Background
Hopwood was born to James and Jule Hopwood on May 28, 1882, in Cleveland, Ohio.
(Drusilla Wills, Eva Moore, Claude Rains, George Relph, No...)
Drusilla Wills, Eva Moore, Claude Rains, George Relph, Nora Swinburne, A Scott-Gatty. Arthiur Wontner, William Kershaw, Herbert Bolingbroke, Allen Jeayes
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(Published here for the first time, "The Great Bordello, A...)
Published here for the first time, "The Great Bordello, A Story of the Theatre" (edited and with an afterword by Jack F. Sharrar) is by Jazz-Age playwright Avery Hopwood (1882-1928). Hopwood was the most successful playwright of his day, with four hits on Broadway at the same time in 1920. Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, "The Great Bordello" is a roman à clef that tells the story of aspiring playwright Edwin Endsleigh (Hopwood's counterpart), who, upon graduation from the University of Michigan, heads for Broadway to earn his fortune and the security to pursue his one true dream of writing the great American novel. Shaping Edwin's journey in the world of the theater is his love of three women: the beautiful, ambitious Julia Scarlet, whom he first meets in Ann Arbor; the emotionally fragile and haunting Jessamy Lee, and the very private and mysterious leading lady Adelina Kane, idol of the American stage. In the company of Edwin and his loves are an array of thinly-veiled representations of theatrical personages of the time, amongst them Daniel Mendoza, the exacting and powerful impresario, who controls the lives of his leading ladies; the goatish manager Matthew Lewis, who promotes Julia Scarlet as "the American Sarah Bernhardt"; the worldly-wise veteran of the stage, Ottilie Potter, who has gotten where she is because, "Men had what I wanted, and I had what they wanted"; and the huge, manlike Helen Sampson, chief among theatrical agents. Once described as "the most devastating exposé of the American theatre as an institution imaginable," "The Great Bordello" provides a deeper understanding of the human desire to accomplish something of enduring value amidst commercial success and ruthless realities of life.
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Hopwood was born to James and Jule Hopwood on May 28, 1882, in Cleveland, Ohio.
He was graduated from the University of Michigan in 1905 with the degree of A. B.
He entered newspaper work. A few months later he was sent to New York as special correspondent for the Cleveland Leader, and shortly after reaching New York, his first play, Clothes, a modern comedy written in collaboration with Channing Pollock, was accepted for production. Its first performance was in 1906, with Grace George in the leading rôle. Thereafter for eighteen years Hopwood turned out plays rapidly, nearly all of them being financially successful. Many were entirely original, some were adapted from the work of foreign dramatists and some were written in collaboration with other authors. He wrote several mystery melodramas, but he became best known for a type of "smart, " ultra-modern, and usually risqué farce-comedy. He had the remarkable record of eighteen successful plays in fifteen years.
In 1920 four of his plays, all decided "hits, " were running simultaneously in New York playhouses. These were The Bat, Spanish Love, The Gold Diggers, and Ladies' Night. His earlier plays were Clothes (1906); The Powers that Be (1907); This Man and This Woman (1909); Seven Days (1909), in collaboration with Mary Roberts Rinehart; Judy Forgot (1910); His Mother's Son (1910); Nobody's Widow (1910); Somewhere Else (1913); Fair and Warmer (1915); Sadie Love (1915); The Mystic Shrine (1915); Our Little Wife (1916); Double Exposure (1918); The Gold Diggers (1919); and The Girl in the Limousine (1919), with Wilson Collison. In 1920 he and Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote The Bat, perhaps the most widely performed of all mystery dramas, and one of the most profitable plays ever written. It was translated into several foreign languages and has been played on every continent on the globe, paying its writers and producers profits amounting to millions of dollars.
In the year of its first production, 1920, Hopwood collaborated with Mrs. Rinehart in the writing of Spanish Love and with Charlton Andrews in Ladies' Night. He also wrote A Thief in the Night (1920); The Great Illusion (1920), from the French; Getting Gertie's Garter (1921), with Wilson Collison; The Demi-Virgin (1921); Why Men Leave Home (1922); Little Miss Bluebeard (1923); The Alarm Clock (1923), from the French; The Best People (1924), with David Gray; and The Harem (1924), from the Hungarian. In 1925 he announced that after completing two plays on which he was then working, Naughty Cinderella and Four Stuffed Shirts, he would write no more for the stage. Apparently he kept his word, for nothing more came from his pen during the remaining three years of his life.
Unspoiled by his remarkable success, he did not over-rate his own plays but knew them for the clever, ephemeral things they were. Genial, kindly, tolerant, he had a sort of modern Epicurean philosophy and lived by it. Throughout his career he had worked with furious energy and played almost as intensely; perhaps these energies conspired to shorten his days. While summering at Juan-les-Pins in the French Riviera in 1928, he went bathing in the sea one day, too soon it is believed, after eating dinner, was seized with cramps, and drowned before help could reach him.
(Published here for the first time, "The Great Bordello, A...)
(Drusilla Wills, Eva Moore, Claude Rains, George Relph, No...)
In 1906, Hopwood was introduced to writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten. The two became close friends and were sometimes sexual partners. In the 1920s Hopwood had a tumultuous and abusive romantic relationship with fellow Cleveland-born playwright John Floyd. Although Hopwood announced to the press in 1924 that he was engaged to vaudeville dancer and choreographer Rosa Rolanda, Van Vechten confirmed in later years that it was a publicity stunt. Rolanda would later marry caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias.
