In Praise of Laurette Taylor: “The Rocks Became Real.”

If you know about 20th century American theatre, you know about Laurette Taylor.

I never saw her live. How could I? She died in 1946, right after her triumphant raise-the-bar-for-everyone-for-all-time performance as Amanda Wingfield in the premiere production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. After years of obscurity (she had been a star earlier in her life, and then went on a 10-year bender – her words – after her husband died), she came back for one more performance, and changed everything. Her performance as Amanda was as definitive as Marlon Brando’s as Stanley Kowalski, it’s just that it wasn’t ever captured on film. We can only imagine it. We can only take the words of the many many many people who saw that production of The Glass Menagerie who say that Laurette Taylor was something new, something special, it was a performance that touched the Gods. (Here’s just one of the quotes from someone who saw it.) Responses to Laurette Taylor in Glass Menagerie could fill a book.

Lynn Kear has written a new biography of Laurette Taylor, Laurette Taylor, American Stage Legend, and Ms. Kear opens the book with an introduction about her own introduction to the work of Laurette Taylor. Ms. Kear had heard of Taylor, of course, but it was through Rick McKay’s amazing PBS documentary Broadway: The Golden Age that she realized the huge impact that this one performance had on an entire generation of actors. There has got to be about 45 minutes devoted to Laurette Taylor in McKay’s doc. Very soon, there will nobody alive who ever saw her perform. Her genius will be passed on through time, but there is nothing like an eyewitness account. Lynn Kear compiles the comments on Taylor in the documentary:

While directing his documentary Broadway: The Golden Age, By the Legends Who Were There, Rick McKay discovered that Laurette Taylor influenced an entire generation of actors. Ben Gazzara made it clear that “all he ever really wanted to be was Laurette Taylor when he grew up …. ‘How can someone laugh and cry in the same breath? … She changed acting … I think we’ve all been striving to be her one way or another.”

Many of the legendary actors said she was the greatest actor they’d ever seen. Gena Rowlands said, “She was mesmerizing. She was … powerful.” According to Uta Hagen, “She was unforgettable.” A moment later, Hagen, thinking about Laurette in Outward Bound, was overcome with emotion. Charles Durning admitted, “I thought they pulled her off the street. She was so natural.” Martin Landau said, “Laurette Taylor was almost like this woman that found her way into the theatre through the stage door and was sort of wandering around the kitchen.”

Kaye Ballard saw Laurette in The Glass Menagerie and thought, “Ah, she’s not so good. She’s just like everybody you see on the street. I didn’t realize it took a lifetime to get to be that good.” Patricia Neal said of The Glass Menagerie “That was the greatest performance I have ever seen in all my life.” Hal Prince added, “I knew when I watched it and I sat in the balcony, you’ll never see greater acting as long as you live.” Marian Seldes saw The Glass Menagerie before it opened. “And then I saw it three more times. I had to see her. I just had to see her again … She was anything she wanted to be.” Fred Ebb saw The Glass Menagerie seven times. “Laurette Taylor turned around and pulled down her girdle, and I have never been that affected by a stage action in my whole life. It made me weep.” Maureen Stapleton said, “Oh boy …. I can’t describe what she did or how she did it, but boy …” Nanette Fabray saw her in The Glass Menagerie and said, “This, we must preserve this. It never happened.”

It will be preserved, although we can only imagine it now.

And while Laurette Taylor will go down in history for that one performance, she had a long career, very successful in some respects, and then crashingly devastating in others. She lived life hard. She took things hard. Lynn Kear’s biography is an appreciation of Taylor’s talent and filled with first-hand impressions of this or that performance. While it may have taken Tennessee Williams to release her talent in its most fully-expressed form (often it is the ROLE that releases the actor: talent is all well and good, but the material is just as important), there were many other instances over her career where people watched her and thought, “This actress is working on some other level.”

