20. The Duchess of Arch Street, Part Two

© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

[OPENING THEME]

Hello and welcome once again to Adventures in Theatre History! In this episode we continue the story of Louisa Lane Drew, or as she was known in her day: Mrs. John Drew. Once again I am very pleased that, as we did before, Philadelphia actress Susan Riley Stevens will provide the voice of Mrs. Drew for us.

We left Mrs Drew as she had just taken up the reins as the manager and the leading lady and director at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. It was early in 1862, halfway through her first full season, and her husband Mr. John Drew, the popular comedian, had just returned home from a world tour. It’s possible that the Drew’s marriage was already rocky even before he had left. And as we mentioned in the last episode, his co-star on that three-year tour had been Louisa’s half-sister Georgiana, who brought home to Philadelphia a baby girl who had been born in Melbourne, Australia, and who was named after their other sister, Adine.

Now the story tha husband John Drew and sister Georgiana had been writing in all of their letters home apparently was that while abroad she had met and married an Australian actor named John Stephens. Mr. Stephens, the story went, had been unfortunately prevented from accompanying his young American wife on her subsequent tours due to his own, um, pressing engagements, yeah that’s the ticket, and then somehow never caught up with her again. But the obvious true explanation was there for all to see, and it’s unlikely that John and Georgiana’s story stood up for very long that first night after they came home.

But apparently his Louisa, when presented with this new reality, simply took it in stride. Anyway, there was a theater to be managed, plays to be rehearsed, and employees to be paid, every week. She herself was then appearing as Rosaline in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, along with the entire Arch Street Stock company including a new young actor named Mr. Craig, playing Lord Longaville. John’s brother Frank was doing Costard the Clown. As if that wasn’t enough to manage, Love’s Labour’s Lost was followed on the bill by an elaborately produced Civil War melodrama called Scotto, or The Scout & the Spy, which featured scenes about the recent Battle of Bull Run and a Grand Tableau that showed the Burning of Charleston. It was a busy week at work for Mrs. John Drew, actress, director, and theater manager.

So the new little family member’s name and parentage were simply quietly entered in the family bible as Adine Stephens. The new mother and little Adine were given room in the family home, then at 138 N. 8th St, which still contained the three other Drew children (her son John Jr. and her daughters Louisa and Georgie), as well as Mrs. Drew’s mother Eiza Kinloch, now herself retired from the stage. And by all accounts we can find, it seems that Mrs. Drew was honestly happy to make a home for all the children in the family, whatever their provenance, and she was as efficient and thorough at home as she was at the theater. More room was made at the dinner table, and more space was made at the Drew family pew at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. Above all, she knew that her reputation in the city depended upon maintaining an appearance of respectability and propriety. They were not a ragtag group of actors, after all, they were the first family of the Philadelphia theater.

Mr. John Drew, who had been wandering in so many ways, was quickly re-domesticated and put back on the stage, and no open acknowledgement was ever made of the embarrassment of the situation. Making the most of the local publicity about his return from his world tour, he threw himself into the family business, appearing at the Arch Street Theatre for 100 nights, reviving his old roles in the repertoire with such staples as Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, and Sheridan’s The Rivals - as well as bringing out all his highly popular Stage Irishman characters in plays whose characters and titles made their subject matter entirely evident: Sir Patrick O’Plenipo in The Irish Ambassador, Terry O’Rourke in The Irish Tutor, and Paddy Murphy in The Irish Dragon, the last of which was billed as “a screaming farce”. Mr and Mrs John Drew even appeared again as Mr. and Mrs. Dove in the comedy A Married Life. Newspapers called him: “The bright particular star of the Arch.” Audiences flocked to see him, and for the first time ever since Mrs. Drew had taken over management - the theater actually began to turn a nice profit.

