far from flattering to the town. He
would begin these articles — I remember one
particularly which began, “Five o’clock, the
hour of absinth in Paris.” Then he went on to

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

describe life at that time of day in Paris. Then
he wrote of what five o’clock meant in New
York — less romantic, but still interesting; and
thus, by easy stages, and filling a column and a
half of space, he arrived at Minneapolis at five
o’clock, where nothing happened at all. Then
he would launch into one of his invective attacks
upon the street railway company, the gas com-
pany and politics in general in the town, about
which he knew nothing.

Butler’s writing, particularly of invective,
always seemed to me to be extraordinarily good.
He had style which, alongside of some of the
slangy, present-day newspaper writing, was
almost Johnsonian. And he could write with
charm and whimsicality, as he did in the story of
the books. Just as in the case of Rip Anthony,
a great deal of natural ability and bitterly ac-
quired experience went to waste. I lost track
of Butler for a while, and then I heard of his
death. This must have been hastened by the life

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

that lie had led, the uncertainty of food and
lodging, the lack of even the most ordinary com-
forts and a preying, almost childish, loneliness.

During these early vagabond days I con-
tinued my study of art with Bridgman as long
as I could, and now and then I sold a drawing.
I could almost always get a dollar by doing a
drawing for the advertising of a certain clothing
firm, and once for twenty minutes I was on the
staff of the New York Telegraph. I went there
one morning and asked if there was a vacancy in
the art department, and was told that there was.
The editor gave me, without seeing me, the
assignment to copy in line Gainsborough’s por-
trait of the Duchess of Devonshire. It took me
just twenty minutes to make the copy, and then
word was sent out that it wouldn’t do, and I was
fired.

While I was looking for a chance to draw
for some paper I went into a peculiar business
for one who wished to be an artist. The product

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

we were to sell was a lotion to be used after
shaving, and it was called after its discoverer,
Schaeferine. For this important concern I was,
oddly enough, the testimonial getter. The job
was given to me because I was the nephew of
John Drew, and in our advertising there ap-
peared this statement: “John Drew uses and
indorses Schaeferine.” For this I once more
got five dollars, and I was told that for every
testimonial I could get there would be another
five.

When our preparation was put upon the
market it was intended that it should be used
only by men, but because there was a prospect
that I might be able to get an indorsement from
my sister, it was changed to a general face lotion.
Ethel was away and I telegraphed her urgently.
For many anxious days no reply was received in
the office of the Schaeferine Company, and then
this message came: “Dear Sirs: I received
your — I can’t remember the damned thing’s

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

name — but I think it's the best table water I ever
drank.”

While I was waiting for this reply I ap-
proaehed other celebrities. Nat Goodwin gave
the company a serious testimonial and then sent
me one personally: “I have used your Schaefer-
ine- — my lawyer will see you in the morning.”
The Schaeferine Company did not last long, be-
cause the product cost fifty cents to make and
thirty cents a bottle to sell. At this rate there
could he no profit. When the company went
out of existence I was once more confronted with
“Where do we go from here?”

After an interval, I succeeded in getting into
the art department of the New York Evening
Journal, where I worked for eighteen months.
During this time I did a variety of conventional
newspaper work, hut usually my drawings
illustrated something on the editorial page writ-
ten by Arthur Brisbane. I had been tremen-
dously impressed as a child by the drawings of

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Dore and my work now showed this influence.
My drawings were of a symbolic, allegorical
character and steeped in gloom.

I illustrated some of the -verses of Ella
Wheeler Wilcox and she protested to Arthur
Brisbane: “Don’t let that pessimistic old swine,
Barrymore, illustrate anything more of mine.”
The combination was an extraordinary one, for
she was a poetess of optimism. Arthur Bris-
bane sent me up to the Hoffman House to see
her.

My timid knock was answered by the poetess
herself, who was wearing a flowing light-blue
velvet dressing gown. “I am Barrymore,” I
said.

“Didn’t your father have courage enough to
come up here himself?” she asked.

I then explained that I was the artist who
had offended her, and we had a long talk in
which I confessed some of my shortcomings.
My study of anatomy had not progressed so far

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

as the human feet, and there was always long
grass hiding feet in my drawings. When I left,
Mrs. Wilcox, who was a grand soul, called up
Brisbane and told him that she didn’t want any-
one else to illustrate her verses.

Though my work was usually on the editorial
page and did not always reflect the immediate
news of the day, it was a news item that caused
a good deal of a stir that led to my being fired
from the Evening Journal. Paid Leicester
Ford, the novelist who wrote Janice Meredith,
was shot and killed by his brother, Malcolm. I
was to make a drawing of this, hut on the day of
the happening, I got to the office late — as I so
often did — and my drawing could not he repro-
duced as it ordinarily was in half half-tone. It
had to he reproduced in the quickest way, which
was an ordinary half-tone reproduction, and it
came out badly. There was no time to do any-
thing about it and the botched drawing was re-
produced. Mr. Brisbane had written a very

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

powerful article on the subject of this crime, in
the middle of which he wrote: “The picture on
this page illustrates” so-and-so. It was so badly
done, however, that it showed only that the artist
had been out late the night before.

Mr. Brisbane sent for me to come to his
office. He had the paper stretched before him,
open at the offending page. “Barrymore,” he
asked, “you were an actor, weren’t you, before
you came here?”

I admitted to having been on the stage,
though not importantly.

“Well,” he continued, “don’t you think you
could ”

I didn’t know whether I could or not, hut I
had to; so I did.

On a night in April, 1906, I was sitting in
a box in the Grand Opera House, Mission
Street, San Francisco, hearing a performance of
Carmen sung by Caruso, Madame Fremstad
and others of the Metropolitan Opera Company
of New York. I had been playing with Willie
Collier’s company in Richard Harding Davis’
play, The Dictator, and we had closed our season
in San Francisco the Saturday before. We were
to sail for Australia the next day. Carmen, the
first opera of what was intended to be only a
short season and turned out to be but an engage-
ment for one night, drew a marvelous and appre-
ciative audience; all of San Francisco and his
wife was there. Most people perhaps have for-
gotten that Fremstad sang Carmen. It was not

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

one of her great roles, like her Isolde, but it was
a competent performance, and because Frem-
stad, a blonde, did not wear a dark wig, there
had been a good deal of advance advertising.
Rut within a few hours, however, not even a
blonde Carmen was a topic for talk. Man’s af-
fairs suddenly became very unimportant.

After the opera I went to a supper party and
between three and four I walked home with a
friend to his house. We talked a while, and then
he insisted that I must look at some pieces of old
Chinese glass that he had just received. Upon
this collection my friend lavished all of his leisure
and a great deal of money. It got so late that
I decided to sleep where I was and not go back
to the St. Francis Hotel. I had only been in bed
a few minutes when the earthquake — the first
great shock — occurred. It all but threw me out
of bed. I put on my evening clothes again and
went out into the hall, where I found the valet
trying to wake his master, without success. An

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

earthquake or the fact that his house was all
askew did not disturb him, but when I went into
his room and shouted at him “Come and see what
has happened to the Ming Dynasty,” he jumped
out of bed, for he was a true collector. The col-
lection in which he had taken so much pride was
shaken into little more than a mere powder of
glass.

There was nothing for us to do there, so we
walked toward town. Everywhere whole sides
of houses were gone. The effect was as if some-
one had lined the streets with gigantic dolls’
houses of the sort that have no fronts. People
were hurriedly dressing and at the same time
trying to gather and throw out what seemed
most valuable to them. More prudent persons,
who couldn’t too readily shake off the habits of
shyness nor too quickly forget their decorum,
were putting up sheets to shield themselves from
the passers-by.

I was going into the St. Francis Hotel when

John Barrymore as Beau Brummel

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I heard Willie Collier call to me, “Go West,
young man, and blow up with the country.” He
was sitting just opposite the hotel in Union
Square, wearing bedroom slippers and a flowered
dressing gown.

The square, into which so many oddly dressed
persons and their belongings had been hastily
thrown, presented a strange, almost uncanny
appearance. Ordinarily this open space is
dominated by the column which Robert Aiken
designed to commemorate Dewey’s victory.
This had shifted to a slight angle, so slight that
it was found in the rebuilding of San Francisco
that by shaving off the column and making it
cylindrical instead of fluted, it would be true
and stand straight. Rut the figure on top had
turned completely round on its axis, and pre-
sented the most rakish appearance. Just near
by, sitting calmly on one of her trunks, and sur-
rounded by others, and with an excitable French
maid hovering about and contributing largely

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

to the general excitement, was a lady I had never
seen before. It was cold that morning in Union
Square, between five and six.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked her. “Can’t I
get you something?”

