Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today we are
going to talk about an actress actor, although she would

(00:21):
have called herself an actress because that sort of more
standardized form of using a non gendered noun for it
would not have existed then. She was hugely famous in
the early twentieth century, although she has not really retained
her iconic status the way some other actors have. She
kind of got into acting in a surprising, sort of

(00:43):
sideways way, but she quickly had a reputation as a
stage diva with a sharp tongue, and she also originated
one of the most beloved characters of the stage and screen.
We are talking about missus Patrick Campbell, which was the
name that she used publicly and professionally throughout her her life.

(01:05):
It was her stage name, but it was also what
people knew her as we will talk about her birth name.
But we have to talk about names being tricky here
because in her personal life, some people, especially family members,
called her Beatrice. Particularly older family members always called her that.
Other people called her Stella. That was her middle name,

(01:27):
but she also had a daughter named Stella that comes
up a few times in this episode. So if we
refer to her by first name, we're using Beatrice just
to avoid confusion. But I think with her closest friends
and beloved she was Stella. She was also often called
Missus Pat, though even by people who knew her pretty well,
So we will generally refer to her either as Beatrice,

(01:50):
Missus Pat, or Missus Campbell when we're talking about her.
Her daughter Stella is only going to be called Stella
and will be the only one. Additionally, to make things
a little confusing, I feel like their family just liked
to play fast and loose with names and nicknames. Because
she had a son who was named Alan, he also
went by the nickname Bo and people referred to him

(02:12):
as that throughout his life. So if you hear either
of those, we mean her son, it's a lot. I'm
sure I missed something in there. So Beatrice Stella Tanner
was born on February ninth, eighteen sixty five, in London, England.
Her parents were John Tanner and Maria Luigia Jovanna Romanini,

(02:32):
and according to Beatrice, the two of them fell in
love at first sight the first time they met in Bombay, India.
John's father was an army contractor for the British East
India Company and Maria's father was a political exile, so
both of their families were there. Neither of them spoke
the other one's language, but John and Maria got married

(02:55):
while still living there in India and had six children
there before moving to London. Once they got to London,
three more kids, including Beatrice. According to Beatrice, when she
was tiny, she cried so much that the nurse the
family hired for her told her parents, quote, she is
not a baby, she is a tiger. She also caused

(03:17):
the same nurse unintelligent. Yeah, I told you she had
a biting tongue. In her autobiography, Beatrice wrote of her father, quote,
my father, it seems, managed to get through two large fortunes.
He was careless with money, exceptionally generous, delighting in business,
enterprise and speculation. In that book, she details a letter

(03:39):
that he once wrote her, in which he explained the
various pitfalls of life that had cost him his financial security,
and she concludes that discussion with quote, people who knew
my father well, spoke with much love of his extraordinary
kindness and buoyant spirits. As for her mother, Beatrice clearly
just thought the world of her. Reminisced about her beautiful

(04:01):
singing voice and how she spoke so many languages and
played guitar. She wrote of Maria Luigia, quote, my Italian
mother and her beautiful sisters were invested for me with
great romantic glamour that has remained with me, and the
few stories I was told about their youthful adventures delight
me now as they did when I was a child,

(04:21):
and felt proud that they were my people. While her
eldest brother was away at school, he died unexpectedly, and
her father was often back in India, so her memory
of all of this appears to be her mother. In mourning,
she describes her as elegant and beautiful, and also wrote
of her mother, quote, she gave me her great love

(04:43):
of beauty. She could not pass by beauty unnoticed. Beatrice's
mother influenced and nurtured her love of the arts, and
she wrote of it, quote from my mother, I learned
my love of music. Schubert was my first love. She
sang his songs in French with a touch a unsentimental simplicity.
My mother spoke to me with enthusiasm of the Italian

(05:05):
actor Salvini Rossi and Madame Roustori, also of the singers
Mario and Grisi and Adelina Patti. I do not think
she ever saw any of our English players. If she did,
I never heard her speak of them. And writing of
herself and her formative years, she said quote, I think
I was neither a sweet, amiable nor amenable child. I

(05:27):
was physically strong, very affectionate, imaginative, but temperamentally alien to
those around me. I believe I was impatient with unintelligent
people from the moment I was born. A tragedy for
I myself am three parts a fool. She mostly speaks
of her childhood as pretty enjoyable, though one of her

