George Beban — And George Did (1918) 🇺🇸

December 10, 2024

After you, my dear Alfonse! After you, my dear Gaston!”

by Kenneth McGaffey

Everybody knows them, but did you ever stop and think back how long these two famous personages have been displaying themselves in the comic supplements? I don’t know myself, but it was long before the photodrama began to flicker. Then there was a musical comedy version of Alfonse and Gaston which played the pistol opera circuit for several years — and guess who was the man who first played Alfonse?

Ta-a — da — the curtains move. Ta-a — da — the official announcer steps forth. Coughs. Bows. Coughs again. “Ladies — and — gentlemen.” — (Pause.) — “I take great pleasure in introducing the speaker of the evening — the original Alfonse, who is none other than the famous interpreter of Latin characters — Mister George Beban.” Ta-a — Ta-a — Ta-a — da. The curtains part, revealing Mister Beban in poses plastique of an Italian Peddler. Applause. — Cheers. — Curtain.

* * * * *

Those funny cartoons of Frederick Opper brought George Beban to the attention of the theatrical world and were the first step of the long ladder of successes his popularity has erected. His appearance in Alfonse and Gaston attracted the attention of a theatrical manager and Beban was given an opportunity to appear on Broadway with a real show and from then on it was a cinch. How he developed from a French comic into the most famous player of Italian types is a long and complicated story.

To see Beban now on the screen as an Italian truck gardener or peddler, do one of his wonderful scenes with a little child — one of those scenes where you sneak the handkerchief out and dust the rain out of the corner of your eye — you cannot imagine him singing A Flower from My Angel Mother’s Grave, with Lask’s Bitters and Vigor of Life Medicine Show in some Western tank, with the boosters among the crowd calling, “Another bottle sold. Doctor!” at the saddest part. That was the time in Beban’s life when he had taken the name of “George Dink” so his irate male parent could not find him and haul him home.

George was born in San Francisco, where so many eminent actors started from. He had a fine voice for a twelve-year-old kid and his father planned that he should become an opera singer. According to George’s notion, it took too long to prepare for opera, so, with the help of his elder brother, he sneaked out and got a job with the old McKee Rankin Stock Company and made his debut on the stage as “Jack Mason, age 6, the tender cord that bound two loving hearts together.” It said all this on the program, so all that George had to do was to wrap them up. He played Little Jack for nearly a week, when one night the manager came to him, told him he was rotten, had no talent, and fired him.

At home the elder brother tipped off the fact that George’s father had gotten to the management and had him fired. A little later George coralled a job at the old Vienna Gardens. He wore an old satin suit he had outgrown, and was billed as “The Boy Baritone of California,” the song that made the biggest hit being The Picture that’s Turned to the Wall. For this and a couple of other tearful ditties George collected twelve dollars a week. Father located him again and the manager told him he had a rotten voice and sent him on his way. George could not figure this out; the audience seemed to like him, yet he would always get fired for being rotten.

“A brief rest at home and then I got a job with the Reed and West Minstrels as one of the boys in a quartet,” said Beban in reviewing his past. “Even under the burnt cork the eye of my father found me again, and again I was fired for being no good. Then I woke up and, to get away from the parental influence, joined out with the medicine show with a boy chum. The towns the Vigor of Life visited were too small to have theatres, so we played in hotel dining-rooms, lodge halls and vacant lots. When I was not edifying the audience with my boyish baritone, I was down through the crowd selling ‘Bitters.’ We got a rake-off for every bottle we sold,” explained Beban, “but trade was none too good for in some distant mountain town the ‘Bitters’ lost their bite and the ‘Vigor of Life’ fluttered and went over the Great Divide, and I had to write home for money enough to get back to San Francisco.”

Goodyear, Elitch and Shilling’s Minstrels came to Oakland and George pussy-footed across the bay and joined out. The minstrels went east and so did George, and it was many years before he saw the tower of the ferry building, and when he did get back he was not afraid that his father would have him fired.

