VARIOUS LETTERS AND INCIDENTS OF 1905.

In June, 1905, Belasco, accompanied by Mr. Roeder, sailed for England, his purpose being to purchase, if possible, or else to arrange to build, a theatre for his own use in London,—as Daly had done many years before. This ambitious project, however, proved impracticable of execution and, though he has never finally abandoned it, he found himself forced by circumstances to set it aside and he soon returned to America. While he was in England the subject of his fight against the dominion of the Syndicate was discussed in various newspapers: in one of them I find the following letter:

Soon after his return to New York Belasco received a message from the great singer Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who had been much impressed by his presentment of Warfield in “The Music Master,” who desired to adventure on the dramatic stage, and who proposed that Belasco should undertake her management and write a play for her use. This he gladly agreed to do, and the play, which was to have been a sort of sister piece to “The Music Master” and was to have been called “The Opera Singer,” was planned and in part written; but the demands on Belasco’s energies and time were more than any one person could meet and he was regretfully forced to relinquish that project. “It hurt me to let go,” he said: “I had a good story. Mme. Schumann-Heink had great natural talent for acting, and I believe that if I could have carried it through, working in a tremendous scene for her, as a singer on the opera stage, we should have set the country wild. But—there is a limit, and I was pretty near to mine, so that little scheme went up in smoke!”

The following letters all are characteristic of Belasco in varying moods:

TRIBUTE TO IRVING.

BLANCHE BATES AND “THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST.”

Belasco’s stirring play of “The Girl of the Golden West” was first produced at the new Belasco Theatre, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on October 3, 1905. It is a fabric of situations contrived for the advantageous display of that old, familiar, everlasting, always effective theatrical personage, the Rough Diamond. The Girl was beautiful, intrepid, passionate, vivacious; the soul of innocence; the incarnation of virtue; the blooming rose of vigorous health; and she could swear fluently, play cards, and shoot to kill. She kept a drinking shop, she was adored by all “the boys”; and the fame of her probity and her many fascinations filled the countryside of California, in the halycon days of ’49. That fortunate State, according to the testimony of novelists and bards, was densely populated at that time by girls of this enchanting order; but this particular Girl seems to have transcended all rivals. She was beloved by a picturesque and expeditious outlaw, Dick Johnson, known as Ramirez, who had gained brilliant renown by means of highway robbery, and likewise she was beloved by the local Sheriff, Jack Rance, a grim, obnoxious officer, self-dedicated to the wicked business of causing that outlaw’s arrest and death. Both those lovers were ardent, and, between those two fires, her situation was difficult; but she always rose to the occasion, and when her outlaw was entrapped by his pursuer the ingenuity of her love and the dexterity of her stratagem delivered him from bondage, and, upon his promise of reformation and integrity, launched him upon a new and better career. The most conspicuous display of her passionate devotion and adroit skill occurred on a night when he was captured in her dwelling. The circumstances were essentially dramatic,—because the Girl and her favored swain were storm-bound in a mountain cabin, whither the Sheriff had tracked his prey; and the robber had been shot and wounded, so that there seemed to be no method of escape for him, till the Girl proposed a game of poker with his foe, staking herself against the liberty of her sweetheart, and won it by successful emulation of the Heathen Chinee,—substituting “an ace full” for an empty hand, at the decisive moment.

There came a time, however, when even Love could do no more; but at that crisis Fate interposed, in the shape of Public Opinion,—that is to say, the friendship of “the boys,”—and the Girl and her lover were united.

