Part 12

What sort of woman was Ada Rehan? Well, she was of the royal line of women, regal in her stature, opulent in bodily beauty, gracious and rich in her nature. Her face, like her careless joyousness and exuberant animal spirits, was Celtic. She was not beautiful in the conventional sense, but as with Ellen Terry, simple beauty paled beside her. Her hair was exuberant too, and brown, except where, in the middle of her career, it became streaked with gray. She had the gray-blue Irish eye. “What a great woman she was!” wrote one of her more rhapsodic admirers.[137] “Tall, easy, almost majestic, except that the geniality of her manner took from majesty its aloofness and pride. When she spoke her voice came out mellifluently, so that without forcing it seemed to pervade the room. It had something of the quality of a blackbird’s note. Ada Rehan is not at all of a classic type of countenance. She is genuine Celtic. To call her pretty would be ridiculous, for prettiness is something that seems to dwindle beside her. To call her beautiful would be neither completely expressive nor apt, for her features have the warp of too many conflicting, irrepressible emotions, and the turn of what one feels tempted to call _rale ould Irish humor_. Yet the eyes, and the brow, and the head are beautiful--the eyes especially, with their soft, lamp-like, mellow glow, with their sharp, fiery glints, with their gorgon directness, or again with their innumerable little twinkles of fun and sly melting shadows, with the flashing from the lids and the eyelashes of light, or the deep, still beaming that perhaps most eloquently of all speaks of soul.” These are high words, indeed, but they had much provocation.

All these things, and more, Rehan appeared across the footlights. Off the stage, simply as Ada Rehan, she was still the exceptional woman. An actress who is capable of diverse and subtle characterizations is often, singularly enough, in her own person a woman of essential simplicity. Such seems to have been the case with Ada Rehan. Her lack of pose can be glimpsed in various ways, in her capacity for pleasure in the success of others, her ability to see and admire beauty and talent in other women,--a severe test for any actress. “She was generous and grateful, and she never forgot a kindness,” says Mr. Winter. “Her mind was free from envy and bitterness ... and she never spoke an ill word of anybody.” One more evidence of her simplicity was her un-Bernhardtian sense of contentment in the limited opportunities for personal glorification afforded by her position with Mr. Daly. As we shall see, she refused numbers of offers to star, preferring the comparative obscurity of her position as “Daly’s leading woman.” Notice the phrases of a writer in the _Sun_, who observed her on the street in New York in 1894, after her return from triumphant appearances in London. “She exhibits a degree of calm serenity that might almost be called matronly.... Her face wears a youthful and almost childish expression.... Much of her time has been spent since her return in looking in the shop windows, but apparently she has not purchased much, either here or in Europe, as her attire is invariably that of a woman who devotes little thought to dress!” But this writer goes on to say: “No one would be likely to mistake her for anything but an actress nowadays. Her distinction of bearing is so great that, even if her face were not familiar to the public, a great many people would turn around to look at her a second time as she walks along the street.”

Her early education was inconsiderable, and we are told that even during her brief career in school she cared less for her lessons than for romping with her three brothers,--a course that may not have been without its value in preparing her for her success as Katherine and Peggy Thrift. Later, however, she read much. She liked Thackeray, and she particularly admired Balzac. “Her knowledge of human nature,--gained partly by keen intuition and partly by close observance,--was ample, various, and sound,” wrote William Winter, who knew her well. “Her thoughts, and often her talk, dwelt upon traits of character, fabrics of art, and beauties of nature, and she loved rather to speak of these than of the commonplaces and practical affairs of the passing day. Her grasp of character was intuitive; she judged rightly, and she was seldom or never mistaken in her estimate of individuals. Her perception was exceedingly acute, and she noted, instantly and correctly, every essential trait, however slight, of each person who approached her presence. She was intrinsically sincere, modest, and humble--neither setting a great value on herself nor esteeming her powers and achievements to be unusual; she has been known to be in tears, at what she deemed a professional failure, while a brilliant throng of friends was waiting to congratulate her on an unequivocal success.”

Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Winter has poured out his praise with a lavish hand. Yet it is clear that Ada Rehan added many fine qualities, for those who knew her, to those qualities known to all who saw her: vitality, a true sense of comedy, personal charm.

For a long time newspaper interviewers had the greatest difficulty in getting Miss Rehan to talk for them. Like Duse and Mrs. Fiske, she loathed the interview. By nature she was, within the circle of her friends, candid and ingenuous, talking freely, stating frankly her opinions and drawing freely from a fund of interesting anecdotes about the personages she met and knew on both sides of the ocean. It is related that during her first visit to London, she met at a dinner an editor with whom she talked in her characteristic manner. He printed all she said. Though she was of a kindly disposition and had said nothing uncomfortable, she was annoyed by the incident, and for years avoided journalists.[138]

Daly’s Theatre, in the days when Ada Rehan was at the height of her charm and power, was sometimes called “the _Théâtre Français_ of America.” The leading man was John Drew (who did not become an independent “star” until 1892); the comedian was James Lewis, a talented, intelligent, genuinely comic actor;[139] the “dowager parts” were played by the incomparable Mrs. James Gilbert; and the younger women of the company were Isabel Irving and Kitty Cheatham, both clever actresses, though they paled beside Rehan. At Daly’s one saw acting that dispelled any impression of theatricalism. Mr. Daly’s rule was rigorous, his standards exacting.[140] He was altogether an exceptional manager, scholarly and thorough; and his instructions and advice were of immense benefit to the actors in his company,--a fact that Ada Rehan always freely acknowledged.

The list of parts that Miss Rehan in the twenty years between 1879 and 1899 acted in Mr. Daly’s company is simply amazing in its extent and range. We think of her as Katherine, as Viola, Rosalind or Beatrice, but she had been with Mr. Daly several years before the company attempted Shakespeare. Before, there had been a long succession of plays whose names mean nothing to us nowadays. Many of them were adaptations, made by the versatile Mr. Daly himself, from the German. Adaptations from the French, the American, and English stage had seen in plenty; but the German comedies afforded Mr. Daly a comparatively unworked field of which he made the most. One gets a satisfying sense of the essential improvement since 1890 in the art of playwriting in America upon reflecting that these translations and rearrangements of pieces grown on a foreign soil would seem, if presented in our theatres today, peculiarly thin and artificial. Miss Rehan’s more discerning admirers regretted the waste of her great talent in them, but then, as now, the theatre had to be made a paying institution in order to exist at all, and these plays indubitably succeeded. The finished acting of the Daly company, admirable both in individual impersonation and in _ensemble_, made them one of the keenest of the theatrical pleasures of the day.[141]

Miss Rehan did not at once leap into recognition as the leading American actress of the day. For a long time she was thought of merely as a prominent member of an excellent organization. Gradually, however, by sheer merit, her preëminence became evident. With confidence she undertook all kinds of rôles, and, in the midst of her work, there would occasionally flash forth an impersonation that would seem, what it often was, acting of unique quality.

Rehan was essentially a queen of comedy. Though she attempted from time to time impersonations of a grave and even of a tragic nature, and by virtue of sincerity and womanliness gave them much appeal, she never would have gained her preëminent position by such means. Her range was as wide, however, as the true meaning of the word “comedy,” and extended from the graceful performance of the mirthful or sentimental foolery of Daly’s adaptations, through the satire of _The Critic_ to the farcical comedy of _The Shrew_, the tenderly romantic comedy of _As You Like It_ and _Twelfth Night_, and the sophisticated “high comedy” of _Much Ado_.[142]

It is difficult for one who has seen her in the part to think of Shakespeare’s Katherine, in _The Taming of the Shrew_, without at once thinking of Ada Rehan. The pride, the majesty, the complete identification with the varying moods of the character, and the humanity she gave to what can easily be made merely a stage figure, were quite irresistible. Perhaps she succeeded so well in this part because it was in many ways a reflection of her own personality.[143]

Her Rosalind, by all accounts, was probably the best, possibly excepting Adelaide Neilson’s, that the American stage has seen; her Viola “manifested a poetic actress of the first order.” Add to these her Beatrice, her Mrs. Ford, her Helena, her Portia, not to speak of the half dozen heroines of Shakespeare she played before she joined Daly’s company, and you have a well rounded accomplishment as a Shakespearean actress, which, if she had done nothing else, would have won her fame.

