CECIL B. DeMILLE AND THE GOLDEN CALF.


Chapter One:

“Who Knows Where the Chain May Go?”

Soon after his 70^th birthday, in parallel with his planning of the epic testament of his remake of The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille turned to the planning of a long-delayed project, his own testament and autobiography. In keeping with a DeMille production, it was to be meticulously prepared and researched by his own long term staff and his chosen book editor, Donald Hayne. Another writer, Art Arthur, hired as a publicist for The Ten Commandments in 1954, was later added to speed up the cumbersome process. By 1957 DeMille had amassed great folios of background material, and voluminous research on the origins of the DeMille family. He had traced his father’s patrimony back to one Gillis deMil, born in Flanders, today’s Netherlands, in 1280. The lineage was followed down to Anthony DeMil, a Haarlem baker, who sailed to the New World in 1658. “The first DeMil house in America,” wrote the writers, in Cecil’s voice, “stood near the tip of Manhattan, in what is now Bowling Green.”
In contrast to his Dutch Reformed Church forebears, whom he continued to trace down the centuries, Cecil had little to say about the origins of his mother, Matilda Beatrice, except to mention that one of his great-great-grandfathers was a small merchant, Ralph Samuel, in Liverpool, England. It took another biographer, Ann Edwards, chronicler of the wider DeMille family saga, to pin down the immediate genealogy of Beatrice and the German Jewish origins of her ancestor, who had settled in England in 1779. Beatrice had been born in 1853, to Cecilia Wolff and Sylvester Samuel, a watch-maker. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1871, and it is probable (given the lists of ship’s passengers through the previous years) that this was not Sylvester Samuel’s first trip to America. The family was in fact part of the relatively wealthy and small Jewish merchant class which had prospered in England, before the arrival of the mass immigration of Jews from Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Their arrival long preceded the desperate voyages of those “poor, huddled masses” beckoned across the ocean by Miss Liberty’s outstretched torch.
It is curious, and significant, that Cecil dropped the Jewish origins of his mother from his own tale, though this was consistent with his earlier insistence that it was from his mother, as much as from his Episcopalian father, that he derived his devout Christian beliefs. Her marriage to Henry Churchill De Mille, in 1876, took place against her parents’ objections, though they were not, it appears, heavily orthodox, as they had enrolled their daughter with the Philokalia Musical and Literary Association of Brooklyn, a distinctly secular cultural group. Her acquaintance with Henry de Mille began, according to Ann Edwards, at the Association’s presentation of an Irish comedy, on November 4th, 1872, “in which she played the flirtatious and frolicome heroine, complete with Irish dialect,” somewhat at odds with her “exotic beauty… produced by the Sephardic Jewish background… olive skinned, almond eyed…” Henry, in contrast, is described as a “fair skinned, effete looking, wire-thin Southerner with burnished red hair, myopic hazel eyes, and an aristocratic and aquiline nose.” Given Cecil Blount DeMille’s robust physique and energetic temperament, one can conclude he took after his Sephardic, rather than his Netherlandish background, notwithstanding his own reluctance to embrace it.
Henry was the son of William deMill and Margaret Blount Hoyt of North Carolina, where William was the Mayor of the town of Washington and a succesful, but apparently not slave-owning merchant. Having joined the Confederate Army in May 1861, he served throughout the Civil War and was captured at Greenville, North Carolina and imprisoned by the Union in February 1865. (This information was later presented on behalf of Cecil during the Second World War to obtain for him a “Cross of Military Service” from the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1942.) William’s children were part of the many heirs of the South’s defeat, but for Henry, the eldest at twelve years of age when the war ended, opportunity beckoned when he was sent to the Adelphi Academy – later named the Lockwood – in Brooklyn, New York. There, his theatrical and literary ambitions were nurtured, and his “Valedictory Address,” on leaving the Academy, in June of 1871, recalls his happy college days:

“You all remember the story of Androcles and the lion – how the savage monarch of the forest (though confined three days without food) crouched at the foot of his former benefactor, and licked the hand that had extracted from his foot the thorn. And shall not we, immortal beings, realize our own indebtedness to those who have labored with so much skill to extract from our hearts and minds the thorns of bad habits and ignorance?
We have been placed in a noble institution, guided by men and women of Christian character, of learning, and of talent… They have not contented themselves with casting out the evil spirit from our inner houses, and left them empty for its return. They have striven to furnish us with the means of resisting the manifold temptations of life, and to mark out for us the path of duty, which leads to the love and esteem of our fellow creatures and the approbation of our God… Every true pupil of this academy has stricken from his dictionary the words `despair,’ and `I can’t,’ as expressions only fit for idlers and cowards, and substituting in their places those magic words, `can,’ and `will,’ he presses with vigor onward, his soul, as the poet expresses it, darting `forward on the wings of just ambition to the grand result.”