The condition of California in 1849 was, to say the least of it, turbulent. Some parts of that State are in a turbulent condition now. Groups of “the boys” can still be discovered. They are not paragons, though, and they never were. The existence of good impulses in uncouth persons does not make them less uncouth. Fine qualities can, and do, exist in beings who are unfamiliar with soap and the toothbrush; but it would seem that the study of human nature can be pursued, more agreeably than elsewhere, among saponaceous branches of the race. It is more pleasant to read about “the boys” than it is to see them. But, broadly speaking, in Belasco’s drama the Girl is the play, and with Miss Bates as the Girl there was little more to be desired. Shorn of all extraneous fringes—variously impious, improper, vulgar, and offensive interjections of profanity and violent expletive—the play is the image of a lovely, impetuous woman’s devotion to her lover,—a devotion that is shown in a series of actions by her to save him from danger and ruin and to make him happy. Feminine heroism is the theme, and the Girl selected to exemplify it is meant to be “a child of nature,” simple, direct, and true—and Belasco was entirely accurate when he wrote that the part fitted the actress for whom he made it from her head to her feet. Given the specified ideal to interpret, Miss Bates placed her reliance on Acting, and there were moments in her performance,—as, for example, in the First Act, as the Girl speaks of the protective instinct in the heart of woman,—when the soul that showed itself in her face was beatific. She gave, throughout, a personation of extraordinary variety and strength. In the situations devised for the heroine,—situations, which, while not radically new, are ingeniously contrived and are fraught with the dominant spell of suspense,—the actress had to express the growth of love; the blissful sense of being loved; the bitter pangs of jealousy; the passionate resentment of a heart that thinks itself betrayed and wronged by the object of its love; the conflict of anger with affection; the apprehension of deadly peril, and the nobility of self-conquest. The exaction of the part is tremendous, equally upon physical resource and nervous vitality, but, at every point, it was met and satisfied. The play exemplifies its author’s remarkable faculty of continuation in the making of characteristic dialogue, together with ample felicity of invention, and it is overlaid with profusion of details. The midnight tryst of the Girl and the Road Agent is not altogether a credible device, but, once assumed and arranged, that situation,—comprehending the outlaw’s detection, as such, by the Girl, the awakening of furious jealousy, her turning him out into the storm, her subsequent harboring of him, and the game of cards with the outlaw’s life and liberty staked against the Girl’s whole future,—is handled with consummate skill and moulded to splendid results, and there the acting of Miss Bates rose to a magnificent climax of emotion, fully expressed and yet artistically controlled and directed,—a triumph of intellectual purpose.

This was the original cast of “The Girl of the Golden West”:

A THRILLING STORY—AND A TRUE ONE.

One of the most tense and effective passages in contemporary drama is that contrived by Belasco, in this play, when the Sheriff detects the concealment of the Road Agent, Johnson, in the Girl’s home. Through the swirling snow he has caught a glimpse of a man’s figure near to the cabin of the Girl, has shot at it, and has, in fact, hit and grievously wounded Johnson, who has then been given refuge in the cabin and concealed by the Girl in a low loft. Rance, having come to the cabin and been assured that nobody is concealed there, is about to leave. He goes toward the door, he is about to open it and step out, but turns to speak to the Girl, holding a white handkerchief with which he has wiped the snow from his face; as he does so, a drop of blood falls from the helpless wounded man above him upon the handkerchief, then another,—and Rance, watching the little crimson stain grow, instantly comprehends. Belasco, referring to this device, which, obviously, is as simple and as possible as it is effective but which was somewhat censured by captious fault-finders, writes this interesting account of its origin:

A MASTERPIECE OF STAGECRAFT: THE STORM IN “THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST.”

Considered technically, Belasco’s production of “The Girl of the Golden West” was a genuine masterpiece of stagecraft, and it is specially memorable for the perfect example it exhibited of the right use of “realism” in the Theatre,—the use, in this instance, of an artfully created and perfect semblance of Nature in one of her wildest, most terrible moods as a background,—always felt, yet never obtruded,—for dramatic action the effect of which it steadily augmented and enforced. Nothing of the kind which I have ever seen in the Theatre has fully equalled in verisimilitude the blizzard on Cloudy Mountain as depicted by Belasco in the Second Act of this fine melodrama—such a bitter and cruel storm of wind-driven snow and ice as he had often suffered under in the strolling days of his nomadic youth. When the scene, the interior of the Girl’s log-cabin, was disclosed the spectators perceived, dimly, through windows at the back, a far vista of rugged, snow-clad mountains which gradually faded from vision as the fall of snow increased and the casements became obscured by sleet. Then, throughout the progress of the action, intensifying the sense of desolation, dread, and terror, the audience heard the wild moaning and shrill whistle of the gale, and at moments, as the tempest rose to a climax of fury, could see the fine-powdered snow driven in tiny sprays and eddies through every crevice of the walls and the very fabric of the cabin quiver and rock beneath the impact of terrific blasts of wind,—long-shrieking down the mountain sides before they struck,—while in every fitful pause was audible the sharp click-click-click of freezing snow driving on wall and window.

The means by which this effect of storm was produced could easily be specified and described; in themselves they are as simple as those employed by Belasco to make the almost equally impressive tempest in “Under Two Flags”: but it is a capital mistake to take the public behind the scenes of the Theatre and thus uncover the very heart of the players’ mystery and destroy illusion. In this instance it is enough to say, as revealing Belasco’s liberality, thoroughness, and care in placing his plays before the public, that operation of the necessary mechanical contrivances required a force of thirty-two trained artisans,—a sort of mechanical orchestra, directed by a centrally placed conductor who was visible from the special station of every worker. And it will, perhaps, be usefully suggestive to misguided exponents of literal “spontaneity” in Acting to mention that the perfectly harmonious effect of this remarkable imitation of a storm necessitated that at every performance exactly the same thing should be done on the stage at, to the second, exactly the prearranged instant.