(05:48):
favorite activities was digging holes in the garden and filling
them with water and then sitting in a mud bath,
sort of inspired by tales of ancient Roman baths. This
caused her siblings embarrassment, though, because she often looked like
a wild child just covered in mud. Yeah. She tells
one story in her memoir about her sister basically having
a boy come over and what he was greeted with

(06:10):
was like this little crazed looking kid that was just
a mud pile. At the age of ten, Beatrice started
attending school in Brighton. She did not like it. She
found it dull, and she was also kind of generally
frightened and shy around people outside of the family. A
new period of upheaval came when, following the marriage of

(06:31):
her oldest sister, Nina, her father and brothers moved to
the US to help her uncle who was trying to
set up some business in Texas. So Beatrice, her sisters,
and their mother moved into a smaller home. Then her
mother's friend, Catherine Bailey, offered to take Beatrice to Paris
to live for a year to study French and music,

(06:52):
which she did and that year, she said, quote filled
me with delight. But by the time she returned home
to England, the family for was really in pretty bad shape.
A cousin of Beatrice's father named Eliza Hogarth heard her
playing the piano and thought she was talented enough that
she needed lessons, so Eliza offered to pay for her

(07:13):
to attend formal lessons at the Guildhall School of Music.
Things went well there. They went well enough that Beatrice
won a scholarship to a three year music school in Leipzig,
but she never used that scholarship because when Beatrice was seventeen,
she met Patrick Campbell at a card party. As we said,
she was seventeen when she met Pat and he was twenty.

(07:34):
She described him as handsome and gentle, with the love
of nature and his family. They married just four months
after they met, and Beatrice never finished her music studies.
They had eloped, and when they told Beatrice's mother, she
was not entirely happy. She felt that her daughter had
given up everything for a sudden romance. Beatrice later wrote

(07:57):
of this relationship quote, after more than thirty five years
of life, with its battles, its wounds, its every ready pain,
it is not easy to write of the joy of
that first love. Incapable of pause or reckoning. With the
divine faith and courage of fearless children, we faced the
world we thought ours, and paid the price bravely. Beatrice

(08:21):
and Patrick had a son named Alan Urqhart Campbell. The
family called Alan Bo as a nickname. It's a variation
on Beatrice. Two years later, the Campbells welcomed their second
child that was a daughter named Stella. But unfortunately, Beatrice
and Patrick were faced with some unfortunate news. Patrick's health
had never been robust, and his doctor said that he

(08:43):
was too weak to remain in the city. Beatrice recalled
being terrified of what was going to happen to them,
and at the time, she was still pregnant with Stella,
and she describes this night where she couldn't sleep and
she was pacing in their small garden late at night, worrying.
She wrote quote, I knew was not strong enough to
continue working in the city, and that I must help.

(09:04):
I could not imagine what work I could do. I
had given up my musical scholarship and so was not
qualified for a musical career. My lovely baby and another
coming in a few weeks, must be provided for. I
was bewildered, lost with the daylight. Something entered my soul
and has never since left me. It seemed to cover
me like a fine veil of steel, giving me a

(09:26):
strange sense of security. Slowly I became conscious that within
myself lay the strength I needed, and that I must
never be afraid. In eighteen eighty six, she joined the
Anomalies Dramatic Club, which was a London group that staged
plays so its members could gain experience and hone their skills.
There were three hundred and sixty five members. They paid

(09:48):
three pounds, three shillings and dues to pay for the
plays that they were performing each year at the Town Hall.
She was asked to play a lead role in one
of their stagings after the original actor got sick. Meanwhile,
Patrick's health got worse and his doctor prescribed him time
at sea in the hopes that he would improve. He

(10:09):
left first for Australia. The idea was that he was
going to stay with a family member who lived there
and he would look for work once he got there,
and then he would send for Beatrice and the kids
once he settled. But that didn't work out and he
ended up moving from Australia to Zimbabwe. He found work
here and there, and for a while he was connected
with the imperialist Cecil Rhodes and his debier's Diamond operation.