Family lore has it that Henry’s mother devoutly wished him to be a priest, but Beatrice, after she married him on July 1st, 1876, strongly encouraged him towards a literary career. He had by that time graduated from New York’s Columbia College and was teaching at his alma mater, the Lockwood. Beatrice herself taught elocution at the same school. Their first son, William Churchill de Mille, was born, on July 25th, 1878, at the home of his grandfather and namesake, in North Carolina. The Federal Census of June 1880 finds them living at 408 23rd Street in Manhattan, a genteel residential area, listed as lodgers to a family named Lewis. Henry was teaching at Columbia Grammar School and had just sold an 18-part serial story to a magazine called Leslie’s Weekly. Soon after, the De Milles moved to Ashfield, Massachussets, where he gave private lessons in Latin, Greek and mathematics, and where his second son was born, and named Cecil Blount, after his maternal and paternal grandmothers, Cecilia and Margaret Blount.
Cecil writes that his father’s diary on the auspicious day of his arrival noted succinctly: “August 12th my little boy Cecil was born.” Cecil, or the ghost writers of his autobiography, added: “Eight words, after all, are a longer history than most of the world’s population has had or will have… If any one who has ever lived had not lived, the whole history of the world might be different, for who knows where the chain may go?” That simple summer day had to made, in retrospect, significant, though no comets had trailed through the sky. While imbued with the can-do ethos of his college days, Henry De Mille’s ambitions were as ever quite modest. He had been bitten by the stage bug at at early age, and saw his vocation in the writing of plays which would express the edifying tenets of his religious faith, but would also forward new and progressive ideas. “I do not for a moment wish to decry what is ethically right,” he wrote mildly in 1891 in the New York Dramatic Mirror, “but I think that conventionalism often works much harm.” In 1888, when he became the Associate Director, with a Mr Franklin H. Sargent, of the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts, he told the New York Times writer who queried him about the “primary work of the course”:

“The first thing to be accomplished is to teach them (the students) to read… They are not allowed to `elocute,’ but are required to act. Our idea is to teach them intelligently and well, and veil the fact that they have been taught to read. They must be artfully artless in all their work… Serious work or comedy draws equally on the emotions, and the voice given, emotional power is the great instrument of the actor… The dramatic school is to be a powerful adjunct to the theatre of the United States of the future, and its capacity for good is only just beginning to be recognized…”

By this time Henry De Mille had presented two of his own plays upon the stage, including the first of those he was to co-write with playwright-producer-impresario David Belasco, soon to become the most dynamic force on the American stage. This was The Wife, presented in 1887. Before that, he had made his mark with his second produced work, The Main Line, or Rawson’s Y, co-written with Charles Barnard. (His first play had been John Delmer’s Daughters; or Duty, a three-act comedy, briefly presented – for one week only – in 1883.) The sub-title of Henry’s breakthrough work was “An Idyl of the Railroad.” Presented by manager Daniel Frohman at the reopening of his Lyceum Theatre in New York, The Main Line was noted for its dramatic effects, in particular, “a scene representing a snow blockade in the Rocky Mountains, the realistic effect being greatly heightened by the passage across the stage of a full-sized locomotive and a `cyclone’ rotary snow-plough.”
One can note how the theatre, several years before the first halting experiments by Thomas Edison and other pioneers to project moving pictures, was striving towards that condition of “realism” that, in the end, only the cinema, and the De Milles of the future, could produce. The opening lines of Henry’s railroad drama, however, could well have graced many a coming western oater, as Little Prairie Flower, a “very buxom, jovial-looking woman of middle age,” enters on stage:

Prairie F.: That 11:34 ain’t in sight. Land O’Goshen! What on `art am I going to do? Nothing here but them hackmetack doughnuts and pies that came C.O.D. week before last; guess how they’re B.A.D. (Calls) Possy! Lands take the gal! If I was her mother, she’d toe the mark or my name ain’t Little Prairie Flower. Possy! (A crash heard in station.)

