“Darlings All—”: The Dramatic Life of a New York Theater Family (1895–1957) Based on over 3,700 Letters, Hundreds of Period Photographs, and 20 Scrapbooks

By Harmon Smith

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465388667

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CHAPTER ONE

Love and Marriage

SAM WELLER WAS only nineteen when he slipped away from his home in Austin, Texas, in June 1895. He had not told his parents, or anyone else, that he was heading for New York City. I shall never forget my feelings that sad Sunday, his mother wrote, when I suddenly learned that my boy was gone. As the oldest of five children, his departure shocked the entire family.

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The Weller family shortly before Sam ran away to New York City in 1895.

(Standing, from left to right: Sallie Belle, Elizabeth, Sam, Clarence; seated Burford,

Cyrus Otway Weller, Florence Burford Weller.)

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The Weller house in Austin, Texas, where Sam lived until his nineteenth year.

In Galveston, Sam booked passage on a steamer for Manhattan. When he first glimpsed the island, its distinctive skyline had just begun to emerge. The recent development of elevators and steel-beam construction that replaced load-bearing masonry had allowed new buildings to shoot high above their neighbors in the previous five years. In 1890, the twenty-story World Building had reached the astonishing height of 309 feet. Four years later, the twenty-four-story Manhattan Life Insurance Company building broke the record at 348 feet. To carry thousands of workers to and from what had become the financial and commercial center of the United States, elevated rail lines roared along tracks high above Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenues. Sam had seen photographs in newspapers and magazines of the nation’s largest city, but he was unprepared for the overwhelming reality.

After settling in a boarding house on West Twenty-Eight Street, Sam wrote home, confessing that he had come to the big city to win some prizes in fortune’s lottery but openly acknowledging that the way would undoubtedly be rough and success difficult and elusive. In that first letter, there is an intriguing sentence suggesting that something beyond ambition had impelled him to pack his valise. I can truthfully say that since reaching here, I am a much better person morally than I was in Austin, and if I had stayed at home, I don’t think there would have been much chance for an improvement. Neither this nor any succeeding letter sheds light on what he had done that he and his parents might have considered immoral except, perhaps, for spending too much time hanging around the stage door at the Hancock Opera House.

Growing up in the bustling Austin of the 1880s and 1890s, Sam had fallen in love with the touring theatrical companies that visited the city. In those days, with the advent of motion pictures and television still in the future, theater was the main source of entertainment in the United States. A lifelong enthusiasm for the stage had been born when, as an eight-year-old, he saw the great American tragedian Edwin Booth in Shakespeare’s Othello and Julius Caesar. Unlike most boys of his age, he enjoyed reading books more than engaging in rough-and-tumble play. The theater allowed him to slip into a world of the imagination, removed from the demands of everyday life.

As an adolescent, Sam bought balcony tickets to the Hancock Opera House with his pocket money whenever he could afford to. During his freshman year at the University of Texas, he regularly spent his evenings leaning over the railing, transfixed by the action on stage. After the curtain went down, he commented on what he had seen in long letters to the Austin Daily Statesman and the San Antonio Express. In time, the papers began publishing his reports, and Sam was encouraged to think that his dream of becoming a Broadway critic might not be foolish after all.

Shortly after Sam settled down in Manhattan, sixteen-year-old Hortense Kellogg boarded a train in Oakland, California, to travel east with her mother. Hortense had studied voice from an early age and had recently made her debut singing Inez in a local production of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine.

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Hortense Kellogg at sixteen in the costume she wore as Inez in an Oakland, California, production of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine.

The experience fanned her desire to sing in the world’s great opera houses. Enthusiastic reviews in the Oakland newspapers bolstered her mother’s belief in Hortense’s talent, and her father, George Kellogg, reluctantly agreed to finance the trip to New York. The little he could spare from his modest salary as a railroad employee barely provided enough for the journey, but they managed to rent a room in a boarding house, and Hortense began studying with Tom Karl, a tenor with the Metropolitan Opera Company.

