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Don Marquis was born July 29, 1878, in Walnut, Illinois, a small, dusty town 40 miles from the Mississippi River. He was the eighth child of Dr. James Marquis, the town doctor, and Virginia Whitmore Marquis.
Don claimed that he was born during a solar eclipse — not just the same day, but during the actual eclipse — a fact that he believed carried mystical significance, though to what end he was never quite sure.
Don was named Robert Perry Marquis at birth, but the story goes that an older brother declared that the infant bore a striking resemblance to the family dog, Don Pedro. By the time of the 1880 U.S. Census, and forever after, his name was “Don.”
This is a High Holy Day of the Don Marquis Double Scotch and Prohibition Society, of course, and you members of the Society — and if you’re reading this, you are a member — know what to do: Celebrate the day in suitable fashion as you see fit, whether with Scotch, Irish whiskey, gin, or lemonaid. (See the link above for the DS&P.)
Cheerio my deario!
(The drawing accompanying this post is by Tony Sarg, a popular artist a hundred years ago who drew the illustrations for “Noah an’ Jonah an’ Cap’n John Smith.” Sarg was a skilled puppeteer, too, and he built the balloons for the very first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.)
For more tall tales and clippings from Don’s columns, see his page on Facebook: www.facebook.com/DonMarquisAuthor.
CNN says its June 7 broadcast of George Clooney’s play “Good Night, and Good Luck” will be a first for television: Never before has a play been broadcast on TV while being performed live on stage.
CNN’s broadcast brings to mind a similar first on the American stage, but more than a century earlier: the first live theater production presented on radio, on Jan. 9, 1923, with a broadcast of Don Marquis’s hit Prohibition-era comedy “The Old Soak” from the stage of Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre (today’s Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre).
Harry Beresford as Clem Hawley in ‘The Old Soak’ at the Plymouth Theatre.
Presented on the WJZ radio program “Broacasting Broadway,” with host Bertha Brainard, the remote broadcast was a technological marvel in the earliest days of commercial radio. A microphone was hung from the stage’s proscenium arch, with a dedicated telephone line connecting the Plymouth Theatre with engineers at radio station WJZ in Newark, New Jersey. (WJZ was a Westinghouse station at the time. A few weeks after the broadcast, the station was sold to RCA and moved to New York City.)
The broadcast was a critical success. Broadway producers had worried that a radio broadcast might keep theater-goers at home, but the opposite happened: The next day, several customers were heard telling Plymouth Theatre box office workers that they were motivated by the witty dialog – and loud applause – they heard on their home radio sets.
The remote broadcast was the idea of radio host Bertha Brainard, who quickly lined up additional Broadway shows for performances over the airwaves. Within a year, Brainard was WJZ’s assistant program manager, and three years later she was program manager. She would become one of the most powerful executives in radio.
‘The Old Soak’ theater program cover
“The Old Soak” was in its twenty-first week at the Plymouth Theatre at the time of the radio broadcast. It had opened on Aug. 22, 1922, and went on to run a full year on Broadway – 421 performances – before embarking on three simultaneous nationwide tours. The show told the boozy adventures of Clem Hawley, a character Marquis created in 1914 in his daily Sun Dial column in The (New York) Evening Sun.
Hawley was a lovable reprobate who used fractured Bible verses and rum-soaked logic to bemoan the Prohibition movement in America, and the character only became more popular when Prohibition became the 18th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920 – the nation’s misguided “18th commandment” in Hawley’s words.
Marquis’s publisher, Doubleday, released a popular collection of Clem Hawley stories in 1921, “The Old Soak and Hail and Farewell,” with the Broadway production appearing the following year. The play would later form the foundation of two Hollywood movies, “The Old Soak” in 1926, and “Good Old Soak” in 1937.
The play had a corny and predictable plot — lazy, good-for-nothing husband leaves home in disgrace after the family’s savings disappear, then confronts the real villain and saves the day — but critics applauded Marquis’ deft writing. Alexander Woollcott in The New York Times called the play “gorgeously entertaining,” and Burns Mantle of the Evening Mail named “The Old Soak” one of the top ten productions of the 1922-23 season.
