Overview
-Marian Seldes
"Margaret Webster is a highly welcome addition to our knowledge of the first important female director in American theater. Remembered now especially for her staging of Othello with Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer, Margaret Webster was probably the best-known, in-demand, and admired director of Shakespeare in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Fascinating throughout, the book's discussions of working with Robeson, and of HUAC, which targeted her just as her career was reaching a peak, make for especially engrossing reading."
-Oscar Brockett
Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater is an engrossing backstage account of the life of pioneering director Margaret Webster (1905-72).
This is the first book-length biography of Webster, a groundbreaking stage and opera director whose career challenged not only stage tradition but also mainstream attitudes toward professional women.
Often credited with first having brought Shakespeare to Broadway, and renowned for her bold casting of an African American (Paul Robeson) in the role of Othello, Webster was a creative force in modern American and British theater.
Her story reveals the independent-minded artist undeterred by stage tradition and unmindful of rules about a woman's place in the professional theater. In addition to providing fascinating glimpses into Webster's personal and family life, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater also offers a who's-who list of the biggest names in New York and London theater of the time, as well as Hollywood: John Gielgud, Noël Coward, George Bernard Shaw, Uta Hagen, Sybil Thorndike, Eva LeGallienne, and John Barrymore, among others, all of whom crossed paths with Webster. Capping Webster's amazing story is her investigation by Senator Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, which left her unable to work for a year, and from which she never fully recovered.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472026036 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 02/24/2010 |
| Series: | Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 768 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Life in the Theater
By Margaret Webster Milly S. Barranger
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2004 University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11390-3
Chapter One
An Itinerant Childhood
My parents objected to a stage career with the usual insincerity of theatrical parents. -MARGARET WEBSTER
Margaret Webster's life in the theater began in earnest in London at age twelve when she appeared in a benefit called The Women's Tribute. A company of "star" actresses was rehearsing the benefit performance, written for the occasion by Louis N. Parker, when the "Youth" in the allegory took sick. May Whitty knocked on her daughter's bedroom door and asked if Peggy (as she was called) wanted to learn thirty lines overnight and perform the next day.
With greasepaint on her face, dressed in a too large tunic, and carrying a wreath of artificial flowers, Peggy made her entrance on the stage of the Empire Theatre in Cheswick. She was entranced. "I still remember how the footlights seemed to glare up at me," she wrote years later, "and the auditorium beyond was like a limitless black cavern, stretching away to infinity." Even more amazing, the critic for The Stage remarked that she was "a brilliant young lady of undoubted histrionic gifts."
Peggy was bedazzled by the excitement, the greasepaint, the costumes, and the pageantry. Moreover, she had appeared on stage with her celebrated mother, May Whitty, with Marion Terry as Peace and Lilian Braithwaite as Britannia.
Peggy Webster had been in and around the theater during her entire life, for her parents were professional actors. Now she herself had appeared before the footlights and breathed in the enchanting world of the theater, and for the rest of her life its mystery and magic would enrapture her.
Peggy's mother had always planned for her only child to follow in the family's theatrical footsteps. Mary Louise Whitty (celebrated in later years as Dame May Whitty) was the third daughter of Alfred Whitty and Mary Ashton. The family fell on hard times when her father died of pneumonia at thirty-eight. At sixteen, May decided to help her mother and sisters by going on the stage. Following a letter of introduction to the acting duo Madge and William Hunter Kendal, the petite, doe-eyed Irish beauty appeared in the chorus of an operetta called The Mountain Sylph. Her stage career was effectively launched on London's West End, and she soon progressed to the prestigious St. James's Theatre, where she was understudy to an ingenue whose family name was Webster.
Unlike the Whittys from Wexford, Ireland, the Webster family had a long and illustrious British ancestry and stage history, beginning with a dancing master and progressing to Benjamin Nottingham Webster I who became the distinguished actor-manager of the Haymarket Theatre in the mid-1800s. He was Peggy's great-grandfather.
