My father’s plan of The Life of David Belasco was communicated, in detail, by him to me. He realized that whenever he might die he was certain to leave much work undone. He hoped and expected, however, to live long enough to complete this book. It was in his mind to the very end. The last entry in his “Journal” refers to it: “June. Saturday, 2. Cloudy and gloomy. Worked all day on the Memoir.” He spoke of it often during his agonized final illness. The last words he ever wrote are a part of it. I have, as well as I could, finished it for him, according to his plan, because I know that he wished me to do so.

This book was planned by Mr. Winter in 1913, as part of a comprehensive record of the American Stage which he purposed to write. Other kindred projects which he then had in view and on which he labored much include revised and augmented editions of his Life and Art of Edwin Booth and Life and Art of Joseph Jefferson; joint biographies of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and an encyclopedical work to be called Alms for Oblivion, in which he intended to gather a vast mass of miscellaneous material relative to the Theatre. He also had in contemplation a Life of Augustin Daly, but he abandoned it because his friend the late Joseph Francis Daly (Augustin’s brother) had undertaken and in large part written a biography of that great theatrical manager and extraordinary man. All those projects languished because of lack of money: such books as those by William Winter issued since 1908 are, in every way, so costly to make that little commercial profit can be derived from them.

David Belasco, however, is the most conspicuous figure in the contemporary Theatre: his career has been long, picturesque, adventurous, and brilliant: “the present eye praises the present object,” and it was deemed certain that an authentic Life of that singular, romantic person would prove remunerative as well as interesting, instructive, and valuable. In September, 1913, accordingly,—soon after Mr. Winter’s The Wallet of Time had been brought out,—I was, as his agent, easily able to make for him very advantageous arrangements for the publication of such a work,—first to be passed through a prominent magazine, as a serial, and then to be issued in book form. Mr. Winter was much pleased and encouraged by this arrangement, and he had begun to gather and shape material for The Life of David Belasco when announcement was made that Mr. Belasco was writing and would presently publish, in Hearst’s Magazine, an Autobiography. My father had met with a similar experience in 1893, when Jefferson’s Autobiography, published as a serial in The Century, forestalled his authoritative Life of that great actor, rendering it, monetarily, almost profitless, and, therefore, he deemed it wise to lay aside this book.

Belasco’s The Story of My Life was published in Hearst’s Magazine, March, 1914, to December, 1915,—but, though it preËmpted the magazine field and made a work therein by my father impossible, it proved wholly inadequate and unreliable as a biography. In September, 1916, however,—soon after Shakespeare on the Stage—Third Series had been published,—Mr. Winter decided that the time was propitious for him to take up again the present Memoir, and, his publishers agreeing with him, he engaged to do so. He was then ill and weak; but he earnestly desired to work till the last, to be always doing, to overcome every obstacle by the force of his indomitable will, and, whatever he might suffer, never to yield or break under the pressure of adverse circumstance or the burden of age.

About the end of October, 1916, accordingly, he began the actual writing of this Memoir, and, although repeatedly urged by me to desist, he continued in it almost to the last day of his life. “I might better be dead,” he once exclaimed, “than to sit idle! I must go on: I must work at something: if it were not at this, it would be at something else. Moreover, I will not be beaten by anything: I will make this book the best thing of the kind I have ever yet done.”

If he had lived he would have done so; but his spirit was greater than his strength. When death came to him unconnected sections of this book, amounting to about three-fifths of the matter contained in Volume One and about one-third of that contained in Volume Two, were in type, awaiting his revision. Much of the remainder was in manuscript—some parts of it practically completed, some of it more or less roughly drafted. My task has been, substantially, to supply some dates, to fill some blanks, and to edit, coÖrdinate, and join the material left by my father. That task I have performed with reverence and care, and if the errors and defects in this work—which I hope are few—be recognized as mine, and the merits and beauties in it—which I know to be many—be recognized as his, then the responsibility of authorship will be rightly divided.

