Mary Ellis’s Memories

The late Mary Ellis’s memories of Rose Marie and Dennis are extracted from her autobiography, Those Dancing Years*:

One evening during this play Arthur Hammerstein sat in the second row of the stalls. It meant nothing to me to hear of it that evening – but I soon received a call to go and see him At his office I met Rudolf Friml, the composer, and Oscar Hammerstein II, then a big, gentle, very young man. At that meeting Rose Marie was born. They all persuaded me that I must sing again and told me that what they had in mind was a new kind of play with a really dramatic story and fine music which would demand real singing – more like an Offenbach light opera. It was to be the first of Oscar’s long list of timeless musical plays. It was about a French Canadian girl and her love for Jim a fur trapper, wrongly accused of murder. Hammerstein got Dennis King to play him. Dennis had been having a Shakespearean season in New York and no-one then knew he had a splendid baritone voice. After Rose Marie he swashbuckled and sang in Friml’s two later musicals The Three Musketeers and The Vagabond King.

…

Day by day the production grew and, before I knew what was happening, rehearsals were in full swing. I felt dim and awful because I knew none of the ways and means of operetta. I … plunged into the playing with all the zeal of attacking Sardou and Puccini rolled into one! Perhaps that ultimately came over and accounted partly for its extravagant and phenomenal success. It is still something I cannot understand because, in the pre-New York tour that summer, we felt too terrible for words and managed to see only the long grim faces of the management in that try-out.

We were in Long Branch – a famous sea-side try-out place. The only hotel Dennis and I could get into was a kosher Jewish one, where we were fed on cucumbers and sour cream, among other things, which almost killed me with violent indigestion and added to a depression that seemed ominous. The ocean looked inviting enough to walk into and so avoid the terror of the New York opening.

On September 2nd 1924 at the Imperial Theatre, Rose Marie and the ‘Indian Love Call’ became theatre history. All I remember of that first night is sitting cross-legged on the table in Act One and reaching a pianissimo high B-flat which brought the house down. After that, euphoria, bliss and the final curtain fulfilling everyone’s expectations. During the run, Sir Alfred Butt asked me to go to England to play Rose Marie at Drury Lane. But for some reason I refused and the part was played in London by Edith Day. It is strange to think that I might have been in Drury Lane in 1925, instead of ten years later when I was destined to perform there!

*Those Dancing Years by Mary Ellis, published by John Murray, 1982.

Mary Ellis died in 2003 in London at the age of 105. She was born in the same year as Dennis. I heard her on the radio before she died and thought that I should get in touch with her to ask her about Dennis but I never did.