Draper, Ruth (1884–1956)

American actress, performing as a solo artist in skits and playlets of her own devising, who was considered the foremost solo performer of her day. Born Ruth Draper in New York City on December 2, 1884 (not in 1889 as is sometimes found); died on December 29, 1956; daughter of William Draper (a physician) and Ruth (Dana) Draper; sister of Muriel Draper ; educated by private tutors and private school; never married; no children.

Awards:

Command performances before King George V and Queen Mary of Teck of England, the king and queen of Belgium, and the king and queen of Spain; honorary degree of Master of Arts from Hamilton College; honorary degree from Cambridge University; Commander, Order of the British Empire.

Made first professional appearance (1915); made first appearance on the New York stage (1916); toured the Western front in World War I; made formal professional appearance as a solo performer, London, England (1920); toured Europe and U.S. (1924–28); toured South Africa (1935); toured Far East (1938); toured Latin America (1940); toured U.S. and Canada (1940–41); toured Europe and U.S. (1946–56); gave last performances in New York (December 25–28, 1956).

Ruth Draper was born in New York City on December 2, 1884, the daughter of Dr. William Draper, a well-known New York physician, and Ruth Dana Draper , whose family was socially prominent, her maternal grandfather having been Charles A. Dana, the renowned editor of

the New York Sun. The young Ruth and her five siblings were raised in a wealthy, cultivated atmosphere in which such artists as the novelist Henry James, the painter John Singer Sargent, and the Polish piano virtuoso Ignatz Jan Paderewski were frequent visitors. Except for one year when she attended a private school, Ruth was educated by private tutors. For a time, she lived with her family in Italy.

As a young girl, Ruth Draper evinced an extraordinary talent for mimicry. By her own account, when she was a child of seven, she began to carry on long conversations with herself in which she would imagine that she was first one person and then another, all of whom were very real to her, be they fairy princesses or Indian squaws. In Draper's case, however, these imaginary friends grew in number as the years progressed and remained her intimate companions for the rest of her life, companions whom she shared with the rest of the world. Her debut as a monologist took place at a party in her teens at which each young guest was invited to contribute to the entertainment. It occurred to Draper to do the kind of a monologue she had seen performed on stage by solo artists such as Beatrice Herford and Elsie Janis . Choosing a tailor who had made some clothes for her as a subject, she then elaborated on just what such a character must be like. Later, as she repeated this first tour de force, the sketch began to take on a definite form that suggested still others to her. In this way, the art of Ruth Draper was born and developed over many years before she tried it on the professional stage.

By 1911, after several years of performing at home and for friends at parties, Draper began to entertain at schools, colleges, charity affairs, and clubs. By 1915, encouraged by Paderewski who recognized her genius and who predicted that one day she would have the world at her feet, she turned professional and began to earn her living through her unusual talent. In May of the following year, she made her acting debut in New York, portraying the role of a maid in the play A Lady's Name, which starred the celebrated Marie Tempest . This proved to be a false start, however, and Draper never appeared on the stage with another performer again. Several years of struggle ensued, with many managers not wishing to even audition yet another "onewoman act" for vaudeville, as variety shows were called in those days. Her real career began only in 1918, when she performed for seven months, entertaining the troops of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France during the First World War. This trip awakened in her a love of travel, and for the rest of her life she never tired of touring both in the United States and abroad.

Ruth Draper's first official professional performance took place at Aolian Hall in London in January 1920, when she was already 34 years old. But, though her career may have begun late, fame came quickly; she was soon so well known in London for her talents as a monologist that she managed several weeks at the West End Theater in 1924–25 and, in 1926, was invited to give a command performance before King George V and Queen Mary of Teck at Windsor Castle. In the years 1924–28, Draper toured the U.S. and Europe, during which she appeared in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and Madrid, giving command performances before the kings and queens of Belgium and Spain, and received an honorary degree of Master of Arts from Hamilton College. At the end of her U.S. tour, she regaled audiences for an astonishing 18 consecutive weeks at the Comedy Theater in New York City (1928–29), a record for a solo performer.

