Harvey J. O'Higgins

“ The producer, who had put up the money for the play, had the first right to say what should be in the play for which he had put up the money. The stage director, hired to rehearse the production, began immediately to suggest changes in the play in order to show that he was worthy of his hire. The star attempted not at all to subdue his personality to the part he had to play; he busied himself subduing the part to his personality. And not merely that. He did not care whether or not he was true to life; he considered only whether or not he was true to the sympathies of his audience. ”

“ The fact is she will probably end by marrying Fritz Hoff (now Hoffman) , the property-man who blacked the star's other eye for her in Atlantic City.
He has served her like an adoring watchdog ever since that first defense of her. He was her property-man and stage manager in her first success. It was his skill as a stage carpenter that made her house so deliciously picturesque and theatrical with its window-seats and diamond panes and Belasco lights and Juliet hangings. ”

“ I had felt all along that the play was a conglomeration of fatuous nonsense, anyway. One always feels that way about a friend's play.
And next morning I found that—as usual—while I slept all the really important things of life had happened. The others had been up all night. The star had left for Florida, with an incipient attack of press-agent's pneumonia, having broken his contract, abandoned his interest in the production, insulted Jane Shore, and had his other eye blacked by a little property-man named Fritz Hoff who hated him. ”

“ An audience was a sea of mirrors to him, and the image that he saw reflected there was that of a fine, upstanding, robust hero who never did a human thing on the stage or said a true one. He was an actor by virtue of the fact that he "put across the footlights" the fictitious personality that had made him popular. And he did not know it was fictitious. Obviously he did not know it. He saw himself in the eyes of admiration only, and never suspected the truth about himself.
7 At the dress rehearsal there began to appear one truth about him that few of us suspected: he could not act. ”

“ And you've no idea what a nuisance they are to an actress. They see you all beautifully made up, in the romantic stage lights, being everything sweet and noble and heroic that a playwright can make a woman out to be. ”

“ They were a respectable lot of hard-working men and women, but they had no illusions about their star. They admitted that he was a handsome bully, an egotistical cad, a bone-headed matinée idol, a strutting lady-killer with all the delicate impulses of a caveman. One of them said, "He's the kind of actor that ought always to wear a wig—as a protection against woodpeckers." Faro Nell summed it up, "He's the lowest form of humanity I've ever had to associate with." ”

“ It explains why Jane Shore has never married. Her suitors, she thinks, have not been in love with her; they have been in love with Shakespeare's Juliet, or Shaw's Patricia Beauchamp, or Barrie's Grizel, or some other ideal that is not Fanny Widgen. And they bore her. She will not marry an actor. "I won't marry one," she says, "for the same reason that I won't co-star with one. There isn't room for two of our egos in one house." A manager wanted to marry her, and she explained her rejection of him by saying in a Bowery voice, "I'm not goin' to be no man's white slave." ”

“ Once, when she was no more than eight, she was out driving with her father—behind the fastest and most vicious of the young horses that he delighted to fight and master—when the breeching of the harness broke, going down a hill, and the frightened animal, being butted into by the carriage, kicked back at the whiffletree, broke one of the shafts, put a hoof through the dashboard, and then bolted, with the harness breaking anew at every plunge and the hanging shaft prodding him on. ”

“ It is Fritz Hoffman who has made possible her whole later career. She will probably marry him. She will have to if he has ever sense enough to say, "I'll leave you, if you don't." And in the purely practical world in which Jane Shore has to live—the world of the theater—it would be the best thing that she could do. ”

“ Broadway 's always strong for its mother. Its wife's a joke. But its mother! Oh, boy! It's sure fire. We've got to have it. It's mother-love, I tell you. It's mother-love." And he struck his breast argumentatively every time he said "mother-love"—to indicate the seat of the appeal. And every time he struck his breast the producer nodded solemnly.
It was evident that Jane Shore had chosen the right scene to steal. "I knew it," she laughed. "I knew they'd never let him take that away from me." She had seen the producer's face, as I had seen it, contorted with emotion. ”

“ She is a great actress, perhaps. She is certainly a fascinating character. I have done her injustice in this account of her first success if I have not indicated that, though she was incredibly crafty in her handling of the star, she was also impulsive, full of deviltry, a person of incalculable temperament. It was certainly an impulse of mischief that prompted her to start that dining-room fight, although she took such excellent advantage of the results of it. She is tricky. "Of course I'm tricky," she says. "Could any one who is not tricky get ahead in the theater?" She is deeply egotistic. ”

