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"Pixy," If Miss Hayes had been born to a Cincinnati soap tycoon and finished at Farmington, she would probably have turned out to be one of those rare girls who for two or three seasons reign supreme at all the best college proms in the East, not because of good looks or a reputation for cuddlesomeness but because of unmistakable social charm.
Helen Hayes' father was a man named Brown who did a number of things, none of them very profitably. For a brief time he worked as a clerk in the Washington Patent Office. His daughter was born the first autumn of the 20th Century on Washington's P Street, Northwest. Her education was at parochial schools. Abetted by a mother with theatrical ambitions, Helen Brown made her Broadway debut in 1909 in Old Dutch. Elders like Lew Fields, Vernon Castle and John Bunny crowded her out of the press notices. Not until five years later did she get any notices at all. These referred to, her as "fanciful," "whimsical," "pixylike" when she appeared as a first-act child with the late John Drew in The Prodigal Husband. John Drew called her "Childie."
At 17 Helen Hayes, looking not unlike Maude Adams, was touring in Pollyanna when the chance came to work for the playwright who had made Miss Adams famed. The piece was Sir James Barrie's Dear Brutus. The leading man was William Gillette.* And there was not a dry eye in the house when Helen Hayes got through wringing the last teardrop out of the scene in the wood where Gillette, the childless artist, meets the daughter he might have had.
At 19 Miss Hayes had left her juvenile parts behind and was at the height of her flapper period. She played Clarence with Alfred Lunt, To the Ladies, We Moderns. High spot of this phase was the title role in Edward Childs Carpenter's Bab.
"Precious Burglar," Bab was a piquant girl in a knee-length skirt and a hat like an inverted pot. She got into all kinds of scrapes, including a burglary. To collegiate hearts in 1920 she came very close to being the Dream Woman. When the play opened in Boston. Edgar Scott, socialite senior from Philadelphia, translated this widespread emotion about Miss Hayes into the following verse for the Harvard Lampoon:
. . . If man has considered Troy's
Helen perennial,
As years and as aeons go rollicking by,
Let us hail our own Helen, the artist's
millennial,
Who's teased us "with smiles, and who's
taught us to cry. . . .
If Broadway's the god that can give her
the glory,
Her talents and charms are entitled to
win,
Let Boston prefix "Chapter One" to the
story,
For Bab in her triumph—we saw it begin!
Good luck to you Helen, when Fate will
bereave us,
Of you and the coat sleeves that covered your paws,
You'll steal our poor hearts, precious
burglar, and leave us
Alone in the echoes of Boston's applause.