Though lightly clad, she was charmingly un-
perturbed. I was much the best-dressed person
on the Square, and she seemed greatly amused
by my solicitude. “Certainly,” she said, “if it
isn’t too much trouble.”

I walked up Post Street to the Bohemian
Club and while there fortified myself. I then
proceeded back to Union Square, carrying a
glass of brandy in my hand. As I remember, I
spilled most of it. I learned afterward that the
lady whose poise was so perfect in these strange
surroundings and who was so grateful for my
attention was Madame Alda, of the Metro-
politan Opera Company.

If ever people needed stimulants they needed
them that morning, and the bar in the St.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Francis Hotel was soon opened to an excited
group of people, all of whom talked at once and
no two of whom agreed as to what they had seen ;
in fact, I find that no one believes anyone else’s
stories of what he saw during those few days.
People have often doubted mine, particularly
that I went to help a friend bury a trunk con-
taining some of his choicest possessions in an
empty lot, and that afterward neither he nor I
could remember where these things were buried.

I walked about the streets and ran into many
people I knew. I saw Caruso with his trunks on
a van; and in front of the Palace Hotel I found
Diamond Jim Brady, that inveterate first
nighter of New York. He was amused to see
me in evening dress, and when he went back
East he and many others circulated this story
about my dressing for an earthquake ; in fact, a
great deal of my reputation for eccentricity had,
I think, its origin in this incident. Until I talked
to Brady it had not occurred to me that I was

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

oddly dressed for the occasion. I don’t know,
though, what one should wear at an earthquake.

As I was getting very sleepy I went back to
the St. Francis and went to the desk to get my
key. The clerk started to talk to me and to tell
me that there was a split in the front of the hotel.
I asked him if it was safe to go up to my room.

“Perfectly,” he said, with the trained assur-
ance of a Californian. “There isn’t the slightest
chance in the world of it ever happening again.”

Just then the second version, which was a
little before eight o'clock, shook the whole place
angrily, and the clerk jumped across the desk
and, with what seemed to me like one motion,
was out in Union Square. It was not so much
a jump as it was a dive. It reminded me greatly
of the old extravaganza, Superba, in which the
Hanlon Brothers, of pleasing memory, used to
make the most surprising entrances and diving
exits from the stage. I went back of the desk,
took my own key out of the box and walked up-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

stairs to my room and went to bed. I slept till
late afternoon, when I was awakened by the
general excitement in front of the hotel and the
smell of things burning in the distance. My
trunks had been made ready for Australia the
day before, and had gone to the baggage room or
somewhere else on their way. I never recovered
them.

In taking some clothes out of a bag that was
partly packed, I discovered a gun which had
been given to me by Chief of Police Delaney of
Denver. I met him while I was playing witli my
sister in a play called Sunday. I acted the part
of a young man who kills the villain in the first
act. With my gun play I had one line: “He
had to die.” This always got an unintended
laugh. Chief Delaney told me that he intended
seeing the play, and I promised him that I’d use
the gnu he had given me. I pulled it out and
though it was a good murderous weapon, with
which, before it became police property, a China-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

man had killed his wife, it failed to fire the blank
cartridge. As ever in an emergency like this,
the stage manager fired a gun backstage. As
I said my line, “He had to die,” the smoke of the
other gun floated on to the scene from the wings
and was quite visible. Never before had the
audience had such a good laugh over this, though
the line was always a cue for a magnificent one.
Somehow one night there was no laughter at all.
The line was taken seriously. I had become
better in the reading of it, and after that there
was never any trouble again. I think it was in
San Francisco that this unaccountable change
took place.

And this reminds one that we are in the midst
of an earthquake, and that a fire is spreading
rapidly through a whole city. I put Chief De-
laney’s gun in my pocket and walked up to the
house of some friends on Van Ness Avenue.
The family were making a hurried preparation
to leave for Burlingame, and I tried to help

John Barrymore as Richard III

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

them. Rumor had spread that both sides of Van
N ess Avenue were to be blown up with dynamite
to make a wide ditch that might stop the fire.
The small-scale dynamiting which had been done
up to this time had accelerated rather than
stopped the spread of the fire. As I walked
through that house, trying to find valuables
which were to be packed, I saw that in an upper
room the dresses that the two daughters of the
house were to wear at a ball at the Presidio that
night had been laid out the night before.

From this same upper room, which had no
front wall, I saw Walter Hobart, a great friend
of mine, go to a house which he owned across the
street. I ran down and across to him. He had
heard, too, that all of Van Ness Avenue was to
he blown up, and he had come to get two great
treasures — a painting by Rochegrosse of an
Assyrian king shooting lions, and the other a
bust of himself as a young boy which had been
done by Falguiere. He had not been in this

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

house for fifteen years. It was the old family
residence, and he had no key. In the earthquake
the house had not been sufficiently damaged for
us to enter without breaking a window.

Just as we were picking out the glass from
the frame a man dashed around the corner with
the biggest-looking gun I have ever seen, though
I am assured that all guns aimed at one assume
gigantic proportions. Fortunately, the man be-
hind the gun asked questions before he shot. It
took a great deal of persuasion, however, to con-
vince him that two unshaven men, who had just
smashed a window, were not doing it for the pur-
pose of loot. Also Hobart’s story that he owned
the house and had not been in it for fifteen years
was far from convincing. Finally, we did get in,
and secured the bust and painting which we cut
from the frame, wrapping it around the bust.

I went back to my friends across the way and
with them I drove to Burlingame. Here we
stayed in an untenanted house, owned by some

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

people we knew, for six days. I hoped that by
that time the company was well on its way to
Australia. I never had any desire to go on that
trip anyway, and now I felt that I had seen
something of the wonders of Nature during the
earthquake. After playing lost for six days, it
occurred to me that I ought to get word to my
family and to the Frohman office, by whom I
was employed. I borrowed a bicycle and
started for San Francisco. I was given a lift
part of the way, hut I entered the destroyed city
on my bicycle. I had been quite familiar with
the town, but all the landmarks were gone, and
it was the strangest effect, riding through those
streets which were nothing but ruins, and it was
with the greatest difficulty that I found the
Oakland Ferry. My friend, Walter Hobart,
had given me his police badge, with which he as-
sured me I would have no trouble in getting to
Oakland, but some soldiers from the Presidio,
seeing the badge which I displayed conspic-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

uously, stopped me and put me to work bossing
a gang of men who were sorting out and piling
up debris. I knew so little about work myself
that it was difficult for me to become a good ex-
ecutive. After about eight hours of make-be-
lieve I was allowed to proceed to Oakland.

The first person I met as I got off the boat
was Ashton Stevens, the dramatic critic. Think-
ing to give me good news, he said: “You're in
time to get your boat after all. Word was sent
East, ‘Everybody found except Barrymore.’
The company is going to sail from Vancouver in
three days.” I then learned that the boat on
which we were to have sailed for Australia had
been commandeered by the owner of the
line, in order to get his wife, who was ill, out of
the city. I wanted to turn back and be lost a
little while longer, and I would have done so if I
had not just then encountered Jack Dean, an-
other member of the Collier company. There
was nothing for it but to go to Australia.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

In Vancouver I found that I had ten dollars
and no clothes, except the ones I had on, and
these had suffered greatly in the days following
the earthquake and were far from presentable.
For five dollars I bought a blue serge suit which
did not take kindly to the damp air, and when
we had been at sea a few days it shrunk so that I
was the butt of the other members of the com-
pany whenever I appeared.

Having purchased this blue serge, I went to
a hotel and wrote a long letter to my sister. I
wanted to make it a good one and worth at least
a hundred dollars, so I described in great detail
what I had seen in those harrowing days and
what I had myself been through. I confessed to
having seen people shot in the street, spiked on
bayonets and other horrors so great that the
imagination was almost blunt from contemplat-
ing them. I wrote that I had been thrown out
of bed by the earthquake and almost mirac-
ulously escaped injury from falling bricks and

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

plaster, and then, with much pathos and resigna-
tion, I described the terrible scene at the Oak-
land ferry where, weak from exhaustion and
privation I had been cruelly put to work sorting
stones by the soldiers.

