MCKEE RANKIN: THE ACTOR AS PLAYWRIGHT

David Beasley

McKee Rankin (1844-1914), from Windsor, Ontario, became one of the greatest actors on the American stage for a half-century. He also earned a reputation as the best stage manager and the best teacher of acting. This article deals with his talent as a playwright within the context of the important plays of his day. His The Danites brought a new realism to the stage, and his Abraham Lincoln introduced historical realism as drama.

McKee Rankin (1844-1914), né a Windsor (Ontario), fut, pendant une cinqauantaine d'années, l'un des plus grands comédiens de la scène américaine, où il acquit aussi la réputation d'être l'un des meilleurs régisseurs et professeurs d'art dramatique. Cet article traite de son talent de dramaturge par rapport aux pièces les plus saillantes de son époque. La pièce de McKee Rankin, The Danites, apporta un nouveau réalisme scénique, tandis que son Abraham Lincoln dramatisa de façon réaliste l'histoire récente.

McKee Rankin as an actor had his admirers: he was acclaimed as the best Macbeth, and second best to Tommaso Salvini in the role of Othello;¹ he was considered by many, particularly ladies, to be the best actor on Broadway in his younger days; in his maturity he was unsurpassed as a character actor. In his later years he was also considered the best stage director and the best teacher of acting. It may be that his talents were too spread out for his admirers to fix on any one asset and dedicate a monument to it. Moreover, unlike the commemorated Edwin Booth, he did not die at the apex of his career. In his last years he was known for his large girth, for his habit of drinking two bottles of champagne before breakfast and for his inability to pay his hotel bills. In the post-Victorian age one did not raise statues to those who had fallen from grace. But we have surveyed his acting career elsewhere and paid homage to his great abilities.² Here, we shall examine his work as playwright from 1870 to 1913 when his last work appeared but a year before his death.

In considering plays of the latter half of the Nineteenth Century we are first faced with the problem of finding them. Few were published. Even if they were copyrighted difficulty arises: The Copyright Office of the Library of Congress threw out its collection prior to 1900, or so I was told by a member of its staff. My source may not be entirely correct, because another source reported that all that was necessary for copyright during the period was to submit the title and a few representative lines. One hopes that some of the playscripts may be discovered in theatre archives.

Rankin was relatively well educated. He and his older brother, George, attended the Gower Street School for boys in London, England, which provided a better education than that offered in the grammar schools of their native Windsor, Ontario. Later they attended Upper Canada College, but McKee, restless for action in the theatre, left within a year. Not until he had spent a half-dozen years on the stage and attained star status did he begin writing. It was in Chicago in 1870 that he astounded his fellow actors with the success of his first play, 'Rip Van Winkle.'

One is immediately struck by the familiarity of the title and the playwright's commercial instinct. Washington Irving's story had been dramatized most recently by Dion Boucicault, the Irish playwright, in 1865, at the request of the actor Joseph Jefferson who, gifted with an ability to enhance the most pathetic humour, toured England and America for years in the play. Rankin was declared indistinguishable from Jefferson in the role, which was an enormous compliment.

Rankin's version included roles for young children, calculated to appeal to the sentimental audiences of the day. But here again Rankin's practical eye was at work. At the same time, he wrote a melodrama, 'Nannie; or, the Dutch Orphans,' which called for performances from the same children he and his company took on tour by the newly completed (1870) railway to the Far West. They met with great success in the mining camps and pioneer settlements in California, Nevada and Oregon, and Rankin returned to the East laden with silver and gold dust. He returned also with the memory of unforgettable scenes and experiences, particularly of the theatre in Salt Lake City where Brigham Young and his forty children applauded from their centre box. These experiences inspired him to construct one of the most successful dramas of the Nineteenth Century, to thereby set a new trend and make himself very rich for a time.

