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<text> <title> (1930s) Theatre:Helen Hayes </title> <history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1930s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Time Magazine December 30, 1935 Theatre: Helen Hayes </hdr> <body> "Helen Millennial" To Washington's National Theatre one night last week Anna Eleanor Roosevelt took Secretary of the Treasury & Mrs. Henry Morgenthau Jr. to see Helen Hayes as Victoria Regina. So charmed was Mrs. Roosevelt by Actress Hayes' performance that when the play ended, she stood up in her box, clapped for five curtain calls. Next day she had Miss Hayes in to the White House for luncheon and at 3 p.m. Actress Hayes hurried back to her hotel suite in high excitement, canceled half a dozen appointments, summoned a beautician to fix her bobbed hair. That evening by special invitation she went back to the White House for 8 o'clock dinner and the glittering Democratic Reception which followed. Clearly Helen Hayes had made a profound impression upon the Presidential family. And critics who watched her Washington tryout forecast another hit for her when Victoria Regina opens on Broadway this week. Victoria Regina. For those who make a hobby of Actress Hayes' career, Victoria Regina can be considered a sort of retrospective exhibition of some of the memorable parts she has played on her way up to the top during the past 17 years. Scene 1 represents the entrance hall at Kensington Palace early one morning in 1837. Lord Conyngham, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury have come to rouse William IV's niece out of bed, tell her of her uncle's death and her succession to the Throne of England. Suddenly Actress Hayes appears, long locks falling to her shoulders, a night dress sweeping to the floor. She receives the news without a word, but by some alchemy of gesture and expression, manages to convey in full the young queen's terrific bewilderment, anxiety and delight. Those who saw Miss Hayes a good 16 years ago as the extraordinary dream- child in Dear Brutus could almost hear the echo of her plaintive cry. "I don't want to be a might-have-been!" In Scene 2, only a year after her coronation, "Vicky" has already begun to assert her Teutonic stubbornness. Her colloquy with Lord Melbourne, in which she gently lets that Prime Minister understand that she will accept his matrimonial advice provided that it coincides with her own wishes, is strongly reminiscent of Actress Hayes' pert and pretty Bab period. Miss Hayes continues to model her impersonation of Victoria with sure dramatic strokes when, after her marriage to the tall and handsome Albert, she sees him at his toilet for the first time. "Oh-h-h!" she cries, breathless at the wonder of her maidenly discovery, "you're shaving!" Not even the quiet resolution of punctilious Albert prevents her from embracing him before an open palace window, an act of domestic abandon evocative of certain tender moments in the cinema version of A Farewell to Arms. Most people who take their theatre-going seriously managed to see Helen Hayes in Mary of Scotland, one of the dramatic events of 1934. Memorable sequence in that play was the hapless Scottish queen's leave-taking from her lover Bothwell (Philip Merivale). Minus swords and capes to heighten the drama, Miss Hayes as the dumpy little royal matron of Victoria Regina manages to pack an astonishing amount of tragic power into her dismay at Albert's fatal chill. The last two scenes in Victoria Regina are concerned with the familiar fat-faced old age of the Widow of Windsor. For this final period, Miss Hayes has inflated her cheeks (Asked how she does this trick, Actress Hayes replied: "That's mamma's secret."), dropped her mouth and eyelids in a fashion as extraordinary as her withered disguise for the closing shots of The Sin of Madelon Claudet. Here her quality as one of the nation's really great emotional actresses gets full display. Playwright Laurence Housman has contrived his finale along Cavalcade lines. The time is the Diamond Jubilee of 1897. The place is Buckingham Palace. Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, has just been wheeled into one of the front chambers by her big-bellied son, Edward of Wales. Slight, bewhiskered Grandson George and other of her numerous descendants are gathered respectfully around the old lady when she suddenly begins to cackle about an extraordinary thing that happened during the procession as she passed the Marble Arch. A mob of workmen broke through the soldiers and police, says Victoria, and began to shout: "Go it, old girl! We knew you could do it!" Victoria irritably smothers a sniffle, adds: "Very improper people!" Playwright. Compared to his poetic brother Alfred Edward Housman (The Shropshire Lad), Laurence Housman is a literary lightweight. The author of such things as An Englishwoman's Love Letters, Angels and Ministers, and Little Plays of St. Francis, Housman has written two previous dramatic works which were refused licenses by the censor who cannot permit representations of the Deity or the Royal Family on the British stage. That Victoria Regina was also refused permission to be performed in Great Britain was the result of an accident, for it was confected for the study rather than the stage. Out of a dramatic biography in 32 scenes, Producer Gilbert Miller has hacked ten for theatrical purposes. What is left is pure, if unexciting, history, since Playwright Housman has entirely neglected to develop any dramatic significance from his theme. Yet the play has definite artistic merit and for this the audience must thank Actress Hayes. Queen or no queen, hers is a lively, three-dimensional portrait from girlhood to senescence of a spirited woman whose virtues and vices were proudly middle class. Also to be thanked is Vincent Price, a good-looking beanpole two years out of Yale, who went to Europe to study art and wound up an actor. The image of Chelsea figurines of the Prince Consort, he gives a cunningly conceived and ably represented impersonation of the virtuous, conservative, kindly Albert. Corpulent Producer Miller is supposed to have spent $75,000 on mounting Victoria Regina. Indeed, the gilt alone on the elaborate period furniture he brought from England for the show looks as is if it had cost enough to keep several families through a hard winter. And in the elegant fashion to which he has accustomed himself, discriminating Mr. Miller confidently expects to be kept through this winter by the golden talents of the most valuable of all his properties, Helen Hayes. "Pixy." If Miss Hayes had been born to a Cincinnati soap tycoon and finished at Farmington, she would probably have turned out to be one of those rare girls who for two or three seasons reign supreme at all the best college proms in the East, not because of good looks or a reputation for cuddlesomeness but because of unmistakable social charm. Helen Hayes' father was a man named Brown who did a number of things, none of them very profitably. For a brief time he worked as a clerk in the Washington Patent Office. His daughter was born the first autumn of the 20th Century on Washington's P Street, Northwest. Her education was at parochial schools. Abetted by a mother with theatrical ambitions, Helen Brown made her Broadway debut in 1909 in Old Dutch. Elders like Lew Fields, Vernon Castle and John Bunny crowded her out of the press notices. Not until five years later did she get any notices at all. These referred to her as "fanciful," "whimsical," "pixylike" when she appeared as a first-act child with the late John Drew in The Prodigal Husband. John Drew called her "Childie." At 17, Helen Hayes, looking not unlike Maude Adams, was touring in Pollyanna when the chance came to work for the playwright who had made Miss Adams famed. The piece was Sir James Barrie's Dear Brutus. The leading man was William Gillette (Actor Gillette, aged 80, announced last week one more farewell appearance beginning Jan. 13.) And there was not a dry eye in the house when Helen Hayes got through wringing the last teardrop out of the scene in the wood where Gillette, the childless artist, meets the daughter he might have had. At 19 Miss Hayes had left her juvenile parts behind and was at the height of her flapper period. She played Clarence with Alfred Lunt, To the Ladies,We Moderns. High spot of this phase was the title role in Edward Childs Carpenter's Bab. "Precious Burglar." Bab was a piquant girl in a knee-length skirt and a hat like an inverted pot. She got into all kinds of scrapes, including a burglary. To collegiate hearts in 1920 she came very close to being the Dream Woman. When the play opened in Boston, Edgar Scott, socialite senior from Philadelphia, transplanted this widespread emotion about Miss Hayes into the following verse for the Harvard Lampoon: <qt> <l>...If man has considered Troy's Helen perennial,</l> <l>As years and as aeons go rollicking by,</l> <l>Let us hail our own Helen, the artist's millennial,</l> <l>Who's teased us with smiles, and who's taught us to cry...