Ethel was reading this letter sympathetically
to our uncle, John Drew, and during one of the
best bits he was so strangely quiet that she
stopped and asked: “What’s the matter, Uncle
Jack? Don't you believe it?”

“I believe every word of it,” he answered.
“It took a convulsion of Nature to make him get
up and the United States Army to make him go
to work.”

In Australia we played both The Dictator
and Augustus Thomas’ play, On the Quiet.
We opened in the former, and at the end of the
second act there was a most friendly demonstra-
tion. Flowers were handed over the footlights
for the women of the company and someone had
sent Collier a puppy about a week old. In the

John Barrymore and Dolores Costello in The Sea Beast (Moby Dick)

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

next act when the scene was reached in which the
Central American general, an all-round bad
man, tells the character played by Collier that
he is going to kill all the Americans, and ends
with the defiant words, “What can you do about
it ?” Collier was supposed to reply patriotically,
“1 11 appeal to the American Government.” But
he could not miss a chance to put in a line of his
own; he was quite willing to gag or interpolate
on an opening night on a new continent, vital
though that night might be to the success of the
expedition. He said, instead of the customary
line, “Why, I’ll sick my dog on you.” It nat-
urally went with a yell.

In Australia we were asked about a great
deal, and one day we attended a ghastly
luncheon. It was one of those affairs that are
sometimes given by a college professor or a
clergyman who desires to prove that lie is broad-
minded and therefore he entertains a theatrical
company. It was a clergyman this time, I be-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

lieve. We had gone through all the usual ques-
tions that are asked actors by people unfamiliar
with the stage: “Do you make up your own
face?” “Do you live the part you play?” “Do
you enjoy acting every night?” We parried
these as well as we might without seeming to be
too rude. Now there was in the company a
young man who was very shy, and he had said
nothing at all. Finally, our host noticed this,
and wishing to put him at ease, asked, “Do you
have absolute control over your face?” This shy
young man, who was one of those one-remark
young men, answered quickly: “My God, no!
If I had, it wouldn’t look a bit like this.” Then
he subsided into his silence, in which he was left
undisturbed.

Melbourne is not a city, at least it was not
during our engagement, where the actor finds
places to go to supper and sit up and talk. The
proprietor of a delicatessen store gave us the use
of a room over his shop. There was only one gas

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

jet, and night after night we sat in the dusty
dinginess, because literally there was no other
place to go. The company had played together
for three years. We had been on a long sea
voyage together, we had listened to and doubted
one another’s stories of the earthquake, and not
one of 11s had anything in his past or future left
to talk about.

One night when we were leaving the theater
we saw in the foggy distance a figure that ar-
rested our jaded attention. Even in the murk
of Melbourne, we could see that he was prodi-
giously drunk and a resplendent figure in a high
hat, a thrown-baek Inverness coat and a shirt
front like the advertisement of the Hoffman
House cigars. As we neared him he flung out
his arm, after the manner of the father of Mere-
dith’s Harry Richmond, and said in a voice of
Falstaffian sonority: “Birds of the night,
whither away?” He was full of language like
that.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

lie was far too good for us to lose, bored as
we were with one another, and we haled this
picked-up and hrushed-up acquisition in tri-
umph to our mortuary supper table. But we no
sooner sat down than our newly acquired friend
went sound asleep. Collier was talking about the
business that we had done — we had not been a
gigantic success — and he was consoling himself
and us with the fact that other American com-
panies had not been too successful in Australia,
lie began talking about the failure of Nat
Goodwin in Melbourne and Sydney.

Our sleeping friend, at the mention of the
name Goodwin, woke up and said: “Goodwin!
Goodwin? Um-m — Nat Goodwin was once
preeminent in sententious comedy, but now —
hie — if you will permit me to say so — he is — -
hie — erstwhile He was a one-remark man,
too, and he said nothing else the rest of the
night.

On our way back from Australia, Collier and

John Barrymore as Capt. Ahab in The Sea Beast (Moby Dick )

i'1

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

I allowed our beards to grow, and we had much
amusement anticipating that we would go into
the Frohman offices in New York and say,
“This is what Australia has done to us.” But
upon arriving at Vancouver, we found that we
should have to shave, for the company was
booked to play all the way back East before dis-
banding. It was a great education to be with a
man like Willie Collier, who was never at a loss
for a moment on the stage. He was marvelously
quick to sense if anything was going wrong, and
he was equally quick to make things go wrong to
divert the other actors.

Early in his career Collier had played with
an old minstrel comedian, Charles Reed, who
had a great reputation for gagging and interpo-
lating. Collier learned everything that Reed
knew, and then developed the art himself. This
sort of thing, which does not make for the se-
renity of playwrights, has practically passed out
of the theater. At the dress rehearsal of The

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Dictator, Collier had Richard Harding Davis in
a state of positive panic. Hardly any of the play
was written by Davis that night.

I played in this piece not only all over this
country and in Australia, but in London as well,
where A. R. Walkley, writing in The Times,
gave me faint praise, but did not mention my
name. He referred to me as — “a gentleman
who appears as a wireless telegraph operator
and offers a choice anthology of American
slang.

This long association was very pleasant, ex-
traordinarily instructive, and I think only twice
did I annoy Collier. Once during the New
York run I went to bed in the late afternoon
leaving a call for seven o’clock. It was naturally
thought that I meant seven in the morning, and
it was nine o’clock when I woke up. I rushed to
the theater and found that the understudy, Wal-
lace McCutcheon, had played my part during
the first act. Collier very wisely refused to let

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

me go on for the rest of the play, as the under-
study had already appeared before the audience.
Having nothing else to do, I went to the front of
the theater and sat in one of the boxes, with some
rather swell friends of Ethel. No one in the
theater that night applauded so much or so
loudly as I did. I should have been fired, but
somehow I wasn’t.

In Chicago, Collier delivered an ultimatum,
and that was that I purchase a new pair of white
duck trousers. The only pair I had were cov-
ered with bolarmenia and other make-up and
they were quite disgraceful. Collier insisted
that I buy a new pair. lie told the men of the
company that he didn’t care whether I borrowed
from them, but if there was a spot on the bor-
rowed trousers, the owner, as well as myself,
would be fired. It was too great a risk and no
one would let me borrow, so I was forced to go
to Marshall Field’s to buy a pair of white duck
trousers, but as it was February and people

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

didn’t go to Florida so feverishly in those days,
their stock was not easily accessible. After a
long delay the only pair I could wear at all was
discovered, and these were much too small for
me. When I came out on the stage that night
Collier at once noticed that I had to move about
with care. I appeared literally molded or
poured into the trousers. It was a chance after
his own heart. “Young man,” he said to me,
“you work too hard.” He placed a chair for me.
“Do sit down.” It was some minutes before he
allowed the play to continue, and I had to stand
there, not daring to move. The next night the
dirty trousers appeared again, and they were
never mentioned.

At another time during the Chicago run
when I was in the good graces of the star, I
found when I came on the stage that, entirely to
divert me, Collier had made himself up to look
like my uncle, John Drew. On still another oc-
casion, when he thought he had played too long
in a certain town, he went to great trouble to

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

make up Thomas Meighan, who played the
United States Marine in the last two minutes of
the play, as an old man with a long gray heard.

My next job was in a play called Half a
Husband, in which Emily Stevens was the lead-
ing1 woman. At the dress rehearsal in New
York there were very long intermissions and a
great many people came in. We had supper
brought in, drank a good deal of champagne and
discussed the play amicably. No one knew just
how long the piece was. As I remember, we
opened in some little town which was reached by
motor from Syracuse. Here, to the consterna-
tion of the management, it was found that even
with the utmost generosity on the part of the
orchestra — they played everything they knew
and one man, heavily encored, did a xylophone
solo; he was the only hit of the evening — even
with all this help, the play ran less than an hour
and a half and the final curtain came down at
nine-thirty.

Arnold Daly, who produced the play, had

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

written in a love scene for me. I had never
played one, and I didn’t know how to. I don’t
remember the story of the play, but in any event
I was too late for my wedding, and the bride re-
fused to marry me. I entered and saw her in
the arms of another man. I said, “God bless
you!” and that was the end. Earlier in the play
there was a scene in which a table in the center
of the stage figured. It was filled with sup-
posed wedding presents— awful horrors from
the property room of this small-town theater. I
had some line about these gilt caskets and fruit
dishes, but when I saw them for the first time,
remembering my long training with Collier, if
not my line, I said: “Ah, I see father has been
playing pool again.” I imagined the audience
knew the “props” from other plays, and it was
the only thing I said that night that got over.

