William Gillette, America's Sherlock Holmes

By Henry Zecher

William Gillette is best-remembered today as the living personification of Sherlock Holmes, but he was much more than that. He was one of the nineteenth centurys greatest stars, among its most successful actors and playwrights. In a career spanning six decades, he was one of the best-known celebrities in the Western world, a towering figure in an age of towering figures. Among his friends were Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Theodore Roosevelt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Nast and Maurice Barrymore. He built a castle on the Connecticut River and a miniature railroad to run around it. Among the guests who rode on that train were President Calvin Coolidge, physicist Albert Einstein and Tokyo Mayor Ozaki Yukio, who gave to America the cherry blossoms in 1912. James M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, wrote two hit plays for which he specifically asked Gillette to star in.

As a playwright, Gillette was known for the stark realism of his sets, costuming, dialogue and actions. He developed realistic and dramatic lighting and sound effects. As an actor, he developed the philosophy of The Illusion of the First Time, in which an actor speaks his lines and moves about each night, not as he has done a hundred times before, but as if he is making up his dialogue as he goes along, and moving about as if doing so for the first time, as real people do. Gillette's intention was to reproduce as much as possible the real world on stage, to make his audiences believe they were seeing a life episode being lived across the barrier of the footlights.

This magnificent biography is the first full treatment of Gillette ever published. Exhaustively researched, thoroughly documented, and beautifully written, it not only details the life of this extraordinary man, it provides a colorful context of the times in which he lived. This is a major part of the history of the Western theater finally documented for our edification and enjoyment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781453555828

Henry Zecher

Former journalist and Federal government human resources specialist Henry Zecher is now a freelance writer specializing in historical subjects. Two leading works were an evaluation of German Reformer Martin Luther’s impact on the English Bible (published in Christianity Today Magazine, October 23, 1983, republished several more times, recorded for the blind, and fi nally included in Christian History Magazine’s special Martin Luther issue), and the fi rst analysis from a biblical and historical point of view of the Papyrus Ipuwer, claimed by many to have been an Egyptian version of the plagues on Egypt described in the Old Testament Book of Exodus (The Velikovskian, A Journal of Myth, History and Science, Vol. III, No. 1, January 1997). His wife, Gay Zurich Zecher, is the founder and president of Art & Soul, Inc., producing personalized water color cartoons and selling scented candles. They live in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and between them have fi ve children, three grandchildren, a cat and a fl uctuating number of grand-pets. Read other published works on Henry’s website at

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Copyright © 2011 by Henry Zecher.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

NOTES: Every effort has been made to locate copyright holders for photographs and quoted materials that were originally published in both recent and now long-defunct books and magazines, or distributed by long-dismantled news or feature-syndicating organizations, as well as authors and estates. Where no permissions acknowledgment has been given, the material has either been determined to be out of copyright, to have never been copyrighted (as in the case of personal unpublished memoirs and most newspaper material), or to have proven untraceable to such present holders of copyright as may exist.

In all quotations, the original grammar and spelling have been retained, whether incorrect or simply the customary spelling and style of the time. However, where newspaper reports got his age wrong, the figure has been corrected and placed in brackets.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Sherlock Holmes Looks Exactly Like William Gillette

Chapter 2 The Nook

Chapter 3 Only Child

Chapter 4 Predestination And Insubordination

Chapter 5 Hometown Appearances

Chapter 6 Coming To The Madison Square

Chapter 7 Marriage And Stardom

Chapter 8 Dramaturg Par Excellence

Chapter 9 On The Rise

Chapter 10 The Great Hiatus

Chapter 11 Tryon

Chapter 12 Recovery

Chapter 13 Comeback

Chapter 14 London Success

Chapter 15 Mr. William Gillette, Mr. Sherlock Holmes

Chapter 16 The Curtain Rises

Chapter 17 The Artist, The Little Tramp And The Prince Of Denmark

Chapter 18 Crichton And Clarice

Chapter 19 From Clarice To Samson

Chapter 20 The War Of 1912

Chapter 21 Dean Of The American Theater

Chapter 22 The Hadlyme Stone Heap

Chapter 23 From Tragedy To Triumph

Chapter 24 Hallucination Daddy

Chapter 25 Winding Down And Up Again

Chapter 26 Torrington Road

Chapter 27 His Last Bow

Chapter 28 Airwaves And Irregulars

Chapter 29 Farewell, Good Luck, And Merry Christmas

Postscript

Gillette Bibliography

Illustrations

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

To the two women in my life,

my mother, Frances Zecher;

and

my wife, Gay Zurich Zecher.

INTRODUCTION

I t has been said that stars of the theater are made up of fictions. They are, to us, mere images, more or less real, their personal identities bound up in illusions, stereotypes, social and literary conventions. ¹

Like so many stars in his profession, William Gillette fashioned a career out of fictions. His existence off the stage, one writer noted, was a mystery, his personal and private character less known than that of anybody else in public life, wearing a mask before the public that he never removed.² His fictions were many: from Benvolio, Shylock and Rosencrantz to Job McCosh, Augustus Billings, Lewis Dumont, Carrington, Dearth and Sherlock Holmes. But these were the masks he wore onstage. Offstage, the mask he wore was simpler but more impenetrable—aloof, mysterious, eccentric, unknown and for the most part unknowable, in one writer’s words, the best-known and least-known actor in America.³

When they spoke of William Gillette, ordinary folks, newspaper writers and theater people talked of his houseboat or his miniature railroad or his eccentric castle or the things he did and said. This is true because these are the humanizing incidents of a man’s life, critic Burns Mantle explained. They bring him closer to those who knew him only as a celebrity.

The problem was that a celebrity was all he wished to be known as. With all but a few, he slammed the door shut on anything else. The fact is that less is known of the private life of this actor than of any of his fellows, Mantle continued. He was, in shying away from publicity, as fussy and particular as was Maude Adams. Not alone because he belonged to a day when even theatre managers were of a more reticent breed and considered it good business to surround their stars with a kind of protective mystery, but he also came of a line of New England aristocrats that considered self-exploitation one of the deadlier of the social sins.⁴

This, of course, makes him a biographer’s nightmare. Unlike novelist Edith Wharton, who left a packet of papers marked For My Biographer,⁵ of which there would be several, this master of reticence did not want his story told and remained deliberately inaccessible. He kept no journal, granted rare interviews and allowed only a privileged few inside his carefully constructed and studiously maintained reserve. He burned most of his personal papers and correspondence before his death and directed his brother-in-law to dispose of any letters, diaries, or other such personal papers as he might find. He wished most of all that no one would ever know his secrets.⁶

However, if he left us no memoirs, he did leave us his writings—letters, plays, essays, one marvelous book and a great number and variety of scrapbooks that reveal the enigmatic mind of a man with interests in a wide variety of things.