By the 1930s, Ruth Draper had acquired an international reputation as one of the most, if not the most, distinguished solo performers of her time, with critics vying to find fresh superlatives to describe her art: "a unique artist and in her line unsurpassable" (London Daily Telegraph); "an incomparable artist who runs so true to form that there is nothing new to be said in her praise" (London Observer); "No one can play so many tunes on one instrument" (The New York Times); "Ruth Draper is a genius" (London Daily News).

In 1935, Draper toured South Africa and, in 1938, embarked on a Far Eastern tour that took her to India, Ceylon, Burma, the Malay States (now Malaysia), Java, Australia, and New Zealand. So enamored was she of travel that not even the Second World War curtailed her hectic tours. In 1940, prevented by the hostilities from visiting her beloved Europe, she performed throughout South America, and, in 1940–41, toured the U.S. and Canada. It was at this time that she received a second honorary degree, a Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of Maine (1941).

Herford, Beatrice (c. 1868–1952)

British monologist and actress. Born in Manchester, England, around 1868; died in her summer home at Little Compton, Rhode Island, on July 18, 1952; sister of Oliver Herford (1863–1935, a writer and illustrator); married Sidney Willard Hayward, in 1897.

A noted British monologist, Beatrice Herford's most famous sketches were The Shop Girl and The Sociable Seamstress. She also appeared on Broadway in Two by Two, Cock Robin, See Naples and Die, and Run, Sheep, Run.

Draper's career was as unique as her art and was punctuated by unusual details. One man claimed to have seen her perform 140 times; actresses went to her matinees in order to study the way in which she achieved her effects; dramatic coaches took their students to see her sketches and had them imitate her in their classes; stage hands were said to have abandoned their card games and craps shooting to watch her from the wings. Although Ruth Draper was a natural genius, who had never formally studied acting, there is no question that her monologues and character sketches had some influence on the teaching of so-called "method acting" in the U.S. with its emphasis on "improvisations" as a teaching technique. Over the years, considerable discussion ensued over exactly how to describe what Draper did on stage. Such terms as monologist, diseuse, solo performer, reciter, elocutionist, impersonator, and character actress seemed highly inadequate terms to define her art. For her own part, Draper insisted that she was simply an actress.

Always a New Yorker, Draper lived in an apartment at 66 East 79th Street when not on tour, usually vacationing in Dark Harbor, Maine. Her brother's son, Paul Draper, became a noted dancer, and on occasion she appeared with him on a double bill alternating her sketches with his own solo performances. In the course of her career, many honors came to her. She not only appeared before crowned heads but was also presented to the pope. As early as 1914, she was being painted and sketched by John Singer Sargent, and, besides her honorary degrees (one of them from Cambridge University), she received the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire from the British government and only her lack of British citizenship prevented her from being granted the ultimate title of Dame Commander of the British Empire, which she otherwise would have certainly merited.

Over the years, Ruth Draper composed no less than 37 skits, featuring some 58 characters. Her playlets were brief and incisive, cutting away all but the essentials of the characters but nevertheless delineating them as true individuals. Taken together, her sketches would have required over eight hours to perform in their entirety and would have involved the speaking of some 30,000 words. Typically, however, an evening with Ruth Draper "and her cast of characters" was composed of seven sketches involving about 7,500 words. Her longest sketch, Three Women and Mr. Clifford, took just over an hour to perform and was, in effect, a one-act play in three scenes; her shortest, A French Dressmaker, was accomplished in four minutes. In between, lay items of varying length such as Love in the Balkans and A Cleaning Woman, taking five minutes each; The Dalmatian Peasant, eight; In a Church in Italy, twenty-six, and Three Breakfasts, twenty-seven. A perfectionist who was devoted to her work, Draper honed and polished her opuscules, elaborating, expanding and adding to her bill of fare. Her scripts, however, published after her death, give only an approximation of what she actually did on the stage for they served largely as mere mnemonic devices, and she rarely performed any of her sketches the same way more than once. As she grew older, she declined to expand her repertoire with new material, claiming that it took years that she no longer had to produce a work that she considered ready for the stage.