I was broke once more and in Atlantic City.
A certain set of lapis lazuli cuff-buttons, which I
rather liked, had already gone, and my hotel bill

John Barrymore as Hamlet

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

was getting worse and more unpayable. I was
in a situation like this in London once, years ago.
I had a cab and no money to pay for it. Every-
where I drove I was turned down, and every
time I approached a new prospect I had to ask
for more money than I had just been refused, as
the cab bill was mounting. When I finally
found a complacent person to lend me some
money, the cab bill was four pounds. At At-
lantic City that night I was dining alone, eating
some shrimp bisque — I have never eaten it
since — when Mort Singer, the theatrical man-
ager, came up and began talking to me. lie
told me that he was putting on a new musical
piece called A Stubborn Cinderella, at a new
theater in Chicago. “Would you like a part in
it?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know; I’ve got something in
mind that I’m considering.” All I was consid-
ering was what the hotel might do to me and
who was going to pay for the shrimp bisque.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

“How would a hundred and fifty dollars a
week do?” asked Singer.

Up to this time my salary had not been over
fifty dollars a week, and I was so staggered I
couldn’t answer.

Singer looked at my blank countenance, and
thinking that I was hesitating because he had
not offered enough, said: “Well, then, make it
a hundred and seventy-five. If you want some
money now, here is a hundred dollars.”

By that time I had found my voice, and I
accepted the offer.

The plaster was scarcely dry in the Princess
Theater when A Stubborn Cinderella opened,
and the production seemed to the company des-
tined to quick failure. After the first night, at
which the audience had not been particularly re-
sponsive, Walter Ilackett, the playwright, Lou
Houseman and I went to a cafe known as The
Bucket of Blood, where we talked all night
about things and changes that might be done to

John Barrymore in The Stubborn Cinderella

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

save the piece from utter failure, though we hon-
estly thought there was little chance. Our dis-
cussion was interrupted by the arrival of the late
edition of the morning papers. The critics
pronounced A Stubborn Cinderella the best
show that had been in Chicago for years. It ran
for two years. It never was a success in New
York. I did a song and dance in it.

Then I played in a number of plays and in
three of Barrie’s with my sister — Alice-Sit-by-
the-Fire, Pantaloon and A Slice of Life, but I
never had a real chance until I was cast for the
part of young Nat Duncan in Winchell Smith’s
play, The Fortune Hunter. It didn’t go very
well at rehearsals, and after the first night in
New Haven the management was in doubt
about letting me go into New York. Finally —
perhaps they had no other juvenile — they let me
try it, and I was a success — my first real hit in
the theater. One’s first success? How did it
happen ? Whoever stops to think of such things ?

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

In other arts people strip their souls naked in
mean attics year after year, but in the theater
one may win recognition overnight. But then,
in the theater one is never safe. At any minute
one may show himself up. It is easier to get on
and up in the theater than to stay put.

But while I was pondering over this brand-
new state of things for me — being a hit in the
theater — there came to me a disturbing, some-
what saddening thought. From now on I had a
career, it seemed, which I could no longer kick
in the slats. It was good-by to the irresponsibil-
ities of youth. I had happened to be fairly good
at them.

In a melodrama of New York’s underworld,
called Kick-in, I had my first opportunity to do
serious work in the theater. In its original form
Kick-in had been a one-act play which the au-
thor, Willard Mack, used to play on vaudeville
circuits. The one serious scene of the expanded
version was practically the whole of the one-act
play. While I was playing the part of Chick
Hughes in Ivick-in, Edward Sheldon, the author
of Romance and Salvation Nell, came to the
theater to see me. I had first met him when I
was playing the young hero in a play that he had
written, The Princess Zim Zim. This play,
which was tried out in Albany, moved on to R os-
ton, but never made an attack upon New York,
had an excellent first act in which a supposedly

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

swell young man on a spree goes to Coney Is-
land and while he is bathing in the early hours
of the morning, his evening clothes are stolen.
He is forced to take refuge in a dime museum
where they give him some clothes. Here he
stays on as the piano player as he becomes inter-
ested in the snake charmer.

During the rehearsals and the short run of
Zim Zim, I saw a good deal of Sheldon and he
became interested in my work. No one since I
have been a serious actor has been more helpful
to me than Edward Sheldon; in fact I am not
sure that he didn’t make me a serious actor.
That day lie came to my dressing room during
the run of Kick-in, he said: “If I were you I
should play a part without a hit of comedy in it.
As long as you do both comedy and straight
work in one play, they will always think you a
comedian.”

“I suppose that I might try it,” I said. “I

coidd paste down my mustache.”

0 Harvard College Library Collection
John Barrymore in Galsworthy’s Justice

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

My first thought was not of what I might do
in the serious part, but that a great many serious
parts might require me to make the sacrifice of
my mustache. To me, then, this seemed a tiling
not to lie too lightly parted from. Pasting down
was an old expedient of the theater and in the
palmy days many vain actors refused, regard-
less of the period they were supposed to repre-
sent, to sacrifice their facial adornment. It is an
old story of the theater that Edwin Forrest,
whether playing in a contemporary play or one
of the Roman period, always wore the side and
the little chin whiskers. As Spartacus he looked
like a venerable rubber in a Turkish hath.

Sheldon, however, did not dismiss the matter
so readily or so lightly as I did. He persisted.
When he found that Galsworthy’s play, Justice,
was to be put on, he arranged with the producers
that I play the leading part of the defaulting
clerk. I went at it with no little trepidation.
The play was produced for the first time in New

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

II aven, Connecticut, which had also been the
scene of my first comedy hit in The Fortune
II miter. On the opening night when I pounded
with frenzy upon my cell door in the prison, I
broke right through the wood grating, which was
painted black as an understudy for iron. Few
persons outside of the theater have any compre-
hension of how strong an actor is on the first
night. He is worked up to such an intensity
through fear, I suppose, that he can do almost
anything of the Samson or Sandow character.
Actually, I believe that a midget playing a
tragic part, if he was wrought up to the proper
pitch of panic, could, on a first night, lift a
grand piano.

A. Toxin Worm, who was for many years
associated with the business end of the theater,
and was, just before his death, press agent for
the Shuberts, in commenting upon the first
night of Justice, which he went up to New Ha-
ven to see, said: “I don’t think very much of it.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

It’s dull, and I suppose it’s deep; there’s only
one good scene and that’s the one where Barry-
more busts the prison door and makes his es-
cape.” Thereafter, the door was sufficiently
reenforced with metal so that no one in the
audience might think that I made my escape and
thus miss the point of the play.

When we came into New York for a few
rehearsals before opening, I found that in front
of the Harris Theater in Forty-second Street
and in the lobby, there were hills and posters
featuring my name. I went round with strips of
paper and pasted out this display. For a short
time I was given credit for modesty, but it was
not that. It was shrewdness, I think, for I
wanted no extra advertising if I were to fail.
When the play proved to he a success, I had
someone else remove the stickers. As I look
back, I think that I played one or two scenes
rather well — better than I could play them
now — just as by some happy accident, at fifteen

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

I did some drawings better than I coidd ever do
them again. Though I was quite unused to se-
rious values, there was in this performance in
Justice something vital that came wholly from
the desire to make good. Even though not
backed up by the right technique, it had a certain
gauche sincerity.

Justice, which had been produced in the late
winter, ran till the middle of July, and the fol-
lowing fall I went out on the road, where it
proved no great lure in many of the middle
western cities. This play, which was responsible
for certain reforms in British criminal jurispru-
dence, seemed very remote in many towns and
cities where we were booked. In one place, I
think it was Grand Rapids, I was informed by
the press agents that they had arranged a mar-
velous stunt for me to do which would cause a
healthy glow in the box office. I was to go to
the leading department store and there auto-
graph copies of Justice for anyone who brought

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

them in or would buy a copy in the book depart-
ment. They broke this to me gradually. There
was more to come. So that nothing of all this
might be lost, I was to stand while inscribing the
play books, behind a plate glass window, which,
of course, they assured me would be tastefully
decorated in a most literary and dignified way.