He made his fortune in the most public of professions, he was among the very best of his time at what he did and he left an impact still felt and acknowledged long after his death. Yet his life remains a greater mystery than any presented on the stage. Few knew him then. None know him now. Like the detective whose image he created, he remains, in the words of Orson Welles, one of those permanent profiles, everlasting silhouettes on the edge of the world.⁷

And there he stands, invisible behind the mask he rarely removed, known mainly through the masques he created for our entertainment. Writer Rennold Wolf saw him as diffident, timid, shrinking. When he gazes across the footlights at an auditorium packed to the door with a cynical, skeptical first-night audience, his countenance bears no more expression than a modiste’s dummy; but he has been known to blush like a schoolgirl when a stranger watches him intently from the opposite seat of a street-car.⁸

Nobody dealt better with reality when he had to, but he mostly lived a life of escape into worlds of work, play and illusion; escape into nostalgia; escape on a bicycle, a houseboat, motorcycles and a railroad; escape to a mountaintop bungalow and to a cliff-top castle.

So just who and what was this permanent silhouette?

00a.jpg

William Hooker Gillette.

He was born William Hooker Gillette—Will to his family and friends—in Nook Farm, Hartford, Connecticut, one of the most cultured and intellectual havens in America. He invented or developed several aspects of modern theater that we take for granted today. He helped boost the careers of some of our most distinguished thespians. He built one of the most eccentric homes in America. And to a very great extent he created the public image of Sherlock Holmes.

In a career that spanned six decades, he became a towering figure in an age of towering figures, a celebrity bigger than all but two of the neighbors and friends of his youth: Samuel Clemens and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

He is best known today as the living personification of Holmes. Over the years, he gave living substance to this fictional hero, lifting him off the printed page and infusing into the character a life that would never end. The primary reason he is remembered today is that he established for all time the Holmes image with the three items most associated with the master sleuth: the deerstalker cap, the bent briar pipe and that profile, thus creating what may be the most instantly recognizable icon in the world. And it was from Gillette’s Holmes, not Arthur Conan Doyle’s, that Hollywood filmmakers derived four of the most famous words ever spoken in the English language: Elementary, my dear Watson.

It took Gillette only three years—from 1899 until 1902—to become totally identified with Holmes, although it was certainly not his stage appearance alone that did it. Artist Frederick Dorr Steele in America was spreading his likeness around the globe on the covers of Collier’s magazine and in various editions of the Sherlock Holmes canon. And, as Dennis Sherk wrote,

it is understandable, then, that when Gillette walked on the stage it was just as if he stepped out of a book.

Gillette’s conception of the detective became and still is standard throughout the world. He is fixed in the popular imagination as a tall, lean, angular man with sharp features, in dressing gown and pipe, or in double-flapped hunting cap and cape. It is said that Gillette’s impersonation of Sherlock Holmes… became one of the fixed points of theatrical and literary history.⁹

So if Doyle gave Holmes to the world, it was Gillette who made him seem so real that even today many people believe he actually lived.

But William Gillette (he never used his middle name or initial) was more than simply the man who brought Sherlock Holmes to life. He was one of the leading actors and playwrights of his time, a matinee idol of enormous appeal and an imaginative genius who made some important contributions to the theater still in use today.

He was to the theater what Clemens and Theodore Dreiser were to American literature: a leading exponent of realism. Born in the era of melodrama with its grand gestures and sonorous declamations, he created characters who acted and talked the way people act and talk in real life. Held by the Enemy, his first Civil War drama, was a major step toward modern theater. It abandoned many of the crude devices of the time and introduced realism into the sets, costumes, props and sound effects. In Sherlock Holmes he introduced the fade-in at the beginning of each scene and the fade-out at the end instead of the slam-bang finishes audiences were accustomed to. Clarice in 1905 was significant because, for the first time, he tried, without conspicuous success, to achieve emotion through character rather than incident.¹⁰

He personified the strong, triumphant hero later portrayed on screen by John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford, although his silken on-stage persona was compared by those who saw both men to Rex Harrison and his acting demeanor was reincarnated in Gary Cooper. Into a theatre that was accustomed to florid gestures and genteel bombast he introduced the first modern acting technique, the New York Times said upon his death. ‘Psychological acting,’ he called it in the spirit of those times.¹¹

He led the way in the American conquest of the British stage, in part due to the dramatic excellence of his two Civil War dramas and in part because he was, first and foremost, a gentleman of exquisite birth and breeding. Along with fellow thespians Edwin Booth, John Drew, Otis Skinner, Henry Miller, E. H. Sothern and a few others, he helped overcome America’s puritanical objection to the theater and showed that, while actors may not have always been gentlemen, there was no reason why a gentleman could not be an actor.

There are many errors contained in the various written accounts of Gillette’s life and it is important to set them straight. One may read—in magazines, books and websites—about his undergraduate education at some of our leading universities, including Harvard and MIT; or that his family disinherited him when he became an actor; or that his servant, Ozaki Yukitaka, was ashamed of his lowly position when his famous brother, the mayor of Tokyo, visited Hadlyme, and that Gillette and Ozaki exchanged positions as master and servant for the famous brother’s visit. Even the year of his birth is often listed wrong: usually 1855 but also 1856 and even 1858. He was born in 1853.

Gillette’s story may not be appealing to modern readers accustomed to the depraved behavior of so many modern celebrities. His was a life remarkably free of scandal. There were no paternity suits like the one that put Charles Chaplin in the 1940’s headlines; no underage lovers like the girl with whom Errol Flynn cavorted; no casting couch or pornography collection like David Belasco’s; not even a multitude of wives. His one marriage, while it lasted, was an idyllic romance, and his heartbreak at his wife’s death may have helped cast him into the depths of a debilitating illness. His colleagues later considered him to be quite the ladies man and a succession of leading women was believed to have shared with him more than their dramatic talents; but this was no more unusual then than it is today and, if the stories are true, at least he was discreet about it.

He was politically uninvolved throughout the busy part of his career, finally taking time to campaign for Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. In so doing, this man who prized his privacy gave stump speeches for the old lion, but not with the ideological blather so often heard today. Much of what he said in 1912 is being said now and is just as true as it was then. This new experience, however, emboldened him to speak frequently to groups on issues related to the theater.

He was charmed by children, particularly young girls like nine-year-old child star Elsie Leslie as well as by such young ladies as seventeen-year-old Ethel Barrymore and eighteen-year-old Helen Hayes; but his interest in them was purely paternal and his conduct, however lavish at times, was never inappropriate. Except for the reticent Ethel, whose vanity he wounded with a bit too much gallantry, these ladies spoke glowingly of him for as long as they lived. He drank alcohol in moderation and smoked more on stage than off. To our knowledge he never indulged in drugs and overall lived a remarkably clean life. This eccentric genius might be a remarkable subject for psychoanalysis, but scandalmongers will have to look elsewhere for their fodder.

