Elizabeth Robins

Staging a Life

Angela V John

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780752440286
• eBook ISBN: 9780752496467
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Beautiful and talented, versatile and charismatic, Elizabeth Robins was one of the foremost actresses of her day. Yet, this enduring character was also an active and lifelong feminist. This biography examines Elizabeth's historical identity and provides a study of the social culture surrounding a woman who lived a life in the spotlight.

PART I

BESSIE ROBINS

1

WHITHER & HOW?

On 6 August 1862 during the American Civil War and in the middle of a wild storm, Elizabeth Robins was born. Her parents, Hannah Maria Robins (née Crow) and Charles Ephraim Robins, were first cousins living on East Walnut Street, Louisville, Kentucky.¹ Elizabeth, known as Bessie, was their first child though Charles had a son from a previous marriage. In later years Elizabeth would refer proudly to her Kentuckian heritage though she actually spent little time living there.

The family moved to St Louis for some months when she was under a year and although they returned to Louisville briefly, they went east before she was three. Her father, fascinated by science and the social sciences, tried to convince himself that he was a businessman. He worked in insurance (his own father had been a pioneer in the development of life and fire insurance) and as a bank cashier. His bank somehow survived the panic of 1857 but a few years later a recently formed banking partnership (Hughes and Robins) collapsed. So before the end of the Civil War the family moved to New York in search of better times. Charles was employed by the Home Insurance Company on Broadway and they lived on the south shore of Staten Island, just outside Eltingville. Here he cultivated the soil and conducted chemistry experiments in the barn. He spent much of his time planning for the future though few of his dreams were realised. Foundations were laid for a big house but typically it never got built, the family residing instead in the lodge on their Bayside land.

There is not much evidence about Hannah in this period. Refined, of gentry stock and musical—Elizabeth later recalled her singing haunting airs and one particular aria from Il Trovatore—she was in her mid-twenties when she moved to Staten Island. For much of the next decade she was pregnant. A son, Edward, born in Louisville two years after Elizabeth, did not survive. Hannah then had five more children in the next eight years. Eunice, known as Una, was Elizabeth’s only surviving sister since baby Amy also died in infancy. The eldest boy was Saxton, seven years younger than Elizabeth. In 1872, the year that Vernon was born, Charles was devastated by the death of Eugene, his adolescent son from his first marriage. Eugene had studied at a military academy. It was, however, the birth of the youngest and ultimately most successful son in the following year which ironically presaged the greatest tragedy for the Robins family. Raymond’s birth resulted in severe post-natal depression for Hannah and thereafter a perilous mental state. There was also financial disaster: her fortune was lost on Wall Street. The marriage floundered.

The young Elizabeth’s life now changed dramatically. In August 1872 the family moved to her paternal grandmother’s home in far-off Zanesville, Ohio. Her beloved papa left for a metallurgy course in St Louis then headed west for a mining life in Colorado. Her ailing mother was soon placed under the watchful eye of her brother-in-law Dr James Morrison Bodine, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Louisville. Saxton joined his mother in Louisville. Vernon and the baby of the family, Raymond, who was always Elizabeth’s favourite, remained with their sisters in Ohio for the time being though eventually the boys also left for Kentucky.

Not surprisingly given the upheavals of her childhood, at the age of ten Elizabeth saw herself as already ‘disagreeably old in observation and experience’. Yet her new life actually gave her a stability she had long been denied. This was largely because of her remarkable grandmother, Jane Hussey Robins, who now became the central figure in her life. Long widowed and in her seventies she appeared undaunted at the prospect of once more raising a young family. She earned Elizabeth’s lifelong respect and love. Elizabeth dedicated her most personal novel The Open Question (1898) to this ‘most stern and upright judge’, her grandma.² Elizabeth’s notes for this book show that it was written ‘just for her and me’, a tribute to the woman who had been her guide and mentor. Its most memorable character is Mrs Gano, a thinly disguised grandma. In fact Elizabeth’s grandfather had founded a Baptist theological seminary in Cincinnati and one of his co-founders was an Aaron Gano. Elizabeth would comb her family history for names and incidents for her stories. She found particular delight in an aunt, Sarah Elizabeth Robins (Aunt Sallie) who not only possessed her name but also wrote drama and poetry, was inspired by seeing the French tragedienne Rachel, knew Edgar Allan Poe and published stories. It was, however Grandma who was, in Elizabeth’s words, her ‘touchstone’, always far closer to her than her own mother.

