When James L. Ford died in 1928 – blind; both legs amputated – he and his beloved sister Mary had long forsaken the city.
In 1913
James purchased an old cottage, early nineteenth-century with a white picket
fence, in Brookhaven Hamlet on the south shore of Long Island. Then around 1920 he and Mary decided to move
there permanently, bidding farewell to an equally nineteenth-century brick
townhouse on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village.
The Copley
portraits and mahogany chairs went with them, whisked away from the “large new
hippodrome city,” as one of James Ford’s friends described it, “in which
everyone must be either a tiger or a ring master or a spectator.”
A decade
earlier, as James swam in anesthesia in Roosevelt Hospital, he reportedly was
willing to depart for good. But he
stayed alive for Mary, cheerful and busy to the end according to visitors.
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Caricature of James L. Ford |
The siblings
were born in the mid-1850s and grew up during the “Flash Age” – James’ term,
which I’ve never seen anywhere outside of his own work. That is what he called the post-Civil War era
of newly minted fortunes and ill-gotten gains, “vulgarity, crime and loose
living,” as he wrote in Vanity Fair; the Tweed Ring in power, the
uninspired emergence of the brownstone city.
Neither James
nor Mary – a fierce feminist – opposed change per se, but their spirits
resonated largely with the daguerreotypes stashed in the top drawer of the writing desk in the parlor.
The family
descended from New England colonists.
After marrying in 1850, the parents moved to St. Louis. By 1860 they had returned east and settled in
Brooklyn, now with two sons.
For several
years James studied at a boarding school in Stockbridge, Mass. while his older
brother Arthur, a graduate of the Columbia School of Mines, became a railroad engineer. Arthur was in Colon,
Panama, repairing a bridge, when he died of yellow fever in 1880. Fortuitously he had already introduced James
to the Railroad Gazette, a job which launched his younger brother’s
career in journalism.
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Railroad Gazette, 1876 |
James’ first
assignment for the trade journal was to describe a new industrial process that
converted coal-dust into fuel.
I shall
never forget the pride and delight that filled my soul as I stepped aboard the
Hudson River steamboat. “Little do these
passengers dream that I am a reporter,” I said to myself as I walked proudly
down the gangway . . . Still greater was
my delight when I read my account in the columns of the Gazette and realized
that I was actually in print.
A perfect
summation of the pleasure of the byline.
From the Railroad
Gazette Ford leapt to the New York Ledger, the New York Sun,
and the New York Herald. He made
his biggest mark as a theater critic at the Herald for more than two
decades, until the newspaper mogul Frank Munsey purchased it in 1920. James resigned immediately in protest and
disgust, for Munsey boasted a terrible reputation for ravaging the guts of the newspapers
he owned.
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Cartoon depicting the ruthless newspaper tycoon, Frank Munsey |
Undoubtedly
present at every major theater opening between 1880 and 1920, James hobnobbed
with the likes of Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse, the Barrymores, Edwin Booth,
and George Arliss.
He also
documented the underbelly of American theater – minstrelsy that promoted the Uncle Tom stereotype and the “New York Negro,” a dandy in a top
hat and suit. The comedy team of
Harrigan & Hart, along with performers like “Johnny Wild” who colored their
faces with burnt cork, drove these popular shows well into the 1920s.
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Illustrations of Johnny Wild characters appeared in Ford's 1921 memoir, Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop. |
A sharp
social observer, James regaled readers with tales of actors, agents,
socialites, Knickerbockers, Bohemians, and women and men of letters in his
candid books and articles.
Another
opium smoker was Pearl Eytinge, a woman of vivacious charm and no mean
accomplishment . . . I have seen her
lying in a joint in Bleecker Street reading poetry to a pickpocket beside her;
I have seen her on Mr. Wallack’s stage playing an ingenue part to which she was
ill-suited by temperament and manner of life; and I have seen her at one of the
great masked balls at the Academy of Music, the center of a group of
fashionable admirers.
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Pearl Eytinge (from Find-a-Grave) |
James’ final book, Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop, was his best. On page four he reflected:
The
shifting decades offer a long vista, dim in sundry places but shining brightly
at its furthest end on a wide, shady garden where, under wise and loving
parental guidance I had a little sister to play with and a kind elder brother
to kick me when I tried to be funny.
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Brookhaven home of the Fords, 1920s |
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/04/the-literary-days-of-james-l-ford.html
I may have to start the Pearl Eytinge Fan Club.
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