Shadows and Acts: With linked Table of Contents

From: Joseph Mercur

To: Edward B. DeBar, Professor, Production and Directing, UCLA School of Theater

Attachments: Berrell Manuscript and Letters

April 17, 2014

Eddie,

Given your family history in the theater in St. Louis, as well as your interest in the film director, John Ford, the attached will knock your socks off. There’s at least one movie here for sure, although I agree with Law’s assessment of Berrell’s character.

Cheers, —Joe

Mercur Literary Agency

From: Cary Law

Sent: Sat 2/13/14 10:45 AM

To: Joseph Mercur <mercurlit@hotmail.com>

Attachments: Berrell Manuscript & Letters…doc (2.7 MB)

Hey Joe,

I am attaching to this email a manuscript and the cover letters that came with it. I received them last month from a professor at the University of Chicago, the father of one of my more promising graduate students. After reading them I immediately thought of you.

As Nancy’s literary agent I thought you might find the manuscript worthy of your attention. While it has some historical value, I am not sure how to regard it. It does not fit neatly into the scholarly categories I am accustomed to working with and thus would probably not be a candidate for publication by a university press. George Berrell, the author, was a Nineteenth Century actor and theatrical manager who had a more than conflicted relationship with John Wilkes Booth. Perhaps you might be able to find a publisher interested in off-beat 19th Century memorabilia. It certainly has some timely implications for the present, but for obvious reasons it made me quite uncomfortable. Berrell may have been an actor in the theatrical sense, but he was hardly an actor in the real world, more of an observer, part of the audience to the dramas of his time.

Nancy and I are at our home on St. John and working hard as we get it ready for the rental season. Ah, the joys of owning a home in Paradise. I am sanding down and refinishing doors as well as rebuilding for the umpteenth time things the tropical climate destroys with infuriating regularity. Nancy is equally preoccupied with landscaping and painting the things I build as well as trying to finish her new novel.

Happy New Year, —Cary

145 Guilford Avenue / Somerville, Massachusetts 02145 / Box 7610 Carolina, St. John, VI 00830

Watts Dubler Rutherford, Ph.D.

Professor of Paleoclimatology

Department of Geophysical Sciences

University of Chicago

5734 S. Ellis Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

January 12, 2014

Dr. C.B.F. Law, Professor

Department of English

Carney Hall

Boston College

140 Commonwealth Ave. 

Chestnut Hill, MA 02467

Dear Professor Law:

My daughter, Madeleine, a graduate student in English at BC took your course in 19th Century Theater Studies and was fascinated by your theories of gender and equality in the theater of the time. During her summer break last year we had many dinnertime discussions about her studies, which I found gave me a welcome recess from the grim results of my research.

Subsequently I read in Theater Studies an excerpt from your forthcoming book on John Wilkes Booth and was intrigued by your brief speculation about sexuality and violence in forming, if not his social views, certainly the actions he took predicated on those views. Your discussion led me to remembering a manuscript by a nineteenth century actor named George Berrell that I had discovered among my maternal grandfather’s papers. It had been left in his study after my mother and her siblings had divided his more valuable belongings among themselves. In going through what remained I took the manuscript, a letter that accompanied it, along with other writings, as well as several small items no one else in the family was interested in, things that reminded me of my grandparents, including a miniature oil painting of a Lake Michigan lighthouse, a brass floor lamp that used to sit beside my grandfather’s favorite armchair and a number of volumes of so-called dime novels published by my great-grandfather, Graves Dubler.

After reading through Berrell’s manuscript I made several copies of it for distribution to other family members, one of which I am taking the liberty of sending you under cover of this letter, as well as a copy of a letter Dubler had clipped to it. I trust they will be useful in your research.

Yours truly,

Watts Rutherford

Mrs. C. I. Bannister

112 S. Chancellor Street

Los Angeles, California

March 6, 1941

Mr. James Dubler

Dubler Publishing Company

136 Ryerson Lane

Chicago, Illinois

Dear Mr. Dubler,

Mr. Will Davis who lives in the same rest home where I live is writing this letter for me since I am almost blind and can not read or write no more has found out for me that you are the son of Mr. Graves Dubler who published a book called Will Starr, a Boy of the Old West which was based on the adventures of George B. Berrell who used to live in a rooming house which I had here in Los Angeles before I got too old to run it anymore. When I sold the boarding house and was cleaning out my things I found these papers I am sending you that was in Mr. Berrell’s room when he died and that I have kept and now I don’t know what to do with them since I am in a small room and don’t think I will live much longer and which I think should be published since Mr. Berrell had a very interesting life being an actor who was in plays in the olden days and was in movies when they did not have talking in them and who knew John Wilkes Booth and Catherine Terrell and other famous people and who traveled around the country and did lots of interesting things and tells about how the country was in those days.

I hope you can do something with Mr. Berrell’s papers because they are very interesting.

Sincerely,

Mrs. C. I. Bannister

/by her friend, Edw. R. Sark

PART ONE

One

What We Say We Are

HUNCHED ON A stool before me, John Ford leaned forward, squinting as he rested his hand on the blanket covering my legs. How well did you know John Wilkes Booth?

Pulling back I looked through my window toward the garden. A few feet away a small alligator lizard sat on a rock in the sun staring in my direction. It was March 15, 1933 and we were in my room at Mrs. Bannister’s Boarding House in Los Angeles. We had been talking about my times in the theater and my work in motion pictures since 1915, including my appearances in several of Ford’s. His eyes had snapped open when at first I carelessly mentioned Wilkes. Ignoring the intensity of his interest, I shrugged and replied as if my friendship with Wilkes had been merely casual. I adopted a facade of indifference.