Beban did fine in black-face and then went into vaudeville. A little later he went to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and did his specialty in a show called A Trip to Buffalo. One of the principals was taken ill and George was offered a part, but he had to have a French dialect. Now, up to this time Beban did not know any more French and Italian dialect than a rabbit. “Why, I couldn’t even argue with a boot black,” he says.

Beban’s favorite dining place in Buffalo was a little French table d’hote presided over by a buxom propriétaire recently from France. Beban would engage her in conversation and rapidly acquired the Franco-American dialect. Pretending to have trouble with his eyes, he got her to read his part to him. When he appeared on the stage he used the table d’hote dialect and made a hit. A little later he was starred in Alfonse and Gaston — then came the offer to support Marie Cahill in Nancy Brown, on Broadway!

Here he scored his hit which centered the eyes of the theatrical world on him. He was with Weber and Fields [Joe Weber | Lew Fields] and then George Cohan [George M. Cohan] wrote The American Idea especially for Beban and he scored a pronounced success. While on tour with The American Idea he heard Elsie Janis give an imitation of Nick Long reciting an Italian character interpretation, Rosa. The little story impressed him deeply and a little later at a dinner in Chicago he, being called upon for a recitation, gave Rosa as an imitation of Elsie Janis giving an imitation of Nick Long. Long was the applause when he finished.

Rosa was used for after-dinner purposes for some time until one night at a dinner in New York, the late Percy Williams, the vaudeville magnate, offered him a vaudeville engagement if he could make Rosa into a one act playlet. After weeks of hard work he brought Williams a one-act play founded on Rosa and called The Sign of the Rose. Williams liked the playlet and Beban opened in it two weeks later. For six years, both in this country and in Europe, Beban appeared in this playlet. Later it was elaborated into a four-act play and he appeared for several seasons in that. Returning to California for a vacation, Thomas H. Ince induced him to do “The Sign of the Rose” in pictures and an eight-reel production was made of it under the title of “The Alien.” That is the history of the little recitation, Rosa. It changed a comic Frenchman into the greatest interpreter of Italian characters on the stage or screen.

During all of this excitement Beban took time to get married and led Miss Edith Ethel McBride, a professional, to the Beban dove cote. By this time Beban was beginning to think he was quite a star, but nearly three years ago he was forced to take second place. George Beban, Jr., arrived and grabbed the domestic spot-light. George, Jr., is some temperamental, too, for as soon as he was able to talk he discarded the name Beban and adopted that of “Bob White,” from the quail whistle his grandfather would call him with. “Bob White” sticks and he refuses to be known by any other name. Bob appeared with his father in “Lost in Transit” and nearly stole the picture- — in fact, some say he did. Bob acted right out and did every scene as if he had been before the camera ten or fifteen years instead of that many days. He was scarcely two and a half years old, but he went at it in the manner born.

The watchful eye of the Morosco Company spied Beban on the screen and it was not a great while until he was over at that studio toiling away. “Pasquale,” “His Sweetheart,” “A Roadside Impresario,” “Lost in Transit,” “The Bond Between,” “The Marcellini Millions,” “The Cook of Canyon Camp,” and a number of others have been produced there.

Beban works with the picture from the first germ of a story until it is finally ready for release. His director, Donald Crisp, has always guided the Beban pictures and Beban and Crisp swear by and at each other. “Jules of the Strong Heart,” which Beban has just recently finished, was directed by both of them — though, of course, Crisp did the majority of the work.

He appears in nothing but clean, wholesome pictures, filled with wonderful sympathy and human understanding. Having been through what he has, this is easily understood.

“You do not have to have hairbreadth escapes or sensational stories to make a hit in pictures,” said Beban recently. “You can take a simple little story and if it is human — if it has the personal feeling in it — the average photoplay theatre patron will like it just as well as some big, thundering drama with a lot of battle scenes and such like. Give your audiences something they can feel and it will do just as well as some, and a great deal better than many of the pictures now shown.”

George’s elder brother, the late Senator D. J. Beban, of California, once said to his father, “If George wants to be an actor — let George do it.” And George did.