By this time, Sam had ordered a letterhead announcing that he, Samuel MacLeary Weller, was Special and Dramatic Correspondent in New York City for the Austin Daily Statesman and the San Antonio Express. His initial piece for the Texas papers was a review of a show called Black America featuring 300 Negroes. It was followed by a stream of others, including a weighty essay on the proper place of the stage among our institutions. To ward off his parents’ disapproval, he wrote his mother, I know the fears with which your mind will be disquieted when you think of my associations with theatrical people, but I beg of you, put your fears aside. My companionship with actors and actresses ceases when I get the information I desire. His intentions were sincere, but in time, his attraction to theater people would prove too strong to be ignored.

If Sam imagined that the credits he was earning in the Texas papers would engineer an immediate entry into the world of theater criticism in the great metropolis, he was in for a disappointment. Instead he had to settle for a job as salesclerk for Dempsey & Carroll, art stationers, engravers, and publishers of Town, a monthly society magazine. His initial assignment was to secure pictures of the prettiest women in Texas for the next two numbers; after that, his involvement with the magazine appears to have ended. By January, he had landed work on William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal although not of the type he had dreamed about. I get mostly the odds and ends, he complained. Being inexperienced they won’t risk very important things in my hands. I have to sit around the office several hours a day without doing anything. His first break came when he was selected to provide local coverage of Canarsie, Brooklyn, sending copy to the office by the fastest means available—carrier pigeon.

Meanwhile, Hortense had been struggling. Tom Karl called her the most promising pupil he had ever had, but the small sums her father sent limited the number of lessons she could afford. The need of money was our greatest trouble, her mother complained later. There never was sufficient. At times, the struggle and desire and effort for success left the pair almost hopeless. Only a single letter and a few clippings from unidentified journals survive from those early days, but they make it clear that Hortense was already performing. The letter—from a young man—mentions a most delightful evening at your musicale; and the clippings refer to her singing ingénue roles with unnamed American opera groups, presumably those that emerged suddenly, then disappeared after a season or two.

Sam and Hortense met in August 1899, perhaps backstage after one of her performances. They made a handsome couple. He was slim, of medium height, with fine features and dark-brown hair. Shorter by a few inches, Hortense possessed the hourglass figure so admired at the time, expressive brown eyes, and great self-assurance. His letters reveal that he fell in love at first sight, as she had. Sam and Hortense shared an intense ambition to succeed, but the bond that united them depended on more powerful forces. They were not only strongly attracted to each other, but they also prized the same deeply held moral values.

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Sam in Cuba during the Spanish-American War serving as one of

Col. Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War the previous year, Sam had left his job at the Journal to sign up with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders as a private in Troop F of the First Regiment of Cavalry Volunteers. Shortly after landing in Cuba, he joined in Colonel Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill, facing determined fire from the Spanish soldiers. Sam had embarked on the adventure in high spirits, without giving any thought to the possible consequences; he returned home sobered by what he had experienced. His four months in the army, although a short time when measured in weeks, had turned him from a carefree youth into an adult with a sturdier sense of self.

Before setting out, Sam had bet that Hearst would let him cover the war as a soldier-journalist—a wager he lost. He arrived back in New York safely, but without a job. Although Colonel Roosevelt wrote a recommendation letter to the New York Sun, it was the Daily News that made him an offer. When Hortense entered Sam’s life, the front page of the Sunday News was featuring a series of short pieces dramatizing his San Juan Hill experiences—among them, A Stealthy Night Attack, On Guard near the Bed of a Dying Comrade, and Carmela, a Trooper’s Little Cuban Ward. At the moment, he was a celebrity of sorts. It wasn’t long before his Rough Rider’s hat was hanging above the headboard of Hortense’s bed to remind her of him, and they were making plans for a brilliant future together.

Oh, my sweetheart, I love you, I love you, I shall love you forever. You are everything in all the world to me, he wrote when she left New York in April to visit her mother, who had returned to her husband in California. By then, Sam and Hortense were living in the same boarding house although in separate rooms, and she had asked him to move into hers while she was away. I lay down upon your bed with what emotions, dear! I trembled at the presumption! How could I dare place myself where your pure body had rested? It came over me that it was sacrilegious until I remembered how you desired it.

