Harrison Grey Fiske

Background

He was born in Harrison, New York, the second of three sons of Lyman Fiske, a prosperous hotel owner, and Jennie (Durfee) Fiske, both of seventeenth-century Massachusetts descent. He had first become enamored of the stage when as a small child he was taken to see a play at Barnum's Museum, and his father had later given him a toy theater.

As a boy he also had a printing press on which he got out his own monthly paper.

Education

He received his early education from tutors and at a school run by Mrs. George C. Vandenhoff, Jr. ; her husband, a retired English actor, gave Shakespearean readings which instilled in the boy an enduring love of Shakespeare.

After attending Dr. Chapin's Collegiate Institute in New York City, Fiske traveled for a summer in Europe and then, in 1878, entered New York University.

During his teens he combined the two interests as dramatic critic for the Jersey City Argus and the New York Star, papers on which his family had influence, and while in college he began contributing to the Dramatic Mirror, a New York weekly. He left college after his freshman year to become a journalist. His father bought an interest in the Dramatic Mirror and made his son (then eighteen) the editor; young Fiske became sole owner in 1888.

Career

Fiske's courageous editorial policy turned the Dramatic Mirror into the artistic and professional conscience of the American theater. Distressed by the plight of out-of-work actors and by the laissez-faire practices of the American stage, Fiske in his paper battled successfully to establish the Actors' Fund, chartered in 1882--the first voluntary, large-scale social security measure for an always insecure profession.

Another Mirror campaign sought the improvement of working conditions and the regulation of health hazards in theaters; Fiske disapproved, however, of attempts to organize an actors' union.

He helped secure passage of the Cummings Act of 1896 and subsequent laws to protect playwrights against literary piracy. In the theatrical world he consistently championed the creative artist against the profiteer.

The Fiskes spent twelve years fighting the theatrical trust known as the Syndicate, a combine of theater managers formed in 1896 by Charles Frohman, Abraham L. Erlanger, Marc Klaw [Supp. 2], and Al Hayman of New York, and Samuel Nixon (Nirdlinger) and J. F. Zimmerman of Philadelphia.

Their professed aim was to rationalize theatrical booking and eliminate wastefully competitive practices.

In fact, the Syndicate attempted to create a nationwide monopoly so that no play could be booked and no actor employed without its consent. Using the customary pressure tactics of the age, they soon brought most independent managers, as well as most actors, within their power. In the meantime, after several years' retirement, Mrs. Fiske had returned to the stage under her husband's management.

Her first important role was that of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House (1894). For twenty years the American stage had ignored Ibsen, but the Fiskes also succeeded in producing Hedda Gabler (1903), Rosmersholm (1907), Pillars of Society (1910), and Ghosts (1927).

Despite the Syndicate's growing control of the first-class theaters, they took most of their productions on tour and sometimes improvised stages in churches, vaudeville houses, and roller-skating rinks. Rosmersholm, thought to be a "heavy" play, made a considerable profit and interested even small-town audiences.

Fiske's productions of Ibsen, carefully designed, staged, and directed, using first-rate actors in all parts but rejecting the star system, were typical of his revolutionary work in the American theater. Fiske continued to war against the Syndicate both as producer of his wife's independent ventures and in the pages of his Dramatic Mirror.

He was finally able to lease the Manhattan Theater from 1901 to 1906 and thus provide a New York stage for Mrs. Fiske. At great personal and financial sacrifice, the Fiskes held out against the Syndicate, and they excited considerable public distaste for its methods.

By 1910 the Shubert Brothers had defeated the Syndicate by imitating them; the battle was over. But by that time the Syndicate had yielded to the Fiskes' independent policies and Mrs. Fiske was appearing under the auspices of Daniel Frohman.

Besides Ibsen's plays, the Fiskes' most successful productions during their lifelong collaboration included Lorimer Stoddard's dramatization of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (first produced in 1897); Victorien Sardou's Divoreons (1896); Becky Sharp (1899), an adaptation by Langdon Mitchell [Supp. 1] of Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Mitchell's original play The New York Idea (1906); Herman Sudermann's Magda (1899); Edward Sheldon's Salvation Nell (1908); and Mrs. Bumpstead-Leigh (1911), by Harry James Smith.

