Joseph Jefferson: Dean of the American Theater
by Arthur W. Bloom
Summary
Joseph Jefferson: Dean of the American Theater is the first in-depth biography of one of the most famous nineteenth century American actors. Drawing on a stunning amount of research, Arthur Bloom reassesses a life packed with bravura and romance. The result is an extraordinary, vibrant biography of a fascinating and celebrated actor.
Excerpt
Joseph Jefferson learned the way all actors learn that he had no other choice but to please. And because he learned it well, his story is a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches saga of a young boy from a financially and socially impoverished family who rises to opulence and honor through hard work and his own abilities. It is the American story. Industry and talent bring wealth and success. In the end, the hero lives happily ever after, in opulent style, while still humbly attached to his rustic origins.
Like his country’s, Jefferson’s life began in the East moved West, suffered a period of physical and emotional darkness during the Civil War, and was reconstructed to achieve material wealth and international recognition. After 1865, Jefferson became a national power, an icon of the Gilded Age, the dean, as he was called, of the American stage, the most important comic actor in America?and the most financially successful.
His is also the story of the American theatre, developing from small itinerant touring companies, performing everything and everywhere, to specialized urban stock companies, to combination companies’the nineteenth-century equivalent of the modern road show. Yet what Jefferson brought to the opulence of late nineteenth-century theatres was nostalgia about a bygone era, the rude vigor of an eighteenth-century Dutchman [Rip Van Winkle, his most famous role] who wakes up to find a strange new world.
Any version of Jefferson’s story has to investigate the version he wrote, an immensely popular 1888 biography, first serialized in magazine form and later published by Century Press. The Autobiography is a collection of amusing personal and theatrical anecdotes brimming over with nostalgia. It is exactly the sort of book audiences would have expected from Rip Van Winkle, and Jefferson?who could, in private, refer to the role as “the theatrical swindle”?never disappointed an audience. And like Rip, he was beloved, as beloved as Bob Hope or Jack Benny. His death, in 1905, made front-page national headlines. The clearest modern equivalents would be a handful of television or film actors whose characters became so indelibly linked to them that audiences were disturbed to see them “out of character"--whether in real life or performing another role.
This identification generally occurs to comic actors. Audiences seem willing to allow “serious” actors the right to transmute from character to character, but they insist on Groucho’s mustache or Benny’s stinginess or Lucy’s red hair. Jefferson knew this, and constructed and maintained a personal image so consonant with the role that it actually enhanced the popular myth that the only part he played was Rip?.
Jefferson was a hard-working, tough, professional, nineteenth-century actor. At the height of his career, long after he had become accustomed to the most luxurious of existences, he could still perform with the scenery literally falling down around him. Jefferson was a survivor. He had been brought up hard, and he was never soft. If this biography seems to seize upon the negative aspects of his life, I must plead the necessity of humanizing a figure lavishly praised, devoutly admired, and publicly adored throughout most of his life. If I seem to insist that he could not have been that charming or lovable, it is probably because the overwhelming evidence tells me that he was.
From Chapter 1
Joseph Jefferson III (who was called Joe all his life) was born on February 20, 1829, in a four-story brick house that still stands on the southwest corner of Spruce and Sixth streets in Philadelphia. When the building was constructed in 1805, it was located in the center of the city’s most prestigious neighborhood. The house had a central mahogany staircase, Georgian mantels, and marble fireplaces. Joe’s parents could never have afforded such a place; they had rented the house when its owners moved to a more elegant setting because the neighborhood was going downhill. The Jeffersons were middle-class actors, always bordering on genteel poverty, always beset by the vicissitudes of theatrical economics.
In the early nineteenth century, acting was a family business, as it had been since the Renaissance and continues to be for various theatrical and film families. Today, however, the wealth earned by successful actors, together with compulsory education, enables their children to make career choices closed to the Jeffersons, whose limited income and itinerant life denied their children formal schooling. The only thing Joe was educated to do was work in the theatre; the sons and daughters of theatre people normally followed their parents’ profession. Actors married actors and produced actors. Even their theatrical roles were inherited, like the inventory of a family business. Today, the last thing a young actor would consider doing is repeating his father’s most famous role, but it was the first thing a nineteenth-century actor was trained to do, and the very thing nineteenth-century audiences wanted to see. Acting was passed down as a craft, from generation to generation; Jefferson learned comic roles from his stepbrother, Charles Burke, and from his father that they in turn had seen Jefferson’s grandfather perform. It would have been as unlikely for Jefferson to become a tragic actor as it would have been for his friend Edwin Booth to become a comedian.
Reviews
"A nuanced account of the public persona and the enigmatic, private man"--Julius Novick,State University of New York, Purchase
"A tale worthy of its subject: one of the great American theatrical pioneers"-- James Coakley,Northwestern University
"Bloom’s biography is surely the definitive chronicle of one of America’s unforgettable characters"-- Don B. Wilmeth, Brown University
Author's Biography
A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale University, Arthur Bloom has served as an academic administrator in visual and performing arts at Loyola University, Loyola Marymount University, and Kutztown University. He lives with his family in Chalfont, Pennsylvania.