CHARLESTON, S.C. - Even working in the South Carolina Room at the Charleston County Public Library, a place where sorting through donations of historical artifacts is a regular feature of the job, you don't expect to find something that joins a love of history with a love of early cinema and theater.
And you definitely don't expect to find something that ties the Holy City with the Royal Family of American Theater.
But that's exactly what happened to South Carolina Room Manager Marianne Cawley when a donation of several books showed up from a man in Upstate New York who had some things to donate that belonged to his mother. She was born and raised in Charleston but spent most of her adult life in New York.
Donations are fairly commonplace in the South Carolina Room, and the staff dig through them looking for unique and rare items to expand the existing collection. In many cases the books are old. Sometimes, they're scarce.
On a recent day, three boxes of donations from Michigan were dropped off, and many of the items had ties to South Carolina, including a lot of maps of the Edisto Presbyterian Church cemetery, maps of early South Carolina, about two dozen books, and plenty of loose papers, photocopies of other documents or pages from books. One thing stood out in the collection though - an account of the battle at Hiroshima.
"I'm not sure there is a normal day in the South Carolina Room... which makes it fun and interesting because I don't know what somebody's gonna ask me next!" Cawley said.
Like many donations, the books from the benefactor in New York contained titles already in the South Carolina Room collection. In this case, it was another copy of the book "The Charleston Stage in the 18th Century." However, that's where this donation took a departure.
Cawley says she opened the front cover and found pasted inside a newspaper article about Ethel Barrymore.
"I opened it up and I looked inside and there was a newspaper article pasted in the cover about Ms. Barrymore. And I said, 'Barrymore? I know that name. I'm very familiar with that name.'"
On the facing page was written "Presented to Miss Ethel Barrymore by the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals of Charleston, South Carolina."
"I don't know if Ethel Barrymore is that familiar to people today. She's Drew Barrymore's great aunt. Her younger brother John Barrymore, who was known in his time as The Great Profile because he was so handsome, and he was also a noted Shakespearean actor, is Drew Barrymore's grandfather."
While the general public may not be familiar with Ethel's name, Cawley is quite a theater and movie buff and is quite familiar with the Barrymore dynasty. That kicked her curiosity into overdrive. She had to know more.
"I didn't know Ethel Barrymore ever appeared in Charleston. So that got me doing a little digging," she said.
She searched through old newspaper archives available through the library and found that Ethel Barrymore appeared for a one-night performance of "The Love Duel" in March 1931 on the Charleston stage. After the performance, there was a reception for her at a private Charleston home. Cawley says she thinks that's where the book was presented to Barrymore. The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals also performed at the event.
This was a big event for Charleston in 1931, Cawley said. The small town was likely too far away from the bright lights of Broadway to have stars make a stop in the Lowcountry for a performance, a movie shoot, or a vacation. Charleston today is much different, where movie stars, major musicians, and even vice presidents spend their leisure time checking out the Holy City.
Digging through those old newspapers, Cawley says she found dozens of mentions of Ethel Barrymore in the TV guide section of the paper, descriptions of her films airing on TV. And then she found the results from 1931. Articles started a month before Barrymore's arrival and continued for weeks afterwards. One article focused on a Summerville man's trip to Charleston to see the play.
"That's partly because of who she was. But back then I'm sure a lot of big theater didn't come to Charleston. There probably were not a lot of touring shows like we have now. You couldn't go up to the [Performing Arts Center] or the Gaillard and see something, you know," Cawley said.
The find was an even bigger deal for Cawley, a big fan of the Barrymores. A self-professed movie buff, Cawley says says a book with Barrymore's name can't come across her desk without getting her excited.
"More than a little, actually," she said. "Drew is Ethel Barrymore's mother's maiden name. The Drews were an old theatrical family from Philadelphia, but the Barrymore family were theatrical royalty in their time."
She said the closest equivalent to today might be Meryl Streep - if Streep had two brothers named Jeff Bridges and George Clooney.
Barrymore, who preferred the New York City theater life to that of the quickly growing Hollywood movie world, only appeared in a handful of movies. One of them, as Cawley notes, is in the CCPL collection. A remastered version of the 1946 thriller "Spiral Staircase" is available to check out on DVD, if you want to watch a movie about a young woman who cannot speak being stalked by a repeat killer at her uncle's mansion.
But it's the Christmas season, and most people might prefer a Christmas classic starring Ethel's brother Lionel, who played Mr. Potter in "It's A Wonderful Life." Several copies are also available for check out at CCPL.
The book earned a Pulitzer Prize for Peterkin, and coverage of the play consumed the arts pages of newspapers for months as the mostly white cast dressed in blackface for the performances. The novel was even banned from a public library in Gaffney.
Finding such an unexpected tale linking Charleston to theatrical royalty, Cawley has reached back out to the donor to see if he knew how his mother came to own the book. She was also involved in the theater community in New York, so there's that possibility that she met or knew the Barrymores.
As she waits for a response, work goes on at the South Carolina Room for Cawley and she and the staff there work with preservation students doing research, out-of-state visitors looking for branches of their family trees, helping professors research local history, or answering emails from people looking to trace their lineage.
That cope of "The Charleston Stage in the 18th Century" is being housed in the South Carolina Room if there are other movie buffs who want to flip through the pages of a book given to the so-called "First Lady of American Theater."
Who knows, Cawley might even be there ready to talk old movies with you.