Jeanne Eagels(1890-1929)
- Actress
Jeanne Eagels, one of the most intriguing stars of late silent films
and the early talkies, was born Amelia Jean Eagles on June 26, 1890 in
Kansas City, Missouri, to Edward and Julia Sullivan Eagles. Young Jean
was part of an impoverished family of eight, with three brothers and
two sisters. She likely stopped going to school when she was 11 years
old.
As a girl, she decided to become an actress after appearing in a
Shakespearen play. Of that performance, she said, "I played the
grave-digger in 'Hamlet,' first, at the age of seven. They gave me the
chance to play Shakespeare because nobody else of the tender age of
seven would do so. They wouldn't say the rather amazing words...the
other kiddies. I took it all quite seriously and said ALL the words
without a quiver. Once I had begun I could not be stopped. I was ill
when I was not on the stage. It seemed to me I couldn't breathe in any
other atmosphere."
She followed up the experience up by playing bit parts in local
theatrical productions. When she was 12 years old, she became a member
of the Dubinsky Brothers' traveling stock company, appearing at first
as a dancer, but eventually working her way into speaking roles. Eagels
soon was playing leading roles in the stock company's repertory,
including "Camille," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Later, a myth arose that Eagels' began her career as a circus
performer. The 1957 biographical film "The Jeanne Eagels Story"
erroneously depicts Eagels' beginning as a hootchie-kootchie dancer in
a carnival. The Dubinsky Brothers did use a tent to put on their shows,
but they did not present carnival acts but performed popular comedies,
musicals, and dramas. The tent was only used during the spring and
summer months, while during the colder months, the company performed in
theaters and halls in the Midwest.
Jeanne Eagels married the scion of the Dubinsky family, Morris, the
oldest of the brothers. She was likely in her teens, and probably had a
baby by Morris. Stories about Eagels' past diverge, and in one account,
the child was adopted by family friends, while in another, Eagels' baby
boy died in infancy, triggering a nervous breakdown for the bereft
mother. Eagels and Dubinky separated, likely due to his infidelity.
Jeanne eventually left the Dubinksy company and joined another touring
stock company, which eventually brought her to New York City.
Eagels decided to make herself over in New York as she fought her way
up in the fiercely competitive theatrical world. A brunette, Eagels
dyed her hair blonde and said that she was of Spanish and Irish
lineage, and that her surname was originally "Aguilar," which loosely
translates into English as "eagle." She changed the spelling of her
name from "Eagles" to "Eagels," reputedly as she thought it looked
better on a marquee. Eliminating her past, she presented herself as an
ingÃffÃ'©nue rather than as a divorced woman and mother of a dead infant.
She also adopted an English accent as David Belasco, the legendary
theatrical impresario, had commented that she spoke like an "earl's
daughter."
She began her climb up the greasy pole of Broadway stardom by appearing
as a chorus girl. She even served a stint as a Ziegfield girl, but
Eagels was determined to establish herself as a dramatic roles, wining
bit parts in the plays "Jumping Jupiter" and "The Mind the Paint Girl."
Eagels took a trip to Paris, where she likely studied acting with
Beverly Sitgreaves, an expatriate American actress who had appeared
with Sarah Bernhardt, Eagels'
idol. After Jeanne Eagels' death, there arose a myth that she was a
"raw," untrained talent who just happened to have the spark of genius
on stage. This is demonstrably false as she had a thorough grounding in
technique in her six-year apprenticeship in regional stock companies.
She also studied acting with Sitgreaves and with acting coaches in New
York. The myth likely is rooted in the biography of Eagels' stage
co-star Leslie Howard that was
written by his children. Howard was of the opinion that Eagels was
untrained, but that likely was rooted in English snobbery vis-ÃffÃ'Â -vis
America actors as he had the same opinion of the great
Bette Davis. What Howard likely meant that
the emotionally erratic Eagels was undisciplined rather than untrained.
George Arliss, considered one of the great
stage actors at the time he appeared on Broadway with Eagels, would
hardly have chosen her to appear in three of his productions if she
were not trained and up to giving a fine performance. Arliss was full
of praise for Eagels.
In Paris, Eagels attracted the attention of
Julian Eltinge, the famous Broadway
female impersonator, though they were not introduced. Ironically, when
he returned to New York, Eltinge found out that Eagels was to be his
co-star in what turned out to be a long tour of the play "The Crinoline
Girl." The two became good friends.
Eagels won the role of a prostitute who becomes a faith-healer in the
touring company of the play "Outcast" by modeling herself after the
play's star, Elsie Ferguson, for
her audition. She won the part, and also won great reviews during the
tour's swing through the South. When the touring company returned to
New York for an off-Broadway engagement, some critics were there to see
if Eagels actually did live up to the road reviews of her "Outcast"
performance. She did, and the critics were suitably impressed.
The Thanhouser Film Co. cast Eagles in the film of "Outcast" in 1916,
which was entitled
The World and the Woman (1916)
upon its release. Eagels was working during the daytime in films and at
night on the stage. Suffering from fatigue and insomnia, she sought
treatment and likely became hooked on drugs during this period. With
the aid of physician-prescribed dope, Jeanne Eagels continued her
hectic dual-career of making movies during the day while acting on
stage at night. The routine continued until 1920. Suffering from
chronic sinusitis and other maladies, Eagels descended the slippery
slope of self-medicating her ills, an unfortunate situation exacerbated
by her fondness for drink.