“Don’t you think it’s a good hunch?” they
asked. “It’ll be wonderful advertising.”

I suggested to them that it would also be
good advertising if I, like Lady Godiva, and in
the same costume, were to ride through the town
on the back of an elephant painted blue, holding
in one hand the scales of Justice and in the other
a placard with the name and location of the the-
ater. In spite of the unleashed imagination of
the press agents, and they actually performed,
unaided by me, some of the dubious stunts they
thought up, comparatively few people on the
road were attracted by or seemed to want Jus-
tice.

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I returned to New York in mid-season, con-
fronted with the problem of what to do next.
God help anyone after his first success in the
theater! There is always the fear and the dread
that it may he different next time. If one yields
to the temptation to do again what he has suc-
ceeded in, there is the certainty that sooner or
later his equipment will become exhausted.
Some actors never exhaust their equipment till
they are dead. Irving never did, but then, there
are few Irvings.

Among other things that I considered to do
next was the dramatization of DuMaurier’s
Peter Ibbetson. Of this hook I had always had
and still have the fondest recollections. Noth-
ing pleased me more mightily than when in Lon-
don last winter, Gerald DuMaurier gave me an
original drawing by his father and a notebook
which had been used during the writing of Peter
Ibbetson. On the last page of this is the family
tree of the Ibbetsons, showing the lineage of

A leaf from Du Maurier’s note book presented to the author by the artist’s
son, Gerald Du Maurier, the actor, on Barrymore’s opening night of

Hamlet in London

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Peter, with his delightful French ancestry. It
is a charming thing to possess, being so typical
of the gayety and beauty of the author’s mind.

I had often talked with Constance Collier
about doing Ibbetson together; she owned the
dramatic rights, but nothing ever came of our
talks. We were both free at this time, and there
was a prospect that we could get my brother
Lionel to play Colonel Ibbetson. The only dif-
ficulty was to get a management and a theater.
I went to see A1 Woods, who had been my man-
ager both in a play I like to forget, called The
Yellow Ticket, and in Kick-in. “Al,” I said,
“I’ve got a play, but I don’t want you to read
it.”

“I suppose you just want me to give you the
theater and pay the bills.”

“Yes, that’s about what I want.”

“What’s the play like?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t like it; it’s full of dreams.
It’s called Peter Ibbetson, by a guy named Du-

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Maurier. I’m going to play Peter, Constance
Collier is going to be the Duchess of Towers and
Lionel is coming back from the movies to the
theater, and he’s going to play Colonel Ibbetson,
my uncle.”

“That’s pretty good; can’t you tell me any-
thing about it at all?”

“Well, there’s one scene in it where Lionel
calls me a bastard and I hit him over the head
with a club and knock him cold. It's the end of
the second act.”

“You’re on, kid. I’ll take it.”

A1 Woods is, to my mind, one of the most
interesting figures in the theatrical world. lie
pretends not to know about things, whereas his
grasp of the details and business side of the-
atrical management is extremely comprehensive.
It was not mere luck that turned the impresario
of such significant sensations as Nellie, The
Beautiful Cloak Model, into one of the leading
producers of Forty-second Street.

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We went at the production of Peter Ibbet-
son with the greatest delight. We were all so
fond of the book and bad been for so long that
we wanted to get everything in that would
please the jjeople who knew the story. We even
went so far as to figure out what the loathsome
scent would be that Colonel Ibbetson used. Be-
fore the scene where I killed him, Lionel took
great pains to douse himself with this so that I
should get a strong whiff of it when I was near
him. My adoration of the drawings was so
great that I made myself up to look exactly like
them and wore a beard. The late Sir Herbert
Beerbohm Tree, when he came to the theater one
night in New York, was very charming about
the performance and the production, but refer-
ring to my beard, he said: “That fellow looks
so like a dentist. If you don’t shave him in-
stantly, the romance will fly out of the window.”

These things which we did in our excessive
zeal to preserve the book meant nothing to the

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spectators; but a certain inherent beauty, an ar-
resting nostalgia of the story did get into the
dramatization and kept audiences spellbound
and quiet, even during the terrible first night in
New York when the properties acted up and in
the dream scenes the scenery fell over, disclosing
shirt-sleeved stage hands, guy ropes and brick
walls. On tbe second night most of this hap-
pened again and the company was unable to give
on either occasion a real performance. Rut
through it all the play obtained, and at subse-
quent performances became a great success.

I know of no play with which I have ever
been connected at which audiences were so
largely made up of people who had already seen
the play. At every performance there were re-
peaters. One woman in New York told me that
she had seen Peter Ibbetson forty-five times. It
was war time, and the scenes in which the past
was lived again and there were reunions with
loved ones were very comforting to many per-

John Barrymore as Peter Ibbetson

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sons. When we played it in Canada, where so
many people had lost sons, the sympathy for the
play was most unusual. This quiet, peculiar
appeal hardly seemed like the theater.

After Peter Ibbetson, I had my choice of
two plays. One of them was Barrie’s Dear
Brutus. The leading part of this was sympa-
thetic and good, and when I read the play it
seemed difficult to see how anybody could fail,
even if he were only able to give one-tenth as
good a performance as was given by Gerald Du-
Maurier in London. I knew that the play could
not help succeeding in New York, and worse
than that, if one played it in New York there
would almost inevitably be a long road engage-
ment. The least to be expected from Dear Bru-
tus was two seasons.

So I elected to do the other play which was
offered to me, an English version of Tolstoy’s
play, The Living Corpse, which we called Re-
demption. My wife made the adaptation, but it

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wasn’t credited to her on the play bills. She had
from the first been enthusiastic to have me do
Redemption, and while I was hesitating about
accepting Dear Brutus, she went to the sister of
Joe Davidson, the sculptor, who was then run-
ning The Russian Inn in New York, and from
her she obtained a literal translation. Out of
this she made an excellent adaptation, which,
like most good adaptations for the theater, con-
tained a great deal that was original. I am cer-
tain that it was in a large measure responsible
for the success of Redemption, a success which
bewildered a great many people. At first the
play did not do good business, because it was put
on in the midst of the flu epidemic. As soon as
this scare was over, however, and people began
to go to the theater again, it became an estab-
lished success.

I have never felt that my playing of it was
particularly able, and there were portions of it
that I never found very clear and consequently

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

could not make them clear to audiences. In the
first act, when I should have been a human be-
ing, I was given so many jewels and appurte-
nances to wear that I always seemed to myself a
sweet-scented jackass. Till the last act, where
there was great reality, I was never on the balls
of my feet. Occasionally, I think I was good in
that last act. As everyone knows, Redemption
is one of those gloomy depictions of a Russian
soul in especial agony, and only rarely is there a
mild bit of cheer or color.

One night my brother came to see the play,
and near him was a girl who munched chocolates
diligently all through the performance. When
in desperation at the futility of life I stood be-
fore a mirror to shoot myself, she said in a loud,
nasal voice to her companion: “Oh, the poor
pru-in.” I fear that in that line the voice of
many persons spoke, though perhaps they would
not agree with the pronunciation.

One night, in changing a scene, the mirror

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

before which I stood when I was about to shoot
myself was broken and there was no time to get
another. So that I might be looking at some-
thing before I pulled the trigger, the frame was
left on the wall and asphaltum, which is ever
ready in the theater to touch up scenery, was
daubed in the frame where the glass should have
been. After that performance, a friend of mine
who is a painter came back to my dressing room
and after telling me some nice things about my
performance, said: “What a perfectly wonder-
ful touch that was of Tolstoy’s — that a man
about to kill himself should, before doing so, go
look at a painting of a landscape.” The artist
in him spoke. Each to his trade.

Before we did Peter Ibbetson I had pur-
chased the rights to do Sem Benelli’s play, La
Cena delle Beffe which was called in English
The Jest. Both Ned Sheldon, who made the
English version, and I thought that this would
be a very good play for Lionel and myself to do

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together. There was a great part in it for him,
and it seemed almost criminal that he should not
be back in the theater to play it. He was doing
extremely well in the movies, not only acting,
but also at odd moments and in various bars,
suggesting with extraordinary imagination, a
great many of the most distinguished producers’
two-reelers. Most of his ideas were received
with mild amusement, but later they almost in-
variably had an odd way of appearing on the
screen. Though we owned The Jest before
Peter Ibbetson was produced, the conditions
were not right for its production, and conse-
quently Lionel’s return to the stage was as Col-
onel Ibbetson, in which his success was tre-
mendous.