However, perhaps all was not so contented in the actual Drew family home, for as the end of the theatrical season approached, apparently John Drew quickly got the urge to travel abroad once again. In April he announced he planned to be off on a tour of England, in whose theaters he evidently could always find work. The bill of the Arch Street Theatre for May 1st 1862, advertised that he was performing the drag role “Old Mother Griffin'' in a play entitled The Groves of Blarney, and then as Ally Croaker in an afterpiece called “The Miseries of Human Life”, with the backing of the entire stock company, including his wife, and his brother Frank Drew. Tomorrow, said the bill, he would appear as Rory O’More, but a note at the bottom gravely warned: “The Public are respectfully informed, that as Mr. John Drew’s Engagement will positively terminate on Friday, May 9th, there will be no repetition of any of his Representations.” Perhaps the Drews planned to divorce - or at least Louisa had made it clear to John she was not going to support him financially. The Philadelphia Bulletin expressed sorrow at his imminent absence from the local stage: “When we think that this is the last time we shall see this gifted actor in these characters, we feel somewhat sad.” John Drew went off to New York for a few days to book his passage on a trans-Atlantic steamer, then came home to Philadelphia to pack and to say goodbye to his children and their mothers at the narrow row house on 8th Street. On May 20th 1862, he was carrying little Adine down the steep main flight of stairs to join the 7th birthday party of his daughter Georgie, when his foot slipped. Though he was successful in keeping the baby safe, he had no hand available to break his own fall. To everyone’s horror John’s head slammed against the newel post at the bottom of the railing. He died the next day from the subsequent brain injury, at the age of 34. 

All those earlier warnings in the playbills of John Drew’s “positively final appearance” in the preceding weeks had tragically proven to be all too apt. Needless to say everyone in the family was deeply distraught, including his young children. Mrs. Drew canceled all performances at the Arch Street Theatre, and the wake and his funeral were conducted from the family home. The Reverend Dr. Ducachet, of St. Stephens Church, conducted the ceremony, and John Drew’s brethren of the Phoenix Lodge of the Actor’s Order of Friendship, joined the cortege to Glenwood Cemetery at Ridge Avenue and 27th St., where he was buried. The notice of his sudden and unexpected death was briefly and sadly noted in the Philadelphia newspapers, but in a time when the bloody carnage of the American Civil War was raging there was hardly room for much more, as space was needed for all those of long lists of local men, soldiers who were killed or among the wounded. Two of John Drew’s younger brothers who were then in uniform, on active duty, were unable to attend the funeral, but soon enough they, too, would both meet their own deaths, in service to the Union cause.

On Friday, May 30th 1862 the remaining acting company of the Arch Street Theatre, including his older brother Frank and his first love, Georgiana Kinloch Stephens, appeared in a benefit performance for the Drew Family. Mrs. Drew did not perform herself that night, but simply thereafter closed the theater for the season.

In the odd way that the Drew family had, the specific circumstances of the death of John Drew was rarely referred to ever again. Even his son John Jr., who eventually would follow in John Sr.’s footsteps, barely mentions his father’s passing, which would have happened when he was nine, in his memoir. As for Mrs Drew’s autobiography, she too lightly passes by what must have been a very traumatic memory in her narration, but then at the very end of the book, just when you think she is done with her life story, she suddenly returns to the subject of her husband, and of course tells us nothing about their relationship or what she felt about his wanderings, but instead takes up the only possible topic suitable for public discussion: his talent on the stage. But even there you can find a subtle note of rebuke, one that she had held onto for decades:

[SUSIE AS MRS DREW:]  “He was one of the best actors I ever saw, in a long list of the most varied description. Had he lived to be forty-five, he would have been a great actor. But too early a success was his ruin, it left him nothing to do. Why should he study when he was assured on all sides (except my own) that he was as near perfection as was possible for man to be? So he finished his brief and brilliant career at thirty-four years of age, about the age when men generally study most steadily and aspire most ambitiously.”

Though her departed husband’s talents may not have been fully realized, she was determined to keep his name alive, though. Like a proper Victorian Era widow, forever afterward, she was known to all the world as “Mrs. John Drew”. In another sad note, her sister Georgiana, who might have earned that title back in the day had Louisa not intervened, passed away in 1864 from tuberculosis. Louisa took in her daughter Adine and raised her along with the rest of John Drew’s children.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

But the show, to quote a much-overworked truism, must go on. Louisa had a family to raise and a business to attend to. And as ever, she simply got on with it. At the beginning of next September, Mrs. John Drew was mounting her next season at the Arch Street Theatre. That meant she was hiring actors, choosing plays, approving scenery, booking visiting stars, conducting rehearsals, and supervising new renovations to the theater itself, as well as learning and practicing her own many roles as the leading lady of the company - her lines, as always, letter perfect. 