Tall, with a commanding presence, she was a deeply religious and principled woman with a keen sense of loyalty, strict yet fair. At the same time she was acquainted with modern literature. In 1882 she was reading The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, later to become one of her granddaughter’s close friends. She explained in a letter to Elizabeth that James seemed to be ignorant of woman’s nature, ‘its complex machinery, its hidden springs of motive and passion— its actual working and latent possibilities’. In contrast, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and George Sand wrote differently, understanding their own sex ‘and by strokes of genius, have succeeded in portraying womankind’. The Zanesville Signal felt the portrayal of Mrs Gano in The Open Question to be a little harsh³ but Elizabeth was concerned to represent her in this story as a child might perceive her.

The novel also dwelt lovingly on Elizabeth’s Ohio home, the Old Stone House. Her grandmother had moved there from Cincinnati in 1858. Charles Robins who was then working as a cashier at the Franklin bank of Zanesville also lived there with his mother and, until she left him, his first wife, Sarah.

The Old Stone House on Jefferson Street in the township of Putnam had its own distinguished history.⁴ In the year that Elizabeth settled there Putnam became part of Zanesville though this old township on the bank of the Muskingum river retained a sense of separate identity since it had originally been founded by New Englanders. Unlike the other local houses Elizabeth’s home was built of stone. This well-proportioned, Federal-style building had been erected in 1809 in the hope of its becoming the permanent legislative seat for the new state of Ohio. Although Zanesville on the other side of the river enjoyed this honour between 1810 and 1812, Columbus became the state capital thereafter. The Stone Academy, as Elizabeth’s home was originally called, housed a grammar school between 1811 and 1826. The women of Zanesville and Putnam Charitable Society also met there as did, for a time, the United Presbyterians. Elizabeth’s school, the Putnam Seminary for Young Ladies, originated there but soon moved to a handsome building on nearby Woodlawn Avenue. The Old Stone House’s secret passage leading from the cellar to the river may have been part of the ‘underground railroad’ network for runaway slaves and the house hosted one of the first conventions of ante-bellum Abolitionists.

Such a home helped instil in Elizabeth a love of history. This later found expression in her wanderings round London, her perusal of books on the history of Sussex and a loving account, written in England, of one of the books kept in the Old Stone House library, The British Merlin, a detailed almanack for the year 1773.

Yet the young Bessie Robins was far from being an introverted bookworm. Within a few months of arriving in Putnam she was part of a group of nine who called themselves The Busy Bees, held their own fair and wrote a song about the wares they sold.⁵ After a week in the Putnam Seminary (granted collegiate status in 1836), Elizabeth was writing to her mother explaining that she was studying geography, arithmetic, reading and spelling and liking school very much. Certainly her spelling had improved since an earlier letter (probably dating from about 1870) in which she had described a visit to the zoo in ‘scentrail’ Park, Manhattan and signed herself ‘Your affectionate dater’. Elizabeth remained at the Put. Fem. Sem. as it was known, for nearly seven years though by the age of sixteen her appreciation of school was less dutiful. Fresh from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, she wrote that the start of term and ‘continual chemistry, geometry etc etc is enough to cloud the sunniest temper’. Her father had already warned against time-wasting novels. He was anxious that she regained her position as the school’s best scholar. To his dismay she found science a tribulation though reading and writing provided welcome scope for her fervent imagination.

One of her compositions about a lawyer’s wife declares her occupation ‘far more necessary than that of a lawyer’. Where would the latter be without his wife’s cooking? His very words depended on her. The title of another story about the fortunes of a button includes the word ‘Herstory’ now incorporated into feminist vocabulary. It can, however, be questioned whether the twelve-year-old writer was actually ‘conscious of its feminist content’ as has recently been claimed even though Elizabeth chose her words carefully.⁶ Two years later, influenced by the presence of her grandmother, disillusioned by the absence of her mother and infrequent appearances of her father, she declared that if women did their duty better there would be fewer worthless men. On leaving school she studied at home, her father’s influence evident in her diet of reading which included the Boston Journal of Chemistry and the Engineering and Mining Journal (for which Charles was briefly a sub-editor).