In a twenty-first-century world saturated with detectives and secret agents, we can scarcely imagine how riveted audiences were by Gillette’s presentation of Sherlock Holmes. Yet to the general public, he is largely unknown today except as the builder and owner of an eccentric castle in Connecticut.

Impressionist Rich Little said, You’re only as big as the generation that remembers you. Gillette’s generation is long gone. This was emphasized by Christopher Redmond: "He played Holmes from 1899, when he was 46, to 1932, when he was 78. And for all that time—and a decade longer—he was acknowledged as brilliant. Indeed, Gillette was accepted as being Sherlock Holmes in person, his stage interpretation accounting for most of the still surviving popular image of the great detective. The suave but nervous movements, the quiet confident voice, the curved pipe and the pointed needle, these all came from Gillette as much as from the pages of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But other Holmeses have intervened, chief among them being Basil Rathbone in the 1940’s and Jeremy Brett in the [1980’s-90’s]. The Gillette image has become a blurred memory."¹²

While those who saw him on stage have passed with him beyond the Reichenbach, various other reasons are cited for his being so largely unknown today, from his personal reticence to the disappearance of melodrama from the stage. The real reason for his obscurity at the dawn of the electronic century is that he was never seen on television and not even on film after 1916. Once a stage performance is over, it is gone forever. It is this instantaneous birth and demise of each stage performance, and beyond that the passing of those who saw it, that prompted Ethel Barrymore to ask, We who play, who entertain for a few years, what can we leave that will last?¹³

What lasts is what is left on film. Nearly every great thespian today starts out on the stage, but those who are widely known went on to motion pictures and television. As a playwright, Gillette created nothing of lasting popularity for us to remember him by. He has been exceedingly skilful in making parts for actors, Clayton Hamilton observed; but he can scarcely be said to have created a single human being who lives outside the play in which he figures, since Sherlock Holmes—as a person—was imagined by another man. Another major problem with his plays was that they were built upon and shaped by his own strengths and limitations as an actor, which made for great theater at the time but allowed for little variety: They all present a man of extraordinary calmness in a series of situations that would fling an ordinary person into flurries.¹⁴

Today, Gillette has been consigned to the role of creator of an eccentric castle, which he was, and the namesake of a razor blade, which he was not. Visitors drawn by the curiosity of the castle must have it explained to them that he was an actor who portrayed Sherlock Holmes. Sadly, castle guides sometimes must explain to them who Sherlock Holmes was.

The first authentic published biography of Gillette was Doris Cook’s pioneering work, Sherlock Holmes & Much More, but it came out in 1970 when Gillette had been dead for only 33 years. Many who had known him were still alive and so much correspondence, documentation and artifacts had not yet surfaced. Cook did a remarkable job with no precedents to guide her and her work remains both a milestone in Gillette scholarship and a primer and guide for those who have followed. Other biographical and technical treatments of Gillette include several well-done graduate theses that are referred to throughout this work.

Thomas Macaulay once wrote that "biographers, and indeed all persons who employ themselves in illustrating the lives of others, are peculiarly disposed to the Lues Boswelliana, or disease of admiration."¹⁵ When your subject is, with all his eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, a good man—and William Gillette was a remarkably good man—it can be easy to insert one’s feelings about him and speak for him, rather than allowing him to speak for himself. It would also be tempting to psychoanalyze him, to try to explain his odd ways, but I have tried not to do that. Allowing Gillette to speak for himself, however, can be problematic because his tongue was routinely stuck in his cheek and his flirtations with the truth were episodic. For example, when Peter Clark MacFarlane wrote the article about him for Everybody’s Magazine in 1915, Gillette said it was all rubbish except for the year of his birth. MacFarlane had given it as 1855.

Gillette’s acting and his plays reflect the developed skills of a craftsman who learned by practical experience, a man who served his apprenticeship and came up the hard way. That he was one of his era’s leading actors and playwrights has been forgotten except by a handful of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts and theater historians. Norleen Healy noticed that it appears that William Gillette has been generally neglected in terms of research. The fact that a general lack of information has been recorded concerning Gillette has tended to minimize his accomplishments and effectiveness in the American theatre of the late nineteenth century.¹⁶

If his real accomplishments have been minimized and his personal qualities forgotten and if all he is remembered for today is his impact on Sherlock Holmes, then the public has missed out on one of the modern theater’s pioneering dramatists, one of its most majestic actors and one of its most fascinating personalities. Here was a man who could hold both small gatherings and massive audiences in the palm of his hand, whose personality was arresting as soon as he walked into a room or onto a stage, and who was personally reticent but in social settings nearly always made those around him happy that he was there.

Here was a man who made more theater history than any of his contemporary playwrights and led the way in establishing realism in the mise en scène (putting on stage). His personal history is long and rich and his associates and associations many, varied and historic. He was a man you would love to have as a guest for dinner or at a party, or simply among a gathering of friends by the fire. To ignore him is to pass over a man who helped to make the theater of today what it is.

His story has waited decades to be told, but when it comes to piecing together a life long after it has been lived, we are drawn back to the words of Gillette’s good friend Samuel Clemens, who claimed to have made the discovery of the wide difference in interest between ‘news’ and ‘history’; that news is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form, and that history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it.¹⁷

Gillette made news for the better part of a century throughout the Western world. Today, the best we can offer is a pale and tranquil reflection gathered from news clippings, letters and the published recollections of those who knew him. We cannot really know the thought processes, the motives, even the fears, or expectations that lay behind the often eccentric things he did—that sweeping bow over the delicate hand of Ethel Barrymore; the stage costumes he wore on dinner dates; his switch from the laboriously slow houseboat to the speedy motorcycle when he rarely, if ever, drove an automobile; or the bird cages he collected and the scrapbooks he kept.

Those pale and tranquil reflections are the only clues we have as to what kind of a man William Gillette really was. His letters and conversations connect us to the man himself, but they’re all we have. We cannot find the deepest answers because, as Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick so graphically put it, no matter how long one peers in from the outside, it is never quite the view from within.¹⁸

All we can do is see Gillette within the context of his own era, his own circumstances, with his own background and personal traits and strengths and weaknesses. We can see him against the backdrop of his times and understand and appreciate him as he was, for who and what he was to the world in which he lived. We need to see his importance as it related to the people he knew and was important to. In this he stands out because the range of his friends and acquaintances was enormous. A major part of any life story is the cast of characters that becomes a part of that story. This includes the people Gillette grew up among in the intellectual haven of Nook Farm, two of whom—Stowe and Clemens—did more than all but a handful of other writers in shaping the century in which they lived. Among his boyhood friends were men of later renown: Dr. Edward Beecher Hooker, Professor Richard Burton and actor Otis Skinner. He later performed with America’s greatest actor of the nineteenth century, Edwin Booth. He was personally invited to become the first American actor to take the stage owned by the great British actor Sir Henry Irving. And he was managed by the world’s foremost theatrical impresario Charles Frohman.