The New York Times">

She is not astonishing you with the brilliance of her talent. She is modestly asking you for your interest in various characters most of whom represent her respect for the human race.

—Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times

Ruth Draper's performances were as austere as her scripts. A chair and a table were her only props; an addition of an accessory—a hat, a shawl, a bit of lace—to her plain black gown was enough to enable her to create her character. When her hair turned grey and eventually white, she ignored it, and she never resorted to makeup; her artistry alone was all that she relied upon to create a role, even when playing young women when she was herself past 60. Her carriage was superb, and she had complete mastery over her rich and pliant voice; her ear was perfectly pitched to the subtleties of accents and to the patterns of speech of her characters. An interesting aspect of Draper's performances was her use of "foreign language." Although she performed in French or Italian when appearing in those respective countries, she thought nothing of faking a language when she needed one that she was not familiar with. Thus, her Dalmatian peasant spoke neither Croatian nor any other Balkan tongue; Draper simply and skillfully mouthed what one observer referred to as "Draperese," a gibberish that conveyed the lilt, the tone, and the feel of a Slavic language.

When once asked by someone what was the formula for her technique, Draper answered with complete ingenuousness that she had none at all. Imagination, observation and faith in her abilities were the sole ingredients of her work. Her artistic creed was sincerity. She believed with childlike simplicity in the characters that she portrayed, and she expected that acceptance from her audience, as well. In the words of Thorton Delahanty: "It is this thing that she does to her audiences, her extraordinary power of lifting them out of themselves and making each member a co-creator with her, which so distinguishes her art from that of the ordinary theater." One London critic opined in 1930 that Ruth Draper's greatest strength as an artist lay in two sources: first, her power, already fully developed, to make a general criticism of contemporary civilization by means of ironic portraiture, compelling one to criticize not only the characters that she portrayed but one's own attitudes towards them; and second, her tragic power, which she had only begun to tap. While her rivals provoked one to laughter, he felt that only Draper was capable of evoking pity:

Her study of a Dalmatian peasant visiting her husband in a New York hospital and her wordless portrait of an unhappy woman who, when the tourists have gone, comes to pray in a Florentine church are pointers to the future development of her art. They are supremely beautiful, touching and profound. The woman capable of them is no longer to be thought of as an "entertainer"; she is potentially a tragic artist of a very high rank.

Much of the art of Ruth Draper seems to have been based on a phenomenon well known to radio producers: the ability of the audience to let its imagination run free. Yet there was more to her art than the mere conjuring up of images. Draper was a humanist who saw and felt the pain of others and who depicted her characters with understanding and compassion. Her sketches of immigrants and their plights, and those depicting the decency of simple, ordinary people were always tinged with affection, and, if her satires were mischievous and always on target, they were never concocted with malice or scorn.

Among Draper's most popular sketches were: A Board of Managers Meeting, Breakfast in Bed, At a Children's Party, At an Art Exhibition, At an English House Party, At the Court of Philip IV, A Cleaning Woman, The Dalmatian Peasant in a New York Hospital (her own personal favorite), The Debutant, Doctors, A French Dressmaker, In a Church in Italy, In County Kerry, In a Railway Station on the Western Plains, The Italian Lesson, Love in the Balkans, The Miner's Wife, On a Maine Porch, Opening a Bazaar, The Return, The Scotch Immigrant at Ellis Island, Showing the Garden, Three Breakfasts, Three Generations in a Court of Human Relations, Three Women and Mr. Clifford, Visit to the Art Gallery, Vive La France, The Wives of Henry VIII. The mood of these little plays ran the gamut from tragedy (The Miner's Wife) to broad satire (Doctors), with comedy being the most common genre in which she chose to work. All of her characters were females, though they often interacted with invisible male counterparts brought to vivid life by the magic of her art.