Eagels received great reviews when she starred with
George Arliss in the Broadway hit "The
Professor's Love Story" in 1917. She followed up their joint triumph
with two more co-starring ventures with Arliss, "Disraeli" and the
even-more-popular play "Hamilton." Of his co-star, Arliss said that
each of the three distinctly different parts she acted were "played
with unerring judgment and artistry."
In 1918, she appeared in Belasco's production of "Daddies," an original
play about the plight of war orphans starring
George Abbott. She quit the hit
show either due to exhaustion or because, as rumor had it, she was fed
up with Belasco's sexual harassment, though she praised him as a
producer.
"Often in the theater there is a feeling of commercialism in every
detail; it may not touch one directly, but it is there, and the
consciousness that the financial success of the play is perhaps of
first importance is decidedly unpleasant. Now, Mr. Belasco puts acting,
like every other element of a production, upon an artistic basis. He
makes you feel that a thing is important artistically or not at all.
Money seems never to be a consideration, yet the making of it follows
as a result of making the production as nearly perfect as possible....
That point of view on the producer's part means a great deal to the
actor; it leaves him free to do so much, and is an incentive to work
toward a faithful portrayal of character. To me everything about Mr.
Belasco's theater points toward that one ideal of his -- perfection."
She next appeared in the comedy "A Young Man's Fancy" (1919), followed
up by "The Wonderful Thing" (1920). By the time she appeared in the
latter, a modest success that played for 120 performances, she had
become a true Broadway diva, having to wait for the applause to die
down after her entrance before she could deliver her lines. She had her
own distinctive ideas on how to give a fresh impression to the audience
for each performance:
"Audiences mean as much to an actress as the acoustics of a concert
hall mean to a musician. The musician must vary his playing according
to his acoustics--according to the sort of room in which his concert is
given.... A sort of sixth sense enables me to discern the character of
an audience within a few minutes after I have begun to play, and it is
only the people for whom I am making this lovable girl live at that one
performance that matter. Former audiences are swept from my thought as
though they had never been. As far as the audience of the moment is
concerned others have never been. What I have done, or have not done,
for them doesn't matter to the folk who have come to see the play
to-night. I am so very conscious of this that I am able to play to them
as though I were creating the part for the first time... I do wrong in
speaking of 'playing to an audience,' however. A true artist never
'plays to the audience.' Rather he or she keeps his or her own vision
true, and the creation evolves itself."
Her next Broadway appearance, "In the Night Watch" (1921), was another
modest success, but she soon was to appear in the play that would make
her lasting reputation. The opportunity came her way when another
actress turned down the role of the prostitute Sadie Thompson in the
theatrical adaptation of
W. Somerset Maugham's short story
"Rain."
On the road in Philidelphia, the play received discouraging reviews,
necessitating a rewrite of the second act. By the time the rewritten
"Rain" debuted on Broadway on November 7, 1922, at Maxine Elliott's
Theatre, all the kinks had been worked out, and the play was a smash,
running for 256 performances. When the company returned to Broadway
after the road show, re-opening at the Gaiety Theatre on September 1,
1924, "Rain" starring Jeanne Eagels ran for another 648 performances,
transferring to the New Park Theatre on December 15, 1924. "Rain"
elevated Jeanne Eagels into the pantheon of American theater greats.
John D. Williams, the director of "Rain" said, "In my score of years in
the theater Miss Eagels was one of the two or three highest types of
interpretive acting intelligences I have met. To work with her on a
play was once more to feel one's self in the theater when it was in its
finest estate; when a play was not a 'show,' nor even a performance,
but a work, which because it had something to say that might clarify
life, was a living thing and simply demanded to be heard. It was then
that somebody, known or unknown, wrote something that deserved
fanatically true fulfillment--and somebody else of magic touch acted
it.... Miss Eagels had that touch of magic in character interpretation-
the quick exchange of ideas as to the sense of the scene. And then
would come the superbly tragic entrance, for example, of Sadie Thompson
in the last act of
'Rain,' with its flawless blend of bitter
disillusionment, irony, revenge, terror."
Eagels' great performance was acknowledged as responsible for the great
success of the play, and although
Gloria Swanson
had some success playing Sadie in the silent movie version of the play
in 1928, Joan Crawford did less
well in the role in the 1931 talkie version. Both Swanson and
particularly Crawford were upstaged by their leading men,
Lionel Barrymore and
Walter Huston, respectively.
Rita Hayworth's version in 1953, opposite
José Ferrer, is barely remembered.
Sadie Thompson belonged to Jeanne Eagels, and the touring company of
"Rain" toured for four years.
In 1917, Eagels had said, "I am timid and afraid of men and far too
busy to become well acquainted with them. My work fills my life, and I
should not care to fall in love or marry before I am very, very old --
about thirty-five -- because a woman gives too much of herself when she
loves, and that would interfere with her career."
By the time Eagels married her second husband, the stockbroker Edward
H. Coy, in 1925 at the age of 35, she had developed a reputation as a
temperamental actress who was a hard drinker. Coy had achieved Ivy
League gridiron immortality as a 6-foot, 195-pound fullback at Yale,
where he was named an All-American in 1908 and 1909 but had turned to
the sauce for solace now that the cheers had faded. The incompatibility
between the two did nothing to ameliorate her problems with her mood
swings or with drink.
