The Story of My Life by Ellen Terry

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[Illustration: Ellen Terry

drawn from photographs by Albert Sterner]

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS

BY

ELLEN TERRY

[Illustration]

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.

MCMIX

_1908, The McClure Company_

1907, 1908, The S.S. McClure Company

1907, 1908, Ellen Terry

TO

EDY

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I. A CHILD OF THE STAGE, 1848-56
The Charles Keans, 1856
Training in Shakespeare, 1856-59

II. ON THE ROAD, 1859-61
Life in a Stock Company, 1862-63
1864

III. ROSSETTI, BERNHARDT, IRVING, 1865-67
My First Impressions of Henry Irving

IV. A SIX-YEAR VACATION, 1868-74

V. THE ACTRESS AND THE PLAYWRIGHT, 1874.
Portia, 1875
Tom Taylor and Lavender Sweep

VI. A YEAR WITH THE BANCROFTS

VII. EARLY DAYS AT THE LYCEUM

VIII. WORK AT THE LYCEUM

IX. LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS

X. LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS (_continued_)

XI. AMERICA: THE FIRST OF EIGHT TOURS
What Constitutes Charm

XII. SOME LIKES AND DISLIKES

XIII. THE MACBETH PERIOD

XIV. LAST DAYS AT THE LYCEUM
My Stage Jubilee
Apologia
The Death of Henry Irving
Alfred Gilbert and others
"Beefsteak" Guests at the Lyceum
Bits From My Diary

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Ellen Terry

Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Terry

Charles Kean and Ellen Terry in 1856

Ellen Terry in 1856

Ellen Terry at Sixteen

"The Sisters" (Kate and Ellen Terry)

Ellen Terry at Seventeen

George Frederick Watts, R.A.

Ellen Terry as Helen in "The Hunchback"

Henry Irving

Head of a Young Girl (Ellen Terry)

Henry Irving

Ellen Terry as Portia

Henry Irving as Matthias in "The Bells"

Henry Irving as Philip of Spain

Henry Irving as Hamlet

Lily Langtry

William Terriss as Squire Thornhill in "Olivia"

Ellen Terry as Ophelia

Ellen Terry as Beatrice

Sir Henry Irving

Irving as Louis XI

Ellen Terry as Henrietta Maria

Ellen Terry as Camma in "The Cup"

Ellen Terry as Iolanthe

Ellen Terry as Letitia Hardy in "The Belle's Stratagem"

Edwin Thomas Booth

Ellen Terry as Juliet

Two Portraits of Ellen Terry as Beatrice

Ellen Terry's Favourite Photograph as Olivia

Eleanora Duse with Lenbach's Child

Ellen Terry as Margaret in "Faust"

Ellen Terry as Ellaline in "The Amber Heart"

Miss Ellen Terry in 1883

The Bas-relief Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson

Miss Terry and Sir Henry Irving

Sarah Holland, Ellen Terry's Dresser

Miss Rosa Corder

Miss Ellen Terry with her Fox-terriers

Miss Ellen Terry in 1898

Sir Henry Irving

Miss Ellen Terry

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

Sir Henry Irving

Ellen Terry as Lucy Ashton in "Ravenswood"

Henry Irving as Cardinal Wolsey in "Henry VIII."

Ellen Terry as Nance Oldfield

Ellen Terry as Kniertje in "The Good Hope"

Ellen Terry as Imogen

Henry Irving as Becket

Sir Henry Irving

Ellen Terry as Rosamund in "Becket"

Ellen Terry as Guinevere in "King Arthur"

"Olivia"

Miss Terry's Garden at Winchelsea

Ellen Terry as Hermione in "The Winter's Tale"

INTRODUCTION

"When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life!)
Why even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real
life.
Only a few hints--a few diffused faint clues and indirections
I seek ... to trace out here."

WALT WHITMAN.

For years I have contemplated telling this story, and for years I have
put off telling it. While I have delayed, my memory has not improved,
and my recollections of the past are more hazy and fragmentary than when
it first occurred to me that one day I might write them down.

My bad memory would matter less if I had some skill in writing--the
practiced writer can see possibilities in the most ordinary events--or
if I had kept a systematic and conscientious record of my life. But
although I was at one time conscientious and diligent enough in keeping
a diary, I kept it for use at the moment, not for future reference. I
kept it with paste-pot and scissors as much as with a pen. My method was
to cut bits out of the newspapers and stick them into my diary day by
day. Before the end of the year was reached Mr. Letts would have been
ashamed to own his diary. It had become a bursting, groaning dust-bin of
information, for the most part useless. The biggest elastic band made
could hardly encircle its bulk, swelled by photographs, letters,
telegrams, dried flowers--the whole making up a confusion in which every
one but the owner would seek in vain to find some sense or meaning.

About six years ago I moved into a smaller house in London, and I burnt
a great many of my earlier diaries as unmovable rubbish. The few
passages which I shall quote in this book from those which escaped
destruction will prove that my bonfire meant no great loss!

Still, when it was suggested to me in the year of my stage jubilee that
I ought to write down my recollections, I longed for those diaries! I
longed for anything which would remind me of the past and make it live
again for me. I was frightened. Something would be expected of me, since
I could not deny that I had had an eventful life packed full of
incident, and that by the road I had met many distinguished and
interesting men and women. I could not deny that I had been fifty years
on the stage, and that this meant enough material for fifty books, if
only the details of every year could be faithfully told. But it is not
given to all of us to see our lives in relief as we look back. Most of
us, I think, see them in perspective, of which our birth is the
vanishing point. Seeing, too, is only half the battle. How few people
can describe what they see!

While I was thinking in this obstructive fashion and wishing that I
could write about my childhood like Tolstoi, about my girlhood like
Marie Bashkirtseff, and about the rest of my days and my work like many
other artists of the pen, who merely, by putting black upon white, have
had the power to bring before their readers not merely themselves "as
they lived," but the most homely and intimate details of their lives,
the friend who had first impressed on me that I ought not to leave my
story untold any longer, said that the beginning was easy enough: "What
is the first thing you remember? Write that down as a start."

But for my friend's practical suggestion it is doubtful if I should ever
have written a line! He relieved my anxiety about my powers of compiling
a stupendous autobiography, and made me forget that writing was a new
art, to me, and that I was rather old to try my hand at a new art. My
memory suddenly began to seem not so bad after all. For weeks I had
hesitated between Othello's "Nothing extenuate, nor write down aught in
malice," and Pilate's "What is truth?" as my guide and my apology. Now I
saw that both were too big for my modest endeavor. I was not leaving a
human document for the benefit of future psychologists and historians,
but telling as much of my story as I could remember to the good, living
public which has been considerate and faithful to me for so many years.

How often it has made allowances for me when I was nervous on first
nights! With what patience it has waited long and uncomfortable hours to
see me! Surely its charity would quickly cover my literary sins.

I gave up the search for a motto which should express my wish to tell
the truth so far as I know it, to describe things as I see them, to be
faithful according to my light, not dreading the abuse of those who
might see in my light nothing but darkness.

I shut up "Othello" and did not try to verify the remark of "jesting"
Pilate. The only instruction that I gave myself was to "begin at the
beginning."

E.T.

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

I

A CHILD OF THE STAGE

1848-1856

This is the first thing I remember.

In the corner of a lean-to whitewashed attic stood a fine, plain, solid
oak bureau. By climbing up on to this bureau I could see from the window
the glories of the sunset. My attic was on a hill in a large and busy
town, and the smoke of a thousand chimneys hung like a gray veil between
me and the fires in the sky. When the sun had set, and the scarlet and
gold, violet and primrose, and all those magic colors that have no
names, had faded into the dark, there were other fires for me to see.
The flaming forges came out, and terrified while they fascinated my
childish imagination.

What did it matter to me that I was locked in and that my father and
mother, with my elder sister Kate, were all at the theater? I had the
sunset, the forges, and the oak bureau.

I cannot say how old I was at this time, but I am sure that it wasn't
long after my birth (which I can't remember, although I have often been
asked to decide in which house at Coventry I was born!). At any rate, I
had not then seen a theater, and I took to the stage before many years
had passed over my head.

Putting together what I remembered, and such authentic history as there
is of my parents' movements, I gather that this attic was in theatrical
lodgings in Glasgow. My father was an actor, my mother an actress, and
they were at this time on tour in Scotland. Perhaps this is the place to
say that father was the son of an Irish builder, and that he eloped in a
chaise with mother, who was the daughter of a Scottish minister. I am
afraid I know no details of their romance. As for my less immediate
ancestry, it is "wropt in mystery." Were we all people of the stage?
There was a Daniel Terry who was not only a famous actor in his day, but
a friend of Sir Walter Scott's. There was an Eliza Terry, an actress
whose portrait appears in _The Dramatic Mirror_ in 1847. But so far as I
know I cannot claim kinship with either Eliza or Daniel.

