Let me tell you about meeting Mark Twain.
Well—-Hal Holbrook, actually.
He was Mark Twain longer than Mark Twain was Mark Twain. Actor Hal Holbrook died about two weeks ago although word of his death didn’t come out until this week. He was 95.
I saw “Mark Twain Tonight” the first time at the Stephens Playhouse in Columbia, as I recall, in the early 1960s and I think maybe a second time there. Definitely a third time many years later at Jesse Hall at the University and a final time on May 16, 2014 at the Miller Performing Arts Center here in Jefferson City. Nancy and I got to be part of the meet-and-greet bunch backstage after the show in Columbia and then again at the Miller Center.
There is an interesting, perhaps remarkable, story about his Jefferson City performance.
Mark Comley, my successor as president of the Community Concert Association, shared my enthusiasm for Holbrook as Twain. The association decided to go for broke and bring him to the Miller Center even though he cost every penny of our annual budget. But we thought a sell-out would justify the investment even if it didn’t quite cover the entire cost and we’d gain some recognition for the association that would pay off in the next season. I was disappointed that we didn’t sell every seat in the auditorium. Big crowd, but it was disappointing to see that so many people in our city passed up a chance to see one of the great acts in the history of the American theatre.
It was the last day of the legislative session and as usual, the last week was exhausting. I missed most of the first half of the show and didn’t have the energy for an after-show dinner at Madison’s (they kept their back room open so the concert board and guests could dine with Holbrook at midnight).
Holbrook was 89 then and showed plenty of energy in the show and in the post-show meet-and-greet afterward. He had removed his makeup (he told me in an interview in 2016 that he had to use less of it as he aged into the age of Twain, who he portrayed as being 70).
He stopped and spent time with each person. I told him I had hoped we’d be able to get him to the Capitol to see the various tributes to Twain (the Huck Finn art of the Benton mural, the bust of Twain in the rotunda’s Hall of Famous Missourians, and a—in my opinion— fairly undistinguished portrait of him) as well as a painting in the Senate of Francis Preston Blair Junior, the son of the man Holbrook played in the movie, Lincoln.
We took a couple of friends with us, Larry and Peggy Veatch who had lived in Hannibal for many years where Larry was the minister of the First Christian Church for a long time—and Holbrook had spent part of his performance on Twain’s ruminations on religion. He and Larry had quite a conversation.
Mark (Comley) told me a remarkable story about midnight dinner the next time I saw him. It seems that Mark’s favorite routine is Twain’s recounting of the story of the skipper of little boat impressed of his own self-importance who crosses paths with another ship and its skipper who put him in his place. Holbrook often used the story, originally told by Twain at a dinner in his honor in Liverpool, England on July 10, 1907 to close his shows. He hadn’t done it at the Miller Center and Mark mentioned it to Holbrook at the dinner. Holbrook grew quiet for a time–And then did the entire routine. You can see it as Holbrook sometimes did it on stage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_rTMNnxwSE
Mark figured that Holbrook had gone quiet for a little while because he was sorting through the hundreds or thousands of Twain stories stored in his memory until he found the story of “The Mary Ann.”
The first half of his shows were filled with wry and humorous observation of Twain. The second half of the show turned serious pretty soon when he did the reading from Huckelberry Finn when the boy has to decide if he’s going to lie to protect his friend Jim, the room was always absolutely still, the audience moving only so much as necessary to breathe.
He spent about an hour with me on the phone in 2004 when he was appearing at then-Central Missouri State, the University of Missouri-Columbia, then at Kansas University. That was his 50th year of being Mark Twain.
Somewhere, in a box of recordings of interviews and events we covered in forty years at the Missourinet is a CD of that interview. I’ll find it someday and post it. I do remember that he told me he often updates his show with new Twain material but he never went beyond Twain’s thoughts. He never thought, “What would Twain say” about contemporary issues. But Twain’s social commentary covered such a wide range of topics that many of his observations of 19th century situations fit contemporary events.
Holbrook didn’t exactly invent the one-man show portraying a historic figure but as Mark Dawidziak at the Center for Mark Twain Studies put it, “Holbrook not only unleased platoons of Mark Twain impersonators (several in almost every state), he popularized the one man show about American figures. He soon was followed by James Whitmore as Will Rogers, (then as Harry Truman, and Theodore Roosevelt), Henry Fonda as Clarence Darrow, Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson, and Robert Morse as Truman Capote, just to name a few.”
But, in truth, many of the Twain impersonators weren’t really impersonating Twain. They were impersonating Holbrook.
Samuel Clemens started using the pen name of Mark Twain in 1863. He died in 1910 at the age of 75 after 47 years if being Twain.
Hal Holbrook retired his act, and himself, in 2017, his health no longer strong enough for tours and performances. He had been Mark Twain (among other characters in numerous movies and TV shows) for seventy years.