"I knew him; after all, I was raised in the theater. I knew all the Booths as well as most of the other great actors of the last eighty years, the Drews, the Barrymores. I did a motion picture with John back in ‘26, The Sea Beast. I knew Edmund Forrest, Catherine Terrell, Mary Anderson, and thanks to acting in your picture shows, men like Harry Carey and Hoot Gibson. I sat back and rubbed my eyes. I knew them all and knew many of them well."

Tell me about Booth, Ford said.

A fly buzzed and banged against the windows. The sun slanting through half-open Venetian blinds cast shadows on the curtains. I was tired. I often am these days. I do not think I will live much longer.

I often carried his costume basket for him. He was a man of stature in the theater and I was a boy.

I had no idea your paths had crossed, he said.

There’s no reason you should. I was simply another performer in your motion pictures. We’ve never been close friends. I shaped a smile to ease a testy tone that had crept into my voice.

He looked uncomfortable. I respect your work. You always gave me what I asked for in a performance.

I raised my eyes to his and smiled. It was nice of you to take the time to visit me.

He waved a hand dismissively. Ollie Levitt told me you were ill and I wanted to see you. You played a central role in my first big picture, George. That was a major step for me and I came to let you know I remember and appreciate your part in it.

"Straight Shooting, I said. That was a long time ago."

It was in 1917. Harry Carey and you.

That was the best motion picture role Ollie ever got me.

 Ford asked, How old are you, George?

Eighty-four. I’m old and I’m cold all the time. I pulled a shawl around my shoulders.

The temperature’s in the high eighties.

It happens to old men. It can be hot and we’ll be cold, especially in the lower extremities. My doctor says it’s due to an aging heart not having the strength to push warm blood far enough from the central core. I don’t find his analysis encouraging.

Ford grunted and said what young men always say in such situations, in spite of my having already mentioned my age. You’re not that old, George.

I gave him my best stage harrumph. "I was born in 1849 at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia, right between Acts One and Two of Macbeth. My father was playing Banquo. Mother was a player too, a pretty good one according to people who knew her, including Edwin Booth, but that night she was helping with the costumes, at least until I came on the scene."

I had mentioned Edwin’s name with special emphasis, but Ford did not react. Instead, as though he thought I was rambling, he let his eyes drift away. I wondered if he was looking at a motion picture running in his mind in which Wilkes’s celluloid image crept across the screen.

He shook his head and turned back to me. I’m fascinated that you knew John Wilkes Booth. History, the west, they fascinate me. Tell me more.

I’ve got so many stories that sometimes my life seems like nothing more than a series of disconnected tales. Some of them I hardly believe. I gave him another studied smile. They’d make pretty good motion pictures, you know.

I want to hear about Booth, he said.

His voice stirred me. In memory it still does.

Ford nodded, as if he too had known Wilkes.

Shutting my eyes, I let my chin drop toward my chest and fabricated the way old men can seem to fade away for a moment, indulging myself with the memory of Wilkes Booth. In that brief time I was barely aware Ford was still there. I was twelve again, hearing Wilkes speak.

"Georgie, run back to the hotel for me, please. I forgot to bring the jacket I need for the second act. It should be hanging on the door hinge of the closet."

"Right away, Mr. Booth."

All these years later I can almost feel the warmth of his hands as he tousled my hair. Leaning over behind me, his face so close to mine I could feel his breath on my neck, he moved his hands to my shoulders and spoke in a soft purring growl. "Wilkes. You should always call me Wilkes. We’re friends, Georgie."

"Yes sir, Mr. Booth."

Whatever chore he asked of me I would run off to do it, eager to please him, to fulfill his needs.

Fetching and running errands had been part of my regular duties in the theater for as long as I can remember, but I found more satisfaction in pleasing Wilkes than any other actor I served. He was the most generous and affectionate in expressing his gratitude for small favors, and he instructed me in many ways; some I learned to embrace and others I learned, often at great pain, to reject.

George. Ford’s voice jolted me from my reminiscences. Outside the alligator lizard was still on his rock, preening, his blue stripes bright in the sun, his tongue flicking in and out.

Are you all right? he asked.

I’m fine. I was just thinking.

About Booth? Tell me about him, what he was really like. Perhaps you know details I could use in a motion picture.

I lied. It was so long ago. I don’t recall the details.

You carried his costume basket, eh?

It was nothing special.

But Booth was special, not in a good way, but he was special.

Every actor had a basket to carry costumes and other personal equipment to and from the theater. I laughed, remembering. Many children whose parents were in the theater slept in them back stage. I don’t remember sleeping that way, but I recall seeing other children in baskets. Pausing, I imagined myself in one, my hands reaching up from under the blankets my mother tucked about me, trying to grasp the silver medallion my father gave her on their third wedding anniversary. My sister Mary said she wore it on a silver chain around her neck until the day she died.

Ford tapped his foot. What was he like? Booth, I mean?

He killed Lincoln. What would you expect him to be like?

You knew him. I only know what I heard in school.

I did not answer immediately. More memories of Wilkes rushed through my mind and I took another moment to savor them.

He was kind to me. I took a deep breath that rattled in my chest.

Ford looked alarmed. Are you all right?

Happens all the time, I said.

How was Booth kind to you?

It was a long time ago. I said again, laughing to break the moment and change the subject. I’m probably older than anyone, you know.

