Harold Heaton

Harold Robertson Heaton, born January 19, 1861, in Salem, Illinois, was a newspaper artist, stage actor, and playwright whose career spanned cartooning, illustration, and Broadway performance from 1899 through 1932. The son of Charles Heaton, a civil engineer originally from England, and Amy Robertson of Missouri, he spent much of his childhood in New York before relocating to St. Louis. As a young man he was known as Harry Heaton. He studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and began his professional career at the Missouri Republican before becoming, in 1887, the first artist hired by the Chicago Daily Tribune.

At the Tribune, Heaton's early drawings were produced using the chalk plate method at his home, a technique that gave way to zinc etching by the end of 1887. His illustrations quickly became prominent features of the paper, appearing on the front page shortly after he joined the staff. During the 1890s he signed his work with the initials HRH, earning him the nickname His Royal Highness. In 1893 he produced illustrated weekly commentaries on the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Tribune continued commissioning his Events of the Week drawings long after the exposition closed, eventually publishing annual compilations in book form. These multi-panel pen pictures, as the Tribune called them, resembled a comic strip format though without a continuous narrative. Heaton also delivered lectures on newspaper illustration to professional societies throughout this period, and during the later 1890s began participating in amateur theatricals.

With the death of his mother in January 1899, Heaton resolved to leave newspaper work and pursue acting. He departed the Tribune in the fall of that year. William Gillette cast him as Sir Edward Leighton in Sherlock Holmes, a role he performed from the play's first tryout in Buffalo, New York, in October 1899 through its Broadway run and final tour in Boston in March 1901. When Gillette took the production to London, Heaton traveled with the company and remained in England after the play closed, spending a year with the James Welch company at the Comedy Theatre in the West End and on tour through England and Wales in The New Clown.

Returning to the American stage, Heaton appeared in the American production of J. M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton, which opened in November 1903 and closed in March 1904. He subsequently formed a three-person troupe called Harold Heaton and Company, which performed a one-act farce of his own writing, The Rat, on a vaudeville circuit. He rejoined the touring company of The Admirable Crichton in October 1904. Gillette cast him again in a Sherlock Holmes revival in March 1905, and Heaton also wrote a one-act play, In the Artist's Studio, for actress Jessie Busley to use in vaudeville. He then joined Lawrence D'Orsay's company for the tryouts and Broadway run of The Embassy Ball in early 1906.

The first full-length play Heaton wrote was the three-act comedy Lady Jim, purchased by producer Walter N. Lawrence in March 1906 as a vehicle for Hilda Spong. Heaton co-staged the production alongside George Forster Platt, and the cast included Antoinette Perry. The play premiered on August 28, 1906, at Weber's Theatre but received harsh notices, with critics targeting the writing, staging, and acting alike. Despite revisions by Heaton and the producer, it closed on September 19, 1906. He spent the remainder of 1906 and part of 1907 touring with The Embassy Ball, and in early 1908 appeared in a Julia Marlowe revival of When Knighthood Was in Flower.

In the fall of 1908 Heaton re-entered journalism, joining The Inter Ocean as an editorial cartoonist for a period of approximately six years. His work there evolved from broad commentary on current events into a focused engagement with Chicago politics, with particular attention to Mayor Fred Busse and State's Attorney John E. Wayman. During this period he signed his cartoons as Harold Heaton and incorporated a small crow as a recurring trademark. One cartoon, Merely a Passenger, received recognition from a national gathering of bankers in Washington, D.C. His final drawing for the paper appeared on April 25, 1914, as the publication entered receivership. Throughout his time at The Inter Ocean, Heaton continued to act, including a 1911 appearance in the musical comedy The Heart Breakers, with music by Harold Orlob and Melville Gideon and a book by Frank R. Adams and Will M. Hough, which ran for seven weeks in Chicago.

Beyond his newspaper cartooning, Heaton was also a painter and illustrator. He traveled to Spain and Morocco in the early 1890s for a book illustration assignment and contributed illustrations to magazine stories between 1893 and 1895. His black-and-white work was shown at Chicago Society of Artists annual exhibitions at the Athenæum, and his artwork appeared regularly at Anderson's Art Gallery and O'Brien's Art Gallery. A Chicago exhibition in 1900 noted watercolor landscapes drawn from travels to Maine, Florida, and Tangier.

Heaton continued performing on Broadway through 1932, accumulating credits that included the musical The Boy Friend, the play Happy Landing, the play Three Times the Hour, and the play The Greeks Had a Word for It, in addition to Lady Jim and his earlier stage appearances. A retrospective published by the Chicago Tribune in October 1942 noted that his obituary had appeared in print a few years prior.