There are few direct accounts of how she went about her work, but we do know that everyone who worked with her, spoke of her with nothing but awed respect and admiration. Her schedule was relentless and regular. She would arrive at the theater in her small horse-drawn brougham at 5 minutes to 10. Rehearsals with the company would begin at 10 precisely and then continue for four hours. Since there were usually two plays on the bill to be prepared on any given day, a brisk pace was maintained in rehearsals, and Mrs. Drew expected her actors to be exact in their business and correct in their speech and phrasing. In the afternoons the actors were free. Mrs Drew, for her part, would spend the time in the theater’s office, going over the books and daily receipts, and sending off letters to New York and London to secure rights and bookings for the latest popular plays and available stars. She would return home to have dinner with her children and her mother, issue orders to the domestic staff, kiss everyone good night and then go off to the theater to either perform or if she was not in the play, to carefully observe how everyone’s performances went. On Saturdays her children would come and see the matinees and mingle with the actors backstage. On Sundays, the whole family went to church. In her theatrical religion, she firmly did NOT believe in Sunday matinees,

Her employees all called her “The Duchess” amongst themselves, and always knew to watch out for when she put on a certain red shawl and marched out of her office - it meant she was very displeased about some particular matter. But on the whole the company was devoted to her, and valued her instructions as to how they should act their parts, which were always based on her own long stage experience. The stage carpenters even allowed that she frequently taught them a thing or too. She was very sparing in her praise if they did things well: a slight nod or an approving smile in the passages backstage was regarded as the highest accolade you would ever get from The Duchess. They also appreciated how she was extremely regular and conscientious with paychecks, which ranged from twelve to fifty dollars a week. The Arch was known as a good place for young actors - a real school where one could learn one’s craft from top to bottom and get a wide variety of roles under one’s belt.

By the end of the second year as manager she was able to pay off the mortgage on the theater, and the building’s stockholders were very pleased as they watched their share prices rise. Generally they knew that if she spent a great deal of money on any production, it would provide a solid return. She staged a magnificent Christmas show that year, called The Naiad Queen, a sort of Wagnerian spectacle in which she played Lurline, the title character, the leader of a trained corps of Rhine River Amazon warriors. In the final scene the naiads all descended back into the river, and swam away. The theater machinery required for this was billed as being made “on an entirely new principle to which public attention is especially directed,” as the mortals and immortals mingled under the water and the orchestra played away. There was even a special Christmas Day matinee intended for Philadelphia’s younger theater-goers.

Visiting star performers at the Arch usually received five hundred dollars a week in that era. Wallacks, Keenes, Davenports, and Booths and other stars of the time were taking advantage of the ease of railroad travel to reap huge salaries as they went from town to town. The Booths, the offspring of Junius Brutus Booth, her former acting partner in the old days, were often resident in the city. Edwin Booth had even bought the Walnut Street Theatre, together with his brother-in-law John Sleeper Clarke, who lived in Philadelphia, married to Booth’s sister Asia. Mrs Drew knew them both well and performed with them in benefits in the city for the care of wounded soldiers from the front. 

In the spring of 1863, the youngest Booth brother, John Wilkes, a rising star whose famous name and handsome good looks instantly made him an instant box office success, came to Philadelphia. When he had first appeared at the Arch in 1858, he was a lowly member of the stock company. He was not regarded as a very good actor when he was younger, and often forgot his lines. But now he had become a star. Despite his heavy schedule, he of course found room for the great Mrs Drew, and played a full week of various classical roles with her. His audience appeal was so large, in fact, that patrons were allowed to book seats six days in advance - a very unusual practice at the time. I can hardly imagine it, but even though she was by this point 43,  the 23 year-old John Wilkes Booth played Petruchio to her Catherine, Shylock to her Portia, and he also did a turn as Richard III and the villain Duke Pescara in The Apostate. "The audience was very enthusiastic, the ladies joining in the applause," the Inquirer reported of one show. It was a highly successful engagement, in terms of box office, as far as Mrs. Drew was concerned. . Later on, many years after his disgraced brother had played his dreadful role in History as a Presidential assassin, Edwin Booth would also perform at the Arch Street Theater for Mrs. John Drew, and give acting tips to her son John Jr. In her usual way of editing out any unflattering facts, Louisa, for her part, did not mention her time on the stage with John Wilkes Booth in her published memoirs. But his brother Edwin, she happily recalled, “had a very sweet character, and a very charming manner at rehearsals, which he detested.” Though generally suspicious of the new more naturalistic school of acting Edwin Booth represented, she allowed that his famous portrayal of Hamlet was very fine indeed.