May Whitty met the handsome Benjamin Nottingham Webster III, a golden-haired, blue-eyed young man, outside the stage door of the St. James, where he had come to meet his actress-sisters, Annie and Eliza. Ben Webster was studying for the bar at King's College with little enthusiasm for a career as a barrister. He delighted in acting with the Irving Amateur Club and singing in concerts. Once he graduated from the Inner Temple and before his admission to the bar in 1885, Ben made his professional debut under the name Mr. B. Nottingham in A Scrap of Paper, a comedy by Victorien Sardou.
The chance encounter with May Whitty eventually determined the direction of Ben Webster's career. In 1887, he made his stage debut in the West End with the Kendals as Lord Woodstock in Lady Clancarty, a historical drama by Tom Taylor. Ben and May were married five years later and remained professional actors for the remainder of their lives.
Margaret Webster was born in the proverbial theatrical trunk on March 15, 1905, in an apartment at 260 West Fifty-ninth Street in New York City, when her father was on tour with Ellis Jeffreys's Company and appearing in The Prince Consort. Peggy made her earliest debut when her birth was announced from the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre on West Forty-second Street, where her father was appearing as the prince consort. A grinning fellow actor whose part called for him to announce the birth of the prince's son said, "I'm afraid tonight it's a girl!" A newspaper account got it partially right: "Margaret Webster was born in New York City while her mother was touring the United States."
Despite young Peggy's artistic surroundings, she had an ordered upbringing, although an itinerant one. In the summer of 1906, the family sailed back to England, where she was baptized on October 29, 1907, in St. Paul's Church (known as the "Actors' Church") in Covent Garden, just a few steps from their home at 31 Bedford Street in the Strand. The Websters lived in an upstairs flat in a multistory, redbrick Victorian building. When she was two years old, Peggy, her parents, and Mrs. Beck, her elderly Irish nurse, returned to the United States with Mrs. Patrick Campbell's company. Vilified by friends and critics as "the Royal Tigerine," Mrs. Campbell was an actress of great beauty and magnetism and a friend of George Bernard Shaw. She tempted Ben from England with superior roles in Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, and Hofmannsthal's Electra. The Webster family sailed again to America in November 1907 and settled in New York City. Peggy's earliest memories were of a large shedlike building vaguely resembling a railroad station, a friendly steward supplying tiny jam sandwiches on a huge steamship, her mother seated at a sewing machine in a hotel room, gigantic squirrels in Central Park, and her parents writing picture postcards to their London friends.
When the family returned to London a year later, they settled again into the flat on Bedford Street, and Peggy grew up among the noises and smells of the market at Covent Garden. Her playground was an enclosed area of grass and trees bordered on one side by St. Paul's Church and shielded by adjacent redbrick houses on the other. These were happy times. There were picnics with Mrs. Beck in various green parks and long summer holidays with her parents at Woolacombe, a small seaside village on the North Devon coast, or at the William Faversham summer home in Chiddingfold in Surrey among artists, writers, and their children from the London and New York theater world. (Here, at Chiddingfold, Webster met the Londonborn Eva Le Gallienne, six years her senior.) Le Gallienne remembered her younger friend as a "very small, rather plump child, her brown hair worn in two tight little plaits, her big blue eyes made rounder by large round-lensed glasses."
Peggy's impaired eyesight was the singular cloud on her parents' bright horizon. She was an intelligent, perceptive, and shy child, but May worried that her daughter was "short-sighted." "She sees and knows people and things at a distance," May wrote to Ben in 1908, when Peggy was three years old. An early illness had left Peggy with a weakness in the muscles of her right eye. She called it her "crooked eye." She appeared in early family photographs as a smallish child with blond curls and large eyeglasses, staring myopically into the camera with the right eye turned slightly inward. May consulted a number of doctors, but their diagnoses were conflicting and she turned to Christian Science, then in the early stages of its growth as a religion, and she remained a devout Christian Scientist until her death.
