Revised Nov. 2, 2002
Revised Nov. 2, 2002
Table of Contents:
By then, however, the Williamsons' marriage was effectively over. Viola Tait and Ian Dicker both agree that Maggie left J.C. in 1891 for Harry Roberts, an actor; what they and most others gloss over is the fact that Harry Roberts, who himself was from an Australian theatrical family, was about 20 years Maggie's junior. The "Companion to the Australian Theatre" and the "Dictionary of Australian Biography" state that J.C. and Maggie divorced on May 28, 1899. He married Mary Weir in August of that year. Maggie married Harry Roberts in New York City on April 12, 1902.
What happened? It's hard to tell from here. Dicker's book, written with the sanction of one of Williamson's daughters, Viola Horsley (she wrote the foreword), says little more than "their relationship had been deteriorating for some time." Nellie Stewart is quoted in Dicker's book at length expressing veiled outrage that Williamson could have dictated his autobiography at the end of his life without mentioning Maggie. (The veiling comes from her attribution of the omission to failed memory.) Dicker seems to think that Williamson was justified, if not to pretend she didn't exist, then at least to say as little as possible about her.
Consequently, little of Maggie's side of the story has been recorded, or at least published. But there's possibilities.
The juxtaposition of dates of divorce and remarriage alone seem to indicate that he was at fault, perhaps having an affair with Mary Weir. But why was he doing that -- if he was?
Here's my theory: It seems that most acting couples have some form of rivalry between them, and when the woman's popularity outstrips that of the man, trouble often follows. This is, for example, what led to the breakup of Burt Reynolds' marriage to Judy Carne in the 1960s. Even Viola Tait, who didn't seem to think very much of Maggie as a person, admitted that she had become more popular than her husband due to her versatility. An executive of the J.C. Williamson company, Johnny Farrell, who debuted in "Struck Oil" as a bootblack, said that she and Nellie Stewart were the "most versatile actresses ever to appear in Australia and New Zealand." This can be seen in the range of singing roles she took on: In Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, Maggie not only sang the title role, which required her to hit several high notes, but sometimes sang Lady Jane, which was a heavy contralto part. She would also switch back and forth between Josephine and Buttercup in HMS Pinafore and Poor Wandering One and Ruth in Pirates of Penzance. And she played Katisha in The Mikado so well that she frightened the actress playing Yum Yum. "I really believed she thought I was going to tear her face. I felt all the anger so intensely," Viola Tait quotes Maggie as saying.
She appears to have run up some debts, which Williamson estimated at between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds, in spite of having an allowance from her husband of about 10 pounds per week, plus her earnings, which he thought averaged 40 pounds per week while a play was on.
And then there was the legal flap over "Struck Oil." Not long after leaving him, Maggie formed her own theater company and began playing it. Williamson was outraged. He insisted that she had no right to the play; he'd bought it, he'd rewritten it, and he'd produced it, so he had a "legal and moral right" to it. But Maggie, for whom the play had been tailored, and who brought Lizzie Stofel to life, seems to have thought she too had a moral right to the work. (Either Maggie didn't wish to pay him royalties for the right to perform the play, or J.C. was trying to refuse her permission to perform the work regardless of whether she paid him royalties or not. Otherwise, this quarrel doesn't make a damn bit of sense to me.)