"Ollie said something like that when he asked me to cast you as Sweet Water Sims in Straight Shooting. I think what he actually said was that you were older than anybody in motion pictures. He smiled. Ollie always did know how to draw the long bow."

And you gave me the role.

 As I said, my first big picture, and I made it at the age of twenty-three. He spoke with pride.

I was sixty-eight. That seems young now.

You don’t look a day older than you did then.

I must have looked pretty damned bad at sixty-eight.

You look pretty damned good at eighty-four.

I shrugged. You’re in great demand these days.

I work hard and I know how to promote myself.

I was never much good at that. I just relied on my acting ability and my experience as a director on the stage, what we called a stage-manager back in the old theater days. Neither did me much good in motion pictures.

Acting is acting, Ford said.

Maybe, but I mentioned my experience in the theater to your brother Francis once when I was interested in a part he was casting. He laughed and said that he didn’t give a damn for my theatrical experience. ‘All we want is for you to look the way we want you to look,’ is what he said.

Now that we’ve got sound things are different, Ford said.

I missed that train.

With your voice you’d have been great in talking pictures.

In 1915 no one cared a hoot about my voice or my experience. When Ollie took me on as a client I told him about the theater and my travels as an actor, about frontier towns with makeshift stages and the dangers from lunatics in audiences who couldn’t tell the difference between the imaginary events we performed and real life. I described the years I spent managing theaters in St. Louis, Chicago, told him about other places where I worked. You know what he said?

Ford put a partially closed hand over his mouth, his face stiff as he stifled a yawn. What did he say?

He called me Georgie and said that I was in motion pictures and wasn’t an actor anymore. I told him to call me George, that only my mother, my sister Mary, Catherine Terrell, Wilkes Booth and Mrs. Bannister, my landlady, could get away with calling me Georgie.

Ford stifled another yawn. Back then I didn’t care much about the lives of performers in my pictures. Frank was right in a way; how you looked was what was important, at least in those days. Things have changed, you know. Now the voice is as important in pictures as it is in the theater, and music is getting more and more attention. He seemed to be studying the fly on the window. Everything about our business needs to be rethought.

It hardly matters to me.

You could still work, if you wished. There are always roles for old men.

I’m old old, I told him.

He smiled. Funny how things start out, isn’t it? Take me, for example. I wasn’t born a Ford. My parents were Jack and Barbara Feeney and they named me John Martin Feeney, as Irish as you could get up in Maine. I took on the name Jack Ford when I was twenty. Lifting his glasses, he rubbed his eyes and dropped them back in place.

Why Ford? I asked.

It’s a name with a great history in the theater, from the Jacobean playwright to the owner of Ford’s Theater in Washington.

Motion pictures aren’t the theater.

He rubbed the end of his nose. Not yet, perhaps.

A chuckle rose deep in my throat.

He frowned, as if trying to decide whether or not to be offended by my laughter. "Anything wrong with a Feeney becoming a Ford? Everything about us is fiction in one way or another, isn’t it?

If you can’t control your name you can’t control anything.

He scratched his forehead and rolled his hand in the air for me to continue.

 My earliest memories are of the theater. Mother would often put me to sleep in a champagne basket backstage or in a dressing room.

You just said you had no memory of that.

I crafted still another smile.

Did I? Memory is just another fiction, I suppose. At any rate, after a night’s performance she’d carry me back to our rooming house where they say Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Did he?

You never know about the past. People talk about what they remember and just like we did in the theater, they make up the rest of the lines as they go along. He could have written it there, or he could have done it in another house on the same street, or another street. I like to think he wrote it in our house.

My early life included nothing as interesting as that, Ford said. My father farmed and fished for a living, worked for the gas company, ran a saloon, and ended up an alderman in Portland. I spent too many years plowing dirt, gutting fish in boats, and running errands for drunks in his bar room. At least you got to run errands for people like Booth.

He sighed, and I returned to our earlier conversation.

I miss the stage. When I was in the pictures no one cared about my theatrical experience and now that I’m too old to act you tell me that acting’s a skill the motion picture business finally values.

The talkies have changed everything. He adjusted his glasses. Have you heard about my new project?

I shook my head.

"It’s called Dr. Bull, and I’ve signed Will Rogers in the lead."

You must be excited. I hoped the lack of excitement in my voice was not obvious.

What have you got up your sleeve, George?

There’s nothing up my sleeves except two scrawny old arms with a little loose skin hanging from them.

He looked away again. From what little I know about you, you’re not the type of person to waste away. You must occupy yourself in some creative way.

I said, I am working on a memoir.

That sounds like a good idea. There was no more enthusiasm in his voice for my memoir than there had been excitement in mine for his motion picture with Will Rogers.

I have little company, other than my landlady and Ollie’s occasional visit. Fearful that Ford might leave soon, I began to tell him a story. I made it up as I went along and it was a frail piece that didn’t hold together well, but I hoped it would serve to prolong his visit, even for a few minutes.

There’s a chap down the hall, a few years older than I am, who insists he’s Frank James.

Ford laughed. Frank died in 1914, he said.

 1915, I said. I’ve always been a stickler for dates, peoples’ names, historical figures as well as actors, actresses and the plays in which I have seen them perform. Already I fear they are cluttering up my memoir, undermining the dramatic impact of its narrative, but they are necessary to substantiate the times.

 So, what’s your idea?

There’s a story in him, a motion picture.

We all have stories.

Not like this.

Ford laughed quietly. I can’t count how many times people have said that when they’re pitching me a story.

