E.H. Sothern
(1859-1933)

E. H Sothern met Joe Haworth in 1879. Young Sothern had made his New York stage debut at Abbey’s Park Theatre in his father E.A. Sothern’s vehicle Our American Cousin. Although the lad had only a few lines, he completely froze and had to be prompted by his father. The elder Sothern decided his son needed experience and persuaded The Boston Museum to employ him at no salary.

Only twenty years old, E. H. Sothern was extremely bashful and diffident. Women found it embarrassing to speak to him because he blushed so easily. This diffidence got him in hot water with the acting company almost immediately. When he was introduced to William Warren, the company’s leading actor, he got flustered and didn’t rise from his chair. An old friend of the elder Sothern, Warren thought nothing of it. But the other actors turned a cold shoulder to young Sothern, and it was Joe Haworth, already one of the company’s stars, who broke the ice and became E. H Sothern’s friend.

Joe stayed in a "swell" boarding house near Bowdoin Square in Boston. His fellow lodger and close friend was a newspaperman named Charles H. Hoyt, who was to become one of the most successful playwrights in America. Young Sothern would join Joe and Hoyt at restaurants and chophouses; the three young men would lay plans for the future, and listen to Hoyt’s brilliant sallies. Sothern was low man on the totem poll at the Museum, playing mostly non-speaking and one-line parts under an assumed name. He gained a great deal of self-confidence from his friendship with Joe and they remained life long friends.

In 1884, E. H. Sothern was in New York, broke and out of work. He heard that a Police Fund Benefit in Baltimore needed an attraction and sold his own script Whose Are They? for $300.00. Joe had just had a flop called The Fatal letter and was available, so the guys went to Baltimore and the play went over like wild fire. It was brought into the Star Theatre, New York, on May 27, 1884, got good reviews, did decent business, and played a short tour. Its plot turns on the mishaps of a husband afflicted with a tyrannical mother-in-law. The May 27, 1884 New York Times wrote: "Mr. Joseph Haworth’s portrayal of Theophilus Pocklington, the persecuted husband, could scarcely have been improved upon. Mr. Haworth’s comedy was, perhaps, a little over done, but it was imbued with so much earnestness and made sympathetic by so unceasing a flow of animal spirits as to be quite irresistible. Mr. Edward Sothern’s personation of Melchisedeo Flighty, a harmless lunatic, was just as good in its way, and, although somewhat conventional, exceedingly funny."