"Looking back, I discover, much to my astonishment and disappointment, that I have never been able to bear malice toward anybody, although there have been plenty of opportunities."
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-Ethel Barrymore
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The Broadway audience at the evening performance of Lorraine Hansbury's A Raisin in the Sun one June evening in 1959 weren't at all upset when it was announced that the curtain would be going up a bit late. Nor were they surprised when, precisely at eight o'clock, the house lights were dimmed to half strength and remained so for five minutes in silent tribute to the woman for whom the theater in which they sat had been built and named thirty-one years before. Ethel Barrymore had died early that morning, at eighty years of age, and her passing marked the end of the American theater's "royal family".
Like all royal families, the Barrymores - Ethel and her two brothers, Lionel and John - could claim an impeccable family tree. Their maternal grandfather was John Drew, the leading tragedian of the19th-century American stage and a beloved Shakespearean actor; while their maternal grandmother was Louisa Lane Drew, who had been an even more formidable presence on the stage and who was said to be the only fellow thespian of whom Edwin Booth was afraid. Born in England, she had first appeared on the stage at the tender age of twelve months ("I played a crying baby," she would drily remark), moved to Philadelphia, married John Drew, and eventually managed for many years that city's most famous theater of the time, The Arch. She was known in the theater world as "The Duchess", and no one with hopes for a future on the stage got on her bad side.
John and Louisa Drew's children went on the stage almost as soon as they could talk. Georgiana Drew became the favorite commedienne of discerning Gilded Age audiences; her brother , Sidney, was a noted comedian; and her second brother, John was eventually dubbed "the First Gentleman of the American stage". To complete the picture, Georgiana married a dashing young Englishman just making a name for himself in American theater. Herbert Maurice Blyth (sometimes, Blythe) had been born in India of Anglo/Indian parents, proper civil servants during the British Raj. Horrified that their son had plans to become an actor, they begged him to at least change his name before taking to the boards. Grabbing the nearest book to hand, Herbert put his finger on the first character name he came to and pronounced himself thenceforth to be Maurice Barrymore. He arrived in America in 1874, got his first stage role the following year, and shortly afterward married Georgiana.
Ethel was the second of the Barrymore's three children. She was two years older than Lionel and a year younger than John. The children enjoyed an unusually stable childhood, given the peripatetic profession of their parents. While Georgiana and Maurice were frequently on tour, it was the children's grandmother, Louisa, who ran the large, comfortable home on Philadelphia's North Twelfth Street. "Mummumm", as her grandchildren called her, got her charges to their classes at local convent schools, mediated their disputes, and entertained them with stories of the theater. Then there were always visits from Uncle Jack or Uncle Sidney, on their way to or from engagements, and houseguests from the best society of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, brought home for long weekends by Georgiana and Maurice. There were trips to England and the Continent, too, when their parents were engaged to play the West End. Ethel and her brothers never knew the rough-and- tumble world of the stage, for they were born into the aristocracy of American theater.
Summers were spent at a camp on Staten Island, where Ethel made her acting debut, at the age of eleven, in a homegrown production of Dumas' The Lady of the Camellias, cobbled together and acted by the three children. They charged a penny admission to sit in a barn on the camp property which they had converted to a theater. Preparing for her death scene, Ethel practiced a tubercular cough to such effect that a camp supervisor feared she had a bone stuck in her throat.
Although Ethel wanted to be a concert pianist, and Lionel and John aspired to be artists, it seemed only natural and inevitable that they would all go on the stage. Acting was the family business, and had been providing it with a good living for two generations. It was fitting that Ethel's first professional appearance, in 1894 at fifteen years of age, was in a scene with her Uncle Jack in a production of Sheridan's A School for Scandal in which he was then starring. Mummumm watched from the wings.
"Nobody in our family ever taught me anything about acting, except by absorption," Ethel wrote many years later, and she had the chance to absorb from some of the best talent in the profession - her own family. The hallmark of the Barrymore style was its naturalness, and Ethel soon noticed that her Uncle Jack never seemed to be acting; never, as she put it, "let anyone see the wheels going around". The roles she would find most challenging during her long career were the ones in which she played "normal" people, with whom people in the audience could readily identify. She would become known for these finely turned, exquisite character roles, in which she expertly hid the "wheels going around".
Despite her name and her family's connections, Ethel didn't have an easy time of it when she began visiting agents and casting people as a young woman of eighteen. There were walk-ons and small parts, and she appeared several more times with her Uncle Jack before audiences in New York and Philadelphia. But it wasn't until 1900 that she was given her first leading role by the most famous impresario of the time, Charles Frohman. She had appeared in minor roles in several of Frohman's productions, and when he bought the rights to a frothy romantic comedy called Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, he cast Ethel in the lead over the playwright's objections. The show opened at Philadelphia's venerable Walnut Street Theater in late 1900 to a packed house, eager to see how the newest of the "fabulous Barrymores" would handle her first leading role.