This kind of frontier romance, combining heightened melodrama with “realistic” characters and a moral dilemma resolved by true love, came in the historical period of the construction of the great transcontinental railways. The Northern Pacific Railroad was completed after twenty years labour in 1883. In 1882, Henry De Mille had been engaged by manager Frohman – who would play a great part in the career of the de Milles, father and sons, for many years – to be a playreader at the new Madison Square Theatre. At the same time, David Belasco was hired as its stage manager.
This was a serendipitous meeting. Belasco was a suitable star in his own production of his own mercurial life. Fact and fiction blended perfectly in his account of his early years. The son of Jewish parents who had, he claimed, been the first passengers to cross the Panama isthmus en route to a new life in gold rush California, he was produced in 1853 in San Francisco, a town full of opportunities for good folks and sinners alike. When his parents moved to British Columbia in 1858, Belasco claimed he had grown up among the native Songhee Indians of Victoria, and fell under the influence of a Catholic priest, remaining two years in a monastery before decamping alone to the Rio de Janeiro Circus. Diligent biographers have cast doubt on this narrative, but all agree that young Belasco was back with his family in San Francisco in 1865 – where he was, despite the alleged Catholicism, properly Bar-Mitsvaed.
Consumed by a powerful compulsion to the stage, young David produced his own plays and found a mentor in one Tom Maguire, redoubtable builder and manager of Californian theatres. Amid San Francisco’s cyclical booms and busts, Belasco appeared for Maguire in such venues as the Egyptian Hall on Geary Street, which specialized in eery stage illusions: “Gas lamps were ingeniously concealed so as to give the impression of a phosphorescent light from ghostlike bodies…” Shadows were cast across a glass, which produced an illusion of ghosts shaking tables and chairs, while Belasco gave readings of “The Maniac” and “The Maiden’s Prayer.” This apparent freakery was significant in sparking the young man’s interest in the effects of imaginative stage lighting – which would, in the fullness of time and the twists and turns of combination, play a vital role in the younger de Mille’s ideas of quite another medium. Without a pause, Belasco took every theatrical opportunity, performing the gamut of roles from Richard the Third to Dickens’ Fagin, as well as producing plays and adaptations, including a controversial Passion Play which featured James O’Neill, father-to-be of playwright Eugene, as Jesus, removed from the Cross not to the cave of burial but to the San Francisco jail. By 1882, San Francisco and Belasco had all but exhausted each other, and Gustave Frohman, brother of the afore-mentioned Daniel, beckoned him across the country, to New York.
It was Belasco who, as director, produced the spectacular effects that made the critics gasp at Henry De Mille’s “Idyl of the Railroad.” His collaboration with de Mille produced four successful plays between 1887 and 1890: The Wife, Lord Chumley, The Charity Ball, and Men and Women. Despite this, he gave only a glancing mention to his partner in his own account of his stage life, The Theatre Through Its Stage Doors, published in 1919. The only partners in his ventures Belasco offered any praise were actors. Since Belasco produced plays with all three de Milles, Henry, William and Cecil, in turn, over two decades, the omission is curious, until one hears the tale – to be recounted further on – of his great split with Cecil over the authorship of one his flagship plays – The Return of Peter Grimm, produced in 1911. The de Milles were all but written out of Belasco’s life, and he shouldered on well into the 1940’s, America’s longest lasting theatrical mogul.
While Belasco excelled in the technical staging and production of the plays he co-wrote with Henry De Mille, it was De Mille who mainly attended to the text – dialogue, characters, plot, construction. Critics for the most part applauded the plays, though there was resistance, as an article in the March 4, 1893 issue of The Illustrated American, entitled “About A Certain School of Plays,” reveals:

Mr. De Mille discovered the possibilities for entertainment in the utter commonplaceness and puerility of the humors, sentiments, and motives of the school of which Mr. De Mille was a chief exponent; but in comparison with the placidity and prudery of “The Wife” and “The Charity Ball,” the really mild effusions that Robertson, Pinero, Gilbert and Howard had in lighter moments sprinkled on the boards, proved strong drink…
An understanding of the distinctive and essential characteristics of Mr. De Mille’s dramas is best attained by the circumstances and environment that must in all probability have exerted a forceful influence on his mind and method. At the beginning of his scenic experiences he was employed as a reader of plays in a little box of a theatre… under the control of some gentlemen more or less commercially concerned with virtue and piety… They set out to find in dramatic form the sentimental platitudes, the innocuous jocularities, the labored namby-pambyism, whose charm and attractiveness had brought prosperity to their religious periodicals.
These pious patrons of De Mille, the anonymous writer noted, had not only mentored a new type of play, but also a new audience whose previous diversions had been consigned to “Sabbath-school picnics, strawberry festivals, sociables and possibly an organ recital.” To thrill this audience, the author stated, De Mille would sprinkle his anodyne dramas with a “Damn!” or two, entrusted “to some player whose personal purity and whose manner of performance would remove any hint of violence or vulgarity from the objurgation.” To further spice things up, “an element of farce” was added, as the patrons of this type of drama “insisted on getting a giggle for their money.” The writer continued to put the boot into De Mille, who by then was a posthumous target, by mocking his presentations of love:

From the calf love of the impuberal twain, to the senile amorousness of some pursy widower and anxious spinster, through all the gradations of childhood, youth, middle age, and ripe maturity, they showed us love in all its phases, forms and conditions save those of actuality. It squatted on hall stairs, in scenes that imitated the absurd decoration and construction of the prevailing mode; it coddled behind screens; it nestled and cooed in freaks of upholstery; it sniffled in the softened light of stained glass church windows; it moaned in the face of the calcium moon; but it never deceived anybody that it really was love. It was never passionate, or proud, or willful, or jealous, or exacting, or cruel, or vengeful. A homely, prosaic, polite and prudent emotion it was that De Mille and his disciples portrayed…

Henry De Mille’s plays are indeed mild fare for our tastes, long preceding the modern American theatre of psychodrama and extreme emotions reflecting a deranged, corrupt and/or decaying society. The Wife is a tale of a woman “parted from her lover through the machinations of an adventuress to whom he had rashly engaged himself in former years, and whose plot is helped on by the villain to further some political aims.” Of course virtue triumphs in the end. The Charity Ball presented a clergyman as hero, who has “the manly as well as the churchly virtues, and is neither a prig nor a canter.” The villain is “only a human one, a victim of the ambitions and social tendencies of the day.” Love is good, money grubbing is bad. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle summed up, in 1890: “The whole play is an outcome and presentment of good impulses, moral and artistic, and the impression that it leaves is wholesome.” Lord Chumley is a piece of fluff set in a mythical England of Henry’s American imagination, where people say “By Jove!” and “By Jingo!” and once again true love comes up trumps. Men and Women is a far more substantial work, if verbose and somewhat ponderous, set in the New York world of bankers and politicians. Subtitled “A Drama of Our Times,” the cast includes Israel Cohen, “a rich Hebrew” and President of the Jefferson National Bank, a Governor of Arizona, an ex-member of Congress, a rich stockbroker, cashiers, etcetera. The combination of a liberal Jew, a conservative churchman, embezzlement and speculation, made the play controversial, and despite being panned for failing to display any “evidence of conspicuous originality,” by the New York Herald, it was a hit with the public. Of all Henry’s plays, it had the longest reach, and was filmed twice – as a silent movie – once in 1914 under the direction of James Kirkwood and once by his son William, in 1925.
Henry’s last completed play, The Lost Paradise, was produced on stage in August 1891 by Charles Frohman’s company (Charles being Daniel’s second brother), a play of “the war of classes against masses.” Its German derivation seemed to free Henry to present more radical ideas about “the cause of the… laboring man.” The “finely-bred daughter of a rich factory owner,” the New York Times summed up the original German play by Ludwig Fulda from which it was adapted, “learns in time that her father’s sturdy foreman is a worthier suitor than a Berlin military fop.”
By this time, Henry had split from Belasco, who had become intensely involved in his obsession with furthering the acting career of Mrs. Leslie Carter, a 27-year old millionaire’s wife who had been sued for divorce on the grounds of her adultery with five male lovers, and, in Belasco’s own words, rose rapidly “to the place of great distinction she afterward attained as a star under my guidance.” Henry turned to his teaching at the Theatre of Arts, and to the writing of a new play, The Promised Land, which would deal with the struggles of American working people. But it was never finished. Late in January, 1893, while attending a Charles Frohman production in New York, he fell ill, and returned to the old “pre-revolutionary” house he had bought with money inherited by Beatrice from her father in Pompton, New Jersey. He was diagnosed with typhoid fever and died ten days later, on February 10th, 1893.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that he had “died in his prime…when he had given hope that he would yet be great.” Hopes for a dignified religious cremation were somewhat dashed, according to the press, when, “while the author’s body was being incinerated the body of Michael Krenzol, the New York cigar maker who had committed suicide and left a request that a band of music should accompany his remains to the crematory and also provided that three kegs of beer should be drank, arrived.”
Even in death, piety and the profane clashed, and not for the last time, to disorder the De Mille plans.

 

 

	[previous]	[top]	[next]

:: home :: fiction :: non-fiction :: films :: news :: :: unpublished :: links :: about :: contact :: sitemap ::