After "Rain," she took time off, either turning down offers such as the
role of Roxie Hart in "Chicago" (1926) or quitting plays she did sign
up for during rehearsals. Finally, she made her Broadway return in the
George Cukor-directed light comedy "Her
Cardboard Lover" (1926) opposite
Leslie Howard. Broadway critics
and audiences had grown accustomed to Eagels in more substantial fare,
and on opening night, it was
Leslie Howard whom the audience
cheered, calling for Howard to take curtain calls. Controversially,
Eagels took Howard's curtain calls, thanking the audience "on behalf of
my Cardboard Lover." The critics, too, wound up praising Howard rather
than Eagels.
Eagels fondness for medicating herself and for drink caused problems
during the run of the show. Her on-stage behavior could be egregious,
as when she stepped out of character and, thirty for the sauce, asked
Howard's character for a drink of "water." This caused the stage
manager more than once to bring down the curtain during a performance,
and Howard left the stage in a huff at one point.
About bad acting, Eagels blamed it on "...[N]ot being a good listener.
So few people are. For instance, when you and I are talking here and I
say 'no' very deeply and quietly, your reply will be 'yes' with
something of a rising inflection, a lighter modulation. You have
listened to me and have made a correct tonal reply. On the stage, most
of the actors and actresses know their cue words and take their cues,
but they haven't listened to the speech preceding their own. The result
is a correct enough answer as to word, but not as to tone. There is not
tonal intelligence in the reply. Good listeners...so rare."
John D. Williams, her director in "Rain," attributed her greatness on
the stage to her great ability to listen while on stage.
"First off, she knew to perfection, and adhered to as to a religion,
the art of listening in acting. At every performance, whether the
first, or the hundredth, the speeches of the character addressing her
were not merely heard but listened to. Hence there was always thought
and belief and conviction behind every speech and scene of her own--
the essence of theater illusion."
The drink and drugs apparently were eroding that greatness. However,
despite her on-stage antics, "Her Cardboard Lover" was another modest
success, playing for 152 performances. After shooting the
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film
Man, Woman and Sin (1927) with
John Gilbert, she toured with the
play in the large cities.
Eagels' behavior during the filming of
Man, Woman and Sin (1927) was
atrocious. Gilbert, whom she reportedly had an affair with, said Eagels
was the most temperamental actress he had ever worked with. She would
appear late at the studio, and once, she disappeared for several days.
The Hollywood trade press credited Eagels disappearance to a drink
binge, and at one point, she took off on a two-week vacation to Santa
Barbara without informing her director,
Monta Bell. Bell asked studio management to
terminate Eagels' contract, which they did. Fortunately, there was
enough footage so Bell could salvage the film without re-shooting.
John Gilbert said of Eagels, "She
seemed to hate the movies for a popularity they could not give
her....[The] blind, unreasoning adulation of the movie fans was a type
of popularity she spurned. Fundamentally, Jeanne was much superior to
us. Movie actors are crazy to be worshiped. Jeanne Eagels wanted to be
understood and appreciated."
When the film was released, Eagels' performance received mixed reviews,
but the picture was a failure primarily due to the poor reviews
garnered by Gilbert. Critics rejected the great lover playing a naive
mama's boy in this film. Gilbert's career was salvaged shortly
thereafter by the release of his second film with Great Garbo,
Love (1927), which was a smash hit at
the box office.
When Eagels began touring the East Coast in "Her Cardboard Lover," the
Boston engagement was cut in half to one week as Eagels reportedly was
ill. After the play moved to Chicago with a revivified Eagels, she
divorced Coy in 1928, citing physically abuse and accusing him of
breaking her jaw. Eagels claimed that Coy had threatened to wreck her
budding movie career by ruining her face. Coy, a heavy boozer like his
soon-to-be ex-wife, pleaded no contest and the divorce was granted.
The Mid-Western tour of "Her Cardboard Lover" moved on to Milwaukee,
but Eagels was a no-show at both the Milwaukee and the subsequent St.
Louis performances. She claimed that she was suffering from ptomaine
poisoning, but eye-witness accounts placed her in Chicago on a long
boozing binge when she was supposed to have been in Milwaukee. Her
indefensible and unprofessional behavior brought her an 18-month
suspension from Actor's Equity, which banned her from performing on
stage with any other Equity actor for the length of the suspension. The
ban essentially ended her stage career in New York and the rest of the
country, although it could not stop her from appearing by herself on
stage in non-Equity venues. Eagels hit the vaudeville circuit,
performing scenes from "Rain." She also appeared in movies as producers
were desperate for trained stage people with the advent of sound, and
she eventually made more money from the film industry and vaudeville
than she ever had from the "legitimate" stage.
Ironically, it was Monta Bell, now working at
Paramount's Astoria Studios in New York, who hired Jeanne Eagels for
her film comeback. In 1929, Bell announced that even though Equity
didn't want Eagels, he wanted her, for she had been the consummate
professional during the making of
Man, Woman and Sin (1927). The
man who had urged the MGM brass to fire her now told the press that he
had actually urged MGM to sign Eagels to long-term contract for more
pictures.
The first movie Eagels made for Paramount was the
Monta Bell-produced
The Letter (1929), which reunited
Eagels with W. Somerset Maugham.
