The Original Channing Pollock

Your correspondent is one of the few people who requires the specificity that characterizes this post’s title. There was a later Channing Pollock, a magician who lived from 1926 through 2006. Obviously that later one was named after the ORIGINAL Channing Pollock (1880-1946), playwright, critic, lecturer, and a guy I should have written about a long time ago.

Pollock was the son of a career diplomat, one whose final post embroiled his family in enough drama for a lifetime. The elder Pollock (Alexander) was assigned by the Cleveland administration to be the U.S. Consul at San Salvador in 1894. The family (including 14 year old Channing) had just joined him when in rapid order the country suffered both a Revolution and then a Yellow Fever epidemic. The father died of the fever almost right away. Pollock, his mother, and two siblings all came down with it as well, and suffered an ordeal lasting weeks, though they finally all made it back home.

Pollock was all of 16 when he began writing dramatic criticism for The Washington Post. Later he also wrote for The Washington Times, before being hired by the Shuberts as a press agent in New York in 1903. Pollock wasted no time taking his talent to Broadway. His first effort was a 1904 adaptation of Frank Norris’ The Pit, produced by William A. Brady and starring Hale Hamilton and Wilton Lackaye. The latter would star in the 1914 film version, directed by Maurice Tourneur. (This is separate from 1909’s A Corner in Wheat, which D.W. Griffith adapted directly from the novel).

Pollock’s second Broadway play The Little Gray Lady (1906) starred Dorothy Donnelly, who later wrote Poppy for W.C. Fields. He collaborated with Avery Hopwood on Clothes (1906), which was brought to the screen in 1914 and 1920. All told, Pollock penned a couple of dozen shows for Broadway, most of which were adaptated into silent films, most of them more than once. And, most of them, forgotten. In addition to these, he also wrote for several additions of the Ziegfeld Follies starting in 1911, famously writing the English lyrics to Fanny Brice’s signature song “My Man”. He also wrote playlets for vaudeville, such as “It Doesn’t Happen”, which Helen Ware took on the Big Time circuit in 1915. The Fool (1922-23) was his biggest box office hit. Pollock’s last Broadway show was The House Beautiful (1931) which Dorothy Parker famously reviewed as “the play lousy”.

Though Pollock’s works were enthusiastically embraced by audiences, critics were cooler toward them. Pollack was given to heavy handed moralizing in his plays, an old-fashioned prudishness at odds with the 20th century spirit. His early religious moralizing had a progressive dimension in the form of pacifism, but as he got older he grew more conservative. He was very much against “naughty” content onstage, and felt that cinema was having a negative effect on the spoken word. His last years were spent lecturing, both in live appearances and on radio.

Pollock was married to Anna Marble, press agent for the Manhattan Opera, granddaughter of actor and stage comedian Dan Marble, and daughter of Edward Marble who have the world the 1891 musical comedy Tuxedo. Pollock’s autobiography, Harvest of My Years, was published in 1943.

For more on the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and for more on silent film check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.