I’m not pitching, I said. I’m just talking about how Frank resented Jesse, riding in his shadow, playing a bad man in Jesse’s script. In the end, Jesse gets shot in the back by Robert Ford and gets celebrated in song and story, while Frank gets forgotten and maybe ends up in a rented room in L.A. down the hall from me. At least that’s the way the storyline could go.

John said, Everybody knows how Jesse died and it’s no secret that Frank made a living for a time showing curious people the house where he was shot and then taking them for walks down to the graveyard where he’s buried. What makes your idea interesting and different?

Because it’s about Frank, the forgotten man, and not about Jesse. In 1882, five months after Jesse’s murder, Frank boarded a train to Jefferson City, Missouri, where he met with Governor Crittenden and said, ‘I’ve been hunted for twenty-one years. I’ve literally lived in the saddle, and have never known a day of perfect peace. It was one long, anxious, inexorable, eternal vigil and Governor. I haven't let another man touch my gun since 1861.’ Then he put his holster and gun in the Governor’s hands.

Good story, Ford said. Good line too. Is that word for word?

Of course, I said. In the old theater days my living depended upon the ability to memorize lines and details.

He removed his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. So then what happened to Frank?

For the next thirty years he had all kinds of jobs. He was a shoe salesman for a while and later he was a theater guard in St. Louis. That’s where I knew him. In 1902 Sam Hildreth, who came from Missouri, hired him as his betting commissioner at the Fair Grounds Race Track in New Orleans.

You knew both Frank James and John Wilkes Booth?

I nodded. I’ve known a lot of men: Brigham Young, Edmund Booth, Lewis Stone, soldiers, actors, politicians; I’ve ridden with killers and the killed. I knew them all and I traveled the country on foot, in coaches, trains, canoes, working in lumber camps, building the railroad, herding cattle, teaching school. I’ve done just about anything I had to do to keep meat on my bones.

Ford said only, The man down the hall isn’t Frank James.

Of course he isn’t. You know it and I know it, yet despite the all the evidence there are still people who’d be willing to believe he is Frank James. People need to suspend their disbelief in exchange for a good story.

I doubt that anyone really cares, Ford said. Perhaps he never heard of Coleridge. Now Booth, that’s different.

No one could prove that he wasn’t Frank James.

Sure they could, he said.

It wouldn’t matter. What’s important is the old man’s story. Whether or not he’s Frank James, he says he is, and that’s the point. We are what we say we are.

And what would you do with this story?

Sell it to you.

He shook his head. It’s melodrama and I don’t go for melodrama. Real drama with real action is what motion pictures call for, stuff to keep audiences on the edges of their seats, the sounds of guns with smoke rising from their barrels, and hoof beats kicking up clouds of dust, women in peril and strong men saving them and then riding off like knights to fight for honor and glory. With this nut who says he’s Frank James you’re talking about someone who’s just an old man telling stories to attract attention.

Like me, I said.

He shook his head, convincingly. Nothing like you, George. And even if your man down the hall is Frank James, and we both know he’s not, but for the sake of the story let’s say he is, then all he amounts to is the brother of a dead outlaw, an old man who stopped being an outlaw and ended up guarding race horses. No guns, no riding off into the sunset, no lovely girls to kiss, just repentance, selling shoes, watching the stage door at a theater and baby-sitting horses. Now what could I do with that? What kind of drama is there in repentance? It’s such an internal thing.

Not much, I guess, no more than you could with my life.

Don’t sell me short, George. If I cared to I could make a movie out of anything with the right actors and a decent script, but this isn’t something I could get my heart into.

Here’s another one, I said, and told him in brief the story an old wilderness scout named Isaiah Shull told me about his brother Rufus. Isaiah and I had been working as night guards at a logging camp in Wyoming. To keep us awake until dawn he told me how Rufus’ daughter had been kidnapped by Indians and what happened when he went looking for her. The story had drama and excitement aplenty. Perhaps one more skilled than I in pitching a story, someone who could have told it better, someone who could move around the room acting things out, might have interested him in it. I was once a good actor, but I’m no longer able to move with anything more than the most halting of steps and my stage voice is corroded by age and unused dramatically since my retirement from the theater.

Ford did not seem interested and soon he stood and stretched. You look tired and I’ve got to get back to work. It was good seeing you. I’ll come back and we can talk when you’ve got more energy.

We shook hands and Ford left. I doubt I will see him again. I’m just an old actor who appeared in minor roles in a few of his motion pictures, which are nothing more than shadows projected onto screens countless times over, actions captured on film by cameras, a highly unstable medium subject to rapid deterioration. Ollie had undoubtedly told John I was ill and he visited me out of pity. Now, his duty performed, he could with no qualms of conscience forget me. If he does come back I have many stories to tell him, such as the time I was part of a mob that tried to hang a man in Laramie, or my encounters with Brigham Young and his successor, John Taylor. I could regale him with tales of riding stagecoaches and trains as I traveled around the country, stories of Indians, outlaws, labor riots, of living in logging camps and old times in the theater.

There is much I have to tell a man who is fascinated by history. Wilkes I will keep to myself. Wilkes and Catherine Terrell are my private stories and I will tell them in my own way, and not to someone like John Ford. Honorable though he may be, he would revise them, restructure them, create fictions around them and make of them what they were not, all for the sake of entertaining an audience. Those stories are mine alone. I keep them close and tell them to myself as I try at last to understand.

Letting my blanket slide from my lap, I walked to the window. With a wavering hand I brushed the fly away, leaned on the sill and looked out at Mrs. Bannister’s gardens, rife with flowers and vegetables, remembering a long-ago conversation with Ollie as he described the time he was trying to convince Ford to use me in Straight Shooting, and how Ford pushed his glasses up his nose, peered through them and said, This Berrell, can he grow his own beard? I want things to look real.

