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Entertaining Women:

Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

Actress Jeanne Eagels was an attractive, petite entertainer with delicate features. According to her friends and peers she was childish, adult, reasonable, unreasonable – usually one when she should be the other, but always unpredictable. The Oscar nominated actress was born Amelia Jean Eagles on June 26, 1890, in Kansas City, Missouri. She was the second of four children born to Edward Eagles, a carpenter, and Julia Sullivan Eagles.* Edward and Julia were from Kentucky and both had an ancestry that could be traced back to France and Ireland.

As a child Jeanne was frail, but mischievous. There wasn’t a boy on the block that wasn’t afraid of her. According to the sole biography written about the famed thespian by Edward Doherty and entitled The Rain Girl, Jeanne was a tomboy. She liked to climb onto the roofs of barns, swing from the limbs of trees, walk fences, and skip from rafter to rafter in the attics of the buildings in the neighborhood.

“She was six or seven when she fell from a fence she and her sister were walking on,” Doherty wrote about Jeanne. “She broke her right arm and ran home to her mother. A doctor was called, but he wasn’t the best in the world. He set the arm, but it pained her all the rest of her life, especially when it was wet. And it was wet every night and every matinee for five years when Jeanne performed in her most recognizable stage role, that of Sadie Thompson in the play Rain.”

Throughout the duration of her career, Jeanne told newspaper and magazine reporters that she had broken her arm while traveling with the circus. She claimed she’d fallen off a white horse she was riding around the ring. It was the first of many stories she herself would contribute to the legend of Jeanne Eagels.

To learn more about Jeanne Eagels and about the other talented performers of the

Old West read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

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Entertaining Women:

Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

My life has run in strange places. My years have been full of color. I have known the heights of success, but likewise I have known the depths of despair.”

Leslie Carter, Liberty magazine, 1927

Catherine Louise Dudley Carter sat at her desk and clutched a pen in her hand. Nothing was left of her life but the raw will to do the only quasi respectable thing open to a woman in her circumstances. She had lost the wealthy position and standing in society that she had taken for granted for so long. She’d been kicked out of her palatial home. She had failed in her divorce case and in obtaining the money to maintain her lifestyle; her nine-year-old son had been ripped from her arms, and her once good name had been scandalously linked to actor Kyrle Bellew and New York Senator James F. Pierce.

The scandal didn’t bother her too much—small-minded persons, including her husband, just did not understand. “There is great romance, there is great love, there is great passion—all things difficult to guide—and some men and women reserve the right to have these things, regardless of that sharp dividing line which makes it legal,” she later wrote, dramatically justifying her choices.

Unfortunately, she’d fallen to the wrong side of that sharp legal and moral dividing line and now knew the cost. Her husband, wealthy industrialist Leslie Carter, had won everything in what the New York Times, in June 1889, called the “most indecent and revolting divorce trial ever heard in the Chicago courts.” Louise Carter considered herself virtually penniless, her reputation shredded to ribbons by the press, while her husband gloated over winning his countersuit charging her with adultery.

She shuddered at the memory of the witnesses against her, a veritable parade of chambermaids, housekeepers, hotel guests, and other traitors her husband had somehow coerced into telling the most awful tales about her. He had taken everything from her. She decided to take the one thing he’d given her that could most embarrass him: his name.

The plan she conceived to become an actress did not stop short of stardom. Her name—no, his name—would be blazoned in lights for all to see. She would, forevermore, be known as Mrs. Leslie Carter. That, she thought, would make her husband’s impassive face show some expression. “Nothing ever happened to Leslie Carter; consequently, nothing ever happened to his face,” she recalled. The day would come she vowed, when the name she hated would be on marquee lights and his humiliation would be as great as hers was now.

Dreaming of revenge would not make it happen. Images of poverty and squalor rose in her mind. Somehow she must triumph over this ugly trick of fate that her husband and a jury had played. The theater offered the only way out, with the added attraction of mortifying her ex-husband. Shrugging away the fact that her first attempt at becoming an actress had been unsuccessful, she concocted a new plan to succeed.

Dipping her pen into a small bottle of ink, she wrote to a man who had promised to help. The plea Louise Carter sent to wealthy meatpacker Nathaniel K. Fairbank resulted in an offer to assist her to become an actress, and his influence secured an appointment with New York theatrical manager E. G. Gilmore, who agreed to handle her career.

