The Pittsburgh Press (February 3, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
The Mrs. Moonlights and Peter Pans of yesteryear: Where are they now?
By Florence Fisher Parry
Who is your favorite movie star? Who is your favorite actress? – I mean on the stage? What hero of the theater and the screen takes the place, in your heart, that my favorite matinee idol did in my day? Ingrid Bergman? Jennifer Jones? Katharine Hepburn? Hedy Lamarr? John Hodiak? Gary Cooper? Bing Crosby? Jimmy Stewart? How beautiful the faces of these young women! How handsome, how magnetic the men! You cannot imagine them, can you, grown older, their fires cooled, hair graying, taking on weight? Just the thought of these glamorous creatures growing older hurts you, doesn’t it? You reject the idea.
Yet someday, someday not too distant either, you will be sitting in a theater watching the performance, in a secondary part, of a spinstery, wrinkled actress, and on the program it will say that she is Katharine Hepburn! You will see a benign old grandmother, oh, giving a wonderful performance something like Dame May Whitty, and on the program it will say that this is Ingrid Bergman! And a genial-faced comedian with a slight paunch and stiff gait, you will find to be Gene Kelly! And that tall old-timer with the very stooped shoulders, that will be Gary Cooper!
When that time comes, dear reader, and you see these names on the program and you look upon the stage or at the screen and are asked to identify these aging actors with those memoryful names, you will feel sad and tender in the way that I feel sad and tender when I see in the theater, a shapeless, oldish woman and am asked to believe that she is the Laurette Taylor of “Peg O’ My Heart” and I see on the screen a crochety old man in a wheel chair and am told that he is the magnificent brother of that young Adonis, John Barrymore, when they co-starred in “The Jest” and “Peter Ibbetson.”
Oh, time in thy flight! Oh, time in thy flight! Do not look too closely at those who are passing, for it is likely to break your heart, O time!
Now next week at the Nixon you and I will be going to see “The Late George Apley.” We will be sitting side by side, and anyone observing us would thin that we were seeing exactly the same scenes and exactly the same people up there on the stage. But that will not be so at all, for you will be seeing, the role of George Apley, a dignified and rather creaky old gentleman with wrinkled old eyes and grisled hair and stiff joints. But I won’t be seeing hm that way at all. I will be seeing a very vigorous, magnificent, young man who just about 20 years ago came over to America from the London theater to make his debut here with Noel Coward in a very morbid play called “The Vortex.” That was Leo G. Carroll, still young to my way of thinking, a man of my own generation and age. I remember seeing Leo G. Carroll in “The Constant Nymph.” I can’t remember now how many years ago. How delightful he was, how rare an actor!
Then, when you see “The Late George Apley,” you will see Mrs. George Apley in the person of Jane Beecher, a cozy, practical-looing matron, and there’s nothing I can do to make you believe that when I look at her, I don’t see Mrs. Apley at all; but I see the most charming and lovely young girl playing the constant wife of Leo Dietrichstein in “The Concert,” way back in the days when David Belasco was the theater’s most mysterious magician.
There will be another very nice old lady (that’s what you will think) who comes in and out of the George Apley living room imparting life and spunk to the musty old place; a still beautiful, slender person, to be sure, but in your eyes just another old character actress, prettier than some and with a better figure, but still oldish and gray.
Not to me! Oh, no! When I look at Margaret Dale, my eyes penetrate right through the mist of years between the present and the past when as a girl I used to haunt the Empire Theater and watch this beautiful, this lovely young creature, in one leading role after another in John Drew’s famous Empire Theater plays.
And even in “Life With Father” you will see an actor who on the program is listed as Percy Waram. You may have seen him play the part of “Father Day” in “Life With Father.” Now Percy Waram in “The Late George Apley” is a caustic, brittle old man: but do you think you’re going to make me believe that? For don’t I know what he looked like when he played with the old Ben Greet players dressed in all those handsome Shakespearean costumes and filling the stage with his infinite grace, his light mercurial truth?
And if it seems preposterous to me on this side of the footlights to see all these young, glamorous, talented creatures masquerade as old men and old women, how more preposterous it must seem to THEM who know themselves to be exactly the same persons that they were 20, 30, yes 40 years ago?
For your life and mine changes as time goes on. When we are young, we lead a young life, we have young friends, young interests; and then as we grow older slowly, one by one we discard some of our enthusiasms and habits of youth; and these earlier interests give place to others more mature.
Not so in the theater. The lives of actors remain the same. They are surrounded by exactly the same interests each season; each season comes to them as a renewal, a repetition, of the season before; the same uncertainty and suspense; the same uneasy intervals of being “at liberty.” The habits of their lives suffer – or enjoy, as the case may be – no change. They are as they were; eternally young, avid. pursued by the furies of insecurity and the dread old age.
I sit in the theater and look at the performances of aging actors who not so long ago were in the full prime of their talents and vigor. I sit there and I am absorbed in their performance, giving them the fullest due, heady with relief and delight when they come through with a fine performance; sick at heart with sympathy and understanding when their performances lag and fall.
For I know what the theater demands of them – what it takes from young and old, from well and sick. It is the most relentless master of all. Yet like a glorified Svengali it exerts upon the spirits of all true actors an irresistible spell!
A born-to-be actor is its willing slave, and it will command him until he dies – with his boots on, you may be sure – close to the falling curtain.