Hortense remained in California until the end of June, a separation that taught her and Sam how strong their need for each other had grown. In the months following her return to New York, the pair—coming from strict Protestant families—struggled against their natural desires as they continued to pursue their careers. Under this dual pressure, Hortense’s health deteriorated, and her search for opportunities to sing faltered. Despite this, it seems that they held out until winter before making love for the first time. Soon after, they decided she should again take the five-day train ride to the West Coast. The ostensible reason was to allow Hortense to live a while far removed from vexations and any kind of daily grind in order to grow stronger in body, firmer in purpose. Actually, a more serious concern confronted the pair.

Early on the day of Hortense’s departure for California, she and Sam rode the ferry to Jersey City, New Jersey, where a justice of the peace married them. The next morning, Sam discovered that their attempt to conceal the event had failed. The unfortunate publishing of our secret by the Evening World weighs upon me, he wrote to Hortense, who was by then on the transcontinental train. His concern was that the Associated Press would release the item nationally, and the Oakland Chronicle would pick it up where her parents could easily stumble upon it. Also, he was near sick with remorse that they had neglected to be married by a clergyman in New York. It seems polluting that such a man as that justice should have touched even the hem of our love. Nevertheless, he confided, My ears ring with your vibrating words ‘I do.’ The glimmer of the many lights in the little ring still dance before my sight like so many merry guardian stars.

Relief swept over Sam several weeks later when he received the news that Hortense was not pregnant as they had feared. He immediately wrote to his parents, not to confess that he and she had secretly married, but to announce their engagement. The couple had no intention of revealing the anxious period they had just passed through, and they wanted their marriage to be confirmed in a church ceremony. The fact that Sam’s father, Otway Weller, believed the dearest legacy I can leave my children is my service in the Confederate Army and that Hortense’s father had fought for the Union did not seem an impediment to Sam’s family. But the staunchly Methodist Wellers were horrified that their son had proposed to an opera singer. In reply to their angry objections, he wrote, My love for Hortense is not and never has been infatuation. It is founded on qualities of mind and character and not on the flesh. Could there be no other way to have her, I would be perfectly satisfied, or nearly so, as nearly so as any normal man could, to live with her without sustaining the usual relations. If my feelings were the result of her beauty or the purely physical, you know this would not be so. P.S. Please write to her cordially.

At the same time, he sent Hortense a letter saying how much he longed for her. I want to be a bad fellow and just holler until you cuddle up next to me and punish me with a whole lot of ‘tisses.’ Body and soul call out for the wild, affectionate little Esquimau with hair flying, eyes gleaming, lips parted and feet dancing. I want to pick her up and kiss her into calm and happiness, forgetting for a while there is a world with duties and ambitions to worry us and spur us on to unwelcome exertions. I would place her head on my breast and she would dream her glorious fantasies.

With a date set for their wedding, Hortense arranged to return east toward the end of September. Aware of her repugnance to boarding houses—a feeling Sam shared—he promised to find a studio with bedroom, dressing room and bath, skylight, southern sunshine, steam heat, hot and cold water. The nearest he could come to this ideal was an apartment in a house at 21 West Twenty-Fourth Street. It was without a separate dressing room, but included a sitting room painted a bright red, with broad windows looking out through trees at other brownstones across the way. All our present possessions are now in the studio—our home, Sam wrote just before Hortense boarded the train for New York. Our tea set and other China are in the shelves and our Madonnas are looking about with gentle, sympathetic approbation.

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Sam and Hortense about the time of their remarriage on October 8, 1901

at the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue and 10th Street.

On October 8, 1901, two months after Sam and Hortense informed the world of their engagement, they were remarried by the rector of the Church of the Ascension at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. Since they could not afford an elaborate wedding and reception, only Sam’s father, who came up from Texas, and Hortense’s beloved friend, Gwendolyn Mills, were in attendance. After the ceremony, the quartet went to a nearby restaurant for a simple meal, and the newlyweds quietly entered a life together that would be vastly different from the one they had imagined for themselves.

