Crane Wilbur — Sans Grease Paint and Wig (1914) 🇺🇸
From the heights of Jersey, Crane Wilbur was about to descend upon New York. I prepared for his coming by getting out the near-brass ash-tray and the almost-silver matchholder and placing them conspicuously on the desk that belongs to the Goatman, on his seldom trips to Gotham town.
by Mabel Condon
Even if Mr. Wilbur wasn’t possessed of a cigar, I reasoned, the sight of an ash-tray and matchholder might make him feel more at home. My only regret was that Fred Beecroft had not yet managed to save up the forty or fifty dollars worth of coupons necessary to make him the possessor of a dollar tray that ascends two or three feet from the floor and which, if he ever gets, he has promised to donate to me.
Meanwhile, for possible service and doubtful decoration, a Japanese shop near Wall street yielded the near-brass tray and a kindly man from Newark proffered the almost-silver match-box.
So, when I had removed my hat and coat to the furthest bracket on the hat-tree, thus leaving the remaining three brackets for Mr. Wilbur’s things, and when I had put my Alkali Ike doll aright on his horse and straightened the photographs of Earl Williams [Earle Williams] and F. X. Bushman [Francis X. Bushman] — on display as a reminder that other and as valiant men had gone before — then was all in readiness for the coming of Crane Wilbur.
He came. He was not possessed of a cigar. There was not the slightest redolence of cigar smoke about him. He hooked his leather-colored cane on one of the brackets, hung his blue English coat, with the belt and the plait in the back, on top of the cane and set his derby on top of that. When I had slid into the Goatman’s big chair, he settled himself in the one that had the ash-tray and the match-box as part of the scenery and didn’t even see them.
“I’m sorry to be late” — I had set my cameragraph clock five minutes fast — “but when I’ve been away four or five days as I have just been (we were making a picture at Block Island) I’m back so far with my other work that I keep at it until the last minute.”
“I thought Crane Wilbur was so busy being other people in Pathé pictures that he didn’t have time to even think of other work,” I said by way of asking him what the “other work” could be.
“No, we’re not always working on a picture and when we’re not we don’t have to go to the studio at all. I call up every morning to find out if I’m wanted for that day and if I’m not I don’t go down. That’s one of the things I like the Pathé Company for” — he rested his left foot on his right knee and caressed the black instep — “they don’t demand that you spend your time at the studio when you are not needed there.”
“I see,” I admired and wondered if he were going to disclose the secret of the “other work.” He was, and went on:
“The time I’m not working in pictures I spend in my office at home — I live in Jersey in a cottage that I built myself. No, nothing big before that, only little things that every kid makes, but I always felt I could do it if I had a chance, so experimented on the cottage. I like to live where I can take a deep breath — besides, I have six bulldogs and they need lots of room.”
Were the bulldogs the “other work,” I wondered to myself, and just then Mr. Wilbur explained how they were not by offering:
“I have three vaudeville numbers on the road and I have written an act with which I am going into vaudeville — big time, not soon, but in the distant future — please be sure to say ‘distant future,’ will you?”
I promised and he made the startling statement: “I have every week of my life for the next two years mapped out now. But vaudeville for myself doesn’t enter it until — well, until the ‘distant future.’” He laughed the laugh that has helped make him so popular with picture fans and asked, “Would you care to hear the introduction I have written for the act?” I would and he told it to me — not recited it, but just talked it in a “me to you” manner. It’s poetry and tells about his start in the working world via a butcher shop and how he happened to become a Pathé player three years ago.
“It wasn’t that I wanted to work in the butcher shop,” he explained, his black, heavy brows coming together in a thinking frown over his straight nose, “but I had to make a start and that was one of the ways of doing it. Later I was a grocery clerk and my ambition was to be an actor. Well” — he discovered a position that offered more comfort, and after shifting to it, continued, with his deep-set eyes seemingly deeper than ever — “I got my chance. Tyrone Power [Tyrone Power Sr.], who is my uncle by marriage with my mother’s sister, Edith Crane, got it for me with Mrs. Fiske, and for four years I played in her company, Mary of Magdalen. A wonderful opportunity came in England when I secured a place in Henry Irving’s company. I had one scene with the great actor; in it I was to say one word, ‘Yes,’ and I forgot it.
“Mr. Power and my aunt kept me with them for some time and I made the trip to Australia in their ‘Crane-Power’ company. Then I did one-night stands in Romeo and Juliet for two years — 104 weeks straight — and played vaudeville, time and stock. Every once in a while now I appear at some theater where I was a stock favorite.
“But I didn’t tell the audience ‘how they make motion pictures.’ The audience doesn’t want to know that, nor how many escapes from death an actor has had while doing daring things before the camera, and how he ‘insisted upon finishing the scene.’ The audience wants to be entertained, not bored to death, and I have tried to keep this in mind while preparing the sketch I’m to use in vaudeville.”
“The one for the ‘distant future?’” I asked, and the Pathé favorite replied, “Even so.”
“It was through Harry Handworth, with whom I had worked on the stage, that I chanced to begin picture work, and it was while I was waiting for the commencement of an Al Wood contract that I took up the work as a filler-in. But I got to like it so well that the thought of filling the contract began to bother me and I got a release from it. That was three years ago and Pathé’s is the only company I’ve been with in that time. I started as a cowboy — you know there are Jersey cowboys as well as western ones — and I still like romantic western pictures best of all. A peculiar thing about being born in Athens, N. Y.” — and he told how a number of Greeks had read that his birthplace was Athens and not waiting to read the “N. Y.” after the name of the town, sent him a letter voting him into some Grecian brotherhood as an honorary member.
“Tyrone Power asked me to call on him a few weeks ago at his Riverside Drive home,” he resumed when he had ceased being the “Tony” his Italian fellow-men had believed he was. “I went for lunch and came away just as school was out. Mr. Power came to the door with me and as we stood. there talking, a number of school-children came along and some of them recognized me. They stood and whispered, and watched, and gathered more of their playmates around them and Mr. Power wanted to know if there was something odd about us that the children were noticing. I knew it was because they had probably seen me on the screen the night previous and said so to Mr. Power. Then the children began calling my name and Mr. Power, in absolute wonder that motion pictures could make one so well known, gasped:
“They know you — they call your name! Great heavens, they don’t know me!”
His Tyrone Power impersonation over, the Crane of the screen tried to smooth back his curly hair which drooped its obstinate thickness over his right eye, no matter what the objection of its owner, and casually offered the information —
“I have a book of stories in verse at the publisher’s and hope to realize a big sale on it, on the strength of the popularity the screen has brought me.”
Perfectly frank, just like that.
“Five-five,” my cameragraph clock mistold him, “and I have an appointment at the Knickerbocker hotel at five — I have a desk there — it’s necessary to be in touch with things right at their heart,” he confessed, adding, “with all due respect to Jersey.”
When the door had closed upon him and his rapid footsteps died away around the curve in the hall, I gently replaced the near-brass ash-tray and the almost-silver match-safe in the upper right-hand drawer of the roll-top desk for a like future decoration, or maybe use. Then I closed my typewriter desk and went down Broadway to find a Pathé picture with Crane Wilbur.
Collection: Motography Magazine, January 1914