I told him you could grow a beard down to your knees if he wanted you to.

If he’ll pay me enough, I’ll grow it, I said. So, he wants verisimilitude, eh?

Ollie shrugged. I don’t know about that, but he wants things to look real. He’s full of wild ideas. He’s twenty-three and thinks motion pictures are going to be art. He laughed. Art for Christ’s sake. Him and his brother Francis are full of themselves.

As long as he pays, I said.

He’ll pay. You won’t get rich, but it’ll cover your rent and buy food and pay me too. Besides, you’ll be working with Harry Carey.

Is he any good?

The best cowboy in the pictures.

 Better than Tom Mix?

Tom Mix is a flashy goody-goody. Carey’s real. You look at him and you believe he’s the character he’s playing.

He’s an actor, I said.

Ollie did not respond to my comment. You look at Mix and see Mix. You look at Carey and you see a guy that’s been through everything and it shows, from the creases on his face to the way he holds his left arm with his right one, as if in pain of the soul as well as of the body. Cheyenne Harry, he looks like the role. You believe him.

Ford hired me and I grew the beard. Ollie got me jobs in a number of motion picture plays. I had left the stage in 1914 and I hired him as my agent in 1916. He knows the business, but in spite of his description of Harry Carey’s face and the way he holds his arm, he shows little concern for the art of performance, and certainly not that of the theater, whether it be on the part of an actor, a director, a stage manager or the lowliest stage hand responsible for erecting and maintaining the sets necessary to promote the illusions audiences demand.

You’re a silent face and a moving body in black and white pictures that look like they’re moving, he told me early in our business relationship.

They do move, I said. I jump on a horse or shoot a gun and dust comes from the hooves and smoke comes from the gun.

It’s just a bunch of still pictures projected on a screen so fast that they look like they’re moving, but they’re not. Illusion, Georgie, it’s all an illusion, a flipping illusion.

People don’t understand or care about that. They see smoke and dust.

Smoke and mirrors is more like it, he said. Forget about the stage and forget about acting and be glad you don’t have to travel around anymore, getting beat up in small towns by rowdies that don’t understand an actor is acting, don’t get it that he’s not the villain he plays. Acting’s done for. It’s all motion pictures now.

I threw myself into motion pictures and never again mentioned my former career to prospective employers. From 1915 through 1927 I appeared in fifty-five productions in all sorts of roles, from a central figure to one of twelve in a jury box. I have galloped at break-neck speed over desert sands and down rocky slopes, sometimes falling off my horse and banging myself up. Once I broke my arm in a dusty fall and somebody else showed up on the screen, remounting the horse I fell from. No one could tell the difference. My replacement wore the same clothes I had been wearing and he rose from dust stirred up by a worker using a broom.

I have been hanged, shot, stabbed and burned to death. I have been a villain fighting heroes and a sidekick to heroes defeating snarling mustached toughs aiming to steal land, rustle cattle or take off with captured women tossed across their saddles. I appeared to lose an arm in one picture and I’ve done many other things that motion picture actors do to satisfy the public’s craving for thrills. I worked for hours in the hot sun of the Mojave Desert when the temperature registered a hundred and thirty degrees and I had a fistfight in snow when the temperature was fifteen degrees below zero, all with cameras rolling as I repeated my actions until whatever director I was working with was satisfied.

Once, playing a Canadian trapper paddling a canoe on an icy mountain lake, I was shot at by men hiding behind an outcropping of rocks on the shore. Wearing thick wool garments and heavy boots, I had to jump overboard into the lake and swim eighty feet to the opposite shore, bumping into cakes of ice as I went. My soaked clothing and water-filled boots weighed me down and I was terrified I wouldn’t live to reach land.

When I dragged myself halfway up on the beach, the director shouted, Make it look like you’re exhausted, Berrell.

That’ll be easy, I told him.

He didn’t reply, but turned to the cameraman and the crew. Rest up for a few minutes, boys, then get ready. We’ve got to shoot it over again.

My career in pictures has not been an overwhelming success, but thanks to Ollie’s connections to producers and directors, the wolf has not howled at my door. He has been an invaluable buffer between me and some of the crass characters who manage the picture business.

I have dealt with arrogant, bullying, domineering motion picture directors who with bluff struggled to conceal their incompetence, and whose knowledge of theatrical history and the technique of the drama was absolutely nil, some little more than bully boys off the street with bravado and big mouths, able to talk their way into jobs with nothing more than the ability to tell a story. I mentioned Edwin Booth to one of them.

He shook his head and scratched his chin. Who in the hell’s Edwin Booth? Never heard of him.

One of the greatest actors of all time.

What studio does he work at?

I’m not sure, I told him, hoping to end the discussion.

If he’s as good as you say, I want him.

He may be dead.

I kept my tone vague, not bothering to tell him that Edwin was indeed dead, that he had died in 1893.

Find out, he said and walked away.

FORD’S VISIT had been a pleasant interlude. My days are all much the same, an hour or two of writing my reminiscences followed by many hours devoted to idle memories and fantasies as I lie on my bed, the afternoon sun filling the room. In some Catherine Terrell comes knocking upon my door, sits opposite me and rests her hand upon my blanketed knees. In others Wilkes appears, on the best occasions as an angel. He calls me Georgie, smiles and laughs, full of promise, beautiful to see as he tousles my hair, walks past me and takes the stage, that great voice filling the theater of my unconscious. Other times he comes springing suddenly, deadly, from beneath dark and still waters. That afternoon as I napped, even though her name had only come up in passing during my conversation with Ford, I dreamed of Catherine Terrell and saw her as I first did and as she was at the last. I awoke heavy with the pain of loss.