Ethel's entrance as the curtain rose was not auspicious. She had to appear at the top of a ship's gangplank, carrying a small dog, and descend to the stage while burbling winsomely about how good it was to be back in America after such a long time in England. Stagefright got the better of her and she simply couldn't get the lines across the footlights. But so beloved were the Barrymores that encouragement from the audience was immediate. "Speak up, Ethel! You Drews is all good actors!" urged one patron. "We love your grandmother, Ethel, and we love you, too!" shouted another. The show went on, but the next morning's notices were less than encouraging. Ethel would remember many years later, word-for-word, the review that stated, "If the young woman who played Madame Trentoni had possessed beauty, charm, or talent, the play might have been a success".
Despite the poor reception in Philadelphia, Frohman decided to open the show at his Garrick Theater in New York early in 1901. Ethel, stung by her ordeal, dreaded opening night on Broadway. "I had for the first time the terrible sense of responsibility which ever since has made every first night a kind of little dying," she remembered in her autobiography. But this time, her Madame Trentoni was a triumph, and Ethel would also remember walking to the theater one afternoon, after the show had been running for some weeks: "As we approached the theater, the lights in front of the house looked different to me...I glanced up again and suddenly stood frozen to the spot. ETHEL BARRYMORE was up there in lights."
Among the admirers waiting for her backstage after the curtain came down that opening night was Maurice, who presented her with a rose, kissed her on the cheek, and complemented her on her performance. It was particularly poignant for Ethel, for Maurice had not been well and had not himself appeared on stage in many months. Later that year, after he had been behaving erratically for some time, Maurice was declared legally insane, the result of syphyllis contracted shortly after he had arrived in New York as a young man. The family had no choice but to commit him to an asylum, and it was Ethel's painful duty to sign the committment papers. Maurice would remain institutionalized for the rest of his life.
Captain Jinks ran for months, Ethel installed herself at the swank Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue, and eventually went on a national tour with the show, introducing her to an even larger audience. Although not every production in which Ethel appeared over the next several years would be as successful as Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, her place in the Barrymore royal lineage was now firmly established. Her portrayal of Lady Helen Haddon - a lower class woman who enters high society by marriage, only to be destroyed by it - in Zoe Akin's Déclassé was another of her successes of the early 1900's, prompting the fledgling theater critic for Vanity Fair - Dorothy Parker, not yet the jaundiced, biting reviewer of her New Yorker days - to state, rather precociously "If, during my theater-going lifetime, there has been one other performance so perfect as the one Ethel Barrymore gives, I can only say I had the hideous misfortune to miss it". (Dorothy Parker would be a consistently loyal fan of the Barrymores in years to come, although Ethel would have nothing to do with the infamous Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel.)
Another admirer was Russell Colt, the son of a millionaire inventor, who was a frequent backstage visitor and escort. In 1909, Ethel married him and set up house at the sprawling estate in nearby Mamaroneck, New York, given to them as a wedding present by Russell's father. While Russell commuted to Wall Street every morning, Ethel retired from the stage to give birth to three children between 1910 and 1913 - Samuel, Ethel, and John. Russell's success on Wall Street, however, was less than spectacular and it would be some time yet before he would come into his inheritance; and by the end of the decade, it was apparent that his interests lay more with other women than with providing for his family. In 1920, the couple divorced and Ethel, with three youngsters to raise, went back to work.
The same material in which she had first appeared all those summers ago on Staten Island - The Lady of the Camellias - would reintroduce her to Broadway. The play opened in a new adaptation in 1918, telling Dumas fils' story in flashback and opening and closing with the title character's moving deathbed scene. So effective was Ethel's dying six nights a week that New York's bright young things could be seen rushing off to the theater crying "Let's go and see her die!". In 1919, Ethel, Lionel, and John were prominent in the historic actor's strike against the unfair practices of theater owners and managers. Appearing at benefit performances and public rallies, the Barrymores were instrumental in the success of the strike, which forced theater managers and agents to recognize the unionization of the profession under Actors Equity.
While Lionel and John were as busy as their sister was on the stage, they had been spending increasing amounts of time over a garage on West Sixty-First Street, which was the offices and studios of Metro Pictures. Metro was one of many hastily-formed companies in New York exploiting the potential of the new medium of film. The two brothers publicly extolled the dramatic possibilities of film acting, but privately told Ethel that it was the money that was the main attraction. The early film companies were anxious to legitimize their product as more than a sideshow novelty and were willing to pay large sums to established actors. With three children to raise, Ethel admitted it was "the dough" that brought her to All Star Pictures, which offered her fifteen-thousand dollars to appear in her first film, The Nightingale, in 1914, the year after young John was born. Much of the film was shot on the streets of New York, although Ethel, playing a poor street singer, refused to shoot outside a mansion on Madison Avenue which happened to be the home of Mrs. Whitney Reid, a longtime family friend. She was horrified that Mrs. Reid might emerge to find Ethel begging for pennies on her front steps. A two-year contract with Metro Pictures followed, at sixty-thousand dollars a year, for which she shot five films between 1915 and 1917, all of them well received. The New York Times critic particularly liked her performance in a Klondike adventure film, The White Raven, calling her "lovely to look upon, and never more so than in the sketchy costume of the dance hall" and noting that she "has adapted her fine skill as an actress to the new medium". Ethel, whose heart remained on the stage, seemed almost embarrassed by the substantial sums she was paid for her film work, and defensively told a newspaper reporter that "it doesn't matter how much we earn, it all goes...and gracious knows where it disappears". In later years, she would publicly acknowledge only one of these early Metro films, The Awakening of Helen Ritchie. The rest, she said, were too horrible to remember. She was dismissive of "talkies" when they first appeared in 1927. "People don't want their ears insulted," she said, although Winston Churchill, an early admirer, described her voice as "soft, alluring, persuasive, magnetic". She agreed to do a voice test for Paramount, but refused the contract they offered, as she did all film offers between 1919 and 1933. "I am lost without my audience," she wrote.