A pleasing device utilized by Belasco in the investiture of this melodrama was a variant of the long familiar panorama which, moving from bottom to top of the stage, instead of across it from one side to the other, showed, first, a beautiful and romantic view of Cloudy Mountain and of the Girl’s cabin, perched, like an eyrie, high upon a canyon’s side; next, a winding mountain path leading down to a settlement and ending outside her saloon, the Polka: then, in a fleeting instant of darkness, the scene was changed to the interior of that saloon, where the action of the play begins. In this production, also, Belasco banished the usual orchestra and substituted for it a band of homely instruments,—the concertina, the banjo, and “the bones” of the old-time minstrels,—which discoursed such old, once familiar but now long-forgotten, airs as “Coal Oil Tommy,” “Campdown Races,” “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,” “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and “Old Dog Tray.”

THE PARTING OF BLANCHE BATES AND BELASCO.—“THE FIGHTING HOPE” AND “NOBODY’S WIDOW.”

“The Girl of the Golden West” proved to be as successful as its author had expected: also, greatly to the disadvantage of the public, it proved to be the last important production in which, down to the present day (1917), Blanche Bates has appeared,—although she continued to act under the management of Belasco for about seven years. Three of those years were devoted to “The Girl,” which was presented throughout the country. Then, September 7, 1908, at the Belasco Theatre, Washington, Miss Bates was brought out in a new play by Mr. William J. Hurlbut, entitled “The Fighting Hope,” which was acted in New York, September 22, at the Stuyvesant Theatre. It held the stage there until January 16, 1909; was transferred to the Belasco Theatre, January 18, and remained visible there until April 10. This was the cast:

“The Fighting Hope” served as a professional vehicle for Miss Bates during two seasons. On October 24, 1910, at the Euclid Avenue Opera House, Cleveland, Ohio, Belasco presented her in “Nobody’s Widow,” by Mr. Avery Hopwood: that play was first acted in New York, November 14, that year, at the Hudson Theatre, with the following cast:

Both those plays, though they enjoyed profitable careers, were, in fact, stop-gaps: they had never been produced but that “the strong necessity of the times enforced”: “Blanche wanted to appear in ‘drawing-room’ drama,” Belasco has said to me; “I was hard pressed and I took what I could get.” Both those plays owed their profitable careers entirely to Belasco,—to his unremitting and unacknowledged diligence in the labor of revising them and making them feasible for stage use and to the perfection of detail with which he invested their production and caused them to be acted. A whimsical remark which he once made to me, in conversation about another play, applies with force to both these ventures: “I have,” he said, “first and last, paid many authors handsome royalties for the privilege of working like a slave on their plays, without credit and generally without thanks, and making them into popular successes. Each time I have solemnly sworn I’ll never do it again—yet, somehow, I do! But I live in hope that some day somebody will bring me a finished play that only needs production.”

“The Fighting Hope,” even as rectified and notwithstanding its measure of popular success, was but a flimsy fabric,—crude in construction and improbable in plot, though at times theatrically effective. In it is displayed an experience of a loyal wife, Anna Granger, who clings to “the fighting hope” of vindicating her husband and rescuing him from the consequences of crime. That husband, a peculiarly contemptible scoundrel, has been detected in a forgery; has been tried, convicted, and imprisoned. His wife, believing him to be innocent and the victim of Burton Temple, president of a fiduciary institution, obtains employment in the service of that person and becomes his confidential secretary. In that capacity, after discovering and shamefully destroying a letter which establishes the guilt of her husband, she discovers, also, that she is beloved by Temple and that a reciprocal sentiment is developing in her own bosom. And then, having confessed her identity, her wrong conduct, and her regard, she is relieved from a distressing dilemma by the convenient taking off of her husband,—who, having escaped from the State Prison at Sing Sing, is overtaken, shot, and killed by officers of the law who pursue him. In the hands of any other manager than Belasco, instead of enduring for two years, this piece—if it had ever been produced at all—would have been relegated to the regions of tall timber and high grass within a fortnight.

“Nobody’s Widow” is an ephemeral farce, the central idea of which is denial of an established relationship in circumstances which might cause absurd perplexities and ridiculous consequences,—such, in general character, as ensue when Charles Courtly, in “London Assurance,” on being introduced to his father, Sir Harcourt, blandly greets him as a new acquaintance. The chief female character, Roxana, acted by Miss Bates, has, in Europe, met and married a “Mr. Clayton,” who, actually, is an English nobleman, the Duke of Moreland; but having, on their wedding-day, found him in the embrace of a former mistress, Roxana has repudiated and left him,—privately instituting proceedings for divorce, and presently apprising her friends in America that her husband, of whom they have heard, but only by his assumed name of Clayton, is dead, and that she, accordingly, is a widow. Later she visits some of those friends at Palm Beach, Florida, and there she is, by chance, confronted by her husband, then a visitor to the same hostess, but bearing his right name. Roxana’s husband endeavors to reinstate himself in her affections, but, persistently and with alternate pleasantry and sarcasm, he is treated by her as an accidental acquaintance. Roxana assures him that, as “Mr. Clayton” he is “dead”; that she has never seen him before; that to her he is, as the Duke of Moreland, nobody; that she is nobody’s widow. That attitude she maintains until apprised of her divorce, when she becomes conscious of a sudden access of tenderness for him;