And so I spend my days, reviewing the scenes of my life, one in which I saw much and met many people and finally learned to accept them for what they were, not what I expected them to be. Perhaps I may yet, through writing this reminiscence, find the same kind of acceptance for myself.

I grew up with the country and then grew old. I’m left with memories, some of adventures on the road and in logging camps and western towns, others of the theater and the people I have known and loved and those who have loved me: Wilkes, whose affection was abruptly ripped from my grasp; Catherine, with whom I could have ended my days, the chaste love that endured throughout my life.

Two

Some Things Are Better Forgotten

MY FATHER WAS KILLED in a duel with a fellow actor in 1853, two weeks after my sister Mary was born. Wilkes Booth once told me Father’s depth and range of voice was the envy of many other actors. I was four and have but a faint memory of a tall man with a loud laugh who, hunched over and growling, would chase me around the theater, arms hanging below his knees as I ran screaming and laughing, crying, Father’s a monster, Father’s a monster, much to his delight and mine.

As I grew my image of Father was shaped by Mother’s story, always told with an undercurrent of fury, of his fatal argument with Edward Taylor over the proper interpretation of Shakespeare’s Iago.

Your father believed Iago was a tortured soul and that he should be played as suffering over the choices he makes. The words of the story came from her as a soliloquy of her own.

He used to say Iago was so consumed with shame and guilt that he could never again face the fact of his crimes. Mr. Taylor believed Iago should be played as cold, remorseless and evil, citing his final comment as evidence. He said Iago was demonic, keeping the joy of his deeds to himself so that he might take them out in private and gloat over them. They argued endlessly over their differing interpretations. The disagreement grew and grew, until they argued over everything. The weather, costumes, politics, they couldn’t agree on the time of day, and they had been good friends for several years before that damned Iago came between them. Once they came to blows over who was standing closer to the footlights.

I remember her sighing and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand each time she recited the events of Father’s death. One evening after drinking through the afternoon they had an unusually violent argument and Mr. Taylor challenged your father to a duel. Your father foolishly accepted the challenge and Mr. Taylor killed him.

As a child I had heard her tale so often I could repeat it word for word as I imitated Mother’s voice. Once I could read I studied Othello to see if I could understand Iago. I pored over the pages and the next time she told the story I said, That’s why Iago says, ‘Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: From this time forth I never will speak word,’ I said, proud of my knowledge of the play. He can’t face the things he did and couldn’t bring himself to speak of them to anyone.

She patted my shoulder. But he did them, Georgie. It’s his actions that are important, not why he did them.

I didn’t understand. Why do you think Iago was that way, Mother? I asked. Why did he do the things he did if doing them filled him with such shame?

Her hand still on my shoulder, she dug her fingers into the flesh. I was wincing from the pain when she bent down and pushed her face into mine, a fierce glow in her eyes and an equally fierce tone in her voice.

He did them, Georgie, and that’s that. People do things and we question their motives at our peril. Take life as it is and don’t ask questions, not of others and not of yourself. Your father died over an argument with no answer beyond speculation. As long as you can tell right from wrong you needn’t know why people do wrong, nor why they do anything. All we need to know is that when people do bad things they must be punished for them. Do you understand?

I nodded. I did not have to understand. It was enough that I heard her words and accepted them as true. To this day I imagine life to be a series of events that occur but need not be overly examined. To do so risks an over-interpretation with possibly lethal consequences. My life happened and I recount it as it happened, not why it happened.

Mother dug her fingers into my shoulders three years before the birth of Sigmund Freud. Today people speak of such things as egos and ids and superegos, neuroses and psychoses, guilt and repression, as they try explaining motivations for actions in real life, in the imaginary lives of literary and dramatic characters, and in talking and writing about actual historic people. I don’t need Freud’s theories to help me with repressed memories. Some things are better repressed, if not forgotten.

I have never tried to analyze either Father’s or Mr. Taylor’s motivation for dueling over what was in reality an insignificant matter. It is important to understand the words and actions of a character one is to portray onstage, but difference of opinion over the nature of a portrayal is too trivial for a duel to the death. Such combat results from a kind of stupidity on the part of the duelists, although perhaps Father was prescient, anticipating the preoccupation of Freudian era dramatists in their attempts at exploring the psychology of the soul. If so, his foresight resulted in a duel that robbed me of a father.

*

I HAVE NO memory of my first appearance on the stage. Mother claimed it was in 1850, in Philadelphia, and I played a baby in arms. It wasn’t a difficult role, she said, but I had colic and my cries drowned out the actors. That was one of her favorite stories about my early childhood, along with one of another time in Philadelphia when I was four and had been sent on stage as the Child of Cora in Sheridan’s Pizarro. Edwin Forrest was playing Rolla. After he had rescued me from the Spanish Camp and was making his getaway, he held me aloft at arms length in his left hand, while wielding his sword in his right hand to chop down a bridge he had just crossed. She said I kicked and squirmed and yelled for him to put me down. When he made his exit he placed me in Mother’s arms.

Take your brat, Madam, he said to her. He knows nothing about the interpretation of character.

I told him he had no character at all speaking of a child in such a way, she said.

You said that to Edwin Forrest? I was horrified to hear she had spoke to such a distinguished performer in such a way.

