February 15-22, 1916
Last week the woes of the world weighed heavily on Kate Roosevelt, but this week her agenda included some lighter fare, the theater and society doings. On February 15, 1916, she began her day by taking her grandson to school in a taxi and noting that it was, “very cold.” But the chilly temperature didn’t prevent her from taking in an entertainment at the Colony Club on Madison Avenue between East 30th and 31st Street. Her diary entry for that day read, “To see two one-act plays at the Colony Club done by the Washington Square Players.” In addition to the bone-chilling temperatures outside, Kate’s review of the play was equally as arctic. She blasted the performance when she wrote, “Very poor show. The pretty little stage was burned-up, supposedly by a cigarette stump dropped by one of the actors.” At least something about the day received a warm response from Kate Roosevelt.
Related Articles
Katherine Cornell
Once again, her instincts could have right. Her assessment of the Washington Square Players indicated they were not her “cup of tea,” just a group of amateur actors, disenchanted with the parts that the commercial Broadway theater was offering. The troupe started in 1914, calling itself the Neighborhood Playhouse, headquartered at 466 Grand Street in Greenwich Village. In 1915, the actress, Katherine Cornell recently arrived from Buffalo, New York, joined their roster and began rehearsing with the actors who referred to themselves as the Washington Square Players. The name came from the Greenwich Village Bookshop on Washington Square where the group often gathered.
They played Friday and Saturday evenings in space they leased at the Bandbox Theater on East 57th Street. Seating only forty people, the admission charge was fifty cents. The payroll included one stagehand, one office boy and a seamstress.
Eugene O’Neill Plaque at his birthplace, 1500 Broadway
Scornful of New York City’s legitimate theater, its members all came under the umbrella of the Drama League and included two unknown playwrights, Anton Chekov and Eugene O’Neill, known then just as “G. O’Neill.”
By 1916 with rave reviews providing them with sold-out performances, the group moved to the Comedy Theater on West 41st Street, just east of Broadway. The larger space could accommodate six hundred people, charge one dollar a performance and pay the aspiring actors twenty five dollars a week.
Louise Bryant
Their forte was performing one-act plays and boasting a bohemian lifestyle. While living with the playwright, John Reed at 43 Washington Square, the divorced actress, Louise Bryant carried on a romantic affair with Eugene O’Neill. After his years of wanton experimentation in Greenwich Village, the playwright got serious and went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the early days, their circle included anarchist, Emma Goldman and political activist, Max Eastman who Kate Roosevelt once referred to as a ranting lunatic after hearing him speak at the Colony Club.
Free love, birth control and women’s rights were often subliminal subjects in the group’s one-act plays and quite possibly the reason for Kate Roosevelt’s rather raw review.
Steinway Piano in Steinway Hall
Needing some sane and sedate company, the next night Kate Roosevelt hosted Ruth and Theodore Steinway, her niece and nephew-in-law for dinner. The couple, who were members of the piano-making dynasty were also active in the exclusive Comedy Club and most likely got an earful from Aunt Kate on poor taste in play production.
Minnie Maddern Fiske as Erstwhile Susan
“Mary here to wash my hair at 1:15. Bop dined here. She and I to see Mrs. Fiske in Erstwhile Susan in the evening. We went to see Mrs. Fiske in her dressing room after the play.” It was the second time in the last month she had been in the audience to see the play, but the first time she mentioned going backstage to congratulate the star. Kate had written that she felt that Mrs. Fiske’s role in the comedy, Erstwhile Susan suited her and provided just the right vehicle to boost for her waning career. As lifelong friends, Kate was probably there to support the aging actress and at the same time give her unmarried sister, Bop Shippen a night out on the town.
Minnie Maddern Fiske and Frederick Perry in “Highroad” 1912
“Heard of Oliver Roosevelt’s engagement to Miss Grace Olmstead,” was the next day’s news. Oliver Wolcott Roosevelt was Kate’s nephew, the eldest son of her late- husband Hilborne’s brother, the late Dr. James West Roosevelt. Named for his mother’s ancestor, a Connecticut patriot, Governor Oliver Wolcott, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Oliver Roosevelt graduated from Harvard in 1912 and was often a guest at his Aunt Kate’s home. His widowed mother, Laura Roosevelt resided at 32 East 31st Street and summered at the family’s estate “Waldeck” on Oyster Bay, not far from Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill.
The announcement in the New York Times identified the bride-to-be as Grace Temple Olmstead of Brookfield, Massachusetts who had recently returned from abroad where she studied painting and volunteered in Paris with the American Ambulance Hospital. Her father, the late-Chauncy L. Olmstead was the owner of the Quaboag Corset Company. According to the Times, Oliver Wolcott Roosevelt, a cousin of former President Theodore Roosevelt was working in Paris as a representative of the Farmers Loan and Trust Company at the time of the engagement.
The Hippodrome
On Saturday, February, 19th it was time to entertain Ettie, another un-attached Shippen sister, “Ettie and I to matinee at the Hippodrome.” In 1916, the Hippodrome Theater on Sixth Avenue between West 43rd and 44th Street was the world’s largest theater with a seating capacity of 5, 300. Built in 1905 to stage spectacles, its massive stage could accommodate an entire circus with the horses and elephants marching up from a basement menagerie. A rising glass water tank could float boats, swallow showgirls and replicate a waterfall. The production that Ettie and Kate went to see was called Hip-Hip-Hooray, a musical review written by the theater’s artistic director, R. H. Burnside.
Well it wasn’t exactly a high-brow opera or classy symphony orchestra concert, but it seemed that even the sometimes- snobbish, Kate Roosevelt appreciated the rather pedestrian performance put on at the world-famous Hippodrome.
Sharon Hazard’s Dowager’s Diary appears on Thursday.
Photo One:
Washington Square Players Being Fitted for Costumes
Library of Congress
Photo Two:
Katherine Cornell
New York Public Library Digital Archives
Photo Three:
Eugene O’Neill Plaque at his birthplace, 1500 Broadway
wiki
Photo Four:
Louise Bryant
Oregon Encyclopedia
Photo Five:
Steinway Piano in Steinway Hall
Steinway Company
Photo Six:
Minnie Maddern Fiske as Erstwhile Susan
Library of Congress
Photo Seven:
Minnie Maddern Fiske and Frederick Perry in “Highroad” 1912
Library of Congress
Photo Eight:
The Hippodrome
wiki
The post The Dowager’s Diary: New York City’s Downton Abbey – Week Fifty-Four appeared first on Woman Around Town.