and, eventually,—though not until after various trips and stumbles on the track of reconciliation,—she first allows herself to be again married to him, and then allows herself to be convinced of his honest intentions and the sincerity of his love. A farce is well enough in its way: but to record industry of such a manager as Belasco and such an actress as Blanche Bates in such stuff as “Nobody’s Widow” is only to record wasted opportunity and disappointed expectation. In conversation with me Belasco has once or twice intimated some thought of proposing the resumption of Miss Bates’ management: it might be greatly to the public gain if that actress should return to his direction; but, while I earnestly hope it may come about, I do not believe it ever will:

A GREAT NIGHT.—BELASCO AT THE METROPOLITAN.—A GENEROUS ACKNOWLEDGMENT.

During the season of 1906-’07 Belasco’s friend the Italian musical composer Puccini, who desired to write an opera on a characteristically American subject, made a visit to our country for the purpose of selecting one. While in New York, in January, 1907, he attended performances by Miss Frances Starr in “The Rose of the Rancho” and by Miss Bates in “The Girl,”—at the Academy of Music. After considerable cogitation his choice fell upon the latter, and while travelling to his home in Italy he wrote the following letter to Belasco:

Puccini’s wish was immediately complied with, and upon the basis of Belasco’s melodrama he wrote his opera of “La Fanciulla del West,”—which was sung, in Italian, “for the first time on any stage,” December 10, 1910, at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York: the libretto was “arranged” by

Signori G. Zangarini and C. Civinni: it is, substantially, a translation, until the last act, when a scene is introduced showing the imminent lynching of Johnson by “the boys” in a convenient grove of redwood trees and his rescue by the Girl. This scene, as I understand, was originally planned by Belasco for use in his play but was by him discarded. “La Fanciulla del West” was sung for the first time by an extraordinary cast, which should be recorded. This is it:

Belasco felt profound interest in the production of his friend’s opera and directed many of the rehearsals, intent, as he has declared, “to make the artists act as well as sing.” That, doubtless, was a laudable ambition,—but, practically, it is, in the very nature of things, impossible of fulfilment, whether by Belasco or another. Opera singers may be, indeed, frequently are, dramatic in temperament: they are not and can not simultaneously be excellent as actors and as singers. Sometimes a comparatively poor singer becomes, in opera, a tolerably good actor,—but that is the limit of achievement in this direction. True impersonation, as made known on the dramatic stage,—in, for example, Forrest’s Othello, Davenport’s Macbeth, Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle, Barrett’s Cassius, Irving’s Mephistopheles,—never has been and never can be displayed on the operatic stage.

Talking with me about the first performance of this opera, Belasco said: “It was a great night for me, and I took unbounded pleasure in it and felt much honored when I found myself taking curtain calls with the author, Toscanini, Gatti-Casazza, Caruso, Miss Destinn, and the rest. Puccini, as always, was simple and frankly demonstrative in his delight. The singers were all wild with enthusiasm—I was never so much be-kissed in my life!—but I think I was, perhaps, most interested in that wonderful man Arturo Toscanini. He seemed to me one of those self-contained fellows—calm on the surface but burning white-hot inside. To me it was thrilling to watch him conduct, and he did so at that first performance without a score, as though the work were a classic long familiar to him and held in memory.”

Belasco’s labor on the production of “La Fanciulla” was wholly one of love, as he declined to accept any payment for all his arduous work at rehearsals. In the programme of the first performance appeared a notice saying: “The Metropolitan Opera Company desires to make public acknowledgment of its indebtedness, and to express its cordial thanks, to Mr. David Belasco for his most valuable and kind assistance in the stage production of ‘The Girl of the Golden West.’” And among his most cherished possessions is a sumptuous album containing signed portraits of all the principal singers who participated in the opera, as well as of Puccini, Toscanini, and Gatti-Casazza, together with an exquisitely illuminated copy of the programme on vellum and an appreciative inscription, also illuminated on vellum. This gracious token was taken to Belasco’s studio and delivered to him by a committee, representing the opera company, composed of Messrs. Otto Kahn, Henry Rogers Winthrop, Robert Goelet, and John Brown.

BELASCO AND THE MESSRS. SHUBERT.