Memory Lane: Famous for playing Rip Van Winkle on stage, actor was fixture in Palm Beach

Before movie stars, one of the Gilded Age’s richest and most popular stage actors became as enchanted with Palm Beach as the island’s locals and elite winter residents did with him.

A pre-mass-media idol, of sorts, Joseph Jefferson had friends in high places — Standard Oil partner, railroad tycoon and Palm Beach developer Henry Flagler among them — but rare was the day when the affable storyteller wasn’t spotted around town by adoring locals.

He often could be seen fishing or riding around in the most popular local conveyance of the Gilded Age: a wheeled wicker wheelchair pedaled from behind, in this case by the famed actor’s longtime valet.

That Jefferson was a benefactor who gave to local causes and invested in the area’s infrastructure heightened his popularity in both Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, where schools and shops closed when he died in 1905 so all who grieved could “share an enormous power of loss.”

“As long as kindness remains on Earth, the name Joseph Jefferson will be remembered in Palm Beach,” a then-local newspaper, The Tropical Sun, declared in a pathos-heavy farewell.

Though most 21st-century celebrity hounds probably haven’t heard of Jefferson, he once was considered “one of the most celebrated actors in the world,” and often was recognized wherever he went.

Born in 1829 into a family of actors going back three generations, he was weaned on the stage and achieved critical acclaim by his twenties.

In 1859, after playing for the first time the role of Rip Van Winkle — based on the 1819 short story by Washington Irving — Jefferson became famous for it and played it in U.S. and overseas productions for decades.

By the time he came to Palm Beach in the 1890s, he was a world-renowned actor whose fans included Queen Victoria.

During his visits to Palm Beach in the late 1980s, Jefferson was an honored guest at Flagler’s lakefront and now-gone Hotel Royal Poinciana, located just west of its oceanfront sister hotel later renamed The Breakers.

Both Flagler-developed Palm Beach hotels quickly became the winter destination of the nation’s social and financial elite. Starting in 1900, Jefferson enjoyed wintering in one of The Breakers’ separate multi-room oceanfront cottages, which decades later were demolished to make way for new development.

Jefferson and Flagler were good friends, according to officials at The Flagler Museum, which is anchored by Flagler’s former Palm Beach marble-pillared mansion, Whitehall.

Lucky were those invited to Whitehall — and Jefferson was one of them.

He was a frequent guest, beginning with the manse’s debut season in 1902, when Jefferson attended, among other things, musical performances hosted by Flagler’s third wife, Mary Lily Kenan Flagler.

Old Palm Beach photographs of the era show Jefferson and Flagler looking jovial in one another’s company. They’re dressed in fine suits — typical attire in warm Palm Beach for men of their stature.

The two evidently also knew how to let their proverbial hair down.

In 1898 at Palm Beach’s then-swishiest social event of the season, the Washington’s Birthday Ball in February, several of the nation’s most powerful men, Flagler included, masqueraded in long dresses (a court judge once reportedly came as Marie Antoinette), according to a 1986 biography of Flagler by David Leon Chandler.

Jefferson came as Rip Van Winkle.

The actor was feted annually in Palm Beach by Flagler and other friends at a birthday breakfast hosted at the showpiece garden-oasis North End estate of Charles and Frances Cragin.

Despite such an affluent social scene, most of Palm Beach then remained an undeveloped swampy jungle.

And it was precisely that — the natural lush splendor flanked by lake and ocean to the west and east — that Jefferson seemed to love most while also seeing the area’s potential for development.

“Do you feel this glorious breeze?” he’d say, inhaling deeply as he enthusiastically fished in waters visibly teeming with fish.

As a talented amateur visual artist “of quite unusual skill,” as observers noted of Jefferson, the actor could also be found painting the Palm Beach landscapes he admired; an ocean sunrise, say, or a sunset over the lake.

Early on, Jefferson sought to give back in Palm Beach. To help raise funds for local Congregational and Episcopal churches in 1898, for instance, he gave a dramatic reading from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” at the Royal Poinciana to an audience “young and old” who received his “benevolent countenance as a never-failing pleasure.”

Over the bridge, fledgling turn-of-the-20th-century West Palm Beach was poised to become a city of importance, Jefferson noted. He was instrumental in developing its first public ice and electric plants and invested in several new buildings.

When Jefferson — married twice with eight children total — died in the spring of 1905 in Palm Beach, it was attributed in the press to pneumonia.

He was said to have contracted it after fishing for days prior in Hobe Sound with friend and former U.S. President Grover Cleveland.

When Jefferson’s body was transported to his family’s summer home in Buzzard’s Bay, Massachusetts, it was Flagler who arranged that via his own private railroad car as part of his Florida East Coast Railway system.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Memory Lane: Popular actor Joseph Jefferson was a hit in Palm Beach