Why, the blonde fever in New York was as big a thing in its way as the California gold fever, or the war fever, or bounty jumpin’, or the draft riots, or the Tammany ring, and is worth a place in these reminiscences of New York durin’ the last generation.
Sam Colville, the manager, was “in” with this blonde burlesque business from the start, Sam is a good fellow, and a very honest man for a manager, has always tried to pay his debts dollar for dollar, and is a pretty good business man in his way. He was never particularly “mashed ” on any particular blonde himself, which shows that he has a cool head, but always looked upon the whole thing, women and all, as a mere matter of business; and I have always noticed that whenever a man can come to look upon women as mere matters of business, it is so much the better both for the man and the business.
The town went wild when the blondes first came to New York. Not only the young men about town, but the old brokers and business men got an attack of the fever. They worshipped the blondes in New York as much as ever the Jews worshipped the golden calf in the desert, and with about as much reason. In fact, for the same reason—on account of their calves.
The blondes at first liked it; then they laughed at it; then at last it became a regular nuisance. The stage door was besieged by “spoons”; the blondes were, as it were, waylaid on their way to their coupes. Geese in coat-tails stood around the doors of the places where they boarded, pulled their door-bells, and sent ’em messages at all hours of the day or night, called on ’em at breakfast, dinner or supper—were worse than flies in August. or mosquitoes along the Jersey coast.
Smith, the door-man of old Niblo’s, used to be a great man in those days among the would-be mashers or “spoons,” who used to bother the life out of the blondes and the burlesquers. Smith was a good-natured, but rough-lookin’ man, who knew his business, and he knew just who to let in and just who to keep out, and bribes couldn’t fetch him, and threats couldn’t scare him. And he knew all the dodges that the boys were up to, to get in on to the stage, if they could. Smith could have made his salary every night in fees and perquisites if he had chosen to be careless. But then, sooner or later, he would have lost his place, for Jarrett and Palmer wouldn’t stand any foolin’ past a certain point.
There used to be a good deal happenin’ behind the scenes at old Niblo’s in those times, which has never been told and never will be. Once a friend of Palmer’s, a married man with a jealous wife, came round on the stage a good deal, and especially durin’ rehearsals, and flirted with the girls. One night he was havin’ a good time with a lot of the ballet girls who were seated on barrels, durin’ the preparations for one of the show pieces, and he was treatin’ ‘em to beer, when Jake Zimmerman, the treasurer, came along and called out to him, “Here comes your wife.” Now he had told his wife he would be detained at the office that night, so he thought Jake was foolin’ him, and he went on chinnin’ with the girls. Then Palmer came along and saw him and said, “Your wife has just come. Smith let her in, thinkin’ it would be all right.” He knew Palmer wasn’t foolin’, so he dismissed the girls in a hurry and hid himself in one of the barrels they had been seated on. His wife came along, accompanied by one of her male relatives as escort, and pretended that she had dropped in while passin’ just to see how a rehearsal looked, but said not a word about lookin’ for her husband. But she looked for him on the quiet, nevertheless, and she peered all around and finally tumbled to him in the barrel where he was hidin’ and pulled him up by the ear, with all the ballet-girls and scene-shifters and the whole gang just splittin’ with laughter. She scared him haft to death, and he went home the meekest man you ever saw. She weaned him of his fondness for blondes.
If the blondes had been wise they might hive feathered their nests; but one fact will show how little sensible use women make of the folly of men. Of all the blondes who have come from England to this country, only one has married well and settled down, and that is little Ada Harland, who married young Brander Matthews, son of the rich Matthews who formerly owned so much real estate in New York. Ada Harland was the most quiet and sensible of all the blondes; kept herself straight, supported her family, lived with her mother, refused all taffy, and got her reward by becomin’ the wife of a rich man’s son, and a man who is of some account in himself.
Pauline Markham was by far the best known of the blondes, and was at one time the rage in New York. She received seventeen offers of marriage in the first month–kept a register of ’em for that length of time and then stopped countin’ ‘em. Nor were all these offers of marriage from fools, either. One of ’em was from a young fellow in Brooklyn, whose father is now deep in the Brooklyn Bridge; and another of ‘em was from a Republican politician who has since married. Richard Grant White, the author, became a great admirer of Pauline Markham, and wrote about her “voice of vocal velvet,” and all that stuff; and one of the writers connected with Frank Leslie’s paper got “mashed” on her, and wrote what he called her autobiography, in winch he got up a story of Pauline declinin’ the advances of the Prince of Wales. This is the way Pauline is made to write of her interview with the prince in her book “I received him as a prince, but I repulsed him as a man,” whereas, the real truth is the Prince of Wales never saw Pauline Markham in the whole course of his life.
