Georgie Drew Mendum — The Unrecognized Drew (1922) 🇺🇸

Introducing Georgie Drew Mendum, cousin of the celebrated Barrymores, Ethel, John, and Lionel, and niece of John Drew

by Mary Morgan

In circles that know her well, Georgie Drew Mendum is regarded as one of the cleverest of the Drews. Some persons, over cups of loquacity stimulating after dinner coffee, pronounce her the cleverest of them. Save in those circles she is still The Unrecognized Drew.

It were idle to deny her cleverness, or to minimize her resemblance to that unique and brilliant family whence she sprung. She has the facile, flashing, sometimes stinging wit, of the Drews, that which causes the bon mots of Louise Drew, daughter of John Drew (John Drew Sr.), to be quoted in the Twelfth Night and the Sixty Clubs, and the words of Ethel Barrymore to pass into headlines, as, for instance, Miss Barrymore’s summary of Maxine Elliott’s beauty. “She is the Venus de Milo with arms.”

She has the full, Drew eyes and employs them according to the Drew methods, the methods, in the main, of comedy. Too there is a hint of the Drew characteristic that still inheres in her cousin Ethel, of dragging speech. Yet she delivers her speeches with all the propulsive power of her cousin Louise Drew, and the significant pauses of her “Uncle Jack.” John Drew, schooled of Augustin Daly, had learned perforce, as all that eminent manager’s eminent actors learned, the emphasis and the suspensive value of the pause.

Physically she bears no challenging resemblance to the present generation of the old and esteemed family of actors. By one of the caprices of capricious nature she is of physique and physical traits more like her aunt, Georgie Drew Barrymore, than is that gifted comedienne’s daughter, Ethel Barrymore. A few ancient folk, last leaves on the nearly bare tree of other generations, find in her facial resemblance and mannered reminiscence of her grandfather, John Drew. Visible in her, they assert, are the rounded profile and the engaging insouciance of the ancestor who was an Irish singing comedian, a Billy Scanlan of his long gone time, and who returned from a trip around the world in time to help his distinguished wife to manage the Arch Street Theater in Philadelphia and retrieve its fortunes. Mrs. Drew often looked fixedly at large eyed Georgie and said, “Child, you’re very much like your grandfather. Very.”

Miss Mendum is the daughter of Louisa Drew, whom, the casual minded say, was “the only one of Mrs. John Drew’s children who never went on the stage.” Her daughter corrects this impression by a characteristic speech.

“My mother was on the stage, but only for a few minutes. She had evinced comedy gifts. But she married when she was seventeen and she had three children. They kept her busy in a constant rehearsal of life. And she died while we were very young.”

Louise Drew chose for a husband Charles Mendum, then a theatrical manager. Their abode was Boston. That was the abode of the child, Georgie Drew Mendum, although as others of that family she was born in Philadelphia. “Grandmother would never have forgiven any of us if we had been born in any other city,” says Ethel Barrymore.

At two Louise Drew Mendum’s daughter evinced a trait to which we will give the name firmness of will or tenacity of purpose. Noting it her father bestowed upon her an after christening title.

“Let us call her Budge because she won’t.” he said, a suggestion that has been adopted by the Drew family unto the last ramification.

At four she displayed the spirit of comedy which after a decade or more was to register in the appreciative consciousness of Joseph Jefferson. For after her debut in the usual maid’s part, with Annie Russell in Catherine, a debut which was followed by small parts in her Uncle Jack’s company in Richard Carvel and The Tyranny of Tears, Joseph Jefferson selected her as his leading woman in a company made up largely of members of his own family. She was Dot in the Cricket on the Hearth and Lydia Languish in The Rivals. The venerable actor discovered one night that she had the family assertiveness and will to command in a crisis. She came off the stage one night during a performance of The Rivals, and found Mr. Jefferson sitting in the wings, spending a wait in amiable chat.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk in my scenes,” she flashed. The venerable actor rose a little stiffly from his camp chair. Awed members of the company awaited rebuke of his childish censor. Instead he said: “You are quite right, my child. I shouldn’t like it myself. I won’t do it again.” Tradition of one honored family was making obeisance to another.

She went on a road tour in The Secret Dispatch and with Would You for Five Millions? She rejoined her uncle in The Mummy and The Humming Bird and was with Ethel Barrymore in Cousin Kate. As Tessie Rode in Glad of It, she made a strong impression upon both public and author. Clyde Fitch declared he would write a part for her that would establish her for all time, or approximately that period. The author died untimely and Miss Mendum was one of those players whose ambitions were nipped by his premature passing. She was one of Clyde Fitch’s dramatic widows.

New York saw her as the stenographer in Via Wireless and she endeared herself to Chicago as the nurse in The Time, The Place and The Girl, and as the waitress in The Girl Question. Chicago was the first to recognize her as a proficient player of pert parts. That city dubs her “Our Own Georgie Mendum” and she glows happily while she talks of Dear Chicago.

Miss Mendum ought to play plump parts. Yet she is playing an exceedingly thin one in Lightnin’. No one, not even Miss Mendum, knows why her roles have been comparatively few and unprofitable, and the recent years have been lean ones.

Miss Mendum was born within a few months, so practically under the same planet as her unusually fortunate cousin, Ethel Barrymore.

For several months she has been appearing in print in verse form. The serious lines, she says, express her outlook. The light ones she classes as “mere jestings.”

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She has all the wit and the charm of her famous family, though she is not quite so well-known. Hers are the full Drew eyes and the slow speech

Photoplay Magazine — Advertising Section

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Collection: Photoplay Magazine, January 1922