Who was Sophie Treadwell?

By MICHAEL BROWN
Managing Editor
 
Treadwell was a unique talent: A social activist, playwright, world traveler and international journalist who retired in 1965 to Tucson, where she died five years later.

Born Oct. 3, 1885, in Stockton, Calif., Treadwell was abandoned by her father who moved to San Francisco when she was 5 years old. Growing up, she would spend summers with him; it was there she was first introduced to theater. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1906 from UC-Berkeley and in 1907, she met Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who tutored her in acting. In 1908, she started writing for the San Francisco Examiner. She continued to study theater and married sports journalist William O. McGeehan in 1910, eventually moving to New York.

Treadwell joined the women’s suffrage movement and became immersed in New York theater and journalism. Seven of her plays appeared on Broadway between 1922-41, including “Machinal,” her most recognized work.
Well-known actors who performed roles in Treadwell plays included Clark Gable, Helen Hayes, Frederic March and Robert Preston.
As a journalist, she traveled to France to cover World War I, the only credentialed female US foreign correspondent. Later, she was the only foreign journalist to interview Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

McGeehan died in 1933. In the 1950s and ’60s, Treadwell wrote short stories and novels, spending significant time in Austria and Spain. In 1965, she resettled to Tucson from her US home in Newton, Connecticut.

When she died five years later, Treadwell left in her will the production rights for her works to the Diocese of Tucson for the benefit of Native American children in Arizona.

Treadwell expert and former University of Arizona’s associate dean of the College of Fine Arts Jerry Dickey said Treadwell had a strong personality that likely aided her journalism career but hurt her opportunities as a playwright.
 “Machinal” was named one of the top 10 plays of 1928-29, and then was rediscovered in the 1990s. It won three Laurence Olivier Awards for a production in London and was nominated for four Tony Awards in a Broadway revival in 2014.

Dickey attributed Treadwell’s “rediscovery” by the emergence of feminist literary critics in the 1960s and 1970s.

He credited Judith E. Barlow, a professor of English and Women's Studies at the University at Albany-SUNY, who reintroduced Treadwell and “Machinal” to new generations of theater students and directors in her books, including “Plays by American Women: 1900-1930” and “Plays by American Women: 1930-1960.”
With that exposure, “Machinal” and Treadwell have become ensconced in the “dramatic canon of the American theater,” Dickey said, “and I don’t see this diminishing anytime soon.”

He said that as a playwright, Treadwell was notoriously “particular” when it came to dealing with directors and designers.

“Theater is a collaborative art,” Dickey said. Treadwell was “the supreme artist. She didn’t often take counsel from others.”

In the early 1920s, Treadwell sued John Barrymore, the American theater icon, over the production of a play about Edgar Allen Poe. Barrymore announced he was producing the play, written by his wife. Treadwell objected, saying it was based on a manuscript she had shared with him years earlier. She won in court but lost in the eyes of the public and among the Broadway professional community.

The exception came with “Machinal.” Treadwell worked with designer Robert Edmond Jones and director Arthur Hopkins. The two were interested in the play because it broke ground for the new genre of psychological dramas. The action was “not explicit, more suggestive,” and often important action took place in the gaps in time between scenes.

“It led to tighter writing,” he said. “She always felt this was her masterpiece.”

Being a woman and a playwright in the first half of the 20th century made it very hard to be taken seriously, and being difficult made it even harder, Dickey admitted. It didn’t help either that Treadwell was constantly revising her plays, he added, not usually making the plays any better.

“I think that (rewriting) worked against her in most cases.”

Dickey defended Treadwell and her approach to theater, especially as it compared to another talent at the time, Eugene O’Neill. “Some of (Broadway’s hostility) was because she was a woman,” Dickey said, adding that “O’Neill was notoriously difficult to get along with,” but was tolerated.

Treadwell’s final split with Broadway came in 1941. She had written an autobiographical novel, “Hope for a Harvest,” following a visit to Egypt and the Far East in 1936. She wrote it into a play that opened in several East Coast cities in 1941.

It explored, among other topics, the growing xenophobia in the country at the time.

Though it earned good reviews, when it appeared on Broadway, it was panned by critics. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, theatergoing dropped dramatically, and the play closed after a run of only 10 days.

Treadwell also suffered from a “debilitative but unspecified illness throughout her life,” Dickey said. It manifested through anxiety and stomach problems and was treated through visits to spas and clinics.

It is what led her to settle in Tucson in 1965, Dickey said.

It was not, however, her first visit to Tucson. In New York, six years into her marriage to McGeehan, Treadwell had a three-year affair with artist Maynard Dixon, who was also married at the time and had a daughter. The affair ended around 1919, after Dixon moved from New York to San Francisco. Dixon later moved to Tucson. After McGeehan died in 1933, it’s likely that Treadwell would visit him in Tucson during her travels. Dixon died in 1946.

Looking back on her marriage to McGeehan, a highly respected sportswriter from San Francisco, Dickey said the relationship between the two was likely one of “great companionship.” They were separated for lengths of time on various assignments, but nothing suggests that the couple was unhappy.
He believed she was in love with Dixon. There is no evidence that, even after McGeehan died, she ever found love again.

Dickey said she “was not overly happy” as a person and “was like that in her friendships as well.”

After Treadwell moved to New York in 1915, she joined a group of suffragettes known as the Lucy Stone League. It led her to taking up a separate residence from her husband and maintaining her own last name despite their marriage. She even participated in a 150-mile to the New York Legislature in Albany to deliver a petition on women’s suffrage.

Some biographers suggest that Treadwell advocated on behalf of sexual freedom and birth control. However, Dickey said, there is no suggestion in her private writings that Treadwell advocated for abortion or embraced the beliefs of Margaret Sanger. At the time, Sanger headed the Birth Control League, which eventually led to the establishment of Planned Parenthood.

“There’s never anything she says at any time about abortion” in her private writings, Dickey said, adding that Lucy Stone was not a pro-abortion group.
While in New York, Treadwell became friends with art patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg, and in turn with other artists and activists including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Allerton Parker, Arthur Craven, Heywood Broun, Ruth Hale and Katherine Cornell.
 
Dickey said Treadwell was much more widely known during her lifetime as a journalist, and specifically as a “stunt” journalist. It meant going undercover for assignments for weeks at a time to later resurface and write a series of stories on social issues.

Dickey cited her 1914 series that ran in the San Francisco Bulletin called “An Outcast at the Christian Door.” She had posed as a homeless prostitute to see what kind of assistance she might receive from the various churches and benevolent societies.

Opportunities like that and her other more widely known coverage of World War I informed the characters and circumstances she wrote about in her plays.
Dickey said the closest Treadwell may have come to writing a character based on herself may have  been a pair of characters from her 1925 play “O Nightingale.”

During a brief Broadway run, it featured a young actress named Helen Hayes. The play was a rare occasion where Treadwell, using the pseudonym Constance Eliot, played the role of an old, disillusioned Russian dancer.

The dancer engages in conversations with a young girl who moves to New York full of optimism and hope. “Those two characters portrayed equal sides of Treadwell herself,” Dickey said.

For most of her life, Treadwell’s central goals was simply to work hard, he added.

As she neared death, Treadwell reportedly wrote the following: "Work is the greatest thing on earth, greater than love, greater than death. . . . Work is the product of time and energy - and time is the brother of death. Death is the reward for having lived."