Katharine Cornell had had a Broadway
hit with Maugham's play as the murderous adulteress, and Eagels
delivered an electrifying, legendary performance in the role on film.
After Eagels received rave reviews for her
The Letter (1929), Paramount took
Bell's advice and signed her to a contract for two more pictures,
Jealousy (1929) and
The Laughing Lady (1929).
She began shooting "Jealousy" (1929) with the English actor Anthony
Bushnell, whom she had hand-picked to be her leading man, but during
filming it was apparent that Bushnell's voice was not registering well
on the sound equipment. Bushnell was replaced by the up-and-coming star
Fredric March, who later said Eagels was "great" to work with, but that
the movie they made together was a "stinker." There were rumors that
Eagels had suffered a nervous breakdown while filming "Jealousy", but
Paramount denied there had been any trouble with their new diva.
However, Eagels asked to be let out of her contract for "The Laughing
Lady" on the grounds that she was either ill or because she didn't like
the script, and the studio obliged, replacing her with Ruth Chatterton.
About her management of her personal affairs, Eagels said, "I cannot
bear to transact any of my own business or make any of my own
professional arrangements. I have an aversion to it I cannot overcome.
I can't read the papers, either. Mention of my personal life, even tho
I expect it, acts terribly on my nerves. I suppose I'm an odd person."
It was reported that now that the Actors Equity ban was due to expire
in the fall of 1929, Eagels was preparing to return to Broadway. In
September, Eagles underwent successful surgery to treat ulcers on her
eyes, a condition was caused by her sinusitis. Two weeks after surgery,
on the night of October 3, 1929, as Eagels was preparing for a night
out on the town, she fell ill and was taken to a private 5th Avenue
hospital. In the hospital waiting room, she suffered a convulsion and
died.
Three autopsies were conducted over the following three months and
reached three different conclusions as to the cause of her death, which
was variously attributed as an overdose of alcohol, the tranquilizer
chloral hydrate, and heroin in the successive autopsy reports. All
three substances likely were in her system when she died, and it was
suggested that the unconscious Eagels had received a sedative from the
first doctor to treat her, and that subsequently a second doctor, not
knowing she had already been sedated, had unknowingly given the
unconscious actress a second shot, thus causing the overdose that
killed her.
When her estate went through probate, it was worth an estimated $52,000
(approximately $562,000 in 2005 dollars) after her debts and funeral
costs were deducted. Dying intestate, the estate went to her mother. A
wake was held at Campbell's funeral home in New York City, the same
establishment that had handled Rudolph Valentino's funeral. Reportedly,
her movie "Jealousy" was playing across the street from the funeral
home as she lay in her casket, finally at peace. Her body was sent to
Kansas City, where a Catholic mass and requiem was held, and she was
laid to rest with her father and a brother.
Eagels was posthumously nominated for a 1929 Best Actress Academy Award
for her role in "The Letter," the first actor to be so honored. She
lost out to superstar Mary Pickford, one of the founders of the
Academy, who took the Oscar home to Pickfair for her performance in
"Coquette," her first talkie.
Jeanne Eagels' life was limned in the 1957 film _Jeanne Eagels_, which
starred Kim Novak. This film is
fictionalized biography that whitewashed the truth about Eagels' life.
In recent years, there have been rumors that Eagels enjoyed same-sex
relationships with other women, but the rumors remain unsubstantiated.
In her lifetime, she was romantically linked to many famous men,
including the conductor Arthur Fiedler,
the gambler "Nick the Greek" Dandalos, and the theater critic
Ward Morehouse. She was pursued by
producer David Belasco, theater
owner Lee Shubert, and the Prince of Wales, the future
Duke of Windsor.
About actors, Jeanne Eagels was quoted as saying, "We are glorious,
unearthly people, set above all others because of our genius, our
capacity to sway others, to make them laugh and cry, or make them live
a romance we but play." In the Academy Award-winning
All About Eve (1950),
writer-director
Joseph L. Mankiewicz has the critic
Addison DeWitt tell the great fictional diva Margo Channing (played by
Leslie Howard's other great
"untrained" co-star, Bette Davis), "Margo,
as you know, I have lived in the theater as a Trappist monk lives in
his faith. I have no other world, no other life -- and once in a great
while I experience that moment of revelation for which all true
believers wait and pray. You were one. Jeanne Eagels another."
The actor playwright Noël Coward said, "Of
all the actresses I have ever seen, there was never one quite like
Jeanne Eagels," while actress-playwright-Academy
Award-nominated-screenwriter Ruth Gordon, a friend of Eagels, said of
her, "Jeanne Eagels was the most beautiful person I ever saw and if you
ever saw her, she was the most beautiful person YOU ever saw."
Kathleen Kennedy, her co-star in "Rain," said, "I sincerely doubt if
Jeanne Eagels really knew, in spite of her pretensions, that she was a
great actress. She was. Many times backstage I'd be waiting for my
entrance cue and suddenly Jeanne would start to build a scene, and [we]
would look up from our books at once. Some damn thing- some power,
something- would take hold of your heart, you senses, as you listened
to her, and you'd thrill to the sound of her."
John D. Williams, the director of "Rain," called her an acting genius.