Before she was of an age to go to school, Peggy was acquiring a theatrical education. The Websters lived in easy reach of the West End theaters, then dominated by such actor-managers as George Alexander at the St. James's, John Martin-Harvey at the Lyceum, Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty's, and Gerald du Maurier at Wyndham's. She was not quite four years old when she saw Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's Pinkie and the Fairies with Edward Terry (Ellen Terry's brother and John Gielgud's great-uncle), followed by Brandon Thomas's Charley's Aunt and Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (with Ben's sister Lizzie Webster Brough). The prize of them all was James M. Barrie's Peter Pan with Hilda Trevelyan as Wendy.
When Peggy was five, she was taken to Harley Granville Barker's revival of Trelawny of the Wells, directed by Dion Boucicault, with her mother playing the desiccated Aunt Trafalgar. In her childlike way, she called it "trilling and wonderful." At eight, Peggy sat in the presence of Barker's newest production at the St. James's Theatre, the premiere of Shaw's Androcles and the Lion, with her father as the "handsome Captain."
From the start, the theater enraptured Peggy Webster. She thrilled to the glow of the footlights, the sound of music rising from the orchestra pit, and the red plush curtain rising to reveal elaborate pastoral settings, some with real rabbits, sheep, and even a camel. By the age of six, she was wholly stage struck. She went to see Peter Pan year after year at its Christmas revival with Hilda Trevelyan as its perennial Wendy. Time after time, she was suspended in a haze of rapture as she heard Peter and Wendy speak their final lines and all the fairy lamps began to twinkle, the music soared, and the curtain came swooshing down. She was permanently seduced by the wonder and magic of the theater.
When she was six, Peggy made her amateur acting debut at Albert Hall, as an angel with a "wobbly halo" in a Pageant of the Stage, organized by May Whitty and Edith Craig, daughter of Ellen Terry and sister to designer Edward Gordon Craig. Christened Edith Ailsa Geraldine Craig (for the isolated Scottish island Ailsa Craig), Edith Craig was a designer, a director, and an early exponent of feminist theater. She lived on the ground floor at 31 Bedford Street with her partner Christopher St. John (born Christabel Marshall), where they entertained and provided refuge for ardent "suffragettes" like themselves. Peggy frequented their downstairs flat and sometimes saw Ellen Terry there and recalled the actress's resonant voice that floated through the air and filled the room.
Ellen Terry, the greatest actress of her age, appeared in the all-star Pageant staged by her daughter. Despite failing eyesight, she was still a striking beauty with a deep husky voice and a commanding stage presence. As Peggy watched from the wings, she was awestruck by her first stage appearance with celebrities and the opportunity to watch the redoubtable Ellen Terry.
For nearly a quarter of a century, Ellen Terry was Henry Irving's leading lady at the Lyceum, a partnership that galvanized the English theater in the late Victorian years. A brilliant, joyous actress, she was celebrated for the vitality and freshness of her Shakespearean heroines and admired for her "natural" and spontaneous style of acting. A sweet-natured, intelligent woman, she was adored by the public and by such notables as the great actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson and the playwright George Bernard Shaw with whom she had a famous correspondence. She was also impulsive and reckless in her private life and scandalized the more respectable members of the Terry family. She had three husbands and was almost certainly Irving's lover for many years. She had two illegitimate children, Edith and Edward Gordon, from a long liaison with architect Edward Godwin. While her daughter remained in her shadow, Edward Gordon Craig became one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theater as a designer and a theoretician.
At the time Peggy appeared in the pageant, she was already caught up in the powerful effect of the make-believe of the theater and the thrill of standing behind the proscenium arch and looking into the dark cavern beyond the footlights filled with expectant faces.
Like many children of theatrical parents, Peggy did not make an official professional debut. "I rather seem to have attained professional status," she recalled, "in a few peculiar jumps and a series of slithers." In the early years of the First World War, Peggy took part in a masque in the gardens of the Inner Temple in a scene from Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing, again with the aging Ellen Terry as Beatrice. "I can still see the stooping, golden figure dip and glide onto the green lawn as swiftly as a bird in flight," she recalled in admiration of the great actress.
Peggy's education was similar to that of other children, especially daughters, of professional parents who were not terribly interested in an elitist education for their children since they were destined to be actors anyway. In 1911, Peggy was enrolled in the Burlington School for Girls in Old Burlington Street, where she remained until the zeppelin raids over London prompted her parents to send her to a small Christian Science school, Bradley Wood House, in Devonshire.
