First Fifty

Modern clubs are little more than two centuries old. They really got going in Queen Anne's London, where men-- usually impelled by politics--met regularly in coffeehouses and taverns. At the Whigs' Kit-Cat Club, Addison and Congreve fellowshipped with statesmen and lords; at the Tories' Scriblerus, Swift and his friends forgathered. Before the 18th Century went out, London swarmed with clubs that, like Dr. Johnson's immortal one, produced great conversation, or like White's, Boodle's and Brooks's, witnessed some of the steepest gambling in history.

White's, Boodle's, Brooks's still exist; London's Athenaeum Club is 115 years old. Manhattan's Union Club is 103, its Union League 76. Last week, as bells rang in another year, another Manhattan club turned a corner, looked back sentimentally at its first half-century of life. Lest memory fail, it incorporated that half-century in book form.*

For years the great Edwin Booth was fired with the idea of establishing a club primarily but not entirely for actors. In the summer of 1887, with fellow-members of a yachting party, he got down to serious planning. During the next year Booth purchased a Manhattan house at 16 Gramercy Park, engaged Stanford White to remodel it, collected 46 charter members, and on the last night of the year, as first president of The Players, handed over the deed of No. 16 to Augustin Daly, the first vice-president. Next day Booth moved in, and for the five remaining years of his life The Players was his home.

In its 50 years, The Players has become one of the great Bohemian clubs of the world. Besides artists, all sorts and conditions of men have gained admittance-- ambassadors and auctioneers, ornithologists and explorers, magicians and Presidents of the U. S. Actors have always formed a powerful minority. Only dramatic critics are excluded by rule--to avoid the possible embarrassment of having them run into actors they have panned. The long list of celebrated members includes Grover Cleveland, Mark Twain, Sir Henry Irving, the elder J. P. Morgan, Elihu Root, John Singer Sargent (whose Edwin Booth hangs in the club), George Bellows, John Philip Sousa, Richard Mansfield, and the club's three Presidents who followed Booth--Joseph Jefferson, John Drew and Walter Hampden.

In 50 years, faces have come and gone, but the club itself has remained much the same: its air of worn brown leather, almost unused elevator, ancient chandeliers, cluttered rooms, classic busts and beery mugs, walls crowded with faded photographs and playbills--an "old uncle of a house," as Booth Tarkington described it. Still kept just as he left it-- except that the bedsheets are said to be changed occasionally--is the room where Booth lived & died. In tall wall-safes lie carefully preserved costumes and relics of Booth and other actors.

Relics of the past, too, are ubiquitous quotations from the Bard. One in the lavatory reads:

Nature her custom holds,

Let shame say what it will.

Year after year the same special occasions are celebrated--a repetition of the original founding ceremonies on New Year's Eve, a courtly reception to wives & daughters and friends on Ladies' Day, the only time women are admitted.*

Above its eating, drinking, card-and pool-playing, the thing that has given The Players gaiety and life is conversation. Wits & wags the club has had in plenty. There was a member who would fall asleep standing up -- whom another member de scribed as having "cab-horse blood." There was a member who went off the water-wagon saying: "After a terrific struggle, I have finally conquered this goddam will-power of mine." There was a famed wit, Oliver Herford, who at the expense of an extremely loquacious mem ber, changed the fire-warning to read: Exit in case of Simmons. Of Simmons it is also told that once he paused for breath in the middle of a long story, and a woman started to break in. Recollecting herself, she said: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Simmons, I am interrupting you." "Madame," said Simmons, "no one can speak without interrupting me."

With their traditions, their fund for helping indigent actors and artists, their all-but-annual revivals of plays from the past, The Players are a sentimental lot. Perfectly representative of the club's spirit are the well-known lines of one of their stanchest and most sentimental members, the late Don Marquis:

A Certain Club

Ah, dead and done! Forever dead and done

The mellow dusks, the friendly dusks and dim,

When Charley shook the cocktails up, or Tim --

Gone are ten thousand gleaming mo ments, gone

Like fireflies twinkling towards oblivion!

Ah, how the bubbles used to leap and swim,

Breaking in laughter round the goblet's brim,

When Walter pulled a cork for us, or John !

I have seen ghosts of men I never knew,--

Great gracious souls, the golden hearts of earth--

Look from the shadows in those rooms we love,

Living a wistful instant in our mirth:

I have seen Jefferson smile down at Drew,

And Booth pause, musing, on the stair above.

*THE PLAYERS' BOOK--edited by Henry Wysham Lanier.

* This rule has been broken, notably for Sarah Bernhardt.

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