"Acting genius--that is, the power of enhancing a written character to
a plane that neither author nor director can lay claim to -- Miss
Eagels had at her beck and call, whether in tragedy or in comedy."
and the early talkies, was born Amelia Jean Eagles on June 26, 1890 in
Kansas City, Missouri, to Edward and Julia Sullivan Eagles. Young Jean
was part of an impoverished family of eight, with three brothers and
two sisters. She likely stopped going to school when she was 11 years
old.
As a girl, she decided to become an actress after appearing in a
Shakespearen play. Of that performance, she said, "I played the
grave-digger in 'Hamlet,' first, at the age of seven. They gave me the
chance to play Shakespeare because nobody else of the tender age of
seven would do so. They wouldn't say the rather amazing words...the
other kiddies. I took it all quite seriously and said ALL the words
without a quiver. Once I had begun I could not be stopped. I was ill
when I was not on the stage. It seemed to me I couldn't breathe in any
other atmosphere."
She followed up the experience up by playing bit parts in local
theatrical productions. When she was 12 years old, she became a member
of the Dubinsky Brothers' traveling stock company, appearing at first
as a dancer, but eventually working her way into speaking roles. Eagels
soon was playing leading roles in the stock company's repertory,
including "Camille," "Romeo and Juliet," and "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
Later, a myth arose that Eagels' began her career as a circus
performer. The 1957 biographical film "The Jeanne Eagels Story"
erroneously depicts Eagels' beginning as a hootchie-kootchie dancer in
a carnival. The Dubinsky Brothers did use a tent to put on their shows,
but they did not present carnival acts but performed popular comedies,
musicals, and dramas. The tent was only used during the spring and
summer months, while during the colder months, the company performed in
theaters and halls in the Midwest.
Jeanne Eagels married the scion of the Dubinsky family, Morris, the
oldest of the brothers. She was likely in her teens, and probably had a
baby by Morris. Stories about Eagels' past diverge, and in one account,
the child was adopted by family friends, while in another, Eagels' baby
boy died in infancy, triggering a nervous breakdown for the bereft
mother. Eagels and Dubinky separated, likely due to his infidelity.
Jeanne eventually left the Dubinksy company and joined another touring
stock company, which eventually brought her to New York City.
Eagels decided to make herself over in New York as she fought her way
up in the fiercely competitive theatrical world. A brunette, Eagels
dyed her hair blonde and said that she was of Spanish and Irish
lineage, and that her surname was originally "Aguilar," which loosely
translates into English as "eagle." She changed the spelling of her
name from "Eagles" to "Eagels," reputedly as she thought it looked
better on a marquee. Eliminating her past, she presented herself as an
ingÃffÃ'©nue rather than as a divorced woman and mother of a dead infant.
She also adopted an English accent as David Belasco, the legendary
theatrical impresario, had commented that she spoke like an "earl's
daughter."
She began her climb up the greasy pole of Broadway stardom by appearing
as a chorus girl. She even served a stint as a Ziegfield girl, but
Eagels was determined to establish herself as a dramatic roles, wining
bit parts in the plays "Jumping Jupiter" and "The Mind the Paint Girl."
Eagels took a trip to Paris, where she likely studied acting with
Beverly Sitgreaves, an expatriate American actress who had appeared
with Sarah Bernhardt, Eagels'
idol. After Jeanne Eagels' death, there arose a myth that she was a
"raw," untrained talent who just happened to have the spark of genius
on stage. This is demonstrably false as she had a thorough grounding in
technique in her six-year apprenticeship in regional stock companies.
She also studied acting with Sitgreaves and with acting coaches in New
York. The myth likely is rooted in the biography of Eagels' stage
co-star Leslie Howard that was
written by his children. Howard was of the opinion that Eagels was
untrained, but that likely was rooted in English snobbery vis-ÃffÃ'Â -vis
America actors as he had the same opinion of the great
Bette Davis. What Howard likely meant that
the emotionally erratic Eagels was undisciplined rather than untrained.
George Arliss, considered one of the great
stage actors at the time he appeared on Broadway with Eagels, would
hardly have chosen her to appear in three of his productions if she
were not trained and up to giving a fine performance. Arliss was full
of praise for Eagels.
In Paris, Eagels attracted the attention of
Julian Eltinge, the famous Broadway
female impersonator, though they were not introduced. Ironically, when
he returned to New York, Eltinge found out that Eagels was to be his
co-star in what turned out to be a long tour of the play "The Crinoline
Girl." The two became good friends.
Eagels won the role of a prostitute who becomes a faith-healer in the
touring company of the play "Outcast" by modeling herself after the
play's star, Elsie Ferguson, for
her audition. She won the part, and also won great reviews during the
tour's swing through the South. When the touring company returned to
New York for an off-Broadway engagement, some critics were there to see
if Eagels actually did live up to the road reviews of her "Outcast"
performance. She did, and the critics were suitably impressed.
The Thanhouser Film Co. cast Eagles in the film of "Outcast" in 1916,
which was entitled
The World and the Woman (1916)
upon its release. Eagels was working during the daytime in films and at
night on the stage. Suffering from fatigue and insomnia, she sought
treatment and likely became hooked on drugs during this period. With
the aid of physician-prescribed dope, Jeanne Eagels continued her
hectic dual-career of making movies during the day while acting on
stage at night. The routine continued until 1920. Suffering from
chronic sinusitis and other maladies, Eagels descended the slippery
slope of self-medicating her ills, an unfortunate situation exacerbated
by her fondness for drink.
