Nathan, Adele Gutman, 1889-1976.

Biographical sketches of Adele Gutman Nathan and Elizabeth Gutman Kaye are provided in the register for YCAL MSS 58, the Adele Gutman Nathan Theatrical Collection.

From the guide to the Adele Gutman Nathan theatrical collection : addition, 1901-1986, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

Adele C. Newberger Gutman was born September 15, 1889, in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Ida Newberger and Louis K. Gutman. Her father ran a successful department store which had been established by and named after her paternal grandfather, Joel Gutman. The family lived on Eutaw Place in the middle of the Jewish section of town and enjoyed the affluence that went with being prosperous merchants. Adele and her younger siblings, Elizabeth and Joel, were surrounded by a comfortable coterie of friends and relatives while growing up. The Cone sisters, Etta and Claribel, were companions of Ida, often looking after the Gutman children when contagious disease struck the family. While living in Baltimore, Gertrude Stein was a family acquaintance, as well.

Adele attended high school at the Girls Latin School, then matriculated Goucher College, where she developed an interest in tennis as well as drama. When she was graduated in the class of 1910, she had already been engaged in the staging of plays. The earliest evidence of her professional involvement with dramatic productions is her work with the Children's Playground Association in Baltimore, where she began to coordinate participative entertainments for young underprivileged children. The amateur productions of this group eventually grew into the Little Lyric Theatre which produced plays for children and "grown-up children" in the early 1920s. It was here that she began her writing career, adapting A Midsummer Night's Dream for child actors. While this project was germinating, however, Adele Nathan started what would be her longest project. One summer day in 1916, she and two friends were seized with the idea of renting a hotel basement for the purpose of establishing an amateur theater group. As soon as they had paid the rent, the Vagabond Players were born. Among their first productions were H. L. Mencken's The Artist and Theodore Dreiser's The Girl in the Coffin . In 1917, Adele Nathan went to Provincetown, Massachusetts in search of suitable new plays. She met an unknown playwright named Eugene O'Neill and brought back his one-act play, Bound East for Cardiff . Though the Vagabond Players survived over 60 years, Nathan's involvement with the group ended when she increased her commitments to the Little Lyric Theatre.

During the 1910s and 1920s, Nathan was involved with a number of personal projects as well. She joined her mother in working for the suffrage movement, participating in marches and rallies in her hometown and in Washington, D. C. In February 1912, Adele was married to James Nathan, a real estate agent. They were divorced sometime around 1920. During her travels in Europe in the mid-1920s, she acted as a correspondent for the Baltimore Daily Gazette, writing about her encounters with artists and musicians.

Nathan moved to New York in the mid-1920s, principally to continue her work with little theaters. Though she participated in several theaters in the Northeast, her principal work in the 1920s was with the Cellar Players of the Hudson Guild in Manhattan. She began working with the resident director, Alene Erlanger, and directing plays in 1924. During her tenure with the group, Nathan directed such works as Anna Christie by Eugene O'Neill, Trifles by Susan Glaspel, and The Betrayal by Padraic Colum. She continued her involvement with this group well into the early 1940s.

In 1927, Nathan was contracted to create the first production of what would be her trademark medium, the historical pageant. Pageantry, a celebration of an event or anniversary, usually consisting of tableaux, entertainers in period costumes, and a historical drama highlighting the celebration, was popular in the early 20th century. Nathan, when presented the opportunity to arrange a pageant to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company, began a lifelong career that combined her many interests and talents. This same celebration galvanized her fascination with and love for trains and railroadiana, a passion that she would write about the rest of her life. The pageant itself, entitled, "The Iron Horse," was a success that was reported on in newspapers and wire-stories throughout the United States.

The B & O centennial led to a secondary career for Nathan. Using the information compiled during her production of the pageant, Nathan collaborated with Margaret Ernst to write a children's history of train travel in 1931. The Iron Horse was selected as a best book for children by the Child Study Association of America. Nathan followed this success with two more children's books, Thus the Farmer Sows His Wheat in 1932, and Let's Play Garden in 1936. As her success in writing grew, she expanded her repertoire, collaborating on a musical version of the story of Gilbert and Sullivan titled Knights of Song with Glendon Allvine in 1935 and a screenplay, The Fourteen Uncles with Bertram Bloch and Peter Arno in 1939.