In The Italian Lesson, Draper portrayed a wealthy Park Avenue matron about to depart for a lengthy trip but who nevertheless insists on having her weekly Italian lesson. Alone on the stage, reclining on a chaise lounge, she conjured up a stageful of people all of whom were in some way connected with her departure, all the while gamely attempting to continue the constantly interrupted lesson ("Oh, Signore, I'm so glad that we're finally getting into Dante"), her non-existent "entourage" creating an invisible chaos that was hilarious.

Opening a Bazaar has been described as possessing "the sort of quiet irony which is in its nature more English than American," so much so that Draper felt obliged to caution her audience that it was not intended as a satire. A gentle caricature of a titled English woman with a strong sense of her own charitable importance, it nevertheless made a point that bordered on social commentary.

In Doctors, three women gather at a fashionable restaurant at the invitation of a fourth (played by Draper). All four of the ladies are on a diet, including Draper's character, but her diet consists of three chocolate eclairs which she devours, all the while going on and on about her marvelous physician and the wonderful cure he had effected on her ("I hadn't slept a wink for a year! Not a wink!"). Showing the Garden, depicts an English lady gamely running on and on about her garden to a visitor while having to continually apologize for its present state ("If you had just been here a week ago that whole side there would have been a mass of purple.").

One of Draper's cleverest skits was The Wives of Henry VIII in which she played each of the king's six wives in turn, selecting from the life of each the one scene that epitomized the particular wife's relationship with him: the middle-aged Catherine of Aragon pleading for her marriage, the alluring Anne Boleyn , not quite as clever as she thinks she is, the coarse Anne of Cleves playing cards with Henry and outrageously beating him, and so on through to Catherine Paar , his final queen, depicted praying at his coffin.

One of Draper's most touching playlets was Three Women in a Court of Domestic Relations in which a daughter, her mother, and her grandmother testify in turn, each giving her particular view on the question of institutionalizing the grandmother. When it comes to the grandmother's turn to speak, however, it becomes clear, even through her broken English, that institutionalization is hardly necessary; she has just become a burden to her daughter and granddaughter who simply no longer want to have her around.

The Dalmatian Peasant presents the audience with the plight of a young immigrant woman, new to America, who has just learned that her laborer husband has been injured on the job and taken to the hospital. Almost completely ignorant of English, the poor woman tries to comprehend, while unfeeling hospital employees explain to her that she is at the wrong hospital. In the end, they convince her that her husband is at Bellevue, but, as she shuffles out of the hospital muttering "Bellevue? Bellevue?," it is clear that she has no idea what Bellevue means.

Three Women and Mr. Clifford was Ruth Draper's longest and most ambitious playlet, as well as, perhaps, one of her most insightful. Wearing a plain, long-sleeved, black dress, Draper began the first scene by adding a whitelace collar and a stenographer's pad to depict Mr. Clifford's secretary. In her one-sided dialogue with Mr. Clifford, she was able to convey to the audience that the secretary, so cool and efficient, is actually in love with her employer. In the second scene, Draper removed the lace collar and replaced it with a heavy strand of pearls, a fur stole, and a perpetual pouty look of discontent to portray the wealthy, bored and unloved Mrs. Clifford. When first we see her, she is obviously standing on the curb outside of a Broadway theater waiting for Mr. Clifford to fetch a cab. Once inside the imaginary cab (a simple folding chair), Mrs. Clifford runs on and on about their son's latest escapade at college, fretting over how her husband has let the boy grow up with insufficient discipline, Draper all the while conveying through her movements the starting and the stopping of the cab at each stoplight. In the final scene, Draper sits on the arm of a chair that has its back to the audience so that we can not see its occupant. Now Mr. Clifford's mistress, she is facing the audience, laughing merrily as Mr. Clifford describes his son's latest antics at school, the very same that had earlier caused his wife such chagrin. By the end of the three short scenes, we know all that we need to know about Mr. Clifford: his insensitivity to his secretary's feelings for him, his boredom with his wife, and his want of a mistress to relieve the tedium of a moribund marriage.