Eagels received great reviews when she starred with
George Arliss in the Broadway hit "The
Professor's Love Story" in 1917. She followed up their joint triumph
with two more co-starring ventures with Arliss, "Disraeli" and the
even-more-popular play "Hamilton." Of his co-star, Arliss said that
each of the three distinctly different parts she acted were "played
with unerring judgment and artistry."
In 1918, she appeared in Belasco's production of "Daddies," an original
play about the plight of war orphans starring
George Abbott. She quit the hit
show either due to exhaustion or because, as rumor had it, she was fed
up with Belasco's sexual harassment, though she praised him as a
producer.
"Often in the theater there is a feeling of commercialism in every
detail; it may not touch one directly, but it is there, and the
consciousness that the financial success of the play is perhaps of
first importance is decidedly unpleasant. Now, Mr. Belasco puts acting,
like every other element of a production, upon an artistic basis. He
makes you feel that a thing is important artistically or not at all.
Money seems never to be a consideration, yet the making of it follows
as a result of making the production as nearly perfect as possible....
That point of view on the producer's part means a great deal to the
actor; it leaves him free to do so much, and is an incentive to work
toward a faithful portrayal of character. To me everything about Mr.
Belasco's theater points toward that one ideal of his -- perfection."
She next appeared in the comedy "A Young Man's Fancy" (1919), followed
up by "The Wonderful Thing" (1920). By the time she appeared in the
latter, a modest success that played for 120 performances, she had
become a true Broadway diva, having to wait for the applause to die
down after her entrance before she could deliver her lines. She had her
own distinctive ideas on how to give a fresh impression to the audience
for each performance:
"Audiences mean as much to an actress as the acoustics of a concert
hall mean to a musician. The musician must vary his playing according
to his acoustics--according to the sort of room in which his concert is
given.... A sort of sixth sense enables me to discern the character of
an audience within a few minutes after I have begun to play, and it is
only the people for whom I am making this lovable girl live at that one
performance that matter. Former audiences are swept from my thought as
though they had never been. As far as the audience of the moment is
concerned others have never been. What I have done, or have not done,
for them doesn't matter to the folk who have come to see the play
to-night. I am so very conscious of this that I am able to play to them
as though I were creating the part for the first time... I do wrong in
speaking of 'playing to an audience,' however. A true artist never
'plays to the audience.' Rather he or she keeps his or her own vision
true, and the creation evolves itself."
Her next Broadway appearance, "In the Night Watch" (1921), was another
modest success, but she soon was to appear in the play that would make
her lasting reputation. The opportunity came her way when another
actress turned down the role of the prostitute Sadie Thompson in the
theatrical adaptation of
W. Somerset Maugham's short story
"Rain."
On the road in Philidelphia, the play received discouraging reviews,
necessitating a rewrite of the second act. By the time the rewritten
"Rain" debuted on Broadway on November 7, 1922, at Maxine Elliott's
Theatre, all the kinks had been worked out, and the play was a smash,
running for 256 performances. When the company returned to Broadway
after the road show, re-opening at the Gaiety Theatre on September 1,
1924, "Rain" starring Jeanne Eagels ran for another 648 performances,
transferring to the New Park Theatre on December 15, 1924. "Rain"
elevated Jeanne Eagels into the pantheon of American theater greats.
John D. Williams, the director of "Rain" said, "In my score of years in
the theater Miss Eagels was one of the two or three highest types of
interpretive acting intelligences I have met. To work with her on a
play was once more to feel one's self in the theater when it was in its
finest estate; when a play was not a 'show,' nor even a performance,
but a work, which because it had something to say that might clarify
life, was a living thing and simply demanded to be heard. It was then
that somebody, known or unknown, wrote something that deserved
fanatically true fulfillment--and somebody else of magic touch acted
it.... Miss Eagels had that touch of magic in character interpretation-
the quick exchange of ideas as to the sense of the scene. And then
would come the superbly tragic entrance, for example, of Sadie Thompson
in the last act of
'Rain,' with its flawless blend of bitter
disillusionment, irony, revenge, terror."
Eagels' great performance was acknowledged as responsible for the great
success of the play, and although
Gloria Swanson
had some success playing Sadie in the silent movie version of the play
in 1928, Joan Crawford did less
well in the role in the 1931 talkie version. Both Swanson and
particularly Crawford were upstaged by their leading men,
Lionel Barrymore and
Walter Huston, respectively.
Rita Hayworth's version in 1953, opposite
José Ferrer, is barely remembered.
Sadie Thompson belonged to Jeanne Eagels, and the touring company of
"Rain" toured for four years.
In 1917, Eagels had said, "I am timid and afraid of men and far too
busy to become well acquainted with them. My work fills my life, and I
should not care to fall in love or marry before I am very, very old --
about thirty-five -- because a woman gives too much of herself when she
loves, and that would interfere with her career."
By the time Eagels married her second husband, the stockbroker Edward
H. Coy, in 1925 at the age of 35, she had developed a reputation as a
temperamental actress who was a hard drinker. Coy had achieved Ivy
League gridiron immortality as a 6-foot, 195-pound fullback at Yale,
where he was named an All-American in 1908 and 1909 but had turned to
the sauce for solace now that the cheers had faded. The incompatibility
between the two did nothing to ameliorate her problems with her mood
swings or with drink.
