John McCabe, Noted Show Business Biographer, Dies at Age 85

John McCabe at Mackinac Island in 1973

John McCabe was most at home with the old actors of stage and screen. Their performances, converted to video tapes, surrounded him at his home at British Landing on Mackinac Island. He was the noted biographer of some of the best, like Laurel and Hardy and James Cagney, and his appreciation of these actors and of drama in general was steeped in the Shakespearean traditions of the craft. He billed himself as a show business biographer, but acted professionally since childhood and instructed countless students and adults in drama and speech.

Mr. McCabe, who would have turned 85 November 14, died late Monday night, September 26, at Northern Michigan Hospital in Petoskey of congestive heart failure.

“One of my greatest joys has been that I knew what I wanted to do in life by my eighth birthday,” he wrote in The Mackinac Island Town Crier in 2001. “I became a child actor.”

He first appeared with the Jessie Bonstelle Stock Company in Detroit and, overcoming both stammering and stuttering, he acted for 15 years in stock and then became producer-director of the Milford Playhouse in Pennsylvania.

He was born in Detroit in 1920 to Charles John and Rosalie (nee Dropiewski) McCabe and was graduated from the University of Detroit in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, from Fordham University in 1948 with a master’s in theater, and from the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in 1954 with a Ph.D. in English literature.

He taught acting at Detroit’s Wayne State University, City College of New York, Interlochen Arts Academy, and New York University where, as professor of dramatic art, he headed the Educational Theatre Department for many years.

“While I was at NYU,” he wrote in 1997, I appeared on the Today Show, NBC, plugging one of my books and was seen by officials of the new Mackinac College, who asked me to fly up and see what they were offering in the way of amenities to prospective faculty. I was bowled over by the theatre they had and the sound stage and, of course, the beauty of the Island. I took the job of structuring the new Department of Film and Theatre, and though the College failed financially, my three years there were the happiest of my teaching life.”

From 1967 to its closing in 1970, he chaired the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Mackinac College on Mackinac Island, then taught speech, Shakespeare, and drama at Lake Superior State College (now University) in Sault Ste. Marie for 16 years while maintaining his home on Mackinac Island.

He retired to Mackinac Island in 1986, where he lived at British Landing.

For years before that, and continuing this summer, Mr. McCabe presented a weekly course at Grand Hotel he called “Meet Mr. Shakespeare,” in which he would discuss one of William Shakespeare’s plays and, more often than not, slip into a reading of significant parts.

“He would make Shakespeare interesting,” said R. Daniel Musser, Jr., the hotel’s chairman and owner. “He would make theater interesting. I suspect he related so much to theater that he kind of mixed it into everything he did.”

The series, which lasted 27 years, attracted a number of cottagers, who attended each week, and 10 to 15 hotel guests who, Mr. Musser said, were delighted to find such a program at a resort hotel.

“Jack was a sweet man,” Mr. Musser continued. “He was pretty funny, a lot of fun. He sure knew Shakespeare, and he sure knew a lot of literature.”

John McCabe begin studies of Shakespeare in earnest after a 1940 meeting with his childhood idol, John Barrymore, who challenged him to discover for himself why William Shake-speare was the best English writer, playwright, and poet. He went to England to study at The Shakespeare Institute to find out.

“It is the true gauge of Shakespeare’s greatness that he was at the summit of these three professions,” he said this summer.

Dr. McCabe asked Mr. Barrymore what was his favorite Shakespearean line, to which Mr. Barrymore uttered four words spoken by Hamlet in Act 5, Scene II, “The readiness is all.”

Years later, Dr. McCabe met Sir John Gielgud, who he said is arguably the greatest Shakespearean actor of the later 20th century. Over tea, he asked Sir John the same question and Sir John responded with the same four words as Mr. Barrymore.

“They are almost like a trumpet call,” said Dr. McCabe of those four words. “They are the philosophy of life.