Stories of the West were becoming popular. Rankin, discussing his idea for a western drama with friends, listened to an actor known as Philadelphia Jim recreate scenes from Joachin Miller's The First Family of the Sierras, dealing with miners in California. In disguise among the miners is a girl, Nancy Williams, marked for assassination by the Mormon's Avenging Angels or Danites because she was the daughter of settlers believed to be among those who had slain the prophet, Joseph Smith, on the migration to Utah. Rankin had seen a few of the Danites when he was in Salt Lake City, where they formed the Mormon secret police. The Mountain Meadows Massacre which they perpetrated, however, was the subject of an ongoing investigation by federal authorities who at that very time had wrung a confession of guilt from one of them. Rankin recalled:

I got a copy of the book next day from the publishers and after dinner I started to read it aloud to my wife. I never stopped until I had finished it, about 3 o'clock next morning, and neither of us were the least bit sleepy either. The next evening found me at work on the construction of the framework, so to speak, of the play.³

Rankin, with an actor's instinct, recognized that the story needed another element to be dramatic, something to provoke the passions of the miners: love, jealousy - in other words, an attractive woman. In the story the only woman, Nancy Williams, was disguised as a miner throughout the play. He found what he needed in an anonymous story in Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly.⁴ It described miners preparing for the arrival of a schoolteacher in such a manner that the supposedly 'uppity' educated woman would not last long. To their surprise the schoolteacher was a beautiful woman, a widow who quickly brought out the best in them. He incorporated the widow-schoolteacher into the second act of his play.

When the demands of his own acting caused him to abandon work on it, he turned the five-act scenario over to an old friend, P.A. Fitzgerald, who agreed to write the dialogue for $25 per act. Fitzgerald delivered the first two acts in four days, the third act in another four days, and the last two weeks later. He then hanged himself from the transom of his bedroom. Because Joaquin Miller, after the play's success, claimed that Rankin stole the play from him, I quote Rankin's story of the authorship, having found it to be the most reliable source:

After the play was accepted (at the Broadway Theatre in New York) we thought it a good idea to have Joaquin Miller father the play, as it had been taken almost entirely from his story, and he was plainly entitled to a rakeoff, as we say. I wrote him care of the Chicago publishers, and after some weeks of delay received an answer from him which took me several days to decipher. As a matter of fact I never did really translate it, but I made out enough to know that if I saw anything in the story of 'The First Families of the Sierras' that I wanted to help myself.
    A few evenings later I was sitting in the green room of the Chestnut Street Theatre when a tall, bearded man, with long hair, came in. He had on a frock coat and carpet slippers. Extending his hand, he gave me his full name, Joaquin Miller. Of course I was delighted to see him and after a little chat he made an appointment to come to my house the next day and hear the play read. We soon came to a bargain, by the terms of which I was to pay him $5000 for the use of his name and the material taken from his story. When the money was paid a few days later, 'The Danites' became my sole property for all time, and poor old Fitzgerald, who really wrote most of the play and introduced the most beautiful thoughts in the whole work, only realized $125 out of it.⁵

It was true that Miller's book of vignettes of Western characters appeared in 1876 and that Bret Harte's play, Two Men of Sandy Bar, had begun to introduce theatre audiences to western scenes in the summer of that year and could have inspired Rankin to produce a play with a Western theme, as he claimed. It was true that in June 1876 he had some weeks free of acting when Wood's Museum in Philadelphia, where he had spent the previous three months in various roles, went bankrupt. He became stage manager and lead actor of the reorganized theatre for the summer, after which he had to prepare for a full year of demanding roles at the Chestnut Street Theatre. It was true that Franklyn Fyles (who called himself 'File') had his first play produced at the Chestnut Street Theatre in April 1877; but it appears doubtful that Rankin would have approached him to write dialogue for 'The Danites' as Fyle's son claimed.⁶ It was also true that P.A. Fitzgerald hanged himself on 3 November 1876, in a fit of despondency. Rankin first met him at the Arch Street Theatre when they joined Mrs. John Drew's company in January 1865, liked him for his education (he wrote a fine book on elocution), his poetry (for which he was praised in Philadelphia) and his two plays which were produced at Philadelphia theatres in the seventies. Rankin also sympathized with him because he was unable to find employment as an actor for some years, which led to his depressed state of mind.⁷ Fitzgerald's widow confirmed that he began writing the play in September 1876, and identified the author of the anonymous short story that Rankin adapted into his play as John Habberton, although she was wrong on other points.⁸ Rankin pretended not to know the author of the story till the day he died, perhaps fearing he would have to compensate him.