After "Rain," she took time off, either turning down offers such as the
role of Roxie Hart in "Chicago" (1926) or quitting plays she did sign
up for during rehearsals. Finally, she made her Broadway return in the
George Cukor-directed light comedy "Her
Cardboard Lover" (1926) opposite
Leslie Howard. Broadway critics
and audiences had grown accustomed to Eagels in more substantial fare,
and on opening night, it was
Leslie Howard whom the audience
cheered, calling for Howard to take curtain calls. Controversially,
Eagels took Howard's curtain calls, thanking the audience "on behalf of
my Cardboard Lover." The critics, too, wound up praising Howard rather
than Eagels.
Eagels fondness for medicating herself and for drink caused problems
during the run of the show. Her on-stage behavior could be egregious,
as when she stepped out of character and, thirty for the sauce, asked
Howard's character for a drink of "water." This caused the stage
manager more than once to bring down the curtain during a performance,
and Howard left the stage in a huff at one point.
About bad acting, Eagels blamed it on "...[N]ot being a good listener.
So few people are. For instance, when you and I are talking here and I
say 'no' very deeply and quietly, your reply will be 'yes' with
something of a rising inflection, a lighter modulation. You have
listened to me and have made a correct tonal reply. On the stage, most
of the actors and actresses know their cue words and take their cues,
but they haven't listened to the speech preceding their own. The result
is a correct enough answer as to word, but not as to tone. There is not
tonal intelligence in the reply. Good listeners...so rare."
John D. Williams, her director in "Rain," attributed her greatness on
the stage to her great ability to listen while on stage.
"First off, she knew to perfection, and adhered to as to a religion,
the art of listening in acting. At every performance, whether the
first, or the hundredth, the speeches of the character addressing her
were not merely heard but listened to. Hence there was always thought
and belief and conviction behind every speech and scene of her own--
the essence of theater illusion."
The drink and drugs apparently were eroding that greatness. However,
despite her on-stage antics, "Her Cardboard Lover" was another modest
success, playing for 152 performances. After shooting the
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film
Man, Woman and Sin (1927) with
John Gilbert, she toured with the
play in the large cities.
Eagels' behavior during the filming of
Man, Woman and Sin (1927) was
atrocious. Gilbert, whom she reportedly had an affair with, said Eagels
was the most temperamental actress he had ever worked with. She would
appear late at the studio, and once, she disappeared for several days.
The Hollywood trade press credited Eagels disappearance to a drink
binge, and at one point, she took off on a two-week vacation to Santa
Barbara without informing her director,
Monta Bell. Bell asked studio management to
terminate Eagels' contract, which they did. Fortunately, there was
enough footage so Bell could salvage the film without re-shooting.
John Gilbert said of Eagels, "She
seemed to hate the movies for a popularity they could not give
her....[The] blind, unreasoning adulation of the movie fans was a type
of popularity she spurned. Fundamentally, Jeanne was much superior to
us. Movie actors are crazy to be worshiped. Jeanne Eagels wanted to be
understood and appreciated."
When the film was released, Eagels' performance received mixed reviews,
but the picture was a failure primarily due to the poor reviews
garnered by Gilbert. Critics rejected the great lover playing a naive
mama's boy in this film. Gilbert's career was salvaged shortly
thereafter by the release of his second film with Great Garbo,
Love (1927), which was a smash hit at
the box office.
When Eagels began touring the East Coast in "Her Cardboard Lover," the
Boston engagement was cut in half to one week as Eagels reportedly was
ill. After the play moved to Chicago with a revivified Eagels, she
divorced Coy in 1928, citing physically abuse and accusing him of
breaking her jaw. Eagels claimed that Coy had threatened to wreck her
budding movie career by ruining her face. Coy, a heavy boozer like his
soon-to-be ex-wife, pleaded no contest and the divorce was granted.
The Mid-Western tour of "Her Cardboard Lover" moved on to Milwaukee,
but Eagels was a no-show at both the Milwaukee and the subsequent St.
Louis performances. She claimed that she was suffering from ptomaine
poisoning, but eye-witness accounts placed her in Chicago on a long
boozing binge when she was supposed to have been in Milwaukee. Her
indefensible and unprofessional behavior brought her an 18-month
suspension from Actor's Equity, which banned her from performing on
stage with any other Equity actor for the length of the suspension. The
ban essentially ended her stage career in New York and the rest of the
country, although it could not stop her from appearing by herself on
stage in non-Equity venues. Eagels hit the vaudeville circuit,
performing scenes from "Rain." She also appeared in movies as producers
were desperate for trained stage people with the advent of sound, and
she eventually made more money from the film industry and vaudeville
than she ever had from the "legitimate" stage.
Ironically, it was Monta Bell, now working at
Paramount's Astoria Studios in New York, who hired Jeanne Eagels for
her film comeback. In 1929, Bell announced that even though Equity
didn't want Eagels, he wanted her, for she had been the consummate
professional during the making of
Man, Woman and Sin (1927). The
man who had urged the MGM brass to fire her now told the press that he
had actually urged MGM to sign Eagels to long-term contract for more
pictures.
The first movie Eagels made for Paramount was the
Monta Bell-produced
The Letter (1929), which reunited
Eagels with W. Somerset Maugham.