Throughout the war years and all the way to the end of decade of the 1860s, in fact, Mrs. John Drew’s Arch Street Theatre remained a byword for quality and rigorous standards. “I would have played there for ten dollars a week on account of the prestige it gave an actor”, said Stuart Robson, one of the stock company’s principal comedians. She frequently traveled to New York in search of new plays and new actors, and box office managers and restaurant maitre d's there always had a seat or a table for her, like she was visiting royalty. President Lincoln, before his untimely and violent death at another theater, wrote and expressed a desire to come see the Arch Street company in action. In 1868, the great novelist Charles Dickens came through town on a reading tour of America, and was discretely ushered into a box at the Arch to see a performance of his friend Tom Robertson’s play entitled Ours. All was going swimmingly well. “For about eight years fortune favored me,” Mrs. Drew recalled. Many of her acting company loyally stuck with her, but by the end of the decade others eventually moved on. “During this time many of my company went to New York . . “ she wrote, “including Robert Craig, who was one of the most talented young men I ever met. “

Ah, yes, Mr. Craig. A handsome young comedian of the company, twenty years her junior, had in fact accompanied Mrs. Drew to that public reading given by Dickens, in a very companionable way, and while there he had studied that famous writer enough to do a burlesque imitation of him in an Arch Street Theatre comic afterpiece the next week. I should also mention at this point that there was yet another addition to the Drew family household around this time. In her mother Mrs Kinloch’s family bible, its pages carefully annotated with all the births, marriages and deaths, preserved for posterity in the collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, there is an entry under the page “Miscellaneous”. 

“New York, August 28th, 1863”, it reads, “Sidney, only son of Sidney and Maria White, son by adoption of Louisa Drew.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but numerous historians have concluded that her fourth son Sidney was not adopted at all, but was in fact the product of an affair Louisa had with Robert Craig, and that she had quietly slipped away to give birth to a baby boy in the summer of 1863. But is that correct? Confusingly there are several differing dates in various memoirs of when and how exactly Sidney joined the family. Before there were official birth certificates you could get away with stories like that, if you needed to. For his part, Robert Craig certainly left her theater, and her life, sometime after 1870, but exactly why is not clear. Indeed, their relationship may not have been an impetuous affair, as it has often been portrayed, but might have just naturally ended after having lasted for as long as seven years. It’s hard to tell, because there's quite a lot of suspicious fudging of dates and stories in Drew family documents, when you start to really examine them. Much much later, two of her grandchildren, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore, were quite clear on one matter in their own memoirs, however: Sidney Drew, whom they had always known by the affectionate name of ‘Uncle Googan’, was definitely Mrs. Drew’s natural son. And as he grew older, he certainly looked a lot like her, sharing her strong nose and prominent eyes. Whether he looked like Robert Craig at all I can’t say, I’m still searching around for a photograph of him.

But I must stress that I’m not judging Mrs Drew for her affair with a much younger man so soon after becoming a widow, and it's fine with me if she chose to be a bit coy about whether she had three or four natural children, just as she may have been coy about whether she had three or four marriages and other unofficial romantic relationships over the course of her life. I mean, nowadays, the HR Department might want to have a word with Louisa about having a romance with a younger subordinate, sure. But back then, the way she saw it, she had a position in society to keep up, her business depended on it so therefore Sidney was her adopted son, she would loftily maintain. All I’m saying is that Victorian lives were just as complicated as modern ones, if you look close enough. Don’t let all those heavy leather bound biographies in the library and the stern faces in all the old photos fool you. They had their fun and their personal messes, too. Where do you think they got the inspiration for all those intricately plotted melodramas anyway? 

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

If she did have a late-in-middle-age baby in the Summer of 1863, Mrs. Drew deserves even more respect, because that was the very time that the Arch Street Theatre was undergoing a major re-construction. This alone would have taken up all of the attention of a mere mortal, but Louisa was a person of very formidable abilities, and could obviously multi-task, as we have already noted.  But if Mrs. Drew was otherwise occupied that summer, perhaps the theater’s business agent and treasurer Joseph D. Murphy looked after the construction.

