A Time of Years

Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!

When the little boy on the stage thus pleaded with the audience for a show of faith, even the most skeptical teen-agers clapped and shouted "Yes!" till the rafters shook, and adults dabbed at their eyes. The "boy" was Maude Adams, who played Peter Pan 1,500 times, always evoking the same response. But one matinee day, nearly half a century ago, as Actress Adams pushed her way through the admiring crowds from the Empire Theater stage door to an electric automobile at the curb, she caught the eye of a small boy. The profound disappointment on his face seemed to tell her: "You're not Peter Pan, or even a boy; you're an actress, and a lady." From that time on, during the run of the play, Maude Adams never again left the theater after a matinee, lest too many little boys grow disillusioned.

A Decorous Pin-Up. Maude Adams was only nine months old when she first appeared before an audience. In Salt Lake City, where she was born, a player carried her on stage in a production called The Lost Child (Maude's mother, Annie Adams Kiskadden, was the leading lady). By the time she was 16, famed New York Producer Charles Frohman became Maude's mentor and manager. He helped create the shy, veiled creature whose personal life was an enigma. Frohman's order: "You are not to be interviewed. You are not to be quoted . . . People will wonder at you, yearn for the details of your private life . . . Let them. It will only spur their interest and desire for you."

Frohman was right. At 34, Maude was America's best-loved actress. Sir James M. Barrie, a boy who never grew up, wrote the charming plays in which she was best --The Little Minister, Quality Street, What Every Woman Knows, A Kiss for Cinderella, and above all, Peter Pan. She became the goddess of a nationwide cult, a decorous pin-up in saloons and glittering restaurants. President Taft, like thousands of other people, kept her picture in his study.

It was not so much her acting that excited audiences; there were dozens of contemporaries who were better actresses, including Sarah Bernhardt. Ellen Terry, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Nor was it her looks: she was, if anything, plain, with large, astonished eyes and a nose slightly off-center. The magic seemed to be in her gentle, fluty voice and in her personality --the curious way she had of tossing her head or motioning imploringly to the audience. Through the tumult of her success, she remained as elusive as Tinker Bell. She had few close friends, was rarely seen in public off stage. At one time, overwork broke her health, and she found rest in a Roman Catholic convent in France (she was a nondenominational Christian). She lived there in a white-walled, cell-like room, which she later had reproduced in her own palatial Long Island home.

Precious Things. On the eve of World War I, the twinkle of her star began to fade. Frohman went to his death on the Lusitania. Barrie wrote no more plays for her. There were a few revivals, one or two new plays, a radio program or two. She spent a year in General Electric's laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y., experimenting with new ideas on stage lighting. For five years she taught drama at Missouri's Stephens College. She even tried lecturing (said she in Manhattan's Town Hall in 1939: "Emotions are the nicest things we have . . . and the most dangerous").

She never married, turned over her Long Island estate to an order of Roman Catholic nuns, and lived quietly with a companion, Margaret McKenna, in a house in New York's Catskill Mountains. Greying heads never forgot her. Wrote Critic Alexander Woollcott in 1940: "I can recall her every intonation, her every gesture, her every bit of business . . . Maude Adams in The Little Minister! Bless me! I still can hear the music of her laughter as she danced in the moonlight [and] see the toss of her head in the firelight in Nanny Webster's cottage . . . Maude Adams in The Little Minister . . . 'What a time of years! What a time of years!' ':

One day last week the aged actress lay down on a couch in her home and called to her friend: "I don't feel so good, Miss McKenna. Don't go away from me." A little while later, Maude Adams, at 80, was dead.

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