Draper's sketch Vive La France was a particular tour de force for in it she not only played a young maiden but performed the entire scene in French. On a darkened stage, she conveyed—with not a word in English—that we were on a beach on the Channel coast of occupied France, where a young woman has come to see her beloved off as he embarks for England to join the Free French Forces fighting against the Nazis abroad. Although the stage was darkened and Draper wore a large shawl over her head, these artifices were scarcely necessary, for through her quick, youthful movements and the timbre of her voice, she never let you doubt that she was a woman of scarcely 20, even though she was actually past 70 the last time she performed the skit. When she ended the scene waving to her lover as his boat left the shore, crying out to him "Vive la France, Vive la France," the audience, completely swept up in the mood that she had created, would frequently cheer, so much so that Draper often used this sketch to conclude her evening's performance on a rousing note.

In her appearance, Draper was a tall, slender, handsome woman with a strong face, aristocratic features, a long aquiline nose and a bright, sunny smile. On stage, she radiated kindness and good will, and her devotees always felt that they were coming to the theater to see an old friend at work. Many of the members of her audiences were repeat attendees, and there was always a large number of theatricals in the house who considered Ruth Draper to be "an actor's actress," and who would never miss an opportunity to see her perform.

The success of Ruth Draper's solo performances encouraged other monologists to enter the field with various degrees of success, none of them enjoying the popularity of Ruth Draper. Among the better of these was the talented Angna Enters , a gifted performer, who used no words at all. As a one-woman performer, however, only the great Canadian comedienne Beat-rice Lillie , whose solo scenes were the highlights of her London and Broadway reviews, was in the same league as Ruth Draper. To see Lillie simpering in a Japanese kimono, reducing an audience to tears as she silently arranged and rearranged a single chrysanthemum in a vase, was to enter a realm of comic genius without compare.

Apart from her performances, Ruth Draper was an author in her own right. She not only wrote all of her own sketches but, in 1933, published a translation of Lauro de Bosis' poetic drama Iearo. Although she was asked to appear in motion pictures or at least to allow her sketches to be filmed, Draper always refused on the grounds that what she did was only suited for performance before a live audience. In fact, it is very likely that a live audience was indispensable for her to work her magic. She also declined to appear on radio, partly for the same reason but also because much of her effect was achieved precisely because of the disparity between the nature of her characters and her own appearance. A private person, Draper avoided publicity and never gave interviews. Personally, however, she was warm and gracious and had many devoted friends. She was also a delightful house-guest, having not the slightest hesitation in giving impromptu performances for her hosts and their friends or other guests.

After World War II, Draper continued her tours, appearing repeatedly in London, where she was extraordinarily popular. She played in London for the last time in 1956 and then moved on to perform in New York, even though she had announced her "farewell performance" there two years previously. Opening at the Playhouse on Broadway on Christmas night for a four-week engagement, she received the usual rave reviews, even though, with her talents undimmed, the reviewer for The New York Times despaired of finding anything new to say to describe her still marvelous performance. Four days later, however, at age 72, she was found dead in her apartment by her maid. She had never married and was survived by two sisters and her nephew. Although her funeral was private, over 400 attended. A collection of her sketches appeared in 1960, and, a devoted correspondent, her letters were published in 1979.

sources:

Free Library of Philadelphia, Theater Collection.

Obituary in The New York Times. December 31, 1956, p. 32.

Parker, John. Who's Who in the Theater. NY: Pitman, 1957.

suggested reading

The Art of Ruth Draper. New York, 1960.

Warren, Neilla. The Letters of Ruth Draper. New York, 1979.

Robert H. Hewsen , Professor of History, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey