Fade-outs

LEMUEL F. PARTON

What will Sister Aimée be doing fifteen years hence? And when he's fat and forty will Rudy Vallee still be able to make the hearts of household drudges go pit-a-pat?

No one can say. A Cook's tour of the idols of one or two decades back shows, however, that a good many have rusted or cracked, and it is certain that some of today's heroes and heroines will meet no kinder fate. What has happened to Charles H. Parkhurst may even happen to John Haynes Holmes, and the fate of Jack Johnson may yet he in store for Babe Ruth.

A brief survey of the elect of yesteryear reveals a once valiant gourmet moaning with dyspepsia, a beauty queen with four children and a mortgage, the author of a famous song hit running a meat shop and chopping rump steaks to slow rhythm, and a great majorleague pitcher peddling Fords. But a kindlier destiny has made a mellow philosopher out of a reformer, a rich and respected business man out of a gangster, a college president out of a baseball player, and a concert violinist out of a heavyweight champion.

The parade of the years leads the headliners in various directions. Here is what has happened to some of those who were in the spotlight when the century was younger, and when the Great Engineer hadn't yet begun to promote foreign mining stocks.

CAULIFLOWERS.—Jack Johnson is "rasslin a bull fiddle" and occasionally directing, for dance orchestras, in New York and Tia Juana. At fifty-three he still flashes a few octaves of white teeth. Jess Willard, Iowa behemoth, lost all his money in oil stocks and now peddles real estate in Los Angeles. James J. Jeffries does a little desultory farming in California. The grass is pretty short. Tom Sharkey is having a good time on the first nickel he ever earned, at Tia Juana and Biscayne Bay, Florida. Poor Sam Langford, Boston Tar Baby, is almost blind; he lives with his sister in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Philadelphia Jack O'Brien plays the violin and threatens to go on a concert tour. Benny Leonard is trying to come back.

ATHLETE TO COACH

JIM THORPE

ELSIE DE WOLFE

ACTRESS TO DECORATOR

STAR TO EXTRA

HENRY B. WALTHALL

SCREEN STAR TO STORY WRITER

WILLIAM S. HART

ACTOR TO DEAN

WILLIAM FAVERSHAM

FAVORITE TO FADE-OUT

MARY MILES MINTER

SCOURGE OF TAMMANY TO BENIGN RECLUSE

CHARLES H. PARKHURST

PRIZE FIGHTER TO ORCHESTRA LEADER

JACK JOHNSON

SENATOR TO PLANTER

JOHN SHARP WILLIAMS

JOCKEY TO LINGUIST

TOD SLOAN

DUDE TO BOULEVARDIER

BERRY WALL

BOULEVARDIER.—Down the Rue Castiglione in Paris strolls an old man with a chow dog. He wears a tall, lustrous collar with stiff points and a black silk stock. His morning coat is edged with silk braid. He is Evander Berry Wall, once the ''king of the dudes." The battle of the vests between Mr. Wall and the almost equally effulgent Robert Hilliard engrossed multitudes back in the days when vests were vests. Mr. Wall would flash a pousse-cafe effect. The town would view it through smoked glasses, and then Mr. Hilliard would see him and raise him. Mr. Wall finally got the decision, but Wall Street almost got his last vest, with the trousers as well. He salvaged a remnant of his distillery millions and, in Paris, he did nothing so gracefully that the French government gave him a ribbon to wear in his coat. At Deauville, in the summer, he has his morning aperitif at the Sunbar, and a turn at baccarat—close to the vest —in the evening. He's a mellow and charming old gentleman, and everybody likes him. Specifications for the height of the famous Berry Wall collar are still four inches. He's seventy-two.

BOSS BOOTER.—This old railbird figures that Tod Sloan just about topped them all. He got full of literature and it turned gaseous on him. In England, the dukes and the like let him win races for them but they just wouldn't talk Swinburne with him. He smacked a haughty head waiter with a champagne bottle, in London, and was ruled off the tracks in England, France, and America. At fifty-nine, he's a social embellishment for Jim Coffroth's

Tia Juana establishment, with his home in Hollywood. His life has been full of exciting box-office angles. Once he was earning $50,000 a year and paying $150 a day for his suite at Saratoga. He learned languages and sprang long words on the slightest provocation. He came back from England with a monocle and an English accent. The sports writers razzed him, but he stayed erudite. On the home stretch, he is still bookish. He never pulled a race.

FLAMING SWORD.—Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst was ninety years old April 17. "I see no prospect of change," he says, referring gloomily to current Tammany tail-twisting. Never did he talk like that in the old days. On Feb. 14, 1892, while pastor of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, he set the town on fire with his blistering sermon on intrenched wickedness. The district attorney demanded that he make good on his charges. He made a red necktie out of a flannel shirt, put on a soiled shirt, a pair of checked trousers, and a double-breasted reefer and, with two assistant sleuths, hot-footed it around the major hell holes. He plastered the Tiger with 248 affidavits and brought on the Lexow investigation. But the town wouldn't stay reformed. Dr. Parkhurst scolded for years and finally retired to a little rose-bowered cottage near Atlantic City. His beard, once black and scraggly, is now ample, white, and benign.