“Just think of it,” he continued. “Once you have that, you truly have a good life!”

With his good boyhood friend from Detroit, William T. Rabe, Mr. McCabe liked to practice the lighter side of theater and literature, and the two enjoyed creating skits for closing ceremonies at Grand Hotel for years.

Mr. Rabe, a publicist for the hotel and director of College Relations at Lake Superior State College, and Dr. McCabe, the resident thespian at the hotel and professor of drama at the college, collaborated on such activities as the annual word banishment list published on New Year’s Day by the college.

He loved Mackinac Island, and, in 2003, while directing the Community Theater’s performance of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” he reflected on the magical Forest of Arden, removed from the authoritative jurisdiction of the court, and its relationship to his home.

“For me,” he told the Town Crier then, “the play is the essence of Mackinac Island because the play is about town versus country. People come here to escape the town and enjoy the water, trees, birds, and everything else that is visually beautiful in nature. Here we enjoy all the beauty and simplicity of the 19th century with little of the noise or pollution that comes with the town.”

Keeping it that way had prompted him, in 1998, to sell the development rights to his 6.47 acres of land near British Landing to the Mackinac Island State Park Commission.

When confronted by the suggestion that his property could accommodate a “bunch of homes,” he said in 1998, “I went rigid with revulsion at that -

revulsion at the thought that after I died, my children, for whatever reason, might have to sell my property and that, indeed, a ‘bunch of homes’ would be put up there.”

“I can now rest content,” he said of the transaction with the commission, which allowed him to retain ownership of the land, but not the right to build more houses on it.

John McCabe and his first wife, Vija Zarina, were married in 1962 and had three children, Leonard P., Dierdre Rose Berardi, and Sean C.

Vija, was head of the Dance Workshop at Lake Superior when she died in 1984.

Dr. McCabe married Rosina Marchisio, the teacher in the Little Rascals - Our Gang films, in 1987, and she died in 1997 of cancer.

He married Karen Jackson April 16, 1998, whom he knew from his Mackinac College days, and she has shared his love of Mackinac Island and involvement in theater on Mackinac Island since. She was with him in Petoskey the night he died.

Dr. McCabe met Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy at Stratford while they were touring British music halls and developed a deep friendship with Mr. Laurel. He published their authorized biography, “Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy,” in 1962, and later founded The Sons of the Desert, now a worldwide Laurel and Hardy club, and revised the book in 1986.

Other showbusiness books followed. He wrote “George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway” in 1973, “The Comedy World of Stan Laurel” in 1974, “Laurel & Hardy” (with G.B. Harrison) in 1975, “Proclaiming the Word” in 1976, “Cagney by Cagney” which he ghostwrote in 1976, “Charles Chaplin” in 1978,

“Grand Hotel,” centennial history in 1987, “Babe: The Life of Oliver Hardy” in 1990, “The High” in 1992, “Cagney” in 1997.

Jack educated, encouraged, and taught many of us, said Dick Bann of California, a 40-year friend and active member of The Sons of the Desert in England. He was always with pen in hand or reading a book. And through his 10 books, a whole world learned of the joy of humor, the mystery of drama, and the sacred importance of theatre.

“At the same time,” added Karen McCabe, “he was essentially an actor and with such sensitivity he responded to life's challenges dramatically.”

Dr. McCabe served in the Unites States Air Force from 1943 to 1945, and was a member of the Shakespeare Association, American Actors Equity Association, Catholic Actors Guild, Baker Street Irregulars, and The Players and The Lambs clubs, both in New York City.

Dr. McCabe’s sister, Charlene Bell wrote to Karen McCabe this week, "Jack went from the Island on a ferry boat and came back on wings."

Services will be Sunday, October 9, at 1 p.m. at Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church on Mackinac Island. Father Rey Garcia will officiate. A memorial will be held next summer.

Dodson Funeral Home in St. Ignace assisted with arrangements.