Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater

1. An Itinerant Childhood

chapter 1  An Itinerant Childhood My parents objected to a stage career with the usual insincerity of theatrical parents. —margaret webster Margaret Webster’s life in the theater began in earnest in London at age twelve when she appeared in a bene‹t called The Women’s Tribute. A company of “star” actresses was rehearsing the bene‹t performance, written for the occasion by Louis N. Parker, when the “Youth” in the allegory took sick. May Whitty knocked on her daughter’s bedroom door and asked if Peggy (as she was called) wanted to learn thirty lines overnight and perform the next day. With greasepaint on her face, dressed in a too large tunic, and carrying a wreath of arti‹cial ›owers, Peggy made her entrance on the stage of the Empire Theatre in Cheswick. She was entranced. “I still remember how the footlights seemed to glare up at me,” she wrote years later, “and the auditorium beyond was like a limitless black cavern, stretching away to in‹nity.” Even more amazing, the critic for The Stage remarked that she was “a brilliant young lady of undoubted histrionic gifts.”1 Peggy was bedazzled by the excitement, the greasepaint, the costumes, and the pageantry. Moreover, she had appeared on stage with her celebrated mother, May Whitty, with Marion Terry as Peace and Lilian Braithwaite as Britannia. Peggy Webster had been in and around the theater during her entire life, for her parents were professional actors. Now she herself had appeared 7 before the footlights and breathed in the enchanting world of the theater, and for the rest of her life its mystery and magic would enrapture her. Peggy’s mother had always planned for her only child to follow in the family’s theatrical footsteps. Mary Louise Whitty (celebrated in later years as Dame May Whitty) was the third daughter of Alfred Whitty and Mary Ashton. The family fell on hard times when her father died of pneumonia at thirty-eight. At sixteen, May decided to help her mother and sisters by going on the stage. Following a letter of introduction to the acting duo Madge and William Hunter Kendal, the petite, doe-eyed Irish beauty appeared in the chorus of an operetta called The Mountain Sylph. Her stage career was effectively launched on London’s West End, and she soon progressed to the prestigious St. James’s Theatre, where she was understudy to an ingenue whose family name was Webster. Unlike the Whittys from Wexford, Ireland, the Webster family had a long and illustrious British ancestry and stage history, beginning with a dancing master and progressing to Benjamin Nottingham Webster I who became the distinguished actor-manager of the Haymarket Theatre in the mid-1800s. He was Peggy’s great-grandfather. May Whitty met the handsome Benjamin Nottingham Webster III, a golden-haired, blue-eyed young man, outside the stage door of the St. James, where he had come to meet his actress-sisters, Annie and Eliza. Ben Webster was studying for the bar at King’s College with little enthusiasm for a career as a barrister. He delighted in acting with the Irving Amateur Club and singing in concerts. Once he graduated from the Inner Temple and before his admission to the bar in 1885, Ben made his professional debut under the name Mr. B. Nottingham in A Scrap of Paper, a comedy by Victorien Sardou. The chance encounter with May Whitty eventually determined the direction of Ben Webster’s career. In 1887, he made his stage debut in the West End with the Kendals as Lord Woodstock in Lady Clancarty, a historical drama by Tom Taylor. Ben and May were married ‹ve years later and remained professional actors for the remainder of their lives. Margaret Webster was born in the proverbial theatrical trunk on March 15, 1905, in an apartment at 260 West Fifty-ninth Street in New York City, when her father was on tour with Ellis Jeffreys’s Company and appearing in The Prince Consort. Peggy made her earliest debut when her birth was announced from the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre on West Fortysecond Street, where her father was appearing as the prince consort. A grinning fellow actor whose part called for him to announce the birth of the prince’s son said, “I’m afraid tonight it’s a girl!”2 A newspaper account got it 8  Margaret Webster partially right...