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| Maxine Elliott (1873-1940) |
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In Press and Literature |
The Theatre - VOL. III., No. 33, New York, November, 1903.
Beautiful Maxine Elliott: An Interview
Chats with Players No. 22
In her serene, statuesque beauty, Maxine Elliott reminds one of the straight, majestic pine trees of her native Maine. Someone who sat watching her in "Her Own Way," at the Garrick the night when, with signal success, she made her first appearance as a star, remarked cleverly that she was a Venus de Milo with arms.
But the actress herself, like most handsome women who also possess brains, deprecates and even resents the attention and admiration her beauty excites. She who has been called the most beautiful woman in the world regards mere beauty with contempt. In her opinion, she has assets more valuable than her good looks. For instance, she has mentality, temperament, repose and ambition.
"Beauty is only a fifth wheel," she said seriously to the writer one morning shortly after her first appearance at the Garrick, and unsmilingly and with earnestness she proceeded to elucidate this queer text, declaring herself weary of the eternal subject of beauty, almost ashamed of it, this thing for the possession of which most women would lay down their lives.
"It is of no help to a woman at the beginning of her career," she said. "On the contrary, it is a positive hindrance to be a so-called stage beauty. It challenges attention and one's poor beginnings as an artist stand out the more glaringly because of the prominence one would so gladly escape during those first two or three years.
"If," she continued, "the young actress have the other things needful for success, and after years of work and waiting attain success, then good looks do not stand in her way. They may even be a little help. But at best beauty is only a fifth wheel. You have but to look at the successful women of the stage to prove this. They are plain almost without exception! It is in the choruses of the extravaganzas that you find the real professional beauties. They are the peers of any beauty in the world, but their beauty alone without talent and determination and work will never get them out of the chorus. Really, it is, as I said, a fifth wheel."
Miss Elliott was bowling gently along Fifth Avenue in her automobile as she spoke, and her progress was in the nature of a triumphal march. Men and women, forgetting amenities in their admiration, craned their necks and leaned from their carriages. The words "Maxine Elliott", alternated with "Isn't she beautiful?", were forming in foolish pantomime on busy lips beneath staring eyes, but upon them all the dark, lovely profile turned in serene unconsciousness.
Had any ripple of vanity ever stirred the calm depths of this woman's soul? It was doubtful. One might imagine the youthful, strong Maxine Elliott, fifteen years back, gazing into her mirror, indifferently estimating her loveliness as a possible factor in the assets of a future stage career. It is conceivable, too, that she may have graciously smiled at the rapturous admiration of a lover. But the joy which comes with the sudden knowledge of the power of beauty she has probably never known, or long ago forgotten.
It seemed trivial to speak to this fine, unconscious creature of dress, and yet it was a logical step after discussing beauty. This subject she dismissed as briefly: "It is merely a question of individual taste and appropriateness. The colors and the lines which throw our best points into relief are the best for us. Personally, I prefer neutral colors. White is lovely."
But when the conversation turned upon success, and the influences that work for success on the stage, her well-bred indifference and reserve were thrown off like a discarded mantle. She faced about, her luminous brown eyes fixed on her interlocutor in eager interrogation.
"Who knows how one grows in art," she said. "There is a great deal of nonsense written about how this player was coached by that player. No one can teach another how to act. The only way to learn how to act is to go and act. That is all. Mr. Goodwin never taught me anything. He may have inspired me to do my best, as many actors have done, but those of us who succeed on the stage owe our success to the development of whatever there is within us." She crossed her hands upon her bosom in sudden dramatic gesture. "If it is here, no one can develop it but one's self."
Miss Elliott is as shy as a robin when the conversation grows personal. After something which resembled coaxing she said at last with hesitancy: "I don't know that one quite realizes a sudden success. When you have been working for a success for years, and hope and believe you deserve it, and at last it comes, I am not sure that one cares so very much after all, at least just at first. One is so tired after the monotony of weeks of rehearsal, and the torture of the first night. A reaction comes and with it a feeling akin to indifference. I have been so anxious about my voice, too. I found myself whispering my lines at the third performance so that I have hardly had time to think of the reception I had. But the critics were most kind.
"The price of it all," she added gravely, "was work and determination," and as she spoke there was, in the rigid straightening of her figure, a suggestion of the lofty pines of her native Maine. "The beginnings were hard, of course. Are they not always hard? I met with the usual discouragements, but," she smiled, "they never embittered me. I do not believe there was a time in the past five years when I could not have played this part in "Her Own Way," as well. You see, heretofore I have been playing small parts. It was no one's fault. I was playing with my husband and the parts that fell to me happened to be small. Audiences are not very discriminating, and a person who plays a long part badly is likely to receive more attention and even more praise than one who plays a small part well. Achievement is often only a question of opportunity. My opportunity came. That was all."
We talked of Richard Mansfield's published conceit that, looking out over the footlights, the audience seemed to him a great, black monster which he fed nightly, and which when the time came that he could no longer feed it enough, nor what it wanted, would turn and rend him.
"It was clever, wasn't it?" said the actress. She was dreamily thoughtful now and her dark eyes followed the farthest lines of the tree tops of Central Park. "He is right," she added. "An audience is something to be feared. No one who has not acted knows the exquisite torture, the positive bodily fear, of a first night performance. I always feel like a child afraid of a steam engine."