And she did much else. One of Mr. Daly’s noteworthy departures from the ordinary theatrical routine was his revival of various specimens of old English comedy: _The Country Wife_ (in Garrick’s version called _The Country Girl_), _The Inconstant_, _She Would and She Would Not_, _The Recruiting Officer_ were all Restoration comedies, modified by Mr. Daly to suit modern taste; and _The Critic_ was his one-act rearrangement of Sheridan’s famous three-act satire of that name. These pieces all involved difficult tasks for a modern actress, for their language is of another time, their feelings of a different civilization. The plays are never professionally revived nowadays; and Mr. Daly’s ventures with them succeeded mainly through the conspicuous ability of Miss Rehan to give her characters, whatever their dress or speech, naturalness and vitality.

There was some surprise when Mr. Daly produced Coppée’s _The Prayer_, for the usually buoyant Rehan had now to portray a thoroughly serious character. Yet, says Mr. Winter:[144] “No one acquainted with her nature was surprised at the elemental passion, the pathos, and the almost tragic power with which she expressed a devoted woman’s experience of affliction, misery, fierce resentment, self-conquest, self-abnegation, forgiveness and fortitude. She did not then, nor at any time, show herself to be a tragic actress, but she evinced great force and deep feeling.”

It further strengthens one’s impression of Miss Rehan’s really triumphant versatility to read the records of her Lady Teazle, which subtly suggested the country girl within the fine lady; of her Letitia Hardy with “its intrinsic loftiness of woman’s spirit”; of her Jenny O’Jones, an irresistibly comic figure done in the spirit of frank farce; or of any of her half hundred impersonations in modern comedy, on which she lavished the spirit, the beauty, the technical proficiency that were always in evidence, whether or not the material she worked with was wholly deserving of her gifts. She was always ambitious, always a patient hard worker, and she never slighted her tasks.

In 1884, when Miss Rehan and the reorganized Daly company had been working together for five years, they made their first visit to London, where they played a six weeks’ summer season at Toole’s Theatre. London did not take kindly either to Mr. Daly’s pieces from the German, which then formed their repertoire, or to Miss Rehan herself, whose style of acting was a surprise to conservative eyes. William Archer wrote in _The World_: “The style of Miss Ada Rehan is too crude and bouncing to be entirely satisfactory to an English audience. She makes Flos a painfully ill-bred young person,--surely not a fair type of the American girl; and her way of emphasizing her remarks by making eyes over the footlights is certainly not good comedy.”[145] Clement Scott, on the other hand, praised her. No great impression was made, on the whole, but two years later, (1886) when Mr. Daly again took his company to London, Miss Rehan really made a name for herself, although the plays were as yet what seem to us now paltry pieces for such an actress: _A Night off_, and _Nancy and Company_. At this time Mr. Daly offered his company in the English provincial cities and even ventured to present them in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris, where they met some success.

Mr. Daly continued his biennial visit to London. In 1888, after the failure there of _The Railroad of Love_,[146] he offered London its first glimpse of Rehan’s Katherine the Shrew. The immediate result was a grand chorus of critical praise, and a remarkable exhibition of public interest. If on her first entrance “she ‘took the stage’ in a manner that astonished even the oldest playgoer,” and if, as one paper said, “Katherines had been seen before, but never such a Katherine as this,” it is true that the actress herself also “took the stage” in popular fancy. Rehan at home was something of a recluse, but now in London she allowed “society” to pay her its tribute in its own way. She was fêted, and dined, and given a public reception. Different this from her habits in New York, where reading, and walks with her dogs, made up the sum of her leisurely activity. During the 1888 tour Miss Rehan played Katherine at Stratford-on-Avon (where her portrait in that rôle was hung in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre), and in Paris, where Victorien Sardou assisted in her “great triumph.”

