Madcap May

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Madcap May Page 3

by Richard Kurin


  In Philadelphia, Lizzie was becoming a successful dressmaker and costumer. Lizzie was a superb artisan, and “her originality brought to her the theatrical stars of the period,” according to May.15 Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre opened in 1879, and costumes were needed for performances. May remembers Mrs. John Drew, Georgia Drew Barrymore, Victoria Creese, Clara Louise Kellogg, and Marie Van Zandt as prominent women who ordered dresses from Lizzie.

  According to May, these actresses “fired my childish imagination and fanned that desire for the footlights which later led me to the heights—and to the depths … I was happiest when purloining some fantastic costume and portraying some imaginary character.”16

  Decades later, May recounted an episode where her childish imagination got her into trouble. She and a friend wanted to playact for a neighborhood picnic. Having no costumes, they searched the house and found out-of-the-way boxes containing what appeared to be two old and forlorn gowns. May and her friend cut up the gowns to compose their costumes and proudly went off to the picnic to “create a sensation.” That’s exactly what they did, as a prominent lady recognized the garments as composed of family heirlooms she had left with Lizzie for repair. “We had ruined them beyond redemption,”17 May wrote.

  May was no less wild or imaginative in Bethlehem. With other children, she would explore the river bank near the Eagle, and Calypso Island, the local resort in the Lehigh River. Once, riding a horse in a Wild West children’s circus, she was thrown “head over heels into a hedge” and rescued by a “gypsy” who brought her back home “more dead than alive,” and also insisted on telling her fortune—accurately, May swore.18

  May Yohe, age 13. (photo credit 1.4)

  May was self-admittedly “ungoverned in some of these impulses”19 of fantasy, but enjoyed play-acting and taking roles in school plays.

  Though May could have continued her education in Philadelphia or Bethlehem, another option beckoned. Most likely because of Aunt Anna’s “Fem Sem” influence, May was sent to Europe for schooling. May knew German well enough, and Anna knew of a girl’s school in Dresden run by educators influenced by Comenius’ Moravian pedagogical theory. Caleb and Mary Yohe probably provided the funds for travel, room, board, and tuition from the ample proceeds from the sale of the Eagle.

  Years later, May offered several alternative versions of how she came to be educated in Europe. In one, Lizzie’s theatrical friends were so impressed by the teen’s talent that they pooled money and used their contacts to send her to a private school in Germany. In another, more legendary account, May delivered such a rousing performance to an audience of poor Pennsylvania miners that they were inspired on the spot to take up a collection in order to send her to school.

  Whatever the case, off to Dresden May went—“I was sent away like a bride in a C.O.D. package,” she later wrote. “A big yellow trunk contained six of everything she needed, in accordance with the school regulations.” May later said she was ten years old when she left, but in fact, she left in 1879, when she was thirteen, and her mother took her to the pier in New York, handing her over to the ship’s captain “with a tear and a kiss.”20 Sometimes May reported that she spent four years at the school in Dresden, and at other times she said she spent one or two years there. Then she went on to what she called “finishing school” in Paris for a year, though sometimes she said it was for a longer period.

  At Madame Florence Leonharbie’s school in Dresden, May’s classmates included daughters of the wealthy and prominent, including several Americans such as Louise Corbin from Long Island and the Patton sisters of Washington, D.C. Some of the English girls gave May a hard time, teasing her that only “bad people went from England [to settle] America.” May argued and fought back. “It made me real proud to be American,” May later recalled.21

  May studied dance, improved her German, and learned French. She claimed that the eminent Dresden pianist, composer, and conductor Hans von Bulow taught her music. Sometimes May reported that she’d received voice training at the school, and at other times she’d vociferously deny it, taking pride in her untamed and natural talent. One event, a devilish episode that foreshadowed her future career, stood out for May as emblematic of her experience.

