WEST, Lillie

Born 11 October 1860, West Burlington, Iowa; died 3 July 1938, Chicago, Illinois

Wrote under: Amy Leslie, Marie Stanley

Daughter of Albert W. and Kate Webb West; married Harry Brown, 1880 (divorced); Frank H. Buck, 1901 (divorced 1916)

Lillie West was the daughter of an Iowa newspaperman and banker. After graduating with honors from St. Mary's Academy in Notre Dame, Indiana, and receiving a gold medal from the Chicago Conservatory of Music, she joined the Grayson Comic Opera Company, one of the many troupes formed in the 1870s to tour the phenomenally popular Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore. West rapidly rose to prominence on the light-opera stage. She married singer Harry Brown, and they performed together on Broadway and toured with the famous Grau Opera Company. When her four-year-old son died of diphtheria, a grief-stricken West retired from the stage. She settled in Chicago, and she and Brown were later divorced.

Her second husband was a twenty-three-year-old bell captain at the Virginia Hotel, where West lived. In her forties at the time, West dyed her hair to win the man who was later to earn the nickname "Bring 'em Back Alive" as a big-game hunter and author. He divorced her in 1916, claiming she humiliated him in public, but they were good friends in her last years.

West began contributing brief sketches to the Chicago Daily News after the death of her son; she became the first woman racetrack reporter and finally worked as a drama critic. As such she served for over 40 years, using the pen name Amy Leslie. West's style might best be described, like her personality, as effervescent. In a 1906 feature story on Sarah Bernhardt's tent tour of Texas, for example, she writes: "If no cyclone blows Sarah clear over the Gulf of Mexico, and if the coyotes are protected by game laws and warned out of gunshot and the centipedes are still hibernating, Mme. Bernhardt will triumph prismatically and bring beauty of art, splendor of charm, amazement, and a superb example to the youth and femininity of Dallas by her courage, her repertoire, her inexhaustible ambition, her diet of applause through sixty years and her power of concentration on the American dollar unadulterated and beatified."

Through the years, West encouraged many beginning stage and screen performers whose careers brought justification to the early praise she had lavished on them. She was the personal friend of such outstanding actors and actresses as Edwin Booth, Helena Modjeska, Julia Marlowe, E. H. Sothern, and Lily Langtry, whose intimate portraits she sketched in Some Players (1899).

In 1930 West published her only novel, Gulf Stream, using the name Marie Stanley. In it a fair-skinned black heroine spends a lifetime trying to deny her ethnic heritage, but is finally chastened when her daughter grows up to affirm her blackness with pride.

West was a popular critic and personality. Among the many affectionate tributes to her is one written by Ben Hecht, upon the occasion of her retirement: "There is a high wind about Amy that blows your hat off. She is as hilarious as a feast day. Her conversation is as successful as a circus. And she looks like a Mardi Gras….Her phrases still rise like Fourth-of-July balloon ascensions."

Other Works:

Amy Leslie at the Fair (1893).

The New York Public Library has a collection of clippings and photographs relating to Lillie West (Amy Leslie).

Bibliography:

Bookman (Feb. 1901). Chicago Daily News (5 July 1939). Chicago Herald Examiner (4 July 1939). ChicagoTribune (4 July 1939). NYT (30 Aug. 1930, 4 July 1939). Show World (17 Aug. 1907).

—FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