Perhaps no one knows the discouragement a young adult faces when trying to launch a career better than an aspiring thespian.
Blanche Yurka, a 20-year-old woman living in New York City, captured that discouragement, just before she managed to get her foot in the door.
“Many visits to [the] offices resulted in nil,” she wrote in her diary on Nov. 24. ”Countless trips to other places ditto, altho’ I had many experiences and gained much insight into the dramatic profession — especially the side technically known as ‘hunting a job.'”
Yurka had already been looking for a gig for several months. She had studied at the Institute of Musical Art, after moving to New York from the Midwest with her Bohemian immigrant family, but she was frustrated.
“I wrote letters and waited for answers. Oh how tiresome that was,” she complained.
Times have changed but some things stay the same, says Boston University physics professor William Skocpol, who owns the diary the Broadway-turned-Hollywood actress kept in the early 1900s, just before her big break. Skocpol, Yurka’s first-cousin, three-generations removed, has decided to post the diary the actress kept during her uncertain days as a music student and job hunter in 1907 on the Internet as a blog — something he thinks Yurka might have done had she lived a century later.
ARTIST’S ARTIFACT
“This particular diary makes a really nice story because it starts with her wanting to be an opera star,” Skocpol said. The year ends with Yurka’s realization that her talents are better suited to acting than music.
Yurka’s diary is an unassuming brown book with a gold title, “Engagements Diary 1907” emblazoned on the cover. Each date of the year is marked at the top of a single, separate page. The title page reads “The Brentano’s Engagement Book 1907” and a calendar is printed on the inside cover. Yurka began writing on Tuesday, Jan. 1.
She updated her dairy on a daily basis from January to September 1907, after which she made only two entries to catch up the record with the promising opportunities she had found.
Skocpol said he became interested in researching his family’s history in the 1980s, when he sought out his family’s personal rendition of Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871.
“As a kid, I was drawing family trees on rolls of . . . paper,” Skocpol said.
One generation of Skocpol’s family includes several “really strong, fascinating women, and Blanche is one of those,” he said.
Skocpol received Yurka’s dairy from a family member in 1996, and he has since researched the connections between Yurka and other society and theater figures.
“I love tracing interconnections and there are so many of them,” he said.
The Yurka family moved from St. Paul, Minn., to New York City in 1900. Blanche immediately looked to further her musical career, eventually winning a scholarship she later lost, after overworking and damaging her singing voice, from the Metropolitan Opera House.
By 1907, Yurka was studying at the IMA and singing in a choir at St. Bartholomew’s Church, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, who later directed the world’s finest orchestras and conducted music for the movie Fantasia. She recorded her strenuous days of piano playing, singing and quotidian young adult concerns in her diary.
“It’s a wonderful primary source,” BU History professor Bruce Schulman said of slim volume.
The journal teaches about developments in urban life, women’s lives and “especially about the world of popular entertainment that is more and more coming to overshadow religion and politics” at the time, he said.
Schulman said he has spoken with Skocpol about integrating the diary’s blog into the readings for his American history survey course, although “the timing didn’t work out for this year.”
In the early 1900s, Yurka’s decision to pursue the stage was “no longer unheard of, but certainly a bit risqué,” Schulman said.
Yurka’s female contemporaries, like Sophie Tucker, who ran away from her home in Hartford, Conn., were pressing into new career fields, Schulman said.
Tucker’s Russian Jewish immigrant parents disapproved of her performing. As a vaudeville entertainer, Tucker became known as “the Last of the Red Hot Mamas.”
“We can see that young women enter the stage and screen as new forms of entertainment emerge,” Schulman added.
THE DIARIST
The contents of Yurka’s diary are not unlike the blog entries young adults post online today, Skocpol said. He has collected works such as the Victor Book of Operas, published in 1912, to learn more about what Yurka mentions in her dairy.
In the autumn of 1907, after years of strenuous musical studies, Yurka decided to pursue acting.
