Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,161

This is the grave of Nathaniel Goodwin.

Born in 1857 in Boston, Goodwin was an actor who first shows up in the record in 1874, when he got a part in Joseph Bradford’s play Law in New York. He did well and started working New York plays the next year. He quickly got signed by the comic opera impresario Edward Rice. Ambitious and difficult, he wanted more money and in 1878, now married to an actress named Eliza Weathersby, left Rice to start his own company. This led to a tour of the nation, either under Nat Goodwin’s Froliques or  Eliz Weathersby’s Froliques, depending on reasons about which I am not sure.

But imagine–you are in the 19th century. You are looking for something to do. Everything you know around you in the 21st century basically hasn’t been invented yet. I mean, what the world be without Facebook and YouTube? Can you imagine such a dystopia. So some new guy came into town with a decent theater troupe to do some light comedy and singing and the like, well, why wouldn’t you go? Unless you were a Methodist, could be a little too risque for you in that case.

So Goodwin did well. He made a good bit of money and he was a man about town. He reallly liked you manly pursuit of sports and drinking and women and so he dedicated himself to those, especially after Eliza died in 1887, for reason that I’m not sure of. He co-founded the Elks lodge in Boston. He and his buddy, a guy by the name of George Floyd, became what some consider the first player agents in baseball history. This is overstated, I grant you, but the idea is that the Boston Beaneaters (I wish the Red Sox had this name today) had signed King Kelly and there were issues and they became the go-betweens running back and forth between Kelly and management.

Goodwin’s critical acceptance grew in the 1890s, as he moved from just light comedy and bits drawn from various places to real plays, often working for others in these productions. Some were comedies, some dramas. The key was getting the lead in Brander Matthews and George Jessop’s A Gold Mine, which hit Broadway in 1889. This was designed for the actor John Raymond, who debuted it in Memphis but then died a couple days later. Goodwin made the pitch that he could move into a more serious role and so they tried him out and it worked. Goodwin held onto the role for as long as he could, playing it for years. That included the first London performances in 1890, but he would tour with the role too throughout the nation. The critics did not actually care for the play and in fact, in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser takes a shot at it, saying it’s the play that Carrie sees that gets her interested in the theater, which was not a compliment.

Goodwin then got the playwright Henry Guy Carleton to write him a lead for a good comedy. A Gilded Fool debuted in 1892 and went to Broadway pretty quickly. It remained popular enough to see a silent film version, though not with Goodwin. But Goodwin would remain a relatively prominent actor the rest of his life. That included getting the lead in a 1912 adaptation of Dickens’ Oliver Twist, costarring Marie Doro and Constance Collier. This was also made into a silent film, with all the main leads. Talk about totally different kinds of art by the way. There was a lot of this–let’s put a silent film version of a big play in the theater, but given that the leads couldn’t speak and the films were 12-15 minutes, it might as well be a different art form.

Now, Goodwin went through wives like a mid 20th century actor, not a Victorian one. OK, his first wife died. But then we married actress after actress and evidently lived a pretty wild personal life. He tended to marry actresses he was working with. That started with Nella Baker Pease in 1890. They divorced in 1896. Then in 1898, he married Maxine Elliott, a wild woman in her own right who later would have likely sexual affairs with both J.P. Morgan and King Edward VII of Britain. They divorced in 1908 and he immediately then married Edna Goodrich, who was a major star in the first decade of the 20th century. He then left her for Margaret Moreland, a somewhat less prominent actress.

Now, toward the end of his life, Goodwin did a few silent films. There are a couple of early versions of Oliver Twist on YouTube, but there were so many of them that I can’t tell if they are his. Evidently the film does survive. I’m not sure if anything else survives.

Goodwin had an eye problem and had to have it removed in 1919. He did not recover and died a couple of weeks later. Health care was still kinda grim then. He was 61 years old.

Nathaniel Goodwin is buried in Milton Cemetery, Milton, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other theater folks of the early 20th century, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Maxine Elliott is in Cannes, if anyone wants to send me to the film festival next year as the official LGM Correspondent, I might be able to make that happen. Marie Doro is in Duncannon, Pennsylvania and Minnie Dupree is in Mount Vernon, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.