In their constant search for new American playwrights and in their work with Mitchell, Sheldon, Smith, and Moeller, the Fiskes had as salutary an effect on American dramatists as their productions of Ibsen had on the American playgoer. Later notable productions were Hatcher Hughes and Elmer Rice's Wake Up, Jonathan (1921), St. John Ervine's Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary (1923), Sheridan's The Rivals (1925), and Fred Ballard's Ladies of the Jury (1929).

In 1911 Fiske sold the Dramatic Mirror and turned increasingly to dramatic production. Among the other actors who appeared under his management, the two greatest were George Arliss and Otis Skinner [Supp. 3].

He also introduced the famous Yiddish tragedienne Bertha Kalich to the English-speaking stage. Fiske's most famous independent venture was his 1911 production of Edward Knoblauch's Kismet, in which Skinner created his most memorable role.

Kismet, which ran for two years, was assembled with little regard for cost and, like other Fiske productions, was carefully cast and elegantly set in the taste of the times.

In 1914 Fiske's production of Just Herself, in which he attempted to make the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova into an actress, was a failure; it wiped out all profits from the preceding two years and sent him into bankruptcy and to the brink of suicide.

His friends offered him help, but he preferred to work off his debts and to reduce his standard of living; a bon vivant, he had lived beyond his means for some years. After the Fiskes' production of The Merry Wives of Windsor toured successfully in 1928, they attempted Much Ado About Nothing, with disastrous results, driving Fiske for the second time into bankruptcy. He staged his last play (Against the Wind) in Chicago in 1931.

In later years the Fiskes, although remaining close friends and business partners, lived apart except for summers at their camp in the Adirondacks. Surviving his wife by ten years, Fiske died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-one in his New York apartment.

Achievements

• Over the course of his career, Fiske produced more than 140 plays, many of which he wrote or directed including Hester Crewe (1893), The Privateer (1903), and The Queen of Liars (1896) adapted from a play by Alphonse Daudet and Léon Hennique. He is perhaps best known for his 1911 production of Edward Knoblauch’s Kismet starring Otis Skinner.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Giddy Gusher Papers FACSIMILE

    (HIGH QUALITY FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION: Fiske, Harrison Grey...)

  • The New York Mirror Annual and Directory of the Theatrical Profession for 1888

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The New York Mirror Annual and Directory of the Theatrical Profession for 1888

    (This book, "The New York Mirror Annual and Directory of t...)

  • The Giddy Gusher Papers

    ( About the Book Biographical books, or bios, are detaile...)

  • The District Attorney

Religion

Using the customary pressure tactics of the age, they soon brought most independent managers, as well as most actors, within their power.

Interests

• Fiske also wrote short stories and plays, but none achieved lasting fame.

• Music & Bands

  Despite the Syndicate's growing control of the first-class theaters, they took most of their productions on tour and sometimes improvised stages in churches, vaudeville houses, and roller-skating rinks.

Connections

After a prolonged infatuation with Fanny Davenport, an actress almost ten years his senior, Fiske in 1886 began a leisurely courtship of a younger actress, Minnie Maddern [see Minnie Maddern Fiske, Supp. 1].

She divorced her first husband, and on March 19, 1890, she and Fiske were married at Larchmont, New York.

They had no children. The marriage, though unromantic in the conventional sense, proved of vital importance to the American theater. Maddern, daughter of itinerant actors, limited in formal education but possessing a practical knowledge of the theater, and Fiske, the urbane, well-to-do gentleman with literary tastes and a passion for the drama, together were uniquely suited to the task of reforming and civilizing the American stage. Mrs. Fiske taught her husband the realities of the hazardous, day-to-day existence of the barnstorming troupe; he devoted himself to her career, encouraged her artistic growth, and helped shape her taste until she was considered one of the most intellectually progressive of actresses.

In an interview with Alexander Woollcott [Supp. 3], Mrs. Fiske referred to her husband as her "artistic backbone. "

Father:

Lyman Fiske

mother Jennie (Durfee) Fiske

Wife:

Minnie Maddern