</l> </qt> <qt> <l>If Broadway's the god that can give her the glory,</l> <l>Her talents and charms are entitled to win,</l> <l>Let Boston prefix "Chapter One" to this story,</l> <l>For Bab in her triumph - we saw it begin!</l> <l>Good luck to you Helen, when Fate will bereave us,</l> <l>Of you and the coat sleeves that covered your paws,</l> <l>You'll steal our poor hearts, precious burglar, and leave</l> <l>us,</l> <l>Alone in the echoes of Boston's applause.</l> </qt> Glory. Actress Hayes' "cute" period fused with her more mature phase in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. The Serpent of the Nile was her first regal impersonation. Notwithstanding Columnist Franklin Pierce Adams' crack that she was suffering from "fallen archness," Miss Hayes still maintains: "I felt that my tiny Cleopatra was just right. It seemed to me that Shaw meant her to be a gay young numbskull." It seemed that way to the theatre-going public, too, for Caesar and Cleopatra had a long and prosperous run. The god Broadway was beginning to give her glory in good measure. Her What Every Woman Knows was a great personal and financial success, and the next year (1927), she took a chance on a play that had the unhappiest ending imaginable--the heroine, a Southern flibbertigibbet, shoots herself in the last act. This was Coquette, which had to be interrupted while Miss Hayes bore her new husband, Playwright Charles MacArthur, their famed daughter Mary. First notice of this affair occurred when Producer Jed Harris abruptly terminated the run of Coquette, announced that his star was going to have a baby. Several weeks later through Actors' Equity the cast filed $3,050 in claims against Mr. Harris for two weeks pay in lieu of notice that the show was closing. Mr. Harris took refuge behind the "Act of God" clause in his contracts and the matter was finally adjudicated by a board of arbitration which decided against the producer. "Little Lady." With Coquette in 1929, Miss Hayes reached Los Angles in her 88th week. Her agent took her out to see the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer casting director. The director took one look at the slight little woman with the tipped-up nose and unflattering yellow hair, turned to her agent to ask: "What does the little lady do? What sort of parts does she play? Mmmmm. Well, leave the little lady's name and address and if anything comes up that she might fit into I'll give her a ring." He never did. Miss Hayes was not to be so easily side-tracked from the silver screen. "You know how dames are," says her rough-and- ready husband, who at that time was already a well-known Hollywood writer. "They go to see a picture, look up at the doll on the screen and say to themselves: `What the hell, anything she can do I can do.'" What Helen Hayes subsequently did in Hollywood won her one of the little gold statuettes which are the topnotch mark of merit of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, for her performance in The Sin of Madelon Claudet, which Husband MacArthur wrote for her cinema debut in 1931. Only last week did Playwright MacArthur's first wife, a Chicago newspaperwoman, drop her alienation of affections suit against Helen Hayes. That legal tangle was merely a fraction of the excitement that ebullient Mr. MacArthur has brought into his wife's life since 1928. A great cut-up, he goes in for such japes as spreading strange lingerie around the home in his wife's absence to see what she will do upon her return. Irregularities like these have evoked such effusive sympathy for Miss Hayes that her husband once thought of founding a Poor Helen Club. But the organization seems unnecessary. The MacArthurs' private life in their big white Victorian house at Nyack, N.Y. is probably as serene as the average. The smallest star (5 ft.) on the U.S. stage has one of the longest tempers, rarely permits herself a more violent expression of dissatisfaction than her characteristic "Pe-ew!" But last week Helen Hayes was feeling particularly good. There were the White House invitations. ("To think, here I was born in Washington and never imagined I could get in the White House back door!") And, with a pair of noteworthy Queens already in her hand, she was reasonably sure of drawing three of a kind on Broadway this week. </body> </article> </text>