Theatre: Daly

Arnold Daly, actor, died last week in Manhattan. His life was brilliant and formless, his death terrible, grotesque and blurred. He began as an office boy for Charles Frohman. He became dresser for John Drew. Leaving Mr. Drew, he said that he would become an actor—not only an actor, a better actor than John Drew. He appeared with Fanny Rice in The Jolly Squire in 1892; three years later his own name was in headlines across the façade of the old Herald Square Theatre. He was playing in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. He had intelligence, sensitiveness and a rare, nervous charm. He duplicated his success in London. He supported Mme. Simone in The Return From Jerusalem. At 28 he turned manager and introduced the plays of George Bernard Shaw to the U. S. He acted in Candida, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny. His work was not great art. It was very interesting. Playwright Shaw seemed then an outrageous iconoclast, Actor Daly, his mouthpiece, a daring pioneer. When Mr. Shaw became a vogue, Arnold Daly lost some of his importance, as the introducer on the speaker’s platform is obliterated by the lecturer who gets up to speak. He had some failures. He needed money (he had always spent copiously what he earned) and tried to get it in vaudeville, in the cinema. When he acted in George M. Cohan’s The Tavern in 1920 people remembered what a good actor he could be. Last autumn he appeared in the Theatre Guild’s production, Juarez and Maximilian. The week before he died he was headlined in a one-act play, Kidnapped, at the Flatbush Theatre, Brooklyn.

He had been trying all day to arrange a tour for this play with some booking agent. The two young women who went out with him the last evening said that they did not think he had had luck because he seemed depressed. All three came home early from a party to the place in which they had their respective apartments, one of those remodeled houses west of Fifth Avenue—a restaurant on the first floor, a dressmaking place on the second. The two girls lived across the hall from Actor Daly. Smoke woke them up in the night. The stairs were on fire.

They rushed to the window in their nightgowns, screaming. The street was full of people. In a minute the Fire Chief’s car came round the corner. The driver ran upstairs in the next building and climbed across a ledge to their window. When the ladders came he handed one girl to a fireman and carried the other down himself. The crowd cheered. Now the girls remembered the actor. A fireman went back for him. He found him sitting in his pajamas in a chair by the window. He was dead. His body was burned but recognizable. There was no indication in his attitude of any struggle, or in his face of any suffering.