After another two years, in June, 1890, the company again appeared in London, and this time, in the estimation of the critics, her Rosalind--“a Rosalind who is a very woman, and never an actress!”--surpassed even her Katherine.

From now on the trips to London became more frequent and it soon became part of Mr. Daly’s programme to complete each season with a few months in the English capital. He built there his own theatre, and it was Ada Rehan who laid its corner-stone.[147] She visited Tennyson, who read to her his play _The Foresters_, which Daly later produced with Miss Rehan as Marian Lea.

In June, 1893, the new Daly’s Theatre was completed, and the company deserted America for more than a year to go to London to establish the success of the new house. It was dedicated by Miss Rehan’s performance of the Shrew on June 27. _The Foresters_, _The School for Scandal_ and _The Country Girl_ followed, and then in January, 1894, she acted for London her Viola, which was new to her repertoire. Again a triumph, for _Twelfth Night_ ran for one hundred and eleven performances. And again Miss Rehan consented, as still she had never done in Now York, to indulge in the life of society.

It was when she returned this time--after spending the summer of 1894 wandering about the Continent--that Miss Rehan became, for the first time, a “star” in her own right. Miss Rehan’s loyalty to the Daly company--or at least her steadfastness in refusing to be weaned away from it--was rather remarkable. When the opportunity was offered her to appear as a “star” and not merely as a member, drawing a fixed salary, of Mr. Daly’s company, she at first refused. Finally she consented to a brief tour, to supplement her usual work with Mr. Daly. Again, while she was abroad she had received an offer from Possart to appear with him at his theatre in Munich, another from Blumenthal, a third from Sarah Bernhardt, and still another from a syndicate in London to manage and head a company there. In New York, one of Mr. Daly’s rival managers offered her “backing” as a “star” to the extent of $50,000. Miss Rehan refused all these offers, and remained content as leading woman of the Daly stock company. Even now the independent tour was limited to ten weeks; then she returned to New York and her usual duties.[148]

In 1897 Mr. Daly sent Miss Rehan and his company on another English tour. Beginning (on August 26) with a performance of _As You Like It_, at Stratford-on-Avon, on the sward of the Shakespeare Memorial (of which Miss Rehan was made one of the life governors) they proceeded to the larger provincial cities, as far as Glasgow and Edinburgh, playing _The Taming of the Shrew_, _As You Like It_, _Twelfth Night_, _The School for Scandal_, and _The Last Word_. The results of the tour were all Mr. Daly could have hoped. Miss Rehan, as Katherine, in particular, swept all before her.