CHAPTER TWO

Five Years, Four Babies

THE JOY AND pride of my life will be to give you every advantage you deserve, Sam pledged to Hortense shortly after their wedding. He sensed that she was depressed and angry with herself for allowing the stresses of the previous year to distract her from diligently pursuing her work. Just turned twenty-one, she felt that time was slipping away from her. Sam set out at once to keep his vow and, in a few weeks, had found a new job at the Morning Telegraph. The raise that came with it went in part to increase Hortense’s visits to Tom Karl’s studio, spurring her efforts.

In switching newspapers, Sam had won a bonus for himself as well. He had attained his goal of returning to an office in Manhattan, and along with a city reporter’s normal duties, he had been hired to review plays, the opera, and concerts. Six years had passed since his arrival in New York, which undoubtedly seemed a long time to him, but was actually a relatively short period in which to gain such an assignment. During the winter of 1901-02, Sam reviewed the major events of the season—Maude Adams in J. M. Barrie’s Quality Street; Mme. Lotte Lehmann and pianist Josef Hofmann in Carnegie Hall recitals; Sir Henry Irving in The Merchant of Venice; an evening of vaudeville with Lillian Russell, De Witt Hopper, and Weber and Fields; and Miss Ellen Terry in Victorien Sardou’s Madame Sans-Gêne. But from Hortense’s point of view, his most important assignment was to cover the Metropolitan Opera since his press pass guaranteed an excellent orchestra seat for her as well.

Sam’s survey of the Met’s eleven-week season titled Mistakes and Triumphs at the Grand Opera left no doubt about his lofty standards. The company’s roster of extraordinary singers from around the world was its greatest strength, he noted, but he was critical of the Met management, specifically of its practice of scheduling little or no rehearsal time when reviving an opera from a previous season. Lohengrin and Faust were put on for the first time this year without a single full rehearsal, he complained. As for those most arduous and difficult of operas, The Magic Flute and Götterdämmerung, the orchestra and cast were extremely lucky to get together twice before opening night. The best results are impossible under these circumstances, he insisted.

When Sam’s article appeared, Hortense had already confided a sweet secret to her mother. Despite her seeming happiness at being pregnant, she was naturally concerned about the effect it would have on her work. When Cedric was born on August 6, 1902, Hortense set aside her plans—temporarily, she hoped—in order to care for him. Although she adored her baby and worked hard at being a good mother, she quickly realized that she was not cut out for a housekeeper. The sordid business of washing diapers, sweeping floors, and preparing meals weighed her down. Hortense may have been raised in straitened circumstances, but she never forgot that her middle name was Carroll, after Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Maryland, at one time America’s richest citizen and from whose family her mother traced her descent.

Before Cedric’s birth, Hortense had assumed that during the day, while the baby napped, she would have ample time to practice the arias she had been studying with Tom Karl. But when free of other household demands, she lacked the energy to focus on her singing. Meanwhile, Sam had discovered that his salary at the Morning Telegraph, although plenty for two, was stretched by the needs of three. Bills were piling up, and he was having a hard time paying the rent. Nevertheless, the couple hoped to find a way to bring in a woman to care for Cedric a few hours each week, which would allow Hortense to resume work with Karl. That plan came crashing to earth when she found herself pregnant again ten months after Cedric’s birth.

With another child on the way, the Wellers realized that drastic steps needed to be taken. The expedient course, they decided, would be for Hortense and Cedric to go to Oakland to stay with her parents while Sam moved to a boarding house to begin recouping financially. After the family left, it was his turn to fall into a deep depression. Yesterday, in Central Park I almost cried out in distress: it seemed so unwarranted that we should have to submit to this sorrow when I could look around and see thousands of other men happy in the midst of their families. The future that had initially looked so bright for them had turned into a hard reality. Not quite two years had passed since his reviews had begun appearing in the Morning Telegraph. Was it necessary for him to give up the work that he found so gratifying? And if so, how could he earn more? While covering the theater, Sam had come to know George C. Tyler, manager of the successful production house, Liebler and Company. He decided to talk to him about entering the drama business.

