William Gillette, America's Sherlock Holmes
William Gillette, America’s Sherlock Holmes, by Henry Zecher, is the first full and in-depth biography of William Hooker Gillette (1853–1937), the American actor, playwright and stage-manager of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who is best remembered today for portraying Sherlock Holmes.
Gillette was among the first American playwrights to offer tightly-knit and well-constructed plays, Bronson Howard, Steele MacKaye and James Herne being the others, but his most significant contributions to the theater were in devising realistic stage settings and special sound and lighting effects, and, as an actor, in putting forth what he called The Illusion of the First Time. His portrayal of Holmes helped create the modern image of the detective. His use of the deerstalker cap (which first appeared in some Strand Magazine illustrations by Sidney Paget) and the curved pipe became synonymous with the character. And it was in his play, not in Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, that Holmes first said "This is elementary, my dear fellow," which subsequently became "Elementary, my dear Watson". Gillette assumed the role onstage more than 1,300 times over thirty years, starred in a silent motion picture based on his Holmes play, and voiced the character twice on radio.
The author is a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Journalism, Class of 1971. He was an award-winning sports writer and sports editor of the Delaware State News in Dover, Delaware, before embarking on a career in Federal government human resources. He has worked as a free-lance writer for many years and published a number of magazine articles, two of them of historical importance. One was an evaluation of German Reformer Martin Luther's impact on the English Bible, and the other was the first analysis from a biblical and historical point of view of the Ipuwer Papyrus, first claimed by Immanuel Velikovsky and subsequently by others to have been an Egyptian version of the plagues on Egypt described in the Old Testament Book of Exodus.
This is Zecher's first book. It contains 585 pages of text and is profusely illustrated with more than ninety images, nearly all of them containing two to four and, in two cases, six individual photographs. It contains a bibliography of Gillette's writings, a list of his plays subsequently made into motion pictures, a list of his patents, a list of audio/visual recordings of his voice, and 97 pages of Endnotes.
Reception
Reviews of William Gillette, America’s Sherlock Holmes, have been nearly entirely positive.
James Zeruk, biographer of the Hollywood Sign Girl, Peg Entwistle, and a Hartford, Connecticut, native, reported, “Meticulously researched and footnoted, and jam-packed with many heretofore unknown aspects and insights into Gillette's private life and public career…, Zecher takes the reader on a journey that covers Gillette's ups and downs with honesty and integrity.”
In addition to being a biography of a great actor, Zeruk observed that “it is also a wonderful history of a great era and of the pioneers of America's great moments in the footlights on America's stage!”
Matt Sanders, who works summers at Gillette Castle in Hadlyme, Connecticut, was among the castle tour guides anxiously awaiting publication of the book, and he hit upon one major reason why Gillette is mostly forgotten today: “Unfortunately, as he never did film, he was quickly lost from memory after his death. Though he might well have laid the foundation of modern theater and our perception of Sherlock Holmes, his only accomplishment still celebrated by today's masses is the strange house on the hill that everyone assumes was made with razor-blade money.”
Sanders observed that the author “pulls from innumerable newspaper articles, personal correspondences, memoirs, and even a few doctoral thesis to try and construct a picture of Gillette… Zecher does a really admirable job of pulling together an in-depth chronology of Gillette's work and descriptions of his methods.”
Covering all the bases, Sanders felt that the author had perhaps included a bit too many reviews of some of Gillette’s various productions, as well as repeating a few times the same description of Gillette as an actor, but that the book “gives a very good history of the times. Specifically, he outlines the development of American theater starting in the 1870's until Gillette's death in 1937. It was a time of huge change in the presentation and purpose of theater of which our subject was not only a participant but an active visionary.”
Others agree with Zeruk’s and Sanders’s assessments. Peter Blau’s April issue of Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press called it “a splendid biography of the actor/playwright who did so much to make Sherlock Holmes so popular. There was much more to Gillette's life and career than Sherlock Holmes, and the author has told the story well, with careful research and readable style; recommended.”
Steve Rothman, Editor of The Baker Street Journal, felt that the author “must be congratulated for discovering so much about his subject; his notes and bibliography are formidable. He not only writes about Gillette’s life and career but also offers a longish postscript about his place and influence today in popular culture.”
GROANS, CRIES AND BLEATINGS, official news letter of the Baker Street Breakfast Club in Vermont, pointed out how the author “tracked down every resource that was available, discovering letters and photographs in various surprising places... An indication of Zecher’s tireless researching is that his endnotes take up almost 100 pages of his book.”
The book, the newsletter concluded, “should appeal to theatre people and Sherlockians alike, since although Zecher pays the attention Gillette’s work on Holmes it deserves, he also provides a full picture of Gillette’s theatre work and of the theatre world of the time in which Gillette worked.”
And, The District Messenger, newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, noted that “Mr. Zecher’s fourteen years’ research has uncovered no scandal, no sensation, just the fascinating life of a brilliant, chivalrous, witty gentleman, and he’s done Gillette proud.”
Finally, Sanders concluded that, “Zecher has done a very good job given the scope of his task. Though the book may be over-long, no fault of that lies with the man's prose, which possesses a really keen humor that would have made his subject proud. He keeps a very fair hand by sharing the bad reviews as well as the good, and is completely forthright with the fact that, while Gillette was immensely popular and laudable, he was not a very good playwright. When it comes right down to it, even his acting was largely limited to one stoic, unflappable role. None the less, the reader comes away with a new appreciation for an American icon they didn't even know they had forgotten. Gillette was a man who inspired generations of theater goers and theater makers and created an image so iconic that even Orson Welles was forced to admit that, "Sherlock Holmes looks exactly like William Gillette."