(10:31):
Patrick would send checks home as often as he could,
although there were sometimes large gaps in between, and that
lack of steady income led Beatrice to ask Pat if
he was okay with her seeking professional acting jobs, and
he wrote back that he was supportive of this idea.
So this is all the version of the events as
told largely from Beatrice's perspective. Seems that Beatrice was pregnant

(10:56):
with Alan already when the two lovebirds eloped. So there
are some interpretations of this situation that kind of take
the position that Beatrice entrapped Patrick in a marriage that
he never wanted. So in that interpretation, that's the reason
that he left to travel. Missus Patt never mentions the
date of her first child's birth in her memoir. That

(11:19):
may be why, but it does seem like Patrick was
truly almost always in precarious health. He wrote her a
lot of letters while traveling that indicate a tenderness and
a genuine love between them. I have some questions about
the medical advice he was receiving. Way, go to sea
well and like advising people to go to the seaside

(11:42):
with the salt air to recover their health, like that
was pretty common, but like taking on a boat taking
a long voyage that like that was recognized as being
really hard on your health. So I'm like, I'm confused here. Yeah,
I mean, I think the thinking was that at least
if you buy this version of it. England, no matter

(12:03):
how remote you tried to become, was too industrialized at
that point for him to be healthy, and he needed
to get out of the country. That's my guess. I
don't think there's any validity to that, but that's what
I think was probably the logic and play. Beatrice started
working with a touring company in eighteen eighty seven which
put on almost exclusively Shakespeare plays. She made two pounds

(12:25):
a week initially, and she had to provide her own dresses,
and she started going by missus Patrick Campbell at that time,
and that was, as we said, her stage name throughout
her life. She wrote of her first professional appearance, quote,
when I came to the stage, my first feeling was
that the audience was too far away for me to
reach out to them. So I must, as it were,

(12:45):
quickly gather them up to myself. And I think I
may say that this has always been the instinctive principle
of my acting. Whether it is the wrong or the
right principle, I leave it for others to decide. I
am sure I had no technique and my voice this
was the voice of a singing mouse. The papers praised me,
and they also praised my dresses, and I was very

(13:06):
proud and happy. From there, she really became an audience favorite.
She was often cast in leading roles, although she describes
herself as delicate and having to miss a number of
performances and one time coming down with typhoid and having
to sit out six weeks of shows. After weathering the
most serious of her illnesses, she describes regaining her health,

(13:28):
but not her faith in the world. Having come out
of this experience without the naive positivity of her youth,
she knew that life was fragile and that Pat may
never really be able to provide for the family. Patrick
was away from the family for six and a half years,
during which Missus Pat, as she was often called, was

(13:48):
continuing her career rise. In eighteen ninety three, Missus Campbell
appeared in her breakout role in the play The Second
Missus tanker A. In this play, written by Sir Arthur
Wing Pinero, she played Paula. This is what's known as
a problem play, meaning that the central device of the
plot is driven by social issues that were considered controversial

(14:09):
in the time the play is written. It's a genre
that is credited in its early development to Alexandre duma Feis.
In the case of Panero's play, mister tanker A, a widower,
announces his upcoming marriage to a woman named Paula Jarmont.
That's Missus Campbell's character, who is considered a ruined woman,
i e. She has had sexual relations outside of marriage.

(14:31):
The two wed and their marriage is plagued by problems,
made much worse when mister Tankeray's daughter gets engaged unknowingly
to the man who Paula had an affair with years earlier.
It is a drama and it ends tragically. But even
though some critics were really kind of displeased by the
subject matter and thought the whole thing was icky, Missus

(14:51):
Campbell's performance was raved over that had really not been
a guaranteed situation. Rehearsals had not gone particularly well. Missus
pat developed what she called nervous exhaustion and some rehearsals
right up through the second dress rehearsal, she just walked
through her part with minimal emotion. But on opening night
she was in full force and the reviews really reflected it.

(15:14):
She was instantly famous in London, but she found this
attention Jarring, writing quote, I was surrounded by what seemed
to me intolerable curiosity. There were searching, thrill seeking questions
and strange, critical glances which offended me, sometimes arousing impertinent
courage on my part. She found herself trying to reconcile

(15:36):
the stage star that people perceived her to be, with
the quote fragile, unsophisticated young woman whose heart and nerves
had been torn by poverty, illness, and the cruel strain
of a long separation from the husband she loved. She
found the experience of celebrity and strangers speculating about her

(15:56):
life really isolating. I feel like this is one of
the earliest instances where people where someone really has insight
and is able to articulate what that feeling must be like,
of like why being a celebrity is actually quite stressful.
We are gonna pause here for a sponsor break, and
when we come back, we'll talk about some of the
challenges that arose in Beatrice's early fame. Although she was

(16:30):
lauded for her talents, Missus Campbell still was sometimes seized
with nerves during one of her performances as Missus Tankery.
Well into the play's run, she forgot all her lines
and she could not clearly hear the prompt that she
was given from the wings, so someone had to physically
walk on stage and hand her a script to read
from until she recovered. But she recovered so well that

(16:53):
the incident actually seemed to bolster her reputation instead of
harming it. As her career was really taking off. There
was a lot going on in her personal life. Her
father died during the second run of Missus Tanker A.
He was living in Texas at the time with her brothers,
so she found out via a letter. And then in
March of eighteen ninety four, Patrick finally returned from Africa

(17:17):
after six and a half years away. She wrote of
their reunion quote, when Pat arrived, I saw in his
eyes that youth, with all the belief and faith in
his own efforts and his luck had gone. His health
and his energies were undermined by fever, failure, in the
most bitter disappointments. Nothing had come of his hard work,

(17:38):
his hopes, and his sacrifice. The expression in his face
wrung my heart, But the old gentleness and tenderness were there.
He still loved me. His pride in his beautiful children,
and in my success that was by reward. The transition
back to life together was kind of a strange one.

(17:58):
Patrick returned to a wife who was famous and in demand,
and at a time when he kind of wanted to
take some time to have quiet family time at home.
He became a curiosity to Missus Campbell's fans and the press. Additionally,
Beatrice was busy. She had eight performances a week, so
that time together was kind of limited, but they were together.

(18:21):
They were, by her accounts, still in love, and Patrick
supported her career as best he could in between relapses
of malaria. After the second Missus Tanka for Missus Patrick Campbell,
as the New York Times put it, quote, thereafter one
success followed another, It's not entirely accurate. There were definitely
some bad reviews in the mix, and some instances where

(18:44):
one of her performances and her run was especially uneven
due to her ongoing nervous exhaustion. Her next critically acclaimed
role was as Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in
eighteen ninety five, but that was one where her opening
wasn't really strong. Although all the other shows were in
the case of one original play, Michael and His Lost Angel,

(19:08):
she dropped out because she found it too vulgar and
the playwright's edits to it weren't sufficient. That play failed.
She was blamed in part for the failure, but overall
her success seemed to climb pretty consistently. In nineteen hundred,
she starred in Magda, which is a play about a
German girl who has left her small town and has

(19:29):
become a famous singer. Because of her leaving, her father
refuses to ever even speak her name again, and when
she returns home after having achieved fame, her father scorns
her and it is revealed that she had a child
out of wedlock and that pregnancy was the cause of
her leaving town. This leads to pressures to accept a

(19:49):
marriage proposal and a tense final scene where Magda's father
threatens to shoot her if she does not marry to
save her reputation. Both the play, which was trans from
the original German play written by Ermann Sudermann, and Missus
Campbell's performance were panned, but despite its rocky start, this
actually became one of her most popular roles, and that

(20:11):
play was staged many many times throughout her life due
to demand. In March of nineteen hundred, pat left again,
this time to join the volunteer horse regiment known as
the Imperial Yeomanry. That regiment was engaged in the Boer War,
and on April fifth of that year, he was killed
in action. Beatrice took a week off of work and

(20:32):
then she returned to the stage. In addition to her
personal loss, she also felt responsibility to the backers of
the repertoire of the Royalty Theater. The theater was popular,
but it had not made its money back on the season.
In an effort to try to get some fresh money
into the theater company, in nineteen oh one, Beatrice began
her first booking in the US and started doing a

(20:55):
tour there. This was part of a repertory engagement which
lasted for six months, and it included two of her
established claims to fame, the Second Missus Tankery and the
Notorious Missus Ebbsmith. The Notorious Missus Ebbsmith was also written
by Arthur Wing Pinero, and just as Tankeray, it debuted
with Missus Patrick Campbell playing the lead role. Her character,

(21:19):
Agnes Ebbsmith, is a woman who bucks social convention choosing
to live with a man she's not married to after
the passing of her husband. Agnes, in fact, is deeply
against marriage, having been very unhappy in hers, and she's
an outspoken advocate of society abandoning the practice altogether. The

(21:39):
entire plot plays out as the various people in the
lives of Agnes and her lover Lucas, try to intervene
to get each of them to behave in the ways
that conform to the various ideals that the other characters hold.
As with the second Missus Tankeray, this story resolves in
an unhappy way. In this case, the lead character is
ultimately being broken of her spirit. In nineteen oh two,

(22:03):
Missus Campbell was once again back in New York. This
time she was starring in various plays in repertory, including Magda,
Aunt Jenny, and The Joy of Living. But she was
not happy. The noise out on the busy street was
she felt bleeding into the theater and ruining her performances,
and she complained so much that forty Second Street was

(22:25):
covered in mulch to muffle the sounds of carriages on
the street for the run of this show. While in
New York, Missus Campbell also got a lot of attention
this time around when she allegedly went to a lady's
bridge party and walked away with twenty two thousand dollars
in winnings. In nineteen oh seven, theater became a family

(22:45):
affair for Missus Campbell. Her son Alan wrote a play
called The Ambassador's Wife. She would later write of this play,
which she starred in and which her daughter Stella also
appeared in. It was quite a success in its way.
Te teen oh seven, Beatrice also made news in a
less artistic way when she was staying at the Plaza Hotel.

(23:06):
Missus Campbell, in the course of the evening socializing, lit
a cigarette and the staff was shocked. She was told
she must douse that cigarette immediately, not because they didn't
allow smoking on the premises, but they did not allow
ladies to smoke on the premises. We're using the words
ladies instead of women here, very deliberately, because she was
informed that the hotel only sought ladies as guests, so

(23:30):
she should not smoke there lest the hotel's reputation be tarnished.
The years from nineteen oh nine to nineteen fourteen were
very tumultuous for Campbell. In nineteen oh nine, having become
her own manager and director, she took on a new
role as producer. Socialite Jenny Spencer Churchill, known publicly as
Lady Randolph Churchill, read Missus Campbell her play his borrowed plumes,

(23:54):
and Campbell offered to produce it for her. The opening
to a very specific crowd, given the status of the playwright.
The Times theater critic Aby Walkley wrote of the opening quote,
when mundane ladies produce original modern comedies out of their
own original modern and quite charming heads. All the other
mundane ladies who have written original modern comedies themselves, or

(24:17):
might have done so if they had chosen, or are
intending to do so the very next wet afternoon, come
and look on so ah well refresher here Lady Randolph
Churchill was Sir Winston Churchill's mother. Lord Randolph had already died.
At this point. She was married to her second husband,

(24:39):
George Cornwallis West. We're telling you that for a reason.
Although the play itself got sort of amused to lukewarm reviews,
something much more impactful on Missus Campbell's personal life happened
as a result of all of this. In missus Pat's
own words quote, then, in the unexpected way things sometimes
happen in this world, George Cornwallis West was seriously attracted

(25:04):
by me. I believed his life was unhappy and warmly
gave him my friendship and affection. This caused gossip, misjudgment,
and pain that cannot be gone into here. The two
of them became quite close over the next several years.
Missus Pat came down with an illness in nineteen twelve
that was quite serious. Depending on the source you look at,

(25:26):
you might see it categorized as a head injury, or
as peritonitis, or as a nervous breakdown. And the truth
is it's actually pretty nuanced, and there are two different
instances that are conflated. It's easy to see how any
one of these might wind up being mentioned. While she
was performing in a play called Bella Donna, missus Pat

(25:46):
was on her way to the theater when her taxi
hit another taxi after swerving to avoid a child on
a bicycle. She recalled that her head went through the
window and she saw stars. Yeah. I have to give
her a like bless this woman's tenacity moment because She
got out of the crash taxi and hailed another cab
to get to the theater, but she was a mess.