The teenage Elizabeth was now dreaming of a life far away. In later years the Zanesville Signal (with the benefit of hindsight) recalled her as ‘excessively, almost immodestly, ambitious’.⁷ Since 1876 she had kept a diary. Early entries such as ‘Going to begin to be good tomorrow’ suggest her rebellious spirit. Her schoolfriends Kate Potwin and Emma and Julia Blandy feature prominently in her diary as do the boys they know. With these friends—characteristically Elizabeth was still corresponding with Emma in the 1920s—Elizabeth developed a love of the stage. She was prominent in school recitals. Her rendition of part of the closet scene in Hamlet at the age of fifteen prompted the local newspaper to comment on the ‘fire and effect’ usually attributed to ‘the sterner sex’ and after another recital to speculate whether she might have a future as a reader. The future actress later commented that Mama had once been considered the finest reader in the Shakespeare Club. Elizabeth and four Blandy girls were members of an Amateur Dramatics Club and performed a two-act comedietta Which of the Two? which she stage-managed. She also played the flirt Arabella in a short comedietta set in England entitled Who’s to Win Him? This was a substitute role in the newly opened Schultz Opera House in Zanesville. Schultz lived in a mansion opposite Elizabeth’s home.

The first professional play she saw was at Macaulay’s Theatre, Louisville where, aged fourteen, she watched Edwin Adams as Macbeth. Her early adulation of Mary Anderson was partly because the actress shared her birthplace and it was after seeing her that she wrote a ‘wild letter’ to her father about going on the stage. He was shocked. Acting in school and family theatricals was one thing: going on the stage professionally was quite another and anathema to a family which saw itself as part of the gentry despite its impoverished position. Other young women from more modest backgrounds faced opposition on choosing the stage for a living. Clara Morris’s mother, a housekeeper and seamstress, was ‘stricken with horror’.⁸

The position of the American actress seems to have improved slightly from the 1860s. Elizabeth’s grandmother certainly felt that there was less superstition and bigotry surrounding the theatre than there had been earlier. Nevertheless, the legacy of New England Puritanism remained strong as did any threat to the deification of the home. Constantly in the public eye and deliberately shunning anonymity, the actress enjoyed almost unparalleled freedom in a profession which anybody could enter and where it was still possible to succeed without formal qualifications. Elizabeth’s father criticised the way the press appropriated and exaggerated the personal lives of actresses. Associations with immorality lingered on. The term ‘public woman’ was used interchangeably for performer and prostitute. ⁹

Those outside the theatre were also often wary of people whose livelihood depended on perfecting the skills of deception. In Both Sides of the Curtain, Elizabeth tells of her father’s encounter in the mid-1880s with his actress daughter.¹⁰ On tour with James O’Neill (father of the playwright Eugene) in The Count of Monte Cristo, she played his lover Mercedes in her home town. To her profound humiliation, ‘Before all the world’ her father walked out of the Zanesville Opera House in the middle of the second act. His objection was to her assumption of distress, ‘all that in a world of real suffering—of disaster’ and he refused to watch any more of what he disparagingly called ‘play-acting life’. And Grandma was mortified to think that Elizabeth was playing an outcast (Martha in Little Emily) before the Boston public. She also objected to her playing King Lear’s daughter Goneril: ‘How can you successfully assume such a character as the undutiful, unnatural daughter of the poor distraught king?’ Hannah’s letters urged her daughter to play modest and appropriate roles: ‘Don’t accept any role that a lady or pure girl would be ashamed to own, I could almost rather see you dead than personating vile women.’ Ironically, years later a distinguished playwright who rather specialised in writing about ‘women with a past’ told Elizabeth: ‘I see your line is sympathetic outcasts.’

Before Elizabeth reached the stage, her father made one serious effort to deflect her attention. In the spring of 1880 she boldly sought out the great actor Lawrence Barrett when he came to Zanesville and asked him if a young girl could become a fine actress without dramatic training. He denied that training could ever make a great actress. It was necessary to start at the bottom and by careful observation and practice work up to the top. She wrote to tell her father that as soon as Grandma no longer needed her she must carry out her plan to act. Aware that she might run away rather than be consigned to a life at home with her uninspiring sister, Charles now dangled before his daughter the prospect of a summer in a camp at the highest gold-mines in the world up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. He had once more changed jobs and was now employed by the Little Annie Mining Company as the financial agent at the Summit camp, Rio Grande, 11,300 feet (3,444 m) above sea level. It was a somewhat extreme move taking an adolescent daughter to live in a mountain mining camp but so, in her father’s view, was a future on the stage.