Pauline got a member of the Lotus Club called Elliot to publish her life for her, and it commenced to sell, and the papers commenced to “guy” it, and one of the New York papers called her “the Blameless Blonde.” But instead of seein’ an advertisement for her look in all this Pauline got mad, came out in a card. went back on her own life, disclaimed the book, and poor Elliot had to lose all the money invested in the enterprise. Pauline had a weak head but a good heart. Everybody about the theatre liked her, and the supers and scene shifters and call boys and stage hands were ready to fight for her at any minute. She always had a smile and glad word for ‘em and remembered ‘em all at Christmas, and when they were sick and in trouble she did what she could for ’em, both in the way of money and of kindness, but she played the deuce with her rivals and her managers.
She would always have the best of everythin’, and didn’t spare her tongue on anybody that came in her way. She and Liza Weber used to live at the same house, at Mrs. Marshall’s, in Fifteenth street, near Third avenue, and it was as good as a play to visit the two women there. Sometimes Markham and Weber would be friends, and then you’d find the two women visiting each other, with their arms round each other, and it was all “Liza, love,” and “Polly dear.” The next day there would be a row in the camp. Then you would stop at the first floor, occupied by Markham, and seein’ her alone you would ask “Where is Weber?” “Do you mean that creature upstairs?” Markham would say, with freezin’ dignity, cold enough to make a sherry cobbler with. And then, if you would go upstairs and ask Weber about Markham, she would say “Oh, you mean that thing downstairs,” and be as short as piecrust. Liza Weber was the jolliest girl of the whole party, and got along pretty well with the whole caboodle of ’em, except I.ydia Thompson. She and the Thompson woman hated each other as only two women in the same line of business can hate, and never had a decent word for each other. Thompson would have discharged Weber time and time again, but Weber was decidedly clever, and the blondes couldn’t have got along without her. Weber knew this and took advantage of it. One time at Niblo’s, in some burlesque, Weber had a song which brought her an encore every night, and kept Thompson waitin’. So Thompson gave orders to Oberti, the musical director, to cut the song. But Oberti was coaxed over by Weber, at any rate he forgot to do what Thompson told him. So she bounced on the stage the next night expectin’ to see Weber retire without her song in disgust, but to her own disgust and “mad” Weber went on with the song as usual, keepin’ her waitin on the stage without anythin’ to do or say while she sang it. Then, when the song was finished, Thompson burst in with the beginning of her speech, but the audience encored the song, and then Thompson had to stop again, and Weber went on with the encore, which she did so well, with some new jokes and business added, that the boys went wild, and made her sing it for the third time, makin’ Thompson so mad as nearly to spoil her actin’ the rest of the evenin’. Oh, there was “high jinks” behind the scenes between the acts that night.
As a rule, the blondes were not a happy family. Markham and Bessie Sudlow quarreled a good deal, and once, a pistol was drawn between ’em; they said it was a toy pistol, but it wasn’t.
Markham was jealous of Clara Lippincott, who led the Amazons in the “Black Crook.” Now, Clara couldn’t act worth a cent. She could do nothing but look amiable and swill beer. But she was very handsome, and had a magnificent figure. Her form was as good as Markham’s, while her face was better lookin’, so Markham made it as uncomfortable for Lippincott as possible.
This Lippincott girl was of good family in Philadelphia, connected with the Broome family, I believe, and really was a nice girl, kind to everybody and nobody’s enemy but her own. She afterward married a musician, I believe; a fellow who played the fiddle—fifth or sixth fiddle—in some orchestra. Liza Weber afterward married a musician named Mullaly, while Markham had a lot of adventures; sometimes rich and sometimes poor, sometimes sick and sometimes well, sometimes quite famous, sometimes quite obscure, trainin’ canary birds for a livin’, till at last she married some tall Englishman and went out West. As for Thompson, she was always in love with her husband, Henderson, though Henderson wasn’t always in love with her; in fact, Henderson, though an ugly, weazen-looking man, had the reputation of having more women “mashed” on him than any other man in America—not exceptin’ Harry Palmer.
Palmer and Jarrett, take it altogether, made perhaps the best theatrical team of managers in this country. Harry Palmer was a dandy, and one of the best judges of stage effect that ever came to New York, and he “bossed” rehearsals of his pieces in a way that was really wonderful. Hu believed in dress rehearsals, and all that; and the rehearsals of the “White Fawn” lasted from Saturday night at 12 o’clock till Tuesday evening at 7. During that time Harry Palmer never left the stage for over two hours at a time, and never allowed his people to leave the theatre at all. Some newspaper men and artists of picture papers were “locked in” during this “eternal rehearsal,” as one fellow called it, and although they had lots of fun and plenty to eat and drink brought to ’em from outside, they weren’t allowed to go out ’emselves. It was the longest rehearsal on record. Why, Harry Palmer did as much work in that one rehearsal as most managers do in a whole season, and did it well, too, though he was sick for some time afterwards. He was a delicate man off the stage, but a cast-iron man about the theatre.