He gave initial boosts to the careers of four of our most cherished thespians: Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin and Helen Hayes. While he was not directly responsible for it, three future Hollywood stars made their film debuts in productions of his plays: William Powell as Foreman Wells in Sherlock Holmes (1922), Meryl Streep as Edith Varney in Secret Service (1977) and Christian Slater as Billy the page boy in Sherlock Holmes (1981). Finally, he was the author’s personal choice for major roles in two plays by James M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan.

Gillette entertained at his Hadlyme castle estate President Calvin Coolidge, physicist Albert Einstein and Tokyo Mayor Ozaki Yukio, whose 1912 gift of the Japanese cherry blossoms still beautifies the nation’s capital. All of them took rides on his railroad. Political cartoonist Thomas Nast, America’s first professor of drama Brander Matthews, book and drama critic Alexander Woollcott, Utah wartime governor and doctor/dentist/lawyer/wheeler dealer Frank Fuller and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of literature’s best-known character, were his friends. As for admirers, simply cite a Who’s Who of the Western world for the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth, and you’ll pretty much have them all.

And, if that’s not enough, and although the honor would never appear on any marquis, Gillette was an old friend of actress Gertrude Berkeley, who had a son named Busby Berkeley William Enos. The boy was apparently named after two of Gertrude’s friends. One was actress Amy Busby, a young British soubrette who later appeared with Gillette as Edith Varney in a production of Gillette’s Secret Service and was among those leading ladies the press claimed Gillette would marry; she later became a major star on London stages. The boy’s other namesake was William Gillette, after Busby and Gillette agreed to be the boy’s godparents. Little Busby grew up to become the most famous Hollywood film director and choreographer of his era.¹⁹

Then there are the locales of his life. We must do as actor Richard Mansfield told his biographer: Travel over the ground together, foot for foot; all the places I lived in…²⁰

This means going where he went and where he lived. To see the tree-lined haven of Nook Farm, the home he built in the mountains of western North Carolina, the seacoast of eastern Long Island and the majestic castle overlooking the Connecticut Valley is to be in those places he held dear.

These people and these places cover a broad landscape of the international scene. At the time of his death, Sherk reported, Gillette was referred to as the ‘Dean of the U.S. Stage.’ He had been admired and applauded for the greater part of a century by audiences on two continents and held in genuine affection by British royalty, by U. S. Presidents from Grant to Hoover, and by the American people from coast to coast.²¹

It can’t be said any better than that.

Henry Zecher

December 2010

Chapter 1

Sherlock Holmes Looks Exactly

Like William Gillette

I f you’re going to create one of the most distinctive and compelling characters in all of the world’s literature, then you had better find the right actor to play him. While they may not grow on trees, they can be found, even if on the other side of an ocean. And if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in England did fashion such a compelling figure, it was left to America to produce the actor born and bred to play him.

His very person and appearance, Dr. Watson wrote of Sherlock Holmes, were such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer. In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing… ; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination.¹

Whoever played Holmes had to look like that!

01a.jpg

As Vincent Starrett pointed out, playing Holmes is not the same as playing Hamlet. Nearly every actor wants to play Hamlet; any of them can and many of them do. But Hamlet is not a singular type. Holmes is. Portraying him requires both the masterly manner and that world-famous profile. Many over the years have fit the image and done it well, but what made William Gillette different was that he did it first and arguably better, and he became the complete embodiment of the masteur sleuth on the stage.²

It helped that he had the field pretty much to himself for more than two decades, as so few others even came close. Then, having embodied the character, he proceeded to do more for the image of Holmes than all the rest put together. Even Basil Rathbone, who best fit the image and personified Holmes on film, merely acted in the style and used many of the nuances introduced by Gillette. All impersonators of Sherlock Holmes, Time magazine reported when Rathbone took on the role in 1939, must stand comparison with William Gillette, who created the role on the stage.³

The Buffalo Express had proclaimed four decades before Rathbone, It must be admitted by the closest follower of Dr. Doyle’s detective, that in every way has Mr. Gillette realized the ideal.⁴ Thirty years later, the New York Post agreed: He is and has been from the first the only embodiment of Sherlock Holmes that the world has had. He is Frederick Dorr Steele’s illustrations to the life.⁵

Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, sister of the Rough Rider, wrote the following verse in honor of the man in the deerstalker cap:

Subtle, sincere, illumining, illusive,

Convincing, captivating, and delusive,

You who can thrill until we hold our breath,

And hang suspended as twixt life and death

Who are you then, but one of two? and yet

You must be Sherlock Holmes

You are Gillette!⁶

Producer George C. Tyler declared that when Gillette walked on the stage, it was just as if he’d stepped out of one of the books—Sherlock Holmes in the flesh.⁷ He was, Wilella Waldorf added, what Sherlock ought to be.⁸

Featured extensively in newspapers, books and magazines during his lifetime as a colossus of the theater, Gillette has in recent years been written up mostly in connection with Holmes; and, if his plays have not stood the test of time, his image of Holmes certainly has. For an entire generation of aficionados, Gillette’s face was the face of the great detective. Orson Welles, broadcasting The Mercury Theater on the Air, paid him this tribute:

As everybody knows, that celebrated American inventor of underacting lent his considerable gifts as a playwright to the indestructible legend of the Conan Doyle detective, and produced the play which is as much a part of the Holmes literature as any of Sir Arthur’s own romances, and as nobody will ever forget, he gave his face to him. For William Gillette was the aquiline and actual embodiment of Holmes himself. It is too little to say that William Gillette resembled Sherlock Holmes; Sherlock Holmes looks exactly like William Gillette… sounds like him, too, we’re afraid, and hope devoutly that the Mercury Theater and the radio will take none of the glamour from the beloved fable of Baker Street, from the pipe and the violin and the hideous purple dressing gown, from the needle and the cigar on the window ledge, and the dry final famous lines, Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary, the mere child’s play of deduction.⁹

Sherlock Holmes was in many ways a preposterous play with a ludicrous plot, an impossible, absurd melodrama,¹⁰ sensationalism run riot,¹¹ and frank and shameless buncombe.¹² One history of the drama called it an ingenious practical achievement of impossibilities, so candidly acknowledged at the outset as to win indulgence from the audience.¹³ It was a wildly improbable melodrama, Walter Prichard Eaton noted, made marvelously probable in the theater, not alone by the ingenuity of its construction, but by the naturalness of its method in the writing and acting.¹⁴

It mesmerized two generations of audiences and it still entertains today. Having introduced the master detective on stage, Gillette spent the next thirty-six years of his life playing him. He wore the colorful robe and the deerstalker cap, smoked the bent briar pipe, told Watson it was elementary and gave a name to the character of Billy, the page boy. His face, his figure, his voice and his manner gave the entire world its image of Holmes. He was so divinely suited to the role that Doyle’s only complaint was that you made the poor hero of the anaemic printed page a very limp object as compared with the glamour of your own personality which you infuse into his stage presentment.¹⁵

With more prescience than it could have possibly known, The Bookman predicted in 1906 that Gillette might as well accept the fact that his original identity has been destroyed. For a time, perhaps, he may have had a dual personality. He may have been William Gillette off the stage, and Sherlock Holmes only when he was acting in that play. But now and for the rest of his life there is no longer a William Gillette, whether he calls himself that, or the Admirable Crichton, or Dr. Carrington. In whatever costume and character he chooses to appear, he is, in spite of himself, and always must be, Sherlock Holmes.¹⁶

In appearance, personality and acting ability, he remains for many the definitive Sherlock Holmes of all time. But giving life to the literary detective was by no means his only achievement, nor was it even his greatest. Despite the impact of his natural approach to acting, Gillette made his first original contribution to the theater in stagecraft. He brought exquisite and authentic detail to his sets, wonderfully realistic sound effects and startling lighting effects to all his plays. He contributed technical and mechanical ideas that improved stage productions, his most famous single effect being raising and lowering the curtain in total darkness so as to hide scene changes. This, and eliminating between-act curtain calls and speeches, helped maintain the illusion the actors were trying to create. His dialogue was realistic. His characters, within the realms of farce and melodrama, were natural in both their behavior and their mannerisms. Gillette sought to make his settings, scenery and sound effects as realistic as possible. The main issue he addressed, Marcia Nash explained, was how to break through the affectations of the era in order to create a sense of reality on the stage. It was as an acting teacher, actor, designer, producer, mentor and director, that he became a strong and positive contributor to his craft.¹⁷

Gillette, in fact, had a heightened sense of the dramatic. His two most riveting scenes—the hospital scene in Held by the Enemy and the telegraph office scene in Secret Service—are still considered to be among the most dramatic in the history of the American theater.¹⁸ Add to these the Stepney Gas Chamber scene in Sherlock Holmes and the blackout scene in Electricity, and you have a dramatist with a knack for spine-tingling excitement.

Held by the Enemy was hardly the first Civil War play, coming as it did two decades after Appomattox, but both it and Secret Service were in a class by themselves. The sets were truly realistic, the dialogue honest and real, and—most important—the playwright refused to take sides. He treated North and South equally, bestowing integrity, loyalty and honor on both, even as he made a spy each play’s sympathetic hero. Bronson Howard, father of the American drama, made his own big splash with Shenandoah in 1889, three years after Held by the Enemy, but he wrote to Charles Frohman: The secret of the success of ‘Shenandoah’ in both sections of the country is the same as in the case of ‘Held by the Enemy’; neither Gillette nor I trifled with the sanctities of the war, North or South; we bowed to them reverently. Mr. Gillette preceded me in this, and the authors of many war plays yet to come must follow in his footprints, as I did.¹⁹

What set Gillette apart from the rest, however, was not simply his reliance on realism, his naturalistic acting or his sense of the dramatic. At a time when American art—of all kinds—was held by the British in very low esteem, he was also a pioneer in making American drama ‘American,’ rejecting what had been up until that time a pervasive European influence on American theater.²⁰

Gillette was the first American playwright whose authentically American plays were not only accepted but were also critical and commercial successes on British stages. He was, in the 1880s, one of only three American playwrights (Bronson Howard and Steele MacKaye being the other two) whose plays were known for their unity and tight construction. He led the way in providing realism in stage setting. And he was among the very first to try to reproduce the real world on the stage. By realism should be inferred not actualism, but the artistic representation of reality, he wrote in 1889. After citing examples of animals—buffalo, bears, dogs, lions and donkeys—brought on the stage in the name of realism but not remaining, he added, It is impossible to exactly reproduce nature upon the stage as upon the easel. Art must have recourse to the principle of suggestiveness. The mimic clatter of hoofs produces the same idea as the visible gallop of a soldier’s charger from Right Upper Entrance to Left Lower Entrance, but it does not excite the fear that the animal will plunge into the bass-drum in the orchestra, or convert a mimic town or forest into a wilderness of shattered framework or ruined canvas. The plunge of D’Artagnan into a painted ocean, or of Monte Cristo into an illusory sea, is more natural and thrilling than the shivering leap of a water-proofed heroine into a tank of cold water in midwinter.²¹

Realism had become the driving force in American drama by 1890, but that alone was not enough. The playwrights also had to produce a higher-quality product. The new realistic playwrights were literary people, Brenda Murphy wrote. They knew the literature of the day, and they were aware of its principles. They also knew the theater. They were popular playwrights, and their plays show the reality of compromise—the sense of just how much realism, and how much literature, would ‘go’ with their audience.²²

Not only was higher education not a prerequisite, some considered it detrimental. Leading playwrights who had no college at all (and neither MacKaye nor Gillette had much) included David Belasco, James Herne, Bronson Howard, Augustus Thomas and Charles Klein. They learned their craft the hard way through either acting or business, usually both. They knew from firsthand experience what audiences wanted to see. The theatre was alienated from the bookish world, Thomas Dickinson explained. Writers for the stage acquired a hand-picked education that was by no means to be despised, but a college education as such was considered a handicap.²³

Gillette was among those playwrights considered theatre craftsmen, their education coming from the theater itself. None of their plays are considered today to be literary masterpieces, but they were successful, they made fortunes and they contributed to the high quality of the American drama.

While his acting was credited with putting his plays over, most notably Sherlock Holmes, that alone does not account for their success. He acted in only nine of his productions, not always in the lead. Yet nearly all were successful because they had audience appeal. If many of the situations were contrived, their appeal nevertheless was both emotional and romantic. Gillette, however, eschewed artificiality in his sets to a greater degree than any other playwright and he personified the craftsman who was thoroughly versed in the theater. Norleen Healy summed up the situation at the time:

When America was just coming into its own in terms of theatrical activity, playwrights earned the right to write plays by devoting their lives to gaining an intimate knowledge of the theatre not only through writing, but also through acting, directing, stage managing and technical work. This is the type of individual that Gordon Craig alludes to when he speaks of a master craftsman in the theatre. Certainly the concept of the actor-writing-manager is not unique to nineteenth century America. Shakespeare and his contemporaries had this sort of total involvement in the theatre as did Moliere.²⁴

The son of a United States Senator and brother of a member of the United States Congress, Gillette also established in people’s minds the idea that a gentleman could be in the theater without sacrificing his integrity. He was not alone in this. As so often happens, there comes at the right juncture in history a particularly gifted individual or group of individuals who bring about the type of revolution called for by the changing times. Thomas Kuhn would later call this a paradigm shift and, as such shifts go, it was not nearly as traumatic as discovering that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe or that we are dissolving into a global society, but it was monumental in its own way. Gillette’s partners in crime were, among others, the sophisticate John Drew, boyish Otis Skinner, dapper Henry Miller, debonair Richard Mansfield, comic Joseph Jefferson and classicist E. H. Sothern, all of whom were true gentlemen; and naturalist Minnie Maddern Fiske, classic veteran Ada Rehan, beautiful Julia Marlowe, elegant Ethel Barrymore and elfin Maude Adams, ladies living lives beyond reproach.