She laughed and waved her hand in the air, as if to erase any discomfort I felt. We were friends. He took it as a jest, which it mostly was.

I don’t recall my first speaking part but I do have a clear memory of playing the Prince of Wales in Richard III, with Forrest as Richard, in Philadelphia during 1855.

You were letter perfect and very cute, Mother told me, although she was hardly impartial.

I had other child parts, including one of Mrs. Haller’s children in August von Kotzebue’s play The Stranger, and the part of Oneactah’s child in Nathaniel Bannister’s Putnam; or, the Iron Days of ’76. I distinctly remember the excitement of being carried across the stage on horseback.

Bannister was an interesting character, and his life should stand as a warning for everyone who seeks to make a living in the arts. A playwright and actor from Baltimore, Putnam was his only successful play. Desperate for money, he sold it for fifty dollars. He wrote many other plays, including The Fall of San Antonio; or, Texas Victorious. His depiction of the Texans’ plight during the siege of the Alamo created such a sensation that many young volunteers arrived in Texas after having seen it, an example of how the dream life of the theater can stoke the dreams of men and women, influencing their true actions in the world. Even so, the play earned him little money and he died a pauper at thirty-four. I will always think of him as a victim of the romance and penury that often go hand in hand with the lives of actors and playwrights, conditions I know all too well.

The theatre is a calling and a passion, not a way of life that rewards the majority of those called with wealth and position. I survived, had a number of good times as well as difficult times and many bad times. My father’s ill-fated career was extreme, but too often actors, writers and others whose lives revolve around the stage suffer greatly for their art. I suppose the same is true of the majority of artists. Few win acclaim and fortune while most of us struggle for our daily bread and the temporary roofs that shelter us from the elements.

I FIRST SAW Catherine Terrell in 1856. I was seven, helping manage backdrops and stage properties during a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Walnut Street Theater. Catherine was several feet before me, preparing to make her entrance on stage as Little Eva. Blonde hair fell in ringlets around her shoulders, the glow from the footlights soft upon her face and glimmering in her hair as she stood half shadowed in the darkened area to the side of the stage.

Slender and delicate, she walked on stage her movement as she passed stirring the air I breathed. In that instant Catherine, no older than I, became the standard by which I would forever measure feminine beauty. I did not yearn for her. I was never tortured by dreams of unfulfilled love and desire in which she was the object; but she, with her slim boyish figure, was for me the ideal. No other girl, or as we grew, no other woman ever measured up to her in my imagination or experience.

Throughout the remainder of her engagement at the theater I placed myself near the spot where she stood. Each night she stirred the air I breathed. She was one of two poles between which I have forever been torn. Nearly four-score years later, I judge the beauties I see here in Hollywood by that moment in 1856 when Catherine Terrell’s entrance upon the stage caused the backstage air to swirl and fill my senses.

I saw her off and on through the following years, although we had no important connection until 1873, when I was a member of the Stock Company at the Academy of Music in St. Louis and she was engaged for a two week run. It was then that she confided in me details of her life that ultimately changed me in a most profound manner.

Three

Something Extra in it

I OFTEN DIGRESS when telling stories of times and events I have experienced, on occasion giving rise to groans and rolling eyes among friends and traveling companions. I have absorbed Aristotle’s concept of the unity of action. In the theater, constrained by space and limited in time, I cannot abide works that unnecessarily violate it. Memoirs require a different aesthetic, or at least I may indulge myself by claiming they do and thus ramble a bit from time to time in this work of recollection. There is much of interest among my early memories of Philadelphia and the theater. Some are petty in comparison with the rest of life, some extraordinary, still able to stir my emotions. Such are my recollections of Wilkes Booth and Catherine Terrell. Most are little more than colorful backdrops to the scenes of my life, small moments—snippets of mental celluloid—that in accumulation shaped the adult I became.

In 1860 I saw the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, riding in an open barouche, doffing his hat in response to the cheers of the crowds upon the sidewalks, the sun reflected brilliantly in the hat’s silk as he seemed to look from side to side into the faces of the crowd, each onlooker sure the Prince was looking directly at him. In spite of his reputation for geniality and bonhomie, I suspect he saw only vague motion and indistinct figures, like a player sees only formless shadows beyond the stage. Another time I saw members of the Japanese embassy seated in open carriages, wearing exotic garments. They all resembled actors, Prince and diplomats alike, playing out their roles clad in finery that made me realize the costumes of our Company were but shoddy imitations of true grandeur.

The city was a collection of sounds, sights, movement and colors: men and women dismounting from carriages and cautiously walking the evening sidewalks headed to restaurants and theaters; the crossing-sweeper, the chimney-sweep, the cats-meat-man, the soap-fat man with his weekly visits, and the peripatetic hawkers with large trays balanced on their heads, the hot-corn man, and the pepper pot vendor all crying their wares and services as they vied for their attention.

I once saw a bellman walk slowly along the street crying loudly as he rang his bell, Lost child, lost child, has anyone seen a small boy with brown hair, wearing a blue shirt and brown pants? I shuddered at the thought of a child, someone like myself, but alone and frightened in that great gray city beside the Delaware River. That night riding home from the theater, I sat as close to Mother as possible and told her about the bellman.

Life is dangerous, Mother said to Mary and me. You need to be wary of strangers and keep to yourselves when running errands in the city streets. Her voice dropped and she told of the perils the world held. Be sure to avoid the docks and warehouses of the waterfront. There are men there who would take you captive and force you to work on their ships until you are worn out and useless and they throw you overboard to drown.