TOAST OF THE TOWN.—The beaux yeux still luminous—the gracious Dame Maxine in a lovely and mellow old house near Regents Park, London. Maxine Elliott was Jessie Dermott, a sea captain's daughter, of Rockland, Maine. She first won New York in Augustin Daly's famous company in 1895. The chivalry and the shovelry lurked at the stage door to get a glimpse of her. Audiences were breathless and enthralled. Nat Goodwin babbled to the end of his days of the lovely Maxine, one of his succession of wives. In 1924 she retired gracefully to the golden haze of a Tennysonian countryside. MATINEE IDOL.—William Faversham was once an iron puddler at Marleybone, England. He was handsome and gifted. Henry Irving helped him. On the New York stage, his first success was as the English aristocrat in Edwin Milton Royle's "Squaw Man." Thereafter he was much be-deviled by women. He faded as a leading juvenile as the years went by, but he was a competent actor and here's what looks like a happy ending, filched from the grudging Fates. Knocking about on the four-a-day for the last few years, Mr. Faversham now finds himself installed as the head of a stock company and a dramatic school at Montclair, N. J. In spite of all the bilge written about him in his prime, sound critical judgment is that he is one of the masters of the spoken word. He's sixty-four, a fine, studious actor, and the world wishes him well. GENTLEMAN FROM MISSISSIPPI-— From 1893 on, during a period of thirty years, Senator John Sharp Williams eviscerated more stuffed shirts and pricked more balloons than any other citizen. Surrounded by many descendants and by oak, cedar, walnut and hickory trees, he meditates and smokes his pipe on the east porch of his plantation home in Yazoo County, Mississippi. His suit is still baggy and his vest still unbuttoned. He reads Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Cicero, and Demosthenes—in the original, for he's a Heidelberg scholar, once a classmate of the Kaiser. Once in a while he fashions a little satirical poem, like those he used to read in Congress, but he doesn't erupt much now. The bellicose little minority leader was one of the sharpest blades in Washington. He's seventy-eight.

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PRETTIEST LEGS.—Frankie Bailey is a charming and dignified old lady, living in a furnished room at Red Bank, N. J. Her legs got into more headlines than the Boer War. As Thomas Hood put it, "People who stand on legs of gold are sure to stand well with society." She did. But there was one thing the glamorous Frankie would not do with her legs and that was travel on them. So Weber and Fields dropped her. For years she was behind the cigar counter in the Flatiron building and then on the Lincoln Hotel shoppers' staff. At seventy-three, she is game and humorous. She gets a weekly check from the National Vaudeville Artists.

NEMESIS.—Sumner's "Folkways" engrosses the now urbane and ironical William Travers Jerome. He who bagged Canfield behind his Florentine bronze doors, drove out Croker, and set the righteous in high places now plays poker at the Union Club, shakes dice for the drinks, studies psychiatry, reads Epictetus, and, in khaki trousers and sweater, does copper and goldsmithing which even Cellini might admire. Philosophizing over his work bench, he says, "You can't make people honest by law." He has a skyscraper office where he looks after Technicolor, in which he is heavily and profitably interested, but he is happiest at his lathe and his books. DECO RATE USE.—Thus the ornate early Nineteen-hundreds referred to Elsie de Wolfe, but she lived it down and was one of the best interior decorators, perhaps the best, in the business. She helped renovate American taste. A beautiful and successful actress, she retired from the stage in 1903 to "do interiors." A low bow to Lady Elsie de Wolfe Mendl. At her Villa Trianon, near the Versailles Gate, she is an exemplar of gracious and intelligent living—"bowered in beauty."

SPEED DEMON.—"This French mechanic says we need esprit in our outfit," Bill Pickens reported to Barney Oldfield, when Barney was tuning up for a race. "Buy him one," roared Barney. "Buy him anything he wants. We've got to win this race!" He's a broker's clerk in Detroit, with the same old cigar. He was the Captain Malcolm Campbell of his day.