Tyler offered Sam a job handling the tour of Liebler’s New York hit, The Eternal City, which would keep him on the road until spring. With Hortense in California, he could see no reason not to accept. The inconvenience for him would be outweighed by the assured income. His responsibilities included seeing that the actors, sets, and costumes were in place for opening night in each city on the tour. He was also required to travel ahead of the troupe to publicize its upcoming appearances. In a letter to Hortense from the National Hotel in Peoria, Illinois, he outlined his plans for a typical three-week period: I have just had breakfast, and in half an hour I start for Rockford. I should be there by eight-thirty this evening and with fair luck will be finished by noon tomorrow and will reach Milwaukee before night. A day there, then Tuesday in Madison, Wednesday in Oshkosh, and Thursday in Winona. After that, two weeks divided between St. Paul and Minneapolis. A hectic life, but he was young and healthy.

Transcontinental travel by train was slow, and Sam spent much of his time sitting in railroad cars. I am away up in the north coast country in Portland, Oregon, he wrote as winter set in. My train arrived an hour ago. Two full nights and one day were spent in traversing the distance from San Francisco. I left under clear skies and in spring-like air. When I awakened next morning the precipitous hills were covered with snow and defied us to climb them. Two and sometimes three big engines were pulling and pushing. We crept nearly all of the 772 miles between the Golden Gate and here. This was a side of theater life far from what Sam had dreamed of. But despite his intense loneliness, he ground on, slowly paying his debts and even putting aside a modest amount for the future.

Hortense’s relationship with her father had always been stormy, and as the time neared for her to give birth, she was finding it increasingly difficult to live with him. My beloved, unhappy darling, the long letter laying bare your distress reached me this morning, Sam replied when he learned of the situation. He suggested that she go to his family in Austin, where his father practiced medicine. Unlike the Kelloggs, who rented simple quarters in Oakland, the Wellers owned a large comfortable house. I would much rather you be there when our new little fellow arrives, for I know you would have the most tender loving care possible. Hortense accepted the suggestion without argument. Reassured, Sam managed to reach his childhood home in time for the birth of their first daughter, Gwendolyn, on January 6, 1904. In a week, he was back on the road with The Eternal City and would not return to Austin until late in the spring after the play completed its tour.

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Sam in the yard of his parents’ house in Austin, Texas,

holding six-month-old daughter Gwendolyn

During his months away, Hortense had made a very deep impression as a soloist with church choirs. Every church in town had been after her. But the attention did not satisfy Hortense. The demands of two infants and her frustration with singing locally instead of in New York exacerbated the nervous irritability that lay just beneath the surface with her. Already, her sparring with Sam’s sister Elizabeth had begun to disrupt life in the Weller home. His advice that she be forbearing and charitable in a certain direction, even if provoked went unheeded. At the end of June, Sam’s mother took Elizabeth away for a lengthy vacation to separate the two young women.

Earlier, in a melancholy letter to Hortense, Sam had expressed a desire for about four years for reading, study and travel during which I would not have to produce, only accumulate and digest. She sympathized, but pointed out the impracticality of his wishes under the circumstances. Nevertheless, with July and August free, he enrolled in the summer session at the University of Texas where he continued his interrupted study of English literature, writing a term paper on Robert Browning’s long narrative poem, Pippa Passes. Although Sam still dreamed of remaining at the university to complete his degree, he finally settled on the more practical plan of taking a summer course the next year in one of the northern schools, most likely Harvard.

Although the prospect of another long separation from his family was difficult for Sam to face, at the end of August, he accepted the necessity of returning to the road—this time, going out in advance of Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman, starring the popular actor Kyrle Bellew. Meanwhile, to avoid her sister-in-law’s impending arrival home, Hortense began packing to return to California. In Oakland, she soon became embroiled with her father as she had been earlier. Do not be irritated whatever the provocation, Sam cautioned. Calmness and diplomacy is far the best policy as you should have discovered before now. This was not Hortense’s way, however. Miserable, she made it plain to Sam that a means had to be found for them to return to New York. Her desperation tore at him. The greatness of your love is terrifying, it deserves and demands so much more than I may be able to deliver. I don’t believe you would love me if I should fail. For decades, the Wellers’