William Aloysius Brady was an American theatrical manager, producer, and sports promoter.
Background
William Aloysius Brady was born on June 19, 1863 in San Francisco, California and was apparently the only child of Terence A. and Catherine (O'Keefe) Brady. His father was a newspaper editor who had landed in San Francisco in 1856 from Dublin, Ireland, and had founded the Catholic Monitor; his mother was "the most famous singer on the Coast in her day. "
The elder Brady was a fervent secessionist during the Civil War and his newspaper was wrecked. He was also, according to William, a scholar who educated his son on Shakespeare. When William was about three, his parents separated. His father "kidnapped" him and took him to New York, where they lived on the city's Lower East Side.
Education
During the elder Brady's periodic unemployment as a freelance writer, William sold newspapers and shined shoes. He early abandoned public school in favor of haunting the theaters.
Career
When William Brady was about fifteen his father was killed, apparently by a fall under an elevated train. Due to this unfortunate event, William had to seek employment to make a living. The New York Press Club hired the youth as a day steward, but shortly thereafter he returned to California, aided by the Press Club and by working as a "peanut butcher" or vendor on trains.
Once in San Francisco, young Brady earned a living by running a newsstand. Brady spent his spare time "chasing the theatrical will-of-the-wisp" until he landed a job as call boy with author-producer Bartley Campbell's production of the melodrama The White Slave in 1882. He made his professional debut when he took over the role for an indisposed actor. Campbell next sent him to Sacramento to join the troupe of Joseph R. Grismer as a utility man.
William Brady's break into management on his own had a good deal to do, as he later wrote, with "the old-time tradition of piracy and plagiarism. " Elated over the success of his own rewritten and dramatized version of H. Rider Haggard's popular adventure novel She, he decided to book it east. He abandoned it in St. Paul (or Minneapolis), Minnesota, however, when confronted by the more elaborate production of Charles Frohman heading west and starring William Gillette. Instead, Brady resolved to storm New York with the melodrama After Dark, the rights to which he had purchased for $1, 100 from the author Dion Boucicault while trouping on the West Coast. After Dark opened at the People's Theatre in the Bowery in April 1889 with Brady in the part of the boatman Old Tom and Marie René as a "transformation dancer. "
Producer Augustin Daly immediately served him with an injunction, claiming that the big scene in the play--the rescue by the heroine of a man bound to the rails in the path of an onrushing train--had been plagiarized by Boucicault from Daly's own Under the Gaslight. In spite of litigation lasting more than a decade and finally settled against him, Brady enjoyed several successful years with After Dark, especially after introducing into the cast the prizefighter James J. Corbett, whom he later managed and for whom he coauthored the play Gentleman Jack (1892).
Brady's next venture, his biggest moneymaker, was Way Down East, the tale of a country girl betrayed into a mock marriage. Titled Annie Laurie by the author Lottie Blair Parker and turned down by nearly every important Broadway manager, the script was renamed and elaborated upon by Brady's partner Joseph R. Grismer and produced by Brady and Florenz Ziegfeld at the Manhattan Theatre on February 7, 1898. Ziegfeld shortly withdrew from the undertaking leaving Brady to reap a fortune with the play, which toured for more than twenty years and whose screen rights David W. Griffith purchased.
Brady helped many other players on their way to stardom. Of his early "discoveries" he considered his "most notable, " David Warfield, whom he had met on the West Coast and who first appeared on Broadway in 1891 in Brady's production The Inspector.
Robert B. Mantell claimed to have learned more about Shakespeare from Brady than he had "in all his studies". Grace George called her husband's attention to Douglas Fairbanks, who appeared under Brady's management in several plays including All for a Girl (1908), his initial starring role, A Gentleman from Mississippi (1908), and The Cub (1910), where he first conspicuously utilized his acrobatic talent. It was Grace George who suggested the young Helen Hayes for the role of Maggie in What Every Woman Knows (1926).
When Broadway turned a deaf ear to Katharine Cornell, Brady gave her an opportunity in one of his road companies of The Man Who Came Back in 1918-1919, her first touring experience. Of his more than 250 productions Brady lost a fortune on the one of which he was most proud: The World We Live In by Josef and Karel Chapek, adapted by Owen Davis (1922), a fantasy concerning a drunken philosopher who falls asleep in a forest and discerns an analogy between the lives of insects and men.
His longest Broadway run came at an ebb in his fortunes and toward the end of his career. Most of the important New York managers had turned down Elmer Rice's Street Scene with its cast of fifty as too elaborate. But Brady, though often known for his penuriousness, envisioned the possibilities of its setting: a dingy New York street dominated by a brownstone house with whose occupants the play dealt. Lee Shubert furnished the financial backing and Jo Mielziner, then at the beginning of his career, designed the set.
According to Brady the production cost him $6, 000, with profits reaching $500, 000 and movie rights selling for $165, 000. Street Scene, which opened in January 1929, captured a Pulitzer Prize.
He also played a role in the film world, serving for a few years beginning in 1915 as head of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry.
He died of a heart ailment at his New York home at the age of eighty-six and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, New York.
Achievements
Brady ran a successful theatre operation for thirty years, having met actresses like Grace George (whom he later married) and having, at one point, hired famous humorist Robert Benchley to complete ad copy for him. Brady's success continued until the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which wiped out his entire savings. He was able to secure the funds to produce Street Scene, which was written by Elmer Rice, won the Pulitzer Prize, and netted Brady a half a million dollars. His total theatrical output included over 260 plays, including a version of Uncle Tom's Cabin that was later used as images for a book in 1904, and a number of movies before his death.
His name is still remembered and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1998.
William Brady won and lost many fortunes during his life, not only in the theater but, especially in his early days, as a sports promoter.
He had an "uncanny instinct for drama. " At rehearsals he would "roar a reading of a line" that was "electric" and "the whole stage would light up".
Personality
In his thirties he was pictured as having the physique of an athlete with clear, shrewd, blue eyes and a ringing laugh; in his later years he assumed somewhat the look of a gangster, seldom appearing without a cigar in the corner of his mouth.
Connections
During his barnstorming days in the West he married, at the age of twenty-two, a Paris-born dancer, Marie René ("In the Spotlight for Forty Years"); they had two children: Alice and William A. Brady, Jr. , who died at the age of five.
On January 8, 1899, some three years after his first wife's death, Brady married the actress Grace George, by whom he had a son (also William A. Brady, Jr. ), who followed in his father's footsteps as a producer.
Brady succeeded in his ambition to make his wife a star. In 1911 she opened the playhouse he built with Sauce for the Goose, followed by a series of plays including a comedy by Victorien Sardou and Emile de Najac (1913), and George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (1915) and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1916). His daughter, Alice Brady, also scored in several of her father's productions, among them Little Women (as Meg, 1912) and Owen Davis' Forever After (1918).
Father:
Terence A. Brady
newspaper editor
Mother:
Catherine (O'Keefe) Brady
Daughter :
Alice Brady
1892–1939
Wife:
Marie René
wife :
Grace George
1879–1961
colleague:
Augustin Daly
producer
Partner:
Joseph R. Grismer
American stage actor, playwright, and theatrical director and producer.
