The Jefferson Theatre

Our history expert solves local mysteries: who, what, when, where, why, and why not. Well, sometimes.

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Dear Vance: I recently came across a reference to the Jefferson Theatre in Memphis, and I had never heard of such a place. Where was it, and what happened to it? — G.L., Memphis.

Dear G.L.: Any talk of theaters in Memphis — whether you mean the motion-picture variety, vaudeville houses, or traditional performance venues — quickly turns up the landmarks: the Malco (now the Orpheum), Loew’s Palace and Loew’s State, and the Warner, all of them located within blocks of each other Downtown. Keep the conversation going, and invariably people will recall places their parents or grandparents took them: the Crosstown, Plaza, Park, and others. Those of you — and you know who you are — who visited a certain adult establishment on Summer could look up and see that it had once been home to the Luciann Theatre, a sister to the Rosemary on Jackson.

But the Jefferson? That one rarely comes to mind, and here’s why: First of all, it was quite old, opening in 1908. But the name also confuses people because it wasn’t located on Jefferson Avenue, as you might expect, but at 291 Madison, and it wasn’t even named for Thomas Jefferson, as you also might expect. The owners — and don’t ask me to name them, because I never determined who they were — decided to name their new venture after the noted American actor Joseph Jefferson (1829-1905), who had recently died.

I’m not going to go off on a tangent here and talk about him, except to mention that Jefferson enjoyed a remarkable career. Though he spent the last 50 years of his life as an actor, he played only one character: Rip Van Winkle, whom he portrayed in plays and early silent movies. In fact, this may sound lazy of me, but I’ll just quote Wikipedia: “Jefferson essentially created no new character after 1865, except for minor parts. He was known as a one-part actor. The public never wearied of his one masterpiece.”

My goodness, most of the play takes place overnight in Paris, and then, three years later, everything concludes at a lettuce farm in Austria. Oops, I just gave away the ending, didn’t I?

The Lauderdale Library has a very rare (and fragile) item, an 18-page program (right) for one of the first shows presented at the Jefferson. Dated February 22, 1909, it was given to anyone attending a play titled The Heir to the Hoorah, described as “Paul Armstrong’s Sensational Comedy Success” and “A Tremendous Hit in Every City in the Country.” The Chicago Post said the play “captures the liking at the very start and holds it to the very end.” The Milwaukee Free Press proclaimed it “wholesome, human, and hearty,” and the New York Herald simply declared it “A BIG HIT.”

Jaded though I am, I must admit the play intrigued me. After a diligent internet search that consumed 15 minutes of my precious time, I found very little about it (although a silent movie version came out in 1915). Just look at the cast, which includes such curious characters as Madam Berton, General Berton, Claire (their daughter), Raoul (their son), Sophie Chaponniere, Valentine Favre, Paul Sylvaine, and “Kleschna, known as Mon. Garnier.” That Kleschna sounds like trouble to me.

Let me say right here that we sometimes give writing tests to anyone seeking employment at our magazine, and I think we should ask them to write a short story incorporating all of these characters. Ready? You have a half-hour.

The program doesn’t give a synopsis of this “sensational comedy success,” but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions by the list of acts:

Act I: Kleschna’s lodgings in the Rue de Clichy, Paris

Act II: Sylvaine’s study, the same night

Act III: The same, the next morning

Act IV: Kleschna’s lodgings, night

Act V: Reichman’s Lettuce Farm, Austria. Three years later.

My goodness, most of the play takes place overnight in Paris, and then, three years later, everything concludes at a lettuce farm in Austria. Oops, I just gave away the ending, didn’t I?

So, what was it like to attend a play in those days at the Jefferson? The floorplan, included in the old program, shows a massive stage facing an auditorium that seated 1,400 theatergoers, with two balconies and eight private boxes. Between acts, and during intermission, the men could visit two “Retiring Rooms” and the women could do the same in a pair of “Ladies Parlors,” or everyone could mingle with friends in a spacious lobby. Toilets were located on every level, but the only “snack” available came from “a fountain of running iced water in the foyer.”