It was during this English visit that George Bernard Shaw, then dramatic critic of the _Saturday Review_, wrote that he never saw Miss Rehan act without burning to present Mr. Augustin Daly with a delightful villa in St. Helena. He thought Mr. Daly was wasting Miss Rehan’s rare talent, just as that other rare talent, Miss Terry’s, was wasted by her enmeshment at the Lyceum. “Mr. Daly was in his prime an advanced man relatively to his own time and place,” wrote Mr. Shaw. “His Irish-American Yanko-German comedies, as played by Ada Rehan and Mrs. Gilbert, John Drew, Otis Skinner and the late James Lewis, turned a page in theatrical history here, and secured him a position in London that was never questioned until it became apparent that he was throwing away Miss Rehan’s genius. When, after the complete discovery of her gifts by the London public, Mr. Daly could find no better employment for her than in a revival of _Dollars and Cents_, his annihilation and Miss Rehan’s rescue became the critic’s first duty.” Mr. Shaw’s predilection for the psychological, realistic modern play led to his irritation with Miss Rehan’s labors, as with Miss Terry’s, and even to some doubt as to whether she was a creative artist or a mere virtuosa. “In Shakespeare she was and is irresistible.... But how about Magda?” Yet, with unwonted complaisance, Mr. Shaw also says, “I have never complained; the drama with all its heroines levelled up to a universal Ada Rehan has seemed no such dreary prospect to me; and her voice compared to Sarah Bernhardt’s _voix d’or_, has been as all the sounds of the woodland to the clinking of twenty-franc pieces.” And again, “Her treatment of Shakespearean verse is delightful after the mechanical intoning of Sarah Bernhardt. She gives us beauty of tone, grace of measure, delicacy of articulation: in short, all the technical qualities of verse music, along with the rich feeling and fine intelligence without which those technical qualities would soon become monotonous. When she is at her best, the music melts in the caress of the emotion it expresses, and thus completes the conditions necessary for obtaining Shakespeare’s effects in Shakespeare’s way.”

The memorable part of Ada Rehan’s career was now about to close. Before Mr. Daly’s death in 1899 she added to her long list of impersonations Roxane in _Cyrano de Bergerac_, Portia in _The Merchant of Venice_, and Lady Garnet in _The Great Ruby_, but none of these brought her any added fame. Augustin Daly died, in Paris, in June, 1899, and the great chapter in Rehan’s life ended. Subsequently she was the star of companies organized for her by new managers, and in 1900 she appeared in a new play, _Sweet Nell of Old Drury_, in which she impersonated one of her famous predecessors, Nell Gwynn.

In the spring of 1901 Miss Rehan suddenly ended her tour in this play, and sailed to Europe, there to repair her broken health by living for awhile at her bungalow on the coast of the Irish Sea. She had been more or less ailing all the season, and the loss of her mother in January, 1901, added to her troubles. In 1903–04 she acted with Otis Skinner as a “co-star” in plays from her old repertoire, _The Taming of the Shrew_ and _The Merchant of Venice_ among them. One more season she played, 1904–05, this time with Charles Richman as her chief support, and then, on May 2, 1905, she appeared on the stage for the last time, when she took part in the farewell to Modjeska at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. Rehan herself has never had such a testimonial, though she deserved one as richly as the great Polish actress. Unostentatiously she entered her profession, so she pursued it, and so she left it, slipping out of public life so quietly that many playgoers were half consciously expecting her reappearance years after she had quit the stage for good. But she can have, as long as she lives, the reward of as genuine a success as can come to any actress. And it is also not beneath notice that she accumulated a fortune. Like Lotta Crabtree, Ada Rehan took good care of her money. In 1891, when she had been in Mr. Daly’s company twelve years, she was “worth something like $300,000.” “She owns,” says a contemporary account, “a $30,000 house in New York, possesses mortgages on adjoining property, and holds almost enough stock in a New Jersey railroad to entitle her to the position of director. She is not extravagant in anything except her love for dogs.”

Of dogs, and other animal pets, she was fond. She had a monkey, which Mr. Winter, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, described as “an interesting creature of its kind”; and she had, wherever she traveled, a dog or two. “I have seen her wandering with her dog,” says Mr. Winter “on the broad, solitary waste of the breezy beach that stretches away, for many a sunlit mile, in front of her sequestered cottage on the Cumberland shore of the Irish Sea. She was never so contented, never so radiant, never so much herself, as in that beautiful retreat.... There, encompassed by associations of natural beauty and of historic and poetic renown, and surrounded by her books, pictures, relics, music, and her pets, she was happy.”

Ada Rehan still lives, but, her work done, she remains out of the public eye. She never appears in the public print. She is not yet an old woman, and has many years to enjoy the memories of as true a triumph as an actress can have. For by her exceptional, regally endowed equipment and her devotion to her art, she upheld the gospel of the actress,--poetry, beauty, life.

MARY ANDERSON