Most of the renovations were to the front of the building. William Strickland’s 1828  triangular pediment was removed, a rectangular classical facade with two rows of windows looking out on Arch Street were added. The old statue of Apollo that had always graced the building was re-installed on the upper level, and the bearded face of another theater god - perhaps Dionysus? - was added to the cornice. New offices and workrooms with plenty of natural light were thus created, and more light was brought into the upstairs lobbies. Inside, the infamous ‘third tier’ where once prostitutes had roamed on a regular basis, was now totally eliminated. As we mentioned this had been a long-standing goal of Mrs. Drew, who wanted to give the theater a much more respectable reputation. The second balcony level was enlarged with sloped amphitheatre seating, although it’s true that narrow supporting iron pillars typical of Victorian era theaters continued to impede some of the audience’s views of the stage. Importantly, the number of total seats were not really increased, but the prices that could be charged were. In September 1863 Joseph Murphy had business cards made up which boasted of the new box office potential of the theater’s expansion. “Capacity of house $1000”, they read.

The increased commercial capacity of the house really paid off, and the next five years were the high point of Mrs. Drew’s management, both artistically and financially, with a repertory consisting of a few classics, sprinkled into a season mostly of popular comedies and melodramas. In November of 1867, for instance, The Arch Street Theatre presented a comedy by Olive Logan entitled Surf!. This was a 'production' - a play with spectacular scenic elements, ones that were much more elaborate than the usual standard flats. The entire stock company of the theater was utilized, including Louisa Lane Drew herself, who played the grande dame role of 'Mrs. Madison Noble'. The company's 'leading lady', Lizzie Price, played 'Mrs. Alice Warren, a Soldier's Widow', and Mrs. Drew’s close personal friend Robert Craig played 'Mr. Simon Schweinfleisch, a rich German Pork-Packer of St. Louis'. Even Gen. Ulysses S Grant was put as a character in the play, portrayed by the company's 'leading man', William Osborne.

The play was meant to appeal to Philadelphians who were just beginning to take annual summer vacations at the Jersey Shore in those days, so to flatter local sentiments, the theater pulled out all the stops to depict such scenic vistas as "The Incoming Tide", "Sea Bathing at Cape May", "A Panoramic View of the Delaware", and the Columbia House, a fashionable hotel ‘downashore’.

It evidently made an impression on Louisa Lane Drew's son John Drew, a youth at the time that Surf! was staged, who later could recall the production vividly: "Breakers were made by white cotton cloths and barrels. Just how it was arranged I do not know, but in spite of the fact that the play was rather indifferent, it had a run of eight weeks, which was at that time considered a long run."

Augustin Daly, the well-known New York director and producer, frequently came down to see Mrs. Drew’s shows, since he regarded her taste for material and actors as impeccable. He bought the rights for Surf!, and he produced it in New York with some success. In fact, on his visits Daly also took note of two intriguing new members of the Arch Street’s company, Mrs. Drew’s youngest children Georgiana and John Drew, Jr., then just entering their late teens.

All the Drew children had been hanging around the theater their whole lives, of course, and like many kids of theater people, were not really impressed with it at first. However, their mother was aware of her family’s long history on stage, and was not averse to the addition of a new Drew or two to the evening’s bill. The older daughter Louisa, had some small success, but it was the younger Georgie, her mother’s favorite, with her large eyes, striking beauty and merry wit she was an immediate addition to the company. And on March 22, 1873, her older brother John, in his 19th year , made his stage debut, in the comic sketch Cool as a Cucumber, playing the role of ‘Mr. Plumper’. He had previously been employed as a clerk, selling clocks at Wanamaker's Department store, but had evidently grown tired of the dull possibilities of commercial employment, thought he’d give the acting biz a go.

To get his first gig, however, he did have to meet his mother’s high standards, and he carefully honed his elocution to rid himself of the distinctive Philadelphia accent he had picked up during his days in local boarding schools. To encourage him, his mother shared the stage with him in the skit as the maid "Wiggins" who opens the door. Seeing the tall fellow with the fashionably long mustache on the doorstep, Mrs. Drew knowingly turned to the audience & deadpanned: "What a dreadful young man! I wonder what he will be like when he grows up?"

Well, what John Drew Jr. would be when he grew up was a Broadway actor, one of the great matinee idols of his day. Augustine Daly saw his potential right away, and quickly snapped John up for his own company, along with the young leading lady Ada Rehan. It seems that his mother was glad to see him succeed on the bigger market of New York, because it was clear even to her that Philadelphia was now permanently in the shade of its larger cousin, and that the Arch Street Theatre would have to cease its long reliance on the age-old stock company system. Indeed it was one of the last theaters in the country to do so. With the ever increasing capacity of rail transport, big stars were now not just traveling alone to theaters around the country, but were insisting on bringing along their own supporting companies and even scenery.

