#216: Edwin Booth and the Players Club

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2016

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Edwin Booth was the greatest actor of the Gilded Age, a superstar of the theater who entertained millions over his long career. In this podcast, we present his extraordinary career, the tragedies that shaped his life (on stage and off), and the legacy of his cherished Players Club, the fabulous Stanford White-designed Gramercy Park social club for actors, artists and their admirers. The Booths were a precursor to the Barrymores, an acting family who were as famous for their personal lives as they were for their dramatic roles. Younger brother John Wilkes Booth would horrify the nation in 1865, and Edwin would briefly retire from the stage. But an outpouring of love would bring him back to the spotlight and the greasepaint. Edwin Booth would give back to the theatrical community for the formation of the Players Club in 1888. In this show, we’ll take you on a tour of this exclusive destination for film and theatrical icons, including a look at the upstairs bedroom where Booth died, still preserved exactly as it looked on that fateful day in 1893. Boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	Episode 216 of The Bowry Boys, the tragedies of Edwin Booth.
0:07.0	Hey, it's The Bowry Boys.
0:09.0	Hey!
0:10.0	Support for The Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:13.0	Join us for as little as a dollar a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:22.0	Hi there, welcome to The Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:25.0	And this is Tom Myers.
0:27.0	And we thought that we'd present a tribute to one of the greatest actors of the gilded age.
0:33.0	His name was Edwin Booth.
0:35.0	Now that's a name that may not be terribly familiar to many people listening to the show right now.
0:41.0	Edwin Booth, that is.
0:43.0	Because in many ways his name and his legacy as the most famous actor of the second half of the 19th century in the US
0:52.0	was overshadowed by a tragedy that faced him and his entire family,
0:57.0	brought upon by his younger brother John, which we will of course get to later in the story.
1:03.0	He also may not be familiar because of course he was a huge star during the era before television and film.
1:10.0	And they were just scant audio recordings of him.
1:14.0	And it was even before the period of mass photography or fan magazines and things like that.
1:20.0	So when people wanted to see Edwin Booth, they had to do it the old fashioned way.
1:25.0	They had to head to the theater and they did in droves for many, many decades in the 1850s, 60s, 70s and 80s.
1:33.0	His impact on New York City is through two principal stages, which we're going to talk about.
1:39.0	And then one special organization that he formed in the late 1880s.
1:45.0	And we shall be raising a toast to this organization during the show, the players club located in Grammar C Park.
	...

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