BEST BAD ACTOR.—The late Tad Dorgan, cartoonist, so labelled Corse Payton and the title stuck. He was a Centerville, Iowa, boy who became the magnate of the ten-twenty-thirty, and a resounding Shakespearian—as conspicuous with his canary gloves and doggy topcoat as the Empire State building in a Flatbush front yard. At sixty-four, he is a night club master of ceremonies, dabbling in real estate. PRODIGY.—Just about the saddest of these little chronicles is the story of William J. Sidis, the boy who entered Harvard at eleven and lectured on the fourth dimension at fifteen. He was a forlorn alien in a world of laggard minds. Never could he shuffle along in the Binet-Simon lockstep. The ruck of sad-eyed New York straphangers swallowed him up. In 1924, he was a shipping clerk, working for $23 a week. Since then, he has been glimpsed occasionally, unhappy and aloof and in bitter revolt against life. Which moves one to conclude that Marpessa, the earthling, did well when she refused to be wedded to the god. Wilbur Huston, 1929 Edison prize winner, is doing well at Boston Tech, but not topping his classes. PICAROONS.—Heavy mortality here. Erased: Monk Eastman, Kid Twist, Big Jack Zelig, Rubber Shaw, Johnny Spanish, Dopey Benny, Little Augie, Chick Trigger, Moss Enright. Surviving: Nigger Mike Salter, Big Jack Sirroco, Jimmy Kelly, and Owney Madden. Charlotte and Katherine Poillon, lady Cagliostros, are still suing people and occasionally collecting. Two little girls from Troy, they stood the town on its ear thirty years ago. "I'll be suin' you." Soapy Smith, slickest of all the easy money crew, passed out years ago. Swede Sam of Butte and Dick Dreyfus of Salt Lake, top card gamblers, are said to be still sticking around, dealing a last hand or two against the Grim Reaper.

MISS OSKOSH.—Nothing exciting seems to happen to the beauty queens. Margaret Gorman, the first Miss America, at Atlantic City in 1921, is the wife of Victor Cahill, Washington real estate dealer. Ruth Malcolm, Philadelphia, 1924, is a photographer's assistant. Charlotte Nash Nirdlinger, Miss St. Louis in 1923, shot her husband a while back and lives nicely on her legacy. Norma Smallwood, Oklahoma City, 1926, did a few turns in vaudeville, plugged beauty lotions and then exited quietly—the same for Lois Elinor Dellaneer, Miss Joliet, 1927. Little Genevieve Dorlanne, Paris, 1923, was thrifty. She used her prize to buy a little dress shop and still prospers. One of the prettiest of the lot is in considerable distress with four children and an ineffective husband. She asked that her name be withheld. TINKER TO EVERS TO CHANCE.— Maurice de Shong, Philadelphia left fielder in 1867, tells me there never was anything like this combination in baseball. Frank Chance is dead. Joe Tinker and Johnny Evers do a little scouting and managing. They've both been in the money and out again in the last few years. Cy Young, great Boston National pitcher, is farming near Peoli, Ohio. Eagle Eye Jake Beckley of Pittsburgh is a gray shadow around the ball parks. Edward M. Lewis, Boston Nationals pitcher, is president of the University of New Hampshire. James Mutrie of the high hat and the "we are the people" slogan, he who founded the Giants, had a little newsstand on Staten Island until recently. Fred Merkle, who failed to touch second, is still around the edges of professional baseball.

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MERRY WIDOW.—The lovely Ethel Jackson as Sonia in 1907. At fifty-one, an occasional guest star, she's gallant and game in adversity.

REDMEN.—Jim Thorpe, greatest athlete ever, was working as a laborer for four dollars a day until a short time ago. He now has a little coaching job. Fate fans Chief Myers, great Giant catcher. "Me and my squaw stick feathers in our hair and sit down for a few years when I get through with this," he used to say in the dug-out. But—he's selling Fords in Los Angeles.

SHADOWS.—William S. Hart writes short stories and plays with a horse named Paint, on his Southern California ranch. Mary Miles Minter lives with her mother in Hollywood. She's worked off pounds and hopes to come back. Pearl White has a cunning little rococo gambling casino on the Riviera. Priscilla Dean is married to Leslie Arnold, the round-the-world flyer. Mary McLaren is in the interior decorating business in Hollywood. Carol Dempster is married to a New York broker. Eileen Percy is a syndicate writer. Henry B. Walthall makes the transition from leads to character and still is occasionally cast in the talking pictures. Marguerite Clark is the wife of a wealthy merchant in New Orleans. Charles Ray is apparently a complete fade-out, after a long desperate fight. Dorothy Dalton is married to Oscar Hammerstein. Jobyna Ralston is married to Richard Arlen. Ruth Roland is married to Ben Bard, Los Angeles go-getter. In vaudeville: Viola Dana, Cullen Landis, Claire Windsor, Frank Mayo, Esther Ralston, Belle Bennett, and Lea trice Joy.

GLEANER.—"When the Harvest Days are Over, Jessie Dear" was the big song hit of 1902. Fred C. Kahrs, who wrote both words and music, now has a tidy little one-man butcher shop at 300 Bank Street, New York. He still writes songs but says the meat business is a more dependable trade. "My partner sold the song to Harry von Tilzer for $2.50 and got drunk on the money," he said. "I was taking my girl for a boat ride and they played my song. She liked it and married me and that was all to the good. This meat business ain't so bad."