Mrs. Drew realized she had to bow to the winds of change and turn the Arch into what was called a ‘combination house’ - with a few local actors in smaller roles but the juicy ones going to New Yorkers. In February of 1874, for example, the melodrama Maum Cre was presented at the Arch Street Theatre for a week-long run. The play was advertised as "Strong in Situation, Absorbing in Human Interest, and opening a Glorious . . . Impersonation of the IRISHMAN AS HE IS." The production featured a thrilling and violent mutiny scene aboard a ship full of Irish immigrants to America, a picture of which was graphically detailed on the publicity posters.

Maum Cre (evidently the name of a small Hibernian hamlet, the home village of the hero) was one of these 'combination productions’. The New York players belonged to the comedian Joseph Murphy, who performed no less than six roles in the play himself, and also sang songs including "The Martyrs of Our Land" & "Maum Cre, or Handful of Earth." Mrs. Drew did not appear in the show, and indeed by this point she tended to only perform in just the earliest and last shows of the season. Though she was glad of the business touring combination productions brought, on the whole this was not a change she really approved of, and as she later wrote:

[SUSIE AS MRS DREW:]  “During my long career as manager I have seen the stock company system pass through its palmiest days to give place to the present horde of wandering combinations or companies of strolling players .  . condemned to the wearisome round of performances of the same play year in and year out; deprived of a settled home, doomed to play week after weed of one night stands; compelled to rise at all hours of the night and morning from uncomfortable beds in queer hotels to take trains on which they must ravel all day long and reach their destination barely in time to appear supperless on the stage.  . . When I first took up the manager’s reins . . . there were no matinee performances.  . . .Looking back over my more than quarter of a century of management and my sixty-three years of professional life, I may well exclaim, with Ophelia: ‘Woe is me - To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!’”

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

But Louisa Lane Drew’s career was hardly over, indeed at this point she had two more decades to go on the stage. At last we’ve reached the portion of her life that she became mostly remembered for in the wider culture: Because to most people, even more memorable than her long stewardship of the Arch Street Theatre was the fact that in her busy household in the 1880s she also was the grandmother and chief caregiver of those three famous siblings, Lionel, Ethel and John Barrymore.

Their father, the English actor, Maurice Barrymore, had first made his appearance in Philadelphia in 1875, brought home for the weekend by John Drew, who wanted to introduce him to his peach of a sister, Georgie. Though his real name, he freely allowed, was Herbert Blythe, and he had only taken the name Maurice Barrymore professionally when he went on the stage at the insistence of his well-connected family. Maurice was athletic, physically graceful, astoundingly witty, utterly charming and devastatingly handsome. The female servants kept peering up the back stairs just to get a peek at him, the shy Adine Stephens nearly fainted when he walked by her in the hallway, and even old Mrs. Kinloch threw him a kittenish wink from time to time. Georgie liked him just fine, it turned out, and with her own quick wit and fiery temperament proved more than a match for him. Although the skeptical Mrs. Drew was unsuccessful in damping the fires of romantic attraction between them; she at least was able to insist that the couple at least be married at the family church of St. Stephens, which they were on December 31st, 1876. They immediately launched into active performing and touring careers on the stage. Their stormy marriage sometimes took them far apart from each other, though they were together enough to produce Lionel in 1878, Ethel in 1879 and John in 1882. All of the Barrymore children were born in Philadelphia, each time, on the insistence of Mrs. Drew, Georgie always returned home when the day of delivery drew near.  But despite their growing family, Georgie and Maurice were soon traveling around the country again - both often in the company of the charismatic Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who seems to have accomplished the great trick of both seducing Maurice, while at the same time convincing Georgie join her in faith and convert to the Catholic Church. Georgie became such a convinced Catholic, in fact, that all three of the Barrymore children were eventually baptized and raised as Catholics, much to the annoyance of their Episocopalian grandmother. Maurice, for his part, remained mostly unrestrained and unrepentant - both on stage and in his personal behavior. There’s a story of him once returning home very very late from his night’s carousing, only to find Georgie at the door dressed and ready for morning Mass. “Go to church, my dear!”, said Maurice, sweeping a gracious arm towards the street. “Go to hell, my dear!”, replied Georgie with an equally gracious smile, as she put on her hat and glided off.