On Nov. 24, 1907, Blanche wrote that her teacher “said he thought it showed much more intelligence to decide upon the dramatic career than to persist in singing when results were not satisfactory.” In the same entry, Yurka describes the audition process. She interviewed with David Belasco — the famed playwright and director for whom today’s Broadway establishment is named.
“The next interview proved a little more satisfactory verbally — he made me talk — and resulted in another appointment when I was to read for him, as he wanted to hear my voice and movements on the stage,” Yurka wrote.
While Yurka kept her diary regularly until September 1907, Skocpol notes that Yurka was quick to neglect her diary keeping immediately after she decided to make the leap from opera to theatre.
“It skips over all the parts of having sent out the letters and not getting the responses,” he said. “She returns to it when she’s really got something to say, and that makes it a complete story.”
Yurka wrote about her part-time work at the New York Public Library (“The work is delightful and the environment ditto.”) and details a short relationship with a New York University student.
On June 4, she recorded that she attended a dance: “At eleven we went over to the ‘gym’ to the Senior Ball, where we all danced till 4. Poor Frank had to rush way down to 161st to scare up some flowers as his florist had disappointed him.”
Yurka confided in her diary the romantic and possibly scandalous intentions of her date: ”When I carefully evaded his requests ‘to go out for a stroll,’ he accused me of being ‘no sport’ and ‘a girl without spirit . . . Frank talks quite freely enough, when I do keep him within bounds, thanks!”
Yurka summed up her night out with collegiate friends: “Well, I had a jolly good time and college life is a delightful one!”
LIFE’S WORK
Following her rough transition year, Blanche Yurka’s career took off to Broadway, Europe and Hollywood. Skocpol said Yurka was an an “actress of some renown” who wrote a “very interesting, name-dropping biography” later in life.
Yurka had plenty of names to drop, and Skocpol is quick to point out “the Drew Barrymore connection.” Yurka took the role of Gertrude in Hamlet, playing mother to John Barrymore.
Although Yurka was “awfully young to be playing the mother of John Barrymore,” the play ran for 125 performances.
Bette Davis, considered a pioneering figure of cinema, was inspired by Yurka’s performance, Skocpol said.
The Wild Duck, a play by Henrik Ibsen, opened in Boston, with Yurka playing Gina in the performance and Davis sitting in the audience. The play ran at the Repertory Theatre of Boston, which later became the BU Theatre. The Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center now holds many Davis artifacts.
In her autobiography, Davis recounts her experience in the theater as she realized her fate.
“It seemed as though everything in my life fell into place and I was in focus for the first time,” Davis wrote.
Four years after seeing Yurka on stage, Davis joined her there, as an actress in the same play.
Skocpol picks up autobiographies and books about actors and performances in the early 20th century as he browses stacks with his wife, Theda, a sociologist and political scientist.
As Skocpol reads from Davis’s autobiography, selecting the excerpts in which his ancestor plays a role, he seems engaged in the history.
“Miss Yurka stepped through the curtain for her solo curtain call,” he reads from Davis’s work.
“Suddenly Miss Yurka took my hand and led me to the foot lights and the curtain fell behinds us,” Skocpol continues, gesturing to an invisible curtain he was lowering.
“This was a tremendous honor and most gracious of her. Then she let go of my hand, smiled that secretive smile of hers and walked off the stage,” Skocpol continues. He skips a few lines, and reads that Davis called that moment her “first stardust.”
In 1955, before her death in 1974, Yurka wrote a letter to The New York Times summing up her acting career.
“It was a career which has given me brief periods of great joy and exultation, as well as long ones of frustration and frequent defeat. And others of comfortable affluence in utterly unimportant plays. But I’ve had it, the brou-ha-ha, the name in electric lights, the occasional privilege of earning a living thanks to television, the movies, one-woman tours et al . . .”
A career she might only have dreamed of as a 20 year old.