 To learn more about Leslie Carter and about the other talented performers of the

Old West read

Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

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Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West

The pliant figure leaned over the ship’s rail, expressive eyes intent on the blue-green waters of the harbor. A mass of wavy light-brown hair with tints of gold lifted and curled with every breeze, its arrangement a matter of complete indifference to the angler. Suddenly the slender form froze, breath held, and then, with a quick yank and a breaking smile, lifted the rod and hauled a wriggling fish aboard the Cabrillo. Exclaiming in French, dark eyes sparkling with pleasure, Sarah Bernhardt ordered her catch, small as it was, to be prepared for dinner.

It was May 19, 1906, and the farewell production of Camille was scheduled for a few hours later at the ocean auditorium built on the water at Venice, California. Sarah stayed, and fished, at the hotel built like a ship, and she performed in the adjacent theater on the wharf at the seaside resort, Venice of America. Having caught a fish, Sarah wended her way to her quarters. Piled high in her dressing room were the results of a recent shopping trip to the Oriental bazaar nearby: silk and crepe matinee coats of pink and pale blue and mauve, all embroidered with butterflies and bamboo designs.

The tiny window in the dressing room provided a sparkling view of the ocean, and the streaming sunshine picked out details of the furnishings: a repoussé silver powder box, containers of pigment, eyebrow pencils, silver rouge pots, and scattered jewelry twinkling in the light. The tragedienne who attracted huge audiences wherever she went swooped up a small tan and white fox terrier, wriggling with joy at her return, and snuggled it close for a moment as she related the happy details of her fishing venture to a visiting reporter. Then she put down the small dog and closed her mind to the fun waiting outside the porthole.

Within moments Sarah became Marguerite Gautier, filled with the sadness and torment of the beautiful French courtesan in Camille, the play by Alexandre Dumas that became her signature role, performed all over the world more than three thousand times. Sarah’s ability to sink fully into the character of the play made the tragic death scene so convincing that it became a trademark for “the Divine Sarah.”

No one played tragedy with such believable intensity as Sarah Bernhardt, and no one brought as much passion and enthusiasm to the pursuit of pleasure. From fishing on the Southern California coast to bear hunting in the woods outside Seattle, on every western tour the French actress indulged in some kind of adventure. Sarah Bernhardt threw herself into life with the same characteristic energy she put into her stage appearances. Yet she often slept in a coffin, preparing for that final sleep.

To learn more about Sarah Bernhardt and about the other talented performers of the

Old West read Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

Long before actors were vying for an Oscar nomination and world wide fame thespians were trying to carve out a modest living entertaining prospectors and settlers of the Old West. This month the curtain goes up on women entertainers who captured the hearts of the western pioneers.

Ladies and gentlemen, the immensely talented star of Peter Pan and The Lost Child, Maude Adams.

“I wish you could have seen Maudie that night. She was simply wriggling with excitement. It was all I could do to keep her in her dressing-room until the cue came for her to go on…. Just before the curtain went up I made her repeat her first-act lines to me. She had learned them like a parrot, to be sure, but she spoke them like a true little actress.”

Annie Adams’s comments about her daughter Maude’s first full performance at the age of 5 in November, 1877 at the Metropolitan Theatre in San Francisco.

The Palmer Theatre House in New York was jammed to the doors by a curious clientele all there to see the new actress working opposite the most celebrated actor of the day, John Drew. It was October 3, 1892 when the stunning, elfin-like Maude Adams took to the stage in the play “The Masked Ball.” At the end of the evening Drew would be congratulated on his admirable acting job, but Maude would score a hit that would be greater than his entire career. Her performance was so successful the applause lasted for a full two minutes after she made her exit. She was on her way to becoming a star and local newspapers predicted her talent would be talked about for years to come.

“Her performance (in the Masked Ball) was a revelation. There is one scene in the second act where in order to punish her husband for some ante nuptial remarks of his she has to pretend that she is drunk. It was just touch and go whether the scene ruined the play or not. It would have been hard to devise a more crucial test for an actress of even the wildest experience and the greatest skill. In order to carry off this scene successfully it was necessary for the wife to appear to be drunk and yet be a gentlewoman at the same time. Miss Adams achieved this feat. If Miss Adams had done nothing else throughout the entire play than that one scene it would have stamped her as a comedienne of the first order forever.” The New York Daily News – October 4, 1892

Maude Adams’s stage career began at the tender age of nine months. The play was called “The Lost Child” and the baby that was playing the lead became fussy and could not continue in the show after the first act. Maude’s mother, Annie, who was the female lead in the production, suggested her daughter take the child’s place. Maude was so good that the other baby received her two weeks notice immediately after the play ended. For the remainder of that season all the infant roles were played by little Miss Maude.

To learn more about Maude Adams and the other talented performers of the Old West read Entertaining Women: Actresses, Dancers, and Singers in the Old West.

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