Before we produced The Jest, Lionel had
made a great hit in The Copperhead. The old
man in the last acts of this was as different from
the part he played in The Jest as any two parts
in the theater could possibly be, and yet no critic

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

mentioned this extraordinary versatility. We
thought The Jest would be an artistic success
that would run about six weeks, make little or
no money, and then go to the storehouse. We
felt that the play was a sound one and very good
theater, and as it had so much of the Renaissance
we thought that it would be great fun to put it
on.

Predicting the length of a run is always haz-
ardous. We were quite wrong. In production
The Jest proved gory, passionate, colorful and
provocative. Audiences did not seem to mind
that the play was not exactly a moral one. They
didn’t care that it was like a bullfight
in a brothel, punctuated by occasional flashes of
lightness. They did not seem to be able to get
enough of The Jest and it ran and ran.

After the fun of solving the difficulties was
over and the play settled down to sure success,
I became very tired of the patchoulied neuras-
thenic that I was called upon to play. This

Photo by Charlotte Fairchild

Lionel Barrymore in the Third Act of The Copperhead

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

character has been variously described. One of
the critics referred to it as a pallid but “mor-
dauntly beautiful” young sensualist. With the
blond wig and the very long green tights, it
seems to me now that pictorically I must have
appeared like a stained glass window of a de-
cadent string bean. When we took The Jest off
for the production of Richard III, the houses
were still packed.

The first thought of my playing Richard III
came about in an odd way. I was at the Bronx
Zoo one day with Ned Sheldon looking at a red
tarantula which had a gray bald spot on its back.
This had been caused by trying to get out of its
cage. It was peculiarly sinister and evil look-
ing; the personification of a crawling power. I
said to Sheldon: “It looks just like Richard
III.”

“Why don’t you play it?” was his only com-
ment.

Many of my friends had wanted me to do

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Hamlet first. Now I may not have been wise
to do Ilamlet when I did, but I am certain it
was wiser to act Richard first. Going into this
was quite a stunt and involved a good deal of
hard work; but I never like to talk about hard
work, for no one believes it anyway, nor does
the average outsider or layman consider that
creative work is especially difficult. I had to
make over my voice and work unceasingly on
intonations. I am afraid that when I came to
the playing, I probably, with no intention of so
doing, sang a great deal of the text.

Richard III was the definite result of months
of labor; it was a meticulous and not particularly
inspired performance. Occasionally, however,
it was effective and great fun to do. The pro-
duction by Robert Edmund Jones and Arthur
Hopkins was extremely beautiful and much
liked, I am sure. People have told me that they
can recall few scenes in the theater that were so
hauntingly beautiful as that of Richard on a

O Albert Davis Collection

John Barrymore as Richard III

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

white horse talking to the young princes before
the tower. I could play the whole play a great
deal better now, I am certain, but never again
would I undertake to play it eight times a week.

After Richard III and before I played
Hamlet in New York, Ethel and I appeared in
Clair de Lune, which was written by my wife.
This was a case of a play maimed by loving
kindness, in which the author was slightly be-
wildered, but quite helpless. The only thing
that I can think of that would correspond to
what we did to this play would be, if when a
debutante is going to her first party, instead of
giving her a simple dress, in which her charm
would be apparent, the family in their glutinous
affection should deck her in everything but the
kitchen stove. I know of nothing more that
could have been done to distract attention from
this charming play, except to have called upon
Lionel to play a part in it. As it was, it seemed
entirely filled with dwarfs and Barrymores.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

And Clair du Ernie should never have had all
these trappings or have been made a vehicle for
stars or box-office reputations.

Then came Hamlet. For several seasons
people had been telling me that Hamlet was the
logical play for me to do next, but I had never
read it with the idea of acting it. Naturally, be-
fore I could make up my mind I wanted to go
over the part carefully. I wanted to read and
re-read it until I could find out what I could do
with it or what it would do to me. I went down
to "White Sulphur Springs and went over the
play for weeks. It was practically my first
reading. Then I went out into the woods and
rehearsed myself in parts of it. I was amazed to
find how simple Hamlet seemed to be, and I
was no little bewildered that anything of such
infinite beauty and simplicity should have ac-
quired centuries of comment. It seems to me
that all the explanation, all the comment that is
necessary upon Hamlet Goethe wrote in Wil-

Jolm Barrymore in Clair de Lime

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

helm Meister. These simple words in short sen-
tences, with which the editor of the Temple edi-
tion has had the wit to preface the text, are more
illuminating than all the commentaries:

“And to me it is clear that Shakespere
sought to depict a great deed laid upon a soul
unequal to the performance of it. In this view
I find the piece composed throughout. Here is
an oak tree planted in a costly vase, which
should have received into its bosom only lovely
flowers; the roots spread out, the vase is shiv-
ered to pieces.”

Hamlet to me in the theater, no matter who
plays it, will never be quite the play that it is in
the theater of the cerebellum. When one thinks
how few illustrators add anything to a book — -
Howard Pyle added a great deal, but lie was one
of the few — it is not strange that the acting does
not always add to or enhance the reading of
Shakespere. Perhaps one of the reasons so
many people write about Hamlet and do not

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

write about other simple things of great beauty,
like the Sermon on the Mount and the Gettys-
burg Speech, is merely because they feel they
can add something to the character which no one
else has done. They see themselves playing the
part. I don’t know whether it was Noah or
P. T. Barnum who first said: “In every man
there is a little of Hamlet.” Seriously, I have
often wondered why women go to see Hamlet in
the theater. Perhaps it is because they bear
male children. I don’t know.

The Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London,
has a stage cat which is a privileged character.
It is a huge tom-cat with a big, broad head.
Just how long it has been in the theater, no one
seems to know, nor what its life is outside of
theater hours. In appearance it seems to he a
bland combination of a conservative and a bum.
I was told that during actual performances it
was always locked up, but that during the prep-
aration of a play it was accustomed to keep track
of what was going on. At every one of our
rehearsals of Hamlet, it was on the stage. It
had a way of crossing back and forth with its tail
in the air and sniffing slightly. It always did so
during my soliloquies, and it was very disturb-
ing. Nor did I quite like the way it looked at

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

me. It seemed to say: “I’ve seen them all —
what are you doing here?”

Don Marquis’ famous cat, Mehitabel, in her
wanderings in Greenwich Village last winter met
an old theater cat that had played in the support
of Forrest, Barrett, Booth and many others.
This old-timer deplored bitterly the inadequacy
cf the race of present-day theater cats and touch-
ing his breast with a paw, said: “It’s because
they haven’t got it here.” The cat at The Hay-
market was, I am sure, very like the cat Mehit-
abel met.

Herbert Waring, who played Polonius in the
production of Hamlet, told a story about this
Haymarket Theatre cat at a dinner which was
given for me by the O. P. Club of London, an
old organization which once a year gives a dinner
to some stranger. A number of the company
were also present, and they were called upon for
speeches. After Israel Zangwill, who presided,
Fay Compton, who was the Ophelia, Constance

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Collier, who was the queen, myself and others
had spoken, there was very little that was left to
be said. The possibilities of the delightful oc-
casion were vitiated, sucked and squeezed dry.
Everything that could be told about the produc-
tion had been used and much had been made of
the entente cordiale. Still there was another
speaker — Herbert Waring. I could see that he
was apprehensive about what he was going to
say, for bit by bit that he had thought of and
had hoped to use himself was being said by
others. When he rose he told this story about
the Haymarket cat:

“Mr. Barrymore,” he said, “had been sitting
hunched up in the orchestra watching the last
dress rehearsal. At the end he came upon the
stage and complimented the members of the
company in turn upon their work. lie turned
to Miss Compton and said: ‘Miss Compton,
yours will be the most enchanting and most
adorable Ophelia since that of Ellen Terry. You

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

combine virginal charm and wistfulness to a de-
gree which I am sure has never been approxi-
mated. God bless you and thank you very
much.’ And then to Constance Collier: ‘My
dear Constance, I can’t tell you how magnificent
you are. You have invested this character with
sensuous beauty, enhanced by a certain full-
blown provocativeness which I feel certain is
exactly what Shakspere meant. God bless
you and thank you very much.’