For this privilege patrons paid a “scale of prices” for tickets, which ranged from 10 cents for a gallery seat during a matinee, to $1.00 for one of the “Lower Box Seats.Those tickets, by the way, were available at the door or at a ticket sales office in the Pantaze Drug Stores around town.

And you could certainly expect first-class treatment at the Jefferson. The program makes that very clear: “Any inattention or incivility on the part of employees should be reported to the manager.” What’s more, “The management requests that patrons offer no gratuities to employees.”

That management was none other than A.B. Morrison, whose name turns up in any story about old-time amusements in Memphis. He was the manager of East End Park, this city’s sprawling amusement park, hailed as “The Coney Island of the South,” located where Overton Square stands today. In the early 1900s he also ran the Jefferson, and later the Orpheum, theaters. In Memphis Memoirs, noted historian Paul Coppock wrote, “Morrison was either one of the best theater men in Memphis, or had the largest number of admirers, or both. He brought in top names, but he was hired away to Main Street” — meaning, the Orpheum.

So what happened to the Jefferson, and why didn’t it last longer than it did? For one thing, even though it was just three blocks from Main Street, that was considered “out of the way” in the days when people walked everywhere, with little other entertainment around it.

It’s also hard to say how well it competed with the elaborate “movie palaces” that opened around this time. On one hand, Coppock mentioned, “In September of 1908, the theatrical menu of Memphis was enriched by the opening of a new theater on the south side of Madison, just west of Fourth.” That was the Jefferson. Elsewhere in another book, however, he said establishments like Loew’s Palace and Loew’s State “were luxurious, while the Lyric was a plain building of yellow brick.”

Coppock basically wrote the theater’s obituary in Memphis Memoirs: “Empty, abandoned, almost forgotten, the old Lyric was wiped off the map on January 23, 1941, by fire, probably the victim of a lightning bolt. The owners had even neglected to insure it.”

Wait — did he say Lyric? Yes. It didn’t help that the building on Madison kept changing its name over the years, becoming the Lyric just three years after it opened as the Jefferson. It apparently didn’t matter that Memphis already had another Lyric Theatre, this one located on Adams, and a Lyceum Theatre, just two blocks away.

Just to add to the confusion, in its last years, the building became the Mazda Theater. No, it wasn’t named after the car company, but a fraternal order known as the Mazda Grotto.

By this time, the building was used mainly for public events like boxing matches and political rallies. In his fine book, Memphis Movie Theatres, Vincent Astor noted, “Several significant events took place there, including the first radio broadcast of opera in Memphis and a controversial run of King of Kings during its film and broadcast years.” (Astor later told me the film itself wasn’t “controversial,” but our cranky city censor, Lloyd T. Binford, made it so because he complained — loudly, as always — that he didn’t think it was an accurate portrayal of the Bible.)

Even so, Coppock basically wrote the theater’s obituary in Memphis Memoirs: “Empty, abandoned, almost forgotten, the old Lyric was wiped off the map on January 23, 1941, by fire, probably the victim of a lightning bolt. The owners had even neglected to insure it.”

The site today, where audiences once enjoyed The Heir to the Hoorah and other performances like it, not to mention opera and boxing, is now a gated parking lot (below). Portions of the original building were salvaged. According to newspaper accounts, a home-owner purchased 60,000 of the old fire-scorched bricks for a "rambling, English-style home he was building on South Parkway," but I was never able to determine the address. One fellow obtained the massive chains that had once held up the marquee, and used them for a footbridge at his home on Princeton, off Mendenhall. Another Memphian, George Watson, bought 10,000 leftover bricks and used them to build a nice wall at the corner of his property at Highland and Watauga, and the last time I looked, it was still standing.

Got a question for Vance?

Email: askvance@memphismagazine.com

Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, P.O. Box 1738, Memphis, TN 38101