Mr. Winter was of many moods,—and, when possible, he wrought at his writing as he felt inclined. That is the reason why some passages in this book which stand near to its close were finished and polished by him, while others, much earlier, were left incomplete or isolated. The subject of The Theatrical Syndicate, for example, was thoroughly familiar to him, and he wrote the section devoted to that subject in intervals of his restudy of “The Return of Peter Grimm,” a play about which he had written, for this book, little but rough notes when the end came (I have, herein, reprinted his criticism of that play previously recorded in another place). The last passage in the text on which he worked is that treating of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” He brought the revised manuscript of that passage to me on the afternoon of June 2 and asked me to type it for him, saying: “I like the earnestness of it, and if you will make a fair copy for me I will go over it once more in the morning and dismiss it: I am too tired to go on to-day.” On June 3, 4, and 5, although suffering acutely, he insisted on rising, each day, and attempted to work, but was unable to do so. On the morning of June 5 he was forced to take to his bed. That was the beginning of the end.

My father died on June 30, 1917. The direct cause of his death was urÆmic poisoning, sequent on angina pectoris. His personal reticence was extreme; he disliked strangers about him and depended on me; it was, therefore, my very great privilege to wait on and nurse him in his final sickness. His suffering was indescribable and was exceeded only by his invariable patience and gentleness. The last thing he ever wrote was the Dedication of this book. At about eleven o’clock on the night of June 9 he endeavored to compose himself to sleep. I sat at the door of his bedroom until about midnight, when, as it was obvious that he could not sleep and that he was in terrible distress, I went to him. The next two hours were specially hard: there is little that can be done in such circumstances but to hope for the release of death. Anybody who has seen and heard the piteous restlessness and the dreadful, strangulated breathing characteristic of such a condition as my father’s then was is not likely to forget them. At about two o’clock in the morning, his breathing and his pulse both being so bad that I believed he was then to die, he asked to be helped out of bed into a chair. I lifted him into one, and, after a little while, he asked, with much difficulty, “Is there paper—pencil, here?” Supposing that he wished to write some request or message that he was not able to speak, I immediately gave him a pad of paper and a pencil. He sat for a few minutes with them in his lap, gathering his strength. Then he took them up and slowly, painfully, wrote the Dedication of this book, all except the four lines of verse with which it ends. He made a mark beneath the text and wrote there “Four lines of verse—not finished yet.” A while later he seemed to grow easier and presently asked to be got back to bed. The next day, June 10, in the forenoon, he asked me to help him to dress, which I did: it was the last time he ever had his clothes on. He read for a little while in one of his favorite books, Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,”—the passage relative to the execution of Dr. Dodd. He presently spoke to me, in his old, gentle, whimsical way, of “the touching resignation shown in Johnson’s letter to the fact that Dodd was going to be hanged.” Then, after an interval of acute and dreadful distress, he spoke of his illness. He said: “It is my principle to go on. I felt that I was going to die last night,—that’s why I wrote the Dedication to the ’Belasco.’ I feared I should die before I could complete that work and the three other books I have undertaken. But my principle is to go on: to hold on, till the end—and then, still hold on! I do not mean to break. But I am very sick.” Soon afterward he became so weak that it was necessary to get his clothes off and lift him back to bed. In the afternoon he roused himself again,—rising above the tide of poison which was slowly submerging him, as visibly as a drowning man rises in water,—and asked for the Dedication, which I had typewritten. He sat up in bed and revised it, as it now stands, and then added the four lines of verse. Although he had been suffering horribly for days he made but one mistake in writing the Dedication: he wrote “useless” instead of “useful“—and was much vexed with himself for doing so. In the last line of the verse he first wrote “boy”; in the evening he changed that word to “son.”

Among the manuscript notes left by my father I have found the beginning of a Preface to this book, which I think it desirable to print here because it gives in his words some intimation of his purpose and feeling in undertaking the writing of it:

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David Belasco and William Winter were friends for thirty-odd years. They did not always agree as to the course which should be followed in theatrical management; but their disagreements on that subject, such as they were, never estranged them nor lessened their mutual sympathetic understanding, respect, and regard. Belasco, undoubtedly, is what my father called him, “the last of the real managers,” the heir of all the theatric ages in America that have been led by Dunlap, Caldwell, Gilfert, Wood, the Wallacks, Booth, McCullough, Ford, Palmer, and Daly, and it is fitting that his Life should have been written by the one man in all the world best qualified to perform the task. Belasco’s feeling about the matter, at once modest and appreciative, is shown in a letter from which I quote the following:

(David Belasco to William Winter.)