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As far as legal rights go, it is tempting to apply the modern concept of community property to the play, but those didn't apply in the late Victorian era -- and if they did, their application to the rights to a play is questionable in any case. Williamson, who was in London on business at the time Maggie began playing "Struck Oil" without him, transferred the rights to the play to his attorney and told him to seek an injunction. His friends and business associates convinced him it would be better to let the matter slide. Unfortunately, by the time the attorney heard about his change of heart, the injunction had already been filed. Maggie appealed. In the three years that it took to get the matter resolved, Williamson expressed a dislike for her brother and manager, James Moore, that was perhaps greater than the dislike he expressed for Maggie, describing him as an "unscrupulous scoundrel." The rationale for this opinion is entirely left to speculation, with precious little to speculate upon. Many times in letters to his attorneys he described them both as having a complete disregard for the truth. He calls her "dangerous" because on top of being a liar, in his estimation, she is a convincing liar -- in his words, "apparently so plausible and genuine," with the weight of public opinion firmly on her side. He accuses Maggie and her brother of trying to blackmail him over the debts she ran up with the threat of publicity if they weren't paid. He was obviously quite reluctant to make himself look bad, and resented having that held over his head. "I am as loath as ever to wash our dirty linen in public," he wrote in 1894, "the result in such cases being that nearly always the woman gets all the sympathy while the man has to find the soap and then have the dirty water thrown over him." The appeal was eventually argued before the Chief Justice of Victoria, Sir John Madden (a fact that Oakland Raiders fans would appreciate) in 1894. The Chief Justice sided with Maggie and, adding insult to injury, told Williamson that the law assumed a man ought to be able to manage his own wife. "Fancy the fate of the man who tried to manage Maggie, and Maggie unwilling," said an anonymous commentator in The Bulletin of Sydney. But what else can you expect? In Dicker's own account, she had been working since age eight, was the sole support of her family for many years, and reacted to Williamson's early attempts to assert his husbandly authority by laughing at him. (This was in an era where the husband was assumed to be the teacher and the wife the dutiful pupil, always.) Williamson (not in the deliberately amnesiac autobiography, but as quoted in Clay Greene's memoirs) compared his first year of marriage to being a horse trainer with a "fractious filly" to train. With her legal victory firmly in hand, Maggie promptly put the play on again, with John Forde as Jan Stofel and herself as Lizzie, making sure she headed the advertisements with the notice that she'd won the legal right to stage the play. Tait calls this the greatest blow she could have dealt Williamson, though she later cast her second husband, Harry Roberts, in the role of Jan Stofel, which Williamson used to play. |
(What you have to understand about Williamson is that not only did he file the suit establishing the English copy right in Australia, but he also got into a three-sided dispute over a Dion Boucicault play, "The Shaugrahn," while the Williamsons were engaged at the Adelphi Theatre in London. The Adelphi's manger cast them in it, but Boucicault refused to grant him permission to perform it because he was hoping to come back to London and play it himself. Williamson learned what was going on and announced that he had no intention of performing in a play when the author hadn't given permission for it to be performed. Eventually the manager of the Adelphi sued him for breach of contract. What made this worse is that Boucicault denied telling Williamson what was going on -- "he denied any previous association with them," is the way Dicker puts it. Does that mean he denied having ever known him? It's possible. On the other hand, Boucicault offered to pay Williamson's legal expenses stemming from the breach of contract suit. Williamson refused, and he seems to have lost the lawsuit.)
The day Williamson died, Maggie walked into his Sydney office right about the time when a newspaper man was calling looking for a reaction. She asked if there was any word about Williamson and was put on the phone with the newspaper man. Upon hearing the news, she broke down crying so hard that the man concluded she'd put aside all her rancor against her ex-husband. However, Maggie wasn't done skewering Williamson. About 12 years after his death, Maggie told a story about a performance with JC (probably in "The Chinese Question") in which he went onstage having forgotten to put on his pants. The audience was laughing hysterically at him, and he took it to mean he was that funny. She made several attempts to tell him in stage Chinese (ling-how-chong-lookee-pants-off) before he finally noticed. I wonder how true this is. Part of the article is missing and I can't tell what led up to this incident. I suspected when I read it that she had just made up the story for a laugh, and I'm more convinced than ever now that she did.
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Tait and Dickers (Dickers based a lot of his book on Tait's), after blasting Maggie for taking away her husband's favorite role (I still don't understand why he couldn't have played it) almost grudgingly admit that she remained very popular in Australia for the rest of her life. When Maggie left Australia to return home for the last time in 1925, she was given a tribute at which the governor-general of Australia presided and at which she netted $19,000. At the end of her journey, "She was received by [San Francisco] city officials with elaborate ceremonies," including, apparently, a ball. |
After she came back to SF, the unidentified clip quoted her saying, "After the South of Market ball, one of the papers spoke of me as 'a gray-haired old lady.' [I think this was an article in the Examiner of 11/28/25, the author of which also seemed to think it was terribly sad that Maggie was speaking into a microphone and over the radio.] Can you tell me why they do that? I hope I'm not silly about my age. But my voice is strong, I can get around without help and my hair isn't gray."
She had also been performing in Sydney up till the time of her departure, including a scene of the play "Struck Oil" at her farewell banquet in Melbourne. (One last jab at J.C.?) Two photographs both purporting to be of her in 1925 look radically different -- in one she does rather look rather old and gray, but in another she looks pert and saucy, with dark, bobbed hair. A third photo in "Australian Theatre" (the one above) does seem to back up the "gray-haired" description, though she doesn't look very old otherwise to me.
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Created 20 Feb 1999 by Reunion, from Leister Productions, Inc. Revised January 10, 2003