With their parents so often at odds or away, it was Mrs. Drew who was the anchor in the early lives of her three grandchildren. Throughout her life she had always taken care of others: her mother, her stepsisters, her wayward husbands, her children (legitimate or otherwise), and her company, and now she devoted herself to solemn little Lionel, quiet and shy Ethel, and dreamy young John, who was her secret favorite. They were allowed to call her “Mummum”, and were no doubt reassured by the regularity and strict discipline she brought to their early lives. The Drew family was now living at a large row home at 140 N. 12th Street, even though the neighborhood north of Market Street where the house and the theater were located was beginning to go downhill. Daughter Georgie, with her usual wit, called the house the “Tomb of the Capulets” due to the fact that a gravestone carving business was right across the streets, with its sad monuments on prominent display. But even less reputable establishments like Billiard halls, minstrel shows and burlesque theaters surrounded them on every side. Bawdy houses and opium dens were not that far away. Their Uncle Sidney often slipped away to shoot pool and run after chorus girls, while shy and sickly Adine, whom they called Aunt Tibby, did her best to look after the children though she herself was to die of TB at the age of 28. Mrs Kinloch, their great-grandmother, lived to the age of 93, though she was a rather fearsome presence in the house, and mostly stayed in her room, coming down only for dinner or on Sundays for church.

But truth be told the family needed the money that Georgie and Maurice were earning in their whirlwind and glamorous careers. The Arch was no longer attracting the respectable set of theatergoers, who were all moving to the larger and more fashionable houses along Broad and Chestnut Streets. Maurice and Georgie Barrymore eventually took their children largely away from Philadelphia in the mid 1880s, and went off to try to conquer the London stage, and when that didn’t work out they settled on Staten Island in New York. When her mother died in 1887, Louisa Drew herself realized there was nothing for it but to go on tour herself, once again. The world of American theater had changed much during her lifetime, and now every city large and small had theaters controlled by large commercial syndicates. American newspapers now all had huge sections devoted to the  exciting goings on of the theater world, and every actor and every play was competing for national, not just local attention. What you needed, as a performer, was not a variety of roles in different plays to bring along with you, but just one highly recognizable and well-packaged production. And from long experience, she knew there was one role in one play in her re that she knew could always be reliably depended upon to pack the audience: Mrs. Malaprop, with her famously hilarious word substitutions, in Sheridan’s 1775 comedy of manners, The Rivals.

[SUSIE AS MRS. DREW] “Oh! Sir Anthony! You overwhelm me with profusion. However, as Shakespeare says, ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’ As for these young people who are about to enter into the maze of matrimonial duplicity, I freely give them my malediction. For myself, my motto shall be nil desperandum. And if we have been fortunate enough to secure the reprobation of our friends, we may cheerfully await the solicitations, while enjoying the expression of their depreciation.”

She had actually done the leading lady role - that of Mrs Teazle - in The Rivals many times during her career, and only started performing this character role of Mrs. Malaprop at the age of 59. She had done it quite a few times at the Arch Street - but only on special occasions. But now she teamed up with her old comrade Joseph Jefferson, of another longtime Philadelphia theater family, who did the part of Bob Acres. This was a production made to tour, and designed to please the largest crowd possible. She even begrudgingly brought along her son-in-law Maurice as Captain Jack Absolute in one early tour of the play, even though he was notorious for forgetting his lines. One night, in fact, Maurice appalled her by wittily improvising everything he said in a key scene between them, leaving her with only her carefully rehearsed lines in reply. You can imagine her burning fury when she finally got backstage, as well as his grinning ripostes to his formidable mother-in-law. He knew that the version of the play they were performing had already been heavily cut and re-written, in order to highlight the parts of Mrs. Drew and Mr. Jefferson. In fact, he once quipped to a newspaper reporter, the whole production reminded him of a dispatch from the front during the Civil War: “ . . and Sheridan Twenty Miles Away.”