(26:07):
She should not have done that. For the next six months,
she was confined to bed and she was unconscious for
a lot of that. She describes having to regain her
physical strength and essentially relearning to walk in her memoir,
but she also mentions that once she was told she
was expected to make a full recovery, she experienced a
wave of panic. The idea of returning to work and

(26:31):
information that she had received about George Cornwallis West's marriage
failing her possibly being involved in it. The idea that
she was going to have to quote pick up the
senseless things of life and go on with my career
made her feel like she never wanted to return to
her old life. It all seemed meaningless to her at
the time. So then later in nineteen twelve, in the autumn,

(26:54):
a second round of news came out that missus Pat
had been stricken suddenly in the Pain Paper's words, and
that Ford doctors had been called to the scene and
could not agree on the diagnosis. Two of them believed
it was partonitis and that she needed immediate surgery. The
other two weren't sure and they wanted to postpone any
surgical intervention. This illness was speculated to have been related

(27:18):
to the car accident. She didn't wind up having an operation,
and she slowly recovered. Yeah, you could see how all
of those things got a little confused for people in
some of the retellings of this story. But if you
kind of pick through papers, you'll see where it all
plays out. We're gonna pause here for a word from
the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class going,

(27:39):
and when we come back, we will talk about the
relationship between Missus pat and George Bernard Shaw. So when
she was still convalescing, George Cornwallis West had come to
visit Missus Patt whispering, according to her account, that he

(28:02):
needed her help. That was the thing she describes as
like helping her get through her sickness, knowing that someone
needed her. But there was another man who also reached
out to her while she was convalescing, and she wrote
of this admirer quote, there was one who, perhaps through
the intelligent grasp of his genius, understood a little the
nerve wrack of my illness himself living in dreams. He

(28:25):
made a dream world for me. Only those who can
understand this can understand the friendship Bernard Shaw gave to
me by my sick bed, the foolish, ridiculous letters he
wrote me, and his pretense of being in love with me.
Missus Pat published some of these letters in her memoir,
which was a pretty scandalous move when it came out

(28:45):
in nineteen twenty two and one. He wrote to her, quote,
I haven't been quite the same man since our meeting.
I suppose you are a devil, they all tell me,
so when I go on raving about you, Well, I
don't care. I've always said that it is the devil
that makes the hell, But here is the devil who
makes heaven. Wherefore I kiss your hands and praise creation

(29:07):
for you, and hope you are well. As this leaves
me at present, thank God for it. So. Missus Pat
and George Bernard Shaw, who she called Joey, are often
described as having an affair. They had actually known each
other casually at least since the eighteen nineties, but it
really wasn't until nineteen twelve that he seemed to become

(29:27):
romantically fixated on her, and the two exchanged a lot
of emotional letters, so while it could for sure be
categorized as an emotional affair, it doesn't appear that they
ever had a physical relationship. And from the outside, when
you read them, it really seems like this correspondence may
have helped Beatrice find her strength again, and the playwright

(29:48):
noted that he sensed she was improving, writing at one
point quote, I think you are getting well. I hear
a ring, I see a flash in your letter. The able,
courageous Stella is stirring. And perhaps she will put me
away with the arrow route. No matter, I shall rejoice
and glory in her. And that kind of was what happened.
Beatrice shut the romance down as she got better, although

(30:11):
she did become best friends with his sister Lucy, and
she and George Bernard Shaw remained close friends. As she
put it quote, when my illness was over, the real
friendship which exists today was between us. In nineteen fourteen,
missus Pat starred as Eliza Doolittle in the first English
language version of Pigmalion. It had actually been staged in
German after Shaw wrote it in nineteen twelve, but it

(30:33):
was postponed in English until Missus pat recovered so that
she could be the debut star in it. We think
of Eliza Doolittle as Audrey Hepburn's role thanks to the
movie My Fair Lady, but that role was written for
Campbell by George Bernard Shaw. But the two of them
really disagreed on the play's ending. So if you read
the play as written, it ends like this. Higgins says

(30:56):
to his mom, goodbye mother. Oh, by the way, Eliza
or her a ham and Stilton cheese, will you and
buy me a pair of reindeer gloves number eight and
a tie to match that new suit of mine at
Elan Binman's. You can choose the color. And at this
point Eliza Toolittle says buy them yourself. Uh, and his

(31:17):
mother says, I'm afraid you've spoiled that girl, Henry. But
never mind, dear, I'll buy you the tie and gloves,
and Higgins says to his mom, Oh, don't bother, She'll
buy them all right enough. So Missus Campbell felt like
this ending was ambiguous and it wasn't clear whether Eliza
and Higgins would be together. She thought it lacked romance,

(31:37):
and she did the audience out of knowing what happens
to the characters that they had come to love over
the course of this show. She wanted the play to
have a happier ending, so when she performed it in
its English language debut, she changed that line from buy
them yourself to what size to indicate that Eliza was
getting the gloves and would be back. This is so

(31:59):
funny to me because it's not a particularly romantic line,
but she is smart enough to be like, yes, but
then they know I'm coming back, right. It's very sneaky.
The playwright and his actor remained in locked horns over
this issue, but every single time Missus Patt performed it,
which was a lot because it really became known as
her role, she finished it her way. He wrote her

(32:23):
a letter detailing what he felt were the four levels
of illiteracy, with the fourth being quote the illiteracy of
Eliza Doolittle, who couldn't even read the end of her
own story. He then continued, quote, there is only one
person alive who is such a monster of illiteracy as
to combine these four illiteracies in her single brain, and I,

(32:43):
the greatest living master of letters, made a perfect spectacle
of myself with her before all Europe. While she was
making controversy on stage by defying a well known playwright,
Missus Campbell was also making another controversy in her personal life.
She remarried in nineteen fourteen to Major George Frederick Middleton

(33:03):
Cornwallis West. The reason this was controversial was because Cornwallis
West had just gotten divorced, as in the paperwork was
completed hours before he and Missus Campbell got married. This
is one of those things that sounds really sensational, but
the divorce proceedings had started in the autumn of nineteen thirteen.

(33:24):
They got married in April of nineteen fourteen, so they
were waiting for these legal steps to be complete, and
her children and friends all seemed pretty happy about the marriage.
Any scandal about it seems to have been outside of
their actual social circle, probably because the two of them
were so well known. Yeah, there had been all those

(33:44):
rumors about them, and there are some reads that she
basically cut off her her flirtation or emotional affair with
George Bernard Shaw because she was like, no, I'm picking
George Cornwallis West. Early nineteen eighteen, Beatrice received news that
her son Alan had been killed in action in France

(34:05):
during World War One. She wrote quote one day's rest
to get my heart steady and then work again. Life
was pitiless. The theater hell I was in deep sea
and there was no light anywhere. She includes what appeared
to be all of Allan's letters from his time away
at war in her memoir, as well as letters written
to her about her son by his fellow soldiers and

(34:28):
leaders in the military after he was killed. After Allan died,
Missus Campbell grieved really deeply, but she did continue to work,
but she was feeling worn down. In late nineteen twenty
she was put on bed rest by her doctor for
her nerves, and she stayed there for three months, but
anxiety over money made her want to end her convalescence.

(34:51):
She took a brief engagement where she got on stage
to give a prologue at an epilogue for a short
film that was being shown in between. Then she was
ordered by her doctor to go to the country alone
for six to eight weeks. She sold her London home,
bought a small cottage and spent time writing her memoir,
which was published in nineteen twenty two. In nineteen twenty seven,

(35:13):
Missus Campbell returned to the New York stage for the
first time since the loss of her son. She had
not really wanted to do a big international trip. That
play was The Adventurous Age, written by Frederick Whitney, and
it premiered in the US on February seventh, nineteen twenty seven,
at the Mansfield Theater. The play was billed as a
farcical comedy and it featured a mature couple by the

(35:34):
name of Rivers, each of whom was hoping to ensnare
a much younger paramour for themselves. In Missus Pat's obituary,
The New York Times stated that critics didn't like the play,
and nowhere was that more apparent than in the Time's
own review by Jay Brooks Atkinson, which ran the morning
after the play opened, under the headline Missus Campbell returns

(35:57):
at redd in part quote for her first appearance in
America after ten or twelve years, Missus Patrick Campbell has
not been happy in the selection on her play. To
be perfectly candid, her selection could not have been worse.
Beyond the faintest glimmering of dramatic idea, The Adventurous Age
has nothing to recommend it upon any save the amateur stage,

(36:19):
and then only among close friends who dare not show
their boredom. How came an actress of her distinction to
select the adventurous age. The review does seem to conclude
by suggesting that missus Campbell is not the problem, that
just she has terrible material in the play, and it
concludes with quote, Missus Campbell deserves at least a play