She was never to forsake her audience for the rest of her professional life. Throughout the 'thirties and 'forties, the name "Barrymore" became synonymous with acting. Certain public figures were said to have a "Barrymore voice", and after having delivered a particularly rousing speech, were said to have "done a Barrymore". Ethel's professionalism and sang froid on the stage became legendary among her fellow actors. Her co-star in Emlyn Williams' The Corn is Green remembers a scene with her during one evening performance when it became apparent that Ethel had forgotten her lines. Before anyone but him noticed, Ethel - still in character - merely said to him, "Don't move", went to the door stage left behind which Ethel knew the prompter was standing, peered out, then returned to her chair. "I thought there was someone at the door," she said and, unperturbed, carried on with the scene.
Despite her disdain for film work, Ethel was enticed by a ninety-thousand-dollar offer from MGM's head of production, Irving Thalberg, to appear with her two brothers in 1933's Rasputin and the Empress, the story of the mad monk's rise and fall in pre-revolutionary Russia. It was the first time in over thirty-five years that the three Barrymores appeared ensemble, and everyone knew that shooting it would be fraught with the possibility of clashing sibling egos and merciless scene-stealing. But Thalberg was convinced that casting the three Barrymores in the same film would be box office gold ("something like a circus with three white whales," Lionel remarked), and Ethel duly appeared on the set laden with fake jewels and a heavy gown as Empress Alexandra, to swoon before Rasputin (Lionel) and watch in horror his murder by "Prince Chegodieff" (John).
There were, to be sure, the expected rivalries among the three. Typical of them was the argument between John and Lionel as to how much of the camera frame each would get in a particular scene, only to be interrupted by Ethel, in full regalia, who reminded them loudly, "You two can argue about the camera all you want, but I still have a voice, you know."
The real problem, however, was exactly that - Ethel's voice; and it became apparent in the first scene Ethel played. By her own choice, she had been absent from films since 1919 and, unlike her brothers, had no experience in playing to a microphone. At the end of the scene, in which even Ethel admitted she had been "moaning, flailing my arms,, and touching curtains all over the set", Lionel approached her.
"Ethel," he gently asked, "what the hell are you doing?"
I haven't the faintest idea," Ethel confessed, at which point the Barrymore professionalism came to the fore as Lionel and John gave her a few lessons in moderating her voice for the microphone. All went well from then on, even though Ethel insisted on so many retakes during the shoot that the crew dubbed her, not "Empress of the Russians", but "Empress of the Rushes". Ethel never saw the finished film until twenty-five years later, on television. "I thought it was pretty good," she remarked, "but what those two boys were up to, I'll never know. Wasn't Lionel naughty?" She went on to appear in twenty-two films during the next forty-five years, and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1945 for her performance in the screen adaptation of Carson McCullers' None But The Lonely Heart.
Ethel continued working until heart disease forced her to slow down and eventually retire in 1958. Through it all, she managed to raise her three children to adulthood - "the most important thing in my life," she said. All three would dabble in theater and film but ultimately abandon them for other pursuits. (Contemporary actress Drew Barrymore is Ethel's grandniece, her brother John's granddaughter.) She outlived both her brothers; John died in 1942, Lionel in 1954.
During her final illness, many of Hollywood's stars, who had been just entering the business when Ethel was at her peak, came to her Beverly Hills home to pay their respects, like so many courtiers attending their dying queen. One of them was Katherine Hepburn, who brought Ethel fresh flowers nearly every day. At eighty years of age, and despite her illness, "she was beautiful to look at," Miss Hepburn recalls. "Wonderful hair, exquisite skin, not much makeup, and eyes that, well, scared the death out of you."
At three o'clock in the morning on June 18, 1959, Ethel Barrymore died, ending a career that stretched from the red plush and gaslights of Gay Nineties music halls to television drama. "All of us work hard in the theater," Helen Hayes said at a memorial service on Broadway, "but none of us can ever give it the luster that she did." Ethel Barrymore is still honored today for setting the tone and style of American acting, long before The Method or other rigorous training programs were developed to keep hidden "the wheels going around". "She lifted the standards of American acting," remarked author Cornelia Otis Skinner, "and gave all who knew her an impetus to live on her level."