  The school girls were to dress up for a tableaux vivant, a popular form of late nineteenth-century Victorian entertainment in which costumed participants formed themselves into a posed “picture.” May conspired with another American teenager to go on stage dressed in tights. This, she thought, would scandalize and surprise the staid German parents of the other girls—but wouldn’t get her or her friend in trouble, because their parents wouldn’t be in the audience. May and her friend crafted risqué bodices and made tights by stitching together pieces of several pairs of silk stockings with red petticoats. They covered up with raincoats off stage, and when the time came to make their appearance, shed their cover in full view of the audience. As May recalled,

  May Yohe as a teenager in Dresden. (photo credit 1.5)

  In later years I played many parts which called for scant costumes, but in all my professional life I could never have been persuaded to appear in such a costume as that one. I can realize now why, when we came from behind the scenes there was a quick gasp from the audience and then a minute of dense, pregnant silence.

  Then there was a shout from the German officers [who were present].

  The shout grew into a hilarious guffaw and a great din of pounding canes.

  I looked down into the audience and saw the faces of dignified, adipose mothers and fathers blanched white. But I didn’t care. The approbation of the officers and the young men students from the nearby university was elixir to me.

  My chum and I whirled into our dance, kicking and jumping merrily, although not without a terrible fear on my part that the improvised tights would give way where we had sewn them onto the trunks, or perhaps the knitted junction above our knees unravel.

  To say that our dance was a success is putting it mildly—it was a sensation.

  The other girls hugged and kissed us rapturously when we danced off the stage. But there was no such greeting from our teachers and school authorities. We were almost expelled. Still, I meant no harm. I didn’t understand the heinousness of my offense—I just wanted to be different.22

  This adventure pretty much summed up May’s approach to life and provides an almost paradigmatic model for future episodes, whether in the theater, her marriage, or other matters. She took risks. She was creative. She adored attention and appreciation. She wanted, almost needed, to stand out. And her attendance at a Paris finishing school—she sometimes reported it as the Convent of the Sacré Cœur, and other times as Madam Bronier’s school on Rue de Passy—did not suppress a thing.

  As May was finishing up her term in Paris in 1885, her grandmother and namesake, Mary Yohe, a stalwart of the community, died after a long illness. If this loss was not enough, days later the family got word from a Denver newspaperman who was originally from Bethlehem that William Yohe had died. Apparently Bill had been in contact with a group of Moravians and former Bethlehem residents who had gone West. These acquaintances were now the mourners in his funeral service.

  May Yohe in Paris, age nineteen. (photo credit 1.6)

  May had lived in Europe without her family—but they were always present in her mind as being “back home.” Now, she was on her way back to America and to a family bereft of her friendly grandmother and of a father she idealized, though hardly knew. May, who often feared abandonment and longed for social acceptance and close ties of affection, was now headed back to an uncertain home.

  Reporter: Do you know, Miss Yohe, that yours is the sort of voice that goes right to the heart?

  May: Is it? Well, perhaps that is because it comes straight from it—at least from the chest, which is somewhere in the same neighborhood.1

  CHAPTER TWO

  Footlights Goddess

  MAY’S DARING TURN BEFORE AN AUDIENCE in Dresden thrilled her. Performi
ng on stage, being the center of attention, playing out fantasies, and assuming somewhat whimsical, risqué roles had a visceral appeal for her. Later, in Paris, she attended theater performances and met actors and actresses, further strengthening her attraction to the stage. Aspiring to a life in theater, she sailed home across the Atlantic to Philadelphia. While at sea, she had her first romance at the age of nineteen, becoming “engaged”—as she euphemistically called it—to the ship’s second officer, a handsome young Frenchman.