Katharine Cornell had had a Broadway
hit with Maugham's play as the murderous adulteress, and Eagels
delivered an electrifying, legendary performance in the role on film.
After Eagels received rave reviews for her
The Letter (1929), Paramount took
Bell's advice and signed her to a contract for two more pictures,
Jealousy (1929) and
The Laughing Lady (1929).
She began shooting "Jealousy" (1929) with the English actor Anthony
Bushnell, whom she had hand-picked to be her leading man, but during
filming it was apparent that Bushnell's voice was not registering well
on the sound equipment. Bushnell was replaced by the up-and-coming star
Fredric March, who later said Eagels was "great" to work with, but that
the movie they made together was a "stinker." There were rumors that
Eagels had suffered a nervous breakdown while filming "Jealousy", but
Paramount denied there had been any trouble with their new diva.
However, Eagels asked to be let out of her contract for "The Laughing
Lady" on the grounds that she was either ill or because she didn't like
the script, and the studio obliged, replacing her with Ruth Chatterton.
About her management of her personal affairs, Eagels said, "I cannot
bear to transact any of my own business or make any of my own
professional arrangements. I have an aversion to it I cannot overcome.
I can't read the papers, either. Mention of my personal life, even tho
I expect it, acts terribly on my nerves. I suppose I'm an odd person."
It was reported that now that the Actors Equity ban was due to expire
in the fall of 1929, Eagels was preparing to return to Broadway. In
September, Eagles underwent successful surgery to treat ulcers on her
eyes, a condition was caused by her sinusitis. Two weeks after surgery,
on the night of October 3, 1929, as Eagels was preparing for a night
out on the town, she fell ill and was taken to a private 5th Avenue
hospital. In the hospital waiting room, she suffered a convulsion and
died.
Three autopsies were conducted over the following three months and
reached three different conclusions as to the cause of her death, which
was variously attributed as an overdose of alcohol, the tranquilizer
chloral hydrate, and heroin in the successive autopsy reports. All
three substances likely were in her system when she died, and it was
suggested that the unconscious Eagels had received a sedative from the
first doctor to treat her, and that subsequently a second doctor, not
knowing she had already been sedated, had unknowingly given the
unconscious actress a second shot, thus causing the overdose that
killed her.
When her estate went through probate, it was worth an estimated $52,000
(approximately $562,000 in 2005 dollars) after her debts and funeral
costs were deducted. Dying intestate, the estate went to her mother. A
wake was held at Campbell's funeral home in New York City, the same
establishment that had handled Rudolph Valentino's funeral. Reportedly,
her movie "Jealousy" was playing across the street from the funeral
home as she lay in her casket, finally at peace. Her body was sent to
Kansas City, where a Catholic mass and requiem was held, and she was
laid to rest with her father and a brother.
Eagels was posthumously nominated for a 1929 Best Actress Academy Award
for her role in "The Letter," the first actor to be so honored. She
lost out to superstar Mary Pickford, one of the founders of the
Academy, who took the Oscar home to Pickfair for her performance in
"Coquette," her first talkie.
Jeanne Eagels' life was limned in the 1957 film _Jeanne Eagels_, which
starred Kim Novak. This film is
fictionalized biography that whitewashed the truth about Eagels' life.
In recent years, there have been rumors that Eagels enjoyed same-sex
relationships with other women, but the rumors remain unsubstantiated.
In her lifetime, she was romantically linked to many famous men,
including the conductor Arthur Fiedler,
the gambler "Nick the Greek" Dandalos, and the theater critic
Ward Morehouse. She was pursued by
producer David Belasco, theater
owner Lee Shubert, and the Prince of Wales, the future
Duke of Windsor.
About actors, Jeanne Eagels was quoted as saying, "We are glorious,
unearthly people, set above all others because of our genius, our
capacity to sway others, to make them laugh and cry, or make them live
a romance we but play." In the Academy Award-winning
All About Eve (1950),
writer-director
Joseph L. Mankiewicz has the critic
Addison DeWitt tell the great fictional diva Margo Channing (played by
Leslie Howard's other great
"untrained" co-star, Bette Davis), "Margo,
as you know, I have lived in the theater as a Trappist monk lives in
his faith. I have no other world, no other life -- and once in a great
while I experience that moment of revelation for which all true
believers wait and pray. You were one. Jeanne Eagels another."
The actor playwright Noël Coward said, "Of
all the actresses I have ever seen, there was never one quite like
Jeanne Eagels," while actress-playwright-Academy
Award-nominated-screenwriter Ruth Gordon, a friend of Eagels, said of
her, "Jeanne Eagels was the most beautiful person I ever saw and if you
ever saw her, she was the most beautiful person YOU ever saw."
Kathleen Kennedy, her co-star in "Rain," said, "I sincerely doubt if
Jeanne Eagels really knew, in spite of her pretensions, that she was a
great actress. She was. Many times backstage I'd be waiting for my
entrance cue and suddenly Jeanne would start to build a scene, and [we]
would look up from our books at once. Some damn thing- some power,
something- would take hold of your heart, you senses, as you listened
to her, and you'd thrill to the sound of her."
John D. Williams, the director of "Rain," called her an acting genius.
"Acting genius--that is, the power of enhancing a written character to
a plane that neither author nor director can lay claim to -- Miss
Eagels had at her beck and call, whether in tragedy or in comedy."