Mike Donlin’s Second Career As An Actor, With Vaudevillian Wife Mabel Hite

This World Series champion turned to acting during his playing career and wrote a hit play with his wife.

by Rich Watson

In 1905, Mike Donlin was on top of the world. The outfielder and first baseman was third in the National League in hitting with a .356 average and his team, the New York Giants, beat the Philadelphia Athletics in five games for their first championship. 

“Turkey Mike” (he was said to have strutted like one) was known for drinking, partying, and dressing flamboyantly—for the turn-of-the-century era, anyway. One story about him claims he arrived at the ballpark wearing a medallion on his lapel, bearing a newspaper photo of himself. When security didn’t recognize him, he pointed to the medallion and proclaimed “I am Mike Donlin.”

The following season he broke his ankle while sliding into second base. He missed most of the 1906 season and the following one. During this time, though, he got a taste for what would become a second career when he met and married stage actress Mabel Hite.

Mike Donlin and the “dead ball era” of baseball 

Babe Ruth emerged as the game’s first power hitter during a time when teams averaged 3.4 runs per game. The same ball would be used over and over, foul balls counted as strikes for the first time, ballparks were huge (the Red Sox played on a field before Fenway Park that was 635 feet to center field), and spitballs were common. This was the period Donlin played in, known as the “dead ball era.”

Donlin played for six teams, including ones named the St. Louis Perfectos and the Boston Rustlers, but mostly with the Giants. In 1904, the Giants won the pennant and he finished second in the league in batting, behind Honus Wagner. In the 1905 World Series, Donlin scored four runs in the five games.

He recovered from his injury in 1908 and hit .334, second in the league. He took a two-year hiatus to pursue acting, then had a comeback from 1911-14, which included a year in the minors and barnstorming, and a brief return to the Giants. He retired with a .333 batting average in twelve seasons.

Mabel Hite and vaudeville

Donlin met Hite in 1904 while she was on tour in the south. They were ignorant of each other’s professions, but connected. They met again in 1906 and married in April.

Hite had been acting professionally since the 1890s. She debuted on Broadway in 1904 in A Venetian Romance, a musical comedy. Prior to marrying Donlin, she had also done some vaudeville in and around the New York area.

In 1907, Donlin sat out the baseball season due to a salary dispute with the Giants. He spent the year on vaudeville with Hite. He said at the time, with his characteristic brashness, “I can act. I’ll break the hearts of all the girls in the country.” Critics didn’t share this belief. Donlin did make friends in the field, however, including John Barrymore. They were drinking buddies.

Donlin and Hite’s play ‘Stealing Home’

In 1908, Donlin and Hite wrote a one-act play together, Stealing Home. It debuted after the baseball season, in October, at the Hammerstein Theater in New York. It was Donlin’s first stage performance. He played a struggling ballplayer who turns to theft to avoid his nagging wife. Though critics were split on his acting, they loved Hite. No less a celebrity than Will Rogers saw the play and liked it too.

The play was a hit. The couple spent the next two years on tour with Stealing Home. Donlin would say about his acting turn:

You see when a man’s been playing baseball out in front of 30,000 people, and a lot of them of the critical sort, and mighty free with their remarks at that—well, it gives him a little assurance, enough, anyway, to let him get by when he faces an ordinary audience in a theater. So I’m not afraid in that score.

In 1911, Donlin and Hite starred in a follow-up performance, the musical A Certain Party, at New York’s Wallack Theater. It only lasted for twenty-four shows. 

At Hite’s insistence, Donlin returned to baseball and the Giants. His skills, however, had atrophied during his time away from the ballpark. The Giants sold him before the season’s end. 

The next year, Hite died of intestinal cancer. She was only twenty-nine.

Donlin in the movies

Donlin remarried in 1914 and continued with acting after his baseball retirement. He returned to vaudeville for awhile, appeared in a baseball documentary and a serial, then made the semi-autobiographical film Right Off the Bat.

With his friend Barrymore’s help, Donlin found roles in the movies, beginning with the 1917 feature Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman. The two would team up again in 1926 for The Sea Beast.

IMDB credits Donlin with sixty-nine film appearances, in both the silent and sound era. He worked with, among others, directors John Ford, William Wellman and Josef von Sternberg before Donlin’s death in 1933. Also in 1926 he played a Union army general in Buster Keaton’s The General, one of the all-time great silent films. More about his dual careers can be found in his entry at the SABR website.

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I was fortunate to have been one of the winners in the What a Character Blogathon contest, co-sponsored by Turner Classic Movies and the University Press of Kentucky. I got a film history book, 52 Must-See Movies and Why They Matter by Jeremy Arnold, a TCM tote bag, a bunch of TCM buttons and stickers and other knickknacks. My thanks to Aurora, Kellee and Paula for holding the blogathon and to TCM and UK for the gifts.

My next post, on January 5, will begin a new series: the history of old baseball stadiums.

Enjoy your holiday season.