The Bangor area was a great place for celebrity watching a century ago. From Hollywood heart throbs to powerful millionaires to famous babies, one could expect to see them in person or at least read about them in the local news. Throw Bar Harbor into the mix, which the steamboat and railroad had certainly made part of Bangor’s orbit, and the possibilities for stargazing were endless.
In the summer of 1915, the famous stage and silent movie star Dustin Farnum was witnessed by hundreds of celebrity watchers roaring up and down the Penobscot River between Bucksport and Bangor in his new speed boat, The Virginian.
Named after one of Farnum’s recent starring roles, the powerful motor boat sped between the Eastern Steamship wharf in Bangor and the Bucksport wharf in just 28 minutes.
The Bangor Daily Commercial on July 28, however, claimed that — much to Farnum’s chagrin — Islesboro nabob George W. C. Drexel, the Philadelphia millionaire, rode circles around the actor out in Penobscot Bay in an even faster boat, and it was last year’s model.
Another celebrity claiming extensive space in the Bangor papers that summer was little John Jacob Astor, age 3, who was spending the summer with his mother on the late George Vanderbilt’s estate in Bar Harbor. Baby John’s father, Col. John Jacob Astor, had gone down with the Titanic. The son was dubbed the $3 million baby by the Bangor Daily News on June 17 in a story devoted mainly to describing his temper tantrums when being dragged about town by his nurse.
Little John was allotted $20,000 a year for expenses, but his mother complained it wasn’t enough. An indignant newspaper writer wrote on June 18 that $20,000 was enough to support 40 families making $500 a year in Bangor.
Another celebrity headline that summer: “Charlie Chaplin at the Palace.” Oops, don’t get your hopes up. This was an advertisement for a movie.
Charlie Chaplin didn’t appear at any of the local theaters any more than Mary Pickford did. The rise of movies and vaudeville in Bangor, all within the last decade, saw to that, much to the displeasure of live theater fans who had been used to seeing recent Broadway shows with the original casts.
The opening of the first movie theater, The Nickel, in 1907, and the first vaudeville house, the Union Theater, the next year slowed down the parade through Bangor of live performances by celebrity actors like Ethel Barrymore, Maud Adams, Maxine Eliot and James O’Neil, to name just a few.
This was especially true since the Bangor Opera House burned in 1914. Until then, the sight of major celebrities walking along Main Street between the Bangor House and the opera house had been a common occurrence.
Live drama had to compete with song-and-dance routines, animals shows, acrobats and other fare more popular with general audiences with only nickels to spend. Only a few of the newer vaudeville performers such as Mae West and Will Rogers had approached celebrity status.
Perhaps the best place to spot celebrities in Bangor was Union Station where dozens of trains passed through town daily, and famous people got off to stretch their legs. A friendly reporter could expect a call from an observant station employee if someone interesting came to town. In this way, brief interviews with the likes of Jack London, Alexander Graham Bell, Jacob Schiff and others appeared in the Bangor papers.
Especially prized on the celebrity beat were personal interviews before a show with famous performers (with Maine connections) like Madame Nordica and Emma Eames. They were two of the many internationally known divas who passed through town long enough to sing an aria or two at the Bangor Auditorium, where an annual opera extravaganza was held each fall.
John L. Sullivan, the boxer turned vaudevillian, sat down in his room at the Alpha Hotel for separate “lunches” and interviews with reporters from the city’s two competing newspapers before and after his show around the corner at the Bangor Opera House in 1904. Even though he had once spent an unpleasant night in the Bangor jail, the former heavyweight boxing champion continued to accommodate the local press.
By 1915, the parade of celebrities traveling through the Queen City of the East seemed to be trailing off unless you counted the people with out-of-state license plates. They managed to cause a commotion in an era when long auto journeys were still a novelty. The papers interviewed autoists from Los Angeles, Galveston and a few other faraway places who were putting up at the Bangor House that summer.
Newsmen regularly checked the registers at the Bangor House and the city’s other well established hotel, the Penobscot Exchange, in search of celebrities — sometimes publishing the entire list.
People from Presque Isle or Biddeford got listed in the papers if things were slow. (As a young reporter for a Maine weekly some years back, I used to collect and publish the names of people discharged from the local hospital, surely a jailable offense today.)
A sure way to find famous people by the dozen, however, was to take a trip to Bar Harbor, the summer celebrity capital of northern New England, which attracted rich and famous from all over the northeastern United States.
Both Bangor newspapers provided lengthy celebrity guides in their news columns. The Commercial printed long lists of people staying in cottages and the more exclusive hotels in Bar Harbor and some other Mount Desert Island towns during the summer of 1915. The paper’s publisher J. P. Bass owned a summer home in Bar Harbor and provided more news of islanders than the competition.
All Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, widow of the publishing tycoon, had to do was to get into her expensive auto with the help of a chauffeur to get her photograph in the Commercial on Aug. 23 that year.
The Bangor Daily News offered its own extravagant guide that summer. The headline said DIPLOMATIC AND SOCIAL LEADERS FILL BAR HARBOR THIS SEASON: Blue Blood of America at Maine’s Famous Summer Resort …”
The members of the Washington diplomatic corps who populated the summer “colony” were listed first. Ambassadors from Denmark, Sweden and Portugal were on hand, but because of the European war many of the regulars — from Austria, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Greece — were elsewhere.
Prominent folks from “private families” came next. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Alfred DuPont of Delaware and Mrs. Robert Taft of Cincinnati. Mrs. Taft would soon deliver President William Howard Taft’s first grandson.
It would be noted almost as an afterthought a few weeks later in one of the Bangor papers that Andrew Carnegie was also spending the summer near baby John Jacob Astor and his mother in one of the empty cottages on the Vanderbilt estate.
Dustin Farnum, a mere silent film actor, would no doubt have been a bit out of place in Bar Harbor. But he was definitely the celebrity of the summer in the Bangor papers with several stories to his credit.
The Bar Harbor mystique would fade away in a few decades. A movie star with a powerful speed boat was certainly a sign of things to come as the shelf life for super star celebrities grew shorter.
Join Wayne E. Reilly on Tuesday at the Bangor Historical Society on Union Street where he will be presenting a talk entitled “A Decade of Prohibition in Bangor: 1904 to 1915 … an Anecdotal History of Vice in the Queen City of the East.” The talk is part of the historical society’s Brown Bag Lunch series and is free to the public.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, “Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era,” is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com