If the play was finished in late October, its acceptance for production for the following August in New York could have been accomplished by February of 1877. Joaquin Miller's surprise visit to Rankin would have taken place in April 1877 when he was invited to Philadelphia to give a lecture in the Star Course series. However, the sources which claim that the actor Alexander Fitzgerald wrote the play are wrong. Alex Fitzgerald was acting in stock in Toronto at the time.⁹ It was not until the play opened on Broadway that he was connected with it in the role of the Danite, Bill Hickman. Miller's reference to Fitzgerald as the author in a foreword to the printed play is slanderous; the long-winded printed version in four acts, The Danites in the Sierras, must have been written by Miller long after 'The Danites' was a success. The Rankin-Fitzgerald version, by contrast, demonstrates Rankin's superb talent for constructing a play.¹⁰

Rankin staked all he had on the work, despite a general dislike for the idea among his professional theatre friends. On the night of its production he had to borrow 25 cents to get his wife and daughter to the hotel where they were staying. Two days later his manager had to bail him out of the Ludlow Street Jail, where he was held for debt, in time for him to appear on stage that night. Playing the two principal roles, he and his wife Kate toured the United States and Canada solely in 'The Danites' from the opening night in New York on 22 August 1877 to 7 May 1881 in Montreal, a period which included several months of enormous success in England. Afterwards, Rankin remarked, 'We took a long, long rest, for we needed it.' Eight years later he counted its 2,015th performance; it remained popular long after the vogue for Western drama which it helped spawn had passed from the stage.

It should be remarked in passing that the reviewer of the play's opening night for the New York Times called it 'obscure and tedious.' The reviewer for the New York Daily Tribune, however, reported the birth of a new sort of drama. The play was like a photograph of the wild, rough life of California, vociferous and vulgar, rather than a selection of objects from the surface of life to represent the human emotions beneath it.

Did the play incite Americans against the Mormons as has been claimed? For some years prior to the play's opening, the events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre had been replayed in the press of the nation during the two jury trials that it took to find John Lee guilty of the killings (an arrangement being made that he be found guilty if others were found innocent). The play uses the Danites as backdrop and concentrates on the love triangle involving the unlettered miner Sandy McGee, the schoolteacher Huldah, and Nancy Williams, who acts most of the play disguised as the miner, Billy Piper. Whatever incitement there was (and, by then, the events were history) could be found in the daily press rather than the play. Accompanying the early performances, however, was a four-page broadside, 'The Danites,' giving the background to the secret society and the Mountain Meadows Massacre in detail, including the story of the Williams family, but also showing sympathy for the sufferings of the Mormons. Also, Rankin was not above claiming that his play was inciting: on the programme for Rankin's California Theatre Company production for January 1886 we read:

The Mormon Church Organ at Salt Lake says: 'This Drama has done more than all the sermons by all the preachers to arouse and intensify the bitter Anti-Mormon sentiment that exists today on both sides of the Atlantic.'¹¹

The main influence on the writing of the play was not Bret Harte's undramatic piece but the melodrama Davy Crockett, which opened to great success in New York in 1872 with Rankin's best friend, Frank Mayo, in the title role. This role became part of Mayo's repertoire for two decades. The untutored Davy eventually wins the love of a well-bred young woman, just as rough-hewn but gentle Sandy McGee wins the schoolteacher. 'The Danites,' however, is more complicated and profound.

The idea for Rankin's next play, ''49', came from his own encounter with a long-lost uncle who had joined the Gold Rush, lost touch with his family, and turned up in one of the mining camps at which Rankin played. Whether he actually lived on toast and rats while digging for gold, as Rankin told the story to Joaquin Miller who followed 'The Danites' company on its Western tour in 1878, is a matter of conjecture. Miller dramatized the story, which he called California Gold, for Jim Williamson and his wife, an acting couple who rejected it. The play then came into Rankin's hands. Recognizing his story, Rankin offered to reconstruct the play and pay Miller twenty dollars royalty a performance if he did the literary work. Rankin, with his 'Danites' company in England in the summer and autumn of 1880, wrote to Miller from Liverpool: 'I have been working at ''49' the past two or three weeks and I feel confident it will prove a better piece than the old Danites.'¹² He returned to New York in December with a script ready for Miller's dialogue. In a note written to Miller at the close of January 1881, when 'The Danites' was playing at Haverly's Brooklyn Theatre, Rankin said it would open at Haverly's in September.¹³ But when Miller sent Rankin the script in the summer of 1881, it was in a chaotic state, and Rankin with help from the playwright Archibald Gordon and J.H. Barnes, an English actor with Rankin's company, worked frantically to fix it for the New York opening. Only before it opened in Detroit in December, however, did Leonard Grover, known for his comedies such as Our Boarding House, make it a smashing success. At this point Joaquin Miller persuaded the courts to place an injunction on further performances until the ownership of the play was decided. After the decision went in Rankin's favour, Miller complained for years that Rankin had stolen it.¹⁴

The theme is the pioneer who sticks to his tunnel even after hope is gone, and who finds gold at last. A critic commented:

The character of 'Forty-nine,' played by Mr. Rankin, is in a sense an epic figure, and when he takes the blame of a supposed robbery to shield his son, who is ignorant of his parentage, he achieves a certain distinction. Carrots, the girl he is protecting, and who turns out to be an heiress, was played by Mrs. Rankin, and is an amusing figure. The scene in which the old negro, Sam, identifies Carrots by the song he sang her in her infancy is real drama.¹⁵

The printed version under Miller's name is a fair dramatic piece, comparable to Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana (1859), not only for its local colour and dialogue, but for its raw and clear motivations and the villainous character of Tom Bradshaw who resembles Boucicault's scheming Jacob McClosky. Rankin, however, moved away from funny stock characters based on race and locale and gave deeper and more realistic portrayals of individuals. The 'Chinaman' of Bret Harte and Mark Twain, and the Indian of Boucicault were no longer needed as comic props. ''49,' as it was called when it opened in Chicago, is doubtless a better play than Miller's Forty-Nine, and we await with anticipation the discovery of the script.

We know that Rankin's ''49' had five acts and fifteen characters (sometimes fourteen when the role of the District Messenger was dropped), whereas Miller's Forty-Nine had four acts and eleven characters. Here is a comparison of the roles:

Leonard Grover's successful scripting of the play prompted Rankin to join with him in writing 'The Metropolis,' a drama of New York life in five acts and seven tableaux. Again Frank Mayo's long-run success in The Streets of New York may have prompted this play, which seems not to have been produced. When discovered, the script should demonstrate Rankin's interest in the underclasses, as did the one-act plays written late in his life, such as 'True to Life' which is about a convict returning home after years in prison.

We have the script of 'The Golden Giant,' Rankin's next Western drama, which he wrote with Clay Greene, a San Franciscan dramatist. In it the Rankins tried to continue their success with 'The Danites' and ''49.' The background of the play is interesting: the Rankins bought the rights to a dramatization of Bret Harte's episodic novel Gabriel Conroy in January 1844, but when they staged it at the end of the month it was roundly criticized for its 'want of definiteness' and 'want of dramatic episode.' The New York Dramatic Times recommended an entire remodelling of the piece: 'it will require all the wit and ingenuity of McKee Rankin (no mean dramatist himself) to do it.'¹⁶ On tour with it, Rankin worked at the script until the play received commendable reviews in Boston. But it was still not satisfactory, and when the Rankin Company opened a successful season in San Francisco in June 1885, Rankin asked a local playwright, Clay Greene, to rework the text. Greene, like Grover and Archibald Gordon, had a light dramatic touch, and is now regarded as one of the better journeyman craftsmen of the period. 'Sold play for $5000,' Greene wrote in his memoirs, 'instead of royalty by which performance I probably lost many times that amount of money.'¹⁷ It is unlikely that he had a choice.

Greene cut the play from five to four acts and the cast by one. Kate Rankin added a prologue. The hero, Alex Fairfax, the golden giant, played by McKee Rankin, extends the Sandy McGee character of 'The Danites,' and Bessie, his sister, played by Kate Rankin, is a gamine like Nancy Williams of 'The Danites' and Carrots of ''49.' Fairfax falls in love with and marries a woman visitor, Ethel, who turns out to be the widow of his old partner in a rich gold mine. She is pursued by treacherous men who calumniate her and pressure her to give up her share of the mine and to flee from her happy marriage to Fairfax. The loyalty of Fairfax's friends helps him regain Edith, the mine and their happiness. The plot is tortuous, and the villains, like the vigilantes of the earlier plays, are implacable, but the characters are colourful and the action is entertaining. It is not surprising that after Kate Rankin separated from McKee, she continued the play in her repertoire for years as 'The Golden Giant Mine.' It lacks the clarity of design of Rankin's other two Western plays, but that results from its origin in Bret Harte's only novel, which was a confused and uneven work. To have made a successful play from that material is testimonial to Rankin's determination.

With the fall in popularity of the Western, Rankin turned to writing sensational melodrama in the 1880s. His collaborator was Frederick Maeder, a fellow actor whose mother was a famous stage actress. With Maeder Rankin wrote five plays. Of these only the playscript for The Runaway Wife has been located, although before his death in 1891 Maeder auctioned his manuscripts which may turn up in private collections. It is a well-constructed play. The story concerns an American painter who goes blind from overwork. His faithful wife takes a job in England as a governess to relieve their poverty. She is informed by her sister-in-law, who hates her, that her husband and son are dead. She marries into the nobility. At the end of the third act, fifteen years later, Eastman, the blind artist, and his painter son, Arthur, encounter her at a soirée musicale at Charnleigh Manor, England:

Arthur: Lady Charnleigh, permit me to introduce you to my father. (She advances smiling, hand extended, looks up to Eastman, screams and falls Center in faint).

Curtain.

The fourth act ends with the blind man's discovery by her voice that Lady Charnleigh is his wife. The blind man seizes her by an arm and demands that she (Lady Charnleigh) fall on her knees and beg his son's forgiveness. She claims that she is not his mother. But the blind man's doctor of many years enters and identifies her:

Eastman: My runaway wife! My runaway wife! (pointing finger at her as she stands with head bowed).

In the last act, Eastman's dying sister admits to her treachery in a letter, and Eastman, who has bandages removed from his eyes after an operation, sees again and embraces his runaway wife. Rankin's brother George referred to Rankin and Maeder's play as 'of the Buffalo Bill variety.' He said this in the heat of a quarrel over the authorship of 'The Canuck,' one of their plays, and in reference to Maeder's famous play, 'Buffalo Bill, King of the Bordermen,' which brought Bill Cody from the plains onto the stage.

Rankin's folksy comedies, western realism and society melodrama grew out of the theatrical background of his time. The high-class drama represented by Drury Lane and Covent Garden was undermined in the 1830s when Parliament, believing that the freedom of reproducing higher class drama in the minor houses would raise the public taste, abolished the monopoly held by those two theatres. Within two years the companies of the great houses disbanded and scattered among the minor houses. Covent Garden became an Italian opera house and Drury Lane a circus. The acting tradition whereby actors aspired to the Royal theatres and learned from the great actors the movements and gestures of every scene, and whereby the grouping of the actors on the stage and their relations to each other were the product of the careful study of two or three centuries, was destroyed. Thus an opening was provided for the entrance of the theatre manager who introduced the burlesque, opéra bouffe and the deluge of French plays after 1842.

The French devised innumerable twists in a plot which became a labyrinth, offering at each turn a clue rather than a key. The pleasure came from following the dramatist through this maze. Dion Boucicault owed his livelihood to adapting French plays to the English and American stages, a task which he greatly resented. He got his revenge with a play he adapted from an American dime novel over a single weekend in New York. Called The Colleen Bawn, it was a huge success. When he took it to England, he insisted that theatre managers buy the play with the supporting star actors. Rather than the poor lump sums authors were paid, he demanded and got half of the gross receipts. The author of the play was suddenly the star, and the acting company belonged to the play. Thus the combination system was born and replaced the stock system in which only the star would travel and act with the resident company. Boucicault persuaded the French playwrights to adopt his system in 1866. America took it up after 1872.

This weakening of the theatre manager's grip allowed native writers to introduce more realism. Tom Robertson's domestic and sentimental comedies, for instance, gave new life to the English-speaking theatre in the 1860s. Robertson's dramas provided relief from the elaborate stage machinery of the French melodrama which called for speeding trains and giant waterfalls, not unlike Broadway musicals today. Robertson introduced a central purpose to the drama, surveyed the moral problem impartially and constructed the plot with skill. Rankin, drawing on Robertson's example, wedded realism with melodrama in his plays to heighten the suspense. But in his three Western plays, 'The Danites,' ''49,' and 'The Golden Giant,' he created an original drama from French sentiment, Robertson's skilful plotting and the rough realism of the Far West gleaned from personal experience. With 'The Canuck' Rankin contributed the Canadian experience to a developing American theatre.

His brother claimed that he, George, developed the character of Jean Baptiste Cadeaux in a forty-minute sketch which he produced in Sault Ste. Marie in 1884 in aid of the organ fund of one of the local churches. Later he sued McKee for $10,000 for stealing the play. Without going into the intricacies of this dispute, we can safely surmise that Rankin and Maeder actually constructed the plot in which the daughter of an old Canadian farmer runs off with the son of a Vermont neighbour only to learn that he is already married. She returns to a forgiving father. 'The only originality this particular farmer can offer,' wrote a New York critic, 'is that he wears antiquated front-flap breeches, speaks bad French and worse English, and rejoices in his cognomen of Canuck.' Audiences loved it, however, and Rankin kept it in his repertory for some years. George's contribution was the character and speech pattern of Jean Baptiste Cadeaux. When a copy of 'The Canuck' surfaces we can assess its value as a realistic portrait of a hitherto virtually untouched aspect of North American life.

Yet all the foregoing seems in hindsight a preparation for Rankin's best Abraham Lincoln, of which we have a copy. Although meeting with enormous popularity, it was produced in only five American cities in the autumn of 1891. President Lincoln's son, Robert, thought it was too soon to bring the events back to life, and too many influential people agreed with him for the production to continue. The first dramatization of Lincoln's life to appear on the American stage with approval came from England in 1918. Written by John Drinkwater, Director of the Repertory Theatre in Birmingham, it was a rather stiff portrayal of Lincoln as President with emphasis on the 'malice toward none' aspect of his personality. This Abraham Lincoln was written to inform the British about the Americans who had helped them win the war. In this patriotic guise it was acceptable in the United States, and it stimulated an American response a few years later with Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, in which Drinkwater's saint became a young folk hero. Rankin's Lincoln, on the other hand, gives us a very human character caught in the political meshes of civil war. Unlike Drinkwater's play, it develops the character of John Wilkes Booth and allows us to follow the plotting of the conspirators, beginning with the second act which opens in Mrs. Surratt's house in Washington. Of the eulogies bestowed on the play by the newspapers, one by the Washington Post strikes me as being particularly plausible: 'As the characters grew more and more life-like in the development of the play, it was followed with incessant applause.'

There are four acts and six tableaux. The claim by the New York Herald that 'Nothing in the history of the American stage has ever been produced so realistic' may well have been true, since every scene was staged from documents and photographs and the action hewed to what really happened, as was exemplified in the third act where seven pages of the dialogue from Our American Cousin precede the assassination of Lincoln. The effect must have been to involve the audience intimately with the action of the play-within-the-play and cause it to experience the alarming disturbance of gunshots and death as they actually happened. The play does not end conventionally with the death of Lincoln, but with the shooting of Booth in a barn in Virginia.

Rankin's motive for writing the work came from his life-long belief that nobility lay in character rather than in birth, a trait he brought to many of the roles he played and particularly to Sandy McGee, the miner in 'The Danites.' His father, Colonel Arthur Rankin, was widely known as a foe of slavery and even received Lincoln's permission to raise a regiment in the Detroit area to fight in the Civil War before the Canadian parliament stopped him. McKee's wife, Kitty, remembered John Wilkes Booth as a star performer coming to fill an engagement of a few days in the Louisville, Kentucky repertory company of which she was a junior member. Rankin himself was tangentially connected to Booth's evil deed in the following way: Booth gave his trunk of costumes and prompt-books for safekeeping to John McCullough, the great Shakespearean actor, who took it with him on his Canadian engagements before and after the assassination. McCullough wisely abandoned it as all actors came under suspicion. In 1873 Edwin Booth heard of the whereabouts of his brother's trunk and asked Rankin, who was touring Ontario, to send it to him. Booth, in the dead of night and in the company of a faithful theatre employee, opened the trunk in the basement of his New York theatre and spent some emotional hours inspecting and throwing into the furnace his brother's magnificent costumes for Iago, Richard III, Othello, Matamora and so on, and his letters and keepsakes. But aside from these connections, one of Rankin's partners in authorship, Leonard Grover, knew Lincoln very well because Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln frequently attended plays at the Grover Theatre in Washington. Why, therefore, did Rankin choose Archibald Gordon, rather than Grover with his fund of anecdotes about Lincoln, to be co-author of the play? Gordon, a journalist who had migrated from Ceylon to New York, seems to have had the particular writing talent which made Lincoln a believable character. From his obituary in the New York Times four years later one sentence bears out this assumption: 'Added to a rare fund of knowledge, classical grounding, and the mastery of the literary features of several modern languages, Mr. Gordon possessed a wit and humour of a character peculiarly his own, and a gift of satire that was potent when called into play because it never became invective.'¹⁸ The star of the play, Elmer Grandin, the first actor to play Lincoln, combined great height and size with strong personality and exceptional acting ability. For instance, in 1911 when in the Broadway production of Quo Vadis he played Ursus, the barbarian, the giant who twists the neck of a bull.

Strong characters in complex situations, which Rankin provided for American audiences in his novel use of Western themes, had transformed American drama. Two American playwrights contemporary with Rankin contributed to the development of the drama on Rankin's level: Bartley Campbell and James A. Herne. Campbell wrote plays for theatres in Philadelphia during the seventies when Rankin was acting there. His best play, My Partner, produced two years after 'The Danites,' followed the Western theme and explored the relationships between two miners and a woman with the emotional depth that Rankin had shown. Campbell, who employed Louis Aldrich, a leading actor in 'The Danites,' for the lead in his play, was so sensitive about the derivation of his drama that he sued Rankin for suggesting that the idea came from him. Herne similarly used local colour and strong character in triangular love situations to make his plays of the 1890s popular, such as Shore Acres which was set in Maine. Herne had acted with Rankin in Lucille Western's company in the late sixties and had stage-managed Rankin's Western plays on the West Coast with an assistant stage-manager, David Belasco, who later wrote plays about bitter-sweet love reminiscent of Nancy William's unrequited love for Sandy McGee (for instance, his Madame Butterfly).

Playwrights immediately following Rankin's best writing years refined the themes he had set forth. William Gillette's Secret Service (1896), depicting a Southern girl's love for and trust in a Northern gentleman who was really a spy during the Civil War, owes its mixture of love, war and betrayal and its exciting stage movement to Rankin's Abraham Lincoln. William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide (1906) disabuses a rich girl from the East of her romantic notions of the West by having her kidnapped by and falling in love with a rough-edged Western desperado, thus bridging the chasm between social classes and completing the East-West romantic and social explorations that Rankin made in his Western plays and the society plays written with Maeder.

Rankin turned his hand to comedy in 1893 and wrote 'The Baxters' for his comedian friend, Charles Cowles. Unfortunately, the action is predictable and the emphasis on characterization of the leading role makes the other roles pale by comparison. 'It is a one part piece patched out by non-original situations that make it last through the time required for three acts,' reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on its opening night, 5 February 1894, adding 'It is as crisp as a wet cloth and coherent as a dream.' The playscript has not survived.

Rankin did adaptations from French and German, in particular the plays of Hermann Sudermann, Magda and The Fires of St. John, in which he acted with his protégée, Nance O'Neil, from 1895 through 1908. He wrote one-act plays suitable for vaudeville, in which he acted with O'Neil and his daughters. He adapted 'The Danites' to silent film: Selig Co. produced it under his direction in 1912.¹⁹

In 1909, he wrote his last full length play, 'Invasion,' describing a Japanese invasion of California. The first act concerns a family quarrel over whether a Japanese-American can be loyal to America. In the second act, a character announces the surprise invasion and, to us today, the remarkable prescience of the playwright:

Two fast cruisers with fifteen hundred infantry and arms, ammunition, clothing and supplies for fifteen thousand more, landed in the Hawaiian Islands yesterday, defeated the battalion of regular troops, marines and the National Guard Regiment there, at the same time sinking the Revenue cutter and small gunboat, all that represented our navy. The Japanese General in command called all ex-soldiers of the Japanese population to the colors. There are forty-five thousand Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands and I can tell you every one of them knew a month ahead just what he was to do and where he was to report!

The Japanese flotilla escapes detection by sailing a few miles north of the established sailing routes. They capture the Presidio in San Francisco. The gloomy third and last act portrays a harsh Japanese military occupation of the Western seaboard reminiscent for audiences of today of the atmosphere of The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Rankin's talents as actor and company manager prompted him to create plays consistent with his vision of the drama of real life which he saw unfolding and crying out for expression. Their popularity does not suggest that he was a 'hack,' but rather one of the rare actors with writing talent. He combined this talent with his knowledge of the stage, reaching people for whom drama was an important part of their lives. Quite aside from providing him with vehicles which were not the property of syndicate managers, his plays made his life as an actor and stage manager more fulfilling.

The question remains: how could a man as busy as McKee Rankin write plays? It was answered for me when I saw the manuscript for his one-act play, 'Above the Law.' It was written on the back of hotel and restaurant stationery: the Hotel Sherman in Chicago, the Reisenwebern Restaurant in Coney Island, and the private office of the Heublein in Hartford, Connecticut. The manuscript for his 'A Counsel for the Defense' was written exclusively on the back of stationery from the Australia Hotel in Sydney, where, presumably, he was engaged in a longer run.
 

Notes

MCKEE RANKIN: THE ACTOR AS PLAYWRIGHT

David Beasley

1 GEORGE CRICHTON MILN, 'Another, But Welcome Invader,' The British Realm (London), July 1902. Rankin first acted Macbeth on 25 May 1877 at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia and gave the role 'an original' interpretation. The North American (26 May 1877) commented, 'a very creditable effort and deserving of much praise. [ ... ] Mr. Rankin, in his
"make-up," was the perfection of art. We cannot call to mind an actor who has given such a close copy of the historic thane of Cawdor as did Mr. Rankin last evening.' Rankin brought his role of Macbeth to a fine art, with Mabel Bert as Lady Macbeth in the late 1880s.
    As for Othello, his roles must still be documented. George C. Miln had been a famous American minister who lost his faith and with Edwin Booth's encouragement decided to act the great Shakespearean roles. The press, mocking his desertion of the ministry, prepared to damn his efforts but was amazed at his success. He was the first to take a Shakespearean company throughout the Far East, including Japan
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2 'An Unconquerable Hero of the Stage: McKee Rankin,' Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, vol 87, no 4 (1986-87), pp 515-40. A list of Rankin's plays is appended
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3 'McKee Rankin Taps Fund of Memories; Actor Tells How "The Danites" Came to be Written From Old Tales,' San Francisco Examiner, 1913
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4 Anonymous, 'Schoolteacher at Bottle Flat. A Story,' Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, vol 1 no 2 (Feb 1876). It appeared in a collection of stories by John Habberton the following year
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5 Article cited in note 3 above
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6 VANDERHEYDEN FYLES, 'An Apollo of Long Ago: The Story of McKee Rankin, a Matinee Idol of Our Parents' Day,' The Green Book Magazine, no 12 (July 1914), pp 39-42
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7 'Death of P A Fitzgerald,' New York Clipper, 11 Nov 1876. He died in his 52nd year
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8 "'The Danites"' Author,' The Press (Philadelphia) 7 Oct 1881, p 1
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9 New York Clipper, 23 Sept 1876. Alex Fitzgerald headed the stock company at Mrs Morrison's Grand Opera House in Toronto for the 1876/7 season
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10 Differences between Rankin's 'The Danites' and Miller's The Danites in the Sierras (New York: American Book, 1935): Rankin's play has 5 acts and 15 characters; Miller's 4 acts and 11 characters. The widow schoolteacher in Rankin's play becomes a missionary in Miller's. The poignancy of Nancy Williams-cum-Billy Piper's unrequited love for Sandy McGee in Rankin's play is absent from Miller's, in which the Danites kill the widow by mistake for Nancy, and Nancy marries Sandy. The Danites have a small role in Rankin's play and a larger role in Miller's in which they behave like terrorists. Rankin's play has short speeches, poetic thoughts and dramatic tension whereas Miller's is long-winded, undramatic and unfocused. A pirated version of Rankin's play (with shortened speeches) is in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Rankin caught this dealer in stolen plays (see New York Times, 16 Feb 1878 p 1 col 6)
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11 Playbill in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library
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12 McKEE RANKIN to JOACHIN MILLER, Liverpool 28 Sept 1880. HM 19262, Dept of MSS, The Huntingdon Library, San Marino Ca
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13 McKEE RANKIN to JOACHIN MILLER, np ns, Special Collections, Shields Library, Univ of Ca (Davis)
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14 GROVER added a fifth act. MILLER's preface to his published version of Forty-Nine disparages Rankin with sickening sanctimoniousness: 'Vergil ... fell in with a loud pretender in letters who got hold of one of his poems, altered it and gradually came to claim it as his own.... For he made no accusation or complaint, but merely took his poem; in his own good time, divested it of all rubbish and finally completed it.' JOACHIN MILLER, Forty-Nine: An Idyll Drama of the Sierras, San Francisco: California Pub Co, 1882
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15 Clipping, Billy Rose Theatre Collection
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16 New York Dramatic Times, 26 Jan 1884
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17 My thanks to Alice Whistler of the Library of Santa Clara for this information
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18 New York Times, 10 Jan 1895
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19 Rankin's 'The Runaway Wife' was produced by Kalem Co in 1915 (AFI Cat IF3813)
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