Chappell, Producer of Lillian Gish’s “Camille” (San Bernardino Sun, 1933)

 

Chappell, Producer of Lillian Gish’s “Camille” (San Bernardino Sun, 1933)

  • San Bernardino Sun, Volume 39, 1 June 1933
  • Chappell, Producer of Lillian Gish’s “Camille”

MANHATTAN’S newest, brightest and most amiable man-about-town is Delos Chappell, a Denver blade who made his metropolitan debut last fall as producer of Lillian Gish’s “Camille.” He frequents the more sedate bright spots with. Miss Gish or George Buchanan Fife, the last and most beloved of the Park Row dandies of a glamorous newspapering unhappily dead. Another young recruit from the ranks of the haute noblesse is Tom Hamilton, wealthy and handsome Pittsburgher. A juvenile, he speaks of his first failure as “a grand Thursday night run.”

Camille Cast with R.E. Jones and Lillian Gish in Chappel Garden by Laura Gilpin Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas 1932

LILLIAN GISH, by the way, provided a melancholy evening in “No. 9 Pine Street,” a study of frozen New England conscience. It was a dramatization of the famous axe murders of the mauve decade the killings in the Borden family. Miss Gish did fairly well by a poor piece. And made a stage door John of the silk-hatted George Jean Nathan on her opening night.

Laura Gilpin (1891-1979); [Gish, Lillian, and Mrs. Carrington] [Made in Chappell Garden, Denver, Colorado]; 1932; Gelatin silver print; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft Worth, Texas; Bequest of the Artist; P1979.140.197

BROADWAYITES have finally had an opportunity to see Lillian Gish as Camille, and she is assured a place in arguments about illusion in the theater for years to come. Not every one approved her delineation of the role, but every one found some evanescent magic in it. There were harsh words said about her playing the fabulous courtesan as a chaste spinster. There was some confusion over the play being presented in the manner of fifty years ago with quaint lighting, soliloquies, and exrated posturings.

LILLIAN GISH

” Among the significant and potentially historic figures of our dramatic times, Lillian Gish occupies a particularly luminous place. The literati have burdened her with ethereal apostrophes: she has been likened to Duse, to Helen of Troy, to an angel, and to a “frightened chrysanthemum”. She has been in pictures ever since she was a fragile wisp of a girl, and she has remained the symbol of delicacy and passive tenderness ever since the days of Broken Blossoms, down the years through The White Sister and Orphans of the Storm to the present day. Now she is hack again on the legitimate stage, exquisitely moribund as Camille, her first play since her great success of two years ago, in Uncle Vanya. Miss Gish is being further canonized by a new biography, Life and Lillian Gish, by Albert Bigelow Paine, and by a revival of one of the first Gish opera extant, an ancient Biograph film, entitled A Northwoods Romance, which is being shown as a part of that acid revue. Americana

Miss Lillian Gish

(George Jean Nathan)

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