Resurrecting a legend

The monologues of Ruth Draper, a character actor who was in her prime in the 1920s and '30s, are preserved in a new CD set.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 22, 2000

The world of Ruth Draper included an amazing collection of characters:

-- A New York society matron taking an Italian lesson while managing her troublesome children, planning a dinner menu, gossiping with friends on the phone, getting a manicure, flirting with a lover and doing many other things all at once.

-- Three women -- secretary, wife, mistress -- talking about the man in their lives, a captain of industry named Anthony Clifford.

-- A crone sitting and talking on her porch in Maine.

-- Four women discussing their diets and dishing their friends over lunch at a chic restaurant.

-- A Parisian actress getting ready for a world tour.

Draper called herself a character actor, but she never appeared onstage with anyone else. From 1920 until she died in 1956, she performed dramatic monologues, or "monodramas," that were prized by sophisticated theatergoers.

John Gielgud said, "She was (with Martha Graham) the greatest individual performer that America has ever given us."

Draper is virtually unknown today, but a new two-CD set gives a good idea of her artistry. Ruth Draper and Her Company of Characters: Selected Monologues has seven of her sketches, including famous ones such as The Italian Lesson, Doctors and Diets and Three Women and Mr. Clifford. Two -- A German Governess with a Class of Children and A Class in Greek Poise -- are released for the first time.

"I didn't even know who she was until a friend of mine who's an Italian professor gave me a copy of The Italian Lesson a dozen years ago," says Susan Mulcahy, a writer and editor in Seattle who produced the Draper compilation. Mulcahy decided to take on the project after she wrote an article on Draper for Vanity Fair last year and discovered that recordings of her performances were hard to come by.

The monologues are drawn from recording sessions Draper did in 1954 and 1955 for RCA, which put out several of them on a record that is long out of print. "A small spoken-word label carried them for years, but nothing was done to promote them," said Mulcahy, who obtained rights to the recordings from RCA's parent company, BMG Entertainment. "Larger labels weren't interested in rereleasing them. So I just did it myself. I got sick and tired of making people copies of my tapes."

Fans of Draper's original RCA recording include current-day performers such as John Lithgow, Simon Callow and Charles Nelson Reilly. Director Mike Nichols plays tapes of her when he gives acting lessons.

Draper's legacy is most strongly carried on by Lily Tomlin, who first heard her in the 1960s on an LP she found at the Detroit Public Library. Tomlin and Draper share the ability to do satire without being cruel.

"One thing that Lily Tomlin told me drew her to Ruth Draper's work was that she didn't ridicule her characters," Mulcahy said. "She tried to show both sides of her characters. I think if you really inhabit a character, and you're really projecting a character, then you can't be nasty to them."

Tomlin has been quick to credit Draper's influence on her one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, which returns to Broadway in November.

Born in 1884, Draper was something of a social pioneer, considering that she was a member of the New York elite who took to the stage at a time when it was very much not the thing for a well-bred young woman to do. Her father was a prominent physician, and her mother's father was Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun. Family friends included Henry James (who wrote a monologue, unused, for Draper), Henry Adams and John Singer Sargent.

She started out as a clever child brought out to entertain family and guests at home.

"I think that what I do is something that, as a child, I never lost," Draper told Studs Terkel, the longtime Chicago radio host and author, in one of the few interviews she ever gave. "Which is the child's capacity to throw themselves completely into what they pretend to be ... (and) if you're completely given over to what you're trying to portray, you will convince the other people too."

At the peak of her career, in the 1920s and '30s, Draper was a favorite of the British royal family. Her fans included George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, Clement Atlee, Eddie Cantor, James M. Barrie, Noel Coward and A.A. Milne. When the Italian poet she loved was killed in a plane crash in 1931, she received a note of condolence from Edith Wharton.

Like a character in a musical by Cole Porter (also a friend), she traveled extensively, made a lot of money and seemed to know everyone worth knowing.

"If she weren't such a great artist, she'd be like Zelig," Mulcahy said, referring to the Woody Allen movie character who invariably showed up at the side of historical figures. "I did a lot of research in her personal archives, and you start saying to yourself, "Was there anybody she didn't know?"'

Draper performed regularly in New York and London and toured widely. Today, the recordings are about all that remain of her work, although Wesleyan University's cinema archives has a segment from the 1950s TV show Omnibus on which she performs four monologues.

In the 1980s, a New York actor named Patricia Norcia acquired long-term rights to Draper's repertory. She performs 13 of the monologues.

"The thing that's supposed to be really fascinating about seeing her do a whole evening is you get a sense of what it was like to see Ruth Draper shift from character to character, from a comic old lady to a young woman in a dramatic piece," said Mulcahy, who has not seen Norcia. "She has the exclusive rights. Nobody else can perform those pieces. If you want to go on stage and be Ruth Draper, you've got to get Patricia Norcia's permission."

The RCA recordings include more monologues than those on the current release, and Mulcahy hopes to put out a second volume. Still, she feels some frustration over never having seen Draper in her prime and in the theater.

"Think about the fact that she was at the height of her power in the 1920s and '30s, and she didn't make any of these recordings until 1954 or '55," Mulcahy said. "She was already 70 years old, and you're not getting the full package, you're just getting the voice. But just the voice itself -- just what she's able to evoke through the audio -- is amazing. Imagine what it would have been like to see her in 1929 onstage. It must have been incredible."

One reason Mulcahy thinks Draper's monologues remain fresh is that she didn't rely on pop-cultural references, which tend to limit the lifespan of a lot of comedy writing. "I was watching Will and Grace the other night, and I was struck that every single joke came out of a pop-cultural reference, and I didn't get half of them," she said.

Compare that to Draper's take on a perennial subject whose fads and foibles she universalizes and makes timeless in Doctors and Diets.

"When I hear that monologue, I think of people I know who are going to holistic physicians, or are trying this new vitamin," Mulcahy said. "I mean, those ladies having lunch could be happening here, today. Her stuff is pulled completely from character, and character does not change. People don't change. These same women still exist, they just wear slacks more often."

Ruth Draper and Her Company of Characters: Selected Monologues, a two-CD set, is sold for $19.95 exclusively through the Web site http://www.drapermonologues.com.

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