David Belasco

Playwright

• Born: July 25, 1853
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: May 14, 1931
• Place of death: New York, New York

Other Literary Forms

David Belasco published a number of human-interest essays and articles about stagecraft, including “How I Stage My Plays” and “Stage Realism of the Future.” A serialized autobiography, “My Life’s Story,” was published in Hearst’s Magazine from March, 1914, to December, 1915, followed four years later by a full-length memoir, The Theatre Through Its Stage Door (1919). With two of his most popular plays later turned into novels, Belasco was one of the first in the United States to capitalize on the success of dramatic works by revising them for a new reading audience.

Achievements

While contemporary critics frequently criticized David Belasco’s penchant for melodrama, his immense popular success was a product of his reliance on heart-interest as well as a strict interpretation of the fourth-wall convention. Belasco paid meticulous attention to details, often rewriting extensively in rehearsal. Indeed, he is best remembered for his directing methods, his realism, and his technical effects.

Belasco was the directing genius behind many actors and actresses. David Warfield, for example, who began his career with the burlesque company Weber and Fields, under Belasco’s tutelage moved from the farcical The Auctioneer to Belasco’s own seriocomic The Return of Peter Grimm and later appeared in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597, pb. 1600). Perhaps “Mr. Dave’s” greatest success was Leslie Carter, a society divorcée who undertook two years of acting lessons from Belasco. Best remembered for her electrifying performance in The Heart of Maryland, the fiery-haired actress exemplified the sensationalism that Belasco’s audiences enjoyed. Such individual triumphs by no means detracted from Belasco’s attention to his entire company. On the one hand, he encouraged every expression of individual talent, no matter how slender; on the other, he held long, painstaking rehearsals commencing at least six weeks before opening night.

Belasco believed that the purpose of the theater was to mimic nature, and he attempted to immerse his actors not merely in a realistic scene but in a mood as well. As Lise-Lone Marker points out, his goal seems similar to that of the proponents of the New Stagecraft, yet Belasco saw both light and color to be as essential to dialogue as music is to a song. He is noted for his ultrarealistic stage sets—sets that seem to answer August Strindberg’s objection, in the preface to Fröken Julie (pb. 1888; Miss Julie, 1912), to unstable canvas scenery. Belasco imported antique furniture and draperies for his sets, and he offered his company his collection of authentic jewelry. He even introduced a flock of sheep onstage for his production of Salmi Morse’s The Passion Play, and The Governor’s Lady featured an exact replica of fashionable Child’s restaurant. He followed the fourth-wall convention to its logical conclusion, forcing the famous tenor Enrico Caruso to sing his arias with his back to the audience in Giacomo Puccini’s operatic version of The Girl of the Golden West.

Belasco’s stage sets were complemented by his innovations in the use of movable spots, diffused lighting, and, above all, the baby spotlight (invented by Belasco’s light man, Louis Hartmann), which eliminated the harshness of the ever-present footlight. His experiments with colored silks as filters and his discovery of the scrim, which was used in staging The Darling of the Gods, produced the spectacular effects that earned him the nickname “The Wizard.”

Biography

David Belasco was born in San Francisco, California, on July 25, 1853. His father, Humphrey Abraham Belasco, was a London actor who, with his bride, Reina Martin Belasco, had succumbed to Gold Rush fever. Once in San Francisco, however, the couple settled into shopkeeping after David’s birth. Five years later, news of a gold strike in British Columbia lured them north, where David’s three brothers were born and where Humphrey Belasco maintained a tobacco shop while investing in real estate and digging for gold.

Belasco’s published memories of British Columbia are highly imaginative accounts, containing references to a monastic education as well as to his appearance as “Davido, the Boy Wonder,” with the Rio de Janeiro Circus. More sober accounts place him first at the Colonial School and then at the Anglican Collegiate School in 1862. Two years later, he made his first professional stage appearance, as the Duke of York in Charles Kean’s King Richard III. Belasco’s other theatrical efforts took place in San Francisco, to which his family returned when he was eleven. The Roll of the Drum, a childhood play strongly influenced by the penny dreadfuls, and a gold medal at Lincoln Grammar School for his impassioned rendition of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s poem “The Maniac” were among Belasco’s early achievements.

After graduation from Lincoln, Belasco entered a self-imposed, five-year apprenticeship during which he took a touring company up and down the West Coast, deriving much of the material by copying prompt books and pirating uncopyrighted Continental works. At twenty, he began a fifty-two-year marriage with Cecelia Loverich. His subsequent career in California was furthered by Tom Maguire, an unschooled Tammany barkeeper who opened a series of successful California theaters. As Maguire’s prompter at the Baldwin, a magnificent hotel/theater, Belasco oversaw Salmi Morse’s The Passion Play, which scandalized the citizens of San Francisco. During this period, he staged his Naturalistic version ofÉmile Zola’s L’Assommoir and collaborated with James Herne in such works as Chums, which became known as Hearts of Oak after its New York success under that title. Before Maguire retired in 1882, Belasco had written and directed a number of works, among them La Belle Russe and The Stranglers of Paris, an adaptation of Adolphe Belot’s earlier work.

Belasco’s first New York assignment was as stage manager at the Madison Square Theatre, backed by Marshall and George Mallory, who sought wholesome productions by American playwrights. The interference and parsimony of the Mallory brothers caused Belasco to leave after only a few years, in 1885. After brief stints with Steele MacKaye and Lester Wallack, Belasco was hired by Daniel Frohman to direct the Lyceum Theatre. There, he collaborated with Henry C. DeMille to produce The Wife, Lord Chumley, The Charity Ball, and Men and Women. In 1889, Belasco undertook the training of a red-haired society divorcée, Leslie Carter, for the stage. Finally, at forty, he had his first unqualified success with The Heart of Maryland, a Civil War drama written expressly for Carter, whose role called for her to swing on a bell clapper to keep the bell from ringing and to save her escaping Northern lover. After winning a lawsuit against N. K. Fairbank, Carter’s financial backer, for withdrawing funding for another play, Belasco produced Zaza—inspired, in part, by Carter’s determination to go on the stage—and began training another star, Blanche Bates, who initially appeared in Belasco’s Naughty Anthony. Ironically, the afterpiece with which Belasco bolstered his slender farce—an adaptation of John Luther Long’s story “Madame Butterfly”—proved the more memorable production. In later years, it became one of Puccini’s best-known operas.

In 1901, Belasco produced a dramatization of the life of Madame DuBarry, the mistress of King Louis XV. In staging DuBarry, another Carter vehicle, Belasco imported French antique draperies and furniture. The next year, he leased Oscar Hammerstein’s theater, the Republic, which was remodeled and renamed the Belasco; his first new play, a collaboration with Long called The Darling of the Gods, featured the back-lit scrim. Although leasing the Republic gave him relative freedom from the Theatrical Syndicate that for sixteen years controlled bookings in New York and throughout the United States, Belasco entered a 1903-1904 lawsuit charging hidden partnerships and bribery against Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger, a lawsuit often credited with breaking the syndicate’s power. Immediately after the altercation, Belasco produced his very successful melodrama The Girl of the Golden West, which Puccini produced as La fanciulla del West.

In the same year, Carter deserted Belasco by remarrying. Consequently, in 1907, it was Blanche Bates who helped inaugurate Belasco’s new theater, the Stuyvesant, whose ornamental façade hid not only the finest lighting equipment then available but also Belasco’s own private studio. Shortly thereafter, Belasco shocked his public by producing The Easiest Way (pb. 1908, pr. 1909), Eugene Walter’s play about an unreformed prostitute. Belasco recouped with a production of his own The Return of Peter Grimm, a play known as much for its masterly lighting as for its afterlife theme—validated, according to the program notes, by psychologist William James himself.

From 1910 to 1920, Belasco produced thirty-two plays, mostly melodramas by other authors. His masterly 1920 production of Deburau ( Harley Granville-Barker’s adaptation of Sacha Guitry’s play about pantomime) and his 1922 production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, with David Warfield, demonstrated that he was still a powerful figure in the theater. In November, 1930, Belasco fell ill with pneumonia during rehearsals of Frederic and Fanny Hatton’s Tonight or Never and died the following year, on May 14, in New York.

Analysis

While David Belasco experimented with naturalism, an overriding number of his plays are either melodramas or farces, whose strong emotion, light wit, and happy endings appealed to his audiences. Indeed, when Belasco was not writing adaptations of foreign novels and plays, he relied on a number of well-worn themes and used his Magical Realism to disguise the similarities. Many of his well-made plays feature the trials and tribulations of young lovers. His fascination with the lives of outcast women is equally evident.

On the whole, Belasco’s plays are not classics and do not even lend themselves to serious criticism. In his own day, his appeal to the emotions did as much as his wizardry in the areas of lighting and directing to guarantee his plays full houses and long runs. Today’s more sophisticated audiences would judge them overly sentimental, melodramatic, and simplistic. Yet Belasco did have an enduring impact on the theater, setting an example with his imaginative approach to extending what had become the usual boundaries of staging and his meticulous attention to the details of production.

Historical Plays

A number of Belasco’s melodramas have historical or ethnic backgrounds. DuBarry, set in the time of Louis XV, and The Darling of the Gods, set in Japan during the samurai period, exhibit the same melodramatic characteristics as The Girl of the Golden West—slender character motivation, a romantic plot, strong appeal to the emotions, and a denouement characterized by poetic justice. Of the three heroines, DuBarry is the only one who fails to win a happy ending. The French milliner turned king’s mistress, executed by the revolutionaries as an aristocrat, does nevertheless achieve a final reunion with Cossé, her former sweetheart. Yo-San, who dies for betraying the hideout of her samurai lover’s band, meets Kara in the afterlife. Of the three, the Girl—Minnie—achieves the most enduring happiness, for although she leaves her beloved Sierra Nevada mountains, she does so in the company of Johnson, a reformed thief who has become her sweetheart. The Heart of Maryland, perhaps the most sensational of Belasco’s historical plays, features a pair of Civil War lovers divided by opposing North/South sympathies and reunited after an act of heroism on the part of Maryland Calvert herself.

Naughty Anthony

Belasco’s farces were much less sumptuous in staging and considerably lighter in plot; like Lord Chumley, Naughty Anthony relies on complicated, improbable situations for its humor. Professor Anthony Depew, a teacher of moral behavior, when caught kissing one of his patients in a darkened park gazebo, gives his landlord’s name instead of his own. An incompetent lawyer, another love triangle, and a vengeful wife are coupled with what was then a mildly shocking episode in which Cora, a hosiery saleswoman, strips off her stockings onstage. Handled differently, Naughty Anthony might have succeeded as a satire of moral hypocrisy; as it stands, however, the tangled skeins of the well-made play are too much in evidence.

La Belle Russe

Belasco attempted to deal with the outcast woman in historical plays such as DuBarry and in sheer melodrama such as La Belle Russe, in which a notorious prostitute tries to profit from the good fortune of her innocent twin. La Belle Russe herself is saved by the love for her illegitimate child; similarly, in Zaza, the heroine redeems herself by becoming a great actress. Other characters, not nearly as well received, face a more realistic end.

The Heart of Maryland

A lavish and sensational Civil War melodrama, The Heart of Maryland made Belasco independent. The play, backed by Max Blieman, a dealer in art, opened on October 9, 1895, in Washington, D.C., and moved to the Herald Square Theatre in New York two weeks later for a run of 229 performances.

The property and light cues for the play show that Belasco paid extraordinary attention to detail, even visiting Maryland so that he could duplicate the atmosphere. The first scene opens on The Lilacs, a nostalgically reproduced mansion replete with fragrant lilac bushes and water lilies. In the near distance is a stream crossed by a rustic bridge; in the far appear the hills of Maryland. The plot interprets the conflict between North and South romantically: Maryland Calvert’s Northern lover is Colonel Alan Kendrick, whose father commands the Southern forces; Nanny, a sharp-witted Yankee of sixteen, is wooed by Robert Telfair, a lieutenant in the Southern artillery unit encamped at The Lilacs. Further complications arise when Colonel Thorpe, a Southern officer in the employ of the Northern Secret Service, uses the information given to him by Lloyd Calvert—Maryland’s brother, a Northern sympathizer—to further his own career rather than to warn General Hooker of General Kendrick’s advance. When Alan is brought as a prisoner to The Lilacs, Maryland, despite her strong Dixie bias, passes the information to him.

In act 2, Lloyd is killed while he is carrying information, but not before he asks his sister to detain an anonymous “friend” of his—Alan. Captured while awaiting Maryland, Alan confronts his father, who keeps his military bearing with difficulty. Maryland becomes hysterical on learning of her brother’s death and impulsively accuses his “friend” of spying. As the scene closes, she understands that she has accused her lover in order to save her brother’s name.

At the beginning of act 3, Alan is incarcerated in an old church that serves as a prison. Maryland, crossing the lines, brings a stay of execution, but Thorpe realizes that had the letter reached the now-dead Colonel Kendrick, he himself would have been indicted for spying. He brings Alan from the prison to torment him with the sight of Maryland. Alan, bound and helpless, watches as Maryland—like the operatic heroine Tosca—stabs her attacker and urges Alan to run. The climax of the scene occurs when she races up the stairs and leaps to grasp the clapper on the bell that is rung to alert the Southern artillery. As the act closes, Maryland swings back and forth on the bell, a tour de force supposedly reminiscent of Belasco’s childhood fascination with Rosa Hartwicke Thorpe’s poem “The Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.”

The resolution in the fourth act finds Nanny nursing the wounded Telfair while the Northern troops, led by Alan, cannonade The Lilacs, where Thorpe has imprisoned Maryland. Thorpe negotiates a retreat to Richmond but insists that Maryland accompany him to stand trial. Alan accepts but then, given safe conduct, delivers a letter from General Lee court-martialing Thorpe for double treachery and appointing Telfair commander. The curtain closes as Maryland and Alan are reunited.

Although Belasco, in a first-night curtain speech, had said, “Now I am encouraged to hope I have proved myself a dramatist,” critical praise was not forthcoming; nevertheless, the play ran for nearly nine months and had a successful season in London. Although some British critics praised Leslie Carter’s histrionics as Maryland and likened Belasco to the wildly popular French playwright Victorien Sardou, George Bernard Shaw (who also disliked Sardou) made sharp-tongued fun of American melodrama while conceding that the actors themselves were better trained than their British cousins and that Carter’s intensity showed her to be an actress “of no mean powers.”

The Return of Peter Grimm

One of the works that held the most personal meaning for Belasco, The Return of Peter Grimm is permeated not only by a sense of loss for departed family members but also by a belief in an afterlife. During the play’s first performance at the Boston Hollis Street Theatre on January 2, 1911, Belasco’s younger daughter Augusta, terminally ill with tuberculosis, impressed her father with her belief that dying is another form of living—or, in Peter Grimm’s words, “knowing better.” Other personal facts contributed to the production of the play about the old horticulturist who returns from the dead to right his mistakes, most notably Belasco’s insistence in 1898 that his mother had appeared to him in a waking dream. The next morning, news was brought during the rehearsals for Zaza that she had died in San Francisco during the night.

Despite rumors to the contrary, Belasco reiterated publicly that Cecil B. DeMille was responsible only for the idea of the play and not for the actual script—a script that, Belasco noted, presented the serious problem of how to make Grimm’s return believable. Three factors contributed to his success in solving this problem: naturalistic stage setting, acting, and lighting. First, the props were carefully selected to suggest not only a real room but also a wealth of memories that might be evoked by a cozy, homey house; likewise, the view shown from the onstage window conveys the close tie between Grimm’s sense of well-being and his thriving business. Second, Belasco instructed his other actors to look through the Grimm “apparition” so as to highlight the reaction of the eight-year-old child medium. Third, the complex lighting system made use of the baby lens developed by Louis Hartmann. This lens concentrated spots of flesh-toned light on all the characters but Grimm, who was bathed in a colder, bluer light; consequently, he seemed in contrast always to be shadowed. In addition, Belasco abolished the footlights and substituted bridge lights on beams above the set. The lighting schematic took almost a year to develop but was called “perhaps the most perfect example of stage lighting ever exhibited.”

The melodramatic plot includes a love triangle, a villainous family member, and a child who dies young. In the long first act, the love that James Hartman, Grimm’s secretary, has not only for Catherine Staats—Grimm’s adopted daughter—but also for the plants themselves is juxtaposed to the money-hungry courtship of Grimm’s nephew Frederick, whose dearest wish is to sell the house and nursery. Warned by his doctor that the condition of his heart may cause his death at any moment, Grimm forces an engagement between Catherine and Frederick so that he may be, he thinks, assured of the continuance of his business and of Catherine’s happiness. William, the eight-year-old illegitimate son of a runaway servant, is also put under the protection of Frederick, who clearly dislikes him. At the end of the act, Peter dies.

An approaching storm, James’s and Catherine’s manifest unhappiness, an altercation among Grimm’s old friends over their legacies—all produce a mood of suspense that builds toward the arrival of the ghost in act 2. When the ghostly Grimm does appear, however, it is very quietly; moreover, since he can make himself felt only indirectly, his efforts to save the business, to make Catherine break her engagement, and to reveal Frederick as William’s father are all subtle (or else, indeed, the play would end abruptly). It is only to William, who is ill, that Grimm can speak directly. Through Grimm’s influence, William points out the incriminating letter from his mother, Annemarie. Frederick’s perfidy revealed and the marriage broken off, the third act centers on William’s death, a scene that escapes the bathetic partly through the circus motif that carries over from the first act and partly through Peter’s insistence that he is taking William away “to know better.” As the curtain falls, the two dance away to the clown’s tune, “Uncle Rat Has Gone to Town.” The play, which moved to the New York Stuyvesant Theatre on October 18, 1911, ran for 231 performances. Critical reception was warm, citing Belasco’s triumph in making the impossible appear actual by his magic of lighting and directing.

The Girl of the Golden West

A compound of memories of California (as well as of Bret Harte, as some contemporary critics charged), The Girl of the Golden West opened on October 3, 1905, at the Belasco Theatre in Pittsburgh and moved to New York on November 14. Puccini adapted the play, which Belasco believed his best, under the title La fanciulla del West (Puccini had brought about a similar musical transformation with Belasco’s Madame Butterfly in 1904). As Belasco notes, teaching acting techniques to opera singers—Enrico Caruso among them—familiar only with vocal flourishes was a difficult task, considering that both he and Arturo Toscanini, the conductor, were autocratic in their methods. The December 10, 1910, premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House was, nevertheless, a success.

The melodramatic plot, which Belasco insisted was based on his father’s stories, features the trusting, unlettered Minnie, owner of The Polka, a Western saloon. Most of her customers, including the gambler/sheriff Jack Rance, are in love with her. While the bartender, Nick, slyly keeps up business by encouraging her suitors, Minnie, who has fallen in love with a nameless stranger she has met on the road, cheerfully and faithfully serves as a “bank” for the prospectors’ nuggets. In act 1, the stranger, Dick Johnson—in reality, Ramerrez, a bandit who has plotted to rob The Polka—appears. While Johnson is at The Polka, the Pony Express brings news that Ramerrez is in the area, and the Girl, who innocently admires Johnson, stoutly declares that she will protect the prospectors’ hard-earned gold.

In act 2, Minnie welcomes Johnson to her cabin for dinner, where he becomes convinced that she is the one woman for whom he would reform. Trapped by a snowstorm, he hides when Rance and his men appear at the cabin to ascertain Minnie’s safety. While there, they arouse Minnie’s jealousy by mentioning Ramerrez’s supposed lover, Nina Micheltorena. Minnie angrily sends Johnson out into the storm, but he is wounded by Rance and returns to take refuge in her loft. Rance is almost convinced that Ramerrez has escaped until a drop of blood from the loft falls on his handkerchief. As the act ends, Rance and the Girl play poker to win Ramerrez; during a diversion, Minnie uses the three aces she had hidden in her stocking to make a better hand, wins the right to let Ramerrez escape, and frees herself from Rance’s power.

In act 3, Minnie opens the “Academy,” a grammar school for prospectors, but is distracted by happiness at the thought of meeting Johnson and sadness at leaving The Polka. A crisis occurs when the Wells Fargo agent recaptures Johnson, much to the glee of Rance, who has kept his promise not to interfere but who can now take revenge. Rance proposes lynching Johnson, and the boys in The Polka are willing to follow his lead until they witness the reunion between Johnson and the Girl. Hearing her prayer, they become convinced that Providence protects Johnson. As the play concludes, Johnson and the Girl are leaving California for a new start in the “promised land” in the East.

Belasco introduced a number of special effects that enhanced the play’s atmosphere. Before the first act, audiences saw a detailed panorama of the Sierra Nevada, complete with the Girl’s cabin on Cloudy Mountain. The panorama, a transparency painted in evocative colors and lit from behind, slowly unrolled to the bottom of the mountain, where The Polka appeared blazing with light. The sound effects were introduced at this point; Belasco discarded the usual orchestral accompaniment, using instead a small band of concertina and banjo, playing such favorites as “Camptown Races” and “Pop Goes the Weasel,” partly, Belasco claimed, in memory of Jake Wallace, the famous banjo player of the mining camp. After the houselights were dimmed and the panorama removed, the act opened on the interior of The Polka, where all props were handled with meticulous detail, from the real pineboards in the walls to the riding paraphernalia piled carelessly on the floor. In addition, even the minor characters were costumed in distinctly individualistic ways to suggest a realistic and motley selection of prospectors. Perhaps the greatest tour de force of the play was the snowstorm that trapped Johnson in Minnie’s cabin. Making use of the pathetic fallacy—the idea that natural events parallel emotional and moral situations—Belasco built the suspense of the scene. Blowers, fans, rock salt, snow bags, and air tanks to reproduce the sound of the storm were operated by a cadre of thirty-two stagehands, who formed, as William Winter notes, “a sort of mechanical orchestra.”

Biliography

Boardman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. This study of Broadway dramas covers a number of Belasco’s works.

DiGaetani, John Louis. Puccini the Thinker: The Composer’s Intellectual and Dramatic Development. 2d ed. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. This biography of Puccini examines his operas, some of which were based on Belasco’s plays. Contains bibliography, discography, videography, and index.

Green, Adam. “The Phantom of the Belasco: A Tale.” New York Times Current Events Edition, July 16, 1995, p. 25. An account of a Broadway production’s attempt to find Belasco’s ghost in the boarded-up rooms of his apartment above the Belasco Theater.

Marker, Lise-Lone. David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975. This volume is considered the standard and most scholarly biography of Broadway’s most innovative producer, including Belasco’s very successful collaboration with James A. Herne.

Meserve, Walter J. “David Belasco.” In Twentieth Century American Dramatists, edited by John MacNicholas. Vol. 7 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1981. A concise overview of the life and works of Belasco.

Meserve, Walter J., and Mollie A. Meserve, eds. Fateful Lightning: America’s Civil War Plays. New York: Feedback Theatrebooks and Prospero Press, 2000. This anthology of Civil War plays provides a history of the American theater in the second half of the nineteenth century, providing information on Belasco as well as his play The Heart of Maryland.

Winter, William. The Life of David Belasco. 1925. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. This reprint of the 1925 edition was completed by the author’s son, William Jefferson Winter, after the author’s death. It discusses the history of theater in the United States as well as the playwright’s long career.