This new guard brought respectability, glamour and a new understated style to the old stages. Together they formed the front line of assault on old taboos and Gillette helped lead the way. Gillette proved a number of things about the theater which we take for granted today, but which in the middle 70s, when he made his debut, were beyond belief, the Herald Tribune noted at his death. Nobody then conceived what is a commonplace today: that a person of gentle culture could make a successful trouper and retain his integrity. That an actor could capitalize restraint and reticence was equally beyond understanding. For a third point, such was the sway of the classics that professional distinction through contemporary drama was unheard of.²⁵

His other great contribution was to the art of the actor. He was on the front line of attack against the melodramatic acting style with its exaggerated gestures and overly dramatic declaiming. He was among the leading practitioners of natural, reserved, understated acting, talking and moving about as real people do. Actors spoke their lines, not as if they had been spoken for a hundred previous nights, but as if they were being said for the first time, as in real conversation; and they moved about the stage, not as though they had done it over and over before, but as though they were entering the room for the first time.

He was also famous for his use of pantomime. He knew precisely how long to hold a pause and, as an extremely handsome, majestic and mesmerizing stage idol, he could hold an audience in the palm of his hand. It was the most polished acting his co-stars had ever seen or ever would see. Helen Hayes, who appeared with him in Dear Brutus in 1918, recalled, There was great simplicity to his style, and style in his simplicity. Never in the least florid, he was always real and seemingly spontaneous… It is a felicitous combination of grain and polish. It was all so neat and effortless to the beholder. Just being on the same stage with him for one evening was equal to a full dramatic course.²⁶

Gillette was part of the new star system created by Charles Frohman based on individual personalities rather than plays to draw audiences. He was also the first to systematically categorize and describe an approach to acting that was based on (1) the individual personality of the actor and (2) maintaining the illusion that everything the actor says and does is being said and done for the first time. This he called the illusion of the first time, and he collected his thoughts in his famous monograph, The Illusion of the First Time in Acting. Published in 1915 by the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University in the City of New York, this treatise is still in print and is often relied upon either in describing the acting of some of our most accomplished thespians or instructing aspiring actors on their art.

He was a presence, both on stage and off. At a time when the only form of dramatic entertainment was the live theater, he stood out as one of its premier personalities. What those who saw him remembered most was the majestic appearance of the man. Charles Dana Gibson had introduced his famous Gibson Girl to the public as the epitome of Victorian glamour and femininity. Her paramours were always tall, dark and handsome gentlemen and, at more than six feet in height, Gillette personified this image. Amy Leslie called him one of Gibson’s notables materialized and then added, He is slender and ungraceful in a gentlemanly, attractive fashion, sudden and eccentric in gesture and infinitely slow in everything but thought, wit and argument. He has a face inviting study and rewarding belief, a face whereon is outlined a map of joys and griefs, but still retaining so adorable a touch of unsullied youth as to give it a beauty and purity almost feminine. Much of this interesting contradiction in Gillette’s manly countenance, is stamped there because, with all of his illusions one by one weaving themselves fairy wings, he regrets nothing and smiles as they fly away, hugging closer the dreams still possible to so learned, wise and world-brushed a man.²⁷

Actress Billie Burke called Gillette both the great aristocrat and the great gentleman of the theater.²⁸ Gene Fowler described him as having a face of tomahawk austerity, the manners of a curator, the mind of a professor of Romance languages.²⁹ Alexander Woollcott called him an enchanting blend of slinking gazelle and Roman Senator.³⁰ And Frank Fuller called him the noblest Roman of them all.³¹

He was more than that. After more than seventy years in the theater both in England and America, B. Iden Payne, who directed him in Dear Brutus, wrote upon his own retirement, that

Gillette was in my estimation the First Gentleman of the American theatre. He was somewhat aloof in manner, and strangely enough he never appeared to take much interest in what he was doing. Nevertheless he carried out his task with undeviating efficiency, and with his fellow players he was always considerate and gracious. In William Gillette, I saw exemplified once more the old-time theatre etiquette. I regarded it as valuable as well as charming, but it had so nearly disappeared from the theatre that I had almost begun to forget that it had once been universally practiced. Gillette had not forgotten. He would never interrupt a scene to approach the prompt table. If he had some real reason to speak to the director, he would choose a suitable moment between scenes or when the action had temporarily ceased.³²

Slender as a matchstick, distinguished in appearance, speaking with a staccato voice, but silent in manner, he was, for both women who adored him and men who wanted to be like him, the image of irresistible manhood. With his incisive face and understated manner, he could steal a scene with a mere nod, a look. Slight inflections in his voice spoke wonders, but his pantomime pauses were legendary. Harold Shepstone observed, His manner, his actions, and movements bespeak a personality that is no mere surface cloak that can be removed and explained at leisure.³³

Isaac Marcosson was commissioned to write the biography of Charles Frohman and spent countless hours interviewing the many people who had worked for him. He later wrote that one of the most emphatic personalities that I encountered… was William Gillette… Gillette talks just as he acts, which means that his conversation is keen and illuminating.³⁴

Gillette was a memorable character. He developed over the years into a quotable humorist and he loved a practical joke. Like Holmes, his sense of humor could be dramatic as well. Helen Hayes and her mother visited him at his Connecticut castle and Helen later recalled,

In the middle of the night we heard sounds of a terrible altercation in his room, voices raised… a quarrel going on, and suddenly his door was flung open and something hurled out onto the balcony outside, and there was a thump as of a falling body, and then silence.

The next day at breakfast he said, I hope I didn’t disturb anyone last night. I was writing a scene, a second act climax, and I had to act it out to get the right rhythm, the right timing for it, and I hope I didn’t disturb anybody’s sleep.

He looked around the table and there was a mischievous devilish look in his eye. He knew darned well he had ruined our night’s sleep.³⁵

He was a man of considerable wit. It has been commonly believed that the Gillette razor blade was named after him when actually it was his very distant cousin King Camp Gillette who invented it. However, when discussing with Woollcott the spellings and misspellings of their names, he wrote, What you want to do if you don’t mind a little advice is to get some damned inventor to associate your name with a razor. I had a lot of trouble with my final e until Gillette came along with his face-lacerator, after which all was well.³⁶

It was common knowledge among his friends that Woollcott was extremely touchy about the spelling of his name: "three o’s, two l’s, two t’s, if you please! So in another letter to Woollcott, Gillette again commented on the spelling of their names: You’ve got me terrified on spelling your name with a sufficient quantity of letters—they say around that you are hogging the alphabet. I am leaving the e’ off the end of my name so that you will have enough."³⁷

A word often used to describe him was eccentric. Allen Churchill observed, In a sense Gillette—austere, Lincolnesque, unapproachable—rivaled John Drew as the first gentleman of the American theatre… In Drew a bedazzled public found the quintessence of the urbane, cosmopolitan gentleman. Gillette was more American: crotchety, individualistic, caustic. Even when young he showed a demon integrity bordering on the eccentric. As a fledgling author he attended the opening night of an established playwright who might have aided his career. In the lobby, after the show, he encountered the man.³⁸

Actor Nat Goodwin remembered that evening: I was standing, many years ago, in the lobby of the Parker House, Boston, speaking to the late Louis Aldrich, an old and esteemed friend of mine, who had just made a tremendous success in a play written by the late Bartley Campbell, called ‘My Partner,’ when a gaunt, thin and anaemic person suddenly approached us and grasping Louis by the arm said, I saw your play last night, great house, splendid performance, bad play,’ and left us as quickly as he came.

All eyes had been on Gillette during this impromptu performance. When someone asked who that had been, Aldrich said it was a young crank who had a decent play but wanted to play the lead himself. To which Goodwin remarked, He looks more like a chemist than an actor.³⁹

Relating Gillette to Holmes, Charles Higham added, He did not have to pretend to be taciturn, cold, reserved, and sardonically logical. His humor was acrid and mocking… He was as eccentric as Holmes… His cruel logic, extraordinary knowledge of books… made him a man after Conan Doyle’s own heart.⁴⁰

Goodwin commented that

he succeeded unquestionably in cultivating a pose, an air of, please don’t approach me, I am too much absorbed, etc. I have seen him enter a drawing room in London, and by his presence stop all conversation. Apparently oblivious to his surroundings, he would enter, stop at the door, locate his host or hostess, say a few epigrammatic things in a hard rasping nasal voice, acknowledge the presence of a few friends by a casual nod and quickly take his leave. The conversation for the next hour would be devoted to the man who had entered and left so unceremoniously. What an eccentric person, how unique, what personality, splendid presence, would be heard from all sides.⁴¹

Doris Cook added that, to people everywhere, Gillette seemed aloof, austere, dryly droll, eccentric, escapist, gay and charming in conversation. Others recalled him as a gentleman, handsome, impishly humorous, independent, laconic, a ladies’ man, meticulous, a practical joker, reserved, scholarly-looking, self-sufficient, taciturn, tall, and somewhat testy.⁴²

He mirrored Sherlock Holmes in these ways and more. When Watson entered the suite at Baker Street where Holmes was interviewing Jabez Wilson about the strange happenings with the Red-Headed League, Holmes reminded the doctor that he shared Holmes’s love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life.⁴³ Cousin Richard Burton noted that Gillette hates the conventional as the devil holy water,⁴⁴ to which Henry Perkins later added that he loved the unexpected, if not the actually bizarre, and had no use for the obvious and commonplace.⁴⁵

Gillette was, as Ward Morehouse called him, a man of many fascinating eccentricities. He would go about off the stage and on the streets in the costumes he wore in his plays. Actresses who had dinner dates with him were shocked to see him show up at their doors wearing the bluish gray coat worn as the war correspondent in Held by the Enemy or in the deerstalker cap and jacket he wore in Sherlock Holmes.⁴⁶

He once went about in what was described as a grotesquely archaic piece of head-gear, which he had worn for the entire season, and was rebuked for it. He then purchased a quite fashionable derby hat, which made him look most distinguished. However, that very evening following his purchase he entered a hotel dining room and left his new hat on the rack outside and after dinner found the hat stolen and in its place an ante-bellum relic that would have shamed a scarecrow. Popping the relic onto his head, he said, You see, there’s no use in tempting fate any further.⁴⁷

Like everything else about him, his hobbies were eccentric. He designed and built one of the weirdest homes in America. He collected old birdcages (no one ever asked him why) and paintings, both valuable and not, according to his tastes. He dined after his evening performances and would go walking through the city parks into the early hours of the morning; a special pass issued by City Hall certified his respectability. He loved Chopin and read O. Henry aloud. He read scientific treatises. While rarely granting newspaper or magazine interviews, he entertained guests and enjoyed being entertained.

He was quite the bicyclist in his youth, but when others rode bicycles and played golf, he took up houseboating, keenly enjoying the solitude of meandering in and out of the coastal and inland waterways. Then, when motorism became the new rage, although he hated driving a car, he rode a motorcycle at high speeds through the Connecticut countryside. He later drove a miniature train around his castle estate. And always—always—he was a tinkerer. He tinkered in his downstairs workshop on many things, particularly old clocks and scientific apparatus. Lowell Thomas commented,

01c.jpg

Gillette was majestic on stage, in Secret Service (left)

and in Too Much Johnson (right).

It did not astonish me that William Gillette had a great aptitude for mechanics. Only a born mechanician can construct a good farce. As a lad he used to make toy engines out of tin cans. If you gave him a jumble of assorted parts he could assemble them into a motor with the utmost ease. As a matter of fact, when the War broke out he offered his services to the Allies, not as a soldier but as a mechanical expert. Through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle he made urgent efforts to secure employment in the British and French armies in such mechanical capacity. He looked plenty young enough, but some whipper-snapper of a clerk in the British War Office must have looked him up in Who’s Who and there discovered how old he was. So the British army lost the services of a highly accomplished mechanician.⁴⁸

On a larger scale, such were his mechanical, engineering and architecture skills that he designed and built his own house in North Carolina, where he hand-carved both his utensils and half the house. He later designed both his castle in Connecticut and the miniature railroad that ran around it.

He had a lifelong passion for cats, prizing them for their independent spirits. The first friend he made at every theater he played in was the house cat. On a few occasions, he even took one of the felines on stage with him. He kept cats on his houseboats and maintained an entire herd of them at the castle.