  In Philadelphia, May moved in with her mother Lizzie on Chestnut Street, a bustling neighborhood full of music halls, bars, and whorehouses. Lizzie was sewing theatrical costumes and running a small boarding house; a dentist, a dry-goods salesman, and one of her sewing assistants lived with the family. Lizzie gave May her unconditional love and support. Her father was dead, his longstanding absence now final. May made him out to be a hero, a brave and gallant soldier, an officer in the Civil War. “My father was a soldier, a man of courage and of the spirit of adventure,” she later wrote.2

  May also depended upon the tutelage and love of her aunt, Anna, who lived about a mile away. Anna and her children, Tom, John, Adeline, and Grace, had also been “abandoned” when Anna’s husband, John Parke, died while May was in Dresden. The widowed Anna and divorced and widowed Lizzie both had families to care for alone, and they depended upon each other in the big city. In previous years, Caleb and Mary Yohe had provided a lifeline of financial and spiritual aid from Bethlehem for both. Now, with Mary gone, Anna was taking care of the elderly Caleb, who spent much of his time at a farm that Anna and John had purchased years earlier in Yardville, near Trenton, New Jersey.

  Anna and Lizzie continued to instill in May the belief that a woman can survive and even flourish without depending upon a man. May was coming to grips with her sexuality, her dreams of romance, and her aspirations for a career in theater. She had heard her mother’s tales of how she had been abandoned as a young girl by her parents and raised by a wicked stepmother, and how she had had to make her own way in the world with no family support or stable home. From Anna, the Bethlehem “Fem-Sem” graduate, May heard about Moravian ideals of womanhood. These were progressive ideas about a woman’s God-given abilities and potential, about the divine feminine and the importance of music—and even about secular singing as a vehicle of spiritual grace. They resonated well with what May had learned in Europe.

  May helped her mother sew costumes and run the boarding house. Though she dreamed of a “life of excitement,” she wrote that she found instead “only routine without revelry.”3 That may only be partially true. May no doubt visited Anna and grandfather Caleb in Yardville, where there was a famous old roadhouse and inn (which, years later, hosted the likes of Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill when they were on tour). Legend has it that May visited the roadhouse and met lovers there.4

  In Philadelphia, May received her first invitation to perform (as an amateur) for the congregation in “little old” St. Andrews Church. She was “frightened half to death,” and it seemed as if she was being “stared at by thousands of people.” But her stage fright passed, and her performance was a resounding success. “I created a sensation I will never forget,” she wrote.5

  May joined a burlesque chorus and had her professional stage debut at Philadelphia’s Temple Theatre on February 8, 1886. It was a role in an American-Japanese comic opera called The Little Tycoon. May played Dolly Dimple and sang the lead contralto part. She had a distinctive voice, later described as sounding like a foghorn. As she said whenever she was asked about it, “I possessed a soprano voice, but on my way home to America, from Dresden it broke … just like a boy’s voice.”6

  By August 1886, May was working for the McCaull Opera Comique Company. John McCaull, a Scottish-born lawyer and former Confederate colonel, had defended John Ford, of Ford’s Theatre in Washington, from a suit brought by Gilbert and Sullivan producer Richard D’Oyly Carte. Moving from the bar to the stage, McCaull operated a touring company and a network of theaters and came to be regarded as the father of American comic opera. He gave May her first professional opportunity, a bit part as Esther in Josephine Sold by Her Sisters at the Wallack’s Theatre in New York. While Wallack’s was on Broadway, it was at Thirteenth Street near Union Square, not in the Broadway theater district of today. The production starred McCaull mainstay De Wolf Hopper, an actor, singer, and comedian who was six feet and five inches tall and who went on to star in some three dozen musicals. Hopper later popularized the poem Casey at the Bat and performed it thousands of times.

  May again performed with Hopper in McCaull’s production of Lorraine, a three-act musical farce about Louis XIV at the same theater, renamed the Star, in February 1887. May had a small part, and the play was a flop, closing within two weeks.

  As May tells it, she got her big break from Mrs. John Drew, née Louisa Lane. Mrs. Drew had been born in London to a family of actors; her father died when she was seven, and her mother took her to the United States, where she became an acclaimed actress. She was married three times and went by the name of her last husband. When May met her, Mrs. Drew was the well-respected manager of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. She was also helping to raise her grandchildren, Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore, who later become major stars of stage and screen.

