MCAVOY LAYNE PERFECTS MARK TWAIN

By Richard Miner

Thirty five years after beginning his stage career as The Ghost of Mark Twain Incline’s McAvoy Layne rang down the curtain at Virginia City’s Piper’s Opera House on the evening of September 30 with what he claimed to be his final stage performance. Mac’s amazing career spanned three and one half decades and over 4000 performances for audiences across the USA and around the World. His penultimate performance was staged just a week earlier with an outdoor performance for locals at St. Patrick’s Church which was also a standing room only affair. If you missed my article in the Spring Edition of LIVE.WORK.PLAY about how a local radio morning show host became famed author and humorist Mark Twain’s meme you can read all about that here: https://issuu.com/ articles/21009152

Over the years many of you have said that if they had the chance they have questions they’d like to ask McAvoy. Some of these questions recur regularly so I’ve asked Mac some of the most frequently raised ones and here are his answers.

The Famous White Suit: McAvoy always performed as Twain wearing a beautifully tailored white suit so I asked him when did the historical Mark Twain first start wearing white in public? McAvoy responded that most Twain scholars agree Twain first started wearing white suits upon the death of his beloved wife Olivia in 1904. But it was his appearance in 1906 in an address to the Library of Congress which was considering changes to copyright laws that marked the first time he began wearing white whenever he appeared in public. Twain, according to McAvoy, called his all white attire “my I don’t give a damn suit.” McAvoy’s first public appearance in white came while he was still working as the morning show host on Incline radio station KLKT and trying out his Mark Twain stories in the afternoons for local elementary school children. For what he regarded as his breakout performance he decided to make a surprise appearance as Mark Twain at his father’s 75th birthday party at the LaPlaya restaurant in Carmel, CA. And for that occasion he ordered a tailored white suit from a Carson City seamstress named Josephine Baldassare. At the time Mac was also training for the Iron Man races in Hawaii and for the bicycle portion of that event he was riding round trips on SR 50 from Carson City to Spooner Summit and back. “I’d ride downhill, have a fitting with Josephine and then ride back up to Spooner.” How’s that for multitasking?

After performing “Cure for the Common Cold” for his dad and his dad’s long time friends McAvoy decided he’d found his niche and the white suit became his attire for all subsequent performances including his visits to area schools. Over the course of the next thirty plus years Mac admits to having had at least a dozen white suits made to order, three or four by Josephine and after she passed (Mac spoke at her funeral) three or four more ladies stepped up to the task and made the rest. He currently admits to having seven white suits with accessories, “…six in the closet at home and one I keep in the car so I can still go to work in case the house burns down.” For years McAvoy’s suits have always been lovingly cleaned and pressed by his friend Mike Trute’s Incline Cleaners. Mike, for his own part, also has a thespian streak and now performs as Snowshoe Thompson in venues around the Wasach, in no small part encouraged by his friendship with the Ghost of Mark Twain himself.

McAvoy’s Twain Monologues: Some of you like I have always wondered how many different Mark Twain stories McAvoy has had in his repertoire over the years and whether each one is an exact copy of Twain’s text on the subject or if they are edited or rearranged to fit the circumstances. Mac replied that he probably has mastered some 400 Twain monologues and that almost all are painstakingly edited from the original text to suit his audience. For example he mentioned that his rendition of “1601” which was the grand finale of his Piper’s Opera House appearance was a good example of this kind of adaptation. Walking over to his book case he pulled out a rare copy of that story which he explained was written by Twain just to amuse his good friend the Reverend Joseph Twichell of Hartford, CT. 1601 was originally not published and had never been performed, at least in public, to the best of Mac’s knowledge before he performed it. Mac was gifted the bound copy on a trip to Germany many years ago and set about seeing if it could be tamed and condensed for verbal performance. That slight and beautifully illustrated volume easily runs to twenty or more pages of text with exquisite calligraphy—enough material to easily comprise an entire half of a normal Ghost of Twain stage presentation. And the language Twain employed would make even a constable blush. So Mac shortened the text to something like 10-12 minutes and delivers it in flawless period English to the rare audiences who are probably hearing these words from Mark Twain for the first, and perhaps only time. And similar editing is required for much, if not most, of every monologue McAvoy has performed over the years as Mark Twain. Mark Twain himself said the following about the difference between the written word and spoken ones, “Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue. They have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into the common forms of unpremeditated talk; otherwise they will bore the house, not entertain it. One will recite, the other won’t.” McAvoy’s performances prove Twain’s Maxim to a T.

Perfecting Twain Speak: The only known recording of Samuel Clemens speaking as Mark Twain was recorded by Sam’s good friend Thomas Edison at Edison’s laboratory in the early 1900’s. It was recorded on one of the wax tubes that Edison had invented for the purpose and unfortunately for history, the wax was melted in a fire in the building sometime thereafter. Thus no person living today has ever heard what Mark Twain’s speaking voice sounded like. McAvoy says “I was 45 years old when I started perfecting my notion of how Mark Twain must have sounded in his 60’s and 70’s when speaking publicly. Now I’m actually six years older than when Twain died so I sure don’t need to sound old anymore. If anything, I need to sound a little bit younger than I actually am!” Mac continues, “I have to give a big hand to Hal Holbrook.

Holbrook was the consummate actor and Twain impersonator before I came along. However Hal effected a voice for Twain that was just a little too “southern” for my thinking.” Scholar William Dean Howells once said this about Sam: “He was the most desouthernized southerner I ever knew.” McAvoy’s opinion is that “….by the end of his life Sam pretty well had shucked the Missouri accent and from what his friends have said he pretty much spoke the King’s English.”

There’s more to this look at McAvoy’s portrayal over the years of Mark Twain that could not be included here for space reasons but the unedited copy is available on the LIVE.WORK.PLAY website, so I’ll conclude here with Mac’s quite unexpected response to one last question I posed:

If you get bored with your retirement and decide to do just one more performance what would it be? “For the first time I’d perform The Diaries of Adam and Eve with my old high school and college sweetheart, Tina Cole, in period costumes—Twain’s period, not Adam’s—right here in Incline Village and we’d do it for charity.” your adoring public can hardly wait!