Clay Meredith Greene (March 12, 1850 – September 5, 1933) was an American screenwriter, theatre critic and journalist, but he was chiefly known as a dramatist. He was often referred to as either the "first American" or "first white American child" born in San Francisco, a claim spread by Greene himself. A graduate of Santa Clara University (SCU), Greene was the author of the Passion Play Nazareth which was written for and staged as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of SCU in 1901. The play was performed repeatedly every three years at SCU during Greene's lifetime.
He began his professional life as a stockbroker and journalist. With his brother Harry Ashland Greene, he co-founded the brokerage firm Greene & Company. While working in that field, he began writing plays, his first being Struck Oil (1874). By 1878, Greene had moved to New York City, where he was soon working as both a playwright and journalist. He and his wife lived in a home in Bayside, Queens, for approximately thirty years. He wrote an estimated 80 plays and musicals, several of which were staged on Broadway. His plays brought him wealth and popular celebrity during his lifetime, but none of his works endured after his death.
With playwright Steele Mackaye, Greene co-founded the American Dramatic Author's Society in 1878, the first U.S. organization dedicated to protecting the rights of dramatists. He served as the president of the New York City arts social club The Lambs (called "The Shepherd") from 1891 to 1898, and again from 1902 to 1906. Financial problems forced him to sell his estate on Long Island not long after he married his second wife in 1911, when he moved back to San Francisco. From 1913 to 1916, he worked as a screenwriter for the Lubin Manufacturing Company, also occasionally as an actor on camera and as a film director. He remained in San Francisco until his death in 1933.
Early life and education
Clay Meredith Greene was born on March 12, 1850, in San Francisco, California, to William Harrison Greene and his wife Anne Elizabeth Fisk. Some sources claim he was the "first American born in San Francisco", although his obituary in The New York Times was careful to point out that he was born six months before the California Statehood Act. This assertion originated with Greene himself, who claimed that he was "the first American white child born in San Francisco". While it is possible that he was the first white child born in San Francisco when it was a mining supply camp in 1850, the historicity of this claim was questioned by reporters, who pointed out that white children were likely born at the Mission San Francisco de Asís much earlier, during the Spanish colonial period. Greene was the grandson of Squire Fiske, who served as a first lieutenant in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment during the American Revolution. As his descendant, Greene was an active member of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Clay grew up in a house his father built on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. As a child, he was enthralled by the theatre business that blossomed in San Francisco during the California gold rush. As a teenager he became a regular theatregoer, and he both acted in and wrote amateur burlesques and other plays. He was educated at the College of California (now University of California), when it was located in Oakland, California. At that time the school was a college preparatory school, so Greene did not earn a university diploma from that institution. He did however attend City College of San Francisco and Santa Clara University (SCU), earning a degree from SCU. His parents sent Clay to SCU in 1867, encouraging him pursue a career in medicine or law, but his university education only increased his interest in theatre.
Clay returned to his native San Francisco in 1870, where he worked as a journalist and as a stockbroker. He initially worked on his own, but eventually he partnered with his younger brother, Harry Ashland Greene. The two co-founded the stock brokerage firm Greene & Company. While working as a stockbroker and journalist, he continued to write plays and act, including performing the role of Dick Deadeye in the comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore at San Francisco's Standard Theater.
Playwright
Between the years 1874 and 1925, Greene wrote approximately eighty plays, opera libretti, and musicals (book, lyrics or both). He was one of a group of American playwrights who emerged during the 1870s, including Augustin Daly, Bronson Howard, James J. McCloskey Jr., and Thomas Blades de Walden, that provided a new surge of popular melodramas and comedies to the American theatre. In 1878, Greene and playwright Steele Mackaye co-founded the American Dramatic Author's Society, the first organization in the United States created to protect the rights of dramatists. It was short-lived and was supplanted by a series of similarly short-lived organizations until the Dramatists Guild of America was formed in 1919.
Many of Greene's plays, particularly his early and late ones, were first staged in his native San Francisco. Three of his successful plays were set during the California Gold Rush: M'liss (1877), based on a story by Bret Harte and co-authored with A. Slason Thompson); Chispa (1882, co-authored with Thompson); and The Golden Giant (1886). During most of his career as a dramatist, however, he lived and worked in New York City. His plays were performed widely throughout the United States during his lifetime, and he achieved wealth through his work as a playwright. but none of his works remain in the Western canon of theatre literature.
Early writing career Greene began a journalism career in San Francisco, writing for The Golden Era in 1870. He also wrote for its competing paper, The Argonaut. His earliest success as a dramatist was the play Struck Oil which he adapted for actor J. C. Williamson from Sam Smith's play The Dead, or Five Years Away. Premiered in 1874, Struck Oil became a hit for Williamson, who toured in the work in both the United States and Australia. That same year he wrote the four-act play The Cut Glove for the comic duo P. F. Baker and T. J. Farron, which they toured in the southern United States.
