Pearl Eytinge

Pearl Eytinge (née Wyckoff; 1854–1914) was a New York-born actress, author, playwright, producer, and activist whose Broadway appearances spanned 1878 to 1880. Born into a family with deep artistic connections, Eytinge built a career that extended well beyond the stage to encompass writing, advocacy, and public lecturing, though her later years were marked by addiction and decline.

Her family background placed her within a notable creative milieu. Her mother, Margaret Winship, married Sol Eytinge, an illustrator who moved in New York's bohemian circles and collaborated with writers including Charles Dickens. The Eytinge family had emigrated from the Netherlands in the first half of the nineteenth century, and many of its members worked in the arts as actors, writers, and illustrators. The most prominent among them was Sol's cousin, the actress Rose Eytinge. Pearl's mother was herself a published author, writing under the pen names Margaret Eytinge, Madge Elliot, Bell Thorne, and Allie Vernon. Pearl's half-brother, James S. Wyckoff, retained the surname of his biological father, James B. Wyckoff, while Pearl took her stepfather's name.

Eytinge showed creative ambition from an early age. By sixteen she was contributing short stories to Our Young Folks, an illustrated magazine for young readers. She was also an accomplished elocutionist with a notably rich voice, and gave recitals and poetry readings from childhood. Her professional stage career began in 1875 at the Park Theatre, where she appeared in productions including Davy Crockett and Mighty Dollar. She subsequently worked at Wallack's Theatre and performed with Dion Boucicault's company before her Broadway credits in The Upper Crust and Diplomacy during the 1878 to 1880 period.

Her personal life was complicated by a series of marriages. A note in the readers' section of Our Young Folks dated 1871 indicated she had married at sixteen. A decade later, describing herself as a widow on the license, she married Joseph Watkins Yard on 25 May 1881 at St Giles in the Fields church in London. Yard was twenty-two at the time, and his family's strong objections led to a divorce, with Pearl later stating she accepted a payment from the Yard family in exchange for not contesting it. The two secretly remarried in 1884, but that union ended acrimoniously when Yard discovered Pearl had made the remarriage public. He initially denied it to the press, then attributed his actions to having not been sober. Yard went on to qualify as a doctor, married Josephine Marie Siedler in 1891, later became involved in mining in Mexico, remarried in 1907 to Mary Ryan, and died in El Paso in 1941.

Following her Broadway work, Eytinge continued to pursue a range of professional activities. In 1881 and 1882 she toured with the plays Brentwood and Coming Thro the Rye, though both productions operated at a loss. Her manager during this period was Alexander Russell Webb, a former newspaper proprietor and editor. By 1884, reports had emerged of her use of opium and morphine, alongside concerns about her health. Her career prospects improved in 1888 when she came under the management of William Fleron, a Copenhagen-born newspaper man who identified as an advanced socialist and had connections to social-revolutionary groups in London. That same year, Fleron helped Eytinge make a successful appeal to Governor Hill in Albany on behalf of Chiara Cignarale, an Italian immigrant sentenced to death for killing her abusive husband; the sentence was commuted as a result.

Fleron also intervened when a landlady named Mrs. Benas held Pearl's manuscripts, including her first play Two Women, as security against an unpaid bill of $120. His attempt to recover the documents resulted in a brief imprisonment, though he was released the following day. In 1889 Eytinge published her novel Velvet Vice. The following year she appeared in a stage adaptation of The Clemenceau Case, a story by Alexandre Dumas fils that Fleron had translated, but her performance was poorly received and she was replaced. In 1891 she wrote the play Vivian and adapted Amelie Rives's story The Quick or the Dead. That same year she contributed lyrics to Fleron's production Elysium, an adaptation of Mario Uchard's Mon Oncle Barbassou, in which she played Madame Barbassou. She also discovered the Danish Barrison Sisters and wrote a comedietta for them titled Mr. Cupid; Fleron subsequently managed the sisters and later married the eldest, Lona.

During this period Eytinge became acquainted with Madame Diss Debar, also known as Swami Laura Horos, a self-described spiritualist later convicted in 1888 of conspiring to extort money from a recently bereaved New York lawyer named Luther R. Marsh, for which she served six months in prison. At one of Diss Debar's séances, Eytinge met Robert Augustus Chesebrough, the inventor and developer of Vaseline, whose wife had died in 1887. A friendship formed between the two, and in 1891 Chesebrough provided Eytinge with a house at 209 East Forty-eighth Street in New York at his own expense.

Her addiction to alcohol and drugs ultimately ended her stage career. In January 1896 she was hospitalized following a drug overdose and was not expected to survive. She recovered, but was admitted to hospital again later that year with alcoholic and morphine poisoning. Over the following years she made repeated attempts to return to the stage, even after announcing she had been cured. She sought counsel from the evangelist Dwight L. Moody following one of his sermons and found some comfort in his guidance. In her final years she lectured publicly on the dangers of drug use. Reports from that period indicated she descended into madness before her death in Atlantic City in 1914. The degree to which she had faded from public consciousness by then was illustrated when her step-cousin Louis Victor Eytinge, on trial for murder in 1907, entered a plea of insanity partly based on the false claim that Pearl was his sister and had died insane in Bellevue Hospital — she was, in fact, still alive and was not even a blood relative.