We touched upon the semi-superstition that players attach to parts and lines. An actress once said that misfortune always followed her acting a role in the old play "The Cherry Pickers". Another had been voluble about certain lines involving all of her philosophy of life. "One's philosophy of living," remarked Miss Elliott, "is more or less unconscious. I don't believe I could express mine. Certainly no line of a play ever quite covered it."
The picture of the actress, in the scene in "The Altar of Friendship," - her head erect, her eyes flashing, delivering the speech that was an arraignment of all men and a bitter sarcasm upon the double standard of morality for the sexes, had always remained vivid in the writer's mind.
"Once there was a man and his name was Adam," we prompted. Miss Elliott laughed. "I am sorry, but I can't remember any more of the speech myself. I forget lines as soon as I stop playing the part. They would only come back to me if I rehearsed the entire scene with someone. When studying a new part," she continued, "I read the whole play to get the general effect and the sense of proportion before rehearsals begin. I have a wholesome, and long-nurtured respect for the stage manager. Clyde Fitch is an ideal stage manager. The way he handled the children in 'Her Own Way' was marvelous. I never begin studying my lines before we begin rehearsals, because I don't want to have any preconceived ideas that might not agree with the stage manager's. If, for instance, I had gotten it into my mind that I should stand on the right of the stage while reading a certain line, and the stage manager should think I ought to stand on the left, there would be a kind of mental jolt in readjusting my ideas to his standard, and there would be a loss of force."
Circumstances, the need of making a living, Miss Elliott explained, was her reason for going on the stage. She is the daughter of Capt. Thomas McDermott, a sea captain, and a voyage with him to South America is one of her earliest recollections.
There was no ancestral predilection for the stage to account for her choice of it?
"Oh, dear no!" she laughed, "Puritan ancestors on both sides forbid that. I had a grandmother whose name was Hate Evil Hall, and the women of the family were all Patiences or Prudences or Hopes. No, there was nothing in the environment of Rockland, Me., to make me want to go on the stage, unless it was the impelling force of contrast." An interesting fact is that through one of these Patiences or Prudences, Miss Elliott is distantly related to her own husband.
By this time we had reached the home of Mr. and Mrs. Nat C. Goodwin for the brief time they are in New York, a five-story brick house at No. 326 West End Ave., the facade of which is nearly covered with reddening English ivy. Past the door where Sport, an English bull terrier, so ugly that he must have an inestimable pedigree, gave his mistress a noisy welcome, through the ample reception room with its tones of oak and dull yellow and blue, upstairs and past the drawing-room where roses were everywhere, and Miss Elliott stopped before a door. A sacred hush now fell upon us in obedience to the finger upon her lip.
"She's asleep," whispered the actress, "but I'll show her to you. I'm taking care of her while my sister, Mrs. Forbes Robertson, is travelling. She is two years old and is named after me." She opened the door softly and we tip-toed across the floor to the lace-covered crib. A little brown-haired beauty lay with her delicate, olive profile outlined against the white pillow, her round arm curved above her head. Maxine I. softly drew down Maxine II.'s arm and tucked it under the cover. "Her eyes are blue," said the actress, "but excepting that, they say she looks like me. Do you think so?"
There was an anxious query in her eyes. So much so, indeed, that even Miss Elliott's expression was there, reflected in the face of the sleeping child, a look not of hauteur, though it might be mistaken for that, not sternness, but the inherent, conscious strength of the Maine pine.
Downstairs we talked of Maxine II.'s mother, who was Gertrude Elliott. "Yes, I am prouder of her career than of my own. There is more to be proud of; I've always taken care of her. There are only six years and eight months difference in our ages, but I have always felt more like a mother than a sister toward her."
The strong face had grown gravely sweet under the spell of affectionate memories. Why had she fallen into the head class of women? Or why hadn't that mellow philosopher, Oliver Wendell Holmes, added the soul class, when he said that there were two types of women - those with heads and the others with hearts? Maxine Elliott has a heart assuredly, though she does not adorn her sleeve nor embroider her utterances with it, and the oliveskinned baby upstairs and her brilliant mother nearly, if not quite, fill it.
"We spend four months a year in England, at our place, 'Jackwood'. We go for rest, and to see the new plays, and because England is now my sister's home. No, indeed! That does not detract from my Americanism. Once truly an American, especially of the Down East sort, always an American."
Of society and study as influences of an actress's art she had this to say: "It is all a matter of temperament. Some need more of one, some the other. When I am playing I don't go out. In the summer, though, while I am relaxing I enjoy it. Perhaps you will not think my ambition a great one. I want to entertain the public and that with modern plays. No, it is not true that I have Rosalind in view. I want to appear in the best modern plays I can get, and to act them as well as it is in me to do."
The question of "Minerva's Choice" came up. "If you might choose love or fame or power, which would be your choice?" With her marked preference for the third person as opposed to the first, Miss Elliott said: "Everyone will choose that which he has not. The unattainable is what is sought. That is human nature. It is life." Of friends she said: "We do not love them for the traits or qualities they have, but for what they are to us. In general, my friends are professionals. That is natural, for we, as it were, speak the same language. But my dearest friend happens to be a nonprofessional."
"I am more interested in people than in anything else in the world," she added, with grave sweetness. The expression still lingered as we looked back, and again there returned the thought of the supreme self-reliance, the courage and the sheltering strength of the sturdy pines of her native Maine.
ADA PATTERSON.