  May Yohe at the beginning of her acting career, c. 1888. (photo credit 2.1)

  Mrs. Drew was a customer of May’s mother Lizzie, commissioning gowns and stage costumes from her. According to May, Mrs. Drew came to the house to pick up some gowns. While Lizzie was engaged with another patron, May got up the courage to tell Mrs. Drew of her desire to perform and then sang a popular song, accompanying herself on the piano. Mrs. Drew advised May to learn a more dramatic, interpretive piece and then come to her place for an audition. May wrote:

  Star Theatre (formerly Wallack’s Theatre) at Broadway and Thirteenth Street, New York City. (photo credit 2.2)

  I was quick at study and very impatient. I soon had a new piece by heart, and Mrs. Drew gave me another hearing, this time in her own hotel suite. When I had finished, she said, ‘quite nice child.’ Then putting her hand on my shoulder she remarked, ‘If you work hard I don’t see why you shouldn’t win on the stage; but remember it is work, work, work.7

  Louisa Drew encouraged May to pursue her dream of a career in the theater. She even wrote letters to two leading New York impresarios, Albert M. Palmer and Augustin Daly, recommending May for an audition. Both Palmer and Daly worked with Louisa’s son, John Drew Jr., and her son-in-law, Maurice Barrymore.

  Palmer, who ran the Madison Square Theatre, responded. He had a fine sense of artistry and a soft spot for young, untested talent—traits unconnected to his own route to show business. He had earned a law degree at New York University and worked as a librarian and as an accountant for New York City before grappling with the business end of the theater as a bookkeeper. He developed great skill in theater management, and when the Union Square Theatre was in danger of going under, he turned the vaudeville into a playhouse with a serious acting company, earning critical acclaim and financial success. By the time he met May, Palmer was at the height of his career. Often interviewed by the newspapers as the theater industry’s de facto spokesman, he was producing new works by American authors and had recently helped found the Actor’s Fund of America.

  May wrote of her audition for Palmer:

  My gracious! I’ll never as long as I live forget my first trial. I had to recite to Mr. Palmer in his theater. The place was empty except that mother and Mr. Palmer were in the gallery. The theater was cold and dreary, for it was a winter evening; everything looked dim and miserable. There was no scenery, no audience, no music, no lights; the theater smelt very badly of stale cigars. I felt wretched; my heart was in my boots and I was sick.8

  May performed, and her despair turned into perhaps the happiest moment of her life. “Mr. Palmer, from the chill, dark gallery, listened to my voice and responded—‘not so bad lit
tle girl, not so bad.’ He promised me my first engagement as an actress.” For May it opened up a new world, a “fairy land in which only the chosen may enter.”9

  Mythic though it might have appeared to May, Palmer signed her for nine dollars per week. “It was a pitiful chance,” wrote May, but a chance nonetheless for recognition and a career. “That counted. It bred confidence.”10

  May’s entry to the theater and onto the stage of broader popular culture came at an opportune moment, on the cusp of the “Naughty Nineties.” While her early performances earned her modest accolades, May’s celebrity and notoriety grew from both her strong performances and her backstage and offstage escapades, elopements, and engagements—which helped animate a new era in American social life.

  The “Naughty Nineties,” a decade later more commonly called the “Gay Nineties,” was characterized by people like May who defined the period as one of increasing personal freedom and social license, particularly for women. The decade saw a gradual loosening of some of the social strictures of the Victorian era, both in Britain, where it was rooted, and in the United States.

  The era took its name and moral atmosphere from Queen Victoria, who had been Great Britain’s monarch since 1837. Throughout her long reign, she espoused values and policies that encouraged the development of a middle class aligned with the positive aspects of industrialization and urbanization. Middle-class social values congealed around the sanctity of the home, family, proper etiquette, and public decorum and opposed the perceived moral ills of the rapidly growing British cities, beset with problems such as broken families, child labor, and prostitution.

 

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