He believed that the less seen of him in public, the more patrons would pay to see him on stage. For him, show business was his business. He claimed to care nothing about the art of it, which may be taken with a grain of salt considering how he helped raise the artistic level of it. He claimed to care only about making as much money as he could by giving the public precisely what it wanted, and he knew that it worked best when he gave them an excellent product. Given the drive for perfection which he brought to everything he did, it was obvious that artistic excellence meant a lot to him and fulfilled the only passion that he would maintain for his entire life—his love for the theater.

He refused to be interviewed for most of his career, in part because of the air of mystery that he wished to maintain. Except for some early interviews that he later denied giving and a 1914 interview with the New York Times, he rarely sat down for a reporter. When he invited Morehouse to visit him at the castle in Hadlyme in the 1930s, he rolled out the red carpet, enjoyed the visit, gave Morehouse a ride on his miniature railroad and served hot tea with rum afterward, but he insisted that there was to be no interview. He was never unfriendly when someone who was not an intimate friend tried to pry too deeply, but he would quickly deflect the intrusion with repartee and laughter.⁴⁹

His refusal to be interviewed became legendary in newsrooms throughout the country and a joke among the hapless reporters who tried in vain to get him to open up. He was often described as painfully modest. Daniel Frohman felt that Gillette—though hospitable, witty and charming—did not relish a social life but preferred the company of a few close friends. Yet while he was no party animal, he could attend a party and have a wonderful time, and others at the parties he attended had a wonderful time because he was there. He was, simply put, fun to have around. He did have close and intimate friends, but these were a few friends, but these without capitulation.⁵⁰ His was a small circle of intimates with whom he could be truly himself. All others were kept at a distance with an emotional armor described by Henry Perkins as intangible, light as air, but as impenetrable as steel.⁵¹

Gillette was said to be a typical reticent New Englander who kept his views and his business close to the vest. With family he was a joy to have around, a loving and generous man. While he had a reputation for parsimony, with people in need he was always secretively generous. He cared for his relatives and supported many of them financially for as long as he lived. He had family members living with him at both of his homes: his sister and her husband in his mountaintop retreat in Tryon, North Carolina, and his brother- and sister-in-law in the castle at Hadlyme, Connecticut. He took more than a year off the stage to tend to his father in the senator’s final illness and

Reviews for William Gillette, America's Sherlock Holmes

[magus_manders · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To begin, I have to say for the sake of full disclosure that I have something of a personal investment in this book. I have worked for the past few summers at Gillette Castle State Park in East Haddam, Connecticut. Gillette Castle, William's retirement estate, is more or less the last thing for which the man is remembered. To make matters worse, there has never been a serious biography on him. This is bad enough for reasons of general interest, but doubly bad on us poor tour guides who have been left with a rather scanty store of information with which to educate the public. My co-workers and I have been awaiting this book with baited breath (ok, so maybe only I have, but we've all at least thought about it.) In addition, I am personally acquainted with a number of the people and institutions used as sources for this work, which has let me follow along for the last few of its thirteen year synthesis. Thus, I will do my best to avoid the Lues Boswelliana that Zecher himself states he did his best to avoid.First, some background information: William Gillette was born in 1853 in Hartford, Connecticut. Long story short, he became the premiere blockbuster American actor and playwright, Dean of American Theater, and just about the first show-biz millionaire without even touching Hollywood. His most successful show was the first official adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, in which he played the title character and became the template on which all later Holmes were based; the classic costume and demeanor, right down to that bent pipe, was Gillette's creation. He was also a revolutionary in modern acting method and design. He was at the forefront of realistic acting and coined the term 'the illusion of the first time'. Presidents, royalty, and personal friends like Mark Twain and Alexander Woollcott held him to be a god on the clapboards. Unfortunately, as he never did film, he was quickly lost from memory after his death. Though he might well have laid the foundation of modern theater and our perception of Sherlock Holmes, his only accomplishment still celebrated by today's masses is the strange house on the hill that everyone assumes was made with razor-blade money. Henry Zecher was introduced to Gillette while doing some amateur Holmes scholarship. What started out as a series of articles for a tiny pipe-smokers fanzine became a more than decade long project. Zecher pulls from innumerable newspaper articles, personal correspondences, memoirs, and even a few doctoral thesis to try and construct a picture of Gillette. As the man was a hugely well-liked and respected performer he had no dearth of friends who have mentioned him in their remembrances. Likewise, he was still quite celebrated in the first half of the 20th Century and featured in many writings on theater. Zecher does a really admirable job of pulling together an in-depth chronology of Gillette's work and descriptions of his methods. If anything, he includes too much; there are times when he will include pages of quotes about and excerpts of reviews of one of Gillette's plays. While these samples often have many a bon mot, their quantity adds little to narrative. Unfortunately, Gillette had no memoir and requested all his papers be burned after his death, meaning that Zecher and the reader are left with only a public sketch of the man. Though curious in his character and, perhaps his eccentricities, we'll never have more than a speculative look at his inner life. In addition to Gillette's life, Zecher's book gives a very good history of the times. Specifically, he outlines the development of American theater starting in the 1870's until Gillette's death in 1937. It was a time of huge change in the presentation and purpose of theater of which our subject was not only a participant but an active visionary. As one of Charles Froman's chief stars, Gillette was front and center in the most dynamic time of theater's evolution, as well as a close friend to the biggest names in entertainment, from Helen Hayes to the Barrymoors.. Likewise, the book provides us with a wonderful sketch of Hartford in the mid 1800's where, in one neighborhood, Charles Dudley Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sam Clemens, and a young William Gillette bumped shoulders in a generation-long block party. Of course, as an added bonus, we also have a history of Sherlock Holmes, particularly his representation on stage, with the book concluding in the creation of the Baker Street Irregulars and Gillette's lasting legacy in the deerstalker hat. As stated earlier, one of Zecher's biggest problems may be an excess of information. Though the whole country once had a great deal to say about Gillette, we could be quite content with a much smaller representative sample. Along the same vein, his editors missed several repetitions. Disregarding the two times he carefully analyses Gillette's acting style, there are multiple times when quotes are repeated to prove the same point. This is understandable when there are a few hundred pages between the two instances, but at one point he shares exactly the same information in exactly the same way twice in 30 pages. Things like that are not deadly, but distracting and give the book an air of being slightly amateurish. All flaws aside, Zecher has done a very good job given the scope of his task. Though the book may be over-long, no fault of that lies with the man's prose, which possesses a really keen humor that would have made his subject. proud. He keeps a very fair hand by sharing the bad reviews as well as the good, and is completely forthright with the fact that, while Gillette was immensely popular and laudable, he was not a very good playwright. When it comes right down to it, even his acting was largely limited to one stoic, unflappable role. None the less, the reader comes away with a new appreciation for an American icon they didn't even know they had forgotten. Gillette was a man who inspired generations of theater goers and theater makers and created an image so iconic that even Orson Welles was forced to admit that, "Sherlock Holmes looks exactly like William Gillette."