Footlights and Spotlights*

Otis Skinner's Exits and Entrances

The Story. At the age of 18, Otis A. Skinner broached his plans for a stage career to his conservative clergyman father and his artistic mother. They laughed heartily. They could not foresee this awkward youth of bad diction and poor carriage as anything but ludicrous behind the footlights' all-revealing glare. Nevertheless, young Otis was sent to a friend of the family, who gave the youth a noncommittal letter, running as follows :

To whom it May Concern:

The bearer, O. A. Skinner, Esq., is known to me. His parents, whom I have known in Hartford, Conn., for several years, are eminently respectable. Mr. Skinner has an ambition, a talent and a yearning for the stage. I have no doubt that he will prove an important acquisition to any theatrical corps which he may join.

(Signed) P. T. BARNUM.

Aided by this letter and lots of crust, Skinner got an engagement with William Davidge's Stock Company, which gave bad performances at the Philadelphia Museum. During the season 1877-78 he played 92 parts, "including Negroes and women."

The names of such actors as Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett are freely sprinkled over the ensuing pages. Humorous stories are told of missed cues, scenic mishaps. Madame Janauschek, temperamental, egotistical, flashes meteorically through the pages, is made to live again in her great roles and her off-stage tantrums. There are many amusing episodes of Shakespearean productions; atrocious costumes and absurd scenery failed to detract from the serious and pseudo-scholarly performances of the bombastic hams.

In 1884 Augustin Daly engaged Skinner to play in his famed company. The great manager is tenderly pictured in all his quaintness; his whims are described, his essentially city character and strong religious tendency. Mr. Skinner found himself associated with Ada Rehan, John Drew, James Lewis, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert. After a tour of the provinces, the company made a successful invasion of England, Germany, France.

Meanwhile Otis and his brother Charles were writing a melodrama, The Red Signal, which eventually enjoyed a brief run in Chicago. Feeling the time was not ripe for him to embark by himself as a manager, Mr. Skinner joined forces with Edwin Booth, who was just past his prime and had begun to rest on his laurels. Shakespeare and Restoration Comedy were the order of the day.

His Grace de Grammont, in 1894, was Skinner's first success as his own manager. Then came the association with Charles Frohman and at last Kismet. A few more plays--The Honor of the Family, Mister Antonio, Blood and Sand -- and this story of nearly 50 years is done.

The Significance. "The deeds of all actors are written in water," says Otis Skinner. It is only through the writings of stage people and those who love the Theatre that any memory of an actor's greatness can be kept; and even then the true picture of his art can never be preserved.

The Author. Otis Skinner's genial smile and friendly disposition are well known. His greatest popularity is with the towns outside New York. His each visit is greeted by a large attendance. These provincials do not go to see a play, they go to see their much beloved Otis Skinner. He has played parts extending from the polished and educated gentleman of French plays to the uneducated and homely role of Sancho Panza, squire to Don Quixote. To each part he brings a rich nature.

Educated at the Brown Grammar School and the Hartford High School, Mr. Skinner tried his hand as clerk for an insurance company. But this was soon changed for a position as shipping clerk at a wholesale commission house. It was the physical exercise of handling heavy cases in all sorts of weather that gave Mr. Skinner his powerful physique.

Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

SMUGGLERS AND SMUGGLING--A. H. Verrill--Duffield ($4.00). All the world loves a pirate--witness the innumerable pens that have spattered laudatory ink about that highly romantic villain. But here his stepbrother, the smuggler, comes into his own, with a no less intriguing assortment of crimes. Can you imagine smuggling elephants? They do, over in Siam. And Oriental rugs, in Persia. And in our own Civil War, some ill-advised officials smuggled in camels, thinking they would be a help in the deserts of the Southwest.

Here are thrilling tales of outlawed clipper-ships running before the wind, of sinister campfires in dark passes of the Pyrenees, where contrabandistas bivouac with their laden mules and ill-gotten treasure--all the thrill and mystery of lawless adventure--nor is our own rum-runners' fleet neglected, jauntily riding the waves an hour's sail from shore.

THE IMMORTALS--Harold Scarborough--Appleton ($2.00). An amusing, tongue-in-the-cheek novel, flirting with that eternally fascinating subject, the conquering of Death. The serious old Russian scientist who discovers the remarkable serum blissfully considers himself a public benefactor, and the Hebraic gentleman who finances the undertaking is inclined to think that immortality, if handled right, may pay almost as well as oil or steel. But insurance companies, patent medicine men and undertakers are appalled at the prospect of the dent it would make in their incomes. They kidnap the scientist, and while subsequent events may be a strain on the reader's credulity, they are at least an equal one on his risibles.

MY LIFE IN ART--Constantin Stanislavsky--Little, Brown ($6.00). A gracious gesture to the public which "took the Moscow Art Theatre so kindly to its heart." Its director here recounts his artistic career, in pages that literally ooze Russian color, and echo to the tread of Chekhov, Tolstoi, Rubinstein, Chaliapin and other Russian great. Attractively bound, the book furnishes interesting backstage glimpses of that people whose Theatre seems to leap from the unalloyed joyousness of comedy to the most unlit depths of tragedy, with never a midway stop between the two.

Christopher Morley

Bookish, Hearty, Impish

Christopher Morley sailed for Europe last week where he intends to settle down and write another book. "Just one other?" I asked him. "Well, at least one other," he replied; for the book habit--writing, reading, studying, collecting, etc., etc.--is the chief habit of Chris Morley's life. He is the most thoroughly bookish man I have ever known, yet with none of the dust upon him that sets bookish men apart from the world. He is hearty! He looks rather younger than he did a few years past. Christopher Morley is the ideal sentimental journeyist through life. He has wit as well as sentiment, and his heartthrobs are pierced by shafts of keen intelligence.

His escape from America will not take from us his contributions. He will be an active member of the staff of Dr. Canby's new Saturday Review of Literature. He will publish in August a collection of his one-act plays. His work in collaboration with Don Marquis, Pandora Lifts the Lid, was published this month. Morley! one of the most human, industrious, eager, enthusiastic, friendly, and trustworthy of the literary gentlemen! Honest, sincere, upright--but with a peculiar genius which illuminates these homely qualities with -- what shall I say? -- impishness?

Christopher Morley was born in Haverford, Pa. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He still carries an air of England about his person. He has worked for various newspapers and on the editorial staff of Doublefday, Page & Co. His books are many and they vary from sometimes delicate, sometimes sentimental verses, through essays, bookish and otherwise, to his stories-- to such a little masterpiece as Where the Blue Begins.

Perhaps it is unwise to write of Mr. Morley without mentioning the sea-- for that is one of his chief enthusiasms. He is a perfect sea captain gone wrong --a Conradian hero with a wife, four children and a home in Roslyn, L. I.-- an adventurer who finds his adventures in blue pipe-smoke and the howling of winds around the home chimney.

J. F.

* FOOTLIGHTS AND SPOTLIGHTS--Otis Skinner--Bobbs-Merrill ($5.00).