“I’d
rather sit when comes the night
And
darn his socks by candle light,
Than
be an actress, all the rage,
Upon
the shallow tinseled stage.”
Thus
sang a maiden loud and clear
So
all the listening world might hear;
Thus
said the histrionic pet,
The
fair and graceful Margaret.
“Let
me darn socks, and cease to rant
In
Shakespearean or Cohan cant;
Let
me my darning needle ply,
And
croon a twilight lullaby.
No
more for me the wild applause,
The
big bouquet, or dome hurrahs;
The
mop and broom, the simple life,
For
me the loved, domestic wife.”
And
who will say that she is wrong?
Who’ll
not applaud her darning song?
The
stocking darner, if you please,
Is
great as any one of these;
The
home is in the loving heart
And
not the corridors of art.
Sing
high, sing low the household pet,
The
fair and graceful Margaret.
Nov.
15, ‘09
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared, “There are no second
acts in American lives.” The Jazz Age titan of American letters must’ve missed
out on Bloomington’s Margaret Illington,
a brittle star of early 20th century theater whose tumultuous career included
several premature declarations of retirement followed by notable comebacks.
Illington was born Maude (sometimes spelled
Maud) Light in 1879, though she later maintained her birth year was 1881 (even
her lengthy New York Times obituary gets it wrong). Born and raised in
Bloomington, she attended Illinois Wesleyan University, graduating with
certificates in oratory and music before completing her education at Hart
Conway’s Dramatic School in Chicago.
In 1900, Illington left Central Illinois for
the Great White Way and in no time attracted the eye of famed theater producer
Daniel Frohman. It was he who suggested the stage name Illington, and he who
gave the unproven 20-something her first Broadway role, that of a gypsy girl in
“The Pride of Jennico.”
If you haven’t figured it out yet, Illington is
a clever amalgamation of Illinois and Bloomington!
In the summer of 1902, Illington fell down a
stage staircase performing in Richmond, Va., an injury which proved to be the
first of several in her career. She also suffered from periodic nervous
exhaustion, said to result from her “unrestrained style of emotional acting.”
Illington won over critics and the public alike
for her performance in “A Japanese Nightingale,” in which she played Yuki, a
young Japanese woman torn between her American beau and her tradition-bound
family. Several days after the 1903 “Nightingale” opening she married
Frohman, 28 years her senior.
Another of her successes was “The Thief,” which
played to crowded houses in various cities for 14 months. In the fall of 1908,
Illington had a nervous collapse while in Boston for “The Thief,” and soon
thereafter she announced her retirement. “I have loved the life,” she said of
her acting career. “But now it is over, and I must rest.”
The marriage to Frohman lasted six years,
ending with a divorce Nov. 9, 1909 in Reno, Nev. Less than a week later
Illington married Edward J. Bowes, a Tacoma, Wash. real estate developer who
went by the sobriquet Major Bowes. To the press, Illington explained her
divorce and remarriage by way of her longing for domesticity and motherhood. “I
now have a man I can love, a husband who will care for me and a real sure
enough home, where I can be happy in rearing children and the duties of a
normal woman,” she said.
Yet it was only a matter
of time before Illington returned to the stage, this time under the management
of Bowes. “She has cut out the baby idea and wants public life,” was one blunt
assessment. “They all go back — for some reason or other,” noted a Chicago
newspaper of Illington’s return. “The ‘forever’ of most persons is notoriously
short. But the ‘forever’ of an actress who abandons the stage is the shortest
eternity that has yet been discovered.”
Bowes, ever the consummate salesman, helped
push his wife back into show business. “Outrage to waste her talent,” he said
in June 1910. The couple had several theatrical failures leavened by a few
triumphs, none greater than “Kindling.” This play, in which Illington assumed
the role of a penniless tenement wife forced to steal to provide for her unborn
child, drew praise from muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and other
sympathetic literary types.
In April 1912, “Kindling” came to Bloomington
for one night at the Chatterton Opera House, with local advertisements
proclaiming “Edward J. Bowes presents Margaret Illington.” Despite the
controlling men in her life (first Frohman and then Bowes), Illington somehow
saw herself as a modern woman free of domestic constraints. “I always knew,
from the time I was a wee girl that I would want to support myself,” she said
two months before her Bloomington performance. “I wanted to be independent.”
She appeared in two unsuccessful silent movies
from 1917, and wrapped up her stage career several years later with “A Good Bad
Women,” though that, too, was a failure. Illington made the most of her curvy
figure, though she couldn’t help but notice the rise of pencil-thin silver
screen starlets. “If she weighs 100 pounds, she looks on the screen as if she
weighs 125; the latter is a good weight for the legitimate stage, but too fat
for the pictures,” she said with what one imagines a hint of irritation.
Margaret Illington passed away at a Miami Beach
hospital on March 11, 1934.
(second
picture: undated publicity shot showing Kyrle Bellew and Margaret Illington in
“The Thief.” In this play, Illington’s character commits a crime but lets her
lover take the blame. (Courtesy of the McLean County Museum of History.)
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