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Romantic West in Baby Doe
by Lucius Beebe
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Herald Tribune
July 15th, 1956
Romantic West In ‘Baby Doe’
by Lucius Beebe
Publisher of “The Territorial Enterprise,” Virginia City,
Nevada
CENTRAL CITY, Colo. The biggest doings
in this remote and romantic old mining town, since the razzle-dazzle
which accompanied the visit to the Teller House Bar in 1873 of President
Ulysses S. Grant, took place a week ago with the celebration of the
twenty-fifth anniversary of revivals in Central City’s opera
house in Eureka St.
The turnout and general hooray even
ensmalled the splendors of that well-remembered night in 1932 when
Lillian Gish in a Robert Edmond Jones setting for “Camille”
brought Central City back from the dead and into the national news
for the first time since the Boston Mine was making millionaires in
Colorado as commonplace as they are today in Houston.
The occasion last Saturday evening
was the world premiere of a flashback into Colorado’s own well-publicized
folklore called “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” composed by
Pulitzer Prize-winning Douglas Stewart Moore with a libretto by John
Latouche and sung by a cast partly recruited from New York’s
Metropolitan Opera. For the story’s unveiling there was assembled
an audience of critics, social and political notables and names that
make news ranging from Lily Pons to Kim Novak. Music reporters from
as far away as Seattle, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles occupied aisle
seats in what is perhaps the most perfectly preserved monument to
the grandeur that was the old mining West.
A Legend of Love
The romance of Horace Tabor, richest
of the carbonate kings of Leadville, Lieutenant Governor of Colorado
and briefly United States Senator, with a blonde adventuress who was
to become immortal as Baby Doe, is an established staple of Colorado’s
full-blooded folklore, which teems in resolute profusion with Indian
fighters, fur traders, railroad builders, embattled editors and other
stock characters of the Wells Fargo years.
To clear the way for his June and
September alliance with Baby Doe, Tabor had to divorce his first wife,
Augusta Tabor, herself a tall tower of pince-nez respectability, through
the agency of a variety of legal devisings which still bemuse students
of Colorado law. What had originally been a local scandal confined
to Denver and the gold town circuit of the Rockies flowered into the
full light of national awfulness when Tabor prevailed upon President
Chester A. Arthur, himself a man who liked nice things, to marry the
ill-assorted couple in the White House. The razzberry from the pulpits
of the nation that greeted this defiance of man’s conventions
is still clearly audible to students of the period.
The Wages of Sin
The force if righteousness eventually
prevailed, however. The declining fortunes of silver which spread
ruin throughout the West combined with Tabor’s own fantastic
investments in mythical enterprises in a few years reduced him to
a mendicant for minor political favors. He died in office as Denver’s
postmaster in the nineties in a small room in the Windsor Hotel where
once he had swaggered at the banquets of the mighty. A third of a
century later Baby Doe was found frozen to death in a shack by the
hoist of the long disused Matchless Mine in Leadville, her wealth
and reason long gone in the delusion that one day the mine would reopen
and restore her to wealth.
Today no mining town of any pretensions
in Colorado but has its Tabor or baby Doe Suite in the George Washington-Slept-Here
tradition of the best New England taverns.
Baby Doe’s unloved end was
universally seen as a vindication of virtue and rebuke to those of
evil ways. It was also nicely timed to bring Colorado into national
attention just about the time the Central City revivals were being
inaugurated by Miss Gish’s tragic camellias. Briefly suspended
during the 1941 war, Central’s summer theater revivals have
become the most important theater event in the entire West and are
noted alike for the high gold bearing content of their audiences and
for the professional precision and expertise of their productions.
The sets for this season’s
run of “The Ballad of Baby Doe” were designed, together
with the lighting and costumes, by Donald Oenslager, a Central city
veteran of long standing. Musical direction was by Emerson Buckley
and Walter Taussig.
It is not often that complete illusion
is so available to theatergoers as it was the night of the opening
of “Baby Doe.” Here, in a playhouse where once they themselves
had been participants in departed dramas, in a setting which had been
the factual background for their own lives and hopes and frustrations,
amidst the wreckage of the mining years that might well symbolize
the wreckage of their own fortunes, the characters of Tabor, Augusta
and Baby Doe came to life behind the footlights in a manner intensely
startling. To a few oldtimers in the audience, who had at first hand
known those departed scenes and faces, the recreation of reality was
overwhelming.
While this very familiarity with
the Tabor-Colorado theme is an asset to the production of “Baby
Doe” in Central City, it also constitutes what is undoubtedly
a hazard to the opera’s presentation in the great world or on
Broadway. The authors have traded heavily on audience understanding
of, and indeed vicarious participation in, the story. To make it understandable
to theatergoers less informed in Colorado history than those who applauded
every local reference last Saturday night at Central will require
ample background material in the program.
The tone of both score and book is
uneven, but with a calculated unevenness obviously intended by the
authors; ranging from an almost Gilbert and Sullivan quicktime and
rhyming at the outset to authentic grand opera of emotional volume
in the scene during a ball at the Windsor, in which Augusta renounces
Tabor and warns Baby Doe of impending tragedy if she continues to
believe in him, and concluding on a note of dreary melancholy in an
interlude in which the future is revealed to Tabor with its fated
consequences to his descendants.
The performance, appearance and manner
of Walter Cassel as Tabor could hardly be improved. His creation of
a pathetic figure in the rich and swaggering rum-bum without the emotional
stability to balance his great wealth and fortune was without flaw,
his makeup so realistic as to be a matter of universal remark. Dolores
Wilson as Baby Doe, while both personally and vocally adequate to
the part, lacked in character and definition. This may very well have
been suited to the historic fact but it made for an emotional vacuum.
The evening was dominated by Augusta
Tabor, played by Martha Lipton, and she carried it off in the very
grand manner indeed, supplemented by a stately presence which diminished
Tabor in his person as in character and capacity for emotion.
This is the conventional estimate
of Augusta, and almost all historians of Colorado’s great days
unite in their sympathy for her as a figure of noble dignity in circumstances
of overwhelming tragedy. Of authorities on the Tabor legend, only
Caroline Bancroft dissents with the view that she was a miracle of
avarice and domestic shrew of the first chop. The Augusta of the moment
gives no hint of this uncharitable assay.
Regardless of what considered critical
opinion may make of “The Ballad of Baby Doe”—and
it should be remarked parenthetically that the Denver press, never
impartial in matters of Rocky Mountain context, roared with critical
acclaim—it was a date marked with a star in the annals of Central
City. Donald Oenslager’s always professional and often inspired
recreations of such Colorado landmarks as the Clarendon Hotel at Leadville,
the Windsor and the hoists of the Matchless Mine enchanted all beholders.
The same gold and crimson curtain
that had gone up for first night audiences in the Central City seventies,
and had seen on both sides of the footlights so much of life and drama,
went down amidst a snowstorm of bouquets distributed by the ushers
and tossed from the audience as the players took their bows.
If there were moist eyes and a covert
dabbing of handkerchiefs as the audience filed out into the Colorado
night, they were not for Augusta Tabor and baby Doe and the Matchless
Mine alone, but for one more evening of sentiment and one indissoluble
tie with the storied past about which Colorado is very properly very
sentimental indeed.