I have a very dim recollection of anything that happened in the attic,
beyond the fact that when my father and mother went to the theater every
night, they used to put me to bed and that directly their backs were
turned and the door locked, I used to jump up and go to the window. My
"bed" consisted of the mattress pulled off their bed and laid on the
floor--on father's side. Both my father and my mother were very kind and
devoted parents (though severe at times, as all good parents are), but
while mother loved all her children too well to make favorites, I was, I
believe, my father's particular pet. I used to sleep all night holding
his hand.

One night I remember waking up to find a beautiful face bending over me.
Father was holding a candle so that the visitor might see me better, and
gradually I realized that the face belonged to some one in a brown silk
dress--the first silk dress that I had ever seen. This being from
another world had brown eyes and brown hair, which looked to me very
dark, because we were a white lot, very fair indeed. I shall never
forget that beautiful vision of this well-dressed woman with her lovely
complexion and her gold chain round her neck. It was my Aunt Lizzie.

I hold very strongly that a child's earliest impressions mould its
character perhaps more than either heredity or education. I am sure it
is true in my case. What first impressed me? An attic, an oak bureau, a
lovely face, a bed on the floor. Things have come and gone in my life
since then, but they have been powerless to efface those early
impressions. I adore pretty faces. I can't keep away from shops where
they sell good old furniture like my bureau. I like plain rooms with low
ceilings better than any other rooms; and for my afternoon siesta, which
is one of my institutions, I often choose the floor in preference to bed
or sofa.

What we remember in our childhood and what we are told afterwards often
become inextricably confused in our minds, and after the bureau and Aunt
Lizzie, my memory is a blank for some years. I can't even tell you when
it was first decided that I was to go on the stage, but I expect it was
when I was born, for in those days theatrical folk did not imagine that
their children _could_ do anything but follow their parents' profession.

I must depend now on hearsay for certain facts. The first fact is my
birth, which should, perhaps, have been mentioned before anything else.
To speak by the certificate, I was born on the 27th of February, 1848,
at Coventry. Many years afterwards, when people were kind enough to
think that the house in which I was born deserved to be discovered,
there was a dispute as to which house in Market Street could claim me.
The dispute was left unsettled in rather a curious way. On one side of
the narrow street a haberdasher's shop bore the inscription, "Birthplace
of Ellen Terry." On the other, an eating-house declared itself to be
"the original birthplace"! I have never been able to arbitrate in the
matter, my statement that my mother had always said that the house was
"on the right-hand side, coming from the market-place," being apparently
of no use. I have heard lately that one of the birthplaces has retired
from the competition, and that the haberdasher has the field to himself.
I am glad, for the sake of those friends of mine who have bought his
handkerchiefs and ties as souvenirs. There is, however, nothing very
attractive about the house itself. It is better built than a house of
the same size would be built now, and it has a certain old-fashioned
respectability, but that is the end of its praises. Coventry itself
makes up for the deficiency. It is a delightful town, and it was a happy
chance that made me a native of Warwickshire, Shakespeare's own county.
Sarah Kemble married Mr. Siddons at Coventry too--another happy omen.

I have acted twice in my native town in old days, but never in recent
years. In 1904 I planned to act there again, but unfortunately I was
taken ill at Cambridge, and the doctors would not allow me to go to
Coventry. The morning my company left Cambridge without me, I was very
miserable. It is always hateful to disappoint the public, and on this
occasion I was compelled to break faith where I most wished to keep it.
I heard afterwards from my daughter (who played some of my parts
instead of me) that many of the Coventry people thought I had never
meant to come at all. If this should meet their eyes, I hope they will
believe that this was not so. My ambition to play at Coventry again
shall be realized yet.[1]

[Footnote 1: Since I wrote this, I have again visited my native
town--this time to receive its civic congratulations on the occasion of
my jubilee, and as recently as March of the present year I acted at the
new Empire Theater.]

At one time nothing seemed more unlikely than that I should be able to
act in another Warwickshire town, a town whose name is known all over
the world. But time and chance and my own great wish succeeded in
bringing about my appearance at Stratford-on-Avon.

I can well imagine that the children of some strolling players used to
have a hard time of it, but my mother was not one to shirk her duties.
She worked hard at her profession and yet found it possible not to
_drag_ up her children, to live or die as it happened, but to bring them
up to be healthy, happy, and wise--theater-wise, at any rate. When her
babies were too small to be left at the lodgings (which she and my
father took in each town they visited as near to the theater as
possible), she would bundle us up in a shawl and put us to sleep in her
dressing-room. So it was, that long before I spoke in a theater, I slept
in one.

Later on, when we were older and mother could leave us at home, there
was a fire one night at our lodgings, and she rushed out of the theater
and up the street in an agony of terror. She got us out of the house all
right, took us to the theater, and went on with the next act as if
nothing had happened. Such fortitude is commoner in our profession, I
think, than in any other. We "go on with the next act" whatever
happens, and if we know our business, no one in the audience will ever
guess that anything is wrong--that since the curtain last went down some
dear friend has died, or our children in the theatrical lodgings up the
street have run the risk of being burnt to death.

My mother had eleven children altogether, but only nine survived their
infancy, and of these nine, my eldest brother, Ben, and my sister
Florence have since died. My sister Kate, who left the stage at an age
when most of the young women of the present day take to it for the first
time, and made an enduring reputation in a few brilliant years, was the
eldest of the family. Then came a sister, who died, and I was the third.
After us came Ben, George, Marion, Flossie, Charles, Tom, and Fred. Six
out of the nine have been on the stage, but only Marion, Fred, and I are
there still.

Two or three members of this large family, at the most, were in
existence when I first entered a theater in a professional capacity, so
I will leave them all alone for the present. I had better confess at
once that I don't remember this great event, and my sister Kate is
unkind enough to say that it never happened--to me! The story, she
asserts, was told of her. But without damning proofs she is not going to
make me believe it! Shall I be robbed of the only experience of my first
eight years of life? Never!

During the rehearsals of a pantomime in a Scottish town (Glasgow, I
think. Glasgow has always been an eventful place to me!), a child was
wanted for the Spirit of the Mustard-pot. What more natural than that my
father should offer my services? I had a shock of pale yellow hair, I
was small enough to be put into the property mustard-pot, and the
Glasgow stage manager would easily assume that I had inherited talent.
My father had acted with Macready in the stock seasons both at Edinburgh
and Glasgow, and bore a very high reputation with Scottish audiences.
But the stage manager and father alike reckoned without their actress!
When they tried to put me into the mustard-pot, I yelled lustily and
showed more lung-power than aptitude for the stage.

"Pit your child into the mustard-pot, Mr. Terry," said the stage
manager.

"D--n you and your mustard-pot, sir!" said my mortified father. "I won't
frighten my child for you or anyone else!"

But all the same he was bitterly disappointed at my first dramatic
failure, and when we reached home he put me in the corner to chasten me.
"_You'll_ never make an actress!" he said, shaking a reproachful finger
at me.

It is _my_ mustard-pot, and why Kate should want it, I can't think! She
hadn't yellow hair, and she couldn't possibly have behaved so badly. I
have often heard my parents say significantly that they had no trouble
with _Kate_! Before she was four, she was dancing a hornpipe in a
sailor's jumper, a rakish little hat, and a diminutive pair of white
ducks! Those ducks, marked "Kate Terry," were kept by mother for years
as a precious relic, and are, I hope, still in the family archives!

I stick to the mustard-pot, but I entirely disclaim the little Duke of
York in Richard III., which some one with a good memory stoutly insists
he saw me play before I made my first appearance as Mamilius. Except
for this abortive attempt at Glasgow, I was never on any stage even for
a rehearsal until 1856, at the Princess's Theater, when I appeared with
Charles Kean in "A Winter's Tale."