With A. G. Thompson, Greene co-wrote the play Freaks of Fortune, which premiered at the Grand Opera House in San Francisco in 1877. Williamson acquired the rights to the work after its original successful run and brought the play to the Boston stage. Williamson and his company performed other plays by Greene at The Boston Theatre in 1878, including Struck Oil and The Chinese Question.
Actress Kate Mayhew owned the rights to an 1873 play by Richard H. Cox based on the popular story "The Work on Red Mountain" by Bret Harte, which had been serialized from 1860 to 1863. Its central figure is a feisty miner's daughter, Melissa Smith, aka "M'liss". Dissatisfied with Cox's writing, Mayhew hired Greene to substantially rewrite the play. Greene's version, titled M'liss, premiered in 1877, at the New Market Theater in Old Town Historic District of Portland, Oregon, and a subsequent run immediately followed at the California Theatre in San Francisco. M'liss was well received in Portland but had a lukewarm reception in San Francisco. Mayhew asked Greene to rework the final act of the play, and he began work in late 1877, but, according to Mayhew, he ultimately abandoned this project to A. Sisson Thompson to finish, when Greene decided to leave San Francisco and relocate to New York City. Greene and Thompson copyrighted the play as M'liss, A Romance of Red Mountains in February 1878, a copyright which Mayhew disputed in court later that year.
New York City dramatist
In 1878, Greene moved to New York City, where, by 1879, he had established himself as a journalist and playwright. There he had his most active years as a dramatist, becoming well known among the literary establishment, including befriending Mark Twain. Greene and his first wife resided at a home in Bayside, Queens, for thirty years until her death.
1880s With Slauson Thompson, Greene co-authored the four act farce Sharps and Flats as a starring vehicle for the comedy duo of Robson and Crane. A send-up of the speculative New York stock market and its buyers during the Gilded Age, it premiered at the Standard Theatre on Broadway in 1880. Greene and Thompson collaborated on a second play, Chispa, which was produced by David Belasco at the Baldwin Theater in San Francisco in 1881.
In 1883, Greene collaborated with the Hanlon Brothers acrobats on the play Pico; or, The legend of Castle Molfi, later reworked as the fairy pantomime Fantasma, which had a long stage life in the Hanlon Brothers repertoire. He also worked with the Hanlon Brothers that year on a revised version of their musical Le Voyage en Suisse. Greene was hired to write a play for the Grand Opera House in Toronto on the life and death of Canadian politician and resistance movement leader Louis Riel, who had just been hanged on November 16, 1885. Greene rapidly produced the play, Louis Riel, or, The Northwest Rebellion, and it premiered in Toronto with a cast of New York actors on New Year's Day 1886.
In 1886, Greene wrote his first original musical, Sybil, with the composer John F. Mitchell. The same year his play The Golden Giant was produced by Charles Frohman at Broadway's Fifth Avenue Theatre in a production starring McKee Rankin and his wife Kitty Blanchard. While successful in New York, the play was a flop on the road and lost Frohman a considerable amount of money. 1887 was highly productive for Greene, beginning with the musical play Hans the Boatman, which he created for the Theatre Royal, Sheffield, in England, to start the Swiss-born English actor Charles Arnold (1854–1905), who portrayed the title character. The most successful musical of Greene's career, it was a tremendous hit for Arnold, who toured the piece for three years across Australia, Asia, and the United States. Greene also wrote the libretto to the 1887 musical Our Jennie, starring Jennie Yeamans, which was staged on Broadway at the People's Theatre. That same year he co-authored the play Pawn Ticket 210 with Belasco for Lotta Crabtree; it premiered at McVicker's Theater in Chicago.
In 1888, Greene's play adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin premiered at the Hollis Street Theatre in Boston. He served as the lyricist of the musical Blue Beard, Jr., composed by Fred J. Eustis, Richard Maddern, and John Joseph Braham Sr. It premiered at the Grand Opera House, Chicago, in 1889, and then toured nationally, including a stop on Broadway at Niblo's Garden in 1890.
1890s
Greene wrote the book of the musical Peti, the Vagabond, which starred Hubert Wilke in the title role and premiered at the California Theatre in San Francisco in 1890. He co-authored the 1892 play The New South with actor Joseph R. Grismer, about racial animus in the Southern United States after the American Civil War. The story followed a white United States Army captain sent by the U.S. government to arrest individuals illegally making and selling moonshine. The captain's support of African Americans in that community puts him at odds with the white southerners, and his life is threatened. While the authors intended to critique racial prejudice, the work propagated racial stereotypes, and theatre scholars James Fisher and Felicia Hardison Londré described both it and a 1916 silent film adaptation of the play as "exploitive".