As her photographs show, Perry was an uncommonly pretty young woman with long, pinned-back blonde hair, a round chin, a perfectly straight nose, and crystal blue eyes, crowned with long lashes that must have been able to produce a provocative, stageworthy flutter. She considered good diction essential for a stage performer and worked hard to perfect her own. “What disqualifies young aspirants for the stage most often,” she wrote, “is their inability to speak with as fine a diction and pronunciation as the theater requires.” By her standards, the best diction in the United States could be heard in San Francisco; the worst belonged to “youngsters from the Middle West.”

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Despite her promise, her noteworthy start, and her childhood ambition, on November 30, 1909, Antoinette gave up acting to marry Frank Wheatcroft Frueauff, then president of the Denver Gas and Electric Company. It was a decision, she later remarked, that she “never once regretted.” The wedding took place at the Perry family home on East Colfax Avenue in Denver, but the couple took up residence in Manhattan, where Frueauff was a partner in Henry L. Doherty & Co., a vice-president and cofounder of Cities Service Co., and a director of more than one hundred other firms. The marriage put the new Mrs. Frueauff in the upper range of the upper crust, with homes in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, and a castle in England. Antoinette gave birth to three daughters–Margaret, who became an actress herself; Virginia, who died in infancy; and Elaine, a successful stage producer in the 1950s.

Tragedy struck the family in 1922, when Frueauff, overextended and overworked, succumbed to a heart attack. Left with an estate worth some $13 million, Antoinette had no need to work ever again. But the 34-year-old widow soon “tired of the life of social whirling dervish,” she said. “After my experience in the theater, it provided me with no impetus in life. I found no charm in a life of leisure. It was downright dull. I needed a change–something vital. There was only one option left, and I yearned to return to the theater.”

Antoinette Perry made her comeback on to the stage in January 1924, playing opposite Walter Huston in a production of Mr. Pitt by Zona Gale. Later that year, she starred in George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s Minick, and in 1925, she performed in three more plays–The Dunce Boy, Engaged, and Caught.

While she was appearing in Caught at the 39th Street Theatre, journalist Percy N. Stone explained to his readers that “there aren’t many who would go on acting if they could clip coupons all day instead.” He wrote that he had asked Perry why she had returned to the stage. “There were tears threatening the mascara-ed lashes,” according to Stone, “as she said in a voice full of pathos, ‘Can’t anybody understand? Why do they say I don’t have to work? Women have come to this room just to tell me that I am taking bread out of some other person’s mouth. I don’t have to work? I am making a fight for my very existence.’”

One afternoon in 1921, a year before the death of her husband, Perry had gone to Carnegie Hall to attend a concert by the Russian piano virtuoso and composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff. Also in attendance that October Sunday was theatrical producer Brock Pemberton. “The great Russian was playing his first number when I arrived,” Pemberton later wrote, “and with scores of others I stood in the back until he had finished. I made a hasty survey of those around me. By far the most interesting and attractive person was a handsome woman leaning against the east wall just by the door. I remember she wore a huge bunch of violets. She was blonde and she was beautiful and it seemed a shame that she should stand when I had an extra ticket so, as I started down the aisle, I offered it to her. She hesitated a moment, smiled, accepted.”

After the concert, Antoinette invited Pemberton to her Fifth Avenue home to meet her husband. Thus was born a friendship that was pivotal to Perry’s life, for it eventually inspired a major change in her career. After her decision to return to the theater, Pemberton produced several of the plays in which Perry appeared, including Mr. Pitt, The Masque of Venice, and The Ladder.

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