The man with the memory may have seen Kate as one of the Princes in the
Tower, but he never saw me with her. Kate was called up to London in
1852 to play Prince Arthur in Charles Kean's production of "King John,"
and after that she acted in all his plays, until he gave up management
in 1859. She had played Arthur during a stock season at Edinburgh, and
so well that some one sang her praises to Kean and advised him to engage
her. My mother took Kate to London, and I was left with my father in the
provinces for two years. I can't recall much about those two years
except sunsets and a great mass of shipping looming up against the sky.
The sunsets followed me about everywhere; the shipping was in Liverpool,
where father was engaged for a considerable time. He never ceased
teaching me to be useful, alert, and quick. Sometimes he hastened my
perceptive powers with a slipper, and always he corrected me if I
pronounced any word in a slipshod fashion. He himself was a beautiful
elocutionist, and if I now speak my language well it is in no small
degree due to my early training.

It was to his elocution that father owed his engagement with Macready,
of whom he always spoke in terms of the most affectionate admiration in
after years, and probably it did him a good turn again with Charles
Kean. An actor who had supported Macready with credit was just the actor
likely to be useful to a manager who was producing a series of plays by
Shakespeare. Kate had been a success at the Princess's, too, in child
parts, and this may have reminded Mr. Kean to send for Kate's father! At
any rate he was sent for towards the end of the year 1853 and left
Liverpool for London. I know I cooked his breakfasts for him in
Liverpool, but I haven't the slightest recollection of the next two
years in London. As I am determined not to fill up the early blanks with
stories of my own invention, I must go straight on to 1856, when
rehearsals were called at the Princess's Theater for Shakespeare's
"Winter's Tale."

THE CHARLES KEANS

1856

The Charles Keans from whom I received my first engagement, were both
remarkable people, and at the Princess Theater were doing very
remarkable work. Kean the younger had not the fire and genius of his
wonderful father, Edmund, and but for the inherited splendor of his name
it is not likely that he would ever have attained great eminence as an
actor. His Wolsey and his Richard (the Second, not the Third) were his
best parts, perhaps because in them his beautiful diction had full scope
and his limitations were not noticeable. But it is more as a stage
reformer than as an actor that he will be remembered. The old
happy-go-lucky way of staging plays, with its sublime indifference to
correctness of detail and its utter disregard of archaeology, had
received its first blow from Kemble and Macready, but Charles Kean gave
it much harder knocks and went further than either of them in the good
work.

It is an old story and a true one that when Edmund Kean made his first
great success as Shylock, after a long and miserable struggle as a
strolling player, he came home to his wife and said: "You shall ride in
your carriage," and then, catching up his little son, added, "and
Charley shall go to Eton!" Well, Charley did go to Eton, and if Eton did
not make him a great actor, it opened his eyes to the absurd
anachronisms in costumes and accessories which prevailed on the stage at
that period, and when he undertook the management of the Princess's
Theater, he turned his classical education to account. In addition to
scholarly knowledge, he had a naturally refined taste and the power of
selecting the right man to help him. Planche, the great authority on
historical costumes, was one of his ablest coadjutors, and Mr. Bradshaw
designed all the properties. It has been said lately that I began my
career on an unfurnished stage, when the play was the thing, and
spectacle was considered of small importance. I take this opportunity of
contradicting that statement most emphatically. Neither when I began nor
yet later in my career have I ever played under a management where
infinite pains were not given to every detail. I think that far from
hampering the acting, a beautiful and congruous background and
harmonious costumes, representing accurately the spirit of the time in
which the play is supposed to move, ought to help and inspire the actor.

Such thoughts as these did not trouble my head when I acted with the
Keans, but, child as I was, the beauty of the productions at the
Princess's Theater made a great impression on me, and my memory of them
is quite clear enough, even if there were not plenty of other evidence,
for me to assert that in some respects they were even more elaborate
than those of the present day. I know that the bath-buns of one's
childhood always seem in memory much bigger and better than the buns
sold nowadays, but even allowing for the natural glamor which the years
throw over buns and rooms, places and plays alike, I am quite certain
that Charles Kean's productions of Shakespeare would astonish the modern
critic who regards the period of my first appearance as a sort of
dark-age in the scenic art of the theater.

I have alluded to the beauty of Charles Kean's diction. His voice was
also of a wonderful quality--soft and low, yet distinct and clear as a
bell. When he played Richard II. the magical charm of this organ was
alone enough to keep the house spellbound. His vivid personality made a
strong impression on me. Yet others only remember that he called his
wife "Delly," though she was Nelly, and always spoke as if he had a cold
in his head. How strange! If I did not understand what suggested
impressions so different from my own, they would make me more indignant.

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