Many readers may suppose, because Belasco is still living and at the zenith of his career, that it was an easy task to compile and arrange a complete record of his life. The truth is far otherwise. There was once a vast amount of invaluable material for such a record,—comprising a copy of every programme in which his name appeared from 1871 to the end of the theatrical season of 1897-’98, together with every important article about him or his work in the same period, several scores of photographs of him in dramatic characters and many hundreds of interesting letters. But that unique collection, the property and pride of his mother, was destroyed in the great San Francisco earthquake-fire, April 18, 1906; and his dubiosity about exact dates proved to be more than justified. The comprehensive and authoritative Chronology of Belasco’s life which is included in this Memoir is, therefore, chiefly the product of Mr. Winter’s indefatigable, patient original research and labor: such parts of it as were not made by him were made entirely according to his plan and by his direction, specifying the sources of information to be consulted. And I would specially emphasize the fact that wherever this Memoir may be found to differ from, or conflict with, other accounts of Belasco’s career those other accounts are erroneous.

The letters which appear in this Memoir were all selected by my father,—excepting a few of his, toward the end, which I have inserted. Mr. Winter requested Belasco to chose from his collection such letters as he would permit to be used, but received from him a reply in which he writes:

In assembling originals for pictorial illustration of this work I have been specially aided by Mr. Belasco, who has not only loaned me everything in his own collection for which I have asked but has also obtained for my use many photographs in the Albert Davis Collection, as well as the six very interesting and now, I believe, unique pictures of him, preserved by Mrs. Belasco, in the characters of Hamlet, Marc Antony, King Louis the Eleventh, Uncle Tom, Fagin, and Robert Macaire. For photographs of members of the Theatrical Syndicate I am indebted to my father’s friend and mine, Louis V. De Foe, Esq., of New York. My father was not altogether satisfied with the illustrations of his other books: every effort has been made to embellish this one as nearly as possible in the manner in which he would have had it done.

On behalf of my father and in accordance with a written note found among his papers I would here make grateful acknowledgment of the courtesy of Mr. Belasco’s sister, Mrs. Sarah Mayer; his brother, Mr. Frederick Belasco, and his nephew, Mr. E. B. Mayer, all of San Francisco, who endeavored to answer many inquiries by Mr. Winter and who were able to provide some necessary corroboration of details. Also, I would make acknowledgment of the obliging kindness shown him by the late James Louis Gillis (1857-1917), Librarian of the California State Library at Sacramento, and by his assistants, unknown, who searched for Mr. Winter various old California newspaper files which, otherwise, might have remained inaccessible.

For myself, I owe thanks to Mr. Gillis’ successor as State Librarian of California, Milton J. Ferguson, Esq.; to William Seymour, Esq., to James A. Madison, Esq., and to the several members of Mr. Belasco’s personal staff,—all of whom have assisted me in verifying for my father casts of plays long ago forgotten and in supplying or verifying dates. I wish, also, to thank Captain Joseph H. Coit, formerly Vice-President and manager of Moffat, Yard & Company,—now, I believe, on service somewhere in France,—without whose coÖperation this work, perhaps, might not have been undertaken.

To Mr. Belasco I owe a debt of lasting gratitude—not only for his unquestioning, instant compliance with every request I have ventured to make of him, but far more for his simple, hearty sympathy in affliction and his great personal kindness, which is not less valued because I know that, primarily, it has been inspired by his reverence and affection for my father.

The Indices to this work I am chiefly responsible for. They have been prepared on the model of others made under my father’s direction and in large part by him: many of the biographical facts given in them were set down for the purpose by him. I trust that they will be found accurate and useful.

The delay in publishing this work has been due in part to ill-health which compelled me long to neglect it; in part to technical and mechanical difficulties and mischances in its manufacture. I surmise that notwithstanding the great care which has been exercised some minor errors and slips will be found to have crept into this edition:[A] if any are observed I shall be glad to have them brought to my attention in order that they may be corrected in future issues.

Jefferson Winter.

46 Winter Avenue, New Brighton,
Staten Island, New York.
June 30, 1918.

THE LIFE OF DAVID BELASCO.