Maude Adams - Infinite Women

Born: 11 November 1872, United States
Died: 17 July 1953
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Maude Ewing Adams Kiskadden

The following is excerpted from Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company.

Maude Adams, an American actress, born at Salt Lake City, Utah. Her parents James and Annie Kiskadden (stage name Adams) were both actors. She first appeared in the West, in children’s parts, when very young. Her first success in New York was with John Drew in The Masked Ball (1892) when she made an extraordinary advance in public favor. Soon after this she became a star under the management of Charles Frohman, and remained under his direction until his death in 1915.
Her most important impersonations have been in plays by J.M. Barrie and Edmond Ronstand. The delightful, whimsical boyishness of her Peter Pan, the charm of her Lady Babbie, and the power and pathos of her Duke de Reichstadt, had place Miss Adams among the foremost artists on the American stage.
In 1908 – 1910 she gave some notable performances of Twelfth Night, Joan of Arc and As You Like It at some of the principal universities.
Recently Miss Adams has been devoting herself to new ideas in the progress of motion-picture art.

Adams’s personal genius for acting and stagecraft were apparent by this point, but she never worked alone. Several people and forces combined to enable Adams to realize her visions in a period when the theater industry marginalized women, especially women involved in technical stagecraft. Adams became a brilliant exception in part because she had the support of Frohman, her domestic partners, and a community of people who, at the time, might not have referred to themselves as gay or lesbian, but who were nonetheless committed to same-sex relationships of love and devotion.

Frohman and Adams were both in long-term same-sex relationships. Adams had two, in fact, her first only ending with her partner’s early death in 1901. The loss sent Adams into a temporary retirement, which entailed extended stays at a spa-sanatorium and convent in Europe, out of the public eye.

From 1905, and for almost the rest of her life, Adams lived with the second of her two life partners, Louise Boynton, who had her own career as an editor, author, and publisher, and they are buried together at Adams’s former estate in New York. Frohman, Adams, and Boynton carefully concealed their private lives from an adoring but potentially unaccepting public. Frohman took pains to keep stories of Adams’s domestic relationships out of the press, and he allowed rumors to circulate that posited romantic connections between Adams and men—himself, even. None of these rumors were true, but they provided good cover.

Frohman and Adams’s preferred strategy to protect Adams’s reputation was to present her as unimpeachably chaste. When she gravitated toward convents as convenient escapes from the rigors of fame and career, Frohman was quick to play up the association between Adams and the nuns: they all renounced sexuality for a higher purpose. Nevertheless, Adams’s sexuality was a fact of her life—a fact that makes her accomplishments all the more impressive. She managed to work, innovate, and excel under public scrutiny, against a backdrop of misogyny and homophobia that might have brought her down in scandal at any moment.

Yet neither Adams nor Frohman was quite “in the closet,” either, as we’d put it today. They created productions that appealed to gay and lesbian audiences on purpose, with elements that extended a winking glance and wry smile to people steeped in the coded references to the cultural lives of LGBTQ Americans at the turn of the 20th century.

Audiences could and did read Adams’s choice to play male or male-presenting characters—Peter Pan, the Duke of Reichstadt, Joan of Arc, a court jester, and a rooster, even—as a challenge to the strict rules on gender and sexuality then current in the real world. Suggestive motifs, phrases, and costuming choices, moreover, spoke directly to audience members outside the sexual mainstream.

“The only thing that can save [Tinkerbell] is for you to believe in fairies. Do you believe in fairies?” was a line in “Peter Pan” delivered directly to the audience by an actress in drag, playing a character who lived in a dreamworld according to his own sense of right and wrong, supported by a group of lost boys (also actresses in drag). As such, the line had multiple meanings, to be sure, but one of them, according to theater historians, was a plea for compassion and understanding when it came to members of a sexual minority. Lesbians in the audience rewarded Adams by making her one of their idols. A fan base developed that itself constituted a kind of community organized around admiration for Adams as a prominent and beautiful example of successful “queer” womanhood.

In this way, Frohman and Adams presented material to the American public that, in a certain light, provided support, representation, and visibility to LGBTQ audience members. This effort, like Adams’s endeavors in stagecraft, rested on a deep and special understanding between her and Frohman—one that lasted until Frohman’s death in May 1915 aboard the Lusitania after it had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. Adams was devastated by the news but managed to organize a memorial service for hundreds of mourners.

In the next several years, Adams devoted her full attention to the problems of stage lighting. Around 1920, she realized that her experience, expertise, and intuition might be useful to the nascent film industry. She began work the following year with the General Electric Corporation (GE) in upstate New York on a bigger, brighter incandescent bulb for stage and screen.

GE’s director, Willis R. Whitney, recognized Adams’s scientific aptitude immediately. “Where did she get it?” he asked. The answer should have been clear enough. Never having attended college or high school, she got it from years of innovation on stages across the United States, from Broadway to Berkeley.

Adams and Boynton, by now longtime domestic partners, rented a house near GE’s labs, where Adams charted the progress of a team of engineers, participated in brainstorming sessions and experiments, and offered insights on applications of the new technology. The idea was to use tungsten filaments to allow for high wattage and easy maneuverability of the fixture.

Several months into the project, Adams invited Whitney to witness the progress. What he saw—a prototype of the massive incandescent bulb—shocked and delighted him. Still, the invention wasn’t quite operable, and another two years passed before Adams and the engineers had a working product that was ready for market. The last stage of development, perhaps the most important, was where Adams’s expertise became most valuable. She ensured that further adjustments to the bulb, especially with respect to its maneuvering and focusing capacities, would make it appealing to theater and movie producers.

At the same time, Adams was experimenting with early color film technology, especially as it related to lighting. News of these latest forays attracted the interest of George Eastman, whose company led the industry in the manufacture of film for motion pictures. An agreement between Eastman, GE, and Adams came to naught, however, as Adams preferred to return to the entertainment industries, where all her creative faculties might be employed—not just her expertise in lighting design.

After this parting of ways in 1923, GE continued work on the bulb, patenting it, finally, in the early 1930s. By that time, the bulbs were already in use all over the country. GE credited Adams as the first inventor on three patents: U.S. Patent No. 1,884,957, for an “illuminating device” (the massive lamp itself); U.S. Patent No. 1,963,949, for a “high powered illuminating device” (a cooling apparatus and supporting frame for the lamp); and U.S. Patent No. 2,006,820, for another “illuminating device” (the system for supporting the filament, thereby allowing the lamp to be moved without incident). Taken together, the patents presented a marketable lighting system that featured the world’s largest incandescent bulb. Using 30,000 watts, it could do the work of some 60,000 candles, giving directors and cinematographers a steady, reliable, adjustable beam for setting actors, actresses, and scenery in the very best light.

Maude Adams and her colleagues at GE received U.S. Patent Nos. 1,884,957 and 1,963,949 in 1932 and 1934, respectively. The largest incandescent bulb to date, their invention found immediate success among movie and theater producers, who benefitted from the device’s superlative maneuverability, reliability, and luminosity.

Adams performed onstage a few more times in the 1930s before settling at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. The president of Stephens had asked that Adams start a theater program there and gave her full control over the curriculum. It must have been a familiar arrangement to Adams: the trusting patron, a supportive community, and total autonomy.

Today, Adams’s portrait hangs on the back wall of the Stephens Playhouse. “We have her there,” explains retired theater professor Rob Doyen, “so that when you’re onstage, you know that Miss Adams is watching everything you do and supporting you.” A side room nearby, the “Maude Adams Gallery,” contains the most prized artifacts of her career, including one giant light bulb, intact, with a filament as wide as your hand.