If you google Mrs. John Drew, nowadays, the first dozen or so images that pop up will all be of her as Mrs Malaprop. Now as we all know by now she did hundreds of other roles in her long career, but that’s the way the internet works, and if you’re not careful the easily obtainable images are the ones we let shape our mental picture of an entire life story. And because of this late career role, there are plenty of great photos from the 1880s and 90s of her, wearing an elaborate 18th Century dress, with a ridiculous hat and an enormous white wig, her prominent eyes popping out of her head. She filled the part with such presence that it became the most delightful feature of the play, a sort of Dogberry in petticoats. A bit of original stage business she herself came up with is now re-created in almost every subsequent production of the play. Joseph Jefferson, her co-star, never stopped being impressed by it, said it was one of the finest things he had ever seen on stage, and described it in detail in his memoirs:

“When Mrs. Malaprop handed the letter to the Captain to read, by accident she gave him her own love letter lately received by her from Sir Lucius O’Trigger. As the Captain reads the first line, which betrays the secret, Mrs. Drew starts, blushes, and simperingly explains that “there is a slight mistake.” Her manner during this situation was the perfection of comedy. . . [during the first rehearsal in Philadelphia], she asked me if I thought the introduction was admissible, I replied that I not only thought it was admissible, but believed that Sheridan himself would have introduced it if the idea had happened to occur to him!” 

After many miles on the road with The Rivals, traveling all over America, in 1891 Mrs. Drew finally resigned from the management of the Arch Street Theatre. Indeed by that time she derived very little income from it. Unlike her contemporary Edwin Forrest she had never, in fact, made a great deal of money from theater, it was how she made a living, not a killing. She had given up the house on 12th street in 1889. 

[SUSIE AS MRS DREW]  “I couldn’t live in Philadelphia in the manner in which I had always lived; couldn’t afford it. So I moved to New York, after nearly forty years of housekeeping in Philadelphia. It was a terrible wrench! To look about for ‘something to do’ at seventy-two years of age!”

 There was a testimonial performance given in her honor at the Academy of Music, and she moved away to join her children in New York. Sadly, both daughters Louisa and Georgie died soon after, and in 1896 Louisa at last stopped performing, hobbled by sadness and various ailments, appalled by the realization that she couldn’t seem to remember her lines properly anymore. In August 1897 she finally passed away at her son John Jr.’s house in Larchmont, New York. As you might expect, however, her body was brought back to Philadelphia, and her funeral was held at St. Stephens Church on 10th Street. 

Mrs. John Drew was buried next to Mr. John Drew in Glenwood Cemetery in Philadelphia, along with her mother, her sisters and her daughters. Eventually that whole cemetery was closed and the grounds were appropriated for other uses, in the way the many Philadelphia burial grounds often have been, historically. John Drew Jr. had all the family graves transferred farther north to Mt. Vernon Cemetery, where eventually Mrs. Drew would be joined by him and many of her Barrymore descendants. But we’ll talk about all those Barrymores, another day. 

Really, to my mind, it's rather unfair that there’s now a blue metal historical marker on Arch and 6th Streets, which is all that remains of the long ago presence of the theater that once stood there, and that it mostly natters on about the Barrymores. Though Maurice, Ethel, Lionel and John and all the rest did occasionally perform in Philadelphia, really their professional lives were mostly spent elsewhere: New York, London, Hollywood. And in terms of theater history there are lots of other reasons to talk about the Arch Street Theatre. It spent just as many years as vibrant a home for Yiddish drama in the 20th century as it did for English language drama under the control of Mrs Drew in the previous era - but that sort of omission, after all, is why we are doing this show, and we will certainly return to the Arch again, in future episodes. But I feel privileged to have been able to bring the story of Louisa Lane Drew to you. She was the last real figure in 19th Century Philadelphia to make the local theater of the city matter, for a long time. As she made her final exit from the scene, big changes were coming in the city and its theatrical world. We will do our best to explore them in upcoming episodes - as the 20th century inexorably approaches. But before we do, we’re going to backtrack a bit, and cover some other stories about Philadelphia theater in the 19th Century, one’s that we’ve passed by along the way so far. Please come along with us, there is so much more great stuff to explore and to find out about. 

I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. The voice of Louisa Lane Drew was performed by Susan Riley Stevens. 

I must also acknowledge again all the help I received from Karin Suni and the staff of the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

If you’d like to have a daily dose of Philadelphia theater history, please follow us on Facebook [or Instagram or Mastodon] - the links are in the show notes. As always there are additional images, blog posts, and bibliographies about this episode and all others on our website, www.AITHpodcast.com. Thanks for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

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© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.