Nathan's reputation as a producer of pageants increased in the decades following her first triumph. She produced "Wings of a Century" for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, and "Century on Parade" celebrating the town of Rochester, New York in 1934. A series of Labor Day Pageants for the Weirton Steel Company in Weirton, West Virginia during the early 1940s teamed her up with a man who would become a principal collaborator, Blevins Davis. She also consulted on "Railroads on Parade" for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

The years of World War II saw Nathan expand into a greater number of creative outlets. She became active in radio programming, writing or directing a number of broadcasts such as "The Story of All of Us" for WEAF-NBC, "Beyond the Call of Duty" for the Young Men's Christian Association, and "Opinion Requested" for Army-Air Force WOR. She became more involved with motion pictures, serving as a story editor for Grand National Pictures, and scripting series of short educational films, namely "States of the Nation" for MGM and "Pedigreed Pictures" (about breeds of dogs) for Paramount.

After the war, Nathan continued to write occasional articles for the likes of Vogue and the New York Times, but concentrated her energies on pageant production and writing children's books. Her "Forsythorama" presentation for the Winston-Salem (North Carolina) centennial (1949) was a highlight of her résumé, as were her well-received pageants celebrating the Lincoln's Speech at Gettysburg (which won her a Valley Forge Freedoms Foundation Medal in 1954) and the American Jewish Tercentenary in 1955.

Her career as an author continued to flourish with the publication of her works: The Building of the First Transcontinental Railroad (which was translated in several languages and issued in at least 14 printings) (1950), Wheat Won't Wait (about Cyrus McCormick's reaper) (1952), Famous Railroad Stations of the World (1953) and Seven Brave Companions (about the explorations of Joliet and Marquette along the Mississippi River) (1953).

In the 1960s, Nathan continued her output of notable children's books, branching off into more historical realms. Her Churchill's England was published in 1963 and Major John André, Gentleman Spy in 1969. She wrote Lincoln's America in 1961 and returned to Gettysburg to produce a centennial of Lincoln's visit in November 1963. She became a pageant consultant to the Howard Lanin Productions and participated in a commercial production with the company in 1960 to promote a real estate development in New Mexico. Long involved in professional organizations, Nathan began to devote more time to her many clubs and organizations, including The Woman Pays Club (of which she was president 1967-68, The Overseas Press Club of America, and the American Theatre Wing.

Her final book, How to Plan and Conduct a Bicentennial Celebration (1974) was written in anticipation of the United States' celebration of 1976. After this, Nathan retired from pageant production and concentrated on writing shorter articles and biographical reminiscences about herself and her forbears. In 1979, she was contacted by J.R.S. Productions on behalf of Warren Beatty to sit for an interview for his film-in-progress, Reds . Nathan's reminiscences about John Reed and Louise Bryant, both of whom she had met during her visit to Provincetown in 1917, were recorded on film and became a part of the finished Academy Award winning motion picture. More offers followed for film roles, though she made only brief cameos, and she became a favorite interviewee on subjects ranging from women's suffrage to theater history.

Her boundless energy carried her into the 1980's. She was awarded the Alumna of the Year Prize from Goucher College in 1981 and continued to attend to organizations that served her interests in history and railroad lore. She only lapsed into relative inactivity during her final two years. She died in New York on July 24, 1986 at the age of 96, leaving no immediate heirs.

Elizabeth Gutman Kaye, younger sister of Adele Gutman Nathan, grew up in the same atmosphere of artistic edification as her siblings. Whereas Adele became a director and writer, Elizabeth matured into an artist and performer. She began a career as a soprano, specializing in folk songs. Her concert performances took place around the East Coast of the United States and in several major capitols of Europe, including Paris and Vienna. In the late 1930s, she developed an interest in painting and slowly this career became paramount in her life. A series of exhibitions of her watercolors brought her attention in Europe and North America. She set up residence in Italy and after her husband Walter Kaye died, she returned to live near Adele in New York City. She died while on vacation in Jamaica on April 15, 1971.

From the guide to the Adele Gutman Nathan Theatrical Collection, 1834-1989, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)