The Theatre: Ethel’s 40th

One wet, snowy Manhattan evening forty years ago last week handsome young Ethel Barrymore slushed from her nearby boarding house to the Garrick Theatre where she was opening in Clyde Fitch’s Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines. At the theatre she found a big red apple from Uncle John Drew (apples are traditional at Drew-Barrymore opening nights). Next morning the papers weren’t very good to Captain Jinks. But they were wonderful to Ethel, and a week later Producer Charles Frohman put her name up in lights. The first time she saw the lights, she bawled like a baby.

Last week the theatre’s devotees had themselves a sentimentally huge half hour —an NBC Blue Network program celebrating Ethel’s 40th anniversary as a star and the ripe, mature job of warming Broadway audiences she is now doing in The Corn Is Green. There were tributes from Producers Arthur Hopkins and Herman Shumlin, Helen Hayes, Louis B. Mayer, Alexander Woollcott, and it was the first radio program to include Ethel and both the Brothers Barrymore.

The Brothers spoke from Hollywood and their usual lavish feast of superbly baked ham was mixed with reasonably straight brotherly sentiment. Lionel wanted to tell Ethel over the radio: “We brought a big red apple for you, but John drank it.” The line was cut from the script. So with many heavy Lionelesque gasps and wheezes he told how Ethel had helped him into his first big part when “I burst like a chrysalis on Broadway and knocked them for a row of Chinese pagodas. . . . I’ve never been so good since.” With a melancholy, boot-reaching sigh he then exclaimed, somewhat irrelevantly: ”The corn is green. The corn is green. How green is the corn? I don’t know, but I bet Jack will.”

Making memorable the occasion, Jack Barrymore, who was referred to by Variety last fortnight as “that daft sprig of catnip,” had arrived at the studio cold sober and an hour early, for rehearsal.

John’s contribution was a snorting, hissing account of a performance of Camille in a barn in North Long Branch, New Jersey, by Ethel, 12; Lionel, 14; John, 10; and Arthur Byron, somewhat older. He recalled how Byron had panicked the audience by sweeping up to Ethel and inventing the line: “Come, entice me further, pretty one, over a libation in the conservatory.” Then John saluted his sister’s “gaiety, charm and splendor. . . . One has only to think of her to be invested with a God-given quality of humility.”

Last came Ethel’s own moist, resonant voice: “If my years are to be lined up and counted off, I can think of no pleasanter way for it to happen. … I have been used for so long to shuffling time back and forth in my make-up box, that actual time has lost its meaning. . . . Thank you all, for this treasure you have stored for me, in my particular heaven.” She closed with the most famous line of her career, from her early play Sunday: “That’s all there is—there isn’t any more.” Her voice was not quite so resonant as usual, and somewhat moister. Most of the time she was bawling like a baby.