Actorviews (1923)

The First Gentleman of the Theater 3 actor must be before he begins to brag instead of lie about his age. Mr. Drew didn’t seem to know just how old; his gesture made it incalculable. “But it’s all damn rot, this trying to conceal your age,” he barked, who would be seventy on his next birthday. “They’ve got you in ‘Who’s Who’ and the newspaper almanacs — and they’ve always got you right. I mean the almanacs, not the newspapers themselves. There was a paragraph in a New* York paper the other day that said — it ought to be here on the desk, but those women have tidied it out of sight, dash their sweet souls!” “Never mind looking, John. What did it say — substantially ?” “Said that next March I’d celebrate my fifty-ninth year on the stage. Hell, fiftieth is enough!” “I should say! And today you don’t — honest to heaven, John — look more than that many years old. I’m almost tempted to ask you how you’ve done it.” “That’s what an old fellow was asking me the other night. ‘I know you’re two weeks older than God,’ he said, ‘because you keep looking younger. How do you do it?’ “I told him. I told him that I never sat up late,” smiled the habitually nocturnal Mr. Drew, stirring the brown stimulant from the bottom of his glass, “and never drank anything.” And we fell to talking about acting, and I asked him who is ever the most modern of the comedians of manners if, during the long years of achievement, there had been any conscious and calculated change in his method of attacking a so-called modern part. “You are, and always have been,” I said, “contemporary.” “I haven’t realized any change of method,” he