Clem Hawley, Mantle said, was “representative of all the genial alcoholics, all the winning failures, all the domestic derelicts with weak characters but good hearts, who have both blessed and infested the world from the days of Bacchus to those of Volstead.”
Robert O’Connor as Al, the bootlegger; Harry Beresford as Clem Hawley; and Eva Williams as Nelly, the hired girl, in ‘The Old Soak’ at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre, 1922-23
A depiction of how theater shows were transmitted via Bertha Brainard’s “Broadcasting Broadway” radio show in 1923. The microphone has been moved from the proscenium arch, used in ‘The Old Soak,’ to hidden locations on the stage.
One of the most endearing portraits of Don Marquis was drawn by the brilliant 1920s book and magazine illustrator Ralph Barton. This image appeared in Liberty magazine on Sept. 26, 1925, one of two illustrations for Don’s light-hearted essay “The Curse of Efficiency.” (Scroll down the page for another view of Don by Ralph Barton, from the April 1922 edition of Vanity Fair magazine.)
At long last, your editor has fixed a number of bugs that have bugged him, and most likely you, too (and we’re not talking about Archy). Chiefly, the Chronology has been updated so that it now actually is a chronology of Don’s life, and accurate, too. Also, the Checklist of Books has been updated to include some recent additions, with a distinction made between trade editions — in all, thirty-one principal books and plays written in his lifetime, plus thirteen omnibus editions and translations — and notable editions that were privately published.
More changes and additions are in the works. Please check back soon!
Here is brief clip showing actors Alan Reed (left) and Eddie Bracken reading lines from the 1971 animated movie “Shinbone Alley” — with a glance at Carol Channing, too. The clip is from “Animation: A Living Art Form,” a 10-minute feature that was released with “Shinbone Alley” to explained the intricacies of the animation process. (Coming decades before computer animation, the 85-minute film required more than 400,000 drawings!)
Reed is known to many as the voice of Fred Flintstone, but he also gave a memorable performance in “Shinbone Alley” as Mehitabel’s tough-guy tomcat boyfriend, Big Bill. Bracken and Channing were Archy and Mehitabel, reprising their roles on a remarkable concept album released by Capitol Records in 1954, “archy and mehitabel: a back-alley opera”—the predecessor of the 1957 Broadway show “Shinbone Alley,” starring Eartha Kitt and Bracken, as well as the 1971 animated movie.
“Shinbone Alley” confounded critics, who were impressed with the voice actors and with the movie’s bold animation, unlike anything seen in Hollywood in years. But they rightly pointed out that the movie’s premise — a cockroach infatuated with an alley cat, a love affair that Don Marquis never suggested in his original stories 40 years earlier — was preposterous.
“Animation: A Living Art Form” is impossible to find today. The clip is taken from an original 16mm film that was acquired 20 years ago (on eBay) and converted to digital format. “Shinbone Alley” is much easier to find, on old VCR tapes and on DVD. It’s also available on YouTube, here.
Don Marquis ranked in the top tier of Broadway celebrities in early 1922, even though his own comic masterpiece, “The Old Soak,” was still months away from its Broadway premiere (on Aug. 22, 1922). He is pictured here, fat and happy, surrounded by fellow first nighters in a classic Ralph Barton illustration that appeared in the April 1922 edition of Vanity Fair magazine titled “A Typical First Night Audience in New York:—The Scene Which Invariably Confronts the Actor.” Don is seated between Vanity Fair publisher Conde Nast and actress Elsie De Wolfe. In front of him are actress Irene Castle and arts patron Otto Kahn, with the tall, gangly Robert Sherwood in the row behind, to Don’s right. The old sourpuss in the lower-right corner is Don’s nemesis, the Rev. John Roach Straton, an angry fundamentalist minister who eagerly predicted the impending doom of heathen New Yorkers.
The complete, two-page illustration presents 91 spot-on caricatures. It is linked here, with its original key identifying all the celebrities of the day. Barton was famous for his group caricatures, and this one was a precursor to a similarly mammoth piece that appeared in the Jan. 4, 1923, issue of the old Life magazine (linked here) that once again shows Don in the thick of the action. (He’s on the left page, a bit off-center, with Robert Sherwood once again in the row behind, next to a bemused Robert Benchley!)