Early in June 1880 the Juan Prospector reported the arrival of ‘Professor Robins and his accomplished daughter Miss Bessie’ (Charles had taken a metallurgy course at the University of St Louis so was known to the miners as the Professor or the Doctor). During the ensuing months Elizabeth and her father were at their closest. Here he could expound his scientific and political theories, show his daughter the mines and mills, teach her to assay and operate the weather signal service, and generally shape her reading and thinking. For a father who maintained that ‘The only knowledge worth having is knowledge of nature’ she was in the right place. She enjoyed freedoms unheard of at home, travelling like Isabella Bird before her in a Mountain Costume complete with alpine stock (long before she created the role of Hilda Wangel). On 4 July the future actress read out the Declaration of Independence above the timberline to an appreciative audience. She went snow-shoeing (skiing), climbing and riding, collected wild flowers and specimens of ore for her cabinet. On her eighteenth birthday she made an assay of the San Juan tailings, her father presented her with $1,000 of Little Annie stock and the men made her a gold ring.

There are several sources for the fourteen-week adventure in a mountain camp including Elizabeth’s own diary and the letters she wrote to her grandmother. In the late 1920s she reworked much of this material into a sprawling story of over 600 pages, initially called ‘Kenyon and His Daughter’; she later changed the title to ‘Rocky Mountain Journal’. It seeks to present these months from the viewpoint of her father. In addition to name changes, Grandma is conspicuous by her absence ‘which I regret to the deep of me’. This was a deliberate decision to avoid too much similarity to The Open Question though in fact ‘Rocky Mountain Journal’ never found anyone prepared to publish it. Elizabeth probed the apparent innocence of the original diaries and letters. The ‘yellow-haired’ unkempt girl had given way to an attractive and tanned young woman with long, chestnut hair. She had come to a camp full of miners who saw little of women. In the story she portrays the anxiety she presumes her father felt about her and his bewilderment at her mixture of precocity and naïveté. There is a suggestion, probably enhanced by the gap in time and the author’s later feminism, of the young woman in control of herself and deliberately choosing not to ‘tell all’, the woman’s use of silence to which she would refer so frequently in her writing. Her father is so disturbed when he finds a miner kissing her and his daughter never alluding to it, that in this fictional account he reverts to urging a suitable marriage as the solution.

The story underscores the hopelessness of her father’s own marriages and here and in another story, ‘The Pleiades’, there is a suggestion of his involvement with other women. Some of this—for example, his wife bolting the door against him and making him homeless for five years—may simply have been for dramatic effect but it is interesting to see that the feminist Elizabeth Robins reserves the sympathy for him, presenting her (fictional) mother as unsympathetic, shallow and stiff. The heroine, named Theo (not Thea) is the daughter who replaces the son who has died, or at least seeks to fulfil this impossible task. Above all, this story is Elizabeth’s attempt to come to terms with her father.

Despite the blows life dealt him, Charles Robins liked to impress his own experiences upon his children’s minds. He reminded them how he had studied as a young man but earned his living since he was eighteen (his father had died when he was twelve). Elizabeth was told that she was descended from intellectuals on both sides of the family and, as the eldest, could not fail to mould the boys’ tastes (Una always seems to have been left out of such considerations). Charles had been influenced by the communitarian experiments of the Welshman Robert Owen and the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. He was attracted by Auguste Comte’s positivism and by Herbert Spencer. Perhaps the two greatest influences were the American Henry George, author of Poverty and Progress, and the British evolutionist Charles Darwin. As Elizabeth observed, science became his religion. In one of his many long letters he told her that ‘The change wrought by Darwin is incomparable and universal. It will bury Theological agnosticism in the same grave with teleology–for it not only shows a way by which th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• About The Author
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Bessie Robins
• Part II Lisa Of The Blue Eyes
• Part III C.E. Raimond And I
• Part IV Elizabeth Robins
• Part V From E.R. To Anonymous
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Notes