Most managers don’t believe in allowin’ strangers or outsiders behind the scenes durin’ a performance, and I guess they are right. But Jarrett & Palmer, like Jim Fisk, availed ’emselves of their privileges as managers and allowed newspaper men and politicians, and their own personal friends, men about town, and distinguished strangers, on the stage durin’ the performance of the “Black Crook” and their other show pieces.
The way they worked the “Black Crook” on the stage was as well worth the seeing as the piece from the front; more so perhaps. Ben Sherwood, the master machinist, used to take pleasure in explainin’ the mysteries, though his men, if they didn’t happen to like the fellow, generally managed to make its “mysteries” pretty unpleasant for that fellow.
There was one such who used to come behind the scenes pretty often, who put on a heap of airs, and was downright impertinent, so the stage hands put their heads together and arranged a little racket. The snob came on the stage the night after this consultation, and somehow or other everythin’ went wrong for the snob. This scene ran against him, this flat hit him, that scene-shifter fell on him, another scene-shifter stumbled on his corns, he was knocked around and knocked down, and whirled about by the strangest of accidental (?) circumstances. He never saw anythin’ like it, exceptin’ on the next night after that again, when just the same series of accidents (?) occurred, till the snob took the hint and skedaddled, when, strange to say, all the machinery got workin’ smoothly again, just after he left.
Once a funny thing occurred behind the scenes that might have been still funnier. It was a wet, cold night, and a writer for one of the papers, with his overcoat on and his pants rolled up over his top boots, and an umbrella in his hand, and an old slouch hat on his head, stopped a moment to have a chat with Pauline Markham, who was playin’ Stalacta. Markham was waitin’ below the stage, standin’ on the trap that was to bounce her up into her fairy realm. The writer got talkin’ to Polly, and they got interested in the chat, and before they knew it the trap had begun to go up. Markham noticed it first, and cried to the reporter: “For heaven’s sake, get off!” but gettin’ off wasn’t as easily done as said. The reporter was pretty tall and very clumsy, and thoroughly scared, so he stood lookin’ about him like a fool— goin’ up, up, all the time. But Markham at last, and just at the last moment, too, gave the fellow a shove and knocked him off the trap. He struck his head against the floor of the stage and then tumbled down on a coil of rope. He might have broken his head, or his bones or his back, but he didn’t. But it was a mighty close shave, and Markham kept laughin’ to herself all the evenin’, thinkin’ how the audience would have roared to have seen that long, lank, slab-sided fellow, with his dirty, wet boots, and his rolled up breeches, and his slouch hat, and his old cotton umbrella, comin’up out of cloud-land alongside of her, in all her silks and satins and spangles and flesh-colored tights, ss the Queen of the Fairies.
Among other English beauties that were imported by Jarrett and Palmer was Kate Santley, who was a pretty girl with a good deal of nerve. She was sick, very sick, durin’ her voyage from Liverpool to New York, and landed in New York hardly able to stand up—in fact, not able. But they were waitin’ for her at rehearsal, and she drove right from the steamer to the theatre, rushed on the stage, went through part of her part, fainted on the stage, was brought to again, and then went through the rest of the rehearsal on her knees. One day, when Santlev was with one of her chums, a young man about town, chattin’ with him in the cosy little parlor on Thompson street that used to be occupied by Billy Cook before he fled from New York, a countryman of mine, who prided himself on being a high-toned critic of a leading daily, was announced.
Santley had never met him before, and was a little afraid of him. She had been told he was so high-toned and virtuous. So, as she had been havin’ a little breakfast with her “chum,” and had been discussin’ a brandy punch and some cigarettes, she swallowed the brandy to get it out of the way, replaced it with a mild-looking glass of milk, made the cigarettes vanish into a table drawer, and made her “chum” hide behind some big red curtains, and told him to keep still as death.
In comes the high-toned critic, and the “chum” held his breath, expectin’ to be bored by a prosy, high-toned talk, to which he would be compelled to listen, whereas he was never more amused, as well as astonished, in his life. For the high-toned critic, thinkin’ there was nobody around, of course, and seein’ Santley lookin’ charmin’, began to mush and “push over her at a two-forty rate,” and made love to her spoony fashion, windin’ up by gettin’ down on his knees and talkin’ the most infernal nonsense that ever was. The “chum” behind the curtain nearly choked tryin’ to hold in his laughter. But Santley got rid of the high-toned ass as soon as she could, and then she and her chum had some more brandy and cigarettes.
The thing was too good to keep, so the ‘‘chum” gave it away to “the boys,” and before long there was so much “chaff” about it that the high-toned critic resigned his position and went back to London.
