Paul H. Gilmore

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Paul Gilmore (1873-1952) was a popular stage actor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who also appeared in 10 silent films. Additionally, he owned and managed for many years the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City, giving work to such future stars as Robert Walker Sr.(1) and Carl Reiner (2).

According to the “Blue Book of Players” by A.D. Storm (1901), Paul Howard Gilmore was born July 14, 1873, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He got his start in a stock company in the early 1890s and soon gained a reputation as “the youngest, best-dressed leading man on the American stage”(3). In 1898 he starred in an Edison short film, “The Vanishing Lady,” in which a woman in a chair is covered with a drape and made to disappear. This 48-foot film, which was one of the first produced in the U.S., is considered lost.

Gilmore – dark-haired, clean-cut and of average height – played many swashbuckling roles throughout his career. On Dec. 16, 1899, at the Opera House in Phoenix, Arizona, Gilmore and company were performing “Three Musketeers,” a stage adaptation of the Dumas novel, when the action called for shots to ring out from the rear of the stage.

An actor hidden behind the stage rapidly began to fire his pistol. Suddenly, Gilmore and actors David Halbert and Lewis Monroe fell to the floor, wounded. It wasn’t until Gilmore shouted, “For God’s sake, stop shooting; these are ball cartridges!” did people realize that something was amiss.

The acting company’s supply of blank cartridges had given out, and shortly before the performance a small boy was sent to a store to purchase some. The store clerk sold him ball cartridges, thinking they were blank. Some 30 real bullets were fired at the actors. (4) While Gilmore and Halbert recovered, Lewis Monroe did not. On Jan. 20, 1900, Monroe died of lockjaw as the result of his gunshot wound to the hand. (5)

In 1900, Gilmore reached full star status with his performance in “The Dawn of Freedom” at the Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City.(6) “It is no fanciful assumption,” wrote A.D. Storm, “that in the near future Mr. Gilmore is destined to be one of the very most leading artists of the American stage.”

Gilmore performed relentlessly all over the country in scores of plays, one of which he wrote himself (“Captain Alvarez,” 1914). More often than not he played the heroic lover role. Audiences flocked to see him in productions such as “Captain Debonnaire,” “The Mummy and the Hummingbird” and “The Boys of Company B.”

Having married and divorced early in his career, he married again in 1901. Eight years later, in January 1909, a judge in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, granted a decree of divorce to Mrs. Mary A. Goodwin Gilmore, who claimed desertion and non-support. (7) In November of that year, Gilmore suddenly married for the third time while touring in Staunton, Virginia. Gilmore, who was appearing at the Beverley Theatre in “The Boys of Company B,” married 22-year-old Ethel Elizabeth Cauley of San Francisco, who had performed with him in his touring company. (8)

“Mrs. Gilmore,” wrote a Staunton reporter, “is an unusually pretty woman and is considered a clever little actress.”

In addition to operating his own touring stage company and acting in productions throughout the United States, Gilmore began making movies in 1915. By 1920, he had made nine movies and accumulated more than a quarter of a million dollars in cash and tangible assets, including 40 acres of land on Anna Maria Island in Florida. (9) It was here that he hoped to build a movie colony – Paul Gilmore’s Oriental Film City – that would rival Hollywood.

Gilmore and Albert Plummer of Character Pictures began filming the South Seas adventure, “Isle of Destiny,” in the spring of 1920, on Anna Maria Island. Gilmore pumped huge amounts of his own money into the production, footing the bill for the importation by boat (there was no serviceable road or bridge to the island) of cars, horses and some 200 actors. (11)

“Isle of Destiny,” a six-reeler, performed well when it premiered in New York theaters, and Gilmore planned at least two other films for production on Anna Maria Island. But his speculations in real estate went bust, and Gilmore lost all his assets and most of his cash. His dream for a Florida movie colony died.

Gilmore returned to New York City with $100 and a used coupe. (12). The once-prosperous actor settled down in Greenwich Village over a tobacco warehouse that he would transform, with the $100 he had in his pocket, into the Paul Gilmore Cherry Lane Theatre. (13) Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Gilmore and his daughter, Virginia, ran the small venue and starred in many of its productions.

[edit] References

(1) Modern Screen, Jan/Feb. 1946

(2) Jewish News Weekly, Oct. 15, 1999

(3) The Lowell Sun, Oct. 24, 1936

(4) The New York Times, Dec. 18, 1899

(5) The New York Times, Jan. 21, 1900

(6) The Players Blue Book, 1901

(7) The New York Times, Jan. 2, 1909

(8) Staunton (Va.) Daily Leader, Nov. 21, 1909

(9) The Lowell Sun, Oct. 24, 1936

(10) Manatee County Historical Records Library, article, Sept. 2004

(11) Ibid

(12) The Lowell Sun, Oct. 24, 1936

(13) Ibid