(36:39):
commensurate with her abilities. Throughout the nineteen twenties, Missus Patt's
appeal to the public was waning. She was aging at
a time when youthful flappers were the trend, and she
knew it. She had a reputation for being bossy and
biting with her words, and fewer and fewer people were
willing to put up with that in an actor who
was losing star power. She really got to a place

(37:01):
financially of just screeping by for a while. Although the
nineteen twenty nine play The Matriarch by Gladys bronwin Stern
was successful enough and ran long enough that she was
able to write her financial boat. In nineteen thirty she
made the transition to film, appearing in the movie The
Dancers by Sir Gerald Marier, which originated as a play

(37:22):
in nineteen twenty three. The plot is a story of
two childhood sweethearts, Una and Tony, who promised to get
married as adults. Then as adults, they're reunited after Tony
inherits a fortune and appears once more in UNA's life
to make good on their agreement. Una agrees, but she's
harboring the secret that she has not stayed true to him,

(37:43):
whereas he has waited for her. Like many of the
plots we've discussed here, particularly the ones where a woman
is determined to be ruined, it ends tragically. In nineteen
thirty four, she was in three more films, Riptide, One
More River, An Outcast Lady, and then she appeared in
the nineteen thirty five film adaptation of Crime and Punishment.

(38:04):
In addition to acting, Missus Campbell also started booking appearances
on the lecture circuit in the United States, where she
taught diction. Missus Campbell's last performance was in nineteen thirty eight.
She started in the thirteenth chair in Connecticut. Her career
had gone on for fifty years. When she finished the show.
She moved to Paris instead of going back to London.

(38:26):
At some point she and her second husband became estranged,
but they lived more or less separately, so he wasn't
with her during this time. When World War Two began,
Missus Patt moved from Paris to Powe in southern France.
She lived there only a few months before dying of
pneumonia on April ninth, nineteen forty, at the age of
seventy five. Although her obituary in The New York Times

(38:49):
was lengthy and full of praise, it's likely that she
didn't get as much notice as she might have if
she had died at a different time. By that point,
most of the newspaper was dedicated to war coverage. The
front page on April eleventh, nineteen forty had the headline
Nazis driven from Bergen Trondheim. Yeah. Her o bit was

(39:09):
kind of buried in that that obituary did manage to
talk about Missus Campbell's demanding nature, but in a positive way.
That write up states quote, had her temperamental whims been
those of a middling talent, she probably would have faded
into obscurity. But because they were coupled with a first
rate ability, those who worked with her seemed to enjoy them.

(39:30):
George C. Tyler for many years. Her American producer said
of her temperament, you laughed instead of trying to strangle her.
Oh that's missus, Pat. Yeah, I find her charming in
her own way. I have so many things to talk
about him behind the scenes. Oh good, do you have
some listener maw before we do that? I do. It's

(39:51):
from our listener, Elizabeth, and it's about our Louis Sullivan
episode and buildings I got wrong, although I did go
back and double check, and they seemed to be wrong
in a number of places, which makes me think it's
one of those cases of something being printed wrong in
an authoritative place and then being repeated elsewhere. But here's
the scoop, Elizabeth writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I'm sure

(40:12):
you've had an architecture nerd or to descend on you already.
Actually not really, but just in case, I wanted to
provide you a clarification on a couple of the Chicago
buildings you mentioned in the Louis Sullivan episode. The Field's building,
designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, was the wholesale warehouse, not
the department store. The wholesale store is regarded as a
landmark in the development of an American architectural style, and

(40:34):
group floors together on the exterior in a way that
foreshadowed Sullivan's later work and the commercial style of the
early twentieth century. The original part of the Field's department
store building was designed by Charles Attwood, who eventually took
over for John Root at the Columbian Exposition. The larger
parts of the building on State Street were designed by
Pierce Anderson, who worked in the successor firms of D. H.

(40:55):
Burnaman Co. Personally, I love all the Fields buildings, but
I have to chuckle at what Sullivan might think. Keep
up the good work. Thank you for that clarification. Never
would have figured that one out on my own. If
you would love to write to us, you could do
so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
find us on social media as Missed in History and
if you have not subscribed yet, that is very easy

(41:16):
to do on the iHeartRadio app pretty much anywhere you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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