An actor's life

Footlights and Spotlights, Otis Skinner

My interest in the American theatrical family the Skinners continues.  I'm glad, though, that I read Cornelia Otis Skinner's Family Circle before reading this, her father's account of his acting career over almost fifty years.  As his daughter does, Skinner describes his family and his early life growing up in Massachusetts and Connecticut.  On a visit to New York City, his brother took him to a performance of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and while absorbed in the play he suddenly realized, like a religious conversion, that acting would be his life's work, his vocation.

It wasn't easy for a small-town boy to break into acting, even in the 1870s.  A letter of recommendation from his father's former parishioner, P.T. Barnum, finally got him a place at a struggling Philadelphia theater as a general utility man, playing different characters every day and scrambling to learn new parts between each performance. From there, Skinner would move on to increasingly distinguished companies, and he would also organize his own companies, taking them on grueling road tours across the United States.

The subtitle of this book, "Recollections of My Life on the Stage," perfectly describes it.  It is an account of actors and theaters and plays, a true theatrical history.  Reading this, I realized how little I know about the literature of the drama.  I didn't even recognize the names of most of the playwrights, let alone their works.  Skinner pays tribute to the managers and actors with whom he worked, especially those who helped his career, and he is generous even to those with whom he disagreed and parted company.  Two extended sections discuss Edwin Booth, whom Skinner greatly admired, including an eerie account of Booth burning a trunk of costumes and properties belonging to his brother, the Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

This is a book about the theater, and it includes very little of his life outside the theater.  It was Cornelia's book that provided much of the context and fleshed out some of the stories.  Otis briefly describes his parents in a couple of pages; he does not even mention a sister who died in infancy. Cordelia recounts the death and its effects on the family. The sight of his father pacing the house, clutching his sister's tiny body, taught Otis "that his Olympian father was capable of profound emotion," while his mother "bore the tragedy with desperate stoicism."  Otis discusses at length his tenure with the Augustin Daly company, one of the most distinguished in New York in the 1880s.  He mentions the temperamental star, Ada Rehan, but it is Cornelia who explains that her volatile liaison with the married Augustin Daly caused many of the problems in the company.  His wife Maude Durbin generally appears only in the context of her acting career, and there are only three references to Cornelia.

Skinner's book was published in 1923.  Cornelia published Family Circle in 1948, after the death of both her parents.  The greater frankness of her book may reflect a different attitude toward biography and autobiography, in the changes those 25 years brought.  Of course, hers is also a family's story, rather than an individual's.  I'm glad to have read Footlights and Spotlights, but in the end it's the Skinners themselves that interest me, more than the theater, and it's Family Circle that I will re-read, with pleasure.

A great theatrical family

Family Circle, Cornelia Otis Skinner

I can't remember the first time I read Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough.  It had to be thirty years ago or more.  I've read it so many times over the years that I can visualize some of my favorite scenes, like Cornelia and Emily's arrival at the Trocadero in London, wrapped in their new, tent-sized white rabbit evening cloaks. Emerging from their taxi in billows of white fur, they discover Cornelia's father helpless with laughter. "'Oh my God!' he managed to choke forth. 'How could you get so many rabbits?'"  I never really thought much about Cornelia's parents, they were there in the background for help with bedbugs and financial crises.

I picked up Family Circle at Half Price Books a few years ago, because it was written by Cornelia Otis Skinner (my copy, which may be a first edition, is even autographed).  But it sat on the TBR pile for years, until this past week, when for some reason I took it off the pile and sat down with it.  I found it a bit slow going at first, as it starts with a biography of Cornelia's mother, Maud Durbin, who grew up in a large family under unstable conditions, with an alcoholic and often absent father.  Maud, who showed talent in private theatricals, wanted a career in the theater, and she found a mentor in the Polish actress Helena Modjeska.  And by the point that Maud joined her theater company, I realized that I was reading in part a history of American theater.

This wasn't a subject I know much about, except for the tragedy of the Booth family.  That's pretty clear by the fact that I never realized who exactly Cornelia's father Otis Skinner was.  The second strand of Cornelia's book is his story, how a Unitarian minister's son became one of America's great actors, in a career spanning fifty years. Otis Skinner was often under contract to theater companies, like Helena Modjeska's, where he met Maud in 1893 (it was mutual indifference at first sight).  But between seasons, he loved to tour, despite the hardships of travel and the primitive conditions of many local theaters.  This part of the story reminded me so much of other well-loved books, Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series.  Touring companies bring excitement and glamour to Deep Valley, Minnesota, in the 1910s, and there is even a reference to Otis Skinner in the books; and Cornelia quoted a letter from her father dated from Mankato, the real-life Deep Valley.

Cornelia herself entered the story she was writing a third of the way into the book, when it became the family's story.  Maud retired from the stage at that point, and she made a home with Cornelia while Otis continued his career.  At times mother and daughter joined him on tour, and the three also traveled to Europe for work and pleasure.  All three of them were such high characters, and Cornelia a most unusual child, that there is so much humor just in their daily lives.

Maud had many great plans for Cornelia's future, none of them involving a career on the stage.  Cornelia, who had a firm conviction that she going on the stage, never bothered to argue with her about it. Otis supported her decision, gave her much wise counsel, and arranged her debut in New York in one of his plays.  The book ends after she takes a curtain call with him, then retreats to the wings to watch as he returns to take still more.

I finished the book last night feeling very much part of their family circle, and wanting to know more, what happened next.  I did learn that Our Hearts Were Young and Gay takes place the year following, and I knew I'd need to read it again, now that Maud and Otis have become so real to me, much more than just the parents in the background, the supporting characters.