Laurette Taylor was born in 1884. She would become a big Broadway star in 1912. But before that, she spent her time in hotel rooms across the country, touring with shows, having babies, and trying to keep her marriage together. Early on in the book, we learn about Laurette Taylor’s early (and exhausting) sojourn in Seattle, with her brand-new husband (Charles Taylor) and their theatre company. He was a bit of a mover-and-shaker, and started writing melodramas for his teenaged wife to star in.

I loved the following section, where someone in the audience (who would end up being very important himself) was actually able to compare and contrast two different actresses in the same role (often the only way we can realize how great something is.)

Listen to the details with which he remembers Taylor in that long-ago melodrama:

Guthrie McClintic, who later married Katharine Cornell, grew up in Seattle and recalled attending performances by Taylor’s company. He quickly realized that there was something special about Laurette: “[Long] blond curls framed a face of peculiar loveliness, with great, deep-blue eyes that reflected her Irish moods and a radiant smile that seemed to give the lie to the haunting melancholy of her voice. She had for me an inexplicably disturbing appeal …. She was different.”

[Charles] Taylor’s leading lady on stage at that time was Ailleen May. She was a beauty in the style of a Gibson girl and certainly a much more experienced actress than Laurette. She was a fan favorite but a definite contrast to Laurette. According to McClintic, “Miss May was winsome, with a bleached-blond pompadour that never varied no matter what part she was playing – and an off-stage wardrobe of big hats with waving ostrich plumes and dresses with peekaboo tops (very daring), mostly in baby blue, that made the stage-door mob gasp when she came out after matinees. She spoke to all of them and they followed her up the hill to her hotel. She was a great favorite. Miss Taylor was not so popular, perhaps because she was concerned more with her acting than with hobnobbing with the customers. For me, magic hovered over her like a halo.”

After May left the company, lured away by a rival producer, Laurette took over her roles. McClintic noticed that Laurette played May’s roles with a different style. For example, he’d seen May in Stolen by Gypsies, a typically overheated melodrama. In the play the mother’s soul travels into the daughter’s body, affording the actor the opportunity to play both mother and daughter. “As I recall Miss May’s entrance down a painted rock runway, her bleached-blond hair was exquisitely marcelled, her make-up was impeccably pink-and-white, her costume of red china silk was jingling with Chinese yen, and her gold sandals were immaculate, a great tribute to the roads over which she had traveled – she obviously had not run, even from her dressing room. Her first request was for a drink of water, of which she took two dainty sips from the miner’s dipper that eager hands had rushed to her; and then one of the miners, removing his hat, asked the name of the wee bairn. Miss May, grasping the prop papoose, vocalized thus: ‘I call her Lone Star because she is the only star’ – and left it at that, while the miner wiped away a tear.”

Laurette took the part in an entirely new direction. “Laurette Taylor’s performance was as different as chalk from cheese. On her entrance, you saw a dark hand grasp a rock for support as slowly she pulled herself into view. The rocks became real. Her natural blond curls were obscured by dark hair that had been in wind and rain. Her clothes were torn and soiled; her sandals revealed feet that were dirty and bloody. She literally collapsed. Her speech was incoherent. (No dressing-room trek, this.) When she got her drink of water it was as if a thirsty plant was absorbing it and gradually showing signs of life. And when she was asked the name of the child, she looked at the prop she was holding and it became active. You felt her heart beat faster as she held it closer. She transformed that ‘Lone Star’ speech into something that was motherhood and longing and desperation. The actors around her, with their assumed Western accents, were forgotten. We were in the presence of a dimensional person wracked with emotion, her great eyes haunted with the image of what was to be her destiny – her husband and the knife! That moment Laurette Taylor opened my eyes to the facts of acting.”

This is a perfect example of what John Strasberg (son of Lee Strasberg, and wonderful acting teacher himself) said once to us, his students:

A good actor can transform WHO they are. A great actor can transform WHERE they are.

Laurette Taylor had the ability, through the sheer power of her own imagination and belief, to transform WHERE she was, and to make an audience believe that transformation.

How did the rocks “become real” and stop being papier-mache set-pieces? They became real because Laurette Taylor believed they were real.