“ ‘Mr. K eene,' he said, ‘the King has usually
been considered a bad part. I never thought so.
Seeing you rehearse it to-night, I'm certain it
isn’t. God bless you and thank you very much.’
Next came my turn. ‘Mr. Waring, you will
make a triumph that will be unprecedented as
Polonius. Never before has the part been played
with such a happy combination of glutinous
sententiousness and senile verbosity, patined by
a kindly wisdom. It is unique. God bless you
and thank you very much.’ ‘Mr. Thorpe, the

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

ghost of Hamlet’s father, I feel quite certain,
has never been played as you play it. It is an
onomatopoetic tour de force. With the assist-
ance of the electrical equipment, you will be un-
forgettable and terrifying. God bless you and
thank you very much.’

“ ‘Mr. Field, the first grave digger,has been
played with everything from a red patch on the
seat of the breeches to barnyard imitations to
enhance the text. Without any of these acces-
sories and with judicious cuts, you are extreme-
ly funny. It is a great gift. God bless you and
thank you very much.’ ‘Horatio, all I can say
about you is that you are like the Rock of
Gibraltar, sprayed upon by the milk of human
kindness. I feel than I can lean upon you. I
shall probably have to. God bless you and thank
you very much.’ ‘Laertes, you were a flaming
ball of fire to-night, melting into tenderness at
the proper moment. It was an excellent per-
formance, particularly in the duel scenes where,

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

without any apparent effort at self-protection,
you seem always to be in the right place. God
knows how you do it. God bless you and thank
you very much.’ ‘Rosencrantz and Guilden-
stern, I imagine you know that for centuries
these parts have been known as the sleeve links
of the drama. Until to-night I have never been
able to tell you apart, but you invest them with
separate personalities. It is incredible. God
bless you and thank you very much.’

“Even Hamlet’s vocabulary, and by now he
was an extremely tired Ilamlet, was consider-
ably exhausted. Just then the theater eat came
on to the stage to see what it was all about, and
Mr. Barrymore stooped over and stroked the
large, square head: ‘As for you, my dear fellow,
you are going to make a hell of a hit in one of
my soliloquies.’ ”

Hamlet was not put on in London until I
had been through two years of the greatest dis-
appointment. I had a very good company lined

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

up, but I could not get a theater. Everyone I
went to see was most cordial and kind, but no one
had faith enough to help me. I could not al-
together blame the lessees and managers of the
London theaters, because Shakspere has not
been particularly successful in the recent years
in the West End. The plays of Shakspere are
constantly and very beautifully played at The
Old Vic, which, as I remember, is more North
than West.

I’m not very good at talking business any-
way, and I was very glad when in the various
managerial offices the conversation could be
changed from theater renting to fishing. I was
always embarrassed at being turned down, but
I became slightly hardened to it. I persisted
because I was encouraged by the flattering suc-
cess that I had had here as Hamlet. Arthur
Hopkins, who was associated with me in the
production in America, did not feel that there
was anything but loss to be encountered with

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Hamlet in London; and so lie withdrew. But he
was gracious enough to loan me the head elec-
trician, the head carpenter and the stage mana-
ger of the American production. Without this
trio, I should have been almost helpless.

Finally, after two years of negotiations that
came to nothing, I met Frederick Harrison, who
owns the Haymarket Theatre. He agreed to let
me rent the house for six weeks. Half of the
money for the production was raised in London;
the other half I put up myself. Had it not been
successful, I stood to lose twenty-five thousand
dollars. No one could have been more gracious
or more interested than Mr. Harrison was. At
the end of the six weeks he postponed his own
production of a new A. A. Milne play in order
that Hamlet might run three weeks more.

I was particularly delighted to have the
II aymarket Theatre, not only because it is the
best in London, with a delightful staff and
clientele, but because in this theater my father

John Barrymore as Hamlet

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

played many years ago. I never went into the
stage door without smiling over a story that I
had heard so often. The stage entrance is in a
cul-dc-sac street, and there is only one way in.
One night my father and Charles Brookfield,
who was, a few years ago, the play censor in
England, were leaving the theater together.
My father espied two bailiffs approaching and
anticipated that they were for him, as they were.
There being no other way out of the street, my
father grabbed hold of the more athletic appear-
ing of the two, and then shouted to Brookfield:
“Run, Barry, run.” There was nothing for
Brookfield to do but to oblige by running, and
when he had been given sufficient time for a get-
away, my father, as Brookfield, apologized good-
naturedly to the bailiff that he had detained.
The other one made a feeble effort to follow
Brookfield, who jumped into a cab and disap-
peared.

The rehearsals of Hamlet were more fun

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

than anything I ever have (lone. I had wanted
to put it on in London so much, and one crashing
disappointment after another merely made me
keener to do so. There was another pleasure for
me, and that was because I was doing the whole
thing myself. In London I had no producer or
director. This added responsibility was really
a delight, as there was such a splendid sense of
collaboration and helpfulness everywhere. The
company was interested extraordinarily by the
way in which the production was staged; this
was quite new for Shakspere in London.

There was always a feeling of good humor
and good fellowship on tap. I was explaining
one day to the girls who carry on the body of
Ophelia in the burial scene that, owing to the
extraordinary and suggestive lighting of Robert
E. Jones, they would not he recognized as hav-
ing appeared in earlier scenes. I cautioned them
that they should remember that in this scene
they were virgins. One of them said to me:

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“My dear Mr. Barrymore, we are not character
actresses, we are extra ladies.” This is the spirit
in which the whole production was done.

Finally, the first night. The man in front
of the house, who was diplomatic, courteous and
dressed in evening clothes, as the business people
of the English theaters always are, came back to
me several times to tell me about the audience.
He was full of the cause and his enthusiasm was
so whole-hearted. “Of course, you know,” he
said, “Mr. Shaw is in the house.” Next he came
back to tell me: “With the greatest difficulty
we just found two seats for Mr. Masefield.”
The effect of this upon a fairly nervous Ameri-
can in London, who is about to appear in the
best play that England has in-oduced, can well
be imagined. But the man from the front of the
house kept on — only mere time stopped him.
He told me of the arrival of Dunsany, Maug-
ham, Mary Anderson, that beloved actress of
Shaksperean roles, the Asquiths, Sir Anthony

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Hope Hawkins, Henry Arthur Jones, Pontius
Pilate, Paul of Tarsus and the Pope. Some-
how, it did not add to my scare, for one had the
same sense of detachment, I imagine, that one
would feel on the route to the guillotine. I
looked from the wreath that Madame Melba had
sent me — the first I ever received — to the
mounted tarpon caught off Key West, Florida,
which had been inadvertently packed and sent to
London by my colored valet. Fishing, I
thought, will be just as good as ever when this is
over.

I powdered the beads of sweat off the fore-
head and sauntered on to the stage smoking a
cigarette. I wanted to put up a bluff of casual-
ness to the other members of the company. It
was much worse for me, playing Hamlet under
my own management and direction in a new
country, but I understood that they were appre-
hensive and I appreciated their reason for being
so. There had only been time for one full dress

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

rehearsal with the scenery, and it was compli-
cated for persons not accustomed to it. Many
of the entrances and exits were made by the
steps that lead up to the massive arch which
formed the permanent background of the entire
production. I did the best I coidd to encourage
them. I think this is the best performance I
have ever given. No other make-believe that I
have accomplished has been so authentic, I am
sure, as my simulated calmness that night.
Then came my own first scene. I threw my
cigarette away and on the darkened stage I sat
waiting for the curtain to go up. Those seconds
that I sat there are reasonably unforgettable.

It was awfully pleasant to he in London, and
just because I was playing something at a
theater to be let in on so many things. It was
charming to meet again the friends I had made
in my school days. I went to see Ben Webster
and Mrs. Webster, who had been so kind to me
twenty years before wh<m I used to go to their

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

flat in Bedford Street from my school in Wim-
bledon. I saw the same old sofa where I slept
when I could stay away from school. There
were the identical hooks and pictures, and the
whole place had managed to keep from change,
as English flats are apt to do. Nor did the
Websters look any older. And now their daugh-
ter was playing a small part in Hamlet.