At other times she terrified us with stories of human depravity. There are monsters that would eat you alive. People so close to starvation that the flesh of human beings is something to be sought after so they might ease their hunger, and they especially crave the flesh of young children. There are men who will take you prisoner and make you work for them until you die of exhaustion. Then they’ll dump your body in a river or out in the woods and steal another child they can work to death.

Why would they take children like Mary and me when they could have slaves? In my youth I was ignorant of ethical questions surrounding slavery, thinking of it, if at all, as part of the natural order of things.

My Quaker mother’s face tightened and her voice dropped as she shook her head. Slavery is as reprehensible an institution as there is in this country and could well be the destruction of it. It’s a problem that could tear us apart. But people who claim the right to hold other people in slavery think of those poor souls as an important investment. They need to feed them and look to their health if the investment is to be profitable. Kidnapped children need just enough to keep them alive until they are no longer strong enough to work and then they’re replaced by other kidnapped children. She looked at Mary, her voice low and trembling. And there are those who would take a young girl and sell her into white slavery.

What is that? I asked.

Mary and Mother exchanged glances, Mary’s stricken face evidence that Mother had previously terrified her with tales of this white slavery.

We needn’t speak of it, Mother said. Her tone allowed no further discussion.

ALTHOUGH I WAS ELEVEN at the time it all happened, I have vivid memories of the excitement surrounding the 1860 Presidential election, the different candidates, the storm of ideas and fears, the talk of the Union’s dissolution. There were factional fights, parades by day and night, jeers and cheers for Lincoln, and great rejoicing throughout Philadelphia when the news of his election arrived. I knew nothing of the passions of the time, nothing of the Abolitionist movement and other current political and philosophical ideas. Mother’s indignation aside, for me there were slaves, obvious due to their color and features, and then there were the rest of us.

In spite of Mother’s religious sensibilities she rarely took us to Quaker Meeting. Members of her faith looked upon the theater as a worldly and degrading occupation and we were never made to feel welcome in their congregations. My grandmother blamed my father for leading Mother astray, and perhaps there was truth to that, but after his death Mother remained in the theater and any religious leanings she might have had seemed irrelevant to our lives. That sense of their irrelevance has remained with me.

Life on the stage, as I knew it as a boy, was an all-consuming thing. Discussions were about the skill or lack of skill of various actors and actresses, the chances of a play being successful before audiences in certain cities and towns, the reliability of theater owners in regard to matters such as appropriate billing of players, of payment and accommodations. It seemed there was little else of importance.

Yet Lincoln was a being apart. Mother spoke his name with hushed reverence and told me often he was the best chance for holding the Union together. His Presidency was the background against which the first five years of the Sixties were played out. Gangly and homely, he loomed over my years of early adolescence.

Mother, Mary and I traveled extensively; south to New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, north to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York City, Albany, Troy and other upstate New York cities. From the fall of 1860 through the spring of 1861 we were in Albany where Mother and Wilkes Booth were members of the stock company at Spackman’s Gayety Theater.

Life was a struggle for us. Mother, widowed and with two small children, was fearful that she was a burden on the theatrical companies she worked with and cautioned us to be careful, polite and useful.

We thrive at the sufferance of others, she would say, speaking like a character in one of the many plays in which she performed. I am convinced my own sense of the drama in my life is a result of her belief in the tenuousness of our lives, what comfort we attain liable to be threatened by the appearance of a villain or villains determined to wreak havoc upon us, for no other reason than that they could. Mother was beautiful and talented, a productive member of the profession and sought after by many stock companies. Yet she never truly believed in her worth.

As a result, I was determined to be useful. At a young age I became the basket-boy of the theater, carrying the wardrobes of members of the company to and from the theater as often as was required, receiving in payment twenty-five cents per week from each. The baskets were generally filled with costumes and boots. Some would have swords fastened on the outside. It was impossible for me to carry more than two at a time and the hotel rooms of those who employed me were scattered around the city. My job was not easy. Still, it netted me between four and five dollars each week, a fortune I thought then, and one which Mother did not permit me to spend on frivolities.

Boys outgrow their shoes with alarming frequency, Mother told me. And trousers wear out where they get the most usage. I expect to see evidence of that wear in the knees from walking and carrying things and not in the regions worn out by those who sit idle.

Children of the actors were granted free admission to the theater and I was a member of a small group of boys who saw at least one performance of almost every production. I still remember being thrilled by Wilkes’ dashing figure in the final combat between Richard III and E.L. Tilton’s Richmond. While cheering the death of the villainous Richard, I despaired in seeing Wilkes lying on the stage in a posture of violent death. In another play, Rob Roy, James Herne as Francis Osbaldistone, betrayed his brother, Rashleigh. Herne’s villain was so convincing that we boys hated him. Another boy and I were loud and vigorous as we hissed and hooted our loathing of his character. Two rough and brawny ushers quickly grabbed us by the neck and threw us into the street.

Mother was mortified. When I returned she grabbed me by the ears, shook my head and pulled me toward her dressing room.

You’ve humiliated yourself, and you’ve humiliated me, to say nothing of putting us in jeopardy of being thrown into the streets with no way to make a living. How could you have done such a thing?

I felt my face redden. Everybody in the audience hated Osbaldistone. Me and the boys weren’t doing anything the rest of them wasn’t doing.

The boys and I is the correct way to say it, and it’s what the rest of them weren’t doing, not what the rest of them wasn’t doing. Watch your speech, Georgie.

I straightened and looked her in the eyes. The boys and I were only doing what people in the paying audience were doing.

She twisted