“ At one time I had a dozen photographs of her tacked up together over a writing-desk; and invariably the stranger would say: "Who are all the good-looking girls? I recognize Jane Shore, but who are the others?"
Take, for example, the earliest anecdote about her that I have. It is the story of how, at the age of six, she rode her pony into a corner drug-store and demanded of the soda-fountain clerk that he serve her and her Shetland with ice-cream soda. ”

“ The author was busy rewriting again in order to make a star part for Jane Shore. The stage director was helping by beating his breast like a gorilla and howling for more mother-love. A young leading man, in answer to a wire from Jane Shore, was coming from Washington to rehearse the part in which the star had fallen down. A New York manager had agreed to take the Atlantic City theater off their hands for the latter part of the week. And the producer was leaving for Broadway and the booking-offices, to arrange for an out-of-town opening for Jane Shore in "a new American drama" within the month. ”

“ The difficulty was overcome by making Faro Nell take the actual guilt of the kidnapping, and he assumed the responsibility in order to protect her, because she loved him—poor soul, she loved him. And then, in the second week of rehearsals, he arrived glowing with an idea. The hero should not be a criminal at all. He should be an honest, though desperate, man whose child had been kid- napped and whose wife had died of grief. ”

“ He hailed her, if I remember, as a young Madame Janauschek—for she played her cheap melodrama with such eloquence and distinction that comparisons with the old school were inevitable. She showed, in her later plays, that she was modern and naturalistic; and Mr. Winter felt that she was a noble promise unfulfilled. ”

“ How he'd thrashed a cheeky waiter, and an elevator-man who insulted him, and a cabman who tried to overcharge him. And even how he'd silenced Maurice Barrymore with the superior brilliance of his repartee."
He never boasted to her of his previous conquests. No doubt they had been merely mirrors, as she said. As long as they gave him a flattering reflection, he treasured them. As soon as one grew tarnished in the brightness of her complacency, he tossed her into the matrimonial dust-box, paid for the breakage like a gentleman, and looked for another glass. ”

“ But there was, as Sir Thomas More said, "nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you had wished her somewhat higher"; and greater height would have handicapped her in her beginnings on the stage, where the men are rarely tall and rarely willing to play opposite a woman who dwarfs them. ”

“ And indeed she was so respectable that whenever any one attacked the moral conditions on our stage, Mrs. Fiske, in replying, never failed to refer to the immaculate record and reputation of Jane Shore. With whatever abandon she played Juliet or the proposal scene in Shaw's "Satan's Advocate," she was always primly chaperoned, off the stage, by the inhibitions of her Calvinistic and Quaker ancestors. The nearest she ever came to scandal—
12 It was quite recently, at Madame Bernhardt's professional matinée, in the Empire Theater, on her last tour. ”

“ She had another with the producer. I heard from the author that the star had threatened to give up the play unless it was played the way he wanted it. There were more conferences, while the audience gathered into the theater and the orchestra struck up a rusty overture. They were still conferring when I went out to find a vacancy in the back row, and the stage director, as I passed him, was saying: "I tell you he's a four-flush. You watch him to-night. Never mind her. Let her play to her limit. Watch him." ”

“ Hoffman's Theater, New York City.—Who's Who.
1
IT is not easy to do any sort of truthful portrait of Jane Shore. We are all, no doubt, different with different people, and at different times, but Jane Shore is wilfully so, particularly when she sees that she is being watched. It is difficult to choose any incidents from her life that seem wholly characteristic. ”

“ She has faults of pettiness that seem impossibly opposed to her large and generous qualities; but with all the disintegrating impulses of variable temperament and contradictory moods, she has a strength of will that gives her character and direction. ”

“ An unexpected millionaire had "bought in" on the play, and this was the same millionaire who had been guilty of the barrelful of American Beauty roses across the footlights. "Tom the Gum-man" we came to call him. ”

“ They were not stage people. Far from it. Her real name is Fanny Widgen. Her father was Mathew Widgen, a Philadelphia business man, a rice importer, of Quaker descent. Her mother was the daughter of a Calvinist minister, of an old Huguenot family. And unless you blame the French blood of a great-grandmother, there is no inheritance to account for temperament, artistry, and the stage.
2 Jane Shore herself gives a curious explanation of the origin of her career—more curious than credible. She says that just before her birth her mother developed an unaccountable passion for the theater ”