Until she went to boarding school, Peggy helped her mother and a growing number of surrogate "aunts" from her parents' theatrical world who were absorbed in organizing benefits and charitable work for the "good causes" related to England's war effort. Outside of school, Peggy helped by selling homemade flags and red paper poppies made by the many committees and women volunteers organized by May Whitty. To occupy herself during her after-school hours, Peggy often attended rehearsals for matinees featuring the most celebrated actors of the day and staged as charitable benefits for war victims.
Ben Webster tried in vain to get into a branch of the army, but he was over fifty. He was ashamed of playing in films during the war, but the new medium was more lucrative than the theater. A handsome matinee idol who excelled in romantic comedies such as Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells and Milne's Mr. Pim Passes By, he was fully aware that he could not support a family by taking time away from the commercial theater to work in serious plays produced by theatrical societies or clubs. Years earlier, following his success as Hippolytus in Gilbert Murray's new translation of Euripides' play, he wrote to May: "It's a bad thing to be an ancient Greek. It limits one's chances of employment." Nonetheless, his newfound work in silent films compounded his dilemma, as he appeared in Liberty Hall, A Garret in Bohemia, Cynthia in the Wilderness, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Gay Lord Quex, and Because between 1914 and 1918.
During the first year of the war, London had seemed inviolable-until June 1915, when the Zeppelin raids began. In August, the bombings continued in London's East End, where the streets blazed. The Oxford-Cambridge boat races and cricket matches were suspended; the British Library, the Tate Gallery, and much of the Victoria and Albert Museum were closed. The West End theaters were also affected as German planes approached London along the line of the Thames and dropped their bombs near the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Charing Cross, Covent Garden, and the theater district in the Strand.
To safeguard the audiences, the London fire department required every stage to be partially roofed with glass so that fires caused by incendiary devices would be deflected away from the auditorium and thus save many lives. The actors on stage were in danger of upward-roaring flames and falling glass. Ben and May, who were playing together in a revival of Trelawny of the Wells at Dion Boucicault's New Theatre, developed a strategy. When he was playing a scene without May, she would stand in the wings to share in his danger. In contrast, the stage crews sensibly retired to the stone staircase below ground level.
Peggy was aware of the peril to herself and her parents during this phase of the war. If she was not in school, her parents took her to the theater with them. When the war entered its third year, they decided to send her away from London for her safety. Learning that she was being sent to boarding school, Peggy exhibited a childlike fury, protesting her "exile" in Devonshire. 12 In truth, separation from her mother and father and their bustling, glamorous world was a bitter experience for the preadolescent girl. Peggy wrote plaintive letters to "Mamie" describing her tearful feelings of homesickness. She was constantly fearful that May Whitty would forget to send parcels and clothing, but her greatest fear was that her mother would forget her birthday. Shy and insecure, Peggy wrote frequently to remind her mother: "Only twelve days to my birthday!" Holidays were another time of stress for the lonely exile. She needed to be reassured that she would spend her vacations at home with her parents when all the other girls left Bradley Wood House to be with their families. Nonetheless, Peggy was always careful to apologize for making the inquiries. "Please don't think this is a hint," she wrote to May, "because it is not."
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
\lrrh: Contents\ \1h\ Contents \xt\ \comp: add page numbers on page proofs\ Chronology Introduction Act One 1905---1936 Chapter 1 An Itinerant Childhood Chapter 2 Serious Beginnings Chapter 3 The Old Vic and the West End Act Two 1937---1949 Chapter 4 Broadway Nights Chapter 5 Giants and Pygmies Chapter 6 Battle of Angels Chapter 7 The Making of Othello Chapter 8 The American Repertory Theatre Act Three 1950---1972 Chapter 9 Life at the Opera Chapter 10 McCarthy Chapter 11 Unfinished Business Chapter 12 Losing Battles Epilogue Notes Selected Bibliography IndexLibrary of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Webster, Margaret, 1905-1972, Theatrical producers and directors United States Biography