It was a great pleasure, too, to renew my
old friendship with Gerald DuMaurier. One
day he told me that Sir Squire Bancroft, the
dean of the English speaking stage, wished to
see me. I went to his apartment in the Albany,
where he has lived for years. He told me about
Hamlets that he had seen and suggested many
things which I might do in the part. His ideas
were so illuminating and so amazingly modern.
He was so helpful and interested. “Did you
ever hear of this bit of business?” he would ask,
and then he would illustrate what he meant. He
came one day with some grandnieces to a mat-

The author with a day's catch off Cornwall

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

inee and sat in the box of the theater that he had
once owned. lie suggested that I use a device
that Fechter had employed effectively. I did
not adopt this particular suggestion because it
was out of line with what I felt I could do, but
since he had been so gracious and helpful, I sud-
denly decided, when I saw him sitting there that
afternoon, to incorporate the idea. It was at the
end of the soliloquy in the first act and the other
members of the company were crowding in the
wings waiting for the call at the end of the act.
They could not, because of the nature of the
scenery, see what was going on on the stage and
when the curtain did not come down as ordina-
rily, they thought that Hamlet had really gone
mad.

I saw Sir Squire Bancroft again the night
the Garrick Club gave a dinner for me. We as-
sembled in an upper room, and then this distin-
guished, white-haired man escorted me down the
broad circular steps to the room where the din-

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

ner was to be held. On the way we passed one
after another of those eighteenth and early nine-
teenth century portraits of great actors and ac-
tresses of the English stage. Suddenly I
remembered my grandmother, and I could
understand their apparent look of whimsical
austerity. An American Hamlet in London!

A supper in a loft over a tavern was given
for me one night by an organization known as
The Gallery First-nighters. They had all been
to Hamlet. They had expected a speech and
they asked a number of questions, but it didn’t
go very well and I was grateful when the chair-
man suggested that like the Jongleur de Notre
Dame, who had no gift but his juggling, the
actor’s business was to act. They therefore
called upon me for something from Hamlet.
Though the party was informal, I had another
engagement afterwards and was dressed. I told
them: “It isn’t easy to indulge in Danish ru-
minations when one is dressed like a waiter.’’ As

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

soon as my soliloquy was over, it was a very
amusing evening, for these first-nighters of the
gallery were genuinely interested in the theater.

I was saddened during my London engage-
ment by the death of John Sargent. In Whist-
ler’s old house I had lived next to him in Tite
Street during the first year I was trying to
put on Hamlet in London. Only two winters
ago when I was playing Hamlet in Boston,
Sargent made a sketch of me. My wife was
very anxious that I have this done. He told me
that his portrait-painting days were over, but
that he would make a sketch. I was to pay him
a thousand dollars. When he had finished it, he
wrote upon it: “To my friend, John Barry-
more,” and refused to take any money, though
it had been a commission. He said: “It’s a
Christmas present for you.”

At the end of the engagement of nine weeks,
Hamlet closed. The run could not be extended
because some of the cast were under contract to

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

appear in other plays. The last night I look
back to as the pleasantest I have ever spent in
the theater. There was enthusiasm all through
the play, and at the end, when I stood with the
company to acknowledge the applause, there
were cries of “Come back.” After the play I
gave a party on the stage of the theater for the
entire company, the stage hands, the carpenters,
the electricians, and everyone connected with the
II aymarket Theatre in any capacity what-
soever. The charwomen and cleaners sat upon
the steps of Elsinore and drank Cointreau,
thinking, I’m afraid, that it wasn’t very good
gin.

There is always someone who, when you have
been regarding a charming this, calls your at-
tention to a not so entrancing that. A few days
after Hamlet was produced in London, I re-
ceived the following letter from G. Bernard
Shaw:

John Barrymore — a drawing by John Singer Sargent

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

“22nd February, 1925.

“My dear Mr. Barrymore: I have to thank
you for inviting me — and in such kind terms
too — to your first performance of Hamlet in
London; and I am glad you had no reason to
complain of your reception, or, on the whole, of
your jn’ess. Everyone felt that the occasion was
one of extraordinary interest; and so far as your
personality was concerned they were not dis-
appointed.

“I doubt, however, whether you have been
able to follow the course of Shakespearean pro-
duction in England during the last fifteen years
or so enough to realize the audacity of your
handling of the play. When I last saw it per-
formed at Stratford-on-Avon, practically the
entire play was given in three hours and three
quarters, with one interval of ten minutes; and
it made the time pass without the least tedium,
though the cast was not in any way remarkable.
On Thursday last you played five minutes

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

longer with the play cut to ribbons, even to the
breath-bereaving extremity of cutting out the
recorders, which is rather like playing King
John without little Arthur.

“You saved, say, an hour and a half on
Shakespear by the cutting, and filled it up with
an interpolated drama of your own in dumb
show. This was a pretty daring thing to do. In
modern shop plays, without characters or any-
thing but the commonest dialogue, the actor has
to supply everything but the mere story, getting
in the psychology between the lines, and present-
ing in his own person the fascinating hero whom
the author has been unable to create. lie is not
substituting something of his own for something
of the author’s: he is filling up a void and doing
the author’s work for him. And the author
ought to be extremely obliged to him.

“But to try this method on Shakespear is to
take on an appalling responsibility and put up a
staggering pretension. Shakespear, with all his

The author in a characteristic pose

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

shortcomings, was a very great playwright; and
the actor who undertakes to improve his plays
undertakes thereby to excel to an extraordinary
degree in two professions in both of which the
highest success is extremely rare. Shakespear
himself, though by no means a modest man, did
not pretend to be able to play Hamlet as well as
write it; he was content to do a recitation in the
dark as the ghost. But you have ventured not
only to act Hamlet, but to discard about a third
of Shakespear’s script and substitute stuff of
your own, and that, too, without the help of
dialogue. Instead of giving what is called a
reading of Hamlet, you say, in effect, ‘I am not
going to read Hamlet at all : I am going to leave
it out. But see what I give you in exchange !’

“Such an enterprise must justify itself by its
effect on the public. You discard the recorders
as hackneyed back chat, and the scene with the
king after the death of Polonius, with such
speeches as ‘How all occasions do inform

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

against me!’ as obsolete junk, and offer instead
a demonstration of that very modern discovery
called the CEdipus complex, thereby adding a
really incestuous motive on Hamlet’s part to the
merely conventional incest of a marriage (now
legal in England) with a deceased husband’s
brother. You change Hamlet and Ophelia into
Romeo and Juliet. As producer, you allow
Laertes and Ophelia to hug each other as lovers
instead of lecturing and squabbling like hector-
ing big brother and little sister: another com-
plex !

“Now your success in this must depend on
whether the play invented by Barrymore on the
Shakespear foundation is as gripping as the
Shakespear play, and whether your dumb show
can hold an audience as a straightforward read-
ing of Shakespear’s rhetoric can. I await the
decision with interest.

“My own opinion is, of course, that of an au-
thor. I write plays that play for three hours

Photo by Melbourne Spurr
The most recent portrait of the author

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

and a half even with instantaneous changes and
only one short interval. There is no time for
silences or pauses: the actor must play on the
line and not between the lines, and must do nine-
tenths of his acting with his voice. Hamlet—
Shakespear’s Hamlet — can be done from end
to end in four hours in that way; and it never
flags nor bores. Done in any other way Shakes-
pear is the worst of bores, because he has to be
chopped into a mere cold stew. I prefer my
way. I wish you would try it, and concentrate
on acting rather than on authorship, at which,
believe me, Shakespear can write your head off.
But that may be vicarious professional jealousy
on my part.

“I did not dare to say all this to Mrs. Barry-
more on the night. It was chilly enough for her
without a coat in the stalls without any cold wa-
ter from

“Yours perhaps too candidly,

“G. Bernard Shaw.”

CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR

Not as a result of this letter, but because I
like to interlard work in the theater with the
making of movies, which I thoroughly enjoy, I
am back in Hollywood once more working upon
a new picture. It is made from a great classic
of American literature, Melville’s Moby Dick.
This book appeals to me and always has. It has
an especial appeal now, for in the last few years,
both on the stage and on the screen, I have
played so many scented, bepuffed, bewigged
and ringletted characters — princes and kings,
and the like — that I revel in the rough and al-
most demoniacal character, such as Captain
Ahab becomes in the last half of the picture
after his leg has been amputated by Moby Dick,
the white whale. What we are going to do for a
love interest, I don’t quite know. He might fall
in love with the whale. I am sure, however,
Hollywood will find a way.

THE END

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